Omega was not a pleasant place.
It was too big. It was too small. It was dirty and treacherous and poorly maintained, and that was just the people. Mechanically-speaking, it was even worse off. It creaked and groaned, it blinked and sparked. It was falling apart, it was a nightmare. It was too far away from civilization. It was certainly much too close to it.
A piece of trash city on a burnt out rock in a forsaken nebula at the end of space. An ugly metal spindle on a rust-coloured rock, far away from any homeworld planets or even optimistically settled ones, Omega was ignored, abandoned, and quite happy with it. It was a seething, turgid mass of chaos, cruelty, blackmail and extortion. It was the unofficial homeworld of every criminal and con artist in the universe. Omega was where decency came to die.
The chilly, greasy air of Omega breathed gently through the open windows of the once-abandoned building, bearing with it a ubiquitous scent of garbage, and the distant din of an insomniac metropolis in a moon-sized space-bottle—the sounds and scents of a crowded city that hadn't seen prosperity for years, and even then only the prosperity of the murderous and criminal.
The building was empty. Or, more accurately, it had been empty recently. It had been occupied before less recently, but all the furnishings bore the signs of hurried absence. Things had been left out, cupboards had been rifled through, and everyone had left. Then someone had come back. Just one person.
He was here now, upstairs from the main floor, in what had once been a living space. He was engaged in pitched combat with a large group of people, outside the building—exchanging gunfire back and forth through the window—and he was face to face with death in every way it was possible for a person to be so.
Garrus pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession. His rifle did not suffer from especially unmanageable recoil, and he used it to his advantage. The three figures dashing up the bridge toward him were arranged roughly in a sort of ragged, lolloping single file; the rifle pulled up a little with each shot he took, sighting further back along the line, and it only required the slightest nudge left or right to take the three down.
Straight through the head each time. Except for the last one, a salarian. The bolt sank into his neck.
The young salarian sank to his knees, eyes bugging in agonized dismay. He couldn't have been very old; he was still wearing the camouflage mottling that lingered on young salarians' skins.
Panic ripped the salarian's facial features apart, contorting them into a horrified, nightmare display as his blood most likely poured down the inside of his own throat, drowning him and bleeding him out in the same fatal stroke.
That should've been a clean shot. Garrus blinked, once. He was getting sloppy.
He frowned in something that might have been vague disappointment and ejected the thermal clip. It dropped to the ground, hissing and smoking, and gently began to char away the dust around it. It glowed a faint, cheerful red. Garrus stared at it, blankly.
It should have been a clean shot. He was getting sloppy to let—to le…
The memory of the horrified, hopeless expression on the face of the dying kid drifted behind his eyes for a moment.
He brought his hand back and tapped his fingertips meditatively on the side of his helmet. No. It should have been a clean shot.
He reached for another thermal clip, and slid it into the base of his gun. The gun made a faint electric sizzle as charge began to build up along the barrel again, preparing the next microscopic shaving of metal for its super-sonic trip into somebody's face.
There was a part of him that might have been bothered or upset about the pain he caused the salarian, up until recently, but Garrus had stopped feeling bad about things over the past few weeks. He had slowly found it more and more difficult to care about people; chilling and inhumane accidents like this became mild vexations, and the mowing down of person after person had stopped registering as anything except the rhythm of a light tattoo, keeping count in the back of his head.
He was too tired to worry about this, though. He was too tired to spend much time feeling anything, so he ignored these little problems when they came and, very soon after, they inevitably left again, leaving him with the blissful, clear-thinking head of one who is completely detached from the situation and from everything one is doing.
It was the peculiar clear-headedness that came from killing. In times of intense stress and high combat, Garrus had learned to take advantage of this ability to switch off his feelings. He had learned the skill a couple of years ago, and it had served him remarkably well. There was a price to pay, later, of course—for this stifling of your emotions—as your mind surfed high above all the thoughts and feelings that you did not, would not dare acknowledget—here was always a price to pay, later, but for now...
Well, he was going to pay his price soon enough; Garrus was going to die. He was boxed into a little hole, the victim of exhaustion, undersupply, and a constant, constant stream of attacks. One of these days, he knew, his body would fall asleep on him, whether he wanted it to or not. Then it would be over.
He saw another couple of straggly thugs toting their terrible, hocked firearms up the bridge. He squeezed the trigger twice, as his scope glided across their visage and then past. They fell, cleanly this time.
I can't flatter myself, though; it's not that hard.
They had no concept of advancing through cover, no idea of how to make use of their shield, how to make use of their silhouette, their environment, the light, the wind, the buildings around them. The fact that he was picking them off so easily was not a testament to his skill, it was a testament to the desperation of the hideous coalition that his arrival had caused.
They were a bunch of idiots out there, but what could you expect from bounty hires. Eclipse had long since stopped sending their own troops in, Blue Suns were the next to stop, after exhausting all their options, trying all points of entry, and sending a—
Garrus smiled faintly, but not happily—sending a gunship. It was almost a little depressing how fast he had taken it out. People inexperienced with using the Mantis gunship for anything except civilian enforcement always left the Mantis' nose riding up in the air, exposing what veterans called its 'glass jaw', to coin a human phrase. It was a 8-inch gap in the armour, inset against the back of where its nose-cone where a variety of data ports were left under a simple latch cover.
Normally you couldn't see it, but every once in a while, a rookie would back-pedal too fast—to slow down, or to counter a strong gust of wind—and the little crevasse would swing into sight long enough for someone with a steady hand to get off one perfect shot.
The thing had been blinded and disarmed in an instant. None of the weapons could sight, the EAL system had probably been cored out, and reduced to a collection of extremely expensive and absolutely useless sensors which were no longer connected to anything. The gunship listed badly as the pilot, forced to fly the gunship completely manually, desperately fought to get control of the drifting, useless craft.
Garrus sniffed, his nostrils flaring and contracting to break the dust caked on his face; his helmet's air filter had stopped being useful days ago. He could see a new group of useless day-wage bandits, shuffling and jostling awkwardly beyond the bridge as they eyed the piles of bodies on the bridge.
He considered taking a shot at one of them, but they were partly obscured by a palette of useless junk—hurriedly formed into a barricade. They would start across soon enough.
He sniffed again, and almost sneezed. He frowned, and scrunched his face up, to shift the sensation. He was getting dry. He picked up his canteen, it was discouragingly light and made only a faint splashing as it moved. He put it down again.
Across the bridge, the recruited guns decided to make a run for it, and headed out in much the same fashion that the last few dozen had done. They were trying to... buy time, for something.
For what?
He'd find out soon. He could probably guess. There were too many doors into this place. Wonderful when you wanted to exit and enter unseen, but secrecy was no longer a part of defence, and at this stage every entrance was just another unguarded way in. He'd done his best to block them off, but he had been here a long time, and the mercenaries had probably started digging at around the same time they'd given up trying to take the building by storm.
He lazily began shooting down the bridge again. The gunmen panicked, rushing for cover. A couple of them made it behind a stack of crates. The rest, well—
The rest didn't.
He watched the badly-armoured heads bobbing and ducking over the top of the crate stack. They had no concept of their position in physical space. Anyone worth their armour had to have known that Garrus could see them from his angle up above.
One of them, a human, peered above the edge of the crates and brought his gun up, wildly searching across the top row of windows for a sign of the terrifying rogue turian they had been sent to kill.
Garrus sighted, rested his finger on the trigger.
There was a flash from the edge of the bridge. The man twitched and jerked, and slumped down against the box, out of sight. The other gunman behind the boxes jumped up, startled, and received a blazing line of light machine-gun fire to the face. His brain shredded to pieces, he took a single tottering, mindless step backwards, and pitched over the edge of the bridge.
Garrus stared, blankly. He had not fired at either of them.
This was not something he had prepared for.
For the first time in a day and a half, Garrus moved with alacrity, departing the dreamy ghost-walk state he had fallen into. He sat up, shook his head vigorously, hunched down, and sighted down at the scene again.
Yes, they were dead. Someone from the other side of the bridge had shot them. Alarm bells began to go off in the turian's head. Were the mercenaries done stalling—he tried to assess the situation—was that their way of clearing the field for a final approach? Should he turn his attention to the stairs behind him?
He began mentally cataloguing the things left in the building. Thermal clips downstairs? A couple, probably. Cooler of water, half empty. A package of explosives, contact spray, caps; useless in a firefight, obviously. Guns? Useless to him, he wouldn't want to offer the inbound mercenaries any advantage in spare firearms, though, if it came to—
Three people approached along the bridge.
They knew what they were doing. He could tell, instantly, without having to look down his scope. Two aliens flanking a third perfectly, lagging a little, separating their movements from each other, bobbing and weaving in turn to keep him, the on-looking sniper, off guard. They were exposed on the bridge for only a second before they'd all reached cover, and he'd lost sight of them.
A few more people entered the far end of the bridge. Garrus watched in mild curiosity. They were trying a full-on assault again?
That's... interesting.
He wondered if these were special combatants, specialists that the rest of the mercenaries had been waiting to arrive from off-world. That would've been flattering—he'd been so much trouble that they'd sent for more outside help to finish him off.
He placed his eye against the scope, reflecting impassively on whether these three would get any closer to the front door than the rest had, when a firefight broke out amongst the group on the other side of the bridge.
Then Garrus' world began to slide.
Gunfire flashed back and forth, shields buzzed and hummed. The two groups—the first three versus, well, everyone else, apparently—were actively shooting at each other. The professionalism of the mysteriously well-organized trio on the other end of the bridge was further established. They split up their targets perfectly, delivering as little ammunition as possible to deliver death to the intended recipient.
Garrus began to actively wonder, for the first time in days, at the situation. He knew that the Blood Pack and Eclipse did not get along well at the best of times, but were they really infighting? It didn't make sense. The three he saw appear on the bridge didn't look like Eclipse or Blood pack—couldn't have been Blue Suns—wrong colour, wrong silhouette. His stomach began to turn, and his breath began to speed up as his mind flared alive, trying to make sense of the situation. His world tilted further, as the situation became more surreal.
His rifle's scope went white. Garrus looked up, away from the scope; fire had broken out on the bridge—a roiling, churning inferno that lit up nearly two-thirds of the opposing, decidedly less professional members of the firefight. His rifle's scope chirped a warning, auto-cycling down its range of exposures and filters in an attempt to find some setting at which it could focus.
Garrus ignored the warning and switched all the filters off except the polarized screen. He ignored the bleeding white stains left on the periphery of the scope by potentially damaging over-exposure, instead focusing on getting a bead on his next set of adversaries. If they were smart they would know he would have trouble seeing them, and would choose now to advance their cover.
If they were very smart, they would know that he knew that, and would stay put.
A pair of hands stuck up from behind the cover that the Trio had hidden. The leader's hands, the one who had taken point. The hands were empty of weapons, and were waving at him.
They were very smart. And... friendly? His pulse increased, the nervous turning in Garrus' stomach began an agitated, turgid churn of panicked hope mixed with disbelief. Someone was coming to bail him out. His world was leaning dangerously now, disorienting and unreal.
After a few moments—still separated from the head of the bridge—the leader stepped out, hands still in the air.
Finally acquiescing, in the face of his scope's frantic warning, Garrus applied a couple of filters, trying not to black out the face of the distant figure by low exposure. He zoomed in, and tried to get a better look at the leader who had stepped out in front of him.
And his world capsized.
Shepard.
Garrus's mind went blank, filling with white-hot noise like the sizzling, screeching crackle of a jammed radio—the antagonistic, agonized squealing of a comm channel in a solar flare.
He stared down the sight, fixedly.
I'm dead, Garrus thought.
No he wasn't. That was ridiculous.
I have to be.
No.
Why.
It couldn't be Shepard, Garrus thought. He had lost it. He was dreaming. It felt like he was dreaming.
The world swam and shifted awkwardly in front of his eyes. Shock rippled through his system, making every inch of his body feel hot, and then icy, icy cold. His tongue felt clammy, and the back of his throat seized. He felt sick.
No he didn't.
Yes he did.
No.
The ghost on the other end of his rifle sight ducked, suddenly. A bolt flew through the air, narrowly avoided the apparition's shoulder, and she—it—Shepard—the ghost—dodged behind cover again; dodged onto his side of the bridge. Garrus's mind stopped its frantic whirling, and the turian focused. Whoever the leader was, she, or he, had placed their trust in him explicitly by taking cover on his side of the crates, fulling exposing her or himself to Garrus's gun. He had a duty to protect them, at least until he could figure out what they were doing.
What were they doing—could they be trying to lure him into letting someone across the bridge? Could this be a bluff?
No, these were mercenaries, they solved their problems with bullets—even Eclipse wasn't that subtle.
The spectral form of Shepard beckoned to her teammates, they quickly traded their side of the cover for Garrus's. He looked at them sharply, but didn't recognize them. A salarian, and—a krogan. Wrex?
No. Not Wrex. He didn't recognize the salarian, either. He turned his rifle back to settle his scope on the leader, the person who might or might not have been Shepard. Maybe he had just been hallucinating. He had been awake for three days—he might've just thought he'd seen Shepard, through a haze of exhaustion and stress and wishful thinking, and wh—
His scope found the leader again, and, again, Shepard stood in his sights, shooting over the cover at the far end of the bridge where the fire had subsided and more panicking hired guns were trying to figure out who was on their side.
It still looked like Shepard.
He moved his gunsight up, mechanically, and landed two shots home on the people at the far end of the bridge. He returned the sight to Shepard.
She was wearing—not N7 armour. He was not hallucinating some ghost from two years ago. She was wearing a top-heavy hodgepodge of—what he recognized—were capacitor-lined armour plates combined with custom-tooled, obvious even at this range, ceramic plating, and an off-sided shoulder guard. She was not wearing a helmet.
She'd always worn a helmet.
She wasn't wearing one now. Her head was bared. She turned momentarily, to shield her face from a blast, and he saw a glimmer of blue. She was wearing a headpiece.
He stared. It was Kuwashii Visor. He instinctively touched the side of his helmet, where—underneath the armour—adjunct to his vision for years, the same visor ticked out a constant readout of information.
His mind numbly rattled off specifications: eta-grade, version 5, full forward, wide-bar support—good for turians and humans, keeps the sensor suite out of the peripheral vision—capable of tracking wide-band emissions on a scale of what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing?
Shepard looked up at the window he had shot from, and nodded to him. One respectful nod. She was always like that in battle. She was so:
well-mannered. So well-mannered it was almost impossible to mistake her battle attitude for anyone else's. She was storming up the length of the bridge now, weaving around cover quickly as her two squad-mates covered her movement.
Her movement. No other human female walked like her. She had a strange, broad-strided swagger, almost like a turian—or a male of her species—keeping her centre of gravity low, moving rigidly from the hips.
It had to be Shepard. It had to be. Garrus's mind whirled, abuzz with blazing, racing thoughts—the first thoughts he'd had in days—too many thoughts. He shoved them away, replacing them again with combat instinct: here came the next wave of hired dreck.
He watched carefully as a new group of hire-by-days and armed hobos milled around awkwardly at the edge of the bridge. One of them pointed at Shepard. Two others raised their rifles.
On a whim, Garrus took a shot at Shepard. The bolt bounced off her shield, which vanished. She jerked, stumbled. For a moment she gazed up at the window in shock, then she appeared to buckle down to the task at hand. The group at the end of the bridge turned their attention from her and began firing at him. He watched her, placidly, ignoring them. Shepard resumed running, and reached cover, closer to his end of the bridge.
He kept his sights on her a moment longer, before he noticed that his finger was resting on the trigger. That was a mistake. He should never have let his finger sit on the trigger while watching a friendly. For the first time in days, Garrus felt something—the beginnings of emotion. Emotion was something he hadn't felt in days, and—repressed for so long—it began to leak into his consciousness at high pressure—a horrible, raw, frustrated feeling, lurking in the back of his throat, and it triggered again the sense of nausea that he had felt at Shepard's arrival.
Abruptly, the salarian in Shepard's squad broke cover, sprinting daintily along on his lanky legs. Garrus crushed the rising levels of foaming, caustic anxiety and covered him. The gunmen either did not notice the salarian, or mistook him for one of their own, distracted as they were with trying to land a shot on the turian, hidden up above. The salarian remained un-shot-at, up until the point he retreated behind nearer cover, similarly, and launched another high explosive at the mercenary fodder. The end of the bridge erupted in flame, for the second time.
The stragglers fell back in confusion, and began blindly firing across the whole span of the bridge, trying to assess the new threat. The trio of friendlies below laid into them savagely, grabbing the opportunity as it came.
The krogan broke cover. Shepard and the salarian laid suppressing fire. The krogan reached cover. Shepard broke cover. The salarian and the krogan provided suppressing fire, Shepard reached cover. They moved up, across the bridge, measure by measure—faster and with less care as their confidence built in Garrus's ability to cover them from above. Then they were in the building. He heard gunfire outside in the hall, were the mercenaries that close to getting me? His eyes searched the path outside for more intruders. He took a shot, and a turian outside collapsed—his neck snapped by the impact of the bolt going through his head.
The door opened behind him.
"Archangel?" Shepard's voice called out; her clear, hard voice, ringing out like the voice of a turian phalanx general out of legend, calling from beyond the grave.
Garrus's mind slowed down. His thoughts were suspended and clear.
He did not look behind him. Not yet.
If it was Shepard, what would he say? Assuming that he, Garrus, was not completely insane, what would he say to her?
If she was alive—how could she be alive? Had she been away on a mission? Had she been in deep cover as a Spectre, unable to contact him?
Movement caught his eye. The bridge was clear, now—the arrival of reinforcements as proficient as the three aliens who had stormed up the bridge to join him had quite seriously made reconsider anyone who was thinking of fighting him. Except for that guy. Hm.
A human was crouching behind a pillar, peering into the base of the building—trying to figure out if—did Garrus dare say it—if Shepard was still in the lower floor.
Garrus held up a dreamy finger. One moment please, Shepard. He felt strange. She was dead.
No she wasn't.
Yes she was.
Wasn't she?
He pulled the trigger. The human died.
He stood up slowly, and turned around, and there she was.
She craned her head, looking at his mask from an angle, trying to see past the reflection of his visor. She wiped sweat out of her eyes and squinted appraisingly. Her face was stained with soot from the fire below, her eyes were red and watery, and there was a long stream of blood running down one side of her face, from when her shields must have been depleted. Her face, he realized, her face had been shredded. Not in the firefight now, but some time in the past, something had happened to her—an ugly spiderweb of scars were etched across her cheeks and brow, and beneath them, sunk into grooves along the surface, was the glimmer of cybernetic patchwork, holding her skin and bone together.
But it was her.
And suddenly Garrus felt more tired than he had ever felt in his life. No sooner had he stood up, than he was seized with an incredible, overwhelming urge to sit down again.
She'd called him Archangel. Did she—
Was it possible that she came here without even knowing who he was?
How could she know who Archangel was. No-one knew who he was.
He gripped his helmet by the fringe guard and slowly pulled it off.
He saw Shepard's face go blank with shock. Shepard's hands flew up to her forehead, and she clasped them around her temples.
Garrus sat down, heavily, and tried to think of something to say. Somethings did not come. Shepard ran her gauntleted hands back through her hair, wordlessly, her eyes still fixed on him in astonishment.
"Shepard," he said, finally.
Saying her name, and hearing his own voice out loud for the first time in—a very long time—brought him into harsh, clanging contact with reality.
This was real. She was really here.
Garrus shook his head faintly, in incredulity.
"I thought you were dead," he said.
Shepard's mouth was open. She gaped, then her expression of shock resolved into a broad, brilliant smile.
"Garrus!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
He looked at her, blankly. He looked at her smile. She was surprised to see him—and happy? Happy.
And for a moment, Garrus felt happy.
Then, the feeling drained away. His head swam. He opened his mouth to reply.
"Just keeping my skills sharp," he said, after a moment, "a little target practice."
The inane joke fell out of his mouth, unbidden. It was habit, more than anything else.
Shepard's exuberant smile faded at the edges.
"You okay?" she asked, in concern. She cocked her head the other way, examining his face carefully.
Garrus felt her scrutiny on his face, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
"Been better," he said, passing off on the question, "but it sure is good to see a friendly face. Killing mercs is hard work, especially on my own," he added glibly.
It was good, it was...
It was wonderful, but there was something wrong. Something was wrong.
Shepard spoke again.
"You nailed me good a couple times, by the way," she laughed, broadly, easily. It was too easy. Something about her laugh...
He felt too tired to figure it out. He was sore and he was stiff, and he hadn't slept in three days, and it was catching up to him.
"Concussive round only," he said, blandly, "no harm done. Didn't want the mercs getting suspicious."
"Uh-huh," agreed Shepard with played up sarcasm, "sure." He rarely saw her so actively playful, rarer so in a fire-fight. Her eyes sparkled.
He met her gaze for a moment, and her eyes lit up brighter. Her eyes: her dark, serious, intelligent eyes, staring at him out of two years of long-buried history, were laughing now. Hey old friend!, they said. Garrus stared back, wooden-faced.
He looked down again, the feeling of wrongness in his chest was beginning to germinate into the beginning of aggravation.
"If I'd wanted to do more than take your shields down, I'd have done it," he said, coolly and matter-of-fact, and then suddenly, without quite knowing why he said it, he added, "and you were taking your sweet time getting up here. I needed to get you moving."
It wasn't a kind thing to say to someone who had just come to rescue him, and it was not even necessarily true. He looked at Shepard and saw her face fall, slightly.
Shepard looked at him; the laugh had faded from her eyes. For a moment, he could see a faint... expression, pass across her face, a ripple of muscles twitching, revealing some emotion that he could not decipher. Then the expression vanished.
In the silence, the salarian coughed; the krogan stared at Garrus unkindly and Garrus began to feel surprised at the way he was acting. The drone of Omega filled the room; there was a distant, slushy whoosh of steam; the uneasy wailing of a hovercar.
"Well, we got here," she Shepard evenly, "but I don't think getting out will be as easy."
"No it won't," said Garrus, after another, slightly uncomfortable pause, "that bridge has saved my life: funneling all those witless idiots into scope. But, it works both ways, they'll slaughter us if we try to get out that way."
The salarian spoke up at this point.
"Range box choke-point," he said, briskly, "solid strategy—but, heard mercenaries say you collapsed tunnels—no plans for getting out—famous last stand? Archangel, Hero of Omega?"
Garrus breathed a hollow laugh.
"Up 'till this point, yes, and—Archangel... was just a name the locals gave me, for," he paused, "all my good deeds," he finished. He glanced at Shepard, she was watching him, there was nothing unfriendly about her face, but the smile had gone. She's shut off—he realized. He finally recognized the look: it was her bland, inoffensive look she wore when she was talking to people she didn't know especially well, or whom she didn't like, or when she was unsure of how to react.
"It's just Garrus, to you, if that's alright, or 'Vakarian'," he added, to the salarian.
Shepard obviously knew something was going on, and that they didn't have time to figure it out right now, and so she'd simply put it away. It was that trick he'd learned from her: shutting off your feelings and considering what the moment gave you, detached and objective. He decided to do the same. Enough time to wrestle with his emotions later, for now—now it was time to deal with the mercenaries.
"It's not completely suicidal, though," he went on, "this place has held them off, so far. And with the three with you…" He looked around, "I suggest we hold this location, wait for a crack in their defences—"
"Take our chances?" asked Shepard, rhetorically.
"It's not a perfect plan," said Garrus, nodding in agreement, "but it's a plan."
Shepard nodded simply: "It'll do," she replied.
And they were off. It did not take long for the mercenaries to discover that their forward assault team had failed, and they had rapidly run out of recruits to pick up off the streets of Omega.
It did not take long for their plan to be revealed, either. Garrus had a feeling that it was coming. When the first Blood Pack krogan crashed through the debris of the collapsed tunnel, down below, Garrus knew it was the beginning of the end of something. He would've expected, under other circumstances, for it to be the end of him—he had planned to sit in this room, shooting until he stopped moving completely—but now.
Now Shepard was here.
Why was she here?
He carefully put the thought aside. He couldn't let himself think, now. Thinking complicated things.
She was here, though, and the plan had changed. His mind flew, combat ready again. The shutters, in the basement; he directed Shepard and her other squad member—she had left the krogan with him—to close the emergency blast shutters around the building. Nearly every Omega building had them, it wasn't paranoia, it was just good sense in this neighbourhood. It wouldn't hold them off forever, but the tide was changing in the battle, and predicting where things would go from here was becoming an increasing non-issue.
The shutters were closed, and the guns were up. Garrus heard the fight break out below, as the returning team began chasing the invaders up the stairs behind him. The krogan that had stayed with Garrus ran out of the room in the direction of the fight, yelling unintelligible fury. He smiled, grimly, people who found themselves on the other end of a krogan charge often regretted it.
"Garrus, you still okay?" The radio buzzed; Shepard, "Grunt, where'd you leave him,"
"He's just behind me," boomed the bassy crackle of the krogan's voice, "we're alright."
Then drone of Omega seemed to get louder.
"Shepard," Garrus heard the thinner voice of the salarian, "eyes up—incoming—three o'clock."
"What is it?" Garrus queried over the radio.
The drone seemed to becoming more rhythmical, it increased in volume.
"What are we looking at," Shepard, her voice clipped and efficient.
"Not sure yet," said the salarian, "bad profile—some kind of ship."
"Shepard?" Garrus asked. He knew what it was, though. The gunship was coming back. He raced to the window that looked over the bridge, and scoped down the line of buildings on either side of his. No gunship. The noise was getting very loud. He cautiously, quickly, craned his head out and looked up. No gunship above. Maybe on the roof..? No roof access to the building, though, so what were they—
"Okay, keep down, if it—Garrus? Garrus, are you under cover? It's—"
"ARCHANGEL," howled a voice, booming over the gunship PA. The source of the back-ground droning that had been getting louder and louder finally sailed into view.
Garrus turned, and there it was. In front of the OTHER window.
He turned, and began to run for cover. The gunship opened fire. He staggered as his shield vanished, and bolts began to collide with his armour. A shock ripped through his arm, and he saw a flare of sparks out of the corner of his eye. Armour breached. Not good. His shields whined in his ears, desperately fighting for space to build up a charge as he crawled to cover. Another bolt connected with him. He felt a tug on his right mandible, and felt a rush of air and blood enter his mouth.
"You think you can screw with the Blue Suns?" bellowed the PA voice.
"Garrus, are you okay?" Shepard's voice sizzled in his ears.
Behind cover, finally, Garrus probed with his tongue. There was a hole through his mandible. Great, he thought dizzily, as his deadened and scorched nerve endings woke up and began to complain, another problem I don't need. He wouldn't be able to sight down his gun properly without making it worse. His face was going to start hurting very soon, as soon as I get out of shock, he thought, with little emotion.
And he was going into shock, he could feel it. He looked down at his arm. Blood gushed from an inside seam in the metal. Not the best of luck, a bolt had hit a weak point. He tried to flex his fingers, and found that they could not move. Hm. This could be a problem.
He heard Shepard's frantic voice calling in his earpiece. Heard clattering outside. Soon he wouldn't be able to shoot at all, it was now or never. He broke cover, awkwardly, lifting his gun up to bring his sights on the nose of the ship. He winced as the stock of the rifle brushed against his face, but kept going, trying to get a bead on a sensitive part of the ship.
"This ends NOW!" screamed the gunship's pilot.
Garrus saw the hatch open in the gunships' hull. Saw the rocket pod emerge. He turned, and ran—trying to get to deeper cover.
He heard a crack and a swish, behind him. The rocket had launched.
He felt the force and heat of the explosion. He didn't hear it; he was deafened, instantly.
An impact like a huge, burning boot kicked Garrus across the room. His face went numb as the snap of the shockwave introduced a thousand tears in the exposed surface of his skin, and his head rattled about inside his mantle like a billiard ball. A piece of white-hot metal punched a second hole into his mandible, skewering his tongue and pinning it to the inside of his mouth.
He hit the ground. He bounced off the ground. He landed again. He could feel the rough surface of the floor dragging on his armour, sending him tumbling. He rolled over, twice, before landing in an awkward heap on the floor. His head rang, the room swirled. The walls warped and rippled, bowing inward as if they were breathing.
He saw Shepard run in. Her eyes were wide, her teeth were bared. A human smile and human distress could be confused, sometimes, but Garrus had grown to understand human expressions from his time on the Normandy—Shepard's expressions especially. The two of them had spent so much time together that sometimes Garrus forgot he was looking at a human face instead of a turian one.
Shepard's face was pulled into a horrified rictus now as she sprinted towards him, ignoring the gunfire. Shepard had never looked like that, before, did she? Not as far as Garrus remembered. She looked terrified now.
Maybe he was just imagining all this.
Maybe, he thought blearily, she isn't here after all.
The last, tormented halucinations of a man straining to come to terms with where his life had ended. He'd failed Shepard, he'd failed his family, he'd failed Omega, he'd failed his team.
Shepard grabbed him, tried to pull him to cover. The salarian appeared behind her, put his hand on her arm, stopped her. Shepard was asking Garrus a question. Garrus moved his mouth, slowly—agonizingly. The piece of metal through his tongue clicked against his palate. Garrus wasn't sure if he made any sound, or even what words his mouth formed. He looked in her eyes and saw blazing panic burning in them.
Maybe this was a dream. Maybe he would wake up.
The gunship opened fire again, and Shepard's face disappeared from his view. Garrus couldn't turn and see where she'd gone. He couldn't move. Black spots shifted behind his vision, blotching out things he should have thought were important, but he no longer had the energy or focus to care about. Gunfire bounced off the wall in front of him. He stared at it blankly.
Maybe he was just crazy.
Blood gushed from Garrus's arm. His face, half of which hung off of his skull like a slab of useless meat, oozed thick, chessylite-coloured drops of it. He could see it running down the ridge of his eye sockets, in his peripheral vision. A drop of blood slid into his right eye and he squinted, unable to shift the stinging liquid which obscured his vision.
Bullets streamed through the wall, tearing shavings off of the metal and sending a waterfall of sparks to the floor of the miserable building.
The world of Omega stretched away from him, getting smaller and smaller, and Garrus began to feel like he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. His arm—flopped out in front of him in a pool of his blood—seemed to be stretching away from his body and drifting off into the distance as he stared at it through a long, dark tunnel, which only got longer and darker as the world slid out of sight.
Maybe Shepard was still dead.
Garrus felt an explosion rumble silently through his bones. He blinked, blearily, as the building shook around him.
Maybe he was dead, too.