19. You think you see her at the Afterlife, and you're too drunk to believe it could be anyone else.
She's standing there at the bar, a half-full lowball glass in hand and waiting to order another drink. You don't even register the tight, shimmery dress or the feet crushed into candy-red heels, things you'd never catch your old commander wearing; you're zeroed in like you're sighting down the scope, cutting through the blur left by four drinks you shouldn't have had. You bump into dancers and servers on your way over because there's nothing else now but sniper's instincts, nothing beyond her outline, the height and military posture, the hair all pinned up and dark as an oil spill. Your chest aches. These used to be the things that helped you find her on the field before your trigger finger twitched, that checklist of don't shoot, it's her. It's her.
It's her.
You think you should be leaving now, just pay your tab and get out, but even just the memory of her pulls at you like a gravity well, tugs you in by your lungs and leaves you breathless. She sucks in light and color and you. You're afraid you're never going to find your way back out again, afraid you're going to burn and burn and burn (just like she did) as you wobble over before you can stop yourself, move in too close and mumble "Shepard?" somewhere around the slope of her shoulders.
But it's not her. (Vakarian, she's dead.) You're up and stumbling and gone before she can even ask who you are, what you're doing there.
(Six months ago you would've had an answer for that, but you don't now. You spend the whole cab ride back just thinking about Shepard branded by scar tissue and those eyes as black as the gaps between galaxies, just like you have been for the last two years.)
You lie in a borrowed bed that night and say to the wall, "I remember your face now."
But you never see her again.
17. You arrive on Omega with nothing more than a rifle and a plan and no way of knowing if she'd ever forgive you for this.
Once upon a time, she'd taught you about fairness and patience and look-before-you-leap, that you could be better and greater and more. Everything you're doing now is a betrayal. You traded her lessons for transport tickets because those words she said were meant for Garrus Vakarian, Spectre hopeful, C-Sec officer, and you're neither of those anymore. And what she doesn't know won't (can't) hurt her.
Really it's for the best, you think. Doing it wrong is better than doing nothing.
(Still can't get the taste of stomach acid out of your mouth, though.)
You haven't prayed in a long time now. No spirit—not even her—could ever hope to move you.
1. The first you ever hear of it isn't from proper channels. It's in your apartment, on your couch, in the crisply professional diction of Emily Wong.
SSV Normandy scuttled, 22 presumed killed or missing in action.
It can't be her, you think in your mad scramble for the comms; not her, can't be, over and over as you make call after call after call. No one can give you the answers you're looking for—even the Alliance is reeling, knowing they've lost something so important and too tangled to realize when or how or why just yet. It takes three days before you finally get a call from a somber Anderson, and by then you're so rooted in your mantra that you're already convinced it can't be true.
Not her, you're still thinking numbly a week later, rolling around in sweat-slick sheets. Can't be her.
She's invincible.
4. You see her sometimes.
She's smaller without the sleek grey shell of her armor, the proud red of N7 stripes; she curves wickedly with the lines of her spine, her ribs and hip-bones, all of it so desperately and breakably human. Part of you had always hoped that maybe, someday—maybe you'd see her in civs, see if she still looks like some coin-stamped turian empress when she smiles. (You've never had a more humorless commander, not even in the Hierarchy, and you don't even have words for how much you miss being elbow-deep in the Mako's guts while she leaned against the frame and looked on while you worked in silence. You couldn't make her laugh no matter how hard you tried.)
It makes your insides churn now. Feels wrong, like an invasion of privacy; you watch her from behind, trace with your eyes where her brown skin dips under thin white fabric, and she might as well be naked because you were never meant to see this. (Even Alenko, a human and a better man than you, couldn't thaw her. What chance did you ever stand?)
The afterimage of her back is burned into the black beneath your eyelids. You see it when you toss in your sleep. It was your job to watch her six, and you left her behind instead.
Makes sense that this is what really hurts, doesn't it?
2. You're not a believer, not like your mother, but you're not about to let a sick old woman's requests go unfilled. All she wants to see is her son get better, move on, so you're going to give it a shot; talking will help, she urges, and this is how the old turians always used to bleed out their grief.
You're not a believer, but you sit on a quiet stretch of homeworld beach, stack stones and light the incense anyway, calling on the spirit of the Normandy. Maybe there's something left of it that can inspire you; she was a living, pulsing thing, full of electric pride, carrying all those honorable humans on her wings. Something in you swells to remember how it felt to be a part of that. You were better and greater and more.
There's nothing to talk to, but you do anyway, straining your voice at the silver-flecked sand while the ocean sweeps at your bare feet. (Sorry, Shepard, I should've been there, but you wanted me back in C-Sec and I'll always follow your orders.) It soothes. By the time you're ready to leave, you think your mother might have been right about this.
It's only when you think you see her—a human silhouette in the half-light of that fiery Palaven sunset, nothing but an outline with military posture and an empress' profile that you would recognize anywhere—that your blood sticks cold in your veins. You want to call for her, but her name catches in your throat and she's wading out to sea and she's gone,
gone,
gone.
13. You've been drinking a little tonight. Not out of grief, for once, and that's a relief; guy in your department's having a kid, and after the battle on the Citadel, nobody needs a whole lot of reason to go out and scrape together some fun. (And really, it's been six months. Don't you deserve a break?)
And after a few beers—and some shots, and some awkward dancing, and some laughing and joking that comes out of your chest all rusted but sincere—it feels, finally, that maybe things are going to be alright someday. Maybe you can pull through, figure out how to be a Good Turian and trudge through this swampy C-Sec mess in a way that would make the people who love(d) you proud.
So you drink and laugh and let yourself feel warm and hopeful, because when you fumble into your apartment, she's sitting on your couch.
You lower yourself down beside her and let yourself feel that squeeze on your heart, the burning in your throat and eyes. Any other night and you'd just go to bed, but tonight you're all loose and boneless and riding this roller coaster that peaked three hours ago at Flux with the bass in your blood and four shots into a friendly game. Your stomach's crawling up into your mouth now though; it's all downhill from here. You reach out for her hand with yours, some sad and desperate grab to remember how she felt when she clapped your shoulder, or how your fingers would brush when she would hand you a wrench.
(It doesn't feel like anything, just numb flesh questing for numb flesh. How far gone are you if you thought, even for a minute, that it would be any different? Because she was always wearing armor and gloves even when she was clapping your shoulder and handing you wrenches, protected from head to feet, hair pinned and out of reach. You'd always wondered about all that human softness just beneath ablative plating and heavy weave, but it could never go beyond that. Shepard the woman was inaccessible, and Shepard the commander had nothing soft to touch.
Can't remember places you've never been, Vakarian, and you've never had a good imagination.)
"I always saw you looking, but I never really knew." She shifts subtly in the seat like a mountain might and you don't know if you should blame the alcohol or the dim lighting or yourself for not being able to see the face that you've slowly been forgetting. "I'm sorry."
"Not as sorry as I am," you whisper, and pick yourself up for bed.
5. There are a lot of memorials for her, more than there should be—turians would do just one, just burn the pyre and let her rest, but Shepard commands crowds even in death, on the Citadel and half a dozen human colonies who all want to say goodbye—so you only go to the one that matters most, held on Earth.
Everyone is there. It's the first time since Saren that you've seen most of these people; you pick Kaidan and Joker and Chakwas out of a sluggish ocean of faces that all look the same to you. Humans mourn in black (so unlike turians, who mourn in blue) and you feel like it's your first night on the Normandy again, your presence tolerated but ignored. You stand over with Tali who looks as out of place as you do, wringing her hands painfully and fumbling with the ornaments on her new suit.
There are eulogies. Anderson and Hackett reminisce on a green Shepard fresh out of basic that you never knew; Udina makes rehearsed offerings on behalf of the Council about sacrifices for the good of all. Alenko recites poetry in a way that makes you think, just for the tiniest breath, that he might have loved his dead commander. Liara sheds silent tears two seats down from you in a way that makes you know.
Halfway through the Prime Minister's speech, Tali puts an elbow into your ribs and whispers, "Garrus, you should say something." Speak for us.
"No," is your crisp reply. She doesn't bring it up again. And when they've folded Shepard's flag up and it's time to pay your private respects at the (empty) casket, you're glad.
It's not fair to say to an audience what you could never say to her.
18. "For what it's worth now," you say words meant for Shepard to a woman who isn't Shepard, the first in a long time—because maybe it's the club lighting, or maybe it's the music, or maybe you've just forgotten-"I think you could've been anything you wanted."
"You're sweet," she says, grinning and giggling and still mostly sober, at least, fingers flirting with your exposed skin. You decide then that you're going to leave with her; temporary warmth is still warmth. It's not what you need or want, but on Omega you've learned how to take opportunities as they emerge, to make the best out of the worst hands you're dealt.
In the dim of her apartment, you imagine dark skin and hair and eyes as black as the gaps between galaxies, and you've gotten so good at playing pretend that you can almost believe it.
You call her the wrong name, but she doesn't say a word.
7. "How do you feel about parallels?" she asks you at her own funeral, brown hands pressed against an empty casket lid and her lips drawn back in a wistful flatline. You've never seen her this sad. (You've never seen her sad at all; she's always been some statue of a woman, even and still and immutable as ashlar.) "I've always liked that theory. The idea that even if something is wrong here, it's right somewhere else. I don't believe in Heaven, but I do believe in that."
She doesn't say: And maybe in a few of them, I'm alive. Instead, she just weaves in and out of lichen-mottled gravestones, leads you through copses of strange evergreens while you suck down cold clots of London oxygen. "What about you?"
What about you?
You have this dream a few more times, but you never really understand.
14. You say to her in your kitchen a year after you first hear the news, as though it's just sinking in: "You're dead, Shepard."
"But they never found a body."
"But they never found a body," you solemnly agree.
You'll never be free of her at this rate.
3. You've spent the last week lighting the incense. You don't know why except the vague reason that it makes your mother happy-until you finally wake up one morning and she's sitting there on the edge of your bed, legs crossed, hands folded primly in her lap, facing away from you and you get it now.
"You must miss me." They're the first words you've heard from her since Go back home, Vakarian. You'd spent three days after leaving the Normandy thinking it was a cold dismissal until she shot you messages from the front, crisp things that you still can't bring yourself to delete from your inbox. Now you hear that same voice and you can catch the edge of humor in there like you never could before, clear as subharmonics. You can't even breathe. "I never figured you to be the religious sort."
And the truth is, you never have been until this very moment.
"Go back to sleep," she says, almost laughing. "I'll be here."
6. Sometimes you lie in bed and try to remember what her face looked like.
Sometimes it almost even works.
10. "Do you ever wonder what else you could've been?" she asks.
And for once, she aggresses: she takes your hand by the wrist, puts her palm to yours. You can imagine the look on her face, the flywheels spinning just behind her eyes, because Shepard doesn't wonder—she only calculates. She aligns your fingers, compares size and shape and number, and you know that what she's calculating now is talons onto the tips of her nails, sandpaper for her skin.
(She would've been a good turian.)
"I think you could've been me," she finishes, not even waiting for you answer. "You've got the stuff. You're just afraid."
There's something in those words that guts you, just cuts right in and empties you out. It's like talk of mutiny or treason. Heinous. Impossible.
"The universe only needs one Shepard," you say. It's a toothless protest because the only thing on your mind now is getting out, to pull away from this feeling of wrongness and daggers in officers' backs. It terrifies you.
(And the only thing that terrifies you more is the fact that you can't think of a good reason why she's wrong. If you replace her, it means she's gone, but isn't that the problem in the first place?)
"It doesn't have one now. So why can't it be you?"
Why can't it be you?
15. You stop lighting the incense. You stop praying.
Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. If it's going to fill the space she left behind, then it might as well be with you.
8. There's a balcony in your apartment, a small thing with just enough room for a stool and a plant and an ashtray. She likes to stand there most nights, leaning against the railing while she looks up at the stars as though she's pining for home. You can't ever seem to do anything but watch her; she's like a gravity well, sucking up all the light and color and you.
"I'd bet there's a world out there where you're a Spectre," she says. The grin in her voice resonates, almost musical. Almost painful. "Or a general. Or a primarch. Or a renegade cop who doesn't play by anyone's rules."
"Watching too many vids again, I see," you laugh.
"Or one where you're human. Or one where you love me."
Your eyes forget about trying to remember simple things like the royal set of her cheekbones, her symmetry ruined by scars. Everything in you tenses, tunnels down into a single point—sniper's instincts you're helpless to fight—and you lock onto her outline, not sure if you should leave or stay or yell.
I bet it's this one, every coiled fiber of you wants to scream, but you're afraid of pulling the pin on something so volatile, that sticky grenade you keep locked down in your ribcage. (For good reason. What would yelling at shadows do now, aside from piss your neighbors off?)
"Good one," you say. But you aren't laughing now.
12. "I'm the Normandy," she says suddenly, strange enough to make your mandibles flare.
"You're the Normandy's commanding officer. Huge difference."
She closes her eyes like she's concentrating and ghosts a smile, shaking her head. "Wrong. There's no difference at all. Ask anyone who was there."
11. "What about you, Shepard?" you ask; you swallow and it feels like asphalt in your mouth. "Maybe you could've been the renegade cop who doesn't play by anyone's rules."
"Don't be ridiculous, Garrus," she says, flat and humorless like he always remembers her. "I don't think I could've been anything but this."
"Don't give up on yourself so fast." But by the time you say it, she's already laughing in great, fractured gusts and you feel something in your chest break.
16. "I have a plan, Shepard," you say to an empty elevator. It's been a year and a half in the making, this day; you don't have a badge anymore, no C-Sec issued firearm, and maybe you'd feel off-balance and wrong without them if you haven't already been windmilling on the edge of this for so long.
She would hate to see you do this. She would call you an idiot and order you back to the Normandy. She would chase you to the ends of the galaxy, which is exactly where you're going to go.
(And maybe that's the reality of it: You just can't accept that she's gone somewhere you can't follow. You just can't accept that she's not going to come back some day, that you'll never wake up one morning to your door sliding open with one last "Suit up, Vakarian, we're planetside in fifteen."
The galaxy is less without her in it, and you can only think of one way to make it better.)
"I can't be you," you say to your empty, aimless, gunless hands, "but someone has to try."
9. Sometimes you think there must be a world where she loves you, too.
20. It's true that you never see her again, because when she comes back—she's back, she's real, she's breathing—she's something different.
She has no battle scars now-just the peek of exposed titanium and circuitry and light-leaking fissures that need seals. What looked queenly years ago is just wild and wolfish after Cerberus got its teeth in her, a turian empress dethroned and calling for her allies in a voice still being broken in. You have an edge over the new crew. You can tell that she's angry, the kind of cold heat that leads a supernova.
You can tell other things too, now that she allows it. You don't know how you ever could've thought there was softness under that armor. Even now, as vulnerable as you'll ever see her, she's still made of steel and starstuff, full of a static pride she keeps locked up in her belly. She's still carrying honorable humans—and you, and half a dozen others who have carved out a home in her heart—on her wings. She sits at the foot of the bed and you trace her back with your eyes, moving from those wicked curves to where her skin dips down under the thin white fabric of the sheets, and you know now that Shepard the woman is no more yielding than the commander. Just more real.
Her face shifts when she sees you; defeated into smiling, finally, just for you, an anchor for her anchor because right now you think you might be dead already, spiraling off into space where no one can reach you, because how else could this have possibly happened? The corners of her eyes crinkle, full of all that humor you could never coax to the surface years ago. "You'll have to wake up earlier if you're looking to cut and run. Hope you've practiced your awkward 'call you later' speech."
You could laugh, but you lunge for her instead, wrapping your arms around the dangerous slope of her waist. Part of you will never be sure she won't just go up in a cloud of incense, leave you sitting on a silver-spat beach. The way you try to memorize her geometry by touch is nearly frantic; you tuck away her warmth, the way muscle and tendon slide smoothly under her skin. Whole and healthy and yours (for as long as she lets you think it). "Wouldn't dream of it, Shepard." You nuzzle into the hollow of her neck, feeling how she hums. "You know where I live."
She laughs then, loud and clear and beautiful like suzu gongs, puts a gentle elbow in your ribs and you can't help but laugh too. "Go to sleep, Garrus," she says, and you memorize how she sounds smiling, too, because the idea of forgetting again scares you more than any Reaper vanguard, makes all the hope in you seize up. "I'll be here."
"I know you will," you say.
(But you pull her down with you, just in case.)