2186

Commander Shepard is alive.

In the void above Earth, he made a fateful choice, the consequences of which are still being felt 2 months after the event. All Reaper technology, no matter its form, shut down in the aftermath of Shepard's decision. This resulted in the shutdown of all geth and the synthetic AI EDI. Commander Shepard himself was not seen until at least a week after the event, a cleanup crew finding his body surprisingly unharmed from a presumed fall from space, however, Commander Shepard has not awoken at all since then. While his surviving crew mates and friends visit him regularly it seems nothing can wake the commander from his slumber.

And a certain turian is beginning to lose hope...


Garrus Vakarian sighs for what seems like the hundredth time this week alone, obsessively flicking through news article after news article. He had no clue how these still got made after all the devastation of the Reaper war, and even less of a clue why he bothered reading them. Scratch that one, he did know why, he had little else to do on days like this, keeping an eye on Shepard along with Tali hadn't ever been an option he could have turned down. Shepard was the best damn friend he had left in this galaxy along with Tali, so when the quarian had asked him to watch over him with her he hadn't hesitated. Still, he had that coldly logical side, always had, and that one was screaming at him right now. Shepard could stay like this forever, spirits knows what happened to him up on the Citadel, the only 2 men who had met him up there were dead. Still, Garrus mused, he had always had a habit of forgetting about logic around Shepard.

"Hey Garrus, how is he looking?"

He was disturbed from his thoughts quite suddenly as Tali poked her head around the corner, coming to take the next shift on looking over Shepard. She had recovered well from her initial intense grief over the Commander's death, and now put as much energy as she could into making sure Shepard was well looked after.

"No change, as per usual, everything's steady."

Tali nodded sadly, as she came over to Shepard's side and grasped his hand. "Keelah, it's hard looking at him like this..." "I know. I wish we could've done something." She was silent for a moment, just looking at the human she had come to love over the last couple of years. Garrus quietly got out of his chair, picking up the datapad he'd been reading as he left the quarian alone with her thoughts.

The hospital Shepard was being kept in was consistently empty aside from permitted visitors and the occasional doctor to check up on his health, usually Doctor Chakwas. Garrus doubted anyone else knew about Shepard's health better than that woman, having been on the Normandy in all its iterations. In any case, Garrus was alone, so he went back to his apparent new obsession with galactic news, skimming through page after page of stories on all the happenings in the aftermath of the Reaper war, there were the occasional articles which caught his notice, apparently, former Major Kirrahe was now a council spectre. "You really have a knack for moving up in the world don't you?" Garrus chuckled to himself, another one, talks of adding several more races into the citadel council for their contributions during the war, and another announcing governmental reforms in the rebuilding Batarian Hegemony. But despite all this a single article caught his eye more than any others.

"Vigilante Archangel is judge, jury, and executioner on a backwater planet."

Archangel? This couldn't be right... Garrus hadn't gone by the name Archangel since his siege on the station Omega. But here it was again, this new Archangel who apparently ruled over some planet that had undergone a massacre during the war...

Well, this definitely demanded investigation.