Garrus found her body in the rubble, among the hot, dusty remains of ships and buildings, body parts of husks, Cannibals and Brutes strewn among the disturbingly-recognizable scraps of fabric and pieces of armour – Alliance blue, asari –commando black, various turian battalion markings…
No one else had started looking yet. They were tending their wounds, watching the debris from the Reaper corpses fall like so many meteors through the hazy atmosphere. Anderson, tending a broken leg and organizing clean-up, had met his eyes as he had left the makeshift camp where most of the Normandy crew were waiting. He'd actually just passed the Normandy itself; Joker had 'landed' it about three kilometers from the base camp – it was the only flat spot for some while. But it was empty; EDI had gone offline in the crash.
He'd been restless. He'd made it out of the battle with some deep cuts and bruises, but nothing medigel couldn't fix. He was sore and dirty, but he could move – there were advantages to being a sniper: you stayed mostly out of the way of the nasty stuff. He couldn't stand to stay there, mobile and unhurt, and not look for her.
He'd given her an order …
And she hadn't come back yet.
So he'd gone looking, and he'd found her.
Found her lying in a pile of scrap metal and stone, dirt and sand, his only clue the distinctive pattern of her armour on the one arm sticking out into the air. For a moment, his mind had entertained the worst-case scenario of that being only an arm, but he'd swallowed the thought and started digging.
He hadn't been able to lie to himself and think that she was alive. There were no lifesigns, and his visor was more than military-grade: if she'd been alive, he could have seen her through three meters of reinforced military-grade steel ship armour, to a range of twenty meters. Unobstructed he could see her from kilometers away. He'd watched her pace many a night away in her cabin on the Normandy.
His throat had constricted as he'd slowly dug her out, using a minifactured shovel and his omniblade to move the debris. She hadn't broken any bones, somehow, and her armour was still mostly intact apart from regular battle damage; no telling the internal injuries unless he did a full scan.
He didn't need to.
Her eyes were, thank the Spirits, already closed by the time he uncovered her head. She had some scratches on her face, and there was blood in her hair, and her 24-hour Omega-bought lip stain was still perfect (he remembered the time she'd kissed him slightly too soon after applying it, resulting in the brightest lip marks on his mandible he'd ever seen – he'd had to use abrasive powder to get it off … and then they'd tried the colour in other places … ).
When he'd cleared the last of the dirt and stone away from her, the impact of realization hit him like a Banshee's biotic missile to the gut. He fell to his knees, lowering his head over her chest and keening, the sound growing from the smallest grieving whimper to a loud, strident, anguished shriek. He quieted then, slipped his arms around her, and pulled her limp body against him, rocking back and forth, still keening softly in a whisper, his subvocals raspy and painful.
Oh Shepard, my Shepard …
He remembered a line of a poem Williams had recited after Alenko's death on Virmire, where the two of them, plus Wrex and Shepard (Tali had already passed out, and Liara was hiding in her room) had been drinking heavily. Ash had gotten angrier than Garrus had ever seen her, a quiet but fiery fury that set her jaw hard and had her knuckles white on her bottle.
He'd looked up the poem afterwards, and it still sent shivers down his spine.
He held Shepard tightly and then got to his feet, lifting her in his arms. She was heavy like this, with all her armour (he remembered in passing how light she was without it, how she fairly floated in his arms, how she felt pressed up against a wall, how it had felt when she'd leapt into his arms when he'd returned to the Normandy after Menae).
He bent his head over her, shifting her slightly so he could press his forehead against hers.
He'd walk back soon, and bring her with him, and the formalities of death would commence.
But not yet.
No, this was for them.
"You promised…" he whispered, his voice cracking, the flanging uncontrollable. He knew, of course, that the odds had been against them. But they had always been against them, against her, and she'd always come back. The odds had been bad against Saren, Sovereign, and the geth. The odds had been astronomically against them when they'd gone after the Collectors. This was … well, the fact that they weren't all dead meant that she really had beaten the odds, seeing as the probability based on historical accounts of the Reapers had meant that they had been doomed.
But couldn't she have pulled this one off, too?
He closed his eyes, turned, and started walking back, his feet crunching in the gravel. She was heavy; it would be a long walk.
He raised his head to the sky, glaring angrily at the streaks of fire falling through the clouds.
Oh Shepard, my Shepard, my love, my sun, even if you can't come back to me, even if you cannot return, please, my love, do this for me…
…Do not go gently into that good night.