AN: Just a little post game one-shot I wrote to heal my hurts over the ending and complete Shepards story. It's tentatively set in the synthesis ending, and obviously I took a lot of liberties.
Disclaimer: Mass Effect does not belong to me, or things would have ended a bit differently.
The Normandy is full of Ghosts
The world was arising anew, better than ever it had been before. Everyone was helping each other because she had given that to them, just as she had given everything else. She had given her life twice, but she had also given them her courage, her goodness, her strong heart, and her endless capacity for empathy.
The worst part was the sharp pain of her death had never gone away, it had been almost a year and it felt like yesterday. Solona had shaken him so hard. Wake up you! She didn't die so you could bumble around like a sleepwalker. His father had been more understanding. She had been your mate, you have lost a part of yourself. You won't ever be like you were. He and his father had never seen eye to eye, but they did just then. And he was grateful for that.
Had anybody really been soothed by that plaque on the Normandy? To put her name on a list of the dead did nothing for him. But there had been faces there that day that seemed to have regained some measure of peace. And he had been angry then, so angry. At himself, at everybody. She's dead. She died alone for the second time. She wanted to live more than anybody I know. If we put up a plaque does that make it right? Did we do enough now? Do we just move on?
But he remembered her perfectly, long black hair that he had loved to touch and brush. And when she had it down and it moved in the breeze and he asked her how that felt and she had replied, it feels like being with you. A flash of a bright smile and large blue eyes, Vakarian blue, he had thought even the first time he had met her. That was how he had known, meant to be. Her scarred and strong body, lithe and flexible, that had been so beautiful to him. So strange and so new. Those moments when she looked at herself in the mirror and touched her scars, slumping over momentarily as if reliving a thousand hurts.
This was all that remained of her now. Though every now and then he would hear her laugh in a crowd, or catch her scent on the breeze, or hear her call out his name like she sometimes did in the heat of battle. At your six Shepard. Scoped and Dropped.
He stopped walking and looked at the Normandy, parked haphazardly on some uneven terrain. Liara was walking around outside looking at a datapad, obviously deep in thought. He almost smiled then, because clearly some things never changed. She noticed him and smiled then, waving him over.
"I didn't think you'd come," she told him, the glow of her eyes still odd to him after all this time.
"Thing were busy on Palaven," he replied, in what was almost the truth. The rest of it was that he could not stand for them to comfort him, and he could not talk to Kaidan no matter how many emails that man sent him.
"I'm sure they were, but Turian's were always good organizers. Earth's still a mess after all this time, we need some good heads to hasten the process." She surveyed the area, and all the craters. A shadow suddenly fell over them and they looked up to see the reaper pass them over.
"I still can't-" Liara started.
"I know," he replied, "Me either." A chill traveled down his spine and his trigger finger twitched.
Liara grabbed on to his arm suddenly, her large glowing eyes filling with tears. "Garrus please, can't we just talk about her?"
"Not yet," he pulled his arm away.
"But I have to talk about her! I'll be working on the Normandy and then look up expecting to see her standing over the Galaxy Map, or hear her laughing on the bridge with Joker! And her cabin…nobody can go down there..nobody can even look at the button on the elevator!"
"That's why I don't go on the Normandy. The Normandy is full of ghosts."
She wiped her eyes. "Since when do you believe in ghosts Garrus?"
"Since I see them everywhere," he shrugs.
She continues to look at him in that transparent way she has, as if she's looking right past him. "I don't see you smiling anymore Garrus. You used to always be so quick with a smile."
"There's lots to smile about these days," he responds.
"But not for you." Liara is astute, as always.
"No not for me. I'll go sweep the perimeter, see what advice I can offer."
He sweeps the perimeter but he's not sure what advice he'll be able to give, his head is not what it used to be. Jane would probably have known, but she was gone now. What was it she would do in a situation like this? Talk to people.
So he did, he talked to them in the way that she would have, always respectful and listening carefully. He went from person to person, Geth, Asari, and Humans all readily spoke to him. Of infrastructure, and the lack of support for those trying to find family members, and of the lack of aid for those who had lost their memory in the shift. In that blast of green light that had saved everybody else and killed her.
He walked towards the big tent that was holding those that were memory challenged. A tired looking Asari was holding a clipboard and talking to a young human boy.
"Think very hard," she was saying. "Can you remember your name?"
The boy sniffled. "No, I want my mommy."
The woman sighed. "Do you know your mothers name?"
"No." Tears were sliding down his cheeks.
The woman sighed again, putting down her clipboard. "You have to give me something!"
The boy then burst out crying. Garrus moved forward to comfort him but somebody beat him to it. A tall human woman got out of one of the beds and moved gracefully to his side, kneeling to be at his level. She placed a reassuring hand on his head, "Shhhh it's okay, we'll find your mom for you. But you have to be a big strong boy for her until then okay?"
The child nodded, taking her hand and following her across the tent where the woman pulled out some crayons and a paper, and was asking him if he could draw his mother.
The asari shook her head. "She can't remember who she is, but somehow is mentally sound enough to help others." He was standing paralyzed and staring at the woman who had helped the boy. Her hair was yellow as opposed to Shepard's shining black, and she moved differently than Jane had. But the voice, the voice was the same.
The asari woman finally turned and looked at him. "V-vakarian!" She saluted him with a rapturous expression. "What brings you here, sir?"
"Just surveying the area," he replied, watching the woman across the tent. He was waiting for her to give some sort of sign, do something that was signature Shepard so he didn't feel like a madman. But then, he realized, going up to help the crying boy was as signature Shepard as you could get.
"Who is the woman?" He finally asked, trying to sound as casual as he possibly could.
The asari turned around and looked at her and then turned back to him and shrugged. "She just wandered in here on bleeding feet some months past, practically naked, no clue as to even what her hair color was. Most who have been here that long have remembered but she hasn't. She's been a great help though, people seem to like her."
"If I may-" he gestured to the girl.
The asari nodded. "Of course sir, but she won't be able to tell you anything."
Her curtain of yellow hair was obscuring her features but he was right about her voice. It was the same. The voice he loved more than anything else in the world. The voice he thought he would never hear again.
She looked up when he came close and he almost ran out of the tent. Her eyes were blue and glowing but even through the glow he could tell what precise shade they were. Vakarian Blue. Is this some cruel trick? Her face was almost the same, the nose wasn't broken, and there was no scar splitting her eyebrow. No scars at all. Is it you if there are no scars?
"Hello," she said with a smile, a smile more open and trusting than any Shepard would have ever smiled.
He felt shy again, as shy as when she asked him to bed for the first time. As shy as when he asked her if they were more than bed-mates, hoping and praying she would say yes. He hadn't felt shy for a long time.
He coughed a little and tried to save face. Is it you Jane? Has this damn crazy universe done something right for once? "Hello," he finally responded, in a move of unparalleled eloquence. Oh hey are you my dead girlfriend come to life for the second time, maybe?
"Would you like to sit down with us? You seem like you're looking for something too." She gestured to the third seat and he sat down gratefully, not sure how much longer his legs would support him. He tried not to examine her too closely but the hair irked him. Shepard's hair was black. Not yellow. Except…..The hair on other parts of her anatomy hadn't been black, but yellow.
And she had told him…When I was a blonde they called me Miss. I dyed it black and they called me Mam. So I left it that way.
"This was my house," The boy was telling her, showing a crudely drawn building. "Oooh," she responded, "Do you remember what was around your house? Maybe grass or more buildings?"
The boy looked thoughtful and continued drawing. "So you really don't remember anything?"
She shrugged. "No not a thing, sometimes people look at me oddly and I think they recognize me. But then they walk on by. Everybody here has come and gone, but all I remember is green light. I'll probably go soon, and just start a new life."
"A new life," he echoed.
She smiled mischievously at him and he felt that familiar ache inside again, because that was Shepard's smile. That was how she looked when she was about to tease someone.
"But you recognize me don't you? I see the way you looked at me, like you'd seen a ghost."
He smiled, and surprised himself. He didn't remember the last time he smiled. He didn't answer her though, just leaned back and looked at her.
Then he extended his hand to her, a new life huh? "I'm Garrus Vakarian."
She took his hand and smiled back, the smile he had seen a thousand times before. "Pleasure to meet you Garrus. I'm not quite sure what my name is, but around here they call me Jane."