Garrus knew that in order to achieve his goals, he'd have to approach this situation like one of his cases: slow, careful and methodical.
The first step was gathering information.
Turians had a pretty good memory in general, and Garrus was definitely smarter than the average turian (there was a reason he had risen so quickly through C-Sec ranks, after all). It wasn't difficult to compare the details of his cases with those of his memories from the previous timeline.
He was looking for deviations. He had to know how different this galaxy was from the one in the last timeline.
Turns out there weren't any.
He leaned back casually in his chair. Nothing seemed different from his memories. Heck, even the people were as he remembered them.
He ran through his mental checklist once again. Pallin was still a bureaucracy-obsessed lunatic, Chellick was still running his sneaky undercover operations and Harkin was still a sleaze ball. . . .
Nope, seems like nothing much had changed after all.
He glanced at his omni-tool. Twenty-four hours.
In twenty-four hours Saren was going to hit Eden Prime, and set off the chain of events that would change the galaxy forever.
His first instinct had been to warn the Systems Alliance about the attack on Eden Prime, find a way to prevent the thousands of deaths that were going to define that colony's place in galaxy history.
But he couldn't. Doing so might set off a different chain of events that would change the future, turn it into something beyond his control.
Garrus was at war with the Reapers, and wars demanded sacrifices.
Ruthless calculus of war.
He gave a hollow bark of laughter. So it came down to the same thing all over again. Once again he was forced to look at the whole situation from a cold, detached perspective. Sacrifice "x" here, to gain "y" there.
Ten billion people over here die, so that twenty billion over there can live.
He shook his head forcefully. No, he wasn't doing this because he wanted to. He was doing this because he had long since learned that he couldn't hope to save everybody. Working with Shepard had taught him that well.
Shepard. He sighed. His mind went back to the last conversation they had had.
She had been indoctrinated.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious from the very beginning. The Shepard he knew would never had made some of the decisions she had during the Reaper war.
Sabotaging the genophage cure. Betraying Mordin and Wrex. Sacrificing the entire Quarian fleet to save the Geth, simply because she felt the latter would be more useful.
No, the Shepard he knew was a good woman. One who believed in second chances, one who gave them to those who truly deserved it. She wasn't the Paragon of virtue most people made her out to be, but she also wasn't the monster she had eventually become.
But if she'd been indoctrinated all along? Garrus nodded to himself. It explained a lot of things, things which at that time he had explained away as the stress of the war.
But that brought up the logical question, when had she been indoctrinated?
If he had to guess, it must have been during her mission to the Bahak system. She herself had told Garrus about that mysterious Object Rho, the Reaper artifact which Dr Kenson's team had been studying.
By Shepard's own admission, she had been held captive at the base for two days. Plenty of time for the Reapers to plant their insidious seeds in her mind. They must have taken extra precautions to make the whole process as subtle as possible, so that even someone like Javik wouldn't have suspected anything if he tried to read her mental state.
Garrus had to give the bastards credit. It really was a very ingenious strategy.
Too bad for them he wasn't going to let it happen this time around.
He sighed tiredly. No point in worrying about that now. What was that human saying Shepard was so fond of? Oh yeah, they'd cross that bridge when they came to it.
He glanced at the time again. There was still quite some time to go before Shepard arrived at the Citadel to plead their case against Saren.
He had a few calls to make.
"Hi Mom. Garrus here. . . no, nothing's wrong. Just wanted to chat a little bit. How's Sol doing?"
There she was.
Commander Shepard, Hero of Elysium, Savior of the Citadel and Bane of the Reapers.
And the one person who Garrus Vakarian loved more than anyone else in the galaxy. . .
He stood a respectable distance away from her, watching as she disembarked from the docking bay elevator. He drank in the sight of her lithe frame wearing her beloved N7 armor, her short red hair dancing in a gentle breeze, her bright green eyes searching her surroundings. She had a neutral expression on her face, but Garrus knew that look in her eyes. It spoke of an innocence, a child-like wonder which Shepard always possessed when she saw something that piqued her interest.
Then he caught sight of a familiar figure standing right behind her.
Kaidan Alenko.
And just like that, the magic was gone.
He sighed. If there was anything out there that Garrus Vakarian despised more than Reapers and Cerberus, it was Alenko.
No, "despised" was perhaps too strong a word. Alenko merely irritated him.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was Shepard's ex, maybe it had something to do with the way he had treated her on Horizon and on Mars, maybe it had something to do with the way he'd turned his gun on her during the Cerberus coup attempt. . . .
. . . or maybe it was just his stupid hair.
Garrus clenched his fists. The very idea of that bastard running his hands over Shepard, his Shepard, made his blood boil.
Grimly, he wondered if he could get away with shooting the upstart in the groin with a hammerhead round.
It would certainly be one hell of a conversation starter.
Alenko doubled up in pain as he fell to the ground, clutching his family jewels.
Garrus walked up to Shepard, holstering his smoking pistol like the badass he was. "Commander Shepard. I'm Garrus Vakarian."
Shepard looked at him, eyes filled with awe. "Oh Mr Vakarian, you're such a badass!"
Garrus snaked one arm of his around her slender waist. He looked deep into her eyes. "Am I?" he purred, his sub-vocals trilling with pleasure.
"Yes, you are!" squealed Ashley Williams, looking up at him in hero-worship.
Without looking away from Shepard, he reached out with one hand and pushed Williams away. She fell backwards with a crash, resounding curses coming from an unfortunate bystander.
"What say we find a nice quiet place to test my reach. . . and your flexibility?" he purred.
"Oh Garrus," Shepard whispered, her voice husky with lust. . .
He shook himself awake. What the hell? This was no time to be daydreaming!
He scanned the crowd anxiously. Shepard and her gang were hailing a cab, presumably on their way to the Presidium.
Time to put his plan into action.
He turned and jogged away to C-Sec academy. He had to catch up with an old friend.
Note to self: ease up a little on watching re-runs of Fleet and Flotilla.
AN: To all you Shenko fans out there, no I'm not going to indulge in too much Alenko-bashing. This is just an attempt at injecting some humor into an otherwise dry storyline. Remember, we're talking about Garrus' POV here.
Lemme know what you guys think.