Shepard freezes , her pistol a solid, reasuring weight against her palm. The marauder continues to stare as it hauls itself in jerky steps through the shattered landscape; tilting its head from side to side, voicing the typical nonstop babble of slurred turian dialect and untranslatable metallic feedback.
Dancing in the back of Shepard's mind she can hear its pre-programmed hostility blend with confusion and an overlay of all too organic pain. Its been injured Shepard notices, a bad shot from one of the cleanup crews had left a shattered ruin where its reaper-augmented shinbone used to be. Its bleeding a mix of dark oily fluid, and the familiar dark blue hemocyanin of the turian it used to be.
Stepping back to line up a clean shot, Shepard distantly reminds herself to reprimand whoever it was that wounded a creature as dangerous as this and then let it get away. Every one of the reaper forces allowed to live was a threat to the fragile remnants of the civilian society they were trying so hard to rebuild.
The marauder screeches out a grating threat as Shepard brings the carnifex up to shoulder level. Random flickers of thoughts batter feebly against her reaper implants like dying moths against a light; flashes of confusion, anger, regret~the creeping blackness of reaper control that stole self and spirit. In the middle of the scattered projections a single image, held steady like a shipwrecked man clings to driftwood~her own face.
For a moment she thinks she is simply seeing herself through the marauder's eyes, it takes a few moments to realize that the flickering image is of another her, before the end, before she made a deal with the devil and sacrificed her own humanity. In her minds eye she sees the memory-her laugh silently, an un-scarred mouth forming the words "I love you".
Shepard remembers the moment above Alchera, when her oxygen failed and she was falling, falling for miles into the blue frozen arc of the planet. It feels the same now, that same sick realization as her diaphragm tightens on empty lungs and she can feel herself falling. Only this time she knows the impact is going to hurt, no fiery re-entry to singe the pain from her nervous system~this time she's going to feel every bone-crushing moment of agony. She forces the reaper visions down in her mind, swallows down the bile in her throat and raises glowing eyes to meet those of the marauder standing in the rubble.
For a few seconds Shepard thinks she might have been mistaken. Her mind shies away and all she can see is the uncountable perversions the reapers have wreaked on the turian in front of her; but as it utters another metallic chatter and steps closer, her eyes catch up with what her mind already knew. Even with the bottom jaw and mandibles sheared away, the arc of blue colony paint across the cheek plating and nose is unmistakable. Where it's not overlayed with twisted cybernetic enhancements the visible hide is a suede brown, plating gleaming silver in the fading evening light. The scars on his right cheek are still there, torn away in places now~replaced with metal and wire, and for a delerious, hopeful moment Shepard half expects him to laugh and quip "nobody would give me a mirror, how bad is it?"
"Oh god Garrus," Shepard can barely hear her own voice over the roaring in her ears , "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
Shepard's finger tightened slowly on the trigger of her pistol, her rational mind knew this had to be done, this wasn't her friend, her lover, this was a reaper-parading around in a puppet shell. A perversion to heap unfair grief on the living. As if aware of her silent struggle, the marauder hauled itself a staggering step closer, a steady stream of grating babble issuing from its ruined jaw. Then it stopped, tilting its head to the side and rasped out "Seh-arrrd?"
Shepard had faced armies of geth, Saren, the collectors and lately the reapers without the fear she felt at hearing the slurred attempt at her name spoken by the brutalized remains of her former lover. For the first time she could remember, Commander Shepard, hero of the citadel, dropped her gun from nerveless fingers and fled.