IMPERIUM
Chapter 1: Reunion
Dr. Liara T'soni was not a very good shadow broker. Not anymore. The majority of her contacts were either dead or in systems that remained dark. She felt their collective silence like a thousand missing limbs.
For the first time in a very long while, she had no idea what was going on.
Leaning against the back of her chair, she inspected every sterile corner of the room. It exuded military minimalism with sleek white walls and shiny floors, a startling contrast to what lie aboveground. She fidgeted, shifting her weight from thigh to thigh, before a small voice in her mind reprimanded the display completely lacking in the poise necessary for this sort of meeting. The scolding voice in her head always sounded like her mother.
A metallic hiss drew her attention to the door panel sliding open, exposing a slim figure entering the room.
"Garrus."
The tense line of his shoulders slackened as his gaze met her own.
"Liara. Good to see someone who knows what the hell is going on."
She smiled ruefully, "I'm afraid I'm as much in the dark as you seem to be…will you sit?"
He declined with a terse shake of his head, opting to lean against the wall, "Can't seem to sit down lately. Feels too indulgent."
There was falseness to his usual sardonic tone and she did not begrudge him it. But she couldn't stop her eyes from drifting away and focusing on the ground. It hurt to look at him too long. All she could see was a metal plate catching the gleam of the lights in the Normandy, the name embossed in white letters. Pain welled up around the pinpricks of memory.
"Why do you think they requested us specifically? "
She tried to focus on his voice, blinking back the sudden moisture gathering in her eyes. She had no right to cry in front of him when he bore it all in the dignified stoicism expected of a turian.
"I…don't…I don't know." Her voice quavered and she took a deep breath, "Would have been nice if they gave us some time to really get our bearings."
"I think I got the picture. Rubble. Stranded fleets. Chaos."
She opened her mouth only to close it as the door panels slid open again. A weathered man in military blues entered. Immediately, she stood up. Sitting in the presence of Admiral Hackett was unthinkably rude. Her nervous fidgeting dissipated as he stepped forward. There was something to him that inspired the calm derived from confidence in authority.
"Thank you both for agreeing to meet with me. I must apologize for all the secrecy but I hope you will soon understand how vital it is to restrict this information in any way possible."
Garrus grumbled, impatient, and leveraged himself from his slouch, "What does the Alliance want with us now?"
The undercurrent of hostility rumbling through the multi-toned question left the air between them thick with tension. Her recently gained composure vanished as she shot her friend a startled look.
Admiral Hackett's face remained carefully neutral, no hint as to whether or not he picked up on the loaded remark. Liara had no doubts that he had.
"Weeks after the…event…involving the Citadel, we received a communication of sorts from Sol. As you can imagine, we had thought this to be impossible. The relays were nonfunctional and the comm buoy network nonoperational. "
Hackett paused and Liara hesitated a glance towards the wall. Beneath the cool mask of metallic cartilage, Garrus simmered with open hostility. She had never seen him like this.
Dragging her attention from the smoldering figure, she made an attempt at focusing on the conversation at hand, "Who sent this communication?"
Skin crinkled into folds around the corners of Hackett's mouth. He easily looked twenty years older than the last time she saw him. A terrible feeling jolted through her when she realized that last time had been aboard the Normandy.
"Who…or it might be more appropriate to say *what* sent it is responsible for the reconstruction of the Charon relay and the repairs to the now functioning relays around the galaxy. It is the reason we are standing in this very room together. "
He crossed the room, stride uneven from what Liara deduced was an injury sustained months ago. A flick of his hand revealed the green luminescence of a panel seamlessly integrated into the north wall of the room. Panels of gleaming white split into two separate segments retracting back into the wall to reveal a small alcove. A sliver of dark metal jutted out from the floor, a line of green light glowing along the matte surface. She had seen similar tech before. On Virmire. Goddess…no…
Everything spun, the clatter of a chair against the floor sounding so distant it could have been in another room.
The form flickered a moment, familiar enough to send a hot stab of pain through her stomach. It solidified. Hair cropped short, high cheekbones, the smattering of freckles traced in blue light.
Her voice was small in her own ears, a tiny gasp of disbelief, "Shepard?"
She was alive? But how? How?
A hundred tiny things screamed wrong. The posture was off, like someone had posed a Shepard doll into a holographic display. No cocked hip, no arms crossed over her chest. Her expression was unlike anything Shepard ever wore, entirely vacant.
"No."
Liara started, realizing that it was Garrus who had spoken, realizing that her knees were smarting and that she had fallen to them in shock.
The cold fury radiating from him eclipsed anything she had seen earlier. His mandibles were tight against his jaw, near flush with the sharp angle and vibrating with tension. He looked terrifying and predatorial. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to lunge forward and rip the device apart with his naked talons.
His voice was the whisper of a knife cutting through the silence. Measured and slow, "That is not Shepard."
"Correct."
Liara felt her stomach drop. That voice.
"I am an assimilation of Shepard's collective memories, thoughts, and moralities. Her consciousness, if you will, elevated beyond human comprehension. But to say that I am Shepard would be as false, as I am simultaneously more and less than my living embodiment. "
She was suddenly so cold. Her body began to shiver uncontrollably as the air crystallized in the spaces of her lungs.
"Living embodiment? Is Shepard alive?"
If Shepard was alive and imprisoned somehow by the Reapers- indoctrinated or…something far more sinister- that was worse than her simply being dead wasn't it?
"The corporeal form of Commander Shepard does not exist in your perception of the present."
No, Liara realized. No, it wasn't. Or maybe nothing was better. Maybe hearing that Shepard had been twisted into something like her mother would be equally terrible. Without realizing it, she had been clinging to the desperate hope that maybe Shepard was still alive and unaltered, just waiting out there in the dark of space for them to come and find her.
"Hackett, what have you done?"
Garrus was stepping forward, suddenly taller and more imposing than Liara could remember seeing him.
"What is this? Some kind of twisted A.I. the Alliance cooked up with reaper tech?"
Liara refused to cry. Of course, of course it was something like that. They had all seen the lengths the Alliance was willing to go to cover up Shepard's death years ago. Falsified vids, complex V.I. impersonations, anything to keep up the surge in enrollment after the first human spectre saved the Citadel. She remembered those terrible recruitment ads and how they turned her stomach whenever she stumbled across them on the extranet weeks after Shepard's death.
Her lip trembled.
"I am the result of a choice made by the woman you know as Shepard."
The voice was undeniably Shepard's, if you took Shepard's voice and scrubbed it clean of emotional inflection to overlay the ghostly impressions of synthetic vocalization.
The fury that was Garrus Vakarian seemed to crumple before her eyes. In a second, he was diminished. He stood, vulnerable and bare in the middle of this freezing room, unable to speak. When he finally did, his smooth pitch fractured.
"What choice?"
"The choice to sacrifice herself and assume control of the reapers."
He scoffed, "Shepard would never do that. That was the Illusive Man's dream, not hers."
"It is the only solution with repercussions she is able to continually understand and foresee as it is the only solution she is able to control."
Liara stumbled to her feet, "If she is dead, how can she possibly control anything?"
"Shepard is immortal. Her consciousness is timeless and infinite. The lack of a physical form does not constitute death."
"But earlier you implied that you are not living."
"In the definition of living that implies a physical, organic form."
"This doesn't make any sense!" Liara was almost shouting now. Frustrated and angry that she was frustrated, "Whatever you are. You aren't the Shepard I know. "
Turning on her heel, she faced Hackett, "Why did you bring us here?"
"He does not trust that I am independent of the reapers. He fears I am a tool, a weapon of manipulation. He fears that he is being indoctrinated and he fears what will happen if he refuses my help. He seeks your help."
Hackett's lips compressed into a tight line, "I'm not the only one."
There was a flicker of something in the holographic details of her face. Liara wondered if grief and shock were taking a larger toll on her senses and waved away the curiosity surfacing beneath the dark well of her despair.
"I seek your help was well."
Baffled, Liara examined the placid expression of the woman she once knew and loved, "What could we possibly have to offer you?"
"A solution."
Garrus was pacing.
"I'm taking no part of this."
Liara stepped forward, pressing her palm against his shoulder to still the frenetic motion that had possessed him since they left the room with…Shepard.
"Garrus, don't leave me to do this alone. I can't handle this on my own."
His eyes pierced through her, vivid blue and searching, "What makes you think I can handle this at all Liara?"
She found one of his hands, twitching restlessly at his side. Gripped it between hers, feeling the feverish heat through the heavy material of his glove.
"Garrus, this might be our chance. I don't…I don't want to give up on the hope that maybe we can get her back. I *can't* give up on it."
He sighed heavily and said nothing. Liara watched the fruitless struggle in his eyes, pale reflections of the conflict in her chest. It was too soon. The loss was too fresh, the nights too sleepless, the flickers of renewed hope too wild and irrational. She wasn't ready to let go. In his tired eyes, she saw that neither was he.
Resolution steadied him and he shifted away from her hand, a subtle denial of her attempts at comfort.
"There's something I need to know first."
And he was walking back towards the room. She watched him go.
He didn't like looking at it, so he fixed his eyes on the gleaming wall as blue light flickered and reflected off the tiles.
"Garrus."
Spirits, the voice was just as bad. Even Legion managed a hint of emotional inflection. He found himself glaring at the wall as if it had personally insulted him.
"All-powerful consciousness can't handle decent speech modulation?"
It was not the question he planned on asking. His voice distorted somewhere in the distance between his brain and his mouth, twisting into a parody of his usual cocksure drawl.
"Organic speech patterns are not beyond my abilities."
His mandibles flared, "No logical prerogative?"
"The opposite. Mimicking emotional responses diminishes the unease organic species feel when interacting with an emotionless entity. "
"So why?"
Despite himself, he found himself glancing at the form. It was part instinctual, a fruitless endeavor to read her intent. Tranquil. Passive. Everything Shepard was not.
"I am without emotional response. To indicate otherwise is a contradiction of what I am."
The plates covering his brow drew together, "Does that matter so long as we help you?"
Vacant eyes stared past him.
"Yes."
His willpower gave and let himself look at her, really look at her, eyes drinking the curve of her waist, the sculpted musculature of her stomach just visible beneath the fabric of the casual military garb, the small indentation nestled at the base of her throat. The sight was the world's most potent liquor and he binged with the desperation of a man wanting desperately to forget. It made him warm and not just a little disoriented, his mind fuzzy with the tiny details of her.
The hologram's eyes snapped from the wall, fixing on him before her image flickered away, blue light condensing into a simple sphere of glowing intensity. Nausea swelled in his gut, a roiling mess of shame and longing.
"It is what matters most."
The voice was still vaguely Shepard, emanating from the ambiguous form. He wanted desperately to say something sarcastic, to drawl out a flippant line, anything to look like he was in control. But the glowing blue afterimage of her seared into his mind, cutting through his self-assurance with the metallic edge of a flaming brand.
He left the room determined to never go back.
Liara started as he came into the hallway, unfolding her arms to pull him back and stop him from rushing off.
"Hackett wants to meet with us, in private this time."
"Good luck with that." Garrus snarled, pulling free.
"Garrus! What happened? What did you ask her?"
He hated the desperate hopefulness in her voice. He wanted to stamp it out, crush it beneath his foot into a fine dust.
"Liara, it's not Shepard. Shepard is..."
He still couldn't say it. His breath hitched around the word and the moisture in his throat suddenly evaporated.
"It's just a Reaper trick."
Anger was good for him. He had learned to work with anger. Most people let it cloud them, let it obscure their judgment and get them killed. On Omega Garrus honed his into a tool. It was his greatest weapon. He was sharper, faster, deadlier, a blade against the whetstone of his murdered team, his dead mentor and the injustice of a universe that let that happen while Omega continued to exist.
Neglected details swarmed into his mind. Working in C-sec, he never missed much. It made him an excellent cop, part of why he stayed on as long as he did. He didn't enter a room without analyzing every corner and he didn't have a conversation without filing away minute details. Years of habit were difficult to break.
It didn't fit. If the goal was manipulation, that thing did a shoddy job of it. The shoddy VI on the Citadel could pull out a better performance.
'Please tell me you aren't going to fix that thing.'
Her hand was pressed against her brow as those full pink lips twitched with the effort not to smile.
'You're a hell of a looker soldier.' the VI chirped at her. The voice wasn't bad really, the peppy tone was the only aspect that was completely off.
Garrus grinned, a wolfish flare of the mandibles and a wink of sharp teeth. He traced a lazy path along her body with his eyes as his taloned finger crossed the gap between them.
The skin of her cheek was warm against his hand.
'That you are.'
He did end up getting the thing out of demo mode. She was not appreciative. Threatened to throw it out the airlock but never actually went through with it. It was a joke between the two of them, a routine of playful argument settled more than once with some enthusiastic sparring.
The day he placed that placard on the wall was the day he shut the thing off and shoved it into the bottom of his trunk.
'To indicate otherwise is a contradiction of what I am'
How very Shepard. Not the actual wording, but the underlying sentiment. It could almost be her motto. Shepard was Shepard. The hero, the savior, and she never pretended to be anything other than what she was. Garrus knew from experience that few legends managed to live up to their legacy in person. Shepard did. She was a living person gone supernova, a once in a lifetime galactic phenomenon. There were times that it hurt to look at her, the radiance of her burning afterimages into his retinas.
"Garrus?"
Liara didn't touch him again, but her voice was soft and concerned in that graceful asari manner of hers.
"Let's go." he said, seeing her puzzlement smooth away like ripples fading into the glassy poise of a still pond.