"Are you sure about this, Vakarian?" Victus set the datapad down on the table with a decisive click. His expression gave nothing away, but they both understood the seriousness of the question.

"Yes, sir." Garrus met his eyes steadily. He'd gone over this decision time and time again since he'd returned from Venaxa, and it didn't get any better. No matter how he turned it, he could not see another way out. "They were exposed to Reaper technology for at least a week. They broke procedure to hide what Pallian was doing at Venaxa and deliberately covered their tracks afterward. We have to treat them as compromised."

"It sets a dangerous precedent. We have no conclusive proof that they're guilty of anything more than a lapse in discipline."

"We can't take the chance. Look at the damage they nearly caused at Venaxa, just by not doing anything. They're all highly placed. If they set themselves to sabotage, it could be devastating. They have to be detained."

Victus returned his gaze levelly for a moment and then sighed. "The STG appears to agree with you. They forwarded some of their work on indoctrination. Your Dr. Solus' name features prominently."

Garrus sat up straighter at that. "Then we've made contact with the Union?"

"After a fashion. There's some kind of political game going on behind the scenes there, and they won't officially commit to anything, but the STG seems to be convinced enough to liaise with our intelligence people."

"What about the Alliance?"

"We're currently in talks. They're at least willing to take action, but their politicians want to be in charge, as usual."

Garrus made a disparaging clicking noise, but kept his mouth shut on the subject of politicians and the time they were wasting. He'd already made his views abundantly clear. Victus sent a warning look his way and he held up his hands in acquiescence. Victus let the silence stand for a moment before continuing.

"Very well. The original investigation team to Venaxa will be detained indefinitely on your recommendation. Do you have a proposal for the facility and its contents?"

Garrus felt his shoulders tense at the question. He'd spent even more time agonizing over this than he had the fate of the original investigation team. When Shepard had destroyed the Collector base, he had ultimately agreed with the decision. Perhaps they could have learned something from it. There was a calculating part of himself that had argued that they shouldn't pass up the chance to dissect the enemy. But in the end, that argument had been put to rest by the diseased quality of the place. It had been riddled with Reaper tech like a corpse with insect larvae, and he wouldn't have trusted Cerberus to know when to leave it alone. It would have been the worst dishonor imaginable to the thousands of people who'd died there to let their grave be abused to that end.

Venaxa, though, was different. Sovereign's remains were dangerous, more so than anyone had realized. But they were also isolated. Controllable. And if they were to win this war, they needed to learn everything they could about the Reapers.

He hoped he was not making a very bad mistake.

"Quarantine the facility. Have a response team stationed in orbit in case of a breach, but no personnel access. Recruit a new staff to analyze Sovereign's remains from a remote location via mech interface. Have a kill-switch ready if worst comes to worst."

Victus produced a thoughtful subvocal hum. "Ambitious. But well-planned. I'll pass it along. Is there anything else you wanted to address?"

Garrus relaxed, the worst part of the meeting over. "Sir, I'd like to roll out that new shielding R&D came out with to frigate wings patrolling in the vicinity of relays. I know we can't engage in aggressive behavior, but this would be purely for field-testing purposes and..."

"Done."

Garrus stopped and blinked. "What?"

"I said, 'done.'" There was a suspiciously smug angle to Victus' mandibles.

"What's the catch?"

Victus leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. "No catch. I sent your report on Venaxa out, as well as the video you took. Up until now, it's been easy to suppose that the Reapers are interested specifically in humans. Venaxa changes that, and it's got a lot of people thinking." He held up a hand in warning. "Don't let it go to your head, Vakarian. If you can find a reasonable excuse to bolster our defenses, it will probably get done. But don't overreach yourself. People are paying more attention now, and that means they're watching you closely. Stay out of trouble."

He blinked again in surprise before schooling his features to a neutral expression again. "I'll try, sir."

Victus nodded. "Good. See that you do. Dismissed."

He spent the rest of his day consulting with his team and coming up with excuses to justify the essential defensive steps they should already have been taking. The ridiculous nature of the exercise strained his patience. He understood the rationale behind it, and even agreed with its necessity - the Hierarchy could not risk conflict with the other powers at such a time. But the pettiness of it contrasted poorly with his recent experience in Venaxa, where they'd had a problem and gone in and solved it, without a lot of extra fuss. The day left him frustrated and drained, and he was glad to leave when his work was done.

He came back to a dark house and the hunched shape of his father, glass in hand, seated at the kitchen counter, watching the twilight out the window. He realized suddenly that he had seen his father drink more on this visit back than he had in all the years he'd lived in this house. Moved by a sudden sense of trepidation, he stepped up and sat next to him.

"Dad."

"Garrus." He took a sip of his drink. "Your mother's in the hospital."

The breath froze in his lungs and he could feel his heart hammering. "What happened?"

"She had a round of treatments scheduled for next week, but she's had a bad few days. They decided to move up her appointment. They want to keep her a week for observation."

The vise around his lungs let go, leaving only a nebulous tightness in his chest. "Do they help?" He asked quietly. "The treatments?"

His father let out a breath. "Some."

But not enough. The silence of the house was heavy, and there was an aching, blind pain digging in under his keelbone. He thought of his mother, sequestered away in the hospital, and his father, drinking alone in the dark house while she was gone, and wondered how many times this scenario had played out while he was away.

Neither of them said anything more, but Garrus stayed there while his father slowly found his way to the glass's bottom. In the morning, he knew, they would both bury themselves in their work, keeping their apprehensions at bay by focusing on the problems they could fix. They'd always been alike in that regard.

At length, his father got up and cleaned the glass and they both turned down the hallway to their respective rooms. His father hesitated a moment outside the door to Garrus' room, but in the end, he just shook his head and bade him a quiet good night. Garrus returned it, and went, reluctantly, to try and sleep.


Savian woke in the morning, his hand resting in the space where Thalia usually lay. There was a brief rush of panic at the emptiness at his side, and then he remembered that she was in the hospital again. He allowed himself a moment of grief, taking slow, deep breaths as he stared at the ceiling, before locking the anxious thoughts away and picking himself up off the bed.

He went through his morning routine with special care and precision, taking extra time to straighten his clothes and tidy the room. Garrus was already gone when he entered the kitchen. It was just as well. He hadn't meant to let his son catch him out in a moment of weakness the night before, and they both likely needed the breathing space.

He managed to keep himself busy through most of the morning. Administrative work often lacked the urgency of his former occupation, and at times like this he missed that distraction. Working for Intelligence had its attractions, though, and let him feel like he was doing something concrete despite his need to remain at home to care for his wife.

He sorted through the usual round of reports with the ease of long familiarity. After he was done, he began to dig deeper, working through the longer missives his key agents sent, checking and re-checking them against the other information he had, looking for the ways they fit together, trying to piece together the shadows of larger patterns that none of his individual agents might see singly. He worked through official reports and extranet gleanings, and informal requests and sightings passed on to him. He still maintained contacts in C-Sec, who sent him information on cases which might have roots in the Hierarchy's jurisdiction. C-Sec did the same for all the governments with a Citadel presence, so it was no special consideration, but he enjoyed the occasional chance to cross paths with old colleagues.

Of the current batch of C-Sec inquiries and tip-offs, one caught his eye.

Seeking criminal history of Lantar Sidonis, of Taetrus colony.

He frowned, something nagging at his memory. Sidonis was not a common name, but he was sure he'd heard it somewhere before. A brief search turned up no Hierarchy court records for a Lantar Sidonis, but the more he thought on it, the surer he was that he knew the name. It was possible that the man had been peripherally involved in one of his old investigations, or even that he'd happened across him by chance in his personal life. He flexed his mandibles in thought, and replied with a request for more detail on Sidonis' case.

He received the reply a couple of hours later and put it aside as he tried to piece together exactly where the latest run of smuggled weapons was coming from. By the time he'd finished, he'd almost forgotten about the message and only remembered when his messaging program pinged the alarm for new C-Sec messages at him. He opened it and skimmed the officer's brief description of the case. 'Ten men killed outside C-Sec jurisdiction,' was an unusual charge, and the purported connection to Archangel's activities on Omega was interesting, but he could not connect it with his own history in any way. The name still pulled at his memory, though, so he watched the video of the deposition, wondering if he would recognize Sidonis on sight.

The video showed a small, bare interrogation room, with a human C-Sec officer on one side of a desk and a thin, haggard looking turian on the other. They ran through the usual round of questions establishing Sidonis' identity, and then the officer invited Sidonis to give his statement.

"I was responsible for the deaths of Archangel's squad on Omega."

"Can you identify the victims?"

"I didn't know all their legal names. Some of us used aliases. Melanis. Mierin. Erash. Weaver. Ripper. Grundan Krul. Monteague. Butler. Vortash. Sensat. All of them, except for Archangel."

The world seemed to stop and lose all its color. Suddenly, he knew exactly where he'd seen the name Sidonis.

Ten names carved into his son's visor, and an eleventh scored out.

Deliberately, he began breathing again. Carefully, methodically, he closed the video and struggled to think through what he'd learned, his mind full of those two long years Garrus had disappeared. He wanted to think there was some other explanation, some series of coincidences that would erase that connection between his son and Archangel, but he'd been an investigator too long to really believe it.

He'd only become aware of Archangel's existence once his operations had grown bold enough to put a measurable dent in smuggling traffic. He'd figured him for some shortlived hotshot with a grudge or a deathwish and not paid more attention than that at the time. Now, Savian combed the extranet and his own networks for anything he could find on him.

There were no official news organizations on Omega, just as there was no official law. But there was a lot of gossip. Archangel had grown into something of a folk-hero on Omega's seedy extranet underbelly. There were a lot of dubious stories about his exploits and a few drinks named after him, but nothing verifiable. Digging deeper into the information provided by his own networks, he found angry, increasingly panicked communications among the Eclipse, Suns, and Pack companies on Omega - Archangel had graduated from 'unknown' to 'annoyance' to 'business threat' with remarkable speed and efficacy. He found detailed lists of shipments interrupted, operations sabotaged, and locations compromised.

He also found lists of associates executed.

And 'executed' was the word, he reflected grimly. The first men on the list had been felled neatly, from a distance, with a single headshot when they least expected it. A clean, calculated death. As time went on, though, Archangel had become more creative, had developed a morbid calling card of punishment fitting to the crime. His hands were shaking with rage by the time he'd finished reading through the list of dead men.

He wanted to believe some other man's son had committed those murders, but the evidence spoke against it. All except Archangel, Sidonis had said.

What the hell had Garrus been thinking? He'd known his son was reckless, that he always took the straightest path from his position to his goal, cutting through or leaping over obstacles in his way. He had not imagined that that recklessness could metasize into a crusade of this sort. How had the boy he'd raised grown into Archangel? Where had he gone wrong?

He paced back and forth the length of the study, his thoughts loud and hot and too close together. He was furious, at Garrus for casting aside every damn thing he'd tried to teach him, and at himself for not having taught it better. An irrational sense of betrayal stalked him as well; he had thought they had reached a truce, had begun to look forward to forging a friendship with the man his son had grown into.

It took over an hour to for him to calm down enough to think clearly. As he did, his thoughts crystallized around that cold, barren year he had thought Garrus dead. The memory of that time dragged at him like the weight of shackles. Regrets had dogged his steps like scavengers following a wounded animal, and he had wished, with everything in him, that he could have seen his son one last time and made things right between them.

His steps slowed, and he sat in the chair by the abandoned terminal, his knees creaking. He suddenly felt old, and the anger hollow. A war was coming, and his son would be in the thick of it. Silently, he weighed that regret against what his son had done and found, to his mixed shame and relief, that he no longer had it in him to shut his son out of his life.

He let out a long breath, and began to think on what questions to ask.


Garrus returned late in the day, worn out. They had a set of plausible excuses for more heavily armed squadrons at relays and increased patrols. He'd sent off the proposals before he left, and his team had submitted another round of ideas to go over the next day. His head ached, and the muscles at the back and sides of his neck felt strained.

His father waited for him in the space just inside the house's front door. It sent a wary prickle up his spine – although their relationship had become more friendly, it was unusual for his father to go out of his way to cross paths with him.

"Garrus. We need to talk."

Instantly, the aches and pains of the day were forgotten. A weight plummeted into his stomach.

"What happened?" He asked tightly. "Is Mom all right?"

His father looked briefly startled, then guilty before his face settled back into a neutral expression. "No, nothing like that. Your mother is doing well."

Garrus breathed out in relief. His father waited as he closed the door behind him and they found seats at the counter they'd sat at the night before. When they were settled, his father spoke in a measured voice. "C-Sec sent me an inquiry today about a Lantar Sidonis."

Garrus froze, but his father continued speaking, careful eyes watching him. "According to C-Sec, he's confessed to killing Archangel's gang. The names he listed match the ones on your visor. What were you doing on Omega, Garrus?"

There was silence for a moment, before he worked the words past the tightness in his throat. "I think, if you're asking me, you already know."

"Maybe. But I want to hear it from you," his father replied, his voice snapping with controlled anger. "I want to know how a son of mine wound up playing vigilante on Omega. I want to know what the hell you were thinking."

"I-" He heard the discord in his sub-tones and halted, gathering his thoughts. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and controlled. "I don't know if I can tell you. I'm still not sure what I was thinking at the time."

His father's reply was frigid. "Try."

He was quiet a moment, trying to think of a way to explain what had happened. His father waited, silent, every line of his face set in anger. "I quit C-Sec after Shepard died," he said finally. "After the invasion, we spent weeks clearing Sovereign's wreckage out of the wards and chasing down leftover husks and geth. I know Shepard never stopped trying to get the Council to do something about the Reapers, and I thought with that kind of evidence, they'd have to take action. Things would have to change. But they kept delaying and making excuses, and when Shepard was declared KIA, they stopped pretending to be polite. Suddenly, Shepard was delusional and the invasion had been a fluke. I tried to take up where she left off and found myself 'promoted' into a desk job."

He stopped, an echo of the helpless, choking anger of those days still ringing in the back of his mind. His father watched him with a nameless, intense expression.

"I quit and took the first transport I found off the Citadel."

"To Omega," his father said.

"Yeah. It's..." he trailed off, at a loss to explain. "Have you ever been there?" he asked, suddenly wondering if Omega might be one of the hidden parts of his father's life too. There had been times when he'd taken investigations outside the Citadel.

His father sent him a strange look. "No. I know Omega only by reputation."

Garrus let out a breath. "Anything you've heard is only half the story. It's a miserable place that rewards viciousness. Anyone who doesn't have the muscle gets crushed. People aren't shy about it, either. They do their shakedowns and their beatings and their killings right out in the open because no one gives enough of a damn to stop them. They just accept that that's how Omega works." He felt his mandibles drawing back, almost a snarl, and was vaguely ashamed to let his father see that expression on him. He got himself back under control and continued. "I stopped it whenever I saw it. And I saw it a lot. Before I knew it, I had men following me and people calling me Archangel. We carved out a space on the station where that kind of thing didn't happen." He paused and then said, fiercely and quietly, "It felt damned good to be able to make a difference like that."

His father gave him a long, hard look. "It's a long step up from a gang holding a territory to harassing mercenary bands."

"We weren't a gang," he retorted sharply. "We didn't take protection money and we didn't hurt civilians or bystanders. That was the rule." He waited, but his father simply tipped his head forward, a gesture that could have indicated anything from acquiescence to challenge. When he did not speak, Garrus continued. "The Pack, the Suns, and Eclipse were responsible for some of the worst things on the station." His voice leveled out into satisfied thrum as he remembered those first successful operations, where it had felt like they'd done something good, something permanent. "We couldn't get rid of them, but if we could make them uncomfortable, afraid to do business out in the open where innocent people get caught up in it... So we started interfering with their operations. Just interdiction at first, and then small raids."

"Assassinations?" his father growled.

Garrus sobered, his sub-tones returning to a clipped, controlled range. "Those too," he said after a moment.

His father tossed him a datapad. "People say you killed these men. I want to know what made you do it the way you did."

He stared at the names on the datapad for a long time before speaking slowly. "Kron Harga was a slaver. He shipped people in crates packed so full that sometimes they suffocated before he got them to their buyers. He'd been doing it for a century." He took a breath. "That was supposed to be a raid, not a hit, but things went pear-shaped and I wound up facing off with him. I lost my temper." He could not look at his father, remembering that sordid pit he'd found Harga in, lined with cages full of filth and starved men and women packed shoulder to shoulder with their dead peers.

"The others we killed as examples," he admitted bluntly. "When Harga died, it shook things up. No one wanted to step into his place because of what happened to him, and the slavers kept quiet for a while. We learned something from that." His mandibles pulled in tight, remembering how it had felt to make that decision. "The targets we chose were monsters with a reputation for being untouchable. Thralog Mirki'it dealt red sand. He had an arrangement with a slaver gang. When his clients couldn't afford another hit, he'd offer to let them sell someone to the slavers to cover the debt. Usually, it was their kids. Zel'Aenik nar Helash killed twenty-three people that I know of, just for the fun of it. He made a new virus for all of his victims, and had started hiring himself out to anyone who wanted an enemy to die painfully and without dignity. They did a lot more good dead than anything they'd done alive."

"Examples." His father's voice was the coldest he'd ever heard it.

"Yes." Garrus forced himself to meet his father's eyes and took a few long breaths, wrenching himself out of the memories of Omega. His father said nothing, waiting. Garrus could not read his expression at all. "I'm not proud of some of the things I did there," he said at last. "Omega works itself under your plates after a while. You get a little bit meaner every day." He swallowed bitterly. "I think it's a good thing I got out when I did."

His father watched him for a long, silent moment, and finally, something loosened in his stance. "How did it end?" he asked, quietly.

He took a sharp breath through his teeth. It felt like a blow to the gut even when he was expecting the question, and he could hear but not suppress the discordant note of his sub-tones when he replied. "Sidonis lured me away. When I got back to the base, my men were dead or dying. I held out as long as I could after that. Shepard got me out." With a start, he realized he was tracing the scars across his damaged mandible and purposefully moved his hand away.

There was another long silence between them, and then his father said, "Is there anything else I should know? Anything else you did in those two years that may be a problem?"

The question was so unexpected that it startled half a painful laugh out of him. "You're taking this far better than I'd imagined."

His father let out a sigh. "What do you want me to say, Garrus? I'm angry and disappointed. I don't – can't – approve of what you've done. But it's in the past." He paused, leveling a suspicious stare at Garrus. "Is there anything else?"

The acceptance was more than he'd ever expected from his father, and he had the feeling that they'd once again struck a new balance. He had the impulse to sweep everything clean between them, and it was that, more than anything, that made him speak up. "Shepard and I are, ah, involved."

His father swung to face him, staring, mandibles akimbo and speechless for the first time Garrus could remember. He blinked twice. "Involved," he said, slowly. His mandibles worked up and down wordlessly a few times. "Is it serious?"

"We haven't been official that long, but it was a long time coming." He let out a breath. "Yeah, it's serious."

His father stared at him for another couple of heartbeats and then wearily passed a hand over his eyes. "Of course you're involved with Shepard," he muttered. "Of course it's serious." He gave Garrus another look, this one with something wry about it. "Is that it?"

"Yeah. That's it."

His father kept his silence another moment, examining him, before nodding. "All right." He brushed past, headed to his study. The door opened and closed, and Garrus was left feeling a little numb and a little raw, alone in the empty room with Omega's ghosts.

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AN: Thanks to Cadmos for beta-reading, and everyone who's reading. FYI, updates will slow down considerably from here on out, as classes resume for me this week, but hopefully I won't be too bogged down by Real Life.