Chapter 14

I don't know where I am when I start to feel my senses coming back. I'm definitely aware…but am I still alive? I can't remember how I got here. I try to open my eyes and clear the darkness around me but they're already open. What's going on? I struggle to put the pieces together. Assassins, poison, team is in danger—I have to get back to—

"Garrus?"

…to…no…no, it's not possible. I know that voice better than any other. Hearing it say my name brings back the lightness in my heart I haven't felt in so long. But this can't be real. She…she was…what was it? …was she dead? Or…was I dead? No, I vaguely remember the thought breaking through my mind, tearing me down—She's gone, she gone, she's really gone forever.

But she's not. Because she's here. When I feel her touch on my hand, I know it. Not a hallucination. Not an image on a screen. It's her. It has to be. I look up and find myself once again gazing into vivid green eyes I haven't seen since…since when? What happened? I don't remember.

I don't care.

"Shepard." I say her name and every other thought escapes my grasp. What could be more important than this? She's here. I can see her, I can touch her—that's proof this is real. It has to be.

She smiles as she reaches up to press her hand against my scars. Like she always did before. The feeling it invokes is so strong that I barely remember anything else, not even how I got those scars and why it seems like we haven't seen each other in decades. How long has it been anyway? It feels like a lifetime.

"I missed you, Garrus," she says as she draws even closer. Every inch between us is a year of my life I spent without her. Every inch she closes pushes them away for good. "What took you so long?"

What did? Why in the galaxy would I possibly wait a single second to spend my eternity at her side? I can't think of any reason that could've made me stay away. "…I don't remember."

She gives me a curious look but she knows not to ask for more. She's always known me better than anyone. How could I ever need anyone else? "It doesn't matter. You're here now."

"Yeah," I speak softly, pulling her closer, desperate to keep her safe and never let her slip away again, "I am. And you're with me. That's all that matters." All that matters. Right. Nothing else. What else is there? I don't remember that either. Every image I can conjure is a moment spent with her. Every moment I spent with her is so pure and passionate that I can't believe anything else in existence could ever be half as important as having her here. No, all I need to know is that I love her, that she's here, and that we're never being separated again. I'm not even sure what could've possibly separated us the first time. How could I let anything ever keep me from her?

Then she closes every space between us and we kiss for the first time in…in…too long. Every second we're locked together drives another thought or memory away. I don't remember anything except this, the unrivaled intoxication of Sara Shepard and our love. And I don't care. Nothing else matters. Nothing else could matter. All I could ever want or need is here with her.

But then something breaks through. I hear the sound of a distant voice calling my name. It seems to be coming from miles away and I don't even recognize it. But it seems so familiar that I actually pull myself free and take the time to question it. "What was that?"

"What was what?" Shepard asks, her voice taking me over until it feels like my heart stops and I begin to wonder if I would care if it did, "I didn't hear anything."

Right. Right, I didn't either. I couldn't hear anything except that voice I hold so close to my heart. Suddenly, I can't remember why I pulled away from her and I'm desperate to bring her close again. So I take hold of her and rush back into our embrace like it's the only thing sustaining me. It might as well be. I can't imagine I could ever need anything else to survive and I can't believe I could ever survive without it. No, I couldn't. This is all there is for me. Nothing else exists.

—Garrus!—

The voice is closer and even more familiar now. The shock brings me to break the embrace again, this time by pushing her away. "There it is again."

"It's nothing, honey," she tries to assure me, "You're imagining things." I almost succumb to the allure of her voice again and let it chase away everything I hold to be reality. But then those words begin to bring me back and I know why that voice in the shadows seems so familiar.

Reality. Imagining things. Hallucinations. The poison. The gas. The assassins. The archer. The team that got captured. That's Tali calling for me!

"No!" I try to push it back, try to give in completely to this…this…it's a dream? No, it can't be! It has to be real! But…but it isn't. Because there's something else that matters after all. Because I have friends in danger and I have to help them. I can't let them get hurt or let Tali suffer trying to save them alone just because I selfishly want to sacrifice EVERYTHING to lose myself here with all I have left of my kalwen.

When I meet her eyes again, I see a pain inside them that tells me she knows I'm waking up and she wants to keep me here as much as I want to stay. But I can't. And the fact that she knows that is agonizing.

"I have to go," I force myself to admit it. The results of the admission almost bring her to cry again or even lead me to show her my discovery that turians can cry, too. "The others need me." I start to pull away, but she grips my hand like a vise. The pressure drives me back to her side and forces me to meet her eyes again so that I start to wonder if I might break a bone unless I surrender my mind to this vision again, completely this time.

"You promised you'd never let me go again," she says, her voice shaking with tears. The pangs in my heart in response to the plea are more than I can take. But I can't let myself think about that. Not when I have family that need me.

So I keep my eyes on hers and reach up to wipe her tears away. "I know. And I won't." Then I kiss her one last time, pry her hand away from mine, and fall back into the shadows.

"Garrus! Come back!"

"Garrus! Garrus, please, you have to wake up! GARRUS!"

I have trouble breathing, moving, and even opening my eyes when I stumble back into reality. Slowly, as my strength starts to come back, I begin to remember where I am and how I got there. Finally, I force my eyes open. "Tali?"

She sighs with relief as I truly wake up. "Keelah! Don't do that to me!"

I groan as the tightness in my entire body eventually fades and I force myself up from the ground, letting her help me stay upright. Then my gaze catches on the arrow I'm lying beside. The one that released a poisonous gas I thought was deadly. "Why am I still alive?"

"You had some of the antidote for the poison on you when—"

"No, I mean why didn't the gas arrow kill me?"

Tali looks at the arrow in confusion and starts scanning it. "Hmm…there's just enough traces of it left here to get a reading. It's not poisonous. It's just a knockout gas."

"What? Why wouldn't she take the chance to finish me while she could?"

"I don't know," Tali answers as she closes down her omni-tool, "But it gave her a chance to get away and, wherever she went, she's got our ten closest friends."

"She'll be with the other Shadows," I say as I force myself back to my feet, "And I think they're on Omega."

"Omega? How do you know?"

"Because…I just know. Look, we all know there's a chance they're in Liara's network. If they are, then they know everything about Shepard's missions. So if we keep with the pattern of Korlus and Ilium…"

"…then Omega is either their next target or their headquarters."

"Either way, that's where they'll be headed now. And I know Omega. If there's any place in the galaxy to set up a headquarters for a gang of assassins, that's it. I know it's not a very substantial lead—"

"—but it's the only lead we have. We'd better get back to the Normandy and tell Joker to take us to the Omega Cluster. Fast."

She says it and she means it. We're back at the docking bay in a matter of minutes, and the minute we come through the airlock is the minute Tali explains everything and urges our pilot to get moving as fast as possible. Once we've stopped running and takeoff is underway, I take a moment to relax and clear my head. Easier said than done. Thoughts and memories are rushing so fast in my mind that they pass my senses entirely. The gas must not have reacted well with the poison, which explains that wild dream.

…or whatever it was.

My attentions return to the ship when I feel it get moving. "Headed to the Omega Cluster," I hear Joker say, "ETA four hours." Part of me wants to complain that we're not getting there fast enough, but I know better. I can hear the concern buried in Joker's voice and I know he's worried about EDI. I know I'd be worried if it were Shepard.

But it's not. I need to remember that. It's pretty obvious at this point that our new adversary is another Shepard-clone. But it's the exact opposite of obvious why she would gas me and run instead of ending things while she could (or capturing me like she caught the others). And the way she looked at me before she ran…it was so distant, but it almost—almost—looked like…like my Sara Shepard. I don't—

"We'll get them back, Garrus," Tali's voice shocks me out of my rampant thoughts, "And we'll stop the Shadows for good. I promise."

I don't say anything. I just nod to let her know I understand. She is right, after all. We will save our friends and end the Shadows. I just don't know how I'm going to be any help when the time comes. I'm no good to anyone like this. I need to figure out some way to hold off the poison until we can get a real cure. But that's not something I'm cut out for. For that, we need Mordin.

Who am I kidding? Just Tali and me—a poisoned me, at that—against what must be an army of trained assassins holding our ten closest friends hostage? We'll never stand a chance. Especially not if I do something stupid again like when I missed the clone on the Citadel.

…spirits…I did miss on purpose. Why did I do that?! Was I acting on some subconscious plan, trying to give Liara a clear shot at her instead of taking one myself? Was the poison taking hold again harder than I thought, faster than it should have, feeding me hope that it really was my Shepard and all the readings were wrong and all the not-at-all-like-my-Shepard moves in the fight were fake? …or was I really thinking deep down that there was a chance it was true, that somehow this really is my Shepard and everything that's happened these past few days has been some huge misunderstanding or lie?

"Are you alright, Garrus?" Tali asked, her voice clearly showing genuine and deep concern.

I want to open up to her, confess everything that's happened to me, but I can't do it. "I…I'm fine, it's just…the poison and everything, it…"

But, somehow, she still understands. "Maybe you'd better get some rest before we get there. We've got four hours, you can take some time alone."

I can always count on Tali. I know that now. I give her a small smile before I head to the elevator.

By now, it's a habit to hit deck 1 when the doors open. I'm not even consciously aware of the action until the elevator is moving. I keep my focus on the movement as it slowly ascends. If I'm counting how many seconds it takes to go up one level, I'm not thinking about Shepard, this disaster of a mission, or the poison trying to kill me. If I'm watching closely as the walls go by, I'm not hallucinating or reliving my failed fight with the clone. If I'm listening carefully for the ding informing me I've reached my destination, I'm not waiting for her to come back when I know she never will.

As I enter her cabin, I look off to the right. On the shelves on the wall by the bathroom door, just to the left of the hamster's cage, are a small collection of books. Actual books with paper and everything, not manuscripts on a datapad. I find myself diving into the memory of the day she told me why she had these. I don't fight it or give in this time. I just let my focus shift to it until it takes up all of my attention.

It all started on Rannoch. Shepard, Tali, and I followed Legion into the geth's headquarters on the planet's surface while the Migrant Fleet waged war with the geth fleet over our heads. Our mission was to get in and find the source of the Reapers' control signal. Then Shepard would use a targeting laser to signal the Normandy to hit it, it'd be destroyed, and the geth would be free of Reaper control.

But nothing was ever that easy for us.

The strike did nothing to shut off the signal. It did the exact opposite. It woke up the Reaper hiding under our feet. There was every chance that we had just fallen into a trap that would cost our lives and thus make the quarians lose the war. Legion showed up just in time to pull us out and put just enough distance between us and the Reaper for Admiral Gerrel's artillery to take it down if only for a moment. All that was left was to signal the Normandy for an evac, fire off a few shots during extraction, and hope for the best.

But Shepard was never one to just stand back and "hope for the best." She made Legion pull over and then she jumped onto a cliff in plain view of the Reaper so she could set a target for the Migrant Fleet and take that monster out. She'd just thrown herself…what is it humans say? "Under the bus"? Well, she threw herself under the biggest bus imaginable just to make sure that Tali and Legion's peoples survived.

She was on a cliff's edge, running for her life from a weapon that could tear through a turian dreadnought. Tali and Legion both tried to talk her down before we drove off, but she wouldn't listen to either of them until Legion said "Shepard-Commander…good luck." I just sat there, paralyzed. There was no way to talk her out of this, I knew that. She'd do anything to save who she could and she wasn't going to give up on this fight now, no matter what it took. I wanted to say something, to beg her to come back before the Reaper's fire became more than she could take, but there was nothing I could say or do now. So I watched as we left her alone there and headed back to the shuttle.

When we made it back, Tali and Legion took a moment before telling me they were headed back to make sure the Reaper was definitely dead and to deal with the fleets at war overhead. I nodded and let them go. Then I stayed there and waited, hoping no harm had come to her. About an hour later, when she came back to the shuttle with Tali and told me everything that had happened, I listened to what she had to say then, while Tali wasn't looking, pulled her in and held her close, both comforting her over the loss of Legion and begging her to "Never do that again!"

After we were back on the ship, I headed back to the battery while she went to get some sleep and everyone welcomed Tali back. I spent about two or three hours working on calibrating the forward cannon. But every time I started to fade into the world of numbers and wiring like I was hoping to escape to, my mind would fall back into the sheer panic of watching as my girlfriend jumped headlong into Reaper fire. I still persisted in my attempts to focus on the targeting systems, but nothing was distracting me.

Until EDI came online. "Garrus?" The sudden interruption of her synthesized voice on my thoughts was enough to make me jump back. The loss of the silence hanging over my work managed to push both my technical focus and my lingering fears out of my mind. "Are you alright?"

I shook it off and leaned against the console. "Yeah. I'm fine. Why?"

"Because that is the 17th time you have miscalculated the same equation. It is not like you to make such a mistake more than twice."

That brought me to check the systems again. What? I didn't…oh. "…right. Guess I just…need some space from this. I'm having trouble focusing." Because I was tired of just throwing myself into the weapons systems with something so big hanging over my head. There was just one way to fix that. "Is Shepard still asleep?"

"No. She woke up about an hour ago, took a call from the asari Councilor in the COMM room, set us on course for the Citadel, and then checked on Tali and returned to her cabin. I believe she is still there."

Now I knew something was wrong. She didn't come to see me? She always comes by the battery after a mission, especially one as big as this. "OK. I'll head up now."

"Should I inform her you are coming?"

I smiled to myself as I opened the battery doors and gave her my answer: "No. I want to surprise her." After EDI confirmed she would comply, I left the battery and headed for the elevator. When I got up to her door, I opened it without a moment's hesitation. I never hesitated to just walk in. I had come by this room every day for weeks after the suicide mission. For the first three days, I had gone ahead and knocked, but, after the third time, she outright told me "You don't have to knock, Garrus. You can come in whenever you want." That seemed to be one of the biggest signs of trust she could give. So I had gone along with it and never regretted it. And that's what I did now.

I found her sitting on the couch and flipping through the pages in one of her books. She seemed to be pretty enamored with it, because it took her an extra four seconds to realize I had come in. When she did notice me, she smiled, a soft glimmer coming to her eyes as she did, and then marked her place in the book and set it aside. "Hey. Come to check up on me?"

"If I did that every time you came back from halfway-to-killing yourself, you'd eventually get pretty sick of me."

She scoffed, shaking her head at me. "Never."

I smiled. She always knew how to get that from me. Then I sealed the doors to her cabin and went to sit down next to her. As I took her side, I looked straight into her eyes, using one hand to grasp hers and the other to lightly stroke her red hair. After a moment of this, my defenses dropped entirely and I ended up confessing to her what'd been killing me since we came back to the ship: "You scared me back there. I thought I was going to lose you forever."

She slowly reached up the hand not tight in my grasp and began to stroke my scars. "I know the feeling."

We stayed like that for a while, just barely moving closer with every passing minute until there was no space between us anymore and we began to kiss again. I held her closer, as if I needed to be as close to her as possible in order to determine that this was real and not a dream covering up the grief of losing her to the Reaper's beam. But it was real. I know that much without a doubt.

We only broke off when we had to in order to breathe. Even then, we stayed tightly wrapped together, our arms around each other, until it seemed like time had stopped and there might be a chance we could stay like this forever. Of course, that was never a possibility. But I truly wish it could have been.

After a while, we leaned back on the couch and she curled up beside me, letting me hold her close. In that moment, she seemed so…fragile. I'd never seen her that way before. Even when she let down her own walls for me, even the select few times I wound up holding her while she cried, she'd never seemed more broken than that moment.

It didn't take a genius to see why. "It really hurts, doesn't it? What happened to Legion."

She just leaned in closer to me. "That and…let's just say I haven't been sleeping well. Not since the war started."

She didn't any day after that either. How many times during the war had I been in her cabin solely because she seemed to need me there in order to get any sort of rest? Was it always like our last night together? Had it always been that same bad dream? It must've been really hard on her.

I sighed and reached my hand up to her hair again. "Well…I'm always here if you need me."

She answered that by reaching up to grasp my hand in hers, cutting off the calming motions. "I know. And I always need you."

I held her close in silence for a few moments, letting those words sink in. She didn't seem to be getting any relief from the depression overwhelming her, so I started looking for a way to change the subject. I found one when I noticed the book she had been reading when I walked in, set down on the table. "What is that?"

She followed my gaze and reached over to pick it back up. "It's a book—a real one, not a digital transcription or anything. I found a few in an abandoned library on Earth when I was about 12. I took them everywhere. A lot of them were about ancient human mythology. I've always been fascinated with the myths of the different cultures."

Her fascination led to my curiosity. Since I had her all to myself for the entire ride to the Citadel (which, being essentially on the other side of the galaxy from Rannoch, was about eight hours away), we ended up spending the next hour discussing some of the myths she had learned over the years. Every now and then, she'd ask if the turian cultures had anything similar and I'd share with her some stories I knew, but most of the conversation was taken up by her telling me about fairies and dragons and…

….and…

"Sirens. In the ancient mythology of some human cultures, they were women of such beauty that no man could resist their charms. Their voices were even more powerful—they got their kicks by singing so strong to passing sailors that the victims lost all free will and crashed their own ships on rocks. Hence the term 'siren song'—something so alluring you would sacrifice everything for it though it could very well be the death of you."

…a siren song…

Spirits, that's what that dream was?! The vision of my long-lost Shepard was so strong, so enthralling, that it took over my mind entirely. Every memory that disappeared as the dream took hold was another part of my life fading away. I was dying the whole time and I didn't care. Now that I'm free from its hold, the thought of being trapped in a darkness where I would let go of everything, including my free will, until I allowed myself to be dragged to my death by my own kalwen—everything about it is terrifying.

…but what's more terrifying is that part of me still wishes with all I have that Tali never woke me up.