Chapter 20: The Thing About Past Mistakes

"I'm…going out this evening. Meeting a friend," Garrus said. "You'll be…okay watching Junior?"

Tiersa looked up from her biotic homework. She raised her brow markings at Garrus.

"A friend?"

"…yeah."

She stared at him a moment longer. She wanted to ask more questions: Garrus could see it in her eyes. It was the Broker in her, he supposed. He had considered telling both Junior and Tiersa about Vega's message, but he knew that they would have too many questions—like the ones he saw threatening from behind Tiersa's eyes now. Or, worse, that they would try to argue their way into coming along. Tiersa had a right, he supposed, to know what happened to Shepard, but he wanted to know what this was about first. He still didn't trust the Alliance and he was worried that James was dragging Garrus into some kind of conspiracy. And the last thing Garrus wanted was to drag the girls in with him. Hadn't James warned him as much?

To his infinite relief, Tiersa finally shrugged.

"Sure. No problem."

To be honest, Garrus appreciated this newfound respect for his privacy. It reminded him that Tiersa was growing older and wiser. When her training with Jack was finished in the spring, there would be little to justify her staying with them any longer. She wouldn't need his protection anymore. He knew that he should be pleased with this. He knew that he should be proud of her for coming so far in less than a year since Liara's death. And he was proud, of course. But he also found himself trying to avoid thinking about the inevitable day when Tiersa would leave them for the last time: stepping out the front door and embarking for her future.

Traffic was light by this late in the evening, so Garrus had no difficulties piloting the skycar through the city and landing it just down the street from the restaurant. Garrus glanced inside the restaurant, but couldn't see anyone of Vega's girth and height. The massive human would stand out in a crowd. Garrus walked back out onto the patio, choosing a table under the small awning. They could move inside later, if James insisted, but for now, Garrus preferred to be out where he could watch the street. He glanced around, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. It was a quiet street, away from the traffic on the main skyway a few blocks away. A few humans, a couple of asari, and even one fellow turian walked by, but none of them spared Garrus a second glance.

When he opened the menu, Garrus noticed very quickly that there wasn't anything listed that he could actually eat. James was either trying to be funny or had spent so much time on Earth dealing with only humans that he had forgotten that, as a turian, Garrus had very particular dietary restrictions. The waitress approached his table awkwardly and recommended another restaurant that had a dextro-friendly menu that was only a few blocks away.

"I'm…hmm…supposed to be meeting a friend here," Garrus said, trying to explain. The waitress looked surprised. "Sorry," he added.

She stood there a moment longer, shifting back and forth on her feet. She was very thin for a human and probably in her mid-twenties. Her golden hair was done up in elaborate braids that were wrapped around her head.

"I promise you, he's human," Garrus said hastily.

"Oh no, sir. It's no problem with me if you want to wait," she smiled. "Can I bring you a water, at least?"

"Thanks. Oh, and thanks for the tip on that other restaurant…though I'd sure like to find a restaurant here that serves only dextro meals. So that I can return my friend the same courtesy he's apparently given me."

She laughed.

"Oh, I'm sure he just forgot. Or didn't realize. Either way, you can ask him when he gets here, right?"

Garrus settled back into his chair. The waitress returned a moment later with a glass of water. There was a straw.

"Heh. Emergency induction port," he muttered, thinking of Tali. Shepard had chuckled about it once and then Garrus had teased her into recounting her brief encounter with an exquisitely drunk Tali.

"Sorry?" asked the waitress.

"Oh, nothing. Thank you."

Garrus sipped on the water, checking the time on his omnitool. James was late. Garrus would be sure to point that out to him, whenever he decided to show up. He checked the coordinates, but he was sure this was the right restaurant—despite James's little joke with the lack of dextro-safe food.

The second time the waitress came by his table to re-fill his water glass, Garrus checked the coordinates and the time from the message again. Now James really was late. He wondered about the waitress's hair. Had she done those braids herself? Was it painful for humans to have their hair bound together? Just the thought of twisting his fringe around like that made Garrus wince.

The third time the waitress came by, Garrus started glancing around the patio. He didn't like this. Something must have gone wrong. Had the Alliance intercepted the message? He used his omnitool to check remotely for any other messages, in case James had sent anything, but there was nothing. There wasn't really any decent cover in the area. He should have chosen a table inside the restaurant.

The fourth time she refilled his glass, the waitress waited a moment beside his table, swaying slightly from side to side. She seemed to be working up the courage to say something. Her mouth opened and closed a few times. Garrus waited patiently. If she was some kind of contact or operative that James had sent to lead him on a…what did the humans call it?… a "goose chase" around the city, James could have picked someone with a little more confidence.

"I just…I wanted to thank you," the waitress finally stammered in a soft voice.

Garrus raised his brow plate at her.

"Do I know you?"

"No! I mean, I don't think so…but…you're still here. On Earth. And you're obviously old enough that you must have fought here during the Reaper Wars."

Wait, what did she mean by "obviously"? Garrus glanced around again for James, but there was still no sign of him. The young woman's voice drew him back in, though. It seemed that, now that she'd started talking, she couldn't stop. And there was compelling urgency laced into her voice—like this was a story she had to tell.

"I…I was only three when they came," she said, staring at Garrus intently. She wound and unwound her fingers. "I lived with my parents on their farm in the interior. I was outside…just fooling around in our sunflower fields…when the sky got dark and suddenly there was one of… them. I remember thinking that it was staring at me. Watching me."

She lowered her voice.

"I had…I had this toy. An Alliance frigate. I used to play out in the fields and pretend I was a human Spectre, flying through the galaxy. Killing geth. But when I stared up at that…that thing as it stared down at me, I remember realizing how stupid and small I was. So I dropped my toy. And I ran. I remember the flowers whipping against my face and hearing that sound…"

She shivered.

"I didn't look back, but I know that the sunflowers were being torn up behind me. All of them falling face down into the dirt. I don't know how I made it into the trees. Maybe because I was so small and stupid…it just didn't care if I made it or not. I climbed into the trees and stayed there for days, drinking water off the leaves and…"

"Your parents?" Garrus asked quietly. He was disturbed by this girl's story. He couldn't help but think of Junior.

The waitress shook her head, her blonde braids catching Sol's rays.

"I'm sorry" he told her.

She stared off into the distance for a moment, towards the mountains. On the other side of them would have been her family's farm. Garrus could almost still see the memory of the Reaper reflected in the sheen of her green eyes. She shook her head again.

"I am too. But…you know what? You came. You and all the other aliens. You came here. To Earth. You saved us. I know that…well, it's been a long time now, right? And there's all this anti-alien and pro-human talk from the Alliance. But I wanted you to know that I…that I remember what you did for us. For humans. And I'll never forget it."

She looked down at her hands.

"Crap," she said, shaking her head. "I really wish we had a dextro menu. You saved us all and I can't even serve you something you can actually eat."

Garrus couldn't help but laugh. She looked up and he could tell by the way that she smiled now that the memory of the Reaper was gone again, retreating into the back of her mind.

"Well," he said casually, "I'm sure you tell this story to all the turians who only order water. Looking for a big tip, I presume?"

She nodded mock-seriously, playing along.

"Absolutely, sir,"

Then, she looked around.

"Hey, is your friend ever going to show? I mean, you're welcome to stay as long as you need to…but…?"

Garrus shrugged.

"I don't know where the hell he is. I think I've given him enough a chance to get here. If he really wanted to talk to me, you'd think he would make more of an effort."

Garrus tried to keep his tone light, but Vega's failed appearance prickled the edges of his instincts. He felt like something was wrong. He tried appraising the waitress again, wondering if she had been deliberately trying to distract him, but she seemed honest enough. Garrus had gotten accomplished at picking out liars and spies over the years.

"I think…I think I'll just give up," he said, rising from his chair. "Thank you, again."

"No," said the young woman. "Thank you."

Garrus left the patio and decided to walk through the adjoining side streets—just in case he had missed something. But there was no sign of James or anything out of the ordinary. He thought back to the message and decided to take an inventory of everything that was odd about it. James's stiff, awkward posture. Maybe James just didn't like any recording device? No, that couldn't be it. They had exchanged messages before, shortly after the Catalyst, and James had been perfectly relaxed in those. Those had been the last time he had seen James, outside of news vids. In fact, there had been a news vid fairly recently. Garrus recalled that James had given a speech about the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Battle of the Catalyst.

And then he realized what he should have noticed the first time he had played the message.

Scars.

His name. James had used his name. He had never heard James use anyone's real name. It had always been nicknames. Garrus had been "Scars." Always. And even Shepard had been "Lola," whatever a Lola was…

Garrus rushed back to the restaurant, almost running into the waitress.

"Sorry…sorry…but do you have a news vid console I could use? Just for a moment?"

"Sure, it's in the back of the bar. Is…is everything okay with your friend?"

"I'm not sure," he called over his shoulder, storming through to the back of the restaurant.

He scrolled through the archives and pulled up the broadcast of Vega's twentieth-anniversary speech. Garrus tried to ignore the words about "Shepard's great sacrifice" etc. and instead focused on his movements. They were the same stiff, nervous motions that Vega had made in the message to Garrus.

In fact, they were exactly the same.

Heart pounding against his chest plates, Garrus pulled up James's message on his omnitool and played it in parallel to the news vid. It was the same video. Only the audio had been swapped out. And, now that he listened closely, Garrus could hear a strange buzz in the background of the message that he had never noticed before. Voice manipulation and reduplication, perhaps? Once, that human thief, Kasumi, had given Garrus a lecture about how easy it was to do with a voice sample. And James was now such a public figure…there had be hundreds of samples of recorded speeches and interviews to draw from.

Damn it.

Obviously, the message had been faked. Why?

He needed to get home.

He sprinted for the door of the restaurant, praying for the click of weapons or the cold tingle of biotics to come hurtling towards him. Because if he was ambushed at the restaurant, then that meant whomever had sent the message wasn't targeting the house. But he had waited here too long. Surely, if the restaurant had been the trap, they would have struck before now.

Garrus cued up his omnitool, desperately calling the house. There was no answer, but that wasn't necessarily unusual. The girls never answered the comm link, since the calls were always for him. He thought of calling Lynn. But that could possibly mean sending her into danger. She was ex-Alliance, but if whomever had done this was sophisticated enough to hack a message from Vega and fake N7 credentials, it seemed unlikely that Lynn would be able to deal with it. Would he even be able to deal with it? All he had was his usual pistol. A sidearm.

It didn't matter. Whatever happened, they were his daughters, damn it. It wasn't a matter of whether or not he could deal with it: he simply would.

The skycar barely touched the driveway before Garrus threw himself out of it. Garrus stopped at the front door and listened, but there was only a cold silence. He drew his pistol. The front door slid open, but the lights didn't come on automatically. Garrus groped alongside the door and found the manual switch.

The couch was upside down, the table shattered. Even the fridge was pulled over on its side—and speckled with bullet points. Heat sinks littered the ground.

It took every tendon of self-control to not start roaring their names at the top of his lungs. But there was a possibility that the attackers were still inside. Surprise might be his only advantage at this point. He crept quietly through the main floor, but there was no sign of any living being. There were some small blood splatters in the kitchen: red. Human blood. He cautiously slid around the stairs. Nothing in his bedroom, the bathroom. He snuck along the wall of the hallway, peering around the edge of the door frame into the girls' bedroom.

Tiersa was lying face down on the floor. She looked like she had been thrown into the wall. There was purple blood pooling beneath her. Garrus flew into the room, turning her over. She was still breathing, her pulse fluttering beneath her neck. There was blood seeping from wounds across her body and a smear of purple trailing from her nostrils. Biotic nosebleed.

Garrus ran back down the hall to the bathroom, pulling out some medi-gel from the cabinet. He returned to Tiersa, pulling her head into his arms and slapping the medi-gel onto the wounds that seemed the worse. After a moment, Tiersa's eyelids fluttered open.

"Garrus!" she gasped.

She pulled herself out of his arms and onto her feet. She staggered and Garrus grabbed her elbow to steady her. She pulled away from him, muttering.

"I…I don't know who they are. I need to find out."

She limped over to the drawer beside her bed. She started pulling out datapad after datapad, flipping through them and then tossing them beside her on the floor, shaking her head.

"Mother had all the answers. She has to have them somewhere."

"Tiersa," he said, grabbing her arm. "Slow down. What happened? Where's Junior?"

"Who were they? They had…I can't remember any distinct markings. Mostly humans. Some batarians. I haven't met a batarian before. But that is what they were. Four eyes. Had to be. And two salarians. And an asari with strong biotics. Obviously. Obviously! But who were they?"

"Tiersa!" Garrus roared.

She stopped, staring up at him from the latest datapad. It slipped out of his hands and clattered on the floor. Her face was coated in purple blood and tears.

"We…we were upstairs. I heard someone come through the front door. I heard voices. It...it was strange. I told Adrienna to hide under her bed, to sneak out to the roof if she had the chance. There were so many of them. I asked them what they were doing in our house. I told them they were dead. I tried shielding her. I tried everything I learned…I…I tried so hard to protect her. And it wasn't enough."

She wiped the blood away from under her nose and stared at it for a moment uncomprehendingly. She rubbed it off onto her shirt, leaving yet another purple stain in the fabric.

"They just tossed me aside. I could hear her screaming as they dragged her down the hall. And everything was going black, but…but I saw them take her away."

She stared down at the floor, her fists curling and uncurling.

"One of them…one of the humans…he grabbed my face and held it up as everything was going dark. He said to tell you that you'd be hearing from them soon. And…"

Her tone suddenly darkened. As she raised her head and stared at Garrus, her biotics began to sparkle in her blue irises.

"…and they said to tell you that this is a message. For Archangel."