Chapter 25: The Messenger
When he opened his eyes he could only see her outline.
Blackness stagnate in the dead of night, hardened and formed into a silhouette. The dark incarnate with her crested crown, a form that held him fixed and still as time froze in stasis. A head with no face, a body with no movement, a mouth with no words. That which had had come to him in the heart of every night for nearly two months. A nightmare hardened into solid shadow.
The recurring memory that never died.
Every night the same dream, every night the same paralysis. The same crushing fear that swept him in a leaden wave as he awoke to see her standing in his corner faceless and black. Her shadow, still and silent, watching from across the unlit room.
Eyeless as the shadow was, he knew she could see everything. Everything he had done wrong. Everything he had let so blithely slip through his fingers to the ruin where she lay.
Though the morning would come, though he would pray for those mechanical lamps so high above to consecrate the heavy space with their artificial light, he felt her sight upon him in every waking moment. The unseen glance that ate the marrow from within his bones, the icy fingertips that touched his neck from the corner where he knew she still stood in what he prayed were only dreams. Through this silent requiem, through this nightly penance, every moment he drew breath was as fruitless as breathing in a vacuum. Every moment was a burden. He breathed those empty breaths filled with the cold air of the dead from the void where they'd gone without him, where he had abandoned them in their graves still open to the unforgiving sky. He could not cease the guilt which poisoned each second of the borrowed time he was given to live. And so he toiled.
To toil, to pay. The heavy price for his cardinal sin. That they all had died so that he could live. He lived to work at the counsel where he stood night and day until he fell down exhausted. Only then could he sleep, too heavy with hunger and effort to go on awake.
His dreams drowned him in violence and pain. The thrashing of his limbs long since abandoned, for now, the only direction was only down. Deeper and further, tied to his feet was the anchor of his guilt.
That he had lived and lived only, because he didn't listen.
He never listened to her.
Every sliver of time he lived was on air stolen from the last breaths of the dead, every time he heard his heart he felt hers slow beneath his face, and every time he looked in the mirror, he saw the stars dimming in her eyes that he could never save.
And every night, the contrition of his conscious metastasized into something familiar. Something once welcome, in their place beneath the hold. She came to him, again, as she had. Once, in a place now far across the endless plane.
Once in the chairs where they had come to sit beside each other in the dark; where after the moments of their daylight passed they reposed aside the other, quiet. He could always feel the sweet, ruinous words hanging on the tip of her tongue, but she never spoke them, not in two years, and this alone brought him the thinnest thread of relief that he could name in that time he spent on that grave they called an asteroid. He knew she could hear him descending to the below each night after they had drained the blood of the wretched, that she also never slept, and he knew with a pained heart she could not resist the chance to sit beside him even in silence. He knew, because she came to him in the center of every night of every week, nearly silent on the pads of her many toed feet that walked bare upon their cold and empty floors. How she would descend and slip into the chair beside him, deep beneath the earth, far from where the others slept and every night with him, sit beside, and listen with open ears to the soundless dirges of obsession. He had watched her life slip away, the lenses fog in her eyes as they lost their light forever. But she never stopped coming to visit him, to be with him. To stand by him in the night.
"I don't deserve your forgiveness."
He whispered to the form watching from the black, but it said nothing to him from where it stood amidst the machines, still as stone in its wrong angles that enclosed the unyielding stare that pinned him to where he lay.
Paralyzed.
His heart, threatening death that never came with every passing moment. The moments going on, him staring into the black, as the black stared back into him. On and on, until the lights powered up from above. The voices of the crew rang out like the bells of the churches he remembered from the Presidium. And the ghost, driven out, was gone.
Only then could he move, only then could he think. And every morning life would slowly replace the ice that seized his bones from his nightly death as he stared into the embodiment of his guilt, the lives of ten people spawned into one unmoving entity.
One demon.
Even though the lights came on every morning, and he would fold up his cot and store it away in the battery he never left, he still felt her there, watching, from that corner. And there to that room he became chained by the thing only he could see that held him in its cold breath, that kept his eye firmly upon the screen even when the only thing he had left would come and try to coax him out. He let the tea go cold beside him long after she would leave, even her strong heart in its bulletproof armor crushed by his penitent silence.
How could he live, and what pleasure did he deserve - for what he had done?.
And though he asked there was no answer. A punishment, that he accepted in the suffering that was the only solace against his crucifying guilt. The woman he desired so powerfully it killed stopped coming to see him, and his embittered relief at her absence again took him as it did with Mierin.
That Shepard would be spared of the disease that was the eye of his heart.
And so day by day the tea went cold, until the day came that it stopped coming at all, and a day later, when he least expected it, came something else. An unwelcome visitor appeared. Someone older, who in his last hours saw things with a clarity that was too beautiful and painful to bear. Someone proficient in the subtler arts.
He remembered; forgetting was an impossibility. He who had lived and died more deaths than stones stood tall in those graveyards on Omega. His every lungful was poisoned with the dust of cemeteries filled, wet with the blood of families torn, the silent violence of a heart necrotic from a loss of air; reached for with thrashing hands beneath the falling sands of time in an hourglass with but an hour left.
He had lived in vain only to finally see what was most beautifully, terribly precious, the greatest secret of the Universe, the purpose behind it all – the reason for life itself, only in his last hour. A lifetime lived before the minute hand struck, and the last grain of sand in that desert where he squandered his life and now lay entombed, fell.
He said he wanted to make the Universe a brighter place.
He came to him, bearing three things written on that grain of sand.
A truth, a gift, and a secret.
A certain intervention was necessary. Although he could not see it then, the path the turian still tread if only for the prayer whispered from the blue lips that had made him bulletproof, was no longer his alone.
And through the darkness came a messenger in the image of a drell, who came to walk beside the other still following his path within the shade, and said,
"I envy you."
His gun was out and his back was pressed into the corner near the door so fast the unconscious movement of his limbs passed in a cerulean blur. The turian, startled witless by the graveled voice which split the soundless hours of his penance before the workstation, flared. Plates back, muscles firing, heart caught pounding in his chest, he stared up to a the dark space above the ship's leviathan weapons in the red hazed foreground to watch the warm shadows stir slowly to life as a being melted into existence from the air itself.
His eyes focused; unblinking.
The assassin.
Thane emerged easily, his lithe body crouched like a feline above the twisted metal of the massive guns beyond the railing, and set his dark eyes down on Garrus with something complex written into his often undefinable features.
Something quiet. Something reminiscent, almost, of resentment.
"How long have you been spying on me?" Hissed the turian, for the life of him not being able to recall having even left the room since he awoke that morning. The drell, still perched easily, slowly shook his head, uttering in his soft way,
"Spying? No. Not spying. Realizing."
The drell's black scleras did not move as he watched the turian who, unpleasantly surprised and somewhat disturbed by the notion that he had been watched in complete silence for an entire afternoon or more, stared right back at him; the deep light glancing off his fissured scars. Though they had fought beside each other in the short months since the turian had been revived and he had found the often wordless assassin remarkably skilled and personable enough when he got around to it, those notions however pleasant did not stop him from training his M-15 Vindicator on him with surgical precision.
Cobalt and obsidian met and pierced, the one trying to stare the other down as ice met ice; nothing faltered, nothing gave.
He was in no place to be crept up upon, alone in the great below of his thoughts.
"Illuminate me." Detracted Garrus in a low phlanged threat, not moving his weapon even a sliver.
Thane kept his sight trained on him as finitely as the gun, his lips the only thing that moved.
"Long enough to doubt that you are doing anything here at all."
Eyes that did not blink.
Not once.
"Except stare into things better left behind."
The searing heat of anger filtered up from the turian's gut through the bottoms of his lungs, up into his pieced together heart, burning with an intensity he had not felt in months. A hot, awful hatred from somewhere else entirely; a hatred reserved only for the thoughts he collected and ruminated over of a certain member of his own kind he had once called brother only to be betrayed. Dark thoughts bred deep in the battery after everyone else had gone, and left him with himself.
He stared at Thane in writhing contempt as the words fell like fire from his tongue.
"And what do you know,"
Thane's eyes with their secrets and deep wells of memories narrowed like a retracting vein, as he slowly turned his head the other way, staring deep into the turian's rotting core.
Unnerved, the turian felt no fear.
Only disgust. Disgust, at the his pride. His utter trust in his own axioms, his reviling dare to even dream they applied to anyone, anyone else.
To him.
To what he had seen. To all he had done.
How dare he.
How dare he.
So the words kept pouring.
Over two years of suffering in the dark, of sleep measured only in seconds between the touch of solid ghosts. Dreams punctuated by the visions of rotting flesh tinged in blue. Cold lips wreathed in shining black, parted with no breath. Eyes that looked, but didn't see.
Every piece of his broken heart, let fall.
"- assassin? You do what you're told, you don't have to deal with the repercussions later! I know you drell and your convenient philosophies, your liberating beliefs...You don't have to feel a single damn thing...Just your finger on the trigger. How restful your conscious must be, how fortunate – that the blood on your hands doesn't count because your body did it, not your mind."
Thane merely stared back.
His features unphased.
He had nothing to explain to him.
Nothing.
The turian stared into him with every atom of wrath his destroyed body had to muster, focusing his hate on him like a laser. The stranger and the hypocrite; the killer who dared to dole out judgments down upon anyone's shortcomings from his misplaced and imaginary ivory tower, standing tall and proud amidst its moat of corpses.
How dare he.
How dare he even try to tell him how to feel.
No one knew.
No one.
His finger slipped onto the trigger, uncaring, so bitter he could barely see as the drell walked, simply moving – forward, one foot before the other so quiet and uncaring, staring the turian's furious plates down before him as he moved with unbreakable conviction towards him.
He slipped himself over the railing in an approach like rain; the air electric, alive with the scent of oncoming storm that was felt before it was seen; every subtly fatal movement magnified by the slowed passage of time as he emerged from the dark to the light.
The turian did not move even a hair as the assassin walked right up to the barrel of his gun, not tearing his glance for a single moment.
And pressed his scaled forehead to it.
"Your gun won't save you."
Eyes in eyes.
"And I do not fear it."
A heartbeat.
He looked into him and saw pain so deep words did not exist for its depths, and an old man said to a young man, with bitterness that did not reach his eyes.
"When your last hours come, on their fiery wings. Inescapable. Inevitable. Your gun won't save you."
Eyes
"When you finally see, after your whole life..."
Widening.
"The time you wasted. And you stand there, looking, into that impossible light, the light that leaves you behind...that claims all that you love, all that you built..and where she goes, you cannot follow..."
He pressed his head harder to the barrel, until with a shake of his hand the turian had to slip it down, to look into those haunted eyes as they gleamed unobstructed in the vibrating silence.
"Your gun, will not save you."
The assassin banefully glared straight into him; past his armor, past his plates, down to his very soul, and drove the anger out of his bloodstained pit with the gravity of his words; staring into the turian's searching eyes with an intensity he had never seen in anyone he had ever met in his entire life, and said,
"You should have died that day...And yet you just keep breathing...Wasting."
His eyes.
"Every."
There were not words for his eyes.
"Breath. Nothing. Nothing, will buy that time back. The time I watch you squander with every passing day."
Shaking.
"Do you hear me? Nothing. And you...you have everything...Everything...And yet, here with your thoughts and your memories of places long dead you waste the gifts of the living...No more...No more can I watch while you squander two miracles when there are some who would kill for only one."
He stared at him, into the unknown, into a voice that spoke to him from somewhere he had never heard, as the assassin put his face right in his, and said with absolutely no fear.
"Go to her."
Eyes, narrowing.
"She waits."
Time. There was no time in those eyes.
"For you."
Not taking his eye off him, the turian stepped back, his plates crossed deeply, centering himself, and asked in shaking harmonics to the drell whose expression was unreadable and whose rasped voice was as cold as stone,
"Where?"
He set his gaze down upon their shadows crossed upon the floor, and said with a voice that was as lifeless as that sand,
"Above us. She seeks to go out into the Citadel alone. She asked me... not to shadow her."
His eyes met the turian's, heavily. And then something else came through.
From somewhere buried beneath those graves, far beneath the sand in that sun soaked desert, from the rivers that ran red with the blood that drowned his lungs, came a betrayal.
A betrayal from his body, the thing that was his tool, the thing that acted, and wanted, of its own accord.
The drell's gaze wavered, and his voice split strangely, as he said.
"She still believes...she won't be recognized...She goes alone...foolish...I wouldn-"
He hid his face suddenly.
"...do not let her..."
And as Garrus watched the drell turn his gaze forcefully away from him, back into that shadow, he realized slowly and with overwhelming heaviness, that the man standing across from him with eyes gleaming with guilt fixed so forcefully on the ground, was in love.
A lesser man would have been angry.
But a lesser man was not Garrus.
All anger, all hate, faded from his heart, as he watched the drell merely stand, unwilling to look up for even a moment, from where his eyes came to rest deep into the floor. But no despondency crossed him, no jealousy. No dejection, and no poison. He felt not wrath, or envy, or any sin. Only, from the deepest fiber of his being, pity.
Pity as he watched him, and knew the look written on his face.
And knew it well.
He turned to leave.
But as his foot reached the last step before the door, he turned back and looked to the man still facing fixedly away from him, at the long striations on his neck lined with perspiration shining, and at the hands with their strange fingers draped lankly at his sides.
"Thane."
He didn't turn around.
"...Thank you."
He only nodded, never looking back, as Garrus left him.
With the ghosts.
The elevator already gone, he bolted for the stairs, running, running for all his life. He caught his breath before the door and feigned out an easy exit, swiping the massive gleaming room with his eyes before he caught her sight – just a flash of red, sliding on a black jacket as she moved fast towards the cockpit. He slid out, feet carrying him to her in his long stride, and called,
"Shepard."
She stopped dead, the jacket falling to her shoulders.
Slowly.
Angrily.
She turned around.
She stared into his eyes, raising an uncleaved eyebrow.
"Keep your voice down. I'm trying -" Her eyes glanced around untrustingly,"To leave on my own."
Eyes, dreamed of, yearned for, reached for even in such bitter disappointment, slid back into his, and she tilted her head to the side and exhaled, looking from one of his black scleras to the other.
"If there's something I can help you with, well." Her blacklined eyes narrowed slightly, "You probably should have asked earlier. I've got-"
"I know what you're doing. Let me come with you."
Her lips parted as she realized she had been betrayed.
Goddamn you, Thane.
Fury crossed her as she abuptly began to walk away from him; he who she had so dutifully tried to work out into the open away from that dark place where he had gone to hide, she who knew the taste of loss in place of a mother's touch - to talk with her, to heal with her, after weeks and weeks of fruitless effort only for nothing, nothing to -
"Please."
She stopped, thin fingers clenching in her fists. She turned to him with her blazing eyes, and was caught still by the look unfolded on the broken plates of his face.
But she shook it off, raising her finger, realizing only a moment later that she was standing right before him, drawn into his warmth, against her will.
Close, if only to refuse him.
"No. No. Two months. Two months you don't utter a single word to me, after everything. After all we've been through. After – god, look at all of this! Look at where we are! And you won't even look at me? No. No, I'm going, I'm going out there, and no one is going to be my chaperone! I can take care of myself – I don't need you, or Thane, or any other goddamned man - "
"You're right. You don't."
Words cut off, her chest heaving in conniption, staring up into him with wrath, and he only looked down at her over those few inches which meant all the difference; that spare bit of air that defined normalcy for him and her as separate species entirely.
"You don't need me."
Her fists shaking.
"But I need you. To listen."
And they fell.
"...Again."
She stared, blood turned to ice, and stomach to air.
Inhaling slowly, carefully, she made sure she was seeing him correctly and that she wasn't hallucinating in some stasis pod somewhere as he looked down to her with heavy eyes back behind his ruined face, and said,
"You can go wherever you like. You can go alone, or with company. I can't stop you. You're...you, you're...untouchable. But this time..."
He leaned, slightly on one foot, looking long at her from the eye without the visor.
The harmonics in his voice more unsure than afraid, a tone he would never have had two years before.
But what the hell else did he have to lose.
"...I'd like to come with you."
Her eyes searched and fell into his, as he said the words, in that voice that left her knees - no matter how hard she resisted, no matter how hard she didn't want to believe that any part of her could still be after all, after all that had been said and done -
Weak.
"If you'll have me."
She stared at him, and he looked down at her, silent, with the embers in his eyes.
And she said, tearing her gaze away and hiding it behind her hand, unable to bear his unmoving look, as her hair fell between her fingers as she couldn't stand to look at him for the shaking in her gut.
"...Fine...But only because you owe me."
"I know."
"You said...you said you would tell me the 'whole damn story', if I got you out alive."
"Well." he said in his low harmonics as he observed her slide her hand out from beneath the jagged sheath of her hair to fold her arms protectively across her leathered core, to look, very cautiously, back into the cobalt rings of his eyes, where he kept her in reflection.
"Here I am."
She nodded, smiling very slightly, though he saw the sadness there.
"Indeed you are."
Her eyes closed, and her head fell, and she spoke to the ground, with great caution.
"And... I think...you owe me, roughly, something like thirty-seven cups of tea. I might like it if you paid me back somewh-"
"How about I take you for a drink, and you can have whatever you want."
Her eyes shot up into his, and there they stayed, in a long, intense glance he did not care to hide.
Not anymore.
He looked at her, and she looked at him.
A tense moment passed, before she said,
"Yeah. You know, I think I'd like that."