When Garrus Vakarian was five years old, his father and grandfather saw fit to educate him on them. He didn't know who they were, just that his father, his father's father, and most of the Vakarian side of the family didn't like them. Mother, pregnant with his baby sister, merely frowned, and was shut out of the conversation.

They were the Enhanced, the 'Gifted'; biotics, seers, telepaths. He didn't know what any of that meant, but there were more, the mundanes, the invincibles, a whole host of others. But there were none in the Vakarian family; they were normal. All their sons were normal. They found normal spouses and had normal children.

He didn't understand.

His father assured him he would someday.

All across the galaxy, there were extraordinary people capable of doing extraordinary things. People who could lift things ten times their weight, people who could fly, or use the ezzo in their nervous system to move things without touching them. His teachers said that roughly 27% or the galaxy's citizens had gifts; some were the obvious ones, but some were 'mundanes', people with gifts so subtle, even they might think they were normal.

He asked mother if his father would still love him if he was gifted. She told him he would never have to worry about it, and he spent the rest of the day snuggled up against her, watching her paint an abstract of a black hole surrounded by debris. He studied the way the paint glistened on the canvas, the little textures that moved with the paint and took on it's colors. The way even the blacks were rich in color.

Father comes home, and mother gently shoos him from her studio. When he sneaks in later, the canvas is covered. He never sees mother's paintings after they're done; they disappear, into the attic, away from the sunlight and away from his view. It makes him sad, not being able to see the finished paintings, especially his favorites. He got to see them made, but never finished and in the light.

So, one night, when he thinks his parents are sleeping, Garrus uses a broom to pull the attic stairs down, tensing at the noise they make and expecting Solana to start crying. She doesn't, and he climbs up the steps. There are over a dozen paintings, all covered. It's more than he's seen her paint, and though a small part of his young brain comprehends that she had been an artist before he was born, the irrational, overactive imagination in him wonders if she's been painting in secret. An exciting mystery- why would his mother paint in secret?

One by one he examines them, turning up the brightness on his flashlight. He takes quick peeks at first, to find the ones he remembers. His favorites are the one of the Citadel in it's lock-down state, a formidable pillar adrift in space and awash in Widow's particulates, and the one of a heavily-armored hierarchy soldier with an eye visor and an equally armored human woman with black hair, not at war but sitting at a table with steaming mugs in their hands, raised in a toast.

His grandfather wouldn't like this painting. Maybe that's why he likes it so much? He hasn't got much interest in guns and war, those are scary, grown-up things he'll never have to deal with. His parents say he will join the army when he is old enough. He thinks he won't; he wants to be an artist, like his mother.

He sneaks into the attic and looks at the rest of the paintings over the course of a few nights, until the one of the black hole joins them. He never sees father enter the attic after him, on the one night. He doesn't know that one of the paintings-the one of an empty bedroom with odd streaks of rusty color staining the floor-matches a crime scene that his father will visit a week from then.

He has no idea there are drugs that can suppress 'gifts'. He just knows that suddenly, mother has run out of ideas for paintings.

Garrus is eight, and it's been weeks since his parents had had their great screaming match. Mother has taken him and Sol to a small house belonging to her side of the family. It was like normal, at first, though she refused initially to tell him why they were running from father. Two nights in, though, she looked up from her frantic sketching when he told her he'd put Sol to bed, and she had him sit down.

His mother was a seer, and her medium to get the visions out was art. Father had found out, and started sneaking pills into her food, because Vakarians are normal and anyone otherwise so cannot marry into the family. She had to be normal, or she would have to leave. She told him the future and past were colliding, that they were both the same, that he should roll left instead of right, and all sorts of disjointed things that an eight-year-old can't possibly comprehend.

Then she told him, very seriously, that being normal should not be a requisite for love. If anyone told him they could only love a normal person, then they didn't deserve his love. She told him father loved him, and Solana, but could only love her by breaking what she'd been born with.

"Never let anyone dictate your normalcy."

Those were the last coherent words he would ever remember from her with clarity.

By the end of the week, the whole house was a studio, and she seemed to forget Garrus and Sol existed. Every now and then, she would stop when she saw Garrus. She would grab him, check his head at all angles as if expecting injury, like when he fell on the playground, and briefly leave her hand on the left side of his face, before getting back to her sketching, painting, muttering.

They are found after two months. He has done his best to care for Sol, as mother has forgotten that she has children.

They never see mother again after that.

It had only been a year since he last saw his mother, when his vision gradually started to deteriorate over the course of a few days. The doctor cannot(or, looking back, does not)name a cause. His father gets him a prescription, as if pills can stop him from going blind. He spent his nights wide awake. Solana spent them much the same way, these days, and fathers says she has chronic insomnia.

At night, shadows that were once sharp had become blurred. The light of the moons seemed dimmer, the deep colors of the night less rich. During the day, he could no longer see as far as he could, and he finds himself squinting and straining to make out closer details and distant ones equally. He asks, multiple times, if he could get one of the fancy vision-correcting eye surgeries that he knows several of his school friends have gotten.

Father refuses. They don't have the money. Garrus is surprised to learn this, they've always been so well-to-do, but he passes it off as the complications of a single father raising two children on a cop's salary. It would be so much easier if mother were here. He asks if they can visit her, and the answer to that is no as well.

Perhaps if Freja Vakarian remembered her children, everything would get better? His sight would clear. Solana would start sleeping again. He found that, in addition to his now-poor eye-sight, his sister's fatigue was rubbing off on him, dulling his movements. At times, it felt like he was in one of those dreams where you tried to move fast, but you're body only knew one speed, and that was 'slow'. Like moving through water.

Eventually, his vision stops worsening. He's given the all-clear. Everything is blurred, and the colors of the world are so much lesser than they used to be. He still feels slow, but eventually all of this becomes normal to him. He adjusts, and by the time he's old enough for the mandatory service the Hierarchy required, he felt as though he'd always been like this.

It was normal.

But he missed his mother. And when he looks at the bridge that Solana, maddened by her insomnia, jumped off of on his way to boot camp, he misses her, too.

When he first gets into the service, there is a brief concern about his eyesight. He's spent years practicing his shooting skills to make up for it, but part of him is worried it won't be enough-that despite all his hard work, he would always only ever be the 'cop's son', good enough to follow in his father's footsteps, but never anything more.

The military doctors insist his vision is perfect, and he wonders if his eyes have been healing all these years, returning to health so gradually he hadn't noticed at all. But he seems to have memories of colors being richer than this, of shadows being sharper, of night not being so hard to see in. He dismisses it as childhood dreams and imagination, and lets himself be happy that his eyesight has corrected itself, somehow. Perhaps the spirits had something to do with it. It seemed like something Sol would invest in.

His happiness doesn't last for long. The doctors find something in his DNA. They test him for every gift they can think of. Then they look even closer and discover he's been given Inhibin.

It was a drug, discovered about a year after his mother fell to her visions, that could, over prolonged dosages, permanently inhibit the abilities of several classes of Enhanced. It wasn't a 'one-size-fits-all' deal; there was a generalist pill that simply lowered the body's ability to produce enzymes typically found in higher amounts if you were enhanced, but to have any shot of truly doing the deed, you had to know what you were dealing with.

Garrus remembers his sister, who before the insomnia had the most dreadful nightmares of fire, death, and things someone her age couldn't have seen enough of to dream about them so vividly. He remembers how his vision went at about the same time. He remembers his mother, telling him about pills slipped into dinners.

He remembers his father, so reluctant to seek advanced treatment for either of his children, because of money. Money he had probably spent on buying the generalist pills, and then something more specific after, once he saw which side effects his children had.

We have to be normal.

He is too angry to call his father, or even call him his father anymore. He ignores the brass when they tell him he won't be put in a Cabal, since he is, technically, normal. He's too angry, and too busy analyzing everything about his childhood that suddenly jumps out at him. Everything that a child's ignorance had pushed aside. Everything that makes cruel, sudden, terrible sense.

Castis is killed in the line of duty before Garrus can confront him. It takes all his willpower not to spit on his father's grave in front of the whole funeral service. He does the next best thing, and instead of a eulogy, reads the Hierarchy a list of crimes committed by it's 'model citizen'. His mother's madness, poisoning children with Inhibin, his little sister driven to suicide because she'd inherited mother's gift, though with a medium of dreams rather than art, and she couldn't sleep or dream anymore, as her gift was too tightly tied with the ability to do so.

Himself, losing his sight. He didn't know what his gift had been; something to do with his vision, no doubt. But the normality's of before and after are so blurred by the incompetent attentiveness of his younger self, he has trouble making comparisons.

The family goes into an uproar. He if pulled from the podium. Later, he is disowned, for dishonoring his father and carrying the tainted blood of Freja. Even if he is normal now, he was a freak in normal skin; he still carried the predominant freak genes, even if the drug had crippled whatever powers he'd had. This, on top of the reputation of being disowned by a family as powerful as the Vakarians, signed his death sentence as far as his military career went.

In another life, he was being considered for special SPEC. training, and even if he didn't make the cut for the prestigious group, the Blackwatch would have dibs on him next; the SPEC. washouts were still good meat for them. His father would convince him not to go that route, and he, eager to please, would listen, later to his regret.

The Council dismissed his file entirely this time, as did the Blackwatch. He was too politically poisonous. Too volatile in personality. In the end, he did get one more thing out of his last name; a humiliating job in C-Sec's parking enforcement division.

Garrus discovers that, incredibly, he's fine with it all.

Garrus still shoots, he still practices hand-to-hand, and he spends much of his time in the combat sims down in the Wards. He's been a meter maid for almost eight years now, with no promotions or pay raises. The Hierarchy ran C-Sec, and the Hierarchy didn't forgive or forget; he was convinced they gave him this job-and let him keep it-just to show him that his place in the universe was at the bottom of the ladder.

The burnout has been getting to him more than usual lately. He finds himself fantasizing about selling all his belongings, using the credits to buy high-grade weapons and armor, and booking passage to Omega, the cess-pit of the galaxy. He already has a good targeting visor, which he's modded extensively in his free time. He's been trying to find where Castis had sent his mother, but all his leads dry up, and they dry up pointing towards Omega of all places. He doubts Castis had actually sent her there, but if you wanted to make sure someone disappeared, going through Omega was the way to do it.

He certainly isn't doing anything useful here.

At least, not until two quarians run him over, and a turian arrives shortly bearing arms and no badge. The quarians, by their trajectory, had come right at him, and he hadn't even noticed. He's about to ask what they thought they were doing, not looking where they were going, when the turian rounds the corner and open fires.

The males quarian is hit as he tries to scramble to his feet, and Garrus tackles the female to the ground behind a skycar; he feels an impact on his shields as he does so. He would apply medigel to the male, but they don't issue medigel to meter maids. At least, not on the Citadel. He tries to lead the two to C-Sec, to safer ground, but the female practically drags him along after them, one hand griping both their arms.

Garrus initially tries to tear free of her grip, but he realizes that nobody in the area is reacting to the quarians, just the turian who is 'shooting at nothing', and he realizes that the girl must have notice-me-not powers of some sort.

The man, Keenah, doesn't last long, and the woman, Tali, explains her situation. He'd heard about Eden Prime-who hadn't-but he hadn't seen the point in getting worked up about the injustice of it all if he couldn't do anything about it. The two of them trick the mercenary-who also must be a notice-me-not, to have gotten through the Presidium without half of C-Sec on him-into an incinerator.

Garrus tells Tali that he's only a meter maid, and can't be of much use to her. Any evidence he gave in her stead would be subject to heavy scrutiny because of his reputation, and the events of the day were entirely unbelievable. He does, however, know that the Alliance Marines involved in the attack would becoming to the Citadel to testify. It would be in her best interest to get an audience with the human Ambassador, or better yet, go to the Alliance directly.

She informs him that Chellick had told her to get off the station within twenty-four hours. Garrus decides to hide a fugitive in his apartment.

By the end of the trial, his place in the universe, for whatever reason, is no longer at the bottom of the ladder.

Honestly, not sure if this came out as well as my Saladad concept for Destiny 2 did. Let me know what your thoughts are; there will be a bit more of this, exploring the events of the trilogy and going a little more in-depth with the dynamics of all these powers floating around.

As with Saladad: This is more of a detailed concept than a proper fic, but I hope people enjoy it. I might put the concept up for adoption; I like it, I kind of want to write it, but I just don't have the patience to make it into a full-length fic.

This actually started off as me wanting to find a viable excuse for Javik not using a helmet in a vacuum, and it turned into 'what if superpowers were commonplace?' And 'what if Garrus' life turned into a shitshow because of this?'

Fare Thee Well!