Chapter 16

Gaius
February 7th, 2191

I sat at the dining table, furiously coloring in a picture of some old human superhero who wore no shirt and ripped knee-length shorts. Looking over at my sister, I asked, "What do you think, Avi?" I held up the page for her to see. The ripped figure was colored a light blue color, but I colored outside the lines several times in my haste.

Octavia looked up from her page, where she was coloring a human woman in skintight clothes, her tongue still pinched between her lip plates in concentration. She made the woman's hair a dark, fiery red, similar to our mother's. "You went over the line a lot," She commented, prompting me to stick my tongue out at her, getting a giggle.

A few moments later, Bailey came down the steps, whining as she reached us, nudging our legs with her nose. "What's wrong, Baiwey?" The dog laid down, putting her front paws on her snout, and wined again. I looked over at Octavia, who just shrugged and started coloring again. Bailey stood and placed a paw on my leg, not getting what she wanted, looking from me to the stairs and back.

"Follow you?" I asked, and Bailey barked. I tapped my sister, "Let's see what Baiwey wants."

We walked up the stairs, following Bailey, who kept looking back to make sure we were there. We entered our parent's bedroom and watched Bailey enter the bathroom. Following again, we came in and saw our mother through the foggy glass, sitting on the shower floor, her knees pulled up to her face and her arms wrapped around her legs.

"Mada?" No response. Bailey had laid back down, putting her paws over her snout again, and wined.

"Mada!" I smacked my hand onto the glass but still got no response. Concern bloomed on my face as I looked at Octavia. "I'm gonna call Pada."

Garrus

I sat at my desk, taking a sip from my mug. I had just left a meeting with a quarian and a geth representative about their allocation of resources to Bastion, the replacement to the Citadel. It was a productive meeting, and dealing with the geth gave me a much-needed respite from my job's politics.

My arm started to vibrate with an incoming call on my personal omnitool. It was Amelia. I answered with a smile, "Hey, Ame, what's… Gaius?" My son's head was just visible on the lower portion of the screen, the boy holding the datapad too high for the camera to see his whole face. "Gaius… What's wrong?"

"Something is wrong with Mada," Gaius said, sounding very distressed.

"I'll be there in five minutes."

-0-

I rushed into the house, barely closing the door behind me, and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Gaius and Octavia were standing in the bedroom, looking worried and silent, and it looked as if they were crying. "Hey…, everything will be alright. Head downstairs, and we'll be down soon." Nodding, the children complied.

I went into the bathroom, seeing Amelia pulled in on herself, sitting on the shower floor. I slid the door open and got under the spray, not even remotely caring about my clothes. The water was warm for me, which meant it was scalding for her.

She did not react to me sitting next to her, but I could tell she had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her back hitched when she breathed in.

"Ame?" No response. I had seen this before, several times during the War, but this was the first in a long time. "Amelia?" Still nothing.

I rested my hand on her back, ignoring the tingling from her on-edge biotics, hoping the contact would break her from the spell.

"GET OFF OF ME!" Her arm flung out and hit him across the cowl, bringing a wave of biotic force that sent me flying into the wall, cracking some of the tiles behind me.

I coughed and groaned but quickly got close to her again, this time taking a wrist in each of my hands. "Amelia! It's not real! Snap out of it, come back!"

She thrashed under my grip, sending out a buffeting wave of energy, but I held on. Just like it started, it ended. The power stopped, as did her struggling. "...Gar… Garrus? Where… Where am I?"

"At home. Everything's alright. I'm here," I pulled her in, resting my forehead on hers. "You got lost in a memory, but everything is fine now."

She looked around the bathroom, "Oh my God, Garrus. I'm so sorry…." She began to sob again.

"It's fine! All of this is material. All that matters is that you're alright. Are you?"

"I… I think so…," She sobbed.

"Okay," I turned off the shower, "I'm going to clean this up, but first, let's get you out of there." There was no protest when I lifted her and deposited her onto a fresh towel on the bed. I moved back into the bathroom and started cleaning up the shattered glass and bits of tile strewn about the room, closely listening to her hitched breaths and sobs.

"What did I do to deserve you?" She asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe you saved the galaxy from utter annihilation three times," I quipped back, confident that he heard a slight chuckle under the sobs.