XIX
Auld Lang Syne: Seas between Us
"You're quiet," Shepard remarked the next morning as they walked across the Nos Astra trading floor for the second-to-last time the next morning. "Something wrong, or are you just hungover?"
Garrus forced a smile. "I had a few last night, but not enough that I'm really hurting. You should see Tali. She swears she's never drinking again and says Ken and Gabby are worse. I guess I just didn't sleep much. After you left last night, I saw a message from Liara. She says she's got a lead on Sidonis."
"Ah." There was a wealth of things she wouldn't say in the single syllable, and when he glanced at her, her face looked like a sealed airlock—shut down tight, and behind the lock, as cold as space. Her eyes were unreadable, but her fingers twitched at her side.
Sometimes he wondered just how far he could push her. He was, he knew. Part of him was driven to keep pushing, to make her see his side of things, drag her into line. He'd always been a rebel, and sometimes it itched to answer to even the best damn commanding officer he'd ever known. Most of him knew enough to follow someone who deserved her post more than any officer he'd ever known. If he mellowed another twenty years, he couldn't keep his head like Shepard did. She was direct—even blunt, impatient with idiots, and hated politics almost as much as he did—but she never led or acted out of righteous anger in the way he'd struggled with all his life. He'd break the rules he set for himself time and time again in obedience to one overarching concept: Justice. He knew Shepard's measured pragmatism and steely principles were smarter and more stable.
Garrus usually didn't disagree with Shepard's principles as such. He often disagreed with where she drew the line. The difference between them was that he was willing to be the arrogant bastard that made the call some higher authority couldn't—or wouldn't—make when she wasn't, that he was willing to sacrifice his morality along with his life to do what was required when she wasn't. He'd see justice done, damn whether he stayed just; while she'd stay just, damn whether justice was done.
He admired her conviction, he really did. And in most situations, honestly? I'd make the sacrifice before I saw her make it. Shepard's adherence to her personal code gave life a kind of stability. But this wasn't most situations. This was personal. This wasn't some abstract moral quandary—it was his team that had been gunned down by an army when Sidonis gave them away. This time, he needed Shepard to give in. He needed her to admit that no personal moral sacrifice could be worse than letting Sidonis walk. "I need to know you'll help me find him, Shepard," Garrus said quietly. "I have to take care of this."
"I've said I'll help," Shepard snapped. She sighed. "You need closure. I know."
"I do."
She hesitated then, and shook her head. "I just remember once you were a cop. You were a soldier, but you weren't a killer. I guess I haven't given up hope that before this is all over, you can get back to that."
Garrus looked down at her. "There's no going back, Shepard," he told her. "There's no way to erase what happened, the things I've done. There might be a way to go forward. Maybe. I don't know. Most days I can't see it, even when we're not going up against Terminus mercs. But if I'm ever going to have a shot, I have to do everything I can to make things up to my team. I have to make sure the man who betrayed us dies."
Shepard held his gaze for a long moment. Then, as they climbed the stair Liara's office lobby, she simply reached out, squeezed his wrist once, and let go. Garrus looked for Liara's assistant, but the place behind her desk was empty.
"Is Liara supposed to be off today, or did her secretary take a sick day?" Garrus wondered.
Shepard tried to smile. Couldn't manage it. "Something like that," she said, and walked right into Liara's office.
T'Soni was behind her desk. She hardly looked up from her computer as they approached and took the chairs across from hers. "Shepard. Garrus. Good morning." Liara said. Her eyes flicked up to Shepard then. "Nyxeris had some interesting data hidden away. Thank you, Shepard. I wouldn't have caught her without you. I'm one step closer to the Shadow Broker thanks to you." The assistant's dead, then. Spying?
T'Soni moved her cursor across her screen, and Shepard's omni-tool buzzed. "Here. Nyxeris was very well compensated. You need it more than I do."
Shepard pulled up her omni-tool. Her eyebrows rose, and she frowned. Garrus guessed Liara had paid her a lot of credits. But Shepard didn't argue; Liara was right. Ship upgrades, weaponry, and fuel was expensive. They needed the money. "You have any trouble with her?" Shepard asked.
Liara's mouth turned up. "She was very talented. I imagine that, had she been ordered to assassinate me, I would have never seen her coming. But her barriers needed practice. Practice I'm afraid she won't be getting."
Her voice was cool and collected. Garrus wondered if she could see it hitting Shepard like he did. She didn't use to be a killer, either. But T'Soni knows Shepard. She knows she's hurting her here, and it's almost like she wants to, like she's trying to push her away—paying her far more than a recon job's worth; casually admitting she's murdered a spy instead of firing her or sending her to prison.
T'Soni wanted Shepard gone, and Garrus didn't think she was just trying to get Shepard to leave before they discussed their business. What's she hiding?
Shepard stiffened, but she kept the conversation going. "What's the next step in your hunt?"
Liara steepled her fingers. "Now I gather information. Peel away layers of lies. And shine light into the shadows. And when I find the Shadow Broker, I hit him with a biotic field so strong that's what's left of his body will fit into a coffee cup." There was a venomous, hateful edge to her that Garrus recognized. He felt it every time he thought about what Sidonis had done: the desire to see him personally dead for what he'd done, that nothing would be right until he was.
Shepard was frowning. "What the hell did he do to you, Liara? I've never seen you like this."
For a long moment, Liara didn't say anything. She seemed to be wavering on the edge of a confession, but her eyes were locked on Shepard's face, and Garrus somehow knew she wouldn't lie. She couldn't. "Did Cerberus ever tell you how they recovered your body?" she asked.
It wasn't at all what he'd expected, but suddenly everything fell into place—how Liara had wound up here, her secretiveness, why she seemed to want to push Shepard away. Garrus glanced at Shepard as they came to the same realization. "Miranda."
The Illusive Man had warned Shepard T'Soni wasn't trustworthy; Lawson had avoided T'Soni's office like the plague even when invited to go there—all so this wouldn't come out.
Shepard fell back in her chair. "It was you," she said, looking at Liara.
Liara had cracked, and now all the guilt and anxiety she'd been hiding behind that veneer of professionalism came bleeding out of her. "Yes. I gave it to them. I gave you to them, Shepard. Because they said they could rebuild you. And to do that, I had to take it from the Shadow Broker, who was going to sell your corpse to the Collectors."
There was a story there, but Shepard didn't care about that, and both Garrus and Liara knew it. Shepard was frozen, expressionless. Garrus saw her swallow, close her eyes. Time seemed to stretch before she opened them again. In a carefully controlled voice, she said then, "Thanks for saving my body from the Collectors."
"But you're angry," Liara said. It wasn't a question.
"Angry," Shepard echoed, as if testing the sound. "I guess that's one word for it. Aside from the fact that people aren't supposed to come back from the dead and they did things to me to pull it off I don't even like to think about—leaving all that alone for a minute, I have to wonder if you were paying attention during our tour together." Her voice was shaking now. She was pale. Her jaw, her hands on her chair, everything about her was tight with tension.
This won't be good.
Garrus had only seen Shepard like this once before, on Ontarom as she faced down one of the scientists responsible for what had happened to the Akuze colony and the 179 Marines. A Cerberus scientist. Liara glanced at Garrus, as if for reassurance, but his mandibles tightened. He wasn't sure what Shepard was going to do.
Liara hadn't given him the information he needed yet. So will you stop Shepard if she tries something—for personal vengeance? Revulsion roiled in his gizzard—at Liara, at himself—and he sat as unsure of what he'd do in the next thirty seconds as he was of what Shepard would do.
"You saw the experiments Cerberus ran on the thorian creepers, all the scientists that died," Shepard said. "The colonists they let get taken by the geth, just to see what would happen. You saw the insane rachni they tried to train to be their attack dogs—living, thinking creatures. You weren't tuning all that out?"
"No, but—"
Shepard cut Liara off. "You heard about what they did to Admiral Kohoku, how they killed his squad. You weren't in the team with me for all of that, so maybe you forgot."
"I didn't forget!" Liara cried. Tears were streaming down her face.
"Then you forgot it was the same way the Akuze colony went down, my entire unit back in '77. Except for the one man that survived that they kept for years, torturing him and experimenting him on like a lab rat. You couldn't have remembered that." The worst part was that she didn't even raise her voice, Garrus thought. It was as cold as the cliffs on Noveria, and her sarcasm bit like the wind in a blizzard.
"I knew it was wrong!" Liara shouted. "I knew what they were, that they'd use you for their own business. I thought it was worth it to get you back. It was them or the Collectors, Shepard! I did the best I could! I'm sorry!"
Shepard stared flatly across at T'Soni. "No. You had a choice, Liara. You could have let me go. When you recovered my body, you could've told Cerberus to go to hell and given it to the Alliance for proper disposal. That's what you should've done."
But at that, everything in Garrus rebelled. "No."
Shepard and Liara both looked at him. "Garrus?" Liara asked.
"No," he repeated. "Shepard, don't ask Liara to be sorry for bringing you back. We need you. The galaxy needs you. You're not done yet. Who else is going to stop the Reapers?"
Her response was immediate. "You." Garrus felt sick, hearing how much faith she had in him, knowing just how unwarranted it was. Liara's face twisted with sadness and pity, but then Shepard looked at her too. "Either of you. Anyone."
Garrus shook his head. "Not like you," he said simply. "And not without you. Never." He had his gifts, he knew. So did Liara, Kaidan, Wrex, all of them. But no one could do what Shepard did.
"He's right," Liara agreed. "You brought us together, Shepard. You saved the galaxy from Saren and the Reapers. You're the only one that can save it when they return." Garrus saw the weight of those words cover Shepard's face and bend her shoulders, but before she could start objecting, Liara was admitting, "But that's not why I gave you to Cerberus. I did it because I couldn't lose you."
Shepard met Liara's eyes. The anger had drained out of her. She wasn't going to do anything stupid, but her sadness and weariness was absolute when she responded. "Liara, they own me now. And that's on you. Jeff and Karin don't know it, but they're hostages on the new Normandy Cerberus built to be my cage. Cerberus is listening to my every word, watching my every move. They say I don't have a control chip in me, no failsafes or kill switches, but with all the cybernetics in me, I have no way of knowing that's true. And with their AI running the Normandy, it doesn't matter. They don't even need any of that. She could vent me out the airlock. Depressurize my quarters or lock me inside. If I deviate from their agenda in any way—"she shrugged. "Even with Garrus and Tali with me, I'm not sure if I can get out of this one. And it's Cerberus. They're the people that were responsible for Akuze."
Liara crumpled in on herself, sobbing in earnest now. "You—you're n-never going to forgive me for this, a-are you?"
Shepard sighed. She raised her hand, dropped it. "I'm not sure I can. Liara—I—I get why you did it. I do. But you did the wrong thing."
"I can't believe that," Liara cried. "I-I can't, Shepard. The things I've done, the sacrifices I've made—I have to believe they were worthwhile. N-not just for you. For me! Do you understand that?"
"That debt you have to repay," Garrus guessed. "Something you incurred messing with the Shadow Broker to get her back?"
Liara turned bleak, tear-filled eyes to him. "I wish we could turn it back to before Alchera—for all of us. You. You. Me. But I can't. I'm sorry."
Shepard stood. "Yeah. Me too." She dropped her eyes. "I'll see you later, Liara. Garrus—I'll see you back at the ship." She stalked out of the room.
Part of him wanted to follow her, needed to follow her. But I have to know. "You found Sidonis?"
Liara was staring at the door. Her lips curved up, but the resulting expression was nothing like a smile. "I brought Shepard back from the dead," she said. "Everything I've done, everything I've become has been to achieve that goal—and to make up for what I did to do it." She looked back at him then. "And you're the one she's going to forgive."
Garrus was silent. What was there to say? He understood why she had done it. He agreed with her. He would have never dreamt of doing the same. Shepard said it. People aren't supposed to come back from the dead. And you gave her to Cerberus to do it. T'Soni was about a thousand times crazier than he was, but that kind of crazy had consequences. My kind of crazy has consequences.
T'Soni didn't answer him right away. Instead, her fingers flew over her omni-tool, and her monitor rotated in front of her until it faced him. A vid came up on the screen, time-stamped four days ago. Security footage from a traffic cam across the street from a Nos Astra café. And in the corner of the screen, the smug expression on an asari's face slid off, only to be replaced with a sudden panic as she stared at the turian across from her. Her biotics flared, and she lunged, only for the turian to seize her in one of the military holds they taught in advanced hand-to-hand for disabling amateur biotics. He thrust a gun in her face.
Garrus watched his encounter with the Eclipse assassin play out. There was no sound on the vid. It wasn't clear what either of them had said—but everything that had happened was clear as crystal, captured play-for-play on the camera. When he'd circled the table to stand behind her, the camera had gotten a great angle on his ravaged face.
"Murder," Liara said. "It'd be the verdict in any asari court. The waitress did turn over the glass, which tested for a very strong, very nasty poison, and the fingerprints of a mercenary who had been arrested twice before on lesser charges. The waitress also testified the assassin physically attacked first. But this vid tells the real story. You'd disabled the mercenary—quite effectively. You could have incapacitated her any number of ways, left her for the authorities. Simply shooting her the moment she attacked would have been a clearer case for self-defense. But you held her helpless, intimidated her, tried to force a suicide, and then shot her, when it was already obvious she couldn't do a thing to stop you. And you missed the camera."
"Where did you get this?" Garrus asked.
"I've had a VI scanning for vid of Shepard and every associate I know of all over Nos Astra since the Normandy landed," Liara answered. "A security measure in the event of a situation like this. Shepard's Spectre status may have been reinstated, but Illium authorities aren't mandated to respect it outside of Council space. I wanted a way to protect you if some degree of lawbreaking became necessary. The surveillance has been expensive—but apparently worth it. The Nos Astra police never saw this, and they won't. But Garrus—"She broke off, pressed her lips together.
Garrus assessed her. What's her game? "You're good at this," he remarked at last. "Anticipating information outlets, preparing for contingencies, leveraging intelligence. You're a natural." He leaned forward, bracing himself on his knees. "Do you mind telling me what the point of that was?"
She was angry. He got that. Angry at Shepard, angry at him. T'Soni was looking at a galaxy where she could try to do the right thing and hurt the woman she loved beyond any possibility of repair—while he could run to the edge of the galaxy to die, recklessly throw out so much of what that woman had taught them both, and be forgiven for it.
But T'Soni didn't have any real moral high ground here, and Garrus was angry too. Sure, he was angry he'd forgotten to scan for cameras when he'd realized Neryn meant to kill him and known what he would do. But he was angrier now that he'd acted the way he had at all—angrier than T'Soni could ever be. One for one. Justice for those that can't claim it for themselves. Never personal. What you do matters, but so does why you do it. Those were the rules.
I've gone outside the lines before. I could sit here all day saying Neryn deserved it, that Harga did. They did. But in those moments, whenever I became whatever the bastard of the day deserved, when I enjoyed it—did I deserve anything less?
There's a reason I drew those lines. There's a reason Shepard does.
T'Soni swiveled her monitor back around, and he heard the standard programmed sound effect that was her shredding the vid file. "There's a new identity specialist on the Citadel," she said. "According to my contacts, in the criminal underground, he's known as Fade. He's an expert in erasing information trails, forging official documents and creating a false digital footprint on the extranet. Seems particularly good at getting around Citadel Security protocols.
"A turian matching Lantar Sidonis's description docked on the Citadel around three weeks ago under the name Jirhael Thenoplaexus. He'd already passed through customs before his paperwork registered as a forgery. I was able to trace the forgery through multiple shell proxies and a midlevel encryption to an Eclipse cell on Omega." Liara offered him one end of a hard-line connector. He took it from her, plugged it into a manufactured port on his omni-tool, and a double-encrypted file appeared on his interface.
"Everything I'm telling you now is in that file," she said, sliding over a piece of paper on which she had written two codes. Garrus took a shot of the paper with his visor's camera, slid the paper back across the desk, and Liara picked it up and fed it into her shredder. "Jirhael Thenoplaexus disappears two days after landing on the Citadel. Maybe Sidonis had a reason to believe Eclipse might not be completely invested in assisting his escape—or he knew you would come after him."
Garrus handed Liara back her connector and clasped his hands together. "He was right on both counts. If anyone in that Eclipse cell was still alive, I'd bet everything I have that they'd be after him now too. He'd deserve it. But I'm going to get there first."
Liara laid her hands flat across her desk and looked him in the eye. "Garrus—before. My point?" She smiled slightly. "I hope you know I wasn't asking for anything, and I wasn't threatening you. I know we haven't been close, but I do consider you a friend, all the more because—"she stopped, and dropped her eyes. "Well. You know why. But I do want you to think. Think carefully.
"You and I have done terrible things. You've stopped some terrible people. I helped others. We both hoped it would serve some greater good, but I think both of us have faced terrible consequences." She took a deep breath, her expression pained. "You might think after everything you've lost, there's nothing else you can lose, but—"her expression hardened, her eyes flickered up to his again, and she straightened, steeling herself. "I'm sorry: it wasn't true when you went to Omega, and it's even less true now. You've had something of a reprieve, and I was able to extend it this week. But I might not be there next time."
Garrus sighed. He looked past T'Soni. It was easier. Her eyes were too bright, too earnest. There was a difference between a crying civilian on sec duty and seeing the drying tear tracks on the face of a woman with whom—like she'd said—he hadn't been close but had always considered a friend. "My guess is it would've been half an hour. Maybe less. If Shepard had been half an hour later the day she found me, I'd be dead. There's no reason I survived. I shouldn't have. Sidonis deserves what's coming for him—but if there's some impartial spirit of justice out there somewhere, I know what it'd say about me."
"I am not sure you understand me—"Liara began.
Garrus stood. "I understand," he interrupted. He shook his head. "I—I know what it's worth. That Shepard's back. Several billion credits, from what the doctor and Miranda tell me." He tried to smile at the joke. Couldn't. "I know what her trust is worth." He walked to the window, putting physical distance between himself and Liara's gaze—a dead giveaway, and he didn't even care. I know what it's worth that even after all the complications here, she wanted me backing her up every time we went out. That she's letting me stand where you'd give anything to if you weren't committed to your own mission—even though I don't deserve it any more than you do or maybe even less. "You have to believe me—the last thing I want to do is disappoint her. I just—they trusted me."
"The people Sidonis betrayed," Liara finished softly. He heard her chair roll back, and she walked up quietly to stand beside him. "Kill him, if that is what you need. Just be careful."
She turned to face him, and he shook her hand. "I'll do what I can to limit your exposure off of Illium," Liara promised. "Degrade mercenary communications, provide misinformation to the wrong people that ask."
"You don't have to put yourself at risk. I have a few tricks up my sleeve. A little out of date, now, but five weeks ago, our tech was five years ahead of everyone else's."
Liara shook her head. "Let me help. Please."
Garrus looked at her, then nodded. "Thank you. Really." Liara smiled sadly, and Garrus left her to her hunt. He needed to tell Shepard about his.
A/N: Goodbye for a very long time, Illium.
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LMS
