A/N: In Greek mythology, the Lethe was one of the five rivers of the Underworld, bordering Elysium, or heaven. When a soul drank of the waters of the Lethe, he or she would forget the earthly life. Only then could they be reborn into another. In Dante's Purgatorio, the Lethe flowed at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. Dante had to drink from it to forget his sins before Beatrice, the blessed, heavenly love, could show him the vision of paradise.
XXXIV
The Rivers of Hell: Lethe
Garrus and the others followed Shepard into the refinery courtyard. Flames were crackling in the distance. Gas hissed from the valves Massani had broken all over the facility. The humid heat of Zorya was rapidly being swallowed in the dry, hungry heat of the spreading blaze. Massani's original mission was already a failure: they weren't reclaiming this place for the Eldfall-Ashland group. Every minute the fire spread was weeks more worth of damage. Soon there'd be nothing left to save—if this place didn't kill them all.
To the left, a man in a jumpsuit ran out of a section of the refinery down below. "Help!" he screamed up at Shepard. "We're trapped! We can't get to the gas valves to shut them off! The whole place is gonna blow!"
It was the first confirmation they'd had that Shepard was right—Santiago's people hadn't killed all the refinery workers like the guy in the jungle. There were some still alive, they were trapped, and Zaeed had put them all at risk.
The heat closed in on Garrus, and the smoke on the air tasted like panic. You've done a lot of stupid crap in your day, Garrus, but you've never come in like this. You've never been the guy killing civilians to get the target. It didn't matter that the target was Vido Santiago, intersystem leader of the Blue Suns, didn't matter that taking him out could throw the entire cancerous organization into chaos. Garrus could hear the yelling now, past the one guy that had got out to ask for help. Why do we do anything we do, Massani, except for guys like that?
The refinery worker could leave. The path behind them, back to the ravine, the jungle, was clear. But he was staying, ready to plunge right back into the fire to save his coworkers.
Massani's face was hard. "No time," he grunted. "Vido's probably halfway to the shuttle docks by now." He started making his way ahead. Probably he knew the plans to the facility.
Something in Garrus snapped. "Shepard, we're not going to leave these people," he said. It wasn't really a question, but Shepard didn't hesitate to answer anyway. She vaulted the walkway railing down to the lower refinery, and without missing a beat, Garrus followed her. It was faster than running down the stairs.
"We're not letting them die," she told the others.
Taylor nodded, looking relieved. "Let's do it." He vaulted down to join them.
Massani was angry. He pointed toward the processing center where Santiago had gone. "We stop to help these people, and Vido gets away. And if he gets away, I'm blaming you." There was a dark, dangerous undercurrent to his voice, but Shepard just shook her head.
"We came to save them," she repeated. "We're saving them."
Jack glanced at Massani, then shrugged. She launched herself off the walkway and floated down to them on her biotics. "Into the fire then. Hell, yeah."
Shepard was already moving toward the refinery worker. Garrus moved after her, but looked back at Massani, who was hesitating on the main walkway. He shook his head. Massani couldn't take all Santiago's Blue Suns on his own. But he's still thinking about it. He'd kill them all, kill us all just to shoot that guy in the head. If he's not careful, he'll kill himself.
Finally, Massani swore under his breath and vaulted after them. "I knew this was a mistake," he muttered. "If we're going to do this, we better get to it."
"Thanks," the refinery worker said hurriedly. He led them into the burning building ahead, and almost immediately doubled over, hacking. He reached down into his jumpsuit and tore, and a piece of his undershirt came away in his fist. He held it over his face, filtering the air with it, and gestured ahead with the other hand.
The air in the refinery was warping in the heat. The room was black with smoke, but Garrus could just make out another glass room on the other side of the one they stood in. Seven other men and women in jumpsuits were standing there. Some of them were banging on the glass. Some supported others, crying or screaming or just too weak to stand. The access panel to the room glowed red. Locked.
"The doors won't open until the fire's out," the man who had led them in shouted, "but I can't get to the valves or the sprinklers."
Shepard nodded, and plunged forward. "Hurry!" the man called after them.
Over the din of hissing gas and roaring flames, Garrus heard the screaming from the locked room. "We're going to die!"
"Don't worry!" Garrus yelled back. "We're on it!"
The gas valves they needed to shut off to prevent an explosion were around the room—Garrus could see them: little wheels of metal on the piping. Some were blocked off by fountains of flame where the piping had already given way. Others were blocked by the paneling, some of which had collapsed.
It was so hot that Garrus was already soaked in sweat. His eyes burned. His mouth was dry. Warnings flashed on his visor as he ran after Shepard, but Garrus ignored them.
At least there's nobody shooting at us at the moment. The Suns had left these people to burn too.
Jack and Taylor were able to push at least some of the flames back with their barriers, but they couldn't do anything about the heat. One time, Garrus's shields went down in the two seconds it took him to shut off a single valve, and he pulled his hand away stinging, a five-centimeter circle warped and melted into the outer surface of the gauntlet. Medi-gel rushed to the area to cool and protect his hand, and the valve hadn't burned all the way through, but they took the rest of the valves in turns after that just the same.
All of them were crawling by the time they'd pushed through the entire room, shut off all the valves, and made it to the sprinkler system at the back, crouching as low to the ground as they could get, where the sight lines were clearer and the air was better. All the humans had started coughing. Garrus, adapted to higher temperatures and thicker air conditions than they were, was doing a little better, but even he was wheezing, feeling as though someone had shoved a fist full of sandpaper down his trachea and into his lungs. Shepard's eyes were bloodshot and streaming as she punched on the sprinklers.
The hissing as the water met the flames, the healthier steam that filled the room was amazing. Garrus felt the fire being dampened, start to die. The sounds coming from the other room changed—the screams became cheers, and the choking, desperate sobs of the terrified relaxed to become the freer sobs of men and women ransomed from death.
All five of them sprawled on the floor in front of the sprinkler system, gasping, each breath deeper than the last as the air began to clear. Massani was the first to stagger to his feet. "Let's go," he said. His voice was a harsh whisper, little more than a rasp, but he got it out.
Garrus shot Massani a disgusted look, but lurched to his feet anyway. He coughed as he did, trying to clear his throat. To his left, Shepard braced herself on her knees, head down as she tried to get her own breath back. Taylor reached out a hand to help Jack to her feet, and she took it. Her eyes were bright and shining, haunted but not defeated in her soot-stained pale face, but she turned to Shepard and nodded, ready to go.
This time, Zaeed led them through a passage on the right—an alternate route to the processing center.
As they left, Garrus saw the man that had called them into the lower refinery shepherding the others out, letting another, older man lean on his shoulders as they went. Every mission, every bullet we fire, for guys like that, Garrus thought again. Shepard always remembered that. Sometimes he forgot. But he never, ever wanted to come in like this again, burning the people he should be saving, so intent on getting the bad guy that there stopped being any real difference—not to the people that mattered.
I won't forget that again.
Massani had worried that if they saved the refinery workers, they'd lose Santiago, but as they crossed into the processing facility, the sprinkler system still tinkling on metal floors all around, it was obvious he hadn't cleared out just yet. They kept intercepting his orders through Massani's patch on the radio. By scrapping Eldfall-Ashland's refinery, Massani had effectively made Santiago's position here untenable. The fuel lines were wrecked. No way Santiago could make any kind of profit by staying. The smart thing for Santiago to do was to evacuate, regroup someplace else, and find another way to recoup any financial losses he had sustained here. But Garrus had heard the guy talk all of a minute, and he knew there were a few other concerns at play here.
Massani had founded the Blue Suns with this guy. Now that Massani had shown up again, everyone knew that when Santiago had made his play he had failed to kill Massani. Now Zaeed had trashed this entire operation. If he got away with it, Santiago would lose authority with his men. Zaeed had to pay, and so Santiago was hanging around, even though it was tactically smarter to withdraw.
He'd set up his remaining squads in defensive formations in the time they'd been putting out the fire in the refinery. Rear patrols, defensive lines, crossfire traps. Fires were still burning here and there across the facility, but most of the worst of it had been contained. So, of course, the Blue Suns had brought out flamethrowers.
They heard Santiago's orders over the radio as they fought: "First person to bring me Massani's head gets something special in their paycheck."
Massani stepped in close to a guy coming in, hit his elbow upward, and clubbed him in the head with the butt of his assault rifle. Taylor shot him when he went down. Jack pulled two guys out from behind the mess of pipework in the processing center. It was hard to make out the targets through the steam coming off the superheated metal, from where water from the sprinklers had instantly evaporated. Garrus's heat sensor was no help. But he managed one shot to the center of mass. Jack took care of the other.
Shepard wasn't using her usual incendiaries. Not here. Instead, she'd flipped a switch on her Locust to implement cryo rounds. Slowing down the enemy, cooling down the environs—at least a little. That a couple direct hits left the Blue Suns vulnerable to shattering into bits of blood and bone was just a bonus.
It was slow-going, pushing forward through the works, into the processing center proper. Santiago had stationed Blue Suns in each of the storage areas adjoining. Eight doors enemies could be hiding behind, at least. Too many places for them to run. And two minutes in, someone made Garrus and Shepard. "All squads," a human said over the radio. "Check it: Massani isn't leading. Repeat: Massani isn't leading. We've got high-tech flanking tactics and leadership from the rear. Mark the armored human female and the turian sniper."
"Shit," someone else said. "These guys were on Omega! It's Archangel and Commander Shepard."
"I don't care who they are or what they've done," Santiago sneered. "Put them down."
As the room became more dangerous for Garrus, Shepard, and Massani, however, Taylor and Jack just got deadlier, the enemy's focus on the named threats freeing up operations for the biotics. Garrus stayed in cover for the most part, hanging back near the entrance to the room behind heavy machinery and in corners. Making enemies come to him. Shepard took the opposite tack, playing decoy and inviting the Suns to chase her all over the room, using the shield-stealing program she'd learned from Tali to boost her defenses when she took fire and leave the Suns vulnerable for the rest of them at the same time. Taylor and Jack adapted at once, taking out the Suns by fours and fives as Garrus and Shepard drew them out. In the meantime, Massani had stolen a flamethrower from a dead heavy and torched anyone who came within two meters of him.
That was when some of the Suns had the bright idea to sabotage the fuel lifts to leak. They swung over the room, back and forth, pouring out flaming liquid, starting new fires where the old ones had gone out.
The air became hot and bad again. It tasted like oil and smoke. Garrus's throat burned and his eyes watered, making it even harder to make out the enemy. "Shoot the tanks!" Massani barked.
It was stupid. Shooting the tanks down would cause more explosions. The gas in the pipes was off, but if anything on the ground caught fire, the damage to the facility could get even worse. They didn't have time to head back to the sprinkler system. If the Suns haven't already cut us off. I would have.
On the other hand, Garrus thought, right now the fire from the tank is uncontrolled. It's burning everything. Feeling a wave of wicked heat approaching, a roar of flames that stole his breath, he left the corner he had been posted in and ducked into a nearby storage room, away from the flames. A turian soldier ran at him. "Blue Suns!" Garrus took his first bullet on his shields, knocked the guy's gun aside, kicked him to the ground, and fired three rounds from the Vindicator straight into his skull. He was cut off from all of the others in here. He could hear Jack screaming defiance at someone, the burr of Shepard's Locust, the blat of Taylor's shotgun. The roar of the leaking tank passed on.
The storage room ran parallel to the main room, up ahead. Garrus followed it, and sure enough, there was another exit further on. Garrus moved back out into the main room, checked the sight lines, raised his gun, and fired. Five rounds. The tank fell from the lift, crashing to the ground and going up in a bloom of superheated fuel and deadly chemical reactions. A wave of pure heat radiated outward, but the room was big enough that Garrus was out of the blast zone, that all of them were. But at least half of the route back was now blocked as a new fire started crackling and growing behind them.
"Nice one," Massani called, approval in his voice.
"Well. We weren't going that way anyway," Garrus answered. He ignored the irritation in his gut at Massani's compliment. He didn't need Zaeed's approval. He didn't want it. But the workers have to be out now. The gas is off, and the sprinklers are working. And we've got a job to do.
Taylor took out the other tank, up ahead, on the left side of the room. At least three Suns were barbecued in the blast. Garrus saw their armor fuse and melt together, and they fell, black and twisted, to the ground. Garrus looked away and fired at a batarian that had rounded the corner out of another storage room.
Santiago was getting angrier by the moment. His voice was higher, sharper, and now he spoke to Massani directly over the radio. "Even with Shepard and Archangel, you still don't have a chance!"
Jack fired three pistol rounds into a human heavy carrying another flamethrower ahead. "The rest of us aren't anything to sneeze at either, asshole!" she snarled.
Santiago was speaking like they were talking now. But he ignored Jack and spoke again to Zaeed. "I took your Suns, I took your life. Now I'm going to do it again."
It was possible he was speaking directly to them, Garrus thought. If Massani had the know-how to hack into Santiago's transmissions, they couldn't rule out the possibility that Santiago could hack into theirs. On the Normandy, the AI would have blocked him. That was her job. Her efficacy was limited planetside.
Whether Santiago had hacked into their transmissions or had just guessed they were patched into his, though, his goal was to make Massani careless. They were winning, and he knew it. His Blue Suns were getting fewer and fewer, and farther between. They couldn't relax just yet; the layout of the processing facility was too friendly to evasive enemies. But the Suns weren't fielding organized offensives against him or Shepard anymore; there weren't enough of them left. They were withdrawing, trying to stay out of the main room and take potshots from the storage rooms or move around and attack from behind. If Massani lost it again, though, they could potentially take back the advantage.
The sprinklers were running again, trying to put out the fires that had been started with the flamethrowers, the leaking fuel tanks, and the explosions in here. The air was better, but the floor was slick. Jack slid on it once, falling on her ass. She turned it into an attack, throwing her arm up over her head and biotically hurling the batarian in front of her behind her, back toward Shepard. Shepard took care of the guy for her. Garrus stripped the shields for from the human on Shepard's flank, enabling Massani to light him up without a hitch.
"Take a knee now, Zaeed, and maybe I'll forget this ever happened," Santiago hissed over the radio.
That's going to happen, Garrus thought, watching the tic jumping in Massani's jaw through his visor. They were more than halfway across the room now, moving toward the docks. Taylor took some fire from a human from storage. His barriers absorbed the shots. Taylor turned, knelt, and lunged, doing deliberately what Jack had done by accident moments before, using the water on the floor to slide under the enemy's fire and into his legs. The human went down in a tangle of limbs, and in a second, Jacob was up, making sure with his shotgun that his attacker stayed down.
Then it was over, or seemed to be. The concrete floor was a shining mess of blood, water, and liquid fuel. The lingering smoke and steam in the air carried the fumes. They burned in Garrus's nose. But he couldn't see or hear any more of Satniago's men in the place—they'd taken out every last one of his Suns.
Garrus heard a metallic whirring to his left then. He turned, and saw a camera aimed at the processing center pivot. Santiago was watching. This isn't over.
"You never should have come here, Zaeed!" Santiago yelled. "Did you forget who you were dealing with?"
Across the floor, near the exit, something metallic moved. "Twelve o'clock!" Garrus snapped, as a YMIR mech that had been quietly folded up against the far wall stood up and opened fire.
Taylor, Jack, and Massani—the most exposed of the five of them—all dived into cover. Garrus and Shepard crouched down. The sound of the YMIR miniguns was deafening, bounced off of all the metal and the concrete in the refinery processing center. There was no lane of approach to the docks the mech didn't cover, the last few meters of the room didn't offer a lot of cover to get into close quarters with it, and there was no way to flank it either. Taking it out would be slow, it would be involved, and it would give Santiago all the time he needed to make his escape.
Massani knew it too. "No!" he screamed. "No!"
He tried to move out of cover, but the YMIR had his shields out in a second, and he ducked down again. "Goddamn it!"
"Fan out," Shepard said calmly, over the radio, because her voice would be lost in the fire without it. "They won't have had time to program target prioritization into it, and without preprogrammed instructions, YMIRs go for the biggest threat in the room. We're going to relay it. Garrus and I first; we'll take down its shields so Jack and Jacob can go for the armor. Zaeed, use the mech's distraction to move in closer, but stay in cover. Maybe you'll get a chance to take it out, but if you don't, the rest of you should have hurt it enough that I can finish it off with the missile launcher. Ready? Go."
Garrus understood the plan. They'd have to bounce the mech's attention from man to man so it never fired long enough at any one person to take them out, which meant that in addition to their effective attacks, each of them would need to fire long enough to register as the biggest threat in the room on the YMIR's scanners. He stood, sent his tech attack, and opened fire with the Vindicator. Five three-pulse bursts. The YMIR turned its miniguns on him, but by the time his shields went out, Shepard was making her attack. Garrus dropped back into cover, and the YMIR shifted its focus to the person actively attacking.
The effect was that by the time Taylor finished his attack, one of the YMIR miniguns was melted onto its forearm and useless with dark energy and one of its legs was stalling, fused into its hip. "That's right," Massani growled, on the YMIR's useless flank. He fired three rounds into the mech's other gun, effectively crippling it, and as its central processor began blinking red, indicating its self-destruct sequence had begun, Massani broke away, making for the exit and leaving the rest of them behind.
Over the radio, Garrus heard Shepard's sigh. She fired her missile launcher once, preempting the YMIR's self-destruct, and the four of them started after Massani. Before they left the processing center, though, Garrus knew it was too late. Santiago's voice sounded over the radio again, low and malicious. "Not this time, Zaeed, you son of a bitch. See you in another twenty years."
Garrus exited the refinery to the docking area and saw a shuttle flying off out over the Zorya jungle. Santiago. Zaeed screamed, firing blindly at it, every round in his assault rifle, until it clicked, out of ammunition. "Aaaaaaauuuugh!"
A bullet actually hit the shuttle. Garrus saw it buck. But it wasn't disabled. It kept flying. And the odds that Zaeed had hit Santiago? Pretty slim.
Massani ignited. He jettisoned a heat sink and rounded on Shepard. "You just cost me twenty years of my life!" he yelled.
But there was fuel all over the dock from the fire and the traps the Suns had left. The heat sink hit some. The flames licked up to a fuel barrel, and before anyone could react, the barrel and a good portion of the dock exploded.
The shockwave threw Garrus, Shepard, Jack, and Taylor back and off their feet. It did a lot worse to Massani. The explosion brought down some scaffolding and rebar on top of Massani. Garrus stood and saw him there, trapped under a crossbeam, too heavy for him to lift on his own. Massani kicked and struggled. It was useless. "Son of a bitch!" he swore.
The remnants of the explosion had started another fire, spreading out along the fuel dribbled out over the dock. Garrus felt the heat on his hide, felt the flames sucking at the air. He looked at the remaining fuel on the deck, the way it would lead the flames right up to Massani. Zaeed had two minutes. Maybe less. In the open air, he'd be breathing longer—but the fire would spread faster.
Shepard didn't move to help Massani out though. None of them did, and despite the heat, Shepard's face was as cold as Garrus had ever seen it. She shifted. "You started this fire, Zaeed," she said. Her voice was soft, but it sent a chill down Garrus's spine. "Makes sense that you'll burn in it."
Garrus stared. Massani was reckless, insubordinate. He'd scrapped the mission they had agreed to in order to pursue his own objective, put every single one of the people they'd come here to save at risk.
More than that, he put them in danger in the first place. Garrus remembered the screams of the workers in the refinery, how they'd hugged one another, wept, and waited for the end, caught in a death trap. Massani had created it, and he'd wanted to leave them there.
Now, any turian commander would court-martial Zaeed at the very least, and Garrus had known several who would have strung him up or shot him in the head right here. And no one higher up the meritocracy would argue, either.
But Shepard? He had known her a while now, even setting aside the time she'd spent dead. I thought I knew her well. He would have guessed she was capable of court-martialing a reckless, insubordinate soldier, but never that she could execute him without a trial in the field, no matter how justified an execution might be.
And leaving a man to burn alive?
Garrus wasn't saying she was wrong. It was what Massani would have left those workers to. Like she said: it made sense. It was justice. Garrus had served criminals in similar ways—never anyone that fought with me, but I understand.
Still, there was something in his gut that squirmed to see Shepard letting that fire burn, leaving Zaeed trapped there.
He's crazy, a loose cannon—and he deserves it.
It was true. He knew it. But since when has Shepard given anyone what they deserve?
You idiot, you hypocrite, make up your mind! What the hell do you want from her?
Still, Garrus didn't believe her, not entirely, and neither did Massani. He thrashed under the rebar. "Yeah? Screw you! Now come on, get me out of this shithole!"
Shepard raised her eyebrows to look down at Massani and didn't budge. "Why?" Garrus's gizzard clenched. "You dug it. You put your revenge ahead of the mission. How can we trust that you'll be there when we need you?"
Damn, there's an edge to that. Garrus heard it. He saw that Taylor and Jack did too. None of them had ever disobeyed Shepard's orders as such. None of them had ever put anyone else at risk, even Jack, but all three of them had been distracted. With the Collectors already starting the work of the Reapers, Garrus knew all three of them had been navel-gazing, caught in their own crap when the galaxy needed their full commitment to the mission. If the Reapers kill us all, it won't matter that Sidonis might just do six months. Shepard's been doing what she can for us, because we might as well take a little more time to prepare so we have better odds in the end, but if we don't, all of us, get it together, this whole initiative could fall apart, and it'll be us that she can't trust.
Massani spat. "I'll do what I was goddamn paid to do, Shepard. Just don't expect any more than that. Now stop screwing around, and let's go!"
She still didn't move. Massani had a minute and a half now, probably. The crackle of the flames was closer to the fuel spill. Garrus could feel the heat, through his armor and on the back of his head.
A vein started jumping in Massani's neck. Underneath his sweat, his red face went a shade paler. He looked around at the rest of them. "Jack? Taylor? Vakarian?"
Garrus could see the same struggle he felt in Jack and Jacob's faces. He deserves this. But can we watch it?
Jack was shaking. Her fists were clenched, and biotics flared around her, a centimeter deep all around. "You could've blown us all up, asshole!" she yelled. "You're on your own."
Taylor hesitated. His jaw was tight. He glanced at Garrus, back at the refinery, but he didn't move either.
Shepard squatted down in front of Massani. "You put your own goals ahead of the mission," she told him. "That's not the way this works."
She wasn't going to leave him. If she was talking about the way this works, this was a teaching moment, not an execution. Hell if I know why, but I'm relieved.
But Massani wasn't getting it. "I've survived this long watching my own back," he growled. "No time to worry about anyone else."
In one fluid movement, Shepard had drawn her pistol, removed the safety, and pointed it at Massani's head. "You're part of a team now, Zaeed. There's no way we can do this unless we're all working together." She held his gaze for a long moment, then rotated the pistol in her hand so the grip was facing him instead.
This is Shepard, Garrus thought. The lightest sentence an offense like Massani's would be likely to get in the Hierarchy was a dishonorable discharge—kicked off his mission and out of his unit and down to subcitizen on the meritocracy, on level with children and client races. And the officer that handed it down would be considered soft and risk losing the respect of his or her subordinates. Shepard wasn't even doing that much—she was giving Massani an outright second chance. But there was nothing soft or weak about it, and somehow, in this moment when she offered her trust again to the guy that put her life and the lives of others in danger with her eyes wide open, she had more authority than any officer he'd ever seen.
Everyone felt it. Taylor's jaw had relaxed. He was radiating approval. Jack's biotics had died down. There was uncertainty in her face—a tremor in her jaw, a confused slant to her brows. But she wasn't going to fight Shepard on this, either.
Garrus acknowledged his own admiration for Shepard was mixed in with a little more bitterness than there used to be just now.
I'll work it out later.
For now, if Massani was stubborn, Garrus would shoot him dead with no regrets. He thought all four of them would. But if they were going to put the mission first, they needed to put what had happened here behind them and move on.
Zaeed stopped struggling beneath the rebar. "You—you have a point," he said. "I'm not done with Vido, but I can put that behind me long enough to get your mission done."
Shepard stepped back, holstered her gun, and nodded at Garrus and Taylor. Garrus stepped up. He and Taylor stooped and together lifted the rebar off of Massani. As soon as Massani was free, they let the metal fall back to the ground. The five of them walked away from the fuel spill just as it went up in flames.
Niels had obviously been monitoring communications, because in a moment, he'd flown down the Kodiak. Shepard got in first and sat. For a moment, she wasn't the commanding figure that had stood over Zaeed less than a minute earlier—she was an exhausted, fairly slim woman without a weapon in her hands who had just blocked off access to two of her guns and the missile launcher, and Garrus saw Zaeed realize it. He hesitated, and Garrus could almost hear the twenty years of pent-up rage simmering in him. Garrus, to Massani's left and slightly behind him, put a hand on his assault rifle, but Shepard didn't flinch, and Massani nodded at nothing.
"Let's get the hell out of here," he grunted, swinging up into the Kodiak.
Garrus followed him, taking the seat across from him and beside Shepard.
Garrus sat in the battery. He stared at the gunnery console, but all he could see was the flames licking over the Eldfall-Ashland refinery. He could hear the screams of the trapped workers, civilians coopted by the Blue Suns, defenseless and in the middle of everything that had happened completely by accident. He could hear Shepard, Jack, and Taylor, coughing in the smoke.
Vido dies, whatever the cost!
Garrus swallowed. His hands tightened on the console.
Vido Santiago hadn't been worth it, leader of the Blue Suns or not. Not all those people in the refinery, and not the jeopardization of the larger mission.
No one's worth that.
Now, he wasn't any Zaeed Massani. Never had been, never would be. But Garrus knew he'd been guilty enough of forgetting what was really important. Ever since Sidonis had betrayed his men, he'd been all too willing to ignore the people he still could protect and put off the fight against the Collectors—letting who knew how many hundreds or thousands of human colonists get taken in the meantime—so he could hunt Sidonis down.
Tell the truth. You abandoned the real fight years ago. After Shepard, after Mom, you got tired enough of swimming against the current that you gave up. Ran away to hunt gangsters on Omega like Shepard beat the Reapers for good at the Citadel. Like they were as imaginary as the Council said they were. How many people have died or been subjected to the Collectors' sick experiments, been indoctrinated or turned into husks because you were angry and fixated on some bastard you could beat?
. . .
Too many.
What were you going to do, take on the entire Council by yourself? Every commentator and psychologist that said Shepard was crazy, every salarian doctor and asari matriarch and propo vid that said Saren worked her over and that the threat was done? They sidelined Anderson. They split up the crew and assigned them to backwaters, and you saw them do it.
They wouldn't air a word I said and slapped me with a penalty every time I spoke up besides.
You still could have done something. Something. You could have kept trying.
Garrus's eyes stung, still raw from the smoke and fumes down on Zorya. His throat was raw. He had taken a shower, but he still tasted ash.
He hadn't done enough then, and he wasn't doing enough now. He knew it. There were individuals across the galaxy that still believed Shepard had told the truth about the Reapers. There had to be. A professor here, a conspiracy theorist there. An enclave of hanar dedicated to the Enkindlers. Specialists like Liara who had studied the patterns of past cycles and knew there had to be some bigger reason behind Saren Arterius allying with the geth than because he hated humans. The misanthropes and outlaws that settled out here in the Terminus had to be panicking by now, reaching out to one another with theories about why so many colonies were disappearing. But there weren't enough people out there that were really worried. There weren't enough people out there really planning for the return of the Reapers, and if the entire crew of the Normandy died taking out the Collectors in three weeks—or failing to do so—the galaxy would be left defenseless, completely open to the Reapers' next attack.
On impulse, Garrus opened up a new message on his omni-tool. He stared at the blank display for a moment, uncertain. His father had contacts in the Hierarchy. Castis Vakarian had the power to make the right people listen, start preparing a defense, even when the Normandy went down. If Garrus could make his father listen. If Castis was even in a position where he could listen right now.
Garrus's fingers hovered over his omni-tool. His mandibles tightened.
Not yet.
He'd have to send a message eventually. It would be irresponsible and stupid not to. But if Castis didn't believe him, or if the message distracted him from Garrus's mother's last few weeks—
Not yet.
In the end, Garrus just wired more credits to his family account. The Cerberus funds had come in again a couple days ago. Garrus sent it all. I'm not likely to need it. Not anymore. With the transfer, he sent a simpler message, to Solana and his mother as well as to his father.
I can afford it. Don't worry about me. I can't tell you where I am, but I'm doing some good out here. I hope so, anyway. I can't come home. I wish I could. You deserve better. I'm sorry.
—G
Garrus looked over the message and sent it. Then he shut off his omni-tool and started up a calibration sequence on the Thanix.
A/N: Leave a review if you've got something to say,
LMSharp
