"Shepard?"
Garrus's voice sounded odd, a little shaky, but Val couldn't see his expression behind his helmet's dark-tinted faceplate.
"Yeah," she said. Anyone would be shaken by a close encounter with a Reaper. She had no idea what had happened to the two men while she was locked in the Reaper's vision. "You okay, Garrus?"
"Fine," he said with a shake of his head. "I think." With exaggerated care, he started climbing to his feet.
Val turned her attention to her brother. "Alex?"
"I died," he said. Flat, almost matter-of-fact.
"What?" That didn't make sense. Val reached toward him and hesitated, wishing for the feed that EDI used to send to her hardsuit's HUD showing her her teammates' vital signs.
"Not now," he said, voice rising slightly. "Then. When the slavers came. There were explosions and then... nothing."
Val stared at him in horror, unsure what to say. The enormity of what he'd said felt like a weight, sinking onto her. She looked back over her shoulder, but the Reaper had almost vanished into the blackness of the sky, rising relentlessly away.
"Shepard," Garrus repeated, now on his feet. "Are you all right?"
His head tilted slightly, a familiar gesture. Automatically, Val said, "Yeah. I'm..." She felt chilled, actually, and a little sick to her stomach. Her head had been cracked open, flooded with new information, and reassembled, and her skull still ached as she tried to grasp the ramifications of what she'd been told. When she blinked, she saw Reapers flooded with red, slowly crashing into allied ships. With a shake of her head, she shoved the vision away. "Fine," she said. "I'm fine."
Garrus let out a short laugh. "Whatever you say. Are you —" He stopped abruptly, his head tilting down.
"Am I what?"
He stayed still for a second before straightening. "Nothing. I just thought you — it seemed like I hadn't seen you in too long. But you've been right here the whole time."
Val bit the inside of her cheek, remembering the Reaper's words. "I guess I have been."
He glanced around, scanning the horizon around them. "Maybe we should get out of here and figure out what the hell just happened."
"Yes." Her head throbbed. For a moment she considered the facility they'd just left, but she still wasn't sure what had happened to Alex, and she didn't want to figure it out with Miranda's people around. She wanted a private space, somewhere safe. "Let's get back to the ship."
This time, Alex took her offered arm, and between her and Garrus, they maneuvered him to his feet. The three of them entered the ship's airlock in silence, waiting for the decontamination cycle to finish and the inner airlock hatch to open. When it was done, Alex tore off his helmet faster than Val did. "What did that thing do?" he spat, wild-eyed, his hair matted with sweat.
"What did you see?" Val asked anxiously. He looked shocky, breathing hard. She was breathing hard herself, her head swimming with confusion. At least Garrus, unlatching his helmet more slowly, looked okay.
"I didn't see, I remembered. Even though that never happened." Alex raked a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. "But I remembered being in school, and the alarms going off, and then..." He inhaled and then shut his mouth firmly.
Val's stomach tightened into a knot. "They told me the school was destroyed," she said slowly.
"That never happened," Alex repeated, his voice growing frantic. "How can I remember that?"
"The Reaper must have done something," she said, a seed of anger sprouting in her heart. Messing with her was one thing, but the Reaper had no business screwing around with her brother's head.
"Whatever it did, I'm a little confused myself," Garrus said. "What are we doing here, Shepard? What happened to you?"
There was something grating in his subharmonics, a note that made Val turn and look at him head-on. Garrus's mandibles flexed, and he met her gaze with what she read as a glint of sharp concern. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
"What do you mean, what are we doing here? We came for that dimensional tech," she said, and only then realized: "You called me Shepard."
"Yeah, of course," Garrus said, but that grating note hadn't faded.
"How come she gets to be Shepard?" Alex asked, his voice pitched higher than usual.
"Because she's the commander," Garrus replied without looking at him. And then, a beat later, they both said, "John's the commander."
"We had this conversation before," Alex finished.
"When I came aboard the Normandy," Garrus said slowly. "After Omega." He glanced toward Alex and then back toward Val. "But Alex wasn't there when I joined you on the Normandy."
Val swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. "How much do you remember?" She wanted to ask, do you remember us, but it seemed out of place with Alex at her elbow.
"I remember a lot of things." Garrus rubbed the side of his head, mandibles tilting down. "They can't all be true."
"Okay," Val said, trying to keep a lid on the confused hope fluttering in her throat. "Let's talk through what just happened. We can figure this out."
"I need a smoke for that," Alex said.
"Not aboard this ship," Garrus replied, almost absent-mindedly, as if he were thinking about something else.
"Fine, then. I need coffee." Alex turned on his heel and made for the galley.
Garrus scratched at his scarred mandible. "I'd go for whiskey myself, but I didn't stock any."
Val managed a faint laugh. "Well, you didn't have much time."
"Shepard," Garrus said as she took a step toward the galley, and she looked over her shoulder to find him looking back at her with an intensity that made her blood race. "We need to talk."
"We will," she promised. "Let's sort out what's going on first."
Garrus snorted softly. "That could take years," he said, but he followed her to the galley.
They sat around the table with steaming cups of coffee and kava. Under two sets of pointed stares, Val explained, haltingly, what the Reaper had shown her. Like the Prothean beacons, so much of these visions were sensory impressions that didn't fit neatly into words. The steam had long since vanished by the time she was done.
"Let me get this straight," Alex said when she was done. "According to the Reaper, these Leviathans basically rearranged the entire cosmos just to get rid of you?"
"Unmake," Val whispered, remembering the Reaper's repetition of that word.
"Unmake, whatever." Alex pressed his head between his hands. "You realize this is impossible, right?"
"And switching her over between dimensions was possible?" Garrus asked dryly.
"No. That wasn't even my idea." Alex scowled at both of them as if it was their fault.
"People thought the Reapers were impossible, too," Val pointed out.
Alex groaned, stood up, and started pacing. "No, you don't understand. To do this, they would have had to alter reality somehow. At a quantum level, maybe. Or... imagine it like this, they completely rewrote things, selectively, like they were altering the code on a very complex simulation. Introduce a new character here, write one out over there." His hands grappled with the air, trying to illustrate his point.
"That doesn't actually sound so hard to believe," Val ventured warily.
"But it would take a colossal amount of time, or energy, or both," Alex said. "Reality is hugely more complicated than any computer simulation. Infinitely more variables, billions of sentient beings, and you can't just boil each of them down to a handful of attributes like in a game, or..." He paused, eyes unfocused. Half of his hair was standing on end. "Shit. Maybe that's exactly what they did. This is starting to make sense."
"They would have had to bring people back from the dead," Garrus said. "You always said your family died in the raid."
"Right." Val looked down. She had to force out the cold possibility she'd never wanted to consider. "Or... I might not have known, if they'd been taken."
There was a short silence. Garrus reached toward her.
"Well, I don't remember any shit like that," Alex said, loud and echoing. Garrus's hand dropped to the table. "The only thing in my head that doesn't fit is the raid. Like everything diverged from there. Bringing us back, hell. Atoms are atoms. If they're altering reality this profoundly, I don't see where constituting people out of matter is so difficult."
"And that... doesn't bother you?" Val asked, surprised.
Alex laughed. "Everything about this mess bothers me. I just uttered the wildest nonsense I could think of and it actually sounded like a reasonable explanation for observed phenomena. That bothers me. Hell, to accomplish something like this — do you have any idea the massive amount of energy required? How would they even get —" He stopped. They all froze.
The realization crashed down over Val, leaving her feeling as if she'd been punched in the gut. "The Crucible."
"But that was a Prothean device," Garrus said.
Val shook her head, thinking back. "We thought it was a Prothean device, because we found it in the archives on Mars. But Javik didn't know anything about it, and the Prothean VI from Thessia said the Protheans had inherited it themselves. Something passed down through the cycles, something easy to build. Only no one ever completed it before us." She felt like she was going to throw up. All that hope, pinned on one vast device, and this was their reward? "Maybe this was the plan all along."
"Or maybe the Leviathan interfered with the Crucible's construction somehow," Garrus added darkly.
Val swallowed and nodded, wondering just how long Liara had been under the Leviathan's influence. She'd been the one who found the plans in the first place. One or two well-placed Leviathan artifacts at the Crucible site, and they could have controlled the whole project.
"Either way, we're fucked," Alex announced, sounding almost manically cheerful.
"What do you mean?" Val asked.
He turned his chair around and planted himself on the seat, draping his arms over the back. "If it takes an energy discharge on the level of the Crucible's blast to make changes like this, there's no way to duplicate it. The Crucible's in pieces and we don't know how to set it off. Not enough resources and labor available to construct a new one, if we even knew what to do with it."
Val lowered her head. No going back, the Reaper had said. The enormity of everything they'd revealed settled like a cold weight, bending her shoulders. If Alex was right, there was really no getting back to the reality she knew. Her stomach churned. She wondered, for a bitter moment, why the Reaper couldn't have changed her memories, too, making it easier for her to fit into the world around her.
She did her best to muster up Commander Shepard's confidence. "Leviathan's up to something, though," she said. "And somehow I don't think they've got our best interests at heart." The words felt hollow, in spite of her best efforts.
"So what are you thinking?" Garrus asked.
She shrugged and lifted her chin. "So, we go on. We figure out what they're up to, and we try to put a stop to it." That sounded better. Still pretty desperate, though.
"Just like that?" Alex asked, disbelieving.
She shot him a tight smile. "Well, it'll be a little more complicated than that, but that's why we've got your brains around, right?"
Several expressions rippled across his face: surprise, horror, curiosity; he finally settled on a sneer. "Meanwhile the Reaper goes and fucks with our heads for no reason," he muttered.
"I don't understand that part, either, I've got to say," Garrus said.
Alex shrugged. "Reapers alter brains all the time through indoctrination. I'm not sure it makes less sense than anything else." His eyes narrowed as he looked at Garrus. "You never did say what you remembered."
Garrus settled back in his chair, carefully nonchalant. Val held her breath, wondering.
"I remember both Shepards," he said finally. To Alex's curled lip, he added, "Both Commanders. Some missions I remember going down in different ways. First one thing, and then another. It's a little confusing."
Val exhaled and tried to relax her tense posture.
"Huh." Alex's eyes darted between the two of them. "Care to elaborate on that?"
"Not really," Garrus said after a moment.
Alex looked prepared to argue the point, but before he could say anything more, Garrus went on, "In the meantime, let's get out of here. I'll go set a course to the Charon relay."
He rose and left the room, heading toward the cockpit. Val watched him go out of the corner of her eye. She had a fairly good idea of what he wasn't saying, or at least, she hoped she did.
His departure left her alone with Alex, who frowned, leaning back in his seat, and drank the rest of his coffee. He kept rearranging himself in his chair, as if he couldn't get comfortable.
Val wouldn't have wished her own memories of the attack on Mindoir on anyone. For someone else to have them, suddenly —
"Alex, are you okay?"
"I'm fine." He pushed himself away from the table in a jerky motion, and took his cup back to the coffee pot.
She chewed on her lip and then tried again. "Because if you want to talk, I'm here."
He snorted, his back to her as he poured himself more coffee. "It's just a memory. It's not even clear. Fuzzy, like any long-ago memory."
"Still," she said, watching the stiffness in his posture. "I know it's a lot to deal with."
"How did you survive?" He turned around, turning sharp attention on her.
Val took a breath. Her own memory of that morning was easy to summon up, well-worn in spite of its horror. "I went out for a morning run. I had a free period first thing in the morning anyway, so I just kept running."
"Right," he said softly. "You did that a lot."
"Yeah, some of the teachers didn't care, so I usually didn't get written up. That morning I saw the smoke while I was out, and started back, and... I guess you know what I found."
"Yeah." He shook his head and returned to the table. "It's not like I remember the actual moment of dying," he said, fast and clipped. "I remember alarms going off, and the teachers marching us into the storm shelter. I remember having a moment where I was sure I was going to die, and then nothing."
Val winced, thinking about drifting in space, panicking when she realized her oxygen line was ruptured. "Yeah. I get that."
"The problem isn't what I'm remembering, it's having these memories just stuffed into my head in the first place," Alex said.
Val looked skeptically at him. He scowled back. "All right, it's a little bit what I'm remembering."
"I don't expect you to be okay with any of this," she said, keeping her voice calm.
Alex made a noise in his throat. "You're being so nice. It's weird. You do realize Shepard — the other Shepard — would be telling me to suck it up and get my head on straight right now."
Val gritted her teeth. "I knew I didn't like that guy."
To her surprise, Alex grinned. "I didn't talk to him that much, but I heard him talking to other people. I don't know. The tough love shit has its place sometimes. I do need to get my head on straight if I'm going to make any sense of this." He passed a hand absently through his hair, already matted and rumpled. "I mean, complete rewriting of reality, that's huge. Obviously. And I guess the joke's on me, because I always complained that you thought the universe revolved around you. Surprise surprise, it actually does."
Val shook her head, loathing that image of herself with every fiber of her being. "Alex, come on. I know we pissed each other off when we were kids. That's what siblings do, right? And we were kids, and we were in each other's spaces all the time. But was I really that bad? I just..." She took a deep breath, trying to sort through the haze of grief and gold-tinted nostalgia that colored all her childhood memories. Even so, they couldn't be that far wrong, could they? "We were friends, too, weren't we? What happened to us?"
Alex frowned at the table and took a swift gulp of coffee. Val bit back her impatience and waited while he took a surprisingly long time to drink it. Finally he said, "You left. You got off Mindoir and you hardly came home any more."
"Well, yeah," she said, momentarily glad that she'd looked up her own records. At least she had some context for what he was saying. "I turned eighteen, and I went to the Alliance Academy." It might not have been exactly the same as she remembered, but she remembered enough. There had been a ton of work, she'd drifted away from her foster parents. The trip back to Mindoir would have been too long to take except between terms.
"I know, I know," Alex said, sounding weary. His shoulders slumped. "I wasn't mad that you left, but it was just... weird. You were never around any more. And then I left for uni, which is what I wanted, but..." He shook his head. "I will kill you if you tell Mama this ever, but she was right, it was hard to be that far from home at sixteen."
"You were sixteen?" Val asked in disbelief, even though it made a kind of sense. Alex had always been the smartest of them, ahead of most of the other kids his age. He could have finished up all his schoolwork on Mindoir by sixteen, easy.
"Yeah." Alex cast her one quick sharp look. "Most of my classmates were older, of course. That was okay most of the time, but sometimes it was a little weird." He shook his head. "I understood better then. It was hard to get home, there were always things to do where I was. And I didn't want to let on to Mama that things weren't perfect, because she never would have let me hear the end of it. If she'd known my roommate that first year had a Hallex habit, she would have gone ballistic and insisted I come home. But you weren't exactly around to talk to, either."
"I'm sorry," she said. The words felt small and inadequate.
"And whenever you did come home, it was always the Val show. Everyone flocking around, all excited about whatever you'd been doing. You got invited back to school to talk up your service. And you hardly ever came home before I left, but somehow you managed to visit a lot more when I was in grad school."
"I had leave between missions sometimes, I suppose," Val said slowly, trying to picture it. She'd actually spent that leave doing nothing in particular, usually. "If I was stationed out in the colonies anyway, it wouldn't have been hard to get home for a few days. Not like getting back from Earth." Which was at least two relay jumps from anywhere.
"Yeah." Alex sighed. "I guess that must have been it. It just seemed like Mama was always talking about what you were doing when she called, and why didn't I ever come home, and... well, you know how she is."
"Yeah." Even if you were trying not to mind it, Mama's constant stream of advice or correction could be hard to take. "Did I ever visit you?"
Alex shrugged. "Couple times. Early in grad school. I couldn't just drop everything when you showed up, though. I had experiments and shit to do. You got bored."
Val winced, picturing how she might have acted. Hit the bars by herself, probably, or hung around bugging Alex until she was driving him crazy. "I'm sorry."
"Eh," Alex said. "It wasn't really you, was it?"
She didn't have an easy answer to that. She hesitated a moment. "Maybe not, but I'm still sorry."
"Thanks, I guess." He leaned back in his chair. "But, you want to know what happened with us? That's what. We were just in different places doing different things, and we were both kind of shit at calling or writing. Mostly Dad or Mama passed messages back and forth, and it's not like I was telling them everything."
Val nodded. "I bet I wasn't, either."
"Probably. I mean, who does tell their parents everything?"
It all sounded painfully plausible. She didn't remember what he was talking about, but she did remember being twenty and twenty-two, full of herself and focused on her career. She hadn't had her family to think about or compare anything to do, but if she had — oh, it would have been so easy to take everyone for granted, to be insufferable with her own success.
For a moment she hated that other version of herself, and then she shook her head. No point in dwelling on those mistakes. "Listen, I really am sorry I was a shitty sister."
Alex snorted.
"No, really. That's not... I wish things had been different." When she'd been sixteen and seventeen, she'd lain awake in bed at her foster parents' house, wishing her brothers were there, and she'd imagined everything so simple: hugs and comfort and perfect trust. "Waking up with everything changed — that's been — hard — but having you here, and knowing the rest of the family is okay, that's the good part."
Alex's eyebrows shot up. "I tied you to a chair and interrogated you."
Val found, by now, that remembering that night no longer made her flinch. As grueling as the whole ordeal had been, she could understand why he'd done it, and she had faith now that it wouldn't happen again. "If I thought someone was impersonating you, I probably would have done the same," she said, and meant it. "I missed you. I'd like to do better."
He stared at her incredulously for a long moment. Then his eyes shifted away, and he took another drink of coffee. "I guess we could both do better."
"Yeah," Val said, relieved. "Maybe."
Alex ran a hand through his hair again and made a face. "I'm going to hit the shower."
Val nodded as he drained his mug and headed off. She let out a slow breath. She hadn't been sure if Alex would accept her overture. It was a relief that he had: one piece of her life inching into some kind of order. Left alone now, even the buzz of caffeine through her nervous system couldn't mask her exhaustion. She felt slow and heavy, as if her bones had turned to stone and were weighing her down.
She rose, intending to go sink into her bunk, and stopped short on seeing Garrus in the corridor.
"We're on our way to the relay," he said. Val had been so caught up in her conversation with Alex that she hadn't even noticed the engines engaging as the ship took off. "Shepard, we need to talk."
Her mouth went dry. Hope and fear tangled in her chest. "It's been a long day."
Garrus tipped his head down. His eyes seemed to pierce through her. "You really want to put this off?"
Yes. "No." Much as part of her longed to retreat, she rejected that idea. Better to say what needed to be said now, and then... at least she'd know. "What do you remember?"
He took one step toward her. "I don't know if I remember everything, but I think I remember enough. You pulled my ass out of the fire on Omega. You were the only one talking sense about the Reapers. Every mission together, I had your back, while you rocketed around the battlefield like a damned missile."
She almost laughed at that, it was such a familiar complaint. Garrus took one more step and added, "One-turian woman, you said," and her laughter died.
"Yeah. I did." She moistened her lips. She'd been afraid that these memories, the most important thing, would be missing. That the Reapers would have found one more way to screw her over. It didn't make sense — not that any of it did — but even now, she wasn't sure she could trust fragile, easily confounded memories. Her chest felt tight, guarded. "What did we do after that?"
Garrus cocked his head. "We had a hell of a good time in a skycar," he said, with a familiar suggestive rumble in his voice.
Val let out a breath. A little of her tension eased. "Yeah, we did."
"And then we went down and filed some papers, and made some promises. I'm assuming you haven't forgotten."
People talked about your wedding day being the happiest day of your life. Val wouldn't have said that, necessarily, but it was one of the best days she'd had in the last year, that was for sure. She shook her head. "No, I haven't. And Tali will never forgive —" She stopped herself as Garrus lowered his head.
The Leviathan might have rebuilt her family, but whatever they'd done had killed Tali. And Joker, and more.
"She was so mad," Garrus said, in the soft way people talked about departed friends. He lifted his head to look her in the eye. "So do I pass the test?"
Val's hands tightened into fists. "A few weeks ago you didn't know who I was."
"I know now," he said. "Shepard..." He took one step closer, and reached out, armored hands curling around hers. She let him, even though her heart was beating wildly, caught between hope and a nameless terror. The grip was familiar, armored gloves and all, their hands used to fitting together in spite of the disparity in size and shape.
"You sure you still feel the same way?" Her voice came out rough, shaking a little.
"Nothing's changed on my end."
She laughed, quick and incredulous. "Everything's changed."
"The galaxy may have changed," he said, "and yeah, my head's full of two sets of memories, and that's a little..."
"Terrifying?" she suggested when he paused.
"I was going to go with 'weird.' Shepard." His grip tightened as he bent his head toward her. "I remember fighting with the other Shepard, sure, but when I look back on it now, I know something was missing, the whole time. Everything might have turned upside down, but this doesn't have to change."
She squeezed his hands back, feeling like a dam about to burst. "Garrus."
"Shepard," he answered, voice warm and low.
The breath that escaped her was more like a sob. She leaned forward, and Garrus bent down to meet her, brow to brow; and with the next sob, he dropped one of her hands and snaked an arm around her. Everything so right, so familiar: the slight roughness of his plated skin against hers, the wiry strength of his arm around her shoulders.
The dam burst, and she lost track of how she stood there, having a ragged little cry, with Garrus a steady, solid bulwark around her, until she heard a voice distinctly say, "Oh, hell."
Val's head jerked up, and she turned to see Alex fidgeting next to the lavatory entrance, hair dripping wet. He said, "Could you, like..."
Val and Garrus said simultaneously, "We were just..." and stopped.
Alex's mouth twisted. "Yeah. I see that. I would totally go somewhere else, if there were anywhere else to go on this ship, but..."
Val stepped back, though she let go of Garrus's hand only reluctantly. "I need to sleep anyway," she said. Exhaustion had seeped into her right down to the bone, and her head was still spinning from everything that had happened. As much as she might want to make some impulsive decisions, a few hours of sleep sounded like what she needed.
"Yeah. Don't we all," said Garrus with dry cheer.
Val hid a smile, and retreated into her cabin.