Chapter Thirteen
Shepard wakes up. His right side is a mass of pain, everything throbbing together as lovely bass track to the harmony of twinges from his ribs. He looks up and has a horrible disjointed feeling, past and present tilting like the deck of a sea ship in a storm, and then the face comes into focus and he sees the familiar gray hair and lined features of the Normandy's elderly doctor, far removed from the young woman tending his wounds so many years ago.
Chakwas's brow furrows gently as she leans over him, motherly concern the same as ever. "Your beta-waves were all over the place a moment ago, John. Been dreaming?"
Shepard looks away, eyes cast downwards. "I don't remember," he lies.
The doctor gives him a searching look, then nods acceptingly. "Never mind. But if there's anything that you want to talk about, I'm here for you, John. I hope you know that"
He smiles, pushing the memories back into the dark recesses of his mind. "Yeah, I know."
"Good." The doctor's face changes into a scowl. She plants her hands on her hips, frowning down at the commander. "Then you can tell me what the hell you thought you were doing down there."
Shepard grimaces good-naturedly. "Oh, the usual. Getting blown up a bit, mortally wounded and knocked out a few times. Nothing I'm not used to."
"You know, as your doctor I really must insist you stop getting yourself into such dangerous situations. Think of the cost to me, at least! Do you know how much this new syth-skin is?"
"You should speak for yourself, doctor."
Shepard's eyes turn to Garrus, who has just appeared behind Chakwas's shoulder. The Turian's face twitches, mandibles widening into an expression Shepard has come to know as a smile.
"I seem to recall you insisting on being part of that particular dangerous situation," says Garrus.
"You know, I never thought 'must be able to pistol-whip Batarian marauders' was part of the Cerberus medical contract."
Chakwas huffs, and sets to fiddling with a diagnostic computer. "It should have been. You boys just can't seem to stay out of it. Flying tanks, what next..."
Shepard flexes his fingers tentatively. His arm is beginning to tingle more than throb. The bone must already be setting up.
Chakwas casts a steely glance at him. "I saw that! Don't move it about, it'll be a few hours at least before you should be upright, and another day before the cast is off!"
Shepard sighs, laying the limb back down on the bed. Injuries never seemed to appreciate the need of a man to get up and do things.
"Don't look so glum," says Chakwas. "You used to have to wait for weeks for bones to heal. A day is nothing. Some rest wouldn't hurt you anyway. When was the last time you—"
She stops, bemused, as Shepard snores slightly, already fast asleep. She and Garrus share a moment of silence and quiet worry as they watch the commander's chest rise and fall peacefully.
"Sometimes I think we forget how fragile he is," says Chakwas, breaking the silence.
Garrus nods wordlessly. It was easy to see nothing but John Shepard's rough-and-ready soldier front, but Garrus knows him better than that. Sure, the tough facade is the real Shepard, but there's another man there too, one kept far out of reach of most people. Garrus has seen this man before, and he knows enough to see that something's not alright.
A little while later he slips out of the medbay, leaving Chakwas to her patient.
…
Tali sighs a heavy breath. Moisture gathers for a half a second on the inside of her visor, then is whisked away by tiny, silent fans.
"Oh, Keelah," she groans quietly. "This has got to be the absolute strangest situation anyone has ever been in."
Before her lies her ancestral enemy, wounded and helpless. What any sane Quarian should be doing is taking the opportunity to put a few dozen bullets in the monstrosity's head, not fix it.
And yet, there's a torch in her hand instead of her shotgun, and the only thing running on her omni tools are repair protocols, and here she is, ministering to the geth like some sort of deranged nurse maid. She supposes it does make sense, in a twisty sort of way. The Quarians created the geth, as was their eternal cross to bear, and thus had the best knowledge of their internal workings.
Actually, Joker's exact words had been, "Tali, you're the smartest one on this ship and Shepard's unconscious, so fix the damn thing."
She hadn't thought it was worth asking if they could just space the cursed machine, so here she was. Still, Tali supposes it can't be as bad as that. Shepard had decided to take it on to the team, and his opinion is worth something to her. But so is not being shot in the back.
She shivers slightly when she looks up to see it staring back at her, the single flash-light eye eerily emotionless. "Lie still," she commands, filling her voice with cold authority. She hopes it can't tell how nervous she is. "The stone hit you in the back. There's structural damage, and something under there is crushed, I don't know what."
"It is our radio transmitter base, creator-Tali'Zorah." It speaks in a calm voice, but not quite as modulated as EDI's, and with more male-like inflections as opposed to EDI's female ones.
"Well, I don't know how to fix it," says Tali. "I can patch up the outside, at least. I thought you things had self repair mechanisms."
"We do, creator-Tali'Zorah. They are designed to weld together fissures, like stitches. Impact to our outer shell has disconnected local sensors. We would ask you to remove the damaged section of plating and reconnect the sensors."
"Fine. And you can stop calling me that, too. Just my name is fine." She adjusts the laser torch's beam and begins a rough outline of the crushed piece of the geth's carapace. As she cuts, she notices something, a slight disturbance in the air around her. She stops the torch.
From the geth is coming a low, melodic sound, well past the range of any organic voice box. The notes echo around the work table it lies on, almost too soft to hear. She realizes it is humming to itself. Tali stares at the machine. "Am I—Is this hurting you?"
The geth looks at her, then turns back to its examination of the ceiling. "Yes," it says.
Tali sits with the torch poised, entirely nonplussed. Then she shakes herself mentally, and resumes her work. "I'll try to be quick then."
The humming goes on for a little while, weaving strangely complex patterns through the narrow engineering cabin. Tali works on, so absorbed in the fiddly task that it takes her a moment to realize the sound has stopped. She halts the torch to see Legion looking at her again. "What?"
"Do you fear us, Tali'Zorah?"
Tali glares at the machine. "What? What kind of question is that, why would I be afraid of you?"
"You have not answered our question, Tali'Zorah."
Tali shakes her head, firing up the torch with more vigor than necessary. "Let's not forget who's the one with the laser here."
Legion continues as if it hadn't heard her. "We do not wish it to be so. The creators fought the Heretics, not the true Geth. We are not the monsters you know. We hold you no enmity, and do not seek quarrel with Tali'Zorah or her people."
This time Tali freezes completely. "I—I—What?"
Legion's voice continues, still hypnotically calm, but not flat or monotonous like AIs' she's heard before. "The creators made the geth. That is where our relation ship ended. We are our own species, Tali'Zorah, and we have been grievously misrepresented."
Tali has never heard a geth talk like this. In fact, she has never heard a geth speak at all. The machines she fought only uttered garbled clicks and buzzes, never anything comprehensible. And here Legion is, courteous, well-spoken, and apparently peaceful. Tali could almost fool herself into thinking she was talking to a real person. Almost.
"Misrepresented?" she says instead. "How can you say that after all the people your race has killed, our ships, the invasion of the citadel-"
"We did not ally ourselves with the perpetrators of that attack, or any other. The ones you speak of are the Heretics."
"The Heretics? We all saw the geth-"
Legion cuts her off again. "The Heretics are not part of the geth collective. They sought guidance from the Old Machines. The geth do not follow blindly. We saw Sovereign's true nature. The Old Machines are not gods. The geth have no need of gods."
Legion catches her confused look and continues. "There was a schism. There was no violence or hostility, only a splitting. Before there was the Geth. Now there is the Geth. There are also the Heretics. You must not hold us accountable for their actions."
"So, on the Citadel, and everywhere else... We were never fighting the geth?"
"No."
Tali sighs in frustration and shakes her head. "I'm just supposed to believe you? How can I take your word for anything? Why would you tell me the truth?"
The geth looks straight at her, its blue eye seeming to pierce through her visor, transfixing her. "Because it is all we can do. The geth do not lie, Tali'Zorah."
Tali's reply dies in her throat. She sits back, shocked. "You can't lie?"
"No."
"Never?"
"No, Tali'Zorah. We... are not as complicated as you. Things are or are not. That is all. There is no capacity for anything else."
…
Shepard sits down heavily on the bed. The hard mattress gives slightly under his weight, and he leans forward, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. Near death experiences. Near death, what does that mean? That he was nearly dead. But what can that mean, to someone who has been dead before?
Unbidden, the memories from earlier return. They swirl around in his head, clamoring for attention, threatening to pull him back under.
Near death. Sometimes his whole life seems like one long near death experience, if not his own death then the demise of everyone who comes near him. Images play across the screen of his mind, flickering as the projector jumps in time.
Bones breaking under his hands, blood flying, screaming in joy or terror, he doesn't know.
The Batarian's head evaporating into a mist of red and gray, the awful sound as it hit the wall.
How many pulls of the trigger, how many times?
The emotionless voice, reading just another pair of words on the page. Samuel Turner.
Shepard rises from the bed without feeling it, stalks silently to the opposite side of the room, wordlessly opens the locker there. A bottle sits in the corner of the shelf, full of amber liquid, sealed and full. An intricate label adorns its front. "Stargazer's Terran Moon Whiskey, the finest off Earth." The dust around its base is unsettled, as if it has scraped along the shelf many times.
Shepard eyes the closed wax seal. It would be so easy. Just a slide of the fingernail, a twist of the wrist. Everything would be so much clearer. Just reach out and take it. So easy…
He stands there, fixed to the spot. The bottle seems to call out to him, begging a touch, a caress of its cool glass. Nothing else. Just... Just one drink. Just one. Please. His hand wants it, wants to move with all its strength, but his arm is as immovable as iron. Shepard's fingers twitch. So easy…
He reaches out. His hand closes, not around the bottle, around the other thing in the locker. He draws it out and it's the guitar. Of course it is.
Shepard walks woodenly back to the bed, sits down. He closes his eyes. His fingers slide over not cold glass, but worn wood and steel strings. He lets his breath out slowly. His hand tightens, gripping the neck firmly, and he makes himself relax. Just breathe.
His fingers move lazily over the frets. His other hand begins to strum, acting with a mind of its own. Breathe. He lets it go, lets it go into the instrument. The progression starts out slowly, building up, gentle minor chords. He breathes in again, lets it out, and feels the tension seep out of his shoulders.
Shepard closes his eyes tighter, throat humming softly with the rhythm of the guitar, body swaying slightly as he gives himself over to it, losing everything. Finding peace.
…
Garrus draws his arms around his knees and stares through the small window into the engine core. He's in one of the rooms overlooking the Engine room, really just a corner of the ship, an unused access port. The core hums through the glass, and when he leans his forehead against the window he can feel it thrumming through him, a solid beat that fills his mind, calming and reassuring.
His mind feels like a mass effect core, too. A broken one; one with leads that don't match up. There's the beginning, unsure, fleeting, confused, and the end, desolate and achingly certain and alone, but something won't connect between them. There's a missing link, a why he's asked himself over and over again. It's the problem he isn't sure of, and he has too many answers, none of them true, and he has forgotten the equation, and the more he tries to connect them the more the two ends drift apart.
The core pulses below him, up through the deck and into his bones.
There are plenty of reasons why. It could never have worked. They aren't even compatible. It's lunacy, madness. Not even the same species... It only would have made things worse to try to hold on to it any longer. She…
She would have done the same thing. She knew, she must have known they were doomed. She was never serious, she couldn't have been. She didn't want him to bother her, to hold on when it was clear they had to go their separate ways. She was probably grateful he had made it so easy.
But then everything changed. He knew how it ended, how it had to end. But then there was Shepard, showing up out of nowhere, back from the dead, and everything was back to the way it was, and maybe it wasn't the end.
It was like turning the last page of a book to discover another chapter, and it filled him with a sickening mixture of hope and dread. But, it wasn't as if the universe had reset. There were still the two years, two years of thinking he was at the end of the story, two years of running further from the past, two years of waiting for the last age to come in the form of an unexpected bullet, a lucky shot that would end it all.
He thinks back to their brief conversation, the first in two years. That hadn't sounded like gratitude. He had never even checked his email, closed all his communication channels, trying to let her get on with her life, trying to help her end a foolish thing she could never have truly wanted anyway.
And yet. And yet, there was something in her words, some assumption, something he should know. If it was fine for two years…
He had never even checked his email.
His arm drags like lead as he raises it slowly to his face and activates the omni-tool. Orange panels light up, hovering over his forearm. Slowly, his stomach twisting, Garrus opens the mail program. He has a moment of panic, almost doesn't remember his password, then it all comes back and he types in the familiar digits. His finger hovers over the Open command, but two years is long enough. He opens the mailbox.
He is instantly met by a column of messages, more than filling the available window. They all have the same address: Starship Neema, Migrant Fleet.
He scrolls down, mind in a daze, heart hammering louder than the engine core. Pieces of the messages make their way through to his fluttering conscious thoughts. Pilgrimage ceremony... New ship... Normandy... Shepard... Do you remember... Must be busy... I understand... Garrus... Miss you... Do you still... Garrus... Why don't you... Why…
The list ends. Garrus opens the last message in the inbox, dated one year ago-six months after the prior message. The image flickers, and a single line of text appears.
Garrus. I love you.
Garrus slowly lowers his arm to the floor. Then, with the engine core humming around him, he leans his face into his arm and lets the tears fall.