A/N: This time, a look at Hannah Shepard through the lens of one of Shepard's friends. A short, somewhat awkward conversation. Set within a month of the destruction of the SSV Normandy.

Garrus attended the service, though he didn't much care for it. There was no body recovered, so there was no one in the coffin. The empty vessel only served to add a hollow right to every voice that spoke on Shepard's behalf, some lingering falsehood that left a bad taste in his mouth.

It was an enormous funeral. It seemed as though half the Citadel had shown up. At the very least, most of the human population made an appearance. Garrus sat close to the front, in the section reserved for the Normandy crew, surrounded by humans with the occasional peppering of himself, Tali, Wrex and Liara spread through the small section. Williams sat up on the platform along with Councilor Anderson and his assistant, each one contributing words to the ceremony. Joker, he noticed, was nowhere to be found.

Garrus knew the Normandy was a small vessel and thus had a small crew, but he hadn't expected to feel so dwarfed in comparison to the civilian attendees. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the Commander Shepard story so they could tell relate the story of the funeral years later, proclaiming, "I was there." It certainly wasn't Garrus's sort of service at all. There were precious few here that could claim they really knew the Commander, and even fewer that could call her, "friend."

The entire thing didn't sit well with him. When each speaker had said their piece (Anderson spoke about the loss of a friend and Williams recited a piece of poetry, marking two of the only pieces of sentiment he had heard that afternoon), the crowd stirred and began to mingle. Garrus didn't much feel like talking to anyone. Instead, he ambled over to a corner and stewed over his dissatisfaction with everything that had happened, watching the assembled civilians milling about, Shepard's name on their lips.

At length, he growled to himself and made to leave. He only made it a few yards when a voice stopped him.

"Excuse me."

Though the words were polite, the tone made Garrus perk. It wasn't a request for attention; it was a demand for recognition that rang of every order from a superior officer he had ever heard. He turned on a heel, knowing that anyone capable of that sort of lingual dichotomy had to be worth his time.

A human woman in full Alliance military dress stared up at him. Her graying hair and wrinkling skin denoted an older female, but the sharp look in her eyes warned him against making any special cases for her age. He recognized her as one of the women who had sat in the front row. She had to be family. Something in her stance rang unerringly of Shepard.

"You're Officer Vakarian, I take it?"

Garrus nodded, resisting the urge to stand at attention. "That's me."

The human's gaze broke briefly to sweep across him. Her mouth twitched, and she appeared to make a decision. "Captain Hannah Shepard of the SSV Kilimanjaro," she announced, sticking out her hand. "I understand you served aboard the Normandy."

He shook the offered hand, replying, "Yes, though I took leave to return to the Citadel a few months back. I wasn't on board when…" he trailed off, unwilling to continue. After a beat, he latched onto a new thread of conversation. "So you're Shep…ah, the Commander's mother, I take it."

She nodded. "I am. Was," she said, correcting her tense with a sudden flinch. "She didn't mention me?"

Garrus ran a hand along his collar. A nervous habit he'd never broken. "She didn't volunteer much about herself. Always preferred to ask more than tell."

The Captain made a small, amused sound, and a wan smile passed across her face. Her eyes unfocused, and Garrus was loath to rouse the woman from what seemed at the least a bittersweet memory. When the silence stretched between them, though, he cleared his throat and searched wildly for some sort of human pleasantry to fill the space.

"It was a lovely service," he managed at last.

That was either the exact right thing to say or he had offended her greatly, judging by the way her head snapped up and the scrutiny with which she regarded him. One, two, three heartbeats of her stare, and then the human threw her head back and laughed. It wasn't the way Shepard had laughed at a clever turn of phrase, but it instead rang of the noise she made when she was frustrated and bitter.

"'Lovely,'" the Captain repeated. "I suppose it was, at that. But tell me, Officer Vakarian, do you think she would have liked it?" Every public relations seminar at C-Sec told him to say yes, I'm sure she's very happy in [cultural/religious post-death consciousness belief], but the way the human peered up at him made every instinct in his body scream for honesty, else the small predator would tear him asunder.

"No," he relented, "No, she would have hated it. She would have stood there and listened, but she probably would have slunk off to some hole-in-the-wall bar in the Wards and gotten herself very drunk afterwards."

The human's shoulders sagged as though releasing a weight. "That sounds about right," said the Captain, and she regarded the turian with a weary smile. It was only at that point that Garrus noticed the bags beneath the woman's eyes and the very carefully-arranged mess that was her short hair. She hadn't been sleeping in some time, he guessed. This wasn't the captain of the Kilimanjaro, he thought. This was the grieving mother of a young woman.

"Was she always that bad about big public spectacles?" Garrus asked.

She chuckled, the firmness of her stance slipping. "She used to be worse at ad-libbing, I'll admit. You can't imagine how hard it used to be to get her up on a stage. Even at school plays."

Garrus scoffed. "Really? Shepard with stage fright?"

"The worst," the Captain confided. "Every time she had a line she would step forward and freeze. Her teachers had to feed her word by word until she finished the sentence. She kept getting more and more flushed every passing second. She would run off-stage whenever she finished, even if it was in the middle of the act."

"You're kidding," the turian said, laughing. "No wonder she never talked much about herself."

"Oh, Esme's just like that. She never thought she was interesting enough. It was hard enough getting anything new out of her when we mailed each other back and forth. Her letters were always filled with new things she had seen or the people she had met and what they were like. The past year was mostly the more interesting things she had thought about having such an eclectic interspecies crew."

Garrus coughed at that; he had the vague feeling he should be embarrassed for even being mentioned in her correspondences. "I imagine she was quite a different person in her letters."

"No," said the Captain, and her expression clouded over again, "you'd think that, but no." She offered him a smile. "Let me ask you something, Officer Vakarian. Gunnery Chief Williams suggested that we gather up a few of Esme's friends from the Normandy to get together in some hole-in-the-wall bar in the Wards and tell a few stories about her once this little affair has cleared out a bit. Would you care to join us? I'd like to know more about the woman my daughter had become over the past few years."

Garrus's mandibles flared in a grin. "That sounds like my kind of service, Captain."