Garrus Vakarian

The crew had steadily grown. I had coaxed Shepard - Er, Jane, as she now wanted to be called - into talking to most of the crew, and getting a better sense of who they were and what they were about. We'd even done a few favors by way of missions for the crew. On the occasions when I sat at the mess table I no longer heard awkward commentary about how they were serving with the Commander Shepard. Instead I heard the latest news of other crew members, I heard the crew informally referring to her as the commander, or possibly even just Shepard. It was heartening. There was teamwork and camaraderie going on, and I'd helped Shepard - Dammit, Jane - facilitate that.

It was going to take some serious getting used to. She'd always been Shepard to me. The embodiment of strength and bravery, black and white, even right down to her makeup - which I still could imagine her without, despite having seen it. To suddenly ask for the change of name, and in such a strange way as she did, had left me with no lack of confusion. Still, the simple friendliness of the gesture hadn't been lost on me. And since she'd always called me just "Garrus," it was kinda nice to have some reciprocity there. I'd have to get used to it somehow. She'd seemed to insistent about it, and I'd never been so close to a human as I was with her, so I didn't know if it would offend her to use her last name even if she asked me not to. I laughed and shook my head at my food as I took another bite. I knew Shepard well enough to know she wouldn't be offended at something so small.

The non-essential operational crew now numbered seven, including Shepard herself.

"Hey, since you're doing all these favors," I joked. "Why don't we go take shore leave somewhere for a day or two." She laughed heartily.

"Yeah, while I'm at it, I'll buy a pony. I'll name him Harvey, and make sure EDI and Kelly can clean up after it for me," she said. "But yeah, a day off might be nice,she conceded. "I'll look over the area and see what's close by." With that, she disappeared to the star map to choose a location. A dry chuckle came from the overhead.

"You sure about that, commander? I've heard some pretty nasty vacation stories from that place," said Joker, his voice distorted slightly from the projection.

"Just set the course and fly like a good Harvey," said Shepard.

"Ouch. I guess that answers why EDI would be cleaning up after me."

"Commander," came Kelly's tiny, cheerful voice.

"What is it, Yeoman?" asked Shepard. One pang that still gummed up the works was how Shepard and Kelly got along. Oh, they didn't hate each other, but Shepard clearly thought that Kelly was a particularly useless addition to the crew, whose only real talent was acting like an indicator light for her emails.

"You have a message from the Illusive Man," said Kelly. Her voice was bright and cheerful, lacking all the foreboding that sentence should have held. I groaned inwardly. Kelly was a little naive, and that was one of the few personality traits that Shepard and I had never really been able to cope with.

To her credit, Shepard managed to maintain a straight face. "All right, I'll take it in the comm-room."

Wherever we'd been headed, she'd told me to put it on hold while she answered the call. I'd only just gotten back from relaying the order to Joker - and sitting through what he undoubtedly though was witty commentary, annoying as it was. Not three minutes later she'd come back out of the comm-room and told Joker to set a new course. At the languor in her stride - which had sadly become all too familiar - I asked her what was wrong.

"Horizon," she said. "And therefore Ashley."

Instinctively I reached a hand for her shoulder. She was trembling, whether from anger or from fear I couldn't tell. It was bad enough that Horizon was another little fringe human colony with the Collectors being an inevitability, but the fact that Ashley was there was a particular sore spot.

"I need to go take care of some paperwork," she said, pulling her shoulder loose and marching off to her quarters.

Shepard had in the past few days expressed wishes to avoid, at all costs, Illium and Tuchanka. She'd said that she didn't want to reopen old wounds, and she didn't want to be reminded of a past she couldn't have back, a team she trusted with her life. Ashley was probably the person she wanted to avoid the most. After Vermire, her and Ashley's relationship only became more strained. They hadn't been that close to begin with, and it only got worse after Shepard had to choose Ash over Kaidan. It was the sort of thing that she only confided when she was drunk, which was getting to be a nightly event. I actually started stealing booze from her quarters and getting it out the air lock. It was kind of fun, in a way, playing a stupid game to protect a friend, but I needed to find a slightly more permanent solution before she did herself some real harm. She seemed to take it upon herself to administer strange punishments, such as not drinking water before bed, and insuring that she'd have a hangover if she wasn't expecting combat. Little, stupid things like that. But they were starting to add up. Some time soon there was going to be a threshold crossed.

Really, I was starting to see the cracks all around her. She was barely holding together, both figuratively and literally. Her face was a peeling, broken layer of skin over glowing orange implants. She looked weird, even for a human. And she wasn't sleeping, wasn't eating right, still hadn't used a single biotic power since I'd seen her. She was actually quite the wreck. I was thankful that the rest of the crew couldn't see it, but I didn't know how to fix it.

As a last ditch effort to understand and help, I hacked myself into some files on commander Jane Shepard, both what few of the Alliance files weren't encrypted beyond my skill, and what other sources I had acquired along the way of my rise to vigilante extraordinaire. I had plenty of time to kill, as we weren't actually very near Horizon yet.

Some part of me wondered if I should just go up to Shepardand ask her point blank about some her state of mind. I hadn't been getting any straight answers out of her for weeks, though, so I didn't see why things would be different the next time. So what if hacking into a few of her personnel files was intrusive? I was a concerned friend, and she needed someone nosy to help her out.

The initial things I found didn't surprise me very much. Born on a colony, never lived on Earth, honored for her heroic acts on Akuze, the cursory stuff that everyone who'd ever read Galactic Gossip knew. I found footage of her all over the extranet, as her name was always associated with 鍍he first human Spectre. I found some interviews by Wong, and another by Al-Jilani. Everywhere I looked, I found something that belied the broken creature who roamed the ship these days.

Then I found it. A veritable treasure trove of information on Jane Shepard, almost an encyclopedia. It claimed to be a fan site dedicated to her, but it had more of a following than the rest, and was edited by many of the users. Every minute piece of information publicized about here was on here. I had to hack a few things to get into it without giving any personal information, and to be given all access, but it was easily within my reach.

There were several articles linked to the colony Shepard was said to have grown up on. A small human colony called Mindoir had been brutally assaulted by batarian slavers. From the dates, it looked like it happened when she was only sixteen. Some of the footage that was linked in with these articles made me nearly retch. I had to turn it off before I'd even combed through a fraction of it.

I moved on to the detailing of her military career. She'd shined in basic, with a few commendations, and a few disciplinary measures here and there. Basically like any turian recruit, I thought ruefully.

There were several articles that appeared to be entirely uncited, or if they had citations it was to lurid pornographic sties that put Fornax to shame. One such article told of how she was solely responsible for keeping the volus off the Interstellar Council, and another that seemed to be a list of impossible things that Commander Shepard and her allies had apparently done. I skipped past those when I saw them, despite it being amusing the occasional 吐actabout myself. I was trying to find something closer to the truth than 敵arrus Vakarian has counted to infinity. Twice."

Several hours later, gnawing at my talons and staring glassily at my screen, my eyes refusing to read, I determined I was even more amazed than I'd ever been before. To think she went through all this, and still managed to be the hero she was on the battle for the Citadel. To think she went through everything, or even just most of what I found written up here to be credible, and still had herself pulled together enough to defeat Sovereign. I was more humbled at that moment than I could ever remember being. Whatever it was that held her together, I didn't have anything of that caliber. I went off the deep end because she died. She didn't go off the deep end when every force I can think of was trying to pull her there. She just went off the deep end when she died.

That's not entirely unreasonable, when you think about it. The people who've supposedly come back from the dead have all been crazy prophets and bizarre warlords, even cross species this held true. All Shepard had to hold her together was the Reaper threat. She was forging herself into a sharp point to head it off, but she probably didn't know how to think about anything else.

I flick off my terminal screen. The main battery hasn't been calibrated yet today. But if the last twenty times I've done it have been any indication, I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's fine. The little blue EDI light says it's well within operational parameters, and right now Shepard needs me more than this gun does.

I slipped out of the main battery as non-nonchalantly as I could, hoping not to draw too much attention to myself. We had a good, solid five hours before we reached Horizon, so I had plenty of time to catch up on my duties for the day. But I still didn't want then to see me shirking them. When I got to the elevator whirred up a couple of levels, and opened at the captain's cabin. I stepped out and reached my hand out for the door panel.

What was I gonna say? "Oh, hey Shepard, I know we're both still on duty, and all, but I just hacked into some of your personal files and I wanted to talk about them. Good Job, Garrus, you let yourself get all the way to the captain's cabin before you let yourself think about your actions. Yeah, sounds about right.

"What the hell are you trying to do, break me down?"

I had never heard Shepard's voice tempered with so much anger before. I was surprised I could even hear her through the walls, and wondered who she was talking to. Probably someone on her vid screen. But I'd already pried into her personal information once today though, I'd be a sucker not to do it again when the opportunity presented itself so well. Investigative C-Sec habits die hard.

"One run in with Williams isn't going to matter." The tone was dismissive, as if rebutting someone stupid. There was a short pause. "Why are you always trying to make this about him?" This time Shepard's voice took on an accusatory, almost hateful tone. "Move the fuck on, Jane. You're so fixated on that shit. We have work to do." While I would have to be the first to admit to indulging in little mirror pep-talks before missions or stressful situations, this was a little bit far from what I would expect of her. Also, not so very peppy at all.

"You're damn," thud, "right," thud, "I killed," thud, "those batarian monsters!" This sentence was punctuated with the sounds of something colliding followed by the gentle tinkle of fractured glass. Against my better judgment, I stayed outside. If Shepard was breaking stuff in there and yelling at herself, I probably should have gone in to stop her. And yet I didn't want to be the next pummeling victim.

"They deserve the same treatment Balak got, and more, and you know it." I read the extranet reports on Balak right after the events of X57. At the time, I'd assumed instantly that some of the engineers had messed with his corpse after Shepard had left, and it was publicly speculated that she mutilated the corpse. After my reading today, and this little morsel, I think I was too trusting of her.

"Jane, why the fuck are you so naive? Trying to make me feel guilty about batarians, trying to get a friend you can trust. You won't break me down like that. What were you thinking telling Garrus to call you by your name?"

This . . . Well, I had no idea what to say about this. This wasn't what I expected to find when I came up, and it's different still from what I expected to overhear. I thought maybe she would be running herself through the mission, thinking out loud. This was different. This was the ranting of a madman.

"Well, Garrus is just as fallible as anyone else. Don't trust him. Trust me. I've saved you how many times? Why do you trust him more than me? I pulled you through, even when you were ready to curl up and die."

I stopped dead in my breathing when I heard that. She trusted me, me, over a part of herself? I was flattered, but mostly just frightened. That's a lot of trust for someone that important to place on my shoulders. I tried to hide my bashful expression as I hoped the the spirits I was worth her trust.

"You know what? That's bullshit, about you wanting to be in control. With an attitude like that, you'll stay backseat forever, and it will always be Shepard protecting Jane. Your pathetic attempts are, well, pathetic."

And suddenly it clicked. I understood what was going on, and I understood why she'd asked that favor of me. Shepard and Jane weren't interchangeable, and I had to start thinking in a different way about her容r, them? I was right. Jane needed me more than those guns.

I moved to press the door console again. Again, I hezitated. I wondered which one I knew. Which one I admired, and which one I was afraid of. But they were the same, right?

In the end, I did press the console to go in and have a nice, friendly chat with Jane. Shepard could go rot, if Jane didn't want to deal with her.