Apologies for the update delay. The next two updates are still going to be irregular, but it should be back to a weekly-ish schedule after that.
8. Rites
Cremation is easy, as death rites go. A cocoon of silence and isolation from midnight to midnight, that was once meant to fool the newly dead into believing the living were nothing but mute shades. He recalls bits and pieces from childhood lessons, and wonders in an idle, detached way whether his father or sister know the correct way to hum any of the old Valluvian chants.
It's overwhelming, the need to ask them this as they all emerge from their hermitage at moonrise to gather and sift the ashes. Their hands appear disembodied in the moonlit dark, covered as they are in the white gloves of mourning. The only other pale thing in the round crematory chamber is the mound of his mother's ashes, almost gleaming under the domed ceiling's oculus.
His hands shake as he receives a frontal plate fragment from his father, and he has to close his eyes and take a steadying breath before he can touch his forehead to it, hand it to Solana to place in the sleek, iridium glazed urn.
The Garrus who emerges from the cremation hall is not the Garrus who entered.
That certainty persists through the days that follow, like the disquieting memory of an oppressive dream. He draws comparisons to other losses—his team, Shepard before them—but concludes those were echoes of this event, experienced in temporal displacement.
Those hurts should have prepared him. They didn't.
Visitation is hardest. Hearing the stories of Roya Vakarian's life is nothing short of a vivisection of her memory, pieces of her paraded around to assuage the living. He finds the recollections of relatives and strangers obscene.
Most of the guests are unknown to him, and he only has indistinct memories of the ones he recognizes. Odd, to realize he's been away long enough that commonplace exchanges feel forced. It strikes him that this must be a similar experience to coming out of prolonged suspended animation, and being asked to provide a facsimile of oneself with only wispy memories and a lifetime's worth of disconnect.
He wonders if this is how Liv felt when she first woke in that Cerberus facility, but he banishes the thought as soon as it occurs. He can't think of Shepard. Not now, and not in those terms.
"My condolences." One of his father's military cronies has approached him. Her white markings stand in stark contrast to her oxidized steel coloring, and he finds the pattern of dots above her frontal plates familiar. "Daria Fedorian," she adds after a short pause. "I served with Roya just out of the Academy. Your mother was the best sniper in the legion. I hear you inherited her skill."
"You did." It's a stupid thing to say, his almost question, but he can't help it. The last thing he expected was Hierarchy officials taking note of him. Out of the corner of his eye he catches a glimpse of his father watching the exchange from across the room. "I'm sorry, General Fedorian. I think the last time we met I was still practicing with toy guns."
"Yes, I think that's right. It must have been, what—over twenty years ago? But I won't keep you. Maybe we'll get to talk again, in different circumstances. Spirits guide you."
"And you be guided." The traditional reply, sure, but he spends the rest of Visitation mulling over Daria Fedorian's words. Conjecture calms him, helps him say the right things to the right people at the right times.
After the last guest leaves, his father hands him a tall glass of brandy. As if planned, Solana has disappeared, leaving the clean-up to them. Ganix Vakarian seems more alert than he's been in weeks. "So, Garrus," he says at the end of a deliberate sip. "You want to tell me what's really going on?"
He swirls the brandy around in the glass. He has yet to fulfill his Visitation duty of sharing a memory of the dead, so he shouldn't be drinking. If his father, the traditionalist, meant to unseat him by skipping over the whole point of the event, he succeeded. "What do you mean, Dad?"
"Everything. You running off with that human Spectre, leaving C-Sec, Omega, that Collector business, the moping—everything."
"Shepard thought you wouldn't approve."
"You haven't cared about my approval in a long time, Garrus."
There's a gentleness in his father's words, unlike the last time they spoke this way. Then, Shepard was dead. Presumed dead. Resurrected. He said nothing because the instant Shepard's auburn head in his scope proved the return rumors true, the words no longer demanded to be said. Things are different now.
He stalls: "Any idea why the Primarch's sister complimented my sharpshooting skills, Dad?"
"Is that what that was. I wondered."
There's nothing in his father's tones to suggest he had been General Fedorian's source. He sets the glass down, spins it around slowly. He can't bring himself to break with ritual, but he can't follow it either.
"I sort of told Mom about Shepard at my last visit," he says at length. For now, he refuses to speculate how his father will interpret that statement, or what his mother might have made of his rambling about Palaven's moons. "The other stuff—" He spreads his arms, an exasperated gesture. There's a knot in his throat, and he has to blink away the stinging in his eyes. "Everything is on the brink of destruction, Dad. I couldn't find a way to tell her that."
His father says nothing, just watches him over the rim of his glass with a calm devoid of his usual calculating stare.
That is what breaches his defenses. His belief in spirits is at best agnostic, but in this moment he chooses to believe his father's calm is the spirit of the family home, brought into existence by the end of a life together, well-lived. If he's going to fulfill his Visitation duty, this is it. Not with memories of the departed, but with the reasons why those memories must be protected.
The silence before he begins seems to him like a bridge to the unknown, and for the first time in years, he trusts the facts will be believed.