When Garrus woke, it was to a feeling like he was missing more face than usual.
Turians were difficult to make a dent in. They had skin closer to metal than anything else, but you couldn't really describe it in those terms. It was sharp, occasionally toxic to the touch, hard and unflinching. It didn't scar easy, but when it did scar, those moments could last a Krogan lifetime.
Shepard had a few scars of his own. Nothing big. Nothing too obvious. When the going got tough, Shepard got going, so they all said—with a certain reverence that was nearly too difficult to contest—and, now and then, a few of his choices showed right there on his face. Not quite as impressive as taking a rocket to the mandible, but it came close.
Shepard was always close.
Garrus breathed. He could definitely feel a once-relevant, though not invaluable, portion of his face missing—but then, what else was new?
Those were the stakes. As long as he gave better than he got, the balance wasn't entirely unpleasant. Neither was the scar tissue.
It had texture. Shepard had even complimented it once—and it was better than being bare-faced, after all. It was better that their choices showed, that they didn't try to hide them.
Garrus had tried hiding.
It hadn't worked out for him. It turned out Turians weren't small enough to lay low.
When Garrus opened his eyes, he didn't recognize his surroundings. He was nearly certain he wouldn't recognize his face, either—whatever was left of it—when he saw it. There was a ceiling above his head, sound filtering in from somewhere else and a heaviness sitting on his chest, but all those sensations, finicky as they were, meant that he was alive.
So long as there was something left to scar, then people generally kept trying.
He flexed his fingers. Those moved, all three of them on one hand. That was an inspirational sign, though the rapid beeping that followed wasn't.
'Yes,' he said, his voice as dry as the desert on Tuchanka. An unfortunate comparison, as it reminded him of the locals, but it had to be made. There was no better way to describe it, or that lingering and unpleasant weight settling in to his joints, much like the cold. 'I am alive.'
Taking shots in the dark was part of his specialty. Missing was no longer an option.
Shadows fell over him. Doctors, he assumed, or nurses. Certainly not enemies. Clearly not more Krogans.
They were too quiet for that.
'Don't be so surprised,' he added. 'It was a lucky guess.'
He remembered the heat. He remembered the pain. He remembered Shepard and the knowledge—perhaps even the acceptance—that he was already gone, his square shoulders set in the distance, telling them to run. No matter how many times Garrus proved he was better than him, Shepard always found a way to keep one step ahead.
Garrus remembered the acceptance. Then, he remembered nothing else.
That lack of memory was a lightness neither more nor less unpleasant than the heaviness. It was equally balanced.
Garrus also remembered watching, from a vantage-point too low to the ground, thinking about the time on the Citadel when Shepard had missed the shot. He wouldn't miss when it wasn't between friends, of course; that was more than just unlikely. But still, seeing the man go in alone and knowing that he had to were moments beyond memory or understanding.
Stubborn.
Garrus's vision cleared. There was more than one point to focus on; too many of them clouded his perspective. Aim required clarity and distinction, so that was out of the picture, at least for the time being.
'Do you know where you are?' someone asked him.
Salarian. Garrus would know those voices anywhere. Meticulous and proud, so long as they weren't singing.
Then again, Garrus had only known one Salarian to do that.
'Why don't you tell me,' Garrus said, 'and then I'll tell you if my guess was right.'
The Salarian didn't laugh. They rarely did. 'This is the Waterloo Memorial Field Hospital,' he said. 'You were very nearly dead—for a turian.'
'Damn,' Garrus replied. 'It seems I wasn't even close.'
As little face as he had left, what remained was still moving—and he was still forming words. The skin was taut and pain lingered at the edges of that sensation, draw tight across the bone beneath.
'Tell me,' Garrus said, 'how much of my face is gone?'
He knew the Salarian would be incapable of giving anything other than an unfailingly specific answer. 'I would say, based on close observation, that the percentage is not insignificant. Somewhere between forty-six and forty-eight of the right side is missing. Appears there was damage done to a pre-existing skin graft. Do you recall the name that you were given, or shall we call you John Shepard for now?'
Garrus's smiles were neither few nor far between but the mandibles tended to mask their presence, making them seem like something else less obvious than they were. Now, he didn't have the luxury. He didn't feel like smiling, either. 'Tarquin,' he said, having realized some time ago that he had a marginally perverse penchant for nicknames. '…Tarquin Victus.'
'Very good,' the Salarian replied. 'One moment, Tarquin Victus. Entering your data. Please, no sudden movements—you might get dizzy.'
He was writing things down, distracted. Garrus stared at the ceiling only to see it move; what he thought might be a hallucination based on physical damage—it seemed unlikely so much of his face would be gone while both his lucky turian eyes remained unharmed—was in fact just part of the architecture. He was under a tent, the tarp snapping with a sudden wind.
That explained the cold.
'My colleagues will be arriving shortly,' the Salarian continued. 'They are…very excited to learn you've, shall we say, made it?'
'That makes two of us, I'm sure,' Garrus replied.
'Touch and go. Turian anatomy isn't our specialty.' The Salarian's voice held the same trance-like quality as whatever machines surrounded them—none of them with the vibration of the final roar, each wave of piercing light, each fired beam and the scorching heat that followed, even the predictable rhythm unavoidable because of its power and speed, and the final deafening explosion that razed them all, when Garrus was reminded of just how fragile human bodies really were. Shepard, lifted in the air, tossed forward and beaten sky-high, and no way to tell whether it was fabric or flesh being torn to shreds as Garrus, too, succumbed to the sheer force of it all.
Man up. Turian down. This was always something Shepard had needed to do alone. And Garrus understood it. He liked to think he understood it better than anyone else.
That didn't mean he had to like it.
When he turned his head, the pain became more acute. The beeping quickened. He could hear some commotion nearby and imagined the salarians, their heads bowed together, in typical salarian conference over atypical turian anatomy.
Some things never changed.
Shepard had died to protect that.
Garrus allowed the words to make themselves known as more than just words, a state of truth, a reality of the galaxies they now inhabited. Whatever came, whatever had passed and whatever waited on the horizon, this was their inheritance. Whatever Shepard had done…
Obviously, it had worked.
'Tell me,' Garrus said, as his doctors gathered close, 'what have I missed? I get the feeling it's a lot.'
So they told him.
About the relays. About the Citadel. About the Commander Shepard, whose body was never found but whose sacrifice was understood and praised in a way only the dead could ever claim. About the synthetics and about that final second in battle when all seemed lost—when, suddenly, the Reapers fell. All the while, they checked his vitals, and Garrus's heartbeat didn't kick out of time or pick up its pace when he heard what he already knew, down below the ruined skin-graft, even deeper than bone.
Yet turians were stubborn—maybe not in the same way krogans or salarians or council members were stubborn, but they were stubborn enough. And Garrus in particular had always enjoyed knowing the title was his. He wouldn't have had it any other way.
Just like Shepard.
He owed me a drink, Garrus thought. Those things left unfinished but not unsaid were…unfortunate, because they gave a stubborn turian reason to be more stubborn than ever.
It was possible Garrus owed Shepard that drink. Wherever he was, Garrus had promised to meet him there.
One of them wasn't making good on their end of the bargain. That didn't sit right. Garrus asked how much time he had left in observation and special care and the salarians conferred for a while longer in hushed voices they probably assumed he couldn't hear. When they passed into a certain part of his field of vision it was like they'd disappeared.
It was possible Garrus was missing part of his eye, the one on the right side, which was always his blind spot to begin with. Hence the missile he took to the face.
His situation was unpleasant, but it wasn't dire.
Wasn't that always the way.
'Some time yet,' the first Salarian told him, a long while later. Night must have fallen, because everything was darker now. The bleeping had slowed along with the rise and fall of Garrus's chest, under the heaviness that remained—like that time James Vega asked Pilot Steve Cortez to sit on top of him while he did push-ups to make the task more difficult and, presumably, more meaningful. There was a rumbling noise coming from nearby just like a Krogan snoring—when Wrex and Grunt slept on the Normandy, the entire ship knew—and maybe that was exactly what it was, here in the Waterloo Memorial Field Hospital, where they had all kinds of patients. It made sense, grim and determined and gritty as sense ever was, that Garrus wasn't the only fallen soldier in these times, and also that he might be one of the few who had a chance to rise again. But he didn't want it—not alone. 'There used to be a river here, you know. The Thames. Famous for such a long time, but now…' Garrus could hear the Salarian sigh, very quietly, but loud enough to make the snoring unimportant. 'Well. We're very lucky there's still a river-bed, aren't we?'
'Without a river to go in it?' Garrus replied. 'That's a strange way of looking at luck, if you ask me.'