He could feel the steps in his feet. He knew exactly where he was going to go.

'It's not really a good place.'

Garrus woke with a lurch.

As soon as he was conscious of his eyelids—the thin, fleshy gap separating him from the world, he tried his hardest to keep them open. As soon as feeling returned to his limbs, he struggled to sit upright. He tried to push himself up—and found he was having an amazing amount of difficulty. Adrenaline pumped through his body, and the associated rush let him mindlessly fight against the latent disability in his shaking limbs, but he still felt as if he was moving too slowly. He panicked. He was going to be late—he was going to be too late to—!

Something in his head.

He had been dreaming.

He grunted, groaned—he fell back, breathing heavily. His arms, he thought—his arm, his right arm, lay limply at his side—he held his forearm up over his head, dangling at the wrist. He looked at the layers of dressing. A Sirta ConWrap, some plastic gauze, and a pressure sleeve. There was also some kind of jelly on his arm—wiped away around the edges of the dressing to leave remaining the minutest, gleaming residue. His whole arm felt amazingly heavy and he let it flop down across his stomach.

Well, that was a mistake, he thought. A distant tingling sensation from the impact ran up the length of the limb and into his shoulder. He remembered the hole in his armour, the burbling, cheerful fountain of his own blood through the crack in the metal, and grimaced reflexively.

He heard the distant fzzzsh of a door opening and the approach of rapid footsteps.

"What do you think you're doing," exclaimed an cold voice from somewhere in the room, where Garrus could not see it. He tried to crane his head up and around, and saw a slim, grey-haired figure stalking toward him.

Garrus drew in a surprised breath.

"Dr. Chakwas," he managed. He stared at her.

"You can't try and sit up with a hole in your arm," she said, her face burgeoning under hippocratic indignation—her eyes flashing, her lips pursed—"You snapped two tendons," she went on, "and the stitches are barely holding your skin together as it is. You are lucky enough to be alive, let alone have the use of your hand, and if you destroy all our hard work just because you don't have the sense to sit still after an operation, I will personally throw you out the airlock into the nearest star."

"Sorry," said Garrus, indistinctly, as soon as the presence of mind to speak returned to him.

He flopped back, and his head hit the thin pillow again

"…Your bedside manner is as soothing as ever," he added. "This must be a taste of what I'd be going through if I actually died."

Dr. Chakwas snorted derisively—although without much malice—as she examined his dressings.

"I thought Turians didn't believe in the afterlife," she said, "look, you're bleeding again."

"Oh, we do for the bad things," Garrus mumbled, "fire, eternal punishment… a soldier needs a bit of fear to keep him in check—fascinating concept—best thing humans brought us. That," he added, with the easy-going locution of the barely lucid, "and ramen noodles."

Garrus was aware he was slurring slightly and the sensation was creeping across his mind that he might not be making any sense.

"Shh!" Dr. Chakwas said. Garrus shushed.

Garrus stared at the ceiling. He was overwhelmed again. The weird, dreamy, slow-moving feel of unreality washed over him. Dr. Chakwas, another bizarre, displaced vision from the past, worked over him, talking a low-key, grumbling stream of disapproval as she discovered new places he had revisited his wounds in his first struggle to sit upright.

He looked at her.

"Tell me," he said, distantly, "am I—" he took another breath, "am I asleep?"

Dr. Chakwas paused and she looked at him intently. Then her face softened, and she smiled a small smile.

"No," she said. "You're not asleep."

"Am I crazy?"

Chakwas closed her eyes, for a moment, and the smile became subtly different; sad.

"No," she said, opening her eyes again, "you're not crazy. You were caught in a rather nasty explosion from what I hear," she went on, "I'm surprised you remember anything, to be honest. You're… you're on board with us now."

"Us," repeated Garrus.

"I'm not quite sure how to put this," she said, "you're on the Normandy."

Garrus felt his pulse speed up. He felt a cold sweat break out on his neck.

"What?" he asked. He tried to sit up again.

"Garrus you need to get your rest," she said, firmly, "and I don't—"

"No," he said, begin to feel breathless, "No! I need to—" he struggled to sit up, but his arm buckled underneath him.

"Garrus Vakarian!" Chakwas said, "I don't want to have to strap you to this table but I will."

"Please—" Garrus said, his thick, groggy voice failing to convey how desperately he needed to sit up, to see for himself.

Dr. Chakwas looked at him in agitation. Her careful bob cut was beginning to look frazzled and Garrus could see she had smears of blue… his blood on her. He relaxed. Chakwas did not force him down, however.

"Just, let me sit you up," she said, "stop struggling."

She helped him up, pulling him carefully upright. Garrus looked around, and...

"This isn't…" he said immediately, then he stopped. He looked around warily, "This isn't the Normandy—"

"The Normandy SR-2," she said, "you'll see."

"Shepard," he said, "Where—"

"She's fine," said Chakwas, soothingly, speaking over him, "She's just sleeping. She's doing much better than you were. You shouldn't even be awake, yet."

"Spirits," he said, "it was really her. What's she—Where did she come from? What happened to her?"

"I think she'd better tell you that herself, when she wakes up."

"What time is it?"

"Well officially it's oh-fifteen-hundred hours, but," she added with a wan smile, "who can tell, on a starship? She's just resting," she went on, "She lost a little blood, and suffered several gunshot wounds, but nothing critical was hit. She's been through a lot worse. You both have, I should expect."

Chakwas rested her hand on his shoulder. Garrus nodded, wordlessly.

Chakwas gently applied pressure down on his shoulder, and he relented. He slowly, awkwardly lay down again, assisted by Dr. Chakwas's support.

"Oof," she grunted, "theeere you go. I'm too old to be lifting turians up and down, you know," she added, "I should be fixing you, not injuring myself."

"Sorry," Garrus managed to grunt, through the effort of supporting his torso.

"It's alright, just—" she looked at him, "don't make it worse than it is. You've already torn a couple of your stitches."

Garrus lay back on the thin bed, the flat, shiny plastic pillow, and sighed a deep sigh that might have been a yawn if he'd had the energy. He was exhausted, and right now, even though he wanted to stay up, to ask questions, he wasn't sure he could summon the energy to. He could be insane, he _could_ be, but…

His eyelids were heavy with unspent sleep. His body throbbed, dully. Pain was definitely there, but it had been drowned in a sea of painkillers and sedatives, it was just a quiet, urgent warning now, letting him know that he still couldn't do anything without injuring himself further.

Did insane people constantly wonder if they were insane? Wasn't that part of it? This bizarre dream state he seemed to be occupying was too consistent to be fake, too linear and progressive to be a halucination. If he was still dying on Omega, wouldn't he have died by now?

The idea occurred to Garrus that perhaps he might actually be dead and in some kind of afterlife. Perhaps the humans and hanar and whoever were right after all.

He dismissed the idea quickly. No. He could not be dead, this was not what being dead felt like, he was sure of it. He could not be insane. He hoped. No, there had been no… no moment of over-riding stress prior to seeing Shepard. No—immediate break-down. Not even with all he'd seen. No.

He'd learned to recognize shock and combat fatigue in other soldiers. Especially in his team on Omega. He would know if he was exhibiting either of those.

He might be dreaming, but he knew there were ways to tell whether or not this was true. A careful study of your environment revealed little holes in the dream that your brain couldn't properly patch up. With humans it was numbers. When a human thought they were dreaming, they could tell because they would look very hard at a list of numbers and their brain, unable to keep such vast sequences of information intact on the fly, would start dropping or shuffling numbers around, and so the illusion would break down.

With turians it was colour sequences. Complicated patterns would begin to look hazy or indistinct the longer you dwelled on them, Turian dreams were fast-paced and lively, blurred pastiches sights and sounds and scents, and tended not to allow for much idle contemplation. If you were contemplating in a dream it was not on the immediate scenery.

Garrus looked around. He was in a medical bay—not the Normandy's, and not any other one he recognized. He carefully scrutinized his surroundings as he lay on his bed. The ceiling. The ceiling was a smooth, indifferent polished metal surface. Hm. The computer screen, there. It displayed medical charts and things—complicated little bars and codes that would not react well to existence in the turian dreamscape.

He gazed at the monitor across the room, craning his neck around to see it better. He tried to ignore the faint, angry twinge in his neck that let him know that—against all impressions of sensation—there was still a pretty grievous wound down there.

He stared at the monitor. It remained stable. He gazed at the scatter chart and the little coded gene patterns on it. They remained resolutely unaffected.

Gene patterns?

He gazed at the computer screen.

"Doctor Chakwas..?" he said.

"Hmm?" The doctor looked up from where she had become occupied, studying some sheet of paper or another.

"What's that on the monitor?"

She looked at him, looked where she was looking. She frowned a little.

"Oh," she said, "that's just some… medical information."

"So it seems," said Garrus, "is it mine?"

Chakwas hesitated.

"Yes," she said, then: "Garrus."

She approached him, leaned towards him as he lay on the bed.

"You were very badly injured."

What?

"What?"

Garrus felt a wave of fresh unease.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Well, you lost quite a bit of tissue in the explosion."

Garrus reached up, brushed his face, gingerly. Against all odds, it seemed… remarkably intact, under the bandage. There was no scooped out caverns of missing flesh, no cut away bone.

"What do you mean," he said, "where'd I lose it?"

"Part of your face," she said, "was badly damaged."

"Well," said Garrus, slowly, "it can't be too bad… feels like everything's still there."

"You d—hm." he said, "whatever I lost, I think I can live with it."

"Well, that's not all," she said, "you actually lost quite a bit of muscle tissue and what was left was cut apart by the piece of shrapnel."

"Oh," said Garrus.

"I—" he said.

"Wait," he said, trying not to sound worried, "it… it went through my tongue, didn't it. How am I talking?"

"We had to correct some of the damage," said the doctor, "with cybernetics."

"Wh—" Garrus begain.

He gently felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue, which flexed with… alarming ease.

He prodded where the hole had been, and felt firm, unyielding skin. It was entirely possible that a turian's mandible could regrow if it was splinted properly and kept clean, but that wasn't the point. The hole in his mandible had quite simply been removed. The metal spike that had entered his face, he thought, would've left the bone splintered into dust. A spider-web of cracks would have spread through it, and it would have to have been stapled and splinted, making it a giant, ungainly mess of metal and bandages.

The explosion, he thought, he'd been so close, it would have to have melted the skin off the right side of his face. Would there have been anything left to splint..?

"Doctor," he said, "is this…" he raised a wavering hand to his right mandible, and touched it, gingerly.

"Is this mine?"

"Mostly," said Dr. Chakwas after a hesitant silence, "we took a small graft from the opposite side of your face and used it to culture a skin patch. Your mandible will be scarred, but mobile. We had to use a cybernetic patch to reconstruct some of the muscle though."

"Uh," said Garrus, distantly. He felt a little light-headed. "I see."

"Well, that's interesting," he added after a few moments, "I suppose this makes me… part machine," he trailed off.

"Nothing wrong with that," said Dr. Chakwas, "Commander Shepard has, well, has had some cybernetic surgery done since you saw her.

There were a few moments of silence.

"I have to get up," Garrus said.

"You most certainly do not," rejoined Chakwas, with tremendous vehemence.

"I have to see Shepard," he said, "she… It's been too long. If this is real, if I'm not dreaming—then I have to see her right now."

"Well," Dr. Chakwas said—she frowned—"I suppose I can't stop you, can I. Be careful, though, Garrus Vakarian."

"Yes," he said, sitting up slowly and gingerly.

"Don't put any weight on your arm."

"No weight," said Garrus.

"And don't try to flex any part of your face. No… no smiling, no frowning. Don't open your mouth wide or you'll tear something, and we'll have to start work all over again with a new patch."

"Don't flex, got it," he replied, vaguely, swinging his legs off the table.

"Garrus," said Chakwas, putting a hand on his shoulder. The sudden concern in her voice startled him. He looked over at her.

"It's been a while," she said, "Shepard won't… there will be some… changes."

"I suppose so," said Garrus, "out in the middle of space, doing whatever she was doing. Months and months of covert ops… Missions like that change anybody, Shepard's no exception."

"No, there won't be changes with her," Chakwas said, "Shepard hasn't changed a bit. You have. You might not like it."

Garrus looked at her, hard.

"What—" he said.

"Just," said the doctor, sadly, "just be prepared."

Garrus got off his bed, slowly, silently. He turned her words over in his head, paying little attention to the environment around him.

He got half-way through the room in quiet thought before turning around.

He felt he ought to say something, but words were in short supply.

"Don't worry," added the Doctor, in a tone which did nothing to allieviate any worry, "just try not to be surprised."

"Well," said Garrus, evenly, "alright. Thank you, Doctor. For everything."

She nodded. He turned and left.

Garrus proceeded through the… the Normandy, he supposed it was. It was a completely unfamiliar ship to him, it was bigger than the Normandy, newer than the Normandy. It had a different floorplan, and different equipment, different rooms and different markings on the wall. Cerberus but, in some ways, it was very much like the normandy. He found himself absent-mindedly treading the same path to the stairs that he always used to on the Normandy, before… before everything changed. He found an elevator in its place, and, after a little trouble figuring out where it went, he managed to ascend to the floor directly above, and through that to the conference room.

He heard voices as he approached.

"…I know the docs corrected what they could—surgical procedures; cybernetics, that sort of thing—but he took a bad hit. I wouldn't get my—"

The door slid open. Hiss, click. Garrus saw a table in a long room, with two people stood in front of him, on either side of it.

To the left was a dark-skinned human Garrus didn't recognize, to the right…

"Shepard," said Garrus.

"Tough son of a bitch," breathed the dark-skinned man, "didn't think he'd be up yet."

Garrus was aware of his voice in the corner of his mind, but ignored it. He stared at Shepard, soaked her in. She stared at him back, grinning quietly. He felt all the old neurons in his head light up—felt a rush of happiness at seeing her face after… so long.

You've changed, Garrus.

Had he?

He opened his mouth to speak. For a moment, he wondered what on earth he would say, but then the words filled his mouth, and they seemed absolutely perfect.

"No-one would give me a mirror," he said, "how bad is it?"

The corners of Shepards eyes crinkled up as the grin expanded. She took a deep, happy breath.

"Aw, hell," she began, "you were always ugly, Garrus; slap some face paint on there and no-one will even notice."

The shock of the words made him laugh in surprise. Garrus groaned and put a hand to his face. He hadn't thought much about Chakwas' words at the time but she was right, and there felt a very distinct possibility—in the strange, hollow tingling feeling, the alarm that his face sent him—that the entire right half of his face would come apart right there in his hand.

"Don't make me laugh, damnit," he cursed, still trying not to laugh, "my face is barely holding together as it is."

You've changed, Garrus.

He stopped laughing, and looked at Shepard, regarding her quietly, wondering if it was true. He briefly recalled how cold he'd felt when he first met her. She didn't seem to remember, she was laughing now—without any noise. Her shoulders shook. The brown-skinned man looked back and forth between them, mildly happy that they were enjoying each other's company, but at a loss as to how to participate, and—perhaps—a little bit awed.

Garrus appreciated the man's silence. He, himself, would never dream of interupting the reminsciences of a pair of turian officers meeting for the first time; it would never do to interrupt two old friends, especially those whose bonds had been forged in combat, and it was good to see that this sort of respect crossed species.

Except… He and Shepard weren't that old a pair of friends. How many weeks had they known each other? Maybe months—two months? Had the whole mission with Saren only taken around two months? They'd become close friends then, but then… two years of silence. Shepard, drifting through space, doing whatever it was she did that she could not tell him, him… him, believing she was dead. Becoming bitter and angry and hateful and so sick of the galaxy. So sick of everything.

You've changed, Garrus.

He sighed, picking up the slack in the conversation before it became uncomfortable or difficult to recover from.

"Some women find scars attractive," he mused, "mind you, most of those women are krogan."

Shepard snorted out loud and put a hand to her face. The other man, after a few more moments of standing there in the pair's presence, saluted.

Shepard briskly—if a little sloppily—returned the salute, and the man left.

Shepard moved a few paces closer, bringing them from the shared cameraderie of old fighting buddies, to the closer personal space of friends.

"So," she said, "how are you, really? You…" she sighed, and gazed away for a moment, past Garrus, at a corner of the room.

"You didn't look good," she said, "not really. We weren't sure you'd make it."

"I'm fine," Garrus said, waving his good hand, gently, "Dr. Chakwas is the best doctor I know, in space or planet-side, and if she can't fix me up, then, well, maybe I don't want to be in combat any more. It's nice to see her on this ship."

She nodded, distantly, a smile on her face.

"It's good to see her—Joker too," she added, "he's the pilot."

"Really," said Garrus, genuinely interested for a moment, "that tireless reprobate's been piloting the Normandy?"

"Since it's—since this one's maiden voyage," Shepard said, correcting herself.

"Well, that helps me feel better about this," Garrus mused, only half-heartedly though, as another thought began to steal back upon his mind.

"It's how I sleep at night," Shepard said, solemnly. Garrus snorted.

He paused. He looked around the conference room. Something which had been bothering him since he woke up finally surfaced to be vocalized.

"Frankly, I'm more worried about you."

Shepard raised her eyebrows, a human reflex he'd learned meant surprise or interrogation. It was easily faked, and he looked at her narrowly, trying to gauge how genuinely she did not understand him. There was a tense silence.

"Cerberus, Shepard," he said, a little louder. Her face slackened again, she understood his point now. Still…

Garrus felt his throat tighten.

"You remember those sick experiments they were doing," he said.

Shepard shifted on her feet, shot him her Honest Jane look.

"That's why I'm glad you're here," she said, quietly. "I'm walking into hell, I want someone I can trust on my side."

"Hm," said Garrus. Her answer was an appropriate one. She was not… she wasn't blind, at least. She admitted that she wasn't keeping the best company, and that was good enough for now.

"You realize," said Garrus, "this has me walking into hell with you."

"Hah," he snorted, dryly, after a further pause, "just like old times."

There was another silence, made elastic and comfortable again by the equilibrium restored between them. Shepard appeared to be thinking about something.

"I'm fit for duty, Shepard," Garrus said, as the silence coasted to its end, "I'll settle in and see what I can do at the forward batteries."

They exchanged nods.

He took a few steps backward, turned, left.

"Garrus," he heard her call after him. He turned back, Shepard stepped out into the hall behind him.

"You know," she said, "they can hear me. They have the whole place bugged."

Garrus stared at her quietly. He nodded, he turned and left.

He strode aimlessly around the deck he was on, until he discovered that he was on the wrong deck for the forward guns. He felt mildly bewildered. The new ship was very clearly supposed to be the normandy. There was normandy stencilling everywhere, there was normandy in the computer controls, normandy on the walls. Normandy SR-2.

Cerberus.

It was not the original normandy, it was Cerberus' normandy. Cerberus on the walls, cerberus on the computer controls, cerberus stencilling everywhere.

After a brief but mildly frustrating excursion into the service level, as the result of his over-estimating the distance down to the forward battery, he finally made his way through the ship—through the crew quarters, for that matter—to the gun controls.

Finally.

He stepped into the quiet, red-lit room, leaving all the people behind him. There were quite a few people. Human people. Hm.

Hmmm.

Cerberus, the anarchistic, raging, almost totally unhinged pro-human terrorist group intent on turning the human race into the supreme member of the alliance—perhaps on supplanting the alliance entirely. They did not seem, in spite of all their propaganda and cautiously worded public statements, to herald a new dawning era of enlightenment and mutual prosperity. He'd seen things done on distant planets, done by cerberus in the name of humanity, that should not be done to anyone, or anything.

It was done, of course, constantly—not just by humans, by every race. It was done by criminals, pirates and psychopaths, unethical researchers, cults, murderers. Basically, it was done by the people he'd sworn to put behind bars, and had spent a considerable portion of his career-oriented life trying to do. Later on, he'd stopped worrying about the bars, and started trying to put them in coffins. That, he sometimes thought, might not be the best way to solve the problem, but it was the only one he could see, near the end, and the only one that consistently worked.

The point was he was against it, and now here was Shepard, in the middle of these people, doing their missions, wearing their armour and eating their meals.

It upset him.

He knew what she was trying to tell him, of course, when she told him that they were listening to her. She meant that they didn't trust her, and that they knew she didn't trust them. She was trying to tell him that she was more aware of what was going on than she'd said, and that he didn't need to worry, but…

but…

but nothing, really. He sighed, and walked up to the gun controls. She'd always known what to do. She'd always known how to move the situation the right way, how to move people the right way.

She was a lot more devious than anyone would give her credit for, to be honest.

He breathed a brief laugh. So many times she seemed so incredibly naive and uneducated about the state of the universe. Sticking to weird old ideologies, and sometimes seeming to choose almost deliberately difficult paths, just for the sake of principle, but then, after all the idealistic monologuing and all the appeals to the natural goodness of people in the face of all evidence, sometimes, sometimes…

Sometimes Garrus would see her smile, in a way that didn't seem quite honest to him. A little grin would crumpled up the corners of her mouth at an inappropriate time, her eyes would squeeze up in delight at a private joke, and he would wonder just how hard she thought about the words she spoke, and just how much thought she put into words that seemed on the surface so blithe and ingenuous. She'd had the galaxy wrapped around her little finger—to coin the term—and Garrus was sure she knew it, every inch.

For all that, he had never doubted her, and now that he thought about it now, it'd never even occurred to him that he might be one of the people under her strange spell. She'd always been honest with him, he'd felt. Always…

She was always taking him on missions, always wanting his opinion on everything. It wasn't that he wasn't capable of rising to the occasion, of course; most of her dependence on him was on account of their time in the field, and, he hoped, her respect for his tactical experience.

He hoped. It would have been a tremendous blow to his ego if she didn't actually respect him in combat, but she seemed to weigh his opinions. She would argue with him, listen to him, nod, shake her head. She would act on his advice, and he would act on hers. It had always seemed like a strong bond between soldiers, who trusted each other.

But then she left.

And now…

He had to trust her. He wanted to trust her. He had trusted her back then, and he had to trust her now, didn't he…?

Chakwas had said that Shepard was the same person, and, well, who knew, Chakwas could very easily be on the payroll of Cerberus in more ways than one, but something about what she said stuck with him.

"She hasn't changed," Chakwas had said, "You have. You might not like it."

She did seem very much the same. Same old Shepard, even under the new scars and new armour…

…Chakwas was right though, Garrus realized, he didn't like it. To tell the truth, he still wasn't entirely sure what either of them were doing in this end of space. Shepard with Cerberus, and he with Shepard.

It was, he reflected, less than a day ago he'd been waiting to die in an empty shell of a building, an empty shell of a man. All the people he'd killed, after Shepard had… had died. He didn't think he'd ever recover. He fell out of spectre training, he fell out of police work, he fell out of… of life. He'd ceased to be a good son, a good friend, a good turian, a… anything.

He'd been so heart-broken when she'd left him there in the citadel, when she went off to die above some frozen ball of junk in the end of space, destroyed by an unknown monster in an ignominious and lonely death.

There was a nervous chill with that memory. He felt a prickle on his neck.

He shuddered, and promptly began to busy himself with the gun's interface. He always felt it was best to recalibrate a gun when you took over its maintenance—it helped you know where you stood. Even if the previous engineer had done a five-star job, actually getting in there and completing the adjustments yourself helped you get a feel for the shape of the barrel, for the weft and the warp of it, the little electromagnetic snags, the imperfections.

A good gunnery officer was one who had taken apart his gun and put it back together at least twenty times, who knew it inside and out, and in the case of a flagship point cannon—where taking it apart would be ungainly and putting it back together again would be impossible outside of drydock—calibrating it was the next best thing.

He looked at the broad, desk-like interface.

A pair of Javelin torpedo pods, on the lower composite wings.

A Parrott front-point ezo slug accelerator, six meters long.

25 GARDIAN contact points, in a network of 9 discreet alignments.

4 Lamnius remote triple-barrelled cannons, for anti-personnel sweeps. Turian-made, he thought with a little pride.

Turian and human, just like the old Normandy. Not really, though. This one was made by Cerberus, and he was sure no Turians had actually been involved in the project. Still, the design testified to the skill of Turian engineers.

Had the old Normandy really been destroyed..? Was Shepard's cover, he assumed it had been her cover, really that important that she needed people to believe she'd been dead? The thought of the Normandy, that beautiful, sleek, broad, powerful ship—sitting on some planet at the end of space, burned out and irrecoverable, made him…

Angry. The nervous chill came back. She had to destroy the Normandy to keep her cover for… Cerberus?

He was confused. He didn't understand where she'd gone those two years in space, why she needed the world to believe she'd died—why she couldn't have trusted him, couldn't have said—

The nervousness turned into panic, and Garrus reacted, stomping down the rising torrent of emotions, like someone trying to put out a campfire that had gotten out of control. Oh, spirits, what was happening to him?

He blinked and fluttered his plates, and calmed himself down again. He did not have the… attention-span to cope with whatever it was that he was going through right now. He would deal with it later.

He brought up the interface for the Parrott and looked at the small table of obscure-looking romanic acronyms. HLM, TNL, TRM, HHG, CTI. English, of course. This was a human ship, after all. His eyepiece seamlessly translated for him into palaven equivalents, but he had long-since learned to recognize the foreign acronyms and numerals. He could calibrate a gun in almost any language.

He looked at the first table of data.

TGM it said, and then:

0.004512, 0.002110, 0.000134 :: β -0.00021 return

0.004441, 0.002101, 0.000133

0.004470, 0.002001, 0.000500

WEFT WARP SHEAR PITCH YAW SIG ERROR BOSON

TEMP NOISE BUZZ DRIFT CAVITATE

He frowned. At this point, he had no idea what any of that signified. He understood what it MEANT, of course. None of the errors were lit up, and the numbers looked good—but he really had no way of knowing what caused this unmitigated success. It could be a freak result, it could be a careful adjustment to cover for a grievous flaw in the gun's manufacture, it could just be because no-one had fired it in a long time.

He poked a button on the touch screen. A prompt appeared asking him if he wanted to begin a new calibration set.

He poked another button 'yes'. A table of new buttons cascaded across the screen.

This was it. This was what he knew how to do. Garrus suddenly felt warm and comfortable, and fell into the rote—brought through training and experience—as quickly as someone who had woken up from a nap might fall into the rote of walking.

He sank into a revery over the controls, letting his trained mind process and filter through the information presented to him as the rest of his mind—wearied by months of paranoia, responsibility, and ragged, on-edge military functionality—finally rested.

He stood in silence for quite some time, working carefully with the computer until he finished calibrating the Parrott, and saved the settings.

The terminal began to echo text to him as the script executed.

EXEC -GLU c69023x GACANNON,0,0,1,4 (Parrott)

Compiling...

He felt a satisfied smile tug at his face, but only briefly—it died on his mandibles, leaving a grim smirk, which began to fade away. He looked around, suddenly aware that he needed to sit down.

Sorting bits

SIG INTERRUPT

SHUT DOWN

His gaze settled on a crate. He stepped rigidly over to it, and sat down. He leaned back, slowly, gingerly, until his spine contacted the wall behind him. He relaxed, and sank back the rest of the way with a groan. His entire body hurt. Every last inch of it. Even his claws hurt. Dr. Chakwas was probably right, he thought. He shouldn't have gotten up, but…

FLASHING GUN MASTER BOX. PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS.

He felt better, for having done it. He wouldn't have been able to sleep in the medical bay, it wasn't… a good place to be. Not a problem with bay itself, obviously—the medical bay was fine, and a good soldier learned to sleep anywhere, wherever he could, but… Garrus knew that he had needed to see the ways this new ship was like and—and very unlike—the Normandy. He'd needed to get up, to touch reality, to know he wasn't insane. He needed to see Shepard.

He closed his eyes, and listen to the warm rush of the console fans, he felt the thrum of the engine in his feet. Just for a while, maybe, the Universe was okay.

BOOT

It was… very good to be back in a star ship, any starship, even if it wasn't the Normandy(and it wasn't, not really). It was good to make use of older skills, skills Garrus hadn't used in a while; to feel the learned, stately path of his hands across the console. The gun had been in immaculate condition, of course, but it felt great to make just that extra bit sure; to do it yourself.

Writing Receipt ( )

RECEIPT MOVED TO MASTER

SENDING RECEIPT...

It felt good to make use of a skill that didn't have grisly, gratuitous, intensely personal death attached to it. Garrus hadn't realized how grating and unnerving it felt to make use of his more violent skillset for an extended period of time.

A tremendous relief rested in his mind, and Garrus closed his eyes.

Returning registry code.

Done!

He heard the console chime, and smiled again.

All tactical systems online.

Garrus fell asleep.