Process of Elimination

There were only a few seconds left until Shepard was dead. Everything would have been for nothing. The pain, the struggling. The lives already lost to the Shadow Broker's minions.

Could Garrus keep living in a galaxy without Shepard? He'd done it once. He didn't want to find out if he could do it again.

Shepard was on her knees, surrounded by her guards, as she had been at every location. Their weapons were drawn, ready to fire. But they weren't aiming at Garrus and Kaidan. No, the guns were pointed right at Shepard.

"Kaidan! Barrier!" All he needed was a few more seconds. She was so close. She was within reach. Out of the corner of his eye, Garrus saw Kaidan flash brilliant blue, giving him the okay to open fire. Without fear of hurting Shepard, Garrus pulled the trigger.

The clock hit zero. Whatever hostages hadn't been saved would surely be dead. Except for one. Kaidan was still able to keep up the barrier, but only barely. Looks like we're going into overtime. The would-be executioners were firing at the biotic barrier, chipping it away, while Garrus took them down one by one. One of the agents took the initiative, realizing Kaidan was the source of the barrier, and fired at him.

It didn't take much to scatter Kaidan's energy. A couple of rounds spattered over his chest plate and suddenly, Shepard was completely vulnerable.

And then, just like that, she was dead. A shotgun blast to the face, and the great Commander Shepard was just another dead body. "Fall back!" their leader ordered, waving his hand in a circling motion to indicate that they were moving out. Garrus gunned him down. None of these bastards were escaping. They killed Shepard, and he was going to kill them.

He managed to kill three more before the assault rifle ran out of ammo. "Dammit!" he yelled. He hurled the gun at the nearest agent. It thunked off his shoulder blade, but didn't stop him. Garrus whipped out his pistol, his trusty Phalanx, and squeezed off as many rounds as he could. A few ricocheted off the glass of their getaway vehicle, another gunship, before they were gone. The gun clicked empty. Garrus pulled the trigger several more times. Click click click. The pistol fell from his hand, echoing loudly in the penthouse lobby.

Slowly, Garrus turned his head to look at where Shepard's body lay. No. She couldn't be dead. She was invincible. She was supposed to stop the Reapers and save the galaxy. She was supposed to stay at his side forever. Impossible. But deep down, even Garrus knew that she was only human. And that was why he loved her. She wasn't some big war hero, ears too full of her own glory to hear anyone else's cries for help. She was Shepard, his Shepard, who was loud and aggressive and accepting and willing to lay her life down for any one of her friends in a heartbeat. And now, looking at her ruins, Garrus saw just how fragile she really was.

Kaidan was already kneeled next to her. She was still warm. Red liquid pooled underneath the black sack that covered her head. The smell of blood was so thick that he could almost taste it. Gently, he covered her hand with his own. So this was how she met her end. Finally his commander would be able to find peace, to relinquish her burdens once and for all. She deserved it, too. More than anyone, she'd fought for this galaxy. She'd been so passionate, so unrelenting in her pursuit of justice and protection of innocent life. And now, this. Kaidan entertained the thought that she was up there, wherever "there" was, having a beer with Ashley and at long last being free of the weight of the galaxy. It was a nice image. Better than the reality that he was currently faced with: the reality that, even though he'd been forced to before, Kaidan had no idea how he was supposed to go on living without her.

Garrus felt his knees wobble as he approached Kaidan and his dead commander. He was tired and wounded, and it felt like he had run out of reasons to keep fighting. Every step was a battle, every breath drawn, a labor. He almost couldn't bring himself to move any closer when he noticed just how much damage that shotgun blast to the face had done. Garrus quickly averted his eyes from that spot. Something on her ribcage caught his eye. It was a long jagged scar, just recently healed. Wait a sec. I recognize that scar.

Filled with new purpose, Garrus got down next to her and ran one gloved hand over her skin. He couldn't see any cybernetics. The Shadow Broker could have covered them up artificially, but...

Garrus pulled a knife out of his boot. He was going to cut her wrist restraints, when he realized that there were none. That's not right. Shepard's a biotic. They wouldn't let her hands free like this. Kaidan looked up at the movement. The knife hovered over her bare skin.

"What are you doing?" Kaidan asked, eyeing the knife.

Garrus explained, "I've never seen this scar before. This one here." He gestured to it with the knife. "And I can't see the cybernetics. They have sort of an orange glow."

"Don't you think that now that she's..." Kaidan couldn't bring himself to say it out loud. "Wouldn't they stop glowing?"

Garrus didn't know much about cybernetics, but he got the feeling that Kaidan was right. "In that case, there's only one way to find out."

Kaidan's hand shot out before Garrus could make the first incision. "That's going too far."

"She could still be out there! We need to know for sure," Garrus retaliated. His heart thrummed with the possibility. Shepard might be alive. We might be able to save her.

"I can't let you do that, Garrus. This was the very last location. None of the other living hostages were Shepard. She's dead, Garrus, whether this is her, which I'm pretty sure it is, or not," Kaidan replied. He didn't release Garrus's wrist. "You're not going to cut her open."

"Yes, I am."

"No, you're not."

Garrus couldn't afford to waste any more time arguing with Kaidan on a point he wasn't willing to budge on. He punched Kaidan in the side of the face with the hand that wasn't restrained. Kaidan oofed and fell back, giving Garrus just enough time to make a shallow incision...

Nothing. No cybernetics, no telltale Cerberus adjustments. The woman was, as Garrus expected, Officer Laurel Tracit, Nos Astra City Police. No relation to Commander Shepard at all except for the fact that her two daughters idolized her. Two motherless daughters. Garrus slipped the knife back into his boot. He'd orphaned those little girls. He hadn't saved Laurel the first time he saw her, back in the prisoner transport warehouse.

And now she was dead.

"You bastard!" Kaidan tackled Garrus into the ground, his fist snapping into his jaw.

"It's not her, Alenko!" he tried to yell, receiving an elbow in the teeth for his trouble. Kaidan wrestled his way to the top, pinning the turian beneath him.

"I can't believe you, of all people, would -"

"She's alive!" Garrus shouted. Kaidan hesitated. "She wasn't at any of the locations. No one's come across the Ardat-Yakshi yet, and she's practically Shepard's personal guard. They were never really going to kill her."

Once again, Kaidan remained silent, processing. After a moment, he spoke up. "If what you're saying is true, then this whole thing was a trap..."

"... and the Shepard look-alikes were the bait," Garrus affirmed.

Kaidan jumped to his feet, then gave Garrus a hand up. "Oh my God," he realized. "All this time, we've been playing right into their hands."

Garrus nodded grimly. That was the unfortunate truth. They'd all been so eager for some way to save Shepard that they didn't look too closely at the opportunity that they'd been presented with. But as long as she was alive, they'd keep looking.

"There's still time to get to her."

"How?" Kaidan asked. He'd doubted Garrus before, but the turian had a plan, and that was more than he could say for himself. While he couldn't agree with what he'd done to the hostage's body, he understood the reasons behind it.

Garrus jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Extra skycar. I'm guessing they thought more of them would get out of here alive."

"Well, they thought wrong."

There was a lone agent, badly wounded, trying to drag himself into the driver's seat of the skycar. Garrus advanced quickly, jerking the agent back by his helmet, tearing it off in the process. The face underneath was human.

"Oh, fuck," he whimpered. "Please, don't kill me. Take the car, I don't care. Just don't -"

"Shut up," Garrus growled. He gave the agent a hard shake, smacking him against the interior of the skycar. "Where are your pals headed?"

"Shit, I dunno, I -"

Garrus shook him again, this time much harder. "If you can't give me information, then you're more useful to me dead!" Kaidan went around to the other side of the skycar to wait by the passenger side door. Garrus would probably want to drive, anyway.

"Okay, okay! They're all gonna regroup at a warehouse in the Arsacid district." So that prisoner holding warehouse was the Shadow Broker's main base of operations on Illium. Well, in Nos Astra, at least.

"Then what?" Garrus demanded.

The agent looked apprehensive for a moment, but one look at Garrus and he knew his life was on the line. "We... we were gonna launch an all-out assault on the Normandy."

Spirits. Garrus couldn't believe he hadn't seen this coming. The Shadow Broker, or Kamala, or whoever was pulling the strings on this operation, had devised a way to lure nearly all the crew away from the Normandy so they could attack while its defenses were down. Garrus had to admit, the plan was perfect. They'd fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

While Garrus had initially planned on following the other gunships, it would do no use for just him and Kaidan to attack the warehouse. The two of them would be slaughtered. Besides, they had to get back to the Normandy to warn everyone and perhaps get together a preemptive strike. At the very least, they could get the Normandy out of harm's way. They were closer than ever to finding Shepard, and the Broker was trying to drive them off Illium. Hopefully they'd be able to get to her before that happened.

Sensing that he'd run out of useful information, the Shadow Broker agent asked, "You're gonna let me go, right?"

Garrus shook his head. "I can't risk that." He slid the knife out of his boot. "Besides, you killed that woman. You deserve to die."

The agent's expression twisted into a snarl. "Knife me if you're gonna, but don't pretend you're some kinda saint, Archangel."

Garrus leaned back, startled. The side of his knife was pressing into the human's throat, mangling his words somewhat, but he was pretty sure he'd heard what the agent said.

He gave a low, menacing chuckle. "Yeah, I heard about you, all right. You go around shooting whoever you want, making out like you're a big goddamn hero." He leaned forward, actually digging his flesh deeper into the knife. There was a shallow stripe of red. "You're just as bad as the rest of us."

"I kill scumbags like you, who kill innocents like her," Garrus said, seizing the agent by the front of his chest plate and jerking him in the late Officer Tracit's direction. "We are not the same." His voice was loaded with heated venom.

Another scorn and blood spattered laugh. "That's what you're afraid of, isn't it? Becoming like us. Well, I got news for you, buddy." He lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. The whites of his eyes shone, pupils darting back and forth as he searched his captor's eyes, as if there were something there that he needed to find. "The Shadow Broker, Blue Suns, Eclipse, Blood Pack, C-Sec, Cerberus: you're already one of us." Garrus slit his throat, kicked the lifeless body away from the door, and got in.

Garrus stared at the dashboard for a moment before saying, "We need to get back to the Normandy."

Kaidan slid into the passenger seat, then nodded. "I know... I heard." Garrus didn't say anything. Kaidan continued, "We're not like them, Garrus." More silence. "We're trying to do something good here."

Garrus turned to look at him, his sharp avian eyes piercing Kaidan's. "We're still killers."

"They kill innocent people, Garrus. People like Laurel, with daughters and -"

"Her blood is on my hands. I let her die."

"You didn't pull the trigger."

But I might as well have. "That's all any of us do, Alenko. We aim the guns and we pull the triggers." Kaidan wanted to tell him that death was a necessary part of what they were doing, and wasn't he willing to kill for Shepard, seeing as he'd done it before, but Garrus stopped him. "And if I have to pull the trigger a thousand more times before we get her back, then I will."

I'm sorry, Shepard. I'm not an angel or a saint. I know I don't always make the right decisions. But I'm going to bring you back, even if it kills me.