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Chapter Title: The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep. ~E. Joseph Cossman
A dark shape passed over the window like a rock rolled before a tomb. Shepard shuddered violently, confused by the image, confused by her reaction to it. And then realization dawned.
The gunship.
Garrus must have realized it, too. He was scrabbling back for cover even as she drew breath to warn him.
She wasn't fast enough, and neither was he.
A hail of bullets thudded over him.
The room went silent, as if sound had been severed from it. The silence grasped her by the throat like an old nemesis; the death of sound, the sound of death.
Garrus righted himself, staggered toward cover.
Sound returned with a roar, a sound worse than silence. Worse than death...well, worse than her death, at least.
"No, Garrus!" she screamed, or she tried to, but she couldn't breathe. There was no air. Her throat was tight...with fear or grief...maybe both...her chest burned.
Time slowed.
Garrus fell to the floor, but the floor was moving, spiraling out from under her feet. She was falling...falling...lost...
She'd failed. Again. She didn't want to live with the consequences.
And she wasn't about to give Tarak the satisfaction of allowing him to live with them, either. He might have defeated them; he might have killed Garrus, and destroyed her fledgling sense of surviving self, but he hadn't won. And he wasn't going to win. She wasn't about to let him. She wasn't going to fail Garrus that far. She wasn't going to fail him again. Not ever again.
Completely oblivious to Miranda's attempt to reach out and pull her to safety, Shepard vaulted up and over the couch offering her and Garrus some poor cover with one hand, ripping the missile launcher from its slot in her armor with the other. Her feet hadn't even touched the ground when she began to fire, pounding off four shots in quick succession without much caring where-or what-they hit.
The gunship broke into a ball of fire, shrapnel pounded off the bridge and walls, rained into the windows.
Shepard later discovered she had slapped the missile-launcher back into place through sheer habit...she might have thrown the it aside for all she knew at the time...She skidded over to Garrus, dropping down beside him.
He was still, so still.
Emotion crushed in on her from all sides. She felt suffocated.
She had some vague idea of closing his eyes in benediction.
She reached out to touch him in farewell as he hadn't allowed her to touch him in greeting.
Her hand was shaking.
Some small part of her that passed for rational observed that would make it considerably harder to put a bullet in her own cold, dead, brain. The rest of her didn't even register her own irritation. She swayed slightly, dizzy. Her fingers dipped, brushed warm, rough plating.
Garrus gasped, a deep gurgling breath.
"Garrus!" she cried, pleading, exulting, commanding.
He opened an eye, his hand grasping reflexively for the barrel of his rifle. In that moment, one small, pain-dulled blue orb held all eternity.
Miranda crowded in close, running her omni-tool over the turian, keying in the most efficacious applications of medi-gel as quickly as she could.
"Garrus," Shepard breathed. "Stay with me." Her omni-tool glowed to life. "Joker," she rasped. "We are in need of emergency medical evac."
Jacob pressed in close, too, studying the turian for the best places to apply pressure and help slow the bleeding. "He looks bad," Jacob murmured to Miranda.
Shepard's head snapped back and she glared in a way that made them both stiffen. "Now, Joker," Shepard hissed.
She didn't hear Joker's reply.
Jacob had to bump her with his shoulder before she noticed the shuttle had arrived, hovering at the window with its door ajar.
Doctor Chakwas was leaning out, offering them a low, thin stretcher.
She wasn't sure if she helped her team Garrus onto the stretcher or not. She was barely aware of shifting to the side a bit, just enough to let Miranda activate the stretcher's hover capabilities. Miranda and Jacob guided the stretcher to the window. Shepard followed, her whole body strangely numb.
"Garrus," she murmured, twining her fingers through his around the barrel of his rifle until they were all inextricably entangled.
"Garrus?" Chakwas repeated. She would never have recognized him. In spite of years in service to the Alliance-she hadn't really learned to easily differentiate one turian from another, but she'd spent a lot of time patching holes in the hide of one Garrus Vakarian. She should have recognized him. "He doesn't look good."
"Tell me about it," Jacob agreed as the shuttle door opened. "And she doesn't look much better," he muttered darkly.
Startled, Doctor Chakwas glanced up from her patient. And stared in surprise.
Shepard knew it was best to pick the person with the right skills for the job, then stand back and let them do it. She was standing back now; she didn't try to interfere, but even standing off to the side, she hovered.
And Shepard never hovered.
Her face was more drawn than Chakwas had ever seen it, and she had seen it after Shepard had taken some pretty terrible hits. Her previously faint scars were raw and livid, crackling under her pale skin, all but sparking where they intersected other lines, dull and silvery like the tracks of tears. The edges of Shepard's grey eyes were limned in red, the pupils so shiny they looked like the flare of an exploding drive core.
As Jacob moved the stretcher away from her, tugging Garrus' hand from her grasp, Shepard wound her hands together, pulling them in opposite directions with such unthinking violence Chakwas was afraid she would snap a finger.
Jacob looked past them both, to Miranda. Miranda gave him a nod in answer, a nod only someone who knew her as well as he did would recognize as a nod at all.
As Shepard emerged from the shuttle, following the stretcher almost blindly, Miranda reached out and touched her shoulder. Grasped her shoulder, actually. Firmly.
Shepard jumped. "Get away from me," she snapped, wheeling toward Miranda as if to strike. "Get..." She waved her arms in wildly, "over there. You-you-fixed me. So get over there and be of some use...fix...him..." Her head lulled forward and her eyebrows went up. Her eyes narrowed. betternnew..." she slurred fiercely, but heavily. For a moment it seemed as though she was about to say something else, then she slumped heavily into Miranda's arms.
Miranda eased her to the cargo bay floor with surprising gentleness. "Jacob, why don't you escort the Commander to her quarters?" She said almost conversationally as she slid the empty hypodermic injector back into her belt. "I'll accompany the doctor and her patient. I believe," she added, her voice cool with irony, "I'll...get over there and see if my skills might be of use."