Shepard was tired. It wasn't the kind of tired that can be repaired by rest, but a bone-deep, soul-sick kind of exhaustion that slithered through her body like worms in old meat. Too much loss, too much death, too many moments that should have happened-and yet never could built up in her bones like a slow poison. A deep resentment stirred in the back of her mind, the slow stir of anger that mirrored the worry that Garrus had voiced so long ago: nothing ever goes right, and I wanted...of all the things in the galaxy, I wanted this to go right.
The slab of concrete she was leaning up against seeped cold into Shepard's back as she watched a sinking crimson sun arc through the smoky haze of endless fires. Part of her wanted to reach up and grab the sun itself, bring time to a halt and just stay here forever.
Garrus lay heavy against her, his head an achingly familiar weight as he nestles in under her chin. One arm thrown awkwardly across her midriff, talon still fisted tightly around the ruined visor frame, steel talons tightening and relaxing against the metal with a soft rhythmic grinding. Shepard passes her hand softly over the grafted metal of his fringe, trying to ignore his occasional convulsive jerk as waves of dark energy trigger an involuntary muscle spasm.
Shepard tells him of how the war ended, the plans the races have to rebuild the relay network. Of the mad scramble to set up industrial greenhouses to force-grow the food needed to feed the two-hundred thousand Hierarchy troops still in orbit. Garrus had given an odd metallic chirp when Shepard told him of Eve's pregnancy, and how, once the comm-network had been repaired she had announced to a startled Wrex that she was carrying twins. Even in the horror that surrounded her, Shepard couldn't keep the smile from her face as she recounted Wrex's gruff excitement and pride; fatherhood would suit him well. Desperate words poured out of her, each one buying her a few more seconds to not think about the cold weight of the pistol clasped in her right hand. A few more seconds to close her eyes and imagine warm sand and the soft roll of waves, before the cold reality of the situation raised its ugly head again.
As shadows lengthened, a turian patrol flight passed overhead, the fading light flickering over their arc shapes like sunlight on water. Garrus tracks their flight with a fixed gaze, rasping a sad sort of keen from deep in his chest; and Shepard tells him about his family. She tells him they are safe, evacuated to the turian colony on Invictus; but she cannot tell him how his sister's shrill keen of grief echoed through the comm-unit as his father stoically thanks her for the call, grief blurring the shaking harmonics of his voice.
Eventually her voice trails away, and they cling to each other in silence until Garrus presses an insistent talon over the dreaded weight of the pistol, pressing into her hand hard enough to sting.
"I know" she whispers "I know….oh god"
The controls of her omnitool feel like second nature, as Shepard flicks through the menu with shaking fingers. Every movement feels like she is struggling through tar, every nerve of her being resenting each terrible twitch of her fingers. It feels like the ultimate betrayal...the ultimate mercy and she gasps back a shuddering sob as the slight tingle of the overload charge builds. She can't look at his face, see her own terrible guilt reflected in that blank stare, so she folds her hand gently over Garrus's eyes, pressing her lips to his fractured browridge for those few, precious seconds before the charge hits.
Garrus arches in her arms and screams a grating shriek as the electricity arches into the optics and nodes in his skull, disrupting the implant connections and dragging down the enforced kinetic shielding with a sizzle. As he lies, panting and dazed against her neck, Shepard hoarsely whimpers "I love you" before she presses the muzzle of her pistol against the now unshielded gap in his sternum plating and pulls the trigger.
"Shhh, I've got you" Shepard folds her arms around him then, rocking him slightly as he groans a soft babble of unintelligible feedback. He grasps uselessly at her, shivering as his blood slicks her Alliance uniform with dark dextro-blue. "You wait for me remember" Shepard can barely recognize her own voice, "y…you're buying, so you better wait"
He nods weakly, rough bone edges scraping against the skin of her clavicle, leaving a smeared streak of ash and blood. "Neevvv'r aa…looonnne?" he rasps lowly, the cybernetic glow of his eyes starting to dim.
"No" Shepard agrees softly "you're never alone." She cradles his ruined, twisted body in numb arms until he goes fully limp against her, and the hellish light flickers out in his tortured eyes. She lets herself scream then, a wordless howl of grief that tears at her throat until she can taste blood in her mouth and spots dance across her vision. She stays there until his blood has dried to a sticky black on her skin. Stays until the primal grief has settled into a lump of cold pain in her guts and the stars wheel across the sky toward a grey London dawn.
Shepard buries him in the ruins of an old brick building. She wishes it was somewhere better than this~somewhere warm; but private burials are a luxury denied to the survivors of the reaper invasion, and this somehow seems more dignified than the mass pit graves she could have consigned him to. Her hands are frozen and raw by the time she has settled the last brick in the makeshift cairn, but the pain is distant, as if it were happening to someone else. She wishes she could say something, but standing over the grave of her best friend, her only love, the words twisted and died in her throat. She mouths 'forgive me' when her voice fails her, and forces her aching body to turn away.
She looks back only once, pressing the piece of his visor against her cracked lips as the pallid sickly light of sunrise slants across her eyes. "Just wait a little longer" she whispers, "just a little longer, then I'll meet you at that bar."