Having served on a handful of turian warships during his military service, followed by time on the Normandy, Garrus was unused to the slow pace and monotony of public travel. Military vessels always had first clearance for the relays and the waiting endured by the commercial flights grated on his almost nonexistent nerves. An almost two day layover on an Alliance controlled orbital station gave Garrus a chance to rent time at a holographic firing range, forcing himself to put round after round into various computer generated targets until his hands ached with clenching the pistol grip so tightly. Despite the physical end emotional tole of the practice, by the time the call went out to board the next shuttle, his shots were steady and true and the targets no longer wore achingly familiar faces.
As the trip progressed, the shuttles got consecutively smaller, and the passengers more degenerate and desperate looking. Garrus shared the limited space on the final shuttle with a sullen asari maiden, a puffing volus who smelled inexplicably like fried onions, and a sour human girl who's constant jaw movement confused Garrus until he remembered Ashley Williams had once told him that humans enjoyed masticating flavored resins. Listening to the volus wheeze out horrendous pick-up lines to the frustrated asari got tedious after the first half hour, and Garrus finally cranked up the music files he had uploaded to his visor, relishing the throb of the powerful beat in his aural membranes as it drowned out the tedium.
There was no customs on Omega, just the usual riffraff milling around the dilapidated public docks, hoping to sideline any potentially profitable passengers, or hawking various wares in a cacophony of shrill voices. It was the smell of the place that brought Garrus up short, the familiar scent of too many people in too small a space, the thick reek from the street vendors selling an assortment of unappetizing offerings, refuse overlaid with the hot metal of overheating engines and the sour smell of old death. Not realizing that he had simply frozen in place in the walkway, Garrus jumped when the resin-chewing human female blundered into him. Turning to offer an apology, he blinked in surprise when she cut him off with a snarled suggestion to engage in an activity that was physiologically impossible for turians... humans must be considerably more flexible than Garrus had thought if they were capable of such a feat.
As he ignored the propositions from a multitude of dull-eyed prostitutes, it became apparent to Garrus that finding anyone on the sprawling station was going to be more difficult than he had originally thought. The network of informants that he and his team had coerced, convinced or bullied into aiding them would have sunk back into Omega's slums as quickly as water disappears into sand. A small bar had always been a meeting place, but its neon facade was now cracked and broken, and a batarian was loudly hawking illegal weapons modifications from behind the heat warped bar.
Garrus wasn't even sure where he was going until he stepped of the second bullet riddled, and graffiti stained tramway, and the familiar skyline and street layout hit him like a slap in the face. He had consciously meant to avoid this sector, but somehow, deep down, Garrus had known that he would have to end up here.
It hadn't changed much, the filthy walls and desperate people proving the futility of anything he had tried to accomplish. In the shadows of a nearby door, a tired asari hiked her tattered dress up her thin thighs, when she got no reaction she pulled a prepubescent child into view with her, tilting the girls face up for Garrus' approval. Feeling sick he hurried away, trying to ignore the human who sauntered over in his place. The slumping buildings were the same as he remembered them, cheaply constructed, scored with burns and gang symbols, some residences merely gaping black holes in the facades. A mixture of loiterers, street merchants and gang enforcers cluttered the streets, idling in alleys and doorways.
Garrus recognized one of the street vendors, an elderly human man who sold strings of looted electrical conduits, fuses and security terminals. For a long moment Garrus was sure the man would recognize him, he and Erash had bought enough conduit cable once to set up a basic security system...but the cloudy gaze skated over his face without even a pause or a flash of recognition. Catching a glimpse of his own visage in the reflective surface of a terminal, Garrus wasn't surprised that the vendor hadn't recognized him, there was little left of the brash, bright young vigilante who had come to Omega full of promise and bravery.
There were a few other familiar faces in the crowd, but nobody, even the hard faced Blue-suns operatives slouched on a corner recognized him. Padding through the throng, Garrus morbidly wondered how many people had been part of the screaming crowd who had cheered the local mercs on in their brutal retaliation against him and his team. Had that human woman laughed when Garm had held him down, had that muscular batarian helped throw the brutalized bodies of his friends down some abandoned eezo mineshaft? Had they mourned, even in some small way, the deaths of people who had died in an attempt to help them; or had they simply shrugged off the violence and degradation they had witnessed, and gone about eking a living from the tattered slums.
Shaking his head to clear that particular line of thinking from his mind, Garrus turned his attention to the array of merchandise, mostly stolen, that was on sale. It hadn't taken long for him to add a security hacking module to his omni-tool, first paying a few extra credits to have it fully scrubbed of its former owner's identity. A military talon knife was now tucked inside the wrist guard of his armour, the sleek, crescent blade a familiar weight against his skin. Garrus, like all turians, had carried one since his military days... the last he had seen of his it had been dwarfed in Garm's cruel hands as the krogan had used it to cut rocket shrapnel from his mangled shoulder. A street cart selling assorted foods smelled surprisingly appetizing, and Garrus bought a few skewers of some manner of spiced meat from a tired looking turian cook.
Against his better judgment, Garrus added a common narcotic stimulant to his purchase, a request so common it got little to no reaction from the vendor. The 'everglow' as it was called stung in his eyes as it absorbed into retinal tissues, a familiar irritation from missions he and his squad could never have managed without a few doses of this and a handful of stim chasers. The burn faded quickly, and Garrus could feel the mental and physical fatigue of the last few days ease.
Chewing idly on his food, Garrus passed the majority of the crowds. As he got closer to the end of this particular sector the less people he saw, and the more disrepair was evident. Where the bridge he had worked so hard to defend began, cobbled together wooden barricades had been used to blockade the street. Scrawled signs in a few different dialects warned to keep out, that the area was unstable, or as one literary vorcha had written 'stay oot-go way or dy!'
Various gang symbols had been painted on the rough prefabricated sheets of wood, although something appeared to be overlayed across the entire barricade, and when Garrus backed away to get a view of the entire thing he stopped short, blinking in surprise. The sprawling symbol was crudely done, as if the graffiti had been done in haste or anger...or both. Garrus ran his fingers across his face, even roughly done, the symbol was as familiar as his own skin; the question now was why anyone would paint his colony markings over gang symbols.
The paint was newer than the symbols beneath it, although it had been there long enough to be slightly dulled with a patina of grime, so probably about a month old, Garrus reasoned. Was it possible that Butler's traitor wife had done this? Garrus tried to imagine a pregnant, terrified woman trekking half way across the station to do what?...paint over some gang symbols as an expression of defiance, grief, guilt?
"Unlikely," Garrus muttered to himself, casting a glance over his shoulder to make sure he hadn't been followed. The barricade was surprisingly sturdy, hardly even creaking as he hauled himself over the top, twisting to land lightly on his feet in the dim light of the other side.
With the exception of a couple of half grown vorcha squalling over refuse, the area behind the barriers seemed completely deserted. Walls pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes bore a silent testimony to the conflict that had raged there; and in places greasy slashes of crusted black marked where countless mercs had bled out. The strategic exposure of the bridge made Garrus nervous, all to aware of how easy it was to put a bullet in a target from the vantage of the balconies of the apartment complex. Keeping as low as he could, Garrus loped quickly across, following the cover provided by the rubble. Gaping holes in the street itself itself provided tattered windows into a vertiginous drop to the next sector.
A lot of Garrus' time in captivity had faded into an unclear montage, with moments of startling clarity; Lanastia had called it post traumatic memory displacement, an automatic psychological survival mechanism. Certain scents, sounds or situations could trigger a wave of memories in such excruciating detail that Garrus had morbidly wondered how a drell, with their perfect recall, would cope with the situation. Most of the time, Garrus' memories were like white noise, an almost imperceptible montage of torment in the back of his mind, so much a part of him now as to be almost unnoticeable. Here, standing on the battle scored street staring at the debris littered courtyard where the nightmare had begun, his memory had never seemed so clear.
It seemed so much smaller without the howls and cheers of the mercs leaning over the balcony, and the bone rattling roar of the gunship overhead. A shabby, filthy atrium cluttered with broken masonry and slathered in graffiti. Garrus couldn't stop himself from looking for the stains he knew would be there, the trampled, faded whorls dried to a crusted black all that remained of the friends who had died there. The earlier meal made a violent reappearance as Garrus went to his knees, bile burning in his throat as he wretched, shivering with nausea.
'Its not fair!' Garrus wanted to rage, scream out his anger like some untrained, unblooded youngling. 'They had done everything right, they had been making a difference, and this just wasn't fucking fair!' Rocking back on his haunches, Garrus fought to control his labored breathing, watching dark spots dance in his vision as he struggled to relax, ignoring the flash of distorted pain through the cybernetic implants in his jaw as he gritted his teeth. Lanastia would tell him to get off his ass and face this, to, as she would say "deal with the now, and leave the past exactly where it is." Garrus strongly suspected Shepard would share similar sentiments.
Levering himself to his feet, Garrus tried to ignore the way his legs were shaking, and forced himself to pace resolutely across the courtyard and into the dilapidated apartment complex. Inside, the complex was hardly recognizable. The stairs were half crumbled, and ground alarmingly under Garrus' feet as he gingerly picked his was up the accent; anything that could have been looted had been, panels were missing from the walls, showing bare struts beneath~stripped even of the electrical wiring. Those damned planters that Sensat had insisted on dragging in were still there, although the lovingly tended plants were now little more than seared black stalks. The gunship damage was at its worst on this level, the artillery cannon had shredded everything, leaving gaping holes in nearly every surface. Water staining showed where the water mains had vented their contents down the walls and across the floor.
The blast radius from the rocket that had been the death knell of the conflict was easily recognizable, and Garrus had no difficulty in remembering the booming voice of Tarik over the gunship's loudspeakers that preceded the burning impact of searing pain as the rocket impacted. The explosive impact had thrown him backwards like a rag doll. The first thing he had seen as he wavered on the edge of consciousness had been Butler, his face pale and scared, leaning over him as he pressed a medigel soaked pressure bandage against his throat. Garrus had tried to ask what the situation was, but it just came out as a pained, wet gasp as he struggled to breath through the blood flooding his trachea and lungs. There had been yelling, cursing, the harsh rattle of gunfire, Butler had disappeared~and Garrus had drifted further from the conflict. Breathing had become more difficult, each labored gasp seemed to take too much effort, finally the muscles that allowed him to inhale simply would not respond and his eyes had drifted shut as his breath stilled. Life had reasserted itself in a wave of agony as something heavy came down on the mangled remnants of his shoulder, and his body had spasmed as an involuntary gasp forced a small amount of air back into his lungs. As his eyes had flickered hazily open, Garrus had come face to face with the leering visage of Garm, the bloodpack leader.
"Well hello Archangel," the massive krogan had leered, patting Garrus on the face with mock concern, even as he ground his boot harder against his shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm not going to let you die," the grin got impossibly wide, "there's a medic on the way, just for you~ see, you and I have some unfinished business."
Shaking his head, Garrus stepped past the blasted out section, somehow it was strange to think that, in a twisted way he owed Garm his life. Sure, the warlord had only dragged him back into existence to act out his grim revenge; but that didn't change the fact that he would have bled out on the floor of a dingy apartment without his interference. Shepard would have never known...And somehow after reading the documents Liara had provided, and learning the bloody details of Garm's somewhat ironic fate, it was easier to be objective of the krogan's role in his survival.
A slight flash of color in a shadowed corner caught Garrus' attention, an incongruous collection of brightly colored objects clustered against the far wall. Padding closer, Garrus unconsciously flared his mandibles in surprise as he recognized the same painted representation of his colonial markings above the odd collection. Crouching down, Garrus stared curiously: tapered wax that he recognized as human candles rested next to a small, delicately made bowl, the ashes and oil crusted inside marked it as asari memory urn. A curiously crude statue of a batarian goddess shared space with a string of turian prayer flags; and throughout there were photos.
Carefully picking up a photo, old enough to be crumbling around the edges, Garrus stared at the image of an asari matron with the young child in her arms, recognizing a young Melanis by the lavender markings around her wide, somber eyes. Settling down, Garrus scooped up a handful of sheets, recognizing a girl Sidonis and Melanis had smuggled from a brothel onto an earthbound transport, her smile was bright in the photo, a simple message 'I made it home, thank you!' was scrawled across the bottom. Many were like that: oddly touching messages from people they had helped. Others were more painful: a shockingly young Sidonis looking stiff and uncomfortable in a recruits uniform, Weaver, looking happier than Garrus had ever seen him, with his arms around the waist of a smiling woman.
Near the bottom a single image made Garrus' breath catch, it was slightly faded, a white fold line across the middle suggesting it had been carried for a long time. Garrus could remember the day it had been taken, during the first leave he had been given since beginning his military service; Sol was hanging over his shoulder, jade eyes bright with humor, mandibles spread in her trademark grin.
"Solana"...Garrus traced a thumbclaw over the familiar angles of his sister's face, missing her and home with a sudden sharp ache. He hadn't known how to even begin to explain the last several months to her, so he had taken the cowards way out and not even contacted her, or his parents. In the maelstrom of recovery, home had been such a distant possibility that Garrus hadn't really even missed it; but now, sitting in the ruins of his life he longed after it. Longed for the honest heat of Palaven's sun, the bright, clean light that reflected off the towering Cipritine skyline.
Biting down on the mournful keen that shivered in his throat, Garrus was disgusted with himself, spirits, how old was he to cry over being homesick! Heaving a sigh, he leaned back against the wall beside the makeshift memorial, unfolding his sniper rifle and laying it across his knees.
The narcotic he had purchased was too weak, and Garrus could feel the creeping exhaustion working its way through his limbs again. The lassitude of a too-long day asserting itself. The silence in the ruined building was almost oppressive, the only respite the distant roar of machinery from another level. Any movement stirred the jewel bright prayer flags, and Garrus focused on their languid shifting until his eyes closed and he slipped into an uneasy doze.