Sorry for the sudden chapter dump! I wanted to finish off the sections that had been posted before, and get on with the job of turning (yes, seriously) several hundred pages of hand written story into something legible and typed. So yup, this is the last chapter that anyone has ever seen~next post will be all new material. :)

And thanks to the people who pointed out that there was a weird paragraph break/scene change that didn't make sense. Apparently something went weird when I uploaded that & a few paragraphs were missing. Sorry about that, and thanks for the heads up!

"Ahh fucking hell...bloody fucking hell. " Shepard had never wanted to have this conversation, and the dread was tempered with guilt...guilt that she had never found the time to contact Garrus' family on his behalf. That somehow in all the desperation and heartbreak she had forgotten the depths of cruelty Warden Kuril and his subordinates were capable of. "Ok," Shepard muttered, resting her palm against Garrus cheek, rubbing her thumb over the sweep of tattoo under his eye. "Do you remember anything about what they told you on Purgatory?"

"Ye..esss," Garrus flicked his eyes to some point over Shepard's head. "Stand up, lie down, don't move, breathe, beg, open your mouth..."

"No, no," Shepard stilled the awful litany by tracking her hand back across the crest of his fringe, hating the way he twitched and stiffened as her fingers touched the shorn spine, even though the raw edges had long since healed. "I meant did they tell you why they did this?"

"Because it hurt?" The bafflement on Garrus' face was almost painful. "Why else did they do anything?"

"They..." Shepard's voice cracked and she cleared her throat and tried again, "they used it to taunt your father Garrus...it spurred him to a desperate search for you...and they found that...amusing."

Garrus jerked back from Shepard so fast he cracked the edge of his fringe against the glass of the fishtank, and backed away with a hiss of pain. "That's not true! If they did that he would've...he was a detective with C-sec, one of the best, he would have..."

"Found the video footage and tracked it to Omega, where everyone believed that Archangel was dead." Shepard kept her voice as gentle as she could but the effect was devastating, Garrus slumped to the floor, his head hanging listlessly to the side-a marionette with half his strings cut. There was a low groaning keen echoing in the back of his throat, an ugly tone of grief and a despair Shepard couldn't even begin to understand. Doing the only thing she could, Shepard sat beside him, pulling him gently into her arms, disturbed by his pliant lack of reaction as he limply sagged against her-head resting in her lap. "I'm so sorry Garrus, so sorry...I should have never let this get this far, but its going to be alright."

"Is it?" Garrus sounded unconvinced, "is it really?" He was silent for a long moment, so still that Shepard began to worry. "I don't know what to do now...please Shepard, tell me what I should do?"

"I don't know," Shepard gulped against the lump in her throat, hating-after all the progress he had made over the last months-how absolutely fucking broken Garrus sounded. How totally lost, like every foundation they had built up had been yanked from under him. "I don't know, but I can tell you that the merc's are rallying on Omega again, and this time Aria is backing them...we don't get him out of there and they'll kill him, Garrus."

Garrus didn't say anything after that, but Shepard could feel the shivering tension in him. Eventually he pulled away, silent and distant, turning his face away as if that could hide his pain and fear from Shepard.

"I'm going to see if Liara can help...she said she might have more info." Shepard didn't get more than a shallow nod of approval from Garrus, and she watched, heartsick as he rested his forehead against his knees, body radiating fear. He didn't move when Shepard went to the door, and looking back at him, she wondered if he was even aware she had moved. Sadly she watched him scrape his talons across the clipped edge of his fringe, his pale eyes so flat and blank he looked half blind.

"Oh, Shepard," Liara's face crumpled with worry, "I'm so sorry, I ever even thought..."

"None of us did, least of all me." Shepard scrubbed a hand over the thin tracery of scars on her cheek, "and trust me, I'm going to lose some sleep over this...but an old recruit trainer I knew used to say 'if you keep looking at yesterday's mistakes~you're gonna get today's bullet in the eye.' We need to find this guy, Liara, and worry about the fallout later."

"Agreed," Liara's eyes flickered over a readout offscreen, "I've got three agents stationed on Omega, I'll see if I can get any of them to make contact."

"Do you have any information on the target," Shepard struggled to distance herself, the possibility of disaster in this mission was looming ever higher. "Garrus didn't tell me all that much about his father during the hunt for Saren, but from what he did say its hard to imagine his father was capable of this kind of ...unsanctioned devastation. If he had problems with Spectres playing fast and loose with the rules, its hard to imagine him going vigilante"

"His records don't suggest that either." Shepard could hear Liara's fingers skimming over a keyboard, "Aisus Vakarian, flawless military and service records...only complaint on file was from a temporary human partner." Liara's mouth twitched into a smile, "Officer Vakarian shows a passion for rules and regulations that borders on pathologically obsessive," she quoted from an unseen report, "apparently not a genetic issue."

"I got the impression that was what caused tension between them," Shepard shrugged, "but honestly, does this sound like a man who would go to the most lawless place in the galaxy and spend time torturing mercenaries to death?"

"I thought Garrus was positive about his identity?"

"Garrus was positive about the identity of his rifle." Tapping a thumbnail against her teeth, Sheppard stared at the military ID photo of Vakarian senior, marveling at the similarities between him and his son. Both had the same coloring,although Garrus had paler eyes and a narrower face than his father they shared the same solemn intensity. "What about the rest of his family? Anyone else fit the bill for vigilante?"

"I'll look." After a few minutes Liara let out a soft 'oh' and her brows crinkled, "no family should have this much bad luck."

"Aaaand?" Shepard prompted after Liara continued to read silently.

"Garrus' mother was diagnosed with late stage Corpalis syndrome shortly after Saren was defeated, she was moved to a palliative care center four months ago." Holding up a hand to forestall the comment about to roll of Shepard's tongue she continued, "control of her care was signed over to one Solana Vakarian around the same time."

"Would that be enough of an added stressor to push him over the edge?" Shepard voiced her own confusion.

"Combined with what he knew of what happened to Garrus?" Liara looked tired, frowning as she scanned rapidly through appropriated data files and secure vid channels, "it would try any parents sanity. But something doesn't make sense, the timeline seems...off."

"Off how?"

"Garrus' father booked passage off Palaven about five days after, after the video clips of...after Garrus' group..."

After Omega." Shepard watched Liara nod, steeling her own face against the sour regret roiling in he gut.

"Until he left Palaven his extranet activity was obvious...he contacted old friends, co-workers and dignitaries on the Citadel, posted rewards, offered money to anyone who could tell him where Garrus was. He left the Apien Crest on a public transport and disappeared, I can't find any records of him past that...he just ceases to exist under that name."

"So what was he doing during that time?" A headache was threatening, and Shepard pressed her fingers into the hot ache of her temples. "The attacks on Omega didn't start for months after that...gathering intel?"

"Unlikely," Liara turned away from the vid screen, slim fingers dancing over a scrolling mass of text behind her. "The video footage made it fairly clear who he would have to...hunt. I can't find any sign of him until about a week after the time I think Garrus was transferred to Purgatory."

"That makes sense, doesn't it?" Shepard grimaced, trying not to imagine the horror of finding pieces of ones child shipped to you from a prison colony.

"Hmmm," Liara frowned, "wait, this can't be right!" Shepard could see the pale flicker of Liara's drone flit by in the background and cleared her throat until Liara filled her in. "I had Glyph scan through the stored files while running a biometric scan...it found these."

As the stills uploaded to the data terminal Shepard was using in Miranda's office Shepard went cold, the blood sliding from her face like congealed grease in a pan."Liara...this can't be right, no way is this the same person!"

"Biometric measurements are as individual as a fingerprint, he's obviously had his facial altered ...but it's definitely him."

Staring blankly at the turian in the blue and white armor of the Blue Suns mercenaries, Shepard compared his face to the stern, blue-marked countenance from Aisus Vakarian's military records and felt ill. "I don't understand, this doesn't make sense...its got to be an infiltration, some kind of undercover operation. Garrus always said his dad was often disappointed in him, but I never took him as the kind of man who would respond to the rape and mutilation of his son by joining one of the groups responsible."

"I agree, Shepard," Liara raised her hands placatingly, and Shepard realized she must have shouted the last of her protest. "The timing still seems odd, this footage," a grainy set of stills showing the turian Shepard could identify as Garrus' father leaning against a crate in the company of a batarian popped up on the screen. "This footage was from the supply dock on Purgatory...the time stamp shows it to be approximately nine days before the Normandy docked."

"What the fuck?" Shepard muttered. "So...was he undercover? There to rescue Garrus except I got in the way?"

"I don't know," Liara chewed at her bottom lip, face creased in concentration. "All I can put together is that shortly after he saw the extranet footage from Omega he went to the station and entered the Blue Suns as a recruit. He worked with them for weeks, low level work...running sand, weaponry, I've got footage of him working as a Suns enforcer. Then around the time Garrus was transferred to Purgatory he just goes missing for nearly two days...I'm presuming he went back to Palaven? After that he turns back up on Omega's security network...and after a few weeks manages to get himself on a supply ship bound for Purgatory."

"So he was there to find Garrus?" The relief almost made Shepard giddy, the thought of having to tell Garrus that his father had anything to do with his imprisonment had made her sick.

"I assume so, but it's strange Shepard, the docking manifests show that the supply ship remained in dock for engine repairs...it departed almost five days before the Normandy arrived. If he was there to find Garrus...then why did he leave while his son was still being held captive?"

"I'm going to have a long, very private conversation with this man when we find him," Shepard promised in a low voice. "And he better hope the answers are ones I want to hear."