When Garrus stepped back onto the Normandy, it had almost felt like coming home. He realized, oddly enough, that he'd missed the ship and its inhabitants while they'd been away on shore leave. He'd had an enjoyable time on leave, certainly, but it was nice to return, to get back into the action.
With no mako to calibrate, and Wrex gone, he would have to find some other way to bide his time. Shepard was busy mapping routes with Pressly and Joker, or else making her rounds to keep herself familiar and friendly with the crew. Even if she hadn't been busy, he recognized that they needed to spend a little time apart. They'd grown too comfortable together, especially while on leave, he didn't want to do anything that might make the crew even the least bit suspicious of the way their relationship had changed.
Tali was as busy as ever down in engineering, so Garrus found himself spending most of his time with Liara. She had taken to using Wrex's old cot, though he imagined the bed in the med bay was more comfortable. She said she liked sleeping down in the cargo bay where it was a little warmer, and the extra room on the cot made it bearable.
Still unsure of her own skill with a gun, Garrus took to target practice with her again, though occasionally she would get frustrated and make the bullet hit its mark with her biotics. He had to remind her that if she was using her gun on the field, it might be because she'd run out of energy for biotic power use. She only listened sometimes.
For the first few weeks of their travel, they didn't encounter much of anything. It was a lot of 'reports of geth' that turned out to be nothing, and a lot of sitting around the ship. After a week or so, Garrus took to sneaking up to Shepard's cabin at night, which made him feel like a child breaking a rule and trying not to get caught. Occasionally he did get caught, but only by Karin, who would usually just roll her eyes.
The reward was always worth it, though. He would have spent every night with Shepard if he could have; exploring her body, the experience always so exhilarating and pleasurable. But neither of them wanted to risk any of the crew knowing about their little affair, so he would always sneak back down to the cargo bay when they were done. There were some nights where he nearly fell asleep, but he had always caught himself in time. He wanted to stay, and Shepard wanted him to as well. Sometimes, he thought, it was almost as good of a feeling just to hold her body against his, to feel her smooth skin and soft hair.
A month after they had left the Citadel, he was feeling a lot of emotions he didn't want to address. He wondered if Shepard was feeling the same way, wondered if he was even sure about what he was feeling, if he could even feel that way about a human. He wouldn't give it a name. Like most turians, he would stomp down his emotions and forget about them until later when they came boiling to the surface.
By that point, the ship was nearing the edge of the Terminus systems, a much more dangerous place for an Alliance vessel to be. They'd spent nearly four days searching up and down a sector near the border, looking for any sign of the geth. Several ships had gone missing in the area, so there was definitely something happening there, but Garrus was skeptical that it was geth.
He was making his way over to the mess hall, listening to Joker's status report on the comm system, when the ship shook violently. Several nearby crew members went flying, and even Garrus didn't have the balance he needed to keep himself steady during such an impact. He toppled forward as another blast hit the ship.
The hull breach alarms went off and Garrus rushed down to grab his gear from the cargo hold. Suiting up, he took the ladder back up as more blasts hit the ship. The crew was in chaos, running around trying to get their gear together frantically.
Where was Shepard?
Garrus hurried up the stairs to the CIC to find himself surrounded by a sea of orange flames, the heat overwhelming. He moved forward, past the bodies of crew members who'd been killed in the blast, blood pooling on the floor beneath them, running to meet Joker at the helm. Pressly and his ensign lay dead on the floor behind the pilot. Garrus stepped carefully over them, his body too flooded with adrenaline to process the full reality of what was happening.
"Joker, what's happening?" He demanded.
"Ship's been hit. I don't know what it was. Some huge ship…maybe a Reaper…" Joker's face was covered in sweat, hands moving frantically across the ship's control display.
"We need to evacuate!" Garrus cried. "There's a dozen dead already. Where's Shepard?"
"I don't know. Go save yourself, Garrus. I'm not leaving my ship," Joker waved his hand dismissively.
Garrus didn't have time to argue with him. He would come back for the stubborn pilot, but first he wanted to find Shepard. He ran back toward the command center; pieces of the ship had been breached entirely, a whole section of the wall gone now, an emergency mass effect field holding the ship's atmosphere together.
Shepard stormed from the comm room, fully suited, and ran headlong into Garrus.
"Garrus!" she grabbed his shoulders. "Get to the shuttle."
"I'm not leaving without you," he told her.
"I just had this conversation with Liara. Get your ass out of here."
"Joker's refusing to leave," Garrus told her.
"I'll take care of him. Now go!"
"Shepard…"
She shook him roughly. "I can't lose you, Garrus. Get on the evac shuttle. Now."
He hesitated. He wanted to drag her to the shuttle with him. But she was bound and determined to get Joker out of his chair and into the escape vessel. He knew it would only be more dangerous for both of them to be up there, the fires raging around them, but he didn't want to leave her. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach. Something wasn't right.
She pushed him away and he ran. It was no use both of them dying for no reason. This was Shepard after all. If she could take down a rogue Spectre and hundreds of geth, she could handle an evacuation protocol; even if it was the most intense evacuation he'd ever experienced.
He hurried to the side of the ship, where the emergency evacuation port with the evac shuttle was. He climbed in and saw that a scarce few of the crew had made it. Liara was there, and Tali, Karin and Engineer Adams, and only a handful of others.
"Where's Shepard?" Tali cried.
Garrus stood by the door of the shuttle, not wanting to strap himself in, his heart pounding in his ears.
"She's getting Joker. She'll make it."
"The commander's dealt with worse than this," Karin assured him.
"Shepard? Do you need help?" Garrus asked into his comm link.
"Negative," she replied quickly. "En route with Joker."
She left her comm link on. They could hear her labored breathing as she carried the pilot along toward the shuttle, the sounds of electronics malfunctioning in the background. Garrus waited, and waited.
"They're prepping another attack," he heard Joker say.
A moment later, Shepard appeared, thrusting Joker forward into the shuttle. Garrus caught him and pushed him into a seat before reaching his hand out to Shepard to pull her in. Her fingers grasped his, a moment that seemed to last an eternity. Before he could get a hold of her and pull her in, though, another blast rocked the ship, exploding between them in a flash of blinding light. She flew backward, grasping at the ship's wall desperately.
"Shepard!" Garrus screamed, nearly launching himself out of the shuttle after her.
She slammed her fist on the shuttle lock on the ship wall and the door sealed shut, sending the evac away from the burning hull of the ship. A second more and Shepard was floating away into space in the opposite direction.
Garrus pounded against the impenetrable steel door of the evac shuttle. "Shepard!" he screamed.
"Garrus," her voice sounded over the open comm link.
"Turn the shuttle around! Turn it around, we can save her!" He demanded.
But it was an automated evac shuttle, meant to send out a distress call and seek out the nearest Alliance vessel. There was no way to control where it went. He stared out the window on the door, watching her body float away. A piece of the ship debris was floating toward her, and a moment later they heard the sound of it ripping through her suit on the comm link.
Garrus slumped to the ground. Shepard struggled to seal the suit back up, the effort sounding out to the entire shuttle, her breath was ragged as the oxygen within the suit depleted itself
"Garrus," she gasped. "I…I…" A series of horrible coughs and gasps escaped her throat.
"Turn it off!" Liara begged. "Turn it off!"
Garrus buried his face in his hands, listening as the last breaths escaped from Shepard's mouth until there was nothing but silence on the other end of the comm link. His entire body felt numb. He had just been lying in bed with her barely two hours earlier. She had survived so much more than this. It couldn't be true, she couldn't be gone.
Unaware of himself or anything around him, his body shook as his subharmonics vibrated in a horrible keening sound. After a moment, Tali unlatched her harness and knelt down on the floor next to him, wrapping her arms around him in a warm embrace.
"I'm sorry, Garrus," she said softly, sniffling; she was crying as well. "I know how close you and Shepard were."
He had no words. His brain couldn't process anything except the fact that Shepard was gone.
Not gone. Dead.
He couldn't control the violent shaking of his chest or the awful noise his subharmonics were making. It was simply too much to bear. He slumped against Tali, barely aware of the others in the shuttle who had also begun to cry.
When the Alliance vessel found them, they were taken in to be returned to the Citadel. The report of Shepard's death seemed to be a devastating blow to everyone who heard, but Garrus selfishly felt that none of them could have possibly hurt more than he did. He didn't know it was possible to feel so much pain without a physical injury to show for it. He wanted to reach inside his chest and pull it out, but it wasn't tangible, which made it all the worse.
He, Tali, and Liara, out of place aboard an Alliance vessel, holed themselves up in one of the store rooms aboard the new ship. The three of them were despondent. Liara had cried so hard he thought she might be sick, until no more tears would come and she could only stare at the ground blankly. He felt a twinge of pity for her; she had only just lost her mother a few months earlier.
How could something like this have happened? This was supposed to be a routine sweep of the traverse. They'd taken on hundreds of geth, what were a few more? It seemed like child's play compared to fighting an indoctrinated Spectre and taking out a Reaper. How could she really be gone?
He kept replaying the comm link broadcast, listening to those horrible, wretched final breaths. Had she been scared? Just like Shepard to put others before herself right to the end. She could have been aboard the shuttle, but it would have meant Joker's death. Garrus felt incredibly guilty for thinking that he would have preferred it that way.
"You have to stop listening to that!" Liara finally yelled. "I can't take it, Garrus, I can't!"
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "If I play it over again, she's not dead…she's still speaking…she…"
Tali put her hand on his and gently shut the comm link off. "It won't bring her back," she said.
The next days passed in a blur. Arriving back on the Citadel, the galaxy seemed to have already received the news of Shepard's passing. People who had never met her, who only knew her as some symbol of heroism, cried on the streets. It felt like the entire Citadel was in mourning for this human, this incredible human, who had brought so many races together, united against a common enemy.
A memorial service was held on the Presidium, but Garrus couldn't bring himself to go. He didn't want to stay and listen to useless platitudes about what an excellent soldier Shepard had been, what kind of hero she was to the Citadel and the humans, meaningless praises from Udina, who had always disliked her. Instead, he stayed home and lay in bed, wishing he could die with her, all of the emotions he had quashed down bubbling to the surface. Had he…loved Shepard? Could a turian love a human? It didn't matter now anyway.
He wasn't sure how long he lay there in bed, wallowing in his own sadness, blinds closed, sheets drawn up around him, replaying that comm link broadcast over and over, wishing he hadn't gotten in the shuttle, wishing he had forced her to come with him, knowing it never would have happened. He missed messages and calls from Tali and Liara, a message from Wrex, from Karin, from Joker, from Chellick, from Pallin, from his father, from half of C-sec. He barely moved except to use the bathroom and get the occasional glass of water. He couldn't remember when he'd last eaten, and whenever he slept, he dreamed that Shepard was still alive, which made the pain all the worse when he woke again.
After several days, he was surprised when the door to his apartment, which he had locked, came open and his father burst into his room.
"Garrus, no one has been able to reach you in days." His father cried, storming over to the side of the bed.
Garrus buried his face in his pillow. "What does it matter?"
"You can't carry on like this, son. You weren't even at her memorial service."
"You were?" Garrus asked, genuinely surprised.
"Yes. I was. I don't like Spectres, and I don't love the idea of my only son wasting his time with a human, but what Shepard did for the Council and the Citadel was a commendable act worthy of military praise. I was also hoping to see you there. I knew you must have been taking it hard." He knelt down close to Garrus. "Would she want to see you like this? Wasting away in your bed?"
Garrus said nothing, reaching over to his bedside table and pressing a button to play the comm link broadcast.
"Garrus…I…I…" Shepard's voice sounded.
His father's face contorted in horror. "You heard her die?"
"Yes."
"You need to delete that, son. It's not going to make her come back and it's only going to make you sick with sadness. You need to get out of bed and take care of yourself. Did she die saving her crew so that you could die anyway?"
Garrus rarely discussed emotional matters with his father; turians in general didn't like to discuss those things, except perhaps with their bond mates; but he felt so hollow and empty that he had to say it out loud to someone.
"I've never hurt so much in my entire life," he told his father, subharmonics trembling. "I didn't know it was possible to feel this terrible. I feel like my heart's been ripped out of my chest. It hurts so badly…"
His father sighed. "I know it hurts, Garrus. It's not easy to lose someone you care about." His voice had a note of surprising compassion. "But it can't get better if you let yourself fall into a depression like this. I've got a job waiting for you at C-sec. Everyone there is worried about you too. It will get better, Garrus, I promise."
"I don't want it to get better. I want her to come back."
His father folded his arms. "Did you love the girl, Garrus?"
"I don't know," he said honestly.
"There's nothing you can do to bring her back, son. I acknowledge that I didn't know Shepard very well, but I seriously doubt she would have wanted to see you like this. Why don't you get up and clean yourself up and I'll make you something to eat?"
He knew his father was right. If Shepard could see him now…she would have asked him what was wrong, talked it out with him, made him feel better. She wouldn't have wanted to see him so sad. It was just hard to reconcile that she was gone. It might take months or years to ever get used to it. He felt like if he stood up and tried to get on with a normal life, he was admitting that it was real, and he didn't want to do that.
But Shepard would have wanted him to. And that's what got him out of that bed, forced him to eat the food his father made, and got him down to C-sec a week later. If he couldn't bring her back, he was damn sure going to work at making the galaxy a safer place in her wake.
A/N: And thus ends the ME1 arc! As I've said, this story will follow the plot of the entire trilogy, but I won't be covering Garrus' time on Omega in this fic. So the next chapter will shoot us ahead 2 years to 2185. Thank you to all who have been reading and reviewing!