All the Stars

by BlueWay

When the Long Night of Solace is evaporated over Reach via the weaponized usage of a Slipspace Drive, it ferries with it in its swallowed sections the Covenant Empire and, more horrifyingly, the desperate measures that the UNSC used to fight them. When they are found in a universe on the precipice of their own history, the meaning of the term "Mass Effect" will change forever.

44. 2-1: Homeworld - Californication

All the Stars

By: Matthew "BlueWay" N.

---

The Beginning of

Section 2: Arc of the Covenant

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Section 2-1

Homeworld – Californication

---

A Sangheili warrior, a young Minor in Destiny's Covenant, walks on sun baked ground that clays over to a red. He was told once that Sanghelios ground had been hardened by the blood spilled on it, dried, after generations of conflict that had formed the modern Sangheili into who they were. The blood that stains the ground he is on is perhaps the same in its ferment, but not in his history. He kneels down, holding off the Needle Rifle in his hand for a brief moment as his claws thread through grains unfamiliar, hardened by the sun above and yet crushed by his pressure. A chunk of the land falls within his grasp, his palm, and he stares at its cragged shape before his claws close and the dirt of it weaves into the ridges of his palm.

He looks up, putting his eyes to the fiery line that is the battlefield he has walked all his life, and he sees a world gone the way of the Covenant.

A man is beside him, a Quarian, more specifically, a forward scout in the Quarian Marines attached to him. The Sangheili considers the Quarian as they move up to him, a rifle in his hand, well used, well taken care for. Around them a hot planet, scorching, but it is a warmth that keeps them all grounded.

"I've never been on Sanghelios before." Said the Sangheili.

The Quarian, looking down on that selfsame ground, kneeled down as well. He could not touch the fibers of the world like he did, and in that moment the Quarian envied the Sangheili. "I've never been on Rannoch before." They answered instead.

In that moment the Quarian had felt aligned with another being in that universe far more than any other in the Galaxy. The Council had not stood with them in solidarity or mercy.

The Covenant had.

Far above them a scrap laden battlefield orbited. Mostly Geth, some Quarian ships too. Red hot, as numerous as the stars. The Covenant had been responsible for that. The Ardent Prayer had slipped into existence amid the middle of the defensive fleet around Rannoch, and popped its bubble that had been three times in that galaxy nullifying completely of element zero and its effects on spaceships. What little anyone knew of the phenomenon was that it had been the overriding clash of energy existent in one galaxy and not another, two totally incompatible systems that spoke to different fundamental baseline understandings of FTL.

And yet, even in that, the Covenant had remained standing.

It was a massacre spelt in the stars as the Quarian fleet moved in and took out a paralyzed Geth. It was a massacre when an orbital beachhead was established and the first retrofitted Quarians ships took to breaching atmosphere with the Scarabs in tow, landing upon, in ancient Quarian history, where many survivors gathered to be ferried away to what would become the Migrant Fleet. It was a massacre of metal and machine when a million Covenant of different blood and body landed, and returned to the business they had been taken from months ago: planetary invasion.

Banshees filled the skies piloted by Sangheili aces as Scarabs walked across the planet delivering death on a measure the Geth could not account for. As a machine learning hive mind, they did not know of the Covenant. They were a new factor, and one that they could not fully account for as Mgalekgolo with their natural ability to hunt for machines found server clusters and began tearing out wires.

Of all the divine wrath of the Covenant, for the Sangheili in particular, this war, this invasion, was a personal one. So Sangheili warriors who had been born of Sanghelios led hunting parties across the undeveloped wilds of a reflection of their homeworld and found the enemy before killing them. They did this so that they had hardly mind the Systems Alliance Marine Expeditionary Force that, offering a token chaperone, fought alongside them. This was the only tolerated party from the wider community, an extension of grace given to the Alliance for their harboring and cooperation with the Covenant on Altis.

There, Humans saw how the Covenant waged war, and the Covenant had reminded them that, in another place, this battle would be upon them.

But this was not that Humanity.

Admiral Hackett looked down upon his ship as his fleet stood in overwatch with the Quarian and Covenant ships. As battles broke out upon the planet, Rannoch-Sanghelios saw a new order being written. A Systems Alliance spook was in his ear and then Shastri himself in the other, but he could not listen as instead he bore witness to a new world.

The Prophet of Destiny, his ivy crown sprouting, stands, stands, besides Shipmistress Seylu Karonee, her gold half-cape flowing as they look upon an old world turned new. The remnants of the Geth combat fleet had tried to take them on but it was to no avail, for even as powerful as the Ardent Prayer was its captain was a veteran of a naval war against the Humans.

Destiny looks upon his favored Sangheili with intrigue. She is silent, her orders have been given, and her officers are doing as they must in unison with the Quarian ground forces.

"Did you stand like this, Shipmistress, when we laid waste to the Human world that housed their Demons?" He asks her, coming to her, placing his hands upon her shoulders and she not moving for it.

The crew does not look. All she can do is answer.

"I stand in victory, but there is… an odd feeling." The grip of his fingers on her shoulders is tight, uncomfortable. But she can say nothing. "Normally, when I am over a world like this, the Glassing would follow."

And yet, there would be no Glassing done here. Only conquering. Only, perhaps more accurately, reclamation.

It takes only a month for Rannoch-Sanghelios to fall, but when it does, it does so in the pattern known to children: replicating their parents. A generational cycle done, again and again. For the Covenant it rings of irony. For the Quarians, it rings of irony. For the Citadel fleets that have been told to stay away from the "airspace" of Rannoch, it has justified their wages.

The defensive efforts around server clusters lessened, and then fell within a week, entire facilities of industrial sites used by the Geth to replenish their numbers left quiet as Covenant and Quarian forces raided them.

Covenant Ghosts and Banshees tracked the masses of Geth, evacuating to the equator of the planet, entire layers of them left behind meant to slow down pursuing forces.

On one day, and one day alone, as the sun set on the last battlefields, Geth ships rose from deep receptacles in the ground and rose out to the stars again.

The Covenant forces are too used to this, but this time, they are not the ones who chase them.

In historic rhyme and echo and farce, the Geth make a run for the Relay, fighting through the Quarian blockade with such ferocity that onlookers had thought they were fighting for flesh and blood. Not many get through the Alliance, Quarian, and then Council ships, but when they blink out, the Quarians have a homeworld again.

There is a celebration. In a world that had once had zero organic intelligence, that changes overnight to several million.

Citadel and Council press call it a worrying precedent set that the Quarians were able, more or less, to take back their homeworld without Galactic oversight. Systems Alliance press secretaries stay neutral, Humanity's presence now as a mediator between the Covenant, the Quarians, and then the Council a realization that seemed to run hotter than the idea of sitting on the Council. Though those politics fall aside as, for at least two species, they have returned home, and liberated it.

The troubles of the Reapers, of Saren, now deceased, seem so far away.

Rael'Zorah is the only Quarian not celebrating as he stands on the sands of his homeworld and sees the sun of his ancestors for the first time. Plans for settlements, the breaking down of the live ships, are underway almost immediately, ships that have not known rest since centuries past, leaving Rannoch the first time, return to the ground. Whereas the rest are celebrating, the Covenant welcomed in open arms as liberators of a centuries long plight alongside other Quarians, Rael is quiet, contemplative, as battlefields still smoldering from thousands of dead Geth mark the landscape so barren, he could hardly imagine that this was indeed home.

Shaala'Raan vas Tonbay approaches him from behind, but it is not her footsteps that he hears: Instead, the rather heavy footsteps of a silver armored Elite instead is also in her wake. Ke Nazhumee, the Elite Ranger. An older Elite, but now one of the Covenant's most senior. He had been first contact with the Quarians via Shaala'Raan, and he still appeared to be connected to that day with her. He had seen much fighting in the battle for Rannoch, and even now, in victory, he held his fuel rod gun to him.

"Rael," Shaala'Raan reached out, touching upon his elbow. "You seem so troubled on this day of days." This day, which would be remembered as the birthday of a new life for so many Quarians.

Rael could hardly feel her touch through his suit. He stood alone on Rannoch.

Ke had stirred once, rumbling in his throat, the deep dark voice that all Sangheili seemed to have grizzled even for him. "Not all victories give you what you want."

Shaala'Raan had pivoted back, as if lending her ear, to listen. "Is that true for you, Rael? Is this not what you wanted? Your homeworld back?"

Rael'Zorah could only breathe air out of his nose once. How funny it was.

Many Quarians still wore their suits out of fear, the acclimation period not yet beginning or even advisable to start at all for them, but Rael would harbor, and breathe in the air of what he supposedly wanted because he deserved it. With a hiss, his helmet had come off, and his skin pricked at the unnatural feeling of real air, of planetary wind. The sun sizzled on frail skin. He felt alive, but yet not at the same time. This is what he wanted, but not for himself.

Tali'Zorah never answered the call to return to the Migrant Fleet. Tali'Zorah never came home.

---

The year is 2185, and Rear Admiral Jane Kennedy Shepard rouses awake in her apartment in San Francisco.

She lives off base, the half-hour commute that the Kodiak shuttle that is assigned to her down to Coronado Base is a good enough of a trade to live back in her childhood home. It's this apartment that has been in the Shepard family for several generations that has survived in spite of the rapid modernization of the San Francisco metropolis. It's not by any means an extravagant affair: a two floor block on top of a mid-sized apartment building, alongside Presidio Park, a stone's throw away from the Golden Gate. Despite being deep in urban sprawl, the first scent that often greets Shepard is that of her plants.

They sprawl from everywhere she can fit them: on book cases, hanging off the ceiling, in every window sill. They lather her with fresh air and the fresh luster of green, and it's far preferred from the urban pollution that, as best as the city had tried to filter, persisted. She hates the smell of the city, for someone as much as world traveled as she.

Now, coming around to the summer of '85, it's about the first year she's had a singular residence, fixed in place.

The formality of her notice that she was to be taken off space duty came about three months after Virmire, but she didn't need to know that after the debriefing of her mission on the Normandy. She had been Shepard, however, all the same. They couldn't discharge her to keep her hidden, to have her fold into the pages of History. The Alliance did the next best thing and placed her back on Earth on training duty.

They gave her a promotion, they gave her a raise, they gave her an entire base and, by all means, a prestigious job training the next class of N-class candidates.

They should've just killed her.

That is the thought she has from time to time in the middle of those Earthen days, held down by gravity, daring a glance at the stars.

It's her omni that usually wakes her up at 6:30AM, on the dot, every day, the coffee maker in her apartment kicking on and beginning its sweet brew for her to be roused awake. It's a hard audible buzz, she barely getting her other arm to swipe away the alarm as she keeps her eyes closed. The alarm used to play a brief summary of events of the day in the galaxy, but she had turned them off months ago when the Covenant and the Quarians eradicated the last Geth server cluster on Rannoch-Sanghelios. It drove her irate in the morning and after that, she wasn't sure her blood pressure could take it.

A message alert, as it usually does from her secretary pings as well, but she ignores it. She's had a message waiting for her every morning anew for the last year and it turns out they're not always all that important.

Nowadays she keeps herself passive, she keeps herself sane, as thankfully, today, her dreams do not bring plasma fire nightmares and distant dead revisiting her.

The year is 2185, one year since the Battle of Virmire, and the once Commander Shepard has been defanged, dressed down, and in the end, told to step back from the world.

---

It's 11:24 AM when she finally forces herself out of bed. It's a week day, so she is expected down in Coronado for at least to check in and collect what might be awaiting for her in her office on base as the CO, however the current training class of new Alliance SOF are on a field exercise on Luna, so Coronado is decidedly dead.

The coffee is cold by the time she gets down to the kitchen, her blue admiral coat still unbuttoned, and her hair not yet pushed into its bun. She's tired, but she's been tired for the last year. For as much as cold water rubs into her face as she wipes it down with a face towel, her freckles have lost their color, her eyes never seem want to open fully, but she's long since written that off for becoming too comfortable in her place.

Her apartment is decorated with the a life of its own between long vines and greenery, just as her desk on the Normandy had been adorned with pictures of places and people, so too had been her walls: frames and frames of distant locals, stories, troops and missions she was on. All of them, in her short life of thirty years thus far, seemed to have each made up a lifetime of their own. She yearned for those lifetimes in her idle thoughts in her apartment, not so content to even go out into San Francisco again.

She spends most of her time in this apartment, sitting before her desk, and typing, absent mindedly, of details beyond her.

Thousands of pages now.

Her dreams, her nightmares, her memories, they are not her own, but they must be remembered.

But that was for her own time. She had still been on the payroll of the Systems Alliance, and as far as she was concerned she did need to get down to the base.

She buttoned up, admiral coat and all, a deep blue that contrasted much with her pale features and auburn hair. Many often spoke of her becoming a flag officer at some point, but none could hardly believe, when it happened, that she did fit into that uniform. Fit, prime. Domestic. Formal. She hadn't been in armor or kit in over a year. She'd last fired a gun less than half a year ago.

As she stood in the doorway of her apartment, it too surrounded by photos of peoples from faraway places, she noticed her coffee hadn't been in her hand.

Must've slipped her mind.

So, she went back, admiral cap in one hand as another, in a routine that had become far too familiar to her, reached out, and the thermos was surrounded by a light hue of blue fire and brought into her hands.

She doesn't fight it anymore: this ability of hers that has separated herself from the common person. She is no longer common, and, if not that, she has been long removed from them.

The apartment building is filled with older people. Retirees who had inherited the wealth required to have lived in a place like this in the middle of metropolitan San Francisco, and they were always happy to see her out of her own top floor apartment. They would wave, give greetings to the war hero if they caught her while they were collecting mail or coming back from about town, and she would say hi back, but then no more. The thought of interacting with more people at all had tired her so.

She takes the stairs. Not the elevator. It was enough to get her steps in for the day and not in the small gym she had turned an office in her space into. That had been going to the wayside too. But the life she lived now did not require the physical tenacity she once had to keep up with gunfire and offensive maneuvers. She lived a new life. One that kept her away from History.

The stairway echoes with each footstep of hers beneath her shoes, leather, tapping. Nearly 180 steps down, and a 180 to the top. That is the extent of her victories nowadays, and, perhaps, the extent of her victories allowed. The stairwell is painted in white with the blue sky above through skylight, she looks up from the very bottom, and the light captures her before she moves away. She hadn't been to space since Virmire too.

The glass doors of her apartment open up to a private vehicle bay, a parking lot, and there, as always, is the blue blocky Kodiak that is her personal vehicle, with the attending Marine pilot awaiting her. He was always ready by the time she left the building, rendering silent salute.

"Yao." She approaches the edge of the Kodiak as its open and its pilot, besides retro cars and other sky vehicles. The Marine aviator gives a curt salute, and she returns it. They don't talk. It's a comfortable relationship. Yao's hand goes down and he is into the Kodiak to take her down to her usual destination: Coronado Base near San Diego. As he turns the inclination to ask him how his day has been, how his life has been, how he got such a comfortable position shuttling her back and forth arises in her, but he is turned away from her before she can ask, and this is not the first time she has failed to strike up conversation. The suck of the Kodiak's engines disguises her sigh as she takes off her blue officer's cap and settles in for the short commute.

The lift off, the pulse of the engines behind her in the seat is long a normal feeling to her as she leans back, unscrewing the cap of her coffee to harbor a sip. But it coincides with a sudden lurch of the shuttle, one that had come unexpectedly before the flight resumed its normal trajectory. This version of the Kodiak has windows, and Bay Area California slides past her as she swears.

"Shit." A splash of coffee had come down on her dress skirt. The color is soaked up leaving a dark splotch on her left leg that burns, but she has felt for worse. She has no napkin, or anything like that, so all she can do is watch the liquid soak up into her skirt. She looks at that splotch for minutes, perhaps half the trip in a such unnamable feeling that when she does know that she has spent much too long on a simple mistake, it all rises up in her in a cough, a groan, the thermos sent across from her, a mess not made just because of how tight the cap had been on after the initial spill. The thermos makes its way on the opposite end, settling in the divot of another seat in the Kodiak, but Shepard does not see it, only hear its contents slosh around a metal basin as she holds her face in her hands.

"God dammit, Shepard." God dammit, god dammit, god dammit. "Fuck."

The impression that her life had gone wrong exists within her like an itch beneath her skin in an EVA suit: unable to be attended to. She was a strong woman, apparently, if her history, her memory was correct. She had been shot, broken, left for dead and failed people. She knew true pain, and so an itch would never destroy her. But that itch did, day by day. She was supposed to be better than this.

But the dreams, the images, of Prothean and Spartan both, swirl in her and drag her down like gravity itself.

Her leg shakes, up and down, heel in shuddering rhythm against the metal floor, and it can do nothing for her as she listens to the Kodiak start to shift to a lesser thrust and begin its descent down to her base.

She knew not what she was supposed to be, to do, but she knew as she descends from the sky she didn't look into, to a base she cares little for in her heart, in the service an Alliance that is hiding the secret of a billion Human dead, this wasn't it.

She feels cold, her stomach aches, but all of that goes away as the door to the Kodiak rises open and warm costal air blasts in like gunfire, and she forces herself up, alive, and out to do the bare minimum of the day.

"Ma'am?" Yao asks her as he dips his head back from the cockpit section.

Shepard raises her head up, cap on. "Short day, today." She tells him, "I'll be back soon."

---

Coronado Base was nestled on an island jutting out from California's coast, a bridge over beach and a small bay how most people reached it: a resort, idyllic beach front property that the rich, the comfortable, or the military had used. In the ancient past naval special forces trained here, and in the present, space special forces started training her. The stone of the base was bleached white by its battering by the sun, distantly, on either side of the base past a further safety barrier, kites flown by beach goers that summer day fly out like tethered birds giving color to the sky. Across the landing pads of Coronado Base Shepard walks, and her secretary is already there waiting for her, meeting her half way. No salute.

"Admiral." Adelaide Rockfort was the first of her family to not be a military member herself, but she kept close enough as a civilian in a military occupation. For Shepard, it was as her secretary. She was older than Shepard by five years, but wore it well in the California sun, and for as long as Shepard had been fighting, she had been filing away and making sure her bases where she was asked to go were running smoothly.

"Good morning, Adelaide." Shepard responded, her eyes having long since stopped scanning for the guards and MPs that remained on base even on the slow days, guard towers always filled by sweating Marines.

Adelaide's blonde hair was golder still in the sun, and for Shepard it almost hurt to look at as the two of them walked that same old path to the administration building.

"It's noon, ma'am."

"Huh?"

"It's ten past noon, Admiral Shepard." She was polite, but knew when to remind officers who, busy themselves, forgot the simpler items of the day that were not in meetings, spreadsheets, or training regiments.

Shepard blinked several time, shaking her head, her thermos left behind and the splotch brought with her. "Right. Yes. Report from the class on Luna?" Shepard tried to move past as they hit the administration building, it's air conditioning doing overtime as a blast of cold air went through as two Marines, nameless, voiceless, opened the doors for her and rendered salute. Shepard returned it as she passed.

Adelaide had thumbed up on her data tablet. "No casualties."

"Well, I'd hope so."

"Sergeant Canton reports that all recruits from the class are within performance bands, with Forty-Three and Thirty-Six being extremely recommended to being sent to the next step of the program." It's a ritual, for entrants to the N Program to be stripped of their names and be called a number. But now, numbers to names sit in Shepard differently, and her eye twitches.

"I'm… I'm sorry, who-"

"Davies and Melbourne, ma'am." Adelaide is polite in reminding Shepard as the two of them walk those halls to her office. In Coronado, Alliance heroes from the First Contact War and conflicts before that sprawl out along the walls, all looking down upon her. Her own portrait is there, somewhere, and the new recruits to the program have made it a habit, a rite of proving, to lay a big kiss on its glass and getting away with it for a measure of good luck. More than once she has heard herself called "Mama Shepard", and it is not a name she wishes to hear of too often.

"I'm not here for long today. I don't suppose I have too many pressing items to square away?" Shepard is frank as they approached the CO section of the building up several flight of stairs.

Adelaide grimaces in Shepard's periphery. "In my morning brief I did alert you to a scheduled meeting at 11AM."

That, more than coffee, wakes Shepard up. The stain on her skirt is even more hot, burning on her. "Oh. Shit. Who-?" Shepard stops in the middle of the hall, and Adelaide stops with her.

"Commander Lucy Cyma from Alliance Intelligence and…"

"Shit shit shit." There's a tissue box on a small desk to the side of the hall that Shepard goes to, meant for civilian visitors to clock in, but none are there today. She pats away at it, but it does little.

"Ma'am?"

"Ah. Well. Agenda, what's the agenda?" Doing what she can, Shepard pockets the tissues, making her hair right. Lucy Cyma was the cleft lipped spook that had been there from time to time during her journey on the Normandy with Sunglasses, especially as concerned the matters of Master Chief Mai Gul and Master Chief Jonathan-Jameson Durante.

She thought of Mai every night; she remembered that again she was taken by military spooks.

"Unsure." Adelaide answered promptly, glancing over her shoulders. They were close enough to the wooden doors in that marble hall that Cleft-Lip could probably hear. "Ma'am. This is… I can't go in there. I was told that the meeting had certain clandestine natures to it."

"Oh, it's fine, it's fine. Not the first time I've messed up being a respectable flag officer this year."

Adelaide had a thought on her tongue, but she held it, holding her teeth as she kept her data pad close to her chest looking at Shepard fuss over herself. "Ma'am." She started. "I was told by this entire world that Commander Shepard could take on entire planets of pirates, and could save Human colonies with just a pistol and her will."

But those times were passed now. "You've been reading too much Extranet buzz."

"Ma'am." Adelaide started again, her voice putting a foot down. "My entire family looked up to you. They still do. Even if I see you every day." What was left unsaid was the truth, but Shepard could not disagree.

"Never meet your heroes, Adelaide." Shepard tried to laugh off, but there no laughing left to be had as Adelaide sighed and spoke once more:

"They're waiting for you. I have the rest of your duties squared away for the day." And she leaves. "I've got to go."

And she left Shepard there as her frizzled red hair was barely matted back down into its bun.

When it came to training, to making sure that the N-candidates knew what they needed and were trained right, Shepard didn't fail. She wouldn't fail like that, and so she was a competent woman to follow when it came to exercises and training her people. But everything else? Everything that could not be asked of her? She felt herself fall through, as if sand in a sieve shaking slowly, day by day.

Adelaide is gone, and Shepard is alone in those halls of power and military history. Ancient heroes, all died in battle. She lives on.

---

She opens the door to her office, and her office is segmented into two parts: In one, a reception area, the other further back along the wall of the administration building that looked out to the beach and where recruits often trained, her actual office. Waiting in the comfortable, frigid reception area where Adelaide would be in her desk is instead Commander Lucy Cyma, sitting on the desk surface, arms crossed, dressed in those black suits all so a necessity for those who worked along the lines of state security and intelligence. His upper lip was deviated in two, going up his nostril leaving some teeth forever barred because of a cleft-lip.

"Admiral Shepard." He greets.

No salute.

"Commander." The ranks between them were formality only. The Alliance Intelligence spooks operated on a different level than her and were charged with authority different than what even she answered to as an admiral. Only Hackett and Shastri had been realistically above her, and yet she was still trapped.

"Sorry," Shepard starts, arms bowing out once as if offering herself. "There was… traffic."

"Traffic. Right. An hour long blockage in the sky?"

The silence that followed was no protection.

"…Why are you here?" Her shoulders dropped, her eyelids drooped just a little bit more in tiredness. "I didn't think my quarterly checkup was in yet."

She would see either him or Commander Oscar Horne, Sunglasses, from time to time to remind her of why she was there: Because she had set the galaxy down a certain way, and she needed to account for it for the rest of her life. She couldn't and didn't fight it.

Cleft Lip flicked his nose once, brushing back as he leaned on the desk again. "Look, I don't want to see you anymore than the next person, but I'm here as a token chaperone because I'm not your visitor today."

Shepard raised her eyebrow. "You? Chaperone? Is it Ma-"

"No. It's not Chief Gul or Chief Durante. You're unlikely to see them ever again, Admiral." Her hopes had been crushed, and she was wise enough not to ask further. Cleft Lip settled himself up and breathed out, eyes and head shaking as if loathed to admit.

"You have one visitor waiting for you in your office because I can't stand sitting in the same room with another spook."

Visitor was a loaded word. Visitor meant something other than other officers ferrying half-remembered messages to her about new policies. "Visitor? I thought I don't get visitors."

"Well, unfortunately there's only one galactic body in the galaxy that supersedes us, as we are still pursuant to the Citadel Council." Cleft-Lip had sighed. "No funny business, but by all means, we'll allow it."

No notice was ever delivered to her about the status of that one candidacy herself that led her down the path she did: By all accounts, she was still a Spectre. Humanity's first, and only. But she wasn't doing a whole lot with it. Maybe the Council had sent one to finally let her know that this too was being taken from her, but she couldn't care anymore. If all she had to do today was sit at her desk and listen to someone say that she had failed the expectations of someone, she could do that as she had every day she woke up and stared at herself in the mirror.

"That it?" She hazarded a guess.

"Well, it's a big it." He thumbed back to the door, a bronze plaque with her full name and rank on it:

Rear Admiral Jane Kennedy Shepard

They gave her such a promotion, so far up, that it justified her staying far and away from everything as if it was an award. It was a rank that made sense to everyone that knew her that Shepard, the Shepard, had been given the rank that befitted her. And yet it fit on like an ill fortune. She might have as well been one of those many portraits on those walls now.

She leaves Cleft-Lip behind, locking the door as she enters. Before her, idly thumbing through his omni-tool: a man of a different cloth, a different skin and blood and bone. The man turns:

"Shepard." The man says, and Cleft-Lip scoffs in the background as the door closes behind Shepard in her stunned shock.

Garrus Vakarian stands from his seat, clothed in the casual wear of a Turian. The markings of his clan are bluer than the sky, and his face betrays himself as a soldier. He is a young man, still, but a proud man, head strong. He stood as a man of his age stood, despite his species, Shepard could recognize it when someone stood on achievement and pride in their work.

Or, just maybe, Garrus was just glad to see an old friend.

"Garrus!"

She last saw him on Virmire, a Citadel ship taking him and Liara away from Virmire back to a place where they could make their own way back to where they started their journey. She wasn't allowed to say goodbye, all she could do was watch them go. All things considered, it was perhaps best, Shepard rationalized, that they do not communicate any further, but clearly Garrus had other ideas.

She approached him with a quickness, taking his arms both and squeezing them with her hands as if a hug incomplete, but Garrus returned it before she stepped back and realized what he had been now, without saying, and without knowing:

"You're a Spectre now?" She asked with surprise.

Garrus guffawed. "You and my sister sounded the exact same when they found out." He nodded despite this, flashing the ID of a Spectre on his omni. "My father wasn't also happy as well, but you know the work suits me."

Spectre Garrus Vakarian sits in a barren office of Admiral Shepard's ownership in a base on the coast of California, and Shepard can't help but feel even more wistful as she smiles at the man who she had only known for a few short months but would fight a galaxy for. Not because of any particular bond, but because she knew Garrus was the type of person who she would die for. She rounded her not often used desk and settled into its leather chair, a picture of her family kept there along with a data pad and a note pad for when she did want to do work here.

Above them all, a bronze display piece mounted on the wall: An Eagle, a Trident, and an Anchor. A memorial for a different type of service, and a different type of warfare operation.

"Do what do I owe the pleasure, Garrus?" She raised her hands up to the sky, her elbows on that wooden desk. "Council want their Spectre ID card back from me?"

Garrus chuckled, settling back into the chair that didn't quite fit him, but he made work as he crossed his legs. "Not quite. Your file says your inactive."

"Oh." She's quite surprised. "Well, that's good to hear, I guess." Her chair creaks as she lays back. So, Garrus isn't here about that, but he's lax, leaned back as well. Only when the silence takes on between them, Shepard waiting for him to speak more on it does she catch his eyes, and when he catches hers back she sees them flick up to the corners of the room in all four corners, a small grin on his face.

"This place. Cali-Fornia. It's pretty nice. Dries me the hell out, and I've only been on planet since the morning."

Shepard beats back a question, and even an eyebrow raise as she nods along with him. "First time on Earth, right? Just for me?"

"Ah. Well, maybe I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to see an old friend… It is a nice neighborhood to be fair." He was bashful and coy as he always was, but in his eyes and face bore wear marks from work more advanced than C-Sec even. Shepard knows the look on older soldiers.

"You should see Greece." She offers.

"Grease?"

"Yeah, Greece… No no, not like, the cooking thing, it's a place, real sunny too, but a lot more temperate. Beautiful coasts, very quiet. Blue and white and green as far as the eye can see and it's not too harsh about it. I spent maybe three months there, as a kid, when I walked the Earth."

She walked the Earth from San Francisco west to San Francisco east, with the world in between. She traveled the oceans as stowaway or lucky passenger, and walked the deserts and mountains. She'd seen the whole Earth and realized the next place to go was up, for other planets, for other worlds so fantastical they were only in her dreams. She dreamed once then, of living that life.

She dreamed no more, but she could remember at the very least the type of person she was before boot camp and the people she met with the lands she traveled. It made her, and she, from time to time, think about returning to such a life.

Not today, however. But maybe someday, when her mind was clear and she could disappear on her own terms.

"I heard up north you've got these great forests. I'd be interested in seeing those, "redwood" trees, you call 'em, right? Big enough to be toothpicks for our Turian gods, sounds like."

"Yeah. Big enough to live in, even. They've got some of them hallowed out and rented out for people who want something different…"

"Oh, really? Unfortunately, I think my people have evolved past living in trees. Maybe I'll check it out anyway for kicks."

"You got that type of time, Garrus? To go sightseeing as a Spectre?"

"It's not like the Council keeps all my hours, Shepard." He leans back further, again eyes to the ceiling, to the corners of the room. "Being a Spectre has its perks."

"It doesn't…" Shepard paused, waiting for him to come down. "Bug you, does it?"

"Not as much as it bugged you." Shepard understands, just a little more, lingering on the word. "I missed your voice Shepard. You know all the Humans say I have a very relaxing vibration to mine but in reality I can't stand it, especially if I hear it recorded. You must be a pro at that, right?"

"Yeah, even now." She pursed her lips.

"Please, just keep on talking for me then." Garrus's hands are behind his back, locked there, looking very relaxed. "How's this last year been for you?"

"It's been…" Shepard tries to find the word. "Calming."

"Calming?"

"Yeah. I guess. I've got a routine now. Sometimes on weekends I go out to this little café on the corner of the Presidio, and I just watch the sky cars fly by above. It's… a very quiet life, I've found myself in as a Rear Admiral." She had starkly thought in the first few months of this new life why and how those admirals that often called for her to assist them had ended up so busy, if this is what they could be doing otherwise. But Shepard had no problems. She was the problem. "A small espresso. Maybe a croissant. I sit there, on my off days, look up at those sky cars go by and past."

She could name so many models now from Axon, to Chevrolets, to Fords and Toyotas and Milos. Different colors, different builds. Different shapes cutting against the skies and the clouds in predefined lanes that keep San Francisco above mostly car free. This was her Home. A home that had been distant, but a home still. She grew up on those streets first before the world and she had returned to a place she never knew and didn't want to be.

"Yeah? And what else does the great Admiral Shepard do? It must be nice, having all this free time."

Garrus was doing something. She didn't know what, but he was. There was trust implicit however, so she kept on, and on. "Just doing nothing, actually. If I'm being honest." And even that was a poor lie. "I have my plants in my apartment. The landlord doesn't allow pets, which is a shame, but I've got to water them at least once daily, some of them. I try to read books but they're not really my thing, so it's just a lot of… People watching, I guess, sky watching. I've never really had a time in my life as free as this." She tries to make it sound positive, but Garrus sees through it fairly easily, leaning in.

"So why don't you go do something more…" He raised a non-existent eyebrow.

"Garrus…" She warns him outright, and he takes it in under consideration with a nod. "I'm not really what the Galaxy needed, I guess. Not after Virmire, and all that."

She failed her mission given to her by the Council. Saren was dealt with by the Covenant. She tried to save him, and for that, nearly twenty dead and one in a vegetative state. Galactic peace did not come. Turmoil instead, the great launching of Rannoch-Sanghelio's reclamation a spark that put the entire galaxy on edge so much so that any idea of Reapers was far smothered out by the danger of life in the Galaxy, against each other.

Garrus, his mandibles slightly shift, and Shepard remembers what that means well. He is curious, biding a question that he then asks: "I uh, I was wondering if you had heard about JD, or Chief Gul. I haven't heard anything from them ever since… well, you know. The Normandy."

"Spectre like you wouldn't know?" She asked.

"It's impolite." He shrugged at wider implications of intelligence gathering.

She smiled once at him before it turned into a grimace, her fingers tracing wooden grain on her table before answering. "The higher ups have seen fit that I don't intercede in their lives anymore. Sorry." She apologizes to Garrus for herself. "It's not within my hand."

Garrus nods softly. "Ah. I see. Shame. Me and JD were good friends. Maybe even great friends."

"He was interested in C-Sec, right?"

"Yeah." Garrus had said once breathlessly, as if he had just remembered that fact as well. "I feel bad, sometimes," he goes on, leaning back forward. "I turned out a Spectre and everyone else…" He drags as if not wanting to bring it up. Outside seagulls glide in the wind as if frozen in place, and behind Shepard is an almost too bright outside world that blinds his sensitive eyes. He looks away, to empty book shelves and a clock, ticking away in analog fashion in a Human way of time keeping. "Have you heard what happened to everyone else on the Normandy, Shepard?"

"Outside of the Human crew?" Shepard posed. "No, not really."

Joker had remained the pilot of the Normandy as far as she knew, beneath a new command: Kaiden Alenko. Kaiden, as pacifying a man that he was, had been tasked with QRF duties with the Normandy among non-Human colonies as a gesture of good will. He had been performing his duties admirably but she did not reach out or keep in contact with them, or any. Williams she had heard ended up beneath the colonial garrisons, and Shepard prodded no further on her behalf.

"Really? Don't watch the news?"

Her stomach lurched. That hadn't been good.

"No. Why?"

Garrus grimaced himself, eyes again finding the countdown of the Human clock. It was 12:30 now. Bottom of the hour, as the Humans said.

"Do you really not? You seemed to have been such a worldly person."

"Look, Garrus," She raised her voice just a tad, some aggravation coming, the lobe of her brain pounding again as it did at night. "I shut that shit off from my feeds ever since the Quarians took back their ancient capital and rose a god damn Covenant flag with it." Such scorn, such vile burn in her voice it surprises Garrus. "If I don't need to know about it, then Adelaide out there-"

"Adelaide?"

"My secretary- Adelaide doesn't bring it to my attention."

"Guess I'll play the bearer of bad-… maybe interesting news, then. Would you like to get hit hardest first, or last."

She hadn't noticed when she started leaning out of her chair in her exasperation, but she settled back in to a squeaky leather. "Go easy upfront. I don't think I've got the heart for this type of stuff anymore."

"Oh Shepard." From time to time the fact that Garrus was equal to her in age showed. That certain tsk, that certain brevity between them that came with still being young, but not too young to be naïve toward the predilections of youth. She leveled herself, shoulders slumped, and all those late night of the Normandy could not reveal a Shepard as beleaguered as the one that sat across from him. "I can start with Liara then."

Liara T'Soni. Last daughter of her house. The sole T'Soni save for relations so distant that they mattered not. Shepard's eyes softened as did her form. Like all, she wishes she could've done more for her, after setting her upon a mission that had her kill her mother. For those that live a thousand years, even one year to mourn is nothing. "Is she alright?"

Garrus is not sure, shaking his head.

"She's a shut in on Thessia, last I heard, putting it lightly. She inherited her mother's estate. Last I heard from the Asari Spectres she's still parsing through her mother's thousand-year history. For what? I don't know. But she's traded dig sites for her own history, and well, it's a sad thing."

"You see her since?"

"Once." He affirmed with an uncomfortable shift. "We had tea in her manor on Thessia. It's a nice place. Awfully lonely though. Books and journals everywhere. This was about three months ago."

"You think I should write?" Shepard had asked Garrus.

Garrus looked at her for a long time. The Shepard she knew wouldn't have to ask. "I don't think it'd hurt." He said instead. "I'm not sure what she's looking for, but whatever it is it's got her deep."

"Do you think, sometimes, about what we should've done more for her?"

"We were in the middle of a mission. Perhaps the most important of our lives." Garrus remedies, but he knows, and she knows, that's not the ideal answer, a perfect solution to their pains. "We had no time."

"No time at all." The mission on the Normandy took them from was just under 90 days, give or take galactic time standards and intricacies, their mission taking them through from 2183 into the beginning of '84. Yet it felt like years with the pace, the density of their duties. She felt like she had known Garrus for that long at least, with how naturally they talked. But that was the matter of war and comrades.

It was the first days of June now, but the summer heat had already been in full swing, not that that the two of them would notice with the A/C still blasting.

"Wrex has relocated quite a lot of the warring Krogan clans from Tuchanka to Virmire, inoculating those who come against the Genophage." Garrus moves on, but Shepard is not surprised at that at all. Wrex always, despite himself outwardly carrying like a brutish mercenary, had such higher principles in him. She stops short of wanting to congratulate Wrex for it via Garrus.

"I assume you haven't met him since our time on the Normandy?"

"On the contrary actually." Garrus shakes his head from side to side as if it was a horrible thing. "I'm the only Spectre he entertains at all. We're friendly, but he knows I'm a "Council Pet" all the same."

"Surely he doesn't mean that to you." Shepard tilted her head knowingly.

He shook his head back. "With Wrex? Who knows? But we talk, I let him know on what the Council doesn't want him to do and, unsurprisingly, he does those things."

"Like curing his people from the Genophage?"

"Oh yeah." Garrus nodded once. "Even just a year on we're getting the first wave of births on Virmire. So many Krogan clans are swearing themselves to him for the sake of generations to be born that Wrex has just gone about and created a new network of Krogan in the Galaxy that we Spectres have to corral."

"But it's a good thing, right? That the Genophage is cured?" How long it had been since one of Shepard's questions. Garrus had missed them and what they meant. He was a more solid man now however to answer true and quick.

"I think it is. Obviously. But everyone is on edge about a resurgent Krogan in a few decades, especially one that is aligned with the Covenant." Again, her eye twitched at their mention, and she had fire in her eyes that she fought to pelt down. Garrus goes on, seeing even her twitch. "The Covenant got in the way of Citadel involvement immediately after Virmire, but promised to keep the Krogan in check. Right now Virmire is the first planet that truly is Covenant it feels."

On Virmire, Krogan and Covenant walked among each other as once did the Covenant on Altis with Quarians and Humans, and it seemed a very natural thing to them. The Jiralhanae in particular found themselves well with the Krogan, not in parity or unity, but rather in healthy, brutish rivalry. If the Council had been so concerned about the Krogan resurgence, the Jiralhanae had already been there in strong numbers and numbers to come.

"I- I heard a little about that? Wrex shaking hands?"

"Not really, but it's an unofficial, official thing. He works with the Covenant as far as letting their envoys be escorted by them into Council space. The "Honor Guard", so they tell me." Krogan, bathed in scarlet red and gold, side by side their partners of Sangheili and Jiralhanae kind. It makes Shepard sick to her stomach, but she already knew what they were called. Mai's memories, this long, have imparted in her certain details that have come to life like a dictionary that she alone can read from.

If, she has to guess, it's perhaps the only reason why she is still alive.

A backup plan. Just as she had been once: a repository of memories, she is again.

Cleft-Lip and Sunglasses have the faintest idea that she had those memories within her, but she held them close. Close enough that they sat in her like another secret, one that had run a line up from her core, through her stomach, right to her heart.

She wonders if Garrus knows now with his information. She wonders who else knows but keeps quiet.

"The Covenant," he says again, "They're not uncooperative. A lot of the Spectres actually work with them. Given the fact that we are Spectres without oversight, working with the Covenant has been a nice shortcut given their resources. The Covenant and the Citadel have an icy relationship in general, but we're not looking at another war, at least for now. The Covenant is too busy sending out colony ships."

He glances again to the corners, and the walls, and before Shepard can finally comment on it he flicks his finger up one close to his chest, it rolling; continuing as if he coaxing on his own words. So, she remains quiet.

"They've rediscovered the Kig-Yar actually. They're pre-FTL, and even pre-space at this point, but they're being folded into the Covenant as a whole. We have a hand on that pulse. That's public news now, though."

She's heard about this too: about how the famed ship, killer of Saren and that Geth Dreadnaught, the Ardent Prayer had been now using its miraculous slipspace FTL, so outside the bounds of any other method in that galaxy yet, to go find the distant cousins of the Covenant if they existed.

In that year, she had heard that the Kig-Yar were existent, as had been the Yanme'e (or at least a species very, very similar), but the Unggoy and the Jiralhanae, their ancestors, or perhaps the astral events that would've led to their upbringing in this galaxy had been of the same as the Sangheili: left in the ancient past. Fossils of tentacled-faced predator animals in Rannoch's ancient past were brought back to focus, and for the first time in thousands of years the Sangheili were presented of fossils who they had once been. In this space, they had lost that bet with the Quarians distant ancestors, but here the miracles drew them together.

The hunt for the Lekgolo, the Huragok, and the San'Shyuum went on, but to no success.

All that was left now them, was the full acclimation to the Galaxy, one that had been built upon knowledge the Covenant, with several centuries of foresight to work on, had used for their advantage in new planets ripe for exploitation or development in places that the Council could never get to in a realistic time period over traditional spacefaring methods.

There was a cold war happening, and Shepard didn't even need to guess. But it was a war already lost on the premise that the ultimate weapon: the harnessing of slipspace, had been within the hands of the Covenant. She knew, deep down, that the Alliance would try with all their might to try and get there, but for now, and the foreseeable future, the Covenant alone would wield a power so great it skipped over borders and barriers that kept those native to this reality bound to it.

These are the thoughts that keep Shepard happy to only think of her plants and the San Francisco traffic.

Garrus gives her a different thought.

"As for Tali…"

Shepard perks up. "Oh? How's she?"

Garrus pauses, looking straight at Shepard. She hadn't known. This was the last part anyway, the bandage rip.

"Tali's a wanted criminal, actually."

"What?!" Shepard snaps, her voice cracking.

A young girl, adventure and duty in her eyes and on her shoulders. A criminal? The question was on Shepard's face, but she was also the answer. Tali'Zorah was born a soldier for the Quarians, but it was Shepard that divined her ability as one. The situation, the mission, it had leveled her up to a new type of person able to fight in a way that could change the world. She had been there, after all, for those missions on Therum, Feros, Illium, Virmire, and all those ships and outposts in between. They all blurred together but they bound them all together, and then to themselves in capability.

Garrus gives her a long, sad look, nodding to himself as if biding within himself. Shepard's eyes are big, he notices. Big for seeing all the world she can, but their shape is that close to a Turian's. They're sharp, and focused, and the splash of green color is so unnatural to his eyes he can't help but feel them burn. It's a different burn from the massive woman that had been JD's shadow. This burn is one that comes from within.

His talons wrap around themselves, uncomfortable himself as he tells her this story that he had to internalize himself.

"She's currently one of the higher up priority targets with the Spectres." Garrus relents. "I can't say much, but she and a choice few other Quarians have rejected the Covenant and the Quarian alliance. Last March on Illium, a financial hack transferred billions in credits and resources out toward Batarian space. Some backdoor that a Quarian pilgrim had placed during their pilgrimage. Investigations showed that that Quarian had given those perms to Tali."

"Really?" Shepard's eyes darken and sadden by the second and Garrus wills himself to go on in a nod.

"We would've dug up even more, but that Quarian strapped several high explosives to himself and destroyed a Quarian attaché facility on Altis shortly after."

Garrus remembers the bone chilling report: how the Quarian had walked up, just into the office building in Altis and cried havoc in the form of a now killing word: Keelah se'lai.

Thirty-three casualties: one dead Sangheili, and four dead Quarians among them. Nothing to say of the Human cost.

Hours after, broadcasting out from unchartered space, taking credit for the bombing in a unilateral promise of terror and uncompromising Quarian fundamentalism, had been a splinter group led by none other than Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, or rather, someone else:

"She goes by the name Kell'Tass naz Aimer nowadays, supposedly some combination of early Quarian philosophers before the Geth who spoke about nationalism in pre-space travel society uniting the planet, but, as far as we can tell, it's our dear Tali."

This is why she doesn't watch the news, or hears of it at all.

If she had, she would've been starside already hunting Tali, or rather, Kell'Tass down herself.

Garrus flashed a group emblem on his omni. A burning sun, gold, ancient Quarian script across it that translated out to this:

The Morningstars.

And suddenly Shepard is back as a Marine operator, receiving a briefing on another terrorist or criminal group that the Alliance needed wiped or dealt with. She's been there before, as a lieutenant, listening to agency spooks tell her of the enemies of Mankind. Now all of them pale to what greater dangers she knows exist out there. If there is any good for her with the new evil in her mind, then it is the fact that she has not thought of Cerberus in a long time.

The Morningstars had something more intriguing than manifestos to Shepard however.

It had Tali in it.

"She wants the Covenant out, and the Geth brought back into the fold." Garrus explained.

"The Geth?" Shepard raised her eyebrow. "Back?"

Garrus sighed deeply, "The Geth were always a part of a Quarian duality, one could not exist without the other… Or, so Kell'Tass says. Having them be removed breaks a natural order to things."

Natural order. A natural way of things and history. Shepard wonders who Tali was to be without all of this, about whether or not something was natural or not, especially the progression of history.

She could've been a mother. A parent. She might've stepped away from the world and born life and cared for it and let someone else deal with Saren and the Reapers and maybe the Galaxy would've been better for it.

But what life was was where she had been, stuck to a ceremonial office.

"If there's anything I can do to help, Garrus," Shepard leaned in herself, mustering what she once was. "I'll be sure to make myself available to you."

"Oh, that's very kind of you Shepard, but unfortunately as far as me and you go, we're not allowed on Kell'Tass's case on the account of our proximity to her during our mission together." Garrus raised his hands. "In fact that mission is very much the reason why she's as capable as she is."

"Well she needed to be fit and prime-"

"No. Not that." Garrus shook her head. "She was there, on the ground, when we accounted for a lot of Saren's assets. A lot of them have gone missing." There's scorn and regret in Garrus's voice, annoyance. "If only the Covenant kept Saren alive maybe we would've been able to get the leg up on her, but given her rhetoric, a lot of Saren's assets after his failure were redirected."

"Assets like?"

"Access information, financial, technical readouts, and as I'm sure the Alliance Intel agent outside knows, information about the Normandy and her class." Before Shepard could open her mouth Garrus continued. "It's all in the past, Shepard. We couldn't have known she would be like this."

Across the galaxy, Quarian sympathizers to Kell'Tass roam the world openly, ghosting the new Covenant and the Quarians that have been so easily within their grasp. Money stolen, technology taken, infrastructure destroyed and at worst blood spilled all in the name of a free homeland.

"Jesus Christ." Shepard breathed in her own hands, palming her face. "Garrus." She said his name openly, for no reason in particular other than to draw his attention; a woman adrift needing a life preserver.

"I know, Shepard, I know." He said, his voice stony before he breathed deeply again. Outside the world had been so blue. "I was a cop, Shepard. I mean, I still am, just on a galactic scale. But when I was out there in my district in C-Sec, the scale was small, intimate." His first cases were always little things: pickpockets, robberies, stick ups, bar fights. It was no wonder he yearned to make a difference, to gut people like Saleon and see them split in two. But that didn't mean what he had done didn't matter. "I was assisting my first partner on a case, over in Little Illium. Murder-suicide. No one was running, just had to make sure all the details were straight and narrow for the report. The biggest question was who was doing the murdering."

"Who was it between?"

"An Asari who had almost been a Matriarch and her daughter. Barely sixty years old." The eagle on the wall looks down upon all of them. Garrus talks slowly, details still as present to him as when he stepped into that apartment years ago. "Both dead by gunshot wound, same general place on the body, both their prints on the gun."

"Sounds horrible."

"Mm." Garrus mumbled. "Our job was to explain the why and not the how. There was no victim outside of the family. When we went around, asking neighbors if they had heard or known anything, there was always the assumption that it had been the daughter that had been the one who pulled the trigger. All of them coming up to us and saying, "Oh wow, did Classeria finally do it?" Apparently it, and trust me, I understand this, it was a matter of upbringing and career path.

The mother wanted the daughter to go down the career she did in her eight century life, and that was as a lawyer, but the daughter, the daughter was a rebellious sort, according to friends, family, and neighbors. So it was a cut and dry case right there, that it was the daughter that did it. This firebrand who wanted to reject her mother who was closing in on her."

"But it wasn't like that, was it?" Shepard asked earnestly.

Garrus gives her a long stare, choosing his words. "I mean. My captain at the time didn't want to wait too long on the report to close it up, so that's what we said, officially, but the alternative was about the mother being the perpetrator. I brought up some details, pointing to pride, and ego, discontent that her daughter was going to ruin her family name… Spirits. That early in my career I had to weigh what was worse, whether or not a mother killing a daughter was worse, or a daughter killing a mother."

It makes him think about the intimacy, the personal bearing on how scale works. Tali was a galactic scale individual, but it was very personal to them both.

Outside the gulls cawed out to each other in heartbeat rhythm and their conversation was probably more pleasant than the one taking place in that office. "I missed these kind of talks." Shepard had half-joked, but it was the truth in her little scoff. But conversation was transitory, all leading up to something. "What are you really here for, Garrus?"

"Why, I just wanted to catch up with an old friend who doesn't seem too pressed for time." Before Shepard could respond Garrus twitched, rolling his head off to the right. "Alright, we're good."

"Huh?"

Garrus from his pocket had drawn a silver puck, its top brimming with emitters that revealed their purpose as soon as it settled.

"Hello, Shepard." Nihlus Kryik in the flesh, or, rather, the hologram, right down on the table. "No cameras in this room as far as we can tell, but it's bugged. About five mics creating a nearly a perfect audio landscape that you can use to recreate the scene in here by audio alone."

"Sorry we had to stall," Garrus doesn't look sorry at all. "It's been a while since we've had your current voice on record and Nihlus here needed to develop a sample set in order to put out a low level audio frequency that cancels out our own voices as we're speaking and masks it with random, believable conversation."

"You two are talking about food now, actually." Nihlus interjects, and the image of Ais in another place goes past Shepard's eye. She wonders how Cash, of all people, is doing. But the world swirls for her, the wind that is Garrus Vakarian coming into this room and shuffling her. She used to be that wind. Now she barely recognizes it, even as it stirs and shakes her.

"Garrus, what's going on?"

"Procedurally generated conversation from samples of your voice and mine, along with a frequency nullifier for our actual voices. We can speak freely." Garrus seems too impressed, too confident, too comfortable, but he has become a Spectre for a reason. He explained the literal, but not the truth.

Shepard knows that Cleft-Lip can't hear her through the door, it's a thick door, one that she's left people waiting behind and not being able to hear their idle conversation on why she had been so late.

"No, no. Why you're here." The last time a Turian, Nihlus Kryik, even showed up before her her life had gone down that path that led her here to purgatory. The urgency of her voice shows the warning signs of that life. "What is happening?"

Garrus kept his mouth closed, and Nihlus, on his puck, looked up to her.

Nihlus Kryik lived. One year after his physical body had all but been destroyed, he had been transferred to a system that allowed an adaptive matrix to fill in the damage in his brains and make continue his survival, his being, in the form of a something half-organic, half-synthetic. He lived now, more closely than those would think, to an AI. "Shepard," he started, and Shepard remembers how this story started with him and hero on the Normandy. "I still know your file. For as long as you've had one, you've been fighting for the truth, regardless of race, political line, or even the law. The truth, and only the truth is what you've fought for. We call on you to do so again."

If there's an inclination in Shepard to get up and walk away, it's larger in her now than she would care to admit, but she sits there, her hands folding to themselves, looking between Nihlus and Garrus. "To do what?"

"Tell the truth. About the Covenant. About the Alliance."

"I know nothing about-"

"Charles Pressly, former XO of the SSV Normandy, corroborates with Doctor Karin Chakwas, and at least thirteen former Normandy crew members that you suffered visions in relation unaffiliated with your mission. Urdnot Wrex further implies that these have to do with the original reality of the Covenant due to his witnessing of events on Feros." The truth was said to her by Nihlus, and Garrus nodded with each point. Of all the secrets Shepard has kept, this one cuts deep, beaten by one item and one item alone.

Garrus shut his eyes in some shameful admittance. "That's been my job, my charge, these last few weeks, hunting down the old crew and grabbing testimony and signed statements."

"For what though?" Shepard had to ask again, the stress in her voice peaking.

"Bringing an indictment against the Covenant, if not officially, then at least in the public eye." Garrus answered. In the public eye, Shepard knew so much, the Covenant had been a strong, anti-Citadel position that proved that the Galaxy could be lived in without them. And yet their strength was built on so many lies to them.

"What do you know that you're not telling me then?"

"About Spartans, about ONI. Twenty-three billion dead Humans. A war that was fought for decades where Humanity has all but lost."

In her nightmares, she sees great Covenant ships spit fire upon planets so hot it turns them to glass. She sees children, disintegrated by plasma weaponry. More than anything else that haunts her: she cannot do anything, either to stop it, or to avenge the innocent.

Nihlus says those names and her body seizes.

"Shepard!"

"Wait-." Shepard grips the edge of her table. For every night, ever since the Normandy. An iron grip at the tip of her memory that seemed to drag her down like gravity. She held on for dear life, over a dark pit that no amount of lightyears could put her between the edge of. It was a hole she had to hang over every night, restlessly. It was a whole that almost none could know existed.

And here, two people had found that hole.

She breathed, in and out, eyes closed, hard. The edge of the table becoming her hand hold as memories of fire, of killing, burned through her mind. Truth, and nothing but the truth; weight. Even her own sins were fewer. Minutes pass in quiet, but instead all the microphones in the room could hear was a conversation all too real. When her breathing levelled off, Garrus spoke again.

"The Covenant is a force built on billions of innocent dead."

"Yeah, well, what power in this galaxy isn't?" She coughed, brushing an errant bang behind her head. "Council, Alliance, and every power below that. Billions dead anyway, and we do nothing for it."

She met a man, once, out in South Africa. A descendant of Apartheid. South Africa had been an economical powerhouse because of its apparent proximity in temperature and climate to Palaven's more wealthier places, and Turian tourism there had been great. But he had known better, fishing on his dock, his dark skin glowing in sweat and sun. The Turians would love this place even more if they knew the genocide of his people that had taken place there.

"That… AI, Cash. When you were on the Citadel before Virmire, he left a package off for me. It was only three months ago I opened it only to discover it's a fully detailed report on both the nature of his existence, the Covenant, UNSC history, and the relations between the Covenant and the Alliance as known by him. He told me not to open it unless I felt as if the natural course of our history was being disrupted on."

"You know how silly that bullshit sounds, Nihlus?"

"Shepard." Through the puck alone his voice, Nihlus's authority as a Spectre comes through. "The Council generally knows that your position here isn't exactly voluntary or ideal. More than that, we know you know information that you shouldn't, and is a truth that is proper for the galaxy to know. The difference between our history, our "billions dead", and this, is that you can do something about this, their, history." Nihlus leveled at her, but she looked away.

"I'm not the doing person, anymore. I did that once and now this," she gestured back up, "is happening." She gestured to the room, the mics she had always known at some point were there in that office and back in her apartment but stopped caring for. She gestured to that empty base, and then the Earth beyond her. She gestured to the stars above and a political order gone awry. "If the Covenant uprooted what was supposed to happen, so did I."

"You were victim, same as anyone else. And because of that you are chief witness to corroborate what Nihlus has within him." Garrus offered instead, and hand offered. She didn't take it.

"The Council still not believe its own?" She knows the song and rhyme, very much so.

Garrus reeled back. "Naturally, it's a very a convenient package to present. Too convenient for Nihlus alone. They need someone that can be seen as impartial comparatively. A Human, speaking out against Human interests even is perfect, especially if that Human is a Spectre."

"Oh, so now the Council believes what's inside my head." Sick irony, sick humor. The convenience now of her stares at her in the face and she wants to scream.

"Times have changed, Shepard." Garrus tells her, but she already knows. "Human and Covenant advances in space territory are unprecedented, they're the only two powers in this Galaxy that seem to act like this current state of affairs is normal."

Nihlus interjected, arms behind his virtual back. "This needs to be stopped before we barrel towards a new normal. One that cannot be managed safely. The Alliance needs to be accountable as well in this control."

"Controlled by the Council." Shepard's hands, knuckles, cracked as they held themselves.

"But control, nonetheless. Do you know how many generations have lived beneath this system we have now? Our First Contact War even was nothing more than a blip because of the parameters of the Council."

The breath that comes out of Shepard is ragged, she glancing at that eagle, looking down on her. "If the Council really cared for this control you would know that that handoff is coming, with or without the Covenant." The same darkness. It's been a long time since Garrus has heard it, and for the storm that's coming, it covers up a different disaster, something so complete it swallows all, even nature itself. Her fists curl, and she sees a problem that has long been put away in her mind but no less real. Like a tumor, growing inside, not only her, but all.

"Do you still think about them?" Shepard knows what Garrus means before he says it aloud: The black monsters from beyond the darkness of space who came and put to death the closest things to gods this galaxy had, who had done so so many times that they were already in their graves; graves built into the ribs of a thousand thousand civilizations before them. "The Reapers?"

She sees them in her restless dreams, the leviathans of horror that no one, not even the Covenant, could stop. If anything, they would worship them.

"If you let us pursue the Covenant with your corroboration, the Council can move on back to the matter of Saren's Reapers again. Vakarian has the authority to seize you and transport you to Council space. We'll keep you safe."

If this was what it was like, for her to come into someone's life and just ask for their help, to drag them away over their heads on an adventure, suddenly that weight dragging her down that dark hole is that much more active. She had done this to people before and here she had been now: the admiral in the seat, with a Spectre asking her for too much. And now she understood why she had to say no.

"At least the Alliance will just let me sit and rot; you seem to be intent on feeding me to History." There's nothing on her desk to make her look busy, so she simply stares blankly at the photo of her and her family. They talk, every day, but now it's them on the assignment out with the Fifth Fleet and under opsec. They never brought up the need for grandchildren. She was enough, they would always tease her. "Gentlemen, you should go. I wish you luck on your mission, but I can't do anything for you."

The two Turians remain as if she said nothing.

The beach outside is one of the staples of the N-program, and one she knows well. It's a beach that has hosted thousands of soldiers like her as their baptismal on this side of the world, arm in arm, linked together square, backs beat upon the waves for hours, hours, hours. The Pacific Ocean was a cold bitch and Shepard knew her as her own mother as a special operator. Preliminary training often took place here on Coronado, where entrants into the program were cut through, weeded out until out of a class of fifty, only five remained. Below her office is a bell, an old bell green now from the ocean wind. It was when a soldier gave up, when that bell was rung, were they free from the punishment.

She never rang that bell, she was its master now. When it rang for this last year, it rang for her.

"What happened to you, Shepard?" The question that is asked of her for so many times in this last year in so many different ways is finally said by Garrus: a straight shooter for her, and now, at her. It is said in pity, but it is said in genuine confusion. He catches her eye, and he holds it. "I saw you fly across the Galaxy on a mission that required all of you, for the sake of the Galaxy, and yet you still found time to do errands, to go help, those out in there that needed your help, even if they were out of the way, unimportant, or even the worse people I've ever known." Nihlus is silent between them like a chess piece, but he more than any knows the board. Garrus, long digits, they reach out and his head nods up as if asking her permission for her own. She does, and he grabs her left hand that is offered once slowly, gently, before holding it tight. "You helped me, and I'm here asking for your help again, so I can help you."

Shepard's hand darts away as he says it, eyes narrowing. "I helped you kill."

"Well, it was the nearly seven foot tall metal monster woman that killed, you, you helped me bring him to that judgement. Because that's what you are, and always have been, on that mission, and every day of your life before Virmire: the only person that can do that, for all of us. I know it."

"How?"

"Because I saw you gave Saren a chance. We had him dead to rights, and we all wanted to put him down right then and there, but you begged him, for his own life." A killer of the innocent, and she still wanted him to be good. "That was Saren. And yet you still did it."

She has thought about that choice every day. She has thought about what if someone stopped her and lit Saren up without her command, or if she had just done it already. Would JD still be okay? Would those fifteen dead men and women of Hitmen still be alive? There was always a better way, and she tried her best to walk that better way, but all those roads led to that moment.

Nothing changed.

"Saren shouldn't have gone on living. Not when because of it over a dozen good men lie in graves." Her voice drips with regret, and it makes her choke. "I made my final choice. I can't be out there anymore, or else things are going to be fucked up even more. It's why I'm okay here, training the next generation."

Here she was, a woman lost to her position, to History, and she was quite okay with it. If Garrus couldn't understand that then the curse, the dance, had taken him too. It's a dance without coordination or reason or rhyme, but it has a name:

The butterfly effect, dominoes falling, a house of cards collapsing, ripples in a pond-

Mass Effect.

It was his, not hers.

She was done with it.

She doesn't sound convinced of herself, and they both know it, but staying alive was the bare minimum she could work with.

She had her entire life to beg for other people's lives. Now she could beg for hers.

A mission that could've saved the galaxy, and she failed because it was her at the wheel. It wasn't her turn anymore and whatever she thought of where she had been now, left on the ground as the world moved on around her, she didn't like it, but she knew why it happened. One day the Alliance death squad would come for her, she imagines, led by those who she was training because one day there would be an officer above her, or maybe in the civilian government, who would be paranoid enough to wipe her from the slate because she was a liability.

She knows because those were the missions of the color she had never gone on, expected in special forces work, and fortunate enough to be in favor of commanders who'd never send her on them because she was too useful.

The only time, the only exception because there is always one, was the one that took her and a cadre of N7s and N6s like her to a Human city, wave down a car full of alleged Cerberus scientists, and kill them all.

Those days were done for her.

She would wait to die.

Unfortunately, she was talking to a cop, and cop had their routines.

"Alright then. I won't give you a choice then." Nihlus's voice is all machine, but it cannot hide the ire that was all too organic.

"Nihlus." The warning off of Garrus voice is more for covering fire.

"When I originally sought you for-"

"Shepard, I know nothing about this." Garrus pleaded, but he was off the table already as Nihlus went on, and suddenly he wanted out of that room.

"Vakarian." Nihlus snaps, and Garrus is silent. "When I was introduced to you as Humanity's first Spectre, I did my own research, more than just the files generated by our security services. I'm a Spectre, that's what I do, and even back then, I knew. It took a lot of digging, and I never completed my research before I found you, even though I didn't know it at the time. But now? As I am? I can see trends, digital data so clearly, it's like clouds in the sky. Because of that, I know where your child is."

And suddenly, the dark is not so scary to fall into. Another Shepard would've walked away then, for no one could hold that leverage over her.

This was a different Shepard. Not better or worse. But a new one.

This Shepard was a mother.

Garrus's covers his face, from shame, and from the sight he sees on Shepard's face. It's like he has committed a crime from which he could not excuse, and after a year of being a Spectre, he knows the indiscretions of this job.

On Shepard's face is a mix of horror and hope, and it ingrains in him the realization that they are much too of the same thing.

"They're still alive?! Who- what, what's they're name?" There is life in her voice, and she is out of her chair, but there is no body to grab Nihlus by. There is nothing to grab and yet her hands want something in them. Something she gave away a long time ago.

Nihlus is silent, but he knows. "Shepard. Help me, and I'll help you." He stares up at her, arms at his side resolute. "You might think this Galaxy lost, but I know there's still someone in it you'd give it a fighting shot for."

The detail overlooks the procedure, and suddenly the mask is back on. "Is this what you would've taught me, Nihlus?" The grit in her teeth does not hide the scorn. "This kind of coercion?"

In a room with three Spectres, there's only one there that's an immaterial ghost. He knows more as if accessing an afterlife repository of forbidden word. "Too much is at stake for us not to." Nihlus answers.

"How do I know you're not bullshitting me?"

"The last Q4 report card before they graduated first grade said that they had an A+ in Reading and Writing, C in Math. I got no idea what that means for Human children, but I do know teacher's comments say that they "Get along with everyone in class". The trend has stuck."

"Shepard, I'm so sorry." Garrus can't help but apologize in the silence of Shepard hearing those words from Nihlus. "I didn't want that to even come up." Her child is still existent, out there. "But Nihlus is my supe on this."

Garrus looks at Shepard, but there is no person there, not one he can see through his fingers. He sees what the rest of the Galaxy. A force beyond his comprehension beneath the skin of a Human. It stirs, like the darkness between stars. That room is so brightly lit, and yet it is so, so cold.

It's that type of darkness that all Spectres need, and yet Shepard's, invoking the word of a child upon her, her child.

"Got records." He goes on, and no way that he can speak will be enough for Shepard and the brevity she would think would come the day she learned of the continuing life of their child. "Got the agency that they were put up through adoption for. Every ticket on every liner that they took until they found their adoptive family. Medical, dental. Tickets to a theme park on the planet they reside on that list their name. Them on a roster for school choir. Got a lot. Got everything. Everything you need to go find them."

"I-" Shepard can barely catch the breath in her mouth. "I-" A long string of Is, of Hows, of questions that put Shepard back in her seat. For a woman who had made her life once in bringing the truth, she cannot handle her own

Her child was alive in a galaxy going to shit.

"Shepard," Nihlus calls her, to level with her, as only he can. "Spectres can kill, take information as needed, show information as needed. We can hide the truth when convenient, yes. We can do all that. But we do not lie. Not true Spectres that is. You know how true to the cause I am, Human? Even in death, I still serve, so know I am not lying to you."

"We need you." Garrus tells her, and he says it true. "Everyone needs you again."

There was no choice for her to make.

She could no longer live for herself, and perhaps that had always been true, but her own flesh and blood was all she had left now. For what possibility, for what reason it would serve for her to know about them, she does not know. They would be about seven now. Seven years where she was not involved and was no more than a stranger to them. It was an easy thing to do, not thinking of their life with that fact about them: on how if the Commander Shepard had come to them, they would uproot their life assuredly, and the parents that took them in.

But she had become no one.

She buried herself in her hands, and her decision lay ready to come out. She just needed to get ready herself for it.

All that she had was the maybe, the knowledge, that she could see who they were, and that they could live a good life.

An eagle looks down on them all, and an Alliance Intel agent is in the next room.

"How's this going to work." She whispers, and her face is free from her hands. "Cuff me?"

Garrus smiles his smallest of smiles, and Nihlus looks to him and nods in success. He shakes his head. "I've shot my way out of military bases recently, but none Human. I don't intend to rectify that."

"This is my base, Garrus."

"Your prison, more like it."

"Voice gen is off in five. You were last talking about the proliferation of thermal clips." Nihlus reports before Garrus gathers his puck back into a shirt pocket. There is no blip, no sound that can reveal that the veil is down again and whatever is being recorded is true, but Garrus melts into it easily:

"I'm on planet for a few days, you know, building a network of my own. We can meet over lunch, and then take off from there when I'm settled."

"Oh. Okay." Extractions were always dramatic, but not hers. "Give me a few days. I need to put my affairs in order. Get someone to water my plants."

Just like that, again, a Turian Spectre is before her taking her some place. They both rise at the same time, and Shepard is unsure of what the feeling beneath her feet is, lost in herself.

"Hey." Across the desk, Garrus reaches out, a hand on her shoulder. "I'm glad you're still around. I know I was only with you three months, only about half a deployment by Turian Navy standards, but Spirits, there's not a day when I was off on my first assignments as a Spectre where I didn't think of you."

"Oh yeah? Fall a little in love?" She teases, and just a bit of her, the version Garrus knew, returns.

Garrus almost chokes, hands off and away and trying to wave her off. "I don't have time for that." There is wist in even his voice that the translator picks up. "I don't know how you had time to talk with all of your crew back then, Shepard."

"It had to be done." She answers.

In her may be the memories of a dead race and a Spartan, but there are other memories too. Of men and women long gone, who survive in what they spoke to her about. They spoke of hobbies, of true loves, of places to go and things to do. Daughters and sons and wives and husbands to go back to and homes to build and futures to live. Perfect memories. Perfect details. Chosen, given. Not forced upon.

If only all her memories were as such.

His talons slide off her shoulder, and he nods, and understands.

"Hey." Shepard says in return, walking around the desk. It was time for them to go. "I'll forward you some places you could visit around here. Stay close. California's a bit dry, but we still have good country around here to check out. Maybe some dextro-amino food in our style."

With a hand at his back, they walk out together. "Yeah, that'd be nice."

Each step in the last year for her was purposeless, without the weight of distinction. The steps she takes on her carpet now had been different. They were taking her forward, even if it was toward the unknown.

Before they got to the door however it is opened, and Cleft-Lip had made the impression that he had been waiting for them. The two shock themselves a little, but it is Cleft-Lip that is wide-eyed. Just a coincidence then.

"Shepard." He calls for her to look as he had:

There is a TV in the reception area kept on, and it runs wide and loud. The door cut both ways, as Cleft-Lip could not hear them, they could not hear the TV on the outside and all that it told them both, showed them all, an image from a place far away, but still on Earth: Over drylands, the sun seemed to have fallen to Earth and turned a color of inky black, and idea that, if they were there, they could reach out on their toes and touch that inky black sphere is impressed within all of them. It takes up all the cameras feed, held by a shaky camera operator as a woman speaks in hurried, confused reporting language. The tag on the upper right: Kenya, Africa. The ticker:

WOTE WANAOMBWA KUHAMA KAUNTI ZA PWANI / KUSIKILIZA WAFANYAKAZI WOTE WA MUUNGANO

The station is an affiliate of the Alliance News Network, and the ANN itself, being fed these images, a host sees and speaks in caution:

"It appears some sort of black hole has opened up above the city of Mombasa."

---

A/N: And we're off. Like Mass Effect I am going to consider each section a sorta of a reentry point to the story, and, now that the canon story is off the rails, I can do my own thing.

Welcome to All the Stars, Section 2. Thank you for reading, let's discover this strange new world together!