Chapter Text
Garrus wasn’t the only member of the crew who was desperate to keep busy in the days after the crash, but in some strange twist of fate it had fallen to him to organize everyone into some semblance of a work force. When he stumbled after Joker into the light of some unknown star, he felt nothing but the pain of the injuries he’d sustained in that final push to the beam, the ache in his spirit at letting Shepard run off without him, and a very distinct desire to make her proud.
He hadn’t been present for most of the firefight that followed, or the rush from Earth as the relay sputtered and died—he was trying frantically to help Tali patch herself up, she had so many suit ruptures and she was bleeding as much as he was, and someone was slapping bandages on him and black dirt and ashes and spirits-know-what kept falling off his armour and onto Tali’s exposed flesh. But he had met Joker up near the hatch, after the crash, and the pilot had tried to say something, anything, but Garrus knew. It didn’t sit well with him, but he knew.
They had left Shepard behind.
“She stuck around for me, you know,” Joker had said, sitting in the sunlight, “when the SR-1 was going down. She… she did that for me…”
“She’d do it for any of us,” said Garrus, staring at the planet the moon they stood on was orbiting, visible even in daylight.
“I was supposed to repay the favour,” said Joker, and Garrus could hear the hitch in the pilot’s voice. “Not just… watch her get spaced again.”
“We don’t know anything yet,” Garrus had said, and he’d understood that it offered precisely zero comfort. “You did what you could. That’s all anyone could ask.”
But the conversation had to end there, because EDI had finished assessing damage and the length of time required to finish repairs, and more importantly that their food supplies would not last them. And that also the crew was beginning to panic.
With Tali out cold to fight her nasty fever, the engineers scratching their heads and the replicators being one of the many, many systems damaged in the attack, the thought of starving to death in the middle of nowhere after losing their Commander was just too much. To their credit, they didn’t precisely panic, but the crew who weren’t injured hung about in the common area in silence until someone asked what was going to happen next, and by the time Garrus and Joker arrived the situation had devolved into a lot of yelling.
Liara and Kaidan were trying their damndest to keep everyone calm, but the scene Garrus saw featured a very confused crew demanding answers from two equally baffled biotics. The situation was too much for every lesson his father and military training had instilled in him, so Garrus planted his feet and snapped “Enough” into the crowd.
He hadn’t meant for his voice to have quite the snarl it did, but he was hurt and angry and scared shitless and it sort of just slipped out. But it had the effect of quieting the room, just as Vega and the other members of the squad came in from the other levels.
Garrus surveyed the room for a while, and he felt the weight of exhaustion and responsibility settle on his shoulders as they all stared at him, waiting for orders.
“Since you all have so much energy,” he told them, this time keeping his subvocals in check, “you might as well put it to use.”
Since then, he had been running a tight ship. A recon team was sent to figure out if there was anything the majority of the crew could eat, the engineers settled down to fixing the ship’s scanners, and everyone else was on cleanup or medical duty. Except for Joker.
“Fantastic,” he said as everyone settled down to work. “I guess I’ll go pick up some paper or something, and hope it doesn’t break my tibia.”
“We need our communications systems up,” said Garrus, ignoring the quip. “We’re blind out here and we need to know if the crucible worked or if we should be preparing for another Reaper attack.”
“The blast that hit the relays is worrying me too,” said Liara as she came up to them. “I’m not entirely sure they’ll still be functional after even when the ship is repaired.”
“At least we won’t have to worry about Reapers then,” Joker said, turning and limping up to the elevator, possibly the only thing not broken in the crash.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Traynor offered, and she went for the emergency stairs. That left Liara, Alenko and Garrus standing, their backs turned to the memorial wall.
“Garrus,” Liara started to say.
There was a softness in her voice that made his mandibles curl, so Garrus said, “I have to check on Tali,” and left them just as abruptly.
Thankfully whatever bizarre place they’d landed had levo food, and it took little work to determine what was poisonous (most of it, incidentally) and what could be eaten. Then Garrus sent crews to harvest what was edible, and carefully rationed the dextro food. He made sure to ration a bit more for Tali for when she woke up, and resigned himself to feeling hungry for a while.
Garrus and EDI organized a general schedule, so that half the crew was sleeping at any time. The cycles were arranged so half of any given shift was in daylight, so that everyone got some sunlight and some darkness. He pointedly arranged Liara and Kaidan’s shifts opposite his, which EDI was tactful enough not to mention. The midnight/morning shift reported to Kaidan, and the afternoon/evening shift reported to Vega, and they both reported to Garrus.
It took Tali a couple days to get back on her feet, and another week before she stopped swearing at the replicator in her attempts to fix it. Both she and Garrus were down to quarter rations before she’d managed it, and Garrus had never been so happy to shove tasteless paste down his throat.
Of Shepard, or of their fate in general, the crew said little to Garrus. EDI informed him that they would speak of her, occasionally, in the space between shifts, little whispers to each other. Some expressed concern that she had failed, only to be hushed by the others. Mostly the crew was worried about her. After all, how many times can someone come back from the dead?
-
When he dreamed of her, he dreamed of small details. Dirty things, like checking out her ass with the scope of his rifle. Or letting her borrow his scope so she could check out Tali’s ass. He dreamed of how she used to run her fingers along the places where his plates met, where there was a thin seam of just skin, after they had exhausted each other, and it sent vibrations through his body. The way her tongue felt on his neck, her hands on his fringe, her lips on his mandibles.
Sometimes he dreamt of the way her mouth formed a hard line, just before she jumped out of the shuttle on Rannoch. Hearing her scream come at me motherfuc- before the doors slammed shut and Cortez took off, and Garrus’ protests died in his throat as he woke, reaching into air. Her eyes when, after Thessia, she slipped her hood over her head, pulled her knees up to her chest. How she rested her chin on her knees and stared directly ahead of her, just stared.
Most frequently, he dreamed of seeing her again on Omega, and of their goodbye on Earth, when she turned and he didn’t have the strength to follow her. He would lie awake just breathing, and agonizing over the sliding scale of his usefulness to the team and his unwillingness to crawl out of bed and face the day.
He was, as usual, interrupted by Vega pounding his fist on the bottom of his bunk. “Up and at ‘em!” he would shout. Or, that’s at least what Garrus assumed. He always turned off his translator before he went to bed, so for all he knew Vega could be shouting about the pin-ups he posted everywhere. Garrus knew some English, but Vega only ever used English half of the time, and it was never the half Garrus sort of understood.
Garrus was sleeping with the crew because the main battery was not a priority and therefore still a wreck, not to mention he couldn’t find his cot in all the chaos that the Normandy had become. And because he couldn’t quite bring himself to sleep in Shepard’s bed without her. That would be like admitting something he just wasn’t ready to do.
Vega’s wakeup call was followed by EDI’s, whenever Garrus bothered to put his visor on. EDI tried to be delicate, but it was an AI version of delicate because after every list of shift assignments and reports he read she always left an additional little note. His favourite to date was still, Dr. Chakwas wants to talk to you about your feelings because she thinks you’re suicidal and that you have survivor’s guilt, so I’ve assigned you to foraging duty and you won’t be back until late. Have a nice day. There were sometimes calibration one-liners, most likely Joker’s input because he could actually tell they were jokes.
But this time, there was a message to speak to Joker tacked onto the end, and that was curious enough to get Garrus out of bed quickly.
Joker was not holed up in the cockpit with Traynor, but instead sitting outside in the afternoon sun, just far enough away from the ship that sensors wouldn’t be able to pick up their conversation.
As Garrus approached, worried, Joker said, “We didn’t get blown off course.”
He stopped. “What?”
“Everyone assumed we were blasted off course, that we didn’t hit the coordinates.” Joker shook his head. “Well, not my assigned coordinates.”
Garrus understood suddenly why they were meeting outside. “EDI wanted us to be here.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t catch it before. But the logs all say we were supposed to land here.” Joker rubbed his too-long stubble with one hand. “And EDI’s been taking off without telling anyone.”
Garrus instinctively scanned the horizon, but of course his visor came up with nothing. “You know where she’s been going?”
“No. But Traynor picked up something… unusual on the last sweep scan. EDI told us it was nothing, but… She’ll send it to your visor.”
“Noted.” Garrus hesitated to ask the next question, and Joker laughed.
“She hasn’t gone rogue, relax. She’s just… up to something. And she seems to think that doing things solo will fly with us now that our resident snoop is AWOL.”
That actually made Garrus chuckle, too. Joker was the only crew member who seemed to acknowledge Shepard’s existence around him, and it helped with the tension, a little.
He returned to the ship and sent a message to Tali and Javik. Suit up, it said.
-
“She’s just been disappearing?” Tali asked, and she sounded far enough behind that Garrus had to wait for them to catch up.
Garrus wasn’t used to the point position, but he had the visor and Javik had the aversion to actually reading things so there he was, assault rifle out as he moved through the underbrush.
“And her motives are unclear,” Javik added from the rear.
“That’s pretty much what we’ve got.”
“Well the AI hasn’t come this way,” Javik said, “unless she has a way to hide her tracks.”
“I’m aware,” said Garrus. They’d lost EDI’s trail somewhere behind them in the jungle, where she’d scaled down a cliff that Garrus almost walked clean off. Thankfully the underbrush was surprisingly sturdy. And he’d been cursing his way through it only moments before. “But I’m picking up an unusual energy signature not far from here, and odds are that’s where she’s headed.”
“Unusual how?” Javik asked, and Garrus rolled his shoulders in a shrug.
“It’s not exactly anything we’ve seen before,” he replied.
“What about this place seems particularly familiar to you, Turian? As I recall, you can’t seem to even eat any of it.”
From the sound of it, Tali let a particularly large branch smack Javik in the face, and a glance over his shoulder confirmed Javik had a mouthful of broad green leaves. “Why did you even bring him,” she grumbled, and Garrus had to admit he was asking himself the same thing.
The jungle came to an abrupt halt at a rocky beach covered in azure shell fragments, and a green ocean lapped at the shores. The rocks that the waves tumbled around shone like precious stones, and Garrus instinctively bent down to pick one up. They were bright green, and contained trace amounts of Element Zero. A quick scan of the ocean confirmed the source.
“Looks like there’s a pretty significant Eezo source in the ocean,” he said. “More of the stuff in the water than on Thessia.”
“Kheelah,” Tali whispered, “it’s beautiful.”
The sun was passing behind the planet in the sky, and the light of it skitted across the waves, catching in the foam where it sparkled . They stood and watched as the light flared, then dimmed, and then the ocean began to glow.
It seemed to come from the depths of the ocean, somewhere the sunlight didn’t reach, somewhere on the horizon. It was the crisp blue of a mass effect field, and at first it looked almost like a bubble, but as the sunlight faded it grew stronger and seemed almost to focus, and they could make out distinct lines, places where the light was brighter than others.
“It looks like a city,” Garrus said.
Tali was furiously typing on her Omni-Tool. “It doesn’t just look like a city,” she said. “It is one.” Her combat drone appeared, and buzzed out over the water, its movement leaving little ripples in its wake.
“Then there is intelligent life here?” Javik said. “There is a civilization here?”
“Then why haven’t we seen anything until now?” Garrus’ visor didn’t have scanners that in-depth, but it did note that the light was from a Mass Effect field. How deep was it? His visor registered a sharp dropoff just thirty feet off the beach, but from this angle he couldn’t tell how deep it was.
“None of the previous explorations have gone this far, I presume,” Javik said.
“No,” said Garrus, breathless. “We’ve gone much farther than the recon teams ever did. And they’re never out at night.”
“If we presume this species is clearly aquatic in nature, possibly nocturnal, then they would have no use for the resources we have been accessing. It is only natural we would find no evidence.”
“Was,” Tali said, softly.
They looked at her.
“My mistake. It was a city. It’s… hard to say, but I’m not getting any readings other than the Mass Effect field. And it seems to be generated by a reaction created between the sunlight and the Eezo in the water, or perhaps it is powered by Eezo below the ocean floor…” She exhaled sharply. “But… there’s nothing there. Just the field.”
“Then we are looking at the remnants of a previous cycle,” Javik said, crossing his arms over his chest. Garrus thought there was a touch of sadness in his voice, behind the bravado.
“The cycles,” Tali said, softly. Then, “Do you think she did it?”
They all knew who she was talking about, but they didn’t say anything. They stared out at the glow and waited for someone else to speak up first.
“I mean,” Tali said finally, “what’s going to happen when we get communications back up? If we call for help, will anyone answer?”
Garrus could feel Javik staring at him without really looking. That was the crux of the whole thing, wasn’t it? That was what no one what whispering in the corridors of the ship at night, but everyone was thinking.
“The relays were destroyed,” Garrus said finally, and Tali visibly recoiled.
“What?” She shook her head. “Destroyed.”
“Yes.” Garrus looked at Javik, who was still silent. “Destroyed. Damaged. Not deactivated.”
“How?” Javik asked, his eyes narrowed.
“The blast from the crucible,” Garrus said.
Tali was shaking. “How—how long have you known? Who knows?”
“This morning,” he said. “Traynor’s the one who picked it up. She hasn’t told anyone else. And she suspects EDI wasn’t surprised at the news.”
“So the AI knew, but did not inform us. And has been going off into the wilds on its own.” Javik looked again out to the ocean, and said, thoughtfully, “It is unlikely these things are unconnected.”
“So what? EDI’s been looking for a way to fix the relay? But even if we fix this one, can we guarantee the others will be functional?” Tali’s voice was wavering, and Garrus could tell she was trying to fight back tears. “If we tried to make a jump to a broken relay, what would happen?”
“You do not want to know,” Javik said, and Tali hugged her arms close to her chest.
“There’s more,” said Garrus, and they looked at him. “Something’s repairing it.”
They stared at him.
“Something?” Tali ventured.
Garrus glanced at the ocean. “It’s unclear what, exactly. But it… reacted to Traynor’s scans.”
“Reacted?” Javik said.
“Like the Reapers did,” Tali whispered.
He nodded. “But different,” he said, his subvocals subconsciously lowering, mandibles flaring. “It reacted, and it scanned us, and then it ignored us.”
“It ignored us.” Javik shifted his weight. “That’s absurd. If it was a Reaper it would kill us on sight.”
“So it’s not a Reaper,” said Tali, “right?”
Garrus could feel his mandibles curl just a touch closer to his face, and he closed his eyes and tried to force his expression neutral. “I don’t know,” he said, finally, and with it a great pressure that had been building up in his chest was released. “I don’t know,” he repeated, softly, and his subvocals lowered again. He was dangerously close to keening, if he didn’t keep himself in check.
Something changed in Tali’s stance, and she opened her body posture, dropping her arms and even holding them a little away from her body. Javik bowed his head and began to move up the beach a little, bending down a ways away to stick his hand in the water.
“Garrus.” Tali’s voice was soft, and she reached out to touch his arm. He allowed her to twine her fingers around his, and the way her hand fit like it was supposed to just made Garrus miss Shepard more.
“I shouldn’t have let her go,” Garrus growled, “I should have gone with her. I don’t care if I died or got a rocket to the other side of my face, anything’s better than just sitting here and not knowing anything.”
And then he really did start half-keening, half-growling, the sound low in his vocals and it felt like hell on his throat and his pride but Tali stood there, holding his hand until he wore himself out. He didn’t feel any better after, just tired and frustrated and worn all raw, because what the hell had that accomplished, and he sat on the beach with Tali and just stared out at the ocean until Javik came back, drying off his hands.
He gave them a look that said are you done because I don’t do feelings, and Tali nodded.
“I believe the—Tali’s scans are correct. I can feel nothing in the ocean, but the memory of living things is still there. The shellfish under the sand have memories of predators that no longer exist.”
“What sort of predators?” Garrus asked, and winced at the rawness in his voice.
“It is unclear. They are many evolutionary steps removed. But there are redundant defences against large creatures that I cannot feel in the ocean.”
Garrus nodded and stood, slowly. They all stood in an awkward triangle, both of them looking at Garrus, and he rolled his shoulders.
“Right,” he said, and he pointed up the beach. “The energy signature Traynor picked up is still coming from up there.”
“Not the mass effect field,” Tali said.
He nodded. “And we still haven’t found out what EDI’s been up to.”
They set off down the beach, accompanied only by the sounds of shells being crushed under their feet. The light reflecting off the planet gave them plenty of light to see by, even without the crisp blue glow coming from the ocean’s floor.