#post me1

During the night cycle, when visibility was too low for recovery work, Garrus picked over the ruins and tried to find his apartment. He had lived on Kithoi for a decade and had been sifting wreckage for a week, but he still found it difficult to maintain his bearings. His customary landmark - the flashy, dirt-cheap jurum take-out place two blocks distal from his apartment complex - was now a circle of raw vacuum. Clean as a bullet, a plasma-hot shard of the Presidium had pierced through the heart of his old neighborhood and left behind a lacy, delicate ring of exposed strata. Beyond a thin sheet of transparent pressure shielding, the stars watched him. Bright and cruel and hungry, they glittered like teeth.

After several nights of fruitless exploration, Garrus was ducking under fallen girders on the promisingly familiar third story of a blown-out building. He stumbled through a slip of loose ash and his boot came down on something hollow, shattering it to pieces with a startling crack. Terrified that it was a skull, he hesitated to look.

But when he lifted his foot, all he found was a soot-black 1/144 replica of the Destiny Ascension.

He was home.

Only the vaguest top-down details remained, like an archaeologist’s reconstruction propped over a burial mound. The superstructure lingered. A single wall had survived nearly untouched, the interior support between the bathroom and his bed. Everything else was heat-blasted beyond recognizability. The panels on his kitchen cabinets, once dingy but serviceable, now peeled back in rippling sheets. The street-facing walls were hardest hit of all, transformed into tortured fists of rebar clenched around shriveled black clumps of plasticite that had once been windows.

He entered slowly, unsure of the floor.

His boots crunched over plastic and glass, over the chewed-up remains of his furniture, his television, his data-pads, his desk. He watched a thin gray powder stir around his heels, making clear, dark footprints wherever he stepped, and realized he was walking through his own ashes. Ten years of his own life, gone.

The corner of his living room that had once been dedicated to a life-long modding hobby (an obsession his sister had dubbed unhealthy) was now a foul-smelling smudge. One quick glance told him that his carefully tended supply of oil-soaked lithium had caught fire and fueled what looked to have been a sizable inferno. As usual, Solana had been right, though he imagined this particular I-told-you-so would have given her little satisfaction.

All across the apartment, model ships were strewn in unrecognizable bits and pieces - a tragicomic miniature of the numerous tragedies outside. Years of careful collecting and affectionate assembly were in that graveyard. Gifts from his mother, his sister, friends from Cipritine that he hadn’t spoken to in years. Each vessel thoughtfully assembled over long months - some had taken years. As a matter of principle, Garrus had been in the habit of cleaning the collection on a bi-monthly schedule, rotating the fleet through his spotless display cases, carefully mounting his favorites on plaques that he engraved himself.

There was only one he cared about now. The newest and cheapest, never even finished. Garrus dug through debris for a full half hour before he found the first recognizable piece of the Normandy: a three-inch fragment of her starboard hull. He tried to wipe the soot away with his thumb, to see if her colors were still intact, but the fragment crumbled through his fingers.

After that, he had little reason to stay. Desperate for anything salvageable, he made one final sweep. This time, he focused on the surviving bedroom wall, going straight for the built-in bedside storage. He wasn’t hopeful, but maybe he’d left something in a drawer. An omni-tool, a data-pad. Something. Anything. He would walk out of here with a half-melted candy wrapper clenched in his fist, if that was all he had left.

Instead, what he found winded him like a fist to the keel.

There, in a mostly-empty drawer on level with what once had been his headrest, he found a pair of pristine Alliance dog tags. Paralyzed by the sight, chest on fire, he sucked in a breath and held it to the count of ten. A mistake, surely. She must have forgotten to take them with her, last time…

Mechanically, he reached into the drawer. Picked up the dog tags. Brought them closer.

He swallowed a sick flood of bile. On one side, Jane Shepard’s name topped a short list, the insultingly dull bullet-points of a military life. Fighting the knot in his chest, Garrus turned the tags to the reverse face.

His heart stopped. No.

No accident. Shepard had left the tags in this drawer deliberately, had carefully arranged them like this in the hope of future discovery. A message. A promise. A confession. He knew all this for a fact - the evidence had just been seared into him forever like a sunspot in the back of his eye. 

Before leaving these tags in his bedside drawer, Shepard had stolen two small bottles of enamel from his model kits and meticulously filled the stripes on her identical N7 insignia with hand-painted streaks.

One red, one blue.

The room swayed. For one gut-clenching moment, Garrus was convinced the building was about to topple. To steady himself, he pressed the cool tags against his forehead. Out of sight, out of mind. He tried to blink away the nausea, but the cold touch of Shepard’s last message soaked through his plates like a soft kiss.

Blowing faintly through the dust of the room, he heard a small but terrible noise.

I love you.

A moment too late, he recognized that wretched, broken cry: his own voice. 

Silencing himself, forcing down the scream in his throat, he brought the tags to his mouth and sucked in an involuntary, shuddering breath. Cold and chemical, the familiar metallic tang of fresh-set modeling paint filled his mouth, his nose.

With that, his final vestiges of structural integrity gave way. He hit the floor in broken stages: one knee, then the other, a hip, the heel of his hand.

Kaidan had left the restaurant fifteen minutes earlier, hoping to avoid any incidents with the paparazzi who had been relentlessly dogging Shepard since the battle.They had chosen a smaller restaurant, dark lighting, far apart tables. The stainless steel accents, dark wood, abstract art on the walls; this was kind of place where you needed a million credits in your bank account to even be considered for a reservation. Still, she thought as the hanar had guided them to their table, it would be difficult to get a good picture, and hard for a reporter to listen in. She glanced at a salarian waiter dressed in black and white, noting that the staff were likely too well paid to accept bribes. They hadn’t seen any paparazzi when they came, probably because the reservations had been under Kaidan’s name to avoid notice. It was halfway through the first glass of wine before she stopped looking at the faces of the other guests, trying to see the flash of a hidden camera.

People mingle around her as she steps into the artificial light, neon signs washing over her exposed skin. Silversun always fascinated her. It seemed like the epitome of city life, full of flashing lights, glitzy dresses, and endless chatter of the crowd over the booming announcements from the casino a block away. The Silversun Strip never sleeps, full of the sound of clinking glasses and Quasar scoreboards. She walks slowly, trying to avoid catching her heels on the seams of the floor tiles. The crowd swims around her, moving in the fast paced current of traffic. She stumbles over a ledge on the floor, absorbed in the flashing purple billboard advertising happy hour at Flux. Her wayward step trips the asari maiden to her right, who curses as she struggles up from the floor. Shepard is about to apologize when the maiden’s tiger striped face twists in irritation.

“Watch where you’re going, human!” she huffs, picking up her long hemmed dress.

Under normal circumstances Shepard would have flashed her gun and watched the girl stammer out an excuse. Instead she stares astonished as the asari glares at her and then turns on her heel. Like she is just another passerby. Shepard holds her hand to her mouth to suppress a laugh. She could hear a newsanchor’s voice shuffling their papers before looking at the camera and stating that the ‘Savior of the Citadel’ had been told off by an spindly armed asari.

In the darkened windows of the casino she can see her reflection, the artificial pink of her lips and clinging fabric of her dress. Between the makeup and clothes most of the galaxy would find her unrecognizable. Her ability to roam the wards had been granted by an eyeshadow palette and a pair of designer heels. Her ribs seem to expand and her smile turns broad. Now she’s just another casino guest, taking a short break from the smoke clouded rooms.

She remembers being eleven and seeing the bright lights and elegant dresses darting by fuzzily on her sister’s omni-tool screen. In the dark of their house in summer she crowded around the screen with wide eyes, hand stitched blankets scratching her legs. Back then the Citadel was some far away space station thousands of times bigger than Mindoir. She held the plastic model of the Citadel in her hands like a baby bird and imagined all the people moving along its fast-paced halls. Glamorous and romantic, full of unbuttoned collars and smeared lipstick.

I could have had this life.

The thought slips unwanted into her brain.

A mixture of amusement and something heavier settles in her chest.

She could have. She could have gotten textbooks instead of dogtags for her eighteenth birthday. Business school instead of basic training. Her friends would be dressed in suits and evening gowns, chatting about stocks over a late night drink. Her skin would be unscarred, nails polished, hands soft. Her biotics would be a little irregularity people asked about in conversation, not the thing that kept bullets from piercing her vital organs. Her nightmares would be of spiders and long falls, not reliving the day she saw her skin melt off her arm.

Her head shakes involuntarily, trying to keep out the intrusive thoughts that rattled in her skull.

Shepard starts walking again, faster this time, leaving the thoughts behind, but dragging along the heaviness in her chest.

Under breath she starts listing of good memories, small pieces of happiness. Making jam with her father in a messy kitchen, watching award shows on the couch with her sister, trying tequila with her brother when her parents were asleep. The memories keep flooding in. She’s playing cards with her first squad, Anderson teaches her to shoot a gun. She remembers standing proud as she received her N7 armor. The feeling when she became Anderson named her captain of the Normandy. The silence in the cargo bay when Ashley recited poetry.

Shepard flinches away from the memory.

Her heels make a light clicking sound on the walkway, but all she hears is the heavy dragging meg boots, muffled by her helmet, walking away from a slumped figure. The list of memories suddenly becomes a list of the deceased. Names of smiling friends turn into faded uniforms and empty chairs. For every friend she can name there is a body buried light years away.

Her mother used to point at the sky and say a person had as many lives as there were stars. Each speck of light was another chapter in a life, another stop in some grand journey. Standing on their porch she’d beg her mother to tell her about all her other fantastical lives. As a detective on Earth, an ambassador on Terra Nova, a bounty hunter on the edges of Citadel space. Looking at the checkerboard of lights high above her she didn’t see the emptiness of space. She saw the adventures of lifetimes. Every story would be ended with ‘but the most amazing story takes place in a small colony in the Kepler Verge called Mindoir.’ She would beg for her to tell the story of the colonist girl, but her mother would just wink and say ‘you’ll have to wait.’

Standing in front of a freshly engraved headstone she wondered when her mother had stopped telling those stories, and when had she stopped believing her life was anything other than a surviving.

Every year that passes seems to carry her farther away from a the girl sitting on a porch swing with star filled eyes. The world gets greyer every new year, and the chorus of dead voices gets louder. On which planet had she been standing on when she gave up hope of happiness?

Her chest feels empty and her throat burns. She falters in the crush of people, stumbling to a halt.

And then she sees him.

He’s standing in the center of the boulevard, an island in the stream of people, lights washing over his black suit.

In the chaos and clutter her world suddenly snaps into place.

Because if there is an word that was the opposite of regret, it would be his name.

In all the lives she would have, whether it was just one or countless more, she would pick this one every time, because this was the life where she met him.

His face breaks into a smile when she approaches him. He barely gets a greeting out before she pulls him in by his collar to kiss him. He makes a sound of surprise but melts into her after a second, arms wrapping around her. The kiss tastes like lipstick but the smell of his cologne fills her nose. Shepard presses into him and they stumble backwards a step. When they finally break apart they’re both breathless.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Kaidan says gasping “but what was that for?”

“To celebrate,” Shepard grins “afterall we managed to go 24 hours together without everything going to hell.”

Their noses brush softly and she can see the dark fringe of lashes around his eyes. In the light of the Silversun Strip gravity doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and she could just float away.

“I think we’ve still got time to cause an explosion.”

Her laughter is light like a sixteen year old girl with bouncing braids.