Omega was a blight on the galaxy— something Garrus knew all too well. But when Shepard gets strung into Aria T'Loak's coup, he insists to return to the place he swore off for good. Except the ghosts of his past are loud, his mistakes louder. And after a year, he comes to realize that maybe Aria shouldn't be in charge after all.
Rated M: blood and gore, PTSD, angst, mild sexual content. 8/8 chapters, 17,000 words, completed.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It wasn't the pit he had known so intimately and fondly forming in his stomach. It wasn't the anger and the guilt and the rage that had fueled him the second he woke up in a Cerberus bed, side of his face whirling with brand new circuitry that meant that every time he picked up a fork anymore, he had to fight through a zap of static shock. It was something different.
It felt like absence. An Absence, to be precise, in its proper form. He wanted to name it, so that he might understand it. It was like an oil spill, muddy and iridescent. He should feel the pain, the grief, the hatred. But when he reached into the well, it had dried up.
Garrus didn't linger on it. He trained himself well, after all. Later. He would think on it later. He would do it later. Later-Him probably would say the same thing, again and again. He pushed everything off for a time that never really existed, because if he put enough distance between now and the problem, it would be nothing more than a little blip.
That, or he would be dead, and problems wouldn't be problems anymore.
Which seeing as Omega had shored up their defenses in Aria's absence (that she was calling a sabbatical, as if it was her choice to get ousted), that was growing increasingly likely. Defense towers, AA guns, all pointed at their exact location. He could feel the sting of a laser pointed right between his eyes. Crap.
Their defenses were perfect, really. And Garrus knew that because he was the one to shore up their base. Sidonis's old apartment, that was bigger than his house he grew up on back on Palaven (Sidonis never wanted to talk about it). Trip wires, sensors, cameras everywhere. Every door had its own unique code of numbers and letters that Garrus would recite over and over again until he would fall asleep at night. It was much better than counting earthsheep.
But that wasn't all. Liquor in the fridge. A couch that could fit eight of them if they squeezed. Shelves lining the walls with armor, guns, grenades, old medals that lost their luster long ago. Picture frames. Garrus banned anything personal— nothing to connect any of them to the lives they lived outside of the group. But still, they found their way to tables and mantles and underneath drawers. Little bits of all of them, endemic to the apartment like organs. Garrus had a picture of his family when he was a child on their porch, shrubs starting to change colors for the season, hidden underneath the coffee table. And under his pillow, he had one of the Normandy. The seven of them all crowded into the Mako, some joke that long lost its humor. Something called a clown car. Green eyes. Fire red hair. A hook curved her nose when she thought too hard.
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