[Mass Effect] this being alive thing
Nov. 8th, 2021 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anaisonfireTitle: this being alive thing (1633 words)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Mass Effect Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Garrus Vakarian
Characters: Garrus Vakarian, Kaidan Alenko
Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death, (it's shepard), Grief/Mourning, Set during the 2 years skip, POV Garrus Vakarian
Summary:
Garrus isn't on the Normandy when it goes down.
Written for the 2021 round of![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
trickortreatex (AO3 collection).
Garrus isn’t on the Normandy when it goes down.
He'd gone back to Citadel, inspired by Shepard to give C-Sec another try. With Saren and Sovereign gone and the threat of the Reapers just a shadow on the horizon, there'd been no reason for him to tag along on an Alliance vessel.
Shepard hadn't protested, just clapped him on the back in that bizzare human way of his and wished him luck. The crew - the whole crew even, not just the ground team - had all gotten together the night before for a small send off party, like they'd done for Wrex two weeks prior.
So. He's not there.
The thing - not the worst thing by far, but maybe the one he won't be able to forgive himself for - is that he doesn't even hear about it until over a week later.
He'd been working a case, a sort of "prove you haven't lost all your training running around with a human around the galaxy and maybe we won't kick you out for real" trial run (not that they could actually afford to throw him out - there was too much work to be done after Sovereign, but he could be polite and pretend). He'd gone looking for information in… not entirely legal places and hadn't had time or need to listen to the news.
So coming into work the next day, he'd been entirely unprepared to overhear the latest gossip topic.
“...damn shame.” A human voice floats over the general noise of the surroundings - it takes Garrus a moment to place it as belonging to Eddie Lang, one of the human officers.
“And they’re not even looking for the bodies.” Another human, this one unfamiliar. New recruit, maybe? There’s been an influx lately.
“Shit, really?”
“Yeah, my cousin’s in the Alliance and she says that’s the way the wind is blowing from up high. Apparently they went down on some shit planet, no chance of survival. It’d be a waste of resources, or something.”
“Still… not even for Shepard? I mean…”
“I know, right? You’d think if anyone would warrant it, it’d be the first human Spectre, but bureaucracy moves for no one, apparently.”
They move away, not noticing his attention, and take their conversation with them, but Garrus feels stuck in place. He should move, do the work he came in for, but suddenly tracking down the tainted eezo shipments is the last thing on his mind.
Shepard? Dead?
Feeling like he can’t breathe, Garrus pulls up the news for the first time in a while. He doesn’t even have to actually search for what he needs, it’s right there at the front page.
COMMANDER SHEPARD KILLED IN MYSTERIOUS ATTACK, ALLIANCE INVESTIGATING
(updated today)
He opens it and mechanically absorbs the information, what small parts of it are publicly available. And it’s truly little, no wonder rumors are flying everywhere. Unidentified (or undisclosed) attacker, presumed geth. No mention of a list of casualties, but it does say that one Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko had assumed control of the surviving crew. So, that’s one safe, at least.
Something eases within him. Sure, him and Kaidan might not have been the best of friends - too many conflicting worldviews, there - but the idea that the quiet biotic who was one of the few humans to not mind Garrus' presence on the Normandy in the early days, might've been dead is suddenly too much to bear.
He’s not quite sure how he gets through the rest of his shift, but clearly his training is good enough that even moving entirely on autopilot no one bothers him about it.
It’s like suddenly that’s all anyone wants to talk about. Thank the spirits that no one tries to bring it up with him. He’s not sure what he’d do if someone tried to give him their condolences - or if they spoke without realizing it was personal.
So. Here he is now, inexplicably living in a Shepard-less galaxy.
Somehow Garrus ends up sitting on his tiny kitchen counter, with an open bottle and a message typed out - the whole thing a series of bad decisions he’ll likely regret in the morning.
He spends far too long staring at Shepard’s contact. (He’d meant to call this week, ask if the Normandy was Citadel-bound soon.)
The message isn’t even anything special. What is there to say? “Hey, you’re not dead, what the hell happened?” Yeah, that’d go over well.
It may be the brandy getting to him, but he hits send anyway.
I heard.
That’s it. Two words. Not that Alenko will need more.
He’s not expecting an actual reply, least of all any time soon, so he’s caught off guard when a notification pops up less than five minutes later.
The news finally break?
It’s remarkably casual, but, well. It’s not like Garrus knows how to approach this with the proper gravitas either.
Yeah.
He almost sends it just like that, but thinks to add: Youokay injured? There's no point asking if he's okay, so he replaces it with a more concrete query.
Superficial.
Garrus' mandibles flick. That could mean… many things.
Pondering what to say, a second message comes before he figures out how to ask Kaidan if he’s full of shit.
Joker says he saw him get blown off into space.
...Fuck.
I'm sorry.
Me too.
He gets the feeling neither of them is apologizing for the same thing.
After that first grief-driven exchange, Kaidan forwards him a list of casualties.
The only consolation is that Liara and Tali's names aren't there.
Reading through it and coming across someone Garrus actually knew is like being punched by a krogan. And not a nice one like Wrex.
Pressly is on there. Grenado. Felawa. Dubyansky. Pakti. The Draven sisters. The requisitions officer whose name he never could remember. Thirteen others, most of them just faces he saw occasionally on the crew deck or in the CIC without talking to them. He regrets, suddenly and intensely, not taking the time to get to know them at least a bit.
And there’s Shepard, of course.
Garrus is no stranger to death. He did his time in the military like a good turian and C-Sec certainly had shown him enough bodies. But somehow… this sits differently.
They keep talking.
At first, it’s mostly fits of desperation for a listening ear that gets it, what it feels like to lose a man like Shepard. But eventually, over the course of the first couple of months after, Garrus finds himself reaching out more and more casually. Random gossip from the Citadel, funny things that he sees on the job... Kaidan never seems to mind, so Garrus keeps doing it and doesn’t read too much into things.
From the little Kaidan’s allowed to talk about over unsecured channels and what details he lets slip anyway, Garrus manages to piece together that the remaining Normandy crew is being strategically reassigned to posts as far away from each other as possible. It could just be normal bureaucracy, of course, but from Kaidan’s grimace (they’d scheduled a real-time call for once) when he says Chakwas is being posted to a colonial facility instead of a warship, that’s unlikely. Add to that the very careful way news outlets and Council representatives word their statements when talking about Sovereign - “Saren’s attack”, emphasising “the geth” at any given opportunity and never, ever mentioning the Reapers unless it’s to call them a myth, Garrus and Kaidan both come to the conclusion that the ones in charge very much intend to bury their heads in the sand about the incoming threat. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth when he realizes, and Garrus can’t quite make it leave.
He does, however, get sufficiently distracted from his rising discontent when he gets a message from Kaidan. That’s regular enough, but what throws him off is the actual text.
Dropping by the Citadel next week. Got time? :)
For some reason that sets his heart beating double time, but he does reply and they arrange a place and time to meet.
Over the next days Garrus finds himself thinking about the upcoming meeting at odd times and has to shake himself out of it more often than not. Stop being ridiculous, it’s just Kaidan, he tells himself and refuses to dwell on the fact that just Kaidan means something different now than it did a few months ago.
When the day comes, he has half a second of wondering if he should wear something other than his regular clothes before realizing how much like Solana in her teenage years that makes him sound. (He does put on a slightly fancier shirt than he’d usually wear in his downtime.)
Garrus spots Kaidan first. He looks… good. Wearing Alliance BDUs, of course, but that’s not a detriment. At all.
Kaidan spots him and cuts off that thought.
“Garrus!” He calls and- damn it. Garrus likes the way he says his name.
Internally shaking his head at himself, he replies, voice slightly raised to be heard. He hopes like hell no turians are paying attention to what his subharmonics are doing.
“Kaidan.” He waves at him, abruptly realizes he doesn’t know what to do with his hands and ends up awkwardly crossing them.
Kaidan slides up next to him, paying no attention to the jostling crowd and smiles.
"Hey."
Garrus clears his throat.
“So, how long are you here for?”
“Just today," he starts walking in the direction of the Upper Wards and Garrus follows. "This is more of a stopover, really. Got a new ship." That last part is said only somewhat bitterly.
They decide on getting lunch and, in between glancing sideways at Kaidan, Garrus admits to himself that maybe at least one good thing came from this.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Mass Effect Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Garrus Vakarian
Characters: Garrus Vakarian, Kaidan Alenko
Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death, (it's shepard), Grief/Mourning, Set during the 2 years skip, POV Garrus Vakarian
Summary:
Garrus isn't on the Normandy when it goes down.
Written for the 2021 round of
trickortreatex (AO3 collection).Garrus isn’t on the Normandy when it goes down.
He'd gone back to Citadel, inspired by Shepard to give C-Sec another try. With Saren and Sovereign gone and the threat of the Reapers just a shadow on the horizon, there'd been no reason for him to tag along on an Alliance vessel.
Shepard hadn't protested, just clapped him on the back in that bizzare human way of his and wished him luck. The crew - the whole crew even, not just the ground team - had all gotten together the night before for a small send off party, like they'd done for Wrex two weeks prior.
So. He's not there.
The thing - not the worst thing by far, but maybe the one he won't be able to forgive himself for - is that he doesn't even hear about it until over a week later.
He'd been working a case, a sort of "prove you haven't lost all your training running around with a human around the galaxy and maybe we won't kick you out for real" trial run (not that they could actually afford to throw him out - there was too much work to be done after Sovereign, but he could be polite and pretend). He'd gone looking for information in… not entirely legal places and hadn't had time or need to listen to the news.
So coming into work the next day, he'd been entirely unprepared to overhear the latest gossip topic.
“...damn shame.” A human voice floats over the general noise of the surroundings - it takes Garrus a moment to place it as belonging to Eddie Lang, one of the human officers.
“And they’re not even looking for the bodies.” Another human, this one unfamiliar. New recruit, maybe? There’s been an influx lately.
“Shit, really?”
“Yeah, my cousin’s in the Alliance and she says that’s the way the wind is blowing from up high. Apparently they went down on some shit planet, no chance of survival. It’d be a waste of resources, or something.”
“Still… not even for Shepard? I mean…”
“I know, right? You’d think if anyone would warrant it, it’d be the first human Spectre, but bureaucracy moves for no one, apparently.”
They move away, not noticing his attention, and take their conversation with them, but Garrus feels stuck in place. He should move, do the work he came in for, but suddenly tracking down the tainted eezo shipments is the last thing on his mind.
Shepard? Dead?
Feeling like he can’t breathe, Garrus pulls up the news for the first time in a while. He doesn’t even have to actually search for what he needs, it’s right there at the front page.
(updated today)
He opens it and mechanically absorbs the information, what small parts of it are publicly available. And it’s truly little, no wonder rumors are flying everywhere. Unidentified (or undisclosed) attacker, presumed geth. No mention of a list of casualties, but it does say that one Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko had assumed control of the surviving crew. So, that’s one safe, at least.
Something eases within him. Sure, him and Kaidan might not have been the best of friends - too many conflicting worldviews, there - but the idea that the quiet biotic who was one of the few humans to not mind Garrus' presence on the Normandy in the early days, might've been dead is suddenly too much to bear.
He’s not quite sure how he gets through the rest of his shift, but clearly his training is good enough that even moving entirely on autopilot no one bothers him about it.
It’s like suddenly that’s all anyone wants to talk about. Thank the spirits that no one tries to bring it up with him. He’s not sure what he’d do if someone tried to give him their condolences - or if they spoke without realizing it was personal.
So. Here he is now, inexplicably living in a Shepard-less galaxy.
Somehow Garrus ends up sitting on his tiny kitchen counter, with an open bottle and a message typed out - the whole thing a series of bad decisions he’ll likely regret in the morning.
He spends far too long staring at Shepard’s contact. (He’d meant to call this week, ask if the Normandy was Citadel-bound soon.)
The message isn’t even anything special. What is there to say? “Hey, you’re not dead, what the hell happened?” Yeah, that’d go over well.
It may be the brandy getting to him, but he hits send anyway.
I heard.
That’s it. Two words. Not that Alenko will need more.
He’s not expecting an actual reply, least of all any time soon, so he’s caught off guard when a notification pops up less than five minutes later.
The news finally break?
It’s remarkably casual, but, well. It’s not like Garrus knows how to approach this with the proper gravitas either.
Yeah.
He almost sends it just like that, but thinks to add: You
Superficial.
Garrus' mandibles flick. That could mean… many things.
Pondering what to say, a second message comes before he figures out how to ask Kaidan if he’s full of shit.
Joker says he saw him get blown off into space.
...Fuck.
I'm sorry.
Me too.
He gets the feeling neither of them is apologizing for the same thing.
After that first grief-driven exchange, Kaidan forwards him a list of casualties.
The only consolation is that Liara and Tali's names aren't there.
Reading through it and coming across someone Garrus actually knew is like being punched by a krogan. And not a nice one like Wrex.
Pressly is on there. Grenado. Felawa. Dubyansky. Pakti. The Draven sisters. The requisitions officer whose name he never could remember. Thirteen others, most of them just faces he saw occasionally on the crew deck or in the CIC without talking to them. He regrets, suddenly and intensely, not taking the time to get to know them at least a bit.
And there’s Shepard, of course.
Garrus is no stranger to death. He did his time in the military like a good turian and C-Sec certainly had shown him enough bodies. But somehow… this sits differently.
They keep talking.
At first, it’s mostly fits of desperation for a listening ear that gets it, what it feels like to lose a man like Shepard. But eventually, over the course of the first couple of months after, Garrus finds himself reaching out more and more casually. Random gossip from the Citadel, funny things that he sees on the job... Kaidan never seems to mind, so Garrus keeps doing it and doesn’t read too much into things.
From the little Kaidan’s allowed to talk about over unsecured channels and what details he lets slip anyway, Garrus manages to piece together that the remaining Normandy crew is being strategically reassigned to posts as far away from each other as possible. It could just be normal bureaucracy, of course, but from Kaidan’s grimace (they’d scheduled a real-time call for once) when he says Chakwas is being posted to a colonial facility instead of a warship, that’s unlikely. Add to that the very careful way news outlets and Council representatives word their statements when talking about Sovereign - “Saren’s attack”, emphasising “the geth” at any given opportunity and never, ever mentioning the Reapers unless it’s to call them a myth, Garrus and Kaidan both come to the conclusion that the ones in charge very much intend to bury their heads in the sand about the incoming threat. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth when he realizes, and Garrus can’t quite make it leave.
He does, however, get sufficiently distracted from his rising discontent when he gets a message from Kaidan. That’s regular enough, but what throws him off is the actual text.
Dropping by the Citadel next week. Got time? :)
For some reason that sets his heart beating double time, but he does reply and they arrange a place and time to meet.
Over the next days Garrus finds himself thinking about the upcoming meeting at odd times and has to shake himself out of it more often than not. Stop being ridiculous, it’s just Kaidan, he tells himself and refuses to dwell on the fact that just Kaidan means something different now than it did a few months ago.
When the day comes, he has half a second of wondering if he should wear something other than his regular clothes before realizing how much like Solana in her teenage years that makes him sound. (He does put on a slightly fancier shirt than he’d usually wear in his downtime.)
Garrus spots Kaidan first. He looks… good. Wearing Alliance BDUs, of course, but that’s not a detriment. At all.
Kaidan spots him and cuts off that thought.
“Garrus!” He calls and- damn it. Garrus likes the way he says his name.
Internally shaking his head at himself, he replies, voice slightly raised to be heard. He hopes like hell no turians are paying attention to what his subharmonics are doing.
“Kaidan.” He waves at him, abruptly realizes he doesn’t know what to do with his hands and ends up awkwardly crossing them.
Kaidan slides up next to him, paying no attention to the jostling crowd and smiles.
"Hey."
Garrus clears his throat.
“So, how long are you here for?”
“Just today," he starts walking in the direction of the Upper Wards and Garrus follows. "This is more of a stopover, really. Got a new ship." That last part is said only somewhat bitterly.
They decide on getting lunch and, in between glancing sideways at Kaidan, Garrus admits to himself that maybe at least one good thing came from this.
