Chapter Text
Twenty-nine days since the end of the war, and the focus was on containment. Sure, there were smaller ideas like distributing food and medical supplies to the millions of new refugees—both human and alien alike—and maybe the Alliance was even telling the people that their priorities lie with caring for all the victims, but for those with half a brain, they knew what the real message was. Containment. Keep the large groups of starving, homeless, injured people from reacting too loudly and riling up the other ones too buried deep in their misery for the time being. Control what they do and don’t see, what they do and don’t eat, and for god’s sake, keep them in one damn place to isolate the chaos.
It was a lesson that Charlie knew all too well in the month since things had gone from outlook-not-so-good to outlook-only-slightly-better. Instead of the Reapers in the skies, their carcasses now littered the flesh of the earth across the globe, their hulking masses peeking from beyond tree tops and the cavities of downed buildings in the major city centers. Out in the countryside, things were better, and the occurrences of the derelict monstrosities grew less and less in direct correlation to the distance one got from where any significant numbers of population had been before. The cities had been crowded then, but now farmhouses and summer chateaus out by lakes and mountains held the remainders of families and orphaned children.
There would be many orphans on earth because of how long the humans had held off against the Reapers. With more casualties came the need for more civilians to jump into the fight, fathers and mothers leaving their children behind somewhere they hoped their offspring would remain safe, silently praying they’d be able to return to watch their sons and daughters grow up some day. But most of those parents, they wouldn’t ever be coming back. Just like hers, Charlie allowed herself to think for half a second, before banishing that line of thinking away to the recesses of her mind where she stored all the horrible things she’d both seen and endured over the last few months. An orphan, that was what anyone else would call her, but it wasn’t what she’d let herself be.
Charlie rolled her shoulder against the heavy weight of her small duffel bag’s strap, ignoring the familiar soreness and ache that had worked itself into her muscles. It was a constant to her now, always there but her consciousness only aware of it in certain situations, like when she woke up in the morning or actually found not only the time, but food, to sit down and have a bite to eat of whatever cold sustenance was afforded to her. When she’d started this wayward trip, her bag had been fuller then, with a few more pieces of clothing before they’d gotten ruined and somewhere upwards of half a case of ration bars. She had a feeling her digestive system would never be the same after the amount of tasteless cardboard she’d been forced to eat in order to keep herself going.
The man beside her brushed into her harshly, and as an innate response, Charlie reached up, gripping the shoulder strap of her bag a little tighter to her. He leered, corner of his mouth lifted in a particularly untrustworthy grimace. She steeled herself for the moment, just as she’d done hundreds of times before while fending for herself, pushing the little girl aside to bring forth the woman Charlie had unceremoniously been forced to become. There were dozens of others around them, but she knew from experience that if it came to a scuffle, few of them would help, so she went with what she knew and let the left side of her jacket fall open, exposing the gun at her hip. It was a bold move, one that had its flaws, but her heartbeat resumed normal function again when she saw the man retreat. He’d have to make another person his unwilling victim.
The main gate of the Alliance’s London headquarters came into view just as the sting of blisters hit the soles of her feet. The boots she was wearing, they hadn’t been hers and were a size too large, but they’d become a welcome replacement to the flimsy little things she’d been in the day she’d left her home behind. She veered off the main pack of bodies that gathered at the checkpoint, instead following the length of the high-rising fence. She hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet off when a soldier from the bird’s nest security perch called down to her, rifle raised.
“Gate’s back that way,” he shouted.
“Crowded,” she yelled, keeping things short. “Figured I’d give another entrance a try.”
“They’re closed,” he responded, not for a second lowering his weapon. He jerked the barrel of the gun back towards the direction she’d come from. “Go with the others.”
Charlie cursed under her breath, but knew better than to linger and put up a fight with a gun pointed at her chest. Unlike most other things, that wasn’t a newly learned trait. She nodded and turned back towards the growing line of queuing bodies to wait her turn.
The overhead lights were bright and blinding, especially in the darkness of the night, an effect she was sure was done with purpose rather than coincidence, allowing the working soldiers to stare down each and every person who tried to gain access to the military base. Charlie fished her hand through the inner pocket of her coat, pulling out the ID and data cards she’d presented similarly at all the other shuttle ports and camps she’d passed through, but the soldier on duty merely grunted at her presentation.
“Step into the scan,” he said.
She eyed the machinery set forward in the checkpoint, the exact piece of equipment she’d been hoping and trying to avoid through an alternate entrance. In the heat of battle and war, there hadn’t been time for protocol and proper security clearance. If you had a weapon, you could fight the Reapers. That was all that had mattered then. But now, however remotely, things were returning back to some military-state version of normal.
“These haven’t been a trouble before,” she started, and did her best impression of all the authority figures she’d ever crossed with before. If you act it, her mother had told her in some of her final words, they’ll believe it. Charlie pushed the identification card back towards the soldier, this time with some force.
The man in uniform took her papers, looking from the image presented to the person before him skeptically. He folded it closed and handed it back, and repeated his earlier gesture of tilting his head towards the machine and guards ahead of them. “Not my problem. No one comes in or out without a scan, not even the admirals, “ he paused and swallowed, a glance given back before adding, “Ma’am.”
Charlie pursed her lips, her heart pounding inside her deceptively still body, as she set her focus back on the checkpoint a few feet ahead. A man in uniform was standing patiently as he waited for a soldier to motion him forward once verification had been put through. Another was at the next machine, handcuffs fitted around her wrists, arms strained painfully backwards as a pair of soldiers led her off, even as the tears fell down her cheeks and shouted pleas grew louder. No one dared to intervene.
A push at her back from another civilian encouraged her forward, and with the image of the other woman in custody burned into her mind, Charlie stepped into the passageway of the scanner, bag and all. She shut her eyes tight, throat dry as she tried to swallow, choking back the growing fear that for all her mother’s last ditch efforts at seeing her daughter protected, she’d be another name on a list of people buried deep inside some military prison facility. Of course, there was never any proof that such places existed, but it was the same rumor she’d heard over the last few weeks as she moved around. Don’t make too much proverbial noise, everyone said, or you’d end up somewhere that would rival the treatment the Reapers had given the general population in the days their strategy went from merely ‘destroying every living thing’ to ‘collecting bodies.’
There was no clink of handcuffs opening, though, and no footsteps of extra infantry come to haul her away, just the polite clearing of a throat from the junior officer at a desk ahead of her, waving her on. She did as ordered.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Captain Hendricks,” he said apologetically and with the kind of deference reserved for those in positions of higher rank, “we’ve had to be careful over the last few weeks.”
Charlie just nodded, trying to not act too surprised by his calm demeanor.
“Long way from New York,” he continued on as he read the information off of the screen, “though I imagine it looks just about as bad as it does here in London.”
Standing a little straighter, she coughed into the back of her fist. “It does.”
“All right, ma’am,” he said with a nod of his head, “you should be clear to be on Alliance property. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Yes,” she said, and slid the bag from her shoulder, letting it hit the ground. “I’m looking for Garrus Vakarian.”
Charlie hadn’t thought much about what she’d do when she finally reached the Alliance’s base in London. The plan itself, rudimentary as it was, had been farfetched enough that she’d spared no thought for what she’d do once she got there, just that it was imperative that she get there at all.
In her head, Charlie could still hear her mother’s voice.
“Find Shepard,” she’d said, fingers gripping hard into her daughter’s upper arms. “If something happens to me, find Shepard. Find anyone who can take you to her, Charlie. She’ll keep you safe.”
That had been the last time she’d seen her, and given what her mother had left her with—a pistol and a forged set of identification and data cards proclaiming her to be a one Captain Andrea Hendricks of the Systems Alliance—Charlie understood her mother, like her father, would not be coming back.
And so when the war had ended, when the threat of Reapers had been lifted only to be replaced by the threat of the chaos of the common man and government, Charlie had done as her mother had told her. She would head to London, where she’d last heard Commander Shepard had convened before the final push. Only, when she’d touched down in England, the mourning had already begun. Commander Shepard was dead—perished on the Citadel.
The tears she’d held back when she realized her mother was gone, and before that, her father, the anger she’d reined in at all the horror she’d witnessed and lived… it came to her all at once that day, left her knuckles bloody as she thrashed her fists against brick and stone of the building nearest to her, screaming through her tears. She’d had nothing left when she’d left New York, nothing but the hope of finding a woman that was as much a stranger to her as she was to anyone else. But it was hope nonetheless, and Charlie had clung to it during her nights when she slept curled around the bag that held her only belongings, and she’d clung to it during the days when she’d dragged her body in what she hoped was the right direction.
To lose that… Charlie had half-starved herself in her mad grief, determined to let herself simply fade away like so many had since the war had begun. Only when she’d caught word that the Normandy had returned from its weeks lost amongst the stars, and then seen a glimpse of a video feed of those on board being welcomed home in London, had Charlie found the strength to keep going once more. Maybe Shepard was gone, but those that had called themselves her friends weren’t. It wasn’t much to go on, but Charlie had once again started walking.
The officer she’d spoken to hadn’t been able to give her much information on Garrus’ whereabouts, other than he hadn’t yet left. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and so Charlie had started to make her rounds, doing her best to fly under the radar rather than draw anymore attention to herself than she already had. The scan she’d been forced into had left her rattled and though it had worked once, she preferred not to press her luck on the off chance it had been a fluke. Her mother had mentioned it once, ages ago, about seeking a favor from a friend for Charlotte in case the worst happened, but had never brought it up again between then and her final departure. Maybe her mother had left her with one last gift.
There was word of hot food, showers, and even barracks to take a load off, and though she desperately wanted to fill her belly and find some sleep, she didn’t dare risk that the handful of hours she caught happened to be the ones in which her last hope slipped through her fingers. Her stomach had stopped rumbling weeks, maybe even months ago, and that sharp pain of hunger had become an old friend, reminding her that she lived when so many others didn’t.
She was ashamed to admit that every turian she passed seemed just like all the others, save for the identifying facial markings some of them wore. Though Charlie was familiar enough with all the races of the galaxy just as any of her peers were, she’d never left Earth proper, only dreamt of it. Her father, more than once or twice, had promised they would see the Citadel someday, and for years it had been the dream she longed for—to see the stars and other planets. Now, anyone who had been on the Citadel when it had sealed off and finally destroyed… they were gone. Including Shepard.
None had the markings she was looking for, though—the deep blue pattern she’d memorized from photographs and video, committing to memory as a symbol of her salvation over the last few days. And so when Charlie caught sight of the Alliance’s makeshift dockyard, and the one familiar, iconic even, vessel that skirted the edge of it… she took it as a sign to stop and take a breath. Her fingers grasped the chainlink fence, and Charlie pressed her face against it, studying the Normandy from afar.
That’s the ship. That was Shepard’s ship. I was so close.
Tears fell as she wept with her eyes open, unwilling to stop looking, even for a second, at the damaged hull of the Normandy.
It’s more beautiful than I thought it would be.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” From beside her, a flanged voice asked, echoing the thought in her head. The fence creaked as her new companion leaned into it as well, mimicking her in pose. “Seen better days, but still got the fight in her.”
Charlie didn’t care who she was supposed to be in that moment, didn’t care if Captain Hendricks was the type of woman who cried in front of strangers or not, didn’t care if she was the type of woman who would even cry at all.
“Will she fly again?” She barely got out, voice a whisper.
“Yeah,” the turian said wistfully. “This isn’t the end of her story, not by a long shot.”
Maybe it was exactly what she needed to hear. Charlie let go of the fence, wiping the dirt and tears from her cheeks, and stepped back, prepared to resume her search once again.
“Wait.” The turian said suddenly, and Charlie looked back to him on instinct, to find his eyes locked on her, staring. “You…”
She knew those markings—if not the shape, then the color at least. Charlie lurched forward, bag sliding from her shoulder, fingers grasping greedily at any piece of his armor she could find purchase on. “Garrus.”
Whether or not he said anything audible in that first moment of contact between them, Charlie would never know. She was lost to it, senses momentarily sacrificed for the sake of staying on her feet at all. What she did recall was that at some point his hands were pushing her off, pushing her back, away. Garrus held her at arms’ length, hunched forward as he took her in, studying.
“I swear…” he started, but never finished, shaking his head. “Sorry—you just look like—“
“Like who?” Charlie questioned, hoping to draw him out.
He blinked twice, letting her go, straightening up and stiffening. “Someone.”
She’d always wondered if she looked like the woman who had given birth to her. A few pictures of Shepard were all they’d ever given her as she’d grown older. She wondered if her hair was as thick or the same shade, if their eyes had the same flecks of color to them, if the thick muscular thighs that always touched but were so very strong came from that woman. When Shepard had appeared on the news reports those years ago, however, she’d gotten some of those answers. That slope to her nose—that was Shepard’s. Cheekbones, hair, even that way she raised one corner of her mouth when trying not to laugh… that had come from the woman she didn’t know.
“No,” he said suddenly, and fingered the long length of hair that was swept over her shoulder. What joy and life he’d had for the moment in talking about that ship had gone out of him. Left him hollow. “Too long.”
Charlie nearly flinched at his touch. It had been so very long since someone had touched her with any manner of kindness. Kindness was gone from the world these days.
“Like who?” She asked again, and when he didn’t respond, she did the work for him. “Like Shepard?”
Garrus’ eyes darted back to her, a soft squint. It scared her, the kind of look she sometimes saw in wild animals when deciding to run or pounce. But just like that, Garrus eased, weight shifting on his heels.
“I’m losing my mind. Seeing her everywhere.” He took Charlie’s stance from before, leaning into the chainlink fence, a careful eye on the battered hull of the Normandy. “Again,” he spoke softer, to himself as though he were alone. “Only this time she doesn’t come back.”
It felt too intimate almost, like the time she’d caught her father crying years earlier after his mother had passed. Seeing someone that was supposed to be so strong break down like that…
“What was she like?”
It was a matter of curiosity for her, to know any details about the woman she hadn’t known at all. She’d have been unlikely to admit at the time how many late nights she’d spent reading news articles on the net, even scouring for gossip, regarding the late commander. There’d been a glut of it when she’d reappeared on the scene after her ship had exploded over that ice planet. Her parents had found out of course, just what she was doing with her time, when she had been equal parts irritable and betrayed by the word that Shepard had abandoned the Alliance for Cerberus.
There was only so much one could learn from outside sources, however. Only so much one could glean from interviews with canned answers and forced smiles.
“Terrifying.” Garrus laughed for half a breath. “When I first met her, I never knew what side of her I was going to get on any given day. Terrifying Shepard, or the other side of the same credit chit that told jokes so dirty they’d make a krogan blush, that would have your back in public even if you were wrong, that was the kindest and most honest version of herself when she was on hour thirty without sleep or stims.”
Loyal, that much she’d been able to infer on her own. Still, it made her happy to hear it. Maybe she could be cut from the same cloth as that woman.
“She’d never let anyone else know it, but she was soft, too.” With that, Garrus sagged against the fence, his voice gentler, warmer, with an intimate affection. “Settled for a pet hamster because she couldn’t get a cat. Always talked about all the hobbies she couldn’t wait to have when all this was over—something about a garden mostly. Loved spicy food, or at least loved pretending she did and then bearing through it so she didn’t look like a wimp. Cried more than once or twice—but don’t tell anyone I said that, or she really will come back to life to punish me for saying so.”
They stood in silence after that, and while Charlie knew very much what was on her mind, she wished for a glimpse into the mind of the turian beside her. Across an ocean she’d traveled—a distance that had once upon a time not been much of a feat—to find a sanctuary in Shepard. That dream had died along with all the rest she’d had: attending a university, taking a trip to the stars for the first time with the parents who had promised her so, even the thought of just seeing her family together again. Where she went from there if she chose not to take the risk, she didn’t know.
Tears coated her eyes, threatening to spill. Her hands folded into fists, dull nails digging into the callused skin of her palms just enough to border on pain and leave their mark behind. Charlie shifted the bag off her shoulder, strap looped through the crook of one arm as she rifled through it.
Garrus peeked over his shoulder at the stranger.
“I’ve something—“ She rushed, and even in her periphery she understood Garrus’ behavior to be suspicious. “Something to show you.”
He took at her once again, like he was seeing her for the first time, head cocked slightly to the side. “Who are you?”
“If you’d just…” But the bag slipped from her hold just as she pried the object in question from a slim pocket on the bag’s interior.
The sudden movement left Garrus reacting on a soldier’s instinct, grabbing hard at her wrist as though it would stop an enemy from drawing a gun, tossing an explosive canister. Charlie just yelped in pain and froze, those tears spilled finally more from shock than anything else. Still, she held tight onto what she’d sought out: a worn photograph of a girl not so very unlike herself in appearance and age, holding a baby of only a few weeks old.
Charlie knew the moment Garrus saw it by the ease of pressure on her wrist.
“Shepard, she was my mother. The one who gave birth to me, I mean. Not my mother. That was someone else. That was…“
She offered the photograph and he took it in both hands, his breathing going unsteady, labored.
Garrus offered nothing in response, but reached for Charlie’s bag where it sat on the floor and slipped the strap over his shoulder with ease. His head jerked in the opposite direction. “Come on,” he said, “you shouldn’t be out here alone.”
Out here alone. She had wanted to laugh when he’d said that, wanted to say that inside those Alliance walls was the safest she’d felt in the better part of a year. She didn’t, though, and had followed him in silence through the network of alleyways and roads crafted since the reapers went out. In the end, they’d wound up on the top floor above what she could tell used to be a pub, the rear windows overlooking the shipyard that held the Normandy.
There was little more to the small flat than a couple of rooms crafted into the gables and dormers of the roof, most parts of the ceiling hanging too low for her turian companion. The original furniture was still there, in fact nearly everything there seemed original except the modifications that had been made to the home terminal. Those, with cables and wires strewn about, were certainly not stock parts.
“There’s hot water in…” Garrus checked his omni-tool, “thirty minutes, usually. Sometimes not. But you can try your luck.”
Hot water had been a bit of an overstatement, as it turned out, but she’d make not a single complaint. There’d even been a small piece of what had formerly been a larger bar of soap in the corner of the tub’s edge and watching the dirty water rinse down the drain was cathartic. She looked an entirely different person when she wiped her hand across the mirror afterwards to remove the steam.
With what little water pressure remained, she rinsed her clothes in the bottom of the tub with the chunk of soap, and hung them to dry across the bathroom’s fixtures after they were rung out. She was drying her hair when she stepped from the bathroom, unsurprised to find Garrus hunched over the terminal he’d previously hacked.
Charlie took a seat on the couch, digging through her bag for a pair of socks to pull on her feet. She found them easily, but the contents of her bag had been tossed, out of what usual order she tried to keep it in.
“I went through your things,” he admitted readily, swiveling his seat halfway around to her. He touched his talons to the old Carnifex sitting on his desk, then the data card. “Even I can tell you’re nowhere near old enough to be in the military, especially not the rank you’ve got listed. So you better start talking before I decide everything you’ve already told me is a lie.”
She chewed her lower lip, tears beginning to come to her. “I—“ There was no mercy to be found in his eyes, not at the moment, try as she might to find it. “She—that woman—she was a friend of my mother’s that went missing when the reapers first… first arrived. My mother was a police officer, a detective. She worked for the commissioner back in New York.”
“That doesn’t explain why your picture is on it, or why the DNA scan associated with it was wiped and changed awhile back.”
There was always a paper trail, so to speak, something that someone could find if they looked hard enough.
“We fled the city when everything happened at first, but she went back to help—to fight—and left me behind. She gave that to me,” Charlie’s voice cracked, and it was the first moment she saw Garrus’ hard exterior waver, the plates around his eyes relaxing and softening his expression like a person’s eyebrows would. “Told me that if I needed to, I should use it to get out. She said I could use it to slip in with some of the Alliance, hop on a shuttle.”
“Where did she expect you to go?”
Charlie opened her hands, nothing in them. “Anywhere else. She told me to try to find Shepard.”
The photograph was back in his hands, a talon rubbing over the image. She’d done that before herself, like the heat of her hand could somehow warm the memory back to life.
“I know I’m too late, but I don’t know where else to go anymore.” He gave no reply. Charlie shifted on the couch, slightly closer to where he was. Garrus looked up at her movement.
“I don’t even know your name.”
She reached out to him, hands upturned in a sign of innocent offering, and flipped the picture over. On the back in fading pen, was both her and her biological mother’s name, dated 2171.
“Charlotte,” he said, like it was the first time he’d heard the name, and perhaps it was.
“Charlie, everyone always called me Charlie.”
His head bobbed in ascent, and he returned the picture to photo side up. “I never imagined Shepard could be that young,” Garrus said with a quiet laugh, “it’s hard to remember she had a whole other life before I met her.” There was a sudden lightness to the conversation, and though the tension wasn’t gone by any means, she at least allowed herself to ease back into the couch, pulling her legs up with her. She curled her arms around them, fingers worrying at the fabric of her pants.
“She was seventeen there. I think just turned seventeen by time I was born.”
“Is this the only picture you have together?”
“There were more, a couple I think, but where those are now… probably ash, for all I know. My mother had met her back in New York, something to do with a case she was working at the time. They adopted me from her when I was born and helped her get back on her feet, set her up with what she needed to join the Alliance. At least, that’s the story they always told me. I’m old enough now to know there was more to it than just that.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
Charlie shook her head. “No. She stayed with them for awhile when I was a baby, but when she left… she left. I don’t have some secret stack of letters from her hidden away somewhere like in the vids. For awhile I hoped my mother was just keeping them for me when I got older. I mean, it was never a secret that I was adopted. I knew her name, I knew she wasn’t ready to be a mother, I knew—know—it was the right thing to do. But until a couple years ago when her name showed up in the news… she was a ghost to me.”
Garrus leaned back in his chair, listening. He reminded her of her mother, the way she watched and listened, reading between the lines for the whole story. It had always been impossible to lie to her.
“I used to stay up half the night reading about her, what she was doing. I wanted to know anything and everything about her, but when she abandoned the Alliance and joined Cerberus, faked her own death—“
“She didn’t,” he said abruptly, and Charlie nearly jumped in place at the tone of his voice. “Hard as it is to believe—she did die back then.”
“That isn’t—“
“I’m telling you the truth, kid. She died and horrible things were done to bring her back.”
There were always rumors of fringe science, talk of clones and the kind of research that was illegal throughout the galaxy. But to bring back someone from the dead… her chest clenched at the thought. If they could bring back Shepard then if they found her mother or father someone could… Charlie shut her eyes, hard as she could, to try to stop the tears from coming. She buried her face in her knees and pulled them tighter against her.
The desk chair rolled and a hand touched her shoulder, squeezing.
“You’ve got to be tired, maybe you should head to bed.”
“No,” she sniffed, wiping her cheeks and red rimmed eyes across her sleeve, “not yet.”
“Yes,” he countered with a nod of his head. “There was a time when tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed, but Shepard died so we could go to sleep and pick up the next day and every day after where we left off. So for tonight: sleep.”
His palm pressed to her cheek, a simple gesture that warmed her more than that shower ever could. He left the room not a moment later, retiring to the bedroom and leaving her with the couch. She wasn’t alone, not by a long shot, but it didn’t make sleep any easier.
It was the smell of food that woke her the next morning. Not the faint, dull chemical scent of dried rations she’d survived off of for months now, but actual food. Someone was cooking.
She followed her nose to one room over, and there were sounds to accompany the scent, too: a wooden spoon circling around a pan of some sort, the sizzle and hiss of something frying up. Sun crept through the window, warming her as she passed, and all of it together crafted a familiarity of sensation unique to her childhood. Charlie knew it wasn’t real—knew it was her senses playing tricks on her—but still some part of her expected to find her father in the kitchen as he usually was on a weekend morning, frying a couple eggs while toast browned.
Her father wasn’t there, of course, instead it was the turian she’d only barely been introduced to the night before. He moved scrambled eggs around in a copper pan and Charlie took a seat at the nearby counter, watching. Her stomach growled and mouth watered.
Garrus looked up only just slightly, catching her in his peripheral vision.
“They’re powdered,” he answered, and tipped the contents of the pan onto a chipped plate on the counter top before sliding it in front of her.
“What about you?” Charlie asked, but she already had the fork in hand, ready for her first taste. It was hot and heaven, all in one bite.
“I already ate.”
He cleaned as she devoured it, and though her attention was not to be pulled from the meal before her, she occasionally spied a glance he’d give her, a reserved smile accompanying his features.
“I cooked for Shepard sometimes,” Garrus finally said when she was scraping the smallest bits off her plate with her fork. He leaned against the edge of the stove, arms crossed. “When she missed a meal with the crew.”
“It was good,” she offered, a bob of her head. “I haven’t eaten anything hot in weeks. Thank you.”
She watched as he took her plate, rinsing and drying it before replacing it into a bare cupboard with only a few other items. He took care, like the owners would someday be back, counting pieces of missing china while the rest of the world around them was in crumbles. There was a gentleness to him, something she hadn’t seen in the few others of his species she’d met only in passing. An unexpected gentleness, however, didn’t translate to exactly what she’d been seeking out on this journey. A foolish wish, she knew.
He vacated the room without a word, just the sound of his heavy footfalls fading away as he moved through the apartment. Charlie gave him a few minutes head start before she followed, not wanting to seem a pest that was always at his heels in the tiny flat. The living room was empty by time she got there and quickly she set about to gather her just barely dampened clothing from the bathroom. She changed there, then reemerged, tucking away what was leftover into her bag.
The couch was still haphazardly spread in the blankets from the night before and she quickly took them at hand, folding them and replacing them in a neat stack on a single cushion. A silent thank you, she hoped it said. And with that, Charlie toed her boots on, slung her bag over her shoulder, and headed for the door.
She was a block and a half away, following the perimeter of the fence that contained the large swathe of land the Normandy was in, when she heard those same footfalls behind her. Louder now, a quick staccato beat as they moved to catch up with her.
“Hey!” Garrus shouted “Stop!”
She continued on, steeling herself, not looking back.
“Where are you going?”
It was his hand on her shoulder that caused her hurried pace to finally halt, and though she’d hoped for some biting remark or quip she imagined Shepard would have had, she had nothing. She couldn’t even look him in the eye.
“Did I do something?” He questioned, and there was an insecurity to his voice, a wavering in the natural flange.
“I need to get going,” she said, head shaking, lips pursed. “I need to figure out what I’m going to do now.”
“Now?”
“Shepard—she—she’s dead.”
From the edge of her periphery, she caught the way he stiffened at that word, like it was presented to him for the first time. Charlie was even prepared for his denial, but then he spoke, solemn. “Yes. But you knew that before you got here and you came anyway.”
“I was stupid!” She shouted suddenly, turning from him. “I thought I’d get here and it’d be okay. Some miracle. But it’s just as bad here as everywhere else and I’m just as much an orphan as I was two months ago. I don’t know—“ Tears came to her again but she tried to stifle them and hide them. She had never been much of a crier in her whole life as she’d done in the last year. Stress, trauma, they’d say. Most of those tears she’d shone only late at night when there wasn’t another soul nearby to hear. And yet, this stranger of another species had seen more than almost anyone in not even a full rotation of the Earth.
“Hey, hey,” he repeated, calmer now, and took her into his arms. It wasn’t foreign or awkward, and Charlie, she didn’t fight when he squeezed her tight. “I’m—“ Garrus stopped, as if the words he were about to say surprised even him, but he soldiered on, “—I’m going to take care of you.”
Words flooded her head: a rejection of the offer, a scoff at empty promises. None came, however, and instead she just dug her fingers into the plates of his armor, pulling herself even closer.
They stayed like that for some time, her cries growing quieter and cheeks growing drier, and somewhere at the end, she felt Garrus nuzzle his mandible to the top of her head.
“I’m sorry,” he was the first to speak as they gradually pulled away, “I haven’t exactly been welcoming.”
“No… I, I understand.”
“I meant what I said,” Garrus reaffirmed. “Shepard would want me to take care of you.”
She wanted to say that she knew Shepard would want that as well, but Charlie truly didn’t know what Shepard would or wouldn’t want. All those things she’d read about her birth mother, maybe Charlie had just seen what she’d wanted to. Maybe she’d ignored the things she didn’t want to imagine in the woman that had given birth to her. But a woman that fought until the end to save not only her species but those across the galaxy, who had inspired loyalty from even just the one person in front of her… that had to count for something, didn’t it?
“You don’t…” Charlie didn’t have the heart to finish the statement.
“I don’t have to,” he agreed, then gently chucked her under the chin, “but I want to.”
Charlie nodded and reached for the strap of her bag, tugging it securely back into proper place on her shoulder. She fell into pace beside Garrus as they began the return trip, following the fence.
“I’ve got a ground rule,” he said after half the journey’s silence. “Just one.”
It was the least she could oblige him. “Alright.”
Garrus came to a stop and turned back in her direction. “We’re honest with each other. The good, the bad, everything. I don’t care if you lie to anyone else, just not to me. I’ll give you the same courtesy.” He offered her a hand.
She took it, grip firm.
His mandibles flickered in a bit of a smile before he turned towards the fence, the view once again of the Normandy where it sat dormant in the dock yard. In daylight, it was even bigger than it had seemed the night before.
“Do you want to see where she lived?”
Charlie couldn’t imagine anything she wanted more.