Chapter Text
They’re actually going to make it.
It dawns on him as they run through a hail of dust and debris and, oh right, reapers . They’re exhausted, banged up and out of medigel, but frankly not the worst they’ve ever been, and it’s right there . The ruins of the citadel loom ahead of them, and he tries not to name the districts, tries not to think of all the refugees, the girl he’d seen last time he’d gone down to the holding area, fierce and scared and refusing to accept she was on her own. Every run-down, out of the way cafe he used to get takeout from, every laundromat and night club, and even the ridiculous apartment in the Silversun strip, they’re all gone now.
But Garrus isn’t.
He laughs, a dry and desperate huff as he dodges a molten control panel that flies at his head. Shepard’s just ahead of them, so he can’t see her face, but he doesn’t need to. He knows what she looks like; she looks like she had at Ilos, like she did at the collector base. Brows drawn, chin jutted fiercely, he’d bet his life on it. She has the Commander Shepard look that makes scared privates and war-weary lieutenants alike snap to attention, the look that had convinced him, almost as soon as the words I’m Garrus Vakarian left his mouth, that he’d follow her anywhere in the damn galaxy, as long as she’d have him. He doesn’t envy the reapers just now, because they are so close , and nothing gets in her way when she looks like that.
An explosion ahead, the awful electric klaxon followed by a Mako rolling over the spot where Shepard had just been. He skids to a halt, fear slipping cold fingers under his suit, and though it has to be the space of seconds, it’s enough that he doesn’t see the second one in time. A flash, he rolls, too late too late too late , and everything bursts into white-hot pain.
Meet me at the bar , he hears himself say, and his plates are sticking to his armor, what’s left of it, and he can’t tell which one has melted, and this can’t seriously be it, after everything, but he hears the sizzle of his skin and sees that damn Mako crash over Shepard’s silhouette again and again and again.
Her hand yanks him from the ground, hauls him over her shoulder, and though it takes everything in him not to scream from the pain of it, there’s also relief, sudden and delirious. She’s alive. He’s alive, he thinks. He wants to quip it’s not as bad as it looks , but everything is muffled and far but Shepard’s armored shoulder, but the tickle of her singed hair against his cheek.
Suddenly, too late, he realizes he’s being passed off— Take him— and it’s metal beneath his feet, not baked earth and ashes. It’s Shepard shouting “You’ve gotta get out of here!” and him snapping, desperately, “And you’ve got to be kidding me.”
Don’t ask me this, Shepard. This, I can’t give you .
It’s her hair gilded with the light of reaper fire, her hard eyes softening, just for a moment as her hand finds his cheek, and he realizes she’s not asking. His armor’s busted all to hell, his visor’s lit bright with warnings, and he’s not sure he could even stand without Javik half-supporting him, half holding him back. No. She’s not asking him to go. She’s asking him to let her.
He wants to rend that fucking reaper apart with his bare hands. He wants to refuse, childishly, and follow her, limping, crawling if he has to, to the end. He wants her to stop looking at him like that and stop talking to him like this is goodbye, and go back to any of those thousands of moments before: even the ones where he was angry with her, even the ones where he’d messed up. Banter, brags, and being the one she leaned on when the rest of the galaxy weighed on her. There’s so much he wants to say, but he sees the grim line of her mouth and hears the roughness in her voice, and they don’t have time, so instead, he settles for the words that had been true all along, that he’d been too scared to voice before, and hopes she hears them.
He watches her disappear into the dust. He reaches, long after she’s gone, even after Chakwas manages to get the sedative into his arm, for his gun, for her, for that last brush of fingertips.
They had been so close.