Chapter Text
The tinny taste of Omega’s recycled air lingered on Garrus’s tongue as he waved a finger for another shot of horosk. The batarian behind the bar squinted half of his four eyes in his direction, no doubt wearied by Garrus’s somber presence and his half-hearted attempts at humor.
“Drowns out the taste of the air here,” Garrus had told him, raising a glass of the hard turian liquor in the batarian’s direction when he’d ordered his second shot in as many minutes. “It’s temporary, but nothing else seems to do the trick.”
Four shots deeper, that turned out not to be true. The stale air tingled his mouth, refusing to release its hold as Garrus fought to shake off his proverbial sea legs with brute force and alcohol. He’d arrived on Omega 15 Galactic Standard hours ago.
But Omega wasn’t on Galactic Standard Time. Not really. The station’s haphazard timekeeping reflected its central principle: to defy the “order” of Citadel space. The station that never slept, its citizens were content to forget that time existed outside of their little corner of the galaxy. Most attempted to use this chaotic existence to their advantage, fooling themselves into thinking their lives were limitless. Days slipping into years without notice, locals disappearing to reinvent themselves anew, the blow of disappearing friends and loved ones softened by the reminder that you too could disappear and reinvent yourself on a whim. Few sought steady employment without a standard work week to encourage or enforce it, instead joining up with one of Omega’s three major industries: entertainment, contract work, and organized crime.
In practice, however, most on the colossal station still kept GST, at least psychologically maintaining the same twenty hour day cycle, though this sense seemed to wax and wane with convenience. Building owners, for instance, used the lack of a centralized calendar to shake a few more credits out of their tenants’ rent here and there to line their pockets. Bars, however, were open all twenty of those hours, and there was rarely a dead period. Which was just as well, considering Garrus had nowhere to be, no one to see, and thoughts he’d like to drown out.
He was on Omega for one purpose, and that purpose had died the previous night with the last breath of the smuggler he’d tracked down to the Terminus Systems’ twisted counterpart to the Citadel. The eerie red light that seemed to emanate from the hollowed out asteroid itself lent a certain hazy focus to the atmosphere.
The bartender slammed down another shot in front of him with more force than was necessary, making it clear he had no interest in continuing to be of service.
“Thanks,” Garrus said curtly, throwing back the shot with a wince.
“What’s got your gizzard?”
He looked up to see a grizzled turian sitting at the bar a few stools away. He hadn’t noticed the other’s arrival. The bar was quiet compared to the nearby Afterlife, but the thumping bass from Omega’s premier club could still be distantly felt in one’s bones, the smoky atmosphere of the dive bar adding to the illusion of timelessness and loneliness.
“What’s got yours?” Garrus remarked, knowing from experience with older turians that a personal inquiry was usually a segue to airing one’s own grievances. That, or he was looking for a chance to impart unwelcome wisdom on the younger turian to make himself feel relevant. Garrus prayed it wasn’t the latter.
“Huh,” the turian coughed out, the thin, pale tattoo on his face catching the red light, “Son, at my age, it’s more than just a disgruntled gizzard I got to worry about.”
“Fair enough.” A futile hope that the conversation would end there.
No such luck. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the older turian twitched his small nose and opened his mouth.
“So what brings a nice Palaven fledgling like you to the ass end of the galaxy?” He lifted his chin towards Garrus’s face, which was forever marked by his homeland.
“I had some business to settle up,” Garrus took a drink and, when his older counterpart didn’t break his insistent gaze, continued with a suggestive tilt of his head, “Had to tie up some loose ends.”
“Oh, now don’t tell me you’re out on some revenge kick? Omega tough guy win your girl’s affections?”
“Nothing so personal,” Garrus shook his head, the liquor and the delirious exhaustion loosening his tongue. “I -- Well. I had a disagreement with my… boss. An order I had to refuse. Had to see it through to the end, so I tracked my mark out here.”
“Lemme guess. Military?”
“Huh.” Garrus inhaled, “Not in this life. Citadel Security. Left Palaven years ago. I did my time.”
“Uh huh,” the old man looked amused, “So, a man of principle, are we?”
Garrus didn’t care for the old man. But the last real conversation he’d had had been a less-than-ideal confrontation with his father, and despite himself, he could feel himself ramping up to rally around his firmly held positions.
“What are we talking? Hackers? Terrorists?”
“Drug runners,” Garrus responded, rolling his neck from side to side, “Red sand. Saw a lot of lives ruined… A lot of death. Supply line traced back to this station. After all the red tape set the smugglers free, and I ran into a, uh, dead-end on the Citadel, figured I’d cut it off at the source.”
“Spirits. Can’t imagine C-Sec’s paying you to come all the way to this hellhole–and you said this ain’t personal. What skin you have in this game, kid?”
“I guess I don’t, I just... Well. The fact that someone out there can do that. Can take away all those lives. Kids losing their families, their futures. And just… They get away with it. You can’t stop it, you can’t predict it. It’s just going to keep happening. Because the people that are supposed to make it stop -- to prevent it -- just clocked out for the night after doing paperwork all day.”
His voice had risen, his cadence quickened and erratic.
“Easy now, son. You’re all right.” A hand waved in Garrus’s direction.
Garrus couldn’t deny that he was deeply uncomfortable with the reality that allowed those who broke the rules to continue breaking them, while those who followed them let them get away through their inaction. Paperwork made sense in theory, but the villains of the world weren’t sitting around considering theory. He could feel his throat constricting, his vision narrowing. That didn’t make the old man’s patronizing tone any more welcome.
“You're afraid of the unpredictable. You want someone to be bad enough that your way forward is clear.”
Garrus considered this, tilting his head to one side as he pushed aside his memories of the night before. A hazy corridor, neon lights, the glassy eyes of a criminal whose time was up. An elderly human couple standing behind him, eyes wet with relief and gratitude.
He waved at the bartender for another shot. “The way I see it is without your clear way forward, no one will do anything but talk.”
“To hell with due process, I suppose. Quite the position for a C-Sec officer.”
“Ex-officer. Couldn’t follow the rules, remember?”
“So you came here.”
Garrus shrugged.
“Kid, it sounds like you want someone to tell you what to do.”
“I don’t think you were listening,” Garrus snorted.
“As best I can,” was the gruff reply, talon tapping at a hidden aural canal. “I know you, kid. I dunno what they told you on Palaven, but I’m sure it was something about discipline and good, old-fashioned turian honor. How you ain’t falling in line, you ain’t strong enough. I’ll tell you, they want you to think you got something wrong in the head. That all turians think the same,” he sniffed.
“Well, they don’t.” The old man nodded at the bartender as another bottle was placed in front of him, “The irony is, you ain’t so different from all the other barefaced, trigger-happy ganders that ended up on this hollow rock.”
Garrus looked up from the bar and toward the ancient turian, an irritated prickle at the sides of his neck.
“You’re breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules. But you gotta have rules to break ‘em. Gettin’ so wrapped up in someone that everything you do becomes about spiting them and their rules is still letting them make your decisions for you.”
Garrus looked towards the door, wondering how smoothly he could extract himself from the situation. He’d been at this bar long enough. It was about time he found somewhere to sleep. His insides felt warm from the alcohol, and he wasn’t in the mood to start analyzing the decisions that had led him here. Omega was a sort of last ditch effort to do something with his life, and he couldn’t afford to lose himself to the past now. After leaving the Normandy, he’d found himself unable to settle down anywhere. He’d followed Wrex for a while, doing a job or two together before the krogan set course for Tuchanka. Now Garrus couldn’t help but wonder if his friend had found him clingy, too needy.
He shook his head. This wasn’t about him or his need for control or clarity or whatever the old man was suggesting; it was about everything that was wrong in the galaxy. Everything that continued to threaten it.
After parting ways with Wrex, he’d found himself back on the Citadel, re-joining the ranks. That hadn’t lasted long. After he tracked down Kishpaugh, the criminal that Castis had so naively cut loose, the last thing his father had done before retiring was threaten to lock his son up personally if Garrus didn’t change courses. Garrus had chalked this up to his father being out of touch. Frustrated with the lies the Council and C-Sec were spreading about Sovereign's attack, but refusing to indulge in his memories of what had happened, he attempted to re-join Spectre training, but just as quickly withdrew when he realized that all of their briefing sessions were full of images of Saren’s face, tales of Saren’s exploits without a drop of insight about what had actually happened.
Fed up, exhausted, and depressed at the constant news coverage that hit so close to home without a shred of accuracy, he’d booked a flight back to Palaven, morosely preparing to face his father, who had returned to their home planet not two weeks before. Sitting at the shuttle station, he attempted to compose a message to his family to inform them of his plans to come home, while making it clear it was just a coincidence that he was following his father back to Palaven so soon after their falling out and Castis’ retirement. At the last moment, however, he’d marched up to the ticket kiosk and changed his destination to Omega, following a lead on Kishpaugh’s supplier he’d dropped when he quit C-Sec.
“Sad, that,” the old turian said. Garrus turned to look at him and saw that he was gazing up at the holoscreen above the bar.
Cursing himself for somehow manifesting this, for bringing Citadel baggage to the Terminus Systems, Garrus felt a sting in his sinuses as his eyes locked with a holo of Saren in the news vid playing.
He cleared his throat, heart racing. It had been months since Saren’s death, why was he in the vids now?
Seeing that their attention had shifted to the holoscreen, hoping they’d shut up now, the bartender tapped at his omni-tool to bring the volume up.
Twilight of the Spectres? the headline read next to the Omega News Network logo.
An Asari reporter was on screen now, the image of Saren behind their torso as they turned toward the camera.
“Citadel Spectres -- short for Special Tactics and Reconnaissance -- have long been the bane of free existence in the Terminus Systems, deploying Omega tactics in the name of Citadel politics. Interfering at the slightest hint that the good people of our free systems are a threat to their iron grip on the galactic economy, these agents prove that the Citadel doesn’t believe in its own rigid structures for maintaining so-called “galactic peace.” Though we don’t know how many Spectres there are, we know their numbers are dwindling. Could this be the beginning of the end for the chokehold the Citadel Council has on the Milky Way?”
Suddenly, he was face to face with not only Saren, whose image glided to one side of the screen, but with another familiar face, as Commander Shepard materialized opposite the turian’s twisted face. He was gazing at the camera, his short, textured hair contrasting brilliantly with a bright background. He looked tired, annoyed at the photographer, but his expression was full of the life he no longer possessed. Garrus's stomach lurched.
“Commander Shepard, a former Alliance military soldier, has been declared dead. After murdering fellow Spectre Saren Arterius in a bloody battle that destroyed much of their ”indestructible” Citadel, Commander Shepard has disappeared somewhere in our very own Omega Nebula. The Systems Alliance has ruled Shepard’s death a geth-related accident… But is it really ? Could this be the start of our own humble corner of the universe finally fighting back against the Citadel’s galactic tyranny? Saren and Shepard were both known bullies who let their personal, petty matters affect the lives of billions. Locked in a months-long internal dispute that wreaked havoc on peaceful worlds across the galaxy…”
His focus ebbed as nausea settled in his stomach, heart beating in his ears, and he became furious at the vids, at the lies, at his own inability to grieve, to honor his late Commander’s memory because he couldn’t picture his face without seeing Saren’s behind closed eyes. That’s how the galaxy was determined to remember him, inextricably tied to the rogue Spectre, and he hated that his own mind, his own efforts to separate them, only reified the link in his memory. Two Spectres, two radically different individuals with radically different roles in his life, and yet he was losing sleep at night, tortured by the memory of each, somehow distorted and intertwined.
Light-headed and hot, he stumbled off the stool, focusing on his feet as he made his way to the door. He ignored the bartender, who was insisting that leaving without closing his tab would incur a 30% convenience fee.
“Spirits,” he heard the old man at the bar mutter, “You all right, kid?”
Garrus waved a hand behind his head as he slammed the controls on the door and was immediately hit in the face with a warm breeze from the adjoining alley. The thrumming bass emanating from Afterlife was more pronounced out here in the open, and he followed it to find his way back to the station’s main hub, where he could eventually find a room to rent and, in the more immediate future, a more populated area to collapse in that wouldn’t end in him getting pickpocketed, mugged, or killed without anyone there to witness.
Hand resting on his shotgun, he used his other arm to propel himself along the wall, afraid that if he let go, he’d collapse.
“Shepard,” he said aloud to no one in particular, grounding himself by vocalizing the first word that slipped out.
In his exhaustion, he found himself in a more barren area than where he’d begun, the alley tapering into a narrow set of stairs that led downward. He didn’t know where he was headed, but his heart was beating too quickly for him to turn around now, as his body threatened to collapse on him. At least he was still following the music of The Afterlife. He couldn’t be far from the docking bay.
As he rounded the corner, he paused, bending low to rest his palms on his thighs, trying to discern whether the thumping he was hearing now was real or if it was his dizziness causing his heart to echo in his ears. He hadn’t slept since he’d left the Citadel twenty hours ago, and the time since had been fueled by violence, alcohol, and grief.
When the thumping was joined by a yelp, he decided it was real. Taking a moment to steady himself with a deep breath, he lifted his sniper rifle from his back and extended it to its full length as he listened for clues about the nature of the situation.
"You want trouble? You just found it .” A gruff, booming voice echoed through the hall.
Krogan, Garrus guessed. Female. He crept along the wall as the thumping continued. The sound of fists hitting flesh. So the assailant wasn’t aiming to kill the victim. Had she been so inclined, the krogan could have taken her victim out with a single punch. She must be keeping him alive -- either to get answers out of him or to send a message. Crossing to the other side of the narrow hall to avoid his shadow giving him away, he came to a railing, where he found himself overlooking one of the lower levels of The Afterlife Club’s sprawling venue.
His eyes darted around the scene. It was mostly empty, drinks spilled on the bar and on the floor. Clearly the club’s customers had left in a hurry, likely to avoid ending up at the receiving end of the krogan’s rage. The krogan in question had her back to Garrus as she towered over her unfortunate victim. Garrus could not see her punching bag, but with another punch came another yelp, and with his close proximity, flanging subvocals vibrated the base of his skull, signalling distress. The victim was turian.
Looking through the scope of his rifle to the other end of the bar, he noted two vorcha, dressed in red armor that matched the krogan’s, guarding the door. Garrus steadied a shaking hand, swallowing as he realized that his advantage as a sniper was slightly compromised at the moment. He dare not take the shot at the krogan now. For one thing, it would take at least two shots to take down the brawny krogan for good, and that was assuming they were well-placed shots. That would give the krogan and her lackeys time to react, putting both turians in the room at risk. Making matters worse, Garrus didn’t trust his shaking hand or his drunken eye to take the krogan out without hitting the other turian.
Darting back behind the wall for cover, he cursed silently, looking for an alternative. Having arrived on Omega a matter of hours ago, he didn’t know the layout of the bar well enough to find his way to the other side of the balcony, which had a better angle to maintain control of the situation. He examined the railing he’d ducked behind moments ago. There were glasses lined along it, some empty, waiting for a bartender to come collect them, others clearly abandoned when the patrons bolted. He had only a few seconds left to react. The turian’s cries were becoming desperate, and if he was too slow, the vorcha guards would shoot him before he had the chance to take them down.
“Please! Help!” The turian’s pleas reverberated through Garrus’s head, compelling him to action.
He lined up his shot, aiming for the spot right between the far vorcha’s glistening eyes, looking up once to estimate the distance between the two guards. He only had one chance to get this right.
"I’m going to drink out of your stupid turian skull! ” The krogan’s voice thundered throughout the bar, punctuated by the perpetual bass of club music.
Using the music to his advantage, Garrus timed his shots quickly. With one thrum of the bass, he pulled the trigger, the beat of the music accomplishing what his silencer could not on its own. With the next thrum, he quickly reloaded. And on the third, just as the second guard realized that his friend had fallen, Garrus placed a well-timed shot in the side of his forehead.
Without waiting to see the full outcome of his shots, he lowered his rifle in the same fluid movement as he grabbed the largest glass within his reach, still a quarter full of a faint, purplish liquid, and slung it over the railing towards the side of the krogan’s head. The krogan made a garbled sound in the back of her throat and took a startled step back, just enough for the turian on the ground below to come into view. He looked up, grey eyes wide with fear, locking onto the sniper in whose sights he was caught.
From behind his scope, Garrus nodded once at the turian.
In a split second that stretched before him for what seemed an eternity, he saw through his visor a muscle in the turian’s neck twitch, followed by an exaggerated gulp of air before, all at once, the turian sprang into action and shoved with full force at the krogan. The push didn’t budge her much, but it was just enough to maintain the confusion for Garrus to take the shot as the wounded turian dove to safety. One high-impact shot to the side of her thick neck and Garrus dropped his sniper rifle where he stood, no time to re-load, as he mounted the railing and pulled his assault rifle over his head, dropping down to the lower level of the bar as he shoved a thermal clip into place and fired a short burst into the natural armor of the krogan’s leathery skull.
She staggered back, ready to charge, but the bloodied turian on the other side took full advantage of her distraction, knocking a wall of heavy liquor down from the bar with his one uninjured arm so that her path was littered with broken glass and bouncing bottles, rolling about and making the floor a slippery landmine, giving Garrus just enough time to empty his rounds directly into her face, sacrificing accuracy for deadly power at such a close range, her movements becoming stilted and slowed as she fell to her knees, a guttural growl still sneaking past her lips for a few delayed seconds until it slowed to a halt, and she was dead.
The bass continued to roll as Garrus felt his exhaustion re-take him. He blinked at his surroundings, suddenly wondering whether the lights were flickering, if it was the strobing effect of the club design, or if his own brain was short circuiting. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey,” an anxious voice emerged rung in his head. He looked towards the other turian, who was staring wide-eyed at Garrus from where he clung to the side of the bar with one arm.
He opened his mouth to ask the other if he was all right, but found that no words came out as his own vision suddenly blacked out, and his knees crumbled beneath him, hearing muffled as the sound of his own body hitting the floor mixed with the alarmed turian’s voice.
“Fuck!”
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