One: a refrain of praise to my beta, Sapidus, and to apologize to the readers who have watched this story collect dust on their story alerts for the last two years. If I ever meet any of you IRL, I will buy you a beer/soda for putting up with my nonsense. (Seriously. I'll have my penname on my badge at cons from now on specifically for this punishment.) I am not a perfectionist so much as permanently unhappy with my work, and it takes me a long time to finally bite the bullet and click "submit."

Two: A whole bunch of lyrics in this one, so I'll move in reverse order: closing lyrics are "The Foggy Dew," 19th century Irish; Shepard's song is "Rorogwela," a Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands; and ten cookies to anyone who recognizes Garrus' bit in the middle.

Three: Finished ME3. Not sure how I feel about it yet. Still percolating.

Four: Updated again because eats my formatting.

After a lifetime spent in cities and stations, Garrus took the omnipresent hum of civilization for granted. Nothing could have prepared him for the heavy, dead silence that existed just below its surface. The staggering alienness of it felt like being thrown headlong into a wall.

Garrus wasn't exactly a stranger to quiet – he needed the undisturbed hush of the main battery to order his thoughts, after all. But in the battery, he couldn't hear every dull thud of his heart as it beat a maddening rhythm against the inside of his ears. Life was unwelcome here, and for a brief moment, Garrus felt as if each hill was an eye trained on their shadows as they trudged slowly toward the setting sun.

It didn't take long for him to realize that the downed comm link meant that he could no longer hear the soft rustling of Shepard's breath in his ear. Every pause to check their tail for followers erased her from the reach of his senses. Some small, irrational worry began to gnaw at his chest each time he pivoted, wondering if when he turned back, she would be gone without a trace.

Garrus managed to find some solace in the irony of the situation. Thousands of years of technological marvels, and only in the last few generations had some genius realized that the best ward against battlefield stress was the quiet, almost unnoticeable hiss of another being's respiration.

That Shepard, of all people, had fallen into a brooding silence only made the scene more surreal. Twenty minutes had passed since she'd made a lone sound. On any other landing they would have been negotiating their third ill-conceived bet by now, adrenaline fueling the brash give-and-take that they had elevated to an art form.

Garrus' mandibles fluttered uneasily. Anything from Shepard - even those strange, quavering tones he'd heard earlier– would have been infinitely more welcome than the hollow crunch-hiss of dirt and wind.

At that moment, as if moved by some merciful spirit, Shepard began to talk.

–

Moving across open terrain, barely able to communicate to her only backup, and with nothing between her and Alingon's low-pressure atmosphere but her hardsuit, Shepard could no longer ignore the creeping sense of dread that trailed slowly up her spine. Garrus' presence, invisible but felt, at her flank only barely stilled the disquiet that weighed like lead in the pit of her stomach.

So, she did the only thing she could think of; she began to talk.

"I'm not going to die out here," she said firmly. "Not again, anyway. It's got to be boring the second time around."

She smiled slightly at her own joke and Garrus' resulting silence. She hadn't really expected a response, but she had to admit that a grunt – or anything, really – would have propped up the illusion of conversation. As it was, she was sure she seemed a little loopy, monologuing to no-one in particular.

"You know something? This mission, it's my life in a nutshell. It's insane, improbable, and will probably end up with me pissing off all the wrong people," she said, a smirk forming at the corner of her lips. "Best of all, I'm stranded with the one person who could hold my ass to the fire for an explanation, and he wouldn't understand me even if I did." She kicked a rock aside as she passed it. "At least the universe has a sense of irony."

Garrus' face was inscrutable through the tinted visor as she glanced back at him. She shrugged nonchalantly and turned back to the horizon. "You're going to want to call me an idiot when this is over. Honestly, you'll have to take a number. I can see it now; Tali will chew me out, loudly, and I probably won't understand half of it even with a functioning translator. She'll cut a meter-wide swath through the shuttle bay to be the first to explode at me, but once she gets it out of her system, it'll be like nothing happened. But Miranda? She'll lecture."

Shepard sighed, a headache beginning to knot in her brow at the thought. "You know, I save the galaxy, piss off the head of a galactic terrorist network, and sign up for a wild goose chase on behalf of an asari with a god complex so that my crew can keep sending checks home to their families. But no matter what I do, everyone treats me like a goddamn child. 'Go to bed, Shepard.' 'Eat your peas, Shepard.' 'Let the politicians handle it, Commander.' And you, Garrus." She turned, unable to suppress the resentment in her tone. "What is it now - three years we've known each other? Even taking away my brief bout of 'dead', that's more than a year that I've spent trusting you at my six. And you don't even trust me to sleep?"

Garrus' shoulders tensed beneath his armor. She faced forward, fighting to keep the rush of agitation at bay. It wasn't worth discussing, anyway.

Garrus wasn't sure what Shepard was saying, but he would have had to be deaf to miss the edge in her voice. Worse, he was uneasy about the sharp tone she'd put on his name. He glanced at her back, bewildered, as she faced stubbornly forward.

Flaring fringe,he thought, suddenly recalling how she'd looked when he had called her "ma'am" back on the Normandy. So close to turian, it was scary.

The silence – now loaded, and oppressive – returned. Even her anger unsettled him less than the silence. Desperate, Garrus did the only thing he could think of.

"Merry and bold is now the Primarch;
Court he holds, amid walls tumbled down."

Shepard tried, but failed, to cover a stumble at the sound of his voice. He allowed himself a smug flutter of his mandibles as she quickly glanced over her shoulder.

It wasn't much, but it anything was better than that unwelcome quiet - even if it was a turian battle epic he'd been forced to memorize as a child. Spirits knew it was terrible enough in the original – at least she didn't have to endure the imperialistic drivel of it – but it was something.

"His siege has battered town and tower.
Great treasure his knights have placed in hand,
Platinum and gold and many a fine ship.
In Parthia there is no rebel now
But has been slain, or takes the Primarch's oath…"

–

As Garrus paused before continuing his recitation, Shepard was forced to admit that he wildly outclassed her in verbal memory. Granted, she couldn't understand a whit of what was issuing from his mouth, but it was too rhythmic to be casual chatter, and she thought she could hear a rhyme scheme.

Suddenly, it hit her: Garrus Vakarian, ex-C-Sec officer turned vigilante, was reciting poetry.

Laughter welled up in her chest before she could stop it, spilling over in a loud snort. Garrus stopped with an audible sniff of disdain.

"Sorry," she said through a spasm of repressed laughter, and attempted to regain her composure. A moment's silence passed before Shepard realized that he couldn't understand the apology. Drawing a deep breath, she closed her eyes, and her lips parted.

"Sa ziza zecob dela dalou'a,
Boralea'e borale mi komi oula."

The melody was simple, and sweet, and came to her as naturally as breathing. Notes melted into one another as the words, lilting almost until they danced, sprang from her tongue. A lullaby, and a very old one at that, in a dialect so rare that the only translation VIs equipped to handle it were found in university libraries; but to her, it was nothing more than a nonsense song sung by children seeking the comfort of a breeze from the river on warm spring nights. It was apropos of nothing, and somehow all the more perfect.

It was Garrus' turn to break stride. As a general rule, Shepard sang even less than she hummed. That rule became law when she was in front of her team, and she'd never broken character long enough to give anyone a private concert, accidentally or otherwise. Her voice was anything worth bragging about anyway, and she could only carry the most basic tunes.

But given the situation, well… a lot of rules weren't relevant anymore.

She liked to believe that, at 29 – because like hell was she going to let her two years of being KIA push her over 30 – she had gotten over battle nerves. The first sixteen years of her life had passed in something resembling a war zone, and she'd grown up with one eye open for cover at all times. By the time she figured out that there was no documentation to contradict her when she lied to the recruiter about being 18, gunfire was as natural to the soundscape of her life as the ambient hum of electricity. The morning she left for basic, her few possessions chucked hastily into a backpack, an explosion – probably a drug lab, knowing the neighborhood – had leveled a low-rise tenement two blocks from her own. She had only spared a passing glance at the column of smoke before she left, briefly acknowledging the nuns who stood in the door of the church, shaking their heads silently at the distant ruin.

They had been hiking for just over an hour when Shepard saw the ground drop off some meters before them. She held up a closed fist, and Garrus stopped. She crouched and dashed to cover behind a rock fin at the ravine's edge.

They were at the northern rim of the mesa. In front of them, Alingon's canyon network abruptly stopped their advance northward with a chasm some eight hundred meters across. Shadows melted down the dramatic slopes of the canyon walls before them, finally pooling in a broad, flat wash five hundred meters wide. North along the wash, less than a kilometer away, stood a large conical structure.

It was less impressive from the ground, though Shepard wasn't too surprised, since her impressions during the jump had been fed by an adrenaline rush and Alingon's dizzyingly complicated topography. For starters, there were two structures instead of one, both circular and topped with conical roofs. The smaller of the two was closer and only three, or possibly four, stories, tall; the larger was twice again the small one's height and diameter both. Both were capped with arrays of antennae that bristled toward the sky.

Shepard examined the area. The uneven terrain meant that the shadows uneven and difficult to read, but there was no obvious movement on the canyon floor. She motioned Garrus forward, and he was at her side before she could lower her hand.

With a careful grace, he peered over the fin. A moment of silence, and he shook his head. Shepard watched his fingers fly to his rifle, extending the scope and resting the barrel against a groove in the rock. He raised his eye to the scope, and a barely perceptible shift in angle told Shepard that he was sweeping the canyon floor.

After a moment, he pulled back and turned to Shepard. She looked at him quizzically.

"A-" he began, then stopped abruptly with a sigh. He shifted away from the scope, and Shepard scooted over to fill the gap. Garrus held the rifle steady as she peered through the sight.

A dozen figures – LOKIs, by the looks of them, though she was still too distant to tell – were moving near the structure. They were carrying something, though she couldn't tell what.

She sighed. 'Uninhabited' my ass.

Pulling back, she scanned the descent. A series of narrow washes ran down into the trench, each providing varying degrees of cover. They emptied into a small, shallow pit at the edge of the canyon floor, separated from the structure by a hundred meters of flat space and a large fin that sloped in from the southern rim. The washes got them close enough to snipe, but not much else; everything between the pit and the structure was open ground.

She turned her back to the canyon and looked at Garrus. His body language was conspicuously neutral as he collapsed his rifle and turned to face her, awaiting a response.

She swore under her breath, and, hands flying, began to lay out a plan.

–

A shot rang out across the canyon floor. Steel spewed forth from a LOKI skull chassis, and the abandoned torso crumpled to the ground. Its companions turned toward the source of the shot, and Garrus ducked behind the fin as their optics flashed over the southern rim.

He would give Shepard this; her hands could move. He had seen military signals before, but Shepard gestured in turns that he could only describe as borderline poetic. He hadn't caught all of what she was trying to convey, but had come away with enough to justify a confident nod. Considering they didn't even have the same hand structure, that was an achievement in and of itself.

A second crack sounded, this time from the right. Shepard's helmet glinted from the eastern washes. They turned toward her, assessing the new threat. They had been flanked.

Garrus leveled his rifle and paused. Below, a good half of the twenty or so units were still moving in inscrutable formation around the front of the structure, unperturbed by the brewing firefight. The unpleasantness of another unwanted surprise caused his mandibles to tighten against his face.

A red flash ripped him from his momentary pause as the first LOKI leveled and fired at Shepard's position. His blood rushed, and he pulled off a second round, then a third. A half-dozen mechs turned toward him and returned fire. He had the high ground, and dropped two with two shots.

Six drones broke away from the group firing at him and moved toward Shepard's position. They began to advance, laying down heavy cover fire as they went. He swept his rifle to the east and settled the cross-hairs on Shepard just as she emerged from behind the fin, M-98 Widow in hand. Another rifle shot rang out from her position.

A flash of red burst into his crosshairs. Shepard reeled. Time slowed.

Rock exploded only a few centimeters from his head, and he cursed as he ducked behind the fin. No digital support meant no shields. How stupid he had been not to realize this at first, he had no idea. Shepard's armor would hold up for a while, but not long enough under concentrated ion fire.

Garrus ducked his head lower as another cluster of rock blew free from the fin, followed by another. They'd spotted him.

–

Shepard cursed as she glanced at her shoulder. The shot hadn't penetrated her plating, but the impact hurt like a bitch. The numbing bath of medigel that would normally have followed was absent. To add insult to injury, any breach would depressurize the suit quicker than she could blink. Shit.

The LOKI cluster was advancing in lock-step, sending a storm of red shots over her head. If she stood, she was completely exposed; if she stayed where she was, she was trapped.

She shimmied down the fin, keeping low and out of sight. Near the end, she spotted a small dip in the rock, and, taking advantage of the few seconds before the advancing drones could adjust their targeting, rested her rifle in the crook.

Red boxes.

A cluster of drones lay headless on the ground near the foot of the ridge, and beyond them, a handful continued to move near the entrance in a methodical and unbroken path. One paused and began to amble toward her, a large red crate in its arms, and Shepard shifted the sight down to the package in its arms.

A clear, yellow hazard sign stood brightly against the surface. Explosives.

A blast of heat shot past her ear. The advancing party had found her. No time to psychoanalyze a mech.She leveled the rifle, held her breath, and fired.

The explosion was substantial. The drones advancing on her, which were now within twenty feet of her previous hiding spot, paused to assess the situation. Shepard moved.

She dropped the Widow and swung her Tempest into her hands as she rushed forward. Bursts of fire spit from the barrel. Two mechs fell; in the back, one's head exploded from a sniper bullet. A fourth raised its weapon, and Shepard slammed her elbow into its optic core. The fifth collapsed under a hail of bullets from her SMG.

She whipped her head toward the structure. Mechs, still carrying their explosive boxes, crumpled in time with the steady, repeating crack of rifle fire from the ridge. Garrus.

A sudden clench of panic hit her in the chest. She barely breathed as she watched two, three LOKIs drop almost serenely to the ground. Nothing so much as a spark emerged from the boxes and they plunked soundlessly onto the soft dirt at the bottom of the canyon.

A shallow sigh of relief escaped her lips.

Something clutched at her ankle. Shepard looked down to see the upper half of a mechanical torso clinging to her leg, and hear the grating, unwelcome whirring of a self-destruct sequence.

The last thing it saw was the butt of her Tempest.

–

Shepard slipped back behind the fins, retrieved her Widow, and paused to look over their handiwork. A few LOKI continued to carry their cargo, unmoved even as their companions' heads burst forth in showers of sparks. The drones crumpled to the steady rhythm of fire-reload-target that sounded from the southern ridge, and Shepard sank to the ground for a moment of rest.

Fatigue rose to meet her as she settled, weighing down her limbs and tickling a deep sigh from her chest. After a futile struggle against the weight of her own body, she leaned her head back against the rock. Her helmet muffled the continuing beat-pause-pause-beat of Garrus' fire until it thudded lowly, with a sound like a heartbeat. Her eyelids sagged, and she cursed under her breath.

A small cascade of gravel jarred her from her daze, announcing Garrus' descent along the wash. She pushed herself up as he began down the slope, and as he neared, Shepard was relieved to notice no new scars on his armor.

His head was slightly askance as he jogged toward her. A question – or at least Shepard thought it was – rumbled from inside his helmet. He rested a hand on her arm, just below the scorch mark left from the one stray shot, and turned her slightly toward him for a better view. A hot knot of pain flared across her shoulder, and Shepard gritted her teeth. Leave it to me to get shot in the same place twice, she thought bitterly.

She jerked her arm back – though not without a wince. "I'm fine," she said pointlessly, and brushed past Garrus toward the structure. He paused a beat before following, at a distance.

As they approached the looming, conical form, the wheels in Shepard's mind began to turn. They now knew that the explosives were stable enough to withstand a sudden one-meter drop. They weren't military-grade, either; the one she had set off reacted more like a roman candle than an anti-personnel charge. It was more likely that they were small charges used in minor construction work. But the only way they could get any kind of punch out of something that small was…

Shepard's eyes widened, and she froze. "Garrus!"

Garrus, who had moved a step past her, turned at the sound of his name. Shepard's eyes were already scanning the ground when they fixed on the spot beside a fallen combat LOKI. A moment of silence passed before Garrus followed her eyes downward.

"Jesus," she muttered, and stepped back.

Beside the wrecked drone was a broad, shallow groove where its carapace had skidded across the soft dirt. From underneath a thin layer of dust and pebbles shone a bright yellow hazard label.

"They're buried," she said. She looked up at the field in front of them. "It's a minefield. But if they weren't expecting visitors, then…"

Garrus glanced at her uneasily. She returned the look, suddenly grateful that she didn't have to translate.

She frowned. "They were going to blow this whole place sky-high."

–

Garrus had to admit, looking across the approach to the structure with renewed apprehension, that whoever owned this place was serious about covering their tracks. The boxes were clustered closely enough that a chain reaction could have easily taken out the building at the foundations. Beside the pressure lock doors stood two enormous towers of explosives, likely designed to blow the doors inward and contain the spread of debris.

Now, he realized with a sinking feeling, they were faced with two options: spend what could be hours clearing out the charges, while running the risk of an accidental detonation that would announce their presence to anyone within several kilometers; or leave it, and enter a building rigged to demolish at a lone stray shot.

Shepard crouched by the side of the downed LOKI. Before he could object – however pointlessly – she began to scoop handfuls of soft dirt from the sides of the buried crate. Garrus barely resisted the urge to step back as the box emerged with a jerk of her arms, dirt spilling from its top.

Without a word, Shepard turned and carried the box back toward the northern rim of the canyon. Garrus watched her carefully as she returned and began to sweep the dirt with her foot as she moved. After a few moments, a half-dozen hazard signs had emerged from under a ten-foot circle of dirt.

Rather than moving to the closest one, Shepard passed it, pausing at the box after it and crouching to dig. Shepard's logic suddenly dawned on him; they only had to remove enough boxes to prevent the explosion from chaining. It wasn't much of a concession, but it was better than nothing.

–

Even with the two of them working, Shepard was surprised that the effort went as quickly as it did. It took just under an hour to clear a patchwork of crates that would keep an explosion from reaching the doors. The booms would be big, yes, but they wouldn't send the edifice crashing down around them.

When the last box was nestled securely against the northern slope, she headed toward the door. The fact that no one had dropped in on their little digging party meant they were likely alone, but she wasn't willing to bet her life on it.

Garrus took up a position beside the entrance. As Shepard raised a hand to the sealed doors, the lock interface suddenly flashed to life. She glanced quickly at Garrus, whose only response was to release the safety on his rifle.

Shepard pressed her hand against the door, triggering the release sequence. The interface whirred obediently, and with a click and shudder, the doors swung open. Inside was a small pressure lock, dim and completely bare.

Shepard nodded toward the far end of the room. Garrus followed her in, and the doors hissed shut behind them. The dull roar of oxygen jets broke the silence, and she sighed gratefully. After a few moments, the computer blinked from red to green, signaling that the room had been repressurized. Shepard shook her head, and Garrus nodded; better to leave their seals intact out of an abundance of caution than to end up depressurized, or worse.

They took up positions on either side of the door, and with a quick nod, Shepard reached out and punched the lock. The doors slid open.

Nothing moved. Shepard and Garrus slipped around the corner, guns at the ready. Barely two heartbeats passed before Shepard lowered her gun and slowly stepped forward, sucking in a breath as she raised her eyes to the enormous domed ceiling that arced a hundred meters over their head.

"Jesus," she swore.

As down the glen one Eastern morn
To a city fair rode I,
There armed line of marching men
In squadrons passed me by.
No pipe did hum, no battle drum
Did sound its loud tattoo,
But the Angelus bells o'er the Liffey swells
Rang out in the foggy dew.