Author's Note: This is going to be rated M for language and adult themes-still figuring out if I'm going to put other chapters on a LiveJournal account in light of new guidelines on FFnet. I'm also planning to try and update this every Sunday but that's a tentative schedule once my buffer is gone (it's at about fifty pages).

Disclaimer: all characters and ideas belong to Bioware.

She would lose half her right hand and most of her lower body was mutilated past basic recognition of the human anatomy; her face was apparently repairable with extensive surgery but the left side looked like melted plastic, the eye a jellied mess pooling in a screaming, red socket. Doctors were impressed with how well her rib cage held up and even more impressed that her heart had not exploded—good engineering one of them said, it almost sounded like a half-hearted joke but no one cracked a smile. What wasn't charred or flayed on her was crushed; almost every bone in her body was suffering from fractures and breaks. The amputations were carried out as soon as she was determined stable enough not to go into shock and there were already cloned replacements being grown for future graft attempts. Commander Shepherd's life and its precarious balancing act with death was the focus of every news network still functioning in the galaxy but no one was getting any answers.

It was difficult to give a proper prognosis on her condition, the doctors said initially, because she was so tangled up with advanced technological implants that were neither on the available market for even the wealthiest patients nor remotely within the realm of medical knowledge. Cerberus scientists and agents began to show up shortly after it became clear Shepherd's chances were dwindling, an entire swarm of them descended on her hospital bed while a recently arrived Miranda Lawson barked directives at them. A few were wanted criminals by the Alliance but until the livelihood of the galaxy's most recognized hero could be guaranteed no one was willing to interfere. The salarians, in spite of a shaky relationship with the pro-krogan Alliance, surprised everyone by immediately sending their best surviving medical experts to assist and the turians were fast on their heels with the most advanced equipment they had available. Devastated as they were, the asari were slower to react but their best doctors were soon added to the milling crowd of professionals and prodigies who attended Shepherd's broken form.

There were daily calls over the net from Wrex who raged and blustered—never admitting his shame knowing the krogan could send no one to aid in this new little war that was playing out on the bloody field of Jane Shepherd's dying body. Why would any species evolve without secondary organs? They were all too damn soft, too damn vulnerable, he grumbled. Tali was much quieter about her helplessness, the quarians sent what provisions they could but human anatomy was too different. The turians were in a similar situation but had a few pieces of impressive medical tech that was involved in external treatments and one machine was posited with vastly improving the surgical precision of Shepherd's operations. But the quarians were couched in a totally different area of expertise: bacteria, viruses, overactive immune responses—Shepherd wasn't going to fall prey to the same pathogens that affected their species and so most of the attempted aid was of little consequence.

Other friends were being kept busy but checked in often—Liara was doing whatever Shadow Brokers did after the end of a war while involving herself in Thessia's reconstruction. Tali, while staying longer than anyone else but Garrus, left for Rannoch to fulfill her duties as an admiral. Alenko and Vega were still on Earth, just not with Shepherd. They, like the others, were working within their government's reclamation programs as they organized refugee camps and were flown in to deal with complicated rescue and recovery situations. Javik had disappeared after the last push against the Reapers but he kept turning up in different places—Thessia, Palaven, Tuchunka, and Earth were a few. Garrus wasn't sure exactly what he was up to but figured a man frozen for fifty thousand years had a right to wander a little. Joker, Traynor, and Cortez were still operating with the Normandy, it was hard to imagine them anywhere else. The Normandy was grounded initially after its return to Earth for inspection but was sent off again to run missions between the star systems and was serving as a courier, refugee transportation, supply runner, and everything else the Alliance could think to task its crew with.

Garrus should have been home on Palaven, his sister made it clear to him in their calls that she was confused by his lagging efforts to make it back to his family. He expected his father was disappointed too but Solana wasn't bringing it up in their talks. She wasn't the only person inquiring about his return either, Primarch Victus wanted him involved in Palaven's recovery and Garrus had no answer for his sister or his leader. His relationship with Commander Shepherd, while public enough to the Normandy's crew, had somehow managed to stay private enough that no one in the major media had picked up on it. If Allers had noticed anything she was keeping mum about it and it looked like Shepherd's Alliance crew respected their commander too much to leak personal information to the press.

Then again, maybe it had never been all that obvious. They spent time together, sure—even more time together than they did anyone else, but PDA was minimal. They were too damned busy trying to win the war to have the time their relationship deserved. There was that one moment back on Earth, in that city called London, where they had a particularly public kiss, but how many people actually saw them? And even if there were onlookers, how many of those people lived through that last push? It was a morbid train of thought but a true one; no one had said anything about human-turian heavy petting during Hammer. If Shepherd survived her injuries they might have the opportunity to finally go public. Until he knew for sure he didn't want to leave her side and he didn't know how to admit that to his family.

Trapped in an Earth hospital he had nothing to do but dwell on Shepherd's fragile state. Garrus didn't like visiting her but he hated being kept out of her room. The relief of knowing she was alive was washed away by the horror of seeing how narrow her escape from death was. It was painful seeing Shepherd gargling on her hospital bed, there were so many tubes in her she looked like a failed science experiment; there were ones pumping her full of chemicals and others for draining fluids, she had a few piping fresh blood into her veins and some others for nutrition. Her bed sheets were changed daily because she leaked everywhere. Even worse was trying to keep his eyes away from the stumps where her legs used to be and the gore-tinged bandages that wrapped her body. She didn't look like Jane Shepherd anymore; she was a ruined parody of the woman he loved. Her hair had been shaved off and her skin was a sickly yellow that made her cheeks look gaunt and hollow. Her one good eye looked more like an enormous bruise and her mouth was full of pulverized teeth. She was barely breathing on her own though her heart was still beating strongly, perhaps one of the only major organs not completely damaged.

It was hard to say what happened to Jane Shepherd after she had managed to successfully reach the Citadel and activate the Crucible. The Reapers were dead, annihilated by the combined efforts of the galaxy and the miraculous contributions of an Alliance commander. When a sweep of the Citadel was made in the aftermath of the battle it took days to locate Shepherd, even with the miniature beacon installed in her N7 armor leading the way, standard issue for every set of Alliance armor allotted to operatives known to be assigned to covert and sensitive missions. Despite the shock of a Reaper invasion still dogging the survivors it was still staggering to discover the extent of unknown territory within the Citadel, an entire under-city of passages and cavernous rooms full of enigmatic machines. Bodies clogged every hallway and a path had to be cut through the carnage; most of the rescuers were vomiting all over their shoes by the time Commander Shepherd was at last located. The bodies of Captain Andersen and the Illusive Man were recovered as well amongst the rubble. It was assumed Shepherd was dead too when one of the rescue team noticed her chest rising and falling as they began to cart her away.

She was being hailed as the savior of every sentient species and possibly the galaxy's most un-killable soldier. Garrus wasn't so sure she was going to live long enough to have accolades for either of those claims but he kept hoping. Money wasn't a problem, no one was asking to get paid keeping the galaxy's liberator alive and no one was begrudging her the least service or supply. As civilization was rebuilding itself Shepherd's doctors were busy trying to rebuild her.

"It's a little easier this time around in some ways." Miranda had told him, "In other ways it's so much more difficult. We weren't trying to keep her alive when we started Lazarus, we didn't have to worry about dosing her with anesthesia or keeping her vitals steady enough to operate. She was dead. There wasn't much more we could do to her to make things worse and by the time she was finally alive again it wasn't nearly so touch and go with keeping her stable as it is now. There were a few scares, yes, but they were always containable. I wish I could say the same about her new condition." It was not a subject Garrus cared to dwell on but Miranda's half-hearted attempts to comfort him were surprising. He had not realized the extent of her relationship with the commander—he hadn't even known they were friends. But it was easy to see that Miranda regarded her as such in the way she doted over the barely stitched together form of her ex-CO. The mothering aspect of her was completely unexpected but oddly reassuring. This was a woman, Garrus suspected, who would never give up on Shepherd no matter what the circumstances came to—she had already accomplished the unthinkable before, hadn't she?

Of course he wasn't nearly so pleased with her now as he had been then. Miranda Lawson was poised by the window of Shepherd's hospital room, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared him down. Her back was to the window and the light filtering through it gave her figure a glowing halo that didn't match the glower darkening her face. "She is not going to be awake for at least a month, maybe longer with all the surgery that needs to be done. I promise you you're not going to miss her first conscious moments, Officer Vakarian." Miranda never called him by his first name, which would, admittedly, have felt wildly inappropriate for too many reasons he couldn't name. Not that he liked her calling him 'Officer Vakarian' much either, her tone had little respect for the station she was supposedly acknowledging.

"So you're asking me to abandon her, right, of course." His eyes swept over Shepherd's slumbering figure. She still looked awful but her breathing didn't sound like a torturous process anymore, he'd noticed. "Because I can just walk away from her while she's struggling for life. Sure. You have odd ideas about how turians exercise our affections, Lawson." He angled his head away from her, shifting in his chair to stare at Shepherd's face. New skin had been grafted on to the left side and she no longer looked so hellishly disfigured—he wanted to hold her hand and joke about how they had matching scars. All of the doctors kept saying that by the time they'd finished facial reconstruction she'd look almost exactly the same as before. Human faces were, apparently, much easier to repair, being more pliable than turian ones.

"She's in a medicated coma." Miranda insisted, "Shepherd is not going to wake up until we want her to—and that's still a long ways off. Any sooner and she'd die, so yes I can guarantee that you are not going to miss her waking up because I will be able to actually tell you when she is going to wake up, Officer Vakarian." She paced on her end of the room, beginning to bristle at him in frustration. They had been at it with each other for almost an hour, recycling their arguments every few minutes.

"I don't understand why you want me gone so badly." He dug his hands into the armrests of his chair, rooting himself more firmly to the spot, as if she might call in guards to bodily remove him. "How exactly is leaving the woman I'm in love with supposed to help anything?"

Miranda narrowed her eyes, "One: everyone else has managed to keep themselves busy with work that is very much necessary to the reconstruction of civilized life except you. Two: you're agitating the doctors by staying here. You will be hindering her healing process more than helping it—the only person benefitting from your insistence on remaining by Shepherd's side is you. As much as you'd like to think she knows you're here I can say with a hundred percent certainty that Shepherd doesn't know anything at the moment. She is, as I mentioned, in a medicated coma." Garrus gave one low snort and turned his eyes back to Shepherd again.

Glare deepening, Miranda paced the room and then stopped, pursing her lips at Garrus. "Look, don't you have a family? A sister and father?" He grunted at her, not wanting to hear why she knew that. "Exercise some of your affections on them, Vakarian. I promise that when it's time for us to wake Commander Shepherd the first person I will be contacting is you. She's in terrible shape right now but I think we've actually managed to get past a turning point with her. She's going to live, I'm almost positive of it. Complications will arise, they always do, but we literally have the best medical minds in the galaxy watching over her. None of us want to see her die, you know that."

"And what if something does happen? And I'm not here? What if you send me off to go stare at the rubble of my home world and in the meantime Shepherd dies on the operating table? I'd rather face another Reaper down on foot than leave and find out I've missed her last moments of life. Or that I wasn't there to greet her when she woke up—that's almost worse."

Miranda unfolded her arms and stood at attention, "I am giving you my absolute promise on my honor that Shepherd is going to recover. There are other people in your life, Vakarian. You should remember that."

Garrus ran one hand over his face, "Shit." He left the next morning on a ship bound for Palaven.

AN: please forgive any minor mistakes, I'm editing this by myself and it's easy to miss little spelling errors. Anything bigger than that should be pointed out so I can be embarrassed about it.