A loud ping from the main battery's door jolted Garrus from his thoughts. He held in a sigh.

It was a sound he usually awaited with nervous anticipation. Just the relief of seeing her felt like a knot in his chest slowly loosening, the weight of the last two years dropping away. He couldn't remember when things had changed, when his feelings had become something more than what a subordinate should feel for their commanding officer. He could barely admit it to himself. But today, well ...

His mandibles pulled tight. Sooner or later she would demand his attention, calibrations or no calibrations. He'd run through the conversation a thousand times in his head, but words had never been his forte. How could mere words describe the way he felt when she stood in his scope, protecting a murderer?

He should have known she'd interfere. Hell, maybe he did know. Maybe he'd acted in cowardice, knowing she would take the decision out of his hands. Part of him wanted to snap, growl, shake her, pin her down and make her understand it was not okay to stand in the way of a bullet.

The door pinged again, cutting off his train of thought. He shook his head vigorously. Focus, Vakarian. Now isn't the time!

Garrus punched the key on the terminal and the door swished open behind him, interrupting his internal diatribe.

"Shepard," he said without turning. "Need me for something?"

He watched his fingers hovering over the haptic interface. He knew he couldn't focus on calibrating the guns' targeting systems with her there, but he wasn't going to let her know that. It was a sullen, childish thing to do, he knew, but he was feeling a bit petty today. Still, Garrus was a good enough turian to know better than to tell his C.O. to go away and let him sulk.

"I am not the Commander, Officer Vakarian."

Garrus froze at the cool, measured voice. He turned slowly.

The Justicar stood placidly in the entrance, watching him. "Do you have a moment?" It may have been posed as a question, but Garrus got the feeling she wasn't asking.

Despite her size – petite by turian standards – there may as well have been a blue and red glacier blocking the exit. He swallowed back his unease, pushing away the memory of her recruitment on Illium. Not that he had any love for the Eclipse, but even he had flinched at the dispassionate way she had crushed the throat of the asari merc under her heel. They'd barely spoken twenty words, if that, since she came aboard. And in the rare event she left her meditations, her interactions with the crew were barely beyond simple acknowledgment.

"My apologies, Justicar," Garrus said, straining to sound calm and polite. "What did you need?"

She locked eyes with him as she stepped forward, heels clicking loudly against the floor. The door swished closed behind her, and Garrus had the irrational thought that he was suddenly locked in. He knew asari couldn't understand turian sub-harmonics and they weren't mind-readers, either, despite the myths. Garrus didn't consider himself a superstitious sort, but looking into those unnaturally serene, ice-blue eyes, even he could start to wonder if there wasn't at least a little truth to the rumors.

For a few moments, she just looked at him, seeming to measure his life and find him wanting. Garrus fought the urge to squirm under that cool, unflinching gaze. He could swear the temperature in the battery dropped twenty degrees since he entered. He suppressed a shiver, thinking about what this ancient being was capable of doing. Her biotics alone could crush his plates to a fine, gray dust.

"Do you regret letting him go?" There was no need to clarify who. She knew.

Garrus felt his mandibles pull tight. "Massani should learn to keep his mouth shut."

"Perhaps. That is not why I am here." She seemed to size him up. "Do you believe you have done the right thing?"

Garrus laughed bitterly. "The bastard who led my team to a violent, painful death is still alive. Does that sound right to you?"

She nodded as though he had confirmed something. "You believe justice was not served because your traitor escaped with his life."

"You would have shot him."

"I would have."

Garrus's fist clenched. "So why would it be right for me to let him go?" It wasn't quite a snarl, but getting dangerously close.

Samara gave him an admonishing stare. It was eerily similar to the look his father used when lecturing him on his latest failure. "The Justicar's Code is absolute. It paints the world black and white, with no room for mercy."

Garrus snorted, not bothering to keep the quaver of irritation from his sub-harmonics. "And what does that have to do with me, Justicar?" He stepped back and propped himself against the battery's console, fixing her with an insolent look that his father would have recognized right away. "You willing to induct me into the Order?"

Samara held his gaze without reaction. "You think you are willing to throw away mercy for justice, but you are not ready to make such a sacrifice."

"What makes you so sure? I'm don't know what mercy has ever gotten me."

Samara shook her head, lips tight. "That is because you are unaware of the alternative. The Code condemns your traitor, whatever the reason for his actions. The same Code would condemn Shepard for hers."

"What are you saying?"

"The Code demands death of the wicked and any who harbor them. By the Code, if Shepard stood in the way of delivering justice, she would have to die with him."

Garrus jumped to his feet. "That's-"

"Extreme? I once thought so as well." Samara's lavender lips twitched in what could have been a smile, though it didn't reach her eyes. "Have you ever heard how one becomes a Justicar?"

Garrus hesitated at the sudden change of topic, unsure of where she was going with this. "Can't say I have," he said warily.

"There are five thousand sutras that make up the Code. There are six Oaths, nine prayers to the Goddess, and five hundred Precepts that govern the Justicar Order. Those who wish to undergo the rites of the Justicar must spend ten years memorizing them."

"Guess that's why only asari become Justicars, then," Garrus said with a wan smile.

"No," Samara said, focusing her eyes back on him. "That is merely the first step towards initiation. Our Order is a dying one, but it is not due to the time requirement."

Garrus tilted his head. This is getting weirder and weirder by the second.

"The first lesson we learn is the danger of attachment," Samara drew her hands together before her. "A Justicar must have nothing to hold her back. She must lose it all, to show that she is willing to commit herself fully to the Code."

Garrus walked over to the rail and folded his arms. "Sounds like the military, then."

"No." Samara's voice was sharp. "A disciple sacrifices all, symbolically taking her life to be free of it. Everything must be severed. She is dead to all who knew her, as they are dead to her. Her name is cast to the wind. She spends ten years in silence, nameless, while she trains her body as a weapon."

Garrus braced himself against the rail and watched her, a knot forming in his stomach. I don't like where she's going with this.

"Within the stone walls, she is cut apart." Samara wrenched her hands apart and held them parallel. "She is the invisible. None may comfort her in the long night. There is only the Code. Should she persevere, she is bathed in ash and sea salt. No longer a woman of free will, she is reborn a Justicar whose will is the Code."

"How can anyone live that way?" He stood and took step towards her.

Samara took a quick step out of his reach, calm settling back on her like a shroud. "The Justicar Rites are death rites, designed to stop us from thinking of ourselves as a person. A Justicar is renamed for one of the tenants of the Code. I am Samara," she said, sketching a figure in the air with her hands. "Death follows behind her."

"Samara ..."

Her expression hardened to stone. "I do not need your pity. A Justicar is nothing more or less than an instrument of justice. An instrument cannot have attachments or qualms if it is to be effective. It cannot hesitate or fail to execute its purpose. Otherwise, it must be destroyed."

"But that's not the only way to be just. That's crazy."

Samara closed her eyes. "Perhaps so, but it is the only way to live in black and white." She opened them slowly, her eyes glowing. "The Justicar is the executor of the Code, an agent of its execution. She cannot grant mercy. If the Code says someone must die, the instrument acts accordingly." She raised her arm and let a blue corona flare down into her hand. "All who stand in the way of the Code must die, no matter who they were to the one who has died."

What? That sounded too specific to be a general precept. The blue fire whipping the air in her hand convinced him that it wouldn't be wise to pry. Still...

"Samara," Garrus said, his sub-harmonics broadcasting his distress. "Why are you telling me this?"

"If you wish to wholly serve justice, as I do, you must be willing to sacrifice all without hesitation." The corona died and she was calm as ever. "Justice demands impartiality without exception. You must, with your own hand, carve away that which you hold most precious. By the Code, you would have to kill Shepard yourself so that justice may be satisfied."

Garrus recoiled, her words hitting him like a shot to the gut.

"Think on this and decide if you are willing to make that sacrifice. Only then can you live without mercy."

She nodded to him politely and turned, slowly walking out without another word.

.

The door hissed shut behind her, sealing Garrus in with his thoughts.

The words churned in his head, tearing him to pieces inside. Because when she stepped in front of Sidonis, shielded him with her body, said to that traitor that she was there to help him ...

He stumbled to the battery, gripping the console's edge to hold himself up and stop from shaking.

The voice in his head, the one he started thinking of as Archangel, had whispered to him to punish and calmly, coldly noted angles and trajectory. No wind in the Wards to adjust for, easy to line the shot and take them both down. A clean shot. Just one bullet to finish it. And just for a split second, he had wanted to do it.

That voice—it had always been there, whispering at the back of his mind. It railed against C-Sec's rules, when criminals could escape justice on technicalities and he'd been forced to let them walk free. It wanted to shoot down Saleon's ship, even if it killed the hostages. When they finally found him, it was furious when Shepard stopped him from killing the salarian bastard, wanted to kill him no matter what she said. It was the part of him that felt vicious satisfaction when he finally cornered the slaver Kron Harga alone. It wanted blood for blood, demanded justice in measures of flesh.

Garrus knew, if he was honest with himself, that he was a killer. The voice was his own, him at his core. Some part of him knew killing murderers didn't make him any less of a killer himself. What was that human saying Shepard told him? 'Two wrongs don't make a right?'

On Omega, there was nothing to hold it – him – back. Just criminals and monsters of every stripe. 'The ends justify the means,' he told himself. Soaking Omega in their blood would be a good end.

Rejoining the Normandy had reined it back, but when she blocked his shot, it flared up again, hissing and malicious. And no matter how he wanted to deny it, no matter how horrified it made him for even thinking it, it was there. With her in its sights.

She was the impediment. She was the one stopping it from running free. It wanted her gone.

The memory flared back with a sickening wrench and Garrus was back in the moment—lining up the shot, finger on the trigger. Waiting.

He could see her standing in the scope. She called Sidonis out. The crowed parted around them as Sidonis approached her. Her kinetic barrier was down, biotics relaxed. Sidonis wasn't wearing armor at all. Nothing to save him from Garrus's bullet.

It would strike them both. His blood would splatter her face before she fell, the blue vivid against her skin. He could see her falling; her soft, human body entangled with Sidonis's traitorous one as they collapsed. Their blood would run together, crimson and cobalt mixing to dark purple. Screams as people realized what happened.

Garrus was no stranger to death. He'd seen plenty of bodies, killed in various ways. He'd killed many of them himself. There was no denying the rush he felt doing it, the satisfaction of a perfect headshot, the way his blood pumped fiercely as they fell to his bullets. He'd laughed in the face of death. He thought he was past feeling anything for an empty shell, but Shepard ...

No. No, no, no, nonononono ...

A bullet would take her down as easily as any merc. A twitch of a finger, and Shepard—powerful, vivacious Shepard, Savior of the Citadel, full of life and humor and mercy—would be as dead as all the mercs he killed. As dead as his team.

No! I would never-

His mind constructed an image of her face, blood spattered, her vibrant, green eyes gone dull and cold.

I couldn't. Not her. Please, Spirits, not her. I can't, I-

The bullet would tear through her skull, explode out through her forehead, her blood and brain exposed to the air they were never meant to touch.

Stop. Please, stop!

.

His breath sounded ragged as he pushed himself away from the console, stumbling blindly to the crate in the corner. He sat down hard, holding his face in his hands.

He'd told Shepard he wasn't like her. He was a sniper. A sniper doesn't aim to deter, doesn't fire warning shots. He was trained to kill without remorse.

The value of justice had been pounded into him his whole life. Pounded until he couldn't see anything else. He wasn't trained in mercy. Shepard had said vengeance wasn't like him. It wasn't like him. It was him, and always had been.

Didn't she understand what it did to him when she died? When he was with her, he could believe in mercy. No matter what happened, she never turned against her principles. Time and again, she set him back on the path, made him believe in it.

Then she died, and mercy died with her. How could such a thing exist in a universe that would let her die?

Omega hardened him. But that wasn't really true. He had sought Omega out, trying to escape her and her mercy.

It sickened him, the way the universe kept going like she never existed. The way people used her and spat on her memory. He couldn't forgive them, any of them. Every time he saw her face, heard her voice or even her name – on advertisements, on recruitment posters, everywhere he went – he wanted to scream. How dare they? How dare her?

She died and left him alone, expecting him to have mercy on these morons who insulted her memory. He wanted to get away from the gentle reproach he could imagine in her eyes when he lashed out at their idiotic ignorance, knowing she would forgive them for it.

He hated the way they looked at him when he tried to defend her, their pity and condescension. They called her crazy, said she was delusional! Part of him hoped the Reapers would come and kill them all. Let them see how crazy she was when the Reapers carried them off to be harvested.

On Omega, nobody even pretended to care that he walked around like a man bleeding out. Nobody even looked twice. Omega was filled with hate and pain and blood and anger. It was easy to ignore mercy when there was none. Archangel let him go numb in a haze of righteous fury, let him forget the way his heart clenched when Anderson told him—Alchera, an attack, Shepard's gone. Omega could benefit, and he could stop having to think.

Yeah. Look how that turned out, Garrus.

And now she was back, charging across the battlefield in a haze of blue light. She had stormed that bridge and back into his life, blazing through mercs like a spirit of war. Just like old times, he'd said a few times already. And it was. He could almost forget the years that had passed. She was still Shepard, just like he remembered.

'If I'm walking into Hell, I want someone I trust at my side,' she'd told him, her eyes wide and earnest. She trusted him.

The image of her looking up at him with her wide, green eyes filled his mind. Everything about her was so alien, nothing like a turian. Even her eyes were alien: large, wet and fringed with little, black hairs. It should have repulsed him, but lately, he couldn't stop himself from looking into them.

Sometimes he'd wake up in the middle of the night, shaking in fear that she was still dead. That none of this was real. Part of him kept waiting for everything to fade, for it all to be a delusion fabricated by his dying mind. After all, the dead don't come back to life. He had to be lying on the floor of his apartment on Omega, slowly bleeding out. Any moment now, the mercs would come end him and the dream would vanish.

But then he would look into her warm eyes and his fear always melted away. She was real. He could never fabricate that warmth. Once he looked, he never wanted to look away, never wanted to let her go.

No, he realized. He stood up, pacing the battery. He was not Shepard, and never would be.

She was a paragon of virtues, forgiving anyone willing to repent. Hell, she even tried to give Saren a way out. Death had taken her once because her virtue made her try to save everyone.

And she saved everyone but herself, he thought bitterly. It was typical Shepard, taking all the risk. And they – Cerberus, the Council, the Alliance – they let her take it so they could get all the reward. She died because she was just too selfless to put her own life first.

Well, he would be damned if he let it happen again. Garrus liked Joker well enough, but he'd sacrifice the pilot in a flat second to save her. Even if she was mad at him for it, at least she would still be alive.

Samara was right: he wasn't ready to give up everything to be like her, a pure instrument of merciless justice. Not if it meant losing Shepard. Justice without mercy was too harsh a code. Maybe he couldn't trust his own instincts, but he could trust Shepard's. But mercy made her vulnerable. She made herself vulnerable so she could grant mercy.

But he could live with that. He'd been given a second chance. If she had to be selfless, he would be selfish for her. He could be the renegade to her paragon ideals. If he couldn't be a perfect instrument of justice, he'd be her weapon and keep her safe. And if he was a killer, fine, so be it. He'd kill anyone who threatened her. She could offer mercy, and he would deliver justice to anyone foolish enough not to take her up on it.

Maybe it was cruel, maybe it was selfish, but he wasn't going to lose her again.

Oh? some part of his mind purred. And do think she belongs to you? What are you really interested in? Is it her warm eyes, or her warm, slim waist?

Garrus activated the battery's console with a little more force than necessary, telling that part of him to shut up, even as another part reminded him the futility of arguing with his own brain. Besides, Shepard was Commander Shepard, his friend and Commanding Officer. Even if she did have an amazingly slender waist, it was none of his business and that was that.

He rolled his shoulder as the familiar streams of data flashed on the screen, feeling the tension in his muscles. He'd been cooped up in the battery too long. He needed to get back in the field, blow off some steam on mercs or Collectors before he made a complete ass of himself.

When Shepard came by next, he would thank her. He was ready to get back to work, doing what he did best: sniping and watching her six. And maybe if he was ready to move on, she would keep him at her back. Next time, he would be there to make sure she made it out.

A.N.: So, this isn't the Mass Effect fan fiction that I wanted to post, but I found this in my files. I almost didn't post it because it's similar in a lot of ways to Eponymous Rose's Fade to Grey (a great fan fic, by the way). Ultimately, I decided that the feel was distinct enough to go ahead and share. It's been a long, long time since I've posted fan fic anywhere, so I may be a little rusty. It's also posted on my deviantart account, so if you see it over there, it's probably me.

In my head-canon, Garrus has very contradictory feelings about Shepard. On the one hand, she's Shepard, who he respects, cares for, is loyal to, and generally enjoys being around. He's also found himself in the strange position of discovering his own attraction to her on a more physical level and having no idea what to do about it. On the other hand, he resents Shepard. She's everything he's not (at least in his own mind) and also the one who holds back his more violent impulses.

My reading of his time on Omega is that he went semi-suicidal serial-killer killer on Omega's mercs, since he had no laws (or Shepard) to hold him back. It's especially clear if you read the Shadow Broker's dossiers on him. Kron Harga is implied to be a krogan, but given how many krogan Shepard and co. kill in the first two games, it's pretty clear Garrus went above and beyond the force needed to kill him.

This fan fic was meant as an exploration of some of those mixed, contradictory feelings. Don't know if I succeeded, but I tried. Reviews, critiques and what have you very much welcomed!

Edit: I fixed some things, added a lot of dialogue. Hopefully Samara feels more fleshed out now and less like a plot device sent to make Garrus angst. ;P

Edit 2: Moved some things around, did some pruning. Reworked a few scenes. Changed some dialogue to try making the pace a little snappier. Clarified a few things.