A/N: This is the first fanfiction I've published. Yay!

The concept of Acherusia and the Thoi'han artefact, the characters Ard'oro, E'ranech, Eletania, and Eng'agea, and my own personal Shepard belong to me.Everything else belongs to Bioware/EA.

Dedicated to FemShep/Jennifer Hale. Thank you, it's been a hell of a journey.

You Do Know How to Swim?

By Penstakingly

The sound of her heavy breathing cut through the thick, hot air as Shepard glanced up from her cover behind a couple of monstrous roots. Overhead, the view was breathtaking. She and her team of two were on the M-class moon, Acherusia. Though, Shepard mentally noted that, after this mission, she'd strongly petition the galactic survey team to make a whole new category for celestial bodies that were teeming with so much life that even the very air you breathed seemed bent on strangling you from the moment you took your first breath. She slowly continued to tilt her head back, taking in the majesty of the satellite's planet and its two enormous rings dominating the sky. Several other moons were speckled among the rings. One of them was a bright orange ball about the size of Luna at moonrise whose gaseous albedo made it look almost like a second sun in the sky. Though she had been to many planets and had seen many amazing vistas from her life traveling the stars, there were still sights that made her pause in awe and admire their unsullied beauty, a beauty that the Reapers did not care about. And though some worlds would fall victim to the destruction they wrought in their aim to eradicate civilisations whole, beauty would always eventually return, reborn after the ashes of their fires. Try as they might, it was something the Reapers could not destroy whole.

Her admiration was abruptly cut short by the sound of bullets hitting her kinetic barrier. A Cerberus Operator had managed to flank her. "Commander, now is not the time to be admiring the scenery!" Javik admonished her over the comm. She swore and quickly cloaked before the Operator could take down her shields, watching his frantic head movements as she snuck behind him. With a heavy melee, she quickly put him out of his suspense. Nothing. No horror at taking a life, like the first time. Not even the twinges of guilt she used to feel. By now, he was just another number on her unforgivably long kill tally. And she knew it was not healthy.

A pause in fighting afforded her a moment to reflect. Ever since she returned from incarceration on Earth, days and nights and blended into one long diplomatic struggle that brought with it an endless chain of fights on the heels of one another. It was all finally catching up to her over the past couple of weeks. Not just the way things were right now, either, but the entire struggle that began four years ago on that fateful mission at Eden Prime. This was not the first time she had been caught spacing out, but thankfully, not a lot of people had noticed, or she suspected she would already have a mutiny on her hands. Only Garrus had been gently nudging her, though stealing worried looks at her every now and then when he thought she did not notice. And she could feel Liara's eyes boring into her whenever she took the naive-scientist-turned-shadow-broker planetside. They were both wonderful friends, but, despite knowing that they had her back, she felt that sharing something like this would only alarm them, making matters worse. As Samara had once wisely put it, "You carry many burdens, yet you carry them alone. As it should be." But now, Javik knew, and she began to suspect it would only be a matter of time before he threw her out the airlock and assumed command over her forces. She shook her head. No, I've got to pull myself together. I'm being too paranoid. Still, she snuck a peak at Javik—only to find that all four eyes were fixed on her. Or more like boring into her.

She blinked and threw her head away, fortunately catching a glimpse of the next wave of enemies. They were a company of about twenty. She had to stifle a heavy sigh. "More incoming," she alerted her team and took off a few paces in front of them, taking point. Something was very wrong with her; it felt as if her limbs were thirty pounds heavier and everything, including her running, seemed to be in slow motion. Then suddenly, she was not running anymore, but careening full-tilt into the ground. Distantly, she heard the sound of a cloak dropping and felt a breeze over the back of her neck. It took a moment to register that she was, indeed, facedown on the canopy floor. A pair of boots entered her peripheral vision about a couple of feet away, sending a jolt through her body that instantly spurred her to action. She instinctively rolled away from them, and it was not a moment too soon, for she heard the distinct sound of something impaling the ground. A phantom had her sword stuck in deep where Shepard's neck had been. All of this action and reaction had taken only two seconds to soak into Shepard's adrenaline-filled brain. In a third, her pistol was whipped out at the ready. Firing two shots in rapid succession, she swiftly breached the Phantom's barrier and was about to fire another shot when the Phantom fell over dead. "Sniped that one!" Garrus crowed over the comm. Shepard would have thrown him a grin, but more enemies were nigh upon her by this point. They were two Cerberus Guardians and one Centurion. Cloaking immediately, she dashed around, whipping out her shotgun. Garrus's overload took care of the Centurion's shields as she closed in for the kill. She made quick work of the two Guardians, who had no idea she popped up right behind them. With a slam, Javik incapacitated the Centurion, whom Shepard finished off with another shotgun blast to the chest. Between Garrus's concussive shot and her cloaking and gunning, they made quick work of the rest of the ground forces.

Shepard gave the all clear, but instead of pushing onward to the cruiser wreckage, she doubled back to where she had fallen, curious about what the hell tripped her. "Shepard?" Garrus looked at her oddly. She came to a halt a foot away from something jutting out of the ground. At first, it looked like a root, but a closer inspection showed her that the object beneath the moss and overgrowth was, in fact, metal. "Commander," Javik's deep voice came a few centimetres from her, "is there something wrong?" His tone seemed to suggest that it was not really a question.

"I was just wondering what made me trip..." She did not need to finish the thought. It was unspoken that if she had not fallen at that very moment, their team would have been permanently short a head. Her head. Today was certainly one of those days. It was a mission that she could do in her sleep, enemies that she had taken out countless times before, and there were not even that many compared to countless situations she had been in before. For goodness' sake, she was no stranger to dire circumstances and loss, even before the Reapers arrived. After all, she had assumed command of her entire unit on Torfan when her commanding officer had a breakdown and lost a lot of good men and women. And she had faced down waves upon waves of enemies at Project Base with no team and slim hope of contacting the Normandy in time to get her off the rock before it smashed into the Alpha Relay. But today... today, a simple mission had, more than once, come a hair's breadth away from a worst-case scenario. Literally. And yet she still felt like a drone.

A heavy sigh escaped her lips. "Come on, let's find the downed cruiser, grab the cache, and get off this hellhole." She fervently wished—no, prayed—that she could just crawl off somewhere relaxing for just two days. Two days—that was all she asked for. Go to a nice sunny beach, perhaps, where she could sprawl out on the sand and sip a nice cold one. Maybe a Molson Golden, if Joker had any left. Collect a few seashells, maybe run tests on them. But the most shore leave had to offer was waking up to the underside of the bar, or worse, in a wet spot of her own drool next to Aria's lap. She needed the fire back in her veins. Not the kind that came from downing three whiskey sours followed by a shot of Ryncol.

Once they were inside the cruiser wreckage, it was only a matter of finding the information cache. She knew it was here. At least she had enough presence of mind to order their hijacked Cerberus shuttle to maneuver and strike the enemy's communications relay first. However, this act had cost them their targeting sensors and Garrus got a couple of second-degree burns from exploding consoles. She had to roughly shove him aside, muttering awkward apologies and a "Stop getting blown up!" as she took control of the guns herself and fire two more shots that took out the cruiser's propulsion and weapons. But their victory was pyrrhic. They were too close when a couple of large explosions rocked the cruiser, heavily singing their tiny shuttle. The inevitable result was an eventual crash-landing of both space-faring vessels on the moon they were orbiting. It was a slow and quiet descent as both sides eyed each other off, unable to do anything with damaged weapons arrays. Fortunately, the shuttle still had some thruster power, which Shepard used to match the speed and descent trajectory of the cruiser.

Fingers now mostly having regained their dexterity thanks to the advanced burn medi-gel, Garrus tapped away at the damaged control panel that would decrypt and upload the invaluable Prothean data cache to their omni-tools. Shepard watched him, unseeing. Her thoughts drifted back to her conversation with him in the forward battery three weeks ago.

She walked into the forward battery and, looking to her left, caught Garrus typing away at his strategy board. "Hey, Garrus."

Garrus turned around from the board and gave her a turian-style grin. "Shepard."

She took a deep breath, hoping for a good answer to what she was about to ask him. "Any word from your family?"

"They made it off Palaven. It was tight, but they're okay."

"That's fantastic!" She beamed and leaned in to pat him on the back. "That must be a weight off your shoulders."

"It is. Though this being a war, one burden replaces another." Garrus paused then, shifting slightly and tilting his head downward.

"What happened?" Shepard asked cautiously, sensing his agitation.

He turned around to face the strategy board he'd been fiddling with when she came in, and he leaned over it. "I just had to make a tough call with the Primarch. He said our fleets are being decimated. So I advised him to cease all offensive operations against the Reapers."

"A full retreat?" Garrus nodded. Her heart sank. This did not bode well.

"The only way to save Palaven now is to hold our ships back for the Crucible. But if I'm wrong..." his mandibles twitched in agitation, "then a lot of other turian families won't be as lucky as mine."

Shepard leaned against the console, next to him. "If it means anything, I would've given the Primarch the same advice."

"Yeah, there's that ruthless calculus again." Garrus sighed and straightened up from the railing. "How are you holding up Shepard? This all has to be taking a toll."

She took a moment to decide whether or not to be honest. She had to admit, it was getting harder now to keep everything to herself. She had always had an incredible balance kept not only by the happiness that came with saving lives but also by that which came from challenging missions, witnessing strange, new wonders, and going up against the unknown. But gone were those times of "blind optimism"—as Garrus had put it, exploring uncharted worlds, rolling over geth in the Mako while listening to Lacuna Coil, or testing scientific theories in the midst of battle. What got to her was not that she was under pressure to race against time. No, that's how she did her best work. Aw hell, she may as well at least admit it to herself. She missed all the science, the exploration and wonder that cropped up on missions. The nature of the missions had changed drastically even compared to what they had been during her stint with Cerberus. Then, she at least had Mordin to chat with and it was an exhilarating moment on Horizon when he wished her good luck field-testing the Seeker swarm countermeasure. With so many casualties and so much of the same brute running and gunning, her balance had been thrown into flux, the needle—sometimes accelerating, sometimes decelerating but always—moving toward the red zone. She cleared her head, knowing Garrus was waiting for her answer, and decided to allow herself this one levity, trusting that he had her back. "There's only so much fight in a person. Only so much death you can take, before you—"

"Before your best friend tries to cheer you up." Garrus's arm now repeated the same gesture she had given him.

"Cheer? Coming from you?"

"Mm. Mood swings." He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Don't worry, we'll get through this. We always do."

"Ready when you are, Commander." At first she thought it was the memory-Garrus who spoke, but realizing he had never said that then, she snapped out of her reverie. There was a soft pressure on her shoulder. She looked down and saw three-digit hand resting there and then looked up to Garrus's face. Mandibles were twitching, but his gaze was steady and calm. Reassuring. She smiled back to him. "Well done," she said warmly and then added, "come on, Garr Garr, let's go."

"You know I hate it when you call me that," Garrus drawled, but his voice held a lightness she had not known she had missed during the past couple of weeks.