Chapter Text
He does not know what to say, so he says nothing.
Shepard spends a few moments soothing Tarquin, humming softly, until the babe quiets.
Then he is all too aware of the silence.
He tries to think of the right combination of words but fails. Only Tarquin’s occasional soft noises interrupt them.
“I suppose I should say thank you,” Shepard says, finally breaking the silence. “Without you, Garrus wouldn’t have been here in time for the delivery.”
“It was nothing.”
“And, for the record, I am glad you’re here.” She sighs. “I know this isn’t what you wanted, but – “
“But it is what Garrus and you want.” He nods and looks at her. “I am sorry I did not realize that earlier.”
“I am too. You hurt him,” she says, and even though there is no malice in her thin voice, he winces. “You really did. It’s very hard for me to forgive that.”
He closes his eyes.
“It….has not been easy on me either, Commander.” He rises from the bed and walks toward the window – which, he notices, is far too large and far too easy for a sniper to get a clear shot through. He makes a note to tell Garrus to request a room change.
“Honestly? I’m glad,” she says. “Because he’s been suffering, too, for a long time. And it hurts me, to see him like that. I love your son very much, Primarch, and yet you can’t even call me by my name.” Her words are an open challenge.
“I know…Jane,” he says. He cannot turn to face her. There is another loud noise in the hall, and he purposefully stares at the closed door, only partially monitoring it for a threat.
“I need to know something before we go any further with this,” she says, and he can detect a subtle hitch in her voice. “If Tarquin looked fully human, would you still want to be in his life?”
“Commander Shepard…” He sighs. “Why bring up what has not come to pass?”
“I want to know.”
“…No, I would not.” He concedes. “The logical explanation would be that he would not be my son’s issue-”
“But, even if that was true - which it wouldn’t be - if your son raised him, he would be your grandson, none the less.” She runs a finger from her free hand down to caress her son’s cheek. “Garrus told me that he wants you to be part of our son’s life. Frankly, I’m less sure. I don’t want Tarquin feeling ashamed of his human heritage.”
“I have already talked to Garrus about this. He will not learn such from me.” He gathers his courage and meets her eyes. “I have worked with many humans in my career.”
“I’m not challenging your ability to maintain a working relationship with humans.” She raises an eyebrow. “A family relationship is something different.”
“It….” He shakes his head. “It is …complicated. I objected to your union because I did not believe you could give my son what I felt he needed to be happy. Turians place a great deal of weight on ….heritage, particularly clans as old as ours... Garrus might not have cared when you married, but it is my duty as his father to consider his future needs as well. I was, obviously,” he chuckles, “quite wrong, despite all medical literature to the contrary.”
“So you’re telling me that if Tarquin here hadn’t come along, you would have been happy to just…never talk to Garrus again? Because you didn’t like a choice he made?”
“Happy? No. I would not be happy.” He sighs. “But I…was a detective, Jane. I believe in the outcome that the evidence points to. Human-turian couples are rare, for good reason. Your culture is very, very different than ours.”
“You’re right.” Shepard looks thoughtful. “But different does not mean incompatible, Primarch.”
“Perhaps you are right.” He flares his mandibles. Solana and Garrus have been gone longer than he’d like. He feels vulnerable, exposed in a way that has nothing to do with the too-large window.
Still, he perseveres.
”You should call me Tiberius, Jane. Given that you are my…daughter…it does not seem right you address me by title.”
“Tiberius, then.” She smiles, and he dares to hope.
“But…let’s get one thing straight, Tiberius. I don’t want you in my son’s life if you’re going to pull this crap again. I’m not having my son feel like he did something wrong just because grandpa suddenly isn’t talking to him anymore. If you’re just going to cut him out of your life like that…You might as well not be part of it.”
“And if I offer you my word that that will not come to pass?”
“Then I’ll let you off with extra diaper duty as your punishment.”
He chuckles.“A fitting punishment, I suppose.”
Tarquin breaks up their discussion with a soft keen, and he watches Shepard move to tuck Tarquin closer to her body. She instinctively comforts the child with soft caresses as the babe clings to her.
She will be a good mother, he thinks, even without a cowl to tuck him in.
“One more thing.” Her smile fades as she looks down at Tarquin. “Did Garrus tell you, how this happened?”
He tilts his head to the side. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, humans and turians aren’t normally…compatible, like that, as you well know. I wasn’t originally, either.” She frowns. “I’ll give you the short version. I died, once. Spaced. Dead two years. Cerberus - you’ve heard of them, right?”
A nod. He's dealt with Cerberus a few times in C-SEC, and he knows their methods. He feels too uneasy to speak. He thinks of Garrus, of two years lost, and wonders if Shepard was the only one who has died and been reborn.
"Well, they decided to bring me back, and Cerberus did. However…"
She gives a soft chuckle that sounds odd,like it is caught in her throat. “Cerberus always had backup plans. I went through a lot of damage. Guess burning up on re-entry can do that to you. They knew there was no guarantee I’d ever regain function...Let alone consciousness.” She looks away. “But I was too expensive to invest in without some kind of guaranteed return.”
She pauses. He isn't sure of what to say, so he says nothing.
"So, while I was dead, they decided if I couldn’t stop the Reapers, I could be the means of controlling them." She shivers. “They decided the best way to do that was to breed their own squadron of reapers. The only problem for Cerberus - besides how they could even think of doing that to a sentient being - was they didn’t know what reapers were made of. They hadn't gotten any samples of Reaper tech yet; I was just the first piece of the puzzle. So they gave me enough programming to make me compatible of breeding with anything. Dextro or Levo.”
Shepard finishes her story in a whisper and refuses to look at him.
“…Why are you telling me this, Jane?” He is uncomfortable with her being this vulnerable in front of him. The story is so preposterous that he struggles to believe it. He knows he wouldn’t be able to if evidence to the contrary wasn’t currently pawing at her fringe.
She does not turn her gaze to him; rather, she smiles down at her babe, warm and safe in his mother’s arms. “I’m telling you this because Garrus and I weren’t planning on having natural children. Cerberus didn’t give me an owner’s manual about everything they did to me. We just figured we’d adopt, and then, well, Tarquin David Shepard-Vakarian here came along.” She brushes Tarquin’s fringe and the babe gives a happy click.
“And even though we’ve got Tarquin here, we’re still planning on adopting, too. I need to know – if Tarquin has siblings who are human, or asari, or salarian, or hell, krogans – how are you going to see them? Will they be your grandchildren as well?”
He imagines the krogan named Grunt sporting Vakarian markings and shudders.
But…there are worse things in the universe, and being without his family is one of them.
“…Yes.” Perhaps she is right, and they can live together. Perhaps he will be able to teach what it means to be a member of the Hierarchy to a human child. He tries to imagine himself teaching a young asari maiden how to make her first copulae di spiriti to place in her grandmother’s tomb - and finds it surprisingly easy to do so. He can even see himself looking forward to teaching a krogan how to fire his first rifle. They may be the first of their kind in the Vakarian line, but he will guide them to the ancestor’s spirits. “Yes, I could.”
“Then I think we’ll be ok.” She grins. “Provided you don’t mind occasional babysitting responsibilities.”
And with that, the ember between them catches flame.
“Of course,” he says. Tarquin mewls in his mother’s arms, and he reaches out and grasps one tiny hand. Shepard murmurs a soft Turian melody and he hums along with her, his sub-vocals adding depth to the song that her human voice cannot.
Tarquin’s eyes grow heavy and slowly droop into dreams, his fingers still touching his grandfather’s finger.
“Jane,” he whispers, and Shepard’s eyes are instantly on his. “The sacrifices you have made to join our family will not be undocumented.” Tiberius buries his eyes in the infant. He doesn’t trust his voice not to break with thin, reedy sounds of shame if he turns to face his daughter-in-law. “When I return to Palaven, your name and deeds will be written into the family lineage, and Tarquin’s, of course, when he is grown. I also intend to see that both Tarquin and you will have full hierarchy citizenship. And any future …additions, as well.”
He will raise her to the ancestors. He prays they find her fitting.
“Thank you,” she says. When he finally glances up at her face, he sees her eyes shiny and wet again and decides that, for once, this is a good thing. “I’d like that.”
“Me too.” He smiles. Nothing can ruin this moment. Not even the very loud, scraping noise that sounds suspiciously like a krogran riding a gurney outside their door. Not even the sound of two familiar flanging voices raised in alarm distract him from this new beginning, three generations united in bond and blood.
“You know, they said they were only going to give us a few moments with the baby.”
“I suspect,” he says dryly, “that our krogran friend may be keeping them…distracted.”
"Yeah." She chuckles. “Hey…do you think you could hold Tarquin for a while?” She smiles, but he can see the exhaustion behind our eyes. “First, I got interrogated on ship details by a bunch of really boring dignitaries. Then, I was involved in a shoot out with a bunch of krogans. As if that wasn’t enough, then I pushed a spikey six pound infant out of my body. Now, there’s all this emotional bonding crap - It’s been a heck of a day.”
“It would be an honor,” he says, and gently takes the babe from her arms. Tarquin wakes for a moment and fidgets, but relaxes when he sees his grandfather’s face. He rubs the child’s brow with affection and is rewarded with a soft birth-purr. He flares his mandibles in a wide grin and looks back at Shepard, only to find her already asleep.
“I suppose it is just us now, Tarquin,” he murmurs. Tarquin gives no response, simply curling more into his grandfather’s touch.
Spirits, could he have ever considered living without knowing this child?
The ancestors have blessed him. Perhaps not in the manner he imagined it, but…this is a blessing.
It is time he shows deference to their spirits. As Patriarch, it is his duty to say the rite.
“Thank you, ancestors, for bringing Tarquin to us,” he says, and gently dips his touch from the child’s brow to his still-soft keel, feels the child’s soft heartbeat.Oh spirits, he loves this babe already. “May he make you proud.”
Tarquin looks at his grandfather and whimpers a cry into his arms. He rubs the babe’s too-soft body and murmurs a thousand devotions to a thousand different ancestors. He prays they watch as this child lives, grows strong and does honor to their memories. He loses count of his prayers until the loud noises in the hall suddenly stop and a door opens.
Garrus enters, but he notices that his son is walking with a more pronounced limp than when he left.
“Sorry about that,” Garrus begins, eyes cast down on the floor and sub-vocals screaming embarrassment, “Grunt wanted to …demonstrate some moves to show Tarquin and when Solana came out, he got excited about two-on-one techniques. Anyway, he hurled Sol halfway across the floor and she came back with some Blackwatch moves and then it all got out of hand; they destroyed half the waiting room and let’s just say not only are they going to spending the next few hours cleaning it up, but I had to cash in some favors and C-Sec will be involved in the next several Huerta fundraisers…”
Garrus stops babbling as he lifts his eyes for the first time and notices Shepard’s drooping form. He turns and stares, instead, at his father.
Wordlessly, Tiberius stands up, carrying Tarquin over to his Garrus’s arms. Garrus takes the babe almost gingerly. He smiles with more gentleness than he’s ever seen in his son when Tarquin stirs in his father’s arms.
“You were praying to the ancestors for him,” Garrus says, and he hears the sub-vocals keening with hope.
“Yes, but I did not get a chance to finish the blessing for him. I would like to do so, with your permission.”
The unspoken words of the last lines of his prayer hang heavy in the air.
Garrus nods, understanding, and he notes his son’s throat flushes just a bit bluer as Tiberius utters the final words of the benediction- I claim this child as blood of my blood, a continuation of Line Vakarian, unbroken since the last battle of Cipritine. He brushes his mandible against Garrus’s own, and then to Tarquin’s impossibly small one.
“Thank you.” Tiberius murmurs, watching his son.
“Hmm?” Garrus raises one brow-plate at him. “What for?”
“It would have been well within your right to refuse me today. You had every right to turn me away from your wife and your child and yet you did not.”
“Mmm.” He nods. “A few years ago, I would have but…” Garrus’s gaze turns from his son to his wife. “She taught me to believe in second chances. She’s…she makes me better, dad.”
“You make yourself better for her, Garrus.” He thinks of the time he has lost to know Garrus and his bondmate. “I am sorry I did not understand that sooner.”
Garrus trills reassurance softly, and for a few moments, the three stand together in peace.
“So, uh, dad…Do you uh…” Garrus’ neck is definitively bluer. “have any advice? I uh…I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”
“Well… As his father, you must always be looking out for him. Looking for ways to help him become a productive adult. Never coddling him or cutting him breaks. Holding him accountable for both deeds and misdeeds. Praying to the spirits for him to choose the right paths.”
“I know that much,” his son says, rubbing his neck. “Seem to remember someone telling me his job wasn’t to make my life easy.”
“And most importantly,” he takes a deep breath before continuing, willing the spirits of their ancestors to give him courage. “You must realize when your son has gained the wisdom to make his own decisions.”
“Dad…” Garrus pulls him with his free hand, and the two embrace for the second time that day.
A new record, that.
He looks forward to breaking it.
This is just the beginning, he knows.
There is a long future ahead of them, one that he is sure will not be easy.
But, he thinks, they will meet it as a family.
That is his duty as a father. As a grandfather.
He embraces his son and grandson in the same moment and marvels at how just this simple act can make things once more feel right.