It started out good but became to angsty... Not my cup of tea... You need to add angst as a tag so people like me whondont like that will not bother to read it...

Holy **** this is scary! I feel like I'm watching a horror flick right now.

Previous chapters were so heartfelt and touching, but now the fear of the unknown is so dominant. Gotta keep reading to find out WTF is going on!

Man, I'd been expecting more "Garrus pulls himself to a semblance of sanity with the help of a maybe-just-hallucinatory ghost, falls in bad-hurting grief-loss-want with it, and saves the galaxy, without ever finding out if it's real". Not "an adventurous romp where Garrus' first recruit for his new team is Shephard's very real ghost". But I suppose I can work with the latter.
Also, that looks like an actually-pretty-competent stealth Artemis Fowl reference. Fun!

Ohhh /man/ this is bleak, and I'm instantly addicted. I hope it's finished, because I must have more.

Oh man, l love this hunting concept! Now this fic have my attention.

I es a quarian and I too find it disturbing

please continue this story, I would live to see more

So this was very likely one of the best Shakarian reads I've had in awhile. I like where you went with all the undercurrents and implications with the spirits, revenants and reapers. The hints at indoctrination being a direct influence of the revenants is brilliant. I always thought BioWare sort of lost/missed something in their own story with the reapers. A simple AI, no matter how sophisticated of ancient, wouldn't necessarily be able to affect organics the way the reapers do without some kind of wetware interface.

Shepard and Garrus….what can I say? I love what you did with the fundamental foundations of their relationship. I imagine him being nearly emotionally crippled when he first hears of her death. After all, she was the driving force that shaped his personality and decision making processes as he just hitting his stride. BioWare says Archangel was always part of him, but I like to think Shepard was the final trigger that set him on that path.

Shepard being fairly non-descript, I think that's one of the best parts here. It leaves plenty of wiggle room for those of us who like to picture our own Shepard avatar here. I've read too many of these where she is defined to the last detail. Your story was refreshing.

So, after rambling on, I'll ask a couple of things: Is there more? Will you be updating this? And if you're not already a mainstream published author with an ass-load of original bestsellers out there, why not?

Don't doubt that your writing is that good.

Btw, if this piece ever needed a theme tune it’d be this! It was playing in my head as I finished reading! Hmm, hmm, oh yes, you know I’m right!

/4kNetd_lISI

It’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts on this work, and I’m still not sure I can do it justice, but here they are.

I came here looking for a Femshep/Garrus story and for the most part it was wonderful.

The writing style is very professional, far above the usual fanfic level, this person can truly write. They’ve done their research. They can really get into the minds of the characters so they feel 100% real to the reader, not just the established characters but the ones created for this fic feel like cannon too. It’s incredible.

The first half is just amazing, exactly what I was looking for and more. The way the writer has fleshed out Garrus’s time on Omega using what scraps of evidence we have from the game is truly inspired. I love every second of it. His team slotted together so wonderfully, their characters are so full of life and the way they interact with Garrus is heartwarming and heartbreaking since we all knew what the outcome would be. Like all prequel works, it was like a juggernaut that you knew was coming and could not stop. You half wished it would veer off at the last second and miss, but of course it doesn’t. Even though you knew how it would end for them, it still hits you square in the face when it does. You feel it even more. While playing the game, sure you feel sorry for Garrus, it’s a sad story. But since you never meet his team on Omega you can’t ever really know, can’t truly understand what he’s been through. This work brings that all home with horrendous clarity. It’s extremely well done.

I loved the way the author has taken those little snippets of information that the game gave us about Garrus’s squad and his exploits in pissing off the merc bosses on Omega and actually let us live through those events with him. That is truly wonderful.

The addition of Shepard haunting Garrus during that time is also inspired! I even didn’t mind the explicit stuff, it felt right, was written very well, it left me feeling breathless and wanting more. I even popped over to Archive of our Own to read the redacted bits and honestly I believe they deserve to be included, but do I understand why it was done like that. Personally I found myself wishing that they had been fully integrated into the main works. Perhaps all that was needed was a full version with them in and a full version with them out for those who do find them jarring. I didn’t though, I was honestly curious about how sex between a human and Turian would work considering how different the two species are. I think it’s that mysterious unknown qualities of a non-human character that makes them so alluring. So my thanks to the author for that.

So perhaps that’s why I found the second half of the story so sterile. For me personally I don’t think the story needed so much Miranda. She felt like such a fifth wheel. If the idea was to create some kind of love triangle between the three, then fine, but most of the time it just felt like she was an unwelcome irritating presence that I just wished would go away. I really didn’t care to read anything from her perspective, I initially came to this piece to read about Shepard and Garrus, Miranda needed to be there, for sure, but she was too intrusive what had started out as their story. She couldn’t even give them a break at the end, for goodness sake! She even spoiled their last moments. I spent most of it thinking “Oh will you just piss off Miranda!”.

The Joker part was not needed either, to be honest I skimmed past most of that too. I’m sure there is plenty of fanfic out there for both of those characters without them crowding in on what had been at the start a very compelling story about the relationship between Garrus & Shepard.

The second half needs to feel like the first. Fine if some of it was from Shepard’s point of view, that would kind of make sense as she’s trying to work out what went on while she haunted Garrus on Omega. But the voices of those two are all the piece really needs.

While the ‘dancing around each other’ needed to happen and the missions from ME2 are needed to ground the piece into the stories we already know - to keep it feeling like cannon - but I wished those parts were shorter. An big event that gets Shepard to realise what she had with Garrus was necessary. Garrus’s torment about that, his relief and playfulness about it when it does happen was the only welcome part of the second half but even that didn’t really go anywhere. The event that filled in the gaps for her needed to be punchier, I wish it had held my attention more but I just found myself skimming simply because I needed it to be over, I need Garrus and Shepard to have a truly decent reunion that I felt they deserved. But they didn’t get that did they? After all that, all they were left with was what felt like a footnote. I was left with a sense of ‘is that it?’ And of course, ‘ffs piss off Miranda’.

So in that regard the end is very Mass Effect. A fantastic piece of science fiction that is ultimately unfulfilling and sadly not satisfying in the end in any way. Which is a shame because the first half of this work is some of the best goddam fanfic that I have ever read!

TL:DR I wish the second half could be re-worked to focus purely on Shepard & Garrus. Other than that, bravo!

So glad to see you're back writing again! I love how descriptive and visceral your writing style is, it really pulls you into the story. And this chapter was great, and such a long time coming! It's so good to see Shep and Garrus properly back together.
I also love your characterisation of Miranda. You've made her likeable but flawed, really well-rounded overall.
I have a couple of points of CC I hope you'll find useful.
First the tiniest one: "anyways". You've used this word a couple of times and it immediately throws me out of the story each time because it's like a teenager suddenly took over writing. It sticks out like a sore thumb in such a well-crafted story.
Second, the biggest one: this chapter (49) was such a huge relief for me because for the first time in at least twenty chapters, there was a brief moment of happiness. I get that your story is not meant to be sunshine and flowers, but I feel like there has been so much sadness and worry and pain and grief that it actually became hard to keep reading - especially because you write it so well. After a while I think I started to become desensitised to it. The other problem with this though, is that you're going to need to finish the story at some point, and if you're constantly writing hard-hitting scenes of pain and sacrifice and having the heroes endure more and more hardships, you're not leaving yourself any room to write a really hard-hitting ending.
And a couple smallish ones in the middle: you tend to backtrack over things the characters have already dealt with sometimes, such as Akuze. And sometimes you can be a bit obtuse, assuming the reader understands what the characters are thinking about or talking about without actually saying it. This happens quite a bit with Shep and Garrus. For example at the end of 49 when Shep asks if Garrus remembers... something? I think she's referring to the oil and sand thing but it could be the white spots, I'm not sure.
I hope this was helpful and I'm looking forward to the next chapter!

Oh my I hope you continue this! I started reading maybe 3 days ago and I couldn't pull myself away from it! I love this. LOVE IT! Here's to hoping you will continue the story!

I can’t express how much I love this story. It is haunting and beautiful and very real. It is one of the first Mass Effect fanfics I read since I started looking around last year, and I just barely read it all the way through again because I saw you had added a chapter. Thank you for sharing such an amazing story. I hope you choose to keep writing.

Oh snap, I thought I'd hallucinated this in my inbox.

WOW. seriously. damn.

very deep, moving, and infinitely scary in a way I've only see Stephen king reach. well done.