Archive of Our Own ^beta

Garrus is frustrated.

He had been on board the Normandy for a while back now, but mostly stayed behind whenever the Commander went out with other soldiers. He’d always watch them leave, his fingers itching for his rifle, a pang of jealousy as he watched Williams and Alenko join her. It makes sense, he thinks for what seems to be the hundredth time. It doesn’t matter how often he reminds himself that the Normandy was a joint-venture with Turians, this is still an Alliance ship, and the Commander is still a human. Of course she’d stick to her own. 

So when she descends to the cargo bay, armor in place and points a finger at him, Garrus actually thinks he’s in trouble. A myriad of scenarios pass through his mind, things that he may have done. She has one of those human faces that are particularly hard to read, and she always seems about to hand someone’s ass to themselves, so he can’t be sure if she's actually angry or just… Shepard.

“You, Vakarian. Come with me,” she shouts, and then looks around. “Wrex, you too. We’re leaving.”

“What?”

For a second there, Garrus thinks he was the one who said that out loud. But Shepard turns around, towards Williams, who’s standing on her usual corner, staring from the Commander to Garrus, and then back at the Commander, and then at Wrex. Garrus grimaces internally. Big mistake. 

“Any questions, Williams?” Shepard asks, and he’s in full Commander mode now. 

“Sorry, Commander. It’s just. Ahm. Are you sure?”

Shepard stares down at her, and Garrus actually admires how Williams doesn’t just crumble under that stare. If Shepard looked at him like that he’d probably be offering his resignation right away.

William shifts in place, uncomfortable. “Can we speak in private, Commander?”

“No, Williams. You had the guts to call me out in front of everyone here, so now I’m sure you can speak your mind in front of everyone too.”

Garrus takes a quick glance at Wrex, who is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, and seems to be enjoying himself immensely. When their eyes meet, he sees something that isn’t complete contempt in the eyes of the krogan. For a millisecond there, both of them are in the same inside joke. 

Both know exactly what Williams is upset about, and it isn’t that she wasn’t being brought to the mission. And Garrus has a suspicion Shepard knew it too, which makes his enjoyment of the whole scene even better.

“Nevermind, Commander.” Williams says, after staring at both of them and going back to doing whatever she was doing before. Shepard stands, in her place, eyes locked on the other human for a second too long before turning around. 

“That’s what I thought,” she says, loudly, looking back at Garrus. “Why aren’t you ready yet? Move out!”

She doesn’t have to say it a third time. 

“You’re a good shot, Vakarian.” Shepard tells him at the Mako, on their way back to the Normandy. 

“Thanks, Commander.”

“Where did you learn to shoot like that?”

“My father taught me.”

“That must be nice,” Shepard said. 

“At the time I hated it,” he tells her. “He was… Demanding, to say the least.” Shepard nods, looking away from him, and Garrus clings to the conversation like a needy child. Now that he has her attention, her admiration, even, he sees how addictive it can be. “You know how parents can be.”

He almost hits his own head against the wall of the Mako as soon as he says it,  remembering what he had read about her past. But much to his surprise, Shepard laughs. A humorless, dry laugh that Garrus hasn't heard before, but a laugh all the same. “I actually don’t know. Never met mine.”

“You’re lucky,” Wrex says, and at least now Garrus doesn’t have to worry that he is the insensitive one. But Shepard just shrugs, stares out of the window. 

“Was your dad in the military, Garrus?”

“C-Sec man. Through and through.”

The human sighs, wishful. “You know, I wish I was Turian sometimes,” Shepard said, and that took Garrus by surprise. “You guys can enlist at sixteen, right?”

“Fifteen, Commander. I’ve been a soldier my whole life.”

“I had to wait until I was 18. Would’ve enlisted earlier if I could’ve.” She adds. Garrus had read about the Commander once he joined the Normandy. He had been quite surprised that the poster child of the Alliance was an orphan who ran around with gangs and survived the streets by doing only Spirits know what. The rumor mill had told him she’d only been charged for ‘petty crimes’ but, looking at her, the hard lines on her face, the scars he could see, he wonders how petty those crimes were or if the Alliance was just smoothing things up. “Damn shame if you ask me.”

Garrus smiles. “It’s not every day you hear of a human wanting to be a turian, Commander.”

Shepard shrugs. “I’m not that deep into my own ass not to admire how other people do things.” She pauses, looks back at him. “I apologize for what Williams did back in the Normandy, by the way. To the two of you. It won't happen again.”

Wrex doesn’t seem to care. Garrus gives her a quick nod. “It’s a human ship, Commander. It comes with the territory.”

“You’re not on a ‘human’ ship, Garrus. You’re on my ship. And on my ship, that kind of shit won’t fly.” Her voice is firm, her stare unwavering. “If anyone gives you trouble you come to me, understood?”

“Of course, Commander.” Garrus replies, dutiful. Wrex, however, shifts on his seat.

“If anyone gives me trouble I will throw them down the airlock,” he says, and Shepard scoffs.

“Or something like that,” she agrees, and Wrex looks back at her. Garrus had no idea krogan could smile. 

“You said you wanted to be turian, Shepard,” Wrex tells her, “but I think you’d make a better krogan.”

Shepard laughs and Garrus joins, quietly thinking Wrex probably is right. Just like Garrus himself, Shepard would make a terrible turian.

After that first mission together, Garrus becomes a fixed part of the Commander’s ground party, much to his surprise and delight. And much to their human crew surprise too, at least. 

The thing is, it seems like Shepard had decided not only that she wanted a turian to be a fixed member of the crew, but that she’d basically only run ground missions with Aliens. Garrus is always by her side, but with them usually they’d travel together with Wrex and Tali at first, and sometimes Liara whenever the Commander needed her Prothean knowledge. But ever since that first time, Alenko and Williams rarely ever leave the Normandy on the Commander’s side again. 

And that starts rumors. He can hear the human crew talking about how their Commander Shepard only walks around with them. Most people are respectful to them on their faces, at least to him. Tali and Wrex seems to get the bulk of the uglier comments, which makes Tali go into endless late night rants at his comms (“Us Dextros need to look for each other,” she tells him, “What if they poison our food?”), while Wrex – well. He’s very Wrex about it. 

The one time things escalate slightly, though, is again, downstairs. Shepars is speaking to both Williams and Alenko, some kind of Alliance briefing he doesn’t have access to. Until, suddenly, voices start to rise. Tali, who came down to visit him and watch him work, looks up. Even behind her helmet, he can see that her sparkly eyes are widened. The both of them fall into silence, obviously trying to hear what’s going on.

“Ma’am,” Kaidan is saying, always the voice of reason. Garrus almost feels sorry for the guy. The one level headed human soldier between two trigger-happy women. “I don’t think that’s what Ashley is saying–”

“Then enlighten me, Alenko. What is she saying?”

“I don’t need you defending me, Kaidan!”

Muffled sounds. Something falls on the floor, and Tali gets closer to him. “Did the Commander slam her?”

“No. Yes?” Garrus replies, tries to spy. He wonders if the two of them just walk towards Wrex, who is in a much better place to watch the whole thing, it’d be too obvious the two of them are prying. 

“Ashley!” Alenko shouts.

“It is weird. Everyone thinks so, but no one has the balls to say it!” Ashley is saying, voice loud enough for them to hear every word. “This is a human ship, and yet–”

“And yet?”

“It doesn’t feel like it!” Ashley replies. “You’re always with– always only–”

Shepard laughs. “What happened to kissing a turian, Williams?”

“You said it wouldn’t be necessary, Commander. But now I’m wondering.”

“VAKARIAN!”

Garrus’ name hits him like a hammer. He looks up at Tali, who offers to hide him, but of course, he doesn’t. He stands up, and Shepard is walking towards him in furious steps. 

“It’s simple, Ash.” Shepard starts, and her voice is pure venom. “I take the best with me. You want to go out? Be the best.” She points at Garrus. “This turian has saved my ass more times than I can count. When he’s with me my shields barely go down. Know why? He doesn’t let anyone go near me without a shot. Now tell me. Why would I bring you instead of him?”

Ashley is bright red now, and when she looks at Garrus he almost feels pity. Almost. 

“That’s not fair, Commander.”

“What is not fair is having to hear you bitch and moan about this. You want in? Sure. Work for it. Become a better shot than him.”

Kaindan – poor, sweet Kaidan – is lost, looking around. He looks at Garrus of all people almost expecting him to do something to fix this. Garrus crosses his arms. 

“So you listen,” Shepard continues, “ and everyone in this damn ship better listen. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re turian, human, krogan, my fucking dead mother in a rocket ship, as long as you’re the best at what you do. So I won’t have my decisions questioned because your pride is hurt over bullshit, do you understand that, Williams?”

Williams gulps. “Aye, Commander.”

“Alenko?”

“I never– I–,” he stops under her stare, “Aye Commander.”

Other soldiers around the room do the same. Shepard looks around, eyes lock at Garrus. “And don’t get too cocky. Maybe Williams will get better than you.”

Garrus can’t help a smile. “I’d like to see her try, Commander.”

It takes five days. 

He’s by the Mako, Tali is down there with him again, sitting in a box with her legs up in the air as she plays with her drone. He hears human steps behind him but the lack of purpose on them let him know this is not Shepard. He looks back, and no one other than Ashley Williams is standing behind him, her Sniper rifle on her hand. 

“Vakarian,” she says, also nods at Tali. 

“Williams,” he replies, amused. She clears her throat, and once again he sees the flush of red all over her cheeks.

“I–,” she stutters, breathes in deeply. Garrus gives her time to work through whatever she’s working through. She motions to her rifle.  “I was hoping you could teach me a few tricks.”

Garrus stares at her, maybe for a second too long, because her cheeks are getting flushed again. Humans, he thinks. They never cease to surprise him. He picks up his own rifle. 

“Only if you teach me some too,” he tells her. And for the first time since he joined this ship, Ashley Williams smiles at him. 

“Deal.”

Garrus doesn’t quite know how he feels about Shepard.

At first, he’s a little scared of her. Their first meeting she'd been abrasive, even a little rude to him before going into the Council. And when they met again, and he had been so sure he had played hero, she just destroyed him verbally in such a way he hadn’t been since his father used to train him. The woman was small in height, but strong, and her voice packed a punch. After a few missions with her he knows he'd do anything to never be on the other hand of her shotgun.

With time, fear becomes admiration. He takes every chance in the Normandy, under her command, to learn whatever he can from her. And she is a demanding teacher. When Shepard makes rounds, she doesn't just ask for a report from him; she asks questions, challenges his beliefs, and plays devil's advocate to every point he makes. He remembers hating whenever captains would approach him on other ships, their visits feeling more like busy work than actually anything productive. But every time Shepard came by, he'd leave with something new to think about. 

With her he learns what it means to protect people. With her, he learns that justice is not something for him to decide and take on his own hands. It doesn’t mean he likes it at first, but she helps him take a step back, rethink what he’s doing.

Then, with admiration, of course, comes respect. At some point Garrus becomes comfortable with her. He stops accepting all of her opinions as law, all her orders as the only path. He feels safe enough to tell her when he thinks something isn’t the best call, feeling proud whenever Shepard comes to him to explore parts of a plan she wasn’t sure about. Regardless of his own opinions, though, he still respects her enough to follow them. He'd follow her to the ends of the Galaxy, and Shepard knows it. He knows she knows it. And she doesn’t take his loyalty lightly. 

But the thing about Shepard is that every time he starts seeing her as a person, an equal, a friend, she just goes ahead and does something so out of anyone’s reach that Garrus can’t help but wonder. As he lives and breathes, he knows it’s something he’ll never forget: him, in the Citadel, watching as she makes her way over Sovereign remains. Spirits. For a second there as she stands, battered and bruised, red hair falling on her shoulders as she takes her helmet off, she just seems larger than life. More than a person, human, turian, whatever. She is something he'd never manage to be, to imitate. And he feels proud. Maybe he should feel jealous, but all Garrus could feel was this immense pride for that red-haired human who'd shout at things until they bent her way.

That night they drink, and dance, and laugh, and for all effects, Shepard almost makes Garrus start believing in immortality. 

Until she goes off and dies. 

At first, he didn't believe the news. He had been back on the Citadel for a while now, back with C-Sec. Shepard was the one who made him believe he could make a difference, that he could help people. Shows him what he knows. 

But what gets to him the most is the injustice of it. How is she dead, while so many murderers, killers, corrupt assholes still live? How is she lost on some planet, her body never found, dead, forgotten, while so much trash lives to see another day? And to see her memory being ruined like that. The hypocritical Council saying kind words when they never gave her a chance in real life. 

And is he any better? And where was he when it happened? He should’ve been with her. Here he was, in his comfy Citadel apartment, working for bureaucrats. She had been out there, fighting for this Galaxy, for their survival. And he?

He should’ve died with her. His Commander. The best one he’s ever had. 

On the next day he hands in his resignation.

Garrus Vakarian is ready to die. 

He doesn’t want to sound dramatic about it, so he doesn’t. The only thing he does when he knows death is coming soon is to call his father. Which maybe, just maybe it’s a tiny bit dramatic. He doesn’t mean to say goodbye, or to make the old turian anxious. He just wants to hear his voice before he goes. 

His father, always the one to surprise him, keeps him company. Not even on his final moments Garrus can get him to agree with him, or just to go soft on him. No. He feels his heart ache, chest impossibly tight as he hears his father’s tense voice in his ears:

“You finish up what you have to do there, and then you come on home to Palaven.” His dad pauses, and Garrus takes a shot. A perfect headshot, but he doesn’t feel like gloating right now. “We have a lot to sort out.”

“Yeah,” Garrus says, and his voice needs to fight its way out of his throat. “We do.”

And here he is: once again, disappointing his father. Because by the ache of his body, and by the way this is going, he doesn’t think there’s a way he’s getting out of this alive. Or if he even wants to. 

“Thanks, dad,” Garrus says after a long minute of silence, only punctuated by his own shots and by the sound of bullets against the walls. He almost wishes the bastards were better at this and just get over with it. “For everything.”

His father doesn’t say anything. He can almost see him, probably at home, standing up, eyes furiously scanning everything as he thinks of the best words to say, the best way to handle this. His father sometimes reminds him of Shepard.

Shepard?

He has to blink at least three times before he even believes what he’s seeing. Because Spirits be damned, there she is – shouting orders to two human strangers behind her back. Her efficiency is the same, shotgun in hand, as she blasts her way towards him like a damn krogan. His knight in shiny armor, as humans would say. He only notices he has gasped loudly when his father’s voice echoes in his head:

“Garrus?” He asks, expectant, worried. Garrus breathes in. 

“I’m fine, dad. Listen–,” he aims at her. He wants to see her, wants to mae sure she’s real. Concussive shot in place, he fires towards the outer edge of her shoulder, just enough to get her moving. He can see the annoyance in her stare as she looks up, orders her people to move out. Garrus laughs. “I have to go now.”

“Son?”

“Dad. Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it home, okay?” He tells him, now focused on doing what he does best. Clearing a path for her. He takes a few shots at her friends, just so it doesn’t get too obvious. “My odds just got a lot better.”

A rocket to the face, now that’s a story to tell. His little stunt of going directly to the Comms room to talk to Shepard right after Dr. Chakwas barely finished with him took its toll, but Garrus doesn’t regret it. While he was in the med bay, high on drugs and Spirits knows what else that witch of a woman did to bring him back to life, he couldn’t help but believe this had all been some weird hallucination. He was in the Normandy, yes, but maybe this was his After Life? Maybe Spirits took mercy on him and took him back to the one place he had been happy to spend his eternity on. 

So he had to see her. Had to make sure it was really her, and she was alive and well. Damn, he had always sort of believed that Shepard could make anything possible but even coming back from the dead was too much for her, wasn’t it?

He guesses not. Because she’s here, dressed in Cerberus’ colors of all things. Making him laugh, and only her could do it, after all he’s been through. 

But even after seeing her, there’s still an air of oddity around him as he makes his way down to Deck 3. Shepard had once showed him something about ‘liminal spaces’, something humans would talk about and he had thought the whole concept funny, but now he wonders if the Normandy–this version of it–is that. He looks around, and everything feels out of place. The Cerberus uniforms, the walls, the lights even. The lack of Alliance blue. So he hides in the Main Battery, keeps himself busy, even when his face still hurts like shit, and he must be just a little high still because his numbers are blurring together, and he has to blink many times before they stop screaming at him. 

He sits down, hands on his face. He should call his dad to tell him he’s alive. But then the doors open and here she is.

“Garrus,” she looks at him, worried. “Are you okay?’

“What, do I look hurt?” He jokes, and she smiles. It makes him happy that she has chased him. He wonders, quietly, if maybe she needs to make sure he’s here too. “I’m fine, Shepard. Just–,” he generally motions towards his face, then his whole body. Shepard laughs. 

“Seemed like you had it tough out there.”

He agrees. “Had to wait for you to go save doctors and all.”

‘If I knew it was you–”

“It’s a joke, Shepard,” he says, and she stands in front of him. He’s not used to having to look up to look at her, and he sees a flash of regret in her eyes. He doesn’t like it. “I know.” He reassures her, and stretches his neck, then shakes his head, trying to stay awake.

“When was the last time you slept, Garrus?”

He offers her a humorless laugh. “Hell if I know.”

“Then go get some rest. I need you fit for duty. Didn’t come back all the way from the dead to save your ass just so you’d collapse on my ship.”

He knows it’s a joke, their usual banter, but something about her words tugs at his heartstrings. Garrus clears his throat, uncomfortable with his own reaction. “You came back from the dead only to save me? I’m flattered, Shepard.” He jokes, looks up again, and she’s still there, looking down at him. Maybe the meds are making him see things because he notices a red flush on her cheeks, making the scars on her face more noticeable. “Those are new,” he reaches out for her, almost touches them. Shepard nods.

“Cerberus’ gift for me,” she places a hand on top of them. “Dr. Chakwas says she can get rid of them.”

He nods, and silence comes in between them. Shepard heaves a deep sigh. “Go get some rest, Garrus. That’s an order.”

When she makes to leave, Garrus’s hand moves on its own. It may be the drugs, or the tightness in his chest, or just the complete absurdity of it all, but he grabs her hand. Shepard looks back and for a second there Garrus is sure she’ll tell him off for his insubordination, but she just stays still, staring at her own hand on his. So small, he thinks. So warm. Alive.

“You’re really here, aren’t you?” He asks, voice low, almost a whisper. He turns her hand around, looks at each finger. Then his thumb slides down to her pulse, and feels it. He can feel her heart beating. “You really came back. How–”

Much to his surprise, instead of yanking her hand away from his, Shepard curls her fingers on his, allows him to keep his thumb on her pulse. Her hold on him is reassuring. I’m real , she’s saying. I’m alive .

“I’m just as surprised as you,” she confesses, and Garrus nods. He doesn’t want to let go of her. He doesn’t remember ever touching her like this, not on purpose, not with purpose, at least. He blames it on everything but his own need to touch her. 

“Thank you, Shepard. For coming for me.” Garrus tells her, finally letting go. He notices that Shepard keeps her hand out stretched for a while, almost hesitant, before she pulls it back to her side. “I’ll help you get this done. Whatever it is.”

She smiles. “Wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”

She turns around, and leaves, and Garrus has a glimpse of her flexing the hand he had held before the doors close.

Shepard is different. In the same way he is different, he supposes. But some things stay the same, like having to, once again, serve on a human ship. Garrus had thought he had seen everything at this point, he was almost an expert in humans among his own, but still they always found a way to surprise him.

Like all the expressions they could make with their soft faces, and yet, Miranda seems as good as any turian to hide how she feels, her face a mask whenever she’s talking to Garrus to the point he almost wonders if she’s AI.

Or like the first time Shepard tells him she loves him. It’s during a mission, and Garrus had no idea humans would just blurt these words as if they were wind.

They are under heavy fire, and she is surrounded by Geth. She is trying to stay out of Haelstrom's sun when her shotgun runs out of ammo, and he can see the quick flash of desperation on her eyes before focus takes over again.

Garrus doesn’t have much time, but he doesn’t need it either way. He aims,, takes a deep breath in and out, getting two of the Geths out of her way with one shot while he overloads the third, taking out its shields. Shepard doesn’t even blink - taking the opportunity to stun the fourth one with her omni tool.

And then she looks around, finds him, smiles that damn smile of hers and shouts on his comms, "you brilliant son of a bitch, I love you, you know that?"

And then she turns around, blowing more Geth to pieces, while Garrus misses three consecutive shots, his heart beating so high in his ears he can barely hear Kasumi chuckling.

"Don’t worry, Garrus. I’d miss my shot if she said that to me too," she is saying, and he shakes his head. Focus, Garrus . She didn't mean it like that. Of course she didn't. Just fucking focus.

"I'm so happy that you two are here," Shepard is saying when they are back in the Normandy, Tali now back with them. It is late at night and most humans are sleeping, but not their Commander, no. She stays up until late, making sure she has all requisitions lined up for Tali to join them.

"I don't want her eating all my chocolate," Garrus says, and Tali makes a face at him. He can’t see it, but he can feel it.

"Is Cerberus food better?" She asks. "Not to complain, but the Alliance--"

Garrus scoffs. "You think the ship of certified racists will be better? Tali, c'mon."

"Is it that bad?" Shepard asks. "I can complain to Miranda. Sometimes I think the Illusive Man told her to do whatever I say, because if I ask for a fucking chocolate fountain suddenly there's one in my room."

Garrus hums. "I wouldn't mind some meat. All I get is this damn porridge."

"Some fruits?" Tali offers.

"And alcohol." Garrus adds too. “They only get me one kind of brandy, which is fine, but–”

"Do you want some biscuits too?" Shepard mocks, eyebrows raised as she pretends to take note, like a waiter. "Maybe some cheeses with herbs for m’lord and lady?"

"If you so insist, Commander, of course."

And they laugh, and it echoes through the empty lounge. Shepard lets out a deep, heavy sigh, but she seems happier than she's been since she came back from the dead.

"I'm honest. I don't know what I'd do without you two here--"

"Is she drunk?" Tali asks.

"I think Cerberus implanted some sentimental shit on her,” Garrus whispers, “You should’ve seen her when she saw me the first time. Cried and all.”

Tali gasps. “You didn’t cry for me!”

"Shut up. Shut up!" She laughs, and Garus loves to hear it. "I just. Fuck, you two, I felt so alone in here. It's Cerberus, for fuck's sake. Most of the time I'm not even sure I should be here, but then where the hell do I even go? The Alliance treats me like a joke, the Council still thinks I'm hallucinating the Reapers. You two are the only ones I can trust in this damn ship. Fuck. In the whole Galaxy!"

The pride he feels when she says that. Spirits, it’s embarrassing. But he can see Tali feels the same.

"We're with you, Shepard." He says. Tali nods, solemn.

"To the end."

"Until we fucking kill every single Reaper."

“Every single one?” Tali asks, “That will take a long time.”

They laugh, and clink their glasses, and drink. 

“I just want to say,” Garrus starts, looking at Tali from across the room, “I should still get the cheese because I joined first.”

Shepard makes a pensive face. “You got a point there, Garrus,” she looks at Tali, “Tali rejected me when I first asked her to join me”

“Shepard!” Tali exclaims, honestly scandalized, “I had to–’”

“It broke my damn heart, you know,” Shepard continues, “And I had just come back from the dead, so my heart was not all that whole to begin with.”

Tali is a drunken mess now, muttering “oh no”, and “sorrys,” and “but I had to” and “the fleet!”, but Shepard is nothing if not a good actress. She keeps shaking her head, places a hand on Garrus’ own.

“Good thing you were here to mend my broken heart, Garrus.”

“Well, what about my broken heart?” He asks, taking his hand away from hers. “Now I found out you went to her first!”

Tali giggles, suddenly over her excuses. 

“I didn’t even know you were Archangel!” Shepard exclaims, and Tali turns quickly towards her. The quarian knows an advantage when she sees it. 

“Oh. So if you knew you’d recruit him first?” She asks. “Did you propose to me first simply because I was there?”

“Well, well, well,” Garrus hums, low, “How the tables have turned.”

“No. No. Listen you all,” Shepard starts, her voice suddenly Commander-like.

“Don’t go all Commander Shepard on me!” Tali points at her. “Now my heart is broken. And this suit does a lot, Shepard, but it does not have a ‘heal-broken-hearts’ protocol.”

Shepard is laughing, but also desperately trying to get out of the situation she suddenly sees herself in. 

“I’d recruit you both at the same time if I could, okay?” Shepard says. “I’d clone myself–Cerberus probably could do that–and go get you both!”

“Uh-huh,” Garrus crosses his arms, “Now, be real, Shepard. If Cerberus gave you the option, who from the old crew would you recruit first?”

Silence follows his question, and Shepard doesn’t say anything. She just stares from one to the other, shrugs in a way that says “isn’t it obvious?”, and Garrus has to agree. Tali nods.

“That’s fair.” She says.

No one beats a krogan.

In retrospect, maybe he should’ve noticed the signs. There are some things he had found interesting as they happened, but part of Garrus always brought him back to reality. He was reading too much into small things. Humans like to touch more than it was strictly needed, she didn’t mean anything by it. Right?

So when she touches his arms in the shuttle and her hand lingers there for a whole minute too long, he doesn’t think anything of it. She is exhausted, tired. She didn’t even notice she was touching him. She is just… resting her hand. That is all. 

Or when she comes by the Main Battery and sits on the boxes on the corner, not as part of her rounds, not with anything to ask, order – she just sits there and fills reports by his side. He thinks she probably just wants company. Any company, nothing special about him, right? Maybe she doesn’t want to be around Cerberus people. She probably did the same in Engineering with Tali, or with Thane in Life Support. Life Support even has a desk and all! It has nothing to do with him specifically. 

But things are weird. Sometimes, during missions, he catches her staring while he is in position, eyes in his target, to the point that sometimes she’d miss her cue to charge. But Garrus always has an excuse, maybe she is stressed out. Spirits knows she’s been barely getting any sleep. Or she wants to be sure he is focused. Garrus knows she’s still worried about how everything went down with Sidonis. He knows she feels slightly guilty that she meddled so much, to the point of blocking his shot, but Garrus tries time and time again to reassure her he doesn’t regret letting him go. That he’s thankful she helped him see that killing Sidonis wouldn’t change anything.

And then there’s this day, and perhaps he is ‘as sharp as a spoon’ like Tali likes to say, because he doesn’t think anything of it when he’s explaining something to her, and Shepard just closes her eyes while he’s speaking, and there’s something almost… vacant about them as she opens them again. She blushes when she notices he’s staring. “Shepard,” he asks, worried, and she clears her throat. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I–,” she stops, breathes in very deeply, “Got a bit distracted there, pal, sorry. You were saying?”

So maybe, maybe, he shouldn’t be that confused when she just straight up makes a move on him. Of all people in that damn ship, Commander Shepard decides that her turian-best-friend is the one she’ll ask to ‘blow off some steam’ with. Garrus is flattered, really, he is, but also flabbergasted. Maybe she really has lost it? Has a turian and a human ever fucked, for Spirit’s sake? (Yes, he finds the vid–a movie about a human female who falls in love with a turian general during the first contact war, and he’s horrified). But he’s not–he’s not sure, but he’s also not put off. He’s not not willing to try. It’s Shepard. His friend. His battle mate. His other half in the field. His Commander. His leader. Why would he be put off?

He tries to talk sense into her, though, but the woman is intent. He worries when she asks him if she makes him uncomfortable because, Spirits, he never wants to give the wrong impression to her. He’s never uncomfortable around her but he’ll be damned if she doesn’t make him nervous. Nervous. Like a teenage boy with his first girlfriend. 

And things get tense with them. Shepard is nothing if not a goddamn flirt, and a very… shameless one at that, which takes him by surprise. Truth be told, that is a side of the Commander he had never seen. He remembers back in SR-1 he had thought there was something between her and Kaidan, but the latter denied it once when they were having some crew-bonding moment without the boss. 

“I don’t think she does that kind of thing,” Kaidan had said, and Garrus still remembers how red his face got when Ashley had added:

“And oh, he tried .”

Well Garrus hadn’t tried. Had he? He doesn’t think so. Thinking back to all these times with her he doesn’t remember ever giving her any impressions, or even thinking of her in that way. He’s not stupid. He knows Shepard is fairly attractive in human standards. And her military capabilities made her also very attractive in turian’s standards. But Shepard has always been… Shepard. Commander. Almost sexless, in that sense. Until now, at least. 

Until she had decided every moment is a chance to make Garrus’ life miserable. 

She has no shame. No shame at all. Whenever they’re alone, she touches him more than needed, even if there are people around, which drives him off the walls. In missions sometimes, a hand that lingers on the back of his neck– why, why would she need to even touch him there? -, a smile when he shivers. One night, when he’s tucked in and ready to sleep, his omni-tool rings with a message from her.

I was just doing some research of my own, found some interesting vids. Unfortunately now you won’t be the first turian I see naked, but I must warn you: my expectations are high.

He almost gasps.

Is she sexting him?

Sexting ? Commander Shepard? 

He fumbles, sits down. What should he do? He can imagine her laughing if she sees the state he’s in right now, and it’s probably why she’s been doing this. The damn sadist. She enjoys seeing him suffer. 

He starts replying. Stops. “Sexting,” he says under his breath, in complete disbelief. That’s a first for him.

Good for you I perform better under pressure.

He hits send, heart in his throat. What the hell, what the hell, he’s thinking. It doesn’t take long for his omni-tool warn him of a new message.

Oh, I know that. Counting on it.

He lets out a laugh, buries his face on his hands. Well. If Shepard is going to fight dirty, then he can do it too.

On the next day, as he’s making the way to the elevator after breakfast, she passes by him to her way to Miranda. She flashes a cocky smile his way, and Garrus nods at her. 

“Commander.”

“Vakarian.”

“Oh,” he stops her, a hand on her shoulder. He leans in just a little, a thumb on the corner of her mouth. “You got something. Here.”

He looks down at her, and her eyes are bright with surprise and… something else. Garrus decides he likes it, and that is a victory for him. 

“There you go.” He lets go of her, pretending he’s cleaning whatever was on her mouth on the side of his armor.

“Ahm,” she starts, cheeks as red as her hair, “Thank you?”

“I aim to serve,” he adds, walks away. Tali, who had just been watching everything from the door of the elevator stares at him.

“What the fuck was that?’ She asks, and Garrus shrugs. 

“Wouldn’t have our Commander looking like a fool with Miranda, would we?”

She stares at him. “You’re weird.”

All he knows is that these little games take him from cautiously willing/terrified/worried/doubtful this will even work to a very willing partner in the whole thing. He’s still worried. All the vids he can get his hands into leave him with more questions than answers. The thing with humans, he’s coming to learn, is that they’re all very different. Every time he thinks he’d learned something, he reads somewhere else that some women are like that, some aren’t. Some like if you touch this part, some don’t really care much for it. 

So, in the end, he’ll just have to wait to see what his human is like. His human, he catches himself thinking. He’s pathetic.

Garrus breathes in, tries to focus on other things. They’re friends, he reminds himself. Best friends. Whatever happens, things will just fall into place and work out. He’s sure of it. 

Things don’t fall into place at first, and Garrus is about to call it all off right in the middle of it before it gets any worse and he just throws himself at the first Collector that tries to shoot him tomorrow.

Sex should be an uncomplicated thing, isn't it? At least it had been for him before. It was all about blowing off steam, letting go of stress but this ? This is stressing him out more than anything. 

Maybe he misunderstood. Maybe he saw his own nervousness as sexual tension, when actually it was more about his admiration. Good old Shepard-Vakarian banter. Maybe what he thought was attraction, was just her usual magnetism. Maybe– Spirits, maybe he’s royally fucking up the one good thing he has. Again. 

“Ouch,” she says after they’re trying, again, to kiss. Garrus hadn’t know how that whole thing would go, he saw humans do it among themselves, and with Asari too, but he didn’t have all that–flesh. He lets go of her, fast, and holy Spirits, there’s blood coming out of her lips. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, not quite knowing where to go with his hands, and she shakes her head.

“You’re not the first man to draw blood out of me, Vakarian.” She says, smiling, devil-like.

Garrus’ voice sounds defeated even to his own ears. “This shouldn’t be like a fight, Shepard.”

“I don’t mean in a fight.”

And she seems focused. Her eyes are the same as when she’s given a mission. She had put something in her head, and Garrus knows she is going to find a way to win this fight. He just never figured this - they - would feel like a fight. Crap. He should’ve said no. He should’ve taken a cold shower, found some female Turian in the Citadel and told Shepard to go fuck someone who wasn’t able to perfurate her neck if they didn’t control themselves enough.

Maybe she feels what he’s thinking, because again, her hand on his face, cupping them in that very Shepard way. Her green eyes sparkle in the darkness–the darkness they chose because doing this whole thing in the light would’ve been even more awkward. 

“Do you want to stop?” She asks. And now she’s the one giving him a way out. He knows he should take it. Stop this right here. “It’s okay if you do. No bad feelings.”

Her fingers caress his scars and Garrus closes his eyes. Maybe his mistake was that he thought things would just work between them, the same way they worked everywhere else. That it’d be like it was on the battlefield. That Shepard would just look at him and he’d know where to shoot. That he’d just wave his rifle and she’d know where to charge. That one look from her would tell him if he should advance or retreat. 

He hadn’t expected to feel this lost when it came to her, this confused. Shepard was supposed to be his chartered land, not unknown territory. And yet. Just looking at her in front of him, her nakedness, the way she’s looking at him, all of this is new to him. New to her. New to them. He opens his eyes again.

What Garrus had forgotten was that they weren’t always connected as they were now, as a team. That they practiced. That they talked to each other until they became the well-oiled killing machine they were now. But that one day, back in SR-1, Shepard didn’t even know he preferred a Sniper rifle, and he had no idea she charges head-first into battle like she has no love for her own well-being.

“Show me.” He tells her, and something in his tone is right because her mouth parted slightly, and she gasps for air. He offers her his hand and Shepard stares at it, kissing his palm, before lowering it down on herself with dangerous, cruel slowness. She places his hand on top of hers, and presses down.

“Like this.” Her voice comes out on a moan. And well. Garrus is a lot of things, and a good learner is one of them. 

The calm before the storm that he was looking after actually comes later, after the sex. Garrus finds that just being with Shepard in this way eases tension more than anything else they can do together.

She stays by his side, lying down, sweaty. It surprises him how much she could sweat, and his chest swells with pride knowing that the cause of the satisfied look on her face was his doing. She bit her lips, and then she smiles at him. And that smile is one that Garrus will learn one day that she keeps for him, and for him alone. He doesn’t know that yet, but it makes his insides twist, and turn, and ache all the same.

“I thought you were going to bail on me for a minute there, Garrus.”

He laughs. “Not gonna lie. I almost did.”

“You looked terrified.” She adds, turning on her stomach to face him. “Last time I saw you like that was back at Dr. Michel’s office, when I told you off.”

“Fun fact,” he says, “I was turned on back then too.”

“Uh-huh,” she shakes her head, and traces a finger down his torso, staring at his chest with interest. Spirits. He hopes she wasn’t as tireless in bed as in battle, otherwise he’s about to have some trouble. 

“So,” she starts, stretching her arms above her head, content. “Another thing to cross from my bucket list. Fucking a turian.”

He laughs as she snuggles to him, and that shouldn’t be possible, but it is. Shepard has a knack for making anything possible. “Well. Glad to be of service,” he says, an arm behind her neck. She places her pillow between his arm and her neck, gets comfortable. “I’m still in shock, though.”

“What? Was I too mind blowing?”

“Yes, yes, sure, that, for sure,” he jokes, and adds, “but also that you’d want this at all.”

Shepard makes a sound. “You’re selling yourself too short, Garrus.”

“It’s not that,” he tells her, “I know I am an attractive turian. But usually that only attracts other turians, you know? We’re not the Asari.” Shepard rolls her eyes at him. “It’s just. I meant it when I said you could find something closer to home. Jacob seemed–willing.”

“Oh, he was,” she tells him, laughing, and Garrus can’t help but wonder what went down during her conversations with the LT in the armory. He’d rather not ask. “But nah. He’s a good soldier, but–”

“Not alien enough?” Garrus teases. 

“He’s Cerberus,” she says, and that’s settle it.

“What about Thane? He’s a bit more… Humanoid.”

Shepard looks up at him. “Funny you say that. Did you know that if a human has sex with a drell they can have hallucinations?” She opens her mouth wide in amusement. “It’d be like being high! You should be proud I passed that on for you.”

“Oh, so you thought about it?” 

She laughs, shrugs. “You were working me to the bone, I had no idea you were even interested. Jesus Christ, Vakarian. Never has a man made me work this hard to get him in bed.”

Garrus laughs, bringing her closer, and she hides her face on my neck, laughing. And Spirits, he’s still getting used to the whole inter-species thing, but there is something about the softness of her body against the hardness of his that just makes sense to him. 

“Well, Shepard.” He caresses her forearm. “I happen to enjoy being courted.”

“Courted?” She looks up again, using her elbows to prop herself up. “I had to explicitly say: “Hey Garrus, let’s fuck” for you to get it. And even then–”

“No, no, stop–”

“I, uh,” she starts, mimicking his voice, “didn’t think you’d feel like sparring, Commander.”

“Shut up,” he pokes her gently, making her laugh. Oh. Interesting. “How could I– Damn it, Shepard. You’re my best friend. You’re a human. I never thought you’d be into Turians of all things.”

“Wanna know when I knew it?”

That interested him. “Yes.”

“Nihlus. One look at that Turian and I was like, oh. Oooh.”

“Nihlus? Wait a damn minute.” He uses his new found power of making her laugh by poking the side of her stomach, and Shepard kicks him, rolls away from him. That he doesn’t like. 

She stands up then, picks up her underwear and dresses herself up. That Garrus likes even less, if it’s possible. 

“Honestly, though, you never noticed? You really don’t know when I got interested?” She asks. “I thought I was pretty obvious.”

Garrus shrugs and Shepard shakes her head, fake disappointment on her face. “Tell me.”

“Nah,” she replies, kneeling on the bed and kissing his scars. “It’s no fun if you don’t figure it out.”

They are in the middle of the Colector’s base, when suddenly Garrus’ eyes widen. He taps his comms. 

“Shepard,” he shouts, because there’s at least a dozen Collectors shooting at him right now, “was it when I got the scars?”

She’s breathing hard on his ears, running, probably. But she laughs, hard. Making her laugh in the middle of a suicide mission feels better than any headshot. “Keep trying, Vakarian.”

“Can you two keep your kinky shit out of the comms, please?” Jack shouts.

When they are back, impossibly alive, drunk on their surviving the most impossible mission any of them ever been a part of, the crew throw themselves at the bar to get actually drunk in some real alcohol. It doesn’t take long for the crew to be wasted, and Garrus, for the first time, sees how humans suddenly are all able to bend the rules when it comes to Military decorum. Oh, well. Cerberus never was an actual Military ship, he guesses.

“And here’s to Shepard,” Jack shouts at some point, glass raised high, “For giving the Illusive Man the biggest fuck you in the century.”

Here things get a little tense. Shepard’s decision had been the right one, he has no doubts about it, but the crew is still a Cerberus crew. He can spot Miranda shifting on her spot, uncomfortable. She had agreed with Shepard, she heard her say so in the shuttle, but he can imagine it’s difficult to her to be comfortable with it. Her whole future with the organization could’ve been jeopardized. 

When he’s about to go to her, he is stopped by a very drunk Tali who decides to jump from the couch to his back, and he has to hold on to her legs so they both wouldn’t go directly to the floor. Shepard laughs, and when Garrus looks back, Miranda is gone. 

The night goes on like that and while he has more than enough to drink, enjoying the sheer glory of being alive. In all truth, he’s still living the high of the whole thing. Not only did they win, but Shepard entrusted the leadership of the team to him. Twice. After everything that happened to his own Squad in Omega, she trusted him to lead. Not Miranda, who would’ve been the perfect choice, really.. Him. 

And he did not fucking disappoint.

There are some screams, and he looks up to find that the joy of the party is that Shepard is finally dancing. He will have to remind her of that tomorrow, laughter coming easy as he watches her flailing the way she does whenever dancing. Miranda seems to be back, because she’s suddenly behind Shepard, dancing with her, though Garrus has to admit the latter is much better at it. Tali seems to take the proximity as an invitation, because she approaches the two, the three suddenly laughing when Grunt starts to imitate the way Shepard dances. 

A krogan. Dancing. Maybe Garrus is getting too drunk. 

His eyes go back to Shepard, and she’s now holding her own hair up, flapping her hands behind her neck as she keeps dancing. There’s something about it that catches Garrus’ attention. Her closed eyes, the sweat on her brow, the way the lines of her face, her whole body seems finally free of the usual tension. His body reacts to seeing her like this.

Her eyes open, find his, and the way she looks at him makes his inside ache with need. 

He leans back on the couch, allows himself to watch her, takes advantage once again of the usual turian-face-neutrality to shamelessly undress her with his eyes right here, in front of everyone. She, though, she sees behind his mask. A teasing smile on her face, she lets her hair fall to her shoulders.

Garrus is pleasantly surprised. In all honesty, he had barely thought about how their little escapade would develop, mostly because he didn’t even think he’d be alive today. But now that they’re here and, well, very much alive, he notices he had expected this would’ve been a one time thing. But by the look in the eyes of his Commander, well. Maybe.

Most definitely.

“So.” Jack starts one day, which is rare. Ever since the Collector’s mission she’s been more… sociable, though still on her very Jack way. “Are you two fucking or what?”

He almost spits his whole stake. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes, because you two are so mysterious and chill about it.”

Miranda, who had seemed to be about to leave the table after finishing her dinner, sends Jack a pointed look. “I don’t think we should be discussing the Commander’s private matters.”

Jack points at her. “No one asked you anything.”

“Do you really need to ask, Jack?” Tali asks, heaving a deep, tired sigh. As if she had been the witness to countless, unmeasurable horrors. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Garrus wants to just stand up and leave, but he’s stuck in place. He tries to stand up, but feels hands on his shoulder, pressing him down. Kasumi  just appears behind him, out of nowhere.

“C’mon, let’s chat. We’re a team, aren’t we?” She says, smiling under her hood. “This is a bonding moment.”

Garrus stays sit, stares at everyone, and then crosses his arms. “I have no comments.”

“Pfff,” Tali makes a sound, “We don’t need him to confirm anything. Everyone with two eyes, and two ears, Garrus. Actually, scratch that,” she adds, “even Legion probably knows and he only has one eye.”

Legion looks at them. “We don’t enquire into Shepard Commander private affairs.”

“Thank you, Legion.”

“But what do you think?” Tali asks, and Legion makes a sound. There’s a long pause. 

“We’ll reach consensus.”

“No!” Garrus shouts, and Tali giggles, and Miranda suddenly is not going anywhere, which is infuriating. Thane is the only one with any decorum, staying quiet throughout the whole thing. “Thane, help me out here, mate.”

The drell stares at him with his dark eyes, both hands interlaced in front of him. “I think love, in all its manifestations, it’s a beautiful thing–”

“Spirits.”

“Of course they’re not,” Grunt says, “Shepard is strong, fearless. Why would she mate with a puny turian?”

“Thanks, Grunt,” Garrus tells him, nodding. “I appreciate the thought.”

“What if he’s goddamn fuckin’ her?” Zaeed says, and Garrus could very well just die at this point. “Are you all just goddamn jealous she didn’t ask any of you?”

“That’s not–” Garrues tries, gives up, eyes going wide when he sees Shepard approaching them in slow steps. 

“Who’s fucking who?” She asks, arms crossed and the room goes straight into silence. Except for Jack, of course, who laughs while biting on something they call “french-fries”. 

“You and Garrus,” she says, and Garrus could kill her. If his rifle was here he’d do it without any regrets. 

Garrus starts to stand up. “Commander, I–”

“And what about it?” Shepard asks, still with her arms crossed. It’s a good thing Turians don’t blush, because Garrus is pretty sure he’d be blushing right now if he could. He simply gapes at her, while Shepard and Jack just have a staring match. Miranda stiffens a laugh and Thane just nods, as if this is a very good conclusion to this whole thing.

“Anyone else has anything to share?” Shepard asks, and the silence is deafening. She stares at each and every one of them before shaking her head and leaving. Once the elevator closes, the whole room explodes, and Garrus just stays there, in silence, the stupidest proud grin on his face.

“So,” Tali says later that night, approaching him when all the humans had already gone to sleep. “Are you two dating?

Garrus sighs. He had hoped this talk would be over by now. “No, Tali, we’re not dating. It’s not that serious, we’re just friends–”

Tali chuckles.. “Well, I’m your friend too.”

That makes him almost choke. Again. “I’m flattered, but I’m not sure I have that much energy for two.”

“Cocky bosh’tet, that’s not what I’m saying,” she slaps his shoulder, and then pauses, looks at the drink on his hand. He knows that look, so he starts searching for a straw behind the bar.

“What are you saying then?” He places a cup in front of her, fills it up and then places the straw inside of it. She gives him a thumbs up.

“I’m just saying–much appreciated!--you don’t do that with ‘just friends’.”

Garrus gives her a look, pouring more drink to himself.  “Doing that between friends and staying friends is quite normal for humans and turians.”

“Oh, okay,” she starts, twirling the drink on her hand,  “so you’re just friends, right? Just friends having fun? No strings attached.”

“Yeah. That’s all there is to it.”

Tali stops drinking for a second, then shakes her head, muttering something under her breath he can’t understand. 

“What?”

“Just that Jack was right.”

He frowns. “What? What did Jack say this time?”

“That you’re a fucking idiot.”

But they are just friends. How did Shepard call it, friends with benefits? Right?

Garrus is not a teenager anymore. He can have a casual relationship. Damn it, most, if not all of his relationships had been casual. He’s not in love with Shepard. He admires her, and respects her, and he likes her–she’s his best friend. His Commander. The woman he’d follow everywhere in this cursed Galaxy, the woman he followed through the Omega-4 Relay!

But he wasn’t in love. That’s silly. Garrus had really little thoughts of love but whenever he did think about being with someone, really being with someone, the image in his mind had always been a normal Turian family Settling down somewhere nice in Palaven. Teaching his son or daughter to shoot in the fields. Not–

Shepard interrupts his thought with a kick, and he looks up, finds her staring at him with annoyance. She raises both eyebrows at him.

“Where are you, soldier?” She asks, and Grunt scoffs by his side. “I need you to be focused.”

He kind of likes it when she turns Commander mode on him, he’s not gonna lie.

“Aye, Commander.”

And she punches the shuttle door with the side of her hand, jumping out as soon as the door opens. Garrus jumps right after her, finds a nice spot to take cover, rifle in hand. Shepard doesn’t wait any time, shotgun ready as well, charging as if she had the regenerative powers of the krogan by her side. Garrus shoots two, three mercs who could’ve done some damage. 

“Careful there, Shepard.” Garrus says in their comms. “You already died once, don’t push your luck.”

Right then she turns around, red hair on her face thanks to the wind. Garrus can see her so close through the scope of his rifle, and she flashes that cocky smile of hers. 

“I got you watching my back, Garrus. I’m not worried.”

Her eyes flash at him, even greener against the sunlight. He had never noticed the specific shade of green of hers, green like… Palaven. Like home. 

He misses his next shot.

Fuck. He thinks. You are a fucking idiot.

So now he knows: he’s about to screw this up. Because Shepard never said she wanted to date him, these words never came out of her mouth even for a second. Her offer was pretty straightforward and simple, but he had to go and complicate things with feelings. 

He tries to hide them as best as he can. He has the whole inter-species thing in his favor, he knows from countless searches that humans have a hard time reading Turian emotions and Shepard is good at pretty much everything but reading the room is not always one of them. So he’s safe, for now. 

She doesn’t seem to have noticed anything different. She still invites him to her cabin from time to time, still shows up at the most random places, always with the cheesiest “we should test how sturdy this actually is” line that Garrus doesn’t even wait for her to finish anymore, before having her against whatever object she wants. The sex continues, and their friendship doesn’t change and that's all he cares about. He can swallow up any tightness on his chest, any lingering feelings or wantings for something more. He's a pretty ambitious man but he won't ruin this. Not them. Never.

So he keeps all of this to himself, ignores any jokes or playful banter from Tali, or Joker. When around Shepard he reminds himself all of the time what they actually are. It's not his place to be jealous of her with anyone - be it Thane, be it some random human he sees her talking to during shore leave. It's none of his fucking business who she's messaging, or if she was with anyone after a night out with some old Alliance soldiers, in one of their few stops at the Citadel.

He's not her damn boyfriend, and he’s not going to stay here sulking about it. And she never asks him anything too. Anything about what he does when he's out by himself. What he's up to when he's out with old friends from C-Sec, or folks from Palaven who reached out, asking when he'd be on Shore Leave again.

And Garrus wouldn't think much of it, would be content, even, to just keep going this way. But Shepard. She has to go and put him off course, always.

One night, in one of their shore leaves after the Collector's base, Garrus goes to meet some old folks from C-Sec in Purgatory. These situations can always be interesting. Garrus went from "normal-run-of-the-mill-Turian-C-Sec-officer" to the guy who helped Commander Shepard save the Citadel, so his whole dynamic with the group already changed significantly. People treat him differently, joke with him differently. He's not going to lie, it feels good.

There's a Turian, female, that night. Her name is Caliia. And she's pretty, tall, of a dark brown color that Garrus always found attractive with white markings on her face. Garrus can feel her interest almost oozing out of her. She's not making it not obvious, anyway. And he’s not gonna lie, at any other moment of his life, he’d be very interested too.

But now? With a whole-ass human taking all the space in his heart? He can’t even think about it. He's not even thinking about doing anything with her, but he's flattered, of course he is. Until he feels the whole environment around him shift. Alliance soldiers in the bar are saluting someone behind him, and there are whispers. Caliia's eyes widen, and Garrus knows before she says anything.

"Oh. Look. Commander Shepard!"

He looks back. Shepard, telling some soldiers to be at ease, takes a quick glance at Garrus before heading to the bar. His head is spinning. Did she see him talking to Caliia? Why didn't she say hi? Is she angry?

No, why would she be angry? They're not exclusive. They're not--

"Are you listening to me?" The turian asks, and Garrus excuses himself, awkward as he makes his way towards Shepard. She doesn't look at him. Why is she not looking at him?

"Hey," he says, too loud. He's screaming. "Hey." Again. Chill, this time. Yeah, he's chill. He's a chill man, talking to his chill friend who he also has sex with, and it's totally chill about that too. "How did dinner go?"

"Fine," she says, curt. She's chewing on her bottom lip, which Garrus knows is a bad sign.

"Did anything happen?"

"No, why would you ask that?" She asks, gulps her whole drink in one go. Garrus is starting to get scared. "Do I look upset?"

She motions the bartender for another one. Garrus doesn't know what to say. He's pretty sure his answer is "yes, you do," but he feels it'd be dangerous to say that.

"So," she starts, and now she looks at him. "Who's the girl?"

"Oh. Ahm. We were just talking."

"I didn't ask what you're doing, I asked who she is."

"I don't know. We just met." He needs a drink too. Right now. "She's a new officer in C-Sec, it seems."

Shepard nods, looks at her. Her eyes scan Caliia, and then she looks back at Garrus. Her jaw is tight.

She is angry.

"Well, Vakarian. Have fun," she taps his shoulder, downs another drink. His own arrives just now, and Garrus grabs it, drinks it, and looks around. For fuck's sake, how did the night get this out of hand?

"Shepard, I'm not-- I'm not doing anything with her, we--"

Shepard laughs now. Really laughs. But it's not his laugh, the one he learned to yearn for.  "You're on shore leave, soldier. You don't have to report your personal business to me."

And then, just like that, she's gone, walking away from the bar in broad steps. Garrus couldn’t focus on anything for the rest of the evening, so he just goes back to the Normandy after a few more rounds, leaving a very confused Caliia back at the bar. 

When he arrives, Joker turns around on his chair, beckons him over. 

“Do you know if anything happened to the Commander? How did the dinner with Anderson go?”

Something in his gut drops. He clears his throat. “No, why? Did she say anything?”

“No, nothing.” Joker says, and then adds, pensive, “But I haven’t seen her looking that pissed off in a long time.”

She doesn’t call Garrus that night, or visit him. He only sees her again on the next day, when he was beginning to worry she might just drop him out of the airlock. When the door opens and she shows up, Garrus doesn’t really know how to act, so he decides to just act as if nothing happened. 

“Shepard,” he says, turns around, “Need me for something?”

“Yes,” she says, both hands behind her. She straightens her back. “I want to apologize for my behavior yesterday, Garrus. It wasn’t professional.”

Now, he wasn’t expecting that. But Shepard has this thing with throwing him off course, he should be used to curve balls at this point. 

“You have– I don’t think there’s any need for that, Shepard.”

“There is.” She adds, stern. “I invaded your privacy, and put you on a rough spot due to my own personal feelings. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

His heart tightens, uncomfortable. There are a million questions running through his mind right now. What is she saying? Is she “breaking up” with him? Will their little escapades stop now that things got out of hand? Is she regretting letting him close?

But the one question he actually voices is: “and what personal feelings were those, Shepard?”

“I–,” she stutters, looks around. Then back at him. Hands behind her back, clasped tight, the poised Commander she is. Until she lets go. “I don’t know, Garrus.”

She walks towards the boxes at the corner, the same ones she spent so long sitting by his side, working, listening to music. Then she sits down.

“Do you miss it?” She asks suddenly after a few minutes of silence. “Being with a Turian?”

So this was what was bothering her. Garrus takes a minute to answer her. The answer he wants to give her is reassuring. He wants to tell her that no, but he also doesn’t want to lie to her. 

“I can’t tell you that it isn’t different, Shepard.” He says, and she’s looking down, at her own hands. “It’s what I’m used to. It’s what my body was made to– work with.”

She nods.

“But. Missing it?” He continues, walks towards her. “I’m not sure. Being with you, it’s not– it’s not about being with a turian, or human,” he places a hand under her chin, raises her face towards him. Finally, he has her looking at him. He looks into her Palaven eyes, and for the first time in his life he sees… uncertainty in them. “It’s about you.”

The red on her cheeks intensifies as he caresses it with his thumb, unsure if he should even be this close now. He doesn’t know if he said the right thing, but he said the truth. He’s not sure about many things, but he knows he’d never be interested in another human. It’s her he loves. This one. And only. 

Shepard reaches out, hands on his face.

“Smooth talker,” she whispers as she drags him down, towards her.

He knows there is something wrong with this mission as soon as Shepard leaves her room. She goes alone, something he doesn't remember her doing before. "Hacket's orders," she tells him as she leaves her quarters all armored up, looks back at him and Grunt with a shadow of a smile, "I'll be back in no time."

She only gets back after days. And a whole system explodes at her wake. And now she is going back to Earth.

Everything happens so fast he barely has any time to register it. They start leaving people on other planets as the Normandy makes its way home. Shepard doesn't want anyone to be associated with her crimes. Tali goes back to the fleet, Miranda, Jacob and Jack ask to be dropped on the Citadel (the last one, not before telling Shepard they can very well just go pirate for at least a hundred times), together with Thane. Kasumi and Samara stay in Ilium. Their last stop is leaving Grunt at Tuchanka, and Garrus is quite surprised to see tears in his Commander's eyes as she drops the krogan off. The both of them go back to the Normandy in silence. 

“Joker,” Shepard says, “Set course to Palaven now.”

“Aye aye, Commander.”

Shepard doesn’t look at him as she walks down to the CIC, but Garrus follows her all the same. That evening they drink themselves to a stupor, laughing and joking about stupid shit they did on their missions. 

“You know what I’ll never forget,” she tells him, “You taking a fucking rocket to your face.”

Garrus laughs. “Happy my suffering was for your entertainment, Commander.”

“No, no, not like that.” She adds. “I thought you were dead! Like at the time it was awful, but now? You took a rocket to your face, Garrus. And survived. What a tough son of a bitch.”

“Says the woman who died and came back.”

“Hear hear,” she raises her glass, “To the toughest sons of bitches in this Galaxy.”

They clink their glasses, and Garrus watches as melancholy takes over her eyes and she looks around the empty ship. The only ones still aboard are the two of them, the Engineers, some other members of the Cerberus crew who wanted to join the Alliance and Dr. Chakwas. And Joker, of course. 

“You will win this one too, Shepard.” He tells her, and she nods, drunk, lies her head on his shoulder. 

“It feels so fucking stupid, Garrus. I barely delayed the Reapers. And they’re talking about house arrest–”

“I know. But we’ll do something about it. You’re not alone in this.”

She looks up, smiles a sad smile. “But I’ll be, won’t I? They’re taking everything from me. My crew. My ship.”

Garrus holds her face. “Say the word and I’m going with you.”

“I’d never do that to you.”

“Well, I would do that for you.” His hand on hers. “I’ll follow you everywhere.”

“I know.” Shepard closes her eyes. “And this is why I’m dropping you off on your planet. So you won’t do anything stupid.”

That night, there’s something different about them, together. It wasn’t just sex. For fun, pleasure, whatever. There’s a desperation in the two of them that hasn’t been there even on their first night, when they had been sure they’d be dead by the next evening. They’re slow, meticulous, focused. Garrus wants to remember every single curve of her, every spot, every scar. Now they know each other. There’s no more awkwardness to get through, misunderstandings, communication failures. They’ve learned how each other works, and there was just pure wanting. And a cruel understanding that by daylight, it’d be over. At least for the foreseeable future. 

When they get close to Palaven and the shuttle is ready, Garrus is still in her bed. His things are ready, he’s not planning on disobeying her, but the thought of leaving her all alone on this ship breaks his will in tiny little pieces. 

“C’mon,” she tells him, “Joker won’t sit still for long.”

“Are you sure about this, Shepard?”

“Get the hell out of my ship, Vakarian.”

Garrus says his goodbyes to everyone, the little of them that remained. When he’s about to get inside the shuttle, he turns around and looks at Shepard. Her dark circles. Her scars. Garrus knows the next time he sees her, it’ll be because of a war.

“Garrus, I,” she starts, takes a step towards him. It’s the first time she’s ever been this close to him in public. “I don’t want to assume anything. And I’d never ask you to wait for me when we have no idea what is going to happen, but–”

He leans his head against hers. Damn the world, Joker, whoever is around. He tilts her chin so they’re eye to eye. 

“I waited two years for you, six months is nothing. And this is not goodbye. You’ll come back to me,” he tells her, demands. His first order to her, ever. “We still have our war to fight. Don’t forget it.”

“Never.” She kisses him, and he enters the shuttle. And leaves her behind.

The first thing he does when arriving at Palaven is going to his mother’s resting place. It doesn’t take long for Solana to join him.

“Took you long enough.” She tells him, and Garrus places the flowers he brought on the ground. He doesn’t say anything, just brings his sister in for an embrace. Much to his surprise, she allows him to, hugs him back, clings to him. Maybe both of them are very bad turians. 

“I’m sorry I left you alone,” he tells her. “I’m sorry you went through all of this alone, Sol.”

“Whatever,” she separates from him enough to wipe her tears, shrugs. “You were out there being a damn hero.”

The two of them stay like that, standing, staring at their mother’s tombstone. Solana leaves out a shaky sigh.

“She missed you,” she tells him, and Garrus nods. 

“I missed her too.” He looks back at her. “And I missed you.”

Solana gives him a weak grin. “Being on a human ship is rubbing on you.”

Garrus laughs, rough. “Pray with me?” He asks. “I forgot how.”

The only thing that makes his return to Palaven bearable is seeing his sister again. His father too, though with him things are always a little bit more complicated. Though it is a pleasant surprise when his father believes him about the Reapers, and even acts on it, getting Garrus this new spot of Reaper adviser that he’s still not sure it’s worth anything, really. But he tries. It’s the least he can do.

Every day, though, feels like a hundred years and yet times flies. He knows his main focus should be on preparing himself, Palaven, everything he can for the war that he knows it’s coming. And yet, so much of his free time is spent thinking of her. What she’s doing. How she is. The only news he gets from her is through Liara and her Shadow Broker thing. The news are not good but at least he knows she’s still alive. That’s something. 

The only one he talks about Shepard with is Solana, mostly because his sister keeps bugging him about it for so long. 

“I know something is up, Garrus,” she tells him every day. Garrus thought he’d keep it quiet, unsure what his family would think of the whole “being in love with a human” thing. Even more now with things as up in the air as they were. They weren’t dating, properly. They weren’t even talking right now. And yet his heart felt as full as it had ever been. 

So one day he just gives up and tells her. Everything. The whole story. Without the sordid details, of course. He changes how they got together just a little, to keep Shepard’s honor intact (no need for Solana to know about anyone’s reach and flexibility).

“I knew it!” Solana tells him that day, the two of them at her apartment. “I told dad that you wouldn’t be this invested if she wasn’t your girlfriend.”

He scoffs. “That’s not true. Sure, it’s an incentive, but I’d follow her even if we never–,” he trails off, “you don’t know her, Sol. If you did, you’d understand.”

“I’ve seen her on vids. She’s quite something.”

Garrus laughs. “What do you even mean by that?”

‘I think the vid I saw her was this interview with another human. She punched her?” Garrus can’t help but laugh at the memory.

“Spirits. Not her best moment.”

“And there was this other Alliance ad with her, I saw it on the Citadel. I had no idea human hair could have that color.”

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

She smiles that very Solana smile at him, and Garrus looks down at his own food. 

“Is it that weird?” He asks her. A question he’s been wondering for so long, but never had another one from his own species to ask to. 

Solana shrugs. “Is it? I don’t know. We see turians with asari, quarians. There’s even that super famous soap opera and all.”

“I know, but. I–,” he stutters, shakes his head. “I never thought I’d fall in love. And if I did I never thought it’d be with another species, or a human, at that.”

“I think it’s very you,” Solana tells him, sitting by his side now. “You always liked to be different.”

They laugh, and he holds her hand. “What do you think dad will say?”

She stares at him, a look that says ‘you know it already’, and he does. But he wanted to hear her say something different. 

“I don’t think he likes her,” Solana tells him, “Every time she comes up on conversations he sort of changes the subject. Sometimes, when he was telling people about you, he’d say it like ‘that Shepard’,” he mimics his tone of voice, “you know? But I don’t think it’s because she’s human, or anything. I don’t think he likes Spectres.”

“He doesn’t.”

“And I don’t think he’d be happy with you being with anyone that isn’t a turian. Bloodlines and all.”

He nods, tired. He doesn’t want to think about his father, and what he thinks of Shepard.

“Mom would’ve liked her, though,” Sol says, and Garrus wants to think about that even less. The image of Shepard with his mother, the two of them talking. It hurt more than he could bear. “She always liked strong women.”

“Shepard would’ve liked her too.”

“How is she?” Sol asks, and Garrus shrugs. 

“Hell if I know.”

Whatever is on the news suddenly shifts, a sound that they know is when the usual programming is being interrupted for urgent news. Garrus looks at the screen behind Sol, his heart pounding. Could it be the Reapers? Already?

Garrus never hated being right so much as of now. 

Because indeed, it’s them. Finally, they’re here, as they always knew they’d be. On the screen he sees massive ships, one after the other – that sound that he knows already so well. He stands up, and Solana gasps, covers her mouth with her hands. 

“It’s–It’s–Spirits, Garrus!”

He can’t comfort her. He’s too busy walking towards the screen. He recognizes the planet, even though he never been there. She had shown him pictures of it.

It’s Earth.

“Garrus,” Solana is saying, “Garrus I’m so sorry.”

He doesn’t have time for the wave of pain in his chest. He takes her hand, turns around to face her. “Sol. Go to dad. You two–,” he stops, stares at his omni tool. The Primarch is contacting him. 

It’s happening.

After that first day of news from Earth, everything happens in a blur. He leaves Solana with their father, says his goodbyes while making his way to Menae. He knows it shouldn’t be long before the Reapers are on their door steps, and Spirits, for once he wishes he was wrong. But he isn’t. And they’re pathetically underprepared. 

“Vakarian, sir,” a soldier comes to him, salutes. “Commander Shepard is here. I thought you should know.”

“Where?” Garrus asks, but he doesn’t wait for the soldier’s response. He spots Liara first, and he’s walking too fast, too eager. He doesn’t care. At this point, with the Reapers here, with everything that is happening, he could barely give a damn about any protocol. 

Her voice reaches him before he gets to see her, and every note of it tugs at him. He has missed her. Spirits, there’s a whole war going on, but right now he’s just so happy to hear her, see her. 

“Garrus!” She says, and he’s gotten used enough to her to understand the tone of her voice. It pains to hear the relief when she says, “You’re alive.”

She offers him her hand, which, by turian standard, is already quite forward. But Garrus wants to reassure her, needs to feel her here, with him. He can feel her hands shaking on his, so he places his other hand on top of hers, nods meaningfully at her as he says. “I’m hard to kill. You should know that.”

It surprises him how shaken she is, so he’s happy to ease her into conversations about Menae, about the war. He can see how she recovers quickly, finds her footing as the true soldier that she is. And if Garrus had any lingering doubts about his feelings for her, they get smashed, quickly as they fight side by side to get to Victus. For him, it’s not really a matter of if he’ll join her, but when.

He’s not surprised to see the Normandy flying Alliance’s colors again, though, if he’s honest, he thinks Cerberus had better taste in decor. Regardless, he had missed the old girl, heading straight to the Main battery to see what absurds the humans had done to his boys. Calibrating and numbers are a welcome distraction to all the pain–body and mind. 

He doesn’t expect Shepard to come see him so quickly. A very quick introduction to Samantha Traynor upstair gave him an idea of just how much she had to do. And yet, in a couple of hours from his arrival, there she is, dressed in Alliance blues. She looks different, he thinks, now that he’s looking at her from this up close. Only six months, but she looks fuller than she had been back in their Cerberus run. Her hair is a bit shorter, too. But what jumps out to him the most is the way her eyes look at him, the deep lines on her face, lines he wonders she can see on his own as well. Whatever she had seen on Earth, he knows it had been as hard as what he’d seen in Palaven. 

“So,” he starts, his will to cling to humor in times like these the one thing he has going for him, “is this the time when we shake hands?”

It’s silly of him, maybe, to be anxious over romance in times like these. But still, he can’t help the wave of relief when she kisses his face, allows him to hold her hand. There’s something different between them now, an openness, and intensity that wasn’t there before they got separated. Maybe having the whole Galaxy at the edge of complete obliteration does help two emotionally constipated dumbasses to just let their feelings for each other come to light. 

Later that night, Garrus goes to her cabin. He doesn’t wait for an invitation from her, and she doesn’t seem to mind. It feels natural, almost. Garrus sits on her desk, finishing reports while she takes a shower, the quiet hum of the Normandy the only sound in the room. 

Until he feels hands around his neck, a weight against his back. Shepard is leaning her head against his carapace, her hands tight around him, as if keeping him in place. He can hear her breathing in deep, and letting the air go slowly. 

“Shepard?” He asks, voice low and careful. Her hands tighten against his chest. 

“I kept remembering. That time, in Omega. After you got shot,” she tells him, her voice the lowest, the most fragile he had ever heard, “I tried to keep it off my head but it kept coming back, every time I looked at Palaven burning.”

“I’m here, Shepard.” He tells her. 

“You are.” She buries her face on him, and if his hardness hurts her, she doesn’t seem to care. “Thank God you are. I don’t know what–What I would’ve–”

He can’t take the way her voice breaks. He turns around, cups her face with his hands. Then he kisses her forehead, then each of her cheek, presses his mouth against her lip in that so human gesture. 

It’s a bit of a terrifying thing when he thinks of it. That the woman the whole world relies on, relies on him so much. So he has to be strong. If she falters, he had to be the one keeping her straight. If she lowers her gun, he needs to be the one who keeps it up right. He’ll be that for her. He has to. He owes her that much.

So Garrus takes care of her, mostly from the shadows, because he knows that if she notices it she’ll be even more frustrated. But the pressure, the horror of it all is getting to her, and it’s Garrus and Liara, two of her longest friends, who notice it among their crew. It’s small things, but for them, they feel like the world. 

She starts to forget things here and there. She forgets to have lunch, or keeps forgetting datapads around the Normandy. She also starts forgetting things the crew tell her, small details here and there, that most people would just think she’s too busy to remember. But Garrus knows Shepard. Her attention to detail, to every single nook and cranny of her crew was always her greatest strength as a Commander. 

So he does things for her, here and there. A report she forgets. He researches human nutrition, and nags Gardner for hours until he starts preparing her food with the exact nutrients she needs. And when asking her to eat doesn’t help, he starts inviting her to eat with him–when she thinks she’s helping him get something done, suddenly, she does things for herself. 

Liara is there too, always the faithful friend, and Tali as well once she joins them. Even Wrex, when they meet, pulls Garrus to the side.

“You taking care of her, Garrus?”

“Of course.”

“She looks rough.”

Garrus scoffs. “Wouldn’t you?”

The krogan nods. “You keep her sane. She’s the only hope we have.”

And while Garrus agrees, how can he tell Wrex that this is exactly why Shepard is cracking right before his eyes? He starts intercepting Traynor before she reaches Shepard, asks Liara to start bringing him the little things so she doesn’t have to bother with them. He can take these small burdens for her, though the big ones, he can only help her carry. 

They’re all exhausted, he can see it in his friends’ eyes. Liara, watching her whole planet burn. Wrex, seeing the new hope for his people, at the wake of so much destruction. Thane, even in his deathbed, taking that last step to help them. Tali and the world that Shepard brought back to her. 

“How do you ever repay that, Garrus?’ Tali asks him one day, and hell if he knows. He asks himself that same question all the time. How do any of them repay her for all she does?

And sometimes that makes him resentful. Resentful of humanity and all their petty needs, all added to her. Resentful of the turians and how long it takes them to trust her, of all other races, asking, nagging, demanding her for more, more. They’re not there when she wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming Mordin’s name. They don’t see her reading reports, her nails digging on her own skin in a habit Garrus despises. They don’t see when he wakes up and finds her standing, eyes staring at the emptiness of space, and he knows she didn’t get a single wink of sleep. 

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she tells him, and Garrus bites down his own feelings so he can soothe her. 

This war. These people. They’re all taking little by little of his best friend, of the love of his life, and he clings to the little of her he has left. 

She’s the only reason he hasn’t gone completely insane by this point. His family fled, but day by day he has to make new decisions that twist his insides, and Garrus has no idea how Shepard did it all these years. But the little moments, the fleeting moment when she’s his, his girl , they’re his safe haven. 

When she tells him she loves him at the top of the presidium, Garrus is at a loss for words. But Shepard doesn’t pressure him she doesn’t want him saying anything he’s not comfortable with, and damn, he loves her for that. 

He loves her. He knows that, he’s sure of that. But saying words like that aren’t easy for him. Not only because of turian society, and how things work, but something inside of him always make him pause before fully saying it. And Shepard, Spirits. Now that the war has taken everything from them she says it with so much conviction, so much love. And Garrus tells her he loves her, in his own way, with no words, and he knows she knows it. 

He says it to her when he’s up every night after a nightmare, making circles at her back with his fingers until she falls back into sleep. He says it with a hand on her back when she has to make a difficult decision, a reassurance that she isn’t alone. He says it with every bullet he shoots to keep her safe, every bullet he takes to draw enemy forces on his way. He says it when he takes her to a bar, after taking stupid human dancing classes for days from a random crew guy, so he can give her one normal day, one single normal day where they acted like a foolish couple in love. 

Garrus says it to her when he holds her through the night after they raid Cerberu’s Headquarters, and for the first time in his life he sees his Commander lose it. He holds her hands away from her face as she scratches at her Cerberus’ scars, shushing her, keeping her safe. She falls asleep on his arms, and Garrus kisses her time and time again, his girl, saving the world, the unsaid ‘I love you’ in every touch of his lips to her forehead. 

He had thought, at some point, he was holding it for a special occasion. A proposal, even. Something more serious. He imagined sometimes how she’d react to it. If she;d laugh, if she’d kiss him, if she’d be surprised. In his head, when he finally told Shepard ‘I love you’, it’d be a good day. 

But not even in his worst nightmares he ever thought he’d say it to her while watching her leave him behind.

That the first time he says ‘I love you’ would be the last time he sees her.

She saves the world. Of course she does. And Garrus should be happy. He is. For his family. For his planet. For his friends.

But what about his world?

He is still in the Normandy when he first hears the news. 

Life is, at that point, the weirdest it has ever been–which is a whole new low for Garrus. He had lived quite a weird life: hunting rogue Spectres, taking down Reapers, falling in love with a human, but rebuilding a ship in the middle of a random planet with little to no help is a whole new deal. Though, to be fair, a pretty welcome distraction.

 He feels lost, something that haven’t happened ever since Shepard died. Well, the first time she’d died. Don’t think about it. He knows what he has to do, and Tali and Liara are there every day to remind him, push him, bring him to life a little, but things still feel pointless. He has never thought about just how much he’d leaned on Shepard to show him the way and now, without her, he doesn’t know where to go. Don’t think about that.

So when comms are re-stablished at some random afternoon by a screaming, almost hysterical Tali, who hugs Liara so tight the poor asari has bruises from her suit, Garrus doesn’t join the excitement. He congratulates Tali, of course. Nods while Joker starts telling that maybe, maybe they could get EDI back online too (they couldn’t, Garrus thinks, but he wouldn’t tell that to him, not now). The first contact they have then is with a Turian Squadron and they find out they weren’t thrown that far away from Earth, or Palaven, for that matter. But the best news they hear that day is that they are sending people to rescue them, to help with the Normandy rebuild. The Mass Relays are being rebuilt. They have a chance of survival. 

He stays with them for a while, while Liara laughs and James claps him on the back, and everyone just feel so full of life to him. He feels their looks from time to time, their de facto leader, but he has no idea what to say, or how to act. He wonders what Shepard would’ve done in his place, if she had been the one who’d lost him. She’d be pushing through, he knows it. Well. She had always been the strong one. 

Don’t think about her.

He just excuses himself, and gives them some lame excuse about inventory. He had been worried about their dextro rations ending before they could get the hell out of whatever planet they were in, but perhaps, with rescue, he is relieved of that too. 

So he stays in the Life Support area, quiet, listening to the re-construction of what had been his home for years. The ship that gave him the best years of his life and that now feels like a tomb for him. A museum of memories, not too different from Kasumi’s grey box. Every corner of that ship has a memory of her held into it, even the most remote corners. 

Hours go by when Liara suddenly runs into him, her eyes wild and teary, her hands on both sides of his face. Holding him, like Shepard used to.

“Liara? What–”

“She’s alive, Garrus!” She shouts at him, right when Tali enters the room too. Even with her helmet on, he could feel her crying. “She’s alive!”

His heart sinks. He laughs at first, but it turns into a choke, the knot in his throat finally finding release after keeping it bottled inside for so long. 

“Are you sure?” He asks, his voice breaking, and Tali hugs him so tight it almost hurts. He can hear her crying on his shoulder, as Liara joins them, the three of them holding on to each other, and Garrus is so thankful for his friends. That he has people around him who cherish her as much as he does.

“How?” He asks, somewhere between laughing, and crying, and disbelief, but also–total belief. If someone was going to cheat Death twice, it was her. My girl. My girl could do anything. 

“I have no idea. They just told us. They found her in the Citadel’s debris. But Garrus, she’s–” Liara paused, wiping her own tears. “She’s in a coma. They said she’s– Not well. Goddess Garrus. But she’s alive.”

“She’ll make it,” Tali says, and it isn’t a platitude. She knows she’d make it, as she knew the Sun would rise.

“That crazy bastard, she did it.” Garrus says, and Liara laughs. Suddenly the door opens and James is there too, and of course he has some joke about ‘you crying, Scars?’, that Garrus can’t even begin to care for. He just accept his hug. Smiles as Joker joins them. Jeff’s eyes are red and puffy. Humans. 

“We need to get out of here soon,” Joker says, sniffing, giving Garrus two taps on the back. “The Commander will get the welcome party of her life.”

“And an earful,” Liara says.

James laughs. “Please, Doc, the woman just saved the world. We can allow her some dramatics.”

Garrus gives Joker a nod, and stands up, still feeling a bit weak on his legs. But he doesn’t falter, doesn’t wonder. He has a goal again. Shepard is back, and she’s pointing in a direction and telling him to shoot, so he goes. 

Just like old times. 

As much as he wants to, the first thing he does once they get the Normandy into flying shapehe doesn’t join them in flying to Earth. He asks the Turian Platoon who helped them to take him to Palaven.

It’s not a choice that weighs lightly on him, but Solana needs him more than Shepard does. The last news they had from her was that she was out of danger, but still in an induced coma. Her doctors wanted to work on the worst of her injuries before waking her up. And since Liara and Joker swear they’ll keep him posted every day, he relents. Solana’s threats also don’t help. 

And he owes her, he knows that much. She went through their mother’s disease alone, and he barely was there once she died. He owed this to her, to his mother, and to his father, even, who was the only one who believed in them. And he knows Shepard would agree.

His sister is happy to see him, for once. His father is well, but running away from Palaven, living as a refugee, having to care for Solana when she was hurt had its toll on him. This time, Garrus does what he expects of him, for once. He takes care of his family. He accepts it when the Primarch asks him to continue his work as advisor, even if the Reaper threat is over now. He helps his people rebuild. 

The only time he decides ito be selfish is after Liara calls him, and tells him the words he’s been waiting for so, so long. 

She’s awake. 

She’s well.

But most importantly, and maybe he is a selfish prick in the end, because Spirits, part of him feels so relieved when she tells him that one of the first things she asked was:

“Where is Garrus?”

This time, he does this right, so he tells his father he’s leaving for Earth. The Primarch, and all his subordinates already know. Solana already knows too, and even though she wanted to come with him, she accepted that it’d be best to stay with their father. 

His father, much to Garrus’ surprise, accepts it. He can see it in his eyes that he suspects something more than the obligation with an old friend and Commander. That’s Garrus’ official story. But his father doesn’t say anything. Just tells him to be careful. And to come back. 

When he arrives on Earth, Tali is waiting for him. They hug, and Garrus is happy he has someone to go with him. 

He looks around while they’re in the taxi. Last time he was on this planet it had been completely destroyed, but he’s surprised by how far humans have fixed things. He’s not sure this is the same city they had been in back then - Ladon? - but the signs of the destruction Reapers caused are almost not noticeable. It’s been almost nine months since that fateful day, he thinks. It still feels like yesterday.

When they arrive in the hospital, he’s pleasantly surprised to see that some other folks from their crew are already there. Liara, of course–she hadn’t left Shepard’s side even for a second. Joker, and Jack, much to Garrus’ surprise. James welcomes him with a slap on his back and a loud “Scars!” that makes Kaidan look back at him and Garrus wonders if he really saw some disappointment in the Major’s eyes. If he did, though, it was momentary. Kaidan smiles and they all exchange words. He can barely focus on any conversation, though.

“It’s good that you could make it,” Kaidan says, and he means it, Garrus knows. Even if it hurts. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

“Have you talked to her?” Garrus asks, barely hiding the jealousy. Not of Kaidan being with Shepard, just that he’d seen her before he did. 

“Oh, no. I think the only one who has talked to her already is Liara.” He tells him. “She was the one who told us you would be arriving today, though she said you had some trouble–”

Garrus rubs his fingers on his eyes. “Seems like there were some issues with the relay fix. Anyway. Luckily, it’s working.”

Liara spots him and walks towards him and Tali. She places one hand over Garrus’ shoulder.

“I’m so happy you’re here. But, before we go in. I need to warn you too. She–” She pauses, eyes nervous from one to the other. 

“What is it, Liara?”

“She– She doesn’t look the same, Garrus. She is alive, and well,” she adds, noticing the anxiety in him, “But she was hurt. Really hurt. I just want you to know so it won’t be too much of a shock.”

“Is she in pain?” He asks. He couldn’t care less about how she looks.

“No, they’re keeping her comfortable.” She places a hand on his shoulder, and Garrus can see his friend is relieved by his reaction. “But she lost an eye, Garrus. And–” but right then the door opens. The doctor looks around, seeming overwhelmed with the number of people in front of him, including three aliens. 

“Ah,” he starts, “The maximum number of visitors is–”

“Doc, you have to make an exception for Commander Shepard. Come on,” James says playful but also charming, and the doctor doesn’t put up much of a fight. 

“Just please, be quiet. And calm. She’s still recovering”

Garrus doesn’t know why but he’s the last one to enter. He lingers behind, hears the sounds and exclamations from inside the bedroom, but something keeps him still. His heart, beating in his throat, an anxiety he can’t quite place. Will she be happy to see him? How will he react once he sees her, truly sees her? He watches as Tali pauses by the door, shouts Shepard’s name, and the doctor shushes her. Garrus closes his eyes.

Fingers interlace on his and he looks to the side, catches Liara’s blue eyes. 

“She’s waiting for you.” She says, and Garrus nods. He enters. 

The bedroom is quite big for a hospital room, and he knows the Alliance didn’t hold back on expenses for their biggest hero. From the door he can barely see her, surrounded by everyone as she is. James already placed his “Get Well” balloon by the side of the bed, and Garrus takes slow steps towards the bed. Little by little she comes into frame. 

First, the top of her head - her red hair that he had always loved so much is now cut short. Then her hand as she extends it to Tali, so small, so frail. Garrus always wondered how someone of such strength had such small hands. And then her face, and half of it is hidden, covered in deep, burning scars. There’s a bandage over her right eye. Her other eye, though, still green, still alive, still beautiful, is scanning everyone around her, from face to face, until finally it meets him. And Garrus watches as her face relaxes, a smile that says “there you are” and Garrus calms himself too. Yes . He tells her, without speaking, because they don’t need any words.

“I’m all right,” she says, looks back at Tali, the one she was talking to before noticing him. “You don’t need to cry.”

That makes Garrus laugh. Leave it to Shepard to be the one doing the comforting when she’s the one without half of her face in a Hospital bed. 

“I’m just so happy!” Tali says, and Shepard smiles, or tries to. She squeezes her friend’s hand. “I’m so happy you’re alive, Shepard.”

“Well, that makes it two of us.” Shepard says, and her voice pulls at his heart strings. He doesn’t remember if he had ever heard her voice this quiet, this weak. 

“Listen Lola, you cheated death twice,” James says, “People are starting to say you’re immortal. I’m not joking,” he adds when everyone laughs, “People are talking. There are some serious conspiracy shit going on now, they think she’s a God.”

“I’m just lucky, that’s all.” Her eyes meet his, and Garrus nods, words stuck in his throat. He wants to make a joke. He wants to say something, but nothing comes to him. But she smiles when their eyes meet, and he reaches out, touches her leg over the sheets. And that’s all he needs. That’s all they need. 

After an hour (which is thirty minutes more than the usual visitation time, the doctor tells them, exasperated), their time with her comes to an end. Garrus lingers by the end of the bed and when Liara passes by him, she whispers: “You can take my place as her companion. I need a shower”. And leaves. 

The silence feels odd. The room one second was full with laughter, and tears, and people talking, and then suddenly everything is gone. All they can hear is the sound of the machines Shepard is connected to. Shepard stares up at him, tilts her head slightly.

“So,” she starts, and Garrus hates that she’s the one who has to say anything. Because he’s here, too stunned, too in awe of her. “Is this the part where we shake hands?”

She pauses.

“Sadly now I only have one hand, so,” she puts her amputated arm up, “You don’t have many options here.”

And just like that, she breaks him. 

Garrus laughs, shakes his head. He walks to the chair by her side and sits down.

“I thought you were dead.” He says, an echo from the past, and Shepard nods. 

“Me too.”

“I–” He trails off, looks down. And then slowly he lowers his head on her lap, breathes her in. All the grief, all the pain he’s been through for the last months. All the certainty he’d never see her again, just to have her on his side once more. He’s lucky. Too damn lucky. “Fuck Shepard. You need to stop doing this to me.”

She gives him time to take everything him. 

“You know,” she starts after a while, allowing him to breathe, to calm himself down. “I went to the bar you told me about,” she says, and he feels her hands on the back of his head, careful with his crest. Soft. Her hand. Hers. “But you weren’t there so. I came back to find you.”

He chuckles, sits back up. “You didn’t come back to take me to the bar, though? I don’t think our friends would deal well with losing you a third time.”

“I don’t plan on dying again, Garrus,” she says, and then shrugs. “Well. Not now, anyway.”

“I missed you,” he whispers, “Fuck, Shepard, I– When I thought I’d never see you again–”

“Shhhh.” She says, places a hand on his face. “I’m right here. And you’re right here. I told you, Vakarian. I’m not leaving you alone.”

He nods, holds her hand against his face. His eyes are scanning her, all of her. She touches the burning scars on her cheeks.

“I hope you have a thing for women with scars. And one eye.”

Garrus scoffs. “I have a thing for you.”

“I’m glad to hear.” She smiles, as best as she can. “They say they’ll give me prosthetics. A new arm, a new eye. But I guess I’ll need to be here for a long time still.”

Garrus nods, kisses her hand. “I’ll take care of you.”

“You don’t need to–”

“I know I don’t. But I want to.” He cuts her off, and she makes a face at him. The Commander in her isn’t happy with the insubordination. “I outrank you now.”

“What, did they make you Primarch?” She laughs, but then pauses when he doesn’t say anything. “ Did they?”

“No, thank the Spirits. But let’s just say I pray every day for Victus’ health.”

Shepard chuckles. “I quite like the idea of being the Primarch’s girlfriend. Can you imagine?”

“The scandal!” Garrus says, and she laughs. “The Primarch and his human wife.”

“Wife?” Shepard asks, laughing. “Are you proposing to me on a hospital bed, Garrus Vakarian?”

Garrus shrugs. “If I become Primarch you’ll need to step it up. Probably get you some clan markings.”

“They’d make a movie out of us.”

“They might, still,” he looks at her, and she reaches out to him, caresses his scars. Garrus closes his eyes, leaning in as she does the same, their foreheads touching. For the first time in years, his heart feels calm, content. He’s not wanting for anything, he’s not angry at anything. He’s just happy she’s here. With him.

“It was because of Kelly Chambers..”

“What?” He opens his eyes, confused. 

“When I knew. That I was into you.” Shepard tells him, and Garrus remembers, their old inside joke. Spirits, he had even forgotten about that. “She used to ask me about you. And once she said you made her feel like holding you close or some shit like that–”

“Wait, wait –”

“--and that pissed me the fuck off, Garrus. And I didn’t get why I was that annoyed at her saying that. I thought maybe I just didn’t want people patronizing you. But then it hit me that I was jealous.”

“Who is Kelly Chambers? She wanted to hold me?”

Shepard smiles. “Well, I’m happy you don’t remember her. I used to almost burn in anger when I saw her in the Main Battery. I even started staying there for no reason from time to time so she’d take a fucking hint.”

Garrus stares at her, mouth open, total surprise. “I honestly thought it was because of the scars.”

“I mean, they helped, but. I guess I fell for you before I even wanted anything physical.” His girlfriend, alive and well girlfriend, shrugs,  I’m the last of the romantics.”

“Yeah. I’ve never been courted that romantically by someone in my entire life.”

She smiles, pleased. A nurse comes in with her food and Garrus take the chance to learn everything he can about how he can help her with this. No nurse is going to feed his girlfriend while he’s here. 

“Now,” he starts, picking up some of the food with a spoon, “You gotta tell me, Shepard. How the fuck did you survive that?”

Her eye glimmers with mischief. “Oh. You know me, babe,” she says, takes a sip of her drink, “I’m hard to kill.”