After a week in Huerta Memorial, surrounded by every doctor and nurse who wanted the chance to claim they'd helped the Savior of the Citadel, Shepard was all too happy to be released, ready to sprint out of her room before the doctor had finished giving her the all-clear. Of course, her freedom was a limited one: she moved from a hospital room to a hotel room, and instead of over-protective medical professionals, she had to face over-eager journalists. Other than the equipment, she didn't see much of a difference between the two. They were each far too interested in internal matters.
And the well-wishers. Oh, the well-wishers.
I never thought I'd miss Conrad, she thought, peering out her window. From her vantage point on the seventh floor, she could see the crowd swirling around the entrance like eddies in a creek. Goddamn, it's one in the morning and they're still down there? Get some sleep, it'll be better for you.
She twitched the curtains closed and winced as the movement jarred her elbow. The inflatable cast kept her from jostling it too much, but after three separate ossification treatments, her whole arm felt sunburned and tender. One enterprising doctor had suggested cybernetic implants to replace the bones, implants that came with a guaranteed forty-seven-percent increase in strength, but Shepard had refused, striving to be emphatic and polite while she fantasized about shouting the grin off his face. The day might come when she needed implants, but this body still had too many battles to fight. She wanted to carry the marks from those battles as long as she could before glittering steel and smooth skin replaced them.
She'd probably spend all day tomorrow arguing against the implants, just like she had spent today, and yesterday, and the day before.
So I should get some sleep. Shepard sighed and cast a longing look at the bed. Too big, too warm, too soft. She missed her bed on the Normandy, with the crease down the middle of the mattress and the flat, stone-hard pillows.
If all went well, she'd be back in that bed in two weeks.
She'd be hunting in two weeks. Teeth bared, face to the wind, digging her claws into the ground as she primed to leap, and flush her prey from cover.
Her left hand half-closed into a fist, and she willed her muscles to relax. She still didn't have a replacement amp, but her body kept trying to run through her mnemonic forms by habit so deeply ingrained it was almost instinct. If thinking about being on the Normandy distracted her, the odds were good she'd flare her corona and take out a window. And wouldn't the brass just love that? Celebrated war hero wrecks hotel room in post-victory celebration. That Al-Jilani woman would leap at the chance to push a headline like that.
Too bad there wouldn't be any truth behind it. Shepard had barely seen her crew since the mass clean-up on the Citadel had begun, and she had a inkling — more than an inkling, really — that only Hackett's intervention had kept half her crew from being conscripted for other projects. That, and her status as not just a war hero, but the first human Spectre. So she still had her crew, down to the last man, and they'd all escaped court martials for following her to Ilos.
This time, she didn't stop her grin.
All that remained now was to heal, and to hear back from her squad. As soon as she'd been allowed an omni-tool again, she had written to all of them, reaching out with an invitation she hoped none of them would refuse.
In short order, they had all replied. All but one.
Shepard picked at the edge of her cast and looked at her bed again. A hot shower might relax her enough to get a few hours before she braved the crowds to head back to Huerta. The sentries posted outside her door would knock to wake her in seven hours. Plenty of time for a shower, a snack, and then bed.
Twenty minutes later, in the middle of trying to dry her hair one-armed, Shepard heard her omni-tool chime.
"Accept call. Five-second visual delay," she said under her towel, and waited for the beep as the call connected. "Hello?"
"Shepard, it's Garrus Vakarian."
The towel hid her instant grin, and by the time she pulled the towel away and faced her display, she had schooled her face into proper neutrality. Garrus' face popped into view at the end of the five seconds, mandibles twitching.
"Garrus," she said, and let a little warmth leak into her voice. "It's a little late for a social call. Everything okay?"
His mandibles twitched again as his gaze traveled over her face, like he couldn't help cataloging her bruises and scrapes. I look better than I did the last time you saw me, Garrus, she thought, and had to fight away her grin again.
"Everything's fine," he said, but the barely-there hesitation before he spoke rang too loudly over the connection. "Are you — are you busy? I wanted to talk to you about something."
"No, I'm not," she said, not adding that there was very little she could be busy with at one in the morning, other than sleeping or watching bad vids. "I'll let the desk and the sentries know to clear you. Good luck getting through the party downstairs, though."
Garrus laughed. "I saw your fanclub, but I think I'll make it. Be there in twenty."
"See you then." Shepard closed the connection and stared at the empty space, tapping her fingernails on the table. Was this about Ilos, again? By all signs, he'd let it go after she tried to explain — but so much of Garrus was still unmapped to her, and going through hell with him at her six hadn't helped fill in the blanks.
She'd half-expected him to politely refuse her invitation to come back to the Normandy. She wouldn't have blamed him; subjectivity didn't sit easily with Garrus, and while he might have understood her position, he might not have been able to continue serving with her.
The disappointment at the thought — no Garrus on the Normandy, bitching about food and the Mako, no Garrus with his steady gaze and even steadier hands — surprised her. There hadn't been time to consider the tangle of what she felt and what she wanted during the mad rush for Saren. Shepard had barely let herself feel anything, beyond a wide, warm pleasure in his presence and gratitude for him as the most reliable of all her squad. There hadn't been time. So she had put any thoughts about what if and I should aside, along with everything else she hoped for, and kept her eyes on Saren.
And if she let her mind play with the possibility of hope now that Saren was dead, well, who could blame her? She deserved something for her own. This was a small hope, barely large enough to fill her cupped hands, small enough to hide forever if she needed to. Or until it faded away, like embers starved of oxygen.
Now I'm just being maudlin. Time to get dressed. Shepard pushed out of her chair and moved toward her duffle, and put her hope aside.
Almost half an hour went by between the end of their call and Garrus actually making it up to her room. Shepard didn't spend the extra ten minutes pacing, but she caught her hands trying to form Singularities and had to clasp them behind her back as she waited at the window.
Finally, the sentry knocked at the door.
"It's open," she called back, and turned around as Garrus stepped inside the room. She stayed at the window, hands still clasped, and let her smile welcome him in.
I'm a bit old to get swept away by a crush, so I should do myself a favor and at least try to act like an adult.
"It's good to see you, Garrus," she said. For a wonder, she sounded like she meant exactly that, and no more. "I'd offer you a drink — you wouldn't believe the mini-bar — but I've got this inner-ear thing, and I'd prefer not to find out what happens when I mix balance problems with alcohol. And drinking alone is no fun at all."
Garrus blinked at her.
Well, she thought, I never said I was good at acting like an adult. Now how the hell do I salvage this?
Before she could open her mouth again, Garrus flicked a smile at her.
"It's good to see you too, Shepard." He gave her another one of his cataloguing looks. "You look, ah —"
"Like hell," she said, and smiled back at him. "I had a choice — stay in the hospital and let them fix all the cosmetic damage, or wear the bruises and stop feeling like a lab specimen." Shepard shrugged. "No contest. The rest of the damage they can fix in one-off appointments. And bruises heal."
"Do they?" Garrus laughed — nervously, yes, but he seemed to relax under his armor. "I don't know about that, Shepard. I've got bruises that — well, you don't need to know about that."
As badly as Shepard wanted to tease him — and oh, she did, so very badly, because a flustered Garrus was something she hadn't seen before, and the thought of filling in part of the Garrus she carried in her head made her fingers itch — she let the comment go with a nod and a smile. "Fair enough." She cleared her throat and planted her feet on the carpet. No point in delaying any longer. "So you wanted to talk?"
"Ah, yes. I — I got your message. About the Normandy."
Shepard waited, keeping her face politely interested, nothing more than a friend listening to a mildly interesting piece of news, and tried to strangle each spring-green flare of disappointment before it could show in her gaze. She didn't know how good Garrus was at reading her expressions, but she didn't want to risk it.
Bad enough she had something to hide to begin with.
"I won't be able to join you — thank you for asking, but there are — things, that I…" Garrus shook his head. "Would you believe me if I said I had all this planned out before I got here?"
Shepard laughed, a light sound that surprised them both. "I'd have a harder time believing you hadn't planned it out, Garrus." She leaned against the windowsill, and decided to put herself out of her misery. Better to smother the embers before she let herself warm her hands with them. "Is this about Ilos?"
"Ilos?" Garrus cocked his head at her, and she caught the slight, ancient echo of his ancestry in his pose. The angle of his neck, the bright beady gleam of his eyes — and, God help her, it excited her. He was still so new to her, even after all those months on the same ship, and how often was someone going to surprise her? How many other people could she trust to hold her interest with just the way they opened their mouths? More importantly, how many people did she trust, plain and simple?
Mom. Lamia. Anderson. My squad. She swallowed and made herself meet Garrus' eyes as he watched her. Well, I made my choice. I stole the Normandy. I stand by that, and I'll pay for it if I have to. There's no room for doubt where I'm going. If he's out, then he's out.
She gave herself the time it took to breath in to feel a sliver of self-pity — then she straightened her spine, and put the hope out of her head. She closed her hands around the embers and waited for them to die.
"Ilos," said Garrus again. "No, this isn't about Ilos. Well, in a way, it is. It's about what you said the night before Ilos, and after Dr. Saleon — the best way."
Shepard nodded, holding herself to silence, sensing Garrus hadn't finished speaking.
He gave his head another shake, breaking his gaze from hers.
"I left a lot of things unfinished when I signed on with you to fight Saren. Not just with C-Sec, but with my father too."
Shepard couldn't help arching an eyebrow at that; she'd had exactly one conversation with Garrus about his father, but even that was enough to tell her that unfinished business barely scratched the surface of Garrus and his father.
We're all trying to prove our fathers wrong, absent or otherwise, she thought, with a wry grin in spite of herself. Garrus caught the expression and huffed a laugh in her direction.
"I know that's putting it lightly, and well, I want to do things the right way. But there's nothing I want more than to go with you."
Shepard glanced up as the skin around her amp port prickled; some new note had crept into Garrus' voice, reedy and thin, but it struck her like a steel dart between her ribs.
"I've got cases to finish," Garrus said, his voice back to normal. "And I should probably go home, and let my father carve me a new one for running off with a Spectre — ah, sorry — and that'll take time, but once it's done, if you still have room, I'll be there."
So much for keeping a poker face, thought Shepard, as a bright child's smile caught her mouth. "And miss out on you complaining about how I treat my guns?" she said, as her throat clenched like a fist. "Wouldn't be the Normandy without you."
There was the kind of reckless that made someone drive a Mako past geth Colossi, through a relay that might or might lead to the center of a star instead of the Citadel, and then there was the reckless that made someone let their own armor slip, just for a moment. Shepard didn't have much experience with the second kind, but she never refused a challenge.
"Going to be hard without you watching my six, Garrus," she said, and held out her hand. "I'm spoiled now."
Garrus took her hand slowly, careful of her bruises, but didn't shake. "I'll work fast," he said. "Just try not to throw yourself into the line of fire until I get there."
"Deal." Shepard laughed, and let her hand linger, just a little, as she slid it out of his. One tiny moment to keep for herself. Just a little warmth, not much at all in the vast, eternal cold of space, but it would be enough. Enough to wish on.