She talked to a dead man this morning.
Shepard sits in the observation lounge, watching the stars drift lazily past her window, and wonders if the man who pretended to be Garneau had still been in there, watching as the thing they call a Leviathan pulled his strings. Had he felt himself die? Could the thing have kept the memories and not the man? Had he wondered, as she has wondered once or twice, whether his thoughts were his own?
She's never wanted to thank the Illusive Man before, but if Miranda was telling the truth - which is not at all certain, no matter how friendly they are now - he's the only reason Cerberus kept its sticky fingers out of her brain. From here it is tempting to let her mind run a well-greased course on Cerberus and its methods, and whether they're any better than humanity's enemies at this point, but she resists.
She doesn't wonder if she could have saved him if she'd known more, if she'd been faster, if she'd had the right words, but she does wonder what his name was, and if he'd be missed.
The door behind her hisses open, and she turns her head slightly; not to look, but to listen. She knows who it is. EDI would have warned anyone else off.
"Joker says we'll hit the Citadel in ninety minutes," Garrus says. She waits for him to come up behind her and rest his hands on her shoulders, or maybe make his way around the couch and sit with her, but he does neither.
"Thanks," she says, listening to him walk to the bar. Now she does turn to look, because she knows him better than that; their return trip to the Citadel has some urgency around it, and they don't know what they'll find. If Leviathan can indoctrinate like a Reaper, then anyone who's been in that lab could be affected. Garrus won't drink with a mission coming up.
So what is he doing, then?
He sits on a stool behind the bar, two steaming mugs in front of him, and watches her intently, waiting. She knows he'll sit there all day, if necessary, and count it a good day's work. It's what takes a sniper from dangerous to deadly. But because she values his time as much as her own, she stands and crosses to the bar, settling on the stool opposite him and raising her eyebrows in a silent question.
"You don't have to talk," Garrus says, nudging a mug in her direction. "But you do have to listen."
She might have mentioned once or twice that she'd listen to him read dry, dusty weapon repair manuals all day long. Using the voice on her isn't fair, damn it. Shepard takes the mug and gives him a bitter, sulky glare that turns betrayed when she takes a sip and realizes that it's tea, not coffee in her mug.
"You can't have any more because we're out," Garrus says, pointedly making no mention of who's been drinking coffee in place of sleeping. "Don't worry, Natia's got a supply dump waiting for us on the Citadel. You can poison yourself again later. Besides, Chakwas said that tea's good for you."
She knows his face, and the way the skin at the corner of his eyes draws tight and his mandible flicks out on one side means he's suppressing a smirk. She narrows her eyes at him over her mug. "I'll have no mutiny aboard my ship, Mister Vakarian," she warns.
Oh, that's definitely a smirk. "Aye aye, Captain," he says.
She'd kick him if the bar weren't in the way. "I have a rank, and it is Commander," she says haughtily.
"But I've been studying," Garrus says, bringing up his omni-tool. "You're a naval officer. The commander of any naval vessel is referred to as Captain," he reads off the extranet.
"And if I were still in the naval chain of command, that would be true," Shepard says, crossing her legs just to have something to do. This isn't her favorite subject. "Technically I'm on indefinite detached duty, still accruing seniority though I'm not eligible for from time-in-grade promotions." She turns the mug around and around in her hands.
"Time-in-grade?" Garrus asks, confused, but when she starts to explain he cuts her off, shaking his head. "Never mind. I'll look it up later. That's not what I wanted to talk to you about." He pauses, taking a long drink of whatever he's got, and when he rests the mug on the surface of the bar, he stares into it like he's looking for something at the bottom.
After a long moment, he looks up at her. "Do you know how long I'd been holding off those mercs on Omega before you showed up?" he asks. It's a leading question, one he knows she can't answer, and that he's willingly talking about Omega -
There are a few things they won't discuss, even with the other. Mindoir. Elysium. Garrus's new rank in the Hierarchy. Omega. She doesn't know what it means, or where he's going with it.
Shepard shakes her head, unwilling to speak and scupper the mood.
"It'd been seven and a half days," Garrus says with a quiet intensity, and that means something. Shepard turns the words over in her mind, examining them from every side.
"How'd you hold them off so long on your own?" she asks. "Even you have to sleep."
"A lot of hard work," Garrus says with a twist of his good mandible that she doesn't understand. "And a whole bucket of stims."
Stims aren't illegal, not precisely, but on most worlds they're confined the gray side of the market. Here, as usual, Shepard expects Omega to be the exception to every rule. They're probably passed around like candy there.
She's never taken anything but military standard issue stims, and since Cerberus rebuilt her, she doesn't even need those; her cybernetics keep her boosted high during combat and flush the toxins so efficiently that she barely feels the aftereffects. They'd had the lecture in basic and N-School on rules and regs, intended application, side effects, and the maximum recommended sustained usage. In humans using military-grade stims, that's all of thirty-six hours. Not seven and a half days straight.
"You should be dead," Shepard says blankly.
Garrus chuckles, though there's an edge there she doesn't like. "It's not as bad as you're thinking - turians can go longer without sleep than humans, and we last longer on stims, too. Still, it was close. You turned up at an opportune time." The mandible flicker is a subtle humor, one echoed in his voice. "When I saw you through my scope..." He shakes his head. "Well. I thought I was seeing what I wanted to see, frankly. I thought you were just another mercenary. And then I saw the N7. Omega doesn't see many of them, as you might imagine. But even then..." He trails off, shaking his head again as if to get rid of something he doesn't want to think about.
This is more than she's ever heard out of him about Omega put together.
She doesn't expect him to continue that train of thought, one he obviously finds painful, but he does.
"Even then," he says, his voice painfully even, "I didn't truly think it was you. I thought I'd died, and the spirit of battle was here to bring me to the eternal struggle, wearing your face and your form, because that's what you are to me. I was convinced that I was dead, Shepard."
"Garrus!" she protests. She is truly worried now, and she reaches out for his hand but he doesn't take it, clutching his mug tighter and tighter.
"That's what we believe lies beyond death," he says, his eyes far away. "The land of the dead, fighting for all eternity. That you were there... I thought it meant that I was already there, that I'd got my reward. And that maybe I'd find you and we could fight side-by-side through eternity." He laughs, something old and rusty that makes her heart ache. "I'm not entirely sure that's not what's happened."
"Are you telling me," Shepard says, her voice very dry, her throat tight with concern, "that the Reaper War is a turian's idea of heaven?"
"The perfect enemy, the highest of stakes," Garrus says with a shrug that doesn't quite hide how very serious he is. "What else would it be?"
Shepard dismisses that. "Keep going," she says softly, sliding her hands under his and taking away his mug. "Please." You need this, she adds privately.
"I decided you were probably real when you called me Archangel," Garrus says, finally taking her hands in his. He traces her fingers with his own, plays with her fingernails, tests the flexibility of her joints. "A spirit of battle would have known my real name."
"If I'd known - " Shepard begins, suddenly so guilty. She'd gone to Mordin first, because every second wasted meant another colony was in danger, and that wasn't acceptable. But to know that she'd spent an entire day fetching Mordin while Garrus had been fighting for his life -
"No," Garrus interrupts her, pinning her with his eyes. "I didn't tell you so that you'd feel guilty. Spirits." He sighs. "I wanted you to know what I think of you. If Javik is the avatar of vengeance..." He touches her cheek with one hand, stroking her cheek and continuing to thread his fingers through her hair. "You are the avatar of the fight," he says in the end. "You're a symbol. But even you need to grieve those you can't save, and nobody should grieve alone."
It hits Shepard like a brick in the face, which unfortunately is something that's actually happened to her, and she takes a deep, shuddering breath before she hides her face in his hand.
She hates to be weak. But she also knows that he makes her stronger.
And if he can talk about the worst experiences of his life, then so can she.
"I should have saved him," Shepard says after a long moment. "I could have been faster, or EDI could have shielded the fucking artifact, or something. There's always a way, and I didn't find it, and that's on me."
His hand turns her face toward him. "I won't tell you not to feel guilty," Garrus says, and she could weep for the matter-of-fact tone, the complete lack of sympathy or pity, which are things she can't handle and doesn't need. He always knows what she needs. "I won't even tell you not to mourn him, because I know you will. But I will tell you this." His voice goes deep, his flange suddenly much louder, and his eyes flash hot. "You can make his death mean something. Leviathan killed that man, not you. Hold it accountable."
Shepard surges up onto her feet, knocking the stool over behind her, and leans over the bar - it's not far enough, and she gets her knee up on the bartop, knocking over her long-cold tea, and kisses him for all she's worth, pouring every ounce of love and affection and sheer gratitude into his mouth and hoping he can feel it. She's no good at words, not like he is, but she'll be damned if she can't at least show him how much she cares.
She sighs and leans her forehead against hers in the turian gesture of affection she's become so fond of. "Damn," he says, breathless. "What did I do to deserve that? Tell me so I can do it again."
"You know exactly what you did," she says, amused.
"Yeah," Garrus admits. He lifts her with a strength that still takes her aback at times, setting her on her feet on his side of the bar. "Anytime you need it," he says, his eyes intense. "That's what I'm here for."