There was no question in her mind that he belonged there, with her. She'd been without him for far too long. Of course, this wasn't a Cerberus ship anymore, and there were Alliance regs to consider again for the first time in two years and six months. Standard Alliance regs which clearly stated the Commanding Officer's cabin was strictly for the Commanding Officer, most certainly not "the Commanding Officer and her favorite turian".
The Normandy was hardly a standard Alliance ship, however, and Shepard was hardly a standard Alliance officer. And after six months apart, Shepard didn't especially give a damn about Alliance regs where Garrus Vakarian was concerned. If she really had to defend it, it came down to a morale issue—namely, hers. After the strain of a hard day's combat, she could unlace her boots and put them neatly in the closet beside his, sit on the bed with a datapad full of the day's intel, with the knowledge that he'd gently pull it out of her hand and tell her Hackett could wait until the morning. And even if he was up working late when she went to sleep, she could wake up to warm breath upon the back of her neck, an arm wrapped around her waist.
That was worth a price beyond measure in a time of strife. Someone to come home to, someone to share this room that seemed so cavernous and empty with just one person, a room too quiet and too easy to lose herself in the space of her own dark thoughts within. She'd had six months of being alone in a room with her thoughts. Six months of being eaten alive by self-recriminations and fears that she hadn't done enough, said enough, fought enough. Now, at least, after the other proverbial shoe had dropped and everything really had gone to hell in a handbasket, she didn't have to be alone. There'd be a little piece of comfort here, with his mischievous blue eyes and inappropriate cracks about her fish tank that he'd learned from some human vid.
Even the small act of making room for his meager belongings made her feel better. Neither of them made a habit of traveling with a ton of possessions, and there was more than enough storage space available. With an anal retentive sort of precision, she hung up his small collection of heavy turtleneck sweaters in the closet, reshuffled the armor cabinet as best she could to make room for his far bulkier turian gear, and declared the second shelf in the bathroom dextro-amino country so as to prevent unfortunate toothpaste incidents. She glanced over at her desk, already something of a disaster area of hardcopy files and the occasional empty can of Tupari beside her private terminal again, and laughed a bit ruefully. His stuff was more organized than hers, now.
There were a handful of data discs at the bottom of the duffel, a couple of datapads and a hardcopy book to neatly stack on the coffee table. But when she lifted the bag to fold it neatly and stash it away in the closet, she noticed another book, larger and thicker than the other, hidden in an interior compartment. She wasn't entirely sure what it was about that book that sparked such curiosity when she unzipped the pocket and lifted it out. Shepard wasn't the sort of person that generally went snooping around in other people's things, even those belonging to her lovers—she'd asked permission before unpacking for Garrus, after all. She valued her own privacy and respected that of others. Still, she couldn't help herself. A little peek wouldn't hurt, and it was probably some sort of dry textbook anyway.
When she opened it, she blinked in surprise. It wasn't an engineering manual or a treatise on weapons systems. It was…a sketchbook. And not a digital one, an old-fashioned sketchbook with real paper. And as Shepard turned each page slowly, with a kind of hushed and loving reverence, it was like an entire world opened before her eyes; a world brought to magnificent life in strokes of real charcoal and pencil, the smallest details captured in laser-like focus. She held her breath a little, flipping through those pages. Some were in color, others black and white, but all of it was exceptionally well done. There was the gleaming, surreal perfection of the Presidium, followed by darker, gritty scenes of urban vice in the Wards. This was some of the most beautiful art she'd ever seen.
Most remarkable to Shepard was the emerging pattern as she browsed through the pages: a life told in strokes broad and refined, landscapes and more intimate portraits, their life, in the brief years she'd known Garrus. First, there was a portrait of her in her old Onyx armor, standing before the Council as she became the first human Spectre. Her face wasn't terribly detailed in that one, but it made a kind of sense to her; there really weren't many humans in the book before her, just generic figures in some of the scenes. And then their journey together unfolded: a disturbingly detailed sketch of a geth sniper on Therum, the ExoGeni building towering over ruins dotted by broken Prothean spires, the Mako as a tiny speck amidst a bleak winterscape blanketed in snow on Noveria. And dotted throughout them all were sketches of the SR-1 and her crew: Wrex leaning against the lockers in the shuttle bay, Kaidan smiling with a cup of coffee in the mess, herself chatting with Liara, Joker tipping his ever-present cap. The human faces were getting more detailed with each page, too, more expressive, and it was like she could see how his comfort level grew.
The wave of nostalgia that washed over Shepard soon turned to a familiar sorrow, however, a lump forming in her throat as she turned to a sunlit tropical scene that could only be Virmire, and a portrait of Ashley in the sunlit sky, her hand raised to her brow in a proud salute. The vine-choked ruins of Ilos, complete with eerie, unsettling statues. Vigil, silent guardian and final hope of the Protheans. Saren Arterius, a nightmarish hybrid of organic and synthetic, blazing red eyes possessed by Sovereign and fully descended into madness, laying in a crumpled heap on the floor of the Presidium Tower.
There was something remarkable, then. She'd noticed the sketches of herself becoming a bit more prominent as the book went on, scattered here and there between their friends and battle scenes. It was subtle, but not really worth noting. But after Saren…it was like the floodgates opened and there was nothing but Shepard, page after page after page. Simple sketches of herself in her hardsuit enveloped in that tell-tale cobalt glow, or just sitting in her civvies in the mess with a cup of coffee and a datapad. Cleaning her shotgun. Gazing into the distance with a thousand yard stare. A dozen and more portraits of nothing but her face, with features that seemed much less turian at last and far more human, fragile. There was a kind of tenderness in the way he rendered her features in these works.
It occurred to Shepard that this would have been the time of her death, and viewing them in that context made her tear up a little. They'd never actually discussed that time apart, not really. Neither of them really knew how to broach the topic beyond general references to Garrus returning to C-Sec after the Battle of the Citadel, and re-upping for Spectre consideration. He'd never spoken about just when he found out the Normandy had been destroyed, or the memorial service, or anything surrounding her death at all. But he didn't have to say anything to her, not now that she saw his deep and unbridled grief etched in muted colors and loving detail, the immaculate shading of her mahogany cheeks, the henna red curls framing the face of a human angel. He'd mourned her a thousand times in those pages, with his pencils. And if those few bliss-filled moments of heaven before the assault on the Collector Base hadn't been proof enough of his love for her, this surely was.
He'd loved her for so long and never said a word.
She paused then, and took a breath, suppressing the flood of emotions welling up inside her, as she was so practiced in doing. When the moment passed, she continued flipping through the book. Strangely enough, there didn't seem to be a single drawing of anything that resembled Omega or his time there. He could have been too busy with his squad. But they seemed to pick up again on the SR-2. There were a lot more guns, this time, amongst the now expected sketches of the various specialists and haunting scenes of desolate colonies with empty pre-fabs.
More surprising were the sketches of Thane, by far Garrus' favorite subject in this section besides herself and said plethora of guns. A lot of them were action shots of him going through biotic katas, the wiry muscularity of lanky and toned limbs in graceful poses as beautiful as they were strong. She found herself a bit shocked at the almost loving detail that went into one particular portrait of the drell assassin with his favorite sniper rifle. The way his webbed fingers curled around the trigger, his brow furrowed in concentration, full lips slightly parted…she could have stared at it for hours. She smiled, lightly brushing them with her fingertips. Seeing Thane through the lens of Garrus' perceptions was a bit strange, if only because he seemed to share her fascination with specific features on the drell. The way he captured the light of his eyes, that hint of green that was really only visible in those deep pools of black when he turned his face just so in the light—it really was uncanny. As though Garrus shared his eidetic memory, and this was the one thing he kept dwelling on. It could have been because drell eyes were so unlike turian eyes—she noticed a similar level of detail fixation with the way he drew her lips. Then Thane's, in subsequent sketches.
It made Shepard feel a bit warm and giddy, in a ridiculous sort of way even she couldn't entirely make sense of. But the sensuality in those drawings nearly leapt off the page. There was a tension, an energy there, that seemed to mirror those loaded glances Garrus gave him when he thought she wasn't looking, the ones he didn't even realize he made.
That kind of sensuality was even more blatant in the way he drew her. She could feel her cheeks grow warm and flushed when she turned to see the final set of sketches, a long series of racy pinups. Some of the poses were quite familiar—echoes of the "souvenir" holos she'd taken during their final night together, before he left for Palaven. They weren't distasteful at all, just…well, cheesecakey. And it appeared he'd acquired quite a taste for it. Maybe as much as she'd acquired a taste for turians. The last sketch filled her with unexpected warmth. It was his rendition of a silly holo they'd taken together with her omni-tool in a booth at the Fishdog Food Shack in the Nos Astra Exchange of all places. She'd had a piece of spinach stuck in her teeth, and he still had his napkin tucked into his collar.
Page by page, sketch by sketch, it was the story of their lives together, gathered in one book. She felt a bit guilty then, as if she'd been reading his innermost thoughts in a journal, and somehow she felt closer to him in a way she didn't entirely understand.
"Well…I suppose I'm busted. Hope this isn't going in your log, Shepard."
Shepard looked up sharply; she hadn't heard the door to the cabin opening, but there was Garrus all the same, leaning against it and looking altogether sheepish. "Why didn't you ever say anything?" she asked, as she shut the sketchbook, hugging it to her chest. "It's not anything to be ashamed of."
"Because it's just a stupid hobby," he replied, sitting beside her on the bed. "And we've always had more important things to worry about, like genocidal maniacs, the impending end of the galaxy…"
"But you've got a real gift," Shepard said. "How long have you been drawing, anyway?"
"That's…a long story." Garrus let out a sigh, tilting his head. "My whole life, really. Believe it or not, I wasn't always the best damned sharpshooter in the galaxy. When I was a kid, my weapon of choice was a stylus rather than a rifle. Dad was never too crazy about it, he thought it was frivolous and undisciplined."
"That's ridiculous," she scoffed. "It takes a lot of discipline to be this good at anything."
"Yeah, too bad he didn't see it the same way. I even had a scholarship for a summer program at a university on Thessia, some asari program for emerging young foreign artists. Didn't exactly work out, though, I never made it there. Life got in the way."
Shepard knew that look, the way his eyes darted downward, his mandibles twitching slightly, the furrowed shift in his brow plate. "Well, I'm glad you didn't give it up entirely," she said, with a reassuring hand on his shoulder. He seemed to relax then, and turned to grasp her hand with his own.
"I've got one hell of a muse."
She blushed then, despite herself. "I didn't know turian artists had muses. Or drew anything that wasn't abstract."
"Imani, we've been over this. I'm a bad turian, remember?" Garrus chuckled, and wrapped an arm around her. "Somewhere along the line, I guess it became a way to cope with the craziness I saw, when I couldn't just shoot it in the face. And then sometimes it was just a way to kill downtime. I've never made a big deal out of it, and I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same."
Shepard kissed his cheek, and reached up to stroke his fringe in reassurance. "Your secret's safe with me, but I don't think it's frivolous or a waste of time. My dad was an artist, back before he and Mom left Earth, and your stuff's as good as anything in the galleries he showed in back then. For what it's worth, I think you've got an amazing talent that's worth sharing. Sooner or later we'll run out of things to kill, you know."
"Preferably sooner rather than later. These Reapers are a pain in my ass," Garrus snickered. "Just out of curiosity, though…how far did you get into that?" He tapped the book meaningfully.
She couldn't help it, she felt herself smirking at him that time. "I saw those pictures you drew of Thane, if that's why you're asking," she replied. "So am I your muse, or him?"
Garrus' mandibles twitched, and he gently pried the book from her arms, to rest it on the nightstand. "I think you're tired, Imani. It's been a long day, and you're starting to get a little punchy. Maybe you hit the one Brute a little too hard with your face."
"Maybe." She didn't stop grinning, either.
He cleared his throat and started for the door. "I've got some more tweaking to do downstairs, I don't know what the hell your Alliance techs were doing in drydock."
"Sure."
"You tell Krios and that bed's going to be empty when you get back."
"Wild varren couldn't drag it out of me."