A gift-exchange fic for fourth-age. (Whose stories are amazing, and if you haven't read them you REALLY ought to.)

"All right," came the voice that, even muffled by the undercarriage of the Mako, Garrus recognized as Shepard's. "I'll bite."

He dragged himself out from under the tank's belly with as much dignity as he could muster. Shepard stood opposite him, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over her chest. He parsed her posture for anger—in his experience humans sometimes stood that way when they were frustrated or upset—but found only amusement in the tilted lips and arched eyebrow. It was her Commander Shepard making her rounds posture, friendly but still professional. His mandibles flicked into the hint of a smile and his eyes lingered too long at her waist before darting back up to her face. If she noticed, she gave no outward sign of it.

Her blunt teeth weren't bared, so the reference to biting was doubtless idiomatic. When the second eyebrow lifted to meet the first, he supposed the phrase served as a kind of query, though he wasn't entirely sure what the appropriate response was meant to be. He linked his hands behind his back in an easy parade rest, polite but not overly formal. She maintained her casual posture. And her enigmatic smile.

"Sorry, Commander? You'll… bite?"

She unfolded her arms long enough to wave one hand. The gesture included him and the Mako and all the various tools and spare parts littered around them. "About this."

"Ah," he said, resisting the urge to roll the ache out of his shoulders and neck. He'd been under there longer than he thought. Again. He always forgot how cramped it was. "Looks worse than it is. I'm just recalibrating the suspension after the, uh, thing. With the mountain. Nothing vital. She'll be ready when you are. "

Shepard's laugh emerged a single short ha and, not for the first time, he wished the timbre of human voices was a little more revealing. Even with experience, it took effort to follow a conversation without subharmonic clues. As if picking up on this, Shepard's smile widened a bit, into something unreservedly friendly. "It's not that. You're taking prodigiously good care of her. Honestly? I'm curious how a turian Citadel Security cop learned his way around an Alliance land infantry vehicle well enough to take over sole mechanic duties."

"Right. That. Well." He gave a slight shrug. "Always been pretty good with my hands."

Her mouth twitched and then thinned slightly. He wondered if she was biting down on the inside of her lip. Her cheeks looked a little flushed, even in the dim light. "Yeah? And you think that superlative piece of machinery's the same as a C-Sec squad car or a standard X3M?"

Reaching out, he patted the side of the tank. Her eyes followed his hand and lingered. Anyone else—any turian, anyway—and he'd have thought she was admiring him. Or wondering just what else his hands were good at. His last tap turned into a languid stroke. Shepard's face remained curiously and carefully blank. "They're all pretty much the same once you open them up."

"Really?" she drawled, dragging the word out to thrice its usual length. She lifted her chin in slight challenge, but something teasing danced in her eyes. "That so?"

"Uh, engines? Sure." Garrus cleared his throat, ducking his head in case he'd overstepped. He didn't want to overstep. "Just wanted to make myself useful. Ma'am."

The arch of her brow turned speculative, and she cocked her hip as if she knew what it would do to her waist. Maybe she did—but no. She was Commander Shepard. Commander Shepard. He swallowed and kept his gaze fixed just over her shoulder.

"You ever driven one?" she asked abruptly.

"A Mako?"

"No, a stealth reconnaissance frigate." Shepard pushed herself away from the wall and crossed the distance between them. Her gaze was steady, unblinking, still challenging. "Of course a Mako."

Garrus shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. "No, ma'am. But I assure you I do know my way around the turian equiv—"

"Want to?"

He blinked at her. "Drive a Mako?"

"Exactly."

His mandibles flared wide, genuinely startled. "Your Mako?"

She laughed again, the kind of deep laugh that made her shoulders shake and a fine web of lines crinkle at the corners of her eyes. A rare kind of laugh, well-worth the earning. He was inordinately pleased with himself for a moment. Scoped and dropped.

"It's not a trick question, Garrus. Yes or no will do."

"You're sure, Commander? I, uh, know how you are about driving. And pushing buttons."

She took another step closer, decidedly into his personal space, and he froze. For a second—just a second—he thought she was going to touch him. At the last second, her hand swept to the side, echoing his earlier pat. She was close enough that he felt the air shift at her hand's passing. Her stroke was almost certainly a caress, and he was pretty sure the Mako didn't give a damn. "I'll take that as a yes, Vakarian. You, me, and the Mako. It's a date." She stepped back and began to cross the room. Just before she reached the door, she turned and winked at him. "Any buttons are still mine."

#

"What's that human saying?" Garrus asked. "Piece of… some kind of food? Pie?"

Shepard chuckled, shaking her head. "Cake?"

"Right," he replied, as the Mako trundled across the barren landscape, steady and smooth and implacable. It handled even better than he'd imagined it would; he always suspected Shepard was putting on some of the more daring or krogan-vomit-inducing moves for show. "Piece of cake."

"I'll have you know there's a distinct lack of rivers of lava on this planet. Rivers of lava really change the game."

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

Behind the clear faceplate of her helmet, Shepard's grin flashed, though she didn't look up from her radar. "Yeah, yeah. You talk the talk, Vakarian. No one questions that. Right. You want to head through that canyon straight ahead. The signal's coming from just over that mountain range."

"Through the canyon? Not over the tallest peak next to the canyon?"

"You questioning my orders, Vakarian? Or some of my earlier peak-related decisions?"

Garrus chuckled, shaking his head. "No, ma'am."

"Wouldn't want to have to write you up for insubordination."

"If you ask C-Sec really nicely, I think there's probably a template you can borrow."

Shepard leaned back and crossed her armored legs at the ankle. To anyone else, she'd have looked the picture of ease, but he noticed the tension in the line of her arm, and her left hand was curled into a tight fist, as if it was taking every effort not to lean over and wrestle the controls away from him. He deviated a little off her specified course just to push her buttons, and her hand opened and closed reflexively in response. She didn't say anything, though, and he relented and headed toward the canyon she'd indicated. Her fingers uncurled slightly. The huff of his exhale wasn't quite a laugh, but it was close enough to earn him a reproachful glare.

He discarded a couple of smart remarks and was just opening his mouth to congratulate her on her forbearance when she sat bolt upright and the entire easy mood shifted in a heartbeat.

"Uh, Garrus? We've got a hostile incoming."

The Mako, ever sensitive, swerved and skidded under his startled hands, kicking up a wave of sandy stones before he could get her back on track again. "Here? I didn't think there was any—Hostile what?"

Her voice came tight and strained over the helmet's comms. "Maw. I think."

"You've got to be—" Before he could finish, though, the thresher maw in question came barreling up out of the packed ground, close enough to rain clods of earth and stone down on the Mako's exterior. None of them were big or mean enough to penetrate the shields, but they didn't need to be. Garrus knew extremely well what kind of damage a couple of blasts of maw acid could do to them. Shepard was already scrambling out of the front seat and into the back, where the gun turret stood unmanned. "No, you're not."

"I will kid about lots of things," Shepard insisted as she strapped herself in. Her voice hardly shook, but he knew her well enough to hear the fear in it. "I will never kid about thresher maws."

"This was not part of the plan."

"Thresher maws," she replied, sending a burst of fire toward the angry creature, who retaliated by sending a flood of acid their way and diving underground again, "are never part of the plan. And yet they're forever showing up, like the cockroaches of the galaxy." Then, in the voice she reserved for orders—usually life or death ones—she barked, "Hard right, Garrus."

Hard to the right was a mountain. Not a gentle, rolling slope, either: a sheer cliff climbed toward the dusty sky without so much as a hint of a foothill in sight. "Shepard—?"

"Hard right, Garrus! Now!"

He did as she ordered, gunning the thrusters to give them a bit of lift. The front wheels screeched and slipped, and he found himself remembering with agonizing clarity the time he, Shepard, and Tali (mostly Shepard) had ended up flipping the Mako flat onto its roof. That time there hadn't been a maw on their tails; he and Shepard had been testing a theory about ninety-degree inclines. Turned out the Mako wasn't a fan. That previous research indicated a high likelihood of ending up—as Shepard had said then, and shown him proof of later—like a turtle on its back. He didn't need the readout on his visor to tell him how much his heart-rate increased, or how rapidly. Shepard's vitals echoed his panic, but she moved with the same steady precision he remembered from countless firefights at her six.

"Thrusters again and nudge her forward when you've got air," Shepard shouted from the back, followed by the sound of machine gun fire and the cannon firing again. "Easy, though. Not too much too quickly or you'll spook her." The back end of the Mako rocked hard as it took the full brunt of blast of acid. Shepard swore, loudly and with some creativity, in a mixture of three languages. The turian phrases were coming along nicely; he was pretty sure the things she was muttering in quarian weren't anatomically possible. For any species. The cannon fired again. The answering screech of the thresher maw was audible even through the Mako's sturdy plating.

He hesitated only half a breath before obeying. The tank's heavy wheels skidded briefly before catching the uneven terrain and gripping hard, propelling them forward with force enough to earn another muffled curse—in krogan, this time, with all the right inflections and everything; Wrex would be impressed—from Shepard. His console complained about the damage to the rear of the vehicle, but they were undermanned, and with him driving and Shepard shooting, there was no one to cauterize the wounds left by the maw's attack.

"It's coming around again," Garrus warned.

"I've got it in my sights," Shepard replied. "You keep easing us up this slope. It'll back off once our vibrations stop pissing it off."

"You don't want to try and take it out?"

"Thresher maw evasion trumps rivers of lava. You're in the big leagues now, Garrus. Let me worry about the gun. I want you to drive."

He drove.

Even with the threat of the maw, even with the rear shields at twenty percent, even with the Mako creaking and shuddering far too slowly toward the canyon and safety, emitting a dire plume of smoke all the while, Garrus felt calm, centered. Dangerously content. He'd missed this. Not thresher maws, of course—no one in their right mind missed thresher maws—but the sound of Shepard's voice crisp and clear and commanding over the comms; his body acting instinctively to follow her orders; their familiar, synchronized dance. Just like old times. Right, Shepard? He engaged the thrusters and turned the Mako so the relatively undamaged right side took the next hit. Something squealed. Something else gave a disturbing and unhealthy pop. Shepard switched to asari cursing, which was somehow the most vile of them all because it was so unexpected.

The cannon fired, followed by the reassuring patter of heavy machine gun fire, and he knew the maw was dead when Shepard threw back her head and started laughing. A moment later, she came crawling back to the front seat, still shuddering with the aftershocks of her triumph. Without the thresher maw hunting them, it was short work to get the Mako down the side of the mountain and into the valley beyond the canyon. The glint of a silver probe—their original target—caught the sunlight, winking cheerily. He didn't need the order; he pointed the tank toward it.

When the vehicle rolled to a stop, Shepard turned and faced him, already reaching up to remove her helmet. The entire landscape of her face shifted and changed and lit up, bright with exertion and the giddy excitement of having once again eluded certain death. Garrus almost—almost—thought the thresher maw was worth it, to see her so alive. Before he could reach out and touch her shoulder, her cheek, the fall of her hair, she opened her hands wide and patted the console.

"Pretty sure the suspension's going to need more than recalibrating this time, Vakarian."

He snorted, his own hands flat against the console so she wouldn't see them shaking. Maybe—just maybe—he'd never given her quite enough credit for keeping her cool every time one of those damned worms came exploding out of the earth. "You think?"

She sighed and sprawled as much as the interior of the Mako allowed for sprawling, huffing a breath that blew the sweat-damp hair out of her eyes. "I'm so glad we bought this thing. It's so much better than that beach retirement."

He grinned. "Oh, is that it, then? We're done with the yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, superior and subordinate thing? Wasn't sure how far you wanted to let this one go. You know, with the unanticipated thresher maw and everything."

Shepard leaned on one elbow, a slow smile spreading across her face. Her eyes shone as she glanced up at him through her dark eyelashes. She gave them an exaggerated flutter. "I don't know, Officer Vakarian. I could go for a bit of 'yes ma'am'ing."

He blinked at her, all 2183-and-never-considered-interspecies-liaising innocence. "Ma'am? Doesn't the Alliance have regulations about this sort of thing?"

Her smirking smile was especially alluring, paired as it was with flushed cheeks and elevated heart rate and pupils so dilated he could hardly see the green ring of her iris. "You're the one with the addiction to research, Vakarian. You tell me."

"Mmm. Funny you should mention research, Commander."

Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. He watched its progress with intense focus and she laughed softly. "Something you'd like to share with the class?"

"Only that I've been, uh, reading up on how best to put the Mako's minimal interior space to good use."

"Yeah?" she asked, turning a simple stretch into something so completely distracting, even in armor, that it took a companionable punch to the shoulder to bring him out of it. "I assume you're talking about carrying back the inevitable cargo that probe is going to yield."

"I don't think the writings of Matriarch Dilinaga are going to take up that much space."

"I'm still hoping to complete my collection of turian insignia. After all this time."

"Damned good thing Saren was willing to put his galaxy-destroying plans on hold while you hunted down vital League of One medallions."

She shifted in her seat, the better to elbow him sharply, right at the weakest seam of his armor. Her aim was impeccable. He winced and she made a face. "It was on the way."

"Right. On the way. Three relays over and two systems out."

Her lip curled slightly. "That's the best use you can think of for that mouth, Vakarian? Giving me shit about my slightly obsessive compulsive need to finish what I start?" She reached for one of the seals on his armor and flicked it open with practiced ease. "Oops. Guess I'm going to have to finish that, now. Unless—"

He didn't let her finish that thought.

The Mako's cramped interior swiftly filled with bits of armor; he was grateful this particular scenario had involved him squeezing into the old C-Sec black-and-blue light gear. He tried not to sigh his relief when the last possibly-a-bit-too-snug piece fell to the already-crowded floor. Shepard tried to push the bulk of their gear aside, and succeeded only in creating an equally impossible pile slightly shifted to the right.

"You know how much I love the Mako," Shepard gasped, wriggling against the leg wedged uncomfortably between hers. When he tried to give her a bit more space he succeeded only in cracking the back of his cowl hard against the Mako's low roof. "But this really isn't necessary. The air's breathable out there."

"And deny ourselves the satisfaction of acrobatic contortions and inevitable bodily harm?"

She grinned and reached behind her head to slam her fist on the hatch's opening mechanism. The door sprung open obligingly, and they spilled half-clothed into the sunlight. "We're in luck," Shepard said. "No space cows."

"Shifty or otherwise." He swept an arm around her waist—finally—and she responded by pressing herself flush against him, head tilted up to collect a kiss. She groaned when he dipped his head to nuzzle at the soft skin of her neck, dragging her hands down his back but pausing before she reached the curve of his waist. He laughed against her, tickling the underside of her jaw with the flutter of his mandibles, recognizing the tenor of her distraction. "You're dying to see what's in that probe, aren't you?"

"Of course not. Much more, uh, important tasks at hand."

She couldn't quite meet his eyes. He stroked a hand down her side, skimming a breast, and her eyes fluttered shut. "Go on. I want to see if we're going to need to call someone at the spaceport to collect us."

Before he'd finished examining the smoking damage—looked worse than it was—her triumphant crow of victory filled the air.

"Matriarch Dilinaga?" he asked dryly.

She came around the side of the tank, hand aloft, smile shining. "Turian colony insignia!"

He shook his head, echoing her smile. "I have to say, maws and missing medallions is not the way I envisioned this particular date unfolding when you first floated the idea."

She placed her trophy inside the Mako and returned to him, walking teasing fingers along the dip of his back by way of greeting, her touch so soft he couldn't help leaning more heavily into it. "Still not as bad as the hanar poetry reading."

He chuckled, running his talons through her hair and cupping the back of her skull. "This one has had enough talk."

"This one is happy to switch to action," Shepard replied, reaching for the fastenings on his trousers. Her nimble fingers pulled a pleased groan from him. "This one hasn't pushed any buttons yet today, after all."

"Yes, ma'am," he murmured, bending to touch his brow to hers. "My buttons are all yours."