It wasn't that Garrus had forgotten how Shepard looked. It was difficult not to remember. For the first few months after her death he had drowned himself in drink and work and when he had had enough he'd see her drinking a glass of whiskey with one of those damned ciggarettes in her mouth.
"those things'll kill you, Shepard," he had once said, after the collector base.
"Really?" She had shaken her head, "we just finished a suicide mission and you're worried because I'm smoking."
It wasn't that he had forgotten what she looked like. She was short and her head came just to the top of his chest. Even so, she was rock solid. Military solid. And damn if he hadn't seen men twice her size fall in line when she gave them that look.
He hadn't forgotten what it was like to make love with her either. They way they moved as a unit, how they shouldn't be able to fit together, but they did, and when they did they were two pieces of a puzzle.
It wasn't even her smile that he had forgotten, even when he crossed that last boundary, a few friends gathered around his bedside he could see it in his mind's eye quirking up the corners of her mouth as her eyes twinkled.
No, when he crossed that misty threshhold and entered the acrid atmosphere of the bar, he realized he had forgotten what it was like to see her relaxed. She was leaning across the counter sipping whiskey and laughing at something the bartender said. There was no tenseness written in the contours of her body. She was not thinking about war strategy, the next mission, keeping up crew morale, or scanning the room so she could make herself presentable in case a reporter walked in. She was just sitting, and having a drink, and laughing at a joke.
Next to her Anderson saw him from across the room and rose, resting a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him and smiled as the admiral left the seat next to her empty, but she still hadn't seen him. Anderson nodded at him as he moved through the crowd. Garrus nodded back.
He was divided. Part of him wanted to run across the room, to grab her and spin her around and exclaim because she was alive, more alive than he had ever seen her. The other part of him had waited and waited to be here and he decided to savor the moment.
He had known when she ran towards that beam, leaving him on the Normandy, that she wasn't coming back. She had known to. It was written in the way she stared into his eyes, caressed his cheeks, in the fervant way she whispered that she loved him. He had let her go anyways. He had to, and he had understood. After everything she had been through how could he begrudge her a chance for peace?
It wasn't that he hadn't moved on. With Victus dead, someone had to rebuild Palavan and that someone had been him. He had learned to hold a hammer after all, he had done it for Shepard. But he had never moved on romantically. He was Shepard's turian, alive or dead. He had tried but he always found himself feeling that these women deserved someone who didn't still want a dead woman. Nevertheless, he had a child; he had adopted, a precocious little turian girl who had risen through the ranks of the turian military.
He wondered if she knew what he had done, that he had done it all in her honor, in her memory. He wondered if he made her proud. His stomach flipped with anxiety. That was when he realized she was staring at him, grinning and his worry dissolved. The old age, the blunt and speckled plates, the drooping fringe, they all vanished and he was, once again, the way she remembered him. There was no pain when he moved towards her.
"Is this seat taken?"
"Thought you'd never make it," she answered. There were something like tears in her eyes, not the sad kind that she had shed that night before they stormed the illusive man's base but the kind lovers shed at their reunion after so many years apart. When their embrace finally ended, his cowl was damp. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
"Leave it to you to wear BDU's in heaven," he commented with a laugh.
"Once a marine..." She took his hand, "you did good Garrus."
He stroked her face absently and for a long time they sat, looking at each other. "What do we do now?" He asked finally. Shepard laughed, "now that you're here? Anything we want."