The night she walked in on Garrus listening to B.B. King was the first in a long series of nights talking about music in general, and the blues specifically. She professed a long, undying love of the blues, the grittier the better, everyone from Muddy Waters to Lucille Bogan, Doc Watson to Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Lee Hooker. She rattled off names he knew and more that he'd never heard of before like they were old friends, and to her they were. Garrus, like many other turians, listened to a lot of human music, the pre-Shanxi era being his favorite. Sure, there was a lot of great stuff that was more recent, but there was something about the twentieth-century blues that spoke to him, and Shepard felt the same.
In a way, it was the beginning of the end for him; he'd been fighting his feeling for her for so long, but to hear her wax poetic about the difference between a Gibson and a cigar-box guitar, the tonal variants between D-minor versus C-major, and the way some guys knew how to bend the strings just right with the right amount of distorted twang that gave a song so much soul . . . he fell for her to Billie Holiday and when they made love it was to the accompaniment of a C.F. Martin in A-minor.
After the war was over and they had more time, they devoted a lot of it to music. They listened to The Doors, Buddy Rich, Rush, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Steely Dan, anyone they could get their hands on and argue about over breakfast. But it always came back to the blues.
One day, she took him out to a basement bar that happened to sell protein-neutral whiskey, and the ambiance was straight out of the prohibition era. It wasn't even really on purpose, either; the war had rendered nearly the whole galaxy, with the exception of the most rural areas, without power, so everyone had to revert back to using the most rudimentary lighting sources, usually candles or lanterns. The room was low-ceilinged and full of the smell of cheap alcohol and sweat, sawdust and wood smoke. Shepard and Garrus took off their coats and settled down in a dim corner to listen to the house band. The band was comprised of a drummer with a small and battered kit, a guy on a harmonica with a bullet mic gripped in one hand, a bassist playing through an ancient Marshall amp, and a guitarist using a bottleneck slide on a six-string acoustic.
And they were absolutely killing it.
The floor was packed with people dancing along to the deep, infectious beat. The guitarist leaned into his microphone and his voice, roughened by cigarette smoke and drink, belted out a strong lyric about a man running from the law, and he would have been able to run away if he hadn't fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in the Mississippi Delta. Shepard swayed along in her seat and was soon trying to drag Garrus out onto the floor with her.
"You know I'm absolute garbage at dancing, Shepard."
"Aw come on, just this once?"
"I just want to listen for now . . . but I'm not opposed to watching," he said with a wink as he sipped his whiskey, and she shrugged.
"Suit yourself. But you're not the only one getting a show, you know." She shimmied a little, hiking up her already short dark-green dress up her thigh. His eyes raked over her, from her long legs up to her bare arms, and she shivered appreciatively.
"I'm counting on it. Give the rest of these guys something to regret by the end of the night."
"You're so bad."
"And don't you forget it." He took her hand and spun her around once before nudging her toward the other dancers, but she kept right on turning until she was facing him again, her bare legs bumping against his knees.
"Oh no, I'm not going out there by myself."
"So sit back down and drink with me. Your rum is getting lonely." The next song started up, a grungy, dirty swamp blues tune that filled her head with Spanish moss and cypress trees, and she swung her hips in time with the bass line, her hair falling down to veil her face before she shook it back again. He sat back in his chair and when she sat down in his lap he slid his hand across her back, absorbing her warmth even through his gloves. She wrapped her arms around his neck and didn't see the way some of the patrons stared at the way she was touching him, a turian—not dirty looks, but not mere curiosity, either. She wouldn't have given a damn even if she'd seen them, though, and that was one of the things he loved about her.
"You want to watch?" she crooned in his ear, sending shivers down his spine. Damn, that woman knew just how to fire his engine. "All right, big guy. I'll give you a show." She stood up suddenly and left him in favor of the press of bodies in front of the stage.
The guitarist was giving the slide a workout on this song. He'd attached an electric pick-up to the front and was playing through an effect pedal, giving the scrape of strings and bending notes a gritty, fuzzed-out edge that rumbled through the dense air like a thunderstorm. Through it all, Shepard moved and turned and swayed, losing herself in the rhythm like she did at home when she thought no one was watching. Her hair was loose and moved in waves, the roots dark with sweat in the warm, close air of the bar, and the way the muscles in her legs flexed and stretched in the flickering lamp light was intoxicating. Garrus found himself wishing he was out there with her, but he hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said he was a horrible dancer. Ballroom dancing was more his style; this involved more dexterity than his species was capable of.
It was about a minute into the solo that he realized the guitarist was watching and taking his cues from her. He eyed her out of his peripheral as he watched his own fingers on the frets and kept time with her, giving percussive slaps when she snapped her fingers and arcing up the scale when she rolled her head, her hair covering her face. The asari might be able to boast the highest population of dancers in the galaxy, but humans tended to use a more free-form style as they let the music move them. Shepard was a damned good dancer when she stopped thinking about it, which wasn't very often, but maybe he was biased.
The song ended and the whole bar erupted in drunkenly enthusiastic applause. She returned to him and pulled her chair close beside his, her leg brushing against his.
"So, did you like that?" she asked, knowing good and well that he did. Her face was flushed and there was sweat beading at her temples, and Garrus wondered if she had ever looked so beautiful before.
"I might have to show you just how much I liked it later on."
"Promises, promises, Vakarian."
"When have I ever not delivered?"
She smiled, something she did much more often now, and took a deep drink of her rum. "Touche."
The rest of the night was spent listening and drinking and letting the sound wash over them. It had been only six short months since the end of the Reaper invasion, and people were looking for any reason at all to cut loose for a while and forget everything they'd lost, if only for a few hours. Maybe that was why the blues were so perfect for them—rather than ignore the pain, it dug down into the soul and joined with the sadness there, molding it with its own mournful and evocative tones into something more, something visceral and real that could never be leeched out but only accepted for what it was.
The beat and the chords and the bass and those raw vocals twined around the both of them and in the music somewhere was Mordin, who had told her that someone else might have gotten it wrong; Legion, who had been the ghost in the machine, the most sapient of geth; Thane, who had gone to be with Irikah in the sea; there was Thessia, and Palaven, and Earth, and all the people who had fought and died with honor against a terrifying enemy to make sure that others could live. Every day they lived was because of those that didn't, and it was in the music that they would be remembered. The modern-day bards would tell their tales until their voices gave out and maybe, in the space between one note and the next, the voices of those who had been lost would sing.