Title: Across the Hellespont Strait
Summary: Six times Garrus waits for Shepard. The galaxy holds its breath and waits with him.
Rating: T
Words: 9k
Notes: Originally posted March 2017.
1.
The first time Garrus waits for Shepard is for two years.
That's not correct. He's nothing if not dedicated to getting the details right. The first time he waits is in a corner of Chloe Michel's clinic. He listens to eight men threaten and bully and jeer, he listens to Chloe cry, her gasping: "I didn't tell anyone — please, please, I swear — "
Garrus peeks his head over the counter once — and is nearly spotted by one of the thugs, a brute of a man with a large, ropey scar down one side of his face. Too many of them to take out with only his pistol, and he can't get a shot on the one holding her from this angle —
He calms his breath. He remembers his training. He holds out hope that the right moment is coming, and it does: it arrives with a loud sweep of the door opening behind him and a sharp, authoritative voice ringing out to drop their weapons.
The first time Garrus waits for her is in a dark, cramped corner of the Wards, and it is for a minute, two minutes, the unquantifiable length of time for a sniper to prepare his shot, until Commander Shepard provides him an opportunity, and then offers him a way out.
2.
Not long after that, he waits for two years.
He doesn't know he's waiting. He thinks his days of waiting are over, in fact; that's what Archangel is for. That's Omega talking. That's the filth of this place getting to him, the grime working its way between his plates like grease. He had quit waiting for a sign the universe was healing when he walked out of C-Sec two months after Shepard suffocated in the black emptiness of space. He quit waiting for his application response the week the Council posthumously retracted her Spectre status and all of his efforts to argue the matter were met with closed doors and clipped, tight-browed reprimands.
Garrus quit waiting for his family to understand after his father called him from his office line the minute his old Citadel contacts informed him his son had left his job – and he quit all of the rest when their conversation ended on the sentence That damn Spectre does not mean more to you than your duty to upholding galactic society.
If there's one thing Shepard had understood, it was sacrificing one's life for galactic stability. If there was one thing she had inspired him to do, it was making a career out of it.
He goes to the place where people wished and prayed for a change and decides that he might as well be it.
Omega is at once everything and nothing like he expects. He had expected to be outraged at the injustice he finds; he had expected that outrage to fuel his activism.
What fuels him most, in the end, is his team's conversation and pain and laughter and histories; what fuels him is knowing that for every victim on Omega, there are five persecutors waiting for him to introduce them to the business end of his rifle. What fuels him is Erash surprising him in the middle of the night by taking over guard duty early; Sensat wrangling him into a game of Skyllian Poker and refusing to take his many excuses; Butler turning the tables and asking him about his own history this time, and his discovery that it no longer hurts to talk about it — even if being asked about his old life is the first time he realizes he's truly left it for good.
Maybe this was how Shepard did it, he remembers thinking once, but the thought is easily lost here. Thoughts of Shepard are swallowed by the next job, the next raid, the next assassination. Thoughts of Shepard are few and far in between anyway, so long after the initial shock and hurt and betrayal have passed through his emotional register, but the shades of that grief had never really left him. They have adopted new names, speak in new voices, found a new home in his work. When he had accepted Shepard's demise – and with it, the death of any possible future as a Spectre – it had been a mandatory acceptance, necessary to function in this unforgiving reality. But only he knows that he had fought the facts within himself, with everything he had, until the day he'd received an invitation to attend Shepard's memorial in the mail, and he couldn't deny it any longer.
Two years have passed, only for the same war to arise within him again.
Strangely, it's his C-Sec training, not Shepard's advice, that he hears in his ear as he peers out over the bridge now.
Categorize the facts. Take stock of what you have and what you need. Breathe. Move on.
The facts: Lantar – Sidonis is gone. Sidonis has betrayed him.
No.
Fact. Sidonis is gone. Sidonis has abandoned him. Sidonis has left him to die.
No.
The facts are that Garrus has never pretended to be a saint, even before the day he took his first step onto Omega's spaceport. The facts are that he's always been willing to dirty his own hands if it means someone else might sleep safely at night; on Omega, the dirt is just harder to wash off. Most don't even try. The facts are that if Shepard would have disapproved of who he is now, what he's done, it doesn't matter anymore. Shepard is dead.
And Garrus no longer has a team. Now he has twelve corpses, and a bullet waiting to find a home in the skull of the thirteenth.
What he needs: Food. Sleep. A friendly gun, just one, just one. But what he needs most of all is to pick his way through these imbeciles to eliminate the real enemy: a dead man, somewhere out there, still walking.
(If he were a spiritual man, he might add forgiveness to that list. But he doesn't dare hope for things he doesn't deserve, and what he deserves least of all is to call upon the spirit of the Normandy's name for guidance to lead him out of the mess he'd made with his own two hands.)
So he waits until his rations are out. When those are gone, he waits until he runs out of stims. When he's out of those, he waits until the instant that he's out of clips.
Until then — until then, if there's still one merc on the bridge, his work isn't done yet.
When three helmeted mercs in heavy military-grade armor blaze a path through the bridge below, cutting down those ahead them without hesitation or prejudice, he's too tired to challenge it. He's too tired to seriously question the bright red N7 on the leader's chestplate. Someone must've tracked him down. An Alliance operative come to collect one of Commander Shepard's old team? Bit embarrassing for PR, he guesses wildly, if a soldier who brought down Saren died in this shithole in the ass-end of the galaxy.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Sixty-seven seconds later, the door behind him beeps thrice in rapid succession at a hacking from the other side.
Garrus doesn't move from his perch, doesn't take his sights off of the dimwit down below, not even when someone behind him barks out, "You Archangel?" — he doesn't even flinch when his spine goes cold at the voice.
If he were a poorer sniper, his finger might have twitched. Instead, he allows himself to take a moment. It's too much. He takes another.
He makes the shot when the merc peers around the corner looking for his fallen comrades. A perfect hit. Archangel stands and removes his helmet, but it's Garrus who speaks.
"Shepard," he breathes out, "is dead." His voice is raspy from disuse and dehydration, and thoughts of caution and exhaustion are rattling around in the back of his head: it could be anyone wearing that armor and you've been awake for twenty-seven hours —
"Garrus?"
A stranger removes her helmet. A dead woman stares back in shock.
Later, Chakwas will reveal that Shepard stayed awake through the night during Garrus's surgery but said not a word herself until joining Taylor in the briefing room. Shepard never mentions it; Shepard is a professional. When Garrus joins her, she talks about Cerberus and Collectors and missing colonists and a suicide mission. She does not talk about rising from the dead or the hidden cameras and omnipresent AI in the walls, she does not talk about waiting for him to wake in the medbay, waiting for an impossible friend to make an impossible recovery.
Later, Garrus will remember most strongly the look on her face when she sees him upright and alive in the briefing room doorway: the mutual feeling of relief in the air is nearly tangible. The Cerberus operative huffs an incredulous breath, but in one look, Shepard tells him everything he needs to know without saying a word, and Garrus lets himself fall easily, gratefully, back into her orbit after so long drifting alone.
3.
The thing about working for Shepard is that she has always been, and would always be, a decisive leader over a placating friend. One hand might be extended in welcome and the other hovering at the ready on the holster of her pistol, and neither would be a lie. Either way, when the commander executes a course of action, there will be no half-measures.
Which is why four months later, exactly 31.89 meters across from the Orbital Lounge, with a level head and a clear gaze, he waits for her again. He waits for her to move.
She's not moving. He has a brief flicker of a wild guess that perhaps her earpiece is broken, perhaps she couldn't hear his update — but the rest of him knows the truth now beyond any certainty or doubt. She can hear him just fine. The woman is an immoveable object, and her mind is made up.
Shepard is talking. Sidonis is replying. Garrus feels his skin crawl, can't stop the edges of his fringe from flaring slightly in anger. Disappointment. What —is this her plan from the beginning? To stand willingly in a sniper's shot, and talk her way to a peaceful resolution with a murderer?
Turians don't believe in hell. But they do believe in justice. They believe what lies after parallels one's life before. Traitors and the treasonous receive no pity, no second chances.
Shepard isn't turian. And she's not moving, and she's not listening either —
"Dammit, Shepard," he snarls in a low growl that comes straight from his diaphragm, that leaves his left hand nearly shaking with rage, "if he moves I'm taking the shot."
She doesn't move. There's a slight pause, a hitch to her breathing, and then she says out loud:
"Your men deserved better."
Garrus waits for Sidonis's response, waits for the crawling in his skin to hear a former brother speak, waits for pathetic excuses and arguments —
Sidonis is quiet. Within his scope, Garrus can see his eyes wide, locked on Shepard with the look of a man meeting his executioner on death row.
Shepard is not looking back. Her head is to the side, tilted low, into her microphone — she's speaking to him.
The silence has stretched on for a beat too long, and in that moment, even as the chatter on the strip continues and advertisements flicker brightly below — from this angle alone on the railway, it is almost as though life has paused, and the plaza holds its breath and waits for Garrus to decide.
He takes a long, slow breath, and reaches out one last time to the long-lost spirit of his team. Hoping to hear, to feel — he doesn't know. An apology? An understanding? Permission?
He was never a saint. He was never a religious or patient man. But if it should ever come to it, he likes to believe, when it matters, he might be judged a good one.
Garrus stops waiting. He wanted his damn moment, and he's looking it square in the face, and his finger's on the trigger, and he decides —
He decides. That in itself somehow means more to him than he wonders if Shepard will ever recognize.
The thing about knowing Shepard is that she has never kept him questioning for long. When a problem appears, a response from the Normandy will be swift and immediate; when an N7 and Spectre plans a course of action, there are no half-measures.
Which is why it shouldn't surprise him when she comes to him one day in the battery with a joke that sounds a bit more serious than he thinks she meant for it to be. But it does.
It shouldn't surprise him when she comes back later to clear the air, concerned over his hesitant response, he clings to an admittedly vain hope she might drop the topic so that he can go back to ignoring this, this whatever-this-is — but it does.
And when he replies a bit enthusiastically — "I, um, I can do that, I'll find some music, do some — research?" — he isn't surprised to find he means it genuinely. He does.
Garrus has learned to exist within Shepard's world with more ease than he knows he would have ever found within C-Sec. Garrus has dedicated his life struggling to carve a space for himself in the galaxy; has spent two years wondering if his skills and morals will ever be valued together, or if all of attempts to do good will continue to force him to sacrifice one for the other; wondering if one day, their combination might ever make him an effective leader in his own right.
Right now, though, he's every other bachelor who's ever had feelings for a woman. Somewhere out in the galaxy, he swears he can hear his father laugh, but in the warm battery of the Normandy as they drift past the Nubian Expanse, the burden of his team feels just that bit lighter, and he's all right for that.
(He keeps her waiting sometimes, too.
"Should I book the room?" she'd asked him in the battery, and underneath her teasing he detected a note of seriousness, an underlying question if he was ready, a opportunity to back out if he wasn't.
He gives her a half-answer. Like a damn fool, he wrings his hands and stalls, hoping for a time in the vague and undefined future when the thought of — relations with Shepard doesn't make his mouth dry or his heart stutter out of sheer nerves. He delays, he dances around the subject, until it's almost too late, and suddenly they don't have months or weeks but two short hours before they pass through the Omega-4 relay into the unknown.
He took too long. He was nearly late. He brings her a bottle of wine in apology. Something in him easies when she smiles.
The rest is for their eyes alone.)
4.
Their first argument — their first real argument — he sees coming, though it helps to lie and tell himself he doesn't. Garrus knows he falls into the trap, and quite often at that, of believing Shepard-the-Spectre an unstoppable force of nature, having seen so little evidence against, but Shepard-the-woman is still human with foibles and just as prone to bad luck in the field as the next soldier.
The argument starts in bed, escalating from an innocent question and a tense response, because he's never been good at timing.
"So you want, what?" She puts her hands up, a sort of hold-everything gesture, then runs them both down her face as if attempting to pull the stress straight from her forehead. "You're suggesting I bring a seven-foot turian in military-grade armor with a twenty-kilogram sniper rifle strapped to his back while on infiltration?"
"At least take Kasumi," he argues. However unnerving the thought of her diving into a hostile batarian gulag without him is, the thought of her going it completely alone leaves his plates cold. "Everything I hear about this mission is just another reason backup sounds necessary."
"Hackett only needs one agent," she says, and shoves a sleeveless top back over her head, and if he hears the words Hackett's orders one more time, he thinks his nails are going to break the skin of his palms. Shepard roots around for her pants on the left side of the bed — already the warm mood she'd greeted him with from earlier is fading, and he feels ridiculous, suddenly, for remaining bare in her bed here, overstaying his welcome. He reaches down and grabs her trousers from his side of the bed, handing them to her silently; she grunts a thanks and continues. "What's the point in sending two or three when one can do the job?"
"Sorry, Shepard," he says incredulously, "am I talking to the woman who packs heat every time she steps onto Presidium just in case?"
"You know, the N7 over there wasn't slapped on with glue," she snaps back. The ferociousness is somewhat diminished by the fact that from this angle, she's one-legged and still struggling to put her pants on.
Because there's no point in delaying, he gathers his own clothes from the floor and begins dressing. Of all of the times they've done this, this post-relief come down, this time is the first that he leaves her bed feeling worse than when he joined her in it.
"I didn't spend two years," she grunts with a final shove, and her leg is through, "busting my ass to earn it and listen to questions about my proficiency now. Is this going to be a regular thing, now that you've seen me naked?"
He's just worked his shirt over his head when he's struck with the fierce epiphany that she believes his protests stem from doubt over her capabilities — or worse, perhaps, fear of losing his respect some time between joining her bed all those weeks ago and deciding to stay. Instead of clarity, he feels suddenly and thoroughly incensed, his honor hurt, that she might expect that sort of tactless disrespect from him, that this is a question of her proficiency, after everything they've done, everything he's seen her through —
"I've seen this from a lot officers, Shepard, but never expected from you," he fires back. He's now fully dressed and he steps away, back to the fishtank. She's sunk into one of the low armchairs along the portside wall, wearing nothing but jeans and a tanktop and an expression of sheer annoyance, as though he's only an irritation to be dealt with, a crew complaint she's forcing herself to listen to. A look he's seen her direct at uncooperative citizens and criminals and the occasional rowdy crewmate, but never at him. "You remember Kryik," he says, "or should I remind you what happened to him? Is this lone agent alpha behavior bullshit just a side effect of being appointed Spectrehood?"
"Yeah, Garrus, it comes with the badge," she snaps. "While we're at it, you have any other complaints about how I arrange my team lineups? Most crewmembers who file grievances with my command have the courtesy to wait until I'm fully fucking dressed, but, you know, while we're here?"
"Yeah, just one," he spits out. Something in his chest is clenched tight. "'Cause I was really hoping my CO had worked the death wish out of her system after the SR-1, but it seems that was too much to expect. You know what happened to the woman who gave all those speeches about nobody left behind, refusing to let a friend fight alone? Or does she just come out for show when the cameras are looking?"
Shepard brings her fingers to her temples again for a long moment, and Garrus wonders briefly if he's gone too far. The shadows under her eyes look deeper than they had even five minutes ago. Before he can question it, she lowers her hand and gestures at the door without looking at him. In a rough, low tone: "Get out of my cabin, Vakarian."
He holds on for a second longer, staring back for a long, incredulous moment, hardly daring to believe this sort of childish response. But if he was expecting her to change her mind, he would have been disappointed; her face only grows harder.
Even poor turians know when they're not welcome.
Ramrod straight and unapologetic, he clenches his jaw and obeys.
He waits for two days.
It'd be disingenuous to pretend that he hadn't been counting the time. Shepard had allotted eleven hours to infiltrate the prison and extract Kenson. They expected contact within fifteen.
She's been radio silent for twenty-five and counting.
Lawson is an efficient XO. Garrus is certain she'd had Plans B and C ready before Shepard had even briefed the crew they'd be making the trip to Aratoht. If Shepard doesn't make contact by hour forty, she and Kasumi will take the shuttle to the landing zone north of the gulag for a planned SAR operation, discretion be damned. At Garrus's insistence, she had reluctantly added his name to the team, with a look as she did so that seemed a little too pointed to feel casual.
He couldn't give a damn if she knows. Even Shepard's omnitool has gone offline. EDI should've been able to wiretap a status even trapped behind a mile of batarian steel. A disabled tool would have been telling: Shepard had powered it down herself before disembarking so as to not alert hostile signals to her presence, but EDI had maintained steady readings on its location up through hour fifteen. At hour fifteen and seven minutes, the signal was no longer broadcasting a status at all. There was nothing to hear.
Hour thirty-four.
Jacob is starting to look annoyed at Garrus's pacing in the armory, so he throws himself into one of the workstations — typical Cerberus, the tile is so bloody pristine in here, how does Taylor anything ever get done? — and patiently disassembles his Widow. Fiddling to keep his hands occupied, he recalls Miranda's order of stealth being of the essence, and adds a silencer to his pistol.
Hour thirty-five.
Fuck discretion. Garrus reassembles his rifle and removes the silencer, opting instead for an assault rifle. Shepard's been trapped in a hostile batarian prison for a full cycle, if she's not dead already, and he should've gone with, he should've insisted —
"Don't mark the table," Jacob says. Out of the corner of his eye Garrus notes Jacob is a workstation over and watching Garrus with — unbelievable — concern, of all things.
Garrus grunts in response and doesn't look up.
Thirty-six.
Kasumi joins him in the armory. Jacob had departed for the night shift half an hour ago. She settles like a ghost in the corner, guns already prepped, mouth unsmiling below her hood. Occasionally she glitches out of vision only to appear seconds later across the room, staring out at the window to the drive core below. They don't speak.
Thirty-seven.
Miranda's name flashes over his visor as an incoming call pushes forward. There are three hours until departure, but Garrus has his firearms holstered and is halfway out the armory when the audio patches through, Kasumi a shadow behind him.
"Negate operations." Her voice comes out in a rushed breath, and Garrus is momentarily stunned. She sounds like she's sprinting. "We've had contact. Meet us at the airlock."
"What's her status?"
"Shepard's requesting extraction. She initiated — "
"What's her status, Miranda?"
"That's all I have, Vakarian," she says, and a part of him registers that Miranda Lawson, so valued for her perfection and professionalism, is currently too distracted to remark or chastise him for impertinence. "We'll see soon enough, won't we?"
At hour thirty-nine, they have Shepard, alive and stable in the medbay, and they have the ruins of a small solar system on the edge of the galaxy left in their wake. The Normandy cruises gently toward the Citadel, leaving every passenger inside with a muted sense of shellshock, as though everyone inside is trapped within the aftermath of a bomb explosion that only they were to witness.
With the CIC directing their course above, the off duty crew and a members of ground teams have gathered in the mess. The quiet is so thick it nearly has a name and presence, but no one wants to break it, no one wants to dare.
"'Z anyone know what happens when a system goes like that?" Jack surprises most of the hall by speaking up, lifting her bare head to look around the room, almost in challenge. Nobody replies.
After several moments, Samara speaks serenely from where she stands still by the starboard lounge entrance. "It would have been immediate."
Garrus spies Thane sitting at one of the long tables surrounded by a dozen solemn humans. His head is bowed, as if in prayer.
This is getting them nowhere. Admiral Hackett of the Systems Alliance is en route to intercept them for an in-person debrief, and Garrus decides he's had enough.
He feels eyes on him as he strides to the door of the medbay and lets himself in.
Chakwas is in the corner, typing up what looks like a diagnostic report. Shepard is lying on one of the cots, facing away from him.
"No, Officer Vakarian, the Commander will not be taking visitors now," Chakwas says without turning around.
"Yes I will," Shepard says in a rough voice, surprising both of them. She rolls over.
She'd looked better after coming back to life, is his first embarrassing thought. After two days under sedation she's concerningly pale, with dark shadows around her eyes, but she has strength enough to push herself up, which she demonstrates quickly when she spots him in the doorway. One of her arms trembles with the strain of the movement.
"I'm fine, Karin. Yes, really." Shepard rolls her sleeve down, covering an IV injection tucked into the skin on the inside of her elbow. With her other arm she motions for him to take a seat at her bedside, which he does after some hesitation, eyeing Chakwas warily. He feels a bit like circling a mother varren to approach her charge.
"Five minutes," Chakwas says firmly. "If you push it — " She raises her right hand and taps her omnitool warningly. " — I'll know. Garrus, don't let her out of that bed."
"Aye, ma'am," he says, and watches as she exits. The light on the door blinks red after she's gone.
They're alone. He's not sure what to do first. If she were turian, she'd already be giving him a mission brief, involved as they are or not. He finds himself wondering if it's appropriate to — shit, hold her hand? Stroke her hair? All of the human relationship advice on the web has proven thoroughly useless when faced with a woman like Shepard, who breaks typical rules of engagement by just existing in a galaxy that doesn't seem to know what to do with her.
But something in him clenches when he looks at her, and he thinks, to hell with it. He reaches out to place his hand just next to her left, an invitation. After a brief pause, her fingers curl around two of his.
The medbay is very quiet.
"I," she starts.
"Shepard — "
She shakes her head, and he cuts himself off.
"I messed up," she says finally. Garrus watches her; her eyes are trained on the windows looking out into the mess, which have been shielded dark to prevent the more curious peeking in from outside.
He decides not to acknowledge this. "You okay?" he asks quietly.
"Just — take an apology, okay?" Her voice is rough. "You were right."
"I don't care," he says, and when she starts to shake her head, he continues: "I don't, Shepard. Are you okay?"
She takes a breath and her gaze hardens. "I crashed an asteroid into a relay."
So it wasn't an accident. Garrus pauses to take that in.
"Three hundred thousand people," she mutters under her breath.
He squeezes her hand. "Reapers back in the picture, then?"
She rips her hand out of his and scrubs her eyes with both palms. "Would you just — accept that I messed up? You were right. I should've taken down a team. I don't need your sympathy or your — your support on this one. I don't deserve it."
"That's fortunate, because you don't have it," Garrus says plainly. He tries his best to feel as confident as he sounds when she looks up at him, wary. "You knew the risks of going in alone," he continues, "and you turned away to every piece of tactical advice your team offered."
Shepard looks at him. "I did," she agrees quietly.
"I don't know why," he says to her. Something tight within him makes him reach forward — her hair is falling in her face, covering one eye — and he tucks the strands behind her ear, then lingers against her chin, holding her jaw gently. "I don't know if it would've made a difference if we'd been there. But I stood by Commander Shepard when the Council refused to indict Saren, and when the Reaper threat was dismissed as a terrorist attack. I believed her when the universe called her a liar. If she says there was no other way, I'm standing by her now."
"Yeah, well." Shepard grips the edge of the cot with both hands and closes her eyes, as though preparing for an invisible gust to sweep her away. "The way things are going for her this year, Commander Shepard's going to be tried for war crimes against the Hegemony and lose her rank in six months on a dishonorable discharge." She opens her eyes and sighs. "There. I just had to — say that out loud."
"Commander?" Joker's tinny voice pops over the intercom, sounding tense, with a forced tone of formality. "Admiral Hackett of the SSR Sydney is within the system and en route. Approximate arrival, one hour. Would you like me to pass along a message?"
"No," Shepard says firmly. Her voice carries a bit stronger to the ceiling, but it seems to take extra effort, with her brow furrowed and her eyes closed. "But call — shit," she stops herself, seems to make up her mind about something, and continues with a shake of her head. "Call the Guinness Galactic Records. You're about to witness the longest, most volatile dressing-down ever delivered to an N7 in galactic history."
There's a long a pause, in which Garrus — if he isn't mistaken — hears Joker snort quietly, as though he's not sure if he's allowed to. "Aye, ma'am," he says, and then: "Just to let you know, if the words dishonorable or discharge are even whispered during the next two hours, EDI says she's prepared to join you in galactic history as the first AI to eject an Alliance admiral into space." The noticeable click of the com silencing goes off before Shepard can respond.
"I need to speak to Steven in private." He looks back down at her; she's speaking to his collar. With her hair in her face again, he can't tell if she's avoiding his eyes, or just submitting to exhaustion. "He'll need to read a summary report that I haven't written yet."
Garrus nods and rises. He reaches over to Chakwas's table and rummages for a spare datapad linked to the network, and hands it to Shepard, who takes it with a murmur of thanks. She seems unwilling to continue, unmoving. Still standing, he looks down at her then and there, and decides…
There's still so much unsaid, and her words from days earlier drift traitorously into the back of his mind, insisting that he's overstepping, that he's unwanted in these private moments of hers, that he can't understand a human hint to leave —
He makes his exit to the door.
"Garrus," Shepard says, and he turns immediately. "The admiral shouldn't be more than an hour. I still…"
Garrus watches her for one long, lost moment.
"I've asked a lot of you lately," Shepard says finally. "I need to ask one thing more." She looks so tired now, in this flourescent light — more than the dark eyes, the pale skin, the way her hair falls limp beside her face. There's something beyond her posture that's tugging at him, something in her nature that awakens multiple longings within him, a desire to see her happy, a craving to see her to safety. But that's not who she is, and he knows the both of them too well to believe she would ever stay there, and that he could ever do anything but gladly follow.
Shepard looks at him, pale eyes and bone tired, and he thinks in this moment that this whole — this tension thing, this blowing-off-steam thing, spirits, it might be something realer than that, and instead of terror, he feels no fear, no anticipation, nothing but the slow and dawning acceptance as a door opens up within him and he thinks, oh.
He'll take it to his grave, but he's not afraid. And Shepard will never have to know.
She asks him: "Wait for me upstairs?"
And he nods. Like it's the easiest decision he's ever made — perhaps it is. "I'll be there."
Garrus has long stopped counting the time. If a bibliographer were to ever put his life to words, spread his history out like a tapestry for analysis and discovery, he's sure the more romantically inclined might speculate he's been waiting for her most of his life. He exits the medbay and finds that it doesn't really matter to him. After two long years, two agonizing days, two heart-stopping minutes — keeping two quiet, steady hours safe for her to come home to him, just upstairs, is nothing.
5.
The thing about waiting for Shepard — the thing he'd thought he'd learned by now — is that it never, ever gets any easier.
Garrus likes to think he's had more experience than most. But nothing prepares him for Despoina, for the ocean that stretches across a planet, for the mech that Shepard climbs into on a moment's notice, preparing to dive without a thought for how she might come back up.
But Shepard —
I can't swim. I'd be useless. You're terrified of drowning. You might not come back.
I'll be fine.
There's only room for one. He clenches his jaw and nods.
When the mech lifts off and jumps down over the edge of the platform, Shepard is swallowed by the sea in an instant. Within seconds, the mech disappears under the waves, and Garrus finds himself holding his breath, as if he were right there alongside her.
One hour passes.
The Reapers keep them busy. Tali's suit hisses at a small rupture. Garrus covers her as she patches it just as a brute comes barreling down the way. He feels his elbow crack when a large fist slams him into the side of the Kodiak — and then the beast's head explodes in a mess of blood and brain matter. Bits of it hit his helmet. Cortez has a shotgun aimed his way in the distance, Garrus blinks the stars in his eyes aside, and he gets back on his feet.
An hour and a half.
A pause in the Reaper assault. They lock down and restock in the shuttle, and prepare for the next wave.
Tali checks and double-checks her magazines. Garrus swallows down two water bottles and listens to the ping of Cortez's tracker as it follows Shepard's mech on the little panel at the front. She's still sinking to the ocean floor. It blinks down, down, dow —
It disappears.
Garrus is over his shoulder in an instant. "Did it glitch?"
"I'll reset the ID code," Cortez says. He fiddles with the signal, inputs the coordinates once again, reboots the system. When the signal flickers out and doesn't reappear, he doesn't answer.
The system is correct. The mech's simply disappeared.
An hour forty-five.
There's blood staining his visor, and the rainwater is messing up the display — that'll be a pain in the ass to get out later — and Tali cries when what sounds like a small body hits the ground with a dull THUD behind him. Garrus whips around; three husks, one of them all but legless, have grabbed her by the feet and arms, dragging her across the surface of the paneling —
He takes care of two of them within seconds, sinks firing as fast as he can make them, but his gun clicks, and the third husk has her at the edge of the water. He's switched to his Widow within seconds, but Tali's feet are skirting the top of the waves and there's no time to aim — Garrus charges.
He nearly slips on the wet panel, water in his eyes and soaking his armor, but he manages to swing into the beast with the butt of his rifle. The thing goes flying outward, a good five-meter soar before it falls into the water with a faint splash.
Shit, he thinks wildly as he helps Tali up, Even Wrex might've been proud of that.
"I think it's sprained," Tali grits out.
"It might be broken," Garrus says as they limp back to Cortez. That's the last of them, for now. "Let's get you to the shuttle."
At two and a half hours, their clips are depressingly low, Cortez is in the air, and Garrus lets himself start preparing for the worst.
Tali shoots from the Kodiak's doors, unable to move further with her swollen ankles. Two brutes are closing in, accompanied by five husks on his right, three on the left. They can't hold ground forever —
"Mech signal's back online!" Cortez's shouts from the cockpit. "She's — it's — "
Garrus's stomach plummets as a large, aquatic thresher maw erupts from the waves on his right, a tunnel of water shooting straight up from the sea. It spews grime and seawater down on them below —
Except no, that's not right, maws don't live underwater —
Garrus gets a clear look at the thing only when it crashes down onto the ship's broken panels, and he nearly feels his heart stop. It's the mech.
It staggers forward two shaky steps, then one knee goes down. It shutters to a halt and drops forward.
The hatch opens — a dark-haired figure falls out —
He's already running. "Shepard's back," he yells into his earpiece as the brutes begin to charge, "Cortez! Cortez! Can you hear me?! Talk to me — !"
Later, he wakes in the middle of the night gasping for breath. He wakes and nearly chokes to death on seawater, the pressure's in his ears because he's right there with her, water is pooling into his throat through the sides of his mouth, he's drowning and drowning and he can't —
"Garrus," Shepard's voice says, and his eyes snap open for good.
It's dark in her cabin. Middle of the night cycle. He'd only gone to sleep an hour ago. The aquarium is the only source of light in the loft; it floods the front half of her quarters with a low blue glow. The occasional shadow flickers across her model ships as a fish swims by, but he can't look at that now, can't stare at the water for too long without beginning to think he might be trapped on the other side of the glass, so he turns away.
He can barely make out her form above, a hazy but familiar figure in the darkness. She's looking down at him, and her hand's on his ruined mandible. He turns into her palm and closes his eyes.
It had been so real.
Garrus had read once, so long ago now, in a childhood school lesson on early interspecies literature. A story about a lovesick human who lived on one side of a strait of water, and fell in love with a woman who lived on the other. With their overbearing families and even the divine gods disapproving of their match, he would clandestinely swim across the strait every night to convince her of his love, and she would light a lamp every evening to guide his way.
Even knowing many humans can swim without fear of drowning or death, Garrus remembers wondering as a child how much the man must have adored her, how must have loved her more than his own life, to go through such an ordeal twice every night with only a distant fire to guide his way. How much faith she must have had to wait every evening, to keep a candle lit, to say goodbye every evening and trust he would return.
The average human body can swim with relatively little distress. The turian body is — ill-equipped, is perhaps the kindest word. He would have been useless to her, down below. He could do nothing but stand on the shore and wait.
Shepard's fingers trace his jaw now, where the scars pattern his neck, and he opens his eyes to look up at her. Still dark, but the sight of the water in the distance, glowing blue-silver at the edges of his vision, no longer feels like a warning.
"Garrus," she says, and he shakes his head.
"I need you to do something for me."
There's a pause. "Okay."
"I need you to promise me you'll come back."
He still can't see her in the dark, but he knows what she's about to say a moment before she does.
"I always do."
He'd looked up the story later, as an adult. The strait exists to this day, and it has a name, and a measurable distance. The man in the story swam six kilometers, back and forth, every night. Just half of the Citadel's diameter. Right now, that distance seems seems so wide, but for a woman like Shepard, it might just be close enough to manage. Just might.
6.
And one day, long after the war, Garrus walks into his backyard to water the plants, only to find them torn up from the ground. He follows the trail, a mess of stringy roots and flattened leaves, all the way around the rear of the house. Beyond the shed, a sole figure is hunched over with a spade next to a small mountain of upturned dirt. Shepard is digging.
Garrus watches her.
"What is it?" he asks after a moment.
"My grave," she replies without looking up.
He offers without thinking: "Need a hand?"
He picks up a shovel and haves at it. The hole grows deeper with every passing minute, dirt building up around the edges, spilling onto his boots.
"You don't have to do this," he protests. His shovel hits the earth with a low thump. He's hit bedrock.
"You don't have to help," she says, to which he has no response. She's right. He doesn't.
When the hole has grown large enough to cover his waist, he stops. Shepard has climbed up out of the hole, staring up at the stars. It's midday, but the stars are bright on Mindoir, and the moon hangs low in the blue dusky sky. You don't get quiet, peaceful views like this on Palaven, where the pale moons drift by each other in pink and orange sunsets, where the radiation feels like a warm blanket on his plates on thick summer days.
Garrus cranes his neck back to look up at Shepard, who hasn't moved an inch.
"This isn't over yet," he tells her.
She doesn't reply.
Garrus is next to her, moving forward, one hand reaching out to stroke her hair. He's suddenly parched for her touch after so long without, needs to feel her alive next to him, needs —
The morning alarm bleats into his ear and he wakes alone in his bed. The New Citadel's artificial sunlight streams through his curtains. He turns the alarm off and stares at the ceiling for a minute more, indulging in a rare moment of weakness and lethargy.
He'll be expected at his desk in an hour. Victus needs the full report on supplies for the Takama colonies by noon. His nephew's birthday is coming up. Renee from the Spectre Requisitions office asked him out for coffee yesterday.
Shepard is still gone.
The thing about loving Shepard is that time has proven, again and again, that it always comes down to patience.
Life goes on.
Garrus attends a memorial for his mother, now a year passed. Garrus sees Solana remarried with a nurse she'd met during the extraction from Cipritine, sees Tali's first house, sees Liara establish a new base for Broker communications.
He opens his front door to find his father, five months after the war's end, now out of retirement, joining him on the Citadel to help. He swallows, and invites him inside.
The politicians debate. They pacify. They trade. There are pirates in the Iera system. There are scavengers growing more aggressive in the Terminus. He is appointed head of security for the entire Citadel Space — a desk job, but necessary. If Pallin were still alive, he'd be his superior. Garrus wants to laugh, but just can't quite find it in him.
He sees the Citadel rebuilt. He meets Jacob's child once, a bubbly girl endlessly fascinated by the bright lights of his cracked visor. He sees Vega graduate to the fifth level of N-school, fail, attempt again, achieve N7 on his second try. He sees him and Cortez adopt several animals rescued from Earth, thinks about her, how she had laughed at the prospect of settling down, how she had told him once — If we do, if we do, I always liked dogs — and Garrus keeps that memory close on days when the flat feels just a little too empty, even when his father is just asleep in the other room.
He sees the geth flicker back online. Sees EDI join them six months later, a single blue light clicking out responses to their prompts in binary, but it's her, typing zero one zero zero one zero zero zero — HELLO JEFF — and Joker nearly weeps, right there in the lab in front of all the engineers.
And every week, he makes the trip down to the lower wards. It's quiet down here, a change from the old Citadel's nightclubs and bars — now the lowest tip is a refurbished hospital, a small medical facility at the bottom of the universe. Reserved for recovering patients and soldiers, it's quiet, and it's private.
Every week, he enters the northern wing and spends the afternoon within room 334, and doesn't leave until visiting hours are over.
He pulls up a chair by her bedside. He reads, sometimes, or does work when he can't avoid it; when he's particularly lonely, he can't help but talk. Even now, her room still sees fresh flowers, long out of the public eye but never forgotten, not by those who knew her. Occasionally he makes the trip with Tali; busy though she always is, she always seems to make time for her friends. Sometimes it's Williams who he finds reading poetry by her bedside; Spectre Williams, who now splits her duties equally between the Council and Alliance, never quite able to leave her family legacy of military life for good.
But he is the most recurring visitor, the most patient, in her room without fail every week no matter his mood or schedule. And when the hospital staff mention this to him, he isn't surprised. He knows he's had the most experience.
One day, her number of visitors totals two.
"I should've realized."
Garrus turns and puts his datapad down, careful not to let the shock of hearing that voice here show too much in his posture. His father stands halfway in the doorway, arms politely crossed.
"Your sister told me to keep well enough alone," he continues. His tone is unreadable. "I apologize if I'm unwelcome."
In another universe, he might be. Turians are traditionally quite strict about hospital visitation; anyone but family, direct superiors, and clan members are politely rejected. That Shepard only has the crew of the Normandy to care to visit has always stung something within Garrus. That she never got to know his family as her own twists the knife a little deeper.
But humans don't operate by the same rules; he can't imagine Shepard rejecting the company. Perhaps this is why Garrus says, "You're not." He uncrosses his knees and pulls up another chair quietly, not allowing the legs to drag against the tiled floors. After a beat, his father joins him.
They sit in silence for a moment.
"Solana told you not to come?" Garrus continues.
His dad sighs, rubbing at his left mandible; an old habit of exhaustion, one Garrus had unthinkingly adopted himself as he rose the ranks within C-Sec.
"I know that I," he starts. Shakes his head. Tries again. "I hadn't been… kind in judging your loyalty to your mission in the past."
Garrus doesn't respond.
"Or to your commander," his father acknowledges with a drop of his head. "I may be too late to apologize to her. But I can to you."
"None needed."
"You're more forgiving than your sister. She's cross with me at the moment."
"Mm?"
"Yes." His dad sighs and looks out the window. There's nothing in the view today except long-distant stars, but he watches the window as though he's never seen anything quite like it. "She's under the impression I'm here to start a row over your relationship with the commander."
Ah. There it is.
"If that's what you think, too," his dad takes a breath. "Then I'm afraid I've failed you as a parent in more ways than one."
His throat is suddenly parched. Garrus swallows. "How'd you find out?"
"Nothing so obvious," his dad replies, then pauses. "Things have added up, Garrus. If you ever feared my rebuking the choices you make in your personal life — "
His neck feels warm. "Dad — "
"But you're here without fail, every week." His father looks at him now. "I apologize if I overstep."
Garrus scrubs a hand down his face; a gesture he picked up from Shepard, he's certain, which is probably telling most of all, but he can't quite bring himself to care.
Their relationship now still feels raw some days, like Garrus isn't sure where to step, how to avoid the landmines that dot their past. It had taken him three months to work up the courage to ask about his mother — his mother, who had passed as he had been trapped in the Collector base, whose funeral he had missed when Shepard was navigating a hostile batarian prison. There weren't words for how he had failed his clan, and his father had wasted none on him when he returned to Cipritine three weeks later. That they still have a relationship at all, that his father traveled without a moment's hesitation all the way to the Citadel to help his son around the apartment when his leg was still bogged down with splints and cybernetics — some days, it seems a miracle in itself.
"I didn't come here to embarrass you."
Garrus swallows. "Then did you need to talk about something?"
His father makes an abortive gesture with his hand, almost as though he had meant to put his hand on his shoulder, then thought the better of it.
"I can't tell you what you already know about her," he says slowly. "But if there's a reason you've been so careful not to discuss her with me, I… want to make it clear. The time for grudges is long past. I'm always an ear if you need it, Garrus."
Garrus keeps his eyes trained firmly on Shepard. Her hair is longer than she normally keeps it; he sees that someone, probably a nurse, has braided a few small strands together on her left side. So quiet and calm like this, she might just be sleeping.
"Would it surprise you," he says, and he's half ashamed that his voice sounds so pained, that his subvocals are so rough he nearly sounds hoarse, "to know we were serious?"
His father says nothing, but Garrus feels a comforting hand on his elbow.
They sit in quiet for a while; the silence no longer feels tense or expecting, but understanding, as though a window has been just barely opened, and a breeze is finally entering the room. Eventually, they'll talk about his father's upcoming promotion, well-deserved and obvious as it may be; eventually, they'll talk about Garrus's upcoming trip to Palaven, the scheduling gymnastics he will have to make to arrange so that he can make it back here on the dot. Eventually they'll talk domestic things, what to do for dinner and who should sleep on the couch when Solana arrives for a visit with her children next month.
When his father leaves, he almost breathes out a sigh of relief. Some tension in him has eased, though he's not certain how to put a name to it, or even if it will still be there tomorrow.
Eventually, he has to believe this waiting will pay off. Some days, like now, it's easier to pretend than others. Some days his worst fears are arriving in room 334 to find an empty bed, and a solemn nurse. He traps himself in the worst kind of fantasies: remaining in this room until the lights finally turn off, attending a second memorial, learning to adjust his language from is and will be to had been and was.
On other days, he knows that if there is bad news to come, he has already been through the worst of it. The day he'd first visited this room, back when it was unfamiliar and the silence felt like an oppressive blanket instead of a peaceful transition, he'd heard the words no way of knowing how long, and he'd sat at her bedside for the longest time. He thought of everything she had done and deserved, everything they might have done, and tried to convince himself that it was still possible. And yet the worst moment of all of it came hours later, when his stomach growled, and he realized the day was nearly over, and that he still had a life to live outside these walls.
In his hand, Shepard's fingers twitch. He tightens his own.
He's long stopped counting the time. Outside Shepard's hospital window, in the corner of his eye, he spies an asteroid belt in the distance, bright winking dots against a wide and endless black expanse; it's a beautiful sight to wake up to.
He clenches her hand and holds his breath. He waits.
Notes: The story that Garrus refers to is the Greek myth of Hero and Leander. The body of water that separates the main characters is the Hellespont, now known as the Dardanelles, which is located in northwestern Turkey.