Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect, nor do I have anything to do with the franchise or BioWare. There are sexual themes with xenophilia in this story and some violence and profanity.

There are crates stacked everywhere, acting as cover for enemy and ally alike. Where are the allies, at the moment? Knowing the commander, most likely circling around to flank. Garrus rolls out and takes a shot at the drone he'd known to be hovering behind the wall, and he bursts through looking for more to take down. More gunfire erupts from his right, and he slams a shoulder past the next corner, taking a breath before he will take his chance in taking out the next one. Bullets rain everywhere, the smell of battle, the feel of adrenaline-achieved alertness... This is what Garrus needs right now. Spirits, this is satisfying.

There is a blast from a thrown grenade, and Garrus lurches forward again, switching out his sniper rifle for assault. He finds himself barreling through a column of flaming smoke—thankfully without any issue outside of a fizzle in his shields—and slams through a door, following his leader. The sooty smoke has bleared his eyes and muffled his ears for a short moment. He coughs a bit when he hears the door slide behind him, secure in the knowledge that the enemy hasn't followed, and allows himself to double over a moment to breathe in fresh air.

And how fresh it is! He opens his eyes to the bright sights and smells of Palaven... the garden just outside of his childhood home. The light of the sun rains down clear white light that glistens easily on the dew of the tall grasses and ferns surrounding him.

Instead of questioning it, Garrus gives a huff, and remembers his favorite basking rock should be near. It has been a while since he last relaxed. Not that he hasn't had the chance... but it's been so hard to sit still. From here, the rock should be just past the jewel fruit tree, to the left of the large green canopy... Yes, right there it is. A large, grey boulder of igneous rock, its pleasing, organic shape sloped towards the afternoon sun it soaks in, with enough expanse for a full-grown turian to sprawl upon.

And a very nude Commander Shepard was already sprawled on it.

Garrus had seen naked humans before. You see almost everything working in C-Sec, and that included breaking up some public indecency or a few illegal prostitution calls for nearly every species that has any sort of representation on the Citadel. Hell, humans could be the most creative about the flavor of how they were naked together. But the armor-clad Shepard... that's a little different.

Still, he wants to bask, and the rock was certainly big enough to share. He hurriedly pulls off his armor as Shepard napped, breathing languidly like he wasn't even there. And he hopes she stays that way until he finally makes it to her. And she does. His plates glinting in the sunlight, he approaches and look down at his commander's exposed form.

She's human. She shouldn't be exposed to Palaven's sun like this. It could damage her.

Ever the thoughtful soldier, he blocks his commander's body with the shadow of his own. Her eyes flutter open at the intrusion of space, but a smile spreads across her face and her cool hand comes up to stroke his fringe. He shivers and presses his body into hers. Soft, warm, cool... spirits, the sensations of it all. He nibbles at her shoulder and she writhes up into his hips.

As her hands move, fingers dance. More fingers than he can think about. They dance between and over his plates, they massage the softer areas, they spider-walk across his shifting lower plates and make him buck a little bit. He's purring and growling her name in response, licking deep into the column of her neck, her exposed clavicle... anywhere. She tastes a lot like the stone she lays upon, he thinks. Like hard minerals despite the tenderness of her flesh.

Her strong, smooth legs fit in around his waist and he's inside her, biting and licking and feasting while he fucks her, the hot sun-soaked rock below them deliciously scorching his thighs as he loses himself in the inviting softness. The sounds she makes fly past his ears like a song, and then she mutters things to him in that low, smoky voice. Sexy things. Forbidden things. Secrets of the universe. Secrets from beyond the grave.

Wait. Shepard is dead.

Garrus woke up abruptly in his Citadel apartment, thighs against the hard warmth of the heating unit by his bed, and half-burrowed in shredded bedding, soaked with more of his fluids than he'd care to admit.

One generous clean-up and a trip to the trash disposal later, Garrus found himself facing the fact he had just had a wet dream about his dead human commander. He hadn't even had one cause him to orgasm like that since... before boot camp? He took in the scent of the room, and breathed out with disappointment. With the fresh scent of cleaning products and the stale scent of mechanics that pervaded the entire Citadel, it didn't smell like Palaven, or a battlefield, and certainly didn't smell like Shepard. His shoulders felt cool despite the high heat he kept his room.

Implications aside, he really did wish he could just go back to sleep and submerge back into the world of that dream. It had been two months since he saw Shepard or any real action, a full month since she died. Spectre training wasn't nearly as satisfying as any of that, and the political games that the council played was making him lose more and more hope that he even could even make a difference as a Spectre.

What would happen when he finishes up and he still can't stop the Reapers?

He pulled on his clothing and armor to get ready for another day of—likely useless—training. What else could he do? The dream world wasn't real, and even ignoring that, he was now far too awake to try to fall asleep again.

Residue feelings of the dream hung over him through the whole morning. When they broke about midday, instead of taking his lunch there, he took himself to an entirely separate ward and found a bar. Two months hadn't entirely fixed up the Citadel, yet, and he was just about as likely now to trip over a traffic-clogging Keeper as anything else, but it didn't take the citizens two days to set up working bars and clubs, again. C-Sec didn't even have the time to regroup and charge them for operating without licenses.

No skin off his nose, because he wasn't C-Sec anymore and, right now, he needed a drink.

He had drained three tall glasses and was wondering about the time over his fourth when he heard someone calling his name. The voice seemed familiar but he couldn't place it, and when he turned to find who it was, he found a human with a face that he had very much the same trouble with. A serious-looking man, somewhat scruffy in presentation, leaned heavily on crutches.

Oh! Crutches! "Joker?"

"Well, if it isn't my favorite former crew-mate," Joker said sarcastically, but the note lacked any real humor. Though it had only been two months since they really spoke, he somehow struck Garrus as looking much older than he remembered. A smirk quirked half-heartedly on Joker's lips and he took it upon himself to set down his crutches and sit beside Garrus. "...You're in Spectre training, right?"

"Right. I'm a little surprised to see you, Joker. I didn't recognize you for a second." Which was odd, because he really didn't look any different from before. No extra or fewer lines, maybe more beard and hair. "I'm surprised you're here and not glued to the chair of a new ship."

Joker's brows furrowed, but a more natural-looking grin split his face. "Yeah, well, the Alliance seems to have better uses for my talents. Like, you know, letting them rot ground-side."

"They grounded you? Why the hell would they do that?"

"They cited health and mental wellness reasons." Joker caught his falling grin with a drink from the shot that was poured for him. He hadn't even stopped to order it, a testament to exactly how much time he'd been spending at this particular establishment. "But, really, it's because they can't have the pilot of the ship that went down with the great Commander Shepard be all active and willing to tell people that it wasn't the geth that attacked us when the Council is far too happy to say otherwise."

"It wasn't the geth?" No one told him anything about that, even at the funeral. He just had official reports to go on. "Spirits, Joker, what the hell happened?"

"It took me by surprise, too. We saw the ship approaching... a huge spiraling behemoth, nothing I'd ever seen. Whatever it was, it wasn't the geth. It didn't fly like the geth. It didn't send the same signals as the geth. And it spotted us despite that stealth systems were still active and operational. The geth never found us like that before."

"If it wasn't the geth... someone else with the Reapers? Maybe they have more armaments to their disposal than we know?"

"Hell if I know. Doesn't make any difference, anyway." He slammed back another shot and spared a glance at the bartender as if to tell they weren't coming fast enough. "No one'd listen if I did, and the commander would still be dead."

"If you're grounded, where's everyone else?" Garrus might not have heard the whole story before, but he did know from the funeral that Joker was the last one to see Shepard, and he knew how that part of the story ended. Maybe changing topics would keep some of the survivor guilt from pressing on Joker, at least as far as this conversation. "I heard Wrex went back to Tuchanka, and Tali returned to the Flotilla, but I didn't hear anything about the Alliance crew."

"Chakwas is on Mars right now. She's served a long career and the Alliance decided to reward her by giving her the cushy job she deserves. Kaidan has been doing... good. Whether or not he wants to admit it. Ash's been getting more honors dead than she was ever going to get alive. Liara hung around the funeral arrangements and generally acted like Liara, then just sort of vanished with some other asari."

"Shepard's death hit her pretty hard."

"She sure was sweet on the commander. Dunno why, since the commander wasn't exactly nice to her."

"The commander wasn't really that nice to anyone," Garrus responded automatically.

"Nah, she was just curt to most people, but she was outright mean to Liara." He glanced over at Garrus, another quirk of a smile. "I should know. I kept spying on them."

"I'm sure that's a serious breach of protocol," was Garrus' somewhat flippant response.

"Yeah, well, Liara kept coming on to her, and those two together'd be pretty hot, y'know? I just wanted to have a glance at it. Nothing wrong with that."

"Riiight." Garrus took another drink and shook his head in humor. Joker, on the other hand, hadn't turned away.

"If the commander was interested in anyone, it was you."

Garrus nearly choked, and a strange feeling like he'd been caught doing something that he wasn't supposed to washed over him. He jerked to the left and looked at Joker incredulously.

"Well, it's true," he continued, "You were her favorite. All the missions she took you on..."

"She didn't take me on any more missions than anyone else. She kept a very fluid team rotation. You know that."

"Yeah, sure, but you came with her on the big ones. Including taking down Saren, I hasten to add. You had to have noticed."

Of course Garrus noticed. He was actually very proud that she'd favored him over so many of the others, even more so because, in the beginning, Shepard didn't seem to be very fond of Garrus' romanticized view of Spectrehood versus C-Sec. Her placed trust in him was proof that he was reliable. "That couldn't mean anything other than business."

"But you didn't see her face when, oh..." Joker scrunched up his face in thought. "Uhhh, when you said..."

"I said...?"

"I was going to call up the commander about something and you stopped her a second to thank her. Yeah, that's it! You said something like 'I wanted to thank you,' and she blew you off 'cause she was busy and I had just commed her to update her on something. You acted all pitiful about it, and—"

"I did not act pitiful." Garrus bristled. He remembered that incident, and he felt a little violated that someone was watching because the commander's behavior did strike him off guard for a short, vulnerable moment. But, not a minute after, she—

"When she heard you respond like that, she got this look on her face. Like she had just accidentally kicked a two-legged puppy. It was so rare I even had a still shot of it saved on my main terminal in the Normandy. She made me finish my report quick and hurried back to hear what you had to say and soothe your bruised turian ego."

This was the worst time to hear this. Lingering feelings from the night before still hung over him, and it gave Garrus sweet prickles of pain as he breathed and tried to keep his heart rate low. His talons quirked with want of something to do and he shifted uncomfortably. He clawed through his mind for something to respond with before Joker dragged him further into this line of conversation. He wasn't fast enough.

"And it was so mutual it was hilarious," Joker chuckled and sloshed a new drink about in the little glass it came in. "Because she was the only person on the ship you'd even talk to and not be all 'we turians would do this differently because we're better'. You were on such a high-horse to everyone else and passing judgment of a proper cop or soldier or whatever. We have a word for your type among humans... 'stick up your ass'." Garrus opened his mouth to retort, but Joker didn't let him get the chance. "But if the commander said something, hoo boy. If she disagreed, you'd shut up, swallow your pride, and make it a point to agree with her instead. Like some big pet parrot."

"I am a turian, and she was my commanding officer," Garrus countered. The argument sounded weak to his own ears.

"Sure."

"I didn't agree with her about not saving the previous council."

"Funny how it still happened and you were right there to stop her."

Garrus swallowed hard, remembering how the anger with her decision bled away so quickly when Saren's corpse attacked. He wanted to run back to that time, watch her pull herself out of the wreckage again, and embrace her like it would fix everything. He peered into his drink shamefully.

By the spirits, just how messed up was he? "I should go."

"See?" Joker snorted, as if that was the first joke he'd heard in months. "Back to Spectre training you go. Don't embarrass her name too much when you get out of there."

Garrus swiped out his tab and sped out of there.

He trudged through one more month of the training before he reached his limit of bullshit. The gradually rebuilding Citadel and everything about his daily life was constantly throwing one thing into his face: Shepard is dead. The Alliance honored her as a martyr, and frankly couldn't be happier than to have such a great symbol that had the grace and decency to be dead so she won't do anything like publicly embarrass them with her actions. Which she would have, if the trouble the memorial on Torfan stirred up with people was anything to go on.

None of Joker's words would settle well with him. The geth didn't kill Shepard, but no one was going to go out of their way to prove that. Garrus didn't even know where to start, and from what his current superiors where saying, his first duty after obtaining his status would involve chasing the geth. And he'd be under another Spectre through the beginning, a turian who didn't care to question the official story. By the time Garrus would be able to stake out on his own as a Spectre, it might be too late.

It didn't seem worth it. Too much heartache for no progress. He wasn't even able to the stop random acts of violence he'd seen every day at the Citadel. The one time he got involved, both C-Sec and his trainers severely reprimanded him for acting with a title he hadn't yet "earned". So, he left for the Terminus Systems.

He wasn't entirely sure what he'd find there. Lawlessness, maybe. Most probably he ran in that direction because that's where Shepard fell. He didn't really have confidence he could find her killers, or her body, or any clues, but it was better than sitting in the Citadel, waiting for the chance to wait for the chance to do something.

Omega seemed a good a place as any to start, and somehow, he ended up settling there.

While digging and prying and generally trying to find any information from the bottom up, his nature kept him from being inactive otherwise. He already knew a lot of the problems smuggled into the Citadel had Omega connections to blame for them, connections he could do jack shit about due to jurisdiction problems. And he wasn't half-bad about getting the job done. He followed Shepard's example as a soldier and soon found himself with his own comparable team of loyal specialists.

And his new team brought with them interesting new ideas, too. Garrus hardly knew a batarian before, and though Vortash wasn't the friendliest of people, he had a quality about him that reminded him of Wrex and had him reconsidering an entire race all over again. The humans brought with them some of the culture that he'd not fully gotten to know about with his work on the Citadel and the Normandy.

Even the turians he worked with were different, reminding him more of people he served along side in ships than anyone from Palaven or his cop comrades. Sensat, for instance, got along a little better with asari than he did turian women, and even ended up being the one to make Garrus sit down and actually watch Fleet and Flotilla from beginning to end. He got some elbow-jabs for that, because the romantic scenes between the lead couple of different races actually struck him a little too close to home, and when the turian lost his quarian lover to a blown airlock during a space battle, well... he tried to excuse himself from the room, damnit!

Butler gave him the most shit about it, since the married man loved to bring in old human movies (which were all romances in addition to their other genres) and Garrus had been denouncing them as silly and unrealistic. But, he got back at him by having a showing of Talons and laughing all the way through.

Butler bit back, though, and it started the squad's Great Culture War. Garrus and Sensat fumed when Butler brought in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Mierin cried for days after Dark Goddess, Ruck Humpers actually made more than the krogan laugh, and everyone bawled their eyes out at Saving Private Ryan. All the while, different music would be blasted, never mind the various magazines and games lying around to anger and/or gross out each other. Garrus found a Fornax under his pillow more than once, and sometimes they were specialty issues.

It took its toll. By the time they got past the overture of Molt, they had already formed a treaty and opted to leave each other alone. It wasn't even a big deal to Garrus that one of his favorite pieces to play during a firefight was from the Fleet and Flotilla soundtrack, where the turian hero brought down hellish vengeance on his lover's murderers.

Yeah, he'd admit it if you asked him, that it played on his visor because it made him think of Shepard.

During the whole awkwardness of the Great Culture War, Garrus didn't stress himself to figure out the intricacies of human courtship, nor did he indulge even a little in the Fornax copies for their human/turian couples. It wasn't because he had some personal issue to overcome with Shepard being human, or even that she was his commander. But she was dead, and other than her, he wasn't interested in any human in the galaxy. Just how ridiculous would it be if he read up on the material and plotted his every move to Shepard? And unhealthy. People just don't come back from the dead for you to woo.

That didn't stop him from daydreaming every once in a while, but cross-species intercourse, honestly, didn't really enter his mind. Except for that one fantasy he had of raiding an Eclipse operation, then de-helmetting the supposedly asari leader to reveal a supposedly-dead Spectre and... well... he had to interrogate his prisoner, didn't he? But the central theme to that was the same as so many of his other, less naughty fantasies: Shepard coming back. All the other ones were about being on the Normandy with her, doing little things as mates like eating together or washing each other, though there were no grand "confession" fantasies. He dreamt of being there when he otherwise wasn't, to save her from getting spaced. Or just, occasionally, letting himself get lost in a memory of fighting along side her.

And that's why he played "Fire in the Courtyard" so often during battle. It might seem a little reclusive to sometimes pretend that Shepard was there with him, just around the next bit of cover while she tries to flank the enemy, but he couldn't see any harm in it. More often than not, he'd order one of his men to do just that, and it made his own shots that much cleaner. Hell, it did wonders for his morale.

Garrus was close to his men, but that little reminder of Shepard and the Reapers was what kept him from getting as close them as he could have by the end of two years. This might have been the fatal flaw; he didn't even see Sidonis' betrayal until it was too late. When he found himself on the run and down to the wall of an apartment at his back, he actually kept himself from indulging in the fantasy of Shepard fighting along side him, getting him out of this mess. This was his mess; he was alone, it was his fault, and he was going to have to own up to that.

He peered down his scope again to see more cannon fodder jogging up towards him, and one face made him blink furiously and his mandibles twitch with such violence they banged like a stereo metronome on the inside of his helmet.

Daydreaming was one thing, but he'd never hallucinated before.