How long had he been standing in front of the door to Shepard's cabin? If the cup of coffee he held onto was any indication then it hadn't been long. Tendrils of steam lazily floated upwards from the dark liquid's surface just as they had minutes before when Garrus had thought to bring something along with him. Coffee was a good enough reason to drop by the Loft, right? It was a good will gesture. Not that he'd done anything to fall out of Shepard's favor. None the less, he felt like he needed to have a conversation starter… and he'd chosen a cup of shitty instant coffee. Way to go, Vakarian.

If he turned back now and took the elevator down to deck three people would think he was nuts. They already thought he was out of place, he didn't need to help them validate their claims. The last thing he needed was for people to wonder why the Turian vigilante with a blasted off face was walking around and riding elevators with a cup of levo coffee that he couldn't even drink. They'd clearly seen him fish a packet out of the tin marked with a large red 'L', they all knew he didn't even touch the dextro coffee tin. It had sat unopened since Shepard had purchased supplies back on the Citadel. It was a do or die situation. A do or look like an idiot situation.

When he finally rapped a knuckle against the door, it opened almost immediately. Garrus blinked in surprise. Surely Shepard hadn't known he was waiting. "Shepard?" He called out cautiously into the seemingly empty cabin.

"Down here."

The cabin was very nice for being shoved inside of a replica of an Alliance frigate. He noted the empty fish tank and couldn't help but chuckle. Of course it was empty. Shepard was far too busy to take care of aquatic creatures, and he counted it as a design flaw. The blue light that it threw off still hadn't helped to reveal Shepard but she had announced her presence. It wasn't like there were many hiding places in the room he knew he could walk the length of in several long strides.

After descending two stairs he found the Commander sitting on the floor, legs tucked under a low table and back against the couch any other normal person would have been sitting on. She was out of her usual Cerberus fatigues and instead in a baggy pair of sweat pants and a tank top. She looked younger when she wasn't dressed like a soldier, Garrus thought. His eyes followed from her shoulders and down her arms to see her hands rifling through small batches of plastic pieces. He didn't know what they belonged to until he saw, on the couch cushion behind her, a flimsy box from the Citadel gift shop. The great and powerful galaxy saving Commander Shepard was assembling a plastic model of Sovereign.

This was practically a gift-wrapped joke she had unknowingly handed him. "You know, I distinctively remember Sovereign being much bigger."

Shepard grunted in reply, absorbed in sorting the pieces in front of her into more manageable piles. Some kind of instruction booklet was folded open to the introduction pages in her lap but she didn't seem to be using it. Garrus wondered if she even really cared about assembling a miniature of the Reaper that had almost killed them. At this moment in time, probably not.

"Brought you some coffee. EDI said you hadn't left the Loft in a while when I asked where you'd disappeared to, thought you could use a pick me up." Carefully, he set the cup as far away from the pieces as he could without having to worry about it falling off the edge. "Shepard. Are you listening?"

Her fingers were still moving but Garrus could find no pattern to the piles she was making. He sat idly on the couch and did one more scan of Shepard's sparse quarters. It was pristinely clean, freakishly even. The room looked like no one had even claimed it as theirs. No open drawers. The sheets on the full bed were tucked so tightly into the corners and smoothed so perfectly he was sure he could have 'bounced a quarter off of them' or whatever the human phrase was. All of the flat surfaces shone like glass. On the desk across from the bed, Shepard's weapons and armor gleamed under the artificial light from what his well-trained eyes recognized as a meticulous cleaning.

While Shepard was a soldier through and through she wasn't this particular in organization. No one was, at least no one that he had met. Countless times on the original Normandy he'd caught her bringing several cups or plates out of her room and into the mess to clean after she finally had some down time. She wasn't a slob, but she definitely wasn't whatever this was.

"Talk to the Illusive Man yet?" He figured if she didn't want to do small talk he'd jump into something about the mission. Miranda would be pleased.

"Yeah I talked to the bastard," she mumbled as she continued to ignore the coffee.

"And?"

"And he's not giving me many reasons to stay on with him once we get rid of the Collectors. Not that there was ever really a chance of that happening. Pompous fucker."

Garrus rolled his eyes. At least her colorful language was still working while her conversation skills took a nose-dive. For a while the only sound in the room was the scrape of plastic pieces changing position on the table. He couldn't take it anymore and reached his hands out to take both of Shepard's to stop the mindless motions. She didn't seem to register the touch at first but when she did she looked up at him quizzically, as if to say 'when did you get in here?'.

He took a moment to really look at Shepard. There hadn't been much time for the two of them to be in the same room longer than a few minutes since Omega and he wanted to make sure Cerberus hadn't gotten anything wrong. They'd gotten the hair the exact shade of auburn he remembered and the same bright green eyes stared back at him, but they weren't as alive. Right now they were guarded and tired. Above them her eyebrows were scrunched slightly and it was comforting to see that familiar line traveling through the left collection of tiny hairs. Cerberus had recreated her eyebrow scar but not the thick scar that had once been on the lower side of her right cheek? Strange.

Besides the still unhealed lesions on her cheek, only one thing was different. They had corrected her broken nose. Garrus remembered how proud she had been of that nose with the bump. Why she was proud wasn't something he really understood. He'd laughed when she'd first told him the story of a younger, stupider Earth bound Shepard running nose first into a lamp post while outrunning some cops. She'd called it her first battle wound. Now in its place was an elegant and sleek imposter. Most likely it was what it would have looked like if the lamp post had never been in her way.

Before he realized what he was doing, Garrus found himself paying extremely close attention to her lips. They were odd things, lips. Perhaps it was because he himself didn't have any but he found himself fascinated with them. Shepard's were full and rosy pink, a nice contrast to her pale skin. Garrus wondered if they would be soft. From where he was sitting they looked like they would be. Kissing was an interesting ritual among humans, he'd seen in plenty of times back on the Citadel. What would Shepard's lips feel like if she kissed him? What would they feel like against his face?

"Garrus?"

Her voice tore him away from his thoughts and he was incredibly thankful that Turians didn't blush. Where in the world had that train of thought come from?