"You know, maybe steamrolling the Dalatrass in front of the Primarch and Wrex isn't the best way to get the Salarians in line with us. Just a thought, here."
I had missed watching Shepard in action. Seeing her tear into someone with that brutally wretched side of hers was just one of the perks of my position, and her most recent altercation failed to disappoint. Shepard was seething more so than usual after this one in particular, no doubt tired of all the politicians in the galaxy.
"Save it. I'm in no mood for this kind of bullshit, and I wasn't about to let her get the last word. People like her are the kind of vermin that get to scuttle around like mice until someone picks them up by their tails and shoves a block of poison into their conniving little-"
"Woah, woah, easy Shepard. I get it." I consoled, being sure to nonchalantly create a larger gap between us as we walked back to her cabin. I had thought our little catch up session earlier on would have relieved some of the tension she carried with her, yet her meeting served to reveal how deeply entwined her stressors really were. I worried for her well being more than anything, but being within grapple range had caused me more than one accidental punching bag session.
"The last few months have made me… more than a little bitter, Garrus." she told me as we approached the elevator, our backs illuminated by the soft electronic glow of the galaxy map. She held on to her icy demeanor as she spoke, but softened the edge on her words to me, slightly at least. She barely said anything to the duo at the security checkpoint, leaving them more than a little crestfallen, I'm sure. Hell, she was even starting to depress me, if it was possible to make me any more cynical. The walls of the retrofitted Normandy glistened dully as we progressed, stripped of their panels in many places and lined with exposed wiring. Something told me that they weren't exactly finished with the old girl when they departed, but I wasn't about to complain as long as the wired didn't break off and electrocute me.
"Well sure, I doubt it could have been anything more than insulting for you to have handcuffs and accusations thrown at you as soon as you stepped off of the damned drydock. Then on top of all that being told, after years of trying to warn everyone, that your planet was going to burn alone… I would want to shove a dull knife into any living thing that walked within a meter of me."
"Welcome to my inner machinations, Garrus. Every minute of my existence is deciding whether or not to mutilate whatever's standing in front of me."
"Well, I've been on the safe end of that debate, so I would say I'm rather lucky. The Council, though, they ought to watch their backs if they have any plans of being alive for much longer."
The lift deposited us in the smaller intercessory hallway of Shepard's cabin, firmly sliding closed behind us as we exited and returning to a lower level. Shepard never did enjoy the isolation she had from the crew on the SR-2, always finding some excuse or another to wander in the off hours, any reason at all to not be alone in her loft. I could tell that she missed the XO office on the main level, but kept her discomfort quiet.
Shepard made a beeline for her bed, with myself close behind, as soon as she saw the lock on the entryway activate. Free falling onto the mattress beneath her, she sighed with nuclear force and spread her arms wide, taking in the incredibly drab ceiling above her. Still shaking my head, it wasn't long before I unconsciously followed her lead and landed with a noticeably heavier impact right beside her. Giggling in the aftershocks of our launches we both stared into the emptiness that resided above us, illuminated only by the small lamp beside us and the eerie glow of the kinetic barriers just outside the ship shining in through the glass. Neither of us bothered to speak, but we both knew that the other was trying to formulate a conversation. The silence we held in those haphazard moments was often more important to us than whatever it was we were trying to say. Often, but not always.
"... Shepard…" I managed to croak out after what felt like an eternity of staring at nothing in particular, still lying on our backs.
"Hmm? What is it?"
"I know… the last few months haven't been good to you. The last few days, well, they can't have been much better, and I know that you're not always one to get drawn into long talks about this sort of thing-"
"Garrus."
She whispered this to me, leaning into my side, her head softly resting on my shoulder, nuzzling into my neck. Her hand slowly wormed its way into mine, filling the gaps between my digits and flooding my chest with a familiar warmth that only she could provide. Sneakily, she brought a leg across my body, half straddling my hips and half lying beside me, eyes too intrigued with my neck to be occupied anywhere else.
"You're one of the only things I have to live for right now. Anything you have to say, I can listen to it. I'm not some hormone stricken teenager. I did just equivically tell the leader of an entire species to go fuck herself, you know."
"O-oh... Okay then. I, uh, wanted to ask you…"
"Yeeeesss?" she purred, nudging her way further into my various crevices and nooks. It took all of my willpower to not pounce on her then and there, contemplating payback for her little ambush in the battery earlier on.
The beguiling look in her eye threw me off guard, and scattered my thoughts. My composure faltered, and all I could do was stare into her bright mauve orbs, seemingly piercing into my spirit.
"W-well, I had intended on asking you something important, but now all I can manage is... sloppily staring at you and wondering how it is that some renegade Turian managed to catch the eye of the galaxy's saviour."
Her soft laughter seemed to echo through the room, despite its rather compact size. No doubt she was pleased with herself for managing to throw me off guard, as one of the only people capable of doing so.
"I don't see that as an inherently bad thing. Being oogled at instead of being snickered and sneered at is a nice change." With a grunt, she removed herself from my neck and propped her chest onto mine, looking down from the elevated position on my carapace she so enjoyed.
"And who would have the balls to do that within your eyesight?" I asked, tilting my head up to try and catch her gaze again.
Her eyes broke from mine as I said that, losing focus and appearing to be suddenly interested in the exposed tubing behind us. The playful tone of her chatter was beset with a bitter sadness instead. The total 180 flip was surprising, even given her binary expressive pattern. Usually the transition from anger to cool, collected sarcasm took a joke or two.
"More people than I could count. You weren't there, Garrus, back on Earth. Every day, whenever I was in public, the looks that people gave me could kill. Hell, I thought that I was the Queen Bitch of the galaxy, but go and massacre an entire system of Batarians, play nice with Cerberus, then come back to tell the tale and everyone thinks you've sold out your species. Instead of Saviour of the Citadel, I was referred to as 'her'. I didn't even deserve to be named to my own people…"
"How could they do that to you? If you were Turian, sure the military would likely see you like they do Victus, but at the very least the people would respect the sacrifices you've made for them. You would see it in every move they made near you."
"Humans are different. Our entire history is the story of us finding something to hate and be afraid of. For the majority it was each other, for something as silly as the way we spoke or the color of our skin. Nowadays we have the rest of the galaxy to glare at instead. Yet occasionally it's not that abnormal to see us at each other's throats again. Our capacity for hatred is… scary, Garrus. Makes it easy to imagine why Cerberus is so successful...
Her free hands came around my waist, pulling me closer into her embrace. Her fingers squeezed tightly onto my talons, trembling quietly with a nervous energy.
"Every minute that I wandered through the halls in Vancouver, I felt feared. I looked around me, and all I could see were guises of disgust and disdain. Even Kaidan couldn't look me in the eye when we saw each other. I've felt… sick for so, so long Garrus that I don't even know if I'm alive anymore. I try to feel something, anything but this soul-crushing agony and nothing comes. I still… I still feel like I'm suffocating above Alchera sometimes, staring into the void of space, burning from the inside out, with no one around to save me..."
To anyone else Shepard's voice would have been miniscule, drowned out even by the dull drone of the water tank across the room. Shepard had always been a warrior, a lion in her own right. To see her like this, so small and so defeated, it felt wrong. No one deserved to feel like that, especially not her.
"It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends" I mused, mimicking her diminutive speaking, trying to ease her gloom. Shepard was still new to interpreting the subharmonics Turians use in conversation, but even she must have picked up on the unstable, hollow growl that seemed to drip with muted sorrow that laced every word of the sentence.
"You've been reading Sinclair, you little bookworm. I told you he's good" Shepard whispered. Her grip loosened on my body, her posture relaxing and her shoulders beginning to tremble slightly at the mention of her favourite author.
"He's almost as good at hiding emotion at you are, actually. For someone with your amount of stress, this emotional repression isn't healthy. Shit, for normal people it's unhealthy, for you it might as well be suicide."
"Hey, who was I supposed to tell all of this to, my guards? I wasn't exactly in the position to ask for a psychologist, being possibly the most hated person within a thousand miles of Vancouver."
"I know, I know, but you can't deny that you have a bad habit of doing this."
"You mean just like you have a bad habit of over-analyzing everything I do?"
Shrugging, I looked down into her waiting gaze, one filled with worry and expectation shielded by a feigned playfulness.
"Come on, you can't deny that you love watching me squirm sometimes."
"Guilty as charged. I know I'm a sadistic little bitch, it's just nice to have someone to toy with that doesn't end up dying from a pistol shot after I'm done sassing them."
"Who knows how long you'll have me for? One of these days I might just snap and throw your hamster out the airlock."
"You wouldn't dare!" she threatened, goading me into another chest thumping match. Her habit of avoiding her stress and trying to cover it up showed its face once again. Shepard never was good with her emotions, that much was to be expected from a lifelong soldier with a mean streak and a ruthless reputation, but that didn't mean she was oblivious. There were certainly times when she wanted to talk about how she felt, but they just… didn't really work out. In all the time that I knew her and especially in my time as her partner she had always been skittish with that kind of talk. Sometimes I felt like she just didn't have time for them. Most of her deep inner thoughts were those made in retrospect, and she rarely ever told me of a problem until after it was solved. In that way she was very resourceful… but almost always ended up hurting herself in one way or another. Then again if I had to do the things she did, emotions would seem like a hinderance to me too.
"If you had to say, would you feel worse before or after you spaced your boyfriend?"
That joke earned me a good jab to the ribs, knocking the wind out of me and reminding me once again how damn strong Shepard was. I barely saw her move.
"Make another joke like that and you're sleeping on the couch until shore leave" she growled after her hand resumed its position on my body.
"Too soon?" I sheepishly asked, remembering her sensitivity to that topic.
"No shit, Sherlock. You'd think that you would have a bit more decency than that."
"S-sorry, Shepard. Maybe not the most carefully considered joke."
Neither of us spoke much more beyond that; myself, out of self-loathing embarrassment, and her out of general annoyance and a directed effort to make me writhe from the prolonged silence. Instead of words, we spoke with our bodies, passing pointed squeezes and proddings back and forth. Sometimes, words were simply too much for either of us to handle, and communication between us simply degenerated to the half-assed caresses and assorted stimuli we could inflict on each other.
"Garrus" she finally offered, her hand mindlessly grazing the plates on my forearm.
"Hm?"
"I wanted to thank you."
"For what?" I asked, leaning my head to the opposite side, so as to face her instead of the empty fish tank.
"For being alive. Without you, I'm not sure what I would do. You keep me grounded in ways that I can't even begin to explain. If you ever leave me… I'm not sure what I would turn into…."
For the first time in that conversation, her voice shook with emotion, nearly drowning the words as she offered them. Her words were even layered with something akin to subharmonics, whether intentionally or not. Regardless of intent, they transmitted fear with every passing syllable. The talon I had running through her silky platinum blonde locks halted at this admission of vulnerability, and through instinct moved to her face instead.
"I have an idea, then. Just… keep me close, and I can promise you that nothing bad can happen. After all, you're Shepard, you beat Death at its own game. If I stick close to you, what could go wrong?"
I was certain that I was going to be awarded with another punch for that blissfully ignorant comment, but the display of violence never came. Looking down once again to her, the eyes that normally communicated her powerful, dominating aura were encased in something else. It was ever-changing, not for one millisecond staying the same, shifting between admiration, sorrow, love, and a host of other things that I simply couldn't understand. She didn't speak for minutes on end, instead staring into my eyes without a word. In the time that she did so, I managed to locate the medical stints in her eyes that Cerberus had likely used to prop up her corneas. I was still taking inventory of the features of her iris when she finally broke her gaze with me. Sliding her way forward on my chest, she eventually managed to reach a point where our heads reached equilibrium. Softly, the forehead mere inches away from my face tilted down and came to rest on mine. These moments when she emulated Turian culture were endearing to me, gave me an idea that she cared for me every single bit that she spoke of. It's the little things that I came to love the most from Shepard.
"I love you, Garrus Vakarian. You put your life in my hands, and I put mine in yours. Together, we're unstoppable."
Those words made my mind go blank. She actually loved me? I just couldn't believe it, not right away. Love was the farthest thing from my mind when she was around, being with Shepard just felt… natural. I just couldn't imagine that a word like love would find its way into our lives.
Her confession pulled a rare, heart warming purr from my chest, one that sent Shepard into a small giggle fit. I couldn't help but feel my mandibles twitch at seeing her laugh like that… it was too damn cute.
"Yeah, we are. There is no Shepard without Vakarian."
"Damn straight." she curtly remarked, rising from her straddle, making way to the door, a marked spring in her step.
"Come on, Wrex told me he's got something important for us to work out, and right now I feel like I could beat a Thresher Maw with my bare hands."
"This is Wrex we're talking about, Shepard, knowing him that might be what he wants."
On Tuchanka, things were worse than I could have imagined. I'd always heard that it was a nuclear wasteland, but it seemed that the Reapers could even that look barren and mangled. Urdnot Wrex, one of the only sane Krogan in the galaxy, had been our friend for years, and having him around made Shepard a little less tense, but that didn't change the fact that he wanted his dues before he would commit his people to help her. He wanted a cure for the Genophage, the biological war crime my ancestors had used to neuter the Krogan, and it was Shepard's mission to make sure no one got in the way of just that. But, the cure itself was still a ways off, and the head of the research team, Mordin Solus, was still making adjustments to the strains he had to make it complete. That left a lot of time to fill.
So, that left the rest of us to run around keeping Tuchanka from imploding or exploding before he was finished. Wrex had been informed of a Turian transport ship crashing planet-side from the Primarch, and sent us in after the crew. The last thing anyone needed these days was an armed brigade of Turians running around Tuchanka in the middle of a Reaper invasion, it was like a kid getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I had asked the Primarch what exactly he was doing there in the first place, but it seemed that even I wasn't privy to that kind of information.
So, in lieu of better options, that left Shepard and I to clean up the mess, as usual. You would think that after two and a half rounds of saving the galaxy, people would begin to realize that our time wasn't exactly expendable, but if anything all it seemed to encourage was a lazy attitude."Oh, don't worry, we'll just wait for Shepard to handle this! She always gets it done!"
Heh, amateurs, all of them… but I digress.
The situation at the crash site was bad. Escape pods scattered in all directions, ancient ruins ablaze with gunfire and, well, regular fire. Reaper troops littering the levels of the construct, and a desperate Turian squad holding out on the total opposite side of the place from us. Oh yeah, this was classic.
The shuttle dropped us off as close as it could, leaving us to do the rest. With a silent grimace, Shepard ordered us onward into the ruins, trying her damndest to remain as undetected as possible. Tumbling over rubble and crawling through gaps in the burning fuselage, we progressed towards the target, all the while trying to have eyes on all angles of contact. The last thing we needed was to be ambushed in a place like that, with no backup and no fast way out. It was a damn killzone if I ever saw one. After minutes of agonizing stealth, we encountered the first patch of survivors, our silence finally broken by the crack of Shepard's biotic charge into a cluster of unaware Cannibals. The grotesque Batarian forms shattered at the impact, body parts and red mist scattering at every possible angle. With an almost bored stance, her Scimitar shotgun extended from her left and decapitated the remaining husk that had lingered next to her.
Needless to say, the Turians across the crevice that separated us were stunned into silence. Without so much as a "thank you" they retreated further into the ruins, leaving us to the silence yet again.
We repeated that rhythm for hours, rounding up all of the still living crew… reporting the loss of the ones that hadn't made it. By the time all of the crew and company had been accounted for, the powerful daylight of Aralakh was creeping over the smog-laden horizon. Even through our armor, the heat was beginning to build overwhelmingly as the sun progressed through the sky. In a clearing not far from the drop zone, the remaining soldiers crowded around each other, all of them wearing the scorn and distrust that they so easily felt in their hearts. Turians were never ones to hide their emotions, and when pushed to the limit what little restraint we were taught was crushed. That left Shepard and I to deal with half of a company of disgruntled, wounded men. Their commander, who turned out to be the Primarch's son, approached us as we neared their rally site, looking eager to talk with us.
"Thank the spirits you came along when you did. I'm Lieutenant Victus, Commander, and I thank you for saving my men, when it seems I wasn't up to the job…" The soldier looked downtrodden, beat and utterly helpless. To me he certainly didn't look like someone with a lot of experience, let alone the capability to lead an entire company. Why the Primarch had sent him, of all the men at his command, was beyond me.
"Status report" Shepard shot at him, leaving no room for debate. "What the hell happened here, Lieutenant?"
"I made a bad call. Reaper forces closed in on us as soon as we made the break in the stratosphere, we had to lose them. Instead of taking our chances and riding it out, I ordered a route through these ruins… but they were waiting for us here, too. We were shot down, and before we even had time to fully evacuate the ship it broke apart, and we scattered. We were pinned and losing ground, until you showed up that is."
"What are you here to do? Before anything else happens I need to know."
Shepard backed her demand with an assertive stance, taking small inches toward him and showing her teeth, a mannerism I thought unique to Turians before I had met her.
"Commander, I know you just saved us and all, but that information is classifie-"
"Don't talk to me about classified!" she screamed at him, reaching forward to take hold of his carapace and reel him closer to her. The seething rage behind every word visibly scared the Lieutenant, his legs going limp in her grasp. The other men in his unit looked to him, but offered nothing more to the situation than pleased glances and judgmental scoffs.
"I serve on the most advanced starship in the galaxy, accompanied by your Father, who happens to be the motherfucking Primarch of the Turian Hierarchy, and happen to have the goddamned Shadow Broker on speed dial! So, if you want to talk about classified, then I suggest you find some other ignorant fuck to do it with, because that won't work on me. Now, I'll repeat myself, out of common courtesy. What. Was. Your. MISSION?!"
The last words practically leaked out of her, maybe not intended to be understood themselves but more to be used as a vector for transmitting the dominating aura she wore like a second skin. Encounters like this always gave me chills, no matter how many times I sat back and watched them, but I couldn't help but feel some sympathy for Victus. Getting men killed with risky plays was a considerable offense for our people, and seeing him stare death in the eyes while trying to grapple with that reality couldn't have been easy. Lesser people would be groveling at her feet by then, but he held on to whatever composure he had left like a drowning man to driftwood.
"We… w-we were dispatched on EOD."
"A bomb? Why send this many men for just one explosive? Doesn't make any sense. The Krogan could've handled that much their ow-"
"This wasn't just any bomb, commander. This was… this is a Ra'Uhtahi."
"Spirits… there's one here, Lieutenant?!" I spat out, the panic easily accessible in both my subharmonics and my overtone.
"Garrus, did I get something wrong, or did my translator just fuzz out?"
"Shepard, this is bad. Ra'Uhtahi… in Turian tongue, it means 'Sun Eater'. The last time one was used, during the Rachni Wars, just one of the damn things was sent through a relay… the whole system turned into a black hole. They were deemed too dangerous to ever use again, and were blacklisted. The word was probably purged from the Extranet, hence the glitch in your translator. To think that there's one here…"
"There has been, sir, for almost a thousand years… and now Cerberus has control of it."
Greetings, dear readers, it's Hanji. Over my winter holiday, I got inspired from some other entries I'd read here, and decided to write my own Mass Effect story. I hope I manage to live up to expectations, given that I've been writing for some time now. Cheers, mates, and see you all again soon. o/
P.S if you are searching for good stories to read, fadeIn by tyrantmoves and A Tale of Two Shepards: Saving the Galaxy is a Family Affair by TEAM Shepard are the ones that inspired this story, their quality and depth are out of this world. Highly recommended.