Saying "We need to get out of the elevator" and actually getting out of the elevator were, unfortunately, two very different beasts, and in the end, Shepard knew determination could only take her so far. They needed a plan that didn't involve her legs. Or her ribs. And, as it turned out, that kind of plan was bordering on impossible. Garrus could easily haul himself out the safety hatch in the ceiling and up the service ladders in the shaft itself as he'd done to get down in the first place, and to fetch supplies in the meantime. She and her broken bones were a dead weight that couldn't be quite so easily maneuvered.
Garrus stood beneath the hatch, hands on his hips, head tilted. After a moment, he shifted his weight to his other hip, and his head tilted in the opposite direction. "We could do some kind of… pulley? But then we'd still have the problem of getting you out of the shaft. And something tells me running a pulley all the way from the CIC would be a very bad idea."
She snorted. "I don't know what you mean. Nothing says good idea like staging a rescue from the site of the attack."
Grimacing, he grasped the edge of the opening above and pulled himself even with the lip. After a moment of observation, he dropped back down again, almost soundlessly. Then he shook his head. "Even if I could lift you…"
"Are we at the bottom of the ship?"
Garrus shook his head again. "Safeties kicked in. We're basically back where we started, on the quarters floor."
Shepard grimaced. "So you're saying it could have been worse."
"It wasn't," he retorted, in as terse and tight a tone as she'd ever heard out of him. He could have shouted I don't want to consider the possibility at the top of his lungs, and it wouldn't have been clearer than his stiff shoulders and lowered brow plate and mandibles flattened against his face.
"I wonder…" Shepard didn't quite realize she'd faded into complete silence as her thoughts raced until Garrus turned and crouched down beside her.
"Any insight would be welcome," he said, and she could hear him trying—trying and mostly failing—to pull away from whatever image it could have been worse had planted in his head.
"We didn't meet any resistance when we came in and started opening all those doors. Tali didn't seem to trip anything when she was rooting through the console in the mess hall. Nothing happened until we were actually on the command deck. Maybe whatever… process the Reapers were implementing… installing… whatever, isn't finished."
"Maybe the range is still limited, you think?"
She nodded, wincing as her neck protested the vehemence of the gesture. "What if it's like a snakebite? Like… slow-spreading poison? The tech may be taking over the ship, but it's still got to go through all the lockdown safeties and protocols. Maybe lashing out at the elevator was… instinct. Or as close to instinct as a synthetic can get."
"Self-defense instead of intent to murder?"
"Something like that. Otherwise, why not chase us down? Why not finish what it started?" Sighing, she rolled her shoulder and tried to ignore the pain that burned down her ribs. "I'd give my left arm to have Legion here, deploying code to impede it."
Garrus was silent, and Shepard closed her eyes, allowing herself a moment of that different pain, the pain of losing something that couldn't be replaced. Keelah se'lai, she thought. Keelah se'lai, Legion.
"Yeah," Garrus finally said. She heard him swallow hard. "He'd probably have enjoyed the challenge. His head-flaps would've gone all excited and fluttery. Though, frankly Shepard, I'm not sure you ought to be sacrificing more body parts at this point."
He laugh was soft and a little broken. "True enough. And we're no slouches in the tech department. If I'm right, and we can keep it busy fighting the ship…"
"It might buy us time for that rescue to show up."
"But we still need to get out of the elevator." Inhaling as deeply as her ribs would allow, she followed the long, slow exhale into clarity. "I think it may be time for a calculated risk."
"I hate when you say that." He scrubbed his hand along the length of his fringe. It was a gesture both resigned and tentatively hopeful. "You want to bypass the door?"
She raised her eyebrows. "Am I getting predictable in my old age?"
"I think I've just been indoctrinated by your brand of crazy."
"My brand of taking calculated risks, you mean."
He chuckled, shaking his head. "How does that one go? Six of something, half a dozen of something else?"
"Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Close, but no cigar."
This time his head-tilt was all confusion. "No cigar?"
She grinned. "When we get out of this, I'm going to buy you the biggest book of human idioms I can find."
He didn't quite smile, but hopeful definitely took the lead away from resigned, and she considered it a win. Close enough for a cigar, anyway.
It took a few long, very painful moments to move her near the door. She clutched her sock-gag in one hand hand, ready to stuff it between her teeth at a moment's notice, though not quite ready to be preemptive about it. She forced her fingers to relax when she realized she was holding the sock tightly enough to make her ribs ache. The other hand felt steadier, closed around the familiar heft and weight of her pistol.
She hoped she didn't have to use either.
What hurt more, somehow, was seeing how carefully Garrus concentrated on causing as little pain as possible, and how he flinched every time she did. She didn't think he was even aware he was doing it.
Once she was settled on the far side of the car, he helped her into her armor again—or at least as much of it as they could manage. Her greaves were useless; they couldn't close around her swollen, splinted shins, but they kept them, strapping them to Garrus' armor. She flat out rejected the boots. "Too heavy," she said. "They'll only pull the bones out of alignment again, and I'm all about avoiding a repeat of the setting procedure, if it's all the same to you."
He shot her a glare that managed, somehow, to be horrified and fond all at once. In return, her smile was bolstering, and he shook his head as he turned toward the elevator console.
"Ready?" he asked.
"As I'll ever be."
#
Garrus took a steadying breath as he faced the console and brought up his omni-tool interface. One. Two. Three. He couldn't think about Shepard, about the way her breath caught at the apex of every inhale, or wheezed as it slid out on the exhale. He couldn't think about how the bruises under her eyes seemed a painful, mocking mimicry of his own clan markings. He couldn't think about the CIC, or Shepard's theories, or what they'd do if the hoped-for rescue never came. He breathed until it all faded away and he reached the sniper's serenity, where time slowed to a crawl and nothing but the task at hand seemed important. One. Two. Three.
Not for the first time, he was glad of the time he'd spent back on Palaven before the outbreak of the war. If nothing else, it had given him time to reacquaint himself with turian tech, turian methods. Turian encryption. His fingers flew over the console, and even from his place of stillness, he could feel the creak of the elevator around him. He didn't think he imagined the shudder beneath his feet, or the faint whine of metal straining against metal.
He hoped it was the door. He was afraid it wasn't.
Shepard remained silent, but he heard the shift in her breathing and he was aware, through his visor, of the increase in her heart rate. He wasn't imagining things, then. Damn.
Focus, Vakarian.
The shudder began to creep up from the floor, vibrating the walls.
Something above them began to squeal, high-pitched enough to make his ears ring, and to steal a fraction of his calm. He gave his head a minute shake, and chased down another line of the decryption code.
The door slid wide as the high-pitched squeal became a higher-pitched scream and the floor dropped an inch. Two inches. A third.
Time slowed. Three breaths, he thought. Three shots. No mistakes.
One: his omni-tool interface flickered and vanished. Two: it took one long stride to cover the distance from console to Shepard. Three: without pausing, he swept one arm under Shepard's thighs, cradled her back with the other, and launched himself through an exit growing narrower by the moment. The top of his head didn't quite clear the opening and he cracked his forehead before he could duck. He blinked at the sudden shock of pain, but didn't hesitate to curl himself around Shepard, so when they tumbled out into the hallway, he took the brunt of the fall.
"You okay?" she whispered, voice too high, too breathless.
"Fine," he ground out. "You?"
"Fine," she echoed. "But I think my legs are broken. And I dropped my sock."
"Not your gun?"
"Hell no, not my gun."
He couldn't help it. He laughed. Then she laughed.
And for five minutes, they lay curled together outside the gaping door of the elevator shaft, laughing because somehow they'd managed yet again to cheat a death that always seemed to have them in its sights.
"Calculated risk," she said.
"Crazy," he insisted.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I think it probably knows where we are. We should probably find a new hideout ASAP. A bunker, maybe. With thick walls and as little tech-interface as possible."
Garrus nodded against her hair, still holding her as close and as tightly as her injured ribs would allow. "I love you," he whispered into the top of her head, relief loosening his tongue.
She went still—utterly, completely, just-spotted-a-Reaper-at-two-o'clock still. It startled him until he realized that although she'd spoken the words before, high on the Presidium with the wind in her hair and her eyes shining and the words are you ready to be a one-turian kind of woman between them, he hadn't actually returned them. Precisely.
"Hell, Vakarian." Her voice sounded strained, oddly thick, and he wondered again what sub-tonals would tell him if she had them. "You must've hit your head harder than I thought."
He huffed a laugh. "I have it on good authority that I've got a pretty thick skull."
She pulled away from him just enough to look up and meet his eyes. Hers were shining, he thought, and perhaps even a bit oddly damp. Damper than usual; human eyes always tended a little toward the watery. He scoffed at himself for thinking maybe she was crying; Shepard never cried. "You too, Garrus." She tapped her forehead to his chin, gently. "Now. Enough with the heroics. And the swooning princess crap. I can hear Jack making fun of me from the other side of the galaxy."
"Definitely."
Shepard snorted. "Don't worry. I'm sure she could find half a dozen colorful ways to include you."
"Definitely," he repeated, and was rewarded by another of Shepard's breathy, wheezing little laughs.