A/N: I own nothing!
"Harder."
"Ugh, right there."
"Almost…done!"
"Keep going!"
"Yes!"
Garrus fell back on his hands, breathing hard as Shepard fell away from him, covered in sweat. Next to them sat their newly built sofa that had taken them all day to put together by themselves.
"It should not have taken us that long," Garrus said and pushed himself up and off the ground, going for the cushions to finish off the last detail. The instructions had been extremely difficult to follow and thinking that the both of them together would get the job done faster left him sorely mistaken.
"It wouldn't have if you would have let me pop in the instruction vid."
Garrus scoffed, slightly offended that he would need a vid to help him do something as simple as put together a piece of furniture. He had put together and assembled intricate machinery bent on killing and maiming. The Normandy's Thanix cannon (one of the most advanced pieces of weapons technology to exist on a warship) was calibrated to near perfection every single day because of him. Not even Legion, a synthetic being, could improve his work. A sofa would not be the one thing to defeat him.
"Men," his tired girlfriend muttered, shaking her head and plopping down on the cushions and sighing in content. She was happy she opted for the extra fluffy cushions. The extra thirty credits was well worth it if it meant being able to lay on a cloud in the privacy of her own home.
"Alright. Now just the table and we're good to go," Garrus said, already moving to the box that lay propped up against the counter to their kitchen. Truthfully, the both of them had been content to just eat at the island, not seeing the need for a table in their empty dining room, or a comfortable couch in their equally as empty living room. The only furniture they figured they needed were a bed, appliances to make edible food (when they would eventually learn how to cook) and a desk for their terminal.
Living on a ship for the majority of their lives left them able to fit their whole life in a bag thrown over their shoulder and having an actual home to fill with their belongings was still new to them.
"I'm going to take a break, hon…my back is already starting to kill me," she said breezily and shut her eyes, content to listen to him talk about how nervous he was about his father and sister coming to visit. That had been what pushed them into buying actual furniture in the first place.
That brought up a whole other thought process as her belly clinched in anxiety. She had heard stories of the elder Vakarian from both Garrus and Solona. He was a harsh, by-the-book kind of man, the complete opposite from his headstrong son who was known to break a rule or twenty. Not to mention the woman his son was going to marry violated more military regulations than was absolutely necessary, even if she had been in the middle of saving everyone's asses.
So the first time they met, she wanted to make their home look like it was actually lived in and not being squatted by two scarred up lovers. She was going to do her best, but the thought of meeting his dad was intimidating to say the least.
Solona on the other hand had been surprisingly easy to get along with. They talked once a week through vid call and messaged back and forth frequently. Shepard had the feeling that that wouldn't be the case with Papa Vakarian.
"Don't you think?"
Shepard popped her head up at the sudden sound of his voice asking her a question. He sat adorably among a pile of wood and instruction manuals, looking perplexed and shooting glares back and forth between two diagrams he looked like he couldn't understand.
"What was that?"
"I said we'll probably have better luck cooking dinner than putting together furniture," he said, throwing the papers away from him and standing to meet her at the couch. He pulled her folded legs up and slid underneath, running his talons up and down the bare skin of her ankles.
"Well I hope you know more about cooking than I do big guy or else we're screwed."
Garrus chuckled and rested one of his hands on her knee, giving it a squeeze. She smiled sleepily, enjoying the feeling of his rough, leathery hands on her smooth skin. With the impending doom that was his father visiting tomorrow, it was nice to spend this time with her boyfriend either way.