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The barbarian stood before her, legs braced apart with the weight of his muscled, gleaming body balanced securely between them. His jaw, strong and covered with two days' worth of stubble, was splattered with blood; his hands, one wrapped around the hilt of his broadsword and the other resting low against his hip, were crusted with dirt and blood. His hair, obscenely long and falling to his impossibly broad shoulders, looked almost black in the dwindling sunlight, save for the wisps whipped up by the wind and caught by the setting sun - those glowed golden. His eyes were an incredible grey, piercing and direct as if he could - and did - see straight through her cloak, her gown, her skin. He used them to stare at her, try to intimidate the breath right out of her... then to give her body a lazy, languorous head-to-toe with deliberate and overt pauses at key landmarks.
She raised her chin defiantly, deep violet eyes blazing, her mane of raven hair whipping around her head with each brutally cold gust of wind. She wore a heavy cloak over her gown, the golden-embroidered hood pulled as high over her head as possible, the matching edging along the lower hem whipping sharply around her ankles. Like the barbarian, she, too, was bloody. The heavy cloak hid most of the ragged tears in her gown but dirt-encrusted, blood-soaked strips of fabric peeked out below, trailing behind her. Her skin, stinging and reddening in the cold, was smeared with dirt. A deep gash at her hairline oozed, the hair around it matted and snarled.
It occurred to her that he hadn't been staring at her lecherously. He'd been staring at the seeping gash on her forehead, the ragged strips of ruined fabric trailing behind her like a train, the small knife she was holding in her hand.
"You're a little late, Laird," she informed him. She had to shout over the rising winds. Her throat was hoarse from the acrid smoke of her burning home - the gutted keep, the burning village - but she managed not to let her voice break.
He finally moved, taking a step toward her. She immediately raised the tiny knife. He stopped.
"Who did this to you?" he asked. He didn't need to shout as she had. His voice, a deep, rich baritone, carried well enough despite the wind.
"You know who did this," she shouted at him, voice breaking with betrayal. "You know. We called you for help and you didn't come."
He didn't comment on the obvious inaccuracy of her statement. Instead, he took another step toward her and this time, reached out to gently push the knife down and away from him. He could feel the quiver in her hand. "I meant, Lady Alessandra," he said, grasping her chin between a thumb and forefinger and forcing her head up into the dwindling light, "who did this to you?"
She jerked away from him. "What does it matter? They destroyed everything. My father is..." Her voice broke.
He glanced over a shoulder and jerked a nod toward the blackened remnants of the keep. His warriors nodded in return and silently rode forward.
"Oh, it matters, Lady Alessandra," the barbarian said. There was a chill to his voice that matched the icy wind. "It matters quite a bit."
She stared up at him, the wind whipping tendrils of her hair in front of her face and his. Her tongue darted out to moisten her parted lips and she asked -
"Have you -"
Garrus Vakarian jumped, dropped the book, and whirled around. "Shepard!" he said.
Shepard's eyebrow inched up. "... got a minute?" she finished.
"Uhhhh," Vakarian said. He glanced to the left... to the right... then cleared his throat. He reached back with his boot to slowly, carefully, push the book behind one of the legs of his console. "Sure. I, uh." He nudged it a little farther. "Sure. What, uh... What can I do for you?"
Her lips twitched. "Tell you what," she said, settling herself comfortably on a storage container pushed up against the right wall and tearing open a vacuum-sealed package of energy snacks. "You agree I can skip the amnesic treatments and memory engram mods... and I agree never to speak of this again. And then you can pick up Kasumi's book before she perforates your gizzard for ripping it."
His mandibles fluttered for a moment. "Right," he said, then abruptly ducked under the console, retrieved the book, smoothed a three-fingered hand over it gently, then stuffed it into his toolkit.
Funny. He'd never carried a toolkit around before. Shepard had the distinct impression he'd started carrying it just so he could hide his book. Her lips twitched again.
"Thanks for teaching the invisible girl how to do that, by the way," Vakarian said, leaning back against his console. "Perforate my gizzard, I mean. I'm sure that's not going to end badly at all."
Shepard gave up any attempts otherwise and indulged herself in a smile. "Now now," she chided him lightly, "Kasumi would never actually perforate your gizzard. You know that." She jiggled the bag of snacks around to rotate the selection a bit, peered into the bag, then found the one she wanted. She popped it into her mouth. "It's terribly inefficient. She knows at least three other close-quarters options that would kill you a hell of a lot faster."
"Yeeeeah," he said. "Definitely not going to end badly. Shouldn't you be asleep, Shepard? Big day of bending space-time tomorrow."
She smirked at him. "Trying to get rid of me to go back to your bodice-ripping, Garrus?"
Vakarian looked down at his already mutilated armor blankly.
Shepard sighed. "Never mind," she said, waving her hand. "Yes, I should be sleeping." She jiggled the package of snacks around for a moment but didn't reach in for another. She jiggled the bag again... then leaned abruptly forward, elbows on her knees, hands hanging loose between her legs. Her direct gaze met his. "How bad an idea is this, Garrus?"
If Vakarian was at all taken aback by the question, he gave no indication. He pondered it with the same sort of gravity he gave the optimization of the Normandy's firing algorithms... maybe a little more because Shepard's firing algorithms were already optimized and she was probably armed. "You might have to be a little more specific than that, Shepard," he concluded after a moment with surprising gentleness. "This entire mission has been one really bad idea after another." He moved to sit next to her on the crate, a respectable distance away. He matched her position, looking down at his own hands. "Then again, so was the last one... and we ended up saving the galaxy."
She shot a half-smile at him. He half-shrugged back at her.
"Somehow," Shepard said, shaking the snack bag again, "this seems different."
"Look, Shepard..." He sighed. "You're here because of everyone on this ship, only Joker, Tali, and I were with you last time. Joker is... Joker. And you would never confess a worry to Tali for fear that you would tarnish the larger-than-life image she has of you... especially since there's a really good chance that that larger-than-life image of you is the only thing giving her - giving any of the others - the confidence to keep going. So you're here. And as you've probably noticed, I'm still here too. Having a few doubts and voicing a few concerns is actually pretty badass when you consider the fact that you were mostly dead a few weeks ago." He gave her a sideways glance. "So what's on your mind, Shepard?"
His expression suddenly changed from quiet concern to abject terror. He stared at her, wide-eyed and frozen. "Wait, is this about Alenko?" He looked like he was about to bolt.
She gave him a tired look. "If this were about Alenko," she said dryly, "I'd borrow one of Kasumi's books and hide it in a toolkit."
"I'm not above getting the memory engram mods out, Shepard," Vakarian said.
"No," she said thoughtfully. "I think Alenko's a trigger. I think he reminds me of a time when I knew who the bad guys were." She stared at the snack bag. "And the good guys, for that matter."
A few minutes passed in silence. "Perspective," she said finally. She turned to look at him directly, repeating, "Perspective." She turned back to the snack bag. "I'm think I'm losing it."
He thought about that for a moment. "Have you..." - and he really hoped he wasn't about to get shot - "considered that maybe you're not losing it at all and that you're just realizing you haven't had it?" he asked.
He quickly raised a hand to interrupt her and/or protect his already scarred face from another rain of bullets. "You said perspective, Shepard. Not perception. Not sight. Not wisdom. Not even clairvoyance. You said perspective. Has it... occurred to you that you can't really have perspective all by yourself? That's why you're here now, isn't it? You just needed to get a wider view. Not..." He coughed awkwardly. "Not that I'm all that great at it." He gestured to the disfigured side of his face. "Bad eye, you know."
She gave him a half-smile, half-smirk but it faded quickly. "Maybe you're right," she said. She didn't sound convinced.
"There are two ways to get perspective, Shepard," Vakarian said after another long silence. "Spend the time and travel and you can walk around anything to see every side. Or you can have everyone open their eyes and start looking too. Last time, you did the latter... and we saw everything we needed to in time. This time... well, this time, you came in two years late to the party and I think a lot of eyes were watching you make your entrance instead of looking where they should have been. Maybe that's why it feels different."
She couldn't resist quirking a smile at him. "I guess that dog-eared section would tell you everything you need to know about how it feels for a human."
Vakarian's mandibles flexed. "Seriously, Shepard, I have an engram kit with my gear," he said. "I'll use it."
"So." She sat up straight and placed her hands on her knees... took a deep breath... then pushed herself decisively to her feet. "Thanks, Garrus."
She started to leave... but stopped. She asked the next question without turning around. "How bad is it that Commander Fucking Shepard had some doubts?"
The question came out lightly but he didn't think it actually was. "I... think if you can still think to ask the question, Shepard," Vakarian said slowly, "that you're still Commander Fucking Shepard. And I think that anyone who could face what you are facing without taking a moment to reflect... is not someone who could or should save the galaxy. Having doubts is..." He half-shrugged at her again, offering her a faint smile. "It's only turian."
He frowned. "Or human. It's human too. I'm not saying you're a turian or that humans can't -"
An energy snack hit him smack dab in the middle of his forehead.
"Thanks, Garrus," Shepard said.
"Anytime, Shepard."