Chapter 26: The Escapists Part I: Firsts
Two figures evaporated from the ship beneath a veil of stealth.
Quickly they moved, like water, and just as transparent. No one aboard noticed as a tall figure and a small one evanesced from the watchful eyes of the Normandy SR2 without a sound from the shadow of her wings. Though Mierin had taught him well in their years together, the Turian quietly admired the small woman to his right, walking just a few steps ahead, as she slipped beneath the waves of the crowd without causing a ripple.
She had suffered greatly to learn that control over the colorless - the ballet of subtlety that was a fundamental in the art of invisibility. Mierin's lessons filtered back to him; her reprimanding voice and her endless drills. In time he had learned to disappear as deftly as the Asari, to melt and fade by the command of one's solidness against the eye. As his skills grew slowly, his senses became trained to catch and appreciate those whose mastery far surpassed his own. The greatest he had ever seen was Mierin, the seductress and huntress. In close second, Thane the assassin (whose expert deception of him that morning was still raw in his mind) but now in soundless awe, the woman they called Shepard.
He had known her for years, seen flashes of her memories, but still knew almost nothing about her. From the glow in her skin that made her seemingly bulletproof, to the nightmares he knew still veiled her, to those long white scars now gone that lined the memories he had borrowed from Liara - she was still, after all the time he dreamed of her, and all that he had whispered to her shade - entirely, indefinably, but a sum of parts; with no beginning and no end.
Shepard. Just a name and an idea. He knew only what she revealed to him, only what she wanted him to know. He had thought for two years over every moment they had ever spent together. Long had he to meditate over those memories so clear only on the fringes, the centers missing and obscured.
"Do you often go out by yourself?" He asked quietly, watching her out of the corner of his sharpened eye as they filtered through the swells of heads pulsing past them in waves. Her silver eye caught his as they walked beside each other, and he saw it turn away as she considered, her lips, calm now but still taken aback. He could tell by her pace that whatever she was doing, she was used to doing it alone.
"Not since Alchera." She replied softly, definitely, as he watched her eyes slip amongst the faces, left and right, always aware, always on guard. "But much more when I was younger. When I needed to get away. I…like to be among strangers. It helps me clear my head."
It was nearly noon and for many the middle of the lunch hour. The wide neon-stippled lanes of Zakera ward's twenty seventh level overflowed with tides of workmen and shop clerks, women shopping and couples meeting between jobs. The flow of life poured in volus grey, elcor tan, hanar rose, asari cobalt, peppered here and there with quarian calico. Realizing she was moving slightly too fast, as if to get away, she consciously slowed her step a hair and let him catch his long stride beside her, and as he did, she paused and looked up as he approached her in the pale blue light.
Wreathed still in his destroyed armor, the front of the heavy looking carapace still cracked and burned, he looked to her like a tree without its leaves. Her glance traveled; from the double pronged toes of his thin worn soles, up the long recurved lines of his shins encased within the plates of his greaves. Her eyes slipped up the exaggerated curve of his waist set deep within the hips that balanced his frame beneath the steep arcs of his shoulders, and upon his face, looking at her with eyes now so dark. Atop it all, atop the jagged edges, the curves and barbs, the hard lines and angles, was his face amidst its shattered plates, and it struck her profoundly how much it had changed. Beneath the razored fringe which always stole her eyes was a glance that could caress or burn, that had glimmered once with naiveté, and now watched her through a bandaged wound, noting how she stared at him, to the glance that slid down from the blades that crested him to the fissures on his face and lingered there longer than they should have.
He read her thoughts, as they stood amidst the moving crowd, and he watched her eyes stay upon his scars, mesmerized, and he wondered if she liked them.
She was dressed in civilian clothes he didn't know she owned, but of course everything was different now. Details no one else cared to see stood obvious to his trained memory. Her hair was now a richer crimson in its sleeker gleaming sheet, her flesh now even like fine china, erased of every mark, of every sunkissed freckle of which he noticed first and missed along with the scar that once cleaved her elegant brow. Her body had changed almost imperceptibly, but certainly to the sniper's trained eye which had memorized every foreign inch of her that he had seen but once. Every inch that would go on to be remembered in the dark a thousand times and a thousand times more.
Where she had once been lean and muscular, he saw now curves exaggerated where there had before been only muscle and bone. What once was bare and sculpted was now sweeping and soft, he wondered if by design, or from two years of stasis. Her hard cut thighs were now supple and slightly more voluptuous, the new curves undeniable beneath the gleaming black fabric that clung like paint to her with it silver inlet honeycombs, the sheathed garment that swept over the hypnotic wave of her hip into the hourglass of her waist at which he tried not to stare, but failed.
Tragically. Obviously. She hid the quivering of her hands as he made it impossible for her not to notice.
Hidden beneath the tight thing with its distracting striations and seams that covered everything and concealed nothing, his eyes fell beneath the panels of the open leather jacket that could not hide that magnetic curve of her - the valley between her breasts and hips that entranced and trapped and never let him forget how the curve that framed her navel fit between his thumb and forefinger like it was made for just, and only, for him.
Their glance met.
The problem with looking in his eyes was that their color stole her words.
"You look terrible." She lied, hypnotized, tones level, caught in what was daring to smolder just within his lenses. She dared not even blink.
"The bandages are supposed to come off soon." He said quietly, edging just close enough to her that he had to tilt his head down the six inches he had on her, and he watched transfixed as she slid her grey eye with its pupil he was certain was dilating so, so slightly from one of his lenses into the other before falling, magnetized, to the damages on his face. The crowd moved past them, blind to the tension.
The ache.
He watched her fidget slightly, her lips moving with the tilt of her head, and he watched her bite back words, saying nothing. She looked down for a moment, shifting, and then looked back up to him, saying in soft seriousness,
"You…stand out. I wanted to go unnoticed."
"I can manage."
She looked carefully away, fixing her eyes on an asari going through shopping in a nearby lobby, and said in perfectly controlled tones,
"I understand if your armor holds sentimental value. I do not want to intrude upon your customs, but, for 'missions' like this,"
He watched her flex her first two fingers at that word in the human gesture he understood for sarcasm, still looking fixedly away from him.
" – I will respectfully request something more relaxed. Armor draws the eye here, even if unmarked."
He watched her carefully, at her masterfully but still noticeably controlled expression, and considered deeply. He could see she was trying her hardest to avoid the burning glance of his eye, which he didn't care to hide. Leaving the main battery was like leaving the bottom of the ocean. He hadn't tasted fresh air for months, and away from the demons that stole his breath and mind, he was ravenous, once again, to live.
He felt the familiar tidal wave of negativity flowing through his body, and he fought it as it threatened to steal the his slight intoxication at her nervousness, at how he saw the pulse quicken in her veins when he drew near, and confirmed that which he knew to be her greatest lie. The thing he knew she would deny, and deny, but couldn't ignore. Almost sadistically, almost, he felt a slight revenge at this; now, now she knew what it felt like, to be teased by that which was right in front of her.
"Apologies, Shepard. This is all I have." But then he caught her errant eye, and involuntarily he smirked with her, crossing his plates in understanding as that devious glint so familiar from days long gone snaked across her features, "…Unless you are insinuating…"
Her lips drew into a slightly malevolent smile, as she looked slyly away. "You know, Cerberus has quite the budget…"
"Go on."
She caught his eye, smirking so softly, "For 'team building' activities…"
Those fingers flexed again, and and that smirk.
"…You don't say?" He flanged in slippery sarcasm, and she nodded with very artfully exaggerated seriousness.
"Yes. Absolutely. I feel, Officer Vakarian,"
"Officer?"
"Well, you would know that if you left the battery every once and a while –"
"I did. To shoot things. Ask Samara."
She shot him a deeply dissatisfied look.
"You didn't say a goddamn word the entire mission."
His eye glinted sarcastically as he tilted his head, eying her, and said, "I think I know better than to open my mouth around a Justicar. I value keeping my head in once piece. Not my fault if you wanted to interrupt my calibrating genius to 'talk about your feelings.'"
His deep voice was warm with satire that teased her smile into laughter even though he saw she fought against it and failed as hard as he had tried not to stare at her waist. Relief washed over him in a magnificent wave to know, that even after everything, he could still lure out her rare and quiet laugh.
"Shut up, that's an order."
"You know, if you want to get all emotional on me Shepard, I think I saw an advertisement for an Elcor reading of your 'Hamlet', I hear its only supposed to last fourteen hours –"
"Dear god, no –"
She was fighting against laughter, trying her damnest to hold it back, looking all around but never in his eyes. He saw this and pressed harder, his voice dripping with feigned seriousness. She was shaking a little bit, stifling back the laughter, trying to hide the little tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, and he, amused beyond all reason, put his face close to hers and said,
"I'm just saying that you haven't lived until you've experienced Shakespeare in the voice of an Elcor. Don't blame me for being cultured –"
Her eyes finally dug into his for just a moment before she turned from him and set off walking with an almost violent suddenness, and he trailed her quietly smirking inside, victorious in having punctured her anger and disappointment, even for just a moment, with his idiotic humor that only ever worked on her. His long legs striding, he easily caught up to her as she cut through the hustling crowd. He slipped next to her, watching her turn her long neck to navigate the mob, and he wondered what she was looking for.
"So aside from you bowing out of bribing me with new clothes –"
He caught her eye and she glared hotly into it as they turned a corner, falling into easy rhythm beside each other,
"You still haven't told me what you planned to do here by yourself."
He saw her skirt her eyes around uncomfortably and shake her head as they waited for a Hanar to drift serenely past, as he watched her slide her eye longingly across the busy hub into the rose tinted illumination of Zakera Café. Garrus watched incredulously, as she slid a glaring eye into his and said flatly.
"I'm hungry."
He balked.
"You can get food on the Normandy."
She looked sheepishly back towards the cafe and stared. It was so ridiculous he almost laughed.
"All this secretiveness because you are avoiding Gardner's cooking. I…don't even…"
Shepard kept her face fixed on the warmly glowing restaurant, and she stared, torn.
She crossed her arms, before jutting defensively and in rapid speed, "Look, this is why I wanted to go alone. We're only here for 30 hours and I didn't want to waste anyone's time. I'm all caught up with our upgrades and since we picked up Samara, we've gotten additional funding and I left it all up to Miranda for obvious reasons. We're ahead of schedule to go pick up Subject Zero and this is our last stop in the Serpent Nebula for some time. Look, I'm not here for any official reason other than to get the hell off that ship, so you can go back without hurting my feelings, I truly won't care, but you wanted to come, so...There it is. I'm getting some lunch. Sorry to disappoint."
It was painful to hear her justify and rationalize to the extent that he just witnessed for something as simple as a meal alone with her thoughts without the Universe threatening to fall apart at any moment. He looked into her eye which slid guiltily from his back towards the restaurant, and he shook his head, saying calmly as he realized in that moment that he completely understood her motive.
"You wanted to forget about things for a little while."
Her words hit her. From the cameras she knew were implanted in every room that led straight back to the Illusive Man's monitors, to Miranda's condescending looks every time they had another useless meeting, to the pain that it caused her to eat food cooked by Cerberus hands, no matter how kind, no matter how well mannered. She had grown tired of being unendingly surrounded by green-horned Cerberus crewmen who stared at her as she moved through the ship as if she were some sort of demi-god even as she tried to do the most mundane of chores. She felt that she was more the the quasi-captain of the massive gleaming vessel than its commander so long as she had Miranda scrutinizing and reporting on her every move, as hard as she tried to utilize the ship which was still more than halfway still inaccessible to her – and so, at the end of all of this, yes. She needed some time away.
To her, her current crew was only a mockery of what it once was, before the obsessive self-preservation of her own heart had destroyed it all. In her attempt to calm the furious anxiety that every single aspect of the new ship caused her, she quietly clung to the few members of the ship she had known in a life now gone. She had gone back to drink with Chakwas more times than she could count, hovered around Joker until she feared becoming a distraction. Of everyone - though she had not had much time to speak with the Justicar just yet, only Thane could soothe her worries, with his mastery of his mind, and the confidence she prayed to have by his age. Because his time was short, she had fought and learned from him until her hands bled and her muscles burned with soreness to pain her into believing she was still alive, but it was not enough. And, to make things worse, there had been something odd showing lately just behind the drell's sad eyes that had been keeping her from his exclusive company.
Without her masterful, melancholy assassin, and destroyed from the broken promise of her battle-scarred turian - shut away in his sepulchre as if by some wicked force from a fairy tale. Nothing in two months could stop her anxiety at how little she understood of what was happening to the colonists. In that moment, she stood paralyzed with deeply conflicting desires in a part of the Citadel she didn't care to know in its entirety. At that moment the only thing she wanted, as she had once a long time ago as a girl with half her hair missing and not enough food in her stomach, was to be a stranger again in a galaxy where everyone now seemed to know her name. She hid her glance from him, of the turian that stood quietly beside her was the only constant in her surreal world.
And now, finally, after weeks of silence and years of death, there they were again, standing on the Citadel, as much strangers to each other as they had been when they had first met, in that place beside the trees. For the life of her, her feelings for him had grown so complex that she had no idea of what to say, but at the top of her mind was the searing guilt she felt for taking even the smallest break, even if it was from a task she had never signed on officially to do, for an organization she hated, and that she knew kept he - purposefully - in the dark.
Shepard looked back towards the restaurant with longing. The turian's voice softened as he watched her, slowly beginning to understand that they may have been feeling the exact same thing as what had come to gnaw at him. He exhaled, setting his eyes back towards the café, and spoke in low harmonics.
"I just spent two months in front of a giant gun because…well…"
He trailed off, avoiding the thought, the acknowledgment the void staring him right in the soul. Her eyes slid into his again, and he leaned slightly to the side, and said to her.
"You don't have to justify anything to me. I get it."
Her eyes looked into his, which held her gently, and she nodded, but that crushing guilt tightened around her gut sank her resolve, and she couldn't even look. There he was, broken, destroyed, after losing everyone and everything including nearly his own life. In the pit of the specific depression that characterized survivor's guilt, that familiar sting she knew like the back of her hand (or at least did, before Cerberus was so kind to replace it for her) she could only stare at the restaurant, deflated. He saw the look in her eyes and decided to act, knowing that the day Jane Shepard lacked initiative was worth every second of his time, no matter how thinly he was worn, or how much he had lost.
Because knowing what he knew, measured against every pain he had ever had in his entire life, he knew her losses dwarfed his own. And yet, in spite of everything, she never gave. She never caved. He knew her to thrash, to fork her tongue, and lately, to even venture out alone for reasons not fully understood, be he knew that she would never, ever break.
He knew to the end of her days she would never lock herself in a room for months on end after living two years in a coffin. He lost his first team. She had lost an entire ship, and before, fifty to a massacre, and even before, her innocence to the evils of her species. How many more lay dead, lost or broken, he did not know. And how, after all of it, in the blood in which she waded waist high, how she still stood was a miracle. She would look anyone in the face, no matter how high or pedigreed, what title or office; with conviction immeasurable she spoke the truth bereft of gain, blind of profit.
In his heart, he decided right then and there she deserved a day away. The good, he believed, should never have to break their backs for just an hour of leisure.
"Come on. They have sushi there. Ever have it?"
Completely taken aback, she looked over to him with a raised brow. "You like sushi?"
His eyes smiled with a touch of mystery as he looked back at her, remarking as if it was obvious, "I lived on the Citadel for six years,"
Six years in the cultural melting pot of the universe. She never knew. Her eyes glimmered in intrigue, and now it was his to turn to feel the burn of nervousness.
" – I, er. I had the luxury of…of trying lots of foreign foods. Dextro variety, of course."
He stuttered slightly; a sweet sound she had not heard in years. 'Archangel' was so grave, and though she knew and respected the choices he had made in his life that had changed his personality even if she didn't understand them just yet, a touch of his old awkwardness coming back to haunt them made her smile with covert pleasure.
"I never would have guessed." She mused, watching him closely. Garrus Vakarian, apparently, had his mysteries as well.
"Well," He replied as he carefully avoiding her eye as they started towards the café, falling side by side, which in all his time serving with her he was entirely unused to and now very aware of, "I…would get curious sometimes…so I would meander through the restaurants late at night…after work."
Shepard didn't hide her smirk as the ridiculous image of him trying to drunkenly wrap his three fingers around human chopsticks in some low rent C-Sec cop bar flashed across her mind.
"Can you use chopsticks?" She suddenly asked, her mouth moving before her mind.
"What?" He asked, confused, tilting his fringed head curiously, meeting her eye as it was clear his translator had to work to catch the word, and she smiled a little shyly as he continued to watch her, not understanding. After all they had been through, she couldn't believe what they were doing – something so simple if it were anybody else, just a meal, alone on the Citadel, but for them - never did she dare to dream that it would ever happen, even accidentally.
They crossed the threshold into the warmly glowing restaurant, and he steered automatically (his nerves finally kicking in and threatening to throw him into overdrive, but she didn't know that) for the bar, choosing the seats at the far end, furthest from the entrance.
"Chopsticks " She clarified, saying it slowly, still smiling in her small way, her voice calm as she watched his long legs, so alien, slide gracefully around the stool. Feeling something odd glance across her stomach that felt like feathers, she hesitated for a moment before slipping up onto the stool next to him. Made for taller races, the tips of her booted toes hovered several inches above the ground.
"I…don't think we have a word for that. Chop…?"
"- Sticks." She finished, watching him curiously. He replied with a blank blink. She could tell he had no idea what she was talking about.
"Wait…humans eat with sticks? How the…"
"No, of course not – it's just the traditional way to eat this food, from our Far East where sushi was first created. I, well... I learned from an old boyfriend, he had lineage from that part of Earth...I guess I can call him that...Anyway, I am by no means an expert, but I can use them."
She openly chuckled at his bewilderment, and then met the eye of the gangly turian behind the bar who had been watching them curiously ever since they walked in, and despite the odd look he openly gave the two of them, who he only assumed to be a couple, she asked him kindly – which he did not expect for a human.
"Excuse me, but do you have any chopsticks? I'm trying to explain them to my friend here."
"Oh," Said the bartender in gentle surprise – with politics being what they were with Udina as councilor, he was far less than fond of her species, but the kindness in her voice and her smile momentarily wiped the prejudice from him mind. He scurried to snatch a few pairs from deep beneath the bar. He placed them, still brand new in their simple Japanese boxes before them, stuttering awkwardly,
"Uh, well, I've never actually had anyone ask for these before, they pretty much just came with the dishes. Most of us just eat the stuff with our fingers."
"With your fingers?" She asked incredulously, "What, with the ends of your talons?"
Blinking, completely confused, the bartender replied, "Well…yeah. What else?"
"Oh no, this is sushi, men, this is serious business. Sushi is not eaten with the hands. You two are turian, you should get this; do something right, or don't do it at all." Said Shepard firmly, enclosing her many fingers around one of the plain little brown paper boxes and slitting the pretty little green sticker with its flowing kanji in two before slipping the lid from the base.
"Today I teach you both something from Earth. Watch."
Two sets of completely confused turian eyes watched a multitude of fingers slip around the simple wooden sticks with a complex dexterity they never dreamed was possible. She smiled, pleased her muscle memory had not faded after her years of eating whatever military grade slop she could get down before rushing off to do the laughably suicidal things she had planned for the day. She easily began to flex the sticks between her five nimble fingers, before proceeding to pick up various small things around the bar as the two aliens stared at her exotic, strange hands like they were seeing for the first time.
"How does that even…here can you pick up this?" Asked the bartender, gawking like a child, his livid mistrust of humans temporarily forgotten, as he set a small shot glass down before her. The two turians leaned in and watched the human nod and then easily, with the surgically accurate grip of an N7 marine, slip the ends of the sticks around the lip of the glass, twist her flexible wrist, and set it down upside down.
"That is…amazing." Said Garrus quietly and completely mesmerized, watching the sticks tangled in her fingers like it was fine art. Shepard looked at him in bemused wonder, as he stared intensely at her hand.
"It's really not," She chuckled, as his eye slid into hers, "Here."
She pulled out the ceramic rest from her box and set the utensils down carefully, before proceeding to open his box for him; his eyes transfixed upon her oval nail as he watched it slide down the base of the box to cut the flimsy binding.
"Shepard, I don't think-"
"This is what you get for tailing me. Come on, just try. If you can change a heat sink as fast as I know you can, you can learn to do this." She held his two sticks in her right hand, and her eyes met his, as her left palm opened.
Their eyes met, and two pulses began to quicken.
"Can I…have your hand? I'll show you, it's easier than it looks."
"You…realize you have about two fingers more than I do, right?"
She nodded, her grey glance so close, sparked with a life he had not seen in years, a subtle playfulness that brimmed through her serious veil. He watched, powerless, as she leaned towards him, slipping her palm, that soft, silky expanse closer to him, and yet again, he stared at those fingers transfixed; transfixed as he had the day she gave him the paper he never threw away, as the day he gave it back. Cautiously, he raised his arm, and his heart threatened to cave in from its furious beating, he slipped his hand into hers.
She felt her stomach bottom out. Before she could place the sticks into his palm, she exhaled quietly, involuntarily, as three rough, strange, long fingers slipped into her own, and somehow accidentally, a long talon grazed the back of her hand, and every hair on her body stood on end.
He saw her lips part as her breath escaped her as she gasped involuntarily, the sound intoxicating his every vein and tensing his every muscle he heard her bodies' betrayal of her mind magnified with the full extent of his superior sense of hearing. In a moment that vibrated through every molecule of his body, he watched her eyes glaze over as she shivered at his touch, her features relaxing in a way that transmuted his blood to fire.
His body speaking where could not, he stared into her hypnotized eyes with their breath still stolen, and she, turning her glance slowly into his, stared back with something he had seen beneath him once only in a bed on a ship that now was gone, although in that single moment he knew with every searing inch of him that the memory had survived.
Two plates of sushi clinked against the bar before them, beside two bottles of warm sake.
"That stick thing is the most amazing shit I've ever seen. On the house. Drive safe kids." Said the bartender, still shaking his head in complete disbelief as he wandered off, certain now that he had seen everything.
Shepard looked from the bottles to Garrus, who deliberately grazed his claw down her palm as their hands parted ways, and asked, her voice shaking.
"You ever start drinking at noon before?"
He smiled to himself, opening her bottle.
"No. But maybe today is a day for a lot of firsts."