Having always been careful not to come near enough to cross it, Shepard had rather wondered where Samara, and her Code, drew the line. The day after her altercation with Brooks, she discovered it.
Whomever she expected on the other side of the cabin door—not Garrus, since he was down in engineering with Tali, and not Solana, as she was slated to have her newly-grown leg grafted in the afternoon—it was not Samara. It took Shepard a moment too long to regain her composure having been thus surprised, and Samara, lingering in the doorway, looked as uneasy as Shepard had ever seen her.
With Kaidan gone, Samara explained, the most level-headed of the other biotics wasn't present to play jailer to Brooks, and she didn't trust either Jack or Javik to hold their tempers long. "Not," she insisted, "that Maya appears willing to give more trouble, at present."
"Or so she wants us to think. I'll feel better when you've corroborated her story."
"In good conscience, and according to the Code, I cannot, Shepard," Samara said, her voice pitched low even though they had no audience. Shepard didn't think she was imagining the faint edge of disapproval. "Melding is not a tool of interrogation. It is not a weapon. And to use it against an unwilling participant is an abhorrent abuse of power."
"I wouldn't ask if it weren't important," Shepard insisted, tapping her fingers in a complicated pattern against the cover of the book in her lap. "You know me well enough for that."
"I know you well enough to be surprised you would ask at all." The disapproval graduated from faint to definite, and Shepard steeled herself against the rising cringe. Samara's expression did not change. She did not scowl or sneer or even frown the way another might, but the unhappiness was palpable nonetheless.
Shepard stopped her tapping and held her hands wide, palms up. "What would you have me do? This woman is an enemy. More than that, she's an enemy with unclear motives and mysterious connections and we have been half a dozen steps behind her the whole time. Merely holding her isn't enough. I have to bring the fight to those who would use her, and those like her."
"And if you asked me to fight her, I would do so without question. If you asked me to punish her for the crimes she is known to have committed, I would not hesitate."
"I don't get it," Shepard said, not quite able to buff the edge of frustration from her tone. "You let Garrus walk in and blow the woman's knee to pulp, but this is pushing too far?"
"You push me as well as her, Shepard, and I am no enemy to you or yours."
Shepard frowned. "She is hiding something. She's been hiding something from me since before we met. You have the ability to find those things out. I know you do. Liara got a play-by-play of the Prothean beacon when she went poking around in my head."
"This is not the same. I do not deny she may be holding back information. I fear you ask me to abuse this most intimate of acts to satisfy injured pride. You dislike that she successfully deceived you before. I understand. And yet this thing you ask—"
Shepard stiffened, already feeling the urge to defend herself, her motives. A prickle of damning doubt gave her pause. "And the lives that hang in the balance? The innocents she'd see dead without a second thought? Those already lost to her schemes? Do they not deserve justice?"
Samara inclined her head.
"She had a choice," Shepard insisted. "Your way or Garrus'."
"A choice made under duress is not a choice."
"Morality lessons," Shepard muttered. "Fantastic. Just what I need."
"So it would appear," Samara returned, with as sharp an edge to her voice as Shepard had ever heard. "I will interrogate her, if you wish it. But I will not invade her mind in the manner you desire. Not even for you, Shepard."
"She'll lie to you."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I was not at your side during the altercation on the Citadel, and she has not yet been able to lie convincingly to me."
Shepard lifted her eyes to meet Samara's unflinching gaze. After a moment or two, she scrubbed both hands through her hair and shook her head. "Forgive me. I should have consulted you first. I didn't—I didn't consider it from your perspective."
"I know," Samara said. "Or you would not have placed me in this position."
The words stung. More so when Samara left and Shepard realized the Justicar was right. She'd been applying a sort of by-any-means-necessary logic without once considering the pressure it would put on Samara or her Code. She'd been so wrapped up in her little game, playing her little role, and so pleased at seeing the tables turned on Brooks for a change, she'd never thought about the greater consequences. Her gut twisted unpleasantly.
It wasn't like her. Simple slip, or damning proof she wasn't actually who she thought she was, who she wanted to be? When Garrus returned several hours later, she was still fretting about it.
"Shepard?" he asked, just quietly enough for her to know how upset she must look to him.
"I can't sink to her level," Shepard replied, the tinge of mania audible even to herself, "I can't let myself become like her."
"Like…?"
"Brooks," she said. Snapped, really, by the way his mandibles flared. She waved a placating hand. "It's one thing to pretend. It's another to become. I—can't. I can't become. Or she wins."
His mandibles fluttered again, less startled and more confused. Funny, how easy it was for her to tell the difference. That, at least, was familiar. That, at least, was her. "I think I'm missing something here."
Shepard hunched over, curling into herself and taking a deep breath. Steady. Steady. A moment later, she felt the shift of the mattress as he sat next to her. He settled his palm between her shoulder blades, the weight just heavy enough to be reassuring, but not overbearing. Not presuming. She had no doubt that if she twitched away from him, he'd take that hand away just as swiftly. She didn't twitch away.
"Now I know I'm missing something," he added, and though he was trying to sound amused, she could sense the vague worry beneath it. "Want to fill me in?"
What she wanted was to lean against him, to feel the comforting warmth of his arm around her shoulder and her cheek pressed to his chest, but a hand against her back was better than him staring her down from the other side of the room. She drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, careful not to jostle Garrus' hand. Her limbs didn't feel quite normal yet, still weak and aching in ways she despised, but at least they moved when she told them to, and she'd worked herself up to the ability to stand for five minutes without toppling. With their limping drive core, Joker put them a week out of Earth orbit, and even that, he insisted with uncharacteristic pessimism, was a generous estimate. She looked at it as a mixed blessing. With all cylinders—or cybernetics—firing as they were, a week would buy her time she so desperately needed to literally get back on her feet again.
Shepard cleared her throat. "Samara held up a mirror. Didn't much like what I saw."
She didn't think she was imagining the faint press of his fingertips against her spine, and she let herself curl ever so slightly into the touch. "I trust you mean that figuratively."
She snorted, almost a laugh, and then sobered. "Can I ask you something?"
"I can already tell I'm going to regret saying yes, but go ahead."
"When you told me the story about Dr. Saleon, you wanted to sacrifice all the hostages aboard his ship to take him out. And yet, by the time you established yourself on Omega, you weren't willing to accept civilian casualties as a means to an end."
She turned her head just in time to catch the wry shift of his mandibles. "You know there wasn't actually a question in there, right? But I think I know what you're getting at." He sighed, his voice lowering slightly, his thumb running along the bony ridge of her shoulder blade, back and forth, back and forth. She wondered if it was deliberate, or only an old habit resurfacing. She was half-afraid of breathing too deeply, lest he catch himself in the act and stop. She didn't want him to stop. "I'm… not you, couldn't be you if I tried, but I meant what I said when I told you I'd learned a lot from you on the mission to stop Saren. I was… angry about a lot of things when I flung myself at Omega, but not so angry I couldn't at least try to see things the way you'd have done."
His hand left her back, but only to scratch at the side of his neck before returning again. "The thing is, before you I would only have seen the worst. The gangs. The gangrene. Omega had plenty of that. But underneath were the people whose lives were there. Normal people, just trying to eke out their living the only way they knew how. I remember thinking that's who the commander would see. And once I started seeing them, I couldn't stop. A month became six. Six became a team, and Archangel, and…" He shifted awkwardly, his subharmonics thrumming with the kind of nerves she hadn't heard from him in months. "First… I suppose it was a tribute. Then it was a code. I guess the code was a kind of tribute, too, in its way. And, uh, I have no idea how this is related to Samara or mirrors or Maya Brooks."
She hugged her legs because she wanted to embrace him and couldn't. "Samara reminded me that I have a code of my own, and I nearly broke it. Brooks uses people to get what she wants, heedless of the consequences. I don't."
"Samara refused to meld with her?"
"You knew?"
He shrugged. "I suspected. I'm pretty hazy on the details, but that kind of coercion seems like something she wouldn't go for. To tell you the truth, I lumped it in with your philosophy of the threat being enough. At least for the time being, I think Brooks will wet herself if Samara so much as glows in her general direction, and no embracing of eternity actually need be involved."
His words—and the fact that he used his exaggerated by the Goddess Liara voice for the no embracing of eternity bit—startled a laugh out of her. "Oh, Garrus. If I never hear those particular words again…"
He patted her back and she finally uncurled her spine, leaning against the wall beside him, their shoulders almost but not quite touching.
"How's—sorry, I should've asked sooner. How's your sister?"
"I think she's probably almost as good as new, since the first thing she did when she came out of the anesthetic was yell at me for a while and explain at least eight ways I was screwing up my life."
Shepard huffed another laugh, turning a smile his way. "I can give you a dozen how you're not."
He didn't smile. He didn't even blink at her. She sat pinned beneath his sharp gaze for a heartbeat, two, three, and then he kissed her. It definitely wasn't her kissing him; she'd been so damned careful to let him initiate their infrequent touches, their bandage-to-stop-the-bleeding moments, and much as she might've wanted to, she knew she hadn't moved toward him. Not here. Not now. It was all him.
Maybe it wasn't a vid-romantic dip on top of the Presidium, and maybe the angle was awkward because of their relative positions, but it was his hand slipping to her waist and his mouth on hers in the best approximation of a human kiss he could manage, which she'd somehow come to love more than she'd ever imagined she could love a kiss.
She gave herself over to it for a moment—a sweet, unrestrained moment lost in the heat and familiarity and home of him—and then she pulled away, resting a hand against his scarred cheek and saying, "Are you—isn't this—are you sure?"
He turned his head into that touch, and his breath as he whispered her name was warm against her palm. She closed her hand around that sound, holding it close, and then his mouth sought hers again, and that, she supposed, was eloquent answer enough. For here. For now.