War was chaos.
Soldiers ran among the half-destroyed, burning buildings as if in a frenzy, desperately trying to stay alive and kill the enemy at the same time. Most of them didn't even know where they were. Most of them shot blindly, never saw the faces of the people they killed.
It's different for a sniper, Garrus Vakarian thought as he reloaded his rifle. His vantage point gave him clear view of the battlefield. Unlike most soldiers on the street, he wasn't helpless.
He was good.
He knew he was good. He didn't waste bullets - every shot fired from his sniper rifle was one more dead human soldier on the ground. Those few who survived didn't come out unscathed, either.
Garrus didn't care for the entire Relay 314 Incident and he didn't care for the war with humans either. All intel suggested they may be close to evolving into an intelligent race or actually already were one, but there was too little information about them to know for sure. That was mostly why Garrus didn't really care for this war: what they were fighting was an unknown quantity.
Garrus looked through the scope of his rifle, following a human soldier characterized by a curious combination of dark skin and bright fringe and waited until it stopped.
He pulled the trigger and the human fell down.
Garrus didn't have enough time to be satisfied with his skill, because something shook the very foundation of the building he was hiding in.
Oh, damn it! One of the sides—he couldn't tell if it was the humans or the turians—must have set off explosives somewhere nearby.
Garrus grabbed his sniper rifle and, trusting in the maglocks, placed on his back before bursting into a sprint down the stairs.
The building was empty, but that didn't mean it was safe—especially as the shaking only got more intense instead of mellowing down. Garrus pressed himself to the wall to avoid being crushed by an especially large chunk of debris. He didn't hold back now, running at full speed, jumping down the stairs where he could, hoping to make it to the ground before the building collapsed.
Crap. He didn't turn back as he sprinted onto the street outside. A turian soldier spotted him from several meters away, but he ignored her, running in the opposite direction.
The sound of an explosion sounded so close that Garrus winced, wanting to cover his auriculars from the terrible noise. The shockwave hit him at almost the same time, and it was enough to make him trip over and, carried by his momentum, be sent flying into the nearest building.
His head hit the wall with a low thud and that sound and feeling were the last things he registered before his consciousness was consumed by darkness.
Garrus groaned. The first sense that came to him was a splitting pain in the back of his head.
He wasn't the only one hurt in this explosion. A large splatter of blue blood adorned the street corner nearby, next to a large pile of debris. Garrus winced, painfully aware some poor soldier had been killed by being buried by those.
Could have been me, Garrus realized bitterly.
He shakily stood up and was glad to assess he hadn't been hurt badly—aside from the splitting pain in his skull, he felt quite fine.
He looked around and found his sniper rifle and one of his pistols on the sidewalk not that far away. He couldn't find his helmet anywhere, even though he was almost certain he had been wearing it the moment the explosion hit him.
He was slightly anxious when he tapped his temple with a talon, but his visor was still there, mostly intact.
Walking down the road, Garrus managed to find his other pistol. This had been thrown even farther away, but he was glad to have found it.
He vaulted over an overturned vehicle, turned left at an intersection, and almost fell over when he realized the human he was about to pass by was still breathing.
He stared, mesmerized, at the flaming red fringe that fell down its shoulders.
He had never seen a human from this close up.
He couldn't tell if this one was a male or a female—he had never been taught to tell the difference—but he didn't need to guess to know it was a soldier. It was clad in a dark set of heavy armor that covered its entire body aside from the head - he could see the helmet lying on the ground a few meters away, probably blown away in the explosion that had caused the human to bleed out so hard.
Their blood was a deep shade of crimson. Garrus almost shuddered—it was unnatural. Alien.
Of course it's alien, he chastised himself. They're aliens.
He experimentally prodded the human with the hull of his sniper rifle, keeping his distance as best as possible. No reaction.
Now that he had shifted the human and moved its head, the crimson red fringe was no longer spread on its chest and no longer covered the N7 on their chestplate.
Garrus inhaled sharply. Crap!
Well, he couldn't just let this one go now! Not that he had ever been intending to... Damn it! Of course it was an N7. Just his rotten luck. This was bad. This was bad.
He quickly flicked off the safety on his pistol and aimed at the human's head.
He exhaled slowly, steadying his breath. His hand had stopped shaking now.
The human didn't move. A steady rise and fall of its chest was the only sign it was alive at all.
There was no reaction. No self-preservation instinct. The human soldier was clearly unconscious.
"Oh, come on!" Garrus put his hands on the sides of his head. "Don't do this to me."
He aimed at the human again, this time gritting his fangs to keep his cool.
"Damn it!" He took his finger off the trigger. He couldn't. He couldn't just kill it when it was this helpless. It would be nothing short of murder.
He stood there, torn apart, not sure what he was going to do now. He could just leave it there, but with those wounds, it wouldn't live to see the next day. Might as well take the shot.
Garrus inhaled sharply. "I must be insane," he decided before holstering his pistol.
He picked the human up and was shocked by its weight. It wasn't anything he couldn't bear, but this small human was heavier than a turian. Even taking into account the heavy armor it was dressed in. He hadn't expected humans to weigh more than turians.
Maybe the gravity on their home planet is weaker than here, he thought. Or maybe they have more body density... There's so much about them we don't know.
What in the hell are you doing?! he internally screamed at himself.
He wasn't sure what he was doing, actually. All he knew was this one was wounded and unconscious and while he was a soldier, he wasn't going to just shoot it when it couldn't defend itself.
His first few steps were directed towards the base, but he did a double-take when he realized he was carrying an enemy soldier with him. He couldn't bring it to the base—catching a human alive was a rare feat and he didn't doubt for a second that it would be tortured for information without second thought.
"What am I gonna do with you?" Garrus complained, angry now at himself that he couldn't just have the guts to shoot the human.
Then the answer hit him. This was a ghost town now—the front line of the war more than anything else.
He looked around, but there was no one in sight, turian or human. From here, he could easily make his way uptown, to the suburbs, and then...
Well, he hadn't quite planned that far just yet, but he knew that he would come up with it on the way.
Garrus set the human down, trying to be as gentle as possible. Their left arm was probably broken, bent in a way their other arm wouldn't, and there was a gunshot wound in their left side.
I'm going to have to tend to that, Garrus realized. If he had come as far as getting the human here, he also had to make sure they didn't die.
He looked around the room. It was a basement in one of the abandoned houses in the suburbs and would make an amazing temporary holding cell for the human.
Garrus gathered all the pieces of old furniture he could find and arranged in a pile on the stone floor. A few tinders from his backpack and a firestarter did the trick, and he was rewarded with a very nice, albeit makeshift, campfire. Good. This would provide both heat and light for the human—and for the next part, he would need light too.
The things he had used to dress the human soldier's wounds were some of his own bandages from his first aid kit as well as some torn-up clothes he had found in the house. It looked better than an open wound, but Garrus would have to get them better supplies or they wouldn't survive.
He noticed with surprise and aggravation that somewhere along the way, he started thinking of the human as a person. He tried to go back to referring to them as it, but to no avail.
"Great," he growled, angry at himself. He threw another tinder into the fireplace. "The last thing I need is getting attached."
He stood up angrily. He checked the human's restraints and bandages. They probably wouldn't catch a cold next to the fire, but bleeding out was a different issue. He didn't know nearly enough about human anatomy to tend to the wounds professionally and in the end, he had just decided to clear and dress the wound as he would have on another turian or himself.
He hesitantly took the blanket he had been sitting on and put it over the human's shoulders, remembering that humans were supposedly homeothermic. Now you won't freeze to death.
He took a step back to admire his handiwork. The small nest—that was the first word that came to his mind and he decided it was accurate—centered around the campfire looked kind of cozy, actually. He had tried to strip the human of their armor (he wasn't sure which parts were underarmor and which were garments, so he probably hadn't finished the job) and had laid it on the opposite side of the fire, in the human's sight but well out of their reach, just like their weapons. He hoped that seeing their belongings hadn't been taken away would calm the human once they awoke.
He tilted his head, taking the time to take a closer look at the human's face. It looks like a female, he decided. Although honestly, he had no idea what the difference was. (He could look for mammary glands, but since humans stood upright, he wouldn't know where they would be located.) Still, calling the human she instead of they made him feel a bit more comfortable for some reason.
Garrus looked around. The human was bound to a few pipes that ran alongside the wall. There was very little chance she would be able to break free—and even then, the matter of her injuries remained.
He nodded, satisfied with this solution for now.
"I'll be right back," he said quietly before leaving the room and locking the door behind him.
Already at the door, Garrus could feel the change in the atmosphere. He had been gone a bit longer than he'd expected, but it hadn't been easy stealing supplies from his own camp. Morally. Logistically, it had been very easy.
He opened the door to the basement, hoping to get this done as soon as possible before—
Crap.
The human was awake.
When she noticed him, her entire body stiffened and she slowly moved as far away from the door as her restraints allowed, not taking her eyes off him for a second.
She noticed the handful of fresh towels, alcohol, and water he was carrying and a shadow of understanding passed her face. She continued watching him with apprehension, but it wasn't just straightforward hatred anymore.
Garrus was careful not to make any too sudden moves as he slowly made his way toward her. Not because she was scared, not in the slightest. If anything, the other way around - he had no idea how she would react when startled.
He squatted something like a meter away from her.
"I need to change your bandages," he said slowly. He held up the towels to make his point. "You'll risk an infection if I don't."
She pursed her lips in a way that seemed almost defiant and stared at him. (Her eyes were green, Garrus noticed. Not the kind of green he usually associated with eye color, but deeper and darker—like emeralds or grass after long days of rain.) This silent battle of wills lasted for a few seconds, but eventually he couldn't bear the eye contact and looked away.
"I'm trying to help you," he said, enunciating every word as if that would somehow make her understand him.
The woman shifted, not taking her eyes off of him for even a second. She flexed her good hand and, much to his shock, brought up a primitive omnitool of some sort. It didn't look much like Garrus's own, but nonetheless it was proof the humans were much more advanced than the Hierarchy assumed.
"Er..." Garrus paused, not sure how to proceed. She was still badly wounded, definitely not in a condition that could threaten him, but the fact that she was acting so freely stressed him out. "What are you...?"
Oh. The realization hit him hard. Oh, she was smart.
"Are you... trying to understand me? What I'm saying?" He knew his words had no meaning to her just as much as hers to him, but he felt slightly less silly when he didn't just stand there silently. "In that case, you'll need some data... I could talk. I mean, I know I could."
She glanced up at him for just a moment before turning her attention back to her omnitool.
She said something, the intonation suggested it was a question.
"I wish we could communicate," Garrus said quickly. "It would be easier to understand one another if we understood what we're saying." Great job, Vakarian. He wanted to bang his head on the wall.
The human tilted her head. Her facial expression shifted.
"I'm Second Lieutenant Vakarian of the 35th Division." He spoke slowly as if to a small child and at the same time was aware of how it didn't affect their communication at all. "I'm not here to hurt you. As long as you don't hurt me, I'm going to be civil here, alright?"
She had no idea what he was saying, of course.
He sighed. "...Alright," he answered his own question, resigned.
He sat down on the opposite side of the fire. This is absurd.
"You're an N7," he said. "Where's your squad? You were alone. I know you had to have a command. What happened to them?"
She looked at him with an expression he couldn't read, her green eyes reflecting the flickering embers of the dying fire in the pupils.
"I have no idea what you people eat," he continued. "I'm not going to give you dextro food, it's probably poison to you. But you need to eat or you'll starve to death. What kind of food do humans eat? You don't look like carnivores." He tilted his head, looking at her critically. No claws, no sharp teeth, nothing that would indicate her species was predatory. "No, definitely not. So probably some fruit, right?" He tried to remember what the intelligent herbivory species ate. Elcor diet consisted mostly of wild greens and roots... He looked at the human sitting in front of him and mentally tried to compare her to the image of an elcor. Probably not. "I could try to find something, but we mostly eat meat. Not human meat," he added quickly, even though she didn't understand a single word of what he was saying. "You're safe. I'm not planning to hurt you."
She raised her eyebrows, looking at him pointedly.
For the first time, Garrus realized that while he had been rambling on, all the human heard was the same kind of gibberish her speech was for him.
"Right." He sighed. "Listen, I will need to change your dressing."
She made a set of noises that by human standards were probably words. Garrus sat on his haunches, defeated.
Slowly and carefully, he handed her the towels he had brought, hoping this would make his intent clear to the woman. She slowly reached out for them with the same apprehension that had characterized her every movement since she'd first seen him and grabbed quickly.
Garrus cleared his throat, nodding his head at her wounded side. She followed his gaze, her eyes eventually resting on the sloppy dressing he had wrapped up from bandages and dirty cloth.
He moved away for her own comfort and watched in silence as she slowly took off the bandages, assessing her wound in a way that a turian could not. Every few seconds or so, she sent him strange looks, but he couldn't tell what emotions she was trying to convey by that. He doubted it was fear that drove her; so far she had made too much of a point of her defiance and pride.
When she got to changing the bandages, Garrus passed her the bottle of disinfectant he had stolen from camp. Ethyl alcohol, that should be universal enough.
She wrinkled her nose distrustfully.
"It's not poison," Garrus said.
The woman responded to that with a sentence in the human language.
She unscrewed the bottle and suspiciously took a deep sniff of the liquid inside. The way her face lightened suggested she was familiar with the substance.
She mumbled something which Garrus graciously decided to interpret as a thank-you.
He watched, curious, as she redid the dressing on her wound and was pleased to see his attempt hadn't been that far off.
She looked at him, narrowing her eyes slightly now. She tugged on the restraints on her left wrist, tilting her head suggestively.
"I can't," Garrus said, then reflected and shook his head to get the message across.
She pouted and wrinkled her nose.
He shrugged.
She rolled her eyes—rolled her eyes! The nerve. Where was she getting all this spunk from? Garrus was pretty sure that had the roles been reversed, he wouldn't dare jump out of line.
She said something again, which sounded very similar to the last question she'd asked.
There was no way, Garrus realized, that he could keep this up. He either had to leave/kill her or come up with some way to communicate with her.
Garrus put a hand to his crest.
"I can't believe I'm going to steal a translator," he moaned.
"Fine." He set down the rectangular device on the table. "You can try this."
It was one of the translators they had been using to decrypt enemy messages. They were pretty common among officers on the front line by now, mostly because they weren't very reliable and only covered a small, militaristic lexicon of the human language.
The woman looked up at the sound of his voice, but she still made a point of looking at him as if she were the one in charge. (She was tied up and covered in bandages, for crying out loud!)
Garrus passed her the translator.
"It's for communication," he said slowly.
She shrugged her shoulders—he had no idea if that gesture existed in human culture or if she'd just picked it up from him, but she executed it perfectly.
He opened his mouth, but no words came to mind, so he closed it again.
"A translation device," he said after a long pause in which he tried to come up with some nonverbal way to explain what it was.
He grabbed the translator and slowly, pointedly, typed in the words translation device.
There was a long while of waiting while the message was processed and eventually displayed on the screen in strange human runes.
He passed it to the human.
She looked at him, then at the words on the screen, then again at him. The woman narrowed her eyebrows and he felt a sudden pang of fear.
She typed a string of symbols he couldn't begin to make sense of into the communicator.
Despite the situation being clearly in his favor, Garrus felt uneasy. What was the message? What was she going to demand from him? He'd heard stories about those N7 soldiers and he knew they were a whole other deal. Should he be scared? He kind of was already.
The translator gave a low beep when it finally decoded the primitively created message.
Garrus felt his throat tighten, especially since he didn't know enough about humans to read the woman's expression and guess her intent. Was this going to be a threat? A demand?
His heart racing, he opened the message.
THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY LIFE.