Tesseract: In geometry, a hypercube—the theoretical imagining of the square of a cube in four-dimensional space. In Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time, "tesseract" is a description of a movement through space-time outside the bounds of three-dimensional space.
XLVIII
Tesseract
Garrus stared at the bottle of wine in his hand without really seeing it. Two hours until the relay, more or less. Joker had made the announcement when preflight checks concluded thirty seconds ago. All over the too-empty Normandy, the combat squad would be taking showers, gearing up. Praying. Please don't let us be too late. Please let us come back.
Before the abduction of the crew, the mood aboard the ship had been subdued but purposeful. They'd been prepared. Certain. There was an urgency and desperation to the air now that hadn't been there this morning, like a biotic current all through the ship. They were still headed through the Relay to take out the Collectors. But everything about it had changed.
Everything except what really matters: taking a chance to be with Shepard right now in case one or both of us doesn't come back.
Garrus thought back to two years ago, when he'd gotten off work to see Kaidan waiting in the precinct lobby, face gray, shadows under his eyes that stretched for days. Back then, Garrus had only just been starting to understand what Shepard meant to him, and the news had hit him like a dreadnaught at FTL. In a few seconds, under harsh office lighting, surrounded by caffeine-deprived, burnt-out, apathetic cops, Garrus's vision for the future had been blown out an airlock in a couple of awkward, exhausted sentences.
Shepard and Vakarian, Spectres, cruising the galaxy for trouble. That was what they'd said. He'd known it was a long shot. He'd also known it was something Shepard had wanted almost as much as he had.
He hadn't had the words to define what he felt when he'd gotten the news—the loss not just of someone who had changed his life, the best officer he'd ever known, a friendship they'd just begun to explore, but of everything they might have been and done. Left reeling, fumbling to wrap his head around a cruel, hazy something he had missed, hadn't said, Garrus had attended a memorial where Shepard's CO and a bunch of soldiers who had served under her for less than a year were the people that knew her best, and the speakers had been a bunch of politicians, already turning her death to their own ends.
He'd known he had no right to mourn her like he had. He hadn't had the chance to earn the right. So, he had spun out into a spiral of helpless rage that had flung him out to the hind end of the galaxy. Straight to the place where all hopes go to die.
Garrus clenched the wine bottle more tightly, deciding. He stood up and left the battery, heading toward the elevator. Screw the timing. Screw the circumstances. Garrus understood now a bit better what he'd felt back then. And he'd be damned if today he'd leave it the same way.
If tonight I die or she dies or both, this time will be different.
He wasn't going to be left with that yawning, angry void; that enormous, bleeding maybe again.
And I don't want that for her.
The elevator doors opened on Shepard's door. There was a green indicator light on it showing she was inside. Garrus input Shepard's code. The door swished open. Garrus stepped inside, looking around, but he didn't see her.
Instead, he heard the sounds of running water from behind the door that led to her private head.
All of Garrus's brave resolutions slid down the drain with the shower water. I shouldn't have come. She didn't page me. He looked down at his casuals. His armor was two decks below. We have to be in armor and ready for action in two hours. Should've come earlier—or not at all. This is stupid. Stupid.
The shower stopped, and the sound of a fast, strong air current replaced it—all the restrooms onboard were equipped with automatic dryers for human hair, which dried on its own in a couple of hours, depending on the thickness and the length, but couldn't be inspection-ready until dry.
She's not expecting you. Not anymore. Not after the crew was abducted. You should go.
He took two steps backward, but before he could turn to leave, Shepard's bathroom door slid open. On a shelf above her desk, Shepard's little space rodent, startled, jumped off its pointless wheel and ran to hide. Garrus felt a sudden sympathy for the little thing.
But when Shepard saw him, she didn't look upset. Instead, her mouth turned up and her eyes crinkled at the corners in a way that did strange things to his gizzard. Garrus felt hot and cold all over. She hadn't been preparing for the battle. Not yet. Instead, she was dressed in that loose, Alliance promotional T-shirt again and soft, light gray pants that clung to her hips and thighs then fell loosely to the floor over matching gray socks. Her hair, drying but still damp, instead of being knotted behind her head or plaited back in a rope, fell in loose, yellow waves all the way down to her waist. It shone in the soft light coming from above her deck and the fishtank.
She sat back on one leg, and her hands went to her hips. She looked him up and down, taking in his casuals and the bottle of wine in his hand at a glance, and—despite the exhaustion and stress still lining her face—she smirked.
Garrus swallowed. His mandibles fluttered. His subharmonics were already going crazy, and he was insanely grateful Shepard probably couldn't hear them, wouldn't know what it meant if she could.
He lifted up the bottle of wine like a life preserver. "I brought wine. Best I could afford on a vigilante's salary."
Shepard raised an eyebrow, and Garrus couldn't help glancing at the label for the first time since he'd stuck it in his locker just a few days ago. He hadn't had the guts to look at it since. Spirits, it's dextro. Humiliation threatened to swallow him whole. That's sexy, bringing wine that could poison your partner. Of course, Shepard wasn't allergic to dextro any more than he was to levo, but that wasn't the point.
And what was the point supposed to be exactly? It's not like alcohol has any effect on her anymore. He remembered one time up here with Goto, Tali, and Joker, one night after Esabe had gone on duty, testing to see if the four of them could mix any drink, ply Shepard with any amount of liquor that would keep her intoxicated for more than five minutes. The experiment had been an abject failure. Much to Shepard's frustration, antitoxin modifications Cerberus had made to her body kept her stone-cold sober. Her days of wild partying and lowered inhibitions belonged to another life. Even if they didn't, neither of us can afford impaired judgment right now.
Cursing his decision to take romantic advice from a salarian, Garrus set the wine down on Shepard's desk. He wished he'd never brought it.
Recovery. He needed to recover. Music! Garrus cued up Shepard's sound system. Horrible dance pop, worse than anything she'd ever teased him for radioing over in a firefight, started pounding through her speakers. Garrus winced.
Does Shepard actually listen to this crap? She has to, if it's on her system.
Shepard was watching him, still with that damned smirk. Garrus spread his arms, but lost his nerve asking her to dance. Say something, you idiot. Anything!
Garrus racked his brains, then decided he might as well start in familiar territory. "If you were a turian, I'd be complimenting your waist or your fringe," he hazarded. "So, your . . . hair looks good. And your waist is . . . very supportive."
His thoughts were splintering off in a million equally useless directions, but it wasn't a lie. The smell coming from Shepard's clean, damp hair was intoxicating. He could see the long, loose strands blowing in the cabin's air system, and his fingers itched to touch them, feel if they were as soft as they looked. He'd wanted to touch her hair from the day they'd met. Beneath the oversized Alliance T-shirt, he could see the faintest, tantalizing edges of the waist her armor and uniform showed off to much better advantage. She didn't have the jutting hips of a turian woman to set it off, but that waist was nothing any turian woman would ever be ashamed of.
But she hadn't said anything yet. She hasn't said anything. Garrus blinked, and an edge of panic rose in his mind. "Crap. I hope that's not offensive in human culture," he said. He remembered the information Mordin had forwarded to his omni-tool. He'd just managed to review the diagrams, but when it had been time to watch the vids, he'd felt enough like the clueless twelve-year-old sneaking porn behind his mom's back just to figure out what girls looked like that he hadn't been able to go through with it.
Weird, how curiosity can feel dirtier than desire.
Only now did it occur to him that the finer points of human sexual etiquette might have been useful. "I knew I should've watched the vids," he muttered. His face and neck were burning. She'd be able to see it, if she knew where to look.
Garrus took a half step backward. Then, before he knew how she'd gotten there, two of the five fingers on Shepard's left hand were pressed against his mouth plates. His scattered thoughts, nervousness, and embarrassment crystallized and froze, and every nerve tuned in with overwhelming focus on to the feeling of her bare skin against his mouth and the pull of her eyes on his.
"Hey. Hey. It's alright," she told him, her voice low—amused, but steady. "Consider me seduced, ok? Shut up and stop worrying." With her right hand, she reached out and turned off the music. "You're much sexier when you're not trying," she informed him. She smirked again then. "But it's adorable that you're trying." She gave him a hard look, making sure he wasn't about to start babbling like an idiot again, then dropped her fingers from his mouth.
For a moment, Garrus couldn't have spoken again if he'd wanted to. Grateful beyond words, he almost smiled. It was the first time she'd called him sexy in as many words, instead of speaking of her attraction to him as something weird, possibly deviant or crazy. Hell if I know why a human would think that, why a turian would these days, but damn, I'm glad she does.
He wished she'd touch him again. That was another worry gone. Part of him had still been wondering if once he got here, he'd find out that his attraction to Shepard was all mental and emotional, that she'd turn out to be just too alien for this to work. Apparently not. Her hands were by her sides again, but he could still feel her fingers against his mouth plates—unbelievably soft, but deceptively strong.
There were so many other ways he could screw this up, though. He remembered Solus's warnings. Unfiled talons can cause damage to human tissue! Plating can chafe! He should've asked to see Lawson's readouts on the Lazarus Project upgrades and had Solus run a comparison, embarrassment be damned. He couldn't afford to hurt her two hours before their biggest battle yet. Miranda's lecture echoed in his head with Mordin's: Our job is to protect Commander Shepard. Forget the battle, forget all the people that would line up to shoot him in the head if he hurt her; if he hurt her, he'd never forgive himself.
Odds are, it'll just be you that screws it up, Vakarian. The dropout, the rebel, the vigilante hero who'd gotten his entire team killed and hadn't made a dent in Omega. Everything he touched went up in flames. This thing with Shepard, though, it couldn't. It can't.
"I just . . . I've seen so many things go wrong, Shepard. My work with C-Sec, what happened with Sidonis . . . I want something to go right. Just once . . . just—" He trailed off. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid to admit so much. In the space of a moment, all his pretense that he'd come up here to ease some tension before the battle had fallen away.
She'll either accept that, or she won't.
Garrus searched Shepard's face. For a second, he didn't know which it would be. She still smiled, but her eyes shone like they had after Horizon, like they had in that hazy space between life and death after the rocket had hit on Omega. But no tears fell. Instead, she reached down and took his hands in both of hers.
Spirits, when she touched him, everything else went out of his head. Her small, clever fingers ran over and around his talons, which he'd left ungloved for the first time since their fight after Pragia. He felt the dexterity, the versatility of those many-fingered hands, and Garrus focused all his attention on watching those hands explore his. He routinely filed his talons down—less chance of them getting caught on a trigger or in various mechanical parts—but they were still the hands of an adapted predator. Shepard didn't flinch, though. Instead, she turned his hands palm up and brought them to her face.
She pressed her pliable lips to one palm and then the other. Garrus caught his breath. The gesture was strange, but the meaning was clear enough. Acceptance, past anything they'd discussed or she'd given him reason to expect. He searched her face, wanting to believe her, uncertain if he could.
Really, Shepard?
She met his eyes, her lips still on his right palm, and gave him the ghost of a nod. Suddenly, there was a lump in his throat. Something seemed to crack in his chest or maybe his stomach, and up out of the crack welled a joy more free and more full than anything he'd felt since childhood, a relief more powerful than anything he'd ever felt. His mandibles flared wide, and he returned Shepard's silent promise as best he could, turning his hands to cup her small, sharp face.
Holding Shepard's gaze, Garrus ran his thumbs over the strong bones just under the surface of her skin and touched his forehead to hers. No more walls, then. Maybe it's stupid, even crazy. But for these two hours, we won't worry about apologizing for this. We won't try to hide. And before the end—if it's the end—it'll be you and me, Shepard. Just like old times, but different.
Maybe better.
A shiver went through her. Garrus hesitated a moment, then decided it was pleasure, not fear. Actually, she was stepping up on the balls of her feet, pressing her face up into his hands, encouraging him, so he did what he'd never dared to do before and slid his right hand back into her gleaming masses of hair. She smiled at him.
Spirits, she was alien. Her hair slipped and slid through his fingers, twisting, curling, and tangling, but she didn't react at all except to give a soft, contented sort of sigh. "It's so soft," he remarked. "Is this right? How does it feel?"
She tilted her head a little, looking at him curiously. "It's nice," she said. "But—" She got it then. "Ah." Her hand came up to stroke gently, just behind his ear, underneath his fringe. Garrus didn't bother holding back a groan of approval. It's been so damn long. Shepard nodded, satisfied. "You like that," she observed. With her other hand, she guided Garrus's hand closer to her scalp. "There aren't any nerves in human hair," she explained. "It's nice when you play with my hair—relaxing—but you want to be aiming closer to the face."
Garrus experimented with it, running his finger behind Shepard's ear and down her jaw, just where he would be touching her if she'd had fringe instead of hair. She shivered again, confirming he was on the right track. "Like this?" he asked.
"Just . . . just like that," Shepard agreed.
Maybe we aren't so different after all.
Shepard left the light on. She didn't have any more experience with interspecies relations than he did. In a way, it was exactly like being a virgin again, the first time either of them had had to learn how to touch someone else. What worked, what didn't, what just felt weird. There were similarities to being with a turian female, he discovered, but there were things about her body that he had no point of reference for; things about his that she had no reference for either. So mainly, they worked through trial and error, moving by feel. He watched her as closely as he did in combat, logging her tells and working off the information he gathered, and she did the same with him.
Her body was strange, but Garrus decided he liked it. There was a fascinating paradox to the softness of her skin juxtaposed against the lean, steely muscles beneath, the strength in her small, clever hands. A beauty in the symmetry and flow of her—angles into gentle, barely there, but impossible-to-ignore curves.
When she took off her socks, he laughed at the sight of her stubby, useless-looking toes. The way she could lift the feet they grew on up to the level of her hips and higher was much less funny, and when she caught onto that, she took the chance to show off for him a little, stretching her legs completely apart in front and behind her until her hips touched the ground, then reaching back over her head and leaning over her back leg to display the whole length of her torso. Garrus's eyes almost popped out of his head. And I'd talked to her about flexibility. He was almost disturbed, except it gave him so many ideas of things they could do together.
Assuming we both survive.
Shepard's confidence vanished for a bit when the pants came off. Not only did she catch his spurs trying to help him undress, it turned out she hadn't watched the vids either. Or looked at the diagrams. She was very surprised to discover a certain turn turian evolution had taken, especially after the spat they'd had after Pragia. When he explained, though, she got her nerve back in a hurry. She looked at him like he was the best challenge she'd ever seen, led him to the bed, and it didn't take her long at all to get him in the exact state he'd been in after their sparring match and worse.
There came a moment, though, when all the laughter and the joy of discovery died, and Garrus stared up at Shepard and remembered they might never get another chance at this. It seemed incredibly unfair. But at the same time, just having one chance was more than he'd ever hoped for.
It wasn't perfect. At one point, lost in the crescendo, he moved to hold her closer and forgot that it could hurt. She didn't tell him at first. She bit his shoulder and tried to hide her face, and only a harder edge to her movements let him know that her discomfort was starting to build along with her pleasure. But when they switched position, she gasped and nodded, sweaty hair splayed out over the disordered sheets, a pink flush all over her face and upper chest, and her lips parted in an inaudible exclamation, and they were at it again.
In the end, with a dazed, euphoric incredulity, Garrus watched Commander Shepard surrender—to him—with as much glory, honor, and dignity as she'd possessed the day she'd taken out Sovereign. She pulled him after her, as she always did, and he didn't fight it, any more than he ever did.
She caressed his back with one of her ridiculous feet as he gasped and gave one final shudder, circling her thumbs over his wrists, and he rolled over and collapsed by her side. He pulled off the used condom—from a box of turian prophylactics she'd had stowed in her nightstand like the most natural thing in the world—tied it off, and threw it in a lazy arc into the nearby trashcan. Together they crawled up the right way onto her bed.
Without a word, Garrus opened his arms, and Shepard rolled over onto his chest and lay there.
They were silent together for five minutes, maybe eight. Not much time now, Garrus knew. Maybe less than a half hour until the relay. Shepard would need to shower again and so would he, or there was a risk they'd distract the squad. They both needed to kit out and arm up. But Spirits, he didn't want this to end. The smell of her, of both of them, all around him, her dancing fingers tracing meaningless patterns over his chest and shoulders. Garrus combed the tangles out of her hair with his own fingers, feeling them catch and fall away.
But already he felt the moments they'd had together passing. She was watching him now not like the woman who'd allowed herself to fall apart in his arms, but with a hard, contemplative expression he was more familiar with, like he was a problem that needed solving. There was an edge to it that was completely new to him, however, seen on her face. A newborn uncertainty, a self-consciousness that before today he had only ever seen flickers of.
He could feel her perched on the edge of a decision, and Garrus knew instinctively that if he didn't say anything, she'd make it without him. She was Commander Shepard. It was what she did. "I've never seen that look on you before," he said. Her fingers paused in their circling, and she met his eyes before looking away. Her hesitation confirmed his guess. "That's the way new recruits to the turian military look just before their first bad fight. Right when they're deciding if they're going to stand their ground or cut and run. You alright, Shepard? It wasn't . . . bad, was it?"
She winced, and Garrus froze, mortified. "Spirits, it was, wasn't it?"
He would have moved away, but she clung to him, shifting so that if he continued to roll, she would fall. "No!" she told him, fervently. "It was good! Better than good, really. Amazing."
It didn't seem like she was lying, but there was still a note of anxiety present in her flat voice. He didn't get it. "What's the problem then, Shepard?"
She winced more obviously. "Not Shepard," she told him. "Not here." She pushed at him, irritated. "God, I am naked in your arms and we both might be dead in an hour. So just once, before we both get up—Beth, okay? Beth."
Garrus regarded her. It was a privilege to be allowed to say that name—not the name the galaxy and her subordinates knew her by, Commander Shepard, first human Spectre, hero of a dozen worlds and only hope for survival against the Reapers, the name that belonged to all of them—but her prenomen, the name of her childhood, the name she used inside her head to refer to herself, apart from the conceptions of others. As far as he knew, only Joker and the doc ever called her Beth, and only when they weren't thinking about who else might hear.
Another gift she'd given him today. In the back of his mind, he noted that it probably meant something else that she couldn't stand for him to call her anything else right now. No more walls. He took her in, every sexy, amazing centimeter of her, and nodded. "Beth," he repeated.
She shuddered from head to toe when he said her name. Her pupils dilated, her lips parted, and Garrus smiled. "So it was good," he concluded, relieved on that count at least. He searched her face, the reservation he still saw there. "Still . . . not what you expected?"
Before today, both of them had been trying to play it pretty close to the vest. Watching the crew, feeling their way. If he was certain of one thing, it was that neither of them wanted to ruin what they had with a failed romance. Shepard—Beth—she'd said, more or less, that she didn't do romance at all. "Never when things might get serious," she said. "Sooner or later someone's bound to get hurt."
Now, sex wasn't romance, and after a while, it had become clear to him that his attraction to Shepard could not and would not be ignored. But the best commander he'd ever known? The bravest person he'd ever met? The best friend he had left in the galaxy? Smart, wry, and inspiring as hell? Maybe it was inevitable that, after all these years, his feelings for Shepard were a little more complicated than attraction.
Over the weeks and months they had been dancing around this, Shepard had done a much better job of actually playing it cool than he had. Most of the time, he had no clue what she was thinking or feeling. But today, she had dropped the mask. For the last hour and a bit she had let him see her, and now he was almost positive she wasn't nearly as ambivalent as she'd seemed.
Or maybe, as she wants to be. Maybe that was it.
"Beth," he began, taking his time over her new name. Her eyes flickered closed, and she nodded acknowledgement. "I don't know what's going to happen either. Spirits, I never thought it'd be—"
She rolled off and away from him in a single move, cutting him off. "We'll arrive at the Omega-4 relay in less than half an hour," she said in a flat, no-nonsense voice that was as clear of a 'Stop. Shut the hell up,' as he'd ever heard from her. "We should hit the showers and gear up."
She stood and walked over to her pants, lying in a heap on her nightstand.
She wants back in them even if she's headed straight for the shower.
Garrus sat up as well. She was right. But listening to her now, their desperate suicide mission suddenly sounded like an excuse. He hummed. "Collectors won't wait."
"They took our people," Shepard snapped, as if he didn't get that. "They can't."
Garrus stood, walked up the stairs to her office and started putting on his own clothes. "Rescue or bust then?" he asked. He shook his head. "Huh. Good chance we'll bust anyway." He buttoned up his pants quickly. He'd have less than five minutes for a shower now.
She stopped, turned around to face him, in her pants and chest-harness now, still missing her shirt. "No," she said suddenly, fiercely. "I said this isn't a suicide mission, and you'd better not make me a liar, Garrus. You're surviving, okay? You're going to live."
Still shirtless himself, Garrus paused to regard her. She smelled like shampoo and sweat, sex and him, with notes of the smell she'd identified for him as her arousal—and fear. He tilted his head and took a guess. He reached across the gap to cup her face in his hand again. "We both will. What do you say we celebrate together?"
Beth closed her eyes then, and like she had two hours ago, rose up on her toes and leaned into his hand. Then she was half a meter away and pulling on her T-shirt. "We . . . we'll see."
Right but wrong, it seemed. Both the arousal smell and the fear smell had spiked. "Hmm."
Garrus pulled on his shirt, and in the split second it took him, she'd retreated back to her shower. He glanced after her a moment, then looked at the wine he'd left on her desk.
He decided to come back for it later.
A/N: For those of you going back and forth between this story and Disaster Zone: Resurrection, this chapter is concurrent with the ninth chapter of DZ:R, "Strings Attached."
Honestly, take what you want from this. I have my own opinions on both Garrus and Beth's sides of the equation. I'm happy to answer questions or discuss over PM, and I respond to all reviews.
Don't hate me, but I am taking another hiatus from this project for the time being to prep the ending of the fic and focus on some original stuff. I'm outlining the last five chapters of the fic, but I've got outline from eleven before that I haven't even started writing yet. Know we're very close to the end of Disaster Zone: Resurrection, but Sometimes Grace goes past the attack on the Collector Base to hit the major ME2 DLC in the denouement. Want to make sure the Collector attack and the DLC are written out in quality style.
Best Always,
LMS
