She's worked with many snipers over the course of her military service. A necessity, given her usual combat strategy is 'biotic charge and then finish them off with a pistol shot to the head'. It's a good strategy. But a dangerous one.
Hence the importance of a good sniper. For a few years there she worked with a man named Jimmy White. Good man and a decent sniper. Not brilliant, but decent.
Only once has she worked with a sniper she truly gelled with. Who understood how to watch her six. Garrus Vakarian. And the Cerberus assholes don't know where he is.
Shepard charges into a hoard of angry vorcha in the environmental control facility on Omega, sending three of them flying; their limbs shattered by the force of her blow. Aiming her pistol, she prepares to end the fight when a bullet whizzes past her, landing in the head of one of the downed vorcha.
Flames fly towards her and she dives for cover, cursing as she aims her pistol blindly, hoping to hit the vorcha pyro. A moment later he's taken down with a warp from Miranda.
The battlefield now devoid of the living, Shepard rushes up the stairs to where Zaeed is crouched. "What the hell were you thinking?" She shouts, mindful that it is unbecoming of a commanding officer to shout at her squad.
Losing her temper makes her uncomfortable. But being dead for two years and then resurrected by Cerberus tends to make one a little cranky.
"Saving your bloody life?" Zaeed shoots back, unperturbed by her frustration. He stands and walks towards the air system, not bothering to show her the courtesy to stand still and listen to her lecture.
"You don't shoot the ones I'm dealing with, leaving the pyros to barbecue me! You learn that in basic!"
"If you wanted a soldier, you should have hired a soldier. Your boss appreciates my skills."
"The Illusive Man is not my boss." Shepard turns to Miranda who is watching the scene unfold with a blank expression on her face. "We're getting Archangel after this."
Miranda taps at her omni-tool, frowning. "You already have a sniper on your squad. It would be better if we left for the prison ship in search of Jack."
Shepard places the plague cure in the air system, turning it back on with the press of a few buttons. "I need to work with someone I trust. Someone who knows how I fight. I gave you a name and you said you couldn't find him. So until you do, let's hope this Archangel understands how to watch my back."
"Bit of a bitch, aren't you?" Zaeed mutters.
Because she is, admittedly, being a bit of a bitch, she opts to let that one go without reprimand.
While loading her pistol in the transport area, waiting to be taken to Archangel's hideout, an unsettling feeling reaches the pit of her stomach. With all her insistence that Garrus be on her squad, why isn't she making the same demands for Kaidan? Kaidan is her… lover? Boyfriend? They never defined what they were and now it's been two years.
She hasn't reached out to Kaidan, telling herself that he's probably moved on. It's been two years and they didn't have long together. A month of sex and a few months more of dancing around it.
Why disrupt whatever he's found for the sake of an undefined love affair that's two years old and ended in tragedy?
So she tells herself. But then she remembers what she was thinking as air escaped her suit and her insides felt as if they were mushed to hamburger. She thought of Kaidan - briefly. But mostly she thought of Garrus, and what a damn shame it was that she would never see her best friend again. As her eyes closed forever, it was with his face in her mind.
Only it wasn't forever, it was two years and now she's alone, surrounded by people she cannot trust.
"Commander Shepard?" Miranda's voice rings out, interrupting her thoughts. "Are you ready?"
"Ready," she says, the very picture of calm and stoic. She's a soldier and there's a job to do.
They learn Archangel is a turian. "Sounds like you'll get your trained soldier after all," Zaeed says, voice dripping with resentment.
"I will," she says. "Will you be able to kill your former colleagues?"
"I do what I'm paid to do," Zaeed says, with a nonchalance that would have chilled her two years ago, but that now leaves her indifferent and unsurprised.
They cross the bridge with several other freelancers and a bullet flies past her, taking down her shield. "Quickly, we need to get up the stairs," she calls to Miranda and Zaeed.
A freelancer turns and looks at them, seemingly confused by their decision to ignore the orders they were given. His mouth opens but before words escape, he drops to the ground, his eyes blank and unseeing. "The sniper is good, I'll give him that," Zaeed says.
Archangel's movements are familiar; the way he crouches down behind the wall, the way he leans forward, looking into the scope on his rifle; one popularly used in the turian military, Garrus told her once. His own preferred rifle.
The three of them walk up the stairs without facing gunfire. Archangel fires off one last shot, clearing the area and giving them a break - for now.
He walks over to them, lifting his helmet off and it's Garrus - her favourite damned person in the galaxy; the one member of her former squad she wanted by her side more than anyone else. She gasps and then breaks into a rare smile. "Garrus?"
She pushes away the thought that Kaidan is supposed to be her favourite, as her… whatever he is. Was.
"Heard you were dead, Shepard," he says, his voice smooth and deep. On the surface he sounds wry, but his sub-vocals betray the pain of the statement.
"Apparently death is no longer permanent," she shrugs.
"Lucky for me," he says.
In the weeks afterwards, Shepard wonders why she didn't figure it out before the revelation. Probably a refusal to get her hopes up after dying and being resurrected and told it'll be her job to walk right into hell.
And, she didn't want it to be him. To know her best friend - her favourite person in this damned galaxy, has found himself in an impossible situation that would have killed him had she not been there to intervene.
A new wave comes - Eclipse mercs. "I can deal with any who reach the stairs - Zaeed, Miranda, take the bridge." She turns to Garrus. "You got my six?"
"Just like old times," he confirms. "Hit them hard."
"Always do," she says, walking over to the stairs and readying a charge.
For the duration of the battle she can pretend it's just like old times - her and Garrus against a swarm of enemies, with Tali hacking mechs and bringing down shields.
Only Tali isn't here. It's Miranda and Shepard hasn't decided how she feels about the woman yet. All she knows is she doesn't trust her. Not one bit.
She charges a salarian and finishes him off with a shot to the head with her pistol, blood dripping off her helmet. "You know, you'd get far less messy if you learned to fight from afar," Garrus drawls in her ear, his voice staticky over the radio.
"But it's so much less fun," she jokes.
"It did teach me a great deal about human anatomy," he says and a shot fires, dropping a mech that had been firing at her.
How many times has he spread medi-gel over her lacerations, looked over her bruises and checked over her limbs, only to proclaim, "I don't think it's actually broken"?
As the commander it's her job to lead from the front; to take on the brunt of the risk. It's her crew's job to back her up. That means she takes the worst of the injuries in a fight.
"Glad to have been a learning experience for you," she says.
"Would the two of you please shut up?" Zaeed roars over the radio.
She missed the banter. She can't banter with Miranda and Jacob is so dull he might as well be dishwater.
A click in her ear tells her they've switched over to a private channel. "Don't think your squad likes me," Garrus murmurs in her ear.
She sends a shockwave towards a two krogans, sending them flying into the air, their corpses twisting in mid-air.
"Zaeed is just jealous because I told him he's terrible at what he does."
"He's not bad. He's a good shot."
"He's not you," she says quietly.
There's a long silence. Silence makes Shepard uncomfortable. Has she pushed too far?
Pushed too far? The discomfort grows as she ponders the significance of that. That his face was the last thing her mind conjured and he was the first thing she wanted when she was resurrected. That she'd wage war against an entire asteroid worth of mercs to rescue him.
Granted, she was willing to do so for Archangel but is actually eager to do so for Garrus.
"I'm getting you out of here," she says, breaking the silence.
"I'm… uh… I know. We're in the process of doing that," Garrus stammers in her ear, sounding more teenage boy than man.
"I'll try not to break anything," she jokes; an attempt to ease the sudden tension between them.
"I've got the medi-gel ready for you," he says.
She leaves Zaeed with Garrus while her and Miranda go to close the shutters. While they fight their way through, Miranda gives her a look. One she cannot discern. "What?" She asks.
"Nothing," Miranda says. "You must be happy to see your… friend again."
What was with the long pause there?
"It'll be nice to have someone I trust on my squad," she says and she winces internally. This isn't her. Biting comments at her subordinates, open distrust and cynicism. She hates that Cerberus has brought this side out. A side she's always hidden by a cool head and careful professionalism.
Miranda doesn't react to the comment.
They return to Garrus' hideout, ready to fight their way out when they head the sound of a gunship approaching. "Shit, I thought I'd taken that thing out!" Garrus curses, scrambling to find cover.
"I shoved a welding torch through Cathka so it's not quite at its best," she shouts, running towards him.
When the rocket hits Garrus in the face, sending him to the ground, Shepard feels as if she's died once more. "Garrus!"
Despite talking to him repeatedly about justice instead of vengeance, all of that floods away as she lifts her pistol and fires at the fuel tank, hoping to blow Tarak up for what he did to her Garrus.
Today she's judge, jury and executioner.
There's no satisfaction in watching the gunship explode, but it does mean the battle is over. Rushing over, she kneels down next to Garrus and stares, horrorstruck for a moment until he gasps. A beautiful, horrible sound. Blue blood gushes out of the wound on his face and the acrid smell of burning flesh makes her eyes water.
All soldiers receive basic first aid training but battlefield medicine has never been her specialty. That was more Kaidan's thing. Still, she needs to try. "Radio Joker and tell them to be ready for us," she orders, grabbing a medi-gel dressing out of her pack and putting it on his face. "Hang on," she says, applying pressure to his other injuries with her hands.
"He's not going to make it," Zaeed murmurs under his breath.
Shepard turn her head. "Shut the fuck up," she says in her coldest, most intimidating voice.
The one she only used the one time before a few years back when she caught wind of a soldier harassing a recruit assigned to him. That sort of shit doesn't fly under her command and she had the man court-marshalled.
Miranda kneels down and begins removing his armour. Shepard gapes at her, feeling an instinctual need to stop her; to protect him. "The quicker they can get a line in, the better," Miranda says gently, sounding more human than Shepard has heard from her yet.
"Right." She continues putting pressure on his wounds, not knowing what else to do. Miranda was in charge of bringing her back from the dead, surely she must know… something about medicine.
It's 20 minutes before a shuttle arrives for them. 20 minutes in which Garrus drifts in and out while Miranda removes his armour, Zaeed keeps watch and she does her best to be useful. "It'll just be like old times," she says with forced lightness. "I need you."
His eyes close and his breathing grows shallow, the sound of blood gurgling in the back of his throat frightening her more than being surrounded by a hoard of mercs ever could.
"Stay with me," she says. "Garrus, please. I'll do anything. I'll tell you my name."
After her parents were murdered she quit using her first name. It was too painful. Long ago she decided only family would ever be allowed to call her by name.
Few know it. Even fewer are foolish enough to use it. Miranda used it the day they met and she lectured her about how to appropriately address her commanding officer. When what she really meant was, "keep my damn name out of your Cerberus mouth, you bitch."
His gloved right hand inches over, brushing her knee. Miranda hasn't removed it yet. Judging the bleeding to have slowed enough to remove her hands, she pulls the glove off and then her own. Before decorum stops her, she slips her hand into his own, much larger hand. It closes around hers, their fingers entwined, his talons blunted, resting gently on the top of her hand.
It's a perfect fit. Her five fingers with his three. "You'll be OK, I promise. They brought me back from the dead; a rocket hit is nothing for them," she says.
Once before she held his hand. On Ilos just as they entered the catalyst. Kaidan reached up from the back seat and rested a hand on her shoulder and she reached over and grabbed Garrus' left hand while reaching up to grab Kaidan's at the same time. It was gloved then; the gesture one of comfort and not intimacy.
On the Normandy, he's rushed to the Medbay and Shepard runs alongside, still holding his hand. Mordin and Doctor Chakwas are waiting and it occurs to her that recruiting the salarian doctor first was a good move for reasons she could not have possibly fathomed at the time.
"You need to leave," Doctor Chakwas says, giving her a push out the door. "He's in good hands."
"Save him. Cerberus spent billions bringing me back from the dead so do whatever it takes. You need anything, and I'll make sure you get it. That's an order," she says.
"I've treated worse," Doctor Chakwas says, turning around; the automatic door closing, leaving her helpless.
With nothing to do but wait, she returns to her quarters, removing her armour and cleaning it. On a ship this… excessive, there's probably someone tasked with cleaning the squad armour. But she wouldn't be a soldier if she didn't tend to her own damn armour, so she does it herself, trying not to think of how much blue blood stains it.
She showers, turning the water up as hot as she can stand, standing under the stream of water, her red hair clinging to her face and neck.
The last time she washed her hair in hot water was before the Batarian slavers stole her parents' lives from them. Before grief made her want to change into something unrecognizable; a soldier, trading her natural jet black hair for bright red. With the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders, she can't show her anger or grief. Not in any recognizable way. Her hair speaks what she cannot vocalize.
So she dyes her hair instead. She's due to colour it again; being a corpse for two years fades a dye job worse than a hot shower does, apparently.
Shepard doesn't sleep; she sits all night, waiting to hear something. Anything. It's Jacob of all people who calls for her in the morning, asking her to come down to the comms room. His tone is emotionless, giving her nothing. Figures, Mr. Dull-as-Dishwater can't just give it to her straight.
Wearing last night's wrinkled clothes, she walks, feeling more dead than alive.
He looks up when she walks into the room, his expression unreadable. "Commander, we've done all we could for Garrus, but he took a bad hit. The docs corrected it with surgical procedures and some cybernetics. Best as we can tell he'll have full functionality but…"
The door opens and she turns to see Garrus enter the room, making her heart pound like a drum against her sternum. He's wearing sweat pants and a hoodie - apparently the medical staff were able to scrounge up turian clothing from somewhere. His face is bandaged, covering the worst of the damage but burns are still visible. "Shepard…"
Jacob chuckles. "Tough son of a bitch. Didn't think he'd be up yet."
She smiles at him, feeling better than she's felt since before she died.
"How bad is it? Nobody would give me a mirror."
"Hell Garrus, you were always ugly, slap some face paint on there and no one will even notice," she jokes in an attempt to hide the deep, overwhelming relief she feels.
He laughs and then winces. "Oh don't make me laugh - dammit, my face is barely holding together as it is. Some women find facial scars attractive. Mind you, most of those women are krogan…"
Jacob, recognizing when he's intruding, salutes her and walks out of the room. "Thank God for that," she mutters, making her way over to Garrus now that they are alone. Hesitating briefly, she embraces him.
She's never hugged a turian before. Not as if she's ever really had the opportunity to do so; she doesn't exactly make a habit of hugging her colleagues. That and, admittedly she's not generally a hugger. Sex - yes please, but hugging? It reminds her too much of what she lost that terrible day.
His waist is lean in deep contrast to his broad chest and she can feel the hard plates of his body under his sweater. Briefly he remains still, almost standing at attention like the soldier he is and she wonders if she's pushed past a line she should not have. But then his arms wrap around her and Garrus rests a hand in her hair.
"You have no idea how happy I am to have you here," she whispers.
"I have… some idea. Your hair is nice. Soft. I didn't know it would be so soft," he says.
"Never touched hair before?"
"Never had occasion to before now," he says.
It shouldn't be a surprise, given that this is the first she's ever hugged a turian.
They sit in the comms room and he tells her what happened. His squad and their betrayal by a man named Sidonis.
"I'm sorry," she says, because there are no words of comfort that heal the sting of betrayal. "Let me know what I can do to help."
"So, you stabbed Cathka with a welding torch?" Garrus asks, changing the subject abruptly and away from a topic that's clearly painful for him.
"Through the back," she confirms.
He chuckles once more and winces. "Never thought you, of all people, would stab someone in the back. Literally."
"He made me angry," she says. "My temper isn't as cool as it once was. Side effect of being dead for two years."
She suspects Garrus' wince there has nothing to do with the pain of his injuries.
"I recall something you told me. Might have been hallucinating, but I believe you promised me your first name if I didn't die on you?" He looks at her expectantly.
"I did. Figure a rocket to the face has earned you at least that much," she says. "It's -"
"Wait," Garrus says, stopping her. "Don't tell me."
"Why not?" She looks at him quizzically.
"Give me another clue. I want to see if I can figure it out," he says.
She gave him a few clues once before, on the anniversary of her parents' death as she sat in the mess hall, drinking white wine because it reminded her of their vineyard on Mindoir. Of Riesling grapes and the smell of cork and wooden crates.
It's not easy getting a good Riesling off-planet. Even harder to get a good Prädikatswein and it's been years since she was last in the village Papa grew up in along the Rhine in Germany.
That night, tongue loosened by drink, she told him Papa was nostalgic for his home country when she was born. That it is a name from legend and that her namesake is not nearly as impressive in-person as Papa made it out to be in tales he told during her childhood.
After taking a moment to think, she does a (rather terrible) impression of the Normandy's fire alarm.
Garrus looks at her as if she's lost his mind. "Do I need to get Doctor Chakwas to look you over?"
"That was the clue," she says.
"How… Shepard, what am I going to do with that?"
"You might figure it out if you do enough reading and piece it together… I'm surprised you don't know it. I know the council and the alliance tried to keep my death quiet but surely it was reported somewhere…"
"I didn't read the articles," Garrus says emphatically, giving her an intense look. "I was there Shepard; I didn't need to read them to know you died. And I knew I could find it with a few taps on my omni-tool but I wanted to hear it from you. Because you hold it close to your chest and I wouldn't betray that. Not even when you were dead."
"And now?" She did offer it to him; all he needs is ask for it.
"I happen to like this… game we play," Garrus says.
"It's not the only game we could play…" she says, shocked by her own nerve. Where did that come from?
Kaidan is… was her… something. Garrus is her best friend.
But it wasn't Kaidan she thought of in her last moments. It wasn't Kaidan she wanted on the Normandy. It was the man sitting across from her.
The expression on Garrus' face is not one she's seen before. There's a slight blue tinge; as far as she can tell this is what it looks like when turian's blush? But his eyes are alight and once again he reminds her more of a teenage boy than a man.
It's… endearing and Shepard thinks there are few things that she wants more than to discover this side of him.
"I'd… like that. To see what other games we could play," he says, near tripping ass over head on his words.
They stand up and she can't help but marvel at his height. He's well over six feet tall, long and lanky and judging from the hug they shared earlier - all muscle.
She's taller than the vast majority of human women and most human men. There aren't very many women out there who crack six feet and for a long while she was self-conscious of her height. Men she's dated in the past disliked that she towered over them. More than once she was told she couldn't wear heels (screw that; she likes heels and dresses and she's going to wear them every chance she gets, dammit).
He's taller than her. By several inches, she suspects. And he's gorgeous.
Gorgeous? Shit, where did that come from? Shepard decides to play it cool - far cooler than she actually feels. "You should know something." Garrus turns to look at her. "I've always been fond of facial scars. Though I'm no krogan woman so that might not mean much to you…"
"Oh good, because I took the rocket to the face in the hopes of impressing you and it'd have been a shame to have been wrong on that front," he jokes before turning serious. "For what it's worth Shepard… me too."
Garrus leaves the comms room and she brushes her fingers over the scars on her cheek, still thick and red. Scars different from the one she had when they first met. A face she still doesn't recognize as her own in the mirror.
Doctor Chakwas says the scars will heal, but briefly she regrets that they will.