Keep
six: truth
Three words echo through her brain: What the hell? She can half imagine them bouncing around her cranium, ricocheting off the implants.
What comes out of her mouth, though, is, "Are you saying I smell bad?"
"Well, no. Not exactly. I. Aw, crap. There's no way out of that, is there?"
"I don't think there is." He seems genuinely distressed, but Shepard can't help but be charmed by all his blatant awkward.
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, mandibles flaring and brow ridges twitching faintly with every breath. Pretty much everything about him screams 'nervous' and she wants to let him off the hook.
Instead, she lifts an eyebrow.
He makes noises in his lower voice box for a few moments before he finally says, "Shepard, I'll explain everything. I promise. Just... shower first?"
There's really no arguing with him on this one, is there? If she keeps trying to talk to him, he'll just get more flustered.
"Be in my quarters in fifteen," she says.
Shepard strips off the armor first. She throws her towel onto her couch and settles onto it, cleans her armor painstakingly. She could let the armory do it, just lay it all in the drawers and give the order to EDI. But she never had it cleaned automatically on the Normandy SR1. It's not a habit she's going to start.
The door hisses open while she's still running a rag soaked in hardsuit-safe disinfectant along the joints between the Kestrel suit's plates.
Shepard looks up. Garrus's mandibles flare; he begins to backpedal. Which is strange to see a turian do. Their long legs have slightly different musculature. Not to mention the body shape rapidly moving backward.
"Garrus," she says. "Come on in. Talk to me."
"I'll be back once you're, you know."
"Showered? I'm about to. But I want you to be here when I get back. And I'd like a couple of answers now."
The door shuts with a whispering metallic whine.
Garrus crosses the room. He keeps his distance even as he perches on the edge of the couch, grips the leather tight in one gloved hand.
Best to just dive in.
"I'm just a little confused," she says. "What can you tell me about what's going on?
His eyes widen in alarm. He rakes his gaze over her, even as the hand gripping the edge of the couch clenches. "You want to hear about it now?"
She looks at him for a long moment. It's more than an evaluating look — though she is evaluating — it's almost like breathing him in. Not just seeing how he is, but wondering who he is today, because he's not the man he was yesterday.
She sets the armor aside and stands. She shucks the skinsuit she wore under the armor. Between her own sweat and the blood that soaked in somehow, the suit sticks to her back. She peels it without regard, hears a faint scratch as it unsticks from the metal rivets in her spine.
Thank you, Cerberus, for those.
Garrus just watches, still clearly alarmed. He coughs once, looks away a moment, before saying, "Huh. I guess not."
"I expect answers when I get out," Shepard says.
She steps out of her bathroom dressed in casuals, to find Garrus cleaning her armor. He's concentrating on it with intensity she's only seen a few times before.
Like he can't quite pull himself away from it. She settles in beside him and takes her shoulder plates back from him.
Garrus makes a double-toned sound in his throat. She could swear it's a whistle and a growl at once. More distress signs. Or maybe possessiveness?
"Thanks, Garrus," she says.
He shifts in his seat, looking anywhere but at her.
"I'm hoping I smell better. And I'd really like to know why how I smell has anything to do with this."
He hems and haws and rubs at the back of his neck and looks away, constantly. She takes the rag from him, too, and he reaches after it before he stops himself. Then he cocks his head, like a bird considering something.
"Do me a favor," he says. "And smell that."
Dumbly, she takes a tentative whiff. And feels her nose wrinkle at the sour scent of her sweat, and turian blood, and disinfectant.
"Smells like combat and hardsuit cleaner."
Garrus coughs again. "Maybe only turians can smell it. You smelled... I mean, I know it's crazy."
He's said that before. Shepard has to hold herself back from interrupting. She wasn't born as patient as she is now; it's hard won and hard taught.
"Garrus?"
He sighs, heavily. And when he speaks, his voice is quiet. "You dragged a bleeding pregnant turian through a building. Got her scent all over you. It mixed in with your sweat."
"You thought I was Antilarax?"
He actually recoils for an instant before shaking his head wildly. She's always thought that was mostly a human gesture, but everything she knows about turians she's learned from Garrus or the extranet. And the extranet never said anything one way or another about head-shaking.
"No, no, no," he tells her, voice echoing strange and harsh in his throat. "I know who you are, Shepard. No way I could forget it. But you smelled... different."
Pieces start falling together. Or, rather, images and connections flash through her head in bursts of color and fragments of sentences. Sometimes she wonders if the Beacons changed the way she thought, or maybe if it was the Cipher altering the geometry of her logic.
"I smelled pregnant."
Garrus doesn't look at her when he says, "Yeah. You smelled pregnant."
Which doesn't put his frustration or protectiveness into any kind of perspective just yet. So she thinks back. The events outline themselves in vivid still-lifes and the planes of shapes: her headlong rush through the building, conversations with Antilarax.
Men get like this, the turian woman says in a snapping, crackling moment and Shepard looks up at Garrus. They always forget what women are made of the minute we start gaining weight.
"So turian men get protective of pregnant women? The smell triggers some kind of instinct for it?"
Garrus rasp-whistles a hum that turns into an actual chuckle. There's a distinct embarrassed edge to it, but he seems less painfully uncomfortable. "They call it nesting."
Those words sit between them for a few seconds.
"You thought I was...?"
"No, not really. That would've been, what, delusional? I kept telling myself you weren't. But then you'd move, or the air would circulate."
"And you'd react anyway."
He says nothing. She doesn't say anything either, because what can she say? What judgment is there to make, what questions are there to ask?
"So when I pointed out that I was your commanding officer, you started to say you could do something in 'situations like this.' Then you stopped." Shepard leans a little closer to him as she asks.
He doesn't lean away. He looks down at her for a moment, before looking at the shoulder plates she's still holding onto.
"In the turian military, I could've relieved you of command," he says, softly. "Of course, then you could turn around and relieve me. Depending on whose family has the higher social rank, it can get ugly."
She stares at him.
"What, you think the Hierarchy doesn't have social politics? And I just said we get weird about pregnancy."
"That whole social hierarchy chain of rank thing," she says, dazed. "I thought it'd stop that kind of infighting. And how does my relieving you after you pull me out work?"
"You'd have the same grounds I'd be using," he says. "And the Hierarchy is military. I'd stop you from pulling rank, but I couldn't pull you completely out of the CoC. Probably. Depending on families and other officers."
She shakes her head, still a little pole-axed. "Sounds like a nightmare."
"The Hierarchy doesn't like those situations. Real stigma on the parents, too. Nobody thinks there's anything dumber than opening that can of worms in the middle of active duty."
"Then I'll do my best not to get pregnant while we're out here in the field," she says, keeping her tone deliberately dry.
That makes him laugh, his tone a little rueful. He bridges the gap between them, and she curls up against him, and he presses his mouth against the curve where her neck and shoulder meet. She hears him draw in a breath.
They're quiet for a little while. Maybe out of regret for what they'll never give each other.