06: SUREFIRE
JANE
2177
Less than a week had passed since that joke of an award ceremony at Alliance HQ, but according to Shepard's gut-tight internal clock, linear time was a bygone irrelevancy. Whenever the words Star of Terra entered her mind, several millennia would blur past all at once, reducing her memory to static.
Five days previously at a hasty press conference on Arcturus Station, a visibly uncomfortable Amul Shastri had pinned the Alliance's most prestigious military decoration onto a woman raised by an extraterrestrial war criminal. Just like that, at the pleasure of two-dozen swarming tabloid reporters, Second Lieutenant Jane Shepard's comfortable anonymity had been shot straight to hell.
After a funerary receiving line of stiff, bruising handshakes, Shepard had been evacuated to the relative neutrality of the Citadel by her oldest mentor and only remaining friend in the Alliance: Captain David Anderson. Hidden away in the Captain's private apartment, she was to spend an entire month's mandatory leave keeping her head down, goddammit. Anderson had immediately returned to Arcturus HQ, where he was currently going far beyond the call of duty on Shepard's behalf, kissing enough asses and pulling enough strings to prove that the Lieutenant was not - and never had been - acting on behalf of alien interests.
Now at the bleeding end of her first night of compulsory leave, Shepard was already blind drunk. Hazy and lethargic amid the neon-painted shadows of Anderson's glamorous abandoned apartment, she drifted with smoke-gray apathy, finally crashing knee first into a desk. With the yelp of a woman shot, she succumbed to her wounds and fell on the spot, taking the Captain's personal console down with her. After it landed dangerously close to Shepard's head, the console flickered weakly and then went dark. Another man down.
Best to stay right here, she thought. Best to die honorably beside a fallen comrade, a pitiful chance to absolve herself of Torfan.
Thus relieved, Shepard spent her first night on the Silversun Strip sleeping face down on a polished cement floor. It was the best night of sleep she'd had in months.
The next morning, after she'd vomited enough alcohol out of her blood to see straight, Shepard did what she could to straighten up the mess she'd made. Luckily, Anderson's console had survived the fall unharmed. Less luckily, when she managed to boot the system again, it was only to receive a patronizing lecture.
Hey Kid,
Don't slack off. I can squeak you into ICT, but after that, it's up to you. Do whatever you want at night, just don't break my furniture. During the day, your ass already belongs to those instructors in Rio de Janeiro. Use this time to prepare. Proving your worth at Vila Militar is going to hurt like nothing else [...]
The message continued, in no uncertain terms, to spell out exactly how much pain she was promised. Doom and gloom included, it was still good news. If she spent a month quietly avoiding any further media spectacle and forcing herself into the best shape of her life, Shepard might be allowed to exchange the very last shreds of her military reputation for the opportunity to be eaten alive at Vila Militar. All she could do now was ready herself for digestion.
Every day cycle, she ground away dutifully, slowly but surely losing herself in a numbing cycle of PT. Hours spent running on Anderson's treadmill were matched by repetitive weight circuits in his cold, echoing living room. To keep herself sane in the middle of the third… fourth… fifth round of burning reps, she surfed through alien television and tried to avoid catching sight of her own face.
The turians obstinately refused to talk about it. Hierarchy-affiliated channels aired nothing more titillating than the occasional bottom-line crawl: human sources claim excommunicated traitor Albacus Regidonis lived among their own and attempted to raise a human child before dying in exile.
Occasionally a turian military analyst would drop Shepard's name along with a grudging acknowledgment of the Star of Terra, but for the most part, Shepard endured little more than endless, droning isolation. Watching TV and lifting weights, she gained five pounds of muscle and learned more than she ever cared to know about Palaven's water crisis.
She lasted half a month cooped up in solitary confinement before she cracked.
She started small, sneaking out to a declining aquatic recreation center a few blocks from Anderson's. The place was well-maintained but otherwise unfashionable, patronized by rheumy-eyed salarians and one or two ancient, wrinkled hanar. Given a wide berth in this mostly-empty pool, Shepard brought a pair of combat fins and swam daily, going as long as she could take it. Back and forth, back and forth, until her ankles threatened to crack.
Just as the retirement home was losing its appeal, the keepers went belly-up and all hell broke loose in Kithoi. Overnight, the ambient temperature rose by twenty degrees, and by the end of the next day cycle, every pool complex on the ward was packed to capacity, including the unfashionable ones.
To keep off the radar, Shepard drifted ten blocks further from Anderson's apartment. There she found a hole-in-the-wall volus arcade that offered zero-g free-fall and untethered target practice. Good exercise with no background checks and minimal safety restrictions. Fun, for a minute or two. But it wasn't long before the constant drug hand-offs in the lobby started to get on Shepard's nerves. Time to move on.
Her last week brought her as far afield as she dared. Armax Arena was thick with trigger-happy turians and not a few Alliance meatheads. All of them, including her, were looking for a fight. She kept her helmet on and spoke to no one, but the first time she got a funny look, her stomach lining curdled.
Fresh meat, that glance had said. Nothing more.
She chose Eska as her pseudonym on the public scoreboards, and remained undiscovered. Gradually, so as not to draw attention, she blasted through enough combat sims to earn two honorable mentions on the board - and brought home nearly five thousand credits.
Three days away from Vila Militar, Shepard won her first major score at the Arena. No use bragging about it. As usual, she collected her winnings in silence, then rushed into her favorite low-traffic alleyway, the only place she might remove her armor unobserved.
She had just finished clumsily shoving her practice armor into a duffle bag when she saw him.
Standing in the middle of her getaway route was one of the Arena's regular spectators, a retired turian general named Oraka. Something of an eccentric local celebrity, he was in the habit of shaking hands with promising newbies and doling out bits of archaic battle strategy to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. Always courteous, even to humans, but always a little bit drunk.
Today, he was sober.
"Excellent shooting," he called, clear-eyed and deliberate. He stepped closer, keeping his empty hands raised, turning his neck just enough to show he was no threat. "Very sharp with a rifle, aren't you? But the pistol... that's where you truly shine."
"What do you want?"
Slowly, his eyes drifted to her clenched fingers, to the red lacquer on her thumb, obvious as a bullseye. Staring at her, he adopted a look of baffled recognition and opened his mouth to speak. Several times he tried and failed, biting back every comment but the last.
"There are few things I love more than being right," he choked.
She stood her ground, but felt her hand trembling on the strap of her duffle.
Using a thin, tremulous sub-vocal that held more meaning than she could parse, he softly added, "I always told Alba he would make a fine patrem."
That night, on the arm of a general, Jane Shepard visited her first turian dive bar.
Considering her chaperone, the choice of ambience was pleasantly unpretentious. The general himself made for thrilling company for the first half hour, answering every question Shepard asked. But before long he grew maudlin and weepy - and very, very drunk.
The next night she returned to the bar, alone. Despite being the lone human in a heavily populated dextro dive, Shepard was permitted to sit at a small grungy table and drink herself numb, completely unmolested. The turian patrons were preoccupied with rubbing up on each other; they had little interest in a rubbernecking culture tourist. Aside from a few bored once-overs, she was invisible.
Finally, her last night arrived, sudden and rude. The slim, waning hours of precious anonymity before Camp Militar came for her blood. After tonight, it was perfection or death.
Knowing that, Shepard bought a short, cheap skirt and returned to the bar.
As before, nearly all of the locals ignored her. The only trouble came in the form of a persistent, flirtatious drug runner who kept insisting that a monkey in a skirt was adorable, and that everything would look a lot brighter if you took one of these and danced with me, mellia.
Three hours later, everything was tangled up in blue.
GARRUS
2183
Garrus knew he was toeing the line. Press-ganging an Alliance commander in a crowded elevator and oozing down her neck like some kind of drunken lecher might have been a tad over-eager. But turnabout was fair play. After all, she'd started it.
Red: this preposterous woman, long ago given up as his own hallucinogenic anxiety response. She wasn't a slumlord or a mercenary, but something far more impossible. A motherfucking N7 Marine and apparent Spectre protégé, working in the shadow of two living legends: doing recon for Nihlus Kryik and getting into knife fights with Saren Arterius.
At first, her blank face had fooled him into thinking she'd forgotten everything. But then she'd invited him out for another drink, casual and flirty as you please. Not just any drink, but her old friend Tom Collins. Recalling that esoteric terran cocktail with a proper name, she must have been baiting him. So he took it: hook, line, and sinker. How could he not?
Six years since the Summer Shitstorm had done little to dull his memory. Ever since Red had disappeared without a trace, Garrus had been steadily wasting himself on an embarrassing number of replacements. Turians at first, in an attempt to reassert his normalcy. Then asari, as he realized it was useless. Finally, a blur of faceless human partners that had earned him two regrettable injuries: a permanent place as the butt of every xenophile joke uttered in his precinct, and a list of alien exes longer than his arm.
Perverse, maybe, but it all felt worthwhile now.
The elevator shuddered quietly to a halt, doors whisking open to spew civilians all over the lower ward plaza. Good riddance. Everyone could space themselves. Garrus had catching up to do. No more juvenile anxiety, no more wasted opportunities: he knew exactly what to do with her this time around, if only…
"Blue."
Her grunt was all he needed. Now he knew he hadn't gone completely out of his mind. His heart seized. She really did remember, then.
A fresh batch of warm bodies made for the open elevator, but he was at the ready. Forcefully, he said: "C-Sec business," then flashed the keel of his genuine issue armor, held up an authoritative hand to shoo away the crowd. "Take the next one, people."
He overrode the controls. The doors closed out the baffled civilians with a conspiratorial shhh of machinery. Garrus allowed the elevator to go up four and half floors before he suspended the ascent with another override.
They were alone now, nothing between them but nerves. His head brimmed with so much steam that he could barely see the straight line between his fingers and the controls. Without even knowing what to say, he turned, mouth open…
Before he could get a word in edgewise, she interrupted with a voice cold enough to deflect an incendiary grenade. "I remember you," she said, holding her hand up, stopping him. "And I remember…" She grunted inscrutably. "Enough."
Oh.
"I buried that night on the Strip awfully deep, but not deep enough, I guess."
Oh, shit.
She continued in a professional monotone, staring a crater at the floor. "If I could purge that summer from public memory, I would. Please understand, it's nothing personal. I spent most of '77 on a raging bender. You were collateral damage."
Her aim was perfect: the blow was clean, absolute, as unflinching as the three-torin takedown he'd witnessed in that bar six years earlier. He'd already been put in his place, but that clinched things. She didn't owe him anything, and never had.
He understood that. He did. Really. Didn't he?
Of all the possible reunions Garrus had fantasized about during the intervening years, he had always deliberately avoided the version in which Red regretted everything they'd done.
Before his last honorable impulse fizzled out, he stepped away to give her a more professional berth. Forcing himself back to the proper side of the line she'd just drawn, he tried not to look half as gutted as he felt. With a flick of his omni-tool, he restarted the elevator; it started moving again, a nauseating lurch.
In that same professional voice, she said, "If there's been any confusion, I'm sorry. I'd appreciate the chance for the two of us to make a more dignified first impression."
At the end of her impassive, diplomatic monologue, she held out her arm for the second time that morning. He was dumbstruck, too stupefied to move.
"Don't leave me hanging, Vakarian," she said, avoiding his eyes. Sounding pissed.
Obediently, he wrapped a hand around her elbow, but was extra careful to be formal about it this time. He'd accept whatever treaty she offered.
It would be enough to finally learn who and what Red actually was. It would. Wouldn't it?
Before speaking again, he donned his most dutiful, law-abiding sub-vocals. "You took me completely by surprise. I sincerely apologize if I made you feel compromised, then or now." Even though it almost strangled him to force out her full title and last name, he did it anyway. "Commander Shepard. Sorry for being inappropriate."
"No harm done." She said flatly. She had yet to release his arm.
"I look forward to working with you on the investigation, Commander. I hope -"
"Yes," she said, finally looking him. When she met his eyes, her entire face flushed, turning a deep, compromising shade of alizarin crimson. Trying to blink it away, she blurted: "I hope so too."
There she was. She was still in there. The barest glimpse of that wild, unstoppable girl that he would never be able to forget.
His heart hammered, mandibles flaring involuntarily. Reflexively, his fingers tightened on her arm. As if sensing the imminent danger rising between them, she pulled out of his grip and returned both hands to her walking stick.
She glanced at the floor, the walls, her own feet: anything but him, determinedly avoiding eye contact. Despite what appeared to be a truly heroic effort, she was unable to suppress an intense, blazing smile. It spread across her face, burning crookedly into his brain.
"It's good to see you again," she choked out, looking thrilled and distraught in equal measure.
The feeling was mutual.
JANE
2177
So far, food had done little to settle Shepard's stomach as she sobered up from her ill-advised three-month joyride on the Citadel. The deep-frozen slop that the Alliance commissary was offering up on the jaunt from Charon to Earth was hardly incentivizing, but she managed to convince herself that the calories were a necessary evil, no matter what shapeless form they took. As she eyed the differently colored gruels, her appetite shrank into a terrified dot on the horizon, but Shepard poked it back into obedience - tomorrow would be even worse if she went into it underfed. She settled for a generous spoonful of the brownish-greenish blue plate special, and then squeezed herself onto a bench between two slabs of overeager manflesh to try and force it down.
Interplanetary Combatives Training Class 125 had just over twelve hours until their ETA in Brazil. That was twelve hours for her to sleep off this hangover, and twelve hours to get Blue out of her head. Permanently.
On her final night on the Strip, she'd made what her father would have called a fool child out of herself. Come to think of it, if her pari had still been alive to catch wind of his daughter's behavior in that C-Sec officer's car, Shepard probably would have woken up this morning chained to a post in an asari monastery. Her entire stretch of shore leave was an embarrassment that was unworthy of any child of Regidonis, but the last night really took the cake.
Last night. With Blue.
Yes, Blue: the unexpectedly worthwhile attempt at a one-night stand. An eager yet unassuming torin with terrifyingly pretty eyes and a lack of social graces perfectly matched to her own. Oh yes, Blue: handsomely burdened with duty, glowering in a bar like a detective in a film noir and acting far too interesting for his own good and Shepard for CHRISSAKES, he was definitely a goddamn baby cop who you traumatized, stop romanticizing things.
What on earth must he have thought of some random intoxicated club bunny masturbating herself to completion in his squad car?
Plenty, apparently.
Shepard recalled the intense look of desire he'd given her when she'd begged him to fuck her... the way they'd ground together when she'd crawled into his lap... the eager movement of his unfamiliar mouth under her own as they'd kissed... the desperate, breathy sound of his voice when he'd asked if he'd ever hear from her again...
Her crotch thumped crazily and she refocused angrily on her gruel.
No. Absolutely not. Get rid of him, Shepard. Boots on the ground.
From what Anderson had told her, PT on the grinder would start as soon as they landed at 0430 tomorrow; a solid four hours of grueling cadence until half the class had hung their helmets up to DOR. After that, they'd get in a quick meal, a shower, and go back out onto the grinder for a uniform inspection which she already knew she would fail. She'd have to face some kind of nigh unendurable and humiliating remediation in addition to the standard PT, no question, and it was best to be prepared.
Prepared meant numb. And numb meant all of these friendly, fuckable feelings for a turian cop on the Citadel had to fly out the window. Right now.
Once her pari's identity had come to light in the press circus of '76, Shepard had lost all chance of sliding through unnoticed with the other grey men at the Villa. Although she'd qualified to be officer in charge of her class and had more combat experience than the rest of the trainees combined, she had a Palaven-sized target painted on her back, right beneath a giant flashing sign that read: Turian Traitor Bitch, Please Annihilate Me.
If she carried a living torin anywhere in her heart during ICT, she'd be dead in the water. Even at a distance of hundreds of millions of miles, even if she never mentioned him by name, even if she wasn't entirely sure what he meant to her, somehow, they'd know. It would get out. She'd been an idiot to explore her turian fixation before shipping off for N1, but then she hadn't exactly been in her right mind since Torfan.
Shepard let her head droop over her disappointing meal. No more drugs. Ever. What a waste of fucking time this summer had been. If only she'd met him sooner…
That would only have made this worse. She needed to be rid of him. Now.
Blue wasn't that easy to throw away. She'd known it the minute she'd seen him. She should have run her ass back to Anderson's at the instant of woozy, weak-in-the-knees mutual eye-locking on the dance floor. Shepard was hardly sentimental, and she didn't know what she felt for Blue, except that it was dangerous for her to feel anything about a turian right now. That in and of itself made it impossible to continue entertaining fantasies about him.
Her career was already at a breaking point - if she failed out of this first course she could kiss her future as a commissioned officer goodbye forever, forget special tactics or commanding her own vessel.
Blue had been easier to kiss goodbye than her entire military career, though not by much.
Not by much at all.
Shepard chewed and swallowed, tasting nothing, and reached into the cargo pocket of her work blues to drag out a datapad.
After stepping out of Blue's car, she had somehow stumbled back upstairs to Anderson's apartment. She had no memory of making the trip, but somehow she'd managed it. It was a miracle she hadn't run back to fling herself across Blue's windshield in sex-starved agony. Thankfully, even when stoned out of her very life, Shepard apparently had more sense than that.
Once safely alone, she had opened the message Anderson had written for her on her first day of leave, and then she had read it over - and over - and over - and over again. Until the words were etched onto the back of her eyelids.
Before boarding the Citadel shuttle for the Widow relay at 0600, she had transferred Anderson's message to a datapad so she could carry his heavy words around with her on the trip to Earth.
A constant reminder: Don't Fuck It Up.
Hey Kid,
Don't slack off. I can squeak you into ICT, but after that, it's up to you. Do whatever you want at night, just don't break my furniture. During the day, your ass already belongs to those instructors in Rio de Janeiro. Use this time to prepare. Proving your worth at Vila Militar is going to hurt like nothing else.
Don't fool yourself. Everybody who matters knows about Regidonis now. You'll have to be perfect, and that'll barely get you in the door.
The instructors will make it their personal mission to break you in half. No matter what you do, you will fail every inspection. You will be Goon-Squaded at the end of every run. You will be forced into remedial PT at the start of every day. You will carry Old Misery up and down that beach until you bleed woodchips. But they can't fail you out, Shepard. Not if you meet them with steel of your own.
I've got equipment: use it. I don't want to hear about any stress fractures or torn ligaments or any other dumbass rookie injuries down there. Run every day, working your way up to boots. If you can, get some time in on a zero-g sim. There's a couple of decent ones on the Strip. Don't get soft. Don't get lazy. Don't get hurt.
Most of all, Shepard, remember one thing: they'll break your brain before they'll ever break your body. Most of the DOR helmets I saw were from guys who couldn't push themselves the single extra inch that would have saved them. It's all mental fortitude - all of it. The instructors will try to destroy you piecemeal, and they'll start by going after your weakest points: family, failures, whatever they can find - it's a special gift of theirs.
Don't let the bastards grind you down. I happen to know that you're made of sterner stuff than they can imagine, and not just because your dad was a turian.
Keep me posted, and take care of yourself out there.
No one else will.
Anderson
GARRUS
2183
The large public shuttle from mid-Kithoi to the 800 block of Zakera Ward always took twenty minutes. That was twelve hundred seconds, give or take. As Garrus stood inches away from Commander Shepard, once again pressed willingly towards her by a crush of unwashed civilian bodies, he was aware of every single one of those seconds as they winked suggestively on by.
When they'd boarded, he had helped Shepard into the open row of seats along the wall of the transport. She'd been hesitant to sit at first, then he'd offered to hold her walking stick: a polite reminder that she wasn't exactly able-bodied at the moment. Eventually, she relented and parked her ass, but not without a stiff complaint or two. Then she finally gave him custody of the stick, relaxed against the window and abruptly fell asleep.
Letting Shepard get a short nap on the way to the clinic was the least he could do. As ecstatic as he felt to see her again, Garrus knew that their unexpected reunion was yet another burden on an already wearied shoulder, and he'd do whatever he could to keep the damage to a bare minimum. To tell the truth, the lack of conversation was something of a relief - as long as she was asleep, he would have a much harder time offending her again. He focused his attention on the walking stick in his hand, rolled it between his fingers in a nervous tic, and tried not to dwell on his earlier gaffe in the elevator.
His free hand was looped through a passenger assist strap on the ceiling, and every so often the shuttle would sway in traffic and Shepard's knee would bump into his leg. Eventually, she stopped moving her knee away. Whether the prolonged contact was intentional or a result of a deep lack of consciousness was hard to say, but in any case he found it impossible to ignore. After an admittedly brief internal struggle, Garrus gave up pretending to be interested in anything but the woman slumbering nearby. He turned his eyes to the Commander and let his thirsty stare roam over the impressive number of badges, pips, and rank insignia that decorated her semi-formal service uniform.
Though they were apparently numerous, as far as Shepard's personal accomplishments were concerned, Garrus was completely in the dark. If it didn't directly affect his jurisdiction, he'd never had any interest in Alliance business - until now. It would be no work at all to do an extranet search and figure out exactly who Commander Shepard was, what she'd done, how she'd earned her current posting. Hell, he could do it right here while she slept on the bus, and she'd be none the wiser.
The idea was tempting enough to make his omni-tool itch on his palm, but he knew that snooping into her past without permission would be a huge mistake. She'd made it abundantly clear that she wanted to be judged for her current conduct, and considering their brief but embarrassing shared history, that was a request worth honoring. She would have been well within her rights to request a replacement for the Saren case; choosing to keep working with him was an act of pure generosity. He'd be a miserable excuse for a teammate if he dug into her personal life at the first available opportunity. Sometimes, Garrus pointedly reminded himself, ignorance truly could be bliss.
He resolved to keep his nose clean, but nothing could stop him from doing a detective's read on her in public. Careful not to be too obvious about it, he surreptitiously analyzed the sleeping woman.
She was certainly rougher than he remembered, but that was hardly a surprise. He'd known her for all of one darkened, lust-filled hour, and six years had passed between then and now. By the bold light of day - or whatever passed for day in the canned air of the Citadel - she looked older, harder, and much more interesting.
Other than being clean and groomed to Alliance standard, she didn't do much to fluff up her looks; she had an unselfconscious, hammered steel appearance that indicated other priorities. The thin layer of makeup she wore had been applied like war paint - she used it sparingly, and in strategic places. The effect hardened her naturally pale complexion rather than softening it, and the lack of feminine pretense was unique; he'd never seen anyone with a painted face quite like hers. The scar still dotted down the left side of her face, and it seemed even deeper than before. Sometime over the past six years, her nose had been knocked off-center by an injury and so had her mouth; Saren hadn't been her first on-the-job hazard, then.
The lightly creased skin of her face was mottled with an uneven spray of freckles, which crept down her neck to disappear into the top of her Alliance blues; they covered her forearms as well. He'd never noticed her galaxy of spots in the dark all those years ago, but now he imagined they must cover every inch of her...
Garrus shook himself and ejected his inappropriate thoughts as if he were forcibly popping a jammed heatsink from his brain. Not now. Keep looking for clues. What else can you see, Vakarian?
Her hair was a deeper, darker red than was strictly natural, and Garrus wondered at that. Perhaps her quietly deviant shade would go unnoticed by the general public, but Garrus had made redheads into a personal research project over the years. Shepard's hair color was bold, certainly artificial, but he struggled to imagine the Commander in a beauty salon getting her roots touched up. No, it was much more likely she maintained this illusion in secret somehow. She still had those red fingernails - he'd noticed her hands back at C-Sec, well before anything else. Now he saw that the colors were perfectly and intentionally matched. Like her hair, her nails were in pristine condition, the paint as smooth and unblemished as a permanent tattoo.
In that uniform, colored hair and nails must have been reg-breaking, but he knew better than to think she'd been staining herself red for at least six years out of anything but blood-deep loyalty to a single cause: make every bullet fly with honor.
Apparently she'd been shooting with nothing but honor since the night they'd met, because she was a decorated officer now: three stripes of commissioned rank gilded her shoulder-boards, and a well-coordinated red N7 patch was sewn onto her left sleeve. Her chest was heavy with two gleaming special tactics qualification badges and a broad, colorful swath of ribbon bars. Garrus couldn't recognize any of the Alliance distinctions, but he knew they translated into an incredible resume. Since she was working with a Spectre, it was likely that she'd had to dress to impress the Council this morning, which explained the showiness.
It was the loosened top button of her otherwise pristine uniform that really drew his investigative attention. The question was, had Shepard unbuttoned before or after speaking with the Council, and why? Among his own kind, showing one's neck was a sign of either submissiveness or trust, depending on the context. Shepard might have been human, but she seemed close to Kryik - and Garrus knew first-hand that she had more than the average Alliance understanding of turian body language. Had that inch of unprotected skin been revealed for the Spectre's benefit?
He caught himself with a flash of guilt, ashamed by his own petty jealousy. It wasn't his business to know how she got dressed in the morning, or if she woke alone. Whatever her past, whatever her present, it was unquestionable that Shepard's uniform belonged to an accomplished and capable soldier, and that would have to be enough to satisfy him for now.
The shuttle slowed to a stop at the unassuming Zakera-800 station, and Garrus allowed a sizeable chunk of the crowd to disperse before he put a hand on Shepard's shoulder and gave her a friendly nudge.
"Commander, this is our stop."
Her head swayed back and forth a little, then she reached up to her shoulder where his hand still lingered.
"Thanks," she mumbled, unexpectedly squeezing his fingers between her own.
He didn't say anything, just returned her walking stick to her grip and helped peel the Commander from the seat. By the time she jumped the small gap to street level, she was fully awake and alert again.
Michel's clinic was a few blocks proximal from the station, Garrus knew the way better than he probably should have. This wasn't going to be awkward, was it? No. It would be fine. Shepard was his superior officer, not his date, and Chloe was just an old friend. An old, complicated friend.
It would be fine.
"Tell me more about this lead," Shepard prompted as they walked.
"The quarian was shot sometime last night while trying to find one of the Shadow Broker's men. Somehow she dragged herself halfway across the ward and into Doctor Michel's charity clinic just before dawn."
Garrus chose his next words carefully. He had no reason to think Shepard would be interested in his on-again off-again with the good doctor, but he decided to keep it to himself nonetheless.
"Doctor Michel knew I was working the Saren angle, she called the minute the patient was stable." He omitted that Chloe had his private number, or that she'd called him while he was asleep in his apartment at four in the morning. "The quarian wanted to make a deal with the Shadow Broker for her intel, but I managed to talk her down, convinced her to liase with me instead. I haven't seen her in person yet, but she must be a tough kid."
"Kid?"
"She's on her pilgrimage."
"All alone out here, then - an easy target. Any idea what evidence she's carrying? Must be something rock solid, if Saren's willing to hunt her down."
"She wouldn't talk on a comm channel. You can ask her yourself in a minute, we're nearly there."
Garrus pointed to the clinic entrance, and then anxiously paused. Two well-armored turians and a hefty krogan bodyguard were coming around the opposite end of the block and walking straight for the clinic. Shepard noticed them too.
"Those guys don't look very sick to me," she whispered.
"Sick enough to work for Saren," he answered quietly, then slowly pulled his sidearm, keeping it low to avoid spooking the civilian foot traffic. The thugs disappeared into the clinic, and Garrus knew the clock was ticking.
"Vakarian, what's your plan, exactly? They've got a krogan and I've got a stick."
He looked at her for a moment as she parried her cane in his direction like a crotchety old grandmother, then he triggered his comm and called for backup.
"Nearest patrol is five minutes out," he informed her. "Meanwhile, you and I go in the back entrance to buy them some time. It's through the alley. This way."
Shepard followed his lead without a word.
He didn't even have to hack the rear door. Chloe was in the habit of leaving it unlocked during business hours. Her clinic was tiny, only two or three back offices to hold the computers and extra equipment, and the medbay was a single street-facing room. Small, simple, but it got the job done. He could hear Saren's men threatening her already.
"Where's the quarian?"
"She's not here, I swear! I don't know where she went!"
Chloe was lying - Garrus knew her well enough to recognize the false cadence in an instant. He ducked his head into one of the supply rooms and was unsurprised to see the glowing purple faceplate of a young quarian peeking out behind a stack of crates. He raised a shushing finger to his mouth and then silently closed the door, sealing it more securely with a discrete omni-tool override.
He joined Shepard at the end of the short hallway. She was peeking around the corner to grab a quick glance at the thugs, and he risked a look over her shoulder. The krogan had taken point near the front door, one of the turians was rooting through the clinic's supplies, and the second of Saren's torini was threatening Chloe with a gun. Chloe's attacker had a sharp-toothed skull painted across his otherwise clanless face - Terminus gang paint. The predatory way he pawed at the doctor made Garrus' stomach turn.
Almost as if she could smell his hot-headedness drifting in on the breeze, Shepard pulled Garrus back before he could turn into a loose cannon. The Commander gathered him right against her side and spoke in a harsh but almost imperceptible voice, directly in his ear. She was so close he could taste her breath.
"How accurate is that rifle on your back?"
Garrus didn't waste time with inaccurate guns, and he shot her a look that said as much. She nodded.
Shepard didn't ask. She reached around his shoulders in an almost embrace, and slowly, silently removed the sniper rifle from his loadout.
"Nice balance, Vakarian." She noticed the custom mod-work, looked even more impressed. "Two shots before reloading? With this thing, I can take out the krogan all by myself."
She locked her eyes on him, her earlier shyness a distant memory, and seemed to be balancing several heavy contingencies around his head.
"How's your aim?" she asked, nodding towards the pistol in his hand.
Her question was meant as a harmless tactical inquiry, not an insult, but Garrus bristled with pride all the same. He didn't say anything, just pointed to his illustrious line of C-Sec sharpshooting and expert marksmanship badges. He had credentials of his own. She afforded him one small, quiet chuff of laughter.
"Good. How soon until your backup arrives?"
"At least three minutes."
She stole another quick look around the corner. Garrus could hear Chloe's attempts to break free from her degenerate torin captor, but her cries were growing more desperate, more gut-churning.
"Damn," Shepard hissed, her face white with concern. "We don't have that kind of time. You'll have to step out and pick that filthy conrupper off the doctor; I can't get him from here. Don't miss."
Don't miss, or I'll break you in half. The threat was unspoken, but he heard it loud and clear.
Moreover, he heard Shepard's unconscious use of Closed Dialect slang. How did she know turian street lingo? Probably the same way she'd learned the rixoritum moves she'd unleashed in that dive bar, the same way anybody learned to curse and throw punches: by getting into a lot of nasty fights with bad people. Garrus added it to the rapidly growing list of things he wanted to ask her, but probably shouldn't.
Meanwhile, Shepard continued laying out the plan.
"Keep the third guy distracted. Without armor I'm a sitting duck. Don't kill him, but you can relieve him of a knee or two. We need the extra intel."
He flared his shields and gripped his pistol more securely, then rolled his neck a few times to prepare himself for a quick, dirty firefight.
"On your go, Shepard."
She nodded once, then raised Garrus' favorite sniper rifle to high ready. He desperately tried to ignore the shudder of pleasure that rolled through his body at the sight. If he could ever claim to have an ideal fantasy, it would be this exact image. Red, in all her terrifying glory, expertly hefting Garrus' affectionately over-specced Devlon Mantis onto her shoulder as if it belonged there. There was only one flaw: she should have been naked.
She leaned out around the corner, silently lined up her shot. Then she took a single well-trained marksman's breath, and gave her command on the exhale.
"Go."
Garrus stepped around Shepard's perch and out into the clinic. The skull-faced pervert had Chloe in a standing chokehold, and was groping over her clothes with a free hand. The bastard never even saw Garrus' gun, but the shot took him down instantly, right between the eyes. Chloe screamed and covered her ears at the sound of the sudden blast, but was otherwise unharmed. As Garrus barrelled into the second torin's line of fire to keep the heat off Shepard, he grabbed a handful of Chloe's scrubs and threw her out of harm's way behind a medical bunk.
The krogan stirred by the door with a grunt of surprise. He managed to raise his vicious looking sawed-off shotgun about half a foot before his heavily plated forehead was struck by a supersonic slug from the hidden Mantis. The sheer force of the projectile's mass effect field knocked the krogan's hulking head back, and Shepard's second shot tore clean through the perfectly exposed soft spot below his chin. The round exploded out the back of his skull, and with a wild splatter of brains and viscera, his life came to an abrupt halt. That particular krogan wouldn't be regenerating any time soon.
Garrus didn't care if it was psychologically unbalanced, it gave him a lusty thrill to know it was his own gun firing in Shepard's hands, doing that kind of damage. The Commander's invisible one-two headshot was grisly, efficient, and one of the sexiest things he had ever seen.
The last thug standing got in one meagre shot - it fizzled pathetically on the left hip of Garrus' shield before C-Sec's finest closed in for the kill. Garrus wrenched the torin's wrist until the cheap gun dropped to the floor, then he brought down the butt of his pistol hard across the thug's aural canal. Saren's torin staggered, presenting one knee; that was a mistake. Garrus' boot displaced the kneecap and spur with a crunch of bone, and the thug crumpled to the floor with a howl. Garrus kicked the assailant's gun well out of reach and got a good look at him; he was young, barefaced, and about as dangerous as an undermixed pudding.
"He's down, Shepard. You're clear."
Shepard stepped out from the back alcove with Garrus' gun steadied on her hip, and looked much less majestic than he'd hoped. She put her hand to her stomach and he guessed the reason: the overclocked recoil on his high-impact rifle had probably done a number on her still-healing insides.
"Shepard?" spluttered the torin on the floor. Garrus trained his pistol back on the lackey's head and dared him to keep going. He seemed either unconcerned or unaware of the threat of imminent death, and continued mocking the Commander. "He said you'd try to stop us."
Shepard limped towards the captive, signalling to the doctor to stay down.
"You're soft, Shepard - pure virtue. Boss told us as much. Hell, you won't even let your pussy-whipped police escort do his damn job. Just let him kill me. I won't tell you anything."
Garrus heard his backup arriving. Five minutes - right on time.
"Vakarian."
Shepard's voice was hard as stone. He cautiously turned his gaze to meet hers as she approached and emotionlessly handed back his rifle.
"Would you tell your friends to wait outside for a moment?"
Without pausing to think, Garrus did as she asked. He flashed an omni-tool standby code to the officers who had just pulled up in the patrol car.
The half-crippled torin captive still wouldn't shut up.
"Oh no! What are you gonna do, Shepard? Kill me with kindness?"
Shepard settled her boot on the turian's keel, pressing him slowly but surely down into the floor. A deliberate move that said louder than any words ever could: watch your tongue.
"Please. You've got nothing to threaten me with, mamzeris bitch. Tell me, did your dear old daddy teach you to be such a bleeding heart, or was that your whore mother?"
For a moment, Shepard leveled the bareface with a stare that could have depressurized five layers of ablated hull armor. Then, without so much as a courteous blink, she dropped on top of him in an anxiscansus grappling hold: heavy, punishing, and utterly unforgiving.
Her knees pinned his upper arms in an inescapable compression lock, and then she brought the full weight of her small human body down through her hips onto the weakened pressure point where keel met waist. It was a beautifully executed maneuver - all the air was knocked out the torin's chest with a startled cough. Garrus noticed that the scuffle had opened Shepard's wound - a few telling polka-dots were soaking through to mar her blues - but the Commander gave no sign that she cared.
Shepard's left forearm sank into the torin's neck to cut off the last of his air. Meanwhile, the fingers of her right hand wrenched crudely behind the sensitive top edge of his forehead crest. Garrus flinched - and so did the torin on the floor.
In the clear, calm voice of a diplomat, Shepard said: "I promised my father that I would protect the innocent, even at the cost of my own life." The professionalism of her tone smacked strangely against the rawness of her chokehold, and the effect was bone chilling. "I made no vows to save poisonous corpses like you."
Shepard twisted the torin's head around until he was leveraged more deliberately against the tiling, forming an empty triangle of agony between the floor, the back of his head, and the inflexible line of his fringe. Under the pressure of Shepard's carefully controlled headlock, the fringe threatened to lift away from the torin's scalp, and he gurgled beneath her in panic, unable to move, unable to breathe.
Garrus watched with a combination of terror and fascination as the Commander expertly tortured Saren's lackey with the threat of an old-fashioned de-fringing. The sensitive join on the underside of Garrus' own fringe shivered in irrepressible empathy - rail-splitting was an intense choice for an interrogation tactic.
There was no pain like having the entire shelf of cartilaginous fringe snapped off at the root, tearing away half of the skin and plates from the skull in the process. It was hideous, bloody, and disfigured the victim for life. During the Krogan Rebellions, "splitting the rails" of a virile male turian had become a favored practice among the cruelest krogan warlords. Some had made macabre necklaces from the severed fringebones - Garrus had seen one in a museum as a kid on a school trip and hadn't been able to think about anything else for days.
Shepard's voice sliced through the room with the same haunted, careful polish of that ancient bloodthirsty curio.
"Four days ago, your so-called boss murdered over three and a half million colonists in a single morning and declared himself prophet to a very hungry god. If you really want to align yourself with someone that soulless, then you're already rotten inside. Your body is spoiled meat."
Without breaking her death stare or letting up one inch of pressure on his head, the Commander released the torin's crest and smashed her right fist into her own oozing stomach wound. She did it again and again, without blinking, without so much as a flinch of discomfort.
Her tone was numb as she said: "Look at that. I am soft."
She thumped madly into her own side until her fingers swam in blood. The crimson drenched right through the fabric, a few fat drops fell from her wound and splattered against the turian's armor.
"You're soft too, eska," she warned.
More Closed Dialect, this time Shepard unleashed a derogatory jibe usually reserved for the bottom rung first year military cadets. Meat, carrion, worthless offal; that's what she called him. Garrus knew how that felt: his first month at the training academy, eska had been screamed his way enough times for him to hear it in his sleep.
Shepard put her soiled hand back on the turian's face, fingers slick with her own glistening blood, and forced his head down even further. The torin's fringe screeched against the floor and Garrus prayed that the victim's will would break before his head did. Physically, she was torturing the grunt, there was no mistaking the harrowed twitching in his eyes as Shepard encouraged his fringe to part ways with his skull. Psychologically, however, the Commander seemed to be up to something far more complex.
"Convince me you're not eska!" Shepard demanded.
Her words rang firm and clear, like a drill sergeant skinning a fresh recruit. It wasn't a threat, it was a full-throated command. An order to show resilience, fortitude, excellence. Do better, she screamed in his face, or your worthless life is mine.
He broke. She let just enough pressure off of his windpipe to allow him to plead for his life.
"ALRIGHT! Let go of me, you psychotic bitch! I didn't know that he ransacked an entire fucking colony. What do you want to know?"
"I don't want to hear a single word that comes out of your filthy mouth. You'll give a recorded deposition to C-Sec: hand them everything you know about Saren on a plate." She dragged an accidental streak along the side of his face with a bloody finger as she loosened her grip. "And then you'll call your mari and pari to apologize for being such a disappointment."
It was doubtful that the bareface bastard had ever known his parents, and Garrus imagined that Shepard knew that only too well - one last, final dig.
She lifted her leg and rolled away, signalling Garrus to hoist up the perp and escort him to the officers outside. The thug went without much fight, hobbling on his one good leg. Garrus helped the patrolmen handle the torin and his two dead friends, then gave them explicit instructions to extract a full confession back at HQ, no matter how painful.
By the time he went back to check on Shepard, the ass-kicking space marine had been replaced by a badly injured woman who was clutching her side and shivering with pain, unable to even drag herself from the floor. Chloe had already come out of her hiding spot to tend to her.
"Doctor Michel, are you alright?" Shepard was asking.
"I'm fine! You're the one who needs medical attention."
Garrus approached the two women and tactfully said: "Doctor, the quarian is safe - I secured her in the store-room. I can lift Commander Shepard onto a bed for you, if you want to go and check on your other patient."
"Garrus!" As soon as she saw him, Chloe stood and threw her arms around his neck; he cleared his throat and awkwardly gave her shoulder a pat.
He hadn't been intimate with Chloe for years, but she'd never really given him up - every so often she'd send him another small box of dextro chocolates or ask him out to dinner, and he was too much of a softie to cut her off completely.
Garrus could see Shepard staring at him over Chloe's shoulder, and the Commander was reading him like a children's story. One look at Chloe's dark red hair, the desperate way the doctor was clinging to him, and Shepard's face scrunched up with barely contained amusement. She twirled one of her clean fingers through her own hair, then judgmentally raised her brows at him.
He rolled his eyes at Shepard and gently pulled Chloe's arms from his neck.
"Thank you, Garrus," the doctor beamed, a tone of golden admiration glittering in her voice. "I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't shown up when you did. And thank you, Commander," she said to Shepard. "Thank you so much."
Chloe let him go, and hurried to rescue her quarian patient from the store room.
"Tali? Are you okay?"
Garrus heard the muffled voice of the quarian calling back, and then walked over to assist Shepard from the floor. The Commander put a girlish, pleading hand on his foot as he approached, and dreamily whispered: "Thank you, Garrus!" in a perfect sing-song imitation of Doctor Michel.
"I could just leave you down there forever, you know." he said.
She laughed, then immediately looked sorry for trying.
"Ow…" she whined. "Ow ow owwwwwww…" The childishness in her voice was endearing, but part of him was still reeling from her cold-blooded interrogation.
Which version of her was the real one? The wild and crazy bellixatum enthusiast, the calm and collected combat strategist, or the ridiculous jokester reeling in a puddle of her own blood? He looked at those red-tipped fingers curling into his boot and decided Shepard was all of these things, and probably a good deal more.
He liked that.
"You could've just punched him a few times to get him to talk," he teased, shaking his head in an attempt to free himself of her spell. "But no. You had to show off and punch yourself instead."
He knelt down behind her and carefully started to lift her from the floor. When he caught a whiff of her scent, he temporarily forgot himself, and murmured fondly into her hair.
"Forgive the insubordination Red, but you're every bit as impressive as I remember."
She chortled again - it sounded painful - and then she whispered, "What can I say, Blue? I like your gun."
Original words and phrases:
- Eska: Offal, meat scraps or bait.
- Mellia: an affectionate, saccharine diminutive, similar to 'honey' or 'sweetheart'.
- Conruppor: Pervert, rapist.
- Mamzeris: Bare-faced, illegitimate: a bastard.
- Luctoritum: Turian mixed martial art, primarily grappling/submission tactics.
- Anxiscansus: Submission hold from luctoritum mixed martial art.
- Bellixatum: Broad term for the different schools of turian martial arts.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
- Tarin/Tarini: Female turian(s)
- Torin/Torini: Male turian(s)
- Patrem/Pari: Father/Dad