09: Vakarian's Diagonal Argument
Garrus
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
In accordance with Alliance shift protocol, the Normandy's cargo bay lights had dimmed at exactly 0000 hours. Gradually, the human crewmen had filed upstairs for their turns in the sleeper pods. There was no second or third shift duty roster to be had in the cargo area, so by 0030, Garrus found himself completely alone for the first time in days.
Well, nearly. Williams was lingering quietly at her work station in the port bow, apparently lost in her own thoughts. She'd been cleaning guns for the last two hours, which would have been fine under normal combat conditions. Trouble was, just like everything else aboard the Normandy, the brand new arsenal had barely seen daylight. There was little to clean. Garrus recognized pointless busywork - it was, after all, a particular late night specialty for most turians.
Ever since he'd gotten his first model kit on his tenth birthday, Garrus' midnight hobby had always been constructing miniature ships. He supposed he'd have to take up some other mundane chore for the duration of his time aboard the Normandy. Optimizing the M35, probably. Turn up the juice on that coaxial mass-accelerator-meets-machine-gun combo until it sang. Could be fun.
He'd been generously offered his own shift in the sleeper pods, but had immediately opted out. Human sleeping patterns were too uninterrupted for his comfort. An eight hour chunk of sleep? That was tantamount to submitting willingly to a nightly coma. Like most Palaven natives, Garrus preferred to catch a few sparse hours throughout the night. He drifted into unconsciousness only when necessary, and did whatever small, relaxing tasks he could fit in between.
He wasn't used to sharing the wee hours with a human for company, but he decided to take advantage of this quiet aside with Williams. Hard to say if he'd get a better chance.
"Chief. May I have a moment of your time?"
As he approached, the Chief stiffened uncomfortably, as if only just realizing she was not alone in the cargo bay. She looked jumpy. Cornered, even. Garrus did not fail to notice that her hand was resting on a deadly Elkoss Avenger. Luckily for him, the assault rifle was in pieces and scattered all over the weapons bench, in the middle of a thorough and unnecessary cleaning.
"Alright Vakarian," she grumbled, refusing to meet his eye. "I'm listening. But don't get any ideas - I'm not kissing any more turians."
He put his hands up in surrender.
"I swear. No funny business."
Despite the tension between them, the moment Garrus was reminded of William's performance last night at Anderson's party, he laughed unexpectedly, high in the back of his throat. The sudden, honest burst of amusement broke the ice just enough for him to risk another step towards the bench.
"Can I just say, Chief - for the record - that Kryik's face when you licked his forehead..."
His voice snapped over another loud, irrepressible cackle, he couldn't stop himself. After a moment of internal struggle, Williams' face melted into a sly half-smile. Finally she sighed and gave Garrus a dirty little laugh.
"Yeah. Alright. That was totally worth it."
"Agreed. Well done."
"Alright, so? What's up?"
The slow scritch-scritch-scritch of a cleaning brush passing through a gun barrel awkwardly filled the cargo bay, the only audible noise above the low hum of the engine.
"Question. How well do you know Commander Shepard?"
She quirked her head at him, then shrugged down at her work with one shoulder.
"Why? Having doubts already?"
"Not at all. It's only…" He lowered his voice. "Moreau's little… comment back in the mission debrief. Do you know anything about Shepard's service history?"
"Plenty. Personal history, too. Though who doesn't, right?"
He said nothing, and she looked at him blankly.
"Oh. You, apparently. Huh. Okay. Well, the Commander and I have Shanxi in common. My grandfather surrendered the colony to her dad. Awkward."
Garrus was too stunned to react. He watched as Williams passed her stiff metal brush back and forth across the gun's mass accelerator chamber, and felt every bit as inert and discombobulated as the weapon in her hands.
Finally, he staggered out: "Excuse me?"
She balked at him as if his translator had failed. He tried again.
"Shanxi," he babbled. "As in... First Contact? Relay 314."
"Yep. That's the one."
"Your grandfather was General Williams. The General Williams? And he… surrendered to... Shepard's dad?"
"You know: Regidonis. The turian Blackwatch Captain. Infamous persona non grata. Perhaps you've heard of him."
"You mean - He was - She is - That's impossible!"
The Chief stopped cleaning, her eyebrows lifting skeptically towards her hairline.
"Vakarian, are you seriously telling me you didn't know any of this when you signed on? I thought you were supposed to be a detective. And a turian."
He chuckled lightly at his own expense.
"Detective? Maybe. I've never been a very good turian. Anyway, the galaxy is a big place, not everybody knows everyone."
"Are you sure?"
No. He really wasn't. Not anymore.
"I used to think so," he muttered. "But that was before I found myself serving aboard the Shanxi Interplanetary Memorial Cruise. "
Williams tried to smother a small, involuntary laugh. "Yikes. And here I thought I was out of the loop working groundside detail. You're a mess." She teased him with easy sarcasm, calling him right on this bullshit. She reminded him of Solana.
"No argument there, Chief."
Garrus wracked his brain. Shepard and Regidonis. How had he missed this? Williams seemed to be wondering the same thing.
"You had no idea?" she asked. "None? Did you go to school… ever? Or, like, turn on the news at any point in the last twenty years?"
"Ha. Ha. Look, I was very happy under my rock, thank you. Cultivated several varieties of obscure, irrelevant fungi that were never grown on Shanxi..."
"Uh huh."
"Though now that you mention it, I do remember this urban legend about Captain Regidonis, but I always thought it was too stupid to be true. People saying that he'd adopted some human kid out in the Terminus after everybody thought he was dead? It's ridiculous."
But, he reflected, no one was more ridiculous, more impossible than Shepard. The rumors about Regidonis had flared in the distant background of his life, and he'd never paid them much attention. Weird trivia, historical minutiae. Nothing more.
"When was that story going around? The mid seventies?"
Williams nodded, clearly trying not to laugh at him.
"No wonder I never processed it - I was preoccupied. Finishing up at C-Sec Academy, living on the Citadel with my dad after the divorce. That was a laugh riot. I wasn't exactly paying attention to the news."
"Hold on, back up. 'After the divorce?' Aliens get divorced?"
Garrus stared at her.
"Sorry. That was - wow - rude. I only meant… It's just so normal ."
"You think I'm normal now? Please, tell that to my kid sister."
"Oh man. I hear that. I've got three."
Williams looked at the disassembled gun and smiled to herself, then her face sagged. She looked exhausted.
"You should head upstairs, Chief. I can finish this for you."
"But-"
"Williams. This gun is barely a week old. I think it's clean."
"Yeah, alright. I should get some rack. I'm the muscle for Kryik's ground squad tomorrow. You and Alenko are backing up Shepard, yeah?"
He nodded. "We'll be in the tank."
As Williams abandoned her post at long last, she coughed, "You're getting into an M35 with Shepard? Well good luck with that."
She smothered another laugh and stepped into the elevator.
"What?" Garrus said, turning to follow her exit.
Williams' voice gaily sing-songed through the closing elevator doors.
"One word: Akuze."
Garrus was a cop. Or at least he had been. Recently. As recently as yesterday, according to some. He was accustomed to working late shifts on a deep space station with no meaningful day-night ebb to the crime and a constant stream of nocturnal turian coworkers. The Normandy's lighting change and sudden lack of midnight company was unusual. A little off-putting, if he was being honest. Lonely.
Once Williams had departed, Garrus amused himself by reassembling the Avenger and putting it back in storage. That took all of five minutes. Not knowing quite what to do with himself now that the universe had started spinning in the wrong direction all over again, he changed into a comfortable set of off-duty smallclothes. Then he tried to catch a few unenthusiastic seconds of sleep.
Nestled behind the gunnery pillar in the small hideaway nest he'd made for himself inside the Mako, he couldn't stop wondering what Williams had found so funny about Shepard and a standard Alliance troop deployment vehicle. Shepard and standard didn't go together, that was sure enough. But Akuze? What did that mean?
Dammit.
Accompanied only by the regular heartbeat of the ship itself, smothered in the womb-like silence within the secondary hull of the tank, Garrus soon found the grinding sound of his own thoughts too loud to endure. There was nothing to distract him except a constant loop of Shepard. Shanxi. Surrender. No wait that's completely fucking impossible -
On and on his brain raged, until he could barely remember which way was up and which was down. In space, he supposed, what difference did it make?
Sometime around assuming the age of majority, Garrus had experienced the all-too-common whirl of dysphoria that comes with recognizing one's own dust-mote insignificance in an immense, unfeeling cosmos. Oh yes, he had spiraled in weightless horror, reeling amidst the adolescent epiphany that the universe is mostly a void of empty space and cold, ever-increasing distances. Indeed, Garrus had often suspected that everything - even the component parts of his own ordinary mortal body - were governed by physical laws and coincidence, nothing more.
Now he was experiencing a dizzying white-hot inversion of that stagnant entropy - a feeling he had only experienced once before. That, like so much in recent memory, had been Shepard's doing too. All heat and strobe lights and magnetically charged rushes of blood. It was as if everything in his life was pointing in this woman's direction, sucking him inevitably toward her insane, pinwheeling event horizon.
At the end of the universe, the Big Bang was supposed to happen all over again. It must have been starting early.
In any case, sleep refused to come.
Fine.
He gave up and wandered back out into the main cargo bay. His goal was simple: investigate the small training course he'd spotted in the port quarter. The Alliance crew had avoided the area with wary glances, as if they feared trespassing across someone's private property. Garrus had no such qualms, even without a search warrant.
Two choices - which Spectre had staked their claim down here?
No question, it was a Hierarchy Crucible. A bruiser's circuit with obstacle stations, a sparring mat, and a full set of gleaming Armax training guns that looked as though they had been lifted straight out of Cipritine academy. He couldn't blame the Alliance grunts for giving the course a wide berth. This crap was intimidating, even to him, and Garrus had run through enough of these grueling endurance courses for several lifetimes. Like everything else in Hierarchy training methodology, a Crucible was designed for maximum efficiency, minimal variance, and a world of hurt.
One: high-intensity sprints on a treadmill, until the heart rate spiked. Two: mat work and weight resistance to the limits of endurance. Three: try to hold a gun and shoot something with your arms shaking like brittle twigs in a cold snap. Four: trip over some obstacle or another. Then start it all again.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Steady as takkatas.
A few short hours ago, he would have written off this entire training area as Kryik's domain. Now, without even stopping to think about it, he instinctively knew it belonged to Shepard.
Standing there in the belly of this brand new hybrid ship, he could almost convince himself that if he just waited here long enough, studied and analyzed enough of her clues, then he could make sense out of her.
Shepard. Shanxi. Surrender. No wait that 's completely fucking impossible.
There was no making sense of this. If he wanted to keep his head on straight, he was just going to have to take the news of Shepard's heritage as gospel. Become a true believer and accept Red's startling transubstantiation from beautiful sex object into something… far more.
Garrus ran his bare fingertips over a set of adjustable barbells. The handles were smaller than he was used to - fit for human hands. Shepard's hands. He squeezed, wishing there was some afterimage to cling to, but the metal was cold. Dead. It gave up none of her secrets. So what? He could wheedle them out on his own.
He could well imagine the formal upbringing she might have endured, raised by someone from a line as old and noble as Regidonis. Garrus had always thought his own father had been a hard-ass. But this?
Make every bullet fly with honor, she'd said to him a lifetime ago, in the dark privacy of that bar, a little tell that was now knocked wide open. Her father's catch phrase.
Their conversation had been so brief, so unusual, that he'd committed every line to memory almost immediately, replayed it hundreds of times. Now he was grateful for his own pathetic fixation. Context was everything.
If I 'm blue, why are you so red?
Garrus knew familia notas when he saw them. Nevermind that Shepard didn't have hers painted on her face. Shepard's marks were every bit as permanent as his own.
A decent turian should have had strong feelings about Shepard's childhood, her father's supposed treachery, her precocious human appropriation of the Hierarchy's military traditions. Anger, betrayal, offended disdain. Whatever. There were a lot of ways to be an asshole in the name of patriotism - Garrus had no interest in any of them.
Oh, he had strong feelings about Shepard. Many and varied. But his feelings were all the wrong type and they lived in all the wrong places. As the Commander's scandalizing secrets were revealed, each new tantalizing inch only made him want to see more.
Naked. And sweating.
Garrus' heart was already racing, so he skipped the calisthenics.
Hoping for a distraction, he moved to the training guns and lifted the Armax sniper model from its stand. As he balanced it against his shoulder experimentally, he huffed with haughty distaste.
Too light by half, and there was never any useful kickback on these baseline training set-ups. He zeroed the aiming reticule half-heartedly at a slow-moving holographic target, let it dance across the cargo bay wall a moment longer, then squeezed the trigger.
A dainty spray of virtual bullets felled the target, and a new one fizzled up behind. The new target appeared further afield, imitating a distance of several dozen yards with some cheap field-of-vision tricks. It was harder to hit, but still a gimmie by Garrus' standards.
Too easy. He lowered the gun from his shoulder and glanced around the room as if one of the lazily blinking security feeds might disapprove of any further snooping.
Fuck it.
He quietly hacked into the combat log to take a closer look at Shepard's scores.
She'd executed a series of perfect runs on the training module, one bullseye right after the other. Impressive at first glance, but Garrus knew how to spot a training plateau a mile off and in high wind. For the past two years, he'd personally led the sniper training corps at C-Sec academy - he'd reverse engineered half a dozen of these crappy Armax modules to fit non-standard guns.
Rule one: always preferable to practice on your own weapon.
A training rating this high was a sure sign of stagnant equipment. Was Red depending on this set-up to improve? If so, tut-tut. It wouldn't do. Shepard was good, but she could stand to learn a thing or two if he installed a real targeting program on a real gun and then showed her the ropes himself...
Wouldn't that be something? Correcting her grip, settling the rifle to balance in her arms, leaning into her ear to whisper some sage piece of advice. Sugary visions flitted through his head, each one spicier than the last.
It didn't last long. His position in his own fantasies was instantly and rightfully usurped by Kryik, whose level of intimacy with Shepard still remained unclear.
Training Shepard wasn't Garrus' job. Not even close.
And yet.
He rolled his shoulders and took another peek down the scope at a freshly generated target as it bounced predictably from side to side. Pop-pop, it exploded in a cute explosion of pixels, and Garrus growled irritably. Shepard deserved better.
Better than what? Albacus Regidonis? Nihlus Kryik? Did she hang out with the Primarch and Councilor Sparatus on weekends, too?
Garrus kept shooting easy targets, contemplating the astronomical disfavor of his own odds. So many impossible things had happened already. The chance to have Red all for his own… why did that feel like the unlikeliest possibility of all?
Shepard. Shanxi. Surrender. No wait that 's completely fucking impossible.
No sooner had the thought entered his brain then the elevator doors opened at his back. He lowered the training rifle an inch, glanced curiously over his shoulder, and saw Shepard stepping unaccompanied from the elevator.
She was in a state of partial dress, stripped down to little more than an athletic bra and shorts, with her bruised waist open to the air. Apparently the wound she'd been quietly enduring had finally healed enough that she'd been able to remove the bandages.
Inexplicably, the sight filled him with guilt. It had been cruel of him to bend the laws of nature to his whim, summoning a half-dressed Shepard to his side through sheer force of will. Never mind that it was impossible: he was getting used to that.
She'd yanked her hair into a rough, crooked ponytail, slung a towel over her shoulder, and she looked fierce in her solitude. Exhausted, maybe, but no less capable of killing. The instant she spotted him, the private cloud of anger fell from her face, but the expression that replaced it was hardly friendly.
The Commander hadn't sneaked down to her Crucible at nearly 0100 hours to make small talk with anyone - perhaps especially - not with him. She wanted to be alone and she wanted to hit something - he knew that much just at a glance. Courtesy and common sense dictated that he should leave immediately, but he was so startled by her sudden materialization that his mouth ran away before his brain.
"Shouldn't you be asleep?" he drawled, sounding ludicrously arrogant for someone who was clinging to a gun in their underwear. He was dressed for bed: hands and feet bared, spurs exposed. By turian standards he might as well have been buck-ass naked.
In short, he looked like a prancing idiot.
"Sleep when I'm dead," she responded, flat as duracrete. The phrase had an automatic flavor to it, as if rehearsed. When she reluctantly ventured into the aft corner of the cargo bay, she tried to keep herself at a distance, but her eyes roamed over his casual, sleeveless C-Sec tunic and fitted shorts.
Trying to distract himself from that hollow but appraising glance, he turned back to the array of digital targets and knocked a few more of them out of the air. He could feel her eyes weighing on him as she approached.
"Playing with my toys, Vakarian?"
She spoke of playfulness but her voice was anything but. She was annoyed.
He chuffed and blasted away one more target, then lowered the training rifle. Again, his mouth blew right past his brain without so much as a by-your-leave.
"That's all this is, you know. A toy. You're going nowhere fast with a combat sim this basic, Shepard."
"Oh yeah?"
He gestured at the equipment and felt half his age, hardly for the first time.
"Give me a week and an assist from Chief Williams' weapons bench and I can show you a real firearms program."
He leaned the butt of the weapon against his hip and slid her an experimental look. With a noticeable rush of blood to her face, Shepard's gaze got stuck somewhere around the tight fabric covering his pelvis, then she finally stumbled over herself and looked away.
Things between them weren't as one sided as he'd initially suspected, then. Good to know.
Or bad.
Maybe more bad than good.
He thought of Kryik and Shepard, and lots of loaded guns. Thought of all the ways his low-ranking near-nakedness shouldn't get in the way of exceptionally dangerous people doing their jobs.
"Real firearms, huh?" she said, without enthusiasm. "Sounds good, if it'll keep me on my toes. Make the improvements as you see fit. Speaking of training, since you're just standing there trying to look pretty, I could use an assist."
He blinked. It didn't sound like an invitation - more of an exasperated demand that he remain after hours for a stern talking-to. He was well versed in this particular tone, and he was disappointed to be encountering it now. It was a mood killer.
Vakarian, stay after class. Detective, step into my office. Garrus, we need to talk.
Shepard kept forging ahead in the same reprimanding monotone.
"Nihlus wants to start sparring in a few days, and I'm badly out of practice. I assume you're proficient?"
Something was eating at her. Gnawing on her like a bone, really. He set the gun back in its holder and tried to break the tension with humor.
"Sure, but I thought you said no dancing? Ever."
Things like top of my hand-to-hand division four years running sounded a lot more impressive when he slid them into his undertones rather than saying them out loud. He hoped. But everything kept coming out backwards and flirty.
The swarthiness was not wasted on her, because she raised a curious eyebrow and slid the towel from her shoulder.
"Thoripudium? "
He nodded his approval, but felt the floor lurching dangerously beneath his feet.
Thoripudium was ritualized and low-impact. A decent workout, and a style gentle enough to practice with a human who still had half of her intestines missing. Flowing, interlocking positions that relied on focus and balance rather than brute strength. Constant energy in the full range of muscles. Rolling waves of attack and defense, a careful push-pull between partners. Incoming strokes were anticipated, neutralized, or carefully rigged to explode.
Truth be told, in Garrus' personal experience, a round of friendly thoripudium usually amounted to little more than a prelude to friendly sex. Nothing to break the tension quite like... Garrus tried not to think about that, not now, but it was proving to be yet another impossible thing.
Just how many turian habits had Shepard picked up on Palaven? There was more to Hierarchy team-building than the morning drumline, after all.
The Commander refused to drop her gaze - she was definitely up to something, but Garrus suspected this was no playful attempt to get him into bed. Her eyes were too hard, the lines of her body too carefully set against him. She walked straight to the center of the sparring mat and took up the basic stance, legs bent, right arm presented as if this was the most professional idea in the universe.
Which it wasn't.
Cautiously, he stepped up and slotted the back of his naked wrist against hers. Wished he had more clothes on. Wished she had more clothes on. Wished they'd initiated a more violent style. Wished for anything to save him from the embarrassing transfusion of blood from brain to groin that would become inevitable once they began.
As she started to push her wrist against his, commencing the first simple, horizontal circle of movement, he tried to act normal. Quick, crack a joke or something.
"Baby steps, huh, Shepard? Insides still solidifying?"
"Chakwas says I'm combat ready, but she's imagining some glamazon in armor, fully shielded."
The gentle back and forth intensified, the weight shifting between them in equal turns with only the quiet squeak of the padded mat to break the silence. So far so good. Their single point of contact was at the wrist. This, he could handle.
Shepard whispered roughly, continuing a thought he hadn't realized she'd left unfinished.
"Without all that padding? I'm vulnerable. So yeah - take it easy."
Same boat, Red.
They were stuck in a horizontal eddy. Hesitant. Non-confrontational. He might have called this pace relaxing if he didn't feel like Shepard had just chosen to single him out for some demented, spontaneous science experiment.
She didn't make any further moves, but they had to do something to advance the routine, so he assumed the lead and introduced his other arm. This created a deliberate tangle of limbs, and the pace naturally quickened to suit, but their feet remained rooted to the mat for now. He tried to ignore the feel of her cool, smooth skin as she pressed against his forearms, but of course - that was impossible.
Was she testing him, to see if he could stay as professional as he'd claimed? If so, he had his work cut out. Thoripudium was a risky practice for two people who'd struggled to control themselves in the public fishbowl of a police car all those years ago. Now, alone and unobserved in the dark, moving their bodies in deliberate time, they were in much greater danger of breaking regs.
With treacherous disobedience, his blood rushed into all the wrong extremities as he considered getting into trouble in a darkened cargo bay, breaking some old-fashioned regs while tumbling with the first human Spectre...
Shepard's comparatively sober voice was like a cold knife in his chest.
"Vakarian, stop holding back. If you have something to say, get it out of your system."
Oh, he had plenty on his mind, but what words could he offer to chaos herself, the wellspring from which impossible things were born? How about: bend over.
He nearly choked, and opted for the safety of saying fuck all. Reticence did little to save him: she misinterpreted his silence as some kind of threat.
"Don't waste my time." she growled, increasing the pressure of her wrists against his until he lost some ground, had to take a stabilizing step to the side. "Lay it on me. I would have preferred to get this out in the open before you signed on, but Nihlus didn't exactly give me the chance. You're not going to have problems following my orders, are you?"
Her breath was growing ragged. Whether it was from anger, exertion... arousal? Difficult to say.
Too cornered to censor himself, he bit back.
"I get it: you're off limits. Torture me all you like, I know how to fall in. Your ass may be fine, but it isn't that distracting, Commander."
She hissed at him from between clenched teeth. "Stop deflecting. This isn't a joke. If you're holding onto any Hierarchy bullshit about my father, say it now. Consider this your only safe opportunity."
He was so startled that he cracked, and a loud, uncontrollable laugh spilled out of him without warning. Once he started, he struggled to stop.
"Wait, all this… bodywork... and you want to have a chat about your old man?"
His concentration was in tatters, and Shepard's wrist rolled over his arm. With one swift yank to his elbow, she redirected his momentum and sent him tumbling to the mat. He dusted himself off, then swept back up against her and resumed the exercise. Maintaining a minimum safe distance. Of course.
"Sorry, Commander. I thought we were broaching... a very different subject." He quietly added, "Wishful thinking."
Unsatisfied with his answer, she snuck a hand past his cowl and sliced the butt of her palm across a sensitive tendon in his neck. He jumped.
"Regidonis." she said, "Spit it out."
Right. All respect to the dead, but this particular ghost of hers could fuck off already. Garrus had other priorities.
"Shepard, drop your weapons. I've got nothing to say."
Another lunge, this time she got him right in the side, under the carapace. Confess. Confess! Where are the rebel spies?
"Okay, fine. It's weird." He could concede that point to her, at the very least. "But shit, at this point, I doubt I'd blink if you walked in and claimed you were adopted by hanar missionaries from another dimension."
The next series of movements sank them lower towards the mat, deep into thigh work. Back and forth, back and forth. Shepard would lunge for the weak point at the base of his keel, he would roll the wrist and deflect, send his own artful jab for her navel, which she would absorb, transforming his force into her own new attempt for the inside of his knee.
On it went, their wrists always touching, that delicious meeting point growing warmer by the minute. She was a fucking metronome.
If she'd been on his takkatas team, he'd have stuck her on a pulse drum too.
Spirits, she was not kidding around with her bodywork, either. Fit didn't begin to describe it. As they rocked back and forth, slowly lowering and rising in tandem, he saw the meaty lines of her thighs keeping time, thick muscles trembling with exertion beneath the delicate gauze of her skin.
He gulped roughly and tried not to follow the sinews of her leg up to their natural meeting place. Don't think about Shepard's crotch. Not now. Maybe not ever.
His eyes automatically studied her waist, where that bruised, swollen gash stretched and bunched below her ribs. Even injured, she was still so shapely, covered in all those freckles…
Don't stare. Eyes up. His gaze skittered over the dark valley between her breasts. Nope. Even worse. His clumsy attempt at not-staring-but-definitely-staring abruptly crash landed on the line of her neck, where her pulse was throbbing.
His visor unhelpfully suggested that Commander Shepard was approaching a heightened state of arousal.
Oh, thanks.
Her formal rhythm broke and she groped blindly for a weakness, twisting his arm and throwing him a fair distance across the mat. He shrugged it off, came back for more. The embarrassed glow on her face gave her away, she was quickly losing her cool. Hell, she'd thrown herself halfway to the floor with that last attempt at an upset. She shook herself loose and they started over, wrists glued together. All four hands in tandem now, with feet in step. Moving faster.
"If you were hoping for a fight, I'll have to disappoint you," he breathed. "You'll get no backtalk from me. I barely knew about it to begin with - only found out about your special snowflake backstory a few hours ago, after your pilot got mouthy."
"Some detective you are," she snarled.
He'd thrown off her rhythm, now she was struggling to keep pace. This is what she got for pushing too hard, refusing to bend. Absolute control had given way to an uncooperative jumble of mixed intentions when she hadn't gotten her way.
She struck out again with the opportunistic reach of someone long accustomed to a dirty fight, and he turned the blow aside. Yikes - that time she'd gone straight for the eyes.
Too late. He could see clear through her, now. How did that human idiom go? She was blowing smoke out her ass.
She'd risen in ranks by clawing her way there, denying all opposition. What other route did she have, with a traitor's bones dragging behind her? Blazing her own bloody trail, purifying herself in one Crucible after another, it must have taken years of pain, near bottomless discipline. For Regidonis' human daughter, that N4 combat tour on Palaven would have been riddled with threats. Apex predators who saw ripe human meat clinging to a brittle, shameful legacy. Easy pickings.
Conruppor. She'd learned that word somewhere, after all.
His brow lowered, eyes darkening. His mandibles buzzed furiously against his cheeks, but he managed to keep his big mouth shut. This random test of his sexual control suddenly made a lot more sense. Just as suddenly, all he wanted to do was stop. She was relying on ancient stores of anger, old underground fires that had burned too long and too bright for anyone to smother. None of it was for him.
Well, fuck that. No more glancing blows, no more rootless force. If she wanted this fight, it would stay clean and fair. Hopefully brief.
Again, she found a gap in his blockade and tried to exploit it, tried to break the flow of combat and seize the best advantage she knew: fury. With a disgusted grunt, he grabbed her hands and put her arms back in place, stubbornly sticking his wrists against hers. When she came in for another sloppy jab, he absorbed the impact and laced his arm under hers. She hissed and tried to break free, but he had her fingers locked tight between his own.
"I don't believe you." she said, voice low and dark as a bed of hot coals. "A turian cop obsessed with redheads because of one night in a bar. You had no idea who I was? Bullshit. My story ran on every news outlet in the-"
Without breaking stride, he neutralized the last of her forward thrust and slammed her tight against one side of his carapace. Her face bumped his neck, her bare stomach knocked neatly against his groin, and her breath caught in her throat.
"Hey, nobody's perfect," he whispered.
That shut her up.
"Shepard," he sighed. "Listen to me. I. Don't. Care. I've wanted you since zero hour, but only for my own demented reasons."
He breathed down her neck in calm, even gusts and willed her to see his point, thunderous and steady as it was. An obvious, uninvited erection, hammering heavy as a drumbeat behind his sealed groin plates, but well under control. Pressed against him like this, she couldn't miss it.
"That's my problem," he said. "Not yours. Whatever your history, I'm sorry. Consider me the one torin who refuses to add to your damage. I'm only-" Don't breathe, Vakarian. Don't bend your mouth to hers. That's not for you. Not now. Put the damn fire out. "Your ship, your rules. I've got your six, Commander."
He let up the pressure and she twisted out of his grip. Just in time.
Her face was the color of her hair, her chest was heaving, but she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were fixed over his shoulder, throwing flaming daggers into one of the security cameras that was bolted to the cargo bay ceiling. Her eyes slid back to his face, and that steel barricade inside of her gave way.
"Garrus…"
He closed his eyes and let the sound of his name in her mouth boil over him like a smoking wave of lava.
"You…" she tried, but her voice was stilted. "We…"
Shepard yelled something unintelligible at the ceiling, then started to ramble in a low whisper.
"This conversation would be so much easier somewhere else. Anywhere else. In a derelict freighter. The sterile vacuum of space. In a fucking unmarked shipping container at the bottom of the ocean - I - I don't care! Just… goddammit it all. I wish we'd had the time to be alone for two seconds so we could work this out..."
Garrus elbowed her in the ribs with all the tact of an eleven-year-old smuggling an issue of Fornax under the table.
"Hey, Red. You want a minute alone? I can make that happen."
She stopped and stared at him as if he'd materialized out of thin air. He got the eerie feeling that Jane Shepard had only just arrived, hours and hours after coming aboard. About damn time.
As she looked at him - really took him in at long last - her face softened. All at once, like a time-traveler, she transformed back into someone younger, warmer, and far more familiar. He remembered this face. His blood turned over.
Red kept herself buried deep. And no wonder.
"I don't see what's so private about a treadmill."
"Ten minutes, Red."
"You want me to run on this treadmill for ten minutes. Ignoring you."
"Yeah, see... I'm going to need you to ignore me a lot harder than that."
"And you're going to stand over there. Calibrating a gun. Without talking."
"Without talking."
"Is this some kind of patronizing turian life-lesson? 'You want privacy, Shepard? Get on a treadmill and shut up.'"
He wheezed, "Just trust me. A few more minutes of flawless, dutiful behavior, and then I'll show you a magic trick."
She tried to look annoyed and failed completely. Her mouth wouldn't stop quirking at one corner, and she was worrying her bottom lip between her teeth to keep from smiling outright. She shook her head one last time, then climbed up onto the treadmill.
With a cocky flare of one mandible, he snatched the generic Armax training rifle out of its stand and threw it across Williams' workbench for disassembly. The effect was not unlike tossing a half-naked woman onto a mattress, and Shepard missed nothing. Her face flushed a vibrant, glowing pink.
Next, he pulled his personal gun case from his weapons locker. As he unlocked the case and removed the Mantis with all the suggestive patience he could muster, he met Shepard's eyes. She looked hungry.
"Yeah, you want this gun, don't you?" He flexed one naked arm and she snorted. Snorted at him, right through her nose.
He shot a goading tilt of the chin towards the treadmill, and with the bleat of a well-practiced blowhard, she started up the run cycle and turned away. Meanwhile, he moved to the weapons bench and set to work on a quick-fire stripping of the Armax training module. Quietly, he pressed record on a surreptitious little omni-tool program.
Five minutes droned on in requisite silence, broken only by the pounding footfalls of Shepard settling into a nice sprint on the treadmill. There was that steady rhythm of hers - he was relieved she'd found it again. With her keeping such excellent pace, he managed to wrench the training module into a few orderly piles of parts on the weapons bench in record time.
He'd never done this so quickly before, and he admitted it was a slapdash job at best, but it would work. He'd used the Mantis for a training example dozens of times. It was ready to accept the hardware, which made all of this easier in a pinch.
Five more minutes to screw the module in place and double-check the fire-suppression protocols. Surprise hull breaches and deadly misfires were fun for no one, after all. Once he was satisfied that his gun was fit to fire indoors, he checked the last ten minutes' security footage. Perfectly dull, pedestrian, and believable. He set the footage to repeat benignly across the cargo bay security feeds until further notice. A cheap parlor trick like this wouldn't fool the Shadow Broker or a real intelligence agent, but it didn't need to be sophisticated. Whatever low-level Alliance personnel had been tasked with sifting through Shepard's off-duty records would never know the difference. If the Commander of the Normandy needed a moment free from the constant surveillance of anonymous lackeys a dozen links below her on the chain of command, a false vid loop was a cheap and easy way to get it.
In the workout corner, Red had realized that her time was up. She slowly came to a halt, and he noticed a shimmer of sweat was gleaming at the base of her neck. Her eyebrows raised expectantly. Now what?
He brandished his trophies: omni-tool in one hand, giant gun in the other.
"Congratulations, Commander. You're off the record for a while. No cameras. As far as the Alliance is concerned, you're in the middle of a nice long run."
For a moment, all she did was stare him down, then her face blanched white. Maybe this had been a bad idea. Spectre or not, Shepard probably liked her rules in the same state as her internal organs and personal metronome: unbroken.
"Did you just casually sabotage the security system of the most advanced ship in the fleet?" she asked.
"Tada!"
As she stepped down from the treadmill, she glanced around the room and rotated her finger in a thoughtful circle. He wished he could say she looked pleased, but the expression she wore was too difficult to read.
"So it's just playing…"
"One boring loop. Nothing to see here," he explained. "Whatever compromising things you've been holding back, now's the time. Break into song, stop sucking in your gut, scratch your ass. I don't know. What do humans do when they need to blow off steam?"
She broke. Her laugh was every bit as loud and throaty as he remembered. A little deranged.
"Oh, plenty," she muttered.
The timbre of her voice had made an abrupt turn into dangerous territory. He took a step back for safety, keeping the gun between them, but she closed the distance.
"Allowing you on-board was a bad idea," she breathed, stepping closer still. "I should have put a stop to it."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."
She wasn't touching him, but all it would take to bridge the gap would be a single step. Just one. Instead of closing that distance, he pushed the gun into her hands.
"I didn't account for any of this. Especially you." She growled, lifting the Mantis to her shoulder. At the sight, he was greeted with that same rush of blood he'd come to associate with Shepard and danger. This marked the second time she'd ever held his favorite weapon, and she was much closer to nakedness now. Third time could be a charm...
She settled the gun into a more comfortable position and looked down the sight. He queued up the training program with a wave of his omni-tool and watched her line up her first target.
"I've kept my life on track," she muttered.
First target by the heavy kickback, she raised her left hand to rub her bruised collarbone.
"Effort." She reloaded the gun and fired again.
"Endurance." Second target down.
"Ethics." Another reload, but this one was sloppier - she had to break her sight line to properly slide home the orange holo of a pretend thermal clip. "Those were Pari's pillars of integrity - everything I stood for."
The third target took a moment to line up, but it never had a chance. Three in a row right out of the starting gate. Not bad. He increased the difficulty.
"Honorable bullets," he said. "Right. I remember. I'm not a complete stranger to those ideals myself, you know. Garrus Vakarian, Citadel Security. We've met."
"Just - shut up! You're not even supposed to be here. It's impossible!"
The second round of targets moved faster, relied on a procedural algorithm of completely randomized movement. Her fingers were shaking, but she landed her shots.
"Commander Shepard is going to start complaining about impossible things now?" he mocked, cranking the difficulty up another notch. "Oh, that's hilarious."
She missed her first target. "Yeah, yeah. I'm Commander Fucking Shepard: First Human Spectre. Whoopdie fucking doo. Everyone's eyes have always been on me, waiting to see what I'll do, just what kind of fuckup I'll turn out to be. Now? Thanks to Nihlus' and Anderson's scheme to sneak me into the Big Boys Club, I feel like everything I do is being picked apart by a team of psychotic journalists who drink blood and eat brains…"
She was rambling. Another miss. "Goddammit, every time I want to sleep from now on, Nihlus is going to be one bunk over taking notes for the Council and telling them I don't snore loud enough to be a real Spectre…"
She fired blindly, triggering an overheat. Growling low in the back of her throat, she ejected the practice heat sink. The deep rumble of frustration Shepard was emitting had not been culled from the standard repertoire of human vocalizations, and the sound went straight to his dick like a shot of adrenaline.
Garrus tried not to pump a victory fist. Shepard had just accidentally answered all of his jealous, juvenile questions about the nature of her relationship with Kryik.
She kept muttering to herself. "Somehow, magically, in the middle of all of this, you showed up again out of the great blue yonder and I can't stop thinking about your-" bang "-goddamn-" bang-bang "-your whole-" Warning: Heat Level Critical "-Gah!-Everything!"
She lowered the gun and blew a wild hair out of her face.
Alright, she'd had enough heavy weaponry to induce a tantrum, it was time to cut her off. His fingers closed around her wrist to calm her down, and he could feel her pulse jumping beneath his thumb. He curled his other palm below her trigger hand and tried to ease the gun from her grip, but she wouldn't budge. Instead, her fingers tightened, and she pulled him in closer, until his body notched behind hers like a shell casing.
"All the way through Vila Militar, I thought: oooh, ahh! Look at me, I'm an invincible badass! They can't touch me, they've got nothing. No more weaknesses, no more personal losses."
Miss. Miss. Reload.
She glanced the next target twice, once on each side, but didn't get the kill.
With a low moan, he steadily pulled on the Mantis until she fell deeper into his arms. He held her hands steady.
BOOM. Dead center.
One down. An infinitely regenerating number to go.
In his visor feedback, he noticed her heartbeat spiking wildly. He spoke quietly, but with enough bitter residue to make her shoulders tense against him.
"Say, how's that invincible badass thing working out for you?"
She stopped firing, leaned into him more deliberately.
"It was working just fine. I was... just fine until you showed up."
"Oh yeah. I can see that. 30% accuracy once your target stops standing still. Flawless victory."
"How could you just… show up? At the most inconvenient crisis point in my life? Twice!?"
"Hmm. Petty vengeance." he jostled the gun in their shared grip. "You might be a sorry excuse for a sniper but you left a gaping hole in my chest when you ran off. Thanks."
That blew the fire right out of her, and he finally managed to pull the Mantis from her hands and set it in the practice rest. Shepard turned, slumped against him with a stubborn grunt, then spread her hands out across the sides of his waist, bolting him in place. He shivered.
She spoke into his neck in damp, warm bursts.
"I - didn't think - I was so sure I'd done the right thing. Walking away from you."
"The right thing for who, exactly?"
Her voice was tiny. He felt the words against his neck more than he heard them aloud, as she whispered: "I never… Especially not you. I'm sorry."
"Save your regret for something worthwhile. Believe it or not, you're not the only one in danger here." Somehow, his face had snuck itself into the soft warmth of her hair. He flared a mandible and sucked in a deep, selfish breath before continuing. "Besides a raging hard-on for this idiot redhead I met in a bar, I've got my own professional stake in this mission. And I had free will once. Dignity! One or two lingering shreds of self-respect. A promising C-Sec career that I may or may not have permanently flushed down the toilet the moment you came back around."
"You shouldn't be here," she said glumly. "Blue… We can't..." She shook her head and glared at his chest, as if searching for the hole she'd left there six years earlier. "This could wreck everything. You and me? Impossible."
"Saren's robot apocalypse is what's going to wreck everything. Not us. We're just a couple of fools fumbling in the dark."
He moved closer, couldn't stop himself from winding one arm against her waist. Her skin was every bit as soft, every bit as solid as he remembered.
"Red, look at me."
She did. His free hand landed protectively beneath her jaw, just to hold her there. Forever, maybe.
"If you're going to say this is impossible, at least say it straight to my face."
One of her hands crept up the side of his neck, and then, without any further warning, she pulled, he pushed, and their mouths were moving together in time.
Original words and phrases:
- Takkatas: Mandatory drum exercises performed by turian children from primary school onward.
- Thoripudium is based on tai chi tui sho or "push hands" techniques.
- Conruppor: Pervert, rapist.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
-Patrem/Pari: Father/Dad
-Torin/Torini (plural): Male turian of the age of majority (15)
Trivial Pursuit:
There are several obscure mathematical references in this chapter, because a guy who loves calibrations is probably a guy who loves comparing his weird life to a bunch of abstract proofs? I guess. I've probably got all of this backwards, but I find abstract math stuff really fascinating, so, it's in there anyway. The chapter title is a reference to Cantor's Diagonal Argument, which tackles infinity in mathematical terms. Here's another quote from Wikipedia: "In set theory, Cantor's diagonal argument [...] was published in 1891 by Georg Cantor as a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers. Such sets are now known as uncountable sets, and the size of infinite sets is now treated by the theory of cardinal numbers which Cantor began."
Smarty pants bullshit aside, "Vakarian's Diagonal Argument" is 100% a dick joke. Don't get me wrong.