"Thanks for your help today."

"No problem."

She sat down at the mess table with a steaming bowl of noodles and meat. They were rehydrated noodles and preserved Alliance ration mystery meat, but it was hot, salty, and she hadn't had to cook it.

Tali had been teaching Alenko how to cook dextro-safe meals, and he had taught her how to rehydrate ration packets. So the crew gotten dinner fixed for them, however she wasn't sure it was really a fair trade. Looking at the plate Garrus had in front of him, she was fairly certain that somehow he and Tali had ended up with much better food stores than the rest of those on board.

However, the exercise had the humans socializing with the alien crew, and when she had hauled herself into her quarters to shower, Alenko and Tali had been laughing together over pots and pans. She was less than bothered by bland meals if everyone could get along like she had feared they wouldn't.

"Wanna try some?" The turian asked, teasingly holding out a forkful of what looked like meat in dark gravy.

"No thanks, I like my internal organs the way they are." She laughed; she'd heard enough horror stories about what could happen if she did eat dextro-foods to not be interested. At best it would simply contain no nutritional value at all and her body wouldn't be able to process it, however urban legends held that at the worst, she'd have some sort of fatally horrible allergic reaction and die a painful and gruesome death.

"Have it your way." He took a large bite, mandibles held close to his face and spoke through his food. "Looks better than what you got. I mean, what even is that? Is it food?" He looked at it with something had had to have been disgust.

"Noodles." She demonstrated raising a forkful. They dripped greasily back into the bowl.

"Yum." He took another bite of his meat and gravy.

"Oh shut up, Vakarian." She couldn't believe she was laughing with him.

"Did the doctor fix up your head?" He asked, gesturing with his fork.

"She fixed the cut." She said quietly, slurping some noodles. "She said you did a good job on it. You patch up a lot of human heads at C-Sec?"

"No, not... really. But I used to have to stop by that doctor's clinic at the Citadel. She helped me out with a few… sticky situations."

"What does that mean?" She asked. He sighed and sat down his fork.

"I've was never really a very good officer. Some of my interrogation techniques… caused a few problems."

"So you're an agent of police brutality?" She laughed again. Excellent. She had a psychotic turian on board.

"No! Just… Some people I needed information from there was no other way to get it. And when it's the kind of people who aren't going to go to the police to complain anyways, the people who help cause the problems… I just had a hard time adhering to 'innocent until proven guilty' when they know that I know that they've done it—whatever 'it' is—and still want to push me. I just came to realize that when people commit these crimes against others, they don't deserve the protection of the authorities anymore."

"That's a pretty strong belief." She wasn't really sure what she thought about it. She'd never really been stuck in a peacekeeping position like he was. But peacekeeping was really the role of the turians in general—both the turian army and basically every other turian she'd come across, as security guards, personal body guards, C-Sec officers. From what she understood they were trained all their lives to subject themselves to the greater good, all dutiful public servants.

Except for a few. Garrus seemed a little more complex than that, though. He didn't seem to have an easy time going along with that 'needs of the many' approach to doing good in the world.

"I guess. It just kills me to see the law protect people who… don't deserve it. I'm not sure how much longer I could have stayed there… anyways."

"I don't know. You might have a point… Laws are enacted to protect people from others, but it does seem too absolute sometimes. And how do you decide who deserves anything anyways?" She asked. "Good and bad—evil—whatever you want to call it; that's not something I know how to deal with."

"If you don't know good from evil, how do you decide what's right?" He asked. He seemed somewhat flabbergasted.

"I don't know." She said with a smile. "Doing a bad thing for a good reason? Sounds like your 'interrogation techniques.'" He looked down at his plate. "The lines aren't always so clear, if you ask me. That's life. Good and evil are too big—too nebulous for me. All I know is what I see. I used to study religions and philosophy, but it really just made me realize that all I can know is what I've experienced. So I joined the navy. It's a family trade, and the Alliance does good work, despite the paperwork. It's the best way I've found to make a difference."

"That's… interesting."

"What? You think I'm wrong?" She asked, trying to lighten to mood again.

"No!" He seemed to jump. And she laughed, glad she had thrown him off. "No, I just… it's interesting."

"Good. I'd hate to be boring you, Vakarian."

"Oh, please." He drawled. "It's hard to be bored when my dinner is so damn delicious…"

"Yeah? You're going to be wearing it if you keep bragging about it." She grinned as he carefully scooted his plate away from her. She nodded, studying him carefully.

"Good work today. I appreciate you putting your ass on the line for me like that, but I'd rather you be careful yourself. I'll be fine."

"What, you don't think I can handle covering your six all of the time?" He teased.

"No. You better be able to handle it. That's one of the things you're here for." She shoved another forkful of noodles in her mouth and continued around them. "Just beginning to decide that I'd like you to be on my team until we catch up with Saren. We worked well together."

"Just until we get Saren?" He asked. She raised an eyebrow, not sure she was following quite where he was going with this.

"That's what you signed on for, isn't it?" She asked. He shrugged, kept eating. She took a bite herself, tried to ignore the somewhat worrisome way she could feel her heartbeat in her ribcage. She tried not to imagine the end of the mission; Nihlus still gone, Saren in custody… and Garrus gone, too?

"Besides, you just…" She stopped herself from finishing that sentence. "You just seem too good to be true." Instead she started asking him about military tactics, the field gestures from earlier, and this time she had him laughing when she explained that his 'thank you' gesture was a spitting image of a human 'fuck you'.

Despite their laughing, by the time she finished eating around their conversation, Shepard was really ready to go to sleep. She didn't think the head injury had been quite so bad, but she was much more tired than she should be. She had the mission report typed up before she went to eat, so she was clear to head to sleep.

She said her goodnights to her turian… friend and headed to her cabin. Tonight, between the head injury and the mild pain pills Dr. Chakwas had given her she was out.