By the time her door pinged for entrance, she had not only worked herself into a nervous frenzy but had paced across the room, cards in hand trying to remember every card game she ever learned.

When she opened the door, she was first struck a little dumb. She was expecting Garrus, and the right turian was standing at his door—whiskey in hand—but the sly motherfucker was wearing… clothing. Normal clothing. Some sort of loose cargo pants and that typical turian shirt that's latched up the front with toggles and different lacing. She would never have guessed. He got dressed up to come play cards with her. She was flattered.

"God, Garrus, I didn't realize you even owned clothing." She couldn't resist a jab at him, though.

"What?" He looked down at himself and shrugged. She smirked. Like he—he—forgot that he took the effort to change out of his C-Sec blues? "Oh. Yeah, I mean, I don't wear my armor all of the time."

"You could have fooled me." She crossed her arms.

"Hey, look, I thought I came up here to give you shit, not the other way around. I mean, I could leave…" He turned as if he was willing to take the elevator all the way back down to the cargo bay. He actually took a few steps before she lunged out with a laugh to grab his arms from behind.

"You wouldn't!" She laughed. He broke her hold on one of his arms and spun around.

"Oh, really?" He said, putting himself in her space. This playfully challenging air of hers was one she had become familiar with since they'd been fighting and working together. She put herself right back in his, tugging on his arm to try and bring him a little closer to her height.

"Yeah, Vakarian. You didn't let me destroy your baby today, so you've got nothing down there to go work on." She raised her chin in a challenge at this.

"I knew you did it on purpose." He said with a shake of his head and a laugh.

Shepard caught movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head to see Alenko walking out of the Medbay and turn to look at her and Garrus laughing with a frown on his face. She realized she still had her hand wrapped around Garrus arm, and they were standing very close, but that was not Alenko's problem.

Garrus turned his head too. She was dumbstruck for some reason, caught between these two, the man she felt some sort of weird need to avoid, and the turian who was turning out to be the one person she felt... okay arount. While she froze, staring carefully at neither of them, she saw Garrus wave a small informal salute at the biotic and felt him place a touch on her arm, waving her into her cabin with his chin.

His hand was warm as it rubbed over the exposed skin at her elbow where her uniform was rolled up. She jumped and caught his eyes. He looked calm, but he brought his hand up to nudge her shoulder, convincing her to turn around and finally walk back into her cabin.

As the door swished shut behind them, she shivered. She turned around and almost laughed when she realized that he was holding that same bottle of whiskey from a few weeks ago, unscrewing the lid and then offering it to her.

She took a swig, and grimaced when it was just as bad as the first time.

"This is still horrible." She said. "Why didn't you make me buy something better last time we were on the Citadel?"

"I didn't think I was responsible for your grocery lists, too, Shepard." He said, a little derisively.

"Oh, sure, you're not, but Garrus, this is really bad. How are we supposed to play drinking games with this?"

"Fortitude?" He shrugged, and she couldn't help but laugh.

"So that's the plan for tonight? We're getting drunk?"

"Can you think of a better way to avoid that?" She asked, gesturing towards the door. He shrugged in response.

"Why don't you just tell him you're not interested? I mean, I'm pretty sure just about everyone else can see you're not interested in him, but he doesn't seem... to want to pick that message up."

She sighed and pressed her hands into her eyes. "Hey, I appreciate it, but…" She stopped herself from asking to drop it. "But can we not… I'll talk to him. I just can't do it right now." She must have sounded pretty damn bothered by it, because he stepped closer, a tight look in his bright eyes. She spoke up again before anything else could happen that would test her desire to ask him to leave again, this time so soon after she had invited him up. "Come on, Vakarian. Show me what card games you know."

"Ah... Poker?" He offered, sitting at the table in the middle of her cabin. She slowly shook her head.

"Maybe another night. It's too slow." She declined. "Besides I don't want to… think about when you're bluffing me." His head tilted oddly at her words, but then he nodded, flicked his mandibles out. She sat across from him and spread one hand flat on the table, taking another draw from the whiskey. It seemed to be tasting better—or at least less bad.

"Well… there's only the two of us… so we could play towers?" He had taken the deck of cards out, and she couldn't stop watching his gloved hands as they maneuvered and shuffled the deck. It was odd to watch with his three fingers. "These are human cards right? We can make it work."

"What is that? Is that a turian game?" She asked.

"Yeah, you just build she suits up, whoever finishes first wins." He split the deck and shuffled them together. It was actually pretty graceful, but she had this irrational fear that with too few fingers to hold the cards in, that they'd go flying. She tensed forward as the two halves of the deck folded together.

"What?" He asked. She looked up, he'd caught her worried look at his hands.

"Nothing! Just, how do you shuffle with only three fingers?" The plates over his eyebrows twitched in opposite directions and she laughed. "I just don't want them to go everywhere. I'm not playing fifty-two pickup in my own room." His mandibles quirked out in a grin and she suddenly didn't like the way the light glinted off his sharp teeth.

"No?" He asked, holding the deck by the sides and flexing it so the cards threatened to spew out.

"Don't you dare, Vakarian. I told you I'm not picking them up." When he didn't relent, she turned towards their bottle of booze. "You do it and I'm turning this into a mandatory drinking game."

"Fine, fine, you're serious, I get it." He answered, and began dealing out the cards one by one till the whole deck was split. "Doesn't mean we can turn this into a drinking game anyways, though, does it?"

She laughed.

"I knew I liked your style, Garrus."