Characters: Garrus V./Shepard (F) (pairing)
Chapter Rating: T (language, suggestive themes)
Prompt: Reluctant I: use the first-person pronoun only once
Summary: Garrus likes lots of things about Shepard, but he likes her hands especially (ME3)
Friendship/Romance
It was almost completely dark in Shepard's cabin when her door finally slid open, the eezo discharge from FTL flickering outside her skylight the only illumination I could see.
Ah. She must be asleep, then.
Shepard liked to sleep with the lights on—easier to wake up from a nightmare that way, she says—but Joker and Chakwas weren't the only ones who mothered their commander. EDI had devoted a significant number of processes to keeping tabs on her, too, and she made sure to turn the lights down once Shepard was asleep. Humans needed more sleep than turians did, and it was easier to get when it was dark. Chakwas said it was because of... a rhythm, or something? Who knows. Shepard didn't think it was thoughtful, though. She found it annoying (because she was "Commander-Fucking-Shepard, and she didn't need a god damned babysitter!"), but it didn't stop EDI from checking in on her anyway.
The AI had even been known to lock Shepard out of the Normandy's systems whenever her metabolic scans spiked into the red for too long.
Of course, this was Commander-Fucking-Shepard, and you didn't exactly describe her with the same words that you used for other humans. Or krogan. You used words normally reserved for natural disasters, or... discovering new planets. Supernovas. Hypernovas. Things like that. When Shepard spikes into the red, her implants short and her organs start to fail. She literally pukes bits of her guts out. The eezo nodes in her nervous system start firing randomly and she detonates.
Last time her cybernetics shorted it was her spinal implants that went and she was paralyzed from the waist down for two days. EDI had kept her locked out of the systems for a full week after they came back online.
Shepard had been... what was the phrase? Stir-crazy? She had been stir-crazy the whole week, and had worked up quite a bit of... tension... and—
Well. There were some benefits to EDI's protectiveness, if it meant that Shepard had needed to... ah... relax for a week straight.
...She really was very flexible.
The dull glow of the deck lighting barely penetrated the darkness in her cabin. Even the fish tank was dimmed down to its lowest setting, casting soft blue light that only reached a handspan away from the glass. Any farther out and the shadows took over the room, but it had come to be a familiar space.
Four steps in from the doorway to gets you past the bathroom wall. Two steps to the right and you were at the hamster cage. His food was on the bottom shelf, but Shepard probably didn't even know it was there; she wasn't good with pets. The crew took bets on how long each new fish of hers would last. It was a cruel game, true, but it didn't stop them from constantly buying her new fish. One step forward got you to Shepard's desk. It took three steps backwards to clear her display wall, but you had to leave a bit of extra space to accommodate the datapads that teetered on the edge of her counter. If you turned right and took two steps, you'd be at the top of the stairs. Three steps down. Now, just six steps straight ahead to reach the bedside—
Dammit!
—lamp. Unless of course Shepard left her armor lying around on the floor after the last mission. If she did, then it was four steps to her armor locker, one step to bash a talon on her greaves—which, despite being classified as medium-protection armor, were a lot heavier than you would think, especially when one did the bashing dressed in one's only pair of civvies—and two short limps to the switch.
On its lowest setting, with the shade tilted towards the ship's hull, the lamp shed enough light to be able to make out Shepard passed out on the couch, asleep in the middle of some weapons maintenance. Her arm hung over the edge of the couch, her knuckles brushing the floor. The oil she had been using to clean her guns with had settled into the crevices between her fingers and the wrinkles on her palm.
Humans said that you could tell a lot about a person from their hands. How old they were. What they liked to do for fun. Their line of work. Back at C-Sec, there had been an entire course that had focused on reading human suspects by studying their hands. They were one of the most expressive parts of a human's anatomy, but one of the parts they were least likely to be aware of. Turians didn't pay too much attention to them. They were there, sure, but they weren't anything special. They were just tools, useful for eating and shooting and, you know, calibrating with.
Most species thought the five-digit hand was off-putting, only slightly less alien than hair and external ears because of the asari and batarians. They didn't think they were appealing, and they certainly didn't find them attractive.
But Shepard's…
Shepard's hands were fascinating. They were like everything else about her: slender, pliant, deceptively strong. Elegant, but Spirits help you if she ever found out you thought so. Broken. Healed. Scarred.
She was missing the last segment of her little finger on her left hand. It wasn't something people noticed until they had been around her for some time, and it always took them by surprise to know it happened over a year ago, on Zeona. Turians didn't do well in the cold, and it was cold there. Really, really cold. So cold that Shepard lost the tip of a finger to frostbite. She only ever complained about it when she had to get her left gauntlets modified, though.
She used to have a tattoo on the inside of her forearm. It was some sort of script, bold and intricate. Hieroglyphs. Pictographs? Something like that. It, and the scars Shepard had collected from thirty or so years of hard living, had been erased when Cerberus brought her back. Shepard never told anyone what the tattoo meant, but then again, no one had ever asked. Most people tended to assume that she was a very private person.
Her knuckles were big, bony from years of military training and from bending her fingers backward until her joints popped. Spidery purple veins were clear under her skin on the backs of her hands, and on the meat at the base of her thumbs. She couldn't straighten her right one out all the way, and Lawson had always found the proof of Project Lazarus's almost perfection to be personally offensive.
Shepard's fingers, cracked at the nail beds and callused at the tips, were stained a faint yellow from her cigarettes. Her fingernails were all cut at different lengths, and white at their very edges when they were clean, which they usually weren't. She only trimmed the nails that were broken, so they rarely got pruned all at once. She liked to drum her fingers on the table, or her desk, or whatever was around, whenever she was considering war data, so that the nails that grew past her fingertips clicked on the hard surfaces. Ten fingers made it almost mesmerizing to watch her type up mission reports on her terminal, fingers flying over the keys in a way that was almost like a dance.
Ten fingers danced over the soft spots between plates that was mesmerizing in an entirely different way. But good. So very, very good.
Shepard fidgeted on the couch. The light from the bedside lamp, while not bright, was evidently enough to disturb her sleep. She let out a crabby little grunt before turning over to hide her face against the back of the cushions. It was adorable, but you didn't accuse Commander Shepard of being cute without choking on your teeth when she punched them in.
There was a reclining chair, the only one comfortable for turian cowls, to be found in the dark four—careful—steps back towards the stairs, and two steps to the left.
Well, it would be comfortable, if it wasn't for whatever the hell this little hard thing was on the seat!
Ah. Nail polish.
Once, back when there was some downtime during the mission against the Collectors, Shepard painted her fingernails Palaven Blue. It matched the Vakarian marks perfectly, and Tali teased her about it for days.
Shepard never did it again, but that hadn't stopped Kasumi from giving her little bottles of it constantly.