It takes Shepard three days to gather the strength of will to return to the conduit site. She busies herself helping the burial crews during the day, still half-healed injuries protesting as she hooks a heavy gaff under countless ravaged bodies and levers them into the mass pit-graves. The silence of the other workers, dead eyed with grief and overwork, suits her.
The exhausted cleanup teams bring in their kills at dusk, twisted forms piled haphazard on the makeshift skids used to transport them. Shepard cannot help the surge of dread/hope that rises in her with every marauder corpse that is hauled in; she waits for that flash of familiar blue colony paint that will signify that she can rebury herself in honest, bonedeep grief again. The work is brutal, and yet she relishes it, the burn of unhealed muscle weave reminds her that she is awake, not curled up on her military issue cot in the dingy pre-fab she now calls home, as her traitorous sleeping mind drags her through yet another bitter memory.
Shepard rubs a hand over her eyes, the numbers on the requisition form are starting to blur. Garrus is a warm, limp presence behind her, sprawled out with an outstretched talon brushing against her thigh. She lets the datapad slip to the floor, turning to run a gentle hand up the powerful muscles in his thigh, across the heavy, protruberant hip joint and the softer hide in the dip of his waist. He twitches then, muscles shivering under her hand and he slits a blue eye at her.
" Aren't you supposed to be working" he rumbled, his voice a sleepy burr.
"Aren't you supposed to be sleeping" Shepard quips back with a tired grin, laughing as Garrus arches in a full body stretch, then sits up to run a blue tongue along her clavicle and throat.
"I was, but my superior officer seems to require my presence, and who am I to disobey an order?" his mandibles flare into a familiar and cocky grin, as his rough hand skates up her ribs to cup the warm weight of her breast.
In the beginning Shepard had found his body strange, all lean muscles and metalic plating that didn't react as a human male would. It hadnt taken them long, after the first akward fumbles, to figure out what pleasured the other. She loves the way he curles the wet heat of his long tongue around her nipple, feeling it tighten against the smooth plating of his lower jaw. Loves the way he voices an appreciative growl/hiss as she scrapes her nails across the sensitive hide of his abdomen, pressing a teasing palm up against the pubic plating between his thighs. She presses up against him, feeling the sudden rush of heat as his plates retract and his hardness presses urgently against her stomach.
Shepard throws her head back with a wordless cry as Garrus curls talons around the swell of her buttocks and guides her down onto him. Overhead the galaxy flashes past in a blur of FTL blue as they move together, as in synch now as they are in battle; a single unit with a single carnal objective. Shepard feels her stomach tighten as her nerves sing her closer to release, it takes her a moment to realise the hands on her hips are cold. Frozen in the blue light of the fishtanks Shepard looks down at her lover, watches as his eyes dim, conduits and wires snake from his skin like worms feasting on rotten fruit. His hands, moments ago warm against her, are limp, fingers replaced with twisted, blackened metal. She screams, trying to pull away as the thing beneath her arches in a terrible parody of arousal; its glowing cybernetic eyes meet hers as its ruined jaw grates out her name…"Seh-arrrd!"
Shepard comes awake with a garbled shriek, her body tense and quivering with adrenaline. To her shame she can still feel the pinging of her arousal. The familiar ache and wetness at the juncture of her thighs, her body demanding release even as her mind twisted away from the horror it had produced. Curling up on her side Shepard digs fingers into her scalp, trying to remember the feel of careful talons preening through her hair; and far away, on the surface of Mars, a downed and dying reaper gives voice to her grief and fear.
Shepard can hear him within the reaper tech of her mind long before she can see him. The indoctrinated had lost the guiding force of their existence the moment the reapers abandoned their fight, their minds shattered by the vastness of the reapers that guided them are now left to broadcast their confusion, pain and hostile grief. Close to the street leading to the conduit Shepard can only recognize two indoctrinated minds: a hulking cannibal gulps at the festering flesh of a decomposing comrade in the shadows of a decimated law office, an activity forced on it by the remnants of reaper technology while its batarian mind gibbers an insane protest. The presence she recognizes as Garus flickers through her mind like a distorted echo, a mental scream of pain and anger underplayed with a kind of formless confusion and flickering flashes of memories.
She finds him slumped about half way down the street to the conduit site, crouched down with his shattered leg twisted to the side, reconstructed, over-sized steel talons pawing repeatedly at something on the slagged, glass-like pavement. Shepard watches as he manages to lift whatever he's scrabbling at in once dexterous talons, he cradles it against his cheek, groaning out a slurred babble of turian dialect. Eventually the object slips free, clattering back to the ground, and he paws after it again with a hopeless determination.
"Hey" Shepard winces as her voice comes out in a hoarse whisper, "Garrus, its me, its Shepard."
At her voice the marauder lunges to its feet, back arching as the pre-programed wave of dark energy forces an unnatural shielding interface from the leads implanted in its skull. Shepard can feel the surge of hostility like a black wave through her implants, that reaper programed impulse to kill, but it wavers and fades almost before she can react. They stare at each other for a long moment, then Garrus simply folds his good leg and slumps back down to the ground.
"Ree-ssssa" he mutters in that ruined metalic voice, tilting his head to stare up at her, "Ree-sssa Seh-arrrd?"
Shepard almost has to force herself not to run again, instead she pushes herself to walk forward, hands held out to her sides, mouth stretched into what she hopes is the reassuring smile she is trying for, and not the rictus grimace she suspects it might be.
"Yeah, that's me, Reesha Shepard, in the not quite human flesh," Shepard grimaces at her own flippancy. She cautiously eases herself down to sit cross legged across from him, carefully uholstering her pistol and resting it against her knees. "What is that?" Shepard asks, gesturing to the scrap of metal that Garrus has gone back to mindlessly pawing at.
Garrus seems to hesitate, head jerking up so the glowing cybernetics of his eyes meet hers, a low grating keen vibrating in his half synthetic throat. He jerkily offers the scrap to her, folded in an awkwardly fisted talon. It's a blackened strut of some light metal, warped by heat and trauma; Shepard rubs at the crust of ash and what appears to be dried blood, until her fingers find the familiar irregularities. Butler, Weaver, the scored patch where Sidonis used to be written…and she clenches the remains of Garrus's sniping visor so hard is scores deep into her palm, a welcome stab of pain to distract herself from this nightmare reality.
"You never wanted to take this off" Shepard whispered thickly, "even that first night, before the relay….you wore it, even then." It hasn't even been a year Shepard realized sickly, relishing the bite of a metal sliver into her thumb. Less than a year since that first, tentative foray to this…..crouching in the wreckage of her homeworld with the ruins of the one person she loved more than anything.
As though oblivious to her grief, Garrus simply bumps an insistent talon at her hand until she silently relinquishes the twisted pieces of his visor, watching numbly as he presses them against the remains of his face~keening his grief and pain in a garble of reaper static.