"I want to talk to Warden Kuril," Shepard's voice came out choked and muffled, her head still resting against the barrier glass.
Managing to misread her reaction completely, Decker clapped Shepard roughly on the shoulder, "so you want a piece of him too eh?" He grinned, showing a none too impressive array of stained teeth. "Not sure what good he's gonna be for you though, he's so fucked in the head he probably wont know what to do with pussy," the merc gave a suggestive twitch of his hips, "I don't have the same problem, if you get me."
Something in Shepard's stony eyes made Decker take a nervous step back, as she turned her red tinged gaze in his direction. "Open your mouth again, I'm going to fill it with an incendiary grenade," she clenched her hands, struggling with the urge to kill the foul guard where he stood as a sick fury built through her, "now, go get Kuril, we have business to discuss."
Obviously disturbed by Shepard's furious, crimson tinted gaze, Decker made a frustrating show of slowly clipping the baton to his belt and wandering off down the corridor at a maddeningly sedate pace. A last scrap of arrogant defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.
"Commander, what's going.." Miranda's query died unfinished as Shepard raised a gloved hand.
"Open this", Shepard rapped her knuckles against the cell door, her eyes lighting on the turian guard whom Decker had called 'Tarkus'. "Now" she grated when he hesitated. Swinging his head back and forth between the obviously enraged Shepard, and Grunt, who, now that the violence had ceased, was looking dangerously bored, stomping his feet and shifting his grip on his heavy custom shotgun, the merc tapped out a sequence on his omnitool, stepping back as the barrier slid aside with a heavy click.
"Garrus" Shepard half whispered, sinking carefully to her knees in front of the cringing turian, "hey Garrus, its Shepard." For a moment she honestly expected him to raise his head and twitch that one good mandible into the smirk that had always made her laugh; maybe snark something about how she had taken her time, that he was cold, that he needed a mirror...anything. Instead he didn't even stir, no reaction to her voice at all. Being careful to avoid the horrific damage to the right side of his face Shepard reached out to gently cup his jaw, rubbing a thumb over the symmetrical colonial markings on his undamaged mandible; flinching when he jerked back from her touch, squeezing his eyes shut and tilting his head back to expose his throat in a terribly turian gesture of submission.
"Hey, no, no don't do that," Shepard feels a surge of hot anger, all she can hope is that she will get some quality alone time with whoever schooled that reaction into him. "Its me, come on Garrus...its me, its Shepard."
Garrus' eyes flutter half open, dead, flat gaze fixed wearily on something over her head. "Dead," he rasps softly, vocal harmonics slurred without the use of his burned mandible, "you're dead...leave me alone...please, I deserve this." His voice dies away into a horrible gut wrenching keen that makes the hair on Shepard's neck stand up. Shocked to silence she stares numbly as Garrus tips the good side of his face against the wall, "you burned, you left...and you burned...they said you burned, and you...you, you were just gone; and I deserve this."
"Garrus?" Shepard looked up as Miranda stared down at them from the doorway, "as in Garrus Vakarian, from your team on the original Normandy?" Shepard almost can't stand to look at the pity and horror stamped on that exquisite face.
"Yeah, this is Garrus, you know... the same Garrus your boss said had disappeared," the bitterness in her voice makes Miranda jerk back.
"You can't possibly think he had anything to do with this?" Miranda looks genuinely shocked at the suggestion, "what possible purpose would we have in sending him here?"
"I thought that was the Cerberus manifesto, the subjugation of aliens," Shepard is well aware she is being petty, but she cant find it within herself to care about her unreasonable assumptions of Cerberus involvement.
Miranda opens her mouth to answer, but seems to think better of it, pursing her lips into a thin line as she steps back from the cell. The sharp echo of footsteps approaching makes Shepard ease slowly to her feet.
"Ah, Shepard," Warden Kuril's mandibles are quirked in a self-satisfied smirk as he strolls casually into view, "I see you've found my new toy." At the sound of the Warden's flanged rumbling voice, Garrus gives an almost convulsive jerk, a low strangled moan rattling in his throat, the tormented sound hitting Shepard in the gut like a concussive round.
"What's your price," Shepard grates out, hating herself for even having to consider making this a monetary transaction, but what they can't afford right now is to start a war in the facility. Its obvious that Kuril doesn't have a scrap of kindness to appeal to, but Shepard hopes that greed might just turn the tables in her favor.
"By the hour, or would you like a bit longer than that?" Kuril taps a mocking talon against his chin, as a reappeared Decker barks a laugh at the quip. Seeing that Shepard wasn't even going to respond to that, Kuril shrugs, "so you want to rescue your former crewmate, how sweet...but I seriously doubt you have the credits to make that transaction appealing to me. You see I'm rather attached to this prisoner." The warden lopes a few more steps into the cell, "I had some good friends on Omega, I like to keep reminding Archangel here that I tend to take their deaths somewhat personally."
Garrus starts to shake as Kuril gets closer, his eyes going blind in a haze of panic. The Warden cups a talon under his prisoner's chin, tilting Garrus' head back in a sickening imitation of intimacy. "Yes, I would hate to part with this one." He relaxes his hand, and Garrus doesn't move. Shepard can see the muscles in his neck shivering with the effort of keeping his head in the exact place Kuril left it.
"Twenty thousand" Shepard offers, and feeling sickly guilty she gestures at Garrus. "Its a good deal, he cant possibly last that much longer, he's more than half dead already."
"Sixty thousand," Kuril twitches his mandibles higher into an all out grin, as Miranda makes a wordless sound of protest at the price.
"Forty." Shepard clenches her jaw, after the fee for Jack the Normandy account was just below fifty-thousand, she could only hope that she could bargain Kuril to the lower price. "And two hundred units of element zero" she added, seeing the Warden's eyes flicker with greed at the offer
The Warden deliberates for a long tense moment, sharp eyed gaze flickering between Shepard, and the hunched prisoner at her feet. "Fine," he eventually shrugs dismissively, "Decker, do prep Shepard's new acquisition for transport will you; Miss Lawson will come with me to see that your half of the bargain is transferred correctly." Kuril swept his arm across Miranda's shoulders, ignoring the look of revulsion on her face as he propelled her away down the hallway. Staring off after them, Shepard felt a flash of gratitude for Miranda's silent restraint, and the Cerberus operative's acceptance of Shepard's rash appropriation of a majority of the Normandy's funds.
Shoving roughly past her, Decker grabbed Garrus by his broken shoulder. Frustrated at being thwarted and overruled the merc coldly pulled the arm back sharply, making the turian twist forward to avoid the agony of the cruel torque on the mangled joint. Before Shepard could protest, the guard pressed a small device to the back of Garrus' neck, and a half second later Shepard heard the sharp snap as the neural stunner discharged. Garrus went instantly limp in Decker's grasp, and the grizzled merc fisted a hand into the tattered remains of his shirt and hauled the slack form out past the cell door, pitching him onto the hall floor with a dull thud.
"Enjoy commander," Decker muttered sullenly, obviously determined to be petulant. "I woulda given you whatever you wanted without the price tag," he dared to nudge Garrus with the toe of his boot, "but apparently you like them broken."
In the bright lights of the hallway, Garrus' condition looked worse than it had in the dimness of the cell. Gently turning him over, Shepard pressed her fingers to his neck, feeling his pulse flutter weak and erratic beneath the abnormally cold hide. "Its all over now," she hates the choking feeling of tears in the back of her throat, "we're going home now. We're going home, and its all going to be ok."