Jack is a raging spitfire of hate and belligerence. Once Shepard orders her released from the biotic dampening restraints the guards have fitted her with, she paces the dock, heaping spite and outrage on Kuril, Miranda, the Normandy, Cerberus, Purgatory, essentially anything breathing or inanimate. Her vitriol only eases when Shepard promises her access to classified Cerberus files, doing her best to ignore Miranda's outraged protests.
The short shuttle ride is made in tense silence. Miranda can barely contain her distaste of their newest biotic crewmate, and Shepard, far too aware of the slight weight of unconscious turian half cradled in her arms, hopes their inevitable confrontation can wait until the shuttle has landed. She had first ordered, then bullied, and eventually bribed Grunt into hauling Garrus to the docks, the young Krogan grumbling with disgust every step of the way.
"Alright, I'll bite," Jack's strident voice sliced through the shuttle, as she gestured at Garrus, "what the fuck is that. Seriously Commander, you just in the rescue business, 'cause if so, I swear I saw a little bitty varren pup back there." Her mocking laugh is brazen and bright.
"All you need to know," Miranda sighed, her body rigid with irritation "is that he was a ...personal prisoner of the Warden's."
"Oh." The sneer on Jack's face faded slightly, as she leaned back against the shuttle wall, "in that case, do him a favor and end him before he wakes up." She shrugs at Shepard's cold glare, crossing her arms defensively, "I could do it if you can't, but trust me, he isn't going to thank you for the rescue if that's what you think."
"And you know this how?" Shepard didn't even try to keep the hostility from her voice, as she tucks the emergency blanket from the shuttle kit tighter around Garrus, as if the material could shelter him from the cruelty of the young biotic's words. Despite the blanket he's still too cold, and Shepard finds herself waiting anxiously for each shallow breath.
"Heard talk is all...about what that fucking sadist of a warden does to his 'specials'," Jack turns the last word into a disgusted sneer, "and he's a turian, so he's most likely to off himself anyway." She shrugs a slim, tattooed shoulder, "I'd watch him around guns for a while commander," tapping a fingernail against her temple, the biotic levels a bitter smile at Shepard, "bullets are going to look really friendly to him for a while."
The dull thunk of the shuttle's landing gear ends the conversation. Jack is up and moving the second the door hisses open, her harsh face schooled into a bored expression as she marches off towards the elevator, hips swinging in deliberate provocation. Miranda scrambles out after her, casting an apologetic glance back over her shoulder at Shepard, clearly torn between staying to help her commander and making sure an unsupervised Jack didn't destroy anything.
Shepard waves her off, muttering "come on Grunt, help me here" to the reluctant krogan.
Stumping over to stare down at the prone, blanket swathed turian, Grunt's mobile mouth curls into a surprisingly human expression of disgust.
"He stinks Shepard," he grumps with typical Krogan bluntness. " Stinks like death...and humans." Despite his grumbling, Grunt is surprisingly careful as he scoops Garrus' emaciated body out of Shepard's grasp, rumbling his disapproval as he hops heavily down from the shuttle.
The blunt assertion of Garrus' condition makes Shepard's eyes burn as she follows the krogan toward the elevator, turians were a fastidious people as a whole, Garrus was no exception. Shepard had always found his natural, faintly metallic scent pleasant. Even as she had wrapped the blanket around the turian's horribly thin shoulders, she had been aware that he smelled strongly of human sweat and dried semen, overlayed with the faintly sweet/copper smell of his hemocyanin based blood, and the dark ugly reek of old wounds and infection.
Shepard's initial plan had been to have Grunt move him straight to the med bay, but somehow the thought of immediately depositing Garrus to Chakwas in this current, undignified condition makes her feel faintly ill. Trampling down the remnants of her better judgement, Shepard waits for the heavy elevator doors to close behind her and Grunt before bypassing the controls that would take them to the main crew deck, instead after only a seconds hesitation, she slaps in the command for her own private cabin.
Shepard couldn't help but feel uncomfortable as she used a pair of medical shears to cut the the filthy and tattered remains of Garrus' underarmour free. It wasn't that she was bothered by nudity, that was concept that military service drummed out of its recruits; it wasn't even that Garrus wasn't human, there had been limited shower space on the SR1 and it hadn't taken long for the human crew to adapt to sharing the bathing facilities with the aliens. It was the terrible vulnerability that bothered her, Garrus was meant to be at her back, sniper rifle in hand, ready with some sarky comment or quip...not sprawled out on her bathroom floor as Shepard carefully cut his clothing away from some of the worst damage she had seen in her entire military career.
The shower was set to a fine misting spray, the water serving to loosen some sections of cloth that were adhered to untreated wounds, as well as rinse off the worst of the grime. The cleaning was a kind of mixed blessing, the tattered clothing and dried blood had served to conceal injuries Shepard would have preferred she had never known about. Working a patch of gummed on cloth away from the sensitive skin of Garrus' waist, Shepard swore as she uncovered a festering Blood Pack brand; and when what she had assumed was dried blood on his inner thighs, and along the edges of his twisted pubic plating, turned out to be bone-deep bruising, Shepard has to turn her face away, resting her cheek on the cool tile of the wall.
The water was hot enough to sting in Shepard's tracery of red cybernetic scars, but she hoped it might provide some manner of comfort to the still unresponsive Garrus.
"Remember after Noveria?" Shepard carefully wiped a sterile cloth over the worst of the damage along his jaw, "you bitched about being cold for days, eventually Ash jacked up the temperature in the work bay, just to shut you up." With a fond smile, Shepard added the stained cloth to a growing pile in the corner. The memories ate at her gut like an ulcer, they seemed so long ago and impossibly removed from the horror of the situation she faced now.
Grimacing at the mangled mess of Garrus' shoulder, Shepard managed to keep her voice light as she related the story about accidentally recruiting Grunt; trying to keep her mind on that, rather than on the jagged edges of a compound fractured humerus and shattered plating under her fingers. In a few places, she could see thick lines of clumsy stitches in the half-healed devastation; the mercs probably had done enough triage to stop him bleeding out Shepard thought numbly. Gently touching the rough, black line of the stitching at the base of his throat, Shepard tries hard not to imagine Garrus bleeding out on the floor of some filthy Omega apartment. Of blue eyes going flat and glazed in death. Clearing her throat she balls the stained cloths up, and as she rises she hears the slight scrape of plating against tile as Garrus shifts.
Its not much, just a twitch of one horrifically thin leg that drags the spur on that side across the tile, but Shepard feels her stomach drop. "Ah shit, please don't wake up, not yet," hurriedly kneeling next to the turian, she quickly palms the off switch on the shower, halting the thin spray of near-scalding water. "Damn it Vakarian,don't wake up."
Apparently in the two years Shepard had been dead, Garrus had discovered his inner rebel, because as his eyes flickered open, it became obvious he wasn't going to obey Shepard's request. Watching him blink, obviously still shocky from the stunner, Shepard entertains a brief hope that maybe this time he'll recognize her; but as he lunges away from her, foot talons scrabbling for purchase on the wet tile, it obvious there will be no easy way here. Garrus' back hits the wall with a sharp crack of bone on tile, and he immediately sinks down into a crouch, panting for breath.
"Hey, its ok," Shepard takes a step forward, raising her hands in what she hopes is a non species-specific gesture of peace. As Garrus cringes back, pupils contracting to pinpricks in the bright light, Shepard realises he's not looking at her, his eyes are fixed on the medical shears she's still holding in her hand. As his eyes fix on the flash of blade, Garrus makes a horrible low noise in the back of his throat, and tilts his head back, exposing his throat as he lets his knees fall open, spreading his legs with a terrible, shaky resignation.
Shepard turns and flings the shears at the opposite wall, watching them skitter in a glittering arc across the tile, coming to rest in the doorway. Bile burns with a sickly heat in the back of her throat, and she only barely makes it to the stainless steel sink before being violently ill. Rinsing the burning taste of sick from her mouth, Shepard watches Garrus tuck his knees up again, his gaze swinging back and forth between Shepard and the tiled floor.
"Wh...where?" the raspy voice makes Shepard jump.
Slowly crouching down, Shepard tries to meet Garrus' eyes, but he immediately shies away, pressing his face against his knees. "You're on the Normandy," Shepard tries to make her voice as soothing as she can, fisting her hands into the wet material of her pants to stop them from shaking.
That gets a slight twitch of browridge, "it burned," his voice is so soft Shepard has to strain to hear him.
"Yeah, yeah it did, but it got rebuilt." Guessing what Garrus' next statement would be, Shepard adds, "I got rebuilt too, got the scars to prove it," she presses a finger to the tracery of crimson on her cheek.
"Broken," he mutters softly, "y..you shouldn't have...meant t..to be dead."
"Wow, thanks for that Garrus," Shepard feels an immediate flash of guilt for the reprimand, when she sees him start to shiver, his breath coming in short pants.
"N..not you," Garrus reaches up to dig his clipped talons into the terrible wounds on the side of his neck, making Shepard cringe. "Me, t..they made me watch, they made me watch...then they...I ...I don't want to be here." His shivering is getting worse, Shepard can hear the sharp clatter of his functioning mandible clicking against the side of his jaw; before he can pull away she reaches up to touch the hide on his neck, finding it almost ice cold. "N..no, please," he winces back like she had burned him.
"Garrus, Garrus I need to get you to medical," Shepard has a sinking feeling that that suggestion isn't going to go over well, and is confirmed when Garrus shakes his head violently.
"No...n..no doctors, please" Garrus twists his face away from Shepard, but she's used to reading the complex shifts of mandibles and jaw that make up turian expressions, and she recognizes this expression as clearly as she would on a human face. Shame. "Not...fixable. What they did...I don't want this Shepard." Garrus makes a low keen in the back of his throat, squeezing his eyes shut.
Shepard prefers problems she can shoot, failing that, she prefers problems she can huck a grenade at. This is so far beyond what she is used to, she isn't even sure where to start. She's reminded painfully of Veetor, the traumatized quarian she had met on Freedom's Progress, and wonders when she became a PTSD magnet. "This isn't your fault Garrus, none of it," she asserts lamely, wishing she knew what she was supposed to say.
Garrus is starting to slump to the side, breathing harshly irregular, but his eyes are startlingly clear as he raises his head enough to look Shepard in the face for the first time. "It is...my fault. They hurt them...they hurt them so badly," he makes a kind of gasping cry that sounds actively painful, "and then it wouldn't stop...they just kept...they kept...it wouldn't stop Shepard, it just wouldn't stop."
Any fight goes out of him then, his exhausted shaking muscles going limp, and Shepard reaches out to catch him before his head cracks against the floor. He doesn't flinch back from her this time, his head resting loosely against her shoulder, plates ice cold against her neck, eyes open and staring dully at nothing.
"Ok, ok," Shepard soothes a hand over the sweep of Garrus' fringe, carefully avoiding the raw edge of the sheared off spine. "It's going to be ok, just trust me, we're going to fix this."