Work Text:
Garrus wakes up in the Normandy's med-bay with Reaper klaxons still ringing in his ears.
He groans as flashes of memory fall back into place: the battle in London, the race to the beam, the Mako flipping through the air, Shepard—
Shepard.
Everything is spinning, suddenly—both his thoughts and his surroundings whirling in a vertiginous mess—until purple floods his vision and the world blessedly stops.
And then Tali's hand is warm and secure in his, grounding him; her soft, comforting murmurs filling the space where engines and machinery used to hum, now conspicuously silent.
"I thought you were only using me for my body," he says, letting the tension in his limbs bleed away as he slumps back against the mattress.
"I still am," she insists, but her grip is steady and sure, now; so unlike the last time in the battery, frantic and desperate—and so, so much more like someone to come home to. "But you're the only one I've got, so I have to make sure you're okay."
Garrus chuckles, or tries to—it comes out more like a wheezing sort of cough, but he thinks he sees a faint outline of a smile through her mask, anyway. Her thumb doesn't pause where it strokes back and forth along his knuckles, and they stay like that, comfortable in the silence.
It says enough.
---
No one knows where they are.
EDI might have, but.
But.
Garrus is used to fighting for survival. He's not quite sure how to handle this, because they're not really fighting anything, per se, except perhaps the slow, creeping hunger as rations get thinner and thinner, or the crew's dwindling morale as another day passes by with no good news.
Tali finds him sitting in the airlock, the outer door open to the warm tropical evening, looking out at the lush forests that blanket this planet. She joins him without hesitation, letting her legs dangle over the edge like he is.
"Tali," he says, looking up at unfamiliar constellations. "We're lost."
She sidles closer until their shoulders brush together. He must be imagining it, surely, but he thinks he can feel warmth, bleeding past her suit and through his armor, and straight into his heart.
"In the Flotilla," she says, "we never say we are lost. Only that we are 'on the way home.'"
"And if we never find our way home?"
"Then we will just have to make a new one," she says, with a certainty that is both questionable and enviable. "We're still here, aren't we? We will be okay, Garrus."
When she says it, he can almost believe it.
---
When they return, more than a month later, Earth is mostly just piles of rubble claiming to be cities, but the humans are—somehow—still undaunted, talking about recovery and restoration as if these are things that just happen every Tuesday.
But when he and the rest of the Normandy crew are ushered into an out-of-the-way London hospital, when Miranda greets them with uncharacteristic dark circles beneath her eyes and a pleased smile on her lips, when the beeping of Shepard's life support machines continues steady and unbroken and sure—Garrus thinks he understands a little bit what the humans' unbridled optimism feels like.
It's this optimism that sees him through saying goodbye to Tali as she leaves with the quarians for Rannoch. It's this optimism that sends him back to Palaven, a purple strip of fabric tied around his wrist and a promise of a future meeting kept secret and safe in his wildly-beating heart.
---
Palaven is a mess.
Rannoch is, presumably, also a mess, though if asked, Garrus can neither confirm nor deny this for certain, as the comm buoys are also, predictably, a mess.
The entire galaxy is a mess—but, against all odds, still standing. Still breathing. Still fighting.
He soldiers on. There is nothing else to be done, or that he knows how to do.
---
It is months before he gets a message from her, relayed across light-years from the other side of the galaxy, pinged from comm station to comm station until it finally reaches him in slowly-but-surely recovering Palaven.
It is short, as all messages tend to be these days; there is simply not enough bandwidth and not enough power to support the multitudes of people clamoring to speak to each other in a galaxy abruptly thrown back into the era of rudimentary space flight.
Two words.
And yet, it's everything.
Still alive? -T
Garrus has never realized how much weight could be put into two little words: concern and hope and affection and just a little bit of fear. And he's never realized how profound a relief two words could instill in him as he imagines her on the other side of the galaxy, still soldiering on.
Still here. -G
They'll be okay.
---
And it is almost two years and barely a handful of repaired mass relays later when they finally make good on their promise.
The Citadel is nothing like it was; three of the five wards are still completely abandoned, and only a scant few square kilometers of the other two have been reasonably repaired. The Presidium is marginally better, and that's where they meet again at last.
They are older, now, and wearier—and also, apparently, not alone.
"This is Jona," Tali tells him, nudging the young quarian forward. "Do you remember? His mother was on the Alarei—"
"And his father was on Rannoch," Garrus finishes, studying the boy intently. His hood is the same purple as Tali's, as the strip of fabric around Garrus' wrist. Jona quails under his inspection, retreating into the comfort of Tali's arm around his slim shoulders.
There is tension in the way Tali holds herself, too—a nervousness that is both endearing and wholly unwarranted. And sure, this isn't quite what Garrus expected, but—what, like he's going to say no?
Garrus gives them both the turian approximation of a smile, extending his hand out to Jona to shake. His mandibles flutter excitedly when the boy takes it.
"I think blue would be a good color on you," Garrus says. "What do you think?"
---
And it is many more years later when Garrus walks through the door of their Citadel apartment and is greeted by the sight of Tali and Jona curled up together on the couch, both still hooded but unmasked, watching a news vid on a datapad.
From the sound of it, Shepard is giving yet another N7 commencement speech, and his soft chuckle comes easily now, and welcome.
Tali looks up at the sound and smiles, and then Jona looks up, too, beaming at the sight of him.
And when he hears "Dad!" followed by Tali's softly lilting laughter, Garrus realizes she had been right, the first time around.
He's found his way home.