Chapter Text
“526,” says Garrus cordially. He’s been aboard the Purgatory a week, assigned to the human women’s wing (perhaps as a form of hazing, he thinks), and he already has favourites. 526 has iron in her spine. He admires the way she guards her dignity; her bearing makes him wonder if she had a military background. She had been the first of the prisoners to initiate conversation with him, and is still the most interesting.
He waits for a reaction, then realises that he’s unrecognisable beneath his headgear. She stares at him coolly.
"It's me," he says in a low tone, "Vakarian."
"Oh, hey," she says, and throws up two fingers in what he’s fairly sure is an obscene gesture.
"There's no need for insubordination," he hisses, then softens his tone. "If anyone sees I'll have to punish you."
She smirks. "No, that's the other way around. Up like this it means 'peace', see?"
"Oh," he says, embarrassed. "Like this?" He holds up his talons in the best imitation he can manage. She laughs.
"That's probably the best it's gonna get," she says around a grin. “Any updates on Durandis’s asari commando? I’ve been dying to hear whether she’s reached level 49 yet.”
“Apparently she’s been sidetracked romancing a quarian.”
“Scandalous,” she replies flatly.
Durandis is nobody’s favourite guard. He’s a brute with his charges and a bore with his colleagues, and talks entirely too much about Galaxy of Fantasy even for the tastes of those who play it. Nonetheless, it’s risky to mock him out in the open like this. 526 has a way of making him clumsy. He reminds himself that that is reason enough to stay away.
*
His mother had always loved stories of Earth. In turian tradition, the mother named the daughter and the father the son. He had been named Garrus, after Garrus Nikari, most trusted advisor to the ancient Chief Primarch Pohlus; his sister was named Solana, after Earth's sun.
It puzzled him sometimes, how two such different people could have fallen in love. Then again, perhaps it was duty that kept them together. It always seemed that love had faded far too quickly between his parents.
“What’s Earth like?” he finds himself asking 526 one day, surprising himself as much as her. He’s been trying to limit their time together lately - he knows that it’s frowned on for guards to get too friendly with the prisoners, and he isn’t sure if it would make 526 all that popular among the other inmates, either. He’d been lonely, though, and he’d been thinking about his mother, and somehow he had drifted here and asked the question without meaning to.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” she says. “I was raised on the good ship SSV Einstein. Only set foot Earthside a couple of times, and never for long.”
Garrus resists the urge to question her further. For all his curiosity about her life, part of him doesn’t want to know what she did to bring her here. If her parents were Alliance, though, it would explain a lot about the way she holds herself.
“Why do you ask?” she says at last, and he realises he’s been silent too long.
“My mother - she was interested in mythology. Wanted to be a Priestess when she was young. She read all kinds of mythology and Earth’s was her favourite. She always wanted to go there.”
“She dead?” asks 526 with a frown, then winces a little.
“She’s not dead. Very sick.”
“Mine too,” she says, subdued. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he says back, trying to smile.
*
Kuril’s been cracking down, demanding that the guards “discipline” the prisoners more regularly. It isn’t a turian’s nature to resort to violence unless needed - it has to be trained into them. Durandis has been here longer than Garrus, and is comfortable enough handing out beatings, but Garrus has managed to avoid giving any so far. But Durandis is in a worse mood than usual, and he can’t escape forever.
“So I finally get enough XP to advance and my damn extranet glitches. This goddamn ship. Designed by humans, that’s its problem.”
Garrus hums placatingly and tries not to notice that they’re passing 526’s cell, but he can’t help but turn his head a little. Durandis’s eyes follow his.
“What the hell are you smiling about?” he barks. “You think it’s funny that your goddamn species can’t design a ship to save its life?”
“No, sir,” says 526.
“Don’t you take that tone with me. Vakarian, teach this piece of varren-shit some respect.”
“Sir, I -”
“What is it? Scared of a little girl?”
“No, sir.”
“Then get in there and teach her a lesson.”
Garrus lets himself into her cell with an icy-cold feeling surrounding him like a second carapace. Even if he were comfortable with needless violence, humans are so delicate, like insects - they seem so breakable. And 526 is the last human he would ever want to hurt.
“Get on with it, we have rounds to finish,” Durandis shouts at him from outside.
He raises his hand and strikes. 526 spits, and it’s stained red, the colour of her blood.
“You chicken?” she shouts in his face. “I know you can do better than that.” She raises her fists.
If he concentrates on her eyes, and not on her bloody lip or her outfit that will barely soften his blows, it’s just like sparring with his sister, he tells himself. She manages to get a punch in and he almost grins, adrenaline flooding his body, but then -
“Use your baton, Vakarian, this isn’t a boxing match,” Durandis growls from outside, and that icy feeling is back. He pulls out his baton.
“COME on!” 526 screams in his face, like a war cry. “You think I can’t take a beating? Get the fuck on with it!”
He steals himself, and beats her, over and over. There’s a ringing in his ears that blocks out the sounds of hard rubber hitting soft flesh.
Durandis’s voice breaks through the fugue. “All right, that ought to do it. Go get washed up and catch up to me, we still have rounds to finish.”
*
Once Durandis is safely back in the guards’ common room, Garrus creeps up to the window of her cell and leans his forehead against the cool glass. 526 glances up, then smiles around her swollen lip and holds up the two fingers that mean “peace”. He holds up his talons and rests them against the glass.
“I have medi-gel,” he says softly. “May I come in?”
“My house is your house,” she says, then creaks out a painful-sounding laugh. “That’s Spanish, by the way.”
“Uh - my translator - ”
“Oh, right. Come on in, make yourself at home. I’d offer you coffee but I guess I’m out.”
It doesn’t seem like the right time to remind her that coffee would probably kill him. He lets himself into the cell for the second time that day - or ever - and sits beside her. Her back’s against the wall and she’s holding her knees. He may not be all that familiar with human body language, but he doesn’t think that’s a good sign. He administers the medi-gel to her carefully, making soothing sounds he’s not sure her ears can hear.
“Why did you goad me like that?” he asks. It’s not that he blames her for any of it, he just doesn’t understand.
“He would have noticed if you’d gone easy on me, and we both would have been punished. Plus they might get the wrong idea, think we were friends or something.”
“Which would be false.”
“Blatantly,” she says.
Garrus wonders if any punishment they could mete out could be worse than this, as he listens to her struggle to breathe.