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When the crew deck is quiet and dark, you take to the mess hall. Gardner’s asleep, the med bay is quiet, the XO’s cabin is dark, and you just sit in those chairs, cross your arms, lay them and your head on the table. Your hot forehead touches the cold steel and you sigh, eyes closed, trying to remember what it used to be like, before. You hit the Bahak system in a few hours, and you have to go alone. You can't count on someone to have your back. You need to rest, but staring out the skylight in the loft does nothing for you.
Even in the silence, it sounds all wrong. This new Normandy is quieter inside, less intrusive. The chairs are too comfortable. But if you’re completely still, in the pounding of the blood in your brain, you can hear it. Ash and Kaidan, whispering, laughing. You hear it in your dreams, too, but... it’s different, when you’re not in control. She echoes, consuming your thoughts, and then you're breathless in a vacuum.
You try not to sleep anymore.
She wasn’t there, when you died. You had expected to see her, clap her on the shoulder and call her a reckless idiot, thank her for her service in person. Jenkins, too. But there was no reunion party. You couldn’t breathe, you were on fire, your consciousness was ripped away with a thud, and then you were on a table, your face coming apart, alarms blaring like the ache in your limbs. Like you’d just fallen asleep, a lifetime ago, and woken into your worst nightmare.
Is that it?
You struggle and fight, you bleed, you hurt, and for what? Pain, and then nothing?
Ashley believed in God. Maybe that’s why: you don’t. How can you believe in God when humanity is just the latest in millions of years to be groomed for extinction by a race of ancient genocidal machines? What kind of god allows that to happen?
You can’t believe in gods, but you know Ash is up there, somewhere, particles of selflessness floating around in another dimension you can’t see. She has to be. But when you go... it will always be dark. There are no pearly gates, there is no one waiting for you across the sea, your soul won’t pass on through your eyes or cling to the trees to grant wisdom. You’ll just be gone -- not floating through nothing forever, just gone.
It’s terrifying. Grappling with impermanence: that when you die, it’s just electrical impulses that stop -- there’s no other thing that made you who you are, no intangible spirit outside of you that controls your body. What makes you Shepard? Your voice? Your body? Your service record? You died, all you are now is meat and electricity. How can you say EDI isn’t a person, or that Legion isn't?
You’re exactly the same as the Reapers -- no, the same as a Collector -- an empty shell filled with bones and wires, generating thoughts with software processed by bloody hardware, impulses running along electrical pathways and thinking things, making patterns. Just vague shapes and motions, turning into movements in your body, generating sounds that resolve into something they’ve all decided are words, that another machine turns into other words, so that other people can interpret your sounds and fire off little electrical impulses in their brains to make their own shapes and sounds of reaction, stimulating the meat of their heads, their organic processors -- you’re a person, but are you alive? Is anyone alive?
“Shepard?” You feel his hand alight on your shoulder and you groan softly, turning your head to one side to see him. In the low light, Garrus looks at you with a tilt to his head, that little bit of concern on his mouth. His eyes flick over what he can see of your face -- it can’t be much, with the hair brushed over the skin.
Just impulses, biological electronics, subconsciously manipulating the mouth and the brow to convey expressions that you assign meaning to, that you react to, output for the input he gives you--
“Shepard,” he says again, softer. He’s in civilian clothes, gloved fingers brush over your hair, dragging it back behind your ear. A deep ache hits your chest -- it feels so nice to be touched. “Why are you down here?”
The hypothalamus activates the pituitary gland, which activates the adrenal glands, producing cortisol at a low dose, constantly, forever, leading to paranoia, high blood pressure, poor overall health-- signals, everything is just signals, chemicals and--
“Can’t sleep,” you say instead, sighing as you sit up. “Sovereign got in my head.”
Garrus crouches down behind you, wrapping his arms around your middle from around the back of the chair, pressing his better mandible to your cheek. It’s slightly rough, warm. A few nights ago, you ran your tongue along it and he shuddered. “You sure you don’t mean Harbinger?”
“Definitely meant Sovereign.” You tilt your head back just a little, letting your head rest in the little ridge between his cowl and his throat. Even through his clothes he’s warm, and you can feel the rumble of his body through his chest, shaking you to your bones. “Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance...”
“You’re just a machine, and machines can be broken!” Garrus mimics your closing statement from that conversation in a high pitched voice, softened, quiet, so it doesn’t wake the crew. You have no control over the smile that breaks out over your mouth, and you reach up and flick his good mandible with a fingernail, closing your eyes and sighing as he presses his upside-down forehead to yours. "You were right, as always."
“I don’t sound like that.”
“Of course not, Shepard.”
You hum, bringing a hand up to brush your palm over his head, fingers splitting apart to trace the ridges in his crest. You breathe in deep, sigh out. His fingers curl into your fatigues on one side.
“Would sparring help?” He says it in a way that you know that sparring is not what he means. Everyone on this level is asleep, but here he is, trying to be inconspicuous anyway.
You let it sit for a minute, mulling it over. Before you hit the relay, it had been... messy. Quick, desperate -- you slowed it down, tried to make it last, make it good, for both of you. You don’t know what this is -- you don’t know what you want it to be. You have no idea if he knows, either. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“If it wouldn’t, would you still be available?”
“As long as you need me.”
It’s not a hard decision, even if he doesn’t know what he’s signing up for. It’s not like you know, either. When you sit up, he lets go, and you walk him to the elevator, not bothering with the staggered routine from before Omega-4. We don’t want to cause any unrest in the crew, he’d said, like any of the twelve people left on the ship would care. So reckless all his life, and then overcautious when it doesn’t matter.
You push Garrus down onto the bed when you get there, and it’s different from the last time -- from the first time. Quieter, more intentional. His blue eyes are still on you, like you’re a puzzle he needs to figure out, unlabeled buttons to press, a new cannon he needs to integrate, new hardware with no instruction manual, electricity and algorithms, organic software governing a soft body--
Garrus touches your cheek. Delicately, two gloved fingers to the soft skin, and the tension leaves your jaw when you notice how it’s gathered there. His head is tilted now, browplates lowered. You move your hands to undo the clasp, removing your jacket. You don’t rush yourself.
“Talk to me, Garrus.”
"What about?” His eyes move from your fingers to your eyes, he lowers his hand to rest on the edge of the bed.
“Anything. Tell me about you.”
“About me, huh.” Garrus clicks his tongue softly against his teeth and you watch the blue flicker in his mouth as he does it, tilting his head back like he’s thinking about what to say. “You already know about me, Shepard.”
“Indulge me.” Your top comes apart down the middle and you shrug it off of your shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. You brace a hand on his thigh, bending down as you work a boot off. “All I know about is your time working C-Sec, what you did on Omega. What you didn’t do on the Citadel. Tell me something I don’t know about Garrus Vakarian.”
He steadies your shoulder with a hand so you can remove one boot, then the other. You don’t ask, you don’t almost fall -- he just moves to do it, like it’s the obvious thing. Supporting you, as always.
“I’m ambidextrous,” Garrus says, after a moment, brushing the hair from your face. “I like how the air smells when there’s an electrical storm.”
You curl your fingers into the waistband of your pants, tugging them down unceremoniously, stepping out of them. Sweeping a foot to the side, you kick your pile of laundry out to the side, pressing your knee between his legs. Garrus lifts himself, sits farther back as you climb up, wrapping your legs around him, his hips supporting your knees.
“Your turn. Tell me something about Commander Shepard that no one knows.” You wrap your arms around his body. He’s so warm, and you sigh, thinking. What’s left to tell? Everyone knows everything about you, it seems -- the galaxy at large, Miranda, Liara, after her career shift...
“I showed biotic tendencies as a kid,” you say, quietly, as if he’ll tell. You never even told Kaidan, a strange survivor’s guilt after hearing all of his stories about Jump Zero. “Never got the implants to make anything of it. I watched the news, knew enough to keep quiet.” You take one of his hands, palm sliding over the smooth texture of his glove. It’s not what you’re looking for. “Take this off.”
“You really are a polymath,” Garrus says in awe, like it’s a compliment. You pick up a leg and roll to one side so he can get up -- his clothes are so inconvenient, he can’t just take off a glove, it has to be everything. You watch as he bares the plates and skin of his chest, pulling everything over his head, undoing the buckles on his legs to work the pants down. It’s so much.
“One more about you, Vakarian.” Garrus looks up at you, one knee pulled to his chest as he undresses. You’re not especially attracted to turians, but you firmly believe any woman could be brought to their knees by that piercing blue stare. He lays his civilian attire out across the coffee table, a silent judgement against your pile of discarded clothes.
“You’re the first alien I’ve been with,” he says, returning to where you are on the bed with one long stride. When he touches your cheek this time, you feel his skin -- warm, radiating heat. Just a little rough, like brushed metal. “Probably the last.”
“I was that bad, huh?” Garrus opens his mouth for a second to protest, but you laugh before he can defend himself, slipping your hand in the gap there, between his jaw and mandible. Not too far back, you’re not trying to force them apart. “But here you are, anyway. Guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Archangel is a masochist.”
“I’m not. You’re just... an exception. Exceptional.” A pause. “Don’t do that, though. It’s weird,” he says, gently curling his fingers around your wrist to remove your hand from his mouth. Garrus brushes his thumb over the back of your hand, staring down at it. “Something else about you, Shepard.”
You press the same hand to the outside of his mandible instead, coaxing him down to kiss his chin, and he flutters his upper lip against you to participate. Garrus gently presses his forehead to yours, subvocals thrumming enough to rattle your bones. Dual vocal cords, just more impulses, automatic reactions, tiny shocks to stimulate a sound--
“Shepard?”
“I can’t.” You sit back, shaking your head. You can’t focus. “I can’t get it out of my head.”
Garrus is silent as he brushes his fingers through your hair, a pair of talons dragging over your scalp. It feels nice, touch receptors igniting the nervous system, neurons firing--
“You think it’s indoctrination?” His voice is so quiet, eyes searching your face, like that would give him the answer. The panel of blue light between you is distracting -- you reach up to pry his visor from where it clamps into the plates at the back of his neck, tossing it haphazardly onto your pile of clothes. He doesn’t look away from your face for a moment.
“Would I know?” You close your eyes, leaning back -- his hand is there in an instant, supporting your shoulders, gently lowering you down. “Saren didn’t know until it was too late. Same with Benezia. Am I just... I mean, is this just the first stage? Or is it... does the fact that I’ve noticed it mean it’s too late?”
“I’ve been near every piece of Reaper tech you’ve been near for just as long, and I’m definitely not indoctrinated. I was on the dead one with you, too.” Your head rests against a pillow that wasn’t there before -- he rakes your hair out over it, gently lifting your neck to fan it all upward, away from your shoulders. “I don’t think that’s it. I think your head’s just working against you. All those gears spinning with nothing to do, with the Collectors gone, no immediate threat on the horizon.”
You sigh.
“Maybe.”
“So? What’s on your mind?”
He’s not touching you anymore, just holding himself up from your body. You look up to bright blue eyes, glinting in the shadow of his cowl. You feel something, a pulse to your heart -- adrenaline, serotonin; a little of this, a little of that. Just a chemical cocktail, telling you what to think, how to react, demanding you touch his face again. Your fingers brush over the thick bandage on his damaged mandible and he presses his head into your palm, never breaking his gaze.
“I don’t feel like... I don’t know, Garrus.” You breathe out, stare out at the stars behind him, the runoff flickering blue over the skylight. “When I was... trying to survive. When I woke up on that Cerberus station, Jacob said that... when they brought me in, I was just meat and tubes.”
You bring both hands down to your face, rubbing palms harshly over your cheeks, trying to feel something that isn’t just the neurons firing in response to sensory input. Something human. Something real.
“I’m just meat, and tubes, and chips, and little wires and electricity.”
“Hey, don’t talk like that.” His voice feels like velvet on your ears, his words like steel wool on your brain. “That’s not the Shepard I know.”
“I don’t know if I am the Shepard you know.” You press your thumbs into your eyes over the lids, red and black spots forming in your vision. “She died.”
“She got better.” Garrus pauses and you drop your hands down over your chest, blinking away the blur over your vision to look at him. “You’re not just a body, you know. You’re brilliant, empathetic, reasonable and I... we all needed you to come along when you did. Everyone on this ship. Someone with the heart to listen, the mind to separate what we needed from what we wanted, and the backbone to fight us when we argued.”
“Nobody should listen to me,” you hear yourself saying, distantly. It’s like you’re outside the skylight, looking in at yourself; a tiny woman on a bed in her underwear. “I’m just... neurons. Little shocks of whatever, piloting a corpse. Like I'm a real person.”
You shouldn’t be burdening a member of your crew like this, even if you did share a moment together a few weeks ago. The sudden, crushing shame of your situation is overwhelming, unloading all of this on the person you trust most -- and now he’s just going to have to carry this around, knowing that the commander is just a person with issues and saying nothing so the people who depend on you don’t lose hope.
“Permission to kiss you, Shepard?”
It comes out of nowhere, bewildering. You snap back into your body to look at Garrus again, repeating the question in your head, and the tone of his voice is so strangely delicate compared to anything you’re used to from him. You can’t read his expression.
“Granted and ongoing, Garrus.”
Garrus brushes his thumb over your forehead, coaxing you to tilt your head back into the pillow, bit by bit. He presses the base of his crest up against the underside of your chin, and you can feel his mandibles flickering to the sides of your neck as he gently moves his rough lips against your throat. The shape and texture of his mouth don’t feel like a human kiss at all, but the unexpected tenderness of it catches you off guard. You make this horrible, strangled little noise, shutting your eyes tight. When he lifts his head up, you can feel the ridges of his nose brush up against your chin, slow and deliberate. Your cheeks are warm, lips parted as you breathe out against his face. Adrenaline.
“When you found me on Omega, I was so ready for everything to be over.” He’s so quiet as he shifts away, leaning heavily on one forearm so he doesn’t have to lay completely on his side. He’s not built for a human bed like this. “I lost everything. I let myself fall out of contact with my family, everyone who followed me was led to their deaths... even if I survived somehow, I’d have to have assumed my identity was compromised. Dead or alive, my life was over.”
Garrus runs his fingertips over your side as he talks, and the warmth off his skin is so at odds with the ambient temperature. You shiver a little, tilting your head to watch the way the orange glow off your locker lights the soft, metallic planes of his chest.
“When I saw you in my scope, I... I don’t know, Shepard.” The fingers on your stomach curl into a fist. They uncurl, palm ghosting over your breast to rest heavily over your heart. You’re so aware of it, suddenly, hammering against your ribs. “I thought I died. I thought... you know. This is the afterlife. I made it. But then I figured if you were rolling out the red carpet for my arrival, I would recognize the people at your back. Then reality kicked in and I got a makeover.”
“Yeah, well. You should have seen the other guy.” You don’t know when your hand moved to cover his, but you curl your fingers over his knuckles, squeezing gently. “If it’s any consolation, you look better now than when I found you, and you looked really good to me after nothing but Cerberus.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.” His voice is layered with that low, subdued playfulness that makes you feel like you’re home, and he bends down to rub his scarred mandible to your cheek. “You always were a sucker for a good disaster, Shepard.”
You turn your head to press a kiss to his scar and Garrus pulls away, looking at you like you’re a puzzle again. Curious, not confused.
You think you might love him.
“Can you stay?”
He turns your hand over to hold it, curling his talons against your palm.
“As long as you want me.”