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Garrus made it three days sitting at Shepard’s bedside, waiting for her to wake up from her coma, before he started crawling up the walls. Not literally, of course. Liara and Tali didn’t come in one morning to find him clinging to the ceiling by his talons. But it came pretty close. The low point was Tali walking through the door to find Garrus and his completely deconstructed omnitool laid out across the rolling hospital table. He tried to explain his thought process, but his translator was part of the omnitool and he didn’t speak quarian. Though the look Tali gave him spoke volumes. He put the omnitool back together before noon and resolved to be more patient as he waited.
He only made it another six hours.
He probably would have made it longer if he hadn’t had a very sobering thought around 1800 hours. He was sitting in his usual seat right next to her and absent-mindedly staring at the bouquet of monitors and machines at the head of Shepard’s bed. He’d wondered a few days before if the beeping and the hissing would eventually get annoying, but they were so steady that any noise they made rapidly fell into the background. Though as he watched the metronome of her heart beat, the thought suddenly crossed Garrus’ mind of just how much her life was dependent on these machines right now. One minor malfunction was all that stood between her and death. She could have fought and survived a whole galaxy-ending war to suffocate in her sleep because the oxygen pump stopped working.
He didn’t sleep very well that night and was back at her bedside well before the sun rose on the next day, staring down the wall of machinery that held Shepard on this mortal coil--rather unwillingly at this point. He wasn’t so vain as to automatically assume that he could somehow improve the design of any of the machines… but it wouldn’t hurt if he was, say, well-acquainted with their schematics and common problems, right?
That process took him two days, and by the end, he was fairly confident that should some unexpected malfunction suddenly arise--probably with the power coupling, they were terribly shoddy on the 3-52’s--he could fix it. Probably. Theoretically. Hopefully.
Trouble was, Garrus’ life had not taught him to put much stock into theories and blind hope. Reality was fickle and luck even more so. So his theoretical experience did very little to assuage the fears that had niggled their way deep into his gut and did even less to make the time move faster.
So that was how he found himself wandering through one of the refugee camps, hands folded behind his back and doing his best to not draw any attention to himself. Of course it couldn’t last long.
“Garrus!” A voice called through the noise of the crowd behind him. Garrus lifted his head in time to see Joker rather quickly hobbling his way around a group of rambunctious children.
Garrus lifted a hand in greeting as Joker caught up to him. “Joker. Good to see you.”
“Yeah, you too. Liara finally kick you out of Shepard’s room? She was threatening to last time I saw her.”
Garrus nodded. “I’m not allowed back in until 1900,” he admitted.
Joker laughed a little, shaking his head. “Yeah, Tali kicked me out of her workshop too,” he said, his voice a little softer.
The thought suddenly occurred to Garrus that if anyone was going to understand exactly what he was feeling at the moment, it was going to be Joker. By the dark circles under Joker’s eyes, they seemed to be handling the slow recovery of their loved ones about the same.
“How’s that going?” Garrus asked, matching Joker’s tone.
His face was unusually somber. “Feels like it’s not going at all. Tali says she’s making good progress, but… well, you know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Sucks just sitting there and feeling useless.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and scowled. “Would have started crawling the walls if I wouldn’t have broken my femur doing it.”
“...I completely deconstructed my omnitool and then put it back together.”
Joker snickered. “Tali mentioned that. Said you were going a little insane.”
“Probably am. Like you said… I feel useless. Memorizing the schematics of heart monitors because it feels better than staring at the wall--”
“Wait. Did you say heart monitors?” Joker interrupted, holding up a hand. Garrus nodded. “What models?”
“She’s attached to a 3-52… but I studied the whole line from the Daiichi group. Why?”
Joker smiled again, it suited him better. “I think I may have just figured out a way for you to pass the time.”
Tali gave Garrus a very strange look when he returned to Shepard’s room that evening with an armful of broken medical monitors. But he quickly explained that they were all previously used by the various refugee camps around London and repair techs were very hard to come by as Joker had pointed out. She gave Garrus an encouraging pat on the shoulder before she left him alone again with the monitors and Shepard once more.
With the new useful project ahead of him, Garrus threw himself into diagnosis and repair. Days passed by around him as he steadily worked through the backlog of overworked and broken machinery, handing off refurbished models to Joker and getting new projects every few days.
Over a week later, Garrus was deeply focused on trying to solve where the power issue was in this x-ray imager when something finally broke him from his reverie. A quiet chuckle came from the bed he was working beside. His head snapped up, and he looked over to see Shepard, awake and smiling at him.
“Should I wait a minute?” she said, her voice hoarse and scratchy. “You seem to be in the middle of some cali--”
She was interrupted by him standing and immediately kissing her.