Chapter Text
Waking up was as hopeless as it normally was, but… what did he know, he’d been wrong a rather astounding amount of times. Maybe today would be the day. The day for what? He didn’t know. But he was doing his best to be optimistic. Though it must be said that optimism never was his strong suit. Someone approached and he quickly rose to attention from his sleeping spot on the desk in his office. He really needed to stop falling asleep while working. “Garrusss, scouts just got back in, they’re waiting.” The hard pronunciation of his s’ and the slight hiss revealed the speaker as none other than Wrill Natash, a vorcha Garrus had recruited on a quick jaunt to Omega, before Omega was blown to smithereens. He was around thirteen and Garrus was constantly shocked by how smart and canny he was. “Thanks Wrill, I’ll be right there.” Wrill nodded and disappeared out of Garrus’ sight. Garrus sighed, and slid a hand over his crest, his talons scratching an itch he didn’t even notice prior. Garrus exited his ‘room’ to chaos. Business as usual. Somewhere in the background noise he could hear Wrex’s booming laugh, and he set out to find the source. The scarred face of Wrex appeared out of the crowd, seemingly in the midst of a conversation with the resident Geth Prime, Phalanx. Garrus had found Phalanx aboard a geth cruiser in orbit of Digeris on a scouting mission before it had gotten too dangerous to move around. He reminded Garrus a lot of Legion, aside from his fledgling sense of humour, which was more in line with that of EDI. Regardless, as soon as Wrex saw Garrus coming towards him, Wrex slapped Phalanx on the shoulder and lumbered towards Garrus. “I see you managed to drag your carcass out of bed, Garrus.” Garrus chuffed, and didn’t dignify Wrex with a direct response.
“How’d things go on the nightshift?” Wrex shrugged his massive shoulders and opened his mouth wide in an earth shaking yawn. “’Bout as well as can be expected, only one or two husks and a marauder, didn’t see us and we didn’t see any need to engage.” He sighed and looked down at the ground, “Been too long since I’ve seen a good fight.” He looked more downtrodden than Garrus had thought possible, he almost wanted to start a firefight in the middle of the camp to cheer him up. Almost. “Thought you had a ‘good fight’ every time you forced your way into your armour.” Wrex scowled at him. “You saying I got fat, Vakarian?” Garrus shrugged “Well I didn’t not say it.” Wrex’s scowl grew even deeper, but the good natured bantering felt good. Then, Wrex yawned again, this time even louder than the last. “Spirits Wrex, go and get some sleep before you bring the ceiling down on top of us.” Wrex didn’t respond, just clapped Garrus on the shoulder hard enough to knock him into a human woman walking by. In the time it took Garrus to apologize, Wrex had taken off to his hole in the wall. He shook his head and headed back on his path towards the bases ‘war room’ which was just a slightly better maintained room than the rest with a couple of datapads and a galaxy map. Waiting for him was his scouting party of Javik, Miranda and Tali. “Whats the situation out there?” Javik sneered, predictably, but before he could say something Tali interrupted him. “Not much change, from what we saw there’s even less Reapers but there’s not much other good news… We managed to get a few more rations, even a couple dextro rations inside of a slave villa. I… It’s hard to describe how barren it is closer to the city centres.” She shrugged and petered off.
Miranda chimed in too. “I found some thermal clips. So the good news is that there’s a lot of them. The bad news is...” and she trailed off for dramatic suspense “There’s a lot of them so I’ll have to head back with a couple more people and get the rest.” Garrus nodded and shook his head out of surprise that even after all these years they were still finding things like this. “Spirits, that’s going to be good for us, I’m sending you, Wrex and Phalanx out to this immediately, bring back as much as you can.” Garus sighed, a small bit of relief from Tali and Miranda, thank the Spirits. “As the quarian says, there is less Reapers. In my cycle, they did this to flush us out, we must be very cautious.” Javik was right, it was nothing to be relieved about but it was still some sort of good news. I nodded at Javik in response. “Thankyou, all of you, Miranda get back to that ammo drop, I’ll go and get Wrex for you, you grab Phalanx, meet at the east gate as soon as you can. You two-” Garrus looked at Tali and Javik “-get some rest. Dismissed.” Miranda walked off to go and find Phalanx and Tali and Javik went off to go get some sleep. He was not keen to wake Wrex up but it needed to be done, and he trusted him to do it.
Reaching the bunk rooms that some poor unfortunate souls had to share with Wrex, Garrus knocked on the door and slid it open. Wrex was unsurprisingly asleep but seemed to be having a pretty shallow sleep because he woke up as soon as Garrus got close to him. “What do you want, Vakarian?” He grumbled out, sleep still evident in his voice. “I need you to go with Miranda and Phalanx to get what is apparently a treasure trove of thermal clips. Sorry to wake you up but I need this done and I trust you to do it.” Wrex growled and groaned and started climbing out of bed. “Alright Garrus, I’ll do it, but you have to let me shoot something with that Widow in your office.” He narrowed his eyes at Garus as he said it. “Deal, once you get back its all yours.” Garrus said with total conviction. Wrex shrugged, and started walking. Don’t need to get ready when you wear armor to bed. Garrus shook his head and caught up to Wrex. “We’re going to the east gate, hopefully Miranda and Phalanx will already be there.” Garrus threw out. Wrex nodded again and they kept walking all the way to the gate without another word.
Miranda and Phalanx were indeed waiting for them, all ready to go. Wrex grabbed an Avenger from one of the rifle racks and stood with the others. “Goodluck, see you all in a bit, get everything you can, don’t engage as per usual, but especially now, I don’t want to lose any of you or those thermal clips. See you when you get back.” Phalanx grumbled, Wrex chuckled and I could have sworn he insulted my command style underneath his breath. “We’ll be careful, you do work with the best.” Miranda remarked and then left with the other two. I watched them walk away and prayed all three came back in one piece.