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It is not the first time it happens. It is, however, probably the first time he notices.
Garrus is trying to take the heat off Miranda, who’s pinned by a barrage of steady enemy gunfire, when his visor starts popping off and his shields go down all at once.
“There’s another krogan!” Miranda yells, somewhat unhelpfully.
“I can see that!” Garrus scrambles for his assault rifle as the krogan charges, raising his still smoking shotgun. His scars haven’t even begun to fade damnit and at this range-
Like a lightning strike of death, Shepard smashes right into the krogan, her shields also fizzling out as they absorb the blast meant for him. She’s all wrapped up in threads of biotic blue, and Garrus can see the shift in her weight, the slight widening of her stance to stop herself from knocking back into him as she grips her shotgun and empties the clip.
He swallows.
Shepard is busy quite literally punching a krogan to death now, and as he goes down with a sickening crunch she glances at Garrus over her shoulder, flicking her wrist to shake off the blood.
“I’ve got you, Vakarian,” she says, the orange liquid splattering in a sharp line. “Now let’s take down that mech.”
The art of speaking seems to have evaporated within Garrus, who also appears to have forgotten how to breathe. Now, biotics generate a lot of energy. On an intellectual level, Garrus knows this, but when he’s this close to Shepard he can actually feel the heat she emits, the air shiver with static. His eyes catch on the nape of her neck, where sweat makes the too-short hairs cling to her skin.
He sort of… shudders.
Shepard throws him a puzzled look, but charges away anyway to assist Miranda.
Garrus doesn’t understand what the hell just happened.
He shelves the incident to gather dust in the back of his mind, optimistically hoping those strange, embarrassing feelings do not return.
The universe has always taken a sick satisfaction in trampling all over his hopes and dreams, so it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise when just a couple of weeks later he nearly gets himself killed for staring at Shepard.
They are pan-frying under the Haestrom sun, but they are picking up Tali and fighting geth, which officially makes this his favourite mission so far. Despite the rapidly worsening situation Shepard’s good mood is contagious, and even Grunt, who had in complete seriousness asked earlier if they were planning to eat the quarian, seems invigorated by the prospect of finding Tali.
When they run into what remains of her security detail, Shepard, who can be very predictable, gets Kal’Reegar to stand down. Garrus rolls his eyes and allows himself a moment to mourn the brand new armour that has now little hope of leaving Haestrom intact, before bringing his head close to Shepard’s to confer on their approach.
“The middle is too exposed,” he says immediately, and she nods grimly. “The catwalk, however, seems doable. Tricky, but if I can make my way to the sniper’s perch I should be able to do some damage.”
“Geth will follow you up the ramp,” Shepard says, beckoning Grunt over. “You two, take the catwalk – Grunt, watch your flank, keep the geth off Garrus. I’ll draw the colossus’ fire until you’re in position.”
The second she sprints out of cover, the enormous geth unit begins raining bullets. She skids to a stop behind a pillar just in time to avoid getting singed by a siege pulse, holds four fingers up in the air. Go.
Slowly, painfully, they make their way up the catwalk as Shepard closes in on the colossus. By the time Garrus finally reaches the perch, Shepard’s shields are shot to hell and her armour is smoking but she’s close. Her good mood, however, seems to have been left with Kal’Reegar.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Commander,” he drawls.
“Took you long enough,” she grumbles, the ricocheting bullets almost drowning her out. “Now bring down its shields, I wanna try something.”
When his last overload hits, Shepard crackles blue and launches herself at the colossus.
His mouth goes dry.
Shepard materialises into scope, hair flying wildly about her. Her face is crazy focused, and as the geth unit staggers, she lodges her missile launcher in between its plates before the colossus can finish activating its repair protocol.
The geth never stood a chance.
The colossus goes down in flames and she steps away from the smouldering remains, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Garrus follows the curve of her arm, catches her self-satisfied smirk, and feels his stomach drop like he just got launched into zero gravity.
His brain contains precisely zero synthetics but he short-circuits anyway, keeps staring at Shepard with a mixture of horror and something he can’t quite name.
The geth rocket troopers now aiming at him are literally the last thing on his mind.
“Garrus, what are you doing?!” Shepard yells. “Get down!”
He ducks just in time to avoid another rocket to the face.
Grunt laughs dementedly and headbutts a destroyer. Shepard draws her pistol to dispose of the remaining geth. Garrus is slowly losing his mind.
“So,” Jack begins conversationally, “I’ve watched a lot of alien porn.”
Garrus will forever consider it one of the more successful feats of his short stint as a vigilante that he manages to not spit out his drink.
He chokes on it, instead.
Jack spares him a look full of derision but still has the good grace to wait until he’s done suffocating to continue killing his sanity.
“So that thing you do, whenever Shepard does something particularly murderous and terrifying, or when she goes all girl scout on someone’s ass-” Is it him or is the room suddenly really hot, even for him? Garrus needs to get out right now.
“-the thing where your voice gets all cavernous and ululating and your ugly face starts quivering like an untouched virgin, kikikikiki-“ at this Jack brings her hands to her mouth and waves her fingers as if they were pincers, in a frankly offensive imitation of turian mandibles.
“I’m not a rachni-“ Garrus tries to protest, but Jack just growls.
“And I’m not done yet.” She leans back against the mess hall counter and there is a glint in her eye that Garrus really does not like. “Anyway, that thing…”
Jack licks her lips, savouring his rising panic. And then she fucking smiles.
“I know what it means.”
Garrus swears at whatever asshole deity decided that gifting Jack with knowledge of turian sub-vocals and body language was a good idea. He makes several attempts to open his mouth and say something that will allow him to leave this conversation with at least some of his dignity intact, but nothing comes out. Jack still looks incredibly smug, and Garrus still wants to die.
“It’s okay, big boy,” Jack pats him on the shoulder consolingly before leering. “I'm not gonna tell Shepard you want to bend her over the console and calibrate her. If it helps, I also thought it was hot when she body-slammed that YMIR, and I don’t even fuck girls.”
Somehow, that doesn’t help at all.
The next time they touch down together, he takes perverse pleasure in picking off any enemy that gets within four feet of Jack, who is getting progressively more and more angry at her inability to ‘destroy’ anyone.
He lines up a headshot, fires, and pops the thermal clip as the mercenary collapses and Jack hurls a shockwave at the wall in frustration.
“You know, I brought Jack so she could work off stress,” Shepard’s amused voice tickles him through the commlink.
“She’s a big girl, Shepard, if she wants a kill she can go get it,” He replies, unconcerned, aiming right between the eyes of the Blue Suns trooper closest to Jack. He crumples, and they both ignore the ensuing string of obscenities.
“Damn Garrus. Leave some for the rest of us.”
“You’re a big girl too.”
Shepard scoffs, reaches out of cover, and closing her grip around an unsuspecting Sun's throat, smashes them to the ground.
“That I am.”
Garrus almost drops his Mantis, and he can hear Jack laughing at him.
Attraction is completely awful.
Later, cocooned by darkness in the relative safety of his bunk, he lets his mind wander.
The whole thing is baffling.
Garrus has never felt anything but polite interest in the shape of other species – not even in the asari, who everyone seems to like.
He doesn’t not like humans. Shepard is… nice to look at. For a human. Yet it’s not her eyes or her waist or the sharp curve of her skull that make his insides broil with hunger.
Is it because he’s pretty sure Shepard could kill him? Is his type just deadly, frightening women? Or is it the opposite, that despite the increased risk of gunfire, he can feel his survival odds shoot up exponentially whenever she’s around? Is it that he’d fight an entire enemy platoon if she told him to? Or that she’s done that for him already, multiple times?
Garrus shuffles around in his bunk, uncomfortably aware of how his own skin brushes against the covers.
She doesn’t not like turians.
Shepard doesn’t talk about her personal life – he knows little of her rise in the Alliance, even less of her childhood, and absolutely nothing of her love life. As far as anyone on the Normandy is concerned, Shepard has no personal life. She just likes model ships and fish.
Back when he first joined the Normandy, when the presence of a krogan and a turian clearly alarmed a formerly wholly human crew, she always came by to talk, stood close enough to hear him clearly over the hum of engines. She’s always touched him easily, shaking his hand, clasping his cowl, and more recently leaning against him in the shuttle after particularly draining missions. He has also seen her looking – not with curiosity or want, but also not with distaste. Just… looking. She doesn’t not like turians.
Garrus stifles a groan into the pillow, claws at the mattress in frustration.
He has no clue what Shepard looks like naked, absolutely refuses to even begin to entertain the thought, but he thinks he wants her to touch him everywhere anyway.
He manages to catch some sleep in the end, and when he wakes up in a mess of shredded cotton and fabric, he sighs wearily.
A poor Cerberus recruit stands a few feet away, trying really hard to look anywhere but at his (very sharp) talons.
“Sorry,” Garrus says.
The fact of the matter is that if it were just about her prowess on the battlefield, he could understand it. He likes competence. Shepard is, by quite a significant margin, the most competent person he knows.
It is, regrettably, a lot more complicated than that.
Shepard is… compelling. She has a way of pulling you into her orbit, the force of her gravity completely incongruous to her mass. A small, walking sun, burning hot and impossible to ignore. Watch me, she appears to say. I might do something incredible.
Now, Garrus is not a sun. He’s a failed vigilante with half a face, impetuous and hot-headed and so forgettable Cerberus’ best efforts at tracking him down consisted of asking a bureaucrat at Citadel customs when they’d last seen him.
Shepard used to be his literal sun, and he was so swept up in her light that when she got spaced he lost control of his life and ran away to Omega to start a vigilante group. A galaxy without Shepard just felt wrong in a primeval, absolute sense he was never able to clearly explain, and he didn’t quite realise just how big a chunk her death had taken out of him until he saw her again on Omega and felt whole for the first time in years.
It’s different now. He’s still in her orbit, but he’s got better at shooting and at a few other things, and in a way, he feels like he can see her clearly for the first time. She’s humble where it matters, but stubborn and competitive about the dumbest things. She’s always loved space, ever since she was a child. Her morals are at times confusing but always uncompromising, she flat-out refuses to engage in the ruthless calculus military life demands. She’s almost as bad at dancing as she is at sleeping, and she keeps killing her fish. Contrary to popular belief, she does bleed, and when she does it’s a human, violent red.
She is his best friend, hunting down an impossible foe, and her voice still sometimes breaks with disuse from being dead.
The are sat together in the armory, working in silence, and Garrus is uncharacteristically fiddling with a shotgun. Geth weapons are notoriously hard to mod, but he is certain there is a build that will make it marginally lighter and increase damage. When he eventually hands the weapon back to her, he does so with a playful shove and a victorious flare to his mandibles.
Shepard smiles rarely, but when she does – like now – it’s like watching the sun rise. Her whole face lights up. She’s got dimples.
He’s so monumentally fucked.
“I was going through some of the recent requisition orders last night.”
Oh god.
“Care to explain why I have to buy a new bed?”
“Turians descended from apex predators, Shepard. These talons are not just for show.”
“Mhm. I was not aware that you went around hunting mercs with your bare hands. In your sleep. Pick that up in Omega?”
“No rest for the wicked, as you humans say.”
“The requisition order was quite specific, you know. Were you trying to bite the pillow to death?”
“…”
“Well? What were you even doing?”
“…Can this wait? I’m in the middle of some calibrations.”
Shepard rolls her eyes, the tiniest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and something that feels a lot like bubbles rises in his chest.
He must be a masochist.
There is no other explanation for why he is attempting to… to flirt badly with his Commander. The thing is, he sometimes thinks that Shepard flirts back. He doesn’t know if it’s that he sucks at flirting, or she sucks at flirting, or they both suck at flirting, but afterwards he is invariably left feeling feverish, wanting, and confused.
It’s like some sort of disease, and Garrus wants to be rid of it. Attraction is a pain in the ass.
All he needs, really, is definitive evidence that Shepard does not, at all, want him like that. Maybe then the incognita will stop rotting his brain and he can finally stop concocting stupid plans to hint at his commanding officer that he’d like to find out if turians can kiss.
However, Garrus doesn’t usually make it his business to deliberately walk into the line of fire, especially when in all likelihood that would result in him getting completely, absolutely, epically rejected by Shepard, something that would make their rapidly approaching ‘suicide mission’ a rather welcome sight. She wouldn’t laugh. Probably.
Instead, he takes the sniper’s approach to romance. He waits, scopes, lines up the target, and only shoots if… well. If he actually has a shot.
Currently, he is in the ‘scoping’ phase. Shepard is sat in the main battery, her silky, ridiculous human hair falling across her face as she leans towards him. Garrus wants to run his talons through it (he is a terrible turian). In an attempt to direct the conversation towards… sexier territory than ship regulations, Garrus tells her an old conquest story.
You see, he is testing the waters. Most humans see turians as a stuck-up, sexless, unattractive species. He wants her to know, explicitly, that he’s had sex. Wants to see what she says, if they talk about it, if she shares a story of her own. I think about it, do you think about it too?
And then, the impossible happens.
Shepard hits on him. She hits on him hard and to his face and with all the subtlety of a charging vanguard.
Garrus blinks once, slowly.
He has thought about this for months, but it actually happening leaves him so surprised he can only fumble in response.
Shepard just stares at him, her face so open and fond it makes something inside him flutter.
Garrus pretends to think about it for a millisecond, and tries really hard to not let his voice go all cavernous and ululating, and to not let his mandibles go kikikikiki-
He fails, mostly.
When she leaves, there is a sway to her walk he’d call flirtatious on anyone else, and Garrus is so over the moon with what just happened he almost forgets the most important detail.
Fuck. How do turians and humans even have sex?