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Shepard sat with her legs curled to the side on her couch - a new addition to the new Normandy - and ran her fingers over the long, thin arms of her glasses. The shape was familiar under her fingers; the special high-grade plastic warm from her restless fingers. She was still sitting with her glasses when the door opened. Shepard didn’t move to put her glasses away. Shepard didn’t greet whomever was at the door. Only two people would come in without knocking - it had taken her quite a bit of wheedling to get Garrus to do so, and if Miranda came in… well, Shepard wouldn’t say no to a good fight.
“So you remember that contact I… told…” If the footsteps didn’t give him away, the rumble of his subvocals instantly identified the intruder as Garrus. “Shepard?”
She didn’t look up from her staring contest with her hands. “Hello, Garrus.”
Maybe a month ago he would have stopped at the edge of the couch, fidgeting awkwardly and getting nowhere, but this wasn’t a month ago. He strode over to her and settled as close as his armor would allow. “Shepard, what’s wrong?” She didn’t answer. It was a complicated question with complicated answers. Everything was a bit too complicated these days. “Are those your reading glasses?” Apparently he looked at her hands a little more closely. “Or a replication of them?” he added, when she was still silent.
“No,” she managed. “These are the genuine article.” Her fingers slid across the arms, and never had something so lightweight felt so heavy. “I accidentally left them on Liara’s desk the last time I visited her. She handed them back to me today.” A pause, humming with tension, before she continued. “After I’d read the datapads she had for me.”
She didn’t need her reading glasses anymore. Not since… calling it the Lazarus project left a bad taste in her mouth, lack of religious belief notwithstanding. Not since Alchera, then. Not since Cerberus had rebuilt her. Jacob’s words were a mockery in her brain; the body looked like her and sounded like her, but things were different now. She was the latest model of an outdated gun. A new Shepard for the new Normandy.
A noise escaped her throat, half laugh and half choking. “Shepard.” Garrus’ hands came into her field of vision, took the glasses from her with no hesitation. They were almost silent when they hit the table. “So you don’t need reading glasses anymore. Doesn’t that sound more like a help than a hinderance?” Help. Right. It was a help that everything was different, a hinderance that she was unsure if she was really she. Complicated thoughts. She wasn’t sure how to vocalize complicated. For Garrus, she could try.
“Senna Shepard needed reading glasses from the fifth grade onward.” She spoke in the third person, and it made the air tense. She didn’t look at Garrus. Couldn’t look at Garrus. She’d come to understand turian expressions all too easily. She was afraid of what she might see in his. “She had scars here,” Shepard pressed her fingers to her brow, her chin, before making a broad sweeping gesture over herself. “Scars from Mindoir, from Elysium, from the Villa. A bum right knee.” One that Archangel had known about, had expressly aimed for on that bridge. One that could no longer be exploited. “Cerberus thought those things were a hinderance too.” He flinched; she saw the motion in her peripheral. She still didn’t look up from her empty hands in her lap. “They were a part of me- a part of Shepard.” She exhaled, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes.
A rough finger brushed where the scar would’ve bisected her brow. Shepard almost flinched, herself. She still hadn’t looked up. Coward, she thought, and it hurt. I'm a coward. Commander Shepard would never be afraid to know what Garrus Vakarian was thinking. As if in defiance of the insidious whispers in her mind, she set her shoulders and met Garrus’ gaze. There was something heavy in his eyes- an undercurrent they’d both heard in their fumbling attempts at flirting (reach and flexibility, indeed). Except in his eyes it wasn’t an undercurrent, it was a tidal wave. Shepard only hoped she could tread water. She wanted to, and the wanting surprised her. She hadn’t truly wanted anything since she’d woken up on a damaged station, other than to give the Illusive Man what was clearly coming to him. There was something of fondness and comfort and lo- trust in Garrus’ gaze, and Shepard wanted it like she wanted water after a trek in the desert.
Garrus’ finger was rough but warm on her brow, and she held her breath. “How’d you get them?” He followed the path her hand had taken before. His fingers stroked her chin where she’d nearly been caught in a trap during ICT, her bicep where she’d taken a bullet dragging a wounded squadmate to cover, along her inner thigh where some SOB had tried to get her femoral artery in Chora’s Den.
Shepard swallowed, the desire at his touch tempered by a familiar warmth in her heart. Her scars had been extensive - damning, even - before Cerberus. She had no idea Garrus had watched her so closely, to learn them all. To remember them all. “No fair,” she joked weakly, “you were there for that one. And I distinctly remember you leaving that guy with less scars and more mortal wounds.”
He nodded, more emphatically than the turian gesture required. More human. “They all have stories, Shepard, even when they’re gone.” His fingers moved, rubbing soothing circles into her skin. “You look different, but you’re still Shepard. You still know the stories. So tell them to me. Tell me what makes you Shepard.”
How someone who could fumble a come-on so badly could cement her feeling of rightness in the world with a handful of words, Shepard had no idea. She exhaled, again, and this one was a sigh. His fingers never stilled, though they slowed when she leaned forward. Her forehead pressed against his, more solidly than the human gesture required. More turian.
She took a deep breath, and let the memories flow from her mouth.