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On the whole, Garrus doesn’t consider himself to be a lucky man. His best friend died two years ago and, wanting to make some change in this galaxy, he went to Omega and aimed his gun. Now, it’s only a matter of time before he runs out of thermal clips and fires the last clip in his pistol into his head.
Shepard arrives in a flash of biotic blue; alive but scarred, and for the first time in hours, he realizes he might have a chance at surviving. If he does, he’ll be the luckiest damned turian alive.
A hail of bullets and the red hot fire of a rocket. “Only so much luck to be had,” he thinks just as the rocket explodes, inches from the right side of his face. Blackness follows.
He wakes, choking on the thick blue of his own blood gushing down his damaged trachea; to Shepard’s agonizing pressure on gushing wounds; her pleas for him to hold on. He’d laugh if he could; who is lucky enough to survive a direct hit from a rocket?
Bright lights. Foggy mind. Hospital. “Shit, what a stroke of luck,” he mumbles, as fresh flesh pulls with every movement of his jaw and mandibles, making him wince.
“You’re a fortunate man, Garrus. Your shoulder, the right half of your jaw, your right eye and right ear are all cybernetic. You lost the teeth on the right side of your jaw, but those will grow back; I’ve given you a stimulant to speed the process, but you’re in for an unpleasant few weeks,” a woman says, and he blinks several times to clear his field of vision.
Dr. Chakwas. “What are you doing with Cerberus?” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound ungrateful to the woman who glued his face together with cloned flesh, cybernetics and pumped him full of synthetic blood. Because he is; he’s just… confused. And stoned.
“I’m working with Shepard.”
Not a hallucination of his dying mind, then. He sits up, yanks the IV out of his arm, ignoring Dr. Chakwas’ protests. Apparently he’s “an hour removed from surgery and liable to undo all of her good work”, which makes him “supremely foolish”.
“Need to see Shepard,” he says, looking over at a nearby chair, finding a grey turian-style hoodie and sweatpants. Odd that those are on-board a Cerberus ship, but he won’t complain about not having to put his undersuit back on. After days of fighting, it reeked of sweat, the blood of at least seven sapient species, and spirits knows what else. Only fit to burn.
“At least let me put an IV back in,” she says.
“Don’t need it.”
So long as he doesn’t open his mouth too wide when he talks, the pain is a low-level throbbing. He can live with that. Wishes he didn’t sound like he is swishing around a mouthful of marbles while talking, but a man who had half his face blown off doesn’t have room for complaints.
“You’ll be back here in an hour and pleading with me to drug you,” Dr. Chakwas says, her tone ominous.
“Nah; I’ll be fine.”
“Stubborn turian patients,” Dr. Chakwas mutters as he walks through the door, finding Shepard in her N7 hoodie and those stiff blue pants she likes. She’s real. She’s alive. She’s smiling at him like he’s a miracle.
Nobody has ever looked at him like that before.
Shepard is warm in his arms and Garrus realizes he hasn’t been hugged since her funeral. He holds on, trying to convince himself that this is real and not a hallucination his dying mind is projecting. A comfort as the lights grow dim. Whatever she needs, he’ll do, because he’s her right-hand. Her best friend. The person he loves from afar, content to have a second chance at having her in his life. This is enough.
“You have no idea how happy I am to have you here,” she whispers. He tells her his story; she tells him hers. He learns his cause of death: a mission through the Omega-4 relay to destroy the Collectors, who have been attacking human colonies.
Dying by her side as comrades in arms is a fitting end. Whatever time they have on-board this ship is a bonus; time the galaxy does not owe him. Cerberus broke the laws of nature bringing her back, and he never thought he’d be grateful for human supremacists, but here he is, muttering thanks to the scientists who turned her from meat to flesh, to breathing.
“I’m the luckiest turian there is,” he says to Shepard, who rewards him with a tug of her pink lips.