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The first time you fall in love, you’re eighteen years old.
It’s not with a person - you never stay settled in one place long enough for that to happen, and the world around you has taught you that life is shitty and cruel and loving doesn’t seem all that worth it once the losing only makes it worse. Maybe you’re bitter, maybe you’re jaded beyond your years, but you’ve just not been given much of a reason to have faith in people on an emotional level, and you think that you’re better off for it.
You’re eighteen years old and you don’t fall in love with a person, but you fall in love with the weight of a warm gun in your hands, with adrenaline coursing through your veins, the steady pounding of your heart and the humming inside your head. It’s not exactly a normal thing for someone your age, the thrill and the rush that comes along with the fight, but you’ve never fit in anywhere very well anyways so being different isn’t all together an unappealing notion. Shepard - you couldn’t be part of the flock even if you had tried.
You’re eighteen years old and you can’t remember the last time you had a home but you can remember the feeling - it’s a smoking pistol and blood trickling down from a cut on your lip and the knowledge that you’ve done something; you’ve saved a life, you’ve helped a family, you’ve scorched your name onto the earth in capital letters, size seventy five, bolded and italicized and underlined.
SHEPARD WAS HERE.
They tell you that the Alliance Military is lucky to have you, and you don’t plan on letting them forget again.
…
The second time you fall in love, it’s with a job.
You understand what that makes you, in the eyes of society. You’re married to your career; you’re a harsh, cold woman who put professional success over building a family. People like to talk about how advanced they are now, how different the world is from two hundred years ago, but you think they’re fucking kidding themselves. It’s quieter, sure, the bias and the prejudice and the biting words, but you know that there are still those who whisper under their breaths about how strange, how curious it is that you - a woman - made your way through the Alliance ranks so quickly. Your skillset doesn’t matter to them as much as your pronouns, and apparently even the discovery of alien life can’t completely eradicate sexism.
So you have to work twice as hard as your male peers to gain half of the respect. You’re cold, calculating, ruthless. You send three quarters of your squad to their deaths and you mourn them for the appropriate amount of time before moving on to the next mission, and maybe that makes you heartless. Maybe they talk about you in their bunks, tell horror stories to the younger recruits, but you don’t think that it means much - you get the job done. No matter what, you carry the day, and you carry the weight along with it.
It’s not like they don’t drag you down, the names of the dead all carved onto your back. They’re not just numbers; you understand that. But you also understand how to make their sacrifices matter, and that’s what separates you from the rest. That’s what makes you good.
No - that’s what makes you the best.
This is what you were born for. You know it, Anderson knows it, and every single soul above the Normandy knows it - human and alien alike. You’ve never been a xenophobe - humans can be just as dangerous as aliens, this much you know, and you just haven’t seen the point - but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a curling in your gut that cries for you not to trust them. It’s not instinct. If it was, you wouldn’t hesitate to follow it. It’s fear, guttural and base, and you’re not too proud to admit that although you’re getting better, more comfortable once you know them for who they are rather than for their sharp talons and their cold eyes, there’s a part of you that’s still...unsettled.
But they’re good soldiers and hard workers, and you think that that’s all that matters. They each bring something unique to the team, something entirely their own - Liara is gentle and good, but she’s also brilliant and enthusiastic and holy shit, when she wants to the girl can kick some major ass; Wrex is crude and bloodthirsty but you’ve never seen someone with so much raw power, and his rough edges remind you of your own; Tali is sweet and a bit naive, but she’s got a willingness to learn like one you’ve never quite seen before, and her aim is getting better each time you take her out as part of your squad.
And Garrus - you don’t quite know just how to define Garrus yet, but you know that he’s a damn good shot, that he’s loyal, and that somehow, whenever you take him out on the field, he’s always got your six. Not exactly the most informative breakdown of someone’s personality, but you think that it’s going to be enough for now. They’ve always taught you to be the most wary of Turians, with the same brute force as Krogans and a mastery of war unlike any species you’ve ever seen, but thus far he’s made himself to be perhaps the most valuable member of your squad and he hasn’t given you any reason to doubt him, at least not yet.
You look at Kaidan and Garrus laughing in the mess hall, Liara and Ashley discussing literature, the team down in engineering taking Tali’s advice without question, Joker and Wrex exchanging dirty, sarcastic quips and -
and you still can’t remember the last time you had a home but you think that this - the Normandy SR-1, this little band of misfits you’ve pulled together and made more family than team - this might be close.
…
The third time you fall in love, you don’t even realize it until you’re already well past there.
You don’t know how many people in the universe can say that they’ve died and been brought back to life again, but you think that the number must be relatively low. You don’t know how many of those people (if there even are any of them besides you) can say that they’ve been brought back by a military organization in order to fight and destroy a race of sentient robots, but in a weird way it’s kind-of flattering that they chose to spend billions of credits for the sole purpose of reviving you.
Flattering, but also fucking terrifying, because you’re still not sure if your body is your own and you’re on a ship filled with people you barely even know and sometimes you’re lying in bed at night, looking up at the ceiling and it’s dark and it hits you all at once - it’s suffocating, the air being sucked from your body, and you’re flailing around helpless in the middle of a burning shipwreck and there’s a hole in your O2 line and this isn’t the way that you were supposed to go, the great Commander Shepard brought down by a fucking hole in your O2 line, you were supposed to go out in a blaze of glory and light and it’s too soon there’s too much there’s too much -
But you’re not dying, not now at least; it’s just that sometimes it’s easy to forget.
When you do forget- when Kaidan’s voice is burning in your ears, telling you exactly who you aren’t, when you can’t recognize your own body, when the scars on your cheek burn hot and wrong and the biotics buzz in your fingertips (new, terrifying, you still haven’t figured out how to tame them, how to make them your own), you go down to the battery.
You’re almost positive that Garrus doesn’t sleep, and if he does it’s as if he has some sort of sensor in him that alerts him to wake up the minute you require his presence, because he’s always awake, always waiting even if he claims that he’s just “in the middle of some calibrations.” Your conversations are never about anything important - you crack childish jokes about the enemies of the day, he insults some human custom and you make a dig about the size of his claws (talons, he corrects, and the faux-severity of his tone shouldn’t be half as funny as it is) - but he doesn’t coddle you, and he doesn’t ask you questions, and it’s exactly what you need.
You don’t know when he became your best friend, and it’s not as though you need him - because you’re Commander fucking Shepard and you don’t need anything save for a shotgun and the occasional bottle of ryncol - but for once in this fucked up, God-forsaken galaxy, you don’t feel alone.
It is, at the beginning, alarming.
Part of you had almost been hoping that he would turn down your advances, because at least then it would be easier - at least then you could move on, secure in the way that you’ve always been. But he doesn’t, and it’s terrifying and fascinating and utterly new. You’ve been with your fair share of people before, obviously, but this is different, and not just because it’s with a vaguely avian-like alien (although that part of it is more than a little bit bizarre, when you’re looking at the situation from an outsider’s perspective).
This is different because it’s Garrus. This is different because you actually care. This is different because -
Because you don’t love him, not yet, but you know that you could. If things carry on the way that they do, you know that you will.
But it gets a little less terrifying each time that you see him, each awkward, endearing, fumbling attempt at flirting, and then suddenly he’s in your quarters with a bottle of wine and he’s telling you your waist looks supportive and it’s so horrible and so horribly right, and all of a sudden you can’t for the life of you remember why you were even nervous in the first place. It’s Garrus - it’s his frighteningly blue eyes and the patterns that line his face, it’s the low rumble of his voice and the way his forehead presses against yours so gently, not as if he’s afraid to break you but as if he can’t even believe that you’re real -
And it’s all still a little bit new, a little bit unsure, but he touches you like you’re something precious and you’ve never backed away from an unfamiliar situation out of fear before, so you certainly don’t plan on starting now.
So you walk into it on unsteady legs, fumbling through the dark, and the thundering in your heart isn’t fear but rather awe, and the first time you know that you love him, you know it.
You know it because of the warmth of a gun in your hand just before you replace the thermal clip, the rush of adrenaline on your first day as Commander of the Normandy, the medals that they pin to your dress blues, the way that Anderson claps you on the shoulder and calls you Kid, like he’s proud of you, like you’ve taken a little piece of this fucked up universe and made it good. You know it because of the low hums of Garrus’ subharmonics when your hands brush against his fringe, or the way his leg presses against yours on the shuttle back from another devastating mission, or the way he’s always there - from Alliance to Cerberus to Alliance, he’s always there.
And you walk on unsteady legs, fumbling through the dark, but you can feel him behind you - Shepard, on your six - and maybe you’re not quite at the finish line, but God, Kalahira, whoever - he’s behind you and you must be getting close.