Work Text:
Shepard backs toward the door. She's still looking at him, but it's obviously a hard-fought battle. Garrus, however, could not look away if he wanted to, and he just hopes—dimly, because there is a lot of blood surging in his brain and thought processes are working a little slower than usual—that the complete shock is not outright visible on his face.
"Right," Shepard says, looking very much like she would like nothing more than to bolt down the hall. He doesn't need his visor to see her pulse, beating like a trapped butterfly in her temple, or the way she's working to draw breath naturally; seeing her nerves like this seems invasive, intrusive, when she is usually nerveless.
"Good talk," she adds.
"Yeah," he agrees, too stupefied to say anything else.
She does bolt after that, though she does her best to pass it off as a brisk march. She wheels around so quickly, however, that she comes very close to overbalancing and, of the three strides he sees before the door closes behind her, each one more closely approximates a sprint.
"What?" he asks, too late, still staring at the door.
It's too late for surprise, though, too late for words of any kind. He thinks back on the last sixty seconds of their conversation and cringes, a full-body shudder. Not because of Shepard; no, maybe she comes on a little strong, but that's her personality, kind of like that coffee she drinks, which Joker swears is the consistency of mud. No, Garrus is pretty sure the awkwardness there was all thanks to him.
"Respect," he mutters, turning back to the cannon, though nothing on the display makes any damn sense at the moment. "She propositions you, and you say you respect her. Is that the best thing you could think of?"
He's only glad that he already fried all the bugs in the battery; this is the last thing he wants sent on to Cerberus. Maybe his idiocy ought to be broadcast to a glow-eyed human with a god complex, but Shepard doesn't deserve that.
He expects her to take it back. Immediately, maybe, but not face-to-face. A message would be fine. She'll be kind about it, probably. Sorry, I was concussed after that last trip planetside, she'll say. Didn't make things awkward, did I?
But she doesn't take it back, and the idea—the idea that's kicked around idly in his brain a few times, the occasional absentminded musing that Shepard is a good friend, a good person, and it's too bad she isn't a turian—takes root.
It's a bad idea, make no mistake. Maybe Shepard bought an issue of Fornax once, but he's pretty sure that was a joke, or maybe on a dare from Joker; she's not into species other than her own.
(He tells himself this, despite the fact that she has issued him an explicit invitation to test her flexibility. He still can't believe she wasn't concussed.)
In fact, he has no evidence that she's into humans, either. Five-year-old stories about that one time on shore leave aside, he's never seen her pursue anyone, or heard about her pursuing anyone, and she's enough in the public eye—first Akuze, then the Citadel—that he's sure there would be some record of it on the extranet.
That's when he really has to look at himself, late one night with the hum of the ship near-silent around him, and ask what he's doing. And what he hopes to accomplish with it, exactly, because…because Shepard is his friend, and she was dead for two years, which is enough to leave anyone a little vulnerable. He doesn't want to take advantage of that.
How exactly are you going to take advantage, big guy? his brain supplies, very helpfully, in Shepard's voice—the same one she'd used when propositioning him, even huskier than her usual—and he closes the extranet search and tries very hard to go to sleep.
"You okay?" she asks, the next time it's just the two of them comparing damage after another skirmish planetside. "You've been kind of quiet."
They've done this since he came back to the Normandy: their third goes ahead to the elevator while they linger in the open doors of the shuttle, braced on the bulkheads opposite each other, crates of gear and parts open beneath their feet, and go over their weapons for what needs to be repaired. Shepard has more to go over than him, always has. He's used most of them, at some point or another, but he can't possibly be as familiar with them as she is.
She still insists on getting his second opinion. "Two pairs of eyes are better than one," she told him once.
"Maybe you'd better recruit a batarian, then," he'd said, and she'd laughed so hard that her eyes actually watered and streamed down her face, cutting through the faint layer of dust.
First time she'd laughed like that in front of him since...waking up. Thinking about it makes him feel like he's standing in the warmth of Palaven's sun.
"Garrus," she says, her voice flattening out the way it does when she's worried.
He offers the Katana back to her. "If you want a solid second opinion, I can't talk while I'm inspecting."
The furrows over her brows melt away, and she smirks instead. Humans—or, at least, Shepard; he doesn't think he's ever inspected another human this closely before—have this smooth, almost untextured skin, but then when their faces move, it pulls and changes in all these interesting ways. There's a tiny impression in her cheek, like punctuation, following the curve of her smirk, and the fan of creases at the corner of one eye. A turian face could never look that lopsided.
Lopsided's not a bad look.
"I don't know why you carry that thing," he adds, before he can get too far down that train of thought. Like he hasn't already. "You hardly ever use it."
"I like to be prepared."
"And tired. Do you know how much all this gear weighs?"
She rolls her eyes, blows out an exasperated breath. The sweat-damp ends of her hair, falling into her face while she checks over his rifle, swing away and back again.
"I carry it almost daily," she says. "It's fine."
"You never used to."
He can see immediately that he's said the wrong thing; her mouth thins, and her eyes flick quickly to his, as if she's trying to determine whether he can read the sudden change in her face.
"I never used to be half-cyborg, either," she mutters, and shakes her head when he opens his mouth. "For your information, I got through short training exercises with about this much gear. Emphasis on short. Good for thirty, maybe forty-five minutes. Do you remember a single goddamn mission while we were hunting Saren's ass that lasted thirty minutes?"
With a bit of the humor back on her face, he thinks it's safe to chuckle. "Two hours, minimum."
"If we were lucky," she agrees. "So maybe being the president of the half-cyborg club isn't all bad. Beats being dead."
She means it as a joke, but it falls flat, the way it does every time she tries to brush off what Cerberus did to her. She shakes her head, as if she knows, and bends back to the rifle.
"Are quarter-cyborgs allowed in the club?"
She glances up again, one eyebrow cocked. "Sorry?"
"I don't think I'm half-cyborg, is the thing." He touches the bandages still covering the wound; every time they have to be changed, he avoids looking at what's beneath. Reminds him too damn much of Saren. "Maybe a quarter."
She catches on; her smirk widens. "Not even," she scoffs. "Maybe an eighth. And that's pushing it."
"So you're president of a club with...what, no members?"
"Tell you what," she says, and her voice takes on another edge now; they're treading new, deep water, the part where they go off-script and fumble along down this new path, and he's not sure whether he wants to keep swimming or just sink. (Turians are notoriously bad at swimming, his brain helpfully supplies.) "I'll make an exception for you, Vakarian. You can be our secretary."
She says it like she's whispering it in his ear; it's a tone that doesn't exactly match the shuttle bay, let alone the actual words. His mouth is dry, but she's waiting expectantly, one eyebrow raised, so he pushes on.
"At the meetings where you talk, presumably, to yourself," he says, slowly, for maximum impact, "since there are no other half-cyborgs."
"I can't help that I'm one of a kind," she says, grinning outright now—any earlier gloom gone—and he can't believe how much, in such a short time, that he's come to want her. Her, and the way she matches him, shot for shot, word for word. Her, and her odd, intricate, lopsided human face.
They go on, business as usual, except this—this—flirting. This very bad, embarrassing flirting. It probably doesn't look like flirting to anyone else. He's never been good at flirting, so he's not a good judge, but he's starting to think—judging by Shepard's sidelong smiles—that he's good at flirting with her. Possibly because she's bad at flirting, too.
And they talk about it. Behind the battery's closed door. That's when it's most awkward, when they're not out in the open and therefore aware of how ridiculous they sound, but it's also when things are clearest, too.
He starts to plan work on the cannon around the time that she typically comes by, in the hopes that he'll actually be free and not have to wave her off so that they can have more of these very embarrassing, very nice conversations.
The day that he times it just right, of course, is the day that she doesn't show up.
He waits half an hour, fiddling with his omni-tool and glancing many more times than necessary at the door, before he decides to take action. She's not the only one who can turn up and ask to talk. All he has to do is take the elevator up to her cabin, see if she's in. Nerve-wracking, but ultimately, given how things are going lately, it'll be worth it.
Her door lock is green when he arrives, so he goes through. "Shepard?" he calls.
From across the room, her voice curses; a second later, there's a loud thud.
Worried now, he takes a few steps more, drawing almost level with her desk. "Uh, Shepard?"
"Stay there," she replies, her voice muffled and a little pained.
"You sound like you could use some help," he says, but he stays put, examining the half-built model of Sovereign on her desk. Even the model version unsettles him a little.
"No, no," she says, and coughs. "I have my pride."
He hovers near her desk, concern mounting as the occasional thuds increase. "Are you sure?" he asks, after a minute of these noises and the occasional hushed, violent curse.
"Am I sure I have my pride?" she asks, somewhat breathless. "No, I am not." She sighs deeply. "Fine. Come and help."
He comes around the desk and stops dead again, because Shepard—survivor of Akuze, hero of the Citadel, and so on—has somehow fallen out of bed, taking the blankets with her, in such a way that she has trapped herself within them. Above one hopeless knot, she gives him a defeated sort of glare, as if daring him to comment on her predicament.
"You surprised me," she says defensively.
"The door was open," he reminds her, trying not to laugh.
"I wasn't expecting—" She cuts herself off, blowing the stray hair out of her face. "Just get me out of this mess, will you?"
Chuckling—"It's not funny!" she tells him adamantly, even though her lips twitch, too—he kneels down to start unknotting the sheets.
"What were you doing, exactly?" he asks, tugging at one knot in particular.
"Reading," she says, in exactly the evasive tone she uses when she doesn't want to talk about something.
"Didn't realize you had to tie all your sheets together to read," he says. "That a human thing I didn't know about?"
She exhales, a noisy huff that borders on a laugh, and presses her lips tight together. He goes on untangling the sheets.
"I can never get comfortable," she finally says, when she's got a handle on her good humor. "This bed is too fucking soft. Heard the crew complaining about the bunks, too. Apparently Chakwas has taken to sleeping in the med bay." She sighs again, obviously frustrated. "I've tried the couches—" She points to them over his shoulder, "but they're just as bad. Even the chair is comfortable. How does anyone in Cerberus ever relax?"
Experimentally, Garrus presses a hand down on the mattress. It is too squashy.
He catches Shepard's eye, about to say something—he's already forgotten what—when he remembers exactly what they're planning and what they've been talking about, which all sort of centers around this very soft bed.
She has, too, judging by the blush that burns, bright red, across her cheeks.
"I don't think they do relax," he says slowly. This is a solid attempt to keep them on-topic, in his opinion. "I'm not convinced that Miranda sleeps, actually."
Shepard snorts and wiggles within her cocoon of blankets. "I'm still trapped," she points out.
"Right." He starts to go back to work on the remaining knot, but gets distracted by the datapad that's fallen out of the blankets. "What were you reading, anyway? Must've been pretty engrossing if I could sneak up on you."
"Don't—" she begins, but too late; he's already picked up the datapad. For a second, he doesn't quite register what he's looking at, only that Shepard is slowly lowering her forehead to her hand, bright red in the face again.
"Oh," he says.
She screws her face up and pulls her hand away. It looks like it takes some real effort. "Look, I just—I don't want to fumble my way through this. When I don't know something, I research." She tries to look him in the eye, wavers, and focuses somewhere around his neck instead.
He scrolls down a bit, leaning back against her mattress. "You couldn't have found something more exciting to research? This is a medical article, Shepard."
"I thought I'd get the facts first," she defends, crossing her arms over her chest. Now that the blanket-and-sheet cocoon has come unraveled, one leg emerges, long and lean and smooth, from the sheets. Her muscles flex beneath her skin, then still.
Weird. Somehow, he thought—seeing her out of armor, out of clothes, that it would make her look...vulnerable. But between her posture, and the obvious physical condition of her body, she doesn't look vulnerable at all. Just vaguely annoyed.
"You never know what you're going to get when you just…search the extranet all brazenly for this kind of thing," she adds. "I mean, human porn is not exactly accurate. I didn't want to take the risk that turian porn would be the same. Find the most mainstream human shit, and you might think all women have gravity-defying breasts and are naturally hairless." She snorts again, blowing another strand of hair out of her face. "Pretty far from the truth, by the way, if you want to temper your expectations."
"Haven't gotten that far," Garrus says, scrolling further down the page to escape the draw of that leg. There's something nice about the curve of her thighs, vulnerable or not.
"Oh yeah?" She pokes him with a pointed toe. "How far have you gotten? Please spread the humiliation around."
"This isn't humiliating," he protests. "This is…thoughtful."
She raises her eyebrows—a facial expression that she wears at her most skeptical. One eyebrow is not sufficient. "Would've been more thoughtful if I hadn't been caught in the act. Now you're gonna think I've just rehearsed everything."
"I don't see what's wrong with that," he points out. "I'm not saying it's never been done before, but it's pretty…rare. A little rehearsal might not be a bad thing."
Despite the blush still on her face, her lips quirk in a sly smile. "A little rehearsal, huh?"
For a whole second, they look at one another—her expression still intact, his brain very devoid of any coherent thought—before she cringes.
"There I go again," she groans, shifting down deeper into her blanket pile. The leg becomes half-obscured. "God. You probably didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry, I'm just…" She peers up at him, frowning now. "I'm nervous."
"Nervous?" This is more alarming than seeing her nerves, actually: her admitting to them. "You? You don't get nervous. You ate half the good rations ten minutes before we dropped on Ilos."
"You don't even eat levo rations."
"Yeah, but I had to listen to Williams mutter about it the entire time we were in the Mako."
Shepard shakes her head, smiling now. "I'm never nervous before a firefight. Everything else, though…this…" She waves a hand between them. "I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to make a wrong move. I know I came on too strong, before." She winces. "Maybe several times."
"Let's not talk about before," Garrus says, setting the datapad down. "Not my finest moment, either."
She grimaces. "No, no, every woman wants to hear, 'Why the hell not?' in response to a proposition for sex. Really."
"You surprised me. I thought we weren't talking about it?"
"Fine, then, rewind," she says. Before he can ask what that means, she continues, "So. A little rehearsal."
She says it differently this time. All bravado stripped away. He likes the bravado—no surprise there—but he likes this, too. The little bit of anxiety written across her face. The open, questioning hazel of her eyes, watching him.
He's starting to wonder if there's anything about her he doesn't like. He thinks that should probably scare him, but there's no room for fear when he offers his hand out to her and she takes it, letting him tow her closer.
At least, not until EDI's voice comes over the cabin's speakers to inform Shepard of a nearby distress signal, right when he'd discovered the warmth of the skin under Shepard's shirt, right when her mouth had found a very nice place on his neck. She jolts against him like an electric current's run through her, the second time she's been taken by surprise in thirty minutes, and he starts laughing into her shoulder to muffle the sound while she smacks his carapace, hissing at him to be quiet, even though her voice is shaking with mirth, too.
"I will not attempt to draw any conclusion from the noises you're making, Commander," EDI says. Garrus is sure that she sounds a bit lofty about this.
Shepard clears her throat, but he can still feel her shaking. "We'll check out the signal, EDI," she says, only a little quiver audible in her voice.
"Very good, Commander."
They wait, holding their breath, for EDI to say something further—and after fifteen seconds where Garrus can actually feel Shepard's heart pounding, she starts laughing, so hard that he starts up again, too.