Work Text:
Situation
drip.
drip.
Crackling, like food wrappers, or maybe static.
drip.
Fire along her bones.
drip.
Breathing thick. Smoky. Sandpaper in every raspy inhale.
drip.
An alarm, faint, as though heard through cotton, or dirt.
drip.
Ringing in her ears.
drip.
Shepard tried to move, and bit back a cry as her head pounded in protest, as every muscle strained like a dreadnought had pinned her down. Pain like a jolt of electricity lanced up her left arm. Her breath wheezed in her lungs, and she saw stars in the darkness behind her helmet.
Not again.
She forced her eyes open, squinting against the glare of harsh sunlight in a pale yellow sky, and listened to the still-beeping alarm. Not a hardsuit bleeding oxygen. Something else.
No icy chill. No looming planet below her.
Not Alchera.
drip.
Right. A planetary mission, cache recovery, electrical interference of some sort that prevented accurate scanning. Mercenary AA guns, and a klaxon and a concerned VI, and....
The alarm sputtered and died with a pathetic whine, and left her with the crackling and the harsh scrape of her own breath.
drip.
And whatever was dripping.
She tried to move again, and bit out curses through clenched teeth when her head and her left arm both spiked in pain, white-hot, enough to briefly black out her vision. Her suit beeped at her, insistent about some danger, some structural compromise, but she couldn’t address it just yet, riding the waves of pain like training had drilled into her, wondering why her suit’s medi-gel hadn’t deployed yet.
drip.
Finally, her breathing stabilized, and she was able to open her eyes again. Fixate on her left wrist, where her omni-tool would normally flash to life with just a gesture.
Arms...weren’t supposed to bend that way.
drip.
Nor was her hardsuit supposed to be leaking. The casing around her forearm was dark, wet, and it took her several dazed moments to recognize fresh blood against the blue ceramic, oozing slowly out of a crack in the plates to fall to the ground with a steady—
drip.
drip.
A second drip, out of sync.
Shepard’s head snapped up—she regretted it immediately as the throbbing nearly knocked her over and bile rose in her throat—and she squinted through the pain to look around. She hadn’t been the only one in the Hammerhead.
The vehicle in question lay in two halves around her, metal warped and blackened with soot, a few pieces still burning where they’d fallen. The engine housing still belched smoke from overheated shields. Everything stank of acid and melted plasteel.
And there, half-hidden by twisted bars of metal and a particularly dented exterior panel, lay the blue and silver armor she’d dreaded to find.
Garrus.
Lying in a blue-stained puddle.
Shepard cursed and pulled up comms on her omni-tool. “Normandy, I need an evac, over.”
Silence.
“Normandy, this is Commander Shepard, do you copy?”
Nothing, not even static.
Which meant the Hammerhead’s radio booster was fried, and the electrical interference was effectively blocking whatever range the omni-tool could manage on its own.
Shepard grunted and let her head fall back briefly against the paneling beside her—regretting the sharp movement yet again—and began to take stock of her situation as training took over.
It was ICT all over again.
1: Medical
Step one: stabilize herself. Shepard couldn’t help Garrus if her own injuries were a liability.
Her left arm was broken. That much was obvious.
She brought her omni-tool interface up on her right arm—awkward, but better than trying to use her left at the moment—straight to the personal medical diagnostics, and scanned the results. Broken arm, concussion, contusions. Non-life-threatening bleeding from the break. That was something, at least. Medi-gel deployment had been damaged in the crash—she’d have to have words with Miranda about shoddy Cerberus construction in her hardsuit—but at least the diagnostic indicated she still had three doses available.
She glanced over where Garrus lay, and stamped down the fear that tried to bubble to the surface.
Best save the medi-gel. She’d manage without it for now.
But a broken arm was going to be a problem without support.
Shepard gritted her teeth, grabbed her wrist, and with quick and precise movements, realigned the broken bone as best as she could. A small, helpless yelp escaped despite herself, and she took a good minute or two to try to even her breathing back out, before she pulled up her omni-tool again. Omni-gel resources were still accessible, thankfully, and with a few adjustments, she soon had the fabricator building a splint around the break, using the omni-tool interface itself as a framework for the supports. Crude, but it should hold until she could get back to the Normandy and Chakwas.
More importantly, it would keep her from making the damage worse as she tended to Garrus.
Still, she found dizziness trying to reclaim her by the time she stumbled to where her boyfriend—if she could call him that yet; their relationship was still tentative, still new, only half-spoken in late nights beneath the skylight in her cabin—lay among the twisted ribs of the Hammerhead’s engine casing. The drip of blue turian blood was steady, but slow; she hoped that meant minimal injuries instead of a slowing heart rate, and cursed herself for not installing the squadmate vitals app in her breather helmet.
Her breath caught in her throat when she rounded the dented exterior panel and got a good look at him.
The metal ribs twisted around him like a briar thicket, and Shepard was pretty sure at least one of the bars had breached his hardsuit.
The dripping blood mocked her.
She didn’t even think, just surged forward with a fresh burst of adrenaline, grabbed a bar in her good hand, and threw all her enhanced strength into bending it back and out of the way. Her muscles burned, her head pounded, but her only thought was to free him, to get close enough to see if he was even still alive. One after another, chest heaving with exertion on top of pain, her brain running in wild metaphorical circles between worry and terror and focus and the incongruous mental image of prying open the galaxy’s worst blooming onion. Slowly, bar by bar, she uncovered Garrus’s lanky frame, and slowly, bar by bar, she felt her panic ebb.
Only one bar actually had broken through the hardsuit completely. Three others had dug uncomfortably deep gouges into the ceramic or lodged between plates, but she’d been able to pull them away too. But the last...she winced at the clear exit hole in his side as she dropped to her knees beside him and brought up her shaky good arm to run a medical check.
She nearly fainted in relief to see the numbers pop up beside heart rate, oxygen, body temperature. In the yellow, certainly, and he was unconscious, but he was alive, and assuming the scanning software—written by Cerberus, but with heavy modifications from Mordin and Chakwas—was accurate, the metal bar that had impaled him had deflected off of part of his carapace and missed his vital organs.
With the knowledge that he wasn’t about to die on her before she could even figure out how to define their relationship, focus took over in full. “Stay with me, big guy,” she murmured, and synced up his suit vitals to her omni-tool. It was no heads-up health display, but it could at least alert her if his situation changed.
Which it did, almost immediately, with a flashing red alert notification and frantic beeping the moment she tried to shift him to look at his entry wound. His heart rate spiked, and the dripping blood picked up speed. She flinched back and frowned, leaning down to try to get a better look.
The bar was still attached to part of the structure beneath it, on which Garrus lay, and trying to move him was clearly pressing against something important, or something painful, if not both. She couldn’t just lift him off, even if her arm wasn’t busted, because the bar was probably slowing the blood flow, but at the same time she couldn’t just leave him there like a skewered bird until they could finally get an evac. She recalled ICT too well. Safety and medical care could be too far away. She needed to act now.
The alerts flashed all the brighter as she sparked up a cutting torch on her omni-tool, both for Garrus’s vitals and for the tool’s power supply as it burned through plasteel. She’d have to run a diagnostic on the tool itself for damage later. It held out long enough to cut the bar down where it stuck out from Garrus’s side, and then to cut it free from the structure beneath him, before it flickered out with a whine about low power. Shepard thanked all the deities she could think of including the spirits Garrus so frequently invoked as she hooked her good arm around his waist and maneuvered her shoulder under his, and slowly she awkwardly sidled with him to the less mangled cabin half of the Hammerhead.
Her head and arm throbbed. Alerts bleeped at her in her helmet. Her omni-tool flickered to life again just long enough to pop up a warning about an incoming storm before going dim.
Somehow, she got Garrus into the cabin and settled on the floor between the seats, though it left her winded and queasy from pain and exertion.
Shepard fumbled with her omni-tool, then cursed and grabbed at Garrus’s wrist to try to activate his. It took a few tries, trying to remember what gestures he’d used to bring it up in the past, and some creative swearing, but eventually the warm orange glow lit up around his arm, and she found his medical diagnostics. A few swipes, a sigh of relief, and then she had both of his doses of medi-gel pumping through his suit’s distribution system to at least stabilize him.
She tried not to think about how that left them with only three more between the two of them.
2: Shelter
Shepard jerked awake, and immediately went to palm at her omni-tool for the time and winced as she jostled her bad arm. Groggy and disoriented, she looked around for a few frantic moments before recalling where they were.
Rocky mountainsides all around them. Yellow sky, a bit pinker than before. Scrubby plants that grew thicker and taller downslope from where the Hammerhead lay in two—mostly—pieces. The bits that had still been burning had snuffed out, though the smoke and heat that drifted off of them indicated it hadn’t been all that long.
Garrus, tucked between the Hammerhead’s seats in the cabin half.
Shepard, aching—head, left arm, spine, several minor places all over—leaning awkwardly against the console where she’d dozed off, a new crick in her neck and pins and needles down her spine from the bad angle.
And a cool breeze blowing in, kicking Shepard’s foggy brain into gear, into the next steps of survival.
Injuries were stable for the time being. The report on the planet had mentioned a long rotational cycle, which meant more dramatic temperature extremes. The days were pretty hot. The night would be practically frigid.
Turians didn’t do well in the cold when they weren’t injured.
They needed shelter.
Shepard sighed, braced herself, and heaved back to her feet. Her head pounded less, but it took her longer than she’d like for her vision to clear after the shift in position.
Three doses of medi-gel between them. She needed to save them.
The front half of the Hammerhead was, thankfully, still mostly intact. Scorched where the shields had failed first, but it had been the engine that had gone, contained in the vehicle’s rear. Shepard found herself grateful that she’d opted not to bring a third squadmate for once; their usual seat in the cargo space was speared through like a pincushion.
Shepard really needed to have a word with Miranda about shoddy Cerberus construction.
The walls of the cargo space were ripped apart, but the reinforced storage compartments remained intact, though several had been fused shut by the engine rupture. Shepard booted up her omni-tool again, sitting through two false, flickering starts and three failed attempts for the self-diagnostics to send error reports back to the manufacturer for feedback—failed, of course, due to a lack of signal boosters and the electrical interference in the planet’s atmosphere—and then a quickly fabricated omni-blade and she was able to cut through the latches of the worst-mangled supply compartments.
Slowly, a pile of supplies formed near the cabin. Less than Shepard would have liked, of course, but better than nothing.
Better than being dropped on a remote asteroid with nothing more than a base-issue omni-tool and two ration injections, at least.
Here, she actually had thermal blankets. Ground cloths. Signal flares and a first aid kit. Spare rations, though all of them levo, of course, because why would the human supremacist group supply anything else?
Once she was done scavenging, and while her body was still riding high on the adrenaline and focus of survival, she prowled around the crash site examining each loose exterior panel of the Hammerhead for the largest ones she could actually move one-armed, dragged them over to the cabin, and started jamming them as walls around the breach that had once been the secondary row of seats. The Hammerhead’s rocket launcher hung like dead weight from the upper nose of the wreck, and Shepard spared a brief grunt of irritation at the useless thing.
If it had worked properly—if any of this hunk of junk had been as good as the Mako—they wouldn’t be in this mess.
She ran out of panels before she ran out of holes to cover, but some careful positioning of thermal blankets filled in the last gaps, and Shepard judged that her shelter should remain warm enough—mostly—through the night.
Hopefully.
If the temperatures in the planetary report were accurate.
With the way things were going, she wasn’t going to hold her breath.
Instead she moved her pile of supplies into the shelter, and set to her next task.
She grabbed a thick ground cloth, which she spread out in the mouth of the cabin with the thermal blankets flipped back and out of the way for the moment. Some more heaving—and ignoring of med alerts in her helmet—and Garrus soon lay on his good side, folded thermal blankets supporting his head and a second rolled ground cloth tucked under his waist. The first-aid kit—human-issue, of course—found its way beside Garrus next, followed by the only two bottles of clean water that hadn’t ruptured, a rip-pouch of strong soap, and the only bottle of disinfectant. Finally, her helmet beside it all, once she was sure the air was breathable, so she could better see what she was doing.
And then, with the precision and care of both survivalist and maybe-girlfriend, she started removing Garrus’s hardsuit one piece at a time where she could to better expose his wound for cleaning and care.
He finally roused—painfully, with a gasp and a twitch and a sudden bleating of alerts on her still-faltering omni-tool—when she was halfway through stitching up his thoroughly irrigated wound. She met his delirious eyes as she rubbed the back of her knuckles along the side of his neck in a soothing motion, and offered a smile when he managed to focus on her face. “Hello, big guy,” she murmured. The light of turian anatomy diagrams and her old notes on field first aid cast his face in an orange glow.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” he mumbled, trying to look around.
“No,” she hummed, and went back to stitching his wound up once she was sure he wasn’t going to jerk away. “There’d be drinks if you were.”
He tried to chuckle at that. It came out as a cough, and she braced half-soaked gauze against his injury as he hissed through his sharp teeth. Her translator picked up an oath or three among the sounds.
“Easy there, I’m almost done.”
He shifted a little, gingerly repositioning his head on the makeshift pillow of thermal blankets. “As far as ways of getting my shirt off go, I think this ranks at the bottom,” he groaned.
“I agree.”
His eyes flicked back to her and fixated on the splint bracing her left arm, then up to her face. Her lips pressed into a thin line. He didn’t say anything, and instead looked up at the scorched panels of their shelter, and the view of yellow and rose atmosphere beyond. Shepard tried not to think about the smudges of dark clouds gathering with increasing speed on the horizon.
Based on his silence, Garrus agreed.
3: Communication
The temperature had dropped notably by the time Shepard finished with Garrus’s stitches, packing the wound with a little extra gauze and an antibiotic ointment a quick test determined was compatible with turian physiology. She helped him pull his undersuit back up over his shoulders and then eased him to the most comfortable corner of the cabin with one of the thermal blankets that had made up his pillow wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl for warmth, and then cleaned up the blue-stained mess of her makeshift medical workspace. There was no water left for washing—it had all been spent to clean her hands and then his wound—so instead she draped the ground cloth over the portion of their shelter comprised of blankets and tacked it down, and figured if the approaching storm included water that might at least clean things up. If nothing else, the blue stood out against the rusty red and chalk white of the rock outcroppings that surrounded them.
Of course, the moment she turned away, Garrus tried to move. His hiss of pain—another turian curse, judging by her translator’s growl—had her turning back and glaring at him before he could move more than an inch, and he balked at the fierceness in her face.
“Don’t. Even. Think about it,” she snapped.
He ducked his head and settled back against the passenger seat. “I was just going to look at the comms,” he said, holding up his arm, omni-tool glowing and displaying a connection error.
“Then tell me what you need. I’ll bring it to you.”
“You’re going to bring me the whole console?”
She huffed. “If I have to. You are not undoing all my hard work.” She jutted her chin out toward his bandaged side.
He didn’t need the whole console, it turned out, but she did still disconnect and hand over several large components of the comms panel. Several had clearly been fried by electrical damage, and Shepard wasn’t so sure it was collateral from the AA gun.
Notably, the shield generators were also fried.
“Well, it was your decision to charge the AA tower head-on,” Garrus hummed with a laugh, components spread around him, screwdriver in one hand and a circuit board in another. He pointed at her with the screwdriver and gave a teasing wink.
She shifted to stick her tongue out at him before going back to carefully pulling wires from a relay board. “The Mako could have handled that maneuver and you know it.”
“Just because it didn’t fall apart when you drove it over the top of mountains....”
“What’s the point of six-wheel drive if you don’t use it?”
His bark of laughter made something in her chest flutter, and she was glad the console frame hid her blush from him. “I still don’t think that was the intended use, Shepard,” he said with another warm hum.
The fluttering sensation caught in her throat. “I told you, you can use my name.”
“Shepard is your name.”
“My first name.”
There was a long, heavy pause between them. Shepard didn’t dare look over at Garrus, afraid of what emotions might be crossing his face. Perhaps too deep for bringing up so early in the relationship. Maybe not deep enough for what she hoped.
A crackle of static cut through the silence, and Shepard nearly hit her head on the underside of the console in her scramble to sit up.
[...pard, come.... ...rmandy...copy? ... Comman... ...stat...?]
“Well, it’s something,” Garrus said with a shrug, dodging the awkwardness that still lurked at the periphery of the moment.
Shepard nodded, but as she opened her mouth to reply, another alert popped up on her omni-tool. The storm was picking up in severity, and approaching quickly, bringing with it a cold front ahead of the planet’s expected nighttime temperature drops. Shepard waved it away with a grunt of concern, and pushed herself to her feet. At Garrus’s quizzical head-tilt, she waved her good hand at the comm parts. “Keep working on that. Storm’s coming and I need to make sure this won’t all fall on our heads before evac.”
“Try not to break anything else,” Garrus said with a cocky flare of his mandibles, gesturing vaguely at her broken arm. She could still see the tension in his shoulders, the way his mandibles twitched slightly, the turian equivalent of biting his non-existent lips.
Instead of calling it out, though, she simply nodded. “I’ll be as careful as a cat in a dog kennel,” she said with a wink.
“Human idioms make no sense,” he grumbled, and went back to poking at the half-assembled comm-unit.
She laughed and stepped out of the shelter to triple-check for gaps and weak points, only for a sudden burst of static from her omni-tool to startle an un-commanderly yelp out of her.
Garrus’s laughter crackled through the static. “Comms check,” he said, and she could easily visualize his smug look at catching her off-guard.
“You’re sleeping outside the shelter tonight,” she retorted.
“And undo all your hard work?”
“Watch it, Vakarian.”
“The first name thing goes both ways you know.”
This time, she let the awkward silence linger on purpose.
4: Food
The sky really was lovely, with orange and rose and threads of purple bleeding across the yellow as the sun set. Thick clouds gathered slowly overhead, indigo edged in the fiery wash of brighter colors, and the first stars could be seen winking to life as the light faded. Tendrils of energy occasionally crackled across the expanse, and Shepard wondered if they were related to the electrical interference that was messing with comms.
Unfortunately, it was also colder, and the storm would make it all but impossible for extraction until it passed, which meant she and Garrus would have to hunker down for the night.
And that meant needing to find her turian some food.
Satisfied with the sturdiness of the shelter walls, she slipped back through the blanket curtains and nudged Garrus’s boot with her own. “Any luck?”
He barely spared a glance up at her, but pressed his foot against hers to show he’d noticed. “I’ve got a beacon pinging every few minutes right now. No luck on clearing up the signal with the Normandy, though I’ve caught a few words here and there still. Sounds like Joker and Miranda haven’t given up on us yet.”
“Miracles,” Shepard muttered, and began rummaging through her supply pile.
“Hey, at least it means she’s forgiven you for her breakup with TIM.” He grinned at her, wide and toothy, and she suppressed a chuckle at how he looked like an overly exuberant bird.
She pulled a tester kit out of the supply pile. “Please tell me you have a food testing kit on you,” she said, clipping her kit to her belt. “Cerberus didn’t think to include any dextro ones in the Hammerhead’s supplies.”
His grin turned to a frown, or rather the turian equivalent. “Food?”
“Cerberus didn’t think to pack dextro rations either,” she said with a shrug, hiding a wince as her broken arm throbbed slightly. Going without medi-gel was a beast, but she could manage, if it meant saving the last three doses for Garrus. Especially if they were in for an overnight campout.
Garrus made to stand up.
Shepard fixed him with her fiercest no-nonsense glare, the one that had demanded respect at Elysium and helped to earn her rank, and saw him visibly blanch. He settled back down.
“I don’t have a broken arm,” he pointed out instead.
“I won’t bleed out if I move too fast,” she replied.
His eyes darted to her bad arm, and his jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
They stood in stalemate, each silently challenging the other to back down, each stubbornly refusing to, until a rumble of not-so-distant thunder rolled across the sky above their heads. Shepard broke eye contact to look up at the ceiling of their shelter. Too close for comfort.
“Look, we don’t have time to—”
Garrus growled and tossed a small case at her with a hissed curse. To her relief, she didn’t even fumble her one-handed catch despite being caught off-guard, and she clipped it beside her own kit.
“I’ll be careful,” she insisted.
He pointed at her. “You’d better.”
“That an order, Vakarian?”
His jaw tightened again. “Come back alive.” All joviality had fled from his tone.
She inclined her head, a promise, and stepped outside.
Unfortunately, Shepard discovered—after a short hike back along their flight path—that the AA tower was protected by ground-level turrets that fired on her the moment she got in visual range, and she cursed herself for carelessness in assuming it would be an easy walk-up. It was definitely abandoned. EDI hadn’t detected any transmissions or other activity while they’d been in orbit, and noted that visual scans showed the area overgrown and uninhabited by anything other than native fauna. But whoever had built the AA tower had built it to last, clearly, and left it defended by ground-level turrets.
Shepard hated dealing with turrets. Hated it more with one arm broken, because it left her without her primary asset, her Widow rifle. She’d have to whittle them down with her pistol, or hope to get close enough to take them out with incineration bursts and hacking.
At least her tactical cloak still worked, and allowed her to try to close the gap.
Even so, she was thoroughly irritated by the time the last one died with a pop and spitting sparks, and had taken several bruises where her shields had given out under fire. Her armor’s ablative coating could only take the brunt of sustained fire for so long.
Still, she didn’t touch the medi-gel.
The AA tower was refreshingly simple to deal with once the turrets were gone. No further defenses, blast doors already half rusted off of the control panels they were meant to protect. Eclipse tech, if she had to guess by the interface and the faded emblem on the side, but several years old judging from how outdated the firewalls were. She’d hacked more complicated systems in her sleep while in basic.
“Hey Garrus, need any extra parts?”
His disappointment was palpable even over the comm channel. “You didn’t.”
“Just a few ground turrets. It was nothing.”
“Setting a poor example for your subordinate by lying.” He clucked his tongue in disapproval.
She chuckled. “Look, I had to take out the tower if we’re going to be rescued. Consider this early Christmas.”
“I don’t even know what Christmas is.”
She stuck her tongue out, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “Just send me your wishlist.”
“Might take a bit.”
“That’s fine. I’ll do a circuit.”
She hiked on through the rocky terrain, stopping occasionally to test tubers and scrubby plants for suitability for eating, pleasantly surprised to discover the planet was dextro-compatible. Not many plants got the green light on Garrus’s tester, unfortunately, but it at least confirmed that chirality wasn’t the issue. As she moved, she kept the most distinctive outcropping near the downed Hammerhead in sight, a jagged stone pillar that looked like a giant middle finger pointing at the increasingly stormy sky, painted in golden tones by the sunset that looked striking and stark against the indigo clouds.
It perfectly captured her feelings toward Cerberus’s idea of “preparation” in stocking the Hammerhead, and toward the Hammerhead itself.
She took a picture.
If she and Garrus survived this, she was going to have it printed and framed and hung right in TIM’s office.
Something scraped against stone nearby, and Shepard’s heart dropped to her stomach like a rock.
Her omni-tool pinged. Garrus’s parts list, probably.
She didn’t look. Too busy scanning the thick undergrowth around her.
“Shep?”
Was that movement in the long sunset shadows?
“Shepard?” Garrus sounded worried. “Commander?”
Pistol in hand again. Tactical cloak up. Left arm still aching, dull and nearly dead weight but ready with an incineration regardless.
Her comms crackled.
Something in the shadows charged.
“Shi—!”
5: Warmth
Garrus had moved to sit in the door to the shelter by the time she finally shuffled into camp, dragging a varren-sized body covered in scales and proto-feathers with her good hand, fresh scrapes on her face but feeling light and giddy for surviving the fight. Her left arm hung limp again, the brace she’d fabricated earlier clearly cracked and missing pieces. She tried not to show how it ached. She was pretty sure he could tell anyway.
“You didn’t,” he protested, irritation spilling through his sub-vocals enough that even she could pick it up, despite the lack of translation.
She dropped the creature near the cargo half of the Hammerhead and straightened up with loud pops in her spine. “It attacked me first.”
He humphed.
“And shorted out my comms. Some kind of organic EMP burst, I think.”
He growled, but it cut off with a soft hiss as he shifted and jostled his side.
“And you moved.”
“I was worried.”
She glanced over at him, surprised at the admission, and saw his face soften with something far deeper than simple worry. She still wasn’t the best at reading turian expressions, but he looked so human in that moment—no, not human, but unmistakable, his heart on display—that her heart clenched. She moved to crouch beside him, and pressed her good hand to his mandible. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He leaned into her touch. She let her hand slide to his neck, pressed her forehead to his, and allowed herself a moment to lose herself in the gentle vibrations of his sub-vocal purr. His skin was warm, almost concerningly so, but dry, his pulse strong. His heartbeat shivered against her fingers and settled her nerves.
There was no “whatever” to this relationship, she realized. She was in it deep, and was pretty sure he was too. More than enough for “worry” to pass beyond camaraderie and into something approaching....
She pushed the thought away. Not now. Once they were safe.
“Good news, though,” she said as she pulled away from him, and tried not to fixate too much on the involuntary little whine that escaped his throat before he could stop it. “The menace is dextro and edible.” She stood. “I just need to cook it first. Do you like your steak rare, medium, or well-done?”
She had to explain human steak-cooking practices to him as she built up a small fire and laid out a sheet of metal scrap across two stones to heat up for a griddle, even as the storm growled overhead, and lightning lanced down in the distance. Her omni-tool sparked and flickered when she tried to pull it up—she’d have to get a new one once they were back on the Normandy—but she shook it and managed to get it to function long enough to very roughly cut a portion off of the lizard-creature and set it to start cooking. The smell of roasting meat soon filled the camp.
When she jostled her bad arm and bit back a small cry, Garrus held out a hand. “Come here,” he coaxed, and after a brief moment of hesitation, of fighting the urge to remain strong and maintain the illusion of indestructibility, she gave in and went to sit beside him.
He immediately pulled her into his lap, despite wincing at his own injury, and she let him cradle her while he examined her arm. His fingers—somehow dexterous enough for delicate work despite being fewer in number than her own—carefully pulled the cracked pieces of splinting away and probed at the break. Her skin was too warm around her injuries, tender to the touch, and she hissed and leaned into him when he got too close.
His mandibles flicked through her hair, and she realized he was preening her a little. It felt...good, actually. Soothing. It took her mind off of the pain, if only for a moment, and she huffed out a little laugh as emotions bubbled up in her chest.
Maybe she was going to be defining the relationship sooner than she thought.
She tried to protest when he pulled one of her last medi-gel doses from her suit’s reserves and slathered it over her injured arm, but he just rumbled and ignored her complaints, and then cooling numbness set into all her nerves in that arm. Recovery from the scars of being rebuilt had been gradual, and she was too used to automated medi-gel dispensing in her suit. She’d forgotten what a relief it could be to push through the pain until it became a second skin and then have it disappear so quickly.
“Maybe next time don’t be so precious about the medi-gel,” he said, the tease back in his voice.
“I was saving it for you.”
He hummed. “Well. My field medic did an excellent job, so I think we can spare one for her.” He leaned in and scraped his mouth plates gently against her neck, the closest he could get to a kiss, and she laughed at the tickling sensation and tried to push his face away with her good hand and plant a kiss of her own on his cheek.
They broke apart when the meat was ready, and he ate while she pulled out a few thermal blocks—self-contained chemical packets that would radiate heat in a small space when broken—and set them just inside the shelter. It was still warm enough inside for now, but the temperatures would likely plummet beyond uncomfortable before the storm was over. Best to be ready, just in case. Then she set out flares around the perimeter of the camp, and the one beacon light for night visibility.
More thunder rumbled around them. Lightning danced across the sky. Shepard could hear rain in the distance.
Garrus finished his meal as the light faded. Shepard lit the flares, then helped Garrus back into the shelter where they pulled the cushions from the Hammerhead’s seats and made a makeshift nest. Shepard tied the blanket door shut, and they tucked in together for warmth.
A particularly loud crack of thunder sounded overhead, and the rain came down in a torrent seconds later.
The shelter held.
Despite the fuzzy edge that medi-gel applied directly to the skin tended to give Shepard, she wasn’t ready to sleep just yet. Neither was Garrus, so instead the two of them wrapped in the thermal blankets and listened to the rain and to the shelter walls rattling, and swapped stories about basic training and childhood and what sort of nonsense they got up to when their superiors weren’t looking. Shepard practiced simple phrases in the turian language. Garrus tried his hand—or vocal cords—at English. They both dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter at simple mistakes. At some point, Garrus made sure they each got one last dose of medi-gel.
The thunder continued to rumble around them, and flashes of lightning frequently lit up the edges of the blanket curtain that closed off the space.
Eventually, when Garrus’s fingers—stroking through Shepard’s loose, black hair in a soothing repetitive motion—started to slow as sleep dragged his muscles down, Shepard nuzzled her face into his cowl and hummed in the way she knew he liked. “Get some sleep, Garrus,” she murmured against his warm, smoky-scented skin.
“You first, Alex,” he mumbled, and her breath caught in her throat. He didn’t seem to notice.
“What if....” She cleared her throat with a soft cough. “What if I sang? Would that work?”
“You sing?” The syllables were definitely slurring now.
“Just a lullaby my mother used to sing to me, when I wanted to stay up to see my dad’s ship come in.”
He huffed a soft laugh. “Stubborn even as a fledgling, huh?”
She smiled. “Something like that.”
There was a long pause, and she thought he’d finally fallen asleep, before one of his mandibles twitched in her hair. Preening again. “Is your singing better than your dancing?”
She resisted the urge to poke him. “Rude.”
“Mmm...sorry.”
His breathing evened out a little more. She pressed a kiss into his neck, and heard him rumble in contentment, deep in his chest, like a cat.
“Please,” he finally whispered into her hair. His breath was warm.
In the warmth and relative safety of their shelter, Shepard sang.
Dream, little stardust
However far you roam,
A river of moonlight
Will bear you back home.
Survival
They woke to birdsong.
Shepard was stiff, sore in one hip where it had found the ground between cushions, her arm throbbing with the threat of blossoming back into pain as the dregs of medi-gel faded. Beside her, tangled with her, Garrus groaned and sucked in a sharp breath when he jostled his injury.
But it could have been worse.
They were both alive.
Shepard got halfway through checking Garrus’s bandages before he pulled her down to nuzzle her hair, his sub-vocals buzzing with emotion her translator couldn’t pick up, but she thought it sounded like relief. Giddiness. Elation at having survived. She couldn’t say she didn’t feel the same, and even though she really needed to check on his wound and change the dressings on it, she capitulated and let him hold her close.
Her heart thumped against her ribs, its own drumbeat of insistent emotion.
Neither of them voiced it. It would keep for later.
Garrus finally let go long enough for Shepard to finish changing his bandages, and then she helped him carefully maneuver to the opening of the shelter, and lifted the blanket.
The storm had passed, and left everything wet and cold but clean. The sun cresting over the distant horizon painted the world in lines of gold, glinting off of water that still collected on the stiff leaves of the surrounding scrub trees, and a riot of tiny colorful flowers blanketed the surrounding rocky hillsides in the aftermath. Fog pooled in the lowlands. There was no rainbow arcing above, but the sky itself had taken on the hues of one like an iridescent bubble.
Garrus leaned in one more time to nuzzle behind Shepard’s ear as the comm-unit in the shelter crackled to life.
[Normandy to Shepard. We see your beacon, Commander. Prepare for extraction.] And, after a pause, [You’re a sight for sore eyes.]
Shepard leaned into Garrus’s chest and laughed as he complained about human idioms, and laced her fingers through his.
Whatever this was, she wouldn’t trade it for the galaxy.
