Work Text:
“Where’s Shepard?”
It turns out no one actually knows the answer to this question. Garrus doesn’t know if it’s because the Cerberus operatives are recalcitrantly taciturn around him or if it is because they genuinely don’t know the whereabouts of their commanding officer. Whatever it is, it’s getting incredibly annoying.
Taylor seemed most apologetic, mentioning that Shepard had come in to load up her pistol, but didn’t mention anything else beyond pleasantries. Lawson brushed him off (he gets the feeling that she only tolerates him because she’s supposed to, which is just fine by him). Mordin didn’t even realize Shepard wasn’t around, but then again Mordin hardly pays attention to anything but his own research (which, once again, is fine by him).
“She’s probably just in her quarters,” Chambers said. Garrus knew this wasn’t true though. Shepard never sulked away on the first Normandy. In fact, one of her most persistently annoying quirks was how she hovered around the ship, pouring over maps and tactical charts, listening in on strategic conversations, and asking literally everyone on board how they were doing and what they were feeling and what their thoughts on the last mission were.
He misses that now.
She had a way of disarming you with her own unapologetic bluntness. It wasn’t rudeness — though certainly, she never took anything laying down. It was more so the fact she was completely honest and had no problem asking questions that others might balk at. There was a charm to her self-assuredness. She was earnest and idealistic without ever being naïve or unrealistic. She genuinely expected the best from people, no matter who they were, and yet, she had enough backbone and mettle that anyone could tell she wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in the jaw if you crossed her or didn’t rise to meet her expectations. And because of that combination, you couldn’t help but trust her. He’d seen first hand how she could talk down even the most menacing of adversaries.
“I’m a street kid,” she’d told him when he’d pointed that out. “I learned real quick how to talk to basically anyone — matter of survival, you know?” She laughed. “I was probably the sort of kid that you thought about arresting all the time back at C-Sec.”
“I never arrested kids,” he said. “Way I see it, if a kid’s involved in that sort of stuff, there must be something else going on. Tried to help ‘em. C-Sec didn’t always like that.”
“I knew you were soft-hearted under all that armor.”
“Point is,” he said, brushing her off. “I wouldn’t have arrested you.”
At that, she grinned, and with a shake of her head, walked right over to Williams, immediately asking her opinion on the mission. She never could rest. Garrus doubts that two years dead would change that at all.
It’s Joker he gets the truth from, of course. He doesn’t know why he didn’t ask in the first place, except, well, he gets the feeling that Joker never really liked him and that this was a case where absence didn’t necessarily make the heart grow fonder. To be fair, Joker doesn’t actually tell him where Shepard is. What he does tell Garrus is that the planet they’re in orbit around is also the site of the Normandy crash.
“Mineral scanning," Joker says, stuffing some popcorn in his mouth. “That’s what I told Miranda. But I figured you’d wanna know, since you were part of the old crew.”
He never says it, but Garrus knows Shepard is down there right now. What she’s doing exactly, he doesn’t know, but the thought of her combing through the wreckage alone, a small speck on a barren planet, makes him feel sad for some reason. Well, not for some reason. He knows the reason. She shouldn’t be doing this alone.
He’s had two years to mourn. So have Joker and Dr. Chakwas and probably everyone else on that original crew. They’ve had two years to grieve, to drift away, broken shards of a shattered asteroid now that their center of gravity had vanished to the void.
Shepard never had that same luxury.
He’d heard the rumors, but he didn’t allow himself to believe anything till he saw her in the flesh. And there she was on Omega, through a hailstorm of bullets, coming to save him.
He probably didn’t deserve it, but hell, if Shepard needed his help, he'd be there.
**
One of the peculiar things about being in space that Garrus never got used to is how you can never really tell when night falls. Oh sure, he likes gazing into the vast expanse of space as much as anyone can, but before he followed his father to the Citadel, he grew up watching the sun lift high into the sky before sinking low over the horizon as the planet settled into nighttime. But looking out the observation decks on the Normandy, all he can ever see is a dark night sky pin-pricked by distant stars.
He only realizes just how late it is when there are just a few people — those on shift, really — wandering the deck. When Kelly Chambers goes to bed, that’s how you know it’s getting late. He doesn’t bother to ask her if Shepard is back, because he knows she’ll just tell him some chipper non-answer (and if previous conversations are any indication, she’ll also try to flirt with him and he doesn’t know if he has the emotional bandwidth to be charming right now and he doesn’t want to be rude .)
It must be late, but he doesn’t feel tired at all.
If he can’t sleep, he’ll work, because at least he’s doing something that’s not wandering around aimlessly. He makes his way to the battery, typing in the entry code on the wall panel, and waiting for the familiar swoosh as the doors open. He’s here so often it only takes a second for him to notice that someone else is in here too, someone with familiar violet hair, slumped against the wall, whose face lights up the moment she sees him —
“What are you doing here?” he asks Shepard, who sits up a little taller.
“What does it look like?” She slurs her words, then gestures at the half-empty bottle on the floor next to her. “Having a drink.”
“You're having a drink on the floor of the ship’s battery.”
“I didn’t want to be alone.” She pauses. “I thought you might be here.”
He doesn’t know what to make of that and pauses in the doorway. She unearths another bottle from somewhere behind her and holds it up.
“I got you the good stuff.”
“You mean the only bottle of liquor on board this ship that I can drink.”
She doesn’t say anything, just shakes the bottle a little more. Garrus walks over and grabs the drink, sliding down the wall and sitting next to her. He hasn’t drank since joining up with Shepard again, which is probably for the better. Not that he drank at all the first time ‘round. On an official Alliance ship like the original Normandy, Turian liquor was hard to find. But in the time after the crash, drifting through Omega, he probably drank a bit more than he ought to have, looking for some renewed purpose.
He uncorks the liquor and holds it up to his mouth, pausing.
“Wait — this is my favorite.”
“I remembered.”
“How the hell did you get this?”
“Picked it up last time we were in the Citadel. I wanted to save it for your birthday, but I realized I don’t actually know when that is.”
"I don't think I ever told you." He takes a sip of the drink, the sour tang of the liquid familiar on his tongue. It's been a while since he's had liquor as nice as this. "I guess on the human calendar it'd be sometime in the spring. Not sure when."
"Isn't that weird to think about? How we all have different calendars? But somehow it all makes sense and meshes together, and except it doesn't really 'cuz space just kinda neutralized it all and…you know?” A crease appears between her brows. “I don’t know how old I’m supposed to be. I mean, I’d be 31, but I died, so does that mean I’m still 29? Or did I age while … " She fumbles with her words, which makes Garrus chuckle softly. He's suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to gently pat her on the side of the head. He doesn't do it, of course, even when she slumps further down the wall, her head lolling against her shoulder. It almost brushes against his arm.
He clears his throat.
“Don’t you have a whole fancy cabin to yourself now?”
“Too fancy,” she mutters. “I’m not used to fancy.” She glances up at him now, the glow of the battery reflected in her clear eyes. "I try not to stay too long. I feel out of place."
"Yeah, but you deserve it."
She's quiet for a moment, flicking her gaze forward again, as if she's looking for something far off in the distance. "I never had my own room growing up. It was small cots in crowded group homes till it was sleeping bags in rundown houses that had room till it was the bunks at the Academy."
“Right.”
“Even on the old Normandy, when I had my own quarters, it was tight and cramped and ... I don’t know. I was used to it.” She pauses. “This room has a fucking fish tank. What the hell do I do with a fish tank?”
“Uh. Keep fish in it?”
“I tried.” She groans and tilts her head back so it hits the wall. “They died the next day.”
At that, he nearly chokes on his drink, trying to hold back laughter. She slaps him on the shoulder.
“It’s not funny! You’re laughing at the death of innocent creatures — “ She struggles to keep a straight face but ends up bursting in laughter, which only causes him to laugh even more. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like this, but he doesn’t stop himself. They’re both laughing now, and he’s not even that drunk. But he feels light. Well, lighter. There isn’t much time for laughing these days. Even though Shepard is as relentless with her questions as ever, he can see the exhaustion in her eyes, how her smile never quite reaches them.
Not like they used to anyway.
Even right now, as she laughs, there’s an echo of sadness etched into her smile. Her lips don’t pull up the same way they did before, her eyes don’t crinkle into waning crescent slivers of moon like they once did. She snorts a bit, the laughter fading, as she looks at the bottle of whiskey.
“Fucking fancy Cerberus spending all this money.” Her voice hardens. “It pisses me off. All the money they spent putting that goddamn fish tank in my room could probably feed an entire family for a year.”
They’re both quiet now. Shepard grips the bottle tighter, her knuckles turning white. Garrus takes a long sip of his drink and listens to the barely-there hum of the ship. This Normandy is even fancier and sleeker than the first, which means it runs even quieter. But when you’ve been around ships a lot, you know what to listen for. It’s not so much a loud, apparent noise as it is a soft afterthought, something you notice the absence of more than you actually notice.
“They put a picture of Alenko in my room,” she says, after a moment of silence.
“Oh.” Garrus hadn’t particularly liked Alenko, but he hadn’t hated him, either. It was more of a grudging respect. Alenko was a good and capable soldier. Garrus did know that Alenko and Shepard were close. Just how close was a matter of rumor and suspicion, and to be perfectly honest, he’d never cared for gossip. He had overheard snatches of conversation between Williams and Tali, but figured it wasn’t his business to pry. It made sense, though. “That’s nice of them, I guess. Kinda weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t think Cerberus was that sentimental. Why didn’t I get a picture of him?”
Shepard laughs, bumping her shoulder against his.
“I’m sure if I ask Miranda, she can get you one.”
“Great, just what I need.”
They both laugh a little, though it’s certainly not as much as before. It dies off rather quickly in comparison. Garrus feels something strange bubble in his chest, something heated and heavy that he cannot quite parse. Must be the alcohol, he thinks, and takes another sip, because, clearly, that will help wash it away. As he lifts the bottle to his mouth, she speaks again.
“No one will tell me where Kaidan is.” She says Alenko’s first name, Garrus notices, and it comes out like a whisper, even if her voice isn’t particularly soft otherwise. “I guess that’s for the better. I’m sure he’s moved on.”
“Did you lo…?” Even with the alcohol flowing through his system, Garrus can’t bring himself to ask that and his words taper off before he can even formulate the end of the sentence. It seems improper, first of all. Second of all, he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer.
But Shepard understands.
“Yes,” she says, slowly. Immediately, she makes a face, her lips puckering like she’s tasted something sour and she shakes her head. “No.” A pause. She shakes her head again. “I don’t know. Maybe the fact it’s not a yes makes it a no. I guess I wish I could have been in love with him. If that’s what you were asking.” She laughs a little here, but it is hollow. “Kaidan makes me want to be a better person. He’s just so good , you know? Always sees the best in people. Thinks before he does anything. Tries better all the time. Two years ago… it would’ve all gone really differently if he hadn’t been there. I guess… if I loved him, maybe there’d be hope for me. Because he’s everything I should be.”
“That’s funny, because I could say the same thing about you.” It comes out before he can stop himself, the words loose on his tongue. Quickly, he adds, “I mean — not the in love part. It’s just… You talk to everyone on the ship to make sure everyone’s doing alright after every mission. You give people you don’t even know second-chances, even when they could shoot you first. You just fearlessly do the right thing, even when it’s not the easy thing. Especially when it’s not the easy thing. Being around you, well, it’s made me a better person, Shepard.”
He can’t bring himself to look at her, because he feels completely overwhelmed with embarrassment. It’s way more candid than he expected to be tonight, even with the alcohol coursing through him. Damn, maybe his tolerance just totally plummeted. He feels both heavy and light, in that odd, disarming manner happens when you speak a truth you’ve been holding onto for a while out loud.
“Garrus,” says Shepard, after a moment. She glances at him, eyes softer now. He fears she’s going to make a big deal about this and he’s going to have to relive the mortifying embarrassment of what he’s just said again — “It's been two years, you can call me Nyx.”
Thank Spirits. He chuckles, shaking his head.
“I can’t do that. It feels disrespectful.”
“Fine.” She smirks, the corner of her lip twisting up. Garrus never thought much of lips and the way they were shaped and how every human had a different way of moving them till he came aboard the first Normandy. Sure, he knew the general language of smiles and frowns from working so long on the Citadel, but he had to learn the hard way that sometimes Williams’ grin was polite and sometimes it was friendly . That Alenko’s tired smile usually meant it was better to say nothing beyond a greeting, but when it widened, that meant he felt chatty. And he learned that Shepard’s lips moved the most — twisting into smirks, widening into laughs, pursed into frowns.
Well, maybe her lips didn’t move more than most humans’. Maybe Garrus just paid more attention to Shepard, since he interacted with her more than the other humans aboard the first Normandy. That was it. Of course.
This thought briefly crosses his mind now, as he watches her lips twist again, tugging into a slow, lopsided smile, before she announces, “Then I’ll start calling you Archangel.”
Immediately, she bursts into laughter again.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Hey — now that’s not very respectful.” She snorts. “I happen to think it is a very formidable and respectable nickname —”
“I didn’t come up with it.”
“ Sure. ” She leans closer to him now and he can smell the whiskey on her breath. “Don’t pretend part of you didn’t think it was cool and sexy — “
“No.” He cuts her off. “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t hate it.”
That’s enough for her and she lets out a triumphant bark of laughter right into his face. He scoffs, pretending to be more upset by this whole thing than he actually is. (Though, he does, for the record, think it’s a stupid nickname; and also, he does, secretly, think it’s kinda cool). She keeps her grin on as she takes another swig of her drink.
Garrus looks at his bottle, at the curling script on the label. This probably wasn’t cheap. Not that he should be worrying about money, what with Cerberus tossing credits around like they're nothing more than space debris.
A silence settles over them again. It’s not awkward. It rarely is, though he’s certain that the heavy, yet pleasant, blanket of the alcohol helps in that regard. He’s become such a lightweight these past few years. He’s older now. Seen more things. Maybe that would turn some to drinking even more, but once Garrus figured out what he was gonna do on Omega, he needed to stay sharp.
‘Course, staying sharp didn’t help in the end.
Maybe nothing helped in the end.
It’s a fatalistic thought, but because all his feelings and thoughts are blurry right now, he lets it linger. It doesn’t taste bad in the back of his mouth. It simply is and he lets it pass right through him as it shapes itself into another thought, which in turn molds itself into a sentence and before he knows it, he’s speaking again.
“What was it like being dead?” Sober, it would be a weighty question, but now it comes out like he’s asking about how that last mission went or something along those lines.
Garrus realizes that perhaps he’s taking a leaf out of Shepard’s book tonight, asking all these questions. He wonders if anyone ever bothers to ask her how she feels after missions. He sure as hell hasn’t before.
This question is a lot, he knows, and she takes a moment to deliberate it, pursing her lips together and staring somewhere off into the distance.
“I’m not sure.” Her voice is soft, something between a sigh and a whisper. “I like to think it was nice. Maybe, because it wasn’t.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what he was expecting to hear. He doesn’t know if he believes in an afterlife. Turian religion, for the most part, emphasizes some sort of nebulous interconnectedness bullshit with spirits that he’s not sure he’s ever ascribed to. (He’s a bad Turian, he knows). But he likes to believe there’s something there. Something else. Something more.
There has to be something more.
This is all starting to make him feel very small in a way he’s not sure he likes. The alcohol isn’t helping. Neither is the growing silence.
“Why did you go down alone?” It’s been on the tip of his tongue the entire time — somehow this is the question he could not ask till this moment.
Once again, Shepard doesn’t answer right away. This time, though, instead of deliberating it in silence, she begins to rummage around in her pockets. He hears the sound of metallic clinking and glances over. From her jacket, Shepard unearths a handful of dog tags and holds them up, the red light of the battery reflecting the names etched into the metal.
Garrus doesn’t need a further explanation.
“All these people died for me,” Shepard says. It is matter-of-fact, a statement that is irrefutably true as the genophage destroyed the Krogan population or the quarians were driven from their worlds by the Geth or Shepard’s eyes are the color of starlight. “But I was the one who got to come back. Because Cerberus thinks I’m special.” A beat. Her face twists in pain, like she cannot comprehend what she’s done, like this was somehow her fault. “How fucked is that?”
Garrus isn’t sure what to say to that. Saying that he’s glad she’s back would undermine the guilt she’s feeling. Saying that she’s right feels like a lie, because he does believe out of anyone on that ship, if he had to handpick who got a chance to come back from the dead, it would be Shepard above them all — above Alenko, above T’soni, above himself. Especially above himself.
So what he does say, is another simple statement that is also irrefutably true.
"If you'd asked me, I would've come with you," he says.
She is quiet, her gaze locked on the dog tags. A minute goes by before she speaks, her voice barely above a whisper. "It's not your burden to bear."
Another moment passes.
"Maybe not," he says finally. He looks at her now, her face illuminated by the battery’s glow. She used to have a scar running down her right eyebrow and across her face, but it’s gone now. Cerberus fixed it up, she said, they kept everything the same except that ol’ scar. Not that her face is flawless. He can see the faint cracks across her skin from the procedure, the aftermath of the artificial reconstruction etched across her face.
He prefers the original scar. When he’d first asked about it, two years ago, she said there was a story that went with it — but with a wink, added that it changed every time.
He never got the real story. Nowadays, when she’s not paying attention, he sees her trace her fingers over where that scar once was, as if she is trying to grasp the ghost of who she used to be.
Garrus stares at her till she tears her gaze away from the dog tags. Their eyes meet.
"Maybe not," he repeats. "But that doesn't mean I can't help you bear it.”
She’s quiet again. The dog tags clink in her hand as she lowers them to her lap. Garrus recognizes the names that he can see, though he isn’t sure if he can picture the faces that go with them. He hasn’t really thought about them till this moment and now he cannot stop reading the letters etched onto the tags over and over, as if that will somehow conjure faces and personalities and histories that he does not know.
“I’m going to write a letter for each one of them,” Shepard says. “And send the letters back to their families. It’s not much. It’s barely anything. They deserve to be here with us. Not —” Her voice cracks. She lifts her free hand to her face, covering her mouth. It occurs to Garrus that he’s never seen Shepard cry. Not that he ever expected to see a famed war hero cry, and not that she’s even crying now, but there is a vulnerability in her face that catches him off guard.
At this moment, she doesn’t look like Commander Shepard, hero of the Skyllian Blitz and savior of the Citadel. She looks like Nyx Shepard, a street kid who joined up with the Alliance the moment she turned eighteen because she wanted to see the stars.
Of course, from the stories she’s told and the things he’s read, Garrus knows she’s never been just Nyx Shepard. Nyx Shepard hacked into hedge fund accounts in her teens. Nyx Shepard knocked the living daylights out of a pimp and rescued the underaged girl he was parading around. Nyx Shepard snarled at the cops who tried to evict her and the gaggle of others who’d been sleeping in an old warehouse. Nyx Shepard might’ve been a hungry, scrappy kid once upon a time, but there had always been fire in her heart and the world was damn lucky she was on its side.
But that didn’t mean Nyx Shepard was infallible. That didn’t mean she could carry the world on her shoulders without stumbling, even if everyone in the goddamn galaxy thought she could. The Alliance, the Council, and now Cerberus — each of them the same, in the end, just using her for what they needed, knowing that she’d always try and try and try.
Maybe he’s not better than them. He saw a hero in her face, when really all he should’ve seen was a woman. A remarkable woman, certainly, but a flawed woman, a vulnerable woman.
There are lines under her eyes, dark circles, which probably aren’t good for a human. She smiles less than she did. She takes a little more time to think before she makes decisions. She saved the entire fucking galaxy when no one believed her and they still didn’t fucking believe her and she was still going to save it — and he was going to be by her side the entire time. Because she didn’t have to do this alone.
Oh, he knows what it’s like to be the sole survivor. The guilt weighs down on him every damn day. But coming back when others died? That’d destroy him.
He doesn’t want it to destroy her. Not just for the good of the galaxy or whatever. But because she doesn’t deserve that.
“You can’t change what happened,” he says slowly. “But you have a second chance. The best you can do is make sure that second chance counts. And whatever you need, Nyx, I’ll be there.”
She looks at him now. At is perhaps the wrong word. He’s never seen her look this intently at him, the intensity of her gaze making him feel like she’s staring right into his mind. He feels his heart beat a little faster, just because this is weird and he’s drunk and they’re talking about death and resurrection and saving the galaxy and it’s a lot, but he’s glad that he’s here with her, that they’re together, that in this fucking mess at least they have each other and her eyes are starlight — and there’s another thought that equally scares and thrills him and he’s too drunk to comprehend which and right when he’s decided he should say something, anything, her lips tug up into a smirk —
“You said my name .” She barks a frankly uncouth laugh, knocking her head back against the wall and stamping her foot. “You did it! Ha, take that Mr. Respectful C-Sec — “
“I think you’ve had too much to drink,” he says, though he’s thankful that the moment has passed, that they’ve slipped back into laughter and teasing and whatever convoluted tangle his thoughts had knotted themselves into has faded. Perhaps when he treks back to his bunk, he’ll lie on his back and try to untangle them, picking them apart slowly. Perhaps he’ll let them fade away.
Shepard snorts. Her head slumps down to her shoulder, then she shifts so she leans fully on him.
“This armor cannot be comfortable,” he says.
“Shut up,” she grumbles. “Let me sober up a bit before I trek back to my stupid fancy quarters or I’m gonna accidentally fall in the fish tank somehow. Your brittle Turian armor will make sure I don’t completely pass out.”
“It is famously good for that. When you buy it straight from the manufacturer, it comes with a little label that says Perfect for when your commanding officer is completely wasted .”
“I’m not your commanding officer,” she murmurs, rolling her head a little. “This isn’t the Alliance anymore. We’re freelancers now.” She adds, “And technically, was I ever your commanding officer? You kinda just tagged along.”
“You invited me!”
“Technicalities.” She lazily waves a hand in the air. “Makes me feel less guilty about dragging you into this mess.”
“Stop that.”
“What?”
“Feeling guilty. I’m here because I want to be, Shepard.” He doesn’t use her first name because it still feels weird and also because he doesn’t want her to use it as a chance to detract from what he’s trying to say. “Everyone on this ship is here because they want to be.”
Well, except maybe for Jack, he thinks. And whatever test tube Krogan thing is in that tank. But that might undermine what he’s trying to say, so he doesn’t add it.
Shepard is quiet. Her breathing is heavier. He wonders if maybe she did drift to sleep after all and debates if he should shake her awake.
“Hey, Garrus,” she says, her voice just above a whisper.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Just… thanks for being here. Right here, right now. I didn’t want to be alone, even if I didn’t want to ask anyone to be with me.” Her words are sloppy, and she fumbles with them. “And also in a more macro sense. Thanks for existing, I guess. I’m glad I met you. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad for both those things too.”
She makes a little noise, something like an affirmation, but also a yawn. Whatever it is, it makes his chest clench for some reason. He listens to the sound of her breathing, waiting for it to get slower and heavier, so that he can shake her awake and tell her to get to her quarters. It is quiet. He hears that nearly invisible hum of the engine. It is rhythmic, methodical. He feels his head grow heavy and nearly jerks back awake. Once. Twice. His breathing grows slower. He wants to close his eyes.
There is a chance that tonight he’s going to let Shepard down.
Ah, well, at least it’s something like this. At least if they both drift off to sleep in a drunken stupor, it won’t be the end of the world. They’ll face that when it comes, but this? This, Garrus thinks, and it is the last thought he thinks before the exhaustion overtakes him, this at least is nice.