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Shepard was late for the most important meeting of her day. Damn councilors and their “we just need a few clarifications on your last report.” She could forgive them for a lot of things, but making her miss even five minutes with Garrus wasn’t one of them. Not so soon after she’d gotten him back. She barreled into the starboard observation lounge with two bottles of whiskey in one hand, two glasses in the other, and some highly imaginative suggestions for how they could spend the next hour on her tongue.
Which she quickly kept to herself when she realized the turian silhouetted against the window wasn’t Garrus.
“Primarch Victus. I wasn’t expecting to find you here tonight.”
The Primarch turned. “Commander. Garrus received a potential lead on his family’s whereabouts and is following it up. He sent me to keep you company while you wait. I realize I’m a poor substitute, but I confess that I wouldn’t mind a chance to talk away from the war room.”
Shepard was nothing if not adaptable, and any lead on Garrus’s family was worth a little disappointment. “Seems as if talking is most of what we do these days. Can I pour you a drink?”
“Please.”
They sat on the sofa and Shepard poured four fingers of whiskey for each of them. She should have offered up a toast as they drank, but for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with something that didn’t sound trite in the midst of a war. She took a healthy gulp and the alcohol burned all the way down.
“How good is the potential lead?” she asked.
Victus leaned back and studied his drink, showing far more restraint than she had. “It’s a long shot. But I know Talus Vakarian. He’s even more stubborn than his son. If anyone can find a way off of Palaven, it’s him.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I do, too,” he said.
“You know, Garrus hasn’t been particularly forthcoming on his position in the Hierarchy now,” Shepard said. “I asked him point blank and he dodged the question. Don’t suppose you’d let me in on the secret?”
“I suspect Garrus is even less excited at the prospect of leaving the battlefield than I am,” Victus said. “Not that the Hierarchy gives us any choice.”
Shepard quirked an eyebrow. “That, too, is a dodge. You’re both better at politics than you think.”
Victus smiled. “Let me ask you this: how important is Garrus to you and your mission, Commander?”
She opened her mouth to answer and promptly shut it again. Garrus was a helluva shot. Her most reliable gun on the ground in any mission. A sounding board. An excellent tactician. Someone the rest of the team looked up to. A grounding presence. A breath of levity. A solid hand on her shoulder. A friend.
And yet, none of that even began to explain his worth — to the mission, and certainly not to her.
Eventually she shrugged. “Garrus is… irreplaceable.”
Victus laughed quietly. “Then let us just say that the Hierarchy is coming to share your opinion.”
She knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the galaxy figured out what she’d known for a while. She should be happy for Garrus, and she mostly was. But part of her wished he’d remained her little secret. Let everyone else see a failed C-Sec officer who’d lost a fight with a gunship. Then she could have the astonishing man he’d become entirely to herself.
“You know, the old Shadow Broker had a file on Garrus. Said I was ruining him. Squashing his leadership potential before it had a chance to develop.” She swirled her drink. She’d intended her tone to be light, conversational. It sounded guilty and falsely nonchalant. “Guess he did okay anyway.”
“Commander, that may be the first time I’ve ever heard of the Shadow Broker getting something wrong,” Victus said.
“Really? How so?”
“All of us career military kept our eyes on the younger generations. Garrus was one of the most promising we’d seen. We expected him to stay in the military or enter Spectre training, and I’d have bet a year’s wages on him making it through to full Spectre. But he didn’t. Turned down the offers and joined C-Sec, like his father. It was, frankly, a shock.”
She nodded. “He idolized his father.”
“He did,” Victus agreed. “And Garrus was never, ever going to be like him.”
Shepard started to object but Victus held up his hand.
“Garrus is not his father. They share the same work ethic, the same sense of duty, perhaps some of the same skills. But they are very different people. Garrus tried to be his father and it came as no surprise to me that he failed. And then that he blamed himself for that failure.” He took another sip. “I know a thing or two about being an imperfect turian.”
She smiled. “That’s probably why I like you, Primarch.”
“Likewise, Commander,” he said.
“But at least you didn’t end up on Omega,” Shepard said heavily.
Victus grew serious. “Garrus told me about his time there. And I won’t pretend to fully understand why he went or everything that happened. But I do think it was important for him. He needed to find out what sort of leader he could be outside of his father’s shadow. The lessons were, if his stories are true, painful for everyone involved.”
A pool of blue blood. A gurgling noise. Zaeed’s voice, He’s not going to make it. She was in the middle of a goddamn war, tragedies everywhere, and she still sometimes dreamed of that moment. Of her heart stuck in her throat.
“But I don’t think he would have ever tried to find out what kind of leader he’d be if he hadn’t met you in the first place, Commander,” Victus continued. “Your mission to stop Saren changed him. You showed him a different way to be a leader. He stopped idolizing his father and—“
“Idolized me?” She snorted. It was such an undignified sound.
“Yes, perhaps at first,” he said. “Let me use a metaphor we soldiers understand. I believe you were like a concussive shot, Commander, knocking him out of the straight and narrow path his father had followed, the only path Garrus could see for himself.”
“I’m a concussive shot, eh?”
“Is that an insult to humans? If so, I apologize,” Victus said.
“No, comparing me to ammunition is… apt.” Maybe she even liked it a little bit.
“My point is, you did not suppress Garrus’s leadership abilities, Commander.” Victus finished his drink in one gulp. “I believe we have you to thank for finding a way to unleash them.”
She quirked him a smile, one of her best, and was rewarded with a warm one from him in return.
“He’s… very important to me,” she said quietly.
“That much is obvious,” Victus said. “I’m pleased that his feelings are… not as one-sided as I’d once feared.”
“What made you think that they were?”
“We fought side by side on Menae and I don’t think he ever spoke more than three sentences without invoking your name in at least one of them.”
Her face grew warm. Hopefully Victus would think it was the alcohol. She’d thought about Garrus constantly while she was stuck on Earth. It sure as hell beat thinking about the threat of the reapers every goddamn minute. But it was gratifying to hear that he’d been doing a little thinking about her, too.
“I’m not going to tell you not to hurt him,” the Primarch said. “He’s not my son, you’re not my daughter, neither of you is fragile, and we’ll likely all be dead soon anyway.”
She chuckled, a little warily. “And yet, I get the feeling that there’s some advice coming my way regardless.”
Victus set his glass on the table. “Only that I hope you take every opportunity to find happiness in whatever time we have left. With so much death surrounding us, it seems a crime not to seize every moment of joy within reach — however quiet. However fleeting.”
Shepard bowed her head, wanting to hide the sudden thickness in her throat. She was saved by the door to the lounge swishing open.
“Primarch. Shepard.” Garrus walked in, still in his armor. He looked tired.
“Was it your family?” Victus asked, but Shepard already knew the answer. She could read it in every line of Garrus’s body.
Garrus shook his head and joined them on the couch, sitting on the other side of Shepard. She felt his knee brush hers, but only for a moment.
“You two done talking about me?” Garrus asked.
“For now,” Victus said. “I’m sure you’ll do something later that requires additional discussion.”
“Of that you can be certain,” Garrus agreed. Then he sighed, letting some of his weariness show on his face, and rubbed the back of his neck. “For the next five minutes, could we pretend that there’s no war and that the three of us have just met up in a bar after a particularly grueling day doing something wonderfully mundane?”
“How mundane?” Shepard asked.
“Oh, as dull as possible, please,” Garrus said.
“In that case, I spent the whole day catching up on vids and drinking coffee in my PJ’s,” Shepard said. And she knew exactly which PJs, too — her oldest pair of sweatpants that didn’t have any holes in embarrassing places and her Blasto tank top, an ironic gift from her mother that she un-ironically adored. Wearing that outfit made her feel eighteen again. Eighteen and without a single thought of reapers.
“I was out in the garden,” Victus said. “There’s a particular flower that my wife used to love, and it’s been too long since I’ve planted any. So I spent the whole day with my knees in the dirt, digging my fingers into moist soil and helping something grow.”
Garrus smiled. “You never mentioned that around the campfire on Menae.”
“No, I didn’t,” Victus laughed. “Soldiers want to hear about different sorts of conquests. What about you, Vakarian?”
Garrus tilted his head. “Hm. I think I’d make enough food for an army, grab my sister Sol, and force her to rewatch Fleet & Flotilla — plus all the terrible spin-offs — until she begged for mercy.”
“You’re that kind of a brother, are you?” Shepard asked. She never got him to talk about Solana.
“You mean the intolerably irritating kind? Yes, of course I am.”
She almost reached over and squeezed his hand then, but managed to stop herself. Regardless of her conversation with Victus, there were things one just didn’t do in front of the Primarch of Palaven.
The Primarch, however, was a shrewd man. He stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll head back to the war room. Thank you for the conversation, Commander. And for the drink.”
“Thank you for the advice, Primarch. I’ll take it under advisement,” she said with a smile.
Victus nodded with military brusqueness. “See that you do, Commander.”
The door had barely swished closed when she felt Garrus’s hand wrap around hers, warm and delightfully familiar, even after all this time. “Do I want to know what sort of advice the Primarch found fit to give you?” he asked.
Shepard set her empty glass on the table and stood, tugging him up with her. “I would rather just show you.” She wrapped her other hand lightly around his neck and drew him down for a kiss.
It was a long, slow kiss, and she tried to pour everything she felt for him through the warm connection of her lips on his mouth, the tingling slide of her tongue along his. All the pent-up longing, all the friendship, all the want and need that only partly had to do with sex. His subvocals rumbled to life, his version of the same.
When she finally separated herself from him, she felt breathless and shaky, only his hands on her back keeping her from falling back onto the couch.
“Damn,” Garrus said, after he’d found his voice again. “I owe Victus a drink.”
She traced the lines of his face with her fingertips. “Come back to my cabin with me, and by morning you’ll owe him a whole damn bar.”
“Mmmm,” he said, nuzzling the hair at her temple. “I definitely like the sound of that.”
She pulled him towards the door, lightheaded from their kiss and the violent storm of emotions roiling through her. “You know, I left something out of my fantasy before. The one where I’d spend all day in my PJs watching vids.”
“Oh? Do tell.” He followed after her, his hands touching her arm, her waist, anything he could reach, as if she would disappear if he didn’t constantly assure himself that she was real.
“You’d be there, too,” she said, pulling him into the elevator and tapping the button for her cabin. “We’d spend the day reading and watching vids. Maybe work out, in the gym or in the bed.”
“Bed. I definitely vote bed,” he said, pushing her against the wall of the elevator, his body heavy against hers, and nipping a line down the side of her neck.
“You’d make bad jokes and I’d laugh at them just to be nice.” She ran her hands over his arms, his back, his waist.
“You are always so nice. What then?” he asked. His voice sounded huskier, his breathing more ragged. Good. He needed to catch up.
She paused to kiss a tiny line along his mandible. “Well, then we invite Sol over, of course. This is both of our daydreams, after all. Then when you make us watch Fleet & Flotilla, your sister and I can bond over your horrible taste in movies.”
He stopped moving, his hands stilling on her waist. He pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes.
Damn. She shouldn’t have mentioned his sister. Shepard waited, but he stayed there, breathing rapidly. The elevator door slid open behind them but he ignored it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I say something wrong?”
Garrus wrapped his arms around her and crushed her close, pressing his face into the curve of her neck. She could feel his heart thudding in his chest, a deep bass line in contrast to the low rumble of his subharmonics.
“No,” he said finally. She expected him to say more; he was so good at communicating, so quick, so rarely without words. But he said nothing, and he didn’t let her go. He was clinging to her so desperately. Was it fear of losing her, or happiness for being with her again?
Both, she thought suddenly. With us, it’s always both.
Eventually, she pushed him towards the open door of the elevator and towards her cabin. “Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s go to bed.”
He nodded and let her lead him inside.
“Shepard—”
“I know,” she said, her chest tight. “I know.”
Victus had called it “quiet joy.” But right now, touching him, it was all she could hear.