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It starts one artificial morning on the Normandy, with Garrus in Shepard’s bed, the warmth of her body still lingering on the sheets, waking up slowly to the sound of safety implied by the softly humming engines and the quiet clinking of metal as Shepard tinkers at her work bench.
Garrus cracks open an eye and watches her fiddle with her armor’s shield capacitors, her tongue sticking out a bit as she concentrates.
She’s so fascinating to watch when she’s tinkering. She’d told him once that machines were her first love; if she hadn’t been a biotic she’d have happily spent her life just creating new inventions, maybe in some R&D facility instead of firing guns out in space.
“What,” he’d said, “and miss out on this turian bad boy experience?”
She had laughed and knocked him off his feet with her biotics, pinning him to the bed. “The only thing that made this worth it, honestly,” she’d said, and kissed him.
Garrus chuckles softly at the memory, and Shepard’s head whips around, alert as always. She smiles when she sees he’s awake.
“Morning, baby,” she says, setting down her tools. “Sorry, did I wake you?”
And Garrus has never been a particularly coherent person during mornings, so when he hears her it takes several seconds to process her words.
Ba… by…?
Was that… was that an insult? Did Shepard just call him names?
“What?” he says, voice rough with sleep and subvocals thrumming with vague, still-not-quite-awake annoyance.
Shepard just laughs, rolling out of her chair to kiss him good morning, before she straightens up and starts to gather the rest of her clothes scattered on the floor.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” she continues. “And no, that wasn’t an invitation. I do really intend to shower.” She flashes him a grin – a quick, there-and-gone thing – but the fact that he’s allowed to see it is honor enough, he knows. “I’ll meet you in the mess for breakfast, okay?”
And then the sliding door to the bathroom closes with a pneumatic hiss, and Garrus is left on the bed, confused as hell, before he finds his voice and calls out, “Shepard, what did you just call me?”
He thinks he hears her laugh, but the spray of water starts and drowns out any other sound.
---
“Maybe it’s a translation error?” Tali offers helpfully as they stand in the airlock of the geth dreadnought, waiting for Shepard to cross the docking tube and let them in.
Garrus shifts uneasily on his feet, the steady thump-thump of Shepard's mag boots over the comm doing little to abate his uneasiness.
“Maybe. I hope so. I mean, I’m no baby,” Garrus says petulantly, and huffs when Tali snorts behind her mask.
“You cried when Shepard got back from Aratoht,” Tali snickers.
“I did not,” Garrus says, affronted.
“Yeah you did. EDI let me hack into the Normandy’s security cameras after Joker unshackled her. I saw you sniffling in the battery, you big softie.”
“I—” he says, losing all plausible deniability. “I was stressed,” he says instead, defensive. He kicks a stray bit of metal littering the airlock. “She could’ve died on that mission and you know it.”
“She could die on any mission,” Tali counters. “We all could.”
“You know what I mean,” Garrus grumbles. “And anyway, showing concern for my girlfriend’s safety by crying doesn't make me a baby.”
“It kinda does,” Tali says, and he can hear her smile behind her mask.
“Does not.”
“It does a little bit.”
Garrus glares. “Does not,” he mumbles under his breath.
“If you say so,” Tali says, the grin evident in her voice.
Shepard is still walking across the docking tube. Garrus’ visor informs him that his heart rate is going up. Spirits, what’s taking her so long?
“Hey,” Tali says, pressing two fingers gently against his wrist. “She’s gonna be fine.”
“Yeah,” he croaks out. “Yeah. It's just— she’s got this thing with open space, you know?”
“I know,” Tali whispers. “I was there.”
“I— yeah. Right.”
They hear the hiss of a door opening over the comm, the steady thumping of Shepard’s boots turning into her usual quick pace.
"But see?” Tali says, brightening. “I told you she'd be fine.”
Garrus lets out a sigh of relief. “Yeah.”
“So no need to be a baby about it.”
“What?” he says indignantly as the door in front of them slides open.
Tali just laughs, already running across the walkway.
---
He probably should’ve just asked Shepard, but between all the missions and meetings and frantic, clandestine make-out sessions there’s not a whole lot of time, and next thing he knows he’s on a shuttle headed to Cronos Station with Shepard and EDI.
It’s almost too easy to get into the swing of things; he’s been fighting with Shepard for what feels like forever, and it’s almost as natural as their tango on the Citadel.
Scratch that, it’s better than their tango on the Citadel, because firefights have guns.
Shepard biotically throws the Atlas pilot across the room before he can fully get into the cockpit, and Garrus follows up with a well-placed concussive shot that takes him out of the fight permanently.
Garrus takes a half-second to celebrate, which he really shouldn’t have, in hindsight, because suddenly he’s flat on his back behind cover, shields down, with a massive crack on his chest plate and what feels like a bruised rib or three.
“Garrus!”
He hears Shepard call to him over the alarms from his visor, her usually calm voice laced with panic. There’s the sound of an overload chain activating, followed by a round of rapid gunfire, before Shepard is dropping to his side, already fiddling with her omni-tool.
It takes a moment for him to register the notice from his visor that the area is already clear. He’d be pretty damn impressed if it was anyone but Shepard, but as it is, well. He’s gotten used to it.
“Garrus,” she’s saying, calling up the medi-gel dispensation program on her omni-tool. “Talk to me. You can’t die on me here, baby.”
“I will not,” Garrus coughs out indignantly, “die with last thing I hear is you calling me a baby.”
“I— excuse me?”
“I said I will not— urgk—!” Garrus winces as he twists a little bit the wrong way and oh spirits, that’s painful. “Shepard, I’m bleeding over here. Slap some medi-gel on your manly turian boyfriend, why don’t you?”
“Ah— right,” Shepard says, and a rush of relief washes over Garrus as the medi-gel kicks in.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Sure thing, baby,” Shepard says, grinning.
“And about that—”
“I hate to interrupt,” EDI says, very much interrupting, “but my sensors indicate that this station’s hangar venting protocols are about to activate in approximately sixty seconds.”
They make the mad dash to the control panel, with Garrus wincing at his still-sore ribs and a helpful countdown courtesy of EDI along the way. Shepard hacks into the terminal with seconds to spare, rolling her shoulders as she draws her pistol again and pops the heat sink.
“Right,” Garrus says, checking his rifle as they start moving forward again, “about this ‘baby’ thing—”
“What about it?”
“My research indicates that it is what humans refer to as ‘pet names,’ typically used between lovers or between parents and children to signify the closeness of their relationship,” EDI chimes in helpfully from behind them.
“You mean she says that because she likes me?”
“Given the length of your courtship, I hardly think you should be this surprised, Garrus,” EDI comments.
Shepard chuckles softly, sliding into cover as Garrus’ face turns a light shade of blue.
“Don't turians have anything like that, Garrus?” Shepard whispers, lining up her shot.
“Not really,” he says, peering through his scope at a Cerberus guardian patrolling the end of the hallway. “Turian relationship distinctions are all in the subvocals, mostly."
“That is correct,” EDI says cheerfully, stunning an engineer with an overload before Shepard takes him out. “My research indicates that the tone of Garrus’ subvocals when speaking to Shepard match the tone typically reserved for talking to one’s spouse—”
“Anyway,” Garrus cuts her off with the sharp cracking fire of his rifle, followed by the thud of a body falling onto the metal floor. “I can understand using ‘baby’ for a child, but for your lover?”
“I can only postulate that it is meant to signify the desire to care for one’s partner, in the same way one feels compelled to care for a child,” EDI muses, before announcing that the area is clear, prompting Shepard to move up to the next room and start hacking the fighter jet controls.
“Still weird though,” Garrus says, sweeping the room for anything useful. “Hey, EDI, did your research turn up any other alternatives?”
“A vast number. There is, in no particular order: honey, sweetie pie, pumpkin, cupcake, muffin, sugar—”
“Er,” he says, mildly perturbed. “Those are all foodstuffs, aren’t they?”
“Correct.”
“Are there any that don't invoke – er, edibility?”
“There is the phrase ‘moon of my life,’ popularized in the early 21st Earth-century by human author—”
“Mm, closer, but isn’t there anything short and sweet?”
“There is the term ‘bae,’ also popularized in the early 21st Earth-century. Contrary to what some humans thought, ‘bae’ was not a shortening of ‘babe’ or ‘baby,’ but rather an acronym that stood for ‘before anyone else.’”
Garrus hums thoughtfully. “Bae,” he says, rolling the unfamiliar word in his mouth. “Hm. Short, to the point. I like it.”
“No,” Shepard says, eyes still on the terminal as she worked.
“Bae, did you remember to bring spare thermal clips?”
“Garrus, no.”
“Oh, you didn’t? You can have some of mine. Don’t want my bae getting caught without a heat sink in a firefight.”
“Ugh,” Shepard grumbles. “This is your fault,” she says, glaring at EDI.
“I accept accountability,” EDI says evenly, the ghost of a real smile on her perfect chrome mouth.
---
They stand, looking out at the ruins of London, hand-in-hand in the face of uncertainty.
Anderson is mobilizing the troops a little ways off, and behind them Tali and EDI are linking their omni-tools and exchanging the codes for the targeting program they’ll be needing before EDI heads back to the Normandy with the others.
He and Shepard watch, silent, as a burning fighter jet streaks across the sky and crashes in the distance.
Garrus’ heart is thudding in his chest; his hands feel clammy in his gloves, but Shepard gives his hand a comforting squeeze and throws him a sideways smile.
“Ready?” she asks, the ghost of resignation and defeat lingering in the corners of her eyes.
He smiles, letting his old bravado leak through, and says, “You know I’m right behind you… bae.”
And Shepard looks at him, and blinks – once, twice – before her face morphs into something between trying to hold back a smile and looking like she’d eaten something incredibly sour.
"Something wrong, bae?"
And Shepard starts shaking, before she lets out an indelicate “Pfft—”
And then she laughs, happy and whole-bodied and free, and Garrus thinks that if he can make her laugh like this – here, in the middle of a dilapidated city on a broken planet, with Reapers raining down hell from the sky – then maybe… maybe everything just might come out alright.