Chapter Text
A new cycle began. Garrus wasn't a particularly good sleeper — whittled down by too many years of snapping awake in the battery, in the barracks, in the room above Shepard, instantly on alert for some new catastrophe. But this, he found, was the best sleep he had in memory. Each time he woke and found himself stunned by the reality of Shepard beside him — that she was reachable, someone he could touch — he made his way back to her. On the few occasions he woke and found her gone, he hunted her down and made use of whatever furniture was nearby: the kitchen island, the low couches, the bathroom vanity.
The apartment’s light dimmer setting kept them in perpetual dusk. By the time they finished their final round and decided it was actually time to start the day, the morning was creeping towards noon.
Garrus straightened the apartment while Shepard finished up in the bathroom. Standing idly in the living room, he stared at a collection of small punctures in the armrest of the couch. Something churning sour in his chest clicked up a notch. Liara was going to have a field day. He hid the punctures with a throw pillow.
Shepard strolled into the room, clothed in the human: day attire she’d found in the bin. It might as well have been labeled for her: loose black pants, a tight-fitting black shirt. She was carrying a bulging backpack and a pair of shoes, the latter appearing loose and malleable.
“Sneakers,” she explained, and he vaguely remembered the word. “No boots. I’ll have to lodge a complaint with the Broker.”
“I’m sure they’ll remedy the situation, post-haste.”
She tossed him the backpack. A quick investigation revealed the contents: their clothes from the night before. As he pawed through velvet and fine linen, his talons clicked against something metallic. The flashdrive. He pocketed it hastily.
When he glanced up again Shepard smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling with the soft gesture. This was officially the longest interaction they’d had without trying to take each other’s clothes off. She seemed comfortable and relaxed. So why was his jaw clenched so tight it ached?
She hopped onto the kitchen island to put her shoes on. Almost on instinct, Garrus crossed the room, lifting the shoes from her grasp. Their fingers brushed, a ghost of the previous night’s first halting step towards this morning.
Was that the first? Or would that be the teasing, the dancing, or something he stumbled through four years prior? Garrus focused on these thoughts as he knelt before Shepard, carefully grasping the heel of her foot and easing the shoe on.
Her fingers slipped over his fringe, a gentle caress that both explored and remembered. She touched him like all the memories lived inside of her already — like she'd known him his whole life.
“What are you doing?” she asked, and he could hear the smile in her voice without looking up.
“I became very adept at human footwear back when… when I lived in your apartment. I just never had the opportunity to show off my skill — you didn't want the help.” He knotted the laces, precise to a fault; the dangling laces were the exact same length. “Making up for lost time.”
Her fingertips stuttered like a hitched breath. “I hated asking you for more. You'd already done too much.”
“No such thing.”
Pros and cons: he always thought clearer on his knees. Kneeling on the floor, he realized he was postponing their departure. He didn't want to walk out the front door. Why? The thought grated at him, a splinter, like something stuck in his back teeth.
“Well.” Her fingers resumed their journey, brushing against a sensitive spot on the underside of his throat. “I figured we should talk about what you're going to say to your dad when he arrives.”
The bottom dropped out, a sensation so visceral he thought he'd hit the floor. That was why. Of course that was why. In the unfeeling, stark light of day, with no haze of alcohol or desire, he couldn’t bear to face reality.
He'd had one night with Shepard — yes, one incredible, blissful night. Now he was going to Palaven to train for Primarch. You couldn't ask someone to be your lifelong mate and move across the galaxy after one night.
Even if that wasn't an insane thing to ask someone — even if he thought whatever they had could withstand the weight of such a question — Garrus couldn't imagine a world where he took Shepard from the Citadel. From her life. Spirits, she'd only recently gotten it back.
The memories of her recovery, buried and barbed in the back of his mind, made an unwelcome appearance. Transposed on top of a life in Palaven, he saw her languishing in empty rooms, lethargic and purposeless, the light within her growing dimmer and dimmer until nothing burned but the cold fire of resentment.
Garrus briefly fumbled the second shoe, the flimsy material slipping in his nearly-numb palms. His fingers flexed in concert with his mandibles, a weak attempt to bring him back to the present, to this last gasp of sweet reality, to Shepard’s free leg brushing against his shoulder like she had nowhere else to be in the whole of the galaxy.
“Yeah, yeah,” he started, then coughed to clear his stuck throat. He finished tying the laces of the second shoe. Uneven. He wanted to fix it. He wasn’t sure how. “About that.”
Garrus slipped his hand into his pocket. His fingers wrapped around the cool metal of the flashdrive.
And so he did what he'd always done. In the eye of the storm, with the debris all around him: he decided to save what he needed to survive; decided how many blows he could weather. Focused on how not to lose his north star.
“I have a plan,” Garrus said, his voice a little more sure as it took shape in his mind — flimsy and jagged-edged, but a plan nonetheless. “But it's… a little unorthodox.”
“When have we ever been orthodox?”
Why hadn't he kissed her when she walked in the room? He wished he'd kissed her before he started talking, one last time in the reality of the night before.
“Liara told me my father selected a mate.”
Now Shepard’s hands froze entirely.
“What?”
Her voice came as if from an unfathomable distance. He almost risked a glance but resisted. “Sometime during the process. He finished the contract and both families agreed. There is a way to void it, though.”
“How? How do we do it?”
“With an alternative mate.”
Garrus pulled the flashdrive from his pocket, the cool metal biting at his palm. He could not look at Shepard's face, could only stare at the flashdrive. Tiny and insignificant, yet somehow still it held his entire future.
“Liara made this up. It’s a… it's a marriage contract. For us.” His words, stunted and halting, tripped gracelessly from his mouth. “We can say we became mates months ago, here on the Citadel, in secret. Liara can forge the dates. It will nullify whatever contract my father has. But the time justifies your refusal to leave the Citadel. If we were mated months ago, you didn't agree to go to Palaven. I— I really think this could work. The Hierarchy won't like it, but I bet they'll make an exception for you.”
He finally looked up at her and wished he hadn't. She stared at him, expression raw and cracked open. Even without subvocals, he could sense her confusion, her hurt.
Time clotted, dripping as slowly as blood from a corpse. Shepard sat in silence for what was likely only fifteen seconds, but Garrus felt each like a millstone.
She cocked her head before she spoke, her eyes never leaving his.
“Wait.” Her tone was not yet the brisk, sharp one she wielded when she was working to contain her anger, but it was balanced on a knife’s edge. “Let me see if I'm tracking this correctly. You are currently… engaged— to…?”
“I don't know who.” His words were barely above a whisper. “Liara didn't tell me.”
He saw the whirring behind her eyes, the hard recalibration. She slid off the kitchen island and out of his reach, and he pretended it did not cost him something to let her go. She moved across the room until she stood against the couch, and he stood to match her.
“Castis has a wife picked out for you. But by marrying me, you get out of it on a technicality. And you think he— you think the Hierarchy won't care that you have a mate off-planet just because it's me?”
“I mean… you’re Commander Jane Shepard. You're the most powerful soldier in the known galaxy, and you'd be the Primach’s mate.”
He winced as soon as he said it, before he even saw the disappointment on her face like a sheet of ice falling. Like she was a toy, a trophy placed on a high shelf.
He opened his mouth to rephrase it, but she was always quicker on the draw: “So I'm a bargaining chip.”
Garrus knew he was subvocalizing his frustration but couldn't stop it, couldn't fix it. The Primarch’s mate was not a vanity position — Victus’ mate still went on mission, after all — but surely she understood active Spectre was a step too far. Shepard answered to no government, no authority, but the Council — and she barely answered to them. She couldn't do that and be the government.
And more importantly, this was the life she'd managed to carve out for herself in the aftermath, after sacrificing everything for everyone else. He wouldn't take her away from that. He couldn't lose her again.
He felt like he was losing it — the thread, his words, his best friend. His fingers flexed, and he ran an agitated hand over the top of his hand. “I just— I mean— do you want to live on Palaven for the rest of your life?”
Garrus hated asking questions he didn't want the answer to. And still, he did it. And still, he saw her eyebrows crash together before she said, “No, but Garrus, surely there's another option.”
The breath ghosted out of him, sharp as a punch. He was going to Palaven. She didn’t want to go.
Garrus dropped his hand. “There’s not. I’ve gone over every angle. Even Liara— this is the only viable option.”
Shepard’s gaze jumped over his face as if she was trying to recognize him, recognize the lover she'd shared the evening with, recognize the friend who'd stood beside her for years. Pale light leaked in through the living room windows, cutting boundary lines between them across the hardwood floors. Marking unfamiliar territory.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “So I'd be your wife in name only. On paper, essentially.”
Garrus wasn't good at the backpedal; he loathed a retreat. “I’ll visit whenever I can,” he said, and hoped it sounded more earnest than placating. “You can visit whenever you want. We can— we keep doing this.”
He gestured between them, or tried too— in his haste his arm swung too low. She looked at the couch, where he’d giddily interrupted their breakfast to bend her over it. He watched her shoulders stiffen, the muscle in her jaw jump. She lifted her head to look him in the face again.
“So I’d be your wife. With benefits.”
“Shit,” he breathed. “C’mon, you know that sounds terrible.”
Her eyebrows flew up. “I agree Garrus, that does sound terrible.”
“Shepard, please —”
She flinched. He faltered. But what was left except this final truth? Reality was bearing down, sand in the hourglass slipping ceaselessly through his fingers. This was the only way they could be together. Why couldn't she see that he was trying to make it work?
“Please,” Garrus murmured. “I need your help. It’s you or nothing.”
For a brief moment, she covered her eyes with her hands. Weak light refracted off the ring still on her left hand. When she dropped her hand, something had shuttered closed behind her expression.
“Okay,” she said, and this was worse, her flat, even tone was worse than her anger. “Okay. Give me the flashdrive. I’ll talk to Liara.”
He handed it over. Their fingers brushed again, and he hated the way it felt like a closed loop.
“I’ll call you with an update,” she said.
Shepard had always been terrible at goodbyes. She was the kind of person most comfortable with simply leaving. That’s what she did then. She took the flashdrive, tucking it into her pocket. He watched her walk down the hallway, watched her reach the door. Watched her slip out of the apartment without a single glance back at him. Watched the door slide shut again.
Garrus sat heavily on the arm of the couch. He felt as if his bones weighed a metric ton. He allowed himself to tip over and sink down, burying his face in the cushions.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when his comm beeped. He answered before he even saw it.
“Shepard?”
“Garrus.”
It was not Shepard. He should’ve checked the screen.
Liara’s voice was so cold he thought instantly of a high rise office, her arms around his waist, her earnest threat: “I know one thousand places to hide a body.”
She sounded like she was thinking about the one thousandth and first. “What the fuck did you do?”