#drums writes

“I wasn’t sure it was gonna work all that well,” she said, staring at their hands. “I was hoping it would. You’re not the only one who wanted something to finally go right.”

There was silence, after that, and no movement from him. She was about to withdraw her hand when he raised his, interlocking their fingers. It was a little unusual, a curious meeting of five on one side and three on the other, but she knew what to do. He’d been the first to try, hours before, fingers quickly finding hers in the soft cabin light as soon as she'd started moving with him towards the bed.

This the kind of research on humans you’ve been doing, Vakarian? she’d asked, voice thick, looking at their weirdly intertwined fingers. Turians didn’t hold hands like that. He’d only smiled, and let her finish leading him to her bed.

He was smiling then, too, as he looked at their joined hands. Very faintly against the hum of the ship, she thought she could hear the low rumble of subvocals.

“I don’t know about you, Shepard, but it did go right, for me.” He looked up at her, letting go of her hand. “There’s no one else I’d rather have done this with.”

“Me neither.” She smiled back, letting go of a deep sigh. “Thank you for this. And for listening to what I was actually trying to say when I made that… questionable proposition.”

“What do you mean questionable? I just recall you confessing an uncontrollable attraction to my scars. Oh, and a very smooth metaphor about sparring.”

He was wearing one of his smuggest grins.

“Now you’re just being an ass. It was your terrible metaphor.” That did nothing to wipe out his smirk. “And if you really wanna talk about sparring, I did come out of this one on top.”

[...]

“Garrus is requesting entry to your cabin, Commander.”

Her hands stopped moving on the cover, and she folded both in her lap.

“Thanks, EDI. Let him in.”

The Ardat-Yakshi monastery is quite possibly one of the worst things Garrus has ever witnessed, and that’s coming from an ex-vigilante on Omega who saw the almost entirety of his squad get decimated. The nagging feeling of impending doom starts pretty strong with the corpses lying all around, but as soon as they make their way further into the empty halls they find banshees, and if that still isn’t the most horrifying Reaper creation they are ever going to find on the field, then he’s ready to quit. At this point he’s scared of precious few things, but a corrupted Ardat-Yakshi closing in with biotic teleportation while he tries to snipe at it ranks pretty damn high on his scale of nightmares. They are not ready for it when they encounter the first one—and really, can anyone ever be ready for something like that—so it takes them by surprise, and there’s a moment when he swears the banshee is a second, a moment away from grabbing Shepard and impaling her with her claws, and there’s a scream rising in his chest to rival that damn banshee’s wails— —until Shepard herself becomes a blur and goes nova right in front of it, staggering it and rolling away after firing a shotgun blast at point-blank range. Spirits, but he loves that woman.

She does it after Tuchanka for the first time. They are standing in the war room, finalizing details about the deployment of krogan troops to Palaven, discussing plans for the Crucible—cementing a triple alliance that would have seemed impossible only months before. Shepard is all duty, armor quickly traded for the dress blues of the Alliance she rarely wears, a steady grip around the Primarch’s hand when they shake on their promise of collaboration. Her face is neutral, if cordial, her voice steady. But her neck is stained with dried blood just above the collar, and there’s still white dust in her hair from the debris falling around her. When Primarch Victus leaves, she leans over the terminal, and there’s a twitch in her right arm she can’t quite hide. She keeps fiddling with the commands, reading reports and updates on their assets, but she is visibly exhausted, the shadow under her eyes darker than the day before. When he brings it up, she doesn’t even look at him. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”.

thank you @malewifezevran for the lovely tag! i can't draw to save my life lately, but having just finished ME3 i have an inordinate amount of feelings about Shepard and Garrus, most of them soaked in angst, so i thought some Turian rebel introspection might work for a late wip wednesday!

She hid her smirk in her hand, resting her elbow on her knee. “Yes. You’re fighting Collector Drones and you can only pick one—your armor or your visor. What’s it gonna be, Vakarian?”

“The great Commander Shepard, wearing a toy visor. I could make good money selling this information, you know.” He settled his head against hers, the unscathed side of his face resting on her hair. “The public deserves to know.”