#misseffect

"You never took [name] out dancing, did you?" she says, without thinking.

The smile slides away and he reaches for his beer. "No."

"Why not?" she asks. He shrugs, non-commital. "She's smart. Pretty. You got along."

He stops with the bottle half way to his mouth. "Never got around to it, I suppose."

"There must've been something."

He huffs an exasperated sort of laugh. "It was months ago, I can't remember. It just - " He waves the bottle vaguely. "I don't know what you want me to say."

Me. Say it was me.

"Just wondered." Her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. "I forgot to ask how it went."

He sets the bottle on his leg and picks at the corner of the label with his thumbnail.

Shepard swallows. There's something reckless creeping over her. The kind of feeling that pushes her to one more punch, one more shot, one more needling question to goad out an answer.

"Have you dated at all since Chloé?"

"A little," he says, without looking at her. "Not lately."

"How come?"

"Christ, Shepard - "

"What? You could've had your pick of the damn ward when I was in hospital."

"Yeah, that would've gone down well."

"I didn't mean - " They're steaming towards an argument. "Women like you, Garrus. "

He scoffs.

"Oh, bite me, you're a catch and you know it." Shepard takes a long gulp of her beer so the acrid, cigarette-butt tang sticks to her teeth. "And at this rate you'll have to wait for the good ones to start getting divorced."

Garrus just shakes his head. He doesn't look angry, exactly, but there's something coming off him that she can't get a read on. Shepard sets her bottle down on the coffee table.

"Honey, I don't know why you broke it off with Chloé and I won't ask you to tell me, but - "

"It's not about Chloé."

"Then what?"

For a long, slow moment, Garrus just looks at her. His face is set in stubborn lines but that mournful, affectionate look hasn't left him.

Years of case files and gunfights are stretched out behind them; brass knuckles, lemon muffins, broken bones, cold stake-out breakfasts, favours owed and repaid a hundred times each way, and threaded through them is that incessant, silent wanting. Like an itch. Like grit in her shoe.

Except it's Garrus. And she knows him. In all his vengeance and loyalty and bull-headed kindness, she knows him. The man who holds more of her in his hands than any other living person. Deserving of whatever kindness the world has to offer.

If he'd wanted her at all - in any of those moments - Shepard would've seen it.

"I'm sorry," Garrus says, and suddenly he's all soft, sad, blue eyes and there's an impossible, shivery feeling building in the pit of Shepard's stomach - in her chest - in her throat.

Surely she would've seen it.

Wouldn't she?

"I'm sorry," he says, quieter still, and this time it sounds like goodbye.

"Don't." Her mouth feels like radio static. "Don't."

And she kisses him.

He goes still as startled rabbit. The rain outside seems louder, suddenly, and it's as if everything - as if five long years of trust and loss and joy - is balanced on the head of a pin.

She pulls away. He looks flushed and dumbstruck in the soft, orange light, and the shiver in her chest feels like it's gone to her bones. Her heartbeat is pounding in the base of her skull.

Shit.

Fuck. Fuck.

"Garrus, I'm - "

You’re real. A little crazy, maybe – (she grinned which made him want to say it again) – but real.

She’s only human, Joker said, when Garrus went to him about it the sleep-cycle after.

But surely – Garrus maintained – surely the problem was that she wasn’t only human anymore. And if even Shepard didn’t know exactly where she ended and Cerberus began, how the hell was he supposed to?

Joker only shrugged, bafflingly unconcerned. She still snorts when she laughs. Pretty sure the Illusive Man wouldn’t have burnt his credits programming that into a VI.

But she made different choices, too, and Garrus didn’t need a masterclass in human body language figure out they were all fuelled by rage. She took Maleon’s research, gunned down David Archer’s brother, and stepped out of Garrus’s scope – not out of compassion but out of spite.

Though she had given him Saleon, too, hadn’t she? Without Cerberus, before Lazarus, she had given him Saleon without even blinking. And even if her choices were different lately he couldn’t call them bad calls with any honesty – they just came from a different place. A place that saw death waiting and walked right on by.

What was different – really, truly, frighteningly different – was standing across from her in the muted blue light of her cabin, and watching her pulse climb the counter on his visor like they were about to drop in the Mako. It was feeling her palm slide quietly over the good half of his neck (who knew humans were so warm) and drawing incrementally closer to her until he could count the – what had she called them? – freckles on her nose.

And her skin – Spirits, her skin – like Tuchanka sand; all sloping peaks and troughs, deceptively soft and broken up by scars that faded to rubble on the edges. He’d seen the veins on her inner wrist enough times – tiny rivers of Asari blue – but he’d underestimated the sheer variety of colours humans wore before they even got dressed. She carried every imaginable shade of pink; deeper in places (around knees, elbows and knuckles) and barely-there in others. As she sat with her legs either side of him on the couch in her cabin, he noticed her toes must be cold because they were tinged with purple.

That, he reminded himself, wasn’t new information either. Sitting across the Mako from her on Noveria, in weather even climate control couldn’t fix, he’d asked why her mouth was turning blue in the corners.

Purple means cold, red means hot, she told him. He’d asked what blue meant, because it was obvious she wanted him to. Blue means get me the fuck off this planet, Garrus.

With his forehead resting against hers, he breathed carefully. At least her toes weren’t blue.

‘You must be the only man in the galaxy who could give three gangs the finger, and still go weak at the knees when I take my pants off.’ And her eyes crinkled at the edges when she grinned.

‘You’re Commander Shepard even with your pants off,’ he said, trying to remember how his voice was supposed to sound.

He felt her brow rise. It was an expression he’d caught himself replicating lately.

‘Do I scare you?’ she asked.

In another context a few weeks earlier, it might have been a difficult question.

‘Only as much as you scare everyone.’ That made her laugh so he kept talking, anything to keep that sound going like the sputter of her Vindicator. ‘Remember that kid in Zakera Ward? She wasn’t crying because she couldn’t find her dad, she just took one look at you.’

Quick as pulling a trigger, they might as well have been playing cards in the mess for all the difference it made.

‘Riiight,' she said, emphatically, 'because I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with you, pretty boy.’

Her thumb tracing the groove under his jaw and his hands resting on her thighs still mattered, but what mattered more was that she was still Shepard and he was still Garrus. Even if they didn’t really know how to take each other’s clothes off. Even if they were a little frayed around the edges. Even if they never came back through the relay.