Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Garrus hadn’t realized that he was sighing heavily, or looking grumpy, until Tali called him on it.

They were in the cargo bay, Tali at the workbench and Garrus realigning his sniper scope. It was a good place for him to do rifle maintenance and for her to tinker with Chatika (and for Ashley to clean her own rifle, which she was doing with loving care sitting on the floor a little way away, and for James to work out, and really, Cortez was pretty patient to put up with all of them), but Garrus suspected the real reason that he and Tali and Ashley were there was that it was comfortingly reminiscent of being back on the old SR1, before everything had gone to hell.

Which was probably why he was sighing. Which he didn’t realize until Tali said, “Something wrong, Garrus?”

“No.” He programmed in a scope adjustment and frowned thoughtfully at the result. “Why do you ask?”

“You keep sighing. It’s a little gloomy. I figured you weren’t just doing it to amuse yourself.”

“I’m not sighing.”

It was Ashley who said, without looking up from her careful work, “Yes, you are.” (It was such a familiar pose for her, bent over her assault rifle. Much more Gunnery Chief than Spectre Agent. She even had her hair drawn sharply back from her face, held out of the way with a clip that looked disconcertingly like a claw.)

“I am?”

“Yes,” said both Tali and Ashley, in unison, and then looked at each other and laughed.

“Okay,” Garrus said. “I guess maybe something’s not great.” He put down his sniper scope. “But compared to everything, it’s a really trivial problem.”

“Compared to everything,” Tali said, punctuating with fingerquotes, “I don’t think a single one of us has a problem that isn’t technically trivial. Nevertheless. Spill.” He gave her a dubious look. Tali sighed. “All right, if you need me to start: I’ve spent the last ten minutes trying to decide if I want to recolor Chatika in pink or purple. Or maybe green. Green’s nice, I’ve never used green. But it would clash with my suit.”

Garrus chuckled.

James paused in his punching-bag workout and said, “Trivial problems? Here’s mine. I would absolutely kill for a fish taco, a real one. I know you can sort of make one with imported ingredients, but it’s not the same.”

Tali laughed at that, and then all three of them turned to look at Ashley, who was still bent over her assault rifle. She looked up, eyebrows cocked, and said, “What?” At their continued expectant expressions, she sighed and put down her handful of pins. “Fine. Sometimes I miss my pink armor.”

“You had pink armor?” James asked, clearly gleeful.

“Hey, I liked that armor,” Tali said. Then, “Okay, Garrus, now we’ve all unloaded our trivial worries. So?”

Garrus sighed again, and then laughed when he realized what he was doing. “Okay. So… Shepard’s really busy,” he said, and then rushed to add: “Of course she is. I’m not complaining, that would be petty when she’s saving the galaxy, and… everything. We’re all busy. But these days half the time we just see each other in passing—and when we do have time, we wind up talking tactics.” And having sex, but they didn’t need to hear that. “And it’s not that I resent it, really, I know that what she’s doing is more important than, you know,” he tuned his voice to a self-deprecating harmonic, “date night, but I worry because she’s running herself ragged and I know she has nightmares. And, well—”

“You want to do something romantic for her,” Tali said quietly. Garrus could feel blood heating his throat, but he nodded. “That’s really sweet. Even if you are too much of a clod to actually admit it out loud.”

“I’m not a clod.”

“Uh huh.”

“Tali.”

She giggled. “I was around when you two first hooked up, remember? You were a mess. I think you exchanged the wine for a different bottle five separate times. And there only are about five different levo-dextro-compatible wines in existence.”

“Thank you for your sympathy, Tali.”

“Oh, hush, I helped you last time, didn’t I?” And she had, even if that help had mostly consisted of patiently listening while he paced and fretted about what to bring and what to wear and whether he was going to screw it up—which, thank all the spirits both named and lost, he hadn’t. “I’ll help you this time,” Tali continued. “Let’s see, something romantic….”

She trailed off, and looked thoughtful. Vega’s rhythmic thump-thump-thump on the punching bag slowed, which meant he was pondering too. And out of the corner of his eye, Garrus could see that Ashley had slowed in her efficient cleaning of her Vindicator.

“Take her on a nice date,” Tali said. “Fancy restaurant?”

“Thought of that. We always wind up talking shop.”

“Take her to a show, then. Live shows are always nice. Hard to get caught up with work when you’re at them.”

“Most of the live shows on the Citadel have been canceled pending the apocalypse.”

“Hm.” Tali rubbed her knee. “Starlit walks on the Presidium? Dramatic declarations of love in inappropriately public places? I don’t know, I don’t really have a lot of experience with this stuff.”

“Doesn’t stop you making fun of me.”

“And I might even feel a little bad about it if you didn’t return the favor.”

“Dancing,” Vega interrupted, very suddenly. Tali and Garrus turned to look at him.

“Have you ever seen Shepard dance?” Tali asked.

“Well, yeah.” James pushed the punching bag to one side and walked around it to lean on one of the crates.

“Not exactly a pretty picture, huh?” Garrus said. “And I love the woman, but—”

“No, no, I didn’t mean like that,” James said. “Not club dancing type dancing. I mean something a little more formal, and a lot more sexy.” He raised his voice slightly. “Hey Williams, you know how to tango?”

Ashley had a packet of Alliance-standard cleaning cloths held between her teeth as she finished the disassembly of her rifle with both hands. She spat it out and raised her eyebrows at James. “Real smooth way to ask a lady to dance, Vega.”

“Hey, hey, I wasn’t hitting on you. I just wanted to demo for Vakarian. But if you don’t know how….”

“I know when I’m being baited, and I still rise to the bait,” Ashley said, setting her work down and wiping her hands off on the knees of her fatigues. “That’s a Williams for you. All right, yes, I know a little.”

“Great. Tali, I’m sending you a link to some music. Can you play it from your omnitool?” Tali bent to the task, and within seconds the strains of human music—a little tinny due to the limited speakers of an omnitool, but enough to get the feeling—filled the cargo bay.

Ashley paused to pull the clip out of her hair and toss it on the workbench and then crossed to Vega. Garrus watched as he held out his hand and she took it and they arranged themselves into what looked like a formal pose—certainly a lot more formal than most partnered dances he’d seen on the Citadel, where two—or sometimes three—pressed as close as possible and then squirmed. But they were still plenty close, with Vega’s hand settling on the small of Ashley’s back in a way that Garrus would not have expected anyone to get away with without losing that hand. Ashley caught Vega’s eye and gave a short nod, and they began.

It was… not quite like anything Garrus had ever seen. Their movements were crisp and decisive, and yet at the same time undeniably sexy; undeniable even to him, who wasn’t attracted to either Vega or Ashley. (He was a one-human turian in the literal sense; Shepard was the only non-turian he’d ever been remotely attracted to.) Vega moved surprisingly lightly for such a big guy. Ashley danced like she fought, decisive and strong and physical in a very immediate way, that left you with no doubt that her attention was fully here, fully now. The steps of the dance had the air of something stylized and yet, paradoxically, also improvised. And underlying it all was a sensuality so intense it was almost tangible, almost visible, as real as the radiation on Palaven, like an aura of light and heat around them. Body to body they danced, and it was at once like a fight just about to begin and like sex just barely restrained, and also like nothing else but dancing.

Though they clearly hadn’t had any time to practice—Ashley hadn’t even known Vega was going to suggest it, after all—they moved in sync, and it took Garrus a few moments before his sharp eyes detected the silent communication passing between them, the way Vega was speaking with his hands and his feet to direct Ashley without words. Even their breathing had fallen into a rhythm as they moved eye to eye, hand to hand, step to step.

They danced like that for a couple of minutes, and then Ashley said, “Not bad, Vega, but can you follow?”

“Uh,” Vega said, and without waiting for any more of an answer, Ashley shifted the position of her hands and Garrus could tell that she was one doing the silent directing.

Vega stumbled but recovered admirably well; they continued, boots loud on the cargo bay floor, accompanied by the thin strains of tango music on Tali’s omnitool. A few minutes more and as if by mutual accord they switched back, Vega leading, Ashley following, to a finale where Ashley bent backwards—backwards—backwards so far that her loose hair brushed the floor, so far that Garrus wondered at the flexibility of the human spine and thought vaguely that the space between their locked gazes was about to burst into flame.

Then Ashley straightened up with a gust of laughter that broke the mood. Tali and Cortez applauded.

Vega was giving her a look of mild consternation. “You can dance ‘a little,’ my ass. Where’d you learn to tango like that, Williams?”

Ashley gave him her smug smirk. “I think I deserve to have a few secrets, Mister Vega.”

Vega’s look had turned intrigued indeed, and he clearly had to drag his gaze away from Ashley to say, “So, Garrus, think Shepard would like something like that?”

Garrus hesitated, but Tali didn’t hesitate even a second. “She’d love it. Garrus, do it.”

“You going to teach me, Vega?” Garrus asked.

“Hell yeah,” Vega said. “Maybe with a little help.”

At first, with some coaching from Vega—and feeling like a mighty fool—Garrus practiced his footwork in the empty cargo bay. (Tali and Ashley had wanted to help, but Vega said that Garrus didn’t need an audience for his first stumblings, which meant that there was no one there but Cortez—who had a good reason to be there, and was good at not looking too unnecessarily amused—and Vega, who was doing the coaching. Also the ridiculous robot dog thing, but Garrus was pretty sure it didn’t have mockery in its programming.) There was so much to remember: how to hold himself, where to put his feet, how to step, how to move. Twice he considered giving up, and it was only Vega saying ‘Anybody who can master hand to hand combat has plenty of dexterity for this’ that stopped him.

Well, that and the memory of the way Vega and Ashley had looked, dancing: light and yet utterly grounded, and as if there was nothing else in the world just then but the dance. And they weren’t even lovers. It was hard not to imagine what Shepard would look like, like that….

Soon enough Ashley joined in as his partner, and Tali came with her; Tali spent her time sitting on the workbench, tinkering with Chatika and acting as cheering section, and to her credit she really was a cheering section, with no jokes at all. They needled each other all the time, but Tali could clearly tell when something was actually important.

“Sorry if I step on your feet,” he said as the music cued up, the first time he danced with Ashley. He hoped she didn’t know enough to be able to read the blush spreading across the thin skin of his neck. Settling his hand on her back seemed downright bizarre.

“Doesn’t matter if you do,” Ashley said, “everyone’s clumsy at first.”

And sure enough she was patient, the same way he’d seen her be patient with terrified young soldiers on their first serious deployment, the same way he’d seen her be patient with the grieving in the refugee camps. Just like Tali knew when to joke and when not to, maybe Ashley knew when you needed a kick in the ass and when you needed a pat on the shoulder.

He did step on her feet, more than once. Vega directed them, made suggestions, stopped them to correct Garrus’ posture or the placement of his hands or feet. He was a good teacher too—a great one, actually, thoughtful and focused, capable of quickly seeing how Garrus was going wrong and how to fix it; and in an odd way, Garrus was beginning to see why Shepard was so thoroughly confident that Vega would do well in N7.

Funny how something as silly—as trivial—as this brought out such different sides of all of them.

Occasionally they would stop and Vega and Ashley would demonstrate some step or show him how to fix something he was doing wrong, and his brief spike of despair (he was never going to look that fluid, that natural, that confident on the dance floor) was lost in admiration for their dancing, the way that slinky grace alternated with movements as staccato and decisive as the crack of a rifle. It was a dance that looked both sleek and abrupt, subtle and assertive, sexy and dangerous.

Perfect for Shepard.

After a bit, Ashley said, “Okay, as much as I’d rather do this, I have some work to catch up on,” and stepped back. She shot a glance over her shoulder at Vega, mouth tilting up at one side with amusement. “Why don’t you take over, Vega?”

“Uh,” Vega said, and then, “…sure, why not, I’m game.”

Vega wasn’t as practiced at following as Ashley, which left Garrus in the position of feeling as though he’d suddenly got much worse. He hadn’t quite realized how much Ashley’s skill at following was compensating for his own deficiencies at leading.

But it wasn’t so bad, because after a minute, Vega started to laugh. “Shit,” he said, “this is a lot harder than it looks.”

Ashley glanced up from her omnitool. “You know what they say about Ginger Rogers, doing everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in heels?”

“Who?” Garrus asked.

“Very famous ballroom dancer. I’ll show you later,” Ashley promised, returning to her work. “But first we need to find Vega some high heels.”

Shepard rubbed the nape of her neck in the elevator up to her cabin, willing the headache back. Part of it was exhaustion, part of it was frustration, and part of it was just the damn chairs she’d been sitting on all evening. She’d been talking to the leaders of an asari colony to help with an evac plan, and for all the humans were liable to think of asari as ‘blue women,’ they weren’t. They had a different musculature. Sit in an asari chair for too long and your head started to throb.

She made a mental note to get another batch of pain relievers from Chakwas. She didn’t want to rely on sleep aids too much—they made her groggy—but something to help with these persistent muscle-tension headaches, at least….

It was a relief and a delight when the door to her cabin opened not to the smell of stale air and dust but to the delicious aroma of food. Vat meat, probably, but she didn’t even care because the only thing more pressing than the growl of her stomach was the exhaustion in her limbs. Food already ready was a goddamn miracle, no matter how artificial.

And yes, there was Garrus, sitting in her chair next to two trays of food.

“Garrus, you’re a saint,” she said, pulling up another chair. “I am starving.” She gave the two trays a cursory glance and then pulled the levo meal toward her. (It was easy enough to tell her levo meal, in shades of reddish-brown, taupe, and green, from Garrus’ dextro meal, in shades of gray, blue, and purplish-pink. She had a great deal of fondness for her dextro companions, and absolutely no desire to taste their distinctly unappetizingly-colored foodstuffs.) She had one bite of the piping-hot vat-pot-roast already swallowed before she thought to say, “How do you always know when I’m going to be in so the food stays hot?”

Garrus grinned, mandibles widening as he took his own bite of blue something. “Cortez lets us know when he’s leaving with the shuttle to pick you up, then Joker fills us in on when the pickup is. Traynor lets us know when you’re coming out of the meeting room after you’ve filled Hackett in. That gives just enough warning to get your food picked out and heated and up to the cabin. I usually do the actual heating up, but if I’m busy or you’ve taken me with you it’s Chakwas or Tali who does the honors.”

Shepard stared at him, her fifth bite of pot roast hovering halfway to her mouth. “You all really don’t need to do that for me, really. I can wait. Or eat it lukewarm.” Although that was hard to say with a plate of hot, freshly-made (well, freshly-reheated) pot roast, mashed potatoes, and mixed vegetables in front of her.

Garrus’ mandibles pulled in. “We don’t mind,” he said. “Really. Think of it as a… benevolent conspiracy.”

“But—”

“It’s nice to be able to do something for you.” Garrus dragged his eating utensil—a turian implement, something like a cross between a single chopstick and a tiny spear, used to hook food and bring it to his mouth—against the plate, sopping up some of the whatever-sauce that doused his pink-whatever. “I mean, I think so particularly, but I’m not the only one.”

“Well,” Shepard said, and then lapsed into hesitant silence. “Thank you.”

Once she finished eating, there were messages to answer, tactical summaries to read—bad news, bad news, one piece of bad news after another—after which Garrus offered to give her a back rub to help ease her growing headache.

She stripped down and stretched out on the bed, letting him get to work. His touch was utterly wonderful. Between the suede texture of the skin on his hands and his three-fingered grip it felt nothing like being massaged by a human, but by now he knew—from experience rather than instinct—where to dig in to work the tension out of her strained muscles, where to ghost over the sensitive patches where she’d been injured, what kind of pressure she liked, what kind she didn’t. She lost track of time utterly, for the first time in days, until all she could feel was a deep relaxing warmth throughout her back and shoulders and an intense sleepiness more powerful even than the artificial sleep brought on by Chakwas’ tranquilizers.

“Thanks,” she managed, her voice heavy with weariness, when Garrus finally stopped. Through her exhaustion she felt a stab of guilt that she’d come in, devoured the meal he’d brought her, worked, and then fallen asleep under his hands.

But he nuzzled the back of her neck affectionately, and she knew from the tenor of the rumble in his chest that it was without any resentment at all; her hair caught briefly on one of his mandibles. “Sleep well, Shepard,” he said, and she was barely even awake enough to be aware of it when he drew the blankets up over her.

Chapter Text

The next time they practiced, about halfway into the lesson, Ashley suddenly stopped responding. Garrus stumbled to a confused stop and stared at her.

“You’re not leading,” she said, with a smile, “so I’m not following.”

“…Excuse me?” Garrus said, glancing over at Vega. The look on his face convinced Garrus that they’d planned this. Over by the gear loadout, Cortez was grinning too. Bunch of conspirators.

“Since you didn’t know the steps well before, I was compensating,” Ashley said. “But now you know the steps. And you can’t rely on Shepard knowing what you want to do. So if you want me to follow, you’ve gotta lead.

And that was harder—quite a lot harder, in fact. He hadn’t realized exactly how much Ashley had been helping him out. He’d always thought of himself as fairly graceful, but it was only some quick footwork that kept him from running her—or himself—into crates. (”Try not to damage anything,” Cortez said, dryly, from across the bay.) But as he practiced, he got better, and learned the techniques to manage things: caminata to get them moving in the right direction, firulete to buy himself some time, arrepentida to move Ashley away from a hazard in a hurry before she crashed into it. And always, always, practice at the silent communication to signal what intended.

Once he’d had some practice leading—or trying to—with Ashley-pretending-she-didn’t-know-what-she-was-doing, he graduated (if that was the word) to people who genuinely didn’t know what they were doing. Starting with….

“Tali, come over here,” Ashley said, and Tali shut down Chatika and jumped down from her perch on the workbench.

Tali rested her hand on Garrus’ arm and glanced up at him, eyes glinting behind her mask. “You’d better not step on my feet.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence. How about you not stepping on my feet?”

“I think you weigh twice what I do, so it’s not the same thing,” Tali said, and then the music started.

In some ways, it was gratifying to dance with Tali, who knew even less than he did. It really made him feel as though he’d been learning something, because she stumbled a little over steps he’d already mastered. But it was also fun because he could actually lead and be sure that she was following because he was leading and not because she already knew what she was doing, as Ashley did.

After five minutes Tali started to laugh.

“Thanks, Tali, that’s great for my ego,” he said.

“No!” she protested. “No, I’m not laughing at you. It’s just—this is fun.” She followed along as he spun her around, and whooped with triumph.

“Yeah, it kinda is,” Garrus admitted. “I didn’t really expect that.”

“I haven’t danced since I was a girl, not really,” Tali said, “and that wasn’t anything like this. Quarians don’t partner-dance. My mother taught me….” She followed as he led her in a complex pattern of steps that looked harder than it was, and laughed again. “Do turians dance?”

“This turian doesn’t,” Garrus said. “Not until now.”

They danced a few more moments, and then, softly, Tali said, “Shepard’s going to love it. Really, Garrus. And it’s sweet of you to work so hard to give her something like this.”

“Thanks, Tali,” he said, feeling a lump of emotion rise in his throat.

When they switched back out so that he could practice a more advanced move with Ashley, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Vega offering his hand to Tali with a little bow, and for ten minutes the cargo bay was quiet except for the thin music playing from Chatika and the sound of four sets of feet on the floor.

That led, in its turn, to the most… interesting part of Garrus’ dancing education.

He practiced with Tali a few more times, and then suddenly it was as though the cargo bay had turned into James Vega’s Dance Studio. Vega lined up a new practice partner for him each time.

(”We don’t know what kind of dancer Shepard was, so you’d better practice with all kinds of people,” was Vega’s rationale, and it sounded reasonable, but Garrus had a feeling that Vega was also trying to bring some kind of… dance therapy… kind of thing to the Normandy.

He couldn’t say he thought it was a bad idea.)

There was Cortez first, who said he couldn’t resist getting in on the fun after watching it for so long.

And then Cortez must’ve said something to Traynor because she showed up next—she was a quite accomplished dancer, although she said, self-deprecating as usual, “Tango was never really my strength.” Despite also knowing what she was doing, she danced very differently than Ashley (less aggressively physical, more—almost circumspect, and he’d be damned if he could explain how you could tell something like that from a dance, but you could). At the end she made him promise to teach her a turian dance in return, later.

Liara arrived, slightly dubious, in Tali’s tow. She started off saying, “It isn’t really my thing, and anyway, I’ve never danced before.” She ended up almost doubled over with laughter the third time they crashed into each other.

“I… think maybe you were born to lead, not to follow, Doc,” Vega said.

“I was born to upturn all stereotypes about asari, and ‘good at dancing,’ is one of them,” she replied. But her eyes were sparkling with enjoyment. Garrus knew that look from her. It was the delight of discovery that was the binding thread from her first life as an archaeologist to her current life as an information broker.

Then there was the time that they were in dock at the Citadel, and he was practicing with Tali. And suddenly Tali let go of his hand and stepped back.

“What—” Garrus began, and then there was an invisible hand in his, another pulling his arm around to settle at the small of her back.

“Kasumi said on the tightband that she wanted to cut in,” Tali said.

“If you can dance with someone using a tactical cloak,” Kasumi said, her voice shimmering out of the air just in front of him, “you can dance with anyone.” (Kasumi, it turned out, danced very well, invisibility notwithstanding, although she kept trying to lead.)

He shouldn’t have been surprised when Chakwas showed up, but he was. She laughed at his startled expression. “I may not be a young woman, but I do like to dance,” she said, as they began. She danced with the smooth ease of someone wholly at home in her own skin.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” she said, and then they didn’t say anything for a while, just danced. After a bit, she said, “I think it’s good, what you’re doing. Shepard needs the break.”

He flared his mandibles. “Is that your professional opinion, doctor?”

“It’s my opinion as her friend.” Chakwas looked up at him. “She needs to be able to let go once in a while. You can give her that; I don’t think any of the rest of us can.” She stopped, freeing her hand from his and settling it on his shoulder. “So. Thank you, Garrus.”

Then there was EDI, who danced with absolute technical perfection. As they were dancing, she said, “I have downloaded one point three petabytes of videos and other information about dancing the tango and created a tango program for my mobile platform. I hope it is suitable.”

“It’s… fine.” In fact the unerring precision of her movements was a little unnerving, but Garrus figured that between Liara’s complete failure and EDI’s startling perfection, he could probably deal with anything Shepard could throw at him.

“I would like to note that approximately five point seven nine percent of the videos I downloaded were pornographic in nature. I feel I should inform you that the tango may lead to carnal thoughts in Shepard.”

“I, ah.” Garrus didn’t know whether to laugh, bury his face in his hands, or run screaming. He was also pretty sure she was deliberately yanking his chain, although it was hard to tell since her poker face was just as perfect as the precision of her movements. “…Thanks, EDI.”

“Of course.”

After Joker stopped him in the mess (to say “Hope it doesn’t break your heart that I don’t want to dance with you”), Garrus pulled James aside.

“How many people know about this?” he asked “I did mean for it to be a surprise.”

“I told everyone to keep it under wraps, and EDI’s helping cover for us.” James leaned back against the workbench. “I figure the Normandy crew can manage a secret if need be.”

“Yeah,” Garrus said. “I guess so.”

James glanced at him. “You calling me James now? Instead of Vega?”

Garrus hesitated, more out of surprise than anything. “…I guess I am.”

“Good,” James said, slapping him on the shoulder. “I was starting to feel left out, Scars.”

“I heard from Joker that we’re heading to the Widow system next,” Garrus said, as he and Shepard exited the elevator and entered her cabin. “Aria’s fleet…?”

Shepard nodded. “It’s as good a time as any to head to Omega,” she said, keying the lights to low and heading down the stairs, “which is to say: it’s not a good time, but things aren’t going to get any better.”

Garrus grunted agreement. He sat in her low chair to pull off his boots. Shepard didn’t even bother, flopping straight down on the bed with her feet dangling off the edge. “It’ll nice to see my old stomping grounds,” Garrus said, sounding wry. “And by ‘nice’ I mean ‘kind of terrible.’”

Shepard winced up at the skylight above her. “I’m afraid you aren’t coming to Omega with me, Garrus,” she said.

“Oh?” He thought about it a moment, and then nodded. “Probably smart to bring someone else. The last thing we need is for someone to recognize ‘Archangel’ and cause a bigger problem.” He cocked his head. “Ashley? She’d do well there. Or James. Or both. I wouldn’t suggest Tali; combat-wise she’d be fine, but Omega is so filthy and plague-ridden that I don’t think it’d be a good idea for her to risk a suit breach.”

“No.” Shepard sighed. “I’m going alone. It was one of Aria’s… requests.” And god damn it, she didn’t like it—didn’t much like any of this—but she needed the mercenary fleets on her side. Not even just for the firepower, but to ensure that they were too busy to instead spend their time pirating off the vulnerable refugees.

Garrus lowered and tightened his mandibles, which she knew to be an unhappy expression, but he didn’t argue. It was one of the things that she loved about him: she knew that he felt protective of her, but he was always, always careful not to be overbearing about it, to treat her as a grown woman and a commander who could make her own choices about danger. So all he said was, “Well… be careful out there.”

“I will,” she said. And then, to lighten the mood, “After that we’ll be spending some time on the Citadel. Anderson wants me to check in on his place there.”

“Oh?”

“I get the feeling he feels pretty guilty about having it. I haven’t been, but from what I hear you could house twenty refugee families in it and they wouldn’t even trip over each other much. But technically it’s Alliance property, and he can’t give it away, so I think he wants someone to get some use out of it.”

Garrus nodded. “At least he feels guilty about it,” he said. “It’s hard to see the elites in those giant apartments down near the Presidium and not think about a dozen people sleeping in one shipping container in the docking bay.”

“I know,” Shepard said. “Anyway, my point is that after this we can probably afford a little down time. Probably even go on a proper date or something.” It was funny how she’d had sex with Garrus many times, but talking about something as mundane as a date made her feel a little shy.

“Mm. We haven’t had one of those yet, have we? Unless you count shooting things together, which is really more of a krogan-style date.”

“So it’ll be our first date. Just a little… delayed, is all.” She glanced at him sideways. “You can pick me up at the bar, we’ll see where it goes from there.”

He gave her a sly look. “A little roleplay, Commander? If you were feeling… adventurous, you could have just told me.”

She threw a pillow at him, and laughed at his affronted look. “Maybe I am,” she said, and laughed again as the affronted look morphed into a broad and very obviously deliberate leer. “Get over here.”

He did.

Chapter Text

Ashley was going over reports in Starboard Observation when the door whisked open and someone knocked on the doorframe. She looked up to see Vega, holding a bottle of something that gleamed golden and promised to be poisonous. Cortez was a step behind him. Vega waggled the bottle and said, “Thought we’d enjoy a little off-duty time, Williams. Care to join us?”

She shut off her datapad and got to her feet, rolling her head to work out a painful kink in her neck. “You don’t have to invite me just because I took over in here,” she said. “I can clear out.”

“Naw, naw,” Vega said, “stay.”

“If you leave I’ll have to drink with this asshole all by myself,” Cortez said, taking a seat on one of the low couches.

“You wound me, Esteban.” Vega slouched in in his inestimable way and leaned against the back of the couch. “Besides, I figure Williams could probably use a break.”

Ashley gave the datapad in her hand a wry look. It seemed downright ungrateful of her some days—she’d not just gotten the promotion she’d always longed for, she’d gotten a promotion—and responsibility to go with it—beyond her wildest dreams. And some days, especially when there were hard choices and harder sacrifices to make, she wished to hell she was just a Gunnery Chief again. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I could stand to let off some steam.”

“This is just the thing.”

Ashley hesitated, then said, “All right.” She sat back down, dropping her datapad onto the seat next to her. “What’re we drinking?”

“Mezcal. Ever had it before?”

“Heard of it. Never had it.” She wasn’t much of a drinker normally, and when—back when she was a grunt—she’d gone drinking with the guys, they’d pretty much stuck with shots of that perennial favorite, Whatever’s Cheap.

“You’re in for a treat,” Vega said, settling on the edge of the seat on the other side of the low table. “You got the glasses?” he asked Cortez, who passed him three glasses, probably filched from Port Observation. (Three glasses, Ashley noted with a hint of surprise: so they really had expected to invite her; they weren’t just being nice.) “It’s kinda a cousin of tequila… well, actually, tequila is a type of mezcal, but that’s not really important. It’s good. You’ll like it.”

“All right, hit me.”

He set out the three glasses on the table between them, poured out a couple of fingers’ worth and handed her the glass, then poured for Cortez and finally for himself. Vega said, “Sip it, don’t shoot it, it’s too good to waste.”

“Give the woman a little credit,” Cortez protested, which was nice of him. Ashley didn’t feel compelled to clarify that her drinking history had mostly consisted of knocking back rotgut to prove her toughness to a room full of marines.

Vega chuckled. He lifted his glass and said, “Salud!”

Ashley and Cortez returned the gesture and Ashley sipped her drink, slowly. The first taste told her that this was several cuts above the Whatever’s Cheap of her prior drinking days: it was complex, smoky, a little sweet. “That is good.”

“It better be. It’s my last bottle of the real stuff.” Vega relaxed back onto the couch, the movement pulling his shirt even tighter across his chest.

Ashley gave her glass a new and more serious look. With everything going on there was no saying when he’d be able to replace a local specialty like this. (If he ever could, she thought, and then squelched that line of thought.) “Are you sure you want to waste it on me? I mean, I’m guessing I’m not appreciating the nuances, or whatever.”

“It’s meant to be drunk with friends,” Vega said. “I’d be disrespecting it more if I hogged it all myself.” He slung an arm up across the back of the couch, for all the world as though he was chilling on a beach somewhere warm, not on a ship hurtling through the cold of space toward another fight. “Plus that’d be pretty sad, right, holing up to drink it all alone?”

“Fair point,” Ashley said, and took another sip.

“Besides which, I wanted to thank you for helping out, you know, with teaching Garrus how to dance.”

“Oh. Sure. My pleasure.” She glanced up, out at the universe of stars beyond the big window. How funny, to have such a big window on a warship; even with the explanation that the blast windows came down at the first breath of a threat, it felt strange. “It’s—Shepard’s been through so much, you know? It’s sweet of Garrus to want to do something for her.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Cortez said. “How did those two hook up?”

“Hah, damned if I know,” she said. At the questioning look, she sighed. “It happened last year, when they were going up against the Collectors—you know that much.” The two nodded. “And I wasn’t with them. We… weren’t really talking. It wasn’t a great time for me.”

“Oh,” Cortez said. “I’m sorry I brought it up, then.”

Ashley lifted a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Don’t be. It’s behind us, we’ve worked it out. The short version is that we ran into each other on Horizon—where I was stationed—and she wanted me to go with her. I couldn’t stomach working with Cerberus, and if I’m being really honest, I was a little hurt that she hadn’t come looking for me sooner. It was a coincidence we ran into each other at all. So I refused. I—said some things, shut her down pretty hard.” Her mouth twisted. “It’s Shepard, you know Shepard, she could talk cats down from trees and convince fish to jump straight out of the ocean for her. I was afraid if I listened for even a minute, she’d convince me—and I wasn’t sure it would be for the right reasons. So.” She swirled the liquid in her glass and then took another swallow. “That’s why I wasn’t around when she and Garrus got together. We’re okay now, though.”

There was a little breath of silence, and then Vega said, “I kinda know what you mean. I was really angry at the commander for dragging me away from Earth just as soon as things got hot. Felt like a damned coward, running from the fight. Lola convinced me otherwise.”

Cortez, halfway through a sip, snorted. “By ‘convinced’ you mean she beat the crap out of you. I was there, Vega, remember?”

Ashley laughed. Vega said, “Hey, now, that’s not fair. I held my own pretty good up to the end.”

“That’s not bad,” Ashely said, “she fights dirty.”

“Hell yeah, she does.”

“Anyway, if you want the story of how Garrus and Shepard got together, you’ll have to ask… I suppose you could ask one of them but I doubt you’d get a useful answer. Ask Tali, she’ll know. She’s been around the whole time, and she’s close to both of them. And willing to gossip… with a little encouragement.”

“Tali’s been here from the beginning too?”

“Uh huh. Back when it was the SR1, without benefit of lounges with poker tables and big windows and bars.” Ashley raised her glass in a silent toast to the old ship, now frozen wreckage somewhere on Alchera and final resting place of a lot of good people. “Tali and Garrus and Liara and Wrex—have you met Wrex?”

“Ohhh, I’ve met Wrex,” Cortez said, and Ashley laughed again.

“And Chakwas and Adams,” she continued. “And me. And Kaidan.” And there, as it would always be there, the prickle of grief. Stupid as it was there were days—more than she liked to admit—that she came down to the crew deck and expected to find him there, looking something up on the consoles. Or that she went into the lab for a painkiller or to restock her omnigel and out of the corner of her eye could almost see him, sitting on the edge of an exam bed, talking about his migraines with Chakwas. It was a strange pain, sharp and almost sweet, like a bad tooth—and like a bad tooth, it lurked unseen until she bit down wrong.

She gave herself a little mental shake. “Okay,” she said, “enough reminiscing. Cortez, how’d you get roped into this circus of crazy?”

They talked for a little while, about places they’d been, things they’d seen. People they’d known. People they’d lost.

(”I was so sorry to hear about your husband,” she said, and there was that look on Cortez’ face, his mouth stoic but his eyes tightening with fine lines of pain, so that she appended “—and I’m sorry to bring it up if you’d rather not think about it.”

“No,” he said. “It’s actually worse when people pretend… pretend it didn’t happen, you know? I know they’re trying not to remind me of it, but it’s not like I’m going to forget about him if nobody reminds me.” He rubbed the palms of his hands across his knees. “And it hurts more to pretend like he never existed. So.” He cleared his throat. “Thank you for saying it.”

Ashley nodded, remembering after her father had died, the pain exacerbated by the way people tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, as if her father wasn’t only dead but truly vanished, erased from memory as well as from life.)

Somehow two more drinks quietly made their way into Ashley’s glass and then into Ashley, until she was feeling warm and very relaxed indeed.

It was around that point that Vega asked, “So where did you learn to tango like that, really? Because damn.”

“Told you, Vega, a girl needs a few secrets.” She settled back into the couch. “God knows I don’t have a lot of mysterious allure to begin with.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Ash,” Cortez said.

“C’mon, seriously,” Vega said, “that’s not ‘I took a dance class one time’ kind of dancing, that was something else.”

Ashley felt a warm flush rush through her, even though she knew perfectly well that she was being buttered up. Maybe it was okay to let someone flatter you, once in a while. “Okay.” It must’ve been the mezcal. “My abuela taught me. Or, rather, she paid for lessons. For all of us. Me and my sisters, I mean.”

“You have an abuela,” Vega said, sounding startled.

“I have two,” Ashely said dryly, “that’s how biology works.”

“No, I mean…” He paused then gave an in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound kind of shrug. “Well, I wondered. You’ve got the look, so I thought, maybe, but with a name like Williams I wasn’t sure. Didn’t want to assume anything.”

She grinned outright at that. “My dad’s family is from… Virginia, actually, but originally from England, Wales, Germany… like that. But my mom’s from Argentina.”

“And her mom’s the one who made sure you knew how to tango, huh?”

“Yeah. We called her Nona. She taught us a lot of things. She wanted to make sure her granddaughters didn’t grow up entirely uncultured on a backwater somewhere.” Ashley heaved a theatrical sigh. “Unfortunately the tango was the only thing that took, for me.”

“I don’t know about that.” Vega gave her a considering look. “You speak Spanish?”

“Speak? No. Well, a handful of words and sentences, but no. I can understand maybe half of what’s spoken to me.” She fiddled with her napkin—also presumably swiped from Port Observation—crunching it between her fingers. “Mom wanted us to learn, but on the colony there weren’t really any other Spanish-speakers, so we never got to practice, so….” She trailed off, shrugging one shoulder awkwardly.

“Yeah, well, you ever want to practice, you know where to find me,” Vega said. Cortez gave him a funny look, like he was trying to repress a laugh. “What, Esteban? It’s true.”

“If I’m going to have to watch this, you’d better pour me another drink,” Cortez said, holding out his glass. Ashley wasn’t quite sure what he meant through the fuzz of the alcohol, but she obliged him.

“My abuela basically raised me,” Vega continued, “her and my uncle, since my mom died when I was real, real little.” He leaned forward with elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped around his glass. “Damn good thing, too, god knows what kind of person I’d be if it’d been my dad actually doing the raising.” And there was a darkness there that wasn’t like Cortez’ clean pain over his husband—more a bruise than a break, tense and sore. Ashley wasn’t sure what, if anything, to say, and then the decision was taken from her when he said, “I grew up near San Diego. Up in the chaparral, but close enough to go to the beach pretty much whenever, or south to Mexico—lot of my mom’s family down there. You ever been around there?”

Ashley shook her head. “Only time I was ever on Earth was Basic in Brazil, and then assigned up in Vancouver last year.”

“Damn shame. You should go sometime. I’ll show you all the sights. You can practice your Spanish there too if you want.” Cortez’s trying-not-to-laugh look was escalating. Ashley had no idea what that was about. Apparently, neither did Vega: “What the hell’s so funny, Esteban?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Cortez said, still smirking. “You going to show me the sights, too, Vega?”

“Sure, if you want. Just figured you’d probably been if you’d wanted to. Seattle’s not that far from San Diego. And your Spanish doesn’t need practicing.” Vega’s expression wilted a little. “And I mean, I’m assuming there’ll even be anything of my hometown to show off.”

“Escondido’s hardly a priority target and there’s been no Reapers sighted there yet, it’s got a better chance than most,” Ashley said. Cortez made another muffled snorting noise.

“I didn’t say exactly where I was from,” Vega said, surprised.

“Oh,” Ashley said. Oops. “…Sometimes I look up where my crewmates are from. You know. Public Alliance records and everything.” She took another sip and then looked over the rim of her glass at Cortez. “That’s not that weird, is it?” she asked, pleadingly.

Cortez shook his head, still chuckling.

“Damn it,” she said, holding out her glass. “If you’re going to laugh at me, pour me another.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cortez said.

It was sometime after that (she was beginning to be fuzzy about time and, for that matter, about cause and effect) that she ended up teaching them a Marine drinking song that somehow Vega didn’t know, and sometime after that that Cortez started a lengthy story and, twenty minutes in, realized that he forgot the ending, which was alright because Ashley and Vega found that hilarious.

And sometime after that, Cortez and Vega staggered out leaning on each other for precarious balance. It took them three tries to get through the door before they figured out they wouldn’t be able to make it side by side. Ashley laughed so hard she rolled herself off the couch, and from there it didn’t seem worth the effort to get back up.

Even though she woke up feeling like death, with Shepard standing over her looking ridiculously smug, even with a crazy headache that was only blunted by a pain reliever and a stiff cup of coffee… it was, she decided, worth it.

Chapter Text

James declared it final exam day when Shepard was off on Omega—and Garrus was three-quarters sure that it was at least partly to help him take his mind off the fact that she was off with Aria (who he didn’t trust farther than he could throw the Mako) and without any of her crew as backup. Shepard could—and did, and had—gotten herself out of ludicrously dangerous situations all by herself, but still, Shepard versus Cerberus and also versus the scum on Omega (who he knew all too well) made him antsy.

So, though he wasn’t willing to admit it, he was grateful for the distraction.

James had told him to meet in the cargo bay, that he’d be dancing with Gabby Daniels (who had offered herself up, at Tali’s suggestion, as someone who didn’t know a single step of tango—good practice if Shepard also didn’t know any tango), that he could pick the music. (Kasumi had already made it clear that wherever he took Shepard dancing on the Citadel, she could make sure the his selection would cue up at the right moment. “It’ll help if you pick a place with a sound system,” Kasumi had said, “but that’s not strictly necessary.” He didn’t ask.)

He hadn’t expected an audience, but when he showed up in the cargo bay, there they were: so many of the people he’d served with, these past three tours, these past almost-three years. Tali, Ashley, and Liara were sitting side-by-side on the workbench; Chakwas had taken a seat on one of the boxes with Adams; EDI was standing near Cortez, with Joker—on a folding chair procured from somewhere—beside her. Traynor was murmuring something to Gabby, who looked fidgety with nerves.

(He half-expected to see Wrex’s looming bulk, even though he knew that Wrex was busy on Tuchanka. Even more crazy, he half-expected to see Mordin, holding forth on the importance of art and culture to any civilization.)

He almost backed right back into the elevator, but it was too late. James had spotted him. So instead he grabbed James by the arm, towed him back into the hallway, and hissed, “What are all these people doing here?”

“They wanted to watch. Not a ton of entertainment going on right now.”

“James—”

“You’d better believe that once you and Shepard are dancing, especially something like the tango, all eyes are going to be on you. Might as well get used to it. Besides….” James’ voice lowered. “You know they’re all rooting for you, Scars. Not a person in here who doesn’t want you to do well. For you, and for Shepard too.”

Garrus hesitated, but he couldn’t stop his mandibles loosening. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I can’t argue with that.”

“All right. Come in here and show ‘em what you got.”

Garrus squared his shoulders and walked into the empty space at the center of the cargo bay. Tali pressed something on her omnitool and Chatika shimmered to life and—quite incongruously for a combat drone—began to play the first sultry strains of a tango. She gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up.

He held out a hand to Gabby, and they began.

He barely remembered how it went, focused on the music and on his footing; he lost track of time until the last chord faded out and suddenly the cargo bay was full of applause.

Must’ve been the acoustics of the place, because it sounded like a hell of a lot more people than it was.

“Take a bow, Gabrielle,” Traynor said, and Gabby did, blushing.

Garrus cleared his throat. “Think I did all right?” he asked. He wasn’t sure why he directed that at Chakwas and not at James and Ashley, his teachers, but somehow it felt… right.

“You’re going to do just fine,” Chakwas said.

“So, a turian on shore leave,” Shepard said as Garrus settled into his seat. “You come here often?” Before he could answer, she glanced suddenly, sharply over his shoulder at someone; Garrus caught a glimpse in the reflection of the mirrors behind the bar. A female turian, cute--not really his type even back when he was single, but cute. Shepard was warning her off, he realized, and had to press his mandibles tight to his face to hold in the pleased and flattered expression. He’d seen plenty of men hovering around Shepard over the year (not that he’d usually had to so much as glare at them; spirits knew she could take care of herself), but as far as he knew this was the first time things had ever gone in reverse.

Better get used to the attention, he thought. Once Kasumi gets the music online and you’re dancing, everyone will be watching.

Shepard was looking at him expectantly, though, so he backtracked his mind over the conversation thus far. “Oh. Uh… is this the first date thing we were talking about?” She tipped her chin and raised her eyebrows, such an exact match for her battlefield ‘hurry up and take care of those mechs, they’re cramping my style’ expression of impatience that he almost laughed. Instead, he fumbled a moment, stalling for time as he tried to think of a line: “Got it. Yes. Yeah. Uh.” It wasn’t like he’d done a lot of picking women up in bars even back in the day; in the military the women were more likely to approach you first if they were interested than vice versa, and in C-Sec he’d never gone to any clubs like this. C-Sec officers had their own bars, quiet bars, where the booze was cheap and the chances of stumbling across a fight or a prostitution ring or a drug deal were low. “Oh, I… uh, yeah, I come here often. Good place to blow off steam.” He saw the little smirk at the corners of her mouth and pressed onward. “Scenery’s not bad either.” He leaned back a little to catch sight of the woman dancing behind him (making eyes at an asari now and ignoring him completely; very few people were foolish enough to ignore Shepard’s warning glance).

Except him, apparently, because now Shepard was giving him the death glare. Not that he hadn’t earned it. “Though the view in front of me is even better,” he added, leaning forward.

Shepard still looked skeptical. “That supposed to melt a girl’s heart?”

“No, but this voice is.” He dropped the harmonics of his voice to the purr he knew she liked, leaning forward further to fill her gaze.

(Not that he ever would have been able to manage this kind of thing on a real first date. His dating record consisted entirely of either remaining completely oblivious until an interested woman clubbed him over the head [metaphorically or, in at least one memorable instance, literally], or flailing around attempting to flirt until someone took pity on him. A smooth talker he was not. Except, apparently, now. Kind of. Anyway Kasumi was going to hack the sound system any minute now and save him from having to do this for very long. …He hoped it was soon.)

Might as well go for broke. “I’m Garrus Vakarian. Codename: Archangel. All-around turian bad boy and dispenser of justice in an unjust galaxy.” Now Shepard wasn’t feigning boredom anymore, although she’d raised an eyebrow. He leaned a little forward and flared his mandibles enough to catch a whiff of her perfume. Shepard almost never wore perfume. “Also, I kill Reapers on the side. And you are?”

“Commander Shepard,” Shepard said, her voice a low drawl. “Alliance Navy.” And… stopped.

The woman needed no other introduction.

Spirits, he was a lucky turian.

He swallowed, but managed to keep his tone light: “Shepard, huh? I might’ve heard a few things about you.”

“Oh?” She tilted her head, an evil glitter in her eyes. “Flatter me.”

Well, this wasn’t hard, at least. He could sing his own praises with a little effort, although he felt kind of foolish doing it. He could sing Shepard’s praises with no difficulty at all. “Word is you’re smart. Sexy.” His eyes tracked down over the elegant line of her clavicles, exposed in the dress and accentuated by her necklace; the smooth muscles of her shoulders and arms, and then back to her face. “A wicked shot. Also, you kill Reapers on the side too.”

“Uh huh.” Shepard leaned back. “And do most girls fall for that?”

“Well sure. You know, this voice, and uh… and uh….” Damn it, Kasumi, where are you? He scrambled for something witty or sexy or even just better than inane to say, and came up blank. “I’m running out of banter here, Shepard.”

And Shepard, spirits help him, was a cruel woman. A sexy, cruel woman, because she smiled, tipped her head, and hissed, “Make it up. Remember, we just met.”

If we’d really just met, here and now in this bar, there is no way I would have a ghost of a chance with you, Garrus thought. I’m just lucky I met you two years ago, before a whole galaxy was in love with you. But before he could think of anything else to say, a message popped up on his visor. Kasumi. It read, “green light. music queued up. playing in fifteen seconds.”

Thanks for the warning, he thought, but what he said aloud to Shepard was, “Right, I mean… Yeah, all the girls fall for it. Let me show you.” He caught her hand, twining his fingers through it, feeling the warmth of her skin. Her smile became genuine, natural… for exactly half a second, before he started to tug her off her stool and onto the dance floor.

Another message from Kasumi popped up: “good luck, v!” He sent her silent thanks as he towed Shepard out into the crowd.

“What are you doing?” she said, all vestiges of the bored, sexily arrogant stranger gone as she flailed her free hand at him. Her eyes opened even wider as he tugged her onto the dance floor… and, there, over the speakers, he could hear the familiar first notes of the tango he’d practiced (and practiced and practiced).

“It’ll be fun.” He coaxed her onward, suddenly smug at the way the tables had turned, and letting that smugness override the constant simmer of nerves in his gizzard.

“Oh no, no no no,” Shepard was saying, but she wasn’t really digging in her heels. He pulled her all the way to the middle of the dance floor (what was Ashley’s saying? In for a penny, in for a pound?) as heads turned to watch them, and part of it was that Shepard was not protesting quietly and part of it was that human-turian couples were quite rare even on the Citadel but part of it was Shepard. Everyone knew Shepard.

He turned into her momentum, catching her with a hand on the small of her back and looking down into her expression, which was wide-eyed with a mixture of surprise and indignation. She loved him, he knew that with perfect confidence… and he knew with equally perfect confidence that if this didn’t go well she’d have his head mounted in her cabin, next to the model ships.

So. It’d just have to go well. You’d better not have led me astray, James Vega, he thought, and then the music swelled and he gave himself over to the routine he’d practiced so carefully.

Muscle memory was a beautiful thing. He managed to make the first few simple step smooth even with Shepard stumbling and still half-protesting, like she hadn’t quite decided to play along. “I’ve been taking lessons on the side,” he said. Someone else could tell her that it was Vega and Ashley that had provided the lessons; for now, he decided, a little mystery would add to the first date feeling. Under his hand at the small of her back he could feel the tension melt out of her as she apparently decided to humor him, and he took the implied invitation, tugged her closer and turned her in a smooth circle. Her movements weren’t anything like as practiced as Ashley’s or Traynor’s or Chakwas’, but they weren’t as stiff as Tali’s or Liara’s or Gabby’s. She knew a little, then. Good.

Even as she signaled acceptance with her posture, though, she raised her chin and her eyes met him, bright and glittering, somewhere in the dangerous territory between amused and annoyed; and her mouth curved invitingly at the same moment she murmured, “You’re going to regret this.” The contrast between the low tenor of her voice and the sharp flash of her teeth, between the incisive glitter of her narrowed eyes and the intrigued arch of her eyebrows—the way her expression was half inviting smile and half warning snarl—sent a crackle through his blood. Invigorated, he spun her out (she stumbled in surprise and he almost lost her, had to grab at her wrist before finding her hand again, three fingers slipping awkwardly between five before he got a proper grip again); but they recovered, together, her steps now following his perfectly, in time with the music and with the thumping of the blood in his throat.

He brought his face close enough to hers that he could taste her perfume on the air, her breath shivering across his mandibles, and murmured, “Promises, promises.” And that, finally, made her really smile, her pretense of hard-to-impress-first-date dropped and just Shepard, now, laughing with him.

It wasn’t perfect, not with the limited time he’d had to learn, not with Shepard never having practiced with him. They stumbled a little as he turned them, feet tangling once, and Shepard looked up at him with a serious expression and bright laughter in his eyes that made his heart tighten painfully in his chest. He spun her close, watched her move with a martial artist’s precision, with a human’s fluidity, briefly away and then back in his arms—and then she surprised him, sliding one leg intimately between his. Before he could gasp she’d lifted the other, high, hooked almost over the spur of his hip and leaning into him, the whole warmth of her strong lithe body against his. This hadn’t been in what he’d planned and furthermore it was intimate enough to make his brain short out, so he was proud of himself that he kept his balance and his composure and followed through with the movement, her weight natural in his arms, the challenge in her eyes melting into something warmer.

And that was enough to catch the attention of everyone in the bar—everyone who wasn’t already watching, because this wasn’t exactly the usual music for this kind of bar. But now instead of casting confused glances their way, pretty much everyone had stopped and backed up—giving them room, and also giving them a clear audience.

Garrus couldn’t care less, really couldn’t care less. All that mattered was Shepard, her movements as sleek and decisive as he could ever have imagined, as sensual and immediate as he could have ever hoped. She smelled, now, not just of her perfume but also of her sweat, a scent even sweeter to him and much more intimate. And she moved with the supreme and inalienable confidence that seemed to be her birthright. She followed each step as if she was reading his mind, no stumbling, now, no hesitation, no threatening looks. No Reapers, no responsibilities, no war. Just Shepard, here, now, with him—and nothing else in the world. She moved with him, adding flair to her steps (there was a word for that movement she was doing, a special tango word, but he’d retained almost none of the terminology James had patiently tried to teach him) and he purred, “Now you’re getting it,” and was rewarded with her exhilarated smile.

Under the spell of the music he lost track of time, lost track of everything. Three years ago he’d barely been able to tell male females from human ones, relying on his translator to make guesses between traditionally male and female names. A year ago he’d had to consider whether a relationship with Shepard was a good idea, whether it would work or end in spectacular and humiliating disaster. Now… now, with fire and lightning in his blood and Shepard moving like a force of nature, like a wild animal and yet with a paradoxical precision, in rhythm with his own thundering heart, he couldn’t imagine not loving her, not wanting her.

The spell broke only once, and then briefly, when he saw James out of the corner of his eye and was briefly surprised. But—no, of course James was here; he’d been there when Garrus had plotted the where and when with Kasumi while arranging for the hacking of the bar’s music system. And of course James would want to see the grand finale of his masterwork. Across the room, James gave him a thumbs-up.

On a whim, Garrus spun Shepard out and this time let her go so that she spun once and ended up nose-to-nose with James. She hesitated, clearly surprised, and James gave her an a little nod—acknowledgment, approval, respect—and then Garrus caught her arm again and reeled her in.

And now no one else was dancing and it was just them, beneath the flaring laser lights, and Shepard’s eternal confidence was contagious (everyone knew that) and he had the nerve to try out a few of the more advanced steps, no longer practiced and stiff but transmuted by the alchemy of darkness and light and music and love and lust into something fluid, something purely primal. He knew he probably didn’t look as smooth as Ashley and Vega did and didn’t care, as long as it was Shepard he was with—breathing hard now, flushed, and spirits that put him in mind of other times together, much less public and much less clothed.

He was aware enough of the real world to notice the music winding up to its conclusion, and he could tell Shepard was too, because when he moved her in tight she responded as he’d hoped she would, sweeping her leg back and then up around his, her thigh resting on the spur of his hip and her calf braced tight against the spur of his hock, giving him the leverage to bend her back—and back, and he was awed all over again at how flexible humans were, how strong despite their apparent softness, and Shepard more than anyone.

“So,” he said, bent low over her, almost against her throat where the inside of his mandibles could almost pick up the scent of her pulse throbbing beneath her skin, “think a girl would fall for that?”

“Oh, hell yes,” Shepard said, her voice as low and throaty as his own sending a shudder up his spine. She tensed her muscles to lift herself upright again and he slid his hand up her back to support her in what was now not as much a dance move as simply an embrace. “I see you’ve been putting that reach and flexibility to good use.”

Yes, Shepard’s confidence was contagious. And it was intoxicating to know that she had, for some insane reason, chosen him. Nearly giddy, keeping his mandibles close to retain some semblance of dignity, he said, “You know it. And it gets even better when you try it in bed.”

Her breathless smile made it worth every practice, every embarrassment, every everything. Her breathless smile was everything.

As they made their way out to a smattering of half-ironic applause, he could see James grinning with approval, and then—oh, naturally—Ashely sidling up to him with drink in hand, standing close enough against his side to make Garrus wonder.

But Shepard’s insistent hand in his, tugging him onward, drove any hypotheses from his mind.

Chapter Text

At first it was Shepard pulling Garrus by the hand, and then Garrus caught up and they were just running, the two of them, pelting out of the bar and down the hallways, past the startled faces of Citadel residents. Familiar hallways, hallways he'd one patrolled, back when he'd first joined C-Sec and had been on beat cop duty. And how funny, how strange, to think of that time of his life: before he'd met Shepard, before he'd traveled half the galaxy, back when he'd have been the one collaring a pair of disreputable lovers roaring down the corridors.

(Nobody tried to stop them now, though, he noticed. Nobody would dare, not when it was Shepard.)

She flashed a grin at him, sideways and all teeth, her hair sticking to her cheek with sweat, and he thought again: how funny. Because back when he would have been one of the patrolmen in this ward, he would have said that never in a thousand years would he get romantically involved with a human, or in fact any non-turian. Hell, back then he hadn’t even seen the appeal of asari, and some days it seemed like everyone was into asari. He remembered thinking that humans were okay as allies and colleagues, but in bed? No. Too sqashy, so thin-skinned you'd have to spend all your time watching your teeth and talons, too many fingers, and the hair thing was just weird.

And now he couldn't get Shepard back to her big, flat, alien bed fast enough. Or she couldn't get him back fast enough, judging by the way she kept getting ahead of him, tugging at his hand.

Faces flashed by: startled humans, wry salarians, and, he could have sworn, one very amused asari matriarch. Then they were in the elevator, and Shepard used her Spectre override to ensure that nobody would stop it on its way down to the docking bay.

Garrus had never seen her use her Spectre override for something trivial before. He figured it was a good sign.

And sure enough, she turned and looped her arms around his neck, brought her mouth close to his. "Well, Mister Vakarian, I hope you're ready to put your money where your mouth is."

"Am I ever not?" he said, and she chuckled and kissed him. Soft lips and soft blunt tongue and warm breath that tasted faintly of alcohol and fruit, and he was glad--not for the first time--that he had tested as non-levo-sensitive. She kissed, not like a competition, but like a promise, and he tightened his hand between her shoulder blades to keep her close. When they came up for air he said, "'Mister Vakarian'? I take it we're not pretending anymore?"

Her eyelids dropped to half-mast and the whisper of a smile curved at the edges of her mouth as she tipped her forehead toward his, the contact quick and warm. "We were never really pretending," she said.

The Citadel elevators were always painfully slow, but for once, he didn't mind.

When the elevator finally came to a stop and the doors swept open, it took a moment for Garrus to realize that it had stopped--and he didn't notice that they had an audience until the spate of ironic clapping from the small crowd awaiting the elevator. He could feel the heat rising in his throat, but Shepard--Shepard! who was always so careful of what impression she was making, and to whom!--just grinned at him and pulled him out, past the cluster of people waiting for the elevator. Someone whistled, and Garrus realized he didn't give a damn who saw them, or what they assumed.

When they were finally aboard the Normandy, waiting for decontamination in the airlock, EDI said, "Welcome back, Commander."

"EDI," Shepard said. "I don't want any interruptions in the next hour. No. Three hours." And then--because she was still Shepard, would always be Shepard--"except priority ultraviolet transmissions."

"Understood, Shepard," EDI said, and Garrus could hear the laughter in her level voice.

So it was probably thanks to EDI that they didn't run into any delays as they made their way through CIC and into the elevator, and then, from there, up to the Loft. By then Shepard had climbed him like a particularly awkward ladder and got her legs around his waist (the movement hiked her skirt up to her hips, and the feeling of her smooth inner thighs against the skin of his waist was driving him insane) and kissed him so exuberantly that he was sure there was lipstick streaked red across the blue markings on his mandibles. She didn't let go when they got to the door, either, just fumbled for a moment until her palm made contact with the hand-scanner the automatic door let her in.

It was a wonder he didn't fall down the stairs, or drop her, getting to the bed. Shepard wrapped around him threw his balance off--not that he was complaining--and Shepard's tongue in his mouth, her bare skin pressed against his waist, her hand gripping tight to the unprotected skin just beneath his fringe were distracting as all hell.

Not that he was complaining.

They made it without disaster, though, and when he tried to drop her on the bed she didn't let go, so he toppled over on her. And he had already come unsheathed despite himself--had done in the elevator when she'd got her legs around his waist, and it was the first time that had happened since he was an inexperienced adolescent on his first tour of duty--and for a moment it was hard not to just grind against her as if he was still that overeager teenager. He did thrust once, couldn't help it even though he was still clothed and she was still at least half-clothed, and he could swear he could feel her heat even through her underwear and his clothes. And certainly he didn't imagine her choked groan.

But he'd promised her reach and flexibility and this wasn't exactly the most impressive display of either. So he shifted his weight off her--she made a little noise of protest--and fumbled around the back of her neck for the zipper of her dress.

Which, of course, stuck.

He tugged at it with increasing frustration until Shepard said, breathlessly, "This dress was kind of Kasumi's joke on me. Just tear it, I don't care."

He hooked his talons through one of the seams along the front and dragged it down, careful not to cut the skin beneath, laying her nearly bare, save for her underwear. He dropped his head to catch the thin fabric at the center of her bra between his teeth and snap it--she yelped, "Hey, this is a good bra!" and then stopped protesting abruptly when he slid his tongue along the underside of her breast, tasting the familiar sweet-salt of her skin, the unreal softness, softer even than the thinnest skin at a turian's waist.

He made his way downward, over her belly (he'd been surprised at first at the way human skin was thin enough that you could actually see the ridges of their muscles; now he just enjoyed the way her stomach jumped as he traced a pattern of licks and nips around her navel). She said, "Hang on, I want you naked too--" and then he rendered her speechless for the second time in ten minutes (a personal best) by tugging down her underwear and pressing his tongue up between her folds.

This wasn't new, at least: foreplay with turian women often involved licking to encourage their plates to shift. But it still awed him, every time, to find her already so open and soft and wet. It felt absolutely decadent, her wetness, her musk, the silky feel of her many layers--folded inside one another like the petals of a flower, and--like a flower--inclined to slowly blossom open. Shepard moaned aloud, and the sound vibrated through her body and onto his tongue. She struggled briefly to spread her thighs wider. Without even thinking about it, Garrus hooked the talon on his thumb through the side of her panties and tore them so that she could just kick them off and widen her legs enough to give him all the room he needed. He felt the bed shift as she sat up, shrugging off the straps of her ruined dress and bra.

He paused to look up at her, naked now, flushed, her chest heaving with her rapid breaths, her sweaty hair sticking to her neck and her lips parted and her pupils blown wide and black. Open to him and without a shred of anxiety in her expression and more completely beautiful than anything else in his entire life.

He must have looked a moment too long because her lips curved again into that wicked half-smile and she said, "Don't you dare stop now, Garrus." So he went back to work.

His tongue flickered and curled around her, tasting, testing, letting her voice guide him: small noises, little gasps and cries--he knew he was doing really well when he wrung a murmured curse out of her. She brought one leg up to brace her foot against his cowl, opening herself up even more--dug the other hand into his neck behind his fringe as if to keep him in place, not that he was going anywhere. Her hips began to shift restlessly on the bed, and for a moment he considered holding her still so he could work, but the fluid rhythmic motion of her body was too beautiful to stop. So he followed it, followed it, let the rising tenor of her cries tell him when to stop teasing her with flickering touches and slow licks, when to concentrate on the swollen nub of her clitoris with a firm, steady caress. Every powerful muscle in her body clenched, and--as he knew she would want--he pressed a finger into her, feeling her hot and silky and wet, and rubbed high against her inner wall as his tongue pressed against her.

She arched up off the bed, strong enough to almost throw him off, and cried out. He could feel her coming in rippling waves around his finger, against his tongue, and he closed his eyes against the throbbing of his own cock straining against the inside of his pants. He was glad he wasn't as young as she sometimes made him feel because a few years ago this would have been enough to make him come too, just like that. Instead he stayed with her, soothing her with his tongue, until the last of her aftershocks faded away.

She tugged at the back of his neck, pulling him up, and kissed him again. It was a different kiss now, slow and satisfied. Then she tugged meaningfully at the collar of his shirt. "I'd tear them off you if I had claws, but I don't, so clothes off," she murmured against his mouthplates.

"Yes ma'am," he said, amused, backing up so he could strip. While he did so--quickly; he was too keyed up to try to make it a striptease, not that he was particularly good at stripteases anyway--Shepard dumped her torn dress and ruined underwear off the side of the bed and sat up, cross-legged and nearly glowing. The appreciative heat of her gaze tempered his embarrassment at being fully unsheathed and slick with arousal already, like a horny teenager.

He crawled back onto the bed with her, pulling her close against him for the warmth of skin on skin. She was slightly cool to the touch--humans ran a little colder than turians--and soothing against his overheated skin. "Your turn. What do you want?" she asked, so close now that he could feel the vibrations of her words against his throat along with their sound, almost as if she had a turian's doubled vocal cords.

"I want to fuck you," he said--growled, really, losing control of his subvocals in the heat of his longing. "I want inside you." How strange, how miraculous, to say this to the most incredible woman in the galaxy, knowing that she would say yes.

He could feel her smile against his throat. "Seems unfair," she said. "I get off twice that way."

He butted his forehead against hers, tipped his head to nuzzle her throat. "At least twice," he said. Promised. "As many times as you want."

Her smile widened. "Lucky me," she said, trailing a hand down over his keelbone. Then she sat up and swung a leg over his waist. Her inner thighs were slick and silky, maddening, and then she rose up on her knees and took him in her hand, angled herself and sank down onto him.

She was tight, tight and soft, and even though it was very far from the first time still he almost couldn't believe that it was really happening. His hands settled on her hips as much to steady himself as to steady her. She leaned forward, touched her forehead briefly to his, kissed him: his culture's gesture of affection and hers both.

Then she started to move, riding him slow and hard. In this position he could watch her: the flex of muscles in her thighs, in her belly. The way her eyes went unfocused, the rhythm of her gasping breaths. She was so hot around him, hot and tightening on every stroke, and he had to let go of her hip with one hand so he could dig his claws into the bedding to keep his composure, to keep from ending too soon.

And here, now, for a precious little while it was just him, just Shepard, just heat and movement and rising pleasure--no fear and no worry and no goal except to enjoy each other. He arched and growled, primary vocals and subvocals mingling and crossing each other, and Shepard moaned a counterpoint. He could feel her getting close again in the tension of her around him (her second orgasm always came quicker than her first, he had learned) and he unhooked his talons from the sheets, pressed the soft pad of his thumb against her apex and rubbed until she tightened up, every muscle taut as a strung bow, tipped her head back and cried out to the stars visible through the skylight above.

He pulled her against him, limp and shaky, and slid his arms around her to roll them both over. He slipped out--she caught her breath at that--pressed her thigh up and sank back into her, smooth and easy and she made a little noise of pleasure in the back of her throat. He was making all kinds of noises, he knew, the constant rumbling of his subvocals now fully out of his control as he thrust into the welcoming warmth of her, thrust and thrust and growled as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, pulled him deeper and faster and murmured happily against his throat. For a moment he tried to hold back, to make her come a third time before he did, but he was too far gone. Her rhythm as she moved against him, the touch of her knees against the small of his back, the touch of her hands beneath his fringe, the sweet tight heat of her all pulled him inexorably to the brink and over. His primary vocals and subvocals merged into one vibrating sound of pleasure as he spilled, finally, inside her.

It took him a while to realize that he was probably squashing her. He tried to roll off but was stopped by her arms and legs tightening around him, keeping him in place. And if Shepard wanted him to stay, who was he to argue? So he stayed there, slowly softening, flicking his tongue out to taste the sweat on her shoulder as she stroked the skin inside his cowl and ran her fingers over his fringe.

"Best first date ever," Shepard said, and that surprised a laugh out of him. He rolled over then, sitting up a little to take the strain off his neck. Shepard slid up to rest her cheek against his chest, tangling one of her legs through his.

"So the tango lessons were worth it?"

"More than worth it," Shepard said. Then: "You better not think I'm done with you yet, Garrus. This is just a breather."

"Good," Garrus said, stroking the nape of her neck, and let his subvocals purr audibly with satisfaction.

It was some time later, aching pleasantly and finally too spent to continue, that Shepard tumbled to the bed and stayed there. Garrus slid up behind her, curling around her, and she relaxed into the warmth of his arms.

"God," she said. "I needed this."

"So did I," Garrus said behind her. She could feel him nuzzling her hair, his mandibles catching on it the way they always did. "It's good to be able to just unwind for a bit." His hand slipped over her waist and settled flat on her stomach.

"Mm," she said, covering her hand with hers. For a while they stayed like that, in comfortable silence. Shepard was near sleep when the idea came to her. "You know," she said, "I bet the rest of the crew could stand to get a breather as well."

There was a long pause behind her, and then Garrus said, dryly, "I hope you're not suggesting they all unwind like this. I'm a one-woman sort of turian, and anyway I think my stamina would give out."

She laughed, and rolled over to kiss him. "I meant that maybe we should throw a party. A clothes-on party. The Normandy's due for a retrofit anyway, we'll all be grounded for a bit."

"Not a bad idea," Garrus said. "We invite the crew...."

"Miranda and Jack are on the Citadel too," Shepard said.

"If you're going to invite both of them, I hope Anderson has good property damage insurance."

"Hush, you," she said. "They can behave." Probably, she added mentally. "Jacob's around too, I think. We can call in Kasumi and Samara and Zaeed. And Wrex and Grunt, of course."

"Now I definitely hope Anderson has good property insurance," Garrus said, and she laughed. "But yes," he continued. "I think that's a very good idea.”

Chapter Text

The party was in full swing when Joker--of course it was Joker--asked, "So, how'd the big tango date go?"

Shepard could feel Garrus giving Joker a quelling look. "Fine," he says.

But Joker was not one to be so easily deterred. "Fine? Just fine?"

"It went fine," Garrus repeated, but by now Jack and Miranda had been distracted from their bickering long enough to notice.

"What's this about, then?" Miranda asked.

"Nothing," Garrus said, at the same moment Joker said, "Garrus took Shepard dancing. Tango."

"Don't make fun, it was sweet," Tali said, leaning over the counter from where she'd been talking with Ashley and Traynor in the kitchen.

But it was too late: Jack hooted, and Jacob said, "Tango, really?"

"You don't have to sound so surprised," Shepard said, amused. At this point in her life she was basically un-embarrass-able. Garrus, sadly, was no such thing, or at least not yet. He was starting to blush blue along the thin skin just below his jaw.

"I'm not sure which surprises me more," Miranda said. "That Garrus knows how to tango, or that Shepard can dance at all beyond that... thing... that she always does."

"Garrus learned," Ashley said, leaning over the counter next to Tali. Tali and Ashley shared what was clearly a conspiratorial smile.

"That is rather sweet, then," Miranda conceded. Jack just snorted.

"You two should give us an encore," Tali said. "We've seen Garrus tango, but not you both together."

"Not happening," Garrus said.

"Aw, why not?"

"For one, you got a chance to see me stumble around plenty of times. For two, it's private."

"Private right in the middle of a bar," Kasumi added, shimmering into visibility just at Garrus' elbow.

"Yes, well." Garrus folded his arms. "Not happening."

"I didn't know you got this much help." Shepard turned to Garrus. "Who...?"

"James was the mastermind," Garrus said. "Ashley helped teach."

"Which is why they were there at the bar," Shepard said, suddenly enlightened.

"Right."

"Couldn't miss the opportunity to see my star pupil in action," James said, taking a swig out of his beer bottle.

"And the for practice partners..." Garrus looked thoughtful. "Tali, Cortez, Traynor, Liara, Kasumi--that was interesting, dancing with someone invisible--Chakwas, EDI. Gabby. It's possible I'm forgetting someone."

Shepard could feel her eyebrows climb. "And you all managed to keep it a secret."

"We're pretty good at that, you know. Most of us. Anyway, yes, I'm very grateful to everyone for helping me learn, and no, I'm not going to dance for you now. Get Ashley and James to dance, they're better at it anyway."

Ashley made a choking noise. "Way to throw me under the bus, Vakarian," she said. "After all that help, too."

"You mean you don't want to show off?" Shepard said, sweetly.

"Well, I didn't say that." Ashley put down her rum and coke. "What do you say, James, you game?"

"Always," James said, putting his beer bottle down on the floor. "Somebody help me move this table, we need some room."

"We need that much room?" Ashley asked. "How ambitious are we getting?"

"Oh, ambitious," James said. "They weren't impressed with my biceps, they can be impressed with this."

They cleared away coffee table, chairs, a particularly breakable-looking lamp, and two potted plants. Tali hopped up on the counter, summoned her combat drone--decked out in a festive shade of purple that matched her suit wraps--and set it to... playing music? Sure enough, the same music Garrus had arranged to have play at the bar somehow. (The faint shimmer of Kasumi decloaking behind the couch gave her a sudden idea of exactly how that had actually been arranged.)

James held out a hand and Ashley took it, and Shepard was close enough to follow the murmured discussion between them.

Vega, settling his hand on her back, said, "Same as before?"

"Think we can knock their socks off instead?" Ashley replied, giving him a somewhat fanged smile.

"Oh, yeah."

"Good. I'll follow your lead."

And they began.

Tango was always sexy, even if--as she and Garrus had been--you were just one step up from a stumbling amateur. James and Ashley were clearly at least a few steps above that, and it showed. Tango done well was an amazing and almost contradictory combination of crisp and fluid, smoky with restrained heat one minute and blazing fire-hot the next. And it was clear that both Ash and James knew what they were doing.

But more than that, they balanced each other beautifully. Ashley had always been strong, but paired with James she moved with a martial artist's precision, as if every muscle was under her direct control. And James dancing with Ash moved shockingly light and smooth for such a big man.

"We didn't look that good," Shepard murmured to Garrus, not quite a question, as Ashley wound herself around James like a climbing vine and then--just when it would have begun to be indecent--unwound herself, fluid as a swirl of silk.

"The sex appeal, or the dancing itself?"

"I know we're sexy as shit," she said, and Garrus chuckled. "The dancing, I mean."

"N-o-o-o-o we didn't," Garrus said, and Shepard grinned.

She watched as Ashley flung herself out in a spin, only to come back inevitably to James, like a comet flaring away only to swing back into the orbit of the sun. She watched James coil her back in, let her go, reel her back--each movement crisp as a pistol shot, smooth as fine whisky. She leaned back against Garrus, who settled his hand comfortably on her hip and rested the edge of his mandible on her temple, remembering what it had been like to dance with him, in front of a hundred curious eyes and yet strangely somehow private.

And there was something compelling to it, in the intensity of the eye contact, the silent signals between them so subtle they were absolutely invisible to the naked eye, perceptible only in the way that Ashley moved unhesitatingly with each of James' changes, followed each movement. Vega was wearing his uniform undershirt and Ashley was dressed down in an old pair of fatigues she'd probably been hauling around since the first Normandy and they wouldn't have been sexier together if they'd been wearing the shortest, tightest, and most sparkly of dance clothes.

Judging by the palpable tense heat in the air, they both knew it.

Garrus leaned over and murmured in her ear, "The night's young yet. Care to place a wager on who will end up in what bed tonight?"

Shepard ghosted a laugh. "I love you, Garrus, but Hannah Shepard didn't teach me to take no sucker bets," she said, and felt Garrus rumble with laughter against her.

It ended with James dipping Ashley so far that her loose hair nearly touched the ground. Shepard was impressed, despite herself, by Ashley's tautly-poised muscles, by the way James bore her weight with no apparently effort at all. For a silent moment they stayed like that and then Tali began to clap and whistle, and Traynor with her, and then everyone--well, everyone but Jack, who shouted something filthy and physically impossible instead.

Ashley stepped away, a little flushed (though that could have just been blood flow to the head from being bent over backwards, she supposed), and Shepard didn't miss the way James squeezed her hand briefly before letting her go.

"Nope," she said. "No sucker bets."

Shepard and Garrus didn't stick together the whole night; you were, after all, supposed to mingle at a party. Even Garrus knew that. So he made the rounds.

There were a krogan, a prothean, and Joker doing target practice in the bar (which sounded like the start of a bad joke), and Liara levitating James on the balcony (which had Ashley in stitches). Miranda and Jack seemed to have kept from murdering each other. Samara might murder Zaeed before the night is over. All was as it should be, he thought.

It occurred to him that he was falling into old, old routines: making the rounds like he did once long ago. He remembered his mentor, a turian with plates so weathered they could barely take a mark anymore, teaching him the patrolman's walk, how to look without looking, how to hold yourself apart.

Old habits. Wrong habits, now. C-Sec kept themselves apart. Being on the Normandy was about being part--a part of the crew, a part of everything.

So he stopped, joined the dancing in the kitchen (why the kitchen? ...why ask?), where, for some inexplicable reason, Tali and Traynor were reciting the periodic elements to one another. He didn't ask about that either. (He considered it completely unfair that Tali called him a nerd for chiming in with thulium when wasn't the one that started it.)

"I happen to be a fan of thulium," Shepard said, coming up behind him and trailing a fingertip up his arm. "Very... shiny."

Jack snorted. "Get a room," she said.

And Shepard, unflappable as always, said, "Later. We have our choice, after all. There are like ten bedrooms in this place. Maybe we'll get several rooms. Sequentially or simultaneously."

Jack made a gesture that was either obscene or approving or possibly both. Traynor rolled her eyes: "No offense, commander, but: too much information."

And yeah, Shepard was being more than usually demonstrative. Everyone on the crew knows they're a thing--a thing, a Thing, a capital-T, death-do-us-part kind of thing, although there's been no time to formalize it. No time and maybe no need. But even so she's never been demonstrative around the crew, and he knew why: there's a difference between knowing something and seeing it, and even as hands-on and informal a commander as Shepard had to watch it, to make sure she always had the kind of respect that meant she'd be unhesitatingly obeyed in the heat of battle.

But tonight it was different. Maybe it was the alcohol, but he doubted it. She hadn't had that much to drink and neither had he. It's more likely... this evening was a bubble out of time, where she didn't have to be the Commander, Shepard, Savior of the Galaxy.

She moved away after a little while (although not before everyone had a chance to get in their jokes in about Shepard's dancing), mouthed, "Find me later," and he nodded.

"Not that you're much better, Vakarian," Tali said after Shepard had gone. "Honestly, can anyone in this galaxy dance besides quarians and asari?"

A little while later he broke away--Tali and Traynor having lapsed into a deep and rather tipsy discussion of the relative merits of various encryption algorithms; Tali was doing remarkably complicated hand gestures and coming very close to knocking over an entire rack of bottles. Kasumi was cheating flagrantly in a poker game with Liara and Javik, who were too busy arguing to notice. She winked at him, and instead of calling her out, he winked back. She'd give it all back in the morning, he knew; it was the challenge of pulling one over on the Shadow Broker that had her hooked, not the money. Then he rounded the corner to find James and Ash.

Garrus was hardly an expert in how large the expected personal space allowance is for various species. He knew that it varied even within species, by culture. He knew that turians had an unusually large one by galactic standards--which he'd attribute to being an aggressive predatory species, except krogans didn't seem to have a particularly great need for personal space. He knew that quarians had a very small personal bubble, due probably to life on the cramped Fleet, where there simply wasn't enough space for ample personal room. (On the first Normandy, he'd several times seen Tali accidentally chase one of the human crew members around the room, Tali trying to close what seemed to her an uncomfortably large gap while the crew member tried to put his or her own idea of personal space between them.) He knew that humans and asari and salarians fell somewhere in the middle.

But he was pretty sure that Ashley and James were standing way, way closer than seemed normal for humans. James had one arm braced against the wall and he was leaning forward in a way that Garrus had seen spell trouble in a hundred bad bars in his cop days... only Ashley was leaning too, leaning forward enough that they were almost touching. Almost, but not quite. Somehow that bare breath of space seemed more intimate than if they had been touching. James said something far too quiet for the translator to pick up and Ashley smiled; she was flushed, giggly--giggly? Ashley?--but not drunk; he'd seen her drunk and this was not that.

She looked happy, he realized with a jolt.

James glanced at Garrus from the corner of his eye, and waved a hand at him, a gesture that encompassed both 'hey man' and 'no offense, but go the hell away, I'm busy' very economically. And Ashley, no fool, noticed and laughed in earnest, which made James laugh too, and then Garrus really did feel like he was intruding, and moved on.

He found Shepard in the upper balcony, watching EDI and Joker dance. "So remember what I said about James and Ashley?"

"There's a reason I didn't take that bet." Shepard leaned against the railing, sounding very pleased with herself. Well, she'd earned it. "I told them to go for it. A little more happiness will do the galaxy some good."

"Mm," he said, looping an arm around her shoulders. She settled back against him, the way she'd found to fit their two disparate bodies together, her chin just in the curve of his cowl, cheek against his throat, shoulder tucked comfortably into the dip along his keelbone. They'd taken radically different evolutionary paths on worlds impossibly far apart... and yet here they were.

Below them, in front of the fire place, Joker was saying, "EDI, you're supposed to be leaning on me, not the other way around."

"Even if it were not for the particular qualities of your musculoskeletal system, I would protest such an enforcement of implicit gender norms, Jeff."

"Aw, shit," Joker said, which Garrus was fairly sure meant he liked it and wasn't willing to admit it. Shepard chuckled.

"So," Garrus said, low in Shepard's ear. He could feel her shiver. "Want to go find some happiness of our own?"

She smirked at him. Okay, so it wasn't the best pick up line in the world; damn it, he was trying. She turned in his arms, sliding a hand up his cowl, making him shiver, too, at the featherlight touch. "Haven't we already?"

"Hm. Yes. But I was thinking something more active. You know how I am. Not happy unless I have something...." He dipped his head, licked the upper curve of her ear, "...to do."

Shepard opened her mouth.

"--but if you make a calibration joke," Garrus added, "I am out of here. Love of my life or not."

Shepard closed her mouth with a snap, eyes dancing. "Come on, then."

"So how many bedrooms do you think we'll need?"

"Just the one. But the one with the hot tub."

Garrus sighed. "You just want to see me flail around in the water like an idiot."

Shepard turned, pulling him down, forehead to forehead and eye to eye. "I want to see you shiny and slippery and hot," she said, "and then I want to see what it takes to wear out a turian's endurance."

He swallowed hard, leaning into her, into the space between them where breath and spirit mingled. "I can live with that."

Chapter Text

“You know," Ashley said, "you never did tell me why I didn’t get a nickname.” She was staring at the ceiling in a pleasant daze, her arms folded behind her head. “I used to feel pretty left-out.”

James’ hand spread comfortably across her bare stomach. “Yeah, well, all the names that came to mind seemed kinda… uh… disrespectful. I didn’t want to offend you, so….”

“Disrespectful?” She lifted her head to look at him. “You call Garrus ‘Scars.’ You call Tali ‘Sparks,’ and by the way that’s a terrible name.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hell, you call your own commanding officer ‘Lola.’” James chuckled and rubbed her belly with the side of her thumb. “I hesitate to ask what you’d consider disrespectful, given all that.”

“Yeah, well… I thought if I called you ‘Hot Stuff’ you’d probably punch me, and I’d deserve it.”

Ashley burst out laughing. “I probably would, and at least half because Hot Stuff is a terrible nickname. That's even stupider than Sparks.”

James shrugged. Ashley took the moment to admire the ripple of muscles across his shoulders. “I dunno, nicknames just come to me. I look at someone and boom, nickname. Lola looked like a Lola. Doc looked like a Doc. Scars—”

“—has scars, yes, I get the idea.”

“I looked at you and it was just, yowza. Figured you wouldn’t approve of ‘Yowza’ as a nickname.”

“Flatterer.”

“Naw, really, right before Mars, you remember--of course you remember. Well, there you were, I mean, there you were"--his hand slid down to caress her hip, and she squirmed pleasantly, "--and all I could come up with was 'holy shit.' And I was trying real hard not to think about…” he traced a fingertip across her cheek to her lower lip “your eyes, your lips, your hair, your fantastic ass, ‘cause I didn’t want to be a jackass and stare, you know? You deserved to be treated respectfully, like the kickass professional you are. Even if you were exactly my type and then some. So that was when I decided maybe I’d better just think of you as Williams.”

“Hm. Well.” Ashley curled onto her side, letting her cheek rest against his bicep. His fingers settled lightly on her hair. “Okay, so while we’re admitting things… the first time I walked into the cargo bay and you were there doing pullups I had to sneak out to the hallway to compose myself.”

“Really?”

“Swear to god.”

He leaned in to kiss her, brief but hot, the stubble on his cheeks just enough prickle to awaken her skin, not enough to hurt. “Whatever else people say about me, I do a mean pullup.”

Ashley sighed and closed her eyes, enjoying the sheer physical pleasure of it: the warmth of his skin against hers, the pleasant ache between her legs, the gentle catch of his calluses against the soft skin of her belly, the firm mattress and crisp (if now rather rumpled) sheets. “I guess this is our last shot at a real bed for quite a while,” she said. If we ever get to sleep in a real bed again, she thought, but didn’t say.

“Yeah, well, we’ll just have to bribe EDI to jam the Starboard Observation doors shut for us if we want some alone time,” James said. “Or take over the Grizzly.”

“Steve would kill us.”

“He’d kill me,” James corrected. “I’m willing to take that risk.”

“Well.” Ashley pushed herself up on one elbow. “Still, I think we’d better make full use of this bed while we have it.” She caught the flash of James’ smile just before she pushed him down onto his back and kissed him.

Chapter Text

Morning came, and with it the sound of a great many people having hangovers at the same time. Shepard--who had indulged but not over-indulged, and who had an unusually resilient toxin-removal system anyway thanks to Miranda's tinkering--wasn't feeling it, but she knew that a lot of them were.

Liara and Tali were whimpering sympathetically to each other. Grunt had the good grace to look guilty about what he'd broken. Joker was leaning even more heavily than usual on EDI. And in the kitchen--

--James was bustling about, looking astonishingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he made eggs.

Traynor grabbed Shepard and hauled her out into the corridor. "I will pay you a hundred credits if you get him to stop," she said. "Every time he says 'eggs' I feel more nauseated."

"I'll see what I can do," Shepard promised.

“That’s ‘nauseated,’” Traynor said. “Not ‘nauseous.’ They don’t mean the same thing.” Shepard must have been giving her a funny look (or at least she was mentally filing her in the ‘pedantic when hungover’ category), because she said, “What? Words matter.”

But it was hard to squash James, since he looked so happy. And Ashley was perched on a bar stool on the other side of the kitchen's sizeable island, feet crossed demurely at the ankles, drinking black coffee, and looking like the cat that had gotten the cream and the canary both and was looking forward to eggs in a minute. She glanced up, met Shepad's eyes, and smiled a very pleased smile indeed.

Shepard couldn't help smiling back.

"Eggs, commander?" James asked. The skilled in his hand did look surprisingly appetizing--real Earth chicken eggs, judging by the color, with cheese and peppers and probably bacon or ham. "They're nearly done, and there's toast--I wanted to make huevos rancheros but there wasn't the right stuff in the fridge--anyway, it'll be good."

"Save me a portion," she said. "But uh, James? Can you quiet it down? Some people are feeling a little bit delicate in the digestive system this morning."

"There's no better cure for a hangover than black coffee and greasy eggs," James said. Shepard gave him a look. He sighed. "All right, fine, I'll put a lid on it."

Ashley didn't say anything, but she poured Shepard a cup of coffee, and then leaned forward with her chin on her hand to give James an amusedly-affectionate look as he finished the eggs.

Shepard left them to it.

And once she'd reassured herself that everyone was awake and alive and suffering nothing worse than a few truly tragic hangovers (in her mental highlight file: Wrex giving Tali advice on dealing with a hangover; Grunt contritely attempting to put a lamp back together, despite the fact that the lamp was clearly long past saving; Samara sitting, very quietly and with great dignity, in a corner, with her fingertips pressed to her temples), she crawled back into bed with Garrus, who was taking shameless advantage of his Commander's Boyfriend status to lie around undisturbed.

"Hey," she said, making her way up the length of the bed on all fours, to where Garrus had propped himself up with pillows.

"Hey yourself," he said, sliding a hand through her hair. She nuzzled her cheek up against his shoulder.

"I guess we'd better get going," she said, though she wished she didn't have to--wished she could preserve this moment of cameraderie and peace, defend it against anyone or anything who would threaten it, seal it in a permanent bubble against Reapers and anything else.

Garrus tipped his head forward, pressed the plates of his mouth against her forehaed. "You lead the way," he said, as she relaxed into his embrace, stole just one moment more. "You know we'll always be following you."