Once upon a time, @yourlocalpriestess requested that I do a kiss prompt with these two NPCS from ME3 and now, a trillion billion years late, I have it. It turned out surprisingly angsty, because… I mean. It’s Mass Effect 3. Also, I wrote it, so… angst.
“staring at the other’s lips, trying not to kiss them, before giving in”
It wasn’t that Joker’s story was boring — if anything, it was slightly too interesting to believe — but Garrus was so very drunk, and the bar so very dark, and it all seemed so very far away…
Joker’s voice began to drift across Garrus’ hull, an exciting but unrecognizable star-field stretching into an incomprehensible blur. For a while, Garrus nodded and made appropriate listening sounds, but before long, even that center lost its hold.
In the far corner, two people sat talking amongst themselves, and Garrus couldn’t look away. A quiet, elegantly dressed human girl and her gregarious salarian friend, that was all. At first, they made a sort of mirror to Garrus and the babbling flight lieutenant. Seemingly distracted by her thoughts, her eyes stayed glued to the table while her friend gestured onward and upward in broad strokes, ordering the drinks.
They were normal, they were young. Theoretically they were nobodies, but Garrus knew better than to put faith in anonymity during wartime. The longer he looked, the more he wondered their names, their reasons for being there together. They made an usual pair, even now, even here on the Citadel where interspecies cooperation was the song of the hour…
What familiarities must have been lost, to find comfort so far from home?
Colleagues? No. The girl was all civilian, prim and slight, with a tendency to tuck her hair behind her ear - a nervous tic. Her companion was a soldier — off-duty armor worn like a badge, prized and gleaming. A sure sign things could only get worse, he looked new to the war effort. New to a lot of things, maybe, caught up in the glory of his own purpose, radiating the wide-eyed, work-obsessed certainty young male salarians tended to spew. But they learned fast, which was a different kind of tragedy.
The pair were sitting too far away to eavesdrop on, but at this distance Garrus could see the color of their conversation. Despite the boy’s performative enthusiasm, there was a shakiness in his arms, a darting wildness in his broad, wet eyes. A lack of replies from the girl, the weight of her shoulders like an anchor dragging her friend back down, closer and closer. They sat on a shared bench that seemed to grow narrower with each long pause, as if the space between them was subject to a rift, a deepening wrinkle. The boy’s eyes always returning to her face, the sad half-shrug of her mouth; his stories told for her benefit. When the smiles grew thinner, he moved closer, lifted his hand to her shoulder as if he wanted…
But no. That would have been strangest of all.
Garrus tried to focus, to stop staring, to look back at his own table-mate and listen to whatever the hell Jeff was still talking about, but the strangeness on the other side of the room became an inescapable weight, a density of shadow and sympathy that Garrus found impossible to avoid.
She wasn’t smiling at all now. The girl had turned inward. Her face was shadowed - perhaps crying, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps neither of those things and something more complex. The boy closed the final inches. His fingers on her neck, pulling her back from the long brink neither would see coming, a deep and inevitable collapse. She turned her head away: nervous, terrified, but he caught her there, held on for dear life, hands on her face, thumbs tracing patterns only a lover could see.
The girl was speaking very quickly now, using words the boy must taste; those broken sentences forced out between uneven breaths and bitten lips. Staring at her mouth, he pulled her closer, closer…
A hand flew into Garrus’ face. “Hey. Normandy to Gar—”
Garrus pulled Joker’s wrist down to the table like a strangled captive. Sniper quiet, he put a strict finger across his own mouth, then pointed.
Girl and boy were locked together now, would stay that way for quite some time — as long as their time could last… considering.
Looking at Garrus’ hand over his own, Joker quipped, “I’m not kissing you,” but his voice masked the same distant recognition, the same sadness, that Garrus currently felt running through his gut. “For one,” Joker laughed, “I can’t take Shepard in a fight.”
Garrus squeezed Joker’s hand once, with feeling, then knocked back his drink.