Burnt Card
Nadia Shepard x Garrus Vakarian | M | 6739 words | AO3
cw: hurt/comfort, major injuries, happy ending
~
The mission went south before the shuttle even touched down on Gei Hinnom. Well, Garrus supposed it went south because the shuttle didn't touch down, instead exploding about twenty meters off the surface. In what felt like a reenactment of the SR1 destruction he never saw, Shepard shoved him and Grunt out the side door that she didn’t wait to open all the way. Blasted it off the ship with her biotics while shouting, “Go, go, go!” and Garrus was airborne before he could even process what was happening.
She must have felt the missile’s mass effect field coming.
Still too slow, because she only had one foot out the door when missile made impact. Garrus saw it happen this time—falling through the air as the shuttle erupted into flames and twisted metal shards raining down across the planet.
The pilot was lost—no way to survive a direct impact like that, and he wasn’t wearing armor—but Garrus was pretty certain one flaming piece of debris that scattered toward the west was Shepard, her vitals still blinking in his visor.
At least he didn’t have to worry about Grunt breaking anything on impact.
“Joker, we need an emergency medical evac,” he heard himself calling before even getting back on his feet. Not that he could do that much with AA guns that just took them out somewhere on the planet. Sensors didn’t pick them up. No hostile presence had been detected at all, but with the thick jungle foliage, scans had been patchy at best. Someone was going to have to disable them on foot, and given the fracture in his ankle his suit was now blaring about, it wasn’t going to be Garrus.
Grunt pulled him to his feet as the medigel deployed, and after a few tentative steps—left leg could bear weight with the armor support and patch job—Garrus started running.
His visor honed in on a pile of smoking, red debris in the center of burnt-out vegetation. Shepard was trying and failing to get to her feet, slipping on what he hoped was mud and melted foliage, but probably contained a good portion of her own blood.
“Stay down, Shep,” he called into his comm.
Growls in the underbrush from every direction—varren circling—and a dead one next to her. Visor indicated its skull was crushed in, and it would be just like her to punch something to death while bleeding out. She should have spent that energy on deploying her own medigel, which he did for her now.
As soon as he reached her, he dropped to his knees at her side. She wasn’t moving at all now. “Throw this thing as far as you can,” he ordered Grunt with a gesture to the dead varren. That would buy him time for Shepard to get to her feet as others tore the corpse to shreds. Grunt grabbed it by the tail, swung the varren and himself around in a circle, and launched it into the forest.
Come on, Shep. Her vitals weren’t changing. Breathing rate rapid, heart rate rapid, blood pressure too low. All the red was blurring into one big, bad sign. It was like the medigel had no effect at all. Shit.
He switched his omnitool from medical to technical, scanning over her armor to diagnose the problem. That couldn’t be right. With a quick apology to his silent commander, he flipped her over from her front to her back.
The fact that she didn’t or couldn’t bother to joke about or at least curse him out over his manhandling was bad.
It was worse than bad, and Garrus shoved down the note of panic in his subvocals. Didn’t really need advanced tech to find the problem—her armor was shredded. Melted, blown off in the blast, it didn’t matter. Even her undersuit was torn away in places, and her bare, burnt skin was exposed and a lot redder than it should have been. Blood, human blood is red, he reminded himself. A quick scan told him the medigel port was still intact by her hip, but the tubes that ran the lines through her armor for administration were broken. His deployment had resulted in the medigel being dumped into the ground to mix with her blood.
Fuck.
Read the rest on AO3
