welcome home kisses, for whoever strikes your fancy!
Shakarian for you my friend! I slipped and fell directly into a pit of Shakarian feels and I've been reading a lot of fics that emphasize turian vs human behaviors in really interesting ways so I've had a hankering to write Garrus again :')
ME3, post-reunion with Garrus but pre-going back to the Normandy
---
As soon as the flaps of the tent closed, the guise of Commander Shepard dropped, and it was Ryn crossing the room in as few strides as possible.
She hit him like a meteor, crashing into his chest with her arms reaching to lock around his middle, as if enough force would meld them into one.
Garrus wrapped her tight against him, burying his face into her hair, nuzzling through the soft stands, longer than he remembered, it until he could rub his forehead against her neck, into the crook of her shoulder.
Familiar. She smelled the same. Sweet vanilla cut with something warm and woodsy beneath the salty tang of sweat and electric buzz from her biotics; he breathed in deep until the smell of her filled his head, swirled around his brain and soothed every raw edge left there.
He pressed his head harder against her skin as if he could rub the scent of her all over him, desperate to be closer than physically allowed.
Months. Months had passed with only the yearning for this feeling to keep him company.
A deep rumbling sound, the one he knew Ryn affectionately called a purr, hummed deep in his subvocals and Ryn melted against him, a long breath blowing warm against his skin.
With one gentle hand on his mandibles, her thumb brushing over the scar there, she drew his head back. Those grey eyes he could lose himself in were shadowed, the circles beneath them darker than when they'd parted at the Citadel, and the creases at the corners of her eyes more pronounced.
Ryn's hand moved to the back of his neck, settling underneath his crest as she pulled his forehead against hers. She nuzzled close, rubbing her forehead back and forth against his and her voice cracked with pain, "I missed you."
Garrus rumbled in response, a noise of such worry, longing, agreement, and hurt that he wasn't sure her translators would pick up on it. Missing didn't encapsulate the void that had taken the place of her in his heart and mind.
Turians had a word for it, when you lost your battle-mate, a constant companion that knew you better than you knew yourself, whose soul melded into your own as if they'd never been two.
If humans had a word for it, he didn't know.
"After we lost contact..." Ryn squeezed her eyes closed, her hand tightening against the back of his neck until he worried his forehead plate would bruise her soft human skin. "After I heard what happened to Palaven...I was worried you were one of the casualties."
He was intimately familiar with the howling grief and denial of believing your other half was dead. He'd fought through those despairing waves every day for two years, only for the barely scabbed over wound (could something like that ever heal?) to tear open again when the Reapers descended on Earth.
Garrus' mandibles quivered as a soft keening sound escaped him despite his best efforts. The echo of the way his chest had felt like it was caving in on itself when Vancouver's visual feed had been lost, the haunting endless ringing of Ryn's personal comm going unanswered, came back unbidden. And on its coattails, the insistent memory of Ryn in the blackness of space through the porthole of an escape pod.
He buried his face in her hair, short breaths huffing in an out as his talons scraped desperately at her armor to try and ground himself against the tide of...well, everything.
There was no way to know if they were getting out of any of this. If there would even be a galaxy to be in, after everything was said and done.
But he'd promised a long time ago that he'd watch Shepard's six, that he'd have her back no matter what.
And if the odds were a long shot, then there was no one else he'd rather be betting with than her.
Indicating that one's state is no cause for concern, e.g. in response to someone checking on or expressing concern for one's well-being, such as "are you all right?"
The most told lie in the English language. They say ‘I’m fine’ because they don’t want to worry anyone with their problems, and it’s easier than explaining what’s wrong.
Shepard is a war hero, not a child. She should be grateful that she's still Shepard at all.
Garrus has his Commander, his friend, his…something, back after two years of believing her dead. He should be grateful that he has her back at all.
So really, what is there to not be fine about?
TW: Depiction of PTSD/panic attack
Other notes: Implied unspoken ME1 Shakarian feelings
--
Cerberus swore that Project Lazarus went off without a hitch (the early launch, non withstanding).
The Illusive Man was very quick to tote around just how successfully his team brought back Commander Ryn Shepard with cutting edge technology and how invaluable a tool he had saved.
Garrus called bullshit.
Maybe it was the still simmering anger that the Illusive Man hid Ryn’s survival (resurrection? The word sent a wave of nausea though him every time he thought too hard about it) from him for months after he’d first been scouted by their agents.
Or maybe it was that while he insisted to Ryn that she was still the Ryn he knew, (though never in such clear words…everything unspoken between them still languished in the purgatory of regret and grief) and not some complex A.I. wearing her body; there was a part of him that knew you couldn’t come back from the dead completely, totally, the same.
There was no magic switch to undo death.
Garrus raised concerns to Miranda almost as soon as he was up and walking with the parts of his face barely stitched back together. Once he'd had the chance to actually talk to Ryn behind the closed door of the battery and learned exactly what had happened since she'd come to in a Cerberus lab.
Joker understood the hairline fractures in their Commander. Each time a conversation with the Illusive Man ended in a slammed down receiver or each time they caught Ryn scrubbing a hand over her face, Joker would find Garrus' look with a concerned one of his own.
Questioning the brutal mission pace always got him the same answer: “There’s nothing to worry about” and “We don’t have time to coddle her.”
So Garrus had to bite his tongue and watch Shepard’s six, waiting for the moment it would all go to shit.
A stray clip on a backwater planet with toxic air finally shattered the facade.
The assailant was downed in a plume of red seconds after a shot was fired. But Garrus couldn't shoot a thermal clip out of thin air, and his voice didn't carry faster than a bullet.
Ryn's breathing heaved ragged in his ear piece as he watched her writhe to clutch at the junction where the bullet broke through her armor. His vision narrowed just to her and his feet were already on the move-- no matter what Miranda was shouting in his ears.
All he could hear was her hitching breaths and all he could see was the air escaping her suite in the deadlock of space--her body dancing like a puppet on a string.
But this time he could slam into her, pulling her close and into the cover of the nearest building as a volley of shots fired off. This time he could keep an arm wrapped tightly around her as he slammed the door control code and the whir of the air system kicked in.
Ryn clutched at the break in her suit, the soft hiss of air escaping already fading, her feet scrabbling for purchase against the slick floor as she fought against Garrus' grip.
She was moving and blood wasn't pouring from the gash in her armor. It was just the burned material of her undershirt and the reddened skin beneath, already fading as medi-gel and the suit sealant deployed.
"Breathe, Ryn." Garrus commanded, mostly to her but sucking in a much needed breath himself, using one hand to push hers down from where they fought to tear of her helmet. "The suit self-seals the air system when breached, Ryn, just breath."
But the connection between her body and the situation now seemed severed--her chest rose in rapid, heaving motions, in and out in hollow puffs of air.
"Vakarian, what happened?" Miranda demanded over their comms, even though Garrus could hear her on the other side of the door. "Shepard's vitals are going insane."
Garrus loosened his grip on her and leaned Ryn back against the wall, moving so that he could kneel in front of her. "Shepard's compromised." he said into his comm before focusing entirely back on her.
He'd seen enough turians and C-Sec officers who'd been through less than Shepard to know that this was exactly why it wasn't standard procedure to throw people back into action.
"Ryn, I promise, your suit sealed." he insisted, but his words fell on empty air. Her eyes locked onto his from behind her helmet's visor, frantic and more pupil than iris. The strange hue from her scars echoed like flame in her eyes and across her visor. Her lips moved, but only a strange squeak fought out from between her erratic breaths.
Her hands, both clamped over the hole that the clip had ripped through, might as well have been fused to her shoulder when he tried to move them.
"Just get her up Vakarian, this is ridiculous!" Miranda snapped, "Suit scans show no significant injuries--"
"Call this mission a wash!" Garrus cut her off with a rough edge, eyes locked on the way Ryn's mouth fought around words that couldn't escape. Though the visor of her helmet, he saw tears streaking down her cheeks.
His own heart hammered in his chest, threatening to block his airway; thoughts looping the newfound knowledge that this would've been what those moments in the vacuum of space had been like.
Miranda finally forced the door open and with a shake of her head crouched beside Ryn.
Garrus didn't realize his arm went out to put himself in front of Ryn until Miranda gave him a withering look and shoved him aside, pushing an injector into a port in Ryn's suit.
"Put your teeth away, guard dog." Miranda snapped. "It's an emergency sedative."
Ryn's breathing evened out in his earpiece within a few seconds, her death grip on the shoulder of her armor sliding down.
Garrus' own nerves still felt like livewire, his entire body buzzing.
Miranda heaved a breath and pushed herself to her feet, typing something as she turned away from them.
"Get up." She commanded and tilted her head towards Ryn. "And grab her. We're going back to the Normandy."
---
Garrus couldn't call what he was doing, leaning against the closed doorway of the medbay, anything but keeping guard.
He dug his talons into the meat of his upper arms, trying to pull himself down from the quivering tension that still seemed to pulse through his veins.
Dr. Chawkwas had looked ready to sedate him when he'd carried Ryn in, pulling her closer when Chakwas had reached for her. It hadn't even been a voluntary reaction, he realized what he was doing only when he and Chakwas had stared at each other for a long beat, both questioning exactly what he thought he was doing clutching his commander close.
Everything was fine, he reminded himself again forcefully, even as the other part of him screamed, not again.
The memory of the Normandy SR1's crash colored his every sense. He swore he could smell the same acrid tear of metal. Over and over again his mind drifted to the way Ryn had grabbed at her armor, and the way her body had contorted in the vacuum of space, bleeding the two memories together into one.
Her wide eyes. The way her voice had contorted around her breathless lungs.
He pressed his back against the door, letting his head thump backwards against the metal. Chakwas wouldn't let him in, she'd said as much.
Besides, who was he to think he should be in there? It was presumptuous, wasn't it?
"I told the Illusive Man that you two would be a liability." Miranda's voice snipped from his right and his mandibles flared in irritation as he lifted his head.
She took the motion as permission to continue, "I told him you would be too much."
Garrus bared his teeth, "I haven't done anything except get my face blown off and do what I've always done for Shepard."
Miranda sneered, "He didn't believe me when I said that as soon as we gave you back to Shepard that we'd lose all leverage. And look what happened. Now we have two feral, pack bonded dogs running loose on this ship."
"What'd you think was going to happen? She was..." Dead. The word lodged in Garrus' throat. Thinking it even set the world spinning around him. Instead he choked out, "She lost everything."
"We should've wiped her clean." Miranda said firmly, "But the Illusive Man said that would strip everything worthwhile from her. But all I've seen is it be is a threat."
Garrus' stomach rolled at the thought of Ryn's remade body being paraded around as an empty shell wearing her face and his voice was strangled as he tried not to dry heave, "She didn't ask for this."
Miranda cocked an eyebrow, "If we didn't do this, she'd still be dead and you'd still be trying to die on Omega. That what you'd rather have?"
His vision went hazy and he stumbled backwards as as door opened suddenly behind him. Chakwas' hand landed firmly at the center of his collar, pushing him back onto his feet.
"If you two are going to argue, do it somewhere else!" she said in a sharp, clipped tone. "You're disrupting the space my patient needs to recover."
Miranda turned her reproachful gaze onto Dr. Chakwas, "Recover from a suit malfunction? She's a war hero, not a child."
Garrus' mandibles flared again, his entire stature seeming to inflate with anger, culled by a warning look from the doctor. She kept her same, cool tone that she always did.
"She's a soldier, who's been through a great deal. It's very common for their nervous systems to be very reactive upon returning to service. Especially when two crew members are at each other's throats right outside the med bay."
Garrus cowed under the doctor's scolding. Really what did he think he was doing, skulking outside the med bay door anyway? Ryn's presence when he woke up after Omega was purely circumstantial. Of course she'd want to check on her old crew member who took a rocket to the head.
He mumbled an apology and after a moment, Miranda loosed a sharp sigh through her nose.
"I need to gather some data, at the very least." Miranda said, "The Illusive Man will want to know details on why we washed this mission."
Chakwas refused to move from the med bay door, "I will send Shepard to you once I've done my own assessments and release her."
Miranda conceded to that with all the sympathy of hearing that a system needed to be restarted.
Garrus turned towards the battery, only for the hiss of the door behind him closing to catch his attention.
Chakwas crossed her arms, looking at him with an intensity that made his skin crawl.
"Garrus, I think you and I need to talk." she said, tone much softer in a way that didn't help the way it felt like beetles buzzed beneath his skin.
He looked away, shrugging his shoulders as if he could roll off her stare that might as well be picking him apart piece by piece.
"M'fine." he mumbled. "Nothing to report since you looked over me last."
Had the doctor's stare always been so laser focused? He gave himself a minuscule shake but it did little to shake away the weight of her stare.
So knowing. As if she understood something that he very clearly didn't.
But after a moment she sighed, "Just remember, I've worked with a lot of soldiers who've been through a lot of things. It's my job to make sure everyone on this ship is doing alright. And I don't know that you are."
"I'm fine." Garrus insisted, feeling too exposed, too raw, under that stare. He turned back to the battery, walking away before anymore words could hit him like tons of bricks.
Walking until the door hissed closed behind him, and he could brace back against the cold metal to try and ease the burning feeling across his entire body.
Because he was fine. There was nothing to be not fine about.
*rises from the pits of writers block and hyperfixation drought with Shakarian*
I am so sorry that this has languished in my drafts for an embarrassingly long time. Like, a painfully long time. Hopefully some Shakarian makes up for it ;--;
Summary: ME-1 fledgling Shakarian. Garrus and Ryn share a night of good natured drinking on the Normandy while the rest of the grew takes their shore leave out on the Citadel. Garrus realizes that Ryn has dimples. Science experiments about inter species smiles ensue.
---
Humans were something of a mystery.
Well, not really, in the twenty-five years since the First Contact War they'd discovered a whole lot about humanity. The newcomers to the galactic world had quite adeptly squirmed their way into the narrative.
That still didn't mean that Garrus totally understood the human standing in front of him. Shepard was something outside of all the other humans he'd met.
The way she carried herself was like the rest of the Alliance military officers, with a straight back and an uncanny ability to easily slide into combat mode at the flip of a switch. He supposed that came with the N7 emblem emblazoned on her armor.
No, it wasn't Commander Shepard that confused him, he understood Commander Shepard at a very baseline, turian level.
Ryn Shepard though...Ryn Shepard was a mystery he had yet to unravel.
They sat together on the floor of the Normandy's lower decks, the metal cold beneath them. Ryn leaned back against the side of the Mako, swinging a half-empty beer bottle precariously between her fingers.
Garrus waited for it to go flying, watching out of the corner of his eye, but it hadn't yet. The more empty bottles piled up between them, the less inclined she seemed to drink. Instead she played with the bottle, rolling it between her fingers, sloshing the liquid within.
Occasionally she took a sip, but she seemed to prefer the act of having something to hold in her hands and as an emphasis to her sentences.
In every battalion Garrus had been with during his mandatory service time before going to the Citadel, they drank until every decision seemed like a good decision and loosened their tight laces until they could get every bit of wild energy out of their system. More often than not, Garrus had watched from the sidelines as the training decks had devolved until sparring matches if shore leave wasn't an option.
He'd never enjoyed getting the shit beat out of him while drunk. So when Ryn had gestured to him with a pack of whatever humans drank in one hand and a dextros pack in another hand, a shudder of foreboding had gone through him.
But Ryn just wanted to...talk. Despite the several bottles buzzing in their systems, she'd get to challenge him to an ass kicking or thrown a punch at him once.
During their service time together, Garrus had pinned her as stoic. Friendly and impassioned if you got her on the right subject, but locked down just like every other military officer he'd interacted with. Occasionally he would a genuine smile out of her, even a laugh if he perhaps said something a little too straitlaced.
"He didn't even win the restaurant's steak challenge to boot!" Ryn was saying, wildly waving her half-empty beer bottle for emphasis. "Bastard was three bites shy and tapped out! But you know what he did have to do? Poor guy had meat sweats for days and got stuck lugging the resupply from base alll the way back to that restaurant to make up for eating them out of house and home on a dare."
Ryn snickered to herself, her cheeks flushed with drink and amusement. "We called him Meatlug after that. He hated it."
Her smile pulled her cheeks back into what he was pretty sure the humans called dimples. A small pockmark at the corners of her mouth. He hadn't seen her smile wide enough to bring those out.
Garrus didn't realize what he was doing until he was already leaning forward and poking her cheek, curling his talon down so his knuckle met her soft human flesh instead of his talon.
Her skin was warm to the touch, soft and silky compared to his rough, leathery skin.
He jerked backwards, feet scrabbling on the floor to scoot back until his back slammed into the Mako.
"Commander, I'm--" He gasped out, horrified as he wondered if he telekineticly vaporize himself on the spot. "I'm so sorry."
Ryn stared at him with owlishly round grey eyes, her cheeks going even pinker as she brought her free hand to where he'd poked.
Great, on top of every other stupid thing he'd done in the span of three seconds, he'd probably gouged a hole in her skin to boot. He waited for the rush of blood, for her to start yelling, something.
Instead, she tilted her head back and howled with laughter. Her shoulders shook so violently that a splash of her drink sloshed from the bottle and over her hands.
She laughed until she could hardly breath and when she looked back at him her eyes were watering, her face so flushed that her freckles stood out like individual stars spattered across her skin.
"Garrus." She wheezed, brushing away the tears that had gathered in the corners of her eyes. "Why do you look like I'm going to kill you?"
"I shouldn't have done that." Garrus pressed himself further back against the Mako, as if he could dissolve into the metal. "I don't know why I did that."
Ryn started giggling all over again, and the sound scratched something in his brain. He wanted more of that light, carefree sound.
He pulled down the hatch on that thought. Pushed it far, far away.
"It's fine." Ryn reassured, catching her breath. "You just caught me off guard. What were you doing?"
She tilted her head, still smiling.
Garrus helplessly shrugged, flailing with his hands. "I uh...argh, well. When you smile..." he pressed the tips of his fingers on either side of what he approximated a human would read as the turian's visible mouth.
Ryn brought her own hands to her cheeks, eyes thoughtful before understand a lit like a fire in them.
"Oh!" she gasped, setting down her beer bottle and scooting across the floor until she knelt in front of Garrus. She was staring at him with such beer-fueled sincerity, as if this was the most important knowledge that should be gained. "They're dimples, I've had them since I was a kid. They come out when I'm smiling."
Garrus struggled to find something to say to explain exactly why he was so transfixed by the details of her human smile, but the intensity that she was inspecting his face threw out any words that crossed his mind.
"So how do turians smile?" she asked before holding up a hand. "Or, well, how do turians do your equivalent of smiling? Do turians smile? I think every turian I've ever spoken to has been very serious, given the situation."
Garrus couldn't suppress his own laugh, deep in his chest and more of a rumble. His mandibles flared as he said, "Don't tell me you think turians are so tightlaced that we don't smile."
"No!" Ryn denied with indigence before horror of her own washed over her face. "No, that's not what I meant. I just...with..." Helpless in her own right, Ryn used her hands to mimic his mandibles. "They didn't really teach us anything about alien expressions in N7 school."
He laughed again and without thinking held out his hands, gesturing for hers. She laid her hands, palms up, in his and he brought them to rest lightly against his mandibles.
"This is neutral for a turian." he explained before 'smiling', his mandibles flaring again. "And this is what you would call smiling. Though context matters--sometimes our mandibles flare when we're pissed off."
"So have you been smiling at me all those times, or been really pissed off with me since you joined the Normandy?" Ryn teased.
Garrus' mind short circuited. He hadn't realized that despite having no idea what it meant, that Ryn had picked that up. No doubt as she'd worn down his hard line pragmatism with her impassioned optimism.
Her expression had started to falter when he was finally able to force out a shy, "Smiling."
"Oh." Ryn's cheeks went a bright, flaming red brighter than her hair. Her thumbs twitched against the edge of his mandibles and if Garrus was capable of blushing himself, he would've burnt bright as a sun at the thrill the touch sent through him.
"And, hrm, are dimples just when you smile? Because they come out when you're concentrating too." The stream-of-conscious question left Garrus' mind through his mouth as a distraction before he could stop it.
Ryn went even redder, if that was a possibility. Garrus contemplated the merits of shooting himself out the airlock at the next opportunity once again. He'd heard the empty void of space was great this time of year.
"They do not." She spluttered before faltering, "Do they?"
"They do. When you're programming routes into the galaxy map or fixing something in your guns." Garrus supplied.
Ryn dropped her hands and gave his shoulders a light shove, "You're too damn observant, Vakarian!" she barked, though it lacked heat.
"I could say the same about you, Shepard." Garrus shot back, his mind a complicated mess of circuits and parts as Ryn leaned back to get her beer and started rambling on another story from her time training in the N7 program.
It took several minutes for the blush to leave her cheeks, and Garrus couldn't read the looks she shot his way for the rest of the way as anything except bashful.
Humans were something of a mystery.
Ryn Shepard though, she was the most curious of them all.
I'm going to combine this one with: “Why do you always have to be so cute when you’re frowning?” for Ryn/Garrus' also from the depths of my ask box because it fits so well :) thank you for the ask(s)
Post-ME3 fluff <3
---
Formal events and rubbing elbows with the higher-ups never was Garrus' strong suit.
From military balls and award ceremonies as a child with his parents into C-Sec galas, he always did his best to do his rounds as quick as possible and Irish goodbye even faster.
That became significantly harder as not only the former (perhaps-- pieces were still falling into place that he didn't quite understand) to the Primark, but also one of the crew members of the Normandy that ended to Reaper threat.
Suddenly every turian in this event room seemed to want to talk to him; whether or not Garrus really wanted to talk to them seemed irrelevant.
He practically swam through the sea of turians, twisting and turning his way through the mob, not even sure which combination of "thank you", "nice to meet you, sir/ma'am", "we'll have to catch up later" or "excuse me" he was saying to each person as he did.
For all he knew, he could be telling someone to excuse their thanks and catch up later.
If they wanted someone better at speaking to the masses, they weren't going to find it in Garrus.
When Garrus broke free of the crowd he scanned the bar for the only person he cared to talk to.
Ryn sat at the end of the bar, pressed into a corner where she could lean both against the bar and the wall. She nursed a water, narrowed eyes roaming the crowd. Her lips pursed in a frown.
A pang of guilt ached in Garrus' chest. He'd promised they'd do their rounds and then leave when he'd asked if she would come with him to this ridiculous event--but that was before 'the rounds' took thrice as long as expected. They'd been pulled apart almost as soon as they'd walked in--Garrus to the Primarch and his party and Ryn to the hoard of military-minded turians ravenous to get a word in with the famous Commander Shepard.
"Hey sweetheart," he said over the mind-numbing classical music overlaid with the raucous laughter of military generals, slipping an arm behind her shoulders. "Has anyone told you that you look adorable when you're frowning?"
Ryn fixed leaned back against his chest and that steel-grey glower fixed on him. But her frown took on a distinctly less serious pout.
"Does this mean nothing to anyone anymore?" she grumbled, hooking a finger underneath the silver chain of the vincorit, the thin metal pendent tinking softly against the simple metal band on her ring finger.
Her own vincorit, the red and clear glass beads and stone shimmering under the low lighting, hung over the high neck of her dress.
Garrus chuckled, nuzzling his face into her hair. Ryn pressed up into the kiss equivalent, making a petulant noise.
"You save the galaxy three times over and suddenly you're the hottest turian around." A grin broke through her pouting lips as she melted further into the feel of his arm around her.
"You're one to talk, Shepard." Garrus poked back at her with a laugh that was more of a sub-vocal rumble. While he'd battled to escape his own entourage, he'd caught glimpses of her blunt shut-downs of several different advances with a growing line-up of bought and untouched drinks.
He extended his hand to her and offered the escape route he desperately wanted to take, "Ready to go home?"
Relief washed over Ryn's face and she set her half-empty water glass down, "Yes please."
He stepped back far enough to let her out of her chair and extended his arm to her when she was on her feet. She looped her arm through his with a thankful look.
"I was feeling fine when we left." she fussed as she leaned her weight into Garrus with each slow, stiff step.
It didn't matter how many miracles the Alliance trauma and surgeon teams pulled off to keep her alive after pulling her from the wreckage of London-- persistent aches and pains had become the normal for her slow healing body.
The cool air outside offered welcome relief from the stale air of the event space and Garrus gave himself a little shake as if to free himself from the last of the stifling bureaucracy.
Ryn smiled up at him, "It's cute how you always do that."
The little thrill that still always went through him when she looked at him with such domestic love shot from the tip of his fringe to his toes and he still bashfully looked away.
She laughed to herself, "And I can still make my turian blush."
My turian. What could Garrus say, except that Ryn Shepard still had him wrapped around one pinkie finger.
"Turians don't blush." he retorted, though it lacked any actual credibility. He still studied the sidewalk with intense curiosity.
Ryn ducked her head down, her red curls cascading over one shoulder, to peer at him with a mischievous smile. In the time since he'd looked away, she'd deftly undone her heels and clutched them in one hand.
"Did I embarrass the biggest, baddest turian this galaxy has ever seen?" she teased.
The scene was so Ryn, that he couldn't help but shake with rumbling laughter. Every time they'd faced any formal event, her heels had always been the first to go. And without the humdrum of formality tying her down, her capacity for teasing had returned tenfold.
She darted forward and pressed a kiss to the his mandible. He knew there'd be a lipstick stain in the shape of her lips yet and he gave her a 'really'? look.
Ryn scrunched her nose at him and tucked herself closer to his arm.
"If you didn't want me to kiss you, you shouldn't look so kissable."
His mandibles flared and his sub vocals hummed as he shook his head and called them a cab, "That's what you say every time, Ryn."
Dialogue starter prompt: "believe me. it was a mistake" for your choice of muse(s)
Ehehe shall I offer you some Agent Angst (kinda) on this fine Tuesday evening?
I started Agentnoveling to @tiredassmage about Rhys earlier and it's devolved into a mess of feels. Enjoy :3
---
Rhys' duffle bag weighed heavy on his shoulder as he readjusted it. He stared at the caf maker, watching the overworked machine strain to push the wateriest caf he'd ever tasted into his equally as abused mug.
"Going somewhere?" Five leaned on the counter next to Rhys, startling him with his silent approach.
Though, from the way Five raised an eyebrow, Rhys wasn't so sure the approach had been so silent.
Five said a lot without words as he held out a handful of goods to make the coffee taste like something more than bitter water.
"Wow, one of Fourteen's caramel creamers from your desk." Rhys said into the awfully loud silence, palming the flavor mix, "You're really spoiling me today."
He made it all the way through pouring in the creamer and stirring exactly three times before Five's stare finally burned a hole into him.
"Yes I'm going somewhere you nosy asshole." He said, wrestling with the lid to his mug under the scrutiny of his field partner.
"Hm, interesting." Five hummed, reaching around Rhys to push the lid down enough to seal. He had that look about him that Rhys hated--humorless eyes and drawn lips. It was his stick-up-the-ass face. "No you're not."
"That's not what Keeper's orders said." Rhys scooped up his cup and went to turn. His duffle bag started to slip and he cursed as hot coffee bubbled up and across his hand.
Five caught his bag, slinging it back over Rhys' shoulder. At the same time, he felt Five's hand tighten over the strap of his bag and into the thick material of his uniform; grappling him the same way you'd scruff a cat.
"What--" Rhys began only for Five's voice, oozing false pep, interrupted him:
"How about we catch up in my office and share our coffees."
Rhys tried to wrestle himself free without causing too much of a scene. Though most of their agents were spread thin these days, sent out to planets across systems, the few that were still working out of HQ were painfully observant and equally as prone to spreading gossip.
Wondering what he did to get strong-armed into their senior-most Cipher's office could keep the rumor mill flowing for plenty of time.
"Five, what the hell?" he burst out as Five's office door slid shut behind them. In typical fashion, his office was lit in soft yellows of lamps instead of brilliant white fluorescent and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust.
"Sit down." All of Five's pep dissipated in those two, brusque words.
Rhys bristled, hiking his bag up onto his shoulder.
"I don't have time for this. I have a flight to catch at the spaceport." he snapped, flipping his wrist to stare at the blinking numbers on the chrono. It took his eyes a moment to focus in on the numbers--the lines blurring together.
"No you don't." Five had the gall to point at the leather chair in the corner before sliding into his own behind his desk, steepling his hands under his chin.
Why the hell did Rhys feel like a kid called into the principal's office?
"Rhys." Five's voice softened just a notch, "Sit the hell down."
He sighed, shucking his bag down next to the chair and slinging himself into it. The leather gave way to his weight, settling him into his own custom hollow he'd worn into the cushion over the years.
Roslynd complained he ruined the chair with the way he leaned to one side. He always told her that if it bothered her that much, she had a perfectly good seat behind the desk.
"I took you off that mission." Five said after Rhys had settled down in a creak of old leather and rustling of heavy uniform. "One of our junior agents is going instead."
"But Keeper--" Rhys interrupted, dread settling in a writhing coil in his stomach.
"Is overwhelmed with other matters." Five leaned his chin on his hands, eyes narrowing. Rhys hated being pinned down by that stare. After this many years, that stare read him like a stream of consciousness.
A deep divet pulled down between Five's brows, "Rhys, when's the last time you went home?"
Rhys frowned and ran a hand over his beard, "Dunno, been busy."
"Hm." Five hummed again, nodding along. "Haven't we all. Did you know that your landlord called me--your emergency contact--the other day to ask if you were still living there?"
He looked away from Five's piercing stare, taking a pointed sip of his coffee. Even with the creamer in it, it tasted like shit. It burned on the way down, meeting the other four cups he'd already downed.
"That so?" he tried to keep his voice casual. "Still gets rent on time every month--shouldn't matter."
Honestly, he hated that little apartment. There wasn't anything wrong with it per say--it was nestled in a quiet neighborhood and had just enough space to make it feel open. It looked over one of the city gardens. His neighbors were quiet.
Everything was so quiet.
"Rhys," There was a firm intentionality behind the use of his name. In these walls, he wasn't supposed to be Rhys, "What did you do when I was at my worst?"
The words were bursting out of Rhys before he realized he'd fallen for Five's trap hook, line, and sinker.
"Not enough, obviously! And believe me, that was a mistake!"
Two years and hitting that subject still felt like hitting an open wound. He gripped his cup, focusing on the way the outside scalded his palms.
"The finance team has us order our memorial plaques in bulk." Five said and the catch in voice was enough for Rhys to force his eyes back over.
Five tapped his desk, "Mine's in there. Erabelle's is in there. Yours. Every Cipher on our roster. And I will not be putting yours up any time soon."
Rhys rolled his eyes before he really thought about it, leaning back in the chair. It creaked and squeaked at the movement.
"You're such a worrywart." he brushed off with a motion of his hand. "I'm not..."
The words faltered on his tongue. Like that. He almost said. But that wasn't right, that implied that there had been something faulty with Five.
As if Rhys should've have caught him on his downward slide.
"There." he settled on. "Not there."
Five leaned back in his own chair, arms crossed over his chest. His fingers drummed on his upper arms in a ratta-tat-tat beat. Pissed off or thinking, it was hard to tell with the line Rhys walked.
He thought about bringing his dufflebag home, unpacking it instead of just washing his things at the laundromat a few buildings over after he landed just the day before. A cold wash ran over him.
"We're getting too old for this shit." Five finally said and while the tension didn't snap, he had his old field partner back again.
"I'm fine." Rhys ground out, "Stop worrying. You might be an old hag, but I'm fine."
Five fixed him with a withering look that listed every single grey hair on his head and every single popping joint without saying a thing.
"Five years." he said. "Ten, if you're being generous. That's how long the projected lifespan of a Cipher agent is from time of starting service, statistically speaking."
"Yeah, I know." Rhys kicked his legs out, slouching deeper into the embrace of the chair. It was cozy. If Five didn't keep the thermostat cold enough to put Hoth to shame, he'd happily doze off.
Five scrubbed a hand over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose in a way usually reserved for the juniormost agents.
"We've been at this for fifteen years now." Five said and Rhys cringed. They'd been bright-eyed busy tailed Academy grads just yesterday, right?
The scars and aches that never abated told a different story.
"Just take a fucking break, Rhys." Five sounded exhausted in that moment--the weight of fifteen years landed on every syllable. "Please?"
Rhys opened his mouth for another retort, then snapped his mouth shut just as fast.
"Alright." He conceded softly. "Fine."
"Dinner at six?" Five prodded and Rhys squeezed his eyes closed before gratefully accepting the olive branch.
❝ i was sort’ve hoping you needed me. is that selfish? ❞ for a Dragon Age Origins character, if possible?
This has been in my drafts for...far too long.
Like, even longer before I made the above note which was equally, far too long.
I hope this is still enjoyable :') it is rather hurt/comfort in the sense that it deals with angst related to Ru becoming a blood mage, but is more comfort than it is hurt.
--
The Fade stripped Ruinel's sense of reality from between her fingers. Connor's innermost agonies cried out around her in unison around each corner, begging her not to hurt him, not to hurt his father. To leave this place, to help him, to help his father, to stay.
All around her, the cries circled until she could barely think straight. She put one foot in front of the other, staggering through the pathways that appeared only with each footfall, nothing turning into something with each step.
She'd walked the Fade before, in her Harrowing, and it though the demons had whispered to her there, it was nothing compared to the cacophony that echoed around her now.
Numbly, she passed another figment of Connor, who sobbed and begged her to leave him alone.
"Ru!" A voice cut through the repetition of Connor's, feminine and commanding. "Ru! Ruinel! Wait!"
Ruinel stumbled to a halt as a hand caught around her wrist and turned her around. Baraneth, the thick leather of her gloves rough around Ruinel's wrist, stared back at her with concern.
"What are you doing here?" Ruinel gasped, jerking backwards, but Baraneth's grip didn't budge. "You're supposed to wait, with Alistair and the others."
Baraneth tilted her head, her dark hair slipping over her shoulder, "We were worried that something had happened to you. It's been hours."
Hours? No, there was no possible way it had been hours. Of course, time worked differently in the Fade, but she would know...wouldn't she? She would start to feel the familiar drain on her body that her mentor's had always warned her of...right?
"H-how did you get here?" Ruinel asked, trying to step back once again. Baraneth's grip tightened pulling her back until she stumbled into the cool metal of her armor. "Baraneth--"
"We need you out there, Ru." Baraneth whispered into the space between them, her golden eyes pleading.
Golden eyes.
"You aren't her." Ruinel gasped, heart hammering. She began to quiver as Baraneth's hand reached up until it was golden-clawed fingernails dragging up her jawline and pinching into her cheeks. "Show yourself."
My, my, you are a persistent little thing." A desire demon purred, Baraneth's face melting away to the grey-skinned demon beneath. Her forked tongue slipped out to hiss between her lips. "Fine, no more illusions. Perhaps we can converse instead?"
The demon's touch bringing a sharp rush of longing for what she'd never had. Her family, her Clan, never sending her away. All of them together beside a roaring fire instead. Ruinel, tucked close between her mamae and papae as they spun stories beneath the stars.
She recalled the Sloth demon in the Calenhad Circle, its grotesque, melted skin and bone-shaking voice, and all desires for what never was died. No matter the shape the demon took, nothing good would come from it.
"I'm willing to talk." She forced strength into her voice, tried to project the way that Baraneth could whenever they entered a room of nobles. The desire demon's lips lifted into an amused smirk.
"Ah, good." The demon sighed. "You desire my release of the boy's soul, I imagine?"
"I do." Ruinel narrowed her eyes at the demon, "So talk."
----
Wynne must know what horror she had committed. The stain of it must have bled from her like a foul odor. When Ruinel came to from the Fade, the elder mage had simply pressed her lips together and remarked that she was glad that Ruinel had returned safe and awoken Connor.
Morrigan had found the gall to smirk at her, looking almost proud as if she could read the events of the Fade from the haunted look in Ruinel's eyes when they had returned from the castle.
Everyone else had been too worn and tired from the day's battle to do more than haul themselves down to the washbasins and roll onto their bedrolls. They would depart early for Haven in the hopes of rousing Arl Eamon, and no one wanted to waste a moment of rest.
Ruinel drew her woolen blanket closer around her shoulders and curled her knees up closer to her chest. The fire did little to ease the chill that settled across her.
"Ru?" Ruinel squeezed her eyes closed as Baraneth's voice washed over her.
The demon had replicated her voice so closely. She thought of the sliver of space between them when the desire demon had pulled her close.
She shuddered and pulled her blanket up over her nose. How dare the demon use the one who'd first showed her kindness after leaving the Circle as a mask to manipulate her? How dare the demon make her feel ill just at the sound of her friend's voice?
"I understand if you don't want to talk about it." Baraneth eased herself down next to Ruinel in a rustle of fabric. "But you've been quiet since you existed the Fade, and I just want to make sure you're okay."
Though Baraneth sat with her legs folded primly beneath her, relaxed as a court trained lady could be, her eyes were sharp as she surveyed Ruinel. She knew something had happened, she just couldn't pinpoint what.
"What happened in there, Ruinel?" Baraneth murmured.
Baraneth was a warrior without a lick of connection to the Fade; if Ruinel wanted she could make something up and Baraneth would most likely believe her. She could say that the Fade left a lot on her mind, or that it sapped her strength far more than it did.
Instead, Ruinel's eyes welled with tears. She roughly brushed them away.
Then, Baraneth's hand was rubbing Ruinel's back, the touch so achingly similar to the familial memory the desire demon had made her crave, and something snapped inside her.
"I just wanted you to need me." she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. "Is that not so selfish? And now I've done something horrible."
She heard Baraneth's sharp intake of breath, and then she was gathered against her friend, the worn material of Baraneth's tunic soft against her tear-soaked cheeks. Baraneth's arms wove a comforting weight around Ruinel, holding her close as one hand soothed over her hair.
So much like how her sister had once done, when they were little and Ruinel had first learned of the demons that lurked in the magic that she'd thought only brought flowers to the dry earth and comfort to ailing halla.
So much like her mamae had, when the Keeper first broke the news that Ruinel was being sent to another clan, to keep in line with the limits on mages.
Ruinel buried her face against Baraneth's shoulder, wrapping her arms around her middle like a distressed child as she cried. She couldn't even force out the words for what she'd done, couldn't explain the bloody gauze beneath her sleeves from the pact she'd made with the demon.
"Shh, shhh." Baraneth murmured, tucking wayward curls back behind Ruinel's long, pointed ears. "Of course we need you here, Ru. You saved Connor, and before that you were brave enough to try."
Brave. As if there was anything brave in the way she'd nearly collapsed in fear as demons of all types had hunted her across the Fade as she searched for Connor.
She shook her head, a ragged keen breaking from her instead of any words she wanted to say.
Baraneth just cradled her closer, repeating again, "You don't have to explain right now, just breath. We'll always need you here, I promise."
Summary: Duncan returns from a recruitment trip bearing two recruits. Alistair thinks it is a joke when Duncan says one recruit is the teryn of Highever's daughter, Baraneth Cousland. From the way Duncan refers to her, Alistair imagines a stuck up princess chasing glory and facing reality of what a Blight really is. Instead, he finds a deeply broken woman who has had everything stripped from her, and is forced to face the thought that conscription into the Grey Wardens is not always the life line it is painted as.
Warnings: Mentioned/Implied Character Death, Mentioned/Implied Violence
--
Duncan was displeased with his most recent crop of recruits.
The more the Blight loomed on the horizon, the less recruits successfully made it through the joining, the more often that seemed to be the case. No matter how much the Grey Warden of Ferelden’s need grew for warriors, for bodies, the supply was never enough.
As it turned out, when the recruitment model involved people with nothing to live for and nowhere to go, it wasn’t exactly the highest quality characters going through the trials.
It wasn’t easy to become a Grey Warden, and somehow that fact was always left out in the pitch to the criminals, the destitute, and the vagabond. They were hemorrhaging people, whether it was those who fled and were hunted down before they reached the edge of the Korcari Wilds, or those who died within minutes of the Joining chalice touching their lips.
Alistair hadn’t seen Duncan this ruffled and discontented in a long while, however.
“You brought two recruits back, that’s two more than last time. Was the travel talk really so horrific?” he tried to jest as Duncan paced by him once again.
Duncan sent a dark look his way, and Alistair pressed his lips together with a wince. Rarely was his senior in a joking mood, but more often than not he tolerated Alistair’s attempts to diffuse the tension that only seemed to grow with each passing day.
“The best they could offer me was a mewling welp of an elven mage, too scared of her own shadow to even think of doing the heinous magic her Circle accused her of, and a prideful noblewoman’s daughter who sees becoming fodder for maggots a better alternative to serving her country.” Duncan spat, running his hand over his beard, “I am not confident either will make it through the Joining.”
Alistair crossed his arms over his chest, muttering, “That seems a little harsh.”
Any information on the two new recruits had been sparse. They’d arrived a few hours earlier and been shuffled off to a space with open bedrolls to rest from the long journey. The elven recruit, a tiny waife of an elf that was all gangly skin and bones, had passed by earlier with Duncan as he’d led her towards the mages’ tents to get new robes that weren’t blood stained and tattered. She’d kept her head down, her faded ginger hair obscuring her face.
He’d seen nothing of the other recruit and Duncan’s description finally caught up with him.
“A noble’s daughter?” he spluttered, “Duncan, we don’t recruit noble’s daughters. They don’t give up their own to our ranks.”
The Grey Wardens were respected when they’d done their duty, repelled a Blight, and gone off to die in the Deep Roads when their usefulness reached its end. That was their unspoken agreement with society. They were meant to exist as legends, as heroes in stories. Not for the children of nobles to go running off to.
“Baraneth Cousland.” Duncan said, voice dropping to a near growl. Something had happened either on their journey or during recruiting that was left unspoken and Alistair frowned. Duncan continued, “You would do well to avoid her at the present, Alistair. She is a wretched sort without a grateful bone in her body for what she was spared from. Perhaps she will come around when she sees what the Wardens will provide her with.”
“Cousland?” Alistair repeated, incredulous, though Duncan was already disappearing into the sea of tents, called to some meeting or another.
“Cousland.” he repeated, softer to himself. An old family second in wealth and influence only to the royal family itself.
Alistair’s frown deepened. He would bet his meager coin pouch that neither the teryn or teryna would give up their daughter willingly to the Grey Wardens. Though he knew they had a son, a few years older than Alistair and well known to be the one in line to inherit the seat of power at Highever, they were not a family known to discard their second borns.
But if a Cousland was among them, Alistair could not imagine why Duncan would not have taken her to get supplies and why he would have simply dumped her in a spot to rest and recover from the journey.
Stay away from her sounded an awful lot like he should go seek her out. Casting a furtive look over his shoulder and finding nary a Duncan in sight, Alistair set off to find where the cart had discarded the recruits.
The elven girl still had not returned to her bedroll, presumably still with the mages at the center of camp. But sitting on a bedroll beside the empty one, a woman his age sat untangling hair with shaking hands.
For a prideful, ungrateful brat as Duncan had described, Alistair expected a prim princess in a flouncy outfit, not a hair out of place with her nose upturned to the commoners around her.
Instead, all the air went out of his chest.
Perhaps at one point the well-made tunic she wore had been the deep Cousland blue, the embroidered, interlocked laurel branches once silver. Her tunic was black with dried blood, shredded at the hem and ripped in places with what looked to be oozing nicks from swords and daggers.
Prideful, he saw in the way she squared her shoulders up at his approach, sitting ramrod straight and folding her hands in her lap. She was every bit a teryn’s daughter as she lifted her chin and as her mabari, a young brindle pup, raised his head in kind to fix too-intelligent eyes on him.
Maker’s Breath. She still had flecks of blood on her cheeks, matting the strands of her hair into clumps.
Where could ungrateful fit into that?
“Baraneth Cousland? I, well, I heard you were here. Not like that, but I’d heard we had a new recruit.” Alistair fumbled under the heavy weight of her stare. Striking, yes, but empty. As if she wasn’t totally there.
He cleared his throat, “I didn’t see you pass by to the supplier. I thought you might need something.”
Perhaps he expected something to click and for her to start making demands, ordering him around like her little manservant. That would sound about right for most of the interactions with nobles he had.
She looked down at herself, running her thumbs along the sides of her hands. Russet stains and dirt flakes off. When her eyes settled on him again, it was like another candle had been blown out within her.
“Might you show me where to find a wash basin and cloth? And perhaps a change of clothes.” she asked and he was taken aback by how it sounded as though she was concerned about inconveniencing him.
What had Duncan been on about?
“Of course!” he shuffled, gesturing towards where the supplier would be, who was supposed to issue all new recruits their clothing, food, and water rations gifted to them before the process of the Joining began. “I’m not sure why Duncan didn’t take you there when he delivered the other recruit to the mages.”
Baraneth’s expression darkened, “I don’t believe the Warden-Commander took very kindly to me nor I to him.”
Duncan was not the easiest to get along with, Alistair would concede to that. His Warden-Commander was prickly, overly serious, and all-consumed with the oncoming Blight. Yet even still, it was unusual that he would be outright hostile towards a recruit.
“Did you not get off on the right foot? I promise he isn’t as harsh as he seems--”
Baraneth’s lips curled, stony anger sharpening her features. She snarled like a mabari, fierce enough that Alistair almost recoiled.
“Your wretched leader used my father’s dying breaths to barter for me like chattel! I would’ve died defending my mother and father as was my place, yet he ripped that choice from me, dragged me away as my father bled out on the cobblestones of our estate--”
Baraneth sucked in a sharp breath, pressing her mouth into a thin line. The young mabari by her side lifted his head, grumbling discontentedly at his mistress’ apparent distress.
“And you would not call that harsh?” she finished, voice evened out and flat almost on command.
Alistair’s mouth went dry and he rocked as if struck, “I believe there’s a misunderstanding, I do not know what you’re talking about.”
Baraneth looked stricken, her brows knitting together, “Word of the slaughter of my family has not spread? Howe has covered it so flawlessly?”
Slaughter. Family. Dying breaths and bargains. Alistair’s heart felt like it was plummeting into the earth, his stomach flipping with how horribly out of touch his comment had been.
“There’s been no word of what happened at the Cousland estate that has reached here.”
“Then Fergus does not know…that man promised. My papa’s life for getting my safety and word to my brother.” She said, speaking to herself.
Baraneth fixed Alistair with glassy, empty eyes. He feared he’s well and truly shattered something within her. “We saw my brother off to fight darkspawn in the south, and I damned to be here.” she gave a mirthless laugh. “I have no way of sending word to tell him that his mama and papa and his wife and son were slaughtered like cattle in their beds.”
There were no words that Alistair could call swiftly to his mind to say. This was well and truly more horrific than anything he could have assumed brought her to Ostagar. He had thought he would find a woman who bit off more than she could chew, seeking glory. Not a woman the same age as he who’d been so thoroughly stripped of everything that had been hers.
People came to the Grey Wardens when they had nothing left to live for. The Grey Wardens were not supposed to leave them with nothing to leave for.
Questions swirled around his mind; what had happened, what had Duncan done to aid her, why did she speak as though he’d given her no choice about taking a Warden’s vows.
Silent tears tracked down her cheeks and it was clear that she was no longer seeing him.
“Can I bring you a basin, some clothes, and perhaps some food? You’ve traveled far.” Alistair asked softly. “Some food for the hound as well? We have a small kennel with supplies.”
For it sounded like what she needed was someone to extend human kindness to her.
A brief moment of clarity swept across Baraneth’s face and she looked almost surprised at his offer, looking at him the way one would look at the glimmer of the sun after weeks of rain. Then it was gone, her face hollowing out again.
She squeezed her eyes closed, and whispered, “Please.”
Ryn Shepard doesn't want to die. But she's not doing what she should to keep herself alive. To herself, she's a machine of the war, no longer a person.
A mission against Cerberus goes wrong, and Ryn's blood is on Garrus' hands in order to save her.
Or, Ryn struggles hard with what happens on Thessia, Garrus struggles to support her, and Chakwas is pissed off with Shepard's sacrificial attitude.
AO3 LINK
--
Ryn was exhausted. Her shotgun felt like lead in her arms, her helmet a brutally heavy crown atop her head.
The eight hours she'd slept the previous night did not count; they'd been anything but restful when all she could do was roll from side to side, trying to banish thoughts of Thessia from her mind.
She couldn't.
At this point, sleep was just a formality. She was never going to recover the hours of sleep debt she was in.
"Shepard, you good?" Garrus' voice rumbled over her inter-helmet comms system and she nodded, taking a needed breath before responding.
"I'm all here, Vakarian." She looked towards him, perched at a vantage point facing their final communications station left to retake. Tali stood on her right, her attack drone pulsing and bobbing beside her.
Ryn added, "Let's get in and out, easy, alright? We can be home by dinner if we're quick."
"Mm, ship rations, my favorite." Garrus chimed in as Tali groaned at the bright, brutally sarcastic optimism Ryn poured into the latter half of her sentence.
Despite the weight that felt like it was pushing her into the ground, Ryn couldn't help a snorting laugh, "Don't worry, you'll get your good food, we're aiming for the Citadel after this."
"It's about damn time." Tali muttered before perking up at movement ahead, "Looks like Cerberus finally decided to show up."
One of the Cerberus troops spun and fell to the ground before they'd cleared the crates that amassed into scattered barricades.
"Heh, scoped and dropped." Garrus hummed over their helmets' comms.
Ryn's mouth quirked up in the barest hints of a grim smile as she focused her biotics around her, shooting off towards the nearest trooper in a storm of energy. She slammed into the soldier, sending them staggering backward. Another pulse of energy dropped the soldier's shields.
She repeated that familiar rhythm, charging and expelling the energy in a brilliant purple nova, bouncing around the battlefield in streaming light.
She could sustain this pattern for long enough to get them through this battle, she insisted with herself. She was far more powerful with her biotics than she was with her guns. Guns could only get her so far when Cerberus had their troops increasingly armored.
Guns needed to reload. Her biotics would last until her brain short circuited and melted out her ears. And if they reached that point in a fight, well, then shit was already so far gone they would have bigger problems to worry about.
Garrus and Tali's voices carried on in the back of her awareness, calling out warnings to each other as Garrus kept an eye on the troop movements from his higher location.
Ryn zeroed in on a Phantom prowling the battlefield, marking their location just before the soldier's invisibility mechanism clicked on. She hit the Phantom like a freight train, sending them both staggering as her exhaustion waned her raw strength.
Grimacing, she began to pull her biotic energy back around her in an increasingly tight coil, poised to charge again. The amassing light and energy around her sputtered out as the Phantom slammed into her first, pushing her back up against the wall of the communications tower.
She struggled, pulling on that energy again. It fizzled inside of her, her implants screaming like burning knives in her temples at each failure to expend the energy she'd gathered. The Phantom's grip on her was vise-like, forcing her back against the wall.
Her biotics would last until her brain short circuited and melted out of her ears…her head blazed with enough pain that she wondered if she was approaching that point at the speed of light.
Ryn's teeth snapped together as the Phantom's grip shifted, hammering her head back against the wall behind her. Blood filled her mouth in an iron-tinged deluge and she gagged.
This was a mistake, her struggle doubled. She tried to cry out, choking as the Phantom slammed her back again. Stars filled her vision.
Images of what had happened to Ashley on Mars flashed through her mind. She was trapped, cornered. Her shotgun was pinned between them; she was as likely to shoot her own head off as she was her assailant’s if she fired.
"Garrus! Tali!" she gasped, hoping her comms system wasn't broken. "Help."
"I can't get...shot...hitting you, Shep..." Garrus' voice was muffled and every other word broke off as the delicate comms systems in her helmet took damage.
Jaw aching with how intensely she clenched her teeth she took all the amassed biotic energy she had left and let it loose, Her vision darkened for a moment, lighting-like shocks running up into her temples.
It bought her a moment.
The Phantom was a Cerberus abomination, moving faster than anything ever should. Before Ryn could so much as roll to the side to put more space between them, her back pressed against the metal wall, the Phantom's hands were back on her, fumbling with all their strength. Ryn dropped her gun, grappling with the soldier.
She didn't realize the way the Phantom had skewed her until searing pain ripped through her. Ryn grunted, the shock ripped all the air from her lungs. Faltering, her legs went to jello beneath her as her body rebelled against the sudden sharp agony from somewhere she couldn’t identify.
She’d been punched, hit, shot…stabbed was a new one. And it hurt like a bitch.
Focus, focus, focus! She chanted in her head, gasping. She couldn't make out the chatter going through her comms, it was all static now.
She tried to charge again, only to find nothing left to expend. Fuck.
Chest heaving, she partitioned off all the pain raging through her from seemingly everywhere in her body for later, diving for her gun. She'd have to do with that now.
The Phantom, also heaving for breath now, she realized with some grim satisfaction, caught her, slamming their shoulders together. Ryn careened into the wall with an, "Umph!"
She could make out one word blaring across her comms as she watched the Phantom's helmet explode in red.
Her name.
*
Garrus ran not for his life, but for Ryn's.
Tali sprinted into the communications tower, a drone trailing behind her, to enable it. Once the disruption was gone they could call the Normandy down, or at the very least get back into contact with Cortez to bring the shuttle.
They were lucky their comms between the three of them hadn’t been jammed with only one functioning disruption left. Even if they’d been garbled at best and barely functional the closer they’d come to the tower.
Garrus’ legs ached as he leapt from his vantage point, joints protesting the height. Shouldering his sniper rifle, he sprinted across the open area that had become their battlefield. He dodged the fallen Cerberus soldiers, boosts clanging and slipping against used thermal clips.
Ryn slumped against the wall, a patchwork of blood splatter behind her. The Phantom lay crumpled at her feet. Garrus pushed the body out of his way, dropping to his knees in front of his commander.
A torrent of curses flooded from him as his eyes flitted about for where to look. Guilt roared in his mind, clenching in his chest, at the neat, puckered hole in Ryn’s armor where the Phantom had used her body to block his shot. The shot he’d made with specialty armor piercing ammo Ryn had got him the last time she’d been on the Citadel.
There was no way for him to change the path his clips took midair but...spirits...
He’d shot her.
“Garrus...” Ryn gasped and he couldn’t help the way relief stuttered its way back into his mind at the fact she was still alive and conscious, “Helmet...off.”
“I don’t think...” Garrus began, wracking his mind for all the basic military medical training he had. He was pretty sure removing helmets wasn’t part of standard protocol for any of what was happening. Especially not when he’d watched her get slammed against the wall several times.
“Please.” Ryn coughed, sounding awful, “Can’t stand it.”
There was enough rising, raw panic for him to throw away that barest medical training. Especially as her hands began to tug at it herself, eliciting a cry of pain.
Her helmet was a wreck. It was banged up at the back where the Phantom had slammed her repeatedly into the wall, Garrus noticed as he gently cradled her head to undo the clasps. If she hadn’t been wearing a helmet…now was not the time for what-ifs.
She gave a ragged, sucking breath as he pulled it from her head. Blood coated the lower half of her face in a grisly smear from where it poured from her nose, the corners of her mouth.
Ryn leaned over and spat, red tinged and brutal.
“Bit...tongue.” she explained, as if that was the most pressing and normal issue at the moment. She wiped at her mouth with her forearm, only smearing blood further across her skin.
Garrus caught Tali’s voice with more clarity over his comm; she’d breached the final comms disruption and was hacking into the last lock.
Ryn went rigid in front of him.
“Garrus.” she said with the sort of calm that put him on immediate high alert. All the color had drained from her face, leaving her eyes wide and stark against her pallid skin, “You need to call the Normandy.”
“Tali’s working on it--” Garrus followed Ryn’s hands, body going unnaturally still.
The Phantom had worked a long, black blade between the fibrous parts of her armor and the carbonized plating. It blended into the dark metal of her armor at a first glance.
Ryn’s hands flitted around it, “Suit deploys medigel.” She reasoned with that too-calm voice, “Medigel can’t fix that.”
She hacked again, spitting out another glob of scarlet spit. Her teeth and tongue were stained as she grimaced, hands settling on the blade, “Heh,” she mumbled, “Chakwas is gonna be pissed.”
Garrus gave himself a shake, pulling himself from his own icy shock that had frozen him in place. He forced calmness onto himself, bringing down like a shield.
Her questionably coherent babbling was either a good sign or a bad sign. She talked when she was nervous and trying to keep herself together. And she was talking a lot right now.
His voice stayed shockingly neutral as he said into his comm, “Tali do you have the comm hub back up?”
“Yes,” She was quick to respond, “Systems are coming back online now, why?”
“Get the Normandy or Cortez down here asap. Tell them to have the med bay ready to go.”
The ‘It’s Shepard’ went without saying.
“Vot,” Tali swore harshly and he heard her sharp breath, “Sending now. What’s the timeline?”
Garrus shot a look to Ryn, who was staring back at him with eyes wide as saucers. Sweat drenched her skin, her breathing starting to come sharper and sharper; whether it was from mounting panic or onsetting shock, he wasn’t willing to roll the dice on.
“Urgent.” he decided.
His comm went quiet as Tali switched to paging the Normandy.
Garrus caught at Ryn’s hand as she gave a tug at the blade and yelped, “Do not do that.” he said with a bit more intensity than intended. Ryn dropped her hands back onto her lap, flexing them from open to closed fists.
“The Normandy is on its way. It’s going to be fine.” Garrus kept talking, feeling the weight of Ryn’s eyes on him. He just needed to keep her with him as long as possible.
He began working on the straps to her chest armor, loosening it just enough to give her more room to breathe. The heat radiating off her skin was disjointed with the pallor in her skin.
“I’m already impaled, Vakarian, now’s not the time.” Ryn’s voice was feeble, on the cusp of losing it entirely.
Garrus squeezed his eyes closed, taking a very long breath, “I’m going to give you a pass on that one given the circumstances.”
An eternity seemed to pass before Cortez appeared with the shuttle, hovering as close as he could get.
Ryn grit her teeth and held her breath long enough that the parts of her face visible beneath grime and blood started to go pink as Garrus hauled her as carefully, but quickly, to the shuttle as he dared.
“Breathe, Ryn.” Garrus reminded her, crouching at her side as Cortez started them back to the Normandy.
“Fucking hell.” She wheezed out in response, squeezing her eyes closed with every jostle of the ship. At least the colorful words got her to let out a breath.
He’d take what he could get.
*
“What happened?” Chakwas demanded.
Ryn was still conscious, barely, if the way her eyes rolled around beneath fluttering eyelashes could count as consciousness when he tried to set her down on the medbay’s cot.
Still, she grasped him with surprising strength when he tried to hurry from Chakwas’ way, and it took his distressed mumbled pleas to let Chakwas work and the doctor’s firm tugging to finally get her to let go.
Chakwas gave him a sympathetic glance as she barked at him, “Out, Vakarian, not enough room in here for all of us.”
It was only because he needed to explain what happened that she amended her statement and shoved him deep into the corner by the door. His voice failed him when he explained the shot to Ryn’s shoulder and he cleared his throat, mandibles flaring as he struggled to get the words out.
He’d shot her. Accidentally yes, but guilt raged in his chest in a burning fire, sweeping all of his breath away.
“You can’t change clips mid air.” Chakwas said shortly, “Better her shoulder than anywhere more vital. If that Phantom had moved her any further, it might’ve been her heart or lungs. Leave the what-ifs as what-ifs.”
Harsh, but true. Chakwas directed a glance over her shoulder from where she peeled layers of bloody armor from Ryn, scissors laid on the tray within reach to work Ryn’s under armour away.
“She’s going to be fine.” she added, “Shepard is too tough for her own good.”
It took him a moment to realize he was being dismissed for real this time. He hesitated, rocking his weight. Leaving her felt like inviting the worst to happen. It was every time he’d left her behind that something bad had happened.
He blinked, bringing himself out of the spiraling of his mind and back into the medbay. Blinked at the lights, glinting off the metal all throughout the room, back into focus. Formed Chakwas’ voice back from meaningless noise into words.
“I’m going to stabilize her,” she was saying, “And then we’re going to have a talk. Confidential, between us.”
*
Their “confidential talk” echoed throughout the crew deck. Penetrating the shuttered windows of the medbay and the sealed door as if Ryn was standing in the middle of the deck.
Ryn rarely yelled when it wasn’t to make her voice heard in combat. Especially loud enough for Garrus to hear from the main battery, where he’d sealed himself away to fiddle with calibrations while he retreated deeper and deeper into his mind to parse through what had happened today.
He’d used the shared crew bathrooms to wash Ryn’s blood off of him. Had scrubbed his armor on the stand he kept in the battery. Going into her quarters without her right now felt wrong, as if he was awaiting her judgment on him when she woke up.
She was awake now.
“Find somewhere else to be.” he said sharply to the crowd milling about, eavesdropping on the muffled shouting. When several pairs of eyes just stared at him, he growled, “Out. This is the Commander’s business.”
Respect for their commander broke through morbid curiosity and everyone slinked away, finding somewhere else to be. He probably should’ve done the same thing, but then Chakwas raised her voice louder than he’d ever heard her address Ryn before.
Worse yet, she used her first name. Chakwas never used Ryn’s first name.
“Commander Ryn Shepard you will sit down, shut up, and listen to your medical officer!”
Against his better judgment, he pressed the control pad and the door hissed open.
Ryn sat on the edge of the bed, face flushed a deep red that splotched down her neck. She clutched a crumpled piece of paper in her hand, held so tightly that her fingers were beginning to rip the material. Beneath an Alliance-issued, loose fitted black t-shirt a bandage crept above the neckline from her shoulder.
Her eyes jumped to her, the muscles in her jaw jumping as she clenched her teeth. But something deep in her expression deflated, a light flickering into something bleak, as if she’d been caught doing something she’d never meant for him to see.
Garrus held up his hands under the pressure of her stare, trying to work exactly what it was, and the ire he felt radiating off of Chakwas.
“I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.” he explained, inching back towards the door.
Chakwas shot a look towards Ryn, once again filled with something imperceptible to him, “Want him here?”
Ryn averted her eyes but gave a subtle nod, “Garrus can stay.”
Looking towards the ceiling for a long moment as if collecting herself, Chakwas motioned Garrus in, “Maybe you can calm your commander down.”
He let the door hiss closed behind him, but kept himself pressed against it, the same place he’d relayed today’s events to Chakwas hours ago.
The doctor crossed her arms over her chest, “Do you want to continue?” she sniped, “Perhaps in a quieter tone?”
Ryn grit her teeth, eyes flaring. Her voice was clipped, each word sharper than the last, as she glanced down at the wadded up paper in her hands.
“Did you seriously hand me a fucking psych eval? I’m fine.”
His stomach dropped to the floor at the words alone. The implications.
Though her tone still made Chakwas press her lips together in a thin line, she said, “It’s standard procedure for service personnel who display reckless or careless behavior in the field. What happened out there today was a severe error--”
“It was a mistake. That Phantom caught me off balance--” Ryn started, only to snap her mouth closed as Chakwas held up a hand.
“You know as well as I do that I am not talking about the Phantom.”
Ryn looked at the paper again, smoothing it out across her knees. Her lips twisted, “I’m not trying to…” she broke off and repeated herself instead, “I’m fine.”
Dr. Chakwas looked towards a datapad propped on her desk, the screen crisscrossed with graph lines. “Preliminary data analysis from your suit suggests--”
“That I’m under more stress now than during the Skyllian Blitz.” Ryn finished the sentence with a guttural edge to her voice that Garrus had never heard before. Then her voice got tired, so very tired, “I’ve been told that already.”
Even if that piece of data sent a chilled zap through his mind, conceptualizing exactly how much stress Thessia and this war were putting on her. He hadn’t known her during the Blitz, had only seen the drone footage of her fight on Elysium when he’d first met her and curiously looked into her service history during his days of C-Sec.
This war was hard on everyone, the whole universe falling down around them, but the front she put on, even to him, never revealed just how much it weighed on her. How much was she hiding?
“You put more stress on your implants today than they’re rated for, and that’s the newest tech on the market. Frankly, I’m surprised you weren’t brought back a brainless shell.” Chakwas’ voice had softened, the edge coming off, “Your suit noted higher levels of fatigue, slower reaction times, and dangerous levels of power output from your biotics.”
Ryn remained silent, staring hard off to the side.
Garrus had spent enough time among turians on warships to recognize the signs of a soldier who had checked out. Surprisingly, it stirred a flicker of irritation in him, a similar fire to when he’d but heads with Ryn over her relentless idealism in the days of Saren.
It was one thing to watch her in the field; there wasn’t time to truly worry for her in the heat of battle and he trusted her implicitly as his commander. Something else deeply turian took over him in those moments, the deference to his higher up that had been instilled in him since he was old enough to grasp that concept. In the field they were not Shepard and Vakarian, but a soldier and his commanding officer.
It was quite another thing entirely to meet that cavalier attitude back on the ship, where those dividing lines of rank receded. Quite another to watch her disengage from the dangerous statistics Chakwas shared with her about her well being.
No. Garrus took a quiet, steadying breath, watchful eyes darting across Ryn again. Disregard wasn’t the right word. She may have turned her face away, her body language giving off the air that she wasn’t engaged anymore, but her eyes flicked back towards them. He’d seen that expression before, where her lips tightly pressed together.
Shame.
He blinked, finding Ryn’s eyes fixed on him now. The dark circles beneath them coupled with the intense overhead lights alit them like liquid silver. Her shoulders rose, then fell, and she looked away.
Taking a deep breath, Dr. Chakwas snatched the datapad from her desk and crossed the space to Ryn’s bedside. Held out the datapad and gave it an insistent shake when Ryn just raised an eyebrow.
Ryn shifted her energy back towards them, grabbing the datapad, “What am I looking at?” That deep emptiness had settled into her voice, drained of all the rage that had filled every word mere minutes ago.
Chakwas traced her finger along a graph that Garrus couldn’t quite make out from his position.
“That’s the strain that your current stress levels are putting on the cybernetics that Cerberus used to put you back together.” She explained, “And you are functioning at at least twice the level they are rated for. Project Lazarus’ tech is almost completely unknown, leaving us with only best guesstimates.”
From here he could make out the image mapping all of Ryn’s cybernetics, the leylines of technology that kept her alive. Her eyes were locked on that, her lip curling with disgust. It left a pit in Garrus’ stomach.
Ryn sighed, long and low, “What do you want from me? The Reapers won’t stop just because my body can’t keep up. Planets won’t stop getting destroyed, people won’t stop dying, just so I can sleep.”
“And you can’t keep fighting a war if you're dead.”
His mandibles might as well be locked from how little he was able to find the words, any words, to buck against the cavalier way Ryn spoke about driving herself to the breaking point.
The literal breaking point.
He’d never thought too hard about the cybernetics that kept her ticking. He’d comforted her through bouts of severe disgust and anxiety, where she’d gouged long, red lines from her nails into her skin, swearing she could feel them.
But whenever his own mind had dwelled too hard on the specifics of bringing her back, his own mind threw up an error code, refusing to go any further. While he could listen to Ryn, provide whatever she needed as best he could, digging any deeper into what happened in his own mind may as well have been trying to bend a plate of metal with his own hands.
The closest he’d come to truly conceptualizing what had happened to Ryn had been in Liara’s apartment, staring at the battered remains of Ryn’s armor from the crash. That had pushed him far too close to that gaping hole where her loss had been.
He gave a viscous shake of his head to dispel the rabbit hole he was careening towards, finding Ryn and Chakwas silently staring at each other in a stalemate.
Ryn broke first, sighing and easing herself back. The look she shot Chakwas was exhausted. It seemed to pull down on her face, on the corners of her eyes, the edges of her lips.
“Can I at least go back to my cabin to rest?” She murmured, quiet enough that Chakwas had to step closer to hear, “I’ll sleep better there than on this cot.”
The doctor’s lips pinched together and Ryn made a noise painfully close to a pleading whimper, “Karin, please.”
Chakwas stepped away from the door, gripping the datapad tightly, “Only if you assure that you will be back in here at 0800 sharp for reevaluation or if there are any issues before then.”
The ghost of a smile touched Ryn’s lips, “0800? Letting me sleep in. Fine. ‘Sides, I won’t be alone. Garrus will be with me…” Her eyes slid over to Garrus, brows drawing together, “Maybe?”
He gave a slight nod, a quiet, “Of course I will.” even as his heart gave a painful lurch. As if he’d leave her alone after the day’s events unless she gave him the orders.
*
Karin unloaded Ryn onto Garrus with a series of orders and instructions that went through one ear and out the other. Her head pounded; her brain might as well have been melting out of her skull.
All she knew was that her body felt too heavy to move and that she hurt all over. Every single muscle was shouting displeasure at her. She was pretty sure that Garrus’ hand around her waist was the only thing keeping her on her feet as the motion of the elevator swayed them back and forth, each jolt sending another wave of nauseating aches through her.
The door to her cabin hissed open and she tumbled out of Garrus’ grasp, the allure of her bed far bypassing the pain it took to take more than snail-steps over there. She thunked down onto the mattress in a puff of the black duvet.
She nearly groaned at the soft comfort on it, but ended up biting her tongue to stave off a yelp as she twisted her ailing shoulder, her side barking in discomfort.
Right. Her injuries. She pushed herself up with effort into a sitting position, locking her eyes on Garrus. He lingered by her desk, fingers tapping the glass that partitioned off her model ships.
She motioned for him to come over. He lingered. She turned to roughly patting the bed beside her, “Sit. Please.”
Garrus sat.
Ryn took a steadying breath, shoving her exhaustion to the other side of her mind. She could wait a little longer. Needed to wait longer.
“I’m sorry, for a lot of what happened today.” She scrubbed her hands across her face. Damn she was tired, “I let you and Tali down in the field and fucked the situation up, down, and sideways. And I shouldn’t have said what I did, there in the med bay.”
She watched recognition flash across his face, watch his mandibles flare, before his face dropped back into careful neutrality, “What’s done is done for what happened in the field.”
“But you are, or were, upset with me. I saw it in the med bay. For reasons that I understand but…I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to hide those things from me.”
She wanted to curl in on herself, tuck her knees tightly up against her chest, but her body wouldn’t let her. She settled for wrapping her arms around herself, “If I let those things show…what’s that going to say to the rest of the crew?”
“I’m not the rest of the crew.” There was an uncharacteristically intense firmness to Garrus, an unyielding wall of…something that she couldn’t parse out.
She squeezed her eyes closed, “I know. That’s not how I meant it…I just--don’t know how to put this burden on you. I don’t even know what to do with it myself.”
Garrus moved closer and she tentatively leaned against his shoulder. When he slipped his arm around her in silent permission she melted against him. The silence between them softened.
“Thank you for saving my ass today.” She bit back a yawn. Her eyelids might as well be pulled down by leaden weights.
Resting his chin against the top of her head, Garrus’ voice rumbled through her, “I shot you.”
“Because that bitch used me as a shield.”
Garrus breathed a long, slow breath, “You should rest.”
She desperately needed to. Her thoughts were jumbling in her head, slipping through her fingers. But they needed to talk, there were still so many things she had to explain.
As if her thoughts were written across her face, Garrus murmured, “Later. It can wait.”
“But…we’re okay?” She murmured, voice breaking. His kiss to her temple soothed that part of her, terrified about shoveling too much onto him, and she let out a sigh.
“We’re okay.” Garrus assured, “Now please, get some sleep.”
Even getting under the covers felt too big an effort, but with Garrus’ help she shimmied beneath them. When he crawled on top of the covers, datapad in hand, she tucked herself close against his side.
The toll of the day dragged her under, and she just prayed it would be restful.
