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The hearings are putting Shepard in some kind of mood.
Since the Normandy docked on the Citadel three days ago, she's spent every daylight hour up in front of Council reps and Alliance brass - a carousel of blue caps and military jargon, familiar to Garrus in tone if not in specifics - and every night cycle putting him flat on his back in their borrowed apartment.
On the first night, when he makes a half-hearted attempt to ask if she wants to talk about it - the chest panel of his undersuit already hanging open - Shepard doesn’t even look up from her cufflinks.
“I spent all damn day talking about it, Garrus. Shut up and take your clothes off.”
He doesn’t ask again.
She at least seems to relax afterwards, slinking around the apartment in his shirts and falling asleep in his lap in front of the insultingly large vid-screen, so for once in his life Garrus resolves not to overthink it. The sex is truly spectacular, which doesn't make him feel nearly as guilty as it should, circumstances considered.
Shepard isn't technically in custody - yet - but the apartment is clearly furnished to give them no excuse to leave. Security is the sleek, invisible kind: his day-one sweep of the building turns up virtually nothing, but the drell concierge is too well-armed for any normal upper-wards residential building, and his visor flags pairs of heat sigs patrolling nearby corridors. The rest of the building is trying not to look empty; the lights in the windows change every night cycle but on the third night, as their skycar cruises towards the block, Garrus realises the whole building is just flipping between two patterns.
If the apartment itself is under surveillance, the Alliance has sprung for tech Garrus hasn't seen before, but more likely Anderson or Hackett put them off it. Maybe they decided leaked footage of a former Alliance poster girl fucking a turian on a coffee table would be one diplomatic incident too many.
Not that they're much of a secret either. Joker claims to have it on good authority that Fornax is working overtime on a Shepard-Vakarian cover article, and Garrus gets almost as much attention sitting at the back of the hall as the hearing itself.
"Did you see the new al-Jilani piece?" Shepard says from the kitchen behind him, on their third evening in the apartment.
Garrus is stretched out on the couch, flipping through a catalogue of shitty action vids; the bottom half of his undersuit is crumpled on the rug and there's a gentle, satisfying ache behind his groin plates.
"Am I ex-Blackwatch yet?"
"Not yet.” Sherpard tears open a snack packet. “But I think she's one bad day away from claiming they trained you in the art of seduction."
Garrus snorts.
"Yeah,” she says thickly, through a mouthful of something. “That's what I'm gonna say if she asks for comment."
The kitchen tap runs for a second or two, while Garrus skips past seven consecutive human movies about... alien robots? Or possibly cars. Shepard pads up behind him, munching quietly, and the butt of a water bottle appears in his peripheral.
"Thanks."
He means to keep talking - to ask about the alien-robot-cars - but when she rounds the couch, the words dissolve into a gulp.
Shepard is in the bottom half of her underwear, the blue jacket from her dress uniform - and nothing else.
Silhouetted by the vid-screen and the artificial blue-green Citadel moonlight, she stops in front of the couch.
She swallows whatever she was chewing. “What?”
There’s another water bottle under her arm and the snack packet on her left hand like a mitten. The jacket is hanging open across her bare chest, gunmetal dog tags at her sternum, and Garrus just stares. He’s never been much of a uniform guy, no more than the next twenty-something turian at any rate, but -
"What?" she repeats, with faint amusement.
“Uh - ”
He feels dazed, like he caught the edge of a flashbang. Maybe it’s the thought of peeling her out of it, like he did an hour ago - and there is something distinctly turian about the turned-up collar.
Shepard grins and for a second he thinks she's caught on. "What's the Hierarchy stance on uniform non-compliance?” She waggles her torso. “Death by firing squad?"
Garrus chokes out an unconvincing laugh and her grin slides away.
“This - ” She points to the jacket with the packet on her fist. “This isn’t offensive, is it?"
"No," he says, quick enough to make her eyebrows shoot up.
"It's not like a flag-burning thing for turians?"
"No, it - it's fine."
"You look a little freaked out."
"Do I?"
Spirits, if she could understand sub-vocals.
"Yeah." She's starting to look concerned. "What's up?"
What he should've said is give me another twenty minutes and you can do whatever you want to me. What he actually says is, "Nothing."
He can’t remember uniform kinks coming up in Mordin’s notes, and the last thing he needs is to spring the human equivalent of gizzard stuffing on her just as the sex is finally starting to feel less alien. All she’s asked of him so far is an hour or two of not being Commander Shepard; to kick the uniform into a corner and fuck every coherent thought out of both their heads.
Slowly, she sets her bottle down on the side table and shakes her hand out of the packet. Human expressions translate surprisingly well cross-species - probably why they’re such successful up-starts, Garrus thinks glumly - and right now she has the look of a person who absolutely, categorically doesn't believe him.
"I'm gonna put something else on."
And Garrus is left watching her retreating back - her hair - her legs - like she hit him with a stasis bolt.
--
He makes himself scarce while Shepard gets dressed the following morning, under the guise of calling Solana, and kills time in the skycar asking her about all the pre-spaceflight human action vids Grunt might like. By the time they’re making their way through the crush of reporters outside the lift up to Citadel Tower, Garrus feels quietly confident. He managed the last three days just fine. What’s another eight hours?
But the second Shepard takes her seat at the front of the hall - a picture of sleek, steel-faced military composure; lightyears away from last night’s irreverence - he realises it’s going to be a very, very long day.
The Hegemony are bringing their key testimonies to the board today, with the Council in personal attendance for the first time all week. True to form, the Batarians roll out the big guns.
There’s an incensed merchant spacer, who made the jump out of the Bahak system hours before the relay was destroyed and lost three generations of his family back home. A teacher with a class of school-age children - all newly-orphaned - on a rare trip outside the system. A volus economist with a damning five-year outlook for the Hegemony’s GPD. A jowly, fist-shaking scientist who categorically denies the Reapers' existence, while three-quarters of the Council and the journalists on the benches in front of Garrus nod along.
Then comes Balak, now an alarmingly senior politician, who wants Shepard stripped of her Alliance rank and Spectre status, and turned over into Hegemony custody. Anderson, sitting at the front of the hall on Shepard's left hand, says something cutting about pots and kettles that Garrus’ translator garbles, while Balak looks murderous.
Shepard stares every single one of them in the face.
Garrus is barely listening.
However much he swallows and shuffles and twists his hands together, he just can’t get that damn jacket out of his head. C-Sec confiscated weapons and tech in the lobby - his visor included - so all Garrus can do for three and half hours is look at her.
In a typical show of bad luck, he ends up two seats behind a Cipritine News Network correspondent for the first time all week. Yesterday he'd just started getting used to the ripple of turning heads, checking him for a reaction whenever Shepard came under particularly concentrated fire, but today every glance - especially from a turian head - sends a twinge of paranoia through him. Like they might be able to see a tiny half-naked Shepard prowling around behind his eyes if they stare hard enough. Chellick at least let him keep his armour, so he doesn’t have to worry about slipping out of his plates like a teenager in the middle of Citadel Tower.
When they break for lunch Garrus seriously considers bolting to the bathroom and quietly sorting himself out, before Anderson corners him with technical questions about the specced-up SR2.
Al-Jilani probably has the bathrooms bugged anyway.
At least Anderson stops him from making an ass of himself with Shepard in front of every senior Alliance official worth knowing. He only catches sight of her once, by the coffee machine, tucking something into her pocket. She sees him looking over Anderson’s head, raises the half-glass of water in her hand towards him - a human gesture usually reserved for alcohol - then downs the whole thing. Garrus zones back into Anderson’s voice in time to catch a question about the Thanix cannon, and stumbles through an answer with his mind still half on Shepard’s throat bobbing over her collar.
Vakarian, you’re a grown man, he tells himself sternly as the room files back to their seats. The Reapers are coming and your girlfriend - no, mate? - worse - your person is one bad testimony away from being court-marshalled. Get a grip.
His resolve lasts until she opens her mouth.
The way Shepard holds the room is enthralling: all dignity and poise and quiet self-assurance, hands clasped loosely behind her back. Spirits, the jacket does good things to her shoulders. He likes the clean lines, the put-together-ness of it; the bright navy and the gold tape down the seams on her chest - which is all very turian of him - but whichever way he thinks about it, Garrus always ends up coming back to the night before.
The light red scratch below her collarbone from a stray talon; the muscles on her abdomen, defined enough in the half-light to look almost plate-like; the tendons standing out on her neck when she turns her head.
He knows the firing-squad bit was a joke, but the Hierarchy is particular about uniform and Garrus can’t help wondering if that’s what’s doing it for him. He’s seen her in dress blues before without feeling like his tongue is too big for his mouth, so maybe it was the carelessness - the indifference of the jacket thrown on that floored him.
Which isn’t very turian of him at all.
--
They’re finally dismissed at 17:43. Shepard is escorted off to show her face to the press while Hackett reads a statement and declines questions, and Garrus hangs around the lobby. There are a few Alliance lackeys going back and forth, the volus economist in conversation with an asari, and Chellick at the security desk.
Shepard reappears while Garrus is collecting his confiscated gear, grim-faced and fiddling the top button of her collar open. "Hey."
"Hi," he says, and fumbles the catch on his omni-tool.
Chellick cuts him a look over the holoscreen. Whatever Garrus' subvocals are doing is about as subtle as stamping I’m horny for my commanding officer across his own browplates, so he keeps his mouth shut until they’re safely inside a skycar, plugging their address into the auto-pilot.
If he'd thought Shepard had been in a foul mood for the last three days, it’s got nothing on this.
“They’ve got some goddamn nerve,” she snaps as the car levels out, like it’s a conversation they were already having. “I mean - Balak? - seriously? - there are some short fucking memories in that room.”
A newsreel is playing quietly out of the dashboard, already running comment on the hearing.
The ever-enigmatic Commander Shepard was once again up in front of the inter-species tribunal board at Citadel Tower today -
“And I don’t wanna get into tit for tat," Shepard adds, "but how many slaves d’you think are propping up the Batarian economy right now? Human or otherwise?” She gestures, palms up. “Like fuck they don’t make money off the shit coming outta the Terminus Systems.”
Garrus makes a nondescript noise as the Presidium’s lakes whistle past beneath them, glittering in the artificial orange sunset.
“And I know the human supremacist angle is very in right now - very chic - y’know, because I did just spend six months cutting about in Cerberus decal, nobody’s denying that - but come on."
- Shepard’s return has been far from the triumph the Systems Alliance will have hoped for -
"You saw Balak's face - it's not about the Reapers - it’s an excuse to start the race war they’ve been gunning for since Torfan.”
- in the near-constant company of former C-Sec officer and subordinate Garrus Vakarian -
“And of course they deserve due process and of course three-hundred-thousand lives is three-hundred-thousand lives - ”
- looking unmistakably concerned today for the first time since the hearings began -
“ - but y'know what's really fucked up?" she says, with renewed venom. "I don’t think anyone'll believe us until the damn Reapers are on our doorstep anyway."
- aboard the Cerberus-built frigate ironically dubbed the Normandy SR2 -
"Not the batarians - not the Council - not even the fucking Alliance." Her voice is rising, filling the cab. "Three-hundred-thousand lives down the shitter for time we're not even going to fucking use."
- only the latest in a series of high-profile incidents -
"Will you turn that shit off," she snaps, and Garrus smacks the mute button on his side of the dash.
Shepard screws up her face and kneads two fingers into the corners of her eyes. The skycar slows a little at the entrance to their district as the traffic branches. Lights are beginning to appear out of the dusk in the high-rises on either side of them.
“Sorry,” she says, quietly.
“It’s ok.”
The cab sweeps around a corner into a clear patch of sky, fading orange to pink to dusty black over the cityscape in the same artificial, uniform gradient it does every night cycle. Garrus steals glances at Shepard, surly and distant, lit up at intervals by skycars passing in the other direction, chewing her fingernails.
He got the talking he asked for in the end - three days late.
At least it took his mind off the jacket.
His omni-tool pings, loud in the bristling silence, and they both jump. Shepard's gaze snaps to him.
"Shit, how's your mom?"
"Uh - good." He swipes to clear the message; something from his father, too long to read right now. "The implant's working and she's pretty settled, so they're starting a new round of treatment next week."
Shepard cracks a strained smile. "Smart little bastards, those salarians."
"Yeah. An hour of sleep a night'll do that."
It's hard to be hopeful about anything with the Reapers on the horizon, but Garrus is trying. If nothing else, Solana is finally speaking to him again.
Shepard sighs and puffs her cheeks, anger ebbing out of her silhouette, and Garrus can't help a guilty twinge of disappointment somewhere in his groin.
"I've hardly asked about her all week," she says. "I'm sorry."
"I would've told you if there was any news."
"I know, but - " Shepard turns a little to face him, her buttons catching the sliding headlights. "Garrus, doing nothing is a big ask right now, I understand that, so if you need to go - " She breaks off and her mouth pinches into an unhappy line. "This isn't an assignment and I’m not your commanding officer," she says firmly. "You don't have to be here. That's all I'm trying to say."
Spirits, she looks tired; worse even than the early days on the SR2, when the residual fear of unconsciousness kept her up all hours of the night cycle.
Shepard had asked him to stay for the hearing in a rare and impulsive show of self-interest, and Garrus wonders if it's because she, too, thinks this might be it: the closest they'll ever get to normal. Quiet morning coffee, yawning and half-dressed at the kitchen table; shoes kicked off by the front door; take-out boxes and dual-chirality wine. Snatches of another life beneath the weight of three-hundred-thousand souls and the promise of millions more to go - possibly themselves included.
They have four more days together and Spirits be damned, they deserve every one of them.
"Contrary to popular belief," Garrus says, summoning up a little of his usual drawl. "I am capable of saying no to you."
Her eyes catch him, green blown out to black in the dim strip lighting on the floor of the car, and slowly, slowly, her brow softens.
"Are you?"
It’s low and full of promise.
Before he can give it any conscious thought at all, Garrus leans across the cab and presses his mouth to hers. If he surprised her, it doesn't show. One of her hands drifts to the front of his cowl, holding him in place and the other finds the base of his skull. She presses gently with blunt fingernails, and the bite is just enough to send a crackle down his spine.
The skycar eases to a stop in front of their building before they can get much further; Shepard draws back enough to rest their foreheads together, the blunt point of her nose nudging his.
"We'll see," she says quietly, and Garrus has to hold down a shiver.
--
It's not the furious, desperate encounters of their previous nights.
Shepard shucks him out of his armour in the hall without even letting him touch her, swatting his hands away when he tries. By the time Garrus is down to his undersuit, the anticipation alone has him practically falling out of his plates.
He follows her into the apartment like he's on a tether, through the artificial greenish-blue moonlight pouring in from the night outside. The bedroom is dark, blinds drawn, until Shepard flips the lights on from her omni-tool; two thin stripes of neon flaring across the ceiling and another behind the headboard, the same cool red as the Normandy's battery whether she realises it or not.
"Sit."
She says it softly, not at all like an order, but he finds himself doing it anyway.
The edge of the bed brings him just below her eye level. She nudges his legs apart with her foot - he registers vaguely that her shoes are still on - and stands between his knees. The gold on her jacket is a brassy bronze under the lights, the navy almost purple; Garrus's hands feel twitchy as she reaches for his collar.
Instead of going straight for the fastenings, she turns over a rolled seam and smooths it flat against his chest. She turns his chin with her thumb - not gentle exactly, but careful - and lifts away his visor just as his pulse counter starts to blink orange. It's the most present she's felt all week and this new, attentive Shepard makes his head spin.
She strips the top half of his undersuit methodically, newly-practiced, watching her own hands as she works. The reinforced mesh is well-worn enough to fit like a second skin, creased and folded into his plates, and he can almost imagine her peeling him apart; laying him open like some fascinating, intricate thing to be catalogued.
He wonders, dimly, if she'll get everything off him before she even takes off her shoes, and his groin plates pull a little wider.
She lets him make his own way out of the sleeves. While his arms are behind his back, tugging the cuffs down over his hands, she puts two fingers under his jaw and tips his face up towards her. It stretches his spine taut and he gets a brief, blissful glimpse of the need in her eyes before she kisses him.
For a second he forgets about the sleeves. She smells fresh and earthy and human; late-summer rain on warm rock. Her palms settle either side of his neck, hot enough on his cool-blooded pulse to leave a print on an infrared scan; a brand, something that says mine.
Garrus wrenches both hands free and finally - finally - she lets him touch her. He squeezes her waist and feels it sink as she relaxes into him, then fumbles one hand under the hem of her jacket to the shirt underneath, pressing it up her spine. He can't say he understood the human obsession with mouths until Shepard; until he felt her breathing light and warm on the side of his face, and the tension bleeding out of her. It's a grounding sort of feeling; a re-setting. Like the sighing of a drive core after a relay jump.
A muted rattle from the chain near her collar brings his attention snapping back. Her hands have left his neck; she's working the buttons on her chest loose and it's all Garrus can do to remember how to breathe. He tries the bottom button inexpertly - distracted by the little press of blunt teeth on his mouth plate - until Shepard nudges his hands away, and the front of the jacket comes apart for him. A subvocal noise flutters out of him like a distant engine turning over. He snags the shirt beneath with his talons, drags it up her torso, smooths his palms under the hem, savouring some eleven hours of residual body heat pressed into the fabric.
But her hands haven't come back to him and when he pulls away to look at her, she's shrugging the jacket off.
Garrus feels something bizarrely close to panic and a reckless kind of feeling surges in behind.
It's not about wanting to tear the damn thing off her, he decides with what remains of his rational brain, but about being entrusted with the contents. Giving himself over to the steel in her bones, to heatsink burns, to cybernetics and gossamer skin. It's doing something indulgent and disobedient and just for them.
And this is Shepard.
Shepard, who trusts him beyond reason and measure. If nothing else they'll laugh about it later, same as always.
He halts her arm with one hand, his other thumb hooked into her waistband. Shepard's eyes flick to his face, one shoulder out of the jacket. The shirt is lop-sided, pulled halfway up her torso.
"Leave it on?"
She goes still.
Then she tilts her head, mouth open just enough for him to see teeth. The soft cut of her facial bones seems deeper in the dim red light - both intimate and menacing - and for an awful half-second Garrus starts to doubt himself -
Then her lip curls.
"Oh," she says softly, like he just handed her the keys to something very interesting and very expensive.
It's less like trying to stand upright in a hurricane than the night before, but there’s something like a threat in the hunger coming off her that knocks the wind out of him.
"Please," he hears himself say.
She tips her head to the other side - slow, making a show of it - then grips him by the chin, firm enough to hold his straining mandibles flat to his face. The jacket is still slipping down one shoulder and Garrus sees her glance down at the outline of his plates pressing open through his undersuit.
"Well, since you asked nicely."
--
Shepard sheds her shoes and pants - leisurely, almost lazily, eyes fixed on his face - before she relieves him of the rest of his undersuit. He's fully hard, out of his plates, twitching faintly near the base and dripping silver-grey from the tip.
They couldn’t go twenty minutes on the Normandy without being interrupted by some catastrophe or other, and lately she’s been in too much of a hurry to really tease him, but now he’s at the mercy of however long Shepard wants this to last.
She kneels between his legs, every inch as deadly as she looks in the bloody neon light. Every inch his.
She rests her elbow on his thigh, goes to wipe the pre-cum off the tip of his cock with her thumb - but stops just short, brows raised. Garrus clamps his teeth together and fails to hold down a huff. He’s feeling ballsy, as Joker might say, spurred on by the jacket and Shepard’s collected, mindful focus, so he tries something new.
“Commander - ”
“Sir,” she corrects, without missing a beat. “Or Shepard.” Her hand is still half an inch away, her eyes bright. “Commander stays on the clock."
Garrus swallows. Turians don't have gendered forms of address for authority figures; he can’t tell which Shepard wants him to use or what her translator will spit out if he tries. He could stick to Shepard. Or...
“Yes - sir.”
Her face softens into a smirk. "Good."
Garrus has to suppress a full-body shiver when she touches him, both hands planted on the bed, back arched. She draws soft, slow circles over the tip with one finger, as he twitches and huffs and leaks more pre-cum. It's not enough. It's not even close.
"Shepard - please."
She stops to rub her finger and thumb together like she's testing the feel of him. "Please, what?"
This isn't new to them, the asking, the begging - they figured that part out early on - though neither can remember who tried it first.
"Please.”
"Tell me what you want."
His breathing hisses, mandibles slack. The gold stripes on her shoulders are reminiscent of something predatory in the red light; a bioluminescent Palaven animal waiting in the night.
She runs her thumb down the underside of his cock, dragging slowly over the ridges, and his head rolls back.
"Do you want me to use my mouth?"
"Yes."
Her thumb stops. "Yes, what?"
"Yes, sir." His breathing would trip an alert on his visor if he was wearing it. "Yes, sir."
With her other hand, she resumes the tracing motion at the tip in light, slick circles. "You're making a mess," she says quietly, and a keening noise tumbles out of him. "You know I can't use my mouth if you make a mess."
Shepard's dextro sensitivity is mild enough that it's not strictly true - not with the allergy meds on top - which is lucky because it only makes him wetter.
"I'll do anything."
"Anything," she says, like she's deciding how it feels on her tongue.
The neon strips overhead are burning tracks on the back of his eyes. She finds the soft hide at the base of his cock, below his plates; presses down around him in a V-shape while he whimpers.
"Anything you want. Please."
After the Reds, Akuze, Eden Prime, Lazarus, Sidonis, Omega 4, and three-hundred-thousand dead batarians - a lifetime of looking other people in the eye and saying anything - the least Garrus can offer her is everything he has. It's power without consequence; no risk, no lives at stake. Just trust and bare skin and the chance to get everything right.
"Look at me."
His head snaps upright in time to watch her wrap her fist around him and duck her head to -
“Wait - ” His hand jumps to her shoulder. She usually leaves him splayed out on the bed (or the couch, or the coffee table) to throw back an allergy pill. "You should - "
"I took it already."
A small, puzzled fragment of his brain pops up out of the haze. "When?"
Her mouth twitches into a grin, half-hidden behind the thick base of his cock.
"Lunch."
Garrus gapes. A sub-vocal sound bubbles up his throat; a little like a human groan but lower, deeper in his bones, less like speech, and it doesn't stop when he breathes. He remembers her by the coffee machine, tucking something into her jacket pocket, raising a glass at him across the room.
Commander Shepard - up in front of the Council, surrounded by Alliance brass - deciding how to fuck him.
Spirits.
When she dips her blunt little tongue between his plates, Garrus thinks he might black out. He stays fixed on her face, half cool red light and half shadow; a vivid sweep of hair and her fingers wrapped around him. It feels like the tail end of a stim high. A residual, jittery kind of focus, sharp edges turned hazy in patches and details tumbled together.
Wandering, molten-metal lines of pre-cum slide further down her knuckles with every swipe of tongue, every slick, slow twist of her hand. Garrus's hips try to come up off the bed and she forces him back down with the elbow on his thigh. Her free hand finds his leg spur and shoves it flat against the edge of the bed, sliding his foot an inch or so with it, pinning him in place. His subvocal rumbling stutters and comes back half an octave higher.
"Are you going to be good for me?"
It's barely above a whisper - Garrus feels it between his plates more than he hears it. Her thumb is drawing those tiny, glorious, infuriating circles near the tip again, pre-cum dripping down her wrist where she's hiked up her sleeve. The gold bands at the cuff are tight around her forearm, veins standing out over muscle.
Garrus is shivering all over. At this rate he'll shoot his damn shot before the fight even starts.
"Vakarian,” Shepard says, and there’s a commanding edge in it that sends a fresh jolt through him.
In a rare show of devastating over-confidence, Garrus decides he can hold it.
He looks her dead in the eye, chest heaving, his fists in the bedsheets, and every muscle below his cowl ready to snap.
"Yes, sir."
If it sounds a little too much like I think I’m in love with you, Shepard doesn't seem to notice.
She buries half her face between his plates, nose and all, and the chatter in his chest pitches up to a roar just as he's trying to slow his breathing. He threads a shaky hand into her hair, dragging talons slowly over her ear just the way she likes, half-expecting to be shoved away and pinned by the wrist.
Instead, Shepard's shoulders relax and her lips pull gently, right at the base of his cock where the hide is thinnest. A shiver rolls through him from core to crest to toes; whatever Fornax might or might not be writing, he's sure it's got nothing on this. Her mouth is soft and certain, pliable and incessant. It's rapture. It's bliss.
When her tongue flattens, dragging lips and soft, wet heat up the underside of his cock, Garrus screws his eyes shut. The dark presses in, leaving everything else heightened.
The smell of her - day-old soap and sex - and the texture on her tongue. Her hair slipping between his fingers. Fabric pressed to the exposed hide on his upper-thigh. The bone-deep tug in his leg spur, held flat against the bed. The barely-there sound of her mouth in the quiet. Her fist curling around him again near the base, where he's too thick for her finger and thumb to touch. The heavy, twisting feeling in his -
That’s when Garrus realises he might have made a mistake.
He yanks his eyes open to Shepard kissing the tip of his cock; soft pink on blue-brown, smudged together in crimson neon. Her lips come away gluey, and - Spirits - the look on her face should be illegal. It's his every sin and vice, wrapped up in Alliance colours.
For a moment he feels suspended - weightless - like he’s caught in the pitch of a nose-diving shuttle.
This is the image that sticks with him on the freighter to Sur'Kesh; in Cipritine; on Menae; as Palaven and Earth burn in tandem: Shepard on her knees with glossy red light in her hair and raw, uncomplicated need in her eyes. Brass buttons, warm hands, an apartment all to themselves, and Are you going to be good for me?
Shepard wipes her mouth slowly with her thumb; makes sure he watches her do it.
"I'll be good," he blurts out, reedy and desperate. "Please. I'll be good."
Her smile feels glorious. "I know."
What turians lack in sensitivity everywhere else they make up for between their legs. Shepard knows this, and she usually starts him off gently. Even in the whirlwind of the last three nights she took her time getting her mouth around him: light, shallow pressure with her lips and careful sweeps of tongue in between. Enough to work him up slowly.
So when she grabs him five inches from the tip and sinks the whole damn thing into the back of her mouth, face flush to her fist, Garrus almost chokes on his own tongue.
He slams his palms on the bed, one foot shooting forward as his leg muscles jump, the snarl pouring out of his mouth humming in the mattress. The leg Shepard has by the spur barely moves; if she wasn't three hundred pounds of palladium-enhanced bone and muscle weave, he might have snapped her wrist.
"Shepard - " He breaks off in a gutteral noise when she hollows her cheeks. "Spirits - fuck - "
A low, satisfied noise oozes out of her, and when Garrus feels it in the back of her throat, rolling down her tongue - all hot and wet and possessive - he realises he absolutely, definitely cannot hold it.
He grabs her shoulder, hard, talons first and the only word he can manage is stop.
Shepard scrambles upright, snatching her hand away, and somehow the sudden loss of touch makes him come even harder.
It smacks him like a biotic kick in the back; wave after crackling wave until he's panting and shaking, head back, muscle and sinew pulled taught.
"Jesus, Garrus," Shepard says, somewhere very far away.
"Sorry - " Spirits, he's still cumming " - I can’t - I'm sorry - ”
"It's alright.” He’s faintly aware of the mattress sinking and Shepard’s hands on his cowl. “It's ok."
He peels his eyes open as it starts to taper off and his hearing comes whining back in. Shepard is a dark block of colour in his left eye, kneeling on the bed, and he leans towards her instinctively, butting his shoulder into her stomach. Her fingers find the spot behind his mandible, about where an ear would be if he was human, and trace vague, soothing shapes for a minute or so while he tries to control his breathing.
"Crap," he wheezes. "Sorry - are you alright?"
“I’m fine. Thought I’d given you a heart attack.”
With his head against her ribcage, the words have a kind of sub-vocal hum beneath her fluttery human heartbeat.
“You gave it a damn good try.”
Her chest jumps. Maybe a laugh.
With returning faculties, Garrus realises he’s covered in cum; it’s up his torso in ribbons, belly to cowl, and dripping slowly into his slackening groin plates. He starts to sit up gingerly but Shepard stops him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Don't. I've got it."
In truth, he’s not sure his legs would take him anywhere if he wanted them to.
Shepard pads off to the bathroom and Garrus leans back on his elbows, watching her legs wistfully below the hem of the jacket.
A snap of white light pours into the bedroom from the ensuite. "I forget how much there is when it's not tied up in a condom," she says as the water runs. "You're like a big, horny spider."
He can't remember what a spider is, but Shepard's tone is warm so it doesn't seem very important. When she returns with a towel and a large, damp cloth, her face is doing something complicated that he doesn't have the cerebral blood flow to analyse. She doesn't seem annoyed or hurt; that's as far as he gets.
“Sorry,” he says again, just to make sure, as she sits back down on the bed and shakes back her other sleeve.
“Don’t be." She wipes the edge of his cowl. "I’m gonna start keeping score on the fridge though. Mouth: one. Dick: nil.”
Garrus tips his head. “And the winner gets…?”
“Bragging rights." She flips the cloth over. “Loser does the Fornax interview.”
They grin at each other; teeth, mandibles, and crinkled eyes. One of a thousand small, miraculous things they can recognise in each other, despite biology, several million lightyears, and - sometimes - common sense.
Shepard works down to his waist, following the sweep of his plates, running the corner of the cloth carefully along each edge. Between the light and the warmth in the cloth sinking through the chitin, it feels like sitting under a heat lamp.
“So…” She cuts him a look, too brief to get a proper read on. “You’re a uniform guy, huh?”
Garrus opens his mouth to say yes, and a nervous laugh tumbles out instead. He'd hoped she might give him ten minutes to scoop his brain back together first.
She grins, flipping the cloth again and swiping it along the plate above his exposed hip. “Relax - a lot of humans are into it. It’s not weird.”
“Oh,” he says, stupidly. “That’s… good.”
Twenty-four hours of crippling anxiety for nothing. Spectacular.
The cloth slows. “Do turians think it's weird?” she says, misreading the clipped answer.
"No, it - " He frowns. “The notes Mordin gave you didn’t mention it?”
It’s Shepard’s turn to look sheepish.
“Maybe. I skipped a lot of the cultural stuff. In my defence - " she adds, when he raises his browplates " - a survey of ten-thousand young-adult turian males doesn't tell me anything about what you like."
"Wish I'd thought of that," Garrus mutters. He still can't listen to Blue Azure without cringing.
Shepard balls up the cloth, which is beginning to stain silver-grey, and catches a rivulet escaping down the side of his thigh. As proficient as she is at ruining him, she's twice as meticulous about putting him back together afterwards. There's something distinctly military about that, too. Distinctly Shepard.
"It's common, then?" she says, as she wipes down the inside of his thighs. "A lot of turians like uniforms?"
"It's basically ingrained. Kind of like lingerie for humans," he says, as she works closer to his cock, still half-hard and just starting to retract. "I don't know if you've noticed, Shepard, but we've really got a thing for - "
She waits until he looks away to press the cloth carefully between his plates. Garrus breaks off into a jumpy, over-stimulated groan, stomach muscles twitching.
"Too much?"
Her voice is light but she's got that look in her eyes again; the one from the skycar. The one that says we'll see.
"No," he says. It cracks in his throat and he swallows. "No - just - "
"Slowly?"
Garrus nods.
Shepard wraps the cloth around two of her fingers and - very gently, with half an eye on his face - wipes the base of his cock clean; first one side, then the other. He breathes carefully, watching her hand, soothing the urge to whine and writhe away when she catches him somewhere especially sensitive. Every tiny movement goes jack-knifing up through his spine, right on the clean edge of pain.
"That's it," she murmurs, when she feels him suppress a particularly strong twitch. "That's good, Garrus."
He's reeling again by the time Shepard is finished with him; dizzy and high on praise, flat on his back on the bed.
"Now, the part of Mordin's notes I did read," she says conversationally, while Garrus stares at the ceiling, "said turians usually have a refractory period comparable to human men."
"Of course you read that part."
"I read all the mission-critical parts." She shrugs the jacket off and throws it at him, so it lands in a heap on his chest. "Why don't I take a shower and we'll see how you feel when - "
"Give me twenty minutes," Garrus says.
He knows enough about what she likes to buy himself more than that, but somehow he doesn’t think he’ll need it. The jacket is still warm.
Two more things land on him - much smaller and lighter - and when he lifts his head, Shepard is completely naked except for her dogtags and a truly evil grin.
"Don't do anything unsavoury with that, I'll need it tomorrow.”