the color of its countries, 5/?
anonymous
March 13 2011, 00:46:05 UTC
She dipped her fingertips into the orange, the closest she could come to the rusty color of the Normandy's highlight paint job, and swept it along the underside of one mandible, just beneath the blue of his facial markings. She moved to dip her fingers back in the orange and repeat on the other side, but Garrus was faster: he dipped a forefinger in the green (the same shade as her armor, nearly) and swept it along her collarbones.
"You and clavicles," Shepard said, with a laugh that turned to a gasp as Garrus bent his head and licked the green back off.
"You don't seem to be protesting." Another sweep of green, curling in from the ball of her shoulder joint inward, this one curving all the way down her breastbone. When he followed the track of his fingers with his tongue, ending with the forked tip swirling over her heart, she couldn't help it: she jerked her hips against his.
She couldn't even fault him for his smug chuckle.
"How's it taste?" she asked, pushing him backwards onto the bed. Turian males couldn't lie down on their backs for long-the heavy arch of their cowl made it uncomfortable at best-but it would work for a little while. She shimmied up further until her thighs bracketed his waist, encouraged by his hands curling around the backs of her thighs. Garrus was probably getting green paint on her ass. She really didn't care.
Garrus made a show of licking his lips. His tongue was faintly green. "Sweet," he said. "Just sweet."
"Makes sense." To be safe for both levo and dextro species, it had probably been purged of everything but carbohydrates: starches and sugars. Hands on the plates covering Garrus' powerful chest muscles (and leaving orange smudges in her wake), Shepard leaned down and carefully, thoroughly, slowly licked his mandible clean of paint. Sweet, yes, and under that the now-familiar taste of his skin, metal and leather; the slick smoothness of his hide-plate there, and, when she curled her tongue underneath (which made Garrus groan and buck his hips against her) the sensitive softness of the mandible's inner side.
He wrenched himself up with a sudden movement that toppled her onto the bed, one thigh still hooked over the top of his hip. He caught the tin of paint with a motion so sudden it reminded her of a striking snake, then dipped his fingers back in the green. Side by side and face to face now, he painted a line down her sternum again, then caught the edge of her negligee (getting green all over it, and she really could not have cared less) and tugged it up over her head. With the soft pads of his fingers, and careful of her thinner skin, he painted more green on the tight points of her nipples and then dropped his head to lick her clean again.
(Her breasts did very little for him, and yet somehow that made it more intimate, the fact that he spent so much time winding his tongue around them just because it made her feel good.)
She scrabbled, with a little help, to get his pants off. By the time she did, the plates protecting his groin had already shifted and he'd fully unsheathed, hard and flushed deeply blue, and she went to draw a spiral of orange up his shaft… and was stopped by his hand on her wrist.
"If you do that," he said, "it's going to be all over really fast." His voice sounded thinner and tighter than usual; one of his twin larynxes was now totally occupied with a constant aroused rumbling that she could feel all through his body and her own.
"That's okay with me," she said, and felt him shudder all over, heard his purr briefly harmonize with itself before he got control of himself again.
"Yeah, but I want-" he said, and then stopped trying to talk at all and instead tracked his hand downward and slipped a finger into her.
(He had to be so careful, his sharp claw naked within the sensitive folds of her body, but she trusted him to be careful and he was, and that combination of potential danger and total faith in him was more a turn-on than nearly anything else they did.)
"Yeah," she said, her own voice tight and breathless, reaching blindly to the bedside table for their stock of dual-chirality condoms. "Yeah."
the color of its countries, 6/?
anonymous
March 23 2011, 06:37:06 UTC
Author's Note: Still here! Sorry, got stuck on an unexpectedly difficult section. More parts incoming!
***
Even the first time, when they'd been fumbling to figure everything out, by the time they got to this part things had just . . . worked. She hooked her legs up over the spurs of his hips, opening herself to him and at the same time rubbing the sensitive skin at his waist with her knee. He thrust into her, thrust and swelled, caught her ass in his hands and pulled her against him. He sank in hard and deep and so simply good it drove a sound from her throat. And the answering two-tone vibration in his chest buzzed through her, made her arch, made her gasp. She dug her fingers into his fringe and tugged, just to ground herself, and he kicked up the pace a notch, and . . . .
She'd never been much of a screamer, but she groaned as she tightened around him, head thrown back and feeling his mandibles against her throat as he bit-gently-at the skin there, leaving marks but not drawing blood. Her body jerked, electrified by his touch, by the roughness of his body against hers, by the warmth of his breath on her throat. And even as she panted in aftermath she could feel his purr broken up by the bellows of his gasping breaths. He ran his hand down her arm to catch her wrist, rubbing his thumb against the sensitive inside and setting off a tremor of aftershocks that drew him to the brink and over.
She gasped at the headboard and felt him panting against her shoulder, felt his hot breath, exquisite on skin sensitized by the tips of his fangs. She could feel the tension melting out of both of them. "Ooh," she said, the only thing her brain and mouth could manage at that moment.
"Yeah," Garrus said, laughing through fast breaths. He rubbed his forehead against her temple and sighed.
"Feel better?"
Another laugh. "No offense, Shepard, but that's a really stupid question."
Her fingertips could feel the truth of his words: his body relaxed, the plates of his chest and back easing.
After a moment, when her heartrate and breathing had returned to normal, she capped the tin and put it aside. Experiment successful, she thought, and also, Thank you, Kasumi.
"The paint was a good idea," Garrus said, echoing her thought. His hand made a lazy path down her spine, then back up.
"Yeah," she said, and then, "Thank you." After a moment, she rolled over and nudged her forehead beneath his chin, against the surprisingly soft skin of his throat. "I thought you'd like it, given all your markings."
Garrus went still all over, and for a moment she was afraid she'd said something wrong. But then he said, simply, "Yeah, that's true."
She rubbed the skin between the plates of his shoulders and wondered what that was about. Well. There would be time to find out. They'd only barely used any of the paint, after all.
the color of its countries, 7/?
anonymous
March 23 2011, 07:15:46 UTC
***
The truth was, after the Collector base, doing merc cleanup was no challenge. Worthwhile, especially to help out an old friend, but just not a challenge.
"Sniper, three o'clock-" Shepard began, and then the sniper's head exploded.
"Have I mentioned that I love this rifle?" Garrus' voice rumbled across the comm, sounding smug.
"Only about fifteen times per mission, every mission we've been on," Tali said without breaking stride as she worked her way north behind cover. Despite her mock-aggrieved tone, Shepard could hear the smile in her voice.
"Krogan-" Garrus began, and before he could even finish the sentence Shepard had summoned and slung a bolt of biotic energy. The krogan went down with a thundering of heavy armor. Without missing a beat, Garrus continued, "-Aw, is my witty repartee getting stale, Tali? I'll have to come up with new lines."
"That's quite all right. Your old lines are bad enough, I hesitate to-" a brief pause as she got off an overload, bringing two mechs down in a blaze of eyesearing white "-encourage you to come up with more."
Shepard finish winding up another ball of energy in her gut and slung it out along her fingertips (not an accurate physiological description, admittedly, but it was how it felt to use biotics), watching with satisfaction as three mercs went down. "I need to find more interesting jobs for you two, clearly, or you'll just keep cluttering up my comm trying to keep yourselves entertained."
"By all means, yes, Shepard," Garrus said. "Another Collector ship. Wouldn't want us getting bored."
"Personally, I rather like the idea of boredom," Tali said. The sound of gunfire had died away, and she eased up out of cover; a good sign that the others could too, because if Tali's custom-tinkered scanners weren't picking anything up, that meant there wasn't anything to pick up. "I don't remember what it's like at all anymore."
"I guarantee, three days of paperwork? You'd change your mind," Garrus said.
"Probably," Tali agreed, amicable. "Shepard, next move?"
"If this section's clear, we're done here. We'll head back to base and tell-" She paused. Something had changed in Garrus' posture, subtle but enough for her to read the message: something not quite right. Tali went quite still too; for all their banter, she probably trusted Garrus' instincts as well as Shepard did herself. "Garrus, what's up?"
"I hear . . . ." Garrus began, and then turned his head-turned his head so that his unscarred side was cocked forward, listening with his own natural auditory membrane. Shepard knew from Chakwas' reports that the artificial auditory membrane on the damaged side was at least as good, possibly better, but Garrus never seemed to quite trust it.
Garrus stalked, and for a brief moment Shepard could see why people compared his species to terrestrial birds, could see something of the stalking crane, the poised falcon, and something, too, of the long-extinct utahraptor. The impression wasn't contradicted at all by his sudden sideways leap, pinning-
"Got a wounded one here, Commander," he said, and she knew the use of her title was meaningful. As a C-Sec investigator, frustrated by his restrictions, he might've roughed up the mercenary. As Archangel, breathing ash and rage, he would've shot to kill, injured or no. But as her crewmate, he held back and, indeed, stepped back, gun still trained on the injured Blue Sun.
The mercenary was a turian, lean for his kind and clearly crippled by the battle-the armor on his legs blown to pieces, his flesh beneath badly burned-but probably not fatally, if he got himself some kind of semi-competent medical care afterward. He was conscious, too, but not speaking. Amber eyes glinted out of deep eye sockets, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Garrus, who was looking back . . . through the scope of his rifle.
"It's your lucky day," Shepard said. "Unless they give me a really good reason, I don't shoot enemies who surrender."
the color of its countries, 8/?
anonymous
March 23 2011, 08:04:57 UTC
The merc didn't answer her. His glinting eyes, sunken deep beneath his red-marked plates, didn't leave Garrus' face. "Vakarian," he said.
Garrus' posture didn't change a bit, he was too disciplined for that. Still, Shepard knew his reactions well enough to know that-hidden by his suit-the spines were rising on his arms and legs.
"You're not talking to Vakarian, you're talking to me," Shepard snapped.
The turian hissed in a way she hadn't ever actually heard before, though she knew intellectually that turians were capable of it. It sounded more like an angry cat than a snake. "No honor in talking to-" and then the translator failed on a word it couldn't readily gloss, but that sounded plenty nasty. At the same time, Garrus rose up further, onto the balls of his feet, and jammed his rifle's muzzle into the merc's thorax.
"'Vakarian' isn't talking to you," he said, the flanging in his voice deepening. Threat inflection. "So you'll talk to Shepard."
The turian spat. His eyes never left Garrus, but finally he said, "All right, Shepard. You can carry this message back to your cronies in Cerberus."
He shouldn't have been able to move so fast, for someone with two charred legs. As it was, he actually managed to sit up, and Shepard got a brief flash of a combat knife, before she heard the shattering report of Garrus' rifle and the turian fell back again, this time not to rise.
Shepard exhaled. This sort of thing always left a nasty taste in her mouth, far more so than straightforward combat. "I hate it when they do that. I'm not even with Cerberus now."
"Suicide by enemy combatant," Garrus said. His voice sounded thick.
"Let's get out of here," Shepard said, and both Garrus and Tali nodded.
***
One major advantage of being with Garrus: the aftermath of battles.
Before their relationship, after any battle that didn't send her to the infirmary, she was generally both bone-weary and too wound-up to sleep. She'd lost count of the number of evenings she'd spent working off excess adrenaline by pacing the room until simple exhaustion overrode restlessness and allowed her to sleep. It was a wonder she hadn't worn a visible path around her bed, past the fishtank, up the stairs, around her small office, and back down.
Now, she still had the excess energy, but there were considerably better ways to work it off.
Her armor and his, not quite scattered across the floor because they both respected it too much, but not quite put tidily away, either. Her clothes and his, definitely scattered recklessly across the floor. Her back against the fishtank, his hands curling under her thighs (gloves still on so he didn't have to worry about being careful with his talons), her legs hooked high around his waist and driving him crazy as she rubbed her inner thigh against the sensitive skin there . . . .
He thrust hard and she braced her shoulders against the cool glass to give back as good as she got, locking her ankles across the small of his back for better leverage. At this angle he hit deep inside, his legs braced to arch powerfully into her; her hands scraped at his cowl just to keep a grip and she tipped her head back and gasped a sob at the ceiling and at the stars through the skylight. Was glad, not for the first time, that the Loft was separate from the rest of the ship, so that there was no chance of anyone hearing.
Garrus was no quieter, the constant deep rumble in his chest vibrating through him-all through him, even deep inside her-and the doubled moan in her ear when he bent his head to nip at her shoulder set her quivering, tight around him and seeking her orgasm with tensed muscles. Reaching, reaching, higher, further-there-
She shuddered and curled her fingers hard enough to leave nailmarks on the skin of his cowl, shuddered hard and couldn't stop the gasped Ah! that left her mouth, any more than she could stop the way her muscles relaxed into heaviness afterward. Heavy and deep and quiet as the water behind the glass at her back, and she sighed and shivered as Garrus followed her minutes later.
the color of its countries, 9/?
anonymous
March 23 2011, 08:20:46 UTC
They made it back to the bed, somehow, and for a moment Shepard just lay on the coverlet next to him and stared at the blue-streaked starfield through the window above them, grinning like an idiot. Oh, endorphins, how I love you. She reached out a hand and Garrus found it with his, and in a gesture that was rapidly becoming second nature she folded her fingers together (pinkie and ring finger, middle and index finger, thumb) so she could twine them more easily with his. After a moment, with a not-at-all-serious-sounding grumble about having to do everything, Garrus rolled over and crawled up the bed, shucked off his gloves, and pulled back the coverlet. Shepard squirmed up after him.
Under the crisp sheets, she curled against his body, relishing the warmth-his body naturally ran a few degrees hotter than she did, not enough to be uncomfortable but enough to be noticeable. Between that and the leathery smoothness of his plates, he was like a heating pad against her sore muscles. Comforting.
Yeah, this was much better than her prior pace-in-circles-like-a-trapped-rat battle-aftermath.
Garrus exhaled and tucked his face against her shoulder, and she rubbed his shoulder, the bony edge of his collar, the soft skin of his throat. She could feel his voice as he said, "That beats the hell out of taking my frustrations out on an innocent punching bag."
"Ha. I was just thinking pretty much the same thing."
Garrus rumbled amusement. "Although, next time, I vote we refuel somewhere that someone will give us a fill-up without asking us to take out a merc company?"
"Request noted," Shepard said. His hand smoothed over the bare curve of her waist and hip, thumb drawing slow circles on the jut of her hipbone. She was silent for a long moment, relishing the warmth, the touch of his skin, washing away the tension. After a quiet while, she said, "Wasn't expecting to run into someone who knew you."
"Hm?" Garrus raised his head a little and looked at her, clearly puzzled.
"He knew your name," Shepard said, finally exasperated.
"Oh," Garrus said, and chuckled, a sound that vibrated through his chest. "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. He might've just recognized . . . " and he brought his fingers up to gesture at his facial markings.
"Oh." Shepard wrinkled her nose. "How likely is that? You learn all of them?"
"Not hardly. There must be thousands. But you remember the markings for people you know, so if he knew a Vakarian . . . "
" . . . He'd recognize the marks."
"Right. Or, well, if you know how, you can read them, kind of. There's a pattern to the way they're designed. So even if he couldn't tell 'Vakarian' exactly, he could read them and tell that I was from Palaven, from a well-respected clan and family, and make an educated guess."
"Oh," Shepard said, digesting this. "So what could you tell from his?"
Garrus rolled his eyes in thought, staring at the ceiling. After a moment, he said, " . . . He must've been from Terakel colony . . . I'm really out of practice with this." Another pause. "Reasonably well-respected clan, nothing noteworthy. That's all I could tell. And that could apply to dozens of clans, hundreds of families-"
"-Thousands of individuals?"
"Tens or hundreds of thousands, actually." A pause. "It's far from an exact science. Just patterns."
Shepard let her fingers trail up Garrus' neck-he sighed, contented and pleased both, and closed his eyes-and then rubbed them over the plates on the undamaged side of his face, remembering how she'd drawn Normandy rust-orange along his mandible, beneath the blue of his homeworld and clan markings. She could feel the marks beneath her fingertips, as a slight textural contrast. The skin over the markings was just a little bit rougher than the almost-slick surface of his face plates. "How do you-what's it like to get them?"
Garrus opened one eye. "Why the sudden curiosity?"
the color of its countries, 10/?
anonymous
March 23 2011, 08:27:17 UTC
Garrus' mandibles flared beneath her fingertips in amusement, but he said, "All right, if it makes you happy. It goes like this: when you're a teenager, when you finally get declared truly adult in the eyes of the clan, they put the marks on. For me, it was a couple of years before I first entered the service."
"I'm guessing the marks aren't a tattoo the way I would mean a tattoo," Shepard ventured. Turian plates were only like human skin in a generally analogous way, after all.
"Needles?" Garrus shook his head. "No. It's much simpler than that. They strip off the-our plates have a waterproof layer on top of the skin, called the cuticle-they strip that off with an acid, and then use a dye on the hide beneath. The cuticle gradually grows back over it, so the marks are permanent, underneath. The cuticle's never quite the same, though. That's why you can feel the marks, not just see them."
"Acid?" Shepard flattened her fingers over the thick, curved line just beneath Garrus' eye. "Isn't that-well, painful? Dangerous?"
He slid a hand up her throat and seized her earlobe between thumb and forefinger. "Your species decorates itself by punching holes in loose bits of skin and hanging things from them, I don't think you have much ground to talk."
Shepard hesitated, then laughed. "Fair enough. So once the cuticle regrows, the marks are permanent?"
Garrus shrugged. "Mostly. You can have the cuticle stripped again and the hide bleached-and you can put other marks on the hide once that's done, if you've petitioned to join another clan. Or you can just have them stripped and go barefaced. And the markings wear off over time, with the molt, so most people have them redone every five or ten years." He gave a sideways smile. "If you're particularly vain, you might get them touched up every year or so, so the colors don't fade and the edges stay sharp. Touching them up isn't as intense as getting them fully redone, though."
"And are you," Shepard asked playfully, rising up on one elbow to trace the lines on his face, "particularly vain?"
"I used to be." Garrus didn't quite rise to his bait; his response was less playful, more serious. His mandibles drew back in, not so much at ease anymore.
Before he'd had half his face blown off, he meant-and Shepard knew he meant-and cursed her own thoughtlessness for bringing it up. She'd never asked (it seemed weird, somehow, to ask him about his habits at picking up women before her) but she knew anecdotally that he'd been quite handsome by turian standards. Between that and the status designated by his colony-clan-family markings, he'd probably done pretty well with turian women. And she knew that, though he never talked about it and rarely even alluded to it, he was dismayed by the still-serious scarring on his face. Some women find facial scars attractive. Mind you, most of those women are krogan.
She wasn't sure what to say. Pointing out that he was attractive to her would be too . . . too obvious that she could read his insecurities, and anyway, beside the point. He was attractive to her because she cared for him. She knew he appreciated that, but it didn't have anything to do with how other people would view him, or his scarred face.
She drew her fingertips down his mandible, thinking of the way she'd drawn Normandy orange alongside the blue. The way he'd painted green on her body, the color of her armor. The silence drew out between them, and every second that passed tightened like a knot in her gut. Finally she said, "Every mark on you means something to me, Garrus, not just the deliberate ones."
He looked at her for a long time, searching-for what? She didn't know-and then his eyes softened, the armored brow ridges relaxing and rising.
"We should get some sleep," he said, his voice purring low and drawing the tension from her despite herself.
"Yeah," she said, and kissed him on the tip of his right mandible, and then pressed her forehead to his. He returned the gesture, sighed, and closed his eyes.
She lay awake, looking at him, for a while before sleep finally came.
Re: the color of its countries, 10/?
anonymous
March 24 2011, 05:06:55 UTC
I was so excited to see an update! You're doing a brilliant job with this story, writeanon. I love the characterization, description, and insight into turian culture. So glad you're continuing!
Just wanted to thank everyone for being patient. :) Due to a) life happening, and b) being kind of a perfectionist about my fic, the next section has been slow coming, but it's nearly ready! Have no fear, I have not abandoned the story. :) Should be up tonight or tomorrow.
"You and clavicles," Shepard said, with a laugh that turned to a gasp as Garrus bent his head and licked the green back off.
"You don't seem to be protesting." Another sweep of green, curling in from the ball of her shoulder joint inward, this one curving all the way down her breastbone. When he followed the track of his fingers with his tongue, ending with the forked tip swirling over her heart, she couldn't help it: she jerked her hips against his.
She couldn't even fault him for his smug chuckle.
"How's it taste?" she asked, pushing him backwards onto the bed. Turian males couldn't lie down on their backs for long-the heavy arch of their cowl made it uncomfortable at best-but it would work for a little while. She shimmied up further until her thighs bracketed his waist, encouraged by his hands curling around the backs of her thighs. Garrus was probably getting green paint on her ass. She really didn't care.
Garrus made a show of licking his lips. His tongue was faintly green. "Sweet," he said. "Just sweet."
"Makes sense." To be safe for both levo and dextro species, it had probably been purged of everything but carbohydrates: starches and sugars. Hands on the plates covering Garrus' powerful chest muscles (and leaving orange smudges in her wake), Shepard leaned down and carefully, thoroughly, slowly licked his mandible clean of paint. Sweet, yes, and under that the now-familiar taste of his skin, metal and leather; the slick smoothness of his hide-plate there, and, when she curled her tongue underneath (which made Garrus groan and buck his hips against her) the sensitive softness of the mandible's inner side.
He wrenched himself up with a sudden movement that toppled her onto the bed, one thigh still hooked over the top of his hip. He caught the tin of paint with a motion so sudden it reminded her of a striking snake, then dipped his fingers back in the green. Side by side and face to face now, he painted a line down her sternum again, then caught the edge of her negligee (getting green all over it, and she really could not have cared less) and tugged it up over her head. With the soft pads of his fingers, and careful of her thinner skin, he painted more green on the tight points of her nipples and then dropped his head to lick her clean again.
(Her breasts did very little for him, and yet somehow that made it more intimate, the fact that he spent so much time winding his tongue around them just because it made her feel good.)
She scrabbled, with a little help, to get his pants off. By the time she did, the plates protecting his groin had already shifted and he'd fully unsheathed, hard and flushed deeply blue, and she went to draw a spiral of orange up his shaft… and was stopped by his hand on her wrist.
"If you do that," he said, "it's going to be all over really fast." His voice sounded thinner and tighter than usual; one of his twin larynxes was now totally occupied with a constant aroused rumbling that she could feel all through his body and her own.
"That's okay with me," she said, and felt him shudder all over, heard his purr briefly harmonize with itself before he got control of himself again.
"Yeah, but I want-" he said, and then stopped trying to talk at all and instead tracked his hand downward and slipped a finger into her.
(He had to be so careful, his sharp claw naked within the sensitive folds of her body, but she trusted him to be careful and he was, and that combination of potential danger and total faith in him was more a turn-on than nearly anything else they did.)
"Yeah," she said, her own voice tight and breathless, reaching blindly to the bedside table for their stock of dual-chirality condoms. "Yeah."
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***
Even the first time, when they'd been fumbling to figure everything out, by the time they got to this part things had just . . . worked. She hooked her legs up over the spurs of his hips, opening herself to him and at the same time rubbing the sensitive skin at his waist with her knee. He thrust into her, thrust and swelled, caught her ass in his hands and pulled her against him. He sank in hard and deep and so simply good it drove a sound from her throat. And the answering two-tone vibration in his chest buzzed through her, made her arch, made her gasp. She dug her fingers into his fringe and tugged, just to ground herself, and he kicked up the pace a notch, and . . . .
She'd never been much of a screamer, but she groaned as she tightened around him, head thrown back and feeling his mandibles against her throat as he bit-gently-at the skin there, leaving marks but not drawing blood. Her body jerked, electrified by his touch, by the roughness of his body against hers, by the warmth of his breath on her throat. And even as she panted in aftermath she could feel his purr broken up by the bellows of his gasping breaths. He ran his hand down her arm to catch her wrist, rubbing his thumb against the sensitive inside and setting off a tremor of aftershocks that drew him to the brink and over.
She gasped at the headboard and felt him panting against her shoulder, felt his hot breath, exquisite on skin sensitized by the tips of his fangs. She could feel the tension melting out of both of them. "Ooh," she said, the only thing her brain and mouth could manage at that moment.
"Yeah," Garrus said, laughing through fast breaths. He rubbed his forehead against her temple and sighed.
"Feel better?"
Another laugh. "No offense, Shepard, but that's a really stupid question."
Her fingertips could feel the truth of his words: his body relaxed, the plates of his chest and back easing.
After a moment, when her heartrate and breathing had returned to normal, she capped the tin and put it aside. Experiment successful, she thought, and also, Thank you, Kasumi.
"The paint was a good idea," Garrus said, echoing her thought. His hand made a lazy path down her spine, then back up.
"Yeah," she said, and then, "Thank you." After a moment, she rolled over and nudged her forehead beneath his chin, against the surprisingly soft skin of his throat. "I thought you'd like it, given all your markings."
Garrus went still all over, and for a moment she was afraid she'd said something wrong. But then he said, simply, "Yeah, that's true."
She rubbed the skin between the plates of his shoulders and wondered what that was about. Well. There would be time to find out. They'd only barely used any of the paint, after all.
***
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The truth was, after the Collector base, doing merc cleanup was no challenge. Worthwhile, especially to help out an old friend, but just not a challenge.
"Sniper, three o'clock-" Shepard began, and then the sniper's head exploded.
"Have I mentioned that I love this rifle?" Garrus' voice rumbled across the comm, sounding smug.
"Only about fifteen times per mission, every mission we've been on," Tali said without breaking stride as she worked her way north behind cover. Despite her mock-aggrieved tone, Shepard could hear the smile in her voice.
"Krogan-" Garrus began, and before he could even finish the sentence Shepard had summoned and slung a bolt of biotic energy. The krogan went down with a thundering of heavy armor. Without missing a beat, Garrus continued, "-Aw, is my witty repartee getting stale, Tali? I'll have to come up with new lines."
"That's quite all right. Your old lines are bad enough, I hesitate to-" a brief pause as she got off an overload, bringing two mechs down in a blaze of eyesearing white "-encourage you to come up with more."
Shepard finish winding up another ball of energy in her gut and slung it out along her fingertips (not an accurate physiological description, admittedly, but it was how it felt to use biotics), watching with satisfaction as three mercs went down. "I need to find more interesting jobs for you two, clearly, or you'll just keep cluttering up my comm trying to keep yourselves entertained."
"By all means, yes, Shepard," Garrus said. "Another Collector ship. Wouldn't want us getting bored."
"Personally, I rather like the idea of boredom," Tali said. The sound of gunfire had died away, and she eased up out of cover; a good sign that the others could too, because if Tali's custom-tinkered scanners weren't picking anything up, that meant there wasn't anything to pick up. "I don't remember what it's like at all anymore."
"I guarantee, three days of paperwork? You'd change your mind," Garrus said.
"Probably," Tali agreed, amicable. "Shepard, next move?"
"If this section's clear, we're done here. We'll head back to base and tell-" She paused. Something had changed in Garrus' posture, subtle but enough for her to read the message: something not quite right. Tali went quite still too; for all their banter, she probably trusted Garrus' instincts as well as Shepard did herself. "Garrus, what's up?"
"I hear . . . ." Garrus began, and then turned his head-turned his head so that his unscarred side was cocked forward, listening with his own natural auditory membrane. Shepard knew from Chakwas' reports that the artificial auditory membrane on the damaged side was at least as good, possibly better, but Garrus never seemed to quite trust it.
Garrus stalked, and for a brief moment Shepard could see why people compared his species to terrestrial birds, could see something of the stalking crane, the poised falcon, and something, too, of the long-extinct utahraptor. The impression wasn't contradicted at all by his sudden sideways leap, pinning-
"Got a wounded one here, Commander," he said, and she knew the use of her title was meaningful. As a C-Sec investigator, frustrated by his restrictions, he might've roughed up the mercenary. As Archangel, breathing ash and rage, he would've shot to kill, injured or no. But as her crewmate, he held back and, indeed, stepped back, gun still trained on the injured Blue Sun.
The mercenary was a turian, lean for his kind and clearly crippled by the battle-the armor on his legs blown to pieces, his flesh beneath badly burned-but probably not fatally, if he got himself some kind of semi-competent medical care afterward. He was conscious, too, but not speaking. Amber eyes glinted out of deep eye sockets, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Garrus, who was looking back . . . through the scope of his rifle.
"It's your lucky day," Shepard said. "Unless they give me a really good reason, I don't shoot enemies who surrender."
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Garrus' posture didn't change a bit, he was too disciplined for that. Still, Shepard knew his reactions well enough to know that-hidden by his suit-the spines were rising on his arms and legs.
"You're not talking to Vakarian, you're talking to me," Shepard snapped.
The turian hissed in a way she hadn't ever actually heard before, though she knew intellectually that turians were capable of it. It sounded more like an angry cat than a snake. "No honor in talking to-" and then the translator failed on a word it couldn't readily gloss, but that sounded plenty nasty. At the same time, Garrus rose up further, onto the balls of his feet, and jammed his rifle's muzzle into the merc's thorax.
"'Vakarian' isn't talking to you," he said, the flanging in his voice deepening. Threat inflection. "So you'll talk to Shepard."
The turian spat. His eyes never left Garrus, but finally he said, "All right, Shepard. You can carry this message back to your cronies in Cerberus."
He shouldn't have been able to move so fast, for someone with two charred legs. As it was, he actually managed to sit up, and Shepard got a brief flash of a combat knife, before she heard the shattering report of Garrus' rifle and the turian fell back again, this time not to rise.
Shepard exhaled. This sort of thing always left a nasty taste in her mouth, far more so than straightforward combat. "I hate it when they do that. I'm not even with Cerberus now."
"Suicide by enemy combatant," Garrus said. His voice sounded thick.
"Let's get out of here," Shepard said, and both Garrus and Tali nodded.
***
One major advantage of being with Garrus: the aftermath of battles.
Before their relationship, after any battle that didn't send her to the infirmary, she was generally both bone-weary and too wound-up to sleep. She'd lost count of the number of evenings she'd spent working off excess adrenaline by pacing the room until simple exhaustion overrode restlessness and allowed her to sleep. It was a wonder she hadn't worn a visible path around her bed, past the fishtank, up the stairs, around her small office, and back down.
Now, she still had the excess energy, but there were considerably better ways to work it off.
Her armor and his, not quite scattered across the floor because they both respected it too much, but not quite put tidily away, either. Her clothes and his, definitely scattered recklessly across the floor. Her back against the fishtank, his hands curling under her thighs (gloves still on so he didn't have to worry about being careful with his talons), her legs hooked high around his waist and driving him crazy as she rubbed her inner thigh against the sensitive skin there . . . .
He thrust hard and she braced her shoulders against the cool glass to give back as good as she got, locking her ankles across the small of his back for better leverage. At this angle he hit deep inside, his legs braced to arch powerfully into her; her hands scraped at his cowl just to keep a grip and she tipped her head back and gasped a sob at the ceiling and at the stars through the skylight. Was glad, not for the first time, that the Loft was separate from the rest of the ship, so that there was no chance of anyone hearing.
Garrus was no quieter, the constant deep rumble in his chest vibrating through him-all through him, even deep inside her-and the doubled moan in her ear when he bent his head to nip at her shoulder set her quivering, tight around him and seeking her orgasm with tensed muscles. Reaching, reaching, higher, further-there-
She shuddered and curled her fingers hard enough to leave nailmarks on the skin of his cowl, shuddered hard and couldn't stop the gasped Ah! that left her mouth, any more than she could stop the way her muscles relaxed into heaviness afterward. Heavy and deep and quiet as the water behind the glass at her back, and she sighed and shivered as Garrus followed her minutes later.
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Under the crisp sheets, she curled against his body, relishing the warmth-his body naturally ran a few degrees hotter than she did, not enough to be uncomfortable but enough to be noticeable. Between that and the leathery smoothness of his plates, he was like a heating pad against her sore muscles. Comforting.
Yeah, this was much better than her prior pace-in-circles-like-a-trapped-rat battle-aftermath.
Garrus exhaled and tucked his face against her shoulder, and she rubbed his shoulder, the bony edge of his collar, the soft skin of his throat. She could feel his voice as he said, "That beats the hell out of taking my frustrations out on an innocent punching bag."
"Ha. I was just thinking pretty much the same thing."
Garrus rumbled amusement. "Although, next time, I vote we refuel somewhere that someone will give us a fill-up without asking us to take out a merc company?"
"Request noted," Shepard said. His hand smoothed over the bare curve of her waist and hip, thumb drawing slow circles on the jut of her hipbone. She was silent for a long moment, relishing the warmth, the touch of his skin, washing away the tension. After a quiet while, she said, "Wasn't expecting to run into someone who knew you."
"Hm?" Garrus raised his head a little and looked at her, clearly puzzled.
"The turian. Who was he?"
"I haven't the faintest idea."
"But-" Shepard said, briefly floundering. Then: "Well, he knew you, anyway."
"What makes you say that?"
"He knew your name," Shepard said, finally exasperated.
"Oh," Garrus said, and chuckled, a sound that vibrated through his chest. "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. He might've just recognized . . . " and he brought his fingers up to gesture at his facial markings.
"Oh." Shepard wrinkled her nose. "How likely is that? You learn all of them?"
"Not hardly. There must be thousands. But you remember the markings for people you know, so if he knew a Vakarian . . . "
" . . . He'd recognize the marks."
"Right. Or, well, if you know how, you can read them, kind of. There's a pattern to the way they're designed. So even if he couldn't tell 'Vakarian' exactly, he could read them and tell that I was from Palaven, from a well-respected clan and family, and make an educated guess."
"Oh," Shepard said, digesting this. "So what could you tell from his?"
Garrus rolled his eyes in thought, staring at the ceiling. After a moment, he said, " . . . He must've been from Terakel colony . . . I'm really out of practice with this." Another pause. "Reasonably well-respected clan, nothing noteworthy. That's all I could tell. And that could apply to dozens of clans, hundreds of families-"
"-Thousands of individuals?"
"Tens or hundreds of thousands, actually." A pause. "It's far from an exact science. Just patterns."
Shepard let her fingers trail up Garrus' neck-he sighed, contented and pleased both, and closed his eyes-and then rubbed them over the plates on the undamaged side of his face, remembering how she'd drawn Normandy rust-orange along his mandible, beneath the blue of his homeworld and clan markings. She could feel the marks beneath her fingertips, as a slight textural contrast. The skin over the markings was just a little bit rougher than the almost-slick surface of his face plates. "How do you-what's it like to get them?"
Garrus opened one eye. "Why the sudden curiosity?"
"Call it . . . interspecies education."
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"I'm guessing the marks aren't a tattoo the way I would mean a tattoo," Shepard ventured. Turian plates were only like human skin in a generally analogous way, after all.
"Needles?" Garrus shook his head. "No. It's much simpler than that. They strip off the-our plates have a waterproof layer on top of the skin, called the cuticle-they strip that off with an acid, and then use a dye on the hide beneath. The cuticle gradually grows back over it, so the marks are permanent, underneath. The cuticle's never quite the same, though. That's why you can feel the marks, not just see them."
"Acid?" Shepard flattened her fingers over the thick, curved line just beneath Garrus' eye. "Isn't that-well, painful? Dangerous?"
He slid a hand up her throat and seized her earlobe between thumb and forefinger. "Your species decorates itself by punching holes in loose bits of skin and hanging things from them, I don't think you have much ground to talk."
Shepard hesitated, then laughed. "Fair enough. So once the cuticle regrows, the marks are permanent?"
Garrus shrugged. "Mostly. You can have the cuticle stripped again and the hide bleached-and you can put other marks on the hide once that's done, if you've petitioned to join another clan. Or you can just have them stripped and go barefaced. And the markings wear off over time, with the molt, so most people have them redone every five or ten years." He gave a sideways smile. "If you're particularly vain, you might get them touched up every year or so, so the colors don't fade and the edges stay sharp. Touching them up isn't as intense as getting them fully redone, though."
"And are you," Shepard asked playfully, rising up on one elbow to trace the lines on his face, "particularly vain?"
"I used to be." Garrus didn't quite rise to his bait; his response was less playful, more serious. His mandibles drew back in, not so much at ease anymore.
Before he'd had half his face blown off, he meant-and Shepard knew he meant-and cursed her own thoughtlessness for bringing it up. She'd never asked (it seemed weird, somehow, to ask him about his habits at picking up women before her) but she knew anecdotally that he'd been quite handsome by turian standards. Between that and the status designated by his colony-clan-family markings, he'd probably done pretty well with turian women. And she knew that, though he never talked about it and rarely even alluded to it, he was dismayed by the still-serious scarring on his face. Some women find facial scars attractive. Mind you, most of those women are krogan.
She wasn't sure what to say. Pointing out that he was attractive to her would be too . . . too obvious that she could read his insecurities, and anyway, beside the point. He was attractive to her because she cared for him. She knew he appreciated that, but it didn't have anything to do with how other people would view him, or his scarred face.
She drew her fingertips down his mandible, thinking of the way she'd drawn Normandy orange alongside the blue. The way he'd painted green on her body, the color of her armor. The silence drew out between them, and every second that passed tightened like a knot in her gut. Finally she said, "Every mark on you means something to me, Garrus, not just the deliberate ones."
He looked at her for a long time, searching-for what? She didn't know-and then his eyes softened, the armored brow ridges relaxing and rising.
"We should get some sleep," he said, his voice purring low and drawing the tension from her despite herself.
"Yeah," she said, and kissed him on the tip of his right mandible, and then pressed her forehead to his. He returned the gesture, sighed, and closed his eyes.
She lay awake, looking at him, for a while before sleep finally came.
***
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You are doing such a great job author. Everyone feels so in character and I love the insight into the clan markings.
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*contented purr*
This is beautifully written, not sappy but emotionally touching.
Very nice job, anon.
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