Comfortable Old Boots

“Comfortable Old Boots”

Chapter Six: “Wrend.”

“Pull over!”

She nearly flung herself from the ship, hellbent for leather and teeth clicking audibly as her head snapped forward, back. Scant minutes before they'd hand out a death sentence to their pilot and its entire race, she heard: “Shepard Commander. Good luck.” Loyalty and trust that wasn't at all synthetic would be shot to shit for the sake of the greater good and the quarian fleet. There were less than two hours before she'd tell her turian lover that if he ever tried to comfort her about the still pile of machinery with its N7 shoulder guard again, she'd shoot him in the knee.

The galaxy had two months before the fall of Thessia, two months and one week before she'd step over shards of broken glass flooring to argue with the Illusive Man and come to the bone-deep realization that neither one of them would survive the war. They had two and a half months before London.

 

Sitting on the ground beside her was a man, eating a steak off of one of the large trays the Alliance used in mess hall cafeterias. He was holding a plasma lighter in one hand, moving it slowly back and forth as if involved in some sort of solo, fucked up candlelight vigil. “You know, I've never been to London.” he informed her, balancing his tray carefully on his lap. “Mordin and Thane probably wouldn't have been impressed by the city, would they?”

“Shut up, Kaidan.” She primed the laser, all merciless, brutal efficiency as the Reaper screamed above them. “We'll talk after we've wrapped up the genocide.”

 

“You know it was the right choice.” When he spoke again, he had the voice of a woman and a data pad full of poetry had taken the place of his steak. There was a glint of light behind him, the Citadel Tower stretching toward the sky like a dragon's tooth. "Heads up, CO."



Silvery bones fell from the sky, a twisted monstrosity of the turian they'd belonged to in life. The targeting laser was ripped from her hands as she struggled against the construction, slamming them both into the mountains boxing them in. She heard a dull crunch, followed by a mechanical hiss of a voice: “Your species must know its place.”

 

They twisted, struggled against one another as Kaidan with his woman-voice read aloud from his book. Her fists bled, knuckles swelling from numerous small breaks. “I'm running out of time, you idiot!” she snarled, spitting her blood onto the sharp angles of his skull.

The dead turian opened his mouth and flashed her a razor-edged smile. She bared her own teeth at him in response, ridiculous laughter rising up in her throat. Legs kicking and throat tight as his skeletal fingers wrapped about her neck and raised her into the air, she barely noticed the little krogan children rushing about underfoot. She hooked her thumb into an empty eye socket, yanked his head to one side in the process.

“How heavy-handed, Commander.”

Sovereign shifted, watching them from above with infinite patience. Every motion of its massive legs was loud enough her eardrums popped. The skeleton looked past her for one long moment, empty sockets with one thumb jammed inside turned toward the Reaper. Then, he looked at her, wriggling like a worm on a hook in his grasp. They were both bathed in impossibly hot, red light as millions of geth 'screamed.' She finally recognized the poem as something by Tennyson, the words somehow very important in their final moments. So much for the homeworld, she thought.



The gates of hell opened, and Rannoch melted to red.

 

***

 

Tess woke once in the night, just enough to realize she'd gone to sleep in the first place. Her dream was nothing more than a blur of unfamiliar faces and overly bright lights, but she was nauseous and the inside of the car felt ice cold. Her heart was pounding in her chest, while she could taste steak in her mouth. Garrus was beside her, all heavy, warm, and completely down for the count. Still hovering in that strange place where one was more asleep than aware of the world around them, she thought she must have rubbed at his shoulder, taking comfort from the feel of his body. “Garrus,” she slurred, giving him a shake.

He batted ineffectually at her hand, then seemed to snap awake all at once, reaching for the gun beneath the dash with a soldier's practice. “What​?” he garbled out, shooting her a hazy look and gradually lowering his hand down to his side. He was more aware of the world than she at that point, wild-eyed and realizing it would have been very easy to strike her without meaning to do so. Waking up in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar woman shaking him was risky for her, at best. “You can't just do that to a soldier-”

 

Utterly unperturbed, she gazed at him in the stupid way universal to those not quite awake. She even smacked her lips once or twice, her breath sour from sleep. He could smell it, smell their sex and the salt tang of sweat long since dried. There was something a little like fear in the air, as well. “What?” he breathed again, his own heart beating a rapid tattoo beneath his ribs. “Bad dream?”

 

“No. It's cold. Mind if I come over there?”

 

He rumbled quietly, gesturing in his general direction. It wasn't as warm as he'd expected in the shuttle-car, darkness and a steady pounding of rain from overhead having lowered the temperature outside. “Here, don't poke yourself on my spurs.” The position they settled into was fairly uncomfortable, but as his pulse slowed and he began to realize her body wasn't so soft for him to damage one of the arteries in her legs just by moving the wrong way, he relaxed. Sleep was surprisingly easy and dreamless for him that night, his body twisted in the small vehicle and her long, human hair caught in his mouth.

 

***

When they well and truly roused themselves to face the day, it was near dawn and to the sound of soft screeching from tropical birds outside. Well. The soft screech of tropical birds or the very distant scream of a kakliosaur. One of her bare feet was in his lap, while the other leg was stretched out, the heel balancing just so against the dashboard of the shuttle-car. His jaw was hanging wide open, drool forming unattractively at the corner of his mouth.



She opened a bloodshot, brown eye and regarded him from where she'd twisted up, having returned to the passenger's side sometime in the night. “Morning, soldier,” she greeted in the smug manner of a woman who'd received exactly what she'd wanted before bed.



The words caused his fringe to prickle slightly. Garrus groaned, scrubbing an admittedly filthy hand down his face as hair-trigger senses brought him back to reality all at once. She'd been awake a few minutes before he had, he realized, as no one slept with one leg in the air. This time, she'd had the good sense not to say anything until he'd already started to come back to himself. The interior of the car was hot and sticky- no doubt leaving plenty of opportunities for jokes open to them if they chose to pursue that particular path.

“Morning yourself,” he rumbled, feeling about the car's console so that he could turn the vehicle on and get some air circulating. Clearly, things warmed up quickly on Normandy. Am I drooling?



The shuttle came to life with nary a sound, little lights and graphs flickering across the console. This same flurry of activity brought with it cool air that whispered over their skin, raising goosebumps on her forearms. He noticed the moles on her shoulders more than he did her scraped breasts, reached a hand over to run his finger along the small brown spots, the way he'd wanted to the very first time she'd sauntered up to him in Shepard's Stand.

Tess shifted her leg just a bit higher and let him have a very good look at the southernmost region of her colony. With her ponytail little more than a mass of fuzz on top of her head and her breath less than fresh, he nonetheless watched her with a great deal of interest. After all, he was still male. It's probably too early for clumsy morning sex. Well. It had was evening somewhere in the galaxy, and that was good enough for him.

A flicker of color on one of the many little screens caught his attention. Unfortunate for his sex life, but fortunate for his actual life. He was far more military and far less libido all at once, flaring his mandibles and buttoning his pants. “Wait. Scanners are picking up activity outside. Something big. Get your piece ready.” He cast a sidelong glance at her face, meaning to add 'just in case' to reassure her. There was no fear in her expression, just a wary sort of alertness that made him feel faintly embarrassed for thinking she'd want to be shoved into the back seat and protected.



She frowned, flexed her heel slightly and started to say: “Too quiet to be a kaklios-”



The colonist never had a chance to finish that sentence, her sweaty foot slipping along the console as she started to sit up. They both froze- even Tess, who was left holding her leg at a decidedly odd angle- when the car bleeped a few times and the doors slid up, exposing them to the harsh light of day.

Both of them scrambled for their weapons in what had to be record time, albeit with more clumsy kicking and swearing on her part. They were, after all, parked on a random hill on a fairly unsettled planet. A 'presence' could be anything from a wandering animal to an admittedly endangered batarian slaver. Little red dots on a navpoint were rather vague at times.



Garrus found it telling that she reached for her gun belt before a shirt.



Years later, he still didn't know why that particular battlemaster happened to be outside such a random shuttle in such a random location, particularly considering krogan scouts didn't find much to scout this close to Shepard's Stand.

Tess raised her pistol and aimed it right at the weaker spot of the newcomer's gut. Garrus had his own spare firearm out from beneath the dash, primed to fire and focused on what no doubt had to be one of the rapidly-multiplying krogan colonists “up the way” with whom the humans of the Stand were on increasingly poor terms. There was something going on with real estate in which Urdnot had absolutely no interest, but that particular krogan was dressed for battle and alone. It was a fairly safe assumption he wasn't scoping beachfront property.



Slit-pupiled eyes blinked at the pair of them. Pale yellow skin was as a sharp contrast to the deep red of the tough, outer hide. Most of the krogan around here, he noted, were exactly that color. contemptuous. His nostrils flared at the very clear smell of sex in the air- if Garrus could smell it so clearly, it had to be smacking him right in the face. And if he rushed us now, it'd mean a messy death for all three of us. As neither one of them had been reduced to a bloody smear on the upholstery, the turian relaxed slightly, but kept him sighted down the short barrel of the pistol. Huh, he couldn't help but note. He's smirking.



He leered at the pair for just a second, guffawed in a way that made the back of Garrus' neck flush blue. The way he studied the two of them was bemused and contemptuous all at the same time. It made him wonder how often the bastard happened upon this sort of situation. “McKay,” he greeted flatly.

“Wrend,” Tess returned, as if she wasn't mostly naked and covered with bloody welts. A moment later, she cleared her throat and reached down to pull her white shirt onto her lap. “Garrus.” She paused again, setting her weapon to 'safe.' “Have you met Urdnot Wrend?”

The beginnings of a headache throbbed beneath his crest. “He's a rather recent acquaintance, sure.”

“Wrend. This is Garrus.”

“Uh-huh.”



Neither colonist so much as twitched. Then, without another word, Urdnot Wrend turned his back to them and sauntered off, as if they weren't worth the trouble it took to keep grunting and jeering in stereotypical krogan fashion.

Garrus lowered his Kestrel III to his knee once he'd reset the safety mechanism, and wondered at the life of a colonist on this planet. He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing to himself. We should induct the humans here into the turian army. Shepard Donnelly alone would be enough to convince the Primarch. He thought it must have something to do with all that blood from the Normandy ship crew pumping through their veins.



She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looked at him askance and smirked just a little. 'Well, what can you do?' is what that expression read. Sore and bruised from a night of sex, on the warm and tropical planet where his ancestor had lived out the remainder of his days, Garrus leaned back in his seat, shut his eyes, and didn't even bother to close the doors.

 

***

He was there for another two months. Getting ships from Point A to Point B often took weeks depending on the destination. Only two relays had been built since the Reaper War, their access controlled by the quarians and salarians who had been responsible for their engineering. Scientific teams funded by the Council had used plans from the Crucible Project created synthetic eezo for travel. That discovery had helped with 'the fuel crisis', but traffic didn't flow the way it had in the past. The last three centuries had been devoted to recovery and galactic stability, leaving technological advancement to take a back seat. As a result, Garrus was left on Normandy with the option to sit around with his 'thumbs' up his ass or to take his crew and perform routine sweeps outside the base while waiting for a salvage ship.

He opted for the sweeps and the scouting.

For the time being, his position in the turian military was somewhat in limbo. The crew responded to this new state of affairs as expected: seething, following orders delivered by the command at Urdnot base and picking off wild kakliosaur that wandered too close to the base in search of food. They were restless, but increasingly accepting of his authority in spite of that rocky first mission. He wrestled with crusty old officers who'd been stationed out here half their lives to get them better accommodations and more freedom on the base.

He waited. He paced, growing frustrated with regulations and protocol. He sent messages to Tess and she returned the favor.

They joked about meeting up at the bars on Omega, neither of them really understanding why they found the idea funny in the first place. 'Battle scars' were compared through the vid comm, complete with the obligatory verbal pissing contests. Sleepless nights were spent talking, Garrus drinking turian brandy from a glass as she speculated about the galaxy and the Reapers in a haze of cannabis smoke. One night, she'd set aside her concerns about unsecured comm channels and touched herself while he watched, her image hazy and crackling from the poor connection.

Emails gradually turned from flirting and bad innuendo to more personal matters, leaving him privately surprised at the speed of the transition. He wrote what it was like to be the son of a political family growing up on Citadel-II, away from Palaven and underfoot of the Council. His mother, Sparatia, was next in line for the turian seat there. Sparatia Victus was 'old school', as the humans liked to say, intending on making it as difficult as possible for the drell to join their hanar counterparts as Councilors.

Garrus didn't let her in on that last part, as she'd once said she had a sister living with a drell on Omega. It was oddly pleasant to complain about family, though- something he'd never really do around other turians.

 

vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma sends to dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha: 'You know, my cousin ran away with a hanar five years ago. They just bought out the rights to the Blasto franchise.'

 

dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha responds to vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma: 'This one is impressed by that one's devotion to classic cinema. Those... ones. Is it 'they?''

 

vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma responds to dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha: 'I'm afraid I don't actually have an answer to that question. I'll ask Delan and Li the next time I talk to them.'

 

dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha responds to vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma: 'And does Delan have a 'lover in every port?''

 

Eventually, he let Tess in on the fact they had something in common. She and the other colonists weren't the only ones with a past tie to Commander Shepard. Garrus Vakarian's niece had married Primach Adrien Victus' grandson. He was just one of numerous descendants who sported the rather popular turian name. One full week passed before he received a message that said nothing more than: 'I'll be goddamned,' giving him the impression he'd made her uncomfortable. Privately disappointed, he'd resolved to say no more on the matter.

Her mother Karin was Jewish, whatever that meant, and Tess had grown up with menorahs being shoved at her by one side of the family, dodging Christmas trees from the other. Currently, 'Hacksaw' McKay off on an Alliance ship serving as a medical officer and enjoying exotic, hard liquor. Out on Omega, Tess' father worked in 'collections', which he found a not so subtle indication Zaeed McKay was a gun for hire.

 

vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma sends to dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha: Don't go rustling around in my family tree. You'll find too much Vega with a subtle hint of Moreau.

 

vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma responds to dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha: 'That would explain why you look like you could snap a krogan's neck with just your ankles.'

 

dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha responds to vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma: 'Blow me, Victus. We're all inbred and tall on this “tropical paradise” of a colony.'

 

vigilantesalary.apienscrest.gamma responds to dontcallmecommander.horseheadnebula.alpha:'If I you were saying that to me in person while making air quotes with your fingers, I'd feel like I was at home.

 

They met when they could, irritated at their inability to get her a vaccine so they could really 'go crazy on each other.' Instead, they did everything but, working one another into a frenzy before laughing and rolling away, spent, from the mess they'd made together. Afterward, they'd pass a bottle of liquor back and forth, one of those rare drinks turians on the base imported to share with their asari mates. She pointed out the constellations in the night sky overhead as he played invisible games of connect-the-dots with the freckles on her arms.

In hindsight, there were far worse ways Garrus could have spent those two months.