You ask me what I thought about

Before we were lovers.

The answer is easy.

Before I met you

I didn't have anything to think about.

- Kenneth Rexroth, "The Love Poems of Marichiko"

Garrus Vakarian was no stranger to quiet elevator rides with Shepard. Back on the first Normandy, he'd bore his eyes through the holo screen in the lift until he saw stars. Before the Alliance retrofits, he'd stare at that damn loose grating in the corner. Cerberus may have spent a fortune resurrecting Shepard, but they sure as hell couldn't build a ship. The silences were deafening back then, but he knew Shepard was too preoccupied with their missions to notice the tension he imagined between them. In those days he would steal an occasional glance at her hair, the blood splatters that had dried to rust on her neck – that same graceful neck that now rested on his armored chest.

His hand gripped hers with more ferocity than usual as they rode the lift down to the third level. How many tiny bones did she have in that brittle paper hand? The mission had been rough on Shepard, and Garrus saw it – her skin still chilled, her face flushed by the wind, her hair a tangle, ruddy sand matted into it. Spirits, that banshee on the bridge… He hadn't the time to shoot before it teleported right in front of her. There was nowhere for her to go, so she hurled a warp blast at the grotesque thing, knocking her back into the rubble. She didn't even need an application of medigel; she brushed herself off and kept moving. She always did.

There in that elevator, she never looked more beautiful, or more fragile.

As the door opened onto the crew deck, she broke their now comfortable silence:

"I need to check in with Liara; she mentioned she had some new intel on the Crucible. Meet you in the battery in ten?" She pressed her lips to the cold chrome of his chest armor and shifted her gaze to his.

He flared his mandibles in assent, giving her ass a playful smack as he followed her onto the deck.

She spun around and pressed all ten fingers into the dip of his waist, her voice husky with anticipation. "We have 6 hours to waste before we have to go back to that lab, Vakarian. I expect you to be ready for me." Even through their armor he felt the heat emanating from her.

He was fully erect by the time he arrived at the battery.

Garrus had just peeled off his armor when the airlock whooshed open. He could pick her gait from a lineup – her left leg an inch longer than her right resulted in a nearly imperceptible shuffle, but he knew it well. When she was injured it was more pronounced. How did she make it off that rock without a scratch? The footsteps stopped and a pair of armored hands enveloped his chest from behind, her breath teasing him right through his under armor.

"Miss me?" She whispered.

If she only knew how much.

"I admit I was worried about you on that dig site." His mouth was so dry his words were sandpaper. "Things got pretty hectic."

She leaned her head against his back in silent solidarity and squeezed him tighter. She knew he needed to speak, so she let him.

"That's what love does…" A nervous laugh trickled out as he stared blankly at the console in front of him, "…turns a guy like me into a nervous wreck with something to lose and the aim to make sure he doesn't. Nobody…" His voice broke again, his throat too dry to swallow the tears that were building. He turned to face her, cupping her face with his bare hands. "Nobody had better hurt you, is all I'm saying."

She smelled of scorched earth and the tangy sweat that could only be hers, just as she had on Menae.

Shepard flashed him a charming smile and a wink. "Why, Garrus, is that a protective tone I hear in that flanging?" A quick tug to the mandible, lithe little fingers pressed into the soft tissue beneath his fringe. "And here I thought you were using me for the private shower."

"It's a nice perk," he said, squeezing his eyes shut as if it could break the wave cresting through him.

In these moments there are flashes – bright white electric flashbangs that shock them into each other, bruised and jolted, his mouth tilting down to meet hers, red and wet and waiting, but he pries her open to show her. You are mine. She hears him, pulls his unspoken words into her pleading mouth before echoing them back to him. I am yours.

She clutches his collar. She is insistent. He tears at her chest piece - her heart is suffocating under those layers of chrome and Kevlar, their syncopated beats in perfect rhythm with the lilting whir of the Thanix. Talons drag down her spine. He tugs at her zipper but she stops him.

"Not yet." The words float in the cabin like helium, suspended by a need the two are only beginning to understand. The reds and blues of the strategy map evaporate into an inky violet haze, seeping into his pores. Indigo smoke consumes him.

His pants are flung over the console, forgotten. She leads him further into the battery. I would follow you anywhere. The pink hands palm his chest as she kneels at his feet in adoring supplication. She takes him into her glistening mouth, slowly. It is deliberate, sweet, teasing. The soft suction throws his head back in a low growl.

Her eyes are fixed on his. I have always been yours, they say. Her mouth stretches around him, that deft tongue flicking the most sensitive parts of him. Tufts of her matted hair are clutched in his talons as he gently coaxes the movements out of her. She strokes the sickle-shaped scar on his hip that never quite healed; she remembers. The symbiosis comes naturally to them; they are meant for this. Now, always, through the hidden passages into the private universe they had constructed for each other in that room, in her quarters, in the quietest corners of the galaxy – the world that is theirs.

Her pace quickens as his breaths grow shallower, more urgent. He grinds his hips into her, shuddering into her throat. His bones melt like hot glass. He collapses next to her and punctuates her mouth with a reciprocal promise.

"I have something to show you, Garrus."

It is quieter now, their fevered gasps dissipated into miraculously preserved memories. Her face is obscured by streaks of golden shadow as she stands, the slow, anticipatory click of zipper teeth soon following.

It is an agonizing striptease - first a taut stretch of shoulder, then the bare arm bathed in the amber glow of the front battery. She lets her jacket drop, revealing her standard issue undergarments, worn with age and the war they can't elude. Her eyes glint with a tender persistence he can't read.

I don't understand how you can be so beautiful. The inadequacy of the word tumbles in his head, so he doesn't say it.

Her back presses against grating, the electric thrum of the Thanix steadying her. She is ready.

She turns.

The rush cracks him open.

Familiar cobalt angles are etched into the curvature of her back, swooping below her shoulder blades like wings. It is all there: the fiery cinders of Palaven, the antiseptic burn of his mother's hospital room, languid summers exploring dank Cipritine caves with Solana, a phoenix in red and black armor on that Omega bridge. Shepard had marked herself. Geometric trust emblazoned on her soft curves forever. His markings. She made herself his. His. His. His. His. He repeats it, clings to it as if mouthing pieties to the spirits. With each hum his subharmonics reverberate through his toes, electrifying him with an ancient, primal impulse that frightens him. How could the hum of a syllable enthrall him so? "Love" consists of only four letters, he reminds himself, "his" only three; what grand evolution of human linguistics allowed for such tiny words to evoke emotions he cannot even name?

He stuffs the sticky words down. What good could his limiting garble do, anyway? Can it crystallize his love for her in a way she will understand, convince her that she is as necessary and natural to him as air?

She is so still, back still facing him, numbed by his admiration. Uncertain gravitas coated in brittle whimsy unfurl from her quivering lips. Again, slow. Deliberate. "I called in a favor to General Oraka."

A favor, as if she had cleaned his rifle, bought him extra dextro rations. A favor. He pulls her in, wraps his arms around her impossibly tight before guiding her gently onto the floor, still holding her from behind. Her tremulous pulse radiates beneath his palm as he begins to knead the soft flesh of her breast, her skin pebbling at his touch. Her back arches into him with involuntary need, the fresh ink begging to bleed through his plates.

She wants to erupt, condense into thick water that will pool so he can drink it, drink her in and keep her. Does he understand that this is what's real, the tangible hope he searched all those dark corners of Omega for, the force that sustained her?

She reaches her hand back and strokes his healing mandible. The hush of her voice tells him her eyes are closed even though he can't see them. "I told you there's no Shepard without Vakarian. Now it's official."

"No getting rid of you now, huh? That snappy Vakarian style does give you a nice edge, Shepard. You still aren't as stylish as me, of course, but we can't all be perfect." He needs the levity so he doesn't implode. He traces idle lines in the valley of her left clavicle, a spot he has always paid special regard to, though she never knew why. The wound that once marred the porcelain traverse had long since healed; even then it was so unremarkable that Shepard probably never thought twice about it.

She asks him why – a vague question for which she requires a specific answer. Why am I special there? You might favor the backs of my knees or the soles of my feet or the crown of my head, but you choose here. Again why. He tells her it made him realize. Realize what, she asks. (He loves these inquisitive waltzes.) That you are beautiful (the most beautiful creature in the cosmos – she requires superlatives). He says it now, beautiful. It pops out like a polished stone, one you can set and wear on your finger as a token, a remembrance, a promise.

Do you remember Therum, he asks her. She nods; of course she remembers. She remembers everything except that which he must tell her, how he fell in love with her in that rubble, amid the death and ruins. A story such as theirs is elegant in its simplicity, deceptive in its importance; it is both epic and allegory, limitless and infinite. The gravity of these moments can be comprehended only in retrospect, but the glittering sparks carry over waves and space and time so that we may see them everywhere and always; they electrify everything with a love so grand nothing can hold it.

It was his first mission with the Normandy crew, so Garrus was anxious to prove his worth. He and Tali worked in tandem through the ruins, hacking the smaller units while Shepard took out the rocket troopers: a delicately choreographed dance the three of them executed in perfect unison. That is, until the accident. He couldn't even remember how it happened now – as one rarely can when every day is punctuated with bloodshed – a collective lapse in attention, probably; it should have been textbook. Tali stopped to calibrate her omni-tool; Shepard reloaded her clips; he wiped away the sweat that stung his eyes. It was only a moment – a nanosecond, that miniscule fraction that simultaneously births unfathomable destruction, serendipitous love, a single blade of sweetgrass. Blink and you'll miss it, the old saying goes. It was only a moment.

A rush of AI clicks and bright light blinded them before a burst of twisted metal flung them into the rocks nearby. They each took a fair amount of shrapnel, but Shepard got the worst of it: a piece of rubble knocked her unconscious, her light armor ruptured by shards of the twisted corpse of a hopper. Garrus tended to her wounds the best he could with their limited supply of medigel, but crimson oozed from her wound like lava. His work at C-Sec required that he pass a course in basic human first aid, but Shepard had been badly hurt and needed to be stabilized before they could retreat to the Mako with Dr. T'Soni. They had little time, so he sent Tali ahead to extract Liara from the dig site while he revived Shepard.

He braced her against a crate while he rummaged through his rucksack for something to aid the clotting – nothing. Her eyelids fluttered; they were sheer as tissue and dotted with pale veins, blue and familiar. Her breaths were becoming more labored, shallower. It must have nicked an artery. Spirits, it's gushing like water. Instinctively he pressed his palm to the wound, taking care not to scratch her further as his talons curled around her shoulder. Her heart beat a tiny thump against his hand, sporadic but strong, considerably faster than his own. He memorized her face: dry pink lips dusted with dirt, dozens of tiny cuts and brown markings like toasted sand peppered the impossibly white skin. He had never noticed them before, but they were not scars, not war blemishes like the jagged ridges that marred his own face. He wove creation stories as he waited for her gash to clot – this one, the one shaped like a varren (no, not a varren… what were they called? A horse.), that one sprouted when she lay out in the sun too long on her thirteenth birthday (he could give her a childhood, if only in retrospect); that other one on the bridge of her nose that's the color of clay, that's one she was born with, a tiny fleck on a tiny oatmeal face. He shuddered at the intimacy the situation had forced upon him. What right did he have?

If one could have been a proverbial fly on that rubble, one might have seen the shower of milky stars that rained down on them as he held her, closer than he should have but still too far, she was too far. It had been only minutes before she woke, lurching into him with distressed immediacy. She babbled strange silent hymns with her dusty pink lips as he recounted how she had fallen there, though he kept from her the enormity of what had occurred within him as they sat on that dry dead earth. He feared she could see the tenderness in his eyes - a bad turian such as himself could not hide such devotion – so he pressed her hand into the healing wound in that delectable valley so he could help her to her feet. We have to get back to the Mako, he said with great effort, his mouth rough with gravel. Tali radioed that Dr. T'Soni is with her. We're ready to go.

And he was already gone.

And so he tells her everything. He has always been hers and she knows it.

"It was Noveria for me," she confesses. A well of red swells beneath her cheeks, but there is no shame, no nerves, only radiance and unabashed love bubbling out of her like rosy foam. Different stories, the same significance: a perfect glowing constant.

He traces his history along her back for hours, forever, regaling her with stories he thought he had forgotten. She made him remember. The sheer silver flowers that smelled like dawn in his grandmother's garden; the pop-pop-pop of his father's impossibly heavy air rifle recoiling into his tender juvenile plates that had just begun to harden.

"You just started writing our future, Shepard."

"With pictures," she adds as her mouth snakes up into a loose smile. It has been a long time; it is something she's missed. She shifts on his lap so that she can envelop him in the embrace of her legs. She rocks her hips forward in earnest, blossoming around him as he pushes into her. The room swirls around him in a drowsy haze, vague and far away from them. They are suspended, lost in the long, deep thrusts. She is buried in concentration, the sweet, dull ache tensing her into his arms. It is not so different for Garrus than that day on Therum. She knows now. She is with him, a blaze of whirling light. For a long time neither speak. Instead they fill the room with beautiful clouds and the promise of something they can control.

She is the first to break the hush. "Behind." A single word spoken with quiet reverence – it is enough.

He pulls out of her gently and drapes his underarmor onto the grating before guiding her onto her knees. His fingers are inside her like wet clouds; they massage the warm rain. He unfolds her, carefully, kneads the tiny pearl – his intimate origami. She shudders into him. Please, please, there, Garrus, please, please. Now. She doesn't need to say it.

She is tight, so tight and pink so deep his eyes glaze over white as he palms the lines on her back that are raised like his own personal Braille, a new memory borne with each slow stretch. He feels their cells fuse together, melting in an erotic tangle deep inside her.

In that instant the orange glow of the battery infuses them with glorious golden light and they fly, beating their gilded wings to the sun that will not scorch them. They are bound together and she sings; he listens.

He watches her as she dresses, cloaking her fragile frame with that awful molded carnage. The blue lines disappear from his view, but they are there. She feels his eyes on her and reassures him. "I can't take you with me on every mission, but you'll always have my six, Garrus."

It is symbolic, he knows. But he needs it. They both do. He pulls her to him and runs an armor-clad hand across her clavicle to say what the burn in his throat won't let him: This is what we fight for. This is all we can do for each other. This is all, and it is enough. He can't say it, but he manages something before they re-enter the world, arm in arm, as it should be: "You'll never be alone, Shepard."