TWENTY- SEVEN

"Decontamination procedures complete." The AI had a startlingly sensual voice. "Welcome aboard, Miss Kryik." The doors slid open, allowing me onto the ship.

"Just 'Maggie' is fine… 'Ms' if your programming insists."

"Logged."

I had to squint my eyes to get used to the lights again. More damn fluorescents. Maybe I should have invested in some dark glasses. It smelled weird too. Not like any ship I'd ever been on. It was clean, but not in a clinical way. The faint aroma of tea, coffee and the fabric freshener of laundered uniforms tickled the air.

"Ms Maggie. Welcome." Shepard stepped down from her podium to offer me her hand. I stared at it for a moment, then, sucking up my pride, I accepted the offered shake.

The commander opened her mouth as though to start rambling off her welcome speech. I stopped her in her tracks with a very simple demand. "Where's Garrus?"

If Shepard minded my manners, she didn't let it show. Her oncoming lecture was dropped. With a jerk of her head, she gestured for me to walk with her to the elevator. "Crew Deck, Edi," she instructed as we stepped inside. The doors slid shut, and the lift began it's slow crawl down. "I'm surprised you showed up."

I looked up at her, half-startled for a moment. People really did have a shitty opinion of me. I turned back to the doors, jaw clenched as a flash of anger got the better of me. Fine. I was a bitch… but I didn't think I was that bad… was I? "Garrus is worth sobering up for."

I caught her eyes stealing a measuring glance at me. "Coming from someone like you, that's high praise."

"'Someone like me?'" I threw her a glower. "You don't know shit about me, Shepard, so don't pretend you 'understand'."

"Actually, the Illusive Man was able to dig up some very interesting files on you, Eve." She looked to me properly, her hands still folded behind her back, perfectly relaxed even as I saw red. "I'm curious. Do you know anything about something called 'Subject Zero'?"

"The hell…?"

She gave an irritatingly knowing smile as the elevator crawled to an even slower stop. "Apparently, you were cloned from genetic material gathered from that project. Your 'Father Daniels' promised an army of biotic super soldiers. Obviously, that wasn't ever his true intention…"

"You can't seriously be trying to justify Cerberus to me on that bullshit argument."

The doors to the lift opened. Shepard shook her head as she led the way out. "I'll never justify anything Cerberus does. I just wanted to forewarn you." She showed me the way around into the mess hall. "Subject Zero lives in the Normandy's lower cargo hold." She paused and turned to face me properly. "She's about as unstable as you are… and she's not too thrilled with you existing."

"Great…" I narrowed my eyes irritably, not really surprised by anything she was telling me. I knew I was a clone of sorts. I knew they must have harvested my genetics from someone powerful. That Shepard collected freaks like me on the recommendations of Cerberus… well, I guess I'd half expected something like this to turn up. "So, Mummy hates me too? I think I'll get over it. Hell, she can take a fucking number."

Shepard actually snorted her amusement. "Oh, she's gonna love that nickname. You ever think about calling her that you give me a heads up so I can reinforce my ship or drop you both planetside, okay?" She shook her head and gestured down the hall to a set of doors on the far end. "Garrus has secluded himself inside the Main Battery since the incident with Sidonis. If you could persuade him to come out for longer than meals and toilet breaks, I'd be grateful." She cast a glance down the hall then turned away. "It's not the same without him on my six…"

I watched as she headed back around towards the elevator, and even as she paused, glancing towards the life support doors for a moment before shaking her head and continuing on her way.

I shrugged my bag further onto my back and began the long walk to the main battery. "There'd better not be anything wrong with the fucking life support… Would just be my fucking luck."

The metal door in front of me was shut and locked with a red panel. "Hey…!" I knocked with furious insistence. "Garrus? You know if you don't open up, I'm just gonna find an air vent to crawl through, right?"

"For health and safety reasons, I would advise against using the air vents," Edi chimed in, her holographic head appearing on a nearby panel. "However, there is a suitable maintenance shaft two metres to you left, Ms Maggie."

"Y'see! Even the AI is against you. You have no chance now. Better hurry up before she cut's off your oxygen or something."

The panel on the door turned green a split second before it opened. Garrus stood in front of me, gazing down with equal annoyance and surprise.

"What, Shepard didn't tell you I was coming?"

His brow plates furrowed… but after a moment of hesitation, he stepped aside and let me slide in.

I glanced around his small workspace; just a console and a workbench. This was depressing even by Omega standards, only cleaner. "Wow. This is quite the downsize…" I cast him a suspicious, searching glance. "You sure you're okay with it?"

"If helping Shepard take out the Collectors means a couple of months in an uncomfortable bed, then yes, I'd say that's a fair trade." He waited for the door to shut, then re-locked it. If it had been anyone else, I might have been unnerved. Hell… maybe I still was. He didn't seem overly happy to see me. For a long moment, he just glared, long arms folded over his bulky chest. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, is this your territory? I can always get Shepard to drop me back on Omega if I'm trespassing." I was almost being sarcastic.

"Don't pick a fight with me, Maggie." He called me out. "Not now."

I pursed my lips for a moment… then let go of my frustration with a huffing sigh. I didn't want to fight with him either, not if it wasn't going to help – and right now, I felt like I was walking on mighty thin ice. One wrong move and maybe I really wouldn't be welcome. The thought terrified me. "Being a bitch is my speciality. Especially in awkward situations where I don't know what to say."

"Then I'll start." He leaned against his console. "I got a message from Sidonis this morning—"

"—No wonder you're in a shitty mood." I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder. "If it makes you feel any better, I ran into him just now and beat some shit out of him."

Garrus blinked a few times, derailed.

"I didn't kill him," I reassured him. "Just gave him something to remember me by."

The turian looked away and shook his head, his mandibles flaring with a tiny smile.

"He told me he'd contacted you to tell you I wasn't in on it. I didn't ask him to do that if that's what you're thinking."

"It's not," Garrus confessed. "I… think I believe him." He turned his steel blues on me. "I think I believe you. You're a lot of things, Maggie – sly and manipulative when you need to be – but I don't think you'd have left Omega just to jerk me around – not if there wasn't something big in it for you... So, I have to ask… Why did you come?" His mandibles drooped into a frown. "If you weren't involved with Sid, why did you conveniently disappear at just the right time. Even you have to admit, it looks bad."

I gave a small nod as guilt squirmed in my gut. "There's the ex-c-sec officer…" With a sigh, I hoisted myself up to sit on a small pile of crates he had stacked in the corner. "I was gone at just the right time because Sid persuaded me to go with him to the Citadel." I frowned, shame jabbing at me and making my face prickle. "I was angry with you for marking me… so I went. But I swear to God, I had no idea where he'd got the credits from."

Garrus looked at the floor, mandibles clamped tight against his face.

"I didn't know anything about it until I got back to Omega." I gestured at him. "Everyone told me you were dead. I went back to the apartment… the bodies and all the blood…" My voice broke with the memory. Mel's face had jumped into my thoughts, followed swiftly by Monty and Gavorn. "I had no reason not to believe them. When I realised what Sid must have done, I went after him."

"Did you…?" Archangel turned and braced his hands against his console, still not looking at me. "Did you sleep with Sidonis?"

I arched a brow in alarm. That was what was bothering him? "Of course not!" I frowned, horrified by the question. "Wait, you think I was two-timing you with Sid?"

"I don't know." He heaved a sigh and straightened up. "I thought I did. I thought we were…" He trailed off and shook his head.

"We were!" I exclaimed sharply, the words out of my mouth before I could stop them. I was outraged – incensed that he could think that Sid was ever a match for him, that I would lower my standards just to knife him in the back. The image Archangel must have of me started to clear in my head and, God, I hated what I saw! I was sickened by it. Disgusted… and not one bit surprised. Why would he think anything better of me?

Finally, he looked up and took in the horror in my expression. A little grain of hope gave life to his weary complexion.

I felt the crushing weight of the moment and cringed under it. I wasn't good at this. Feelings. People. Relationships. I shied away from all of them because I was afraid. But now I stood to lose something I couldn't live without and the fear of that outweighed anything that was squirming in my stomach. "I pissed off Aria and fucked a pirate so I could get back here and kill Sid because I was so fucking angry with him…" I faltered for half a moment. "And because you're a short fringed, fat-waisted bastard and I'm screwed up crazy about you!"

Garrus straightened up and pushed away from his console.

It was my turn to inspect the tilework. My face burned what I was sure was an amusing shade of scarlet. "You marked me you son-of-a-bitch."

"I did." I could feel him stalking closer, felt his presence invade my space.

I looked up, expecting to find some bad-boy smirk on his mandibles… but that's not what I saw. Instead, it was intensity. The same 'something' I'd desperately clung to but refused to name the last time we'd had sex. He put his hands on my waist, and I flinched. Not because I didn't want him too – not because the warm, solid feel of his fingers wasn't the biggest relief of my short life – but because the touch was like the spark of a live wire on my naked skin… a painful pleasure. He was so close I could smell him. I could feel the chill of his scorched armour.

Garrus leaned forward enough to knock his forehead against mine.

I closed my eyes, sucking in a shuddering breath and squirming. Fear gripped my stomach as everything threatened to spill out. Everything. All the pent-up emotion I'd been keeping locked up since Nihlus died. Every wound. Every rabid insecurity. The overwhelming rush of relief to find Garrus alive. I wanted to tell him, but my voice was incapable of making anything but a choked sob.

He didn't know how to soothe me. I felt him flounder, a hint of his own insecurities leaving him helpless. "Maggie… I don't…"

"I love you." I wiped the tears from my face and spoke with determination through the quiver in my voice. "I didn't tell Nihlus, but I sure as hell won't let you go on a fucking suicide mission without telling you." I found his gaze and pressed my forehead tighter against his. I reached for him, running my fingers over the scorched plating and the bandage on the side of his face. "I love you. Garrus… Archangel. I don't even care what you call yourself anymore. And if you're still crazy enough to want me…"

There was that bad-boy smirk I'd fallen for – the one that made me weak at the knees. "You kidding?" A talon knocked my chin, tilting my head back so he could brush mouth-plates against my lips. "There's always gotta be a kiss with the pink-haired femme fatale, right? Why else would you be on the front cover?"

It took me a damn long minute to catch up with what the hell he was talking about. Then, the memory burst into my mind. The first night I'd made a pass at him when we'd joked about his name sounding comic-book. God, it felt like a lifetime ago! I threw a playful hit against his armoured arm. I squirmed, trying to get out from his grip, but Garrus held me tight. "You're such a dick!"

"I'm crazy about you too," he interrupted. "Truth be told, I'm probably about as bad at this 'relationship' thing as you are. But… I want to try it with you… put the past in the past and just start over."

I stilled, looking up at him with some disbelief. I half expected him to tell me he was kidding… But that wasn't his style. As always, nothing but honesty blazed from those steel blues.

Slowly, I nodded. Acceptance finally dawned on me. The reality – that maybe Archangel really did love me as I loved him – settled as truth. "Alright…" I leaned into his offered embrace and reached up to run my hand over his face. "Then… I'm all yours. No more running. No denying. No arguments."

Garrus gave a small scoff and knocked his forehead against mine, his eyes full of overwhelming emotion. "Bullshit."

AN: So that's it… I've run out of material in my vault to dust off! I do plan on doing an 'epilogue' chapter or something 'cause this still feels a little on the unfinished side, but it might take a bit longer because everything I write now will be from scratch rather than a re-work. After that, I might run off to a different fandom for a little while… maybe Dragon Age? I think I have an unfinished Dorian fic over there that had some promise… But who knows, maybe I'll come and do a Maggie part 3 someday… maybe a 'meet the parents' scenario where she goes with Garrus during the 6 months Shepard is locked up? That could be fun… :D