You know how sometimes you get bitten by an Age of Sail horror AU in the middle of the night and have to write something down before it'll let you sleep
Shepard/Garrus, ME3, right before the Leviathan mission
---
Shepard lit another candle in the heavy-bottomed lantern, and by its light the two men looked at one another over the table. Normandy's timbers creaked and strained around them; things shifted and groaned in the ballast below, and outside and beneath and from every direction came the thudding, throbbing rhythm of the ice-choked sea.
Garrus was drawn and grey in the dim light, the blue tattoos bruise-dark. The leaping shadows made the silvered scars on his cheek and jaw freshly deep and heavy. Shepard's own old scars had started to open again, which meant scurvy, or would have done, but that Doctor Chakwas had found no other trace of it.
Perhaps simply strain, she'd said.
Strain might tear a new-knit wound, but a year-old one? he'd retorted.
Neither you nor I know exactly what they did to you, Chakwas had said, and of the two people who might tell us, one is the Illusive Man and the other is dead.
Now, in the present, Garrus laced blue-inked, sharp-knuckled fingers through his captain's and said "Don't go down there."
Garrus' people were of the high peaks and did not sail, mistrusting salt water as the domain of death. Following a lowlander captain to sea had lost Garrus his old honours and the regard of his family, and the horrors of the deep had come to their silver mountains anyway.
"They came from down there," Shepard said. They'd had this conversation three times, four, already, as the wounded ship crawled through the icy waters following Kenson's scrawled map. "There's something. You heard it, we all did. We have to go down." He looked into the eyes of the man who'd thrown over home and family for a sea he still feared, and said "I have to go down."
With T'Soni who did not need to swim, or the automaton who did not need to breathe, or with Alenko who knew the great cold depths from childhood. He would not ask Garrus. If he asked his lover to come down with him into the Leviathan's pit, Garrus would say yes, and that was why Shepard could not ask.
Garrus said bleakly "And if you don't come back?"
"Normandy passes to Alenko and you carry on," Shepard said, because he had been waiting for the question, had lain awake with it while Garrus slept beside him; was relieved, if anything, that it was a question to which mundane law and custom provided a plain answer. "Find the Cerberus; protect the Crucible."
"Without you, though?"
Normandy had been built for another captain, and her crew had served with distinction through the years he'd been thought dead. They could do without him, and yet insisted superstitiously that everything rested on his shoulders, as if his unwished-for, unnatural second life could be shared between them all. Could they not bear to let him rest?
"I'm one man," Shepard said, with a bitterness that surprised him. "Normandy's got one figurehead already. She doesn't need another."
Garrus had no answer to that, or none he was prepared to say out loud, but looked away. His hand tightened in Shepard's, and they sat while the candle guttered down and the ship bore on through the freezing ocean into the unknown dark.
---
also with other microfics on AO3
14 notes
·
View notes
ok side note. Thinking about how insane the shepard/miranda ship is. like she was the head of the resurrection project for two years. She saw shepard go from a bunch of meat and tubes slowly back into a person. She led making sure shepards personality and cognitive status wasnt different. She wanted to install a control chip in his brain but TIM said no. she basically literally built him back from nothing.
How she felt about that corpse on the table is so enigmatic, this was an assignment, a project, bringing back a symbol for humanity. it wasnt personal. She didnt know him. She recreated him just as he originally was.
something something. Miranda herself as a genetically engineered human. How that forms and shapes everything about her and her mindset. Her at the helm of this project. Bringing back a symbol, not intending to care for the man.
Then if they fall in love like. Hello. That is so insane.
17 notes
·
View notes