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After his fourth stim in as many hours, Garrus started hallucinating. Auditory only, thankfully; the only problem with his sight was the grey at the edges. Hearing his father fuss about his form was jarring enough without an accompanying visual.
“Shoulders loose, I know,” he muttered, cutting off the specter, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet sank into a Blue Sun’s throat, spraying bright blood on its companion before Garrus took that one out too.
Maybe in other circumstances Garrus would be concerned about hearing things. But he had more immediate issues to deal with. Now, holed up in his old base, all he could do was be glad of the company.
Still, it seemed particularly cruel that when he started seeing things, he saw Shepard. He’d recognize her on a battlefield anywhere. Garrus wasted a round firing at the hallucination, but she barely seemed to notice—and then she and the two other humans with her turned on the next wave of mercs. He barely got one before the fight was over and Shepard’s group was coming up the stairs.
Garrus stared so hard his eyes watered. His visor displayed three human heat signatures, armed to the teeth. Surely he wasn’t that far gone, yet, to imagine an entire battle just so Shepard could win it?
As Shepard approached he got a clearer look, the shorn hair, the orange web of scars at her temples. And the Cerberus logo on the uniform of one of the humans behind her. The other human seemed to be an old merc, but not someone Garrus recognized. Two years, he reminded himself, two years since she’d been spaced, there was no way this could be the real Shepard.
But when he took off his helmet, she knew him. Relaxed enough to show how uneasy she was with her team in comparison. For a second Garrus actually thought she was going to hug him.
“Of course not,” said his sister’s voice, soft and resigned, like when she’d talked about their mother’s illness. “Then you’d know this version of your human commander isn’t real.”
Shepard seemed real enough when she took the rifle from his hands and sunk a bullet through a mech’s faceplate, but it was too good, too much like he’d spent months hoping after the Normandy went down. Nothing on Omega had gone right so far. Why should it start now?
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Shepard,” Garrus began, barely sparing a glance at the gathering troops. His voice sounded strained and pathetic to his ears; he had no idea what it sounded like to her. “You’re real—right?”
Something flickered in her face. Garrus didn’t know enough about human expressions to say what. “Far as I know,” she said, and curled her hand around the edge of his cowl. He could feel the warm pressure of her fingers through the thinner lining there, solid and reassuring. Her voice went low like he was some kind of traumatized disaster victim. “We’re going to get out of this, alright? Just like old times.”
Maybe he was some kind of traumatized disaster victim, because at that Garrus lost his damn mind. He grabbed the back of Shepard’s head, bizarre alien hair soft even through the fabric of his gloves, and dropped his forehead to press against hers. She inhaled sharply and her grip on his cowl tightened. For a moment he relaxed, the simple contact exactly what he needed after the nightmare of the past few days. Garrus’s eyes drifted briefly shut.
Then his stomach seemed to drop, like the ground had been yanked from under him. The merc behind Shepard let out a choked laugh, and Garrus’s visor informed him her heart rate and internal temperature had spiked.
Right. Shit. They were in the middle of a war zone, and Garrus was an idiot.
Garrus reeled back. The Cerberus woman’s eyebrows had climbed higher on her forehead, and Shepard was staring at him, mouth open. It was too much to hope she didn’t know what that whole thing meant, wasn’t it?
“So,” he said. What had he been talking about? Mercs, right. Shepard seemed to read his mind, and shoved the rifle back into his hands. “I can pick them off from this vantage point, and you can do what you do best. Just, uh.” He winced. Vakarian, you idiot. “Just like old times.”
Shepard gave him an appraising look as she unholstered her pistol. “Maybe not just like old times,” she said, and grinned.