Chapter 1

Timeline: Mass Effect 1, investigating a distress signal.

Shepard

Morim Shepard hated fighting Colossus. She really did. Why was it that landing on a random planet to do whatever the hell she wanted to do otherwise meant running up against a Colossus waaaay too often? Why not wine tastings? Why not a lovely spa in the middle of a shit storm oasis? The only blessing was that it wasn't a thresher maw.

Wrex had run ahead into melee range, which was his usual job. Unfortunately this time he was crumpled, out cold because he had failed to register that this wasn't usual job material. Garrus and Shepard were crouched behind cover. Fortunately a Colossus moved very slowly or not at all. It was content to shoot blue shit at them at regular intervals. Those intervals could be timed, but catching an edge of that blue shit could knock you out of cover and out in the open, resulting in prompt death.

She couldn't see him, but Garrus yelled over from cover to let her know he was fine "What's the matter, Commander, you just going to leave Wrex there? Leave no man behind doesn't count when the man's Krogan?"

Shepard smiled and shouted back "There's no 'behind' yet, Garrus. Let me just kill this thing first, you sit back and wait, then you can kiss him to wake him up."

Garrus shouted back "Sexual assault. Nice."

Shepard timed her shot, working out the interval. It was focused on her, giving Garrus a clear shot. He was aware of timing and watched to see if it turned on him. She was careful, doing little damage. Its interval wasn't the same as hers, so she couldn't reliably line up a very good shot and she couldn't always hit it with biotics, but she took the interval space to appear and draw its attention, keep its attention on her while Garrus did the actual work of chipping its health down. She darted out as bait, red hair and green eyes flashing behind her helmet.

There were a few of those jumpy Geth assholes. She hated the jumpy Geth assholes too. "Garrus, could you focus on the Yo-Yos there for a minute?"

Garrus paused "The what?"

Shepard said "The jumpy fucker Geth assholes."

Garrus snorted "Is that their technical name?"

Shepard shot again and then said "Yes, Jumpy Fucker is their classification."

There was only the sound of his rifle for a while and the timing got easier as the Jumpy Fuckers fell or exploded.

Shepard yelled again to make sure he was fine when the shots were less regular "Garrus, why is it that it's often you and I with someone else unconscious when it comes down to the hard stuff?"

Garrus shouted back "I like our little talks, Commander. That and the fact that I'm not allergic to cover and strategic thought, unlike our usual Sleeping Beauty squad mates."

Shepard sounded surprised "Sleeping Beauty? How do you know human stories?"

Garrus shouted "Porn, Commander. Humans have lots of porn and for some reason think I'm interested. C-Sec had a lot of confiscated bits of weird that made the rounds."

Shepard laughed "Wow, Garrus, that information made my nipples hard."

Garrus answered "Keep it in your pants, Commander, or wherever humans keep it." He took his last shot and the Colossus exploded in pretty colors.

Relieved, Shepard said "Wait, no. THAT made my nipples hard."

They walked slowly up on Wrex, checking for more Geth or whatever else this planet had. Rabid electrocuting squirrels would not get the jump on them. Garrus dug Medi-gel out of his belt and said "They're so cute when they're sleeping."

From there it was fairly natural that her squad choice of Garrus and anybody else was going to be the way it was. She'd probably prefer going with just him, but there was no real need to insult her crew by making them feel like spares, even if she often considered them that way and worried about them, and the effects of extended loss of consciousness. Was there a lack of oxygen to the brain? She didn't have to worry about Garrus. He had moved into the position of being her second in command and had no need of title or confirmation, he just did it. He had adapted to her command style quickly. He had started out straight laced Turian, but she knew he was now enjoying the informality of it, the humor of it, in between being deadly. She was too.

She began to think of herself and Garrus as parents that tried to keep the rest of the crew, their kids, alive.

Meanwhile, in a hallway

Ashley: Thank you for your help back there.

Garrus: You're welcome. Thank you for your help.

Ashley: It was nothing.

Garrus: It wasn't nothing.

Timeline: Mass Effect 1, after Virmire mission

Shepard

They didn't keep all the kids alive. Virmire was a fuck up. They went into a mission not knowing what the hell was going on, no back up from the Council and with a target she absolutely had to reach. She'd saved Kirrahe and his team and Kaidan and lost Ashley. "Sure" she thought to herself. "It was great when the Council sent me in alone. I love those guys and their foresight. I don't want to watch their heads explode at all." She imagined each of the faces of the Council members exploding from a head shot, and the sound in her head was from Garrus's rifle. She had to address the crew and then the Council.

Kaidan was looking at her and he chose exactly the wrong words. "I can't believe that Ash didn't make it. How could we just leave her down there?"

She briefly imagined his head exploding as well and then said "There was no time. The bomb was about to go off. I couldn't save you both."

Kaidan followed up with "But why me? Why not her?" and the sheer idiocy of his question drew her fire at a moment when her fire was not a good thing to draw. This was not the place or the time, and she bit back the impulse to tell him to shove his question up his ass until his biotics made it glow blue. She would redirect this to a teaching moment.

She turned to Kaidan, her voice steady and cold. "Ashley was a soldier. She went into a difficult mission and she gave her life finishing it. She did her job and she is a hero. She understood the stakes and her actions. Guarding that bomb, defending it until it detonated, was her choice, and it was the correct choice with what we all had to work with. I am not saying "right" choice because "right" choice belonged to the Council, who could have provided us with enough back up to get a hard job done right. I can understand the Council being incompetent, because as far as I can tell, that's their whole job. However, we are fucked if any member of this crew cannot differentiate between what they want to happen and what is happening. There are only six of us left. I am willing to cut that number further unless you get your head on straight, Alenko. Choosing to rescue Ashley would have left us open to the bomb not detonating. Choosing you wasn't even choosing you, it was choosing Kirrahe's team AND you. Maybe you should go down into the hold and thank them, because if you think that I made a choice for "you" and not "you and," you should get to know the "and" that put you in the position of not being dead today. If you don't understand that this is a dangerous mission and that people are going to get hurt and people are going to die no matter what we do, you can leave the Normandy with the Salarians when they disembark. We've passed the point of a lot of right choices, but we still have correct choices in front of us. Our actions today saved countless lives that would have been overrun by Krogan forces and gave us precious intel that will save even more lives. I am fiercely proud of Ashley and if I were her, I'd be proud of myself. I'd be angry at anybody who took that victory from me and assumed that I'd choose to live, abandoning my duty, rather than die being of service. Saren killed Ashley. She was doing something critical. Kaidan, your job as a distraction to placing that bomb was completed." Her voice softened and warmed. "I'm fiercely proud of you for doing that job, but it was done, and her job wasn't. Circumstances saved you." She turned away from Kaidan and scanned the team in the room. "If anybody here is not willing to die making the correct choice to do something critical, you are in the wrong place. Dismissed."

Everyone filed out except for Garrus. He waited until everyone was gone and then said "I would have just punched him."

Shepard cracked her neck. "That would have felt good, too."

Garrus said "Don't get me wrong, I like your way better. Punching doesn't always communicate complicated concepts."

Joker's voice sounded "You want me to open a channel to the Council?"

Shepard's face promised an intergalactic incident.

Garrus looked at her, then answered Joker himself "Fuck the council, Joker."

Joker answered "Aye aye."

Shepard's face cleared and she stood for a few moments before saying "Garrus, do you drink?"

Garrus

He didn't like to drink, really, but found alcohol to be a universal solvent for trade and confidences, so he had a cache of it. "I can get a bottle of something if you can get a bottle of something. I don't want to kill you with my something."

After retrieving their particular poisons, they met back in the side room to the mess, abandoned except for them.

The subject of Ashley might have been difficult to discuss, but Shepard made it easy. Garrus hadn't known her well, but had heard her theoretically private discussions with Shepard. He couldn't have failed to hear them. He had wondered if Ashley had said what she said about not trusting aliens on purpose, knowing he could hear it. He later decided she wouldn't have. She would have told him straight to his face if she'd wanted him to know. She was a good soldier and she'd done her job and had died doing it. It didn't matter what she'd thought of him while she was alive, this was about him giving her his full respect after her death.

Shepard drank some vile solvent that made his eyes water in shots, and he sipped at his more slowly.

She closed her eyes and said "That woman liked to hit things."

Garrus added approvingly. "Hard."

Shepard added "Yup, you have to have an appreciation for people who like to hit things that hard." She paused and then said "She liked poetry."

Turians were not poets. He tried to appreciate that corner of the human soul, even if he couldn't appreciate poetry as much as humans appeared to. Shepard pulled up "Ulysses" by Tennyson on her Omni Tool and recited the poem.

Garrus listened dutifully. This was about Ashley, not him. Poetry was a miss for him. People seemed to get lost in it, carried away like they were listening to a harp played with skill. Poetry for him was like throwing a rock at a harp. You might hit something, but it wasn't music, it wasn't rapture. The language was unfamiliar. He could make out some of the meaning, but after a while he just enjoyed listening to her voice, rich and expressive. Her voice was exotic and straightforward, missing the sub-harmonics of Turian speech and no accents from the use of mandible. He searched for a word to describe her. Unified. Shepard was unified.

He picked up a few lines that reminded him of Ashley. "I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race." Well, that was true. "I am become a name." That was what this was about, letting her name echo where she could no longer speak. "Drunk delight of battle with my peers." Damned right she did.

Shepard's tone was enough to tell a story of a life. He'd seen enough lives lived and ended to be able to understand why these would be important words to a soldier.

Shepard finished, then lined up a shot and downed it. It looked like her eyes watered too. So it wasn't just him.

Shepard asked "Do Turians write poetry? I don't think I've seen much in the way of Turian literature."

Garrus answered "No, we don't. Writing is precise and technical. Art should be out in the world. Getting stuck in your own head isn't encouraged."

Shepard laughed "That's what poetry is to you? Someone stuck in their head?"

Garrus hoped he hadn't offended her. "I haven't been exposed to much poetry. There's also a language barrier here. What the hell is a Hyades?"

Shepard thought a moment "I think the Hyades may have been Ulysses's ship. I'm not sure though. Maybe it was like his Normandy." She fiddled with her Omni Tool. "Nope. Hyades was a constellation – a formation of stars as seen from Earth, used for crude navigation. See, even I have no idea."

Garrus said "I'm relieved. It's not just me."

Shepard chuckled "So, Turian poetry would be more like "There is slot A and Tab B and they are to be brought together."

Garrus chuckled "Just make sure you clarify the angle at which they are to be brought together. And add a diagram."

Shepard said "So, Turian poetry is a user's manual."

Garrus nodded "Without fail. Is all poetry like the one you just read?"

Shepard considered "There is one poem I have memorized. "If" by Rudyard Kipling."

Garrus said "You have it memorized? Let's hear it."

Shepard leaned her head back and recited:

"If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same,

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings,

And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"

Garrus was speechless through her recitation. This was very Turian. This was a user's manual. This was Shepard's user's manual. This he understood and he felt like her voice was playing her own harp. He finally felt he could say he appreciated poetry. Except…"You'll be a man?" he asked.

She laughed and clinked her glass to his. "I always hoped Rudyard Kipling would be willing to include women and daughters."