Work Text:
"Why are you so tall?" Shepard hisses, trying to smile as she looks up at Vakarian. It's not really working. Either part – her smile feels so fake that she feels like she must be broadcasting the fact that she's hiding something huge, and Vakarian is tall enough that Shepard's getting a sharp pain in her neck trying to look him in the eye from this close.
And she has to be this close. Because they're pretending –
Shepard shoves her own hysterical cackling as deep down as she can, to be let loose later, when she can pop up behind Joker and terrify the living shit out of him. That kind of laughter will call attention to them, which will blow their cover, after which she will be arrested and possibly punted out the airlock to spare the expense of a trial.
So it's important, in this moment, to be as convincing as possible.
She curls her hand tighter around the elbow joint of Vakarian's armor and smiles up at him harder than ever. It's possible that she looks deranged. Vakarian seems to be terrified.
Good.
"I can't exactly shrink eight inches at will," Vakarian says as quietly as he can. It's easier for her to hear him than it should be, given the bass-deep sound of his voice, but she's pretty sure that he's not audible beyond the range of their personal space. That's the important part.
They're in the main docking terminal in Kithoi, waiting in a huge line for Customs and Security to be cleared for the general levels of the Citadel. Shepard's never had to wait in this line before – every other time she's been to the Citadel, it was on an Alliance cruiser, which rates a private docking slip and entrance through C-Sec. Neither has Vakarian, but at least he knew about it.
He'd tried to warn her. Shepard hadn't grasped the nature of his warning until it was too late and she was seventy people deep in line, stuck in a huge, echoing terminal that somehow smells like fried alien onions.
Apparently some things are universal.
This is a heist. Or, perhaps more accurately, this is corporate espionage between two warring states. Sure, Shepard's side is tiny and the Citadel is a massive, bloated behemoth of bureaucracy, but that doesn't change the facts – which is exactly what Shepard's here to steal. Everything the Council knows about Sovereign is now locked away in the Citadel archives, and the first thing Vakarian pointed out, when they sat down to make a plan, was that they didn't have enough information on the enemy to even start making a plan.
So they're going to steal that information from those who almost certainly know better.
Insanity.
The first test is going to be their identification. The second is the existence of Detective Garrus Vakarian, C-Sec officer in exile, who may or may not know the officers at the security station. Shepard runs an assessing glance over his face; he'd spent half the morning holed up in the head as he carefully repainted his face markings in thin white lines that trace over his eyes and down his nose in a strangely delicate web. With different markings and without his visor, he doesn't look like himself.
That's the point, of course, but Shepard's not so used to him that she can look at a change like this lightly. He looks sort of familiar – and at the same time, not familiar at all. It's making it hard for her to pretend –
Vakarian looks down at her, tilting his head curiously, like a bird. "What is it?"
"You just don't look like yourself today, honey," Shepard says, her smile absolutely blinding. Vakarian looks at her like she's lost her mind.
So the thing is:
Of all of the people on her ship to have senses of humor that give Shepard a quite literal pain in her rear end, Tali is currently in the running for the absolute worst of them all, because she went and made Shepard's and Vakarian's fake IDs linked.
They're married.
(On paper.)
Shepard has not stopped wanting to kill someone ever since. So perhaps that's why she's clinging to Vakarian's arm like a bonobo monkey, because god knows that if she tries to strangle his elbow, she'd have to get through armor thick enough to plate an Alliance cruiser, so he's probably safe enough to vent her spleen on.
Part of the problem is that she's kind of enjoying herself. It's fucking weird.
Over the next hour, as the line winds on and on through the terminal and several units of line tape that look like they were meant to be temporary stand-ins and have therefore achieved the status of permanent fixtures, she and Garrus chat and smile and cuddle, all with a vaguely murderous undertone that Shepard only means a little bit. And she only means it that much because it's deeply amusing to watch a seven-foot-tall turian looking at her warily out of the corner of his eye, like she might explode if he doesn't.
Nice to know she can do that off the battlefield as well as on.
When they finally reach the front of the line, they each offer their IDs pulled up on their omni-tools to the officer waving people through. This is the first real test of Tali's 'totally foolproof' fake identities. The transport tickets were easy – this checkpoint is run through Citadel systems. If Tali took a shortcut – forgot to set a flag – tripped an alarm she doesn't know about – then they might be in for a whole world of trouble.
Shepard's got exits, of course. There's no way she'd let one of her people walk into enemy territory without one. But she would much rather they never have to use them.
She smiles up at Garrus, this time without the threat of a knife in the back of her eyes, giving it everything she's got. She's never been the relationship sort, but she likes being around Vakarian enough to fake it; he's got a good thing going, too, with warm eyes that look down at her fondly and a gloved hand draped casually over hers on his arm.
The turian guard in front of them looks them over – thoroughly, but in the briefest sort of way, the kind of look that someone only knows how to give when they've been doing this for a very, very long time. At least Garrus hasn't given her the signal that this is someone he knows.
Turian-human pairings aren't totally unknown, but they're not very common, either. Both species mostly go for asari if they're in the mood for something that isn't home-grown. Shepard can see that glint of curiosity in the guard's eyes.
It was always a risk – but Shepard only has the access codes to the Archives. She needs Vakarian's C-Sec clearance to get there.
If it's still in the system. Tali cracked C-Sec, but she could only get so far before her penetration would have been discovered, and Shepard made the call to have her pull out and cover as many signs of her hacking job as she could.
It would have been safer to wait to see if Tali would be able to find another approach or another way in, but by then, Vakarian's access codes might be deleted. If they're not gone already. Shepard is banking on the left hand not speaking to the right hand – or Pallin immediately locking down any data on a C-Sec officer choosing to defect. And not to another job, or another nation, but to pirates.
That had to hurt.
Shepard tries to hide the savage edge to her grin, but the guard tilts his head and looks at her more closely and she knows she's failed. Closer scrutiny is a problem.
She turns that grin on Garrus and pushes up onto her toes, letting her body slide along his armor, to whisper in his ear. "If you can blush on command, it would be really useful right now. Pretend I just said something really kinky. Are you into handcuffs?"
Vakarian takes an audible breath, his eyes widening, which is almost as good as a blush at the moment. He's not looking at her in that pointed sort of way that says he's refusing to look at her.
Shepard's being that embarrassing girlfriend who can't leave her man alone for three seconds in public. It's a reasonable reaction.
The guard looks back down at the readout in his palm, the point of his mandible trembling as though he's trying not to laugh. "Cerridos, Pescar and Clark, Jasmine? What's your reason for visiting?"
"Just tourists," Vakarian says quickly.
"Don't lie," Shepard says playfully, smiling up at him. "We're here to see the Blasto concert," she confides to the guard. "He's embarrassed about it for some reason."
That there really is a Blasto movie music concert coming up had blown Shepard's mind, just a little bit. Whatever. It takes all sorts, right?
There's a long, tense moment as the guard lets his eyes skim down Shepard's body and over Vakarian's armor again before he hits something on his reader and waves them through and into the scanner room. Neither of them are carrying, because Garrus is reasonably confident about being able to lay his hands on something inside the station, and anyway, Shepard is a weapon in her own right and so is Vakarian, when he takes the gloves off; it means that the scan goes off without a hitch, thankfully, which is exactly the way Shepard likes it.
She waits for him on the other side and wraps her hands around his arm again, leaning her head against his shoulder like she'd missed him in the five seconds they were apart. "Do you know where we're going, or do I need to look up a map?"
"That way," Vakarian murmurs, nudging her to the left. Shepard takes the hint and starts walking. She lets three hundred meters of corridor pass before she allows herself to relax.
"They held up, I guess," she says quietly.
He doesn't look down. "I think she would be insulted that you were doubting her."
Shepard laughs. "You're right," she says with amusement.
Garrus' contact doesn't pan out, so they're going into the Archives without a weapon. They'd prepared for this eventuality, but that doesn't mean that Shepard isn't slightly nervous as Vakarian hunkers down next to the service entrance in some tiny, cramped Wards access tunnel. She rattles off her Spectre code when he asks for it; even though Shepard's glancing over his shoulder every few seconds to watch him hack into the security systems, she can't figure out what he's doing.
If there were something to punch right now, Shepard would feel so much better about all of this shit.
"You're breathing down my neck, Shepard," Vakarian says without looking up. "Aren't you supposed to be on watch?"
"I'm watching you," Shepard says without missing a beat. But she does turn around to keep an eye on the far end of the tunnel, like she's supposed to.
Waiting is not her strongest skill.
There's a tense moment when something does come around the corner, but it's not a person; it's one of the Keepers, and Garrus takes one look at the thing and tells Shepard to forget it. "It's not paying attention," he says, turning back to the door, his voice far away, as though his mind is already diving back into the problem. "It won't care that we're here, as long as we're not disassembling the station or moving things around. Let it pass."
Shepard pushes back against the wall to let it go by, half-horrified, half-fascinated by the huge beady eyes and thick skeleton, the oddly buoyant way that it walks, with legs that swivel as they reach forward so that the main trunk never moves; it doesn't seem like it obeys the laws of gravity that Shepard understands. It's weird. She hates it.
But Garrus proves to be right, after all. It goes by without even looking at them, as though they're not there.
Good enough.
A few minutes later, Garrus makes a deep sound of satisfaction and starts disconnecting his tools. "We're in," he says. "It's linked to you, so you can open the door with your palmprint."
Shepard leans forward and lays her hand on the slab next to the door, and it obediently whooshes open. No alarms, no guards; just a bare, naked hallway leading inward. Shepard grins. "Good work, Vakarian."
"Tali did most of it," he says with a shrug, standing and pulling on the neckline of his cowl. "I just implemented her programs."
"A modest turian," Shepard says, grinning. "Now I've seen everything." She glances up and down the corridor one more time before she moves past him and through the doorway, part of her waiting for the alarms to sound and C-Sec to come raining down on them, but nothing happens.
Chuckling, Garrus follows her through.
They push deeper into the service levels, hiding in closets and behind open doors whenever they hear other people, until Shepard literally trips over the entrance to the Archives proper. From there, she needs the computer to tell her the way to the secure levels, but while it doesn't sound the alarm at her presence, it also refuses to acknowledge her codes.
"It must be an artifact of your original codes being deactivated," Garrus says calmly. "Here, let me try – "
He starts working on his omni-tool again, his eyes flickering back and forth through various screens; the orange glow is bathing his face in light from below, and it makes Garrus look spikier and pointier than ever. Shepard's never interacted this much with a turian before. Is Garrus typical of his species? Are they all this resourceful, this calm under pressure? Or is that just Garrus Vakarian, former cop?
Hopefully, she'll live to find out.
It takes Garrus fifteen minutes and more than one failed attempt to get Shepard the access she used to have. He swears under his breath when his omni-tool flashes angrily at him, and she has to fold her lips tightly together to keep herself from laughing. They're tucked away in a corner of the stacks, so there's no one here to hear her, but she doesn't want to distract him, not now.
Shepard can laugh at him later.
Finally, Garrus manages to get her the highest level of access her old Spectre codes can grant, but it'll only last until the next server sync, whenever that is. The computer directs her down, down, through levels dedicated to the Morning War and the Krogan Rebellions and first contact after first contact until they reach a level that's been assembled recently. Shepard can practically smell the wet paint.
"Here," she says softly. "This has to be it."
Shepard darts around to every computer, waking them all up with her access codes and biometrics, and they set about copying whatever they can get their hands on; she keeps wanting to read what they're stealing, but Shepard knows that will just slow her down, or piss her off, and she really doesn't want to be tempted to kick in the door to the Council chambers and give them a piece of her mind. She doesn't particularly want to get arrested today.
But she can't help seeing some of it.
Casualty numbers, for example.
"Shepard," Garrus says, his voice breathless and angry and horrified all at once. Shepard spins around instantly, locating him by pure instinct, but he's not being held at gunpoint. He's looking down at the screen in front of him, and his body is very, very still.
Like he's seen his own death.
"What?" Shepard says, dreading the question, dreading the answer. "What is it?"
Garrus raises his head to look at her, his eyes hard, tight little rocks, curiously opaque. "The Council didn't investigate because they didn't have to. They already knew about the Reapers, Shepard. It's all in here. Projected size, strength. Damage estimates. Proposals for contingencies."
Shepard takes a step toward him, captivated and confused all at once. "But we can use that, can't we? Why are you – " She gropes for a word, caught strangely off balance from Garrus' lack of affect, his complete retreat into himself.
But Garrus isn't waiting for her to figure out where her head's at.
"Because the projected size and strength? There aren't numbers, Shepard," Garrus says, his subvocals suddenly gritty, as though he's restraining himself. "It's just listed as incomprehensible."
Shepard stares at him, fear dripping cold into her stomach, a sudden chill that locks all of her muscles tight. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
His mandibles pull tightly to his face, making Garrus look thin and elongated, suddenly more alien than ever before. "It means that we're screwed."