Chapter Text
Shepard hangs up the call and stares at the wall for a long, tense moment before she picks up her pillow, shoves her face into it, and screams. She doesn't bother to keep quiet. The pillow doesn't muffle anything, but god it's so satisfying to squeeze it and imagine it's his fucking neck. Maybe she'll throw it next. That sounds satisfying, too. It also sounds incredibly juvenile, but she might as well act like a child if he's going to treat her like one.
Goddammit.
"Everything okay, Shepard?"
Shepard tries to smother herself with her own pillow, but after a few seconds she admits defeat. "You can come in if you want to," she calls.
Her door slides open and Garrus looks in, narrowing his eyes at her disheveled hair and ratty tank top. Shepard squints back at him. Did she put on pants this morning?
"You look like something crawled into your face and died there," he says instead of a greeting.
Shepard snorts. "At least on me it's not permanent. I don't know what your excuse is."
"Hilarious," he says dryly, exactly as if he hadn't started it in the first place. "Seriously, Shepard, are you all right? I heard you all the way out in the living room."
Shepard looks longingly at her pillow, but in the end, she reminds herself that screaming about it has never solved anything in the past. "My father called. I'm expected home for Christmas." At Garrus's blank stare, she shrugs. "It's a human holiday – it's supposed to be about, I don't know, family togetherness and shit, but somehow it never feels like that when I'm getting reamed out for working with aliens."
Garrus leans against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chestplate. "Do you have to go?"
"I don't want to, but my grandmother's getting older every year," Shepard admits. "And I shouldn't punish my mother for the shit that comes out of his mouth. But god, if I could slip him a tranq for the entire month of December, I would be the happiest inmate in the asylum."
Her restless thoughts run over Christmases past, and she's forced to remember each and every argument, every time her father just wouldn't let the subject go; Shepard's never been the kind to take shit lying down, and she comes by it honestly.
Only once can she remember a Christmas that wasn't completely shitty, when her college roommate had nowhere else to go and crashed on the couch over winter break. Her father watches his tongue around other people.
Wait –
Shepard looks up at Garrus, her best friend – her turian best friend.
"Do you maybe wanna come with me?" Shepard asks, hiding her hands under her pillow so she can fidget without being obvious. "It's going to suck beyond the telling of it, but I could really use a friend, and your very existence would piss him off, so..."
"Oh, this is malicious?" Garrus grins. "Shepard, why didn't you just say so?"