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It wasn’t intentional… at least not at first. They were just ‘shooting the breeze’, as Shepard called it, down in the cargo bay. Garrus was half under the Mako when he first mentioned the fact that he knew how to sync omnitools.
“Doesn’t everyone? How else are you supposed to send messages?” Shepard asked, not looking up from the report she was currently writing on the datapad balanced in her lap.
“Well, yes.” Garrus grabbed the chassis and rolled back out from under. “But you can also sync other information. Here, let me show you.”
Looking back on the moment, Garrus remembered Shepard’s half amused smile as he fiddled with her omnitool. He was quite fond of that smile, honestly. She always got it whenever he was showing her a new tool or some such (Wrex called it showing off, he preferred the term ‘demonstrating’). A few minutes later, his omnitool was receiving her pulse, a steady seventy-two beats per minute.
Shepard looked impressed. “Clever. Honestly, if you weren’t so damn good with a rifle, Garrus, I’d say you should go into tech.”
It was moderately embarrassing how long he turned that off-hand compliment over and over in his mind in the ensuing days.
But the connection was quickly forgotten by both of them as they both had much more important things to be doing. It wasn’t discovered again till Garrus was recuperating in the hospital at the defense of the Citadel. Bored out of his mind, he’d convinced a co-worker to bring him his set of modding tools so he could at least fiddle with his omnitool while he waited for the doctor to finally release him.
Buried in a few subfolders, he found the read out again. For a full minute he just watched the slow rhythm, forty-five beats now--she must have been sleeping. He probably should have deleted it, or told Shepard that he still had it. But he did neither of those things. She and the Normandy were already all the way on the other side of the galaxy, cleaning up rogue geth. And he’d been left behind. They’d only been gone a few days and he already missed them… well, missed her. Hell, he’d missed her the moment she left his hospital room. So he kept the read out, a reminder of their connection and that though he was still stuck on the Citadel, Shepard was out there somewhere. He promised himself he’d tell her that he still had it the next time he saw her.
A few more button presses and he set the read out to appear in a corner of his visor. It didn’t take long for watching it to become a passing habit, noticing the spikes in her heart rate and guessing at what kinds of adventures she was having. Though often that game just led to him being even more frustrated than usual with his C-Sec job as Shepard was obviously off saving the galaxy again and he was stuck doing paperwork.
It was on a sleepy Tuesday morning about a month later that Garrus was doing exactly that. He was midway through a very dry requisitions request form, which had to be filled out in triplicate, and absent-mindedly he noticed Shepard’s heart rate jump. It had been at a very steady sixty-seven since he’d first put on the visor that morning, but now it had risen to nearly one hundred.
Good riddance to those geth, he thought with half a smile as he turned back to the form. He marked down the number of heat sinks he would need and then was distracted again as Shepard’s heart rate continued to climb. He watched out of the corner of his eye for the next several minutes as it breached one hundred and fifty beats per minute, the highest he’d ever seen it. And then it sky-rocketed abruptly up to two hundred beats per minute, making Garrus sit up and ignore everything else but the read out.
Some instinct told him that something wasn’t right, right before the read out started dropping. He relaxed a touch as it dropped back down into normal patterns for a few seconds. But then he froze as it dropped from eighty to sixty to forty to twenty.
And then it stopped.
Flashing triple zeros appeared where the read out had once been. Hands shaking a little as his brain was screaming at him what this must have meant, he opened his omnitool. Perhaps his connection had just gotten severed or there was a glitch in the code, that was all, right? Right??
But he was still connected. The read out was still going, just registering a very sobering zero beats per minute. He sat back in his seat, hands dropping the tool onto his desk. Oh, Spirits. No.
Anderson was grimly waiting for him outside of the precinct when Garrus got off shift, but he already knew. The Normandy had been completely destroyed and it took Shepard with it. The galaxy had never seemed so dim before.