Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: This was done as a Secret Santa gift fic for the lovely jediserenity82. Aw yiss, another Shrios fan. *fist bump*
The Sea Swallows Her Whole
"It is a sad, savage thing that blooms in her chest." - Thane and Shepard. A tale of drowning.
This is how it begins: shadowed, quiet, and breathing of still danger.
It is coiled in his muscles. Spilling out over skin and sinking into sinew. It's in the subtle flex of his fingers when he presses his hands together with a prayer. It's in the tick of his jaw when he glances at the body before him. It's in the hollow, steady look he cuts her way. A look she tries to name for years to come.
She never succeeds.
"I apologize, but prayers for the wicked must not be forsaken."
His voice curls into every corner of the room until even the dust is silenced.
Shepard's words lay slaughtered in her throat.
This is how it begins.
The rattle of her submachine fire is short and static, increment bursts that waste no ammo. Controlled. Exact.
He moves similarly beside her.
Another Collector slumps to the floor when his sniper rifle cracks through the air. She runs. His bullets rain over the enemy as she skids behind a cover of rock. The snap of her loaded heatsink is like the crack of bones.
Thane slides in beside her, panting. They turn to each other. A glance is passed. They move in unison.
The light of her firing weapon in the dank of the Collector ship is only surpassed by the blue tinge of his biotics beside her.
And that is only surpassed by the glint of her smile.
Shepard likes the feel of the Tantalus drivecore from within Life Support. It hums through the walls, a steady, pulsing rhythm, the ship's heart, its breath, its thrumming life. She feels it beneath her fingernails and in the balls of her feet.
It reminds her that even now, even still as she is in her seat before Thane, she is always ever moving. Speeding toward the unknown.
The inexplicable pull of the drell is much the same.
Her shoulders fold forward as she links her hands atop the table. "Think you could show me a few of those moves?" Her brow quirks with the question. Her smile is trapped behind her lips where it lies in wait, anxious.
He blinks. Once. Twice. With both lids. The slow upturn of his lips is barely discernible and filtered in slanted light. "Do you have the discipline, Commander?"
It is as much a challenge as it is a query.
Her fingers curl around her knuckles. The thud of her heart is singular and instant. "I never was one for regulation," she offers, one shoulder lifted in a nonchalant shrug.
His lips press together momentarily, gauging. His eyes flit between hers. At her smirk, his eyes color with recognition like ink in water. His own hands flex along the table. A swift adjustment of one palm cupping the other. "Then I imagine the lessons shall be…taxing."
Her palms spread over the tabletop. She feels the pulse of the Normandy's engines in her bones.
Moving.
Always sprinting in the darkness.
Shepard can see the silhouette of Thane behind the darkened C-Sec glass. His son Kolyat paces the length of the room, his stilted stalk louder than any words they could spill between them.
Shepard shifts in her seat along the bench, linking her hands together with her elbows over her knees. She watches. The dark loom of their forms tells her everything, even when their voices are silent to her.
Officers pass her by. The Citadel resumes its pace. The world goes on.
Inside a stale C-Sec interrogation room, there is a small and hushed death.
Thane walks from the room with eyes downcast and form trembling. Shepard moves from her bench. Her hand on his shoulder makes his muscles bunch, makes his throat tighten with words he will never bring to air.
A long moment of taut silence is stretched out between them. Thane pulls from her touch and walks away.
When Shepard looks back into the room, she finds Kolyat standing with his face in his hands, unmoving. A single, ragged breath rakes through his chest and presses against his palms. He threatens to break with it. Shepard leaves before he does.
A beat crosses between them. His cleared throat is first, and then the rustle of her uniform in her shift. She braces her hands along the table, mirroring him.
"Thank you," he says, his mouth opening as though there is more but nothing comes.
Her brows angle sharply down. "What for?"
He looks to the wall. His fingers unfurl, twist around each other, and then curl once more. Tightly. With the subtle pitch of unease.
Shepard's eyes trail the motion.
"For helping me heal my family," he answers. His gaze flicks to the window past her shoulder.
She feels the trail of his eyes like the first breath after drowning. Unattainable. She swallows her words and just watches him. It is a sad, savage thing that blooms in her chest. "It was important."
He looks at her.
She very nearly chokes on her air. The darkness of his eyes humbles the vast expanse of space. She is everything and nothing in his gaze. She is lost. Losing. Gone.
He blinks and her whole world tilts on its axis.
"You…are important," she corrects.
Because that's what she means.
That's what she always means.
His hands clench, open, shift. "I am unworthy," he breathes raggedly, eyes falling to the table.
Shepard feels the air compress in her lungs and she doesn't know why she can't just reach for him.
She imagines his touch is like burning stars and incandescent nebulas. She imagines the feel of his skin and the taste of his lips makes this broken universe suddenly – inexplicably – whole.
"You're wrong," she urges.
But she doesn't move. She only sits with him.
They wait in the silence.
They wait.
Her hand moves to his. He holds it like the last breeze of summer. Like the last flicker of sun before the light goes out. Like the last promise he ever made and kept.
But it is not the last.
There is a hesitant breath between their lips. Her eyes gauge his.
He is still – as he always is – dark and unmoved and silent.
She kisses him.
And it isn't lost. She feels it in the hesitance of his hands in her hair, in the brace of his chest against hers, in the sharp intake of breath they share.
He kisses back.
He kisses back.
"You are reckless, Siha," he censures as his steady hands smooth the bandage along her shoulder blade, the enflamed patch of her shrapnel-torn flesh still bright and angry beneath his touch. She winces at the pressure, but it is gone instantly. His hands recede. Her sigh spreads along her limbs and eases the ache from her bones.
"It would have hit you," she counters, her gaze shifting to the corner of her cabin where a picture frame rests facedown. Her lids flutter and close.
Thane's hands still at her shoulders, his breath easing light and barely-there along the back of her neck.
"I would do it again," she assures, hands clenching into fists in her lap.
The smooth touch of his lips to the back of her ear is both startling and easing. She leans back against him and when she sighs, her world is suddenly small and intimate and only him.
"I will always choose you, Siha," he breathes against her bare shoulder. Her skin prickles with the caress of his confession. She reaches up and grasps for his hand.
They hold each other's hearts in their palms. The weight of it is staggering.
Mordin recommends a multitude of creams and pills and sprays. Shepard waves him off with a confident laugh.
That night, she sees swirls of light spread along Thane's skin. A nebula, splattered against his flesh and trembling with each muscle. Her hand reaches out and traces the motion. Her fingers splay against his chest. She presses her lips to the light and smiles.
"Beautiful," she breathes into him. Her touch roams and stops. Roams and stops. Until she has touched every inch of him. Until the light of stars has faded from his skin and the bracing hand in her hair feels like an anchor in a too-deep sea. Until the rise and fall of his chest is as distant as Earth.
Until she sees the constellations of his heart and dares to love him deeper.
The next day, Shepard grudgingly takes Mordin's creams and mumbles her aggravation on her way out of his lab.
Her cheek presses against his sternum, her fingers fluttering up his side. His breath catches in his throat at the touch, and then it is a slow exhale, a single lull in his lungs as thin as light. She purses her lips at the sound, remembering.
Remembering.
Death brews in his lungs. Every breath is a step closer.
She thrums her fingers once. Twice. She stills.
"All things must come to an end, huh?" Her voice arcs over his chest like dusk. Somewhere between lightness and cool, immutable darkness. A half-place of uncertainty.
His fingers thread through her hair and graze against the back of her neck. "Not all things," he murmurs.
She lifts her gaze so that she can plant her chin on his chest and watch him. She doesn't speak. Her spine carries the weight of his touch and the tender gift of his kisses.
Thane blinks, eyes glancing out the window to her cabin. "My feelings for you…" Silence spreads out before them in the wake of this beginning. It is the first, the every, the last of his thoughts. He clears his throat, gaze sliding back to hers. His fingers press to her cheek. "Death is inconsequential compared."
Her eyes stay fixed to his for a moment longer, and then his touch is sliding down her neck and over the curve of her shoulder.
She doesn't stop him when he treads lower, when he shifts beneath the sheet to wind an arm around the sturdiness of her waist, when his mouth dips to the sharp line of her collarbone. She gasps, hands winding behind his head and holding him there.
She doesn't stop him because she needs it, too.
After long months of emptiness, she finds him again.
She finds him surrounded by crisp white walls and too-clean floors and the scent of sterile death.
He smiles.
She aches at the image. But she is already moving into him. Already burying her face in his coat and breathing. Deep. Long. Full.
Like her every moment with him.
"Thane." She nearly chokes on his name.
He holds her tighter. She swears there are tears dripping to the crown of her head.
He smells like oil and rosewood. She has looked for it everywhere.
She will continue to look for it in the many years to come. Even when she knows it can only be found beneath hard-packed earth. When it can only be found in the grave.
"Siha."
The rest falls away.
She would shatter the universe if it would keep him with her.
"No!" Her scream rips from her throat like roots torn from the earth. There is the sharp crack of her joints when she fumbles toward his bleeding figure, the Cerberus assassin already speeding away from them. Thane slumps against the wall and lands gracelessly along the red-tinged tile. His pistol clatters to the floor beside him.
Shepard's hands move against his wound, her fingers slick with his blood, her eyes frantic on his. "Thane." His name is a swallowed scream.
He grunts, his face shuttered to her suddenly, his quaking hand reaching for hers and pushing.
Pushing her away.
"Go," he says, blood flecking his lips.
She takes a moment. Only a moment to lean back on her haunches and breathe in the acrid scent of his refusal. And then she pushes from the slick tile and runs.
He has always known, as has she.
He was always meant to leave her.
She feels his gaze along her back long after she has left him bleeding out in the cold, tiled chamber.
"I'm not ready," she whispers into his side, curled against him on the hospital bed.
"I am," he answers, calmly, easily.
Her eyes burn with fierce tears she will not shed. She fixes her gaze on the rise and fall of his chest. The rattle of air that breaks from him is sharper than any bullet that's ever pierced her skin. She cringes with the force of it. Her hand reaches up to his mouth and traces the supple curve of his lips. He presses them unsteadily against her fingertips in a halting kiss. He loves her. His body tells her every day and in every way.
She sobs. Silently at first, and then steadily louder. She trails her hand from his mouth and down along his chest, curling tightly in his coat. His hand moves to brace along her throat. His gaze fixes to the ceiling.
He is beauty she hadn't thought possible in this world. Soft cruelty and sharp tenderness. Sleek and intangible and filled with bleeding intensity that colors his gaze and crashes along his flesh.
The air is stale and uncompromising in the hospital room. He coughs once more, the acute jerk of his body telling her that it is done fighting. It is done raging.
The ragged drag of air that leaves him tells her he is ready for the rest.
"I love you," she whispers against his sleeve, curling in on him, eyes squeezed tight with the suffocation of it all.
His lungs fill with blood and she can't seem to breathe.
He chuckles. Her eyes flash open at the sound. She catches the wistful arc of his lips. It is the last time she will see his smile. "It is not unreciprocated," he breathes, chokes, gurgles.
She feels the thud of his heart through her fingertips.
It falters. Evens out. Lulls quietly and unobtrusively. And then, it ceases.
Thane dies.
Shepard breaks.
She sits in Life Support and tries not to scream. Her hands bunch into fists in her lap. The Normandy is docked at the Citadel for repairs. She hasn't even the hum of the engines to comfort her. No movement. No mind-numbing race through the stars. No promising thrum that tells her there is more.
Out there.
Somewhere.
But Shepard is acutely aware that it is just empty space.
His lungs have stilled and so has her heart. They are, each of them, dead.
She remembers the first time he had brushed her hair from her cheek and leaned in to whisper his affection across her skin.
"I have dreamed of you, Siha."
He wasn't the only one.
Shepard braces her feet in the curling dust and charred earth that is London. Smoke twines around her form and she lifts her gaze to the stark beam of light racing up toward the Citadel.
She is not finished yet.
She has a sea to cross and a shore to reach.
She loads her rifle and charges forward.
Always sprinting in the darkness.
She breaks away. Falls into the wisp of light that eclipses her. Her hand reaches out and trails along the ray of stars tumbling past her.
She sees his face in the depths and smiles.
His touch is eternal.
The waves slough up the shore and her feet are already cold where they dip into the water.
The sea swallows her whole and she sighs into the drowning.
She is home.
This is how it ends:
it doesn't end.