Liara rubbed her arms nervously. "When an asari joins with another for the first time there is a period of adjustment, as the two partner's nervous systems become attuned to each other. It can…sometimes be a little disconcerting. I fear that in my enthusiasm I took things too quickly. I am truly sorry, but I think that if we try again things should not be so…intense."
"Couldn't we just…" Ethan gestured expressively, "Have sex?"
Liara frowned at him in confusion then opened her eyes wide in a mixture of surprise and disgust. "You mean…rub our bodies together?" She made it sound like some of sort of gross bodily function.
"Isn't that what sex is?"
"For your species, perhaps," she said. "But for an asari physical contact is only one aspect of sex, and certainly not the most important. But I suppose, if you like…" She did not sound very enthusiastic.
Ethan groaned. "Look, maybe this was a bad idea. I like you Liara, and I find you…pretty attractive. For an alien. For…anyone, I guess. But it's turning into this big complicated thing, all this talk of joining and becoming One makes it sound like we're getting married or something, and I don't want that. You wouldn't want it either, if you really knew me. I know you're interested in the Prothean crap I have in my head but you don't have to have sex with me to get it."
Lira was giving him that wide eyed intense look again, but she didn't seem upset. She looked…determined. "Shepard," she said, "You do not need to protect me. I know who you are, what this is. I have seen inside your mind, and it is not just the knowledge you possess that draws me to you, it is all of who you are, your flaws as well as your strengths."
She looked so earnest and innocent it made his stomach turn. Ethan reminded himself that she was three times his age and an adult even by asari standards. Still, he'd been worried enough that Ashley was starting to see him as "future boyfriend" rather than "possible fuckbuddy", and even without the joining Liara radiated affection like a little blue sun. And it was true, Ethan did like her, more than he entirely knew how to deal with, but there was no way this could work out in the long term.
On the other hand, disconcerting or not, that had been…incredible. Ethan sighed. "Ok then," he said. "But…more slowly this time, with less of the double vision and muscle spasms."
Liara took his hand and led him towards the bed. This was promising. "For now I think we should keep our clothes on," she said. Which was less promising, though he liked the implication inherent in "for now".
And then… they held hands. For quite a while.
"Close your eyes," said Liara. "Focus your mind on my hand in yours." So, Ethan focused. Her hand was small and warm, her skin smoother and less wrinkled than a human's. He felt the light prickle of static electricity against his skin, barely at the edges of perception, and his own electromagnetic field vibrated in sympathy. A light mass effect field expanded beyond his skin though he had made no conscious effort to create one. After fifteen years of learning to keep his biotics entirely under conscious control this was a little disturbing, but Ethan didn't feel like he was about to inadvertently throw himself across the room or anything. Just to see if he could Ethan damped the field down, then extended it again, letting it flow out through his skin, tiny sparks cracking and stinging where it clashed with Liara's own field. Liara hmmed happily.
She shifted slightly and there was a subtle change in his perceptions. And then he could feel her. Ethan had used his biotics to "feel" things outside his body before, to grab and throw objects and sometimes "see" a little way behind an obstruction. But all he "felt" with a mass effect field was very basic and indistinct changes in pressure. Now he almost felt as if Liara's body was a part of his body, like an extra limb he'd forgotten about until now. Ethan experienced a sharp feeling of vertigo as his mind tried to process the sudden indistinct Liara-shaped extension to his awareness. The skin of his hand where they touched felt strange, almost numb, the contradictory sensory input confusing his nerves. Ethan felt a momentary tang of fear and then irritation at himself for feeling it. He felt a flicker of amusement cross his mind, which confused him until he realised that it was coming from Liara. This did not help with the sense of weirdness.
"Focus," said Liara. "Feel my hand in your hand." Ethan took a breath and focused on her hand. It felt different now, more solid, like he could feel the whole hand rather than just the parts he was touching. "Now extend your awareness to my wrist, see if you can feel the parts of me that are not touching you." And he could. It was deeply strange, but he felt his awareness travel up her arm, past her elbow to her shoulders and then out to her face, her breasts, the rest of her body.
With an awareness of her body came a growing awareness of her mind. He'd felt vague echoes when Liara had helped him sort through his memories, hints of curiosity and horror as she probed the visions from the beacon. But those were surface thoughts, little more than you could tell by just watching her expression. What he felt now was something quite different. It felt…alien, and not just because of the strangeness of having another's thoughts mixing together with his own. Still indistinct, Liara's feelings were intense and slow to shift, her sharp intelligence focussed on him with an almost ruthless singlemindedness. Ethan could feel her awareness extending through his body with a methodical curiosity as she focused on each part in turn. Liara reached across with her free hand and ran it through Ethan's hair, he could feel the prickle of the ends against her fingers and her enthusiasm for the novelty of the sensation. She pinched at the ends of a lock of hair, and then when he didn't react she pulled.
"Ow," said Ethan, flinching away and opening his eyes. He blinked, prepared for another discomforting sense of double vision, but instead he could just see more, the edges of his vision extending around his head to give a panoramic view of the room. It almost but not quite distracted him from the pain in his scalp.
"I am sorry," said Liara, not sounding (or feeling) entirely sincere. "Asari bodies do not extrude biomaterial coverings like hair or scales, and I have always found the concept fascinating."
"Well, watch it," he said. He ran his hand along the top of her…whatever you'd call them. Tentacles? They felt more like solid ridges of skin. He pulled on the end of one but Liara only grinned.
"So," he said, "Are we done with the…" but before he could finish she pulled him to her with surprising force and kissed him again.
There was no sting of electric shock this time, just warmth and want and the strangely acidic taste of her mouth. It was kind of a blur after that. Ethan was pretty sure they took their clothes off at some point, but once they properly joined the details of whose body did what to whom became hard to keep track of. Beyond the sheer physicality of it there was the melding of their minds, the faint flicker of Liara's thoughts mixed with Ethan's growing into an almost blinding conflagration of emotion and memory.
For a while all he could feel was desire, her desire for him and his for her and the building interaction between the two. (The was affection as well, especially from Liara, but that was a lot less immediately compelling) Any qualms Ethan had felt about sleeping with someone from another species evaporated pretty quickly, Liara might only look like an unusually coloured human woman, but the woman she looked like was hot, all breasts and hips and lightly freckled blue skin. Ethan felt a slight pang of disappointed vanity when he realised that Liara did not seem to have much of a direct physical attraction to his body: she found it fascinating (so much hair!) and enjoyed him touching her and his reaction to her touching him, but her immediate response to Ethan's appearance definitely leaned more towards "interesting" than "sexy".
Then again, Ethan wasn't sure that she made much of a distinction between the two, Liara's desire seemed inextricably linked to her insatiable curiosity. She wanted to know everything, exploring his body with fingers and teeth and tongue and stopping every now and then to do things like stare at his nipples and ask what they were for. She poked at his mind as well, wanting to know about his childhood, his life in the military, all the things he had seen and done before they met and what he'd thought of her and all they'd experienced since then. She did not shy away from images of violence, in fact she seemed to seek them out, and and Ethan wondered to what extent that part of himself was what drew her to him. Certainly he felt a darkness in her that he had not expected, a dispassionate harshness hidden beneath the sweetness and compassion. But Ethan was not as willing to share his mind as he was his body, any time she came close to some part of Ethan's past that he didn't feel like sharing (and there was a lot) he pushed her away, physically if need be.
Liara made a sound of frustration and sat up, breaking the connection. "You don't trust me," she said.
Ethan snorted. "Hey, you knew I was an uptight bastard when you seduced me. But no, I don't entirely trust you, never said I did."
She frowned and ran her hands gently over his chest, radiating a mixture of disappointment and frustrated affection. "I…" she began, and then stopped. Ethan felt a little guilty: he could feel, with his entire being, that she genuinely cared about him and intended him no harm. But he hadn't spent his whole life learning to keep people out only to suddenly open up now. "Let me show you something of my life, then," she said. "Though it is not very interesting." The first vision she gave him was of Matriarch Benezia, looking very different to the broken and violent woman Ethan had met on Noveria. She was smiling and playing with Liara in some sort of park or forest. She was also much taller than Ethan remembered, and either everything on Liara's home planet was very blurry and built on a colossal scale or Liara was very small. "This is one of my earliest memories," explained Liara. "My mother was not a matriarch yet then."
Ethan thought briefly of his earliest memories, a few half remembered moments from the orphanage in Kuala Lumpur flitting through his mind before he instinctively pushed them back down into his subconscious.
Liara seemed taller in the next memory, but something about it made Ethan decide she was still quite young. "A little older than you are now," she said. "So yes, quite young. Benezia and I were living in a communal house with some other families with children." Ethan could see the other children milling around the room Liara was in, along with some adult asari and a Krogan. A group of children seemed to be playing some sort of game over in the corner but he couldn't make out the details. "It is called Harmony," said Liara. "Each child takes it in turn to ask a question, and the group tries to come to a consensus as quickly as possible."
"How do you win?" asked Ethan.
"That is a very human question," said Liara. "You cannot win at Harmony." In the memory the young Liara started to head toward the group, and Ethan could feel a tinge of sadness from her adult self beside him. "That said," she added "It is possible to lose."
The child Liara stood patiently next to the circle of playing children. Eventually they stopped their game and one of them addressed her. "What do you want?"
"I was wondering if I was allowed to play now," she said.
"That depends," said another. "Have you learned your lesson?"
"Not really," said the young Liara. "At first you said my questions were too difficult, and then you said they were too simple. I do not understand."
"Then you can't play," said yet another of the children. "And you should go back to being punished by sitting by yourself."
"But I like sitting by myself!" said Liara. "I just like playing Harmony too sometimes." The Harmony players as a group rolled their eyes and turned away from her, and started to play the game again as if she wasn't there. The child Liara in Liara's memory watched them for a while with a mixture of confusion, anger and shame.
"So as you can see," said Liara to Ethan as the memory faded. "I have never been very good at not asking the wrong questions."
The subtext to her words, seeping into his brain through her fingers was do not see me as just another asari.
"It's not that you're an asari," said Ethan. "I don't trust anyone." But they could both feel that this was not entirely true.
"Does it bother you?" he asked. "That I'm…"
"Xenophobic?" she finished. Which is not quite the word he would have chosen. "Well, it is certainly not your most endearing feature. But I must admit that before I came aboard the Normandy my own attitudes to non-asari were a little…condescending." A memory came to mind, a moment from his youth he tried not to think about. Ethan pushed it away automatically and then reconsidered.
"How would I show you a memory?" he asked.
Liara smiled and he felt a brief glow of affection for her. Which of course she felt too, and that made her smile even wider. He really hadn't thought this joining thing through.
"Just describe it to me," she said.
"Right," said Ethan, and closed his eyes. "Well. It's from about twelve years ago. I was living on the streets of Toronto, that's an Earth city in the north of the planet." As he spoke he found himself surrounded once more by the dirty streets and bedraggled buildings.
"Oh!" said Liara. "This is not how it looked on the extranet. And how different it is to your human colonies!"
"Yeah," said Ethan. "Thirty years isn't long enough to build up any really deep layers of filth, for that you have to go to Earth. It was all a lot nicer a hundred years ago, or so everyone keeps saying. Plus I didn't really spend much time in the prettier parts of town." His memories gained a slightly surreal edge of exoticism when viewed through Liara's eyes. Ethan got the feeling that if he ever took her to Toronto he'd spend the whole time being dragged to various historic sites to read plaques about distilleries and the Great Toronto Fire.
"I was running with a gang called the Tenth Street Reds," he continued, "You met some of them back on the Citadel. I won't say they were any nicer back then, but at least when we killed people we did it to their faces and it was usually out of greed and not hatred. We were pretty small potatoes really, just a bunch of street kids who liked to see ourselves as gangsters. Some of us paid the bills with sex work, though I've always had a face better suited to extortion. Anyway, around that time we started getting more aliens coming into the city. This wasn't very popular with a lot of people: resentment was still high after the war, and everyone blamed you guys for the spiralling craphole the Earth was turning into. And then the asari started taking over the strip joints."
"Oh dear," said Liara. "That is an unfortunately common side effect of first contact with the asari. Entire university departments have been dedicated to analysing the ethics of the situation." Ethan thought for a moment that she was kidding but Liara radiated sincerity.
"Well these asari obviously didn't go to those universities," said Ethan. "And I don't know if we were right, but the feeling on the street was that they thought they were better than everyone else. They took all the best jobs and refused to pay any protection money, and then whenever anyone tried to rough them up they'd bring out the biotics and take the poor bastards out. And if there's one thing the gangs hated more than aliens back then it was biotics." "But you are a biotic," said Liara.
"Yeah, I'm getting to that," he said. "Needless to say things didn't end well."
Ethan could feel Liara's happy anticipation of the story to come. He felt a flash of irritation and opened his eyes. She had curled herself around him, maximising the skin contact, and her eyes stared at him black and unseeing. "Are you getting off on this?" he asked, annoyed.
Liara turned her head towards his voice, her eyes staying black for a moment before returning to their more normal blue. "I'm not…it's not like that," she said. She blinked a few times and then slumped slightly, through what remained of their connection Ethan could feel that she was very drained. He felt pretty wasted as well, come to think of it.
"Ok, we should definitely stop," he said. "This is nice and all but we both have a galaxy to save in the morning."
Liara frowned. "But I did not see all of the memory you wished to show me," she said.
Ethan looked at her quietly for a moment, running his fingers in small circles over the smooth curves of her back. "Then I'll have to show it to you next time."
Liara stared at him and then smiled slowly. "So you wish to join with me again?" she asked.
"Are you kidding?" said Ethan. "Even with you poking at my brain like some scientific specimen that was still, just… I think you may have ruined me for all other women forever."
"Strictly speaking I am not a woman," she said. "Asari only have one gender."
He laughed. "You know, a lot of human guys wouldn't like to hear you say that. But fine. You've ruined me for all other sentient beings forever, regardless of gender or species."
"Good," said Liara, stretching and settling herself down to sleep. "Because I have every intention of keeping you to myself."
Ethan thought about objecting but right now that didn't sound so bad.
He woke to find himself tangled in a combination of Liara and twisted sheets. She made a sleepy sound of protest as he extracted himself from her arms and then she rolled over onto her back. Ethan was tempted to stop and admire the view but he really needed a shower, he felt sticky and exhausted and it wasn't going to be long before they arrived at Ilos.
As he stood in the tiny shower in his quarters, the water washing away his mental fog and the salty tang of Liara's scent, he tried to clear his head and focus on the coming mission. There was still so much they didn't know: was Saren expecting them? Would he be supported by a significant number of geth, or would the bulk of their forces be headed towards the Citadel? What was this Conduit they were all after anyway?
Ethan watched Liara sleep while he got dressed. Now that his thoughts were his own he let them roam freely, and his feelings for her nagged at him like a toothache. There was a reason he'd given up on relationships, the only things he'd ever gotten the hang of giving to other people were orders and death. As much as they liked each other now, he couldn't see that they had enough in common to stay together once Liara had satisfied her curiosity about his oh-so-fascinating brain, and letting himself become dependant was stupid. Yet the more time they spent together the less able he felt to push her away.
He thought about the memory he'd been going to show her, of the first asari he'd ever really spoken to. There was definitely an element of self sabotage to the choice.
He'd spent a long time trying to forget it, the way the asari had laughed when Ethan and his friends had come to intimidate her into paying them off, the way she'd so easily killed Ava and sent Ethan and Josh scurrying for cover. He'd never fought another biotic before, and the asari's confidence and power had made him realise how weak and useless his own untrained abilities had been. And then something in her biotic attacks had resonated with the eezo in his blood, and he'd felt himself glowing, his body forming a mass effect field too weak to do anything but get him killed. Josh had turned on him then, tried to shove Ethan out into the open to act as a distraction. And so Ethan had shot him. The look of surprise on Josh's face when Ethan grabbed his gun was not something he'd ever forget. Nor would he forget the look of fierce glee on the asari's face when she'd taken advantage of Ethan's distraction to knock him down and take the gun herself.
She could have killed him. Instead she'd smiled and shot him in the leg before calling the police. "You should tell them you're a biotic," she'd said. "I hear they're in high demand in the army, and with your skills I'm sure you'd make fantastic cannon fodder." A compassionate choice, really, but it hadn't felt that way at the time. He wondered what Liara would have done if it were her.
Unaware of his thoughts Liara shifted in her sleep, the blue of her skin standing out against the white of the bed. He really should wake her. Ethan allowed himself a last wallow in sentimentality and then boxed his feelings back up to deal with later. He wondered who would win the fight between his need for privacy and Liara's desire to know everything about him. Perhaps it was like Harmony, with no way to win, and all you could hope to do was avoid losing too badly.
He nudged Liara's foot gently with his boot. Her eyes snapped open.
"Wake up, slacker," said Ethan. "Unless you want to confront Saren naked."
Liara sat up slowly, watching him watching her, and smiled.