Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: Born of a prompt from bioticsandheadshots, pairing of my choice. Thanks, hon.
Stain
"These hands will never be clean of him." - Shepard and Thane. What stays and what goes.
She doesn't have time to wash her hands.
As soon as the Council is safe and the Cerberus assassin deemed lost, Shepard sprints for the hospital. Still in her armor. Still with a chamber-hot pistol. Still with bloody palms.
Thane is dying.
And she doesn't have time to wash her hands.
Kolyat has already left the room, with a trembling hand over his mouth and a fist full of prayers. She watches the drowning curve of his shoulders as he leaves.
In the space between them, Thane tries to breathe.
Shepard is reminded of three years ago. When she sailed over the crisp blue of Alchera's surface trying to claw out her collapsing lungs.
Shepard knows a bit about breathing, about strangling, about dying.
It never hurt quite so much as this.
Her hand reaches for his, her other hand bracing her weight along the bed as she leans over him. She dampens the white sheets with crimson from her stained palms.
His blood.
His blood she had tried to stop – tried to damn up – tried to keep from spilling out on the cold tile of the C-Sec station where he had fallen and stayed fallen.
Where they had both fallen and would never return from.
Shepard's eyes flit ashamedly over the tainted sheets, her hands slowly retreating.
He blinks up at her, his lids half-lulled in pain, or maybe prayer, or maybe resignation. "Siha." Somehow his name for her comes out steady and clear and bloodless.
Everything she is not.
His eyes soften on her then, and when she looks at his hand, at the hand she had tried to hold – the hand she had always been reaching for, even when she didn't know it – she finds the faint trail of blood from her touch arcing across his knuckles.
Her brows furrow, her throat tightening.
She is just so tired of marking that which she loves in blood.
But Thane knows. Has always known. And when he reaches a hand to her lowered chin and raises her gaze to his, she finds she is also tired of losing that which she loves.
The two have always seemed to go hand in hand.
Hand in bloody hand.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, barely managing not to choke on the words.
His brows angle downward in confusion.
But she answers his unspoken question with a motion toward his bloodied hand. "For…" She trails off, eyes drifting toward the edge of the bed.
The edge of something – anything – just not this sharp edge of panic she's been living on for too many long months.
"I'm sorry," she repeats, swallowing back that hot throatful of bile.
Long moments of silence breathe between them, broken only my Thane's rattling lungs and dragging coughs.
And then he moves, edges slowly and painfully up from his position. "Help me," he commands, more conviction and sureness in his voice than she thinks she may ever feel again herself.
He reaches for her and she answers instinctively, bracing her hands along his weakened form, helping him to a sitting position through the pain. When he is settled, he grasps purposefully for her bloodied hands.
She lets him.
She has always been helpless against his touch and now is no exception. Now is possibly the most helpless she has ever been to his touch.
She finds the surrender far more shattering than freeing.
He turns her palms over in his, his fingers reverent as they tread across her skin. "You needn't worry about such trivialities," he finally says, voice only a fraction above hollow.
She stares at him, silent. The salt sting of tears is already pricking at her eyes.
He looks up at her, a regretful smile tugging at his lips. "I am already unclean," he breathes.
Wetness lines her eyes instantly, her spine rigid, her jaw tight as she clenches her teeth – silent but for all the screams she has known in her dreams – breathless and aching.
In the time they take to watch each other, they each discover a new truth, a new haunt, a new certainty . They each discover what they never could before in any tangle of limbs, or breathless battle, or pure, unadulterated glance.
They each – instantly and irreparably – know fear.
In a very tangible, near, marrow-deep way.
In the slow-drying blood caked into her palms.
In the hitch of a breath from his ever-closing throat.
In the heart she drowned her very self, only moments ago – when he had said her name – her name – and she had known.
These hands will never be clean of him.
He says nothing when her first tears fall. Instead, he reaches for the wet towel alongside the bed, pulls her hand into his lap, and begins to wipe her trembling flesh clean.
"It is I who must offer an apology, siha."
She stares resolutely at their joined hands, at the slight trickle of blood-touched water that seeps from the cloth and past her wrist – threatening pink on sun-worn tan. She stares at the tender way his practiced and deadly touch works to break her further.
"I have sullied you," he whispers, a quake to his voice that she has never heard before.
She closes her eyes.
Because to see him now is to mark him as lost. And she is just so tired of marking that which she loves in blood.
"My hands have been covered in red long before we ever met, Thane."
The truth of her breathless whisper lingers unacknowledged in the air between them.
The sparse, precious, too-little air.
The air that threatens to leave him and never return.
Shepard braces a bloody hand over her face and crumbles, silently and stiffly – unseen from her dying lover.
Thane continues to calmly wash her hands.
But Shepard has already reconciled with the knowledge that there is no washing this away.
There is no escape from this stain of the heart – his heart – still vibrant and warm on her hands.
Shepard already knows she will never be clean of him.