Mature rating applies - It applies A LOT. If you would prefer to avoid sexual content, I'd recommend approaching this chapter with caution, and outright skipping everything that happens in the Mako (when it's rocking, don't come knocking...)
10: Turian Sweet Tooth
Jane
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
Garrus Vakarian smelled amazing.
To be specific, Garrus Vakarian smelled like bellari: old-fashioned turian sweetmeats that had once been a popular export from Palaven's southernmost continent.
To be exact, Garrus Vakarian smelled like the enormous crate of partially-crushed sky-blue bellari that Shepard's pari had kept under lock and key in his home office back on Mindoir.
As a patrem, Albacus had been strict in all things. Steady and unyielding, consistent and predictable as any physical law. Under his protective if occasionally smothering wingspan, life was in full order. Work was foremost. Study and physical training were daily obligations. Meals were square, thrice daily, and never indulgent. Her father's nutritional acquisitions had been utilitarian and flavorless, with the single exception of a crate of mysterious, smashed bellari.
Shepard never figured out if her pari had intentionally tracked down the sweets for his own secret reasons, or if the crate had been included in one of his supply pickups by simple mistake. Either way, the lozengeshad arrived badly damaged. Some were little more than glittering dust, but enough of the medicinal, strange-smelling candy had survived that Albacus could have treated an entire turian regiment. Regardless, those bellari had been doled out on extraordinary occasions only. Perfect grades. Exceptional training. Selfless behavior.
Her pari's affection, like everything else about him, had been careful and austere. He wasted nothing.
Shepard was willing to blame every bad decision she was about to make on these trivial but vitally important details.
Once Shepard got a lungful of Garrus Vakarian, it was all over. That scent: haunting, familiar and anything but sweet. Complex and herbaceous, a rare, victorious morsel, her own secret gift. Adding insult to injury, his eyes were that same delicious blue, a blue as clear and hopeful as the summers she'd spent idling in wheatfields - sucking on bitter alien sweets and watching the sky for starships.
He was so close already, it would only take the smallest tug. Her greedy fingers found his neck, where his skin was thin, soft, warm. Without any further encouragement he changed the angle of his head and closed the distance between them.
When she gasped against the hard planes of his mouth, he made a sound like a grinding in the earth and hungrily increased the pressure on her lips. His hand slid to the back of her neck, locking her down for attack while the rough, strong line of his tongue outlined her bottom lip. He was well rehearsed at this. Confident, deliberate, and earnest. The heat of his barely-contained arousal throbbed against her stomach, and then his tongue was touching hers. She dug her fingers into his neck to keep herself upright.
The real crime she'd committed all those years ago had been forgetting this feeling. The taste of his coppery tongue, the near-painful firmness of his mouth. All the details had disappeared into the foggy amnesia of her hangover, and she'd been too terrified to go searching for those memories afterward. Despite everything that had happened since the night she'd drunkenly masturbated in front of a bashful cop on the Silversun Strip, Garrus Vakarian remained the only turian she had ever allowed to cross the carefully-guarded threshold of lips and teeth and tongue.
Some things were more delicious for the waiting.
He caught her lower lip between the flexible plates of his mouth, nipping and tugging while he dragged his hand from the back of her neck to the base of her throat. His thumb reverently traced her collarbones, then with an anticipatory tremble, he skimmed a blunted talon across the top edge of her bra. His talons were expertly trimmed and well maintained. He kept them short, clean and neat as a whistle. For a sexually mature torin, that could mean only one thing: a preference for skin far more delicate than his own. Garrus had been touching human women for a long, long time - the proof was right there, plain as day.
Her insides turned to magma, jealousy and excitement meeting and sloshing together with tectonic force, ready to erupt at any moment, but before she could make sense of the feeling, his mouth tortuously pulled away. He kissed the line of her jaw until he met her ear.
He rumbled, "Red… You and me, naked and smashed together. Yes or no?"
She blinked slowly and tried to breathe. Turians were nothing if not committed to the good of the group; asking was important. Given the state she'd been in the last time she'd wanted him this badly, she knew exactly how significant her answer would be now that she was stone-cold sober. Her whole body lifted toward him.
"Yes. Please."
The sound he made was part cartoonish mating call, part grunt of lifelong satisfaction. It startled her enough that she came to her senses. Before another second could tick by, she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and held tight to his roving hand. She inclined her head toward the aft entrances to the cargo bay. Disabled security cameras wouldn't mean a goddamn thing if somebody decided to walk out of that elevator or take a late-night stroll through engineering.
Garrus was well ahead of her. He loped over to the Mako, using one arm to tug his C-Sec tunic over his head as he went. The sight of the dark, smooth, plate-less skin below his carapace was so distracting that she stayed rooted to the spot, too dizzy to walk.
"You know, C-Sec still has an outstanding warrant for your arrest," he said. "Let me tell you, my boss did not appreciate seeing 'Wild Redhead' on that AO 442 where your name was supposed to be." With a flourish, Garrus opened the hatch of the tank like it was a long-overdue birthday present. He put one foot up on the chassis, then ran his palm crudely over the flat of his groin plates. "You can't run from this any longer. I've gotta take you downtown."
Blood evacuated her brain and flooded enthusiastically into her groin. The sight of him standing there half-naked and guarding the gates of hell had her so suddenly, uncontrollably aroused, that her legs refused to move. All she could do was laugh and fumble with herself. She ran a shaking hand over her incriminating hair and got her fingers stuck in the band of her ponytail. With a single clumsy yank, she pulled out the band and let her hair tumble down to her shoulders, sloppy and damp.
Across the room, Garrus made a noise.
She looked at him and nearly choked. The blue of his eyes was piercing enough that she felt lanced by it, pinned immovably to the spot. She couldn't remember ever feeling so painfully aroused - except for the last time she'd found herself the solitary object of that stare.
"Get in," he commanded.
A disbelieving laugh forced its way out of her; she'd never been much good at answering the call of her own sexual impulses. Too overwhelming, too messy, too compromising. Easier to pretend she was made of wood and shaped like a ship's mast - or better yet, a battering ram.
"Garrus… this is a terrible idea." If a voice could have gone into cardiac arrest, Shepard's would have been seizing on the table, seconds from death.
He lowered his head and raised his brow plates, huffed out a breath through flaring mandibles.
Suddenly, he was very close, so close that his scent enveloped her all over again without any warning. That irresistible, cultivated scent, the signature of a torin who kept his plates polished, his talons trimmed, and his gun ready to fire.
"Jane. Yes or no."
Without questioning why, she touched her fingers to the side of his face. Tracing the striking blue line of his familia notas, she spat up a word so big that it tore her throat apart on the way out:
"Yes."
He reached for his visor and slowly pulled it from his face. It was the first time she'd seen him without it.
"Then get in the car," he said.
Maybe the Prothean beacon had short-circuited her sense of right and wrong, or maybe she was too sleep-deprived to be rational anymore. Whatever the reason, despite this bottomless idiocy, Shepard jumped straight into the barrel and plunged over Niagara without giving herself another chance to lose her nerve.
She clambered into the Mako, head first and sense last, tumbling into the nest of standard-issue bedrolls Garrus had made behind the main gunnery perch. He must have had a real bedroom somewhere, probably a comfortable little den with tasteful linens that smelled just like him. Garrus Vakarian's bed existed somewhere out in the beautiful, preposterous universe, just waiting for her to slide into it without any clothes on.
She clenched an eager fist into the bedding, heart rising to her throat. As she watched Garrus climb into the tank and forcefully pull down the door to seal the hatch, her legs slackened, her core pulsed, and she moaned.
The only way to lock the door behind them was to trigger the environmental purge. The thirty second cycle was loud and chaotic, a real show-stopping number with a lot of flashing lights and the sound of air rushing at a million miles an hour. A thrill ride.
30 - 29 - 28 - 27 - 26
She'd seen old human time-travelling vids that were just like this. The heroes were always rocketing backwards through time and space on the way to save Earth, or kill Hitler, or have an excellent adventure. She was rocketing through time and space now, spiraling backwards into the Summer Shitstorm at breakneck speed.
25 - 24 - 23 - 22 - 21
Garrus' hands got to her first, rough and impatient. He yanked down one side of her bra, ran the back of a talon along her nipple, and then his mouth caught up with the rest of him. When his tongue trilled expertly against her breast, her eyes flew wide open and she stared furiously at the purge countdown, trying desperately not to scream.
20 - 19 - 18 - 17 - 16
The Mako sucked all the air from the room. Garrus sucked all the air from her lungs. His mouth was everywhere, his hands were never far behind. Suddenly, she was naked. Just as suddenly, so was he, and then he pulled her hand down to meet his groin plates. All it took was one tentative, curious brush of her fingertips, and he slid right out into her hand.
15 - 14 - 13 - 12 - 11
She'd never seen a turian cock up close before. Garrus was boiling hot, self-lubricating, and pulsing a vulgar, forget-me-not blue. Ribbed for her pleasure, more dramatically angled than the human equivalent, and perfectly compatible. And there was his knot, throbbing thick and wild against her palm, making her throat go dry.
10 - 09 - 08 - 07 - 06
As she curled one hand around his cock, she brought her other hand to clutch the exposed skin of his neck. Mindlessly, she pulled his forehead down to meet her own. She hummed without thinking, deep in her chest. Her whole body was going to burst into flames. What would she do if she burst into flames? Would it hurt very badly, to burst into flames?
05 - 04 - 03 - 02 - 01
He pushed her legs open and back without any hesitation. She rolled her hips towards him and felt him pressing against the nervous ring of muscles at her entrance, but no further. Her clit pulsed wildly as he knocked against it - she'd never felt so shameless and desperate to be fucked in all her life. She was breathing heavily, gasping like a fish out of water, and Garrus was just staring at her, eyes locked where they were nearly joined. As if swabbing for evidence, he ran his thumbs through the sweat that had gathered on the backs of her knees, and then.
[[C-L-E-A-R]]
He slid home in one movement. Characteristically on-target, she could have sworn she heard a bang.
She yelped as if punched in the gut.
He was incredibly hard. That was the thing she couldn't escape - just how rock solid and forceful his cock was. Even more than the physical proof, it was the thought Blue is this hard inside me that made her gurgle clumsily in reciprocal lust.
"Alright, Red?" His voice was barely a glimmer in the air as he rocked involuntarily against her hips.
He was gaping at the gunnery pillar next to her head, his eyes blown wide, his mandibles flaring in disbelief. A growl rippled low in his throat as he slowly dragged himself along, and she knew he was holding back.
She raised her hips and clamped down on him, just to see what would happen. She was rewarded with a ferocious thrust that knocked her into the back wall and made the whole chassis squeak. With a full-body tremor, she let out a splintered yelp.
He answered by fucking her in earnest, merciless and singularly focused.
She grappled for solid ground, hands roving anywhere she could reach - his thighs, his arms, finally clinging to the suede-covered steel of his waist and holding on for dear life. Now that he was moving inside her, he felt immense, nearly unbearable. The sounds of her own confused pleasure rose like smoke over their heads, an endless litany of moans and breathy cries, unfamiliar to her own ears.
The blood rushed to her face, her chest, hell, even to her hands and feet. It embarrassed the life out of her, knowing how vulnerable she was right now, how indiscreet and unprofessional they were being, and it made the pleasure that much more intense. She thought about the Mako rocking on its wheelbase, and how despicable things would look from the outside if someone were to walk into the cargo bay unannounced. Would she ever be able to look at this tank again without immediately remembering how perfect it felt to have her legs in the air with Garrus Vakarian fucking her for all he was worth?
She felt herself barrelling towards a spiked ridge of pleasure that was too huge, too uncontrolled, too soon. Trying to ride it out felt as if the sky was falling - everything was turning black and blue.
Oh God, her body screamed, this is how you die.
"Ah - I can't - Garrus it's too much." She dug her nails into the soft skin of his waist. "Can we slow down?" As if she wasn't sure. As if she had no idea how her own body worked anymore.
Instantly, he stopped moving. Turning his keel aside, he gently shifted himself and leaned over her more intimately, as closely as their mismatched bodies would allow. She could smell that unmistakable sky-blue cologne as his face hovered inches from her own. Delirious, her hand automatically sought out the tender velvety spot at the back of his head, right beneath his fringe, and she pulled him closer still.
"Kiss me..."
He did. Slowly, happily, with one wide hand cradling her neck. When he started thrusting again, he rocked steady and deep, and she could feel every millimeter of their connected flesh pulsing in time. She clung to the sensitive line of his neck for security as he kissed her, fucked her, turned her inside out. Every slow, deliberate stroke made her feel shiny and new, like she'd never been intimate in her life.
Maybe she hadn't, she realized. Not like this.
That was what did it. The obviousness of his affection, just that little hint of it was enough. She clumsily moved one hand to rub a few circles over her clit.
When it hit her, the orgasm attacked full force. All at once, with no warning. She beat a fist against his cowl purely out of surprise, and actually yelled - angrily, almost - as if he'd snuck up behind her in the dark.
All the while, he was staring at her with a look of wanton, immature giddiness. In a hot rush, he crushed his mouth over hers as if he needed to devour her pleasure in order to survive. In one long, unbroken note, she keened insanely into his mouth. Her climax crashed over her - wave after unforgiving wave, with no end in sight.
He broke the kiss just long enough to plead against her mouth.
"Red - I need - Mmmm - Inside. Yes or no?"
She didn't hesitate. "Yes. All of you."
The sound he made was quiet but unreal. A bottomless rumble topped off with a breathy adolescent chirrup. He buried his entire face in her hair, and his final thrusts were so rough that she heard rather than felt their bodies slamming together. When she sensed the heat of his release pooling inside, her entire body went pink. She couldn't decide if it was shame or titillation. She'd never let anyone do that before.
They crumpled together for a few moments - breathless, dazed.
"I can't move." He said, voice stripped of modulation.
"Yeah," she answered, capable of little more than a breathy laugh. "Me neither."
"No, I mean. I shouldn't have…" He cleared his throat. "...Sorry. We're stuck like this for a while."
His knot. She'd considered this possibility, fleetingly, the way one considers jumping off a bridge just to see what it feels like. Considering it was one thing, but she'd actually allowed it to happen. Hell, she'd encouraged it.
Even if she didn't know much about turian sexual propriety, she knew that letting him lock into her unprotected on the first date was probably taking things too fast. Still, his cock felt amazing.
"I like you right here," she mumbled, lavishing his furrowed brow plates with punch-drunk kisses.
He slackened and rolled to his side, arms wrapped securely around her shoulders. His mouth drew an affectionate line across her forehead, but all she could feel was the lewd pulse of their conjoined bodies. His swollen knot spasmed inside her, again... again... until she moaned lazily, rolling her hips.
He seemed half-conscious already, but she pulled him down and poured herself into him, tasting his tongue, stealing his breath. The feeling of synchronization was intimate in a way she had never known, like having his heart transplanted into her body. How would she ever be able to sleep again without doing this first?
Deep against her core, she felt his pulse slowing, her own heart dragging after him beat for beat. His eyelids fluttered sleepily, trust written over every bleary feature. As sleep overcame him, his cock gradually relaxed and retracted, and she was able to free herself with a bittersweet twist of her hips.
She checked the time on her omni-tool and swore - the moment she'd walked into the cargo bay and seen Garrus Vakarian mostly naked and holding a rifle, Shepard had lost any sense of time. If Nihlus wasn't already contemplating taking a trip belowdecks to give her a lecture about human insomnia and poor judgment, he would be soon.
She fished around the stuffy cabin for her clothes, but regained her propriety first. In a few short hours, she was meant to be driving this tank on a rescue mission. People were depending on her. People in trouble, who needed her to be at her best. No distractions. No compromises.
She had forgotten: never lose count.
She finally located her bra - wedged under Garrus' knee. Slowly, she pulled it free. He shifted in his sleep, reaching out to grope a blind hand along the swell of her hip. When she reeled back, something dripped down her inner thigh. Cold, thick, inescapable - guilt felt much the same.
With nauseating specificity, she remembered the look on her pari's face when he had caught her sneaking into that secret stash of sweets in his office, stealing a reward that had not been earned.
What the hell had she just done?
Original words and phrases:
- Bellari: Old-fashioned turian sweets, comparable to mints, anise drops, or lavender pastilles. Brittle, hard, and meant to be sucked on for a long time, they come in a variety of strong traditional flavors, most of them unpopular with children.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
-Patrem/Pari: Father/Dad
-Torin/Torini (plural): Male turian of the age of majority (15)
- Familia notas:The colony markings that turians wear on their faces
I am fully aware that a Citadel Security arrest warrant would not have the same form number as the 21st century Earth equivalent, but I couldn't stop myself. AO 442 is a fucking great number, worthy of Douglas Adams himself, hot damn.