Rin observed her. Some things remained ever the same, the way she wanted them.

She studied.

He returned day after day, bearing gifts she needed; food and wisdom, company and reluctant but genuine humor and a depth of solemnity she craved. It calmed her and set free her thoughts. They flew off her like sparks, things she couldn't grasp one by one due to their speed of genesis. They were set in his steady firmament like stars, and they could form constellations of them, patterns, and he could give them context.

Not too much context.

He was in fact an excellent counselor, self deprecating and modest. Effective in setting her at ease. Like the blanket, his presence was a comfort she sought.

It was an expensive blanket bought with the money Vakarian had been gracious enough to provide him with as part of his new identity. He was now a gentleman of independent means, the Council having granted him a fraction of a percentage point of his overall if presently inaccessible financial worth. In perspective considering what he was buying he counted it as generous.

He could not seek out his usual purveyors of the highest quality cloth in all cases but the blanket was an exception.

It was, as Vakarian had stated, a team effort.

The blanket was a talisman she adopted, always near her, the color of her stolen eyes. The first tangible and persistent symbol of him giving her what she had not known she had wanted. Her fingertips stroked along the fabric as she thought, as she talked, as he watched but did not focus on her hands. He imagined she slept wrapped in it. It moved around the cabin with her, the only bright patch of color other than the fish tank.

He also brought her fish and fed them.

Sheets and pillow covers and other blankets would follow, in black to highlight her skin.

The sea green Drell cloth blanket she cherished that had been bought with the Councilor's money would always be a treasured memory of his and hopefully hers. He believed they would sleep wrapped in it, wrapped in each other, her fingers along his skin when he would be able to focus on her hands, her mouth, the way she arched off the bed, her shoulders and hips pressed down into green cloth, his hands in her hair.

He brought her tangible but not talisman in other forms. Small things. Food she enjoyed, subjects that fascinated her, someone perceptive and attentive to anchor her processing. She turned toward discussing Collectors and mission, where to go next, what to do. She spent the day in research and breathed out the essence of what she had taken in at night. Conversation with her was like holding the string to an exclusive kite she put solemnly in his hands.

She had, as he had known she would, only stopped asking him to join for that day only. She persisted and he deferred, but she was not anxious. She knew she would succeed.

He knew she would succeed.

Her path to success presented itself one week after her standing invitation/order to visit. He always arrived on time, did not make her chase him overmuch. Enough for her to know she was chasing and wearing him down. He held the slightly stunned and star struck expression of a man holding a treasured kite that nonetheless threatened to pull him off the ground.

Abruptly she asked him "You said you're trained in combat. Would you be willing to demonstrate?"

His brow ridge raised. He asked suspiciously and skeptically "You wish for me to demonstrate my combat skills to Commander Shepard?"

"No, nothing like that. Okay, yes, exactly like that, but my name's Lal."

"What does everyone on the ship call you?"

"Commander Shepard."

"I am on the ship."

"You're special."

"I am concerned."

"Good. That means you're paying attention. Come on. I'm going to voluntarily leave my room. This is an event."

There was a gym on board, and she led him to it. Spectre Orbestan was the only one in attendance. He was silent, impassive, nodded a greeting but otherwise ignored them, continued with his workout, a combination of impressive biotics and combat on several beleaguered and reinforced dummies surrounding him.

This demonstration would be potentially problematic. Not impossibly so, but still a concern. For both of them.

Cara had been trained by her mother in martial arts, a distinct style. A style she concealed to avoid being asked where she had learned it.

Senar had been trained in eighteen different styles, all of which he could adopt in isolated or blended fashion. Thane Krios had sought out fifteen other disciplines.

The difficulty of physical demonstration compared to verbal demonstration of personality was that he had instincts, and he had developed those instincts to behave as muscle memory. The body of an assassin should move on its own, a separate entity from the logical mind given enough experience and training to move without thought, flow to the next right action like water following the path of gravity.

He would not benefit much in this case from Drell memory. He could remember which style did exactly what, isolate and present them, just as he was able to isolate and present facts, opinion and shading during conversation.

There the comparison and advantage ended. Conversation moved much more slowly than combat. One could always pause, craft, hedge, stall with words. In combat, there were of course feints and ruses, but he would need to craft a style that embodied feint and ruse while being still effective. His instincts were problematic, as was his innate style that would assert itself as the most efficient in actual combat if not practice spar. He was grateful now that he had not required that she watch his daily training routines.

Several things defied the mechanics and expectations of hypnosis. So many things could confound his priming and preparation. Deep things, things unreachable, unaffected by words. Irrevocable symbols. He could tell her to forget the sun, but should the sun appear, should she have no word for it, it could resonate with all her prior experiences of 'sun' and speak to her in warmth, in the way her skin reacted to its presence, memories potentially vibrating with resonance, giving her the feeling of familiarity with something that should be unknown.

He had not been trained in, had not been intended to be able to control a person for potentially years on end, a person asked to forget what was most obvious and un-concealable in another.

It was beyond arrogant to think he could do it.

Just as it was beyond arrogant to think she could destroy Reapers.

They would both need to make arrogance true and not true.

It was part of his choice to not bring her vanisfruit perfume ever again, a sacrifice as it was the most fitting scent for her. To invoke scent was a deeply powerful thing, tied to memories and experiences directly, to Thane Krios and Senar in ways he needed to suppress.

Once Rin became familiar to her many of her memories could blur into familiarity and be less existentially jarring, but he could not afford to alert her to the myriad suppressed memories that could add up to mistrust, undefined and prickling. Trust was something he did not know, something he did not recognize, something he had to induce in others without the experience of it himself and he had no way of testing whether or not she had the stores of manufactured trust that he had wished to create in her to carry her through doubt and forced circumstance. He was in essence a chef creating a meal from an untested recipe for someone with ingredients to which he was allergic and could not, would not taste himself.

His most common instinct was 'this is not going to work because it would not work on me.' Not a single bite of trust would pass his lips.

Would it work on her?

This was all something new, something arrogant, something untested. He had never asked someone to trust him with so much of themselves for so long. He had never attempted to be someone trustworthy for such a long time.

She was entirely capable of learning to adapt to all his preparation and confound it, and this could be her path to it. Before his reinforcing venom or words sank into her skin and her mind, if her body impacted his in combat, a body she knew so well through sex and even combative sex, she could recognize him. It could begin as a doubt, a question, an instinct she would not understand. She might learn to avoid rather than seek him, to seek solving that mystery.

To ask Liara to help her.

A breath of vanisfruit, a whispered voice, an evocative touch or seeing in Rin something that was irrevocably tied to Thane Krios in manner or movement could be a lightning bolt that would sever the carefully built web of obscurity, drop the veil.

There was no way forward other than through. He needed to be a squad member and not merely a counselor and confidante and he needed to earn that.

It had been a serendipitous thing that he had not compelled her to fight or show him what Shepard was like in combat. He had not needed to prove himself to her. It had been true that he had never considered once asking her to do anything for him in a tactical sense other than advise him.

He had wondered if he could convince her to stay on the ship and allow him to conduct away missions but that was unlikely and he would not try. He needed her to advise in each moment, she needed him to execute in each moment and they would be a team, take commensurate risks toward the shared goal.

From her own impression of herself, her tactical capacity was her strength and he agreed. She was capable at hand to hand, had an advantage from her mother's training, but she was not a master and was at some disadvantage even from that limited position due to deconditioning and loss of her implants.

He was a master but needed to appear merely capable.

Just capable enough.

More capable than she was.

Biotics were a concern, something visceral and distinct. His biotics had been felt along her body uncounted times. He could not change their color, sound or frequency and he never had managed to control the patches that covered his skin and spine when she was near, any more than she had learned to control her blush.

Because they were deep things, things unreachable, unaffected by words. Irrevocable symbols.

His solution had been to guide her toward wanting biotics on her skin while convincing her that Thane Krios had not been a biotic.

He had primed her to want him for his biotics, something new, not something she recalled.

He recalled. He touched the memories only, full immersion might make sympathetic color hum and patch his skin, reach for her.

He hadn't allowed her to exercise in order to maintain what muscle she had built in the Alliance. She had begun her stay with him small and toned, had remained small and had softened under his hands. He had never known her with the enhanced strength, protection and reflexes the implants had provided.

He had seen enough surveillance and footage of missions that he accepted her as competent but not gifted.

To induce biotic trance he did not call her Drala'fa, she could not have a name. He could not be Senar. They must both be nameless, the biotics the focus, what she could expect to get from them in terms of promised and delivered pleasure her motivation to seek them out.

He had broken himself down into a set of unnamed traits, traits she would be primed to seek out on their own regardless of the identity of the man who bore them. His biotics were distinct enough that he did not fear her finding another person with the same style. Each trait he induced her to seek was distinct to him. His venom. His biotics. His voice. The way his hands moved on her body.

The potential pleasure from venom, biotics, hands and words had been demonstrated, aided by his knowledge of her. Venom, hands and biotics were easy. Voice was difficult for many reasons. She was literal and opinionated, loyal and emphatic. He had to bypass that, resort to crafted poetry, Drell poetry of calculated stanza and meter.

If he told her she would meet a man…

She would insist she wanted only him.

That was a lovely sentiment and it would be true, but her resistance to change was not helpful to the end goal. It resulted in provoking her argumentative loyalty, not trance.

In many ways her insistence on truth and fact reordered his priming, changed its direction unpredictably to reinforce her own will, and he had been progressively challenged to prepare her for the bizarre coming of the veiled unknown by her insistence upon sense and telling him she would not lose him, would not leave him, don't speak of such things.

Endearing and rewarding she was, but cooperative to his priming she was not, her capacity to learn and insist making the process more treacherous, two steps forward, three steps back as she would not allow herself to be led away from him. She insisted Senar would not leave, she would not leave.

She'd be anxious and ask him if he wanted her to go, she did not want to, but she wanted him to be happy…

Of course he could not tell her that he wished her to go, that he had plans to, and more often than not he was then lost in hours of reassuring her with his body, with his voice, with pleasure wrung from her along with sweat and exhaustion, that it would not be so. She would be tied more deeply to Senar, reinforced that her protests brought reassurance and results.

He would have several blissful hours indulging in his Drala'fa and then the reality that time grew short and he must find a way.

He wished to call her beloved and Drala'fa in the face of her stubborn holding of the name Senar when he wished her to let him go. When those words rushed to his lips as biotics rushed to his skin he held them back, one word held back to keep a promise to her, however tangential. He did not love her but beloved was an endearment with the potential of Drala'fa in irony. He did not say it, though the restriction chafed. Her given ironic name was held back to sever her ties to remembering who Drala'fa was, who she had been.

So he could not and did not address her changing identity or his, only drew her attention to what must remain the same.

He had found no new name for her, maintained a clearing where her new name would grow in time.

His biotics had a distinct hum and he made sure she heard them, his hands cupping the back of her head or her throat as they sounded for her.

He could not ask her to think of another man, of wanting someone else, she would not allow it. Through seeking what worked he found words "You are She and I am He and we will feel like this together, always together. If parted, seeking. She will know He through the sound, from this sight, from hands on skin and venom, only and ever this."

True and not true, arrogance and humility, poetry and potential fate. Also potential failure, her slippery and stubborn in equal parts twisting and turning or remaining unmoved, resulting in the exhaustion of their final months.

There were combat biotics and biotics for pleasure and she had felt both from his body. He restricted the biotics to the ones of the character he knew he could not suppress. Humming and arcs of force, desirous and reaching in their nature, uncontrolled at times but also reproducible around her easily. Always leaping toward her. There was night after night of darkness except for blue biotics that hummed over his skin and his hands, his lips, racing along nerves and backlighting bones.

Every part of her was imbued with blue light, the pacing and stages of her giving way to poetry, associations of the electrical and the liquid. He spoke with Kegirin's voice but not his name, fluid identity. Biotics on her skin and venom in her blood, entranced by blue, whispers of seeking blue and red and violet, which could be Drala'fa's eyes or Kegirin's skin, signposts that pointed a direction but no name she could push back against as unreal and unwanted. He'd wait until she lost the ability to speak, lost her grip on the names of things, the names of people. Not merely venom trance, because that could wear off, fade. This had to stay on her bones like blue fire, like a pleasure-soaked brand that glowed, that she could see and feel in the dark. A place she could find when her mind sought the spectrum of pleasure and found at the high mark "THIS" and could not describe it but it was a measure set, a familiar landscape.

He had driven her to unconsciousness many times, for fun, for the experience, for the pleasure of doing it, often with intentional force. Now he drove her there not for his sake but for hers, only to find out it had been for her sake all along and it had been one more thing she had taken as her own. Something she enjoyed. Whatever extremity of passion he created, she embraced, something he could not fathom and she could not explain but was true regardless of logic.

A deep thing, something unreachable, unaffected by words. An irrevocable symbol she linked to him.

She had tried to explain by saying "It's like a sunset."

"You make no sense, Drala'fa, as is often the case."

"No, it's like a sunset. It's… out there. Separate from me. When you're out of control…"

"I am not out of control." His voice was mock hurt and censorious. They both knew they were out of control in turns or in tandem, reliably and often. Lack of control could be provoked on purpose by either of them through the caprice of whatever whim gripped them. Lack of control could be innate and unprovoked, the difference between inhale and exhale.

"Yes, you are. You know it. Stop arguing."

"Never."

"It's like an argumentative sunset." He had laughed and kissed her brow. "No, listen, really. You want to know… I'm trying to tell you."

"I shall try to listen."

"When you are out of control… and you are… and don't deny it."

"I shall not confirm it."

"I'm shocked. Anyway. When one of us is aware that you are obviously out of control… it is like a sunset… or a thunderstorm… something to behold."

"With your face pressed into the pillow I refuse to believe you can see anything at all, your eyes closed and the sounds you make…"

"It isn't positionally sensitive."

"Unlike you."

"Glass houses."

"What?"

"Never mind. Anyway… it's something elemental. Something powerful. Something that's separate from me…"

"If it were separate from you we would not be having this conversation."

"We're barely having this conversation now. Shush."

"Proceed."

"I can't make a sunset, but it happens. It's beautiful. I can't make a thunderstorm, but it happens. It's beautiful. I can't… I don't… make you feel the way you do… or sometimes I do and sometimes you do and sometimes even if you don't want to, it happens. You touch me but you don't always lose control. Something in your mind, something in your body changes and you're elemental. Even with my face pressed into a pillow… I can feel the heat on my skin or hear thunder."

"I am not certain I like the comparison. Sunsets are predictable, sedate and only occur once a day."

She laughed "Well, you're predictable in effect if not schedule."

"I would prefer some other sort of phenomena, possibly a natural disaster."

"Don't worry, you're a natural disaster."

"I do not like your tone."

"Yes you do."

"Can I bargain my way to being compared to a tornado?"

"No, that I wouldn't survive."

"That would be… positionally sensitive?"

"So to speak."

"You don't fear that I will harm you?"

"No. Thus… sunset. How about a meteor shower? I can offer you an upgrade to meteor shower if that works for you."

"Now you are insulting me deliberately. I wish for a meteor shower that will at least end an epoch and I believe you are describing pretty lights in the sky. I do not like your explanation."

"I did not make the world, I just explain it."

"Badly. Someone needs her face pressed into a pillow more often so she can describe it better."

"Like that wasn't going to happen anyway."

When she described how she felt after hours of biotics, she had told him "aurora borealis."

She had been unable to describe an aurora borealis clearly, but he had found pictures on his Omni Tool.

Still pretty lights in the sky.

He had also researched 'glass houses' and had laughed. He was indeed positionally sensitive in direct relationship to proximity to her.

He considered calling her Aurora, it sounded almost Drell.

He came fully present, the tangential chain of memories fading after changing into workout clothing and meeting back on the mat. He had been given standard workout fatigues and he wore them with unexpressed distaste.

Spectre Orbestan stopped his workout and prepared to watch, not curious but attentive.

Watch what would depend upon Lal Shepard's whims at the moment. There was much to consider. He must be better than she was, but by how much? The answer lay in the fact that Kegirin Itran had apparently been a slave that had been a bodyguard. That was years of experience, years of training, and Drell were excellent students. He must gauge her ability, blunt his own, yet still exceed a certain standard and be considered elite without displaying styles he should have had no access to learning as a slave. Yet he had spent eight years extending that training and might have encountered them independently. Drell assassins were rare, but they were known, particularly to Spectres and the elite. He must avoid parallels. His venom must not be sampled or questioned. He must unquestionably qualify for squad work, enough to justify being favored exclusively.

So enough, Drala'fa, to press your face into the mat, make you feel the heat on your skin, see the aurora and not invoke a tornado.

He would be pretty lights in the sky and she must land sprawling at least once. Then he could adjust to her, obviously appear to adjust to her, and she could suspect he was holding back.

She said "Best two out of three?"

His eyes narrowed, that phrasing making no sense. "My pardon, I do not understand."

"Three matches, match ending at a fall, whoever gets two wins."

So two matches. "As you wish, Commander Shepard."

She smiled and said "Lal."

"No."

She smiled wider. "No hits to the face, no disabling or maiming."

"Commander Shepard, I would do none of those things during a spar even if directed to do so."

"Lal."

"No."

She circled, and this was obligatory. She must have the opportunity to observe him. He matched her speed. It had been years since he had trained with anybody else, but she was not difficult to read or adjust to as an opponent. He had to slow consciously. He made movements fluid but utilitarian, without obvious menace or overlay of intimidation. He stripped some training from his carriage, limited his extension, altered critical angles of footwork by varying degrees, blurred some of his precision and gave himself a more awkward center of gravity, altering how he landed on his feet. He allowed her to close the distance, his reach beyond hers. He believed time as Drala'fa had added poise to her movements, grace she had not possessed prior. She was nafisi. That applied to walking and granted some grace to her combat carriage, but she was still standard Alliance trained with an underpinning of the balance and form she had learned from her mother. She was potentially unexceptional in a spar and he believed that in order to show a decent capacity for combat, she must be essentially crushed.

My apologies, Drala'fa. I cannot bemoan your lack of physical prowess in a spar. I value you for other reasons. I believe this is the conclusion you have come to about yourself and therefore we are of like mind on the subject and you will not begrudge your crushing.

He had studied her leading up to capturing her, and made a study of her each day since. There were few physical mysteries about this woman he had not categorized and tested.

There was no real reason to draw it out. Her first reach for him ended with him pulling her much smaller frame off what was decent but unexceptional balance, a controlled pull beginning with her forearm and with no need for any follow up at hip or knee. There was no real point to belaboring that she was much smaller. She went sprawling easily. His arm went around her waist as her hands moved to break her fall. Fortunately she did it with enough training that she would not have landed painfully or injured herself, but he still halted her fall with his arm and delivered her to the ground with an exaggerated slide. He slid his arm out as she moved forward, sparing her knees even though there was a mat. He enjoyed leaving his hand on her stomach, allowing a slight vibration of biotics under his skin, along his arm, something she should feel, hear, sense slightly.

She looked up at him, laughed and said "One."

He offered her a hand and she took it. He pulled her up and she took the same position, attempted the same circle, danced around uselessly until he smiled at her for stalling. He waited until she tried again, this time she feinted at his arm but lunged for his knees. They would not cooperate with her ambitions. He stepped back, which could have dragged her forward sprawling again, but rather than do the same thing, he picked her up by the waist, breaking her attempted hold on his knees, flipped her body at the waist and placed her back gently on the mat on her back, a hand behind her head and one remaining at her waist. Once it was clear she was down he kneeled next to her and smiled.

She smiled back and said "Two. I am ordering you to stay on board the Normandy."

His hand under her waist was humming with involuntary biotics as he said "No."

"Then I'm asking you nicely."

"Yes, Lal. I will stay."