Alenko, carrying Shepard's unfinished meal as well as his own, arrived at her quarters, tapped on the door and then entered out of habit.
"I'm in the bathroom," Shepard announced, sounding quite composed if a little grim. The door was open, so he set their plates down on the desk, shoving many datapads aside to do so. It looked like she'd made a valid attempt at being at work but had given it up.
Shepard stood before her mirror, leaning on the sink, her expression set into firm lines. "I know Doc didn't mean it that way," she announced simply, cutting right to the center of her own guilty conscience. "It just hit me off-guard. I'll apologize before shift's over."
And she'd be sincere in the apology, too.
"Actually I think she's planning to apologize to you," Alenko answered. "I think she forgets about that sort of thing unless she's got to look at it."
She looked away from his reflection over her shoulder, returning her attention to her own before touching her left cheek as though testing the flesh's integrity.
It was better than he hoped. He knew very well that Shepard was only beginning to really deal with her worries about being 'real' and he knew that he was both part of the problem and part of the solution. He'd doubted her 'realness' before; he reassured her of his belief in it whenever he could.
Thankfully, it seemed to work better when he didn't say it. He put his hands on her shoulders, then ran them down her arms until he could wrap both sets of limbs around her in a kind of twofold hug. He had long since decided it was the best way to reassure her—and certainly gratifying on his end. She might apprise him of having picked an inopportune time—or say it was only to open up to the idea later—but she never outright rejected a touch.
She kept waiting for him to reject hers, though…but only at initial instigation and it had taken him time to remember she had always been like that, even before her resuscitation. She'd been alone and isolated herself so long that reaching out to people, or doing so outside a very set list of permissible actions, wasn't easy for her. She simply hadn't had time to learn anything else so he didn't take it personally, but encouraged her when he could.
Like now, as she knotted her fingers with his without hesitation and apparently without thinking. It was a start.
"You're dinner's getting cold," he said, leaning down so he could say to softly into her ear. "Poor Palmer gave me the biggest begging puppy eyes you've ever seen." She hadn't asked him to try to get Shepard not to skip the meal, just given him the puppy eyes. It would have taken someone like Javik to ignore the puppy eyes.
"I'm actually starting to regret leaving it down there," she agreed with a sigh, relaxing back into him. "I just didn't want…you know. Drama."
"Yeah, I know." He honestly didn't think there was a good way for her to have withdrawn from that conversation if doing so required her to withdraw from the room as well. Withdrawing to eat alone was one thing; withdrawing because she had work was another…and more socially acceptable. "Well, I brought it up and you wouldn't want to actually hurt Palmer's feelings."
"You don't ever wonder?" she asked, still looking at his reflection rather than at him, and not moving when he would have towed her towards the door. Her expression was firm, and her question much different from the usual issue of 'am I real?'
It was much less troubling. It suggested that she accepted that he believed she was real…and sometimes support of an outside opinion helped.
He knew what she meant and found it easy to smile at her before kissing her neck. "Nope." He'd known for a long time…he'd just been an ass about it. But he'd fix it, one day at a time every day until it came back in fits and starts when someone poked a wound that had finally scarred over.
"Nope?" she squirmed loose, or rather squirmed until she could look at him.
"Nope," he repeated, letting his hands slide to rest in the curve of her back.
"How?" her voice actually quavered, responding to the flat certainty, the certainty of someone with proof as opposed to philosophy to back the certainty.
"There's this little thing you do and I don't think you know you do it," he answered, grin broadening as she frowned, trying to figure out what the tell was. "And there's no way anyone could know about it because you obviously don't know…and you do it. Frequently."
By now she looked totally flummoxed. "…what is it?"
"That would be telling," he answered virtuously. Then, when she scowled at him, "It's enough that I know it's there and unless anyone asked me—which no one did—no one else knows. So since you do it without anyone knowing about it to program it in, you must be one hundred percent Jalissa A. Shepard—with or without a couple of extra parts which, I'd like to note, I wouldn't believe are there if I hadn't been repeatedly assured that they were."
It was a cheap shot, but he slid his hands up her ribs and very carefully wiggled his fingers. "See?"
"Gah!" Shepard flinched away from the action and stepped back.
"And no, that's not it," he responded before tugging her in for a kiss.
She responded only grumpily at first, but eventually gave up her grudge with a little sort of chuckle.
Almost as soon as her hand came to rest on the back of his neck, one of her fingers began running mindless little circles around the perimeter of his amp. And no one, no scientist or spy, no clone or VI, could possibly know about that little quirk.