When Shepard kissed Thane and heard sound echo deeper and watched color begin to coast like clouds and flash brighter and dance in between the blinks of her eyes, she wondered how much Mordin had meant what he'd said as a warning, per se. If it had just been a so-you-know, it hadn't ultimately done much good; little had been on her mind that didn't need her - namely, him, in the immediate forefront of the moment, and keeping resolute for the mission ahead - the night they had first done anything undeniably intimate. Doctors' cursory, awkward notes for a pair of thirty-somethings' love and sex lives had definitely not been part of that little .
At the same time, there'd been no alarm or, really, any flavor of surprise when Shepard's senses had begun heightening and shifting during the rendezvous. She was a soldier; she'd seen and been through more than the majority of every other creature that had ever been born in this galaxy could dream. She was no stranger to shifts in perception, from the world dampening and slowly and tilting seconds after a daring shot of an exotic drink, to time slowing as one leans into a fall or out into the wind of a firefight to land a last few shots, to gunfire polishing sharper and the colors of enemy armor striking the eye alarm-bright under the pressure of waiting out a fight for an airlift.
The moment had been like any of the above: intense. Courage and fear orbiting together and colliding into something warm and bright over a backdrop of looming death - Shepard hadn't thought to question rather than simply take in the hallucinations once they'd started, as features of the moment.
Not until she woke up afterwards in the morning-night of timeless space, her head tucked close to warmed scales, blinking slow in the faintly-hungover warm gray haze of coming down off a dream, that had smudged together with what had come before it, still seeing echoes and traces of planets she had visited and faces she had seen in the way traces of light caught and reflected against the walls and ceiling.
It had been beautiful.
They'd kissed and slept together again the night after the mission - celebrating a triumphant and thrilling and pure miracle. A suicide mission which saw all, including them, alive another day to enjoy - as a triumphant, and thrilling, and miraculous. They'd done it again. And again. And many, many other times, simply kissed, hand-in-hand or pressing together in corners of ships and ports for stolen little moments of one-ness in the shadows.
Across all those instances and their varied effect by location, flavor and depth of light to bend and recordings that had been most recently played back in her brain, she had come to wonder if what she saw after a kiss was anything akin to what he saw in his memories. Or, if the beauty and half-controllable turning tide between dreamy vividness and stark harshness of it was simply in his way for words - she hadn't heard another drell discuss their memories, and wouldn't dream of pushing the only other she knew, for his or Thane's sake - she wondered if, at least, in some broader sense, it simply brought her closer to seeing the world the way he did.
She was at a somewhat more balanced point with regards to it, though.
Thane could pursue a memory, or fall and be lost in another.
Shepard always knew when things were going to start shifting once she started gravitating closer to him, and he gravitated back. She didn't invite the hallucinations - but she accepted them, and whatever degree of impressionism or surrealism they'd impose on painting perception of the next few stolen minutes between two lovers in real-time. Just as she'd accepted that Thane's bouts of melancholy and reliving could be little helped - they were to be waited-out and listened to.
It was the best she could do - to see what he saw.
Some days and some kisses, she couldn't deny that she saw or heard ghosts - shapes in the light or voices in her head amplified too loud of old enemies and friends. Thane detected her tension, called her siha and her first name as he asked her with a stalwart seriousness what she saw. It gave her an anchoring point around which to re-ground herself.
Just as, when his eyes snapped back into focus and searched for reality after a harsh flash of the past had consumed him, she looked on with sympathy - held the gaze as a maintained point of connection even as he often looked down with perfectionistic shouldn't-worry-you guilt. Breathed Thane, and pulled on his hand. Touched his face, wrapped arms to set hands on his back and hip.
Here, too, they often kissed.
An anchoring point around which to re-ground himself.
And a kind of synchronicity, within that point, in making memories and a present together viewable and contextualizable as both at the same time.
Written for the 2020 Annual Chocolate Box Gift Exchange on AO3.