He dreams about her, about the way she moves through the kitchen for a glass of water, navigating with her hips; about the way she brushes past him on her way, her mouth finding his inexplicably bare shoulder, dragging exactly three kisses over the skin there. It shocks him awake, so he's blinking in the darkness, his heart doing these slithery wobbly leaps in his chest at the discovery of the hard heat between his thighs.
He's distracted during breakfast, distant during the day, until she actually does it later, except instead of her mouth it's her fingers striping up his shoulder as she walks by. He jolts so bad he spears himself with a fork.
In the evening, he forgoes his usual reading and tells her he's turning in early because of some fake task he pretends to have forgotten to do for C-sec in the morning. She pulls him in for a hug, a bit demanding, and her arms go around his neck, and she turns his face to his and presses her mouth into the wick of his, soft and clinging for a long moment. She lets him go as if nothing happened out of the ordinary and he disappears into the kitchen to pour himself a drink.
He doesn't have Liara's ability to dive into another's mind but she fairly reeks of it, wanting. And it's him she wants. The thought drops in him like a badly skipped stone and it's like he never thought of it that way before, or like he'd been skimming over the top of those thoughts and now he's suddenly down there.
What the hell do I do now ?
It clouds through him all day Thursday, while he's working, while he's scarfing down a midday meal in his desk, while Bailey stops by and tells him sourly that he looks like shit. He messages Jane that he's going to be home late and he eats in his office alone, takeout boxes wilting on his desk.
By the time he gets home she's fast asleep on the couch.
No matter the vividness of his night-terrors, the aftermath is always embarrassingly banal – strip off the wet things, toss down a towel, and shiver uncontrollably until the sweat cools on his skin. John usually dreamt about the stifling heat under the protective layers of his armor, sweat burning in his eyes as he crawled trying to disappear in to the ground with tracer rounds going over his head. His armor digging into his body creating expanding bruises he just ignored. He was able to crawl to a busted Turian combat car where he could take a few calculated shots into the enemy as his "sister" called them out. When Command believed they had been wore down enough he had to storm the building. What proceeded was a two-hour of room to room firefight to clean out an Alliance base.
That was his first mission. The time he killed. The first time he was truly and absolutely terrified.
Since he moved in, he's been spared the worst nightmares, but after the stress of the day and the responsive burning that has preoccupied him for endless hours, it's inevitable that very early that morning he rears up, soaked, freezing, and almost hyperventilating, gasping for breath as if he's just cracked up through the frozen rind of some pond.
This time, though, someone's there to grab for him. The bed bounces a bit, tips, and he blinks salty sweat away from his eyes and sees Jane on the edge of the mattress, leaning over him. He jerks back as her hands find his sides, but she's firm and while she helps him swing his legs over the side of the bed he hears her whispering it's okay, you're awake, you're okay John, you're okay, you're gonna be okay.
And then she's the one that peels off his sweat-soaked shirt, helps him out of bed with the brisk efficiency of a nurse, and leads him to the bathroom, her shoulder tucked under his arm and her one hand curled around his bare waist. As the sudden harsh light flares on he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror: his face looks gray and the deep circles under his eyes make him emaciated. She helps him sit down on the lid of the toilet, leaves and returns in a flurry with a fresh towel.
She doesn't speak as she helps towel his hair and pat his face dry. He's almost aware enough to feel ashamed at the way he leans into her hands, the way the shiver threads through his whole body when her palm spreads over the nape of his neck, the way his every nerve ending flares as she lets the towel drop and strokes long lines over his shoulders. But he keeps his eyes squeezed tight and lets her cradle his heavy head in her arms and tries not to tense up and yearn after her when she leaves him there.
She's gone and he can barely hear the shuffling and banging in the other room through the noise of his own pounding hearth. Shortly she's standing in the bathroom doorway again with her hands full of flatly folded clothes from his dresser drawers – pajama bottoms, a long-sleeved t-shirt, a pair of faded blue boxer-briefs tucked primly between. She pulls back out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
His head is throbbing. He rolls his pajama bottoms and boxers down and kicks them away from his ankles, bracing himself on the sink with both hands. He's still heaving a bit and the muscles in his shoulders and arms are leaping and jumping under his grayish, goose pimpled flesh. His hair is plastered to his forehead and there are unhealthy spots of color blotching over his face, and his eyelids look swollen and purplish, actually bruised. A glass stands on the counter and he fills it to the brim, drinks it in long aching gulps before cracking it down on the counter. He buries his face in the towel she brought and breathes out hard, trying to catch up with his pounding heart.
When he finally emerges, dry if not especially clean and clothed, he finds she's stripped his bed down and is in the process of pulling a clean sheet on over the mattress. He stands and watches awkwardly, pulling a hand through the still-damp hair at the back of his bare neck. When she's done she turns and pads barefoot across to her room, disappearing momentarily before returning with one of her own pillows. He watches, half-frozen, as she goes and tosses it on the bed.
She turns to him and he swallows. "Your pillows are soaked," she tells him, not quite looking at him. "You can borrow mine."
He lets out a long breath. "Oh, no – you don't have to…."
"I wasn't using it anyway," she says. "I never heard you come in. But I heard you dreaming."
He comes forward and shakily settles down on the edge of the bed. She stands watching him calmly.
"Sorry 'bout that," he mutters.
"At first, after everything was over," she tells him, "I was so afraid of what I would dream. My dreams were bad enough before. I used to have night terrors, too." She does look very awake and alert, but her arms are crossed over her stomach, as if she's withdrawing again like a mollusk into its shell. "Liara would help me clean up, before."
This is dangerous. His hand pulls down his face as if he could make it into a mask by sheer willpower. "Thank you. You didn't need to."
She comes forward and her knees are bumping against his. "She'd get in bed with me," she says, and he looks up at her, a ringing in his ears like a concussion grenade went off a second ago. "Help me fall asleep again. No more night-terrors."
He wets his lips with a suddenly-dry tongue. "Janey…."
"You have to get up early in the morning," she tells him, and her hand is on his chest, pushing him down. He scrambles back but she follows and even as he's trying to tell her no, her hands find his face, her thumbs stroking his forehead, her palms sliding down to scrape over his soft beard, and then back up again so her fingers could tangle in his hair. His lashes flicker down and he's squeezing his eyes shut so the crows' feet spring up at the corners, and he turns his head into her moving hand. The no melts out of him and the yes firms right up.
She doesn't speak but hums a little, stroking through his red, damp curls, sliding up beside him and encouraging him to turn over so that, holy shit, so that she's spooning him, pressing her wiry body up behind his, her knees slipping into the crook of his, her right arm going around his body to press into his sternum, press and stroke down and trail little circles over his ribs. And he feels her bare face warm against the back of his neck, the maddening flutter of her eyelashes on his skin.
He knows he's shivering, knows she can feel the fine vibration through his bones, and he hopes to god she thinks it's just aftereffects of the night-terror, and he hopes to god that's actually what it is. He tries not to press back into her too hard and disguises his attempt to melt into her as merely an attempt to get comfortable. He clears his throat and it sounds explosive in the quiet darkness.
"Are you," he begins, but she shushes him and nuzzles into his neck, hooking her arm around his torso, tracing with her finger.
He settles in, listening to her slow movements, feeling the tension in his own muscles release in little clicking bursts, only to ratchet back up a couple notches whenever she shifts behind him. The movement of her fingers slows, turns dreamy, and for a while he knows she's drifted off, but then she's awake again with a little jolt that makes his breath catch, and her fingers are turning those maddening circles on his abdomen once more.
"You wanna talk about it?" she murmurs, her knees hitching up a bit, and his lungs feel so tight he doesn't think he can talk about anything. And her fingers are doing little figure eights around his navel.
"About the nightmare," she presses.
He's able to shake his head. "N-no. I just want to get back to sleep."
Her hand finds its way under his shirt and then it's bare skin on skin, her hand going flat on his stomach for just a moment before resuming the tracing. But he can only revel in it for a moment before her fingers are slipping under the band of his shorts.
He freezes when he feels her running the pad of her thumb and then the nail over the rosy crenellations they left over his hip.
He should push her away, he knows he should, but he finds himself pushing into her touch instead, ever so slightly, his lower back flexing.
"Janey," he moans.
"I like... I like it when you call me that" she whispers, fingers curling downward.
He somehow he manages to pull away from her, rolling onto his stomach, crushing his erection against the mattress. Its not right. He knows this. She is his...mother? Sister? Too close for this, he knows that much. She isn't thinking straight. Some poor reaction to all the trauma she went through. He can't let her do this to herself. To them.
"Jane, I need to sleep," he says, his voice muffled in the pillow, not daring to address the trajectory of her fingers, what she did to him. What she was about to do.
He braces for her reaction.
She's stiffened up next to him and he feels the anger and hurt radiate off her in waves. He is terrified she will press the issue but mercifully, after a minute she climbs out of bed. He lets out a long shaky sigh as she disappears into her room.