(Definition of terms at the end of the chapter)

August 23rd, 2183

SSV Normandy SR-1 | Deep Space

Dr. Liara T'Soni | Associate Professor of Xenocultural Studies at the University of Serrice

"Shepard, I..."

Liara feels her tongue stick to the top of her mouth. Shepard just came back from a mission; she'd shucked her armored plates off and unzipped the undersuit from the collar down to her hipbones, leaving only a sleeveless compression garment that clings like paint and ends just centimeters below the curve of her breasts. She walked straight to the med-bay to show Liara something they found amid the wrecks of the Geth, pausing in the doorway only long enough to hand off her rifle and shotgun to the quartermaster who was chasing behind her like a malyk kitten afraid it would be abandoned.

Liara was glad for the diversion he provided. Her review of the ship's unsecured camera feeds gave her time to scramble back to her lair in the storeroom before she was caught peeking around the corner, waiting to see if Shepard came back alive. Pining like some hopeless maiden in a filthy romance novel. Her current guilty pleasure is the Sunset of Malari series despite the fact it's so full of anachronisms about eighth-wave industrialization that the anti-Justicar rants and fetishization of Ardat-Yakshis barely register to her.

Now Shepard stands against the inside of the bulkhead between the storeroom and med-bay, back against the wall, hips thrust forward. Her abdominal muscles clench and dances as breathing slows gradually after the exertion and adrenaline of combat fades. Her skin shines with sweat. Liara wishes she had so exhausted this fearsome creature.

The smell of her is salty and musky and just so slightly bitter. Not objectionable in the least. Shepard smells oceanic, like the beach near Sonalere after the spring bloom of seaweed recedes. Her abdomen is laddered heavily with muscle, leading to an angular plane of flat sinew below the last pair of her-abs, wasn't that what they're called?-is flat and smooth and disappears into the bottom half of the suit like an arrow in flight. Her hip bones are pronounced on her lean frame, and Liara's thumbs would sit so perfectly in the dips above them as they danced. All that muscle means she's not overly soft, most of her body fat in her small breasts, on the sides of her hips and over her ribcage. The anatomy books and other materials she got from the extranet say many things about human women, and if Shepard would just be so kind as to unzip the suit another few centim-focus, Liara!-it amazes Liara that her skin is pink rather than blue or purple like an asari, or gray or green like a salarian, dusted with freckles and tiny scars.

It's as if the sculptor felt such lust while carving an idol of the huntress goddess Kurinth that her hands shook and she nicked the stone.

Yet Shepard is treating this as a normal conversation, even as eezo and saltwater weeps from every fold on Liara's back and the material of her jumpsuit rasps against oversensitive nerves in the tender furrows of skin over the arched spread of both her spines. The urge to meld is a hot, aching not at the top of her skull. If this behavior is normal amongst what humans consider 'a lesbian', then lesbians are either socially inept, oblivious, or evil. Does she not know how affecting this is for Liara? Does she not realize that Liara can't have a simple conversation about the mission with Shepard standing so close she could touch, looking so powerful? Half-nude? Do lesbians routinely torture each other?

"...I honestly did not hear that last question," Liara admits.

That snaps Shepard out of her excited recounting of the mission, which apparently included finding the Prothean data disc which she offered to Liara with a gleeful smile.

"Are you feeling alright, doctor?"

Before Liara can come up with a convincing lie or beg the Commander to take her to bed and ravage her just to end the confusion, she feels a broad palm pressed to her forehead. Shepard closes her eyes.

"You don't feel hot." Shepard gives her a smile that seems to hang from left to right. What did Kaidan say that was called? A smirk? "Well, you don't feel fevered at least."

Ninety-eight point six, Liara recalls. Her body is that hot inside. The idea of feeling inside Shepard opens a whole new branch of thinking that Liara can't indulge until she's alone. She rarely sets the shower that high and certainly won't be taking anything but cold showers if Shepard insists on being so tempting and so casual at the same time.

"Our...our body...we're warm-blooded, but not as warm. I doubt you could tell."

Shepard chuckles, her voice lower than before. The sound of it lands straight between Liara's legs and tightends the knot at the top of her skull, calling on her to take pleasure both physical and spiritual from Shepard's body and mind.

"Oh, I could. Project Valkyrie. I was sent with a couple of other female biotics to train with some commandos. Serrice City Guard. Terrifying ladies. I couldn't hold a candle to them in terms of stealth or precision biotics, but I was an excellent shot. The thing I was best at was being a medic. We were patrolling the outside rim of the wall when a pygmy skitter-snake bit one of my squadmates. So I know what a fevered asari feels like."

Does she know what we feel like in other ways? Liara wonders. Perhaps this connection Liara feels or hopes exists like a taut wire with current sparking down it is her own fantasy, and it means nothing to Shepard. Perhaps it means little and Liara is simply a conveniently located source of sexual release. What was the insult Gunnery Chief Williams used?

'Crest-chaser.'

At least Liara thinks it was an insult. Her jab at servicewoman Waaberi for reserving one of the five-sense extranet pods on the release day of the new movie in the Justicar's Fall series was the subject of much amusement among the men of the crew, and also some rather nasty chatter among the xenophobic ones.

But William's use of the term had little of the venom of the way she spat out 'blink' and as much humor as she now uses when calling Garrus a 'spike'.

Liara is a fan of the series, of course. She is a maiden with a pulse, and there's a reason the bondmate team of director and lead actress have obliterated the market share of Earth style asari-human pornography and sent some Earth event called the Oscars scrambling to the Citadel to file legislation blocking productions not filmed on human worlds. According to discussion boards, the next one will be partially shot in a place called New Zealand. Hopefully, she'll have time to get to an asari world and watch it before she finds herself in front of a friend of her mother's at a conclave or at the university and cannot speak cogently to the plot.

"You feel fine," Shepard decides, her thumb doing half of a circle across Liara's temple before she catches herself.

"Have you had asari lovers before?" Liara blurts out.

Shepard pulls her hand back as if Liara's skin had become so hot she'd burned herself.

"I'm sorry, Liara. I...I did not..."

Shepard's blush darkens her skin so much that her freckles disappear.

"I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable."

She turns towards the door, resting her thumb over the biometric.

"I got permission from the Council to clear your record with C-Sec and with the SPECTRE database. We can drop you off next time we're at the Citadel, or if we pass by a planet that you'd rather stay at, let me know."

The door opens with a hiss of contracting seals and then slides back down behind Shepard.

"Kate!"

But Shepard has already hurried out of the med-bay.

"What in Athame's name did I do wrong?" Liara asks the metal of the bulkhead.

Liara remains in her cabin for two shipboard days and only emerges when Wrex lumbers into the medbay and lets himself in. His bulk means that Chakwas has to press herself up against her desk.

"Come on, pup. You took it, you do the honors."

He holds out his big hand.

"I did what?" Liara mumbles, though she takes his hand with little thought.

Benezia talked about the krogan in rather more liberal terms than most matriarchs, and in fact, in more liberal terms in which she herself talked about other issues. Sometimes krogan dignitaries visited the estate, including a female to a young Liara's surprise. It is nearly unheard of for one to leave Tuchanka, yet there she was, drinking ryncol with Benezia like they'd known each other long before Liara was born. She's never felt unsafe around krogans, like maidens her age often complain of. She's only felt unsafe around individual krogan who have been hostile to her.

Liara wonders whether in a kinder universe without the genophage, and with a better end to the Rebellions, krogan and asari would be sister races to each other. No other race lives so long. No other can reach the same biotic heights, even if a krogan warlord like that is rare indeed and requires centuries of self-scarring to infuse enough eezo. Asari bodies could weather the radiation of Tuchanka just as they weather the neutron particles bleeding off Thessia's eezo-laced rivers, lakes and oceans. They could inhabit the same cities, intermarry, raise taele and litters of krogan pups in the communal homes both species prefer. The shorter-lived races would thrive under a shield of krogan muscle and ferocity whilst being tutored by asari with their mastery of sciences and the Art of Athame.

Wrex leads her to the mess hall, where a row of neatly arranged bones span half the longest table. It's almost as tall as Liara is, beginning in a spade-like plate with a jagged edge and trailing down in three parallel chains made up of a series of lumpy cylinders of bone, each as wide as Liara's entire neck. A memory of the professor's voice from in her early university days floats to the surface of her mind. "Krogan spines are triply redundant and attach to a plate under the outer skull."

Shepard is watching from the corner, conversing in a whisper with Williams and Alenko by turns.

"What is that?" she asks, afraid someone will answer.

"Vast'kak," Wrex grunts. "Your kill, your trophy."

Shepard chuckles.

"Was scary as hell, doc. One minute, you're slumped next to Alenko like a rag doll and then your hand reaches out and you ripped that krogan's spine out. Peeled the armor like a can, shattered the scales, peeled him like a banana. One pull. Then you passed out. I'd cracked his shields and put a round in under his chin but..."

Shepard sighs.

"He had me. Shotgun was heat-cycling, and I'd used everything but my barrier staggering him. Could've used a grenade, if I could've gotten him to open his mouth. You probably saved my life."

"This was the one from the mines," Liara murmurs. "He killed Emnyi, and I told him I'd have his vast'kak for a grave trophy and have it sent to her wife on Tuchanka."

Gunnery Chief Williams whistles.

"You keep your promises. Remind me to never piss you off. Looks like Prank Night is canceled, LT."

Alenko chuckles.

"If you were planning to prank the doc, I got bad news for you, Gunny."

Something moves behind Liara. Something too dense for its mass and sizzling with enriched eezo. It hurtles towards her and she acts on instinct. Spinning around, she flicks her fingers for a throw field, follows with a warp with one hand while pressing the other palm to the deck to raise a sphere-barrier around herself.

At the far end of the cargo deck, a tube of eezo water splatters into the bulkhead in a luminescent spatter of water, eezo granules, and warped plastic.

Ashley stares at it, blinking far more rapidly than is normal. How many strange cues can one species have?

"That was from your locker?"

"Yup."

"Damn, LT. That had to be thirty yards!" Williams sputters.

"The mass changed," Liara murmurs. Her cheeks heat up. This reminds her too much of the first time she woke up with dawn pains, desperate to meld with anyone who'd have her but twenty years too young to consider a partner. "I could sense the eezo."

"Sort of like those earth fish..." Tali adds. "Sharks! Asari can sense nearby eezo, gravity, and changes in mass. It's like those sharks can sense a fish from its bioelectrical emissions."

The usually cheerful quarian clutches her middle and rubs her arms, shifting back and forth on her feet.

"No more Shark Week for Tali," Shepard declares, loud enough the entire room can hear. "Bad enough I take her on missions. I don't need anyone else traumatizing her."

"I'm older than Liara!" Tali whines. "...relatively speaking."

"Still my kid sister," Shepard huffs.

"I did not agree to that."

"You don't have to agree to other people caring about you, Tali. We just do. Accept it and be glad."

The crowd quiets. No one seems to have expected Ashley Williams to declare an alien her honorary kid sister.

Shepard cocks her head, looking at Liara like she's never seen her before.

"Interesting."

Do humans never use enough words? Do they ever say a single Lucen-fucked thing that she can understand? Liara wants to scream at Shepard.

"Those are sealed. Faraday cage. Designed for zero EM shadow on an omnitool. I trained on that sort of thing with the commandos. But I could barely tell if they tossed a raw fuel pellet at me. Not all of them would've spotted that."

"The ancient T'Soni were paladins," Liara mumbles. "Putting down the Malari Queens' attack on the western shores is how we secured our titles as protectors of Sonalere."

Williams snorts.

"Bona fide warrior princess. I'm sold!"

The door chime warbles. Liara leans over to the computer's haptics and opens the audio channel.

"It's me."

She scrambles to straighten her posture and unlocks the door. This time, Athame be praised, Shepard is in her fatigues, instead of less than half of her armor. The sleeves end at the elbow with a pair of large pouches over her biceps, and more pouches and straps line the thighs. Attachment points for three kinetic barrier discs can be seen and several chemical canisters for quick recharges are fed through the webbing.

Her favorite pistol hangs in a holster on her left calf. Liara's research indicates it is called a Lamtkta, a pirated version of the Carnifex created to Tuchanka and named, naturally, after a lewd slang term for krogan male anatomy. A nameless engineer most likely from Clan Urdnot-no other clan has enough educational infrastructure for occupations besides 'soldier', 'breeder', and 'medic'-reworked the stolen schematics of the already brutish human weapon, enlarging the barrel, upper frame, ammo block, acceleration coils, and firing chamber to take advantage of their thicker bones and stronger muscles. Krogan hands are tiny in proportion to their bulk, not much larger than a human's. And her extranet research indicates Shepard's hands are extremely generous for a human female, a discovery that led to more questions, which led to Liara doubling her list of terms to search. Lesbian postings on the extranet lead in a thousand baffling directions at once.

Unlike most human women, Shepard has the hands, height, length of limbs, and broadness of hips, shoulders, and stance to use it unmodified. Fearsome as she is, Chief Williams' build is shorter, more padded, and more 'womanly' than the commander. The recoil would not dissipate along William's bones before it reached her shoulder and shredded the tendons.

Shepard's lean is the same one she used several days ago. Her back is to the wall, her hips slung forward. Her legs span the gap between door and Liara's cot, with her boots braced on the frame. She's not standing, she's forcing her surroundings to support her weight. Her shoulders have lost some of their usual tension and the grayness of the skin under her eyes is not as dark, a clue she's had more and better sleep.

On the hangar deck training the troops, she stands tall and straight and when she spars with them, male and female alike-something that the Navigator, Pressley, seems offended by-she prefers to take them to the ground and disable them with rapid sequences of blows. Several of her holds and throws are ones Liara recognizes from T'Soni commandos, and if struck with Shepard's biotics, would kill her opponent instantly. There's an appeal to watching an indignant Ashley Williams pulled to the ground like a grouse that got too close to a malyk's hiding place and couldn't take wing fast enough.

But outside this room, Liara's never seen her slouch. Never seen her lose the stiffened, forced presence that so resembles the ancient human artwork of queens.

A warrior relaxed is still a warrior, Liara reminds herself. She's not a halfway-drunk classmate draping herself over my bed to talk about last night's party.

Shepard is off duty, and slouched in Liara's quarters in a uniform of fabric, titanium weave, and plastic bracing with only her sidearm and chocolate at her disposal. Yet she could no doubt do more damage wearing that than a team of ordinary soldiers could do in full hardsuits. She drags her blunt nails across her right arm, scratching at some itch that must lie under the reddish, nearly translucent hairs. The curl of her fingers is slow and rhythmic and the sinews at her elbow flex and shift like a polar malyk slinking low in the reeds while stalking a turtle. Liara's brain recalls vividly how good she looked half-naked and her imagination spirals into the potential uses of fingers so powerful and nimble she can work that gun and intricate biotics with equal ease.

One pouch on Shepard's thighs has several plasticized wrappers poking out of it. Garish things of orange and black and silver. Shepard glances down, unbuttons the pouch, and hands one over.

"Want one?"

Liara reaches for her omnitool to deactivate the translator. Because of the constant, soft buzz of it, she leaves it off when she's working, or around only Shepard who seems all too happy to practice her Serraci.

"Code Orange Chocolate Missile," Shepard explains. "Obscure Earth candy."

She plucks another from her pouch and unwraps it. It's molded in the shape of a torpedo, complete with little pressings on the wider 'warhead' end, obviously meant to mimic the look of the steering thrusters.

"How is a candy obscure? It's not an ancient text!"

Shepard shrugs.

"I have to hit up four stores, on average, to find some. Maybe now that I'm a Spectre, I can just get a crate shipped."

Liara watches Shepard bite the tip off of hers, revealing a core of syrupy looking golden something flecked with what looks like bits of crystallized fruit. She unwraps her own and mimics Shepard.

Goddess. What is this coated in?

She hopes her groan isn't too whorish as the sweet brown substance dissolves on her tongue.

"First time with chocolate?" Shepard jokes.

Liara holds up her hand.

This must be handled with scientific rigor. Shepard watches her intently. When Liara dabs her tongue into the golden, nearly painfully sweet filling, Shepard presses her lips together and her pupils dilate.

"What can I do for you?" Liara asks after her senses settle from the intensity of the flavors.

Shepard cups the back of her neck with one hand and rubs. It's a tic Liara's noticed before, unique to Shepard. Indicates embarrassment.

"We didn't really get to talk about it before, but you're not a prisoner. You're welcome to leave. I came to tell you that we're hitting a small geth outpost for the Fifth Fleet and between it and the Relay, there's a human colony with an Armali City Council office and an embassy."

"I see."

Does she want me to leave?

"What is your wish, Shepard? You're the commander. Do you want me off your ship?"

Shepard's gazes drifts to the deck and stays there.

"No. But..."

"Then I'm staying. Your crew is welcoming...or welcoming enough. I believe Wrex is warming up to me."

"Wrex liked you right off, he said. He says you're so stubborn you remind him of a commando he tangled with centuries ago."

"It's settled," Liara says, praying that some of her mother's acclaimed charisma and oratory prowess might be hereditary despite her entire social life serving as evidence to the contrary. "You might need to consult a Prothean expert on short notice, so my presence is essential to you. The last two data discs you recovered offered me more non-corrupted Prothean text than my previous eight digs. So it is beneficial for me that I remain."

"That's all very businesslike. But you shouldn't feel obligated. Don't you have a home?" Shepard asks, lifting her eyes from her boots to look at Liara.

"There's a House T'Soni compound on the slope of Whitescale Mountain near Sonalere. When my mother sits in advisement over the city, she does so from there."

"Sounds fancy."

"I have not lived there for more than days since I was forty-nine, Shepard. I only call it home because it isn't a tent. With my mother off-planet, If I went home I would be shadowed by our elites and the entire complex blanketed by the House Guard's regulars and reservists. Surrounded by cooks and assistants and accountants and maids. Coddled by family money and quizzed on my role as heir by my old tutors."

Shepard holds up her hands.

"Relax, Liara. I get it. You're more an atmo-tent on a wind-blasted rock kind of asari. You do remember this is a warship, right? A small warship operating without support. We could be attacked, or boarded, or crash land, or have an all-hands to rescue civilians dirt side. I can't in good conscience have a non-combatant aboard."

"Tali?"

"She's as precise with that rebuilt geth shotgun as she is with her omnitool. Engineer Adams thinks she's got cybernetics given how easily she can lift parts. And she's quarian. She's been trained since she could walk in boarding, shipboard combat, and crash landings and all that."

Wrex isn't military, but it hardly matters given his background. Garrus is a turian, and he's a Vakarian at that, Liara reminds herself.

"If I explained my survival training from the commandos when I was younger and before the expedition, could you assist me, Shepard? Even if I'm not front line, I could become as skilled as the CIC crew, or the engineers."

Shepard catches her lower lip in her teeth.

"Yeah. Meet me in the cargo bay, one hour."

"Aye-aye, Commander."

"Three targets, nineteen seconds. Only four wasted rounds. Not bad, doc. Especially not with a pistol I can tell you've never held before. But your form is off."

"I'm sorry, Shepard. I'm used to the Acolyte. This is far lighter."

Ashley lifts her head from the weapon bench.

"The what?"

"Asari-made pistol," Shepard says over her shoulder. "Uses eezo and ice for ammo, spliced with steel wire and a carbon nanotube weave. Scary on its own. Damn thing hits like a missile launcher in the hands of a biotic, because it aligns with their fields to overcharge and degrade the eezo. Each detonates a three inch warp field. A proficient operator can make the slug lighter or heavier as it leaves the barrel."

"What's wrong with ammo blocks, like the Good Lord intended?" Ashley teases, waving one around. "Not good enough for you, prin-"

Shepard gives Ashley a look that makes the irreverent marine's jaw shut with a click of the teeth.

"Asari units use eezo-ice ammo or eezo-carbon ammo because it means your ammo is just the dregs of your water rations and ambient humidity. In a pinch, the waste recyclers in their suits can extract water and eezo. Any planet has easily scraped carbon. The unit I trained with was six huntresses plus me and they carried two field fabricators broken down three ways each. We had some sort of fancy shovel that dug through nearly anything you swung it at, plus miniature ore processors and enough hard tubing and carbon blocks to rig up a light vehicle."

"Absolute independence from supply chain matters on deep cover missions that last years. We did a four-month run on a desert moon the next system over. Just us, the gear from our drop pod, thirty days' rations, whatever wildlife was big enough to shoot without vaporizing it, and about two hundred LOKI and FENRIS mechs for a Red Team. We only went home when the command and control for the mechs reported zero functional units."

"The last ten or so got smart, set themselves up in mixed groups, welded scrap to themselves to break up their outlines in the sand, and hit us at night. We had to rig up a buggy and chase them around."

Does she have other stories from her time with the Serrice Guard? Would she share them with me? Might that be what humans call an 'icebreaker'? Liara wonders.

Shepard chuckles.

"They didn't complain about how heavy my rations were after I dropped a charging FENRIS in the middle of the night. Apparently, human night vision does better with the wavelengths that reflect off moons. Thessia doesn't have one. The only light at night is from plants and algae that absorb enough eezo."

Chief Williams whistles appreciatively.

"I do miss that gun, though. Curved, shiny, folded up tighter than any of ours. Sexy as hell."

The Chief rolls her eyes at Shepard and leans back over her workbench and the parts sprawled out across it.

"The design is classified, Commander. You would not have been allowed to keep it. Only Justicars, commandos and certain civilians with either family connections, permits, or both can purchase them. But if you can get me access to an asari-made fabricator, I have the schematics memorized."

"Good thought, doc. Meanwhile..."

Suddenly, Shepard is all around her, one hand splayed on her hip, tugging it back, one sliding down her right arm, squeezing here and there. Adjusting the angle of her elbow, wrist, and shoulder. Making her body yield under the stern grip of powerful fingers.

Liara knew both humans and asari were endothermic or "warm-blooded" in Earth terms and that humans ran hotter by nearly seven degrees Kelvin. But Goddess it's different to experience it so intimately. To have Shepard's breath on her neck, to have her hands mold her like metal in a forge. The urge to meld gathers into an ache at the top of her skull and baser and more tactile impulses slick her azure and thicken her pulse to a throb between her legs.

Shepard presses against her back, shifting planes of hard, cotton-clad sinew. The unique human gift of hair tickles her shoulder and in the edge of her vision dance curls of a color she doesn't have a good Serraci word for. Gold thread dyed in blood, perhaps. The pungency of the cheap soap the navy uses is cut by something subtler. Something alive. Her human biotics make her presence unfiltered. The eezo in her body washes over her until Liara can feel little else. It reminds her of diving naked into the polar seas for her Rite of Kurinth.

Every place Shepard's skin touches Liara's feels like a brand.

"There. Much better stance. We'll practice with a shotgun later. A real lifesaver, when you're recharging your biotics, but the krogan is not quite dead yet."

She's released, and Shepard takes a sudden step back. She makes some guttural sound and Liara's omnitool warbles out an indication that it wasn't something it could translate.

"Sorry if I was...forward."

She was. Athame have mercy, she certainly was, but Liara's not complaining.

"I'll reset the sim. This time you'll only have one crate to work with and I'm going to put a krogan in. For a challenge."

Shepard taps her omnitool and the makeshift simulation in the cargo bay resets. Three mechs, two human mercs, a turian, and a krogan appear as white-and-gray holograms laid over flash-forged glass.

"Can it model their skeletons?" Liara asks.

"Sure. Why? Actually, never mind. I want it to be a surprise."

She taps on her omnitool again. "Done."

"My stance is better, correct?"

Shepard hums, walking around her in a slow circle, looking her over from boots to crest-tips.

"Spread your legs," she commands.

"Commander, I'm not sure this is the pla-"

Ashley breaks into a very un-marine-like fit of giggles. Shepard approaches, slides her leg in between Liara's and knocks her boots against the insole of her left foot and then her right to spread her stance.

"There. Now you're perfect."

"O-oh. Of course! I misunderstood what you meant."

For detailed entries on all, see the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex and A Guide to Thessia and Asari Culture for Non-Asari

malyk - Any member of the Malykitu genus, made up of nineteen species of catlike pack predators, ranging from 20 kilograms ('desert malyk') to 600 kilograms ('polar malyk'). Malyks are incredibly similar to a lion or tiger in appearance with two key differences: their eyes are far larger proportionally owing to Thessia's lack of a moon and they have three tails with broad tips, one side of which is hairless and studded with Element Zero. Their leaps to attack prey are aided by shaped channels in their ribs and leg bones which mimic a lift-throw-push field sequence, enabling them to jump long distances at high speed, and they have opposing-direction eezo channels in their fangs that give their bite a weak 'warp' like effect. They generate light with the tails to signal pack members and also create barrier fields on the tips to strike prey or pest species.

Members of all species are domesticated by asari and are docile to the 'alpha female' asari, though the popularity of the larger breeds as pets is lower owing to expense.