The first time she goes, it's by her own hand.

"Please," she whispers, desperate and breathless. She's asking for an intangible thing - the usually glib Commander at a loss for words and begging for pleasure in his arms. A wish born of crazed and consuming lust in the throes of their first taste of intimacy.

Thane doubles down. His head is bowed to her breast, tongue flicking one stiff, dusky nipple as she writhes beneath him. His hand rises to her neglected breast, teasing, testing, delighting in every desirous sound escaping her lungs.

Consumed with wanting - never would he have thought he could inflict such pleasure on her alien body this way. Her voice is live wire, a rake over the brightly burning coals of his lust.

Between them, her hand moves with fury at the apex of her thighs, the other clamped firm on the back of his neck. She's rigid, panting, clenched teeth and seething breath and she's breaking - all the voice leaving her body at once, clamoring in his ears, shooting straight to his groin when he realizes she's hit her peak.

She's coming for him.

Heaven help him, she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.


Barely a day later they're tangled again, pressed against the cold steel of the life support door.

"We should take this upstairs," she murmurs into his kiss.

They should. But she's far from insistent. Thane is a disciplined man, but Shepard asks too much of him if she thinks he can endure two minutes of restraint in the elevator up to her cabin. Now that he's learned the sweet heat of her body, the throbbing pulse of ecstasy inside her…

No, he can't wait a second longer.

It's all he can do to steady his hands as he strips her, eager to put his newly acquired learning to the test. The slick warmth of her makes him groan, scaled fingertips sliding over her swollen, aching bud. Seeking hips pitch into his hand, her breath rushing out against his lips as he works her from wanting to desperate. He's steady, but only barely, tense and spurred on by the memory of her spectacular climax just hours before. His first touches are gentle, teasing - indirect, heedless to her constricted sounds of frustration. It isn't long before she's moaning around her lower lip, teeth leaving soft intents where they meet her flesh. She cries out when she comes, mouth wet and gasping. Her knees shake, thighs clamping around his hand, oversensitized, begging for more. Every twitch of his fingers ripples along her limbs in a dazzling spectacle of ecstasy.

When she finally comes down, her skin is aglow in a satin sheen of sweat. Her cunt is so hot he can feel the heat radiating from her inches away, hot like the nuclear heart of a star. He brushes over her clit one last time just to see her body shudder, alive with sensitivity.

From her lips, a breathy gasp - his name.

Beautiful. He can't believe she's his.


Ahrarot. The relay.

Presence in lieu of solipsism is a tragic and nauseating reality.

She's in his arms again, quiet, fearful, and small like he's never seen her. Her words come slowly - each trembling syllable touched by the wingtips of death as she sailed on by, ripped from its clutches at the last second. But oh, at such an awful cost.

Time will tell what kind of woman she will be after this.

She almost stops him with her sorrows. Three hundred thousand lost their lives and she retreats into the arms of a lover - how is it fair?

"It matters not," he soothes. "It cannot be undone, no matter how deeply you regret and grieve. Take what happiness you can, Siha, and do not let this fleeting pleasure trouble you further."

Her arms linger about his neck, her mouth twisted in an uncharacteristic display of upset.

"Take me away from here," she whispers, a grievous fight raging behind her words. "I don't want to think right now."

When their mouths melt together he can taste the unshed tears on her lips.

He will be selfish on her behalf. She may never know much he needs this too.

"As you command."

He lets his body take over. Sinks into the memory of brighter times like a hot, salted bath.

She's spread out before him, prone and vulnerable as he's ever seen her, soft skin stretched over a beautifully woven core of muscle and steel. The scent of her ignites him - it doesn't seem correct that the scent of her body should stir him so, but the memories tether them together and his body screams to please her, to taste her wellspring, the most sacred and guarded part of her.

He curls an arm around her thigh, smooths his hand down her belly, the tips of his fingers skimming the liquid heat seeping from her body.

With a deep inhale, he bows his head to taste her.

The first touch of his tongue is electric. She stutters beneath him, a reaction so profound that for a moment he fears he's caused her pain, and then she moans. A hand blinks to his scalp, her hips twitch against his mouth. Her voice is hoarse.

"Fuck."

Neither of them have any coherent thoughts after that. He opens the wet core of her body with his tongue and buries his mouth between her legs. Whatever may or may not await him beyond her trembling thighs ceases to matter.

She's so soft, so hot, so intensely arousing it makes him dizzy with need. The only battle now is happening in his head - the impossible decision to pump the turgid need between his legs or push his fingers into the impossibly tight, wet, perfect cavern beneath his mouth. Victory is decided the moment he lifts his eyes up along the expanse of her body. Her worries at bay, her tired human body taut like a bowstring - but her face - goddess, her face is enraptured, slack-jawed and softened by pleasure. He mouths deeper into her cunt and groans, delirious, finally conceding, diving his fused fingers into her molten channel to fuck her slow and hard, as his neglected cock begs him to.

It's worth it - goddess, it's worth it. She's rocking against him now, fucking herself on his fingers and tongue. By the end of the night cycle he'll be more than familiar with her favorite human obscenities. His vision goes white when she moans his name.

"Please, Thane, please, please-"

He acquiesces with his tongue, words in his mind like a mantra. Yes, Siha. Anything you desire.

Superhuman titanium fingers grip his crest in desperation. He can feel her tension bleeding through in every trembling twitch of her thighs, the beautiful machine of her body coiling in on itself in anticipation, voice rising, fucking his face for all she's worth.

She finally breaks. Her voice cracks, her body quakes. She's a marvel, shocks of ecstacy rocking her such that he's nearly jealous - an orgasm so intense it steals his breath. Is it truly this good for her? What manner of pleasure could drive itself so powerfully from her body that she screams herself hoarse and loses herself to pure animalistic instinct like this?

She writhes, incoherent and mindless.

He won't stop until she begs for mercy.


In his heart, he knows no amount of individual grief can compare to the devastating loss felt by hundreds of thousands in the aftermath of the relay.

But on a personal level… the simple human consequence thrust upon them feels worse.

Incarceration is perhaps too light a sentence. And yet this abyssal knife cuts deep, a terrible wound in what little happiness he's built for himself.

How long until he'll hold her again? How long will he have to return to the dark solitude of longing, subsisting only on memories in her absence? They've only just begun, and he with so little time left.

Her pain is harder to soothe now that he must soothe his own.

It's not until she's cried herself hoarse in his arms that their lips touch. Together, they decide not to acknowledge that yawning void of uncertainty in favor of the shallow comfort of life's baser urges.

Shepard has turned her attention to other things. The shape of his ridges, in particular. She's sprawled between his knees, one hand on his thigh and the other twisting up and down his length as she gazes up at him with half-lidded eyes. Thane groans, the sight of her almost more overwhelming than the feeling of her wet tongue slipping down every inch of his shaft. Her lips envelop him, her hand slips between her legs, and it isn't long before he begs to be inside her.

She climbs astride him and oh- She's a dream, a manifestation of power descending on him like a warrior angel. Plush thighs ensconce his naked hips, taking him into her body one agonizing inch at a time until there's nothing left but a flash of magenta between the lascivious spread of her cunt around the base of his cock.

Her hips settle for only a moment and then she's grinding against his scales with quick, shallow thrusts. Her shallow gasps turn from wanton to breathless, her fingers clench and twitch against his shoulders.

She shudders and cries out. Throws her head back and breaks like a woman possessed.

She comes with her entire body, and - sweet gods. She's impossibly hot, incandescent, a luxuriant velvet fist of pleasure. The way she pulses around him, her core clenching and releasing, walls rippling around every inch of him buried to the hilt inside her. The wail of climax from her perfect mouth, the pulse of her scorching cunt sends him over the edge and he spills himself inside her, fighting with everything he's worth not to close his eyes, to remember this forever, the desperate undercurrent of tension in her body as she thrusts herself against him to ride out the aftershocks of her climax.

He reaches for her, determined in this moment to never let her go again. She gasps out a harsh breath, snared in a net of hypersensitive, electric nerves.

Thane is in awe, this battle-hardened woman atop him more vulnerable than he's ever seen her. Naked, trembling, and breathless. Every touch like lightning on her skin.

Siha.

He begins to understand, then, why humans are so embattled over sexual intimacy. The trust may as well be written across her in searing neon lines. She is more than an open heart, more vulnerable than her nakedness. For these few moments she is well and truly at his mercy, her breath hissing from her lungs at every shock of contact until her heart slows and the nuclear heat of their joining is carried away on recycled starship air.

At last, she collapses into his arms, the heavy drape of her body an unspoken transition into intimacy's twilight. Peace and softness, sated and heaving and touched with the sweat of exertion.

His arms fold around her and they breathe together in the quiet air.

He won't speak - not until he's sure she's sleeping soundly by his side. He doesn't know how long he sits awake with her, afraid to close his eyes for fear of losing a second more.

He presses a soft kiss to her hair.

Time is so painfully short.


I think Shepard is really super hot and I have big gay feelings for her.