It's approximately two hours until you get off work. You're in your office again, and you're waiting for the email from Pallin giving you the go-ahead to investigate your new lead; you can't seem to take a single step without wading through red tape that figuratively sticks to your spurs and trips you up, and meanwhile whoever's perpetrating this crime's just running free, just sitting pretty in his or her black-market mansion somewhere on Omega or some other place filled with criminal scum.
The walk back from Pallin's administrative complex was uneventful. You'd spent the time ruminating and scanning the area shamefully for anyone who could have witnessed your depravity. Only as you took the elevator back to your office did you realize that you were unzipped, though your cock had mercifully softened and retracted back to within its plates. Thank the Spirits for the little things.
Time seems to move at a sluggish pace and you drum your claws on your plastic desk, leaving miniscule scratches that mar its smoothness. In your boredom, you begin to idly look up people on the extranet. This is your other dirty little secret, far less career and reputation destroying than your sexual deviancy. Somehow you find your fingers typing out "Jane Shepard," a common enough name, and somehow, you find yourself searching through databases for the woman who's haunted your dreams.
It's moments like this that you love your job and the clearance that it grants you, even if it grants you nothing else—no dignity, no freedom, no autonomy—and you're greedily devouring every detail her file has. You can feel like you're growing closer to her, you can pretend that you understand this human, this vexing temptress, this complete and utter mystery.
Her file's mostly clean, and you can see that she's only twenty, just one year younger than you. She was a refugee from Mindoir, which you quickly open a new window to read about; the many human colonies lost to poor infrastructure caused by greedy expansionism never piqued your interest. Until now. You suppose that explains her scars.
You read that she's a trainee for the Systems Alliance special forces, with the rank of N2, and you feel a dark surge of jealousy clench its clawed fist into your heart. She's the future that you can never have; she has all the opportunities that your father dangled over your head only to take away with the mantra of "A good turian always knows his place." Spirits, you hate him. You hate him so much.
Disgust leaves a bitter taste in your mouth that you can't seem to get rid of, and you shut off your terminal and stalk out of your office to clear your head, any prospective emails from your boss completely forgotten. Shepard's probably riding his cock that you've seen, you've seen your boss's fucking dick, you got off to your boss fucking someone, you're so fucking sick—and you feel like the prepackaged lunch you picked at hours ago is fighting its way out of your gullet up into your throat. You feel like you're drowning; you never learned to swim, you were too heavy.
The Wards are loud and dingy and crowded, like always, as you walk home to change out of your uniform. Yes, you're cutting work, but you suppose you were never a particularly good type of turian.
Your apartment is empty and reminds you of your complete pitifulness, like everything else in your life. As you unclasp your buckles and turn your uniform inside-out, you dispassionately notice a whitish stain of dextro-proteins and dead genetic fluids caked to the inside of your crotch. You throw it in the wash and sit naked on your couch, wondering what you should wear, if you even decide to go out today after all.
Eventually, you choose something muted and dull, like most of your clothing. The time you spent waiting for the wash to finish means that your shift, and most of your coworkers' shifts, are over. The eternal evening lights sting your eyes a little bit, and you see a turian in a C-Sec uniform walk into Flux, a redheaded human in his arms. You don't want to know if it's Jane, you don't think you could bear to see her again.
You think about following them to fulfil your sick voyeuristic masochism, but you don't.
In your frustration, you waylay the bars and nightclubs that your coworkers frequent and hand a left into Chora's Den , a seedier dive. There's a seat open in front of a poledancing asari stripper; she looks suspiciously like your boss's receptionist. You wonder if maybe they're the same, but dismiss the notion; all asari look the same to you anyway. You know that's horribly racist, but asari on the Citadel don't really tend to get jobs at C-Sec; you haven't met a single one that wasn't blue, chipper, and working as eye candy.
You lean forward in your seat. Anything to forget about today. She smiles at you, like she knows you, and gyrates before you, running her delicate fingers down her cheeks to her thighs, cupping her perfect breasts along the way. Reflexively, you reach out to touch her, but she bats your hand away and sultrily whispers, "Touching's extra," before she drops down to her knees and spreads her legs wide. You can see how hard she's trying to make it look like she wants you, how hard she's trying to make it look like she isn't dead inside.
You decide you don't care as you hastily grab your wallet and shove a few hundred credits into her panties without counting them off—you don't care about money anymore, there's nothing that you could buy to fill the emptiness in your soul. Her eyes widen for just a second as you grip her thigh roughly, then return back to the mask that she wears for all her customers. She's bending over and her fingers are digging gently into the soft folds of her flesh; she's spreading herself open for you, only you. Or at least that's what you can pretend. Your heartbeat's pulsing in your cock, and blood rushes from your head to below as you stand up and seize her upper arm, pulling her into one of Chora's Den's private rooms.
As you flip her over and throw her onto a stained mattress, she opens her mouth to inform you of her rates, but you push her head down and lift her hips up so that she's lying face-down on the bed, her still-covered ass in the air. You unzip your pants and pull her panties down, revealing that her cunt's basically the same as Shepard's, except for the hue. Air hisses through your mandibles as you inhale sharply and position yourself to thrust into her, locking her ankles into your spurs to keep her legs and sex spread wide open for you.
You ram into her again and again and again, all the hate and self-loathing and frustration from today spilling out of you through your cock, and she's shaking and spasming around you, pretending to moan and like it like the good whore she is. As you speed up, her moans begin to become syncopated with the rhythm of your hips snapping against her ass. You unspur her and flip her over; if you squint your eyes just enough you can pretend that she's Shepard, that she's the human who's haunted you through every night and every day—though of course her moans and mewls are too high-pitched and false sounding, her breasts too small and perky, her skin almost completely unmarred by scars. You can pretend.
She throws her head back and her eyes turn black and roll into her skull and suddenly there's something probing at you, a needle jabbing into the back of your head, the base of your skull. Even as your cock is buried deep within her, somehow, she's inside you, blue biotics tingling and crackling everywhere you're making contact with her. Your mind feels violated and impure and you can't fit your psyche inside your brain anymore. Your thoughts are filled to the brim and they're pouring, gushing over and filling the void between your mind and hers, creating a slurry of emotions and sensation and pure animalistic lust. The barrier between your mind and the rest of the world shatters, and you're inside her and you are everything and you are one—
The dual sensations are both titillating and disconcerting; you can feel both the pleasure of her cunt clamping around your cock and the pain of your client's ridges scraping across your vulva. Your mouth is panting for breath and whispering "Embrace eternity" with two different pairs of lungs. Your skin is blue and your facial markings are blue, and your face is flushed with heat and you're staring into your own eyes, black and wide and blue and beady. Are your heels wrapped around his chest or is your carapace slick with sweat? Maybe it's both.
You feel dizzy, and you come while thinking of Shepard, though you're not quite sure who you are as you do so.
And as soon as the connection flooded your brain, it's gone; the asari harlot's backing away from you hastily, something like horror, or perhaps sorrow, in her eyes, and injecting herself with antihistamines even as your cum spills out of her and soaks into the mattress.
You're throwing a credit chit at her and she's looking at you with wide, frightened eyes before she speaks. "Your mind. It's terrifying." She hands you a business card which you have no intention of reading, and whispers, "Please don't tell Fist I gave you this," before returning your credit card, the transaction finished. "He'd kill me for helping the competition." You know she's telling the truth, and somehow, you don't feel anything at all until much later.
As you leave the room, you remember how she shook with fear and exhaustion and you turn the consort's business card over and over in your trembling hands like it'll burst into flames at any moment. Your head is filled with fog and you know that you'll never be as close to anyone as you were then ever again. You remember Harkin, one of your many superiors, telling you "Once you go blue, you'll always stay true," and patting you on the back over a drink, a deep sorrow in his subharmonics cutting through his flippant tone.
Suddenly, as you're unlocking your front door to shuffle inside and lie down for another sleepless night, thoughts of Shepard bubble up and you realize that you will never be rid of her, you can never be rid of her, no matter how you distract yourself.
You thought that a quick fuck would solve all your problems, but it seems you can't just get rid of your obsessions with a simple trick. You crumple up the business card and throw it into the wastebasket, and the emptiness and shame in your heart threatens to consume you entirely.