4. You Are the Sweetest Limbo
It is a strange rhythm they settle into after the daily check-in on the Normandy's repairs. A quick run to the nearest dive for a pile of the daily levo and dextro specials, then off to the apartment with nothing but cheap, greasy food and their hunger.
They eat with abandon, couple in a fever on every available surface, wake up sore and tangled in each other's strange limbs. She smells like the bittersweet salt of the Exodus Sea, tastes like tears, and the thin skin of her eyelids fluttering in deep REM cycles reminds him of fragile naphidae wings.
Once upon waking, her breath hot against the quickening pulse at his neck, she tells him she dreamt of the spiky Mindoir grass poking her bare thighs as her mother chased after her with a cheap holovid cam. Before the Batarian raid. After. In some eternal dream Mindoir where she never joins the Alliance and her young life does not culminate in smoke, screams and loss.
"Oh, Garrus," she says as she fits her body to his, her alien skin smooth like water, "I ran from her until I fell into the sky. I could see planets burn. It was just like like dying."
He doesn't know what to say. She's died; he hasn't. He's mourned her. He's found her again. The woman straddling him has known anastasis, evaded the right of all life to end, yet she is here, flesh and bone.
He runs his talons across her body, from her shoulders to her thighs, hungry for her unfailing reaction: prickled skin, increased breathing, that guttural half-sigh half-moan that always ends with her arching her back. She almost growls when he brushes the sensitive tips of his fingers across her taut, pebbled nipples, and he can scent the salt in the heated slickness between her thighs. Her toes curl up against the inside of his spurs, and she laughs.
"Garrus," she says. She rakes her fingers across the sensitive skin of his waist, echoes the gesture with her teeth on his throat. Against his mouth plate she says, "Garrus."
Shivers build at the base of his spine in perfect synch with the roll of her hips, and he gives in, grips the maddening slope of her iliac crest, pulls her toward him. She cries out when he enters. This isn't Commander Shepard. This is— this is—
On impulse one afternoon he adds data parameters for human vital signs to his visor, calibrating them to her readings. Watching the numbers flicker into being inside the narrow view field makes him feel like he can quantify their exchanges. Data becomes the sole distinct shape in a sea of blurred feeling. This thing they are doing can't last, and all he'll have to cling to when it ends will be the remembered blue facts of her pulse, her heartbeat, her respiration rate.
.
In 200-word and tastefully filmed form, this chapter was the seed for the story. I'm extra fond of it, even with the softcore, so be nice to mah preshus.