Explicit rating applies.
If you prefer to avoid the sexual content, you're okay to read most of this chapter - just stop reading once they get into the car. Also be aware that this chapter contains recreational drug use.
(Revised Edition, January 2018)
05: KITHOI HEAT
GARRUS
May 27, 2177
It was the hottest summer in Citadel history.
More precisely, it was the only summer in Citadel history, at least as far as Garrus Vakarian was aware.
Three weeks prior, an overeager human tourist wielding an omni-tool flash camera had blinded one of the keepers as it was completing a routine vent diagnostic on the 1600 block of Kithoi Ward. The unforeseen consequences of the universe's most ill-advised selfie were widespread and immediate: the keeper curse had spread through the entire ward arm in less than an hour, over two-thousand city blocks had gone into low-power mode, and the enviro-con system had flat-lined overnight. Ever since, a constant feedback loop of poorly-vented power stations, degassing garbage processors, and humid, uncirculated, previously breathed air meant that the temperature kept going up, up, up, with no sign of stopping.
A team of hyperactive salarian engineers had been pulling triple-shifts to stabilize the affected systems. Luckily, life support had been salvaged in the early hours of the disaster and the air remained breathable.
Still, it was hot. Damn hot.
It was a hell of a time for Garrus to walk his first beat for C-Sec. He and the other alpha-semester graduates had been slotted to start on the first day of the upcoming pay cycle, which should have fallen nicely on the far end of his twentieth birthday next week. As it was, the graduates who had passed muster had been told to roll out early and take the heat off the senior officers. Literally. And In Garrus' experience, wherever there was heat, craziness often followed.
Beacon of galactic prosperity or no, the Citadel had crazy enough to spare. By the end of the first week in crisis mode, the infrastructure of Kithoi had collapsed beneath a seething bender that Executor Pallin personally dubbed Summer Shitstorm '77. With businesses at the mercy of constant power surges, lootings and robberies naturally followed, prompting a constant drone of call-ins. Then there was the biggest thorn in the the precinct's side: the remarkably well-organized, nigh-labyrinthine underage drug hustling ring that had popped up overnight.
Unable to afford emergency maintenance on their enviro-con systems, two of the biggest schools on the impoverished lower levels had given up on classes altogether. Ever since, roving bands of wastrel teens had been forced to find other ways to amuse themselves. Garrus had to admit, their dedication was almost impressive. If these kids were half as good in school as they were hawking hallex, the future was truly looking bright for Kithoi.
Thanks in great part to the efforts of these entrepreneurial children and a mess of day-night cycling errors, the Silversun entertainment district on the distal end of the ward arm had erupted into a steaming cauldron of sweaty bodies and loud music. The already bustling late-night clubs, casinos, and fighting rings were only too happy to turn a blind eye as the party raged on for weeks on end.
Garrus was just now wrapping up his first shift; in the past ten hours, his senior partner Melenis had dragged his increasingly lifeless body through an endless dredge of calls. They'd rescued a handful of junkies from drowning in their own puke, interrupted a few drug handoffs, recorded depositions from several victims of assault and armed robbery, and booked at least three unlicensed sex workers - one of whom had been startlingly, half-nakedly salarian.
"You did alright, Vakarian. Didn't pass out once."
Garrus pulled his eyes from the windscreen to shoot his partner a hassled glare. He'd been staring into the neon blur of Silversun for so long that all he could see was one pinkgreenblue smear of potential crime scenes, and the afterimages gave Melenis a sickly rave halo, which really wasn't her style.
Melenis was a hard old asari halfway into her matron stage, with unsympathetic, half-lidded eyes and rough purple skin. During her brief but bruising stint as his tactical rappelling instructor at the Academy, she'd always struck Garrus as being fed up with absolutely everything and everyone, all the time.
He liked her.
Smirking, she said, "Alright, if you're gonna make me roll your little baby corpse all the way back into the station, the least you can do is buy me a drink first." She waited for him to laugh, sneer, roll his eyes — anything — but all she got was a dead-eyed stare. "C'mon. You need to decompress before you try to fit back into your civvies after a high volume shift like this, or you'll snap like the Consort under an elcor diplomat."
The Consort jab was typical Melenis, but all Garrus processed was high volume shift. That was the real joke. All this effort to make himself into a big-shot Citadel Security gun, and he was still sloughing out of his plates with summer heat, cleaning up other people's messes. Without saying a word, he looked back to the blur outside the window, morosely hallucinating the cloistered, poorly ventilated rear kitchen of his mari's restaurant on Palaven, where he'd wasted away hundreds of hours chopping vegetables and rinsing grime from pots. Trapped in that glamourless, nondescript office block basement on the outskirts of Cipritine, with only his sister for company, Garrus had fantasized of shadowing his absentee father at the security precinct downtown. If only he'd known then how far his pari's dedication to law enforcement truly stretched, and at what cost, Garrus might have stayed in the kitchen.
Melenis reached across the car and smacked his arm, waking Garrus with a jolt.
"Hey rookie. No ennui on my watch." She smacked him again. "Get out of the car."
He blinked and refocused on reality. Melenis had parked out of sight in a poorly-lit alleyway. With matching dimness, Garrus slowly registered why; in a ward gone crazy, an empty squad car was liable to get jacked or vandalized. Even here, they wouldn't be able to leave it unattended it for long, because unsurprisingly, Melenis' choice watering hole turned out to be a dive bar. The place didn't even have a sign out front, just a door in the side of a building that was otherwise occupied with a late-night second-run vid theatre.
Tonight, the dingy-looking marquee advertised a special anniversary screening of some obscure two-hundred-year-old human show. It was an operatic story about waging a war in the stars, made before humanity had achieved interstellar flight. Sentimental and old-fashioned - but popular - a line of curious spectators wound halfway down the block.
Melenis was unamused.
"Ah shit," she grunted. "I'm getting old. I must have been three hundred when that came out. Earth was still some backwater nobody had ever heard of." Her voice deadpanned. "At least they aren't playing the Fleet and Flotilla musical anymore."
She shook her head and shouldered through the crowd, leading Garrus into the dim interior. The single-room club was tall and deep - it ran the full length of the theatre next door, but was limited by a cramped third dimension. The bar service was set into the long shared wall, adding to the feeling of intense narrowness, like walking into a trendy gun barrel. Extra seating had been squeezed into a thin, voyeuristic mezzanine crammed with cocktail tables, but the first floor was standing room only, and the mixed crowd on the dance floor leaned heavily towards working-class Palaven.
The music was loud, but not as painfully, pointlessly thumpa - thumpa as most of the places they'd been in and out of that night while making arrests. Garrus decided it was acceptable, and finally caved to Melenis' insistence that he sidle up to the bar and refresh himself.
He wasn't stupid enough to assume that when his senior officer had said let's get drinks that she had meant alcoholic ones; they were still in uniform and driving a squad car, so booze was off the table. Regardless, the ambience was relaxing and the drinks were on the house. C-Sec perks. He studied the boring half of the drink specials and ordered something innocent, but he was still too gloomy to touch it by the time it arrived.
Melenis settled into her own drink and they enjoyed a companionable lack of conversation for a while, just leaning against the bar and listening to the music, which was growing on Garrus by the minute.
He slowly thawed, felt better. Melenis might have been rough around the edges, but she was exceptionally shrewd about these kinds of things. She'd picked exactly his kind of bar.
"Huh."
Garrus looked over, and Melenis grunted again, setting down her glass with a thud. "You don't see that every day," she said, gesturing with her brows to some wonder behind Garrus' back.
He turned. She was right. Forget every day, Garrus had never seen anything like it in his life.
The woman was a glamorous disaster. She smoldered like the wreckage of a high-speed collision; an expensive, exciting mistake that had already ruined someone else. Draped over a much better-looking torin than Garrus, she danced with all the transparent flirtatiousness of a flirting hanar, practically phosphorescent with sex.
He had never seen a human mashed against a turian; a scant two decades since Relay 314 had not done much to warm relations. The residual taboo rendered the woman in streaks of inescapable neon. With one look, every inch of her was burned onto the back of his eyes — garish — pornographic — brilliant.
Her hair was deep red, the same color as human blood, the same color as her painted fingernails. Her fingers were numerous and long, dragging across the suggestive, sweating stretch of her naked stomach. As far as human bodies were concerned, hers seemed exceptionally hard. She looked weaponized, strong and lean as a physician's anatomical example, the arrogant ideal to which the rest of the universe was meant to aspire.
"This galaxy moves too fast for me."
Garrus jumped, looking away from the woman on the dance floor. Melenis was as flat-voiced as ever, but he could feel her eyes burning all-seeing holes through the back of his skull.
Too knowingly for comfort, she drawled, "Turians and humans bumping uglies. Here I thought all you crazy kids still wanted to kill each other."
He forced himself to chuckle at that, aiming for nonchalance, but all he did was fill his mouth with an imagined gulp of the red-haired woman's oxygen.
Stupidly, he blurted, "Ancient history. I was born the morning of the Ceasefire."
"Cute," grunted Melenis, seeing right through him. She tossed the squad car fob onto the bar next to Garrus' sweating, untouched drink, and said, "Make sure you drop her off in one piece."
She didn't give Garrus the chance to ask whether she meant the woman or the car. Downing her drink in one, Melenis muttered, "…about time I saw that old vid anyway," and wandered away into the crowd before Garrus could do so much as grunt noncommittally.
Garrus closed his fingers around the key fob, returned his eyes to the dance floor, and immediately panicked. The redhead was staring back at him. As their gazes met, her head fell onto her partner's shoulder, showing off the full, soft stretch of her neck.
That was forward. Did she know the ins-and-outs turian body language or was she just universally appealing in that confident, effortless manner of the abnormally attractive? He had no idea what to do. Was he supposed to do something? She was grinding pelvises with someone else, and appeared perfectly happy doing so. Garrus wasn't about to go over and try to dance his way to victory – those kinds of displays always ended in embarrassment. Moreover, everything about her scared the shit out of him. Better for her to stay there, far over there, where some other, braver torin could make the first journey into an unknown frontier.
Garrus felt absolutely juvenile, but he was too tired to care. Serving a ten-hour training shift during Summer Shitstorm '77 had earned him one free lazy creeper pass. Fuck it. He kept on looking. For her part, the redhead seemed thrilled to have his audience. Since locking eyes with him, she hadn't so much as blinked. Interspecies exhibitionism must have ranked high among her kinks, which he suspected were many and varied.
Watching her, he noticed that despite all of her enthusiastic hip swaying, she wasn't a particularly graceful dancer. It made no difference to him; she could do whatever weird things she wanted with her arms, as long as she kept looking at him like that. And the longer she stared at him, the more it seemed as if the torin she was dancing with was little more than a prop for her own self-pleasuring, the grist for her to grind against. That suited Garrus just fine.
As one song faded into the next, the handsome torin's friends showed up. They seemed none too pleased that one of their primo squad-mates was getting touchy-feely with a primate, and after a few tense whispers, the redhead was shrugged off in favor of a group of flirting tarini nearby. As she was dumped right then and there, abandoned in the middle of the dance floor, the human woman's flexible face bent around a series of goofy expressions that Garrus struggled to read in the dark. At a guess, he'd have said she was trying not to laugh.
She met Garrus' eyes again. Making sure he was watching, she lifted the hair from her neck and ruffled it a few times - as if airing herself out just for him. A feral smile overtook her face and he realized with a start: he'd been scoped.
She was actually going to come over. She was actually going to come over to this side of the room and say things to him, and he was going to have to think of things to say back.
Oh.
But. No. She couldn't just come over ... That hadn't been the plan at all…
Oh shit.
With that thought, she arrived, and Garrus Vakarian finally knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of sniper fire.
"Hi," she said, corrupting that simple, utilitarian word for all future use.
He didn't trust both of his larynxes to synchronize properly, so with a mute nod, he raised his drink in her direction. Moisture was beading down the glass and over his fingers; he hadn't taken a single sip since ordering it.
Apparently charmed by his nervous silence, she stepped closer and leaned against the bar. "You look so blue," she said. He got the feeling that 'looking blue' meant something significant to her, but he had no idea what. Feeling disoriented and sluggish, he watched her watching him, caught her eyes roving up and down the blue C-Sec stripe on his armor — a stripe that pointed directly to his crotch.
"I walked my first beat today," he said, managing not to choke.
He must have sounded more pathetic than he realized, because she said, "My condolences. But that uniform looks good on you."
He wondered. Spectre gear might have looked better, but that ship had already been shot out of the sky.
"So…" she prompted. "Why C-Sec?"
"Oh." He coughed, looking at his drink for a prompt. "I guess… Probably the same as most officers: injustice, helping people..." Whatever words might have followed, they disappeared into a dry throat.
"Bullshit." She laughed. "With an answer that canned…" Her laughter deepened. "I'd wager a drink that you only joined up to impress your dad."
He quirked his head, too surprised to be embarrassed.
Admitting defeat, he gestured to the bottles that lined the back of the bar and let a grin thaw out his tired mandibles. "You got me. Looks like I'm buying the first round."
Her smile grew hungrier, eye-teeth glinting — echoing his excitement, amplifying it. "The first round, huh?" Implying there would be more. "I like you already."
"Hey!" She caught the bartender's attention with an easy wave. "Can you do a Tom Collins?"
"Who's Tom Collins?" asked the bartender, using the terse, get-on-with-it sub-vocals of someone constantly harangued by drunks.
As if reciting the greatest punchline in all of recorded history, the red-haired woman said, "an old friend who never comes around anymore."
The bartender blinked, unimpressed, but the redhead slapped the bar, threw her head back, and roared with laughter at her own joke for five complete seconds before realizing no one else had stopped to appreciate the gag. She dropped off mid-laugh and corrected in a bored voice: "Just give me a gin and soda."
Eyes rolling fiercely, the bartender handed over a glass of iced alcohol and a separate sealed container of carbonated water, quickly moving on to a less annoying customer. The redhead stared at this piecemeal order, mouth agape. She laughed again, showing every tooth in her skull. Her laugh was loud, throaty, and always accompanied by a shameless display of neck.
Noticing Garrus' stare, she leaned further into his line of sight and said, "Alright… I won the first round. What's next?"
Internally, he screamed, immediate evac.
Externally, his eyes continued wandering, memorizing that intense blood-colored hair, the black-red accents stitched into her skin-tight top and skirt, the flawlessly lacquered tips of her fingers, where his eyes finally landed. Conspicuously, she balled that hand into a fist and turned it inward. Nice try.
"Okay… since I apparently look so blue…" He gestured vaguely to all of her. "What's with all the red?"
"Just a little tribute to my old man." She smiled, too quickly, then raised her fist. Looking confused and more than a little disoriented, she squinted at her hand, clenching the fist tighter. "Yep. You and me? We've both got daddy issues. He used to say: make every bullet fly with honor..."
Garrus laughed, but only to cover the knot in his gut. "You must need a lot of reminding."
She loosened her fist and returned her hand to her drink, trailing her finger along the rim. Looking deep into the bottom of the glass, she asked, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"
Her tone was accusatory, even childish. He had no idea why she deserved an answer to such a first-year academy bunkmate kind of question, especially one that was so obviously an evasion, but he gave her what she asked for anyway.
His answer, at least, was simple: "Lied to my father."
Slowly, she turned her head towards him, then she smiled — crazily, wolfishly, a smile that ate her entire face. Her tongue curled around the edges of her teeth as if she were forcing back several different comments all at once.
For ten thousand years, she stared at him. He stared back, noticing that she had a scar on the left side of her face. A line of secret code, it bisected her eyebrow, dashing and dotting all the way down to her open mouth, where her tongue lingered on a pointed tooth.
His disobedient heart skipped a beat. She was so close that he could have put his arm around her waist if he'd wanted to. And he wanted to. Badly. But a well-trained instinct tingled apprehensively in the back of his brain, knowing better.
He looked for signs. No excessive sweat, no tremors, but her pupils were blown wide and her movements were jerky, unpredictable.
Breaking the moment, he raised his omni-tool and beamed his credit details to the bar kiosk. With a stubborn huff, the redhead considered her overpriced cocktail again, mixing it with two sloppy red-tipped fingers. Unsatisfied, she alighted on a grab-all display of fruit slices on Garrus' far side. Presumptuously, she leaned across him to pick out a slice of fruit, presenting the silk-smooth line of her neck for his inspection.
There, he discovered a meaty pulse throbbing in time to the music, and mentally added elevated heart rate to his list. Further down, stuffed clumsily into the shadowed valley between her breasts, he spotted the lynchpin: a suspicious-looking wad of plastic. He'd seen more than his fair share of raver's goodie bags today, but this was the only one that had made him upset.
No wonder she'd been wasting time on him; she was probably high out of her mind. Forgetting his own ego, there were more important concerns. If she was wasted, any interspecies shenanigans were strictly out of the question.
Garrus tightened his hand around his drink, forcing fat drops of condensation between his fingers. Time to cool down.
After shopping around far longer than necessary, the redhead decided none of the fruit in the display was good enough. Without asking, she reached over to Garrus' drink and plucked out the skewered sorbacca. She kissed her plush alien lips around the garnish, holding it gently between her flat front teeth to lap off the syrup.
"That'll make you sick," he warned, thinking of all the ways anaphylactic shock might complicate this evening if things went much further. But things couldn't go much further. Because...
Bold as an asari fetish model, she bit down on the small blue morsel. She rolled the fruit from the cocktail pick and into the back of her mouth, her tongue visibly wet, pink, soft… and swallowed.
"I've always had a turian sweet tooth," she said.
His finger slipped on the lubricated rim of his still-sweating glass.
Oh spirits. He pulled his eyes away from her mouth, clearing his throat, but couldn't find the willpower to move. Maybe he could get her extranet address, call her back in the morning…
He opened his mouth to ask, but never got the chance.
The redhead's attractive, show-offy dance partner chose that precise moment to return — and this time he'd brought his friends. With the attitude of someone undertaking a dare, he stepped out of his group and leaned down to whisper in the redhead's ear. As he talked, one of his bare hands settled over her vulnerable, exposed abdomen. The other crept to the back of her neck. A cheap, dominating set of moves.
The torin's words were too quiet for Garrus to make out, but he could see the redhead's expression sagging as she listened. Discomfort turned to annoyance. Annoyance turned to disgust. And then, like a round entering a chamber, her face clicked to an entirely new setting: flaming, renegade vitriol.
She met Garrus' eyes briefly. Not a defenseless plea; he'd seen enough of those today to recognize a call for help when one was sent his way. No, this was something else, something darker.
She looked at him one moment more, then said, "Excuse me."
Her first order of business was a beautifully executed fvastus wind-catching blow straight out of Garrus' rixoritum course at C-Sec Academy. No mistake, she knew exactly where and how to knock the breath out of a turian in the single fastest move. She landed a precision strike on the weak spot at the base of her harasser's keel, and in the next instant, her knee met his waist. As he slumped into the blow, she grubbed a fistful of his sensitive inner cowl and snarled in his face: "My father died a hero. Now fuck off!"
She let go, and that was it. He was down for the count, gasping on the floor.
Well done, Red. Full marks.
The torin's two bully friends moved in. The first rolled over the bar before he even knew he'd left the ground. Garrus could see the bewildered look in his eyes as he flew overhead, legs windmilling, before he vanished into a wet explosion of glass.
Nearby patrons erupted into a chorus of panicked, drunken screams as a rain of alcohol and broken bottles showered down on the bartender. Empowered by the ruckus, Red quickly discombobulated the final torin with a wrenching frustimar arm hold, which she leveraged with well-trained ease, flipping the much taller, heavier body over her shoulder as if he were a pillow. He slammed to the ground so violently that the remaining glasses on the bar tinkled with fear.
In the redhead's wake, the throughly abusedbartender shook herself free of glass... andglared at Garrus.
Ah. Now there was that familiar cry for help. Do something, C-Sec. Did he have to?
Yes. There were certain ethical standards to maintain, but Garrus found himself incapable of applying a single one of those standards to this magnificent rockslide of a red-haired woman. Happily, he would have thrown every patron in the bar at her - just to see how long she could last.
Garrus considered his drink, untouched all this time. Grudgingly, he took a swig. It was too sweet, all the fizz had gone out of it. Slowly, savoring every mediocre drop, he drank. Only after the glass was completely empty did he finally summon enough self-respect to stand.
Numbly, Garrus grappled one of the redhead's wrists into a restraining hold. Thrilled, disappointed, bewildered — his first opportunity to touch her, with the entire bar looking on. The fight went out of her in a single breath, and he felt like a murderer.
"Let's take a walk," he said, tugging her toward the exit.
The music still thumped, but the bar had gone uncomfortably silent. No one was sorry to see a bloodthirsty human escorted out by an officer of the law.
As they stepped into the alley, Garrus pinged Melenis. "Hey. Sorry to interrupt your star war, but I've got a drunk and disorderly that needs an escort downtown. Three dextros got knocked around a bit. Can you call in the code and see if anybody wants to press charges?"
On the other end, Melenis heaved out a long, dry gust. "Yeah, yeah, I'll handle it. You need to learn what 'clock out' means, rookie."
There was a pause long enough that Garrus assumed the comm had gone dead, but then Melenis perceptively cut back in. "Did your new girlfriend start some trouble?"
His carefully flattened grunt was confirmation enough.
"I won't tell Pallin if you don't," she said.
Ah, Melenis. He knew there was a reason he liked her.
Red allowed herself to be dragged halfway to the squad car before she started to protest.
"Listen, I get it, you're just doing your job. But I can't get booked. I have to be on the first shuttle to the Villa in the morning."
"Fuck your next vacation stop-off. You just put a quadruple-digit crater of lost sales in that bar's liquor supply. Not to mention assault and battery..." His voice tightened. "I'm obligated to take you in."
"Fine." She growled, bucking against his grip. "FINE! Go obligate yourself!"
Somehow he'd wrangled her all the way to the car, but if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he wasn't sure he could take her if she decided to fight in earnest. He readied a wrist restraint, just in case.
"I said I was obligated," he clarified. "But I clocked out an hour ago."
That had an instantaneously calming effect.
She noticed his hand fumbling on the wrist restraint and her crooked grin returned. Playacting obedience, she offered her hands, and those painted fingernails winked at him. Through a red haze, he wondered just how many bullets she'd fired in her life, to need a constant reminder to shoot with honor. She was amped-up to the point of violence, had already done enough damage to earn a night in lockup — he had no reason to let her off easy. No reason at all. Except...
Considering her martial skills, her scar, those blood red hands, he was certain she was combat-trained, maybe even a mercenary. But on the off-chance that she was a Alliance jarhead having one bad night of shore leave — another victim in a ward gone mad with heatstroke — Garrus knew that bringing her downtown might ruin her career. He could let her walk, but this far distal, this deep in duct rat territory, he knew what was waiting for her out there. Imagining a drugged-up, half-dressed human lost in the Shitstorm, after all the ugliness he'd already seen today…
Keeping his movements cool and easy, he opened the rear door of the squad car. "Let me drive you home."
She squinted at him so forcefully that she swayed. "How do I know this isn't a trick?"
He shrugged, too tired to offer anything more convincing.
"Aw. Look at that face." Weakly, she pushed against his chest, as if checking for solidity. "You ever play poker? I could wipe the floor with you." Satisfied that he wasn't running a con, she tamed herself into the back seat.
As he closed the door and she settled in, her skirt crept up one more centimeter. Not much, but exactly enough to reveal that underneath, she was completely bare. Garrus hadn't imbibed a single drop of alcohol all night, but it made no difference; his sobriety evaporated.
He stared. A wild russet patch of hair, a nest of thorns right over her…
Hell no, Vakarian, eyes up. He was a damned fool, already a dirty cop and it was only day one. If Pallin ever found out about this, Garrus was as good as fired. Forget Pallin, if his father ever found out, Garrus was as good as dead.
He had more immediate problems. How in the name of the great raving Enkindlers was Garrus meant to drive now that he knew there was an unwrapped slice of interstellar pussy writhing around in the back of his car?
Fuck it. He'd just have to figure it out as he went. He took his seat and slammed the driver's-side door with a such a frustrated wham that Red fell sideways. Behind him, she spread out and laughed her velvet laugh, her lust for life reinvigorated.
He revved the engine. She purred right along with the car as he slowly pulled out of the alleyway and back to the main drag, then she abruptly red-shifted into a new phase of intoxication. Every available sensation seemed to delight her: the squeak of the seats, the hard plastic bite of the door hardware, her own beautiful body. She couldn't stop running her hands over anything, everything.
"Oh. Wow…" was all she had to say for herself.
"What drugs have you taken?" he asked, keeping cool. It was better to know.
She moaned as if his question had been specially designed to stimulate her nerves. "Ohhhh… I don't… know? One or two..."
She groped beneath her tiny, too-tight shirt and yanked up the unmarked baggie, confirming what Garrus already suspected. Looking over the bag, she counted pills beneath the plastic, losing track multiple times. "What? No more red ones? Rip off..."
He swallowed the anger and asked, "Where'd you get the hook-up?" Least he could do. Follow the lead tomorrow, maybe shut down another branch of that endless, tesseracting drug ring.
"That guy. You know. Him." She made a disgusted noise. "Talk shit, get hit."
Well, that was one problem solved. He keyed a short text into his omni-tool, advised Melenis to check the three turian assault victims for signs of a particularly incompetent drug-running operation.
"How about you hand that to me," he said, keeping his voice friendly. One button press later, the perpetrator safety field between them dropped away. "Juuust so I can be sure you don't need to go to the hospital."
With startling strength and accuracy, she tossed forward the baggie. Garrus watched it fly into the front of the car, ricochet against the dash, then plop perfectly into his cup holder. He stared at it like he'd been slapped, making a quick visual inventory of the contents.
Great. If she'd taken half of the things in that assortment, she was already flying high on all the drugs Garrus had ever heard of, and some he could only imagine. Maybe not a deadly mix, but he had to get her somewhere — anywhere — other than back out on the streets alone. There was a minimally-nosy detox facility about twenty blocks proximal that might still be taking walk-ins. He'd start there.
He glanced into the rearview and noticed she was trailing lazy glowing circles up and down her torso. As she teased herself, her right hand began to glow the faintest shade of blue.
"Are you biotic?" he asked, sub-vocals thin.
The sound of his voice, no matter what he said, seemed to cause her great ecstasy and joy. Well, that was marvelous for her, bully for him. He repeated the question, this time with more urgency.
"Hey. Yes or no. Were you born with biotics?"
"No…" she whined. "I'm not that cool."
"Have you ever taken red sand before?"
She blinked slowly, noticing her glowing hand for the first time. "Hey. Wow. I'm turning blue."
That would be the sandblasting giving her a temporary biotic flare, and it was always worse when the user had no biotic experience, no idea how to handle it. Fantastic.
He moved his eyes to the rearview make sure she wasn't about to go supernova. Big mistake.
She was laying spread-eagle, unashamed, reeling with drug-induced euphoria. One of her long, deliciously smooth legs was thrown up over the rear seat-back, her foot mashed against the tinted window. The other leg trailed to the floor, and her glowing biotic hand began to wander…
"Are you turning me blue so that we can be blue together?" she asked, moaning through her words. "That sounds amazing. Please – please – let's be blue together…"
His heart migrated around his entire body before lodging firmly in his throat. "Woah. Cool your jets. I'm taking your glowing ass to detox."
Stealing glances at her in the rearview, he couldn't help but see… her left hand sliding under her cropped shirt, pinching and kneading. Her right hand drifting steadily downwards, glowing brighter all the time…
The lights of the Strip slid over her body in bars of solid color; one instant she was green, then yellow, pink, blue... but always…
Red. Her eyes were fixed on him, unblinking. When she caught him looking, her biotic right hand sparkled against her groin with a surprise surge of energy. Head lolling against the seat, she moaned darkly, deep in her throat, and ground her pelvis into her hand. "Please… fuck … pull over. The minute you opened your big dumb mouth… I wanted… you gotta pull over and fuck me."
"Nope," he said. "Sorry. Can't help you."
She gasped like someone dying. "But I'm dying!" she whined, confirming the diagnosis.
He rambled at her in a desperate, conversational tone, "No, not dying. Well… maybe dying. Definitely incapable of consent."
"Listen! Don't let me die like this! Just fuck me!"
He clutched the wheel, laughed for his very life, and forced his eyes back to the airstrip. He deserved this. Things this terrible didn't happen without a reason. He was going to die, that much was already decided. His options were fiery car crash, massive aneurysm of the dick, or both at the same time.
What a perfect time, then, to stall at the poorly-calibrated intersection at 2nd-tier 110th—Edroki. Here, time didn't just stand still, it completely gave up. Garrus slowed the car, drumming his fingers against the wheel, mandibles twitching furiously. Aha, yes. Hilarious.
He could just run the light, but the car would be tagged, he'd have to explain himself back at the precinct and pay a fine, and his father would certainly find out. Hell, someone in traffic control might actually stop scratching their ass and run back the vid and see just what was going on in the back seat…
No. Hell no. Better to wait it out.
Garrus idled at the light, trying to act casual. But just to be safe, he darkened the windows another notch. Filtered through the heavy artificial tint, the stoplight bathed the car interior with a rich, flaming aurora, which didn't help matters at all. He was surrounded on all sides, every sense overwhelmed by the sight, the sound, the smell of the red-haired woman — and his groin was long past aching with denial.
Behind him, she mumbled incoherently, wouldn't stop begging. "Fuck… please… I can't stop… I'm so close… just… just look at me…"
Just look at her.
Garrus opted instead to have an out-of-body experience. He concentrated his entire being on a single, sobering image: the Taralos Amphitheatre, sitting dark and empty ten kilometers away on the 400 block.
Ordinarily, the rise and fall of a pretentious local theatre would have been beneath Garrus' notice, but the summer season posters were everywhere, impossible to avoid. Digital copies glitched across full city blocks of half-powered vid screens, stuttering like omens. At some point, just to see what all the fuss was about, Garrus had looked up the plot, then had immediately forgotten all about it.
Now, trapped in a hellish fever dream at 2nd-tier 110th and Edroki, Garrus remembered. The 20th anniversary of the Ceasefire meant humans had been trendy this year. To meet demand, the Taralos' extravaganza had been lifted from an ancient human story, a story that went something like this: down in the underworld, some heroic idiot went looking for his girlfriend. He found her, started hauling ass out of Hell with her, but near the exit he got antsy and looked back to make sure she was following. The gods or whoever hadn't liked that, so the girl was dragged kicking and screaming back to the land of the dead. The end.
There was a moral in there somewhere. Garrus tried to put it all in perspective: the theatre, the myth, the weight of his own mortal soul…
But it all came back to Red's strangled cries, the sound of her fingers working in the dark. She was so excited, so wet, that her voice was almost inaudible, her pleas drifting toward him along with the foreign but unmistakable scent of her arousal. "I'm gonna… Oh god… Just look at me…"
By now he was painfully hard, clutching the steering wheel so tightly that his hands had gone numb. A better torin in Garrus Vakarian's current position, after reflecting on that ancient alien legend and marvelling at his own bad luck, might have resolved to make the honorable decision and spare the damsel's soul. But Garrus Vakarian himself, whose level of professional restraint was typically summarized on the lower end of "lacking…" Well. He arrived at an altogether different conclusion.
And so, armed with the fiercest look he had ever leveled at someone that he hadn't intended to kill, Garrus turned around in his seat and declared, "I'm looking."
She cursed, biotic sparks flying from her hand.
He looked, as one by one, her glowing fingers disappeared between her thighs. He looked, eyes glued to her rhythmically lifting hips, as she fucked herself in his stead. He looked and looked and looked, knowing she was imagining his cock inside her… and Spirits, he was imagining it too…
His hips rocked in answer, plates loosening, cock so hard he was going to come just watching… Without thinking, he thrust against the weak friction of his armor, moaning aloud… he couldn't stop… couldn't…
oh fuck
Biotics flared up her arm, over her chest, erupting along her entire body — a spectacular fireworks display that dazzled him halfway to blindness. She arched off the seat and silently screamed, suddenly turning acid green.
This was it. She was about to be sucked back to whatever Hell she'd come from, and all of it his fault.
Lightyears behind her, someone laid on the horn. Then Garrus realized — the light at 2nd-tier 110th-Edroki had finally changed.
He shook his head and tried to focus, but he couldn't see, couldn't think, could hardly breathe. Not trusting himself to drive another block, he pulled through the intersection and immediately lifted the car out of traffic, bee-lining for the nearest roof.
He stopped. Parked. Swore. Turned off the engine. Swore again. He just needed a minute, one minute...
"Tiberius Towers." she whispered, giving him a destination at long last, as if enjoying the galaxy's most expensive cab ride.
Tiberius, seriously? That place was all glitz, total luxury. If she was a merc, she must have been a good one.
Shit.
It wasn't far, but by the time he'd found the shining, well-maintained facade of Tiberius Towers, she was practically asleep. As he pulled to a stop near the front doors, she stuttered awake, revived and alarmed.
"No! Not the lobby! Take me around back."
Garrus coughed. Yes. The back. That wasn't suspicious at all.
He pulled the car through an alleyway that was humid with steam. Clouds of enviro-con fumes bloomed white-warm and stale from the malfunctioning vents. In great herds, they rolled across the car's windscreen, curtaining Garrus from the outside world.
In the shadow of a flickering advertisement for a nearby sushi bar, he parked and observed this bold migration of air, feeling more disoriented than ever.
"You really live here?" He asked.
"Hardly. I don't live anywhere. This place is pure Tom Collins." His heart sank even further. Was this other man her boyfriend? Her target? Quickly, she added, "He's never here, don't worry about it."
That didn't ease his mind much.
A second later, she was in motion. She crawled into the front of the car, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered in his ear.
"You're the only one I want, Blue."
He'd forgotten that he'd left the perpetrator shield down. There wasn't much time to worry about it, because she had already slid her leg over his lap, straddling him while simultaneously pinning herself against the wheel. Dazed and overpowered, he watched as she slid the delicacy of her bizarre hair-tufted groin across the unforgiving ceramic plate of his C-Sec blues.
He should have stopped her. But he was unable to move, unable to breathe. This armor would be soiled forever, no amount of elbow grease would get it clean, would ever allow him to forget that she had marked him this way.
He could smell the trail of pungent arousal she left in her wake, like raw blood and rarest meat. His head fell back against the car seat and he cried out, an agonized wail of self-denial.
Red didn't ask.
She ran her tongue along the sensitive skin of his throat. Rolling her hips, moaning a low dirge, she pressed herself more completely against him and seemed primed to orgasm again. Her hands groped up and down the back of his neck, sliding shamelessly under his fringe, pulling his face down toward her own... then her mouth was over his.
He'd never felt anything like it. She was all softness, moist as an overripe fruit plucked from a hot orchard, and she tasted like - like - he didn't know and he didn't care.
Wild for more, he groaned and crushed her closer. As she opened her mouth and plied him with her small wet tongue, he couldn't stop himself from thrusting toward her with an embarrassing crunch of armor. Fumbling, he tore off one glove and slowly, curiously, slid his bare hand over the small of her back.
Her body was soft, cool. Firmly muscled. He could feel her surging into him, rolling against him, pleasuring herself. His groin plates shuddered, loosened…
Pulling away all at once, he gasped for air.
"No! We can't - I can't do this, Red."
"Don't you want me?" She ground herself against him, made him answer with an automatic thrust.
He growled, loud and mean and desperate for mercy.
"Oh spirits- I've never wanted anything worse. But. Dammit. Stop." He bent his head and filled his nose with her scent, trying to memorize it forever. "Not like this."
"It's my last night. I want it to be you." Pressing her forehead to his, she moved her head intentionally, knowing exactly what she was doing. She'd been affectionate with a turian before.
His head spun.
"I don't know what that means," he breathed, too worn out and confused to be anything but honest anymore. "I don't understand a single thing about you, except that you're off limits until you sober up."
"I'll be gone."
"So tell me your name. Give me an extranet address. I can be patient."
Garrus was anything but patient, but Red didn't need to know that. Not yet.
She shook her head. He could feel her no as it drilled right through his forehead and clean through his brain, down into his keel, boring a hole into his chest so wide that she could have reached in and squeezed his still-beating heart until it burst.
"The break has to be clean," she said. "I know I can fix it, but it's clean slate or nothing. You can't come."
"I'm not asking-"
She pulled away from him then, and her face was completely different; she had become someone else. The discipline in her expression, the firm steel of her eyes, made him think of some ancient gloranumis in a vid, readying to raze an enemy house. It thrilled him exactly as much as it scared him out of his mind.
She opened the door.
"Red," he whispered, capturing her waist in his bare hand. "Wait."
She did, at least for one moment more, raising her hands to the sides of his face. Her thumbs traced his familia notas, then with careful slowness, she kissed him again. Soft and warm, her breath lingered in his mouth, offering up something minuscule but inescapable, until the taste of her became a metal sliver in his lungs.
It was over, but he had to know. "Are you going to be okay?"
She dropped her hands from his face, and her features hardened to stone.
"I'm going to be perfect," she said.
Without so much as a backward glance, she stepped out of the car and vanished into shadow and steam.
Original words and phrases:
- Sorbacca: Turian equivalent of a maraschino cherry, usually dyed bright blue.
- Rixoritum: Aggressive, disarming martial art. Mandatory course at C-Sec Academy.
- Fvastus: Empty. Wind an opponent with a series of brief, hard hits.
- Frustimar: Slice and Chunk. Discombobulate by twisting a limb out of balance.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
- Familia notas: The colony markings that turians wear on their faces.
- Torin/Torini: Male turian(s)
- Tarin/Tarini: Female turian(s)
- Gloranumis (f): One who holds a state of royalty or majesty. Ancient royal title.