Illium pulsed with the cosmopolitan hubbub of the Citadel, but it was still a planetary colony, with proper air and a proper up-versus-down. That and its undercurrent of frontier lawlessness made Shepard feel oddly at home in the place. It was a world which seemed to contain within it all of the strange convolutions of her life: from peripheral colony kid to urban Spectre legend, and now to paramilitary shadow puppet. She adored the magnificent arcology of Nos Astra, towers stretching down to a ground level lost through criss-crossing skycar traffic and mist. It was a city where one could be suitably anonymous. Plus, her favourite colour — these days, at least — was blue, and the atmosphere here seemed tinted with it, endowing everything with a pleasantly filtered glow.
She had let Garrus take point on consulting with the tracking officer and the local police. She didn't want to force him to translate cop-speak for her benefit, and anyway cops behaved differently with outsider eyes in the room. This left her and Thane in the small plaza of the commercial spaceport, loitering amidst various shady personages. They drew some glances, but not many; neither were they a particularly unusual pair in this metropolis, nor were the people of Nos Astra inclined to start trouble.
She was turning to Thane, about to explain her reasoning for standing there while Garrus did the legwork, when he murmured, "Ex-cop?"
She got the sense that his upward inflection was only him being modest. "Yes, he used to work with–"
"C-Sec, yes. Garrus Vakarian. Investigation Division. He was one of the good ones."
She raised her brows at him. He was looking into the middle distance of Nos Astra's shimmering twilight, hands clasped behind his back, polite as a sheathed dagger. She enjoyed puzzles more than she disliked being interrupted, and she was very curious what led Thane to this knowledge — and opinion.
"I've done some wetwork on the Citadel," he said unsolicited, by way of explanation. "Agent Vakarian came closer than most to discovering my identity."
Shepard choked back a surprised laugh. "Don't ever tell him how many of his cold cases you can solve for him, okay?"
The blue-toned Illium light danced across the drell's dark corneas, his lips turning upwards in amusement. "Alright."
Mm, so he has a sense of humour. Now how do I get him to say 'wetwork' again?
"I imagine he quit the force because he was frustrated with cumbersome protocol," Thane said.
Shepard looked at him with some wonder. "Damn, you really do always hit your mark."
"I overheard some conversation while I was there, and I don't easily forget."
"I believe that. Is that all you overheard about him?" She leaned forward on her toes, enticed by the prospect of gaining some real ammunition on Garrus for their next round of playfully smug banter —
— but Garrus was emerging from the police station. He stalked over to them with that high-waisted turian swagger. "The justicar is in the middle of a crime scene, go figure," he said. "Deep in Eclipse territory. We have permission to enter the scene and investigate." He looked from Shepard to the drell and back again. She had wheeled around when Garrus arrived, one step short of emphatically casual whistling. Thane's posture, erect and level-shouldered, was credibly impassive. So Garrus turned his narrowed gaze on Shepard's affectation of innocence.
"…What?" grumbled Garrus, clearly watching himself take the bait.
In their first skirmish against Eclipse mercs, Shepard could see the problem. Enemies — usually the ones closest to her — would find themselves double-dead, two simultaneous headshots airing out the interiors of their skulls. This was hardly efficient. Once the alleyway was cleared, her two squadmates moved together to consult behind her.
"Listen–" Garrus said, just as Thane said, "I beg your–" The mixed rumblings of turian and drell voices made Shepard bite back her grin.
"Listen," Garrus resumed, his mandibles flicking in exasperation. "Just take a position and work that half of the field. I can take care of the rest. Trust me." Oh, so he had gotten defensive. Maybe too many of Thane's shots had landed first.
The drell agreed without argument. The flip side of not generally being a team player is that he had no use for posturing. Shepard approved.
The trio moved to turn a corner in the alley. "Enemy signals," Garrus' voice warned.
"I see them," she replied. She rarely missed anything on her radar, but Garrus liked to verbalize a lot, and it suited her to know what he knew. There was an easy familiarity to their rapport.
Her combat drone went out ahead, as usual. It drew surprised fire from the mercs lying in wait. She pursed her lips and identified the multitude of weapon types from the sounds of their various impacts. "Rockets," she said to Garrus with a quick two-fingered gesture, the only command necessary as they rounded the corner as one. The turian put a hole in the brains of each merc wielding rocket launchers on the far side of the room.
"Ha ha! Scoped and dropped," he declared, backing off to reload for his next deadly salvo. Shepard grinned as she fried the guns of the grunts standing closest to them, leaving them stunned and defenceless to the spray of her SMG. She appreciated Garrus' dark sense of fun, even if Joker had mentioned that it was a new development since Omega. You have to take pleasure in what you do, after all.
They set about the rhythmic process of bringing down enemy shields and penetrating them with rapidfire thermal slugs. Garrus' colourful commentary on his own prowess was amusing, but also helped her keep track of his progress on the part of the field he controlled. She trusted him, on many levels, not least of which was that she knew he would sooner die than let her be flanked.
She suddenly heard the sideways wom wom wom of a biotic charging up an attack. She threw herself behind a wall; peripherally, she saw Garrus do the same. They locked eyes. She'd missed that one in her first assessment of the field. Must have arrived late.
She deployed her drone again, to the position she extrapolated was the origin of the blue ball that had nearly missed her, and settled in for the game of attrition that usually ensued when facing biotics. Shepard's specialized attacks made short work of tech, but biotic barriers were a slippery bitch.
Then her drone pinged back with a surprising message: "no enemy signals".
She craned out of cover to see Thane walking back toward them from what had once been enemy lines. His black coat and liquid strides sketched out the inky silhouette of a noir vigilante. Their biotic attacker was slumped with her head facing a very wrong direction.
"Clear," was Thane's understated announcement.
If Garrus had eyebrows, they would probably have been as raised as her own.
The justicar would only pledge herself to the mission in exchange for the recovery of some data from a smugglers' den. Thane found this surprisingly déclassé, but wisely preserved his silence. He knew little of the Code's position on assassins, but the troubled eezo pinpricking his capillaries told him that any duel with this biotic dreadnought would result in him fleeing for his remaining eight to twelve months. Best to wait to introduce himself until her loyalty is secured.
"I'm feeling pretty warmed up," Shepard said to her two companions. "Let's go pick up what Samara wants." Her even tone indicated neither undue glee nor concern for an impromptu infiltration into the heart of Eclipse activities on Illium. Garrus, in a turian battle flush, gave a slightly breathless, "Hell yeah."
Thane only smiled at her. Like any art, he intended to log many hours of practice at fighting by Shepard's side. Being a part of her relentless pressure wave was… invigorating.
Riding the elevator into the forbidden depths of the Eclipse nest, Thane felt turian eyes on him. It wasn't slow-dawning recognition from C-Sec case files: he was sensitive to this phenomenon, since his species could only ever be on one side of it. No, Thane identified it as a penetrating, evaluative look. After having proven himself as a compatible warrior, what could this be about?
The elevator ride stretched long, silent and tense, as it traversed the monolithic heights of Nos Astra's arcology. Shepard spent the time re-optimizing her omnitool for combat against asari biotics. Thane stood quietly, still as stone, allowing Garrus' stare to wash over him, surrendering nothing.
When the doors parted, they were in the crime syndicate's main facility, containers of biotics-enhancing toxins scattered without thought. Those crates will inevitably be caught in crossfire and burst, Thane thought. The resulting fog of Minagen X3 could do little to Shepard and the turian apart from make them clear their throats; no eezo flowed in their blood to react to the substance's properties. Despite this, as the firefight began and Thane's predictions proved correct, Shepard gave the expanding red clouds a wide berth, characteristic of her cautious approach to battle. Thane had little reason to seek out inhaling the drug, but in the final encounter, when the merc captain began hurling them at the squad, he decided not to dodge.
He breathed in a scent that was warm and spiced like Rakhana safflower. A feverish heat in his chest bloomed and slowly spread until his nerves were coursing with an excess of biotic energy. His body began to shimmer in a blue aurora. "Ah," he said softly to himself, and holstered his gun.
He formed a fist, and he felt space bend around his knuckles, throbbing like snug boxing wraps of warped physics. His hand gained its own blue corona, the glow concentrating into a blue orb as he opened his grasp. He directed it to fly towards an enemy.
It snapped to her with a disembodied urgency that startled even him. The scream was knocked from her lungs, her body flung to the side wall of the large room, tremendous momentum communicated in that palm-sized ball of light. She crumpled, every bone shattered with the impact, executed swiftly like a small animal being crushed.
Thane's glow persisted, flickering like a star warning of nova. Gunshots pinged harmlessly off his bolstered barrier.
He strode forth out of the cloud of red, and buffeted Eclipse mercs side to side, spattering them across any convenient surface. He kept an eye to cover, prepared to duck back into shadow once the drug's effects had passed, but they lingered in his body until the large room had been thoroughly drained of life. It was slaughter.
When the room went silent and the glow of his body faded, he bowed his head and prayed for forgiveness.
As far as Shepard was concerned, biotics were magic. She wasn't born with the gift, and had stopped feeling jealous about it by her teenage years. She had decided she was alright with having a mind that could achieve amazing things without needing a surgical implant drilled in the back of her skull.
She gave her omnitool a break now, however, because matters seemed to be taking care of themselves. Thane was mowing down the enemy stronghold, and it looked for all the world like they couldn't provide fodder fast enough for the outpouring of his drug-augmented energy. The walls were a gruesome work of modern art in blood, and they shook with the force of the biotic explosions Thane was detonating in groups of mercs huddled together.
Garrus had settled down in a sniper position and was guarding their exit, pointedly turned away from the drell's display. Shepard almost set a drone to film the action — keeping Thane and his Tai Chi superpowers well in frame — but decided that would make her a pervert.
The last red light on her radar blinked off, and Shepard stood from cover and walked to join the drell. "Do we need to find you some more punching bags?"
"The enemy gave us an advantage. I took it," Thane said simply — and then suddenly doubled over and coughed. A clot of dark red flew from his mouth to the floor, joining the blood splatters of enemy casualties. A clump of dust, or bloody lung tissue?
"Damn," said Garrus.
Thane's displeasure was knit across his brows. "My apologies," he said, gathering his dignity, standing upright and rolling his shoulders back. "Apparently it came at some cost."
Shepard spared him and broke eye contact, looking around the room. "One of these ragdolls used to be Captain Wasea. She may have the information on her."
Garrus set about examining the bodies in his methodical way. Shepard brushed near the drell and said, "Maybe have a visit with the doctor on the Normandy when we get back." Then: "Ah, found it." The datapad was on the desk, naturally.
Shepard tossed herself into the seat opposite Chakwas in the med-bay. She swirled the glass of wine in one hand — not the good stuff, but something from the stash they often shared for a casual winding down of evenings — and read Thane's medical report, held in the other. Although technically the SR-2 was a private frigate, it was hard to break old military habits of disregarding doctor-patient privilege when a commanding officer wants to know.
"He's in extraordinarily good shape, never mind the Kepral's Syndrome," Chakwas volunteered, with a saucy raise of the eyebrow. Shepard tried to remain impassive, but she was by no means a gifted liar. Her thoughts had always cycled far too quickly to mitigate the subtle quirks of facial muscles, and she was notorious for broadcasting her sentiments across her forehead. This is why she had a wardrobe of tough-looking breather masks for situations where she suspected she would need to do some bluffing — although for the most part she tended to batter her way through negotiations with unapologetically blunt truthfulness. Honesty of that kind could be intimidating as hell.
So of course, Chakwas couldn't have missed Shepard's more than passing interest in Thane.
"That Minagen X3 is nasty stuff, though, especially on lungs riddled with lesions," the doctor said.
Shepard winced. 'Lesions' is a horrible word.
"He has already fully recovered from the exposure, which is rather impressive since his system probably got about four times the dose that a healthy set of lungs would have absorbed," Chakwas continued. "One can only imagine what that was like. He probably felt like some sort of… biotic god."
Shepard snorted. Chakwas gave her an inquiring look. "Later," Shepard said. "Tell me more about what it says here on transplants."
Chakwas leaned back and folded her arms. Her eyes darkened with consternation. "Sere Krios is eligible for a lung transplant that would halt all progression of Kepral's Syndrome in other organs, and fully rehabilitate all of his cardiovascular functions — after physiotherapy, of course. At his current stage of the disease, he could be classed as 'urgent need' and has a good chance of finding a compatible organ within six to eight months." At Shepard's expression of surprised impatience, the doctor explained, "The galactic drell population is still comparatively small. But it makes little difference, since he refused to be added to the list."
"Yeah, I see that," Shepard replied, tossing the datapad onto the desk. She was strangely irritated by the news, and not at the doctor per se. "Did he give a reason?"
Chakwas heaved a sigh. "'Why? Shall I deny some other patient a chance at life, only so that I might extend my time spent ending others'?'" Chakwas' imitation of the drell's melodic pacing was somewhat accurate: conveyed his penchant for vocal drama, at any rate.
Shepard's expression clouded. She saw his point, and empathized with him. If someone had asked her, would you like to be reconstructed as a Cerberus cyborg, at astronomical expense to a massive organization that could be spent instead actually defending human colonies in the Terminus Systems, so that you could have more days spent huddling in the dark shooting at things? – would she have answered yes?
In the brief lull in their conversation, she concluded that yes, yes she would. She loved being alive, selfishly, freely. It didn't matter where she came from. Being alive was a beautiful thing, which is why she tended to get angry at people who killed unnecessarily.
Or was that just an inevitable rationalization? How could she go on otherwise, knowing what she knows?
It was a line of reasoning that bore further examination. Later.
"Now I know I'm not supposed to be the one doing psych reports on this particular incarnation of the Normandy," Chakwas ventured, interrupting Shepard's thoughts. "But I suspect he'll run loops around Chambers' dazzled little eyes, and at any rate he's well within healthy functioning parameters. So I must tell you, in my professional opinion, and bearing in mind that I'm not particularly well-versed in drell psychology…" She paused to sip at her wine, thoughtfully. "He's in a very dark place. He's isolated. I think he believes he deserves to die." And that's a liability, said the silence between them.
"Well he's not dying before this mission is completed," stated Shepard flatly, as she filed away her thoughts on this issue. "Thanks for the drink, and the highly illuminating conversation." She tossed back the rest of her wine. She didn't realize how brusque she had become; it was a bad habit when there was a lot on her mind. Chakwas acknowledged the familiar phenomenon with fond tolerance. "Another time, Commander," she said.
Commander Shepard was an introvert by nature, which is why she picked up the habit of making rounds about the ship to touch base with everyone she works with directly. The routine was designed to prevent her from constructing a bubble of command that left her insensate to any of the real issues of the crew.
But she found herself anticipating her visits with Thane.
Maybe it was because Life Support was so quiet and comfortable. There was nowhere to sit in Mordin's lab or Garrus' battery, but she could relax at Thane's table whenever she came around.
Kasumi has a couch, Shepard reminded herself. And she did adore Kasumi. But it wasn't the port observation lounge that gave her a thrill whenever she stepped off the elevator on the crew deck.
Pausing at the door to Life Support, she afforded herself a smile. Yes, she was attracted to the drell. Perhaps superficially, perhaps embarrassingly: she found him… compelling. In battle, he filled the gaps, provided for unexpressed needs, as though he were reading her thoughts in her body language. He was always positioned where she wanted him, before she could even call out the commands. Sometimes, he was in places she didn't even know she wanted him; close-quarters was usually a last resort for her style, but he would get personal with problematic hostiles and dispatch them like Gordian knots.
And on the ship, she couldn't get enough of that voice, of the way he spoke, the poetry and the formality of his words riding on waves of warm vibrations. He seemed almost designed, a dark protagonist from an old Earth novel, all black leather and poise. She could observe herself going weak-kneed for it like a teenage girl.
The teasing she got from Kasumi might also have been something that soured her feelings towards the port observation lounge.
It will probably pass. It's just a crush. Enjoy it while it lasts, she told herself.
The door opened, and there he was, as usual, sitting at his table with a lukewarm mug of strong tea, or something like it. Wait. There were two mugs on the table, one with curls of steam, one without.
What use does someone with Kepral's Syndrome have for steam?
"Shepard," he said without turning. "Do you need something?"
"Have a few minutes to talk?"
"Certainly," he said, and she slid into the seat across from him.
"You were expecting me," she said, unable to repress her grin.
"Of course," he said. "I could hear Kasumi's cackles next door."
Shepard had modified her route so that she would visit Kasumi first, to undercut her campaigns to make Shepard blush with questions about how her visit with Thane had gone.
But all Shepard said about that was, "Good ears." And then: "What are you drinking?"
"While in Nos Astra I was able to stockpile some popular herbal remedies for Kepral's Syndrome. The warmth feels good in the chest, and despite being a tea it tastes somehow… dry."
Shepard wasn't particularly enticed by the description.
"I am told that one is called 'English breakfast'," he said, nodding towards the mug closer to her.
Shepard's eyes lit up, like sunlight glinting off a curved sea horizon, and Thane knew he had done well. "How did you know?" She clasped the warm mug between her hands. Her fingers had no webbing; it made them seem so spindly and elegant.
He decided not to explain to her that the ability to track someone's routines was integral to his trade. His skills and eidetic memory made it impossible for him not to notice her preferences and habits. He had seen her ritualistically brew this tea in the mess on a pensive evening, when her duties were done for the day. He had marked the way she had added sweetener, and the drop of her shoulders as she relaxed into its aromatic veil.
He was unaccustomed to having a 'commanding officer', someone whose wishes he was accountable to beyond the singular end goal of a contract hit. That could be why he had desired her approval, desired her smile. But he had his doubts.
Sitting there, sharing drinks, he suddenly thought of Irikah. There had been too few moments like this with her.
The table is small, circular. A decorative bowl houses colourful kelp. She had changed them that week, from green to orange. Kolyat cries. She puts down her mug and picks up the squalling child. She purrs at the small boy's face. My son's face.
"I am leaving tomorrow," I tell her. She closes her eyes, blocking me out from her pain. "How long this time," she asks, resigned. Kolyat's screams are piercing, insistent.
"Thane?"
Shepard's voice. She spoke softly, but with a magnetic pull back to reality. Her lips were poised at the rim of her mug, slightly parted; her eyes, watching him.
"Forgive me," he said. He realized a need to explain himself, his species' habits, to her. He knew how rarely they were encountered beyond the cloud cover of Kahje. "Drell have perfect memories. We can relive any moment in our lives with perfect clarity. It's difficult to control at times. Sometimes we disappear into… let's call it solipsism."
He suddenly sensed that Shepard was holding her breath. She slowly lowered her mug to cradle it in both palms, looking at him with a strange intensity. It made his crest tingle.
Silence was usually his trusted ally, but something in her composure had become disquieting.
"I was… thinking of my wife," he said, surprising himself with his forthcomingness.
"You're married?" Shepard asked. Thane thought he heard a tiny raw edge in her voice.
He stood smoothly from his seat, moved to the racks of rifles and folded his hands behind his back. It would be easier to discuss this if he could remain more disengaged. "I was, once. I lost her to my own negligence. I stayed away too long, and my enemies came for her. She was killed."
The warmth of Shepard was suddenly at his side. "I'm so sorry," she said. He sensed her hand twitch to move to touch him, and then go limp.
Even he couldn't decide whether a touch would have been appropriate, but the ache in his chest told him that it would have been welcomed.
