Thane stood by the airlock door, hands folded behind him. He observed the comings and goings of the Cerberus personnel on the CIC.

They were civilians, without a doubt. All experts in their chosen fields, but absent of the practiced rigidity of soldiers. Although they did their jobs well, they were chatty, frequently letting slip with personal anecdotes and private opinions. He closed his eyes and slipped into a minor meditative state, as he often did when his senses were awash with superfluous information.

He heard the muffled click of Miranda's heels as she strutted towards him from the elevator. This upcoming mission was a personal favour to her. The objective was to provide covert countermeasures for a sabotage effort on a family relocation: specifically, Miranda's younger cloned sister and her foster parents.

Thane marked the stutter and stop of a set of haptic interfaces, as one crewman — Crewman Matthews, his memory supplied — stopped to watch Operative Lawson as she passed him in the fore of the CIC.

Miranda was allegedly humanity perfected, designed in a genetic laboratory to optimize the best features of their species. From her interactions with the crew, it would seem that she was also built to appeal to their sense of beauty. No, not beauty: sexual attractiveness. Thane philosophically maintained that aesthetics are universal, and although Miranda was certainly symmetrical in construction, the exaggerated and unconstrained curves that she habitually flaunted were incompatible to his tastes. Perhaps it was the unmitigated human-ness of her appearance, pursued to its ultimate expression, that made her so delectable to others of her own race while seeming crude and bestial to him. She lacked the transcendent loveliness of– well, never mind.

Miranda nodded to him as she fell into position by the airlock door, and the two awaited the arrival of their Commander. Their punctuality, at least, was something they shared. She also, he realized, had his pity. She was a manufactured being: not the way he was, not through the kindly but rigorous training of the hanar, but drawn from a man's blood to serve as a trophy of his ego. Thane had been separated from his parents to honour them; Miranda ran from her father to honour herself.

He admired her resilience. Externally-attributed purpose could either become a lifelong guiding motif, or leave a person adrift. She had persevered and carved her own wake.

Thane settled back into stillness, listening to the quiet blips of terminal outputs, a continuous background aura like raindrops on the glass domes of Kahje.

"Matthews, get back to work. You're drooling," one crewman said, leaned over into Matthews' ear.

"Can you blame me? Goddamn!" Matthews said, his libidinous excitement making his whisper project further than he might have wanted — far enough for Thane's ear to catch it, from his position in the shadows. "And that alien is going on a mission alone with her and the Commander. Ugh, what I wouldn't give…"

"Watch yourself, Matthews," the other crewman said, amused enough to be only cursory with his warning.

"Those poor drell, can't catch a break. The guy needs a dry environment to live, but everywhere he goes, he makes the ladies wet, you know what I mean? –Agh!"

That last outburst was the result of being cuffed on the side of the head by Commander Shepard, striding up the corridor. "Next time I hear you say vulgar shit like that in my CIC, you're spaced," she said coolly, without turning back to look at him.

'Transcendent loveliness': only the right phrase to describe her from a species that worships warrior-goddesses.


The stakeout had been turned; Miranda's megalomaniacal father had been tipped off, and now the trio faced an army of overpaid mercs whose purpose was to delay them until the family could be delivered into the wrong hands.

They battled through a cargo terminal littered with obstructions to line-of-sight, so Thane holstered his sniper rifle and opted to supplement Miranda's biotics instead. Deft orbs of mass effect energy snapped from his hands to detonate her warp fields with deadly precision. Shepard read his tactic, and set to pistol-sniping barrels of explosive chemicals, igniting an inferno that would only appear chaotic to the uninitiated. Thane perceived how cleverly she steered mercs into his and Miranda's killing field, as surely as schools of fish directed by the net. He felt a distant hum of battle elation he had never known before; he imagined that he and Shepard were moving to some shared chorus. She would weave patterns in the flames, a text of bodies laid out in the field, illuminating to him the most elegant, the optimal method of sanitizing the room of their foes. No words were necessary as their abilities worked in complementary opposition.

There was a brief lull in the intermittent chains of her plasma attacks, and Thane felt it like an instrument dropping out of a symphony. He glanced over at Shepard through the reef of freight providing them cover. She was looking up: a strange direction to have drawn her focus. His curiosity aroused, he followed her gaze to a set of mechanical cargo cranes on criss-crossing ceiling tracks. She began to tap away on her omnitool, a glint in her eye.

"I read you, Shepard," Thane murmured into his radio, and she glanced up at him in surprise. He moved swiftly from his position, avoiding the sight-lines of the enemy as he ascended a tall ladder to match the altitude of one of the crates hanging from a stationary crane. A fluid lateral jump brought him to land lightly atop the crate, which swung only mildly under his well-balanced impact. A moment later, the crane shuddered into motion at the behest of Shepard's network intrusion.

Thane stretched himself prone on the top of the crate, tucking his sniper rifle to his chin. The track brought the hovering crate in an angular path along the flank of where the mercs had dug into cover. One after the other, the throats of the mercs came into scope; he squeezed the trigger and planted a thermal slug in each of them. For the final, bewildered target, he holstered his rifle, rose to his feet, and stepped easily off the edge of the crate. He rebounded with a push of his knees off an opposite wall to fall upon the shoulders of his mark, his hands falling naturally into place to execute a tidy neck-snap before the merc hit the ground.

The room was quiet now. Shepard's boots sounded on the concrete floor as she crossed the space to join him. "Nice work," she said, the half-curve of her smile denoting it an understatement.

He and Miranda were both more than competent warriors. On their own, they might even have had a fighting chance at completing this mission. The effect of Shepard's presence, really, was as a facilitator, transforming an uphill battle into a flash flood streaming down a mountainside wadi, unrelenting and unopposable. She was an artist, and Thane did not know if he was a collaborator, or merely part of the material she worked. Around her, he was a supplicant, suffused with inspiration from this incarnation of Arashu's fire.

The measure of their mission success was that a teenaged girl and her family noticed nothing. This was about as much recognition as Thane preferred to get from any of his jobs.

Watching the family safely board their transport, Thane stood back and listened quietly as Miranda gave Shepard all the reasons why it would be senseless for her to go to Oriana and strike up a conversation now. It was better that the girl never know where she came from, and all the heartache and corruption around her birth and life. Better that the girl never know she has a sister who is a Cerberus operative.

Shepard listened, regarded Miranda for a long moment, and then said, "Okay."

The Commander was plainly uninterested in managing the other woman's family relationships. But the hunger and loss with which Miranda looked at her sister across the plaza stirred a memory in Thane.

Kolyat's eyes, sullen at the funeral. It always rains on Kahje.

Irikah's sister purses her lips in that same familiar way. His heart aches. "Please," he begs her. "My skills do not suit the raising of a child."

Kolyat's eyes. My son.

Thane was watching Miranda, the estranged, unloved daughter, walk away from the one person she still had to fight for.

"Shepard," Thane said, as they exited the elevator to the docking area, "I shall meet you back aboard the ship. I have to make a few calls."


Thane's pride had kept him from hiring an information broker to track his own son, but still, time would be short before his absence from the Normandy was felt. This favour for Miranda was the last of their business on Illium — at least foreseeably — and he had a few hours at most before they would be ready to shove off.

The comm booth's partition dented under the impact of Thane's fist. A bad habit, when he was this angry. But he rarely raised his voice. "Clarify," he uttered with the same steely control as an edged weapon.

The volus on the other end of the comm was overtaxing his breather, sucking in air fast and nervous. He was trying to explain to the galaxy's top-ranked assassin about the loopholes that had permitted Kolyat to access his package, despite that Thane had not authorized its release. In this case, 'authorizing release' meant 'dying'. As far as Thane could tell, 'loopholes' meant 'threats of physical violence'. Brutes, all of them. His son included.

The package had contained a log of Thane's career, all identifying markers of clients and targets removed, and a sentimental note to his son which he had struggled with writing for weeks. It was to be his post-mortem apology. And Kolyat had broken into it, taken the log entries and scrapped the letter. Thane could only imagine the hurt and angry expression on his son's face. Actually, he could only imagine his son's face at all: nearly a grown man now, and only a patchwork impression from surveillance vids and rare contact with his sister-in-law.

"Thank you for your time," he said icily to the volus, and closed the link. Locating his son would require other channels which suited the Normandy's communications protocols much better. He vanished into the crowd.


"Hey, Shepard."

It was Garrus' voice, beckoning softly to her as she stood in the kitchen of the Normandy's crew deck. Shepard often had the thought that turians sound like a targeting VI that had smoked too many batarian cigarettes; something about the plating around their resonators gave them a persistent metallic growl. Usually this resulted in a grizzled cadence that made them seem tough and militaristic, but Vakarian's had something more like the purr of a mechanical tomcat.

Shepard took her bowl of oatmeal and followed Garrus into his den: naturally, the room on the ship that had the biggest guns. "What can I do for you, Garrus?" she asked.

She noticed his brief pause until the doors to the battery closed behind her.

He opened with a sigh that was like the flanging of the wind over loose skycar plating. "Shepard. I know you don't like to talk about the past three years. Or for you, one year. Or– whatever."

Shepard dropped her gaze, spooning her oatmeal around in her bowl. It was true, but she hadn't realized he'd noticed, or was being sensitive to it. It would explain their easy camaraderie, when her relationships with Tali and Joker had retained a damaged undercurrent.

"So I'll be brief," Garrus continued, and Shepard sensed that it was as much for his sake as hers. "This is about the two years while you were… MIA."

Shepard was grateful for the euphemism.

The conversation was a confession. Garrus felt responsible for the death of his team on Omega, but Shepard sensed that even they weren't the first void in his heart. He looked away from her when he said that going to that station, forging an opportunity to enact justice without regulations, had been an "almost perfect fit". He was chasing something — some thrill perhaps? — after the Battle of the Citadel had ended. Could it have been the team dynamic of the SSV Normandy? The idealism of their single-minded dedication? The high-stakes adrenaline? She had no insight; she had been a part of it, but she felt like she hadn't actually been there.

One word Garrus didn't use was 'assassination'. Garrus sought to kill Sidonis, the turian who had betrayed him and led his team to death. His lead was a crook on the Citadel named Fade who specialized in making people disappear, and had performed this service for Garrus' target. The hint was subtle, but she took it; when they docked at the station, Shepard left Thane on the Normandy. The drell's practiced expertise at being the arm of a revenge killing would probably drain any of the satisfaction for Garrus, and ultimately satisfaction was the real goal.

In Thane's place, Shepard invited Jack. The ex-convict had recently come to know the catharsis of revenge, and so Shepard thought it fitting. She had also become accustomed to Thane's biotics for quick rescues at short range.

That particular use of biotic abilities never came up as they broke into Fade's hideout and swatted aside his personal defence force, due to Jack's tendency to blaze ahead and murder everything in her path before Shepard could even lay eyes on their foes. Shepard adjusted her tactics into a form of morbid Whack-A-Mole: Jack's shockwaves flung swaths of enemies out of cover and into the air for Garrus to pick off in a deadly turian adaptation of skeet shooting. He was getting very good at it. Knowing him, he was probably cooking up a challenge for Shepard of this particular skill.

This left Shepard to manage all the angles: watch the flank with one eye and her radar with the other, taking opportunities to scout ahead by hacking well-located enemy mechs and seeing through their optics — and shooting through their guns. Her voice was in Jack's ear through the radio, directing her to where the enemies hid so she could go have her violent way with them. For the most part, Shepard and Vakarian were back-to-back in the trenches, alone together, with Jack as a deadly kite which they could reel in to their position or let fly as necessary.

"Forty," Garrus said, masking a boyish thrill.

"Huh?" Shepard asked, turning an ear toward him.

"Forty midair headshots in a row," Garrus explained with false nonchalance, reloading his Mantis with a flourish.

"Nice," Shepard said.

"Aw c'mon, 'nice'? That the best you can do for the most amazing sharpshooting you've ever seen?"

"You do have style, Garrus."

"I bleed style. Unless there's a gunship involved. Then I just bleed."

Shepard laughed, and leaned back against the mech storage box they were sharing for cover. She propped her omnitool wrist on one knee, deftly hacking another LOKI to get a better bearing of the battlefield. She felt Garrus' eyes on her.

She suddenly heard a cry as a body slammed into the ground after Jack's shockwave. Of course, headshotted corpses don't shout.

"Sounds like you missed one, Vakarian," she said.

"Damn! You distracted me with your… blinking lights."

"You can spank it to your Shepard vids later, Garrus," said Jack's voice over the radio. "Heads up for a couple of YMIR mechs."

Shepard could only assume that that particular mandibular configuration was the turian expression for 'mortified'. "What, you need to augment your body count with friendly fire now?" Shepard jokingly rebuked the ex-con.

The two heavy mechs were Fade's last-ditch effort to delay them so he could escape. It was utterly futile; Shepard hacked one and turned the battle into a kaiju deathmatch for her squad's entertainment.

As the last mech burst into shrapnel, Shepard turned to see Garrus' head bent, eyes closed, his forehead touching the barrel of his cocked rifle. The moment between battle's climax and the beginning of denouement: it was an intimate thing to witness. He opened his eyes and regarded her. Turian faces are hard to read, but she felt his whole heart in his gaze. His mandibles parted as though he was about to speak, but instead he silently rose to his feet. It was a long moment before he murmured to her, "Shepard. Let's get this thing done."


It was all too easy, as though karma were running on hard times and needed to collect. Sidonis was on the Citadel. One phone call from Fade was all it had taken to draw him out. Shepard wasn't sure why she felt troubled about letting Garrus pull the trigger; after all, that's what they had come there to do. It had gone exactly how he'd planned: clean and surgical.

As they returned to the Normandy, she turned to look at him, patted him roughly on the shoulder, the scarred neck of his armour. She felt reassured by the harmonic turian sigh she heard, and the way he was carrying himself. He stood a little straighter, his head a little less bent by grief. The three long digits of his hand touched her gently at the elbow. "Thank you, Shepard." He looked at her searchingly, then turned to put away his gear.

Shepard strode through the CIC, eager to head up to her cabin and change into her ship clothes. She was intercepted by Kelly Chambers.

"Commander, you have new messages at your private terminal."

Shepard nodded. Great, she'll read them upstairs.

"Also, Thane would like to speak to you."

This gave Shepard pause. Thane would know her routine, that she would be down there like clockwork within 45 minutes of returning from a mission. Why was he leaving notification with Kelly?

"Thank you, Kelly," she said, and walked into the elevator. The door shut behind her.

She regarded the options on the panel. Going down, or going up?


Thane had found it uncharacteristically difficult to meditate while Shepard was on a mission without him. He found himself pacing in front of his gun rack. It was the first time she had not included him in her squad, and so the first time he experienced this. He felt strangely thwarted and purposeless, denied the opportunity to be at her side, to continue to study at her feet, to continue to prove to her how well he could understand the artful nuance of her methods.

Surely, better than the turian could.

This preoccupation, he considered, may be merely a defensive trick of the mind; it was warding him away from his other concern, which was too personal and painful even to approach in the murky depths of his psychological seascape. Joining her would mean crossing onto the Citadel, and meeting in battle all the old ghosts of his past ineptitudes. Nevertheless, he had paged Yeoman Chambers for an update on mission status, and when they might expect the Commander back aboard — and then immediately berated himself for acting on his impatience.

Shepard was carrying her own chestplate when she entered Thane's room. It was the only piece of her armour she had removed aside from her helmet, baring the collared skintight bodysuit layered underneath. The bulk of her shoulder guards and greaves only contrasted more sharply with the sweeping curves of her narrow waist. When Miranda minced around in her bodysuit, it was vulgar; here, Shepard was unselfconscious and, truth be told, unutterably sexy.

It was not going to make this conversation any easier.

"Is there something wrong?" she asked, bending to set down the chestplate by the door.

With her body? Not a single thing. No– Kelly must have said something. That is why she is here.

"Yes," he admitted. "Now that you are here, though, it seems more… difficult to talk about." A small confession, to prepare himself for the bigger one. Never having discussed his problems with another being before, he could not have anticipated how much of a challenge it would be to put his suffering into words.

"Take as much time as you need," she said. She stripped off her gauntlets and placed them inside the empty chestpiece. Thane folded his hands together behind his back, turning to look through the window at the flickering tendrils of the engine core.

"I have a son," he said, in a careful monotone. "His name is Kolyat. I haven't seen him for a very long time."

The creaking of kinetic padding ceased behind him. He felt Shepard's footsteps bring her closer. "Did something happen to him?" she asked softly.

"When my wife departed from her body ten years ago, I… attended to that issue. I left Kolyat in the care of his aunts and uncles. I have not seen or talked to him since."

He felt Shepard's eyes on him. He turned his head slightly. In his peripheral vision, he saw her expression: sympathetic, non-judgmental. Her beautiful, dark eyes and luminous white sclera. Her gaze spurred him to continue.

"My body is blessed with the skills to take life. I have few others. I didn't want that life for Kolyat. I hoped he would find his own way. If he hated me, so be it."

The words were coming more easily now. He turned to face Shepard. "I used my contacts to trace Kolyat. He has become… disconnected. He does what his body wills."

Shepard's lips pursed briefly as she parsed the metaphor. "What's wrong with him? Is he hurt?"

"Something happened that should not have." Frustration wrestled within his soul, but Thane maintained his discipline. "He knows where I've been, what I've done. I don't know his reasons, but he has come to the Citadel. He's taken a job as a hit man. I'd like your help to stop him. He is… this is not a path he should walk."

He had stated his case more succinctly than he had expected of himself. He had little practice at asking for help. Perhaps it was easier in this case because, in truth, he didn't actually need her help. He desired it.

These past weeks, when Shepard continued to select him for missions when any number of other squad members would have been more than sufficient, he had come to understand that. He was not necessary for the success of the mission, but she had desired him to be a part of it. These shared experiences had been valuable to him in ways he couldn't have predicted.

"Absolutely, Thane," Shepard said, as unhesitating as ever. "Tell me when you're ready to go."

Thane bent his head. The weight had not lifted from him completely, but the burden felt lighter.

Shepard did not move from his side.

He turned to look at her again. The white lights from his gun racks shimmered on her cheekbones, her skin smooth like the glow of the hanar. His hands had gripped a great number of human jaws, always a split second prior to a fatal neck-snap; but the males who made up most of his tally were usually textured with a grotesque thatch of facial hair. He had never contemplated the silken contours of their women — the softness of her cheek, the faint lines of scars leading the eye to the plump pink flesh of her mouth–

This time he remembered to look away. He moved back to sit at his table. Shepard followed suit. The joints of her greaves creaked as she sat in the small chair.

"I have one question though: you don't hire a raw rookie for a contract killing," Shepard said, pointing out one of the anomalies of his story.

The distance he needed to traverse to bring his mind back to the subject at hand, shamed him.

"I'm afraid someone may have seen that we share a name, and assumed that we share skills. I don't know why he would accept the task."

"To be closer to you, maybe?"

Like a knife in the heart. "That thought haunts me more than any other."

Shepard reached across the table and grasped one of his hands. Her hand was so warm, like the gleaming alloys of Kahje's biodomes in the radiant summertime. Human homeostasis was far more specific than drell's, preferring a particular body temperature that ran hot compared to most of the starfaring races. He was reminded of the heat stones provided to him by the hanar when he was a child, something to curl up with in bed at night, something to approximate a drell's natural habitat in the otherwise cold, damp compound.

He thought of curling up next to Shepard at night, and his fingers squeezed hers involuntarily.

"We'll find him, Thane," she said, in her soft alto voice.


Shepard was grateful that it was only a few steps from Life Support to the elevator, and then to the quiet privacy of her quarters. She slung her chestplate into her armour locker, and then sat at the edge of her bed, carelessly unzipping the neck of her bodysuit. She needed to breathe.

She needed a cold shower, actually.

Thane was the first drell she had ever met, but she had scanned the pertinent files about his species before tracking him down. There was nothing in there about the intensity of their black gazes, or the quiet drama with which they carried themselves.

Or was that just him?

Listening to him speak about his son, his profound sorrow barely contained in his carefully measured tones, it was the worst possible moment for her to be distracted by… personal thoughts. There was a flood of them, a cacophony of themes in her mind.

Thane, the father. The husband. The more she learned about the life he had lived, his struggles, his difficult decisions, the more attracted to him she became. Thane may have had a dysfunctional family life, wracked by tragedy — but no one else she knew had even tried to start a family in the first place. Practically everyone she worked with since leaving Mindoir — (so her unreliable memory told her) — had that particular military single-mindedness: obsession with a mission, with a question, with collectivism. Even if he may have failed, Thane had tried his damnedest to balance his career with the safety of his family. He had given someone all of his love and promised her his life, and made a child with her and loved him too. Still loved him.

Shepard had endured a great many strange and horrible things, but the act of making a family seemed elusively mature to her, and by that token enormously, irresistibly attractive.

She had never really questioned the hero's lifestyle she followed, sacrificing sentimentality for a career, floating with no personal attachments, free to chase down more and more urgent missions; in fact she had only gotten more detached and abstracted since her… reconstruction.

Shepard, the secret blank slate. If she had ever nurtured a secret plan to settle down with someone, it had died with her in space. It was fitting: even when she woke up, she was still in an untethered freefall, lost in a solitary void. After the pieces of her body were stitched together, her life became about grappling with and gathering the debris of the galaxy, building something for her to stand on, a team to fight with. The trials of her daily life made her insubstantial past irrelevant; the looming suicide mission made her future potentially moot.

Then here comes Thane with his perfect drell memory, who shifts from gazing at her with burning intensity, memorizing every detail of her posture, and then suddenly being lost within himself. "We can relive any moment in our lives with perfect clarity." He could immerse himself at will, with flawless fidelity, into any physical experience of the past. A lifetime, so hazy and indistinct for Shepard, was for him a library of present moments.

Thane, whose life was so rich and yet so near its end. Shepard, who could not be sure she had even lived her own.

At least in Thane's final moments, his perfectly accurate highlights reel would include things like having a baby. Shepard's deathbed flashback would only be an unmitigated parade of explosions, objectives long forgotten, all bleeding together into a vague and purposeless nihilism.

If she were so lucky to have a deathbed, and not just the numb solitude of space and the hiss of a malfunctioning life support pack as it depressurizes.

She pressed the ball of her hand into her eye. No. More pleasant matters. She lay back on the bed and tried to relive the conversation she had just had, but even now his exact word choices were slipping from her inadequate human memory into a general gloss. In her mind now, it was a catalogue of restraint: moments when she managed not to wrap her arms around him and try to steal away his pain. She found herself skipping ahead to when she finally permitted herself one gesture, and took his hand.

His hand, strong and roughly textured: hands that she knew contained tremendous power and talent, equally as capable of fluid precision as brute force. She felt his thumb press against her and run along her skin. At the time, it made her heart leap; remembering it now, it gave her gooseflesh.

This was her version of drell solipsism.

She had somehow unzipped her bodysuit all the way to her navel, but she would need to remove her greaves before she could get out of it. Huh. That's funny.

The private shower was without a doubt the best perk of command.