"Ha ha ha! I did it! I did it! You should have seen it! I did it! I felled a thresher maw!" Grunt's rejoicing involved such loud and broad gesticulations that it quickly became hazardous to the crew, who were trying to scrub down the shuttle after it had docked in the Normandy shuttle bay.
Following the death of the thresher maw, a brief altercation with Clan Gatatog was tidied and quickly forgotten. Shepard led the squad to leave immediately for the Normandy. Suffice it that the shaman knew that Grunt had passed his Rite. Shepard wanted back on her ship without a follow up conversation with Wrex.
Grunt cornered a terrified shuttle tech and was about to launch into a detailed account of every wave of enemies they'd faced, so Shepard and Thane got into the elevator alone. She punched the button to her loft, sighed, and leaned against the wall.
Thane didn't touch the panel. He quietly regarded her, instead — apparently following her to her bedroom.
"A little presumptuous, aren't we?" She chided him only halfheartedly.
"You said we would talk," he evenly reminded her.
Shepard pulled her helmet off and rubbed her forehead. "Alright." She stepped out of the open elevator, unlocking the door to her cabin with a wave of her omnitool.
The place was a mess. She hadn't been expecting visitors. Components were scattered across her desk, various electrical bits mixed with prestigious medals, a bag of hamster food left out in one corner. Pads of paper, that unhackable retro tech standby, were scrawled with handwritten notes, the letters firmly upright and quirkily joined together. A note in a different hand — much more loops — was stuck to the fish tank. It read: "Fed your fish again", and then "x 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6" as Kelly Chambers counted the days when she would come in and do this small part of Shepard's housekeeping.
Shepard made an irritated sound in her throat when she realized that Thane was seeing her secret shame. The clouds quickly passed as she crossed the room in long strides, unbuckling her armour as she went. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she freed herself of each piece and roughly re-assembled them in her armour locker.
Soon she was in front of Thane in that Cerberus bodysuit again, only this time without a scrap of plating to obscure her.
She wasn't nearly as jiggly as Miranda in the same getup. Shepard's body was compact and taut. Her musculature was smooth and curvilinear, skimming underneath her skin like dolphins at play. Her athleticism was the kind built for obstacle courses.
The synth-weave of the bodysuit covered skin but not much else. One thing it definitely did not cover was her body's read on the room temperature. It was always cold in the loft. Damned pointless skylight.
She folded her arms across her chest.
Thane shrugged smoothly out of his jacket and proffered it to her. Whether it was for her warmth or her modesty, she could not tell — but she accepted it without thinking, motivated perhaps by a greedy desire for closeness to him.
She flipped the jacket around her shoulders. It was only a little warm; certainly not as warm as a jacket would be after a human had worn it, but the temperature was comforting in the way fresh bedsheets are. There was the faintest spicy scent that made her imagine clumps of cinnamon wafting like sakura petals on an alien desert planet.
"Thank you–"
Oh.
Thane's shirt underneath, the one that bared a rectangle of his upper chest, which he claimed was for health reasons but, you know, damn–
It was sleeveless. It was really more like a buckled combat vest. There were his broad and rounded shoulder muscles, and the biceps that were usually kept unpretentiously tucked away in swaths of dark cloth. Arms which easily hoisted the heaviest sniper rifles, which supported improbable acrobatics, which contained both the strength and technique to neck-snap a krogan: naturally, they were big, firm, packed with undulating muscle and cord, powerful without a hint of wasteful bulk. He had the arms of a contract killer — well, of course he did, he was one — but the patient gaze of a monk.
Shepard observed that drell arms were not anatomically all that different from human arms, apart from the black markings that swirled like tattoos across textured green skin.
She pulled the jacket close around her body, and tamped down the appreciative sigh that she felt trying to escape her lungs.
"Tell me of your memory loss." Thane's voice was velvet, soft and intimate, sensitive to the personal environs and her potential difficulty with the subject matter. Of course he hadn't forgotten that moment at Urdnot Camp, even through the adrenaline of the Rite. It was foolish of her to hope that he would. Drell never forget — and Shepard… did.
He moved to the couch, seating himself at a modest distance from her. He rested his elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled together, dark eyes regarding her with a gentle but fixed attention. Shepard briefly resented the way he slammed on both sides of her nice guy/bad boy inclinations, composing his killer body into such courteous dignity. Not fair.
She pulled up her feet to sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed. The black, spice-scented jacket enveloped her in an aromatic cocoon. She exhaled, hard, with a soft thrum of consternation, drawing her attention back to his inquiry. It was a secret she had been keeping from her crew for months. How would she even explain it?
"Loss isn't the right word." She explored how to phrase the sensation, each syllable coming low and tentative. "It's like I was reborn without any way to be sure that those things had really happened."
Thane sat, silent. His dark eyes were two portholes into deep space: the calm of the void, spirited with vast, untouchable life. The epistemological problem of other minds was writ large when gazing out a starship window, but it came full circle in the way he was looking at her.
"I feel like a VI that has gained awareness. I know a lot of things about my life, but that knowledge… it wasn't packaged with the things that make memory real. The embodied experience of it. I'm not sure how to explain… "
She could tell Thane immediately understood. He somehow traversed the inestimable distances between minds with the breadth of his sympathy. His brow-ridges were drawn together in an expression of profound pity.
Shepard was unaccustomed to pity. Not since Mindoir. Not since joining the Alliance and learning to be strong. Or, at least, that was the story. Though she could have been indignant at his reaction, instead she felt a strange relief, like an airlock depressurizing at port. Thane saw past her hero's reputation and multiple military ranks, and saw her as a human. No, even less alien than that — he saw her as a woman. Thane, the noble assassin, stood outside stereotype, and his presence granted her permission to unfold from the imagery of the dauntless marine.
"It seems like I know things about myself the way I know how FTL drives work," she resumed, steadily. "I know it in theory, but it's not observable, you know?"
Thane chuckled softly at the apt simile. He rose to contemplate the fish tank, his hands folded behind him, his silhouette outlined by shimmering aquatic light.
"My religion would have an explanation for you, Shepard." His voice bounced off the glass of the tank, crystallizing its many resonances.
"Really." She would have let him talk about anything, at that moment.
"We believe in a soul separate from the body. My understanding is that many humans share that belief; ours is just a bit more… literal. A priest of our old religion might say that when you died on the first Normandy, your soul departed your body. When you were brought back, a new one came to inhabit you. Although your body retains its experiences as imprints in the brain, the phenomenological experiences, the… qualia of life, belong to the soul. So perhaps, in a way, you were born anew on that laboratory slab."
Shepard stood, suddenly restless. "So I'm a Cerberus super-husk lugging around an underdeveloped soul meant for an infant." The thought tasted bitter as she spoke it.
"Quite the opposite." Thane turned to look at her. "I believe the soul you have is an extraordinary one. I believe you are a siha."
He spoke so frankly, Shepard almost dared not ask what he meant. But she did, and his answer was open, without pretense. "A siha. A warrior-angel of the goddess Arashu. Fierce in wrath, a tenacious protector."
Shepard, the consummate atheist, might have been tempted to laugh, or to judge — but there was something deeply personal in this metaphysical talk, a sentiment carried within it that had nothing to do with antiquated mythologies.
"I knew another siha, once." He turned back to the fish tank and the sleepy, slow motion flutter of its inhabitants. "My wife. I first saw her through my rifle's scope, when she noticed my laser sight and threw herself in the way of my target, a stranger to her. She met my eyes through the scope, and my purpose faltered. I could not pull the trigger, that day." She could see his face reflected in the glass. His dark eyes were woeful, but they had not gained that flickering, inward quality when he was lost inside a memory. He was staying with her, with Shepard, for now. It surprised her how much she wanted that.
"During the Dantius commission, feeling you pushing me to reach the target, forcing me to move faster, challenging me — I suspected I had met another siha. Few are privileged to meet even one."
Shepard watched pale blue light glance off of the burnished smooth scales of his face, his black eyes like inky sapphire baubles. She imagined the way his wife must have seen him, living in a marine biodome of Kahje, submersed in this kind of light all the time.
Shepard decided to unfurl these metaphors in her usual style.
"Is 'siha' just your euphemism for incredible women you've fallen for?" she asked with a crooked smile, leaning against the fish tank to captivate his view.
His expression underwent many transformations: surprise at first, and finally a smile after processing an exquisite ache. "Perhaps, Shepard," he said, as he finally landed upon something gently resolute. "I confess, I have come to care for you. Perhaps I'm being foolish. We are very different."
"Not so different," Shepard murmured, and with the decisiveness that had propelled her up the Alliance ranks, she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the full bottom lip of the first drell she had ever met.
She had wanted him for so long, but in this moment, one reason for it became suddenly clear. The qualia of life, he had said: it was exactly the promise of feeling things that had made him so irresistible. Thane was so deeply present in his physicality, and yet contained vast stores of equally embodied moments in a memory bank she yearned to access, which wildly outmatched the uncertain phantasms of her own past. And in every present moment, being around him was exquisitely multisensory, a perfect counterbalance to her world lived in cerebral calculations floating in impalpable data streams. Her vision drank in the impossibly black pools of his eyes, the fullness of his lips, the graceful precision of his posture. Her hearing thrilled with the multilayered vibrations of his resonance and the careful intention of his words. And now, the scent of him in his jacket: it was so distant and lovely and impossible to place. No wonder she was overwhelmed with the sudden need to discover the taste of his lips. She wanted to feel everything, and she wanted to feel everything about him. She wanted to lose herself in the sensory experience of Thane.
His soft moan of surprise at the contact of their lips, electrified her. She tilted her head and kissed him again, hard, her tongue emerging to taste him. She felt his hands slide around her waist underneath the jacket, encircling her in the firm bulk of his arms. His lips were smoother than they looked, deceptive like the baby-soft surprise of snakeskin. The taste of him tingled on her tongue like asari sugar candy. The jacket fell away to the cabin floor.
She felt the cool, textured touch of a drell hand along the nape of her neck, the thumb gently stroking along the soft slope of her vertebrae. Those hands could just as easily twist and end her life, as they had done to an unknown number of other victims. Living amongst elite soldiers meant every gesture, every moment of proximity to another person was an encounter with death. Everyone was a finely tuned killing machine. Thane was perhaps the most corporeal killing machine she'd ever met, hardly dependent on accessories like guns or tech or flashy biotics, as much as he freely used all three. The galaxy's deadliest assassin had his hand poised on her neck; alarms thrilled through the primitive part of her mind occupied solely with self-preservation. But his touch was so tender, and so achingly welcome. Her heart raced towards the sensation that her basest instincts cried out to flee. The conflict in her body made her extremities tingle. This was phenomenological in a way that promised to compensate for all her lost years.
Their kisses grew fierce, trading moans in one another's open mouths. Her hands instinctively rose to clutch at the backs of his shoulders, the nape of his neck. When her fingers tickled along the base of his crest, the contact drew an impassioned rumble from his throat. She couldn't press her body to him hard enough. The buckles across his chest dug into her with a painful thrill.
Her arms around his neck, she kicked up her feet to wrap her legs around his waist. He accepted her weight without missing a beat.
It had not been Thane's intention to seduce Shepard in this conversation, and he knew little of human courtship practices. When it happened, it was like meeting her in the field: coming faster and more fiercely than he could have anticipated. She was so soft, her lips buttery and perversely wet. He pulled her into him, his body entirely awakened by the sensation of her pressing so tightly. The rush of endorphins and the profound sense of rightness cascading in his brain affirmed his sexuality cared not for their difference in species.
They kissed and kissed and kissed, a succession of passionate snapshots for his mind's eye. Thane committed to memory every whimper and coo that purred in the curve of her throat. He brought her to the bed and laid her atop it, and they kissed away every doubt and every aching hour of tension and every threshold of battle. Her fingers tried to twine in his and the pads of her delicate fingertips caught on his sensitive webbing, his palms coursing with thrills. He reached to grasp her at the ribcage and felt her breasts compress together, soft and lasciviously fleshy. Her skin was so creamy, her lips so moist: all of Shepard's exquisite mammalian textures were as the inside of a drell woman. It was almost unbearably erotic.
Suddenly her lips parted from his long enough to ask, "Do you really?" in a warm and humid exhalation.
He couldn't place what she might be asking. He pulled back to feast his inquisitive eyes on her. Her own dark eyes fluttered open.
They were too dark.
Even with those brown-black irises, he could tell that her pupils were dilated enough to nearly swallow them up.
She squinted away from the dim yellow lamplight, and he knew he was right. He held her head gently with one steady hand, tangling his fingertips in her tousled crimson hair.
"Do I really what, siha?"
Her brows knit together briefly before she was seemingly distracted by something out of the corner of her eye — though nothing was there that Thane could tell.
"I… thought you said something."
"How could I, siha? My mouth was very occupied." He couldn't help but smile. His thumbs grazed her jawline, and he leaned forward, aching to press his lips to hers again.
"Of course," she murmured.
Shepard was seeing spots, or were they crosshairs? Unattended drones flitting to and fro in her peripheral vision? They were innocuous everyday things, the kinds of hallucinations she'd get after being awake for too many days in the field, and then suddenly it was more. Her whole body, every nerve ending tingled, the way she imagined biotics must feel — except her energy was gathering in the hard buds of her nipples and blindingly hot between her thighs. She had no idea how to direct this energy, what form it would take if she was meant to gather it and fire it at an opponent.
There was no opponent, unless the sport was lovemaking. Then there would be only Thane.
She had barely glanced over those pamphlets on human-drell contact that Mordin had sent her. It was mostly the statistics that interested her. What proportion of cases showed symptoms at all? Was Mordin just playing the overly cautious doctor? The science seemed sound, and she figured her Cerberus 'upgrades' stood a good chance of placing her within the percentile that showed no reaction. The documentation had gone into a folder titled "Low Priority". She nearly gave it a new folder, labeled "wishful thinking", since she hardly thought it would even get the chance to become an issue.
Wishful thinking, indeed. Under the influence of drell hallucinogens, her mind saw fit to invent words in the elegant resonance of Thane's voice: I love you, Shepard.
"There's something you should know, Thane." She angled her face away to speak. He pressed his cheek to hers, suckled at her earlobe. Her eyes fluttered. A lesser woman's train of thought might have melted.
There's something you should know, Thane. I think you're sexy as all hell. I think about you too much. I think about your quiet, confident presence. I think about your big guns. I think about the poetry, the sureness of you. I think about your feelings about me. I think I'm falling in love with you.
"I think I'm starting to hallucinate as a reaction to your salivary chemistry," was what she said.
A long, quizzical pause from him, as she held her breath. "Are you alright?" The resonance of his voice washed over her ears in waves that made her vision tingle.
"Yes, I'm fine. It's a known interspecies physiology thing for drell and humans. It's not harmful. It's just a… mild… phenomenon."
Thane pulled back, his gaze roving over her body, almost as though he were checking for wounds, abnormalities. His hands brushed along her collarbone, caressed her biceps. "Tell me, how does it feel?"
It felt like the buildup of energy in a ship's hull before being fired out by a mass relay. It felt like a pistol with a jammed thermal clip, just heating and heating to bursting. It felt like being slammed with a warp field that electrified every nerve ending until it was ultra-sensitive. Her eyes and her ears may have been making up new stimuli, but her skin seemed instead to be discovering every nuance of what it meant to authentically feel. It was the very brink of an explosion.
Her body craved the sensation of Thane Krios executing his athletic precision deep inside of her.
All this arose as she tried to answer his question, and so she could only shudder and say, "Really, really good."
"Then… should we stop?"
It was a necessary question, and a courteous one, characteristic of his unfalteringly respectful manner.
The answer came from Shepard's body, a desperate flare of opposition. She was psychologically brought to her knees by it. Her hips angled forward, pressing against him in an autonomic bid to mate.
"No, please. I need you, Thane." Her words were more air than voice. She felt her breath coming quickly, her heart pulsing like an overtaxed drive core. As the dim cabin light flickered in her vision, she felt herself losing control: bodily control which was ingrained, hard-fought, a constant survival companion. As it slipped away, she pressed her cheek against the cool texture of Thane's chest, and closed her eyes. Visions of floating drones and arcing incendiary rounds continued to flit in the middle distance of sensory darkness, but Thane's body was steady, stable, and very present.
When she opened her eyes again, he was tenderly loosening her hair from its high chignon, a soft rumble in his throat.
"This is… so beautiful." He held a curling lock aloft in his palm, watched the texture splay between his thumb and forefinger. In return, Shepard traced her fingers along his mohawk of bumpy crests. He blinked slowly, his back stiffening somewhat with a sensitive response. The crests were warm, warmer than his jacket was. Vestigial heat-sinks from a desert world, like her vestigial fur from a savannah planet: remnants of lost environments, meeting in space and affirming the universality of… something.
With the backs of two fingers, she stroked the ruddy accordion texture of his under-throat. He laughed a short "ha!" — he was ticklish. He twined his fingers in her hair and pressed her head to his chest, her ear to his throat, which had inflated slightly. He began to murmur in a low rumble that she felt more than heard, just beneath the auditory range of her species. It was a powerful vibration that transmitted warmth through her entire body. Her brain, already overwhelmed by foreign chemicals, responded with a synaesthetic vision of blue and orange waves rollicking across her mindscape.
"…Ah…!" she heard herself say, the sound coaxed forth involuntarily by the sensory overload.
"You could hear that?" There was a smile in Thane's surprise.
"More like… feel it." She pulled back to look at him. "What was it?"
"A prayer," he said in a soft sigh. "Of thanks."
"Don't thank your gods yet." Shepard found her voice had gained a low, throaty rasp. His vibrations had rolled through her, and lingered in certain highly sensitized regions. "We haven't even gotten started."
Her free hand was pulling down the zip of her bodysuit, baring a widening delta of pale flesh. He straightened to gaze down at her from where he straddled her at the waist, watching the deliberate reveal of her breasts. Once the creep of the zipper reached its furthest point in the hollow of her lower abdomen, Thane slid his hands down to the tension of her ribcage, tucking his fingers under the fabric, cupping her breasts from beneath. Pressing them together, he freed them from the cloth, and seemed to luxuriate in their soft, pliable texture. She only realized she was holding her breath when the pads of his thumbs finally brushed across the nibs of her nipples, and a lightheaded cry was drawn from her.
Thane's world was anatomical. He plied his trade with his body. He monitored the advance of his illness. As a small child studying with the hanar, in tandem with practising how to read and write, he learned how bodies work, particularly bipeds. He studied how they moved, how they respired. He became literate in all the systems of air and blood and bone — and nerve. By puberty, he was intimately familiar with the physiology of all the known starfaring species. He knew a thousand ways to take life without causing pain. His mind was mapped with the topography of a body's sensitive points. He was trained to treat them gently, to tread lightly around them. His skill was killing without being discovered, whether by witnesses or by the victim's nervous system.
In this encounter with Commander Shepard's body, Thane could afford to be academic in his approach. He knew human anatomy well enough, but only knew abstractly how to pleasure them. Even more useful than this textbook knowledge was his skill in reading the communications of the body. She was making it easy for him, too. If body language had a volume, Shepard's would be screaming.
Who could look away from the hardened buds cresting the soft domes of her breasts? Her breasts were hypnotic enough as they were. They left nothing hidden, wobbling and soft as the glands beneath, with no scaly defensive hide to toughen their surface. The fine surgical scars tracing her body were like the ghosts of drell markings. Apart from those faint pinkish tracks, her skin was an ivory expanse punctuated only by the rosy wrinkles of her areolae.
The tentative flick of his thumbs across those magnetic poles elicited such a dramatic response that all of his apprehension was assuaged. He could trust his intuition.
He pinched them both, rolled them between thumb and forefinger, watching attentively to her reactions. He applied different pressure and angles, and committed each toss of her head, each startled cry to memory. At some point, her quaking became strained and halting, her cries bitten at the lip, after which she opened those over-dilated eyes and looked at him sheepishly. Thane's perfect memory made note of that as well. His investigation continued.
Somehow, Shepard knew herself to be a 'tough nut to crack'. Her memory abstractly informed her of having frustrated many boyfriends in the academy with her body's reticence to climax under their ministrations. Just as in her budding career, operations went best if she took matters into her own hands.
Maybe it was the new gear, maybe these drell chemicals in her brain, but she felt like a row of firecrackers on Alliance Day, and someone had tripped over one of them and set it off early. Points of light flashed in her eyes prompted by Thane's thorough manipulations, but she knew a whole other display was waiting to be ignited.
He didn't seem inclined to stop, anyway. He had tossed her rank and taken command. She felt an elation of freedom with this realization.
His hands dropping to her waist, Thane hoisted her and spun her nimbly with him, exercising the quickness of his upper body strength. She did not resist him, and he repositioned her neatly onto his lap while he sat on the edge of the bed. With the delicate touch of his cool fingertips, he slid the top of the bodysuit down her shoulders and off her wrists, to hang limply from her hips like a shed skin. Then his hands were firm at the small of her back, pressing Shepard to him to kiss again and again, then slid his grasp down to the compact curve of her ass, underneath the fabric, to aid her to slip out of the bottom half of the suit.
Finally detaching herself from their passionate liplock, she planted her feet and straightened her legs, bent in half over him like a VIP dancer on Omega. As she disengaged the buckles of his vest, he rolled the leggings down her thighs, taking with them the flimsy cotton of her panties. She kicked free of them, tossed his vest aside and slid back onto his lap, crushing her electrified skin against his bare chest. Shepard squeezed her eyes shut and reveled in the discovery that his lean, muscled torso was built in the same way as a human male's: no surprises apart from the alien brushed-metal smoothness of his scales, and the pleasant discovery that his markings do go all the way down. God, he was sexy.
She finally set her hands to feeling out the fastenings of his pants — and was suddenly scooped up in his arms.
Onto the couch she was tossed, her legs splaying as she landed. He loomed above her, predatory. Shirtless, Thane's pants were merely tugged askance by her efforts, a slanted beltline at his narrow hips. He was backlit, and Shepard's photosensitive eyes struggled to pick out the details of his tapered silhouette. Rid of his customary slim-fitting wardrobe, she could now perceive the bulky masculinity of his shoulders, the defined musculature of his torso. The reptilian texture of his skin only firmed up the taut crevices of his pectorals. As Thane moved towards her, there was an easy sway in his waist, spanned with hard-packed abdominal muscles.
Shepard was a marine, and an N7. Most of the men she'd fraternized with in her life were in peak physical condition. But Thane was beyond the generalized fitness of the military; he was honed to a precise and perfected ideal. She ought to have expected it, from the way he kept his sniper rifles so pristine. His primary weapon had always been his body.
The galaxy's greatest hired killer knelt at her side and suckled at her throat, as one hand slid down to explore the brilliant point of hot light between her thighs.
Thane almost feared for the progression of his disease, as the air in Shepard's cabin grew humid with her body's passion. It was a miracle of convergent evolution that human women shared most formal similarities with drell women in construction, although a human vulva was far more lewd in its soft, salacious unfurling. Thane also discovered a novel and fortuitous little button that seemed to be a sensual nexus, the manipulation of which consistently drove Shepard to greater heights of ecstasy. She crested those heights two or three times before he began to muffle her hoarse cries with impassioned kisses. She would need that voice to call directions in battle.
He experimented with ministrations fast and slow, explored her interiority with small deployments of fingers, discovered more bundles of sensuality in fleshy knots inside of her body. He pressed on them, coaxed wild physiological responses from her, evoked soft fluid spurts and moans and cries of every degree.
He could afford to be academic this time. She was lost in feeling. Her eyes had been squeezed shut for the last twenty minutes, and her only communication had become wordless exhalations and the undulations of her writhing hips. He understood them just as well, but also understood that she was on another plane now.
He wondered what visions were behind those eyelids.
He wondered if next time, he would have the strength not to kiss her, so that their first lovemaking would be with eyes that could truly see him.
He wondered if he was too presumptuous to conceive of a next time.
He withdrew his hands from her, coated with her musk. She moaned and let her legs fall open, still quavering from climax. Thane rose and went to wash up.
In the semi-solitude of the bathroom, he bent his head and gave thanks to Arashu, for having met the last love of his life.
