Tali requested to stay behind on the Rayya for few days, to heal and debrief after the evidence was delivered to the Admiralty Board. Garrus volunteered to join her and give her support, since mourning her father publicly would not be an option. In her grief, Tali barely choked out a goodbye as Shepard turned to board the Normandy: "Thank you, Shepard. As usual, you rescued everything important."
Shepard squeezed the quarian's shoulder. It felt like such an insufficient gesture behind the faceless stoicism of her helmet, but she supposed it was standard for quarians. "We won't go far, Tali."
She looked to Garrus, and registered the curt nod of his own impassive breather helmet. Tali was in good hands.
In the airlock, Shepard pulled off her helmet and shook out her hair, patting her cheeks to restore sensation there. Thane carefully rolled his mask over his head ridges. After slipping free of it, he looked at her curiously.
"What?" she asked.
"You have a way with words, siha."
"Maybe, but with your voice, you could say anything and I'd lap it up." Her intonation went inadvertently sultry on the last three words.
He dropped his gaze with what might have been a mildly embarrassed smile. "You are corroborating my point."
Shepard couldn't help her grin as she reached out to clasp his gloved hand in her own gauntlet. It was a bulky and inadequate contact, but she thirsted for it nonetheless. She was in a good mood. She felt like she'd cheated the system and won, fulfilling all mission parameters without giving an inch of compromise. Tali would grieve, and heal, no doubt more easily than she would have if they'd kept the burden of that secret and she'd withstood punishment in her father's place.
Thane, though, was more pensive. "I cannot help but wonder, Shepard; if you had turned that same charm on the Admiralty Board, perhaps you could have convinced them that the evidence was never important in the first place."
"Mm," was all Shepard said. She tried to avoid the construction of hypothetical alternate histories. The sanctity of the decision, once made, was the keystone to successful command.
Also, she'd be damned if she tried to slither free of honest testimony to the Admiralty Board. She killed people for lying about that sort of shit. Not only did Commander Shepard have a duty to the truth, but the engineer in her knew that concealing a catastrophic miscalculation of the scale of the Alarei could only end up costing the quarians more lives. Rael'Zorah's failure was not one that the quarians could afford to repeat.
She would not blithely disadvantage the galaxy's largest fleet. Not with the Reapers on their way.
She hit the panel to open the airlock door.
Thane lingered by the elevator as Shepard moved through the CIC, collecting reports from subordinates of all divisions. She tucked a number of datapads against her hip and finally stepped into the elevator with him. She pressed the indicator to go to her loft, and, once again, Thane did not touch the panel.
"I thought we could talk." He held her in the fixed gaze of his eyes, black as the space between stars.
She raised her brows at him. He didn't react.
Not a euphemism, then.
"Alright, but I'm changing out of my armour first. I hope that's not a problem."
That was a lie. She hoped the thought of her undressing posed a big problem for him. The bigger the better, really.
He smiled, only at the corners of his lips. The rest of him was slyly unyielding. "Not at all. I shall serve as your squire." There was a prickle at the back of her neck; Shepard sensed that he had already turned the tables on her, somehow.
When the elevator door opened, she expected him to grapple her against the wall and crush his mouth over hers. He did not. Instead, they stepped together into her cabin, as civil as though they each arrived there alone.
She watched him casually move about the room, looking at her fish and her hamster, fingering some medals strewn carelessly across her desk. She stacked her reports on the bedside table — they were her usual bedtime reading — and set her helmet within the adjacent armour locker. She reached to unclip her left shoulder guard, and suddenly he was behind her, his hands on the hidden clasps, lifting it away. She heard him set it to rest in the locker, and turn to the next one.
The whisper of his hands on the back of her neck and shoulder at once relaxed and electrified her. She exhaled, letting her eyelids fall half-shut. Moving to pull off each gauntlet, he ran his hands along her arms, waking her skin to sensation after its term of encasement. She turned to face him so they could pull away her chestplate together. Her cheek brushed against his throat as he reached around her to power down the shield cells. She could feel her nipples already becoming hard points, epicentres of the tingles shivering across her skin. Moments later, with the chestpiece in the locker, he was able to see for himself, through the thin white synth-weave of her thermals. He smiled without ego at the effect he had on her.
He knelt and unhooked her greaves, allowing her to step free of them. His grip slid up her thighs, caressing her adductors. She sucked in a breath at his touch, suddenly feeling very warm. He must feel it too.
Her armour was put away, stacked in a much more orderly fashion than they were customarily, even though he had hardly glanced away from her as he disposed of each component. He rose and looked at her with those eyes like inscrutable lenses into the sensory archive of his soul.
She unzipped her bodysuit with breathless haste, the sleeves going inside out as she pulled herself free. She rolled the suit down over her legs and carelessly kicked it away. She wanted him, so much, she moved to crush her body against those shiny black buckles on his vest, hard enough to leave marks on her skin–
But they weren't there. Instead, there was something between them. She drew back, curiosity sobering her from her feverish embrace, to find that he had pulled out her dress — the black one — and was holding it out for her to get dressed again.
A sound of petulant frustration gurgled in her throat. "Really?" she demanded of him.
He laid the dress on the bed. "I thought we could talk." He turned aside to sit on the couch, his body language indifferent but with a subtly upturned quirk in his lips. Smug bastard.
She scowled, and turned to rifle through her drawers of underclothes for a fresh pair of panties. She felt his eyes on her as she bent, nude, at her cabinets. He has a flawless photographic memory — surely he has no purpose in staring! She shot a glance at him over her shoulder, and caught the glassy half-smile that seemed to be universal to males of all sentient species. Found out, he murmured a short "hm!" and adjusted his posture.
It was very strange for Shepard, to be visually appraised by a non-human like this, even if his response was incontrovertibly positive. Her body was a weapon, an interface for killing, built for combat and not titillation. She had always wondered at the sinuous curves of asari dancers; what calisthenics did they do to achieve that effortlessly sexual athleticism whose snare transcended species? Certainly not anything like N-training. That process left a person a scarred and hardened wreck.
Her scars from N-training, of course, were gone, and replaced by entirely new ones. She hadn't even been conscious for those fresh horrors.
What did drell find sexy, anyway?
Well, as far as cross-species proclivities went — she found him sexy, and it was partly because his body was a honed interface for killing.
Very. Honed.
Her mind stuttered, tripping over the visual memory of his body as he stood over her by the couch, lean and powerful and backlit the way he was when they first met in Nassana's office.
She wiggled a pair of panties over her hips, and slid the dress over her head. She was driving herself wild, and they weren't even near each other. He wanted to talk. She pushed past the clamoring of her arousal the way she pushed past pain in the battlefield. So let's talk.
She unpinned her hair, and took a hairbrush from a drawer beside her bed. "What can I do for you, Krios?" She flipped her hair over her head and began to brush it, methodical, back to front.
It took him a moment to respond. From upside-down, she saw the voyeuristic gleam in his eye before he could start talking. Well, I think I've figured out that aliens really like a girl with nice hair. Take that, asari.
He rose and slowly approached her. He outstretched a palm so the ends of her wavy locks could shiver across it while she ran her brush across her crown. "You are a complex, magnificent woman, Shepard." His tone was musing rather than effusive. "I feel I learn so much about you every time I accompany you on a mission. This time, I learned about the fate of your birthplace."
She swallowed. She flipped her hair back and began twisting it up again, pinning it into place without use of a mirror.
His outstretched hand curled in slightly. He ran his thumb across his pads of his fingers, as though cherishing the tactile memory of her hair. "It was a difficult story for you to tell, I am certain. And it was cleverly timed. I believe it did help Tali with what she was about to discover." His hand rose to trace his fingertips along her temple, lightly tracking the curve of her orbital bone. He closed the distance between them in a single fluid step. "The story helped me as well. I was able to see one large part of what has made you the woman you are." He pressed his lips to her forehead with a murmur of blessing. She closed her eyes. The soft purring in her head could have been coming from either of them.
"And I sensed that it was also a discovery for you."
How well must he know her, to have registered that slight hitch in her voice, the briefest of hesitations when the images began to coalesce in her head? All without recourse to her facial expression under the visorless, impassive Death Mask?
"The memories began to return to you."
With Thane Krios, it was always a perfect headshot. Boom. He got directly into her head.
"What does your religion say about that?" Her breathless delivery undermined her weak attempt at a joke.
Thane glanced down, smiled. He turned away to look at the fish tank. "It is only religion, Shepard. It gives answers when we seek them, and offers miracles at the limits of those answers."
She looped her arm around his, drew herself against him. By the subtlest of increments, his posture relaxed at her side.
"Miraculously, I think we see the first signs of you recovering your lost lifetime." She felt the vibrations of his voice in her ear.
She suddenly perceived in herself a resentful ambivalence to her past, when her present with him was so real and full of promise. And so brief.
"If telling stories helps, siha, you know you always fascinate me."
The man with eight-to-twelve months to live was volunteering to listen to her narrate 29 years of lost memories, in hope of helping her regain some indefinite quality to those experiences.
She didn't want to talk about the past. She didn't want to talk about their future, if they had one, if they would live to return from the Omega-4 relay for the privilege of seeing Kepral's Syndrome finally claim him.
She only wanted now.
She pressed her cheek to his shoulder. Through one eye, she watched their ghostly reflections in the wobbling waters of the fish tank. She ran the palm of one hand along his sleeve, feeling the small bumps and ridges of his skin, the sinewy roll of his muscles through his jacket.
Then, Joker's voice over the comm. "Uh, Commander, we've disengaged from the Rayya, so whenever you're ready you can call up a destination from the Galaxy Map."
"On my way." She was able to summon her usual authoritative voice despite being nestled against the leather-clad shoulder of a drell in her private cabin.
He lifted her face to plant a chaste kiss on the corner of her mouth. "You know where I will be if you need me."
He turned and left, leaving the scent of spice in his wake.
Shepard heaved a tremendous, uncharacteristic sigh, and thudded her balled fists into the tops of her hips. "Shut up," she told her ovaries. "He can't give you what you want."
She steeled herself for the elevator ride to the CIC, still feeling the ghost of his touch at her chin.
With only a few days before needing to return to the Migrant Fleet to pick up Tali and Garrus, the Normandy had few options of ways to use their time, and no interesting ports of civilization in the Valhallan Threshold. Shepard was just about to pass command to Miranda so she could get some of her damnable resource mining done, when Chambers edged close to her elbow.
"You know, in the Micah system, one of its gas giants is about to capture a comet as a new moon." Kelly's voice was lowered conspiratorially, as though she were sharing fleet secrets instead of some astronomical event being hyped in the feeds. "It could be amazing to see. It's just so lucky for us to be in the cluster during such a rare event."
"I didn't know you were a stargazer, Kelly."
"I'm not really, it's just that we have some time and it would be such a cool and special thing that we could witness. I think it would be… romantic."
Shepard looked at Kelly dubiously. It was always so hard to tell if the yeoman was hitting on her, or trying to get her to hook up with someone else. Meanwhile, there was something familiar about the name she cited.
"The Micah system… isn't that place full of pirates?"
"Yes but if we stay stealthed I'm sure they'll leave us alone–"
"Joker! Take us to the Micah system. Let's look like astro-tourists, see if we can lure us some pirates for a good old-fashioned dogfight."
Kelly went wide-eyed. "That's not what I–"
Shepard loved making Kelly make that face.
"Aye aye, Commander," said Joker, the smirk in his voice just a little bit brighter than usual. "Setting a course for trouble."
Mess Sergeant Gardner's idea of party hors d'oeuvres was to take the same food they'd been eating for weeks and cut it into bite-sized pieces. For that reason, most of the people gathering in the port observation deck were far more interested in the drinks.
If we do get boarded by pirates, Shepard thought, having half my team drunk on their asses might actually make it a fair fight.
Joker placed the Normandy into a graceful orbital arc such that the port lounge would get a perfect view of the comet as it approached the first planet of Micah. The star was huge and very close, but the Jovian planet of Elohi kept it in partial eclipse for the ship shadowing its orbit. Kelly had worked with EDI to apply a tasteful digital overlay on the window to highlight the comet as it was approaching. The party was called for about an hour before the spectacle would begin.
Truly, it was improbable timing for them to be there to catch this event. For once, Shepard's right-place-right-time career might lend itself to lighthearted merriment.
Shepard stood by the door, a mostly-full drink in her hand. She looked over her crew as they clustered in conversation and collided with laughter, socially orbiting one another not much unlike astral bodies. Zaeed had gotten started early on the whisky, as evidenced by the loud slur in his voice and the optimal seat he occupied at the bar. Grunt sat on the floor listening to him, and Jack was perched on the bartop, interrupting him with quips but poorly concealing authentic interest in his tale. Chakwas swirled her wine glass and smiled as Mordin talked over-fast at her. Kasumi had asked Jacob to move something heavy in her part of the room, and was biting her lip while watching him do it. Ken and Gabby stood by the window arguing about the visibility of the comet's tail, and the path it would take. Their vehement disagreement was punctuated by laughter, and tempered by standing quite close to one another.
Thane was a professional at fading into the background, at adapting fully to the norms of his surroundings to become firmly of no note to an observer. Shepard knew this, and yet her eyes continually went to him, seeking him out, eventually finding him. He stood in a darkened spot adjacent to the bar, a faint smile on his lips as Kelly Chambers continued to talk enthusiastically at him. He held his drink — about as full as Shepard's — loosely in one hand, the other tucked in the small of his back. His formal, polite posture was open enough to permit conversation, but closed enough to give him always the panoptic advantage.
Kelly kept touching his elbow as she spoke, in a fantastically clichéd vision of a woman communicating interest. Shepard leaned against the bulkhead with a private grin. Kelly had told her, when Thane was first recruited, that she couldn't decide if she thought he was scary or sexy. Shepard wondered if the look she'd given Kelly in response had swayed her eventual decision.
She caught Thane's eye for an instant before he let his gaze return to its steady and conversational parade rest. He would never be rude enough to let Kelly catch on that he was distracted by another woman in the room, but Shepard could sense a bloom of warmth behind the same polite smile. It wasn't for Kelly, but she didn't need to know that.
The crew swirled off in trios and pairs, engaging with each other, relaxing, bonding. But she and Thane stood on opposing borders of the scene, patiently staking out one another.
"What, you think we don't know? We know."
It was Joker, coming late to the party after it became clearly unnecessary for him to babysit their stable orbit. He had agreed to make an appearance only if Shepard promised to sling him over her shoulder and haul him back to the cockpit at the first sign of pirates.
She turned to look at him. "Glad you could make it, Joker." She pointedly ignored his opening line.
"No, seriously Commander, if you're holding back out of a sense of military propriety, let me remind you that we are now part of an unregulated paramilitary organization. And also not blind."
"It doesn't seem so obvious to Kelly." Shepard gestured to the two of them with her drink.
"Ah, Kelly," Joker sighed with an affected fondness. "Kelly was always going to try. She's like that guy at the bar who'll hit on girls who are completely out of his league, because he knows it only has to work once. Totally, stupidly, fearless." He turned to mutter to himself, "Damn those guys."
Kelly abruptly reached out to try to touch the layered, accordion texture of Thane's dark red throat. Quicker than thought, he grabbed her wrist out of the air to stop her. Her agape and giggly apology was returned with an affable half-bow, as he lowered her hand back to her side before releasing it.
"It's because he's ticklish there." Shepard turned to grin at Joker.
"Jeez, just because we know doesn't mean we want to know. Don't tease the cripple with the kinky shit you super-soldiers do in the bedroom."
Shepard heaved a tortured, whimpering sigh of exquisite pleasure, mostly to piss off her pilot. It made Jacob turn his head from his side of the room.
"Aah! And definitely don't do that again." Joker covered his ears with a dramatic wince. "You can pull whatever succubus horrors you want on Thane, but leave the rest of us out of it."
Shepard laughed, and punched Joker lightly on the shoulder in a way that communicated that she knew his limits, but wouldn't treat him like he was made of glass, either. "Tell me that's not what you think of your commanding officer."
"What, you're disappointed that I don't want to be included? I didn't know you felt that way, Commander."
She rolled her eyes with an affectionate "t-chhh" in her throat, and they stood companionably for a moment.
"You know, giving relationship advice is usually not my deal, but as a fragile but dignified and highly competent man myself–" Joker softened his joking bravado before he continued. "I hope you're not going to be too cruel to the guy. I know you have your own thing going on and need to find your ways to get through the day, but… he really likes you. So if you're just having your way with him for now… let him down easy."
This was unexpected. Did she really broadcast such a nakedly predatory image? Did she seem so emotionless?
What were her feelings for Thane anyway? The top stratum of her thoughts on him were all bound up in physical want, and there had been no saccharine discussion between them to establish what they felt, the way they do it in vids.
No, that wasn't exactly true. Thane had said something. She hadn't.
I confess, I have come to care for you. Perhaps I'm being foolish. We are very different.
Then she had shut him up with a kiss, pursued her own desires with him.
Her long, contemplative silence proved too much for Joker.
"I just thought, after seeing Kaidan on Horizon… I just felt really bad for the guy. It's totally not my place, and, in fact, I think I need to go to the med bay because I think I've got a femoral fracture from putting my foot in my mouth. Well, great party, see ya Commander!" He began a laborious whirl to head out the door.
She stuck out an arm to block him from leaving. "You didn't put your foot in your mouth. In fact, I should really talk to you more often." Her voice was low, and tired, and serious.
God, Kaidan. When she saw him on Horizon, her mind was already buzzing with thoughts about the newly-encountered Collectors. Then he blindsided her with a nuclear emotional payload. Unlike Wrex, she had recognized his face, at least, but she had no recall of the dynamics of their relationship. She didn't know what to do with his anger, she had nothing to patch together when he implied a night before Ilos, and later, she reasoned that whatever they might have had together, it couldn't have been that serious. He had so little faith in her, seemed not even to know her, to think that she would really have become a radical pro-human terrorist.
But from the outside, it looked like a spurned lover, heartbroken victim of a one night stand, discovering that she had never really cared in the first place.
She was not that woman. She would not be that woman with Thane. There wasn't time for that.
She really should talk to Joker more often.
"Five minutes to orbital capture," EDI announced, and Kelly darkened the lights.
Joker was very good, and not just at making well-timed observations. Placing the Normandy in Elohi's penumbra meant that the comet would be coming straight across the view from the port lounge, between them and the planet. Its tail shimmered against the inky blackness of space, stretched out to an indefinite point behind it. A stream of ice and dust glowed every shade of blue. It looked like it should have been making a soft fizzing sound, but instead the lounge was nearly as quiet as the dead of space. Everyone, even the hardened soldiers, seemed startled into silence by how breathtaking it was, this phenomenon of an indifferent universe.
The comet crossed in front of the star, briefly lost to sight. Then it reappeared more gloriously than before, thrown against the stark blackness of Elohi's gaseous nighttime surface. It suddenly seemed so close, and shades of emerald green and brilliant diamond white flamed in the halo of its coma.
She felt Thane's touch on her arms. He had stepped up behind her, having crossed the room as silent and unnoticed as a shadow. She leaned back against him, and felt his breath at her ear, ragged with emotion.
"Thane, don't you have those ocular implants that allow you to see hanar ultraviolet bioluminescence?" came Chakwas' tenuous voice in the darkness.
"Yes." Thane's gravelly reply was the crumble of sandstone, succumbing to the pressures of exquisite and relentless nature.
Shepard felt his cheek press against hers, felt the cool roll of a single tear moisten the junction of their skin.
The comet gracefully arced, fireworking its trail around the rim of Elohi's gravity well. It seemed briefly to double-back, before it finally vanished on the other side of the planet. Its untold millennia of solitary travel had finally brought it to rest, pair-bonded with this silent, uninhabited gas giant.
It was a moment that was so beautiful, so special, that it seemed to be striving to recompense for the cumulative horrors that Shepard and her teammates had individually endured in life. It was the galaxy whispering, it was all worth it, it will all be worth it.
And Thane's eyes, to which the world was running out of time to prove that point — fittingly, he received the most beautiful display of them all.
Shepard turned away from the window. There could be nothing there more important than seeing her lover's face at that moment.
Her lover.
Her love.
His face was composed and still, but his eyes were in an agony of beauty, transfixed by the window, seeing the long tail of ultraviolet light that was invisible to everyone else in the room.
She slipped her arms inside his jacket and held him, nestling her face into his chest. He unfroze just enough to draw a hand up and rest it on the back of her neck, mutely stroking his thumb along the beating rhythm of her carotid artery.
"That was… kinda alright," came Jack's understated concession from the direction of the bar.
"Hey, uh, that's my hand, Donnelly," said Jacob.
With the resultant peal of laughter from the group, Kelly took the opportunity to switch the lights back on.
And there were Shepard and Thane, suddenly illuminated, entangled in one another's arms, a pocket of quiet intimacy amidst the mirth of the rest of the group. Their intense stillness was so inviolable that nearly everyone averted their eyes.
"Ha ha, Battlemaster. Don't break him, he's useful," Grunt said, pushing himself off the floor. "Where's dinner?"
More laughter, but tentative this time. Shepard looked up at Thane and found him smiling back at her. She reached up to gently thumb away the line of his tears. They were so lost in one another, they hardly noticed as the rest of the guests began to file out of the room, passing them with encouraging and supportive gestures or, particularly directed at Thane, awed looks.
"Let's go," Shepard whispered, hooking her index fingers around Thane's. It was her inventive solution to hand-holding with finger-webbing. "Pirates would have made their move by now. It sounds like we might have a quiet night."
Or an opportunity to be undisturbed while they made the night anything but quiet.
Thus interlocked, they nearly made it to the elevator.
"Commander, before you are indisposed." EDI's voice came from a terminal which had just popped to life.
Shepard quirked a brow. 'Indisposed'? Was her ship making a joke?
"Yes?" Shepard's patience was not feeling particularly elastic.
"What would you like to do with the five pirate vessels I disabled during the comet's orbital capture?"
Thane's shoulders were shaking in silent laughter, probably at the look on Shepard's face.
"Hold. That. Thought," she said emphatically at Thane. "And meet me in my cabin after I'm done dealing with this."
It was an embarrassment of riches, to be caught between her two loves: Thane Krios, and command of her ship.
Two loves.
"Shall I vent their holds and eject them into space?" EDI's voice was as placid as usual, but damn it was sinister to hear her suggest it first.
"No, EDI. I'll be right up."
