Thane hadn't noticed Shepard reconfigure her cabin door to allow him access.
He found it doubtful that she would anticipate a need for him to access the room unaccompanied. She must have done it quickly from the CIC before turning her attention to the pirate vessels, because the door slid open without protest. He was alone in her quarters.
The general chaotic impression had not changed, although the details of the stacks of datapads and components had been moved about to varying degrees. The room was quiet, save for the bubbling of her fish tank and occasional scratching from her hamster's enclosure.
He moved to stand by the fish tank.
Illium skald fish. Thessian sunfish. Prejek paddlefish. He rested his fingertips on the glass.
The vibrant to-ing and fro-ing of the little lives made him feel strangely nostalgic. A drell's life on Kahje was the perfect inverse of this arrangement, with the drell in a diorama, enclosed in glass, surrounded by the teeming ecosystems of the Encompassing.
I grasp his hand. He is so tall, impossibly towering above me. I totter inelegantly, pacing around his feet as though they are a playground. "Thane," he says. "My sweet son. You have been called upon to serve the Compact." I do not understand his meaning. Behind him, behind thick glass, a school of chromis fluoresces a brilliant turquoise. "When you are older, you will remember my words," my father says. "Know that we did not take this lightly. You are going to be a great assassin for the hanar. Perhaps the best. You honour us by being selected for your promise and talent." He takes my head between his hands. "We love you, Thane. Hear me and know forever that you are loved." I do not pay much mind to him.
Kepral's Syndrome rarely struck employees of drell cottage industries, where work was conducted in the safety of the biodome, in climate-controlled and optimized environments. Only those honoured to work directly for, and with, the hanar — those who navigated the social membrane between the drell and hanar worlds — suffered the slow drowning of humidity. It would have been that knowledge, too, which grieved the hearts of his parents when he was sent away to train with the hanar. And yet they sent him nonetheless, with pride and with love.
All his life, he took for granted the gift of being able to perfectly recall his father's face when he bid his last goodbye. As he grew older, came to understand pain and grief, pride and sacrifice, and eventually parenthood, his father's expression gained meaning but never faded.
What a world of doubt humans must dwell in. So much uncertainty. No wonder their notoriously tumultuous approach to relationships. They could not call up their partner's tender smile in the midst of a fight, or ever revisit the heady blooms of new love. They were alone with their imaginations.
It must be terrifying. It is a miracle any of them dare to love at all.
He stood there, and allowed himself to lapse into the memories of Shepard.
For once, the memory of Irikah is outshined by a new figure, standing so close to me. I have confessed to her that I believe she is an angel. "Is 'siha' just your euphemism for incredible women you've fallen for?" she asks, concealing her meaning in humour, reducing its gravitas. Her feline eyes watch me, desert bloom lips parted slightly in her smile. I am struck, taken aback by her forwardness. She is asserting herself in my heart. But it is justified, because she is there; I realize she has taken possession of it. I tell her I care for her. She says we are "not so different". Her noncommittal words sting me with confusion. She is kissing me, and my body's response is primal. My lips on her lips. My body on her body.
He looked away from the fish tank, turning to pace the room. Young drell men were known to a certain type of collector as avid and dextrous lovers: 'the asari for asari', as the joke went, made only more alluring by their rarity. Although he had exploited his species' reputation on a few occasions to get closer to a target, he cared little for its veracity. By the time he reached sexual maturity, he was already consumed by his work; then he was married; then, in a battle-sleep of widowerhood.
The thought that Shepard might be misled by this xenophilia disturbed him, but it did not last long.
The faint taste of iron, ghosting over the succulence of her tongue, delicately textured like the flesh of a Rakhana starfruit. Her whimper is of a woodland animal, so exotic and fragile. The subliminal breath of her heady scent is almost undetectable, yet I am affected acutely. My body throbs and yearns for her. I lay her on the bed, all thought driven from me. Her breasts beneath her bodysuit are so soft, so organic, bobbing like the domes of jellyfish.
"Do you really?" she breathes between kisses. I am obscured from her meaning.
Her eyes, over-dark. Something is wrong. Her gaze flicks away to sight upon empty air.
"Do I really what, siha?" I ask.
I see in her eyes, an immense hope of her heart, dashed.
Thane returned to himself once again, inhaling and exhaling in a long, meditative breath. She must have been hallucinating already, when she asked that. It was his turn to be alone with his imagination of what she had heard him say.
Shepard found him, poised and statuesque, hands behind his back as he stood in front of the flickering blue lights of her fish tank. She took a deep breath and shoved down the desire to keep him, keep him forever.
"Are the pirate vessels dealt with?" He spoke without turning. That was fine with her; she wanted practice burning the image of him there into her brain, drell-style.
"Yes, I gave them ten minutes to get into their escape pods before we remotely popped them." She laughed to herself. "We've sent the coordinates and lockout codes to the Migrant Fleet. I'm sure they'll appreciate some extra frigates. Maybe some of them were originally theirs in the first place."
Thane turned to her with an approving half-smile. "Ingenious as always, Commander."
"It had better be worth it to them. The opportunity cost was pretty damn high." She moved to him, impatient to close the distance between them.
"Opportunity cost?" He raised an eye ridge.
"Yeah. You and I had some good momentum after that comet capture." Her arms slipped around him, her palms sliding across his back, underneath the jacket.
"Momentum," repeated Thane. There was a hint of caution in his voice.
No. She should be clear. She was not using him.
"Maybe I haven't been as up front as I should be." Shepard pulled back to be able to look into his eyes. He seemed reserved, attentive.
"I'm drawn to you, Thane. I'm… wildly attracted to you. But… I also want to be with you. You mean a lot to me, and I need you to know that I–"
He dropped his forehead to touch hers, grazed her cheek with his lips.
"It is alright, Shepard. It is not necessary."
"No, it is." She wrestled with herself, trying to be firm and finding it counterproductive. How to transition from the indomitable Commander Shepard to Shepard, the woman with the open heart?
"Forgive me, Shepard, but no. It is not." Thane seemed to have the cipher to that conundrum, able to assert his position to her with elevated grace and tenderness. "There is no need for you to struggle with words. I have a perfect memory. I have seen the way you look at me. I know exactly what we share."
Shepard felt a hot flush in her cheeks, her teeth gritted. This was somehow more naked than even her planned verbal confession. She gained a sudden appreciation for how inadequate and guarded even the most intimate human statements were, when faced with this kind of flawless honesty. 'I love you' was still a label, pointing to some Platonic ideal that failed even to contain the raw mixture of emotion and want and need that was the authentic experience of her heart. It was impossible to hide behind that, with a drell.
With that realization, it came out anyway.
"God… I love you so much," she whispered, her mind catching up only after the words had left her. She chuckled, glancing down. "Whoops. Human urge for redundancy, I guess."
She felt his gaze, and looked back up to see a shine in his black eyes, much like when he beheld the invisible ultraviolet trail of the comet docking at its final port.
"Mm, you liked that. Looks like words have their uses after all." She pressed up to kiss him.
He angled away, letting her catch just the corner of his mouth.
"Hey." She pouted jealously. "Why the evasive manoeuvres?"
His smile was sly, and his voice dropped into a deliberately seductive tone — surpassing his everyday 'unintentionally seductive tone' to such an extent that Shepard's head spun.
"I merely wish to have you completely lucid, tonight."
His consummate politeness, overlaid by the words 'to have you' and 'lucid' in that obsidian rasp, opened the floodgates. She wanted to kiss him a thousand times more, but that was obviously against his purpose. Instead she caught the strap of his jacket collar in her teeth and bit down.
"Even when I think you're finally about to fuck me, it somehow becomes about restraint," she growled.
Thane never dedicated much time to thinking of it before, but the smoulder in Shepard's eyes suddenly illuminated how his race had gained such a decadent reputation for lovemaking. A largely monogamous species with perfect memories would naturally value the ability to reserve some novelty for every tryst. Carnal couplehood, to the drell, meant always trying something else: pushing a new boundary, or tenderly discovering subtle new differences. It seemed to follow logically, to him. Reality may not always be more delicious than memory, but the act of love ought to be.
Humans, along with most other starfaring races, seemed bent on hastily throwing themselves into every encounter. They sought continually to exhaust themselves and their partner with an indulgent and encyclopaedic thoroughness of sexual satisfaction.
Drell, and Thane from among them, preferred the minimalist approach, discovering each note of a partner's body, playing her like a slowly building nocturne over the course of the relationship.
He looked forward to showing her.
He slipped out of his jacket, tossing it neatly onto the back of her desk chair without looking. She seemed impressed, and he smiled. Of course the furniture was exactly where he remembered it. Oh, Shepard, that is only the beginning of the things I can show you.
He ran his hands down her bare arms, bent his head to suckle at the side of her neck. Her moan was soft and low and universal. Reaching behind her, he precisely located the fasteners at the back of her dress, deftly unhooking them with the practiced ease of having seen her fasten them up once before.
He reached down to the hem of the skirt, and his hands mauled the flesh of her backside, drawing up the fabric of her dress to bare her scant underclothing. He slipped a finger in the gusset of her thin cotton panties, and heard a catch in her throat. Her anticipation had been building for a long time, it seemed — perhaps hours, judging from the heady and slick heat he felt there.
She tugged her skirt's hem from his grasp and pulled the dress over her head with burning haste. It hardly touched down to rumple on the floor before she was tearing free of her bra and panties. She hooked her fingers into his combat vest, beckoning him to the bed. He pulled open the buckles of his vest with more strength than he intended and tossed it negligently on the floor beside her dress. She crawled backwards onto the bed and he pursued her on his knees, their breath coming laboured now with synchronized anticipation.
Her fingers butterflied along his shoulders, her palms pressed hard against the rounded and black-striped surface of his deltoids, as if she hardly knew what to do with herself. She fired quick glances over his body. If he didn't know better, he would think she was being shy.
Thane knew he was in impeccably good shape, but so was she. It was some inhibition from being the perceiver, the visual devourer, which prevented Shepard from shamelessly appraising him. It was a surprising phenomenon for a people with such flimsy visual recall, although it made some sort of sense. For drell, a glance is digital: a thing is either seen, or it is not. For humans, there would be some vulgarity in the thoroughness of a prolonged stare.
He realized that he wanted her to stare. But more than that, he wanted her to feel.
He braced his hands on other side of her and bent his head, lowering his mouth to capture the straining point of one nipple. Her breathless cry affirmed that he had successfully transferred the skills of his fingers, developed in their last encounter, to his lips and tongue. The taste of her skin possessed and endowed him, setting him alight after holding back from so many desired kisses. He moved one hand to squeeze her other breast, stroking the pad of his thumb on her nipple, before lowering it to investigate between her legs.
Her body was so hot, so humid, that his mind reeled with the idea of entering her. He did not know if he could bear it, but he would for her.
He touched her until her hips were bucking the way they did in his memory. He prayed for his sanity, and moved to unbuckle his pants.
Shepard had sneaked a second peek, on a previous day, at the pamphlets Mordin had given her. This time she was looking for pictures.
Part of her had felt a little guilty, like she was cheating — but she put that thought away in favour of preparedness. If she was going to face lizardy horrors in the crotch of Thane's trousers, better she know in advance and avoid a diplomatic crisis like gaping, or laughing, or running away.
When she finally located the visual aids, her reaction was mixed. They were only illustrations and diagrams, which was both a relief and also somehow a disappointment. Furthermore, they were not particularly shocking. In general shape and function, and, yes, dimension, it did not deviate much from the human scale, although the arrowhead corona of a human man's glans repeated itself in chevrons down a moderately thicker shaft. Diagram labels made reference to a high degree of individual variation in both those protrusions and the line of bulbous knots dotted lengthwise under the skin along the underside.
She remembered squinting at the images, trying to breathe some life into them, before putting them away and resuming her duties.
But she felt almost panicked when she saw Thane's hands at his belt, moving to finally bare himself.
His fingers, so deft and dextrous, stopped. "Shepard, are you alright?"
Shepard was accustomed to being asked that question in the context of recent explosions or smoke-addled firefights. Her response was usually determined by a check for bullet-holes, and sometimes she would say yes even if she had a breach in her hardsuit, because most times there was something more important at stake.
It was not often a question evoked by someone's concern for her emotional state.
She heaved a deep breath. "Yes."
The word came with less sureness than the average near-miss in zero-g.
She disliked it. She quickly had enough of uncertainty. She disposed of it in her usual way: by taking hold of the situation with both hands. This time, literally.
"Let me." Shepard brushed Thane's fingers away from the hooks of his pants. She felt his hand come to rest gently on the top of her crown, smoothing her hair. She undid his trousers with somewhat more difficulty than he had with her dress, and she peeled down the fabric of his fly. His pelvis was as lined with well-toned muscle as the rest of him, and the tribal contours of his black-on-green markings drew the eye downward like the focal point of a painting.
She flattened her palms against the scaly smoothness of his abdomen, and slid her fingers down into his trousers to explore the beginnings of his shaft.
From the feel of it, he was only modestly erect, not quite raring with oversexed enthusiasm. Shepard was charmed that his body seemed so patient. The organ was much warmer than the rest of him, softly pulsing with the steady beat of his blood. His light musk was breathlessly intoxicating: herbal and earthy green, like genmaicha. Her fingers discovered the small textured knobs that ran along his shaft, just as in the illustration. She went briefly lightheaded at the implication of how they would feel inside her.
He responded to her touch, stiffening and rising. She heard his voice rumble in a steady, low murmur, deep in his chest. Gripping him in one hand, finding her fingers already not quite able to meet around its circumference, she lifted him free of his pants, tugging the waistband further down his thighs.
Yes, it was green, accented with angry purple. Yes, it was not quite skin, but not quite scales either, with a dull shine like the black leather of his pants. It was alien — but it was magnificent, already forming a proud upwards curve and girth that made her mouth water. She squeezed gently, feeling out the hard ridges against the steadily inflating flesh of his shaft. Those dense bumps and rigidly protruding chevrons had much less give, felt much more solid under the press of her fingers. They felt almost like subdermal implants, like silicone masses or Yakuza beads — but she could also feel a lattice of fibres connecting the structures in a network, composing them in biological symmetry. The forms were definitely organic. They pulsed in sync with his heart.
She drew her palm in an experimental, spiralling stroke over the rolling topography of his cock, and his erection strained toward her, throwing those embedded shapes into sharper relief under the green glisten of his skin.
He looked down at her with a faintly pained expression that seemed to transcend species. Instinct incited her to unfurl her tongue, apply a slurping kiss to the base of his shaft–
Thane's groan seemed on the edge of self-control, which she found wildly arousing coming from a man so disciplined. But he pulled himself back from that edge, and grasped her under the arms to throw her roughly further back on the bed, away from her prize.
He bent over her and growled, "Save that," into her ear in his raspy baritone half-whisper. Shepard sensed his desire to conserve the act for another time meant only that he desired it more powerfully. It thrilled her heart.
He reached down and steadied himself against the slick entrance to her body. Her eyes squeezed shut in anticipation, seeing stars despite having been denied a single drop of his hallucinogenic venom.
Thane pushed himself within her, slowly, patiently. Shepard felt her hips twitch, angling toward him; her body was insubordinate, bypassing her conscious mind to follow far more primal commands. With one firm hand, he caught up one of her calves, her toes pointed and straining in the air. He pressed his lips to Shepard's ankle, his kiss completing a circuit that left her body crackling with sensual energy.
As her flesh parted and moulded itself to him, Shepard knew that she would shortly be utterly ruined for all other men. The excruciating first pleasure of penetration was echoed with each sequel of the arrowhead of his glans, that protruding angled outline repeating down the length of him, sliding into her one after the other. Balling up her bedsheets in her fists, her mouth open in a gasping, repetitive "…ah…!", a part of her mind saw fit to point out that technically, this body was a virgin.
Thane lowered himself over her, finally fully enclosed in the overheated, pulsating grip of her cunt. His breath was harsh against her ear. She bit down on her lip, expecting him to withdraw and begin to fuck her in earnest. What came instead put bright starbursts behind her eyes. She really should have read the text next to those diagrams.
The bumpy texture along his cock began to pulse slowly, thrumming back and forth along the overstretched nerve endings of her vaginal walls. Though Thane's hips remained pressed against her, she felt all those ridges and bumps moving beneath his skin — beneath her skin — steadily thrusting without thrusting. The resultant twisting, slick friction inside of her was something out of an undulating mechanical fantasy. One fortuitously placed angular protrusion knuckled back and forth across the swollen knot of Shepard's g-spot. The intensity of the sensation made her legs try to scramble away even as her muscles bore down, urging more, faster. His dick was so fucking hard, and those knobs pebbling the length of him were even harder still. The mass of his cock churned inside of her, corkscrewed inside of her overstuffed pussy, bringing her to a frantic edge of sensual stimulation without him ever pulling back, never leaving her anything but completely full.
Thane was the Prothean beacon of perfect, primal fucks. A human mind was never meant to withstand it, but hers could — and the results were explosive.
She was inconceivably hot, wet, and tight. He was rendered utterly incapable of thought, only of pulsing, pressing, mating.
His last cognitive facility was to register the look of surprise on her face before it twisted into euphoric, mindless pleasure, and to make a note to ask later how humans do it differently.
Shepard had never taken much stock in the notion of the "g-spot orgasm", but whoever considered that myth debunked clearly had never made love to a drell. Her high-pitched cries of total physical submission were the keening treble over the rhythmic baritone rumbles in Thane's chest. She could hardly control her body at all when she came, dimly aware of her womb being filled with extended spurts of futile, interspecies seed.
They lay tangled together for long, silent minutes, both of their minds swimming in shock. Finally he withdrew and rolled onto his back.
"You are… incredible, Shepard." Thane's intense sexual satiety turned his words langourous.
"That was… all you." Shepard was still reeling, lightheaded despite not being out of breath.
Neither of them had the capacity to comment further.
"So," she managed eventually, after a long respite, "if your kisses make me see things, what is this going to do?"
Her hands reached down to feel the throbbing of her freshly inaugurated lips. Her fingers came away sticky with cream, tinted robin's egg blue. Its optimistic hue made her smile.
They showered together in cold water to prevent steam, holding one another for warmth.
