Casnar takes a drink. "So you have an idea for me."

He looks hard at Thane. "I do."

"How about you stay away from my woman." Thane chuckles.

"Really."

Casnar smiles.

Thane always struck me as odd…I couldn't not find something mysteriously attractive about him…but that voice…That damn voice with its rugged prowl…Like he was skulking around his every word, so eloquent, non-senile—Hell, he was older than me!—and he had that issue about his dying…An old drell but too young to actually…Oh, what the fuck…He was too young to be terminally ill.

I never saw him in action…Anytime someone died and it wasn't by my bullet or Garrus's or another squadmate on that dysfunctional ship under Cerberus control…It would be Thane's fault…He would be the one responsible for the death of soldiers, spies, everything I missed…He caught…Talk about angels…

It makes sense to talk about where it all started, but we'd get off track…So much has happened in my life, and it has been an auspicious life.

I enjoyed Dantius Towers more than most missions I'd been on with my new crew. This was the one where the expected was not what was to be at its end…This was to be the unexpected…The drell…The overseer dominatrix asari who was paranoid beyond all schizophrenic control…A drell who dropped bodies on my goddamn head as I was trying to kill people to find the killer I was supposed to engage to my Normandy crew!

Thane was a dancer…Should have been…The way he dropped through the ceiling shaft vent and started working everyone in that office with Nassana Dantius quipping at them behind her back…The final surprise when she turned?…He was like the fly to the black widow…Didn't see it coming…

I didn't think much of him other than the fact he had a smooth voice, rough in its way…He was a drell after all…How much different could he be from Turians or Krogans?…

A lot…

"I'm dying…I'd like to make the world brighter before I pass…"

Hot shit damn…You're dying and we're going on a suicide mission?…Perfect!

I only thought it kind of sad, but it didn't matter…We were all going on a fucking suicide mission…What more perfect squadmate could I ask for?

The Normandy had its regular pulses and chatter that evening…What constitutes as evening aboard a ship in space where you don't have one sun to tell time by the terminus's passing but, depending on the sector of space, over a million…So yeah, it was evening by our standards aboard the Normandy, our secular little microcosm of existence…20:00 to be exact, or near exact…I like to round.

I was doing my routine run through the ship, checking on everyone before I went up to my terminal and hit the log of emails from everyone I'd connections with in the galaxy…Everyone who'd spare a moment to send their opinion, that was. I'd just come from my visit with Samara, an Asari Justicar who left me on the edge of "Is she disapproving of my tactics and going to file an inquiry with her Justicars on whether to go after me if we survive this shit?" or "She likes me…kind of enough not to smear my brains with her biotics…Hell, that's good for my morale right now"…

I'd checked myself into the lavatory to take a squat, and halfway through my zip-fly I heard EDI, our AI/artificial human stuck in the ship of eternity…That's what I glamourized it as, what with our mission of depressive ends, "Shepard, Thane would like a word with you in Life Support."

Shit, I thought, hanging out over the porcelain and determining if one or the other could wait, …I need to do this…Afterwards I can sit and think about what else I'll learn.

I went down the hall from the Women's/Andro-Females' lavatory and shower compartment to Life Support. The door made like it didn't want to open, or EDI was testing out her/its dramatic heuristics.

I refer to all inanimate objects as feminine singular—partly why Joker and I get along so well…even after he led me to be spaced in the first ship we were in commission together on…I was comfortable cursing at EDI in feminine singular nouns.

The doors slid open in that grating, blood-chilling way aboard spy stealth ships with no serial code in deep space and I stepped through with the loudness of my footsteps making my ears cringe to my skull.

Thane was around the corner…How appropriate for an assassin, I thought…He was sitting at the table in life support, a dingy cot nearby…He treated his guns and knives to more lavish treatment, having evidently installed lit-shelving to showcase his tools of death…Cue eyeroll…Okay, Mr. Professional…I could imagine him speaking Baroque Renaissance French.

He looked up with those sad little puppy-dog deathpools…I stood in my horrid white and black Cerberus paraphernalia…Jesus, for spending more than a million credits on tweaking my fried ass out of an ice world, they could have bought costumes a little less…Crook?

I heard his wheeze and then, as if taking advantage of my presence, "…Siha, have a seat."

"What…" I asked to be clear, "…My translator just gibbed…What did you say?"

"Have a seat," and that was all I was sure I had heard from his lips.

They weren't really green. The more I looked, the more I fixated on the fact he was more than just two colors…Oranges, yellows, limes, pinks, red…The organ at his neck and jaw were red…Bloody red, and at first these appeared—there were multiple folds like a very small accordion that would only wheeze instead of bray their typically annoying music—These were very small and fine and shallow. I'd heard nothing about what it was used for besides inflating and blocking chokeholds…or neck breaks.

He talked to me about my beliefs…I told him I only believed in the Alliance and dead Reapers…He asked me about my stance on life and death…I told him I didn't have an opinion on either, except that dying sucks and being resurrected sucks too.

"So why do you fight the Reapers?"

I shrugged, "…It's what I do."

Thane gives me that patient stare that already rubs me wrong, "…Is that all you are here for, Siha."

I had heard it right that time…I collected my mug I had taken from him as a source of fidgetry and rose from the table, "…Were there anything else, I'd suppose I'd know by now."

I left him with that conceited stare in his eyes…I could not read him…I was too simple, noncomplex to understand someone who spoke in Thomas Hobbs riddles and…Shit…We just were squadmates picked and parsed together by the Illusive Man and his assignees.

I went to my cabin loft and stripped out of the clinging, stale synthetics, went into the cold bathroom and turned the shower to hot…I did not think more of him that night, and I wanted to sleep…Dantius's treatment of her contractors made me sick, and I could understand why Reapers wanted to reap our galaxy…If the "enlightened" of our space-faring civilizations were so cruel and malicious, what hope was there for us "lesser intellectualized" sub-species hanging out at their fingertips, waiting for knowledge.

Thane found me the next day, angrily scrubbing dried mercenary blood off my helmet. "May I help," he says somewhat apologetically…What the hell he felt sorry for I had no idea, but seeing I had to remove entrails from my knife, I let him please himself with my visor.

He did not talk while we worked, and eventually we were joined by other crew members…Garrus set in well with him…Jacob worked as far as he could from the drell—a sense of honor separated him from the assassin…but I would rebuke Jacob later and remind him Thane had a way about him that made him at least appear and sound more honorable than the crooks we were encountering mission to mission.

Thane seemed to appreciate it…He was looking at me, whereas before he would kind of glance at me while his hands were working.

I was too distracted with work to care anything of it.

And so we cleaned.

Garrus stopped by the cabin loft the other night, said that Thane had been inquiring about my habits, such as whether or not I had a god I believed in…He was aware, Garrus said, that Humans worship multiple gods depending on the culture.

I said, "…So…What…Am I supposed to think anything of it?"

"No…I'd guess that he's just curious about you, like you've been curious about him."

"I'm not curious about him."

Garrus gives me "You take me for a vorcha" stare and snorts through his nose bars, "…Really, Jane…You go into everyone's room—correction—You barge into everyone's room on this ship to ask them twenty questions, and you wonder why everyone's suddenly telling you we're all busy callibrating…Except Thane…Talk to him more…I think he's lonely."

"He's a freelance assassin," I snark, digging at a scab on my hand, "…Of course he works alone—"

"That's not what I said…I said," the mandibles twitch, "…he's lonely, and he likes it when you charge in there, blaze a hundred nosy questions and blink out like you've just teleported without your brain." He chuckles, "…Someone doesn't mind you're being a pest, Jane."

"Pest," I grunt as I pull down a lab report from Mordin's secret stash I keep copying, "…You're a pest, go calibrate something…Has everyone really been adopting and using that line because—Garrus, you're a jerk, you know that…Fine, I'll take my five I spend picking that Turian cog of yours and give it to Thane…Pest you…" I grumble and hack through Mordin's codes.

Thane looks more cheerful when I hang outside his room and he surprises me by answering the door before I barge in. He tells me, "…This ship's AI has been informative."

"Yeah, she does that…A little too often with strangers I'd say if you wanted my opinion, but we're working on things like that with her…So…What's up."

He raises an eyeridge as if I said something funny, "…What's up…Shepard," he bends forward, "…you're outside Life Support and I did not ask to see you."

I can hear Garrus saying something in my head, "…Oh…Yeah, right, I'm just…" I walk over to the Rec Room, "…Never mind."

I make sure to "barge" in later to that battery, right when Garrus is working between those final tenth-hundredth tweaks of his "calibrations".

Thane…Thane…Thane…

The night I had a dream about him, I was worried…Worry was my usual caveat…Everyone knew I worried and I would pop off if and when I couldn't handle it anymore and something triggered me…Otherwise, the others said I was consistently the same as everyday, so that was good for morale I'd assume.

He had me from behind…Talk about pent-up frustration…We were in Huerta Memorial and I was against a glass wall…Not very discreet for the other dream denizens but hey…Fantasy or not, we came…So I woke up in a deep sweat, places I did not expect a drell to make any impact on…impacted…and not quite in the literal sense, but yeah, in my dream, he'd been impacting.

There was awkwardness…I tried to make visits to everyone to check in as always…Found him in Life Support and got out quick as I could—though one time he drew me back to him by the hand and we had a moment…or two.

"Why do you dart away from me, Siha…Are you troubled by who I am?"

I wanted to hold him just then and run my fingers over his eyeridges, tell him I was being a fool…A pain in my backside…I wanted to try something, but I just…couldn't.

He was married technically…in death, he was still married to her.

So I was breaking…The end to my former life and the start to this next one left me in bitter pain about Kaidan…The opportunity to see him—unexpectedly and not…The Illusive Man had been keeping me abreast on where everyone I'd worked with in the past had wandered off to, and had helped me find Garrus and Tali, Tali sort of…Anyway, Horizon was the moment I realized I was having a crisis…If I'd been brought back to only kill Reapers, what the hell happened to me afterwards? There was no one I had really waiting for me…After Cerberus, what?

Hell, I didn't really expect to survive the suicide mission…Kaidan's douse on me for not contacting him for two years, not that we could find him or that he would even consider talking to me as Cerberus was my leashholder, made me doubt what the whole effort was for…Worse, I realized we were all going to hell shortly.

Thane was in his room where I found him as usual, tinkering with his toys…I took a lean and watched him in silence for a while and…he looked up at me, stood and came over.

"I heard about Horizon, and I read the transcriptional from the headbox chatter," he informs me, and I look down at my boots as I try to ignore what he's about to say. "Siha, if there were anything I could do, to ease your loss…I am here."

I turned and went to the door, tried to…His hand was on my shoulder and I turned my cheek just enough my chin bumped it…It was sore from being clocked in the head by a husk during the battle in Horizon's compound…His hand tenderly, and I mean tenderly because the sore was still hurting even with the omnigel applications and Dr. Chakwas's help…He brushed my chin with his fingers and it caused me to lift my head just enough…He was a little taller than me so he was above my shoulder when I did this and…

Well, he kissed me on my swollen lip.

And I sighed…Not a depressed, woe-is-me kind of sigh, but one of those pathetic, girly, swoon over him kind of sighs.

A drell…One kiss, a couple moments together, a dream, that's all it took.

And being nosy.

I fell for him and I let him kiss me again.

Spontaneously combusting in my head, I knew I would never be the same…and he was dying…we were on a suicide mission…

What the fuck.

So we are.

What is a good story?