***ENCRYPTED MESSAGE***

***.***.

You've apparently made me about as see-through as clear stuff they put in windows.

It's been a few months and I haven't heard from you. Ms. Chambers contacted me though a few days back, and told me about your radio-silence and how it's colony wide for you and your Cerberus friends there. I'm hoping that's the real reason you haven't contacted me, and not because things ended so poorly.

So taking that in to account, I will continue writing you in the hopes you're listening.

I've hired a new personal assistant. In my attempts to encourage interspecies intergration, I kept my eye out for a human that met my qualifications. His name is Nigel Ohms, and he's a little too observant for my tastes, and far too excellent at his job. So he's both nosey and impossible to fire.

He caught me looking at an image of you I keep on my personal computer that I have in my office, and when I refused to comment on it, he did some snooping and eventually brought it up over a cup of tea.

Tea is a wonderful concept. I'm shocked he found one I could ingest.

Anyway, he encouraged me to continue communicating with you, and suggested that, over time, I try to explain myself over distance and time to hopefully... convey what I was trying to before you left.

For some reason, he found it interesting that you ran away. Apparently, it's more common for the females of your race to express emotional affection than it is for the males, and it's usually a source of much contention and the eventual ending of relationships. Is this true? I didn't believe him, not with how vehemently you argued and practically ran towards the docks.

That aside, Tani ... I miss you, and I am sorry for whatever it is I didn't express properly. I will endeavor to do so until I hear from you again.

Ever yours,

LQ

Tanith was waiting on clearance at a small fueling station, locked into a regulated line and waiting her turn. Seated in her cockpit with time to kill, and unwilling to risk another god awful hangover on the crap left in the cupboards, she'd given in to temptation and queued up a message further down the list from Lorik.

It didn't surprise her that Kelly had initated contact through the unanimous agreement to stay quiet and off the radar, but the flare of alarm she felt the more she thought on it wasn't going away. There was a reason all the former iNormandy/i crew on the colony thought it was best to stay silent and off the comm; Cerberus was too good at what they did, and while they'd figured themselves to be too small-time to garner attention ...

iWell, that assumption was incorrect, and our first concerns turned out to be all too valid./i She rubbed the bridge of her nose, letting the rush of emotions flow through her without stopping them. When the grief and fear finally left her, she gave a little shake and took a deep breath.

"Getting a little easier every time," she murmured, taking the controls and guiding her ship into the fueling dock.

***ENCRYPTED MESSAGE***

***.***.

I dream about you almost every night.

It's distracting, this feeling that you should be at my side when I wake up. Warm and soft and smelling like you do, of female and skin and sex and something faintly floral. I miss the few mornings I had to taste your skin before you woke up, to smell your hair and tangle my face into it.

I love your hair. I love how silken and long it is, how it's thick and curls into funny shapes when it dries after we bathe. I love how you purr when I run my fingers through it, or how you run your fingers through it when you're on top of me, or across the room baiting me.

I love how your neck rises to hold your beautiful face on a pedastal of line and grace, how you move and turn and look and express so much in the shift of your shoulders or tilt of your spine. Whether you wear clothes or not, you wear dignity on your flesh like a shield, like armor grown beneath a radioative star. When you pace through my apartment, nude and without a care in the world, it's hard to fight the urge to lock you up and chain you to my bed forever.

It's late and this is mostly the rambling of a love-sick man. Maybe I've had a little too much wine and not enough romantic cinema. Maybe I just miss you and I fear you don't understand how much I care. How much I see.

You are the woman I never expected to find, so late into my life, and while I'm far from my end, I had resigned myself to a life of eternal bachelorhood. But now I imagine a life lived with the warmth of another, a face to wake up to everyday, the same face, and how I will see that face every day until the day I die.

I expected to feel sadder, given that you're gone, but all I can feel is gratitude, to you and the Spirits and the Universe at large, Reapers or no. What did I do to deserve such small, depthless moment of bliss and joy?

Ever yours,

LQ

The siren telling her to move jerked her from her love letter, and with flushing cheeks, Tanith slapped at her omni-tool interface to deactivate it and yanked at the controls of her ship, getting it free of the docking mechanism safely if without grace. Within minutes she was in the proper flight lane and keying a course to the next waypoint.

"He's star systems away and he istill/i manages to get me into trouble," she mutters, fighting the urge to both smile and change course.

It was so close. Noveria wasn't even that far away. She could just-

Visions of Cerberus tracing her, impossibly so, to Port Hanshan and Lorik Qui'in and the horrible things they'd do to any non-human there, not to mention with the weapons resources and information-

A violent shake of her head and she kept her course, looking for the safest, most lonely route out.

No. No, she'd get herself to the Citadel and contact Lorik from there. Her chances of staying hidden and muddling her transmissions were much better out of open-space. She wasn't going to risk her baggage landing on his doorstep. He didn't deserve that.

No one did.