Despite the change in their ... relationship, Tani wasn't quite comfortable enough to wait for Garrus in the forward battery. At the end of her shift, she headed down to her cot at the bottom of engineering, stripping down to her sleeveless undershirt and a pair of shorts. It was always warmer down here than the rest of the ship, which was alright if you ran around mostly undressed. Tani's grandparents had been nudists, so she had little in the way of shame when it came to the concept of 'naked'.

Come to think of it, she thought, it was probably why Subject Zero made this place her favorite little cubby hole.

She perched on the edge of a stolen chair, she hunched over the workbench mysteriously placed in the bowels of the ship. Tools and circuitry were scattered across its surface, a sniper scope in various parts of assessment. Concentrating on a bit of wiring and using her omnitool to magnify what she was trying to accomplish, she carefully soldered a component into place, frowning, ignoring the wisp of smoke that feathered past her nose. Confirming that she'd made no mistakes, she leaned back to give a long, spine-curling stretch.

She brushed back a few tendrils of hair from her face before giving up and redoing the tail she'd pulled over her shoulder, twisting her locks at her brow to capture the strands out of her eyes. Satisfied, she bent back to her the component, turning it this way and that to consider her next move.

Her work ethic left her the more she pondered it. Giving up, she replaced the part on the bench and dropped her chin to her folded hands. Her eyes glazed over as she let herself get lost in thought, thinking back on the last few days; Garrus, Lorik, Garrus, Lorik...

The whole situation was just ... very bizarre. She'd never had two relationships at once, and Lorik was her first non-human, so two simultaneous, amicable relationships with two non-humans? Good Gods.

Her brow furrowed. It's not that it was a bad thing. At least, so far, it didn't seem to be. Of course, things had only just settled, she'd only just accepted the situation. Garrus, she realized, had wriggled his way into her heart days and days ago, with his subtle care and stealthy affections. It was the little things.

And then with Lorik, it was the opposite; the man definitely had his way with the big things. He was the politician where Garrus was the sniper. It was an interesting mix. To make matters more (or was it less...?) complicated, they seemed to ... well ... like each other. As far as she could tell, it wasn't in a sexual manner, but more of a mutual respect/budding friendship kind of way. Definitely interesting.

She rolled her eyes, closing them as she smiled. Interesting. That's a way to put it. My new lover is sending my existing one video of me in compromising, naked situations. 'Interesting' doesn't really cut it.

Really, if she took everything at face value, all she could say about the whole thing was thus: she was a damn lucky woman. Oh yeah.

Careful talons undid the tie in her hair, a sensation that she took in through a haze of sleep, a state she hadn't realized she'd fallen into until she began to surface from it. As her hair came loose in a cascade of darkness, she turned her head to the side and murmured his name.

"Garrus," she sighed. "You live."

She expected a chuckle or a clever reply, and when she got neither, her eyes opened. He was combing his fingers carefully through her hair, slow and steady and in such a way that had her think of Lorik and their first night together. He'd never been with a woman with so much hair, he'd said, and he was fascinated with the weight and texture of it. When she went to visit him on Noveria, she'd let him brush it for hours; a blissful way to spend a blizzard.

Garrus, still silent, parted her hair in to sections, combing each section out with his fingers, twisting them together, untwisting them, reparting them... Tani wasn't sure why he was doing it, but she sensed something, turmoil or anxiety, pouring off of him and calmed only by his current actions.

So she stayed quiet and let him play with her hair.

It was a secret pleasure of her's; she loved her hair being touched and stroked and brushed and carefully pulled. She would endure hours of the sweet torture, often rewarding the affection with pleasant tortures of her own.

When his claws stroked across her scalp, she couldn't help it; she moaned.

He paused for a moment, the moment lengthening to minutes, the minutes into longer. Taking her chance, she drew away and turned around, unfolding her legs to set her feet on the floor. His bare hand dropped to his side, looking down at her with blue, blue eyes.

He was still in his armor, the surface of which was dirty and spattered in blood. His other hand had a death-grip on his rifle and the finger of his other glove.

She took all this in, and asked, "Did you come straight here?" She reached for his weapon, pried it from his grip. It took a moment for him to let her. She undid the latch of his remaining glove, putting both on a crate along the otherside of the workbench.

His gaze was pensive and anguished; thinking too hard about too many things, she guessed. Leaning over, hair spilling over her shoulders, she reached around him to press into the latches that would begin the process of removing his armor. He didn't resist. His silence unnerved her.

When everything was stacked with the gloves and he was down to his skin-tight undersuit, she pushed him gently to her cot and had him sit down. She reached up to his visor and accessed the controls with her own omnitool; she set it to record. At last, she saw a twitch of a smile.

She pressed his thighs open and dropped to her knees between them, returning his smirk with a warm one of her own. When he opened his mouth to say something, she dropped her head down between his legs and nipped the inside of his thigh. His whole body spasmed, and, glancing up, she saw his eyes go very wide.

"What-" he managed, before she parted the mesh fabric with her fingers and drew her tongue along the genital seam of his plates, pushing right below it with her other hand.

With a ragged grunt, his cock sprang free, half hard and darkening by the second. His wide eyes looked at her in confusion, then slow understanding as her mouth grew closer and closer to the head of his sex. Alarm flickered across his features, even going so far as to get a good handful of her hair to pull her back, but he wasn't fast enough.

The long, shuddering groan her first enveloping kiss and suckle pulled from him was worth the startled yank at her scalp. She drew her tongue along the sensitive underside of his cock, swirling around the head, and then slowly, slowly drawing it back into her mouth. She felt him lean back and heard him strangle out another moan when her teeth stroked oh-so-carefully over the ridge to his shaft. Her hands gripped his thighs, her eyes closing, her brow furrowed in concentration; she wanted to take it slow in the beginning, wanted him to feel what she was doing, but it was wearing on her control. Her panties were sopping wet from the sound of his granite, velvet voice.

She managed two more slow passes of tongue and lips, up and down, up and down, before she sped up. She had to pin his hips down to keep him from bucking, and the startled shout from him had her a little worried someone in engineering might hear. Still, when he dug his hand into her shoulder and came, jerking, on her tongue, it was all so fucking worth it.

Leaning back on both hands, panting and staring at her, Tani licked her lips and leaned over to switch off his visor.

"When you've caught your breath," she purred, "be a dear and send that to Lorik for me, mmm?"

He was having trouble focusing, she could tell, but the flicker of a question passed through his gaze. She smiled slowly, leaning forward to kiss his chin. "I've never done that to him," she whispered, feeling very evil. "And he's begged me to. Consider it a kind of backwards revenge."

Understanding dawned and, within a few seconds, the vid was sent.

Garrus was stretched out on her cot, one arm pillowing the back of his head while the other was wrapped around her, her curves pressed into his side, cheek against his chest. He'd still be rather quiet, but Tani was patient and understood; he had a lot on his mind.

"How is it that you don't need to worry about ... ah ... ingesting?" he finally murmured, mandibles flicking.

"Over an hour you've been here and that's the first real sentence you say?"

"Priorities. Don't change the subject."

Tani snorted, reaching around to the hand he had around her. She twisted to guide it to her upper left arm, letting him press into the muscle. "Feel that?"

Careful probing before he gave an affirming grunt. "An implant?"

"Lorik had it put in the second time I came to visit. It introduces a chemical agent into my bloodstream when my body ingest levo-dextro ... um ... proteins? I forget how it works, but it keeps me from having any kind of reaction. Clever, mmm?"

He chuckled. "Sexual deviancy knows no bounds."

"You are such a hypocrit."

"Hey, technically, I haven't actually had intercourse with y-"

"Keep talking like that and you never will."