He didn't know what woke him up, but it wasn't Shepard shaking him awake. He opened his eyes and stared up at the sky. Stars were smattered across it like diamonds on black velvet and the moon shone bright and full, making the forest around them brighter than he expected. The occasional rustle of small animals in the undergrowth and flap of wings in the darkness reminded him of camping in the state parks near Camp Pendleton.

James could see Shepard out of the corner of his eye. She hadn't moved from where she'd been when he fell asleep. She was staring up at the sky as well. The moonlight bathed her features, making her skin even paler and the freckles across her nose stand out like the stars in the night sky. He wondered what she was thinking about. Perhaps she wasn't thinking at all, just letting the majesty of the Earth sky roll over her.

He noticed then that she was shivering. Parts of his armour were climate controlled whereas Shepard's dress blues wouldn't be much better than a stripper outfit in the freezing night air. He couldn't help imagining Shepard in a stripper outfit and had to stifle his laughter. It didn't matter that it would undoubtedly be hot, Shepard would shoot anyone before they got her in that kind of get-up.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked, still staring up at the sky. Shepard always knew when he was awake.

"You in a stripper outfit."

Her head whipped around so fast he was surprised she didn't spin a three-sixty from the force. "I wouldn't be caught dead in a stripper outfit."

"You couldn't pull one off anyway." He wondered if she'd–

"I could pull one off if I needed to."

Yup, she fell for it. She must have been tired; it was way too obvious a trap. "Great. I'll get you one when we reach Vancouver."

She gave him that deadpan look that she hadn't given him since he was poisoned. "No."

He laughed and crawled out of the sleeping bag. He stood and stretched, missing the warmth of it already and wishing he could go back to sleep. That wouldn't be fair, though, and he nodded his head for Shepard to get in the sleeping bag. When she stood, it was without the pain that had contorted her face earlier, and when she walked, the limp was gone. Whatever she'd injected herself with obviously worked.

He took her place, keeping the blanket wrapped around him, and stared into the darkness. They didn't need to discuss lighting a fire when they first stopped; they both knew it would be too obvious a beacon to anyone flying overhead. The sleeping bag rustled as Shepard snuggled into it, and then everything fell silent again. The soft noises of nocturnal animals eventually resumed as the bipedal forest intruders settled down.

For a while, he stared at the sky again, trying in vain to pick the star systems that he'd been to. There was an annoying sound that kept pulling him out of his musings, and he finally pin-pointed it: Shepard's teeth were chattering.

"Still cold?"

"I'm fine."

Yeah, right, he thought.

He stood and walked over to stand above her. She looked up at him, an eyebrow raised, and her mouth clenched shut so he couldn't hear her teeth chattering.

"Get up."

"Why?"

"Because I'd get in trouble if you died of hypothermia," he said as he pulled off his gloves and arm greaves. "Could you imagine your gravestone? 'Here lies Commander Shepard: survivor of a thousand battles, killed by a bit of cold weather'."

He dropped the armour pieces onto one of the bags and started to unbuckle the chestpiece.

"You are not getting undressed, Lieutenant."

"Not fully. Secretly, you'd like that though," he said with a wink that he wasn't entirely sure she could see.

Shepard sat up and opened her mouth to say something, but it looked like she changed her mind and stood instead. She clutched the blanket around her like it was armour and watched in silence as he detached his shotgun and his rifle and dropped the chest and back pieces on the bag as well. Shepard was standing so the shadows hid her face, but her rigid stance told him that she didn't like the look of this.

He half-unzipped the sleeping bag, setting it on the ground next to a tree, and placed both his weapons on the ground beside him. He tucked his feet into the end of the sleeping bag and leaned his back against the tree before motioning with his hand for her to come over.

For a second, she hesitated, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

"I'm not going to take advantage of you, Shepard," he said with a roll of his eyes and another insistent wave of his hand. "Apart from it being wrong, you'd break my fingers."

"I'd break more than your fingers," she said as she finally moved toward him and settled between his legs.

She zipped the sleeping bag up most of the way, covering the rest of her upper body with the blanket, and rested back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and she tensed. He thought maybe she was going to tell him to let go before she tugged the blanket out from under his arms and rearranged them over his arms to keep him warm too. She eased against him, and soon their combined body heat produced more warmth than even his armour had managed to.

Eventually, her breathing deepened and her head drooped to the side. He looked down at her and brushed some of her hair away from where it fell over her eyes. She had that slight frown between her eyebrows again, and he smoothed his thumb over it.

James had never denied that Shepard was easy on the eyes. The one girlfriend who hadn't cheated on him had had red hair, though not as bright as Shepard's, so he'd decided long ago that redheads were the way to go. Shepard's eyes were her best feature, though—on her face, anyway. They were so expressive when she wasn't trying to shut him out, shifting from jade shards when she was angry to summer moss when she smiled to the green of an aurora when she thought no one was watching her and she got lost in her thoughts. James wasn't a poetic man, but he could wax lyrical about her eyes. And her ass, but that didn't seem very poetic.

She shifted, as if trying to bury herself inside him, and his arms tightened around her. Her hand snaked up to rest on one of his arms while the other fell against his leg. As much as he tried to tell himself this was just for warmth, she fit too easily against his body. Her hair tickled his chin, and he had to hold on to the urge to bury his face in it and breathe her in. He knew exactly what she'd smell like too. Underneath the smoke and pine that clung to both of them, she'd still smell faintly of Alliance-issue soap and something uniquely Shepard that he'd recognise even if he only got the barest whiff.

Any other woman and he would have already tried something. He kept telling himself it was because Shepard was insufferably superior, but that wasn't exactly true anymore. Oh, she was still infuriating as hell when she wanted to be. She led the way through the forest even though he could tell she had no idea about trekking; she went straight for the balls when she felt like she was being attacked; she was vaguer than his abuela's fortune teller when she didn't want to talk about something. At the end of the day, though, he knew full well why he hadn't made a move, and it had nothing to do with her personality or that she could break him in half; it was because she was The Commander Shepard, and The Commander Shepard had no business with—nor any interest in, as far as he could tell—him.

He leaned his head back against the tree trunk and sighed.

If they weren't in unfamiliar wilderness, Shepard shivering in only her dress blues, and someone possibly hunting them, he would have taken a stroll to stop himself from doing something stupid. As it was, he stared up at the tree foliage and tried to imagine Shepard was a pillow.

It didn't really work.

The assassin woke and screamed.

Hands held him down as he struggled to sit upright. A bright light blinded him, and he looked around, willing his blurry vision to clear so he could assess the situation.

"Let him go," came a familiar, gravelly voice, and the hands disappeared.

The assassin sat bolt upright and instantly collapsed forward, agony crashing over his entire body. He squeezed his eyes shut as tears threatened to fall. His groans escaped through his clenched teeth, even though he tried to choke them back.

"Where–?"

"Medbay. You failed. Shepard and the guard are gone." The assassin's stomach clenched as that gravelly voice dropped to a dangerous growl. A hand grabbed at his throat, pulled him off the bed, and slammed him against a wall. "I had to leave a fucking body in that charred mess you made just so the Alliance wouldn't wonder where the hell you'd gone."

The assassin blinked, his vision starting to clear. Four eyes looked at him with such malice but when he tried to look away, the batarian forced his face back to look at her. Foul breath—meat and mint and cigarettes—washed over him, and he had to swallow the bile that surged up in his throat. The batarian's pointy teeth were bared with every word she spat, and the assassin feared she'd rip out his throat with those teeth.

"You will be regenerated. It will not be pleasant, and I will send you after them again. But this time, you'll be on a shorter leash." The grip around his throat tightened, and the assassin nodded frantically, his vision blackening around the edges.

The batarian released him just as he felt ready to pass out. He fell to his knees, coughing and retching, the tears that burned behind his eyes earlier finally streaking down his cheeks.

"Fix him," he heard the batarian say as heavy boots clanked away. "I want him back out there in a week."