Jack hated asking for favors. Either the other person shot you down and made you feel like a chump for even asking or they helped and then you owed them. Either way, it sucked. She'd rather make a trade. It was cleaner that way, with both people putting something on the table. Simpler. The problem was that right now, she had nothing to offer Shepard.
She hadn't exactly come out of deep freeze on that fucking prison ship with a whole lot of money, and she'd already agreed to help Shepard fight the Collectors in exchange for the Cerberus files currently spread all over her hidey-hole. That just left sex, and while the commander was definitely hot, she also seemed to have a stick lodged pretty far up her girl scout ass. Sure, the biotic had seen her checking out some of the other women in the crew, but she was probably way to much of a straight lace to actually go for anything Jack might offer. Hence the need to ask for a favor, but as she looked at Shepard standing across from her in the sub-deck the biotic called home, Jack kept pacing uncomfortably, not wanting to actually say the words.
"What is it?", the commander asked. "Kelly said you wanted to talk to me."
"Yeah, well, uh, you know how sometimes you help people out with shit?", Jack started out, her usual bravado deserting her in this situation. "Like going with Kasumi to that dumb party?" Shepard nodded, clearly able to see where this was headed. "Well, I could use some help too. Remember how I told you that I grew up in some fucked up Cerberus lab? Those files you gave me helped me find it. It's on this planet called Pragia in the outer rim."
"Is it still operational?"
"Nah," she snorted. "It's been closed ever since I busted out." Jack paused for a second, not sure how to vocalize what she needed before settling on, "But I still want to go back there. To see where it all happened and then blow it straight to hell. Wipe all that shit out once and for all."
"All right," Shepard said without hesitation, "If it's important to you, we'll make the time. It'll probably be a day or so until we're finished with the resupply here on the Citadel but after that, Pragia's next on my list."
Jack hadn't expected it to be so easy, and all she managed to respond with was a quick, "Okay then."
Shepard headed back up the metal stairs to the engineering deck, leaving Jack shaking her head in surprise. There'd been no, "You owe me one," no, "This better not be too much trouble," none of that shit. Just, "All right." Maybe there was something to be said for girl scouts after all.
"Rocket on your ten, Jack!"
The biotic convict got Shepard's warning just in time, diving to the ground an instant before the trail of smoke passed overhead. The missile crashed harmlessly into the wall at the back of the vast room even as the commander turned her assault rifle on the vorcha who'd fired it. The burst caught the lightly-armored mercenary squarely in the torso, ripping him to bloody shreds even while Shepard was starting to scan the room for other threats.
On the right side of the decaying facility's largest chamber, Grunt was already crashing through what was left of the mercenaries arrayed against them. The massive krogan smashed the butt of his shotgun into a smaller member of his species, knocking him back far enough to get a clean shot, the blast blowing half of his head off.
The other krogan fell down dead, but another pair of vorcha were opening fire on Grunt, raking her teammate with their submachine guns, and Shepard moved to cover him. A concussive shot knocked both of the feral aliens from their feet and while they were down, she prepared to finish the job. The first one swiftly fell to her well-aimed rifle shots, but before she could get to his partner, things went bad.
She'd thought Jack had the battlemaster. The krogan biotic leading the team of mercenaries at the Pragia facility was in the convict's line of fire, and Shepard figured Jack would keep him busy long enough for her to mop up the vorcha.
What she'd missed in the chaos was that when Jack had dove to avoid the rocket, she'd lost her Carnifex, and while the scrambled to retrieve the pistol, the krogan was free to strike. A powerful ball of biotic energy slammed into the commander's torso, shattering shields already weakened by attacks from the other mercenaries and hurling her from her feet. Searing pain flared up and down her torso and when she crashed into the floor, her helmeted head cracking against the hard stone, everything went dark.
"Fuck! Shepard!"
The commander hit the ground and Jack let out a snarl of rage. Reaching out with a biotic field, she grabbed the last of the vorcha Shepard had been shooting at and yanked him off of his feet. As he dangled helplessly in the air, a couple of shots from her Carnifex left large holes where some of his more important organs were supposed to be and when he fell, she turned back to Grunt.
"You got the leader, big guy?", she asked.
"Hah!" the genetically engineered warrior laughed. "I am krogan!"
He charged towards the battlemaster and while the two krogan squared off, Jack scampered towards her commander. On closer inspection, Shepard's wounds weren't as bad as she'd initially feared, but while not life-threatening, they were still nasty. The armored plates around the Spectre's torso had been twisted by the biotic blast and beneath them, the convict could see raw, red burns on her pale skin.
Fumbling about, Jack managed to find the releases on Shepard's armor, enabling her to wrench aside the chest-plate and lower the torso piece out of her way. Beneath them, the commander's uniform had also been shredded and Jack pulled what was left of her shirt up and pants down, leaving the area covered only by a pair of compression shorts. Too preoccupied to worry for long about what else she saw there, Jack reached into her cargo pants and pulled out a tube of medi-gel, applying a generous amount of the healing substance to the burns on Shepard's body before removing her helmet and doing the same with the newly-raised lump on her head.
As the soothing substance made its way into her bloodstream, the commander started coming around, groaning unhappily as her green eyes blinked open. "Goddamn it," she muttered, "Bastard blindsided me. Are we doing all right?"
Looking across the room, Jack saw Grunt standing on top of the krogan leader, battering his enemy into a bloody pulp with a series of powerful blows from his armored fists. "Yeah, Shep," Jack laughed, "I think we're doing fine."
The commander suddenly noticed her state of relative undress and as quickly as she could, she yanked up her pants and pulled down the remnants of her shirt. It was far too late though. Though she'd been distracted by her first aid work, even someone far less sexually experienced than the convict couldn't have missed that beneath Shepard's shorts, there'd been the unmistakable outline of a cock.
Sitting alone on the edge of her bed, Shepard groaned unhappily, running her hand through her red hair as her mind replayed the events of the last day. She'd showered and changed into a fresh uniform after she'd gotten back from Pragia, but the commander still felt unclean. Every time she thought that the nightmare Cerberus had plunged her into couldn't get any worse, some new, horrible development would emerge to prove her wrong.
The month and a half since her awakening on the Lazarus Station had been an near-continuous ordeal of sexual frustration. Unable to bear touching herself and unwilling to give in to Cerberus' temptations and be with anyone else, the commander felt as if she was constantly ready to pop. Only the fatigue of battle let her sleep at this point and only the occasional nocturnal emission offered her any hope of relief from the torment her cock was inflicting on the miserable Spectre.
It had already cost her Liara. The commander hadn't seen her ex-girlfriend since that wrenching day on Ilium, and at this rate, she didn't know if she ever would. Liara had given her leads on Samara and Thane and in return, she'd helped the asari hack a few computer terminals, but that had been their last contact. She'd heard the pain in Liara's voice when they parted and she couldn't bear inflict that on her again, leaving her no choice but to stay far away from the woman she still loved.
Now, once more, things threatened to get worse. There was no way after treating her wounds that Jack didn't know what Cerberus had put between her legs and the convict wasn't exactly known for her discretion on sensitive subjects. True, she wasn't the gossip that Tali or Kelly was, but she had managed to make friends with a few of the other crew members, notably Zaeed and Grunt, and if she told one of them, pretty soon the entire rest of the crew would know the commander's secret. How could Shepard look them in the face if that happened? Who wanted to follow some breeding experiment into battle?
No, she had to nip this thing in the bud and there was no way to do that except to go and talk to Jack. The convict might be a pain in the ass sometimes, but at least after destroying the Pragia facility, she might be in a more generous mood than normal.
The commander glanced over at the clock. 23:32. She might as well do it now. It was the middle of the night shift, and most of the crew would be off-duty, which reduced their chances of being overheard. With a resigned sigh, Shepard pushed herself off the bed and to her feet. If should could face the Collectors, than she supposed she could face this conversation, no matter how humiliating it promised to be. Time to bite the bullet.