Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This was what justice looked like on Omega: a salarian facedown in a pool of his own blood.

Butler toed the corpse with his boot. “Hey Ripper,” he said. “Cause of death?”

The woman glanced coolly at the body and the clotted yellow-green puddle matting down the plush rug beneath it. “Exsanguination.”

“Well yeah, but how?”

Ripper’s lips compressed down into a thin, annoyed line. Homicides bored her. Too repetitive. Gunshot, stab wound, blunt force trauma, suffocation. What you saw was what you got. Ripper liked her mysteries tucked away inside of cell walls, only visible through a microscope lens to a trained eye.  

“A wound,” she deadpanned without a trace of humor, snapping on blue nitrile gloves with practiced efficiency. “Likely more than one.”

Butler sighed his defeat, glancing towards Monteague for help. Visibly discomforted by the sudden direct attention, Monteague turned towards the bookshelves. Garrus noted the tremble in her fingers as she scanned the leather bindings with her omni-tool for fingerprints. The spasms still weren't getting better. Probably never would. Every bone had been shattered, one by one, by Jens Nilson’s hired thugs when she and Ripper started making real progress on a cure for Red Sand addiction.

It was a warning in the only language everyone on this station spoke fluently: violence. Like many Omega entrepreneurs in the business of selling sex, Nilson used addiction to keep his workforce in line and he didn't want anyone making any progress on a way to cut that leash. He'd underestimated Ripper and why wouldn't he? In Nilson's line of work, in his position of power, when he gave a woman a warning she listened or she ended up in the protein vats. 

Ripper didn't listen. Instead, she grabbed her shotgun and contacted Archangel. Now, Nilson was was dead and so were the mercs who destroyed her assistant’s livelihood. Omega's version of a happy ending.

Garrus walked over to the penthouse’s shattered wall of glass panes overlooking Carrd district’s haphazard dual-skyline, interdigitating stilettos of residential towers jutting into the beryllium oxide haze. They closed around the sky like bloodied teeth gnashing into the sunset. 

The murder rate in Carrd was low—at least, by his guess. He didn’t have the official numbers. The gangs’ protection racket records were what passed for a census on Omega and even with Butler’s info-skimmers and malware, they still didn’t have full access to all of those. Ripper was the closest thing the station had to a coroner. The unfortunate few that graced her and Monteague’s examination tables were only a fraction of the station’s dead but the vast majority came from other, rougher, districts.

Still, it was Omega. Carrd was about as safe as this penthouse was luxurious: only at a glance and only if you ignored the details. The uneven cant of the marble floor spoke to shoddy contractors and absent building codes and the marble itself was obviously a veneer, already peeling up in large patches. 

He got the sense Urlan, the dead salarian, ignored a lot about his life. The building had elcor mercs doubling as doormen, maybe that’s why Urlan thought he was safe, up in his penthouse, insulated by his wealth. Air whistled through the broken glass panes, bits of window crunching beneath his boot with every step. Floor-to-ceiling view—an obvious security vulnerability.

“Well, the uh...lividity is absent,” Monteague finally answered, voice whisper-thin and timid, her face and body still angled towards the books and giving the impression that she was answering them and afraid of what they might say in response. The thick scars snarling across her face stood out the more she paled, violet crisscrossing lurid lines over blue in the glow of Urlan’s desk lamp. Garrus had only met her once before the incident, back when her former career at Afterlife still clung to her, and she winked and flirted with him as if she expected a tip for her efforts, even as she worked an oscillating hand saw into a former Red sand addict’s skull. 

Maybe she would’ve gone back to Afterlife after they’d broken her hands if they hadn’t cut up her face too. 

“Lividity, right…” Butler trailed off and Sidonis sighed, impatient. 

“Blood. It settles in the body with gravity after death like a bruise. Except it didn’t here because they gutted him on his living room carpet.”

A whistle from Butler. “I won’t even ask why you know these things. The peeks we get into your past always give me chills.”

“Try living it,” Sidonis muttered and then began coughing so hard he stepped outside the penthouse into the hall to avoid Garrus’s concerned look, the hissing puff of his aerosolized medication audible through the crack in the door. 

Ripper pushed the salarian onto his back and sure enough, there they were: one green-clotted gash across the arteries of the neck, another carving through the chest, and the last a subtle line in the abdomen.

“Same as the others,” Garrus muttered and Butler leaned closer, not even bothering to disguise his fascination with a veneer of cynical professionalism like the rest of them. He was the newest to their crew and to the station, Anhur dust still creased into his coveralls and shaking off his thick-soled boots onto Urlan’s imported hand-embroidered rugs.  

“I’ll take a bullet any day. Knives are...” Whatever phrase came out was indecipherable— Anhurian Arabic-Spanish Pidgin curling through his vowels and rolling through his consonants. Like most turians, Garrus was passably decent with the four major Alliance nation tongues but on Omega, he was forced to rely on his translators. Silently, he made a note to look for a newer software patch for Terminus colonial languages. 

“Non,” Ripper corrected, a lilt of her own accent creeping through the translators. Haitian Creole, according to the last patch, the lingua franca of Ferris Fields. “Not a knife. The edges of the lacerations are ragged. Talons. Turian. The lack of immediate post-mortem scavenging rules out vorcha.”

“Bite marks,” Monteague clarified for Butler, unprompted, and he screwed up his face with disgust. 

Ripper continued, “Abdomen first—the clotting is predominant there—the wound is shallow and not immediately fatal. They bled him out slowly before killing him.”

“Good,” Monteague hissed out, venom lacing through the words. Her biotics flared, catching refractions of light with coruscating violet.  “Evil deeds etched in thulium.”

“Brass,” Ripper said, with the serious tone of someone making a correction and missing the point all at the same time. She grasped one hand, then the other, checking the fingers and wrists. 

“No defensive wounds...but no signs of restraint. No ligature marks.” Ripped hummed, degloving one hand to nudge back a long, dark twist of hair that had slipped free of the complex knot at the nape of her neck.

Monteague edged towards the body tentatively. “No restraints but they took their time. It couldn’t be mass effect field stasis with the injuries inflicted. A paralytic?”

They were starting to lose Butler. Urlan’s omni-tool and terminal were already wiped clean so he had nothing to do except watch the rest of them and even his morbid fascination was no match for his short-fuse attention span. 

“Who cares? It’s one less asshole on Omega. Urlan kept his workers in the batarian bomb collars and he wasn’t shy about using them. Maybe we should send the assassin a thank you note instead?” 

“No.” Sidonis said, having slipped back in just in time to catch Butler’s remark. He met Garrus’s eyes from across the apartment. “This was the Market’s doing. They thought he talked to someone and they wanted to shut him up.”

Monteague shivered and went pale. “They’ve been busy,” she whispered.

This was the fourth dead club owner this week. Well, Urlan ran a gambling den, but he ran it with slaves captured from the colonies and sold at Omega’s notorious Market. He was a top-paying client and thus, was kept apprised of the auction house’s ever-moving clandestine location. Just like the others.

Ripper was shoving her gloved fingers into the dead salarian’s mouth. 

Garrus cleared his throat, heartbeat picking up, his mouth running dry. Heat worked up beneath his scutes and he pulled up his omni-tool interface in some effort to distract himself from the anticipation jittering over his hide. It was no use.  

“Shattered jaw?” he guessed, a wavering subharmonic flange betraying him. Apparently not noticing, she nodded, her fingers adjusting the salarian’s slack mandible “Pre-dates the hit.”

“Then they were right,” Sidonis said, his eyes lingering on Garrus and narrowing. He’d heard it, Garrus was sure.  

He looked away and said nothing.

Omega had many names but the one that fit least was the one his people gave it: the world without law. To a good turian, law and justice were synonymous but Omega was proof that wasn’t always true. There was law on Omega, outside of Aria’s single edict: survival at any cost. 

What this station lacked was justice. And not the kind they found in Urlan’s penthouse.

Garrus coughed, the beryllium oxide a bitter tang on his tongue, mingling with the reek of garbage piled high in the alleys and left to rot. In a district like Carrd, the elcor hired vorcha to run sanitation. A janitor on a gang payroll—that wasn’t something you saw in Council space. But most gangs couldn’t be bothered to keep their turf clean when they knew their control was temporary at best. The result was the persistent station-wide stench. Warm and slick, it lingered in the sinuses like a bad infection. But the beryllium, the mining pollution spewing into the air and only barely filtered by the station’s shoddy ventilation system—that’s what got you if nothing else beat it to the punch—provided you didn’t have the money for a new set of lungs. Or the muscle and a surgeon on payroll to steal some, gently used, for you.

A similar cough echoed in the distance, only much worse. It wasn’t a cough so much as a chorus of ugly hacking retches tapering into a rattling wheeze. A cough that bad said a lot of things. It said a lifetime on Omega and because lifetimes on this station didn’t last long, it said young . Too young for the beryl to finish off, but old enough to be firmly in its grip. That cough also said dangerous. Because anyone who could survive long enough for a cough that bad was someone who knew what it took to stay on the right side of Omega’s brutal justice system.

A few sympathetic hacks percolated up from Fumi district’s early day-cycle crowd: club-goers and gamblers, veins still singing with Hallex or Creeper or whatever their recreational drug of choice happened to be. They stumbled in hapless milling paths, as sluggish and oblivious as the thorian’s mindless thralls but with no Commander Alenko to make sure they returned safely to their prefabs. Regret twinged through him. Omega didn’t have good men like Kaidan to keep it safe. All it had was Archangel and his team. Garrus hoped that would be enough.

Garrus sped up, turning off into an off-shooting alley, towards the residential slums.

Every step further, his heartbeat picked up faster and faster. He turned into a familiar alley. 

Another cough, maybe two blocks away, just as rough as the first. Garrus decided enough was enough and lunged behind a stack of rusting crates to wait for his pursuer.

Didn’t take long. He heard a crumpled aluminum can crunch under a boot and the puff of a medicated aerosolizer.

“So how long have you been following me?” Garrus asked. 

Sidonis froze, his expression guarded. Then, his chin nudged a petulant tilt towards the end of the alley where the safe house was. “Enough to know where you’ve been disappearing all these nights.”

“Then why are you still following me?” 

Quiet expanded in the moment between them. A block away, a door slammed open and a half-naked turian male stumbled out, screaming obscenities back towards the doorway. Whoever was standing in the doorway, another male, began yelling back.

“You really think she’s back on Omega?”

Think was a good word for it. A worse one was hoped , even though that was closer to the truth.

“Garrus—” Sidonis started. “Not everything that happens here with the Market has The Shepard’s fingerprints on it. They’re good at cleaning up their client list the second people start blabbing, that’s why it’s so impossible to find to begin with.”

He was right, broken jaws weren't exactly an obvious kind of calling card, but that wasn’t why he was saying it. There was something else, a strange warble in Sidonis’s higher register and Garrus couldn’t put his finger on what it meant. He sighed. Maybe Sidonis just had the wrong idea.

The half-naked turian glanced around, noticed them, and panicked. Apparently deciding he’d prefer anything over being out on the street, he lunged back towards the doorway. A laugh cracked out and then cut off into a loud, drawn-out moan as the door thumped shut. 

“I don’t know if it’s a simple cleaning spree. Feels too understated for that,” Garrus said. He wasn’t sure if it was gut instinct or something else so he hadn’t said anything back in the penthouse. But cleanups often functioned as warnings—announcements. They were public. Urlan’s murder was gruesome but it was also discreet. 

Sidonis looked skeptical, his mandibles tense with all the words he was clearly holding back. “Maybe. But that’s not why you’re sneaking off to the safe house alone, is it?”

“She saved my life. If she’s back and taking down the Market, I owe it to her to help.”

What he didn’t mention is that she said they were square on the life-saving front. ‘Time off for good behavior’ she’d called it and the good behavior in question was 20-hour cycle’s worth of sex. But that was exactly the wrong idea. He wasn’t going back to that safe house, hoping she was there waiting for him, because of the sex.  

Reducing it down to sex was too simple. Nothing about Shepard was simple. 

In the growing silence, Sidonis’s attention wavered between Garrus and the door, audible moans still spilling into the alley. For a moment, he looked as young as he was, stripped of the harshness he’d cultivated like armor to survive this station. He looked…bereft and a little indignant. But just as fast, that flicker of vulnerability was gone and he was staring at Garrus with his mandibles tucked tight against his jaw and his eyes burning with his usual live-wire intensity.  

“The safe house is burned. What if they caught her? What if she leads them there and—”

They heard it at the same time: a whistle of displaced air then the thwack of buckling metal behind them. In unison, they turned, weapons drawn, just in time to see distorted shadows tangle against the far side of the alley. Too big for pyjacks. A scuffle of boots and a merc stumbled into view, an omni-arrow tip jutting out of their throat, blood frothing up around it.

Two shambling steps towards them and a dagger tip joined the arrow with an arterial spray spattering blue over the piles of garbage stacked nearby. The merc fell, face-forward into the muck, revealing a diminutive, cloaked figure.

Bixbite sunset haloed the distinctively human silhouette like red-gold dawn and Garrus grinned, his pulse racing.

Rifle report cracked out beside him. Garrus’s arm shot out to push Sidonis’s assault rifle barrel down, holstering his own with his free hand. Her shields flickered but the figure paid it no mind, bending down to retrieve her knife from the merc’s throat. 

“Interesting way of saying thanks,” she said.

Wiping the bloodied knife on the edge of her half cloak with a sleek, graceful motion, the newcomer cocked a hip and examined them from head to toe.

“We can handle a few mercs,” Sidonis bit out, gun still drawn but no longer pointing at her. 

A warbling explosion echoed further down the alley, biotics blooming in the dim. A surprised cry cut off abruptly.

“If you say so,” she said, pushing her hood back with her free hand to reveal a flutter of coppery red hair and a hard twist of a smile. 

Shepard.

Chapter Text

He showed. 

Shepard didn’t know if she was happy or angry to see him. Should’ve been an easy call but years in the Terminus Systems got her in the habit of expecting everything to go to shit whenever ‘happy’ decided to stop by. She didn't trust happy one bit.

Anger, on the other hand, was a nice, dependable kind of emotion. There was always something to be angry about in this place. Happiness? Not so much. Never stuck around. Not in her experience, anyway.

So, anger it was. Nice and safe.

“Your friend is right,” she said, meeting his ice-chip eyes—just as intense as she remembered, even partially shielded by the visor she’d liberated from the wreckage of the slaver warehouse nearly a month back. She ignored the spark of warmth sinking low in her stomach at the thought of the 20 some-odd hours that had come before that...all the…tension relief while they holed up in the safe house, waiting for death and bored out of their minds. Not a bad way to pass the time. 

And that’s all it was: passing time. A distraction.

So why was her skin prickling beneath her armor, why did she feel his breath fanning over her neck as if he was pressing his mouth against her right there in the alley instead of months ago in a room the size of a closet? Why was she so relieved to see him, still alive and breathing despite the odds?

She didn’t even know his fucking name.

And she needed to keep it that way.

Furious, mostly with herself but directing it at him, she strode forward to pry the paralytic dart free from the corrugated metal behind them, careful not to slice her gloves on the edges—still sharp, still dangerous. Even the salarian doctor running the new clinic down in Gozu couldn’t figure out an antidote to the toxin yet. With a wrenching motion, the dart came loose and she spun around to address them, holding it up as proof.

“Not about handling Derius’s body snatchers. They’ve got some nasty new toys. But about the safe house. That’s pretty good advice. Sounds…really familiar actually...”

She leaned closer to drive the point closer and too late she realized her mistake. Getting closer—big mistake. The spark of warmth in her stomach caught, a rippling wave of heat roaring to life. Just centimeters away, his physicality was a buffeting, overwhelming reminder that he was not decomposing in a protein vat like she’d been telling herself for weeks. 

The minute she’d left the safe house, and him with it, she’d told herself a lot of things—ticked them off on her too-many fingers, counting them the way turians did: starting splayed out then folding down with each number. Left to right, pinkies to thumbs.

Pinkie: do-gooders and Omega didn’t mix, even if those do-gooders know their way around a sniper rifle.
Ring: she’d never see him again.
Middle: it was just sex.
Trigger: great sex, best sex she’d had in years, knees weak just thinking about it sex, how’d he–
Thumb: stop. thinking. about. the. sex. 

Knees going weak sex was still just sex. No reason to dwell on those vivid eyes or his gleaming, too-bright thulium-laced edges dipping into the mattress beneath her thighs. No reason at all to remember the crooked hitch in his left mandible when he smiled or when he sighed. It’d all be gone soon enough. This place would see to that one way or another.

Omega was a great, hulking carrion bird of rock and vice. The oppressive misery picked you clean, cracked open your bones to tear out all your dreams and hopes and humanity. If you were lucky, you were alive for most of it. 

No matter how amazing that night was, no matter how surprisingly sweet, happiness never stuck around in the dark corners of the galaxy. Definitely not on Omega. You couldn’t rely on it. You couldn’t get attached and wait around for it to come back. Only an idiot would try.

Shepard wasn’t an idiot.

But none of that seemed to matter with his sheer physical presence punching through her callous disregard, through her anger, and straight into the most secret, most idiotic hollows of her chest. 

Blue eyes held her gaze, his mandibles fluttering into a soft smile as he stepped even closer. One hitched into a crooked cant and her pulse staggered in her chest.

“I’m hard to kill. Besides…I figured since I decided to stay, I should keep up the habit of ignoring good advice.”

A foolish smile tugged at her lips despite herself. She held out the dart for him to take and he complied.  “Well, I guess that’s on me for giving advice to a turian instead of an order.”

He looked good . It was hard to pry her eyes away. Miraculously, he still had the same clean-cut sheen to him, that patina of brassy confidence and self-assured idealism that gleamed in the alley like a shiny new credit chit. The impulse to snap him up from all the surrounding filth and hold him close clawed against her empty palms so she planted them back against her hip, akimbo, as he examined the strange markings etched into the metal. 

“Maybe I’m just as bad at taking orders,” he said.

Her smile broke free with a laugh that didn’t even feel like it even belonged to her: bright, carefree–almost musical. “That would be novel, for a turian.”

“I’m not a very good turian,” he drawled out, bass overtone curling sinuous reverberations through her stomach. For a second, it was just the two of them, bare hands on bare skin, heat and sweat, and her legs squeezing tight against his thighs. A dizzy haze blurred out the rest of the alley, the nights alone in her cabin, her fingers slick as she remembered exactly the way he felt as he rocked against her over and over–

“Give it to me,” the other turian interjected, shoving between them to snatch up the dart. He shot them both a withering glance before muttering something under his breath. She didn’t catch it, Omega’s unique dialect transformed the word into a collection of guttural hissing fricatives. Just sounded pissy. But whatever he said had their mutual friend flinching back with a hand stuttering over his crest, easy confidence faltering as he coughed awkwardly and examined the ground.

Shepard blinked and stepped back, the stench of the alley heavy on her tongue as she tried to catch her breath and her fucking sanity while she was at it. What the hell was wrong with her?

An amused snort echoed from the far end of the alley as a striking female turian with a bright stripe of red down the center of her face emerged from the shadows. Nyreen. Seeing Shepard’s accusing scowl, she fiddled with her grenade belt before offering up a sly glance and announcing, “We should probably go. There will be more and we don’t want them to get the jump on us with those darts.”

Personally, Shepard could use another fight to clear her head. Darts or no, suddenly she really needed to punch something.  

“We don’t need rescuing,” the other turian informed them, chin raised, and what he meant was ‘get your noses out of our fucking business and go away’. He looked like the type who used to jump at his own shadow before he learned how to pre-emptively kill the things that lurked in the dark: rangy build, skittish eyes, and a defensive posture.

Shepard nudged her chin to the side, a turian gesture to convey a concession, but she was spoiling for a fight and didn’t have the fancy mandibles so it just came off wrong. He visibly bristled. 

“Do you recognize the markings?” Nyreen asked him, clearly sensing she’d need to take lead on this. 

Few on Omega would, but he struck Shepard as one of them. Despite the Invictus colony markings, he had the temperament and cough of an Omega native from the worst parts of the slums. This was a station of transplants, with the highest murder rate in the galaxy. Anyone who survived long enough in the slums for a cough like that was as close to ‘born and raised’ as this place got.

After a second, he nodded her way. “I—yes. I used to courier…” 

For some reason, his eyes cut over to his partner and his mandibles tightened with obvious reluctance before continuing. “Around the docks. It was...safer. There were always...bizarre requests. Twins. Anyone with albinism or rare genetic anomalies.”

Nyreen nodded, nonplussed. Most of the big organ snatching operations ran near the docking bays. That’s where they found all the people desperate and stupid enough to try and make a new life for themselves on Omega. Easy marks with nice, clean lungs fresh off the transport. Marks so easy, they went willingly. It wasn’t snatching so much as leading them into a nearby refrigerated cargo container for new, exciting job opportunities. Couriering for the gangs meant always having a target on your back but couriering for organ snatchers was a comparative cakewalk so long as your lungs were already too trashed to end up on their operating tables.

Invictus’s reluctance was apparently justified because the admission earned him a sharp, judgmental glance from his partner. Watching them, Shepard tucked that little interplay away for later—what it might mean—and cut to the chase.  “Well, they’re expanding operations and getting a lot less picky. The Collectors are buying up all the Market’s stock under exclusive contract. Derius’s Talons are running muscle for Kron Harga and in exchange, he gets new high-tech weapons and Harga’s old cut of the organ trade.”

Vivid blue flashed in the dim, narrowed with disgust but little surprise. “The Market wasn’t stopping leaks. They were cleaning out their old client list.”

Invictus wheeled on her. “How do you know about this?”

Nyreen interceded smoothly, drawing closer. “Buy us a kava and we’ll tell you.”

“And breakfast,” Shepard interjected. Trust Nyreen and her bleeding heart to go too low on the asking. “For saving your friend’s lungs.”

Narrowing his eyes at her, Invictus discreetly slipped one hand down to the knife hilted at his belt.  

He clearly didn’t like her but this was Omega, the murderous deliberation wasn’t really personal. From where he was standing, this looked just like a White Hat play—the kind criminals ran up and down the docking bays for the not-so-easy marks. ‘Saved your life, friend, now you owe me’. Most didn’t end up with the Black Hat half of the duo dead and oozing in the street but a good number did. No honor among thieves. 

That shrewdness made him pretty damn likable. Shame he wanted to kill her.

Nyreen tensed as Shepard flicked her own knife into her palm with a twist of her wrist. The prospect of a fight fizzed giddy adrenaline in her veins but something told her he wasn’t the type to leave loose ends. If there was a fight, one of them wouldn’t be walking away from it. Her fingers tightened on the handle but she already knew she didn’t have it in her to kill him. Technically, she owed him her life. And a shirt.

Making her decision, her fingers loosened on her weapon and slipped it back into the sheath. “Look, you don’t know me but I just want a chat with you and Blue Eyes. And coffee. You can play this safe: pick the location and call for back-up.”

He studied her, his knife hilt glinting red with Omega sunset against his hip. Lethal calculation flickered in his pinpoint pupils.  

“Breakfast sounds good,” Blue Eyes drawled, cutting through the tension as he stepped forward to clap his hand on his partner’s armored shoulder, subtly dislodging the three-fingered hand clutched around the partially concealed knife hilt. “Considering the going rate on a pair of healthy lungs on this station—it’s a steal.” 

The waffle house was black and white checkered linoleum streaked with grime, rusted chrome bar stools, and red pleather booths leaking polyester stuffing out between taped-up fissures. In the corners, something skittered—a rat probably, human ships carried them all over the galaxy—and the smell of rancid grease wafting in from the kitchen was a wet handprint slapping across her face whenever the waitress emerged from the back with an order. 

By waffle house standards, it was squalid. But by Omega’s, it was almost decent. They served real reconstituted eggs, dextro and levo, instead of just nutrient paste colored yellow with food dye and bulked up with questionable filler.

Coffee was shit though. Good coffee didn’t exist in the Terminus outside of the Impara’s galley. But the sludgy dark liquid in the mug in front of her fulfilled the basic requirement of being hot and containing a stimulant. 

Shepard dumped another packet of sweetener into her coffee sludge in an effort to ignore the human man sitting across from her and gawping openly: their backup. 

“My wife won’t believe this,” the man repeated, the mishmash of Spanish and Arabic juxtaposed between and lilting through the broad, flat vowels and hard r’s of UNAS English marking him as a colonist from Anhur.  “The Shepard.”

Oh Spirits, he said it with a sweeping gesture and everything. This guy definitely saw the vids.

His eyes were huge, dark, and sparkling with excitement in a way that reminded her of puppies and small children—not that she had much firsthand experience with either. She ducked her head down over the mug, hoping he’d take the hint she made for a shit celebrity. 

“Can you say the line? The one in the vids–”

“The vids get a lot wrong,” Shepard grumbled. Like the fact that she didn’t save the colony single-handedly. Or the fact that half of the Impara’s crew didn’t make it back to the ship thanks to her reckless heroics. Plus, the line was cheesy as hell. She’d lick the disgusting floor before those words came out of her mouth.

If that wasn’t mortifying enough, she was getting darting smirks from Blue Eyes across the table and from Nyreen at her side. Worse, every bit of hero worship tripping out of Anhur's mouth was accompanied by an increasingly disgruntled scowl from the rangy turian who’d wedged himself into the far corner of the booth and was visibly regretting his life choices by putting on his surliest scowl. Not killing her hadn’t improved his mood any. 

Shepard decided that was a better nickname for him: Surly. 

“I mean but you did hold off all those batarians on Elysium until the Alliance showed up. They got that right. It’s a good line!” The human elbowed Blue Eyes. “Tell her G-”

“No names,” she interrupted, her words overlapped by Surly’s. Her voice was tight with alarm and his flanging subharmonics were just as bad.  

Anhur balked, ignoring Surly to focus on her. “But we all already know who you are—” 

“And you’re probably famous too,” he said, gesturing with his fork to Nyreen sitting beside her.

“Nope.” Nyreen smiled serenely, tapping her talon against the chipped table edge. “Entirely obscure.”

Nerves settling, Shepard smiled faintly against the lip of her mug and nudged Nyreen’s thigh beneath the table, couldn’t help herself. Glacial eyes watched her from across the table, not missing a thing. She could practically hear him jot down the mental note on that reaction. Probably missed his standard-issue datapad. You can take the detective out of C-Sec but you couldn’t stop him from treating every mundane detail like a clue to some greater mystery. 

“Sorry,” Anhur laughed down at his breakfast, sheepish. “I’m still new to all this codename stuff.”

Her shoulders twitched, still feeling that piercing blue gaze lingering on her. Too perceptive by half. She wondered if he noticed, or saw the flush flaring up against her neck—probably, the visor would read the uptick in body heat. 

“Maybe you should find Archangel and ask for some pointers,” she said, giving up all pretense of being fascinated by her coffee and meeting the scrutiny head-on with a challenging lift of her eyebrow. 

Feigning ignorance, the legend himself arched his browplates right back and gulped back some kava from his specialized mug. Nice try. As if she couldn’t put two and two together the second she saw him alive and kicking. 

“It shouldn't be that hard to remember,” Surly muttered, shoving his breakfast around with his long, pronged utensils. “You of all people know how valuable that kind of information can be in the wrong hands.”

“I don’t think hands get any more right than hers. The Shepard is a legend in the Terminus—”

Shepard viciously decapitated the paper fringes of a handful of sweetener packets. It wasn’t too late to try to sue that damn vid crew for defamation or something. Her ship couldn’t go into Council space with the 20+ year standing bounty on it by the turian military but there were other ways...ways to make them suffer .

Directly across from her, mandibles flared out into a grin and Blue Eyes gave her an exaggerated once-over. For a guy running around with the pseudonym ‘Archangel’ and saving little old ladies from gangs, he seemed to be really eating up all her personal torment over all the hero worship. 

“A legend,” he drawled under his breath as if talking to himself. She was just close enough to catch it. “ I watched the vids but I had no idea...”

“Well, I’m no Archangel,” she sniped back. “But I try my best, Blue Eyes.”

“Does your best include signing autographs?”

She was about to tell him it did and she’d happily sign whatever he wanted the next time she had him tied up and writhing, naked, underneath her, but Surly and her newest fanclub member were still bickering.

“—outside of that Spectre who died saving the Citadel, it doesn’t get more hero status for humans here. I don’t think that’s the type to sell us out if we worked together.”

All his humor vanished with a flash of grief and Archangel dropped his gaze down to his breakfast. Neither of his companions noticed. Did they not know? That he’d been there when Spectre Alenko died? 

“It doesn’t matter what you think. I think I’ve lived here most of my life and I know how to keep us alive better than you.” Surly snarled, his voice cutting through the waffle house din and provoking a few curious glances towards their booth. He looked like he immediately regretted it. No matter where you were on Omega, drawing attention was usually a bad move.

“Are we working together?” Blue Eyes asked. As if it was as simple as that. Omega didn’t see collaborations very often and for good reason. His partner was right not to trust her—not to trust anyone. Shepard didn’t begrudge Surly’s temper. He must want to tear his crest out every day keeping these two alive in this place. Nyreen cleared her throat delicately but said nothing.

Shepard shrugged and met his even stare. “That’s your call. You seemed interested in taking down the Market last time we talked.”

“Is that why you followed us?” Surly demanded.

Shepard was starting to rethink her stance on begrudging. And her decision to play nice earlier. It probably would’ve been more pleasant for everyone if they'd just gotten it over with gutted each other. Her hand tightened on her fork.

“I wasn’t following you,” she informed him through her tightening jaw. “I was going to leave a message at the safe house. We ended up tailing your tail.”

That earned her an inscrutable look from Blue Eyes but before she could parse it out, Anhur’s fork was tapping down onto the edge of his plate with a rhythmic, almost musical, ‘tink tink tink’. 

“How are you planning to take on the Market? Kron Harga’s gone to ground.” A beat of metallic tines percussed his thoughtful pause. “ All his accounts were deactivated before the club owners started showing up dead in their penthouses.”

Nyreen shifted with the creak of protesting polyurethane, interest peaked. In rhythm with the fork percussion, she hummed a snippet of a melody.

Anhur beamed. “Right? Sinatra! Because of the Blue Eyes thing.” 

He tapped out more of the song and sang. Loudly. Unabashedly. “I’ve got youuuu under my skin.”

Then, he looked at Shepard, as if he expected her to…join in for some reason? She suspected this had something to do with the fact that she was the only other human at the table. As if this song he was singing was encoded in their shared human genome. Camaraderie warmed his whole face, those puppy-dog eyes alight with the shared humanity of the moment, as if they were already best friends. How this guy made it off the docking bay, she’d never know. Or...her eyes cut straight across the table to the distractingly handsome turian...actually, she had a good guess.

Nyreen laughed at Shepard’s bafflement, knowing better than most how wrong he was-Shepard hated most human music- and cut back to the matter at hand. “ How did you know about Harga?”

More taps. Shepard lunged forward and snatched the fork out of his hand but the insufferable man just hummed on, oblivious.

“I recovered some of Urlan’s wiped data and a friend helped me reconstruct some of his private itinerary and notes. He's been on station. Urlan was trying to arrange a meeting with Harga for the past two weeks through Derius since apparently he’s got the Talons running security for the Market now.” He considered for a minute, dark eyes widening. “Is Derius your in?”

Not just some brainless colonial rube after all. So he'd managed to get into Urlan's encrypted datapads?  When she paid Urlan a visit a week ago, she couldn’t crack his security, so she had to go for his jaw instead. She was impressed, and it must have shown, despite her best efforts, because his grin was taking up his whole face. Surly was looking even more disgusted if such a thing were possible.

"He can't stay on Omega forever in his line of work. Why don't you just wait him out back on your ship?"" the turian demanded with a rough gesture common on the station. Omega's natives navigated the station's diverse melange of Terminus pidgin and nonstandard Council dialects through extensive gesticulation, most of which were highly offensive.

"That won't work," Shepard said, twisting Anhur's fork tines on the pad of her index finger. Harga didn't just have a ship, he had an entire slaver fleet. Nothing as organized as the Alliance or the Hierarchy's fleets, just a loose collective of ships that traveled together for safety when it suited them.  The Impara could pick them off when they wandered out alone but it had no chance against the massed strength of the Terminus's worst.  Especially not with Harga's Hegemony-funded batarian cruiser as the flagship vessel, armed to the teeth with disruptor torpedoes. Even the Alliance would balk at taking it head-on. For her little turian frigate, it would be suicide. 

Naturally, she'd already attempted it. With predictably poor results.

”So, no to the direct approach,” Anhur surmised.

“Have you heard of the Stardust?” Nyreen asked them.

“Tempest isn’t a Market client,” Surly interjected, hands in motion and casting shadows onto the sticky table. “Her casino doesn’t use slaves.”

None of the VIP places on Omega did. Aria T’Lok and the slave trade gave each other a wide berth. Which meant anywhere that wanted Aria’s patronage needed to pay their staff but only the really exclusive places thought it was worth the credits. The Stardust was no exception, even though Aria and Tempest were barely on better terms than Aria was with the slave trade. But that animosity was personal, not business.

“But she’s with Derius right?” Anhur said. “That’s why the Talons provide security for the Stardust.”

“That’s not why.” Nyreen swirled her scrambled eggs around. “Derius and Tempest can’t stand each other.”

Another ‘taking notes’ look from across the table from Blue Eyes and Shepard didn’t like it this time around because she could see his gaze flicker to Nyreen’s exposed wrist, where the Talons insignia was branded, and go flinty. Not great. The less he knew about her, the better. 

“Their relationship is fake. She’s blackmailing him,” Shepard said, hoping to draw his attention away. 

Surly laughed scornfully, disbelief fluttering through his mandibles. “Blackmail Derius? With what ?”

As in what the hell could Derius be doing that would draw any ire from the normal degeneracy of Omega?

He seemed to regret the question as soon as he asked it. His answer came immediately from beside him, steely and sure, from Blue Eyes. “He’s planning a move against the throne. Against Aria. That explains all the Talons activity lately.”

“Only thing it could be,” Anhur agreed. “If she found out before he’s ready, he’s done for.”

“So Tempest has evidence then,” Blue Eyes said. “Something like that, she’d keep close, if not on her at all times. An OSD with a proof-of-life mechanism, a dead man's switch, or something along those lines.”

Shepard nodded. “That’s what we think too. Only, she might not keep it on her.”

Nyreen explained. “Tempest's shows don’t involve much clothing. I believe the word is ‘burlesque’.”

“Stripping with props,” Shepard clarified, just in case they didn’t clue in earlier from the ridiculous stage name. “So her evidence might be locked up somewhere in her private suite at the casino. But if she keeps it on her, then we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

And she’d cross it with good-looking turians. Tempest had a type. A fetish, if one wasn't being charitable, for claws and scutes. The honeypot play was cheap as hell but Shepard wasn’t above cheap if it got results.

“With the OSD in our hands, Derius will give up Kron Harga’s location, on station or off. The Talons are the muscle, so he’ll be defenseless and we can take him out.”

“And what happens to Derius and the new client buying up all the Market’s stock?”

Shepard grinned viciously. That was the part she liked the most. Derius betrayed her, tried to kill her, and almost succeeded but really, he’d just done her a favor. It'd taken her far too long to see him for what he really was.  Maybe Omega had changed him, or maybe he’d always been nothing but grasping ambition disguised by the veneer of turian nobility, old war medals, and battle scars. Maybe Licinia had been wrong all along about her old XO. 

But it didn’t matter. The second he agreed to work with the Market was the second he made Shepard's kill list. All the rest—selling her out, hunting her and Blue Eyes all over the slums, that was just extra.

“We’ll make sure they get what’s coming to them,” she promised. After all, Archangel had as much a claim to Derius’s life as she did.

”Pretty obvious why the direct approach wouldn’t work for him either,” Anhur muttered, which told her they knew enough about Derius to know he operated the Talons from an area of the station half-enclosed within the asteroid shell, an unmappable labyrinth of rocky tunnels complete with the hidden dock that had earned him his start as a smuggler.

Procuring an OSD from an armor cache, she set it down on the table in front of him.  “Details are on the drive. You’ve got 40 hours to talk it over with your crew and decide if you want to take the job and work with us.”

Nyreen slipped out of the booth beside her and Shepard made to follow but paused and added. “Oh, and to get some formalwear.”

Chapter Text

“No,” Sidonis said. “This is a terrible idea.”

But Butler was already lunging for the OSD, swiping it off the table. Garrus caught the indistinct smudge of coppery hair through the filthy diner windowpane and before he knew it, he was out of the booth and halfway out the door.

Shepard was alone when he caught up to her in the alley, leaning against the aluminum siding and scowling at a large ventilation duct for some reason. 

“‘Archangel’ huh?” she muttered without looking up at him. “That’s…dramatic.”

Garrus chuckled, half abashed but not bothering to deny it—he wasn’t good enough of an actor to pull it off and she wasn’t gullible enough to buy it even if he was. “Subtlety isn’t really a quality people look for in a local vigilante.”

With a begrudging smile, Shepard pushed off the wall and meandered closer until she was just an arm’s length away, half-steeped in the blue glow of the diner’s neon sign. It feathered a fringe of dark shadows over the tops of her cheekbones as she tipped her face back to examine him. Her eyes wandered over his face, pupils large, catching the light in a way he remembered too well. He felt caught too, drawn into the dark intensity of her eyes.

When he stepped closer, they snapped away. She wet her lips with her blunt pink tongue and swallowed before saying, “It suits you.” 

It didn’t sound exactly good, the way she said it. Not bad either. There was a troubled furrow of eyebrow and tension in the set of her mouth that hinted at something complicated and right in the middle of the two. 

“Thanks…” 

He cleared his throat. This conversation was not going the way he’d planned. Well... ‘planned’ was too charitable a word. It wasn’t really ‘planning’ when he imagined how things might go if he ever saw her again. Or when he watched his growing collection of human porn vids and imagined even harder and in more detail about how things might go if he ever saw her again.

Still not looking at him, she added, “You know, I was sure you’d be in a protein vat by now.”

She said it so casually it bordered on insulting. 

“Ahh,” he said, matching her tone before drawling, “so that’s why you went back to the safe house to leave me a message? Because you thought I was already dead?”

Her advice before she left cut both ways. It wasn’t just dangerous for him to go back. It was dangerous for her too. Why risk that for a dead man?  

Her eyes flashed up at him, a tense line in her jaw saying he struck a nerve. Then, with a hard laugh and an even harder smile, it vanished. Her flat, white teeth glinted in the neon. “Spirits, don’t tell me you’re reading anything into it.”

Garrus shrugged. “Wouldn’t dream of it.  Just a little sentimentality I’m sure. All those...fond memories." His mandibles flared and he dropped his voice into a lower register.

A huffed scoff burst out of her and her eyes flicked away. “Who could blame me for wanting to reminisce over someone who almost got me killed sticking his oversized rifle where it didn’t belong?”

Heat itched up against his neck. Before he knew it, he was laying on the sardonic drawl as thick and sarcastic as possible. “Was saving your life the part where I stuck my oversized rifle where it didn’t belong? Or–”

Eyes sparking, she stepped closer to prod his chestplate with her gloved index finger. The bixbite brume swirled tattered wisps around them, carrying a hint of the faded floral note that clung to her beneath the smell of sweat, blood, and gun oil. 

 “The ego on you," she hissed.

How she managed to fit so much menace into one finger was nothing short of impressive. Somehow she’d maneuvered him back against the wall of the alley, her palm pressed flat against his chest.  Garrus dimly registered the thump of his armor against metal siding.  He couldn't help it. He laughed breathlessly, a thrill jolting up from the base of his spine to shiver through his wavering mandibles, frustration crumbling beneath his own brute-force attraction. 

"Tell me, " she asked. Her breath was hard and hot and close enough that he could feel it slide menace over the thin skin of his exposed neck. "What, exactly , are you implying I went back for?”

The air between them wavered with the force of her animosity, like heat shimmering vapor trails off the tree fronds in Cipritine at high noon. Half-dipped in lurid blue, the upswept edges of her cheekbones looked as if she'd streaked them with blood. With the smell of gunsmoke and the arterial spray of the organ snatcher wafting from her cloak, she was a vision of violence incarnate; death in diminutive form, cloaked in the soft skin and muscular curves he remembered all too well. 

“More tension relief?” she suggested, voice low and husky, her bright eyes swallowed by dark pupil, and wreathed in sweeping shadows. “A re-match?”

Outside of her hand on his hardsuit, there was no contact between them. Just simmering air. A painful throb of attraction gathered beneath his plates.

“I–” he said, swallowing the thick tension knotting in his throat. His mouth had run dry and all his embarrassment and defensive arrogance had evaporated in her baleful stare. All that was left was the truth. “I don’t like to make assumptions.”

She'd just gotten under his skin and he’d gone and made an ass out of himself. For all he knew, she’d just been going back to the safe house for her knife.

He produced it from one of his armor caches: a turian throwing blade with an inscription carved into the handle. The lettering caught the light and etched the words with brightness. Licinia Incendus .  

“I was thinking maybe you’d just gone back for this.”

Her hand dropped away from his chest and she took a step back. “My–”

Something raw and painful furrowed through her face and when Shepard reached for the blade to clasp it, her fingertips trembled. It slipped, twisting in the air between their fingers. She caught it clumsily, the sharpened edge snagging on the tip of his glove to slice into his finger at the edge of his talon.

“Oh–” she started, holding the knife with one hand while carefully grasping his with the other to assess the damage. He never expected her gentleness. For a second, he felt the phantom touch of her fingertips on his bare wrists, slipping silk from his skin and rubbing circles in its wake. “Fuck, I–”

Alarm shot through him when he realized the tip of his glove was parting away. For all his talk about not making assumptions—he jerked his hand back before she could see the damning evidence that said otherwise. “I’ll live. It’s just a nick.”

She nodded, lips compressed in a tight but wavering line, staring down at the handle.

 “Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely.

With two fingers, she held the blade up in the space between them where the light could edge it in neon, a heavy emotion swirling in her eyes, awash in blue.  

“I missed it. More than I expected to.” 

Now she was looking at him. His heartbeat hitched in his chest.

But then a grim smile appeared and Shepard shook her head as if banishing the emotion, quickly tucking the knife away into an empty sheath at her belt.

 “She always said I was too sentimental for my own good. That kind of thing gets you killed out here.”

“Here you are,” someone called out from the end of the alley. The turian woman—Red, Shepard called her.  “I’ve been looking for you”

“Try to lie a little more convincingly next time you abandon me for your own amusement.”

The turian tipped her chin to the side in measured exasperation as she approached.

“For my amusement?” she asked, eyes cutting towards Garrus before finding Shepard again.

The woman looked agitated but he got the distinct sense the source originated elsewhere. Interesting. He’d suspected the nature of her relationship with Shepard extended beyond friendship but there was no trace of jealousy, no possessive posturing. Flared mandibles quickly tucked in close to her chin as she looked him over with a professional eye.

“It’ll have to be him for the floor. The other one has the charisma of a varren.”

“We already agreed it would be you in the casino with me for the honeypot,” Shepard said.

A tense shrug—apparently Red had picked up a few human tics of her own.

“Change of plans. Our source in Afterlife just sent us an update.” Despite her steady tone, his visor picked up an uptick in her heart rate and body temperature. She was agitated. Extremely agitated. “The Queen will be gracing the Stardust with her presence after all.”

Shepard pulled up her omni-tool display, vitals surprisingly stable despite the bad news. “Fuck. Well, that complicates things.”

“Yeah it complicates things, Shepard, she still wants you dead. I just can’t figure out–why now? She can’t stand Tempest. She hasn’t set foot in the Stardust for eight years.”

A noncommittal shrug from Shepard. “I know how to stay off Aria's radar. Besides, maybe she’s learned how to let go of old grudges.”

Red grimaced: a visible testament to how much stock she put into that theory. “She's going because she knows something. Could be bad.”

“Could be nothing to do with us. Derius isn’t being as subtle as he thinks he is.”

Garrus glanced between them. 'Could be bad' wasn't referring to Shepard straying outside of Aria's single rule for Omega, it was something on top of that. He got the sense Shepard was playing something close to the vest. Something to do with the Talon’s insignia on the turian’s wrist and Derius's plans to unseat Aria.

“Exactly how big a problem does Aria pose outside of wanting Shepard dead?”

He suspected he knew. Odds weren’t good on Derius surviving his imminent encounter with Shepard, not after he’d hunted them all over Fumi. And even if Shepard was the most merciful privateer in existence, odds weren’t good on Derius surviving an encounter with him , a fact he was certain Shepard made clear to her partner before they approached him. Which meant the answer was: Red wanted Derius dead too. And then...once he was out of the way...

“Not much,” Shepard answered, too fast. Red simply said, with perfect candor, “She’ll recognize us and that’ll cause problems.”

“But only problems for you,” he said evenly to her, glancing meaningfully at her wrist. People left gangs all the time. But the first thing they did was get the tattoo lasered off. The tattoo meant Red was active. 

The Talons had gone from a minor Omega player to taking half the station’s turf in just a few months thanks to the Collector tech and the money they’d gotten from their new involvement in the organ trade, nabbing people off the streets of their own district. Whatever power vacuum Derius’s death left, whoever filled it would be in a good position to pick up where he left off and make a play for control over the entire station. That person would probably do what they could to avoid Aria's attention.

Narrow pupils flashed in the dim. “You catch on pretty fast.”

She didn’t say it like it was a good thing, which meant she caught on pretty fast too. He had no problem with making sure Derius got what was coming to him. But he had no interest in installing a successor to the man’s criminal empire and then priming that successor to unseat Aria T'Loak.

“And that’s a problem too,” he surmised.

“It’s not,” Shepard interjected, taking a step between them. “You’re both ridiculous idealists who don’t know a hopeless cause when you see one. I don’t see any reason why we can’t all play nice and kill some assholes who have it coming.”

“I’m here to help you take out the Market, I don’t want anything to do with gang infighting.”

She rolled her eyes. “Spirits, you’re stubborn. Look. It’s not enough to just kill Derius. You killed Nilson too, how’d that work out? Did it actually fix anything at the White Rabbit?”

He flinched, mandibles flat against his chin. The club didn’t survive much longer than Nilson; the rival brothel next door demo’d the place and expanded into the space within the week. Garrus checked in not too long after that. It was ramshackle and squalid, catering to a meaner, less-discerning crowd of human fetishists. He'd recognized some of the White Rabbit workers Ripper and Monty detoxed, sand-blasted and smiling blearily with their eerie red teeth from the stage. That was a gut punch. Worse were the ones who showed up weeks later on Ripper’s autopsy table, malnourished and filthy, street-quality Sand cut with beryllium dust clotted in their nostrils and veins.

Shepard had called it perfectly back then, but there was no smug superiority in her expression now. Nothing about being right pleased her. Instead, her hand settled lightly on his elbow, unexpectedly gentle.

“In this place, there’s always someone to replace them and it’s usually someone worse. This time it won’t be.”

“Is that really enough?” he demanded hotly.  A slightly better gang leader damn sure didn’t sound like a way towards real change to him. Just because killing Nilson didn’t change anything didn’t mean there weren’t people on this station whose deaths would fix a lot of problems. Archangel just had to get to them.

“This is Omega,” Red said. “The gangs are the closest thing this place gets to governance. It’s ugly but it’s uglier than it needs to be. Aria turns a blind eye to the turf wars, the Sand, to the slave trade, the mods and tainted eezo. Even the damn broken air filters. But the right leader with the right gang behind them? The Talons could be that.”

She sounded genuine. Fervent. Like something straight out of a turian war vid. Only there were no turian vids that would say anything close to what she was suggesting. Radical lawlessness kept in check by the whim of a single person? He’d never met Aria but he was certain she saw herself in an equally flattering light. 

“Good speech,” he deadpanned. “The megalomania is just subtle enough.”

Shepard removed her hand from his elbow to clap him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, none of us need to go into this with blind trust. Or any trust at all for that matter.”

His shoulders drew tight beneath her palm. “That’s not how I usually operate.” 

It was the furthest thing from how he wanted to operate. He couldn’t imagine Commander Alenko asking him to come aboard the Normandy with an attitude like hers, working together with constant mutual suspicion. Was that how she ran her ship?  Why she was asking for his help getting to Kron Harga instead of relying on her own crew? Was that why she had to come to Omega instead of going after Harga's flagship?

There and gone in a second, but he saw it: a flicker of concern muddled up with an echo of the look she got when she saw Licinia’s knife. An old hurt. It aged her, carving lines around her mouth and nose, the knotted scar at her temple stark and pale. He was suddenly certain that whatever lesson she’d learned on trust had cost her very, very dearly.

“Yeah, I know. But this is how it works here. Your friend already knows that–”

She plucked up the fluttering edge of her cloak, prying off a small, dark device the size of a credit chit with her fingernail. A tracker. Subtle. Garrus started but she seemed unperturbed as she handed it back over to him, unharmed.

“See? He’s already a step ahead.”

Garrus examined the tracker, thoughts swirling. Sidonis hadn’t said anything–when had he even placed it?

Hooding her cloak back over her hair, she regarded him with hard composure and a commanding presence. Utterly professional.

“If you want to kill Derius and Kron Harga, this is your best shot. After it’s all over, we go our separate ways.”

And then she left.

“These shoes won’t work,” Shepard called out, taking a few coltish steps out of the en suite bathroom into the spacious cabin. The ship was small, a pleasure vessel almost solely comprised of a central cabin lined with oversized satin cushions and featuring a massive heated jacuzzi at the center. If there was any doubt as to the main intended activity for the ship, the entire ceiling was comprised of mirrors.

“I can’t run in these things. I can barely walk.”

Nyreen smiled. “Somehow I don’t think the shoes are the problem with your outfit.”

Shepard plopped down onto a satin cushion and stared up at her reflection overhead, seeing no issue. She looked fantastic.

 “This is an improvement,” she gesticulated vaguely at her bra and underwear, the only things she had on outside of her dark auburn wig, cocktail hat, and the liberal layer of expertly contoured make-up.  “Not a sequin in sight.”

The bra was strapless black lace overlay, fashioned by lingerie geniuses with asari matriarchs in mind—she could run without it turning into a belt in a few seconds, an incredible feat of engineering for a strapless bra. And the briefs weren’t bad either–black lace and criss-crossing straps with an added fashion benefit: they matched her drop-leg knife sheath concealed by the edge of her tear-proof stockings. 

Black was such a nice, understated color. 

“Plus, I can actually fight in this.”

“You can fight in the dress too, the fabric has stretch and the side-slit helps with mobility.”

Shepard scowled at the glittering pile of fabric heaped onto the bathroom floor.

“But the suit–”

“The suit won’t work. This is the Stardust. You need something obvious, not–” She raised an amused browplate down at Shepard’s underwear. “Asari couture.”

“Then what about you?” Shepard demanded.

Nyreen didn’t bother disguising her smile as she brushed down the dark, glittering silk of her Asari-cut suit. It was expertly tailored for a turian frame, smooth darted lines gathering at her tapered waist and flaring over her cowl into long, split-kimono sleeves. She looked amazing. No one’s ex should look that amazing. Especially not when one is being forced into head-to-toe sequins. Or…considering her dress’s neckline–tit-to-toe.

“Doesn’t matter what I wear,” Nyreen replied. “Since I’m not running the honeypot anymore.”

Shepard groaned. Oblivious to her distress, Nyreen turned on her music and a man’s voice began crooning in English, the sound of string and brass instruments filling the cabin. Old music from Earth–Nyreen loved that kind of stuff. She read Shakespeare for fuck’s sake. Original texts too, not the ‘misspelled asari translations’.

“Is it too late to change my mind?” 

“You could,” Nyreen offered, her sharp chin tipping to the side so that the decorative jewelry looped around the edge of her mandible tinkled, the crystals at the end throwing up a spray of rainbow fragments across the cabin. “Throw him to the shathas as a diversion, if that’s what you mean.”

“If he’s even coming. Maybe he changed his mind.”

Nyreen laughed. “Trust me. He’s coming.”

“Well then if he doesn’t see the double-cross, it’s on him, don’t you think?” Shepard groused. “I warned him, didn't I?”

“About that,” Nyreen said, trailing off as she retrieved Shepard’s dress from the bathroom floor and walked over to drop the tacky monstrosity into her lap. 

“Anyone else, you’d have a sniper on his six and a proof-of-life blackmail lockbox of your own for him and the sniper. You didn’t even remove the second bug his friend put on you.”

Shepard didn’t say that she had insurance: a face to put to the growing thorn in Omega’s side.  And a name, if she took it on herself to go looking for it. She never did. Instead, she doggedly avoided all mention of Commander Alenko and the crew of the Normandy, had extranet search filter blockers and everything. It was a trump card she didn’t plan for and didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of. 

“Never hurts to keep an opponent complacent,” Shepard said, noncommittal, reaching up to adjust the hat–if it could even be called that, it was more like a bizarre wedge of rhinestoned black satin nestled in a poof of black netting that fell across her forehead.  

Nyreen flicked her hand away before she could dislodge it from the pins again and handed her a pair of black satin gloves. Long ones, to cover up the ugly scar running the back of her arm. 

“Right...that’s what that was.”

For a moment, Shepard said nothing, letting the music fill the space where her answer should be. The words of the song sounded familiar–this was whatever Anhur was singing at the diner. Spirits, Nyreen and her fucked-up sense of humor.

Shepard huffed and began pulling the gloves on. “Just get to the point, Red.”

A golden-eyed stare flitted over her. “I don’t have one. I was just surprised to see you trust someone again. It’s nice.”

Guilt punched through her chest so fast and hard it left her stunned and dazed. Trust. That’s not what this was. What kind of idiot trusted someone else in a place like this? 

“It’s not nice,” she hissed, the daze wearing off like anesthesia to leave a deep, vicious ache.  “I’m just a sucker for turians in a rush to leave me in the dust and go die for some bullshit cause.”

Ah. Too far. Nyreen’s mandibles drew tight, rapidly and she blinked her big, golden eyes for a second of stunned silence before turning back towards the bathroom. 

“Red–” Shepard started. 

“Just, do me a favor if this all goes terribly wrong,” Nyreen paused by the door. “Don’t resent me as much as you resent Licinia if I end up dying to save your life.”

The bathroom door shut closed with a gentle snick. Shepard had extricated herself from the cushions somehow and was halfway to the door, blood pounding against her temples. A hundred things crammed into her throat all at once, but regret was a clawed hand gripping tight around her windpipe until there was nothing left but a strangled squeak. 

“You–” she tried. Barely a whisper. Her eyes squeezed shut but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t block it out. Licinia was painted on the back of them, blue spattered over her facial plates, eyes defiant even as the light left them. Don’t get attached. You’re too soft. Too sentimental. It makes you weak.

See? Don’t you see?

One last lesson for her stupid, reckless protege. And it was the cruelest one of all. 

“Don’t–” she whispered against the door. 

The ship VI was blathering something in the background but it didn’t occur to her why, with the tinnitus ring drowning out the music, until the doors to the airlock parted to reveal three men in formal suits, all wearing identical looks of bafflement when they saw her.

Ah. Shepard glanced down. She still hadn’t put on her dress.

She found her voice, the ringing dimming beneath the sound of brass instruments.

 “You guys clean up nice,” she said, folding her arms across her chest to give them a thorough once over while a chorus of awkward throat clears and averted glances kept them preoccupied. 

Well, she gave Blue Eyes a thorough once over. She couldn’t help it, once her eyes found him, they just stayed. For one, he looked incredible. The stark black and white of his turian-cut suit was dramatic and bold, bringing out all his polished,clean-cut edges. He wore it with a kind of natural elegance that spoke to a life spent high on the rungs of the Heirarchy, no matter how many Omega back-alleys he skulked in now. She wondered what his probably respectable, probably worried family would think about that, and envy soured in her stomach.

Anger chased it. Must be nice to take something like that for granted. Him and Nyreen, two peas in a pod slumming it in the darkest corners of the galaxy when no one with any choice otherwise would hang around. No wonder they wanted to ‘fix’ this place. No wonder they stuck out, too bright with their shiny, idealism and the arrogant presumption that they had all the answers. Assuming they had the luxury of trust , the only thing harder to come by in the Terminus than happiness.

Her eyes found Surly and sure enough, the clothes did not make the man. He was grimacing down at the floor, fidgeting with his collar, restless energy crackling off his rangy build. Despite the fact that they’d all obviously gone to Nyreen’s asari tailor with her warehouse full of high-quality couture knock-offs, he managed to make his suit look too loose and too tight all at once. 

Shepard smiled to see it. His complete lack of charm was growing on her. 

“There’s no engine on this thing,” Anhur said, straightening his starched white shirt-collar, interest already drifting towards the sleek curves of the cabin. “Just thrusters. Is this one of those pleasure vessels that nest into another ship?”

“It is.” Shepard strode over to the ring of cushions to retrieve her dress from the floor. “I liberated both of them from an idiot heiress who wandered too far from Ilium.”

“Humanity’s legend…” Surly scoffed towards the plush carpeting.

“Well, when she inherited her mining operation out on Zesmeni, she shuttered the nearby colony and bought slave labor from The Market to replace her workers. Can’t say the memory of stabbing her in the throat keeps me up at night.”

The opposite, actually. She smiled serenely and caught an appreciative glance from Blue Eyes. It stayed firmly above the neck too, which, for some inexplicable reason, made her feel too vulnerable. She ducked her head down to examine her dress, suddenly very much needing to be wearing something more than just underwear in front of him.

The dress was laughably simple in design: effectively a flared tube of clingy, sparkling silver fabric studded with overlapping bar-shaped sequins and crystal beads. She would look like a Christmas tree, one of those cheap silver tinsel ones that her parents got one year to put on their coffee table.

“Is it just me–” Anhur asked. “Or does this whole cabin give off a strong orgy vibe?”

Shepard bunched the fabric up into a ring and stepped into it, hoisting the top half up against her chest and pulling the rest of the bunched-up skirt down over her hips so that it could fall heavily around her legs. The thing was skin tight at her waist, nipping in before gathering looser into a cowl neckline from thin straps. 

“Definitely not just you. Don’t touch anything,” Surly warned him.

Shepard slipped the straps over her shoulders and spared them a glance. “Don’t worry, I had it professionally cleaned to get all the blood out of the cushions. It’s getting sold soon. I only kept it this long for our cover.”

Word of the original owner’s demise hadn’t gotten out yet. For all anyone knew, Tevi Lasiir was just taking another pleasure cruise and decided to stop by Omega with a few orgy guests for the Stardust’s 10-year-anniversary celebration.

For some reason, the top was a little too loose, the back open and gaping oddly, threatening to drag the straps off her shoulders. That couldn’t be right, could it? She frowned, reaching back with her arm to find the hidden zipper, and remembered too late what happened on her last visit to Omega. The joint popped audibly, painful shocks tingling up her neck to spark bright spots across her vision.

“Ah—fuck.”

Blue Eyes was at her side by the time she blinked the last away, a hand hovering by her elbow but not actually touching it. 

“Need a hand?” he offered she just nodded dumbly, pain tying her tongue into useless knots. 

Gloved talons tipped against her skin through the fabric and despite herself, she shivered, the pain fading into something else entirely. 

“I think…there’s a zipper–” she offered faintly after clearing her tightening throat.

“I see it,” he assured her, talons plucking at the sequins and beadwork. The motion brushed his knuckles featherlight against the bare skin at the small of her back. Another shiver caressed up her thighs, fizzing restless energy low in her stomach. Her breath caught, shoulder blades tight and drawing back as she arched against the touch. He was close enough she could hear his catch too.

“Your shoulder…uh–” he started, awkwardly hemming. “It still hasn’t healed?”

She pushed up the strap slipping down her good shoulder and glanced back at him over it. “Humans got a raw deal when it comes to joints. They never heal right. I didn’t do it any favors when I forced it back in the socket back then.”

His eyes were intense this close. He’d left the visor—wouldn’t clear security—and all she could see was blue ringing the dark, dilated center of his pupils. Warm breath curled at the nape of her neck, stirring the soft waves of her wig. 

“The Sinatra’s a nice touch,” Anhur said from across the cabin. He’d stopped to examine his own faint reflection in the viewport, straightening his gold nametag and employee vest. “Really gets you in the mood for a casino heist.”

To Surly, he said, “Told you we all should’ve gone with the Rat Pack code names.”

“Rats are disgusting animals.”

“The Rat Pack has nothing to do with actual rats . I explained this a dozen times already–”

Shepard cleared her throat, looking down to smooth invisible wrinkles from the front of her dress. The gentle tugging resumed.

“Damn,” he said. Stilted and soft. “It’s...giving me some trouble.”

A sigh gusted over her exposed back and the tugging stopped again. She heard the sound of synthetic leather rustling. His gloves, he’d taken them off.

She darted a smirk over her shoulder. “You sewed up my arm no problem but a zipper is giving you the run around?”

A soft laugh. “I’ll just grab some suture thread then?”

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you sew me into this thing,” she hissed. “Bad enough I have to wear it.”

“I think it’s stuck.”

“Just–just pull harder or something.”

“I don’t want to rip it.”

“Yeah? That makes one of us.”

Heaving a sigh, he pressed his hand flat against the small of her back for leverage. A small, surprised sound escaped her. Even through the fabric, his touch frissoned heat all the way up from her toes. It flared between her thighs: an insistent ache, a painful throb. She clenched her legs close against it but instead of relief, she just felt the scratch of garter strap lace rubbing against her skin. It felt nothing like osteoderm plates rubbing her raw as he jerked her down onto the upward snap of his hips. So why–

Over the thrum of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, she heard the sound of the zipper, at last.

The bodice was now appropriately snug, glittering fabric draping high enough to cover most of her cleavage but low and wide enough to bare most of her collarbones. For humans, it would almost read as modest. But for turians—the silver sequins, the exposed neck, back and collarbone and the draping cowl cleverly disguising her modest bust, rendering it vaguely turian—it was the clothing equivalent of crooking a finger and tossing a wink over a shoulder like some kind of cheesy noir femme fatale. It was a dress that demanded attention. Specifically, turian attention. 

She turned around before he was done, figuring she could get it the rest of the way with her good arm. He’d been closer than she expected and had to take a quick step back to avoid getting knocked in the face.

“Thanks,” she said, voice hoarse. “Even though I was hoping you’d end up ripping it.”

He looked her over, mandibles wavering, his eyes widening and losing their focused clarity. For a moment, he just stared at her. And then, with an awkward cough, he glanced away. “I–Uh…it’s…I think it looks good.”

Oh.

His bare hand reached up to pull distractedly at his collar and that’s when she noticed.

Oh.  

Talons. Trimmed, filed, and buffed into blunted, human-friendly tips nearly flush with his fingertips.

A strange sensation rushed up from her pinched toes to sweep over her and it was all she could do not to get carried away in the upwelling current. Was that…did he do that for the job or for her ?

Nyreen stepped out of the bathroom and surveyed the cabin. “Good, everyone’s here. Time to go over the mission brief.”

“Finally,” Surly grumbled.

Chapter Text

The Stardust was, like pretty much everything on Omega, a bit of a shithole. Burrowed deep into the asteroid shell, in the lowest levels of the station, the casino sat at the mouth of a maze of poorly lit rocky corridors crammed with ramshackle dwellings. In either defiance or ignorance of the less than glamorous surrounds, the building facade was a multi-story blare of blinking neon bulbs pulsing blue and yellow starbust shapes into the dark. A faded, threadbare red carpet rolled out from the glaring casino entrance, framed by tarnished gold stanchions, swiveling spotlight beams, and bored Talons security.

It felt like parody, some seedy interpretation of glitz passed through an Omega lens, distorted and surreal. He blinked rapidly against the staccato pulse of the neon, his stomach jostling with unease. Omega wasn’t home, never would be no matter how long he spent on the station, but at least most of it did you the favor of playing the ugliness straight. Here it lurked beneath the gilded veneer like something unfamiliar waiting to catch him unaware.

“You were expecting Flux?” Shepard teased, marking his expression.

Flux still had smoldering chunks of Sovereign in its ceiling but even so, it ranked above and beyond the Stardust in every metric.

“I expected something more than just a few steps up from the guy running Three-card Monte outside my apartment building. Isn’t this place supposed to be exclusive?”

She smiled but whatever she was about to say got cut-off by gunshot report cracking out over the music spilling out from the open casino doors. Instinctively, Garrus reached for his rifle before remembering he didn’t have it.

In the briefly illuminated dim ahead, three lanky human figures retreated into a nearby tunnel. One lagged behind, limping, only to stumble and grab at the nearest object for support. After another gunshot they slumped to the ground, stanchions and velvet rope toppling with them.

If this were the Citadel, there’d be screaming, gasps—some kind of reaction from the crowd. But here there were only irritated sighs, even a few titillated laughs over the suicidal audacity of the thieves. Garrus watched people step around the growing pool of blood seeping into the red carpet with casual indifference.

No one had even flinched. And why would they? Didn’t take long on Omega to see your first dead body. Didn’t take much longer to get used to it. 

Shepard’s arm tightened around his and he glanced down, surprised to see her freckles stark and lips drawn tight as he approached the body and the two mercs standing over it. Garrus followed the trajectory of her eyes to the dead man, fixing first on the bootless feet with blackened toes before traveling up to see the blood-spattered ExoGeni logo peaking out beneath the torn collar of the tattered coveralls caked in filth. A colonist.

One of the mercs glanced up at them as her step faltered and cracked a dry laugh at her.

“First time at the Stardust sweetie?” His eyes raked over her, head to toe and back again. “Don’t worry, I’ve got good aim.”

Gloved fingertips burrowed into Garrus’s sleeve, her nails pressing indents against the gaps in his dermal plates through the fabric. 

“Yeah?” she asked. “Missing your first shot from five meters away is what passes for good in the Talons? That’s a Blue Suns endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.”

 The merc snarled in response while the other burst into raucous laughter and pulled him back before he could lunge for her. Ignoring them both, Shepard strode past, tugging Garrus along with her as she hissed angrily under her breath.

“Did you get a look at him?” she asked and he knew she was talking about the colonist. “Feet like that—batarians don’t feed mouths they can’t put to work or sell off to the harvesters so they dump them—usually out an airlock. But if they’re close enough to Omega they just release people into the tunnels. Not that it matters. He didn't stand a chance either way.”

“Still think those mercs should be running this station?” he couldn’t help but point out. Gunning down a sick and desperate man in the street—not exactly his idea of better justice.

“I think sometimes, you get a shit hand and you have to make do. Omega is the shittiest hand life will ever deal you.”

There was a line of people at the security checkpoint. They stopped beneath the massive neon portico and Garrus felt a migraine coming from the sheer brilliance prodding his retinas. He wanted his gun. Thirty minutes was too long to go unarmed in this place.

“It shouldn’t be that way,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to live in fear. That’s all the gangs can offer them.”

She wouldn’t look at him but he saw her eyebrow arch. “And Archangel offers them something different?”

“Of course he does. The gangs–” 

“What about the gangs? You think any of those assholes wound up here because they had a choice? Do you think the guy bleeding out on the ground out there is here because he had a choice?”

Frustration prickled along his hide but before he could interject, she continued.

“They’re here because they’re desperate. They’re trying to survive. Almost everyone on this station got the same shit hand and the ones doing the dealing aren’t here, they’re in Council Space, not giving a single fuck about what goes on in the Terminus. So maybe that ’s what needs fixing.”

Garrus bristled, a retort hot on his tongue, but they were next to go through security so he held it while the mercs scanned them for omni-tools, weapons, and other contraband before waving them through. There was a moment, a brief, lurching unease when he considered she might be right. 

He didn’t like it one bit. It made him feel small. Powerless. Like he was back on the Citadel, days hunting down leads on tainted eezo shipments only for the distributor to walk away with a minor fine. Days followed by nights sitting by his mother’s hospital bedside in Alenko Memorial as she forgot him more and more. Some things he didn’t know how to fix. 

Malevolent machine race from dark space? Renegade spectre? Geth? No problem.

Petitioning the Council for harsher shell company restrictions? Handling a sick woman? Dealing with Alenko’s sanitized posthumous legacy slapped on everything from Alliance recruitment ads to whiskey? Impossible.

As they passed through the open doors, a waft of cool, filtered air cleared the lingering rot of the station out of his sinuses. The interior wasn’t like anything he’d seen before—the machines were gaudy gold curves with colorful analog displays. Like the casino sign and facade, there were no holographics to be seen, just stuttering neon punctuated by a jingling cacophony and the simulated sounds of coins clinking together. He spotted a flash of gold cascading out of one of the machines—actual coins too. 

Explained the tech moratorium. These machines were ancient. He could crack one in less than ten seconds with a calculator.

Packed between the machines and the low-hanging haze of cigarette smoke were Omega’s elite, drinking and laughing happily, just as cacophonous and bizarrely ostentatious as the casino itself. He glimpsed a turian with a gemstone stud in his mandible the size of a shotgun shell—Kavius Narril, notorious Red Sand distributor, cut all his product with beryllium dust—and all of Garrus’s self-doubt combusted in a hard flare of anger. 

“Yeah. No one here looks desperate to me.”

 It didn’t have to be so complicated. Sometimes there were just bad people in dire need of a bullet.

Shepard shook her head grimly, pressing her hand against his arm to lead him around the machines towards the bar along the far wall. “Well, they’re the exception. That’s why they’re here.”

She slipped her arm out from his to wave a seedy-looking bartender down for a whiskey, neat. As soon as the glass slid across the bartop, she snatched it up and tossed half down in one go, her bitter grimace chasing the liquor. 

Rocking her wrist to swirl the liquid in her glass, she studied the bartop with a weary expression. He got the sense she was holding back from saying more, that she didn’t expect him to get whatever point she was trying to make. Which was frustrating. She could be so. Damn. Frustrating.

Then she tipped back the rest of the whiskey and despite everything, Garrus couldn’t help but notice the shadows skimming along the line of her neck down to pool in the little hollow at the base of her throat as she swallowed. Turians had a bit of a thing for necks—nuzzling, nipping, touching…licking. He was no exception. The want coiling through him at the sight was so intense, the rest of the casino and everything beyond it blurred out of the periphery and there was just the overwhelming urge to trace his thumb along the tipped-up edge of her jaw down to that little hollow. 

Blinking back the fugue of ill-timed lust, he glanced at the bartender, who was openly leering at Shepard’s neckline as she shook her head a little against the fire of the whiskey and began to study the bottles on the back wall for her second order. Garrus cleared his throat and stepped forward pointedly, drawing the man’s attention towards him.

“I’ll take a Manhattan,” she said. “And my friend will have a…”

Garrus started. “Uh–”

“A Cipritine Sidecar,” she said, waiting for the bartender to nod before turning around to lean back against the bar, her good elbow resting on the bar top. The weariness was gone, swallowed down with the last of her whiskey, and in its place was hard bravado squaring up her shoulders and lifting up the sharp jut of her chin. It made for a striking pose, her clinging dress etching her waist and the jut of her hip in glittering silver before parting over an expanse of thigh as she surveyed the room with a predatorial eye. 

Garrus noticed a few surveying her right back with exactly the same expression.

She’d done something to her hair, it was longer and darker now with just a bare ruddy hint and it curled in gleaming waves, held in place by glittering pins and something complicated-looking humans apparently considered to be a type of hat. She looked different too. Her normal dark, smudged eye pigment was gone and in its place: sparkling silver and sweeping lines of black ending at an uplifted point at the fringe of her eyelashes. The clear, dramatic lines of her face were somehow softer, shadows blending away her sharp chin and cheekbones into delicacy, her freckles so faint he could barely see them. Even her mouth, lips painted vivid red, appeared bedroom lush instead of always on the precipice of a smirk.

Altogether, she was almost unrecognizable. Which was, he assumed, the entire point--one of them. The other was the honeypot. He had no metric for what made a human attractive to their own species outside of basic symmetry,  but the way Shepard carried herself said she was confident enough of getting the type of attention they needed. 

Their drinks came, hers in a shallow bowl-shaped stemmed glass with a glittering rim and his in a long, narrow cylinder. Her gloved fingers perched delicately at the glass stem and she took a sip before throwing him a smirk. “Come on, Blue Eyes. Have a drink, on me. It’ll help you deal with these people.”

Drinks were gratis. Well, as gratis as drinks could be when they came attached to invitations that cost thousands of credits.

“That’s real generous, but I’d prefer a gun,” he muttered, taking her advice anyway. All the cigarette smoke was making his throat itch. 

The cocktail was good, a sweet-acidic zing layered over a rich woodsy spice lingering on his tongue. It tasted like home, like places in the galaxy where things could just be simple truths and not a mire of ugliness and complication. A pang of nostalgia pierced through his chest.

“Yeah, me too, but we still have thirty minutes before we can be sure your pal Sammy has everything in place,” Shepard said, still assessing the crowd. “And right now we need to make some kind of impression before Tempest starts her show.”

Sammy—Butler. He was operating on the floor and the back of the house in the guise of one of the waitstaff and was smuggling Garrus and Shepard’s weapons in through the kitchens. 

“I don’t think the impression will be any trouble,” he said, taking another sip of his drink and nudging his chin towards some of her less subtle admirers. “You seem to be making one already.”

She stopped surveying to glance his way. “ You’re the one who needs to make the impression.”

Wait. 

What?

“But–” he drew closer so he could drop his voice lower, sure that it didn’t matter with the din but wanting to be cautious. “The honeypot–”

“...is you. Tempest has a turian fetish.”

Garrus set his drink down at the bar before he could drop it, mandibles fluttering and his subharmonics sputtering in strangled disbelief. “ Me?”

There was nothing in the brief about this. She was running point on the floor, largely improvisational until Sidonis and Red searched Tempest’s suite upstairs for the OSD. He—why—it’s not as if he was particularly attractive for a turian! He got the occasional once-over in uniform but nothing… excessive . 

Her palm pressed flat against his sternum and he realized she’d drawn closer, slipping easily into the space between him and the bartop, her drink still in hand. 

“Don’t worry,” she smiled reassuringly. “There’s an easy trick for honeypots I’ve picked up.”

“I hope it’s foolproof,” he deadpanned, not reassured at all. Well, maybe a little. That soft smile of hers was a little distracting, glimpsed beneath the black netting of her hat. 

She tipped her chin to the side, bemused. “Give yourself a little credit, Blue Eyes.”

“Sure,” he said. “How little?”

Sighing, she leaned back against the bar and took a sip while the hand on his chest stayed put. “You know human liquor companies pay asari just to hang around bars, talk up and drink their brand? Sounds ridiculous but it works. In the end, people just want whatever other people want. Especially if the other person is asari. Even if the thing she wants is a Midori Sour.”

“And I’m supposed to be the… Midori Sour in this analogy?” The way she said left no doubt in his mind it was not a great thing to be compared to, whatever it was.

“Hardly. You’re top shelf, so just be yourself while I put on a show fawning all over you.” Her hand slipped up to caress his mandible as she looked up at him with that private smile. He shivered, the surroundings going hazy as heat coursed through him. “Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

Not breaking eye contact, she sipped down the last of her drink. “Oh, and I’ll probably need you to punch someone. It’s loud and flashy in here so I think violence will be our best bet to get eyes on you.”

Now that he could manage. He stared down at her, sorely tempted to tug at his suit collar. How could luxury fabric possibly be so itchy? This close, she had to tip back her chin to meet his eyes, that little shadowed hollow at the base of her throat begging to be touched. Garrus gulped, mouth running dry, but didn’t reach for his drink on the bar top. 

“Alright, but when you say ‘be myself’ while you uh...fawn over me. Do you mean I should…” How to phrase it?  He cleared his throat. “Uh…reciprocate?”

She considered, setting down her own drink, eyes catching all the gold light refracting off the chandeliers when she looked back up at him. “Whatever you’re comfortable with would be best. If you have to force it, it’ll show. If you want to play it more aloof, I’ll work off that. If you want to reciprocate…well, it’d probably be better, honestly. Especially when we need to get to the room, but it isn’t crucial.”

His eyes lingered on the base of her throat before flickering back to hers. “And you’re comfortable either way?”

They were close enough, he heard the little hitch in her breath cutting through the music and jangling slot machines. Her hand was back on his sternum, fingers curling against the fabric as she pulled him even closer to lean up and say, “I did tell you to give yourself a little credit, didn’t I?”

He shivered, feeling her parted lips press, petal-soft, against his skin at the edge of his fringe by the subtle depression of his ear. Well, he was hardly one to sit back while everyone else did all the work on a mission. If reciprocating would be better, then…

Garrus brushed his thumb over the dip at the base of her throat, smoothing a line out over her exposed clavicle. A heady exhale sighed over his neck and he glanced up to see her full, red lips, gently parting as her eyes fluttered closed for a brief, unguarded second. When they blinked open, her pupils were wide and dark and full of want.

“Noted,” he said and dipped down to nip her neck with his mouthplates.

Fuck, Shepard thought.

And then longer, drawn out in her mind in a silent moan when his tongue briefly smoothed over the spot he nipped. 

Fuckkkkkkkk.

He was already pulling away, clearing his throat with a cough before reaching for his drink. But she was dazed, the moment an echoing pulse against her skin. It’d taken a second, tops, but it was a dense second. Crammed inside of it were weeks of the stifled yearning she only ever admitted to herself when she was alone in her cabin and staring at a bulkhead in the dark, trying not to think about a total stranger she’d only known for hours—thinking about him anyway. Hoping he was still alive, certain he wasn’t,  wishing it didn’t matter so damn much to her.

She used to hurl stones into the calm water of the reservoir back on Mindoir and watch the ripples lap against the shore. The bigger the rock, the bigger the ripples and she liked that. Catharsis through destruction—stones in lakes were as close as she ever got to going to a therapist. This brief second was a stone so big, she could hardly lift it, tossed into the center of her and sinking to the bottom as she roiled and churned.

It took everything in her not to pull him back.

Instead, she downed the rest of her drink. Tried to. It was already empty, the stem of the cherry nearly going up her nostril. With a deep breath, Shepard struggled for some semblance of composure. She had all of up to five minutes to find a mark and make a scene and her drinks weren’t kicking in yet.

“Fast learner,” she muttered, setting her empty coupe on the bartop and happy to see her hands looked steadier than they felt. 

He smiled, mandibles flaring wide, looking entirely too pleased with himself. 

“Well, I pick up what I can.”

Hearing that familiar rumbling drawl, her thighs squeezed together against the pang of desire. Sly bastard. How was it that he could pull off that kind of suave confidence at the most inconvenient times? 

“Keep that up and you won’t even need me to get you into Tempest’s suite.”

It was meant as a compliment but came out jagged and bitter.  

“Now who needs to give themself more credit?” He tossed back the last of his Sidecar and her eyes skimmed over the sharp upward jut of his jaw and the backward sweep of his fringe, chandeliers etching his silvered features in neon and gold. How was it he didn’t think he could pull off a honeypot on his own? Tempest had no taste if she wasn’t dropping her panties for a view like that.

But then, he balked with a sheepish, “Uh…and hopefully it won’t come to that—the suite, I mean.”

Her heartbeat hitched and a giddy laugh burst out of her as if it didn’t feel like he’d just punched her in the gut. That’s what affection always felt like to her: violence. Ever since she was a little kid, she loved things fast and hard and too much. She never knew what to do with all of it, so she just grit her teeth and shoved it all down until it exploded out of her with the force of a miniature eruption. Usually with biting and a shrill, high-pitched scream. Thank God she’d grown out of that , but the stupid giggle was almost just as bad.

At least the self-disgust was enough to snap her out of it, get her head back in the game and focus on finding a damn mark already. Wasn’t good to rush that part but Shepard didn’t care. She had a knack for confidence schemes, Derius told her once, but none of the patience. 

Before, she didn’t see the point in running them when anytime she needed something smuggled or fenced on Omega or Ilium, she just let Derius handle it, like Licinia did. But now, she wished she’d listened more to all his advice. Maybe then she would’ve noticed that he’d been running a game on her this entire time—pretending he was too good for the Sand, the Market, the organ harvesting when really, he’d just been waiting for the right opportunity.

And sell her out in the process. Fucking asshole.

Someone squeezed into the empty space next to her, nearly knocking her coupe out of her hand: a cocktail waiter dropping off a tray of empty glasses and rattling off an array of drink orders featuring a rare asari liqueur to the bartenders.

Shepard forced out a tipsy laugh and wrapped a hand around Blue’s bicep as if to steady herself. He just watched her cling to him, cautious amusement flickering through his faceplates, obviously not believing she was as drunk as she was pretending to be. She released him to lean against the bar as soon as the waiter hurried off again, sure to keep her motions loose and a little clumsy—just on the verge of sloppy drunk—and surveyed the crowd again.

And there, at the far end of a bar, a turian was openly eyeing her. Barefaced and tall, he had a swaggering air tipped in bad boy menace and no date on his arm. Guy was probably there for Tempest: one of the many turians who showed up to these things hoping a night with the Stardust’s proprietress would come with some additional benefits beyond pillow talk. 

He noticed Shepard’s lingering glance and his mandibles flared into a cocksure smile, eyes flicking to Blue Eyes dismissively before fixing back on her, lidded with a smug expression. There was something calculating about him, which meant he was probably running a game of his own.

Her gut was telling her she should play it safer, find someone else without an agenda beyond the party. Shepard ignored it and smiled back, sly and sweet, plucking the cherry from her coupe. Watching him the whole time, she sucked it into her mouth, intently, without biting, as if to get the last drops of whiskey and vermouth.

Those mandibles flared even wider if such a thing were possible and he began to saunter over.

Shepard tapped Blue Eyes in the shin with the toe of her heel to get his attention. Dragging the cherry out of her mouth and placing it back in the coupe, she leaned in close and whispered, “Wait a little then follow my lead,” against his ear before sauntering off.

About twenty steps away, she glanced back to make sure the mark was still on her tail. He was. Good. The bar was too far to the back, tucked away. She needed somewhere more visible. There, the middle of the floor to the side of the baccarat and blackjack tables, right in front of the stage would do. It wasn’t too far and sightlines were good thanks to the stage positioning. The crowd was thickest here and for a second she worried she’d get too far from the mark and her backup so she halted with a faltering step, feigning an issue with her heel.

Someone bumped into her from behind, purposefully, talons curling around her waist and it was all she could do not to immediately pry his fingers up with a hard, bone-crunching twist.

“So you have a thing for turians too, huh?”  

His voice was gravelly and low. She was surprised to hear the filthy insinuation rumbling in his subvocals. Just in case that wasn’t enough of a tip-off, he pressed up against her back, hard, with obvious intent. 

And here she thought he was running a game of his own. But no, she had to find one of the turians here who actually had a thing for humans. A creepy thing too considering how he was flexing his talons, purposeful, against her stomach. He must’ve taken off his gloves as he was following her, convinced she was a sure thing. Turians had a lot of etiquette around degloving. For humans it was a move on par with removing pants. If that wasn’t jarring enough, his talons weren’t trimmed: a massive red flag for a turian with a human fetish.

“Smart, ditching that one. You look like someone who likes it... ”

His bare talons tapped against her abdomen, catching in the beadwork and carelessly ripping off sequins. As much as she hated the dress, she hated this more.

“...rough,” he finally finished, talons slipping up into her neck to scrape hard against her skin.

Shepard hoped her backup was close and jerked away, purposefully bumping into one of the waitstaff carrying a tray full of cocktails. The tray went flying, splashing ultraviolet liqueur all over the exotic animal-fur stole draped over the asari at the nearest baccarat table. The asari shrieked, horrified and the cocktail waiter began stammering out an effusive apology to the woman in a thick colonial accent. Shepard turned and slapped the turian across the cheek.

“Get away from me!” she shouted, palm stinging through her glove. Slapping a species with an osteoderm carapace—not exactly an effective move. It didn’t do anything but bewilder him. 

“What are you–?”

She slapped him again, really put her arm into this time, and he snarled an obscenity that didn’t translate, talons swiping at her. Before they could find purchase, three fingers wrapped around his wrist, wrenching it back at a painful-looking angle, threatening to pull his arm out of its socket. He pivoted on instinct to avoid the dislocation, cringing with a hiss, back awkwardly contorting with the force, and didn’t see the fist coming. It smacked into the underside of his chin, snapping it up with a sharp crack that cut through the machines, the music, and the crowd. 

A delighted gasp rippled up around them as the turian toppled back onto a baccarat table. The players stumbled away just as the table collapsed beneath him, depositing him onto the floor in a rain of chips and playing cards. 

Shepard didn’t waste a second. She threw her arms around Blue Eyes, pressing a few messy kisses against his mandible for the benefit of the onlookers before whispering, “We gotta go. Let him keep security busy”

Pulling away, she braceleted her fingers around his wrist and dragged him off towards the elevators on the far wall. By the time they reached them, she turned back to see the armed Talons security converging on the broken baccarat table. A substantial crowd had gathered. Omega wasn’t impressed with death or violence but it did love spectacle . She could still hear the woman with the ruined fur dress wailing over the din. Those who had seen most of what happened openly watched them with rabid curiosity.

She nearly laughed, exhilaration careening an intoxicating current through her veins. Perfect execution and timing, as if they’d been working together for years. Shepard looked up at Blue, her breath coming fast and hard. He’d been phenomenal. 

“Hope you’re ready,” she warned with a smile, throwing her arms around his neck again. “Time to really put on a show.”

He was breathing fast too, pupils dilating as his gaze locked onto her face, just centimeters away. “Definitely.”

Chapter Text

Garrus tried, he really did, to keep it within the lines of professional . For turians, that went without saying but humans didn’t understand. They gleefully shucked off their professionalism at the first opportunity, like ill-fitting clothes they were dying to crawl out of. To a turian professional was fundamental. There was no way to forget it, leave it behind, or peel it away, not without doing real damage. 

Problem was, professionalism wasn’t a line so much as a precipice and sometimes you never really knew you were over the edge up until it was too late—until you were already falling, the ground hurtling up to embrace you. 

Her arms were wrapping around him, breath falling sweet and hot against his mouth, eyes glittering dark and dangerous. One arm already curling around her waist, he tipped forward and so did she, her red lips grazing against his mouthplates. It was just a whisper of a touch, a fleeting rumor of warmth. Her fingers curled around the back of his neck as if grasping for a lifeline and his fisted into her dress, exhilaration transmuting into panicky vertigo, like he was losing his footing and it was too late to find his balance.

She shivered. Pressed close, Garrus felt it quiver through her shoulders, her chest, before thrumming down hips and thighs flush against his. He realized it wasn’t just her. His muscles were taut and straining, wracked by weeks of wanting.

It was too late. Hours. Days. Weeks too late. He’d been falling all this time and now he was seconds from impact. But the panic unfurling in his chest wasn’t panic at all. It was relief.

He didn’t know who moved first and he didn’t care. Her tongue was pressing into his mouth, a moan low in her throat. He groaned, tasting her. Bitter and sweet. Dangerous and so achingly familiar he groaned again, voice fracturing into a purring pitch.

Her thigh flexing against his palm, he hitched her leg up to hook around his hip. With her weight settling against him suddenly, his back thumped against the elevator doors. Blindly, he flung out his free hand to slam the button, seeing stars as her pelvis rocked against his, just the thin fabric of her underwear and his suit pants between them.

The elevator dinged, doors parting behind him. Ungainly, he managed to stumble back with Shepard, partially falling back against the wall of the car, her body crushed against him. She seemed oblivious to it all, furiously nipping and licking his neck, her hands furrowing beneath his suit collar as the doors closed.

“Good job—” she gasped against his jaw, underscoring the praise with the scrape of blunt teeth against his pulse point. Garrus shivered. His fingers clenched at her hip as he bucked helplessly against her. His plates were already parted, the luxuriant slip of his pants sliding over the exposed base of his throbbing erection, still trapped in his sheath. When she rubbed against him, the sensation was so overwhelming, he flinched, head lolling back to exhale his ragged moan towards the ceiling.

“Just following your lead,” he admitted between his clenched teeth, desire swallowing the consonants up into a husky rumble.

“Mmm, so modest,” she teased and her tongue traced the exposed line of his neck before asking, “You sure you haven’t done this before?”

The slit in her dress had rucked up and he blindly helped it along, shoving fabric up and out of the way to expose her underwear. Unseeing, he ran his thumb down to where the button fly of his pants pressed into the satin. A breathless laugh tumbled out of him.

“Never. I—ah…skipped–”

Even through his gloves, he could feel the parenthetical outline of her labia plastered against the slippery fabric. A whimper caught on her teeth as he rubbed roving circles against her folds, feeling for her clit, eager to show off his progress from all the…personal research..  

“Skipped ‘Tactical exhibitionism’ during training, ” he finished, so rough it was practically a growl. With her weight settled against him, even the smallest movement evoked a shudder as the friction of his pants rubbed against his erection. It was all he could do not to come undone then and there, still in his sheath like an oversexed teenager. 

“All just natural talent? Cameras are–” she bit back a gasp, writhing in his arms. “On my 10.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” 

Bracing her by the hip, Garrus spun to pin her against the elevator wall while she fished the staff master key out of his pocket to wave in front of the door panel. He hadn’t even noticed her slip it in there after Butler palmed it to her during all the chaos—but then, he’d been a little preoccupied. A little enraged, if he was honest, watching that turian paw at her with his bare, untrimmed talons.

He’d never been happier to punch someone in the face. It’d been…intensely satisfying. Garrus dipped his head down to nip a line down her neck with his mouth plates, savoring the taste of her on his tongue, wanting as much of her as he could take. For as long as he could take it. Eyes heavy-lidded, he grinned with all the hunger and satisfaction coiling at the base of his spine.

“Tell me,” he said, tongue skimming over her pulse point. “Do you flatter all your partners in crime this much?”

With his height now blocking Shepard from the camera’s line of sight, he curled his finger beneath the lace edge of her underwear, pressing his blunted talon against the throb of her clitoris nestled at the apex of her folds. Another moan shuddered out of her and her fingers clutched tight around his forearm. Not to pull him away. Instead, she wrenched him closer, her underwear twisting up over his wrist, his palm cupped against her mons as his fingers slipped inside her.

Her cry rang out with the ding of the elevator and he felt her desperately clenching around his fingers as if begging him not to move. Or maybe he was reading too much into things out of his own desire to stay in the elevator and drive his fingers into her until she came, trembling and flushed, her desire dripping down his palm and wrist. Garrus pumped his hand into her once, fast, then again, slow, curling his fingertips in a dragging stroke as he withdrew just before the doors opened to the floor. 

No one was in the hall. Good. Blearily, he remembered to clock the hallway security cameras. One facing the elevator, two at each end of the hall. Voyeur lenses caught the light, peering down at them from the chipped molding. 

In one smooth motion, he hauled her up against him and her thighs wrapped obligingly around his waist.

“Almost there,” she panted, her tongue tracing the edge of his temple where his facial plating obscured the shallow depression of his ear. A guttural sound tore out of him, her mouth consuming all of his focus.

“Second door…” Her thighs tightened against his waist as she gently rocked her hips against him. Spirits, that felt…so good. 

“On the left,” she reminded him.

Of–of course. He knew that. Arms full of her, he crossed the distance in just a few strides. One swipe of the master key and they were inside. Garrus spotted the room service cart by the bed. Butler had already come and gone, just as planned.

He hesitated mid-step, the door closing behind them. No more cameras. No prying eyes that might be wondering who they were and if they were a security risk or just another couple stumbling upstairs for a quick fuck. Just them. Just the obvious throb of his cock between her thighs. He wanted to throw her down onto the bed and plunge his fingers back into her. He wanted to feel her wet heat as she clenched around him, impossibly tight. With his fingers. With his tongue. Just like in those vids. Just like he imagined, her voice spilling out an unending stream of moans and cries, over and over again. 

“We uh...have a bit of time while we wait for them to check the suite,” she whispered huskily. Her eyes were dark, irises just a thin rim of green vivid in the dim. “If you want to…take care of some unfinished business.”

The unfinished business that began in the elevator or the safe house? But there was no point in asking when he already knew the answer was both. He knew it every time he found himself back in Fumi’s dark alleys or pouring over Ripper’s reports of broken jaws, looking for any obscure sign she was back on the station. Those obsessive rituals, he knew how they looked. To anyone, it might’ve seemed like he was infatuated. In love even. But it wasn’t that. What they’d started those weeks ago wasn’t love. But it wasn’t just tension relief either. 

Whatever it was, intense and indefinable, it wasn’t finished with them. 

By way of assent, Garrus lifted her onto the nearest available hard surface, the food service cart, ignoring the clatter of the serving platters and stainless steel cloches as they fell to the floor. He palmed the outer curves of her thighs, kneading them through the sheer, dark material clinging to her skin like shadow. Hooking his thumbs on her glittering skirt, he watched it crumple as his fingers traversed up, revealing her legs one tantalizing centimeter at a time. The sheer material ended high on her thigh with a lace edge and the straps of her empty drop leg knife sheaths.

He groaned, massaging indents into her skin as she eased back, legs splaying even wider—inviting.

Garrus didn’t waste time, his glove fluttering towards the floor as his fingers worked beneath the satin and thrust inside her. The plates at the edge of the cart rattled furiously as her hips rocked into the plunge of his fingers. He found her clit again, the wild pulse kissing the calloused pad of his thumb with the frenetic tempo of racing heartbeats and stuttering hips and his own raw, syncopated grunts mingling with hers.

The tempo subsumed his thoughts, pulling him under into a feverish current.  He couldn’t catch his breath without swallowing down her lush moans, the salty give of her skin beneath his mouth, the tight, wet heat convulsing against his knuckles as she came.

He didn’t wait, there was no time for it. Garrus fell to his knees in front of Shepard and, with a hand at the small of her back, hauled her hips up towards his face and buried his tongue into her wet, still-quivering sheath.

A shocked cry and her fingers clawed his neck, hips bucking so hard against his mouth the cart bowed with a crack, fragile serving dishes falling and shattering on the floor as she twisted and writhed. Her thighs clamped tight, pinning his mandibles painfully against his jaw. Garrus groaned in satisfaction, subharmonics obscene and muffled against her cunt, his tongue pushing deeper.

He wanted to tell her it was so much better than the vids. Better than he imagined. Drowning between two thighs, her taste wild and salt-sweet, gliding against his teeth. He wanted to tell her a day didn’t go by that he didn’t think about her and he didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Not infatuation and not love, but what did he know? Maybe those were just another precipice he was already falling off of. 

It didn’t matter. That was too much to say and he couldn’t speak anyway. Instead, he nuzzled his face against her parted folds, nudging her clit with the ridge of his nose, and hummed a wordless subvocal rumble. A bitten-off scream and she was rutting mindlessly against his face as he fucked her with his tongue, curling it deep inside her with his salacious, open-mouthed groan. 

She came again, hard, her taste flooding his senses as he greedily drank down the sudden rush of arousal slicking over his mouthplates and face. Unslaked need scythed heat through him and a warning ache shot through his stomach—he’d been too close for too long with his cock still in his sheath. His groan shuddered off into a pained grunt and he jerked away.

“You okay?” she asked, alarm cutting sharp and clear through her breathy voice, ”is it a reaction–”

Garrus shook his head, gently easing her legs from his shoulders and lurching to his feet, pulling her up with him. 

“No, I…” Her legs were just as trembling and unsteady as his and for a swaying second, he was sure they’d topple to the carpet in a clumsy heap. Her eyes darted up to study his face and he was surprised to see them full of naked concern. Mandibles fluttering, he tamped down on the impulse to smooth his finger over the furrow at the center of her brow.

 “It’s not that, I’ve been taking immune modulators just in case. I just—need…”

She nodded intently, then turned around and bent over the cart, looping her skirt up over one arm to expose the backs of her thighs and the swell of her hips bisected by the dark vee of her undergarments.

“Me too.”

Clumsy, his fingers rushed to undo his pants, slipping on the metal clasps. There was a damp patch on the fabric from his own seeping arousal. Spirits, he couldn’t remember ever being this turned on. His desire was a flood tide without the ebb before each surge. It tasted like her, salty-slick, and he was drowning in it.

“The answer is no, by the way,” she said over the curve of her shoulder. “I don’t flatter them all. You’re special.”

Shouldn’t have felt like something but it did. His heartbeat hitched and his fingers stuttered on the clasps, more desperate than ever. Needing, wanting.

There , finally, the clasp came undone. The other two followed as he hooked his fingers into his dripping sheath. He felt the sudden give of painful pressure as his erection sprang free with a pornographically wet sound swallowed up by his relieved exhale. Shepard moaned as he worked his thumb beneath the edge of her underwear, dragging it to the side and exposing her vulva, all rosy pink and glistening sheen. 

“It’s always nice to be appreciated,” he said, brushing his thumb over her.

“Just getting started on the appreciation,” she purred, husky and low. A promise.

His cock, flushed dark, twitched, arousal welling up and rivuleting down his length. He took himself in hand, loosely fisting his fingers to guide his tip into the cleft of her opening. Despite the need unraveling his thoughts into a gyre of fragmented sensation, he wanted to take his time. They didn’t have much and he wanted all of it. Every second. 

He pushed into her slowly, feeling the wet, silky clutch of her around his tip. Scalding relief coursed through him, knocking his head back, fluttering his eyes closed—shutting out everything except for their tenuous connection, his cock just barely nudging into her.

 It was already almost too much. He was so close. 

Shepard was moaning unabashedly. Not the kind of moans you ever heard on a ship or in a barracks with their echoing bulkheads and crowded cots. These were beautifully drawn out, luxuriant and sensual, as if they had all the time in the world in this hotel room. He let himself believe them. This wasn’t just a means to an end, a socially acceptable outlet for all their atavistic impulses as a mission loomed and tensions ran high. Somehow, even with the mission waiting for them on the casino floor below, it was more. It was desire for their own sake, not in the service of professionalism. Just him. And just her.

He forced his eyes open, needing to see her. 

Cheek pressed against her forearm, head lolling back in pleasure—her alien body spread out for him on the cart like a decadent tableau—her hips a sinuous, rolling swell. 

Usually, her physicality had a sort of utilitarian grace that spoke more to experience with hand-to-hand combat than seduction. But this was fluid, hypnotic: roiling desire, loose limbs, and the slip of her parted labia on his cock as she moved against him.

Garrus fitted his palms against her rolling hips, pressing his thumbs into the two shallow indentations on either side of her spine. He feathered the calloused pads of his thumbs against the little hollows, an unfamiliar feeling piercing through him. It was soft, happy contentment welded into dense, complicated longing. Unbearably tender but sharp as heartbreak: the kind of feeling that ricochets inside a person and leaves a ruin of internal damage. 

All the breath lurched out of him at once in a short, graceless sound, and he jerked her back as his hips punched forward, burying his cock fully inside her. It wasn't slow, he wasn't taking his time anymore—there wasn't any left to take. He fucked back into her with full, forceful thrusts, pulling her back onto each with hands yanking at her hips.  Shepard’s cry trailed into full-throated, porn-vid gasps and a string of yes's punctuated by the shuddering creak of the cart beneath her.

The pace was relentless, his thighs slapping against the backs of her legs, the force juddering up through her frame. Another thrust and her arms gave beneath her. She collapsed down onto the cart–face pressed into the tablecloth. Working her arms free, she thrust them behind her back, fingers splayed out in silent supplication, offering him her wrists.

He took them, circling them in one hand, using his grip to leverage her weight against him instead of the creaking cart. Unable to move, she went lax in his grip, moans crescendoing as he drove into her. He felt the tight grasp of her cunt around his shaft, the plush resistance of her heat as he pushed inside of her and pulled free, the pronounced ridges of his cock catching despite the slide of their mingling arousal.

Every breath was a ragged pant torn out of his chest, his mandibles slack and parted. The feeling from before was worse, unbearable and devastating, amplified by the pleasure pumping white-hot through him. He couldn't think, lost in pleasure, lost in pain. He’d never felt this before. It felt incredible. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. He needed–he needed–

“Oh,” she whimpered. “Oh, fuck–oh–”

Shepard’s hips began to falter, hitching against him as tremors wracked through her. He shoved into her, one long, punishing thrust, feeling the fluttering grip around his length: the beginnings of an orgasm. He felt her pulse running wild–fast, erratic, caught in the tempo of agonizing bliss, that sudden euphoric rush. 

“Oh–” she breathed again, barely audible—a defenseless whisper from the woman who struck fear in the hearts of every known criminal in the Terminus.  

Garrus pulled her against him, releasing her wrists to sweep her up into the curl of his arm and pinning her unruly hips so that he stayed fully sheathed inside her. She was plastered against him,  his  heaving breaths gusting over the exposed nape of her neck, parted mouthplates against her skin. Releasing her hip, his hand coasted down until he found the slick throb of her clit, pinching it roughly between his fingers as his need burst through him.

Wailing, Shepard bucked, thighs trembling and clamping together. She was so wet, the press of her thighs and the paroxysmic motion of her hips only drove him deeper. So deep, his tip nudged against the back of her tightening channel—an unyielding swell of cervix curving against the tapered slope of his cock. Spasms shook through her, violent tremors furrowing beneath the taut lines of her shoulders and back as she writhed in his embrace, her sheath clutching against his length as her orgasm tore through her. He didn’t stop nuzzling her neck, breathing in the scent of smoke and sweat and sex and Shepard. Impossible, beautiful, undimmed, and undaunted Shepard burning in his arms, in the shadow and the dark—a red sun combusting.

His legs were quaking just as bad, arms too; it was all he could do to hold her close as she came apart in his arms. Hold her close as the hotel room dissolved into the release thundering through her and into him. He came, he was coming, deep inside her, holding her and being held as his orgasm pummeled into him and through him in starry-eyed bursts of sheer, encompassing bliss.

It was collision and impact. Inevitable and unavoidable. He’d been falling. Falling all this time.  

Sidonis didn’t like heights. First time he saw the inside of a skycar, he was 12 and someone was trying to shove him out of it. Didn’t exactly endear him to the idea of being too far above the ground. Didn’t endear him to the idea of taking another job for the Blue Suns again, either. 

He tried not to think about it too much about how high up they were but thinking too much about imminent, gristly death came too naturally to him, so he peered out through the open door again, eyes tracking the blinking neon sign far below. Long way to go. His talons dug into the interior upholstery of the car seat and it squeaked in distress. 

Sidonis scowled, forcing his hands loose and ignoring the look Red shot him over her shoulder before she went back to slicing through the plate glass with her omni-tool.

“Cameras?” she asked him, her arm steady despite the awkward angle and the fact that she was leaning out of the skycar to brace most of her weight against the glass.

“5 more minutes of the looped feed.” And then the worm would self-delete, leaving no trace, and the cameras would resume displaying what was actually going on outside Tempest’s penthouse suite, 26 floors above the streets. 

The kinetic shields rippled blue as she worked, but while they were powerful enough to stop a mass-effect accelerated slug from a sniper rifle, they didn’t do shit against an omni-blade. A safer bet would just not to have a suite where the only exposed wall was entirely made out of glass. 

“What’s with these people and windows?” Sidonis muttered and somehow Red heard him over the high-pitched whistle of a sudden updraft. 

“Can’t beat the view,” she yelled back.

No view was worth this much security risk. Sidonis glanced out, skeptically. 

This high up, the air was almost clear, free of the murky churn of the beryllium. Through the shadows cast by the glittering skyscrapers nestled into the cracked-open geode of the asteroid, shafts of glowing light slanted onto the streets like sunset spilling in through slatted blinds.

At least, he thought anyway, he’d never seen a real sunset before. Or maybe he did, back when he was just a kid on Invictus, but he couldn’t remember any of them so they were just as useless as no sunsets at all.

The view was more beautiful than a place like Omega ever had a right to be. Beautiful didn’t belong here, didn’t belong to the people that lived here. People like him, who got spare, utilitarian windows if they got windows at all: small rectangles of bulletproof carbon glass so thick it was almost opaque. People like him got the dark. They got dust in their lungs and the cough in their throat, Omega’s stench in their nose and blood on their teeth. Ugly. Vicious. Cruel. 

Sometimes things hurt in ways Sidonis didn’t understand, and this view was one of them. It felt like he was losing something important, but it was something he’d never even had to begin with.

He heard shouts far below, carried on the updraft, and the distant pop of gunfire from the direction of the tunnels. Sounded far away still. Good. The guards at the front of the casino had taken the bait without hesitation, probably just excited for something to do, especially if that something was shooting at someone. Sidonis had worked with enough mercs to stop being surprised when they did something ridiculously stupid like, say, abandoning their posts to go chase armed thieves into unknown territory. Garrus said that’s what happened to the undisciplined and untrained when you handed them a gun along with all the unearned confidence that came with it.  

Glass ground against glass and he felt the air prickle and distort with the shifting mass effect field holding the 3-meter wide disc of half-meter thick glass in place before gently lifting it into the air. He was impressed. Well, what the hell else would he be? She was the first turian biotic he’d ever met. He didn’t know what to expect. She grinned, brazen and bold, like she could read his thoughts.

“After you.”

Swallow stones jostling in his stomach, he clambered over the seat and clumsily lunged through the gap she’d cut into the glass. His lungs burned with the effort, or maybe it was fear, and he pretended his breath wasn’t coming out in ragged gasps, surveying the room while surreptitiously sucking down drafts of air.

It was–well, he was hardly anyone to speak to decor, but it looked…misplaced, something borrowed from another time and another place. The furniture was all brass curves upholstered with swaths of either slippery-looking fabric or heavy, fuzzy-looking stuff. He had his gloves on, but he reached forward impulsively, to brush his palm against a throw pillow on a low, decorative couch thing. The fuzz whispered against his gloves like a sigh.

He heard the grind of the glass as Red fitted it back into place and began the process of re-sealing the seam with her omni-tool. Sidonis turned, shading his eyes against the red glare of the skyline–much brighter than he was used to–and saw the skycar’s tail lights already receding into the distance as the autopilot drove the car back.

A glance at his omni-tool and he was impressed again. The glass was one solid sheet again, all with 2 and a half minutes to spare. He tried the comms. 

Nothing.

Red shot him a glance he couldn’t read.

“Still early,” she said. 

He bristled. “I know that,” he muttered. 

Before she could say anything else, he began his omni-tool EMF scan: the fastest way to find a hidden wall safe or stashed OSD. He got the characteristic reading almost immediately, on the wall behind a comma-shaped desk and mirror made out of gold curves and inlaid glass. A framed poster hung on the wall directly over the EMF signal: a human woman in a strange, elaborate costume, backlit in neon letters, spelling out ‘Roxies’. He leaned forward to pull the frame off the hook, his legs knocking into the desk and setting the clutter of cosmetic bottles on the top rattling.

The safe was mid-line quality, with minimal security features, and he had it open in fifteen seconds. Inside was folio bound in string. Sidonis pulled it free and reached inside, feeling for more and coming up with nothing. Given the shitty safe, that made sense. He definitely wouldn’t keep his blackmail in anything Harrot sold for less than 5,000 credits.

“Maybe she kept physical documentation,” Red said over a shoulder, still scanning the rest of the suite for EMF signals. She didn’t sound like she believed it and neither did he, but he unwound the string anyway and pulled out sheaves of paper. A small rectangle fell free and fluttered to the desktop–a physical photograph. He picked it up and held it up to the light. A small human child beamed back at him. 

“Her daughter,” Red said, apparently finished scanning and coming close to peer at the papers.

“Off station,” he said, because there was no way Tempest was blackmailing Derius if her daughter was somewhere he could get to. 

Half of the other papers, it turned out, were bills stamped with the logo and text of some kind of medical facility. The numbers in the boxes caught his eye: hundreds of thousands in credits. After the bills were letters. Handwritten and clumsy-looking, so his omni-tool translator was having difficulty parsing most of them. Near the back of the stack, he found some legible samples and immediately knew they were good as useless. 

‘Dear Mommy,
I can’t believe you’re finally coming to live here with me and [error: unable to be translated]. I’m going to show you the statue in the Presidium and then the hospital and you can meet all my friends–’

He shoved the papers back into the folio before his translator finished, already regretting not listening to his gut. It was never a good idea to go looking for sob stories in the Terminus. 

“It’s not here,” he said. Of course, it wasn’t. If there was any real chance of it, he’d bet Shepard would’ve been the one to run the suite break-in and not her partner. He tried the comms.

Still nothing.

Sidonis grimaced, tossed the folio down onto the desktop, and began to pace. 

“It’s not here, so she’s got it on her.” Or maybe Tempest stashed it somewhere in the casino, but he didn’t think that was likely. That blackmail was her life. Most people liked to keep that kind of thing close at all times.

He stopped and whirled to face Red, who’d picked up the folio to take out the picture. Seeing it, her mandibles flared into a soft smile that frankly baffled the fuck out of him. Ignoring it, he decided it was time to get the truth.

“So why all this? Why not just pull a snatch and grab from the suite to begin with? Take Tempest hostage and lure Derius out that way?”

Red shot him a glance and that smile stayed put, but took on an amused cant. “You don’t know Shepard. She doesn’t do hostages.”

Sidonis snorted as if it was funny. It wasn’t. It was infuriating.

“So what should’ve been a straightforward job turns into this all so humanity’s hero can feel better about herself?”

A browplate cocked up, and she flipped the picture around so he could see the kid again. “Cynical way of putting it. Outside of the blackmail and questionable associates, Tempest isn’t a criminal. By Omega standards, she’s clean. Some would probably draw the line at kidnapping her, especially after seeing this.”

Sidonis looked away, didn’t want to see any more of that kid. Some didn’t know what it took to survive in the Terminus. But Shepard? Shepard didn’t strike him as one of them.

“I’m not some,” was all he said. So what if Tempest had a kid? Everyone had someone. Well, most everyone. 

“Is your partner?”

Sidonis snarled, head jerked around to stare her down. “Leave him out of it.”

She shrugged, replacing the photo and picking up the folio to slide it back into the safe. 

“Earlier, you didn’t ask how I knew Tempest had a daughter,” she said.

“Didn’t pick up on it,” he lied. Of course, he noticed, but he sensed a story and he sensed it was one he didn’t want to hear. Half of surviving as a courier was knowing when to leave well enough alone. On Omega, information could be deadly. Stick your nose in the wrong mess and you risk losing it along with your life.

“Shepard and I were the ones who got her off the station. Shepard told me there was this girl at Roxie’s, one of Derius’s favorites, and she needed to smuggle her baby off station before he found out about it. She didn’t even know Tempest well and didn’t like what she knew, but she put it all on the line to get help for her. That’s who she is.”

Nice story, but it was a little too nice. From what he could tell, Shepard wasn’t the type. Maybe that’s why she got to him. Stories like that belonged to people like Garrus. For everyone else on Omega, the stories always got a little ugly. Sometimes you had to get your hands dirty. Shepard had been there long enough to know that. So if she was still so obsessed with keeping her hands clean–that didn’t impress him. It just made him think she just had the luxury of picking easy battles. Where was the honor in that?

Sidonis just shook his head and tried the comms.

“Give them some time.”

“They’ve had plenty–” he snapped out and caught that look from her again just as the implication sucker-punched him in the gut. His mandibles tightened and suddenly it was difficult to breathe. Suddenly, it felt like the whole station was tipping to the side.

“So, he doesn’t have any idea,” she said. 

Sidonis used to think that being on his own for most of his life made him strong. But when he met Garrus, he realized it was actually the opposite. Solitude had made him weak, brittle. Cripplingly lonely. The first glimpse of earnest sincerity and his defensive shell crumpled like paper. It was fucking embarrassing, hearing himself spill his guts to anyone who might ask kind enough.

 “Doesn’t matter,” he heard himself say, helpless to stop the words tumbling out of his mouth. “He doesn’t need that kind of thing from someone like me.”

Pathetic, but it felt…like relief to say. Almost as if he’d been dying to tell someone, anyone.

“You should tell him, anyway. It doesn’t do anyone any good to keep it to yourself. Maybe something comes of it, maybe not. But it’s better...”

She turned towards the glass, looking out at the city. “Otherwise, the silence just eats away at you bit by bit.”

It sounded like she was speaking more to herself. For a second, it was as if he’d known her all his life and they were just two old friends bathed in sunset, united in misery and pining over impossibilities.

Sidonis didn’t buy into any of the turian bullshit. Professionalism. Honor. Duty. He’d been on Omega long enough to know none of that was innate for any race. Turians liked to pretend it was; he wished it were true. It’d be nice if all that came naturally to him instead of just being an impossible standard that shamed him for doing what he had to. He didn’t have the luxury of picking his fights. Sometimes he walked away from them as a coward, a traitor, someone devoid of all honor and higher meaning outside of existing for just one more day.

He was jealous of Shepard, he was man enough to admit it. But that was what burned in his gut. That’s what he most wanted. Garrus was free to choose who he wanted to be with, but if things had been different? If he could look at Garrus without feeling like he was losing something he never even had?

Would the choice be any different then?

“Red,” a voice crackled over the comms. “Red, any luck?”

Fuck.

Shepard noticed her hand shaking in the bathroom mirror reflection and put down the tube of lipstick before she could draw on a jagged line. Things couldn’t ever be easy could they? This place could never resist an opportunity to destroy whatever it touched.

No. She stared herself down in the mirror. Red eyes, suspiciously watery, blinked back at her. Full of guilt; brimming up with remorse. She allowed herself thirty seconds and ticked them down inside her head: 1, 2, 3, 4.

On five, the tears burst free and she sucked down a wavering gasp. 

‘You’re too soft. Too sentimental,’ she heard Licinia say. ‘Kill it, Shepard. Kill it before it kills you.’

On thirty, she dabbed the corners of her mascaraed lashes with a torn piece of toilet paper, her jaw set and no longer quivering. With a steady hand, she re-applied her faded lipstick, cleaning up the lines but leaving a little smudge at the corner for effect. Replacing the tube into the small make-up bag Nyreen had the foresight to pack with the rest of her gear, Shepard picked up her knives from the counter and slid them into her drop sheaths. 

This time, when she met her own eyes, there was only a hard flash of determination. She hoped it wouldn’t come to this but somehow, always knew it would. That wasn’t anything or anyone else’s fault but hers. 

And now it was too late to do anything but see this thing through.

Chapter Text

Roxies was as far from a quaint pre-fab farming community as the galaxy got. It was loud, it was crowded, and it smelled like an Omega back alley glazed in red candy apple coating and smoldering cigarette butts. Brass instruments wailed from the speakers and neon pulsing into the dark, caressing over bodies writhing in corner booths. Center stage, bathed in spotlight, was a girl in the most ornate and ridiculous outfit Shepard had ever seen–huge plumes of turquoise feathers spraying from her shoulders and back, glittering ropes of rhinestones dripping artfully off the rest of her body. On the trumpeted downbeat, the rhinestone garlands around her chest dropped away, replaced by a coy arm. She looked young, just a year or two older than Shepard: 19 tops.

A cut-off scream drifted through the music, trailing giggles, and Shepard’s gun was in her hand, her heartbeat slamming into her chest. Licinia’s fingers wrenched her wrist, preventing her draw, and a warning glance scythed down, edged with reproach. 

“I–I’m fine,” Shepard insisted. 

“You’re a jumpy one,” Derius mused, stepping aside to wave them past the cordon sectioning off his private booth from the rest of the club.

“I said I’m fine,” she snarled and narrowed her eyes up at him, challenging. She didn’t budge. Didn’t want to turn her back on him.

He met her hostility with a mandibular smile, eyes brimming with an indulgent approval. It was the kind of look she used to get from her Calc teacher, practically came with a sweater vest. Seeing it on a smuggler in a brothel was deeply jarring.

“Nothing wrong with jumpy. It’ll do you good to keep on your toes while you’re on Omega,” he said. With a dipped bow, he swept past them and took a seat in the booth first. Licinia followed, mandibles tucked tight against her chin with displeasure. 

“I’d appreciate if you didn’t coddle her. Paranoid isn’t prepared and you know that.”

Shepard stayed standing, slotting her back against the wall, eyes cast down to the carpet, face burning with shame.

He chuckled. ”Kid found your soft spot I see.”

Kid ? Shepard’s jaw twitched and she cut an irritated glance his way. He met it with the smooth raise of his brow and she got the weird sense of being in the middle of a game she was already losing. Licinia just made one of her noncommittal hums that meant she found the topic a waste of time. “I need a ship fenced.”

Through a quirk of acoustics, this little corner was quieter than the rest of the club, Shepard could hear talons taping against the glass tabletop and ice clinking in a glass. 

“I thought you preferred dealing with the quarians,” he said.

A sigh. Shepard knew it well. It signified Licinia’s dwindling patience. “20%”

Derius laughed. “Too hot for the quarians, so I’m the only game in town. With all due respect, General, 20 is…well, it’s insulting. Especially from my old CO.”

“23%” Licinia said. 

Before he could answer, a bundle of turquoise feathers and giggles swept into the booth and deposited the center-stage dancer into Deruis’s lap. With her came a fresh onslaught of cigarette smoke and candy apple perfume. 

Shepard flinched as if the smell physically slapped her across the face. Her fingers tightened on her gun. 

“I don’t think you saw me, sweetie,” the girl pouted up at him, seemingly oblivious to Licinia and Shepard. “No, I know you didn’t because otherwise you would’ve come over and said hi.”

Another indulgent smile. “Now, now. I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“But–”

Licinia stood, pistol in hand and aimed at his head, furious contempt pinching all her facial plates together. “30% on the condition that you stop wasting my time and never force me to step foot in this place again.”

Derius didn’t even flinch. “Deal.”

Holstering her gun, Licinia turned to go. Her back to Derius, she missed his sly, satisfied grin. Shepard didn’t. Shepard didn’t miss the pat on the shoulder he gave the girl either or the way she beamed up at him in response, like a kid expecting a gold star on her homework. 

Shepard realized Derius was playing a game. He’d played Licinia’s nonexistent tolerance and the dancer was his trump card. His eyes slid over to Shepard from the booth and then he grinned and tipped his head in a conspiratorial nod as if they were all in on it together. 

Shepard narrowed her eyes back at him but another scream cut through the music. Her head whipped around to look for Licinia, neon and spotlights smearing against the dark. All she saw were disjointed bodies slashed with shadows and garish colors–a flash of naked breasts, thighs, arms and shoulders all jumbled together and disjointed like hypersaturated snapshots of a mass grave. A tipped-back chin bared a neck. Before she could look away, she saw the collar.

Her heartbeat was punching against her ribcage so hard, all six of her barely-healed fractures groaned. She could feel their edges cracking apart again, splintering bone catching on her heaving lungs until every breath was agony, each one like getting stomped on with heavy armor boots all over again. 

The screams came first, then the smoke. The gun was warm in her hand but it was slippery with her sweat and she couldn’t pull it free to aim or shoot.

Someone grabbed her shoulder and she screeched in rage, forgetting her gun entirely and lashing out with clawed fingers. They caught, wrenched, her nail ripping loose and she heard a low, rumbling laugh. A sharp, astringent smell, like alcohol, pierced through the smoke cramming ash and chloroform-sweet perfume into her flaring nostrils.

“You’ve got fight in you, kid,” Derius said, somehow he’d already maneuvered her into the booth despite her wild flailing. He had the low, gravelly voice of a turian serial killer from the slasher vids she used to watch nonstop. If she closed her eyes, she would be back home, on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket and teasing her baby brother for missing all the good parts. He always did, he always shut his eyes tight and hummed loudly until she gave in and turned on his favorite cartoon show instead. For just a moment, she let herself sit there, eyes closed, pretending that couch wasn’t ever ash on her tongue, that those vids were still as close as they’d ever gotten to monsters. While she was at it, she pretended he wasn’t dead, wasn’t probably still half-buried in the rubble that was their living room ceiling. 

She stopped fighting. 

When she opened her eyes, she saw Derius was pouring her a glass of clear liquid from a nearby carafe. He smiled, patronizing, probably because she was furiously swiping at the tears gathering on her eyelashes.  

“Water,” he said with his gravelly turian slasher voice that might’ve been menacing if she’d been anyone else. “Take a breather. Norah here will keep an eye on you while I finish up with the boss.”

And then he was gone and it was just Shepard and the dancer–Norah–who was fiddling with her rhinestone choker. No, Shepard did a double-take. It wasn’t a choker, it was the same batarian bomb collar all the girls here wore. She’d decorated hers in rhinestones.

The glass in Shepard’s hands slipped, clattered to the table, and shattered in spray of cut-crystal shards and water. Rage suffocated her, her breath a dry, sucking gasp. Fucking rhinestones on a batarian bomb collar.

“It’s an improvement, I think,” the girl said, fingers self-consciously trailing over glittering facets. Her voice was lower, lacking the breathy quality from before. “Easier to forget about it.”

“You’re not supposed to fucking forget it,” Shepard spat out. Literally. The words burst out of her mouth so savagely, flecks of spittle went with it, like she was rabid. And maybe she was. The girl who curled up on the couch to watch slasher vid after slasher vid always had anger issues. They always said she was a little feral. 

It was all she could do not to lunge forward the rest of the way and fist her bleeding fingers around that slim neck and rip that collar off. It would almost be worth it, blowing the two of them up. Her rage was screaming, thrashing, detonating bursts of shrapnel around inside her like shredder ammo. 

The girl didn’t look away and maybe that was what saved them both. She had big, cartoon doe eyes but without the perpetual giggling, it was easy to see how hollow they were–like they’d seen too much and remembered too well. “Derius says you’re a fighter...”

Chipped blue-painted fingernails plucked up a crescent of glass. She had delicate hands and small fingernails. The chipped nail polish made them look smaller, look helplessly childish. The glass sank into her thumb but she just watched the blood well up, dispassionately, as if it was happening to someone else very far away.

“...some of us have to fight quietly.”

“Tempest–” someone said.

And then again. Right against her ear.

“She’s got a go-bag full of barterables, clothes, and a one-way transport ticket under an alias. She’s planning on leaving. Maybe tonight.”

“She’s getting scared. Derius must be making his move soon. Once he does, that OSD won’t protect her anymore.”

“If she’s leaving tonight–”

“Cut the chatter, “ Shepard snapped, blinking back the neon-saturated memory of Roxies and watching the Stardust hotel room door swim back into focus. “It doesn’t matter what she’s planning. We’re heading back to the floor. Comms silent until I get into position.”

She jammed her thumb against the earpiece to turn it off and arranged her wig back to conceal it. The device was relatively unobtrusive but once they were on the casino floor, its presence would be an extreme liability given the ubiquity of its usage to scam the card tables. They could only risk her having one, relying on her wig to completely obscure it. Blue Eyes didn't have the luxury of hair and if he got busted by the staff or other patrons, the whole job would be fucked beyond repair so he had to make do with his concealed pistol and omni-tool.

“Shepard–”

She shook her head and refused to look at him as her hand stilled on the door handle. If she looked at him just then, she’d tell him everything, and if she told him everything…

“Look, I didn’t mean to complicate things,” he said.

She couldn’t help it; she laughed. It cracked in her chest like a broken rib, her breath snagging on the edges. Then she pressed her forehead against the door and sighed.

“You didn’t,” she said. “That’s just how things are.”

The carpet rustled underfoot, his shadow striping his insubstantial form over the jamb.

“I thought about you all the time,” she told it, reaching out to trace her satin fingertips over his outline, her chest aching as the truth rushed out of her. Some of it anyway. Something brushed tentatively over her bare shoulder–the backs of his fingertips.

“Me too,” he said and she caught his hand in hers and turned to face him. 

She kissed him, mouth catching against his, swallowing the heady exhale gusting over her lips and the reverberating sound of pleasure he made as she swept her tongue over the points of his teeth before sliding against his own. It was insistent and rough, her own teeth clumsily bumping against his mouthplates, but he seemed to enjoy it. He pulled her close and she pulled him closer, her fingers furrowing into his collar, her moans needy.

For her affection was violent: feral and frenzied. It was an ache that devoured her: hungry and hollow. It was the soreness between her thighs and an empty, building need that wasn’t physical at all but something more, something she couldn’t have and couldn’t keep. Being in his arms felt like she was already losing him, like happiness at the threshold, ready to walk out of her life just as fast as it walked in. 

Just as abruptly, she pulled away, her lips slick and bruised.

He was shadowy and indistinct, face silhouetted against the light spilling in from the window on the far wall, Omega sunset burnishing his outline like flames. When they first met, she compared him to Icarus. Funny how he ended up taking on a name with wings. Funny how sometimes angels fall too and those stories don’t end any nicer.

She knew this one wouldn’t either.

If she’d lived a different life, she would’ve told him she didn’t care if it was complicated. In another life she might’ve told him he was just as arrogant and infuriatingly, stubbornly wrong about everything as ever but damn if that earnest sincerity of his didn’t make her want to kiss him senseless just for the beautiful, breathtaking audacity of not letting this place turn him into a jaded husk of a person. Another Shepard would’ve let herself be happy, even if it was brief and complicated, even if it was doomed to end badly, just to spite the dark spaces in the universe waiting to snuff out everything beautiful and good and meaningful. 

Happy . That word, like an unwelcome ex turning back up with an armful of promises, wanting to put the past behind them. This time for good. This time, they mean it. Please, just one more chance, one more shot. This time will be different. Please.

In another life, she might’ve believed it. 

Before either of them could say anything else, she opened the door. Omni-tool out, she hacked the hallway cameras in seconds before stepping into the hall. 

“Tempest will be finishing up her performance,” she said, cutting a direct path to the elevators, her heart still pounding from the kiss and her breath still coming fast. She ignored both. She needed to focus, she needed to get this over with. Her fist banged the button to go down. “Just follow my lead when I make the approach.”

In the corner of her eye, she saw him nod, his mandibles tight against his jaw in a show of nerves or something else. She tried to ignore him and her own stab of remorse and focused on hacking the elevator cameras as soon as the doors opened. Stepping inside, she hit the button for the casino floor and caught her warped reflection in the elevator car’s brasswork. Her lipstick was smudged even worse at the corner. She left it.

“Look…Shepard–” he said.

“It’s Alison,” she corrected. “Mr. Borlin.”

In the brass, she saw him staring at her, his mandibles wavering with uncertainty, on the verge of saying something. Hope and dread warred in her chest. Instead, he collected himself, military rigidity straightening his spine,  bringing his chin up and eyes away from her and towards the doors as he nervously shifted his holstered sidearm beneath the drape of his jacket.

“Of course. My mistake, Ms. Gunn.”

A ding and the elevator opened up to the casino floor, immediately assaulting them with a riot of color and sound. A synthesized horn section crescendoed and from the stage came a murmur of delighted ‘ohhs’--half of them probably even genuine.

Shepard marched towards the stage and the crowd. The chandeliers had been dimmed but colored spotlights traced dizzy circles around what appeared to be a giant martini glass. In it sat a woman, topless except for a silver feather boa, playing with a beach ball-sized olive prop. 

Hatred and shame fisted tight around her stomach. Tempest. Norah Wójcik. 

Cheers and whistles percolated up from the crowd and smiling, Tempest posed the olive over her torso as she artfully shimmied the boa off her shoulders. More whistles and she kicked her feet in the air, toying with the olive as if it was impossibly fascinating and required the whole of her attention.

Something about a woman frolicking with a giant olive in a giant martini glass–it was too ridiculous, too absurd, for a proper seethe. Shepard found it fucking infuriating and seethed anyway.

Blue Eyes leaned in close. “This is…certainly a spectacle,” he said, almost against her ear. 

It was all she could do to nod, her fury prickling goosebumps over her skin like a full-body itch. Fuck Tempest. Fuck her. What kind of person held a lifelong grudge against someone who made a living half-naked in giant cocktails? 

“So…” he drawled out, letting the question linger, “...is that a Midori Sour?”

A surprised beat and then a braying laugh burst out of her. It was loud enough to draw a few eyes from the people close to them but Shepard didn’t care. She was still laughing, raucous bursts, and her hands reached out to brace herself against his angular chest as paroxysms of mirth shook through her. It wasn’t so much the sardonic drawl but the glimpse of genuine curiosity that got her. 

He just stared down at her and, noticing the scowls they were attracting, maneuvered her away from the stage with the gentle press of his palm against her back.

“I need another drink,” she told him, her compulsive laughter finally fading enough to speak, and he nodded, escorting her towards the back to the now nearly deserted bar.

Shepard ordered a Vesper and it occurred to her that his nerves were getting to him when he ordered a double.

“You okay?” she asked on the tail end of a bitten-back giggle and got a skeptical glance for her trouble.

“Are you? I’d be flattered over the laugh that got, but my ego has limits,” he said, pointedly.

Their drinks came and the bartender withdrew to the far side of the bar to finish chatting up a drunk and miserable-looking asari.

“It’s nothing, it’s ancient history.”

“Clearly,” he mused, sipping his brandy.

She ran her thumb around the rim of her glass but didn’t take a drink. “I’ve just been–hate is a funny thing.” 

He didn’t say anything and for some reason, her mouth decided that was good enough reason to keep rambling. “It’s not nearly as common as people think it is. When you really hate someone, it’s intimate and stupid. Like falling in love.”

“You don’t hate all the people you kill?” he asked.

“Not really. They’re all fucking evil so I used to think so. But I realized–” She smiled wryly. “--it’s not actually that personal for me. Most of the time it’s professional. More anger than hate. Rage, maybe. Hate is vulnerable. It’s being wounded and weak.” Her finger paused on the rim of her glass and she looked at him and asked him his own question. “Do you?”

He set the brandy down. “Yes,” he said without wavering, then seemed to consider. “ Maybe not. Maybe it's Omega that I hate and everyone I've killed here is just... an extension of that. I agree with you. I’ve killed a lot of people but I don’t know if I could say I really… hated more than two or three of them before I got here. Maybe not even then, maybe they were extensions too. Proof that the system is broken.”

“It says a lot about you. Who you hate,” she said. “People fall in love all the time and it doesn’t mean shit. Hate isn’t like that.”

“Spoken like a true romantic,” he drawled and she finally took a drink of her Vesper, letting the botanical sweetness of the gin and the vermouth wash over her tongue.

“I’ve hated way more people than I’ve ever loved, the fuck do I know about romance?”

“Can’t say my ratio is any better,” he offered, without any judgment. 

Another sip and she felt his eyes on her, filing away all her little details as if he planned to jot them down later in a case report. 

“So,” he said. “What does hating Tempest say about you?”

Insightful bastard. She shrugged. “It says I’m nothing like you.”

The Vesper was cool in her mouth, sweet and bitter.  “I wish I could say she deserved it the way I’m sure all the people you hated or maybe hated deserved it. But she didn’t do anything wrong. She was just a girl fighting to survive the life I almost had and when I met her, that was the worst thing someone could be. Now, she’s a reminder of who I really am and I fucking hate her for that too. More, if that’s possible.”

It wouldn’t have taken long to hack the collar. She could’ve done it in less than a minute, even then. But she didn’t, despite those tiny, chipped nail-polish fingernails that screamed helpless adolescence. Because she wasn’t that person in the vids with the cheesy lines. She wasn’t a hero and she wasn’t a good person. She was just a bitch with a grudge against the universe, a criminal with a lifetime debt to repay, and all the survivor’s guilt and self-loathing it took to see her sentence through. 

He made a thoughtful sound and tipped back another gulp of brandy. “Well…” he said, leaning closer. “I do have a confession.”

It had the lingering cadence of a joke and she waited for the punchline. 

“There was this guy I used to work with, right before I left C-Sec. He was always spouting these inane platitudes. You know, the kind of person who puts up motivational sayings all over his desk, has a cliche for everything life throws at you? Apparently, he beat cancer and it changed his perspective on life. I…couldn’t stand him. Made it my mission to get him to see how bad things really were but it never worked. It got under my scutes like nothing else. He actually turned to me once, mid-homicide investigation, and told me ‘Everything happens for a reason.’”

She smirked and tapped the edge of her glass against his. “Sure sounds deserved to me. You kill him?”

“No, uh—”  He grimaced, looking genuinely chagrined over bringing it up in the first place. “Cancer came back.”

“Bastard,” she muttered darkly and he laughed. It was a gallows laugh for a crass joke between close friends with a lot of history: intimate and vulnerable as a confession with all the bad all out in the open and just between them. Shepard smiled, warmth suffusing through her chest, and wished they were back up in the room, wished she could throw him down onto the bed and make him laugh like that again and then kiss every bit of it off his mouth. 

Smiling back softly, he reached out and brushed his thumb over the tops of her fingers resting on the bar. 

“Look,” he said, eyes too bright and too much. She felt them tingling and warm against her skin. “Whatever she reminds you of, whatever person you think that is. It doesn’t matter. There’s a lot worse out there. Worse in this damn room. Taking them out does a whole lot more good than bad.”

Her heartbeat shuddered and she wondered darkly if he’d still think so once the night was over. Something told her no and it told her she wouldn’t ever get a look like the one he was giving her again. She knew the look he’d give her. But he was right about one thing: getting Harga was what mattered. Her guilt, hatred, shame, him and Tempest? None of that was worth a damn to the colonists going missing all across the Terminus.

His eyes darted to the space behind her and tension sprang back into his frame.

“The show must be over,” he said and a glance back told her he was right. The chandeliers were brighter and the crowd was dispersing.

He looked as happy over it as she felt about it, browplates furrowing up into a thunderous expression. 

“You’ll be great,” she assured him and before she knew it, her thumb was smoothing over his, mirroring his touch, drawing this out as long as she could. “We already did all the heavy lifting and she’ll be the one doing all the work once I tie off the loose end that is your date, Alison Gunn. So just…trust your instincts.”

The glance he shot her in response was equal parts skeptical and amused. “My instincts haven’t seen much use since I was in the military.”

She noticed then, hiding in the shadow of his collar: a lipstick smudge. But when she reached out to get it, her hand faltered. Better to leave it. A little lipstick breadcrumb trail for Tempest. She pretended it didn’t feel like her sternum was cleaved down the middle, her own chest caving in on itself at the idea. While she was at it, she pretended she didn’t know exactly what that feeling meant. 

Why did it matter? After tonight whatever was between them would go up in flames and she couldn’t exactly feel remorse over it when she was the one lighting the match. 

Letting her hand drop away and stepping back, she forced a hard smile. “Mr. Borlin, by all accounts, you’re quite prolific. So just wait here and enjoy your brandy,” she told him, turning on her earpiece as she ran her fingers through the waves of her wig. Her hand was almost steady.

“I’m going to go introduce myself.”

Chapter Text

Alison Gunn was a face Shepard didn’t mind wearing: a cutthroat weapons dealer based out of Ilium with high society aspirations and the low-grade sociopathy to see them through. Alison saw people as trade opportunities and weighed their value to her with an expert and objective eye. Slipping into her was a bit like slipping into a pair of silk designer underwear: a silent shift from the woman who sometimes forgot she had blood crusted under her broken fingernails and woke up most nights twisted up in memories of the dead to the kind of woman who drank dark, expensive wine in wide, bowl-shaped glasses and slept like a baby on satin sheets hours after shooting a man down in cold blood.

Alison was the kind of person who thrived in the Terminus, even if she was made up–manifested from the ether of an expert thief’s imagination and given falsified dental records, e-zine subscriptions, a driver’s license, and half a dozen extranet dating profiles. She wasn’t a hero, wasn’t a villain–not by Terminus standards anyway–was just a shit person with a cruel streak, a knack for manipulation, and the ambition and amorality to put both to good use. Putting on her face was a welcome relief. Hands finally steady, Shepard made her way to the stage where a crowd was gathering and found her target.

Tempest was in a sparkling, pewter-colored dress identical in cut and style to her own, only Tempest’s wasn’t a knock-off. The dress said money and connections without taste, Omega chic, and did little to distinguish her from her patrons. Somehow she stuck out anyway with the practiced ease of someone who always had eyes on her, giant martini glass or no.

She had the same wide, animated eyes from Shepard’s memory. They made her look impossibly vulnerable, especially when she blinked them down to the carpet as if too shy, then peeked out beneath the fringe of her eyelashes with a ‘who, me?’ innocence that could pass for genuine if she were any other place besides Omega. 

Here, no one was that vulnerable. Everyone wore weapons and armor. Tempest’s were unconventional but just as effective: sexuality tempered by doe-eyed innocence, charm melded with waifish helplessness that begged to be protected and underestimated in equal turn. If some people had to fight quietly, Tempest was silently lethal.

She was mingling, playing host and starlet at the same time, and doing it well, navigating between clusters of sycophants, rivals, enemies, and clout-chasers without lingering too long on anyone. As she worked the crowd, Shepard prowled, drink in hand, watching and waiting. 

Not for long.

“Incoming,” Nyreen warned but whispers were already announcing the arrival, a red carpet of hushed voices rolling out from the entrance. The name unfurled on a hundred different tongues in a hundred different dialects–too many for Shepard’s translator to parse simultaneously–a susurration of disbelief and excitement ripping over the crowd. 

Aria T’Loak.

Heads whipped around, necks craning to see Omega’s self-proclaimed queen make her royal entrance far past fashionably late and well into insultingly late. Shepard watched Tempest the whole time and saw her back go rigid and shoulders tense. She was close enough to see the fear flickering through her jaw even as Tempest pretended not to notice the man she was talking to was openly gawping over her shoulder.

She pretended right up until Aria was just a few steps behind her, glowering imperiously.

“I see I’ve missed your little show. I’d apologize but somehow my invitation was never delivered.”

Tempest’s expression faltered but rallied within milliseconds as she turned and feigned surprise. 

“Aria! You’re…you’re always welcome at the Stardust,” Her glance drifted down, then peered up at Aria through trembling lashes. “I just assumed my little casino didn’t particularly run to your tastes.”

A sweeping glance around and the smirk tugging on Aria’s mouth seemed to agree. “I was told tonight would be an event I wouldn’t want to miss.”

Tempest’s gaze sharpened and flicked over the crowd as if searching for someone. Shepard shifted back, half-positioning herself between the wall and an ostentatiously dressed elcor. No one noticed the muted orange glow of her omni-tool interface as she pulled it up to record.

“Oh? By who?”

Aria shrugged, nonchalant. “Why? Was it a lie?”

A horrified blink in response, then Tempest laughed–head thrown back and hand splayed across her decolletage artfully. It was a bid for time. After a moment, she finally said, “Should I be humble or arrogant, do you think?”

“Be truthful, I’d suggest.” An undercurrent of a threat rippled through the words.

“I’m parched,” Tempest deflected, gesturing towards a nearby plush settee inset into an alcove and framed by curtains for privacy. “Will you join me?”

Aria raised a brow, not pleased but not displeased either, and nodded. 

The crowd that had followed in Aria’s wake gradually dispersed, content to shoot curious glances towards the curtained alcove as they milled and mingled. Omni-tool already de-activated, Shepard meandered towards the nearby bathroom, downing what remained of her Vesper in two gulps, and deactivating the ‘Closed for Cleaning’ sign she had Sammy put up during the show.

“She knows something,” Red said into the earpiece. “She has to. Why else would she come?”

Shepard checked, just in case, that no one else was in any of the stalls. All clear. 

“Doesn’t matter. She’s just as predictable as ever. It won’t be hard to avoid her.”

Arriving after the show? A petty power play. Aria could never resist reminding everyone who she was.

Shepard went into the far stall, closed the door, and pulled up the recording on her omni-tool. She cut it down to 15 seconds of footage starting with Aria’s threat and ending with Tempest’s invitation for a drink, with the drink part edited out.

“Even if she doesn’t see you. If Derius catches wind that Aria actually showed up, he could ruin everything.”

Derius was notoriously paranoid. A fact Shepard intended to exploit.

“He won’t know, not right away,” she assured, letting herself slip further into Alison Gunn’s talent for pathological lying. “Every Talon and employee here is on Tempest’s payroll, they won’t be rushing to inform on her. And none of the guests have any tech on them that can connect to the extranet.” 

Except, of course, for her. The photographs she uploaded on a mid-range transmission to a mid-level databroker’s server connected directly to the extranet. The vid clip Shepard sent directly via her own with the title ‘Concerned?’. 

“They’re done talking,” Sammy interjected with the casino floor update.

Shepard removed one of the two micro-syringes from the band of her bra and rolled the tube methodically between her fingers, hesitating. 

But it was already too late to turn back, she’d already sent the video. Too late to call the whole thing off and even if she could, that cost would be far worse. Harga and the Market had to be stopped. And the only place she could do that was here, on Omega—a place where a conscience was a luxury few could afford.  Maybe in Council space she could've paid it, maybe in another life but not here.

Besides, what good were her damn convictions when the Market was selling off whole colonies to the Collectors? 

Her stomach churned, the Vesper burning bitter vitriol on the back of her tongue. It tasted like hatred and grudges. But at who, she didn’t know. The Shepard, the woman she wanted to be but couldn’t? Or Tempest, the living proof of her failures? Nyreen, and her unflagging faith and trust? Blue Eyes and his impossible ideals? All of them. Everyone. Everything.  

Shepard growled and nestled the needle into the crook of her arm beneath the edge of her glove. She pushed the top and a dot of blood welled up as the needle bit into her skin. She tore off a piece of toilet paper and blotted it, then flushed the first syringe before replacing the other. 

“Tempest is heading straight for you,” Sammy said. ”How did you know she’d–”

That was a lesson from Licinia: corner your opponent for the first attack but leave an exit route open so they can retreat into your true ambush location. She knew Tempest would get held up by the stage entrance after the performance and assumed Aria would arrive right after the performance ended to land the snub while everyone was still paying attention. And where would be the best place to go, in a state of extreme agitation? The closest bathroom.

“Just intuition,” she lied.

The door opened, then slammed shut, an old-fashioned lock clicking into place. Heels clacked rapidly against the tile, a voice whispering a desperate ‘fuck, fuck, fuck’ over and over again. It sounded like a woman on the verge of crying. Tempest.

Shepard shoved down her glove and stumbled out of the stall. 

“Do these look like hives do you?” she demanded and thrust her arm out towards Tempest, who recoiled back with a gasp, alarmed. 

Without waiting for an answer, Shepard flipped her wrist over. Once. Twice. Fat pink welts dotted over her skin, the allergen she’d injected already taking effect.

“They are, aren’t they? Fuck, I took an immunomodulator.”

She began inspecting her neck and shoulders in the mirror. “I should’ve stayed on Ilium. Have you ever been to Ilium?” she asked Tempest but didn’t wait for an answer. “You have to go. Omega is such a shithole. It’s a joke what passes for luxury here. I mean, I told Jaxum this whole thing wouldn’t be worth it but he insisted, I have no idea why.”

“Jaxum?” Tempest asked, interest peaking in a way that told Shepard the alias was worth every credit she spent paying off Borlin last-minute to lay low for a weekend and pretend he was on Omega. “Jaxum Borlin?”

Shepard didn’t have to feign her annoyed side-eye. “Yeah. I guess he’s pretty well known in the Terminus. Even here. Oh!” she blinked. “Is that why you look familiar? Have you been to one of his parties?”

Nyreen’s amused huff feathered against her eardrum. The annoyed tic fluttering at Tempest’s temple was a thing of beauty. “No, I don’t think that’s it,” she said, too sweetly.

Shepard sighed out a relieved smile. “Oh, good. I mean—it just gets frustrating running into his ex-flings, they’re always so clingy. I get it, he definitely knows his way around a–” She leaned forward to touch up the smudged line of her lipstick before smugly adding, “Well, you know. It’s so hard to find a turian who knows what they’re doing with humans. They think we’re just like asari but last I checked, I am not blue.”

Tempest made a noncommittal sound, eyes glancing towards the door. The imminent tears were still gathering on her lashline.

“On top of him being a billionaire and knowing everyone worth knowing on Ilium. And you should see his place, his levo wine cellar is the size of my apartment. But he’s not stuffy or anything, it’s nice being with someone who’s willing to get into a fight for you. Especially on Omega. I don’t know if you saw all that earlier with that guy who just groped me out of nowhere–”

She was being insufferable and viciously enjoying herself. Part of her insisted the more animosity she fostered, the better, but another part knew she was just being vindictive.

Shepard tugged at the strap of her gown and gaped at the hives speckling over her collarbone. “This is so embarrassing. I don’t want him to see me like this. I’ll just have to hide here until they go away. God, this stupid place, I knew I didn’t want to come.”

“I’m sorry. That’s too bad,” Tempest said and it was to her credit as a performer that it almost sounded believable.

Nodding, Shepard glanced towards Tempest in the mirror. “By the way, I love your dress. Must be hard to find a good knock-off in this place.”

Tempest just nodded, already backing away and halfway to the door. “I’m sorry, I have to go. Enjoy your night.”

And then she was gone. 

“You’re a  monster,” Nyreen said into the comms. “Beautifully done, Ms. Gunn.”

Shepard just watched Alison’s blank expression in the mirror. All she could think of were tiny nails and chipped blue polish. 

“Aria’s–” Sammy started but the door was already swinging open.

Shepard slammed her thumb against her ear to deactivate the earpiece seconds before Aria T’Loak sauntered in.

“Shepard,” she purred. “You never disappoint.”

Shepard laughed without mirth, removing the antihistamine syringe from her bra and injecting it. “Don’t tell me she actually told you the truth.”

“Depends on if I’m assuming what you told me was the truth, to begin with.” Aria smiled serenely, eyes glittering with amusement. “And I’m not.”

“Did she give you the OSD?”

“She isn’t stupid,” Aria chided. “Just pretends she is. Guess you’ll have to get your hands dirty.”

Shepard shot her a vicious look through the mirror and Aria visibly enjoyed every bit of it.

“Makes one of us?” Shepard snapped. “Someone has to do all the work before you move a finger to take Derius out. But that’s your M.O. isn’t it? Nothing on Omega gets fixed unless you can manipulate someone into fixing it for you. That’s why half this station doesn’t have functional air vents for the dust, why the Market can set up shop and–”

The air around Aria’s fist warped but it wasn’t a real threat, just a reminder of exactly who she was talking to.

“You came to me, Shepard. Remember?” She raised an imperious brow. “Nothing’s changed. You and Nyreen never understood what it takes to keep a place like this in line. I can’t replace the air filters because the gangs steal them to sell back on the black market. I can’t move against Derius unless it’s obvious he’s a threat to me or the other gangs will get nervous and stupid. So spare me your ignorance and indignation and do whatever it takes to leak what you say is on that OSD. I’ll handle the rest.”

“And if Derius makes his move before then?” Shepard asked, carefully neutral. “Tonight? Against Tempest.”

Aria’s eyes narrowed on her. Then she smiled, slow like she was savoring something truly delicious. “Well, well.”

She stepped forward, closing the gap between them, and ran a finger over Shepard’s bared forearm. “Poor little Norah. You lured me here to implicate her. She’s your bait.”

Shepard brushed the finger away. “I need to get to Harga. Derius is the only way to do that.”

In an ideal world, they would’ve found the OSD in Tempest’s suite and none of it would’ve had to come to this. It would’ve gone according to plan. What she told Nyreen wouldn’t have been a lie.

But now there were too many variables, too many risks Shepard couldn’t take. Tempest played at helpless but that OSD was her life, she wouldn’t just hand it over, would probably destroy it at the first sign of trouble, assuming she was smart enough to keep an off-site backup or at least smart enough to pretend she did to Derius.

So Shepard had to go with the sure thing. And the sure thing was bargaining with Derius directly, using Norah as collateral. 

The savoring smile stayed put but Aria backed away. “You’re trying to force my hand but just this once, I’ll let it pass just because I admire the ruthless audacity.”

It wasn’t a definitive answer. Tempest was Derius’s bait but he was Aria’s. She needed the justification to take him out and Shepard hoped the leak would prove not just to Derius, but to all of Omega that Aria and Tempest were on friendly terms, which meant a move against Tempest would be a move against Aria. It was a flimsy pretext but just enough to cause problems for Aria if she sat around and did nothing.

She turned towards the door but delivered one last sting over her shoulder as she paused. “What would Nyreen think of your little scheme, I wonder?”

Shepard shrugged, betraying nothing. “How should I know?” 

“If you think you can play the hero and save little Norah after you hand her over to him, you’re a fool. He’ll kill her before you get the chance.”

It went without saying but Aria had to say it anyway, to twist the knife. Shepard clenched her fists against the marble lip of the countertop but her face was carefully blank. “Oh?”

“Neither you or Licinia saw just how much of a sadistic bastard he was. The dancers were all afraid of him and here, that means something.”

Her jaw tightened. “Then death would be a mercy.”

“A little cold Shepard. Especially considering all that trouble you and Nyreen went through getting her kid off station.” Aria sneered. A sore topic and ancient history but asari and krogans held onto grudges for centuries. 

“If you still want to kill me over that mess, take a number and wait in line.”

Something complicated worked its way through Aria’s perfect features but she tossed her head and it was gone. The air hummed around her, a distorted warble from the shifting density. Shepard could feel it prickling in the back of her teeth.  “Oh, there’s no if, Shepard. It’s when. And when is the very second you stop being useful to me.”

Then she turned and left.

Truth be told, Butler was having the time of his life. His grin kept tugging free, earning him suspicious glances from the disgruntled staff. Luckily, no one noticed him pocketing handfuls of hors d'oeuvres–he’d planned ahead, stuffed plastic sandwich bags into his uniform pockets beforehand. Or maybe they noticed and just didn’t care. He spotted another levo tray of spinach puffs and swiped half a dozen, already imagining the look on Nalah’s face when he came back with his bounty that hadn’t ever seen the inside of a nutrient paste vat. Spinach– real spinach, they hadn’t had a decent green thing to eat since they left Anhur. 

Nalah’s smile had a single, perfect dimple he could never resist poking. Lately, he hadn’t seen much of it but that was about to change. His grin slipped free again. 

The 600 credits he’d made in tips over the night wasn’t hurting his mood any either.

Kitchen doors swung open and a waiter stalked in, shoving a half-empty tray onto the counter before producing a cigarette from behind his ears, letting it dangle from his mouth as he searched for his lighter. “Fucking hate these things,” the guy muttered to no one and everyone.

Butler just nodded sympathetically, handed him a lighter with one hand, grabbed the half-empty tray with the other, and headed back out to the floor.

“Sammy. Eyes on Alison or Aria?” Red asked in the comms.

“No,” he said. “But I see Tempest.”

She was back to mingling by the stage but something about her posture read as distracted. Her glance kept panning back towards the bar. Butler followed the direction of her stare.

“And Borlin.”

A tense, displeased silence followed

Butler circulated, eyes on the bathroom. If something had gone down–there’d be some kind of noise right? Shepard definitely didn’t seem like the type to go out quietly.

“Should I go in?” he asked.

“No. Keep your eyes on Tempest.”

“Can do,” he said, then checked his panic when he looked back towards the stage and saw she was gone.

Oh no.

Luckily, he found her again, slowly weaving through the rows of slot machines on her way towards the bar at the back. Suddenly, she stopped by a machine, pushed a credit chit into the reader, pulled the lever, and watched the colorful reels spin. He saw the machine light up. Three-of-a-kind: triple cherries. It spat out a handful of coins. She grabbed a plastic cup and carefully scooped them in before retrieving her credit chit and continuing on towards the bar.

Compulsive gambler or some ritual for luck? He wondered.

Butler followed but paused when he saw her hand the cup off to a random passerby. 

Odd. He continued, passing by the machine she’d played on and noticed, in the coin tray, an antique brass compact stamped with floral designs.

He heard Aria’s name and looked up to see the crowd reforming around the entrance. A glance over towards the bathroom and he saw Shepard. She was scanning the crowd and trying not to be obvious about it. Whatever she was looking for, she found, and even from far away, he could see her pale, furrowed expression. 

Sure enough, following her line of sight, he saw Garrus at the bar and Tempest right next to him.

“Everything’s fine, Red,” Shepard said in the comms. Butler was sure he wasn’t imagining the strain in her voice. “Just had to hide in a stall until she left.”

“Borlin?” Sidonis asked.

“He’s doing great,” Shepard said. She was watching them, Butler saw, and he saw the look on her face as Tempest leaned closer. When she spoke again, her voice was bitter. “Looks like Tempest is taking the bait.”

“Good. Alison will stay on them. Sammy, get to the rendezvous point.”

He nodded, wondering silently yet again what exactly was going on between Garrus and the most infamous woman in the Terminus. “On it.”

Before walking away, he pocketed the compact on a whim. Another souvenir for Nalah.

Garrus was halfway through his double and wondering what the hell was taking Shepard so long and if she needed backup when a woman in a dark silver dress slipped into the space between his barstool and the one next to him.

“Oh, excuse me,” she said and then, bafflingly, reached up to pinch his collar between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing once and letting go before he could respond.

“You know, club soda might take that out,” she said as he turned to face her and realized who she was and then, after glancing down at the smudge, what she was talking about.

Tempest waved down the bartender, ordered a club soda, and asked for a bar towel without taking her eyes off Garrus, looking up at him through the heavy fringe of her eyelashes.

The soda and towel appeared almost immediately by her elbow and she smiled, coyly, dipping the towel in and holding it up before asking. “May I?’

Still baffled and now dying to know what Shepard had done to make this happen, he simply asked, “May you what?”  

Instead of clarifying, she got closer, too close for comfort, one hand pressing up against his shoulder as if for leverage as she began dabbing the smear of Shepard’s lip pigment. Tension clamped down around his throat and all he could think about was Shepard fisting her hands into his suit jacket as she sucked a line down his jaw. 

His hand reached up to grab Tempest’s wrist as if to stop her. For some reason, he felt intensely protective over that little smudge and watching someone scrub it away as if to say it never existed shot a panicky pang through his chest. He wanted to pull her hand away and tell her to leave it be.

The mission. He just needed to focus on the mission and get her to ask him up to her room and this whole charade would be over. The sooner the better. 

Smothering a pained wince, he let his hand drop away and she took it as permission to continue.

“Doesn’t seem to want to come out,” she said and he saw she was right, the club soda had just turned the smear into a large, pink blotch. Unfortunately, right as he looked down, she looked up, smiling. When had she gotten so close? His hand clutched against the bartop, anchoring him in place before he could lean back away from her. 

Despite the smile, her large eyes were vulnerable-looking, a little hollow around the edges. Haunted. Monty had eyes like that after Jens’ men got to her, and sympathy cut through his intense unease. 

“It’s alright,” he assured her. “I like it better this way.”

Wasn’t even a lie. He was stupidly, perversely happy over Shepard ruining his shirt.

“Oh no,” she demurred. “If you come to my room, I’m sure I could fix it for you.”

Garrus paused. There was no mistaking her tone or how she was looking at him.

“Uh–” he balked. “I’m–”

It was going so well, all he had to say was yes. So why couldn’t he? 

A soft giggle puffed against his neck and Tempest eased away enough that he could finally draw a breath. Her hand was still on his chest and she tapped her painted fingernails over his sternum. “You’re on Omega. Nothing you do here counts, everyone knows that.”

“First time on the station,” he said. It was technically true. “Still learning the ropes.”

Tempest waved down the bartender again and ordered a drink without taking her eyes or hand off him. 

“Since you’re new, want some advice?”

Not particularly, but he got the sense she wanted to give it and didn’t think it would hurt to hear her out.

“Well, I haven’t ever been good at taking it, but sure.”

She smiled, sympathy filtering through her expression. “If your date abandons you, don’t spend the rest of your night at the bar waiting for her to come back.”

“Ah,” he said stiffly, his shoulders tensing. 

Her smile turned tremulous in a heartbeat, those eyes pained and bigger than ever. “You’re sweet. I can tell you’re the kind of person who helps people.”

“Uh–”

Cutting off whatever else he had to say, she closed the distance between them, the hand on his chest suddenly wrapping around his cowl. Her whisper pressed insistently against his ear.

“I need your help, Mr. Borlin. It’s urgent.”

When she pulled back, he just saw those hollow, hunted eyes blinking up at him, brimming with barely checked fear. All the seductive innuendo from before was gone–just an act. Relief flooded through him.

“Please,” she begged. “Please, come with me. It won’t take long.”

C-Sec taught him to listen to his gut and it was telling him that every bit of this was genuine. The fact that she knew his ‘name’ wasn’t surprising. Jaxum Borlin was an eccentric but innocuous tech CEO with minimal criminal connections based out of Ilium and Tempest was looking to escape the station, maybe tonight. He wondered if her escape plan hit a snag. Borlin was connected and arrived on Tevi Lasiir’s private ship. Maybe she needed him to get her off station.

“Alright,” he said. After all, it didn’t matter how he got up to the suite with her, just that he did.

She nodded, chin still wavering, and looped her arm around his. “Elevators.”

Garrus complied, leading them through the crowd. “You’re in trouble?” he asked.

A faint laugh and her fingers dug into his suit. “Always. You know Derius?”

“Barely,” he admitted.

“He leads the Talons. I met him back when he was just a smuggler. Best on Omega. I was 16, sold to a brothel–Roxies. He…took care of me. It wasn’t…wasn’t sexual or anything, not then. I thought I was so lucky, to have him look out for me without asking for anything in return. But, I didn’t know that he just doesn’t like having to ask, he wants to make you be the one to offer. I was head over heels for him, I would’ve done anything for him, I was the one who propositioned him, in the end.”

Garrus’s mandibles tightened against his jaw as he guided her towards the elevators. “You were being manipulated. You were a child.”

She nodded. “I didn’t understand. It was all about control for him. I thought I could have a new life, without the collar, but he was just as bad. I was his and I couldn’t escape him. I didn’t have anything without him and he was building me my own place. This place. Then I found out I was pregnant.”

They arrived at the elevators. Garrus pushed the button and they waited.

“He didn’t like that, I take it?” he said, grim anger radiating in his bones.

“I kept it from him for as long as I could but he found out when she was born. I found someone to smuggle her off station. He was…so furious. I learned for myself how cruel he truly was.”

She shuddered just as the elevator doors opened and he ushered her inside the car. Despite the privacy, she didn’t move away from him. If anything, she just pressed tighter against his side even as she waved her keycard in front of the reader.

“The only place he couldn’t get to her was in Council space. She was sick, something in the water here causes birth defects and it was so expensive there. So I had to stay, I had to make a living to pay for her bills.”

The doors opened up directly to her suite.

“But you want to leave now?” he asked and she laughed, high and nervous. She fisted her hand up against her draping neckline, pulling at it as if it were choking her.

“Yes! Tonight. I need to leave tonight. But–”

He saw it too late, the pain registered as soon as the weapon tucked into her bodice did. Not the hard punch of a round, just a pinprick. His fingers impulsively pried the projectile from his neck and sharp edges sliced through his gloves. Fingers stiff, the paralytic dart dropped from his grip and rolled across the marble flooring. Muscles seizing, he toppled forward, just managing to land on his side. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw the dart, identical to the one Shepard showed them: the collector tech Derius was giving out to his organ snatchers.

Tempest kneeled beside him.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying, hiccuping the words through tears, voice frantic to the point of unhinged. “I–I had to. You don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

And then she said, “Whatever you do, don’t move.”

If he could, he’d have laughed. As if he had any choice in the matter.

The paralytic had no anesthetic component. He felt it like a sudden, vicious kick–the cold blade sinking between the unarmored gaps in his dermal plating. Her fingers trembled on the ornate hilt of the weapon and the knife tip juddered, catching on slippery flesh. It was too dull for this kind of thing, little more than a costume weapon, which meant she had to use all her strength to puncture through his skin and underlying muscle down to the viscera. It was like getting cut open with those dull little knives humans used to eat with sometimes. It was agony.

If he could, he’d have screamed. 

Chapter Text

Something was wrong, Nyreen knew it in her bones.

The knowing started as a niggling sensation, an itch gathering beneath her carapace, tingling at the base of her skull as her biotics prickled to life in response to a threat she could feel but not see. As biotic flickers distorted the high-pitched whistle of the recycled station air whipping over the casino roof, the premonition worked deeper—splinters of unease stippling down and down until they pricked marrow. 

Her grumpy companion felt it too, she could tell. He’d been pacing the whole time, of course, but his pacing had developed a whole suite of nervous tics and twitches as he huffed out a steady stream of audible and inaudible worry.

“I don’t like this–” she heard him say over the shrill, ascending pitch of the wind. He was shaking his head, omni-tool display reappearing as he compulsively checked it again.  “I don’t like this at all.”

Nyreen agreed. She crossed the gap between them and gestured towards his omni-tool with the jut of her chin. “Any movement?”

He jerked back, mandibles flat against his jaw in alarm. The light guttered out, far too late and laughably unsubtle.

“Come on,” she chided. “You really think we didn’t know you planted another tracker on her back on the ship? There’s one on him too right? EMF-shielded so it wouldn’t show on the tech scans at the door.”

A sullen mutter under his capitulating sigh and the orange light flashed back to life. And there they were, small and innocuous: two dots with accompanying proximity ranges that were both exactly what they should be, by Nyreen’s rough estimate. No cause for alarm. As expected. If either of those dots had been up to something unusual, he would’ve done more than pace and mutter. She thought it would be reassuring to see for herself instead of just reading him. It wasn’t. 

The keening wind shifted, wailing ominous like some Shakespearean portent. Nyreen scanned the sky for trouble. It never took long for things to go bad. Life in the Terminus was precarious, always teetering on the razor-thin point of a fulcrum. In a single second, the whole thing could tilt into disaster.

“I’m on my way up,” Shepard said into the comms. 

 Sometimes, a second was all the warning you got.

Hearing Shepard’s voice, that second distended, bloated with the gut-turning swoop of a-grav failure. Something was wrong. Specifically, something was wrong with Shepard . Nyreen stepped away and withdrew to the very edge of the roof where the gusts were so strong, she had to plant her feet to avoid getting knocked over. Twitchy avoided the edge, she noticed. He wouldn’t follow her. 

She pulled up a private comm channel. Probably, she was just imagining things, just paranoid after years of working in the shadows of the Talons to take Derius down. This place was just getting to her. Probably. Nyreen opened the channel. 

“Why’d you turn off your earpiece in the bathroom?” she asked. Even in her own ears, through the screaming wind, she heard the fraught, unsteady edge in her flanging vocals. 

A pause. Her stomach dropped, swallow stones jostling.

“It’s Aria, I didn’t want to take any risks.”

She knew her ex well enough to know that pause was Shepard deciding to lie to her. Nyreen staggered back from the ledge, sunset bleeding through the distant skyline to spill messily over the roof. She was weightless, untethered, the whole station tipping beneath her feet.

“Shepard…” she fumbled, could barely get the words out. “What aren’t—what aren’t you telling me?”

Silence.

In the hemorrhaging skyline, Nyreen spotted the distant speck of an incoming skycar. Her omni-tool pinged as the autopilot announced an estimated arrival time. It was too soon. The car wasn’t supposed to come for another hour. 

Light burst around her, shocked hurt pulsing out in a riot of unstable biotic energy. Her skull buzzed. “You called the car?”

A stupid question, smacking of the last desperate dregs of denial. 

“Look Red. I’m making this easy for you. I’m cutting a deal with Derius directly. So do the smart thing and walk away.”

The skycar was getting closer.

“Why are you–”

“We didn’t get the OSD. I need collateral if I want to get Harga. That’s just how it is. I can’t afford the idealism anymore—never had the knack for it anyway.”

“That’s not true.”

Shepard’s laugh was a hollow thing. “Yes, it is. We all have to get our hands dirty eventually. Be happy it’s me today and not you.”

And just like that, all her shocked hurt transmuted into fury. “Fuck you, Shepard. Don’t you dare act like you’re doing me a favor.”

Nyreen knew a cop-out when she heard one. That’s all this was, no matter how much Shepard tried to justify it to herself. 

The line went silent, and then she heard Shepard’s voice, rough with quiet. “Before, on the ship, you asked me for a favor. Red, I want you to know—my answer is no.”

The skycar was pulling up to the roof, doors gleaming dull hemoglobin red as they opened automatically. In the far distance—more specks, a whole swarm of insects swimming in the thick, congealing atmosphere.  

Shuttles.

“I’d resent you. Just as much as Licinia. More . I need you to know that. So just get in the car. Go somewhere and wait for the dust to settle. You don’t need my favors and I don’t need yours.”

“Don’t!” Nyreen shouted. “Don’t do you fucking do this. This isn’t you–“

A burst of static on the channel cut her off. She was shouting at no one.

“It is now,” Shepard said, down to the earpiece pinched between her fingertips. Without another word, she dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath her heel. The crack of shattering components ricocheted through the elevator car, loud as a gunshot.

Alison Gunn, her flimsy persona of lies, fractured with it and there was no heroic, equally brittle, equally false Shepard, hero of the Terminus to fill in the pieces. Nyreen’s words had found their mark through the fissured layers of facade and between the cracks was just a gnawing hollowness.

The elevator shuddered to a stop at the penthouse floor. With a deep breath, Shepard drew her knives with certain motions, honed by instinct and mastery. No matter who she was in the terrible quiet gaps between ops and battles, the moment a weapon was in her hand, she didn’t have to worry about any of that. Death didn’t give a damn what name or face she wore, why should she? 

Automatically, she tested the familiar weight of the blades in her palms, flexing her fingers against the dull, beveled edges of their handles.  Then she stepped through the open elevator doors. 

The smell hit her right away: oxidized metal warmed in a sweat-slick hand. She knew it well.

A low roar pounded loud and louder in her ears, her gaze slipping and skidding around the room until she saw them, haloed in a puddle of hemocyanin—Tempest’s hand on the hilt of the blade still buried in his stomach. 

He wasn’t moving. He was…

Tempest was shouting but the roar had engulfed everything. Shepard’s left hand was empty, her knife sprouting from the settee behind Tempest, still reverberating with the force of impact. Tempest herself was curled over his corpse and shaking, a wet, red shawl slipping down across her neck, clavicle, and over her bare shoulder from the shallow red gash centimeters below her earlobe. Blood. 

But she wasn’t collapsing, which meant Shepard had missed the carotid. 

Odd.

Shepard didn’t miss. But then, she hadn’t even felt herself throw the knife, couldn’t even feel her hands. Everything was numb, the roar bellowing through her bones, so loud the vibrations rattled her teeth. So loud it hurt. It sounded exactly like a pre-fab ceiling collapsing in on itself. Like trip mines detonating. Like death and screaming and hate stretched into a shelled-out pit, opening wide to swallow her whole.  

There was a paralytic dart gun on the ground between them and Shepard kicked it away. She realized she’d missed on purpose. The carotid was too fast, over in seconds. She wanted to feel the resistance of skin and flesh against her knife and fingertips as Norah’s tragic doe eyes rimmed white with terror. She wanted to hear her screams, wanted to drown out the furor pounding against her eardrums. 

A medi-gel packet was in Tempest’s hand and malice twisted vicious and knife-sharp through Shepard to see it. Her mouth spread into a rictus smile. Medi-gel was a good idea, actually. A stomach wound could take a while, you could draw it out for days with medi-gel and really make someone suffer. If you left the blade in, even longer. That was the trick with stabbing, it wasn’t the going in that was the problem so much as the coming out. She could–

She stopped. 

Tempest wasn’t ripping open the medi-gel. It wasn’t for her. Her other hand was still on the blade hilt—trembling but steady enough not to accidentally wrench it free.  The roar cut off mid-note and rushing into the vacuum of sound was Shepard’s own scraped-out inhale, sudden and small. 

She found his eyes then, fixed on her. Not with the unseeing, sightless stare of the dead but with pinpoint pupils, ringed with pain. That undimmed blue punched straight through her ribcage and clutched desperate fingers around the ragged, open wound.

Tempest’s voice was hoarse as if she’d been shouting. “One more step and he’ll bleed out before you get the packet open.”

It wasn’t a bluff. 

“Drop the knife.”

“He bleeds out, my knife is the least of your problems,” Shepard warned toothlessly, already dropping it. Her throat was raw as if torn out by the seams. Every word was a ragged whisper, trailing the gusty threads of her rapid breaths. 

“And your omni-tool.”

Shepard complied, not caring when the microframe shattered on the marble at her feet. 

Tempest nodded her head towards the vanity before ripping open the medi-gel with her teeth and holding it up as a simultaneous promise and a threat. “Handcuffs. Top drawer. Put them on and stay put or I pull the knife out.”

Blue Eyes watched her, the rapid scroll of his thoughts in the bright flash of his irises. Whatever he was trying to silently convey, she didn’t understand. Her skull was throbbing, the roar still thrumming through her bones. Blood was a thick, sweet reek in the air, burrowing into the empty space where her rage used to be, nestling into the tender, gaping wound between her ribs. 

She felt the blood on her hands, heard it drip down to spatter against the decking, over her armor. Licinia’s empty eyes stared up at her, a cold, stiff hand clutched in her palm. Three fingers, then five very small ones—a child’s hand covered in prefab debris— back to three. Nothing good lasted. She wasn’t an idiot, she knew that. 

But when she blinked, she saw him haloed in the beryl sunset in that tiny safehouse in Fumi: a stranger with eyes that saw too much, his mandibles a contradiction of a smile—soft hesitance underscoring bold surety. She could hear his voice: impossibly earnest, heavy with conviction. He was a reckless idealist with all the wrong answers, a man with a death wish he didn’t even know he had—Icarus burning up right in front of her eyes, caught in the flames of a match she’d lit beneath him.

She was an idiot. The galaxy’s biggest idiot and the galaxy’s biggest liar. The mark and the confidence man all in one package, selling herself the tired old ‘maybe this time’ over and over again and looking the other way when she took her own bait. 

“I’m not–I’m not bluffing,” Tempest warned.

Shepard shook her head, copper warmth filling her mouth as she savagely bit down on the inside of her lip. The pain gave her clarity and her anger gave her focus. She bit down again for good measure then spat out the warm surge of blood onto the black-veined marble before squaring her shoulders and staring Tempest down.

“Gel first.”

Tempest hesitated, bravado visibly crumbling, then complied. Both of them knew, even with the gel, he could still bleed out if she removed the knife before it had time to congeal and start the clotting and tissue regeneration. 

Eyes still on them, Shepard moved backward towards the vanity covered with cosmetic bottles to tug open the drawer Tempest indicated. The handcuffs were old-fashioned, the metal kind that you had to unlock with a key. Probably intended for bedroom use. Shepard wasted no time. She snapped them on and held her wrists up to show Tempest, who nodded in response.

“I knew you’d come. I knew the second Derius got into bed with the Market, I was in trouble.” Tempest said, her lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Course, I didn’t know how much until I saw Aria in my casino.” 

Discarding the empty medi-gel packet, she gingerly ripped open the torn edges of his shirt to better see the wound, testing the edges of leathery skin to check for coagulation and tissue response. Shepard flinched and swore something gentle worked its way into the frozen expression still fixed on her—as if he were trying to tell her it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

If he was, the effort backfired. She flinched again, stomach twisting. She didn’t deserve his comfort. She was the one who got him into this, who lied to him and then underestimated Tempest, despite knowing better. He’d find out the truth soon enough.

“I knew it had to be your doing. Didn’t take long for me to figure out why. You got her to come. To set me up. To bait him. You were planning on handing me over to Derius in exchange for Harga. I bet you thought you were clever—the disguise, the cover. I’d only met you once in person, back when we were just kids. I bet you thought there was no way I’d remember what you looked like and you were right. But I don’t need to remember your face, Shepard, to remember you.”

Dark confusion was clouding over the soft warmth in his eyes at Tempest’s words. Shepard didn’t look away. She deserved all his condemnation. Perversely, part of her was looking forward to it. It felt like winning an ugly argument, like proving a point and rubbing it in someone’s face. Hers or his, she couldn’t tell. Maybe both. 

“I was planning on stealing whatever dirt you’re using to blackmail Derius so I could blackmail him myself,” Shepard said. “Obviously that didn’t pan out so I had to resort to alternative leverage–”

“Me.”

“You. He still needs you alive and I need him to get to Harga. Trust me, it wasn’t my first choice.”

Tempest scoffed. “Because you’re so different from Derius? You didn’t have a problem working with him when his actions suited you—when he played at the disgraced turian war hero still obsessed with honor and loyalty all while nursing his sadism behind closed doors in the brothels and clubs. On the girls people like you don’t give a shit about. On me.”

Her fingers tightened on the dagger hilt and Shepard checked the urge to lunge forward and rip her hand away.

“I don’t buy his act anymore, Shepard. I learned the hard way not to. And I sure as hell won’t buy yours either so think twice before asking me to trust you just because you made a name for yourself as some kind of savior of the Terminus.  You better think fucking twice before you ask me to forget how you ignore what happens to those of us who still end up in places like this. Just because we aren’t still shivering in our dirty coveralls, perfect little victims stoking your hero complex, begging you to save us.”

Tempest’s whole body was trembling, cheeks pink with rage, eyes narrowed with loathing. Trust was always off the table for them. Tempest had survived too long in this place to be the naive damsel and Shepard was a far cry from a hero. Both of them knew it. 

Shepard grimaced and eyed the skyline beyond the plate glass windows. She could just barely pick out the dark specks of the approaching shuttles. Wouldn’t be long now. She was running out of time. Without the OSD and without Tempest’s life in her hands, she had no collateral against Derius, no way to force Aria to get off her throne and join the fight, and no way to get Blue Eyes out of this alive.

“You’re right,” she said, squaring her jaw to deliver the concession without a trace of humility or remorse. “I’m just like Derius. So tell me, what makes you think I came here without leverage on you? Do you think he’d help you get your daughter off-station without asking for anything in return? Or do you think he’d bide his time, wait for the right moment to collect on the favor?”

The specks were getting larger, Shepard could almost pick out the individual shapes, almost count them. 

“Alenko Memorial,” she elaborated. “Pediatric wing.”

“What. What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying,” Shepard snapped, patience fraying. “I’m threatening. Give me the collateral on Derius. You or the blackmail.”

Tempest paled, her skin ashen and dotted all over with sudden perspiration. “She’s a child.” 

“I’m no savior, you already knew that.” Shepard pressed, advancing on her. “And I’m running out of patience.”

Tempest seethed, face contorting with helpless rage. Her hands curled into tight little fists, one still holding the knife but she didn’t dare do anything with it now with the threat against her daughter hanging in the blood-soaked air between them. 

“I don’t have it! Of course, I don’t have it! The second I figured out you were planning to lure him here, I got rid of it. If I don’t have the OSD, he can only do so much to me before he has to let me go! He has to keep me alive or the dead man’s switch…”

Or the dead man’s switch activated, releasing the data onto the extranet. Another glance to the window and Shepard counted at least twenty shuttles. Derius wasn’t taking any chances. 

“You have a backup. Without the non-event trigger.” 

She had to. She was too shrewd not to have a backup of the only thing keeping her alive.

“It’s…” Tempest paused. To think of a lie, Shepard assumed. Wherever the backup was, it wasn’t easily accessible. Probably off station and in Council space where Derius’s connections were weakest.

She closed the gap between them, standing close enough that she could reach out and loop the chain of her handcuffs around Tempest’s blood-slick neck. 

There was one way out of this. Even without the OSD, Tempest was still collateral. Shepard looked at Blue Eyes, paralyzed on the floor, his gaze knowing, fury radiating off him; then Tempest; then the shuttles looming larger in the skyline. One was pulling away from the rest and approaching, fast. The shape was wrong too. Not a shuttle. A gunship.

“Wait!” Tempest sobbed out, her slim throat bobbing as she gulped down her desperation and fear as Shepard’s handcuff links clinked together ominously, her fingers splaying out and ready.

Lights bloomed in the distance. Gunfire. The kinetic shielding warbled in distress. It wouldn’t take long to get through the shields with a gunship. A stray bolt of worry stabbed through her.

Nyreen—she was so stubborn, so hard to dissuade from doing the noblest, stupidest thing possible. Shepard suspected she hadn’t taken the skycar. Even with the betrayal, Red wasn’t the type to cut and run. She was always so determinedly good no matter how bad things got. The memory of her last words in the comms burned against Shepard’s ear. Her hands shook with a metallic clatter and refused to move.

Fuck. 

Shepard reached out and pried Tempest’s hand off the blade hilt before pulling it free with a sickening squelch of medi-gel and congealing blood.

“Help me with him!” she barked over the warbling shields.

Blue strobed in through the plate glass as the lights wavered, flickering dark. An electronic buzz built, crescendoing unbearably as the building’s power strained under the draw of the kinetic shielding. 

Tempest got one side, awkwardly grabbing him around the waist. Still handcuffed and holding the knife, Shepard nudged his rigid arm around her shoulders and leveraged his weight against her. Even with the two of them, he was too tall and too heavy, his stiff legs dragging on the floor as they struggled toward the elevators.

A blinding flash bathed the room, the buzz cutting off abruptly. Shepard blinked back the afterimages dancing across her retinas, surging forward with all her strength, practically flinging the three of them towards the doors, her fingers stretching towards the panel.

Beneath her feet, the ground seized and a wave of hot, pressurized air picked her up and slammed her against the wall. Black static swarmed across her vision and before she could fight it, pulled her under.

It’d all gone to shit. 

Sidonis blind-fired over the hood of the skycar, ducking back into cover seconds before he heard the metallic thud of slugs embedding into the frame. 

“We can’t stay here. Without the shields, we’re dead,” Red called out but he shook his head and clutched the Incisor close. He knew she was right but—

“I just need more time. I can get the shot, just keep them off me.”

He didn’t wait for her answer before darting out of cover and ducking behind the closest rooftop HVAC unit. Red’s submachine gun pattered out a burst of fire from behind the skycar.

Sidonis braced the M-29 against his shoulder and leveled the barrel, sighting the gunship through the scope. Truth was, he didn’t know if he could get the shot. Garrus was the marksman, not him. But he had to try. The A-61s had a small vulnerability: a small air intake housing frame. He saw it through the crosshairs. It was unarmored, just a thin, flexible piece of metal that, if shot at the right angle, could snap off and lodge itself in the intake, overheating and stalling the thruster engine in seconds and forcing an emergency landing. 

Sidonis took a breath. He needed to land a glancing shot, that was the trick of it: enough to twist the frame without shattering it. He adjusted his aim a millimeter to the right, finger squeezing down on the trigger just as something crashed into his forearm and exposed unarmored side. He saw the shot ricochet uselessly off the gunship’s heavy armor just before the rooftop slammed into his back. 

Smoke skudded across the red sky, thick and dark. Sidonis blinked up at it, squinting as it stung his eyes. His side was wet, he realized, completely soaked through but when he reached for it with his left hand, nothing happened. He couldn’t move his arm.

He’d known from the very beginning this would go bad. He should’ve tried harder to stop him. He should’ve followed him out of the diner and made him see. 

Sidonis grunted, pulling himself up to lean against the HVAC unit. He pulled up his omni-tool display with his good arm, his fingers coming away wet with blood.

Two dots. No movement. 

A sound he didn’t recognize spilled out of him, weak with anguish. He should’ve told him how he felt about him, maybe it would have made a difference. He should’ve done a lot of things.  

But most of all, he should’ve killed Shepard when he had the chance.

Garrus woke with a mouthful of rusty liquid, vision swimming murkily and ears drowned in a high-pitched whine. It was raining—when had he gotten outside?—and he was half-lying in a pool of water. A hot breeze skimmed smoke and guttering embers over his face, reeking of smoldering plastic. Through the rubble and billowing dust of pulverized debris, he saw a gaping maw of red sky. 

The tinnitis ring was getting louder, as shrill as a scream. 

“Sshh,” someone soothed. A turian. Male. His voice was low, subvocals soft. “There, there.”

It was screaming, Garrus realized when the tinnitus wail cut off into wrenching sobs. He tried to move and the red mouth gnashed crumbling stone teeth, dark roiling in the corners of his vision as if the jagged marble was closing in around him to swallow him whole.

“Please–” she started but trailed off into a thin whimper at the sound of another coaxing shush.

“Enough Derius,” rasped a voice beside him. “She doesn’t have it. She already gave it to me.”

At the dark periphery of his vision was a flash of silver sequins half-crumpled against the wall next to him. Memories sieved in, a slow confused slurry filling his throbbing skull. They were in the penthouse of the Stardust. Shepard…he caught the strong, stubborn jut of her jaw out of the corner of his eye, her red blood seeping from her mouth to trace the point of her chin. It feathered into faint rivulets down her neck, mingling with the water pouring from the sprinkler system above.

She—his gut twisted in on itself as if recoiling. Pain writhed beneath his skin, pulsing beneath his osteoderm. It paled in comparison to the ugly, black feeling churning in his stomach without a clear origin. It felt like waking up those weeks after Alenko’s death with that suffocating reminder of grief hovering, just out of reach but just close enough to pant bated breath against his neck.

Glass crunched underfoot, closer and closer.

“Shepard. It’s been too long.”

Her laugh was flippant before dropping into a pained wheeze. “I could go with longer.”

“No need to start things off on a bad note,” Derius chided.

“Little late for that, don’t you think?”

A sudden blur of movement, bare talons glinting and metal clinking. Garrus struggled against his frozen muscles, furiously willing them to move. A groan of effort leaked out of his mouth but not so much as a twinge, not even a twitch for all his internal flailing against the paralysis. The sound was swallowed up in another, a surprised grunt of pain in flanging subvocals.

Viscous blue, the color of blood, swirled in the water pooling around him. Derius began to chuckle, pain threading through his fond amusement.

“Defiant as ever. But still just as reckless.”

Garrus heard the heavy thud of bone against a hard surface, silver sequins glittering in the dim as a small sound escaped her before fading into silence.

The sick gyre of his stomach seized, frozen. And then the visceral churn surged back, ferocious and wild. Blood blue screened over the gaping red skyline, a pulse roaring in his temples, all his fury and fear raging against uncompromising bone and flesh. Pins prickled along his hide, his muscles trembling and useless, weak flickers of motion rippling through his straining arms and legs in a chaotic swarm.  

Darkness encroached—he was gasping for air but there was no rapid rise in his chest, no secondary respiratory muscles activating to help him gulp down more oxygen. The bleeding maw around the sky clamped down, enclosing him in the wet dark. 

“Take them,” he heard Derius say. “All of them.”

Chapter Text

The pain was excruciating. That was the first thing she noticed. Then, in the thin periphery of consciousness beyond the unrelenting pulse of her skull: a voice nattering  ‘get up get up get up get up ’ with the kind of urgency that didn't make room for explanations. In a way, both were good news; at least she wasn’t dead. Only, Shepard wasn’t feeling very glass-half-full over the prospect. She was never much of a glass-half-full kind of person, more of a ‘glass in need of breaking over someone’s head, regardless of contents’ sort. 

A foul taste coated her parched tongue—wet metal and vegetal rot. She worked her jaw carefully, tongue probing gently around inside her mouth but the motion hitched strangely. Someone had swapped out part of her mandible with gravel. Or, it was broken and not cleanly. Something small, hard and pearl-smooth shifted on her rolling tongue, clicking against her teeth. Shepard spat it out, eyes slivering open to see the pale, blurry H of a molar, roots dark with gristle, glinting in a spatter of bloody saliva on the pane of smoky glass pressed against her cheek. 

Club music, synthy and high tempo, thumped around her in distorted throbs of shuddering bass. She stared at her tooth, willing it into focus under the strobe of pink, green, and blue neon as her fists curled tight, ready to land a punch. 

“Water. For the headache,” someone said, a fancy cut-crystal rocks glass full of ice and a clear liquid looming too close, placed delicately at the edge of the blood. 

The voice was familiar. Not in a good way. She lunged for the source, fists coming up only to jerk back down, pulled with a metallic clink and throwing off her momentum. Neon-saturated shapes swooped, splitting into doubles. Clumsily, she fell back against plush cushioning, bright spots gridding across her vision in CMYK halftones.

A sympathetic sound…well, it might be sympathetic if it weren’t for the obvious pleasure rumbling low in his subharmonics at the sight of her pain.

“Careful,” Derius chided. Patronizing as ever. “You may have a concussion.”

Comprehension hit her then, all at once, and took her heartbeat with it. Blinking back the bright flashes, she searched her surroundings blindly. After a terrifying second, she found Blue Eyes, outlined briefly in magenta, sitting at the far end of the u-shaped booth wrapped around the glass table. His formalwear was ripped at the collar all the way down to his silvery sternum, stained with blood and still dripping the murky water from the fire sprinklers. The paralytic must’ve still been in his system because his arm was still half clutched to his chest, fingers curled tight, the mild surprise still etched in his facial plates. His eyes were blue as ever, cutting through the dim left by the ebb of the flashing neon—alive and full of anger.

Panic receding, Shepard took stock of the situation, then met Derius’s amused stare, leveled at her over the rim of his rocks glass from across the table. 

Her jaw was broken and undoubtedly swollen. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing her lisp and slur her way through an insult. Instead, she raised her shackled hand to gesture at the side of her head he’d slammed into the wall and angled her chin with her best ‘and who’s fucking fault is that?’ glare at him.

He blinked, raising a curious browplate as his gloved talons tapped delicately against the glass. Methodical. Measured. Tink tink tink .  “Well…you did stab me.”

“Only because you deserved it,” she spat out viciously, pleased that the slurring wasn’t too bad. Her jaw had the anesthetic numbness of topical medi-gel, which would’ve helped the swelling despite doing fuck all for the broken bone and the concussion. He’d had them doctor her a bit and something else besides. The other signs were there, smothered by the pain but noticeable when she focused: the drymouth, the giddy stim tremble jittering through her limbs. 

Such a Derius thing to do. He wanted to have his fun. And he wanted her conscious for it. Alert, even. 

She scanned the room again as best she could without setting off the throbbing pain. They were in a club. But it looked like a club from a vid set, the cushions pristine with no questionable stains, the synthetic leather smelling like brand new skycar instead of sickly sweet discount perfume and hand-rolled cigarettes. The floor gleamed. Nothing was sticky.  

More than that, it was a near replica of Roxies—obviously before someone blew the place up.

Eyes on her, he smiled, mandibles flaring wide as he settled back into the booth and crossed one leg smoothly over his knee. “I commissioned it for my private use. Sentimental perhaps, but I do miss those days. Nothing now quite compares.”

Except for the three of them and all the armed talons—roughly 20 between her and the exit just in her line of sight alone—the place was deserted. He’d commissioned a replica of Roxies for his private use? Something about that disturbed. She frowned. 

His gaze drifted past her shoulder, too calculated by half. A nasty surprise was waiting for her in that part of the club, no doubt. Sadistic fuck. She’d like nothing more than to have this conversation with her omni-bow and happily pictured the jut of the cured polymer bolt from his eye socket. It was a useless fantasy and one she couldn’t afford to dwell on too much if she wanted to get them out of this alive. She needed to stay on her toes. Derius was a sociopathic toddler with a toy and the second he got bored, he’d happily destroy it.

Ignoring his glance, she reached her cuffed hands for the glass of water and tossed it back gracelessly, letting the ice cubes pelt her face, a few spilling out to bounce off her neck and shoulders before sliding cold trails into her dress’s gaping neckline.

Derius winced at the display, eyes back on her and mildly affronted. She grinned with all her teeth, knowing how barbaric turians found that sort of smile. Especially when it was filmed with blood. For good measure, she chased the grin by spitting a bloody globule of saliva onto the shiny fabric of the booth.

“Got anything stronger than water?” she asked over the clatter of the heavy crystal against the tabletop.

“I recently acquired a beautiful human whiskey from Elysium you might enjoy,” Derius recovered smoothly, gesturing to an unseen attendant with the curl of a talon. “Manhattan?”

She bitterly resented the reminder that he remembered her favorite drink order. Shepard settled back into the booth as far as the cuffs permitted, shifting so her dress squelched wetly and emitted a waft of rotten water. A groan of pain bubbled up on the back of her throat and she bit down on it so hard, her other loosened molars creaked in protest. 

“I take my whiskey straight these days.”

Someone, one of the 20+ Talons standing guard in the room, produced the bottle and unstoppered it to pour when she shook her head.

“Just leave it.”

A beat of hesitation and then, with Derius’s nod of permission, they did. It was a slim 375 mL by her eye, not a challenge to hold even with the cuffs, so when she spilled half of it on her front to get a single gulp, it was entirely on purpose. 

Predictably, Derius’s smile looked strained. She’d once seen him fly into a rage over a subordinate eating with his fingers, ‘like an animal’. He’d shot the man between the eyes on the spot. But quickly enough, the strain shifted into something genuine. Something…engrossed. He leaned forward as if to watch her closer.

Swiping the back of her tethered hand across her mouth, Shepard asked, “So how’s the stomach?”

“Oh, you needn’t worry. It was barely a scratch, I wonder why you bothered at all.”

Shepard shrugged, an ‘arrogantly casual’ human gesture she knew he loathed. “I already said why. You were being an asshole.”

His mandibles tucked in close to check his sneer of distaste. Another thing he hated: human profanity that translated a bit too graphically. “I don’t recall you ever being quite so vulgar, Shepard.”

God, the pretension of him. She always forgot how insufferable he could get, how much he liked to dress everything up in avuncular consternation as if he were still on Palaven, attending military dinner parties and not slumming it in the galaxy backwater. It didn’t matter how many designer suits he wore–this one looked like the turian equivalent of silk jacquard, pale cream embroidered in whorls of dark, shimmering blue with tailored lapels sharp enough to gouge out an eye–or how many 300 credit bottles of ‘beautiful’ imported whiskey he had stocking his bar. Omega was Omega, all he had to do was walk outside and smell the rotting garbage heaped up everywhere to remember exactly where all his ambition landed him: lording over a junkpile with his army of vulgar criminals.

At least Aria had the decency not to pretend she was somewhere else and throw a tantrum whenever people didn’t pretend hard enough along with her. She embraced the ugliness. Reveled in it. Didn’t shoot it on sight.

Shepard released the whiskey bottle and it predictably tipped over, spilling the rest over the side of the table and onto the booth cushions. 300 credits seeped sticky brown over the leather.

“Oh, am I ruining the atmosphere, Derius? Tell me, does everyone on Palaven act this fucking pretentious in the vicinity of a stripper pole? Because I have some jokes that need updating if so.”

He laughed. The anticipatory glimmer in his eyes was a lambent gleam, bright in the dark, predatory and eager. The smile glinted with a hint of teeth.

“You do always keep things so…interesting with that temper of yours, Shepard,” he said. “A rare commodity here. Omega is nothing if not predictable. The same cheap, artless crime, the petty ruthlessness of the dimwitted and unimaginative chasing drugs and credits. You have no idea how tiresome it all becomes.”

She scowled, unable to stop imagining her omni-bolts again as her nails carved divots into the bare stripe of palm visible through her torn gloves. He always had to be so fucking smug. 

“Then leave. Trust me, no one would miss you.”

He sighed. “Unfortunately that isn’t possible. Ilium and Bekenstein require Council-space connections to thrive. I abandoned mine when I joined Licinia.”

Her head pulsed, the club duplicating into vague overlays of garish color splashed through the dark. All at once, she was tired of this little game. She felt her scowl falter into the blank listlessness of pain. Watching her fail to sufficiently rise to that bait, his amusement vanished in a cold snap of contempt.

“Our reunion is missing one,” he said, nudging his chin toward the space behind her. Defiance slipping through her fingers, lost in the nauseating tidal swell of her concussion, she gave in and followed his glance.

The stage was just like the one at Roxies and Tempest was there, halfway through her routine. In the blur of neon, Shepard couldn’t make out her face but the costume was identical to the one she wore back when they met as teenagers: turquoise feathers and glittering rhinestones. The music cut off abruptly and Tempest’s sinuous motions jerked to a halt. 

Shepard turned back and risked a glance toward the far end of the booth.

Baleful blue, rimed with icy fury, met her eyes. It shouldn’t have hurt to see him look at her that way, but it did. She almost laughed, giddy with the shock of pain, it hurt so much. Funny how Derius didn’t have to lift a finger to torture her, all he had to do was leave her in a room with Blue Eyes and all his righteous condemnation.

She regretted the thought as soon as Tempest slipped into the booth to perch compliantly on Derius’s knee. Her costume was as revealing as ever and when Derius skimmed his talons fondly over the plane of her exposed stomach, Shepard immediately knew she’d severely underestimated him.

Scars, hundreds of them, faint and subtle with age, crisscrossed over bare skin in groups of three. All that fine Elysium whiskey burned at the back of her throat, salty water brash warm on her tongue. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from the deliberate path of his talons. Beneath them, a thin white line carved a faded smile from hip to hip. There was…pride in the way he touched it. She knew with terrible certainty what that meant.  

Norah was right, she’d had no idea. She’d thought he was just a run-of-the-mill crime lord, a control freak sadist nursing a grudge over his miserable lot. Not even the worst she’d met in the Terminus, not by far. Beyond that, she’d only heard rumors, only seen hints. Enough to look the other way. Enough to consider handing his victim back over to him without the safety of her collateral to keep her from his appetites.

She hated Norah, didn’t know she could possibly hate her more until she found her in the penthouse, kneeling in a pool of blood. But that hate was nothing to the sickening shame roiling in her stomach.  

“Relationships are about give and take, Shepard. But sometimes…sometimes you do everything you can for someone and in return, she lies to you. Betrays you. Takes from you. So what else is there to do but take something back? Well isn’t that…only fair? You humans have a delightful saying, ‘a pound of flesh’. I’m…”

His talons fanned possessively across an expanse of unprotected flesh. They were bare, untrimmed. He’d taken off his gloves.  “I’m extremely fond of it.”

Tension flickered through his arm. Norah flinched, already bracing for what was to come, but she didn’t scream, didn’t try to run or pull away. The movements felt rote, familiar with repetition, and if Shepard hadn’t seen the scars, that would have been enough to confirm how commonplace the threat of violence was with Derius.

Shepard wrenched the cuffs, metal creaking in protest, threatening to snap. Her torn gloves shredded apart as steel cut down into skin.

 “Stop–” she burst out. “If you want the OSD–” 

A bluff, that’s all she had. Her mind was bleary, throbbing, and scrabbling to spin out her clumsy lie into something believable.

Derius chuckled. “I don’t believe you have it. I’ve already had my men check.”

“Well, it’d be pretty fucking stupid to keep it on me. I’d already uploaded it to my private server with my omni-tool. Dead man’s switch encryption key. Smashed the omni-tool already, so don’t bother sending someone back for it.”

His browplates twitched upward with delicate incredulity but the smile stayed put. “I assume you have proof and don’t expect me to simply…take you at your word?”

“I hope you don’t expect me to take you seriously with a half-naked woman covered in ostrich feathers in your lap,” she snapped, jerking her chin towards the empty section of the booth next to him.

Derius sighed, wrapping an arm around Norah’s waist and hailing another underling with a subtle gesture. A turian hurried forward, bearing a folio-sized velvet jewelry box emblazoned with the logo of a prominent Ilium jeweler.

“A personal matter before we get to business,” Derius said. “My wayward mistress is back in my arms. I would like to reward her.”

Norah swallowed visibly, the crusted-over cut on her neck dribbling blood. Her smile was tremulous but somehow looked warm with those big, expressive eyes. “Dere, I couldn’t possibly–”

“I insist,” he said, pushing the jewelry box towards her. “Think of it as a promise of things to come.”

With trembling fingers, she accepted it, unlatching the gold clasp. The lid popped open, obscuring the contents from Shepard. All she could see was the stark paleness of Norah’s face.

“Come now. I’ve had it custom-made with precious gemstones from Invictus.”

Heavy lashes fluttered. For a moment it looked as if she might refuse, her shoulders tensing and body flickering on the precipice of movement as if she might bolt. He’d been about to gouge her with his bare talons and she stayed put with just a flinch but whatever was in this box had her ready to run, hopeless as the escape attempt might be. 

But the moment passed, her shoulders drawing down and together as if she wanted to wrap her trembling arms around herself. Instead, she reached in, then met Shepard’s alarmed stare from across the table before withdrawing a glittering circle of silvery gems. Without a word, she opened the hinge, then closed it, fastening the gemstone-studded bomb collar around her neck.

Shepard exploded out of the booth, taking the table with her. It shattered in one go with a furious crash, tempered glass flying everywhere. But before she could lunge for him across the empty space, he pulled up his omni-tool display with obvious intent.

“Come now, Shepard. It’s already armed. As is the other.”

Other?

She blinked, stomach in freefall. Glancing over towards the far end of the booth, her rage flared and guttered over and over. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Derius chuckled. “Too soft, Shepard. I hadn’t known if I should believe the rumors, not after I saw that you’d stabbed Tempest’s hapless bedwarmer.” He frowned delicately. “But then I noticed you’d left him alive. Toothless.”

He thought—of course, he did, she’d taken the dagger. Stabbed Derius with it too for good measure: a desperate act of useless defiance to ensure he’d keep her alive at least long enough to make her regret it. It was a good thing, a very good thing, he didn’t know what Blue Eyes was to her. To Derius, he was just an anonymous hostage and everyone in the Terminus had heard the way to deal with Shepard was to strap a bomb to a hostage. So he’d gone and done it just to test out the veracity of the rumor.

She ripped her glance back from the far end of the booth, buried all her fear as deep as possible, and met Derius’s stare. He was smiling at her again, eyes glowing with satisfaction.

“It’s that sort of toothlessness that got Licinia killed, I’m told,” he drawled.

Norah surreptitiously slipped off his lap to take the seat beside him and Derius leaned forward in the seat, elbows on his knees and hands clasped up in front of him as if in prayer or devotion. 

“Turians pretend like the Unification War is a thing of antiquity but it was Licinia that allowed them the luxury. Her ruthlessness smothered countless anti-Hierarchy movements before they even started and then she went on to lead the only successful rebellion against it in our history. To think, that illustrious military legacy, felled by a simple mutiny sparked by the actions of one small, foolish human.”

It was an old hurt, the kind that never healed right. She didn’t bother disguising the miserable twist of her mouth or her flinch as the words ripped at those scars. Let the bastard have his pound of flesh. 

“Bit off more a little more than you could handle on Elysium, didn’t you Shepard? The Licinia I knew would have left you there to die instead of risking her crew to get you out alive even without any promise of credits from the Alliance to assuage those who survived the slaughter. But that’s the thing with toothlessness–it’s contagious. ”

He’d left Licinia’s crew long before the mutiny and Elysium. Long even before Licinia pulled her from the slaver’s cage. The mutineers were all dead and between the Blitz and the mutiny, only a handful of loyal stragglers were left to stay on with her crew. She wondered which of them told him.

She didn’t like wondering. It wasn’t supposed to matter. She’d already learned her lesson, knew better than most what ‘loyal’ meant in the Terminus, knew to guard herself at all times and sleep with a gun under her pillow, a knife in her hand, and one eye open even behind the locked door of her private cabin. 

Pleasure slithered through his subharmonics. His voice was soft like a lover’s but full of malice. “It may have been a mutineer who slit her throat, Shepard, but it was you who killed her.”

“Are you done?” she snarled, sitting again. “I’d like to discuss terms.”

It was laughable, really. She had no plan, no collateral, and no allies who weren’t paralyzed or in a bomb collar. All she had was a bluff and the flimsy appeal that it was in his best interests to keep all of them around just for the sick fun of it. But living in the Terminus meant thinking on your feet. So the rest of the lie spilled out, still half-formed and nebulous as she spoke.

“My well-armed colleagues will be contacting you with proof. In person.”

“Oh? And how will they manage that?”

Shepard shot him a sly look as if she weren’t blindly hurtling around a corner, not sure if it would be a way out or a dead end. Bluffs were like that sometimes: mazes of half-truths you had to fumble through as they materialized out of thin air. 

“Your men searched me, I can only assume they were competent enough to find the tracking devices.”

Wherever this Roxies replication was, she was betting it was somewhere Derius didn’t want other people to know about: a risky gamble. If she was wrong…

Derius’s jaw flexed, tight, fury blazing in his eyes before jerkily gesturing towards her with his chin. Without warning, she was hauled up from behind. The orange light of an omni-tool EMF scan spilled over her sequined dress.

Very sloppy. Most tracking devices came standard with EM scattering graphene coats that cloaked their long-range EM transmissions between outgoing pings, which were often hours apart unless pinged first. An angry tic feathered tense mandibles against Derius's jaw.

"An infrared heat map scan, you idiot," he hissed.

This time, down, near the hem of her gown, something sparked. The tracking device Surly 'secretly' planted on her back on the ship dropped to the floor, inert.

“I–” the merc started.

A gunshot rang out, blue spattering over her neck and hair, along with gory flecks of bone and carapace. She didn’t flinch and she didn’t gloat. The time for her defiance was over. Derius was done playing. As the heavy thump of the body sounded behind her, she watched him re-holster his Carnifex beneath the sharp line of his lapel and squared her jaw, waiting for his assessing stare to find her again. At last, it did, with calculating scrutiny.

“And the other?” he asked finally.

That lie came easily. “Oh, we both know it’s too late for that. But I'll save you the trouble, it won't show on infrared or EMF. Ingestible radioactive tracer : lights you up like a Christmas tree with a unique isotope for a few day cycles. I’ll be puking up blood for a week after but it's worth it.”

Displeasure flattened his mandibles against his jaw. “Thorough”

“I’ve picked up some things. We’re in the tunnels, for one. Close to your private docking bay, I’m assuming.”

His brooding silence said she was right about that.

It was obvious from how pristine it was that Derius was the only person with access to this place. She could only suspect, with a queasy feeling in her stomach, what he used it for. But it had the hobbyist workshop feel–if that hobby was terrorizing human women. For convenience’s sake, it had to be near whatever secret location he holed up in away from his own men, somewhere in the section of the labyrinthine tunnels under his control. 

From the scale, she assumed it was by the docking bay that had minted his success as a smuggler right under Aria’s nose. He alone controlled it and the small fleet of shuttles entirely piloted by a VI programmed with the ability to navigate the complex twists and turns of the tunnels penetrating through the asteroid crust. Building something like this place would’ve been an undertaking even for a smuggler of Derius’s caliber and the further he took it from the dock, the higher the risk of attracting a tail who might follow him back.    

The graphene-rich asteroid surrounding the tunnels protected the route from scans. It also blocked mid and short-range frequency transmissions. The only way to navigate the maze to and from the dock safely was through Derius. Ever since her fallout with Aria, she’d gotten on and off Omega through that dock half a dozen times. But she had no idea where it was. Derius was too paranoid and too thorough, she’d never been able to smuggle any long-range frequency trackers onto the shuttles, never been able to tail him directly. The radiotracer option she’d considered, but gut cancer seemed a heavy price to pay for simple curiosity. By the time her curiosity became a necessity, it was too late, he was already trying to capture her and hand her over to the Market.

Of course, his paranoia and routines had blind spots. He was the one who’d dragged her here, against her will and unconscious, to torture her for a little bit just for fun, after all. How many others had he done the same to? Defenseless and terrified—not like the criminal customers he sometimes smuggled onto Omega—not armed, not prepared, not a threat or a risk.

“Twenty hours,” she said: a calm, neutral ultimatum. A day cycle was as long as she thought she could get away with and hopefully, it would be enough. “I’ll want Harga’s location, of course, and I assume you’ll need time to procure him. My terms with Tempest will have to be honored too so why don’t you put your gloves back on? Shoot as many of your own men as you’d like but the hostages are off-limits.”

She didn’t mention removing the bomb collars or the handcuffs. They were a security measure for Derius and the more secure he felt, the better. She also imagined that the physical constraints would leave him less tempted by other, more brutal methods of debilitation. That was the theory she had in mind anyway when he surged forward and seized her by the shoulders.

The club tipped over, tempered glass digging into her cheek, a glittering kaleidoscope tilting neon-tipped facets that twisted and spun, fracturing into doubles, triples, octohedrals. Derius was shouting but he sounded far away and muffled through the rush of blood pounding in her ears. Her bruised skull felt like an overripe fruit, threatening to burst, bones creaking under the pressure of his palm. Something was shaking her. Not Derius she realized. Laughter was juddering through her, unhinged manic gales of it.

He was going to kill her but she was high on medi-gel and something else besides—something that sketched out the pain of her concussion in hi-def, crystal-clear detail. The sharp edges of her perception fractured through the edges of her fear and anger and all that was left was laughter. He was going to kill her over a threat that didn’t exist over collateral she never had because of a plan that didn’t work and a betrayal she didn’t have the stomach to see through. Just one failure after another but this lie, this flimsy bluff was all she had left after all her careful plans and schemes with their backups and their contingencies. 

The pressure on her shoulders lifted, Derius snapping an order out. Different hands replaced his and the bright spots were back, blinding her in firework flares as her skull shuddered and strained in time with her gasping laughs. By the time the spots cleared, she was in a small, dim room full of boxes stamped with logos and piled high. A few logos she recognized as liquor brands. Derius had locked her in his private bar’s storage room.

“Why are you laughing?” Norah demanded. He’d locked them all in the closet. “Do you think you’ve won? He’s just taking his time to figure out how he wants to hurt you.”

“I know,” Shepard said, between hiccuping cackles. It would take him a bit too, even after he decided whether or not he should take her ultimatum seriously. 

She looked at Blue Eyes, still radiating fury and some other things she couldn’t distinguish beneath the frozen veneer of his paralyzed features. Something absurd bubbled up in her chest, escaping as a breathy snort. She walked over to him, careening her shoulder into a stack of boxes despite her efforts–the concussion was messing with her balance–but managed an unsteady crouch beside him.

Derius had his incompetent men do a half-assed EMF scan on her and undoubtedly Tempest for the OSD but not a more thorough search for the EMF-cloaked tracking devices because he wasn’t used to thoroughly scanning the defenseless women he dragged into his lair. Victims don’t plan in advance to have tracking devices, as a rule, and his familiarity with them had worn a blind spot into his paranoia. And who was a bigger victim than someone who was wounded and paralyzed at a party where weapons and tech were prohibited? Someone who was as helpless as it was possible to be? 

Shepard clasped her hands around his wrist and sure enough, beneath the suit fabric, she felt the subtle outline of the inert omni-tool microprocessor frame.

She kept laughing.

The screams and gunfire had long since stopped. Butler didn’t know if that was a good or a bad sign. 

He twisted the hammered silver ring on his little finger—a nervous habit-–and tried the comms again. 

No good. Nothing but static. 

Another twist of his wedding ring and he sighed heavily. He couldn’t hole up forever waiting for contact. For all he knew, everyone was—no, no, he didn’t want to consider that. They were alive. But whatever happened to them, he couldn’t help anyone if he stayed put.

He shouldered his way out of the sagging metal of the bathroom stall door. Each step sloshed in the puddles left by the still-drizzling fire suppression sprinklers. Somewhere close someone whimpered at the sound—another straggler, one of many who’d sought refuge in the bathroom from the stampeding crowd during the chaos—but he couldn’t see them. It was dark as pitch.

Butler activated his omni-tool interface, orange light piercing through the dark to wash over the bathroom. The door to the casino had been ripped off its hinges. And crumpled at the entrance were bodies, distorted and trampled—a soaking amalgam of sequins, rhinestones and fur heaped up and splashed over with red, blue, violet, green. It wasn’t possible to discern that any of the bodies had even been people once, they were all so badly crushed.

He recoiled, arm raised to shield the gape of his mouth. His heel struck something soft and he stumbled, dress shoes slipping on slick tile. He didn’t fall, but the contents of his overstuffed pockets slipped free—sandwich bags and napkins of hors d’oeuvres plunking into a filthy puddle along with the clink of the vintage compact against tile.

Unthinking, he bent to retrieve them but obviously the food wasn’t good anymore, obviously , it didn’t matter if he brought real spinach puffs home for Nalah at this point. If she were right there in that moment, she’d be furious with worry, demanding that he just leave them, asking how he could possibly be worried about the food when any minute a merc could come in and–

Butler paused. 

The compact was glinting, brass catching the orange of his omni-tool and glinting bright sparks. It had come apart into two pieces, glass shattered. But…he seized it from the ground, prying at it with his fingers until a snick of a metal latch echoed through the bathroom and a slim rectangle of metal jutted from the bulbous curve of the compact lid. He pulled it free.

A micro-OSD.

He stared at it blankly.

In his ear was a crackle of static followed by a voice.

“--Sammy. Are you there? Sammy.”

Before he could respond, another voice cut in, more familiar and brimming with anger despite the audio distortion.

“ Butler you idiot, you better be alive . ”

Shepard wasted no time. Head bent over the omni-tool display, too-many fingers skittering over the holo keys, she began deactivating the collars. She didn’t seem to notice much beyond the omni-tool—not the gridwork of bloody lines etched into her cheek from the glass or the still bleeding gouges in her chin and temple left by Derius’s talons.  

Garrus noticed. He couldn’t help but notice.

She was still crouched beside him, her body swaying unsteadily to brush against his shoulder.

If he could move, he’d pull her close, crush her tight against his chest. And he would tell her that he understood exactly what she meant before when she said hate was like love. Intimate and stupid, deeply personal. He understood now. 

All thanks to her.

This wasn’t like Saren or Saleon or any of the petty criminals he’d killed on Omega. His anger, as a rule, was fast, vindictive, full of calm and vicious calculation.  Tactical. This was messy, a fumbling violent tangle of emotion that was one thing, then another from one second to the next: passion, sorrow, fury, frustration. It was worry in his gut and a snarl locked in his throat.  He couldn’t stand the injuries on her face or the fact that they didn’t seem to register for her. She was hurt, dangerously so, but she was impossibly stubborn. So damn stubborn, so infuriatingly reckless. And all of this was her fault.

“I can’t deactivate the actual payload in the collar without triggering an automatic detonation with just a standard omni-tool,” she explained. “But I can disable the short-range transmission receiver by overheating it with junk data overload.”

Tempest was up and pacing somewhere in the periphery. Flutters of blue feathers danced in and out of the corner of his eye. 

“So the collars stay on but they can’t go off unless we physically try to take them off,” she surmised.

Shepard nodded. “Physically taking them off is trickier and it wouldn’t work to our advantage anyway. We need him to think the collars are still working, otherwise, he’ll anticipate an attack and we’ll miss our window of opportunity.”

“And the rest of the mercs?” 

A crooked smile pulled at the corner of Shepard’s mouth. “I’ll take care of them.”

His paralyzed stare bored into her. How ? How did she expect to take out 20 armed mercs when she could barely keep her balance? She was going to get herself killed. The idea rankled worse than his stomach wound, burrowing beneath his plates. For all her lectures about him taking stupid risks—the sheer hypocrisy. His sternum rose and fell sharply and he had to force his breaths to come slower before he hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness again. Shepard shot him a look of stark concern and brushed her fingers gently against his wrist. 

“I’ve made it through worse odds,” she said and the concern was gone so fast, it was almost as if he imagined it. Her smile was harder, forced, and her fingers dropped quickly from his hand. He craved the contact as much as he despised her for thinking he needed or wanted her reassurance at this point. Why should he trust her? She’d done nothing but lie to him since she got back to the station. 

Tempest said nothing but she didn’t go back to pacing either.  

“What?” Shepard demanded after the silence drew on too long.

“You’ve been lying this whole time, haven’t you? Having the OSD, the…radiotracer, even–even about my daughter. You were lying then too, weren’t you? She wasn’t ever really in danger.”

Shepard’s face went carefully blank. Brusquely, she said, “No. She wasn’t.”

A muffled shriek of rage pierced through the storage closet, swallowed up into a ragged gasp and faint mutters of disbelief. “It was all a bluff, a fucking bluff –”

“I underestimated you. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need to resort to that.”

“Fuck you, Shepard. The worst part is that it didn’t occur to you,” Tempest snapped before crouching down beside her, reaching into her mouth and wrenching a molar free to hold it aloft between the three of them. It was a false tooth.

“It’s an antidote. Multi-species, made by the Collectors.”

“How did you–” Shepard shook her head and changed tack. “How long will it take?”

“An hour, maybe more given his build.”

Shepard nodded and Tempest looked between them with eyes that saw too much and understood too well. Finally, they settled on Garrus, welling with regret.

“I don’t know if you’re the real Jaxum Borlin or not but you seemed…there’s not that many people here who will help without asking for something in return. It’s just…I was desperate–”

“Don’t,” Shepard cut in, scathing. “We both know you’re only giving him the antidote to settle up with me because you feel guilty so spare us all the preamble and just fucking do it.”

Shooting Shepard a look of open loathing, Tempest complied, using her own teeth to delicately crack the false tooth shell before shoving the bits inside his mouth. It was sweet, like candy coating, then astringent and bitter. Garrus swallowed automatically, the bitterness lingering on his tongue and tasting like the betrayal he didn’t have the capacity to parse out when the whole of him was focused on Shepard.  

So she’d lied about the kid too. Maybe he should’ve known she wasn’t capable of it. But he didn’t know what she was capable of, he barely knew her well enough to know what was lie and what was truth. They were strangers, the sex never changed that. If he'd thought otherwise…the tangle in his chest tightened. Hadn’t she warned him from the very beginning not to trust her? If possible, he resented her for that truth more than all of the deceptions. 

“I didn’t even think it would work,” Tempest said. “I didn’t really believe the rumors about you. I thought it was all just an act.”

Fingers clicked away, Shepard not bothering to glance up as she responded, flatly. “Risky bet on your part, then.”

“You didn’t leave me any other choice.”

Shepard said nothing to that but her fingers stopped moving. Closing the omni-tool interface, she removed the device and carefully slid it back onto his wrist. Garrus tensed, feeling her touch like a brand, almost too much to endure. The rapid flick of her eyes away from his face said she noticed.

“When will he be back?” she asked.

Tempest bit down on her lip, expression hard, face falling down towards the arms she’d folded across her midsection. “Soon. He’ll want to see if you’re telling the truth. In private. He knows audiences can produce bravado during an interrogation. He’ll want you alone and vulnerable.”

Shepard looked as if she’d expected as much.

“You said an hour?” she asked, eyes refusing to look at Garrus. The knot in his chest wrapped around his stomach and squeezed viciously. She–

With a sharp laugh, Tempest glared up at her. “You can’t—whatever you’re thinking he’ll do, it’ll be worse.”

“We try and make a stand here, the mercs shoot us through the door before we can make our escape. The only chance we have is if I draw out the interrogation until the paralytic wears off. I'll kill him, the guards will be distracted. Then, you two can get out.”

Tempest shook her head furiously. “You won’t last an hour. I know him, I know what he’s capable of. You obviously don’t.”

Shepard squared her shoulders and set her jaw. Everything about her radiated the demand for absolute compliance in the face of her overwhelming will. She looked like a military poster: noble lines and latent strength. “It’s the only real way out of this so I have no choice and neither do you. It’s not up for debate.”

With a disgusted noise, Tempest stood and stormed off to the far corner of the closet, outside of his periphery.

Shepard swayed, and reached out blindly to steady herself against his arm but stopped, her hand wavering centimeters away. Gold-flecked eyes flashed up to meet his.

Their ragged breathing filled the quiet, the rise and fall of his chest less strained as the antidote’s effects began to set in. Garrus blinked, wondering why it hurt to look at her—if it was resentment or something else that seared every detail into his retinas. She looked rough, all the scrapes and cuts, eye pigment smeared, mouth bloody. Her hair was…different again, short as it was before and missing the hat and its nest of netting. Damp copper whorls plastered messily over her forehead and cheeks, needing to be swept away with a careful hand. Worst of all, the freckles were back, a haphazard scatter over the bridge of her nose. Impossibly charming, despite everything.

More than anything, he wanted to sweep his thumb across them and even more, he wanted not to want that. He wanted anger and condemnation: uncomplicated.

“I thought you’d try to talk me out of it,” Shepard said, voice low and just between them. Her breath skimmed over his mouthplates. “And I thought I would listen.”

His fingers twitched, desperate to reach for her—grab her and pin her down for a knock-down all-out fight. Or something else. Or both.

If it was an apology, it was a piss poor one but as a goodbye, it was even worse. He tasted blood on his tongue, the pain informing him that he’d bit down on it. Would he have agreed with her plan to take a civilian hostage? He didn’t even know. Before Alenko, when he was the C-Sec officer chasing Saleon, the answer to risk civilian lives was an obvious one. But then came Commander Alenko. Only weeks ago, he'd sworn that Archangel and his team wouldn't risk civilian casualties. 

But now, the stakes were so high. And hadn't he told her, just hours ago, that the ends justified the means? That taking out someone like Harga would be doing 'a whole lot more good than bad'? Wasn't he still a turian? No cost too high, no sacrifice too great? Now, more than ever, Alenko's moral code was a distant thing from a distant place. Here, at the edge of the universe, it felt more and more out of his reach.

“Maybe I was more afraid that you wouldn’t,” she added. “I think that would’ve been worse somehow.”

No, he wanted to snarl. Worse was lying to him. Worse was running an operation with him and his men, then putting them all at risk by keeping them in the dark while she jeopardized the entire thing. Worse was treating him like a wayward idealist who’d foolishly stumbled onto the station, someone who needed protection instead of trust. Worse was telling him this when he couldn’t do anything to help. She was the wayward idealist, anyone could see that. Why couldn’t she? 

“Shepard–” he ground out, a halting whisper.

The door slammed open, light spilling into the room. Hands grabbed her and he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but twitch his fingers as the mercs pulled her from the room.

Chapter Text

His left arm below the elbow was done for. Sidonis knew it… and the way Red was looking at him, she knew it too.

“Just get it over with,” he grunted.

In Council space, they’d grow him a new one in months, but this was Omega and the clinic doctors didn’t have vats of protein slurries, acellular grafts, and stem cells. So it wasn’t just done for, it was done for—for good. He tried to tell himself he didn’t mind. Wasn’t his dominant hand, even.

Red hesitated, not moving her hands from the strips of fabric she’d twisted around his elbow into a makeshift tourniquet. She had to keep it cinched tight, but her fingers kept slipping. Too much blood. “They might save it if we get you to a clinic.”

Sidonis clenched his teeth, thumping the side of his fringe against the fake leather of the skycar’s backseat. Maybe. But that would take time they didn’t have. He shook his head. 

“Not worth the risk. There’s barely–” a rasping cough shook through him and by the time it subsided, his breath was in blood-smeared tatters. “Barely… anything left to save.”

Butler glanced back from the passenger seat with wide, skittering eyes, shading his gape-mouthed expression with the back of his hand. For him, violence was still a novelty, something that could shock and disgust: just more proof he wasn’t cut out for this place. But Sidonis couldn’t summon up his usual irritation over that fact with the whole car reeking of slaughter. 

It was an ugly sight, even he had to admit. Below the shattered elbow joint and above his wrist, there wasn’t even a recognizable limb anymore, just a mess of jagged bone and glistening blue strung along exposed tendons. Red’s tourniquet stopped him from bleeding out when they’d escaped the roof, but he was still losing too much blood. Something had to be done. Now.

“We don’t have the time,” he told her, and she nodded.

“Hold this,” she instructed, grabbing his good hand and looping his fingers around the bloody fabric for him. His hand was trembling, but she made no comment, just squeezed tighter. Reassuring.

What the hell was wrong with him? It didn’t even hurt anymore thanks to the three packets of topical medi-gel applied to the frayed white nerve jutting from the shards of bone. And… and given the choice between his arm and Garrus, he’d pick Garrus every time. Dominant, non-dominant, it didn’t matter with that tracker pinging deep in the maze of Omega’s unmapped tunnels.

It’s just that… he still kept trying to move his left hand—clench it, wave it, touch his fingertips together—and every time: absence, a stair missing beneath his feet over and over. Each time it happened, his stomach dropped, raw panic clawing at the back of his throat.

Fucking pathetic. He was pathetic. Part of him was glad Garrus wasn’t there to see this and part of him wished his fingers were the ones clasped over his own, steady and strong, as the light of the fabricating omni-blade filled the dim of the skycar. 

A faint sound escaped him at the thought, a groan of distress in the gust of a wheeze. His breath was coming fast and shallow, misting coppery bitterness over his mouthplates. 

“This won’t take long,” she said.

He nodded, eyes fixed on the omni-blade. It was smaller, about the length of a finger, and shaped like a scalpel—some custom configuration he’d seen before with the body snatchers, good for precision slicing. But she was no washed-up doctor on gang payroll, hacking up unsuspecting marks for Sand or an extension on her gambling debt. 

“You’ve done this before.”

“Combat medical training. Cabals are small units; we all had to double up on combat and non-combat roles to maximize efficiency. I was medic and demo.”

A pause hung at the end of the sentence as if she expected him to ask what got her from her elite military unit to the blood-soaked backseat of a skycar parked in an Omega back alley.

“I won’t ask.”

The ‘what happened’ stories were never good. Unless you were a witless colonial rube like Butler with less sense than a vorcha.

“It’s not much of a story, anyway.”

There was a sound, a crackling sizzle, and the charred smell of burning flesh. Sidonis flinched, nasal plates flaring, jaw snapping shut audibly. The sizzling sound stopped immediately.

“What about you? How’d you meet up with your Palaven friend?” she asked him. “I bet that’s a better story.”

The tension immediately bled out of his mandibles and he unclenched his creaking jaw.

 “... he saved my life,” he said. The sizzling resumed as he spoke, but as he focused on the memory, he almost couldn’t even hear it. “I used to courier and that kind of target sticks. Was only a matter of time before I got cornered by mercs. Figured I was done for… and then he showed up.”

“You didn’t seem like the kind who trusts savior types,” she remarked conversationally.

“I’m not. He was different. He didn’t even want anything in return. Like–”

Like her. Earnest and forthright, driven by purpose, willing to stick their necks out for a stranger just because it was the right thing to do. As if that were a normal thing, to have goals beyond just survival. 

“That’s why you’re so determined to find him.”

A jerk and suddenly, through the anesthetic numbness of the medi-gel, his arm felt different. Lighter . 

“I owe him that much,” Sidonis said urgently, sub-vocals so weighty they reverberated in his chest. He’d never been so sure of anything before. Surety was something Garrus had, not him. “He might not even need our help, but I won’t… I won’t just abandon him.” 

He met her eyes and saw the same emotion there. Only he knew who it was for and scowled. Garrus was capable, but he wasn’t without flaws. Trusting people like Shepard was one of them. And that was why they couldn’t wait. That was why he couldn’t just leave him there in the tunnels with her.

“I’ve got it!” Butler shouted from the front seat. “Had to pay a fortune for access to a server and a custom VI with higher processing power for the decryption–batarians know exactly when they’ve got you over a barrel. And then I had to go through and re-encrypt everything before Vortash–”

A fresh waft of medi-gel cut through the smell of blood and cautery. Sidonis glanced down just in time to see her fold a dangling flap of ragged skin and osteoderm over the freshly gelled and still smoldering wound bed before wrapping the stump in what remained of her shirt. Her movements were decisive. Professional. He barely noticed the subtle motion of her tucking his disembodied forearm out of view.

Butler was still talking, already on his fifth tangent undoubtedly, “--the security upgrades in the latest patch meant–”

“Butler,” Sidonis interrupted sharply. “What’s on the OSD?”

“Oh! Vid files. Naturally.” He pulled one up. A gravely turian voice filled the cab, detailing the ingress points of Afterlife.

“Exactly what we hoped,” Red said. “Finally, something’s going right.”

Butler nodded, visibly on the brink of proposing a monumentally stupid idea.

“Well? What are we waiting for? We have the blackmail, now we can go after Derius.”

Sidonis sneered. Spirits, it’s like he had a special talent for terrible decisions. “If you’re in such a hurry to die, just jump out of the skycar.”

Butler just looked confused. “It’s parked?”

Of all the–Sidonis shook his head in furious disbelief. “ Obviously, I didn’t mean right now.”

Red interjected with a less scathing response and explained. “They’re in the tunnels, Derius’s turf. Even if we survived, just the three of us wouldn’t be able to get through all his men in time. Luckily, comms are a crapshot down there with all the interference, but we still need to hit hard and fast so he doesn’t get the chance to move or kill them.”

“We’d need the numbers for that,” Sidonis said. “Which we don’t have. Our only option is to open with negotiation.”

Derius was cagey, but he was also arrogant. Odds were he wouldn’t see one of them as a threat. Sidonis could go in under the pretense of negotiation and then–

“I know where we can get the numbers,” she said grimly, buttoning her jacket over the jut of her bare sternum, too distracted to notice the smears of blue left by her fingertips on the pricy-looking fabric. “I just… have to make a vidcall.”

Garrus flexed his fists, corded tendons flickering in contractions wriggling beneath his skin. Every movement was agonizing: an onslaught of incomprehensible sensory input, asynchronous flares rippling and shifting through his flesh. His fingers buzzed. Then turned cold—so cold they felt like they could snap off into cryo-misted shards. Followed by blistering heat so intense, any second it would peel back his skin over the charred nubs of his knucklebones.

Basically, everything hurt. His talons hurt. And what didn’t hurt, itched, tingled, and twinged.

He pushed through it. Relentlessly. Ruthlessly. Welcoming the punishment, the oppressive reminder of the cost of his naivete. 

Maybe not the only cost he couldn’t help reminding himself. Sidonis and Butler…they could be dead, captured, or worse. On Omega, there’s always worse . 

“I’m surprised you can move at all right now,” Tempest said from the dark periphery of the closet. He could feel her eyes on him, even if he couldn’t see them. “I’m told it’s excruciating at first.”

“You said… an hour.”

Talking was getting easier but not by much. Every word was just as excruciating as moving his hand had been so he was forced to resort to sentence fragments.

“It’s only been thirty minutes, tops,” she said.

Garrus croaked out a growl of frustration from his straining vocal cords, forcing his fists open faster. His hand spasmed, phantom pressure slamming into his nerve endings, an invisible weight pulverizing flesh and bone. But then it was gone, an icy itch crawling over his osteoderm. 

“That’s… plenty of time,” he managed.

For someone like Derius, it was more than enough time. Shepard could’ve already cracked, her entire charade revealed, Harga already making his escape. Or worse, she could be…

A blur of rustling blue and glittering ropes of gemstones obscured his vision as Tempest knelt in front of him to look him in the eye, face hard and tight with anger. 

“We don’t owe her anything,” she told him. “I gave her the antidote… we’re square.”

Her voice did something strange, faltering lower and quieter, and her face followed until she was speaking to the floor.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you and her–”

Garrus felt his face do something strange and involuntary: a wince caught in a snarl. 

“--but the fact that she accepted it on your behalf? That tells me she had to settle up a score with you too.” Her gaze swept up over him as she paused. “And you know, somehow, I get the feeling that you still got the raw end of that deal.”

A gloved thumb reached out to brush against his cheekbone and she added softly, big eyes so sad and sincere, he half expected her to stab him in the gut again. “So some more advice: just cut your losses and walk away.”

He jerked his head away angrily, a sharp shake to dislodge her fingertips. 

Shepard lied to him. Betrayed him. Put him in danger and, even worse, put his men in danger. She’d proved he’d been wrong all this time—wrong to think Alenko’s way would work for him. To think gut impressions, high-minded speeches, and noble causes were enough to fight off the oppressive corrosiveness that was Omega. He hated her for that most of all, for ripping away the one thing he had left, the one thing that had brought him into the darkest edges of the galaxy.

He’d just wanted something to go right, something untarnished of his own in a world suddenly devoid of the unbounded optimism of the Normandy: hope for a place beyond grim acceptance and business-as-usual apathy. 

But it had all gone sideways. Nothing Shepard did could change that, not really, not now, even if he survived this with just a healed-over gut wound for her trouble. Even if Sidonis and Butler had walked out of this without a scratch—he’d still been wrong about trusting her in the first place, hadn’t he?  She hadn’t just betrayed him. Then, she’d risked their mission. The turian in him said that was worse. 

“No,” he bit out. Clumsy, ineloquent, the word was harsh on his tongue. 

Tempest was watching him closely, eyebrows furrowing up more and more as the silence drew on. 

“You should hate her for getting you into this mess,” she snapped.

He did.

But that didn’t matter. Spirits, he wished it did. He wished it still felt like hate, the way it did when Shepard was there within arm’s reach. Now that he couldn’t see her, all his fury receded into a stark, suffocating weight in his chest that didn’t feel like hate at all. Instead, it just felt like fear.

“Is it Harga then? You’re after him too, is that it? Because my advice on that count is the same. The only reason he sticks around for anything is profit. So unless Shepard had billions of credits stuffed down that dress, he’s already off station. If you try to go after him, you’d be risking your life for nothing.”

He knew that. He did. It didn’t matter either.

“Fine,” Tempest said. “You know, I could just leave you here. I don’t… I don’t owe you anything either.”

The only response he had for that was his darkest, flattest look. She bristled.

“Look, I said I was sorry. Besides, I could’ve killed you right off, and I didn’t.”

“Remind me… to thank you if I… get out of this alive,” he said. “Flowers maybe?”

The prickly expression transmuted into fury, her eyes flashing and swimming with unshed tears, her mouth twisting tight. “Fuck you. What the hell do you want from me? I don’t even know you and goddamnit , I’m so close! So close to getting out of this place for good and holding my daughter. I don’t… I don’t owe either of you anything more.”

“Then… go.”

A laugh, high with a thin edge, wobbled out of her as the tears finally fell. She swiped them away angrily. “Yeah… yeah, I’ll go.”

She didn’t move.

“If I go, neither of you have a chance,” she said, pressing her hands up to her mouth to gnaw a ragged crescent of fingernail free. “This place is impossible to navigate and you don’t know where he’s taken her.”

Garrus made a noncommittal sound, not willing to admit she was probably right. Knowing the layout would be a critical advantage. Without it, what little chance he stood was likely shot.

“And…I…”

Watery eyes studied the floor as she ripped another fingernail free with her teeth. 

“I’m the one who’s thought about killing him every day for the last eight years. I should be the one to do it. It’s my fucking pound of flesh, not Shepard’s.”

Hard determination flashing over her face, she met his eyes, then asked, “Can you stand?”

He rolled his ankles, testing, shutting his eyes briefly against the shocks juddering up his spine. 

“I’ll make it work.”

She nodded. “Good. Then all we need are weapons.”

Derius’s men hadn’t found his omni-tool, and they hadn’t found the pistol either. In all the chaos, it was still tucked in the low-profile holster concealed by his jacket. With wavering, unsteady motions, he pulled it free.

“Like this?”

The stone was smooth in her palm, a cool, slick oval worn by the gentle current of the reservoir. She threw, wrist flicking at the end of the motion, her bare arm cutting through the breeze rustling the copse of young aspens crowding the shoreline.

One. Two. Three. Four. The last skip hit the simmering reflection of the afternoon sun on the water, too bright to look at straight on. Shepard blinked, eyes watering, pained by the brilliance. When she opened them again, the ripples were already lost to the gentle chop, but she could’ve sworn—it looked like five.

“You see that?!”

No. He wasn’t looking at her or the water. He was sulking, his back facing both her and the water. 

“I’m going to win,” she taunted in sing-song, but he didn’t answer. He was still ignoring her.

She frowned and picked up another stone, testing the weight between her fingertips.

“What was I supposed to do? They keep messing with you. If I don’t stop them, who will?”

Not the school, that was for damn sure. Not their mom with her constant late-night lab hours and distracted exhaustion. Not their dad, just as overworked and just as exhausted.

“I don’t want to. I want to go home,” her brother said, petulant.

Home was the last place she wanted to go, thanks to the suspension notice on her datapad. She’d been doing so well since the last one, the ‘ last warning ’ one. But it turns out it doesn’t matter how many engineering and tech fair ribbons you bring home if you sucker punch a 12-year-old. And… well, maybe she could see that logic in that, even if she still maintained that the 12-year-old had it coming. 

A snap of her wrist and the rock flew out, then sank beneath the water on impact. Too heavy.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was starting up again?” she demanded, suddenly angry with him for keeping it from her. As if her response was the problem. “I told you before to come to me.”

It was the same little shits as the past few years before. And the years before that. She swiped at her eye, still stinging from before, but only made it worse.

People always liked to say violence wasn’t the answer, but the results spoke for themselves. His bullies started back up because they thought they could get away with it again. Why wouldn’t they? She hadn’t been around lately to set them straight.

Another stone. No skips. She was too angry; her throw too clumsy.

He just shook his head, still refusing to turn around and look at her, and mumbled something inaudible over the sound of the water.

“I’m supposed to protect you,” she said. “I’m your big sister. That’s my job, that’s the deal.”

She looked out over the reservoir; the sunlight striking the water’s surface like a spotlight on hot metal. Her eye was really bothering her now. She must’ve gotten something in it. The brightness pierced through her retinas, everything flashing blinding white.

“You can’t,” he was saying, voice low, finally turning towards her.

But she could barely see him, the outline of him shadowing against the white. Grief lurched through her, gnawed through with guilt. She was supposed to protect him… and then she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t get to him in time–it was her fault. All her fault.

She couldn’t see his face because she didn’t… she didn’t even remember it anymore. Not clearly. Time bleached away all the details, and she had no physical momentos. All she had was memory and memory fades. Her fault. A half-swallowed sob twisted out of her. Even his voice, when she really thought about it, didn’t sound right. He’d just been a kid. There was no way his voice was so rough, so distorted, and gravelly. 

“You can’t move just yet,” he said. “Or you’ll injure yourself”

Everything was so bright, even the shadowed outline of her dead brother was burning away into nothing. Her eye hurt and wetness trickled from the corner of her lashes to trace over her temple.

“What…” she tried to say.

“I’ve never liked the collars, you know. Well, they’re useful enough I suppose with limited application. A last resort. A final punishment. The chips are an improvement.”

Another voice, distinctly batarian, responded tersely, “Pain is an effective tool.”

Adrenaline surging, she howled in fury, wrenching herself up. A cacophony of metallic clanging drowned out the voice and something slammed into her side, unknown loose objects pelting over her face and shoulder. Everything was blown out by brightness but she could see shadows looming, ill-defined outlines ringing around her like bare, malformed aspens. She scuttled away, palms tethered together and slapping hard against the floor until something flat and firm thumped against her back. A wall.

Laughter. Sickeningly fond.

She blinked her tearing eyes, willing definition into the shadowy form looming just out of reach, fingertips brushing over the back of her neck. 

Just the old scar. Nothing–no chip. 

“Not there,” Derius said. “I already know you are more than capable of removing the subdermal cervical chips. Harga’s client is paying a premium for us to keep you in one piece, but since I know you won’t go willingly, we had to get… creative.”

Garrus cursed, slumping against the stack of boxes behind the door as his legs buckled again under his weight. 

“We can wait–”

“No,” he said, gripping the pistol tighter. “It’s… already  been too long.”

She looked him over with obvious skepticism before wrapping the glass bottle of wine in her hands in his discarded jacket and setting the bundle on the ground. Taking off one of her sharply heeled shoes, she brought the stilettoed point down. A muffled crack and pale liquid seeped from the fabric, spreading out into a puddle on the floor. Unwrapping the bundle, she delicately picked through the glittering shards.

“The merc guarding the door will expect a bribe. He won’t suspect anything.”

She picked out the neck of the bottle, jagged edges catching the low light. “Derius thinks he’s the smartest man on Omega, but the idea of upping the pay scale will never occur to him. All the Talons turn on a dime. As soon as I lure him in, you hit him in the back of the head with the gun. If that doesn’t do it, I’ll… I’ll finish the job with this—quiet, so we don’t draw any attention. And then we’ll go with your plan.”

Garrus winced. “It isn’t so much a plan as…”

“Oh my God,” she hissed. “You’re just going to wing it?”

He paused. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I’m an idiot for agreeing to help you,” she snapped. “It means you’re going to get me killed!”

“I know what I’m doing,” he assured her. “We’re trapped in a room and going out blind with an unknown number of combatants. There’s no choice but to improvise.”

“And you’re…good at that?” 

His mandibles flared into a faint smile despite himself. It was just nice to be sure of something again. “I’m pretty good at thinking on my feet when someone’s shooting at me.”

Tempest’s once-over didn’t seem to find his assertion particularly compelling but after a long silence, she sighed.

“That’s a weird thing to brag about, just so you know. I feel like you’re just saying a lot of people want to kill you.”

Well, that wouldn’t exactly be inaccurate either. Garrus shrugged, then asked, “Are you ready?”

She looked shaky and pale, nervous energy radiating off her frame. Gulping down a heavy breath, she nodded, not convincingly, then rapped her knuckles against the door.

“Hello?” she called out, voice squeaking and timid. She tried again, gaining volume and confidence. “Would you know anyone interested in a few thousand credits?”

The door hissed open, blue light spilling into the room. An armored turian stood in the frame, a strange weapon in his hands. Garrus could barely make out the details but… it didn’t even look metallic, the muzzle was almost… fleshy.

“Took you long enough,” the merc said as the door closed behind him. Idiot. “I–”

Garrus swung with all his strength, muscles screaming and on fire. A heavy, near-comical thunk of the pistol butt against the unplated side of the turian’s neck resounded. The merc reeled, completely uninjured, spinning to face him.

Only for Tempest to sink the jagged glass edges into the thin hide of his neck… too far back, missing the major vessels. Cursing, half frantic, she yanked it free and stabbed down again in one vicious, striking motion. This time, the glass came free, with a gout of blood spattering in pulses. The merc dropped his gun and reached up uselessly to stopper up the bleeding with his palms as he gasped in disbelief at the diminutive human woman still holding the bloodied and broken neck of the champagne bottle.

Garrus kicked the bizarre weapon out of reach just in case, but it wasn’t a risk. The merc was already slumping to the ground, unconscious.

Garrus was slumping too, half sinking back onto the ground and reaching for the weapon. Some kind of rifle, he guessed. No metal polymer… something organic.

A quick pat-down of the dead merc yielded two flashbang grenades and thermal clips. Apparently, the strange gun took them. 

“Can you handle a pistol?” he asked Tempest, who was staring down at the growing pool of blood spreading beneath the merc’s lifeless body, her face pale. Snatching her attention back to him, she chewed down on her lips and nodded.

“Of… of course.”

He nudged his chin towards the door and slid the pistol across the floor towards her. “Stay low. Don’t take risks. Once the flashbang goes off, get out and get to cover while they’re disoriented. I’ll stay back and pick them off before moving.”

“Yes–yes.” Her lip was bleeding from her chewing on it but her hands were steady and looked familiar enough with the pistol as she held it.

“Take his omni-tool–” he started, and she complied, slipping the housing free and sliding it onto her own wrist as Garrus struggled back to his feet. 

“Alright.”

The door lock flashed green, and the door opened. Garrus pressed his thumb over the flashbang detonator, waited half a second, and lobbed the grenade through the gap before taking cover. 

Light exploded around them, illuminating the interior of the room.

“Go!” he shouted, bracing his shoulder against the door frame to bolster his arm as he aimed.

Three combatants–all stumbling around and dazed–far less than he expected. His rifle roared to life, the recoil thumping hard against his shoulder. It took him a second to adjust to the weapon, another to adjust to the tremors pulsing through his arms after every burst. By the time he did, all three were down before they could get their bearings.

“This way,” Tempest said, darting out of cover–too fast. He cursed, clocking movement on her 9, his finger squeezing down on the oddly warm trigger of the rifle before the merc could fully clear the edge of the settee at the far end of the room. Shields flickering out, the merc rocked back, only for the next burst to take him down. 

Tempest ducked back into cover with a yelp as Garrus scanned the room, shuffling forward to slump clumsily against the back of the bar top. He blind-fired over the top, but outside of the chunk of plaster dislodging from the ceiling with a loud crack, there was no additional movement.

“Wait for my all clear before leaving cover,” he told her. “And stay in my line of sight.”

“R–right.”

Garrus paused. Something about this place was off, but they didn’t have time to wait, they couldn’t risk the reinforcements. He gave her the all-clear and she led him towards an off-shooting hallway at the far end of the room. Despite his slow, shambling gait, they made good time. He picked off the two mercs guarding the hall who’d been too engrossed in some urgent-sounding discussion to even notice they were there. 

Another hallway, the guard running in the opposite direction before Garrus took him down.

“There should be more,” Tempest whispered. “Derius wouldn’t… there should be more.”

Two more tunnels and not a single merc, but he could hear, distant and muffled, the sound of gunfire and shouting. Armored boots thumped through far-off corridors.

“Shepard?” he wondered, but Tempest shook her head as they drew closer to an intersection, leading them towards the corridor away from the sounds of battle. 

“That one leads to the surface entrance. She’s the other way, towards the dock and his private rooms. Unless… she managed to–”

Before she could finish her thought, he heard the crackle of a comm, a merc in commander armor bursting into view from a nearby branching corridor, shouting.

“There has to be more. Deploy the rest of the mechs! Do whatever it takes to keep them out!”

Finally seeing them, he skidded to a stop. Garrus lurched forward and shoved Tempest to the side, slamming his rifle butt into the man’s hands and sending his weapon flying. An overload took care of the shields, but before Garrus could do more, the turian shoved him back into the wall. Muscles spasming, Garrus went down, his grip on his own weapon loosening. 

A shot rang out—the pistol — and as the commander spun on Tempest, Garrus regained his grip. Pressing the muzzle of the rifle into the flexweaved gap between his armor plates, he squeezed the trigger.

Gore sprayed out across the wall and the turian slumped forward, already dead.

Legs shaking, nerves on fire, Garrus struggled to stand. Tempest reached out to help him, but he shook his head, nudging his mandible towards the dead commander’s visor, still hissing with static and distorted voices. She retrieved it and handed it over once he found his footing.

“We’ve got no chance! There’s too many. She’s–” a burst of static cut off the rest.

The inference was bad, something about the asteroid composition, he assumed, but if they were close to the surface, then maybe–

Garrus switched the headset mid-range frequency channel, syncing his omni-tool to the device and typing in the encryption key.

“Sidonis, Butler. Do you read me?”

Static.

He tried again, scanning the hallway for more mercs as Tempest shifted her weight nervously, looking around uneasily.

“We need to go–” she hissed. 

Another try, but it was no use. Pushing back the stab of fear, Garrus finally nodded and gestured for her to lead the way.

The prefab grey of the corridors gave way to bare rock strung with ventilation ductwork and lighting overhead.

“There won’t be many guards here,” Tempest said, voice low. “He only trusts a handful of his men this close to the dock and his personal quarters.”

Then she laughed. “Actually, trust is a bad word for it. They have to agree to get an intracranial killswitch implant first.”

“Then, we’re close?” Garrus asked.

“Yes, just–”

Static popped against his eardrum and he heard a voice, faint and garbled by interference.

“--do you read me?”

Sidonis.

And then he heard the screaming.

Pain, bursting bright against her eye socket. Pain, a raw shocked nerve explosion swallowing up her senses. Pain over and over. It overwhelmed her, swallowed her, drowned her, set her on fire. She was screaming; she was sobbing; she was writhing on the floor, gnashing her teeth, clawing at her eye. Nothing existed beyond it. It was a fixed point, a terminus without beginning or middle. Just this. Just pain. 

“Enough.”

It lasted all of three seconds.

She heard Derius’s disappointed sigh over her tapered-off scream and the shuddering gasps rushing in after it.

“Just a quick tutorial,” he said, drawing close now. He knelt to push away the hair that had fallen in front of her face. “In case she’d forgotten what it’s like.”

No, she blinked back the tears. There was no forgetting it. The batarians were ingenious, ruthless bastards with a knack for efficiency. People thought they were brutal, but their cruelty was more about economy than actual brutality. It was like Harga said: pain was an effective tool. The chips provided that pain without physically damaging valuable merchandise. They were ridiculously simple in design compared to the collars: two-circuits wired together to deliver a shock on short-range frequency command. All you had to do was implant that shock close enough to a nerve and let physiology do the rest. 

It was agony. Beyond agony. Worse than the concussion, worse than her jaw, worse than any torture anyone, even Derius, could conceive. 

Just the thought of another shock made her weep uncontrollably, panic tight in her chest, her ribcage rising and falling in rapid jerks. 

Derius smiled softly, carding his hands through her hair. It was almost worse, this tenderness and the excruciating relief that came with it. 

Somewhere in the room, beyond where she could see, Harga simply stated, “That placement location permanently damages the optic nerve every time it’s activated. If she loses her vision and they reduce the bounty, I’m taking it out of your hide Derius.”

He delivered the threat with a bored, business-as-usual tone: a professional dealing wearily with career banality. His disinterest only made him more vile.

“Yes,” Derius said, withdrawing his hand. “I’d recommend behaving, Shepard. For your own sake.”

She couldn’t tell if they were telling the truth or not. Her eyelid was swollen shut, scraped raw from her own jagged fingernails, and watering uncontrollably even as she managed to stop weeping, her mind racing to catch up. 

“Why do you always insist on speaking to the cargo?” Harga asked as Derius studied her.

“For my amusement, mostly. You know, humans have a number of phrases and sayings dedicated to the concept of enjoying your work.”

Harga made a dismissive sound. “Of course they do.” 

“It’s a shame, really,” Derius said, ducking closer, voice pitched low just so she could hear. “I was looking forward to getting the truth out of you. Taking my time. But it seems you’ve captured their interest… not a good thing, I can assure you.”

They being the Collectors. Harga’s new client.

“Work is work,” Harga rebuked. “Amusement is better left for later.”

The door on the other side of the room opened. A merc rushed in, eyes wide and frantic.

“Derius! We’ve got trouble at the tunnel entrance. It’s–”

She heard the subtle click of clattering metal and saw the canister of the flashbang rolling past the merc, across the floor towards her. Pressing her face against the glossy panels on instinct, she shielded her good eye. The grenade detonated with a piercing whine, white blooming across the backs of her eyelids. 

Shepard didn’t wait. Blindly, she twisted, legs sweeping out and catching Derius at the ankles. She heard him go down beside her and before he could move, she was on top of him, looping the chain of the handcuffs around his neck and pulling back with all her strength. 

Gunfire pattered on in the background, but she ignored it, focused only on Derius’s choking rasps as he thrashed wildly, desperately trying to throw her off before he lost consciousness. He was too strong, had 50 kg of body mass on her and turians had thicker tracheas–almost impossible to crush without real force. She gave the chain some slack, loosening her grip. Sure enough, able to breathe again, Derius surged to his knees, attempting to leverage himself up off the ground and out from beneath the pin. She let him, twisting away from his swiping talons, finding her footing as he found his. But as he stood with an infuriated roar, she let herself fall. The metal snapped taut across his neck, the sudden addition of her entire body weight enough to collapse his reinforced trachea. 

The roar cut off mid-note, not even a gasp to take its place, just the gargle of blood and spittle and the grind of fractured cartilage. 

Blood misted over her hair as the sound of the discharging pistol registered. Derius pitched forward suddenly, the motion throwing Shepard forward to collide into the wreckage of the surgical table in the middle of the room. 

She blinked up, stunned from the impact, and saw Norah in her absurd feathered costume–looking much worse for wear and missing almost all the ostrich plumes–standing over Derius’s corpse, holding an M-3 Predator. She was peering down at him blankly, as if shocked. As if disbelieving.

“Shepard.”

That voice... she hadn’t said goodbye, back in Derius’s liquor closet, not really. But there was no reason to think she’d ever hear his voice again. No reason to see him there, crouching beside her in the shadow of the upturned table and looking at her with those blue, blue eyes. 

Why? Why was he there? 

She reached out, half sure he wasn’t actually real, and brushed her shaking fingertips over a tense mandible. He was bright as ever, silver and shining and the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. A heavy sob punched against her ribcage, taking her breath with it. 

“Harga,” she found the strength to ask. “You killed him?”

Confusion and alarm filtered through his expression. Her stomach dropped.

“Harga? He’s here?”

It hit her without warning. She screamed, pain exploding through her optic nerve, fissuring through her skull. The floor slammed into her back as she thrashed, the impact barely registering even as all the air rushed out of her lungs on impact. Someone grabbed her, arms bracketing around her and palming the back of her head before she could knock herself unconscious.

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped. When she blinked open her good eye, a shotgun muzzle rimmed with incendiary round char filled her view, wafting residual smoke and heat across her face. 

“Don’t move.”

Chapter Text

Shepard’s screams and the roar of the shotgun were still ringing in his ears as Harga shuffled forward, one hand squeezing around Tempest’s throat and the other pressing the shotgun muzzle against Shepard’s head.

“Don’t move,” he told her over Tempest’s choking gasps. Two of his four eyes darted towards Garrus’s fingertips subtly inching towards the rifle propped against his leg.

“You too, turian.”

Garrus froze, mind racing, and before he could second-guess the impulse, a heavy boot kicked the gun away. 

Harga stared down at them dispassionately, cold deliberation in all four of his eyes as Tempest struggled uselessly against his grip, her eyes wide with panic, the whites spotting over with red. Shepard was gasping too, her chest heaving with small, tortured sounds.

In his gut, Garrus was sure of one thing: Harga was deciding which of them to kill first. And it wouldn’t take long. He didn’t seem like the indecisive type.

Burrowing his three fingers into Shepard’s bare arm, Garrus pulled her tighter against his chest, a subtle motion that did nothing to dislodge the shotgun digging into her brow. The gun was hot, still smoking from the incendiary rounds, and the smell of cauterizing flesh hung in the air.

If he went for the gun…

Tempest’s face began turning a shocking pink, her mouth wrenched into a silent howl, nails prying at Harga’s fingers.

If he tried to knock the gun away, he’d only buy them seconds before Harga shot the both of them, point blank. Maybe—

Shepard grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard, a silent signal to stand down. Garrus swallowed thickly, chest tightening. What was she planning? 

“A… counteroffer” she rasped, too quiet for anyone but Garrus to hear. “I said I have a counteroffer,” she repeated louder, between heavy breaths. 

That got Harga’s attention. Fingers loosened fractionally around Tempest’s neck and her explosive inhale ruptured through the silence. 

Top eyebrows raised, his head slanting to the right in mocking derision. “You think you can outbid them for your own hide, human?”

His contempt didn’t cow her. Nothing in her expression indicated she was negotiating with a man holding a gun to her head. No. If anything, she seemed…excited. Beneath her calm, something voracious stirred, coiling tension in her frame, and her eye was burning with a febrile intensity that sent a barb of further unease through his chest.

“My ship. The Imparataesa.”

Harga’s head tipped forward, signalling his curiosity. “You want to barter your ship for your life?”

“ Three lives for one turian frigate. She might be getting on in years but she’s still one of the best ships in the Terminus. And she doesn’t need me to keep disrupting Market operations. It’s good credits picking up Alliance bounties. A drive core like hers makes it easy.”

A rumbling hum in Harga’s throat offered agreement. 

“That core, all her turian military tech… all their technology… what kind of price would that sort of thing fetch you back on Khar’shan?”

Garrus jolted, alarm hissing out of his clenched teeth. Her fingers clamped down even tighter, the flicker of her gaze asking a silent question she had no right to ask. He didn’t know what she was planning, but he knew it was reckless. Just like he knew he shouldn’t fully trust her the way she was asking him to. Not blindly. Not anymore. 

His eyes found Tempest’s bloodshot stare. There was no blind trust there either, only grim acceptance. She knew, just as he did, that they had little choice in the matter.

Harga was laughing. “So your intention is to stall, human? You think I have time to wait for your ship?”

“She’s in system. Close, but out of mid-range. I’ll need access to a long-range comm array. Once I get that, she’s all yours. All her major processes are fully VI automated. I’m the only one with access. It’d just be a matter of transmitting my authorization.”

The Imparataesa, formerly the THS Halikum, was over 20 years old and built around the time the Hierarchy began implementing extensive VI support to minimize crew demands aboard their military crafts. Through the VI, Shepard could lock the pilot out and have the VI autopilot take the ship wherever she wanted in-system. She could have the VI vent the air and kill everyone on board, or overload the core and blow up the ship.

“A long-range comm…” Harga’s brows flattened. 

“Disable their collars and let them go. Me and you go to the docking bays—”

At the second demand, her voice shook with strain, desperation twisting through her face. Garrus could see it was a show. She wanted Harga to think she’d shown her hand, wanted him to think her plan was to lure him out into the open.

Harga blinked a set of eyelids. Without warning, he released Tempest, shoving her to the ground as barking coughs shook through her. Two of his eyes narrowed on her.

“The turian’s omni-tool. Retrieve it.”

Wheezing, shaking, she complied. Too weak to stand, she dragged herself towards Derius’s corpse and began wresting the omni-tool housing from his arm.

Watching Tempest, he said. “Humans are untrustworthy. I’d be foolish to dispose of my insurance by disabling the collars.”

“The chip is plenty insurance.” Shepard insisted and this time, the tremor in her voice was genuine.

But Harga wasn’t listening to her. He was snatching the omni-tool from Tempest after she’d pried it off Derius’s arm and turned to hand it over. With Harga’s attention drifting from her, she slowly, almost imperceptibly, shifted herself further away.

“The rest of your offer will be considered,” he said, head tilting back to the right. A frown pulled at his mouth as he drew back. One foot, then the other, shotgun muzzle lifting away but still pointed, unwavering, at Shepard’s head.

“With a caveat.”

As he pulled up the omni-tool interface, Tempest scrambled to her feet to make a run for the door. Shepard cried out in alarm, lunging for Harga. He stepped back smoothly, out of her reach, taking the time to steady his aim.

The shotgun cracked out, a deafening blast, incendiary rounds catching and bursting into flame. Heat fanned over them as the air ignited. Tempest screamed, crumpling to the ground and flailing as the cinders and shrapnel shredded through her gown and flesh.

Shepard herself was contorting in pain, momentum propelling her back into Garrus. His hands frantically batted at her — but there was no flame. She hadn’t been hit at all. 

“As I said. Untrustworthy.” 

Four emotionless eyes flicked over towards Tempest. The flames were already guttering out, trailing wisps of smoke and faint embers. She was barely moving, too injured to do anything but sob out a soft moan. 

“This one can stay and live out what remains of the life you’ve bartered for.”

He said it as if it hadn’t been his plan to kill off one of them to begin with. Three vs. one. Those were risky odds, even if the three weren’t armed. Despite being cuffed and apparently control chipped, Shepard was dangerous and Derius’s corpse was proof Tempest shouldn’t be underestimated. Harga’s earlier deliberation hadn’t been about who to kill first so much as who to bring along as a hostage to keep Shepard in line.

“Get up,” the batarian barked.

Shepard’s good eye remained on Tempest, stricken. He knew what she was thinking: left alone, she would die. Taking the shotgun blast so close… probably within minutes. Her pained moan tapered off into silence, the last of the guttering flames dwindling into puffs of oily black smoke.

“I don’t repeat orders, human” Harga warned.

Carefully, Garrus leveraged Shepard away from him, getting to his knees as she got to hers. The shotgun traced his movements, an impatient gesture ordering him to maintain his distance from her.

Another crackle of interference burst from the visor earpiece, Sidonis’s voice faint through the static. They were somewhere in the tunnels, in the thick of all the fighting near the entrance, he was sure. If he could just… buy some time.

“Visor off,” Harga snarled as Shepard stood. “Omni-tool too.”

Garrus complied, drawing out the motions in his bid for time. Shepard had no idea they had reinforcements en route, but he got the uneasy sense that her knowing wouldn’t change anything. Even as her eye lingered on Tempest’s unmoving body, it still had that look—the hectic, hard-bitten gleam of a starving person eying a feast. Wasn’t a look that would reassure anyone.

A metallic tray perched on the edge of the overturned examination table behind him. As Garrus tossed away the visor with one hand, the other reached for it, shifting his body to shield the motion from Harga, whose attention had returned to Shepard. 

As his fingers curled around the edge, Shepard brushed against the far side of the table, feigning a stumble, setting off a clatter.

“Hey–” Harga started, grip visibly tightening on his weapon. “Away from the table, towards the door.”

Garrus shot her a venomous scowl, but she refused to look at him.

“Are you taking us to Derius’s private dock?” she asked. “None of his shuttles have any communication arrays. He had them all removed, VIs are pre-programed, and only pick up dead drops.”

“I know what I’m doing. I don’t need to explain anything to you, human,” Harga snapped. 

Garrus understood what her question meant. She wasn't trying to get anything out of Harga. That had been for his benefit: a hint.

“Move, turian.” 

One last glance towards Tempest—no movement. No sign of life. There was nothing he could do. Probably already too late for anything to be done. His gut wound ached. She looked too small, curled up on the floor, arms wrapped tight over her stomach. Young. Fragile. Broken.

She’d been right, he realized. He’d gotten her killed.

As they emerged out into the rough-hewn corridor, Garrus first, Shepard behind and Harga pulling up the rear with his shotgun and omni-tool out and ready, Garrus forced his shaken focus onto puzzling out Shepard’s plan.

Long-range communication arrays capable of transmitting large packets of data required large antennae and a significant power source. Omega had several on the station by the docking bays and connected to the comm buoy network. All were under Aria’s control. Ships and shuttles were all fitted with long-range comm arrays to facilitate navigation. Only, if Derius’s private shuttles had no comm arrays, Harga needed another ship. 

Any other ship would do, but he wouldn’t risk taking them to the docking bays, especially not after Shepard suggested it. Clearly, she’d banked on that..  

Harga barked out impatient directions as Garrus fumbled forward. His limbs still unwieldy with the lingering effects of the paralytic, he stumbled, more than once, on the uneven outcroppings of the asteroid shell. But when he crashed to his knees, it was on purpose, his ears straining for the faint echoing sounds of battle before Harga began shouting orders and threats.

“He’s injured,” Shepard snapped, a cry of pain chasing her words as she slumped back against the rock, one hand tearing at her eye. 

“If he’s too injured to walk, then we’ll leave him behind,” Harga said.

Garrus found his feet, dragging out the motion as long as he dared. Nothing. Whatever help was coming, they were getting further and further away from it. He’d lost his chance and now he had no choice but to rely on Shepard. 

Shepard, who’d lied to him. Shepard, who could’ve helped him take down Harga earlier but ruined the opportunity instead. Shepard, who had madness in her eye. 

Harga needed a ship and if he couldn’t get one at the docking bays and couldn’t use Derius’s smuggling shuttles… that left him with one option: the Market’s slaver fleet.

From Butler’s data scraping VIs, they’d learned that whenever Harga wasn’t on Omega, he commanded the fleet’s unofficial flagship: a massive batarian cruiser that outgunned every non-military ship in the Terminus. Shepard undoubtedly knew something about it. He’d wondered before what brought her to Omega to get Harga. Now he was sure that ship had something to do with it. He was certain that it had everything to do with the look in her eye.

A cavern appeared out of the craggy hallway suddenly and without warning. They were near the surface of the asteroid, far away from Omega’s center of artificial gravity, judging from the bouncing lightness of his steps. Beyond the jagged rock shelf, Garrus glimpsed fissures of the nebulae screened over with the glowing blue of the mass effect field forming the atmospheric pocket around the cracked-open eggshell of the asteroid.

A simple metal walkway extended from the lip of the corridor, jutting into the cavern, a cargo shuttle waiting in the docking clamps.

Behind him, he heard a strange, half-swallowed sound and turned to see Shepard pull up short, the hungry look  in her eye warring with something wild and hunted. A vicious shudder shook through her, as if she were struggling with the effort of restraining herself from ripping the shuttle apart with her bare hands.

Harga shoved her forward with his gun. In the diminished gravity, it nearly sent her flying. Garrus snatched at her arm, pulling her back before she went over the side of the walkway. She was shaking, nails scrabbling at the skin around her eye, too blinded by pain to steady herself.

The door of the cargo shuttle opened to a dark, featureless interior. No seats, no emergency lighting strips, just latches and knotted straps along the walls for restraining crates. 

He couldn’t mean to…

The hard metal ring of the shotgun muzzle smacked against his spine, shoving him forward. Clumsily, he half-fell into the cargo compartment, hand still grasping Shepard and taking her with him. Together, they thumped against the far bulkhead in a tangle of ungangly limbs. 

Framed by the rectangle of light formed by the doorway, Harga’s silhouette regarded them for a moment before the door hissed closed, plunging them into darkness.

“He’s going to kill us. These cargo shuttles don’t have mass effect envelopes–”

They’d suffocate, slowly, as the air escaped through the seals.

A bleak laugh echoed through the inscrutable dark. “No. They do this all the time with—”

She flinched, body seizing up against his with a muffled groan. The door opened again, revealing Harga’s outline, lit orange along one side with the light of his borrowed omni-tool. He tossed two wearable oxygen packs into the compartment.

“Mask up,” he said, before darkness closed around them once more with the quiet rush of hydraulic hinges. 

“Damn it,” Shepard muttered, already recovered and extricating herself. “I’ll take left, you take right. Hurry.”

Garrus found the packs first, his foot sliding through one of the strap loops. Blindly, he and Shepard groped their way around the zippers and then the oxygen unit toggles and knobs. A flick of a toggle and faint green light pierced the dim, making it easier to see.

Despite the restraints still looped and clattering around her wrists, Shepard quickly found the capacity display switch on his unit, ten green bars flashing to life, with a display reading time in Palaven standard as the whoosh of compressed air puffed against their fingertips. 

A rumble shook through the compartment: the engine thrusters kicking on. 

“Fuck me,” Shepard cursed, fingers pulling his mask from his unsure hands, deftly loosening the elastic straps before looping them up and over his crest and fitting the mask over his face by tugging them tight again.

Not wanting to entangle his hands in the handcuff chain, Garrus let her, taking in the furrow of her brow awash in the green light, anger and a thousand other things surfacing through the muffled numb of urgency in one messy, prickly snarl. Pushing it away, he checked on the unit capacity read-outs.

“I should’ve fucking known, I should’ve…” she muttered, hands unkinking the coiled tubing, fingers flying over plastic housing with the accompanying clink, clink, clink of metal until a puff of cool air exhaled over his face.

“How’s CO2?” she asked, starting on her own mask. 

Garrus grimaced. “15% on mine. 20 on yours.”

She shook her head, tightening her mask straps. “About an hour, if we’re lucky. People always forget to change out the CO2 scrubbers on these.”

Her mask on and tight, she looped the pack strap over her shoulder just as the rumble of the thrusters built into a low roar.

“Hold on, it’s about to get bumpy,” she shouted over the noise, stepping closer to unknot a strap from the wall and twist it around her shoulder and wrist while he did the same.

The shuttle lurched forward without warning, nearly flinging him towards the back of the compartment. She caught him by the arm just in time, wrenching him back, painfully knocking his spur with her leg.

Garrus hissed out a curse.

“And cold,” she added, still shouting. “It’s about to get really cold.”

Wonderful.

Nyreen frowned, mandibles pinching tight as they navigated the rocky labyrinth by the chime of the proximity device, pinging out an increasingly frantic pattern.

“You’re going to overheat the damn thing if you keep that up,” Aria said, temper flaring. 

She was in a good mood.

Sidonis—they’d already dispensed with the aliases, Aria made it a point of business to keep tabs on gang couriers, current and retired, and she wanted him to know she knew exactly who he was—snarled silently, but the chiming stopped.

Anto, Aria’s right-hand man, grumbled out terse instructions to their forces into his earpiece, instructing them to hold the entrance in case the last of Derius’s loyalists launched another attack. 

“You owe me for this, you know,” Aria muttered, voice full of promises as she dropped back to keep pace with her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nyreen said airily. “You made a deal with Shepard, not me.

“Try not to sound too bitter, dear. Although… I wonder, is all that bitterness for Shepard or for me?” 

“Why not the both of you?” And it was both, of course it was both. Aria knew that, she was only asking to piss Nyreen off— her favorite pastime. 

Whatever smug retort Aria had to that got cut off by her turian bodyguard’s voice, overlapping with that of the human man, Butler, who’d lasted all of 10 seconds before blowing his own alias after meeting Aria. As Nyreen drew closer, she saw they’d discovered a room, both already crowding into the open doorway.

“That’s not the right–” Sidonis hissed, but trailed off just as he noticed the corpses, an upturned examination table and the ringed operating lights at the center. Dread knotted through the air.

“What the hell…” Butler muttered, skin ashen.

Aria strode in as if she owned the place, the only one of them looking unperturbed. “Figures. No one that obsessed with etiquette could be anything but depraved.”

As Anto and her bodyguard began checking the bodies, a muffled sob came from the overturned examination table. Nyreen noted the trailing streaks of something she’d mistaken for rust tracing a path over the floor towards it. 

“We have to go,” Sidonis urged. 

Nyreen drew close, gun drawn, and tore away the disposable paper sheets dangling from the edge of the table. Blinking up at her, dazed and fearful, was Tempest.

Ripped-open packs of medi-gel littered the floor, trailing goop mingling with the chaotic swathes of dried blood.

“Oh.” Nyreen heard Aria say from over her shoulder, her good mood gone. “You survived.”

A series of frantic chimes rang out before cutting off into silence. Across the room, she found Sidonis’s bleak expression, his mandibles slack and gutted.

“... out of range.”

Shepard pressed the chain of Tempest’s cheap kink play handcuffs against the metal bulkhead and tried not to think. Her teeth clenched so hard her broken jaw ached and when that wasn’t enough, she bit down on her injured cheek in an attempt to drown out the sour tang of other people’s fear in her mouth and nose, muddled with smoke. 

Don’t think about it. 

Fresh blood coated her tongue, warm and metallic. But it did nothing to banish the feeling of flesh, hot and sticky-slick, pressing against her exposed skin, elbows jamming into her broken ribs as whispery fury burned in her throat. 

Don’t think about it. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Some memories fade. Not these. They weren’t her mother’s hands, her father’s laugh, or her brother’s face, blotted out with time, dissolving in her hands the harder she clutched them close. They weren’t the type of memories to reduce down into faint impressions of happiness, niggling like a word on the tip of her tongue the second she focused on them. 

The back of her neck hurt, her scar throbbing like new. Happiness didn’t leave marks like that on people. It didn’t carve itself into your bones and ache years later. It didn’t stick around. But the twelve minute trip up from planetside she spent in a slaver’s cargo shuttle with a hundred other colonists—those minutes would always be there with her, locked in her marrow,  vivid and terrible.

Her fists curled and uncurled, fast and frenetic. Over the hissing puff of her oxygen, she listened to the thin, oddly pitched warble of the straining bulkheads. Ice crystals latticed over the metal, the air thinning around them as Omega’s atmosphere leaked out through the compartment seals without a mass effect field to keep it in place. 

These cargo shuttle compartments weren’t designed with living things in mind, but slavers rarely paid attention to details like that. Cargo shuttles with minimal a-grav and no cargo compartment mass effect envelope were far cheaper and much larger than transport shuttles. And when the trip up from planetside was short enough, the cargo in question didn’t even need expensive portable oxygen packs or suits. 

In theory. 

In real life, seals cracked and corroded, and no one bothered to check them. In real life, the whole cargo compartment could depressurize in a matter of seconds. And the more rapidly the atmosphere in the compartment decompressed, the faster the temperature dropped. Ideal Gas Law. In school, she’d memorized the formula, but the physics of it hit differently seeing heaps of frozen limbs. People were always so afraid of suffocating in the cold vacuum of space, but for many unlucky colonists, it was their own atmosphere that sealed their fates. 

Batarian slavers put those people in the ‘transit losses’ column of their digital records. Generally, that column barely dented their profit margins. Dead colonists still turned a credit. She suspected Harga’s rougher treatment and more frequent use of the chip were a direct result of some similar calculation. Without Derius’s cut of the sale, he had more margin to work with, more reward to leverage against losses.

While ice crystallized over the chain, she glanced over at Blue Eyes, partly because his shivering was getting  worse and partially to focus on something outside of the sensation crawling over her skin — bodies plastered against her, so close she tasted other people’s sweat every time she inhaled. The batarians had packed them all in the single cage until they couldn’t move, so tight they’d become a fluid mass of humanity, screams and sobs bubbling up with the reek of fear. And then, as the air grew thinner and colder…

Shaking, she stretched the short chain between the cuffs taut before bringing it down on the cargo strap’s heavy metal buckle with all her strength. Brittle with cold, the chintzy metal snapped neatly. The handcuffs had worked well enough in her favor, minimizing the threat she posed without doing much to hamper her, but she needed her hands untethered for what would come next.

Slipping the broken link free, Shepard flexed her wrists, then checked her oxygen unit displays. Oxygen levels looked good, but the CO2 scrubber capacity was ticking down faster than she’d like: already at 13%.

She’d expected him to ask by now, demand she tell him what she was planning. Instead, he just sat, silent and shivering, and watched the precipitating fog of water vapor skim pale wisps over bulkhead panels.

“You okay?” she asked, like an idiot, because of course he wasn’t. He was bigger than her but turians were built lean, and his osteoderm offered no protection from the dropping temperature. As cold as she was—he was feeling it worse.

Thankfully, he didn’t hear her. The air was too thin, her voice dropping into nothing as soon as the sound waves left her mask.

Sighing, Shepard tapped his mask to get his attention, then tapped hers and mouthed out ‘talk’ in Palaven Standard. The language looked nothing close to the same on human lips as it did on turian mouths, but understanding flashed through his face, anyway. After a moment of hesitation, his head dipped down and her stomach did a strange, quivering thing when their masks bumped together.

He was… extremely close and looking directly into her eyes until all she could see was beautiful, variegated blue, ringing his dark, dilated pupils. A hundred things lurked there, beneath the pale ice: mostly variants of anger and a guarded defensiveness that spoke to buried hurt. Her hands tightened around the cargo straps.

“Are you okay?” she asked again and got a muddle of an expression for her trouble before his features settled into such pure, scathing sarcasm, her shoulders hunched up defensively before he got a single word out.

“I didn’t ask you to come for me,” she said. “My plan was for you and Tempest to get out.”

His mandibles twitched irritably. “I came to salvage the mission. Odds weren’t looking good on your… plan… and personally, I try not to make a habit out of trusting concussed people’s decision-making.”

“I’ve had worse. Everything was under control.” Barely a concussion to begin with and now little more than a headache. Derius had doctored her up again while putting the chip in. The least he could do, given all the torture.

A scoff, almost polite. It reeked of a C-Sec interrogation room and a career of professional skepticism. 

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” he drawled, as if bored. “The frequency and severity of the concussions, I mean.”

“Look,” she snarled–threatened–jaw snapping from the cold and the effort of keeping herself from shaking him until his mandibles rattled. But she knew the impulse was misdirected. He wasn’t the one she wanted to beat to a gory pulp. Wasn’t the one who got them into this mess. The truth was, she needed his help for what came next, so his choice had been correct. And… she’d been painfully relieved to see him. Happy even, if happiness was the right word for a feeling so strong it crushed your ribcage like twigs underfoot . Of course, that was before Harga shoved him into a cargo shuttle with her. Now, there was no relief. Only the rib crushing.

She cleared her throat. “Look, I have a plan.”

“I’m thrilled. Tell me, is this like the plan where you lie to me and keep me in the dark? Or the one where you say you have everything under control while getting tortured?”

He was shivering badly now, every word undercut with a juddering breath. She couldn’t take it anymore.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake–”

She reached out and pulled him against her, rough and clumsy. 

“What are you-” he started.

“You want to freeze to death or do you want to help me blow up Harga’s ship?” she snapped up at him, winding her arms around his shoulders and crushing her body along his sternum. He didn’t say anything, but the startled tension bled out of his frame. After a stretch of awkward silence, stiffened cloth brushed against her bare skin as his arms folded around her in return, his palms settling in the space between her shoulders just above the edge of her gown. 

And then she was falling into blue, his hands warm on her freezing back. 

“Alright,” he said softly. “What’s the plan?”

All her anger guttered out, as if his question were right against her ear instead of staying within the confines of his mask. She exhaled, furrowing her hands into the fabric of his formal shirt—filthy now from the fire suppression sprinklers and torn at the seam of his left sleeve.

“Harga’s got a bid from the Collectors on my head. I have no idea what they want with me. Nothing good.”

He shifted away from the metal bulkhead, tucking her closer into his embrace. “He’s still planning to turn you over to them.”

“Maybe. He’s greedy.”

Something he had in common with Derius. But Harga’s greed was professional and cultural. It had no slights to set right or ego to bolster, it merely existed: the obligation to accumulate more . The batarian merchant caste called it business sense, but they said it with the same hushed tones turians used for talking about honor and duty. 

“But you’re not actually going to hand over your ship.”

Shepard worked her stinging fingers up towards his shirt collar and wormed them beneath the lapel fold, taking care to keep the trailing metal chains from following. His skin was wonderfully warm in contrast to the surrounding air. She almost sighed in relief.

Harga might let her buy their freedom and walk away unharmed. If the offer was good enough, it was possible. To batarians slavers, it was all business. 

Her fingertips traced over the back of his neck and he went still before the shivers racked through him. 

“My ship is just the bait.” Luckily, with the Collector’s bid for her, Harga had stayed on Omega to collect his bounty. He was greedy but notoriously skittish: a side-effect of operating his trade under Aria’s nose. “I knew that if he was on Omega, his ship had to be somewhere in-system, waiting to pick him up, just in case he needed to get out quick. Which means we have the opportunity not just to take out Harga… but the entire Market fleet.”

Harga’s ship, the Market fleet flagship, was a batarian vessel so well-funded and well-armed, its existence was hard proof that the Hegemony was directly sponsoring the Market’s activities in the Terminus, despite their claims otherwise. That flagship was the reason she had to come to Omega to kill Harga. As good as the Impara was, it was no match for a batarian cruiser.

“And if he doesn’t bring us to his ship–”

She shrugged, but they were wrapped up so close, the motion barely translated. “Then we just kill him.” 

Hell, that was her primary goal to begin with and not a bad consolation prize in her book.

“So you used your ship as bait,” he said. “All so he’d bring you to his, onto the bridge to use the comms.”

“Greed is predictable. So are batarian supremacists. He doesn’t even think he’s taking much of a risk. He thinks it’s his idea, just being clever. To him, it’s easy money.”

Paranoia and its blind spots coming to her advantage once again. Just like Derius’s routines and habits taught him not to fear the women he dragged into his creepy torture lair, the slave trade taught Harga not to fear humans, especially not humans with implanted control chips. And as for fearing her specifically, that was what Blue Eyes and his collar were for. Everyone in the Terminus knew a hostage in a collar  was the way to deal with Shepard. She said as much. 

His nostrils flared, wavering mandibles tucking tight against his chin..

“But how are we going to deal with the chip?”

That ‘we’ shook her more than a word that small had any right to. He said it so casually — as casually as he could say anything through chattering teeth. Unable to look at him head-on, she dropped her gaze, not understanding why her chest was getting so tight, as if she were swallowing down a sob.

“That problem’s already taking care of itself.” 

Derius had warned her, hadn’t he? Every time they activated the chip, it damaged the nerve. Well, she wasn’t a doctor or a scientist, but she knew a dead nerve didn’t conduct shit, not even pain. Egging Harga on to test her theory was… excruciating, but towards the end, it had become… still excruciating, but a form of it she could fight and think through. When she explained, his mandibles fluttered against the constricting straps of the mask, eyes widening, then narrowing on her.

“You—”

Maybe it was anger, or alarm, or concern wrapped up with his surprise. Maybe all of them. But in the midst of it, she spotted a startling flare of something else. Under any other circumstance, she’d take it for begrudging admiration.

“I meant what I saw about the concussions. You’re the most reckless person I’ve ever met.” A deep-chested sigh billowed vapor against his mask. “...how’s your eye now?”

By way of an answer, she wrested open her swollen eyelid and slipped her hand free to wave her fingers at her right temple. Nothing. It hurt still, a dull ache bleeding over from the last few times Harga activated the chip, but her right field was gone. Had been for a while.

“Batarians believe the soul leaves the body through the eyes in death,” she said, off-handed, not able to look at him with her good eye again. “So, on the bright side, I still have one soul escape hatch left.”

He sighed. “Shepard, your gallows humor needs some work.”

“Noted. I’ll start workshopping it for the next time I’m in dire straits.”

She glanced up just in time to catch a smile flit through his confined mandibles.

“ Better hurry. Knowing you, that’ll be sooner rather than later.”

True enough.

“Alright,” she said. “ When we get to the bridge. I’ll have access to the ship systems, but I’ll need time to spoof a fire sensor reading and override the safety controls. I need you to keep Harga and anyone else with him busy until the ship’s fire suppression kicks in. They won’t expect the collar to be non-functional. When they try to activate it, that’ll be your chance.”

“How long–” he asked before the question dissolved into convulsive shivers. 

Shepard unwound her arms and pried his trembling arms away from her back before folding them in closer, pinning them between their huddled bodies and rubbing his clawed fists between her palms and her chest. Extremities lost heat fastest and both of them were at risk of frostbite. Already, discolored rings were blooming around her wrists, tracing chillblains out the shape of the handcuffs. “Five minutes at the most. You’ll have to remember your mask. He won’t think to have us remove the packs as long as we don’t draw attention to them.”

The not-admiration in his eyes took on a less begrudging air. “Nitro… gen gas.”

Ships almost universally relied on N2 fire suppression systems to replace all the oxygen with an inert gas and suffocate any fires. A system she routinely exploited in her line of work. The hard part was getting to the bridge to begin with. But that wouldn’t be a problem this time around: Harga would escort them himself.

She smiled up at him weakly, a thick fug of exhaustion settling over her body, quivering through her knees. Direct contact with the bulkheads wasn’t good, the metal conducting heat away faster, but standing was becoming more and more difficult. Together, they half-collapsed into a huddled crouch, movements fumbling and slow in the diminished pull of the compartment’s artificial gravity. As the water vapor swirled around them, Shepard tucked her legs close to her chest and as he did the same, she nestled beneath the curve of his arm, their numb hands folded between them.

In the halo of green light from the oxygen packs, the ice-rimed bulkheads sparkled like a cracked open geode of velvet malachite—surreal and dreamy. Ice filigreed over her bare arms, over his crest, and her stockinged toes peeking from her gown’s hem. Her eyelids were heavy, glimmers dancing from the frost lacing over her lashes when she blinked. 

She was so tired, the cargo shuttle dissolving into mist and malachite crystals. Their masks tapped together, and she heard her own voice, far away and detached.

“There were hundreds of us in the shuttle, all packed in a single cage. I was near the middle. Suffocating in the crush. I thought I would die right there. But then it got cold. It got so cold. It was just twelve minutes but everyone at the edge… they were all dead, frozen stuck to the bars, covered in burns from the metal.”

She’d never spoken about those twelve minutes before to anyone. Why would she? It was so long ago, and she wasn’t that girl anymore—the one who told herself her voiceless scream was fury and not fear. She’d left her behind, along with her failures and her given name. But had she really? Without Shepard, the hero, without masks and aliases like Alison Gunn… who was left but that girl, still locked away in the dark, powerless and afraid, her bones etched with hurt and the ghosts of everyone she couldn’t save.

As she closed her eyes, she saw small hands, small fingernails, chipped nail polish and when she blinked them back open, the world was orange.

A glance down at the CO2 capacity read-out confirmed her fears: 7%. She couldn’t recall any time passing, but her thoughts were lumbering echoes, delayed and faint. Hypothermia.

“You… okay?”

No answer. His eyes were closed. Worse, he wasn’t even shivering anymore.

Fuck. Alarm broke through her own torpor and Shepard shook him, hard, before pressing their masks back together.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey, answer me.”

He blinked awake groggily, eyes unfocused. 

“Blue–” No, that wouldn’t cut it. She needed to get him alert, keep him engaged and awake. 

“Your name. Tell me your name.”

“G–Garrus.”

“Stay with me Garrus,” she said, rubbing her numb hands over his exposed skin, thin sheets of ice flaking away at her touch. “Talk to me. Tell me something about Palaven.”

“Palaven…”

“Tell me about her—the sick woman. Is she your sister?”

“Mother.”

“Tell me about her, Garrus. What was she like?”

“I–” he faltered, eyes losing focus, eyelids drifting closed.

She shook him again, desperation ripping her chest to shreds. “Garrus! Damnit, stay with me. We’re–”

A shrill, animal sound bubbled up out of her, a sob nesting inside of a scream. It belonged to the scared girl, the trapped girl, the helpless girl.

“We’re… we’re so close, but I need you to... I can’t do this alone.”

He laughed weakly, eyes slitting back open with a touch of wry humor. Admiration was there and not even a little begrudged as his gaze traced over her face, all the cuts and bruises, the seared imprint of a shotgun muzzle at her temple, before lingering on her right eye. “Sure you could.”

Through the numb, she felt his hands beneath her palms. Cold as death.

“Fuck you, Garrus, you idealistic prick,” she shouted, slamming him back against the bulkhead before hauling him back and crushing her mask against his. “You’re the most frustrating—the worst, most infuriating—”

Before, none of her anger belonged to him, but now, all of it did. Fuck him. 

“You came all the way out to the Terminus to prove—what? That you couldn’t hack it out here after all? All your bullshit sanctimonious conviction, this is all you got?”

His eyes sharpened on her, anger struggling through the daze, but he didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

“I hate you,” she snarled, shaking him harder as the world blurred. Her good eye was smarting, prickling with pain as the glimmers flared and wavered.

She meant it. She meant every word. 

“It’s… mutual,” he said, before burying his face into the crook of her neck, pulling her body fully into his lap and her hands into his before pinning their interlocked arms between them to conserve their dwindling body heat. 

For one silent moment, she nestled close, hating him. 

Then, the thrusters roared to life, shuddering through the hull.

Undampened, the momentum tossed the both of them against the bulkhead. Icy metal smacked into her broken jaw through the pliable plastic of the mask. Shepard flailed, head reeling with the shock of pain, numb fingers clawing for purchase, the dangling chains lashing burning gouges into her forearms. Finding a strap, she clutched tight as the motion of the shuttle shifted, everything tipping 90 degrees as she fell towards the far side with a thump.

It was all she could do to hang on in the chaos and by the time the thrusters cut, she only had seconds to lurch towards the shuttle door. 

Just like before, Harga would activate the chip before opening the cargo hold doors, as a precaution. He was expecting her to try something dumb and desperate, and until she did, he’d have his guard up. The man was overconfident, but he wasn’t stupid. 

She needed to give Harga that last, desperate attempt before they made their move on the bridge or he’d be too alert. He might notice things she wanted him to ignore, like the oxygen units. Drawing a deep breath, she switched off her oxygen, pulling the mask down to hang loose around her neck. The pain stabbed through her skull seconds later, just as the shuttle door slid open with a burst of warm air.

Shepard fell to her knees, weakly flailing out a hand to grab at Harga.

Expecting it, he smacked it away with the muzzle of his shotgun, the trailing edge of the handcuff chain twisted around the barrel with a loud ‘thwack’. 

“Pathetic,” he said dismissively. “Consider this a final warning if you value the turian’s life.”

Peering through the curtain of her mussed and frozen hair, she counted just two additional batarians, both armed with strange organic-looking rifles. One leaned forward to wrap a hand around her bicep and wrench her up.

“Move it, human.”

Shepard hesitated, glancing back to check on Garrus. 

He was shivering uncontrollably, blinking rapidly against the light spilling into the dim of the cabin as a rivulet of cobalt blue trickled from a vivid new fissure in his left mandible. It didn’t look like he’d broken anything major. 

Harga snapped out a command and the other batarian strode past her to haul him up.

Yanking her forward, the batarian holding her arm trudged after Harga, ignoring her stumbling attempts to keep pace.

The ship wasn’t anything like a merchant vessel, lacking the long corridors of detachable cargo bays that directly docked to the cargo shuttles. Instead, they were in a single, cavernous cargo hold that could easily contain two dozen transport shuttles or the entire Impara.

As they traversed the hold, she noted the blocky batarian design riveted together from a bronze-colored metal streaked with oxidized smears of grey and cobalt blue. A hulking beast of a ship, ductwork and circuitry spilling out through metal grids instead of cleverly hidden behind sleek bulkhead panels. It was a vast, nightmarish abstract of machinery harshly lit in yellow from the glaring sodium lamps and interspersed with recesses of impenetrable shadow. Everything was dank and moist, the way batarians preferred it, reeking with the musty zing of corroding metal. 

“Lovely ship,” she said. “Batarians really know how to make things homey.”

Harga didn’t turn, but his fingers flit across his omni-tool. A tingling buzz crawled over her scalp, down the front of her face before the twinging lanced through her right eye socket. She played up her response, jerking away from the batarian still holding her arm and crying out in pain.

“You talk too much, human.”

“And you’re terse, for a merchant.”

Harga sniffed loudly. “I speak only to customers who deserve to be spoken to.”

“Great way to expand clientele.” Shepard laughed as the batarian beside her grunted and yanked on her arm. “You sure you’re merchant caste?”

Harga halted in his tracks, a twitch in his shoulders hinting at the promise of violence. To a batarian, there was only one real insult. And insults were not taken lightly. She’d seen them kill over aspersions to caste. 

Before he could move or activate the chip, the batarian pulling at her arm cuffed her, hard, with his open palm. 

“You dare–”

“Enough.” Harga ordered, striding forward to slam his fist over the panel set into the bulkhead. A heavy metal clank resounded, doors sliding open to reveal a freight elevator. 

“I despise doing business with humans,” Harga said, stepping inside. “You make offers and deals with one breath and renege with the next. Your species condemns our traditions and yet, I know better than most how many of you come to the Market looking to buy. Amusing that you don’t seem as preoccupied with killing off our customers as you are with trying to kill us.”

Shepard scowled, jaw feathering tension and pain as she bit down hard. As if it was so easy. For every sleezy club owner she killed, there was always someone there to take their place at the Market auctions. Demand was hard to kill. Supply was the easier target. 

As the elevator rattled, she found a pair of eyes across the dim—a lucent spot of blue flame in the yellowed murk. His broken mandible was still bleeding, a slow trickle tracing down his jaw, over his throat and beneath the collar, pooling into the concave hollow formed by the jut of his carapaced sternum, framed by the dingy vee of his torn-open formal shirt. He was still trembling. But despite the haggard exhaustion carving through his facial plating, his eyes were as piercing as ever, glinting with determination. He held her gaze, a bit of warmth creeping into the hard lines of his face.

A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as Harga continued to rant over the clanging racket of the elevator.

The bridge, just as hideously utilitarian as the cargo hold, was cramped and claustrophobic with the mess of wires and ductwork spilling out from every corner. A precaution against pirates, the view ports were small and shielded with welded metal slats. In another anti-piracy design, the CO station was in the cockpit, shielded behind 10 cm thick blast doors that remained locked shut at all times. They’d designed the ship to sacrifice everyone except for Harga and his pilots, if boarded or attacked. She’d bet the cockpit had its own escape pod.

Harga stepped towards the blast door panel, typing into his omni-tool. In a green flash, the doors opened with a metallic groan, revealing a room that could barely fit the five of them plus the pilot and co-pilot craning their necks to blink four pairs of eyes back at them.

Crowding in, the batarian guard shoved her to the front, Harga’s shotgun barrel doing the rest of the work to force her forward as the doors clanged shut behind them. Shepard glanced around, fast and subtle, clocking the red flash of the cockpit’s escape pod door and the cockpit’s supply of portable oxygen units strapped to the panels nearby.

“Watch her,” Harga instructed, typing in more commands into his omni-tool.

The CO station’s haptic display unfolded in a flash of orange. Too cramped for Harga to keep the shotgun aimed at her, pressed against her back, he pushed her towards it with his hand.

“I’ve locked down everything except the comm system. Try anything funny,” he warned, “and I detonate the collar.”

Shepard nodded, a thrill shaking through her fingers so hard the trailing chains rattled. This was it. So close. So close, she could taste it. At her hesitation, Harga snorted loudly behind her, prickling with impatience. Heart thundering, adrenaline zipping across her tongue, she flexed her hands, settling them against the interface. 

Just another ship. Just another job. Her faint smile stretched into a toothy grin—feral and exhilarated—anticipation coiling through her limbs, dancing at her fingertips. With a quick, stolen glance behind her towards Garrus, she typed in the channel frequency.

In under a second, she triggered the hailing ping, that initial digital handshake, the ‘hello?’ that would tell the Impara their location at the speed of light. Then she typed in a second command—the command to fire—before the crawling sensation tingled down her face, over the right half of her nose: he’d activated the control chip.

The pain exploded inside her eye socket as a grunt of surprise echoed through the cockpit, followed by the repetitive smack of something against flesh and the thump of a body against the metal grating. Gritting her teeth against the pain and wrenching her arm free from grasping hands, she kept typing.

He’d locked down the controls, standard procedure when a ship was boarded. It took her seconds to find her usual exploits in the security protocols. All the money the Hegemony shoved into this ship, clearly none of it had gone towards updating the VI beyond the bog standard operating suite. Not surprising. Batarians always prioritized weapons over tech. 

Behind her, sickening thumps and thuds, the crunch of broken bones. She kicked away a hand swiping at her ankles, typing furiously as Harga roared in outrage.

Just as she accessed the fire suppression system, something barreled into her, scorching a line of fire over her shoulder before a series of ricocheting clangs threw off a shower of sparks from the exposed circuitry and wires of the bulkhead. The overhead lights flickered precariously, before plunging them into the orange-steeped glow of the emergency floor lighting.

“Idiot!” Harga shouted and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow swipe at the pilot, sending the pistol in his grip flying.

“Mask!” she yelled out, hoping Garrus could get his on in time. Hoping he was still conscious.

She flicked on her unit as Harga’s shadowed form lunged for her, oxygen hissing out against her neck as she finished typing the command to override the cockpit safety protocols. His hands fisted into her hair, around her blood-slick arm, pulling as she triggered a false temperature reading in the cockpit sensor.

Red warning lights flashed on, the blare of VI instructing the crew to ensure their oxygen units were on, masks in place before nitrogen flooded the cabin. But instead of the standard 5 minutes, they’d only have ten seconds. In the din, the sharp snap of twigs breaking, and Harga screamed, his hands slipping from her hair, falling away from her arm. 

Shepard jerked her mask up to her face, not bothering to adjust the straps. Then, a foot slammed into her ankle and she went down, just barely keeping her mask on as her temple collided with the grating. Blinking back the overlapping strobe of the emergency lights, she saw Harga’s enraged eyes, red then black, then red, boring hatred into her. His wrists were broken, but he reached for her anyway, his hands flopping uselessly.

She jammed her thumb into his lower right eye, using the momentum and his surprise to pin him down, straddling his chest as she clawed at the others, the slippery squelch catching against her nails. He was screaming, pawing at her with his broken wrists, real fear flashing through his last good eye in the second before she hooked her thumb into the fleshy corner and pushed.

He wasn’t dead, was still struggling, when the hiss of pressurized gas sounded from the vents. Within seconds, his flailing subsided into stillness and silence as the inert N2 replaced the atmosphere in the cockpit. Shepard whipped around and saw Garrus, collapsed on the floor beneath the body of a guard. Before she could get to her feet, the guard shuddered, then rolled over. Lifeless.

Garrus sat up, alive, holding his mask to his face, the elastic straps torn and dangling.

Shepard heaved a sigh of relief, but there wasn’t much time for celebration. Already, Harga’s crew were pounding on the blast doors, a glowing acetylene spark fissuring through the metal. But that was the least of her worries.

Hauling herself back up to her feet and grabbing one of the strange rifles, she slumped into the CO chair. The nav and comm log data she began tightbeaming to the Impara. Simultaneously, she shut off the fire suppression system, dropped the ship’s kinetic barriers, disabled the GARDIAN turrets and initiated emergency evacuation procedures for the cockpit.

The door panel to the escape pod flashed green as her oxygen unit chimed out an alarm, the display flashing.

She checked the data transfer one last time, then brought the rifle stock down onto the console, smashing it. Staggering up and turning, she nearly planted her nose into Garrus’s chest. 

His unit was beeping too, louder and more insistent. 

“Time to go,” she said. “Ten minutes before the disruptors hit.”

She grabbed another oxygen unit from the wall, then his arm, careful not to dislodge his mask, and pulled him after her towards the escape pod door.

Flinging herself into the pod’s single pilot’s seat, she began typing. The pod shuddered, unclamping as the thrusters kicked on. She selected a random vector. Didn’t matter, they just needed to get as far from the cruiser as possible by the time the Impara’s torpedoes turned it into a million chunks of shrapnel hurtling through space at lethal speeds.

Her unit was beeping furiously, the CO2 catalyst completely depleted. Already, the burning, panicked urge to breathe boiled through her veins. Pushing down the mask, she exhaled, pressing it back to her face for a long draw of oxygen. 

Through the escape pod view port, a pinpoint of light bloomed, a distant flare where the cruiser had been.

As she stared at it, as it shrank into nothing against the brilliant backdrop of space, a hand settled on her shoulder, firm and warm. 

They weren’t out of danger yet, but as the atmospheric sensors of the escape pod chimed out cheerfully to signify safe oxygen levels, she couldn’t find it in her to care. All her adrenaline flash-evaporated, leaving all her pain in its wake. Awful, agonizing, so bad it was funny.

She stood on wobbly legs and threw her arms around him, laughing hysterically. Laughing so hard, it hurt even worse. She might’ve broken a rib from that fall before, maybe a few.

“Hell of a mission failsafe, Shepard,” he said, palms finding the spot between her shoulder blades. It was the only place on her entire body that wasn’t bruised, gashed, scraped, chillblained or frostbitten, and his touch felt better than anything. 

“When in doubt, torpedoes.”

“I like how you think,” he said. And then: “I’m going to pass out now.”

She was still laughing, but it died in her throat when she realized the front of her dress was wet, when she reached between them and pulled her hand away to see blue streaking over her fingers, across her palm.

He was bleeding, his knife wound had re-opened and was soaking through his shirt.

“Garrus,” she whispered, but he couldn’t hear her. He was slumping to the floor, already unconscious.

Garrus woke to the rapid-fire prattle of a salarian and several familiar but raised voices.

“Cannot disclose. Confidential patient information.”

“Look Doc–” someone— Sidonis—growled. 

“Hey, hey,” Butler interjected over the porcelain-metallic click of a compacted gun unfolding. “Let’s all calm down a bit. He’s just on edge, we didn’t expect…”

“Ah,” said the salarian as Garrus groaned, squinting against the afterimages of the glaring clinic lights. “Patient has regained consciousness. Perhaps he can answer your questions with minimal bloodshed.”

Leveraging himself by his elbows, Garrus blinked back brightness as the room came into focus.

“Where’s…” his subvocals croaked. “Where’s Shepard?”

The beep of machines filled the new silence, and he knew, he already knew in his gut before they even said the words.

“She’s gone.”

Chapter Text

Through the rivulets of condensation dripping off the noodle stall’s sagging metal awning, Garrus watched as a volus peered around Doru district’s central plaza before toddling towards the listing doors of an abandoned junk shop.

Beside him, Sidonis sighed, tossing back his tepid noodles in one messy swallow, forgoing utensils. As always, he ate like it would be his last meal: in a rush and presumably tasting nothing. Then, swiping his sleeve over his jaw and mandibles; he got up and followed Har Urek.

Garrus stirred his own congealing broth with the pronged utensils Butler once dubbed ‘turian fork sticks’ and tried to look as if he had some intention of eating as he muttered the update into the open comms.

“Tail in position.”

“Don’t get too close. That little rat has a nose for trouble,” Vortash grumbled back.

Billowing clouds of water vapor scudded through the buildings, swallowing Sidonis, the shop, and the rest of the plaza until all Garrus could see were the faint smudges of neon advertising food, alcohol, and lap dances to the laborers coming off a shift in the sludge tanks of the water treatment plant. High in the mist, bursts of methane belched out blue flames and the noxious odor permeating everything in Doru.

“I know what I’m doing, batarian, just tell me what I’m looking for.”

“A makeshift tunnel that opens up into the primary facility. At the back of the shop.”

“I see it,” Sidonis said over the distant, staticky clicks of his unfolding pistol. “Should I follow him into the plant?”

“No.” Garrus skimmed the greasy film off his soup and caught a suspicious glance from the salarian ladling out noodles in levo-stamped bowls to a group of stoop-backed humans in waterproof jumpsuits. “I don’t want to tip him off just yet.”

Vortash made a displeased sound. “I told Butler–”

“I know,” Garrus said. “We’ve still got time.”

Bowls in hand, half of the humans settled into the vacant stools beside him. The half without a seat huddled beneath the metal awning, seeking refuge from the sheets of moisture dripping off the atmospheric recycling plant’s massive condensers looming hundreds of meters over the district.

“Why do we need time?” Vortash demanded. “He’s cornered in there. Just kill him now in the tunnel and be done with it.”

Garrus eyed the humans warily. “Is that what you want?” he asked once he was sure they were all too absorbed with their conversation to pay any attention to his. “After what he did? A quick death? Did he give that to any of his victims? To your husband?”

No answer. He hadn’t known Vortash long, but he got the sense the ensuing silence was as close as the batarian got to a concession. 

One human pulled out his omni-tool screen, and the rest crowded around to watch the flickering feed of a bunch of humans kicking around a ball. Something happened and a crowing cheer burst out of the group.

Garrus did his best to ignore them, keeping an eye out for Sidonis. There—he saw a shadowed figure re-emerge from the mist, one arm missing. It’d been weeks, but the guilt kept sucker punching him, anyway. Garrus studied his soup again, swirling the waterlogged noodles around in the cloudy broth.

Weeks and not a word from Shepard. Someone had arranged for emergency medical transportation off station for Tempest, but the salarian at the clinic was oddly tight-lipped about it. Surprising, given how long he could go on about any other topic. But Garrus knew anyway. Who else could it have been?

“You eating that?” Sidonis asked and when Garrus shook his head, he grabbed the bowl and downed the cold, congealing mess without so much as a grimace.

He didn’t tell Sidonis about his trip back down to the clinic—another sucker punch of guilt. 

The humans were cheering again, and he felt Sidonis’s eyes on him, flinty with frustration.

“It’s not your fault. Stop beating yourself up already.”

Garrus gazed into the inscrutable mist, watched the beckoning pulse of neon through the drizzle tapping out a percussion on the awning.

“It was my decision to take the mission, despite the risks.”

If he’d listened to him in the beginning, Sidonis would still have his arm. 

“Doesn’t make it your fault.”

“That’s exactly what it makes it,” Garrus cut out, tired of this argument. Sidonis didn’t want to blame him? Fine. But he was wrong.

“Garrus–” Sidonis started, sub-harmonics fracturing into something raw and vulnerable, almost plaintive. “I… I just want things to go back to how they were. I—”

Talons brushed over Garrus’s shoulder, but the touch was hesitant. Before either of them could say anything, a name hooked around his neck and jerked his attention towards the humans’ omni-tool screen.

“—ephard, the hero of the Skyllian Blitz who led a small resistance force and held off attackers in the capital city of Illyria in 2176. Alliance officials confirm the eradication of the so-called ‘slaver fleet’ in the Pylos Nebula. Travel warnings are in effect for ships in the Nebula while debris salvage operations are underway.”

His gut wound, barely healed, twinged. He flinched, and the talons jerked away, as if burned.

“I have some things I need to do. I’ll meet you back at the base.” Sidonis said, the plaintive note gone, his voice clipped and halting.

“Sidonis, wait.” His hand reached out to stop him as he turned to go, but the guilt already had him pulling back, leaving his hand hovering in the space between them.

“She nearly got you killed!” Sidonis knocked his hand away. “You should want to return the favor. I do.”

“I know.”

It was true. But it wasn’t the whole of it. She’d also saved his life. First, with Tempest. Then, with Derius. On the shuttle. On Harga’s ship. It would’ve gone so much easier for her if she’d let Tempest kill him in the penthouse. So… why didn’t she? That’s what he kept coming back to, that’s what he couldn’t stop thinking about. 

“You know, but it doesn’t matter, does it?” Sidonis shook his head, shoulders bunching up with anger. “And that’s why you’re still blaming yourself.”

He turned again and vanished into tendrils of mist. But as Garrus moved to follow, his hand nudged the empty bowl and something weighty and metallic tipped out of it to clatter onto the stall’s metal countertop.

A knife. He snatched it up, angling the blade to the light to inspect the inscription. Licinia Incendus. It was dry, which meant someone had placed it in the bowl after Sidonis—Garrus whipped around, neck craning, scanning the shapes in the mist for a bright spot of coppery hair, the flutter of a hooded cloak. 

Nothing.

But there was something else in the bowl. He picked it up and held it up to the light.

It was a keycard emblazoned with the faded scroll of a human language his visor display autotranslated into the name of a hotel and the numbers ‘2-0-4-6’.

He showed.

From the guarded expression, she didn’t know if he was happy or angry to see her, but she was certain of one thing. 

“You reek of Doru,” she said as she toweled off her wet hair.

He blinked, facial plates twitching as the door hissed shut behind him. Looking at him was harder than smelling him, so she padded off towards the kitchenette and began searching the sparse cupboards.

“The way you left after… I wasn’t sure if you’d be back,” he said, voice carefully neutral. “Figured you’d done everything you needed to do here.”

On her tiptoes, she paused, her fingers brushing over a dusty bottle of Nyreen’s favorite turian liquor. Done… well, she was, wasn’t she? She wanted to take down the Market, and that’s what she did. She wanted to kill Derius and Harga—check and check. But it wasn’t like the vids. 

She remembered the slip of Harga’s eyeball against her thumb, his shrill screams clawing at her eardrums. And it wasn’t like the vids at all… not the ones about revenge, anyway. More like the one she saw of a hound chasing down her prey only to look up, dazed and bereft, when she finally caught it and tore it to pieces. 

The Market was a rabbit she’d been chasing since Mindoir. And now she was done. 

Yay.

A snarl on her breath, she snatched up the bottle and another, equally dusty, bottle of asari honey liqueur out from behind a stack of expired caviar tins and fancy water crackers.

“Yeah, well, I still had to settle some debts,” she muttered, ruthlessly thumbing off the cork of the honey liqueur and downing a swallow without tasting it. Remembering herself, she grabbed a pair of dusty glasses next and rinsed them off in the tap. “Yours being one of them.”

The honey liqueur glimmered amber-bright and burned all the way down as she knocked back a second mouthful before pouring herself another. Blanched spots bloomed around her knuckles from clutching the glass too hard.

“Debt…” he trailed off, drawing closer into the room, judging from the smell.

Shepard turned, leaned back against the kitchenette countertop and let herself look at him. Up close this time, not through a magnifying eyepiece in the fog-clotted streets of Doru. 

She wondered if he knew the coveralls wouldn’t fool anyone—his posture was too good, shoulders too broad despite his rangy build. Plant workers were all stooped from 12-hour shifts scrubbing out the sludge tanks. Nutrient deficiencies narrowed their frames and, like most civilians with sense on Omega, they went out of their way to look smaller. That’s how you fit into a crowd and avoided attention.

Nothing about Garrus avoided attention. Instead, he gave the impression of taking up more space than he did—all the arrogance undoubtedly. Except arrogance wasn’t hard to find in Omega, so that wasn’t it. It was something more, something that came pre-packaged with the piercing eyes and idealism.  

This was a bad idea, she realized too late. She was desperate for distraction, her whole body antsy and raw. And something worse, something vast and hollow that hurt when she breathed. Done. It felt like a shitty punchline to a shitty joke. Knock, knock, congratulations. You did everything you needed to do and everyone you love is still dead and gone.

Looking at him was unbearable. All she could think about was his face buried in the crook of her neck, his voice muffled against her neck as he told her he hated her.  

“Your share,” she finally elaborated, eyes darting away as she nursed her drink. “Of the Alliance bounties, for one.”

The air between them shivered, charged with all the live-wire intensity of his blue eyes. Branching paths tingled across her body in their wake. When his gaze lingered on her eyepatch, she fidgeted and crossed her prickling arms, drink still in hand, as if she could ward off his scrutiny. 

No luck. 

She tried a different tack.

“Before we get into that, you should take a shower before you permanently stink up my apartment.”

“Your–”

In the quiet of his surprise, a familiar rhythmic thump reverberated from the shared wall, muffled moans slipping through the concrete. 

“Isn’t this a…?”

She smiled despite herself. Just another tip-off he’d spent most of his life in Council space where hotels that rented rooms by the hour were hard to come by. On Omega, no-tells were the norm. Especially here, around Afterlife, where the brothels were scarce.

“Sure is. Great for keeping a low profile. As long as your credits are good, they don’t ask questions. And some places let you buy a room outright. Technically, this is Red’s, but she hasn’t been around for…”

Her voice snagged in her throat. Shepard coughed to dislodge it and gulped down the rest of her glass. For a long time. And that would probably always be the case now.

“Anyway, it’s as good as mine.”

Silence tangled between them, impenetrable as a barbed wire bramble and just as sharp. Those live-wire eyes were roving over the apartment, studying the shadowed ivy green of the painted concrete walls, the crumbling decorative moulding and lingering scraps of peeling floral wallpaper. There were no windows, just the glow of the lamps suffusing the glass block room partitions with warmth. It was, like the rest of the hotel, shabby, small, and unassuming. 

It was also the only corner of Omega she could stand, the only place she could get a decent night’s sleep while on the station. Back when it’d been her place, Nyreen had covered up most of the pitted concrete with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, then crammed them full of actual physical books and her antique music collection. As a result, the whole apartment smelled like lignin and bookbinding glue—vaguely romantic in the way only things half-forgotten by time could be.

She watched as his C-Sec officer’s attention to detail immediately found all of her own personal touches—a mix of junk and stolen antiques she’d liberated but couldn’t bring herself to turn around and fence: moth-eaten 14th century asari tapestries, old slasher thriller vid posters, an oil abstract spattered in splotches of deep cadmium yellow, scattered gun mods, a chest of drawers carved from a rippling, golden wood and Nyreen’s copy of Macbeth where the front leg should be. And then, of course, the model ships peeking out of every odd corner. 

She flushed, arms tightening, and told herself it was the alcohol kicking in.

“Alright then,” he said.

And then he vanished into the cramped bathroom. For the first time since he walked in the door, she drew a full breath. It shuddered on the way in. Her hands were trembling, the liqueur sloshing up the sides of the glass to mist shadows over the silk charmeuse of her camisole. 

Shepard stalked over to the bookshelves, grabbed one of Nyreen’s priceless antique records from its protective plastic sleeve and put it on the equally priceless turntable. A man’s low, melodic voice crooned out, interspersed with the crackle and pop of dust. She wasn’t one for Earth music, especially not the ancient stuff Nyreen loved, but the singing drowned out the rattle of the old pipes and the sound of the shower. Which made it easier to pretend he wasn’t there, naked, in just the other room.

Turian naked wasn’t the same as human naked. No taboo, no modesty. But somehow, this was different—more intimate, with just the two of them. And far more complicated, which did nothing to quell the tidal rush of want slamming into the base of her spine along with the fragmented flotsam of conflicted emotions still drifting in the wake of their last moments together.

She heard his voice, over and over, felt his hands clutching hers tight. It’s mutual. 

Did he still hate her? 

Probably. The necessary camaraderie and trust they’d reforged in the cargo shuttle and aboard Harga’s ship… without the fear, the cold, the threat of death, the thrill of luck and success… it now seemed translucent and insubstantial—a trick of the mind, a half-forgotten memory.

Maybe she hated him a little for that. Even if it was all her fault. 

Shepard groaned, setting down her mostly empty drink to brace her arms against the bookcase. His being there made her feel vulnerable in a way she didn’t understand. Not a sensible kind of vulnerable, the logical wariness of bringing a stranger into her shabby little space, but something… more fundamental, closer to the chest and plucking at the edges of that raw emptiness yawning wider and wider inside her. She needed to get this over with and get him out of this apartment and out of her life for good. 

And then she needed to find a distraction. More alcohol, more noise, more sex. Anything. Everything. 

The shower clicked off with the telltale groan of the pipes and she smoothed her palms over the dark lace and silk charmeuse shorts riding up on her thigh. 

“Leave the coveralls,” she called out after retrieving the bottle of honey liqueur and taking a long, punishing swig before abandoning it on a nearby shelf. “The only way to get the smell out is an incinerator.”

The honey stuff was as sickly sweet as it was strong, but she didn’t care. As soon as he left, she’d polish off the rest of the bottle. What harm was a little head start?

When he emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of floral steam, she shoved a glass of the turian liquor at him and retrieved the puddled fabric of the coveralls to toss them into the chute.

“I… do you have anything I can wear?” he asked.

Shepard made her way to the bed and unzipped the duffle bag on the worn duvet. “I’ll ask one of my neighbors. Their clients always forget things.”

Without preamble, she pulled things from the duffle and laid them out on the duvet. First, the credit chit.

“2 million in credits, compliments of the Alliance. I split everything evenly with my crew, so this is 50% of my share.”

Next, the datapads.

“All the data I got off Harga’s ship on a red sand network operating out of Omega. Some data on an illegal mod and weapons ring. Details he had on the gang operations on the station. Figured Archangel could put it to good use.”

Last, the case, stamped with the Binary Helix logo. 

“And something extra for your friend. Call it hazard pay. Just don’t tell him where you got it. Pretty sure if he knew, he’d throw it in the incinerator.”

When she finally looked up, he was still just standing there, one hand holding the towel—a gesture of modesty entirely for her benefit, she was sure—and the other holding the untouched drink. His eyes smoldering with anger.

“What is all this?” he demanded.

Shepard bristled. “I told you. It’s your cut.”

Icy blue constricted around narrow pupils. “Is that right? Then why does it feel like you’re trying to pay me to get lost?”

She scowled and began shoving everything back into the duffle before hauling it up by the strap and pushing it towards him. “You don’t want the credits? Throw the chit away on your way out the door. I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, we’re square.”

He didn’t take the duffle. 

“So I’m right then,” he said. “It’s a payoff. Or worse, this is your attempt at—what? Fixing things?”

“It’s what I owe you. Is it not enough? Do you want a formal apology too?”

He jerked his head to the side, a terse ‘no’. Humans loved their ‘sorry’s’ but turians didn’t have much use for words without actions to back them up. 

“Fine,” she snapped, tossing the bag onto the bed before dropping to her knees and reaching underneath the frame.

“What are you doing, Shepard?”

Her fingers locked around the rubbery foam. She grunted, hauling the folded, padded mats out from beneath the bed. Instead of answering him, she slapped away the layer of dust and began unfolding them.

“Settling things. What’s it look like I’m doing?” 

A whumph of displaced air exhaled over her bare feet as she tossed the sparring mats onto the floor, forming a 7 x 7 square meter. 

She had no empty words for him. Even if she did, they wouldn’t have done her any good. She’d broken his trust, and that was a fracture turians didn’t take lightly. Words wouldn’t fix that. The credit chit, data, and the BH case wouldn’t fix that. But sometimes you just needed to take a swing at someone who deserved it. And sometimes you needed to take a swing at someone who didn’t deserve it. Turians understood that.

He was staring at her, expression unreadable. Her eyes darted down, finding the pale scar tissue slashing over the sleek contour of his abdominal muscles between his dermal plates. The guilt hit first, then desire—intense and unwanted—stabbing through her belly before catching on a flare of raw frustration.

“Or you can go,” she said, voice rough and cracking as the hollowness yawned wider inside her chest. “It’s your call.”

He threw back his drink before setting down his empty glass on the nearby bookshelf and angled his body towards the door, considering. Then, stretching his neck to the left, then right, he asked, “Standard rules apply?”

“Best of three.” She began stretching too, working warmth into her limbs. 

He dispensed with the towel and the false modesty and stepped onto the mat.

Shepard didn’t hesitate. She moved to strike first, closing the distance between them. Angling her left side towards him, she feigned a punch with her left fist while jabbing with the right. He blocked it, just barely, a hand catching on her wrist. She spun closer, twisting their arms and breaking the hold as her elbow smacked into his chest. Another hit landed against his side. She pressed her advantage.

The last time they fought, they were evenly matched. This time, it wasn’t even a contest. The onslaught of her strikes pushed him further and further back, towards the edge of the mats. 

With a bitten-out cry, Shepard shoved him back, sending him stumbling off the mats and claiming her first victory.

Chest heaving, she glared at him furiously. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, we’re done here.”

He narrowed his eyes back at her, stepped back onto the mats and, in a flurry of left-sided jabs, had her heels on the far edge in seconds. Exploiting her blind side, he caught her abdomen with the jut of his palm, the force of his strike propelling her back against the bookcases.

“I was giving you the chance to warm up,” he drawled as paperbacks tumbled free and pelted her shoulders. “Build your confidence, since you’re obviously rusty.”

It was true, which made the taunt sting even worse. She was out of shape, already winded and panting. And this was the first physical fight she’d been in since losing half her vision. She was still adjusting to it.

Shepard snarled and launched herself at him. They thumped down hard onto the mats; the breath rushing out of her lungs on impact. She twisted blindly, relying on instinct. This close, she didn’t need to see, just react. His hands, body, limbs—motion and momentum in split-second percussive bursts. Her in counterpoint: a call and response of elbow jabs, slipped grips, grasps, strikes. Back and forth, without a hitch. A music of thump-thump-thwack humming in her bones. It was glorious. Exhilarating. Everything else disappeared out of existence until it was just him and just her in this moment.

Blow for blow, he matched her, each impact reverberating through her shoulders, echoing their grunts of effort. He was stronger, bigger, but the cramped space favored her smaller frame—giving her an edge. Inexorably, she wore him down with rapid strikes, waiting for his endurance to flag before pinning him beneath her. A mistake. His hips bucked up forcefully beneath her, one arm looping around her shoulder. But before he could throw her off, she rolled, leveraging the force of the throw against him. Together, they teetered on the edge of the mats before thumping to the floor in a heap. 

Tie.

Beside him, half her body awkwardly trapped beneath his, she looked up at the ceiling and caught her breath. 

“If I’m rusty, then so are you,” she said between huffs as her heartbeat galloped in her chest. 

“Are you trying to demoralize me, Shepard? Don’t think you have what it takes to win fair?” 

“Just let me know if you need a moment to collect yourself,” she said, slipping free as he got to his feet. “I’ll get you some tissues.”

Moving to the far side of the mat, his mandibles flaring in with every heavy breath, he looked at her with dark, glittering eyes. 

“Over that? Please. Your hand-to-hand technique isn’t the only thing that needs work.”

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

She closed in fast again. Ducking the strike she sensed in the blackness of her right periphery, Shepard aimed a low kick at his ankles. Too close to dodge, he went down. She went with him, going for another pin, curling her body around his torso to maneuver his weight beneath hers. But he slipped free, hands fisting over her hips, lifting. Adrenaline surged through her. Grunting, she threw all her weight back, breaking his grip and slamming back down into the mats. 

And then he was there, pinning her arm, his hips slotting against hers, pressing her into the mat. Her grin vanished, the thrill in her blood shivering with undiluted pleasure at the heft and weight of his body. She bucked against him on impulse, but not one she learned in training. Suddenly, she was all too aware of his lack of clothing, only the thin barrier of slippery charmeuse between their heaving chests. Her clenched fists spasmed. Above her, he tensed, warm palms flexing against her wrists.

“Shepard—” he started. A gruff exhale parted over her neck, gusting heat over her bare collarbone. 

“Garrus… ” 

Spirits, she loved the feel of his actual name on her tongue. Maybe it sounded as good as it felt because his eyelids fluttered closed and he sagged against her and buried his face into the curve of her neck.

The cool press of his mouthplates had her writhing helplessly, a gasp spilling free. Bracketing him between her parted knees, she gave up all attempts to break away. He didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere either. Roving hands plucked full sighs from her lips, palming her back, her hips, the outer curves of her thighs—his touch hurried and impatient but feather light.

Too light. Enough to drive her mad. He touched her the way people touched dangerous things. Like he shouldn’t, but couldn’t help himself. Fast and fleeting. 

“You should go,” she said.

But she was pulling him closer, greedy fingers scrabbling over his dermal plates, grasping and holding whatever she could touch. She was trembling, clumsy with want, burning and restless and something more. Something terrible and desperate. And there, in his darkening eyes, she saw him burning too. 

“I know,” he rasped, hips rocking into hers, the hands on her thighs sliding back to palm her ass and haul her up against him. Shepard choked on a cry, his breath hot on her neck, mouthplates parting to spill deep-chested purrs against her skin. A row of sharp canines pressed flat against her flesh like the edges of a dozen daggers. 

She writhed, back arching, her head lolling back eagerly to expose the column of her throat to him. He devoured her in a flurry of urgent nips with his mouthplates, his tongue smoothing over the stings blooming across her neck. Every pinprick, every kiss, stoked the fire in her veins until it was razing through her, out of control.

Then, he worked a hand between them and up beneath the rucked-up lace of her shorts. Wrist twisting, his thick fingers spread her labia, tracing wet circles before plunging up into her as deep as she could take them.

Her toes curled, splayed legs slack, sheer pleasure flickering scintillas through the lit fuses of her nerve endings. 

“Oh–” she moaned, thoughts catching on her combusting nerves and vanishing into sparks pinwheeling erratically across her vision. “Oh, fuck.”

The osteoderm plating covering the backs of his forearms scraped against the bare skin of her belly as his wrist rocked against her. Long fingers curled inside her, the ridges of his large knuckles rasping against her entrance as the neatly beveled crescents of his trimmed talons pressing into her, beckoning.

She came. Hard and fast. Toes curling and uncurling, legs and belly taut, her back arched in the bend of his arm, head thrown back as his tongue laved over her neck. She came with heat roaring a deafening pulse in her ears, with stars bursting neon phosphenes against the backs of her eyelids. 

The lingering throes of her orgasm were still jolting through her when his thumb flicked hard against her clit. Shepard bit out a scream, vision white, pleasure verging into pain—too intense, too soon. She shoved his chest hard, taking him off guard, and as he jerked back, she went with him and pinned him down to the mats beneath her weight.

For a second, he just lay beneath her, stunned and reeling. She was reeling too, off-kilter and swaying as her trembling knees squeezed against his waist. This was a mistake. He was supposed to take the bag and go. And then that would be the end of it. 

But instead he was still there, beneath her and panting so hard, the rise and fall of his chest subtly lifted her body like the swell of a gentle tide. He was there, with his bright eyes and idealism and that something more that made it impossible to look away from him. Despite everything.

Her eyebrows furrowed together, uncomprehending. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? And what the hell was wrong with her that she was so relieved, she didn’t even care?

When her fingers tipped into the slick seam of his sheath, he was the one biting back a shout. She traced the pliant plates at his entrance, already half parted and glistening wet, he was so ready for her. Dragging her tongue and teeth over the lip of his carapaced shoulder, she gave no quarter, twisting her palm to use the width of her hand to spread him the rest of the way, wrapping her fingertips around the confined length of his cock. A pulse of pre-cum told her he was just as close as she had been. She caressed him with fast, short strokes, her knuckles slippery with his arousal. His hips bunched up beneath her and bucked so hard she had to tighten her thighs against his side just to avoid being thrown off. Riding the snap of his pelvis, she delved deeper, hooking two fingers deep into his sheath and circling the other two around his cock.

There. Her index finger brushed against the plush, unyielding spot at the back of his sheath and he came, jerking, into the curl of her palm with a broken, guttural moan. 

Satisfaction and a crowing sense of victory surged through her, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Instead, she leaned up and sank her teeth into his straining neck, biting down against tendon. The force of his thrusts stuttered as he trembled against her, the wild flange of his sub-harmonics rough and discordant. Shepard drummed her fingers against the curve of his prostate and he swore viciously, another pulse of heat signaling a second orgasm right on the heels of the first. 

“Fuck, Shepard—”

The room was spinning, and her back thumped hard against the mats. She blinked, dazed, up at the flaking concrete ceiling. The soft crooning voice of the man in the record was singing ‘Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps’ in Spanish, and Garrus was yanking her shorts down her legs with one hand, talons pressing fleeting indents into the insides of her thighs.

“Yes,” she said. And again, arching up to rip off her camisole. Pebbled skin scraped against her bare nipples as she pulled him closer, lost in the feel of him pressed against every exposed centimeter. Unmistakably turian—edges not curves and not a hint of softness. Every part of him promised lethality. She wasn’t delicate either, but folding her naked thighs around him felt like wrapping herself around a honed blade, the convex jut of his sternum nestling between her breasts as if it might pierce through her ribcage.

And then his hands were there, clutching her writhing hips, blindly guiding her as his eyes fluttered shut and his head knocked back into a ragged, full-throated moan. He was hot and so hard, the angled tip of his cock thick and throbbing as it pushed into her.  

Despite her impatience, or probably because of it, he took his time—the motion so achingly slow, her toes were cramping from curling so tight, her limbs quivering with anticipation. Her thighs clamped tight, desperately urging him on as the flared ridges of his cock edged deeper and deeper. No use. And with his arms locked around her and his weight crushing her into the mats as he drove into her, there was little she could do to hurry him along.

Finally, finally, the plates framing his sheath knocked against her mons. Shepard whined, rocking her hips in tiny circles as the pulse shuddering through his shaft thrummed inside her. Her whole body was vibrating with need, resonating in response, heartbeat surging to match the rhythm pressed into the deepest, most sensitive part of her. 

The syllables of her name rippled through his groan, forming sweet eddies in the lower registers of his subvocals. It sounded unbearably intimate on his staggered breath—more than it had any right to. Shepard wasn’t a name shaped for closeness. Wasn’t a name for lovers or friends, for anyone who knew who she really was behind its legacy. But he said it as if he were all those things instead of a stranger who had every right to hate her. 

She dug her fingernails into his skin, raking lines over his back, and kissed him. Not gently.

She bruised her lips against his unyielding mouth, pricked her tongue on his sharp edges. He smelled wet and faintly metallic, like a burgeoning storm, condensing steam still freckling over all the secret hollows of his carapace from the shower. She licked up loose droplets as they shook free from his crest. Then a groan rushed out of him and she devoured it whole too, lapping up the sub-harmonic echoes from the possessive thrust of his tongue. 

Tears were beading up against her eyelashes. She hated him for this, too. She hated him and kissed him and needed him so much it hurt. So much, it might kill her.

The room was spinning again, and he was beneath her, his hands bracing her thighs, his cock twitching deep inside her. She fucked him with the forceful plunge of her hips, her hands fisting over his, anchoring the wild, rolling rhythm of their bodies. In seconds, they were both on the precipice, limbs graceless, motions hitching, the rhythmic thump against the mats faltering.

Garrus was still saying her name, over and over, body arching, sleek and angular and lethal and so fucking beautiful, limned in watery golds bright as flame. Her palms spread into five-pointed stars, fingers catching and clutching at all his gilt edges as his thighs trembled and her hips jerked. The orgasm pummeled into her, crashing against her bones, churning in her blood. Shepard cried out his name, voice breaking with pleasure, with pain, with the anguish in her chest.

He cried out too, a flanging roar, as his frame juddered. A rush of heat and then he was pulling her down onto the blade of his sternum, holding her flush against him as he came. He held her with his palms encompassing the small of her back, his touch gentle and fiercely protective—the way people touched things they couldn’t bear to let go. 

Mouth against her ear, he came with her name still on his tongue.

Garrus was still dazed, still seeing the visual echo of flame hair against the backs of his eyes when she pulled free and flopped down, naked, onto the mats. 

“You should really go,” she said, but her voice was strange. 

Blinking back the lingering sight of her, beautiful and wild, skin glistening and haloed in red—he glanced over just in time to see her tip her chin up and as she pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. 

“If… that’s what you want.”

She sucked in a large breath, her heaving chest rising, then falling. 

“No. But don’t you?”

He tried to calm his own heaving breath. The truth came easily. “I guess… it depends.”

“On?”

He turned towards her, propping himself up on his elbow. 

“On if you’re still going to be here when I wake up this time.”

Her palms fell away and when she looked at him, her good eye was vivid green beneath a glimmering shine, rimmed with spikey dark lashes. 

It was supposed to be more complicated than that.  But in that moment, the lingering aura of physical intimacy stripped them bare. It was all so simple. So clear. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want her to go.  

The guilt was still there, but that was simple too. At least, right then. It'd stopped with the sucker punches and now he was left with the bone-deep bruises lingering dark and blue beneath his scutes. Like all bad bruises, the worst was yet to come.  Garrus shut it out of his mind, knowing it'd keep for later and reached out and drew her into the circle of his arms. Bare skin shivering, limbs quavering and yielding, she let him. Twining his fingers into the messy snarls of her hair, he tucked her close and nuzzled his chin against her temple. 

“If I stay, it’s just going to make things complicated for you,” she said finally, her voice tickling his neck.

“I don’t mind complicated.”

She huffed a laugh that sounded a bit like a sob. “That so? You have a pretty black and white worldview for a guy who doesn’t mind complicated.”

“Not everything has to be black and white. Just most things.”

“Not this?”

He shook his head, fingers still buried in her hair, arms tightening around her. “Not you.”

In his arms, she tensed, and he sensed her scowl.

“You’re an asshole,” she grumbled and her voice was strange again—strained and hoarse, a quaver working through the vowels.

“Many find that to be the case,” he mused. “Is that a problem for you?”

Her next laugh reluctantly curled up against the base of his ear. “If it was, I’d be a hypocrite.”

For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of her breath gentling against his ear, the rise of her chest against his side, the slip of her hair against his talons. 

“I don’t—” she started. Stopped. Breathed deeply and gusted out a heavy exhale. “I don’t want to be done. And I think that’s why you’re here on Omega. I think you saved the Citadel and the idea of being done scared you so much, you ended up out here on the edge of the galaxy. And maybe that’s all this is… maybe that’s the only reason you want me to stay.”

His hand stilled in her hair. She was right. He knew exactly what she was talking about. Knew it down to his bones—sitting at his desk, filing the same old incident reports, watching the keepers do the quiet labor of rebuilding after Sovereign’s attack, watching the bronze scaffolding of Alenko’s memorial statue progress every time he went to visit his mother in the care facility where could only stand by the door, useless.  

But that wasn’t why he wanted her to stay. 

“Give yourself some credit, Shepard. I could just have a thing for eyepatches.”

That wasn't why either.

“Well, yeah, you should. It looks good. And it accessorizes with a life of piracy.”

Sensing the rapidly encroaching rejection, the imminent awkward goodbyes, something at the center of his chest recoiled. Felt like it would take his ribs with it. He did his best to breathe through it and loosen his arms around her.  Wasn’t as if he expected different. The Binary Helix case lodged in the corner of his eye and the bruises of his guilt thumped a promise of looming consequences.

“It actually accessorizes too well,” she said. “I’m a walking stereotype. All I need is the fucking parrot.”

He had no idea what to say to that and while he was fumbling for some kind of response; she continued. 

“There’s actually some things I’d like to do here for a bit, now that I think about it. The Market’s gone, but Omega’s still got plenty of its customers. And more, besides. I’ve… I’ve done all I could do on the Impara for the time being. Until the slave trade recovers—well, it wouldn’t be so bad trying to clean up the mess they left here.”

Now he was fumbling for a response for an entirely different reason. His sub-harmonics were catching in his chest and when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a strangled burst of air that took all his breath with it.

“Still a couple things I need to wrap up on the Impara beforehand, a quick run out to a research station out in the Amada system before I transfer command, but that won’t take long. And—”

And then he was kissing her, a human kiss, nothing like the one earlier. This was a slow glide, a soft caress, his sub-harmonics rumbling a bass note of content. If a kiss could have words, it would be all the ones trapped in his chest. And more—things there were no words for—the feel of her name on his tongue, the warmth blooming in his ribcage and drowning out his guilt. It would be this moment burnished in the gold lamplight, enclosed in leaf-colored walls, music and dust motes drifting lazily through the air.

Perfect and endless and exactly where they wanted to be.