Mass Effect 1. Chapter 1

**Author's Notes: **For those of you who have been wondering why my other two stories haven't updated, here's part of what has been occupying my headspace recently. With this out of the way, I should be able to focus on Custodis and Terra more fully.

Also, you should check out my collaborative work with MitisVenatrix. The Partners story arc, which documents the evolving friendship of Garrus Vakarian and Commander Teandra Shepard, (consisting of _Partners/Comrades/Friends, Omega, and E Tenebrea Et Lux)_, can all be found under her profile. That would be where the OTHER half of my creative energy has been directed lately.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Mass Effect, nor do I own Sonnet #130. Those were created by BioWare and William Shakespeare, respectively.

*/*/*/*/*

"That old paradox has always bothered me."

"Which old paradox would you be referring to?"

"I'm not sure if it exists in turian culture, but there's some old human song that puts it rather bluntly: 'Am I beautiful because you love me, or do you love me because I'm beautiful?'"

"And this plagues you. . .why?"

"Because there is no answer to that question that won't earn someone a punch in the face."

Garrus laughed, though there was a nervous edge to the sound that he hoped she didn't catch. "I can see how that would be a problem."

"I'm not terribly worried about taking it on the chin, physically speaking. I'm a big girl. I've taken punches before. What concerns me is hurting the feelings of someone close to me."

"I never took you for the touchy-feely sort, Shepard."

She chuckled at that, and replied, "There are many layers to this Spectre, Vakarian. Just don't let it get around, okay? I have a reputation to maintain."

"Your secrets are safe with me."

She was standing in the back-left corner of her room, just past her armor locker, and watching her Thessian Sunfish take a leisurely swim from one end of her fish tank to the other. Her right arm was crossed over her chest, just below the sternum, with her hand balled into a loose fist. Her left was bent at the elbow, that hand occupied with the wineglass now pressed against her lower lip.

From his position on the sofa, he could only see half her face, and in the dim light, her reflection in the glass was hard to see. This bothered him just a little bit, as he found it difficult to gauge her (or any other human's, really) emotions through voice cues alone. Their lack of a second voice box always made it so hard to work out the underlying meaning in their words.

He watched as her lips (what he could see of them, anyway) curved into a slight smile at his last remark. "I know that, Garrus. I trust no one in this universe more than you."

Even though he could tell the words were heartfelt, and he didn't doubt her sincerity, he _did_ get a little anxious as he watched her smile take on a note of sadness. That anxiety ratcheted up another notch when she sighed and turned to face him.

"Which reminds me," she said just a little too casually as she crossed the room to sit beside him on the couch, "there was something I wanted to ask you about."

He swallowed and said, also a little too casually, "Oh?"

"Remember when we were discussing our next move in. . .whatever it is, exactly, we've got going on, and you said I could find something 'closer to home'?"

Garrus went to answer in the affirmative, but found he couldn't get the words out. He settled for nodding.

"I remember giving you an answer, and you accepting it, but what I don't recall is you sharing the reason you made that little speech in the first place."

Unconsciously, his hand went up to the right side of his head to fiddle with the bandage that covered the majority of the scars on his face. He wore it under the guise of keeping the earpiece to his translator more firmly set in his ear, but, while mostly true, it was also mostly false.

Garrus knew that by the standards of most other species, save perhaps the asari, he wasn't considered attractive. In his own culture, though, he had looks that bordered on handsome.

Right up until he'd stopped a rocket with his face.

He'd never considered himself a very vain man, but when he'd finally gotten ahold of a mirror after rejoining Shepard, well. . .looking at the scarred, wired, mangled face staring back at him had been a rude awakening, to say the least.

It had brought back long-forgotten memories from his youth, specifically his first few years in the military. During hand-to-hand training after Basic, he'd gotten a particularly nasty knife wound during a Mexta sparring exercise, and one of his bunk mates had caught him staring at it in the mirror in the showerhouse while he was changing the dressing.

_"Damn, Vakarian! That's gonna be a beauty!"_

_Sixteen-year-old Garrus Vakarian narrowed his eyes in a combination of annoyance and confusion at the turian with white clan tattooes standing next to him at the row of sinks. "What are you talking about?"_

_Dritan Acanthus pulled a small, stiff-wired brush from his toiletry kit as he drawled, "That thing's gonna leave a pretty nasty scar, and you know what they say about women and scars." His expression bordered on a leer as he took a tube of toothpaste out of his little black bag and proceeded to load his brush up with some of the contents._

_Not wanting to look like an undereducated child, but also insanely curious, Garrus picked at the scab to the left of his chest spur and said, "I guess that depends whether you believe everything you hear."_

_Dritan pulled the brush from his mouth, spraying bits of foam as he said matter-of-factly, "Oh, believe me, my older brothers have told me _plenty_ of stories about their time in the military, and they all point to the same thing: The ladies love a man with scars. Something about making a guy look 'fierce'. Drives 'em wild." Dritan's eyeridges waggled suggestively at that last word, and he smiled lasciviously as he shoved the brush back in his mouth._

Even though he had made a similar statement while talking with Shepard when he'd first come to after Omega, he had doubted Dritan's words then, and he doubted them now. How could anyone find him. . .

"Garrus?" His thoughts were jerked back to the present with the sound of her wineglass settling on the coffee table. Shepard turned to face him more fully, and her knee brushed up against the outside of his thigh. He found that he rather liked the feeling, but didn't have time to examine it further, as she'd pulled his hand away from his face and replaced it with one of her five-fingered ones.

"Garrus," she started again, turning his face further in her direction. "Is this," she stroked his mandible lightly, fingertips ghosting over the cybernetic plating toward the back of it, "what prompted that conversation? Are you worried that I think you're ugly?"

Not for the first time in his life, his mouth overrode his brain, and he blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "Is that so hard to believe?" She visibly recoiled at his outburst, and he felt another layer of shame settle over his own self-consciousness at what he saw in her eyes: Hurt.

Before he could explain himself, her expression grew angry and, her voice that deadly calm tone that preceded her ripping somebody a new one, she asked, "Do you really think I'm that shallow?"

"That's not what I meant." Garrus slammed his tumbler onto the table with enough force to cause the more fragile wineglass to tremble, and nearly snorted with derision at how fitting their choices in beverage holders turned out to be. She, the more delicately built creature, slender and visually appealing, and he, the stocky, sturdy, aesthetically worthless thing meant to take untold damage and keep right on going.

He stood up as he rushed on, not wanting to give her a chance to verbally kick him in the quad for acting like an asshole, "I've done the research, Shepard. I know what humans typically consider appealing, and I know I'm not it." He turned toward the short stairway (and further away from her) as he added quietly, "I've seen what I'm up against."

The silence that followed was crushing, and before long, it was just too much for him to take. Knowing he'd managed to ruin what had promised to be a perfectly enjoyable evening, he growled, "What the hell am I doing here?" and made a beeline for the room's only exit.

Just as his hand moved to the keypad next to the door, he heard Shepard's voice from somewhere behind him. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

He froze with his hand in midair, as she continued, "Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun."

Her voice was. . .different. There was a duality, a richness, there that he'd never heard before, and he was at a complete loss for how to describe it.

"If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks."

It was. . .both soothing and maddening all at once, and it compelled him to listen, even though he was sure he'd rather have been walking out the door. Wasn't that why he was standing in front of it in the first place? He really couldn't remember. . .

"And in some perfumes is there more delight, than in the breath that from my mistress reeks."

His visor was transcribing her words, and giving him historical and academic information as it did so. He didn't need it to tell him what he had discerned just from aural cues alone: It was poetry, in more ways than one, and he found the concept of this sort of speech coming from his friend and commanding officer to be both mortifying and attractive simultaneously.

"I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound."

Well, this was music to his ears, to be sure, though the words themselves made little sense. (Garrus had never been one for poetry.) And it was driving him insane, trying to deduce the reason he felt this way. Then, with the force of a tsunami crashing into shore, the answer hit him:

She sounded just like a turian.

_How. . ._

"I grant I never saw a goddess go; my mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground." He felt a hand on his arm then, pulling him to make a one-hundred-eighty degree turn, and like a sailor listening to a siren's song, he obeyed.

Facing her now, he held his breath as he watched her face as she spoke what his visor informed him were the last lines of one of Shakepeare's more famous works, "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare, as any she belied with false compare."

Her eyes were filled with calm affection, but her mouth was set into something of a worried half-smile. The expressions didn't match, which confused him. . .until he realized he was gaping at her in a slack-mandibled fashion, and pulled them shut against his teeth with an audible snap.

The half-smile turned into a full-blown grin, and for several long moments, neither of them spoke.

Once again, the quiet was just too much for Garrus. He had no idea, really, what to do or say, so he did what he always did in these situations: He cracked a joke.

"Poetry, Shepard? Really?" He nearly winced, as that was about the lamest attempt at humor he'd made since. . .well, ever.

Without missing a beat, she shot back, "Blame Ashley. She started it."

He snorted, and the words came much more easily as he said, "Shepard, that was. . .that was beautiful. Truly amazing. But, how. . ."

Her small, pale hand came into view, and revealed her omnitool to his gaze. She squeezed it, the action shutting it down, and her voice returned to normal. "You're not the only one who's been doing research, Garrus. I know that voice cues in alien speech patterns are tough for turians to catch, so I downloaded a program that would modulate my voice. I. . ." She was blushing now, which, while a completely alien occurrence to his people, he knew it to be a rather normal one to hers, and her gaze dropped to her feet as she went on, "I also found out that voice cues are pretty important when it comes to. . .attraction, and had planned on using this thing if everything else I tried tonight didn't work."

Completely at a loss for words (which seemed to be a running theme that night), he stared at her, awestruck, before he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. She stiffened, but only for a moment, before relaxing into the embrace and returning it in kind.

They stayed that way for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a few minutes when he said, "So. As nice as that was to _hear_, what exactly did you _mean_ by all that?"

Shepard laughed into his shirt before she raised her chin so that she was looking up at him. "Tell you what. I'll explain what I said if you'll come back to the couch. I've been on my feet all day, and I'd really rather not be on them another second longer."

Garrus wasn't sure why he responded as he did, but on impulse, he picked her up off the floor and carried her bodily down the stairs. After her initial squeal of surprise, Shepard wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist to keep from falling. Rather than put her down again when they reached the couch, Garrus carefully sat down on the edge, mostly to keep from crushing the lower half of her legs with his bulk.

She leaned back in his lap to look at him, the smile on her face an amused one, and said, "Well, you kept up your end of the bargain, so to speak. Guess it's my turn."

He waited as she broke eye contact again to look over at her fish tank, and then the glass case holding her model ship collection above his head. "You said that you knew what humans typically find attractive," she began while looking back at her battered N7 helmet on the desk nearby. "First of all," she continued, still not looking at him, "you're very sweet to worry about my sensibilities." She brought her gaze back to his face, and with all traces of mirth gone, said, "However, I am far from typical."

He moved to respond, but was stopped by a single finger laid against what was left of his chin. "Please, let me finish before you say anything." The turian nodded his acquiescence, which seemed to satisfy the human in his lap, and waited for her to finish. "The point of that poem is that, while the poet's beloved is not at all what was considered traditionally pretty at the time it was written, to him, she's the most beautiful thing in the world, because he loves her."

She leaned forward slightly, her gaze softening as she went on, "Affection colors his perception, and while some may find that somewhat insulting, I've always found it to be nothing more than indicative of a simple fact: Emotion may cause us to see things differently than others do, but that doesn't make what we see any less true."

Garrus blinked at her, trying to figure out what to say, but was cut off again, this time by slender fingers sliding inside his tunic and caressing his chest plates. The realization that her nimble little hands had been unbuttoning his tunic during the entirety of her speech was almost as jarring as her touch, but not in even a remotely bad way.

_Nice sense of awareness there, Vakarian. If she'd been your enemy, you'd have a knife in your heart right about now. Apex predator my ass._

Feminine laughter pulled him out of his reverie, which was when he realized he'd shared his thoughts with the rest of the room.

And with her.

His mandibles pulled upward in embarrassment, and he looked away as Shepard removed her hand from inside his shirt._ Great. Finally get over one hurdle only to crash into a brick wall. _Then her hand was on his face again, turning it back to hers.

"Those are two things I love about you, Garrus," she said, breathless with laughter.

"What, my ability to make an idiot out of myself and kill the atmosphere?"

"NO," she said emphatically, bringing her face closer to his. "Your ability to make me laugh, and the fact that you're not afraid to speak your mind." At that last word, her hand left his face and ran lightly up the skin of his neck to his fringe. He released a low rumble in his chest before he knew what was happening, and she laughed again. "What's making you so happy, what I'm doing, or what I'm saying?"

His answer was slightly strangled, as he found it tough to concentrate when she was stroking her blunt little fingernails along the underside of his fringe. "Do I have to choose?"

"Not if you don't want to. I can keep up both. For a while, at least."

"Then don't stop on my account."


	2. Chapter 2

Her husky laughter became pleasant background noise at that point, rather than something that bothered him, as she continued her incongruous running commentary as she explored more of him.

"Let's see. Things about you that I like. Hmm. . ." Shepard's face belied her words, as it was clear that she had no trouble calling up traits about her turian companion that she liked. Still straddling his lap, she stopped playing with his fringe (which made him groan softly at the loss of contact) and looped both arms around her his neck to lever herself forward. In response, his own hands ran up and down the length of her back, and since she sighed happily, he was pretty sure she liked it.

When they were practically nose to nose, she tilted her head to the right and carefully licked along the edge of his damaged mandible, somehow avoiding the bandages, and then moved her mouth to his neck to continue lathing him with her tongue. His head lolled back, to give her better access, and she took full advantage, not stopping until she reached the neckline of his shirt. Then she pulled away and began fussing with the front of his tunic again. "Your passion for justice, while occasionally inconvenient and more than a little scary, is nonetheless admirable." Her hands moved up his torso, in an attempt to push his top off his shoulders. "Honestly, it made me wonder what else you might be passionate about."

Garrus' head snapped up and he found that while her head was bowed toward his chest, she was looking up at him through her eyelashes. If he'd had any doubt about the implications behind her words, they fled when he saw her face. Her expression was all innocence, but he knew her well enough to see that her eyes were filled with pure mischief.

He cleared his throat, vowing not to be outdone, and replied in kind. "Maybe if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll find out," he quipped as he shrugged out of his shirt, letting it fall behind him carelessly. His hands moved to the front of her uniform jacket, and began making short work of the fasteners there. _Thank the spirits for velcro._

Shepard looked down to watch his progress, then back up at him. "What?" He said somewhat defensively. "My shirt's gone, so yours goes, too. Fair is fair."

She chuckled, but didn't reply. Instead, she settled for running her hands up his arms, fingertips skimming over hide and plate alike, until he pushed her hands away. Before she could protest, he mirrored her earlier action of pushing her jacket off her shoulders, and she mimicked his move of letting it slide off her body and onto the floor.

"Better?"

"Much."

She laughed again, but not at his words. Now she was laughing at the look on his face, as Garrus had just encountered that bane of every man's sexual relationship with human women: The bra.

He stared at her chest for what seemed like eternity, and after a bit Shepard began to feel a little uneasy, as she thought perhaps her breasts might be a little too strange for him to deal with, even though the spirit was obviously willing. Then, with a start, she realized what he was doing: He was calculating the best way to remove the damn thing.

_Techs, and their need to overcome every problem with math. _She shook her head, and was about to tell him how to go about accomplishing his goal when he reached out and took one mound in each three-fingered hand. She gasped at the unexpected sensation, and he immediately pulled his hands back.

"I'm sorry! Did I hurt you?"

"No, but I'm going to hurt _you_ if you don't put your damn hands back where they were!"

Tentatively, as if he feared she might change her mind, Garrus lightly brushed his palms across her breasts and she sighed, her eyes drifting shut as she did so. Then his hands were gone again, and she was about to growl out a line about him being a tease when she heard something slap onto the coffee table. Confused, she opened her eyes and then felt a little silly for not realizing what he was doing sooner. He'd been removing his gloves, which she hadn't even realized he was still wearing until just then.

He followed her line of sight, but rather than comment on what he'd just done, he simply shrugged (a very human gesture that, oddly, didn't look that strange when he did it), and turned his attention back to her chest.

But, rather than return his hands to their previous activity, they settled on her waist. His touch was warm, just this side of too warm, and Shepard wondered how it would feel in other places. Still, he didn't move, or speak, and she finally had to ask him what the hold up was.

"You stopped talking."

She quirked an eyebrow at him in disbelief. "That's what you're waiting for?"

He shrugged again, saying only, "Turians don't usually talk much in these sorts of situations. It's. . .different. In a good way."

It dawned on Shepard that this was as close to outright asking her to do something as he was going to come. It wasn't that he was overly prideful; quite the opposite. He felt like asking for things was selfish, and he didn't like doing it if he didn't have to. Hell, it was the exact same reason why she'd had to all but drag him to a kiosk at the Citadel to get him measured for new armor, since she wouldn't dare let him entertain the idea of going into the raid on the Collector base in his shot-to-shit C-Sec duds.

He'd been brought up all his life with the belief that the greater good was more important than the needs (or wants) of the individual drilled into his brain at every opportunity, and while he often said he was a bad turian, some conditioning just couldn't be broken. She'd had to point out to him that going into a mission as important as theirs with sub-par equipment put the whole team at risk before he would stop worrying over the expense.

Honestly, that he'd said anything at all about what he wanted in this current scenario was probably a freakin' miracle.

Shepard smiled, somewhat sarcastically, and said, "So, what you're saying is my talking does good things for you? Wow, that's a switch."

It was his turn to quirk an eyeridge. "Huh?"

"Since we're talking about the things about you that I like, might as well add your voice to the list."

"Really?"

Her own voice turned into liquid lust as she said, "Garrus, I could listen to you talk about firing algorithms for hours."

"But. . .you hate tech talk."

"Exactly."

This was apparently news to him. But, he seemed to take a little bit of pride in this revelation, as he said, "Then maybe it's my turn to talk for a while."

Her eyes widened at this prospect, but before she could say anything, his hands were back on her breasts, and all coherent thought went out the airlock.

"I admit, when I first read about this part of the human female anatomy, I was. . .skeptical." His gaze was intense, staring at the small wedge of plastic that lay between the two fabric-covered spheres in his hands. "But, the more I thought about them, the more curious I was to see what yours looked like." With those words, the talons on both his thumbs carefully slid under the front closure clasp, and with a quick flick, her bra came undone.

It shouldn't have been that funny, but it took every ounce of self-discipline Shepard possessed NOT to fall over into a giggling heap on the floor at what happened next. His face had been so close to her chest that, when her breasts sprang free from their restraints, part of the clasp smacked into his visor's eyepiece, and an edge of the black lycra wrapped itself around a corner of it. He pulled back, but since the eyepiece was well and truly caught in the fabric, he stopped his backward movement at the first sign of it tearing and, like a rock loosed from a slingshot, his head came crashing back into her sternum.

A muffled growl came next, and that cut off any urge to laugh, full-stop. Not from fear, but out of pure, unadulterated longing. The sound reverberated through her bosom and produced a rather arousing effect, which caused her to moan. Loudly.

Garrus pulled his head back to look at her, only to remember belatedly that his visor was tangled in her undergarments. A ripping noise stopped his progress again, though this time, he managed to keep from smacking back into his partner's chest.

Frustrated beyond belief at this constant "touch and retreat", Shepard let loose a growl of her own, and proceeded to none-too-gently pull the Kiwashi visor off his head. Unfortunately, doing so didn't untangle it, and it was left hanging forlornly from her somewhat-shredded bra. Frustration now growing exponentially (not that she was good enough at math to know what that even meant, non-tech savvy as she was), she looked down, took stock of the state they were in, looked back up at the bewildered expression on her turian's face, and all but sobbed as she buried her head in his hard shoulder.

Completely non-plussed at this turn of events, Garrus pulled his human as close to him as he could manage in their seated position, and waited. He wanted to comfort her, but no appropriate words would produce themselves, so he settled for running the blunt side of his now-uncovered talons up and down her back. She'd seemed to like that before, so it couldn't hurt to do it again, right?

It was apparently the right move, as she shuddered against him, and breathed, "And there's yet another thing I love about you."

"Hmm?"

"You seem to know there's time for talk, and that other times really call for action rather than words."

He wrapped his hands around her shoulders and pushed her away from him so he could look her in the eyes. She didn't resist, but wouldn't look at him, so he put a knuckle under her chin, lifting gently until their gazes met. "If action is what the lady wants, then action is what she'll get."

The promise in his brilliant blue eyes (and in his words) had her shivering with anticipation, but his next move nearly sent the last of her composure flying for the nearest asteroid belt. He pulled her forward to his chest once more, and before she could ask what he was doing, she felt more than heard the rending of the material still clinging to her back.

With a few quick motions, the straps and bands of her bra were falling away from her body and onto the floor. His visor landed with a slight thump against the carpet not far from the ribbons of spandex, and for fear that it might wind up getting trampled if it remained there, Shepard leaned down to pick it up.

Or, she started to, but was held fast by an indescribable sound from her companion. She leaned back up to look at him, only to find that his gaze was fixed on her breasts, and his brow ridges were pulled together in what appeared to be confusion.

She couldn't help it. She had to ask. "What?"

"Well, I know there's a lot of variety in human skin coloring and these," he lifted one with his hand, and she almost stopped listening as his thumb grazed a nipple, "I guess, are no different."

"But. . .," she all but gasped out, as he'd increased the pressure of the digit playing with the nub in the middle of her breast.

"But, given how the rest of your skin looks, the centers of these aren't what I expected."

That got her attention. "Just what _were_ you expecting?"

He shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed as he said with an uncertain air, "I'm really not sure, to tell you the truth."

She was blushing again, when she asked quietly, "Do they bother you?"

As if sensing her growing self-consciousness, Garrus rushed to reassure her that his thoughts ran to the contrary. "No! Not at all. I'm just. . .getting used to them, I guess. Though I do want to test a theory. . ." Without preamble, he leaned down until he was nearly nose-to-nipple with her right breast, and hesitantly drew his startlingly _blue _tongue across it.

"Oh, dear _god_." She was panting now, and she didn't give a damn what she might look like right then, naked from the waist up, head thrown back in wanton abandon, hands gripping his shoulders for dear life, as long as he kept doing _that._

He must have taken her reaction as a good sign, as he repeated the action with her other nipple, and she nearly blacked out.

There was foreplay, and then there was torture. This was starting to toe the line between the two, and Shepard wasn't sure how much more she could take. Bringing her head back up, her hands flew to the waistband of his pants as she huffed, "Off. NOW."

Garrus chuckled, and replied. "There's no use doing that until the boots come off."

"If that's what it takes, consider it done." With that, she bent backward at the waist until her head was mere inches off the floor and began unbuckling his boots with swift, jerking movements.

The turian froze, completely unprepared for what he was witnessing. He knew she was flexible, but he hadn't realized she was _that_ flexible. Only the knowledge that he might actually succeed in breaking her in half kept him from surging forward and slamming her down on the coffee table.

To keep his hands (and his mind) busy, he started unbuckling her boots in turn.

Probably because her feet (and by extension, her shoes) were smaller, he finished his task first. Tossing them to spirits only knew where, he yanked off her boots, and then those peculiar little tubes of cloth called "socks." His heartrate had skyrocketed in the intervening moments, and with it, his impatience. Summoning all the control he had left, Garrus resisted the urge to shred her uniform pants at the seams and instead carefully ran all six of his talons along both sides of her rib cage, leaving faint pink trails that faded almost as soon as they appeared. He felt her fingers falter in their self-appointed task, then smiled to himself as he heard her give a muffled curse from between his feet.

Satisfied that he had her as off-kilter as she'd had him moments before, he lightly scratched along her waist, and felt the muscles beneath his talons jump and quiver.

"You are NOT helping me finish this any faster."

"Speed isn't everything, you know."

"Right. I forgot I'm talking to the guy who likes to savor the last shot-"

Indignation rose inside him, not so much at her reminder as at the phantom pangs of chagrin the memory brought with it, and he leaned down to replace his talons with his tongue.

Her yelp of surprise was sweeter than any music he could have called to mind right then, and he repeated the motion, this time pausing to explore the little divot in her otherwise smooth belly, and was rewarded with a strangled moan.

Her hands were grasping at the skin at the back of his head just then, which felt _really_ good, until her nails dug into his hide just a little too hard for his liking.

"Hey, careful back there."

"God damn it, Vakarian, the blood is rushing to my head down here."

"Isn't that a normal reaction to foreplay in humans?"

"I meant because I can't pull myself back up when your head's in the way!"

"Oh. Sorry." Garrus raised himself back into a sitting position, and because her hands were still gripping the back of his neck, Shepard came along for the ride. Her face was flushed, much more so than he'd ever seen it previously, and her eyes looked a bit glassy. Panic started to well up in his chest, but subsided rapidly when she used her remaining momentum to press herself as close to him as was humanly (ha) possible and ran her square, flat teeth along the left side of his throat.

He was barely able to _think, _what with her doing that to his neck, though one thought did worm it's way to the forefront of his mind before he lost coherency: _Foreplay is definitely underrated._

Before either of them knew what was happening, Garrus' hands came up to Shepard's shoulder blades to add a bit of support, and he rose from his seat on the sofa. He took a single step toward the bed before he recalled, too late, that she'd just finished unbuckling his boots.

The first fell off his foot with a muted thud, which sent him off balance at the unexpected change in weight. He tried, unsuccessfully, to regain his balance on his still-booted foot, and let out a startled cry as he went tumbling to the carpeted floor.

Somehow, he managed to maneuver them both so that he hit the ground first, with Shepard on top of him, instead of the other way around. Call it chivalry, or motivated self-interest, but he was pretty sure knocking his lover unconscious would have been very, very bad.

To her credit, Shepard hardly blinked as she pushed herself upright with a grunt, still straddling him as she asked breathlessly, "Holy shit, are you okay?"

"Define okay," he groaned, reaching a hand backward to make sure his carapace was still intact.

"Anything broken?"

"I don't think so-"

"Good." Without another word, she lunged forward and started running her tongue along the gaps in between his rib plating, and he groaned again, this time for obviously different reasons. Meanwhile, her hands were busy working open the fasteners of his pants.

For whatever reason, the most recent turn their night had taken felt. . .well, it just felt wrong, and Garrus couldn't shake it off, even when she succeeded in opening his fly and her lightly callused fingers found their way inside. His own fingers wrapped around her wrists to halt her progress.

"Stop."

Shepard went rigid. Completely flummoxed by his behavior, she tried to remove her hands from his grip, only to have him cinch his hands more tightly over hers.

"Shepard, I said stop."

"Why do you want me to stop?" She was practically whining with dissatisfaction now, but the look she leveled at him was more hurt than angry.

"Because we are NOT doing this on the floor."

"What? Why the hell not?"

With a look so full of tenderness it nearly stole her breath, he said quietly, but firmly "Because you deserve better."


	3. Chapter 3

Time stopped its journey forward, with the two of them simply staring at each other from their respective positions on the floor. Shepard felt tears prick at the back of her eyes, and a lump formed in her throat as his words sank in. She was not, by nature, much of a cryer, but damned if her eyes weren't about to spring a leak over her turian's softly-spoken declaration.

It took several tries, but she eventually managed to get the lump in her throat to dissolve so that she could say, "Garrus, that's just about sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me."

His mandibles stretched outward in a grin as he sat up, her hands still clutched in his. Idly, he wove his fingers with hers, and while it should have looked strange, his small number of talons with her seeming overabundance of digits, it worked just fine. It just took a little adjustment to make everything fit together comfortably.

Not entirely unlike their relationship, really, but that was something to be mulled over at another time and place.

He leaned in, then, until his forehead brushed against hers as he replied, "Just returning the favor."

From inches away, he watched as her eyelids fluttered closed, another happy sigh on her lips. Her evident contentment emboldened him, so much so that he nipped at her chin, the closest thing to a kiss he could give her. Her eyes flew open, and the look within them told him that she knew exactly what he'd just done. Smiling, she tipped her face forward to return the gesture, and his grin broadened. He couldn't express what it meant to him, that she was using overtures that were familiar to his kind, rather than treating him like he was a spikey, hard-skinned human.

Actually, he could. And he wasn't going to wait another minute longer to do it.

With a grace and speed she'd only ever seen him use on the battlefield, Shepard could do nothing but hold on as Garrus levered both of them off the floor (how he accomplished such a feat, she wasn't sure, but really couldn't find the gumption to care) and backward onto the bed.

They bounced a bit as they settled down on the mattress, and suddenly, she found herself flat on her back, looking up into the plated face she'd come to adore.

"Now, where were we?" His breath was hot against her collarbone as he nuzzled up to her, breathing in her very singular scent. Elsewhere, his hands set to work at divesting his human of what remained of her clothes. "Ah, yes. I remember." He dragged the tips of his mandibles down the valley between her breasts, and her chest heaved in a gasp.

It was interesting, on some level, that a sound that used to worry him was now one he looked forward to hearing. In fact, the list of noises she made that he liked was growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to this current situation.

The only thing he enjoyed more than hearing those sounds was doing the things that dragged those noises out of her in the first place.

With that in mind, he changed trajectory, and ever so slowly licked the underside of a breast, just to see what would happen. That little nub in the middle he'd played with earlier seemed to be very sensitive to touch, so perhaps the rest was, too.

Shepard's back arched sharply, the motion accompanied by a breathless cry. Garrus smiled smugly and did it again, this time on the other side, and held back a chuckle as she grabbed the back of his head to try and hold it in place.

Much as he would have liked to fulfill her silent plea, he'd just succeeded in disengaging all the snaps of her pants, and given that neither of them was going to get any real relief until they were well and truly naked, there was no way he was going to delay getting them in that state any longer than he had to. So, he pulled away from her desperate hold to tug her slacks down her legs with a jubilant growl.

Of course, his triumph was short-lived when he realized that the previously-outwitted bra had an accomplice.

The timbre of his growling must have changed, as Shepard was up out of her prone position and placing her hands on his hips in a placating manner before Garrus even noticed she'd moved.

"Relax, big guy. Let me handle this part." Her eyes never leaving his face, she tilted her head downward, which caused her bearing to change from reassuring to demure. The affect was completely ruined by the impish grin she wore, however, and it was a look he knew well. It was a look that said, "I know something you don't," and it was then that he saw where her hands were headed.

In his previous frenzy to reveal more of her soft flesh to his eyes, Garrus had missed a very intriguing detail: Her underwear sported a pair of bows, one at the peak of each hip bone. While they appeared to be purely decorative, as it turned out, this was far from the case.

With slow, deliberate movements, Shepard took the tail of each ribbon between a thumb and forefinger, and pulled until both bows had unraveled. Then, with a quick flick of her wrists, the triangle of black fabric was gone, and there was nothing between the two of them but distance.

Well, that, and his pants. And that simply wouldn't do.

He scrambled backward until he was standing at the foot of the bed, franticly hauling his trousers down his legs, only to get held up by his spurs. With a snarl, the turian pulled with all his strength, and the seams appeared to disintegrate in fear at the violence he displayed. His pants now pretty much useless, he dropped what was left of them and vaulted forward, sending Shepard sprawling backward onto the bedspread in slack-jawed shock.

The shock wore off quickly, as Garrus was moving down her body at a moderate, but purposeful pace. Leaving a trail of nipping "kisses" in his wake, he traveled down her torso until he reached the juncture of her thighs, and pulled up short.

She watched as he contemplated this newly-revealed part of her person. The throbbing that had started there a long time ago increased steadily under his scrutiny, and Shepard just barely succeeded in keeping her protests to herself as she waited for him to work out whatever was going through his head. There was no point in complaining, as all it would do is make him feel the need to rush, and rushing him was the last thing she wanted to do.

At least, that's what the nice part of her personality was saying. Her bitchier side was screaming at her to demand that he stop playing games and nail her into the mattress right. _Fucking._ _NOW._

To occupy herself, she craned her neck in attempt to check out certain parts of _his_ anatomy, but found that between his position and her vantage point, she couldn't see a damn thing.

That didn't matter, though, as her vision went white a second later, when Garrus took a tentative swipe at her opening with his tongue.

She couldn't see, couldn't breathe, couldn't _think. _Every nerve ending in her body was firing at once, and all she could do was grasp at the comforter beneath her hands in hopes of keeping herself grounded. A flanging chortle was her only warning before the sensation returned, and her hips bucked upward of their own accord.

Her fists twisted in the blankets, awaiting the next onslaught, when a new feeling permeated her mental fog: A faintly burning tingle. It took several seconds for her conscious mind to catch up to what her subconscious had already figured out.

She freed her hands from the blankets and brought them up to his head, pulling at his fringe in an attempt to get his attention.

"Garrus," she panted, "Garrus, as wonderful as that is, I think you'd better stop."

He looked at her, his expression akin to disappointment. Then, he seemed to read the message in her eyes and the look changed to one of alarm. "How bad is it?"

"Nothing life threatening. What about you?"

". . .now that you mention it, my tongue's burning a little." He stuck out the aforementioned organ, and sort of picked at it with his talons. Whatever test he was running on himself, he seemed satisfied with the results, as he said, "Not as bad as I feared."

Whatever she was about to say in response died on her lips, as it was at that moment her gaze drifted downward to the space between his legs.

She couldn't keep the smirk from her face as she drawled, "Well, well, well. Who do we have here?" The human pushed herself into a sitting position, which caused the turian to retreat a tad to keep from bumping their heads together. She knew from the pamphlets a certain scientist had provided for her perusal that a turian's manhood (turian-hood?) only emerged from its protective sheath when the male in question was one-hundred-percent ready and raring to go. This development sent all the forlorn thoughts that had been teasing the edge of her mind as a result of the previous minute's incident skittering back into their dark, angsty corners.

Almost languidly, she reached a hand forward to rest on the plates just above his member as she intoned, "Care to introduce us?"

Garrus jerked at her touch, and her smile turned absolutely wicked at her next line of thought. _Looks like that's a sensitive spot. I wonder. . . _With a playful air, she scratched at the plates beneath her hand, and could barely contain her glee when the focus of her "experiment" twitched in response.

With a wistful (and fleeting) thought about what she _couldn't_ do with this information, Shepard's eyes darkened as she said lightly, "Oh, well. A good, old-fashioned handshake will have to do."

With that, her fingers wrapped around this particular point of interest, and squeezed.

Her feather-light touch on the most vulnerable part of him was too much. Garrus had thought he was going to lose it when she started scratching along his waist and lower abdomen, but that was _nothing _compared to what he was feeling at the moment.

"Shepard. . .," he'd started to warn her that he was very close to his breaking point.

Then she'd _squeezed_ him, and that, as they say, was all she wrote.

Unbeknownst to him, he'd hissed aloud, and Shepard's hand left him. "Oh, god, Garrus, I'm sor-"

She never got out the rest of her apology.

With a roar that would have startled them both if they'd stopped long enough to think about it, Garrus seized Shepard by the waist and hauled her to him. In a pantomime of their earlier embrace, he picked her up with the intention of wrapping her around him in a very _different_ way, when she wheezed into his ear, "Can't yet. We need-"

His growl was low and dangerous. "Where are they?"

"Bedside table," was all she managed to say before she latched her mouth onto his throat. Then one of her hands found his fringe and yanked. _Hard._

He nearly dropped her right then, but was able to hang on long enough to get around the side of the bed and fumble open the drawer of her nightstand. He fished around blindly with one hand until his talons closed around a small, rectangular box.

Pulling his prize out of the drawer, he fairly threw Shepard down on the bed to free up his hands. He ripped the box open with enough force that both halves of the tattered cardboard went sailing into separate parts of the room. Little foil packets flew into the air, and scattered about his feet. With a frustrated noise, he bent down to retrieve one when he suddenly discovered he didn't have to.

With an efficiency close to frightening, Shepard had a condom out of it's wrapper and rolling down over him before he could blink.

The very nanosecond she finished, he was on her, and with a long look that was equal parts affection and desire (one that was reflected in her eyes), he settled between her legs and brought her forward until they were joined in the most literal way possible.

Neither of them knew quite what they should expect when they had imagined how this, the most intimate of physical acts, would go. Even after reading all the journal articles and watching all the vids, they knew things could go very, very badly. Or, at the very least, very, very awkwardly. Hell, the odds of things going remotely well were pretty slim, considering.

Which is why they were in no way prepared for how _right_ it felt when they came together that first time.

The couple groaned in unison, he marveling at how easily he'd slid into her, she in awe that his "impossible reach" seemed to extend to parts of him other than his arms. His talons flexed at her hips, and her nails dug into the hide separating his shoulder plates from his upper arms. Neither of them moved more than that for a while, the both of them adjusting to this new degree of closeness, and the realization that there really was no turning back.

Not that either of them wanted to. Or could.

Garrus was trying to gauge if it was safe to move when Shepard wiggled her hips, and that was more than enough encouragement in his aroused state. He pulled back a fraction, then pushed forward, testing the proverbial waters.

She groaned again, and pushed herself closer to him in what appeared to be an unconscious show of approval. He did it again, pulling back farther this time, and he felt something very strange and amazing happen. Her channel contracted, gripping him, and it evoked the same feeling that had surfaced when she squeezed him with her hand, only _much_ more pronounced.

Time slowed and raced in consonance, as he pushed her back onto the bed and covered her smaller body with his larger one. His renewed thrusting was shallow at first, but quickly increased in depth and speed as his need to find completion multiplied, a million-fold.

Shepard's knees were nearly level with her shoulders, her ankles flush with her hips, and even though she knew she was really going to feel this later, it wouldn't hold a candle to the way it was feeling _now_. Sparks were exploding in front of her eyes as he stroked her deepest reaches with each snap of his hips. Granted, it had been a long time since she'd last been with anyone, but she was certain that had little to do with her reaction. She could feel that her shins and the backs of her thighs were already chafing, and still, she didn't care. All that mattered was the sound of their mingled moaning, the building heat in her loins, and the fact that the person doing this to (with) her was her match in every way.

As such, it shouldn't have surprised her in the least when her orgasm snuck up on her, completely overwhelming in it's ferocity. Her eyelids clamped shut and this time, she couldn't stop a tear or two from leaking out. A combination of a whimper and a sob forced its way out of her lungs, and her hold on her turian's shoulders intensified as she rode the downward slope of pleasure, waiting for him to join her.

That sound nearly brought Garrus to a stuttering halt, as it was unlike anything he'd ever heard, and he was worried that something had gone wrong. Then he saw her back arch, felt her spasm around him, and all concern fled as he finally reached his peak with a startled grunt. His remaining thrusts were jagged and uneven, much like his breathing, and by the time he'd finished, he was gasping for air like a dying man desperate to hang onto life.

He collapsed on top of her, sated and exhausted, and barely had the presence of mind to roll to the side to avoid squishing her, pulling her into his chest and laying his rough cheek atop her head as they both slid comfortably into unconsciousness.

*/*/*/*/*

It wasn't until much later, after they'd dozed for a while and simply enjoyed that ephemeral period known to many as the afterglow, that conversation began anew.

"Something just occurred to me."

"Hmm?"

"That. . .what was it you called those lacy things?"

"Lingerie?"

"Right. Those didn't seem very practical, considering your lifestyle."

"They aren't meant to be practical. They're meant to be enticing."

"Ah."

"Did they work?"

"To a certain extent." He was fiddling with her hair now, which she'd finally thought to take out of its perpetual bun after she'd woken up. It hadn't taken much effort, seeing as it had come halfway undone during their. . .exertions. "How fortunate you happened to be wearing them tonight," he mused, absently flipping a tuft of hair back and forth across his knuckles.

Her tone changed from conversational to something he couldn't really decipher. "Yeah, about that. I sort of stacked the deck in my favor."

He dropped the strands he was playing with and lifted his head off the pillow to look down at her. "Explain."

"I have six sets of those, in different colors. I've been changing into a set to wear when I'm off duty every other day for the last two months. Just in case."

He paused, and she could practically hear the gears in his head grinding as he thought over the implications of that admission. This hadn't been the first time they'd been alone together in those eight weeks. It wasn't even the first time they'd slept side by side. It just happened to be the first time they'd been physically intimate, and what he said next seemed to be rather non-sequitter. "Five."

"Five what?"

"Five sets, not six. I ruined your bra, remember?"

"Oh. Right. Well, it was an acceptable loss. Black isn't my best color, anyway."

He nuzzled the side of her neck, chuckling warmly as he said, "That's one of the things I love about you, Shepard."

Her heart stuttered a bit at his use of the "L" word. It was silly, as she was as sure of what he felt for her as she was that she couldn't hack her way out of a grocery bag if her life depended on it, but he'd never actually said it before. Technically, he still hadn't, but that was neither here nor there. "And what would that be, exactly?"

"I think there's a human phrase that fits best: You know how to roll with the punches."

She grinned as she quipped, "That's me. Endlessly adaptable." She was quiet for a long moment. Then, rather shyly, she asked, "What else do you like about me?"

"Are you sure you want to hear the list right now? It could take a while."

"Oh, I'm sure we can find something to do while you're waxing poetic about my finer qualities." She was doing her best to suppress a laugh at his indignant huff at the back of her neck, but the laughter was cut short at the gentle nip he gave her shoulder.

"Which brings us to item number two: You're an excellent multi-tasker."

They didn't get back to sleep until an hour or so later, when they'd exhausted their voices (and their bodies) to the point of lethargy. But that was okay. They didn't really need words or grand overtures to get their respective points across anymore, anyway. A brush of the forehead or a nip at the chin, or even a sidelong glance said more than enough.


End file.
