Chapter Text
The “sun” on the Citadel was no more than an artificial day/night cycle that had no centralized clock to work off. In Zakera ward, days were 10 hours and nights 5. In the Presidium, the cycle ran in line with Thessia—29-hour days and 13-hour nights. On the Silversun Strip, it seemed to be perpetually late evening, or early at night—an everlasting Saturday night, prime for partying and shopping. Individual homes often ran their own cycles as each species tried to mesh their internal clocks with the demands of working amongst a cohort of aliens. Thane, Shepard suspected, had edited his own program to Earth’s 24-hour cycle, or something close to it. Or perhaps her system was so out-of-whack from years spent onboard star ships that it just felt right when she woke to soft morning light beaming through the “window” above the bed.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had woken in a bed to sunlight—usually it was one or the other. The peacefulness of it was so jarring she was seized by an impulse to grab her gun and run out the front door, suspecting a trap, as if someone were trying to lull her into a specious sense of security. For a few moments, she had to lay still and breathe deeply to expel the paranoia. To this end, she turned her attention to Thane, asleep beside her. These days, he slept only on his back, to ease the pressure on his chest, but even in repose, she could hear the strain of his failing lungs trying to draw in enough air to keep him alive. He slept badly, but so did she—now that they were in contact again, it was not unusual for her to reach out to him from her quarters’ video com system late at night, intending to leave a message, only to find him awake at some unearthly hour. Frequently, she told him he needed to rest, but she never pressed it—their conversations grounded her too much to scold him for taking her calls.
Shepard’s fingers twitched to reach out and drag her fingers over the small, smooth scales of his chest, shimmering in the golden light (not as they once had, a voice in her mind said, duller now, with Kepral’s death sentence breathing down his throat), but she held back. Thane was sleeping now, she would not risk waking him. Instead, she studied his face, full lips slightly parted, expression unguarded as it rarely was when he was conscious.
Thane’s apartment was warm in a way it never was on the Normandy, which was never quite comfortable for anyone onboard. It had been optimized for humans, but the temperature ran cool to avoid expending unnecessary energy keeping it warmer. The only times it was truly warm was when they were stealth cruising around and keeping all the ship’s heat from venting. But walking into Thane’s apartment felt a bit like stepping outside in New Mexico. Taking her first breath of air inside it had made her realize how uncomfortable the Normandy must have been for a drell. As for the apartment, Shepard had no complaints—it felt positively luxurious to stretch out on Thane’s slick dark sheets in nothing but her underwear, just on the edge of too warm, but not uncomfortable, as long as she stayed still. It also made her consider the reason he had stayed so close to her through the nights in the Normandy might well have been that she was simply the best source of heat nearby.
Someday, she’d take him someplace hot and dry as a toaster and let him bask in that all he wanted.
She did not let herself think that someday might come too late.
Restless, she threw the sheets off herself. Thane’s lips were there for kissing, but she reminded herself she was not disturbing him, and distracted herself by locating the t-shirt she wore under her uniform. She put this on, and nothing else, and wandered out to the kitchen, tying her hair up in its Alliance-regulation bun as she went. It was about five steps from the bedroom, but Thane never complained about the size of the apartment, not least of all because it was quite standard for the Citadel, where space was at a premium.
Anderson had told her once she’d forgotten how to relax. At the time, she had brushed him off, but his words lit up like a big neon sign now that she was forgoing the chance to lay abed with her lover in favor of…rooting around his refrigerator for something to make for breakfast. She did not recognize most of the things in there (presumably it was all food of some kind), but was determined to find something she could serve them to eat. Drell did not eat as often as humans—one meal a day, even one every other day, would suffice—but Thane would eat if she made something. Crouched in front of the squat fridge, trying to determine if the thing she was holding was in fact, a carton of some kind of edible eggs, she wondered how she would explain this without feeling silly. Thane might not say so, but he would certainly agree with Anderson.
But how was she meant to remember to relax, when every time she turned around, there was someone else who needed something, some other crisis to throw Commander Shepard at, some new obstacle course to run? She wasn’t allowed to relax, and now when she couldn’t, it was some personal failing of hers? Even taking this one day of shore leave felt indulgent to the point of irresponsibility, never mind that she hadn’t gotten into port until afternoon, and would be staying only a few hours that morning before she had to run off and meet with Udina before the Normandy took off again.
Was her plan to ruin what little shore leave she had by overthinking it? Because she was doing an excellent job of that. Shaking off the pesky thoughts, Shepard took the mysterious carton to the stove and grabbed a pan. Whatever they were, they were about to be scrambled, and when Thane did wake, they would eat together and he would look at her with those big, dark eyes that she could just drown in, and somehow she would find it in her to speak softly to him, as she did for no one else. Tali had teased her once—with Garrus, the traitor—about how much gentler her tone was when she addressed Thane. It seemed to please him though, as usual, he would not say so. An exhausting amount of understanding Thane was reading all the things he didn’t say, but Shepard had gotten decent at it. She thought.
How did one decide when mystery eggs had been cooked long enough? Shepard couldn’t say, but they still looked watery, so she stirred them with a spoon and fiddled with the heat, and did not hear the front door open. Idly, she scratched her cheek, nails scraping over the glowing trenches Cereberus had left in her face, dragging her fingers down to her neck. She had taken Mordin’s antihistamines before bed, to combat the effect of Thane’s venom on her skin, but there was the occasionally lingering itch—a reminder of their biological incompatibility, but in this century, merely a passing annoyance.
The sound of footsteps put her on edge all over again, and she had to take a quick breath and remind herself it was not an ambush, just her sweetheart, just Thane, whom she had been apart from for far too long, but—but it wasn’t.
Shepard blinked stupidly, wondering how she could possibly be both so paranoid, and yet unobservant.
“Kolyat?”
If she was surprised, she had nothing on Thane’s poor kid. Shepard was still teaching herself to read drell expressions, but the human term “jaw on the floor” might have been appropriate, judging by Kolyat’s panicked look.
“Commander Shepard?”
Last time she had seen Kolyat Krios, she had put a bullet through his target herself to stop him from making the kill, and then delivered him to C-Sec to speak with the father he hadn’t seen since he was ten years old. This time, as she was becoming acutely aware, she was standing in his father’s kitchen, burning some strange eggs, and wearing nothing but boxer briefs and a t-shirt.
Shepard’s expression began to mirror Kolyat’s horror and she turned towards the bedroom. Disturbances be damned—this was above her paygrade.
“Thaaaaane!”