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Shepard slunk into their apartment, her head ducked so low that she had practically buried it beneath the fabric of her hoodie. She made it almost past the living room to her bedroom before she caught sight of Jacob, his feet up on the coffee table, beer in hand, the biotiball game on the TV.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
Shepard grunted.
“Want to spar about it?” Jacob asked.
Shepard sighed and felt her shoulders drop just the littlest bit with relief. This was what she liked about Jacob. He didn’t ask her to talk about things.
She nodded at him.
Jacob set his beer down on one of the kitschy coasters Brynn had brought home from a conference somewhere and got to his feet, rolling his shoulders. The two of them had installed a gym in one of their unused rooms back when Shepard was still doing PT after the Reapers. It had gotten a lot of use in the years since.
Today was no exception.
It took a couple of hours for Shepard and Jacob to wear each other out. By the time the afternoon rolled around, the two of them were settled on the couch, Shepard sporting bloodied knuckles and a black eye. Jacob had worse under his clothes, but Shepard hadn’t aimed for his face.
It was one of her favorite parts of him, after all.
Behind them, the door to the apartment opened.
“Hi honey,” Jacob said, raising his beer towards Brynn as she made it through the door.
“Hi,” Brynn said, her mouth scrunching up into a smile. Shepard thought it was unbearably cute, but then again, she thought everything Brynn did was cute. “Hi Shepard.”
Shepard grunted at her.
“Rough day at the office?” Brynn asked, making her way to the couch to drop a kiss on Jacob’s forehead and thumb worriedly at Shepard’s face.
“Yeah,” Jacob said, genially. “We sparred about it.”
“One of these days,” Brynn said, letting her hand drift from Shepard’s face to her shoulder, “we’re going to teach you how to work out your feelings in a way that doesn’t involve violence.”
Shepard tipped her head back so Brynn could see the face she was making at that.
“Come on Brynn,” Jacob said. “You think Shepard’s going to go for that?”
“I wish you wouldn’t do it around Isaac, at least,” Brynn sighed. “We’ve got to teach him better than that.”
Shepard agreed with that much.
“Isaac’s not home until tomorrow,” said Jacob. He’d adapted to the role of stay-at-home dad better than either of his workaholic wives had expected of him, and was the official keeper of their son’s calendar, which rivaled the citadel public transit schedule in complexity. “He’s got a sleepover with a couple of the kids from his class.”
“So we’d best expect a middle of the night call when he wants to go home,” Brynn sighed, her mouth turning up at the corners in a fond, exasperated smile.
“Come on, Brynn,” Jacob said, gently, smiling back at her, “he’s almost twelve now. He’s grown out of that.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Brynn said. She glanced at the table. “But I will take a beer.”
-
Half an hour or so later, all three of them had drained their beers and Brynn was almost done telling them about her day. Workplace politics at her university were brutal - every evening, she came home with some story about something one of her coworkers had managed to screw up.
This time, there had been something with the Dantius family and the asari embassy. Shepard tried to avoid eye contact.
“Anyways,” Brynn said, gesturing with her glass, “Larissa called in a favor with this matriarch she knows and we got the patents sorted - thank the Goddess. If she hadn’t, I’d have had to ask Shepard to assassinate him.”
Shepard sat slightly straighter.
“She’d do it too,” Jacob said, morosely.
Shepard totally would. It was way better than the boring shit the Alliance had her working on these days. She missed assassinations.
“Okay,” said Brynn, turning in her seat, “you heard about my day. What about you, Shepard?”
Shepard loved Jacob because he didn’t ask her to talk about anything. Back on the SR-2, which had been a whirlwind of fucked up people, daddy issues, and fucked up people who wanted Shepard to mediate their daddy issues, he’d been a godsend.
When she’d been tired of miserably mediating squabbles between squadmates or playing woefully under-qualified counselor to someone who needed way more help than she could give, she could always count on Jacob to sit with her and not ask for anything.
He’d shut her down hard, actually, the few times she’d tried to offer emotional support to him. He hadn’t wanted it. He hadn’t needed it. He just wanted to shoot the shit about the new weapons models.
Even now, years later, Shepard still hadn’t figured out how to express how relieved she was by that.
Brynn, on the other hand, was the kind of emotionally supportive that Shepard could only ever dream of being. She knew when to push and when to back off, she was always willing to listen and always capable of offering advice - and since she was one of the most brilliant people alive (in Shepard’s opinion, sure, but Shepard knew from geniuses), her advice was always good.
Shepard loved her for that - because she was just so damn good at all the things that made Shepard flounder.
And, alright, just a little bit because her freckles were cute.
Shepard scrunched herself down a little bit on the couch. She wanted to try and avoid the question, but she knew Brynn wouldn’t let her get away with that. It would help, she knew, if she could figure out how to put it into words.
“Come on,” Jacob said, gently, “you could leave it for a bit, Brynn. Let her sort it out before she brings it to us.”
Just for that, Shepard reached across the couch (and across Brynn’s lap) to grab his hand, twining their fingers together.
Brynn sighed. “I’d agree with you, but one of us has to talk about feelings. If I left it to you two, you’d have had your one night stand on the Normandy and then never talked about it again and I would be out either a husband or a wife.”
Brynn took another sip of beer. “And to be clear,” she said, “I would have been so much less happy that way.”
Shepard glanced over Brynn’s head to meet Jacob’s eyes. He was looking just as sheepish as Shepard felt. Brynn was - well, she was very right about that one.
“They wanted me to do a recruitment poster,” Shepard mumbled, fiddling with the cuff of her hoodie.
“Those fuckers,” hissed Brynn, sitting bolt upright in her seat. “Was it Hackett again?”
Shepard laughed a little bit, a horrible, awkward sound startled out of her by the absolute joy of hearing Brynn stand up for her. That was another reason she loved Brynn - she never expected Shepard to give more than she wanted to. She believed Shepard when she said things were hard and yelled at the rest of the world until they believed it too.
“No,” Shepard said. Hackett had learned his lesson from the last time Brynn had called him up to yell at him. Jacob had recorded it, and Shepard still had it on her omni-tool, saved to rewatch whenever she was feeling down. “It was the Council. They - for the Spectres, I guess.”
Shepard shuddered. It didn’t matter how good the rest of the world said she looked or what her value as a figurehead was supposed to be, she hated the way she looked in pictures. She always looked artificial, awkward, posed. Anyone with half a brain could see that she was faking it, if they looked at her in a poster.
“Fuck the Council,” Jacob said, sagely.
“I’ll drink to that,” Brynn said.
Shepard clinked her beer with theirs in silent agreement.
“You told them to fuck off, right?” Jacob said.
“Yeah,” Shepard said. It had been a whole deal - no politician ever liked it when you told them no.
“Good,” said Brynn. “And if they bother you about it again, I’ll call them up and yell at them too.”
“You’re my hero,” Shepard said, glancing down at Brynn and feeling awkward about the words, even as they came out of her mouth.
“Hey,” Brynn said, “given the amount of mercenaries and Cerberus troops you’ve fought for me, I figure I owe you a rescue or two.”
She reached out for Shepard’s other hand, tangling the three of them in a complicated knot of arms. Shepard laced their fingers together, as Brynn glanced over at Jacob.
“That goes for you too,” she said. “If you ever need a social rescue, say the word and I’ll bail you out.”
“Thanks,” said Jacob, smiling at her. “But I can handle the mailman myself. Or I can get Shepard to glare at him for me.”
Shepard nodded, sagely. She could do a great intimidating glare.
“Anyways,” Jacob said, nodding towards the dimming of the Citadel’s artificial sun. “Want to get some takeout? I want to make the most of the evening we’ve got.”
Brynn laughed. “You’re insatiable,” she said, fondly, leaning over to give him a kiss. Shepard gently pulled on her shoulder and Brynn obliged her with a kiss too.
“Hey,” said Jacob, and Shepard leaned across Brynn’s lap to kiss him, while Brynn looked up, grinning at the two of them.
“Come on, you two,” Brynn said, a moment later, smirking at them, “I want to have dinner before we get to dessert.”