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Both of them were characters in a ghost story, even though neither of them realized it.
The dead are always urged to rest in peace, as though it is a state that they can simply fall into. She had found peace eventually, but only after many years of refusing to rest.
Looking back, her own death had been a minor shift, like stepping out of a bustling room to steal a moment of quiet. The true pain had been the aftermath: a decade of watching Thane drifting alone, imploding onto himself with all the certainty of a dying star.
She had tried to reach him, to slam her thoughts against his mind and tell him that he didn’t have to be like this. But the dead and the living are rarely graced with conversation, and all he’d given in response had been a vague murmur of her name. Irikah? Oh, Irikah…
And then Shepard found him, with her amber eyes and crooked smile and a voice with which to say everything that Irikah could not. In Thane’s darkness, Shepard was a wildfire: brilliant, relentless, necessary. When Shepard was with Thane, he shone and burned and changed.
He began to look after Kolyat. He started by writing letters that were stiff and formal, hiding his guilt and love behind an elaborate wall of words. Piece by piece, the two of them took the wall apart. Kolyat never saw how his father’s eyes lit up at each new message he received, but Irikah saw it every time.
He became humble. All his life he had tried to prove, first to himself and then to the galaxy, that he was the best at what he did. He was proud of the reputation he had earned. But once Shepard began to love him, he found that his greatest treasure was something that he could neither earn nor prove; it was only something that he could accept and marvel at.
He explored uncharted territories. Like hair. He came to love Shepard’s hair. He played with it, learned to braid it, coiled his hands through it and cupped the back of her head while his mouth roamed the skin from her ear to her throat and across her collar bones. It made Irikah curious about what hair felt like, and nostalgic about having a throat of her own. When these thoughts came to her, she always knew that it was time to give them their privacy.
He slept more soundly—perhaps too soundly. One warm night on the Citadel, while he and Shepard were asleep, a group of mercenaries nearly broke into Shepard’s apartment. Irikah tried to wake Thane, battering his mind with a litany of urgency and terror. It only made him clutch Shepard more tightly - stop that, you fool, you’re going to snap her ribs - until Irikah lacerated him with her last and best weapon: the memory of her own death, which was much more frightening to him than it was to her. Then, finally, he woke and realized the danger.
Irikah knew she had been manipulative, but she didn’t think it was time for them to join her just yet.
But what gave Irikah the greatest contentment were the small, unremarkable events as Thane's and Shepard's worlds slowly came together, like the first time Shepard tried to explain Halloween.
It was the first autumn after the end of the war. They were on Earth, outdoors. Shepard had her head on his lap, her eyes on the stars, and a half-empty mug of cider at her side. “You don’t have to eat candy if you don’t want to. But you must know at least one ghost story,” she said languidly as he stroked her hair. “You were an assassin, after all.” The past tense was a reminder that a part of Thane had become a ghost, too. This knowledge gave all three of them a measure of peace.