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"Kaidan, put those eyes away," I mock-scolded. "We should talk about this." I gesture vaguely at the world and try to sort the data pads in front of me.
Major Kaidan Alenko moved to my side and drew my gaze away from a spec sheet on Reaper enemies. He spoke with conviction. "Enough talk, Shepard. I’m through waiting for everything to work out. It never will. We have to take the moments that we can."
He held my face gently. His imploring eyes, which he had NOT put away, were searching mine. He had never contradicted me so directly in a private moment.
I find it appeals to me.
Perhaps holding a gun on me had inspired something in him.
"You know, when you’re right, you’re right, Alenko." I saw his eyes flicker at his last name as I closed the distance between our lips.
He kisses me hungrily. His tongue on mine is delicious. I taste a spicy tang from the tajin he likes. Before I realize it, he's helping me out of my clothes. When did his pants come off?
“I need you to be rough with me,” he says against my neck.
So decisive. And yet, could he be even more commanding? “Give it to me like an order,” I purr.
“Exactly,” he says.
God, I’ve never been so hard.“Sir, yes, sir.” I push him down onto the bed hard enough to dislodge the sheet corner.
I kneel over him, straddling his hips, feeling him against me. I push one arm down into his chest and pin him in place. “I’m gonna make you ask again,” I said.
“Fuck me hard, Shepard. Right goddam now.” I felt his voice deep in his chest as my hand presses into him.
“Hmmm. That’s good…but which way do you want it?” As I talk, I encourage his legs apart until I have room to kneel there. I push his legs a little further apart and work my knees underneath his. My cock makes contact with his erection.
“Fuck me in the ass, just like this, while you look me in the eye.”
I haven’t seen this version of Kaidan before. But I definitely like him.
“I can do that.” I’ve got two fingers inside him now, applying lubrication. He does seem to be ready, but let’s not rush too much, I think.
He holds my eyes and says, “Right. God. Damn. Now.”
Not a thought was in my head. Fucking only. All I want to do is make him come. “Right goddam now, Kaidan.”
Tipping him up towards me, I fit my head inside his opening. He feels me trying to be gentle, going slowly.
“Hey,” he gets my attention.
“Right...” I move deeper, luxuriating on the pressure around me. Push and pull, not faster, just…harder.
Kaidan grunts, “Huh…huh…” I slow a bit. “No...Don’t stop…You’re perfect,” he rumbles.
God, it’s like a drug.
“Huh…huhg…huhgh.” He huffs as I fall against his perfect ass, my legs tensed, his abs flexed, working in tandem.
Nothing could be better than this.
I feel myself starting to shake deep in my core. Blue biotic tendrils skate down my torso and arms, across his chest, surrounding us. The lines snake over us, snapping into our skin as tiny sparks. I don’t know the exact moment his biotics join in. I start to lose myself inside the sensations.
“Hale. Harder.” He says it in place of two groans in rhythm but I still catch it. And it threatens to send me over the edge.
I can hardly hold on long enough to pump into him three more times, hard and fast. I feel myself lose control several seconds before he ejaculates. He knows I like it when sex makes a mess.
It’s easy to clean up with fresh sheets and self-disinfecting floors.
Under the blankets, I get comfortable against him and close my eyes.
His shoulder and the pillow merge together and I drift off.
When my eyes open again, I find Kaidan studying me propped up on one arm. Have I been asleep for an hour? Twenty minutes? I can’t tell exactly, but I don’t think it’s been very long. There’s a shine to his eyes and an intensity to his gaze. What did he say? "I’m through waiting for everything to work out. It never will."
I reach up to smooth over his hair and feel the shell of his right ear between my fingers. I focus my eyes there in case a deep penetrating stare might spook him. The question itself was hard enough. “Do you wanna talk about it?” I tuck a few hairs behind his ear and let my fingers linger amongst the strands.
He knew I wasn’t talking about the Reapers. Or the Krogan. Or any other thing waiting inside those datapads on my desk.
“I do. I just need to clear one thing up first: please…I can’t stand it…you calling me Alenko after all this." He sat up and spoke faster, "I can feel that we’re all accelerating towards an endpoint. An end of what, I’m not sure, but nothing will be the same. If you and I are what I think we are, please, call me Kaidan as many times as you can before…well, before that ending.”
He was so sincere, so earnest. And something else.
I sat up cross-legged in the middle of the bed and faced towards him. All I said was, “I get you, Kaidan."
He sighed. Turning towards me, he touched our foreheads together. He didn't moved back, instead he stayed right there and started talking.
“When we got our first reports that you were alive, Admiral Anderson called me in to his office on the Citadel to tell me. I found out right there. My mind couldn’t process what I was hearing. I went straight to quarters and tried to think. When I finally read the data, studied the evidence, saw the Cerberus logo on you…it was worse than when you died."
I wanted to speak up but his intensity quieted me. There was more.
"I blacked out. But when I came to, you were still gone, you know? How could you be alive? How could you not come find me? Then I read the assignment they gave me. Anderson must have told me in person but I honestly don’t remember anything he said once he said your name. The assignment was for Horizon. I was bait. For you, for Cerberus, for the “slavers” we now know were the Collectors. It made sense. It was a good plan."
He kept our foreheads together, eyes downcast.
"But I couldn’t deal with living. Every morning, I’d get up and look in the mirror and almost run to the spaceport and hop a ship to look for you. But I never did."
"And I’d talk to you, in my head...try to imagine what you’d say. I’d done this when you first got spaced for at least a year. I’d head home early from downtime and just think of what our life would have been like. I did several types of therapy, I even considered electroshock. Thankfully, the hallucinogenic therapy worked, I started to accept that you were dead. I was even able to see some old crew mates who made it off the Normandy SR1."
He'd not shared these details before.
"But then, on Horizon, it was all back again, but worse. You’d chosen to stay away for 2 years. You were alive and all I knew was that you didn’t want to be with me. It was all I could think about when I wasn’t wildly speculating about our life together. I would swing between these two horrible extremes; one where you were with me but only as a ghost, and the other where you were alive and wanted nothing to do with me."
He heaved a deep, warm sigh. I could feel his emotions practically radiating out from him. "Everyone called me Alenko during Horizon. I was on assignment, and I didn’t make any friends with my terse replies and thousand-mile stare. Then I saw you in the flesh and my betrayal was all I could see. You said you were 'on a table', 'rebuilt', that you'd asked after me, all these things I couldn’t understand in that moment. Later, I even had to rewatch footage of our conversation to try to verify what I thought you’d said. Was my mind playing tricks? Was I finally going crazy with grief? Did I even see you and talk to you and…and hug you? It seemed ridiculous to consider. I watched our conversation over and over. I heard you call me 'Kaidan.' It sounded like you. It looked like you. You even...you even fought like you." His breath was getting ragged.
I tried to lean back a bit to look at him. “I mean, sure, it was a fight, but…”
He held me gently, asking me without words to just, please, stay like this with our foreheads touching. “No, the fight: you and the Praetorian, the husks, right before. The cameras around recorded everything. I took it back to the Citadel with me and watched it over and over. Any scrap of vid I could get from the colony with a frame of you went through my eyeballs at least a hundred times. I didn’t know what else to do once I understood what you'd said. Time hadn’t really passed for you at all.” He paused and two tears fell. “You’d looked for me.”
I tried to pull myself closer to him. Reassure him somehow. He stopped me again.
“If you hug me right now, I might never say what I need to say. Now’s my chance. I want you to know this. To know me. To know that instead of running to your side, working out whatever we could - instead I thought." He spat the word out with disdain. "I stayed in my head."
I cradled his head in my hands, threaded my fingers into his curls, and let him talk.
"In Vancouver after you survived the suicide mission, we talked but I was still in my head. On Mars I should have kissed you. I should have taken those moments to tell you I was with you. Then on the Citadel after I was hurt, all I wanted was to embrace you, but I stared out that window and talked about my career."
He gripped my shoulders tighter.
"I’m embarrassed about it more than I can even explain. All these moments lost. All that time imagining a future with you and when you turned out not to be dead, I was AWOL. My own mind kept me hostage for two years.”
He took another deep shuddering breath, “I can’t lose any more time with you. Do you understand?”
He finally pulled our foreheads apart. I saw his tears dripping on the fresh sheets.
I pulled him towards me and he let me hold him.
The way he cried, it was deep, His biotics didn't crackle or shock us even once. Instead, a low susurration began and an easy blue glow surrounded us. I'd never felt biotics so calm. He wasn’t thinking about it, he wasn’t worried about how he looked to me, or whether he should or shouldn’t cry. He just let it out. And let me hold him, kissing his tears, stroking his hair. I didn’t dare speak. I felt our souls twine around each other in the space between our heart beats.
I thought about what he'd said. He had been so mean to himself inside his own head. But strong emotions don't answer well to logical words. He needed me to be here. He needed to hold me. I needed to hold him.
The way time hadn't passed for me, yet had seemed like an excruciating lifetime to him, really fucked over our conversation on Horizon. He had always been pragmatic and I'd hoped he'd come around eventually. And he did. But he had obviously been very hard on himself about all of this. I understood how intense grief can be. With his migraines...
My own tears started to mix with his as I kissed his beautiful face.
When his tears stopped and his breathing began to normalize, I spoke. I said the only thing that I could conceive of to say:
“Kaidan, I love you.”