Clearing a Table
Relay 0 | Dark Space | 100,000 light-years from Earth | After the War
The wreckage of the Central Computational Core (CCC) of the "Reaper" artificial intelligence species
The seat of the Prothean Empress Ascendant and location of the Milky Way embassies
"Liara?"
An uncoordinated blue hand flops randomly in the direction of her pillow and smacks Shepard on the nose.
"Siame, it's early."
"I know. But, all the little blue babies have sitters and you and I have guests."
Liara sits upright. Spilling the finest silk money can buy around her middle and baring a pair of blueberries that nearly has Shepard canceling the game.
"Goddess! Today?"
"Yes," Shep laughs. "Today. And we're hosting, so..."
Liara groans.
"I have nine projects in the drive core alone, siame. Nine. Counting only the unstable ones. This is a terrible idea. I can't host. Not like Benezia. They won't like me, Elizabeth."
Shepard stops buttoning her jacket, climbs back into bed, slings her legs over Liara and kisses her. Once per word.
"They. Will. Adore. You."
"How do you know?"
"I'm human. I adore you."
"Seems like an insufficient sample size," Liara huffs.
Shep hums, enjoying the warm, damp breeze of Liara's breath on her lips. She doesn't so much care what's being said, as long as she can feel it on her skin.
"It's not fair, to do that when we're arguing. Stupid sexy humans."
"Really, it's just the one sexy human."
Liara chuckles.
"Thank the goddess. If the rest of them were like you, I'd never get out of bed. Just stay here, melding all day. Be like a queen bee. Always making babies."
"Mmm," Liz muses. "Best stay married, then. Three's enough and you're doing such wonderful work for your students."
"I agree. Let's stay married."
-----
It is, Shep decides, nearly impossible to help a cute biotic prodigy pick an outfit. Piece after piece sails by her head with the speed of a charge attack, one heel even embedding itself in the bulkhead behind her which is crystallized around the impact where it decelerated back below lightspeed.
"Babe," Shep sighs, slapping a warp field on her unruly bondmate.
"Calm down. This isn't the Synod of Peeresses grilling you about funding research into the Temple. These are some friends. Relaxing. Besides, the Synod were quaking in their robes, remember?"
Liara shivers.
"Hey. C'mere."
With a flick of the wrist, she draws Liara in like a breath.
"I don't want to calm down."
"If you didn't want to calm down, you'd have your barrier up, hon. You wouldn't let me pull you because you don't let people do anything you don't want. I'd be apologizing and getting my teeth back in order for Chakwas to reinsert."
"Disgusting. You are disgusting."
Shep shrugs.
"Well, I mean, we can't all be the platonic ideal of the feminine. The warmth of family and the laughter of forever echoing in the cold valleys of the mind. The body pulled open like a peeled fruit so the mind can experience more."
"Firstly, don't paraphrase your wedding vows," Liara grumbles, shaking a hairbrush. "Second, I am so glad you dropped that fruit metaphor. At least until the honeymoon."
"Thirdly, why am I holding a hairbrush?"
"Probably because it smells like my hair."
"Ah. Yes, it really does."
Liara breathes in then sets it by her jewelry.
"Lastly, asari do not have sex powers!"
"Beg to differ, Liara. Do you realize that no matter what human I might have loved, it would not be a fraction what we share? Not sexually. Mentally. I can be inside you, feeling your thoughts...drowning in it. With just your hand holding mine. How can you not see what that is?"
She strokes a finger down Liara's forecrests, letting the eezo in both their bodies crackle and sizzle with the touch.
"We couldn't imagine making love this way, no human could, until First Contact. It escaped even our most lurid writers. Meld, love, let me in."
Liara's eyes fill with black almost instantly and Shep's match.
It's so easy now.
It is isn't it?
Practice?
Practice.
Decades...
A century on Tuesday...
Goddess...
Not one night wasted...
"I feel that perhaps the savior of the galaxy is easier to defeat than anyone ever knew," Liara chuckles, offering a hand. "Thank you."
Shep takes the hand and gets to her feet. She shakes off the fuzz slower than usual. She meant for Liara to lean on her, to take some of the calmness for herself. She didn't realize it would leave her brain flickering, trying to remember if her hands were the pink ones or the blue ones.
"You really let me have it. I couldn't tell...who was who."
"That's the point, siame. You usually can't. We were taught to. Peeresses especially and even more so the Thrity. Books. Libraries were written on the meld and I don't mean the scientific ones. I rarely can, anymore."
"I think it's the cerebellum graft," Shep jokes. "From after the war. The one from that sweet volunteer in Serrice."
"Yes, perhaps. While I certainly enjoyed the original, I can't deny that the asari in your head eases the meld. Should write the Illusive Man a thank you."
Shep chuckles.
"Dear racist lunatic, thank you for having your buthcers turn my human bondmate into an inkblot test of stolen organs, genetically altered tissue, cybernetics and trauma. Thank you for making her lead nineteen species in a fight for survival and getting yourself brainwashed and blowing her up again so that I could have competent doctors fix her," Shepard jokes. "She's so much better at sex now."
Liara's face softens.
"So much better at not dying. Not leaving me. I won't pretend that the cartilage infusions aren't fun. They let me bend you in amusing ways. Instinctive," Liara admits. "My deepest, darkest instincts assume I'm with another asari, not a stiff-bone and...Goddess. With you it's like breathing. The kroganized muscle tissue does make things more...intense."
Liara's eyes flit to the back of the closet, leading Shepard's gaze. Warpfire wraps around the toybox, tickling at the latch.
"Oh, no!" Shep laughs, slapping a statis field under it to keep the box both intact and shut. "I put that on and neither of us are going to make the game, even if I carry you."
"Pity."
Shep straightens her jacket.
"The one Aria gave you?" Liara laughs.
"What?" Shep scoffs. "It fits well. Criminals know their biker jackets."
"Yes," Liara says, her blue lips showing the battle she's making not to laugh. "It does."
"What?"
Liara snorts.
"Babe. What?"
"Do you think that matrons six hundred years into a murder spree give their human friends and acquaintances of clothing? One tightly-fitted piece?"
Shep groans.
"She wanted to fuck me."
"You're learning," Liara chortles. "I mean, she probably wanted to see you in only this. If it didn't stretch, it'd never reach to buckle up. There's barely enough here with it open to keep her hands warm when she was done with your tits. Probably why the shoulders are formed like this."
Liara slides her hands around Shep's tunic. It's black with an Alliance arrowhead, probably leftover from one of the thousands of physical training sessions. Cotton. She and places her own hands on her bondmate's shoulders. There's barely space above the fabric and below the leather for her hands.
Warmth. Pure. Perfect. Comforting.
"Yes. That's why. Mmm...mammals."
Shep laughs.
"Uh, babe? You are perfectly mammaled yourself."
Shep glances at her chest with a crooked grin.
"Pervert! You know what I mean. Earth creatures run hotter than we do."
Satisfied her hands are warm, she pulls back tugs on the hem.
"Goddess, but she wrapped you in death," Liara breathes. "What was it? Rachni skin and thresher scales with geth plating for the clasps?"
"Think so, yeah."
Liara smoothes the smoky black hide back over Shepard's chest.
"I'll have to have other pieces commissioned."
"Will you?"
"Hmm."
Liara goes back to the closet, twirling the haptic controls madly.
"What can you tell me about this game we're playing?"
Shep exhales.
"Twentieth-century Earth. It's called Dungeons and Dragons. We pretend to be other people, we face monsters, a story gets told. We laugh. We drink. Eat too much. We play until it's late and we can't focus."
"Sounds positively decadent. How does the story work, with so many telling it?"
"Dice. We roll dice and that determines what happens. We're free to embellish but the dice define the plot of the story. Whether an attack fails or succeeds. Or whether a guard is convinced of a lie."
"Dice?"
"Physical dice, yes. Tables and numbers."
"Thrilling," Liara drawls. "And less than decadent."
"Well, it was created by accountants in a mostly pre-computer era. They needed uncertainty and they made do with the concepts they had."
"Clearly."
Shep tosses a small velvet bag cross the room.
"For you."
Liara spills the contents into her hand. Her eyes go between the dice and Shepard.
"They're black eezo," she murmurs.
Shep nods.
"From the core here. The most valuable substance in the universe. Carved them myself," she explains, letting warpfire gather on her fingertip.
"The big one, there, that's the D20. Most of the big decisions are there. Attacks, saving throws, success in lying, intimidation, seduction..."
"Seduction? This little thing? This determines whether seduction is successful?"
Shep rolls her eyes.
"Here."
She goes into her pocket. It's nothing but stamped steel coated in omni-gel sealant so it doesn't rust. She made it in basic. Kenzi pocketed ejected shell casings from the course in improvised weaponry that still taught how to use pre-eezo gauss guns and even chemical-fired rifles. Shep hammered them into shape with her biotics.
They played every other night in the barracks. Right until they deployed to Akuze. Shep hasn't played since.
"All right. In this story, you're a princess. I'm a guard, standing between you and the bed and here on your father's orders to take you downstairs and make you eat breakfast. To go back to bed, you have to seduce me. Roll yours."
"I..." Liara stammers. "That does sound like something Atheyta would do, quite honestly."
"Explain more."
Shep tosses her D20 on the floor.
"Seventeen. If you roll over a seventeen, I throw you on that bed and we reschedule. If you don't, I make you remember to eat and then we go play the game."
"No cheating?"
"No cheating," Shep says, hoping it sounds stern.
Liara levitates the dice in one hand and flicks the other. It spins, dancing on a column of broken gravity before Liara snaps her fingers sending it clattering to the deck. Frost surrounds it and covers it and the only place it's melted clean is on the grooves she cut in with her powers. The eezo-sensitivity worked better than she hoped.
"Nine. Therefore, I am not seduced, so we go have fun with our friends."
"Your friends," Liara jokes. "You're the one who made them all tell us their real names."
"Which one of us founded the 'Saved the world, now losing our minds' support group on the Exonet? Remind me."