100 word drabbles for Mass Effect

A series called Moiety.

Chapter Forty-Six: It Starts with a Heartbeat

* * *

The first time they ever kiss goes like this:

It starts with a heartbeat. Sudden. Thundering. Enough for her to suck a breath in at the force of it. His hand braces over her chest and she is sure he feels it just as keenly and desperately as she does.

In the end, Shepard braces her lips to Thane's in the pristine white of the hospital room – a tender, broken thing. Her trembling fingers curl in the sheet beside him.

The last time they ever kiss goes like this:

It starts with a heartbeat.

It does not end with one.

Shrios - “Stain”

Thank you @bioticsandheadshots for the prompt.  I suddenly realized how long it’s been since I wrote my lovely tragic babies.

Stain

“These hands will never be clean of him.”  - Shepard and Thane.  What stays and what goes.

Can be read here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12455732/1/Stain

And here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10679253

* * *

She doesn’t have time to wash her hands.  

As soon as the Council is safe and the Cerberus assassin deemed lost, Shepard sprints for the hospital.  Still in her armor.  Still with a chamber-hot pistol.  Still with bloody palms.

Thane is dying.

And she doesn’t have time to wash her hands.

100 word drabbles for Mass Effect

A series called Moiety.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Breathe

* * *

Thane coughs into the hospital sheet. It comes away splattered with blood.

Shepard's hand finds his as she curls into his side, her mouth planted at his shoulder. Her eyes flutter closed and she breathes deep. One large, scraping, haggard breath.

If she could, she would breathe enough for the both of them.

"I'm not afraid, siha."

The air leaves her in a single rush and so does her mind.

There is nothing left in her but him.

Her hand grips his tighter as she gasps her trembling response into his skin. "Neither am I."

She lies.

She always has.

Shrios - “North” - ME gift fic

Okay, so I’m extremely late with this one and I’m not even going to bother giving you my excuses because they are plentiful and unimportant.  I’m just going to pass along this little piece of angst your way @doglordoffferelden.  Hope you like.  :)

North

“’I…I don’t know what’s wrong with me anymore. And I don’t know how to get right. I don’t…know.’  She finds that in her breathless release of half-panic half-rage, her hands have found themselves curled tight in his coat and her tears are hot along her lids, though unspent.”  -  Shepard tries to find her way in the aftermath of Aratoht.

Can be read here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11984278/1/North

And here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/7109860

* * *

Shepard wakes in the Med-bay to the dimmed lights of the Normandy’s night cycle.  She blinks foggily, her limbs heavy and tongue fuzzy from the pain meds.  She moans, and Thane answers.

“You are awake.”

She blinks.  Once. Twice.  Again.  She licks her chapped lips and turns her head to the sound of his smoke-lined voice. He sits beside her cot, hands held between his knees, eyes unblinking.  “Thane,” she croaks, managing a weak smile.

He offers a meager one in return.  He doesn’t reach for her.

Shepard has never been generous with her touch.  It is a rare and tender thing when she offers it, and Thane has shown he has recognized it from the beginning.  He has never initiated contact himself.  He has always left the extent of their intimacy in her hands, from their first grasping of palms across a cold table-top, to the trembling brush of her lips against his, to the bracing warmth of her palm along his cheek that night before the Omega Four Relay.  She explored his body that night, and he had let her, his own touch seeking out only what she had already willingly bared to him.

She wonders if this newfound intensity between them is perhaps because they are both overtaken by the wonder that something should not break beneath their palms.

Most things do.  It seems the inescapable truth of their lives.