rocky41_7

The sound of footsteps put her on edge all over again, and she had to take a quick breath and remind herself it was not an ambush, just her sweetheart, just Thane, whom she had been apart from for far too long, but—but it wasn’t.

                Shepard blinked stupidly, wondering how she could possibly be both so paranoid, and yet unobservant.

                “Kolyat?”

When Shepard arrived at Huerta Memorial, Thane was asleep in his room. The thought of waking him didn’t even occur to her: she spent so many of her own waking hours aching for the embrace of sleep, and she knew how he got by snatching odd handfuls of hours here and there around Kepral’s keeping him too ill to truly rest.

Instead, she just observed him for a moment: the slight part of his full lips, through which he drew his wet, ragged breaths; the curl of his fingers beside his face; the way the sunlight glinted off his scales (duller now, than when they had first met; Shepard was no expert in what a healthy drell looked like, but she was sure Thane wasn’t it).

The twisting, pulling, stinging feeling that knotted up her chest was something she pushed to the back of her mind every day. The commander in charge of forming the galaxy’s response to the reapers did not have time to be mourning her dying lover; she didn’t have the right, when so many were depending on her.

But here, with Thane asleep and no one else to see, she didn’t have to pretend she was handling it. Moving as gently as she could (which was, to tell the truth, not much), Shepard eased down onto the bed beside Thane, thinking to just close her eyes a moment; just for a minute, imagine there was nothing outside the bed, with the two of them in it.

 - - -

When Thane’s sleep lightened, he was immediately aware that he was not alone, and that catapulted him into complete wakefulness. This ability to be alert so soon out of sleep had proved useful in the past, but in this case, unnecessary: he recognized the scarred brown hand on the bed.

Shepard.

Satisfied his life was not in prompt peril, Thane took stock of the situation: Shepard was pressed against his back, one arm thrown over him, curled against his chest, and from the sound of her breathing, she was as asleep as he had been moments earlier.

As always, her embrace was wonderfully warm to a cool-blooded drell, and he suspected she was as sparse on sleep as ever. Loathe as either of them were to spend their precious few hours together unconscious, he couldn’t bring himself to wake her. Shepard drove herself like a woman possessed; if there was ever an end to the war, he was certain she’d simply collapse, and sleep for several weeks straight. Gods knew she’d earned it.

When he began to move, thinking to give her the bed to herself so she might sleep better, longer, she shifted: the arm tightened around him, and he felt her press her face into the back of his neck, her nose against the ridge arcing down from his cheek. He stopped moving.

Instead, he gave her hand a little squeeze, and, possibly drifting through near-consciousness, Shepard’s fingers twitched around his. They had both implicitly discussed how terrible it would be to waste what little time they had, but with Shepard wrapped around him like a deep-sea kraken, he had to think this memory would comfort him well into the ocean’s embrace, even if Shepard were not awake to hear him say so. He would let her sleep–there was no time wasted in enjoying the feel of her arms around him.