Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The bass hit them three steps past the door, a physical thing, low enough to thrum in the chest and high enough to make Tali's suit speakers crackle with interference. Ashley squinted through the wash of blue and violet light, holographic patterns shifting across the ceiling like bioluminescent deep-sea currents projected onto glass, and whistled through her teeth.

"Okay. This is nicer than anything I can afford."

"You're not paying." Miranda brushed past her, already scanning the crowd with the brisk efficiency of a woman cataloguing exits. Her blouse caught the light, white fabric glowing faintly purple. "Liara's paying. She insisted."

"I did insist," Liara said, one hand resting on the small of Tali's back to guide her through the press of bodies near the entrance. The quarian's glowing eyes were darting everywhere, drinking it in, the tiered balconies, the curved bar that wrapped the room like a crescent moon, the dancefloor sunk a half-level below the main floor where a mixed crowd of asari, turians, and humans moved like one organism. "We've earned a night out. All of us."

Samara said nothing. She walked through the crowd the way water moves around stone, and people parted for her without quite knowing why. The Justicar leathers caught every light in the room, red panels flaring like warning signals, and more than one dancer stopped mid-step to stare. Ashley caught a young turian elbowing his friend, mouthing something that was probably is that a Justicar, and grinned.

They claimed a curved booth on the upper tier, high enough to overlook the dancefloor, low enough to still catch the music. The seats were real leather, deep charcoal, soft as anything Ashley had sat on since before the Pulse. She sank into the cushion and let out a groan that belonged in a bedroom.

"Oh, that's obscene. That's an obscenely comfortable seat."

"Try not to moan in public, Williams." Miranda slid in beside her, crossing her legs, one heeled boot catching the edge of the table.

"No promises."

Tali perched at the end, knees together, hands in her lap, already fiddling with the drink menu projected from the table's haptic interface. "They have dextro cocktails. Twelve of them. Twelve! The old Flux had two, and one was just turian brandy with a cube of ice."

"Order whatever you want." Liara settled across from them, Samara beside her, and flagged a server with a small lift of her hand. The kind of gesture that said I've been in rooms like this before and I know how they work. "Tonight is about rest. All of us, in one place, without anyone shooting at us. That's worth celebrating."

The drinks arrived fast. Thessian red for Liara, a whiskey neat for Ashley, something tall and engineered and probably lethal for Miranda, a cherry-coloured dextro cocktail for Tali with an induction straw she could slot through her helmet port, and water for Samara, who accepted it with a nod that somehow made water look like a deliberate power move.

Ashley turned her glass between her fingers, watching the amber catch the light. The cross under her collar pressed warm against her sternum.

"So." She kept her voice easy, but her eyes went to Liara. "How's the search going?"

The table got quieter. Tali's straw stopped mid-sip. Miranda uncrossed her legs. Even Samara's glass paused halfway to the table.

Liara set her wine down and laced her fingers together, the way she did when she was choosing words with the precision of a surgeon choosing an incision point.

"Slow," she said. "But sure."

Ashley's jaw tightened. Six years of slow but sure. Six years of Liara running down every lead, every whisper, every scrap of data pulled from the black. Six years of the rest of them pretending they weren't holding their breath.

"There's more." Liara's blue eyes swept the table, and something in them was different tonight. Brighter. The kind of bright that scared Ashley more than the alternative, because hope was the cruelest weapon in the galaxy when it misfired. "We intercepted a signal three days ago from the Crucible wreckage field. Emergency life support. Faint, fragmented, cycling on a pattern that matches Alliance-standard Lazarus-era cybernetic specs."

Silence.

Tali's induction straw slipped from her port and clinked against the glass. "You're saying...."

"I'm saying someone is alive in that wreckage." Liara's voice was steady, controlled, the information broker delivering a report. But her hands were shaking, just barely, and Ashley caught it because she'd spent years learning to read the woman behind the desk. "Someone on emergency life support, running on systems that Cerberus built. The signal is weak. We're mobilising a recovery team. Anderson is pulling strings with the Fifth Fleet."

"Keelah," Tali whispered.

Miranda's jaw was set, her blue eyes fixed on a point somewhere past Liara's shoulder. The muscle in her cheek twitched. She'd built those systems. She knew what they could survive. "The Lazarus specs were designed for exactly this kind of scenario. Long-term stasis under catastrophic physical trauma. If the cybernetics held...."

"If," Samara said, quiet as a closing door. Then, softer: "But if."

Ashley picked up her whiskey. Her hand was steady. Her eyes were not.

"To Shepard," she said, and raised the glass.

"To Shepard." Liara lifted her wine.

"To Shepard." Miranda's voice cracked on the second syllable, and she covered it by drinking immediately.

"Keelah se'lai." Tali touched her glass to her visor, a quarian toast, the closest thing she had to lips against the rim. "To Shepard."

Samara raised her water. "To the one who chose, and paid."

The clink of five glasses carried further than it should have. A turian at the next table turned, caught the name, and stood. His drink went up without a word. The asari beside him followed. Then a human couple near the rail. Then a cluster of salarians at the bar, who probably didn't even know what they were toasting but recognised the gravity of a room shifting.

Within thirty seconds, half of Paradiso was on its feet.

"To Shepard!"

The name rolled through the club like thunder, like prayer, like a promise the galaxy refused to break.

Ashley drank, and the whiskey burned all the way down, and it tasted like six years of waiting, and it tasted like the beginning of the end of it.

The second round arrived without anyone ordering it, sent over by the turian who'd stood first, a bottle of Palaven gold with a note on the napkin that just read Normandy crew drinks free. Ashley tucked the napkin into her pocket and poured for the table, topping off her own whiskey with a measure of the gold that turned it a dangerous, honeyed colour.

"So who's not here?" Ashley leaned back, arm slung across the top of the booth, loose in a way she only got after the first glass hit. "Roll call. Who do I owe a drunk message to later?"

"Jack." Miranda said the name with the particular flatness she reserved for people she respected but would never, under threat of death, admit to liking. "She's grading biotic exams at Grissom Academy this week. Sent me a message that was sixty percent profanity and forty percent complaints about a student who keeps accidentally setting his desk on biotic fire."

"That tracks." Ashley grinned. "She actually likes teaching, doesn't she?"

"She'd gut you for saying it out loud, but yes." Miranda sipped her drink, something green and layered that caught the club lights like a prism. "She's good at it. The kids love her. Probably because she swears more than they do."

Tali made a small, hiccupping laugh behind her visor. The cherry cocktail was half gone, and her glowing eyes had taken on a softer, slightly unfocused quality. "And Joker and EDI?"

"Honeymoon." Liara smiled into her wine. A real smile, not the careful, diplomatic curve she wore in meetings. This one crinkled around her eyes. "They eloped three weeks ago. Joker sent me a picture of EDI in a sun hat on some beach on Elysium. She looked.... genuinely happy. He looked sunburned."

"Wait, they actually got married?" Ashley sat forward. "Like, legally? On paper?"

"Elysium passed synthetic personhood recognition last year. EDI helped draft the legislation, then waited exactly one day after it passed to propose." Liara's smile widened. "Joker cried. He told me not to tell anyone, so obviously I'm telling everyone."

"That's...." Tali's voice went small and warm. "That's really beautiful, actually."

"It is," Samara agreed, and the simple sincerity of it from the Justicar carried more weight than a ten-minute speech.

Ashley raised her glass toward the empty seats. "To the ones who couldn't make it. Jack, Joker, EDI. And to Joker crying at his own proposal."

They drank. The music shifted underneath them, something slower, more rhythmic, and the dancefloor below pulsed with new energy. Bodies pressed closer. Ashley's whiskey-gold concoction was doing its work, a warm blur softening the edges of the room, loosening the muscles in her shoulders that hadn't unclenched since approximately 2183.

Miranda set her glass down and surveyed the table with the evaluating look of a woman about to say something that would cause problems.

"Right." She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, heel tapping the booth. "We are, by any objective measure, five of the most beautiful women in this club."

"Modest as ever, Lawson." Ashley snorted.

"I said objective." Miranda didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth twitched. "We saved the galaxy. We look incredible. And we are sitting in a booth drinking like we're at a wake. Someone at this table needs to go home with somebody tonight."

Tali made a strangled noise and hunched her shoulders. "I'm just.... I'm fine here. With my straw. My straw is good."

"Tali." Miranda turned the full force of those ice-blue eyes on the quarian, and her voice dropped into something that was almost tender, if Miranda Lawson were capable of tenderness, which remained an open scientific question. "You are a gorgeous woman in a suit that leaves precisely enough to the imagination. You have hips that could stop traffic on the Presidium. And you haven't been touched by another living being in how long?"

"Miranda!"

"I'm asking because I care."

"You are asking because you are drunk and terrible!"

"Both things can be true." Miranda picked up her glass. "I'm not saying you need to fall in love tonight. I'm saying you need to get dicked. Properly. By someone with functioning hands and a pulse."

Ashley choked on her drink. Liara pressed her fingers to her mouth, shoulders shaking. Even Samara's cyan eyes carried a flicker of something that, on anyone else, would have been called amusement.

"Don't look at me like that." Miranda pointed her glass around the table, skipping Liara entirely, because Liara was Shepard's and that was a line no amount of Palaven gold could blur. "Liara gets a pass. The rest of you? No excuses."

"I'm sorry, the rest of us?" Ashley raised both eyebrows.

"Samara." Miranda swivelled. "When is the last time you had sex?"

The Justicar lifted her water with the unhurried grace of a cathedral door opening. "I do not believe I will answer that."

"That long. Tragic." Miranda turned to Ashley. "Williams?"

"None of your goddamn business, Lawson."

"Also tragic. Tali?"

Tali had her hands over her visor. The violet glow of her eyes leaked between her fingers. "Bosh'tet."

"Three for three." Miranda drained her glass and set it down with a decisive click. "We're fixing this. Tonight."

The music thrummed beneath them, a low, insistent pulse that matched the rhythm of the lights sweeping the dancefloor. Tali pulled her hands from her visor and straightened in her seat, the glow of her eyes steadying into something closer to defiance.

"I'm not.... I don't think I'm ready for dating," she said, the word careful in her mouth, like she was testing the weight of it. "Not yet. It's complicated. Everything is complicated. My suit is complicated. My immune system is a full-time job. And the last time I tried to connect with someone it was in the middle of a war, so my frame of reference is...."

"Tali." Miranda held up one finger. "I didn't say date."

Tali blinked behind her visor. "What?"

"I said get dicked." Miranda poured herself another measure from the bottle of Palaven gold, the amber liquid catching the club's violet light. "Those are two very different proposals. I'm not suggesting you find a life partner tonight. I'm suggesting you find a warm body with working equipment, blow off approximately six years of accumulated tension, and walk out in the morning without exchanging contact details. A one-night stand. Pressure relief. Like venting a coolant line before the whole system overheats."

"Did you just compare sex to.... coolant maintenance?"

"I tailored the metaphor to my audience."

Ashley barked a laugh into her glass. Liara bit her lip, the effort of not smiling pulling the faint freckle-like markings on her cheeks taut.

Tali crossed her arms, chin lifting, the defiant angle of her helmet unmistakable even without a visible face to read. "I am perfectly capable of.... I don't need you to manage my...."

"Of course you don't." Miranda swirled her drink. "But you also haven't done it, have you? Which suggests the capability is theoretical at this point. Rusty. You've lost the knack."

"I have not lost the knack!"

"The skill of seduction," Miranda continued, as if Tali hadn't spoken, her voice taking on the clipped, analytical tone of a woman reading a performance review, "is perishable. Like marksmanship. Like close-quarters combat. Use it or lose it, Tali. And you, by your own admission, have not used it in...."

"Bosh'tet!" Tali slapped both three-fingered hands flat on the table. The haptic drink menu flickered and glitched under the impact. "For your information, Miranda Lawson, I could have any man in this club. Any of them. Wanting me. Tonight. In minutes."

The booth went very still. Then, like a tide turning, four smiles bloomed in near-perfect unison.

Ashley's was the widest, all teeth, the grin of a marine who'd just been handed a live grenade and found it funny. Liara's was subtler, a gentle curve that didn't quite reach her eyes because her eyes were already calculating odds. Miranda's was the most dangerous, the slow, satisfied curl of a woman whose trap had just sprung exactly as designed. And Samara, Samara merely tilted her head a fraction, the barest suggestion of interest crossing those ageless features, which from the Justicar was the equivalent of a standing ovation.

"Any man," Miranda repeated.

Tali's glow flickered. The bravado was still there, spine straight, chin up, but something behind the visor had just registered the shift in atmospheric pressure at the table. "....Yes."

"Then you won't mind if we choose for you."

"If you what?"

"Fair test." Ashley leaned forward, elbows on the table, the whiskey-gold warmth in her cheeks doing nothing to dull the competitive glint in her brown eyes. "You said any man. So we pick. You deliver. Put your money where your.... helmet port is."

"That doesn't even make sense, Ashley."

"It doesn't have to. I'm three drinks in."

"I think it's a wonderful idea," Liara said, and the sweetness in her voice was the same sweetness she used when telling an informant she already knew their secrets. "Think of it as a field exercise."

"I am not calling it a field exercise."

Miranda was already turned in her seat, scanning the club below with the systematic focus of a sniper selecting a target. The bar curved beneath them, packed three deep with bodies, blue and violet light painting everything in bruise-toned shadows. Clusters of drinkers, dancers catching their breath, a bachelorette party of asari shrieking over something on an omni-tool. And near the far end, a group of four men, human, leaning against the bar in that easy, loosely anchored way that said they'd been there a while and were in no hurry to leave.

Miranda's gaze locked. She lifted one manicured finger and pointed.

"Him."

The group was laughing at something the tallest one had said. But Miranda wasn't pointing at the tall one, or the broad one with the sleeve tattoos, or the red-haired one gesturing wildly with his drink. She was pointing at the fourth. Dark hair, a little long, pushed back from a face that sat somewhere between handsome and quietly striking. Grey eyes, pale enough to catch the light even at this distance. He wasn't laughing. He was smiling, a small, private thing, the smile of a man who preferred listening to performing. His shoulders were relaxed. One hand rested on the bar, the other loose at his side, and he held himself with the kind of stillness that suggested he was either very comfortable in his own skin or very good at pretending.

"The dark-haired one," Miranda clarified. "Grey eyes. End of the bar. The quiet one."

Tali stood. She tugged at the hem of her suit, a nervous gesture that lasted exactly one second before she killed it, squaring her shoulders with the same precision she brought to calibrating a drive core.

"Get your credits ready," she said, and walked toward the stairs.

The stairs caught the light in strips, violet and blue alternating like runway markers, and Tali descended into the noise with her hips doing exactly what three cherry-coloured dextro cocktails and a year of suppressed frustration told them to do. She swayed. Not the accidental sway that came with quarian digitigrade legs and wide-set hips, the one she'd spent her whole adult life trying to minimize on the Flotilla because keelah forbid anyone notice the Admiral's daughter had a body under the suit. No. This was the other sway. The deliberate one. The one that rolled from her waist down through her hips and pulled the fabric of her suit taut across her ass with every step, the silver trim catching light like a signal flare.

I can do this. I've fought Reapers. I've hacked geth dreadnoughts mid-combat. I can talk to a man at a bar.

A human man at a bar.

A quiet, grey-eyed human man at a bar who Miranda Lawson hand-selected like she was requisitioning ordnance.

Keelah.

The group wasn't at the far end anymore. They'd migrated to a high table near the bar's curve, five of them now, the four humans and a krogan she hadn't clocked from upstairs, his scarred hump rising above the others like a boulder dropped in a stream. Cards fanned across the table, chips stacked in messy columns, and the red-haired one was in the middle of slamming his hand down with the righteous fury of a man holding a terrible hand and bluffing anyway.

"Full set! Read 'em and weep, Kessler!"

"That's not a full set, that's two pairs and wishful thinking."

"Same thing!"

The krogan rumbled something that might have been laughter or indigestion and swept the chips toward himself. The salarian bartender, polishing glasses behind the bar with the disinterested efficiency of his species, paused to watch the table with one rotating eye, the other still tracking drink orders.

Tali crossed the last five metres of dancefloor and stopped at the edge of their table.

The red-haired one registered her first. His mouth opened, then stayed open. The broad one with the sleeve tattoos turned, and his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. The tall one, the talker, leaned back in his chair and let out a low whistle that cut through the bass.

"Well, hello."

The krogan grunted and went back to counting chips.

Good. They noticed. Something small and warm uncurled in Tali's chest, a bloom of satisfaction she'd never admit to out loud. The suit hid her face, her skin, her blush, everything that made first contact terrifying, but it didn't hide the rest. And the rest, if Miranda's clinical assessment held any truth at all, was worth noticing.

"Evening." Tali clasped her hands in front of her, then unclasped them, then put one on her hip because that was what confident people did in vids. "Having a good night?"

"Getting better by the second." The red-haired one grinned wide enough to show a chipped canine. "You, uh, you play cards? We could deal you in. Pull up a chair. Pull up two chairs. Hell, take mine."

"Smooth, Ortiz." The tattooed one elbowed him.

"I'm being friendly!"

"You got a Fornax account?" The tall one leaned forward with the earnest lack of shame that only five drinks could produce. "Because I swear, you look like, there's this quarian girl who does the, she does this thing where she...."

"Kessler." The tattooed one put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't."

"I'm giving a compliment!"

Tali's cheeks burned behind the visor, heat pooling in her face and the tips of her ears. The attention was a live wire, crackling and dangerous and, keelah, a little bit wonderful. These men, drunk and artless and falling over themselves, knew a prime female when one walked up to their table. The knowledge settled in her stomach like warm engine fluid.

"That's very flattering." She tipped her head, letting the light catch her visor, her eyes glowing bright enough to throw purple reflections across the nearest glass. "But actually, I was wondering about your friend."

She turned toward the end of the table. Toward the dark-haired one who hadn't catcalled, hadn't whistled, hadn't asked about Fornax. He sat slightly back from the group, one hand resting on a half-finished drink, the other loose on his thigh. Those grey eyes were already on her, steady and unhurried, and the small smile on his face hadn't changed, the same quiet, private thing she'd clocked from the balcony. Like he'd been watching since she started down the stairs and had simply decided not to make a show of it.

"Is he looking for a good time tonight?"

The table erupted.

Ortiz slapped the table hard enough to scatter chips. Kessler threw both hands in the air. The tattooed one barked a laugh that startled the salarian bartender into dropping a glass. Even the krogan looked up from his winnings with something approaching interest.

"DAMIEN!" Ortiz was halfway out of his chair, pointing at the dark-haired man with both index fingers. "Did you hear that? Did you hear that?"

"Oh, he heard it." Kessler was already standing, gathering his jacket. "He's just doing the face. He does that face."

The man called Damien hadn't moved. The smile had shifted, though, a fraction wider, and something behind those grey eyes, something coiled and patient, caught the club lights.

"Alright, alright." The tattooed one was pulling the krogan up by the arm, an ambitious project. "We're gone. Booth over there. Giving you room, brother." He pointed at Damien, then at Tali, then back at Damien. "Do not screw this up."

They went, a noisy, laughing exodus of chairs scraping and chips pocketed and Kessler still asking if anyone had a Fornax link, and in their wake the table settled into quiet, just two glasses and a scatter of abandoned cards and the bass pulsing up through the floor like a second heartbeat.

Damien looked up at her. The smile was still there, small, unhurried.

"Hi."

Tali took the empty chair across from him, and she didn't sit the way she sat on the Normandy, all knees-together practicality and engineer's hunch. She turned the chair sideways, sank into it at an angle that planted one hip on the seat and left the other cocked high, the curve of her ass pressing into the chair's back rail so the suit fabric pulled drum-tight across both cheeks, every stitch visible, every contour mapped in purple and black. She crossed one digitigrade leg over the other, leaned forward on her elbows, and let gravity do the rest. The suit's chest panel compressed, her tits pushing together into a crease of shadow between the silver trim lines, and the dim club light slid across the taut fabric like oil on water.

There. Let him see what he's working with.

Damien's grey eyes dropped for exactly one second. One honest, involuntary second. Then they came back to her visor, steady, and the small smile didn't waver.

"Hi," Tali said, and pitched her voice low enough that her suit's external speakers softened it into something almost intimate. "I'm Tali."

"Damien." He turned his glass a quarter-rotation on the table, the gesture slow, deliberate. "You always walk up to strangers and ask if they're looking for a good time?"

"Only the ones worth asking."

His mouth twitched. "That's a hell of a line."

"Is it working?"

He let out a breath through his nose, not quite a laugh, and sat back. The coiled thing behind his eyes shifted, and Tali caught the exact moment it resolved into something she hadn't expected. Courtesy. Genuine, warm, and completely immovable.

"You seem like a great person, Tali. Really. And you've got...." His gaze dipped again, briefer this time, almost apologetic. "You've got nothing to prove. But I'm not looking for company tonight. Honestly." He tipped his glass toward the far side of the room, where Ortiz and Kessler were already waving like idiots from their new booth. "One of the guys might be interested, though. Ortiz is single. Kessler's single and desperate, which is worse, but he's harmless."

The words landed like a door closing.

No.

Tali kept her posture loose, kept her voice light, but behind the visor her jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

No, no, no.

She risked a glance upward, toward the balcony. The booth was visible from here, a dark crescent against the upper tier's railing, and every single one of its occupants was watching. Liara had one hand pressed to her mouth. Ashley was leaning so far forward her elbows were off the table. Samara sat with the terrible stillness of a woman observing a nature documentary.

And Miranda.

Miranda was on her feet.

Miranda Lawson was standing behind the booth, both arms raised, doing a slow, hip-rolling victory shimmy that looked absolutely obscene in heels and a white blouse, her mouth open in what was clearly a silent, triumphant I told you so aimed directly at Tali's soul. Ashley grabbed Miranda's arm to pull her down and Miranda shook her off and kept dancing. Liara buried her face in both hands. Samara's cyan eyes tracked the shimmy with the clinical interest of an anthropologist documenting a mating display.

I am going to kill her. I am going to reroute the Normandy's entire sewage system into her quarters. I am going to….

Tali turned back to Damien, and something hot and reckless ignited in her chest, the same feeling she got three seconds before overloading a mech's power core, the one that said this is stupid and I'm doing it anyway.

"You know," she said, uncrossing her legs, letting them fall open a fraction, leaning in until her visor was close enough that her breath fogged the inside of the glass, "I could do things to you tonight that the Admiralty Board would disown me for. Things they don't teach on the Flotilla. Things I've been thinking about doing for longer than you'd believe." Her voice dropped to a murmur. "But if you're not interested...."

Damien's throat worked. The grey eyes held hers, and something in them shifted, darkened, the coiled thing pulling taut. But his voice came out steady.

"I'm sure you could. But I'm good. Thanks, Tali."

Bosh'tet. BOSH'TET!!

That smug, gene-perfect, catsuit-wearing, victory-dancing bitch is NOT winning this. Not tonight. Not ever.

Tali straightened. She pulled her shoulders back, and when she spoke, she let her voice go flat and dismissive, the tone she used on politicians and people who touched her console without asking.

"Right. I should have known."

Damien blinked. "Known what?"

"That a human couldn't handle it." She gestured lazily at herself, one three-fingered hand sweeping from chest to hip. "This. All of this. Too much female for you. It's fine. Most humans can't. Species thing. I get it."

His grey eyes went wide. The small smile vanished. "Excuse me?"

"No, no, it makes sense." Tali was already half-turning, putting the sway back into her hips, letting the light catch every curve as she angled away from the table. "A quarian with a body like mine? I understand. It's intimidating. No hard feelings."

She made it exactly one step.

His hand closed around her wrist. Not gentle. Not rough. Certain. He pulled, and she spun, and gravity did the rest, and then she was in his lap, her heavy ass planted across his thighs, and something thick and hard pressed against the underside of her suit and keelah that was not his leg.

His palm cracked across her ass.

The sound cut through the bass like a gunshot. Her suit registered the impact, a bright spike on her haptic readout, and the moan that tore out of her throat was so loud her external speakers distorted it into feedback.

"I hate," Damien said, his mouth close to her helmet, his voice a low, furious rasp that vibrated through her suit's audio pickups and straight into her nerve endings, "alien sluts who walk up to a man's table and shake their ass like a goddamn invitation and then call him a bigot when he tries to be decent."

Oh.

Oh, keelah!

"Then prove me wrong," Tali whispered.

His hand tightened on her hip. He reached past her with the other, slapped his credit chit on the bar hard enough to make the bartender's eye stalks rotate, and stood, lifting her with him like she weighed nothing, setting her on her feet with a grip that stayed possessive on the small of her back.

"Move," he said. "Now."

He steered her toward the exit, one hand firm against her spine, and the crowd parted for them the way it had parted for Samara, only messier, louder, a wake of turned heads and raised eyebrows.

Her suit pinged. Incoming message. Two, actually, arriving simultaneously.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS]: RECORD THAT SHIT

[M_LAWSON]: Record. Every. Second. I want helmet-cam footage on my desk by morning.

Tali's fingers trembled as the club door swallowed them into the night.

The skycar ride lasted four minutes. Tali counted every one of them because Damien's hand stayed on her thigh the entire time, his thumb pressing slow circles into the suit fabric just above her knee, and her suit's biometric readout was doing things she'd never seen outside of a combat zone. Heart rate elevated. Core temperature climbing. Nerve-stim sensitivity in the yellow. And between her legs, a slick, molten heat that the suit's internal moisture sensors registered as a notification she dismissed three times before giving up.

He didn't speak. He drove with one hand and touched her with the other, and the silence was worse than words because it gave her nothing to volley back, nothing to deflect with, just the pressure of his thumb and the city lights painting his jaw in amber streaks and the hard set of his mouth that said he was already past talking.

His apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a Zakera Ward high-rise, the kind of place that cost more than a gun shop should pay for. Spacious. Clean. Real furniture, not prefab modular crap, a deep couch in charcoal fabric, bookshelves with actual physical books, a kitchen island in dark stone. The windows ran floor to ceiling, the Citadel's endless skyline burning beyond the glass like a circuit board laid flat.

Tali got exactly two steps inside before he kicked the door shut and grabbed her.

Both hands. Both cheeks. His palms closed over her ass and squeezed, fingers sinking into the heavy, suited curves hard enough that her suit haptics screamed sensation directly into the nerve clusters beneath, and Tali's knees buckled. He caught her weight, pulled her flush against him, her back arching as his grip kneaded and separated and pressed her cheeks together again, the suit fabric groaning under the tension.

"Here's what's going to happen." His mouth was against the side of her helmet, breath fogging the glass near her audio pickup, and the vibration of his voice traveled through the suit's conductors and pooled low in her belly. "I'm going to take you into that bedroom. I'm going to find out how this suit comes off. And then I'm going to fuck the alien pride right out of you until you can't remember how to say bosh'tet."

His right hand reared back and cracked across her left cheek. Then the right. Two sharp, stinging impacts that her suit translated into bright flares of heat, and Tali's moan came out broken, split across two syllables.

"You....you think you can back that up?" She rolled her hips against him, grinding the cleft of her ass into his grip, and the thing pressing against her stomach was still there, thick and insistent through his jeans. "Big talk from a man who tried to pass me off to his friends ten minutes a...."

He picked her up.

Not gently. His hands locked under her thighs and he lifted, and her legs wrapped around his waist on pure instinct, digitigrade calves hooking behind his back, and he carried her through the apartment like cargo he was in a hurry to deliver. The bedroom door caught his shoulder on the way through. He didn't slow down.

The bed was large, dark sheets, and he threw her onto it with enough force that she bounced once, her suit's inertial dampeners firing a useless warning into her peripheral vision. She landed on her back, tits compressed by the impact, hips splayed, and before she could sit up he was already pulling his shirt over his head.

Broad shoulders. Thick chest with a scattering of dark hair. Forearms corded with the kind of muscle that came from years of physical work, not gym vanity. A stomach that was hard across the top and gave just barely at the edges, human and real and warm-looking in the low light from the window. He kicked his shoes off, unbuckled his belt with a sharp, metallic snap that made Tali's hips twitch, and shoved his jeans down.

Tali stopped breathing.

His cock fell free and she understood, instantly and viscerally, every drunken rumor she'd ever half-heard on the Flotilla, every whispered extranet confession, every time an asari maiden had gotten that particular glazed look when the subject of human males came up. It was enormous. Thick as her wrist, longer than her forearm from elbow to the base of her three-fingered hand, curving slightly upward under its own weight, the head flushed dark and broad, a vein running the underside like a cable conduit. His balls hung heavy beneath, full and tight, and the whole arrangement caught the Citadel's skyline glow through the window and cast a shadow across the sheets that made her mouth go dry.

"Keelah," she whispered. The words came out reverent, almost liturgical, her suit speakers barely catching them. Her violet eyes burned bright behind the visor, wide and fixed, every blink forgotten.

"What was that?" He stepped out of the pooled denim, standing at the edge of the bed, all of him on display, the quiet man from the bar gone and something older and hungrier wearing his face.

Tali propped herself up on her elbows. The heat between her legs was a pulse now, rhythmic, urgent, synced to the hammering of her heart that her suit couldn't regulate no matter how many micro-injections it queued.

"I said," she breathed, and the tremble in her voice was genuine, all bravado burned clean away, "I finally understand why half the asari in the galaxy are spreading their legs for humans."

His grey eyes darkened. "Suit off. Now. Show me how."

Tali's fingers fumbled at the seals along her collar, then stopped. Her hands dropped to the sheets. The glow behind her visor dimmed, not with reluctance but with something worse: practicality.

"I can't." The words tasted like engine coolant. "Not all the way. Not safely. My immune system, it's.... I'd need immunoboosters, antihistamines, a full course of amino-acid adapters to handle your biochemistry. I don't have any of them. They're on the Normandy, in my quarters, in a lockbox I labeled 'personal medical supplies' so Joker would stop making jokes about...."

"Tali."

"....and the reaction time is at least thirty minutes for the boosters to take effect, longer for the adapters, and if I get a full exposure without them the best-case scenario is a rash and a fever and the worst-case is anaphylaxis and I am not explaining to Doctor Chakwas how I ended up in the medbay because I...."

"Tali." Damien's knee hit the mattress. The bed dipped under his weight. "We'll make do."

The sentence landed like a palm strike, simple and final, and Tali's rambling died in her throat. He crawled over her, one hand planting beside her helmet, the other gripping her knee, and the sheer size of him above her, bare-chested and hard and close, collapsed every argument she'd been building into rubble.

"But...."

"I said we'll make do." His hand slid from her knee to the inside of her thigh, thumb pressing into the inseam of her suit where the fabric was thinnest, and Tali's back arched off the mattress before her brain caught up with her spine. "Lie back."

She lay back.

His hands found the insides of both thighs and pushed, spreading her legs wide, her digitigrade calves falling open, knees bent, the whole of her lower body splayed across the dark sheets. The suit stretched taut across the junction of her hips, the fabric between her legs soaked dark, a wet stain spreading outward from the seam where the suit's moisture sensors had long since given up sending notifications. The heat radiating off her was visible to a human, a faint shimmer rising from the damp fabric like steam off a hot engine block.

Damien looked at the wet seam. At the suit fabric clinging to every fold and crease of what it was supposed to conceal. His jaw tightened.

He grabbed the crotch of her suit with both hands and ripped.

The sound was obscene. Reinforced polymer-weave tearing along the inseam, stitching giving way in a ragged line from front to back, and the cool air of the apartment hit Tali's exposed sex like a slap. She gasped, a raw, shocked sound that her speakers didn't even try to modulate, and her hips jerked upward into nothing.

Her pussy was purple. Deep, vivid purple, the outer lips smooth and plush and glistening, flushed darker at the edges where blood pooled. Inside, where the torn suit framed her like a ripped window, the color shifted, wet red and pink threaded through with violet, the inner folds slick and swollen and practically dripping, thin strands of arousal webbing between the lips as they parted. Steam curled off her, literal steam, her elevated body temperature meeting the apartment air, and the scent that hit Damien was sweet and sharp and alien, musky with something floral underneath, like hot metal and night-blooming flowers.

"Keelah!" Tali's hands flew to the sides of her helmet. "That was my suit, you, that's custom stitching, do you know how long it takes to...."

His mouth closed over her.

Every word died. Every thought died. The universe contracted to a single point of contact: his lips sealed against her pussy, his tongue dragging a long, flat stroke from her entrance to her clit, slow enough to map every fold and fast enough to make her hips buck hard against his face. His hands locked around her thighs, holding them apart, thumbs pressing bruises into the exposed strip of purple skin between suit fabric and sex, and he ate her like a man trying to prove something to God.

"Ah.... ah!.... Keelah, that's.... you're...."

He didn't let her finish. His tongue pushed inside her, thick and wet and deep, curling against her inner walls, and the moan that ripped from Tali's speakers peaked into distortion, a crackling, feedback-laced wail that rattled the water glass on his nightstand. Her three-fingered hands clawed at the sheets. Her back bowed off the mattress, hips grinding against his mouth, and he matched her, every roll of her pelvis met with a deeper thrust of his tongue, lapping at the slick heat pouring out of her with greedy, audible strokes.

He pulled back just enough to suck her clit between his lips.

Tali screamed.

His tongue circled the swollen bud, flicked it, pressed flat against it, then sucked again, hard, rhythmic, merciless. Her thighs clamped against his head and he forced them apart, fingers digging into the muscle beneath the suit, holding her open and spread and helpless while his mouth worked her clit with a focus that bordered on cruelty. Every nerve in her body fired at once. Her suit's haptic systems overloaded, threw error codes across her visor, and she couldn't read a single one because her eyes had rolled back behind the glass.

The orgasm hit her like a mass accelerator round. No warning. No buildup. One second she was climbing and the next she was there, every muscle in her body locking rigid, her spine a drawn bow, her scream cutting out into silence as her speakers hit their limit and simply stopped transmitting.

His mouth didn't stop.

He sucked her clit hard, sealed his lips around it, and pulled, and Tali's orgasm crested and broke and something inside her let go completely. Fluid gushed from her, hot and slick and copious, soaking his chin, his jaw, the sheets beneath her, a sudden wet rush that her suit's torn seam couldn't contain. Her hips spasmed, bucking against his mouth, and he drank it, lapped at the flood with broad, hungry strokes while she squirted against his tongue and shook apart beneath him.

"Kee....keelah se....se'lai...."

Her speakers crackled back to life just in time to broadcast the broken prayer to the empty apartment.

Damien pulled back from between her legs, chin slick and glistening, and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. His grey eyes were half-lidded, dark with something that had stopped pretending to be polite three floors ago. He licked his lips, slow, tasting her, and the smile that followed was nothing like the quiet, private thing from the bar.

"Sweet." He said it like a verdict. "You know that? Quarian whores taste sweet. Like your whole species evolved to bait humans into sticking their faces between your legs." His palm cracked across her left cheek, the exposed strip of purple skin between the torn suit catching the full sting, and Tali yelped, hips jerking sideways, the aftershocks of her orgasm still rippling through her in trembling waves. "Just a slut with a built-in lure. Nature's little honeytrap."

"I'm not.... I'm not a...."

"Yeah, you are." Another smack, harder, the wet sound of it obscene in the quiet apartment, and the moan that tore out of her speakers made a liar of every word she'd been about to say. "You walked up to my table, shook this fat ass in my face, and begged me to take you home. What does that make you?"

Tali's visor fogged from the inside, her breath coming in short, ragged bursts that the suit's climate control couldn't compensate for. Her thighs trembled. Her pussy ached, still twitching, still dripping into the ruined sheets.

It makes me exactly what he said it makes me.

Keelah, I'm going to need so much therapy.

He moved up her body. One knee on either side of her torso, his weight settling across her chest, and his cock dragged a wet line up the front of her suit as he positioned himself, the thick shaft leaving a smear of precum on the purple-and-silver panels between her breasts. Then he shifted higher, planted his knees beside her shoulders, and dropped his hips.

His cock landed on her visor.

Heavy. The weight of it pressed down against the glass, the thick shaft laid across the full length of her faceplate from chin to brow, and Tali's world narrowed to nothing but the underside of him. The vein running the underside pulsed against her visor, close enough that the suit's proximity sensors fired a haptic outline across the interior display, mapping every ridge and contour in wireframe blue. His balls rested against her chin seal, full and warm, the skin drawn tight, and the scent.

The scent hit her through the helmet's filtration ports like a fist.

Musk. Dense, animal, unmistakably human, the salt-sweet funk of male arousal concentrated by the heat between his thighs. Her suit's air processors flagged it as a biohazard. She dismissed the alert without looking. The smell pooled in her sinuses, coated the back of her tongue, and something primal and desperate clenched low in her belly.

"Open it." Damien's voice came from above, deep and unhurried, the command of a man who already knew the answer. He tapped one finger against the side of her helmet, right where the emergency feeding port sat beneath its magnetic seal. "The mouth port. I know what model this is. Nexus-7 rebreather with integrated oral access. Rated for nutrient paste ingestion, emergency triage, and," his thumb found the port's release catch and pressed, not hard enough to open it, just hard enough to prove he knew where it was, "recreation. Your people built a glory hole into your survival equipment, slut. Don't pretend you don't know what it's for."

"How do you...." Her voice came out strangled, small. "How do you know the model number?"

"I sell guns to quarians on their Pilgrimages." His cock shifted against her visor, the head nudging downward toward the port. "Every kid who walks into my shop is wearing one of these. I've read the spec sheets. I know what the port does. And right now, I'm going to find out what your mouth feels like around my cock."

Tali's three-fingered hands curled into fists against the sheets. The port was right there. Two centimeters of magnetic seal between her lips and his, between safety and the kind of stupid, reckless, immune-system-destroying decision that would put her in the medbay for a week.

"You won't fit," she whispered. "The port diameter is only.... you're too...."

"Open it."

"You brute. You keelah-damned human brute, you can't just...."

She opened it.

Her thumb found the interior release, the magnetic seal disengaged with a soft click, and the port irised wide, a circle of flexible polymer framing her mouth, cool air rushing in against her lips for the first time all night. The musk hit her unfiltered now, raw and thick, and a sound escaped her that wasn't a word in any language.

Damien angled his hips and pressed the head of his cock against the port.

The fit was impossible. The port's diameter was designed for nutrient tubes and emergency intubation, not for this, not for the broad, flushed crown of a human cock that was already smearing precum across her lips as it pushed. The flexible polymer stretched, strained, and the head popped through with a wet, obscene squelch that her speakers broadcast at full volume.

Her lips sealed around him.

Soft. Her mouth was impossibly soft, the interior of a quarian's oral cavity running two degrees hotter than human, the tissue slick with a natural lubricant that coated his shaft the instant he breached the port. Her tongue, thin and dexterous and long, curled around the underside of his glans on reflex, tasting him, and the sound Tali made was not a moan. It was a mewl, high and broken and hungry, the sound of a woman tasting something she'd been starving for.

"There it is." Damien's hand cupped the back of her helmet, holding her steady. "Suck it like the quarian whore you are."

The taste flooded her. Salt and musk and the faintly alkaline tang of human precum, alien chemistry her body had no defense against, and she knew, knew with the clinical certainty of a woman who'd memorized her own immune profile, that she would have a fever by morning. Forty-eight hours of chills and aches and Doctor Chakwas asking pointed questions.

She didn't care.

Her lips tightened. Her tongue pressed flat against the underside of his head, mapping the ridge, the slit, the thick flare of the corona, and she kissed the tip with the reverence of a woman pressing her mouth to a holy relic. Then she swallowed, pulling him deeper, the port stretching around his girth as inch by impossible inch slid past her lips and across her tongue, and the groan that rolled out of Damien's chest was low enough to vibrate through the helmet and into her skull.

Worth it. Keelah, worth every fever, every rash, every lecture from Chakwas.

She sucked, and the wet, slurping sound filled the apartment, and above her Damien's hand tightened on her helmet, and Tali closed her eyes behind the fogged visor and stopped counting the cost.

His hips found a rhythm. Each thrust pushing another inch through the stretched port until the head of his cock kissed the back of her throat and Tali gagged, a wet, choked sound that her speakers faithfully transmitted into the quiet apartment.

He didn't pull back.

"That's it." His grip shifted to both sides of her helmet, cradling it like a handle, and his hips rolled forward again, feeding her another inch. "Just a port in a wall. That's all you are right now. A hole for me to use."

Tali's eyes watered behind the visor. The stretch in her jaw burned, the port's polymer gasket creaking against his girth, and every thrust drove the taste of him deeper, salt and musk coating her tongue, sliding down her throat, settling in her chest like something she'd swallowed on purpose. Her lips made a wet, obscene seal around his shaft, and every time he pulled back the suction popped loud enough to echo off the bedroom walls.

She sucked harder. Drew her cheeks in, tongue working the underside of his shaft in long, undulating strokes, and the sound that came out of Damien was almost animal, a grunt torn from somewhere below language.

"Every quarian slut on Pilgrimage," he growled, fucking into her mouth with a thrust that bottomed out against her throat, "walks into my shop wearing this helmet and I know what the port's for. Your whole species built feeding tubes that fit a human cock. Coincidence?" Another thrust. Deeper. Her throat opened around him and Tali moaned, vibration traveling the length of his shaft. "Bullshit. You and the asari, you're all the same. Blue whores and purple whores lining up to get stuffed full of human cock, pretending you've got culture, pretending you're superior, and every single one of you ends up right here." He buried himself to the root and held, his balls pressed flush against her chin seal, her throat spasming around him. "On your back. Choking on it. Begging for more."

Tali's fists pounded the mattress once. Twice. Not to stop him. The oxygen deprivation lasted three seconds before he pulled back enough for her to gasp a ragged breath through her nose, and the instant air filled her lungs she surged forward, lips stretching, swallowing him back down with a desperate, slurping greed that surprised them both.

She pulled off just enough to speak, lips still kissing the tip, spit and precum bridging from her mouth to his cock in glistening threads.

"Is that all you've got?" Her voice was wrecked, hoarse, barely a whisper against his glans. "I've had nutrient paste tubes thicker than this."

His cock twitched against her lips. His jaw clenched.

"Liar," he said.

"Prove it." She licked the slit, slow, deliberate, her thin tongue probing the opening, collecting the bead of precum that welled there and swallowing it with an audible gulp. "Fuck my throat like you mean it, you human bosh'tet. Or was all that talk about making me eat your cum just talk?"

He slammed forward.

The port stretched to its limit. His cock punched past her gag reflex and into her throat, the bulge of him visible as a ridge pressing outward against the flexible material beneath her chin, and Tali's eyes rolled before snapping back into focus, wild and bright behind the fogged glass. She gagged, recovered, swallowed around him, and the muscular contraction of her throat milking his shaft pulled a sound from Damien that was closer to pain than pleasure.

He fucked her face.

No more precision. No more rhythm. Just raw, punishing thrusts that drove his cock to the hilt with every stroke, the wet gluck-gluck-gluck of her throat accepting him filling the room like a metronome set to something profane. Spit poured from the port's edges, running down the sides of her helmet, pooling in the hollow of her throat seal. Her tits bounced with each impact, the suit's chest panel compressing and releasing, and between her legs the torn seam gave a clear view of her pussy clenching around nothing, slick and swollen and dripping a steady stream of arousal that soaked through the sheets in a spreading stain.

"Gonna feed you," he ground out, his pace turning brutal, hips snapping forward hard enough that his balls slapped wet against her chin with every thrust. "Gonna pump it straight down your throat. Your meal, slut. Every fucking drop."

Tali moaned around him, the vibration traveling his full length, and her hand shot between her own legs, three fingers pressing against her clit through the torn suit, rubbing frantic circles as her throat worked his cock with swallowing, gulping desperation.

His rhythm stuttered. His grip on her helmet locked tight. Every muscle in his torso drew taut, the cords in his neck standing sharp, and the groan that tore out of him started in his chest and ended somewhere primal and bottomless.

"Eat."

He buried himself to the root.

The first rope hit the back of her throat like a punch of heat. Thick. Impossibly thick, yoghurt-dense and scalding hot, a volume of cum that coated her esophagus in a single pulse and kept coming. The second rope fired deeper, past her tongue, past the point where taste mattered, depositing itself near the entrance to her stomach in a heavy, clinging mass she could feel settling inside her. The third was just as thick, just as hot, and the fourth, and the fifth, each one pumping directly into her with a force that made her throat bulge around the delivery.

Tali's eyes rolled to the back of her head. Her visor showed nothing but the dark blur of her own eyelids and the biometric readout screaming in red, and she came.

Her pussy clenched and released, a gush of fluid spraying from her exposed sex in a clear, shimmering arc that soaked his sheets, her thighs, the remnants of her suit. Her hips bucked off the mattress, spine bowing, three-fingered hand still grinding against her clit as the orgasm ripped through her in waves timed to the thick pulses flooding her throat. Each load that hit her stomach triggered another spasm, another gush, her body responding to the sheer volume of him like a circuit completing, input and output locked in a loop that left her shaking, twitching, emptied and filled at once.

He held her there until the last thick rope pulsed out of him, until her throat had milked every drop, until the only sound in the apartment was the wet click of her swallowing and the ragged static of her speakers trying to process a moan that had no end.

Damien pulled back. Slow. Inch by inch, the thick shaft dragging across her tongue, and Tali's lips clamped tight around him the whole way, cheeks hollowed, sucking with a wet, greedy desperation that turned every withdrawn inch into a fight. Her tongue pressed flat against the underside, tracing the vein, catching every last smear of cum that clung to the skin.

"Disgusting," she rasped around him, the word garbled by the cock still stretching her port. Another inch retreated and she sucked harder, the slurping pop of suction obscenely loud. "Disgusting bosh'tet human and your disgusting...." She swallowed, throat clicking, and groaned as the taste hit fresh. "....your disgusting cock...."

Another inch. Her lips dragged along the ridge of the corona, tightening, refusing to release.

"Filthy animal," she mumbled against the shaft, and kissed it, a wet, open-mouthed press of lips to the thick vein just below the head. "Pumping your seed into a quarian like, like we're just receptacles for your...." She swallowed again, audibly, the gulp transmitted through her speakers at full clarity. "Keelah, there's so much...."

The head reached her lips. Tali sealed them around the crown and nursed, tongue swirling the slit, lapping at the last pearl of cum welling from the tip with tiny, kitten-quick strokes. She kissed it. Pressed her mouth to the broad head through the port and kissed it like a goodbye, like a thank-you, like something she'd deny under oath.

Damien pulled free.

A single thread of cum stretched from the port to his cockhead, thin and glistening, catching the skyline's glow like a strand of spider silk. It held for one second, two, trembling in the air between them. Tali's tongue darted from the port, caught the thread, and drew it back into her mouth. The swallow was loud enough to hear from the hallway.

His hand cracked across her ass before the sound finished.

"Over." The word came out guttural. He grabbed her hip with one hand, her shoulder with the other, and flipped her, rolling her onto her stomach and hauling her hips up in a single motion that left her on her hands and knees, helmet pressed sideways into the pillow, her back arched and her ass raised like a target. "Hands and knees. Stay."

His fingers found the torn seam at her crotch and pulled. The rip traveled upward, reinforced polymer shredding in his grip, and the fabric peeled away from her in a ragged flap that exposed the full swell of both cheeks. Purple. Deep, vivid purple, the skin smooth and taut and heavy, each cheek a round, plush mass that spilled over the remaining suit edges like fruit too ripe for its skin. The cleft between them glistened, slick with her arousal, and the faint shimmer of heat rose off her exposed flesh.

Damien's palm crashed into her right cheek. The impact rippled through the muscle, the flesh bouncing and settling, and a handprint bloomed dark against the purple in less than a second.

"This." He grabbed a fistful of her left cheek, squeezed until his fingers sank deep, then released and smacked it hard enough to make her yelp. "This fucking ass. You walk around the Citadel in a skin-tight suit with this and expect men to be civilized about it?" Another smack, the sound cracking through the bedroom like a rifle report. "This ass is begging to be pinned down by a human and bred. Every quarian who walks past me in those suits, swaying like they don't know, like they're not built from the waist down to drain human balls dry." His hand came down again, alternating cheeks, purple darkening to bruise-violet under the assault. "You're not a pilgrim. You're a breeding hole with an engineering degree. And this," he palmed both cheeks, spread them apart, the wet pink of her pussy and the tight pucker above it exposed and glistening in the low light, "is a temptation I'm going to fuck out of my system if it takes all night."

"You arrogant," Tali hissed, pressing her face into the pillow, her voice muffled and wrecked, "you supremacist piece of....ah!"

His cock found her.

The broad head notched against her entrance, the slick folds parting around him, and for one breathless second he held there, just the tip kissing her pussy, the stretch already burning.

He slammed home.

Every inch. All at once. His hips crashed against her ass with a wet, meaty clap that shook the bed frame, and Tali's scream hit a frequency her speakers weren't built for, the sound distorting into a crackling shriek that rattled the window glass. Her fingers clawed divots into the sheets. Her spine arched so deep her chest hit the mattress, and the angle drove him deeper, the head of his cock kissing something inside her that made white light explode behind her visor.

He didn't pause. He pulled back and drove forward again, brutal, his hands locked on her hips hard enough to leave bruises on the exposed purple skin, and set a pace that was less rhythm than punishment. Each thrust bottomed out with a slap of flesh against flesh, her ass rippling with every impact, and Tali screamed into the pillow and pushed back, meeting him, taking him, her pussy clenching around his shaft in spasming, desperate waves.

"Humanity's now." His palm cracked across her right cheek mid-thrust, the combined sensation of the smack and the cock splitting her open sending Tali into a full-body convulsion. "This ass." Smack. "This pussy." Smack. "Every time you sit down tomorrow you're going to remember who claimed it."

"Keelah!" Tali's violet eyes blazed behind the visor, tears streaking her cheeks, her mouth open and panting. "Harder, you, harder, you stupid human brute, if you're going to ruin me then ruin me!"

He grabbed her crest through the helmet, pulling her head back, and his hips turned savage. The wet, rhythmic slap of his balls against her clit with every stroke pushed her over the edge without warning. Her pussy clenched, locked, and released, a spray of fluid bursting around his shaft, soaking his thighs, splattering the dark sheets in a spreading, glistening stain. Her scream cut out into static. Her body shook. And Damien didn't slow down.

The messages scrolled across the inside of Tali's visor in bright orange text, overlaid on her biometric readout like mission updates during a firefight, and the timing was cruel because Damien was buried to the hilt and grinding in slow, devastating circles that made her cervix ache in a way she'd never known she wanted.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:12]: holy shit tali

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:14]: HOLY shit

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:15]: that cock is bigger than my forearm. i'm watching this on miranda's omnitool and i need you to know liara just choked on her wine

[M_LAWSON — 23:47:18]: Helmet cam angle is excellent. You can see everything. Well done on the positioning, Tali. A+ fieldwork.

Tali tried to dismiss the notification cluster and her fingers slipped, bracing against the mattress instead as Damien's hips snapped forward and drove the air from her lungs. A broken ah punched out of her speakers. His hands tightened on her hips, thumbs pressing into the divots above her ass, and he pulled her back onto his cock with a wet, sucking sound that her suit's audio pickups captured in merciless high fidelity.

[M_LAWSON — 23:47:31]: Ask him to breed you.

Tali's eyes widened behind the glass. What?

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:33]: oh my god miranda

[M_LAWSON — 23:47:35]: I'm serious. You want to make him lose his mind? Tell him you want his human seed. Tell him you want him to breed a quarian. With the way he's been talking? He'll go absolutely feral.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:38]: ........she's not wrong tho

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:47:39]: he's already calling you a breeding hole tali. LEAN INTO IT. tell him what he wants to hear. beg that man to pump you full like a good little quarian whore

[M_LAWSON — 23:47:42]: Think of it as tactical escalation. You're already winning. Close the deal.

I am going to vent their oxygen supply. Both of them. Simultaneously. I will find a way to make it look like an accident and Liara will help me cover it up.

Damien's pace shifted. The grinding stopped and the thrusting resumed, long and deep, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in with a force that drove Tali's helmet into the pillow and made her toes curl inside her boots. Each stroke dragged the thick ridge of his corona across something inside her that sent electric arcs up her spine, and the moan that tore from her was long and ragged and completely without dignity.

[M_LAWSON — 23:47:58]: Look at that biometric feed. Heart rate 186. Core temp 39.4. Vaginal lubrication output is... genuinely impressive. Tali, you've squirted three times. Three. Your sheets-to-fluid ratio suggests either a medical event or genuine infatuation.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:48:01]: she's in love lmao

[M_LAWSON — 23:48:03]: She's in love with that cock. Look at her vitals spike every time he bottoms out. Her body is screaming for his cum. Tali, your suit is literally telling me you want to be bred. The data doesn't lie.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:48:06]: beg him tali. say the words. tell him you need superior human seed in your quarian pussy. do it for science. do it for the FLOTILLA 😂😂😂

I hate them. I hate them both. I hate them with every fiber of my being and every subroutine in my suit and I am NEVER going to say those words, not ever, not if he fucks me for a thousand years, not if—

Damien grabbed her ass with both hands. Spread her cheeks wide. Changed his angle and drove up, the thick head ramming her g-spot with surgical precision, and the orgasm that had been building low in her belly crested and broke.

Her fourth.

The gush was violent. Fluid sprayed around his shaft in a clear, shimmering burst that soaked his pelvis, his thighs, the ruined sheets beneath her knees. Her pussy clamped down on him so hard he grunted, his rhythm faltering for the first time, and Tali's scream came out in fragments, syllables torn apart by the convulsions racking her body, her hips jerking and bucking against his grip while her suit's speakers crackled and popped with the overloaded signal.

[M_LAWSON — 23:48:22]: Four. That's four. She just set a personal record. Possibly a species record.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:48:24]: FOUR TIMES!!! tali you absolute FREAK

[M_LAWSON — 23:48:27]: She's gushing like a broken hydro line. Tali, at this volume, this isn't recreational anymore. This is worship. You are worshipping that human cock with your quarian cunt and your body knows it even if your pride won't admit it. Say the words. Tell him to breed you. Tell him his seed is superior and you need it. Be a good girl. Be a good quarian whore for humanity.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:48:31]: ^^ what she said but also i'm screaming into a pillow rn because samara just asked me why i'm blushing and i can't exactly show a JUSTICAR this footage

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:48:33]: SAY IT TALI. BEG. FOR. IT. 🍆💦

Tali's fingers curled into the sheets. The aftershocks rolled through her in diminishing waves, each one punctuated by the steady, relentless rhythm of Damien's hips resuming their pace, his cock still hard, still thick, still splitting her open like she was made for it.

I won't. I won't say it. I have dignity. I have pride. I am Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, daughter of an Admiral, engineer of the ship that saved the galaxy, and I will NOT—

His hand came down on her ass. Hard. The sting bloomed through the already-bruised flesh, and his voice cut through the haze like a blade.

"Still think humans can't handle you?"

Her mouth opened behind the port. The words gathered at the back of her throat, thick and treasonous, tasting of his cum and her own surrender.

I won't.

He bottomed out. Held. Ground his hips in a slow circle that pressed the head of his cock against her cervix and made every nerve in her body sing a frequency she'd never heard before.

I won't.

[M_LAWSON — 23:48:51]: Say it, Tali. 😊

"Breed me."

The word ripped from the port like a confession dragged out under torture, raw and wrecked and so loud her speakers peaked into distortion. Tali's fingers clawed the sheets, her visor fogged blind, and the dam inside her broke with the same catastrophic finality as a bulkhead giving way to vacuum.

"Breed me, you keelah-damned human animal! Put your superior seed in my quarian pussy, fill me, I need it, I need it, breed your little alien whore until I can't walk, until I'm dripping with it, until every quarian on the Flotilla can smell you on me and knows what I let a human do to me!"

Damien's entire body went rigid behind her. His grip on her hips turned to iron. And the sound that came out of him was not a groan, not a grunt, but a single, bitten-off word that carried more weight than a dreadnought's broadside.

"Damn right."

He pulled out.

Tali gasped at the sudden emptiness, her pussy clenching around nothing, a whine building in her throat, but he was already moving. His hands hooked under her thighs, scooped her off the mattress like she was nothing, and flipped her in the air. Her back hit his chest. His arms threaded under her knees, his hands locking behind her neck, fingers interlacing at the base of her helmet, and her legs spread wide, pinned open, her ruined suit and exposed purple sex on full display to the empty bedroom and the Citadel skyline blazing through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Full nelson.

Her weight settled entirely on his cock and his hips. Her digitigrade legs dangled, bent at the knee, locked in place by his forearms, and the angle was devastating, gravity pulling her down onto his shaft while his grip kept her spread so wide the torn suit gaped open from navel to tailbone. She could see everything in the reflection of the dark window glass: her own body, pinned and split, the thick shaft disappearing into her, the slick mess of her thighs, the bruise-dark handprints on her ass.

"Going to make you my quarian cum bed." His mouth pressed against the side of her helmet, breath hot against the audio pickup. "Every drop. Every load. Right here, in this pussy, until you're so full of human cum it's leaking out of you for days."

He thrust upward.

Tali's scream cracked her speakers. The angle drove him impossibly deep, the head of his cock kissing her cervix with a force that blurred the line between pleasure and something holy, and his pace was not a pace. It was a siege. Fast. Brutal. Furious, upward strokes that bounced her on his lap like a rag doll, the wet slap-slap-slap of flesh against flesh filling the apartment in a rhythm that matched the frantic hammering of her heart. Her tits bounced inside the suit, the chest panel straining, silver trim catching the city light with every jolt. Her ass rippled against his pelvis on every downstroke, the heavy cheeks clapping against his thighs, and the sound was obscene, meat on meat, a percussive anthem to everything she'd sworn she wouldn't do tonight.

[M_LAWSON — 23:49:14]: I have to be honest. When we sent you down there, I assumed you would be the one in control. That you'd flirt, he'd melt, and you'd ride him into the mattress like a woman with agency and poise. Instead, he has you in a full nelson and is using you like a whore he rented by the hour. I am genuinely, sincerely impressed. With him.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:49:17]: i'm crying actual tears. liara is watching through her fingers like a horror movie. samara asked what a full nelson was and i had to DEMONSTRATE ON A PILLOW

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:49:19]: tali i should send this to fornax. you'd be their cover girl. "quarian engineer gets COLONIZED by human gun shop owner." six million views by morning. the flotilla would build a statue

[M_LAWSON — 23:49:22]: The Admiralty Board would have to hold an emergency session. "Re: Tali'Zorah's diplomatic relations with humanity." Unanimous vote. Footage entered into the public record.

Tali read every word. Her visor was fogged, her eyes were streaming, her body was a puppet jerked on the strings of his cock, and she read every single cruel, teasing, merciless word, and something inside her that she would never, ever admit to loved it. Loved being watched. Loved being mocked. Loved being the quarian slut bouncing on a human's cock while her friends narrated the destruction of her dignity in real time.

She came.

The fifth orgasm hit like a drive core overload, a white-hot detonation that started where his cock met her cervix and radiated outward through every nerve cluster her species possessed. Her pussy clamped down, released, gushed, a spray of fluid arcing from the junction of their bodies and splattering the window glass three feet away. Her scream dissolved into static. Her body convulsed in his grip, legs kicking against his locked arms, and her head lolled sideways against his shoulder, visor blind with fog and tears.

"Please," she sobbed, the word barely a word, broken across hitching breaths. "Please, I can't, I can't take any more, keelah, have mercy, I'm dying, you're going to break me...."

Damien's arms tightened. His hips didn't slow. If anything, the pace increased, savage upward thrusts that jarred her teeth and turned her begging into shattered, hiccupping wails.

"You walked up to my table," he growled into her helmet, each word punctuated by a stroke that bottomed out against her womb, "and told me you could have any man in the club. You wanted this. You begged for this. And now you're going to take it until I'm done with you."

No mercy. Not a fraction. Not a pause.

Just the relentless, furious rhythm of a man keeping a promise.

The sixth orgasm ripped through her like a hull breach.

Tali's scream hit a register that shattered the last functioning speaker on the left side of her helmet, the audio cutting to a fizz of static while the right speaker carried the raw, animal shriek at full volume. Her body locked rigid in his grip, every muscle seizing, her pussy clenching so tight around his shaft that Damien's rhythm broke for the first time all night. Fluid burst from her in a hot, clear wave that soaked his thighs, his stomach, the floor beneath them, and her legs kicked against his arms like she was drowning.

Damien dropped her.

Not gently. His arms released and Tali hit the mattress on her back, bouncing once on the ruined sheets, the impact jarring through her spine. Before she could draw a full breath his hands were on her, rolling her, pinning her shoulders flat, and his fingers found the chest panel of her suit and tore.

The reinforced polymer split down the center with a sound like ripping canvas. Silver trim popped free, stitching unraveling in a jagged line from collar to navel, and Tali's breasts spilled from the ruined fabric like something freed from a cage. Purple. Full. Heavy enough to spread under their own weight as she lay flat, the nipples a deep, bruised violet, swollen and peaked in the cool air, areolae pebbled and dark against the lighter purple of the surrounding skin. They rose and fell with her ragged breathing, catching the skyline glow through the window, and the faint shimmer of heat rising off her bare skin made them look like something molten.

"Keelah!" Tali's hands flew to her chest on instinct, covering herself, three-fingered palms pressed flat over each breast. "My suit, you absolute, you keelah-damned savage, that's two panels now, do you have any idea what custom quarian polymer-weave costs per square….."

Damien grabbed her wrists. Pulled them apart. Pinned them above her head with one hand, and his mouth closed over her left nipple.

The sound Tali made was not a word. It was not a moan. It was the sound of a woman whose immune system had already raised the white flag and whose nerve endings had staged a full mutiny, a broken, keening wail that climbed and climbed and never quite found a ceiling. His lips sealed around the swollen bud and sucked, tongue pressing flat against the peaked tip, and the wet heat of a human mouth on quarian skin was a violation of every medical protocol she'd ever memorized and the single most devastating sensation she had ever experienced.

He bit down.

Not gentle. His teeth closed around the nipple and chewed, worrying the sensitive flesh between his incisors, tongue lashing the trapped bud, and Tali arched off the mattress hard enough to lift her hips, a scream tearing through her remaining speaker that dissolved into crackling feedback.

"Alien tits begging me to bite them." His mouth released her left nipple with a wet pop, a thread of saliva bridging the gap, and crossed to the right. His tongue circled the areola once, twice, then he sucked the whole nipple into his mouth and bit down with the same merciless pressure. "These don't fit in your suit because they weren't made for a suit. They were made to feed. To bounce on a human cock. To get sucked on by the man who bred you."

"Yes!" The word ripped from the port before Tali's pride could catch it. Her pinned hands twisted in his grip, not to escape but to grab, her three-fingered hands reaching for his head, pulling him closer, crushing his face into her chest. "Don't stop, don't you dare stop, keelah, bite them, bite me, I'm yours, just don't stop…."

He released her wrists. Both hands found her thighs, hooked under her knees, and pushed. Her legs folded up and back, digitigrade calves pressing toward her shoulders, the torn remnants of her suit bunching at her waist, and the angle changed everything. Her pelvis tilted upward, her pussy spread and glistening and open, and Damien settled his weight forward, pinning her beneath him, his chest crushing her bare breasts flat, his mouth still working her right nipple with savage, biting attention.

Mating press.

"Going to make you regret shaking that fat alien ass in my face." His teeth released her nipple long enough to snarl the words against the wet, bitten flesh. "Going to fuck you so deep you feel it in your soul."

He thrust home. Balls deep. One stroke.

Tali's scream hit a frequency that cracked the water glass on the nightstand.

His pace was annihilation. Every thrust drove the full length of his cock into her folded, pinned body with the force of a man trying to push through her and out the other side. Her ass bounced off the mattress with each impact, the heavy cheeks clapping against his pelvis, and the wet, meaty slap-slap-slap was so loud it drowned the bass still bleeding faintly from her helmet's ruined speakers. His mouth latched back onto her left breast, sucking and biting in rhythm with his hips, and Tali's hands clawed at his back, her fingers leaving thin purple scratches across his shoulder blades.

"Save me!" The words burst from her port, delirious, half-laughing, half-sobbing. "Someone save me, he's killing me, keelah, I can't, I can't…."

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:52:07]: HOLY SHIT HE'S KILLING HER

[M_LAWSON — 23:52:09]: He absolutely is. Look at her cervical contact readings. He's knocking on the door to her womb every single thrust. She's going to be walking like a newborn varren tomorrow.

[ASHLEY_WILLIAMS — 23:52:12]: i am recording EVERY SECOND of this. when we find shepard, and we WILL find shepard, i am personally sitting him down and making him watch the helmet-cam footage of tali'zorah vas normandy getting her purple brains fucked out by a gun shop owner on the citadel. he deserves to know what his crew got up to while he was gone.

[M_LAWSON — 23:52:15]: Agreed. Consider it a mission debrief. "Commander, while you were in stasis, Tali discovered diplomacy."

Tali's visor, fogged blind, streaked with tears, displayed the messages in bright orange across the biometric chaos, and the thought of Shepard seeing this, seeing her like this, pinned and bred and screaming, sent a bolt of white-hot arousal through her core that had no business existing and no intention of leaving. Her pussy clenched around Damien's cock so hard he groaned, his rhythm stuttering, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him deeper, her bitten, swollen tits crushing against his chest.

"Harder," she begged, the word dissolving into a sob. "Harder, you human monster…fucking bastard…ngggghhhh."

Damien's pace turned savage. His hips became a piston, a machine, each thrust slamming her into the mattress with a force that drove the headboard into the wall in a rhythmic bang-bang-bang that the neighbors would be filing noise complaints about for weeks. His mouth found her throat, the exposed strip of purple skin between her helmet seal and the torn collar of her suit, and he bit down hard enough to bruise while his cock hammered her cervix with the single-minded fury of a man past language.

His rhythm broke.

Every muscle in his body drew taut. The cords in his neck stood like cables. His hands locked under her knees, folding her nearly in half, and his hips drove forward one final, devastating time, burying himself to the root, his balls pressed flush against her ass, heavy and tight and pulsing.

"Get pregnant."

The first rope hit her cervix like molten iron.

Tali screamed. The scream of a woman whose body had received the signal it had been begging for all night. The thick, yoghurt-dense cum flooded her in heavy, rhythmic pulses, each one hotter than the last, each one painting the walls of her womb in a thick, clinging coat that her body accepted with desperate, swallowing contractions. Her pussy milked him, cervix fluttering, inner walls rippling along his full length in waves designed by a million years of quarian evolution to pull seed deeper.

Her legs twitched. Once. Twice. Three times. Involuntary spasms that jerked her digitigrade calves against his arms while the cum kept coming, rope after rope, thick and heavy and so much, pooling in her womb until the pressure built to something she could feel, a warm, spreading fullness low in her belly that her biometric display registered as a steady increase in uterine volume.

I can feel his balls.

The thought arrived delirious and precise. His sac, pressed tight against her ass, twitched with every pulse. She could feel each contraction through the thin skin, the heavy movement of them emptying, the rhythmic clench-and-release as his body pumped everything it had into hers. Thick. Hot. Relentless. Flooding her in a volume that no quarian male could ever produce, because quarian males weren't built like this, weren't hung like this, didn't carry enough seed to fill a woman until she felt swollen with it.

The last pulse was the thickest. A long, slow, deliberate pour that settled inside her with the weight of a claim filed and stamped, and Tali's orgasm crested one final time, her body shaking, her womb clenching around the load with greedy, rhythmic swallows that wrung a guttural curse from Damien's throat.

He pulled out.

The sound was obscene. A wet, sucking pop as his cock slid free of her swollen, grasping pussy, and behind it came the deluge. Thick ropes of cum poured from her in a heavy, steaming cascade, yoghurt-pale against the deep purple of her sex, rolling down the cleft of her ass and pooling on the sheets in a spreading, viscous puddle that caught the skyline glow and gleamed. More followed. A steady, dripping flow from her gaping, twitching pussy, her body unable to contain what he'd poured into her, the excess spilling out in thick, hot strings that steamed faintly in the cool apartment air.

Damien breathed. Deep. Controlled. The breath of a man putting himself back together from pieces, his chest heaving, sweat running the channels of his muscles, his cock still hard, still slick with her, hanging between his thighs like a weapon only half-holstered.

"We're not done."

Tali whimpered. The sound was small, broken, the sound of a woman who had nothing left and knew it.

His grey eyes found the port on her visor. Still open. Still stretched. Glistening with the residue of the first load.

He stood at the edge of the bed. Tali rolled onto her stomach with the last of her strength, crawled to the edge on trembling elbows, and tilted her helmet up.

His cock pressed against the port.

Her lips parted. Soft. Swollen. Ruined. And she accepted him the way prayer accepts the faithful, her mouth opening around the thick, slick head, the combined taste of his cum and her own arousal flooding her tongue in a wave so rich and dense it made her moan around his shaft. Her lips sealed. Her tongue pressed flat, dragging along the underside, cleaning every inch with slow, reverent strokes, lapping the mess from his skin like a woman tending something precious and profane.

She sucked him clean.

 The Citadel's false dawn bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows at 0500, a pale amber wash that painted the ruined bedroom in tones of whiskey and bruise. Tali lay on her stomach at the edge of the mattress, her helmet hanging over the side, the open port level with Damien's hips. He stood barefoot on the cold floor, one hand resting on the back of her helmet, the other loose at his side, and Tali's mouth worked his cock with the slow, aching devotion of a woman bred and sated.

She was a wreck.

The suit was gone in every way that mattered. Both chest panels hung in ragged flaps, the silver trim dangling by threads, her bare breasts spilling free against the mattress edge, heavy and flushed a deeper purple than the rest of her, the nipples swollen to dark, angry knots of chewed flesh that throbbed with every heartbeat.

Red hickeys bloomed across the exposed strips of skin where polymer-weave had been torn away, clusters of them tracing the line of her throat seal, the curve of her collarbone, the soft inner swell of each breast where his mouth had latched and stayed. The crotch panel was a memory. Both ass cheeks, bare and heavy, bore the layered evidence of the night in overlapping handprints, some faded to dusky violet, some still livid and dark, the skin hot to the touch and tender enough that even the sheets brushing against them made her flinch.

Lines of thick cum striped her body like war paint. A rope across her left breast, drying to a tacky glaze. A fresher streak across her right cheek, still warm, still glistening, trailing down toward her jaw seal. Her visor was filthy, smeared with translucent white that caught the dawn light and turned it milky, and behind the mess her violet eyes burned low and steady, half-lidded, exhausted, incandescent.

Between her legs, the damage was worse. Her pussy, swollen and flushed near-black with use, gaped in a soft, twitching oval that couldn't quite close, and from that ruined opening a steady, thick stream of cum leaked in sluggish, yoghurt-pale ropes that pooled on the dark sheets beneath her hips. Hot. Dense. Hours of it, load after load layered inside her until her womb couldn't hold another drop, and now it poured from her in a slow, steaming cascade every time she shifted her weight.

The sheets beneath her were soaked through in a stain the size of a dinner plate, and the smell of it, human musk and quarian sweetness mingled into something new and filthy, saturated the bedroom air.

Damien had fucked her all night. Every position. Every hole the suit allowed and one it hadn't until he'd ripped the access himself. Her body was a map of his attention, and every landmark ached.

His hand tightened on her helmet. His hips rolled forward, feeding the last two inches through the stretched port, and Tali swallowed around him with a wet, practiced ease that would have horrified her twelve hours ago and now just made her moan, low and warm, the vibration traveling his shaft.

"Good girl." His voice was rough, scraped raw by a night of talking her through things that would make the Admiralty Board dissolve itself in shame. His thumb traced the edge of the port, feeling her lips stretch around him. "Take it."

His pace stuttered. The muscles in his thighs drew taut. A grunt, low and short and bitten off, and his cock pulsed hard against her tongue. The first rope hit the back of her throat, thick and hot and familiar now, and Tali swallowed without flinching, her throat clicking, her tongue pressing flat to catch every drop as the second and third pulses followed. She nursed the head through the last, slow contractions, lips sealed tight, cheeks hollowed, milking him with gentle, rhythmic suction until his hand relaxed on her helmet and his breath came out long and steady.

She swallowed the last mouthful. Licked the slit clean. Kissed the tip through the port, soft and almost tender, and let him pull free.

Damien tucked himself back into his jeans and zipped up. He pulled his omni-tool from the nightstand, tapped it twice, and a contact card pinged Tali's suit interface, the name DAMIEN TERRIN glowing orange on her smeared visor.

"If that alien pussy wants another pounding," he said, his grey eyes holding hers through the filthy glass, the quiet man from the bar back in place but wearing something sharper underneath, "call me." His mouth twitched. The small, private smile. "Next time I'm taking your ass."

His palm cracked across her right cheek one final time, the sound sharp and bright in the quiet apartment, the bruised flesh bouncing under the impact. Tali yelped, hips jerking, and a fresh trickle of cum leaked from her pussy at the movement, rolling down her inner thigh.

"Shower's through there." He nodded toward the en suite. "Clean suit's on the counter. It's a loaner, standard unisex, should fit well enough to get you home without a public indecency charge." He grabbed his jacket from the chair by the door. "Lock up when you leave."

The apartment door closed behind him.

Tali lay still. The dawn crept higher across the ceiling. Her body pulsed with a thousand small aches that would become large aches by noon. Cum cooled on her skin, between her legs, inside her. The contact card glowed on her visor.

Two familiar faces blinked to life on her HUD, the video feed crackling through the damaged left speaker in fizzing bursts. Ashley's grin was enormous, the kind of grin that had been held in check for hours and had finally broken containment. Miranda's smirk was smaller, precise, the satisfied curl of a woman whose hypothesis had been validated beyond all reasonable expectation.

"So." Ashley's voice crackled through the static. "How was the night?"

Miranda arched one perfect eyebrow. "Scale of one to ten. Take your time."

Tali rolled onto her back. The movement sent a fresh, hot rush of cum spilling from her, and she groaned, one three-fingered hand resting on the warm, swollen curve of her lower belly where the fullness still lingered.

"I think," she said, her voice wrecked, hoarse, barely a rasp through the surviving speaker, "I need another round before I can give a fair assessment." She turned the contact card over in her display, the name glowing soft against the cum-smeared visor. "Several rounds. Possibly a dozen. For.... scientific rigor."

Ashley howled.

"He might make a good boyfriend," Tali murmured, and closed her eyes behind the glass. "I just need more data."