Mass Effect - Proxy Love

The light of Widow, long found unsafe for even Krogan eyes, shone filtered and tinted through the artificial ecosystem of the Presidium and dug like a meathook into drowsy eyes. A soft magenta gleam turned screaming blue sky and beige sun meant to resemble every homeworld's star slightly and any one of them only barely. So often these things which are meant to please everybody please nobody and get by only on the lack of offense which they may cause.

Lack of offense if you weren't migraine-prone at least. If you weren't thirteen hours into your two-hour work session taken before rest. If the coffee you were taking early in the artificially enforced morning was for waking up and not taking the edge off of the malaise before bed. Liara was ticking all of the boxes to be irritated but was grinning and bearing it. She had a pair of sunglasses made for this that she'd forgotten, face buried still in her omni-tool as she stepped out the door. Nobody to blame but herself. She was more used to artificial skies than real ones anyway, at a certain point you made peace with it. Like a planet-sized fluorescent hum.

Granted, she still had her nose buried in the hand terminal of her omni-tool. That probably wasn't helping. That or the strain. Reading over emails word-by-word as if taking them slow and laboring on the details could make them say what she wanted to say. An evolved state of the university-age focus she'd developed like a different personality. The only time she really frowned her frustrations and furrowed her brow. That was half of the headache, the other half was that she hadn't slept in a while. Manic focus, made worse by lack of results.

Red Lotus had just... shown up. Companies weren't supposed to do that. It was near enough impossible for them to do that in this day and age. Nobody worked for them, nobody bought the IPO, nobody knew what they did. Shell companies and investor scams were as old as trading was, but this didn't smell like that. This smelled like nothing. That was a hundred times more remarkable than smelling like shit or smelling like roses. Like a virus every computer in the Citadel had downloaded, making all of them conspire to create a single fake entry to trip people up. She had every feeler in the world and none of them got word in or out.

A hundred emails of "couldn't find anything but it's my top priority" and counting. You couldn't fart without a family member or neighbor hearing it and talking about it, or a camera or wire picking it up. How the fuck did you make a whole company and make a public opening for it without so much as a peep?

She sighed, leaned back, sipped her drink, looked around with slightly lidded eyes. The local place didn't make bad coffee, probably because the beans were local. That usually mattered more than some secret recipe or importing it from a planet famed for it. Best cup you'd get is usually one where the person behind the counter could actually point to the exact patch of dirt the cupful had come from. Relax, step out of your job. You need to start the winddown eventually if you're actually going to, you know, wind down.

Artificial birdsong, her eyes shifting and getting used to the light as she looked away from her terminal, a family with a small child. The kid runs ahead of the human and asari parent and looks back with a laugh, pure Asari blue but with the eyes of the father. Grumpy Turian on a bench scowling at them but smiling behind their backs. These were happy things, wind down. Try to relax the muscles of your face out of the scowl. It'll happen when it happens, can't force it.

Across the plaza a man stumbled out of the low din of a closing bar, he straightened his coat slightly before one of the bouncers followed him down the steps and gave him another shove. He landed a few feet from Liara's table and got up, he opened his mouth to say something to his attacker but spotted the child looking at him quizzically and made an aggressive but non-profane gesture the man's way instead. The Krogan bouncer shrugged and skulked back into the building. The man looked around half-dazed, wheeling and wobbling to bely his drunkenness, before spotting Liara at her table and smoothing his shirt. He sat at her table without asking, looking both ways in an almost performed way and leaning toward her.

"Hell of a morning, isn't it?"

Liara sipped her coffee and set it down. "Isn't it indeed?"

He leaned forward, "Though I get the impression that both of us are on our way to bed, if I may be so forward."

"That seems a bit presumptive of you, sir."

He leaned back. He was older, that unique look of a human man who has stopped denying how his age has progressed. Smooth hairless dome of a head with a wrap of hair around it more like an article of clothing than a hairstyle. Everything neatly trimmed and exercised and manicured into place to create an illusion of wizened age and economic class. Looking to be the smart and responsible father figure to lech on a woman far his younger. Both ironic in the face of sitting at her table, considering she had likely outlived him by three or four times and could have bought the bar that had just tossed him to the side. Drunken confidence that no longer served to mask a deeper insecurity but to accentuate a genuine devil-may-care approach to life. Hot shit, if you asked him to describe himself. But with a certain approach, with the right attitude, his type had an allure. Not quite so sad and deflated yet, but a man who had been told no enough not to take it personally. Usually not her deal, but maybe her good mood meditation had been working.

"Well, I was just in the neighborhood when I caught your eye-"

"You mean you were just being removed from a bar when you fell down near my table."

He shifted a bit, "You saw that, huh? Man can't even drink his wages in peace these days without some Krogan telling him about how they're closing."

"Perhaps if they were closing, you may be drinking more prodigiously than they liked."

He rubbed his hands over his face for a moment.

"Nah, I'm not that far in the bag. Damn company I'm working for has me working these boneyard shifts, I was only in there an hour or two."

She sipped her coffee again. He swore like a matriarch who had decided one day that her child was ready to no longer be spoken to like a child, but who hadn't committed to it in full. He wasn't talking to her like a regal doll, but he wasn't talking to her like they had both crawled out of a gutter. She had half-expected him to make a mark of the first Asari he saw and come in all-randy and all-ready. Drunkenness either got genuinely offensive interest or genuinely interested offense out of humans. Either way, he seemed under control enough that he might not have been lying.

"And what is it you do for a living?"

He waved his hand, "I don't want to bore you."

"I control my own hours, I wonder how somebody who does not might come to get off of work at such strange times."

He hid his mouth behind his hand slightly and looked around, a fairly common nervous tic among liars. The kind of tell you needed to recognize in her line of work.

"We're not exactly blue chip but it's these kids down in C-Sec, or former C-Sec, something like that. I'm running odd jobs for them, around the clock shit."

A little more ambitious with his cursing, she leaned back as well.

"I suppose you're a man that wears several different hats then."

"Not really by choice, but it's mostly first-timers so I"m the only guy who's done most things around there. You figure you either teach them most of how to do shit and then they fire you and go under or they keep you around and you wind up being what pushes them under. Either way, kids make their money and fail up, and I find a new job."

She smiled lightly but hid it behind her cup.

"And what company do you work for, exactly?"

He shrugged, "You playing the stock market or something?"

She shrugged back, "Or something."

"Kids called it Red Lotus, they got some shpiel for why, but you ask me it's just greenhorns picking what they think sounds cool."

She didn't jump out of her chair, she'd been doing this job for long enough to have a poker face, that said, she did lean forward.

"You said Red Lotus? I've seen them around, but haven't been able to find anything out about them."

He hid his mouth behind his hand again, but spoke in a low voice that made it seem more like he was trying to be secretive than to lie.

"I think that's by design. What I understand of it they want to do some work for the Alliance with C-Sec money so they're posing a lot of it under false pretenses."

She leaned forward further.

"I'd be curious to know more, it could save me and several others a lot of money."

He looked either way, "Two conditions."

"Let me hear them."

"First, can you keep a secret?"

She grinned, "I'm somewhat known for it."

"Second, you and I go get a drink."

She considered for a moment, glancing slightly at her terminal. He wasn't talking about a drink, not really. But his intentions seemed pure... or at least purely one-track. Probably best to just nip it in the bud and get what she needed, earn herself a longer-term contact. Not like she couldn't use a distraction on top of it.

She set a hand on his arm, "I've got a few bottles back at my apartment, if I may be so forward."

***

Liara's eyes were black, it hadn't taken long physically for her to embrace the mental link formed between an Asari and her partner once hormones and instinct had taken over. The mind, like a worm, reached through dark and empty most of the time, swallowing and letting out constantly, never closed but never grasping at much more than air. An organ designed to intake and excrete in equal measure. To join with a partner was to link two of those worms together eating each other's tail. Closing the loop by nature to all but one another. It was perhaps a less than erotic mental image, but to surrender bodily was itself somewhat gross. It brought a vulnerability of shame, but only so long as you allowed that shame to overwhelm the intensity of the moments.

The Asari had been easier than he might have expected, she was still naive.

With training you could curate what the mind fed into the partner. To assume that you got the whole of a partner was something that, linked minds or no, could be a weakness. Fools rushed in, that much was true, what part of it you believed to be foolish was subjective. He could withdraw, in any situation, and slip into some sullen and sunken place. He had never been overtaken by the moments of pure passion which some described as seeing red. When he had burned bridges, it was with calculation. Poor calculation perhaps, but calculation regardless. Perhaps this meant that he could never experience things wholly with singular focus as he had often imagined himself doing when planning the moments ahead. He rarely thought of himself thinking when he pictured himself in the future, dedicating himself wholesale to whatever task he was doing with some placid neutrality. But in the moment of action, he imagined minutiae, thought about things and tried to match motions to how he had planned them in advance. These things could have been weaknesses when linked if not careful. If the Asari were alert and measuring him as he was her, they were small cracks in the facade of the drunken fool she thought she was taking home.

But she had been naive. With all the power in the world she still often took people for what they told her they were, or at least what her sources told her they were. Perhaps if she had been there back before Shepard was declared a Specter, she might have recognized him. Asari were said to have a better sense of human faces than even humans. Shepard would still likely recognize him, that's why he was taking things in such a roundabout way. Williams likely wouldn't.

These thoughts all sat in that withdrawn, sunken place. With great focus he could maintain some forward-facing sliver of his mind which was what she saw. Maybe she did the same for him, Asari were said to be more wholesale taken by the linking than their partners, but the second you took things for granted was the second the universe tried to cut you down at the knees.

The Asari moaned, sweat starting to shine on her face and neck. She didn't sweat much from the body, mainly the face. It came with a deep navy blush which had started at her cheeks when she slipped her casual wear off and deepened when he'd done the same. It had spread to her face with being winded, the tendrils of her head when her arousal had grown enough that she'd lost most of her words, and then her sex as he kept teasing her and toying with her even after she had climaxed for the first time.

There were certain ways that the Asari were uniquely easy to please. Different erogenous zones, how sensitive some parts of the body were and how that made them respond and what that defined as both too rough and too soft. You could approach it with the same clinical lens that you could with any race, and that in itself wasn't enough. Then there were the unique ways in which Liara was easy to please. That had been harder to research, but what little there was proved a far easier set of instructions to execute.

The approach had been the hard part, of course. It always was and always would be. The targets were all living breathing things with their own minds and decision making processes. They could be predicted, but not with perfect precision. There was always the risk that, all things going right, she could still say no because of something as small as the balance of spices in the food she had eaten. If she had looked closer, Liara might have noticed that the Krogan throwing him out of the bar had approached her a week and a half earlier, propositioned her, and gotten farther than most before intentionally backing away and leaving her confused. A hundred little trial feelers building up to a single, completely honest and ready to fail approach. If she had said no, it might have been as much as a month before he figured he could try again. But she hadn't said no. Sometimes, it went just how you drew it up.

She leaned back on the bed, still in his embrace and with his cock still buried inside of her. He ran his arms down from her hips under her thighs, setting his palms upward against the back of her knees. The muscles of her crotch still flexed both voluntarily and inadvertently. Sometimes she squeezed him skin to skin, sometimes she shuddered. Like with all Asari, her body was prepared for short bursts of intensity and they were well into the marathon phase now. This was the most common falling short point in Asari-human pairings was that either the Asari partner would drain the human dry in the first ten minutes or wind up exhausted shortly after. He'd done everything he could to endure the initial sprint, the burst of hormones and energy made up of quick and frantic embraces and her continuing to writhe and grind even as he climaxed for the first time. Then as she started to slow down, he'd gone on to almost overpower her. Gentle and firm touches alike, teasing and keeping her engine going. His thrusts had slowed, he'd gotten his breath back. Now his goal was to take her to the very point of too much and then back down.

Her eyes closed, drawing a deep breath that made her sweat-slick tits heave directly in his lowered face. He waited, her grip on the bed wasn't intense, her panting was cooling down and not sprinting. Then her mouth opened ever so slightly, her catching and locking her jaw just a moment too late to fully stifle the yawn. Home stretch.

Her eyes opened back up as he started to rock his hips again, one of his hands moving from under her leg to press gently on her stomach and then stroking down toward her clit. He started the soft vibration on his omni-tool again, making her grip the sheets harder.

"By the... G-goddess!"

Her body shuddered, tiredly being dragged back into the middle of it. Blush deepening on her stomach as her pussy continued to grip against him, streaking his cock with both her wetness and his own cum. He was going to need to rehydrate after this, but it hadn't been as bad as he might have worried. Sometimes, it went better than how you drew it up.

***

Without snoring she slept the peaceful unfaltering sleep of the properly exhausted. He had played an almost child-like game of trying all the different things that might wake her, but it had almost been more formality. When she stayed fully asleep, he grabbed her omni-tool from her side and opened it. He input the code that he'd watched her do a hundred times on security footage and waited as it parsed. He feared that it might be fingerprint-connected, but was confident it wouldn't. The Asari didn't place the same emphasis on fingerprints as humans, partially because most of them had almost identical prints. Still, it was hard to know how paranoid Liara was until you actually tried to buy the ticket and take the ride. Certain risks inherent, and almost every time he found them to go his way.

This one did too, her terminal opened to a homepage that came just short of reading "welcome back, shadow broker, what would you like to do today?" in bright letters. She was meticulously organized, he found what he was looking for in short order. The first real hurdle on this front came up when he went to connect his own omni-tool. There was a pair of pieces of security that she had for that. Firstly, a remote connection would get auto-sinkholed on her end, leaving the user trying to connect until the heat death of the universe. What's more, all of their packets would still send, so trying to plug into her directories was basically just surrendering your own. No dice. The other was that she had a logger for manual connections. No dice there either. Fortunately, what he wanted to know wasn't very long. Also fortunately, he'd gotten good at burning things into memory back during his time in prison. He closed his eyes and whispered the things to himself silently, then set back her omni-tool the way he'd found it and stepped into her bathroom.

He made a note on a piece of real paper, he didn't consider using an omni-tool safe in her house, and then slipped that into his wallet. There were some things that were always best served with a pen and paper, and the more the extranet became ever--present and ever-hackable, the more secrecy became one of those things. Liara was not a master hacker, but she had enough friends who were, who had spent their childhoods lobotomizing the viruses they downloaded for fun, that she didn't need to be. The ultimate enemy of the person trying to keep secrets in a box was the person who knew how to make the box work, simple shit.

He stepped back out of the bathroom, letting his pants fall to the floor before he stepped back in sight of her bunk. For a moment, while she still slept peacefully, he turned over staying the night or leaving right away in his head. He glanced at the bed, Liara shifting softly in half-sleep, only the bare flannel sheet of her bed draped over her, hugging to the curves of her body and making what little light crept around her blackout curtains give her an outline of bright blue among the navy sheets. The rise of her hips dominating the silhouette on the bed. Even if she wasn't the main prize, there was no reason he couldn't enjoy his time with her. It probably wasn't a good idea to give somebody in her position even the most minute reason to dislike you, anyway.

When he climbed back into bed she almost subconsciously squirmed and pushed her back against him. The sweat of their passion dried, her room was probably now cool enough that she wanted more than just a sheet. He pulled a blanket up over both of their waists, the soft weight of her blanket forewarning a growth of warmth. She sighed, still half-awake. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, draping it down to hang near her breasts. With his other hand he softly stroked the ridge behind her ear where the soft skin of her face met the harder flesh of her tendrils. Something of a sensitive spot, not inherently sexual, but highly sensitive and by location somewhat intimate.