#shaeed

The soft blue of the fish tank emanates across the room, bathing the Normandy's captain’s cabin in its usual comforting glow. Shepard sits draped across the leather corner couch, a datapad clutched between her pale, battle-scarred hands as she tries to get her latest report finished. She's been at it for god knows how long — hours at this point, probably — but the words just aren't coming.

She knows she's fine. Chakwas confirmed it, after a thorough medical checkup and a few almost-stern words from the usually-unflappable doctor.

Though despite knowing the mission on Despoina hadn't done her any permanent damage, and had actually been something of a success, Shepard can't seem to shake that uneasy feeling. The memory of climbing into that squeaky old Triton and sinking into the ocean abyss still clings to her, gnaws at her, like some insistent wound that'll never fully heal. Not too different from Alchera, really. That almost blinding panic of suddenly not knowing where your next breath of oxygen is coming from, if it's even coming at all.

She reaches for the half-empty whiskey glass on the table and knocks the contents back in one shot, willing it to dull her dark thoughts. Don't go there, idiot. Not now.

The sudden incessant beep of an incoming vid call snaps Shepard out of her reverie, and she's grateful for the distraction but also irritated by the interruption. She tosses the datapad aside before rising to walk the few steps around to her private terminal, bright blue eyes flicking toward the screen to see the caller's name. Zaeed Massani.

With a slight crease of her brow, she reaches down to press a button, answering the call. 

The moment the vid call feed connects, Zaeed’s scarred face fills the screen — and while he usually always has the expression of someone who could tear a krogan in two with his bare hands, there's something different this time. A deeper scowl than usual. A flicker of something in his expression that she sees rarely, if at all.

“Wanna tell me what the fuck were you thinking?” 

Shepard gives a surprised blink, scoffing as she folds her arms. His tone immediately makes her temper flare up, the familiar feeling of a white-hot flame blooming in her chest, but she makes a conscious effort to hold it back — a sliver of patience that's rarely seen and only ever exercised towards those she truly cares about. “Well, hello to you too, Massani.”

“Cut the shit, Shepard,” comes Zaeed's short response, his sandpaper-voice grittier than usual. “Went down to the bottom of the ocean in some tin can and almost didn’t make it back is what I heard.”

Shepard's eyelids flutter slightly as she suppresses the urge to give an indignant roll of her eyes. “Who told you?” she asks, though she has a feeling she already knows the answer.

“Who d'ya fucking think? Vakarian,” Zaeed looms closer on the screen, blazing fury obvious in his good eye. “You scared the shit out of him, and that bastard's not easy to scare.” 

“I handled it,” Shepard says sharply, the line of her jaw giving a flicker of a twitch. She can feel her N7 hoodie clinging to her sweat-dampened spine, a sudden sensory annoyance. It almost tempts her into barking out an excuse to end the call and hanging up in favour of a shower. Yet she remains. Her affection for him wins out. Again.

“S'not what I heard. Heard you nearly drowned then almost got stomped by one of them Brutes.”

Shepard makes a mental note to go down to the main battery and chastise Garrus for being a bigger gossip than Daniels and Donnelly. “I handled it,” she repeats, deliberately slower this time. 

The sound of a harsh, incredulous laugh suddenly escapes Zaeed's lips, his good eye burning hotter than the Tuchanka sun as he stares at her. “Unbelievable. Galaxy's going to hell and you want to get yourself killed going for a swim. You’re a goddamn nightmare, Lucrezia.”

Shepard's eyes immediately narrow at his impudent use of her full first name. He knows she hates it. He only dares to use it when he wants to rile her enough to make a point. And then it becomes glaringly obvious to her what point he's trying to make, in his typical bumbling way. He was worried about me. 

The thought softens and amuses her in equal measure.

“Starting to sound like you care about me, Massani. Getting soft in your advanced age.”

Zaeed scoffs, folding his armor-clad arms in a manner that's almost petulant, though Shepard catches the shift in his expression like a sniper spotting movement. Caught you, she thinks.

“Don't give a shit what you do, Shepard,” he insists, though there's no real bite to his words, and almost certainly no truth to them either. “Long as you live to tell about it. Can't imagine Vakarian'd be too pleased if you got yourself killed and broke the poor bastard's heart like that.”

“I see,” Shepard says, a teasing lilt to her voice now. “Well, I'll be sure to let Garrus know how concerned you are for him and his heart. Such selflessness.”

Shepard's gentle teasing earns her a death glare and a quiet muttering of “Cheeky bitch” in response. She brings her hand up to her face, pressing a hooked finger over her lips in an attempt to hide the triumphant grin threatening to manifest, though the creases at the corners of her eyes give her amusement away.

If there's one thing she's learned in the time she's known Zaeed, it's that he's never the kind of man to shy away from admitting anything to Shepard — except when there's emotions involved. And in those instances, where possible, he'll duck behind Garrus like the turian’s a piece of convenient cover. Some days, Shepard finds it infuriating. In this moment, however, she can't help but find it endearing.

A brief silence stretches between them, and Shepard watches as Zaeed lights up a cigarette, idly blowing his first puff of smoke in the direction of the camera, temporarily blurring him from her sight. Once the smoke dissipates he's still there, almost frozen in place, glaring at her profile almost like it's a battlefield he can't quite conquer.

“You know you don't have to worry about me,” she tells him, seizing the opportunity to coax some real emotion out of him, like carefully tugging on a loose thread. “For once, it feels like we actually have a chance at winning this damned war. And I'm sure as hell gonna live to talk about it.”

She stubbornly ignores the gnawing inner voice that tries to tell her otherwise.

“Yeah, well, be an embarrassment if you don't,” Zaeed mutters gruffly, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Proof you can't do anything unless I'm there to save your arse.”

At that, Shepard doesn't bother to hide her eye roll, returning her arms back into a folded position across her chest. “That so? You wanna put your money where your mouth is, Massani? Come back onto the Normandy?”

Zaeed's remaining eye narrows slightly, the scarred lid twitching as he studies her face. “And have the goddamn Alliance breathing down my neck each time I so much as take a piss? No thanks, sweetheart,” he replies, turning his head briefly to the side to blow out another cloud of smoke.

Shepard lets out a low chuckle, eyes meeting the floor beneath her feet briefly before she glances back up at him again. Even on the flickering holoscreen she can tell he looks more exhausted than usual. He looks how she feels. She wonders if maybe, to him, she looks the exact same way.

Suddenly she feels that longing, one she's had often since returning to active duty on the Normandy: a longing for how things used to be. Obviously not for the days of being on the Cerberus payroll or being surrounded by a crew of Cerberus minions who smiled at her just a little too enthusiastically. Rather, for those times when she could pad down the hallway of the Engineering deck, stumble into the starboard cargo hold, and revel in Zaeed's chaotic, comforting company. The now-renovated space no longer feels the same. Memories of sharing war stories and dirty jokes, heated sparring and even more heated intimacy — some of the best times of Shepard's life, now suffocated beneath the bleak sterility of Alliance interior design and even bleaker drone of Diana Allers’ reports.

“Ez,” comes Zaeed's voice, breaking the silence to wrest her from her thoughts, snapping her back into the present.

The way he calls her Ez, the way the nickname rolls off his tongue with that low, gravelly timbre: it only serves to exacerbate her yearning. The sheer sentimentality of it lands square in her chest, such an immaculately-placed shot that she's half-expecting to hear the familiar click of her armor's shields going down.

He takes one last drag of the cigarette, putting it out with a scrape against the wall behind him as he blows out the smoke to one side. His mouth remains open for a full second before he actually speaks again, hesitance in his stare, almost as though he's battling an internal war of his own. “Just goddamn watch yourself, alright?”

Five simple words. A broken old mercenary's clumsy approximation of tenderness.

And just like that, before she can say or do anything else, he abruptly cuts the call.

From his table in the darkest corner of the room, Zaeed Massani watched as Commander Fucking Shepard herself entered the shittiest bar on Omega. Sure, she was in her civvies, a plain black hoodie covering her trademark red hair, jeans so tight they could have been painted on, but the merc had spent enough time with her on the battlefield that he could recognize her by her walk alone. He briefly considered that the polite thing to do would be to alert her to his presence, give her the option of joining him but he had never been known for his manners. Besides, people didn’t come to this shithole looking for a nice conversation, they came here to drink, fight, or fuck. While Zaeed would never have expected the Hero of the Citadel to show up in a place like this, he supposed it wasn’t that strange. Everybody needed a stiff drink alone once in a while.

So when some dumb young kid in Blue Suns getup made his way across the room and leaned on the bar next to her, lecherous intentions clear in his leering gaze, Zaeed chuckled to himself, waiting for Shepard to toss the little shit on his ass.

Instead, he saw Shepard toss back the contents of her glass, slide off her barstool, and head toward the bathrooms with the man in tow.

Zaeed shook his head hard, like he was trying to clear the image from brain. He had to be imagining things. He wasn’t that far in the bag yet, but maybe his bad eye was playing tricks on him and that wasn’t actually Shepard he had seen. No, he was sure it had been. This must be part of some mission. The guy could be some kind of informant or something. Or maybe she’s just looking for a quick fuck, his brain helpfully supplied. He growled under his breath. It wasn’t that he had her on some kind of fucking pedestal. She was a red-blooded marine and he was sure she enjoyed a good tumble as much as the rest of them. But surely she had better taste than this?

That's as far as I've gotten with that one, sadly. After this, it switches to Shep's pov in the bathroom. The "Bunny" part is the random bar guy asking her name, and she just stares at him and deadpans "Bunny", because she's obviously not here to make any real connections. 😅

Then Zaeed busts into the stall, tosses the poor guy on his ass (pants around his ankles) and tells Shepard there are better options if she's that hard up for a fuck. You can probably figure out where it goes from there. ;)

(I legitimately cannot remember how I was planning to work the "daddy issues" line into it.)

As for the Jack idea, there's really not much. I was just thinking about the line in her loyalty mission about "getting warm feelings during a fight". We know she likes things a bit rough in bed, and it just makes sense to me that, with her conditioning, she would be a sexual sadist.

I'm also really interested in trying to get into the mindset of a sadistic character. I'm very much a masochist myself, but I'd like to examine the flip side of the coin and try to work out what makes them tick.

I also just really like blood play, and there aren't enough fics with it. 😅