(My obsession with Jimmy Vega meets Studio Killers?
Yeeeeah sounds about right.)

Remember this gif(NSFW)? And how I tagged it? Well, Shimmy and I talked a bit about those tags and she ended up writing something about it so of course, being me, I wanted to illustrate it

…this is the resulting drawing

things

didn’t go quite as planned

i’ll just leave this here and then be in my bunk…

Shepard’s close calls usually involved a little more gunfire and a little less heat under the collar. Sometimes they wound up being all about the reconstruction—and, on a good day, Shepard would’ve said falling endlessly through space was the closest thing to the embarrassment he felt when he checked his messages that morning, cup of something hot and flavorless in his hands, right there at the public terminal in the shuttle bay.

Omega had this color—if anything did. The Normandy was blue, clean blue, clear blue, something that Shepard carried around with him in his eyes no matter how many planets he landed on, no matter how many systems they’d been to. But Omega was red, and it wasn’t thruster fuel red, either. It was neon red, blush-on-your-privates red, the red mark your mouth left on somebody else’s skin or the red marks their nails left on yours.

Shepard closed the private message fast enough he could still have faith in his reflexes.

All he’d seen was red, enough to make the heat under his collar match the night he’d spent with Jimmy Vega from Omega five days back.

Not that he’d been counting. He had a head for numbers, that was all, and everything else was statistics. He shouldn’t’ve been surprised to realize he kept this one, too.

Nobody noticed. It was a good thing there was no lasting connection after an asari mind-mild—or so Shepard assumed, one of the assumptions he could afford to make these days—because if there was, Liara would’ve been treated to a show she hadn’t asked for.

‘I’ll be in my cabin,’ Shepard said.

Nobody listened.

It was the formality—just like the numbers—that Shepard had a head for.

The trip back to privacy was uneventful, Shepard’s mug cooling in his hand. He set it down next to his private terminal, checking the name attached to the file.

Even Joker could’ve told him not to open something that was obviously spam. Unless, you know, you go in for that kind of thing, Commander, he’d add with a chuckle—like the idea was that impossible to wrap his head around. Shepard knew how he was. He knew he’d do nothing more than laugh it off, a part of the joke instead of working against it.

The edge of the desk pressed into Shepard’s hip. He opened the file a second time, chin between his thumb and forefinger, the same way he greeted all news.

It was his now. It was up to him to do something with it.

James was licking his fingers. It was the red Omega glow on his skin that Shepard had seen, the shadows under his arm, the light on his chest. It wasn’t too fast to follow the path of James’s hand through the air—call me James, Shepard remembered, and he could do that for him, if anything—all the way to his dick, a solid grip for a solid man.

Shepard remembered that along with the rest. He remembered because he’d been pressed up against it, public to private, and the drinks they’d shared in between.

‘Damn,’ Shepard said.

His knees didn’t buckle—they never did anymore—but he was glad all the same for the desk holding him up.

‘Give a guy some warning next time,’ he added, only there was no one there to listen, same as always, while James worked his own spit over the head of his dick. He moved like a pro in the wash of red Omega signs, one bright pulse bleeding into the next, both of them coming into their palms.

‘Damn,’ Shepard said again.

His voice echoed like the reverb at the end of a song, dancers trying to catch their breath, muscles worn out from all that relaxing.

*

James—

Almost showed an admiral your credentials today. Almost showed the rest of my crew what they were missing on Omega, too. Think you could warn a man next time?

I’d be sending you something else here, but my pilot’s always telling me to watch out for the power of the extranet.

Anyway, it’s better in person, right?

That was one hell of a show.

JS