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Kaidan awoke, but his eyelids wouldn't open.
Bone deep weakness trapped him in a muddled mire, unable to move his body. However what afflicted him was not exhaustion–his mind was certainly alert–but a disconnect between thought and action. No response emerged to the rapidly escalating banging of his conscious brain.
Great exertion of will saw the darkness of his sight crack open to fuzzy light. Colors scattered in a blurry canvas and finally clued him in to the obvious. There was something in his system. Some drug ran through his veins that turned his energy sluggish. What it could be and even why he was housing it were not facts coming to mind, undoubtedly another nefarious symptom.
Bolstered by success, his arms twitched, trying to push him upright, yet on top of his stupor Kaidan found something else keeping him in place. Holding him down were copious restraints giving him no chance of righting his posture from flat on his back. Although he couldn't help feeling they were overkill; he would bet a volus could pin him in this state.
Every passing moment feeling returned to his limbs, so instead of pointlessly struggling, his thoughts turned to how he ended up in this situation. At first, anything concrete easily slipped through his grasp however time saw them increasingly solidify.
He had been… He had been…
Memories were pulled loose from the muck. His stomach dropped.
Reapers. They had invaded London. Dropped from the sky with terrible wails, broadcasting their malicious intent to purge.
Through it all Kaidan was… fleeing, yes, that was right. Trying to find somewhere to rendezvous with the defense forces and mount a proper resistance. And he… wasn't alone.
There was someone with him…
Shepard!
Everything came back. He was escaping the first strike with Shepard of all people, who he ran into on the way to the Defense Council, when a mass of husks descended on their position. He didn't have time for anything besides leaping behind cover when something… pricked his neck. Then nothing.
Marked by adrenaline pulsing through his veins, he willed his eyesight to clear. The blur above him came into focus, revealing an incandescent light fixed upon a regular ceiling. The action of tilting his head was harder than he ever imagined it could be, but he managed, further revealing a rather simple medical room with a closed hull window, denoting his location as a space vessel. By all accounts it followed standard human design, some of the equipment even bore the Alliance crest. It should have brought a sense of safety.
Except he didn't feel safe, far from it. He was hard pressed to recall a moment he felt more vulnerable.
It wasn't his vision that put him off. With one sense came the rest and delivered a profound dread.
He was not wearing any clothes. Starkly apparent in how loops of padded restraints rubbed against his bare skin at every notable point he could think of. Ankles, knees, thighs, waist, chest, shoulders, elbows, wrists. Thick, unforgiving things pinning him in a soft but firm grip against softer bedsheets. The single spot he could say his captors missed was his head that was still allowed the grace to swivel around and appreciate his helplessness.
Not giving him a chance to stew in that unsettling realization was the room's door, which slid open near silently. To Kaidan, hyperalert of his situation, it rang like the crack of a gunshot. His head snapped to the entrance, fully expecting a grotesque husk or maybe some Cerberus goon to stroll in.
It was neither, though if Kaidan were less shocked, he might have suspected the latter.
“Kaidan, you're awake!” Commander John Shepard rushed to his side in obvious relief. In the distant depths of his mind, he knew Shepard wasn't a commander anymore, but the title was too ingrained to look at him and see anything else.
Even after everything they had been through there was a section in his heart that held John.
Their sordid tale started years ago during the chase for Saren. Little glances and clasps on the back, evidence of growing comradery until it suddenly wasn't, in those hours before Ilos. Sparks bloomed into a ravenous wildfire that consumed Kaidan's every waking hour until the day a routine Geth sweep over Alchera doused his soul.
All his fear and confusion coalesced into a single word. “Shepard?” His voice was hoarse, and his throat scratched.
Hearing his name brightened the man like he flipped a switch. Shepard quickly rushed out of sight and the sound of rushing water briefly echoed. Before long Shepard returned, presenting a glass of water to his lips.
Things were so weird Kaidan was drinking before his mind could think to question it. Sloppy, he reprimanded himself between gulps, but he couldn't exactly stop or he'd choke. Better to regain his strength now that he already ingested it.
Somehow, John knew him well enough to pull back as soon as he was quenched. “Better?”
“Shepard,” Kaidan tried again, wetting his dried lips, “what happened? Why am I…” he tugged his restraints as if they might have disappeared when he wasn't paying attention.
Suffice to say they hadn't.
Shepard frowned, “Kaidan, it's… hard to say.”
“What?” Kaidan asked with more heat, his patience wearing thin.
Shepard sighed and placed a hand on Kaidan's thigh. The contact made his skin crawl. His leg flexed but couldn't pull away.
“We lost.”
“Huh?” Kaidan suddenly felt very far away.
Shepard rubbed along his close shaven scalp. His expression was dire, but not nearly as expressive as that news should make him.
“You've been asleep for months, Kaidan. London was just the start. The Reapers were able to hit everyone at the same time, no one stood any chance. All the fleets are gone. At the moment, they're cleaning up any resistance that remains.”
“Shep– John, what are you saying?”
Shepard's thumb traced small circles like how one would placate an animal. Although normally the hand wouldn't be placed on the inner thigh, trailing up so slowly Kaidan was thinking he was imagining it. “I'm saying it's over. Maybe if the galaxy began preparing the second we left Eden Prime something could've been done but…” he shrugged morosely. “They wiped the floor with us.”
“If that's true…” It couldn't be, but Kaidan would let the supposition go unchallenged until he gained more intel. “Where are we?”
“This is the part you're not gonna like,” Shepard avoided his gaze and said nonsense. As if anything could be worse than the destruction of all advanced life.
Shepard moved to the closed hull window Kaidan had previously made note of, visibly steeling himself. He pressed a button on the side to retract the metal shutter, revealing the vast beauty of a black hole crowned by its swirling accretion disk. “The other side of the Omega 4 Relay.”
Kaidan blinked away hazy orange light because he couldn't be seeing that right. It had to be a vid screen overlay designed to look like a window. His lips parted, nothing came out.
Shepard cracked a sheepish smile, like this was some unfortunate circumstance similar to a flat tire instead of the end of civilization–the deaths of everyone they tried to protect. The macabe orange cast an ominous shadow over him. “Look on the bright side, you always said when you retired you wanted to move somewhere far out of the way. Well, nowhere more cut off than here.”
The restraints, the oddities in Shepard, their location. The answer stared him in the face.
It was only then Kaidan was able to remember a crucial detail. That squad of batarian husks were a block away when they dropped. Nowhere near him.
The only being close was–
“You're indoctrinated,” Kaidan croaked, bile in his mouth.
Shepard frowned, opened his mouth, then closed it, and tilted his head in thought. His lips pursed, “Maybe.”
Kaidan closed his eyes. He was shivering.
“But none of that matters now,” Shepard’s words entered his dark world. “All that matters is you're safe.”
“Safe?” Repeated Kaidan, a bare echo, already dreading the reply.
Kaidan felt Shepard move back to his side. In the past, despite their ups and downs it was a presence that never failed to comfort; Kaidan wanted nothing more than to shy away in revulsion.
A heavily calloused hand pressed into his chest. Its texture barely changed from the one he knew on the original Normandy. That short but hot supernova of a relationship. One where Commander Shepard blazed into his normal life and burnt a scar that never managed to heal.
“They were going to kill you, Kaidan,” Shepard placated. “I made a deal.”
“You can't reason with the Reapers. We learned that from Saren.” He knew it was also futile to reason with an indoctrinated individual, but he couldn't wrap his head around the idea the man he once loved was truly lost.
Perhaps there was still something to save.
A horrible, tentative hope he had bitter experience with. Ironically it was a line of thought he replayed over and over again ad nauseum on his trip back from Horizon, background noise to the report he penned detailing how a terrorist group was puppeting the corpse of his one true love.
It wasn't to be. “But that's where you're wrong,” Shepard dismissed. “We know a bit more than Saren did; we know the Reapers do have a use for us, and better yet, the position’s open.”
Kaidan opened his eyes to a piercing blue stare. That gaze reflected nothing but Kaidan, damn the rest, a startling corruption of once unflinching empathy. He almost threw up.
They were beyond the Omega 4 Relay.
“The Collectors,” he spoke with dawning horror. What had John done?
“You're so intelligent, Kaidan. I give you a little and you figure out a lot.” Kaidan hated how the praise tingled down his spine. Making matters worse, Shepard was back to rubbing circles, this time right over his nipple. It was a deceptively gentle touch, and it was all Kaidan could do not to squirm. He wouldn't reveal weakness. Except his nakedness had never been so overt.
As if reading his thoughts directly, Shepard's eyes flicked to Kaidan's exposed dick and he roguishly smirked.
Kaidan’s breath caught, but Shepard's attention soon returned to his face.
“The Alliance refused to prepare, and the Council refused to acknowledge there was a threat at all. Clearly we were going to lose, but I knew you would fight to the end anyway. You're the bravest man I've ever known. A hundred times more valuable than those cowards. I couldn't let you throw your life away,” Shepard said, the most serious he had been since walking in.
Shepard was usually so restrained, the picture of quiet, albeit intense, discipline, making the open adoration he was showing now all the more uncanny. Blatant reverence sparkled in his eyes, shone in the quirk of his mouth. Kaidan was under a microscope, every inch being drank in. Once he dreamed of that look, but he was living a nightmare.
“Even after Horizon?” Kaidan blurted. This entire situation he had been thrown in was incomprehensible. It must have been frying his brain.
If anything, the reminder of their turbulent history made Shepard’s gaze more intense. “Kaidan… You have no idea how glad I was you turned me down on Horizon.”
Kaidan swallowed.
“I was on a suicide mission. There hasn't been a day after I made the offer I haven't kicked myself for giving it.” He sat on the side of the bed near his waist, depressing the mattress and sliding his hand down from Kaidan’s chest to fondle his cock with an inconceivable casualness. His fingers curled into the grooves of his skin, caging his cock and balls in rough warmth.
The audacity of it took Kaidan's breath away. Thankfully, the profound horror wracking him kept blood rushing solely to his face.
“Protecting you should have taken precedent over anything, but I forgot it that day. Since then I've learned.” Shepard's intensity left no other conclusion. “Harbinger needed a new proxy race after I blew up the Collectors; I needed you. We came to an agreement.”
And that's what it was in essence, the true insidious nature of indoctrination. Everyone had a reason under it. The Reapers don't flip a switch and make some unlucky individual think it's a grand day to exterminate all galactic civilization, preexisting goals become twisted into forwarding the Reaper’s agenda.
Saren Arterius sought the continuation of all organic life; John Shepard sought one Kaidan Alenko.
Kaidan jerked in his bonds, finally finding the fire he should have had the second he woke up. “How could you bargain with a Reaper!? All they do is lie! You know that!”
Shepard tutted. “I'm not an idiot, Kaidan,” he said with the cadence of old banter. “Frankly, for all their speeches to the contrary, they're not very complex. As long as their cycle goes uninterrupted, they could care less about what you and I do. On the condition you don't cause trouble–but you won't,” he tacked onto the end, an afterthought. Like Kaidan had no option besides submitting to his fate.
“So what's your plan here?” Kaidan spoke, still trying to wrap his head around… everything. Absolutely not helped by Shepard's unyielding hand, exploring more of his privates with each second. “Say you did turn on the Alliance, keep me hidden away. For how long, Shepard, forever? Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives floating in this derelict surrounded by an empty galaxy?”
“Ideally,” Shepard replied without a trace of derision.
The sheer implications of that submerged Kaidan in ice while the room spun in zero gravity. The light from the window burned. The hand still firmed over his manhood felt impossibly tight.
For as integral as they were, it took Kaidan too long for him to think of using his biotics. Gathering every scrap of training Brain Camp hammered into him, he reached deep inside himself, fueled by his surging adrenaline, and prepared to unleash the strongest Reave he could muster.
Only, as his mental hands were sinking into his reserves of power, he was met with a gaping blank void. There was no glow, no mass effecting field, not even the omnipresent buzz of a headache waiting to pounce. For the first time in over a decade his mind was a calm pond.
Shepard took out his implant.
His former commander held a bemused expression, undoubtedly reading his actions like a book off the slightest tells. He could never hide anything from John.
“As I said, you'll behave, so Harbinger has no reason to care. This medical bay is special. When the Reapers started rebuilding their base for us, I requested it specifically for you. It's far away from any Reaper tech on the base so your mind will be safe, and I've ordered everyone else to stay away. Don't want to tempt fate with them. It'll just be you and me here. Perfect.”
He used his other hand–the one not molesting him–to caress his cheek.
Kaidan flinched away, one step off from hyperventilating.
Shepard looked sad, and even after all the madness of the last few minutes it tugged at his heartstrings. “I'd hoped our reunion wouldn't go like this, Kaidan.”
“I was right not to trust you!” He snarled.
“No, you weren't. Because of me you have nothing to fear anymore.” Shepard bit his lip, looking for all intents and purposes the concerned partner instead of the deranged traitor, “Do you know how worried I was when I saw you on Earth? There was an invasion coming yet you were there running yourself ragged for a group of people who did nothing but use you. The scanner said you hadn't slept in 41 hours, hadn't eaten in 74,” he emphasized.
“Now it's over–done,” pronounced Shepard with the same gravitas he said he would stop the Reapers. “All you have to do is relax and let me take care of you. The hard parts over.”
Kaidan hated how warmth sparked inside him from that, and judging by Shepard’s sprouting grin it wasn't just inside.
“Or maybe it's just begun.” Shepard switched his grip to better handle Kaidan's cock, nestling it in the crook of his palm, confidently grinding it with undiminished skill.
“Shepard–mgh!” Kaidan protested for all of a second before his words twisted into a grunt.
He filled out in John's hand much too fast for the circumstance he found himself in. Ever since Shepard died, sexual gratification lost its magic. He just couldn't bring himself to do it alone, and he'd only gone on a single failed date in between then and now that petered out at the dinner table.
He was left totally vulnerable to a firm hand breaking his dry spell like a thin pane of glass.
As Kaidan melted under the attention, he felt Shepard's satisfaction. “God, I knew you weren't taking care of yourself as well as you should, Kaidan. Drives me crazy. Thankfully there will be no more of that. From here on out, all your needs are going to be met, physical especially.”
“What I needed was for you to beat the Reapers, not doom us all!” Kaidan grimaced. Focusing on his rage kept him from shuddering under the rapidly pooling pleasure. Fuck, can’t he just he be bad at one singular thing–
And Shepard still treated it like a joke. “Ha! Well, that hope went out the window.” His rough chuckle, a perfect match for the friction of his calluses, further undid Kaidan.
Many times, Kaidan wondered if he would ever recover from his thrilling months with the legendary Spectre. So short but so lasting. It made him too spoiled. Unable to imagine anyone in the galaxy matching up to the handful of nights he spent with John. Lack of true closure made it worse, turned an incredible time into an enrapturing myth. Horizon similarly made moving on impossible.
Except now Shepard was back, loving him, touching him, and no one had given his body the memo that was supposed to be a bad thing.
Was it any wonder he started leaking like a rusty faucet?
Touch was sweet joy. Had he closed his eyes he would be back there in the shadowed corners of the Normandy, sneaking contact with his superior officer wherever they could get it like lovesick teens.
Now he was just sick, the illusion of better times broken by medical straps and harsh, sterile lighting.
Arousal built in his blood, throbbing along his abdomen, hot like a fever.
“You can't keep me here forever,” Kaidan ground out defiantly, hoping his breathy gasps didn't keep him from conveying the utter insanity of the situation.
Shepard arched a patronizing eyebrow. “You don't know how wrong you are. All we have is forever. You have to understand, the Reapers don't give allowances to just anybody. They want me, the one who's thwarted them over and over. They need proxies to ensure the efficiency of the next cycle, and I'm going to lead them.”
“How? Thats…” Fuck, Kaidan was too horny to unpack these leading questions. He felt his brain melting.
“Let's just say Reaper medical technology is… something else. I'm going in for augmentation first thing when the gene labs are done. I'm told it will practically halt aging, make me their immortal general. Once I'm sure the process is safe, you're next.”
Shepard retracted his maddening hand job for the time it took to lick a fast strip up his hand and return it with the added slick. Kaidan was instinctively rutting back before he got a grip on himself, not that there was much movement to stop.
“At the very least, we'll have a lot of downtime in the next 50,000 years. True peace before duty calls me elsewhere. God, Kaidan, can you imagine?” Shepard's tone took on a dreamy quality. “All we ever wanted, we have.”
The picture Shepard painted so eagerly was mind boggling. Vast enough Kaidan couldn't comprehend it as John's indoctrinated mind so clearly could. Shepard was always larger than life, but Kaidan never felt eclipsed by his shadow, only sheltered by his warmth.
The sole point of warmth Kaidan felt at present was between his legs. If only it wasn't so effective.
His hands flexed from where they were strapped close to his sides. He sank unbidden into the pillow that cradled his head. “S-stop, John you– can't! Wa-wanted it too but not like– this!” Finally lust was beginning to distort his tongue in earnest. Eloquence was becoming harder, rational arguments drifted away, all the blood flow going from his brain to somewhere else.
There was a twinkle in Shepard's eye, pride in his work. “You like it, Kaidan,” he murmured as if his reaction were some divine revelation. “I was afraid– I don't know. After Horizon, after my arrest, I was worried you might have moved on. Not that there would be anything wrong with that as long as you were happy. I don't need my feelings to be requited, but I'll admit, it does feel nice.”
Fuck it felt great.
Underpinned as it was by better times Shepard’s hand rubbed him with the texture of the finest silk even when it was objectively not. Somehow the rough callouses of a career soldier glided over him, like he was the perfect receptacle.
Kaidan moved his legs, to close them, to kick, it didn't matter. Stopping that building heat was vastly more important.
He failed on all counts. Straps held fast around his ankles, knees, thighs, and waist as they always did, leaving him exposed to the supple, poisonous pleasure John proved intent on wringing out. Trapped under a connection that just wouldn't stop. Sweat beaded along his skin as he fought a losing battle against his body's base reaction. Strangled noises escaped him at increasing frequency, clueing in the blind to his unwound state should his debauched appearance not give it away.
“Don't fight me. Enjoy this, Kaidan,” Shepard commanded, devoting his full attention to his task as he always did.
And Kaidan did as he always did too.
Followed orders.
Time gradually blurred until it lost meaning entirely, wiped clean by repetitive friction.
Too lost to feel shame over it, Kaidan cried pitifully when it stopped. The pillar of his cock twitched in the cold, empty air, matching his own need. He'd do anything–
The bed shifted. “I know, I'm sorry. Just wanted to give a better finish.” A weight draped over his legs. “It'll be over in a second.”
Left bereft, time was no longer timeless, but excruciatingly slow. Kaidan barely came back to himself to catch Shepard's head poised over his cock before pure ecstasy engulfed him.
There was eye contact there, but reality broke around him. Now time as a concept ceased to exist in the first place. There was only a wet abyss engulfing him from all sides. At least, all sides that mattered. His entire self condensed to a spot between his legs like a star to a black hole. Every other concern sucked away by a much greater force.
All problems in the galaxy collapsed save one: he couldn't thrust up.
By his sides, foreign fingers interlaced with his hands, and he whined. Extra grounding was nice, but the action ultimately took an outlet away from him for expressing his building energy.
“John, please-” he struggled to complete the thought. Kaidan didn't know what he wanted. Please stop? Please continue? Both were alluring, dividing his mind in two, leaving it easy territory for Shepard's mouth to conquer. Every carnal second demonstrated why the great commander had never lost a battle.
An equally possible prospect was that Kaidan was just an easy conquest. Weak to John in all his forms and never adept at hiding the fact.
Rejecting him on Horizon was the hardest thing he had ever done. Ultimately, it was a mistake–the biggest in his life, writ large along the months John had been back and currently playing out over his cock.
John hummed, and Kaidan's dick, embedded in the man's throat, vibrated alongside him. Each bob on Shepard’s part sank him deeper until he was buried base to tip in gorgeous heat.
Shepard fixed himself there, burying his nose into Kaidan, relishing his smell and taste. His tongue slathered along his shaft, impossibly pervasive, reacquainting itself with each inch.
Kaidan devolved further into a wheezing mess of pathetic noises. Breathless from Shepherd's suffocating worship.
How was he the one choking on this!?
Any remaining wonder was punched out of him once Shepard resumed his movements, twice as fast and thrice as vigorous.
Saying Kaidan was unprepared for the assault would imply there was any form of preparation that would allow him to withstand it. He unraveled in record time, expertly dismantled by someone who represented all his faults. Plunged into exquisite, maddening pleasure again and again until he was ready to snap. Kaidan felt the fingers crossed with his squeeze, giving permission. It was all he ever needed.
What overtook Kaidan was less of a feeling and more of a pulse. A shiver that started in his curling toes and rung through his body like a bell, exiting his restrained form in the only place he was allowed: Shepard.
Kaidan whited out as his lifeblood left him, a physical substance Shepard swallowed down with obscenely hollowed lips and a contented expression.
When the last of the aftershocks passed, Kaidan lied there paralyzed. Different from when he first woke up in that things were not unfocused but hyper acute. Every brush of air, tense of muscle, pinged his awareness, leaving him wanting to curl up into a ball and drift away, escape the tenderness afflicting his skin. He felt floaty, but circumstances kept him tethered at every point. Strong, soft tethers that stopped him from so much as twitching.
Simpering whines slipped past his lips as Shepard peppered kisses up his stomach and abdomen on the way up, sucking more deeply with each brush the further he moved.
Shepard ended it with a long crash against Kaidan's dumbly parted lips, the latter too delirious to remind himself he shouldn't reciprocate. Dizzy on sorely absent attention, Kaidan almost cried feeling that familiar tongue slot back into where it belonged–something he convinced himself would never occur again.
Shepard partially draped himself over his immobilized body, crushing him in his comforting presence. Sculpted muscles slotted into his side, pressing long healed scars Kaidan was still able to map with his eyes closed into his skin, each holding a story he could read like braille as they long explored every inch of the other's body.
The hero of the Citadel gave the same blinding smile he used to address the masses when he looked at him, angled on a propped elbow. Dashing fingers flitted down to fondle Kaidan once again, keeping a gentle hold of his softening cock. Even still, the sensitivity so close to orgasm made Kaidan flinch. “You know, I'm told the Reaper procedures also get rid of refractory periods,” Shepard dripped poison in his ear.
Separate from his control, his cock showed how much it liked that idea.
Beaming, Shepard breached into his mouth again before just as quickly pulling back. “You'll love it here. I'll make sure you do. Give me some time and you'll never want to leave this bed again.”
And Kaidan… Kaidan couldn't bring himself to hate the warmth curling around his heart, suspiciously similar to the fingers of John Shepard. This was the power of Shepard's charisma, able to sway anyone to his way of things by sheer force of will. A form of indoctrination unique to him.
Tapering down from the explosive activity of climax, Kaidan felt his eye’s droop and his thoughts turn sluggish. No drugs involved, just simple exhaustion. Too much compounded too quickly. Soon enough he began to drift off, blanketed by John's body, watched over by his zealous vigilance. He curled against it as much as he could, no more than an inclination of the head. The breath clearly puffing on his cheek was oddly comforting in a manner he would have the foreseeable future to get acquainted with.
There was a time not too long ago Kaidan craved a breathing Shepard more than anything, and it seemed he would get his wish for the next 50,000 years.
A traitorous part of him, imagining the conversion of all known life into an organic slurry, whispered there were worse eternities.