[Book One] Chapter 12: Naked truth

Chapter 12: Naked truth

Rick woke up quite hungry with his mind already working on the entirety of the visions the beacon from Eden Prime imprinted on him. Taking the elevator to the crew deck where he satiated his hunger first by making himself a nice sandwich and was surprised that no one was there. Checking his omni-tool he knew why. It was “night” time on the ship and only the skeleton crew was up. Cleaning the mess table, he went to the men’s shower, removed his armor, helmet included and went right under the pommel, letting the hot water relax his aching muscles. He was so focused on how it felt that he didn’t hear the door open and someone getting inside. He only realized he wasn’t alone anymore when a pair of arms embraced him from behind and felt a nice pair of naked breasts press against his back.

“How are you doing?” Ashley asked.

“Honestly? I’m alright. My muscles are aching but besides that I’m fine. Still a bit tired but…”

“Not tired enough to have some fun?” she whispered in his ear as her hands went from his abs to his cock.

“If you expect something like last time then no. Otherwise yes.”

“Good enough.” she replied as she began to stroke him very slowly, enjoying every inch and cranny she could feel with her hands; feeling him get hard under her touch. When Rick leaned his back on her body she tightened her embrace and began to kiss him along the neck making him moan in satisfaction. She made a fatal mistake however, when she lightly bit him. He immediately removed her hands from his penis and turned around pushing her against the wall of the shower.

“That won’t do; I’m the one who marks, bombshell.”

His statement made her grin mischievously. It was apparently what she was looking forward to. Going forward, he put one hand on a hip and then used the other to cup one of her ass cheeks before kissing her hungrily. Ashley responded in kind, as lustfull as he was, and put her arms behind his neck. The kiss was effective as she started to grind against his erection, trapped between their stomachs. When he broke the kiss she was panting hard and wanted more but he denied her and instead paid her back in kind, leaving kisses and bite marks on her own neck this time. She began to moan and dropped her hands to his ass pushing it towards her.

“In a hurry, huh?” he teased.

“I’ve been waiting since this morning! I can’t wait anymore!” she exclaimed, grabbing his cock with one hand and trying to direct it where she needed it.

“I’m tempted to make you beg…”

“NO!”

“But I’m too horny myself.” he said as he pushed his member into her burning hot and tight pussy making her scream in pleasure. Half of it was exploring her needy cunt which was apparently also greedy because its wall tried to sucked him in. He grabbed one of her legs and raised it, giving him better access and allowing to go deeper. 

“YES!”

“You really needed a shag.” he lightly laughed as he began to thrust more of his cock in her at a quickening pace.

“That’s your fault!” she managed to say between moans.

He ignored his answer when Ash began to move herself, meeting his every thrust with gusto.

“I’m… already…”

“Really? We started like five minutes ago.”

“I was taking… care of myself before I heard you.”

Rick mentally laughed, she really needed it if what she said was true. He kept on thrusting for a couple minutes more until he felt the wall of her pussy contract hard. Her body shook and tensed as she broke the skin of his back with her nails. She had the prescience to bite his shoulder to muffle the scream of her orgasm. It may have been night time and they could be a bit loud because of the seclusion of the shower but a full out scream would have them caught. Rick stopped thrusting, burying himself as deep as he could, and let her ride her orgasm. After thirty seconds, Ashley’s whole body relaxed. It wasn’t as powerful as the ones he gave her during their two day sex-marathon on the citadel but it didn’t matter, she was content with it. Lowering down her leg, he turned her around making her face the wall and made her bend over.

“I haven’t cum, yet.” he stated.

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Ashley simply turned her head slightly to look at him and shook her ass from left to right as an answer.

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Rick exited the shower room leaving behind Ashley, who needed to wash her face again. He was not quite satisfied, but that was enough for him to relax and take a break from the new knowledge the cipher gave him access to. He has been so focused on it that he didn’t think of bringing a towel or spare of clothes with him and only had his armor but he certainly wasn’t going to wear it as it wasn’t clean.

That’s why it was quite awkward when he met Shepard on his way to the elevator. Completely naked with his armor in his arms. The redhead froze in shock, that’s certainly not what she was expecting when she climbed down the stairs from the bridge. Her eyes instinctively looked down and stopped at the part of Rick’s anatomy Ashley told wonders about. 

“Look all you want, carrot top. You won’t get it.” he said before entering the elevator and going down to the cargo bay.

Shepard was still frozen with a very obvious blush on her face. She snapped out of it when she heard the door to the shower room open and Ashley clad only in a towel came out.

“Hey, Skipper! Still up that late?” the gunnery chief greeted the commander who was behaving strangely. She might not be the brightest tool in the shed but she knew why.

“Judging by the color of your face you met Rick, yeah?”

Shepard just nodded and blushed even redder than she already was. She didn’t quite know what to do. Perhaps space herself out of embarrassment?

“See? I wasn’t lying.”

“That’s… He’s…” the redhead couldn’t find the words or make a complete sentence with her jumbled mind.

“Big, yes.”

“But…”

“Skipper, babies come from there and they are bigger. It’s just a question of getting used to it. You should give him a spin, you won’t regret it. I know I didn’t. He reached places very, very few did and stretched me just right. You’ll love it, I guarantee it.” Ashley replied the obvious question Shepard couldn’t bring herself to ask. She had when they had talked about previously but it was an abstract thing for the commander, thinking she had been exaggerated a bit but seeing the thing literally in the flesh… that gave her perspective.

Ashley went back to the crew quarters and the commander just went to her cabin in a daze. It had been difficult for her to focus properly on her job when Ash had described how big it was but now… she couldn’t get it out of her mind. It was only after bringing herself to two orgasms that she got tired enough to fall asleep. That didn’t stop her from dreaming about it though.

Back down in the cargo bay Rick dressed and cleaned his armor. He was tempted to just take another and threw this one away but it was a perfectly good armor, minus the part that got destroyed on Feros. Laying down on his makeshift bed he began to think about what he learned.

The protheans were exterminated, world after world, experimented upon, what for? He didn’t know as the vision didn’t show but he doubted it was anything good. They had not been defenseless but their efforts proved futile. The reapers had slaughtered them all. The last part of the vision was the most interesting as it depicted a vessel like Sovereign. Was it Sovereign himself or another ship? Or last possibility that worried him, was it what a reaper is? The vision showed bits of machines moving, letting out synthetic noises, certainly they were reapers or the visions wouldn’t show them but there wasn’t any complete look at them, except if the ship was a reaper. If that was the case, it meant that technically a reaper was already here and not with the others wherever they were at the moment. The fact that the galaxy wasn’t under an invasion meant that the conduit was not a reaper technology otherwise Sovereign would have known where it was and would have brought his friends long ago.

That brought forth another question, if the conduit was not built by the reapers, what was its use? The chances were low that its purpose was to bring the reapers here but existed nonetheless. The highest probability however was that its purpose was for something else but in that case why would Saren and Sovereign look for it?

To Rick, something was clearly missing here. A crucial piece of information that would link everything together. He spent some time reviewing everything he knew but found nothing, so instead of going on needlessly he got up and went to the workstation. Flaring up his omni-tool he brought up the design Tali’s made for their new type of shotgun, studied it a few minutes and began to pick up parts to work on. He didn’t know how long he had been working on it when his quarian friend joined him.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Tali.” he replied, his eyes fixed on what he was doing.

“Is it going well?” she asked, taking a look at his prototype.

“Yes and no. The handle is working.” he said, showing the movement of the said handle.“But I can’t see how to integrate the mechanism in the shotgun; chipping a grain of the metal piece, like the pumping mechanism does.”

“That’s alright, I can build on what you did. Now, shoo.” 

She waved her hands in his direction to make him go ahead and took his place. In no time she was entranced in the project, leaving Rick with nothing to do. Sighing, he went up to the bridge, nodded to some of the crew who began their shift on the way and found a free terminal for extranet. He had research to do on Noveria. Unfortunately he was brought out of his work by Shepard, having difficulty not blushing slightly looking at him and who told him that Admiral Hackett had given the ship some urgent missions to do. Thankfully, they were all in the Hades Gamma cluster so they won’t have to run around from mass relay to mass relay forever.

It took him a whole day to gather everything for each mission and give the organized file to the commander. With a lot of free time he spent it talking with Liara as she was the one he knew the least. Not that he knew well everyone else in the ground team besides Ashley and Tali but the asari was an archeologist and he wanted to know more about it or the history of civilizations she had studied. It didn’t hurt that she was specialized in the end of the protheans and may unknowingly hold what he was looking for.

Just like with Tali, Liara was very glad of those chats she had with Rick as he was literally the only one interested in her field of study. Most of the crew were soldiers and were clearly not into science. The ones who did it were tech science not history. Rick joked that they were surrounded by walking talking cliché, something that Liara didn’t understand.

“Humans that serve in the military are usually not very bright people or not very cultured. They enlist because they have nowhere else to go and the military accepts anyone with open arms. It’s an old cliché as many scientists and researchers are working in the Alliance so it’s not like that very much anymore but, if you look around you’ll see one or two like that, not bright enough to do anything other than aim a gun and shoot.”

“That’s something that I don’t understand. Asari all have commando training mandatory in their youth and go on doing whatever they want afterwards.”

“Difference in culture. Humanity is… pretty individualistic in general, where your freedom and free will to do whatever you want to do is yours and yours alone. Interestingly when it bands together it’s tightly knitted for the most part. That causes some problems though.”

“How so?”

“When you can become anything, you get lost in the possibilities. It’s not uncommon to see young people hitting adulthood not really knowing what they want to do as a career.”

“I can’t imagine it. I was five when I knew that I wanted to be an archeologist. I didn’t know what it was, of course, but I knew that I wanted to dig to find prothean ruins and treasures.” she said with a smile making Rick laugh.

“The image I get from that is really cute. A small, hyperactive child version of you, with a bucket and a small shovel in hand digging the ground with dirt everywhere on your clothes.”

“That was a pretty accurate description.” She laughed with him.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you want to become something or were you indecisive?” she asked.

She was curious, like many, about Rick's past. They knew very little besides his life on Eden Prime. Even Ashley was curious though never asked as she didn’t really care. She knew him, her friend, and that was good enough. To others on the other hand it wasn’t. Nobody had ever inquired as he wasn’t really social and felt they would be rejected at best and ignored at worse, the only exception being Shepard because she was ordered to do so.  She didn’t have any results though with how much he disliked her, he wasn’t going to tell his whole life story anytime soon that’s for sure. But Liara was different, she was a friend after all the time they spent together talking and he didn’t have any problem speaking about his past, not in a detailed way anyway.

“I… wasn’t set on one career path. I was thinking of either being a detective or a researcher. The kind of job where you search for the truth.”

“Like an archeologist?” Liara said with a grin.

“Meh, too messy. Rolling in dirt all day every day? No thanks. However, had I known archaeologists could be pretty as hell I may have considered it.” he joked, earning a hit on his shoulder.

“It seemed cool, especially in those old movies, with lots of action and research.”

“You have movies about archaeology?” she exclaimed.

“Yes! It’s more of a quest movie rather than actual archaeology but it’s entertaining to watch. I like the research and the thinking in the story that brings the protagonist to the next clue and then the next until they reach their goal.”

“Do you have any names to share?”

“Interested in watching some?”

“Of course!”

“Well, I guess we’ll have to schedule a movie night then. Do you want me to send information about the artifacts and the culture and story they are associated with? Just so you’re not lost in the story.”

“I’d love to, thank you.”

“You’ll see, every kid that ever watched those wanted to become an archeologist for a while after.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” she said in some kind of promise tone before getting back on the topic they were discussing.

“Detective or researcher… In the end you became a tech expert. How come?”

“Well… I guess it just ended that way. By the time I was back into council and alliance space, I was already an adult. I didn’t finish my schooling so I didn’t even have the most basic of certificates meaning I couldn’t go for university. I could have forged one, it would have been difficult and risky to hack the alliance database again, but I could have forged fake grades and all that. It wouldn’t have been worth it. My identity would have been blown up very quickly. I also wanted to live peacefully in some kind of rural world, far from the Mega-cities and the insanely big amount of people. That’s how I ended up in Eden Prime to begin with. I was lucky they needed someone who knew their way around softwares.”

To Liara, this was more than expected. She was surprised that he was so knowledgeable and smart about things and yet didn’t even graduate basic school. She knew he had left his home young for a new life but she never thought it was that young.

“How old were you when you started your new life?”

“Ten.”

“Goddess! Ten! What made you, a child, leave your home alone to who knows where at ten?”

“Well… I never knew my father, probably because the woman who gave birth to me was a selfish whore. Never even bother to acknowledge my existence. I don't know if that was because I'm biotic or because she never wanted me in the first place. In any case she was almost never there. I had my sister though, so it was alright. At least until she abandoned me when I was ten, to live her life. Since I had nothing and didn’t particularly like my situation as a biotic I just up and left to find something better. Which I did.”

The confession left Liara speechless, never having imagined such a thing possible. She had noticed, behind the nonchalance he had spoken with, the anger and bitterness underlying his speech. Considering what she heard she couldn’t blame him. A neglectful and discriminatory mother? He didn’t even call her that: mother. What about his sister? From what she understood, his sister took care of him until she left. That brought on a lot of questions.

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

“There is nothing to say. My past was shitty. I got over it and moved on.”

“Still.. How could your sister, after taking care of you for years just… abandoned you like that? Your mother neglecting you I can conceive, I had heard that kind of thing happening more than enough but…”

“She wanted to enlist. She did.”

“You say that but you feel otherwise.”

“True. She could have been anything, become anyone and we would have stayed together but she chose the alliance. She was my whole life but I guess I wasn’t enough for her anymore or I wasn’t to her what she was to me. Rationally… I get it, you know? That she had her own life to live. What I don’t understand is why the alliance when she knew she would have to go far away? The only explanation I came up with was that she was done. She had her get away ticket and she used it, freeing herself of burdening old me.”

“Did she ever contact you?”

“No. Or Not that I know of. I left a month after her when that woman brought over her john of the moment to celebrate my sister's enrollment. She didn’t even notice I was still there. I realized that I didn’t want to live like that anymore and that I didn’t really need any of them and just left.”

“Did you never check on her?”

“What for? She left, there was no reason for me to do so. I had my new life and she wasn’t a part of it.”

“Maybe she’s been looking for you?”

That question was so absurd to him that he laughed really loud. Liara wanted to know more but Shepard chose this moment to call the ground team, ordering them to get ready as they had arrived at the location of their next mission.

With regret the asari followed Rick towards the cargo bay.