A/N - Oh gosh, I'm sorry about the delay with this chapter. I got really sucked into Mass Effect Andromeda and had a heard time tearing myself away from my Reyes x Ryder fanfic. Hopefully you all like this chapter! ^_^ Thank you to everyone who is reading along and reviewing - your feedback had kept me writing!

Pandora drew in a deep breath and watched the stars shining through the canopy above her, their faint twinkling light casting a muted glow over the bed. Flushed and sweaty, she ached slightly from both the physical exertion and the position Kaidan just had her in, but she felt wonderful. A warm feeling of contentment seeped through her body as she lay curled in his arms, his biotics tingling against her skin like a familiar purr.

Kaidan was unusually quiet, and she could almost feel him thinking as he lay against her, his thoughts turning over in his head as he stroked calloused fingers up and down her arm.

"Penny for your thoughts?" she asked quietly.

He grunted and slid a leg against hers, cuddling close. "Just thinking about my family and Cerberus."

"Ah."

Kaidan seemed to think of little else these days, and it wasn't to his merit. His fury at Cerberus burned like a brilliantly lit torch within him, blinding him with hate. Miranda and Jacob had become enemies in his eyes, and he spat poison at them whenever they came near him. Other Cerberus workers fared no better, and as unfriendly and prickly as Kaidan had been before learning the truth, he had become ten time worse since.

Not that she blamed him.

Pandora lifted his hand to her lips and kissed each of his knuckles. "Are you any closer to deciding what you're going to do?"

"No." He sounded angry, sullen, and some of the warmth between them evaporated. "I want to find out which Cerberus team was behind my parents death and make them pay, but I can't do that on the Normandy, and I promised you I'd stay and help with the mission. Don't worry, I'll keep my word." His arms tightened around her as though to prove his words. "What about you? Have you seen Samara yet about your little problem?"

Her little problem was Morinth, who was growing stronger each day. The chill of her personality and the strength of her desires were like the darkening shadow of a creature surfacing from beneath still water. Pandora could see her rising, could feel her getting closer, but she couldn't seem to make herself do anything about it.

The thought of allowing Samara into her mind …

Pandora shivered.

She couldn't do it.

"Not yet," she confessed quietly. "But I will."

"You'd better." Kaidan leaned forward and nuzzled her neck, but his voice had an edge to it that made her shiver; and not in a good way. He sounded genuinely unnerved. "You started talking in your sleep again last night, and I'm pretty sure it was her I was hearing. The things you were saying. Fuck, it was terrifying."

Pandora shivered as she remembered the way Morinth had swirled within her when she felt Kaidan's anger and his power; the asari's interest piqued by his display of rage. But she was just a memory, a fragment, nothing more than a lingering ghost who would soon be gone. As terrifying as Morinth appeared in her mind, she didn't compare to the threat of the Collectors, and they were her focus right now.

"I'll get her taken care of soon, I promise." She stretched out a leg and ran her toe up and down Kaidan's calf muscle. "You're not worried she's going to possess me, are you?"

He snorted derisively, as though she were being ridiculous, but there was something in the way he looked down at her that said he wasn't so sure. "She can't … can she?"

"No," Pandora grinned. "At least, I don't think so."

"Great, I guess I'll just move 'possession by the ghost of a murderous vampire asari' onto the maybe pile." Kaidan gaver her a quick squeeze, seemed to hesitate and then asked, "not to change the subject, but is it true we have to leave the Normandy while they install that creepy reaper device?"

"The Reaper IFF?" When he nodded, she continued. "Yeah, just in case something goes wrong or it's bugged. EDI and Miranda both think it will be safer for key staff members and the ground team to be off the Normandy-"

"And they're just going to leave all the non-essential staff up here? Fucking typical." He sat up and glared at a spot on the far side of the wall. "Doesn't that bother you?"

"Well, a little, yeah." Pandora shrugged. "But we can't afford to evacuate everyone and leave the ship undefended and unstaffed. Hell, we don't even have the shuttles to get everyone off. We can barely fit the people that I consider essential onto the shuttle we do have." She pulled the sheet up around her and nestled into the softness of the pillow as Kaidan scowled, his eyes glinting in the half-light of the bedroom. "What? You think I'm going about this the wrong way?"

He hesitated and shrugged. "I just don't trust Cerberus."

Pandora bit back the sigh that threatened to break from her mouth. Of course he didn't trust Cerberus; they'd ruined his life, stolen his childhood, and murdered his family. But hadn't the last few months on the Normandy at least shown him that her team could be trusted? That while The Illusive Man might be as shady as all hell, the people on the ship were doing their best to operate with integrity and honesty?

"Kaidan, have I ever done anything to make you doubt me?"

He looked at her, his golden eyes flickering agitatedly with sparks of blue. "No, you're the reason I stayed when I realised how fucked up Cerberus really was, but I don't trust the rest of them as far as I can throw them. They never tell you the whole story, and if they want you off the ship, there's a good reason for it. They don't want to risk their big investment." His tone dripped with scorn, and Pandora winced.

"I trust Miranda completely, you know," she told him quietly, choosing not to engage over him calling her Cerberus' investment. He wasn't wrong, and his bitterness was understandable. "You could try to trust her, too. Especially since you two are going to be working together until this mission is over-"

His gaze snapped up to hers, flashing blue fire. "Look, you can associate with that bitch all you want," Kaidan all but spat, his eyes narrowing as he crossed his arms defensively. "I don't like her and she doesn't like me, and I'm sick of her defending Cerberus. The only Cerberus employee I really want to deal with is you. Believe me, If I could, I'd pull the plug on this mission right now and leave all the Cerberus sycophants behind me."

Pandora blinked, taken aback by the venom in his tone. "Wow."

He grunted and lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "It's got nothing to do with you. I promised I'd stay and I will, but ... it's Cerberus. I can't stand being here with them. Not after I found out what they did. It's like being fucking tortured all over again."

Her heart squeezed; she knew how he felt. "They've hurt me too you know. Akuze-"

"It's not the same. You have no idea what it's like to be the reason your parents are dead." Kaidan's words were sharp, dismissive, his tone burned with bitterness, but there was also a frostiness which she hadn't heard in a long time, and Pandora stiffened.

She rolled away from him and sat up, her blue eyes narrowing. "You're not the only person who's lost a parent, and you have no idea what I've lost or what I've been through."

Memories of her mother's death seared like acid, ate away at that place deep inside of her where she locked them rather than face up to what she had done and go mad, and she clenched her fists, recognizing that her anger was illogical, that she was fighting Kaidan's pain fueled fire with fire of her own. He didn't know what she had been through, what she had lost when the geth attacked the Citadel and she had made the fateful decision to order the Alliance fleet to stay behind and protect the Council.

Mom.

Pandora closed her eyes, the pain as fresh as ever. It hurt that Kaidan seemed to think that she had never been touched by loss, that she had no idea what it was like to lose someone she cared about; to be responsible for the death of someone she cared about. Her mother had been captain of one of the Alliance ships destroyed by Sovereign's geth; she had been killed covering for the Destiny Ascension so that the Council could escape.

Killed following an order that her daughter had given.

But Kaidan didn't know that. He didn't know that she had killed her own mother.

He looked at her for a solid minute, the seconds ticking by in a heavy silence so thick Pandora feared she would choke on it. She could almost see the chill in his eyes intensifying as he tried to work out her angle, the paranoid shadows in his eyes darkening as he tried to work out if she was trying to cheer him up, or trying to play him. A lifetime of being used and abused, of being lied to, had made Kaidan suspicious of everyone, and a few months with someone who genuinely cared for him wasn't going to change that.

A red flash moved through her mind, snickered in the shadows, pointed out that Kaidan was too much for her; he was too powerful.

And maybe Morinth was right, but Pandora didn't like the greed she felt from the ghostly shadow in her head when it looked at Kaidan, or the way she flickered to life when Kaidan got angry and his biotics flared. There was something terribly hungry in the way she lurked in her head and watched him, something awful and predatory.

Morinth had to go.

Kaidan, unaware of the thoughts flying through her head, sat up and aimed a frustrated stare at her. "So then tell me, who did you lose, Pandora? Huh? What makes you so qualified to understand this? Because from what I know about your childhood it was pretty fucking idyllic. You had parents who loved you, parents who got you all the training you needed without shipping you off to some godforsaken facility where you were tortured, and parents who weren't fucking murdered by Cerberus!"

His voice rose with anger as he spoke, and his words slashed through the air like razor sharp knives. Pandora actually started to shrink back before she caught herself and stayed firm. She sat up and faced him, this time not bothering to check her fury as it crawled from that bitter pit inside of her and slithered down her skin, her biotics flickering like a feeble candle next to the bonfire that was Kaidan, but flickering angrily all the same.

How dare he act like he knew everything about her? How dare he!

"No, my parents weren't murdered by Cerberus," she spat, "but my mother was killed by the geth when they attacked the Citadel, and it was my fault. My fault, Kaidan, do you understand? It wasn't some evil organisation that killed her, it was my fucking order to stay and save the council that got her killed, and I have to live with that. So don't condescend to me and act like I don't know what it's like to lose people and feel like the world is going to shit around me. I know! I didn't even have time to mourn her before I was killed myself!"

She fired her words off at him like sniper bullets, and was pleased to see each of them sink home with dramatic effect as Kaidan's mouth opened and closed, and he actually showed a little human emotion. His eyes widened as he winced, and when she grabbed her bed shirt and made to leave he caught her wrist and held her fast, his biotics pulsing against her skin, crawling against her like a thousand little insects.

"What?" she snarled, her temper beyond the breaking point as the remembered pain bubbled below the surface.

Kaidan's eyes searched hers, and he left out a breath, his fingers curling about her wrist and slowly tugging her back into bed. "I'm sorry," he said gruffly, stiffly, the words coming out as though he were speaking an unfamiliar language. "I didn't know, and I'm an asshole. Just … don't go."

For a moment Pandora resisted, and a large part of her was tempted to tear herself from his grasp and walk away, to make him chase her and beg forgiveness. An idiotic notion, the logical part of her realised even as the thought occurred to her. Kaidan hadn't known how hurtful he was being. He's an arrogant jerk and he shouldn't have said those things, but he's too proud to chase after me when he's already apologised. If anything I'd be left brokenhearted and alone.

It hit her then, almost like a biotic punch to the face, why their shared pain meant so much to her, why she cared so much that Kaidan shared his mourning with her, and why she wanted him to let her in.

She loved him.

She loved every horrible little thing about him. She loved his tattoos and his arrogance. She loved that he always had a five o'clock shadow and that he didn't wear a shirt. She even loved his stupid nicotine stained fingers.

Pandora almost laughed at herself, but the desperate, choking emotions in her chest weren't something she could bring herself to laugh at. Loving Kaidan was dangerous. The dream that he might want more than a fling with her too, that he might truly care for her, maybe even love her, bubbled under the surface, and the urge to laugh rose again.

Stupid! She thought furiously, I'm so stupid to even think about such a ridiculous girly thing! Kaidan wasn't the kind of man to fall in love. Lust maybe, but not love. She wasn't even sure that he'd fight for her if she ever seriously decided to walk away from him. Sure he had stopped her once, but only because he hadn't been done with their little affair.

What about when he grew tired of her?

The thought depressed her, but their relationship had never been anything except physical. Had it? She looked back at him, met his eyes and tried to read his expression, tried to see something in his gaze about how he really felt about her ... but Kaidan's eyes were as guarded as ever. Still, the fingers he kept wrapped around her wrist were desperate, like iron, and she took comfort in the knowledge that he didn't want to let her walk away.

At least, not today.

With a sigh, Pandora let him pull her back into his arms, and she rested her head on his shoulder and listened to the familiar hum of his biotics against her ear. It felt good to be in his arms, even when she was angry with him it felt right to he held by him, and she determinedly let go of all the insecure thoughts swirling around her head. This was where she wanted to be; he felt like home.

"You are a jerk," she agreed as his hands swept low across her back, his fingertips tingling against her skin. "But you didn't know. It's not like I go around advertising that I killed my-"

"You didn't," he interrupted firmly. "The geth did."

"Yeah, and now we have a geth on board and I'm working with him," Pandora pointed out.

Kaidan tensed against her, then he let out a wry chuckle and tightened his arms. "Point taken. I'll try not to be so hostile towards Miranda, okay?"

She grinned and kissed the side of his neck, her anger sliding away. "It'll do."

"Good." Kaidan tipped her head back and slowly kissed her, nipping gently at her lower lip and then sucking on it gently as he tipped her back on the bed, the warmth of his mouth stirring things low in her belly.

He deepened the kiss, teasing her lips open with smaller kisses, and then swirled his tongue around hers as he eased himself between her legs; the hot velvety warmth of his erection brushing against her stomach as he trapped her between his arms. Pandora responded back urgently, hungrily, desperately needing to be close to him after their brief but fiery fight.

Somehow, the discovery that she loved him had fueled her desire to be with him, and though the words burned on the tip of her tongue, I love you, longing to spill out, she held them back. She swallowed them down and curled around them protectively, holding those important feelings tight and dreaming that one day, maybe, he might return them.

For now, for tonight, making love with Kaidan was enough; even if she couldn't say the words.

A/N - Oh Pandora ... she's in love. But how does Kaidan feel? ;) Please drop me a review!