Title: Sheets
Rating: R for swearing, violence, and sexy things.
Characters: Zaeed/FemShep, mentions of others
Summary: She'd barely expected to let the man onto her ship, let alone into her quarters... her bed... her pants.

omfg I can't believe I wrote this. Agghhhh I feel so... saucy.

Erm. Enjoy?

The sheets had, once upon a time, been pristine, crisp, and white. They always had been very neat, and Shepard wasn't sure how that happened, since she never made her bed after she'd slept in it. She imagined Kelly must do so, when she was here feeding the Commander's fish. They were always clean and ready to catch her as she collapsed into their sharp, clinical safety after having been shot at, clawed at, blown up, sliced, diced, burned and poisoned. The bed was nice to look at, sure, but there was just something... something wrong about a bed that was always made.

Beds said a lot about a person, she figured. Back home on Earth, she'd owned only a lumpy queen-sized mattress covered in pilfered blankets and fluffy pillows she had stolen. She often moved it around in the room she lived in, often curled herself up with just a tiny hole for air and a bit of light within the sheets. It had been a soft, warm, cozy little hidey-hole away from rival gangs and the cluster of Tenth Street Reds who took to raising her.

Here, on this new, brighter Normandy, the bed was made for comfort, but she always just felt like she was sleeping in Chakwas' medbay. Except Chakwas meant Brandy and good company, whereas her bed was... just a bed.

But the sheets.

The sheets were always pristine.

Not anymore.

Now, they were stained grey with sweat, soot, grime, and they reeked of both sex and gunsmoke. The mattress had been pulverized into a soft, lumpy mass and she couldn't help but smirk at the slight droplet of blood beneath her shoulder where he had been laying. He was beside her, now, on his stomach, tatooed arm thrown over her belly, hand hooked up to cup her breast. She hadn't expected him to stay.

Actually, she hadn't expected a lot of things about Zaeed Massani. She'd barely expected to let the man onto her ship, let alone into her quarters... her bed... her pants.

They hadn't gotten along at first. He'd definitely heard the entirely overblown stories about her saving the galaxy, sure those things had happened, but it hadn't been the glamorous tale of adventure the news and gossip made it out to be. It had been all hurried decisions, lost comrades and splatters of blood running with the milk-white fluid that ran from broken spots on Geth troops. It had been hard choices, harder missions, and things she regretted.

It had been suffocating in the vacuum of space.

He'd thought he'd be getting some golden-child, saint of humanity, goody-goody paragon who believed herself to be perfect as a Commander. She'd thought she'd be getting a sonovabitch, grizzled old merc who needed to get punched in the face as a teammate.

Only one of them was right.

What he got was a tired, pale woman who was out of patience and SHOULD have been out of time. She was furious over Cerberus dragging her out of her grave, but there was a job to do, a mission, and she had to get it done. Maybe then the Galaxy would let her die. In return she got exactly what she'd expected. He started out alright, but he couldn't take orders and Shepard wouldn't stand for it.

Things went bad after Zorya. He continued to stew in his need for revenge down on the Engineering deck, and she remained steadfast that they not waste lives. Vido got away, and she almost left him to die.

Almost.

She knew what it was like, to hold a grudge and want to tear a bastard's spine out with her bare hands. She'd felt like that after Virmire, knowing that Saren was the cause of her losing her best friend. She'd wanted nothing more than to slam his head into the ground until it cracked and bled and he begged for a mercy she wouldn't give. When she finally had killed him, she'd just felt hollow.

But she and Zaeed were not the same person. Shepard pulled him out of the fire, literally, and dragged him back to the ship. He'd sat in the medbay and while he glared and raged internally at her, allowed Chakwas to patch him up.

"I'll do this mission, only that. Don't expect anything else." was what he'd said.

He'd said it with such venom that she almost felt bad, but then she remembered they'd saved a whole factory of innocents and rolled her eyes. But it was enough. She radioed Liara, sent The Illusive Man a few emails, called in a reluctant favor from Aria.

Vido Santiago had taken passage to Illium with what left he had of his crew, then he'd flown to Omega to recruit a squadron of Blue Suns. He'd quietly paid off several people to feed false information through Aria's contacts, but Liara confirmed that the info she had was wrong. He'd bought a ship at Omega under a false name, and then he'd taken off to an underground base hidden on Melile, in the Elysta system of the Ismar Frontier. She managed the pry the coordinates off a Blue Sun in Afterlife, along with a passcode into the base.

His reaction when she handed him the datapad was actually worth all the bullshit. His mouth dropped open and he gave her a look of stunned incredulity that Shepard thought only Miranda had managed to perfect.

"Why?" he had croaked out.

"There's always a better way." she'd said.

"You really believe that?"

She had shrugged, throwing messy bangs away from her eyes. "It's all I've got."

One thing had led to another, and after he'd shot Vido in the head once for all the times his old partner had managed to slip away, they'd become somewhat... companionable. No, that wasn't the word. Grudging respect, was the term she'd use. Then, in the process of helping Liara get her own revenge, she'd discovered things about him. Things like there was a bounty on his head, and he'd considered suicide as a form of retirement. The fact that he even considered retirement made her wonder about what kind of man he really was.

What sort of man made a living killing and intimidating people, but wanted a quiet, safe end to his career? What sort of man threw away innocent lives like trash but named old, beaten rifles a purely feminine, gentle name? What sort of man, she wondered, was Zaeed Massani?

After the thing with the Shadow Broker, she'd taken to sharing drinks with him in Kasumi's lounge, often joined by some of the crew and occasionally Garrus. Their grudging respect morphed into some weird form of friendship that had no real definition. She couldn't really describe it, but they respected each other, valued each other's talents, and what's more, they'd saved each other's lives countless times on the field, and she trusted him.

"Heh." she chuckled. How many people in the galaxy could say they trusted Zaeed Massani?

He shifted in his sleep, unconciously squeezing her breast. She stifled another snicker and rolled over to look at him, the scars on his face, his nose, his lips, the bruises and healing bite marks on his neck and shoulders. Her thoughts drifted to the one on his shoulder, just near where his tattoo began. She hadn't meant to bite him hard enough to draw blood, but with him gripping her thighs and pounding her against the mattress... well care wasn't at the front of her mind. Neither had it been on his, as she had her own share of bite marks and thumbprints.

His forearm rested on her hip, now, but he remained asleep. In a couple of hours, they'd be heading into the Omega 4 Relay. Probably any minute now Joker would make the announcement that they were in orbit.

She'd docked the Normandy at Omega, before they headed out. She'd decided to give them all a last minute 'get out while you still can'. It was only right, she couldn't ask these people, her friends, to kill themselves for her.

None of them had left.

She couldn't figure out why, of all the people still onboard, why Zaeed hadn't left the ship.

Well... Okay, that wasn't what bothered her.

The question was, why hadn't he left her room yet?

Zaeed wasn't a sentimental man, at least when it didn't come to guns and old stories. He'd shown up at her door with a grunt and a look in those mismatched eyes, and suddenly they were on each other like damn rutting hogs. His fingers were rough and calloused, and they traced burning paths down her skin, making her gasp and moan and writhe beneath his touch. They'd left a trail of armor and clothes on their way to her bed, and she shoved him down on the mattress and kissed her way from his neck to parts beyond and below. They had rolled and fought for dominance and for the top, and while their 'fight' should have made things difficult it just made them rub in all the most perfect, delicious, horrible places. They'd burned like the inferno on Zorya, and her sheets had paid the price.

Shel curled herself up on the bed, liking the new, broken in feelings of the sheets, and let out a soft, pleasant little sigh. She hadn't had a body beside her since Kaidan, and he'd abandoned her. She knew that, once Zaeed woke up, he'd be gone and nothing would change. He was a wham-bam-thankyou-ma'am type of man and she knew that nothing was going to change that. When the mission was over, and it WOULD be over; she'd make sure of it, he'd hop off on Omega and go back to being an asshole and punching people for money. It was who he was, and she had no intention of changing that. It was just nice, before leaping into the unknown, to pretend that this meant something.

He was a bad, unfixable, bitter old man. He swore and drank and fucked and the only 'cuddling' he did was throwing his arm around a woman's waist to squeeze her tits. He enjoyed killing and he wasn't above letting innocent people to die if it meant he got what he wanted.

But he made good on his promises, and he grinned at her jokes-dirty as they were-, and he always understood what she was talking about when she rambled about her guns and her armor and how she had to aim a little to the left with her Widow to make it accurate because the scope leaned.

Plus he told a damn good war story.

She figured that was why she liked him.

"What're you starin' at?"

She blinked, taken out of her reverie by the course grumble of his voice. He'd only popped his good eye open, and it made him look a lot less intimidating in the blue gloom of her quarters. Her eyes trailed down the scar to his naked chest, and the trail of hair that let to a delightful part of his anatomy. She wanted to say something like 'Eh, it'll do.' but there was a question plaguing her mind now that he was awake, and she needed to know.

"Tryin' to figure out why the fuck you're still in my bed, Massani."

He grunted, rolling over onto his back and stretching a bit.

"I take what I want, Shepard, and I keep it."

She turned that sentence around in her mind some, then she rolled over and closed her eyes. She felt his eyes turn towards her.

"If we survive, maybe I'll let you up for round two."

"Good luck keeping me out, you dumb bitch."

Shepard grinned into her ruined sheets, and fell quick to sleep.