KOIP: Do It To Me

“Alright children, gather round.” Officer Tanya Parker stood at the desk on the far side of the room. The sergeant was a self-proclaimed hard-ass and lived up to her well deserved reputation, though there were times like this one where she allowed her underlings to see her softer side.

Kolyat leaned back in his seat as he waited for the rest of the officers to settle down enough to hear their patrols. Beside him, Burnek tapped his talons on the table and gave Kolyat a slight shake of his head. There was something up with his turian partner. The normally good-natured male was introverted enough to compete on a level that Kolyat claimed for himself. After Sergeant Parker gave them their sector he’d find out what was up, for now Kolyat focused on the human woman that had the floor.

The Sergeant was a tall woman, her skin tone the same shade as the heavily creamed coffee that Shepard drank in the morning. Her hair was black and her eyes a dark brown, she was what Kolyat understood to be of Arabic descent. She was a strong looking woman, though Kolyat wouldn’t personally call her attractive. Not everyone could look like Oriana, he supposed.

“To the rookie who keeps forgetting the importance of citations, don’t,” she made an I-got-my-eyes-on-you gesture to one of the officers in the back of the room. “Looking at you Ikar.” When the others started making various noises to haze their fellow officer, Sergeant Parker lifted a hand to silence the room again. She picked a datapad off of the desk she was leaning on and returned to business. “Alright, kids, let’s get to your rounds. Oluk and Trigane, you’re on 27th and 35th.”

“That’s not our district, Sarg.”

Sergeant Parker made an exasperated expression before flicking through the datapad in her hands. “It isn’t? Well let’s just check where it says that I’m supposed to give a damn.” Looking back up to face the officers in question she stated, “That’s right. It doesn’t. That’s your assignment, suck it up.” She listed through the officers, naming districts to each team until Kolyat and
Burnek’s sector was called out. After a short debriefing she dismissed the group to their jobs and returned to her own.

“Be safe out there,” said Sergeant Parker as the C-Sec officers cleared the room.

Burnek didn’t wait for Koyat to gather his things off of the table before bolting for the door. By the time Kolyat found him at his locker, the turian was already prepared to go.

Placing his belongings into his locker, Kolyat gave his partner a sidelong glance as he wondered, “Is everything alright, Burnek?”

“Yeah,” was the turian’s curt reply. His mandibles fluttered that way they did when he was lying and the absence of his subharmonics was further evidence that he was hiding something. “Everything’s great.”

Knowing not to force the subject, Kolyat nodded in acceptance of the answer before shutting his locker and gesturing for Burnek to lead them to the waiting shuttle. They travelled quietly through the busy Citadel airway traffic, Burnek’s silence weighing down the atmosphere as Kolyat waited for him to be ready to confess what the problem was.

Nearly fifteen minutes later, Burnek sighed. He used the calloused pads of his forefingers to rub his eyes as he finally decided to talk to Kolyat. “I think I’m in serious trouble, Krios.”

Kolyat looked at him then, tilting his head slightly when the sound of Burnek’s subharmonics trilled with uncertainty. Furrowing his brows, he waited for the turian to meet his gaze before he asked, “What kind of trouble, Burnek? What happened?”

“It’s not like that,” Burnek assured him to the overly concerned shine in Kolyat’s eyes. He shook his head, “I’m not in danger or anything. I’m just --” His amber gaze was pointed over Kolyat’s shoulder as he tried to find his words. After a moment he returned his attention to Kolyat. “You and Oriana are in love, right?”

Taken aback by the question, Kolyat blinked in surprise. He took a moment to consider the question before answering with the obvious truth. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

There was a slight desperation in his partner’s amber eyes, a need for answers to questions he hadn’t yet asked. “How did you know?”

Kolyat leaned back into his seat, breaking Burnek’s inquiring gaze as he thought over the question. It was a difficult question to answer, but the determined look in the turian’s eyes demanded a response. “I’m not sure that there’s a better answer than ‘I just did’.” He gave his partner an apologetic look but continued to explain as best he could. “It wasn’t like I got hit in the head and got a love concussion.”

When Burnek coughed out a laugh at the visual, Kolyat shook his head and shrugged. “It was more like the more time I spent with her the more I realized how intense my feelings were.” He looked away from his partner’s curious eyes and stared out of the shuttle’s windshield as they neared the district they would be patrolling.

Sighing, he tried to better elaborate his meaning. “When we sleep, Oriana will start the night on one side of the bed and wake up on the other. She turns up the music really loud and dances when she cleans the apartment.” He chuckled at the memory of him returning home from work one afternoon to find her shaking her bottom as she dusted the entertainment center. The mirth fell slightly from his features as he continued. “Sometimes when my step-mother has really bad nightmares Oriana will cry because she can’t bear the sound of someone else’s suffering.”

Kolyat smiled softly to himself, the warmth of his feelings filling his veins with endorphins that made his heart skip happily. “If I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll watch her sleep for a little while because there’s just something about her that makes me feel whole.” Returning his gaze to Burnek, he admitted, “I didn’t realize how much I love Oriana until I forced myself to imagine my life without her.” Kolyat shook his head, banishing the pain of that thought from his mind. “When I couldn’t imagine my life without her, I just knew.”

Taking in a breath, Kolyat allowed a warm smile to curl the edges of his mouth before he asked, “What’s this about, Burnek?”

The turian shook his head. His mandibles flicked as he pointed his gaze out the window, searching for his words while his subharmonics whirred with too many emotions for Kolyat to accurately identify. After a minute Burnek glanced at Kolyat and asked, “Do you remember that night that we went to Purgatory and ran into Oriana and her friend.”

“I’m a drell, Burnek,” he playfully reminded him. “I remember everything up to the time I first opened my eyes.”

Burnek waved off Kolyat’s jibe and continued to his point. “The asari that Oriana had been with --”

“Mau,” Kolyat supplied.

Nodding, his partner said, “After that night we started seeing each other off and on for a while. A few months ago it started getting serious.”

Kolyat quirked an eyebrow in surprise. They were partners, they worked together day in and day out, this shouldn’t have been news to him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

The turian shrugged. “We weren’t partnered up back then, but before that night at Purgatory I used to be a bit of a lady’s man.” Burnek shook his head as though he couldn’t quite believe what had become of that reputation. “And then I met Mau and something changed.”

To the expectant look that Kolyat was giving him, Burnek explained, “Humans have this ongoing debate over whether or not there’s such thing as soul-mates, but for turians it’s scientifically proven fact. Some turians will go their entire lives searching for their bond-mate and others will find one another in their adolescence. I was one of the few that was happy to just go on about my business without a mate to hold me back.”

“Let’s face it,” he gave Kolyat a smirk. “I love the ladies, always have. Turian, asari, quarian, hell I’ve even hooked up with a few humans, race never mattered to me. I never wanted a bond-mate because I never wanted the sexual escapades to end. But then we went to Purgatory and I started talking to Mau, and it was like something just clicked.”

Surprised for the second time this conversation, Kolyat guessed, “She’s your bond-mate.”

“I think so,” was his distant reply. Burnek blinked hard, his mandibles twitching and his subharmonics vibrating with a mixture of annoyance and something else Kolyat hadn’t yet identified. “I tried to fight it for a long time. For months I’d dodge her calls and attempts to reach me, only to hook up with her out of the blue and stay with her until I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe without her; then I’d disappear again and the cycle would repeat. That was the dynamic of our relationship until a few months ago. She invited me over to blow off some steam one night and I’ve spent every night there ever since.”

“You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you, Burnek,” Kolyat grimaced teasingly at his turian friend, pretending that his next words would hurt him as much as they would hurt his partner. “It sounds like you’re in love.”

“I know,” Burnek groaned, burying his face in his talons.

Smiling at his friend, Kolyat shook his head at Burnek’s dramatic response before asking, “So, why are you in serious trouble?”

“Well,” he sighed, peeling his face out from his hands to meet and hold Kolyat’s inquisitive gaze. “For one thing, she’s only eighty one, going on eighty two. In asari years that means she’s still practically a teenager. She’s only been in the maiden stage for a few decades. We can be together my whole life and she’d still have a good two and a half centuries before hitting the matron stage.”

“Ah,” Kolyat was starting to understand what the problem was. “You’re afraid that she won’t be ready to settle down with you.”

“Not in my lifetime,” confirmed Burnek with a nod. “If she’s my bond-mate like I think she is --like I know she is-- then the next logical step in our relationship would be for me to mark her as mine.”

Kolyat nodded as though he followed. “Logically,” he stated, not really sure how it was the ‘logical’ next step.

Ignoring the uncertainty in Kolyat’s agreeing response, he said, “I never wanted to settle down before, but now that my bond-mate might be too young to want to start a family with me I feel like I’ll miss the best part of what our relationship can be.”

He stared at his friend for a moment. Offering Burnek a slight smile, Kolyat wondered, “Can I make a suggestion?” When the turian eagerly nodded he said, “Maybe you should talk to her about it.” Burnek made a disagreeing sound but Kolyat continued before he could give voice to his doubts. “She’s her own individual person. Statistics and averages don’t define Mau’s feelings or desires. Just because the average asari doesn’t enter the matron stage until she’s over three hundred years old, doesn’t mean that Mau won’t want to start a family with you sooner. But you’ll never know until you’ve both talked about it.”

Burnek was silent for a moment, considering Kolyat’s words, his mandibles flicking as he thought. The silence joined them the rest of the way to their sector. Only when the shuttle had descended onto the landing pad did his turian partner speak again.
“Maybe you’re right.”

Gathering himself out of his seat, Kolyat scoffed, “Don’t sound so surprised.”

A chuckle rumbled from Burnek as he followed Kolyat off of the shuttle and onto the Citadel’s pedestrian crowded streets. “I can count on one hand the amount of times you’ve been right about anything, Krios. On the rare occasion that it happens, it’s a little surprising.”

His subharmonics were whirring with mirth, making Kolyat let the jab slide at least for now.


He could hear the heartwarming sound of Oriana’s violin from the hall outside the apartment. Kolyat smiled to himself as he entered the passcode to the front door and entered their home. Glancing to the expansive windows to the left, he allowed his smile to grow when he found Oriana standing in her usual spot as she practiced with the stringed instrument.

Kolyat didn’t recognize the song she was playing, but it was a sweet melancholic sound. The beautiful tune was heartbreaking and awe inspiring all at the same time, and he knew for whom she was playing. His smile faltered as he looked at the framed photo of his father still resting on the piano’s surface.

It had been several days since Shepard left the Citadel to do some top secret Spectre assignment. Her decision to get back onto the field wouldn’t have bothered him so much if he didn’t know what had pushed her to do it. Their awkward and traumatizing morning with the second human Spectre had broken something inside of Anya. For as long as he’d known her there had always been a shadow in her eyes, but after that day the shadow had darkened. When Anya left for her assignment their goodbye felt so final.

She hadn’t bothered to calm his worry with assurances that she’d be back. Anya had hugged him tightly and confessed that she loved him. She’d left him the apartment and everything in it, only asking that he take care of himself as payment. Kolyat and Oriana both knew that Anya left without the intention of coming back, and now they were just waiting for the call informing them that their worst fears had finally come to pass.

Without kicking off his boots to make himself more comfortable, Kolyat crossed the room to where Oriana was still playing. She was too caught up in her ballad to realize that she wasn’t alone, a common occurrence when she played her emotions. Placing a hand on her shoulder, Oriana jumped in surprise and sharply turned to face her attacker.

Sighing in relief at the sight of him, a soft smile brushed across Oriana’s soft lips as she welcomed him home. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said before standing on the tips of her toes to give him a tender kiss. When she was standing again on the flat of her feet, she wondered, “How was work,” and moved to where her violin case was resting on the piano bench.

Kolyat watched as she put away her precious instrument. Enjoying the sight of her bending forward to shut the case, he answered, “It was uneventful.”

With her violin safely hidden in its case, Oriana straightened back up. She smiled briefly at Kolyat before moving toward the kitchen and wondering, “Hows Burny doing?”

“He’s good.” Following her into the kitchen, Kolyat leaned against the center island and followed Oriana’s movement’s through the kitchen as she started to get dinner ready. “Did you know he and Mau have a thing?”

“A thing?” Oriana stopped what she was doing to meet Kolyat’s curious gaze. She arched an eyebrow, clearly as surprised by this news as Kolyat had been. “What do you mean, ‘a thing’? Is it serious?”

“Very,” he nodded in answer. “Apparently they’re bond-mates.”

“Bond-mates,” Oriana’s jaw fell incredulously. “How come she never said anything?”

Shrugging, he replied, “Probably because Burnek only just realized that he loves her.”

A knowing smile coiled the corners of her lips, and Oriana stated, “With your help I’m guessing.”

“Maybe a bit,” he kept the impish smile from forming on his lips for a second before it unearthed under the weight of her mildly scolding frown. “I’m his partner. Shaking sense into him is part of my job.”

Mhm, she hummed. Oriana’s smile grew as she asked, “And what about you, my handsome drell? Who’s going to shake sense into you?”

Kolyat rounded the island and wrapped his arms around Oriana. “That’s what I have you for, my beautiful human.”

Lightly laughing, Oriana curled her arms around Kolyat’s neck and smiled up at him. “Oh is that what you have me for?”

The grin that came over his lips was teasing as he lowered his mouth down to her neck. Scraping his canines across the arch of her neck, Kolyat rumbled, “Among other things.”

Oriana gripped his shoulders tightly as she sucked in a sharp breath. Gently pushing him a step back, the look in her blue eyes was of desire but her expression was teasingly reprimanding. “You should wash up. I’ll have dinner ready by the time you’re out.”

“Alright,” he sighed, releasing her from his hold so that he could take a step back towards the stairs. “But you’re more than welcome to join me.”

“Tempting,” she grinned. “Maybe I will.”

Kolyat waggled his eyebrows playfully before finding his way upstairs and hitting the shower. By the time he meandered his way back downstairs Oriana had dinner ready on the table. Their table talk revolved mostly around their plan to visit Oriana’s adoptive family soon, a trip she was excited to go on to get her mind off of Shepard and whether or not she was even alive.

He gathered their plates when supper was finished and started cleaning the dishes. As Oriana took a place beside him at the sink to dry the dishes as he washed them, their attention was pulled away by a ring sounding from the office. When he gave Oriana a questioning glance she shrugged that she wasn’t expecting any calls. A pit formed in his stomach. If this call was someone from the Specter offices contacting him to let him know that Shepard was dead, he didn’t know what he was going to do.

Leaving the dishes to soak, Kolyat went to the office and sat down at the private terminal. The screen flickered as it rang, requesting that he accept the incoming transmission. A shaky breath escaped him and before he answered the call he looked up to where Oriana was standing by the poker table, her own doubts and fears obvious in her big blue eyes. She nodded for him to answer and Kolyat forced his hand to press the button that would connect the call.

To his astonishment, when the screen flickered again he was greeted by a familiar face. A woman sat on the other side of the call, a grin on her face as they stared at each other. “Anya,” was Kolyat’s surprised greeting. He inspected Anya’s features closely, shocked to be getting a call from her at all. “You’re alive,” he sounded as incredulous as he felt. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t hear from you again.”

A fond smile lifted the corners of Anya’s mouth as she gazed at him. “Yeah, I’m alive,” her brow quirked as she continued, “and a little insulted that you think I’d die so easily.”

Kolyat shook his head, a weary but apologetic smile on his lips. “Sorry, Anya, it’s just that you may not have left here with your head in the right place.” He watched Anya closely, the smile on his lips growing as he said, “But you’re alive; and coming back home, right?” Gods, he hoped so.

Nodding, Anya said, “Yep, and I have a surprise for you.” She rubbed her hands excitedly, a lopsided grin on her face.

Kolyat gave her curious look obviously, put off by her unusual behavior. Glancing up to where Oriana was grinning happily at the pool table, he let his smile grow a bit more. They’d both been so worried since Anya left for her Specter mission, her return was a relief.

“Is it . . .  what do you humans call it?” His attention was on Oriana as he explained. “The little decorative ornament that you place on shelves, made of glass and filled with water and glitter.”

Oriana smiled as she answered, “Snow globes, Kole.”

He nodded in gratitude and returned his attention to Anya. Smiling, he tried again, “Did you bring me a snow globe?”

Anya laughed and shook her head. “This is much, much better than a snow globe. But, I’m not telling.” She made a motion of zipping her lips and throwing away the key before grinning again.

The expression on Kolyat’s face fell with his concern. He watched Anya as though she might have lost her mind during her travels. After a contemplative moment he finally wondered, “Are you alright, Anya?”

“Yes, of course.” She paused, tilting her head curiously, and asked, “Why do you ask?”

“You’re acting very strangely.”

“I’m happy,” Anya shrugged as though it were nothing. “What, I’ve never been happy?”

Very seriously, Kolyat supplied, “Not in my experience, not like this.”

The smile on Anya’s lips fell a little at his confession. Shrugging again, she confessed, “I found my brother and his family. I have a lot to be happy about.”

His eyes widened with surprise. She and her parents had spent the better part of the last year and a half worrying about her brother. That she’d found him was nothing short of a miracle. His smile returned, double the size. “That’s great news! Have you told your parents?”

“Not yet,” Anya shook her head. “It’s their surprise.”

“So what’s mine?”

Laughing, she commended, “Nice try, but you’re going to have to wait and find out.”

Kolyat rolled his eyes and sighed, playfully annoyed that she wouldn’t just tell him outright what it was. After a moment he asked, “When will you be returning?”

She glanced at the time before answering. “We should be docking at the Citadel in another nine hours.”

“We’ll be there waiting for you,” Kolyat couldn’t help the smile that persisted on his lips. It was good to see Anya alive, more than that; it was good to see her happy. That careless grin was an expression that he’d never seen her wear before, but one he hoped she’d show more often now that she had her brother back. Sighing, he admitted, “It’s good to know that you’re safe, Anya.”

“I’ll see you soon, Kolyat.” Her smile turned departing and the screen blackened a second later.

Looking up from the terminal, Kolyat met Oriana’s gaze and they grinned at each other for a moment as they let the surprise of Shepard’s call wash over them. “She’s coming home,” he said in breathless relief.

“Yeah,” Oriana agreed with a sigh. Her smile turned mischievous as she said, “And we only have nine hours to have a little fun in her hot tub.”

Kolyat returned her roguish grin with a devilish one of his own. “Then let’s not waste anymore time.” He didn’t know how she managed to make his blood feel like fire with that look alone, but there was something about Oriana Lawson that imprisoned him to her so completely.