#garrus just doesn’t talk about that sort of thing now does he. someone anyone needs to tell her shes going to be okay

[lordofthemushrooms]

Literally obsessed with my own perception of Shepard. Obsessed with the things I’m making up in my own head that are not text in the gameplay.

Obsessed with how fucked up her relationship and subsequent breakup with Liara is. Can not stop thinking about her being mentally older than Liara (because of species aging differences since Liara herself says she’s hardly older than a child to the Asari) (and my Shep is around 40) and that causing them issues. Shepard falling so hard for Thane for a million reasons but also because he feels her equal when Liara feels….not that

Going fucking feral over how much Shepard is on the brink of mental collapse during 3 because the universes safety rests with her. But all she can think of at night when she tries to sleep is the very young Asari that she hurt terribly and the man that she loves dying without her.

[felassan]

Highlights and insights from the MELE launch cast & crew reunion panel

[rewatch link] [highlights & insights from the N7 Day 2020 reunion]

In case a text format is better for anyone (in terms of accessibility for example). Cut for length.

Some paraphrasing.

If anyone’s interested in just the line-reading session, it starts at timestamp ~1:04:45.

In addition to the cast and crew from the N7 Day reunion, at this reunion also in attendance were: 

Mac Walters (Project Director for MELE, Lead Writer of the og MET)

Melanie Faulknor (Lead Producer for MELE)

Crystal McCord (Producer for MELE)

Fred Tatasciore (Saren)

Seth Green (Joker)

Kimberly Brooks (Ash)

Ash Sroka (Tali)

This was the biggest reunion / meetup of the cast so far, and some of the cast and crew were meeting for the first time here.

It’s been so long since the og MET that PW & KW are getting to watch their kids experience playing it for the first time

JHale doesn’t play but since MELE she’s been sneaking around Twitch jumping into peoples’ MELE livestreams to lurk, watch and comment a bit

What drew Seth to the character of Joker? The whole concept of the game. He likes games and MET’s mechanics (different trees of adventure, stacking reputation, choices carrying between games) at the time were the most sophisticated that he’d ever heard pitched. He thought this was new and exciting and wanted to be a part of it. For the character they cast him based on his personality traits (i.e. he sounds quite similar to Joker personality-wise)

Would Seth ever want to play Joker again if the opportunity presented itself? Sure, he loves the character, and if the writers ever had more things to explore/expand with Joker he’d be down for it. 

Seth said that it’s a different kind of fan that approach him about this project. The fans have spent many many hours in an intimate exchange with “him” that he hasn’t been a part of, but they experienced it nonetheless. “I’ve hugged a lot of strangers, you know what I’m saying? It’s great, you get an interaction with fans that you never get as a performer in any other experience”

Seth has been a space guy since he was little, it inspires him

With the state of the world the way it is now [covid, masks etc], does Ash think Tali’s story will be more impactful now than it was before? Ash hopes so, and that anything they do here will have a positive impact on a bigger level. Ultimately that’s why most of them do what they do, they want to reach people in deep ways. She hopes Tali is an inspiration in courage, bravery, standing up for what’s right and thinking about the greater good

The [MELE I think] dev team had a last team meeting with Greg Zeschuk, one of the founders of BioWare, who they had invited to it. He was regaling them with stories of the inception of Mass Effect. “You would imagine this sort of well-laid out, drawing boards everywhere... [but] it was basically just a napkin sketch in a Greek taverna with him and Casey going ‘We wanna do a space opera’, and then it took off”

The process of creating lore through development is very organic. A lot of it comes from character and story development. It builds up over the course of the game’s development. They did the codex entries at the end, the idea being that if they saved them for as late as they could, then they could pull from the story, characters and meaningful moments, and build them from there

PW wrote a bunch of the codex entries, elevator banter & lots of little bits of lore. They describe their time on the og MET as being a “baby writer”. They originally came in after Mac had back surgery and a junior writer was needed to fill in. “It was really fun, it was us sitting in a room together going ‘What do you think a hanar or a krogan thinks about this or that’?” For a first project for them this was an amazing experience - the world building itself creatively with all these awesome people

They tried to add multiplayer in every game but only got it to work in ME3

They had a lot of plots laid out in ME1 that they called “global plots”. These were outside the core critical path and would take players from planet to planet, and were sprawling stories. They pulled out a lot of really interesting concepts and ideas from these that did make it into the game, but all of the global plots ended up getting cut due to time. Mac still has old diagrams and spreadsheets which detailed how all of these would have come together

Q. If you all had to take a long-distance road-trip with two squadmates, who would you take and why? PW: “Jack and Mordin. Mordin because the drive would never lack for things to talk about at length quickly, Jack because you know you wouldn’t pay for the room. You wouldn’t know how you’d get the room, but you wouldn’t be paying for it.” Courtenay: “I’d take Mordin because there’d be singing, and FemShep just to have this thing - happen. In the room that I get for free.” JHale at this point fistpumped while saying “Yeess” [then I think what she said was “steaming hot”]

Seeing as asari are long-lived, how open is Ali to one day reprising her role as Liara? “She’s a character very close to my heart, it was such a great opportunity. In some games that we work on the character has already been created or voiced by someone else, but this was really a group effort. When I first went into the booth, the only thing I’d seen of her was a sort of like, rendering, and we slowly kind of came to her voice and presence. I would love to bring Liara back any time... hey, she can live a really long time guys. :D”

Caroline and people who do what she does (Creative Performance Director) are so critical to the quality of games. Caroline: “This group of people are extraordinary. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary cast. Every [recording] session was new and challenging. It was a labor of love. I’m tearing up right now thinking about it. I’m remembering my last session with Jen, she was the last session, just sobbing and sobbing”. When JHale was trying to say the lines of Shepard’s goodbye with Garrus, a line hit her like a tonne of bricks and she was in tears and was like “Shepard does not cry”. “It took me a second, I got it out and took another run at it, it was in there but stuffed down as it should have been, and I finished the line [and there was silence in the booth when usually Caroline would have been talking to give direction or instruction] Did we lose her? Did Skype crash?” and it transpired that what had happened was that Caroline was in floods of tears

ME was the first time Keythe had ever come across branching dialogue. “Normally when we work on a script and it’s from page 1 to 100. In this it was get to page 5, then go back to page 2 and play it a little differently. The skill and the fun and joy of it was to be able to go back and play a scene in a different way, with different writing, with different outcomes. This was not only a challenge but a real treat. So to all the writers who dreamed up how this build-your-own-adventure plays out, you have my undying respect. It was a real pleasure”

VEDA is a proprietary system that BW use to record the dialogue, which is the closest way of having it feel like having people in the booth together (it’s all digital and VAs get to hear the line someone else has done in that scene). Caroline really pushed for this because of the amount of time etc that was wasted due to lack of this sort of thing on ME1. William: “It was a god send for me, thank you, getting to hear a cue from Jen or Mark.” Ali: “Us being able to bounce off each other helps make it more real. This for me was the most real acting experience on a game I had ever had - the writing being so good, Caroline helping us through, being able to hear each other.” JHale was always early coming in to record relative to the others so only got to use VEDA a few times - a bit of Liara content and the scene with Anderson towards the end. “Those two times, oh my god it was amazing”. VEDA being a thing also helps from a scheduling standpoint

Seth and Tricia Helfer (EDI) only got to be in the booth actually together 1 time, to record/shoot a piece of promotional video. “We actually got to record a scene together and we were like ‘oh my god this is the best thing ever’. It was great, even though I had to stand on a stool. She’s the best”

Seth: “As an actor, the kind of opportunity to do this kind of material in games just didn’t exist.” Fred: “Oh, never! I had never had a villain part that was complicated like that. In a game? Never before, it was really interesting”

Raphael always goes back to the fact that ME brought more women into gaming than any other game before it. “The writing and the complexity of the relationships gave us so much ballast”. “This set this apart from running, shooting, gunning, looting”

JHale: “What I noticed in the times before when I got to be around fans, there was a huge hunger among women in the gaming world for something they could really jump into. They were starving for something which fed them what they deserved and needed”

Mac: “[praising Caroline] Caroline would often come to us as writers and challenge us and say, as an example, ‘Do we really need another male character to do this? Why are we writing another male character for this?’ She pushed that very early and to the betterment of everything we created”

PW: “Karin and Cookie and all of the editors across the trilogy, [were critical in] making sure that Shepard sounded consistent - [especially since] we had a large writing team, writers came and went, Mac is the only one with a significant writing contribution on each of the games”

PW: “[on game dev] It’s a process of getting hundreds of people pointed in the same direction, all believing that this is something worth doing”

Ash: “Having all the different possibilities and avenues, going back to play them all out in the different ways [really helped to round the character of Tali out and make her feel like a natural person]”.

VAs only get paid for the original recording sessions, not again (as in they don’t any royalties or anything from something like the remaster)

In MELE, they left all the original credits at the end of each game in

Fred: “It’s creating in five dimensions [because of all the outcomes and relationships etc]”. Seth: “The cool thing is that the audience feels that. They’re immediately struck by how dense, thought-out, prepared and planned the entire universe is”

How was it for the new MELE devs coming onto this? Crystal: “I knew it [the series and fans’ love for it] was big, but I didn’t know it was BIG! Working on MELE there was this infectious excitement. Being part of it was so exciting.” Melanie: “I came on at ME3, I had a 3 or 4 year honeymoon period with BioWare. Coming onto MELE, I’m getting really emotional. One of my first meetings originally was going into a cinematic review for an epic Tali scene in ME3”. Crystal: “On MELE, we had an hour or 2 every day where the team came together to play the game. In those reviews, a lot of the devs who worked on the original would tell all these stories. It was really fun to hear all the inside stories on ME’s creation and be a part of that”

DC: “Should this unit get vaccinated?” Ash: “Of course”

How do they think ME will be viewed in the next 10-20 years, what do they think its legacy will be? A piece of history, ground-breaking. It broke down some barriers and opened doors for people. It’s a powerful, powerful community. It’ll continue to age quite well and be enjoyed by a new generation, it’s original and evergreen and there’s a lot in it that people go back to. There’s a lot of universal things in it (personal experiences, like there will always be love, people fighting to belong, trying to make sense of their pasts etc)

JHale and Alix did the “I love you Shepard, now go save the world again” Shep-Sam exchange and both got teary. It was then Seth’s turn to line-read: “Jesus Christ, now that I’m good and choked up, fucking mess”. Ali was also actually crying from it

Seth: “It can’t be overstated, this community is so large and global, it is one of the most powerful fandoms that I’ve ever been greeted with. Thank you”. Ash: “It’s the most amazing group of fans ever. We’re all so grateful”

Some funny anecdotes/stories:

PW didn’t realize that Alix could do different accents. They remember a time when they were listening in the booth and an Alliance soldier was complaining about the gear had been given. They said “Wow that’s really good, who is that?” and the VO producer said “That’s Alix, Patrick”, “because she wasn’t doing her [normal British accent but was doing a Californian accent instead]. Alix roasted me later for not recognizing her voice and never let me heard the end of it”

Alix: “[on Sam’s toothbrush] Caroline’s like, ‘So then she pulls her toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘What? Sorry? A toothbrush?’ and obviously it’s funny now as everyone knows that Sam’s thing is her toothbrush. Caroline’s like ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta like, flirt, over the toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘Who wrote this - a frickin toothbrush, are you kidding me? Really guys?’ ANYWAY. I was wrong and it worked. :D”

Fred: “I remember a 12 year old kid coming up to me and being like [flat tone] ‘Oh yeah. I killed you’.”

Keythe: “The other assasin I play is Kellogg in Fallout 4. People come up to me like ‘Omg. I love you so much. And then I fucking KILLED you!’”

Courtenay once went out to dinner in NZ with a few prominent people from the Game of Thrones cast. “Everyone around was making a big deal out of it like ‘Omg, it’s so-and-so from GoT’. I was feeling a bit like ‘Hi, I’m here, just nobody’. And I looked around in the restaurant and there's one guy in the corner and he’s got an N7 shirt on and he’s just looking at me like [knowing look, does a peace sign]. And I’m like ‘I got one! I love you guys!’”

PW: “I have a question for the cast members, because I don’t know if JHale has done this to all of you or if she just does it to the devs. Show of hands if Jen has ever made you do push-ups.” JHale: “It’s just you guys”

Karin: “One of my favorite editing files that I ever had was a ME file. It was before Seth was coming in for a session. I opened it up and it was just 20, 25 lines with the word ‘Shit’, over and over again, and I was like, ‘This file is perfect, I don’t need to do anything to it, have fun!’”

Seth: “Didn’t we do a track that’s like 60 seconds of laughing? Escalating laughing? I don’t know about other actors but for me getting into a laughing fit is kind of like trying to get into a crying fit, it takes the same level of commitment, you start to follow a path until like you’re hysterically uncontrollably laughing. I remember looking through the glass, and I’m deep in it at this point, and I make eye contact, and I can see from the other side of the booth and they’re like [making ‘okay you can stop’ now gestures] - ‘Like that’s plenty, we got it’ and I was like ‘okay, okay [dying]’”

JHale: “The craziest thing Mark and I had to deal with was how many times we had to say ‘I should go’”. Mark: “We also, Caroline and I tended to use that as short hand when I needed to go to the bathroom”

The panel host: “The first time I interviewed Ali was a decade ago. She did the ‘I’ll flay you alive with my mind’ line halfway through, it was my first interview and I literally fell out of my seat [from being star-struck]”

Ash line-read Tali’s drunk omni-tattoo scene and in response DC said “I totally get why people wanna romanticize all these characters :D”. Karin: “We’ve had more than one person come up to us and show us actual tattoos that looked like that”

[source]

[dianapocalypse]

so I’m having a very interesting (for me) mass effect legendary edition playthru and i wanna talk about it even tho no one but me will be interested so UNDER THE CUT WE GO!

this probably isn’t interesting to anyone but me but I wanted to write it down for posterity lol

so this time around, I spent a LONG TIME staring at the character creator, not even making anything. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make my ‘main’ Shepard, play Jane just for the new model in ME1, or make a new Shep entirely. and if I did the last one, did I want to play differently this time??

i ended up making a shepard that was PRETTY similar to my main one. they’re both vanguards (didn’t want to learn a new kit bc my ability to hold a controller is pretty limited these days), both earthborn, same haircut but different overall appearances. this time I went war hero instead of sole survivor, since I’ve played those sidequests so many times at this point. I hit start and named her Kieran, not really knowing what I was going for with this shep and expecting I’d mostly make the same choices, romance garrus, etc

so the first few hours of the game I played p much like I always do. more paragon options than usual, but I attribute that more to me changing than character choices. I also started picking the middle options I always ignore just to see what they are. grabbed Liara, did bring down the sky, nothing new or unusual until I start talking to garrus.

is it just me, or does garrus.... kinda hit different in 2021? don’t get me wrong, still one of my favorite fictonal characters of all time, but also... garrus is a loose canon police officer who thinks regulations that, presumably, are in place to protect peoples’ rights, should be ignored for what he deems is the greater good. while we as players know garrus’s morals are in the right place, uh... if I met someone like that in real life I’d expect them to be a complete jackass. im also american so that contributes to my ill feelings towards police officers, and c-sec in the games is generally portrayed as being a much less awful organization than the american police state, but I’ve definitely gone from always supporting Garrus when he thinks a fucker needs to die to being like... garrus rules are there for a reason, people have RIGHTS

and then like. kieran shepard is earthborn, she was in gangs. she... probably doesn’t like cops either? my last shep was, too, but tbh I didn’t think about it all that much. for the first time I’m playing a shepard that does not trust garrus and that’s WILD.

so then I’m doing sidequests on the citadel, and earthborns get a gang member from their past who tries to blackmail shep into busting one of their members out of prison. for the first time ever, I actually didn’t have the paragon or renegade points necessary to resolve the situation in a ‘good’ way for me. I got to the end of it, and my only options were to bribe him to leave me alone, or shoot him.

i’ll say in my defense, I thought shoot him would be more ‘shoot him in the leg to show him i meant business’, but shep straight up killed him, and I was like, woah. I’m gonna have to figure out how to make THAT work with this character arc!

and the turian cop who he wants you to talk to, he’s right there, and says “wow, I guess maybe the first human spectre will get things done!’ or something, indicating like. that was the Right Thing To Do by his standards. just kill a dude in public for threatening blackmail.

so in role playing games, i try to justify decisions my characters make, even if it’s a decision that I didn’t make on purpose--it’s more fun for me to try to gather these disparate character choices and cohere them into a character than to try to get it ‘right’ for the character i’m playing, if that makes sense. so here, even tho I was definitely not intending to kill that dude, I wanted to find a way to make it work for Kieran Shepard. and it’s kinda ended up shaping the whole way I’m playing her, and it’s cool and interesting bc this is a shepard unlike any I’ve played before! i’m always so focused on min/maxing my character, especially their paragon/renegade points to get the ‘best’ outcomes, that ive never been faced with something like that.

so I think this is where I’ve landed:

Kieran Shepard grows up on the streets, she does not trust authority. all she has is her crew, and herself, more importantly. she does some bad shit, she gets into trouble, she’s strong-headed and stubborn. later in life, she gets recruited to the alliance military. frankly, I think she keeps a lot of the same attitude and distrust of authority, but this is a paycheck, and I think since the Tenth Street Reds are getting really human supremacist and xenophobic, she gets out and needs to go Somewhere that her past won’t follow her--space. off earth.

mostly she’s a shithead at first. gets into trouble with the brass all the time. but she’s got a really good head for tactics. she knows how to think like a merc gang, she thinks of strategies in simulations that higher ups wouldn’t ever consider. think like. star trek 2009 captain kirk basically lmao.

and then anderson gets a hold of her. for the first time in her life, she has like, a Parental Figure, someone who knows she can do better and expects her to. and she FLOURISHES. suddenly she’s got motivation, she’s straightening up. she’s positioned on elysium and the skyllian blitz starts, and one thing she knows how to do, something she’s always been good at, it surviving, and rallying people around her to fight, not roll over and die. her skills from her life as a gangster marry with her skills as a soldier and she rallies the colonists to beat back the invasion. with her STREET SMARTS!

now she’s a war hero, and she’s starting to feel the impostor syndrome set in. she gets a medal, she gets accolades, promotions--she’s just a scrappy former criminal and she doesn’t deserve this. she doesn’t deserve any of it, or anderson’s regard. she starts spending her time trying to be The Perfect Soldier to make up for her past. for the first time, it’s a point of embarrassment to her, not a point of pride. it’s public record, sure, but she needs her entire existence to refute it. she needs to be Commander Shepard now, she needs to be The First Human Spectre, she needs to be PERFECT.

and then Finch shows up, and he’s threatening her, he wants to drag her back into the Life and he’ll blackmail her if she doesn’t comply. she knows if she bribes him he’ll be back in a month for more, he’ll never stop. so she panics. she shoots this guy, kills him in cold blood, in public. old habits die hard. and the cop practically CONGRATULATES her for it.

kieran, now, is in full blown panic mode about Who She Is. she is very much not a fan of the ‘law and order’ of C-Sec, but she’s also not a fan of the spectres and how they operate, but now she’s becoming the thing she as a teen would have hated the most. and she’s being congratulated for it. can she be trusted with this kind of responsibility?? can anyone???

anyway that’s the last thing I did but I think... honestly? the only character that could help her sort out these feelings? is kaidan alenko.

so. i think this is it. this is the playthru i finally romance kaidan.

[sasskarian]

Fanfic Masterpost ... sort of

In honor of Fanfic Appreciation, I put together a list of my fics for anyone who’d like to look 

Under the cut, because length

Dragon Age:

After the Glitter Fades (Glitterverse):  Hawke x Fenris, modern AU. (Long fic, WIP) Hawke and Fenris are movie stars in a torrid love affair. Fenris has a mysterious past. Also Cassandra is investigating a murder mystery? Varric, as ever, is a delight. (*this is borrowed from @nug-juggler‘s excellent and shorter summary!)

Memorable quote:   Fenris observed candidly was something sacred. For a moment, Hawke fiercely wished she were an artist. The scene in front of her was too… every word she could think of— beautiful, elegant, breathtaking— was trite, a pale description of perfection. 

In the Heart of the Woods: Lavellan x Fairbanks rarepair. (WIP) Inquisitor Lavellan’s heart is broken by a certain Commander, Fairbanks has an appreciation for her, and a love story blooms like elfroot in the Emerald Graves.

Memorable quote:   This kiss, she thinks, two mouths moving in perfect unison, is a spell of its own. Not quite love, not yet, but close enough she can pretend it is. Hope wells up, a solid thrum beating in counterpoint to her heart, and for one perfect moment, the world just bows down and… stands still. All that exists, all that ever has existed or ever will exist is wrapped up right here, right now, in Fairbanks’ lips on hers. Motes of dust turn golden in the sunbeams splashing through the roof, and a touch— his thumb, her cheek— says a million more words than words ever could.

Yesterdays: Surana x Zevran, mild Surana x Alistair pining. Post Origins, complete. A Warden’s sacrifice means something only as long as someone remembers it. A king looks back, balancing regrets with happiness.

Memorable quote:   With a half-sob, he realizes he’s forgotten the sound of her voice. Oh, he remembers how it made him feel, all those years ago, all the glorious, shining moments where happiness dwells still. But what she truly sounded like, what sounds she made as she buried herself in books, the snap of her magic, the low buzz of her and Zevran whispering in their tent, all of that is gone. He knows it happened, but the memory is lit dimly in his mind, a torch burned too low to be flame but not low enough for embers yet.

If You Ever Did Believe (for my sake):  Lavellan x Cullen. (On temporary hiatus) A wary Commander. A lost Dalish mage. Two hearts beating alone and exhausted on a battlefield, their only rest coming from each other.

Memorable quote:   “Does your Maker hate us so much?” Isera asked bitterly, and for a moment, Cullen felt as though years had rippled, bringing his past self— still clanking through the halls of Kinloch Hold in Templar plate— and his current together. He’d asked Ser Greagoir the same question once, after a Harrowing went wrong and the body of a former apprentice lay at their feet. So much potential wasted, so much fear in the mages’ eyes after that. For once, Greagoir had shown a hint of emotion, clapping Cullen’s shoulder briefly before walking away, but hadn’t answered.

Voiceverse:  Lavellan x Solas/Dread Wolf. (WIP) Building off of the great works of @khirsahle and @athreehundredthirtythree. All mages are born with a soulmate--a voice they hear in the darkness of the Fade all their lives. The lucky ones find their soulmates and forge a bond strong enough to threaten the very foundations of the Chantry. At least, that's what they claim. So what happens when a Dalish mage hears the voice of their most reviled and feared god shaping her dreams? 

Memorable quote:   Accompanying the thundering voice, great fissures ruptured around her hiding spot, green light streaking upward as they gathered into a roiling cloud. A wave of raw sound— howls, cries, pleas— rolled over her, forcing her to her knees. Iveani clapped her hands over her ears, losing her own scream among the agony thundering through the Fade. All caution, all her hard-won lessons about walking the Fade, vanished into the back of her mind under the need to simply ride out the explosion and survive.

Mass Effect:

Home is Where You Are: Ryder x Jaal (WIP). Ryder didn’t cross two galaxies and 600 years in search of love. But damn if she didn’t find it anyway.

Memorable quote:   “I should take a shower,” he mumbled, as the same time as Sara said, “Would you like to stay?” Both of them broke off, staring at the other, and she laughed nervously. That feeling was back, the one from the tech lab, fragility and strength and affection turned fierce and bright tumbling over and over one other.

A Song of Sea and Stars: Garrus x Shepard x Thane (WIP). Our favorite turian badboy sees right through the mask the galaxy’s most famous Commander projects. Neither of them expected to fall in love on a host of impossible missions. And both are taken by surprise by a pious Drell who steals both their hearts.

Memorable quote:   (He opens his eyes, shocked how it feels to look into her face, intimate and hungry. He hazily notices that up close, her eyes are thulium-gray. There's a hot, tight knot in his chest and she's pressed so close, he thinks he could count each faint freckle on her face.) (They look like tiny stars.) (…there are twenty-eight on her right cheek. Thirty on her left. And fourteen, right across the bridge of her nose.) (Those are his favorite. They remind him of his own markings.)

the sound of shattering glass: Generic Shepard, post-Tuchanka, pre-Citadel II. The Shroud explodes, taking a beloved friend with it. Shepard only has herself to blame.

Memorable quote:   “Damn Reapers,” he said, striving for nonchalance. “Always throwing us around.” “Banged us up pretty good,” she agreed, and he knew she wasn’t talking about their bumps and bruises. “So what do we do about them?” “Get back on our feet. Keep fighting.” Garrus hummed as she shifted closer, pressed her forehead against his neck. “Maybe find a way to use some really big canons I spend half my time adjusting.”

Star Wars:

He Might Like That: Mandalorian x Cara Dune pining. So they argue. So they took down Gideon, and have a magic green frog baby older than both of them. That doesn’t make them a thing. Does it?

Memorable quote:   He tunes back into the not-so-friendly argument in time to hear Greef splutter. “You trash talked while holding hands! If that’s not flirting, I’m a kowakian monkey lizard.” “It was arm wrestling, not holding hands,” Din points out mildly. 

Star by Star:  Post TRoS. Ben x Rey pining, Finn x Rey x Poe. Can three hopeless idiots in love fill a wound as deep as the death of a dyad? Maybe not, but they’re out to try anyway.

Memorable quote:   “You know,” Poe whispers, a glint of mischief in his eyes, “if we ever did tell him we loved him, he’d probably sleep right through it.” Rey touches her fingers to his lips, tracing the shape of his questioning smile. It’s an invitation to play, that smile. A careful offer of love, of comfort. And though she’s not sure if he can really understand when even she doesn’t, she’s finally ready to try a little. 

Counting The Days (Since Exegol): Finn x Rey x Poe, Ben x Rey. Its been 42 days since Palpatine’s death. 42 long days since she felt the surge of light in Ben Solo. And in her dreams, something whispers on the edge of the Force. But she’s shut it down too tightly to hear it. 

Memorable quote:   True to form, Poe can’t resist the urge to kiss away Finn’s troubles whenever possible, and Rey looks away to give them a moment. Some love stories work out, yes, and she loves Finn and Poe more than almost anything else. But that doesn’t stop the way bitterness floods her mouth as the memory of Ben surfaces, and it isn’t until Poe gently squeezes her knee (and she throttles back the near-instinctive urge to break his fingers from a lifetime of fending off handsy scavengers on Jakku) that she comes back to the moment. His brow furrows and she reaches for him, smoothing out the lines of his frown with her thumb. “I’m okay,” she says, answering his unspoken question. It’s mostly a lie, but she has to say it. Most days, she’s okay enough.

A Language Made for Lovers: SWTOR (NSFW). Torian Cadera x Bounty Hunter, gender neutral. Reflections on love and marriage under the glow of hyperspace.

Memorable quote:   He murmurs in your ear, words that should sound harsh in that still-new tongue scalding your mouth, molding you from aruetii to mandalorian. But the love in his voice softens them, steeps them in warmth and adoration. Still the language of a hunter, of those brave souls willing to be reforged, but with a gentle side, a language reserved for lovers. Words like cyare and riduur, words that mean I love you and forever and home.

Malicious Compliance: SWTOR (NSFW). Malavai Quinn x Sith Warrior, gender neutral. Far away, in an apartment no one knows about, a Sith Lord plays dire games of control... and trust.

Memorable quote:   It takes a man with the courage of an entire fleet of Mandalorians to love a Sith, and oh, how he loves you. Like you hung the moons and the stars and all the spaces between. Like you are his other half, like loving you is his sole purpose in life, does Malavai Quinn love you. Your old masters spoke nothing of this, of this enraging hunger gnawing at your bones and curling into the hollows of your rib cage. ... Is it really even love if you don’t want to devour him just a little?

Misc:

Tumblr Prompts: Grab bag of every fandom and series listed above. Prompts filled originally here on tumblr.

Visual Files: Collections of art and commissions from talented friends and artists here on tumblr.

Every Beautiful Thing: Crimson Peak. Thomas x Edith, Edith x Alan. Edith learned, in the dark halls of Allerdale, not to take ghosts lightly. But still she waits, every year, for a chance to see Thomas again. Until the night their son tells her he can see him too.

Memorable quote:   Snow heralds nothing but pain in Edith’s world: first her mother’s funeral, smothered in fat white flakes wet on her lashes like tears, then her father’s. Smaller ones, then, rain slowly freezing and scattering on the ground; the ones that night at Allerdale were the smallest yet, more ice pellet than snow. Jagged, hateful things scraping at her with a cold that burned through skin and encased bone.…God, how she has come to hate the snow.

Where I Can’t Follow: Co-authored by @suspendnodisbelief. show!Witcher, mild Geralt x Jaskier. (Temporary hiatus) Drawing from a variety of inspiration, including greek mythos. Geralt takes a blow meant for Jaskier, finally granted the death by battle he expects Witchers to end by. And Jaskier is not having it, at all. It’s his turn to save Geralt, even if he has to walk the entire bloody underworld to do it.

Memorable quote: “Geralt, get up. Come on, open your eyes. You’re going to upset Roach if you keep this up, and she’ll bite me. You know you aren’t allowed to be dead, because Yennefer didn’t give you permission, and neither did the Princess, and I’m pretty sure they both outrank you.”  

[octerminal]

I’ve talked before about how Nadia being Earthborn is the central reason she’s renegade leaning, but I really want to get into it again because I’ve been listening to Hadestown a lot recently and that always makes me think of Nadia because the musical touches on how traumatizing poverty is. And also just because, well, I always want to talk about Nadia.

But before I can do that, I have to talk about a few other things first.

(This is going to be niche and also super self-indulgent, but it’s my blog, so who cares. Note that because of what both Hadestown and the Earthborn background entail, this is going to get slightly political. But again, it’s my blog, so who cares.)

Generally speaking, Mass Effect has an issue with downplaying trauma. Ashley, Tali, Garrus, and James all go through the traumatic experience of being sole (or almost sole) survivors. Tali goes through this twice, because the comics show that before she even met Shepard she lost the team she’d been traveling with. (And that’s not even counting the fact she also loses a chunk of her team on Freedom’s Progress. They use this trope with her a lot.) Liara loses her mother in the first game and she has almost no reaction. Shepard dies in the beginning of the second game and spends the rest joking about it, with very few opportunities to express anything but humor over the situation.

People respond to trauma differently, and the game is also told primarily from Shepard’s point of view, so consequently we only see what Shepard sees. All of these characters likely grieved in private, and they definitely do carry scars (literal and figurative) from what they’ve gone through. But I also think that Mass Effect likes making characters go through objectively traumatic things without fully considering how someone might act coming out of it. In fairness, that’s the fun of fanfic, and I also do think everyone on the Normandy has some degree of experience in compartmentalizing because they simply don’t have the time to sit down with their feelings. (A lot of them are also just averse to doing this.)

But exploring that trauma is what I’m interested in the most, and that’s how I approached Nadia. Earthborn is my favorite background for that reason. It’s not a single event that’s shaped their life thereafter, but a sustained stressful environment they endure for years and only escape once they sign up with the Alliance. And in that regard, Nadia rather sees it as trading one cage for another, but that’s neither here nor there.

Like, to go back to Hadestown (I swear I’m not going to write Hadestown meta on this blog), “When the Chips are Down” is one of my favorite numbers because it so accurately describes Nadia’s response to poverty. “How can you expect me to care about another person and put their wellbeing above my own, when doing that will result in my own death? How can you expect me to trust another person, when that could result in my own death? How are you going to lecture me on having no morals when if I had prioritized morality, I never would have survived?” (This is something I love bouncing off Kaidan, but I’ll get to that later.)

In other words, and this is an incredibly obvious thing to say, poverty is traumatizing and violent. It is an incredibly violent thing to put another human being through, to make them worry for their basic safety, to live their day to day in a constant limbo of uncertainty that permeates every facet of their life. Will you be able to eat today? Will you be able to sleep in a safe environment? Can you trust this person you’ve never met? Will trusting them endanger what little safety you’ve managed to achieve? How much money do you have? How long can you make that money last? Where will you be tomorrow? How about the day after?

This is something that leaves its mark on anyone it touches. It’s hard enough for an adult to plan for the future when they don’t have the luxury of knowing how they’ll even survive the week; when you’re a child, and that sort of stress is all that you’ve known, how do you even imagine a better life when you’ve known nothing different?

Before I get any further, I want to pause for a moment. Something that’s always been curious to me are the codex entries for Earth. Here’s a portion of ME1′s codex:

Here’s a portion of ME3′s codex:

(Written transcripts of the complete codex entries at the links.)

In both of them, they talk about how humanity is in a new golden age. A lot of pollution and common diseases have been eliminated. The colonies have brought in more resources. There's even been some correction to the damage early climate change caused. Then the Fire Nation—I mean, Reapers, attacked and ruined all of this. Except, take a closer look at ME1′s codex:

“While every human enjoys longer and better life than ever, the gap between rich and poor widens daily. [...] Less fortunate regions have not progressed beyond 20th century technology, and are often smog-choked, overpopulated slums.”

This seems incompatible with the idea of Earth being in a golden age. How can Earth be thriving if the class disparity is growing, not narrowing? How can Earth be thriving if entire swaths are still "smog-choked” and using centuries old outdated technology?

It’s not incompatible if the idea is that Earth has entered a golden age only for the ones who can afford it. And this is the reality Earthborn Shepards were raised in: the idea that their suffering is an unimportant, insignificant underbelly to an otherwise “prospering” homeworld.

So, resuming with that in mind: the way Nadia sees it is that to allow poverty to exist is an inherent societal failure that reflects on the government. This is why Nadia has no loyalty to the Alliance, and why she doesn’t trust them. This is why she subsequently has no loyalty to the Council, and why she doesn’t trust them, either. It doesn’t matter that the Alliance and the Council weren’t personally responsible for her childhood, because they’re still governments. She knows that governments will lie and exploit and allow for people like her to fall through the cracks if it will benefit them. She knows they will broadcast only the best of what they have to offer while conveniently pretending people like her don’t exist.

Like, personal politics aside, as shown above with the codex entries, this is just...canon. And Thane’s loyalty highlights poverty on the Citadel through Mouse and the concept of “duct rats,” so we know that it exists there, too. How the Council presumably feels about poverty on their station is outlined if you speak to Avina on the Citadel in the second game:

AVINA: Asari futurists believe poverty cannot be eliminated without “cornucopia” technology, which will create anything the user desires. Such technology is unknown outside science fiction.

Essentially: yeah, unfortunately, poverty exists on the station, but what can you do? Believing poverty is avoidable is actually utopian and therefore unrealistic, sorry! 

But when you meet Anoleis on Noveria as Earthborn, he can literally tell you poverty doesn’t exist on Sur’Kesh. (And sure, he could be lying, and we have no proof either way. It doesn’t erase the fact that, at the very least, the existence of widespread poverty is something that even a corrupt and money embezzling salarian thinks is an easy jab.)

ANOLEIS: My homeworld is clean. Poverty is non-existent. If you take some perverse pride in that overheated, acid-washed slum, that is your business.

There’s nothing about the Alliance and poverty that I know of¹, which makes sense considering the main branch of the Alliance we see throughout the games is its military branch. There are still plenty of instances in the trilogy where the Alliance does exploit the vulnerable, or attempts to cover up their self-inflicted shortcomings. An obvious one is with Kaidan and Conatix; Kaidan literally tells you the Alliance is the one who “made mistakes.” That in their haste, they allowed a man to brutalize children for the sake of research. And when it backfired, they sealed the documents and pretended it never happened.

UNC: The Negotiation is one of my favorite ME1 missions for this reason, too—it highlights a part of the Alliance the series doesn’t really focus on otherwise. Darius tells you that the entire reason he’s operating in the region at all is because the Alliance is the one who set him up there. 

DARIUS: You see this gun? This is your gun. Your military set me up here, and now it wants to pretend it doesn’t know me! But I know the truth. The Alliance needed me here! So treat me with the respect I deserve!

SHEPARD: You said we set you up. Did the Alliance give you weapons?

DARIUS: After the batarians were driven out of the Verge, the Alliance wanted to stabilize the region. I had the strongest syndicate in the area. They gave me the weapons and money I needed to take over.

After the mission, Hackett implies the entire reason he sent renegade Shepard to cover a diplomatic negotiation is because he expected and wanted them to kill Darius, because he was now more trouble than he was worth.

HACKETT: I’m sorry that you were unable to negotiate with Darius peacefully. His death is regrettable. Nevertheless, the resulting chaos will create a power vacuum that makes future raids upon our miners unlikely.

SHEPARD: You didn’t think I’d negotiate with him. You wanted me to kill him.

HACKETT: Sometimes extreme measures must be taken to ensure humanity’s safety. Or did you think you were the only one willing to break the rules to get the job done?

(Link, so you can watch the mission yourself.)

None of this is me saying the Council and the Alliance have no redeemable features whatsoever, or that they have never contributed positively to galactic wellbeing. It’s just me citing instances in canon that support why Nadia has the opinion she does of them, and why she’s not exactly incorrect in having them. 

So, to loop this back around to Kaidan? As I said, he’s not a stranger to government-level negligence. But Kaidan had a much different reaction than Nadia did, and this is something that absolutely fascinates her once she finds out.

Before that, though: the two of them don’t really hit it off in the beginning—though they’re both still professional—and this is mainly due to Nadia being, well, Nadia. She is not a people person and she never tries to be, which consequently makes her off-putting to most people. On her end, she’s generally unimpressed and uninterested in the people around her. She sees a lot of them as puzzles to be solved and then to move on from, or threats to assess.² The rare times someone does pique her interest enough to act on it, she still prefers to not linger around for long. So, you know, just general unhealthy behavior.

So, Eden Prime is illuminating for them both. Like, on Kaidan’s end: Nadia comes off as callous. She doesn’t care about the colonists, she doesn’t care about Jenkins’ death. On Nadia’s end: Kaidan comes off as naive. How has he been a marine for this long and she has to tell him to suck it up after someone dies? (This is one of the reasons why she didn’t want to work with regular marines again; in my canon, Anderson had to needle her³ into accepting the Normandy position.)

But the truth of it is that the reason Nadia comes off as callous is because she’s thoroughly desensitized. Like, when you grow up poor, on the streets, and in a gang? You’re both witnessing and being put through a lot of traumatizing situations. Akuze, of course, only adds onto this. There’s this one dialogue option in the beginning of the second game when Miranda and Jacob are assessing Shepard’s memory, and while Nadia doesn’t take this option in canon, it is how she feels:

JACOB: You enlisted, and you survived a thresher maw attack that wiped out the rest of your team. Do you remember that?

SHEPARD: Yeah, I remember it. Everyone screaming, gunfire, blood everywhere. I was the only one focused on survival.

Paragon Shepard focuses entirely on the other marines: how they were their friends, how something like that can destroy you if you let it.

Renegade Shepard barely thinks of anyone else at all. There were fifty other marines on Akuze, and renegade Shepard thinks they survived simply because they were the only one focused on it. For Nadia, that’s because that’s what her entire life has already been until that point.

Look, there are a lot of different ways to play renegade; it runs a much larger gamut than paragon, in my opinion. Nadia is more of a neutral renegade. She’s not particularly bigoted, just dispassionate and apathetic⁴. She resorts to violence and intimidation because it’s the easiest way to control her surroundings, not because she thinks what she’s doing is particularly righteous⁵. This can get brought up in Samara’s loyalty when talking with Morinth:

MORINTH: Violence is the surest expression of power.

SHEPARD: Violence is a means to an end. Power is that end.

Like, Nadia is a person who’s had to live a life surrounded by violence, not because it’s what she initially chose, but because it was repeatedly inflicted on her. She didn’t have the luxury of nursing her compassion and generosity, or of prioritizing morality. Those things would’ve gotten her killed. What she focused on instead was survival: the best way to survive, the easiest way to survive, the way that consistently ensured her own safety. This meant violence, and in order to survive, she became very good at inflicting violence.

That’s what I meant when I said Nadia thinks she traded one cage for another: the Alliance wasn’t freedom in the truest sense; she’s still doing what she ultimately would’ve done if she had remained with the Reds⁶. She’s just doing it with government approval and a steadier paycheck. She knows she’s still being used, and it’s only who’s using her that’s changed. All that’s to say, she isn’t an N7 ranked infiltrator because she feels strongly about protecting Alliance space and dirtying her hands to do it. She’s an N7 ranked infiltrator because it’s simply what she’s good at.

One of my favorite renegade lines in the entire trilogy is during Thane’s loyalty because it perfectly highlights Nadia’s philosophy on her situation:

SHEPARD: Your father and I have killed a lot of people. You haven’t. There’s no reason you should start.

To Nadia, her life is what it is because of the circumstances she was raised in and the decisions she made in response to that. She doesn’t deflect blame for the sort of person she’s become; she holds herself the correct amount of responsible.

She kills people for the Alliance, she kills people for the Council, she kills people for Cerberus. Other Shepards might dress it up differently when death is unavoidable: “it’s a shame, but it was necessary,” said along with the appropriate amount of guilt. Or: they were a terrorist, they were a mercenary, they forced my hand. To Nadia, it’s all death, and there’s no inherent difference between killing someone “to protect humanity” (read: protect the Alliance’s interests) or killing someone “to protect the galaxy” (read: protect the Council’s interests) and simply killing someone in a situation paragon Shepards would deem unnecessary. And to Nadia, if you haven’t had to live a life like this—why start? You still have other options. Use them.

One thing I love about Hadestown is how it discusses the simple accessibility of being able to live your life, let alone live it virtuously. Like whether or not I agree with that, it’s an interesting thing to explore, and it gets brought up multiple times:

“When you’re hungry and there ain’t enough to go round / ain’t no length to which a girl won’t go / [...] and sometimes you think / you would do anything / just to fill your belly full of food” 

“See how the vipers and vultures surround you / and they’ll take you down, they’ll pick you clean / if you stick around such a desperate scene / see, people get mean when the chips are down” 

“Aim for the heart / shoot to kill / if you don’t do it, then the other one will / [...] nobody’s righteous / nobody’s proud / nobody’s innocent / now that the chips are down” 

“Go ahead and lay the blame / talk of virtue / talk of sin / wouldn’t you have done the same? / in her shoes / in her skin / you can have your principles when you’ve got a belly full” 

“I did what I had to do / that’s what they did too” 

“Some flowers bloom / where the green grass grows / our praise is not for them / but the ones who bloom in the bitter snow” 

Again, I’m not going to meta about Hadestown⁷ and the precise context for these verses are different in that canon (for starters, Eurydice never kills anyone), but the concept is similar: when you’re poor, you’re often driven to desperate measures to survive. Sometimes that means stepping over other people, or otherwise ignoring how your actions will affect them. Often, this is to your own detriment. And it’s really, really easy to cast judgment on the poor people driven to these decisions when you were never in their position. It’s really easy to just live when you’re not in a situation where you had to worry about your survival on a day-by-day basis.

I bring up Hadestown because it’s a nice conduit to explain Nadia’s issues. She’s not renegade because she thinks she’s on a crusade and anyone who gets in her way is acceptable collateral damage. She’s renegade because her survival depended on it, and as Sha’ira points out, it’s what has allowed her continual survival:

“I see your skin, tough as the scales of any turian. Unyielding. A wall between you and everyone else. But it protects you, makes you strong. That strength is what kept you alive when everyone else around you was dying. You alone survived. You will continue to survive.”

For her to survive her childhood, she had to step over other people and put herself first. This meant not allowing herself to get close to other people, and to not care about them beyond what they can give her to ensure her own survival.

And this is why Kaidan interests her. Kaidan’s response to brain camp wasn’t to minimize the importance of his morality, it was to double down on it. (Yes, partially to his own detriment, but that’s a different post.) His response wasn’t to distrust others, because after all, one of his defining characteristics is his compassion. It’s just that Kaidan’s inclined to troubleshoot everything, even his interactions with other people. He might be “once burned, twice shy” but he’s not going to be “once burned, byedon’tfollowmeI’mgoingtorelyonlyonmyselfforever.”

Like, he still wants to help...

SHEPARD: So why are you telling me this? Are you saying I’m cutting corners somewhere?

KAIDAN: I’m saying...it’s probably inevitable that we’ll have to. And when that happens, I want to help you. When someone important to you is up on a ledge, you help them. Keep them from mistakes better made by a kid.

SHEPARD: I’m a big girl, Alenko. I don’t need your help.

KAIDAN: I didn’t say you needed it, I said I’m offering it.⁸

...even though his desire to help (because he cares, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do) is precisely what led to the culmination of his trauma.

KAIDAN: He hurt Rahna. Broke her arm. She reached for a glass of water instead of pulling it biotically. She just wanted a drink without getting a nosebleed, you know? Like an idiot, I stood up. Didn’t know what I was gonna do...just, something.

He figures out what went wrong and tries to avoid repeating that mistake. He doesn’t just stop trying at all. He doesn’t lose his faith in having faith.

It’s antithetical to how Nadia responded to her own circumstances, and she can’t quite process the logic behind...why you would be this way. It’s not that she expects everyone to be like her. She’s seen a lot of different people traumatized, and consequently a lot of different ways people have reacted to trauma. It’s more like: “fool me once” is enough for Nadia. There are no second chances after that. She sees no point in ruminating over why something went wrong. Just accept that it did. (Or don’t, but never think about it, anyway.) She thinks living any other way is akin to, I don’t know, laying down in a snake pit right after one just bit you. Stupid, in other words.

(I should also clarify: this is mainly when it concerns people. She will troubleshoot when it comes to things like tech.)

Like, I’ve joked about this to a friend, but when Nadia first reads Kaidan’s file⁹ her impression is: alright, boy scout. Then she actually meets him and she thinks her assessment was more or less spot on, and she loses whatever vestiges of interest his file did manage to leave despite its otherwise boy-scouty-ness. 

But the thing is, Kaidan isn’t naive. He chooses to have the faith he has in the Alliance despite what they’ve put him through. He’s acutely aware that the Alliance is capable of mistakes, because he’s been on the receiving end of it—yet he still wants to help and feels that as a biotic, the Alliance is his best avenue to do that:

KAIDAN: I’m not looking for “the dream.” I just want to do some good. See what’s out here. 

KAIDAN: Commander, I thought real hard about how to use my talents. When I swore the oath to defend the Alliance, it wasn’t on a whim.

Like, Nadia thinks Kaidan giving his loyalty to the Alliance is a stupid reaction, yes (in fairness, Nadia thinks loyalty to organizations in general is stupid), but it still fascinates her precisely because Kaidan has some semblance of an idea of what the Alliance’s negligence can and has caused, and yet he still continues to put his faith in them. Kaidan hasn’t had the easiest life¹⁰, but instead of closing himself off, his reaction was to give the Alliance a second chance, to still place his faith in others, all because he still wanted to do some good.

It’s not what Nadia has done, and she can’t say she understands it, but realizing that Kaidan isn’t the ignorant boy scout she pegged him as goes a long way when it comes to the development of their relationship. (For instance: it allows the relationship to develop at all, lmao.) And the development of their relationship is one of the early domino pieces in a long line of dominoes that sets Nadia down a much healthier path.¹¹

~

¹ We do know, however, that the Alliance does offer to pay college/university tuition in exchange for serving with them in some capacity, thanks to conversations with Traynor and Ashley.

² You know that one Iron Bull banter with Cole where he talks about how one of the first things he does when he meets a new person is to figure out the best way to kill them? Yeah, that’s Nadia.

³ This is because Anderson’s brain is huge, and he understood no one can forever live life the way Nadia was living hers unless they’re a death seeker.

⁴ One of the most in character renegade lines in the trilogy is, once again, during Thane’s loyalty (a big reason why it’s one of my favorites: it’s really, really good Nadia content) when you choose the first renegade check during the interrogation. Shepard sounds so bored, so matter-of-fact. That’s the kind of renegade Nadia is.

⁵ This is probably worse to some people compared to “hard” renegade, since at least “hard” renegade can genuinely believe in what they’re doing, even if others consider it evil. Fortunately, I don’t care.

⁶ I don’t really think she killed anyone during her time with the Reds. (Or, if she did, it was only one person and it would’ve been near the end of her time with them.) I think they primarily used her for cybercrime. She still would’ve witnessed and been expected to participate in a lot of beatings, etc. And, as previously said, had she stayed with the Reds I do think this would’ve ultimately progressed into her killing for them, too.

⁷ Though if you enjoy criticisms of capitalism, an exploration into the traumatizing effects of poverty, and an ultimately hopeful message that meaningful change is possible even when everyone is conditioned to believe it’s not, I recommend giving it a listen. It’s easy to follow along through audio alone, but you can find a low quality bootleg pretty easily, too. (Be warned that some of the songs will differ from the official album recording, though.)

⁸ If the remaster brings better lighting to Kaidan’s little hub area and doesn’t hideously whitewash him like in ME3, this is absolutely one of the first things I’m going to gif because it’s one of my favorite moments in the entire romance.

⁹ Nadia reads the files of everyone she’s going to work with, not because she’s particularly interested in them, but because she wants to know what level of incompetency to expect.

¹⁰ Unrelatedly: ask me about my headcanon about how disgustingly rich Kaidan’s family is, and how much Nadia wants to kill him when she finds this out.

¹¹ This is absolutely not saying love, romantic or otherwise, cures her lifetime worth of unpacked trauma.

[expertmakodriver]

30 Day Mass Effect Challenge: Day 9

9. Favorite romance?

Alright everyone it’s time to fucking cry.

Garrus and Femshep just HHNFGHHN they make me HNRHGhHH I love them.

Let me break down each part of their romance and why I (and like the entirety of the Mass Effect fandom) love it so much.

I already talked about Garrus’s relationship with Shepard in my “Day 5: Favorite Character” post, so I’ll refrain from repeating myself too much here. The bottom line is that Garrus is Shepard’s most loyal and trusted ally and that “There’s no Shepard without Vakarian” is one of the few good things to come out of ME3 (which, again, I will not really be including in this discussion).

When Shepard responds to Garrus’s story about him easing tension with a recon scout years ago (probably back when he was a teenager during his compulsory military service) with a proposed plan to test his “reach” and her “flexibility”, he doesn’t even realize what she means, at first; he thinks that she’s referring to sparring. Why? Because he doesn’t think that she would want him. It seems like he might get the idea that she’s propositioning him, but he can’t bring himself to believe it because he thinks it’s impossible. When she clarifies (and possibly confirms his suspicions), he is surprised at first, but recovers quickly and expresses that he is very much interested in ”blowing off steam” with her. It makes you wonder whether or not Garrus would have ever made a move onto Shepard, had she never expressed interest him first, since he is obviously attracted to her. The reason he provides as to why he is interested is because he respects her more than anyone in the galaxy. Their relationship is built off of mutual trust and respect and Garrus is acknowledging it; he doesn’t say, “Well, sure, Shepard! I think you’re really hot and I would love to bang you”. That’s really important, as it shows how deep their companionship is. This exchange between them is very quick, but it’s intimate nonetheless. 

Look at how he backs up when she walks by him and completely keeps his eyes on her. He looks like he’s wondering if he’s actually dreaming hhnngh he’s just in absolute shock

The next time he talks to Shepard in the Main Battery, he seems nervous. He says that he’s been thinking about what they had agreed to, and that he wonders if they’re crazy for even considering having an inter-species hookup. Even though different-species relationships seem fairly common in the galaxy, Garrus is still bewildered by the idea and states that “cross-species intercourse” isn’t something that he would normally consider. Here’s the thing, though: he’s not questioning whether or not he would enjoy sleeping with Shepard (though he does seem to be considering their compatibility and whether or not they could “make it work”) - he’s wondering why Shepard would ask him as opposed to someone who is a bit more like her. Shepard sees that he’s sort of doubting himself and she assures him so gently and warmly that he’s the one that she wants and it’s fucking adorable (especially if you play Shepard to have a lot of Renegade moments, as seeing her be a total badass who is almost sadistic when it comes to punishing her enemies to then seeing her be so gentle and soft with Garrus is just insanely cute). When she tells him that she wants him, he suddenly seems to gain some of his confidence back despite still being very flustered. 

An important thing to note here is that he uses humor to hide his nervousness and says that if their “steam-blowing” goes well, it’ll be something to cherish, but if their anatomical differences end up making things awkward, fighting the Collectors would be a “welcome distraction”. I’ll bring this back up again later.

So Shepard gives Garrus an opportunity to back out of the plan if he’s feeling uncomfortable (which is very thoughtful of her. She doesn’t want him to feel pressured and wants to make sure he’s completely okay with sleeping with her. She really cares about how he feels), but he refuses to. Again, he brings up how important their companionship is to him and tells her that the matter at hand has nothing to do with a “fetish for humans” - meaning that while he is obviously attracted to her, he’s not sleeping with her just because she’s an attractive human female - it’s about him and Shepard using this opportunity to be close and intimate. This is when he starts to hint that he has deep feelings for her, but he approaches her with it very subtly because he doesn’t want to chase her away with his feelings. He almost seems conflicted: “Do I tell her and risk making things awkward, or do I keep my mouth shut and risk never knowing if she feels the same way? I’ll compromise and drop subtle hints.”

It’s kind of hard to tell with the way the camera moves, but she’s stroking his chest as she smiles fondly at him while he kinda sorta lets it slip that she has all of his uwus. Talk about pure-yet-intimate. 

It’s hilarious to see Garrus’s composure slip when he catches himself making an unintentionally dirty pun (”You know me, I always like to savor the last shot before popping the heat sink”). This entire romance is just filled with hilarity. 

Shepard says that she’ll let him get back to work, and he jokes about how he’s all hot and bothered by talking about sleeping with her and that he can’t focus on his calibrations because he’s too horny. She just grins like a goofball at him as she backs away dramatically and waves goodbye.

His final dialogue with Shepard in the Main Battery before the suicide mission is where he finally starts to make it clear that he loves her. He doesn’t try as hard to hold himself back anymore, he just up and says that he wants to give “cross-species intercourse” a try with her out of all people and that he wants to spend his final moments with her and only her before they possibly all die in the suicide mission. He still flounders around a bit when she reciprocates his enthusiasm, probably because he’s still in shock that she even wants to sleep with him, and Shepard continues to tease him in good nature. Their relationship is just… so healthy and good and pure… hhhgh

AND THEN. THE SCENE BEFORE THE OMEGA 4 RELAY

As Shepard is taking a shower and gettin ready for Garry, he’s literally standing there waiting for her with a bottle of wine AND HE LOOKS SO NERVOUS LIKE HE DOESNT KNOW WHAT TO DO HHH

and then he like jogs up to the stereo system and plays the same cheesy club music that he had made fun of in the previous game. Yes, when he said that he’ll “find some music” for them to bang to, that’s what he had in mind AND SHE CALLS HIM OUT FOR IT BY SHAKING HER HEAD IN AMUSEMENT 

AND HE’S STILL PRETENDING THAT HE’S ALL SUAVE. HE’S LIKE “C’mon Shepard I’m a natural seducer, look at my strut. Lemme smash”

Shepard is so humored by the whole thing. It’s very wholesome. I love seeing them enjoy themselves like this, especially after Garrus’s recruitment and loyalty missions, which were both very emotionally charged. 

Shepard thinks Garrus’s bad flirting is endearing as he tries to apply his knowledge of turian courtship to his current situation and then immediately regrets it because he worries that he might have said something offensive by human standards (WHOLESOME). She calms him down and assures him that he doesn’t need to worry about impressing her (as if to say “Garrus, it’s me. It’s okay. You’re my best friend, not some random dude that I’m hooking up with. We’ve been through hell together man, relax), and then he immediately starts to confess to her that he wants their two or so hours before almost-certain doom to “go right”.

PAUSE FOR A MOMENT. Remember when I said to hang on to Garrus’s line about how if their “encounter” turned awkward due to their differing anatomy, they could just laugh it off and use the Collectors to keep themselves distracted? Yeah, so that line was a fucking lie. 

Garrus is coming clean to Shepard about his feelings in this final scene. He does want things to go right between them, but he was just too nervous and shy to admit that their time together would mean so much more to him than “blowing off steam”, so he uses humor to cope with it. The best part is, Shepard understands. It almost seems like she can read him because of how well she knows him; she’s aware of how he feels, but she wants him to feel ready enough to tell her on his own. ADORABLE.

LOOK. LOOK HOW GENTLE AND TENDER SHE IS WITH HIM. SHE JUST WANTS TO CALM THE NERVOUS BOY DOWN AND HE’S SO MOVED BY IT THAT HE JUST STOPS TALKING AND LIKE STARES AT HER SO INTIMATELY. IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL. 

She’s not just stroking his face, either; she’s stroking his scars - the ones that he got from an event which almost took his life - as if to comfort him and say “I was there for you back then, and I’m here with you now. I’m glad you’re okay. You’ve been through so much”. I DIE!!!!! I DIE. 

And finally, the famous head-butt of love (the first gif). I’m not sure if touching foreheads is something that turians do to show affection, but since they don’t have lips, it would make sense. Either way, it’s obviously a very affectionate and loving gesture and I cannot handle it. This to me is one of those things in life where I can think about it and immediately feel happiness no matter how bad of a mood I’m in. Do I care that it’s a fictional relationship? Nope, because it’s a very well-written (up to this game, I mean), healthy, believable, and profound relationship, and I think it’s absolutely adorable. I’m not normally into shipping or romance but this?? This is just on a whole other level. Nothing comes close to this. 

A few people feel robbed that the scene fades to black right as Garrus gently grips her shoulder (or something? With flycam enabled, he looks like he’s grabbing her boob, but that’s obviously not what’s supposed to be happening) and that we don’t even see a kiss, but I’m totally fine with it. It’s nonetheless an emotionally charged and wholesome scene and that’s exactly how it should be for them. I’m glad we didn’t get anything sleazy or fanservicey. 

If Garrus is the squad member who starts to fall after Shepard kills the Reaper-Larva thingy, it just fuels the feels. They have each other’s backs :’)

Aaah, yes, and let us not forget the post-ending canoodling. Again, not exclusive to Garrus, but seeing them so content is really euphoric, man. They’ve been through hell and really do deserve each other. 

I really like that their relationship hasn’t changed that much, even after confessing/sleeping together. We don’t ever see them acknowledge being in a committed, official relationship, but I think they do - just offscreen. I know there’s really not much post-main story romance in this game, but they still seem to interact normally. They’re very comfortable with each other; when Shepard goes to talk to him after the suicide mission, he assures her casually (but giddily) that he’s down to keep going with cuddlin and love-makin (aka, “what [they’d] talked about”). There’s nothing super romancey or cheesy, and that suits them (unlike ME3, but I’m not going to ruin this post by talking about that.)

Garrus’s romance being perhaps the most popular in the entirety of Mass Effect isn’t a surprise at all. He and Shepard are such a great match for each other, even with the romance aside. No other relationship fills the heart the way this one does. They build their relationship and really establish that same mutual respect and trust that I keep raving about before they move their companionship into a romantic light, and that’s such a great way to write a romance. 

Wholesome raptor lad and his badass, ass-kicking girlfriend own my heart. 

[aliemah]

Okey, fic idea; Ashley stubbornly refusing to admit she’s got the absolute largest boner for Shep because she is independent and opinionated and a smidge too prideful to admit that she has fallen for Commander “i love blasto and eat ice cream for breakfast” Shepard. I headcannon that before she and Shep discuss their relationship Garrus and Tali take turns pointing out how they’re basically already a married couple

here we go: (sorry its late but like. PAX and I’m tired lmao)

“Tali, do you have a minute?”

“Sure, just let me finish this last line here.” the quarian practically chirped. Ashley always thought that, like turians, the quarians had an ave-like complex to them at times.With Tali it was admittedly very cute. The patterned fabric that Ashley had grown so used to was suddenly turning, the tinted visor now in its place. “What did you need?”

“I was just wondering if you could look over this report for me. I wanted to send it off, but seeing as I sort of got knocked unconscious, I thought it would be best to double check that my memory is still in tact.” she laughed.

“Oh, sure. No problem.” Tali reached to take the data pad, her hand not stretching very far to grasp it.

“You don’t have to if you don’t feel up to it, I can ask someone else-”

“You just usually ask Shepard, that’s all.” Tali shrugged. “I’m happy to read over it.”

“I don’t usually ask him. I’m usually the one filling out the reports for him.” Ashley scoffed, crossing her arms and waiting as Tali read. She was always a quick reader.

“That’s true. I’m always watching you two exchange doing work for each other. It’s really cute sometimes.”

“Me? Cute?” Ashley snorted. “Not two words I would ever put together.”

“Not just you. You and Shepard.” Tali looked up, handing the data pad back. “Everything looks good to me. But seriously, you two do things without realizing it.”

“The report is all I came for, Tali.” Ashley smiled as she backed up. “But if you’re still up for it, I guess we can talk more over dinner.” Tali shook her head and muttered something playfully that the translator couldn’t pick up on. Ashley shrugged and went back to her usual spot up in the lounge. 

The new Normandy was massive, but it still felt like a home - everything was laid out more or less the same, at least. And even with the smell of the paint still lingering, and all the loose wires, it was a beautiful ship. She only wished she’d have gotten to see it before some of the rooms had been removed. John was always talking to her about how nice it was to be able to wander around the ship between relays, and just admire the ship.

Ashley sometimes regretted that she didn’t join him all that time ago. But she’d stuck to her guns, and he’d turned out okay. They were mostly over that whole period between them anyway, so there wasn’t any reason to think on it. There were more important things anyway, like what to do to prepare for the next mission, where they would go, what business she could wrap up on the Citadel next time. It was a lot for her mind to process. And with the worst of her concussion behind her, thinking was at least a little clearer. Though she still felt slow at times.

“Whoa,” a voice called her from her thoughts sooner than the sensation of bumping into someone, warm hands on her shoulders that she only now realized were freezing.

“Lost in thought,” she sighed, not even bothering to look up.The hands lingered and kept her from going further.

“Ashley, slow down.” he laughed. “What’s got you in such a hurry?”

“A lot on my mind.” she said, finally looking back. She almost let her shoulders fall, her mouth smile, those feelings bubbling dangerously at the surface… But now wasn’t the time. “I still have some reports to do. Maybe later?” she turned back around before he could reply, slipping away yet again.

Was she avoiding talking to him? Mostly. Was it for a good reason? Not at all. Or entirely. It depended on the view.

She was sitting happily in the relative silence of the lounge when the door chimed and it opened, alerting her softly to someone’s presence. She turned and smiled when she saw Garrus.

“What’s up?” she asked. No one came in here unless they needed to speak with her. At least at this hour. It was nice.

“Just wanted to check in on you, and ask you a small favor.” he shrugged, pulling out a small weapon mod from his pocket and tossing it to her as he walked around the couch to sit. “Found that down in the shuttle bay, James said it was yours.” Ashley took a moment to look over the scope, smiling when she saw the paint chipped off of it.

“That it is. Scope for my pistol. Glad you got it to me before I needed to use it. What was the favor?”

“It’s uh... A little personal.” he laughed, looking to the side. “What um... What does Tali like to do with her time off?”

“An odd question.” Ashley smirked, leaning back a bit. “She usually spends her time off talking with her friends, from what I hear. That or she programs her little drone.”

“Good to know.” he nodded, avoiding looking over at her.

“Are you trying to ask her on a date or something?” Ashley laughed. “Because if so, you should just do it. It’s easier than trying to be subtle. And I think Tali would appreciate you being forward with her. She’s been through enough.”“That’s true.” he nodded again, then looking over, the smirk evident in his eyes and tone. “It’s a shame you and Shepard can’t seem to follow that same advice. It’s driving the rest of us insane.”

“Oh god, not you too.” she rolled her eyes, standing up. “John and I are just friends. Okay? There’s.... Nothing there.”

“So you say.”

“So there is, Garrus. Besides, it’s...” she paused and laughed, “it’s really ridiculous. He is the biggest Blasto nerd I’ve ever met, and I swear that if it weren’t for me and to some extent Chakwas he’d be eating ice cream for every meal.”

“That’s the sweet frozen treat?” Garrus asked. Ashley nodded, and then he laughed loudly. “You take care of him, and in case you forgot, every time we went to the Citadel while you were in Huerta, he went and visited you first thing, for at least two hours each time. I think you don’t want to admit how much you mean to him and how much he means to you, Ash. You two take care of each other and you can’t sit there and tell me that isn’t based off something.”

“You came in here to ask about Tali, not to lecture me on a non-existent relationship that will never happen.”

“I wouldn’t say never.” He stood up. “You two need to talk soon, anyway. You both have a lot to say to one another, whether it be the missions or your personal lives. But listen to me: we may not have a lot of time left. Now isn’t the time to live with maybes. If you think there’s a chance, better find out now than regret it when your time comes.”

They were both silent as they looked at one another. She smiled and nodded slowly as her head lowered.

“You have a point. But I’m telling you, there isn’t anything there between us but a solid friendship.”

“Better than nothing.” he shrugged as he walked out, leaving her in peace with her now scrambled thoughts.

A long time ago, she did feel something very real for John. She’d given herself up to him, trusted him completely, and then he was torn from her before she could even begin to imagine a forever with him. Now here she was about two and a half years later, faced with nearly-certain death every day, and she wasn’t sure if she could open herself up to him again. Or anyone else. But she did still... Feel something. She wasn’t too sure what it was.

But if she was going to give advice, shouldn’t she follow it, as well? Ashley needed to ask John and talk to him about this before the chance slipped away. So she pulled out her omni-tool and sent him a quick message.

Hey,

I know we haven’t talked for a while, but I’ve had a lot on my mind. Maybe when we get to the Citadel, you and I could have a little chat? You know, personal stuff.

Believe it or not, sometimes I get worried you’re working yourself too hard. You could use a break.

Let me know when and where you want to meet, and I’ll be there.

- Ash

There was a tiny fluttering in her stomach that she chalked up to the empty glass in her hand. And the fact that John was running at least fifteen minutes late. She hated not knowing what was going on, and she’d checked her messages at least six times over, making sure she had the right time, day and place. She’d even messaged him letting her know that she was waiting with a table.

Though not a moment later she heard footsteps, and turned, nearly spitting out her drink as she giggled.

“What the hell are you wearing?” she asked as he sat down.

“Best damn shirt in the galaxy.” he beamed, lounging happily in the empty seat next to her. “Took the last one.”

“It’s a Blasto shirt- I can’t believe you, John.” she snorted, setting the glass down as she laughed. It wasn’t that he looked silly in it, it was just that he was so... obsessed with those movies.

“Don’t act like it doesn’t look good on me.”

“I’m not saying it doesn’t,” she got out in the middle of her laughing, “I just can’t believe you sometimes. You act like a child.”

“That’s me.” he laughed, shrugging. “Anyway, this is why I was late, sorry.”

“You know what,” she sighed, “I can’t be mad at you. Of course you would stop to buy a ‘This one will see you in the afterlife’ shirt. What movie was that from again?”

“The fourth one. The best one.”

“Right.” she snorted, aware of how much she was laughing, and likely how dumb she looked and sounded.

“I haven’t seen you this happy for a long time.” he said softly, leaning over. “Maybe I should wear this around the Normandy. It would be worth it if it made you feel better.”

“No, I think that would be too much.” she grinned, “Though, you could bother to stop by more often. It gets pretty lonely in the lounge by myself.”

“I didn’t know if that would be too much.” he suddenly seemed to frown, the creases on his face returning, aging him quickly. “You... Well...” he stammered for a moment before sighing. “I didn’t know if it was too much. Things haven’t been all that clear so far as where I stand with you.”

“Look, John,” she sighed, deciding to get it over with, “A lot has happened since we were last together. And I don’t regret any of it. But we’re different people now, and we have a lot more riding on us coming out of this alive.” She paused and looked up with a smile. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to pick things up where we left them, but I just don’t think that’s going to work. So... I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe we can start over and get to know each other again. I miss staying up late at night when we can’t sleep just talking, and spending time together. I miss having a best friend who I can also fall asleep with at night and feel loved.”

“Beat me to the punch.” he murmured, his smile larger than when she’d started speaking. “But we’re on the same page, at least. That’s a pretty good start, I think.”

“And maybe we can skip over a few things and head back to the Normandy after lunch?” she smirked, aware that her mouth was moving faster than her thoughts. John barked out with laughter and then reached over to push her glass away from her.

“Let’s see how we feel after we’re done eating, first.”

[meggannn]

character meme thing for lydia: 4, 7 (outside of the kid in canon, like if u could control the nightmares what would they be), 19, 35, 36

4. Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?

hm you mean aside from the beacon? lol I think there were maybe 2-3 mental “turning points” for Lydia in the sense that she could partition her life into sections of “before” and “after” around them, if that makes sense.

the gang war on earth is one – it killed her sister and is what (finally) convinced her to leave the gang. after seeing what she did and realizing she had been a part of it, it was sort of her come to jesus moment. she realized if she kept on like this she was either gonna be dead or in jail by the time she turned 20

the beacon is another

the leviathan was a big one. shepard deals with a lot of mind-twisting shit over the years, but something about meeting the leviathan face-to-face really shakes her. it’s not fear, exactly, but it unsettles what she knows about the universe.

most people she’s close to know about the beacon and leviathan. only anderson knows about the gang war.

7. Does your character have recurring themes in their nightmares?/Outside of the kid in canon, if you could control the nightmares what would they be?

drowning/lost floating in deep space – it’s not exactly about asphyxiation, though that is a part of it, but it’s also about helplessness/being surrounded by nothingness. for a character like shepard who is all about the action, they know “calm/quiet" does not always mean “peace/happiness”

after the leviathan, there’s a dream about being trapped under the sea with that thing for all eternity while the galaxy burns over and over again

i kind of like the forest nightmares as an idea. i just wouldn’t have done it that way in canon, but my way is a little genre-specific just cause i like reading horror stories. i’d make the forest nightmares more about suspenseful horror, instead of vague confusion and some whispers

19. What is your character’s biggest relationship flaw? Has this flaw destroyed relationships for them before?

you and i have already talked about this hahahha. it’s definitely emotional constipation, which is like saying “space is kind of big.” she knows her strengths and weaknesses, which is very different from knowing her emotions; likewise she knows how important friendship and trust is, which is very different from being mentally stable enough to open her mouth and say “i love you” to another person. lydia also sees no problem nosing into someone else’s life to solve their problems but the first time someone asks if she’s okay, they’re met with a brick wall. probably has something to do with not growing up in a stable environment, not really understanding the word “family,” and being resurrected by a terrorist group and forcing herself out of habit to put on mental blinders just to do her job and keep putting one foot in front of the other most days in ME2. talk to chambers? there’s a cerberus AI in the walls, she lost two years and is now known as an enemy to the state, she’s got foreign tech in her skull, and you want her to spill her guts to the woman the illusive man is paying to provide him with updates on her mental health? are you fucking nuts? (by me3, it’s less paranoia and more just habit. i got those thermal pipes you asked me for. i’m fine. stop asking me that. what else do you need.)

has it destroyed relationships for her, no, but it has put them to the test. most of the crew understands lydia is unique and they can be the first to reach out and extend, and they don’t mind shepard not extending back because i think they’re all emotionally mature enough to know she’s still grateful – liara, tali, even samara and cortez, i think. meanwhile, my vision of garrus is not one of a guy who is very emotionally forthcoming either, so getting these two together, in a room, while facing each other, to admit that they like each other, out loud, took a long time and a lot of mental gymnastic on my part. the thing is that ofc with the canon shepard/garrus romance, shepard makes the first move because, as is my interpretation, garrus is absolutely clueless when it comes to romance. but lydia is clueless too, so even when they’re finally “together,” the both of them still feel… lonely is not the right word, but for a long while, certainly after the war, they’re serious about it but still questioning what they mean to the other. but you’re not talking to two normal people, so someone like garrus… yeah, he can recognize when shepard’s stressed, when she really wants to be alone vs when she’s just putting up a front, but he’s still got some of his own identity issues that affect his confidence in reading her subtler emotions, like her gratitude. if that makes sense. (not that it’s not on her to also be more forthcoming with things like that as well.)

35. How does your character behave around people they like?

for the not-crew? well for a while they probably wouldn’t know it if she liked them, looool keeping along with the image of “this is what a good soldier does,” she probably doesn’t reach out or react first, just treats whoever they are like normal, until one day maybe she makes a joke she knows that person will enjoy while they’re in earshot, and that’s like. ‘oh, that was meant for me? shepard actually has a sense of humor?’

keeping in mind that lydia did most of her emotional growing up while in a gang, and most of her mental/adult growing up/re-imaging while in the military from ages 18-21, which is a unique situation and gave her a very intense, extreme standard of human emotions. that’s not to say she doesn’t talk or interact normally, but just, she knows she’s not normal and for a long time is content to not get close to anyone.

36. How does your character behave around people they dislike?

she’s the kind of person to smile when she’s angry. not in a mocking or sarcastic way, just kind of, to herself, a sort of, “keep it together, smile, do not explode in front of these cameras.” about how she doesn’t know her own emotions – i don’t think she’s childish, exactly, but when she’s really mad, enough to make her lose her temper, it’s noteworthy since it’s a huge break from the brick wall of professionalism she puts on for the public. (i think this changes around the time of ME3 aka Stress City, but mostly thinking ME1 here.)

character questions: hard mode

[squigglysquidd]

Tell me if I'm being annoying with all the Asks, but I'm loving learning more about your characters :) For the Fanfic Asks, how about 30 and 45. For the OC Asks: how about 18 and 25 for Ellie and Arcanus. And since I just read and really enjoyed "Fibonacci" how about 20 and 22 for that Garrus, and B for you :)

Never be afraid to ask me anything, @wafflesrock16 !  Or anyone else, for that matter.  I absolutely love answering asks or messages of any kind.

So here we go:

FanFic Asks:

30.  What inspires you to write?

To write is a way to get my ideas out, of which I have many.  It’s like watching movies in my head, so I like to get them out onto paper, so to speak, and see what others think.  And, as bad as it sounds, readers help me to keep inspired and updating work instead of just letting the stories play in my mind.  That’s why I love talking to my readers about anything they want to know.  

45.  What is your all time favorite fanfic?

Hm... Tough one as there’s so many I love.  I think I’m going to go with what fanfic has stuck with me since reading it the first time, and that is Through An AI, Darkly by strangegibbon.  It just stuck with me, the way each character has their own hell, so to speak, and the excellent open ended ending really makes you think.  Plus, the decisions Shepard has to deal with and their consequences are something that shows the truth of life - you can’t save everyone and there is not always a happy ending.

OC Asks: (My list is jumbling letters, so if these are the wrong asks, let me know!)

18.  What is their favorite number?

I don’t think Arcanus would really have one, to be honest.  He’d see the idea of favorite numbers as confusing.  ‘What’s the point of having one number be more important?’ he’d ask, but Ellie is old school.  She likes lucky number seven.  Not that she wants to rely on luck in her work, but she can’t deny the idea of a number having some sort of power over the others.

25.  What is their preferred mode of transportation? 

I’m going to consider that these are not pertaining to space travel because, let’s face it, those answers are all the same.  For Arcanus, he would much rather prefer to walk if it’s a short distance and, if he has to, then the most comfortable. luxurious ride, especially when he once lived on the Citadel.  On Virmire, everything is so close that he just walks, enjoying the sun and sand while being able to overlook everything.

For Ellie, she likes to do anything that reveals the less about her.  She walks on Virmire, much like Arcanus, but she has a tendency not to make herself obvious out in the public eye like he does.  Old habits die hard, after all, and she’s all about blending in.  When she’s off Virmire, it’s unassuming vehicles to get around.

Fibonacci Garrus

20.  Why do they get up in the morning?

Boy, this guy is a trip to write.  Why does he get up?  Because he has no damn choice.  Staying in bed would either get him killed or make him miss out on any sort of outlet for his anger and pain through violence.  The chance to beat something or kill it is what makes him get up because, then, the hollow feeling within him seemed to be full for the time being.  

22.  How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)?

This answer depends on what he’s envious about.  If it’s a person, then he is more withdrawn and short with them.  He will often limit any conversation or interaction with them, withdrawing to resent them from afar.  If it’s a thing, then he usually just takes it.  However, with the tenuous relationship with Jon (and some of the Normandy garrison), he is less likely to move towards violence for what he wants and, instead, acts much like he does with someone he’s envious of.  He thinks that distancing from something he wants will give him the chance to see that whatever or whoever it is really isn’t as interesting as he thought and why the hell would he still want it now?  It doesn’t always work.

Questions for Me:

B.  What inspired you to create them? 

Arcanus was meant to be someone the Vakarains could look to that actually had connections to get what they wants.  Liara was there, sure, but having more than one person on your side is always better.  Plus, at the time of calling on him, they didn’t have Liara as the Broker, so he was the best way to get info for Zaeed on Vido.  And he contacted them because he saw they were powerful to have as allies and, through his friendship with Saren, had a bit of a suspicion that Sovereign was something more than the Council wanted to let everyone in on. 

Ellie was meant to be a sort of ‘what if’ for Jane.  She is what happens when someone puts work before themselves.  She almost lost the love of her life forever.  Even as it is, she wasted so much of her life working for nothing but credits in the end.  She was meant to be the warning for Jane, and, lastly, a lover for Arcanus because that old fart needed someone.

Now, for Fibonacci Garrus.  Throughout Fibonacci, I will change up character personalities and/or backgrounds.  The idea started with the ‘what if there was another reality, one Shakarian and one Shali?  (I don’t know the Shepard/Tali ship name)  After that, I blame my playing of Witcher at the time for making it a medieval setting.  Still, I wanted something different from the games because it would just be another retelling and I already did that in Parable.  So what could I do?  Well, I could switch around characters.  Silly as it sounds, the idea to make a subject zero Garrus came from the question of if turian colony paints spread throughout the body.  I mean, Mass Effect has piercings for them already, and tattoos for other species, so couldn’t that be a thing?  Plus, I think it’s pretty hot interesting.

[ohlawsons]

so for anyone curious as to just exactly how cal fucked up so badly

sorry not sorry it’s so long, it ended up being as much me rambling to get a better sense of everything bc i’m still developing cal as it is me explaining the clusterfuck of a suicide mission

miranda: had to be recruited. cal Did Not Like her, which actually makes her the first shep to flat out loathe my wonderful beautiful biotic wife. i may mess with canon a bit, but cal didn’t do the loyalty mission bc it’s a family thing, they’d have to go all the way back to illium, and i’m gonna hc that she calls liara to help miranda bc cal’s focused, not a dick

jacob: had to be recruited. cal doesn’t trust him at first (no cerberus officer should be that nice and honest and open) but they get along. re: loyalty mission -- it’s an old signal, she agrees with jacob that someone’s just probably trying to get under his skin, and the alliance will probably check it out too. she promises they’ll look into it afterwards.

garrus: had to be recruited. cal’s disappointed with his life choices, but also just shrugs and accepts it bc hey, she’s a terrorist now so not much room to talk. she’d go a bit out of her way for his loyalty mission anyway since they’re friends and she trusts him, but it’s a quick detour on the citadel so no issues

mordin: had to be recruited. put simply, he instills a whole new respect for stg in cal. he lowkey terrifies her. re: loyalty, she has no desire to go to tuchanka, and her initial reaction is “well if you ~perfected~ the genophage you probably deserve to be kidnapped” bc she’s pissed and things are Hard and i think she may change her mind? but this playthrough it wasn’t finished so

jack: had to be recruited. jack is good for blowing off steam -- in every sense -- but she’s dangerous, and the minute she brings up peragia and gets all twitchy, cal goes straight there bc the last thing they need is jack taking out her frustrations on the ship. or the crew. or her, in any way that isn’t sexual.

grunt: he stays in his pod. cal doesn’t have a good track record with krogan.

zaeed: as far as cal is concerned, his loyalty lasts till his last paycheck, and the loyalty mission is a form of payment, so it’s finished and she actually has a decent amount of respect for him after learning he led the blue suns for so long.

kasumi: same as above, basically, but they’re better friends and cal has more fun during the party.

thane: recruited bc he’s an assassin, so he’ll fit right in. since kolyat is on the citadel and they stop there anyway, cal goes ahead and helps out.

samara: not recruited. a glorified cop aboard a ship full of criminals, mercs, and terrorists is a bad combination, in cal’s mind.

tali: not recruited. cal wants to, but doesn’t want to force tali to work with cerberus (bc she would if cal asked, she knows this), or bring someone who she remembers as Good And Pure onto a ship full of assholes. also she doesn’t want her to die, like the rest of them probably will.

legion: i’ll admit to metagaming a bit here, since i knew about the loyalty mission. destroying the heretics is basically a “trial run” of sorts for cal, to see if she can trust legion.

and the actual mission:

jack and legion both died on the ship bc i didn’t have all the upgrades bc i didn’t have tali or a loyal jacob (which was rly hard to sit here and let cal do what cal was gonna do ahghhhghhghhg)

the heat vents: she chose kasumi, bc she’s small and good with tech and most importantly cal trusts her. zaeed led the fireteam bc she figured if he can lead a merc group he can lead a tiny squad. garrus was her second choice, but she kept him with her instead. kasumi died (bc of zaeed, i think) here.

the crew: i wanted to lose part of the crew, bc i’ve always imported to me3 with a full crew. but cal didn’t want to spare someone to escort them back (bc if they can’t destroy the collectors they’re all dead anyway) so they’re all gone. even chakwas.

the swarms: zaeed led the fireteam again, and cal chose miranda for the bubble just bc she was going off pure biotic strength. i may hc that to be cal who does the shield bc adept. anyway, miranda wasn’t loyal so thane died, then zaeed died bc apparently he’s not a good leader.

the final run: she took garrus and miranda, garrus bc trust and friendship and shit, and miranda bc i always love to let her tell tim to fuck off. so jacob and mordin were left to [kirrahe voice] hold the line. mordin did not survive. miranda didn’t survive the v end bc she wasn’t loyal.

so cal, joker, garrus, and jacob.

i’m sure it was a fun ride home.

[badwasabi]

Writing Advice: Shut out shout-outs

Due to the subject matter, I included a larger-than-usual number of references in this one, just for fun. You probably won't find all eight, unless you happen to watch a certain podcast about a certain red-masked superhero and his nubile ginger sidekick partner.

Okay, so you're watching the latest Game of Thrones episode. There's tension, there's shouting, it's very dramatic, you're on the edge of your seat. What next? you think, shoveling popcorn into your mouth.

And suddenly the characters start acting out the "What?" scene from Pulp Fiction.

Your hand stops. Your brow furrows. You mouth hangs open.

This doesn't make sense. The writers just...gave up. They made no real effort to integrate the reference into Westeros. Where'd that paper bag come from? Why is the Mother of Dragons is pulling a Big Belly Burger out of it? What is this? 

I'll tell you what this is. Your hypothetical self has just encountered a bad Shout Out. 

Fanfics, especially by newbie writers, often have this classic blunder. You like Thing, you like Other Thing, you want to put them together like it's peanut butter/jelly time. Let me ask you a question; you might like a nice warm fire. You might like libraries. Would you start a nice, warm fire in the middle of a library? If I needed the insurance money. A public library. Oh. Then no. So you've added the gratuitous reference, you post the chapter, and go on your merry way. Some time later, your reader encounters the reference, and it stops them cold, completely breaking immersion. You were so worried about whether you could that you didn't ask yourself whether you should. One Mass Effect fanfic I read had the bad guys capture Garrus, hang him from a hook, and torture him. Normal enough, right? Well, it was a direct ripoff of the torture scenes from Firefly. Y'know, that "War Stories" episode. Was someone wearing Jayne's hat? Someone was, in fact, wearing Jayne's hat. In a certain Halo fanfic, one of the characters make a crack about how they hadn't seen incompetence like that since the Bush Administration of 21st century Earth. For those of you not familar with the setting, that's be like a  2016 character making a joke about some politican from 1466. Seriously, name someone from the 15th century. Christopher Columbus? Anyone else? Besides Queen Isabella? ...No. You see my point. I bought a cheap watch a year ago. Before the ants ate it*, it looked like a G-Shock. Except that it didn't have the logo, the backlight was more of a frontlight - a bad one - and none of the buttons did what the labels said they were supposed to. Shoehorning in a reference can be like that. It looks good, but the charade falls apart the second you take a closer look. A lot of shoehorned references come without the context that would make them "work" properly. It's not a big problem with individual lines, but when you have to bend the story's universe into a pretzel just to make the reference "fit", you should probably reconsider. And even individual lines can get tiresome if they're intrusive enough. Remember that ME fic I mentioned? The characters often reference popular Firefly lines. It wasn't just the one scene. Which brings me to my next point. References are a crutch, if you rely on them. And in case you're wondering, there's a difference between a pastiche or parody or satire...and an outright ripoff. Also, some works are light-hearted enough to have shedloads of references. Take Deadpool (any medium), Friendship is Magic, or Discworld. And they usually cut back on it when things get heavy, doc. Except Discord, of course, by definition. 

So how do I know when to use shout outs? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall; practice. Get constructive criticism from somewhere. Let readers tell you what works and what doesn't. Read it out loud. Ask yourself if the scene works for readers who don't get the reference. How would you fix the torture scene? Oh, that's easy. Dolores Umbridge. From Harry Potter? Yep. Wouldn't that just make the problem worse? Allow me to explain. Torture scenes are a dime a dozen. Torture scenes where the torturer has some sort of crazy philosophy are a dime a dozen. Religious conviction, punishment, intelligence gathering, Mengele knockoff, dime a dozen. You know what we don't see very often? What? Passive-aggressiveness. Think about it. Umbridge's core personality traits are cloying, syrupy sweetness over an absolute conviction that she's doing The Right Thing. This is a woman who created a brand-new way to torture people - her special quill - and used it on a child. The book said she looked like a toad, but in the films, Imelda Staunton's completely normal appearance is arguably worse. She looks like someone's mum or grandmum. And she's evil. Remember in the forest? The part where she may have been trying to kill Harry and Hermione, and she's still rationalizing? Imagine that with a torturer. She's levering your fingernails off with a scalpel, and still saying that it would really be so much easier if you would just cooperate. Do you think she enjoys hurting you? Why don't you just tell her what she needs to know? Brrr. But enough about my mother. So, in this case, remixing two references is better than using either of them alone. This has to be done well; if you had a generic torturer, but he's actually a woman wearing pink, that's not going to make much of a difference. In fact, it would be jarring for your readers, unless you're in a light-hearted work, or pink is an important color in your story. Maybe it's about "The Flamingo Killer", who always leaves their victims with a pink rose, or pink fibers have been found on the bodies, or something. Which brings me to the last piece of advice; good artists copy, great artists steal. Pretty sure I've heard that before. But what it doesn't say is that mediocre and bad artists also copy. So what's the difference between copying and stealing? Glad you asked, Timmy! Copying is imitating. Stealing is understanding, making it your own. It's the difference between tracing a piece of art and drawing it freehand. Wait. Isn't tracing really useful for learning how to draw? Yes, it is. To a certain point. Then it's better to strike out on your own. If you don't understand why something works, you can't really integrate it into your work. You won't be able to take the parts of it that work and leave the rest, you'll probably just keep ripping it off wholesale. If I may humblebrag; in my fic Ferris, the XCOM team decides that they're going to have to do something really dark. There's a regular soldier nearby, and he's horrified. He says he could never do that type of stuff. The XCOM trooper he's responding to says "That's the idea. We do it, so you don't have to." ...Is that...? Yep. The Nostalgia Critic's catchphrase. Altered and integrated. Now, if I had written "I fight aliens, so you don't have to," that would've been a lot more blatant. Did anyone notice? No one said anything, so...not as far as I know. Then what's the point? To increase the emotional impact of the scene. Instead of forcing a reference to a popular review show that would ruin the emotional impact of the scene. Executive summary: References and shout-outs can be fine, if used sparingly, or in a work where they fit the tone. If not, they'll cut the legs out from any drama you're trying to build. Try and understand why something you're trying to reference works, so you can alter it to fit the new context, instead of plopping it in your story like a scoop of chocolate ice cream on a cheesecake. What type of cheesecake? Boysenberry. Oooh! I love boysenberry pie! Good hunting, Jon PS: Let's talk about obtrusive fandom jokes. For example, take all the RWBY fics that substitute "Monty" for "God". If you don't know who Monty Oum was (creator of the series), it's just a weird joke or some kind of reference you don't get. If you do, then it's a fandom joke with worrying theological implications, since Ren was voiced by Monty. Does that make him Remnant's Jesus, or some kind of avatar of their Creator? Either road, it completely destroys the seriousness of a scene. Imagine if Frodo and Sam swore "by Tolkien", or Captain Picard by "Roddenberry", or Marvel characters by "Stan".

Actually, let's dig deep. You know all those Stan Lee cameos in the MCU? They all fit in even if you don't know who Lee is. You could replace Lee with a bunch of random actors, and with maybe one exception (Avengers), they all make sense. They're funny by necessity, because you can't do something like that without tongue in cheek. I can only remember one dramatic cameo, and that was in Incredible Hulk. The "Monty" joke doesn't have any of that. It can't be justified in the context of the series, unlike a bunch of random old guys throughout the universe who happen to look like Stan Lee. TL DR: If your fandom references don't fit unless your reader knows the context, change them or get rid of them. If you're trying to use an injoke in a serious scene, change it or get rid of it. * More precisely, the watchband. They'll eat anything rubber. 

[ My writing advice posts | Chronological order ]

[incorrectly-quoted-queers]

Drunk Punch Love 2: Chapter 3

Pairing: FemShep and Garrus Vakarian (Shakarian)

Rating: PG-13 (with some tossed F-bombs)

Summary: Their awkward, badass journey through saving the galaxy and accidentally falling in love

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089466/chapters/54170929

Part 2- Chapter 3: Enter Archangel 

"So now that the clinic doesn't need me, tell me what you know about the Collectors."

Anya was only passively listening to Mordin and Miranda chatter on. She took a quick liking to the Salarian scientist, but he did talk a lot, and her brain was still sort of a slosh. Her brain cells were starting to get antsy about her getting her head on straight again. With all the back to back missions, she still didn't feel quite human.

Behind her, Miranda answered, "I can't tell you too much without the data we have on the Normandy, but I can say-"

Just then, somebody grabbed her forearm. Someone with a grip like a goddamn claw machine; inaccurate and fumbling, but still rough when it caught on. "You look like a strong type." Shepard's head turned to look at them, a krogan in Blood Pack gear. Taking a turn for the bizarre, a Blue Suns merc behind him nodded approvingly. The real offense of it all, though, was that he was close enough for Anya could smell his breath. Had the faintest hint of pyjack and ryncol.

Jerking her arm out of his grasp, she went on instinct: a krogan headbutt. Though it made her forehead feel a bit like jello, the guy staggered back. She stood her ground. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Don't touch me."

The batarian behind him started to cackle. "Even better. If you want some cash, ma'am, we need more guns to take down Archangel. Been seiging him for three days now, so he should cave any minute. You in?"

Before Miranda could try to butt in, Shepard winked at her, trying to make a point that she had this. If this was any other case, she'd probably beat their asses into the pavillion metal. But since this Archangel was one of their dossiers, this was an easy in, right? Anya laxed her face muscles and glared at him. "What's the pay like?"

"Trust me, damn good."

Cocking her head at the krogan still nursing his headplate, Shepard said, "Hope you all are made of tougher shit than him."

"Why else do you think he's been stuck out here for days recruiting?"

Anya laughed, but almost choked at the end. The second she heard it, she knew her old team would've called it out as her "fake, shitty bad guy laugh". Ruined a different mission where they were trying to infiltrate a shady mining operation. Couldn't let the batarian catch that. Instead, she crossed her arms and talked quick. "Where do I sign up and can I bring my guys?"

Almost out of nowhere, the batarian procured a tablet. Apparently, the gangs really were desperate enough to recruit her, no questions asked. "Sure. And if you sign up with me, I can get you on the next transport to kill Archangel." Anya had to stifle a real laugh. Dude was 100% a "get yourself killed" salesman, but it didn't matter to her. Not when the gangs were about to get some nice, Alliance-bred bullets to their skulls.

"Sounds like my kind of job." Signing the fake names Oksana Marakov, Dinmor Lasso, and Barbie Tits, Shepard waved off the guy and went back to her team. Miranda had a raised eyebrow.

With her best friendly smile, Anya said, "Change of plans. Mordin, Miranda, you come with me. Sounds like Archangel needs some rescuing if we want him to make it to The Normandy alive. Jacob, go back and make sure Chakwas has the medbay prepped. I'm sure the guy won't be in the best condition after what they've been putting him through." Jacob saluted and then headed towards the docking bay.

Miranda grimaced at the merc tag Shepard sent to her omni-tool. Wincing, Anya knew that her impulse name-giving probably wasn't going to be well-received. But she panicked under pressure.

The Cerberus officer groaned and asked, "Barbie Tits? C'mon."

"I'm not good at fake names okay? Just ask Joker about the Dranek mission, he'll explain it in excruciatingly embarrassing detail. Next time I'll try better. Or we'll plan beforehand. Or just revenge kill me at a later date. Right now, we need to get moving."

Mordin just blinked with that slightly unsettling grin on his face. "Never seen all three gangs work together. Will be fascinating."

With a wave of her arm, Miranda let Shepard take point. "Lead the way, Oksana Marakov." Other than Miranda's clear dissatisfaction with her code name, Anya almost started smirking off her skull. This was just the way she liked it. And while normal life still felt surreal, shooting? She was good at that.

One transport ride later, they were knee-deep in the Blood Pack, Blue Suns, and Eclipse strongholds, preparing for the next wave of attack. Unluckily for the bastards, Anya was a trained infiltrator. Minor hacking and sabotage was her jam. By the time they wanted to start a fight, she couldn't even count how many things she'd left her mark on.

After she pulled off her final masterpiece, damaging a famed Blue Suns hovercopter, Miranda kept tossing Shepard concerned, and possibly frightened, glances. As they suited up for the fight, she said, "Remind me never to get on your bad side. Guess you can do worse damage than Barbie Tits."

"I said I was sorry." Shaking her head, Anya focused instead on the good stuff. "But thank you. Mordin's suggestion of killing the mechanic probably would be more efficient, but I like to cross my wires and blow up the controls in style."

Next to her, Mordin looked dissatisfied with her choice, but also didn't seem like the guy who'd mind results. "One less Blue Sun is still one less."

"We can chat more once we've done our cute little betrayal here." Pressed up against the barrier, they linked their comms. After a few other mercs hopped the fence, she looked to her team. They were strangers still, for the most part. Other than Kirrahe, she'd never worked with a Salarian, really. And Miranda was sort of so perfect she was intimidating and worse, she knew that. It was weird to get used to. But so far, she liked them. Anya grinned, prepared for a good fight. "Ready?"

Both of them nodded.

Jumping the barrier herself, Shepard was surprised to feel a bullet already skim her shields. Anya dropped behind some new cover and felt her heart racing. They made it clear this guy was good, but not that good.

She got out her own sniper rifle to get a better view on the situation.

When she peered out from her cover, using the sights to see him, that fast heartbeat of hers went dead. Directly down her sights was another sniper, a turian, wearing distinct blue and black gear. She couldn't see his face, but every organ in her body stopped working, because the way he pulled that trigger felt so familiar.

Half out of confused panic, knowing it definitely couldn't be him, she said into her mic, "You didn't say he was a sniper."

Miranda sounded confused. "Does it matter?"

With her organs struggling to function the longer her brain did mental gymnastics to try to figure out if it even could be him, Shepard gave her honest answer, "Yes." It didn't make sense; Garrus planned on joining Spectres. Instead he went MIA, but she assumed it just meant he did the Spectre thing on his own. But this?

Across the comms, Miranda replied, "Well if you needed to know his weapon specialties, you really should've read the dossier-"

"I didn't get to his dossier. This wasn't exactly on my itinerary today."

"If you prefer to be more prepared, then-"

"It's not about being prepared!"

"Then can you stop interrupting me?"

"Yes! Now let's take out these fuckers, get upstairs, and for the love of god if either of you shoot him, I shoot you."

Behind the barrier next to her, Mordin and Miranda just blinked at her. Christ, she sounded crazy. But at least the Salarian shrugged and shot a merc walking past his position. Then he said, like that was casual, "Interesting ultimatum, but at least the mercenaries we can agree on."

Taking a deep breath, Shepard couldn't explain all the thoughts racing through her head right now. But she only knew one turian who was that good of a shot, and if there was even a 1% chance it was him... Well, she would burn this whole station down before she let anyone touch him.

Missions made the soldier in her feel real and alive, but Garrus? He made her human.

Engaging her tactical cloak, Anya started taking out all the mercs advancing on his position. A lot of them only took a quick punch and a shot to the back of the skull, but she did get to play around with some long-range when the last couple that reached the bottom floor of the apartment finally realized there was someone else shooting at them.

But scared, disorganized mercs were still easy to take out.

When Anya got to the top of the stairs, her heart was already on the fritz and had completely lost its mind. But the second they were closing in on him? It was like time stopped and then started spiraling backward. The tall, broad shoulders, the casual posture, the way he held his gun. It even still had that scrape from Feros. He said he'd get it buffed out on the Citadel. He didn't.

The turian took one last shot. A final hiding merc on the bridge dropped dead. Then, he moved away from the balcony, sat himself on some crates, and leaned his sniper against his hip. One flick of his fingers against his helmet, the thing was off, and those damned bright blue eyes were staring at her again. And when he started speaking she couldn't breathe. He practically growled, "Shepard. Thought you were dead." While he looked cool and serious, even a little angry, she knew his eyes. There was a lot more going on behind them and she didn't know what to say about that. But being able to see him again?

Well, that was worth coming back for.

There in front of her, with his stupid smirk and classic sniper rifle, was Garrus Vakarian.

A whisper to herself, she said, "Garrus." All it took was one look at him and all those feelings that felt lost, the squishy human who knew how to cry and dance and make him laugh? She was right there, screaming under the surface of her skin, infecting every pore with all the complicated things she felt. But Anya shook her head. There wasn't time for all that. She instead tried to keep everything straight and attempted to give him a more proper hello. Though, granted, she wasn't sure what the proper hello was for a friend who until thirty seconds ago thought she was dead. "Garrus Vakarian. I tried to find out where you were, but it seems you were just hiding out in this shithole under a code name. Clever. Trying to make sure I'd never find you again?"

He did that low, tired laugh of his, when he was wearing thin on a mission that went too long. If they had the time, she'd ask why he looked like this, what made him so tired and angry. Anya knew years had passed for him, of course he'd be different but... She didn't expect the way his fists kept clenching.

Garrus played it off with a friendly smile. "If I knew you'd be coming to find me, I would've left better clues."

Everything between them stayed on the surface layer while they talked. She didn't know how to do anything else under the shock and pressure of seeing him again with mercs on the fucking doorstep. But there was so much more under the surface that words couldn't cover just yet.

Instead, she said, "I'd joke that you were trying to run from all the danger I put you in, but looks like you made more than enough on your own. How'd you manage to piss off all of Omega?"

"Vigilante-ism, per usual."

Anya couldn't help but stare at him. Last she saw him, she'd just told him how much he mattered and then sent him away to save his life. And she couldn't fathom all the things he felt after all this time, after what she said.

She didn't even know what he would've said back. Maybe it was why his fist kept clenching, looking at her. That made a pit in her stomach that she didn't have the bandwidth to deal with right now.

So surface level would have to do.

But Garrus beat her to the punch. "I'd love to catch up more, tell you about my wonderful fuck-up here and all, but maybe we can save the reunion chat for after we get rid of the bloodthirsty mercs?"

"Fair." Nodding at Miranda, she said, "Stay up here with Garrus. Mordin and I will take point downstairs. We're lighter; we'll be able to take some good shots that they don't expect."

When she pulled out her pistol, Garrus's smirk felt real for the first time. "Still ruining lives with that thing?"

"It's not the exact same gun, but you gotta stick to what you're good at."

Before she walked downstairs, he grabbed her arm and said, "The second I saw that tactical cloak shooting pistol-fire, my gut said it was you. I knew you were dead, but I know you on a battlefield, Shepard." Taking a deep breath, he added, "I don't know how, but I'm happy you're back. Now, keep yourself alive this time?"

"Will do."

As she walked downstairs, it felt like she was tearing herself away from him, and it kept getting harder. With each wave they regrouped, made a plan, and then she inevitably split from him. The Blood Pack got some extra face bullets for that, as did the krogan that tried to run him down. She would fight any of them, all of them, with her bare hands if she had to.

Getting Garrus back and losing him on the same day was not an option.

Just as things seemed to calm down, he was back to his deflective smirking. "We're doing great. I was already pissing them off, but with you around they're really losing their shit."

"We've always been a good team, Vakarian."

"Trust me, I know." Hearing his voice was like waking up, for real. The past few days were this slow crawl back to reality, but he was the exact cool drink of water that made her realize this all wasn't a mirage.

Just as she got up from behind her cover and started to walk his way, he turned towards her and gave her this look, like he was seeing sun for the first time. While he looked so much rougher, angrier, a few times he looked at her and that all faded away. And it hit her so hard that she knew they'd have a lot to talk about once they got out of here. Hell, they'd always have a lot to talk about, but since the Collector attack?

Things were different. And not just because she died. She wanted to hear every word he needed to say.

Just as she stopped staring at him, though, that bastard Blue Suns ship swept down, shooting rockets. And he didn't have time to get to cover.

The next few minutes were a blur. She got rid of the threat with a few rockets of her own, blowing that asshole out of the sky. Anya's head was racing and couldn't shut up, rolling around guilt and blame on repeat. Maybe if she'd killed the mechanic he'd be okay. Maybe if she wasn't an idiot, mooning over his face and looks and all her damned memories, this wouldn't have happened.

When she knew the threat was gone, she dropped her guns and went to him.

Falling to her knees next to him, Garrus was drenched in a pool of blue blood, his mandible was ripped open, and he was blinking in and out of consciousness. Anya felt empty. She couldn't have come this far, come back from the fucking dead, just to lose him again. For years she kept losing people, but not this one. Not this time. He had to make it. If anyone deserved to drop from a rocket hit, it was her. She literally was out here shooting past her expiration date. He didn't deserve this, not when he was-

Her fingers twined into his and held tight.

As a Normandy shuttle came down with medical supplies, and some crew helped load him on, she didn't leave his side. Miranda tried to pull her away and heal her own bruises and tears, but Shepard wouldn't budge. This wasn't a time to be practical, not when her own practicality sent him away in an escape pod and abandoned him like this for two fucking years.

She wasn't going to let him go. Not again.

/

Very happy to have Garrus back! He's my dude. My main squeeze. My favorite part of Mass Effect.

I may be sick today, but I am going to enjoy his return with all my heart.

Thank you so much for reading! And extra, cherry on top thanks to my patrons:

Danyell Jones

Amy Connolly

If you want to support my stories (original and fanfic), my community boosting goals, and my Twitch aspirations (I play a lot of games, guys, and would love to share it. But I need a desktop first), please check out these places:

Twitter: Steph_Marceau

Wattpad: User/GraceJordan13

I offer one-shots, cameos, a discord, early access, the like. If you can help out, awesome. If not, just keep enjoying the story with me :)