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popculturebuffet · 5 years ago

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Prince of Wishful Thinking: A Tom Lucitor Retrospective and Character Study: Part 1: Firey Little Shit

Star Vs the Forces of Evil is a .. complicated subject for me. When it started it was somewhat hit and miss but the premise was intresting: Star Butterfly is a magical princess, having just got her families ancestral wand.. and a few days later, or a jumpcut in the actual episode later materials revealed the actual time span, sets everything on fire and is sent to earth. There she meets best friend and, to my delight that eventually turned into “OH GOD JUST END THIS WILL THEY OR WON’T THEY SHIT ALREADY” I haven’t seen since the likes of Ross and Rachel that warrants it’s own damn article, and gets into various shenanigans while battling a gang of “monsters”, a general term for most non-mewmans on Mewni, lead by a spoiled king, Ludo, who wants the wand.

Things got turned on their head quickly, as “Mewnipendance Day’ revealed that the Mewmans (Humans in all but name really) took mewni by force, using magic to cast the monsters into poverty, which as the series and “Magic Book of Spells” would reveal, caused a cycle of death and bloodshed with no defendants. It changed the show for the better, as the plot, while heavy handed is a necessary one given these prejduice filled times we live in and how well it’s crafted. And it’s into the show slowly coming into it’s own a new character was introduced: He had been announced by the crew in the show’s press junket was in the title but took most of season 1 to show up... and he’d end up being one of the sho’ws saving graces as it dived into bullshit and go through one of the most through character arcs of the show. HIs name was Tom Lucitor, Star’s obsessive demon Ex-Boyfriend, and this is his story.

THE MAGIC BOOK OF SPELLS

Before we get there though, we have to take at rip down side material mountain... this time to the Magical Book of Spells. The Book of Spells was a real life verison of a book we’d seen in the show itself that recorded the previous queens of Mewni’s spells and held Glossarcyk, a magical being who assited the queens throughout the decades. The real version was used to tell each of the Queens, even the three we see on screen’s stories.. star included. As such it not only gives us some, if sadly not enough, more of his actual relationship with star pre-series, but also the full background on his kingdom’s relationship with hers. See while the Butterflies control the majority of mewni, their Kingdom isn’t endless and there are half a dozen others, most of which aren’t really that fleshed out. But The Lucitor’s are somewhat of an exception: The Lucitors rule the underworld, basically Mewni’s hell where all sorts of skeletons, demons and ghouls exist. You know funny little ghouls.

I had to. Anyways the Lucitor kingdom also has Mewmans, due to some demons kidnapping a bunch years ago. Whoops.

Despite you know, kidnapping a bunch of their people, the Lucitors and Butterflies ended up close allies. This is thanks to the efforts of Mewni’s ambassador, Jushtin who was supposed to be Mewni’s first King to wield the wand... but his mom was pressured into having a sister. Said sister Solaria, to not mince words, was a genocidal monster who slowly descended into madness and tried to kill all monsters declaring outright war on them, but things were tense at first and they needed allies. So the Lucitors, along with the Cloud Kingdom of the Pony Heads which are exactly what they sound like, helped turn the tide. So things were cool for a few decades, and then we get to the reign of Rhina the Riddled. Rhina, who the book all but says is aromantic and likely asexual as well, was shoved into an arranged marriage with John Roachely, a second cousin who had no impact on the Lucitor side of the Genepool whatsoever and thus Star and Tom aren’t really related at all. I bring this up only because if I don’t tackle the incest allegations, someone will try and use that against me. I’d say i’m being paranoid but i’ve seen the rabid shippers use far less to attack Tom, so no. Rhina, to make things go smoother, cast a spell to make her love him.... it didn’t work longterm and, to get him to leave her, cast a heart break spell on him.. which LITERALLY broke his heart, and thus she was left a widow and the demons were not happy about her you know, whoopsie daisy murdering one of them likely set up with her a bridge between both sides and soured things for a while. Now you may all be asking: “Kay, intresting.. but what’s all this game of thrones but with flying pony heads, so better game of thrones, stuff gotta do with tom?” Well wait no more. Luckily for me, Star has a section in the book, and thus she spills the tea on her first metting with Tom. The two met at the Silver Bell Ball, an annual ball where the royalty of Mewni gather and the princes and princesses all dance once each as a good will gesture. The reason I went through the Rhina stuff is I’m guessing Star, who attended the ball every year according to the book and likely since at least she was old enough to dance, didn’t meet Tom earlier because his parents hadn’t been on good enough terms to bring him till he was 13, and River and Moon, Star’s parents, had succeeded in winning them over. The book nor the series dosen’t outright say this but given what we see later and what we have, it’s what i’m going with. We’ll get more into Tom’s personality when we get to his first in series appearance, but being a charming young man, and the first person her age at the ball Star found remotely attractive, they quickly set up a date for the boardwalk in the underworld for Cornshakes, because Mewni loves corn as much as I love Galarian Meowth. He looks so adorably homeless. But naturally if a snowball can’t last in hell, a shake can’t either, but even melted corn can’t ruin their good time and Tom even buys star a gift. I bring this up because said gift is star’s signiture devil horn headband. (Though Star is quick to announce she isn’t one of those annoying people who comes back from a trip thinking their a local). A real steal too at 14.99 or your second born’s soul. Most demons go for the first born, it’s a classy change of pace. The two eventually end up making it official, and star even gets a helpful pamphelt about Demons’ love of mascera, their anger and their tendency to tell their mom’s everything... the latter two will actually be really important as we go. But due to Tom’s anger as we’ll find out, the two end up breaking up and frustratingly we don’t learn the exacts just star was sad.. and that said depression lead to said kingdom distruction and the rest of the series. And since I covered the premise of the series above we can basically scoot right onto Tom’s first apperance.

BLOOD MOON BALL

Before this ep, Tom made a small cameo in another ep when her magic mirror, basically portrayed as working as a person sized video phone, accidently called him when she said call Mom. As a nice little bit of foreshadowing Tom flew into a rage at her preparing to hang up on him , even though it was a wrong number and they’d been broken up for a few months at this point. But it’d be an agonizing wait for Tom. I was curious about the character, given not much had been revealed, I missed the episode with his cameo, and the animatic for BMB’s first scene was released months before the episode came out and was really funny and intresting. Said scene has Tom making one hell of an entrance, landing from the sky in a cool carriage with a skeletal horse, floating in and catching eyes and floating up to Star’s desk in class to ask her out with the moon.

Star.. has no interest and shoves tom, hilarious as while they just cut to the front of school, she had to have been mildly shoving him all the way from her class up a hallway, and outside. And passing Jackie, marco’s crush I bring up because why not and Janna, Star’s future close friend who we’ll get to more later, since he did earlier and they now have to go from oggling tom to wondering what the hell their seeing. She also tells him to take his dead horse back, which leads to one of my faviorite gags of the series as said horse says “Wait, I was dead” and later, mid conversation about her going to said Ball, randomly interjects with “why didn’t you tell me I was dead?” That poor poor horse. You should come live with me. I don’t have a car, I could use a skeletal horse and I would tell you if you were dead man. Hit me up. But Tom tries to convince star he’s changed, he’s got an anger managment bunny, a counselor Brian (voiced by my guy Stephen Root, who you may better know as the voice of Bill Dautrive, the mayor in Amphibia or Bud Gleeful), and he’s doing fine.. then Marco goes and Karate chops his hand off, thinkign he was a danger. Tom gets really angry, to Star’s horror, which tells me she saw this sort of thing a LOT: tom getting this level of pissed at someone and likely leveling either them or everything around them. Thankfully Brian calms him down and Star introduces them and Tom , like the gentleman he is , gives her a bell to take her to the ball and time to think. Star, impressed by him calming down and trying, takes him up on it over Marco’s objections and worries about her safety, including the amasingly radar busting line “Never go with a predator to a second location” and the dance is on. As it turned out, Tom toned things down, ,less death and murder and more prom, to try and impress her and is annoyed when Star turns down his corsage.. which is a live spider. Which i’m generous to her on because spiders scare the shit out of me unless their pokemon. Seriously look at this sweetheart:

Who could be terrified of that face? Such a sweetie. Anyways, Tom is angry about it and his anger only increases when he wants to dunk himself and star in unicorn blood.. because while on earth dumping blood on someone makes them go on a psychic rampage you brought on yourselves, in the underworld is just a teen dance thing. But since one of Star’s best friend is a unicorn, something Tom has no excuse for not knowing as Pony is close to her and a princess in her own right and he had to have met her in his months dating star, and gets pissy over.. and star catches him having to pet his therapy bunny over it and walks off annoyed to get some punch.

And it’s with this Tom’s problems become apparent: He has charm, grace.. but he isn’t really TRYING to change, nor does he see WHY Star hates his anger. Sure he has a counsler, he has coping mechanisms things that would actually HELP him get better.. if he WANTED to. He dosen’t want to control his temper, he dosen’t want to get better he just wants Star back, and that’s why it’s not working: He’s making an effort, but it’s for the wrong reasons and without trying to tackle the root of his issues. He’s just trying to take the easiest way out, which is a problem that will crop up again next time. His second one is easier to illustrate when his plan becomes clear: turns out there’s a magical binding curse thing, it was clarified more in Season 4 but I feel no reason to leave it vauge here, and tom wants to bind his and Star’s souls together forever. He later admits he assumed she knew about that going in.. but it still dosen’t excuse his actions entirely and brings us to that flaw I was building towards: He’s selfish. He changed the ball to impress star, he shoved a corsage on her she didn’t one, got ANGRY, visably angry, at her turning down something he shoudl’ve known just by having dated her before would be a non-starter and worst of all he wanted to bind her to him forever without asking, just assuming she agreed by going. Star can be selfish at this stage too, especially this early on.. but underneath it she cares about people, even if she sometimes goes about it in the same fashion tom does here, she comes from a good place. Really both of this seems to come from them being royalty: both have had privlage their entire life and been insulated from a lot of things.. and Tom being raised in an environment where anger is normal and he gets whatever he wants from two loving parents and an army of servants, probably meant he never HAD to think of anyone else and as the series goes on, never had any friends except a Dog that we never see and probably sadly died. My theroy is Little Lord Fooleroy got ran over by Deatruk, the truck what runs over people, but i’m stupid like that. This winds up costing Tom his soul binding thing as Marco in disguise, being goaded by.. something that’s never remotely explained seriously what exactly the fuck was that creepy deep voice to crash the ball, ends up dancing with her. Shippers squeed, this was probably used in a jillion AMV’s.. and Tom naturally is pissssseeeed and ready to flambe Marco... until star takes him out with zero effort. They go home, Star berates Marco for not trusting her , end of episode.. oh and they speak in unison for a quick gag but i’m sure that won’t be important. As you can probably see her Tom was origianlly supposed to be a recurring pain in the backside for our heroes, showing up to win back Star, pull some “Nice Guy” Crap and then get his ass kicked most likely.. but after the end of Season 1, it was a fairly short season, the writers for whatever reason, and for the better decided to have Tom slowly change a bit.. but since him becoming a better person would be abrubt he has to do one lass dickhole thing first...

MR CANDLE CARES

And now we’ve come to Tom’s worst act, the thing that had he not fixed it the way he had at the end, made him an outright villain. Star and Marco have meetings with the new guidance counselor, who gives eveyrone else great career trajectories but for Star and Marco? Star gets a rather overbearing lecture on how she has to be queen when she grows up and probably shoudln’t date Marco and should be picking a future husband, ewwww, and Marco gets the unitetinonally, given Tom probably knows only about enough about earth to concot this scheme, offensive career path as janitor.. for an honor roll student with a bunch of extracurriculars. Yeah but Tom’s accidental racisim aside, while what he did to Marco was petty , what he’s trying to do to Star is creepy, basically using someone else to gaslight her into trying to get back together with him. But as noted above, Tom is selfish and as I haven’t noted yet he lacks some empathy.. so instead his advice sends Star spiraling not helped by her mother, Moon, basically telling her she has no choice in being queen and being happy dosen’t matter.. because Moon was kind of a dick at this stage. So while star gets a punk makeover and prepares to do something terrible to prevent her miserable future, Marco decides to confront candle and, as I didn’t even try to hide, Tom is behind this. Granted Tom wasn’t great at hiding it either, it’s just star was understandably concerned about her future and too distracted by that to pick up on how weirdly intrested Mr.Candle was in her dating life. But no i’ts Tom who is, and Marco baits him by pretending he and star are “Smooch Buddies”.. something the trailers for Season 2, and this episode was pretty early, used as a bait and switch, but I’m okay with it as most could probably tell something was up by the delivery. Naturally this proves to be a terrible idea, and i’d say it’s the dumbest thing Marco ever did if Season 3 didn’t take a sledgehammer to his character, but that’s an essay for another day, and Tom takes Marco back to his place to murder him... but Marco stands strong and Tom challenges him to a battle to the death, with Marco choosing ping-poing. Tom naturally destroys him.. but Marco uses the game to point some things out: After calling tom out for bascially cheating, since his powers give him the upper hand, Tom talks about Star doing the same, basically making up her own rules as soon as she looses. Marco then uses this to make tom see what a butt he’s been: The ping pong thing is just another example of how Star functions, doing whatever she wants and going her own way. It’s why being forced down the path of queen scares her so much, it’s responsiblity and rules and no fun as far as she can tell with no benifits. It’s why she rebels so much.. she can’t be told what to do.. which Marco makes Tom realize means he can’t control her, nor would he want to, and that he’s made a huge mistake. Tom forgoes killing Marco, and the two rush to star who’s on the edge of cutting of a mermaid’s tail to prevent her from ever being queen.. but just can’t do it. Star can be selfish, the above cheating shows that.. but she’s a good person deep down. Tom admits what he did.. and throughly apologizes for it, agreeing basically to let Star go and stop trying to force her back with him. Star does punch him for good measure, deservedly so, but they part on good terms and Marco reassures Star when she’s Queen she can rule her way, and they hug.. and notably Tom dosen’t get the least bit upset. Mr.Candle Cares is a good second ep. I’ve made no bones about how this is the worst thing Tom did: The controlling stuff at the ball was just selfish, the blood moon thing while not GREAT was asbent minded selfishness. This... it nearly broke star and ruined her future. However it comes from the same place as Blood Moon and his reaction at the end shows he simply didn’t consider star’s feelings.. and likely realize he HADN’T been. it wasn’t Marco’s fault they weren’t together, it was Tom’. While the Apology is a minor thing, it’s still a step in the right direction. As I said had he NOT backed away here he probably never would’ve gotten better or even if he tried, gone so far in trying to get star back he couldn’t walk it back. Here he hit his lowest point.. but thanks to Marco, he had a chance to turn it around before it was too late and grow as a person. This is where Tom gets compelling: he goes from a spoiled selfish douchey rich kid, to someone who clearly WANTS to be better, but has issue, social and otherwise, that make it an uphill battle. And with that we get to tom’s penultimate apperance for Season 2, and his last full one...

Friendenemies:

Tom shows up again and while Star tries to shoo him off before she has to get the shooing broom, Tom reveals he’s not there for Star but Marco. See he feels bad about you know, trying to kill him twice and wants to take Star’s Marco out tonight he’s gonna show him what he’s all about, he’s gonna get jacked up on some cheap champagne and let the good times all roll out. Marco understandably does not want a night out with a guy who was creepy to his best friend and tried murdering him twice, so Tom uses a bribe: tickets to the Mackie Hand, a martial artist that Marco is a huge fan of, film festival that Marco failed to get tickets to. With some encouragment from Star, who while not wanting to date Tom sees he’s genuinely making an effort, Marco agrees They hang out in Tom’s carriage which goes by tardis logic, if only, and to the creator’s credit, just so, and the two soon bond, finding a shared love of both Mackie Hand and the pop band love sentence, and Marco genuinely earns tom’s respect when some shades wearing piles of smug challenge our heroes, which Tom now counts as at this point, to a race, Marco agrees... then has them do nothing while the idiots speed up and get arrested and we get the blessed image above. The good times get interrupted though when it’s time for the marathon but tom locks him inside. And no this isn’t the start of some angry makeouts, as it turns out this was part of tom’s anger management therapy, but once again his propensity for the easy way out means he fails at it and burns up the tickets.. but Marco is more upset that Tom lied to him and pretended to be his friend and like mackie hand, though the love sentence thing was real> The whole thing plays more like a breakup than the end of a blossming friendship, which ties into how this episode got people shipping Marco and Tom with each other.. and rightfully so. While I don’t really ship it myself, I can see why as it has great chemstry and a great dynamic. Tom’s behavior here is part of why I say he has social issues, something I can relate to as a cave troll living in my mother’s basement: Tom dosen’t seem to have any real friends. Oh sure he can charm people, he has servants, two loving parents, and a screeching grandpa whose on the wall of my own personal heroes along with Ric Flair, My Mother, Stan Lee, Peter David, Rebecca Sugar and many more, but he dosen’t have FRIENDS. Star seems to be his first relationship and the first thing resembling a true friend he had, so while his behavior was a tad creepy it makes sense why he clung to her. And that shows here: He tries superfically bonding with marco, faking an intrest, giving him gifts, partying.. but it’s both forming a genunine connection over something, Love Sentence, and just sharing some memories that ended up making them friends. But yeah after Marco sings a sad pop ballad, or part of one. Tom decides to do a three point grand romantic gesture and raises Mackie Hand from the dead, and when Mackie isn’t allowed into his own film festival he fights the ticket guy and tom and marco watch and while they say they hate each other, the two’s friendship is forged. Marco finally has a friend outside of two doofuses and .. does Janna count? I dunno. She’s less of a friend and more of a gremlin who steals his things constantly while being actual friends with his bestie. Before we close out this leg there’s one final episode for season 2 with Tom in it to cover and dive into: Naysaya.

Naysaya comes literally just before the mid-season finale and Tom sadly disappears for the rest of the season, though he’ll be back and in greater numbers in Season 3. I’m not covering it full because it’s not a full on tom episode, he only has a short cameo, but he is important to it and his one brief bit shows off his character. In short Marco is finally asking out Jackie Lynn Thomas, his crush and a great character in her own right who sadly all but vanished from the show shortly into season 3 after something we’ll get to in passing next time, but got some great closure and was revealed to be Pansexual, so good for her. Marco had been building up to this for the last two seasons: first realizing thanks to time shenanigans he never made a move, then actually talking to her, and then not only telling her how he felt but realizing he didn’t know her but he’d like to. So now he’s ready to ask her out but every time he tries, written or spoken, it comes out as his most embarrassing secrets before the little neck tumor man comes out up there and does it for him. Thanks to Janna, local roustabout mentioned above, who after teasing Marco as is her usual response to anything with him, uses her knowledge of the spooky oooky to find out what that thing is: a Naysya, a curse born creature that spills it’s target’s most embarrassing secrets at whoever they try to court. Naturally, given Tom was an insanley jealous ball of asshole until a few episodes ago, it’s his fault though showing his slow growth, while he’s entirely suprised Marco asked no one out since the ball, says the guy who did two schemes and a shenanigan trying ot get star back, he’s also sorry and assumed it’d worn off or he would’ve told him sooner, and tells him how: he has to let all his insecurities out> Marco nearly withdraws over this due to being 90% insecurity, but eventually buckles down and tells jackie every embrassing thing about him and.. it works. Naysaya leaves and he and Jackie go out on a group date. And with that Tom is gone for a while but he, and this retrospective will be back. I owe a huge debt of grattitude to @jess-the-vampire, a dear friend, and wish her a happy belated birthday. She was a willing and helpful resource and worth a follow. And if you want more stuff like this, comics reviews, and what have you, feel free to follow or comisson me. Until next time, keep the home fires burning.

#star vs the forces of evil #tom lucitor #tomtober #star butterfly #marco diaz #janna ordania #jackie lynn thomas #naysaya #blood mooon ball #startom #tomco

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thunderheadfred · 8 years ago

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Valentine’s Day, 2181 CE

In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s the Very Special Valentine from Red Streak.

Featuring Jane Shepard’s N7 mission on Akuze with cameos from Urdnot Wrex, Private Hudson, and one too many unapologetic 1980′s cinema references. Soundtrack by Meat Loaf.

Total word count: 5k

Jane Akuze

The ground was a long way down.

Much like falling in love, there was a drop that could kill you.

Shepard had ample time to worry about the skeleton-splattering deadliness of that distance as the Mako idled ten stories above the crater floor, clutched in the belching gullet of a thresher maw. Shepard spun her wheels against wet meat and empty air, but it was useless. There was no purchase to be found.

Delirious and giddy with fear, she couldn’t stop staring straight down at that drop. Hey, how about that? She could see Uncle Urdnot’s house from here.

The krogan warlord’s fortress might have been a lot friendlier looking if it hadn’t been sitting directly on top of the mouth of hell. The mercenary outpost was now smack-dab in the middle of a rampaging thresher nest, having gone from ‘habitable’ to ‘hell-hole’ overnight.

A week ago, Shepard had been comfortably grounded, babysitting fifty deeply filthy colonial Marines, swerving a baker’s dozen tanks across the rugged landscape of Akuze. Under cover of a remote M35 field driving course, they had been covertly pursuing a tip from Admiral Hackett, trying to find and neutralize “a mad-scientist superweapon.”

Armed with little more than the vaguest estimates as to the location and scale of the threat, things had been tense. All they knew was that they were after a sizeable terrorist splinter cell that had named themselves Cerberus, as if calling dibs on the underworld. What a bunch of assholes.

A week into the search, she’d intercepted Clan Urdnot’s distress call.

It was a sorry excuse for an S.O.S. - just a long, seemingly accidental broadcast bursting with imaginative profanities and the sound of an entire krogan mercenary company dying loudly in the background.

So - much - screaming.

Speaking of loud noises. The thresher maw that currently held Shepard’s tank in its drooling jaws was through with waiting for its snack.

Inch by squealing inch, the tank crunched down around Shepard’s ears, little more than a tin can in a suckling vice. There was a deafening roar of tearing metal, and then a massive glowing polka-dotted tongue crashed through the starboard hatchway. It flopped around with a ferocious slap-slap-slapping, like a great white shark leaping from the water to flail hungrily across a beach of screaming tourists.

Without even the courtesy of asking to be her Valentine, the thresher deepthroated the M35 and then spat out a throatful of acid.

It was no miracle that Shepard was spared: someone paid the reaper in her stead. Her gunnery officer - Private Sheb Wilhelm - took the whole hit of acid full on the chest. He blasted out a wild high-pitched scream before he bubbled, melted on his own bones, and died in tortured gore behind her, the sixth Alliance Marine to perish on Akuze under her command.

Engineer Apone drew unlucky number seven. He was pushed out the acid hole on the far side of the cabin and fell to his death in silent surprise before he even got a chance to turn his head and see what was coming.

As she suspected. Exactly like love, a fall like that could definitely kill you.

The thresher bellowed: a thousand quaking octaves of pure noise. Then, just as suddenly as it had rushed up from below, it abruptly let go of the tank, dropping Shepard ass-backwards into a skyrise worth of empty air.

She fell. And fell. And kept falling. There was no way to know when it would end - all she could see was the sky.

Shepard wasn’t proud. As death rushed up to meet her like a bat out of hell, she clutched the steering column and tearfully remembered sleeping in her pari’s arms… Then she breathed in deep and screamed her lungs bloody. If this was curtains, she was going to fucking announce herself all the way offstage.

The Mako and the ground reunited at terminal velocity, with a sound as loud as it was painful. Airbags deployed from every angle, scrambling her with enough force to break all the ribs on her left side. Just for kicks, her head slammed against the seat back in a sudden explosion of ugly stars, and then everything got real fuzzy.

Shepard was still screaming when someone wrenched open whatever was left of the starboard hatch and clamped their massive hand around her forearm with bruising force. Those brutal, groping fingers rattled her so violently that she stopped screaming entirely out of annoyance.

She turned and saw him. Urdnot Wrex. Huge, red, and lit from behind in glorious technicolor like a god of the sun. With her head in a fog, all she could do was stare.

Sweeping in to rescue the krogan band had been Shepard’s call. Luckily, her Marines and Wrex’s mercs had fallen in love at first sight, and after the initial raid cemented the marriage, nobody had questioned her orders. Wrex was especially infatuated with his rescuers, and he expressed his affection with blended gifts of heavy weapons and heavy drinking. The touch of intoxicating love in the air had only been enhanced by the looming proximity and subsequent arrival of Valentine’s Day.

You haven’t heard poetry until you’ve heard a krogan merc reciting a hand-written sonnet to the Alliance Marine who just pulled his ass out of the fire.

Shepard’s ears were ringing - she was in a stupor. Wrex shook her again.

“Shepard! Stop gaping like a baby salarian and let go of the wheel! Is this what you call a rescue?”

Oh yeah. She was supposed to be rescuing him, not the other way around. Things had not gone according to plan. How had things gotten so backwards? Somewhere between the thresher maw’s mouth and the ground, presumably.

The thresher maws just kept coming. There were dozens. Every five feet, they seemed to spring from the ground like man-eating dandelions, and there was no weeding them. Shepard’s Marines had been forced to attack in shifts, pulling out a few more half-eaten krogan survivors with each crazy, desperate trip into the central compound. Taking turns to dart back to the few safe inches of perimeter, they ran like hell, slept in bursts, and drank themselves numb in between.

Now on day three of the assault, Shepard had been leading the very last wave. Then - whoops - everything had gone straight to shit when Wrex had run back into his fortress, drunkenly screaming that he’d forgotten his piece-of-shit family armor. She should have cut him off after that fifth mug of ryncol. But then again, how do you tell a thousand-year-old battlemaster that he was too deep in his cups? She could use a stiff drink herself right about now. Her whole body roiled with pain.

It felt... sort of… purple. A royal hue.

Wrex, for his part, was through with gentility. He reached into the cabin and slapped Shepard right across her stupefied face.

“SHEPARD! Wake up! It’s time to get your pretty ass in gear! I don’t remember giving my future queen permission to die!”

During one of those scanty breaks between raids, Shepard may have accidentally gotten blinding drunk on ryncol and promised to bear a krogan battlemaster twenty fruitful daughters. Or something.

The thought of being heavily pregnant with exterrestrial offspring was what finally brought her back to her senses. Her head snapped up and she looked outside. Oh god.

Half a dozen thresher maws were writhing in the distance beneath the unending hellfire of turrets, rockets, and mortar squads camped along the western perimeter. Tanks were scattered across the crater floor like discarded toys, most of them reduced to little more than smouldering clumps by concentrated bursts of acid.

Wow, it was loud out there. If she sat on her ass a moment longer, she would surely, surely die.

Undoing her harness as fast as she could, she checked for broken body parts - there were several, but none that mattered - and then she grabbed two fistfulls of rippling krogan neck and let Wrex yank her out of the tank like a bad tooth. Perfectly at ease amidst an exploding hellscape, with the sun setting behind him in a blinding flash of orange, Urdnot Wrex pulled Shepard from the still-steaming wreckage of an Alliance M35 and held her against his chest in a bridal carry. He was seven and half feet tall. Covered in mountainous scarlet plating and scarred even on his good side. Two hundred and fifty raging kilos of pure berserker muscle. Urdnot Wrex: a thousand years old and still not ready to die.

The two of them together made for one hell of a spectacle.

That is, until Shepard beat him firmly on the hump and forced him to set her down.

Every instinct in her body told her to run for the perimeter, but she knew her best chance of survival was to stay perfectly still until she could get her ass back into a functioning Mako. Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm... that had been the motto of the week.

She radioed her lieutenant.

“Alenko! Report!”

The voice on the other end was breathless but ready for anything.

“Commander! Glad to hear your voice. Perimeter squads are holding, but the tanks are getting ripped apart. Saw yours go up - said a prayer.”

She skipped the reunion. Time for that later, over a mug of tasteless swill.

“Do you have the Cerberus intel?”

“Negative. Ferro’s squad went dark right outside Urdnot HQ. They barely made it out the door.”

Goddammit. Ferro, Drake, Spunkmeyer. Just like that: eight, nine, and ten.

Without the data that Engineer Ferro had mined from the Cerberus satellites, she had nothing solid to bring back to the Admiral. Just a fistful of thresher maws and a ten dead Marines.

“I’m still standing. I’ve got Wrex. We’ll get that fucking data. Wait for my signal, then pull everyone back.”

“Roger that, Commander.” She heard him calling to the troops before the comm cut out. “Keep dancing, princesses! Move-move-MOVE!!”

There were shouts, a few well-timed explosions, and then a tsunami of furious gunfire rang out in stereo surround across the canyon floor as the Marines continued to lure the thresher maws away from the base.

“That’s more like it, Shepard. Let’s show Kandros how to choke on a quad.”

Despite Wrex’s blustering, he and Shepard were doomed unless one of those tanks made a rapid detour to pick up some extra passengers. There was no survivable way to do this on foot. She whipped up her omni-tool and did a quick roll-call. Who was about to pull the short straw?

Private Hudson was the closest. Halle-fuckin-lujah.

Private William Hudson, whose first words to her had been: “Hey Shepard, have you ever been mistaken for a turian?”

“I don’t know, Hudson. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” had been her unenthusiastic reply.

She radioed him for pickup and then turned to Wrex.

“Private Hudson is on our nine and closing fast. Says the ultimate badass is about to take me for the ride of my life.”

“Ultimate badass? He must be talking about me.”

Wrex wrapped his arm around her waist and pumped the action on his shogun with a forceful, single-handed throw.

Hard to argue with that.

The Urdnot clan leader was magnificent. A rare krogan biotic leading a ragtag clan of social progressives, Wrex had been bunkered on Akuze for years. Said he'd been trying to trigger a krogan cultural renaissance - but Akuze was an obscure Terminus shithole of interest to few, and Wrex’s conclave of misfits had attracted little interest. Still, he had secured himself a cozy little headquarters, a towering scrap heap where an old warlord could sit pretty on his massive hoard of weapons, credits, and loyal mercenaries. When a seemingly endless hive of thresher maws had ripped his world to bits, he’d barely blinked an eye.

She let Wrex hold her while they waited for Hudson, but only because she felt marginally safer with a krogan battlemaster girding his arm around her in the middle of the apocalypse. Really. It wasn’t because she had a crush on him. That would have been ridiculous.

In comparison, Hudson was a measly posturing blowhard. Green and wobbly as a bowl of medbay gelatin. Exactly the type of touchy-feely, sludge-spewing, barrel-chested man-boy that Shepard’s pari had caught her sneaking out to drink with on more than one occasion.

She’d always had a soft spot for any loudmouth with a heart of gold. Even so, unlike the harmless farm boys back home, she wouldn’t have let Private Hudson anywhere near her own privates, not with a ten-foot pole.

Scratch that. Especially not with a ten-foot pole.

He was obsessed with two-hundred-year-old rock songs, not to mention naval shanties that stretched several centuries even further back into obscurity. While they’d been digging for Cerberus’ trail, he had found a way to broadcast his own private radio channel into the internal sound system of every Mako along the caravan. How many torturous rounds of “Sink the Bismarck” and “Farewell to Grog” had she endured?

By the end of that first week, the Private had led enough enthusiastic rum-fueled sing-alongs for the entire platoon to know every word of Hudson’s Choirbook by heart. To spare her own sanity she might have put a stop to his nonsense, but Hudson was to morale what a shot of tequila was to a margarita. Necessary.

Hudson’s tank skidded to a noisy stop behind them, spewing rocks and dust ten feet into the air. The hatch opened and a wall of sound spilled out.

Oh great. Meat Loaf for dinner. Again. I Would Do Anything for Love, Hudson’s choice anthem for hardcore romantics on this most auspicious holiday.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, lovebirds! Your horse-drawn carriage has arrived!”

Shepard and Wrex dove into the tank. Hudson was driving solo. His squad had been obliterated early in the day, when numbers four and five had been called to Heaven.

Shepard manned Gunner Ripley’s post at the turret, sliding her hips into the channel of the gunnery pillar, where Wrex’s massive hump was too big to fit. The krogan was forced to sit in the bitch seat and do his best impression of the small-boned Engineer Newton.

Shepard had to shout at the top of her lungs to be heard over the music.

“I need this party bus to make one more stop, Private. Get me back to Urdot HQ - we can't leave without Ferro’s Cerberus data!”

Hudson screamed right back at his usual volume: eleven.

“Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, Commander, but we just got our asses kicked! I would do anything for love, but I won’t do tha-”

“Shut the hell up and drive me to Ferro’s tank, Hudson.”

To his credit, the Private shuffled his armor around his shoulders, smacked himself on the helmet for resolve, and then screamed:

“Aye-aye Ma’am! Next stop: the real pretty shit! Anything for love!”

The bulk of the threshers were busy trying to eat everyone on the western edge of the crater, but there was always the risk of a new one popping out from beneath with no warning.

It was the rumbling that gave it away. You could always feel the tremor first, as if the earth were sucking in a starving breath.

Speak of the devil. There it was now.

Hudson had felt it too.

“Ahhhhhhh shitttttt thar she blows...”

After watching his squad dissolve in a rain of acid, Hudson knew the risks better than anyone. Without delay or finesse, he slammed down the accelerator and raced to the mercenary compound, redlining at whatever level was beyond top speed. The Mako’s wheels jumped and skittered over the terrain, barely making contact with the crater floor.

Shepard’s teeth rattled in her skull to the beat of sex and drums and rock and roll, and she was instantly aware of all the injuries she’d sustained in that fall. The pain was enough to make her puke.

She clung to the handles of the turret’s periscope and held back a scream. Instead of passing out, she sang at the top of her lungs - it was the only distraction insane enough to keep her on her feet.

“As long as the wheels are turning…”

They were within spitting distance of the compound. Hudson joined his voice with hers at a blistering pitch.

“As long as the fires are burning!”

Hudson pumped the boosters and skipped them like a rock over a lake, pushing the Mako well beyond the advisable heat tolerance, roaring forward as fast as the tank’s six exhausted wheels could carry them.

They sang on, “As long as your prayers are coming true!”

Private Hudson clutched the wheel, shrieked like a little girl, and then screamed:

“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!”

The thunderously sentimental chorus of the song burst out around them as the thresher maw surged from below, glancing against the port quarter. The impact popped the back of the tank like the tab on a beer can, and with a startled hiss of spinning wheels, the Mako flew forward and crashed into the flimsy wall of barricades surrounding the mercenary compound.

A hard landing, but not the worst she’d had today.

They had wiggle room around the base’s perimeter: a scant circle of solid ground that the thresher couldn’t slither beneath.

Safety was still a long way off. ‘Spitting distance’ was a measurable quantity out here, not just a catchy turn of phrase. One hundred meters. Two hundred, if you wanted to avoid getting acid splashed in your eyes by accident.

Ferro’s tank was an arm’s length away, upturned and smoking. On foot, totally unprotected with a thresher maw hovering nearby, that distance might as well have been interstellar.

Without waiting to be asked, Hudson kicked open the port hatch.

“ANYTHING FOR LOVE!”

Then he ran for it. He had a handful of seconds to get there and back. Ten, if an optimist was counting.

01 - 02 - 03

(Frost - Dietrich - Crowe)

Limbs flailing wildly, screaming the entire time, Hudson made it to the other Mako and ripped open the door in three seconds flat - a world record if she’d ever seen one.

04 - 05 - 06 - 07

(Ripley - Newton - Wilhelm - Apone)

He spent four seconds rummaging in the tank. The thresher maw had seen the Marine’s crazy, pinwheeling approach, and now it turned its head in ravenous anticipation.

08 - 09 - 10

(Drake - Spunkmeyer - Ferro)

Hudson’s hand emerged, data pad hoisted triumphantly. One second later, his head followed. The Valentine’s hearts he’d painted all over his helmet flashed like perfect, pink targets. The thresher roared and lined up a flesh-eating loogie.

“Hudson!”

Shepard threw herself out of the hatch to rescue him before Wrex could do so much as close a contrary hand around her heels.

Hudson was halfway out of Ferro’s tank, scrabbling for purchase along the chassis. The thresher was a lousy shot, and the main acid projectile missed by several feet. Even so, the splashback was deadly enough on its own.

Shepard got lucky. A footlong gash of acid slapped across her thigh guard. As she ran, she popped the seals and tore off the plating before the acid could reach skin. Hudson had been knocked to the ground, and he wasn’t fast enough.

There was a six-inch hole bubbling through his abdominal guard, sizzling and steaming through layers of ceramic and underplating, and then...

The only advantage of a thresher acid burn was that it cauterized as it went, so you never saw much blood.

She locked her arms under Hudson’s sweating, hairy pits and dragged him kicking and screaming back to his tank. She threw him to the floor behind the gunnery perch in a wailing pile of his own guts and pus, and then turned to Wrex.

“DRIVE!” she screamed.

Wrex, despite his age, experience, and superiority to Shepard in every conceivable sense, obeyed like a docile spouse. He clambered across to the driver’s side, slid the seat all the way back with a crunch of gears, and then the Mako slammed into full reverse.

The wheels smoked beneath them as Shepard ripped the medkit from the wall and dosed Hudson with every last ounce of medi-gel she had left.

“What were you thinking?” Wrex shouted over his shoulder. “That whelp wasn’t even worth the drag!”

Hudson wasn’t dead yet, and he wanted everybody to know it. Between his endless pealing screams, he managed to spit out, “What the hell, man? I’m right here!”

Then, in defiance of all sense or reason, Hudson abruptly stopped screaming and started to read.

Until seeing it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed him capable. Ferro’s datapad bounced crazily in front of his face, and his eyes were as round and cartoonish as the hearts on his helmet.

“Game over, man!”

“What?”

He pushed the datapad into her hands, and she saw. A Cerberus breeding facility built into a solid pillar of bedrock right beneath Wrex’s outpost. There was the mad scientist superweapon in all of its apeshit maniacal glory. It had been directly underneath them the entire time.

She scanned Ferro’s report, glanced at the schematics. The ring around the rosie was vulnerable - little more than sediment and worm holes - the thresher maws had been churning the dirt for days. The whole thing was ready to cave.

She let the Mako rattle around her head for a few seconds, and then made up her mind.

“Wrex, how about a little vengeance? Can’t guarantee your hoard will survive, but I can promise you one hell of an avalanche.”

The krogan looked at her, narrowed his eyes, and then barked out a giant, rocky laugh, like a boulder smashing down a mountainside.

“I knew there was a reason I liked you. Let’s blow this place wide open.”

“Alenko!”

“Ready!” The Lieutenant was on a hair-trigger.

“Pull everyone out. Prep every weapon we’ve got for one final, unified blow. I’m sending coordinates. Once I’m clear, hit them all at once, right where it hurts.”

“Roger that, Commander. We’ll bang on the drum all day.”

The Mako stumbled over a pocket of soft earth, and Shepard’s head hit the gunnery pillar with a hollow clap. An unfathomable shade of yellow sparkled in the back of her retinas.

Wrex was a lot of spectacular things, but a good driver was not one of them. Being three sheets to the wind was hardly improving matters. As he tried to shift without easing down the clutch, the Mako groaned and creaked, then let out a tortured squeal.

Despite his injuries, Hudson reached for the wheel and cried, “Ease up, man! You’re killing my baby!”

Shepard’s Marines were a lot closer to the perimeter line than she was, and unlike Wrex, they were professional drivers. As each tank pulled back over the edge with a ballerina’s twirl, the threshers refocused their ire on the remaining targets. Soon, Hudson’s tank was the only moving thing in the field. A ripe fruit dangling on the vine.

Their best chance was to make a suicide run for the nearest edge of the crater - the unguarded eastern periphery. Wrex was too busy focusing on the tantalizing firepower to the west - he was going in exactly the wrong direction.

One by one, the threshers vanished beneath the shifting sands. They were going to come up from underneath. God only knows how many at once.

They were never going to make it. Not with Wrex behind the wheel. With half a dozen thresher maws closing on their location, there was not a single second left to get the krogan out of her way.

She screamed “STAY ALIVE” in Hudson’s face, and then she flew over the transmission box and landed directly between Wrex’s enormous thighs, stealing the wheel right out of his hands.

In a flash of lunacy, Shepard reflected that this would be a difficult Valentine’s day to beat: sitting on a krogan’s lap to take a trip through the thresher maw tunnel of love.

The threshers raged up from all sides, one massive hoard surging in every direction at once. Hudson’s unasked-for soundtrack made a roaring comeback in much the same way: with no warning and a torrential howl of noise. Sound so loud that it filled her pores and forced the fear right out of her.

She couldn’t risk a look into the rear cabin, but she could hear the mass accelerator cannon firing, could feel it shuddering the wheel beneath her hands. Somehow, with his guts spilling out behind him in a sizzling pile, Hudson must have hauled himself up into the turret, and he’d queued up a tune to whistle while he worked.

Just as she had trained her Marines to waltz with their Makos like glittering princesses, so Shepard did now. The only way to successfully steer an M35 was not to drive - but to dance.

With that overpowered eezo core glowing under her hood, the tiniest flinch could send a Mako bucking like a wild bronco. Not much mass and plenty of juice meant the controls felt fidgety on a good day. Only with a lover’s patient hands massaging those thrusters, all care and tact and precision, could you truly see the vehicle’s combat potential. If you treated her like a lady, a Mako could float like butterfly and sting like a bee.

She tried to keep all of that in mind while the thresher maws heaved before her, a frenzy of tentacles so vast that their sheer bulk blocked out the sky.

The cannon overheated, and Hudson switched to the coaxial machine gun without pausing for breath. He tore Shepard an exit route through sheer grit and determination - stubborn, ceaseless, and screaming all the while.

Right before her very eyes, Hudson’s machine-gun buzzsaw hacked down the thresher directly ahead, felling an undulating thirty-meter slab of living flesh like it was a dried out tree. Shepard pumped the thrusters and rode over the steaming corpse. The resulting thump-thump-thump of metal-meets-flesh was startlingly rough - her ass bounced against Wrex’s lap in a way that the krogan was enjoying far too much for comfort.

No time to be a prude. She could see the solid ridge of the canyon just ahead.

One hundred meters.

The mako smoked with exertion as the damage readout flashed cherry red.

Fifty meters.

Burning fumes filled the cabin, a choking black steam of hot metal, torn belts, and eezo.

Twenty five meters.

POP-POP-POP

The thrusters barely had enough hydrogen to burn, and the Mako hopscotched drunkenly to the edge, barely catching her front wheels over the lip of the canyon.

“C’mon, beautiful! So… close!” Shepard grunted, slamming down the throttle and milking the dwindling fuel reserves for every last drop.

A rocky voice groaned directly in her ear: “You’re telling me,” and then Wrex thumped his fist against the dashboard with such a whomp of muscle that the Mako gave one final, sputtering hurrah.

Her engines flared to life and then immediately died, but it was exactly enough. The tank tipped to safety with an anti-climactic mewling sound, like a baby kitten landing in a basket.

Alenko must have had them locked in his sights. The moment Shepard’s Mako was resting on solid ground, she heard him screaming over the comms:

“Marines! The Commander is clear! FIRE EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

Shepard spun in place and craned her neck to look out the port hatch. The fireworks display was spectacular.

It started at the western edge of the canyon, where the Marines' concentrated firepower was dense enough to crush half a planet. The soft, sandy earth sucked itself down and away, transforming into a churning abyss, a grinding whirlpool of rock and stone. The thresher maws, despite their titanic size and strength, were sucked into the tumult like twigs. Howling and thrashing, they spit artful fountains of acid half a mile in the air, until in a single startling flume of earth, they vanished to the last.

A mile-wide crater of earth flushed itself down to hell like the universe’s filthiest port-o-john, and then everything went dead silent.

Standing in the center of the bottomless pit was Clan Urdnot’s base, gleaming like a solid-gold trophy in the sunset. Not only had her Marines just saved centuries of the krogan’s collected loot, she had just turned Wrex’s podunk mercenary outpost into an impenetrable fortress.

Behind her, Wrex let out a gasp that could only be described as sated.

His gratitude was obvious. She could feel it jabbing into the small of her back, and her eyes went wide. Equally difficult not to hear the groan of unmistakable full-throated arousal that he unleashed right in her ear.

“Hey Shepard, was it good for you?”

She allowed herself a single, disbelieving laugh before careening back to reality.

All the pain rushed back at once, an instantaneous gutpunch of broken bones and acid burns. Ripping Wrex’s hands away, she turned abruptly from the krogan’s lap and flopped in battered agony towards the rear cabin. If she’d had the luxury of succumbing to her wounds, she might have blacked out.

Instead, she yelled an incomprehensible mish-mash of turian curses and scrambled over the transmission, dragging herself back towards the aft gunnery perch, where she saw Private Hudson slumped within the pillar, twitching and quiet.

When she approached and gently pulled him off the turret, he reached for her and flapped his lips noiselessly. She eased him down into her lap and wrapped a comforting arm around his shoulders to see him off.

Despite her noblest intentions, she couldn’t stop herself from giving him an angry shake.

“Goddammit Private! I ordered you to stay alive!”

The phrase ‘I would do anything for love’ - mouthed in silence by a dying asshole - was the loudest sound she’d ever heard. Private Hudson, perpetual eleven. She let him put his hand in her hair and drag her down to hear the rest.

“…but I won’t do that.”

#I may have gotten a little carried away #no real Red Streak spoilers #except that Wrex is the ultimate badass #but you knew that already #red streak #urdnot wrex #mass effect #Fred writes

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