there's more screaming than you'd think

Commission for @daisywalletchains of Frankie Shepard!

I’ve been planning a series of one-shots that build off of the little search and rescue missions that we get in ME3, and while this is mostly a sappy little prompt fill, I guess it’s also the first one. For the prompt: “you look terrible.”

Read on AO3

———–

It’s funny how the meaning of something can change. How something so simple can contain its inverse, the history of utterances tethering what was to what is, the meaning of then and now. Equally simple though it may be, the transformation means everything.

“You look terrible,” Kaidan says to him as he shambles out of the decontamination chamber. It means, you look terrible, and the rest of the crew at their stations on the cargo deck know how true it is. Shepard’s boots fall heavy on the deckplates, leaden steps that echo beneath their feet until the sound is swallowed up as the launch bay’s airlock finishes its cycle. He pulls off his helmet with great effort, revealing a pallid complexion and red-rimmed eyes. He nearly retches as the lingering stench of the decontamination reaches his nose. Husk viscera crusts in the weave of his soft armour where the ion shower could not dislodge it.

The medbay staff that stream through the elevator know it too. Dr. Chakwas had stood next to Kaidan, monitoring the mission’s progress from the Normandy’s war room, and when the had finally shuttle lifted off the planet’s surface, she’d readied a response team without so much as a glance from him. Sixteen hours on Trikalon, sifting through the remains of the supercollider that had crashed to its surface, and they’d all seen the radiation flag on Shepard’s suit.

I finally have a job but my first paycheck doesn't come until a week and a half from now and I need a little bit of money to buy groceries

if you could send a couple bucks my way I would deeply appreciate it

ko-fi.com/notEriX