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M/E FIC LIST

dreamt a cipher // femshep x garrus // chaptered 13/? - 106k // WIP -> tumblr tag

HAHA oh boy… this is violence honestly

4. how do you think you would react to this character in real life and vice versa? would you prefer be a million miles out of range, be amicable classmates, or fall desperately in love? (bonus: arrange a hypothetical date between yourself and this character. getting silly with it is encouraged

How I would react to her? Well honestly I’m anti-military so I’d have prejudice going into this, lol, this is also a cultural thing because no one in Germany has the same attitude towards service members as the average person in the US would. Getting past that (which would be helped a lot if I was suddenly in ME universe, because the military context there IS different when they’re representing all humanity as opposed to nation states) then well it would be over for me. Obviously. It would probably be over for me either way though I’d feel a little guilty about it. Shepshep is engineered to make me weak in the knees and that’s what she’d do. I’d make a complete fool of myself and she would think I’m extremely lame. She would never agree to a date with me and I would never expect her to. She’d be the one leaving because what the hell would she want with a hermit like me who can’t even lift. Lol. I don’t think she’d do anything dramatic like climbing out a window, she’d simply get up, apologize and walk away. I’d be heartbroken but what did I expect etc

(these are really interesting questions 👀!)

Hi Em! thank you for playing ♥️

3: throw this character at any other character of your choice to bounce off each other as outsider pov to each other

Hmm who to bounce Garrus off of…

Let’s pick Samara for this one.

She’s not old quite yet, but the last time even the most grizzled of turians seemed old to her was several centuries ago, and the life she has chosen ties her so strictly to the Code that at first glance, Vakarian is nothing more than a rebellious child acting out against the order his society placed on him. She looks at him and sees a young man who paid for this transgression with his own blood, his appearance, and still doesn’t seem reformed. She’s not privy to the details. They’re none of her business, can’t be her business for the sake of his own life and Shepard’s mission, so she reserves the full brunt of her judgment — but she’s seen many young men of various species eschew order and fall apart in the pursuit of something else. She doesn’t know what that something may be, and she’s not going to ask, but he’s clearly troubled. A shadow over his eyes, pain still in his jaw, the report of his rifle sounding more often than she’d expected from a sniper. But it doesn’t take her long to see past her first impression and recognizes that the other thing he clearly is, is essential to the mission. Competent, more of a team player than she’d have thought at first glance, and invaluable to Shepard, who leans on him implicitly both in the field and, as hasn’t escaped her notice, in private. She is content reserving her judgement indefinitely, or for as long as Shepard’s mission lasts.

Garrus, you could say, doesn’t care. Not about anything that isn’t Shepard or the mission or tracking down Sidonis, not right now. But he’s perceptive enough, and he was there when they picked her up: the asari Justicar, who he’s ninety percent sure Shepard only let on the ship in an effort to save the people working in that Nos Astra precinct. He gets it. If he bothered to think about it more, he’d also be uncomfortable with her presence. He respects those in the pursuit of justice — but it’s hard to pinpoint if that’s what her Justicar Code boils down to, justice, if that’s what he’d personally even call it, or most importantly Samara herself, who as he understands it has surrendered her own reasoning and understanding of what’s just to what’s written in some old tome in some old asari temple somewhere, probably, he doesn’t know. But that’s what doesn’t sit right with him: that she’d act like a drone, only according to the ancient law rather than what she feels is right. He’s seen enough of systems of order to know that they fail where they’re inflexible, and the sharpest instrument of justice is not the letter of the law but the mind of who interprets it. A justicar is if someone had handed red tape a gun. He’s not exactly sorry she keeps to her chosen quarters, and that Shepard keeps her off her squad unless tactics demand otherwise. 

*

I think it’s an interesting contrast… They’re both all in for justice, you could even say that a Justicar is the asari version of a spectre, but their understanding of what justice is couldn’t be more different. I do think that if Samara knew that Garrus’ objective wasn’t revenge as much as avenging, she would respect him for it, but also I don’t really know what the Justicar Code says and I’m sure there’s many things in there I would completely disagree with, as would Garrus. He’d only ever manage an uneasy alliance with her because he knows that her decisions aren’t her own, by choice. And the only vision he’s ever seen for achieving justice has been to trail-blaze his own way towards it.

I mean if Shepard’s LI doesn’t count then who does? At least with Garrus it was always friendship-first, that’s the basis of their relationship, trust and loyalty and respect, you know. Everything else is built on top of that. They’re already each other’s most important relationship before they ever discuss going further. They never would have gotten there if they hadn’t been best friends, or whatever you want to call it (I personally don’t think ‘best friend’ is in either of their vocabulary lol so they would have found some other way to express that. Or not expressed it at all because it was already understood, since that’s how they roll.)

For Shep Shep, it does fall off a steep cliff after that. She is not a people person. She is definitely not a social butterfly. She is charming and captivating in her own right, and that’s part of what makes her an incredible leader, but part of that is also that she holds back. A lot, and on purpose. There are many walls up and getting through the first one doesn’t mean you’ll ever even get near the other walls. It’s not just about protecting herself; it’s about keeping things working in the social group that she’s heading, and that means measuring the things you share with the people who look up to you and not giving them insight into parts of you that would tip the balance (make them worry about you, make them feel sorry for you, make them see you as vulnerable.) It’s a careful balance that she knows how to maintain. She’ll have friends, but that doesn’t mean she lets them in, lets them see.

There’s only few people who she’d consider to be very close to her. None as close as Garrus, who managed to worm himself through her shell by circumstance and sheer compatibility. He’d never been her subordinate but more of a liaison, and he’d never pushed for more than she was willing to give at the time. He’d been there when she was lost and had no one and wasn’t able to maintain her distance as she usually would have, and he took it all in his stride and let her take the lead and find out just how well they bounced off each other when those walls were down (even when the walls being down was more of a hardware-software failure than a deliberate choice, on both their parts.)

She had a tentative friendship with Liara in ME1 that crashed and burned after that. I’ve talked about that before. What’s left is the remaining people who are at least close to her final wall but who’ve never made it past it: Chakwas, who was also never her subordinate; Anderson, though that one’s more of a mentor-mentee thing; Wrex, who has just as many walls up and they recognize that neither of them thinks them coming down is a good call; Joker, who is just as bristly and whose bristles somehow tangled with hers, lol.