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M/E FIC LIST

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

your challenge, if you choose to accept it: recreate yourself in this picrew and put your name in this incorrect quote generator for a quote

how would cipher!shep view samara? whatever happened to samara in that universe? would those two be kindred spirits during their time together? i see so many parallels between those two with their overwhelming sense of duty and how they warp that as a vehicle to push away the past/closeness/any sort of emotional intimacy.

HI NAT!!!!!! 😭 my friend…

This is a very interesting question… I’m stroking my chin because the fact is, Shep was never wholly at ease with Samara, and she declined to do her loyalty mission…

It’s the only one she didn’t do. Lots of reasons for that of course beyond the petty: as an orphan, the idea of derailing her critical mission to let this woman hunt down her daughter and kill her just repulsed her on some level, and she wasn’t going to let anyone turn Her into bait when she had something important to accomplish (she found out about the bait plan before they went down, because she demanded a full play by play of how Samara would handle her quest.) She then gave Samara the choice stay on the Normandy and pick the trail back up after the mission, or leave for Omega alone. It was a whole thing and I won’t get into it more now bc this wasn’t the question lol

But you make a very good point. By the point of cipher taking place, they have a lot in common: both chained to their duty by their sense of guilt  (survivor’s guilt/guilt over choosing destroy on Shep’s side, guilt over being mother to a rogue ardat yakshi on Samara’s) and they’re using it to push everyone in their lives away. Actually an incredible observation, thank you Nat… But the thing is that when she knew Samara, it wasn’t like that yet. Shepard respected her commitment to duty but what she didn’t respect is the same thing Garrus took issue with (ask from yesterday: her not making her own decisions) and the thoroughly bad impression left by how her recruitment on Illium went. She would have left Samara behind right there if not to save the lives of the police officers. Because ultimately, Shepard is a woman who takes her duty seriously, but she was never a complete believer in the chain of command (something she’d take care not to make obvious to her subordinates, but that comes through several times in her career, when she takes things into her own hands.) She didn’t join the military because she bought into the concept wholesale but because she needed a way out of her life and she wanted off Earth. Her complete commitment to duty finds her not through the military itself but through her natural inclination to take responsibility for those around her and through worthy causes. Samara’s unquestioning adherence to her Code doesn’t sit right with her.

Here we can ask: how much of that discomfort is really rooted in the subconscious understanding that she has the capacity to go in the same direction as Samara? She’d understand about herself that guilt can drive her to some drastic changes. She’s experienced it before when she left the reds, and again after Akuze. How badly would she have to feel to end up going down Samara’s road? 

Well. lol.

oh so you’re sending these?

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.