#alchera

Cover art by the utterly phenomenal @legionofpotatoes!

Mezzo

Pairing: mshenko | Rating: M Tags: Canon-typical violence, trauma, dealing with your problems poorly, body autonomy struggles   Summary: The twists and turns of ME2, through the eyes of everyone but Commander Shepard. Chapter Summary: Death was the only way

Chapter 1: Stars | Read on Ao3

At first, you think you can survive this. Your ship is in pieces, your momentum catapulting you away from the wreck, the planet you call Alchera watching serenely as your life burns. You tell yourself, you’ve faced worse. The first time you fought death was the first breath you took, into lungs that weren’t ready, in a body too small and fragile to survive on its own. You struggled for days in a vessel adrift between our stars, an insignificant speck of heat in our cold universe, determined to burn as bright as a sun. When your mother finally held you for the first time, she showed you to us and asked if we were what you were in such a hurry to see for yourself. You have always been ours. You were ours when your father sang you to sleep while we gleamed through the shutters. You were ours when you rose for the first time on unsteady legs because you wanted to see us. You were ours when you felt our power come to life under your skin and understood that we are part of you in ways you’d never imagined. How many times did you palm the glow of dark matter in your hand and imagine you were one of us? But no matter how bright you burn now, it won’t be enough to save you. There is fear, now, but you swallow it back.    The second time you fought death it wasn’t your life you were fighting for. You begged, pleaded, to march into the unknown and rescue a father who didn’t come home, and when no one listened, you turned to us in the dark and begged to take his place. That was when you learned we could be cruel.   We felt your pain, we heard your anger, we wi ditnessed your tears and did nothing. And you forgave us. We wonder if you will forgive us now.

"When the Collectors blew up the first Normandy, you died because I wouldn't leave... because you had to come back for me."

I tried some new brushes to make this! 🥹😁

every day i spend just one minute catching up, seeing what he is up to and two days ago he was showing where the potatoes might have been on the boat. i mean it, the demo showed the bag of potatoes in the kitchen of the boat and he was explaining how they were peeled

anyway this kind of things made me wonder. i can see people in the ME universe trying to recreate a demo of the normandy sr-1 and this ship becoming a famous enough wreckage that a version of me in the ME universe would find a version of this guy live on the extranet playing a normandy demo showing where in the ship you could find potatoes

The nature of space was defined by its silence, giving truth to the adage that there was no one to hear her scream, but as inky darkness gave way to a heavily clouded sky the thin atmosphere of the icy planet gave voice to the collapsing ship. Metallic screams tore through the snow filled sky as overheated metals and polymers twisted in their final dance. The shots that had broken her keel had taken even the illusion of stability, and yet the men and women of two races that had built her had known their craft– stubbornly the great hull held a cruel semblance of her shape even as what had once been the SR-1 plummeted. Wind shrieked in the areas that had once held laughter, broken screens icing over as the pervasive cold coiled merciless fingers through the gaping holes in the superstructure. Stress fractures spiraled in a dancing counterpoint to the frost, until they marbled along the frame like a latticework of doomed beauty.

She had been built for space, for the world beyond the skies of the planet that had built her. There were no oceans on Palaven, no great seas that had held thousands of years of sailors across their briny depths, but humanity had lent her its own legacy of the great navigators that had charted endless courses under the stars she would call home. Even without water the *Normandy* still sailed, christened like so many of her ancestors with a smashed bottle and volley of cheers. She was meant to heal the breech of two peoples who had started poorly with each other, and had in her brief service saved more than would ever see her. A legend before her first year serving the Alliance, the SR-1 had carried the glory of her namesake far beyond the shores of a long settled battlefield. She was meant to heal, to grown, and to mend the rift of two worlds who were perhaps not so different.

But there was no mending the great ship as gravity charted her final plunge. Velocity and speed and the cruel mathematics of inevitability were not on the frigates side as the angle of descent sharpened. The chair of the helmsman who loved her best was empty, though even if he had stayed to fight the ending it would have made no difference. The miles of wires and connections that had once given direction were torn, sparking in the thin air like severed nerves still firing in a fading mind. The explosion that had torn apart her drive core had been a fatal blow, power bleeding out section by section with nothing left to give. There was no shield against the glowing corona of Alchera’s atmosphere as the ship fell, nothing to stand to its defense as the ground that roared ever closer finally claimed its prize.

The battle of the Citadel, and the reaper at its heart, had left battle scars on her frame that she had worn with pride. Her gravesite left worse.

Ice and ground cratered beneath the ship as it imbedded itself into unforgiving ground at brutal speeds, the great hull shattering into a thousand pieces as it settled. Steel and titanium shrieked an almost human scream of defeat as they twisted a final time, contorting cruelly into its final pose. By only the greatest of chance the line of the hull that carried her name ground itself face up in the earth, petty defiance for a fate it could not defy. There were none to witness her final fight, but for the dead she had carried with her on their final flight together.

Within moments the noises had stopped. Within hours the snow covered the worst of the carnage. Within days it was almost completely hidden.

It would be five weeks before she would be found, before the leader who had gone down with her would be removed. It would be two years before her commander would return, carried by another ship that bore her name and her legacy.