#justiccr

❝   —-------–   do you mind if i join you   ?    ❞  

wtf space!mom is Offend

The Murder Frog …. ..

     ❛  i wasn’t  complaining.  ❜    exertion flirts the edges of searing calves.  evfra peels his arm from its side  &  stretches it across the broad planes of his chest  ( still heaving,  fatigued ) before letting his elbows tuck close to his flanks.  he  LIKES  sparring with her;  she’s deadly  &  dangerous  ( so is  HE  )  &  intuitive  &  evfra doesn’t know how to describe it in any other way than  FAMILIAR.  

but throwing fists  &  cracking flesh does  little  to dissipate the pinching tension that ropes  &  knots decades of torment  &  failure into the bridge of his nose  ( never has ).  it lives in the bands across his shoulder blades,  too,  braiding around the ladder of his rib cage.  he has it all over in thick scars.  like a  rash  coating him tip to toe,  trauma  &  guilt sewn into skin. 

     –— there are no  HAPPY ENDINGS  for soldiers with dark stains on their hands  &  oil spills in their hearts.  he knows that. 

     ❛  i’ll be whoever they  need me  to be.  whoever  aya  needs me to be.  ❜    his eyes are cool  &  blue  &  clear for once,  the view of  AYA  washing through him  &  settling the aching heat in his heart like fulfilling an old bet.  an old  promise.  

     ❛  i don’t  deserve  any more than they do.  being here  –— is  enough  for me.  ❜

     He hadn’t expected to be telling this story any more than Samara had been expecting to hear it - at least not to this degree of detail. Shepard had the basics from his own mouth, and Lawson knowing the details was unavoidable, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had told this bloody, inglorious tale without omitting exactly how much Vido Santiago had once meant to him - that was deeply private, his single greatest act of weakness and humiliation, and as of this moment the number of people in the galaxy he had told numbered just one.

     But that one was a woman who had had to institutionalize two of her daughters, and murder the third - and he still hadn’t bothered to ask what had become of the woman she’d had them with. Even if she wasn’t dead, you didn’t need to be a genius to see how a catastrophe like that could tear a couple apart. Samara knew exactly what it was like to have your life ripped out from under you, to have someone you loved turn on you, and sitting together in the hush that followed battle, against a barricade in a warzone he didn’t think either of them expected to leave alive, he didn’t feel like he was putting himself at a disadvantage in the telling of it.

     Maybe a part of him even needed to tell it. Morinth was dead, and if Vido wasn’t too, then the Harvester he’d watched carry him off just weeks ago didn’t leave much doubt as to what had happened to him instead. It was over, but the satisfaction he’d been expecting had never come; the hatred had washed out of him, and he’d been left with the uncomfortable discovery that there was nothing else left inside of him, that without his vendetta he was empty, totally devoid of purpose or meaning. Twenty years or four hundred, it didn’t matter - what did you do, how did you move on after spending nearly half your life dedicated to one bloody, thankless goal?

     So he’d told her, told her how an angry, violent young man had thought he’d found some kind of soulmate in a person just as vicious as he was himself, how the Blue Suns had felt like belonging for the first time in his life, a place where his savagery had been an asset rather than a deterrence, and how he had knelt in the mud of some stormy backwater planet and watched the man he loved raise a gun to his head and pull the trigger because he was no longer useful to him. 

     He wasn’t sure if it had helped, but he didn’t feel any worse for it, and when her fingertips brushed his he blinked, looked up at her, struck by uncharacteristic uncertainty and hesitation. After a long moment he looked away, out over the smoking husk of the battlefield, and very slowly let his fingers curl around hers - a tough, pitted, ugly hand, but the only one he had to offer. Funny, how something so small, so goddamn juvenile could make him feel something the way very few things could, anymore. There is always tomorrow. 

     He wanted to read into that - God help him, but he did. He’d shut the book on that notion after the party at Shepard’s apartment, had stated his intention pretty explicitly and been turned down with just as much clarity, but some foreign part of him hoped. As if the war to end all wars near the end of his natural life was the time to be discovering his romantic side.

     “Maybe.” He snorted, looked up as shuttles shot by overhead, dropships offering relief and shoring up the front lines while the lull lasted. “Bloody few tomorrows left, by the look of it.” He’d planned to say more, but at that moment the first bluish rays of the planet’s smaller binary sun broke over the horizon, lit up the smog-choked air with such an ethereal, alien quality that even he had to give nature its moment and appreciate the beauty of it in silence. 

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

LIKE, I literally would have No Issue Whatsoever if they built them as characters first and love interests second, but they usually don’t. If the creators thought ‘okay, so the story calls for a talented scientist/warrior/doctor/etc, let’s get an Asari in here and weave her meaningfully into the plot’, and THEN thought ‘you know what? This woman and our male story lead would make a compatible couple, let’s do it’.