#m!shepard

The adrenaline hums until his ears are ringing with it, he’s just gotten ejected, live and violently, from the wreck of his ship, and there’s nobody to rescue now; he’s totally alone.

And that’s enough to start the panic, bc he’s been quite cool and focused up until this point, by necessity, but then the suit seals fail?

Inside the helmet I feel like Hadrian would be scr-eam-ing at that juncture, because he immediately realizes this is it. He does the War math quick; there really is no getting out of this, he’s going to fucking die.

There’s no graceful, noble acceptance while suffocating to death in outer space. This is not a movie.

The audience sees Shepard’s body writhing when the suit seams initially pop—omg just imagining that frantic grabbing at the ruptured seals, air escaping and ofc heat immediately leaking out into the vacuum. Shepard’s hands flying to the back neckline of his armor where shrapnel’s done its work, and he’s kicking and tumbling into open space, sobbing and screaming and so, so angry.

He dies angry and swearing, just like Zaeed Massani, but it’s also immediately hilarious to him that the Normandy is what kills him when it’s also what made him iconic.

This is the stupidest fucking way to go out.

His last thoughts are selfish and terrified—he doesn’t think about his crew, and if they escaped in the pods okay, he doesn’t even think about his dead parents or his dead sister.

He’s crying and pissed that some unknown enemy is what finally got him, he had so much left to do, the Reapers aren’t going to stop—

And then he’s dead.

Whoops! Nope! Actually, yes, but no. Not now, anyway.

He doesn’t really get to adequately process the terror of coming back from the dead until it happens a second time. That’s its own series of mental breakdowns (some of them über destructive).

For him, all there is is total nothing, then a fuzzy haze of something (Miranda and that bitch Wilson), and then he’s awake again with a body that feels different and awkward in fifty thousand ways. It’s two years later, he’s apparently been dead, and his sworn enemy paid billions to resurrect him.

Apparently this is a movie because this is ripped right off a B-movie plot.

It takes everything he has not to kill Taylor and Wilson on the spot. This shit can’t actually be happening?

But it is happening, it happens, and the whole time it’s happening there’s lingering nightmares about sobbing and suffocating above that fucking ice waste of a planet, and Shepard always wakes up feeling like a post-Mindoir teenager again.

He hates it. He actively rejects it.

Even though he’s horrified at the fact that he continues to exist, he compartmentalizes by seeing his body as the only Temple he has, treating it like a tool, a weapon.

He rereads Frankenstein.

Between his first death and second, there is an concerted, active commitment to make sure he faces certain death like a stone cold badass. It’s as charismatic as it is concerning.

Not to Shepard though, to him this attitude shift is unavoidable. Plus it makes perfect sense.

He knows this is borrowed time. He’s not a fucking idiot, he knows how this ends, but he’s still pissed and vengeful enough to snap and take the Reapers out with him.

And he’s never going out screaming and crying again. He keeps that promise to himself, at least.

But Alchera stays a viscious, horrible nightmare. And it’s worse now, because whenever he thinks or dreams about it now he imagines his crew—the way he didn’t when he died.

And he’s conscious of the fact that Alenko, his favorite last face he saw and the first person he asked Taylor about during the Lazarus attack, now wants nothing to do with him.