#reda shepard

It‘s a long way getting over something like Akuze, and it‘s no one-way-street.

Goodness!

The mighty @masseffectholidaycheer bestow upon me a match with @kirikitsune for the festive reaping whos gift arrived today and made this the best monday ever. I am absolutely in love with this fabulously marvellously wonderfully magnificent self made leather cover and the notebook it protects, as well as the amazing bookmark. This is beyond fabulous and I lack the english vocabulary to adequately express how wonderful they are. That wonderful, indeed!

I mean, look at it in all it's glory? The colors are perfect, and the little punches remind me of shells and sea stars and we all know the ocean is my favourite place and beach combing my favourite hobby! Not to speak of the love for notebooks. This will definitely be a huge motivation to do more art this year.

And as if that wasn't amazing already, I got a whole BUNCH of self made pecan toffees that are beyond delicious and will get me through all this dark&cold season. Your granny has the best recipies, @kirikitsune!!

Thank you so so so so much for this absolutely wonderful gift!

Reda stares at the soft vanilla sponge cake in front of her for a full five minutes without noticing the time passing by or the glare on Cynthia’s face growing more and more concerned. Finally, the older woman decides to interrupt the stare-off.

“You okay?”

Reda immediately nods without blinking, as if she’s following orders, eyes fixating the cake, and picks a small piece onto her pastry fork, giving the impression both the cake and the fork are soaked in acid.

“I’m fine”, she reassures Cynthia, voice as absentminded as her whole presence.

She stares at the tiny piece of cake on the pastry fork. It’s the fork with the decorated end, a small ceramics ball with a decent floral pattern, the one Cynthia only uses for special occasions. Like birthdays, or bullshit like surviving what killed fifty and should have killed her, too.

Her skin starts tingling.

“You don’t have to-“

“I said I’m fine”, Reda cuts her, a little sharper than necessary, and adds in a slightly more defensive tone “It’s fine, really. It’s just my head getting in the way sometimes.”

She ignores Cynthia’s demur that they don’t have to have cake right now, and forces herself to chew and swallow that tiny bite of horribly sweet and soft vanilla sponge cake on the fancy pastry fork. She gets herself to take two more tiny bites from the slice on her plate, before the creeps on her scalp get too bad to just sit here and continue eating cake.

“Just my head”, she mutters again, and wants to crack a half heartened smile, if only for Cynthia, but she can’t. “The cake’s good. I’m good. It’s fine.”

Her skin is itching so bad.

She asked for this, after all. For the cake. This specific cake in particular. The same recipe Cynthia has made since she’d moved in shortly before her sixteenth birthday, eight years ago.

She wanted cake.

Or maybe she just wanted to want cake.

Or maybe something completely different.

She can’t tell, her mind is a huge vast empty blank fucking hole right now.

But Cynthia made the cake, the one that she asked for, and she will eat it and not be an ungrateful little shit.

It’s just cake, she tells herself.

It is literally not my fault that I never really progress more than 2h into the game, with the amount of Akuze related references thrown at you, like, how can I not obsess about that as a writer?

(Yes, I did start a new playthrough. Which will either result in me actually playing the game, or, you know, writing more Akuze.)

(Also, look at my beautiful space babe.)

It's a macabre question to ask, but it cuts to the chase.

Shepard shrugs. The answer is as simple as fucked up.

"Better."

Well, obviously Giles isn't better. There's no way he can get better, because he's dead. He's rotting in the dirt of Akuze, eaten alive by thresher maw acid, cowering behind a rock right next to Reda. He's taken most of the hit, and she hasn't (still got enough damage to need a trachea transplant and eighteen percent third degree burns on her skin, but she's alive and he's not, so that's that).

Corporal Giles won't get better.

But he stopped haunting her every single night, and every single minute of the day, and every single art therapy session. Because he's the only thing of Akuze she remembers and while she's bad at drawing, she's apparently gifted in the horror genre, and she's gotta draw something.

Maybe she'll draw something else tomorrow.

Or maybe she won't.

I swear, I am a serious author.

Things that definitely happened at some point in the post Akuze recovery.

~ ~ ~

Miroslaw always went to check in with her post surgery. Technically it wasn’t part of his job, at least not until she was awake enough for physical therapy. But he knew a friendly face could make all the difference and he didn’t mind doing some sick visits just for the sake of it.

Besides, post-anesthesia-Reda could be a quite entertaining person to be around.

The procedure she’d undergone today had been a relatively minor one to fix some ongoing nerve issues in her left arm. She’d been out for barely half an hour, so he’d volunteered to be around when she woke up again instead of doing their regular afternoon PT session. But even with the surgery being a minor one, sedation had done a damn good job.

Reda was trying to tell him something for a couple of minutes by now but wasn’t quite there enough again to catch up with her thoughts.

“What did I do with my what?” he tried to make sense of her slurred words.

Reda frowned at him, having the same intense stare high on drugs as she had completely sober. She had told him five or so times by now – ten maybe, numbers were hard to catch – what exactly did he not understand about his question?

What was he hiding?

“Egg.”

Her right hand aimlessly waved through the air, trying to gesture something.

“Where’s your egg. The-” more hand waving, eagerly directed at him “-man high. Egg. On trips-“