#serioussamiam

Ah! I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about this headcanon before but here we go :D

So in ME3, Grissom Academy. It’s near the end of the mission when you come across a group of students holding off two Cerberus dicks with a homemade barrier that the lead student designed herself. There’s a lot of emphasis on her name, Octavia, and she’s also young black girl, so I like to think that was BioWare’s way of nodding to Octavia Butler—truly a giant in the SFF field. And where have we heard the name Butler before?? That’s right! Garrus had someone on his team named Butler. With as much as the Shadow Broker dossiers uncover how much Garrus does quietly in the background, I like to think Octavia is the daughter of the teammate who died on Garrus’s watch, and he arranged for her to get as far away from Omega as possible, to Grissom Academy. I feel like Garrus would feel at some kind of guilt or duty to take care of the kid of someone who was in his command and got killed for it.

Now, the title is a pretty well-known reference to Nietzsche: “He who fights monsters should take care he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” (Or something like that, I’m going from memory here.) I think that’s what happens to Garrus on Omega, which you can see pretty clearly with the way his kill list goes from clean and efficient to sadistic and darkly poetic. There has to be some kind of light, from my perspective, that keeps him from succumbing to a darkness so complete there’s no road back. And that’s where Octavia and her family come in, along with the rest of his team.

Unfortunately, this is my least developed story :( I knew it would be a fic that would take up all my attention once I started it, and I had other fics I needed to finish first. This is the only thing I have written for it (beyond outlines, that is):

The Butler girl was like—what was it Shepard used to say?—a bad penny, and her timing for turning up couldn’t have been worse.

Thank you for the ask :D

thanks for asking!!!

13: Who did your first Shepard leave behind on Virmire? 

I left kaidan on virmire. I was making ashley guard the salarian group so it made more sense to save her because more lives will be saved. I really like keeping ashley as my virmire survivor now. I did do a playthrough with kaidan as vs, but i feel like ashley is who i prefer as mine. It’s just cause theres a story within ashley about her wanting to prove her family to the alliance, and i like the idea that ashley manages to do that by crawling through the ranks and becoming the second human spectre. I also like the idea of my femshep being ashley’s mentor cause women, and because ashley tends to lead renegade and my shep’s paragon balances that out.

I think her relationship with aliens would improve as well if shes the vs. Because she actually sees firsthand the importance of working together, and I like to believe that she gets a cloesr relationship with the aliens of the crew than I think she wouldve if I’d let her die in me1.

26: Who do you wish was available as a romance option? 

Miranda! I really wish femshep can romance Miranda. Im going to suffer so bad choosing between garrus and miranda if that happened. But miranda and femshep is......... sexy............. I just want a sassy, cold lady to balance out my shep. And maleshep x miranda is good but it just doesn’t do it for me!

I love how miranda feels on equal terms with shepard, and she’s also independent and has stuff going on on her own. But I think even tho miranda can be cold, shepard sees her as an angel, the one who ressurected her, and someone with a soft heart. I like the fact that miranda was cerberus and they didn’t trust each other, but now theyre close and have an understanding of each other that feels equal.

So, this was supposed to be the sequel to First Seeds, my first ever published piece of writing (and first fanfic) three years ago!

(spoilers for both First Seeds and the WIP underneath so if you don’t want to know the ending, go read the fic first before reading this thing)