#shoker

Maisy Shepard - Colonist / Sole Survivor / Infiltrator/ Paragon

casual outfit | hobby | animal object in bag | portrait | favorite weapon love interest | abstraction | favorite food

Thank youuu!

11: What do you love about them?

The way they accept each other. Neither of them has ever quite fit in anywhere, so finding someone who cares for and respects you even when they don't understand everything about you feels revolutionary to them. It's what I would want in a relationship, really

23: What is a hobby/habit that one of them is into but the other can't get behind, and vice versa?

Hi anon!

Joker isn't there for the fight with Saren and after Virmire there are more pressing events than a little BDSM foreplay with a rogue Turian...

Joker lost his friend there. He wasn't rah-rah close with Alenko, but he generously tolerated lieutenant's company, which is a lot in my books. He also got to know Shepard didn't chose to leave Alenko behind, but explicitly failed the rescue and had to extract Ash instead.

He has a moment of weakness and backs down, bottling up/denying all fellings towards her, because otherwise it would create a bigger mess and he isn't sure he can handle it.

1, please. 👀

1 How would a thumb war go?

Oh. Oh. A dangerous territory. Alice has the strength advantage — once she has him, she would pin him down for good. But unfortunately for her, she would be up against a man who spends his all free time in the extranet and presses buttons (very fast) for a living, so the agility and speed advantage on Joker's side. I'd say it would go 50/50.

11. What do you love about them?

There is... a lot of things I love about them. I love how despite being straight couple, they are not your average heteronormative dream: they don't want to get married, have kids and grow old together.

They are trauma bonded, more platonically than romantically in love (best friends with best benefits if you insist on including sexuality in it), would follow each other into hell and back, but won't therapy talk to each other to save their lives. They are messy, they won't get their shit together, they hurt and heal each other.

31. What's their cursed couple Halloween costume?

I'VE BEEN DYING FOR THE REASON TO POST THIS PIC

20. What is a secret that only their partner knows?

Only Joker knows that Alice is a bottom 😭 And in private she either wants to be cared fof or treated worse than a wet sack of unloved rats (she won't admit it out loud though)

Only Alice knows that Joker is OBSESSED with fish. He gifts her one betta fish for the fishtank and promises to take care of it (as the excuse to be closer to Shepard), but oh my god, he genuinely worries about the fish. Everyone thinks he's doing it for Shepard, but she knows that in case of divorse he would fight for fish custody.

23. What is a hobby/habit that one of them is into but the other can't get behind, and vice versa?

Alice can't understand the social media and binge-watching — well, all the easy ways of entertainment and socialization accessible to a disabled person. And the fact that Joker is a chronically online person.

A: Joker, what's so important there? J: These dipshits at Space War Thunder got Normandy's specs all wrong. She has a way bigger core and stealth time. A: Wait, are you... arguing with strangers on the extranet? J: ...You don't get it.

Hiii Gamma! If only you knew how I love this question. I could answer it over and over again, write essays and papers on when exactly these two were down bad for each other.

Because there isn't a clear date or time in my books.

Since I use Joker's POV to write my fic, there are a lot of blank spots for the reader to fill in (from game context, clues, the general vibe or even their fantasy). And if Joker doesn't know or see something, there's a fifty percent chance that I have no fucking idea either. So we (he and I) don't know when exactly Alice realized she was in love. The general guess is that it happened way before he fell for her. God bless third person limited, if no one writes in it, it means I'm dead.

Alice was very amused and uncomfortably drawn to him from their very introduction, where Joker hadn't express a single sign of being scared by her or the reputation she carried like a shield. More than that, he openly mocked her appearance, but chose to target not the facial scars or the makeup or the non-reg haircut, but the "porcelain doll face", which admittedly no one ever chose to address. Like everyone else before in her life unanimously decided to accept that the confused expression of a lost puppy is indeed a scary Torfan Bitch™ face.

She intruded in Joker's space and he welcomed her by giving her a small safe space of the cockpit to drop the mask and relax. That where it sank in deep for her.

She took her sweet time to get to know him, for some time simply accepting him as a "funny flyboy". It took her one very embarrasing invite to the mats and one volatile fight with Alenko that Joker risked deescalating to finally trying to understand him. The Ship Stealing Incident in his files got her a pretty clear idea that he is the kind of man who fights dirty to get what he wants. And after a short heart to heart with him Alice realized that she's gonna protect this man with her own life (or at least that what she chose to believe at that time. She was hard in denial, because her last experience with men she openly loved, or thought she loved, ended badly.)

For Joker, though, it took way longer to realize he's down bad for his boss. He was interested in her from the beggining, yes, but that was mostly a sport interest of "what are you hiding under that pretty porcelain mask, Commander Shepard?". He started looking into it. For the love of the game, of course, finding out that there were a lot of differen masks she wore: officer, bitch, xenophobe, protector. Some touched him, some scared the shit out of him. Yet he was way too deep in the mystery of Alice Shepard to realize she willingly dropped the masks around him.

Only when Joker had eavesdropped through the comms she left open on Presrop, witnessing her confessions to her former CO Major Kyle, he saw what a kind of person Alice is — the kind that would kill thousand to let billions live and be haunted with it, the kind that would break herself to save someone's innosence, the kind that wouldn do something unspeakeable out of sheer loyalty (yes, silly goose, loyalty...). That's the moment he realized he would follow her to hell and back, no matter if she wants him there.

Though the chain of command and the fact that she is THE Shepard, and THE infamous Torfan Bitch, had been actively meddling with his confidence and he backed down every time he had a chance to confront her about what's happening between them. After Virmire and Alenko's death, Joker panicked and said her "no" before Ilos. He shut it all the way down and Alice didn't push, even if she stayed friendly and frighteningly loyal.

Only before her death, when she couldn't make it to the pod, she says "I love you" out loud through the dead comms, leaving him guessing her last words for two years.

He was staying in denial for his own sake for too long.