#spymastery

🌪️ TORNADO - what is the biggest change you've ever made to them? how have they changed from their original version?

the first iteration of alma was fairly bare-bones since i hadn’t actually played rdr2, so spending time in that world with the characters helped me figure out how she was going to slot into place amongst the existing cast. she’s a lot more fiery than she used to be, has a lot more anger and life burning within her than she used to - original alma was fairly subdued and passive in her life, honestly. she also has much more developed, nuanced relationships with the main cast (especially john & arthur) which makes her feel more well-rounded in my head.

🌈 RAINBOW - what advice would they give to their younger self?

don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself, to throw yourself at the world if you feel like it’s what you should do. don’t be ashamed that you ran - it was the only thing that saved you in the end. good things are coming that will outweigh all the crap, you just have to stay on your feet and they’ll reach you eventually. don’t be afraid to be afraid. 

🔥 FIRE - do they have any self destructive tendencies? what habits do they have that hinder them from becoming their best self?

alma isn’t too prone to self destruction. it could be argued that involving herself with dutch and the gang was her worst crime against herself, but without them she’d still be alone or, more likely, dead. she tends to take the blame for a lot of things, even if she had nothing to do with it, which is a bad habit she tries to teach herself out of - with varying levels of success. mostly, she just wants to be warm and bright and good.

☁️ CLOUD - a soft headcanon

whenever she’s stuck in a foul mood, or feeling down, alma will often gather up a few supplies and go riding for a few days. being alone in the wilderness with gaia has always helped to calm the fire in her heart - her mother used to joke that she was born in the wrong body, that she should have been a mustang free to roam the wild west with no restrictions to hold her back. alma thinks it’s almost the same thing, to ride gaia until they’re both sweating and comfortably empty. 

charles is the only person she will ever let accompany her on her outings, despite the fact that she’s only known him for about six months in comparison to john and arthur, who she’s known for over six years. john talks too much, and arthur is too easily distracted.

🌟 GLOWING STAR - what do they think about when they look at the night sky? is there someone they want to star gaze with?

she always enjoyed picking out constellations in the sky, ever since her father showed her how to do it when she was a little kid. looking at the stars to this day reminds her of him and she’s thankful for it, thankful to have a happy memory of him instead of only remembering him as a bullet-riddled corpse. charles knows more constellations than she does, and shows her some that his own mother had taught him as a child. 

🌠 SHOOTING STAR - if they could make any wish with no repercussions, what wish would they make?

oh what alma would give to see her parents again, to have them alive and well and able to see that she’s okay, to be able to introduce them to charles and john and abigal and arthur and sadie and her little gaggle of a family that she’s somehow managed to find, to let her parents hold their granddaughter in their arms. 

☄️ COMET - what do people assume about them? are they right?

Even before she’d joined the Alliance, before she’d gotten married, she’d never had a place she could accurately describe as a home. There were apartments, sure. Couches. Relatively dry benches in the park. She couldn’t remember what it was like to have somewhere to come back to—couldn’t remember if she’d ever had anything permanent, for that matter.

When she married Jae, things got better. She had a job, and a family that loved her (Jae’s sister-in-law, also conveniently named Hana, took right to her—her and her daughter). They were happy, for a little while, but it still didn’t feel like home. 

As a member of the Alliance, she and Jae were both posted on space stations more often than they were on colonies, though that was a preference of theirs rather than something unfortunate. The fact that her daughter was even born on Earth at all was a small miracle, because they’d only been there on a layover when she went into labor.

The closest Hannah ever got to home was whenever she was with Kira, she realized after a while. If she had to be away for a mission, she felt like a piece of her was missing, only to be filled back in whenever she had her daughter within arms’ reach again. She loved her daughter, wanted to be the best mother she could be for the sweet little girl that followed her around when she was just barely learning to walk babbling, “Umma, Umma!”

She and Jae fought, as the years went by, and Kira grew more and more closed off the older she got as a result—home had once again lost its meaning. 

Hannah hated herself for the relief that settled into her chest after Elysium, curled up with her daughter sleeping in her lap (hiccuping breaths in her sleep all that was left of her hysterics after the fight had been over), clutching her husband’s dog tags in one fist. She’d loved him, once upon a time, but things had been…

Well, they’d been.

When Kira joined the Alliance, Hannah stopped trying to find home, and just let herself be. Let herself enjoy space travel, enjoy the perks of being a Captain with her own ship. Let herself enjoy the downtime between relays, the comforting boredom of routine. She was good at her job, and she spoke to her daughter regularly—this was as good as she needed her life to be. Other captains she knew were vying for the Admiral’s Star, and she could have been as well, but she was happy where she was. She didn’t need anything else.

She especially didn’t need anything else when her daughter made N7, and her niece—looking older and harder than the last time she’d seen her when she was 15—became the first human Spectre. Just being a Shepard now meant she received special treatment, whether she wanted it or not.

After the Battle of the Citadel, and the subsequent funeral a month later for Commander Shepard, Hannah started to wonder if maybe they were cursed. Sun’s family had been lost on Mindoir, and she’d lost her own husband on Elysium. Her daughter had lost some of herself that day as well—she wondered if the name Shepard carried more weight than it was worth, if they were all doomed to a horrific death, one way or another. 

A morbid thought, but she’d never been the happiest person.

Time passed, though, and stranger things started happening. The SSV Washington (her pride and joy) was one of the few frigates stationed out near the Terminus Systems—mostly as a precaution, but nonetheless, she tended to hear things about what was happening to the human colonies out there. Troubling things. Ghost stories and fairy tales come to life.

She tried, once, asking Hackett to do something, shortly after Ferris Fields just vanished, but she was met with nothing but a wall of paperwork and a maybe. It was annoying, it was troubling, and she was dying for the days when she was younger and could just go without worrying about what would happen to the Alliance if she got caught. If she could just go rogue like she wanted, but…

She got an email from her daughter, shortly after Kira made a trip out to Horizon. It read:

Subject: Leave of Absence

Mama,

I just wanted to write you before anyone could say something to you about me. I’ve taken another leave of absence—no, I’m not back with C-Sec. I’m with someone who’s working on this colony thing, chasing down the people responsible. I’m doing something good, Mama. I swear.

I just wanted you to hear it from me that I’d left, and that I’m okay. I’m with someone I know you’d trust. I can’t say more than that on an unsecure channel, but just…know that I’m okay.

I love you.

—Kira

And that was the last she heard from her daughter, for a long while. She worried, and fretted, and asked around, but all she could get out of anyone were rumors and hearsay. Something about The Collectors and, strangely, Commander Shepard.

When the Bahak System was destroyed, and Anderson called her about the consequences, she wasn’t sure what to feel. It was almost funny, thinking back to what had happened at Torfan, and now Commander Shepard and her daughter had, somehow, beat her record for brutality there. She wondered if it was just some sort of weird belayed payback to the batarians for—everything that had happened, until Kira called her.

“Mama, we didn’t—I tried, Mama, I tried! We tried but we just—we—it—” she sobbed into the phone, and her heart sank. “I’m sorry.”

“…I’m coming to Earth,” Hannah said after a beat, and Kira sniffled into microphone.

She spent a full month on Earth, took an official leave of absence and everything, just…getting to know her child again. It had been so long since they’d seen each other for longer than a few days, and they had so much to catch up on after everything Kira went through with the Collectors, and with C-Sec even before that. 

The Alliance Detention Center still felt like, well, a detention center, but spending time with her daughter again almost felt like…not home, but close. 

She met Thane on her way back to the Citadel, at the spaceport in London. They literally ran into each other, a cliche meeting if she’d ever seen one, but she liked it. She liked him, when they got to speak longer once she ran into him again on the Citadel (without the actual physical collision this time). They went for drinks, and Hannah felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

Attraction. To another person.

Of course, she’d had passing attractions, but she’d been so busy with being a Captain and everything since the Skyllian Blitz that she hadn’t had time to think about. Stuff.

Well, she had time to think about it but acting on it was an entirely different story. And she’d been perfectly fine flying solo, anyway, but…

But there was just something about this man, and she was coming up on 47 soon. Maybe it was time to try getting back into the dating business. 

The Reaper War made it impossible to really try that, in the end. They talked, as often as she dared, but there wasn’t much she could do to get time to see him. She was busy with the Crucible, and he was sick, so the most they could do was talk.

And talk. And talk. And talk.

God, it’d been so long since she could just talk to a man—to anyone really—it was exhilarating. She loved it. It was fun and flirty and distantly familiar. She’d been so young when she got married, and had been married for so long that she’d never gotten to experience much of this—this—this.

She felt about 16 again, laying in her bed and giggling sleepily with Thane over the phone about this and that. They talked about their kids, their families. He told her stories in that voice, turning murder and assassination into poetry as he spoke. She told him about her days on Earth, which she hadn’t told anyone since Jae, and he listened.

The first time she kissed him, she had the absurd urge to pop her heel like in all those old Hollywood romance vids.

They spent one night together—a lovely, wonderful night, during which she laughed more than she could remember laughing in the past 20 years (though, that could have been the hallucinogen at work there). One night to treasure until the war was over.

One night to remember when her daughter called her crying about her friend, Thane, and a coma.

She didn’t come to visit him with the war raging, but she thought of him often, in between thinking of her daughter and her niece on the front lines.

And when it turned out that he survived—that so many of the people she cared for survived, more or less in one piece even—she couldn’t quite believe her luck. Couldn’t quite believe it still when he wanted to see her again, wanted to give them a try.

When they bought a house in New Mexico, it hit her that this was real. 

It freaked her out a bit, how happy she was with him. How sweet he was to her, and how unused to it she was—near the end of his life, she and Jae had been fighting almost constantly. Thane cooked for her, kissed her for no reason, rubbed her shoulders when she seemed even a little sore. She’d never been treated so well by a man, if she were being honest.

The first time Thane met Kira, in the context of, “Hello, I’m dating your mother,” Kira had, as a surprise, also brought her new girlfriend. To say that the evening was awkward, with so many new relationships out in the open (well, mostly new—Hannah knew about Tali, but she’d yet to properly meet her), would have been an understatement. 

Tali, bless her heart, thought it was funny, and in fact kept the conversation going throughout the evening while Kira and Kolyat both sulked, and Thane pointedly avoided looking directly at her daughter. 

When their home was finally empty again at the end of that weekend, Hannah wasn’t sure how to feel. It certainly hadn’t gone as planned.

“They just need time,” Thane said one evening, coming up behind her to kiss the back of her neck. “Everything will be fine.”

And he was right, of course, but she resented him for it a little. 

Just a little, though.

It wasn’t until they got together for Christmas later that year that everything really clicked into place. They had Kolyat over again (who still lived on the Citadel through all of its rebuilding), and Kira and Tali, too (living on Rannoch now, in a prefab as they waited for their house to be finished). Everyone spent the early part of the evening in the kitchen, Tali teaching Hannah to cook dextro food for future reference, and then they had a surprisingly pleasant night after that. 

When everyone retired to bed (Kolyat on the sofa in the living room, Kira and Tali in the guest room, and Hannah and Thane in their own bed), Hannah had the strangest feeling of contentment she’d ever experienced. It felt like…she didn’t know, but it felt good.

She woke early the next morning, left Thane dozing peacefully on the bed beside her, his service puppy (affectionately named Noodles, after the first real meal they ate in their new house) curled up by his side, as she wandered out to see about starting breakfast. She was almost in the kitchen when she registered the laughter ringing through the house.

“Oh, come on, baby brother. I just want to know your girlfriend is treating you right.”

“She’s fine. Will you drop it? And stop calling me that! Our parents aren’t married!”

“I heard she was studying music, right? How’s that going for her?”

“How the hell—?”

Tali interrupted them. “Shepard’s ex-girlfriend works as a professor at Auxua part-time.”

Hannah chuckled as she heard Kolyat give a long-suffering sigh. “Of course,” he groaned.

She peeked around the side of the door, pulling her robe a little tighter around her shoulders to see her—her family where they were standing in the kitchen. Kira was sitting at the kitchen table with her girlfriend sitting in her lap, helmet off as she munched on some kind of breakfast bar. Kira’s chin was resting on her shoulder and she was laughing as Kolyat shook his head where he was standing at the stove, apparently cooking everyone breakfast.

The strange feeling was back again, and only got stronger when she heard quiet footsteps behind her, and a cool pair of arms slid around her waist as a furry bundle of joy zoomed past her legs and into the kitchen (to a joyous cry of “Noodles!!” from her daughter and her girlfriend).

“Are they still getting along?” Thane murmured quietly into her ear, warm breath washing over her neck.

“Yes, I…” her voice cracked, and her eyes stung a little, watching the happy little scene.

“…are you alright, siha?”

Tilting her head to lean back against her boyfriend, she sighed softly, wiping at the tear that slipped down her cheek. “I’m happy,” she breathed. “That’s all.”

I’m home.

y’all should’ve known this was gonna turn into Thane/Hannah. also Kolyat’s girlfriend is a tiny shoutout to @ahealthylionisanonillion‘s Indigo from her fanfic that you should all absolutely go read (I hope you don’t mind the reference!!!)