I'm finally able to share the story I did for @spectre-requisitions-exchange I've had a blank assignment and used it, and in all honestly am very proud of this piece. Check it out if you wish ❤️
Explicit
Category: F/M
Fandoms: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Relationship: Harry Carlyle/Female Ryder | Sara
Summary: When the cold moves into the bones, nothing feels like enough to chase it away. She was fine. She was always fine. She was a Pathfinder and she didn't get to be anything else. Harry, apparently, disagreed.
Read on AO3
She was seven years old, and the lake had no bottom.
That was how she remembered it. Not the pier, not the other kids, not even the moment she went in. Just the water closing over her head and the sudden, terrible understanding that there was nothing beneath her feet anymore. That the world had been replaced with something cold and dark and indifferent, a silence that didn’t care about her at all.
Her arms knew what to do, at first. Kick, reach, pull toward the surface. But the cold moved into her muscles faster than she thought anything could move, and her small body spent everything it had in the first thirty seconds. She remembered the exact moment she stopped being able to fight it. The point where her arms had nothing left to give.
She remembered her throat burning.
She remembered thinking, with a strange and terrible clarity, that there was nothing left to be afraid of.
They came from nowhere, and they were so certain, no hesitation, no fumbling. Just two arms that wrapped around her chest and pulled, and a voice that followed her all the way up through the dark water and back into the cold air above it.
I’ve got you. I’ve got you.
She had coughed half the lake onto the shore and looked up through streaming eyes at her father’s face. Alec Ryder, a man who almost never gave in to fear, had been afraid. She could see it even at seven. It was the most frightening and the most comforting thing she had ever seen. He was there, kneeling in the mud at the edge of the water with his arms still around her, solid and warm.
He was the sole reason she’d ever gone near water again.
He was the sole reason for a lot of things.
She still caught herself on it, over two years later. Like a step she kept missing in the dark. Alec had given his life for hers, had made that trade deliberately and without her vote, and she was still here, and he was not, and she still didn’t know what to do with that.
