No scanner. Instead have my topless femshep.
*nosebleed* this is one of the best illustrations of how I imagine femshep looks like. Scars not only on the face, worked out body (abs nomnom), a handfull of boobies. this makes even Liara drool hehe.
Other people’s Turian head canons: Cute and well thought out examples of worldbuilding and character development.
My Turian head canons: What if Turians snored but it sounded like cicadas screaming
i realize Garrus has seen the real Shep, the one that’s awkward, the one that has trouble living outside of a military life, the one that probably trips going up the stairs and can’t dance. She makes mistakes like anyone else, she loses her temper, she can out stubborn mountains.
but I imagine that he also just has tremendous respect and awe for her when she is completely focused on a mission. When the stakes are incredibly high, when lives are on the line, when anyone else would falter and crumble, she just keeps going, unstoppable as the tide. And I bet he would think to himself, if only for a moment of quiet awe, that sometimes she looks to him as a goddess of justice. He so badly wants there to be justice and sense to the universe, the sooner the better, and to see her do the impossible on the daily, to see her save as many lives as she can without hesitation, just fills him with awe.
and since turians find solace and guidance in the spirits found in either their team, their home or nature, i wonder if Garrus sometimes seeks solace and guidance in Shepard’s wake.
I wrote this fic five years ago for the Mass Effect holiday exchange, and recently realized I’d never posted it to AO3, so I edited it slightly and thought I’d post it again. Appropriate to the season, and all that.
May all your holiday shopping go more smoothly than this.
Summary:
Garrus didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into going shopping with Grunt,
but… ah, damn it, it’s too much to hope that everything would go
smoothly, isn’t it?
#
“Grunt,” Garrus sighed, “you can get Shepard whatever you want. She’ll like it because it’s from you.”
Grunt rolled a giant blue eye in his direction. “No,” he growled, “it has to be right. So shut up and help me.”
Why Grunt had roped Garrus into being his shopping consultant, Garrus had no idea. Unless Wrex had suggested it. That was probably it. One more thing to take up with Wrex the next time he saw him: the fact that he was trapped in a store full of shiny distractions, with Grunt’s hulking form blocking his path to the exit. “You could get her another ship model,” he suggested, glancing at the models on display—quite a few of them with working lights and other moving parts, which made him want to take a closer look.
Grunt made a grumbling noise. “Doesn’t she have all the ones she wants?” He wandered along the aisle until he spotted something that caused a glint in his eye, reaching a massive hand toward it. “What about this?”
“She does not need the new Captain Cosmic Action Figures Thresher Maw Carnage play set,” Garrus said, crossing his arms as he identified the box.
“Why not?” Grunt growled. “It’s right here. The thresher maw pops up and roars at you.”
“Because that’s what you want,” Garrus said, irritable. “It’s no good getting Shepard a present if you’re going to stare at it until she gives it to you for your collection.”
Grunt glared at him. Garrus stared back. There was a pretty good chance that Shepard would, in fact, enjoy the Thresher Maw Carnage play set, except that it was obviously supposed to go with Garr the Battlemaster, which was Grunt’s toy, not Shepard’s. The thing was also way too big to store easily in Shepard’s quarters, no matter how oversized they were. “Fine,” Grunt muttered, dropping his hand to his side. “What, then?”
Garrus shrugged. “Some more fish for the aquarium?”
The krogan scowled. “Fish aren’t interesting.”
“Shepard likes them.”
“Fish are for eating,” Grunt muttered, and Garrus had to suppress a grin.
Dystopian novels: only the strong survive.
Me reading dystopian fiction growing up and internalizing the message in the narrative: there’s no place for me in this world, I’d be dead the moment the regime took hold. I’m not strong enough. I couldn’t stand the suffering. Maybe the narrative is right. Maybe only the strong survive.
Me now as an adult getting ready to rip the pin from the grenade with my teeth and brandishing a molotov cocktail in the other hand: IF I GO DOWN I’M TAKING YOU MOTHER FUCKERS WITH ME, BRING IT ON IF YOU THINK YOUR HARD ENOUGH. YOU THINK YOU’RE SCARY? MY IMMUNE SYSTEM IS EATING ITSELF AND I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE. COME GET SOME
We used to talk about how we would survive a zombie apocalypse, in high school, and I had one friend that would go, “Well you won’t last that long anyways, so why should we plan for you?” and I would agree, because I didn’t realize how deep I had internalized the idea that my disability made me not worthy of survival.
Flash forward to college, when my new friends and I are having a very similar conversation and I go, “I won’t last, so I guess I would just feed myself to the zombies” and my friends had a very strong response of, “NO, we are going to rob pharmacies. We will all learn how to get insulin from pigs or bacteria. You are not going down easy, you are too much of a fighter for that.”
I still remember the first time on tumblr, on a post discussing the zombie apocalypse, where I said “hey just leave me behind with the shotgun, I’ll only slow you down” and I think it might have been @undead-tealeaves who said “fuck that, we’ll pick you up and run while you aim” and honestly it might have just been meant as a throw away comment but it made me want to cry. And it meant a lot to me, it really did, like this was a comment from over two years ago and it still pops into my head and makes me feel emotional.
Like it really is the little things like your friends being like, come the dystopian government or the ends of the earth as we know it, whichever comes first, we have you. Because we have each other. And the survivalist community that is willing to ride and die for each other, will be the one that thrives and outlives the bastards trying to put us down. Hopefully long enough to see the new dawn, but hey, you don’t always get to see the garden you sow.
servantofclio
