Aratoht inspires a lot of great fanfic, but in game it’s a little uninspired and more than a little grimderp. Ooh yeah, you can tell this is a game for REAL MEN because we made the hero commit mass genocide! Now let’s never mention it again! Or have anyone be upset about it (except one awful terrorist whose opinions are hardly valid)
So for fanfic purposes, who wants to delete the whole Aratoht subplot, have Shep only be guilty of joining a terrorist group, and have them talk their way out of jail by informing on Cerberus? Then they can spend the next six months trying to get Earth ready for the apocalypse. Or Palaven if they listen better.
Maybe they brought Miranda and she talked herself out of jail the same way?
This’d go so well with a Thanemance… take a couple of days off and go to New Mexico with your boyfriend before he dies…
Or Shepard x James. James gets to be Shep’s straight-up this-is-not-a-euphemism bodyguard (probably with a side order of double-checking they’re not doing anything sketchy?)… much less disturbing to have sexual tension with your bodyguard than your jailor!
Missing moments are my *specialty* (or speciality, as Obi Wan says). Have a moment when Aedan talks to Kaidan about what happened on Aratoht:
“I’d been reassigned for about a month, getting ready to place my squads with regular troops when the news about Aratoht…” He broke off as her head dropped, her face paler than normal.
“I... Kaidan, I swear to god, I tried to warn the colonists.” Her hand was clenched in the bedsheet next to him and he reached over and brushed her knuckles.
“I know that. I do. Hey, Shepard...look at me.” He waited until she looked up. Her eyes were wide and her breath was too fast. And he realized, he was seeing a side of Shepard he never had before, back on the SR1- questioning her decision. Dwelling on it. Old protective instincts kicked in. “I know you did everything you could.”
She took a breath, steadied herself before, warily, she reminded him, “On Mars…”
He cut her off, “I need...I’m gonna admit, I can’t remember much of Mars, Shepard.”
“Oh.” He could see her regroup, see the shift of priority, storing whatever that reaction was back where it had come from. “It’s not...not important, then, if you don’t remember,” she twitched a shoulder trying to be nonchalant about it.
But it was still there, flickering in those eyes that weren’t quite as opaque and steely as they’d been before or maybe he was just smarter after getting his head bashed in and damn it he needed to remember what he said. “No matter what I said, my issue was with you working for Cerberus. You would never have destroyed that relay unless you thought there wasn’t any other way, no matter who was paying for it.” He hoped he hoped
She nodded once and slid her hand back from him before she confided, “Hackett reached me through Liara. He needed... It was more the sort of thing I used to do, go in solo, rescue someone he knew and it couldn’t be traced back to the Alliance. Cerberus...it wasn’t for them at all. I did it...I stole a shuttle, just before we hit the relay. Garrus and Joker tracked me down just before...it went.”
Shepard was breaking secrecy to tell him that much. It wasn’t what was in the official report, though it fit better with what he’d pieced together. Did it matter at this point?
Reports would always matter to HQ. The last person alive would be the filing clerk.
Oh hey, drugs had kicked back in. Her hair glowed in the back light of the hospital and he wished he could touch it. It had always been soft.
He was so distracted he almost missed it when she said, “I missed having you to talk with. Everything makes so much more sense when you’re around.”
“That’s nice to hear. I missed making sense.”
She snorted, a hint of the old cackle in the laugh that followed and he had to grin at her. “They still got you hooked up to some good stuff, hunh?” Her omnitool pinged and her own smile faltered. “No rest for the wicked, I guess.”
“Come back, soon, okay?”
She paused and nodded. “If you want. Next time we’re docked.”
Please, I’m begging. Is there a single fic that changes the Arrival/Aratoht mission so that the colonists can be saved? It single handedly degraded the quality of ME2. Plus the way there isn’t a canon way to save said colonists clashes terribly with every aspect of Mass Effect except the ending of ME3.
