Steady and Strong (A Stardew Valley AU)
Finally fed up with her dead-end job at JojaCorp, Hazel Shepard leaves the city and moves into her grandfather's abandoned farm in Stardew Valley. What she thinks is going to be a simple job raising crops and maybe some chickens turns out to be a complicated balance between befriending the locals, helping forest spirits, fighting monsters, and maybe (just maybe) falling in love with the handsome town doctor.
A Stardew Valley AU for the 2020 Mass Effect Big Bang
Rating: E
Word Count: Five chapters and 35,835 words
Pairing: Kaidan Alenko / Female Shepard
Something has turned sideways since she moved into Pelican Town and took over her grandfather's ramshackle old farm. The most obvious sign is the giant slime that’s trying to kill her, but she’s better than that now. She pulls her sword free of the giant slime and it falls apart into smaller pieces which continue to attack her rubber boots.
A year ago — hell, three months ago — she was sitting at her dead-end job at JojaCorp, watching her ivy plant slowly dying under the fluorescent lights, counting down the minutes until she could clock out and go sit just as silently on her flea market couch in her studio apartment.And now, here she is, wielding a goddamn sword, her extra-large backpack heavy with coal and chunks of gold ore, and there’s nothing even particularly remarkable about the occasion. It’s just a fucking Thursday, the sky overcast and the air cold with the first hints of a summer storm, and she’s fighting her fourth giant slime of the afternoon.
When she moved here, she thought she’d harvest crops, tend a flock of chickens, and spend her afternoons off reaching a deep, freckled brown on the beach, reading books from the town’s little library, and drinking in the Stardrop.
And instead? She’s stomping the last of the slimes to death and barely feels a twinge of remorse when she feels its little body pop under her boot.
Panting, she lets herself sit on the closest boulder, taking a minute to catch her breath. After climbing down so many floors and fighting so many slimes — enough that she’s starting to think the fortune teller on her old TV was right about the spirits being displeased with her — she’s nearly exhausted, hands shaking as the adrenaline leaves her.
She should climb back to the surface, maybe spend a few minutes in the spa by the railroad, just let her muscles relax and her wounds stop bleeding before she makes the long trek back to her little bed in her little house.
She should climb back to the surface, but she’s pretty sure if she goes just a little deeper, she’ll come across another entrance to the mine’s elevator, and then she won’t have to climb up, she can just ride. And isn’t that better?
She ignores the voice in her head that tells her to stop, because she’s been ignoring it practically every day since the last time she stared at that poor, wilting ivy (the same one that’s taking over her little kitchen), and replaces her sword with her pickaxe and starts cracking open the boulder she’d just been sitting on.
Sometimes those ladders hide in the most ridiculous places.
She finds one a few minutes later, slides down to the next level with her heart in her throat, and then… there’s nothing, just a sea of loose boulders as far as she can see, and an elevator right next to her.
She hits the call button and leans against the wall to wait, but… she can see another clump of gold just a few feet deeper into the tunnel, and she’s down here to collect gold for the Junimos in the Community Center, isn’t she?
(If she’d ignored the voice that told her not to go into the collapsing building, she wouldn’t be down here ignoring the voice that’s telling her to stay safe, because she’d never have seen the beautiful little creatures that Liara said are forest spirits.)
(She’s had good luck ignoring that little voice lately, so why turn back now?)
She doesn’t see the shadow pacing back and forth behind the gold ore until after she’s shattered it into manageable chunks, dropping to one knee to scoop it into her backpack. She doesn’t see the shadow until it’s on her, until its creepy void-monster hands are scratching at her face.
Her sword is in her backpack, and she swings her pickaxe up into its nearly-invisible body instead.
She’s so exhausted now she can barely make contact, and it opens its jaws to take a bite out of her shoulder, and she can’t do anything but laugh.
She’s about to die, but she’s never felt this alive.
