#misseffect

[otemporanerys]

Happy birthday, @misseffect! I got @leafy-yezi to draw the F1 AU Normandy team - before [redacted lineup changes], obviously 😉

[misseffect]

Banner art by @nirinart

⭐ = My best and most accessible. Can be read in isolation even if they're part of a series (no motorsport knowledge required for Formula 1 AU, I promise)

GAME-VERSE

SHAKARIAN

⭐ Dress Blues - 6,690 / Ch: 1 / (E) - Explicit one-shot set during the Bahak system trials between ME2 and 3. Uniform kink, subby Garrus, and stress relief with a side of war crimes.

Can You Feel This? - 5,844 / Ch: 1 / (T) - Post-destroy ending one-shot; there are many like it but this one is mine.

Different - 978 / Ch: 1 / (T) - Speedy Garrus POV set before the Omega 4 relay.

LAWKARIAN

⭐ The Woman in White - 16,990 / Ch: 4 / (E) - Set on Omega between ME1 and 2. Archangel takes a job from a mysterious human against his better judgement and things get... a little out of hand. (E-rated for Ch.4)

SHAKARIAN AU

Each series is listed in order of posting. Band AU is best if read chronologically but the rest work as standalone fics.

FLASHPOINTS (Formula 1 AU) - Active WIP

She's the greatest driver in a generation; he's the only one who can beat her.

Delta - 3,311 / Ch: 1 / (T) - Pre-season testing; a quick and dirty intro to the Flashpoints universe.

⭐ Generational Talent - 21,943 / Ch: 7 / (T) - Prequel to the "main" Flashpoints story: Shepard and Garrus are teenagers on the run from family legacies, fighting tooth and nail for a shot at Formula 1. If "she's a 10 but she's got father's anger issues" was a fic.

Slipstream - UPDATING BI-WEEKLY - ~55,000 / Ch: 18 / (E) - The "main" story. Garrus is feeling the rookie season pressure: team politics, bad press, hard races and Shepard just a few garages away, achieving everything they grew up dreaming of. (E-rated for Ch.17)

BAND AU

Spring Break - 5,870 / Ch: 1 / (T) - Garrus rolls the dice on a road trip with a girl from his college dorm. She's magnetic and fearless with a voice like a rockstar and he is in so, so much trouble.

Swimming In The Deep End - 6,245 / Ch: 1 / (T) - writing music with Shepard is the closest Garrus can get to being inside her brain but even then, he's sure she's hiding something from him

THE NORMANDY DETECTIVE AGENCY (Noir AU)

⭐ Flux - 1,962 / Ch: 1 / (M) - Years after the end of WWII, the spectre of war still casts its shadow. Against her better judgement, Shepard helps Garrus take care of an old friend from his unit.

The Interview - 3,856 / Ch: 1 / (M) - The year is 1947 and Shepard is meeting a prospective new PI: an ex-LAPD cop with scars on his face and a chip on his shoulder.

Tinderbox - 4,493 / Ch: 1 / (M) - The duo's first job together goes up in flames

Third Time's a Charm - 4,228 / Ch: 1 / (E) - With years of casework and gunfights stretched out behind them, Shepard and Garrus take a night for themselves. First time fic, friends to lovers, all the good stuff.

[oonaluna-art]

A commission for @otemporanerys based on Misseffect's AU Fanfic Collection, Flashpoints. The kid on the left is a human AU version of Garrus. On the right is kid Shepard.

I held off posting this so that the surprise would not be spoiled for MissEffect!

The commission also included a fake Instagram screenshot.

—

[My Ko-Fi] [Patreon]

[thealexmachina]

WIP asks no.7 please: What are you most proud of? (bc it's easy to forget to acknowledge the awesome in our own writing)

Thank you!! Fair point. 

Overall, I’m proud of returning to writing in spring this year; had a couple of aborted attempts in late 2017, but prior to that, my last piece of writing was in Jan 2015. So I’m really proud of finding motivation to do something that is such a healing experience.

In terms of fics, I’m very proud of Killing Field. I haven’t had a chance to finalise next chapters, but I’ve written so much of it, planned even more and am generally so in love with this story, that I see it as a big part of my writing life for a while to come. 

[misseffect]

SLIPSTREAM - CH.17 (E)

Part of the Flashpoints series: a Mass Effect Shakarian Formula 1 AU

When she straightens up, Zaeed is leaning on the bar. He’s subjected himself to the dress code – shirt, jacket, bow tie – and it doesn’t even have the decency to look weird on him. His eyes flick down her torso, down the front of that beautiful, perfectly-sculpted dress and back up again.

“Buy you that drink?” he drawls.

Shepard hoped her memory had been embellished by the win back at Silverstone but even when she’s not fresh off a podium and smacked on adrenaline, Zaeed is – unfortunately – still hot.

Read more on AO3

[misseffect]

SLIPSTREAM - CH.18 | FINAL CHAPTER

Part of the Flashpoints series: a Mass Effect Shakarian Formula 1 AU

There’s a soft thwap as something lands beside her, then a dzzt-dzzt. Shepard pats around on the bed for the noise while Zaeed’s footsteps retreat away, finds her phone, and swipes blindly at the screen.

“Hello?” she croaks.

“Oh, so you’re not dead.” Ash has a real knack for making Shepard feel like the fifth Williams sister, and not always in a good way. “I’m gonna assume you didn’t make it back to your room.”

“Why would you–”

“Because I knocked eight times and you didn't answer.”

Read more on AO3

[misseffect]

1st for the WIP game?

I've explained this one in another answer so I'll post a snippet here! It'll be a long, long time before is sees the light of day outside Tumblr so it's a little rough and ready.

I couldn't decide where to cut it off so I've included basically the whole fucking thing lmao

He looks strange without glasses and she feels even stranger for staring; like she's caught him in his underpants and ought to look away. His shoulders are relaxed but his expression furrows a little.

"What?" he says.

Shepard opens her mouth. Closes it again.

She knows his handwriting by sight, how he folds his shirts, the most reliable way to make him laugh, how he likes his eggs, the scar on the palm of his hand from a prank Solana played on him when he was seven, his favourite pair of socks, the way he looks splayed out in bed at 4am - and what more is there to know about a person, really?

"Nothing," she says, quietly.

Maybe it's a trick of the light or the hour, but there's something melancholy in the small smile he gives her. A little like the subdued kind of longing she's been herding around for - well - God only knows how long now. Years.

Except this is Garrus. So it doesn't matter.

"You never took [name] out dancing, did you?" she says, without thinking.

The smile slides away and he reaches for his beer. "No."

"Why not?" she asks. He shrugs, non-commital. "She's smart. Pretty. You got along."

He stops with the bottle half way to his mouth. "Never got around to it, I suppose."

"There must've been something."

He huffs an exasperated sort of laugh. "It was months ago, I can't remember. It just - " He waves the bottle vaguely. "I don't know what you want me to say."

Me. Say it was me.

"Just wondered." Her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. "I forgot to ask how it went."

He sets the bottle on his leg and picks at the corner of the label with his thumbnail.

Shepard swallows. There's something reckless creeping over her. The kind of feeling that pushes her to one more punch, one more shot, one more needling question to goad out an answer.

"Have you dated at all since Chloé?"

"A little," he says, without looking at her. "Not lately."

"How come?"

"Christ, Shepard - "

"What? You could've had your pick of the damn ward when I was in hospital."

"Yeah, that would've gone down well."

"I didn't mean - " They're steaming towards an argument. "Women like you, Garrus. "

He scoffs.

"Oh, bite me, you're a catch and you know it." Shepard takes a long gulp of her beer so the acrid, cigarette-butt tang sticks to her teeth. "And at this rate you'll have to wait for the good ones to start getting divorced."

Garrus just shakes his head. He doesn't look angry, exactly, but there's something coming off him that she can't get a read on. Shepard sets her bottle down on the coffee table.

"Honey, I don't know why you broke it off with Chloé and I won't ask you to tell me, but - "

"It's not about Chloé."

"Then what?"

For a long, slow moment, Garrus just looks at her. His face is set in stubborn lines but that mournful, affectionate look hasn't left him.

Years of case files and gunfights are stretched out behind them; brass knuckles, lemon muffins, broken bones, cold stake-out breakfasts, favours owed and repaid a hundred times each way, and threaded through them is that incessant, silent wanting. Like an itch. Like grit in her shoe.

Except it's Garrus. And she knows him. In all his vengeance and loyalty and bull-headed kindness, she knows him. The man who holds more of her in his hands than any other living person. Deserving of whatever kindness the world has to offer.

If he'd wanted her at all - in any of those moments - Shepard would've seen it.

"I'm sorry," Garrus says, and suddenly he's all soft, sad, blue eyes and there's an impossible, shivery feeling building in the pit of Shepard's stomach - in her chest - in her throat.

Surely she would've seen it.

Wouldn't she?

"I'm sorry," he says, quieter still, and this time it sounds like goodbye.

"Don't." Her mouth feels like radio static. "Don't."

And she kisses him.

He goes still as startled rabbit. The rain outside seems louder, suddenly, and it's as if everything - as if five long years of trust and loss and joy - is balanced on the head of a pin.

She pulls away. He looks flushed and dumbstruck in the soft, orange light, and the shiver in her chest feels like it's gone to her bones. Her heartbeat is pounding in the base of her skull.

Shit.

Fuck. Fuck.

"Garrus, I'm - "

Then his hand is under her chin and he's dragging his thumb across her bottom lip, and when he kisses her Shepard thinks she really, truly might burn up on the spot. It's like sinking into a steaming bath; like coming home.

[misseffect]

“This is not new, it only feels like it.”

ME2 Shakarian for @fictober18. Also on AO3.

Garrus was starting to feel like he'd met her for the first time, twice.

His own name had never sounded as good as it did that second time, tumbling out of her from across what he thought might be the last room he’d ever see. When the walls melted into blood and smoke, he found himself grasping for the rapid-fire crack of her Vindicator like the hilt of a knife in the dark. That sound stayed with him for a week in the medbay, popping in his half-ruined auditory tract, and he didn’t mind a bit.

He had to remind himself afterwards that it had always been like this. Back to the first bullet he saw her fire in a doctor’s office in a cramped corner of the Wards, right the way through their hunt for Saren; Shepard’s finger on a trigger was the only excuse he needed.

He had gotten used to working in certainties back then, when his interactions with Shepard were quantifiable. Pass heat sink. Apply medigel. Find Cipher. Fight geth. They’d grown friendlier as the months passed, sure, but if she’d ever wavered he hadn’t been allowed to know. That changed sometime after he had mostly forgotten the smell of burning hide. In an otherwise innocuous moment between firefights, she said something about a VI that made his stomach drop like he’d missed the step out of the main battery. At the time, he’d told her the only thing he could think to say.

You’re real. A little crazy, maybe – (she grinned which made him want to say it again) – but real.

She’s only human, Joker said, when Garrus went to him about it the sleep-cycle after.

But surely – Garrus maintained – surely the problem was that she wasn’t only human anymore. And if even Shepard didn’t know exactly where she ended and Cerberus began, how the hell was he supposed to?

Joker only shrugged, bafflingly unconcerned. She still snorts when she laughs. Pretty sure the Illusive Man wouldn’t have burnt his credits programming that into a VI.

But she made different choices, too, and Garrus didn’t need a masterclass in human body language figure out they were all fuelled by rage. She took Maleon’s research, gunned down David Archer’s brother, and stepped out of Garrus’s scope – not out of compassion but out of spite.

Though she had given him Saleon, too, hadn’t she? Without Cerberus, before Lazarus, she had given him Saleon without even blinking. And even if her choices were different lately he couldn’t call them bad calls with any honesty – they just came from a different place. A place that saw death waiting and walked right on by.

What was different – really, truly, frighteningly different – was standing across from her in the muted blue light of her cabin, and watching her pulse climb the counter on his visor like they were about to drop in the Mako. It was feeling her palm slide quietly over the good half of his neck (who knew humans were so warm) and drawing incrementally closer to her until he could count the – what had she called them? – freckles on her nose.

And her skin – Spirits, her skin – like Tuchanka sand; all sloping peaks and troughs, deceptively soft and broken up by scars that faded to rubble on the edges. He’d seen the veins on her inner wrist enough times – tiny rivers of Asari blue – but he’d underestimated the sheer variety of colours humans wore before they even got dressed. She carried every imaginable shade of pink; deeper in places (around knees, elbows and knuckles) and barely-there in others. As she sat with her legs either side of him on the couch in her cabin, he noticed her toes must be cold because they were tinged with purple.

That, he reminded himself, wasn’t new information either. Sitting across the Mako from her on Noveria, in weather even climate control couldn’t fix, he’d asked why her mouth was turning blue in the corners.

Purple means cold, red means hot, she told him. He’d asked what blue meant, because it was obvious she wanted him to. Blue means get me the fuck off this planet, Garrus.

With his forehead resting against hers, he breathed carefully. At least her toes weren’t blue.

‘You must be the only man in the galaxy who could give three gangs the finger, and still go weak at the knees when I take my pants off.’ And her eyes crinkled at the edges when she grinned.

‘You’re Commander Shepard even with your pants off,’ he said, trying to remember how his voice was supposed to sound.

He felt her brow rise. It was an expression he’d caught himself replicating lately.

‘Do I scare you?’ she asked.

In another context a few weeks earlier, it might have been a difficult question.

‘Only as much as you scare everyone.’ That made her laugh so he kept talking, anything to keep that sound going like the sputter of her Vindicator. ‘Remember that kid in Zakera Ward? She wasn’t crying because she couldn’t find her dad, she just took one look at you.’

Quick as pulling a trigger, they might as well have been playing cards in the mess for all the difference it made.

‘Riiight,' she said, emphatically, 'because I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with you, pretty boy.’

Her thumb tracing the groove under his jaw and his hands resting on her thighs still mattered, but what mattered more was that she was still Shepard and he was still Garrus. Even if they didn’t really know how to take each other’s clothes off. Even if they were a little frayed around the edges. Even if they never came back through the relay.

This isn’t new, he told himself, while he counted her freckles in the half-light, it only feels like it sometimes.