Liara’s eyes linger on the porch swing as she exits the house, heart clenching over a memory that isn’t hers, for a place she’s never seen until today. She runs a curious hand over the old wood, in need of fresh paint but still solid and strong. How often have you sat here, Shepard, she wonders, now that the memory you clung to so tightly is yours to keep?
She looks down the hill, where the lights are on in the barn, offering warm beacons of light as the sunset glow fades into twilight. A breeze whispers through the trees that line the right side of the path, with a stronger bite now without the sun. She draws her stole more tightly to her.
Nothing moves in the barn, but she finally spies Shepard out in the field with the horse, silhouetted in the fading light. He follows Echo with a brush as she grazes, playfully shoving her nose as she tries to pilfer the carrots sticking out of his back pocket. The dog that stays so faithfully at Shepard’s side pokes at the dirt nearby, keeping an eye on her charges. Occasionally Shepard stops to pat the horse’s neck, finally rewarding her pestering with half of a carrot, the price being her standing still long enough to rub his palm over her broad forehead. Or, mostly still. Liara huffs to herself as the horse – Echo, he called her – decides to use his shoulder as a scratching post and nearly knocks him to the ground.
Kaidan had advised her of this ritual when he’d asked her to come, that he tended to disappear to the barn after dinner, and sometimes lost track of time. Such a strange attachment, a strange routine, but the laugh carried up to her on the wind is one that feels happy, whole, in ways that make her ache.
She is too far away for Shepard to sense, but something makes him look back at the house anyway. He waves, she waves back, and a few minutes later he gives Echo the last of the carrots and slips out of the gate to trudge up the hill, followed by the dog, grey coat blending in with the twilight.
“You look cold,” he says with a smile she still isn’t used to.
“I’m surprised you aren’t. I seem to recall many an away mission where the lack of an optimal temperature was…vexing.”
His smile turns lopsided. “Don’t worry. I still complain. If I don’t, Kaidan worries. But sometimes a cool breeze and a clear night is…nice. I, uh. Wouldn’t mind sitting out here for bit, if you don’t mind.”
“For you, I can bear a great many things.”
He chuckles. “Gimmie a sec. I’ll bring you some tea to keep warm.”
“Do you need assistance?” she asks innocently.
“Nah, our fire suppression system is top notch. Ask me how I know.”
She laughs. He disappears into the house, the disgruntled canine left outside. Liara, unclear on how to be good company for her, sits on the porch swing. Mako begrudgingly curls up near her feet. Together they listen to Shepard putter in the kitchen through the open window.
In spite of herself, Liara reaches down to stroke the dog’s back, pleased it is just as soft as Shepard claimed. “If you had known him when I did,” she says solemnly, “you may not be so eager to join him near a stove.”
“I heard that,” Shepard calls out.
Mako whuffs.
Shepard returns and hands her a thermos of tea, and from the scent of it, distasteful coffee for himself. Some things indeed do not change. It is…comforting.
“Lavender,” she says with a smile as she takes a cautious sip. “You remembered.”
He taps the side of his head as he settles into the swing beside her with a creak. It sways gently back and forth, and she is again struck by the power of a memory that isn’t hers. Perhaps the echoes of their melds will remain with her always. Something in her chest tightens.
For so long, the memories Shepard had shared, so terribly tainted by the prothean’s warning against the reapers, were something she sought to escape. But here, now, seeing the beauty and love that existed beneath everything the beacon had twisted, she understands why Shepard had fought so hard to hold onto them.
“You didn’t have to come, you know,” Shepard says, turning his own thermos back and forth between his fingers. He smells of hay and faintly of leather, Earth-scents that are new and strange but not unpleasant. “Kaidan…he frets still, when I’m here alone. And I know you’ve got your hands full these days. But…I’m glad you’re here.”
She leans her head against his shoulder, trying to remember the last time they had just sat together. Talked. The night in his cabin on the Normandy, in the weeks leading up to London? Had it really been that long?
“I am not sure there will ever be day he does not fret over you. But his request was not the only reason I came.”
“Oh?”
She shifts in the swing and takes another sip of tea, gathering her thoughts. Shepard is surprisingly patient, gaze wandering out to the sky, and the stars slowly coming to life.
“I’ve been thinking lately,” she says, hesitantly.
“Sounds serious.”
She huffs. “Perhaps. Or perhaps just...frivolous sentimentality.”
“For someone who rarely indulges in sentimentality, I highly doubt it’s frivolous.”
“Mmm.”
They swing back and forth in comfortable silence, backed by the occasional hum of insects and wind rustling the leaves, until his impatience finally gets the better of him.
“So tell me, Dr. T’Soni, what has you thinking so hard?”
“You,” she says simply.
“Me? Liara, trust me, I’m not worth the smoke coming out of your ears right now.”
You are worth a great many things, whether you realize it or not, she thinks.
She hesitates again. “I have spent so much of my life lost in my work. The protheans. The reapers. The Shadow Broker. I don’t know how to stop, sometimes.”
He tilts his head. “This may shock you, but I have, in fact, also been accused of not knowing when to stop.”
This time she doesn’t return the smile. “I forget, too often, that when I bury myself in the past, how to rebuild our future…time passes more quickly for some than it does for others.”
He regards her now with quiet attentiveness, waiting for her to continue. Out in the distance, an animal hoots.
“Shepard…we have been through a great deal.”
“Moreso than most,” he agrees.
“You’re the first, and still the only person I have melded with since coming of age,” she admits. “Yet our history together has been one crisis following another. We’ve never had the opportunity to simply be…friends. I suppose I have started to fear that I don’t know how, or that I will blink and realize I’ve lost my chance. Because…”
“Because I’m human, and humans die.”
She nods, hastily wiping a tear welling at the corner of her eye. “Your time is so short, and I am still so young. The thought of facing centuries with nothing but a fading memory is…” She pulls away from him, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees, forehead pressed against the lid of the tea thermos. “You see? Frivolous. Selfish.”
He leans forward until his head is next to hers. “So what you’re saying is…you miss me.”
“Yes,” she says, with a short laugh around the lump in her throat. “I suppose I am.”
Gently, he pulls her back against the swing, looping an arm around her shoulders and snugging her close to his side, so much like the memory of himself and Kaidan from years before. Only now, she’s part of it.
Now, in some small way, it’s hers, too.
“I never thought about it from your perspective,” he says thoughtfully. “From my side of things…you’ll always be there. But that’s not how it is for you, is it?”
She shakes her head.
“We’ll be rebuilding the galaxy for the rest of my life,” he continues. “I won’t live to see what recovery really looks like. Not the way you will. By the time you’re old and grey, the galaxy will look…very different. I’ll be some boogie man people tell their kids about to scare them to bed, if people remember me at all. I won’t be…real.”
“The future is all I have thought about since Saren,” she says, voice wavering. “Preserving it. Restoring it. But in doing so…I am missing the present. I have already lost Benezia. I fear that my future could be very empty if I let it.”
His gaze bores into her.
“Liara, over the course of your life, you will meet so many people who love you. I’m just one of them. You have the joy of discovering who the rest of them are still in front of you. Your future won’t be empty. You made sure of that.”
She hums. “When did you become so wise?”
“Well,” he muses. “I suppose after getting your brain zapped by at least three different species, something useful is bound to shake loose in there somewhere.”
“Perhaps,” she says with a laugh.
“I’ve missed you too,” he confesses.
He pushes off with his foot, setting the swing swaying again. With his free hand, he attempts to unscrew the lid of his thermos to take a sip of coffee. After two failed attempts and nearly dropping the thermos, she takes it from him, unscrews it, and places it back in his hand.
“You didn’t have to wait for an invitation, you know,” he tells her. “You’re welcome here any time.”
She pulls away from him, focusing her gaze on her tea. “You’d given up so much. You finally had what you wanted. I didn’t want…to get in the way.”
He looks back out to the stars, deep in thought. “Yeah…we worked pretty hard to get here. This is what I wanted. Minus the atmosphere,” he adds quickly. “That part I could do without some days.”
“Liar.”
“You say that, but wait until it snows. Worse, wait until it melts. Anyway. What I was getting at is, no matter how much I love him, no one can be everything to one person. If there’s one thing he’s taught me, and he’s taught me a lot more than one, it’s that you find some of the most important parts of yourself in the people you care about. And yeah, our friendship has mostly been racing from one catastrophe to another, but. In the middle of all of that, you gave me a piece of myself that I didn’t know I needed. And I don’t mean Kaidan.”
She frowns. “Oh? And what is that?”
“Lavender,” he says, suddenly sounding faraway, lost in a memory she can’t see.
“I don’t understand.”
“It makes you think of Benezia. You remember her for her curiosity. How she loved discovering new things. Dr. Chakwas gave you lavender tea on the Normandy, and the first thing you thought of was Benezia, because it tastes so much like her favorite tea back home. You were sorry that you never got the chance to give her some. Every time you drink it, you think of her.”
“I do,” she says, unable to conceal her surprise. Melds were such strange things, sometimes. “But how does that…?”
“You were estranged from your mother,” he says quietly. “She hurt you. You never reconciled. But you’ve found a way to still let her be part of you, because it was important to you that she could be. The good parts of what she was, and what she was to you, still mattered.”
Liara clutches the thermos.
“I still haven’t figured out how to do that yet. But because of you, I’m trying. I think…it’s important.”
“I didn’t know,” she says softly.
“Yeah, well. You and I figured out melding, but we haven’t perfected talking about things that aren’t the end of the world now, have we?”
“We should practice.”
“We should.”
She loops an arm through his and hugs it. “Indeed, the Shepard who lives on a planet, sits outside, and rides a creature for recreation is very much someone I am not familiar with. And I would like to be.”
“I am a conundrum, aren’t I?”
“I think you are happy.”
He flushes a little. “And what about you? What does the Liara who has conquered the reapers do in her spare time?”
Liara exhales. “To be honest? I’m not sure.”
“Well then,” he declares, with a grin that’s bigger than the night sky. “What do you say we find out?”
Garrus looks up with a start from his pile of gear to find Shepard leaning casually against a row of lockers in the Normandy’s cargo bay. He’d been so engrossed in inventorying his arsenal for Williams he hadn’t even heard Shepard come out of engineering.
“Sir?”
Shepard eyes him from crest to talons, as though he’s a requisitions manifest that doesn’t match inventory. Despite being reasonably sized for a human – in Garrus’ experience, anyway, which isn’t exactly extensive – Shepard barely comes up to his chin. And yet somehow Garrus feels a lot like a pyjack standing next to a varren that hasn’t decided just how hungry it is.
“Well, you’re part of my crew,” Shepard muses. “But you’re not Alliance. You don’t exactly fit in my watch rotation, or know anything about Alliance protocol. Technically, I don’t have any recognized authority over you at all. If you stole this ship from me and waltzed off to hand it to the Hierarchy, you’d probably get a medal.”
“Also probably start a war.”
Alenko snorts from his spot over by the weapons’ bench, where the pistol he’d been working on now lies completely disassembled.
Shepard waves a dismissive hand. “That’s someone else’s problem.” But then he pauses, face scrunching up in ways that faces shouldn’t be able to scrunch. “You know, it probably would be my problem, actually.”
Human faces are distressingly expressive, and Garrus hasn’t been around enough of them to really grasp what it all means. “Uh, while I appreciate the…confidence in my ability to mutiny—”
This isn’t coming out right.
“—I don’t actually have any plans to steal your ship.”
“Good. Because while I may not have authority to give you orders, I’m pretty sure the Council did just give me the authority to put you out my airlock if you don’t follow them.”
Garrus’ mandibles twitch in alarm. It’s a joke…right? Humans like to joke. Surely that’s a universal trait. “I’m very good at calibrating weapons.”
Shepard’s eyebrow raises.
Garrus’ own brow plates shift rather desperately. “You asked what to do with me.”
“Right.” His gaze shifts over to Alenko, who contentedly continues cleaning his pistol. “Any good with mass accelerator cannons?”
“Uh, sure?”
Shepard nods towards the infantry vehicle across the cargo bay. “Then familiarize yourself with the Mako over there. Pretty sure we’re gonna get a lot of use out of it.”
Alenko groans and rolls his eyes – that one Garrus gets – while muttering something about war crimes under his breath.
“Yes, sir,” Garrus says quickly.
There’s that laser-sharp gaze again. It’s like looking a rail gun in the face. But then Shepard’s face breaks into a grin. “Glad to have you aboard, Garrus.”
“Thank you. Sir.” Should he salute? Was that…appropriate? He’s still thinking about it when Shepard calls out to another human stepping off the elevator by engineering, and jogs away.
Garrus blinks. At the weapons’ bench, Alenko shakes his head and chuckles, like he’d seen whatever just happened a thousand times.
“Can I ask…what that was about? That conversation felt like…”
“A test?”
Garrus’ mandibles flare. “Yes.”
Alenko’s smile has softer edges than Shepard’s. “He’s feeling you out.”
“…Feeling me…out?”
“It’s, ah, a figure of speech. He’s pretty good at reading people, but he likes to test out his impressions with a little verbal sparring.”
“I can’t tell if I passed.”
Alenko’s chuckle becomes a laugh. “That usually means you did. He doesn’t often misread people, but when he does, you’ll know.”
“Why? What happens?”
Alenko shrugs, with an affable smile. “Someone usually get shot.”
~
“Do we have a deal?”
A cold, perilous silence falls over the warehouse, where every one of Helena Blake’s mercs stand with the kind of staged relaxation that just so happens to put their hands right by their sidearms.
You trust her? Alenko had asked during their stomach-turning Mako drop, in which Garrus is certain that Shepard waited until death was imminent before engaging the vertical thrusters to avoid smashing against the freezing cold rocks of Amaranthine. Alenko had been right about the war crimes.
No, but I think she’s a lesser evil I can live with, Shepard had replied.
He’d been so adamant this was a friendly exchange that he’d walked brazenly into the center of her band of mercs, who hadn’t hesitated to close in around them. Garrus clocks twelve of them to Shepard’s squad of four, including a sentry on the upper level. Alenko hangs close to Shepard’s left flank while Williams takes the right, leaving Garrus to bring up the rear.
Relax. We’re all friends, here.
Except as soon as Blake had started talking, Alenko’s stance had gotten a little more square, even though nothing about Shepard’s posture changed. When the silence hits, Alenko’s hand drifts marginally closer to his pistol.
“You know what?” Shepard asks thoughtfully. “On second thought, you can go fuck yourself.”
Before the ‘fuck’ is even out of his mouth, Alenko’ is in his hand and he’s knocking Shepard off his feet just in time to avoid the bullet coming from the sniper’s nest. Somehow, in the blur of running, shooting and cursing that ensues, Garrus and Alenko wind up crouched behind a shipping container while Williams lays down another round of cover fire and Shepard yanks the sniper out of the rafters with a skein of dark energy.
“So,” Garrus says, catching his breath. “I take it this was a misread?”
“Oh yeah.”
Alenko checks his heat sink before his corona engulfs him in a bloom of dark energy. He actually chuckles before he gets to his feet and re-enters the fray, like this is just another routine patrol through the Presidium.
I gotta say, I'm always so impressed by how invested I am in opus!Jacob. The mass effect team did his character so dirty (in an arguably racist depiction of their only black squadmate lol), and I am SO HAPPY that you're making space in Mezzo for him! How have you gone about developing his character, given the funky source material?
PS: I'm especially enjoying how he kinda acts as a parallel to kaidan as the level-headed, moral biotic squadmate. I remember a mention of him watching Shepard's left flank, and I gasped.
I am so, SO glad to hear this (and so sorry my reply is so late). I live in fear that I will fumble the ball badly with Jacob, but I am giving it my best shot.
I'm also thrilled that you've caught the parallelism with Kaidan. I love the idea that they're similar puzzle pieces, but one fits and one doesn't. I think they fact that they have so many similarities and both Kaidan and Jacob have tried to get close to Sam but only one of them succeeded further highlights a) how hard Sam is to get to know b) how easy it would have been for any relationship between Sam and Kaidan to never get off the ground. So many unique circumstances had to exist for Sam and Kaidan to even get a chance.
A foundational piece of how I have gone about developing Jacob is a big spoiler, but the nuts and bolts of it more or less revolve around taking a lot of time to dig down deep, take what little we know about the character, and then figure out things that could motivate and drive him that fit in with the direction I want to take him in.
The things I knew:
I was going to throw out his loyalty mission, because fuck that nonsense. In addition to not wanting to touch the wildly unnecessary racism and sexual abuse with a 10 foot pole, I didn't want Jacob's story to revolve around his father - I wanted it to be about him, and his own internal struggle (which I would need to define).
I liked the idea of a Cerberus Cheerleader - but Miranda's core narrative is more about learning to accept herself and her imperfections than it is about her loyalty to Ceberus. So...what if Miranda looks like the cheerleader...but the reality is that the true cheerleader is Jacob? And what if his 'loyalty mission' revolved around that, in a more abstract way?
Cerberus is more or less a cult. So I started asking myself how they got their hooks into them, what power they would have over him, and how they would continually reinforce that power. We know that Jacob has a chip on his shoulder regarding the Alliance, but it's very poorly defined - more of a nebulous frustration and general disillusionment than a specific, alienating event. So I needed to create a reason for Jacob to not just be disillusioned, but to really have a grudge. A reason - and a very justifiable reason - to have it out for the Alliance. And it needed to be something that gave Cerberus a chance to swoop in and play the hero and win over his allegiance.
Luckily, I had a great opportunity, because I want to involve the Conduit in the events of ME3. So I had the thought...what if the Alliance basically stole it while no one was looking in the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel, and what if Jacob's Corsair team was assigned to recover it? And since I have never liked the abundance of human biotics in ME2, what if Jacob manifested his because of this event? And what if the side effects were nearly fatal? The Alliance doesn't want anyone to know they did this, so it's in their best interest to bury it and consider Jacob a casualty of war. Cerberus would see an opportunity to test Lazarus tech they want to use in Shepard, and get themselves another very capable agent in the process. Win-win for everyone!
It's a messy set of circumstances that have been very challenging to pick through, but very rewarding. There are some REALLY interesting dynamics to explore. Before writing Jacob POVs I have to really take some time to sit between his ears and think about how these events color his view of the world, of Cerberus, of Sam, and how they move the story along.
Re-imagining Jacob is a very intimidating process, because he's a black character who was so underdeveloped by BioWare and mistreated by the fandom. I'm not a person of color; I am very aware that my own privilege and inherent racial biases put me in a precarious position to compound those injustices rather than combat them, and that's the last thing I want to do. I want him to be a complex, interesting character people care about. So here's hoping I don't fuck it up.
SWAPS!!!! THE NEW CHAPTER!!!!! I'M SCREAMING!!!!! MEZZO MY BELOVED, SAM MY BELOVED. thank you SO MUCH for keeping us fed.
I had a quick question about Sam's biotics in the chapter (Side note, but your exploration of biotics in all your fics is so unique and I ADORE IT). I understand that the thorian cipher changed the way his biotics worked by allowing two simultaneous fields instead of distortion, and Miranda notes that Lazarus couldn't have created this distortion---only recreated it. Kaidan's reaction on Horizon was partially due to his shock over Shepard's different biotic field, but Kaidan was present before and after Feros. Why didn't he notice Shepard's biotic field change in the ME1 era? Or did the biotic field change only occur after Shepard's reconstruction, as he had to relearn biotics?
Again, I loved the chapter! This is my fav fic and series EVER, and I look forward to the next update :)
THANK YOU!! I have been chewing my fist off to get this chapter out there. I have been so excited about it.
Now, before I dive into this. Remember that there is a lot of fiction in this science. We don't know what it feels like to manipulate gravity or create mass effect fields or how dark energy works. So I take a lot of liberties and have a great time, lol.
To answer your question - the biotic "fingerprint" that Kaidan recognizes is not anything Sam does with the gravity well or how he uses it - it's the sensation created merely by his existence within it. This is different from Sam actively engaging with the gravity well to create mass effect fields, which has also been changed, but by the thorian, and not Miranda. And I think that would be harder to spot.
In Opus, that 'sixth sense' tells biotics when another biotic is passively in their vicinity, and for each biotic, that sensation is unique. Biotic implants make that fingerprint stronger, and influence how it "feels."
I do imagine the distinctions are subtle, and really only stand out when you know someone really well. If you walked into a room with two biotics you had never met, you would know there were two distinct fields, but if you ran into them again later, you likely wouldn't clock, "hey that's the asari who served my coffee yesterday!" unless there was something very, very distinct about it.
But Kaidan knows Sam's field very, very intimately. Even without language to describe it, he would - and does - immediately recognize that it's wrong after Lazarus.
Before Lazarus, I don't think humans had any reason to make the distinction that the implant influenced that field significantly enough to alter it, because replacing an implant is so rare. So the assumption that biotics feel unique in the gravity well didn't have a documented connection to the implant.
Now, how is all this different from the way Sam generates biotic fields?
What the thorian did through the cipher was change enough of Sam's brain chemistry that he no longer creates fields like other humans, or even like every other alien race in this cycle. He now creates mass effect fields like the protheans did.
In Opus, most species biotics work through displacement. They create a field in their hand, then send it where they want it to go. There is, in essence "travel time" between the field being created and it reaching its target. But gravity moves at the speed of light, making that "travel time" happen so quickly it's not really visible to the organic eye - and that's the key.
Because what Sam does post-thorian cipher is create fields through superpositioning - when he generates a field it exists in two places at once, his hand, and at the target. When the waveform collapses, the field now only exists at the target.
It's possible this feels a little weird to him, and possible it feels a little weird to someone like Kaidan, who is so in tune with Shepard's biotics. But it wouldn't trigger the same wrongness that the implant change did.
Now, why does charge feel so weird and unsettling to Sam and anyone near him when he does it? Because charge is going to take the superpositioning one step further, which we'll get to soon. Charge is not something he would have been capable of before the implant upgrade. Because 1) it would have been beyond the limitations of his previous implant. 2) He wasn't fucked up enough yet to be that stupid.
Hopefully some, any, of that makes even a lick of sense. It is science fiction after all, lol.
Hey swaps, hope you're doing well! I reread "The Words That Change Us" from the Opus Multiverse series the other day and it brought back a concept I've wondered about for months since reading Opus for the first time, but never got around to asking until now 🤔
Where do you think Sam would be if it weren't for his posting on the 'Yang and that fateful morning meeting Kaidan over pancakes? Would he still have finished the N program and risen in the ranks? Would he still have wound up on the Normandy and gotten plagued by the prothean visions? Or would he have ended up somewhere else, set adrift without Kaidan as his stable ground?
Cantata is such a huge part of Opus that I struggle to imagine Sam becoming the Commander Shepard we know and love from the game timeline without those years spent finding a family with the 'Yang Gang and that lasting bond with Kaidan. Mezzo has been especially interesting (and heartbreaking) to watch as Sam is forced to endure without Kaidan at his side for the first time in so many years. But while it's clear he can find some way to keep going even "on his own," I've been imagining that a history without Kaidan at all is a very different one for Sam. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts!
'The Words That Change Us' is probably the multiverse story I revisit the most, and I just love it when other people connect with it.
You ask a wonderful question, one that I more or less asked myself all the way through Cantata, because Cantata is very much the story that builds Commander Shepard.
Without the 'Yang, does Sam get the Normandy? Probably. With all the strings attached to him, he was being steered in that direction no matter what happened on the 'Yang. The important thing about the 'Yang and the people he found there was that he had advocates - people who cared about the human behind the soldier, and people who brought that human out of his shell. They didn't change his trajectory; they made him more successful in his path.
So what happens, then, if you take away the 'Yang?
Quite simply - he fails. The galaxy falls to the reapers.
I see Sam and Saren as two beings cut from the same cloth. Two people ordered to protect the galaxy, who were ruthless enough to do whatever had to be done to accomplish that goal. Saren went astray. Sam didn't.
The reason Sam didn't follow in Saren's footsteps was the five years he spent on the 'Yang that taught him not just how to save a galaxy - but why he was doing it in the first place. The 'Yang taught him that he isn't in that fight alone, and that he's stronger when he works through other people rather than just depending on himself. If he doesn't learn those things, he can still make N7, he can still be humanity's first Spectre, but he can't save a galaxy.
We're seeing that Mezzo. It's not Commander Shepard who needs saving in Mezzo - it's Sam - and you may be surprised at who ultimately rescues him.
A smaller little comic I made based off of this fic by @swaps55. Even if you don't know the rest of the fanfiction series, it's worth reading. It's so 🥰
