they got married sometime after the war, in a small ceremony under the trees

seen from Venezuela
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they got married sometime after the war, in a small ceremony under the trees
My Works for SpecReqs
me: I wrote three works for SpecReqs last year, which was in fact too many. I will write fewer fanfictions this year because I am more busy and do not want to burn out
me@me: you’re going to write four works this year. only half of them will be in the collection. good luck.
proserpine for @theharellan: So, proserpine is my actual assignment, taken from the prompt (paraphrased) “bittersweet vibes for Shepard/Samara”. Which, of course, is my jam, so I was very excited to get this as my assignment.
proserpine is about the asari outlook on mortality, how they cope with their own deaths and the deaths of shorter lived species, especially the ones they love/are reproducing with. proserpine is about Samara, who hasn’t had a friend in centuries, trying to figure out what to do with herself when she isn’t lonely. proserpine is about Samara figuring out how to live when her life is more than a pile of grief and regret.
and, perhaps most importantly, proserpine is a single, gigantic excuse for me to make a thousand metaphors about spring, flowers, and blood blooming like crimson petals. I love writing Samara’s internal monologue, it gives me a great excuse to try my hand at being pretentious and poetic.
(And yes, proserpine refers to Proserpina, the roman equivalent of Persephone, because titling this fic Persephone would be a little bit on the nose, even for me.)
erinye: man, it’s gotta be awkward to meet your mother’s new girlfriend when that girlfriend is literal centuries younger than you, helped your mom to kill your sister, and was involved in the one time your other sister and the people you’ve lived with for centuries all got turned into monsters and died. pour one out for Falere, whose problems are only beginning. it’s also an excuse for me to think about ace vibes wrt asari, and how that would work with ardat-yakshi.
this is lowkey a sequel to proserpine, if you would like to believe that that one has a happy ending.
what do you MEAN nobody wrote f!shali for @keita52: ok. look. ten people offered to write tali/female shepard for specreqs this year. zero tali/female shepard fics got written. there’s only one possible response to that, and the response is:
so, I wrote 3.5k of fic in two hours and posted it with zero regrets, as one does.
by necessity (i.e. the player character is invented by the player and not the game), all the romances in Mass Effect are somewhat one-sided. you care about their problems, they can’t get involved in yours. I wanted to explore the other side of the Tali romance with this one - we all know what Tali gets from Shepard, what does Shepard get from Tali?
so, relatedly, Tali starts off being interested in you because you save her life and you look super cool doing it. I wanted to write something about the (extremely bumpy) transition between Tali being in love with the idealized hero Shepard she met and Tali being in love with the human being Shepard, who is a hero, but also has less emotional intelligence than a sea sponge and more issues than the entire Spider-Man comic series.
and thus, this fic, in which Tali and Shepard, after an attempt at a relationship in ME2 which ends in tears for everyone, start to slowly figure each other out and get to a place where they might be able to for real have a functional love affair. good times.
and, finally, the one you’ve all been waiting for:
she broke your throne and she cut your hair (1/2) for @ferusaurelius: the time-travel fix-it sequel to i looked over it and i ached, my Shepard/Saren Shepard-roleswaps-with-Anderson-and-canon-ensues AU that I wrote for SpecReqs last year. if you haven’t read that one, read it first, it’s great. but, you know, mind the tags. canonical character death ahead :)
after a lot of screeching in the comments and a lot of brainstorming with the lovely @ferusaurelius, I figured I’d write the fix-it fic for my own fic that I had to come up with in my head so I wouldn’t chicken out of killing Saren in the ending.
this one is about two dysfunctional assholes with zero compunctions about murder trying to figure out how a “relationship” works. it’s about getting another chance at his life and trying to fix your mistakes and about the difficulty of figuring out what those mistakes were in the first place. it’s about hope in the face of impossible odds and having faith in the people you fight for. and most importantly, it’s about Saren realizing that possession by giant evil space squid was really only responsible for half of his interpersonal problems.
and man, i’ve written like, five-to-eight fics with the same Shepard. maybe I should write some meta on her...
I’m still finding it difficult to get myself to draw, even if I want to, so my new tactic is to draw all the terrible fanart I’ve wanted to make in the past! First here we have Shepard and Samara :>
29.10.2019
not quite a beginning (one-shot)
Fandom: Mass Effect Pairing: Female Shepard/Samara Rating: T, contains discussion of suicide Notes: For @rocket2saturn ‘s prompt for Shepmara, “trembling hands.” Just some riffing on the Ardat-Yakshi monastery mission in ME3 and a Renegade Shepard/Samara romance.
It is a gruesome war.
Shepard thought she knew what an atrocity looked like, thinks she sees one every morning when she catches sight of herself in the mirror, but it seems the universe is determined to surprise her. Everywhere they go, something worse.
The monastery is somehow particularly jarring. Maybe because of Liara. For all she has hardened in the years since Shepard's death, there remains in her a kind of naivete Shepard almost envies. When she looks upon the husks of her own people, it's like the true horror of the situation finally really hits her in some new and horrible way. Shepard despises the irritation that flares up in her veins, listening to genuine sorrow.
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light (and the spaces between it)
Fandom: Mass Effect Pairing: Female Shepard/Samara Rating: K+-ish? Notes: A prompt response for a couple of things @rocket2saturn sent me: "empty" and "Kisses because I don't want you to go and maybe I can convince you to stay just a few minutes longer." Also a response to the fact that I adore Samara but also adore playing a renegade asshole. Also this is in first person which I usually do not enjoy? Wheeee!
I never really thought to doubt myself before now. Maybe I didn't have the time. Maybe I didn't have the luxury. Most people don't care for my methods, but they change their tune when they see my results. I guess if I've learned anything of any real, over-arching importance, it's that if you second-guess yourself too much in high-risk situations, you get yourself killed, or you lose people you...
Well. You lose people.
It shouldn't be a big thing. The mission is over. Some of us survived, against overwhelming odds. Now everyone is licking their wounds, saying heartfelt goodbyes, and leaving, returning to whatever they were doing before, or moving onto something new.
It shouldn't be a big thing, but here we stand not a pace apart, just staring at each other without anything useful to say.
Don't go comes to mind. Useless. There's nowhere to stay. I don't even know where I'm headed next. Is my lot in my second chance at life just to be Cerberus's latest puppet? Do I spend the next few years choosing between slaughtering people and stepping on throats to get what I want, or letting myself get jerked around to make what I want a little easier to grasp at?
What do I even want anymore?
Maybe I've almost died a few too many times lately. The concept of life and death leaves me feeling lazy and indifferent.
The concept of saying goodbye to Samara makes me feel...
Read More: ff.net | AO3
wait hold on, you can romance samara? how?
Sort of! It doesn’t like Count(TM) but it counts in my heart.
1. You have to be mostly a paragon, but I’m not sure what the exact parameters are. I’m pretty sure she rejected me when I had a little over the first marker of renegade points, but it could also have been because I didn’t max out paragon.
2. You can’t romance anyone else, but Liara in the Shadow Broker DLC doesn’t count. I don’t know about Kelly.
3. After being mostly a paragon you have to take a renegade option when talking to her. It’s in the last big conversation--she’ll say “you’ve been a good friend to me” and you can say “I want more.”
She still kinda turns you down, and it doesn’t count as an official romance, but there’s a little bit of content in the Citadel DLC in ME3 as well if all those conditions were met, and though you don’t get the paramour achievement from romancing her, I think your save file is tagged as having a romance with her in ME3.
Besides having pursued her in ME2 I don’t know what affects the Citadel romance--I think you just can’t be locked into a main romance to get it. So it’s kind of hard to get and you don’t know if you got it til you’ve invested a lot of time.
FRIENDS I TORE MYSELF APART FOR THIS TEN SECOND SCENE OKAY
the price of uncertainty
Fandom: Mass Effect Pairing: Female Shepard/Samara Summary: Perhaps her mistake was that Shepard knows all too well the price of uncertainty, knows that a leader must sound sure of herself even when she is furthest from it. Perhaps this is why Shepard sees through Samara's thin deflection. Notes: The results of this morning’s live write on Twitch! Join me after lunch for games and more writes!
It has been a very long time since Samara has felt able to speak to someone as an equal. At first, she imagines that Commander Shepard is the sort who would never think herself inferior to anyone, would never doubt herself in the presence of anyone. At first, she imagines they will not see eye to eye on most matters.
She is pleased to be proven wrong.
One day, as she leans awkwardly against the leg of a sofa, clearly unaccustomed to sitting on the floor, Shepard asks Samara whether her strict code forbids romance.
Samara feels her insides flutter. It's a curious sensation, one she hasn't felt in so long that she was certain the sensation was lost to her. She had loved the mother of her children very deeply—yet another reason that she must swear herself to the Code in order to do what must be done—but she is long-dead, and Samara is nearly one thousand years old.
She tells some of this to Shepard, that she feels the weight of every last year in her heart, that she would never be interested in romance, and she sounds all the more certain for how uncertain the conversation has rendered her.
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