Don't look at me like that

Slowly writing MShenko on AO3 @ TinyBananaMonster | Icon by daedricshrine | Header by daggertongue | Reid | They/He | Same name on Pillowfort & Dreamwidth

[tiny-banana-time]

Jay's Terrible Day

I got to commission the incredible @daggertongue for a little bit of fresh ME2 existential dread, and he fuckin killed it. Thank you, Levi, for bringing this idea to life better then I ever imagined it. Ya left me an incoherent mess for a good day or two 😂

It's taken me a few days to post it, but that's because it inspired the most writing I've done in a couple months. Including a snippet below 👀

It's not until he can breathe through his nose again that he chances loosening his grip, not until he's reasonably sure he can raise his hand to examine the skin without finding himself mirrorless in the end that he touches his cheek. Fingertips join his gaze in tracing the fissures around an eye, disappearing down his sideburn to emerge over the length of his jaw. Each literal crack in his careful facade stings with direct contact, but it's strangely comforting in how uncomfortable it is – confirmation that he can feel it as he'd expected.

A small victory.

He turns his head to examine the other side closely and locks on to a jagged glowing line through a familiar place in his brow. Just like Kasumi had said. Cracks jut out over his cheekbone, down this side of his jaw, and a shaking sigh is released once he's finished the fucked-up little game of connect-the-dots. 

The sigh floats out from between his lips, and fuck, but he knows he's not seeing things.

There's a glow coming from inside, too.

One consistency, even if the nerve damage and scarring aren't quite the same, is the slight shake of his left hand as he opens his mouth wide for a finger to pull his lip up and away. The light is dull but the color distinct, and he lifts his tongue to find another bright rift in the flesh below. Eyes widen and he loses track of blinking while he stares it down. The implications of all the faults he could find if he looked closely enough hitting him then.

One small mercy comes from looking himself in the eye, finding that the little rings of red-orange outlining his usual brown – the last things he'd noticed weeks ago before the mirror splintered through his reflection – were gone.

He'll never doubt Chakwas again.

[ohcaptains]

[enyter]

[bloodraven55]

every time going from me1 to me2 catches me out like

[dinomoder]

This is the best ad for Project Hail Mary I have ever seen. Like if I was on the fence about watching or reading it, this would convince me to do so.

[daggertongue]

👉👈 Could I request Bat in number 12 from the pallets?

(palette list)

[adhdwerewolfgf]

mr sandman

man me a sand

[thesylverlining]

Make it the cutest man car door hook hand

[adhdwerewolfgf]

i cannot begin to explain the emotions i feel every day knowing that this post i made in the middle of playing tf2 when i was 16 is going to be the one thing of mine that has made the largest impact on the world by a fucking mile

[ninjasmudge]

worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard

[ninjasmudge]

everyone in the notes we are all holding hands. everyone who hasnt worked on a wip in weeks or months or years, its okay. we are going slow but we are going

[outofcontextdiscord]

[not-a-spy-garak]

[valas-illyn]

I need this gif reversed

[freakdroids]

nice

[shubheshpedam]

art by @yoracrab

[wardencommandershepard]

It's so funny how at the end of ME1 they do that little fakeout like "oh no! Shepard didn't make it! They got crushed under all this debris! Haha, just kidding they're fine 🙂"

Then you start ME2 and immediately Shepard dies

[rika-mortis]

Life is beach

[cleo-fox]

Writing tips:

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

“You feel the bugle in his pants” - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets

[maple-seed]

Both options convey that he's horny

[cleo-fox]

How dare you be funnier than me on my own post

[amalenko]

I'm thinking about Mshenko again but it's just Shepard's voice. ME2 Kaidan thinking Shepard's gone and that the last conversation they ever had was hurried and rushed with their ship crumbling around them, Shepard sending him away, then going two years either not hearing Shepard's voice at all or only in recordings. Then Horizon happens, and Kaidan comes out of the Collector's paralysis and heads towards the commotion, and it's Shepard, and Shepard's voice, the one he's been playing on repeat in his mind for 2 years, and he sounds the same (or close enough, maybe a little different, reconstructing vocal cords probably isn't perfect.) But it's also Cerberus' Shepard, so Kaidan chooses integrity and what he thinks is the right thing, while Shepard does the same on the opposite side, and then Shepard's gone again, his voice still ringing in Kaidan's ears even though this time, Kaidan was the one who chose to go.

And then Vancouver, where Kaidan stands there for a second, watching Shepard before calling him, and Shepard turns around so quickly like maybe he's missed Kaidan's voice too, and they're talking, but it's strained, even though he smiles and Shepard smiles back, and Kaidan doesn't really know that man anymore, but he used to. And then it's Mars, where it's not just Shepard's voice, but the Commander's, and Kaidan feels like he's where he belongs again for the first time in years and it's confusing because he's still hurt and wary but it's Commander Shepard, so he can't help but be glad to hear him giving orders like it's 2183 again. And this time, when they find their target, he puts himself between it and Shepard and the others instead of arriving too late to help, and the last thing he hears before his head gets bashed in is Shepard shouting for him.

And then the hospital, where we don't know how much Kaidan heard subconsciously. Maybe he dreamed about Shepard, hearing his voice the first time Shepard checked on him. Maybe he didn't hear a thing and woke up to a quiet hospital room on the peaceful Citadel and had to convince himself it'd all really happened. Then he sends an email, Shepard shows up, and it's real, and they talk, and maybe it goes well or maybe it doesn't, but at least it's a conversation without them standing on opposite sides of an invisible line. Sure, Shepard leaves after, but Kaidan doesn't feel like all the air in the room went with him, so that's something. And he comes back, and they talk, and Kaidan's a Spectre, and he's being discharged, and everything's fine until it isn't, until something's wrong, the Citadel is in a panic, Cerberus is there, the Council is in danger, Kaidan has to do whatever he can, so he goes. Then, just when he thinks he's about to fight for his life and the lives of the Council with everything he has, it's Shepard again, standing between him and the elevator, but is it really?

Except it is, because that's Shepard's voice. And it's not just his voice in a way someone could replicate, like the actual sound of it, but in how it softens in a way nobody would know to mimic when he trusts Kaidan to trust him. So he turns on Udina, Udina draws a gun, someone shoots, it's over, but it's not, because Cerberus got away and the Council was nearly killed and the divide between Kaidan and Shepard is still there, a yawning chasm that makes Kaidan really, really wants to make a leap. So he does, and he goes to the Normandy, but he doesn't go aboard because it's not his ship or his home anymore, and this one technically never was anyway. Instead, he waits outside, standing there watching ships go by and bracing himself for a talk he doesn't know if he thinks he deserves to be given the chance to have.

It feels like an eternity, but then Shepard's there, telling him to let him have it, and Kaidan values honesty and communication and Shepard's orders so he does, and they talk about how it felt to point guns at each other and not know if the other was going to pull the trigger. They talk about Udina and what matters, and Kaidan thinks about how this matters too, him and Shepard, the Normandy, helping to stop the Reapers. He admits he'd come home in a second if he could, and he's not sure if there's a better thing in the galaxy than Shepard's voice saying, "welcome aboard, Major," except maybe how easily their hands fit together and the warm proof of Shepard being alive.

And suddenly, for the first time in three years, Shepard's voice is all around him again. He walks through the ship, maybe dodging some frosty looks here and there, maybe looking at everything with a bittersweet feeling in his chest because it's the same but it's so different, and he hears Shepard distantly chatting with this or that crewmate. He sits in the mess and Shepard comes out of the med-bay from meeting with Chakwas and it could be the SR-1 again with how familiar it is. They prep for a new mission and Shepard tells Kaidan to grab his gear and Kaidan grins in a way he never did when he got the same order from anyone else he worked with in the time Shepard was gone.

Not everything's perfect, though, and Kaidan can't get it all out of his mind, but this time, when he's sitting in the crew's cabin staring at the walls, Shepard shows up. He sits down and they banter like they did before the Collectors shredded their words apart, but this time the word "flirting" is said and it feels different, too, except that when Kaidan admits he's been thinking, Shepard listens, just like he always did. They talk, have a real conversation about the Illusive Man and Cerberus and everything that Kaidan hasn't been able to stop turning around and around in his head. It doesn't fix it, but it helps, and Shepard helps, and Kaidan knew he would, but knowing it hypothetically and actually feeling his chest begin to untangle as he listens to Shepard speak are two very different things.

Maybe that's what tips Kaidan over the edge to end up sitting in the Apollo cafe, jiggling his leg under the table and watching artificial clouds to distract himself from his nerves while he waits for Shepard, or maybe it isn't. Either way, he hears Shepard's footsteps and immediately knows them from anyone else's even with his back turned, and he knows Shepard's voice the second he inhales before going to speak, and it's easy to start chatting, making jokes about the menu and a sanity check. It's less easy to get himself to open up about the rest of it, about being restless or about what he really wants to talk about, but it's Shepard asking, all quiet and Shepard about it like the entire galaxy has shrunk down to just their table, so he does. Watching Shepard look away is like the moment the Mako would drive out of the ship in midair and gravity would catch her, pitching them down towards a planet, his stomach in his throat, but having Shepard smile and hearing him say the word love, it's like after a fight when the adrenaline's still pumping but all the emotions have been replaced with relief to still be alive.

And at some point throughout the next few weeks, Kaidan winds up laying in Shepard's arms, one of their heads on the other's chest, feeling Shepard's half-asleep murmurs reverberate through him, and there's a war on, people are dying, the Reapers have turned their home into hell, but for a second, tucked away from it all with Shepard right there, Kaidan can close his eyes and listen, and it feels like peace.

[artassdumpr]

Reminding the people who matters the most… Javik, obviously. Happy pride folks!

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[melyzard]

[elodieunderglass]

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

okay it has its own blog now (@star-system-generator) on Tumblr

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

[hanarinhightown]

Words: 2,512 Fandom: Mass Effect - All Media Types Rating: Explicit Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Male Shepard Additional Tags: Trans Shepard (Mass Effect), Vojta Shepard, Slavic Shepard, Angst, Fantasizing, Masturbation, Gun Kink, Complicated Relationships, Vojta has a “Complicated Relationship” to what you might call “Being Alive”, post-Cerberus coup

Summary:

Kaidan has pointed a gun in Shepard’s face twice now. At least one of them can’t stop thinking about it.

For Kaidan Porn Day 2026 ( @spectrekaidanalenko )

Excerpt below cut

Keep reading

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[sugarcoatednightshade]

Holy shit

[help-help-i-need-an-adult]

I want to be able to add this to playlists