Baby's day out
The baby giggled. Marr blinked at it. The little zabraki boy babbled something in baby at him, trying to reach for his lightsaber.
"No," Marr said firmly, nudging the grabby hands away. The bright green eyes blinked tearfully at him.
"Just kill the brat," Thanaton scoffed. Marr scowled under his mask. Spitefully, he picked up the child and settled it on his lap, making direct eye contact with Thanaton as he did so.
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Hi! I just went through your entire WtTK AU and I have a (potentially sad) question :D
Has baby Eclipse ever accidentally hurt Y/N? Cause I noticed he's got some pretty big claws, and kids (especially young ones!) don't tend to have very good control of their strength and coordination when they're little
*grabbing you and shaking you*
Thank you for liking my au and for engaging! I love these fish a normal amount!!!!! As for your question~
———————🐠🐟🐠🐋🐳🦭🦈🪼🦐🐙
The first time it happens, Eclipse is too young to realize what he’s done. Tiny baby teeth are still sharp enough to pierce and tear, and when he mindlessly mouths at you a little too hard Moon is the first to notice the blood at your shoulder where your baby nestles his face. Sun is a mess of anxiety over the realization that your little guppy has teeth and claws sharp enough to hurt his mama now, and no will yet to prevent it. The bites don’t leave a visible scar, but the boys never forget.
It happens again, of course. Many times. Little nicks of careless baby claws and eager baby teeth. Nothing serious, and your mers are diligent in teaching Eclipse to be careful with his mama and her delicate body. Sun maybe goes to far with it really, and for a while your little boy handles you like you’re made of glass. Eventually you ease the anxiety he develops over hurting you into a more reasonable level of caution, but he’s always very careful.
But even the most careful, cautious people slip sometimes, and Eclipse is just a boy after all…
He hadn’t meant to. He swore up and down around hiccuping sobs over and over again how he hadn’t meant to and how he’s so so sorry. You coo and shush him, one hand pressed down firmly to stem the bleeding from your calf, and the other holding onto his hand (so much bigger than yours already, and covered in your blood) even as he tries to pull away.
“Clip, sweetie, look at me. I’m ok. It’s going to be ok. It was an accident. I’m not mad. It’s ok.” You talk to him as gently as you can, holding him as close as he‘ll let you. For a moment you resent how big he’s gotten so fast. Eleven years old and he’s already taller than you.
Moon doesn’t take it well, of course. Sun takes it worse. They get your injuries cleaned and stitched up, and they end up healing into four pale pink scars just a few inches above the first scratches Moon gave you on your ankle years and years ago. Eclipse doesn’t speak almost at all for weeks. He stays with Moon most of the time, and his nocturnal father uses the time to share whatever wisdom he earned from his own time as a sharp and dangerous creature on how to be gentle. Your son keeps his hands entirely to himself for that time, accepting hugs but not returning them. Your heart hurts far worse than your leg. Sun stays by your side while the other two are away, and his son won’t meet his eyes for days either.
Things get better. They heal, they scar, the marks fade and leave behind lessons for all four of you. Eclipse grows into a frighteningly deliberate predator, and those claws and teeth never do any harm that they don’t fully mean to do by the time he’s mature. Certainly after that, though he causes his fair share of carnage, he never hurts you.
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dreamt a cipher
a shepard/garrus post-destroy ending longfic.
[AO3 link]
I’ve debated a while about when to start posting this. Now it’s the new year, and I’ve been working on Cipher for over a year and a half, and I’ve waited long enough to start sharing it with you all. I’ve decided it’s finally time to start uploading while I work on the final chapters.
I started writing this before I ever drew a single piece of fanart for Mass Effect. It’s all the things that were bouncing around in my head after choosing the destroy ending with a mostly-paragon Shepard—consequence and responsibility and self-recrimination; her relationship with Garrus and with herself; their ties to each other and how much weight they can bear; their differing perspectives and how they slot together—all that fun stuff—compressed into a story, a place, a narrative.
I believe in the power of love, and I promise a happy ending. They’ve just been taking the long way to get there. Feel free to yell at me in the meantime.
A huge thank you to @callista-curations for her meticulous and invaluable beta work, and to @that-wildwolf and @gammaraydeath for being the best hypemen I could ask for!
A more detailed list of warnings can be found on AO3.
I've posted the full cover art here.
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Summary:
Pairing: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Rating: M (subject to change)
Important Tags: post-destroy ending - angst with a happy ending - slow burn (of sorts) - arguing - reconciliation - survivor guilt - minor original characters
Her own personal Noverian peak. That’s what it was supposed to be. Nothing but the discovery: no distractions, no comfort, no windows looking out—no familiar faces. But it's starting to look like her winning streak might have ended in that pile of Citadel rubble, if it ever extended that far to begin with.
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“How does the Earth idiom go? No use beating a dead—” A long-suffering sigh. “What was it again?”
“A dead horse. And yet, you’re here. Beating it.”
Pot, kettle. She wishes he’d just fucking say it.
-> AO3.
Read the start of Chapter 1: Constant Velocity under the cut!
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The overhead lights flicker as they always do when the data screens are up and running. It’s not something one gets used to, even so. It stings at her ocular nerves—or something like that, anyway, somewhere along the delicate wires that extend from her eyeballs into her brain—but her focus on the data doesn’t waver.
“In that case,” says Shepard, squinting against the ache, “what we need is salvage from a relay outside the immediate burst zone. Four jumps away. Five, if possible. There’s no point to any of this if we can’t scrape together a control group.”
She glances back at Elsawy, who so far hasn’t made it more than a meter into the room. She nods without looking up from her omni-tool; orange shimmers off her shiny, black hair, giving her the uncomfortable air of a Cerberus operative. Not the worst comparison, except that Miranda would waste no time letting her know if her logic took a faulty turn somewhere. Elsawy’s just as likely to agree now and write a message detailing all her crap conclusions later.
Leaning her hip against the conference table, Shepard shifts her weight off her left leg, bites down on the sigh that almost manages to slip out. Once in the clear, she grouses, “Where the hell is Meyer? He’s the one that called this meeting.”
As it is, it’s three people in attendance and she’s the only one talking. She could’ve achieved the same results with a voice call from her quarters, where she could elevate her leg in peace and without witnesses. In the dark.
“Lab Two,” answers Elsawy, finally ripping her attention off the omni-screen and gracing Shepard with a second of eye contact. Maybe in another life she could appreciate the effort—Jesus, as if she hasn’t had her fill of lives already. “We’re close to a breakthrough on the initial output patterns. Sorry. He’s been feeding his data to me.”
“Right.” She blinks once, twice, in time with the flickering. It doesn’t help; it never does. “I’ll swing by later, then. Anything else he asked you to relay?”
“Just that, Commander.” Elsawy is mumbling just enough that her voice has to compete with the drone of the air vents. The translator takes a second to filter out and amplify it. The result is less than perfect: “More salvage—” bzzrt—“bigger picture, you got it.” She narrows her eyes, and Shepard raises a brow. “Left leg or—” bzz!—“left hip?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Commander.”
“It’s nothing relevant,” she says pleasantly, forcing herself to stand up straight again. There’s a brief tremor shaking up her hamstrings; she waves a hand to distract from it. In the frenzy of the lights, the movement looks jerky, nervous. She soldiers on. “Old field injury. Unrelated. Anything can set it off.”
Funny, kind of, since it’s that very leg that ends in the most perfect, cooperative example of a foot she’s ever had the pleasure of treading on. It’s cloned; a replacement. Not the only one either. They should’ve just done away with the whole limb, but she hadn’t been consulted. Same with her trick shoulder. Not even Cerberus had managed to get that one back on the straight and narrow.
“I’d rather you bring it up with the doctor,” replies Elsawy. This is, apparently, what it takes for her to finally speak at a reasonable volume. “If we manage to fill even one of the data gaps…”
“I know,” she says. “I know, and I’m telling you, it’s unrelated.”
-> continue reading on AO3
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