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#mshenko
swaps55 · 1 day
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Sparrow
For @dinchenrockt, who imagined Sam and Kaidan having pancakes on a nice day. I just added a little drama, because this is Sam we're talking about. Read on Ao3
The second batch of pancakes is starting to bubble when Kaidan’s skin tingles in the presence of Shepard’s biotic field. Shepard himself peers at Kaidan suspiciously from behind the archway into the kitchen, like he’s doing recon and Kaidan is an unknown element.
 “Hey, you,” Kaidan says with an amused smile. “Good morning.”
“It is morning by my standards. It is ass o’clock by your standards. Why are you awake?”
Kaidan gestures towards the open window, where sunrise hasn’t quite surrendered to daytime and some enterprising birds are getting a jump on things. “It’s a beautiful morning. Thought I’d spoil you with a nice breakfast.” 
Technically true, on both counts, even if it doesn’t really answer the question. Shepard narrows his eyes, perhaps suspecting there’s more to it, but Kaidan heads off further questions by plucking a piece of bacon off a plate and holding it up.
“Burnt it just for you.”
Shepard makes an interested sound and fully enters the kitchen, snatching the Distraction Bacon and popping it in his mouth. Bacon shouldn’t crunch like that unless it’s in a salad, but relationships require compromise.
“So, bacon. Pancakes.”
“Bacon in the pancakes. With bacon garnish.”
“Fancy.”
“Also blueberries,” Kaidan says, gesturing to a bowl. “And, uh, I was going to make some eggs but I accidentally just made more pancakes.”
“True to your nature.” He kisses Kaidan on the temple. “I’ll get plates.”
“One step ahead of you. We’re eating outside.”
Another suspicious look.
“It’s nice outside, remember?”
“I will concede it is tolerable outside, because I love you. But breakfast made, table set, and it’s what time? How long have you been up?”
Kaidan shrugs a nonchalant shoulder. “I said I wanted to spoil you.”
Still not an answer, but he hands Shepard the blueberries to give him something else to focus on and flips the remaining pancakes onto a platter, next to the pile of bacon, all nestled onto a blue and yellow tray that had been gathering dust in the back of a curio until Kaidan stumbled upon it last week looking for decorative pitcher his mother had asked about. After flipping the griddle off, he leads them to the front porch and sets the trays down on the small table next to the porch swing.
Shepard observes the spread. “Orange juice. Cloth napkins. The ‘good’ silverware. By the way, I still do not understand the silverware hierarchy.”
“My mother will happily show you next time she visits.”
Shepard snickers as he takes a seat. “Well, whatever. You pulled out all the stops. You are spoiling me.”
Kaidan makes a pleased sound as they fill their plates. They’re the same blue and yellow as the platter, with a sunflower in the center and a painted band around the edges. He’d forgotten about them completely until finding the platter. His father used to break them out when they had big breakfasts in the summer. He traces a chip in the paint. Where had they even come from in the first place? His mother? Were they just inherited with the house when his mother took it over from Kaidan’s grandparents? He’d never asked. Maybe she knows.
“Look at all this burnt bacon, just for me,” Shepard says, with a soft smile.
“Just for you.”
No reason to mention that it got burned because Kaidan was too locked in his own head to notice until he damn near set off the smoke detector.
But the pancakes are good, quite frankly. The blueberries are ripe, picked from the bushes out behind the barn just yesterday. The breeze is cool but not cold, the sun pooling at the edge of the porch steps, warm and waiting.
A far cry from the days that weren’t beautiful.
He releases a long breath and forces his mind back to the present, where Shepard is drowning his pancakes in maple syrup because moderation is not a concept he has ever developed a relationship with.
Echo whinnies from the field down the hill, head raised, ears pricked, looking right at them, as though now that she’s noticed their presence she’s offended she wasn’t invited to breakfast.
“Later,” Shepard hollers back at her. “I’m getting spoiled.”
Kaidan rests an elbow on the table – his mother would be so aghast – and chuckles into his hand.
When had he stopped getting up in the mornings for those breakfasts his father cooked? Breakfast had been his forte. The only way he outshined Kaidan’s mother in the kitchen. But that last summer before BAaT he’d stopped getting out of bed for them.
Should have gotten out of bed.
Shepard’s eye is on him again, as he saws into his pancakes and fails to spear a piece of bacon along with his next bite because it’s so brittle it just breaks under the tines of his fork. Once he’s subdued the bacon he nudges Kaidan’s knee.
“You’re awfully quiet for someone who just put out such a magnificent spread.”
Kaidan waggles an eyebrow. “Resting on my laurels.”
Shepard knee stays at rest against his, and Kaidan leans a little more into it. The weight of it, the presence is…reassuring.
The sparrow that wings in from the roof and alights on Shepard’s stack of pancakes is less reassuring.
Read the rest on Ao3
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mass effect 2 be like
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aidenlydia · 4 months
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"maybe some things get better with age" I love this scene so much
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thetrashsean · 5 months
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gay male shepards trying to avoid triggering the liara romance in mass effect 1
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clarke-mason · 4 months
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Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2021): No matter what happens...know that I love you. Always
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guchaigue · 3 months
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Happy holidays everyone! Love from the Normandy crew💖 Featuring Samantha's gay panic, Jack crudely flirting with Miri, Zaaed kissing his best girl, Tali being more than tipsy, and a space hamster on the loose.
<<Prints available>>
This was supposed to be an artwork for N7 Day, but 30+ hours into painting I knew I couldn't finish it in time, in the end, this took 50+ hours to finish, I poured so much love and effort into showing everyone's personalities so it doesn't look like early pandemic group photo ,which is how the in game photo looks like 😂 I am replaying Mass Effect again as I always do yearly, with Paragade Sheploo for the first time, so I finally get to hear Mark Meer 's renegade lines 🔥🔥 Oh and I tried the most endorsed mods on Nexus mods and it feels like playing an amazing Remake of mass effect trilogy. I highly recommend using mods at least once! ( "Diversification Project" for increased numbers of aliens , "Take Earth Back" for more impactful final part of the game, "Dreams Remade" to make you cry more)
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clericofshadows · 7 months
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CLERIC'S MODEL SWAPS WHAT IF: Kaidan Alenko was the Biotic Specialist?
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fukiana · 9 days
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MASS EFFECT 3 (2012) dev. Bioware "Come on, Kaidan. I'm getting you out of here."
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sheprd · 7 months
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Whatever keeps you around ⸺
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agirlwithadiary · 10 months
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I can't get over the fact that the illusive man would say "his file (kaidan's) is well classified." Like.... God, imagine having all the resources of cerberus and you still can't access the file of this one dude who is considered "boring" and "average", "bland" and then you see that his history is classified because he's canonically one badass mfer who killed his bully of a teacher while he was a teenager.
Like, fuck, my love for kaidan really just grew by a bajillion percent when the first time I heard that line. 🥹
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Shepard really has a weakness for bad boys and it's kaidan motherfucking alenko. 😭🥰❤️
Not to mention he would straight up square up to Shepard in ME3. Like, hello, yes, that's my man right there. 😩🤤
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valka-arialitan · 6 months
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Here's that, as a kind reminder for people to BE GENTLE TO KAIDAN.
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I saw the ''Wolverine or Kaidan ; who's the best canadian'' poll on tumblr, and had the SHITTIEST idea to go trough the reblogs tags and HOLY SHIT PEOPLE NEED TO FUCKING CHILL ???
Like basically, people voting for Kaidan were like ''sorry Logan, but Kaidan is my sweet baby boy </3'' while people voting for Wolverine were literally shitting on Kaidan and his fans and MAN ?? I DID NOT LIKE SEEING THAT.
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And in the middle of drawing this I thought that I absolutely had to make that second part.
Shepard is in his ''emotional battery'' recharge phase.
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swaps55 · 5 months
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Cover art by the utterly phenomenal @legionofpotatoes!
Mezzo
Pairing: mshenko | Rating: M Tags: Canon-typical violence, trauma, dealing with your problems poorly, body autonomy struggles   Summary: The twists and turns of ME2, through the eyes of everyone but Commander Shepard. Chapter Summary: Death was the only way
Chapter 1: Stars | Read on Ao3
At first, you think you can survive this. Your ship is in pieces, your momentum catapulting you away from the wreck, the planet you call Alchera watching serenely as your life burns. You tell yourself, you’ve faced worse. The first time you fought death was the first breath you took, into lungs that weren’t ready, in a body too small and fragile to survive on its own. You struggled for days in a vessel adrift between our stars, an insignificant speck of heat in our cold universe, determined to burn as bright as a sun. When your mother finally held you for the first time, she showed you to us and asked if we were what you were in such a hurry to see for yourself. You have always been ours. You were ours when your father sang you to sleep while we gleamed through the shutters. You were ours when you rose for the first time on unsteady legs because you wanted to see us. You were ours when you felt our power come to life under your skin and understood that we are part of you in ways you’d never imagined. How many times did you palm the glow of dark matter in your hand and imagine you were one of us? But no matter how bright you burn now, it won’t be enough to save you. There is fear, now, but you swallow it back.    The second time you fought death it wasn’t your life you were fighting for. You begged, pleaded, to march into the unknown and rescue a father who didn’t come home, and when no one listened, you turned to us in the dark and begged to take his place. That was when you learned we could be cruel.   We felt your pain, we heard your anger, we wi ditnessed your tears and did nothing. And you forgave us. We wonder if you will forgive us now.
Read the rest on Ao3 | The Mezzo Playlist
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asthewindbehaves · 9 months
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how many nights did you spend like this?
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aidenlydia · 4 months
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Artblock sketch, hopefully I’ll finish some of my actual paintings soon :’)
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katskip · 9 months
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Like quarks.
I'm completely normal about @swaps55's Fugue, thanks for asking ☄️
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janewayintersection · 5 months
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after the other shenkos ever so cruelly reminded me of the shared "are you flirting with me?" line shep and kaidan have in me3, i just need to cover my favorite things about it.
so there are like, two main flavors of shenko, right. the trilogy romance run and the me3 romance run. the "are you flirting with me?" line takes on different meanings with each one, and they're both so good.
with a previously romanced kaidan, it's funny because it takes on more of a silly "haha let's pretend we're new at this" joke. like "oh, we have to start from the beginning again, looks like we're back to basic flirting LOL". i know people say this line makes more sense with an unromanced kaidan, but i do really love the idea of it being a goof between the two of them as their relationship recovers.
while unromanced, you've got kaidan, who's been pining since me1, but has been dealing with commander "i'm married to my job. also i died and joined cerberus" shepard. and kaidan's genuinely just so fucking flabbergasted at the mere notion that 1. this seems to truly be the shepard he remembers and has feelings for, 2. that shepard might be into him and 3. that shepard is possibly flirting with him. and then once shepard repeats the "are you flirting with me?" line later, its a mix of this confidence boost, and the "fuck it, the world is ending" mentality that finally leads to kaidan flirting way more obviously and eventually deciding to take his shot. i love it. and like others have said, this could become an inside joke as well.
delicious. im eating the shenko parallels off the fucking floor as we speak. yum.
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