Certus LVII

[sinvraal]

Title: Certus
Summary: In the end, there's only one thing that really matters. Explorations, variations and off-camera moments from the Mass Effect 3 storyline. Multiple character POVs.
Rating: M, language, violence, sexual scenes.
Chapter 57: How to Be (Also on AO3.)

Comments

[tov01]

"I am a ruined vessel of sorrow and regret… but I'm free"
That does describe Shepard rather well, sad as it is. It's heartbreaking how confused she is by the very idea of peace.

It's interesting that your Shepard lost her leg, as that's my head cannon for my Shepard (down to the same limb, even)

Also, imagining Shepard arranging flowers is an amusing image.

[sinvraal]

Samara's line is still one of my favorites, and I think resonates with Shepard quite a bit.

Interesting on the limb loss. That kind of injury seems to suit the gravity of the event -- nothing is quite the same afterward.

Thanks! :)

[musa_nocturna]

So that reality-burp thing is now upgraded to creepy status. Like Javik unraveled and then re-raveled the entire thing, all of it, with Crucible, just not the team he was specifically looking for (what does EDI think? If regular cameras smear, EDI who's a sentient camera...) And having an exact second on it just nails the creepy factor for me. Do like that it's how all the possible endings were true at the same time, that's just neat. (if I'm reading Kaidan's sleepwalky-nightmare right?)

The entire segment has the same London-y feel as London does pre-mission, like the whole "it's dark and looks cold and not very homey, but it's a calm before the storm hits". Except after the storm, but sort of same grey-on-grey-on-grey feeling.

At least he'd been wearing pants.

And at least the Normandy still flew.

Priorities, Kaidan has them. (And aww, he wants to hug the Geth. Everyone's come so far)

Admirals were admirals, but doctors in wartime were gods, and Chakwas had a great deal of experience bullying people far above her pay grade.

[sinvraal]

Quantum multiverses: always good for a mind-job!

I think Shepard will heal, finally, but it's not an instant thing. Luckily she's got a support system now, and a healthy one. Real friends instead of superior officers and subordinates. But I always found the extent to which she compartmentalized herself kind of fascinating, and sad... but it seemed like a reasonable response to all the bad things she's had to deal with. But I really like the idea of the wounded warriors learning to live again, together.

Thank you! :D

[davidnm]

I think I much prefer your take on the Crucible to the one we actually got in-game!

So if I'm parsing this correctly, the Crucible's basically used the relay network to entangle itself with the entire galaxy, and then what Javik's done is act as an observer on the system, collapsing its wave function so that the Crucible/galaxy system lands in a configuration that doesn't contain any live Reapers. Nice :)

(Am I along the right lines in guessing that some of Shepard's medical issues are down to deactivated Reaper-derived tech in the implants?)

[sinvraal]

It's something along those lines, yeah. I quite like your interpretation. :) I was going for the "simple in principle" idea, where the Crucible has to plug into the Citadel because the Citadel is the center of the Reaper network, which includes the relays as a kind of connective tissue. I left things deliberately vague... but I definitely wanted to touch on the quantum multiverse idea, and that the Reapers weren't so much killed with blunt firepower but 'edited' out of life.

It's not so much that Shepard's implants are derived from Reaper tech so much as she physically interacted with the Crucible beam, which scrambled the heck out of both her nervous system and her bionics. I didn't want to get too much into the nonsense of killing EDI or the geth, so I kept that simple. Arguably, though, it's open enough that you could read it that way if you wished. :)

Thanks!