Title: the fire of service and battle
Author: Jade Sabre
Summary: "Spectres are not trained, but chosen. Individuals forged in the fire of service and battle; those whose actions elevate them above the rank and file."
a place for me to put my Mass Effect ficlets. probably they will mostly center around my Paragon f!Shep
Title: persimmon
Notes: BACKSTORY emma's dad went mia when emma was 12 and emma was sent to live with her dad's mom while hannah shepard volunteered for the search and rescue; emma spent her adolescence in and out of her grandmother's house and wherever her mom happened to be stationed. (emma's twin sister catie went to stay with hannah's family on elysium.) (they wrote each other.) (and then they both went to the naval academy and catie weaseled their way into being roommates.) (takes place october of their sophomore year.)
Emma counts the day she should be having.
She slept through her alarm, Catie's alarm, AM inspection, PT, the showers, formation, breakfast. She woke sometime around 0800—Trigonometry for Pilots, the only math class she could cram into her schedule—and made her bed and went outside and did PT, boxing with the sky. It's a beautiful blue-sky day, and it's nice to have a sky, and sunlight, and air that hasn't been through a recycler for twenty years. She doesn't want to be here.
Showering and breakfast took her through to 0930, when she should have been listening to Major Hawkins attempt to impress upon her cadets the importance of Military History, and by 0945 she's dressed and ready, sitting in the rocking chair on the porch with the little yellow pine box in her lap.
(Catie has a test at 1000 in Colonial Turian. She didn't want to come.)
At 0950, when she should be on the elevator towards Military Tactics, a cloud of dust appears on the horizon, coming up the mountain towards her, and by 0955 she sees the motorcade of hovertrucks, half the residents of the Village riding in their beds. Old Tom leads, his battered truck painfully familiar, his passenger seat painfully empty. Some of the riders in the bed wave—his son, Greg, grabs at his two children as they try to clamber out, no doubt as they're used to—but the little tin-roofed house is empty and echoing, and Emma does not look back as Tom pops open the side door and she climbs into the seat, cradling the box in her gloved hands. At 1015 they're riding down the other side of the mountain, the engine's hum and the crackling of rock a poor substitution for the clatter of booted feet on a space station's metal floor.
Tom rolls the window down; Emma hisses and pulls her hat farther over her ears. He chuckles, says, "Already afraid of the cold?" She would answer, something about the cold of space, maybe, but her words would be lost in the wind whistling by, carrying the scent of rock and brush and cold—and even now she can tell the difference between cold and frost, can smell the snow on the horizon, but by the time it comes she'll be gone again. She doesn't want to go; she doesn't think she'll ever come back.
Most people trying to enter the park go through the gate, but the yearlong residents have their own roads, and this one leads right into the valley, the wildflowers long gone, the grass brown, the campers headed for warmer climes. The Rising Wolf looks undisturbed in the lake's reflection as they park along its shores, and Emma climbs out of the truck, rocks crunching beneath her feet, the fresh sticky scent of pine filling her nose, the fresh pine box in her hands weighing her down. The other trucks and passengers slowly unload, and most only nod in Emma's direction, having already said their condolences at the wake. Tom loiters near her, smiling under his beard at Greg's attempt to heard the kids; Joyce, from her grandmother's quilting circle, comes over, stamping her feet and sniffing. "Lucky she went when she did," she says. "Another two weeks and it'd be death to drive here."
"We still would've come," Tom says, as though trying to reassure Emma. "Besides, she originally wanted Logan Pass. Now that would've been a funeral procession."
Emma shakes her head and steps to the edge of the lake, careful to keep her boots away from the water as it laps at the gravely pebbles. Tom and Joyce keep talking, but she listens as she was taught: to the brush of a breeze in the pine needles, to the susurrus of the water, to the stray whistle of a bird that ought to go south for winter. Situational awareness, her father had called it; her grandmother called it peace.
Pastor Roy finds her and rests his bare hand on her shoulder, his Bible clasped in his other. "Are you ready, Miss Shepard?" he asks.
He's always been unfailingly courteous to her, no matter how many times she tried to sleep through his sermons. She thinks he sees that she can't muster up the will to say yes, and nods for her, turning away to wave the others near as she turns away to blink into the sun.
"Dearly beloved," he says, at 1100 when she ought to be scribbling down her homework assignment for Alliance Politics, as she instead stares across the lake, willing the mountains to fall or the sky to part or something to happen to take her away from here. We're old enough to handle this now , Catie says, though if it were Uncle Albert she wouldn't be nearly so calm, so what if I'm a hypocrite, you're the one that's got to cope, Emma Jane. She's almost glad Catie didn't come; her twin talks about the green vale of their uncle's farm on Elysium, and she doesn't think she'd appreciate the rocky scruff at this elevation. She wishes she'd visited more, so that she wouldn't have to stand here alone.
You want to join the Alliance , her mother says, as Pastor Roy talks about heaven, you'd best get use to loss.
She vows that she won't, because she won't let anyone be lost.
"Emma," Pastor Roy says, his hand on her shoulder as if he knows she hasn't been listening, "it's time."
She sniffs—the cold is making her nose run, no sense in crying, child, what's done is done—and slides back the lid on the little pine box, filled to the brim with ashes. "Dust we are," the pastor says, as she takes a handful, pausing to wait for the breeze to pass, "and to dust we shall return."
She tosses the ashes across the water, but in the still air they linger close and settle on the nearby waves—too close, too likely to wash ashore and be lost under the snow, trampled upon by unwary campers—I'm dead and gone, child , but if that has to be then Emma wants her gone, and her biotics flare and she grips the box with one hand as the ashes, buoyed by her implant, rise into the air; she closes her eyes and throws out her free hand and for a moment the gravitational field of Earth itself isn't enough to stop their flight.
"And they will soar on eagles' wings," Pastor Roy says into the uncomfortable silence; Emma opens her eyes and squints to see a small cloud dissipate over the center of lake, turns away, ignores the stares of the others, shoves her way back to Tom's truck as Pastor Roy concludes his sermon, scrubs her nose on the back of her glove. She'll take a ride to the train station and be heading on a shuttle to Luna at 1400—the start of Galactic Anatomy, but it's nothing she can't memorize on her own. And the little tin-roofed house on the lonely mountainside—
She'll take the ride, and she'll be gone, and no one will be left who cares.