I have been chronically incapable of finishing any fanfic for some time now, due to the actual games messing with my headcanon (and doing a lot of work on original stuff). However, have a quick drabble I wrote for the Mass Effect LJ comm some time back. :)
Sunshine and Moonlight
Shepard wasn't from Earth, and sunshine and moonlight meant different things to her than it did to other people. To her, it was always the days and nights of Mindoir that came to mind; the rosy-hued sunshine, the blue glow of its twin moons. The memory of those lights, the rhythm of those days lingered through all the disorientation of a military career. Moving through the galaxy meant constant disorientation, after all. Different suns, different moons, days as short as a hour or as long as a year, and the hum of shipboard lights, carefully calibrated to the precise sleep-waking cycle for maximum human efficiency. She spent her days jet-lagged, in the quaint old phrase. Nothing was right. Nothing was home.
She thought it might be different when she got to Earth. After all, wasn't that what she was programmed for? Her stupid ape-brain, wired on a primitive level to the rhythm of this planet she barely knew? But it wasn't. It wasn't right at all. It was worse still, in all that time she spent in captivity in Vancouver, watching the sunshine and moonlight chase each other through the days. Not that there was always sunshine; so many days there were grey, grey, grey-but it was a foreign greyness to her, still. Sleep never came easy to her there, and she watched that single silver moon, trying to ignore the voices at the back of her mind, the voices of all the people she'd lost, all the people she'd failed, from her parents onward, to all those who would die when the Reapers came.
She was a fighter. She didn't know what to do with herself when she wasn't fighting. Except mourn.
And here she was again, in captivity on Earth, only this time she is in London, broken and aching and trapped under the weight of the world, or perhaps just rubble, and all she can do is listen to the patter of rain on the concrete above and watch the pattern of light change as it filters through her prison.
Here, with her vision darkened by blood and the dust choking the atmosphere, it looks almost right. Almost the right colour and quality for Mindoir, and if she could just close her eyes, feel that warmth on her cheeks, she could almost just slip away, fade into the darkness and go home...
Almost. She's a fighter. It's what she does.
And she can't stop.