Hello once again
I'll be quite busy these few days

Don't worry, I'll continue to write nonetheless

Normandy SR2

"HEY! Who the hell are you!" Shepard had just got back onto the Normandy after officially getting married with Tali aboard the Neema. He went up to his cabin, hoping to get some 'personal time' with Tali. However, he was greeted by Zaeed Massani.

"You must be Commander Shepard. If you are, standards for Spectres must have gone way down. If you aren't, then screw off, I need to talk to Shepard."

Shepard let go of Tali's hand and raised an eyebrow at Zaeed. "Yeah I'm Commander Shepard. And NO standards have not gone down."

"I'm Zaeed Massani, the guy you refused to recruit all the way until destroying the collector base. I took the liberty of tracking you all the way to the Migrant Fleet and I'll be happy to join the reaper raping campaign thank you." A wide grin spreading across him face.

"Yeah, alright I suppose you CAN help. You can have the room down in engineering." Shepard uncrossed his arms.

"Oh I thought this was my room," he jerked a thumb towards the captain's cabin. "But I suppose I'll settle for a small dirty room." And he stepped into the elevator, disappearing down below.

Shepard's communicator beeped, and a small version of the Illusive Man popped up on the omnitool.

"Shepard, I need you to go to sector 269 immediately. Cerberus has created a few Reaper-Busters for you to test out."

"But why there? There's nothing but a dying sun!"

"A reaper scout destroyed our research facility there. It is now dormant. I want you to make the first strike before it 'wakes' up and starts attacking. Proceed there immediately. A cargo ship will meet you there to attach the weapon to your ship and to pass you extra ammo. EDI has been given instructions on how to use it. Don't fail." And the hologram flickered out.

Shepard walked into his cabin, followed closely by Tali and pressed the intercom "Joker, set a course to Sector 269 now. We're going to kill ourselves a reaper."

"Copy that commander. Reaching there is 10 hours. You better get some sleep."

"You bet I will," glancing over his shoulder to look at Tali, already waiting for him on the bed.

Early morning Normandy SR2 captain's cabin

Shepard lazily raised one hand up to his face, rubbing his eyes. That was some well-earned sleep. He looked over at Tali who was still asleep. She is so cute when she's asleep like that.

Tali was clutching Shepard's right hand like a security blanket, refusing to let go even though he tried to pull away.

"Shepard, don't go... don't go! I can't lose you again!" she muttered when he tried to pull his hand free. He decided to let it slide and cuddled up with Tali, hugging her with his firm yet gentle grip.

"Don't worry Tali, I'm not going anywhere." He comforted her with his free left hand, gently stroking her back. "Don't worry, we'll all pull through."

About two hours later

"Shepard," Tali shook him gently, "Shepard, wake up. The Cerberus vessel has docked with the Normandy."

"Huh, what, oh alright."

He jumped out of bed, pulling on the top of his uniform and walked towards the elevator with Tali behind him with her full environmental suit on. It wasn't only for protecting the user from germs, but also gave them shields, protection, along with other capabilities such as cleaning functions etc,etc.

As he made his way to the front airlock, a Cerberus agent intercepted him halfway.

"Commander Shepard, these are the Reaper-Busters," he pointed at the big bulky missile which was being loaded into the regular missile launcher system. "And that," he pointed at the big chunk of black metal mess floating in space "is the now dormant reaper. You might want to hit it before it 'wakes up'."

"Donnelly! Get those missiles ready." Shepard shouted over the intercom "Joker, bring us into its Mass Effect envelope nice and slow"

"This is engineer Donnelly, the missiles are armed and ready. We can fire two before having to reload." A Scottish accent was heard over the intercom.

"I have a firing solution ready" EDI's mechanical AI voice came from the cockpit.

"Fire damn it Joker, fire!"

"Missile away commander! Launched just one to see how much punch it does." Most of the crew watched the missile fly away, either from the cockpit, the starboard observation deck or a video relayed from the from cameras.

They watched in silence and suspense. The missile was about to end its long journey.

With a loud audible explosion, the shockwave swept through space, rocking the Normandy back and forth.

"HOLY SHIT! That just tore a big fucking hole in the reaper. Even though it's not dead, it's mass effect field is offline and it's weapons are down. Another shot would kill it entirely!" Joker turned to give Shepard a status report.

"Joker, fire the second missile!" Shepard almost shouted at the pilot.

"Plotting firing solution... and it's away!" Joker replied "Now we just need to wait for the engineers to reload it.

"Ya don't have to wait my man," Donnelly's voice came over the intercom "I figured reloading the first one while waiting would be better."

Yet again, everyone stared in suspense, waiting for the missile to impact its target.

Joker started to feed recordings from the high-impact camera attached on the second missile to everyone's HUD (heads up display by the way).

As the missile impacted the tough reaper 'hide', the Obsidian shrapnel was super heated to tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. The slow motion recording showed the Obsidian glow white hot before cutting through the covering of the reaper, allowing a second explosive to fly straight through and detonate. After which the camera blacked out and Joker cut the live feed.

The entire ship broke out in cheering and applause as the smoke cleared and nothing but scrap metal was left to be seen. Tali cheered and hugged Shepard tightly while he returned the hug.

After a while the cheering on the CIC (go check mass effect wiki if you don't know what that means) died down as almost every crew member was staring at Tali and Shepard.

"Erm, uh, I'm sorry that was very awkward." Shepard let go of Tali and straightened his uniform as she let go as well.

"Well I thought it was cute" Kelly's voice came from behind him "She is your wife after all."

Shepard spun around, "Wait, how do you know that?" he turned back to face Joker "Something tells me you have something to do with this."

"I did 'ya a favour commander. Now you don't have to be so sneaking when you hug Tali or something like that."

"If you put it that way, why the heck not?" and embraced Tali again, now not so awkward, still a bit, but not so. Tali returned the embrace, not caring about what the other crewmembers thought. To her surprise, the entire CIC broke out in cheering.

When he thought it was about time, which would be about five minutes later when people got tired of cheering for him and Tali, he walked over to the intercom.

"Hello, this is Commander Shepard, and I declare the rest of today and tomorrow shore leave because, my fellow friends, we just earned ourselves our first kill!"

The entire ship cheered so much that Joker could have swore the ship rocked back and forth for a moment.

"Looks like we might just having a fighting chance in this war." He said quietly to Joker.

"Hell yeah, commander, hell yeah!"