Two hundred years after the Reaper War, John Shepard remembers only that he was once a man and that he made a choice. As a ghost, he roams the galaxy, attention called by disparate events, until a ripple of ‘something’ calls him to the Kepler Verge.
Kat and Finch are mercenary engineers charged with making repairs on a derelict frigate. The ship is supposed to be un-powered except for the sync mechanism in the repaired circuitry. Something goes wrong and the ship blows apart.
Shepard has to decide whether to save the two people trapped in the wreckage. It’s not a simple choice and the repercussions of his actions will have consequences no one is prepared for.
~~~
“Sunshine” is a Mass Effect fan fiction written for the Mass Effect Big Bang, Fall 2013.
***Warning: Includes Mass Effect 3 ending spoilers***
Mass Effect belongs to BioWare. Artwork by Whuffie. Full Acknowledgements at Ao3
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His favourite colour had always been blue. The ocean, the sky, those flecks of unexpected cobalt embedded in grey stone, cornflowers, morning glory, the eyes reflected in a mirror. The Alliance. Earth from space. The charge beneath his skin, the glow that outlined his fingers at a thought, vapour licking at his heels as he sped through space, the ball of cleansing fire loosed at his enemies.
The fine tracery of veins beneath skin painted a blue so dark it was almost black—except where it wasn’t.
When he died, the galaxy turned blue. White blue flames licked over his arms, dissolving his skin in a cleansing fire of ethereal pain. He remembered the pain. He remembered coming apart, the process of being undone as motes of self pulled free, faster and faster until he lost cohesion. His voice was the last thing to fade; a moan that grew louder, shuddered through him, trying and failing to hold him together, maintain the integrity of being. The last sound a roar, a primordial cry as he became as infinite as the stars.
He did not remember his name. A whisper caressed the nascent bubble of being he carried within. The memory of a sound like the ocean. A sigh. A single kernel of self rippled beneath his touch, knowing without knowing, that it was his.
He did not remember whose skin had been painted with lines, but he knew it had been a person. One being, as distinct from the pulse of occupied space.
But he knew he had died. That thought was known to him, as was his current reality. He knew he was no longer a he, but the pronoun gave him a sense of self. He suspected needing such a sense, requiring it, ran counter to his objective, but he had been at work for a long, long time. And time had rippled and bunched, the flow inexorable, unsteady. A piece of it awaited him right there, and he slipped into it, the space of nothingness, and he breathed.
He was infinite. He remembered everything known by a thousand thousand species. He remembered nothing.
He remembered blue.
Kelly Jensen 