About to be out of pocket for a bit, and still a ways away from posting more Fugue, but I amworking on it and have made some good progress:
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Kaidan lets out a shaky breath and cards anxious fingers through his hair. “Sir, even if I wanted to, I’m not him. I can’t…do what he did.”
“Hell, I can’t do what he did. Even when I was his age and could have kept up.” Anderson’s voice softens. It’s tinny over the comm. “Alenko. You served with him for a long time. Do you think that was by accident?”
Kaidan shakes his head, although the pain the question brings him goes a lot deeper than Anderson will ever know.
A heavy look crosses Anderson’s face. “Shepard was one of the sharpest tactical minds I’ve ever known, but before the ‘Yanghe didn’t understand how to work through other people. It got worse after Torfan. A lot worse. He was pissed off and bitter, convinced the only person he could rely on was himself.”
“I remember,” Kaidan says softly.
On the screen, Anderson’s visage flickers with a brief wave of lag. It makes him look old. “Scared the hell out of me. It was a bad road he was headed down, and I couldn’t help him. So I sent him to Anya and the ‘Yang.I don’t know what happened during his time there. He was never one to talk about things. But I do know the ‘Yangchanged him. What he accomplished with that marine squad he shouldn’t have been able to do with a full N squad. Couldn’t believe my eyes. I looked over the dossiers of each and every one of you, trying to figure out how the hell he did shit like save that colony on Arvuna, or get that intel on Yandoa. You know what I found?”
The ever-present ache in Kaidan’s heart settles deeper. Kaidan knows exactly what Shepard found on the ‘Yang.What they’d all found there.
Each other.
But he shakes his head anyway.
“Every member of that squad had skills he didn’t. In those four years, the kid I could never get to listen to any damn thing somehow learned to listen to people who saw things differently than he did. I don’t think it’s a gamble to say you had something to do with that.”
Kaidan tries to swallow, but it gets stuck in his throat.
“He was a great soldier,” Anderson goes on. “But not just because of what he could do with a gun or his amp. It was because he surrounded himself with people who had the strengths he didn’t.I guess what I’m saying is, you don’t need to be him. Because he thought that to do the things we asked him to do, he needed the help of someone who wasn’t. And the person he looked to the most was you.”
“This Hurts You - Mass Effect Printable Stickers Sheet” 4 of Galaxy’s saddest moments is now up to download on gumroad for 1 dollars! The stickers wont have watermarks after download. https://gum.co/BFhUM
