I am featuring trans Shepards for trans day of visbility. If you have a trans Shepard, headcanon, art, fic or fic rec, etc, feel free to drop me an ask and I'll post your stuff!
I saw my son perform in this semester’s high school play: The Laramie Project- Ten Years Later.
He was wonderful. One of the best. Each actor had a handful of parts, and he seemed to bring each persona to life.
But. It was HEAVY SHIT. Obviously. It dealt with Matthew Shepard’s murder, and public opinion ten years after the murder. A large number of people seem to think it was a robbery, or a drug deal gone bad, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
It is very hard to believe that “something like that could happen here.” So a significant portion of Laramie just…doesn’t.
I’m drinking some tension tamer tea and watching the end of a CU basketball game (we’re ahead of USC, barely) because I need to fill my head with something other than someone like my son getting brutally murdered.
Title: Vicissitude
Series: Virtue and Volatility
Fandom: Mass Effect
Rating: Mature
Characters: Jackson Shepard, Garrett Coats, Warren Mills (OMC), Steven Hackett
Relationships: mShepard/Coats
Tags: pre-canon, Elysium, The Blitz, canon-typical violence, implied sexual content, Outsider POV, PTSD, Drinking, trans male Shepard, renegade Shepard
Word Count: 7171
Summary: Vicissitude- a variation in circumstances or fortune.
Elysium, the Blitz, and choices that change the course of Jackson Shepard's life.
Notes: So, Jackson is a study in contradictions, and even more than in Verisimilitude, I discovered while writing this fic how god damn difficult in can be to demonstrate the emotional state of a guy who flat out refuses to be aware of his own emotional state lol
Anyway, I hope you enjoy learning more about Jackson. I enjoyed writing this, even the darkest bits. Also, I've done a thing I don't normally do, which is attach a song to each chapter because they're just songs that I hard associated with the chapter while I was writing it. I'll be putting them in the chapter notes as I post.
Just like Verisimilitude, this fic is complete, and I'll be posting once a week on. It is important to note that while I don't have any *super* detailed descriptions of what happens, this fic does have some darker themes.
Thank you to @rotschopf-thedrow for batting this around with me constantly for the last like... month and for alpha reading for me! And thank you to @ad-astra13 for beta reading for me <e
Special thanks to @swaps55, @bioticbooty @mallaidhsomo for helping me flesh out some of my ideas!
Read Chapter 1 Here
Excerpt:
“What the fuck is that?” His voice shakes.
“That is a batarian ship,” Shepard mutters, eyes narrowing as he looks up at it. “Probably not the only one either. How the hell did they break atmo without an alarm going up?”
Warren can’t breathe. Five minutes.
The acrid smell of burning plaster and worse overwhelms him, and his stomach rebels, emptying its contents onto the floor. He’s going to lose his job over this. If he’s lucky. Explosions sound in the near distance. He can feel them vibrating through the ground, but they’re far enough away not to be a danger to him.
They’re under attack. People are dying. His eyes flick to the bakery. People are dead. He’d just wanted a cup of coffee. “There hasn’t been a raid here in years.”
Shepard shakes his head. The orange and yellow flicker of the city burning around them plays across his calm, focused expression. “They’re pirates, not idiots. They don’t target capital cities for raids.”
"Demand justice for Nex Benedict and students like them."
Thomas Edison High School student, Jake Crowl, speaking at the Twin Cities vigil for Nex Benedict, organized by Thomas Edison High Gender and Sexuality Alliance. (transcript below)
[Um, so I am actually our next speaker. Hello. My name is Jake Crowl. I'm an 18 year old transgender student at Thomas Edison High School in North East Minneapolis. Nex Benedict was a 16 year old non-binary and two spirit child of the Choctaw Nation. Nex was a straight-A student at Owasso High School in Oklahoma. They had a beautiful cat named Zeus. They loved cooking and being in nature. They loved comics like The Walking Dead and playing Minecraft. Nex was out for just 28 days as non-binary to their peers before their passing.
I'm so, so sorry that your peers failed you. I'm sorry that your school failed you. I'm sorry that everyone who was supposed to be protecting you failed to do so. Rest in peace, Nex Benedict. You were a beautiful soul and a wonderful human. I hope you understand how much you were loved and how much you are cherished.
This October will mark 25 years since the torture and death of Matthew Shepard. After 25 years, why are our transgender and two spirit children still not safe in schools? Why are our babies dying and no one is doing anything? I come before you to beg your representatives, to beg your schools to protect, to demand solid protections for our transgender and two spirit students. Demand justice for Nex Benedict and students like them.]