(Source: libbabink)

An appreciation post for my Gwenya Shepard. An Earthborn Sole Survivor who has been through ME1 and ME2 now. I shall be importing her into ME3 soon.

The first picture is from ME1 — ohh graphics, how far you have come.

The story with the hair —

It wasn’t that she didn’t look like herself, it was that she still looked too much like herself and couldn’t stomach it. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw the same woman staring back, minus her old scar, and with a few new ones added. It wasn’t enough. Inside she never felt whole. Meat and tubes, meat and tubes, the words taunted her, danced in her head. At times it was like everything she was had died in that vacuum of space. Yet again she had been spared somehow. For some purpose. She struggled to find that purpose again. It was Akuze all over. Sole Survivor. Her crew dead, her home destroyed. For really the Normandy was the only place she ever felt at home.

After Horizon it was too much. Her and Kaidan had chosen separate paths, and he hadn’t hesitated to remind her that she was “working for the enemy.” She felt the finality in her own voice as she had said goodbye. She read his letter to her over and over and over. She threw the datapad across the room a few times in frustration, only to pick it up and read it again. Cerberus was a means to an end she kept telling herself, but it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough to keep the shadows of doubt at bay, and it wasn’t enough to keep her fist from shattering the mirror in her quarters. After that, it was cathartic grabbing her knife and stripping strands from her hair. A more precise “haircut” would be appropriate, but it wouldn’t make her feel the way she did looking down at the sink and watching that same face change, finally. An outward metamorphosis that she could control. Afterwards, when she left her quarters, nobody said anything. Not one word was uttered about Shepard’s hair butchering, perhaps nobody dared. Eventually she cleaned up the haircut, but she didn’t change it.

A step in a new direction. Dead girl walking…