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Remi had always thought he was weak. That he always assumed. Although Shepard never showed it, it was clear who shined. Remi excelled, always had. Her plans were on the forefront while his were always shelved. Their mother never even sparing a second glance. With Remi gone, Roman was all Shepard had left. He would stay with her. He would have never left her. She would be able to fill the void inside of him with something useful. But even when Remi wasn’t playing, she always won the game. Shepard was gone. She was gone. And Roman was all alone again.
Jane had let him go in DC. She had the shot and didn’t take it. She wouldn’t have been able to. She couldn’t. She just let him go.
Roman couldn’t sleep after that. He had nowhere to go, nowhere to call home. He had lost his purpose with Sandstorm , so he figures, it was time for a new one. For the first time, he’d be the one moves ahead and his sister would just be a player. A pawn. Her penance.
When his hallucinations got worse, she was always the first person he would see. Her hair still long, her body unmarked. Not Jane. Remi. Just as she was before they lost everything.
Jane was a stranger. The way Remi looked at him was familiar. It was the one thing his fragmented mind could hold onto. She was always there.
Until she wasn’t
So Roman had to make her there.
He loved his sister, yet part of him couldn’t stop himself from hating her. Hated how they were pinned against eachother, hated how she always won, hated the leash she kept around his neck.
Alice was Ian’s sister, the sole person he could rely on in the orphanage, the only one who could understand.
Remi was Roman’s handler. The one who told him what to do, what to push aside. All in the name of their grand mission.
That was the irony of it all. Remi was the one who got the second chance, who got to choose. Roman never made choices. He was a loyal lap dog for Shepard and an asset for Crawford, but never truly was he a son. He loved his mother who raised him, and Crawford who had called himself his father, but he knew what he was to them deep down.
Remi got to choose, and somewhere deep in Roman that’s what made him hate her the most.
Remi got to look in the mirror and see Jane instead. She wasn’t trapped in that orphanage every night when she went to bed; only Roman was.
Jane had a family, friends who stuck their necks out to protect her. Friends good enough that she was able to leave him, live without him.
Roman didn’t understand how Jane could become so selfish until he became Tom.
Tom was different from Roman. Tom made choices. Tom wanted to run away and live with Blake, and that would have been Tom’s decision. No leash around his neck.
When Tom looked in the mirror, he didn’t see Roman; he saw Blake in the bed sleeping beside him.
He had abandoned his own mission. The very thing he had condemned Jane for.
Remi and Roman. Tom and Jane. They were always the same. Two halves of a whole, bound to be together.
Roman didn’t want to die as himself, but it’s not like he had a choice. Blake had shot the ‘Tom’ Roman was, and left him. He was going to end right where it all started: home with his sister by his side.
