Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters
A/N: A short fill for a prompt addressing Shepard's mortality.
We Live And We Die
They had avoided talking about it for several years. A whole decade and a half, in fact. They avoided the topic after their vows and their honeymoon. They avoided it after they purchased a home on Earth and a home on Thessia. They avoided it after they had finally settled in one of those homes. They avoided it through three daughters. Shepard's life span had just never come up.
But, holding her youngest daughter in her arms, rocking her to sleep, Shepard felt a deep, sharp pain slice through her. The jagged splinter exploded so quickly, and unexpectedly, through her that she had to rapidly blink back the tears that filled her eyes. Her lungs burned. Her ribcage felt torn open.
She froze. Her eyes fixed on the three-year-old child in her arms. Blue eyes, half closed in exhaustion, looked at her sleepily, a small, happy smile tugged blue lips as a little, blue hand curled possessively on the collar of her shirt. Shepard trembled with suppressed emotion.
Her jaw tensed in a weak attempt to stop her tears from spilling over. She held her daughter close, her nose buried in the crook of a little neck. She inhaled deeply and she felt herself fall apart on the inside. Shepard looked up at Liara cradling their six-year-old with their ten-year-old curled into her side. Her breath stuttered and caught in her chest. Her tears fell, hot and heavy, down her cheeks.
"Shepard, what's wrong?" Liara tried to rise but was encumbered by two resolutely sleeping children.
Shepard licked her lips, swallowed around the lump in her throat, and shook her head in unconvincing denial. She closed her eyes and willed her tears away. But, they wouldn't stop. And, in that innocuous moment, having a routine evening with her family, she felt the insistence of the one thing they'd never talked about pulling at her whole being.
"I'm not going to see them grow up." Shepard said it with the pain of every year she would never have. "I won't see you grow old." Liara shook her head against the words; tears flowed down her face. "I'm going to miss out on so much of their lives. Of your life." She traced her fingers gently, reverently across the little face cradled to her chest. "No matter how long I have left, it won't be enough. I'm going to die before they ever even start living."
The soldier moved to where Liara was seated and juggled all three of her girls until they were resting against her. And she held them. And she kissed them. And she cried.
"Shepard," Liara cried, her face pressed against the human's knees as she sat on the floor before the seated woman. She couldn't refute Shepard's words, they were truth. An awful, terrible truth. A truth they had never discussed. But, a truth nonetheless.
"I don't want to leave you, Liara," Shepard desperately squeezed her wife's hand, "I don't ever want to go away. I don't want to go."
And the women clung to each other, their children ensconced between them, tears silently trailing down their cheeks. There was nothing more they could say. They had spoken the awful truth; and, it had sucked up their happiness.
They never spoke of it again. The years came and went, one after the other, and they didn't discuss the matter.
They couldn't even utter it at Joker's funeral; or Doctor Chakwas' shortly thereafter. Liara picked up the pieces of her broken soldier in the weeks following the deaths of two of her lover's longest and dearest friends.
They didn't mention the topic at Kaidan's funeral. Though, Shepard clung to Liara for more than emotional support.
They were mum on the subject at Zaeed's, then Jacob's, then Jack's, then Kasumi's, then Vegas', then Miranda's funerals. Shepard cried and waxed poetic but she didn't mention her own mortality.
Decades, perhaps centuries, later, when Samara peacefully passed and Wrex laid down his gun and Javik finally laid his head to rest and Garrus marched to his earned reward and Tali took her last great pilgrimage, they held each other close and cried but reveled in being alive.
And, when their daughters had families of their own and stories of their own, Shepard and Liara held each other close on a balcony overlooking a seemingly eternal Thessian sea.
"Shall we embrace eternity one last time, my love?" Now they didn't have to talk about it. They were finally ready to follow after their friends.
"Together." It was a statement. They were together in all.
And, together, they slipped from mortality into the embrace of a heaven populated with their dearest friends.
EDI and Grunt didn't talk about death when they buried the Savior of the Galaxy and the Shadow Broker. Because, everyone lives and everyone dies, but, what really matters is how they changed the world with their life.