Liara watches Shepard. The commander stands tall, hands linked behind her back, her lean, brown frame open to the asari's undivided attention in the small lab beyond the med bay in this ship she's suddenly found herself on. She tucks her legs under the chair and takes a breath. "I'm sorry."
Shepard raises both eyebrows, the meaning of which Liara can't remember. "What for?" That voice, deep and contained, resonates in her ears.
"When we joined minds, it may have caused you more discomfort than anticipated." She shifts in her seat. "I'd never done it with a human before." It'd be too embarrassing to admit her inexperience extends to her own kind as well.
"The effects were minimal," Shepard says, "Right now, I'm more concerned about you."
Liara resists the urge to point at herself. "Me? Well—I'm still a bit dizzy, but I'm told that will pass. You have a very capable doctor on board."
"Dr. Chakwas is one of the best." She nods her approval, those full lips twitching in a movement nearly too quick to catch. "I've got reports to file now, but I wanted to check on you first."
Shepard's been looking at her with those heavy-lidded eyes this entire time, her face like a puzzle worn smooth by experience and failed attempts to solve it. Liara feels more light-headed. "Thank you, for rescuing me on Therum. If you hadn't…"
"Don't mention it," she says with a disarming smile that hides her teeth and pats Liara on the shoulder, a gesture that makes her jump slightly under those fingers. Shepard doesn't notice. "We'll talk later." She then leaves as quietly as she had come.
Her right shoulder burning, Liara stares at the door, questions and more questions on the tip of her tongue, but she hadn't thought to ask Shepard those because they have nothing to do with Reapers or Protheans or her strange in-between status on the Normandy. She doesn't know how to articulate the inexperience of their joining and the resulting psychic spill that had only flowed in one direction.
What Liara does wish to know, however, is about the frail child swinging low in a ragged hammock by the river; the slender youth inexpertly holding a dated pistol at someone even younger; the soldier with blood and sand in her curly hair, falling to her knees in a circle of her dead unit on some desolate planet. They were inexplicably woven into the fabric of Shepard's actual visions, an unforeseen complication for which the asari blames no one but herself. The shadows of these memories slip through her hands like oil, with only brief flashes that fade further into obscurity with every passing second.
The commander still knows next-to-nothing about Liara, but her own secrets aren't secret anymore. She feels guilty for not telling and guilty for the insatiable curiosity in her chest because she wants to know the woman behind the woman. She wants to know more—anything, anything—about Commander Shepard.