Written for the Mass Effect Challenge Community on Livejournal: Challenge #6 Arrival.
Author's Note: Illium is another name for the ancient city of Troy, thus the title. I've strayed too far away from the prompt, but it's nevertheless the spark of it. Hope you like!
Thanks to my dear friend Stella for beta-reading!
MISTRESS OF TROY
by moondusted
Her mother's words are like bile on her tongue, still burning, still stinging, when Shepard walks in. Announced, certainly, but the call - at some point that call had been important enough to make, even with Shepard in Nos Astra and coming to see her.
Her mother's words and they burn just like the betrayal she committed against him. She has to break the kiss for fear he can taste it inside her and hate her for it.
She doesn't mean to hurt, even if it is something she has learned in the last years with reluctance, when she fears there will be a moment when she won't be able to face herself in the mirror. But she doesn't mean to hurt him. She steps away from him, flees behind her desk and tries to calm her mind, tries to figure out who she is now, so she can tell what to do.
Shepard adapts, of course, respects her enough to accept the distance she asks of him. Somehow, that makes it worse. He doesn't know - how could he? - what she has done to him. But ignorance doesn't make it any less of a betrayal, far from it. The realisation wraps around her heart and squeezes tight.
She remembers her mother - the spirit has been invoked, and won't be put to rest so easily - remembers her mother dying at his feet.
"You are threatening to flay people alive now?"
Shepard adapts. In another man, it might seem cold, callous even, but he has never been as simple as that. He was dead for two years. A man like this, he knows that situations and worlds and people change. Despite everything that has happened, they still understand that much about each other.
He calls her out though, easily, puts his finger on that wound which refuses to heal and instead insists to grow. For a long time now, Liara has secretly suspected that she is not so much different from her mother.
The thought had occurred to her before on Noveria. Easily dismissed back then, disregarded, but now, so far away in time and space from that moment, there is more than just surface similarity. She is a powerful asari - pureblood - dangerous to be trifled with and she is a legendary Spectre's disciple. She has brushed away principle and moral and ethics for what she wanted. And even now, she only loathes herself for doing it, but not that it brought him back. A universe in which he no longer existed was beyond her comprehension, then as well as now.
And there was more, too, she can see the awareness of it burn in his eyes. She longs to tell him the truth, she fears his rejection, but it makes no difference. But she won't - she cannot - do it while she doesn't know who might be listening. Shepard is not the only one who finds himself at war, after all.
Still, when he asks her to join him once again, it is all she can do not to fly into his arms as if everything had ended with Saren's death. Surely they would have deserved as much? After all the tragedies and all the battles - so much pain and loss and flames - a little peace doesn't seem to be much to ask.
Dwelling on it means nothing, though. She closes her eyes after he has left, feels herself sway in her seat. There is a different person in her, she once was someone else, but she has buried it, stored it away like a treasure that would tarnish otherwise. Stored it away and some days she can't even remember it anymore. Some day, she realises, that other self will be gone. Perfect and amber-preserved, but unreachable nonetheless.
"Ma'am?"
Nyxeris edges into her office, careful, unobtrusive. Liara's eyes snap open and the reality around her, for no more than a moment, cut her like blades, cruel and merciless.
"I don't wish to disturb, but you have an important appointment in a few minutes."
Liara shakes her head, forces a business-like smile. "I'm fine. Send her in when she arrives."
Nyxeris gone, Liara slips to her feet and recalls battlefields where the grace of her movements made a difference.
Illium spreads out below her. It doesn't really, Illium is too large and she isn't up high enough by far, but the impression remains. She watches the people on the trading floor, the way the crowds ripple now and then.
She has made many mistakes and there are repercussions still to come. She feels guilt and sorrow over so many things and, worst of all, she realises she will lose so much more long before she is done.
If nothing else, though, her sacrifices might yet mean something, might yet make a difference to the galaxy. She helped bring Shepard back. It was a selfish goal to be sure, but she could just as easily make a case for the greater good out of it. It won't fool her, not in the long run, but she has become good at lying, to others and maybe to herself as well.
Nyxeris announces her customer and Liara turns around, the light behind her back serving to obscure and mystify her expression. Just for effect, just faintly, blue flickers along one hand as she walks back to her desk.
She tries not to think of what part of herself she is burning up with that tiny - necessary - display of power.
End