Author's note: This is a rework of my piece "To Hold on or Let Go". When I wrote this originally it was supposed to be a frame work piece setting the stage for the much larger work I am currently in the middle of. But I am sure you understand that as a story unfolds, it changes pleasantly in ways that were not at first intended. So the larger work has again influenced this one. I wanted to develop my Shepard and especially Liara a little more than I originally had. I found that my characters also did not fit well with the games story in some ways. I was never happy with the way the game had Shepard and Liara interact after the battle with Vasir. To me, I felt that Shepard should have been the angrier of the two, and Liara should have been the one to try to explain her situation.
I also blame Blackdeer 7 , DRwells123, Kachie Takahashi, Elizabeth Carter, and many others for this rework. Through their wonderful works, they have set the bench mark for me to work towards in my writing.
The games Mass Effect and Mass Effect2, it's characters and story points belong to Bioware. Other imagery and ideas are my own. Thank you Bioware for letting me play in the fantastic world you have created.
This work, "To Hold On or Let Go", is provided by the author (me) for public entertainment, and not for profit.
[][][][][][][][][][[][][][][][][]][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
To Hold On or Let Go
It was done...
Finished...
Gone...
The Reapers back door had been sealed, their puppets burned, their mutated tools broken.
...But still that wasn't enough...
"Commander! Wake up! NOW!" Shrilled EDI.
El'Jaid woke to blaring sirens, her cabin a deep bloody red, above her through the widow she saw explosions, flashes of light, and debris flying all around...
She leaped out of her bed and ran for the elevator. What hell could be happening? Her head throbbed, her vision blurred. She couldn't remember where they were or what had happened before EDI's call.
The doors opened to fire and smoke. She could hardly see anything. Quickly she ran to the cockpit..
She hit the back of Joker's chair to stop herself. Out of breath she steadied herself, trying to think clearly. The Normandy shook all around her. She looked at the hands on the panel in front of her...
"Joker?"
No answer, and she came around to find Joker slumped in his chair. "JOKER!" She shook him, but his hands slipped away. He was gone.
"EDI? Status report! What the hell is happening?"
The glowing blue orb appeared next to her. "Shepard, I am currently tasked to capacity. We have multiple hostiles in all quadrants and I'm currently fighting over 100,000 AI attacks per second to our systems. Weapons are off line, main power is offline, shields are down to 10%..."
El'Jaid opened the front shutters. As they peeled away before her, she saw nothing but annihilation. The Normandy heaved as it dove away from debris of a ship breaking up. Reapers of all sizes were tearing in to the fleet around her, but they weren't Alliance, or Citadel ships...yet she felt that she had seen them before...
She went for the comms panel and opened up a channel.
"Watch your flank! Watch your Fla..." The speaker blared.
An entire flight of fighters screamed past Normandy's screen, all out of control. A pack of Oculus trailing them.
Below a dreadnaught broke in two as another killing machine just ran thought it as if it were a snow bank.
"... cannot be stopped...They cannot be stopped!" The speaker screamed.
But what she saw next, she could not describe the ice that struck her. Before her, at the head of the crumbling fleet she saw the Hagalaz. The Shadow broker's ship...Liara's ship...
She jammed her finger on the transmitter. "Liara! Its El'Jaid...can you hear me?" Her eyes were wild as she saw the Ships flanking the Hagalaz falling away, and the reapers coursing in like sharks to spilt blood. "Liara answer me GOD DAMN IT!"
"Transceivers are down, I have multiple hull breaches on decks 2, 5, and 6, my firewalls are failing" EDI replied in an uncomfortable sterile voice. She was losing the ship, and all El'Jaid could do was watch.
"Don't fall back! Hold your ground! The Normandy may have been lost but Don't Fall Back! OPEN FIRE!"
It was Liara screaming commands as the Hagalaz opened up on the marauding swarm. It's fire power looked the like of an eruption of a volcano mixed with the ferocity of a hurricane. It blotted out stars and was staggering to behold. But all that firepower, all the energy, was just batted away like water against rock as the Reapers kept coming.
It was all over...
Our numbers will darken the skies...
Before her eyes El'Jaid saw a massive Reaper grasp a Liara's ship. It wrapped it's tentacle legs around it and tore opens it's hull. Then the Reaper fired it's weapons into the ship. Like a predator killing its prey.
She couldn't scream...she was frozen...
Her head was spinning, she couldn't gain any understanding of what was happening, How had they been so badly routed, no...obliterated. How had it come to this?
"Shepard...they are through, I can't keep control!" Shrieked EDI, and the blue orb died away. The power cut out, and the ship began to feel like a crypt.
"I told you Shepard that you had lost, that you were fighting a war that you cannot win or survive." A cold familiar voice of a Turian came behind her. She heard a click of a pistol's safety and she whirled around, to draw her own.
[][][][][][][][]
She awoke in her cabin, drenched in sweat, her head throbbing, her right hand shaking as it held out a small pistol pointing towards the elevator.
..Another dream. No a nightmare...
She gasped for breath as she dropped the weapon on to her bed and cradled her head in her hands, gasping for breath. She looked over and saw it was 4am on her clock.
"Shepard are you alright?" The blue glow of EDI lighting up the room only matched by the fish tank on the wall.
"Yea...Yes EDI, I'm fine." She said weakly as she rubbed her face. "Are you spying on me again?" Growled El'Jaid her voice raw as she rolled out of bed rolling her neck to work out the kinks.
"Oh course not, it was Dr. Chalkwas and Dr. Solus who recommended that I keep a auditory observer program tied to your cabin ever since our return back from the Omega 4 relay. Perhaps you should see them..."
El'Jaid rubbed her temples and ran her hand through her sweat soaked hair. " No that won't be necessary, it was just a bad dream.." she retorted.
"Which keeps happening..." the AI smartly remarked. "But as you wish Shepard. Logging you out." EDI then disappeared.
"...keeps happening..." El'Jaid thought. She went to the bath room and quickly poured a small bowl of water and took two pain killers.
They were Prothean... She thought remembering the ships from her dream. She had dreamed of a Prothean fleet being devoured by the Reapers. She still couldn't make out the planet in her vision. She shivered at the thought of seeing the Hagalaz broken...the thought of losing Liara...
...Liara...
She climbed in to the hot shower and tried to clean the dream away.
Three years now. Three years since Eden Prime, just a month since destroying the Collectors. She wondered if she was losing her own humanity, her own sanity. She had died, yet here she was. She looked in to the mirror of the shower, water pouring down her ashen face, the scars glowing faintly but visibly, her emerald almond eyes having a slight red glow to them.
...Would it be enough... she thought. She had saved the Rachni, the Council, and returned the heretic Geth to the collective. Yet when she had the chance to possibly use the Reaper's own weapons and technologies against them; she instead destroyed it.
..never compromise who you are...isn't that right dad? She wondered if it would be enough to stem the typhoon that was coming.
She left the bath room in a red robe and she sat down at her desk. Before her, the terminal snapped to operation and before she saw her report that she had been compiling for the Council. The Prothean Orb hummed away blissfully on the table just past her desk, though it provided little comfort.
She had been working on the report for over a week. She had never been officially asked to file a report, but she was still a Specter, and she felt that she may as well keep the Council informed and at least the lines of communication open. Besides they needed to know what had happened, and what was coming, even if they didn't believe her...
...There was also the issue of Vasir's death, a fellow Specter.
Operative Vasir was KIA by operatives of the Shadow Broker. She died while defending an innocent bystander from harm... The convenient thing about being a Specter was being able to 'bend the rules'. She didn't need to explain how Vasir had really died. Besides the Council could not know who the Shadow Broker is, it was all apart of the game...
How could El'Jaid explain that she had killed Vasir in order to protect Liara, and help her in quest for revenge against the Shadow broker...
to help her become the Shadow broker...
Liara...
A Game. A game has pawns in it doesn't it. Am I nothing but a pawn to be used? Am I even here anymore? Alive?
El'Jaid looked over to her desk and she saw Liara's picture, the same picture she had taken on the first Normandy which felt like a life time ago, the picture she had looked at before suiting up to take out the Collectors. Liara looked so innocent, happy, perfect.
It was a life time ago. She mused sourly.
Next to her picture laid a tablet and a stylus. El'Jaid looked on the screen. Over and over again was a incomplete letter, she noticed the last few entries were in Prothean. Am I even human anymore? She thought. Ever since receiving the Cipher on Feros and the three visions burned in to her brain by Prothean beacons, she had a complete understanding of an Alien race, an understanding only shared by being one of them. Yet she was not Prothean.
She angrily struck the entries from the pad and started fresh. Making sure to use galactic basic.
Dearest Liara...
Dear Liara...
To Dr. T'Soni...
...
To the Shadow Broker...
She threw the tablet and stylus on the desk frustrated at not being able to convey her thoughts in written from...
Where could she begin on how she felt?
It had been two years for Liara, but just months for her. When she saw Liara again on Illium, Liara had changed. Gone was the shy, bookish doctor who had won her soul. Now she had been replaced by a force El'Jaid knew all to well. It was powerful, driven, and terrifying.
I am the butcher of Torfan, the Savior of the Citadel, the Destroyer of Reapers... she thought, and knew that what she saw in Liara was a small reflection of herself...
A reflection that made El'Jaid sick...
That is not her...
...For a moment El'Jaid remembered when they first met again in Liara's office on Illium. When she had seen her again Liara had rushed forward to greet her. In the kiss El'Jaid saw the Liara she knew. The kind, shy angel that had awoken her. But it did not last long, nothing ever does on Illium is seemed.
She walked through her memory of helping Liara deal with the shadow broker. El'Jaid saw all to easily, that Liara was feeding off her thirst for revenge; and she had helped her. She didn't know what else to do...
But maybe Liara had not changed so much after all. El'Jaid remembered her Asari after the Shadow Broker had been defeated. Shaking, sobbing, as if all the pieces of her terrible armor were falling away. She remembered taking Liara in to her arms and embracing her to comfort her, she remembered the softness of her lips as Liara pressed in to kiss her.
El'Jaid smiled thinly remembering how embarrassed Liara had looked as she stumbled over her self apologizing. Yet she had just wrapped her arms around Liara again and pulled her in. But it was not a kiss of pure love. It was a selfish act on both their parts; out of passion and desperation...
I was not planning on coming back... El'Jaid mused. Tears pooled at the edges of her almond emerald eyes.
She hadn't felt this way in what seemed to her a life time ago...ever since seeing her parents killed on Mindior. She felt as powerless, and confused sitting there at her desk as she had been as slavers swarmed over her colony, her home.
She barred her teeth as a flash of anger poured through her at a memory. She had finally gotten 'closure', if it could even really be called that, at Torfan.
The leaders responsible for that raid. The Bastards who had destroyed her family, her life. She had crushed them. She had them on their knees begging for her forgiveness, and she just pulled the trigger. It didn't matter that she had given the orders to storm their bunker. That when her people had told her to pull out that she ordered them to stand their ground. That they had died because of her orders. It didn't matter because she wanted to make those Bastards pay!
I am the Butcher of Torfan. But it wasn't enough was it...she growled in her mind.
But it didn't matter what people called her, how they treated her with cold cruel isolation out of fear of her. Because after Mindior she had no feelings for anyone, anything, except revenge...until her.
"Revenge marks you in ways you can't ever understand Liara..." She spoke aloud, with grief on her voice. She reached for Liara's picture again.
Liara had been the first person El'Jaid had grown to truly care for beyond her family. She couldn't explain it, but Liara had been the first person she had ever been attracted to. Liara had been the first to get past El'Jaid's wall. Liara wasn't afraid of the Butcher of Torfan, rather it had intrigued her all the more. Liara was only person she had shared herself with...
Her thoughts drifted back to their last kiss before she left Liara. It too had been selfish kiss, a desperate kiss, a farewell kiss. Her head was throbbing and her vision was blurred. She shook her head as tears started to stream down her face.
"What a stupid, selfish move! I can't have this, its not mine to have... I don't deserve it..."
Then blackness took her.