The Prompt: Liara gets drunk and cuts loose
Liara has been working hard and getting stressed for weeks, and Shepard thinks she could needs a break. So Shepard drags Liara out for drinks.
Liara soon admits that it feels nice, and she and Shepard continue having a good time, getting more and more drunk.
Eventually, they get so drunk that Shepard blacks out. Shepard recovers soon enough, because of the Cerberus implants, s/he is sober. Liara, however, isn't, and while Shepard's been out, has been making trouble.
She's headbutting unsuspecting krogan, singing early 21st century rap songs from earth, tipping elcor over, accusing hanar of giving her funny looks, flirting with avina, etc.
Shepard needs to put out the fires (figuratively?) while she tries to catch up and get Liara home.
The Fill:
Jane Shepard woke up on a not-unfamiliar couch, with blood pounding in her ears and her entire empty head, nauseous and forbidding in her gut. Why was that bar ripped down and the alcohol spilled out? Who was screaming? What was that smell? How had this place become so much worse?
Why did I drink so much?
Ugh, but she had to get out now, before she drowned on her vomit and the gossip magazines never let that go.
Shepard managed to slide her legs down to the ground, and eventually, get off the couch. Never mind that she fell on her face. And maybe it was for the best she couldn't stand up and walk just yet. Now she could evade the smoke.
Stop drop and crawl Shepard.
She was back at boot camp, crawling under wire and getting drunk and flirting with asari on her off-duty hours.
Asari.
Liara.
Where was Liara?
Panic rose in her chest. Her blueberry muffin wouldn't have just left her here. Maybe she was hurt, Liara had gotten hurt, and Jane had just been blanked out drunk. She had gotten kidnapped and was being tortured right now. She was bleeding out in some backalley, waiting for her hero.
Shepard stood up.
Ah god. She was a baby deer, she was Bambi, but she could do this. These teetering legs would do just fine. She would meet talking animal friends that would teach valuable life lessons. Bambi had a long happy life, with lots of sequels. Hannah Shepard could not be stopped by a bullet anyway.
Shepard might still be drunk.
It had been fun, at first. To see her girl laughing, at ease as she never was, this woman who could start a war with gossip and could shot a banshee in the face and could whisper close into Shepard's ear, "I heard your voice coming from the nearby shops, and had to return home immediately." Say the dirtiest things at the bar with her tongue curling into a panting Commander's ear. "Just your voice Shepard, and I was undone."
But she should have removed Liara by the time she found the Journey song on the karaoke machine. But that 'More than A Feeling' rendition had been downright amazing. And Liara had needed this.
A way of blowing off steam, besides rolling around one of their beds (Shepard's, and she would always grin a little at how easy it was to undo the military-tucked sheets) or shooting stranger's and monsters in the face.
But Liara was not the person that should ever get drunk.
She knew too much.
Not even just the gory details of everyone's personal, personal lives and sexual dysfunctions and failings and who the last person you'd made out with was. But little things like old injuries and how to make a krogan fall over clutching his quad while Shepard wailed, 'One time, one time I couldn't get off, it wasn't my fault, the Mako was too cramped!' Or even actual architecture and blueprints, like when she pulled the fire alarm and got the fire extinguisher. And the soft sports on an asari's crest, and how to pull hair (vigorously) and how to threaten and then back those threats up with her biotics.
Shepard dropped down to her belly again.
The only saving grace was that thank god Aria wasn't here. Or Aethyta. But maybe the matron could have talked her daughter down.
Because Shepard could not. Especially when that figure stalked towards her and had the soldier gulping and gasping. In smoke and fire, and victory and they called Shepard the invincible one.
"Shepard!"
"Liara!" Her voice was too high and loud.
Those eyes were so big and wide, full of tears, and now was the crying stage of drunkenness that Jane herself had passed hours ago. Sobbing and confessing, 'I tried to make out with your picture but it didn't work at all. And I did buy that weird statue of you on the Extranet it wasn't James but then the husk skull ate it, and I spent my last paycheck on fish not on supplies for the Citadel hospital.'
"Since we met, Shepard. Since we met I have loved you. You were so kind, even when I told you that I wanted to dissect you and see what long term changed the beacon did to you and publish a paper on it and was basing a future series of lectures on that. You saved me, like something from a story. I would have died without you. Everyone would be dead without you. You are the most important person in the galaxy, the most beautiful. You are the galaxy."
Shepard could nearly be touched, even if she was still damp with fire extinguisher foam and bruised from where Liara had clipped her with a bar stool as she went on about how horrible Jane's spelling was.
"I don't care you have no higher education whatsoever, and you don't really know how to answer your messages. That you never told your mother about me. That you keep coming into my room to bother me and Glyph, and I know you brag about our sex life to James and Garrus and Ashley or when you wake up too early and try to make the bed with me still in it. I don't care. I don't care about how much you spent on your toys. Sometimes it's charming. You love me."
"That's great. I appreciate that. But we have to leave before the cops show up and arrest you for assaulting that elcor and harassing that hanar because you think it dated your Dad."
"You are my Goddess."
She summoned dignity from somewhere. "Your Goddess would like to go home now."
"I'll take you there. I will built you a home on Thessia, by the parks where we'll take our daughters. We'll do it like you said, and built it on the skulls of our enemies." Firm blue hands held her head in place, and Shepard lost herself in that nice fantasy of a playset made out of Reapers, with Lang's head on a wall looking down as their little blue baby took her first steps. "I want to live out the rest of your life together."
"Even if you can be so thoughtless and reckless, and I do wish we could have gone to dinner without something blowing up, just once. And you are a horrible driver, and you never open up enough and I wish you had written more details about what you saw in that prothean ship—and I wish you wore that dress more, and-"
Jane's smile slipped a little. She had created this adorable blue-eyed monster, and had to own up to that fact. Appear it and turn herself over to its mercy. "I'll take you to meet my mother."
"I would like that. I will do my best to impress her," Liara vowed, and Jane remembered, suddenly, her throwing some poor bastard face-first into the bar and the scattering of teeth of blood.
A brief moment of silence, and then Liara was scooping her up, her little dorky professor who would not wear a fedora but might get a whip if Shepard kept bothering her about it. Just picking up Jane like she was a new bride and swinging her around and scaring the shit out of the soldier who now had to worry about the upper body strength of her girlfriend. "I don't even care that your vernacular can be so limited. All I need is for to talk dirty to me."
Only Liara could use such big words when drunk? "I should never have introduced you to human music."
"But I love it. I loved listening to you sing. I loved dancing with you."
For a moment, they had just been two people on a date. And tomorrow, hungover, they would probably be eaten by a Reaper. Right now, though, they were still closer to being two normal people and Shepard could even take some delight in being carted around like when Grunt gave out piggyback rides. The night air would be refreshing, the cops' sirens were still a good bit away and they might even escape without spending the night in prison and on a side story on the news tomorrow morning.
And there was another bright spot. "I can't wait to remind you of this when you sober up."