Author's Note:
"A Letter to My Favorite Ex-Girlfriend" is a series of ficlets/drabbles/whatever made in an effort to bridge the events between ME: Arrival and ME3. This is based on in-game events and some personal headcanon.
~Mass Effect is owned by Bioware and I do not claim ownership of any of its characters or other associated properties.~
A Letter to My Favorite Ex-Girlfriend
Part One: The Shadow Broker
She touched her fingertips to the cold windowpane, watching raindrops drip slowly down the glass. Her ghostly reflection revealed a sickness in her that she only just now began to notice. Her skin, once a healthy light tan, was now ashen, unveiling circles of darkness and exhaustion beneath her once fiery dark eyes. Long unrestrained by military doctrine, she had begun to let her dark hair grow, permitting it fall into loose, untamed curls around her face. Likening herself to an ill-kept bum, she turned away from the window in shame.
Valkyrie Shepard thought that a return to Earth and the Alliance would be a return to all that was clean. She had escaped to it before, crawling out of the blood-stained gutters to find hope and salvation among the order of military life. Shepard found her current tenure in Vancouver a lot less redemptive than it had been when she was eighteen, even though she had arrived once more with blood on her hands.
Of course, three-hundred thousand bodies bleed far more than a single corpse.
Slowly, the former commander paced the floor of her darkened cell, unsure what to do with her free time. Just weeks before, she could have taken the elevator down to the engineering deck of the Normandy for a quick game of poker or to sweet-talk Zaeed Massani into telling some of his stories, not that it was hard to do. However, those options were far out of the question. All she had was her mostly empty room and the storm just beyond the glass.
Dejected, she flung herself onto the rough sheets of her bed and eyed a small desk. She had taken few personal possessions from aboard the Normandy, which now sat beside a dated computer that Anderson managed to secure for her. Surviving arrest were her battered helmet, her dog-tags, and a few picture frames that cycled through the faces of her lost crew like a carousel. Kaidan Alenko, her former right hand man. Kasumi Goto, her trusted confidant. Thane Krios, the alien she had swiftly fallen for. Liara T'Soni. . .
Shepard felt her heart halt in her chest. Liara had been many things to her. At first, a pet project, a person she wanted to see come out of her shell. Then she was a lover, and a damn good one at that. They then settled into bitterness and deception, then finally forgiveness. Now, she was like a sister to Shepard, a sister she could not see or talk to or even begin to think about communicating with.
The need to speak to the asari gripped Shepard by the lungs. It might end the bitter taste of loneliness that settled on her tongue. Liara may have been the Shadow Broker, but she certainly wasn't so out of reach that Shepard could not grasp at her. If there was a will, there was a way, and if anyone had will, it was Shepard.
Shepard sat up, roused the computer from sleep mode, and readied her word processing software. She hit a snag the moment her eyes saw a blank document before her; Shepard was no wordsmith. Hell, she didn't even technically graduate from high school. She could give a rousing speech, formulate a plan of attack on the battlefield, and kick a krogan in the quad, but her keyboard was nothing more than a jumbled mass of incoherent letters.
Shepard could only start simply and move on from there.
"Liara,
I don't even know where to begin. I'm sure with you being the Shadow Broker and all, you know what's been going on planetside. To put it bluntly, I've been all but blacklisted. I lost my titles, my rank. Hell, I'm surprised they didn't take back my Star of Terra. But I suppose I should be lucky that they didn't throw me to the batarians. God knows I deserve it, but I'm glad to be a prisoner if it means I get to keep my life.
Of course, no one wants to even hear the word Reaper out of my mouth. I have this kid named Vega working with me, and I think he at least entertains the notion. Good kid, but a bit of an ass kisser. Reminds me a bit of a stocky Kaidan, but not as cute.
Things feel empty around here. Maybe it's because I spent so long working alone when the Normandy wore Cerberus colors, and I'm not used to an Alliance facility. Remember how I used to say boot camp was like prison? Well, I can't remember it bothering me this much when I was in my twenties. Maybe I've changed too much since then. Call me crazy, but I've been worrying about you lately along with the rest of my crew. I'm not used to being this hands off. You know that the closest thing I had to a family was the Normandy crew. If the Reapers brought me anything good, it was you, and Garrus, and Tali, and Thane, and everyone else I shared that ship with (or I guess that Joker shared the ship with). It's strange to know that they're all gone. I knew when I collected my crew that I had no right to keep them after the mission was over, but I hadn't prepared myself for how much I'd miss them in the end. The first to go was Jack, and I will admit I didn't handle that one well. . ."
