She could see Armali out the window. She was propped up and she could almost forget how hard it was to breathe, how every breath squeezed against her ribs. Because it was beautiful. It was light and it was whole, and everywhere she looked there was the sweep of her people's architecture.
This was the future she had fought for. They had fought for. The future stitched together from what had been left of the old times.
The War was an old memory now. History blurred it around the edges.
I am the last, she thought. I am the last and soon I too shall be gone.
Each breath came slower. Soon, it would be soon. She could barely feel her daughters hand in hers, the thumb stroking across the back of her hand, the soft whisper of 'mama?' That isn't right. Jayika hasn't called her that in the centuries since she was too young, too old, trying to work out how to cradle a baby rather than a gun.
But she can see the city past the faces of the tribe she somehow ended up with when she came home, trying to stitch back the world in hope it would stitch her back together. It hadn't, but she had learnt to co-exist with the hole punched in her.
In those days it was co-exist or find some secluded place where you could close your eyes and no one would shudder when you pulled the trigger. Some had been too tired to fix what the Reapers had broken, too broken to find any sense in what was left behind. Sometimes the silence was too loud
"Don't leave," Someone whispered and she tried to say everyone leaves eventually but no words came. They were trapped in her throat and she was so tried, so very tired.
But there was a brush against her cheek, someone's fingers. Not the tiny scales of her people. Soft, delicate. So delicate you wondered how it kept all the bits in. She was tired. She wanted to sleep, but that hand was persistent, brushing across her eyelids.
"Look at me," A voice that was familiar. A voice she hadn't heard for close to nine hundred years. You mean everything to me. Her eyelids were weighted by Thessia but she opened them. This one last time.
Shepard.
"I told you I'd come," There's a spark in her blue eyes, the one that Liara had always loved and so rarely seen. Soft fingers marked with calluses brushed along her jaw. "I'm always coming back to you."
You were gone for so long.
"I know, I'm sorry." A brush of their lips, lingering. An eternity kiss, a promise kiss.
The sun had gone out but Shepard's arms were warm around her, cradling her, and her lips were against her forehead, her hair was tickling her neckfolds. She could sleep now, she was safe now and Shepard was here. She was here and they were okay, they were together.
Where are we going?
"Home."
Home was where eternity ended and of all things it was a bar and Shepard liked that, of course she did. Garrus had his arm around Tali's shoulders, Ashley and Vega were trying to out-Marine each other and Kaidan had that smile on his face that she remembered from the night before he died. Wrex was laughing as Grunt toppled, defeated by the elder's superior ryncol tolerance.
Here was home; not the Normandy but all the parts of it that mattered.
a/n: a masskink fill for the prompt: 'Shepard's LI is on his/her surrounded by friends/family and sees Shepard's ghost come for them.'
