A/N: This is just something I wrote for my brother, who has major heartsies for Liara. And since he's done a number of art pieces for me, I figured it was about time I return the favor, despite some insistent close-mouthedness from him regarding what exactly I should do for him. As a result, it is his Shepard in the story, and not any one of mine.

Further A/N: I have not, and do not plan to, read Mass Effect: Redemption.

"Have you faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have." Liara's voice reverberated ominously, eyes flaring with contained menace. Implicit threat dripped from her words with the learned ease of a delicately choreographed dance. The businessman shrank, intimidated as much by her reputation as her display of hostility.

Such was the game she played.

"I'll make this simple," she said, making important little gestures with her hands to increase the effect of her declaration. "You pay me," she intoned, "or I flay you alive—with my mind!"

As she spoke those last few words, Liara heard the door to her office open and immediately she could feel his presence in the room. It was not something she could describe, no single sense alerted her that it was him. Rather, it was akin to feeling some unspoken spiritual bond reconnecting.

Instantly, she closed the transmission, shutting off what further words the man might have for her; she was no longer concerned with that particular responsibility. Her heart rate spiked violently. The last thing she wanted to do in that moment was face him, because she was mortally terrified of what she would see.

It wasn't that she was afraid he would be different, that he wouldn't be the Shepard she remembered, but rather she was afraid he would be precisely the same person she remembered. The same Jonathan Shepard who had been touched by the immortal legacy of the long-lost Protheans, who not only rescued her from the rampaging geth, but had prevented the galaxy-wide annihilation of life by the Reapers, killed the treacherous Spectre Saren, and brought peace to her conflicted mother Benezia in her final moments. She was afraid most of all that he would still be the man she had loved, and lost.

Liara turned her head, and there he was.

All the foreknowledge in the galaxy was as nothing before the visceral reality before her eyes. Two years she had steeled herself against this day, should it ever come, only to find in this instant that all her preparation was as vain as a young girl's obsession with high fashion. That one infinitesimal instant seemed to stretch out into eternity as her feelings all came rushing to the surface at once, forming a curious bubble of complete and utter emotional confusion, a feverish paradox preventing her from truly feeling any of them.

She tried to open her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Liara wasn't even sure what her face was saying. She feared it to be the cold, emotionless mask she'd taught herself. Though it felt like an eternity, mere seconds passed before she finally summoned the will to take a step toward him.

"Shepard..." she said, failing for further words as she began rushing to close the space between them. As Liara took in the sight of him, she could clearly see the strength, the passion, the will burning brightly within him. His eyes blazed with life.

He caught her up in his arms. Liara moaned inwardly to feel that embrace once again, before this too was caught up in that emotional bubble which prevented her from speaking, lest it burst and everything come out all at once.

She hugged him fiercely, afraid to let him go and this should prove to be just another of her fevered dreams of impossible desire and longing, the ones that had haunted her for two long years since hearing those fateful last words: "Liara, go!"

Finally, she found herself crying. Not in violent, wrenching sobs of forlorn yearning, but gentle, desperate tears of thankfulness—to whatever god, goddess, or other deity had brought her Jonathan back to her.

Shepard kissed her softly on the top of her head. His voice carried with it a world of comfort. "They told me at the docking station you were here," he whispered. "I don't think I really believed them until now."

As he held her and she him, Liara felt her jumbled emotions begin to smooth themselves out and flow properly once more, until finally she trusted herself to speak. "I've missed you so much, Jonathan."