First off...thank you for the reviews! Oh, how I love waking up in the morning to find them in my inbox. And I'm so glad that bitchy Hannah didn't go over like the ton of bricks I thought she would. Who knew? :)
A ship sits on the horizon of the One Sea, it rocks on the gentle waves. Liara stands on the shore, it's gentle curves evidence of the lack of a tidal pull by a moons gravity. She watches the ship, but it doesn't get any closer, nor does it slip over the edge of the horizon. This is her home, this is Thessia. A salty breeze flows over her and she breathes in deeply. This is what her childhood smelt like, even though they lived miles from the shore. She can remember, very distant memories now, her mother taking her on trips to the beach. They would pick seashells, and watch the large, blue Jullar crabs scurry along the waters edge. A lack of a tide makes the former activity difficult, but they would dive below the shallow waves and run fingers through the sand to find these hidden treasures. They would surface, and Liara can remember her mother laughing as they swam together back to the shore. The Jullar would nip at their toes, and Liara, with only a child's vocabulary, would try to talk to them.
The memory brings a smile to her lips, and Liara kicks off her shoes and digs her toes into the sand. The mild blue glow of the water catches the rays of the setting sun and as she steps into the waves the combination makes it look like her feet are glowing. She looks back at the ship, but still it hasn't moved. She wonders if it every will.
She runs her hands down her arms, suddenly chilly. She turns, ready to return home, and sees her father walking toward her. She raises a hand in greeting.
"Heya kid. Why are you all the way out here?"
"I came to watch the waves, one last time."
Her father nods, and follows her gaze out to the ship in the distance. "The girlfriend sends her regards. Told me to give you a kiss from her, but yeah, there are just some things you don't do to your own kid, ya know?"
Liara laughs, and leans over, kissing her father's cheek. "Give that back to her for me," she says with a laugh, "Is she coming?"
"You know she'd love to. But with everything, she's just too busy."
Liara nods. "Yeah, I know." It hurts that Shepard won't be there to watch the sun set with them. She has always wanted to share this with her.
"Your mother might come though. Nezzy was always a sucker for the sea. Why we settled on the homeworld after you were born, our little bird needed to learn how to swim." There is something about this statement that feels wrong to Liara, but she doesn't know exactly what it is. Something is just a little out of place, something she should know, but doesn't.
"I'd like that," she says, "Illira'll be here too, if she can drag herself away from her studies."
"Damn grandkid's just like you. Always got her nose in a book. Shouldn't have read you all those stories as a kid, you went and passed them on."
"You wouldn't have it any other way."
"You're probably right," Shepard says. Liara turns away from watching the ship on the horizon. Her father is gone, and Shepard is in her place. "But then, however our kids turn out, I know they'll be perfect. A whole bunch of little yous."
Liara smiles, and throws her arms around Shepard's neck. Of course it wasn't her father that was here. Her mother was years dead, and her father no longer knew that she knew who she was. She presses a warm kiss to Shepard's lips, which is returned.
"I thought you couldn't make it," Liara whispers into Shepard's ear, "I thought the rebuilding on Earth wouldn't let you get away."
"As if I would miss the birth of our daughter for anything," Shepard answers, kissing her again.
Liara looks at Shepard in confusion, then down at her swollen belly. She feels her daughter move, feels the touch of the developing mind touch hers. She wonders what she was confused about, but writes it off as hormones. She is due any moment now, overdue in truth. She rubs a hand over the swell of her abdomen, and smiles when Shepard presses a hand over hers.
"I am ready to meet her," Liara says, her voice bright and cheerful.
"Let's not wait then," Shepard growls, eyes flashing a bright red.
Before Liara can so much as open her mouth to answer, Shepard moves and her hand reaches into Liara's womb. It doesn't hurt as the child is ripped from her, though she can feel the warm trickle of blood as the skin breaks. The infant screams, its face turning purple as it desperately fights for oxygen. Shepard rips the secondary umbilical from the child's neck, and Liara can feel her daughter's pain for a split second before the connection is cut. Shepard moves the infant to lay against her arm, the primary umbilical still connected from the child's belly to the placenta that remains attached to the uterine wall. The child is covered in purple blood, and it smears on Shepard's arms.
Shepard reaches toward the child with her free hand, and Liara doesn't know if she is going for the chord that still attaches her to her daughter, or just wants to comfort the screaming baby.
Liara turns her head, looking out to sea, and the ship on the horizon is gone and her father's voice rings in her ears.
"Don't fear Athame's daughters."
She woke with a start, her heart pounding. Where the sheets touched her bare skin it felt like someone had rubbed the skin raw and she jumped out of the bed. Asari didn't have sweat glands, instead her crest radiated excess heat, and if that was not enough, or in cases where the crest and neck ridges were not exposed to the air, the tiny scales that made up her skin worked along the same lines as a radiator. The capillaries just under her skin would engorge with blood, and the scales would lift on one edge. As air passed over them, the blood would cool, and recirculate.
It was highly effective, doubly so in moist climates where the humidity worked to leach additional heat from her body, but it had one large drawback. Where ever the scales were inflamed, and terror and the flight or fight response caused many of the same physical reactions as being overheated, her skin became extra sensitive. The nerves were nearly exposed to the elements when it happened, and every touch was multiplied. Shepard had figured out the quirk to asari migrating erogenous zones long ago, and had made a point of finding ways to exploit it, however the fine line between pleasure and pain was tricky to balance, and Liara had already fallen off.
Every last inch of her seemed to hurt, and the fading images of the dream only made it worse. She couldn't focus long enough to find a way to cool herself off, and thus begin the process of calming down. She gasped for breath, only dimly aware of where she was. Her panic woke Shepard, who blinked blearily once before snapping awake and with training instilled in her long ago, was up and hovering protectively around the panicking asari.
"Liara? What's wrong?" she asked, reaching out to stop the other woman's mad rush around the room.
Liara shied away from the hand. She wasn't sure if it was because of the dream, or fear that Shepard touching her would hurt, though perhaps it was both. She made a small, almost squeaky sound in the back of her throat as she tried to speak, but though her mind was slowly regaining balance, her body had yet to catch up and every movement felt like being stabbed with a million tiny needles where her underwear and the t shirt she'd been sleeping in rubbed against her making it difficult to form actual coherent sentences.
Shepard, without laying a hand on her, guided her toward the bathroom. She helped Liara strip, and made her sit on the toilet while she turned the water of the shower on. Liara's first reaction was to panic, not wanting to think of what the high pressure stream of water on her overly sensitive skin would feel like. But Shepard didn't lead her under the spray. Instead, she turned the water to just below ambient body temperature, and changed the head setting to steam. The clever design turned the tiny bathroom into a somewhat chilly sauna, but it did the trick. In moments, Liara was feeling better, her heart rate had slowed, and her breathing came back under control.
Shepard moved and knelt in front of her, still not touching her, her hands hovering just over Liara's knees.
After a minute of just sitting in silence, Liara finally took a deep, shaky breath. "Thank you. I...Thank you."
She had suffered through her fair share of nightmares since she'd returned to the past, but none of them had affected her like this one. They might cause her to wake with a start, or wake Shepard thrashing in her sleep, but it took a lot for a dream to cause the asari equivalent of a night sweat, especially one of this degree. She tried to think of what in the dream could have caused the reaction, but couldn't place it. The image of Shepard tearing the lifeline between her and the dream child caused her heart to clench, but she knew Shepard would never hurt her or any child of theirs. Yet, as she thought of it, the fear settled back over her, and she quickly shook the image away.
"Feeling better?" Shepard asked, the clothes she'd been sleeping in now sticking to her skin as the moisture in the air saturated the fabric.
"Yes. How did you...know what to do?" Liara asked, waving a hand at the running shower before grabbing both of Shepard's with hers. Talking was making the transition to normal easier, though fleeting waves of panic still threatened to overtake her.
Shepard blushed, and pulled her hands away, standing up. "I might possibly have maybe purchased the entire Asari What to Expect series off the extranet." She turned away, rubbing the back of her neck.
The 200-year-old pregnancy guide series had quickly become a galactic sensation when the publishing house on Earth had adapted it to other species. The asari version was the oldest of the non-terrestrial versions, having reached print only three years after human's made first contact. It's original edition had been geared toward the human parent, but later editions shifted focus back to the mother. Like the human version, the asari one was a series of books, covering the first ten years or so of asari development, or until the equivalent development stage of a human four year old. Liara had more or less lived by the books until Illira had been five, and Samara told her she was being stifling.
Liara smiled for the first time since the dream had forced her awake. "I am not pregnant, Shepard. And that doesn't answer my question." She stood and moved to Shepard's side. The human shut the water off, and shrugged.
"I know, I just like being prepared." She shrugged a second time. "I like the idea. And apparently, infant asari have difficulty regulating their own body temperature for the first year if the air is too dry. The book said a humidifier in the nursery is the best solution, but the shower was the closest thing I had."
Liara laughed and shook her head. "I don't think I will ever understand you," she said, pressing a kiss to the side of Shepard's mouth.
"Don't stop trying," Shepard answered. She walked them to the door, stripping off her wet clothes as she did. They crawled back into bed, Shepard wrapping herself around Liara, her breasts pressed tightly against the asari's back. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"About what?" Liara asked, already drifting back to sleep.
"The dream. It helps if you talk about it." Not that anyone knew a thing about her own dreams, but she had heard that talking about it did help.
"It was nothing. I don't remember."
"Liara," Shepard chastised, seeing right through the lie.
Liara rolled over so she was facing Shepard. She leaned her forehead against the humans and closed her eyes. "I was on Thessia, watching a ship out on the sea. My dad came by, but then she was you, and...," she trailed off. She couldn't repeat what she'd seen, Shepard's hand, covered in blood, reaching down toward the child. The baby, screaming, its warbling cries echoing across the water. Instead she buried her face in Shepard's neck. "It was just a dream."
"What did I do?" Shepard asked, running her fingers along the back of Liara's neck. The slight pressure was more reassuring than sexual, but Liara pressed herself against Shepard anyway. If they made love, Shepard would stop talking.
"It was just a dream, Shepard," she said, running her fingers down Shepard's side.
"Don't think to distract me T'Soni. This wasn't a normal dream; you don't normally start hyperventilating."
Liara growled deep in her throat and nuzzled Shepard's neck, but it didn't work, just made the spectre stop playing with the ridges on her neck. "It was my mind processing some of the issues I've been having with leaving Illira, and then seeing your mother again. It's nothing," she leaned back slightly, and kissed her. "Really, Shepard, I am fine. I used to have night terrors as a child, it was just a matter of time before I had one again." That wasn't a lie, not really. But it had been over three hundred years, or at least eighty depending on how you looked at it, since the last time she woke actually screaming. She had barely even come up to her mother's waist at the time, when Benezia would come into her room, stroke her underdeveloped crest and sit with her until she fell back asleep. She hadn't spoken with her mother in over ten years when the Matriarch had died at Shepard's hands, and she hadn't really missed her mother since the day she'd stormed out of the house; this marked the third time. Immediately after her death, Liara had wanted to see her again, and the day Illira was born. And right now. Right now she missed her mother so much it hurt. She pushed the feeling aside, and focused on the soft caress that was Shepard's voice as she spoke.
"Then tell me who your dad was in your dream. Who do you imagine it is? Some famous asari hero? A justicar? Oh, I bet Samara's your dad." Shepard laughed.
Liara smiled despite herself, thinking of how much like a parent Samara had acted towards her while she'd been raising Illlira. What a gift from the Goddess the justicar had been. "I forgot you don't know. You've met her, on Illium. She was the matriarch tending the bar near my office."
"That bartender!" Shepard said, eyes bright. "I saw her on the broker base, uh, watching you."
Liara nodded against Shepard's neck. "Yes. And I'm sorry I kept you from surprising me again."
"I'll see if I can forgive you," Shepard answered, wondering exactly what surprise Liara had prevented, but not caring as she rolled the asari onto her back.
Shepard shrugged into her jacket, never taking her eyes off the woman in her bed. The sheets were tangled at Liara's waist, exposing the expanse of bare flesh on her back. With the lights in the cabin still off, the blue glow from the fish tank made the skin on her back seem to ripple. It was, Shepard thought, probably the most entrancing sight in the galaxy, and quite possibly the universe. She could just stand there for hours, watching her lover breathe and the small muscle twitches as she dreamed. She wished she could stay, or crawl back into bed with her.
There was a galaxy to save, however, and if she could finish that by this afternoon, well she'd be one very happy Spectre. She was fairly certain she'd figured out what needed to be done. The Citadel was, as far as Shepard could find out from a few extranet searches and a search of the Spectre database, modular. Though the wards were attached permanently to the Presidium hub, nothing inside them was. Entire buildings could be moved within them. This happened rarely, the last major changes happening after Sovereign's attack, but it was possible. The Presidium changed almost monthly, offices suddenly showing up on the other side of walkway, walkways shifting to go over some new stretch of water. No one knew how, or why these changes occurred, but they did, and more importantly, they could.
Most importantly, however, was the fact that the tower could be moved along the curve of the presidium, and its height could change. Shepard was fairly certain that her message to herself – or more likely the Prothean Liara occasionally mentioned, Shepard couldn't remember his name – meant she should find a way to make the tower meet the basic rules for visual perfection.
She just needed to figure out how.
That was the cusp of the problem though. When she'd first thought throwing a number out there would fix things it had been fairly simple to wander around and plug it into any terminal she happened to come across and hope. She and Liara had made a game out of it, in fact. It had come to nothing, and it had taken her mother's jabbed, pointed comments and bigoted pride to make Shepard remember not only the blocks her father had made her, but the game she had played with Chief Bonston as a child. Phi on the Tower. She hadn't thought of the game in over twenty years, but as she'd been putting her old toys away it had suddenly dawned on her.
It hadn't really been a game, but more a way to keep the inquisitive and mostly annoying young Shepard out of the engineer's hair while he worked. The rules were simple. Given a pile of everyday objects, Shepard had been tasked with making the mathematically most visually pleasing tower out of them. Without a ruler or a calculator.
It had kept her busy for hours on end, and while it hadn't made her pay any more attention in math class that she had before, it had taught her a lot. And more than just how to divide. She'd pulled from the busy work posing as a game the meaning of perseverance and of thinking outside the box. It taught her the power of doing things for yourself, but also that it was okay to ask for help. It was, she thought now, one of those things that had shaped the woman she had become. And she'd need all of that if she was going to stop the nightmare that Liara's memories showed the war was.
It had also given her a good eye when it came to proportion, and as she moved toward the bed, she smiled at the near perfection that was the woman laying on it. She ran a finger along one of the ridges on Liara's neck, enjoying the sleepy sound it brought to the blue woman's lips. Shepard knew Liara hadn't slept well after the dream she'd had, and had spent most of the night in something more akin to a trance than actual sleep, but she wasn't one to skip out without saying goodbye either. Even if these were, technically, her quarters and she was, technically, just going to work.
"Hey, sleepyhead," she whispered, squatting down beside the bed. Liara opened her eyes slowly, a slow smile crossing her lips that almost made Shepard decide that being late for her meeting with Udina would be okay. "Joker says we're going to be docking in about fifteen minutes. Are you coming with me?"
Liara stretched and sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "You have figured out what you need to do?"
"No more so than I did yesterday, really, but I'll just cross my fingers. And maybe the councilors can point me in the right direction," she said just a little sardonically.
"I'm sure they will. Would you mind terribly if I didn't go?" Liara asked, stifling a yawn.
"You know I wouldn't. Go back to sleep, I'll contact you when I'm done. And we can go celebrate kicking the Reapers ass before they even showed up."
Liara laughed, and leaned forward to kiss Shepard's cheek. "That sounds wonderful. I'll be waiting." Her voice was deep, husky, and Shepard swatted at her arm.
"Damn woman, keep that up and I'm not going anywhere."
"Shepard, you have an incoming transmission from the Councilor's office," EDI interrupted. Shepard rolled her eyes, stealing one last kiss. "Shall I patch it through to your quarters?"
"No, EDI. I'll be down in a minute. They can bloody well wait a few minutes. I'll see you later," she added to Liara, who had curled back up on the bed, hugging Shepard's pillow. "I really hate the councilors right now," she muttered as she left the room.
Udina's asari aide was whose image was projected into the comm. Shepard raised a questioning eyebrow at the woman, who she always considered young, despite the fact that she probably had fifty or sixty years on Liara. "Is everything alright? I was expecting Udina."
"I apologize, but the Councilor will be unable to make your meeting with him today. Due to the short notice, I did not want to risk that you would check your messages, Spectre Shepard. He has asked that you speak with one of the other Councilors, and that he would try to make time to speak with you in a few days."
"O-kay," Shepard said, drawing the word out. That wasn't like Udina, especially since he'd seemed so excited about bringing her down a notch or two again for the whole 'steal the Normandy from the Alliance' thing. She knew she was never going to live that down, never mind that she'd been little more than Liara's pawn. A mostly willing pawn, true, but it was still Liara's fault. "Is the councilor alright?"
"He is fine. He just expects an earlier meeting to run late. He appreciates your understanding." The connection was cut.
Shepard stared at the now empty comm terminal, and considered calling the office back. She needed to get the information on the tower stats, and access to the central terminal in the council chambers. She was fairly certain that from there she'd be able to make the changes she needed to the proportions of the tower and Presidium. And she couldn't get in without council permission. It was the only place on the citadel, in fact, that her Sprectre status wouldn't let her go.
She paced the room for a minute, thinking. She could go to the other councilors. One of them would probably let her in. It wasn't like they had a reason to keep her out. On the other hand, though, she was the first human spectre. Udina was the human councilor, albeit the second one. She paused, thinking perhaps she could try to contact Anderson. He might still have council clearance; his leaving had been a very quick thing if she remembered the news vids right.
She could also just walk up to the council chambers and wait outside. She was Spectre Shepard after all and some nice janitor or keeper would let her in eventually.
"Traynor," she said into the ships internal comm after another minute of internal deliberation, "get me one of the other councilors on the line." She liked playing fast and loose with the rules, especially where the councilors were concerned, but now wasn't the time.
"Right away, ma'am," came the almost instant reply.
Shepard waited, and eventually Tevos appeared before her.
"Is there something you needed, Spectre. In general, our Spectres confer with the representatives of their own species when one has a council seat." She didn't sound angry, just amused, and Shepard took that as a good sign.
"I understand, Councilor," Shepard answered, trying to be as deferential as possible, "however, Udina recently canceled my meeting with him and requested that I meet with you instead."
"Did he? Interesting. I'm afraid I don't have the time for a formal meeting, but what is it that you need?"
"Just a moment of your time, Councilor. We believe there may be a flaw in the weapon the Alliance is building, but we might have found a way to fix it. I'd rather not discuss it over an open channel however."
"I'm afraid I can't help you. While I've given Liara what support I can for the weapon, I simply don't have the time today. I can see you tomorrow just after lunch, however, if you haven't gotten in to see Udina by then. I will also send him a message enforcing the urgency of your situation. I'm sure he'll be accommodating."
Shepard growled as the comm died again. Stupid councilors. All of them. Politicians to the bone, and it made getting anything done impossible. What the hell could she be doing all day that she couldn't spare five minutes where Shepard didn't have to worry about someone other than her girlfriend getting the information. Anyone could hack into the feed of the comm, and the councilor knew it. She'd have to ask about getting the second end of the QEC moved from Earth to the Citadel. It wasn't like she needed to contact anyone back on the homeworld anyway. She needed access to the council that couldn't be tapped. Or just install a third relay. She made a note to ask Traynor what that would involve later, and then had the specialist connect her to one of the other councilors.
Valern didn't answer, his aide told her he was ill, and Shepard had no reason to doubt it, though it just compounded her frustration. Sparatus was coldly polite, but refused to see her just the same.
She knew it was somewhat last minute, but honestly, she was one of their spectres. She didn't think it was insane to ask them to spare her five minutes. She stormed from the comm room, biting her tongue to keep the string of curses from echoing around the CIC. She walked onto the bridge and threw herself into the empty copilot seat.
"They're hanging up on me now," she said in response to Joker's questioning look.
"Only a matter of time before they caught on, I guess. What'd you do to piss them off this time?"
"Asked, politely, for a minute of their damn time."
Joker chuckled, "Ah, see, I've always told you, you should yell more."
"Right," Shepard chuckled.
"I'm serious. You're too nice to them. I mean, you have been, recently. I can't imagine any of them holding a grudge for broken comm signals."
"Apparently they can. How long?"
"Five minutes. I have clearance, already."
"Thank, Joker. I think I may just crash Udina's party."
Joker chuckled as she left.
Liara tightened the belt on her coat, and cast one last look around the cabin. She'd let Shepard think she was staying aboard, and felt mildly guilty for it, but what she needed to do, she needed to do alone. Shepard would want to come with her. Moral support she'd call it.
She'd hover, like she had the last time, just outside her peripheral vision. She wouldn't say a word, wouldn't interrupt, she would just be there. It wasn't that she didn't want Shepard there when she met her father for the second time, but at the same time she didn't want her to hear about the dream. And her intention with going to talk to Aethyta had everything to do with that dream. She'd had a similar one after she'd finally let Shepard go back to sleep.
It had been Benezia and Aethyta, standing together on the coast. The ship was on the horizon again, rocking in the soft waves. Her parents had watched the ship, not looking at her.
She had approached them, standing between them.
"Hello, Little Wing," her mother had said.
"Hello, mother."
"Hey, kid. Why are you still here?"
"I have no where else to go," she'd answered her father.
"Athame's daughters walk the sea. You should go with them," her mother whispered.
"I don't understand!"
"Don't worry, Little Wing," her mother said, picking her up. She was no more than twelve now, missing both her front teeth, the soft cartilage of her crest a solid mass on her head. "You won't get in trouble for being up past your bedtime."
"Don't wanna go a-sleep, mommy," she said.
"Daddy's gonna read you a bedtime story. It's your favorite."
Her mother had tucked her into a bed made of seaweed.
And then she'd woken up for the third time that night. She hadn't woken Shepard that time, she hadn't thrashed or panicked. If anything, she'd felt comforted by the dream.
But that, and the nightmare, had sat with her even as she'd drifted into a dreamless sleep moments later.
It left her just one option that she could see. She needed to talk to her father. She didn't think that Aethyta would be able to help interpret the dreams, she wasn't entirely sure there was anything to interpret, but obviously her subconscious mind was stuck on thoughts of her parents. And in general she'd found that the easiest way to appease her subconscious was to do what it wanted.
Within reason, of course.
She wasn't sure if talking to her dad classified as within reason, but it was what she had to work with.
She straightened her clothes one last time, put on her boots, and went down to her office. From the window there she could see when they docked. She could give herself just enough time for Shepard to get to the Embassies and then she'd make her way to Apollo's.
Simple.
And Shepard would be none the wiser. She'd already forgotten, it seemed, her desire to hear the nightmare, for which Liara was grateful.
She would never forget the image of Shepard holding their daughter, and not knowing whether the woman wanted to kill the child or comfort it.
She shook her head, casting the thoughts aside.
Doubt wasn't something she had time for, and it wasn't something she ever associated with Shepard. It had just been a rough few days, and she just needed time to collect herself. She couldn't think of anyone better than her father to put her in her place, to not let her bullshit herself into thinking things that would never happen.
Shepard loved her, period. And she would love their daughters when they had them, period.
But seeing her dad again would be nice.
