A/N: Alright! Here you are! The last chapter. After this is an epilogue. Hopefully, this will be worth the cliffhanger I left you all with yesterday. Again, I live for your thoughts, so please let me know if this is a satisfying ending?
And thank you to everyone who has let me know their thoughts thus far. And, of course, to Diablo Kades, who is awesome, and makes me a better writer.
Chapter 11
"What?! What do you mean she's under the drive core?!"
Liara had gone to the medbay with Chakwas, enduring the minor surgery but refusing sedation. The anesthetic was still wearing off when she hobbled out of the medbay, making room for Ashley to receive the medical attention she needed. She was now sitting in the cockpit, monitoring what was left of the ground forces.
But the last thing Joker said had caught her attention immediately.
Getting up, she limped over to the pilot. "Denna is in the drive core chamber? We're about to jump through the relay!"
Joker frantically flicked through his various panels. "Shit, Liara, I know!" He selected one, reading from it. "Shit… I can't do anything about it. The Crucible is going to fire any second." He sat back, sighed.
She was frantic, making to grab at him. A hand grabbed hers, and she whirled around to find Samantha pulling her away from the pilot. "He can't do anything, Dr. T'Soni…"
"Prepare for relay jump in five, four, three, two, one…"
She felt the familiar pull behind her navel. She clung to the communications specialist, desperate to run down to Engineering immediately and yet terrified at what she might find there.
Time slowed, important moments playing in her mind's eye. She saw Denna for the first time, wide-eyed and nervous as Liara cornered her outside the crew quarters. The human woman singing, a song about a man who had drunk too much and gotten himself in trouble. Meeting Denna outside on the Citadel, dog in-tow; running into her now-ex-wife, pretending she was the small human's new love interest. Becoming the small woman's love interest. She saw their first kiss, their first intimate moment, then their first Joining. She heard Denna's words as she confessed that she was terrified of what might happen to the asari while she was on the ground with Shepard.
"Shit, what the Hell is that?!"
Liara was lurched back to the present. She still stood in Samantha's arms, the dark-skinned human clutching her tightly so she wouldn't lunge away. They both looked over at Joker, who was desperately flying through his controls. They couldn't see what he could, but something was definitely amiss – the normally blue tendrils of light that surrounded the ship at FTL speeds were intermixed with fingers of red light, and the ship was beginning to jolt a little.
Suddenly, the entire ship gave a huge lurch, sending everyone not seated to the floor.
"Mayday! Mayday! All hands brace for impact! We're going down, people! Mayday! Mayday!"
Liara was incredulous. "Down?! Down to what?"
"There's a planet nearby with a breathable atmosphere. It also has Earth-like gravity," EDI answered.
Liara didn't bother getting up. Not that she could have even if she'd wanted to. The ship careened, sending them all spiraling towards an unknown fate on an uncharted planet below. Until, eventually, the ship ground to a halt.
A loud beeping filled the air. Liara coughed, pushing herself up, checking herself quickly for injuries. Aside from some serious bruising, however, she seemed to be fine. Looking around, she found that the cockpit was only being illuminated from outside, through the windows. Blinking at its brightness in the dim cockpit, she pushed herself to her feet, looking around further.
She touched her hand to the small radio on her collar. "Denna? Adams? Can anyone hear me?" No answer. She tried instead for the people in the room with her. "Joker? Tali? Samantha, can you hear me?"
"Ow… what?"
"Samantha, are you hurt?" She moved to the woman's side.
"I… something's pinning my leg. I can't move it."
Liara glowed with biotics. "I will get you out." Using the light she generated, she saw that a console had smashed, coming loose enough to fall on the specialist's leg. She enveloped it in dark energy, taking the weight off of it, allowing the human to pull her leg free. As soon as she had, Liara let it go, letting the energy leave her for the moment.
"Are you alright?"
Samantha was probing her ankle and lower leg. "It seems like I'll be lucky enough to just be heavily bruised."
Liara nodded. "Good. I'll check on the others. Our translators appear to be working – see if we have any mass communications or radios within the ship."
"No need to check on me. My suit has kept me perfectly safe. I just was knocked out for a moment."
"Oh, Tali, good. You can help Samantha."
As the quarian got up from the floor, Liara moved gingerly over to the pilot's seat. "Joker, are you alright?" She placed a hand on his shoulder, giving him a gentle shake. He seemed to wake from a stupor, blinking and making confused noises. "Joker, can you understand me?"
"Liara… yeah, yeah, I can understand you." His eyes opened further, and he looked around. "What happened?"
"We came down, remember?"
"Oh, right. EDI, damage report."
They were greeted by silence.
He looked over to her chassis, which was limp against its workstation. "EDI?"
Liara moved over, giving its shoulder a shake. There was no response. Jokey slid himself out of his restraints, which had clearly saved his fragile body from serious injury, and gave the chassis a serious shake. "EDI!"
Liara watched him, pity in her eyes. They AI had come to mean a great deal to the pilot. It also reawakened the panic in her heart for Denna.
"We have no communications outside of our translators, Dr. T'Soni," Samantha said quietly. "I barely have this display. I have no idea of the state of the ship."
"It's true. We have almost zero power," Tali confirmed, flipping through flickering HI displays right next to the specialist.
Liara had been quietly holding her panic down, but now it bubbled forth. She ran the three steps to Samantha, looking frantically at her display. "I need to get down there, Sam. She… I…"
Samantha turned, took both her shoulders in-hand, and made the asari look her in the eyes. "I'll help you, Liara. Don't worry." The woman looked over to Joker. "Are you okay up here on your own?"
He looked up from where he'd been staring through EDI's mobile chassis, his eyes coming into focus. "Yeah, go. I'll see what I can do from here."
Neither of them needed him to say it a second time. They were out of the cockpit in three heartbeats, running toward the lift by the flickering galaxy map.
The hatch opened, revealing a blinking Joker and Liara. They looked around, confirming that the air was indeed breathable. Liara left Joker to get down with Samantha's help, jumping to the floor of what was clearly a jungle, Tali a step behind, and immediately going to find if there was any kind of breach in the hull toward the Normandy's belly. The lift was out of commission, and the access ducts were partially caved-in. They'd found out the hard way, making it to the third level before Dr. Chakwas informed them that the access tunnel in the security room was too clogged to allow them to pass. She held a med kit, and had been hoping to make it to Deck 4 to check on the engineering crew who were most likely to have been injured, in the belly of the ship as they were.
Liara was seriously losing her ability to keep calm. From the outside, on the ground, the ship was huge, and she wasn't even sure Engineering was a section you could detect from the outside like this. She ran and ran, losing hope and then renewing it within herself with every few steps. She heard other footsteps behind her, likely Tali and the doctor tailing her, but she could hardly be concerned with that. She needed to find her. She needed to know how that small human who had come to mean so much to her had fared.
She was in luck, as it turned out. Spotting a breach in the hull, she put on a burst of speed. The hull was partially collapsed here, where the Normandy had crashed into a great tree. The folding of the hull's metal opened a tear in the side, opening into one of the storage rooms. With almost no thought, Liara was encased in blue flame once more, wrenching the rift wide enough for her to make it through.
What she found inside made her heart drop to somewhere near her navel. The reporter, Diana Allers, lay on the floor. If the pool of blood surrounding her head was any indication, she was already dead. She moved on quickly, wreathing herself in dark energy and tearing the partially-opened door open further.
In the hallway, Gabby Daniels was kneeling next to Kenneth, crying, trying desperately to lift a beam from his back. Liara, encased in dark energy as she was, moved it from him with barely a flick of her wrist. She had no attention to spare for the woman sobbing in relief, however. She was on a mission.
Wrenching the door from its frame, she ran in, searching desperately for her love. Engineering seemed to have taken the worst of the damage she'd seen so far, which she supposed made sense, since the ship had crashed on it underside, where Engineering and the shuttle bay were. She distantly hoped no one was still down there.
"Denna? Denna, can you hear me?"
Tali's voice suddenly came to her through the dark. "Liara, do you see anything?"
"No, I cannot see anything. There are broken beams, and the drive core chamber is blocked."
"Here," the quarian said, and then there was a beam of light cutting through the dark and dust. Tali moved next to her, examining the wreck. "Did you get a response?"
She shook her head, moving next to the fallen beams, seeing which she could move without causing them all to fall. "Adams? Are you back there? Can you hear me?"
"Liara? I can hear you, but I can't understand you. I think my translator must have fried. Halanz is back here, but I'm not sure how she is. My omnitool is non-functional. We need to get her to Chakwas immediately."
She did her best to think of what she could possibly say in English, a language she hardly knew any of. "We are coming." That was the best she could do through the haze of her panic. "Tali, what can I move without endangering them?" As she spoke, she lit herself up with biotics once more.
"I think this one," Tali responded, pointing to a beam near the top. "Once it's gone, we'll go from there.
They worked for a few agonizingly slow minutes, clearing the way, beam by beam, Tali telling her what to move, and Liara moving it. Sweat poured down her face, partially from her exertion, and partially because of the humidity seeping in from outdoors. Dr. Chakwas was now at her side, having done what she could for Kenneth Donnelly.
She grunted with exertion, lifting one last beam out of the way. "Okay, stop, Liara. We can make it through now, and I think moving anything else will seriously endanger anyone on the other side."
Liara nodded, quietly thankful that she was done, gingerly extracting the beam and floating it over to the pile she'd made against the wall, setting it down as gently as she could. As soon as it was down, she extinguished the dark energy she had crawling over her skin, breathing a sigh of relief. She looked up to see Adams' face over the remaining debris. He did not look relieved, would not make eye contact with her, instead seeking Chakwas' eyes.
"Dr. Chakwas, I have Engineer Halanz in here. She's badly burned. She needs you now."
Liara's heart sped up at those words. She almost surged forward, but Tali held her fast. "Let Chakwas do her work, Liara. She's her best hope."
Nodding dumbly, only distantly aware of the good sense that made, she allowed the quarian to hold on to her, time going still as Chakwas climbed through to get to the small human who had come to mean so much to the asari.
"You need to come out of here, Liara."
Denna hadn't woken up, but she was, blessedly, alive. Adams had reported that she had reached him just in time, and he had hauled her out of the chamber just as it had engaged, reacting to the proximity of the relay. The ship had gone down mere seconds after the relay jump, getting knocked out of the relay's mass effect field somewhere between one relay and the next. It hadn't given Adams enough time to pull Denna completely to safety. She'd been burned badly when the ship went down, an electrical fire flaring to life on the wall next to where he'd gotten her, and Chakwas had hurried her away from Engineering to start her care.
That had been three days before. They were stuck with only remedial medical equipment. EDI had still not started back up, leaving Joker a sullen mess. Nobody's omnitool would work. The drive core remained powered down, which meant the entire ship had to be shut down so the medical bay had enough power for the few things they could use. Their translators worked, though, only needing a daily charge by the sun. And they had plenty of food, and the water on the planet was, thankfully, drinkable. As far as they could tell, it was uninhabited by sapient life, and the few animals the more talented members of their crew had managed to fell – marines and their guns – had proved to be edible. Tali was carefully rationing the dextro supplies on board, pleasantly surprised to find that she had enough rations to last for months. She was also experimenting with local plant and animal life, because it was looking more and more like they would be here for a while.
Liara had initially been glued to Denna's side. Tears had welled in her eyes when she saw her love, burned over most of her body, her hair mostly burned away from the fire. She had sat in the corner and watched as Chakwas had cut her out of her uniform on an operating table, slathering the worst of her burns in medigel and putting her in a static cell. Without advanced medical equipment, there was really no way to tell if there would be permanent damage, to tell if she'd been exposed to any radiation or had any internal bleeding. The only thing they could do now was wait, and hope she woke up on her own.
Chakwas was not without her talents or training, however, setting broken bones and rationing their medigel beautifully, making sure every single member of the crew survived. Now everyone was getting along nicely except for Denna. Liara had finally left the human's side after the first day, going to her office to clean up. She had instead fallen into an exhausted sleep on her bed, not even bothering to take off her clothes or pull the covers back. When she had awoken, she had begun to make sense of her office. None of the equipment turned on, which made sense, as none of the ship had anything more than emergency power. Several of her monitors had fallen and been destroyed in the crash. She had been very surprised to find Denna's guitar unscathed among the displaced cushions to her couch. Tears had leaked from her eyes as she sat with it, doing her best to tune it properly, the way the human had shown her.
She hadn't left her office since.
Now, Tali was in her room, encouraging her to leave, to go see the human who had not yet regained consciousness.
"I… I can't, Tali. I can't get the image out of my head. What if she never wakes up?"
"She's awake, Liara." The words didn't register, so Tali came to sit next to her, taking her hands, forcing her to look at her through the helmet over her face. "She's already awake. You just wouldn't let us in earlier."
Liara's eyes went wide at this information. "What?!" She stood up, making her way to the door. "Why didn't you make me let you in?!"
"Because," she responded as she hurried to follow the asari. "I had work that needed my attention. We got an emergency beacon working. We can at least let the Alliance know we're alive, maybe see if another ship is somewhere nearby."
Liara knew that was good, but there was really only room for one thing in her mind right now. Denna was awake. She was awake, and Liara had not been there when she woke up. She had been busy wallowing and worrying in her room, instead.
She burst through the curtains they'd hung to the medbay, the door being nonfunctional, and stopped just inside. The sight before her brought tears instantly to her eyes even as relief surged though her: Denna, sitting up in bed, James holding up a mirror, the engineer patting her nearly-bald head, a slight smile on her blessedly unscathed face. Her eyes shifted to the asari when she burst into the room. They filled with light, her face bursting into a grin that Liara couldn't help but mirror.
"There you are."
Liara was paralyzed in a timeless moment. It hit her in that instant just how scared she'd been, just how paralyzing her fear of a future without Denna had been. She couldn't fathom life without the engineer, and she'd only known her a few short months. But she'd been inside her mind, knew her history and her personality almost as well as she knew her own. When she felt the relief of knowing the human would be alright, that she was safe, that she could laugh and smile and wink at her like she had been doing – that was when Liara realized how great her fear had been. It had been all-consuming.
Liara crossed the space between them in seconds, everyone else in the room melting away. She took both the woman's hands in hers, noting in the back of her mind that they were freshly healed, that Chakwas must have decided to use medigel on them since she was awake. Lifting them, she kissed the back of them, looking down into those green eyes and smiling.
Then, she had her hands on the human's face, her shoulders, her arms, taking the woman into her arms and covering her lips with her own.
She was breathless when she finally pulled away, a smile she could not help on her lips, tears falling unabashedly from her eyes. "You couldn't keep me away if you tried, Denna. I love you. Oh, I love you with my whole heart."
The human grinned. Then she got a shifty look, winking up at her. "Good."
Liara laughed, giving her a little shove before collapsing into the short human's arms, nuzzling her face into Denna's neck, savoring her scent. "You are a scoundrel, Denna!"
Denna just grinned further. "Hey," she said, getting Liara to look her in the eyes, cradling the asari to her chest. "I love you, too. And I'm going to be okay. We're going to be okay." Her eyes flicked briefly to James, then back to Liara. Her green eyes grew serious, her smile turning from brazen to shy as she looked Liara in the eye. "Marry me?"