Thessia

Liara's voice trailed away and Sen glanced up, examining the heart monitor that stood beside the bed, noticing no medical reason for the war hero's silence. The jumping line indicated an even, steady heartbeat, much like that of Shepard's from Liara's tale.

Sen turned her attention to the archaeologist, who plucked idly at the bedcovers with her fingers, her blue eyes distant with the memories of what must have been the worst of times.

"What happened next?" Sen asked, eager to hear more of the story, the story that was not relayed in history books or the classrooms in which, she admitted to herself, Sen had been most assuredly bored.

Yet now before me sits someone who was so enamored of history that she was drawn into the greatest conflict the galaxy over, Sen thought. I have never conceived that the pursuit of knowledge could lead to such an end.

"Oh the timeline is familiar to you, I'm sure." Liara looked up and smiled. "What do you really want to know, Doctor T'Aryn?"

Sen flinched, amazed that she had been read and interpreted so easily. She swallowed and attempted to align her thoughts, to discover what the true reason behind her inquiry was. She wanted to discover the reasons behind this sudden thirst for history, to learn all she could before the opportunity passed. She wondered, for the briefest of moments, if this is what had persuaded Liara to put her life in danger. A desire to go beyond the borders of comfort and sanity…for the sake of discovery.

"What drove you to go with Commander Shepard?" Sen asked. "You spoke of yourself as being adamant, and that the adamancy was so antithetical to your character that it shocked you."

"It was antithetical to my character at the time." Liara admitted. "But, in truth, I had such a small grasp on my own identity that what I uncovered about it during those times was nothing more than…frightening. I demanded to accompany the commander, I realized later, because I was craving something so simple…change. I revolved around my work up until that point. It was my very life and my reason for being. There is a certain arrogance that is born into us asari, Sen. It is an arrogance born of long life, of the innate knowledge that we have from birth that we will have all the time we need to learn whatever we so desire."

"You are not wrong." Sen admitted. "But I do not understand the humility in your tone when you speak of it. Is it not a gift to our species?"

"A gift is always a curse in some form or another." Liara looked out of the window, to the sweeping high towers and the sky beyond, the glory of the city that surrounded them. "I was not prepared for that man to die, Sen. I was not prepared to see a life snuffed out in front of my eyes. It assaulted all of my senses on an intimate level, and I did not know how to go forward from there, much less understand how my companions were able to do so."

"I don't understand." Sen attempted to put together the pieces of Liara's words, to decipher the puzzle the older asari had presented, whether or not she was conscious of having done so.

"How do you look at death, Dr. T'Aryn?" Liara asked. "I am certain that you are familiar with it, given your profession."

"I…I am." Sen replied, stunned by the question. "While I despise those times I am unable to prevent it, it is a natural process."

"You stand light years away from where I was at that moment." Liara smiled. "I was a hundred and six, and death was centuries into the future, perhaps even a millennia. I had never suffered loss, nor seen death's ugly side. That moment changed me in ways I had not realized I could be altered."

Sen's eyes darkened as she remembered the first time in an operating room, where the heart beneath her hands had simply…given out. There was nothing she could have done to prevent it, and the heavy hand of investigation had proven her innocence. Yet somewhere in her heart, there was always that bit of guilt, that question hanging over her head like an executioner's axe.

Could I have done something different? Could I have saved that life?

"I did not comprehend how a man that had spoken just moments before could lie forever silent in the space of a few seconds." Liara shook her head. "I was such a fool, and I craved the time to sort it out, to confront the maelstrom of emotions that bombarded me in that moment, and sort them through with time and thought…an ultimate luxury that I had not realized that so many are not given. At first, I thought Shepard and Garrus so impossibly cold, to be able to watch that and move forward with little thought given to it."

"You mean they weren't?" Sen inquired, eager to learn more of the people who had shaped Liara's life and the face of the galaxy thorugh the Reaper War.

The heroes who had altered the fate of the universe…now there would be something. To have walked with giants and spoken to them, been able to hear their thoughts as she now heard Liara's, to know what passed through their minds in the moments of great struggle. Sen found herself enrapt, wanting to know more, to hear everything, from the first moment to the last.

"No." Liara revealed. "But you could not convince me of that at the time. In Shepard's case…she had seen so much death, endured so much heartache. There was a place in her soul carved out for moments such as that one, where death entered and made its home. And in that home, the emotions I felt, the pain, the confusion, the sorrow turned into a monster and at times it came forth and devoured her. But I did not know that at the time. There was no place in my soul for death…there is truly no place in any asari for death as it impacts those shorter-lived."

"I remember." Sen whispered, recalling the unpleasant conversation with her mother concerning her relationship with Mira, how it was destined not to last, and how she must cherish each present moment while accepting that the end loomed in the nebulous future.

The cardiologist looked at the woman in the hospital bed, wondering in silence if Liara had shared those same words with Benezia. And if she had accepted them, as Sen had, what drove her to love a woman like Shepard, who constantly placed her already fragile life into mortal danger? Why had Liara embraced something so foolish?

"So what did you do?" Sen looked up, eager to stray from thoughts of mortality. "If you were so deeply impacted, how did you make it through the rest of the mission?"

"I was still the adamantine archaeologist." Liara grinned, looking, in that moment, only one hundred and six, as if recounting her past and turned back the hand of time itself. "And I did not want to endanger my companions, or jeopardize the trust they placed in me. So I continued learning."

"And what did you learn?"

Liara sighed. "An unhappy truth." she replied. "When we reached Zhu's Hope, the colony proper, Shpeard spoke to Fai Dan, their leader, and was in the process of learning more of the situation when the geth attacked again. We beat them back and returned. Fai Dan informed us that the colonists worked for a group called ExoGeni, an organization we had little knowledge of. He said that the main headquarters of ExoGeni had been overrun by the geth, and told us the way to get there. I expected Shepard, as a soldier, to immediately muster out."

"But she didn't?" Sen questioned, intrigued.

"No." Liara shook her head. "She asked if the colonists were all right, if they needed anything. We spent at least two hours helping restore power and water to the colony before heading to ExoGeni's headquarters. What we found there…it altered my perception of the world in such a way as to make me question everything I'd known before."

"And that was?" Sen sat up straighter, eager to hear more about the epiphanies had by an asari considered the galaxy over to be wise beyond her years, called upon for this wisdom by matriarchs and politicians of other species as well as the asari.

"As much as we hold ourselves above other races," Liara's voice lowered, becoming thick and heavy with emotions carried for centuries, "it is the asari who are…truly cold."