This one is sort of a continuation of 16. Lost, though I did change some of the details from that canon.
Warning for suicidal themes.
"So how's the dating scene going now, Liara? I mean, ya got to have had enough time now, right?"
A ghost of a smile pulled at the corner of Liara's mouth, her father's voice always so welcomingly blunt when she was usually drowning in a sea of diplomacy and subtlety. Not that she did not enjoy being the shadow broker, but it was nice to hear it straight from Aethyta in a bar where she could get away from it in the sound of clinks and chatter. Of course, that did not mean she didn't have access to some of the security cameras. Her father did seem to attract strange and unique customers, and only a look behind her shoulder confirmed it; a famous – or infamous, depending on who you were to ask – hanar anarchist drooped against the wall, the tips of his tentacles at the floor twitching at the vibrations emanating from the speakers.
"I'm not being-?" The asari matriarch started again, dropping the hand she had on her hip.
"No, no," Liara lifted up her hand to get Aethyta to pause. "I had years to prepare for Shepard's death, years to mourn. I enjoyed it but…" The younger woman paused slightly, her eyes lost in the patterns of the bar counter. One splotch looked like a thresher maw, another vaguely like an omni-tool, and a third one looked like a… no. She was only being overly-imaginative once again. "Perhaps it's for the best."
Somewhere in the bar a glass dropped, and broke, but Liara barely paid it any heed. The chipper died for a few seconds, but resuscitated as soon as Aethyta barked an order to an employee over her head. As the shattered glass fragments were gone, said employee's back was straight, the customer offered a new glass, it was as if it had never happened. There were plenty more of them, along with liquor, where it came from.
"Not the fairy-tale romance you envisioned, huh?" Aethyta's attention brought back to her daughter, she leaned in on the counter just in time for Liara to sigh and push herself away from it and into the back of her tall chair.
"It's not like that! … Well it sort of is... but…" Liara sighed, part in admittance, part in resignation. "I guess I just didn't realize being a silly maiden in the middle of a war," she averted her gaze from her father's eyes, first returning them to the counter, then to the other patrons. Neither seemed to offer them comfort. "Shepard and I wanted different things. I enjoyed my solitude in both my occupations, the quiet peace," a bittersweet feeling forced her to smile, thinking of her late bondmate. "Shepard couldn't escape the fame and crowds, the alliance military, even if she wanted to. Goddess, she hated politics…"
The music changed, the earlier jittery tune slowly fading into a more melodious song. Liara recognized it from the Fleet and Flotilla series. It seemed to have turned into a classic, still churning out new remakes and adaptations every few years, but still an odd choice for a bar. Liara found herself taking a sip of a drink she had barely touched, thinking about her old quarian friend. In a way she had been avoiding it, but it was best to meet up with Tali soon.
"Yeah… sometimes we need a bondmate like that when we're stupid maidens to kick us towards the right direction." Aethyta started to clean at the counter with a cloth, changing the shape of the earlier smudges into unrecognizable forms. "Any new contenders though?"
Someone came to Liara's mind, but she dared not voice it.
Aethyta did that for her instead.
"Say, I was looking at some of those vids of your old lectures." Satisfied at least until later, the matriarch wrapped her hand around the edge of the counter, her hip leaning under it. "And let me tell ya, I don't need four eyes to see what that prothean was thinking wh-
"He's dead."
Liara had not spoken loudly, but her voice, her words, were sharper than the broken glass as it cut through the small talk surrounding the two, and the incongruent melody that taunted her. A glare from her father was enough to divert any unwanted attention away, before questioning her even further, as the younger asari drooped her torso forward, her face resting on her coupled forearms.
She remembered Javik's face as he greeted her, his "kukuku" as she tripped on a thin layer of what once was foundation for a building, the broadness of his shoulders as he gave his back to her, overlooking the digsite whose jags and needles stabbed the sky, and where a careless student had already been injured.
"But," Aethyta was too shocked by Liara's reaction to drop to sympathy quite yet. "I thought-
Liara can smell the scent of iron, taste her tears in her mouth. She can see how both stain the sand beneath her, gritty and dark in color, see a quarian's elongated shadow brush the ground. She feels the wet sand as it sinks underneath her, flooded in liquid, and the hot star rays that sting at her skin. There is the weight of Javik in her arms, on her shoulder as she props him up against it, sobbing quietly onto the top of his crest, a less than forgiving surface on her forehead. She whimpers something to him, but her mind is such a confounded and lost blur that she cannot quite remember her own words. What Liara does remember is that despite his body covered in blood, his fingers only become wet as his hand finds itself on her cheek.
"Foolish asari." The noise that escapes his throat is more cough than chuckle. "What makes her… what makes you think… I ever… stopped…?"
"He took his own life."
Her words were softer now, perhaps muffled as she stretched out her arm and leaned her head against it. Her mind was gone from Aethyta, gone from the bar, and had wandered to the lectures, to the digsites that were jagged or sandy, safe in council space or at the edges of the terminus. They went to the shambles of prothean artifacts unearthed from the ground, too broken to serve their obsolete purpose any longer.
Javik had thought he was one of them.
Aethyta was silent, and Liara had the feeling that it was more out of knowing than out of ignorance. Perhaps it was something she didn't know, or perhaps it was something she did know, but was not fully ready, willing, or able to admit.
"You gonna want something stronger, babe?" The matriarch finally suggested.
"Yes, please."