Shepard sat in the center chair of the comm room. It had been an hour since the mission on Therum, and he felt exhausted. However, he had to get this finished. Williams and Alenko were the only crewmates with him in the room; Shepard had decided to let the others recover and rest. He had always hated working with a team; but there were some feats that soldiers such as himself could never accomplish alone, no matter how deadly they were. He had to say that, overall, he was rather happy with their performance. Wrex and Garrus were well-trained combatants who were dependable in battle; he still didn't trust them, mainly because he usually never trusted anybody, but he wouldn't mind having them watch his back in combat. And Tali, well, her engineering skills proved invaluable, both in the engine room and on the battlefield. However, she needed to learn how to fight; it would be something Shepard would have to remedy while she served on this ship. Sure, they all had their specialties, but everyone should at the minimum know how to fight. For now, he was not confident taking her into battle, but when concerning geth opponents, he thought he had little choice. She would either sink or swim. Alas, these were assessments he would have to take care of later.

Liara sat in the chair farthest away from the trio of soldiers. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and had been ever since she had boarded the ship. He was taking no risks with Benezia's daughter, no matter how innocent she looked. She did save his life, but Shepard new how easily friend turned into foe. "Liara T'Soni," Shepard began, "you have a lot of explaining to do, for you and your mother."

"I still can't believe the things you're telling me," she mumbled, "this doesn't sound like my mother at all." She hadn't seen her mother in a long time, and it broke her heart to hear what she had been involved with. Part of her still didn't believe it.

"Well I was there when Eden Prime was attacked, and so were they" Shepard replied, jabbing a thumb at Ashley and Kaiden. "You can tell that to the piles of corpses," he added, causing Ashley to cringe as she remembered the bodies of her friends and civilians. Leave it to Shepard to put it bluntly, without regard for feeling or emotion.

"I'm sorry for your loss, truly" Liara replied, "but I don't have the information you are looking for. Like I said, I haven't spoken to her in years. I've spent my time exploring archeological sites and ruins." It was the only answer Liara had because it was the truth.

"How do we know you're telling us the truth though? There's no way we can be sure you aren't working for your mother," Ashley stated. She wanted to believe this woman, but Ashley could no longer take anything for face value or for granted, not after Eden Prime.

Liara sat there, feeling defeated. How the hell was she supposed to prove her innocence? How can one prove that they did not do something, it was impossible! Unless… "If I'm working with my mother, then why did she send a krogan bounty hunter and a geth army to capture me? If what you are saying is true, and I was working with my mother, wouldn't I just go willingly? Why would I save you?" she added as she pointed to Shepard.

Shepard looked at Williams and Alenko for their opinion. They both nodded their heads, and he nodded his head in return. "Dr. T'Soni, we believe you are telling the truth," Shepard stated. He reached into his pocket and produced the key to the cuffs, which he tossed at the asari.

Not exactly able to catch it with her hands tied, the key fell to the floor, and Liara struggled to pick up the keys. Eventually, she succeeded and unlocked her cuffs, which she deposited on the seat beside her. "Thank you, commander," she said as she rubbed her wrists. She was sure she would have some bruises; she knew that turian put those cuffs on way too tight.

"Well, doctor, why did you think your mother sent the troops to capture you?" Shepard demanded. Just because she proved her supposed innocence, for now, did not mean he wouldn't try to get as much information on her mother as possible.

"Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm assuming it would have something to do with my work," she offered.

Alenko wasn't satisfied with the answer, though. "Which entails what, exactly?"

"I'm an archeological scientist and researcher. Specifically, I study prothean technology and culture, and have been doing so for the past 50 years" she stated proudly.

Wait a fucking second, Shepard thought, she's 50?! However, these were questions for another time. Something far more interesting grabbed his attention: she studied the protheans. Maybe she could answer his questions about the beacon on Eden Prime, his visions, and the mythical reapers.

Shepard started to formulate his multitude of questions but was beaten to the punch by Williams. "If you study the protheans, maybe you can help us with our own run-in with prothean technology."

Liara's eyes lit up at the mere mention of the possibility of getting her hands on a piece of prothean technology. It had been so long since she had found anything that worked. "Where? Do you have it with you on the ship?" she demanded. "I can get to work right away."

Shepard cleared his throat, slightly embarrassed. "Well, you see, we don't have any," he explained, causing Liara's enthusiasm to vanish.

"What the commander is trying to say is that he blew up a prothean beacon back on Eden Prime," Ashley stated bluntly, earning her daggers from the commander.

"That's a great loss. It's been ages since anyone has found a prothean beacon. Tell me, before it blew up, was it working?"

Shepard nodded his head somberly. It was working alright, at least he thought so. He still had the visions it imprinted in his mind. Not visions, more like nightmares. "Yes, it was working. It implanted visions in my mind, but I'm not sure of what exactly. They're all… scrambled" he answered. "Given your background, I would think you'd make more sense out of them than me, but that hope is lost with the beacon," he added with regret. Ya, just leave it to a soldier like me to blow shit up.

"Well, not exactly, commander. There are other ways," she stated vaguely.

"Spit it up," Ashley demanded, not wanting to play games when it came to the beacon from Eden Prime.

"Asari can, uh, meld with a subject's mind, see their thoughts and memories. If you really believe I can be of use, I can try that on the commander's mind and see the visions," she explained.

"No. No!" Shepard yelled. The last thing he wanted was somebody poking around in his mind. His thoughts were his own. "That is not an option!" If anyone saw the things he had down, the whispers of it would be enough to string him up for execution. Sure, some of the brutal stuff was locked away in completely redacted, hard copy files that had "mysteriously" disappeared. But it was the stuff that never made it on file, even on paper, that he was afraid of people ever finding out. War did things to you, made you discover your demons. When you kill a person, you lose a part of yourself, a part that you can never get back. And he had done a lot of that. Killed a lot of people, both good and bad.

"What can you be so scared about, commander?" Ashley mocked, "look at her. She couldn't hurt you even if she wanted."

Kaiden also tried to convince him. "Commander, while I know you have your reservations, it's for the good of the galaxy. We need to find Saren. He's going to keep attacking colonies unless we stop him."

Leave it to Kaiden to unintentionally find his weak spot. "I…I can't. I'm sorry," he replied with disgrace. What good was he if he condemned others to the same fate he experienced as a child? It was a source of shame that he put his own wellbeing over that of those he was supposed to protect. Ironically enough, that's really what he had been doing his entire life. Living for himself, and never for others. Well, he had nobody and no reason to live for anyway, except… revenge. Revenge for those who had taken everything from him.

Liara read between the lines. He was hiding something, and he was afraid of it being discovered No person, not even the asari, would do something like this so casually. But she wasn't looking to find his deepest, darkest secrets. "Commander, you have nothing to worry about. I will only be looking at the visions of the beacon."

Shepard sat there, contemplating for a moment. Well if worst came to worst, and she did see something that could ruin him, he could always kill her and say she was working with Saren. The council would never know the difference. But was that what he wanted to do? Was it even right to do? He was probably overthinking all of this, expecting worst-case scenarios. "Fine," he spat, still not happy that he would have to be doing this.

He got up from his chair and stood in the center of the room, waiting for the inevitable. Liara stood up and approached him. She just stood there for a while, which confused Shepard. He felt like something was supposed to happen. But then, his vision disappeared, and he felt timeless. His sense of consciousness dissolved as he became streams of thoughts, emotions, and memories. He could see everything he had ever done in a moment's glance. He saw himself in the streets, in the army; he saw himself when he was killing people and at funerals for downed comrades. His mind focused on Eden Prime, the reapers, and the beacon. Distorted images rushed by, of carnage and of the sounds of war that he knew so well. A bellowing, metallic war cry could be heard over the chaos, the one that had been haunting his dreams of late. Beasts of metal and flesh rushed through battlefields and city streets alike. His vision zoomed out and the war on the planet below began to shrink. Eventually, he could see the entire planet; odd, it looked so peaceful from up here, almost beautiful. But the massive warship he saw on Eden Prime rushed up from the planet's surface, coming straight for him. It wailed and screamed again as its finger-like structures reached out for him.

And then it was over, Shepard was back in his body. He fell onto one knee, taking deep shuddering breaths to calm himself. Liara collapsed to the floor, unable to stand at all. Alenko rushed to his side while Williams did the same for Liara. Shepard took a deep breath before speaking. "I'm, I'm alright," he stated as he brushed Alenko's hand away. Shepard stood up, having regained his composure, and took a second to contemplate what just happened.

"What the hell happened?" Williams asked.

Liara took a second to formulate her words. She wanted to throw up. "The… the visions from the beacon, they are so intense," she gasped. The vision from the beacon was horrifying enough. She'd never been conditioned to see such moments of mass slaughter. Seeing the reapers in the vision, it confirmed her suspicions about the protheans.

Shepard crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, did anything make sense to you? Do you have anything that can help us find Saren or your mother?"

Liara shook her head, still in shock. Her mother was working for these things, which had wiped out an entire civilization? "Commander, I'm sorry to tell you that there is nothing that can find who you are looking for," she began to explain, "but I believe I have news just as troubling."

Williams helped Liara to a chair, where she took a seat. Still exhausted from being in the commander's head, and seeing a little more than just the vision, she tried to collect her thoughts. "I told you that I was a prothean researcher. I spent the last several decades trying to figure out what made them fall, why they went extinct."

Shepard's head felt like a puddle of mush, but he didn't have time to consider his discomfort. "Yes, you've already told us that."

"Your vision, it adds to a theory that I've been working on for a long time. The protheans didn't just vanish, they were wiped out. The data and evidence I found pointed me in that direction, but I never had concrete proof, until now. Commander, I believe that the so-called "reapers" in your visions and the one that attacked Eden Prime are one and the same," she explained.

Shepard took a seat. This was a lot to take in. If Saren was working with beings capable of such destruction, he doubted he would ever be able to stop or capture him. "If Saren is working with the same things that wiped out the protheans, this… this is far worse than I expected." I need to talk to the council. "I… I always thought it was just a bad dream, but… are you sure you're right?" he asked for the sake of reassurance.

"Yes, commander. I saw the same things you saw," Liara replied. Her head still hurt, and she closed her eyes for a moment.

Shepard, noticing her discomfort in addition to his own, decided to adjourn this meeting. "Williams, take her to doctor Chakwas. This meeting is at an end for now."

Shepard was back in his quarters. He wasn't sure where to go or what to do next. He decided to listen to the recording again. He pulled up his omnitool and pressed play. He'd only ever listened to it two or three times; maybe there was something, something that would explain all this.

"Eden Prime was a major victory! The beacon has brought us one step closer to finding the conduit."

"And one step closer to finding the Reapers."

Reapers. Conduit. The beacon of prothean decent. Shepard began to put the pieces together. Saren, for whatever reason, was working for the reapers. Saren needs the reapers, and doing so involved the 'conduit' of which Shepard had no idea about. The beacon provided Saren with a clue. The very same beacon that Shepard had access to. So why couldn't he figure it out? If he didn't stop Saren, the rogue spectre would raze system after system, killing billions. Now, he had a new job. Stop Saren, and by extension, the reapers.

Shepard slammed his fist down onto the desk in anger. Why did he have to do anything for anyone, or in this case, the galaxy? What made him the person who should suffer and die for the decadence of others? The military and alliance called him a hero because he "risked his life for a cause," or so they liked to say. But Shepard didn't want to be the hero. In fact, he hated it. He was no hero. He did things because he was ordered to or out of fits of anger. He probably had committed enough evils to outweigh the good. When he was called a hero, it was almost like an insult, because he knew underneath the medals pinned on his uniform, he never really fit the bill. He shouldn't have cared, but the irony of the situation hurt because he knew he did not deserve praise.

He hated heroes for other reasons, too. He'd come to live by a tenant he had seen in an old movie from long ago: you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. And, well, Shepard had lived a long time on the battlefield, longer than he had ever expected. All the good men and women of pure and noble hearts had died long ago, buried in graves and condemned to be forgotten. Those who survived war, they quickly learned they had to change. And change they did, from humans to savage animals, all in the name of survival. You didn't wait to find out if the child that walked up to the barrack was a threat or not; you shot him before he could detonate his bomb. And if it turns out he didn't have a bomb, you swipe them under the rug, or more accurately, destroy the body and all the evidence. If the public ever found out about all the alliance's dirty little secrets, they would have shouted war crime and hauled them to Geneva for crimes against humanity, which Shepard found ironic because they mostly fought aliens. He wished he could drag all the politicians and their naive citizenry into a battle so he could watch how quickly they would change themselves. But instead, they hid behind people like him, the people they called heroes, so they wouldn't have to get their hands dirty. And the greatest insult was that the people they called heroes never carried the noble and valiant qualities the term imbued them with.

Shepard didn't believe people deserve to exist. At their core, they were self-centered. Human existence was short, nasty, and brutish. He'd experienced it first hand, the cold side of humanity, for as long as he lived. That's why he embraced it. There was no point in trying to be good if everyone and everything around you was the antithesis of good. Fuck everyone, fuck the galaxy. They weren't worth saving even from extinction by Saren and the reapers, a fact that made Shepard question everything he had done up to this point. He only wanted an answer to a simple question: what was the point of life? Why should he even bother living through this painful existence if he could end it with the pull of a trigger?

Shepard, at least subconsciously, knew the answer to this question. We never truly knew what came after. Shepard never believed in God, so he shouldn't have been afraid of an afterlife; to him, god was dead. But we all fear what we do not know, and we know nothing about death, the undiscovered existence from where no victim has returned. Fear makes us bear the pain and suffering, the price of any burden, to continue surviving. It didn't matter how bad our life is in the present if what came after was ten times worse. That's why he did the things he did, the good and the bad, to keep surviving. In his line of work, if you wanted to live and avoid the undiscovered journey of death, sometimes you had to commit people to the very same fate that you yourself ran away from: it was a necessity. But it wasn't always true; many of the things he regretted the most were just that: evil. And he knew it. Telling himself it was necessary would never put his consciousness to rest.

Shepard hated thinking too much, and he'd lost track of the time. It was way past dinner time, but he wasn't hungry. Alas, he didn't feel like staying in this room right now. Deciding it was time to check on the scientist, he got up from his desk and opened the door. He could hear the sounds of people talking, and as he rounded the corner to the mess hall, he discovered why: his team of ragtag aliens and alliance soldiers was eating dinner. He felt neglected, even a little sad, that nobody had bothered to tell him; it was almost as if they didn't want him there. Even the krogan and that quarian freak were here, and he'd been the odd one out! It was almost like an insult.

Shepard cleared his head. He shouldn't have cared; he didn't care. He was bad company anyway, a bad person too. It had been getting late anyway, and he couldn't really blame them for eating. The mess got quiet when they noticed him, and Kaiden spoke up in surprise. "Commander! Well, I mean, it was getting late, and we were afraid to wake you, sir!"

More useless lies. "It's fine Lieutenant. Not hungry anyway," he replied in a quiet voice, which was a little uncharacteristic of him. The crew just continued staring at him, not bothering to eat or return to their conversations. "Well, finish your meal, I still have things to take care of." The crew reluctantly returned to their meals, but they weren't talking anymore. No matter. Shepard opened the door to the med center.

Doctor Chakwas spoke up when she heard the door open. "Ah, commander Shepard. I was wondering when you'd come to treat your injuries."

"Not hear for that," he replied with a little attitude. "Where's the asari?"

"Oh, you mean Liara? She's in the supply closet over there" Chakwas replied. "She's the sweetest," she added, sounding like a grandmother.

"Sure," Shepard sighed as he walked towards the closet. He wasn't sure what he should do with her exactly. He was convinced that she wasn't involved with Saren or her mother. He wasn't sure if the geth would continue to hunt her down, and maybe kill her, although he wouldn't be surprised by either scenario. Or, on the off chance she was working for Saren or that she could provide information valuable to him if captured, Shepard could just kill her and remove the risk altogether. It was a thought that made him feel immensely guilty, given that she had saved his life on the planet below. But he couldn't rule it out. He would do what he had to do if it came to it.

He opened the door, not bothering to ask for permission, surprising the asari. "Commander!"

The door closed behind him, and he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. "Doctor," he answered back, "am I interrupting something?"

She was sitting in a chair in front of a small desk with a built-in computer terminal. She looked down at her hands, choosing her next words carefully "No, no not at all. I was just thinking about…earlier today."

"You mean the vision?"

"Yes, the vision. And the battle today, so taxing and stressful, it was unlike anything I've ever experienced before," she replied with tiredness in her voice.

But Shepard wasn't fooled. She was dodging, and he knew that. "I think that when you were in my head, you saw a lot more than the vision."

The asari continued to look at her hands, unable to face the commander. "I, I don't know what you mean." She knew exactly what he was talking about. She'd been trying to forget them for the last couple of hours to no avail. After seeing the memories of the things he had done, she was afraid to even be in the same room as him. She'd been expecting to see him killing people; he was a soldier after all. But Shepard hadn't just killed people; he'd slaughtered them in a sadistic rage.

"I still haven't made up my mind about what to do with you."

Liara looked at the human, afraid. He was going to kill her. She knew that because he'd done it before to people who put him at risk. She got up, retreating towards the opposite wall. "Wait, please, you don't have to…"

"What, kill you?" Shepard finished. He started laughing; he found it funny how she already knew what he might do. "You need not worry about that, so long as you understand that you need to keep your mouth shut. You saved my life. Consider us even."

Liara simply nodded her head, implying that she understood perfectly well. But that still begged the question, what was he going to do? She didn't like the fact that she was locked in a room, alone, with a man that could easily overpower her.

"However, I'm really not sure what to do with you," Shepard continued. "If we send you back out there, it is very likely that Saren and his forces will come after you again for your expertise. And that is simply something I cannot allow." Can a spectre lock someone up in solitary confinement indefinitely for their own good? Probably, he decided, but he didn't like that either.

Liara thought about her situation. The commander was right, she wouldn't be safe, but what alternatives did she have?

She is a scientist. Might be useful if we come across other prothean artifacts, Shepard realized. "How about this: you stay on the ship, under my protection. In return, you can make yourself useful by analyzing any data you have about the reapers that can lead us to Saren."

"That, that sounds like a deal," Liara replied tentatively.

"Good," Shepard responded as he turned around to let himself out. "And remember, if you breathe a word about what you saw, I am a spectre and this is my ship."