How many times has Liara stood before the doors in dread?

Once more, she stalled in front of the observation room. There was a different kind of nervousness wracking her stomach, squeezing her lungs - a solemn nervousness, a powerful grief. She touched the doors, unable to find the courage to push the button to open them. She didn't even bother searching the rest of the ship for Sylvia first - but she knew the Commander would be here.

Throughout their journey, this simple, unsuspecting room had played so many vital roles over the course of their bonding. It started out innocent, shy glances and touches and words. It transcended into something unspeakably blissful, a happiness that could not be so easily contained in expressions. The atmosphere itself has become somewhat of a pillar to hold onto in unsteady times, of overwhelming waves crashing down and threatening to drown the world.

All emotions - away from prying eyes - have been felt here.

Liara wished only she was the one who'd feel grief in this room, and her heart ached once again, too soon to heal from the last time the dagger had been twisted in it. She didn't know how to be a source of support when she was standing on unsteady legs, feeling as though her foundation was swept out from under her - but Sylvia tried, even when she didn't know how. She tried so hard, tried even despite the mistakes and blunders she was making, tried to pummel forward in a bid to reach that light at the end of the tunnel.

With a small breath to muster courage, Liara forced her fingers to slide over the button, pushing gently. Her heart cried out at the darkness in the room, the chaotic mess it was in. The cork board was in destroyed pieces, seemingly thrown at the wall. The papers all a flutter. The model ships so painstakingly assembled were dismembered, some models trying to be pieced together even though they were different ships.

All that could be seen was the back of Sylvia's head at the couch, her staring out into space. A quiet recording of a man played on the dim-lit drone that lingered by her feet. The engineer rose and went to the window, her hand rising up to it with some kind of marker in hand. She re-winded the recording, pausing to write down the last lines on the pane.

[Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.]

When the recording finished, the marker fell, and Sylvia rested her hand on the pane beside what she'd wrote in her language. Liara assumed the words were from the recording, and she quietly made her approach. She had to keep taking looks at the floor to make sure she wasn't stepping on anything, stopping just at the corner of the couch when a whisper hailed it's reckoning with a piece of paper wrinkling and shaking in the engineer's hand.

"Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole. I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid."

Sylvia sucked in a deep breath. The paper was crushed in her fist.

"It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."

"I did not take her to be one for poetry... I thought all the 'screaming' she was trying to write down before was just her being silly."

Liara came around the corner of the couch as Sylvia backpedalled to crash back down on it. Her gaze never wandered over. It stayed fixed to the poem on the glass, the thick white marker illuminated by the dull blue glow of the drone. The archaeologist solemnly sat down beside Sylvia, reaching to pull a hand in her lap.

"It's beautiful," she murmured.

"It's one of Ash's many favourites," Sylvia hummed. "Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The one you heard playing earlier is one she's memorized completely off by heart because it was her dad's favourite: Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson." She turned her hand up, her head lulling back on the couch with a sigh. "I want to memorize Invictus for her, and I'm having a hard time. Me. I should have already had it memorized just by blinking once at it."

With a hum, Liara traced feather-light circles in the engineer's palm. "I would be more worried if you could still be capable of that, right now."

"Capable," Sylvia chuckled bitterly. "Yeah... That's me..."

"You did everything you could. It wasn't your fault, Syl."

"It kind of tends to be when you make that choice. I knew what I was leaving behind - who I was leaving behind." Another bitter chuckle. "Whoever said no man left behind is a poetic fool."

"Ashley knew the sacrifice she was making. You didn't leave her behind."

"Stop." Sylvia withdrew her hand and slung it over her eyes. "Please just stop. I know you're trying to comfort me, but I just... I don't want comfort right now. I want Ash back." The corner of her lips was sucked in between teeth, biting harshly to stop the quivering. Her words trembled instead. "I did leave her behind, Liara. The one person who had faith in me, and I left her to die. I never had any friends, you know? Barely had people I could call acquaintances when I was training to attain the rank of N7, but we lost touch real quick after we went on our missions after graduating the program. In school, before that, I was always busy studying, always being a fuckin' prick and never talking to others, thinking I was better than everybody else because I was some genius prodigy. But making friends was just too scary. There weren't equations I could calculate, no formulas to use and navigate my way through things. Social blunders were a crippling fear. Sometimes still is."

Tears were sucked in with a harsh breath, the words warbling and wet. "I was weird - am weird. Ash still saw through all that, saw the human beyond the brain and gave me a chance to show I was more than just my capability to invent stuff. I left my best fucking friend to die out there and she was all alone."

All Liara could think to do was slide her hand over Sylvia's lap, squeezing the knee in her only thought for solidarity. She looked out at the stars, her eyes burning and brimming with tears as she tried to hold them back for the Commander. Sylvia was fighting so hard not to fall apart. One wretched thought ripped the final piece away for the dam to break.

"Now who's going to be the one to tell me not to call you a beautiful piece of pizza?"

Liara had to fight really hard to suffocate the slight chuckle that wanted to bubble out of her, despite it clearly not being the time. She leaned forward and twisted, gently pulling on the engineer's shoulders until Sylvia crashed into her embrace, hiding her face in the crook of the neck.

"Who's going to beg me to stop making dinosaur noises? Fuck," she laughed mirthlessly, "That was the last thing she'd said to me in the mako before we rendezvoused with the salarian STG, apart from screaming incoherently when I confessed to her that I told you you have a porn star body. I'd give anything to hear her cussing like a sailor again."

Sylvia hugged bruisingly hard, ribs crushing in. Liara grimaced and did her best to tolerate the pain, clenching her teeth as she squeezed her eyes shut.

Every movement brought another wave of agony as the engineer's body began to shake uncontrollably, her breathing becoming more ragged in her desperate attempt to hold on. She held tighter and tighter, an arm coming up higher to curl over Liara's nape, fingers digging and clawing into the shoulder. The drone suddenly began to replay the recording, and Sylvia muffled a wordless sob by biting down on the asari's suit.

"I fucking hate Saren," Sylvia seethed, "He was right there. So close. I didn't realize it yet, at the time. It didn't sink in. I thought I'd still have enough time to go back and extract Ash. I was mad at Saren over his stupid fucking hoverboard, 'cause I was in the process of designing one to glide around the Normandy, and that asshole had the same idea as me. But now... Now I just want... I just want to rip him apart. I don't feel sorry for him anymore - could care less that he's indoctrinated. He fucking..." She inhaled sharply, the words bumbling recklessly. "He fucking set himself up for that. That's what he gets for being stupid. He took Ash away from me."

Liara tried not to dwell on the rage too much, though a large part of her nearly surged up in defence of her mother. Mother had good intentions, trying to lead Saren away from this path of destruction. Did that mean it was her fault too for becoming indoctrinated, for 'setting herself up' for that?

It was a harrowing thought immediately evicted from her mind.

"No. It's not anybody's fault but the Reapers. Sylvia will see that someday. Right now she just needs the safe space to feel, just as she'd given me."

A groan was torn from Liara's throat when the pain became too much to bear, and she kicked herself for it when the engineer pulled away. She caught Sylvia's head in her hands and drew her back into the embrace, casting an unimpressed look when the drone had restarted the recording again like...

Like a certain song.

Those memories nearly tore down her own dam. Sheepish over what she wanted to do, she hid her face in Sylvia's neck and began to hum the tune that was engraved in her. She didn't have the courage to voice the lyrics and hummed the melody of them, embarrassment growing when the engineer froze in her arms. She wasn't sure what to make of it when a humourless chuckle hit the side of her neck. Sylvia thawed eventually, withdrawing to press her lips to Liara's aural in her whisper.

"I know. It hurts, it's hard to breathe sometimes."

Shaky breaths pattered into the asari's skin, where Sylvia fluctuated between hugging really hard, and loosening - likely in accordance with her hundreds of thoughts racing through her brain. She sighed when she pulled away and forced herself to rise, heading over to plant her hand beside the poem on the pane.

"I have to call her sisters. I owe them an explanation, let them know that..." Sylvia inhaled sharply. "Their ladies night out at the Citadel is cancelled."

"Syl..."

"I took family away from them." Sylvia's shoulders fell. "I know what that's like. It won't bring any comfort to them, but they deserve to hear it from me rather than reading some crummy letter." Her head fell as she took deep breaths, or tried to, the air squeezing out in a shallow rise instead. "Too many good people are dying on this stupid mission." She turned sharply and marched for the exit. "The Council's called for us to return to the Citadel. I'll tell them about Ilos, there's no way they can dismiss all this evidence this time. We'll tear Saren's fleet apart right before his eyes." She inhaled slowly, but the bloodlust in her voice lingered. "Then I'm gonna use his hoverboard to smash his skull in."

Liara resisted her sigh long enough until she was left alone, sinking in the couch as she looked back to the foreign poem written on the glass. The drone thankfully flicked into an idling state, and a small smile pulled her tired mouth when it had played a soft piano tune. She brought up her omni-tool and began to type in the poem on the window pane to translate it in her language.

Tears welled and went ignored up until her world was blurred, her heart hollow even with her mind full of memories. She didn't get to spend as much time with Ashley as she would have liked, especially with their common ground of a quirky engineer paving a foundation between them. She digested the meaning of the poem, pleasantly surprised that Ashley appreciated such things, wishing with all her heart that she would have learned this appreciation while the loyal soldier was still there with them today.

Hands folded in front of quivering lips, Liara closed her eyes and unshackled her grief, whispering the poem under her breath to try to commit it to memory.

Hands folded in front of quivering lips, Sylvia opened her eyes with a deep sigh. She wiped a bleary hand down her face and crossed her arms on her desk, resting her head upon them.

"I couldn't even maintain eye contact with them," she grumbled inwardly. "Could barely start by looking at them in the eyes. But they knew." She scoffed. "Why else would I randomly call them? Of course they knew..."

And it hurt even worse to see how brave Ashley's sisters were trying to be.

There was vicious anger thrumming in her veins, but every idea Sylvia had to try to get it out of her system was promptly shut down. The gym would remind her of Ashley. She's not in a stable state of mind to be handling unstable designs. She could only put on a front for her soldiers for so long, and she just didn't have it in her to march around, play Commander, keep on doing duty as if nothing happened.

"What kind of message does that send to the others? Hey, thanks for your service and sacrifice, now onto the agenda and - oh it's lunch time soon!"

Sylvia sarcastically rolled her eyes at herself. She buried her head deeper against her arms.

"I can't hide forever either. I have to suck it up and be their Commander, lead them through this."

Pain needled particularly at that, and she pressed the bony prominence of her wrist hard against a tender spot of her eyebrow to try and distract herself.

"I don't want to be a leader. I just want to be a friend - want my friend back."

There was something she was avoiding religiously, refusing to engage her omni-tool and see that there was a message left for her in her inbox. The last message Ashley sent, timestamped minutes before the nuclear blast. Sylvia didn't think she'd ever have the strength to read whatever words Ash left for her. Would they be understanding? Would they be full of anger and betrayal, admonishing her for actually taking Ash's word seriously and leaving her behind?

"How many more people have to die because of me?"

Memories of Elysium prodded in the back of her mind, among countless missions where sacrifices were forced - but it was always others doing the sacrificing.

Before her mind could stray to even darker thoughts, she was abruptly disturbed by the sounds of her door hissing open and shut. She squeezed her eyes as tightly as possible to cut off any tear that dared fall, reigning in professionalism and composure as thrust upon her in her position. She forced a small smile as she lifted her head to look over, her charade decimated with relief upon seeing that it was Liara who entered - peculiarly with a drone in tow, jettisoning beside the knee.

"You figured out how to program it?" Sylvia arched her brow in surprise.

"No," the asari mustered a weak chuckle, forcing a small smile herself. "I do suspect, however, that you may have accidentally programmed it to stalk me as soon as it registers my ID in it's vicinity. A very large range within it's vicinity."

"That seems a rather specific note." Sylvia smiled nervously. "I presume you've tested out it's range?"

"Mm hm."

"How far?"

"Biotically pushing it to the other end of the port observation deck, Sylvia. Not room. Deck."

"Oh... Yeah I definitely didn't mean to adjust the variables to be that intense." Sylvia tiredly rose from her chair and went over to manually program the drone rather than risk that which she will not engage. She knelt behind the drone and felt a melancholic gaze linger on her, making her shoulders itch. In a desperate bid, she looked up with that pitifully forced smile again. "Did you enjoy the tunes this time, at least? I've installed a playlist that I've found calming myself, anyways."

"The songs were lovely - as was the variety of them," Liara agreed, but her words seemed to trail somewhat slothfully.

The engineer refused to address the elephant in the room.

Unfortunately, the sentiment wasn't shared.

"Did you already call Ashley's sisters?"

Sylvia renewed her determination to not maintain eye contact by diving into other settings for the drone. Her cover wouldn't last long as the archaeologist knelt and gently clasped her wrist. She nodded solemnly. The tender hand squeezed her in silent solidarity, pulling slowly as another hand grazed along her jawbone. Liara rose high up on her knees while she drew Sylvia's head in against her chest - ordinarily something that would have provoked searing heat, but the comfort and rhythm of her breaths had the engineer nestle in closer in a selfish and desperate attempt to just forget for a few minutes.

"I can't stop seeing it," Sylvia confessed quietly, "It won't stop replaying in my mind. And the looks on each of their faces when they answered my call... They knew. They already knew - they were so brave, trying to hold on. The youngest one joked saying how Ashley would drill a fist in her hair if she was caught moping. Had even thanked me, said Ashley spoke highly of me, was proud to be serving on the Normandy and - just fuck, Liara... I couldn't do it. I can't do this anymore. I don't want to call anybody's family ever again. Now I know how mom felt, telling me about dad. It's no wonder she couldn't for a few days."

Something about the way that Liara held her had stiffened. Warm breaths seeped into the top of Sylvia's head as a soft pressure wove into the thick of her hair to press a kiss to her scalp.

"I am sorry, Syl," Liara whispered. "For what it's worth, you did the right thing. It is their closure, however that may turn out for them, however they feel they need to deal with the news whether that be in your company or in private." Her arms held a little tighter. "Let me take this pain for you. I can meld with you to-"

"No. You're still hurting too - and you're hurting for losing Ash too." Sylvia pulled away, her other hand blindly working on the drone to shut it off. She rose and gently tugged Liara up into standing, feeling a small lick of heat at the base of her throat when she went towards the bed. "I do have a favour to ask, though, something you can help me with. Something I can't do alone."

"Wh-what?"

Stumped, heels dug in to halt, they stared at each other. Sylvia absentmindedly tugged on the asari's hand again, her brain a tad too slow to register the growing blush on Liara's face. The engineer firmly shook her head.

"N-no, not that. I just... Ash left me a message on my omni-tool. I'd like to just... If you c-could..." Her gaze fell and a lump grew in her throat, feeling absolutely lame for what she wanted to ask for.

And then she was the one gently tugged along.

Words needn't be said, and she was overcome with relief when Liara just figured it out - whether it be intentional or accidental, Sylvia didn't quite care. She melted quickly when they laid down, drawn back into the comforting embrace. A reckless mental nudge had amber lit up in the corner of her eyes, but she chickened out and immediately disengaged her omni-tool just as quickly. Her heart both swelled and constricted painfully when calloused blue fingers intertwined with hers. She suppressed a sigh and turned a little to lie on her back, her head tucked in the crook of where Liara's arm met her shoulder.

Amber lit up again, a menu glaring at Sylvia. It felt like ages passed before she had the courage to select her inbox, but she froze over the unread thread. The asari squeezed courage into her through their fingers.

"I'm with you," Liara murmured softly, her jaw brushing against the side of the engineer's head as she turned to press a kiss where she could reach.

Sylvia closed her eyes and steeled herself with a deep breath, then two, three. Another year passed before she was finally ready to open the thread, inwardly blessing the asari's patience and understanding with her.

Dread sank it's fangs in when they realized there was an attachment rather than a written message - a recording.

"Oh god," Sylvia groaned, "It's official, Ash did this on purpose. She wants me to suffer. She totally did this on purpose so I'd just die from heartbreak and-"

"Syl," Liara chuckled ever so quietly. She pinched the engineer's side. "I am fairly certain that was not Ashley's intention in her final moments."

"You don't know her the way I do, she was way nicer to you. Just you wait and see, she's totally gonna be messing with me."

It was the only thing that motivated Sylvia's finger to get close to the 'play' button, this blasphemous and exaggerated idea of which she too knew it was untrue. Liara's free hand came over and tenderly pushed against the engineer's finger before she could stall some more. Her heart surged straight up to her throat upon hearing the rushing water in the background of the recording, the static and rustling of Ashley's movements, the grunting and hissing as if she were in pain. Finally, a deep sigh, and an abnormally cheerful tone - the usual loud exuberance that would fill the entire room just from sheer fierce energy.

"Hey Commander!"

There was a grin in that voice, hiding the frightful quivering in the undertones.

"Just had something I wanted to get off my chest." A sudden sardonic tone. "Honour to serve you, sir, blah blah blah. Not really what I wanted to say."

"Oh god, this is it," Sylvia realized in horror. "She's gonna thrash me now that she doesn't have to hold herself back anymore. Gonna tell me how stupid I am, lecture me about beautiful pizzas and-"

Liara squeezed her hand and kissed her humorous deflections away.

"I know what you're gonna do to yourself, in your head," Ashley said seriously. "Don't. Remember what you told me about my unit when we met on Eden Prime? There was nothing I could have done, Commander. I did my best, I knew I did my best - you knew and know it too. You know this is the right decision, and if you don't know it, well I do. I'd rather die for the right call than the wrong one, and there's no better death than to die for you."

Sylvia sucked in a sharp breath. She turned her face when her eyes suddenly slammed with tears, ignoring the awkward feeling of hiding in Liara's armpit.

But still, she refused to break down.

"It's my turn to save you, ma'am, consider us even now. And I get to see dad soon. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."

"Fuck, Ash," Sylvia mumbled pitifully.

"So... I guess this is goodbye, Sylvia. Take care of yourself, of Liara, of the crew. Look after Kaidan for me. He's gonna beat himself up for this, I just know it. Just like you. It's nobody's fault. I'm proud to..." A sudden stop, a sudden suck of breath. "Every one of you..." The words tried to start, but fizzled out of existence. They quivered even more, fading in and out. "Liara, Tali, Wrex, Garrus. Tell them-"

Ashley cleared her throat. It didn't help.

"It was an honour to serve you all."

The rushing water stopped, the static of the recording died. The silence that fell upon them was far more deafening than the fierce hammering of Sylvia's heart.

"It seems her intention in her final moments wasn't to make you suffer," Liara murmured ever so softly. "It was to put a stop to the suffering you'd inflict upon yourself."

When the archaeologist pressed a kiss to the top of Sylvia's head, she finally fell apart and succumbed to her grief. Her treasured friend had given one last gift.

Closure.