A dozen screens clad the plain metal wall of the large personal chambers, cables snaking across the floor like hungering roots of synthetic trees, and three consoles buzzed slightly in the corners of the room, their panels connected by vines of wires and cords to the larger mainframes. The lights were dim, and of the myriad screens adorning the wall, only four remained active and glowing. The rest were black and lifeless, looming as if in somber memory before the asari, whose fingers danced over the glowing keys before her, commanding the files within the cold sarcophagus to unfold before her. For the past few months, her life had consisted of little more than trying to manage what information she still possessed, maintain connections with her dwindling contacts, and hopefully pull out of this mess with something on the other side to show for it. More importantly, there was cleanup to tend to across the stars, and what she had she intended to use to pull the survivors together.

Gloved fingers stopped tapping along the keypad for a moment as bright blue eyes lifted to the screens before her. One flooded with the files she had beckoned, and within an instant, she knew they had been corrupted and warped. She swiped the image away and queued it for salvage. In line behind the other few hundred, eventually she would have whatever intel she could pull from the corruption, and everything that lingered would be deleted. She leaned back and took a deep breath, rubbing her brow as she tried to decide where to turn next. There was so much to decrypt, organize, and recover, she was going to have to put it off to be of any real use to anyone.

Her finger tapped a button on the only keyboard she had, bringing her mail up on the screen accompanying it. It's not like she expected much, but it was a welcome distraction, sifting through the twenty or so extranet mails she usually found there. Half of them the true recipients didn't even know she had. They all contained some fairly useful bit of information, each tagged to be filed later, but nothing of any immediate intrigue to the asari. As she skimmed over the contents of yet another Eclipse communication, the door to her chamber hummed open.

"Hey Liara," came the weary voice of the captain as he made his way into the chamber.

"Good evening, captain." She swiveled in her chair to fully view the Spectre, and as she had anticipated, his eyes looked almost sunken with how exhausted he was, and his skin was notably paler than usual. A cloud hung about him, and the asari knew well what that meant. "Counsellor Halldorsen hasn't let up, has she?"

"Not even a little," Kaidan huffed out with a weak chuckle. "I swear, if it wasn't for me, she'd probably have a breakdown."

"Or she would find another human to dump her concerns on," Liara quipped bitterly. Kaidan's brow furrowed at her.

"C'mon Liara, she might lean on us a lot more than she should, but she's doing the best she can with what she's been handed."

"If you insist. Are we heading out soon?"

"Yeah, we've got a stop to make at Europa before we start toward Sur'kesh." Judging from his tone, Kaidan was none to excited about the prospect.

"We're going to handle the Cerberus members from Nepheron?" her voice inflected curiously. While she had thought perhaps they would be called on to deal with the refugees, she had concluded that the situation on Sur'kesh was far more dire, while a few war criminals would best be handled by the Alliance.

"Seems that way. I figure it's basically en route to Sur'kesh anyway, we might as well stop and take care of it."

"Things are rarely so simple and straightforward when it comes to the Normandy." Liara's cerulean orbs focused on Kaidan with stringent austerity, which made the captain stop for a moment. "Should we be risking a potential confrontation with Sur'kesh in the condition it is?"

"Considering that the salarians already have most of their forces on planet to handle the fallout, I think we can deal with this, even if the refugees turn out to be some kind of ambush." The asari regarded Kaidan tentatively for a moment before her expression softened a little.

"You're sounding almost as detached as the rest of the Council." The Spectre fixed Liara with a testy furrow of his brows.

"Now what's that supposed to mean?"

"You've noticed as well as I have, Kaidan," she began quietly, calmly, almost in mournful reverence. "The Council is fracturing. The asari, the salarians, the turians, and the humans are all separating to focus on themselves. Everyone is too concerned with their own problems to offer each other help." With a gesture she brought a particular series of files up, though in their disheveled plenty, Kaidan couldn't make out any details. "I've been watching the communications as much as I can, and the one constant I see is that everyone is putting themselves first, sometimes to the pointed detriment of the others."

"You know it's not like that." Kaidan was almost offended at Liara's insinuation, which played into the timbre of his voice quite plainly. He couldn't, however, argue an observation he had made on a number of occasions.

"No, I don't think it is yet, I simply don't want to lose sight of what held us all together."

"We won't." Finally, Kaidan's voice returned to a more normalized tone, relaxing after the brief moment of aggitation. He had to make himself remember who he was talking to, which of itself was proof that the words were never meant as a jab. "Anything else interesting come up?"

"No, not really," Liara resigned the debate to an uneasy conclusion at the captain's change of topic. "Aria's mercnaries are moving a great deal, but I can't figure out why, exactly. They don't seem to be causing anyone any trouble though." She motioned the deluge of information off of the screen, leaving the gentle twist of ethereal visualizations. "Besides that, nothing." Kaidan nodded agreeably.

"Alright, thanks Liara. I should go."

At that, the asari smiled a wide, bright smile, simultaneously taunting and pleasant. Kaidan's face grew entirely befuddled, which only made the woman laugh delicately.

"What?" he plucked.

"Nothing." Liara shook her head gently at that, swiveling to fully face her screens once more, ushering them to glowing life once more. "You just sound like him. I've noticed it more and more lately." It took him a moment, but the Spectre eventually caught on, and his expression dulled into a plaintive resignation.

"Maybe it comes with the job description or something. I don't know." Liara cast a consoling glance at him with that.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, captain. He had a powerful effect on all of us. I think he touched us more than we ever really knew, to be honest. And, considering your relationship with our commander, it's to be expected." Kaidan thought over the woman's words for a moment, his eyes averting to the grid of black screens at his right.

"I miss him like hell. There's not much more that I want in this galaxy than to find him and have him back at my side, but..." His words trailed into a pause, growing cold as they returned. "There's work to be done. If he taught me anything, it's to keep to the job and get it done, anything else be damned."

"Yes, we all know how dedicated he could be. Sometimes a little too dedicated, though. Almost ruthless. We'll get it done, captain, but perhaps with a bit less ferocity." She smiled warmly at him. "I believe in you."

"Thanks, Liara." His features warmed faintly with that as he turned and made for the door. "Let me know if anything else comes up."

"Of course." The door whirred shut and left the Shadow Broker in silence and dim luminescence. She pulled up an extranet mail that she had come across earlier and read through it again, scrutinizing it for unseen detail. She hadn't believed it when the missive first crossed her screen, but each time she read it, she felt a bit more compelled to accept its truth, though it felt off nonetheless. Something just wasn't right about it, even if she couldn't pin down precisely what. The point was clear though.

Shepard's body was found.

The message passed between a pair of volus, followed by an offer to Barla Von himself that the banker hadn't yet responded to. Supposedly it had been shipped off world to a privately leased lab on Noveria under the name Gura. She had started trying to dig into the Noveria Development Corporation logs to learn more, but it was a difficult task with the state of things, leaving her with only snips of information. She had wanted to tell Kaidan, but the moment she saw how miserable and exhausted he was, her words caught in her throat. How could she heap the anguish of knowing that Shepard was found dead on his already crumbling shoulders, especially without having enough information to know precisely how valid the claim was? No, there would be a time, when she had learned enough to know the truth of the matter, to tell the captain. Until then, she had to find a way to get eyes into the lab on the cold, desolate wasteland of a planet.

She quickly brought up a communications program, adjusting the levels on the voice modulation software as she tried to find the right route of still functioning comm buoys to relay through, and taking a second to ensure the proper layers of encryption and divert any trackers through an endless loop in the communications network. Fortunately, the chaos saturating the aftermath of the war worked in her favor as much as against her, adding yet another level of security. When the contact finally established, Liara leaned in, speaking quietly.

"Gianna, I need you to look into something..."

The elevator door slid open into the plain vestibule, Kaidan entering as he undid the straps of his jacket and worked the zipper down. The door to the captain's cabin hissed open, inviting the biotic into the soft glow of dim lights, the left wall radiating vibrant blue from the aquarium teeming with life. He tossed his jacket into a heap on the chair set askew before his personal terminal. As always, the green light was blinking, a sharp, stabbing reminder that his work would never be done, a ping to keep dragging him back into the mess that was the galaxy. He didn't spare it a thought this time, though, cuing the lights even lower with a swipe of his hand as he entered the bathroom.

After a shower meant as much to brood on his thoughts as to bathe, he descended into the main part of the cabin, settling on the angular couch claiming the corner at the foot of the bed, head in his hands, elbows on his knees. The migraine had barely subsided since he got off of the Covenant, and there was little else he wanted but to sleep. The thoughts, though, chewed at the back of his head incessantly, concerns about Sur'kesh, about Europa, about Jessica. Worries that before they had the chance to piece everything back together, the Council would have torn itself apart, divided into conflicting species vying to pull themselves from the wreckage, even if it meant clawing up the spines of the others. Atop this nestled the ever pervasive stress of being the target of xenophobic scorn for being the only human Spectre, which meant heaps extra dropping onto him to prove his ability while at the same time being trusted to fail, and admonished when he did.

And over all, the ever resounding doubt that he would ever see Tyran again played a haunting, discordant cacophony in the backdrop. He'd push them back with every waking moment he had to dedicate to doing his duty, but in these quiet moments alone, they were all he could hear. They spoke horrible truths to him: that the commander had been slaughtered, that he burned to death with the rest of the Citadel, that he would never again spend another moment with the man he loved. He sunk into memories of their times together on the Citadel, of the moment at the cafe when they finally spoke what had been kept silent for years, the calm nights spent together in the apartment, the precious few days they let themselves put the madness aside to wander the Presidium, and the party that had brought them all together in a moment of bonding, adoring camaraderie. He remembered waking up next to the commander time and again, cherishing the look of astral, dreamlike tranquility that so rarely graced the pale features of the man that saved them all. He remembered the smile that he saw far too rarely, that he had promised he would nourish.

His eyes averted to a picture on the table before him, settled beside the commander's old N7 helmet. It was a simple image of the two of them together at the Relay Monument, casual dress, arm in arm, looking for once in their careers like two normal people. Both smiling. He lifted the frame and stared into the rich emerald eyes of his lover, feeling an echo of that happiness again before it melted into bitter pain, a stinging rebuttal that he'd never get the chance to know a normal life with the man, if at all. His vision clouded as tears gently trickled free, the stone walls that held him aloft and kept him strong crumbling around him. He set the picture back on the table and slumped to the side, laying his head on his crooked arm, staring through the moisture at that long distant recollection.

All he had wanted was to give Tyran some semblance of a good life, be a partner to him, put the military behind them and live out what was left of their lives in woefully pedestrian bliss. They hadn't talked much of the commander's past, but he felt, somewhere deep within him, that it had seldom been free of strife. Shepard was a man etched with the scars of his history. Kaidan wanted to know the details that he could never quite glean, but more than that, he had wanted to sculpt a better future for the both of them. One that could finally bring about the dawn from an otherwise twilight existence.

Now, it would never happen. All of the bright, romantic hopes were buried with the commander's broken body somewhere in the rubble, lost and alone in the dark. The comprehension of that jabbed Kaidan painfully in the chest, carrying him into tormented sleep with ragged, forlorn sobs in a quiet room, painted in thick reminiscence of Shepard's leadership.