Thessia

It has been over three hundred years. Zhira's mind is still as calm, collected, and organized as Liara remembers. She does not know how the elder matron has always been able to bring her ever into a place of peace. It is quiet here, serene, even. Liara suddenly wants to ask Sen if her melds with her mother have always held this peace, or if it is a sanctuary that Zhira creates for her alone. In the connection between them, Liara hears Zhira's soft laughter.

"You have the strangest definition of peace, Liara." Zhira whispers into her thoughts. "In my own thoughts, I see nothing but chaos, a consistent stream of events and madness that I cannot sort out on my own, sometimes."

"I once thought of peace as an emptiness." Liara smiles into the meld. "A place of utter quiet and repose, where all lay still and silent. However, when I enter those moments of complete quiescence, I can hear my own thoughts and see my own memories with a clarity so painful that it rips me apart. There is no peace in that. Perhaps, I have learned to see that peace is chaos, just as change is the sole constant in this universe."

Zhira does not reply to her words, but Liara can feel the other asari's reaction. Empathy. Commiseration. Understanding. She knows that Zhira can comprehend her thoughts on a thousand levels, from the vastly theoretical to the very physical part of her whose heartrate is slowing in the comfort of their mental, perhaps spiritual, embrace. Her figurative heart aches at the recollection of another with whom she felt this peace. A face whom she shall she again, very soon, whose words she will hear with as vivid clarity as if that face was still a physical presence in the world.

"I take it you're ready?" Zhira asks, and Liara nods, knowing that her acquiescence will be felt and understood without spoken language.

The air around them shifts and changes, turning into the image of a long hallway. The tile on the floor is covered in years of dirt. No amount of buffing and waxing will save them, even though they fairly glow with the high polish. The colors staining the wall are a horrid neutral, even the pictures hanging on the wall, holo-images of new spacecraft, honored commanders, and military events cannot distract Liara from the dreadful expanse of industrial tan. She watches Zhira walk down the hall, escorted by a man who, at the time, Liara had no knowledge of. Later, she would come to know him as Lieutenant James Vega. Later, she would call him a brother.

"She's in here, Madame Ambassador." James looks as uncomfortable addressing Zhira as Zhira appears wearing the requisite asari finery expected of a councilor's envoy. "As you requested, there won't be a vid recording. Just audio."

"Thank you, lieutenant." Zhira dips her head in a gracious manner, briefly baring the scar across her neck that the high collar hides. James' eyes widen at the sight, but he says nothing.

He opens the door with a retinal scan, and Zhira enters the room. Liara sees the silhouette of Shepard, the light streaming in from the window making her nothing but a shadow. Zhira opens her omni-tool and enters a code, scrambling the audio recorder in the room so that it will record nothing but muted inflections of their voice. Their conversation will be recorded, but untranslatable.

"I didn't think the asari had a vested interest in a Batarian prison colony." Shepard spoke, her voice hoarse. "Apparently, because of this meeting, I'm very wrong about that. Are you here to tell me that charges will be formally filed by the Thessian matriarchy? Because that's the only thing I can guess at this point, and what I was told to expect."

Zhira smiles, shaking her head. She should have expected that Shepard would be briefed on the supposed reason for their audience, and that she would have been given orders on exactly what to say.

"I am not representing the Thessian matriarchy." Zhira speaks. "But I am representing an asari who has a vested interest in you."

Shepard turns at the words and Liara's stomach clenches. The human woman's silver eyes are framed by the ugly purple and light green of bruising. There is a deep cut across the bridge of her nose, the dark crimson of scabs where fists ripped the skin off of her cheeks, and several deep lines in the flesh of her lips where they were split open. One such gash through her upper lip is stitched together. Her neck is still black and blue from where a boot nearly crushed it, and her left arm hangs in a sling. Her right knee is trapped in a exo-brace…it keeps her shattered patella motionless while allowing her the freedom to walk.

"Zhira?" Shepard is not a woman who gasps in surprise, but the expression is evident in her silver gaze, eyes that are filled with such pain and…Liara remembers the first time she saw those eyes in person after Shepard's incarceration. Where once lived light there was a hollow darkness, a void of something…something lost that could not be regained. She sees it now as she saw it three hundred years ago, through Zhira's mind, on board the Shadow Broker's ship.

"We are safe to speak, commander." Zhira informs her. "Liara has made certain of that."

Shepard still looks around the room, as though expecting to be caught; ambushed. Her eyes turn to Zhira once more. "What the fuck?" She asks. "You can't tell me Liara doesn't know how goddamn dangerous this is."

"We are both fully aware of the risks." Zhira answers. "But since news of your impending incarceration reached your ears, Liara has had an operative attempting to find you. She received news of the batarian attack and was worried. No news has been released as to your condition."

Shepard extends her good, right arm. "I'm fine, as you can see." She states, her voice dark, but not with…not with anger. "Doesn't surprise me that they won't tell anyone how I am. They're embarrassed enough that the batarians got that far. What the fucktards don't realize is that, while the gates are guarded, no one really pays attention to the fencing in the residential district of the base. Buy a holo-generator on the black market and even a batarian can look human as long as no one touches them."

"So that's how it was done." Zhira nods, wondering how much the Hegemony spent on the technology.

"Yeah." Shepard snorts and sits down, a quick wince of discomfort flitting across her features. "That's how it was done. Now the Alliance is answering to the galactic community for being made fools of and dealing with the screaming of the non-military residents of base-housing. They don't feel safe anymore, nor should they."

"You do seem to be the name on everyone's lips." Zhira approaches the topic of the Bahak system.

"From the Savior of the Citadel to the Butcher of Bahak." Shepard shakes her head. "Rebelling against Council oversight and continuing to chase Saren made me a hero when Sovereign attacked the Citadel. But taking action on my own, in the same manner, stripped away any of the good I may have done, even though I took that action for all the right reasons."

"Shepard, I understand that you are speaking to me." Zhira, knowing her time is limited, presses harder. "I know that you realize that the next person I will see after this is Liara. You are speaking to her, through me. You don't need to hide anything."

"Don't I?" The words are an empty sneer, slicing across Liara's heart. "I'm surprised Liara sent you here. I thought she was smarter than that."

Zhira's expression hardens at the dismissive tone in Shepard's voice. "Smarter than what, exactly?" Zhira asks, leaning forward. "Caring about the woman she loves enough to send someone into danger and the highest form of fraudulent impersonation?"

"Smarter than to keep loving someone who's committed fucking genocide." Shepard snaps. "Just because there wasn't actual blood on my hands doesn't mean it's not there. You're a rational, pragmatic asari, Zhira. I'm surprised you didn't support her when she doubted her feelings for me; that you didn't talk her into abandoning me like any sane person would do."

Liara takes the blow to her heart once again, listening to the self-loathing in Serena's voice…self-loathing that had made her question even Liara's love. Listening to this again hurts, but there are no tears in her eyes this time, not as there were when she first witnessed this memory.

"When she doubted?" Zhira's voice is taut, shaking with barely repressed anger. "If it means a goddess-damned thing to you, Shepard, Liara hasn't doubted her love of you at all. And, as you just intimated, if she had, she would have told me. Your party of pity, as you humans say, is for you and you alone. Do not dare drag Liara's name into it."

Shepard's eyes widen. "She didn't…" The shock in her voice scrapes across Liara's hearing like a dull razor, "…she didn't…"

"No."

She thought that I would despise her. That I would doubt her intentions…she thought that I would be so petty as to believe that she did, indeed, see this as vengeance for what happened at Mindoir. That I would think so little of her as to sever our ties and…and leave her alone with no defenders and none who would believe in her. This was the beginning of her breaking, and perhaps I was foolish to grieve for myself, Liara thinks, when I heard those words. But I could not help it. They tore me apart.

"So you didn't come here to tell me that Liara is writing me off?" Shepard asks, her voice low, humbled.

"I came here to make certain that you are all right. Liara knew nothing of your condition save the word of a drunken guard that you didn't fight back when they breached your cell. Is that true?"

"It is and it isn't." Shepard mutters. "They blew the door and the next thing I knew it felt like a fucking giant wasp had stung me in the neck. They hit me with a high-power muscle relaxer. I couldn't do anything while they beat the shit out of me, and when they were taken out, the drug worked so well it almost stopped my heart. My lungs weren't even working anymore. They had to put me on a damn ventilator until it was out of my system."

Liara remembers the shock she felt the first time she witnessed this, the horror at the thought of how close she'd come to losing Shepard again. The pain of that had dulled the relief she felt at knowing that Shepard did not simply allow herself to be taken. Behind all of that still burned the knowledge that Shepard thought Liara would leave her; that Serena believed that their bond was so weak that something like this would dissuade Liara's faith in her. She had not been able to summon anger…not when she had been so deeply wounded.

"But you are recovering?" Zhira keeps her composure, something Liara would not have been able to do, not if she had faced the bruised, battered human woman herself.

"Well enough." Shepard replies. "Hackett and Anderson are keeping my recovery out of the press. They tell me that if there's no word, then people might begin to question what they think of me, and in that questioning remember all the shit I've actually done. They think it might make the small minds. who jump at whatever the GNN says and latch onto a reporter's bias and make it their own, think for themselves on whether actually losing the Savior of the Citadel is something they want to happen. It might work, it might not. All I know is that they're working this politically and I hate politics. The Reapers are coming, Zhira, and no one but Cerberus is doing a thing about it."

"What are your thoughts on that?" Zhira questions.

"At this point, nobody wants to hear my thoughts. I worked for Cerberus, remember? But since you're asking for yourself, and Liara…if Cerberus is the one who saves this fucking galaxy from the Reapers, they're going to use it. They're going to erase the Council and make every single race indebted to them. Then the galaxy will have to endure what our fucking planet did for the last few millennia. Rule by humans and humans alone. Trust me, that's nothing anyone wants or needs. I'd rather see the Reapers destroy us than see this galaxy run by humanity."

"You think so little of your own race?"

"I know the history of my own race. We're ruled by impulse and avarice. We killed our own for centuries upon centuries until we found that we weren't alone in the galaxy. When we found we weren't, we all united to do more killing. Look at Udina, whose somehow back on the Council. He's a human politician that's willing to work with other races. Now think of the galaxy controlled by people like him…who are elitist xenophobes. Talk to Liara about a piece of human history called World War Two. She'll show you what humanity is capable of. What we're good at."

"I know the war you speak of." Zhira counters. "That was the worst of your species, and they committed unforgivable genocide."

"Right you are." Shepard places her hand on the table and leans forward. "Supposedly, once, I was the best of my species. And I just committed unforgivable genocide too."

"Those circumstances were different." Zhira counters and Liara finds herself nodding, even though she knows what happens next.

"Were they?" Shepard mocks herself. "They wholeheartedly believed they were doing the right thing. So did I. Trust me. The galaxy doesn't want to see humans in charge, no matter our somewhat heroic actions to this point. I don't even like that we have a council seat, just because we saved a space station and the councilors."

"I can understand your hatred of yourself, Shepard, given the circumstances." Zhira attempts to reach her. "But it should not extend to your species."

"Watch history unfold, Zhira." Shepard whispers. "See what happens if they keep me locked here while the Reapers invade."

"What makes you different?" Zhira questions. "Why would it be different if you, instead of, say, an agent from Cerberus defeated the Reapers?"

"Because I know the evils I'm capable of." Shepard replies. "And I know better than to forgive myself for them with the weak defense of 'circumstances'." She looks at Zhira's omni. "Your time is up, Madame Ambassador." She says. "Please…please tell Liara that I love her. And that I'm sorry."

"For turning yourself in instead of letting her protect you, or for telling her, through me, that you so horribly doubted her love of you?" Zhira demands the difficult answer.

"For both." Shepard hangs her head, letting her fiery hair shield her features. "And for not knowing, if they hadn't hit me with that damn drug, if I would have fought back."

"You don't deserve this, Shepard." Zhira attempts to comfort her, but Shepard will not hear it. Liara can tell by the set of her shoulders, the thin line of her lips when she raises her head, the hollow void in her silver eyes.

"Thank you, Zhira, but I can't say I agree."