Thessia

Sen's hands clenched into fists. She felt helpless in the face of this. Horror lived inside Liara T'Soni's eyes. The matron's words had fallen short, her azure skin had paled, her cobalt lips trembled. A presence existed in the room that Sen could not properly judge, that she could not give true name to. Whatever it was sent chills down the cardiologist's spine.

She had seen death. She had felt a heart stop beating inside her hands, and no amount of drugs, skill, and determination had been able to resuscitate it. These moments had wounded her, created scars in her psyche. What she witnessed in Liara's gaze could not have been a scar of old, haunting grief. It felt too raw, too powerful...

It is not a scar. Sen realized. It is still…an open wound. Sweet Goddess, Liara…did you…you did.

"How did you do that?" Sen asked, suddenly bombarded with images of Mira, broken, bloodied, barely clinging to life.

Inside her mind, Sen heard a code being run; saw Mira unconscious in a hospital room, the bright lights of the monitors going dim, a flat line howling when the heart no longer beat. Her stomach roiled and her throat tightened as the images assailed her, one after the other in a sickening repeat. Sen gasped for breath and Liara looked up, concern etched in her blue eyes.

"Sen," Liara asked, gently pressing the back of her hand against Sen's forehead, "Sen, what's wrong?"

Sen lowered her eyes, almost ashamed of her weakness, of her need for a comforting touch, a friend that listened, a separate mind that understood.

"I have a vivid imagination." Sen whispered. "It is…not serving me well. Liara...I don't understand...how could you torment your mind in such a manner? How could you possess the courage to see what you saw?"

"The mind will always cling to two things, Sen, the two things we detest surrending to death." Liara answered, her tone heavy with the weight of brutal experience. "Our heroes and our lovers. For me, Shepard was both. Even though I knew what that pod contained, I had to see it for myself, to know in my heart that Serena had truly died. To this day," Liara's eyes met Sen's, "I suffer from that memory. But, to this day, I do not regret what I did."

Sen attempted to gather her composure. "Might I ask…might I ask what you saw?"

Liara nodded and her eyelids closed, slow. She tilted her head back and breathed deep, holding the air in for a long moment until she released it. Her eyes opened once more and she met Sen's gaze.

"Serena was not, by human standards, a beautiful woman." Liara recalled. "Her features were so severe, her nose too large for her face, her lips too full and supple for the harshness of her countenance. Her beauty lay in her presence, in her voice, in her stance of command. She was the pinnacle of the soldier the galaxy needed, and to me, she was lovely, exotic…beauty held to a harsher standard. When I pressed that button, I expected to see at least a trace of that beauty. The vacuum of space is not forgiving, but it does leave the body intact, if cracked and devoid of color."

Sen nodded her understanding, having learned such science long ago while at university, studying to become a saver of lives, a guardian against death.

"I had forgotten," Liara's voice cracked, "the horrid fires in the Normandy. The explosion of the engines. When I looked through the window, I saw a blackened, cracking husk. A hairless creature with fissured skin; pools of black, congealed blood catching the lighting of the ship. Half of her face had been destroyed, and I could see the bone of her jaw, the roots of her teeth. The eyes that I loved had been melted in their sockets. Her lips had been torn off. Nothing remained of the woman I had loved."

"Goddess." Sen breathed, her stomach roiling once more as her vivid imagination turned Liara's words into terrifying visuals.

"I screamed." Liara's words were monotone, without emotion, cold, because her heart needed that frigidity to recollect this. "I saw her and I screamed until my throat became raw. I realized that the deaths I had witnessed had been tame by comparison. The images from my time at Shepard's side were in my memory, locked there forever…but the image of my lover's decimated corpse was seared into my brain. And I knew," Liara's lips trembled, "that I had reached the end of the road."

"What do you mean?" Sen asked.

"The love of my life was dead." Liara replied, wistful and sorrowful. "Dead and disfigured beyond recognition. I was wanted on Thessia, and I had broken Omega's one rule. I had the Shadow Broker's data from Alignon, and I knew that, with it in my possession, he would not cease hunting me. I can itemize these thoughts now, and speak of them as separate. At the time, they all smeared together in a swirling horrorscape that I could not avoid. My mind began to tear itself asunder. Bit by bit, piece by piece I lost it as I sat there, unable to pull my eyes away from Serena's remains, unable to press the button and darken the window into hell."

Sen's heart ached, and she wished she could have been there. To offer comfort to a broken-hearted asari. To show her of the hope still existent in the world. To prove that death was not the end of all things, but the beginning of something unknown and unseen.

"I did not move for perhaps an hour." Liara recounted. "Tazzik's ship broke through Alignon's atmosphere, and remained in orbit around the planet, as it had been programmed to do. I pulled myself away, knowing that, no matter what magic Cerberus thought they possessed, it would not restore Shepard. It simply could not be done. I dragged myself to the flight deck. My breathing was shallow, my head felt as though it would split open, and I was so dizzy I could not walk straight. Just as I pressed a shaky hand to the console, the ship jerked."

Sen's eyes widened. "Cerberus followed you?" she asked.

Liara nodded. "They caught Tazzik's ship in a tractor beam and began pulling it towards their cruiser. I did not have the mental faculties at hand to break free, no matter how much I wanted to. I wanted to leave behind the madness and bury and forget the two people who had sacrificed themselves for me. Feron and Shepard. I could not carry them with me. I could not wear the weight of their lives on my shoulders. I needed to run, to get away…but Cerberus had financed our venture, and thus they considered Shepard theirs. I was too weak to fight back."

Sen bit her lip, understanding that. So many times, she had lost the battles in her life to simple exhaustion. The fight was not always worth it; her strength not always greater. Sen understood compromise and capitulation. But Liara had not. She had defied her mother, a powerful matriarch, and charted her own path. She would have had to be utterly broken to cede Shepard's body to Cerberus.

"I thought I had been through the darkest part." A perfect tear fell from each azure eye. "What I did not know, Sen, was that the nightmare was just beginning."