Liara

A week passed by in an absolute fugue state. I slept for hours beyond counting, always waking with the expectations of seeing those I had spoken to in my dreams. Expecting them to stand at my bedside with the same blurry features and indistinct voices my mind attributed them. I woke with my hands curled as though they held a weapon. I woke with tears in my eyes or sweat on my brow and always with the shuddering of my breath or shaking of my body.

With each painful, labor-intensive awakening there were amethyst eyes drawing me from the nightmares and into the present. With each shiver came a corresponding, gentle touch. Every pained breath over cracked lips was answered with a strong arm around my shoulders and a cup of water or a soothing balm.

All of this was done in silence. If I did not speak, no words were said to me. It seemed as though Zhira T'Aryn wished to become my personal ghost, akin to a figment of my own imagination. Or perhaps she simply believed that I desired her to be silent and thus remained so.

I did not even know who I was, in some moments. In the haze of withdrawal, my identity fled. I was an empty vessel, held prisoner, denied that which would free me. That which would provide relief, and fill the gaping chasm in my body that ached, twisted, and hurt. Spikes of silver littered the wasteland of my dreaming, tips glinting in the sun, begging for me to lay my skin against them and wake from the illusion, blessedly whole and alive again.

I woke from one such dream, desperate to be in a world where pain neither ventured nor existed. My hands had clutched fistfuls of the sheets in my sleep. I released them, slow, hearing the knuckles of my fingers crack. The clothes covering my body were damp with sweat, sticking to my body. I watched my chest rise and fall and listened to the sound of my breathing…like dead leaves rustling in my chest.

"How long?" I asked the question that I always did, knowing that the asari who had kept her promise not to leave would answer me. She always did.

"About twelve hours this time." Zhira replied from her chair in the corner of the room. "You're sleeping for shorter periods of time. That's a good thing. It means your body is starting to recover from the hell you put it through."

"My mind is not grateful." I growled, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

It had become something of a routine. I would wake up, shake off whatever nightmare had tormented me (they were a new constant in my life), and stagger into the shower. When I emerged, Zhira would force food on me and I would eat, tasting nothing. By that time, I would be too exhausted to do much more than stagger back to the bed and read or watch a vid before falling asleep yet again.

Zhira had told me this was normal. That the amphetamines had pushed my body beyond any sane limit; that I needed an immense amount of time to repair the damage done. Time without the drug. Hearing this…was horrible. Time without the drug meant time spent remembering. Simple distractions were not powerful enough to deliver me from what I fled. They were not powerful enough to silence the voices that memories played through my mind.

Simple distractions could not stop the low, husky chuckle whispering over my crest. They could not block the warm body that lay next to mine in dreams, or the memories of hands that brushed my skin with utmost gentleness. With every day I spent back in the land of the living and the normal, I began to remember more and more.

And I hated it. I hated every damn second of it. I hated the webs of the arachnids, for their silk looked too much like human hair. I hated every shade that reminded me of the colors of human skin. I despised the color red, the color of passion, warning, and human blood. But what I hated most of all were the moments when I saw the color silver…and instead of thinking of the needle's constant pull, I saw a pair of eyes flashing at me with the laughter of the gods.

I shuffled into the washroom and leaned against the sink, closing my eyes as another dizzy spell rolled over me. I breathed in deep, as Zhira had counseled, exhaling and counting ten long beats before opening my eyes again. When I did, as she had promised, the world no longer spun around me. I turned on the water, not even waiting for it to warm before splashing it on my face and washing away the sweat.

I closed my eyes again as another wave of dizziness came and went.

It will pass, I tried to convince myself. Zhira said that it would pass, and it is getting better. Time. It will simply require time. And…if there is anything I possess in abundance…it is time.

I opened my eyes once more and stared at the royal blue towel hanging over the mirror. Zhira had covered it. When I had asked why, she said something about not needing to see myself yet. I thought her concerns, or quirks, whichever it may have been, were unnecessary. How would seeing my own reflection affect me adversely? It was nothing I had not seen before.

Rebellious against my caretaker…whom I did not ask for…I reached up and tore away the towel. My reflection stared back at me and my heart faltered. My lips quivered as I drew away from the glass. I did not know the asari standing in front of me. I did not recognize the eyes that I looked into.

No light lived in them. They were flat, dull, listless…I looked like a fragile, broken thing. There were deep, violet shadows beneath my eyes. My skin looked thin, almost translucent, stretched taut across my bones, giving my face an almost skeletal appearance. The skin of my lips was chapped and torn…I reached up and touched them, feeling the roughened texture of skin torn open and scabbed over too often.

I stared at the shadow of an asari who had once been Liara T'Soni. The maiden who had defied a matriarch and charted her own path across the galaxy. The maiden who had fought the greatest enemy in the galaxy and won. The maiden who had fallen in love with a human woman made of sparks, tungsten, fire, and blood. Everything of that maiden that had once existed...had been eaten away.

No one could love this, I thought, staring at the mockery of my face, the ludicrous shadow of my identity. Even I cannot find a shadow of who I was to reacquaint myself with.

Disgust and self-loathing rose in my throat as my gut and heart twisted, wrenched sharply by the revelation that I had brought upon myself. It would seem that Zhira was wiser than I in the matter of mirrors. But she was more foolish than I when she thought that some part of me could be salvaged. I could not continue in the routine we had established.

I could no longer surrender to the nightmares and let them take over my mind and heart. I could no longer stand the burn of tears in my eyes or the heat raging beneath my skin. I turned from the mirror and my fingers grasped the edge of a particular tile with a chip in the corner. I pulled it off of the wall and reached back into the space that it concealed, withdrawing yet another of many silver boxes.

My hands shook and my heart raced as I at last looked forward to something again. I wanted the oblivion. After so long denied, it would be a rush of relief; a beautiful, damning high that I would give myself over to and forget the suffering that had defined my waking and sleeping hours since my overdose in Eternity. That would not happen again. I would make sure of it. I would be careful.

I snapped the catch and opened the box. Two syringes fell on the floor, but I paid attention only to the one that I held in my hand. The needle glinted in the harsh, artificial light, promising relief, promising freedom from the nightmares and the pain and the raspy voice of my un-solicited caretaker.

So enraptured was I at the thought of deliverance, I did not hear the door open until it was too late.

"Lia..." an ominous pause, and I did not look up, knowing who I would see, knowing what expression would be written on her face. "What the fuck do you think you're doing!?"