Author's Note: Hello you amazing wonderful beautiful people, you! Thank you so much for all of your patience, and for taking the time to read this little contribution to the boards. It got really hectic after DA:I dropped, then the holidays, then a move, but I am getting back in the saddle (or desk chair, for a writer's equivalent). I very much appreciate your understanding, and I hope to get back to consistent updates.

Also, a little note on what is to come. Due to the alterations I made to Liara's character in the two years that Shepard was being re-built, you are going to be reading a slightly different angle from what the game shows. Thank you for understanding, reading, favoriting, following, and reviewing this fic. You guys are awesome!

Bright Blessings ~ Raven Sinead

Liara

Fury was not a new emotion. With it, inside of its maw, I had taken lives. I had toppled the empires of multiple competitors and enemies. I used fury as a guide, a guardian, and a protector of what I had built in my name. It swirled in me now as I stared at the fool who had dared to suggest that, since what I had gathered for him was not to his unrealistic, exacting specifications, he did not need to pay for what we had delivered to him.

I glanced to my desk; my attention captured by the blinking light that indicated that someone waited for me in the lobby. I clenched my jaw, staring at the idiotic human whose bluff, bluster, and condescension had done nothing to earn him anything from me, least of all consideration.

The light on my desk blinked more rapidly, and my frustration built. Nyxeris had signaled me that apparently whoever stood outside of my door would not wait for much longer. That particular signal had occasionally ended in bloodshed when rival agents had come, in the guise of prospective clients, and attempted to slaughter me in my own domain. There had been a few close calls, and I did not mind the risk. Their failures simply cemented my success in the minds of others. Blood was good for business.

"Doctor T'Soni, are you listening to me?" the unctuous man, whose name I simply could not remember, jerked me into the present moment with pathetic drivel I simply did not wish to endure. "I have spoken with my associates and I simply cannot countenance…"

"Have you ever faced an asari commando unit before?" I interrupted him, my thoughts twitching as I remembered those words, where they had come from, and the manner in which they had been used. The twitch, however, passed. "Few humans have."

I heard the door to my office swish open and I silently cursed Nyxeris. While her organizational skills knew no competition, she could not hinder unwanted entrances in my office even if she tried. I had never crossed paths with a more inept biotic, and the fury I felt towards the ingrate I had just threatened spread further and applied to whomever had barged into my sanctum.

"Doctor T'Soni," the man spluttered, "you might wish to consider retracting those words. They sounded very much like a threat, and if that is the case…"

"That is very much the case." I growled. "In fact, this will be the last time you are permitted to speak to me. My brokerage's services were rendered and I will be compensated, and, if I do not receive the aforementioned compensation, I will flay you alive. With my mind."

I watched the man's face go pale through the link and, satisfied, I pulled up my omni-tool and closed it, adding a note for myself. If the credits were not wired to the account I had specified within the next solar day, he and his associates would find the consequences far more lamentable than an imperfect delivery of what he had required, and the money lost for services rendered.

"Goddamn." someone spoke from behind me.

My heart twisted in my chest until I thought it would snap. I knew that voice, its cadence, its timbre, how it could sound through tears and laughter both.

"I never thought I'd hear that particular threat again." she spoke again and I clenched my hands into fists.

Nothing could have prepared me for this moment. I had managed to ignore it for two years. I had managed not to consider the possibility that Miranda Lawson had spoken the truth...that the dead could be restored to life, just as they had been before.

I turned on my heel and felt my mouth become a desert. I looked up, into a pair of silver eyes that had once defined my world, until I had seen the charred sockets in which they had melted. They were an exquisite recreation, down to the light and the pain swirling in them that had been the source of my sweetest dreams and most horrifying nightmares.

The angles and planes of her face were perfect, unchanged from the image in the sacred shrine of my memory where I kept the things I loved and despised in equal measure. Her lips were that same, a seductive, supple pink curvature, and I felt blood rush to all inappropriate places when I remembered how red they would look when kissed. They wore a soft smile and I could not bear it, because, once, I had been the cause of that smile. I was not the same Liara. And she was not my Shepard.

I scrutinized her, trying to see the changes written in her body, to find how much "better" Cerberus would have attempted to re-build her. I found everything as it had been. The same tall, lanky frame. The same short, wavy hair, which remained the color of fire. Somehow, beneath the clothes she wore, her muscles were as defined as when she had been at the peak of physical condition. It seemed as though nothing had changed, but, as I knew there would be, something was wrong.

The scar across her face, the scar that had been a badge of honor, a thing of beauty that I had fallen in love with…was no longer there. I had never even thought of how different she would look without that thick, puckered line breaking the symmetry of her features. It…it had changed her. She no longer looked so hard, so battle-tested and tried. I could still see the metal and storm that comprised her being, but without that scar she seemed…softer.

I did not want to speak her name. I did not want to acknowledge that…that this existed. Cerberus had taken the shell of her, with the promise of remaking her, creating her again, restoring her life and light to the galaxy but I knew, I knew in the depths of my soul and spirit that Serena Shepard could never exist again.

Yet here she stood. Here she had spoken, with the same voice that had made my heart catch fire and my soul sing in languages lost to time. My lips parted, but only tremoring breaths left them. The rapid tailspin that had been my life, the depths of ultimate darkness that I had dragged myself from…I stood before the catalyst of it all.

This is not the woman who died! I forced myself to believe. This is not the woman I loved. This is a Cerberus construct, a mouth-piece for the organization that dragged her back from death. They must have cloned her from some piece of viable tissue that remained on the corpse. I can do this…I can speak to her. Because, though it may be her voice…It. Is. Not. Her.

"Serena." I spoke her name, and the three syllables fluttered out of my mouth and spiraled down into my gut where they gnawed and clenched and made a yearning all their own.

Against every base instinct, against every logical thought, I moved across the floor of my office, drawn to the woman who had saved me, loved me, and damned me. Her silver eyes were magnets, drawing me closer, and as I neared her I could feel the fire of powerful energy that consumed and consecrated. I could feel every ignored emotion. I could hear every word from the past that had graced my lips.

I love you. I need you. This…this is something that I do not know and yet I want.

I do not understand.

I did not understand, and I needed to touch her and let that sense answer this question as she had answered all of my inquiries, two years ago. Two years, during which I had become a different asari. Even if she were still Shepard, my Shepard, I would no longer be her Liara. These were the thoughts that drove me when I kept my hands at my sides, walked to her, and brushed my lips lightly across her cheek.

I need to know if there is a chance...a chance it might be you. For if you are my Serena, then you have much to answer for.

I pulled away, quick, because my lips were burning as though I had touched them to a glowing ember. My heart tripped, kicked, stuttered, and shrieked. It felt as it had two years ago when we shared our first, hesitant kiss under the mistletoe. She still smelled like Serena had, dusky and dark, like a warm spice, exotic, rare, and entirely her.

I took a step back, looking at the confusion in her eyes. I could witness the pain in them and fury overwhelmed all other emotion once more. How could she look confused at my civil, if cold, greeting? How could she crease her brow in the little crinkle above her nose that meant her heart was hurting? How could she stand there and…and…and exist!?

"What brings you Illium?" I asked, keeping my voice clipped, professional, and cold inside my fury.

Shepard quirked a single eyebrow upward. "A lot of reasons." she spoke and her voice washed over me in a wave of remembered comfort and bliss. "First and foremost to thank you for streamlining our arrival and paying our docking fees."

What!?

"You must be mistaken." I told her. "I did no such thing."

"I was told by the docking official that you had." Shepard narrowed her eyes. "But I was also told you were an information broker and that…that doesn't seem right."

As if you are any longer a judge of what is right and wrong in my life. I am standing here because of you. The life I lead is a byproduct of your death, and you no longer have the permission to make those sorts of comments.

You no longer have a place in my life. Because you are construct, a facsimile, a wrong done upon the galaxy. Because you are not Serena Shepard.

Because I do not love you anymore.