Liara
I sat in my apartment as the sun went down. Even then, the lights of Nos Astra did not dim. They remained as bright as the star in the sky, a pseudo-sunlight that kept the mind awake and the heart alert when it had no desire to be. I stared at the display case inside my home, wondering what madness had driven me to demand that one piece of the detritus of my life.
Shepard's chestplate. I thought as I stared at the cracked, charred mockery of what had failed to protect her. It had been my last demand of Miranda Lawson. For some reason, I had kept Shepard's armor and dog tags. I had stuffed them into the back of my apartment until Zhira had helped me get free from the drugs. I had felt more confident afterwards, confident enough to dig them out from where they had been hidden and display them properly.
Though I did not do it to preserve any memory of Shepard. I attempted to convince myself, something it appeared that I did in excess lately. I did it to remind myself of what I shall never become. Of what I shall never betray. I will not betray those who love me.
"The last time I caught you sitting in the dark, we'd lost someone in the field." the door to my apartment opened and I heard Zhira's voice.
My friend entered my home, leaned against the wall, and stared at me with her amethyst eyes. Her arms crossed over her chest and she tilted her head in a way that I had come to know. It meant she expected an answer.
"Li?" she asked when I did not reply. "Liara, look at me. What the hell happened today?"
"I saw a ghost." I whispered, even though saying the words out loud made my mind venture back to seeing the eyes I had thought lost to me forever.
Brilliant. Bright. Rare and precious.
"I don't follow." Zhira said, and I glared at her, seeing something in her eyes, something canny, the thing that had made her a fierce enforcer in her grandmother's illicit empire.
"Tell me what you know." I ordered, rising from my chair. "Tell me, now. No secrets between us, Zhira, we promised that to each other."
"I'm hiding nothing." Zhira said. "And, I can see what you're wanting to ask me. Yes. I paid the docking fees for the Normandy SR-2. In your name. To bring her to you."
"How did you know?" I demanded. "How did you know that Cerberus had been successful? That Shepard was…"
"You've known as long as I have." Zhira countered. "You simply refused to acknowledge the information when it reached you. I remember handing you the file myself, asking if you were all right. Your eyes glassed over, you closed the screen and said that it was done, over, and finished."
"And it was finished." I hissed. "I wanted nothing more to do with it. So, Cerberus succeeded. They brought something dead back into living. It is not the woman I knew."
"Not the woman you loved, you mean." Zhira corrected me, slapping me across the face with truths I did not want to admit to myself.
"Loved, knew, what do the semantics of language mean here?" I began pacing the room, uncomfortable with the asari who had become the mirror of my heart.
Zhira knew my mind. She knew my heart, and she had seen into my life in a way that only one other ever had before. And, like that one other, she would speak my own thoughts to me, translate my feelings with a clarity and lucidity that made me wish to strike out at the world that had twisted me in such a way.
"They mean everything." Zhira replied. "They mean that when you looked into Shepard's eyes, you felt something. You felt something that you are unwilling to let yourself believe. You're staring at the armor she once wore, Liara. Why are you doing that? If it is finished, then why are you looking at the remnants of the life you left behind?"
"To remind myself never to do as she did!" I exclaimed, frustrated with this turn of conversation. "To remind myself that I shall not give in, not be broken by the world and that I will never, never turn my back on love!"
"Fascinating." Zhira quipped, not matching my raised tone. "Because is that not exactly what you're doing?"
"Do not dare do this to me, Zhira T'Aryn." I threatened her. "You have no concept of what was visited on me today, what you invited into my heart and life. You, who tore me away from the needle, are driving me back to it with nothing less than vengeance!"
"That's where you're wrong, Liara." Zhira's tones were ferocious, but still the level of her voice did not rise. "I know better than anyone that you can't let the ghosts linger in the past. I face the scar on my neck every day and remember what I walked away from and how it ruined me. I gather the fragments of my consciousness and soul every waking day and move forward. Your circumstances are exceptional, but life will not require less of you than it does of me. You, who have helped save this galaxy, owe it to the rest of us, and to your very soul, to conquer your past. Whether you choose to love it once more or abandon it all together is your choice, and I will support you in either, but you cannot know of its existence and forget it."
"Yes I can!" I shouted. "I can walk away and leave it in the dust and never revisit it again. She belongs to Cerberus now! She is not the woman I loved!"
"Would you be shouting at me so vehemently if what you said was actually true?" Zhira inquired. "Or did something happen, something that is making you question everything you forced yourself to believe?"
My resistance broke. My forced beliefs cracked under Zhira's logic as they almost always did. I stopped pacing and faced my friend, sighing.
"She spoke to me." I whispered. "She sounded as she always had. She spoke with the same voice and looked at me with the same eyes, and in those eyes there was love. There was love and there was pain and all I did was shove my knives deeper into her chest. Because I still hate her for what she put me through. I hate her for what she did to me, but still…she heard my words, my anger and their bitterness and still, Zhira…still she called me what she always had, words that were hers and mine alone, that no one could recreate."
"Li, goddess, your mind is twisted into a thousand layers." Zhira breathed, smiling. "Think this through, like the scientist you are. Look at the logic of it. You can't hate her for what happened to you."
"Why can't I!?" I demanded, angered that my friend seemed to be taking Shepard's side.
"Because she didn't put you through anything." Zhira stressed every word. "Shepard died. She did what her honor and her heart instructed her to do and she fucking died because of it. Everything that happened after that, Liara, everything was something you did to yourself. No matter what you want to think, no matter what you tell yourself, a dead woman couldn't have put you through anything. Now, you can take this opportunity to visit on this new Shepard everything you went through and take some petty vengeance if you want. Or you can realize that her death was simply a catalyst, and nothing more."
"Zhira…"
"You have the opportunity of a lifetime, Liara." Zhira interrupted me. "You have…you have the chance to do it all again, to fix it. Shepard cheated death! The woman you loved cheated death and is back in your life once more. Don't…please don't close your heart away."
"She broke my heart, Zhira." I tried to explain, though her words burned in my chest with the searing heat of white phosphorous. "And today she…she called me something that I am…I am not any longer. I am not a beautiful soul. I have lost that. I have lost the part of me that she loves."
"You're different, Li." Zhira comforted me, drawing close, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me against the strength of her body. "You're just different, but you're still Liara T'Soni. Look, what I did may have been a little bit underhanded, but I want what's best for you. You're chasing ghosts and shadows in the dark, and you've got nothing to come home to but me, and the only thing I'll ever be to you is a friend."
"You're wrong, Zhira." I told her. "I tried, do you remember? I tried to…"
"Yeah." Zhira grinned, her amethyst eyes flashing with the memory. "But that's not what you were really feeling. Your heart is so big…so goddess damned big. But it's so full of anger, and so full of rage. I wouldn't have a place there, ever. I'm not the person who is capable of living in that maelstrom. You're a force to be reckoned with, and right now, I imagine there's only one force in the galaxy to rival yours."
"Even if she is who she used to be," my true fears came to light, "she will not love me as I am, Zhira!" tears flowed, fresh and hot, down my face. "Serena Shepard is all that is good in the galaxy. She is broken, and she is beautiful, and her hands are stained with blood yet somehow they bring life and light to this wretched universe! You know me as what I have become! You know me as who I am now and it is not…it is nothing she would love!"
"How do you know?" Zhira asked, impassioned, lovely, and everything that I needed in that moment. "How do you know unless you work through your fears and your anger and calm the raging storm within you to grant the galaxy the chance to return to you what it stole! If I have angered you, so be it! I've watched you suffer long enough, Liara. Please…try. Try."
"I can't!" I shrieked and a spool of biotic energy fled from my hand and spun into the wall where it shattered, knocking a picture to the floor and shattering the glass.
"You can and you will." Zhira ordered, her calm astounding me, shaking me to my core where a grieving, frightened, terrified asari lived. "You believe in the impossible, Liara. You believe that you saw the dead return from wherever their souls travel…why is it so hard for you to reach out to that belief again, to look into the silver eyes that haunt your nightmares and see the woman you loved and who loved you?"
"Because it will mean…" I gasped, feeling breath torn out of my lungs as her logic cut into me with a fierce, unapologetic razor's edge, "it will mean that I have been bitter for so long with no reason."
"Liara." Zhira's arms were around me again, my head tucked safely beneath her chin as she cradled me like a precious, fragile thing. "Liara, my dear, sweet, beautiful maiden. It's okay. It is. And it will be. Don't borrow the future's troubles. Let tonight happen. Let tomorrow dawn, and let what will be, be as it is."
My friend held me as I wept until my sight was blurred and my steps unsteady. She lifted me in her arms and carried me to bed, as she had when she rescued me from Eternity.
"Keep your eyes open." Zhira whispered against my crest as she cushioned my head with the pillow. "Keep your eyes open, and your heart, and the stars will align themselves. Forgive, Liara. Forgive the past, and seek out the present. Believe."
With Zhira's mantra and prayer ringing through my mind, I fell into an uneasy sleep. For the first time, I did not dream of dark things. I dreamed of a passionate embrace, a gentle kiss, and silver eyes that whispered beautiful things that, in the dream, I was worthy of hearing and being named.