Liara
Shepard rose from her chair and I felt myself transported back to another time, another place, and similar circumstances. Aboard the Normandy, after a bullet had pierced my chest. A bullet that I had taken for Shepard, before I knew her, before I knew that our hearts would beat out of our chest and join each other in the dizzying, twisting maelstrom known as love.
Shepard pulled up her omni-tool and spoke into it. "Miranda, could you bring up the med-kit, please."
"Of course, commander." Miranda's voice crackled through the link. "I'm glad to hear that Dr. T'Soni has come to her senses."
Shepard shut down the link with a frustrated growl from the back of her throat. Her silver eyes were a study in myriad emotions, but it seemed that the foremost among them was care and concern. She released the clips on her chest plate and removed the armor, leaving her in a black t-shirt with the N7 logo emblazoned over her heart.
"Shit." She looked down at her arm and saw the ugly gash across her bicep, tracing with her eyes the ribbons of red blood that had swirled down her arm.
The bright crimson seared into my vision, a color of power and color of anger and emotions that ran too hot and strong. I looked away, uncomfortable with the thoughts and emotions that stirred in me at the sight, not simply of human blood, but of Shepard's blood.
"I'll be back in a minute." Shepard muttered, sounding annoyed. "Gotta wash my hands."
I bit my lip, thinking that those words, too, were so much more than they implied. Shepard had died…she had left this galaxy without a final word, without a final cry. Through death, she should have returned to the heart of the universe, and her deeds should have been forgiven, her hands cleaned. But she had come back, and, if things were as they seemed, she remembered all that once had comprised her life. She had died and perhaps known forgiveness, only to come back into a world altered by her righteousness…altered by her sin.
I heard the slight creak of the washroom door's hinges and saw Shepard re-enter the bedroom, drying her hands. She had washed the blood from her arm, but I could still see the gash, a black and crimson stripe across the defined musculature.
Her hair is longer than I remember it being, I thought, trying to detach myself from the situation, from the fact that my heart wanted to reach back into the past and feel as it once felt. It wanted to erase the two years that stood between us. But I could not let it, so I noticed what had changed about her in order to remind myself. I noticed what had changed in hopes that it would solidify the time that separated us.
Shepard pulled the chair closer to the bed as Miranda entered the room, carrying a med-kit with the Normandy's name emblazoned across it, along with the Cerberus logo. It seemed wrong that both of those things existed in the same space.
I watched Shepard torture Cerberus scientists, I mused. I wonder if The Illusive Man and Miranda are aware. I wonder if they can forgive her for that…for taking the lives of men and women who might have been their friends and colleagues.
"Shepard, you're hurt." Miranda stated the painfully obvious as Shepard took the med-kit from her.
"It'll keep." Shepard said, and I restrained the smile that wished to cross my lips at the memory of Shepard consistently avoiding and rebelling against medical professionals. "There's more pressing issues at hand."
Miranda's jaw tightened, but she was a woman of too much reserve. Even if she were angry, she would not let it show in front of me, but save it for another time. Shepard, believing that she had said all she needed, sat down and opened the med-kit, pulling out and slipping on a pair of gloves.
"That looks deep, Serena." Miranda broached the subject again, and I wondered if the subtle flinch that shook Shepard's body registered with the other woman. "If you don't care for it soon, it will leave a scar."
Shepard lifted her head in a harsh, sharp jerk, and her silver eyes blazed against those of the Cerberus operative. It did not seem right that silver held a greater heat than blue, but such was the case as flame and glacier collided between the gazes of two human women.
"Then let it." Shepard growled, hinting at an anger deeper than this confrontation. "Not all of us stake our worth on being a specimen of genetic and bodily perfection. Now, if you don't mind, someone I care about is bleeding."
Miranda made a disgusted noise and turned on her heel, leaving the room. I looked to Shepard as she turned on a penlight and inspected the wound.
"Do not think to engender good favor with me by playing to my dislike of Miranda Lawson." I said, needing to draw boundaries, to make it clear that I would remain detached and unaffected.
Shepard's lips pursed. "There's still some slivers of glass in here." She ignored my statement completely as she examined the injury. "Probably why the medi-gel didn't seal the wound so well."
She rifled through the med-kit and emerged with a pair of fine-tipped tweezers. She ripped away the protective packaging and glanced at me.
"There's really no way to avoid hurting you, and I'm sorry about that." She apologized. "Also, I'll ask you not to demean me by thinking I'd be a bitch to someone I work with just to try and pander to you. That's high school bullshit, Liara, and you know me better than that."
Her words stung me, but I did not wish to reveal that, not in a situation that was already so intimate. But it seemed as though she ignored me completely as she turned her full attention to the wound in my side. She tucked the penlight behind her ear and placed her hand near the wound. I struggled to control my breathing as I felt the heat of her skin permeate my own.
I knew that if I closed my eyes I would be transported back into the past, before the chasm of pain and fire that held me separate from Serena. I would remember the conflagration of her body on top of mine, the tickle of her hair against the lines of my neck as her hands charted incendiary paths across my skin.
"I've gotta spread the wound to try and get to the glass. If I hurt you…"
"You already have." I spoke, immediate, trying to hurt her in order to shut out the chaos inside my own mind.
"I deserve that." Shepard muttered.
I opened my mouth to speak once again, but all I did was gasp as she spread the edges of the wound with her left hand. My hands clenched into fists as she pushed the tweezers into the puncture and began withdrawing small slivers of glass from inside my skin. My throat tightened as nausea churned in my stomach and I looked away, finding that seeing what Shepard was doing made the nausea worse.
In spite of the pain in my body, I could feel how gentle her hands were. No movement was superfluous; every motion was deliberate and precise in order to cause me as little pain as possible. Moments passed in silence as I lived another life behind my closed eyelids. A life where Alchera had not happened, where Shepard and I had been together for the last two years.
I loved her so much, I thought as tears came unbidden to my eyes and slipped down my cheeks without permission. I might even have become an asari attaché to the Alliance. We might have remained aboard the Normandy and received Council sanction to find the Reapers and discover a permanent solution. Goddess…as close as we were in those last days…had Alchera never happened would…would we have a daughter by now?
My mouth turned into a desert and I forced my eyes to open, to remember the life that I was in, that she was in, and that our alliance this time was brief. We would take down the Shadow Broker and go our separate ways. That would be the end of it, and she needed to know. She needed to know that all she was to me was a starship and a gun that I trusted in an upcoming fight. A fight that meant more to me now than anything.
Shepard tossed the tweezers down on the coverlet and reached into the medkit, ripping the packaging off of a large gauze bandage. She pressed down on the wound and my upper lip curled in pain.
"You wanted to talk, as I recall." I broke the silence between us as she focused on stopping the bleeding.
"Now's not the time." Shepard cautioned.
"For what I have to say, I will not need much time." I said.
I cannot open my heart to love again. I can accept that Shepard might not have been as cruel to me, as dismissive of my love, as I first believed. But that cannot erase the time that separated us. That cannot change the asari that I have become. Someday, Shepard, I might be able to forgive you. But it is not this day.
"Then go ahead." Shepard sounded resigned.
"Oh, please do." A new voice broke in. Shepard and I lifted our eyes to the bedroom door.
"Zhira…" my words trailed off.
"Aren't you supposed to be hurt or something?" my friend asked, pushing herself off of the door frame and walking closer. She looked at Shepard. "Blood loss makes a person loopy. So I'd take everything she says with…what do your people say…a grain of salt?"
"That's the right of it." Shepard nodded. "I'd greet you properly but…"
"But you're a little too busy keeping Li from bleeding out." Zhira smile. "I'll forgive you, this time. I'm Zhira T'Aryn. Liara's partner."
"A pleasure to meet you." Shepard said, but I heard the strain in her voice, strain caused by hearing Zhira refer to herself as my partner, I was certain.
Zhira sat down on the bed as Shepard removed the gauze.
"Goddess-dammit, that's nasty." Zhira shook her head, her eyes flashing to mine. "Li, it's not life-threatening, and Shepard's got the bleeding stopped, but it's going to be a bitch to patch up. It's going to hurt."
"There's a sedative here…" Shepard spoke but Zhira withered her with a look.
"No drugs." Zhira ordered, and I saw confusion write itself into Shepard's brow.
However, the human woman asked no questions, instead moving from the chair and allowing Zhira to take over her work. Zhira unpacked her own medical kit, withdrawing a tube of black-market medi-gel, which, while highly illegal and more painful when activated by ultrasound, worked much faster. Zhira, at least, understood how much time was of the essence. She applied the medi-gel and my breathing hitched at the cold discomfort from it.
"Ready?" she asked and I nodded.
She pulled an ultrasound wand from her kit and held it over the wound. With no preamble, she activated it. My side felt as though it caught fire. I felt the tissues of my body pulling together and being fused together with a trillion microscopic welding torches. White stars flashed before my eyes and drowned me in a black, sacred dark.