Liara

I rested in a vacant bunk that Shepard's yeoman, Kelly, had shown me to. Several hours had gone by, but I knew we were still quite a distance from Hagalaz. I recalled that there were those that I knew on board this ship. Those I had once called friends. I could have seen them, but my talk with Shepard had put a sour, bitter taste in my mouth and I did not have the strength or patience to attempt to endure more of…more of what I had undergone earlier.

Torture. Absolute torture. I closed my eyes and sighed. Torture because…because I looked at her and in my mind and thoughts spoke one thing, and in another part of me, my heart, I remembered that once we loved. Once we shared our bodies and our minds and once it was beautiful and all that I dreamed in the galaxy. How is it, when I see the silver eyes that once held my soul, that I forget such a thing? How is it that I only remember that I loved her when we are apart?

The door slid open. I ignored it, knowing that there would be crew members coming and going at all hours. This time, however, I heard a lowly given order and the steps of many exiting the room. The door closed and I heard the scrape of a chair.

"Hey." I heard the last voice that I wanted to hear. "Open your eyes, Liara. I need to talk to you."

My eyes snapped open and I sat up in the bunk, glaring into the usually warm, sparking eyes of Jeff Moreau. But they held none of their typical warmth as they looked at me. They were cold, accusatory, and I recognized the anger burning behind his gaze. It was the same anger that burned in mine.

"What the fuck did you say to her?" Joker asked without preamble.

"I do not know what you are talking about."

"Don't play that coy clueless thing with me, Liara, not right now." He said. "I just saw the strongest woman I know looking like a mangled puppy and I have a pretty good idea of what did that to her. Because the crew of this ship, they can piss her off, they can give her a case of the grumps, but none of them can really hurt her. That's your job, isn't it?"

I rose to my feet. "I do not need a moral lecture, least of all from you, Jeff Moreau! You are the one that got her killed!"

Joker extended his hand, pointing at me, and I gasped as I saw the precise, delicate scars covering his skin.

"Sit down." He ordered. "I don't want to talk with you and I don't want to talk at you. I am going to talk to you, and I'm not going to take no for an answer."

"You have no right…"

"I think I'm the only one who does, Liara." Joker interrupted, and his eyes were made of tungsten and his tone so assured that I found myself sinking back down onto the bunk.

"Fine then." I assented, needing to have at least some say in this conversation…or confrontation…I was not sure which.

"You blame her, don't you?" Joker asked, surprising me, because though he phrased it as a question, I could sense that he knew the truth behind his inquiry. "You think she did what she did on purpose. That she willingly left you behind?"

"You and I both know that she did." I scoffed at him. "And we both know why."

You were too stubborn to leave your post. You were too idiotic, believing that you could save a destroyed ship. You are the reason that she left my side; that she ran away from safety and into the fray! How dare you think to question my thoughts when we are the sole two who know the reality of them!?

"That's where you're wrong." Joker corrected me, blunt, as was his way. "You don't really know a lot about human history, and that's forgivable, but you hurting the woman I've served under for years, that's not. There's a protocol, bred into us from our history, not taught to us by the Alliance, not given to us by our parents, but something ingrained in our DNA. The captain of a ship always goes down with it, Liara. It's been that way since we put boats on water and ships in the sky. Shepard didn't abandon you to save my sorry ass. She did what we've been taught and trained to do since we were born. Take responsibility. Take action. Do the right thing. If you're in a position of authority, you do what you have to do to make sure everyone under your command gets out okay. Because the people you lead depend on you."

"I depended on her." I scorned him with my eyes and words.

"So did everyone else." Joker replied. "Yeah, she loved you. That's why she saved you. That's why she made you run, even when she knew you would have gone with her to help me. She wasn't abandoning you, she was doing her duty. She was being a soldier and a ship's captain."

"The galaxy doesn't need more dead soldiers!" I snapped. "It needed Shepard alive! I needed Shepard alive!"

I fell silent, breathing hard, shocked as I watched the best-humored human I know begin to weep. Two tears tracked down his face.

"I know." His voice rasped and he extended his scarred hand to me. "She…she had to drag me out of the flight deck." His voice took on the hollow tone of horror, a horror I knew all too well. "I struggled at first, because I was stupid and I still thought I could save the ship. She broke three of my ribs hauling me out of there, and carried me through fire and hell to the last escape shuttle."

Do not tell me of her heroism! I wanted to scream, but my heart trembled in my chest, forbidding me speech. Do not tell me things that I am not yet ready to…goddess! What is wrong with me!? I loved her! Why am I turning her into my enemy? Why am I hardening my heart against her when I should be opening it? What is broken in my soul?

"She set me on my feet." Joker continued speaking, recounting the possible worst day of his life…and the worst day of mine. "She was about to follow me when…when the explosion happened. The entire ship shifted; it blew her feet off the ground. She was floating and I reached out, one hand on the door, one hand reaching for her. She grabbed my hand and I felt the bones crack, but I was not going to let her die. I was going to hold on, no matter what." I saw his frame shudder at the memory.

"Joker…"

"There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand." He cut me off, his voice haunted and chilling, a different picture of the man I had once known. "We held onto each other so tightly that all twenty-seven of them shattered. Not broke…shattered. Even in the tilting of the ship, I could feel her tense up and somehow I…I realized that she knew she was hurting me. Then another explosion rocked the ship and I…" tears streamed down his face now, rivers of self-recrimination and regret. "…I couldn't hold on to her." He confessed. "I watched her fly back, out into space and then…then I passed out from the pain. Briefly but…but there was nothing I could do."

He cradled his scarred hand in his other, tracing the thick, wide lines of repaired tissue with his fingers. "It took seven surgeries and almost a month in a restructuring device to fix this thing." He whispered.

"Why are you telling me this?" I spoke at last. "What purpose do you think this will serve, Jeff?"

"Because you hurt her, Liara." Joker frowned. "You hurt the woman who cheated death, and that shouldn't be possible. So I thought I'd try to give you some perspective, because I'm pretty sure everyone got hit hard that day, but you and I took it the worst."

Biotic energy wisped around my hands as I clutched the blanket beneath me, knotting the material and burning it with the darkness flowering around my fingers.

"You have no idea how much I suffered after that day." I growled. "You say that I lack knowledge of humans and their history, but I know your species' definition of hell and I know that I have been through it and through worse!"

"I know that rock bottom." Joker stressed his words, pressing his scarred hand to his chest, indicating his mind and his greatest point of suffering. "Chakwas could only do a quick fix on my hand. I had to go to the Systems Alliance Hospital on Arcturus Station. Since it was my hand, it was a lot of outpatient shit. And you know what happened, Liara? I dreamed every night about letting her go. I heard my bones snap and woke up every night sweating and screaming because it hurt so goddamn bad. So I started drinking." He told me, and the words I wanted to say, the interruption I had prepared, vanished from my thoughts. "I'd hook up every night with some of my academy buddies who were on the Station, and we'd get blitzed. I didn't talk to them about what happened to Shep. I didn't talk to anyone about it."

"And here you are, with your hand repaired, still piloting a ship. Burying your sorrows with friends and alcohol is hardly…"

"I'm still piloting a ship." Joker killed my sentences once again. "A Cerberus ship if you haven't noticed, and I'm pretty sure you have. And if you want to know why, it's because I got to be such a goddamn worthless piece of shit that the Alliance grounded me and put me on a Date of Separation rollback roster. Before I knew it, I was out of the Alliance and stuck on the ground and I, like you, was in hell. Then Cerberus approached me with an offer." He spread his hands and gestured to the ship. "With this. An upgraded Normandy. And with Shepard at the helm. I jumped at the chance."

"So you lost something and then had it returned, even better." The biotic energy coiling around my hands died and I shrugged my shoulders. "Are you looking for empathy, Joker, because I have very little to offer you."

"That's not what I'm looking for." He shook his head and stood up. "For two years, I thought I was the one that killed her. I drank to forget that I was trapped in a body that was so fucked up that I couldn't pull my commander to safety. I'd lost my rank, I'd fucked my rep, and damn near drank myself cirrhotic. So I'm on board the Normandy, doing all the tests before she went on her virgin flight…when a ghost walked through the doors. I stood up and I saluted like we were both still military. I mean, I had doubts; I didn't think she'd be Shepard. I thought she was a Cerberus clone or some shit. But instead of returning my salute, she hugged me, Liara."

"That sounds…like something she might have done." I hazarded.

He would have been a familiar face, a comfort, someone from the life before…and an assurance that her last action had not been in vain. That she had saved him.

"Yeah." He nodded and swallowed. "She hugged me and she whispered, 'Don't you dare blame yourself, Joker. It's not your fault, okay, soldier? It's not your fucking fault'." Joker wiped his tears away. "That's the woman she is, Liara. Most anyone else who'd been through that shit would have shot me dead the moment they saw me but…but not Shepard. That's the woman you hurt, okay? She doesn't deserve it."

"You have the gall," this time I did rise from my seat, "to tell me that Shepard does not deserve any sort of pain!? That she does not at least owe me an explanation besides duty, honor, and what soldiers do!? She needs to answer for what she did, Joker! She left me alone in the galaxy in order to save you! You, who could never offer the galaxy what she did! Your idiocy and your stubbornness took her from me and both of you deserve to be hurt!"

"Hold your horses there, Blue." Joker stood up and we faced each other eye to eye. "Shepard didn't leave you alone in the galaxy. We were all picked up by that STG ship. Do you really think that we would've kicked you out in the cold? You honestly think that Karin Chawas, Ashley Williams, me, Renee' Llewellyn, Garrus, Tali, and Wrex wouldn't have grieved with you and helped you out? You left us. You made you be alone. Don't blame Shep for your shit, Liara. She left you with friends and you abandoned us!"

"Because you wouldn't have grieved her as she deserved!" I shouted, remembering awakening on the salarian STG ship, hearing again that it had not been a nightmare, that Shepard had died. "I remember Virmire, Joker! No one grieved Kaidan Alenko for more than a day and I couldn't bear that same blasé, 'it happens to soldiers in the line of duty' mantra that is all your Alliance has to offer those who suffer!"

A blur of movement caught my vision, then pain exploded across my cheek and my head snapped to the side. I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted blood. My eyes watered and I glared at Joker. The pilot cradled his hand against his chest, and I knew that he had broken something in order to hit me.

"I've always had issues with hitting women." He spoke between pain-clenched teeth. "But hitting a stupid, heartless bitch felt pretty good. You left us because you thought we wouldn't cry enough, and now you blame Shepard for leaving you alone!?" he shook his head and made a disgusted noise. "You had friends, Liara." He said. "You had damn good friends. And you chose to be afraid and then angry instead. I thought I could help you out, but you won't see reason, will you?"

I could not say anything, for my cheek still burned and his words were piercing me like a hundred thousand microscopic needles, burrowing beneath my skin and making me itch.

"Well fuck it then." Joker muttered. He walked away, hissing in pain every now and again. The door opened and he looked at me one last time. "Knowing what you think of us, I'm glad you hurt her, now. I really hope she'll fall out of love with you. Because you proved to me just now that you're incapable of loving a soldier, and she doesn't know how to be anything else."

"There are two sides to this story, Joker!" I snapped.

"There's a human saying, Blue." Joker shook his head. "There's three sides to every story…yours, hers, and the truth."

The pilot left the room and I found that I was shaking. I knew I trembled with anger…but also with doubt. It had been two years…two years and the memories had faded, leaving mostly the recollection of the hurt…but the truth, even the truth I had made for myself, had been skewed by time, pain, and drugs.

I pressed my fingers along my cheekbone, feeling the dull throb from what would certainly be a bruise. I sat down, slow, and reclined back in my bunk, staring at the wall, willing myself to remember, not just how I had felt…but the truth of what had happened. It was selfish to recall it, but I needed to do so. I needed to do so, not to see where I might have erred…

…but to confirm that I had been right.