Liara

Her words washed over me like a wave and in them I could sense an entire world. A future dwelt in those simple phrases…the future that we had been denied, the future that we had both wanted. A dream that had lived between the electricity of our hearts connecting, that had been passion and purpose and victory and everything that we had been denied in a blaze of fire.

"I wanted that too." the confession fell from my lips before I could stop it, so that she could see that, once, our dreams had joined in the gentle place where we had never spoken aloud, but let touch and connection and silence drive us to a pinnacle of glory. "I wanted that with everything that I had within me."

"Past tense." Serena took a step back, examining my language, knowing what it meant…or perhaps deciding for me. "You don't…you don't want those things anymore. At least…not with me."

"I gave you my world." my words whipped across the space dividing us. "I gave you everything that I had and I watched you throw it all away when you demanded that I go to the escape pod!"

"I demanded that you save your life?" Serena asked, her eyes widening with incredulity. "Forgive me for not knowing you had a goddamn death wish, Liara. If I had, then maybe I would have let you freeze, suffocate, and burn to death with me!"

I had forgotten much. And this was a portion of it. I had forgotten how fierce and compelling Serena could be in her anger. I had forgotten the fire that burned behind her eyes, raging, threatening to consume anything that crossed its path. I had forgotten how truly beautiful she could be when wrath took over her countenance and drove her words between her lips.

"It would have been better than what I went through afterward!" I shouted, furious with her anger, feeling that she unjustly felt it towards me.

She. Was. Dead! How dare she believe she have a right to act so, to speak in such a manner, to someone who has suffered as much as I!

"Do you realize what you made me!?" I shouted, forgetting every lesson I had learned, foregoing every piece of logic and wisdom that had been imparted to me. "I fell to shards after you died! I slaughtered a matriarch in the most frigid of blood because she attempted to bring me beneath the rule of law. I was fleeing a murder charge when Feron contacted me and I spent the next days hunting down your corpse!"

"Liara…"

"No!" the volume of my voice shocked even me, but I was determined to give myself to it. "No, Serena Shepard, you asked for this! I went without sleep, without food, and without sanity in order to find you. I made an enemy of the Shadow Broker…this battle, which you claimed to fight for me, was your doing! And after? After I gave you to the racist, xenophobic, supremacist torturers and terrorists that you now work alongside, I tried to claw my way back to sanity! Do you know what I found instead?" I paused, breathing harsh, waiting for her to answer me.

"Hell." she whispered, her eyes filled with an understanding that I did not want to see from her, that I did not wish to believe existed.

"I found that I could not sleep!" I yelled. "I was haunted by the hallucinations of those you killed! My mother followed me, damning me. Avi Rivera would not depart my side, speaking always in that dismissive way of hers, saying that I had failed because you died! At last I could not take the insanity, the sleeplessness, the nightmares that left me sweating and screaming and bleeding tears! I started shoving needles in my veins, Serena! For six months I found myself strung out on so many drugs that I nearly killed myself with them! But even that could not drive away the curse that was loving you! I began burying my sorrow and my memory in the naked bodies of others. I fucked indiscriminately, Serena. I whored myself to the needle, to the dance, to the bodies of strangers, all for the briefest moments of respite from your goddess damned ghost!"

I gathered my breath and looked at her. She looked sick. Her skin was the white of sun-bleached bone, her eyes were no longer shining, no longer silver and metallic. They had dulled to a stormy grey that made her look ill and near the verge of death. She looked weak, pathetic, and not at all like the woman that I had loved.

I glared at her, at last feeling my pain, feeling what I had endured, facing the fear of it and revealing to her every excruciating detail. She had asked to be hurt. She had begged to know. And thus I would tell her. I would tell her of the hatred that burned within me. I could speak it before Zhira all day long, but that would resolve nothing. I could speak it with myself until the end of eternity, but that would solve nothing. Here, in this place, before the woman herself, I could say the words that breathed in my spirit, deep and black and without forgiveness for their utterance.

"Serena Shepard, I hope you're denied the universe." I spat the asari curse, wondering if she understood its meaning.

Her legs folded beneath her and she landed on her knees, her hands limp between her legs, her hair tangled around her face. She looked up at me, her eyes still that flat, faded color that I did not want to admit tormented me somewhere in my soul. Because it made her look dead.

"That's what you want?" she asked, her voice more flat than her eyes…until, in the flat grey, a molten spark ignited and a low, almost insane laughter bubbled up from her chest. "You're a little fucking late for that. I went to the universe, Liara. I went there, and I suffered, and I was denied everything that anyone ever believed would come. I didn't see my parents. I didn't see my sister. I didn't see Avi. Didn't even hear any of their voices in the desperate, sickening, soul-crushing black that ate into every aching, hellish moment I lingered."

Shepard rose to her feet, her eyes rapidly losing their vacant, blank expression. The fire that had kindled behind them burned brighter and I found myself caught in those flames.

"You know what I heard?" Shepard advanced, one step at a time until once more we stood face to face. "I heard you, Liara." her words were a bare whisper, more terrifying than her shout, more devastating than her scream. "In the chilling darkness, I listened to you sobbing, weeping, shrieking in pain. So I'm pretty damn sure, when you slid the needle that's somehow my fault into your veins, that I heard you go quiet. And I'm pretty damn sure that when you fucked away my memory that I heard every moan, whimper, and plea. I heard you scream when you came. So don't throw your goddamn asari curses at me, Liara. I know what it's like to be denied the universe. More than once."

"You've only died once, Serena." I growled.

"Twice." she countered, fierce. "Because you're slaughtering me, right fucking now. Piece by piece, you're lacerating what little soul I have left, and you're proving what I woke up believing."

"Consider it repayment for killing me." I drew myself up, locking my eyes with hers, not flinching. "Consider it my giving you what you asked. I said I should leave and you all but begged me to remain behind and hurt you. So I hope you are enjoying the pain you asked for."

"I damn well am." Serena breathed the words I did not expect to hear. "Because you're making it really fucking easy to go and kill myself. I'm going to go through the Omega Four and I hope to every god and goddess that I don't come back."

No! Deep in my soul, the single word, the ultimate protestation, rang out and I felt stunned by my own, unexpected resistance. No, Serena Shepard, you…you cannot think that way! You are needed in this galaxy…perhaps no longer needed by me, but that does not mean there is not a galaxy of love and promise and hope awaiting you.

"You've been given a new life and you'd throw it away because I'm not falling into your arms?" I asked, incredulous and furious with her for being so…so…petty.

"Have I been given a new life?" Shepard asked, breath rushing from her lungs, nostrils flaring with the heavy exhalation.

She turned away from me, slow, burdened, as if in excruciating pain. Her arms crossed in front of her, hands grasping the hem of her shirt. She pulled it upwards and a flash of memory burst upon my sight…

…her back, a solid mess of scar tissue, a reminder of brokenness. Thick black letters tattooed between her shoulders, begging Avi's saint to pray for her. Saint Jude…patron of lost causes. Running my fingers over the scars left by the attack on Mindoir, scars left by the time she and Avi were taken prisoner by batarian slavers, scars left from the horrific attack on Akuze. A woman made of scars and injuries, real and powerful and wearing the proof of her devotion and dedication to her dream and…

I looked at Serena, at the smooth expanse of new skin. Gone were the inked letters, the patchwork skin, the shiny scar tissue that had made her beg…made her beg me not to turn my eyes and my back in disgust. She had prayed for me to keep touching her and now…now she stood, a perfect body, a landscape of pure, unmarred skin. I saw the bandage on her back, the sole thing that marred it.

She turned to face me, all firm muscle and perfect skin. The life she had lived, the horrors she endured, were no longer written upon her. To any other eyes, to eyes like those of Miranda Lawson, Serena Shepard would be a perfect specimen of the best humanity had to offer. But to me, she looked broken, shattered, not herself…not whole.

Her eyes glittered, shining, sundered and scarified.

"Am I real, Liara?" she asked, her words echoing through the chasm of my soul as if we stood in the temple of Athame, and I remembered Serena's peace suffusing me, entering me, holding me tight against the maelstrom of the galaxy.

The strength with which she alone could hold me. How her hand and her tongue moving inside of me anchored me in the world and reality. Why are we speaking in anger? Why are we broken, taking the jagged edges of ourselves and using them to wound each other? Once we loved, once we desired, once we were whole…once we were whole…scarred, tattered, and bloodstained…but more than we are now.

"I woke up from death and I whispered your name." Serena breathed, the heat of her anger still present, a tight coiled fury prepared to strike and envenomate. "I woke inside a body that was not mine. I remembered everything. I remembered the pain of Mindoir, Elizabeth's torn and ruptured body, my mother's blood dripping into my hair. I remembered holding Avi's hand as she bled out, whispering marriage vows as thresher maw acid ate me alive. But when I looked at myself, the proof of those moments had vanished. I had been remade, and still, they try to remake me. Still, they attempt to take what I am and shape it into something new and different and so I traversed the galaxy, doing as they asked, performing in my art, taking lives and fighting for something as a ruptured facsimile of myself."

She breathed deep and I saw the flutter across her skin, her breasts flushing with the heat of her body. Her throat tightened, the muscles of her neck standing out in stark prominence as she attempted to rein in the force of nature that she was.

"I still have the nightmares." Serena confessed. "I still dream of Akuze, Mindoir, and the countless times I nearly died. The times I nearly lost you. The time I did lose you. And I wake up…I wake up, reaching for the scars that proved I survived, that proved that I struggled and suffered through and they're not there. I'm losing my mind, Liara. I'm losing who I am, because I don't have proof of what once was reality and until that day…until the day that I saw you again, when I saw the entirety of my future inside the blue of your eyes, I didn't believe I was real. I didn't believe it until I heard your voice, when your lips touched my cheek and my heart kicked in my chest like the explosion of a dying star. Then, I knew myself. I knew myself because the heart that beats in my chest has never ceased to love and there you were…the sum of the newborn dream that we conceived before we reached Ilos. You made me real, Liara."

Her words pierced through the armor of my heart and something shattered in me. The pain that I had stored in my soul burst out from its chasm and invaded me, leaving me with the lingering sorrow of long-borne grief. Never healed, but easier to bear. Never ending, but lighter to carry. Never gone, but becoming a companion instead of an enemy.

I could see the storms crackling in her eyes like the perpetual lightning storms above Hagalaz. I stood in the eye of the storm, the sole thing able to anchor the madwoman and magician that called herself Serena Shepard. I stood in the eye of the storm, the one thing connecting her to a reality that no one should have to know and claim as their own…but it was all she had. All she had to remind herself that the demons that tormented her at night had been slain. That she had done, conquered, and remained kind in a world that did nothing but attempt to embitter her. I stood on the precipice of deciding the fate of her world. I could turn. I could leave. I could throw a half-truth at her and send her into the darkest heart of the galaxy to once again give her life for it.

I could tell her that I did not love her. But it would be a lie.

"I'll give anything I have to stay real." Serena promised, moving a step closer, half-naked, glorious, and destroyed. "I will do anything, say anything, be anything if only you will tell me what you want." her words were strained, her voice the personification of anguish. She reached out with empty hands, her eyes aflame, aglow, sparkling with torment and torture and perfect love…perfect love, bettered by its flaws and mistakes and questioned choices.

"What do you want from me, Liara?" she asked.

I took a step back, feeling the pressure of this moment upon me, the moment that could break us or save us. The moment wherein I could damn her and myself. The moment in which I called into question the entirety of the life I had lived after she had died. The silent screams into the void that I had not uttered with words and lips but with spirit and soul. And I found, in that depth and sweet oblivion, an anchor, a knowledge, a demand and a desire. And in it I found my grief and my unsated longing and my belief and my murdered love.

"I need…" my voice cracked. "I need…" quavered and splintered. "I need…" a heaving, wretched sob tore from my body as I gazed upon the tragedy and triumph that was the woman standing before me, the lover of my heart and mender of my spirit. Anguish and agony poured from my lips as I shouted my one demand and plea.

"I need to know you're always coming back!"