A/N: okay so part of this particular chapter may be distressing because it involves a parents death, so if you don't want to read it, skip the second lot of italics. The first is fine though.

Terry Shepard strapped his young daughter into the back seat of the car, making sure her seat belt was secure before going to sit in the front seat.

Sky cars were new to humans, and came about after the end of the first contact war the previous year, but Terry preferred the old fashioned 4 wheel on-the-ground cars, feeling they were better for his daughters safety.

"Where are we going today, Hayley?"

"To the toy store!" Hayley large grin on her face that revealed a gap in her front teeth, and Terry smiled back at his daughters reflection in the rear view mirror before drawing his attention to starting the car.

"She isn't lying, she really is" Liara looked at Hayley, but instantly looked towards the ground when she saw anger begin to twist into the human woman's face.

"And you never told me?!" The Commander yelled

"I did not know up until a few days ago" Liara was unable to bring her voice up to more than a mutter, as she felt as though she had betrayed her love, "I never wanted to invade your privacy, so I never checked..."

"Oh? Well what happened to you being a 'very good information broker'?" Hayley was blind with fury to the point she didn't notice Liara had started to cry. Hannah and Tom just stood back and smiled as the Commander broke her beloved girlfriend. "You never took long to go into my background before, so why would you stop?"

"Shepard...I'm-"

"Get out Liara!" Hayley glared at the other two Shepard's in the room "and you can leave too!"

Tom chuckled slightly as he and his mother turned to leave the room after Liara, who covered her face to hide her tears as she ran down the corridor to get out the hospital.

Hayley ran her left hand through her hair and fought back her own tears that developed due to anger but threatened to fall due to the realisation of her actions. She had never yelled at Liara like that before and it was already clear that she regretted shouting at her like that. All Shepard did to deal with what she had done was roll over and cry herself to sleep for the first time since the asari was cold to her when she met her again on Illium.

The traffic reached out for about a mile, and Terry rested his head on the steering wheel and sighed, while Hayley sat in the back seat, pressing her face against the window and looking at the sky cars that flew past 25 ft from the ground.

"I want one" The young girl pointed up at the sky cars and Terry followed her finger.

"Maybe when you're older, sweetie" he smiled and tried to ignore the realisation that when his daughter learned to drive, she would be driving one of those flying death traps. Ever since she had been born 4 years ago, the idea of anything bad happening to Hayley made Terry lose the will to live.

When Terry turned to look forward again, he noticed a small flickering light above him. Looking up he saw a small fire that flared up one the part of the sky car that housed the engine, before the car itself came hurtling towards the ground, impacting just short of the front Shepard's car.

The explosion happened quickly, so fast that Hayley's young mind didn't process the loud bang and bright flash until a couple seconds after it was over..

"Daddy?" Hayley whispered, noticing her father slumped over in the front seat, covered in burns and cuts, completely still, "wake up".

"There's a kid over here! Get her out!" The voice of a middle aged woman came close to Hayley, who was still focusing entirely on her father, unaware of her own injuries.

"Da-no!" The small redhead fought to keep herself in the car as the woman desperately tried to pull her out, "daddy!" . She reached forward and grabbed her dad's arm, but the blood caused her to lose her grip and the woman finally managed to pull her out.

"Dad!" Hayley sat up straight in her hospital bed, covered in a thin film of cold sweat. It only took a couple seconds for her back and ribs to feel like they were on fire, at which point she leaned back and took up her normal half reclined position. She inhaled and exhaled deeply while pinching the bridge of her nose, a tactic she taught herself back when she joined the tenth street reds, to help her deal with massive emotional stress.

She brought her hand up and ran it over part of her face, feeling for the scar that had long since vanished after Cerberus brought her back from the dead, thanks to Miranda Lawson and the Lazarus Project. Although everyone on the Normandy assumed it was due to her efforts on Elysium, she knew it had come from shrapnel hitting her after the sky car exploded. What scars she had from Elysium used to be on her torso anyway, one of which went straight through the tattoo she got when she was in the Tenth Street Reds, which she was thankful for.

Hayley had not dreamt about her fathers death for years, but until she was 15, it was a recurring nightmare for her.

When she was 5, her adoptive parents took her to a doctor, after realising she still screamed at night for her dad, and how she often talked about the car accident. She was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder but her 'parents' refused to help her, and let her carry on with her endless psychological suffering. It stopped around the time she became addicted to Hallix and Red Sand (Strictly speaking, Hayley is a biotic, but her abilities were deemed to weak to use, as she couldn't even move tissue paper with the tester implant), and even when she stopped, she had joined the Alliance Navy and that always kept her focused, and seemed to stop the recurring nightmares, but now the war is over, she was terrified that she would relapse.

She decided to not sleep again that night.

A/N: bit of a sad chapter, sucks for christmas...

Anyway, Merry Christmas/Happy [insert holiday here]/Happy Thursday! Thanks for sticking with this so far, and I hope you all have a fantastic christmas (or whatever today is for you) and a wonderful new year :)