One: Aethyta

Aethyta Argyris, matriarch of the asari, spy, saboteur, inadvertent hero of the Citadel and the best damned bartender this side of the galactic core watched as her youngest daughter worked the controls of the stasis pod and tried to sort out exactly what she, herself, was feeling. Anger? Yes. Hell yes. Pissed off didn't even begin to cover it. It had taken all of her not-inconsiderable willpower to stop herself from smacking the kid so hard that she'd have thought Aethyta was Kurinth herself, descended from the heavens to kick the blue from her ass. The nerve, the goddess-damned nerveof her, sitting on a secret like that, lying to her face about it. Two days later and she was still simmering.

And, damn it, she was still plenty angry with the kid's mother too. Forgiveness had come one hell of a lot easier when she'd thought Benezia dead. 'Time heals', 'cherish the moments together' and all of that varrenshit. The unexpected revelation of Benezia's survival and further realisation that she was going to see her former bondmate again had brought a lot of things she'd thought long-buried back to the surface, few of them pleasant. Anger, resentment, hurt, dread-

Dread?

"Are you sure that this is a good idea?" she said, giving voice to the last thought. "I mean, after what happened..."

"Honestly?" The kid paused momentarily in her work to look up and over at her. Her good eye sparkled in the dim lights of the freighter's cramped cargo bay. "No. I'm not. She made a mistake. A big one. And we don't really know anything about the long-term effects of indoctrination." Liara sighed and laid her hand gently atop the stasis pod, before returning to her work. "But Shepard believes in second chances. So do I."

Aethyta couldn't quite help the dismissive snort that escaped her.

"You're about the only ones."

"I know. And that's why I need you. I need someone who knows that it was Saren and Sovereign who did those horrible things, not her."

And that, right there, was why, despite her anger at the pair of them and everything else besides, she'd ultimately agreed to go along with this harebrained scheme. At least for a little while. Nezzie was a victim here. She'd done a stupid, if well-intentioned thing and gotten herself in over her head with no-one standing by to pull her back out again if it went tits up. Which, of course, it had. But Benezia, at the time, had no way of knowing what Sovereign truly was or was capable of. Hell, the handful of people who'd even been aware of its existence back then had thought that it was just some sort of overgrown dreadnought, and Saren just a Spectre a little more off kilter than most of that breed, wanting to use geth to rule the galaxy.

Geth. Huh. If only it had actually been geth. Geth would have been a fucking cakewalk compared to the Reapers, what with their twisted monsters and mind control.

She sighed and moved over for a better look at the pod, her footsteps swallowed up by the crates and containers of the supply stockpile they'd spent the day shifting here from the bunker. The pod was an older model, medical, the sort used by a better class of merc companies to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be properly seen to. Compact, with few bells and whistles aside from the enhanced power supply, but all the more robust because of it. The scratched windows on this one had fogged over during the transfer from the tiny bunker on Gilsame to the ship, rendering Benezia little more than a pale blue blur beneath them. Aethyta wiped her hand across one cloudy panel; it came away damp, with a slight squeaking noise.

"You never gave me a straight answer for why you did it."

The kid went still for a long moment, hands motionless at the controls. The uneven lighting in the bay cast dark shadows across her face as she bowed her head.

"The last shot was mine," she said, finally, quietly.

Oh. Crap. That little detail hadn't been in the official report, or the unofficial one either. She knew from personal experience that losing your parents at such a young age could fuck you up pretty good for a few decades, but shooting, killing your own mother - it was the kind of thing that could scar you for life. A little bit of her anger towards the girl drained away.

A little bit.

"I didn't mean that," she replied awkwardly, feeling like the mother of all heels, but pressed on anyway. "I can understand saving her. She's your mother. But why keep it a secret?"

Liara shrugged, a subdued movement, and returned once to work once more.

"At first we thought we might be able to, I don't know, figure out exactly what had happened to her. How to help her break free permanently and stop it from happening to other people. But nobody believed us about the Reapers, even after they attacked the Citadel. An unimaginable invasion fleet waiting in dark space? Mind control? It all sounded so... fantastic." She shook her head slightly. "With Saren dead, the Council would have used her as a scapegoat. More than they did anyway. She would have been publicly tried as traitor and imprisoned. Maybe even executed. And she still would have been under Reaper control throughout. I... I couldn't do that to her."

The kid finished the last of the diagnostics and looked back up at her.

"Everything's green," she said. Her voice held and odd mixture of satisfaction and concern. "Are you ready?"

"Well," Aethyta sighed and cracked her knuckles, "I guess I'd better be."