Two: Benezia

"You know, for someone so smart, you always could be so damned stupid. What the blue hell were you thinking?"

It took a few seconds for Benezia to open her eyes and focus on the figure seated at the end of her bed, straddling a chair backwards, watching her impassively. It took several more to put a name to the face.

"Aethy..?" she said, startled when her voice came out as little more than a rusty whisper. Goddess, she felt absolutely dreadful. She ached everywhere, her side and stomach worst of all. Her mouth was like sand, her eyes and throat raw and scratchy with each slow blink and breath. All strength seemed to have left her limbs. And her head. Goddess, her head.

"You remember who I am. Well, that's a start, I guess. Do you know who you are?"

"Of course," she rasped, puzzled by such an odd question, especially coming from Aethyta. And... yes, that was wrong, too. What was Aethy doing here? They weren't... They hadn't... "I am Benezia T'Soni, Matriarch of the asari and..." Tool, servant, plaything a dark, unctuous voice within her supplied. Her head started to pound with force. The room swam, nausea rising in her stomach. "...and..."

Aethyta frowned.

"Hmmph. Do you know how you got here then?"

"I..." Her shaking hand flew unconsciously to her temple as she struggled to pierce the fog roiling inside her mind. The room was unfamiliar. Barely furnished and small, cramped with just two occupants, the square metal walls suggested 'ship', and not one of asari design. How had she gotten here? She could remember... "I... was on Noveria. The rachni queen. I... needed to find the Mu relay. There was a battle. I was trying to..." Her hand dropped as the memory reached its conclusion. "Goddess, Liara! She was-"

Aethyta's expression shifted from cool distance into something approaching compassion.

"Relax - the kid's fine. Well, maybe not one hundred per cent fine, but she's alive, anyway, and that's more than most can say. She'll be here in a bit."

"She... knows?"

She'd always meant to tell Liara about Aethyta, but had never been able to find the right words when Liara was younger. Eventually, to Benezia's guilty relief, the girl had stopped asking. And then, later, when she'd thought Liara might be old enough to understand something of love in all of its aching contradictions, they'd fought, all but stopped speaking. Liara had enacted her quiet rebellion, as all maidens must eventually distance themselves from their mothers, and she had reacted... badly. It was obvious with hindsight, and some part of her had even realised it at the time, but, despite all her years, despite all her supposed 'wisdom', she had been hurt by Liara's desire to leave her, and terrified by the prospect of her shy Little Wing going out into the dangerous galaxy on her own. Liara was her only daughter. She would always want to hold her close, keep her safe.

Her only daughter.

She had tried to kill her only daughter.

"Yeah, she knows," Aethyta was saying. "She's a smart kid. But that's not the issue here. Look, we know that the Reap- that Sovereign was fucking with your head."

The name sent a finger of dread and revulsion down her spine. Sovereign. Saren's ship. But not just a ship, something she'd discovered far too late. So many dead, so many used, herself among them.

Her pride. Her blindness. Her fault.

"We know that you fought him too. Broke free, even. But we need to know what the damage is. If you can be trusted again. We don't have a lot of experience in dealing with people who survive indoctrination to the level you had it. Most of 'em died in the war, or offed themselves straight after."

"War?" The word cut through her rising revulsion at herself. She'd been trying to prevent a war. Somehow. That's why she'd gone along with Saren. Another finger of disgust shivered its way down her spine. "What war?"

Aethyta sighed, heavily, suddenly looking all of her thousand-odd years.

"It only ended a couple of weeks ago so it doesn't have a proper name yet. But the long and short of it is Sovereign's buddies showed up and the whole galaxy went to hell. I've never seen anything like it." She shook her head slowly, almost as if in awe. "Conservative estimate is we've lost two thirds of the galactic population. The batarians are pretty much done for as a species and we might not have enough elcor left for a viable population either. And, well, our people are only a bit better off. Some of the smaller colony worlds seem to have come through ok, but Thessia..."

Benezia stared at her in open-mouthed horror. But the shock of Aethyta's words was enough to finally kick her brain into some semblance of action. She could remember being shot on Noveria, quite clearly. The pain of it had been enough to break Saren's hold on her again. She'd felt herself bleeding out, sliding down towards darkness, and had begged them to let her pass on before the monster claimed her once more. But then Liara had been at her side, begging her to stay while two armoured figures worked with clumsy haste to slather her wounds with medigel...

A war of the scale Aethyta was talking about would take time. Years. Time enough for Liara to find and meet her other parent. But when Benezia touched her side, now, above the bullet wound, the skin was still raw and tender. If she'd been unconscious, in a coma over the intervening period, she would have healed.

"How long have I been in stasis?"

"Four years. Or there abouts. But don't think about that now. There's going to be a lot to take in. You'll need to work up to it slowly."

"Four years?" Her voice, to her own ears, was incredulous. Two-thirds of the galaxy, gone in just four years? That seemed hardly time enough for a war of that scale. She'd seen visions of the devastation that Sovereign and the monsters had caused before, but even so...

She blinked, and one of the visions Saren had gifted to her flitted behind her eyes.

Out in the darkness of intergalactic space, the great fleet sat, each ship a nation unto itself, alive and malevolent and unstoppable. One by one they woke; one by one suns darkened, worlds burned, races died.

But there was a way for them all to survive this cycle. Saren had found it. He'd shown her: surrender. Pride was not worth the price.

"And Saren?" she heard herself ask.

"Dead. You actually have our girl to thank for that." Aethyta smiled, some of the age dropping away from her face again. "You did a good job with her."

"I can only agree, really," a new voice chimed in as the door slid open, a voice she would know anywhere. Soft, breathy, slightly hesitant...

Liara.

There was a lengthy pause, the three of them frozen in tableau.

"I'll leave you two to it," Aethyta eventually said, with a tact most would be startled to learn that she possessed. "I bet you've got a bit to talk about."

Benezia watched silently as her daughter carefully maneuvered her way into the small room and past Aethyta, a laden tray clasped in both hands and a datapad tucked under one arm. She looked, to a mother's eye... different. Older. More than four years would suggest. Gone were the soft, subdued contours of youth, replaced by the full figured body of a maiden in her prime. Darker skin. Better posture. New, hard muscle beneath... armour? She'd taken it for a new work uniform at first, but up close it was clearly a ballistics weave with solid ceramic plating, well-used, well-fitted and likely custom-made.

And her face... Goddess, her face.

Almost the entire right side of her daughter's face was a mess of raw scar tissue, bisected by a thin, diagonal band of untouched skin across her cheek. Below the band and across the line of her cheekbone to her nose, the skin was puckered and pitted, drawn tight enough to pull the corner of her mouth up slightly. The same scarring continued under her jawline and down the front and to one side of her neck. Worse, though, was the area around her eye, a single, livid, indigo burn extended halfway up her forehead. She wore a simple fabric patch, white, over the eye.

"She's not what I expected," Liara said, watching the door close behind Aethyta.

"What did you expect?" she heard herself ask. Her voice was remarkably level.

"Someone more like you, I suppose." Liara shrugged slightly and turned back to lay the tray down carefully on the small shelf beside the bed. She then sat upon the edge of the bed itself, rather than seeking out the so-recently vacated chair. "Hello, Mother."

When their eyes met for the first time, Benezia suddenly felt the full weight of her shame and looked away.

Her daughter, her dearest Little Wing. She had tried her best to kill her. It had seemed the only logical course of action at the time. Worse, far worse: a part of her could still understand that logic, feel the echo of frustration at the Spectre's continued interference in their plans and the rage that the human thought her weak enough to be swayed by ties of blood.

"Mother, please."

When Benezia allowed herself to look back up again, there were tears in her daughter's remaining eye as she spoke the words.

"Liara..." her throat was suddenly tight, tears blurring her own vision. "Goddess, what happened..? I didn't-"

Her trembling hand drifted up of its own accord to cup a scarred, mangled cheek, fingertips brushing the eyepatch. What little remained of Benezia's heart broke when Liara's right hand came up to cover hers, and she realised that the little finger of it was gone, along with the tips of the next two, scarring to match her face and neck down the back of her hand until her skin disappeared beneath a suspiciously new section of armour.

"No. This was Harbinger's work. The burns will heal eventually, and there are prosthetics these days that are even better than the real thing. In the meantime, it will certainly teach me not to wear a proper helmet," Liara said with a tight smile that only fully moved one side of her face, and drew their hands away. "I've missed you."

"And I you," she replied, letting the tears fall. How close had they come to losing each other? "Liara, I-"

"Later, Mother," her daughter interrupted gently, squeezing her hand. "How are you feeling? Honestly?"

How was she feeling? Oh, what a question to ask...

"Thirsty," she supplied, deliberately focusing on the physical. "Weak."

"Any pain?"

"Some. My side." She tried to sit and winced, and then Liara's arms were there, helping her up. "My chest."

"I am afraid that we had to put you into stasis straight out of surgery. We couldn't risk you waking up of your own accord. You were shot three times. The areas around the wounds will be tender for a few more days," Liara said apologetically, arranging the pillows behind her so she could settle back. The next question from her, though, when it came, came sharp, and without any apology whatsoever:

"And how is your head?"

"My... head?" The pain was excruciating, flaring with each slight movement of her body. "There is some discomfort."

She felt her gaze drop, a little, at the half-lie. Her daughter had always had a good heart; if she knew the extent of the pain, she would certainly want to help alleviate it. But a headache was such a little punishment for all that she had done and tried to do, and Benezia would seek no relief from it. She deserved something for living when so many others had not.

"Mother, look at me," Liara demanded. Benezia was startled enough by the unexpected note of command in her voice that she obeyed all but instantly; their eyes, the same shade of blue, locked.

"What happened with Saren was not your fault," her daughter said firmly. "You had no way of knowing what Sovereign really was and what it was capable of. Indoctrination is... insidious. Most people fell completely under its sway without even realising it. But you recognised it. You fought it with every fibre of your being. And I am... proud of you for doing so."

Proud? How could Liara be proud of her? She had done terrible things. Unspeakable things. She had led her followers to the slaughter. She'd killed. She had forcibly violated the minds of others. She had worked against her people. She had tried to kill her own daughter.

Her stomach churned, bile rising in her throat. There was too much to forgive for any sort of pride in her.

"But, even with the Reapers gone," Liara continued, apparently heedless of her inner turmoil, "we can't be sure that you're completely free of their influence yet. We don't know enough about how indoctrination works, and what the long-term effects on the survivors are. If we are going to get through this, you must be completely open with me. And Aethyta. We must know if you have headaches, see visions, hear humming or voices, or feel the urge to do odd things."

The headaches had been the first overt sign of their downfall. Dear little Umbri, the youngest of her entourage, had been struck down by debilitating pains in her head that lasted for days. The rest had followed, in ones and twos, over the next few months, herself last of all. She remembered, at the outset, being concerned by the spate of sudden illness. She'd even considered using it as an excuse to abandon her mission and leave that horrible ship and its dangerous master behind, but had shrugged the feeling off once the pains had proven only temporary. And besides, all of the afflicted had been so certain of the importance of their mission, insistent on staying...

But had that been her or Saren who had decided that they should stay? Had she unwittingly doomed them all in her arrogance, or had she already been under the sway of the monster, even then? Either way, they were all dead now, her followers. She had killed some of them personally, taken by fits of rage and nihilism. The lives of the others may as well have been taken by her hand as well.

"It was not your fault," Liara repeated, gently, when she didn't reply, and squeezed her hand again.

"But it was, Liara," she heard herself whisper, gaze falling to her lap. "Goddess, it was. I should have known better. I should-"

Her fragile resolve finally broke when Liara drew her into a hug, holding her tightly. Tears came again, hot and fast, tremors wracking her body as she clung to her daughter for support.

"-I'm sorry. I'm so sorry..."