Three: Aethyta

"How'd it go?"

The kid shrugged as she took up the co-pilot's seat.

"Better than I had expected. Not as well as I'd hoped," she sighed. "Did she say much to you?"

"Not a lot. But then, she didn't have to," Aethyta conceded, taking the opportunity to study the kid out of the corner of her eye. Behind a set of scars that would have made Aethyta's own father incredibly envious, she seemed tired. Upset, but working not to show it. "You alright?"

"Fine, I suppose," Liara sighed, rubbing unconsciously at the scars on her neck. "It's just... difficult, seeing her like this. She was always so strong and confident. She's sleeping now. I've rigged up a monitor, in case she wakes and we're not there."

"Hmm," she acknowledged, fishing beside her own chair for the bottle and two glasses she'd had the foresight to store there earlier. Benezia had always been strong and confident, but in an incredibly understated, grounded kind of way. It was part of what had made her so damned sexy, back when they'd been together. She had brains and power enough that she didn't feel the need to flaunt them. Asses were great for passing glances, and tits could get you a fair bit too, but confidence would always be the galaxy's number one aphrodisiac.

She hadn't seen much of that confidence in freighter's small cabin. In more than a century of being together, Benezia T'Soni had become an open book to her, and all she'd seen, writ large across her face, was confusion, fear, pain and burgeoning self-loathing. None of that boded well for the next few days.

Aethyta deftly poured two glasses and offered one to the kid, who took it without a word. If she'd missed all the other warning signs, that would have been a clear enough signal that something was amiss. The kid wasn't much of a drinker, even socially, more the sort to sit and nurse a single glass of wine for half the night. When upset, she worked rather than self-medicated, a trait she shared with Benezia. It was only when there was no work to be done, or when work itself was the problem, that she turned to booze.

Liara took a cautious sip, brows arching in surprise before a hint of a smile ghosted her lips.

"What, no ryncol?"

So Liara T'Soni had a sense of humour about her heritage after all.

"Nah." She returned the smile with one of her own. "I'll let you in on a little secret, kid: I never much liked the stuff."

"Really? And here I thought you were 'half-krogan'."

"Yeah, but I got my mom's sense of taste, and rycnol's one step below prison moonshine. Besides, when you work in bars and clubs for as long as I have, and you learn to appreciate the good stuff."

"I don't know much about alcohol, but this is quite nice. Sweet but spicy, at the same time. What is it?"

"One hundred-fifty year-old Niacali metheglin," she took a long, slow sip from her own glass and sighed with satisfaction. "Nothing better. I've been saving it for a special occasion."

"'Saving it'?" Liara asked dryly. "I was under the impression you managed to escape from the Citadel with nothing more than your shotgun and the clothes on your back."

Caught out in a little lie, Aethyta shrugged, and took another pull, savouring the sweetness, the spice and the burn. The frantic fight and subsequent flight from the Citadel was not something that she particularly cared to remember. With C-Sec utterly overrun by Reaper troops, she'd done what she could to assist – and then organise - the civilian evacuation. A lot of people had died in the chaos, a lot more than she'd been able to save, and the survivors had called her a hero for it. Just because she was old enough to know how to keep her head in a crisis, and had a loud, authoritative voice.

"Well, I did have a bottle I was saving," she said. "It's in orbit somewhere now. I might have 'liberated' this one from an abandoned bar on Earth."

The kid made a slightly disapproving 'tsk' sound, but took another, longer sip anyway.

"So, this counts as a special occasion?"

"Well, the war's over, we won, and we're finally on our way back to Thessia," she said, ticking each point off on one of her fingers. "I don't know about you, but I'm inclined to drink to all three."

"And I suppose it is a family reunion, of a sort."

She couldn't quite stop the scowl that formed as she stared down into her half-empty glass. You couldn't have a family reunion if you'd never been a family.

"You're still angry with me." It wasn't a question.

"Of course I'm still angry!" Aethyta shot back, letting it rise back to the surface again. "We talked about her for hours and you didn't say a damned thing. You didn't even hint."

"What was I supposed to say?" Liara replied, her own anger evidentially rising. "'Oh, and by the way, she's not actually dead?' I'd known you for a few weeks at most. And you were spying on me for the asari government! How would they have reacted to that news, exactly?"

"It would've gone down like a drunken elcor," she allowed. "But that doesn't make me any less pissed off about it! You shoulda told me."

"Perhaps," Liara conceded, settling back. "And maybe I would have, if we'd had more time to get to know each other."

"If 'ifs' were butts, it'd be raining asses," Aethyta groused, knocking back the rest of her drink too quickly for something of such quality. "'If we'd had more time'. 'If there wasn't a war on'. If Benezia hadn't-"

"You still have feelings for her," Liara interrupted quietly, with rather more insight than Aethyta would have liked.

"Yeah, and they're not all good ones," she shot back, anger flaring again.

Every asari of a certain age had at least one story of a relationship that had ended too quickly for comfort. She'd eventually come to accept that Benezia would be hers, and had tried to content herself with the memories of near-on a hundred and twenty years together. Benezia had left her, and she'd let her go. That was where the story should have ended. There was too much history between them now for anything else. Too many unsaid words, too many angry thoughts and too many broken promises.

"Look, I don't know what sort of twisted fantasies you've got up in that little head of yours, but we're not here to play 'happy families'. Once we're certain she's still all there upstairs and not going to try to bring back the Reapers or do something else that stupid, I'm out. I've got my own business to attend to. Is that clear?"

Liara looked down into her own glass and sighed.

"Crystal."