a/n the first: ah, I almost forgot! The lovely and talented soulfate4-2 drew and coloured a scene from this chapter. It's over at fav .me /d5906vr
a/n the second: if you're partial to femshep/liara and haven't yet found Midnight Lion's Pressure, you are missing out. Go there, now!

Eight: Liara

Liara turned at the sound of Aethyta's cursing just in time to see her catch Benezia as she went down, momentarily distracted from the ranged battle that was rapidly threatening to become a close-quarters one.

"-goddess-damned stubborn fucking-"

"What happened?" she asked, stepping smartly over and bending to assist. Her mother was out cold, a smear of dirt across her brow and a trickle of blood running from her nose. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse, when Liara took it, fast.

"How the hell would I know? One minute she's fine, the next she's spouting gibberish and then this. Had some sort of a flashback thing not five minutes ago. I told her to go back to the freighter and lie down, but no, she just had to see. Stubborn bitch. I swear, she's worse than you are!"

Liara was fairly certain that her father could out-stubborn both herself and her mother if she put her mind do it, and elected to remain silent on that one. Instead, she helped manoeuvre her mother into a recovery position and then glanced back over the makeshift parapet. Another banshee had been felled in the interim, but the remaining six would be upon them soon, and only one had taken substantial damage. She cursed inwardly.

"I knew this was a bad idea," Aethyta continued to grouse, glancing back over the wall herself. "Thawing her out. Bringing her here. You could have waited another year or more, until things were better. We're not going to have the time to constantly babysit, and I don't think that all of this," she gestured beyond the wall, "is going to do any wonders for her mental state."

Liara's blood ran cold as the words registered, accompanied by a pang of sudden guilt. She'd always told herself that she'd awaken her mother once the war was over, in much the same way she'd once promised that she'd recover Shepard's body, bring down the Shadow Broker. But she'd never thought to question the wisdom of the exact timing of bringing Benezia out of stasis. The war was over. The Reapers were dead. That meant she could finally have her mother back. But, for Benezia, seeing all of this - goddess, it'd almost be like forcing Shepard to relive the Blitz.

Stupid, stupid, selfish, short-sighted - all the things Liara could not afford to be. And, worse, it was too late, now, to put her mother back.

"Well, I wish you'd said so at the time," she said shortly, drawing her pistol and moving into position along the parapet.

"I did, remember?"

"No, you wondered if it was." Two of the banshees were within range now; she checked which of the pair the commandos had flagged and opened fire upon it. "And then not for those reasons."

Aethyta rolled her eyes and cracked her knuckles.

"Well, excuse me if I was still trying to get over the fact that, you know, she wasn't actually dead and didn't have time to consider the full implications of the situation."

"Can we please argue about this later? I cannot help but feel that a battlefield is not the place for a family dispute."

On a battlefield with an audience, no less, she added within the privacy of her own head. Hopefully Aurelia and the rest would be too fixated on the battle to pay them any mind, but she doubted it. Commandos, as a general rule, were possessed of very high levels of situational awareness.

"Shows what you know," Aethyta snorted, and then she was gone, jumping lightly over the wall with a flash of biotic energy.

Liara had never seen an asari fight like Aethyta did. Asari combat doctrine almost universally called for classic hit and run tactics, combatants relying on speed, mobility and keeping a very respectful distance between themselves and any enemy. It was a doctrine Liara herself subscribed to when she couldn't rely on the superior doctrine of overwhelming force.

Aethyta, though, was a brawler, like Vega, or Shepard on a bad day or, yes, Urdnot Wrex. The matriarch threw a powerful warp at her target with a lazy backhand, charged into it with an explosion of biotic force that lit up the killing ground like a lighting strike, ducked a wild swipe from its taloned hands, followed thatup with a series of shotgun blasts to its face at point-blank range, and, while it struggled to recover from the assault, barriers down, stove in what remained of its head with the butt of her shotgun in a brutal, two-handed swing.

It was a picture of pure, savage efficiency, not a single, wasted movement in the entire sequence. At the end of it, Aethyta stood above the dead banshee's body, panting slightly as she waited for her gun to cool enough to be fired again. Then she picked out her next target and started to repeat the sequence.

Liara stared at the spectacle, open-mouthed and a little bit awestruck, before remembering where she was and realising that Aethyta was now out in the middle of the killing zone, alone, with the four remaining banshees bearing down on her, charging forward in fits and spurts. The sound of their screams filled the night air once more.

She cursed and vaulted the parapet herself, using her biotics to slow her fall, and hit the ground running. While Aethyta looked to be able to handle the creatures on a one-to-one basis, two at once gave even Shepard trouble and three or four to one would certainly be lethal. She needed someone to draw the extras off, so they could be dealt with, one at a time.

Divide and conquer. Another classic asari strategy.

It was only when Liara had managed, via means of a clumsily-thrown grenade, to attract the attention of the unengaged banshee nearest to her father that it dawned on her that this, too, was an incredibly stupid thing to have done. The blasted creatures had always seemed to be immune to her singularities and stasis fields, meaning that two of her three most powerful biotic attacks were all but useless. More than that, she was tired, out of shape following her two weeks of recovery and inactivity, couldn't hold a gun properly in her right hand and, yes, was missing half her field of vision and part of her depth perception.

Stupid stupid stupid. She'd have to get back into her fitness and training regime starting tomorrow - she could probably attach herself to the commandos' own sessions, if they had them - and work at doing everything left-handed. For now, though, she had little option but to see this course of action through. One thing that she'd learned from Shepard was that people wanted confidence and decisiveness in their leaders. You listened to any advice offered or requested, made your decisions and then made them work. She couldn't back down here, not with an audience. She had a reputation, now, and respect, once earned, had to be maintained. It wouldn't do for a 'hero' from the Normandy to retreat without properly engaging the foe.

She swapped out for her Tempest and opened fire as the banshee tried to close on her, catching it in her a warp field of her own, which she detonated with a clumsy throw. She dropped a grenade at her feet as it recovered and charged at her, covering the distance between them with unsettling speed. Liara dove away at the last instant, behind the ruined remains of a wall, felt the explosion and heard the scream, and knew that she'd timed it right. Rising, dodging, she emptied two clips into the thing before it fell, aided by a barrage from the compound's walls.

Two down...

Liara looked around wildly until she spotted the remaining two monsters. Aethyta was tangling with one - its barriers were down, but it seemed to be happy to take altogether too much punishment, and the matriarch, staying just out of reach of those dangerous arms, was visibly starting to tire. The other creature, despite being continually peppered with sniper fire, was making its way inexorably towards her, coming in from behind.

"Aeythta!" she shouted out in warning.

The matriarch glanced back over her shoulder, spotted the flanker and swore loudly enough to be heard clear across the battlefield. She dodged away from the first banshee, angling back towards the camp, but tripped, stumbled, went down, the gun flying out of her hand. The monster she'd been battling, thankfully, fell seconds after, taken through the skull and throat by snipers' rounds, but the second banshee, leaving bright blue after-images as it charged, would be upon her in seconds. Aethyta seemed to realise this too, fumbling at her side for her shotgun, backing away on her elbows, even as Liara started to run towards them, quickly picking up pace despite the uneven ground.

Liara was not quite sure where the idea came from – certainly not the rational part of her mind - but it went straight from her brain to her body in an instant. She ducked her head, set her shoulder and ran in towards it, quick as she could, like a farliner dashing for the scoring platform in skyball. Her charge took it in the side just as it reached her father.

It was altogether too much like running into an electrified wall, and she rebounded off of it, hard, tumbling to one side, her arm numb from the shoulder down. But the banshee was knocked off balance too, enough for Aethyta to regain her feet and dance away, gun in hand. Between the two of them circling it and the snipers on the walls, it was finally felled moments later.

"I swear, this is fucking harder work than it used to be," Aethyta puffed when it was over, wiping blood from her cheek. She caught Liara's eye and nodded with apparent approval. "Nice job, kid. We'll make a krogan of you yet! Still, remind me to show you how to do the charge thing properly. Keep doing it that way and all you'll do is break your damn fool neck. You've got to use your biotics-"

Later – and it was much later - after they'd conferred and celebrated with the commandos, after they'd put Benezia safely to bed, after they'd found and deployed the auto turrets, after she'd wiped herself clean of some of the filth of the battle and stripped herself of her armour, after she'd treated the burns and changed dressings as Karin had directed… After all that, she'd all but fallen flat into her cot, wedged between two stacks of cargo containers. Sleep though, would not come. Her body might have been exhausted, but her head was full of the things she had to do in the morning.

She had to reorganise the camp, for one, to make it more manageable. She had some ideas in that respect, at least, modified versions the ancient tribal villages she'd studied in the third year of her undergraduate. She needed to see about bulking up the camp's defences, too. The layout changes and turrets would help. And, while almost all of the camp's occupants appeared to be civilians, she could probably find the bodies necessary – with some browbeating and a bit of training - to give the commandos a break from watch.

But for proper security, to do the cleanout work required to clear this patch of Thessia and beyond, she needed more able-bodied fighters. They were in desperately short supply. Perhaps she could ask Wrex for a favour..? Surely there were still krogan out there whose lust for battle hadn't been entirely sated by the war. But she'd need to get the comm buoys modified and deployed and tied into the mass relay before she could call out of the system. Could that be done tomorrow? Possibly. Damn the Reapers. They'd even managed to take out all of the redundant communications infrastructure. And then, behind all of that, there was the issue of food. The camp's population, with proper rationing, could probably last a month or two just off of the supplies she'd brought, but they'd need to find a long-term source of sustenance. Perhaps-

When she finally drifted off into an exhausted sleep, Shepard was there, waiting for her, gloriously naked, bathed in the soft blue light of her quarters on the Normandy. She sat on the bed beside Liara, smiled at her with that perfect, crooked smile, eyes dark and dancing.

"I'm always coming back," Shepard whispered as she caressed her cheek, leaned forward to bring their lips together. The words were soft and warm and full of hope, underlain by steely determination, exactly like Shepard herself. "I promise."

But the moment their lips touched, Shepard burst into a thousand tendrils of black and red mist, tendrils that slipped through Liara's desperately reaching fingers, that faded away into nothing in the space it took to breathe, leaving her to weep, broken and alone.