A/N: Thank you all so much for your comments and favourites. I continue to be blown away by the level of interest this little story has received. And also a very big thanks, as always, to the wonderful jt-boi for pulling beta duty.

Nine: Aethyta

It was seven days later, and the camp was a different place. Liara had... Well, truth be told, Aethyta still didn't know exactly what the kid had said or done in the meeting hall after they'd landed, but it had been damned effective. She'd smoothly stepped into the gap Efrosyni had left with her passing, and the camp, in turn, hadn't known what hit it.

They had an abundance of clean water now that they didn't have to boil and filter first, courtesy of a pair of purifying units taken from the freighter's cargo hold. There was even enough of the stuff that there was talk of setting up a bathing block, an idea met with what Aethyta would charitably call 'delighted squeals'. Truth be told, she'd kill for a decent shower herself or - oh, and now that was a heavenly thought - a long, hot, relaxing bath, with a good vid and bottle of red and lots and lots of suds, and maybe even someone to rub her back and shoulders. She ached at the end of most days, the unnatural cold of the false winter seeming to linger in her bones. Old age: the ultimate kick in the quad.

They had food, too, enough to fill everyone's bellies in the short term, even if it did come mainly in the form of MREs from their ship and non-perishables pulled from demolished shops and warehouses, and the ruins of nearby homes. Communications-wise, a tenuous link to the outside galaxy had been established, though it was limited to low-bandwidth transmissions, sent and received in a burst two or three times a day, whenever anyone activated the mass relay. A tenuous link, too, had been established with the other three refugee camps they'd located within the city limits so far. Liara had already convinced one of the groups to amalgamate with theirs, and expected that the other two would soon follow suit. She'd reasoned - and Aethyta had agreed - that the overall benefits provided by the population increase, particularly in terms of able bodies and diversity of skill sets, would more than offset any problems it caused.

Under the kid's direction, work parties had almost finished rearranging the camp into a series of loosely-spaced rings, the outermost and innermost heavily fortified. It was an oddly reassuring layout, one that had seemed familiar in a way that Aethyta hadn't quite been able to place, until Liara had shown, with a few quick sketches on her datapad, how the oldest cities on the planet had evolved from ancient villages laid out in a similar fashion. The dead centre of Armali - until the Reapers, at any rate - was the great Forum, which had once been not unlike the meeting hall at the heart of their camp, which doubled as the dining hall by night and now trebled as the crèche by day.

Those asari who weren't busy rebuilding and refortifying the camp were sent out on scavenging parties, after food and clothing, weapons and communications gear and anything else that seemed useful. The ones who couldn't - or wouldn't - do either of those tasks were put to watching the walls, freeing their half-dozen frazzled commandos for other vital work, or to supervising the children as they went about the simple tasks assigned to them in turn.

Liara worked them all hard, and worked herself hardest of all, to the point where Aethyta was fairly certain that the flimsy little cot she'd set up in the empty cargo hold saw precisely zero real use. At daybreak, Aethyta invariably either found her daughter hunched over the terminals arrayed beside her cot, or saw her out training with the commandos. After that, she rarely saw her at all but in glimpses, running from this project to that dispute, running out with the commandos and running back in with the scavenging parties. She didn't creep back to their freighter until after dark, until well after everyone with a lick of common sense had already gone to bed, and twice so far Aethyta had gotten up in the small hours of the morning to answer a call of nature and caught her back in front of her terminals, doing Athame knew what.

Aethyta hoped those late-night, slightly furtive sessions had rather more to do with the recovery effort here and less to do with the... other thing that she, personally, tried not to think too much about, in case her half-formed speculations crystallised into an unpleasant certainty.

Improved as it was, the camp still wasn't perfect, not by any means. Sanitation was still an issue, with the bulk of their waste going straight into the river. Liara had been uncomfortable with that, apparently concerned about anyone downstream, until Aethyta had drawn her attention to the bodies and worse floating in the murky waters. The bodies themselves, of course, were another real concern. Efrosyni had made sure to clear away and dispose of any in the area immediately surrounding the camp as a priority, but the city itself remained choked with the dead, asari and Reapers alike, and that was exactly the sort of thing that led to the outbreak of disease. And they didn't have a long-term supply of food, not yet. There wasn't anyone with any agricultural experience in any of the known camps (not that they actually had anything to grow in any case) and scavenging was difficult, dangerous work that could only last so long, provide so much.

And, for all the buzz of activity and burst of tentative optimism within the camp and the jobs thrown her way to keep her busy, Aethyta was left feeling very much out of place. For a start, the entire camp, barring the kid and the commandos, had been rather more than slightly horrified by the prospect of letting her, a matriarch, do anything remotely dangerous - and therefore fun – again, especially after some complete cow whose name she hadn't caught had suggested that Aethyta, at over a thousand years and counting, might very well be the oldest asari left alive on the planet, or even in the entire Republics.

Now therewas a really fucking cheery thought.

If she'd been a better matriarch, she'd have been able to talk them around to her way of thinking. They needed all of the firepower they could get, and fighting was one thing she'd always been good at. It was in her genes. But she'd never had any patience for the endless, back-and-forth, passive-aggressive varrenshit and slight-of-hand manoeuvring most of the others her age seemed to delight in. And so, instead of making her case in a reasoned fashion, she'd lost her temper with the lot of them, the vote along with it, while Liara covered her face with her hand, in despair or disgust Aethyta couldn't say.

And that was reason number two for her discomfort, right there: by rights, it should be her out there, running the show, or, better yet, Benezia, or even one of the older matrons. There was no denying that the kid was good at it, as Aethyta had known that she would be, but maidens who were barely old enough to vote shouldn't have to be responsible for guiding and protecting and knocking some sense into the thick heads of what would soon be over one thousand people. That sort of thing was pretty much what matriarchs were for.

But if Aethyta had never been a very good matriarch, Liara, by all accounts, had never been a particularly good maiden. And, if part of Aethyta felt deeply uncomfortable about letting her youngest shoulder most of the current burden, another part of her enthusiastically cheered her on. Liara was making something - a spectacular something - of herself and helping her people rather than wasting her maiden years stripping or drifting or worse. Yet, if Aethyta looked on with pride, albeit tempered by worry, Benezia watched their daughter with a kind of hesitant bewilderment, as if she were not quite willing to believe the evidence of her own eyes.

Benezia herself, of course, was reason number three.

It wasn't just that she was the Ex of Exes, with all the baggage that implied. Nor was it just that the promised part-time babysitting job had effectively become a full-time one. And it wasn't just that, between Benezia's history and her own recent outburst, most of the camp wanted as little to do with the pair of them as possible. It wasn't even just the certain knowledge that she was woefully unequipped to help Beneiza deal with whatever she was trying to deal with, and that she'd seen enough trauma cases in her lifetime to know that her usual 'toughen the fuck up, princess' approach was typically the last thing needed.

It was that Aethyta was spending virtually every waking and sleeping moment in the company of her ostracised Ex of Exes whilst said Ex was struggling to stop herself from completely coming apart at the seams. Aethyta wasn't sure if she wanted to hug her or slap her half the time, and frankly, wasn't at all sure which approach Benezia would have welcomed more. Part of her former bondmate seemed to actively want some sort of, well, punishmentfor everything that had happened, as fucked up as that was, while the rest of her seemed to want to hide, or fade away into nothing rather than face reality.

Aethyta really was too old to have to deal with all of that shit and everything else besides. As that motherless pyjack in the meeting hall had pointed out, she was over a thousand, which was many more years than most asari actually saw, for all their theoretical lifespans. Life was full of dangers large and small, and, combined with the risk-taking and general stupidity of most maidens, only maybe one in a thousand actually made it to the matriarch stage in the first place. She'd gotten this far, but had, maybe, a hundred years left, if she was lucky. By rights, she should be enjoying a long, leisurely retirement right now, somewhere tropical, spending her days spoiling her great-granddaughters and scandalising her daughters and granddaughters by fucking the twenty year-old turian pool boy senseless then turning her attentions to his older sister.

She didn't know what had happened to any of her daughters, apart from Liara, or to their daughters and daughters' daughters. Once it became clear that war was on the horizon she'd called in every favour she'd ever been owed, bribed and blackmailed and even gone to the (remarkably obliging) Shadow Broker, trying to get them all to someplace safe, but had lost track of them once things started to heat up. She'd always made sure that her daughters could take care of themselves, but... Damnit, she should be out there, looking for them, making sure they were safe, not stuck here, riding herd on Benezia T'Soni because her daughter was too damned busy to look after her herself.

Fucking Reapers. You'd think they could have waited until she was dead to try to destroy the galaxy. From what she understood, they were millions of years old. What the hell was another century?

Fucking T'Sonis. Why couldn't they have needed somebody else?

Fucking galaxy. Fucking everything, really.

"You're pacing," a quiet, low voice behind her noted.

She was too. She hadn't really noticed.

"Well, I'm pissed off."

When she turned, she saw that Benezia had seated herself atop a cargo crate and was watching her, half-wrapped in a blanket against the early morning chill. Her skin had an unhealthy grey undertone in the pink and orange light of dawn, making the blue of her eyes seem absurdly vivid. Her sleep had been broken by nightmares every night since they'd landed, Aethyta knew. Some started with whimpers and ended with screams that would have woken the entire camp, had they not kept themselves segregated by sleeping in the freighter. Camp gossip suggested that she wasn't the only person with that particular problem.

Aethyta wasn't entirely sure what their little outpost needed more desperately – someone who could fix bodies or someone who could fix heads.

"About the vote? Still?"

"You know me," she replied, starting back the way she came. "I hold grudges. Let 'em fester."

There was a pause, and then an even more quiet: "I do."

A hundred and ten years of grudge. Justified grudge, though. Wasn't it? Leaving her? Keeping her last daughter from her?

Of course it was.

"But I do not think that it is anger that drives your feet today, not entirely," Benezia continued, and Aethyta remembered that if Benezia T'Soni was an open book to her, then the reverse was true as well. "Aethyta, what worries you so?"

"Nothing," she lied, and it was a bad, obvious lie to her own hearing.

"Please, I would help if I could. I... owe you that much, at least." Aethyta only realised that she'd come to a halt when she felt the gentle hand on her arm.

"Please," Benezia repeated.

When Aethyta turned to face her, it was the old Benezia, for the moment, standing before her, not the fragile shell the Reapers had left behind. The Benezia whose compassion and patience and generally kind nature had so often been Aethyta's undoing, once upon a time.

It was her undoing today.

"I'm just thinking about my girls," she muttered, shoulders sagging. "That's all."

Understanding dawned in those bright blue eyes.

"You've not heard from them?"

"Not a whisper," she sighed. "I tried to get 'em somewhere safe, before things went completely to crap, but so many places we thought were safe weren't. One of the colonies I wanted to send them to got hit pretty hard."

Benezia's hand slid down her arm until it reached her own, took it and squeezed it gently before letting it go.

"Go, then. Find them. You want to, and no-one would begrudge you."

She wasn't quite able to stop the short, bitter bark of laughter.

"You were at the meeting, right?" Benezia had been there but silent throughout, eyes downcast; she'd abstained from the vote when it came. "I'm too 'valuable' to be let out of the camp or up onto the walls or even down to take a piss on my own. Goddess, I feel like a caged varren."

"You certainly pace like one." This observation was actually accompanied by the ghost of a smile, the first genuine one Aethyta had seen from her since she'd woken up. "Well, perhaps they would begrudge you then. But that sort of thing has never stopped you before. Go anyway."

"I can't justify taking the freighter," she said with a shrug, which was true, "and we don't have anything else with enough fuel to leave the system. And, besides, I promised the kid I'd help keep an eye on you. How're you doing today, anyway?"

And, just like that, the old Benezia was gone.

Her eyes fell, and she retreated back to her former seat atop the cargo crate, wrapping herself again in the blanket. It was somehow painful to watch her fold back in on herself, especially in light of her smile, seconds before, and Aethyta sighed.

"Shove over," she said, and planted herself beside her former bondmate without aplomb. The crate wasn't quite wide enough for two, and she only had half a seat, but it'd do for now. "And give me some of that blanket. It's cold enough out here to freeze your tits off, and that'd be a damn shame."

A bit more than a century ago, such a statement would probably have been delivered with a mock-leer and met with an eye roll, perhaps accompanied by a tolerant smile. Now it was given awkwardly, and met with stoic silence, though Benezia did unwrap enough of the blanket from herself to give Aethyta half. Aethyta studied the her face in profile, noting the fatigue in her eyes, the clench of her jaw, the stiffness in the graceful arch of her neck and the slight layer of dust and ash and other grime they all seemed to acquire after more than a few minutes outside.

"Look, I don't wanna give you mixed signals or anything," she continued, "because what's done is done, but I'm not just sticking around here because the kid asked. We had a hundred good years together, and I think that means something, no matter how it ended. I'd like to help you, if I can," she concluded, deliberately paraphrasing Benezia's earlier words.

Benezia did not look up, but clearly spotted the parallel.

"The debts are mine, not yours."

"I'll be the judge of that. Talk to me."

For a long moment, there was only the sleepy clatter of the camp as it began to wake and prepare for the new day and the distant gurgle of the river on its unhurried journey to the sea. Then Benezia sighed and leaned in towards her, hesitantly, as if expecting to be pushed away at any moment, but Aethyta let her come, not moving until her former lover's head was resting on her shoulder, nestled against her neck. Only then did she move, and it was to carefully wrap an arm around her, pulling her closer. They still fit together seamlessly, like they always had.

Silence again reigned for a time.

"It hurts when I try to think," Benezia finally confessed, voice sad and tired and barely audible. Aethyta said nothing in return, waiting. She might not always have the words to reply, but she'd become a very good listener over the years, and was practised in creating silences that others wanted to fill. Benezia, she knew, would fill this one eventually, and, almost a minute later, she did.

"At first, I had thought that the pain was a good pain. My mind healing from the... conditioning. I thought that it would get better with time. And distance. But it's not. It's getting worse. Sometimes I just want to scream with it."

"Then scream."

"Aethy-"

"I'm serious. It might help. Sometimes bodies know what to do better than brains do."

"You don't understand."

"So, help me then," she replied, more sharply than she'd meant to, and it was some time before Benezia spoke again.

"At times it is as though a thousand shards of ice have been driven into my skull, twisting and burning. At others, my head is caught in an ever-tightening vice. I... catch myself thinking in the ways it wanted me to think, or trying not to think at all, just so that it goes away for a time. It is the final stage of the process. I've seen it. The others with me, my entourage... Some succumbed so thoroughly by the end that they would not even eat or bathe unless instructed to do so.

"I... fear that end for myself. I've no right to, but I do. What good am I without my mind? What amI? And so I fight. But I do not know how much longer I can continue."

"Long enough," Aethyta replied with a confidence she didn't feel. "It'll pass. Everything does eventually. You'll pull through."

"You don't know that."

"Sure I do," she said, forcing a smile as she chucked Benezia's chin, tilting her head up so that they were looking at each other again. "You're the only person I've ever met that could out-stubborn me when you put your mind to it. The kid said that you managed to fight the Reapers off while they were still alive. Now that they're dead, they've got no chance. You'll beat this."

Benezia's eyes held hers, searching. It was such a damned cliché thing to say or even think, but she'd always loved her eyes. They were as blue and changeable as the open sky and, if you knew the secret, you could read her moods by them alone. Today there was anguish and exhaustion and pain but, blooming behind all of that, cautious hope.

"You always were such a good liar," she said softly. "I can almost believe you."

"Believe whatever you want, babe," she said, and her smile this time was more genuine. "I'm more than a thousand years old. I usually know what I'm talking about."

"So you say." A pause, a fleeting, upward quirk of her lips, and Benezia was back, once more, for a few seconds. "Far be it from one as young as I to question the wisdom of the ancients."

"Ancient, am I?"

"By your own admission, I fear."

Even now, dirty, pale and underweight, eyes glistening with unshed tears, Benezia was undeniably beautiful. Maybe not in the pop-culture, supermodel sense, which favoured fresh-skinned, doe-eyed, underfed and under-dressed maidens, but in the classical one, regal, as if she were some throwback to the ancient merchant queens that had once ruled this city and others with guile and cunning and sex. Those high cheekbones, the proud line of her nose and jaw, the delicate markings that drew your attention to those bottomless blue eyes, the broad, dark stripe that highlighted her lips, soft and eminently kissable, the dappling that ran down the sides of her neck, around her perfect breasts, down the line of her stomach...

Benezia must have seen something of her thoughts in her eyes, because her own widened slightly and she pulled away, rising to her feet, turning away. Aethyta inwardly cursed, but let her go, needing the space just as badly. The kid was right, damn her hide: she still had feelings for Benezia, and they weren't all bad ones. Far from it, if protests from her body at the loss of contact with those soft curves were any judge. Goddess, she'd buried their relationship at least three times already, each time thinking it was for good. You'd think it could have the decency to stay dead! There was no future in it at all, just heated memories and regret, and she had enough to worry about without being distracted by either.

"You want to know what happened to your daughters," Benezia said abruptly, her back still turned. "I would know what happened to mine."

Aethyta stared at her, simultaneously annoyed and relieved that Benezia had deliberately gone for the one topic certain to drive a wedge between them, and done so in a manner designed to wound on multiple levels. Anger would easier to deal with. Hell, it always had been. She just needed to remember Liara, remember all of the broken promises, remember that Benezia had left her without explanation, without even a proper goodbye. Remember why Aethyta hadn't chased after her. Five minutes of fellowship was not nearly enough to wipe all of that away.

"She's thirty seconds away," she supplied brusquely. "Go ask her yourself."

"I've tried. She avoids my questions."

"Well, maybe you're asking the wrong ones then."

"If that is the case, then I don't know what the right ones are. I hardly feel as if I know her anymore."

Aethyta scowled, unseen, and stood herself, wrapping the blanket around her body like a cloak.

"I dunno know what you're complaining to me for." After all, it wasn't as if Benezia T'Soni hadn't made it abundantly fucking clear that Liara was herdaughter, not Aethyta's. Even offering the kid the opportunity to meet her father on her own terms had proven to be too much to ask. But, hey, if you could walk out on a bonding of a century without so much as a goodbye, what was another broken promise?

"I thought, perhaps, that you-"

"You thought that what? That I'd fill in the blanks for you?"

"You were present for the last four years. I was… not. "

Four years out of a hundred and ten. No, not even four years. You might manage to stretch it to three, if you took it from the date she'd accepted the contract, but spying on someone from a distance hardly counted as having a relationship with them. And for a good chunk of those three years, Aethyta had honestly thought that her youngest daughter was dead. If you added up all of the time they'd actually spent together before now, with Liara knowing what the relationship between them was, it'd come to less than a standard day.

"Well, it's not my fucking fault you got yourself put on ice," she snapped. "And it's not like you didn't have Liara all to yourself for more than a century. If you didn't learn how to push her buttons in that time, you did more things wrong than I thought. Grow a quad and ask her until she answers. Or don't. It ain't my problem either way."

The crack about her icing might have gone a bit far, she realised, when Benezia bowed her head and made no move to reply, and Aethyta felt an unwelcome pang of guilt that only made her more annoyed. She had a right to be angry without feeling bad about it, goddessdamn it. More than a right. But right here, right now, it'd only feed the part of Benezia that was looking for punishment. Either that or drive her further back into herself, and Aethyta probably wouldn't get any satisfaction from seeing one or the other.

Shit.

She sighed, ran a hand over the top of her head and crests and made a masterful attempt to force her anger back down to a slow simmer rather than a rolling boil. Her next words to her former bondmate, for all they were clipped, were level and bordering on unnaturally pleasant.

"I'm going to go see what new horror's on the breakfast menu. You coming or not?"

Benezia sighed herself but followed after, trailing a few feet behind in silence, head still bowed. They didn't speak again for the rest of the morning.