Benezia

When morning finally came, Benezia was already awake, though it would be rather more accurate to say that she simply had not slept. This was not an uncommon state of affairs of late: sleep brought rest, but with it also came dreaming, and she was weary unto death of the dreams.

The rest itself was not necessarily to be desired either. With a rested body came alertness and awareness, thought and remembrance, none of which were much welcomed. The twilight state she had once feared had become a refuge, of sorts, and her body had found the knack of sleeping just enough that she spent her days not quite awake and not quite asleep, neither thinking nor feeling in as much as that was possible. Hours drifted past in an unnumbered fugue, and she could not rightly say what she had been doing before Liara and the news intended for Aethyta had found her instead, and she'd remembered her old self, for a time. There were some things that a daughter simply should not have to do, no matter the circumstances.

Aethyta was a warm but dead weight against and across her, lost to slumber so completely that she hardly seemed to breathe. A whole bottle of ice brandy, consumed quickly, would do that to a person, especially atop the other liquor Aethyta had drunk earlier in the evening. Perhaps it had not been wise to enable her so. But Aethyta has always sought physical solace for emotional distress, and if it had not been alcohol, she would have come to it via some other means, likely at the expense of someone unprepared to deal with it. There would have been blood.

Never mind that there very nearly had been anyway.

The shoulder not being used as a pillow ached, and Benezia knew without looking that there would be bruises there, five of them, a handprint in purple and black. That had been unanticipated, uncharacteristic. Benezia had expected anger, certainly - shouting and accusations and threats and more - but not violence. Never violence directed at her. Even at their worst, towards the end, when the heated words flew and biotics flared, Benezia had known implicitly that Aethyta's bluster and posturing were just that, that the only bruises she had to fear were of ego.

But they had been bonded, then, and 'then' was more than a century ago. Things were different now.

Worse, though, than the rough touch itself was the hard, unwelcome press of memory that had come with it. Benezia had once again found herself back with Saren, his taloned hands upon her body, the unctuous whispers of his ship inside her buckling mind, and the horrible churn of fear and disgust and desperation to please rising within her heart.

It was so vivid, the memory. The hard, predatory bulk of Saren standing before her, his talons pricking her skin enough to draw blood. The puffs of his breath on her face as he whispered and raged, breath as dank and laden with corrupted as the air around them. The oily, strangely organic texture of the walls and fittings, and the disconcerting, disorientating angles of the room that ever gave one the sensation of falling, of being a tiny, insignificant, uncomfortable thing. The knowledge, deep within the most hidden depths of herself, that if she stayed she was utterly doomed, but that she would only spread the corruption further if she fled.

But then had come gentleness, repentance, affection, things she had never received from Saren in that warm, dark, horrible place. With them, the spell had broken, at least in part. She was back on Thessia, in their ship, the one place on the planet where she did not have to look upon all that she and her masters had wrought. And Aethyta-

Aethyta was kissing her.

It was the alcohol, Benezia knew, and Aethyta's need to meet death with life that drove the kiss and not any genuine want of her, but the feeling of being desired again, after all that had happened, was welcome all the same - surprisingly so. It was life, in one of its most basic, simple expressions. More, it was hope, warming her from within as it had the day Aethyta had held her, so carefully, and promised her that things would get better with time. She had even allowed herself to pretend, as then, for a few, precious heartbeats, that things were other than they were.

Then sense had come, and reason too, and she'd broken away. It was not a wise act, the kiss, in truth only a few heartbeats away from sheerest folly, and it would be unethical, besides. Benezia had left, and it was done, and she'd no right to seek affirmation from Aethyta, least of all at a time when her own need for comfort made her vulnerable. Benezia had done harm enough already.

But, more, beneath the rational arguments against intimacy lay the dark and unnameable terror that rose at the thought of there being anything further than a fleeting kiss. The very idea of letting another touch her mind again chilled her to her core, drenched her in an icy sweat. She had been broken once, already, and the second breaking could only be easier. Those who did not seek to dominate her could simply reach in and take, if they so desired, stealing away, piece by piece, what little of herself remained to her.

And Aethyta would be able see what she had wrought, if she wished. Benezia no longer had any way of stopping her. Dreadful as knowing herself what had been done, worse was the idea of another seeing the full depths of the horror, having to face them in shame afterwards. Once, when they were bonded, she had been sure Aethyta would never go where she was not invited, but she had also once been sure that Aethyta would never lay a hand on her in anger. Such guarantees had been laid waste to on the day Benezia had last crossed the threshold of their home, never to return.

Much of what she wished to conceal lay too close to the surface to be hidden anyway.

The danger had been averted, ultimately, and the refusal seemed to be what Aethyta had actually needed, rather than assistance engaging in what would merely be another avoidance strategy. The poor, dear asari had gotten into her head at a very young age - and here Benezia had always squarely blamed her parents and their unorthodox approaches to, among other things, child-rearing and conflict resolution - that tears were weakness, and, more importantly, that if you didn't cry over a thing, it couldn't actually hurt you. It was a habit of thinking so long ingrained that it was nigh impossible to break, and, more often than not, was one that meant Aethyta let her wounds chafe and fester until they turned rotten, into anger and grudge, or burst of their own accord, often explosively, unless someone stood by with a lancet in hand to release them in a controlled fashion.

Had the wounds Benezia left upon her gone bad? The answer to that was quite obviously yes, visible in the way Aethyta's anger flared every time they strayed from safe topics of conversation, visible in the fresh bruises upon Benezia's arm. And yet, more than once, in the second waking nightmare of her life, there had been acceptance, support, even tenderness. Affection. A kiss.

Benezia allowed herself, not for the first time that night, the luxury of touch, tracing the line of a jaw, the sweep of a crest, an expanse of bare back and shoulder and arm that was so familiar to her but changed in a hundred subtle ways since she'd last held her like this, more than a century before. New, mysterious scars and small blemishes had appeared, begging questions and investigation. Stretches of unmarked skin that had once been accented up by faded pink stripes, the tips of her crests, roughening and paling ever so slightly, and all the other subtle signs of her advancing years. The deeply furrowed brow that pulled her sleeping countenance into a slight scowl.

Aethyta would never be considered beautiful by the standards of their people. Of course, asari were not supposed to care about external appearances, but they'd never quite managed to let go of their own societal ideals of beauty, and it was a notion Benezia had struggled with overcoming much of her life. Aethyta's face was a bit too round, her eyes just a little too widely and deeply set and her nose too broad, too flat, and too often broken in any case. She was small-breasted and thick of waist, stocky and muscular - for an asari, at least - rather than tall, light and lithe. She moved with purpose and efficiency rather than grace, save in the midst of any battle, great or small, where she flowed like water.

But it hadn't mattered. It had never mattered at all, in fact, a discovery that come as both a surprise and delight to Benezia, so many decades ago, long after been resigned to her particular, narrow preferences. There had been recognition, too, of the irony at the heart of it: all those centuries of endless, fruitless searching, and the first person to whom she'd been genuinely, deeply attracted to in the ideal sense, based on personality first, was another asari anyway. And, of course, they had to meet after she had ruled out daughters of her own and elected to devote her life to her faith and her people. The Goddess moved in mysterious ways.

Or so she'd thought at the time.

Of course, it hadn't taken Benezia long to discover the ways in which Aethyta was beautiful. That devilish, knowing smirk, the way her eyes twinkled when she was planning mischief. The infectious laugh, the one that lit up her whole face and shook her body with mirth. The sheer physicality of her, her complete and total comfort with her own body and her willingness to use it; her assurance in her own strength. That voice, of course, smoke roiling through honey, that purred such dreadful, toe-curling things in her ear while she tried to work or think or teach or do anything, really, that did not involve Aethyta and some sort of a supportive surface, preferably horizontal. Her hands, slightly larger than Benezia's own, with their scarred knuckles and rough nails, fingers strong and calloused but as capable of being gentle as they were of leaving bruises.

Benezia found one of them now, balled up and pressed against her side. But when she placed her own atop it, Aethyta, finally, stirred, muttering something completely unintelligible before rolling over onto her back, then, a few seconds later, onto her other side, taking most of the blanket with her. She settled her head more deeply against the pillows, wrapped the blanket more tightly around her body and began, quietly at first, but with quickly growing assurance, to snore.

Benezia watched her for a moment, then turned back to stare up at the ceiling, possessed of a sudden, absurd urge towards laughter. She had wondered, more than once over the decades, if leaving Aethyta had truly been the best thing to do. More than once, particularly during those first, few difficult years, she'd found herself on the verge of calling or writing her, begging for forgiveness, for her to come back to them. If she had remembered, then, Aethyta's tendency to snore obnoxiously when drunk, she might have found herself rather more resolute.

The poor, dear, silly asari. Her hangover tomorrow - later today - would be terrible, and her heartache no less so.

The thought killed any fleeting impulse towards inappropriate mirth, and she sighed. There was little she could do, now, to ease the heartache, but the hangover, once again, could perhaps be provided for.

She rose from bed, shivering as her bare feet touched the uncovered metal of the floor, and dressed. She had to pause midway through, and once again when she was done, to let the cabin stop swimming. When was the last time she had eaten? She couldn't rightly remember. Yesterday. It must have been yesterday, some time. What else had she done yesterday? She had ended up in the dining hall somehow. When not abed, it was easiest to follow the instructions of another, to let her body go through the motions of work. Menial tasks. Perhaps she had done that.

Benezia made her way, somewhat shakily, out of the cabin and attended to the basic needs of her body, dodging the shards of glass still littering the galley on the way. Cleaning her hands afterwards, she found herself caught by her own reflection in the mirror, distantly surprised by how gaunt and ragged she appeared, as if she were fading away to nothing.

But that was what she wanted, wasn't it? An end? To the dreams and the memories and the headaches, to the guilt and the shame and the helpless despair?

But she wasn't, as Aethyta had so elegantly put it, the only one to have been hurt by the war and the events surrounding it. What made her so special, that she should be free to seek her escape while those around her suffered, would continue to suffer after she was gone? She might have been special, once. Been important. In another time, another life, she'd had pride and power, respect and even the love of her people. No longer. Now, she was nothing but grief. Now, she had nothing, not even herself.

No. That was not entirely true, was it? At least Benezia still had her daughter. That was not something to be cast aside and ignored, not when it had been taken away, so easily, from so many others. From Aethyta. She should be thankful that she was spared that burden of grief. That Liara was spared such grief of her own.

Her feet led her, then, to the other end of the ship and the nigh-empty cargo hold and the cot upon which her daughter still slept, pulled up alongside the desk and monitors, looming large and dark. Benezia let herself perch on the edge of the bed to watch her, as she had sometimes done when Liara was young and she had returned home too late to do her part in their bedtime ritual. Liara slept now, as she had always done: messily, the bedclothes tangled up around her body, both feet and one arm dangling limply over the cot's sides. Benezia had sometimes wondered if such sprawling was a cause or a symptom of her daughter's un-asari preference for sleeping alone. The unmarked side of her face was pressed tightly into her pillow, leaving the scarred expanse of flesh that comprised the right to smile faintly up at her. The empty socket, though, dark and angry without its concealing patch, watched her with clear accusation.

Where had she been, when Liara had been wounded so? Who had sat and worried by her bedside while she lay unconscious, struggling to breathe? Had anyone been there afterwards, when she woke for the first time, in pain and afraid? Had someone been waiting to tell her that she was still beautiful and perfect in every way, that she was so smart and so very strong, stronger than her mother had ever been? And where was this 'Commander Shepard' everyone spoke so highly of? The 'Saviour of the Galaxy' who had used her daughter's affections so. Why had she let this happen to Benezia's precious, beautiful daughter?

No, no, again, that was an unworthy thought. Shepard, by all accounts, was injured even worse than Liara was. And she did not know enough about their… relationship to rightly say what Shepard should or should not be doing. She had meant to ask, but-

An alarm sounded, an ugly, jarring tone designed to irritate, jolting her from her introspection and her daughter from her slumber, setting Benezia's temples to throbbing along with each new blare. Liara cursed sleepily, a quarian word Benezia was quite certain she had never taught her, and fumbled blindly in the direction of the alarm. When her questing fingers came up empty, she cursed again - a torrent of turian words, this time-, pulled the pillow over her head and curled up into a tight ball, as if shielding herself from the noise. Benezia looked around for its source herself and quickly found it: Liara's omnitool, buzzing in the centre of her desk. Rather than rise she leaned over, stretching until she could just lay a finger upon it, and pulled it until it was close enough to pick up. The 'sleep' button was helpfully flashing, and she pressed her thumb to it.

Silence, blessedly, returned, lasting several seconds before Liara uncurled herself and rolled over to stare blearily up at her.

"Mother?" she said around a yawn. "You're up early."

"As, it would seem, you are meant to be." She held out the subdued omni-tool. "I suppose I should ask where you came by such language."

Liara had the grace to look slightly embarrassed, even as she accepted the omni-tool from Benezia's outstretched hand and slid it over her bare wrist. The wince that accompanied the subsequent transfer of the tool from her left wrist to her right did not go unnoticed.

"I spent some time living amongst soldiers. I am afraid to say that I may have picked up some bad habits."

"At a hundred and ten and a hero besides, you may be entitled to a bad habit or two," Benezia allowed, forcing a smile. Liara met it with a hesitant one of her own.

"Thank you. I think." Her eyes flicked away from Benezia's and over her shoulder, back down the empty cargo bay. "How is Aethyta?"

"Heartsick and, I suspect, very badly hungover. But she is sleeping, for now."

"Will she be alright?"

The question was oddly child-like in tone, and Benezia found herself remembering a time, many centuries ago now, when she'd watched her own mother mourn a lover, and the worry and feeling of helplessness that had come from wanting to help, in some way, but not knowing how, or if one should even try. Liara, despite everything that had happened, still had a good heart, to worry so for the father she barely knew.

"She will heal, with time."

Time heals all. It was the great, unofficial maxim of their people. Scars and unimportant memories ultimately fade away into nothing, leaving you with only the things worth cherishing. Time had healed her mother. The question was only whether Aethyta had time enough left.

"Will you?"

Whether she herself did.

"I don't know," Benezia answered honestly, looking away, down at her hands. She surprised herself, though, by adding: "I hope so."

Her daughter might not need her anymore, but neither did she need to worry for her. Or mourn for her. She was too young -far too young-and had concerns enough already in any case.

Liara's hand, with its missing and damaged fingers, came to rest atop hers.

"I do too."

Benezia folded her hands around her daughter's and they sat in silence for a time, Benezia uncertain as to what to say or do next. She'd always found it at least slightly difficult to relate to this daughter of hers, and the difficulty had grown as Liara had. Another reason, perhaps, why matriarchs rarely had children: the age gap was too extreme. For all that she had never really felt or thought of herself as getting older, the simple truth of the matter was that she was centuries removed from maidenhood, let alone childhood, and even asari recall, the trained memory of a priestess, was imperfect. Suddenly finding herself responsible for an insatiably curious, unbelievably energetic little person had revealed to her all the ways in which she had, in fact, aged.

As a child, Liara's impatience and sudden fancies, her abrupt changes of mind and complete lack of common sense tended towards the wearing, and had come as something of a shock besides to someone more accustomed to dealing with placid matrons and subtle matriarchs. Even Aethyta, for all her exuberant love of life and innumerable vices, was at least consistent in them, and, if incautious with her words at times, was considered with her opinions. She'd always had a common sense you could deflect bullets with in any case. Without her, with Liara, Benezia was acutely aware of how she had come to cloak her words with the reflection of days and her actions in the caution of years where once she would have spoken and acted with more alacrity, dealing with the imagined consequences as they happened rather than trying to stave them off before the fact.

When Liara had grown from a shy but active child into a shy, moody and withdrawn adolescent, Benezia had struggled to remember a time when her own confidence in dealing with others had been so lacking. She had struggled, too, to understand and empathise as well as she felt she ought to have. The rapidly changing fashions and trends and culture of youth were something only at the periphery of her awareness, and her few attempts to educate herself in such vagaries and then relate to her daughter on those terms had been met with rather more puzzlement and even embarrassment than thanks.

And when it came to helping Liara find children of her own age to engage with, she had proven similarly lacking. A life of constant travel did them few favours, the children of diplomats and entrepreneurs often jaded, unwilling to invest in friendships doomed to last but a few weeks or months. Benezia's own friends and closest acolytes were of an age with her and had children long since grown or none at all, and her estrangement from her own sisters meant that there were no cousins of any degree. Liara, for her part, had been unwilling to even try sports again after one moderately unsuccessful (and a second completely disastrous) skyball season, and had shunned her every other suggestion, from debating clubs to actual clubbing, in favour of hiding away at home or in the hotel suite, her nose buried in a book.

Then, of course, had come the inevitable, if subdued, clashes of ideology and will that marked the beginning of maidenhood, and on the heels of that an unwelcome estrangement that had left Benezia feeling not only very old but very alone. No daughter. No bondmate. Just her work and her acolytes, her secrets and her regrets. She had not been unhappy, precisely, during that period of her life, but there had been an undeniable hole in it that she had struggled to fill with friends and work and study, and the comfort of a different lover's arms.

And now Liara was maiden grown, an adult in every sense of the word, and Benezia was the one who hid away.

"You know," Liara began softly, and when Benezia glanced over towards her, she found her daughter lying flat on her back, her eye shut, "I still find it hard to picture the two of you together. She's not what I expected at all."

"So you've said."

"Can I ask..?"

"You may always ask. But I may decline to answer."

"What did you see in her?"

Benezia looked back down at the hand between hers and tried to ignore the throbbing of her head, while she searched for an answer. Liara's hands were slightly bigger than her own, but they shared the same long, delicate fingers. It was one of many such similarities between the two of them. Firstborn asari typically resembled their mothers far more strongly than any subsequent offspring, she knew, though their understanding of the whys of this, as it was with numerous other aspects of their species' reproduction, was as much based in speculation as science. But even with the knowing of that, it had always pained her, on some level, that there wasn't more of Aethyta in her daughter. Their daughter.

"Tell me, what do you see in this 'Shepard' of yours?"

She thought she succeeded admirably in keeping the slight distaste from her voice as she spoke the name.

"Shepard?" Liara sounded surprised, even taken aback, almost as if no-one had asked her such a question before. "She is... The way... I mean..." She paused and seemed to gather her thoughts, continuing more slowly: "She is brave, and kind-hearted, and intelligent, and... I suppose, she's unlike anyone else I've ever met."

Benezia's smile this time was slightly less forced.

"There you are then."

"Oh." A slight, almost disappointed sound. "But there must have been more to it than that."

"Must there?"

"She said you were together for more than a century. That suggests she had more than novelty value." She paused again, eye opening even as her brows creased into an uneven frown. "Not that I consider Shepard to be a novelty. Um. Or, really, that I think Aethyta is either. I mean, she's very, ah, interesting. 'Colourful', I think, is the word that Ashley used."

"'Colourful' is a good word," Benezia agreed. Colourful was certainly the least of what Aethyta had been called over the years. "Do you like her?"

Liara gave this a moment's thought.

"I do, actually. Though I did not really know what to make of her at first."

"Few do."

Benezia certainly hadn't at the time. But she'd let herself be swept off her feet anyway, in defiance of all their social mores - not to mention all common sense - by a rogue with a twinkle in her eye, a smirk on her lips and a firm hand on her behind. A whirlwind romance, in every sense of the phrase, it should never have lasted as long as it did, but she had found in Aethyta not just a lover and a partner, but a piece of her mind and her soul that she hadn't known was missing until the first time they'd melded. Finding the one who completed you in that way was so rare it was mythologised.

"But she gave me a commando unit to use during the war just when I needed them most. And she talked to me a bit. About you."

"She did?"

She shouldn't be surprised, really. She was the one thing Aethyta and Liara had in common, for all that she had also been the thing that kept them apart.

"Yes. She said that you were smart, and nicer than she was, and were the only person who ever really listened to her ideas."

"Her ideas were often good," Benezia remembered. "Unfortunately, she was not always very good at articulating them to the people who needed to hear them."

She had never had the patience for politics, Aethyta. Which was a bit odd, perhaps, given that she was perfectly capable of spending years at a time working in a terrible cover job, carefully gathering up intelligence or simply waiting and watching for the perfect moment to strike. But, on the other hand, she had also never been one to waste words, or mince them to spare another's feelings unnecessarily, and she was even less able to stand those she perceived as idiots. Unfortunately, nine-tenths of the matriarchs on Thessia fell into that particular category, at least as far as she was concerned. Sometimes Benezia had found herself agreeing with that particular assessment.

"She seemed more… sad than angry that you left her. And she didn't really seem to know why you did."

"Oh."

There was an inexpert hook at the end of Liara's last sentence, and she ignored it in favour of focusing on the one immediately prior. She would have expected anger from Aethyta when talking of her. Certainly, she had seen it herself these, past weeks, on more than on occasion. Had she simply put it aside, at the time, for Liara's sake? Because of the war, or because she thought she, Benezia, was dead? Or...

Benezia absently rubbed at the bruises on her arm, as if they could banish the memories of a kiss, drunken and uncomfortable and ultimately refused.

"Did she... did she say anything else? About me?"

Liara suddenly looked uncomfortable.

"Um. A bit. But nothing important, really."

The evasion was as inexpert as the hook had been.

"'Really'?"

"Really. In fact-"

"Liara," she said, and Liara actually squirmed slightly back in her cot at the warning in her tone.

"She was, ah, quite effusive about you, um, I mean your..."

Liara shut her eye, slipped her hand out from atop Benezia's and waved it instead in her general direction.

"Physical attributes."

"Oh. Oh."

"Yes. Quite loudly too. In a public cafe."

"Oh."

She gave this a moment's thought. Aethtya had never really seen the point in hiding her vices, indulging in them wholeheartedly no matter how uncomfortable others around her felt – sometimes indulging in them simply to make others uncomfortable, which she supposed a vice in and of itself. It was an attitude that Benezia found herself agreeing with more and more as the years went by.

"Well, she always was very appreciative," she conceded. "I could never wear anything low-cut without running the risk of getting backed into some corner somewhere. If I had a credit for every outfit she ruined trying to get me out of it-"

To be the subject of such single-minded pursuit was undeniably thrilling, but even more so was the discovery of a partner who was more than willing to indulge in every idle fantasy she'd ever had about sex in the backs of skycars, or barely-hidden corners of conference centres while delegations of the great and powerful lingered within earshot.

Liara's eye shot back open, a look of abject horror crossing her face.

"Mother!"

"Yes?"

When Liara failed to respond for several seconds, and the expression on her face remained equally unchanged, Benezia sighed.

"You wished to know what I saw in her. Physical attraction and mutual compatibility was certainly a part of it, as it is with most lasting relationships. Don't be so prudish."

"I'm not prudish. I just happen to have a very good imagination. And I do not wish to employ it thinking about my parents..." she trailed off, waving her hand vaguely in the air once again.

"Having sex?" she prompted, provoking another wince. "Then I would suggest that you never raise the topic with your father. If you've not already discovered, she does rather like to brag."

She paused, memories flooding back in a warm rush. Languid morning spent abed, slowly exploring to find new nuances in each other's bodies. Being taken and marked, quick and hard, in a dressing room, over her half-hearted protests. The simple comfort of a warm, soft body nestled against her own, strong arms around her.

"Truth be told, she may have some cause to," she continued eventually. "She could be quite inventive."

Liara cringed back against her pillows, and covered her face with her hand.

"Mother, as wonderful as it is to see you smile," she said, voice slightly muffled, "if you don't stop right now, I may be forced to do something drastic."

If having a daughter had revealed to Benezia all of the ways in which she had grown old, Liara had also helped her to find the parts of herself that were still young. Stories and rhymes, riddles and clapping games that she'd thought she had long since forgotten had come back to her surprisingly quickly, to be shared and delighted in once more. Walks in the park became adventures, and not just due to the difficulty of keeping Liara from digging up half of the lawn. Benezia cancelled meetings in favour of tea parties, and deferred more than one real press conference to attend pretend ones and 'lectures' about Liara's most recent 'discoveries'. She had never expected herself, at more than seven hundred, to while away entire afternoons playing at Justicars, or C-Seccers and Mercs, or that she would rope the more understanding of her guards and acolytes into playing the parts of various villains. Respected matriarchs did not use their daughters as distractions while they stole fresh, hot pastries from the kitchens, and then they most certainly did not blame the head chef's pet iesabeast for the resulting shortfall.

Of course, she had been used as such a distraction herself, by Aethyta, on more than one occasion, but then Aethyta had never once claimed to be respectable. Quite the opposite. And there were other ways in which Aethyta had striven to remind her that there was still an idealistic, adventurous young maiden and a romantic, whimsical matron buried somewhere beneath the passage of centuries and the weight of responsibility, propriety and expectation. The times Benezia had come home, after a long day at the Forum or the baths or lecture halls, to find her bondmate lounging atop her desk or in their bed wearing nothing but a bracelet and a wicked smile weren't the half of it.

They were good memories, all, regardless of how events had played out, or how everything presently stood. Something to hold to, if she could. A daughter's first word might have some power against the memory of a cherished acolyte's last breath; a night, sated and spent and secure in the arms of a lover, some balm against the nightmares of the frozen planet, the dank and terrible ship.

But even as she had the thought, the hopelessness and the crushing despair, black and empty, deep enough to swallow her whole, rose again. What a useless, worthless, pathetic creature she was! Grasping at, clinging to the past, to the lover she had used and cast aside, the daughter she had tried to kill. She was nothing, insignificant, less than an insect, unworthy of anything good that the galaxy had to offer. She had always been so, even if she had not known it until Saren and his ship revealed her place in the galaxy to her. She was-

"Mother?"

She could feel the pattern of her thoughts start to shift and twist out from underneath her, back into the groove that had been ground so deeply within her mind. Goddess, but it was so very easy to slip back into the mindset the machines had forced upon her, let the throb and ache of her temples fade even as the darkness rose within her. So very easy, and so very tempting.

And that, of course, was the trap. A single stray thought, a half-moment's longing to be free from it all and the cycle would start anew, Benezia willingly spiralling downwards, inwards, until she sought and found nothingness once more. A place where there was no pain, no shame, no guilt and no memory.

But she needed to be better than this. For Liara, who bore such terrible hurts with dignity and determination, and who loved her still, for all she was unworthy of it. She did not need to worry for her as well. For Aethyta, who had met her, despite her betrayal, with as much compassion as anger. She deserved such compassion in return. And for her people, the countless thousands of asari who had fought and suffered and seen loved ones die while she lay safe in peaceful slumber, who now struggled to help each other and rebuild while she hid and let herself waste away. She had once worked so earnestly to bring about their suffering; they were owed whatever she had left, however little, to give.

Liara had been late to speak, late enough to cause consternation and considerable concern. Unwarranted, in the end, of course: her first word had been 'go', accompanied by a pudgy fist pointed out the open window one bright spring afternoon. 'Mama', though, had been a close second, those same tiny hands reaching up for her, clinging to her gown as she hummed a fragment of lullaby.

Benezia shut her eyes and brought her hand to her temple, breathing in slowly through her nose and out through her mouth as the pain spiked and then subsided somewhat. When she opened them again, Liara was sitting up, reaching out for her in concern. She waved her daughter's hands away but had no chance to further reply before someone behind them cleared their throat pointedly.

"I'm sorry to intrude, Doctor," Palla said in the tones of one who wasn't necessarily. She had a tired smile for Liara as she entered the hold that quickly faded when her eyes met Benezia's. "But the reporters from yesterday are here, along with four others. I've got them in the dining hall at the moment, but they're asking for you."

Liara winced once more and closed her eye, bringing her own hand to her forehead, unconsciously a mirror of Benezia's own gesture seconds before.

"You know, I had almost convinced myself that yesterday was a dream," she sighed. "Are they causing any problems?"

The matron shook her head in reply.

"No, but then hardly anyone's up. Give it an hour and half of the camp will be queuing in front of them to offer interviews, I'm sure, and after that all bets are off." Her eyes fell on Benezia again, and she could see the distaste hidden behind them. "I don't think they know about you yet, Matriarch, yet, but it won't be long until they do."

The press. Goddess. She had known that this day would come. They had spoken of it, after all, before they had made planetfall, and Benezia had agreed that denying her return would do more harm than good. It had been some mercy that evidently few of the residents had the means or were interested enough, in amongst everything else of note, to spread the word. But the grace period was certainly over now, and she had no idea what she might say when faced with a camera and an inquiring, accusing voice. What could she say, other than that she was sorry? Truly and deeply? That she did not expect, nor ask for forgiveness?

Liara glanced between the two of them, her frown deepening.

"I do not want them talking to you just yet," she told Benezia, "and certainly not without me there." To Palla, she said: "Can you stall them for a few hours? I haven't had time to go through the overnight transmissions, and I need to see what else has been said about what happened yesterday before I talk to them."

Liara had gone somewhere yesterday, hadn't she? To... Cianna? Somewhere to the east, in any case. She had asked Benezia about the matriarchs she thought she might encounter there - not yesterday, but perhaps the day before, or the day before that? It was difficult to remember.

"I can try," Palla said, without a much in the way of either enthusiasm or confidence. "But I've never really dealt with the media before now. That was always Hillie's job."

"A tour," Benezia interrupted as the idea came to her, accompanied by a stab of pain through her skull. "A tour of the camp and the surrounding grounds. Emergency procedures. It should buy you an hour to prepare at the least, and more if you are lucky."

"I might be able to do that," the matron replied slowly, looking over at Liara for reassurance.

She shrugged.

"It's worth a try."

"Is there no one with a media or public relations background that you can call into service? I mean no disrespect to you, Palla," Benezia said, inclining her head carefully in the matron's direction, "but diverting the media is a job best left to someone with experience and training."

The odds of there being someone in the camp with the requisite background was decent, she judged. Armali was a city of politics and a city of commerce; both were endeavours that created a thriving media-management sub-industry.

Liara's frown turned speculative.

"I think I saw someone..." she said, scooting up off of the cot to slip behind her terminals. A few seconds later she made a pleased sound, and swung the monitors around for them to see the dossier of an asari with midnight-blue skin and slightly lighter markings that highlighted her eyes. "Belia D'Azuma. Apprentice Press Secretary with Mosst Electronics for the past five years.

"Palla, could you please find her and bring her to me immediately? She and her daughter are in Hall Five, I think."

"Of course," Palla said and quickly departed, though not before casting another hard look in Benezia's direction.

"She doesn't like you," Liara said once she was gone, surprise in her voice.

"She does not. And with good reason."

Liara sighed heavily.

"What happened wasn't your fault, Mother. You were indoctrinated. People will understand that eventually."

"Perhaps," she conceded, unwilling to enter into an argument on the topic.

Liara did not understand and, if there was any small bit of grace in the galaxy left for Benezia, never would. Her daughter, however, refused to be mollified.

"There's nothing 'perhaps' about it!" she insisted, a touch of anger colouring her tone. "We have proof. Cerberus was good for that, at least. The Reapers did it to thousands of people – the entire batarian government for one. They were torn apart from within. It's why they fell so quickly."

"Just as you say."

Liara's unmarked brow quirked in overt anger.

"Mother-" she began, then stopped and sighed again, and this time it was heavy with exasperation as she visibly reined her frustration back in. "Thank you. For the tour idea, I mean."

"You are welcome, of course. Thought it does beg the question of why reporters have arrived here, now, after we've gone so long unmolested. I take it your meeting yesterday did not go well..?"

"Not exactly, no." Liara winced at recollection. "I may have indulged in another bad habit of mine."

"Oh?"

"Saying things without thinking them entirely through." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and then rose, gesturing for Benezia to take her place. "Um. It might actually be easier to show you."

And so Benezia sat and watched and listened, and then replayed the key sections of the interview again twice-over, trying to contain her growing horror while behind her Liara held a hasty briefing with Palla and the bleary-eyed D'Azuma, who frowned but took copious notes on her omnitool.

Liara's words were no less than an impassioned repudiation of their system of governance, and those who had held power during the war. The anger and contempt behind them was, to a mother's eye, raw, and likely just as apparent to others. Contempt for everything Benezia had believed in and worked for, everything she was in her old life.

There was nothing new in that, save the identity of the speaker, and the wounding the renunciation carried on a personal level. Hot-headed maidens had been railing against the system since the dawn of time, to the amused tolerance of their elders. Anarchists, for the most part, the most passionate or charismatic of which would leave the Republics to found some new colony or another, which itself would eventually, invariably return to the fold as those maidens became matrons and sought stability and security only the greater Republics could provide. So it went, as it always had.

But this was different in tone and, reading between the lines, in purpose. Liara had effectively called upon their people give power to new leaders, but had declined to nominate who those leaders should be. She had decried the system, but suggested no replacement. It was as if she expected the answer for both to be obvious to the viewer, and it was, to Benezia at least, particularly with the urging towards quick, unilateral action:

Not leaders by a leader. Someone who had acquitted themselves well during the war. Someone young, decisive and famous.

Goddess.

On the monitor, the vid began another loop. In it, the stadium of thousands roared its approval as Liara's party walked through it. In her old life, Benezia had filled such stadiums on a few occasions, but the kind of response from she was watching was reserved for only the most famous of pop stars and celebrity athletes, not shy young archaeologists who regularly got so wrapped up in their studies they forgot to eat and still blushed at the thought of their parents having a love-life.

It was hard to comprehend that the angry, passionate young maiden on the screen was her Liara. A few short years should not have wrought so much change in a person. Harder still to comprehend what it meant, if this was indeed her, and if even a fraction of those listening headed the words being spoken: blood on the streets, fistfights in the forums, and quiet knives in the dark.

Quiet knives for her daughter. Not a young hot-head, shouting into a vacuum and easily ignored, but a genuine threat with a popular following and a real powerbase. In the eyes of many, she would need to be dealt with, and quickly.

"Goddess, Little Wing," she whispered when the two of them were briefly alone once more. "What have you done?"

Liara's reply, accompanied by a sad, wan smile, did nothing to assuage the sudden fear that seized her heart:

"Raised a storm, Mother. Raised one hell of a storm."