Sitting on the edge of the bed Liara watched the stuttering breaths come and go from the sleeping occupant. When he was awake she allowed herself to be selfless and kind, but as he slept her selfishness came roaring to the front.
Was this it then? This withered shell of a person, awake in small fits as death came, this was the last Williams.
Even so old and wane, he kept his great grandmother's features well. The strong chin, the way his face crinkled when he had smiled. It was wrong, he had been a soldier, a strong vibrant man who excelled with a gun but was better with biotics. His dark hair faded to a wiry grey, his unshaven face covered in thinning white hair. Where he had once had dimples in his cheeks, hallows rested instead. His mouth open wide, looking almost like he was screaming where he rarely had risen his voice above a whisper in his life.
He was the last one, his own daughter having perished after a heart attack at much too young of an age. He didn't want another child. So the line was over. Ashley would truly be gone.
And Liara hated that thought. Here was her little Benny, a man now but once a boy who had grabbed at her hands and called to her when he was scared. He had called her Grandma, or Gamma, or if he wanted something from her Gamma Ara because he knew that when he said it Liara saw a toddling babe struggling to speak. He had sung to her through the comms and demanded at least hard light holograms when they couldn't be there in person for his birthday. He bought her wind chimes knowing she mostly lived in space and on ships where they wouldn't sound because he found it funny and she found it sweet.
And here she was not mourning her Benny but Ashley, a woman dead more than a century.
Liara didn't have family, her own had been small and destroyed, mother killed by daughter and father never found after Cerberus's attack on the Citadel. Her family had grown beyond blood to her friends, and they had fallen one by one. Wrex had been one of the first, to everyone's shock, crushed in a cave in as the Krogan's rebuilt themselves. Javik had taken his ow life shortly after, as if permission had finally been given. And on it went. Each of her friends and family members passing on, returning home.
In their place Liara had found herself surrounded by their children. She was Auntie Liara then. Then it all drifted away, she had been their parent's friend not theirs after all. The Taylor's were kind but she never knew his grandchildren well. Wrex's veritable brood always welcomed her, but they were not knit together the same way Liara craved. The Zorahs and Vakarians were polite but distant as the generations went. The Williams had truly been a bastion for her. Allan, Benny's father, had called her Grandma and mammy if he wanted to tease her. He'd invited her to countless Christmas celebrations and birthdays and anything he could. Allan had loved her dearly and she had loved him. A soldier who made it out of war, refused a Spectre candidacy, started a family. Then Benny, who had not liked calling her great grandma and so gamma this and gamma that.
"Hey gamma, will you pass me the cranberry sauce?"
"Where is your sense of adventure grandma? Come on roller coasters are the best!"
"How wrong is it that I have to call you to complain that you never call? You don't write! Are you sick? Need a blanket gamma? Pick up your omni!"
"Gamma, gamma you won't believe, she's so small! She's, she's so perfect, ha! I, uh, I wish you were here, I can't wait till you're here. Oh God, you'll love her. Not more than me, but close. I think, you'll, she so perfect."
Liara smiled even as the tears slipped past her eyelids, and opened her eyes once more. This vibrant man with his stupid trumpet and dumb hair, reduced to a wheezing husk. Skin too thin and stretched too far over his atrophied frame. She loved him and hated that as she gazed on him she saw Ashley Williams hooked up to oxygen on her own hospital bed. Her long hair freely flowing in a way she usually detested. Whispering at them to shut up as they tried to talk to her and she tried to sleep. She had been in so much pain at the end, but looking on her wrinkled face and sunken eyes Liara had still felt a force behind them. A fire that dared her to feel pity. They'd held hands as her son prayed over her, and Liara had been honored to sit vigil with them after she passed.
That moment of watching in silence and candles as they grieved replaying in her mind over and over and over again. And as she sat in the silence now, alone at Benny's side, she tried to think of a prayer for him and failed him yet again.