Benezia and her amazing rack didn't die on Noveria; instead, Shepard and crew saved her life, putting her into stasis until they could work out a way to fix her head. Now that the reaper war is over, they've finally got time to haul her out of cold storage. Benezia now has to adapt to a galaxy where her homeworld is in ruins, she's viewed with deep suspicion and even hostility, and her formerly shy, awkward daughter is one of the most powerful people in the galaxy. Fortunately, Aethyta's there to help - or, at least, to provide a welcome distraction...
A/N: I'm not the anon who was nurturing a plot bunny regarding this prompt. If they're still about and working on a fill, I hope they continue to do so! For me, this started out life as an attempt to get unblocked on the other prompt I'm supposed to be finishing filling, but it rather took on a life of its own, eating mine in the process. I think it's going to be long one...
Liara allowed herself a little less than two weeks in the end. Two days to simply sleep, another three to heal, one to mourn and the rest to hover by Shepard's bedside, one eye on the various medical monitors while she worked, trying to pull together what remained of her network and make some sense of the ruined galaxy. Two weeks, and even then it was really more than she could afford to spare. Events were moving forward apace, faster than her ability to plan for them, and the few reports that came in from the homeworld were troubling, to say the least. By rights, she should probably have been aboard the first vessel bound for Thessia she could find once she'd been capable of walking again.
Leaving now, though, meant that she wouldn't be there if Shepard woke up. When Shepard woke up, she mentally corrected herself. But she needed to go, now, and she could only hope that the human would understand. Liara had a duty to her people as well as to Shepard, and she'd do more good organising things on her homeworld and lending what support she could to the others than she could hovering over a hospital bed. It was the right thing to do, however traitorous it felt. Shepard would have to understand. She knew about duty. She'd know that Liara had hated to leave her.
But, even with the teary, wordless farewell behind her, there were still one or two things that needed to be taken care of before she could set foot upon the world of her birth again. This was one of the last of them, and easily proving to be the most difficult. She'd hidden in the ship's small cabin in dread of it, silly and childish as it was, until now. She, who had summoned Kalros, who had spat in the unblinking eye of Harbinger, afraid? It was ludicrous. But then again, she'd always been much better at taking action than dealing with other people.
"Gilsame? Why are we detouring to Gilsame?" Aethyta said, checking the navigation database on the small freighter Liara had not so much talked into as demanded the Alliance loan her. Being one of the now-legendary Normandy crew had to have a few benefits, she'd decided, to go along with what remained of her clout at the Broker. "Two days out of the way for a ball of radioactive ice pirates wouldn't bother with."
"We need to collect someone," she allowed, hearing the tension in her own voice.
Aethyta heard it too, and gave her a hard look.
"One of your 'agents'?"
Liara was not entirely certain how much Aethyta knew about her activities - probably more than she let on and certainly much more than she’d relayed to the other matriarchs. The matriarch's slow, deliberate manner masked a sharp mind, and she'd certainly hinted, more than once, that she found it extremely unlikely that at Liara and the Shadow Broker had made nice, no matter the 'official' story.
"No. They will- I..." She wrung her hands nervously together as she looked at the older asari, at her 'father'. She genuinely liked her other parent, but didn't know her anywhere near enough to judge how she'd react to the news, and she really needed to win her over for this. In the end, she’d decided to plumb for blunt honesty. Plainly-spoken as she was, Aethyta would have to appreciate that, at least. "There is no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come out with it."
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and only then did she dare meet her other parent's eyes.
That Which Was Lost (2/?)
anonymous
June 24 2012, 02:33:28 UTC
Aethyta, matriarch of the asari, spy, saboteur, inadvertent hero of the Citadel and the best dammed bartender this side of the galactic core watched as her youngest daughter worked the controls of the stasis pod and tried to sort out exactly what she, herself, was feeling. Anger? Yes. Hell yes. Pissed off didn't even begin to cover it. It had taken all of her not-inconsiderable willpower to stop herself from smacking the kid so hard that she'd have thought Aethyta was Kurinth herself, descended from the heavens to kick the blue from her ass. The nerve, the goddess-damned nerve of her, sitting on a secret like that, lying to her face about it. Two days later and she was still simmering.
And, damnit, she was still plenty angry with the kid's mother too. Forgiveness had come a hell of a lot easier when she'd thought Benezia dead. 'Time heals', 'cherish the moments together' and all of that varrenshit. The unexpected revelation and further realisation that she was going to see her former bondmate again had brought a lot of things she'd thought long-buried back to the surface, few of them pleasant. Anger, resentment, hurt, dread-
Dread?
"Are you sure that this is a good idea?" she said, giving voice to the last thought. "I mean, after what happened..."
"Honestly?" The kid paused momentarily in her work to look up and over at her. Her good eye sparkled in the dim lights of the cargo bay. "No. I'm not. She made a mistake. A big one. And we don't really know anything about the long-term effects of indoctrination," Liara sighed and laid her hand gently atop the stasis pod, before returning to her work. "But Shepard believes in second chances. So do I."
Aethyta couldn't quite help the dismissive snort that escaped her.
"You're about the only ones."
"I know. And that's why I need you. I need someone who knows that it was Saren and Sovereign who did those horrible things, not her."
And that, right there, was why, despite her anger at the pair of them and everything else besides, she'd ultimately agreed to go along with this harebrained scheme. At least for a little while. Nezzie was a victim here. She'd done a stupid, if well-intentioned thing and gotten herself in over her head with no-one standing by to pull her back out again when it eventually went tits up. She'd had no way of knowing what Sovereign truly was, or was capable of. Hell, at that stage everyone had thought it was just some overgrown dreadnought and Saren just... a Spectre a little more off kilter than most of that breed, wanting to use geth to rule the galaxy.
Geth. Huh. If only it had actually been geth. Geth would have been a fucking cakewalk.
But, victim or no, Benezia had been indoctrinated. Now, she needed handlers, people who knew her well enough from her former life to be able to tell if she wasn't acting like herself. People, in other words, who knew all the little cues and signals to look for, knew the way she spoke, the way she moved and held herself, how she thought... That was a pretty damn select group these days, especially if you limited it to the people willing to remain associated with her in any way. Herself. The kid. Maybe some of Nezzie's old followers and students, if they were still alive, but, given that most of them had denounced their former lady even before her supposed death, she doubted many, if any, of the survivors would volunteer.
She sighed and moved over for a better look at the pod, her footsteps swallowed up by a cargo hold crammed full the mammoth supply stockpile they'd shifted along with it. The pod was an older model, medical, the sort used by a better class of merc companies to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be properly seen to. Compact, with few bells and whistles but all the more robust because of it. The scratched plasteel windows on this one had fogged over during the transfer from the tiny bunker on Gilsame to the ship, rendering Benezia little more than a pale blue blur. Aethyta wiped her hand across one cloudy panel; it came away damp, with a slight squeaking noise.
That Which Was Lost (3/?)
anonymous
June 24 2012, 02:37:28 UTC
"You never gave me a straight answer for why you did it."
The kid went still for a long moment, hands motionless at the controls. The uneven lighting in the bay cast dark shadows across her face as she bowed her head.
"The last shot was mine," she said, finally, quietly. "Shepard didn't want me to be the one who killed her."
Oh. Crap. That little detail hadn't been in the official report, or the unofficial one either. She knew from personal experience that losing your parents at such a young age could fuck you up pretty good for a few decades, but shooting, killing your own mother - it was the kind of thing that could scar you for life. A little bit of her anger towards the girl drained away.
A little bit.
"I didn't mean that," she replied awkwardly, feeling like the mother of all heels, but pressed on anyway. "I can understand saving her. She's your mother. But why keep it a secret?"
Liara shrugged, a subdued movement, and returned once to work once more.
"At first we thought we might be able to, I don't know, figure out exactly what had happened to her. How to help her break free permanently and stop it from happening to other people. But nobody believed us about the Reapers, even after they attacked the Citadel. An unimaginable invasion fleet waiting in dark space? Mind control? It all sounded so... fantastic." She shook her head slightly. "With Saren dead, the Council would have used her as a scapegoat. More than they did anyway. She would have been publically tried as traitor and imprisoned. Maybe even executed. And she still would have been under Reaper control throughout. I... I couldn't do that to her."
The kid finished the last of the diagnostics and looked back up at her.
"Everything's green," she said. Her voice held and odd mixture of satisfaction and concern. "Are you ready?"
"Well," Aethyta sighed and cracked her knuckles, "I guess I'd better be."
Re: That Which Was Lost (3/?)
anonymous
June 24 2012, 19:25:07 UTC
Oh God this is so good! I always thought it was a tragedy that a great character like Benezia died in ME1. I can hardly wait to see where you take this. Thanks so much for this!
That Which Was Lost (4/?)
anonymous
June 24 2012, 08:50:46 UTC
=======
"You know, for someone so smart, you always could be so damned stupid. What the blue hell were you thinking?"
It took a few seconds for Benezia to open her eyes and focus on the figure seated at the end of her bed, straddling a chair backwards, watching her impassively. It took several more to put a name to the face.
"Aethy..?" she said, startled when her voice came out as little more than a rusty whisper. Goddess, she felt absolutely dreadful. She ached everywhere, her side and stomach worst of all. Her mouth was like sand, her eyes and throat raw and scratchy with each slow blink and breath. All strength seemed to have left her limbs. And her head. Goddess, her head.
"You remember who I am. Well, that's a start, I guess. Do you know who you are?"
"Of course," she rasped, puzzled by such an odd question, especially coming from Aethyta. And... yes, that was wrong, too. What was Aethy doing here? They weren't... They hadn't... "I am Benezia T'Soni, Matriarch of the asari and..." tool servant plaything. Her head started to pound with force. The room swam, nausea rising in her stomach. "...and..."
"Hmmph." Aethyta frowned. "Do you know how you got here then?"
"I..." Her shaking hand flew unconsciously to her temple as she struggled to pierce the fog roiling inside her mind. The room was unfamiliar. Barely furnished and small, cramped with just two occupants, the square metal walls suggested 'ship', and not one of asari design. How had she gotten here? She could remember... "I... was on Noveria. The rachni queen. I… needed to find the Mu relay. There was a battle. I was trying to..." Her hand dropped as the memory reached its conclusion. "Goddess, Liara! She was-"
Aethyta's expression shifted from cool distance into something approaching compassion.
"Relax - the kid's fine. Well, maybe not one hundred per cent fine, but she's alive, anyway, and that's more than a lot of people can say. She'll be here in a bit."
"She... knows?"
She'd always meant to tell Liara about Aethyta, but had never been able to find the right words when Liara had been younger. Eventually, to Benezia's guilty relief, the girl had stopped asking. And then later, when she'd thought Liara might be old enough to understand something of love in all of its aching contradictions, they'd fought, stopped speaking. Liara had rebelled against her in the fashion of maidens who think they know everything, and she had reacted... badly. It was obvious with hindsight, and part of her had even realised it at the time, but, despite all her years, despite all her supposed 'wisdom', she'd been hurt by Liara's desire to leave her, and terrified by the prospect of her shy little wing going out into the dangerous galaxy on her own. Liara was her only daughter, and she would always want to hold her close, keep her safe.
Her only daughter.
She'd tried to kill her only daughter.
"Yeah, she knows," Aethyta was saying. "She's a smart kid. But that's not the issue here. Look, we know that the Reap- that Sovereign was fucking with your head." The name sent a finger of dread and revulsion down her spine. Sovereign. Saren's ship. But not just a ship, something she'd discovered far too late. So many dead, so many used, herself among them. Her pride. Her blindness. Her fault. "We know that you fought him too. But we need to know what the damage is. If you can be trusted again. We don't have a lot of experience in dealing with people who survive indoctrination to the level you had it. Most of 'em died in the war, or offed themselves straight after."
That Which Was Lost (5/?)
anonymous
June 24 2012, 08:54:29 UTC
"War?" The word cut through her rising revulsion at herself. She'd been trying to prevent a war. Somehow. That's why she'd gone along with Saren. Saren. Another finger of disgust shivered its way down her spine. "What war?"
Aethyta sighed, heavily, suddenly looking all of her thousand-odd years.
"It only ended a couple of weeks ago so it doesn't have a proper name yet. But the long and short of it is Sovereign's buddies showed up and the whole galaxy went all to hell. I've never seen anything like it." She shook her head slowly, almost as if in awe. "Conservative estimate is we've lost two thirds of the galactic population. The batarians are pretty much done for as a species and we might not have enough elcor left for a viable population either. And, well, our people are only a bit better off. Some of the colony worlds seem to have come through ok, but Thessia..."
Benezia stared at her in open-mouthed horror. But the shock of Aethyta's words was finally enough to kick her brain into some semblance of action. She could remember being shot on Noveria, quite clearly. The pain of it had been enough to break Saren's hold on her again. She'd felt herself bleeding out and had begged them to let her pass on before the monster claimed her once more. But then Liara had been at her side, begging her to stay while two armoured figures worked with clumsy haste to slather her wounds with medigel...
A war of the scale Aethyta was talking about would take time. Years. Time enough for Liara to find and meet her other parent. But when Benezia touched her side, now, above the bullet wound, the skin was still raw and tender. If she'd been unconscious, in a coma over the intervening period, she would have healed.
"How long have I been in stasis?"
"Three years, or there abouts."
"Three years?" Her voice, to her own ears, was incredulous. Two-thirds of the galaxy, gone in three years? That seemed hardly time enough for a war of that scale. She'd seen visions of the devastation the monsters had caused before, but even so...
"Or there abouts. But don't think about that now. There's going to be a lot to take in. You’ll need to work up to it slowly."
Three years. A war fought and over in the blink of an eye. A war against Sovereign and the others like it. She blinked, and one of the visions Saren had gifted to her flitted behind her eyes.
Out in the darkness of intergalactic space, the great fleet sat, each ship a nation unto itself, alive and malevolent and unstoppable. One by one they woke; one by one suns darkened, worlds burned, races died.
But there was a way for them all to survive this cycle. Saren had found it. He'd shown her. Surrender. Pride was not worth the price.
"And Saren?" she heard herself ask.
"Dead. You actually have our girl to thank for that." Aethyta smiled, some of the age dropping away from her face again. "You did a good job with her."
"I can only agree, really," a new voice chimed in as the door slid open, a voice she would know anywhere. Soft, breathy, slightly hesitant...
Liara.
There was a lengthy pause, the three of them frozen in tableau.
"I'll leave you two to it," Aethyta eventually said, with a tact most would be startled to learn that she possessed. "I'd bet you've got a bit to talk about."
Benezia watched silently as her daughter carefully manoeuvred her way into the small room and past Aethyta, a laden tray clasped in both hands and a datapad tucked under one arm. She looked, to a mother's eye... different. Older. More than three years would suggest. Gone were the soft, subdued contours of youth, replaced by the full figured body of a maiden in her prime. Darker skin. Better posture. New, hard muscle beneath... armour? She'd taken it for a new work uniform at first, but up close it's clearly a ballistics weave with solid ceramic plating, well-used, well-fitted and likely custom-made.
Re: That Which Was Lost (5/?)
anonymous
June 25 2012, 16:20:34 UTC
Thanks, anon! I'm glad people are finding it engaging - I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested in an AU of an uncommon pairing, but the prompt ate me alive. Dysfunctional is a good word for the three of them. And Shepard will have a role to play, hopefully along with some other famous faces.
Re: That Which Was Lost (6/?)
anonymous
June 25 2012, 14:40:37 UTC
Almost the entire right side of her daughter’s face was a mess of raw scar tissue, bisected by a thin, diagonal band of untouched skin across her cheek. Below the band and across the line of her cheekbone to her nose, the skin was puckered and pitted, drawn tight enough to pull the corner of her mouth up slightly. The same scarring continued under her jawline and down the front of her neck. Worse, though, was the area around her eye, a single, livid, indigo burn extended halfway up her forehead. She wore a simple fabric patch, white, over the eye.
"What did you expect?" she heard herself ask. Her voice was remarkably level.
"Someone more like you, I suppose." Liara shrugged slightly and turned back to lay the tray down carefully on the small shelf beside the bed. Then, to Benezia's slight surprise, she sat carefully upon the edge of the bed itself, rather than seeking out the so-recently vacated chair. "Hello mother."
When their eyes met for the first time, Benezia suddenly felt the full weight of her shame and looked away.
Her daughter, her dearest little wing. She had tried her best to kill her. It had seemed the only logical course of action at the time. Worse, far worse: a part of her could still understand that logic, feel the echo of frustration at the human’s interference in their plans and anger that the Spectre thought her weak enough to be swayed by ties of blood.
"Mother, please." When Benezia allowed herself to look back up again, there were tears in her daughter's remaining eye as she spoke the words. "
"Liara... my little wing," her throat was suddenly tight, tears blurring her own vision. "Goddess, what happened..? I didn't-"
Her trembling hand drifted up of its own accord to cup a scarred, mangled cheek, fingertips brushing the eyepatch. What little remained of Benezia's heart broke when Liara's right hand came up to cover hers, and she realised that the little finger of it was gone, along with the tips of the next two, scarring to match her face and neck down the back of her hand until her skin disappeared beneath a suspiciously new section of armour.
"No. This was Harbinger's work. The burns will heal eventually, and there are prosthetics these days that are even better than the real thing. In the meantime, it will certainly teach me not to wear a proper helmet," Liara said with a tight smile that only moved one side of her face, and drew their hands away. "I’ve missed you.”
“And I you,” she replied, letting the tears fall. How close had they come to losing each other? “Liara, I-“
“Later, mother,” her daughter interrupted gently, squeezing her hand. “How are you feeling? Honestly?"
How was she feeling? Oh, what a question to ask, little wing, what a question...
"Thirsty," she supplied, deliberately focusing on the physical. "Weak."
"Any pain?"
"Some. My side." She tried to sit and winced, and then Liara's arms were there, helping her up. "My chest."
"I am afraid we had to put you into stasis straight out of surgery. We couldn't risk you waking up of your own accord. You were shot three times. The areas around the wounds will be tender for a few more days," Liara said apologetically, arranging the pillows behind her so she could settle back. Her next question from her, though, when it came, came sharp, and without any apology whatsoever:
http://masseffectkink.livejournal.com/4309.html?thread=10103253#t10103253
Benezia and her amazing rack didn't die on Noveria; instead, Shepard and crew saved her life, putting her into stasis until they could work out a way to fix her head. Now that the reaper war is over, they've finally got time to haul her out of cold storage. Benezia now has to adapt to a galaxy where her homeworld is in ruins, she's viewed with deep suspicion and even hostility, and her formerly shy, awkward daughter is one of the most powerful people in the galaxy. Fortunately, Aethyta's there to help - or, at least, to provide a welcome distraction...
A/N: I'm not the anon who was nurturing a plot bunny regarding this prompt. If they're still about and working on a fill, I hope they continue to do so! For me, this started out life as an attempt to get unblocked on the other prompt I'm supposed to be finishing filling, but it rather took on a life of its own, eating mine in the process. I think it's going to be long one...
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Liara allowed herself a little less than two weeks in the end. Two days to simply sleep, another three to heal, one to mourn and the rest to hover by Shepard's bedside, one eye on the various medical monitors while she worked, trying to pull together what remained of her network and make some sense of the ruined galaxy. Two weeks, and even then it was really more than she could afford to spare. Events were moving forward apace, faster than her ability to plan for them, and the few reports that came in from the homeworld were troubling, to say the least. By rights, she should probably have been aboard the first vessel bound for Thessia she could find once she'd been capable of walking again.
Leaving now, though, meant that she wouldn't be there if Shepard woke up. When Shepard woke up, she mentally corrected herself. But she needed to go, now, and she could only hope that the human would understand. Liara had a duty to her people as well as to Shepard, and she'd do more good organising things on her homeworld and lending what support she could to the others than she could hovering over a hospital bed. It was the right thing to do, however traitorous it felt. Shepard would have to understand. She knew about duty. She'd know that Liara had hated to leave her.
But, even with the teary, wordless farewell behind her, there were still one or two things that needed to be taken care of before she could set foot upon the world of her birth again. This was one of the last of them, and easily proving to be the most difficult. She'd hidden in the ship's small cabin in dread of it, silly and childish as it was, until now. She, who had summoned Kalros, who had spat in the unblinking eye of Harbinger, afraid? It was ludicrous. But then again, she'd always been much better at taking action than dealing with other people.
"Gilsame? Why are we detouring to Gilsame?" Aethyta said, checking the navigation database on the small freighter Liara had not so much talked into as demanded the Alliance loan her. Being one of the now-legendary Normandy crew had to have a few benefits, she'd decided, to go along with what remained of her clout at the Broker. "Two days out of the way for a ball of radioactive ice pirates wouldn't bother with."
"We need to collect someone," she allowed, hearing the tension in her own voice.
Aethyta heard it too, and gave her a hard look.
"One of your 'agents'?"
Liara was not entirely certain how much Aethyta knew about her activities - probably more than she let on and certainly much more than she’d relayed to the other matriarchs. The matriarch's slow, deliberate manner masked a sharp mind, and she'd certainly hinted, more than once, that she found it extremely unlikely that at Liara and the Shadow Broker had made nice, no matter the 'official' story.
"No. They will- I..." She wrung her hands nervously together as she looked at the older asari, at her 'father'. She genuinely liked her other parent, but didn't know her anywhere near enough to judge how she'd react to the news, and she really needed to win her over for this. In the end, she’d decided to plumb for blunt honesty. Plainly-spoken as she was, Aethyta would have to appreciate that, at least. "There is no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come out with it."
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and only then did she dare meet her other parent's eyes.
"Mother is still alive."
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And, damnit, she was still plenty angry with the kid's mother too. Forgiveness had come a hell of a lot easier when she'd thought Benezia dead. 'Time heals', 'cherish the moments together' and all of that varrenshit. The unexpected revelation and further realisation that she was going to see her former bondmate again had brought a lot of things she'd thought long-buried back to the surface, few of them pleasant. Anger, resentment, hurt, dread-
Dread?
"Are you sure that this is a good idea?" she said, giving voice to the last thought. "I mean, after what happened..."
"Honestly?" The kid paused momentarily in her work to look up and over at her. Her good eye sparkled in the dim lights of the cargo bay. "No. I'm not. She made a mistake. A big one. And we don't really know anything about the long-term effects of indoctrination," Liara sighed and laid her hand gently atop the stasis pod, before returning to her work. "But Shepard believes in second chances. So do I."
Aethyta couldn't quite help the dismissive snort that escaped her.
"You're about the only ones."
"I know. And that's why I need you. I need someone who knows that it was Saren and Sovereign who did those horrible things, not her."
And that, right there, was why, despite her anger at the pair of them and everything else besides, she'd ultimately agreed to go along with this harebrained scheme. At least for a little while. Nezzie was a victim here. She'd done a stupid, if well-intentioned thing and gotten herself in over her head with no-one standing by to pull her back out again when it eventually went tits up. She'd had no way of knowing what Sovereign truly was, or was capable of. Hell, at that stage everyone had thought it was just some overgrown dreadnought and Saren just... a Spectre a little more off kilter than most of that breed, wanting to use geth to rule the galaxy.
Geth. Huh. If only it had actually been geth. Geth would have been a fucking cakewalk.
But, victim or no, Benezia had been indoctrinated. Now, she needed handlers, people who knew her well enough from her former life to be able to tell if she wasn't acting like herself. People, in other words, who knew all the little cues and signals to look for, knew the way she spoke, the way she moved and held herself, how she thought... That was a pretty damn select group these days, especially if you limited it to the people willing to remain associated with her in any way. Herself. The kid. Maybe some of Nezzie's old followers and students, if they were still alive, but, given that most of them had denounced their former lady even before her supposed death, she doubted many, if any, of the survivors would volunteer.
She sighed and moved over for a better look at the pod, her footsteps swallowed up by a cargo hold crammed full the mammoth supply stockpile they'd shifted along with it. The pod was an older model, medical, the sort used by a better class of merc companies to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be properly seen to. Compact, with few bells and whistles but all the more robust because of it. The scratched plasteel windows on this one had fogged over during the transfer from the tiny bunker on Gilsame to the ship, rendering Benezia little more than a pale blue blur. Aethyta wiped her hand across one cloudy panel; it came away damp, with a slight squeaking noise.
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The kid went still for a long moment, hands motionless at the controls. The uneven lighting in the bay cast dark shadows across her face as she bowed her head.
"The last shot was mine," she said, finally, quietly. "Shepard didn't want me to be the one who killed her."
Oh. Crap. That little detail hadn't been in the official report, or the unofficial one either. She knew from personal experience that losing your parents at such a young age could fuck you up pretty good for a few decades, but shooting, killing your own mother - it was the kind of thing that could scar you for life. A little bit of her anger towards the girl drained away.
A little bit.
"I didn't mean that," she replied awkwardly, feeling like the mother of all heels, but pressed on anyway. "I can understand saving her. She's your mother. But why keep it a secret?"
Liara shrugged, a subdued movement, and returned once to work once more.
"At first we thought we might be able to, I don't know, figure out exactly what had happened to her. How to help her break free permanently and stop it from happening to other people. But nobody believed us about the Reapers, even after they attacked the Citadel. An unimaginable invasion fleet waiting in dark space? Mind control? It all sounded so... fantastic." She shook her head slightly. "With Saren dead, the Council would have used her as a scapegoat. More than they did anyway. She would have been publically tried as traitor and imprisoned. Maybe even executed. And she still would have been under Reaper control throughout. I... I couldn't do that to her."
The kid finished the last of the diagnostics and looked back up at her.
"Everything's green," she said. Her voice held and odd mixture of satisfaction and concern. "Are you ready?"
"Well," Aethyta sighed and cracked her knuckles, "I guess I'd better be."
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Going to be keeping an eye on this one, anon. Hope to see more.
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"You know, for someone so smart, you always could be so damned stupid. What the blue hell were you thinking?"
It took a few seconds for Benezia to open her eyes and focus on the figure seated at the end of her bed, straddling a chair backwards, watching her impassively. It took several more to put a name to the face.
"Aethy..?" she said, startled when her voice came out as little more than a rusty whisper. Goddess, she felt absolutely dreadful. She ached everywhere, her side and stomach worst of all. Her mouth was like sand, her eyes and throat raw and scratchy with each slow blink and breath. All strength seemed to have left her limbs. And her head. Goddess, her head.
"You remember who I am. Well, that's a start, I guess. Do you know who you are?"
"Of course," she rasped, puzzled by such an odd question, especially coming from Aethyta. And... yes, that was wrong, too. What was Aethy doing here? They weren't... They hadn't... "I am Benezia T'Soni, Matriarch of the asari and..." tool servant plaything. Her head started to pound with force. The room swam, nausea rising in her stomach. "...and..."
"Hmmph." Aethyta frowned. "Do you know how you got here then?"
"I..." Her shaking hand flew unconsciously to her temple as she struggled to pierce the fog roiling inside her mind. The room was unfamiliar. Barely furnished and small, cramped with just two occupants, the square metal walls suggested 'ship', and not one of asari design. How had she gotten here? She could remember... "I... was on Noveria. The rachni queen. I… needed to find the Mu relay. There was a battle. I was trying to..." Her hand dropped as the memory reached its conclusion. "Goddess, Liara! She was-"
Aethyta's expression shifted from cool distance into something approaching compassion.
"Relax - the kid's fine. Well, maybe not one hundred per cent fine, but she's alive, anyway, and that's more than a lot of people can say. She'll be here in a bit."
"She... knows?"
She'd always meant to tell Liara about Aethyta, but had never been able to find the right words when Liara had been younger. Eventually, to Benezia's guilty relief, the girl had stopped asking. And then later, when she'd thought Liara might be old enough to understand something of love in all of its aching contradictions, they'd fought, stopped speaking. Liara had rebelled against her in the fashion of maidens who think they know everything, and she had reacted... badly. It was obvious with hindsight, and part of her had even realised it at the time, but, despite all her years, despite all her supposed 'wisdom', she'd been hurt by Liara's desire to leave her, and terrified by the prospect of her shy little wing going out into the dangerous galaxy on her own. Liara was her only daughter, and she would always want to hold her close, keep her safe.
Her only daughter.
She'd tried to kill her only daughter.
"Yeah, she knows," Aethyta was saying. "She's a smart kid. But that's not the issue here. Look, we know that the Reap- that Sovereign was fucking with your head." The name sent a finger of dread and revulsion down her spine. Sovereign. Saren's ship. But not just a ship, something she'd discovered far too late. So many dead, so many used, herself among them. Her pride. Her blindness. Her fault. "We know that you fought him too. But we need to know what the damage is. If you can be trusted again. We don't have a lot of experience in dealing with people who survive indoctrination to the level you had it. Most of 'em died in the war, or offed themselves straight after."
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Aethyta sighed, heavily, suddenly looking all of her thousand-odd years.
"It only ended a couple of weeks ago so it doesn't have a proper name yet. But the long and short of it is Sovereign's buddies showed up and the whole galaxy went all to hell. I've never seen anything like it." She shook her head slowly, almost as if in awe. "Conservative estimate is we've lost two thirds of the galactic population. The batarians are pretty much done for as a species and we might not have enough elcor left for a viable population either. And, well, our people are only a bit better off. Some of the colony worlds seem to have come through ok, but Thessia..."
Benezia stared at her in open-mouthed horror. But the shock of Aethyta's words was finally enough to kick her brain into some semblance of action. She could remember being shot on Noveria, quite clearly. The pain of it had been enough to break Saren's hold on her again. She'd felt herself bleeding out and had begged them to let her pass on before the monster claimed her once more. But then Liara had been at her side, begging her to stay while two armoured figures worked with clumsy haste to slather her wounds with medigel...
A war of the scale Aethyta was talking about would take time. Years. Time enough for Liara to find and meet her other parent. But when Benezia touched her side, now, above the bullet wound, the skin was still raw and tender. If she'd been unconscious, in a coma over the intervening period, she would have healed.
"How long have I been in stasis?"
"Three years, or there abouts."
"Three years?" Her voice, to her own ears, was incredulous. Two-thirds of the galaxy, gone in three years? That seemed hardly time enough for a war of that scale. She'd seen visions of the devastation the monsters had caused before, but even so...
"Or there abouts. But don't think about that now. There's going to be a lot to take in. You’ll need to work up to it slowly."
Three years. A war fought and over in the blink of an eye. A war against Sovereign and the others like it. She blinked, and one of the visions Saren had gifted to her flitted behind her eyes.
Out in the darkness of intergalactic space, the great fleet sat, each ship a nation unto itself, alive and malevolent and unstoppable. One by one they woke; one by one suns darkened, worlds burned, races died.
But there was a way for them all to survive this cycle. Saren had found it. He'd shown her. Surrender. Pride was not worth the price.
"And Saren?" she heard herself ask.
"Dead. You actually have our girl to thank for that." Aethyta smiled, some of the age dropping away from her face again. "You did a good job with her."
"I can only agree, really," a new voice chimed in as the door slid open, a voice she would know anywhere. Soft, breathy, slightly hesitant...
Liara.
There was a lengthy pause, the three of them frozen in tableau.
"I'll leave you two to it," Aethyta eventually said, with a tact most would be startled to learn that she possessed. "I'd bet you've got a bit to talk about."
Benezia watched silently as her daughter carefully manoeuvred her way into the small room and past Aethyta, a laden tray clasped in both hands and a datapad tucked under one arm. She looked, to a mother's eye... different. Older. More than three years would suggest. Gone were the soft, subdued contours of youth, replaced by the full figured body of a maiden in her prime. Darker skin. Better posture. New, hard muscle beneath... armour? She'd taken it for a new work uniform at first, but up close it's clearly a ballistics weave with solid ceramic plating, well-used, well-fitted and likely custom-made.
And her face... goddess, her face.
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Made a really good start here, A!A, now I'm really interested in how our little dysfunctional Asari family deal with one another.
I'd also like to see Shepard come into it. I don't expect Benezia would be too chuffed with Liara's choice of boinking buddy.
So, more, please?
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"The kid paused momentarily in her work to look up and over at her. Her good eye sparkled in the dim lights of the cargo bay."
I'm guessing it's a referencing of that. Though the end of this just made Liara's injuries sound even worse so... LIaarraaaaa so sorrrrryyyyy!!!!!!
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"What did you expect?" she heard herself ask. Her voice was remarkably level.
"Someone more like you, I suppose." Liara shrugged slightly and turned back to lay the tray down carefully on the small shelf beside the bed. Then, to Benezia's slight surprise, she sat carefully upon the edge of the bed itself, rather than seeking out the so-recently vacated chair. "Hello mother."
When their eyes met for the first time, Benezia suddenly felt the full weight of her shame and looked away.
Her daughter, her dearest little wing. She had tried her best to kill her. It had seemed the only logical course of action at the time. Worse, far worse: a part of her could still understand that logic, feel the echo of frustration at the human’s interference in their plans and anger that the Spectre thought her weak enough to be swayed by ties of blood.
"Mother, please." When Benezia allowed herself to look back up again, there were tears in her daughter's remaining eye as she spoke the words. "
"Liara... my little wing," her throat was suddenly tight, tears blurring her own vision. "Goddess, what happened..? I didn't-"
Her trembling hand drifted up of its own accord to cup a scarred, mangled cheek, fingertips brushing the eyepatch. What little remained of Benezia's heart broke when Liara's right hand came up to cover hers, and she realised that the little finger of it was gone, along with the tips of the next two, scarring to match her face and neck down the back of her hand until her skin disappeared beneath a suspiciously new section of armour.
"No. This was Harbinger's work. The burns will heal eventually, and there are prosthetics these days that are even better than the real thing. In the meantime, it will certainly teach me not to wear a proper helmet," Liara said with a tight smile that only moved one side of her face, and drew their hands away. "I’ve missed you.”
“And I you,” she replied, letting the tears fall. How close had they come to losing each other? “Liara, I-“
“Later, mother,” her daughter interrupted gently, squeezing her hand. “How are you feeling? Honestly?"
How was she feeling? Oh, what a question to ask, little wing, what a question...
"Thirsty," she supplied, deliberately focusing on the physical. "Weak."
"Any pain?"
"Some. My side." She tried to sit and winced, and then Liara's arms were there, helping her up. "My chest."
"I am afraid we had to put you into stasis straight out of surgery. We couldn't risk you waking up of your own accord. You were shot three times. The areas around the wounds will be tender for a few more days," Liara said apologetically, arranging the pillows behind her so she could settle back. Her next question from her, though, when it came, came sharp, and without any apology whatsoever:
"And how is your head?"
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