Work Text:
Sometimes, the most compelling mirrors were the eyes of another. A friend. A childhood mentor. A person whom Liara had once considered as close as family.
Long ago. Before. When all that had existed was the beckoning blank slate of her long lifetime ahead. When the thrilling yet frustrating present held her back from that dazzling future. When the past had been rendered so unimportant that it was forgotten like the ephemeral moment drifting between wakefulness and slumber.
However, the past had a way of catching up with people. Finding them despite not daring to look back.
The past snared Liara in one of the city’s walkways as she strode around a bend, holding her fast as she stared at a person she had forgotten.
As a person she had forgotten stared at her.
In the reflection of green eyes glittering under the industrial lighting of Nos Astra’s financial district, everything was laid bare. The past embodied in a person, a construct of the other moments when Liara had turned corners to find her there. To find Shiala waiting, as if she had known of Liara’s approach before Liara even knew the corner existed.
A giggling child leading the entirety of the household’s commandos who were not out in the city guarding her mother, commandos left to watch over the matriarch’s daughter, commandos who had lost track of Liara less than an hour after Matriarch Benezia had departed with her retinue of acolytes, assistants, and bodyguards. Liara had led those left behind on a gleeful chase and then a grand game of hide and seek lasting the better part the morning. Her lively freedom had ended in a turned corner with Shiala right there, stern yet patient and, perhaps, a touch amused at the small child who had given the slip to her minders.
However, the amusement vanished in the wake of a look from someone dismayed at the danger waiting in Liara doing so yet again, off grounds, where there would not be a constant perimeter guard ensuring that no one who might cause Liara harm could.
A disappointed look had sufficed then, one soon supplanted by the capable, yet warm—at least towards Liara—watchful eyes of the captain of Matriarch Benezia’s guard.
Then, when Liara grew older, the same look had evaluated Liara as she taught her the skills necessary to defend herself in any situation. Offensive skills in biotics—first with a throw, staying on that step until she had mastered it to her full ability, then other biotic techniques followed. They were accompanied by weapons training, hand-to-hand combat, close quarters combat.
Liara was often admonished for failing to check her corners.
But Liara had never planned on using those skills extensively, assuming they would be used for dealing with infrequent pirate raids on her dig sites, never having dreamt that what she had learned from Shiala would save her life from geth. From krogan mercenaries.
From someone who looked like Shiala.
Liara had meant to stay in touch. To check in with her. To help. But Shepard had needed her help more and the rushing wave of activity after Feros had overtaken Liara’s attention, and when the waters had receded after Sovereign’s defeat, Shiala’s memory had receded, too.
Now Liara’s last memory of Shiala struck—the dank, cloying odor that permeated her nostrils, the damp corridors with scattered husks lying in wait to moan and run and overwhelm. Straining to hear the scrape of footsteps of awakened husks for hope to avoid the next ambush. Turning blind corners to blunder into clones wearing Shiala’s stolen face.
As those impostors had died at her hands, Liara had forced herself to believe they wore the faces of strangers. That Liara had not used the skills taught to her by the stern, patient mentor whom she had just thrown into the abyss.
The skin color of the clones—the same shade of green as Shiala’s eyes—had allowed her the tenuous belief that she had not harmed the real Shiala.
When Shiala had been freed after the thorian had plummeted into an abyss of its own making, her skin had been the dusky purple Liara had remembered since the time her memories began.
Now, Shiala’s eyes remained unchanged, yet her skin shared their shade again. Liara almost threw her down the corridor, but the absence of groans from rising husks placed her in the present. Asari voices trading gossip—sightings of a justicar; rumors of a growing trade war; did you hear that krogan who fancies himself a poet?—fresh air, optimal relative humidity.
The present.
Shiala was ill. The planes and angles of her face turned puffy, the green sallow, her posture without perfection.
Liara knew why or, rather, had working theories as to why: the experiments done on the Feros colonists by Erinya’s company, the lingering effects of the thorian, or some combination of the two.
She could not remember Shiala ever being ill before.
No words passed between them; there were not any to say. ‘I am sorry for your loss’ always rang hollow when the losses were too many, too deep, too permanent, the useless statement echoing in the chasm left behind by those departed.
Shiala was alive when she should not have been, not if Liara’s mother was dead. Shiala was to have been her defender to the last, yet she had not defended. Rationally, Liara knew the abandonment of her duty had not been Shiala’s choice, yet it was hard to see reason under the pall of her mother’s last words.
Where is the light?
She wanted to hurl them at Shiala, those last moments of Benezia’s life. She nearly did. But Liara was not any less culpable for Benezia’s death, not when she had been an active participant in the fight that led to it.
Liara said nothing.
In that silent moment of staring the past in the eyes, Liara planned. She planned fervently to make this right, to heal a Shiala who should not have been ill, to heal a Shiala sacrificed and abandoned by the person whom she cared for most. Liara had the resources and the skill to see the research contract ended without penalty to the colonists and so she would.
Then a trio of asari, gathered up in their conversation, squeezed through the gap between them.
When they had gone, empty space remained where Shiala had been.
When Liara turned the next corner, Shiala was blotted out by the brilliance of the future Liara needed to save from the encroaching dark.