A/N:

So. Just a few things you should probably know...

1) *Here there be spoilers!* for all three ME games and all DLC. Ye have been warned! Also, Rated T for violence, some adult themes, etc.

2) The plan is for regular updates (most weekdays). The final story will be 23 chapters, plus the prologue and epilogue. Sequels are entirely dependent on the interest level from all you fine folks, so do let me know. Reviews are always greatly appreciated!

3) This follows the Synthesis ending of ME3. It is my earnest attempt to make some sense of what kind of galaxy Shepard may have left behind...

4) Finally, I don't own anything from the Mass Effect universe. That privilege belongs to Bioware/EA. Obviously.

Prologue: Exiled

"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage." – Garrison Keillor

Liara wasn't usually one to let go of her inhibitions, but she knew that she would only be able to indulge for a few more weeks before her condition would require her to stop.

Some day soon, there would be a funeral.

Tonight, at least, she couldn't face that thought sober. So she had matched him, drink for drink—which was impressive, considering how much dextro-friendly alcohol he was tilting back between his mandibles. They weren't sure what to do with themselves now that they were the only two left. The other non-humans had managed to catch their convoys before they left, but it had taken them too long to repair the Normandy, too long to travel back to the Sol system without the relays. Once they had returned, the humans had been quickly pressed back into the service of the smoldering remains of the Alliance. Then there had been just the three of them: Tali, Garrus, Liara.

And, now, two.

Tali had left this morning. The only reason Tali had managed to catch her convoy back to Rannoch was because the quarian sense of community meant that their convoy was the last to leave. The philosophy that even one of their people left behind was a waste was embedded into their culture, so they had stayed on Earth longer than the asari, turian, and salarian fleets. The quarians had held out as long as their dextro food supplies could last, hoping that every last member of their species would make it to the designated launch sites before they left Earth for Rannoch. Liara and Garrus…neither of them had been so lucky, since both the asari and turian fleets had left weeks before their return to Earth in the Normandy.

They would be able to communicate with her as she travelled at least, since the secondary purpose of the convoy system was to create a chain of short-range comm buoys across the galaxy so that galactic communication could be re-established. None of them would know what had happened to their homeworlds until each of the convoys reached them: the asari for Thessia, the turians for Palaven. The fleets had been stranded with the unexpected destruction of the mass relays, leaving their home planets essentially unprotected against an ongoing Reaper investation of the galaxy. So it didn't look good. But they wouldn't know anything until communications could be re-established. And that would be decades away without the relays. And even then communication would be unreliable, since, although each species had tried to build in as many redundant buoys as resources would allow, there was always the risk that if more than a dozen buoys malfunctioned, the entire chain would be broken. And, without the relays, the journey back out to fix them would take years.

The three of them had stood awkwardly on the docking platform, not sure what to do. There had never been a goodbye as final as this. Before, Liara had always felt a connection to her fellow crew members: the knowledge that, whatever the galaxy would throw at them, they would always be able to find their ways back to each other in times of galactic crisis. But, without the relays, it was entirely possible that they would never see Tali again. They all knew this. She had expected Garrus to find something witty to say, something to lighten the mood. She had waited for this. But he had just stood there, his eyes dark and glowering and refusing to meet Tali's lost gaze.

Finally, Tali had burst out into broken sobs. And no one said anything as she embraced them both, and then walked up the ramp into the shuttle. It was terrible, letting her go like that, but what comfort was there to be found? The only sure thing any of them knew was this: this galaxy had not been worth saving. And there was no comfort in that.

Either of them could have gone with her to Rannoch, they knew, but Liara had wanted to stay because several of her contacts were also trapped here on Earth. And, as the comm buoys were being built out from here, this would make Earth the central communications hub for the next few decades. It only made sense for her to remain. For now, at least. She, of course, dreamed of going back to Thessia someday, but Rannoch would not place her any closer to her homeworld than Earth. It only made sense to remain here as one of the "left-behinds," as the humans had nicknamed those handfuls of aliens that had, for whatever reason, hadn't gone home with their convoys.

She wasn't sure why Garrus stayed. Though she had her suspicions. And they were all the wrong reasons.

So after Tali had left, Liara had found an exquisitely run-down club—"pubs" as they learned they were called in this part of Earth—in which to get exquisitely drunk. Liara marvelled at how the clubs and bars had been the first things to re-open after the attack. There was a need for this collective spoonful of medicine to numb the pain that was etched on everyone's hearts as brokenly as it was etched into the surface of their planet. The faces of the humans were changing to mirror this freshly-scarred face of Earth. And they were both ugly.

It took them a good long while before their throats had been moistened enough that they could find words they could speak aloud.

"It's my fault," Garrus muttered into the bottle between his talons.

"Of course it is," she said, dryly.

The alcohol had a kind of distancing effect on Liara, almost like she was watching herself in conversation. She knew what she would ordinarily do: she would feel sad for him, her eyes glistening with sympathy. But tonight she was upset. And drunk. And it made her mean, made the Shadow Broker part of her come out to play, while the archeologist just wrung her hands cowardly in the back of her mind.

His eyes, bleared with drink, flicked over to her in mild surprise at the venom in her response, but then migrated back over to the bottom of his bottle.

"She didn't take me with her, you know."

"Of course I know. I was there. She took me instead. And Javik, She always had to take Javik. This was his fight long before it was ours. And it was probably for the best anyhow. Did you hear those awful things he said about going back to Kahje and getting the hanar to worship him?"

He snorted into his glass.

"Not that his death changed much…" she continued. "Did you hear what the hanar are doing now? They claim that Javik was one of the Enkindlers made flesh, that he was resurrected from the past in order to save them from the Reapers and that he died on Earth to save them all from their sins?"

"Crazy stuff," he muttered.

"Maybe," she shrugged, "but why not? I wish I had better answers than that…but look at us."

He shrugged and sloshed his drink around. She grabbed him by the shoulder, more violently than she meant.

"No. I mean really look."

They stared back into each other's faces: the right half of Garrus's face seemed normal—or what would have been normal once, for of course there were the scars that made his chitinous exoskeleton rough and raw and broken. But those had been there for a while. The other half…the visor (which, she admitted, she'd never seen him without even prior to The Synthesis) had become merged into his face, blanketing a strip of his face plate a pulsating blue. His left eye burned the same color, vastly outshining his dark, sunken right eye.

And Liara knew what he was seeing in her own features. Her transformation had been less distinct than his with the visor, because, for whatever reason—probably their common gift with biotics, she theorized—there had been less variation in the asari response to The Synthesis than with some of the other species. Liara's eyes shimmered with a biotic blue, an outward manifestation of her newfound ability to see the pulsating aura of an eezo-related activity. Sweeping away from her eyes, up along her fringe and down the back of her neck, freckles of blue biotic energy glowed faintly, like an entire galaxy worth of stars had fallen from the heavens and splattered across her skull.

She secretly liked her new appearance, but the effects of The Synthesis also frightened her as much as they frightened any species: the humans, with their pale green eyes and the green circuits along their skin that blinked on and off with no discernible reason, those turians and humans who had become merged with their omnitools and now found themselves both disabled and enabled in ways to which they were still growing accustomed, the quarians whose suits had burned their ornate tapestry patterns into their skin even while repairing their immune systems, the krogan with their eerily glowing humps…

And then there were the advanced ships and the VIs, all those technologies that had suddenly awoken to a newfound consciousness. The crew of the Normandy had been fortunate, in a way, that EDI was already the Normandy's conscious—that she had already been awakened. But some of the other ships and their VIs, confused, had reacted violently to the sudden awareness of what they were. The losses of those crews were negligible, Liara knew, compared to the total losses of the Reaper War (Was that what they were calling it? Hadn't it really been a Massacre?), but, still, it was what those losses represented that frightened her more than anything else. The convoys needed to trust these ships with their lives. And now that those ships could think for themselves—now that they needed to be respected and treated less like tools and more like comrades—that would be a difficult task for the crews. She feared for her people who had left Earth for Thessia. She trusted EDI, so she knew that ships could be trusted, but this also meant that she understood them each to be individuals. Just because EDI had sympathized with organics—enough to even take Joker as her mate—didn't mean that all the ships would be the same. The remains of the asari fleet had seemed agreeable, as eager to see their homeworld as the asari themselves, but…sometimes she woke to nightmares that the ships had decided to buck their organic cargo off into space and raced away to start civilizations of their own.

Liara realized that they had both drifted back into their own thoughts. She glanced at Garrus as he threw back yet another drink…how many had they had?...and noticed that his brow plates were furrowed and his eyes had grown dark. Her thoughts were avoiding the one subject too painful to analyze, but his, clearly, were not.

"She wouldn't let me go with her," he said, flanging voice cracking at the edges. "After she picked you and Javik as the squad for that last mission…We had said our goodbyes, I realized then, and I hadn't meant…hmm…" he sighed, brokenly. "I hadn't meant that to be goodbye at all. Do you understand? If she had given me that chance to go with her on that one last mission…I could have watched her back. She wouldn't have been alone. Damn it!"

He slammed his fist down on the bar. She jumped, but they were the only patrons in the bar. And the bartender was drunk himself, so he just took the sound to be a signal for a refill. He pulled himself up from where he was slumped against the wall and pulled another box of dextro-safe bottles up from the floor and set it on the bar. Now that was service.

Garrus had collapsed in on himself, holding his head with his six fingers. His voice was barely more than a whisper. And he was making Liara angry.

"I would have had her back. She never would have gone up there alone. Never."

That was enough for Liara. She'd had it with his moaning. And to imply that Shepard's death was…Well, she'd had enough of this damn turian. She staggered to her feet and was surprised by how much she swayed.

"Oh? Are you saying that it's my fault?" she said, voice rising. "That because that blast took us out, we failed her? Javik died! And I barely made it back to the ship. Maybe you would have died, too, if you'd been there! What could you have done anyhow? Scoped and dropped Harbinger? Huh? At least with my biotics I had a chance to get out of here alive. Javik and I...we shielded her from the blast so that she was able to carry on and get to the Citadel, even if…even if we couldn't do any more than that. You wouldn't have done as much."

She wasn't usually genuinely mean, so she was surprised by how good she was at it. She leaned in close to him, aware that even a whiff of the non-dextro alcohol on her breath would make him nauseous for hours afterwards.

"You would have been a blue smear at the feet of Harbinger," she hissed. "'Here lies The Great Garrus Vakarian, killed for no damn reason.'"

He blinked, but did not look away from her seething blue face: the biotics were burning so intensely that they stung her eyes and she felt a tear slide down her face from the pain. For a moment, some dark clarity crossed his face, breaking through the numbness imposed by the drinks.

"Maybe I would have been killed," he mumbled.

And she could tell by his tone that he thought that would have been infinitely preferable to where they were now: stranded on Earth and, worst of all, without Shepard. She sank back down onto her stool. What could she say to that?

"The problem," he said, raising his voice after a brief silence, speaking now in an analytical tone as if this were just some small thing that could be worked out with the right application of reason, "is that she…cared too much about me."

When she didn't respond except to widen her eyes, he continued, waving his drink around and addressing everyone in the room. Which was now just her, since the bartender had dozed off.

"She left me behind because she knew that none of her last squad would be coming back, and she wouldn't give me the damn courtesy of dying with her. That was all I really wanted…why couldn't she…"

"Are you really saying that you wished she didn't love you?" she muttered wearily.

He didn't hesitate.

"Yes, yes I am. That is exactly what I'm saying. Then we could have gone out together. Maybe the galaxy would have been saved…Is this what a 'saved' galaxy looks like? I don't even know anymore. Maybe we would have failed. But at least we could have been together."

She shook her head at him, disgusted.

"You…you damn selfish…You'd prefer that the galaxy had been destroyed than Shepard dying without you?"

"No. Yes. I mean…hmm…Listen." And he leaned in close to her, slurring his words. "You have to listen to me. This…this is important. I've it all figured out. She understood that I wasn't worth it. That, in the end, she couldn't sacrifice me to save the galaxy. She would die for it, but, damn it, she wouldn't let me die for it. That's why she condemned me to this Hell…"

"You need to shut up now," Liara whispered to him.

He was raving drunkenly and she hated it. She hated that he was wasting the life that Shepard had given him on wild ramblings and baseless speculations. She hated that he truly believed everything he was saying, and that for all her ability to talk her way out of anything she would never be able to talk him out of this strange belief that, somehow, Shepard's death had been his fault. That, if he had been there, he could have saved her. His stupidity was making Liara's head hurt—literally, since her anger had enraged the eezo particles into fireworking their blue sparks across her forehead.

His mandibles flared and he was about to continue.

"Shut up," she said again.

"Why?" he roared at her, too drunk on booze and self-pity to be fazed at her uncharacteristic anger anymore. "I'm sorry if this truth hurts. It hurts me way too damn much. I need…I need another drink…"

He staggered up from the bar and grabbed a handful of bottles. Liara was furious now, drawing breath in and out of her so quickly that her lungs burned from the rage…and the biotics coursing across her blue skin.

When he was halfway back to the bar, the singularity building around her exploded, a blue circle spiralling outwards. It slammed him against the wall, the bottles shattering around him and leaving marks of foam on the wall that stuck there like blood stains. She marched over to him. He looked up her brokenly. She had no idea what she saw in those sunken eyes anymore—deep sadness, suicidal desire, dark anger, fear for what would become of them, all these things at once—but she simply didn't care anymore.

That distant part of her—the archeologist, the one still trying to rationally analyze the situation—told her that they were all mad: they had gone insane from the grief of losing so many. But, most of all, from losing her: Shepard. Their Shepard.

"You listen to me, Garrus," Liara said, looming over him as he slumped against the wall, "You have to stop this. What you had was ordinary. Brutally ordinary…and maybe that's your problem? Your loss is no different from the billions of others that happened in this war. Every man, woman, and child alive today feels the same as you do. Telling yourself—deluding yourself—that she somehow meant more to you just because she meant more to the galaxy….it's not only stupid, it demeans every other sacrifice that's been made along the way."

He pulled himself up from the wall and turned away, swatting her away with his three talons.

"You can't seriously expect me to listen to this," he said.

"But don't you see?" she continued, ignoring him while her blue eyes shone like twin singularities. "What you two had…it was because it was so ordinary that it was so important. You reminded her what the galaxy was worth: you and her. But 'you and her' multiplied by billions for each person that has ever felt the same way about any other person in the galaxy. That's the real ruthlessness of your calculus. You had to stay behind for all of us. She gave up bringing you with her: to Harbinger, to the Catalyst, to death, to what lies beyond. She gave up facing that last journey with you at her side. And you gave up death. So that the galaxy might live."

Garrus stared at her, mandibles flickering against his jawline. Liara turned away and started to make her way back across the bar. But she turned around when she was at the door. Now, finally, the real tears had come and she felt like herself again: the anger bred from her own worn grief was all gone, replaced by the deepest of pity for the broken turian staring at her from across the room with drunken bewilderment glowing from his mismatched eyes.

"For what it's worth…I'm sorry. You…you have been left with so much less than me."

Then, Liara tried to smile at Garrus, to tell him that she truly meant those words. Well, she had meant everything she had said, but what mattered most was that he knew she was truly sorry. For everything: that Shepard had chosen her and Javik, that they couldn't have done more to save her, that they had never recovered her body, that Garrus had been forced onto the Normandy, that they had been forced to leave Shepard behind, that they had both been left behind. And Liara was sorry for what she had done—for what she had now, when he had nothing.

But those last words she had spoken seemed to turn a switch behind his eyes. His mouth gaped open for a moment in sudden revelation. And then his face turned hard with rage.

"What…did…you…do…?" he hissed out at her.

She stepped back, cursing herself. She hadn't meant for him—for anyone—to know. She had been careless. Damn her for her poor, drunken choice of words. Damn him for being able to figure it all out from so little.

"What did you do!" he screamed, barrelling at her from across the bar. She didn't resist when he grabbed her arm, eyes flicking down to her stomach.

"Did she know?" he raged at her.

Liara could only shake her head.

He dropped her arm and stepped away from her.

"That's repulsive."

"No, you have to understand. In asari culture…if you meet someone from another species that you admire and they do not necessarily return those same feelings…it's not that uncommon. You'd be surprised by how often it happens. She basically agreed. I asked if I could give her a gift…"

"I doubt that she realized that 'gift' involved her fathering an asari child."

There. He had said aloud what she couldn't admit to herself: her final goodbye to Shepard, what that last joining had truly meant…

"No…I may have been…deceptive…" Liara stuttered over her words and felt her face turn warm. She wasn't so stupid about human practises that she didn't understand what the human equivalent would be to what she had done. But other species—the humans, turians—they were so short-lived they couldn't possibly understand asari customs. Liara knew that something of Shepard needed to survive. The best of humanity in asari form. Their child would be strong and beautiful and everything she knew Shepard would have wanted.

If Shepard had wanted it.

"Disgusting," Garrus said. "I can't…Liara, how could you do something like this?"

"Please," and suddenly Liara was struck by the very un-asari desire to have him, of anyone, to understand. "Please…don't…don't look at me like that…" She reached out to him.

He threw her hand off his shoulder.

"Get away from me."

As the door to the bar slammed shut behind him, she knew that she was never going to see him again. That, for the first time, she was now truly alone on this strange planet with the child of the galaxy's savior growing within her womb: this unborn child her only companion in the dark.