So, the epilogue is dedicated to Theodur for being kinda awesome and because of a certain asari adept :) I might still write the sequel, but for now, have a happy ending :)

The water shut off in the bathroom. The soft lilting hum continued, though. It was some new fashionable song that had been playing non stop on every music channel for much too long. The maidens liked it, the human teenagers liked it, and apparently that was enough for it to be everywhere. It was not, however, enough to make Erra on-time for work. Teiron had already covered for her daughter three times in as many weeks, and she was not about to do it again.

She leaned against the door frame into the large bathroom and shook her head as she watched her daughter sway her hips in time to the song she was humming. She moved with much more grace than her mother had ever had, and had Teiron been any younger she probably would have been jealous. But she was over five hundred now, well into her middle age, and the fact that she was probably the only asari that couldn't dance had long stopped being an issue. And she'd picked up a thing of two in those years, specifically while she was Omega, and though she'd never have her daughter's grace she could hold her own if she went out.

"Erra, honey, you're going to be late again."

The seventy-year-old glared over her shoulder, her song stopping as she stared her mother down. "I'm not a kid anymore, mom. It's my life."

"You live under my roof. I'm not going to keep covering for you." It was bad enough that the girl still lived at home. If it had been up to Teiron, Erra would have been out on her own ten years before, if not sooner. But her bondmate, who was not Erra's father, had made concessions for the girl, and was much too fond of her in Teiron's opinion.

Not that she didn't love her daughter. She did, very much so. Still, it was hard not to remember exactly why she had her. It had not been love, or maybe it had been, in a strange twisted way. But she hadn't loved the girl's father. Hadn't even seen the turian who had sired her since the night she'd gotten pregnant.

It had been a mistake, really.

She'd been sitting at a bar, nursing the same drink for way too many hours. Her maiden years were behind her, she had nothing to show for it, and everything she saw reminded her of...her. The bar. The human drinking a whiskey on the rocks in the corner. Not that...she...had ever drunk her whiskey over ice. It had always been straight up, and she had always laughed whenever Teiron had scowled at the smell. She'd had lovers since...her...a fair few, and in truth she had never slept with Dr. T'Soni.

Yet, centuries after they'd parted ways on Illium, Teiron had been sitting in a bar on the Citadel and had been thinking about her. The sound of her laugh, the way that she had blushed when she smiled, even when she wasn't really embarrassed, the way she had held on hope that her dead lover would come back to her. The way she'd been in that bar on Illium, a bar very much like the one Teiron had sat in the night Erra was concieved, waiting for a turian horticulturist and had seen her sitting alone in a corner. How it had taken every drop of courage to approach her. Even from a distance she'd known who she was. It was hard not to know who Liara T'Soni was so soon after the news of her mother's betrayal had hit the news.

She had never expected them to become friends.

She had never expected to fall in love.

She'd been about to get up and leave, to head back to her tiny, lonely, apartment, when the movie trailer had started on the tiny vid screen behind the bar.

Normandy Rising: The Hunt for Saren.

And there she had been, a still image, as the trailer had thrown up image after image of the Normandy's crew. The second Normandy had been decommisioned years before, its AI transferred to Rannoch and the ship itself in a museum on Earth. But she had been the same, the same smile, the same eyes. The actress playing her simply couldn't do her justice.

And Teiron had broken down, found a nearby turian that looked something that like the horticulturist she'd been meeting that fateful night and had conceived her daughter. She'd woken up, the turian had been gone, and she had spent the next few weeks hoping that the pregnancy wouldn't take. Less than ten percent of asari pregnancies did, she told herself, she was perfectly safe. Only, she'd been at that perfect age when almost all asari pregnancies take, and sure enough Erra had come kicking and screaming into the world two years later.

Not that she minded. She loved her daughter, and had never regretted for a second that she'd had her. Except when she acted like this.

"Then don't. Goddess, mom, just let me alone, I'll be on time."

Teiron shook her head as she watched her daughter double-check that she had covered all her facial markings. It was apparently unfashionable to have them on display, and Erra wasn't anything if she wasn't fashionable. Teiron really wasn't sure how they were related, and was mostly convinced that her own daughter had been switched in the hospital. Well, other than the fact that she'd seen her daughter while the umbilicals had still been attached, and her markings looked very much like the ones Erra was trying very hard to hide.

She moved away, checking the time on her omni-tool. If Erra skipped breakfast, she might actually make it to work on time. It was better than most days, Teiron supposed. Teiron cleaned her way along the hallway, stopping as she reached the bedroom. She peered inside, smiling warmly at what she saw. Her bondmate lay under the blankets, one foot stuck out near the bottom of the bed. She wanted to crawl back into bed and wake her bondmate, but didn't think the sleeper would appreciate it. Teiron was of the opinion that by seventy not only should her daughter be well aware of what her mother and step-father got up to, but should have first hand knowledge of it. Her bondmate, on the other hand, was rather stuffy about that sort of thing. The home they shared on Thessia, like many asari buildings, had few doors, and if Erra decided to walk through the common area of the home rather than going out the back, Teiron would never hear the end of it from her lover.

Still, Teiron thought glancing down the hallway, Erra would probably be gone before anything really happened. A wicked grin spreading across her features, she padded across the room. She was sure her bondmate would forgive her.

Her omni-tool beeped. Halfway to the bed, she growled and made her way quickly down the hallway. That wasn't the way she wanted her lover to wake.

Less so when she saw who was calling.

"Illira! Is everything okay?"

The young asari on the other end of the call looked haggard. There were heavy bags under her eyes, and her smile was strained. There was a warbling, wet cry in the background.

"I can't do it," she said, on the verge of tears.

"Can't do what?" Illira had been Erra's teacher back when the girl had been twenty or so. She and Teiron had become, and stayed, good friends over the years. It was amazing how much the younger asari looked like her father. Teiron had met her once, years and years ago. The asari on the other end of the call had the human's eyes, right down to the tiny little creases at the sides. Teiron hadn't known what to make of Commander Shepard when she'd met her, but she liked her eldest daughter well enough.

"Be a father! She won't stop crying. I've fed her and changed her and rocked her and she just won't stop! Help me!"

Teiron did her best not to laugh. "Where is Nillye?"

"Earth. She had a conference to go to, and I said I could look after Mieyo for a few days. She'd my daughter, I should be able to do this!" She shifted the infant, who had just been off-screen in her arms, and laid her against her shoulder. Tiny fists were flailing, socked feet thrashing as the infant wailed. She was no more than six months old, and in Teiron's opinion much too young to be away from her mother, but she'd do what could.

"Is it gas?" she asked, settling down on one of the sofas in the room.

"No. I've done everything the books said. Everything."

Teiron leaned forward, eyeing the screaming child. With a smile she leaned back. "Rub her neck folds, Illira."

"What? No! That's dangerous. All the books-"

"Not hard. Softly, against the skin."

Illira looked terrified, but did what she was told.

Ten minutes later the child lay limply against Illira's shoulder, murmuring softly in her sleep.

"See, I told you," Teiron laughed.

"How? Why didn't anything I read say to do that? A few of them said specifically not to do that," Illira whispered, rubbing the child's back in slow circles.

"Probably to keep from getting sued if some unsuspecting mother pressed too hard and damaged the exposed nerve endings under the folds. You know how lawyers are."

Illira grunted her agreement. "I'm going to go lay her down, don't go anywhere."

Teiron tucked her feet up under her as she watched Illira walk through her home on the Citadel. The nursery was filled with bright colors except for the large N7 propaganda poster on one wall. It was one with Commander Shepard on it, taken just after the Batarian Action of 2186. Someone had scribbled 'Grandpa' in gold lettering across one corner. The young woman lay the baby down gently into the crib, kissed her on the top of her undeveloped crest and then tiptoed out of the room.

"Finally," Illira breathed as the nursery door shut behind her. "I didn't think I'd ever get her to sleep."

"She's still very young," Teiron told her, "and you're still fairly new to it all. How is Nillye handling it? And being away from her?"

"She's got the whole 'mom' thing down. She's been calling every ten minutes since she left though, to make sure she's okay. Except for last night...when I needed to talk to her."

Teiron laughed. She'd raised Erra alone, hadn't even had her own mother for help. It was nice to be there for Illira now, though.

"How's your bondmate?" Illira asked teasingly, drawing the last word out with an almost sing-song lilt.

Teiron prided herself on not being phased by much. She'd withstood working with the head of Omega. The then-pirate-queen now respectable-business-owner had seemingly done everything in her power to make Teiron uncomfortable, the more so once she'd discovered that Teiron was familiar with a member of Commander Shepard's crew. She'd taken that stoically, just as she had the sudden change from backwater merc head to high-powered CEO that Aria had made after taking control of the human organization Cerberus. By the time Teiron had left her position as spy on Omega, the brand of the same name was synonymous with everything from bio-amps to cheese dips. Cerberus had had some of the largest, most well-funded research stations in the galaxy, and Aria and used them all to her advantage. Teiron even used Omega brand toothpaste. The stuff was amazing.

This, however, always made her a little uncomfortable. Talking to Illira about her bondmate always left her feeling slightly off-center. She knew that Illira didn't care. She'd been at the ceremony, smile splitting her face. Still, Teiron did her best to not talk about it around the younger asari. It always came up eventually, and it wasn't like they could avoid the truth, but Teiron didn't like rubbing it in the younger woman's face. No matter how amused Illira always seemed by it.

"Fine," she answered curtly, "asleep."

"Baby's okay?" Illira pried, her smile widening. It wiped the exhaustion from her face, making her look younger than her 306 years.

"Baby's fine." This was also a bit of a sore point for Teiron. Not the fact that she was about to have a daughter with the woman she loved, but just talking about it with Illira. They had been friends first, and that Teiron's bondmate was now pregnant seemed wrong to discuss. It shouldn't bother her, she knew, but the path to get here had been so complicated, so convoluted and twisted that occasionally, it did.

"Nillye and I are thinking about- Oh, hi mom!" Teiron turned sharply. She hadn't heard her bondmate come up behind her, padding gently on bare feet across the house.

Liara smiled at Teiron and leaned over her shoulder, hands braced on the back of the sofa. "Good morning, Illy. Everything alright?"

"Fine now, mom. Couldn't get the little one to sleep."

"I feel I should be offended you did not call me first."

"You should be in bed. I didn't want to disturb you. You need to keep my baby sister safe. How far along are you again?" Illira chided as she watched her mother walk around and sit next to Teiron.

"Twenty months as you well know. I can take a phone call from my daughter without over taxing myself." She curled up against Teiron's side so she could see the small screen on her arm. "And where is Nillye?"

"Anything happens to my sister, I'm gonna kick the blue right off your ass mom," Illira teased. "And she's on Earth, conference."

"What is she doing on Earth?" Liara snapped, sitting up straight. "Her daughter is barely six months old. She's still nursing!"

"It's fine, mother. This is why I didn't mention it. It's only for a few days."

Liara huffed, and Teiron laughed. It earned her a punch in the arm, but it was worth it. Everything was worth it to have this woman beside her.

"You need sleep, Illira. Call us back when you've rested," Teiron said. She ended the call and turned to her bondmate, who was still scowling over the fact her daughter-in-law had left Illira and Mieyo to their own devices. Teiron did agree that the baby was probably a bit young to be away from her mother, but Illira was an amazing father and could more than handle the girl for a single weekend alone.

"I can't believe she'd leave like that," Liara murmured, curling back up against Teiron's side.

Teiron placed a hand on Liara's stomach, rubbing gently. "You don't trust your daughter?"

"Of course I do. I trust all of them, but that doesn't change the fact that Nillye decided to carry their child. It leaves Illira ill-equipped to handle the child on her own."

"It does no such thing. Her own father handled Illira and her sisters just fine didn't she? And I seem to remember something about her being human?"

That earned her another gentle punch, but it was accompanied by a small laugh.

"When did you become so smart?" Liara asked, shifting to kiss Teiron on the side of the mouth.

"Always have been. It was the smell of that damn whiskey that always made me seem like an idiot." She wrapped an arm around Liara's shoulders and wondered, not for the first time, how the hell she'd gotten so lucky.

When they had run into each other on the Citadel fifty years before Teiron had expected things to go much like they had the last time they had met. She'd expected it to be awkward, neither willing to meet the others eyes, with lots of shrugs and "So, what have you been up to"s. It had been, she supposed to a degree. Illira had been teaching on the Presidium green. It was one of the upper human classes, the asari middle grades she normally taught let off school because of a power fluctuation. That, Teiron had learned later, had been the reason Liara had been on the Citadel in the first place, not her daughter. She'd heard about the mass evacuation, and the small explosion that had left parts of the Citadel uninhabitable for decades, but had not been aware that that was the cause of many of the power issues the station continued to have. Or that the former-archeologist-turned-info-broker was the only person, besides Commander Shepard who had passed in her sleep forty years prior to that fateful meeting, was the only one who knew how to fix them. Liara's youngest daughter, Kiyett, had taken the mantle over from her mother a few years later, and worked full-time with the Citadel engineers now.

There had been little awkwardness, though, between them. Surprise, certainly, but then Erra had come up, carrying two oversized ice cream cones and in that single moment Teiron watched Liara transform. It had been a beautiful thing, the more so when it became clear that Erra liked her. Of course, neither had said then what they'd been thinking. Liara hadn't asked about Erra's father, and Teiron hadn't asked about Shepard and whether she was going to come back from the dead again. She hadn't asked if Liara had ever found a cure to what had landed her in a hospital when they had first known each other. Instead, they had talked about Erra, and Liara's three daughters. Teiron had already known who Illira's mother was, of course, despite all three of Liara's daughters having taken Shepard's surname in deference to human custom. Shepard's relationship with Liara had not only been the stuff of the tabloids, but they had made two straight-to-vid movies and written half a dozen books on the couple before their children had even been old enough to tie their own shoes. She had never mentioned her relationship with Liara to Illira though, even after she had begun to consider the younger asari a friend.

But just like before, they had fallen into an easy friendship. With a twenty-year-old daughter there had been far fewer late nights at the bar then when they had first met, but there had been plenty of evenings, the three of them, playing board games in Teiron's tiny apartment, or Saturday morning walks through the Presidium. Teiron had been more than happy with that. It had been everything she could have ever hoped for, to regain the friendship the two of them had lost.

Only it hadn't stopped there.

Teiron still, fifty years later, couldn't believe she had gotten so lucky.

That late, rainy evening on Thessia. School had been out, Erra had been at a summer camp on a colony world, and Liara had invited her to her home for the weekend. To remember what it was like to talk to an adult without being interrupted, Liara had said.

She had walked up to the sprawling, ancient house in Armali and had realized she had never felt quite so inadequate as she did right them. The building was probably the oldest non-religious structure on the planet, and Teiron was fairly sure that it was worth more than she would make over the entire length of her life, should she live to be the oldest asari in recorded history. Only, Liara had come out the front door, skipped down the stairs, and flashed her the biggest damn smile Teiron had ever seen, and it just didn't matter to her anymore. There had been pictures of Liara's daughters and of Shepard scattered around the common areas of the house. One wall had a large, pre-spaceflight triptych depicting Athame and her companions. On a table in the corner sat a bound copy of the Holy Texts. Teiron had never seen such a book before, the vellum it was printed on so fragile that Liara had put it under glass. She had never before considered what it meant that her friend was a T'Soni.

And they had sat on the screened in porch at the back of the house and drunk way too much and had talked about their lives and their lovers and their families and about nothing in particular.

"I think about it sometimes," Liara had said, holding her liquor much better than she had the last time they had drunk together, "what things would have been like if...things with me had been different."

"Pretty crappy, probably. We'd have either ended badly, or if we hadn't we'd all be eaten by those...whatchamacallits."

"Reapers."

"Right. The batarian eaters."

Liara hadn't laughed, hadn't so much as smiled. And that was familiar to Teiron, that was more like how their conversations at the bar had always ended. "Yeah," she'd said thoughtfully, standing up. "But I'd have been able to do this." She leaned over the table they were sitting at, moving their drinks carefully out of the way. She stretched herself over the table, and Teiron had a fleeting moment of déjà vu, or that's what the humans called it anyway. Liara had paused, her lips a fraction of an inch away from her own. "Any important calls?"

"Nothing that can't wait until morning," Teiron had breathed, hardly believing that this was happening. She'd been afraid to blink, afraid she'd find it was nothing more than fantasy running away with her. But then their lips had met, and things had been damn near perfect. It wasn't a long kiss, or terribly passionate. It was almost chaste.

And then it wasn't, and they moving, and this, too, had been familiar in a long-lost sort of way.

"I better not wake up in the hospital," she had joked, mostly hoping that if this wasn't going to happen, that Liara would stop it now before she let herself wish again.

"Not a chance in hell," Liara had muttered against her lips, and she let herself be led up the stairs.

They had been bonded five years later.

Teiron still woke up most days and expected to be back in her tiny apartment on the Citadel, working a dead-end job, single and alone, her daughter off dancing in some sleezy bar. And then she'd roll over, and Liara would be there. She was fairly certain that to her dying day she wouldn't believe it was true. That this woman, this woman who had loved Commander-fucking-Shepard, could love her too.

Teiron jumped, lost in the memory, when Liara grabbed her hand and moved it. Lower, to the right, and she felt their baby move. There was something strangely exhilarating about feeling that. She'd been on the other end, and she'd never forget how amazing it was to feel the child move within her – when she wasn't using her internal organs as punching bags anyway – but this was wholly different.

"Foot?" she asked, as the soft movement came again.

Liara nodded, smiling, looking so terribly content that Teiron felt her heart swell. She wondered if Shepard had felt like this. No, she knew Shepard had felt like this. It was clear, on the pictures that were still scattered around the room.

There were more now. Pictures of Erra, of all six of them, Liara's three older girls, Erra and the two of them. Professional holos, snapshots. Liara had a rather strange hobby, taking images with an ancient earth camera, and the images she'd taken of Erra when she'd been younger hung on the wall as well. On one side of the fireplace hung the holo of their bonding, both smiling brightly, their hands locked together by the ceremonial bracelets, the ribbons twinning up their arms, all their daughters around them. And on the other, Liara's bonding holo with Shepard. The human soldier was in her Alliance dress blues, and though she was smiling she looked mildly confused at the way the ribbons knotted her arm to Liara's from wrist to elbow. Liara was laughing, her eyes shining, looking so terribly young. All three of her daughters were older than their mother was in that picture; she'd only been 109.

"You know," Teion said, standing and drawing Liara to her feet, "she was one hell of a lucky woman."

Liara looked up at her, one hand still on her swollen belly, the other tucked around Teiron's waist, then she looked over at the photos on the wall and shook her head.

She was thoughtful as she turned back to Teiron, her eyes bright.

"No. I am."