If the Normandy had been humming with tension during the hurried flight to Terra Nova, it was choking in it now. Their Commander’s wrath had been immense before, but with the near-fatal shooting of Tali’zorah…well, each and every one of them had seen the footage of the damage that Shepard had left in her wake. The carpet of corpses, crushed and burned, melted and turned to ash. Each and every member of the crew was now more than aware that their leader was not, in fact, ‘just’ a strangely powerful biotic and preternaturally good soldier.
Which left the rather gaping question of what she was instead.
A question that no one, it seemed, knew the answer to.
Well, until someone worked up the courage to ask Shepard or T’Soni directly, which wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. They’d barely left the Commander’s cabin since it had happened, with Williams and Tali’zorah closed in with them more often than not, and none of the quartet ever went anywhere alone when they did emerge. Something had changed between them, something that was quite intimate and profound, and while any other crew might have gossiped extensively on just how intimate -and what happened in such intimacy- the group was, beautiful women one and all as they were, none of them dared. Discretion was the better part of valor, after all, and above and beyond their respective ranks and positions and the fact that two of them could kill you with their minds, this was The Dragon of Elysium. Not a man or woman on the crew, even before all that they had been through together, would have dreamed of causing her and her…whatever the other three women were any trouble. And after? After they had been through so much, come so far, watched every battle and seen her deal with the results and aftermaths of their missions?
No. The happiness, whatever form it might be and however it might be had, of their Commander was sacrosanct.
Besides, for all that she hadn’t officially been discharged from the Alliance yet, she was a Council SPECTRE. She was quite literally above the law in regards to anyone and everyone save the Council themselves, and quite frankly the crew was very much of the -most likely correct- opinion that the Citadel Council wouldn’t give a good God-damn who Shepard was sleeping with so long as she kept doing her job.
Especially not Tevos.
Why would an asari care if one of their SPECTREs had a multi-species lesbian harem? A good portion of her race did that! In fact, until the asari traversed the stars and met other races, their entire race did that!
So, let their leader, their hero, live her life to the fullest. It wasn’t their place to judge, and it wasn’t their place to speculate -much- on what was going on behind closed doors.
…they couldn’t help being a bit curious, though…
############################################################
“I think I’m going to pass out.” Ashley Williams said, very matter-of-factly and with a calm that was frightening and worrisome in it’s depth, as she looked around the white nothingness that surrounded her, devoid of any feature or object or thing beyond the pulsating Prothean obelisk a few dozen yards away. Well, the obelisk and the copious amounts of redheads, from a multitude of races -most of which looked distinctly human and resembled her lover(?) in no small way- that surrounded the four Normandy crewwomen.
“Can…can we even pass out while we’re inside our minds?” Tali muttered, sounding far less sanguine about things, even as she wrung her hands and kept her focus solidly on her Commander, drawing what strength and stability she could from her Captain. Then she shuddered and wilted slightly as the words she’d just spoken sank in a bit. “Oh, keelah, I can’t believe I said that so casually. We’re inside Cassandra’s mind. We’re inside her mind, surrounded by strange people who look like her but aren’t her, while our bodies lie unconscious in her bed on the Normandy and what is happening to my life.”
“Don’t forget her curing your bullet wounds, and restoring your immune system to perfect strength. Better than perfect, really.” Liara pointed out ‘helpfully’, face creased by a placid smile that fooled absolutely no one, and both of her human companions -those still alive and not an imprint in the White Hot Room, at least- gave her exasperated looks that were tinged with varying degrees of amusement and affection. She paused, tapping her chin demonstrably. “And, technically, we’re not in anyone’s mind. We’re inside Cassie’s soul. Sort of.”
“Oh, her soul. Well, my apologies, that’s so much better, and not in the least terrifying.” Tali snarked back, sarcasm and aggravation dripping near-visibly from her unmasked lips, her pale and pupil-less eyes narrowing into a glare that deepened at Liara’s unrepentant shrug and grin of a response. Muttering imprecations to herself under her breath for a moment and rubbing her forehead with a three-fingered hand, she sighed deeply. “Look, just…what is all of this?”
Cassandra let the silence linger for a long moment as she considered how best to answer. It had only been some forty-eight hours since Tali had nearly been killed over Terra Nova, and she would be the first to admit that she’d been both terrified and intent on keeping the young woman close. Close enough that a very frank, emotional conversation had quickly resulted leaving the four of them in a very tenuous, emotionally charged…something, one that would require another rather calmer discussion once everyone had settled themselves a bit. Especially Tali.
She’d never expected her efforts to heal her quarian to result in anything more than her recovery from the bullet wounds that had been inflicted upon her, healing others never having been a particular strong-suit of hers, her…well, according to Jean -speaking on The Force’s behalf, of course- her emotions had been desperate enough that her lack of talent and practice had been functionally irrelevant. It, and the slaughter that had followed the wounding and preceded the healing, had also reinforced just how important it was that she maintained control. Her power had subconsciously recognized Ashley, Liara, and Tali as ‘hers’ and left them unharmed, but…she wasn’t sure she could guarantee that the same would have happened with anyone else. Jean disagreed, as did many of the other past hosts, but she doubted their confidence in a not-so-quiet corner of her mind.
“Alright,” she said finally, running a hand through her hair. “You two deserve to know who I am, what I am, if you’re going to consider this,” she gestured vaguely but eloquently between the four of them, getting faint blushes from Ashley and Tali, which was fascinating on her very pale lilac cheeks. “so here it is, band-aid off and all that. I’m the host to an immortal, indestructible, and mutable manifestation of the primordial essence of Life itself, known as the Phoenix Force. It’s been with me since before I was born, and it’s the reason I survived to be born after the eezo exposure when mom was pregnant with me.”
“It would introduce itself, but that would probably be a bit much for you guys right now. It’s come a long way since it picked Cassie, but it still struggles with dealing with mortals.” Liara added, the serenity of the words and the nonchalance they were said with getting strange looks from Ash and Tali, and she shrugged at them. “It’s a conceptual being, one that has existed since the moment that the universe began. It doesn’t really understand how finite we are, how small. Even with Cassie, it usually uses the imprints of it’s previous hosts to communicate.”
"Imprints?" Ashley repeated, the word rolling off her tongue like she was testing the weight of it, and Cassandra watched her gaze sweep across the gathered figures that populated the White Hot Room, lingering on more than a few faces. The faces most similar to Cassie’s own. "So all of these people... they're what, ghosts? Memories?"
"Echoes, really." Jean corrected gently, stepping forward from the crowd of former hosts with a warmth in her expression that Cassandra recognized as both genuine and deliberate. Not surprisingly, Jean was by far the most pleasant of the imprints, and had always been the spokesperson for the group and the Force both. "We're echoes of the people we were when we lived. We retain our personalities, our knowledge, our experiences. We're not alive, not in the way you understand it, but we're not dead either. We’re…fragments of their souls, echoing for eternity.”
“Every one of them carried the Phoenix before me. Some for decades, some for centuries. Some, like Jean, carried it multiple times across multiple lives. When each of them died, whenever and however it happened, it kept a fragment of them here in the White Hot Room.” Cassandra added, and Ashley nodded in slow fascination.
"And all of them are redheads?" Tali asked, the question so unexpected and so genuinely bewildered that it caught her companions entirely off guard. Ashley snorted, Liara covered her mouth with one hand, and even Jean looked momentarily taken aback before letting out a laugh that was rich and warm and entirely too human for someone who had been dead for longer than Cassandra could accurately calculate. Not to mention everything she had been and done before that.
"Not all of them." Jean managed, gesturing behind her at the crowd with a sweep of her arm that was both theatrical and self-aware. "There are a few brunettes in the back, and I think K'thyri was more of an auburn, really. But yes, there does seem to be... a pattern."
"What Jean means is that the Phoenix has a type, Tali." Cassandra said dryly, and the literally cosmic absurdity of that statement —that a primordial manifestation of Life itself apparently had recognizable preference for the physical appearances of the mortal hosts it barely understood were actually alive- set off a round of laughter between them all.
“So…that’s where all the fire came from, but where does the healing come in? You saved my life, Cassandra. And not just that, you’ve completely cured my immune system. I’m the healthiest quarian alive, and probably the healthiest in at least two-hundred years.”
It was a good question, one that likely had less to do with genuine ignorance on Tali’s part -she was smart enough to understand some of the implications of the Phoenix being the concept of life- and more to do with trying to grasp such an extreme and fundamental shift of her existence. The gratitude in Tali's voice, raw and unguarded and full of bewildered wonder, made something twist behind her ribs. Not painfully, but with powerful, affectionate tenderness.
"The Phoenix is Life, Tali." she said, gently and quietly but without mockery. "Capital-L Life. Creation, renewal, growth, rebirth. That's its nature, its essence, the fundamental truth of what it is. Destruction is part of its repertoire too, don't get me wrong —you can't have life without death, can't have renewal without something ending first. Forest fires cause fresh growth, that sort of thing.— but at its core, it exists to give life, to maintain it and renew it. When you were shot, I wanted you to be healed. That thought, that desire…it consumed me. So the Force gave me what I asked for. It healed you, all of you. Everything that was wrong with you.”
The silence that fell across all of them was pervasive and powerful, and why wouldn’t it be? It was one hell of a statement to make, especially as matter of factly as it had been delivered, and after a moment Tali took a long, deep, shuddering breath.
"You wanted me healed…" she repeated, her voice barely above a whisper, and there was something fragile and enormous in the way she said it, her hands clasping together in front of her and twisting slightly. "You wanted it so badly that an ancient cosmic force just... did it."
"Yes." There wasn't a more complicated answer to give, not really. Saying anything more, adding anything more, would just be extraneous information. Because, ultimately, it was Cassandra’s will, her desire and demand, that the Force perform the healing. The nuances and finer details were, quite frankly, irrelevant, and would likely only stress and confuse Tali to boot.
Tali's eyes glistened, and Cassandra watched the quarian's throat work as she swallowed, once, twice, her fingers still twisting together in that anxious gesture that was so quickly becoming familiar to the entire crew. She look so small without her suit, vulnerable, in spite of how skin-tight said suit was, and Cassandra didn’t need her psychic gifts to get a read on her emotions and her thoughts, and it occurred to her that quarians as a whole had probably lost the ability to keep their facial expressions under control over the last three centuries. They didn’t need to, always masked as they were.
It was…oddly cute.
But dealing with the cause for those emotions was her priority at the moment.
"Tali," she said softly, reaching out to take those anxious hands in her own, and waited until those pale eyes found hers to continue. "You don't owe me anything for it. I need you to understand that. Before you say or do anything else, that’s the most important thing to know. I didn’t do it to create a debt or make you feel like you had to do anything besides survive. I saved you because you’re my squadmate, my friend, and because I care about you."
Tali's fingers tightened around hers, and Cassandra felt the tremor that ran through them, felt the way the quarian's grip shifted from anxious to anchoring, like she was holding onto something she was afraid would disappear if she loosened her grip too much. Like Cassandra would disappear, and wasn’t that a strange way for the young woman who’d almost died to feel? Or…maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Tali was afraid that this was all some sort of death hallucination, a fever dream?
Whichever it was, Cassie didn’t have the opportunity to find out, because Tali had finally gathered herself enough to respond.
“I…I know,” she whispered, her voice cracking on the second word, her fingers flexing again on Cassandra’s skin. “I know you didn’t do it for any sort of reasons like that. That’s…that almost makes it harder, really. What makes it so…” she stopped, her teeth -slightly sharper, uniformly, than humans. Quarians had been on the more carnivorous side of being omnivores than not, Cassie gathered, before the Fall of Rannoch.- sinking into her lower lip slightly as she worried it. “No one has ever been able to do anything for my people, Cassie. And a lot of people tried. The Council might have hung us out to dry, refused to help us take our home back and refused to let us settle anywhere else, but the asari did try to help us shore up our immune systems when they started to fail. Nothing worked. When someone gets sick on the Fleet, we do everything we can, but…there’s always been a limit. How much we can do, and how many resources we can spend on someone. Even my mom…”
She shook her head, pain spiking through her soul and expression alike, and even as Cassie squeezed her hands gently in comfort, Liara and Ashley laid gentle hands on her shoulders. She smiled softly, tremulously in response, and took a deep breath before starting again.
“You could fix it all, Cassie. Everything. We’d never have to be in the suits again. We’d be free.”
The words were spoken so full of emotion that Cassandra was pretty sure her heart stopped beating in her chest, but even as the last syllable faded, she could see Jean -and many of the others hosts- frowning slightly. She knew why, of course, and she sighed softly before pulling a confused Tali into a hug.
“I could, and I will, but I can’t do it yet.”
The confusion in Tali’s expression deepened, tinted heavily by worry, a worry Cassandra could feel it in the way her body stiffened slightly within the embrace. In the way her fingers curled into the fabric of Cassie’s shirt with a sudden, almost desperate grip. The question that followed was obvious even without her abilities, obvious enough that a child could have seen it coming.
“W-why not?”
Cassandra drew back enough to meet her eyes, keeping her hands on Tali’s arms, thumbs tracing slow circles against the bare skin there. Skin that was warm, warmer than a human’s -because of the natural Quarian body, or the Phoenix’s influence on her?-, and softer than she’d expected. Though, in hindsight, maybe it wasn’t all that surprising. She’d spent her entire life in a sealed suit, why wouldn’t her skin be soft, even after being healed?
“Because the Phoenix isn’t a tool that I can just point at a problem and fire, sweetheart.” she said carefully after a moment, not wanting to lie but not entirely sure what to say or how to say it, or even how much more information she could dump on her girls right now. “What happened with you was... instinctive. Reflexive, entirely outside of my control outside of my desire to save you. Especially not for something as small-scale as healing you.”
Tali pulled back slightly, a look of bewildered offense starting to gather on her face, and Cassandra shook her head.
“I don’t mean unimportant or insignificant, Tali, I mean on a matter of size. The Force is a universal force, a multiversal force. Dealing with individuals that aren’t it’s hosts is something…” she paused, her own brow furrowing, and it was Jean who took over the explanation for her.
“The Force doesn’t really understand mortals, Tali. It barely even notices them, and it’s only thanks to myself and my fellow hosts that it does. Without any insult meant on anyone’s parts, to the Force we’re the same thing as ants. It knows, on some level, that we exist, but we’re so beneath it’s level of existence that a vague awareness is really all we can hope for unless we draw it’s attention.” the woman who had been bound to the Force longer and more often than anyone else across Creation said with a small smile, trying to give reassurance with expression where her words couldn’t. “It’s learned, over more lives and more hosts than any of us can comprehend, but it’s like teaching a star or a black hold to pay attention to, and care about, the existence of a grain of sand. Honestly, Cassie is the host that it’s had the most stable and tempered relationship with.”
“How so?” asked Ashley, curiosity and a desire to take some of the pressure off of Tali -loving and gentle though that pressure might be- alike pushing her to break the silence she’d held for the last few minutes.
“Most hosts, many versions of myself included, are given everything the Phoenix has from the beginning. Limited, of course, by our mortality, but the power we can wield is quite literally incomprehensible. That happened because the Phoenix wanted to give us power, wanted to give us what we needed to change the world, to change lives -ours or others- the way we needed to.” was the answer, a small shrug accompanying the words. “But it was the equivalent of being thrown into the deep end. We weren’t able to handle that level of power, of consciousness, for that long. Most of us lived short and glorious lives. Some of us, like me, lived long enough to…go wrong. To lose ourselves in the Phoenix, to let the deepest and darkest parts of us taint the gifts it had given us. To become a Dark Phoenix, destroying everything and everyone that we wanted to protect.”
“Dying a hero or living long enough to become the villain.” Liara interjected, giving the now-somewhat sad-looking Jean a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, knowing what the long-dead human’s soul-imprint was thinking of. “But, thanks to all of you, the Force learned. It does things better now. It’s thanks to all of you that my love is safe. And I’ll never stop being grateful to you for that, Jean.”
Jean’s expression shifted at Liara’s words, the sadness and bitter regret easing into something that was still melancholy but tempered by a warmth that Cassandra had come to recognize over the years since she’d first learn to deliberately step into the White Hot Room, since she’d first met the woman who looked so very much like her. It was the look Jean wore when she was reminded that, for all the darkness of her own story, something good had come of it. Something lasting.
That despite how it had ended so many times, she was still a hero. Someone who had still done what was right for the vast majority of her existences, and had never wanted to do or be anything but a good person, no matter what she had eventually been turned into by forces beyond her control.
“You don’t need to thank me, Liara. Any of us. We did what we did and our times are over.” Jean said softly, her hand coming up to cover the asari’s where it rested on her shoulder. “We failed, each of us in our own way, just as much as we succeeded. That Cassie hasn’t suffered the same fates that we did is as much a testament to her as it is to what we taught the Force. Maybe more.”
“See, girls, the Force learned that giving it’s hosts too much power, widening their gazes and broadening their horizons to strong and too quickly, always and inevitably led to bad ends and poor results.” Cassandra explained, ignoring with the discomfort of long practice the itch between her shoulder blades that always came with being praised by the souls of her dead predecessors. She’d come nowhere close to being put under the same pressures and facing the same threats that some of them had been forced to contend with. “It just wasn’t something that mortal minds were meant to handle even a fraction of. So, with me, it’s…tempering itself. Throttling itself. Letting me grow into it. Which means that I just…I don’t have what I need, yet, to save your people, Tali. Someday, I promise I’ll make it happen. Each and every one of them will be just as healthy as you are. But only when I know it’s safe for me to try, and only when I know I will succeed.”
There was a silence that followed on the heels of her words, and it was a thick, heavy silence, as Tali processed that. As she turned it over in her mind, and Cassandra could feel her inner turmoil ebbing and flowing, before the quarian took a deep breath and turned her desperate grip into something warmer and softer.
“Okay.”
That was it. Just that one word, small and quiet and full of enough trust that it was…well, honestly, Cassandra would struggle to put it into words if she was asked. But however she would word it, it meant much and more, and the human couldn’t resist the urge -nor did she try very hard- to press a lingering kiss to the top of the head pressed against her chest.
“Alright then. I guess the only thing we can do now is…talk.” she said after a long, peaceful moment. Looking around at the family she was tentatively laying the foundations for, she smiled, bright and warm that three pairs of cheeks tinted with color. “So let’s talk, girls. About ourselves, about each other, and about us.”
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“…derstand, Councilors, but I’m concerned about the circumstances. From what you’re telling me, both the emergency message from the STG unit and the message from Nihlus were both badly garbled, on mission-critical and ultra-secure channels that go unfiltered straight through the relays. The level of jamming required for that is incredible, and that means an equally significant enemy presence.” Shepard was clearly trying hard to keep her tone even and respectful, and Tevos could appreciate it. The girl and her team hadn’t even made it all the way back to the Citadel to resupply -and after their previous resupply had been cut so short, as well- after their rescue of Terra Nova when she and her fellows had reached out to her about Virmire. She was exhausted, on edge, and felt like her advice and experience was being ignored. No one would be happy under such circumstances, but she was mastering herself beautifully. “I strongly recommend that, if you won’t send a squadron with me to investigate, you at least have a battlegroup waiting a few jumps away. The last thing we want is for Saren or the Warmaster to slip away because we didn’t have the forces present to keep them pinned down.”
“Their escape, should they even be present, is less of a concern at the moment.” Sparatus refuted, as bluntly as ever. “What concerns the Council is the possibility that this is a decoy base, or even a manufactured trick by the two of them to draw our fleets out of position. Any force sufficient to fight a geth or batarian fleet, never mind the dreadnaught from Eden Prime, would by necessity be large enough that their deployment would leave sizeable gaps in our defensive lines. Gaps that could be exploited by more of Saren and the Warmaster’s puppets and lead to attacks on soft targets in Citadel Space.”
“With respect, Councilor, Terra Nova was a soft target.” Shepard replied, and Tevos could hear the effort it took to keep the edge from her voice. The girl’s jaw was tight, her posture rigid even through the holographic projection, and there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before Terra Nova. Something harder, colder, but still seemed to burn. “So was Eden Prime. The gaps in our defensive lines already exist, and our enemies are already exploiting them. Holding back forces to protect positions that are already vulnerable doesn’t help if the source of the threat continues to operate freely. We need to hunt them down and destroy them.”
Valern sighed softly on her other side, the sound too soft for the microphones to pick up.
“The Commander makes a valid point about the existing vulnerabilities.” the salarian Councilor said in a fashion that could only be considered conciliatory. “However, Councilor Sparatus is not wrong about the risks of redeployment. The question is one of acceptable risk versus potential gain. In that regard…”
As her colleague went about politely telling their probationary agent that they weren’t sending a battle fleet into an unknown situation when they had a perfectly good stealth frigate that could investigate the exact circumstances instead, Tevos let her thoughts drift to the increasingly frequent, and interesting, reports that she’d been receiving from and about the girl in question.
The brief crusade against Cerberus had made for some interesting reading, and she’d readily signed off on the quiet request from Admirals Hackett and Shepard to have some extra, non-human security making sure the Admiral survived his wounds long enough to wake up and report on what had happened. The galaxy had enough problems with the batarians running around, they didn’t need a powerful and capable human supremacist terrorist organization -especially not one capable of kidnapping a flag officer on the Citadel itself and transporting him out-system before anyone realized he was missing- causing problems as well. Anything that could stymie ‘The Illusive Man’ and his cronies was something Tevos would heartily support, and she’d felt no small amount of glee when reading about the carnage that Shepard’s team had wreaked on their operations.
The fact that they had known about the Terra Nova situation, and been able to inform Shepard -honestly, as events had proven- about it before any official channels could was worrisome, but ultimately manageable.
What had truly caught her attention, however, was the report on Shepard’s attack on the asteroid itself, and the slaughter she’d delivered onto Balak’s fanatics.
There wasn’t much surviving footage, and there weren’t many eyewitnesses who’d seen anything unusual, but what information she did have had been illuminating. Especially the report, sent through more clandestine methods, from the sole asari that had been aboard the asteroid -an expert in asteroid mining, loaned to the Alliance to help them hollow out ‘Asteroid X57’ and make it habitable- who had felt Shepard’s actions with her biotics.
Her report hadn’t been very detailed, at least not in regard to any events that she didn’t witness, but she had been very firm and clear about what details she did have on the colossal aura that Shepard has apparently been radiating. Large enough to sense from hundreds of feet away, and powerful enough that she could, even at that distance, sense something other beneath it all.
What, she didn’t know, and neither did Tevos. What the asari’s representative to the Citadel did know, however, is that the surviving footage had shown Shepard turning geth and batarian alike into little more than charred husks, if not ashes entirely, as she had inexorably and by herself laid waste to the terrorists. Tevos had seen many, many things in her long life, many of them some of the most powerful biotics in recorded history, but she’d seen nothing like that. Fire, genuine and red-gold, had wreathed the girl and struck down her enemies, and nothing they’d thrown at her -and they had thrown enough firepower at her to destroy an APC- seemed to have so much as slowed her down, never mind stopped her.
If Tevos was going to be honest with herself, it frightened her. It was an unknown, clearly significant, difficult-to-quantify power that had either been newly developed -which had worrisome implications- or had existed for sometime and been deliberately concealed, which was even worse. And if she were to lay odd, she would gamble that it was the later and not the former that was true. She, after all, had access to certain pieces of footage -tiny, badly mangled, distorted- from the attack of Mindoir. There had been nothing, then, that was…entirely impossible to explain as anything more than particularly potent biotics amongst a race who hadn’t yet developed a biotic baseline to measure by. Certainly not without delving deeper, and she’d known better than to delve too deeply into a child so precious to, and so fiercly guarded by, women as old and dangerous as the two Matriarch’s that Cassandra Shepard called ‘Aunt’.
But now? Now, with footage that was far clearer, far more damning, and far more difficult to dismiss?
Tevos settled her weight imperceptibly onto her back foot, letting Valern and Sparatus’ somewhat-contrasting attempts at diplomacy and swaying the young woman to their way of thinking wash over her as background noise while she turned the problem over in her mind. The trouble wasn’t what Shepard could do, necessarily. There was plenty of power in the galaxy in the galaxy, and while this power was perhaps different to most, the girl had thus far wielded it in service of causes that Tevos could only approve of. The trouble was what she didn’t know about it, and the uncomfortable awareness that the people who did know —Benezia, Aethyta, T’Soni the younger, Shepard herself, Urdnot Wrex, and likely more— had made a deliberate, calculated decision to keep the Council in the dark.
That stung, if she was honest. Not personally, of course -she wasn’t so vain that she expected an only-tentatively allied star-nation to share all of their secrets with her own, or with her as an individual!- but it spoke to a level of deliberate, coordinated secrecy that went beyond simply, basic caution. This wasn’t a handful of average people failing to mention something in passing. This was some of the most powerful and influential and deadliest people in the galaxy conspiring to keep their silence.
And Aethyta, damn her eyes, had to be at the center of it. Benezia could be clandestine when required, certainly, but the Founding Mother of the Eclipse? She lived and breathed secrecy and conspiracy, and very few people were willing to take the risk of trying to delve into her secrets, no matter how juicy they might be.
She couldn’t, she realized, do anything about this yet. Perhaps not ever. Shepard was proving herself more than worthy of the trust, the task, and the rank -however probationary it might technically be- that the Council had given her, with aplomb at that. They could hardly strip her of that same rank and duties simply because she was more capable than they expected her to be!
Sighing within, even as her mouth went through the typical niceties with the visibly-incensed but controlled and obedient human woman before her as the meeting ended, she couldn’t help but be glad neither Valern nor Sparatus had the same sources, with the same knowledge, that she did. Otherwise, convincing the ‘cautious’ salarian and the warhawk of a turian to keep their hands to themselves on this matter would be impossible.
The asari would handle all matters regarding biotic development and research, as they always had before. This was their sphere of power, their wellspring of knowledge, and she wasn’t interested in being forced to argue the point with anyone, least of all her colleagues.
Perhaps, after this Saren business was handled, some additions could be made to Shepard’s retinue. Additions with a very specific set of skills, carefully honed talents…and particular orders. Because one way or another, Tevos would have the answers she needed, the knowledge she required, and the leverage it would give her over this pale-skinned force of nature.
She didn’t have a choice, after all.