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Tombstones and monuments, broken, forgotten
Names eroded by time
Empires built for the sake of your children
Crumble like dust in the wind
Immortality somehow escapes you
History repeats it again and again
Status and ego, go to the grave with you
Soon no one remembers your name
Tombstones and Monuments, Charles Hurley
I’ve always loved you.
There were things best left unspoken, Tevos knew. Holding her daughter in her arms, she looked at the people who gathered around to say their farewells. Tevos missed him keenly in those moments, missed his ready smile and his eyes shining with love. She knew her daughter would eventually learn that her father had sacrificed himself time and again, putting everything he had on the line to save the galaxy.
She saw Mattie, Duncan, Richard, Lizzie and Katie standing with their parents. She saw Admiral Shepard and Captain Shepard look older than they were—the loss of their eldest son had aged Admiral Jack Shepard beyond his years, and Captain Hannah Shepard seemed to be going the same way. Tevos was grateful they had accepted her into their family, and was grateful that her daughter would get to know her human family as well as her asari one.
Tevos would never understand the human funereal custom of digging a hole and putting the body down into that hole for as long as she lived. The asari had a different way of doing it: they embalmed their dead and let them be seen for the entire galaxy to see, encased forever in a glass stasis pod. Their memorials seemed a much more respectful way to remember the dead, though Tevos knew that to asari, death was only a temporary state.
Her grief was raw, but she held it together. There would be time later to lose her composure, to lose herself in grief, but right now, she had to act the part of the asari councillor. It was hard, though, to close herself off to her grief, she felt numb, like she could never be happy again.
Why had she fallen in love with a human, whose lives were so brief compared to her own. Asari longevity had once been something she revelled in, but with the man who she had loved dead and gone, she wondered if her grief would ever abate. At least she had a child to comfort her, and remind her that a part of him still loved and lived.
She stood silently as everyone left the memorial, but she stayed. She could afford now to give into her grief. She felt the tears start coursing down her cheeks, and she felt the hot burn in her eyes. Tevos whispered to their child, and vowed to always tell her stories of her father.
“I will always love you,” she whispered to the headstone, and for a brief moment, thought she felt him standing behind her, his strong hands on her shoulders. When she glanced behind her, all she saw was the empty space where he should have been.