#Anderson mostly occupies his time with taking Kaidan under his wing but I like to think that he looks after Liara a bit too

[springagainafter]

Thoughts on Merrick and Liara post-Ilos and thoughts on the memory-sharing part of asari bonding:

Liara makes the memory/thought sharing aspect of the romantic version of asari bonding sound cool and then canon does....basically nothing with that (aside from her goodbye in London, which is one-sided memory sharing).

I think asari are just wired differently and can pick up all sorts of memories from different people, still identify particular ones as being from a specific person instead of their own memories, and function perfectly well without having any sort of breakdown due to all that getting mixed up in their heads (in much the same way drell function just fine with having perfect memory).

I also think there's something about that process that involves Merrick being able to distinguish between his own memories and what he picks up from Liara so *he* doesn't have a breakdown due to all that getting mixed up in his head.

Due to the memory-sharing nature of asari bonding, post-Ilos they both randomly get little flashes of "hey I recognize this new object I just encountered/this new place from the other person's memories despite never having seen it before personally" or "this aspect of human/asari culture makes sense to me because it made sense to Merrick/Liara." Also it gets much easier to read the other person's body language, which is convenient.

Anderson has multiple you-doing-okay conversations with Merrick over the years and multiple chats about how the hunt for Saren is going during ME1 during Citadel visits.

He kindly pulls Liara aside to his usual chat-with-Shepard spot to see how she's doing after Alchera and then Liara gets to navigate that conversation while she keeps getting flashes of similar previous conversations Merrick had with him. But she also gets a chance to tell Anderson out loud that Merrick thought of him as a father figure and would walk through fire for him - which Anderson already knew, but it was nice to hear anyway.

(Anderson, incidentally, is unaware of the romance or at least thinks it's one-sided on Liara's part and is generally probably not trying to look at that too hard, so he just says kind true things about Merrick talking about how brilliant she is, etc.)

I'm not saying Liara ends up on Illium because Merrick had never been there but that's definitely part of why she ends up on Illium.

Merrick's version of it circa ME2 is about equally as fun - at first he has no idea where she is (because he was NOT going to ask TIM) so getting little flashes and being reminded of her makes him worry. And then after that he's angry with her about the Cerberus thing - or worried about how to fix things once he's not so angry - so Liara reminders are not very pleasant then either.

It is helpful when he's calling her post-ME1 while he's stuck in meetings and she's on Thessia at her mother's funeral/figuring out what to do with all of Benezia's things and house and so on. Means Liara has to do less explaining since he already gets some of it (even though they are both bummed that he can't be there).