Chapter Text
Should I fall out of love, my fire in the light
To chase a feather in the wind
Within the glow that weaves a cloak of delight
There moves a thread that has no end
- Led Zeppelin, "All My Love"
The first thought that goes through Tali'Zorah's mind when the sound of the elevator startles her out of her slumber is Kaidan's doing his rounds again. Not Shepard's doing her rounds, a mistake that she found herself correcting over and over, each time bringing another jolt of grief.
She almost wishes he would stop.
In the weeks since the blue shockwave from the Crucible had hit the Charon relay at the same moment as the Normandy SR-2, flinging them ancestors-know-where instead of the rendezvous point in Arcturus and crashing (though Joker liked to insist it was just a "rough landing") into an uncharted garden world, he'd tried a little too hard to emulate Shepard.
The rounds, for instance. One of Shepard's stubborn little habits, and something Tali had initially thought was some sort of strange human custom—no quarian captain would ever manage to find the time to go around twice a day and personally speak to every single person aboard the ship. Although Kaidan has the sense to restrict his rounds to once a day, both rations and tempers are running short for the crew of the Normandy, and he's mostly just using up valuable calories that a biotic could scarcely afford to lose.
It takes Tali a few moments to realize that Kaidan's not actually on his rounds. Usually, he first goes to the port cargo area to talk to Javik—from the few snippets of conversation that she sometimes overhears, mostly to make sure that their resident Prothean wasn't planning to throw anyone out of the airlock. But right now, he's making his way directly toward her, his footsteps a little quicker than usual.
When her people had reclaimed their homeworld and Tali had returned to her duties on the Normandy, she'd set up a cot right in engineering, across from her station. At one point, it might have been practical: with the other engineers bunking up on the crew deck, having somebody close by in case an emergency came up made sense. And although she's a quarian, used to living in close quarters, she has somehow come to prefer the company of the thrum of the Normandy's drive core, the heartbeat of the ship.
Plus, the others didn't need to overhear her late-night intercom conversations with a certain turian.
Maybe it wasn't practical now. With everybody ordered to rest as much as possible to conserve their energy and EDI taking over pretty much everything—including the helm when Joker finally admitted that the pain of the bones shattered in the Normandy's "rough landing" was far worse than he'd let on—she's remained down in Engineering, even if it meant a daily elevator ride to the crew deck to receive her allotment of nutrition paste. Some days, it almost doesn't seem worth the effort.
Although she's careful to lift herself from the cot slowly, the dizziness nearly overwhelms her at first. She allows herself a moment to adjust to her wobbly legs, struggling to ignore the swimming feeling in her head, the ever-painful gnaw in her stomach, and how loosely her envirosuit drapes off of her shoulders. It's not just mere hunger at this point, but something nearing starvation. Before the Normandy had departed for their final assault on Earth, they'd had enough rations to last around a month, provided they were careful. It's been almost three.
(During the rounds, Engineer Adams had once joked that he wasn't sure he wanted to know what strings Shepard had to pull to keep their pantry full during wartime shortages; it was normally a job for the executive officer, but for reasons known only to her own inscrutable mind, Shepard had never gotten around to assigning one.
"Strange you should ask." She leaned against the railing, just at the edge of Tali's limited peripheral vision. Dark skin, dark hair cropped close to her scalp, thin and wiry, and almost a head shorter than Tali—people who knew of the great Commander Shepard's reputation before coming face-to-face with her were sometimes disappointed that she didn't look more like the tall, muscular, heroic-looking soldiers in the Alliance recruitment ads. "'I tried to sell my soul last night—funny, he wouldn't even take a bite.'"
It was several seconds before Adams responded. "...what?"
"Yeah. Said there was too much rock 'n' roll, not enough sex and drugs."
Donnelly made what Tali assumed was a comment about their commanding officer's fraternization with the Major—his accent might as well been a language of its own with the way it constantly defied the adjustments she made to her translator. Daniels' exasperated response confirmed it.
Shepard didn't even blink. "No idea what you're talking about."
Tali turned to look at her, arms crossed. "Shepard, you do realize that sound carries through the ship, right?"
"...oh. Huh. Shit. "
Just when Tali thought she'd managed to fool Shepard—if any noise did somehow make its way down to engineering from the captain's cabin, it'd probably just be from her stereo—Engineer Adams let out a noise that sounded somewhere between a snort and a cough.
Shepard's bright green eyes narrowed as they focused on Tali. "Almost had me there, Tali. Guess I shouldn't have kept asking when you planned to do a reenactment of Fleet and Flotilla." She gave a short laugh. "But as a wise man once said, 'we've gotta hold on to what we've got—it doesn't make a difference if we make it or not.'"
Tali shook her head, and Adams looked up from his control panel. "Commander, did you just quote...Bon Jovi?"
"Nope." Shepard gave a small shrug. "Lynyrd Skynyrd, actually.")
By the time Kaidan arrives, she's hunched over her control panel, pretending to be doing something important. He walks up next to her and gives a slight frown when he realizes she's pressing the same few buttons over and over, to no effect. She stops.
"Good to see you, Kaidan," Tali says, and immediately regrets it; she isn't able to entirely conceal the edge of aggravation in her voice. She tries again, and manages to sound a little more sincere. "You need something?"
It was only logical that Major Alenko should take over command of the Normandy; the ship was flying Alliance colours, and he was the highest-ranking Alliance officer aboard, as well as being a Spectre. And in the first few weeks immediately following the Normandy's crash-landing, he had done his duties well: despite the injuries he'd sustained in London, he had pulled the crew together, focusing their efforts into getting the ship repaired before their food stores gave out.
At least, that's what the others told her. Tali herself had been delirious with fever at the time, and had nearly died before Dr. Chakwas came across the right cocktail of antibiotics to wipe out the worst of her infection. Her suit hadn't just been punctured, it had been shredded, exposing her to open air. It had taken her time to recover, time for her to figure out how she'd ended up in the Normandy's clean room, time for her to realize that Shepard—
"Tali," Kaidan's voice interrupts her thoughts. "Do you have any idea what the geth are doing in this system?"
How should I know? I'm not a geth. She doesn't say it, though, and immediately begins to worry; it wouldn't take much to shatter the fragile peace that organics shared with the geth. But there's no way to know for sure if that happened. Despite their best efforts, the Normandy's crew hadn't been able to repair the damage to the QEC; between that and the comm buoys suffering the same fate as the mass relays, the Milky Way was large and empty. Too large and empty. The crew of the Normandy have been completely cut off from everyone else.
Keelah, no wonder everyone was getting on each others' nerves.
Finally, Tali speaks. "I don't know."
"But—do you know if they're still on our side? Or if they could be some of those heretics your geth friend was taking about?"
Tali straightens herself, trying not to yell. "Kaidan, I don't know."
"No, you're right." He pauses a moment, running a hand along the back of his neck and exhaling softly. He looks almost skeletal at this point, having restricted himself to the same limited rations as everyone else. "It's just—"
It's easy to guess. They may have gotten the Normandy space-worthy again, but neither she nor her crew were in shape for combat against hostile geth.
"I wish Shepard was here," Kaidan finally says. His head droops slightly, as though the weight of it is too much of a burden to bear for the moment. "She'd know what to do."
"You knew her better than anyone." Tali's voice is soft. "What do you think she'd do?"
"Aside from quote one of her old songs? She would—probably point out that she's not here, and then ask me what I think we should do." Some of the tension seems to leave his shoulders, and he shakes his head slightly. "EDI, what do we have?"
"Passive sensors are picking up energy signatures consistent with a geth ship. Range, approximately ten thousand kilometers." EDI's voice is tinny through the intercom's speakers. "The Normandy's stealth drive is allowing us to remain undetected. However, many of our kinetic emitters and main gun were both damaged during the crash."
He grimaces. "EDI, prepare an escape vector, and open a communications channel. Be ready to jump to FTL if they turn hostile."
"At once, Major."
Tali finds it strange that he doesn't call everyone to their stations—that's what Shepard probably would have done—but decides against commenting on it. Kaidan pauses once again, his shoulders lifting and falling slightly as he takes a long breath. Then he speaks, his voice as authoritative as a half-starved soldier could possibly make it. "This is Major Alenko of the SSV Normandy SR-2."
The mechanical voice of a geth comes over the intercom, sounding so much like Legion had that Tali has to remind herself again that it couldn't be:
"Major Alenko, geth units aboard this transport vessel are prepared to offer any required assistance. We are also able to provide provisions for the organics onboard the Normandy."
A wave of dizziness and relief nearly overcomes Tali, and she braces herself against the control panel. Oh, keelah. Provisions meant food.
"Admiral Hackett has also requested that we convey information to the Normandy consensus about the status of Shepard-Commander."
For several heartbeats, Tali's vision narrows to a pinprick of light. Her envirosuit automatically increases the concentration of oxygen, and then she finally remembers to breathe. Beside her, Kaidan is pale. Shepard had been Tali's crazy bosh'tet captain, her best friend, practically her sister. But for Kaidan, Shepard had been something completely different.
As long as their communications had been down, it had been so easy to pretend that they didn't know if Shepard had survived, so easy to disregard the fact that she'd been barely able to speak in her last radio message to the Normandy, that she had been right next to the Crucible when it had released enough energy to not only wipe out every Reaper in the galaxy, but take out the mass relays as well.
(Now that she no longer had to devote it to calculations to help combat the Reapers, EDI had reallocated some of her processing power into analyzing the signal that she had detected embedded deep within the blue energy that had washed over the Normandy, one that might've taken her offline or worse if she hadn't immediately modified her programming. One that had still temporarily overloaded parts of the systems that she hadn't been completely able to separate from Sovereign's hardware.
A command, telling every Reaper to self-destruct.
And it had worked. Just a few thousand klicks away from the mass relay the Normandy had been thrust through—its gyroscopic rings shattered, its eezo core dissipated into the emptiness of space—was the corpse of a reaper, just barely visible against the backdrop of distant stars. Sovereign-class, and a grim reminder of the inert reaper that had orbited Mnemosyne, of a supposedly dead god that could still dream.
This one didn't dream. Its mass effort core had exploded, tearing it apart from the inside out.
When Major Alenko called the crew together to brief them about the length of time it'd take to return to Sol, or what was left of it—not the few hours or days they'd all anticipated, but a few months —EDI found opportunity to bring up the subject. There was something strange about the signal, something that she wasn't able to determine.
"It does not matter," Javik said, his four eyes slowly blinking in unison. "The Reapers have been destroyed. That is answer enough.")
It was easy enough to pretend, but it was Kaidan who actually seemed to believe that Shepard might not be—gone. That she had slipped away from death once more.
"Do you think..." He trails off as it finally seems to sink in. "Was she happy? Do you think she wanted to—?"
"She loved you, Kaidan." The conviction in her own voice surprises her, and she reaches over to touch his arm. "She didn't want to leave you behind."
But she had. The last that anyone had seen of Shepard was her back as she turned to make her last, desperate rush toward the Citadel beam. Tali doesn't remember it. Her suit process logs said that had overridden protocols to increase her dosage of antibiotics and painkillers to unsafe levels, but she has no recollection of doing that either. Sometimes, brief glimpses of half-formed memories trickle through to her mind, usually through her nightmares: purple fabric stained with red, the smell of burning flesh and metal and eezo coming through a shattered visor, and a desperate voice—if it didn't sound so panicked, she could almost swear it's Shepard—calling for an evac.
"But was it enough?" He looks down at his hands—no, at the ring that Tali had never noticed on his finger. It seems familiar, but she can't place where she'd seen it before. "No. It wasn't about—I mean, she was a soldier. She had to put the mission first. I just wish..." He doesn't finish the sentence, and eventually turns back to the intercom. "EDI, transmit rendezvous coordinates."
"Affirmative."
But he can't bring himself to ask about Shepard. So Tali does.
"This is Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy of the Migrant Fleet. What can you tell us about Shepard?"
"Following the activation of the Crucible and the destruction of the Old Machines, Shepard-Commander was discovered at the Tower."
Kaidan chokes out the words. "Her body."
"No. Shepard-Commander's platform was not destroyed. She was discovered alive."
Notes:
Yet another fanfic comes out of me being unhappy with the ending of a video game. This time, Mass Effect 3.
Of course, it quickly ballooned out of control. Nearly six months and a full rewrite later, here we are.
Chapter 2: ...i'm not dead and i'm not for sale
Notes:
Warnings: Implied self-harm, non-graphic description of a suicide attempt.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I am, I am I said I'm not myself
But I'm not dead
And I'm not for sale
Hold me closer, closer
Let me go
Let me be
Just let me be
- Stone Temple Pilots, "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart"
Keystroke Recording
Omni-Tool Use
SSV Normandy SR-2
- BEGIN NEW MESSAGE
"Commander Shepard,"
- ERASE LINE
"Shepard,"
- SAVE PROGRESS
"Our QEC was damaged when the Normandy crashed, but the geth"
- ERASE LINE
"The geth helped us repair the damage to our QEC, and Admiral Hackett offered to forward any messages we want to send. I don't know if you can read this yet"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"you're feeling well enough to read this yet, but I might as well."
- SAVE PROGRESS
"The Normandy's crew is doing well. I nearly died from an infection"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"had an infection for a while, but I'm doing much better now. We're all relieved that you didn't die"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"survived the final battle. We would have come back sooner, except that whatever the Crucible did also destroyed"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"damaged the mass relays. We've been making our way home"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"back to Sol with conventional FTL travel. We're only a few weeks away now."
- SAVE PROGRESS
"We're all worried about you"
- ERASE LINE
"We all miss you"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"care about you"
- PARTIAL LINE ERASE
"love you."
- SAVE DRAFT AND EXIT
Tali stretches out a bit more on the lounge sofa in hopes that it'll relieve the discomfort of solid food distending her stomach. For the first time since she'd emerged from the Normandy's clean room so many weeks ago, her mind isn't shrouded with the fuzziness that made it difficult to think, but doesn't make it any easier to figure out what to say. At times like these, when words seem an unnecessarily cumbersome way to get her thoughts across, she can almost understand Shepard's tendency to lapse into bouts of silence.
Focusing on the news reports takes less effort.
Wrex and gentle are two words that Tali never thought she'd use in the same sentence. Her first impression of him was of a moving bulwark of muscle and biotic power charging into a dark alleyway in the Citadel wards to kill two of the assassins that were trying to kill her.
Some people might question Shepard's decision to bring a krogan battlemaster along on a mission to track down a rogue Spectre—usually the same sort of people who questioned her decision to allow a quarian free access to the engine room of a prototype Alliance starship—but it wasn't hard to understand why. Hostiles focused on the krogan were that less likely to notice the lone figure skirting around their flank to take position. If Wrex was a bulwark, Shepard was a scalpel with a tactical cloak and a sniper rifle.
(Tali didn't have much time to wonder about the sudden appearance of the krogan before something grabbed her arm and yanked her back into cover. The third assassin's gun suddenly overheated in his hands, there was a gunshot, and then, almost in slow-motion, he crumpled to the floor, a hole in his chest.
"You okay?" came a female voice, but it was neither from the krogan nor the turian C-Sec who'd just appeared. The cold knot of apprehension that'd first formed inside Tali when she'd discovered that geth patrol in the Crescent Nebula only seemed to solidify—
"Commander," the turian said, with what seemed to be a tone of exasperation. "Your cloak."
"Fuck." A word that Tali recognized as a decidedly human curse even before a human shimmered into existence beside her. "You okay?"
—and then flared into sheer anger. "Fist set me up! I knew I couldn't trust him!"
The human spoke as she unloaded the thermal clips from her sniper rifle. "'And when the hit man comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated.'"
"...what?"
"Don't worry about Fist. Our krogan associate dealt with him." She collapsed the rifle and holstered it on her back.
The krogan stood there, impassive. "He brought it on himself."
"Uh, yeah." The human waited a few seconds for Tali to say something, then switched to a vaguely intelligible but rather stilted version of Khelish. "Are you hurt? I have dextro medigel."
"No," Tali said once she came to the conclusion that these three were not the enemy. "I know how to look after myself."
"Against those three?" The human switched back to her own language. She walked over to the corpses, and crouched down to examine them. "You could probably handle them, so long as you didn't panic. They clearly underestimated you."
"Um—"
"Yeah." The human stood up, moving with a kind of restrained grace that made Tali—who was tall for a quarian—feel like a lumbering giant beside her. "Smart enough to have your barriers up before they pulled their guns, and you had the element of surprise with that tech mine. Damn thing tore through their shields and knocked them off their feet. Most important is that you kept your head. Guess you've had some military training someplace. That one"—she motioned towards the body of the turian assassin— "might've been a problem, but overheating his weapon would let you get up close with that shotgun. But once Saren got wind that you dealt with them..." She exhaled, taking a shotgun off her back and handing it to Tali. "Try this. M-22 Eviscerator. Better than the piece of shit you have now. Got it off one of Fist's men, so consider it his repayment for setting you up."
"...Not that I don't appreciate the help. Or the tactical advice. Or the shotgun." Which was probably of questionable legality, at least in Citadel space, but the weight of it in her hands made her feel a bit more reassured. "Who are you?"
" Fuck. " The human shook her head. "Forgot to introduce myself. Lieutenant-Commander Joan Shepard of the Systems Alliance. Just call me Shepard, though. 'Pleased to meet you, hoped you guess my name, but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.'"
Tali paused for a moment, trying to parse that last sentence; she was pretty sure her translator had mangled it. Then she gave up. "What?"
"I'm looking for evidence that a Spectre named Saren Arterius was behind the attack on Eden Prime."
In the events of the last few days—attacked by assassins in Illium, being arrested for stowing away on that turian freighter, getting shot on the Presidium, and trying not to think about the fate of poor Keenah, and keelah , this wasn't how her Pilgrimage was supposed to go at all—Tali had pretty much forgotten about the news report she'd heard about the geth attack on Eden Prime, and of the human soldier named Shepard who had saved the colony from going up in nuclear fire.
The same Shepard who was now standing in front of her, looking at her with those steady green eyes.
"Then," Tali said, "I have a chance to repay you for saving my life.")
For the third time in an hour, Tali opens up one of the news articles that Admiral Hackett had forwarded to them and skims it again, as though the words aren't already burned into her memory. Published mere hours after the activation of the Crucible, it's sparse in any sort of actual details and rich in utter speculation. But she's able to pick out a few facts: Shepard had been discovered in the Citadel Tower, close to death. She had been stabilized and transferred to a medical transport ship, where she remained in critical condition after undergoing surgery.
It's no longer accurate; as Shepard's condition had improved, she'd been moved to an Alliance military hospital in Vancouver that had, through some miracle of random precision, had remained mostly untouched by the Reapers. But it's not the article itself that interests Tali so much as the photo accompanying it. More specifically, the unedited version of it. Taken in some part of the Citadel that she doesn't recognize, it shows several krogan, ones that had been handpicked by Urdnot Wrex to 'borrow' a Kodiak shuttle and make their way to the Tower to rescue Shepard—or to retrieve her body.
Tali recognizes only two of the krogan in the picture: Urdnot Grunt, his silvery-grey scales and piercing blue eyes providing a sharp visual contrast to the others. And Wrex himself, head hung low and surprisingly gentle as he carried something in his arms. And although the caption to the photo says that it's Commander Shepard that he's carrying, it's hard to believe, because she—she—
Whatever Wrex is carrying doesn't even look human. It's all black and charred and it can't be her, nobody who looked like that could possibly be alive—
—but it is Shepard, and she had survived—
Oh, keelah.
Tali isn't sure what compulsion drives her to keep looking at the photo again and again; perhaps it's the same one that's currently driving her to once again play the recording that EDI had made of Shepard's last radio contact with the Normandy:
"Normandy—" That was Shepard's voice, weak and interleaved with the crackle of static. "—copy?"
Then Joker's voice, sounding almost panicked: "Commander, is that you?"
"Yes. Got the arms open. Illusive Man already there. Dealt with him." Another of her stubborn little habits: Shepard never killed someone, she dealt with them. "But Anderson's—" The static doesn't quite drown out the sound of her desperate attempt to choke back a sob. "Ground team?"
"Everyone on board, Commander." Joker sounded close to tears himself. "Just waiting on you. "
"Don't think I'll be going anywhere. Someone's got to see this—" Shepard groaned, and her voice grew weaker and more slurred. "—see this thing through. Least it's a nice view. 'Planet earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.'"
"Shepard! Dammit, you're not doing this again! Send us your coordinates. We can get a shuttle to—"
"No can do. Too risky. Fall back when Hackett says. That's an order. Don't make the same mistake again."
A pause. "Aye, aye, Commander."
"Keep them safe, Joker." Her voice was barely audible. "Love you all."
No more static. Shepard had turned her comm off.
Then Joker's voice, barely more than a whisper: "Damn it."
Now that Tali knows that Shepard is alive, listening to it again doesn't leave her with the same pained sense of finality that she always got before.
But it doesn't make it any easier.
Tali isn't too surprised to find Javik standing by the Normandy's memorial wall, his fingertips tracing the edges of Shepard's nameplate as he holds it in his right hand. Although his limp is gone and he hasn't lost as much weight as the others—Tali doesn't think she's ever seen him eat—the entire length of his left arm is still encased in the grey-white bulk of a plaster cast, one of the older medical treatments that Dr. Chakwas had to resort to when supplies began running low.
"It is strange to think that it was the machines to come to our assistance." His voice is quiet, his words carefully chosen. "Such a thing would never have been possible in my cycle."
Tali stands next to him, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. With food in her stomach, she feels much stronger than she had hours before. "The geth are helping. Setting up new comm buoys, assessing the damage to the mass relays, looking for any ships that were stranded."
"You would trust the machines?"
"I trusted Legion. And I think they want to make this work as much as anyone. To prove that organics and synthetics can live together."
"And yet you would have destroyed them without a second thought."
"Yes, I would have. And I'd have been wrong." An awkward silence stretches between them, until Tali breaks it. "How are you doing?"
"I am fine." He doesn't look up from the nameplate in his hand, but vaguely motions to his cast. "Though I will be glad to be rid of this thing. The doctor says she will replace it with something more lightweight once she is finished tending to the 'Joker' pilot."
"That's good. Are you and Liara still planning on writing a book together?"
"We are. But for now, I have been studying the old mission reports from the first Normandy. You were part of the ground team at Ilos."
"I was." Although it's been over two years, the memories are still vivid enough for her to reach out and touch them—buildings overgrown with foliage and rust, dead stasis pods lining a wall, and that awful feeling of trespassing on something that should have been left untouched.
"Ilos was only a rumour during my lifetime, but Dr. T'Soni spoke with me about the place. She wishes to visit again someday. Perhaps I will go with her."
"That might be years away. Even decades." Maybe centuries, but she doesn't say it. Even with the finest minds of the Crucible Project now dedicated to figuring out how to repair the mass relays, it would be a long time before she could return to her homeworld.
Her homeworld. Two words she thought she'd never get to say.
She slides a hand into one of her envirosuit's pockets; even through the fabric of her glove, she can feel the rough surface of the rock she keeps in there. She likes to imagine the slight warmth it holds of her own body heat is actually from the sun-warmed surface of Rannoch.
"The wait does not matter," Javik says. "I think I will enjoy seeing what peace looks like. It is the commander who I fear may be unable to adjust."
Tali takes her hand out of her pocket to twist her fingers together. After nearly three months of everyone desperately trying to avoid the subject, it's almost strange to talk about her so freely. "I'm worried about her, too."
They all were. Miranda Lawson had spoken with them on the QEC earlier—but only briefly, and with a strange un-Mirandalike hesitation in her voice that signaled that something wasn't quite right.Shepard would recover. Her overloaded cybernetics had been repaired and her injuries were already beginning to heal. And yet—
"She did not heed my advice. I warned her that she must numb herself against loss."
"My father"—Tali resists the urge to laugh, wondering what he'd think of his daughter now—"once told me that commanders mourn losses, not people. But Shepard wasn't like that at all. I don't think she could numb herself."
"You know the commander well, quarian, for that is what she told me." As usual, his face is unreadable. "But when we fought the Reapers, the feelings of one soldier did not matter."
She crosses her arms. "But you're worried about her. Some part of you must care."
"I respect her abilities. She is a capable warrior."
"Uh-huh."
"In my cycle"—keelah, she'd come to hate those three words—"there were those who had become weakened by empathy and compassion. They could not cope with the things they had seen." Javik's fingers tighten ever slightly around the nameplate. "The commander had allowed her feelings about Aratoht to cloud her judgment."
"Don't." Tali turns to glare at Javik. "You weren't around when it happened. We didn't have any idea that she'd—" She stops herself, knowing that as easy as it was to ignore, it wasn't entirely true.
(Shepard disappearing from the Normandy for over two days without a word to her crew was...worrying, but it was far from the strangest thing she'd done. But the circumstances surrounding her extraction from the asteroid in the Bahak system were even more worrying, especially since said asteroid was hurtling directly toward a mass relay.
Tali and Garrus were waiting when she stumbled through the airlock, her hands gripped tightly around her Incisor—never the M-92 Mantis or the M-97 Viper or the M-98 Widow, always the M-29 Incisor— and, the perfect picture of calm, made her way up to the cockpit to give a completely unnecessary order:
"Joker, get us out of here."
Shepard waited until they were through the relay before she stood up straight and, without a word to any of them, made her way directly towards the galaxy map in the CIC. And stared at it, stared at the spot where the Bahak system had been as it blinked, slowly faded to red, and then disappeared. She didn't put away her sniper rifle, or take off her helmet, or answer any of the questions being slung at her. Finally, she spoke, her voice barely raising over a whisper.
"EDI, what other ships were recorded going through the relay in the last two hours?"
The blue orb by the elevator popped up. "Two Alliance shuttles, Shepard."
Shepard paused for a long, long moment. Then, almost mechanically, she removed the thermal clip from her Incisor before folding it up and holstering it. She removed the thermal clips from her other weapons and re-holstered them. She removed her helmet and tried to set it down on the ledge by the terminal, but she missed and it tumbled to the floor.
"'That's great, it starts with an earthquake—'" She said this calmly, then paused for a few long moments, staring off into space.
A silent understanding passed between Tali and Garrus as the implications began to sink in about what just happened. There were lots of things they could say to their commander, but even if anything they said was able to cut through the churn of her breakneck thoughts, it wouldn't have helped.
"'—birds and snakes and aeroplanes—'"
Instead, they took position on either side of Shepard and ushered her towards the elevator, away from the confused gazes of the skeleton crew. Shepard waited until the elevator doors slid shut before she spoke again.
"'—and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.'" And then she collapsed.
The next week was difficult. Tali kept finding excuses to leave her station at engineering and head up to the crew deck, but the shutters on the medbay windows remained closed. She and Garrus spent much of their spare time going over news reports that painted an ugly picture of their commander: a mentally unstable soldier exacting some sort of demented revenge for Mindoir.
Cerberus pawn. Terrorist. Mass murderer.
Monster.
Just one day after Miranda had called together the crew to brief them about their current situation, EDI informed Tali that Shepard was ready for visitors.
When Tali entered the medbay, the first thing she noticed was Shepard sitting on the edge of a cot, looking surprisingly... calm for someone who'd annihilated an entire planetary system. "How is she?" Tali asked Dr. Chakwas.
"Physically, she's fine." The doctor looked up from her datapad and responded in a hushed whisper. "What she needs most right now is a friend."
Tali wasn't entirely convinced. Looking over at her commander—legs dangling over the edge of the cot, eyes closed, and completely engrossed in whatever old song she was listening to—she figured that if anything, Shepard would've preferred that everyone leave her alone to listen to her music. But Dr. Chakwas didn't give Tali any time to protest before she left the room to give them some privacy.
Not knowing what else to do, Tali hauled herself up on the cot beside Shepard, linked up her suit's auditory feed with Shepard's earphones, and immediately recognized her mistake. Whatever song came through was loud and noisy and at least 150 years old, and Tali winced at the assault on her senses.
Shepard finally acknowledged her presence. "Not a fan?"
"Keelah, what is this racket?" Tali immediately recognized her second mistake. "Wait, don't answer—"
She didn't miss a beat. "The Moody Blues."
"Shepard, this is not the Moody Blues."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because the song itself says it's by"—she paused a second to check—"Nirvana."
"Yup. Definitely the Moody Blues. And what do you mean 'racket'? It's rock music!"
"It's noise . Noise, and some guy mumbling." Tali took a moment to adjust the volume. "And now he's yelling. Are those even words?"
"'Here we are now, eat potatoes.' Or maybe it's 'entertain us.' Not entirely sure myself." Shepard shook her head. "Far from their best song, if I'm honest. I don't even like it that much."
"Then why are you even listening to it?"
"Because I wanted to."
Tali threw up her hands and let out a strangled noise of frustration. "But it's noise. I don't even know how you can stand it."
"Tali, you listen to that modern pop crap. I don't think you're in any position to evaluate the quality of old-time rock 'n' roll and then give it a disdainful title such as 'noise.'"
"Stubborn bosh'tet." She huffed behind her helmet, then waited for the song to finish and Shepard to tuck her earphones away in her pocket before speaking again. "I read your mission report, and—keelah, I can't even imagine. How are you feeling now?"
"Dr. Chakwas just locked me in here as a precaution, and Mordin ran a couple thousand scans of my brain. But if I start complaining about voices in my head or hailing the return of the Reapers, you should probably start backing away. And then find a shotgun."
Tali glared at her.
"Oh, you meant emotionally ." There was a bitter note in her voice. "You read the report. Probably saw the news, too. I crashed an asteroid into a mass relay. Destroyed an entire system. Three hundred, four thousand, nine hundred and forty-two people are dead because of me. 'All they are in dust in the wind.' Struggling against cosmic winds. How I feel about it isn't important at all."
Tali crossed her arms. "Do you want me to come back later?"
"No, it's—" She exhaled slowly. "I'm sorry, Tali. You can stay if you want. But really, you don't need to worry about me. I'll be fine."
Tali's voice was soft. "That's what you said to Joker just before you went down to Alchera."
Shepard said nothing.
"You've listened to me babble like an idiot about my problems more than enough. Now it's my turn."
Shepard tapped her fingers in rhythm against her leg, before finally responding. "'There's bodies in the water, and bodies in your basement—if heaven's for clean people, it's vacant.'"
"...right." Tali waited, but Shepard remained frustratingly silent. "Shepard, you did the right thing."
"I know." Her voice was calm. "It was the only way to give the rest of the galaxy even a scrap of a chance."
"You don't seem convinced of it."
"I just wish the price didn't have to be paid in blood. Seems like a pretty clear-cut case of the trolley problem. Action or inaction. Pull the lever, kill one person, but the five on the other track get to live." She shifted her weight, crossing and then uncrossing her legs. "They put that problem to me. One of the psych evals the Alliance put me through to make sure I hadn't completely cracked after, uh, what happened at Akuze."
She went quiet again for a few moments. Shepard didn't like to talk about Akuze.
"First, I pointed out that there's modern safety features in place to make sure that kind of situation didn't happen in the first place. But if it did manage to happen, I'd just pull the lever halfway so that the trolley would run off the tracks without hitting anyone. Then I'd go find the idiot who decided to deliberately violate multiple safety protocols and file a complaint." She shook her head. "Pretty sure that wasn't quite the answer they expected."
Tali couldn't help herself: she laughed. Because it was exactly the kind of answer they'd expect if they knew Shepard.
"You know, 'going off the rails on a crazy trolley' just doesn't have the same ring to it." Shepard gave a tiny smile. "I hate that problem anyways. It's too abstract. And it doesn't take into account that there's rarely just two choices, so it just boils down to simple arithmetic based on a false dichotomy. But philosophy's not my strong suit. Sitting around in a room thinking does funny things to my head." She paused again. "Garrus and I talked about it a bit."
Tali's head lurched upwards. "Oh?"
"Yeah." Shepard looked directly at her for a few seconds, and Tali was glad that her visor hid the flush in her face. "You know, he mentioned you went to see him in the main battery a few times."
Oh, keelah. "I don't know what you're suggesting, Shepard."
"Uh-huh. Nothing, Tali." Much to Tali's relief, she dropped the subject. "But he pointed out that I'd assumed the trolley was empty. So I derail it to save six people on the tracks, and end up killing twenty-five passengers. That no matter what you do, sometimes people have to die so that others can live. If only ten people can fit in a lifeboat, the others will have to get kicked off. 'It's not a deal, nor a test, nor a love of something fated, death.'" She paused. "I think his words for it were the 'ruthless calculus of war.' A star system sacrificed to give the rest of the galaxy a few more months to prepare. Or how many human lives sacrificed to save a Council that rubs my fragile mental state in my face and uses it as a reason to ignore the Reaper threat."
Tali crossed her arms again. "Well, the Council can just go to hell . "
Shepard remained silent for a long time, looking down at her trembling hands, at the tiny cuts gouged out of the heavy skin weave in her bare arms; with a sickening sense of clarity, Tali slowly came to realize that her exposure to Object Rho was far from the only reason she'd been confined to the medbay.
"And sometimes, there are no good alternatives. The people living on Aratoht would've died anyways when the Reapers rolled in, or even worse. Or the batarians would've blown the asteroid to pieces if I'd been able to give them more warning."
"You didn't really have much of a choice, did you?"
Shepard's voice was quiet. "No. Even if it was between two shitty options, I did have a choice. It'd be an insult to say otherwise. I could have just walked away, and—I almost did. But I didn't. I chose to destroy the mass relay, even though I knew there wouldn't be enough time to evacuate the colony. It was the wholesale slaughter of civilians." She closed her eyes. "I killed them, Tali."
Tali had no idea what to say to that. Instead, she reached over and put a hand on Shepard's shoulder. Shepard didn't pull away.
"Funny, isn't it? One of the reasons Hackett sent me in, besides the whole plausible-deniability thing, is because he knew I had a knack for avoiding what they like to call 'collateral damage.' Instead, I end up turning into the worst mass murderer in galactic history." She gave a shaky little laugh, and then turned to stare at the wall. "I snuck in a datapad to check some of the news reports. Read a few of the more unflattering ones."
Tali glared. "They're idiots."
"I know." Shepard continued to stare at the wall. "I'm not working with Cerberus anymore. And I wish they'd stop dragging Mindoir into everything. But it's not that. It's that—" She shook her head, then went quiet.
"It means they're ignoring the real reason you destroyed the relay."
"Which means that those 300,000 batarians died for nothing. I might have saved the five people on the tracks, but since they won't move, another trolley will just come along and cut them down anyways. The Council won't even admit the Reapers exist, and Hackett outright admitted to me that the Alliance is nowhere near ready for an invasion. Nobody is."
"It's a good thing you're around, Shepard. You already killed two of them." Tali hesitated a moment. "Well, one and a half."
Shepard should have laughed, or at least cracked a smile, but she didn't. "I appreciate your faith in me, Tali. But—I need you to go back to the flotilla. Do anything you can to get your people ready for the Reapers. See if you can get the admiralty board to listen. Even if we're all doomed, we might as well make them work for it."
"That's a pretty tall order. But I'll do my best."
"I know you will. Good head on your shoulders." Once again, she slipped into silence.
"Are you okay, Shepard?"
"Why don't you ask that to the people who lived on Aratoht?" she asked, slowly turning to look Tali directly in the eyes. There was no doubt about it now. She was in one of her moods—one of those restless, in-between ones where she straddled a thin line between despair and irascibility. "It would've been easier if I'd joined them.")
Tali wrings her hands together, struggling to push back the memories of a desperate vidcall that Liara sent her from the Mars Archives a few months after the Normandy SR-2 had been turned into the Alliance and Tali had returned to the flotilla—Tali, it's about Shepard, she—
Not an accident. Not an assassination attempt.
It was self-inflicted.
"None of us knew." Tali somehow manages to keep her voice calm. "We weren't allowed to communicate with her. Even afterward."
That wasn't completely true, either. When Shepard had turned herself into the Alliance as a convenient scapegoat for avoiding open war with the Batarian Hegemony, she'd been put under constant surveillance. Tali had attempted to send a few messages, but outside communication was blocked. But through some glitch or another in the system, Shepard's messages always got through to her.
It wasn't easy to forget that Shepard was, above all, a special forces soldier. If she decided that someone was a problem and that the only possible solution was to remove them, she would end their life, without hesitation.
But sitting in a room with nothing to do other than listen to her own churning thoughts did funny things to her head. Until Shepard came to the conclusion that she was a problem that needed to be removed.
But not before sending one last message to her closest friends: I'm sorry. Don't blame yourselves. Love, Shepard.
Maybe she hadn't been expecting anyone to get her message until it was too late. Maybe she wasn't expecting anyone to get it at all. Or maybe she had, and it was one last, desperate plea for help.
One that hadn't gone unheard: the frantic message from the Migrant Fleet wasn't the only one that Admiral Anderson had received regarding Shepard's state.
She straightens herself again. "She wasn't even supposedto return to active duty. But then the Reapers showed up."
Javik was right: in the face of the annihilation of every sapient species in the galaxy, the fragile mental state of the one soldier in the Systems Alliance who knew how to kill Reapers didn't matter.
He doesn't flinch away from the subject. "It is fortunate for the rest of us that she did."
"Yes. It is." Tali finally finds the courage to bring up the subject. "Before the final push to the beam—you spoke with her." It wasn't a question. Although they hadn't been on the Normandy, Shepard hadn't broken with her habit of doing the rounds one last time.
"I did." Javik hesitates a moment, before silently offering Shepard's nameplate to her; she takes it, closing her three fingers around it. Although his expression doesn't change, somehow his relief is tangible.
She slides it into one of her envirosuit's many pockets, reminding herself to later ask Kaidan what to do with it. "Did you—were you able to tell how she felt?"
"She trusted you." Javik turns to look directly at her, his four eyes blinking in unison.
"Keelah, I hope so."
"She did. You are one of the few people that have seen the commander at her most vulnerable. Otherwise, I would honour her wishes and not share this with you." He rubs the fingers on his good hand together. "Her emotions have always been...difficult, but I was able to sense a deep turmoil. Her family was slaughtered when she was young. The first time she killed another was to protect them."
Tali wrings her hands. Shepard had never told her that.
"The commander had come to consider the crew of the Normandy as her new family. She did not wish to lose them—us."
Tali doesn't draw any attention to that last-second swap of words. "But what about her?"
"She was...resigned to her own fate. As the old human saying goes, 'it is better to burn out than to fade away.'" His voice grows quiet. "I should have been with her. It was where I belonged."
Tali's voice is soft. "You were in no condition to fight. None of us were."
None of them had come away from London unscathed. But of all of them, Tali is keenly aware of how much it had cost the Avatar of Vengeance to be taken away from the battleground of a war he had waited 50,000 years to finish.
"You are right, quar—Tali'Zorah. The battle was no longer mine to fight." He tries to fold his hands together, but the cast prevents him from bending his left elbow. "In my cycle, the races never came together, and there would have been no krogan to drag her away from the jaws of death. She would have been celebrated as the exemplar of victory, but..."
"Your people would have counted her as a casualty."
"Yes, they would have." Javik pauses. "I would have. And I would have been wrong."
Notes:
If you are ever feeling suicidal, please reach out for help.
I debated with myself for a while about whether I should remove that scene—especially since it was completely unplanned, and came as a surprise even to myself. However, I decided to keep it for the sake of the story.
Shepard's habit of quoting song lyrics (and her love of rock 'n' roll—which led to the Pink Floyd-inspired title) was another of those unplanned things that worked its way into my story. Although my version of Shepard is far from autobiographical, her tastes in music are pretty similar to my own.
Chapter 3: ...if we can make it to the morning, we can get things right
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
But up in the distance
Even in the dead of night
If we can make it to the morning
We can get things right
It's been a tough go lately
I hate choosing sides
What we do in the darkness
Will come to light
- Arkells, "Come to Light"
There had been a time when some part of Tali had held onto the hope that once the war had ended and the Reapers were gone, the nightmares would end and her sleep would return to some modicum of normalcy. Of course, that hope had long ago been shattered. If anything, the nightmares were even worse.
She doesn't bolt upright and scream, like people always seemed to do in the vids; instead, she awakens quietly, tucked safely into her cot, her arms wrapped tightly around the plush spider that somebody had snuck under her pillow months ago as a joke. Nobody on the Normandy could escape her odd sense of humour. Some might call it exasperating; Shepard herself preferred the term "idiosyncratic"—a word that isn't exactly easy to translate to Khelish, although Tali found that "crazy bosh'tet" usually gets the meaning across. Whatever it's called, Tali had found herself the brunt of it more than once, finding googly eyes stuck on her visor when she awoke, or multiple printed copies of a Fleet and Flotilla fanfic with most of the names search-and-replaced scattered in well-frequented areas of the ship.
She hadn't been the only one. For a while, it'd been nearly impossible to navigate certain sections of the Citadel Wards without hearing the Commander's glowing endorsement that "this is my favourite store on the Citadel!"—something a bit difficult to take at face value when every shop in the building was spouting the exact same line.
She tosses and turns for a bit, trying to keep her mind from sneaking back to her dream, one of those recurring ones where Admiral Gerrel hadn't stood down—streaks of fire against the bruised sky as the Rayya shattered apart and cascaded towards the horizon, except it was actually the Normandy plunging into Alchera's atmosphere and exploding as she watched from an escape pod, and the screams of the crew were the screams of her team on Haestrom and a synthesized voice asking if this unit had a soul, and then—and then she was falling off a cliff, careening towards the sharp rocks below—
It's hard to keep herself from thinking about all the little anxieties and what-ifs that had congealed themselves firmly into the dark recesses of her mind, only to burrow to her conscious mind when she least expects it; like her memories of London, they flit through her head too quickly to grasp onto. She props herself up on one elbow, waiting for the familiar rush of dizziness. It doesn't come, so she gets to her feet and makes her way to the engine room. She settles down on the floor, legs sprawled out in front of her as she tries to match her breathing to the quiet little hum of the Tantalus core.
Maybe it helps. She's not sure.
Finally, she straggles back to her feet and looks over the control panels. Makes a few small adjustments to compensate for the increased power draw of the newly-repaired Thanix cannon and kinetic emitters, but it's almost automatic at this point and can't occupy her mind for very long.
Since she knows she won't be getting back to sleep anytime soon, she digs out a datapad and sits on the edge of her cot to read some of the messages that'd filtered through to her inbox—all high-priority—once the Normandy had reached one of the new comm buoys. After a few minutes, she gives up trying to piece together a coherent reply to Admiral Raan and checks the Normandy's chat system to see if anyone else is up. Except for EDI, all the names are greyed out, including the one at the very bottom of the list:
JShepard - Last online: 87 days ago
Eighty-seven days—Earth days, not galactic days. The Normandy was a human ship, so it ran on human time. Shepard had always done her best to accommodate for the different sleep patterns of her non-human crew, just the same as she always tried to speak to them in their own languages. Tali hadn't minded the duty rosters—she was a quarian, and had never really lived with the luxury of an actual day-night cycle—but there had been times when she wished Shepard would just stick to the translators.
Thinking about Shepard isn't really helping, but for just a brief moment, she feels something: Something other than the bitter taste of helplessness that had become so familiar to her ("we...left her behind?") or the numbness that had slowly begun to creep in once the initial shock of grief had passed, not at all helped by the lethargy that came from a reduced caloric intake.
If for only a brief moment, the thin skein of hope that had stretched out between her and Kaidan when the geth had announced Shepard's survival returns, and it's enough to make her put away her omni-tool and get back up. She begins to head back to the engine room—but then hesitates a few moments, resting her weight against the walls. And when she begins to move again, this time she heads out of Engineering and towards the elevator.
(It's almost like old times; heading to the elevator and up to the crew deck, rounding the corner to the mess hall. Not just for Tali herself, but for everyone aboard the Normandy whenever they were kept awake by their nightmares or their fears or the anxieties about their future—if there even was a future, because as much as everyone threw their hopes into the Crucible—
—they just didn't know—
And as the Reapers took world after world, the sleepless nights grew longer, and she found herself on the crew deck more often. Joker, when he was the one who couldn't sleep, liked to refer to it as IA—Insomniacs Anonymous.
The first time she'd headed up to the crew deck after-hours was just a few nights after her people had reclaimed their homeworld and she'd returned to her place on the Normandy. She'd woken up from a nightmare—the Migrant Fleet falling, her team on Haestrom falling, herself falling—and couldn't bring herself to stay in her cot. She got up, headed to the elevator—not really thinking, almost as though movement alone could purge the emotions from her. The elevator was just as painfully slow as ever, and by the time it finally reached the crew deck she'd mostly calmed down, mostly convinced herself that she was being silly.
She didn't head back down right away, though. She paused a moment, thought about heading to the lounge for a drink—remained undecided and instead lingered by the memorial wall, reading the names over and over, until she finally realized someone else was standing beside her. Tali didn't even need to look to see who it was; only one person currently on the Normandy's crew could appear next to her without a sound. But she looked anyways.
Shepard stood next to her, arms clasped loosely behind her back, quietly looking over the names through a pair of reading glasses. She took a slow breath before speaking in Khelish. "Tali'Zorah. How are you doing?"
"Hey, Shepard. I didn't realize you were up."
"I had to work on some—" She paused a moment, motioning to the datapad tucked under one arm. Despite her best attempts to improve it, her version of Khelish remained clumsy and inelegant, full of mispronunciations and awkward pauses. She struggled for a moment to find the right word before she gave up and slipped back into English. "—paperwork."
"My people call it 'tsakin,' although it more accurately translates to 'tedious job.'" Tali looked over the names on the wall again. "I didn't realize about Mordin and Thane. I'm so sorry."
"I'm the one who should be sorry. I meant to tell you earlier." Shepard didn't fidget; she just shifted her weight to her other leg. "But it slipped my mind."
Tali twisted her fingers together. "How did they...?"
"Mordin died curing the genophage on Tuchanka. Thane died defending the salarian councilor when Cerberus attacked the Citadel. Both of them were heroes. I'll get you the mission reports later, if you'd like." Shepard reached for another object tucked under her arm. "Here. I thought you should be the one to put this up."
"Thank you." Tali's voice grew soft as she placed Legion's nameplate on the wall. "Does—it ever get any easier?"
Shepard paused for a long moment. "'Come on," she finally said. Not even checking to see if Tali was following, she rounded the corner to the mess hall. It was surprisingly empty, with nary a sign of Alliance or non-Alliance crew.
"Where is everyone?" Tali asked.
Shepard once again spoke in her awkward Khelish. "I guess I forgot to tell you. I sent everybody else—" She paused a moment to settle herself down onto one of the chairs and take a sip from an oversized mug. "Off-duty. I have a meeting with Councilor Tevos in the morning, so I told them all to get off the Normandy until then. And anybody who gets into trouble is on latrine-duty."
"Do you really think that's such a good idea, Shepard? To stay here by yourself?" Tali made a point to say this in English, hoping that somehow she'd get the hint.
"But I'm not alone. You're here." She said this in Khelish, the stubborn bosh'tet. Thankfully, she switched back to English immediately afterwards. "You know, I once read that there isn't really a quarian word for 'shore leave.' It must be a bit of a strange concept for your people."
"On the flotilla, we'd rotate people off active duty." Tali twisted her fingers together. "But we didn't have shores. Until now."
"Guess it'll take a while for your people to get used to everything." Her voice was soft. "You go on ahead, Tali. No reason for both of us to be stuck here."
Tali looked directly at her. "I think I'll stay."
She braced herself for Shepard to get stubborn and try to pull rank, but she didn't. Instead, her short human fingers tapped in rhythm against the table—tap-tap-taptap. "Okay. Afraid I won't be very good company right now, but—go take a look under the cupboard."
Tali grumbled a bit—surely Shepard could do it herself—but complied. What she found quickly made her stop complaining. "Oh, keelah. More dextro chocolate." Even pre-sterilized and vacuum-sealed. " Thank you."
Shepard took another sip from her mug as Tali sank down into the chair across from her. "Asked around on the Citadel earlier. Not exactly standard Alliance fare, but better than trying to explain to Admiral Hackett that my dextro crew staged a mutiny over the food." Her voice was quiet and serious, and it might've been almost possible to take her seriously if not for her mouth, quirked in a half-smile. "That would be an embarrassing chapter in my autobiography."
Tali would have laughed if she wasn't too busy stuffing chocolate through her filter. Shepard hunched over her datapad, forehead wrinkled and eyes squinted behind her glasses.
"When did you—" Tali motioned vaguely at Shepard's glasses.
Shepard grimaced. "Not long ago. A reluctant concession to Dr. Chakwas. Can't exactly figure out how the hell a set of artificial eyes can get strained, but..." She dug into her pocket for her earphones, put them in, and picked out some music on her omni-tool. "S'pose I'm starting to get an idea why the Reapers are so damn successful."
"...why?" Tali finally ventured.
" They don't have to do any paperwork. Or interviews with reporters. Or meetings with politicians. Tsakin." She grumbled a bit, put the datapad and glasses aside, and wrapped her hands around the mug as she drifted off into her music.
Tali linked up her suit's auditory feed—braced herself in case she was listening to one of those horrible noisy songs that made her wonder if all humans were partially deaf. Thankfully, she wasn't. Tali recognized it right away. "Dark Side of the Moon?" she asked, although she didn't expect an answer.
Shepard didn't respond, of course. Although she may have been physically sitting in the chair across from her, she was far away, in some place of her own. Tali didn't even pretend she could understand what was going on inside the commander's head sometimes—she wasn't even sure that Shepard herself entirely understood. Her behaviour was often incomprehensible, her moods inscrutable, and her lapses into silence almost deafening.
It was a rare thing to see Commander Shepard at peace.
Some people listened to music; Shepard breathed it, let it run through her veins, seep into her very being. Draped backwards over the chair with her eyes closed, it was easy enough to think she had fallen asleep—but only if they didn't notice her fingers tapping in rhythm against her thigh, or her lips moving almost imperceptibly along to the words in the songs. Because Shepard never actually sang along to her music—and everybody had learned better than to ask why, for no amount of begging, bribing, or blackmailing would budge her from her usual vague non-answers, when she even chose to answer at all.
The two of them sat together—Tali tinkering with her drone, Shepard humming to herself as she took slow sips from her mug. Both of them pretending, if only for a short time, that they could forget everything that was wrong in the galaxy.
"You really like this album," Tali said once the music ended. "Is it your favourite?"
"'And everything that's under the sun is in tune—but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.' I like that line." Shepard's voice was soft, and some part of Tali wondered if her head had exploded with dark forebodings when the Prothean beacon had carved its message into her brain cells. But she didn't ask. "Probably not the easiest one to listen to, but—I keep coming back to it anyways. Two-hundredth anniversary remaster, so I'm not the only one. Of course, the real way to listen to rock 'n' roll is on an analog radio just barely picking up a signal from a pirate station on the opposite side of the continent."
"On Mindoir?" Tali asked, trying not to wring her hands.
Shepard grimaced. "Earth. Foster care. A thoroughly unpleasant time for everybody involved. Has to be at night, though. Something to do with the way that radio waves bounce around the atmosphere."
"Ionosphere." The correction slipped out before Tali could stop herself.
"Yeah. The ionosphere. 'Fraid I'm not a genius like you, Tali. My head's too full of stardust and sniper rifles." Shepard reached up to run a hand across the stubble on her scalp, then gave a small smile. "Don't know if Dark Side of the Moon is my favourite album overall, but it's probably my favourite Green Day album."
Tali gave a dramatic sigh and let her head fall forward onto the table with a dull clunk. "Didn't you also once say that it was your favourite Metallica album?"
"No, that's Wheatfield Soul," Shepard said without a shred of irony in her voice. She drained the last of her mug and put it aside. "And as for your earlier question...no, it doesn't get any easier."
She'd been afraid of that.
"Anyways," Shepard continued, "there's only two reasons I can think of for you to be up here in the middle of your sleep shift, and you're neither running for the clean room or sneaking off to the main battery."
Tali lifted her head to glare.
"All right. One reason, then." Resting her arms on the table, Shepard looked right at her. "Is everything okay?"
"I—" Tali twisted her fingers together, almost feeling like a naive child still on her Pilgrimage. But then she looked up at Shepard, into those steady green eyes. "I had a nightmare."
"Thought it was something like that. Nobody on this ship's been sleeping well as of late." Shepard leaned forward a bit. "I don't know if I can help, but I can lend an ear if you need it."
Although Shepard may have been one of the only people she could tell about her dream, it didn't make it easy: watching the Migrant Fleet fall, her team at Haestrom fall, herself fall. Shepard listened, reached over to rest a five-fingered hand atop her own, and gave it a reassuring squeeze when Tali's voice grew rough and she had to stop and let her suit's recycling systems reabsorb the tears she hadn't noticed were running down her cheeks.
Finally, Shepard got to her feet and motioned for Tali to follow her around the corner and into the lounge. "I know," she said as she rounded the bar. "A bar is definitely not Alliance standard. But everyone's pitching in to keep it stocked. Anything in particular you want?"
"Just—just as long as it's sterilized." Tali took a shaky breath and flopped down onto the sofa.
"Let me see what I can do." She looked over the selection of bottles, then poured some drinks—ginger ale for herself, filtered turian wine for Tali—and brought them over. "You okay, Tali?"
"Yes. No—" Tali took a shaky breath and flopped onto the sofa before accepting the offered drink. "Damn it, I'm sorry. It's stupid , I know. You've had enough troubles without me crying on your shoulder."
Shepard sat down next to Tali, putting her ginger ale down on the table. "You'd do the same thing. One of these days I'll be the one crying on your shoulder, and then you can return the favour." Never mind that Shepard never cried. "But right now, you're the one who needs a friend."
Tali paused a moment as she used an induction port to take a sip of wine. "I—don't know, Shepard. I just keep thinking of everyone I've lost. Of them being gone, while..." She trailed off.
"While you're still here." Shepard sat down next to her, putting her ginger ale down on the table. "There's a name for it. Survivor's guilt."
"You said that it never gets any easier."
"Maybe that wasn't entirely accurate." Shepard tapped her fingers against the armrest. "Shit, Tali, I don't know if there's any good answer for this kind of thing. It's not like you just 'get over' something like Haestrom after a few therapy sessions."
"Or Akuze," Tali said softly. "But how do you...live with it?"
"I'm probably not the best person to be giving advice on this." Shepard took a long breath, rubbing one thumb over her wrist. "The pain doesn't ever really go away. And sometimes it's pretty damn hard. But you just have to...take it day by day. Do what you can to cope with it. Eventually come to accept that what happened wasn't your fault. Sometimes even manage to convince yourself that you're okay. Or something close to okay."
She paused a long moment, then slowly got to her feet, crossing the room to open the viewport—a bit strange for her, because she was usually the first one to close it. The massive arms of the Wards stretched out before them, reaching forth to grasp the swirling purple haze of the Serpent Nebula.
Finally, she returned to her seat next to Tali, reaching over to pick up her glass of ginger ale. "I can't really tell you how Tali should deal with it, because I'm not Tali. But there is one thing I can tell you..."
She slung an arm around Tali's shoulder and squeezed her into a clumsy, one-armed hug, all the while trying not to spill her drink. "...you're far from alone in this. There's lots of people on this ship that care about you, Tali. Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it." She took a small sip of ginger ale. "And as a wise man once said, 'Might as well go for a soda—nobody drowns, and nobody dies.'"
"Or some turian wine." Tali couldn't help but laugh. "Quoting song lyrics again, Shepard?"
"What can I say? I'm just an incorrigible bosh'tet." Shepard grinned as she turned towards Tali. "Doesn't make it any less true, though. Anyways, you up for a game of Skyllian-Five?")
She had originally intended to go to the crew deck—head to the lounge, perhaps. Ancestors know she could do with a drink right about now, and she might still be able to scrounge up some turian brandy if Garrus hadn't gotten to it first.
But instead, she finds herself on Deck 1, standing in front of the door to the captain's cabin, facing a handwritten sign taped to the door:
ATTENTION CLONES
ATTACK HAMSTER ON DUTY
She's not intruding, she tries to tell herself as she enters the captain's cabin—Shepard's cabin, because Kaidan had taken to sleeping on a cot in the starboard observation deck. Shepard had always kept an open-door policy. And Tali had been in the cabin by herself plenty of times before—before—
Some selfish part of her is glad she doesn't have to go through another memorial service. The first one—after the first Normandy had gone down—was hard enough: a closed casket, a handful of Alliance officials, and the last few shreds of the Normandy's crew. A somber affair. Shepard would've hated it.
She's not intruding, not coming up here to mope, not feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she's coming up to check on Shepard's pets—no, just Shepard's space hamster, who had gone through a series of names before his owner settled on the rather-unimaginative 'Space Hamster.' The fish had died a long time ago.
It's not like she hasn't been up here every day since she'd been released from the Normandy's clean room; somebody had to make sure that Space Hamster was being fed. And although it would've been easy enough to take the cage down to Engineering...
Maybe she shouldn't be so harsh on Kaidan for doing the rounds.
As she passes through the doorway and into the quiet sanctuary of the captain's cabin, a voice greets her:
"Good to meet you! I'm Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy."
Tali glares at the holographic figure as it flickers to life. Its programmer had taken a few liberties with its appearance, because the VI is nearly as tall as her and has curves where the real Shepard had none. Although she has no idea just where Shepard managed to track down a bootleg VI of herself, it'd almost seemed funny at the time. But these days, it's yet another reminder of another time—Tali doesn't dare call it a better one, because it was far from that.
"Extranet says you're Error: No connection available for VI model 1.7 AGB, Commander Shepard. Take care of yourself out there, Error: No connecti—" It freezes for a moment, its odd blank eyes frozen in an unseeing stare, stutters, and then finally crashes. Tali suppresses a shiver as she makes a mental note to figure out just how it keeps reactivating itself. At least the husk head on Shepard's desk is gone.
The room is painfully quiet; the only sounds that Tali can make out is the faint thrum of the Normandy's engines reverberating through the ventilation system and the quiet hiss of her own CO2 scrubber.
It doesn't seem right.
She scoops Space Hamster out of his cage, holding him in her cupped hands. It's a calculated risk—those teeth are sharper than they look, and one well-placed nip would be enough to slice through the thinner sections of her gloves—but right now, she needs the comfort of another living being. Space Hamster doesn't protest as she sits on the chair, absently scritching the top of his head.
"Hey," she says softly, then tries not to laugh at herself—although it's probably less silly than talking to Chatika. "I might have to cut back on your feed a bit. You're getting fat."
Space Hamster squeaks.
"Is that a 'no', then? I guess I should be glad that at least one of us around here isn't starving." Tali shakes her head, and briefly glances around the cabin.
The viewing portal in the ceiling above the bed, staring out into the cruel, infinite expanse of space; because only Cerberus would think it was a good idea to put a giant window over the bed of someone who'd been spaced, and only Shepard would be stubborn enough to sleep under it anyway, or at least try.
(She found Shepard fast asleep—in her own cot. Shaking her head, Tali crouched down and nudged her shoulder.
"Hmm?" Shepard stirred, then rolled over to meet Tali's eyes. " Shit. I didn't—I just sat down for a few minutes—"
"Another bad night?" Tali asked softly.
Shepard hesitated a few moments, then slowly nodded.)
The fishtank, still missing its glass; just after Thessia had fallen to the Reapers, EDI had reported several shorted electrical components on the top deck, but what Tali had found alongside that was a slightly dazed Shepard standing in the middle of a flooded cabin, her hand bleeding from the glass shards embedded in it.
("Shepard? What—keelah, what happened here? Are you okay?" Careful to avoid the broken glass and dead fish littering the floor, Tali took a step towards her. "Did you—why did you punch your fishtank?"
Shepard turned towards Tali, eyes holding a strange, haunted look. She lifted her hand to stare at the blood trickling down her arm. When she spoke, her voice was oddly quiet. "My fish died.")
The holoframe sitting on her desk, displaying the group photo taken during that big party; Shepard sat in the middle of the sofa, arms wrapped around herself protectively, jaws locked in a wistful-looking smile.
(Tali awoke with the worst hangover ever.
"I. Am going. To die," she moaned, burying her head into her arms.
"Belay that, Admiral." Shepard looked down at her, arms crossed. "We've still got a galaxy to save. Also...omni-tattoo?"
"Wait, did I get an omni-tattoo? I don't remember—" An explosion suddenly ripped through the apartment, making them both jump. Tali summoned her drone; Shepard reached for a pistol that wasn't there. "What was that?" she yelped, although it was hard to hear herself over all the yelling and blaring alarms.
"I think," Shepard said dryly, "that was the coffeemaker.")
The guitar case sitting in the corner of the room; the morning following the party, Shepard had arrived late to the docking bay with it slung over her shoulder, joking that if she was finally putting some effort into trying to learn an instrument, a guitar was just a bit easier to sneak onto the Normandy than the grand piano from her apartment.
(Sitting on a crate in the lower bowels of Engineering, guitar propped on one knee, Shepard simply nodded at Tali, then hummed quietly to herself as she strummed at her guitar.
"Hey, Shepard," Tali said as she crouched down next to another crate to rummage through its contents. "I have a question."
She didn't even look up. "If it's about whether I can play a specific song, the answer is 'probably not, but ask again later.' If it's about whether I can play 'Don't Fear the Reaper,' the answer is 'no, and don't ask again.' For other inquiries, please leave a message after the beep. Beep."
Tali laughed. "No, it's...did you always want to be a—what do you humans call it again? A rock star?"
"An architect, actually," was her response.)
Finally, she looks up at Shepard's collection of model ships hanging on the wall, remembers the long hours she'd spent gluing them back together—of Engineer Adams sending the shattered fragments through the clean room's passbox while Tali was still recovering, knowing that she needed to do something, to fix something, to make up for the things she couldn't fix.
But it was just another painful reminder of another time, one where she and Shepard would sprawl out across the cabin's sofa and carefully assemble them from the kits; Shepard might've been able to strip, clean, and re-assemble her sniper rifle in record time, but she was absolutely hopeless at putting together a model ship.
Although she's not sure who put the model ships back in place afterward, they had taken care to put them back in the same positions they were before, each of them telling their own little story: the Normandy SR-1 preparing to deliver the killing shot to Sovereign before it reaches the Citadel; Alliance and turian ships flanking the Destiny Ascension, a Kodiak shuttle departing from the SR-2, an Athabasca freighter making some anonymous delivery to the Shadow Broker.
Quarian and geth ships facing off with each other.
The sound of her own heartbeat seeming to fill the room, she slowly gets to her feet. One hand is still tightly clasped around Space Hamster as she opens the case and rearranges the models so that they're all surrounding the quarian liveship, protecting it from Sovereign.
"That's better," she whispers to nobody in particular, and her voice seems to echo against the walls. Holding back a yawn, she sinks back down into the chair.
"Your owner will be glad to see you again," she says to Space Hamster. He blinks up at her, and Tali briefly wonders if his coat is really as silky as it looks. There had been no pets on the flotilla—too much of a luxury in a society clinging to the edges of survival, too much of a risk to their fragile health—but maybe on Rannoch...
...if she ever returned to Rannoch...
"Do you even remember her? She could be so...so..." Space Hamster yawns widely and stretches out in her hand, and Tali can't help but laugh a bit. "...moody. Stubborn. Frustrating. Keelah, she could be such a bosh'tet sometimes."
She turns to the holoframe again; it had changed to another picture, this time of two humans that Tali had never seen before. With a jolt, she realizes that it's a picture of Shepard's parents. It must have been taken before Shepard was born, because she was nowhere to be seen. And although Shepard took more after her mother—small and slim and wiry—it was from her father that she got her bright green eyes.
They look so happy.
The Reapers had been defeated. The Normandy was on her way back to Sol. And, beyond all hope, her best friend had survived.
She should be happy.
"I'm just being silly," Tali says, more to herself than to Space Hamster, who had curled up in her palms to fall asleep.
She gets back to her feet and gently deposits Space Hamster into the cage. Weariness begins to creep in once again, and her eyes drift closed as she allows herself to lean her weight against the wall. So absorbed in her thoughts of how painfully silent the room is, she barely registers the faint hiss of the door opening before the room suddenly swells with music.
The Fleet and Flotilla soundtrack.
"I didn't touch anything!" she yelps, nearly bumping her head against the shelf as she whirls around to see the familiar figure standing there. It's still strange to see him without his visor or the silver-and-blue armour, which had been exchanged for civilian clothes weeks ago when its weight finally became too great a burden for his emaciated frame. And although he doesn't have the same gaunt, sunken look of the others, his plates are still pale and brittle-looking.
He looks back at her, his mandibles flicking back and forth in a manner that Tali had come to recognize as a look of embarrassment.
"Garrus! What are you doing here?" She almost bounds over to him, and they embrace, Garrus leaning over to press his forehead against the smooth surface of her visor, Tali reaching up to place a gloved hand against his scarred cheek.
"I could ask you the same thing." He inhales sharply as he shifts his weight off his injured leg and then glances over at the stereo system. "Wait, is that—"
"I don't know what happened." Tali groans. "It just started playing when—unless—" She pulls away, strides over to the stereo on the bedside table, and scans it with her omni-tool. "Of course."
Favouring his right leg, Garrus limps over to stand next to her. "I think we both have a pretty good idea who's idea this was."
"Somebody thought it'd be funny to program the stereo to play it when we're in the room together. When we get back to Earth, I'm going to—" Her shoulders shaking with something between frustration and laughter, Tali presses one hand against her visor. "Keelah. I was just thinking of how annoying she could be. And I thought she hated modern music."
There's a wry note in Garrus's tone. "Not enough to be able to resist pulling one last prank on us."
"Right." She exhales slowly. "But really, what are you doing up here?"
Garrus reaches over and turns off the stereo before either of them can get more embarrassed. "I...uh, came up to feed Shepard's hamster."
"In the middle of your sleep shift?"
"Well, with the news, and all the geth running around earlier helping with repairs, and then having to re-calibrate the Thanix, it—just slipped my mind." He hesitates for a moment. "So...yeah."
Tali crosses her arms. "Well, you don't have to. Because I already fed him. As I've been doing every day. I just came up to...check that he was okay. Because of the—change of routine."
Both of them go silent. They look at each other, then look over at Space Hamster sleeping in his cage, incredibly fat and content. Finally, Garrus speaks. "You know, I thought it was strange he wasn't eating very much."
"You think that—" Tali exhales, and then shakes her head. "I doubt we were the only ones, either."
"Probably not Javik, though. He'd go"—Garrus does a brief, terrible imitation of the Prothean—"'in my cycle, we did not keep adorable, furry creatures as companions. Instead, they were snacks.' I'm surprised he didn't try, considering the starvation rations most of us have been on."
"Or maybe instead of eating them, the Protheans trained them as warbeasts." She tilts her head to one side. "That could have been our backup plan. Release a horde of vicious hamsters against the Reapers."
"Nuzzle them to death. And if there's any remaining after that, send in Shepard to quote song lyrics at them until they either shut down or run away." Garrus turns to the model ships, and takes a moment to inspect the turian cruiser. "It wasn't you turning on the Shepard VI, was it?"
"Keelah." Tali shudders. "No."
"Good. Damn thing creeps me out. Still, it's been so..." He shakes his head. "Quiet."
"I miss her," Tali says softly. "Do you think she'll be okay?"
Garrus hesitates for a long moment as he continues to examines the model ships. When he finally speaks, the low rumble of his subharmonics filters through her suit's auditory processors. "I think we both know she was never okay in the first place."
Neither of them speak for a while. From the edge of her vision, Tali can see the two of them mirrored against the back of the shattered fishtank, their reflected image broken and distorted.
"Do you—" Tali says, and at the same time that Garrus says "I was thinking—"
"Go on," he says.
"No, you go ahead." Tali crosses her arms and gives him a look. No, not just that; the look.
He suddenly remembers that it's probably not a good idea to get on her bad side. "I was thinking—ah—" His mandibles flick again. "I doubt either of us are going to get back to sleep tonight. So—"
"Just spit it out, Garrus."
Although she's still not an expert, Tali had gotten better at reading turian facial expressions, and she's pretty sure that the look on his face is almost sheepish. On the other hand, her translator utterly fails to catch the first part of his sentence. "...Fleet and Flotilla?"
"As I recall," Tali says once she finally gets the gist of what he's trying to ask her, "the last time we tried to watch it, you and Shepard would not shut up."
"That was mostly Shepard," Garrus says, and then does an impression of her that somehow manages to be worse than his attempt at Javik. "'Guess you always had a thing for turian men, huh?'"
"Keelah." With a groan, Tali presses a hand to her visor. "She sounds nothing like that. And you kept griping about being pulled away from your calibrations." Not to mention the argument—sorry, friendly debate—he and Shepard got into about their preferred sniper rifles.
And then a fight over the remote control that tested Garrus's reach and Tali's flexibility, at least until Shepard jumped to her feet, muttered something about forgetting to go meet Kaidan for dinner, and rushed out of the apartment.
And then using one of the many bedrooms in the apartment to test their reach and flexibility in a far different matter—
"It wasn't that bad," he protests, and it takes her a moment to realize he's not referring to her flexibility. "Anyways, just for you, I'll abstain from the witty commentary."
"Hmm," Tali says with a tilt of her head.
"And," he says, "I still have some dextro chocolate."
"Now you're just being mean, Vakarian." She leans closer to him, her voice lowering to a teasing whisper. "But don't forget, I'm still using you for your body."
They never do get around to watching Fleet and Flotilla. It's still Tali's favourite vid, but right now the forbidden love between Shalei and Bellicus just doesn't seem to hold her interest in the same way that it used to. Not now that she has her very own turian bad-boy.
With a bit of embellishment, it could almost be the plot for a sequel: A young woman—who just coincidentally happens to be the daughter of a quarian admiral—runs into trouble on her Pilgrimage, gets rescued from certain death by a dashing turian C-Sec officer, fall in love, and with the guidance of an unconventional human soldier, go off to save the galaxy. Multiple times.
There had been a time when she had despised him; so confident, so arrogant, so sure of himself. But on the mission against the Collectors, still in shock about the loss of her team on Haestrom, dealing with a ship full of Cerberus personnel, and nobody quite sure if her old commander was still herself, it'd been good to see a few old faces. Even if one of those faces was far uglier than before.
Shepard had been right about one thing: she did have a thing for turian men. Especially ones with scars.
"Just narrowly avoided getting a matching set in London," Garrus says. His mandibles widen to a cocky grin—because despite everything they'd been through, some things never changed—and he turns to Tali, sitting next to him on the cot in the main battery. "Though somehow I doubt you'd really mind."
He hands her a vacuum-sealed square of dextro chocolate, one of the last two he had been saving for some special occasion. Finding out their best friend was alive probably counted.
Despite—well, everything, Tali allows herself a few brief moments to indulge as she puts it through her filter. Even before supply chains began to dry up, dextro chocolate was a luxury few could afford; sterilized dextro chocolate even moreso. It was practically unheard of on the flotilla. Tali herself had the chance to try it on her Pilgrimage, and it'd been one of the things she missed most when she'd returned to her people.
"Let me guess," she eventually says, glancing over at him. "You tried to block a rocket with your face. Again."
"Mako flipped over on us." He starts to lift one talon to touch his unscarred mandible, but hesitates and lets it drop back down. "Then it exploded."
"Don't tell me—"
"And for once, it wasn't Shepard driving." He shakes his head. "Though knowing her, she'd just try to run over Harbinger. All the time I spent calibrating the weapons on that thing, and she decides it's easier to just ram into everything."
"Or drive straight up mountains. I went through so much anti-nausea medication back then."
"I wish Wrex used it. I had to clean up his vomit." He pauses a moment before he speaks again. "About London...you still don't remember it, do you?"
"No. Not really. It's still—" She hesitates. Still a nightmare, she almost says as she looks down at the motley patchwork of repairs to her suit, but the words lay dormant. "—coming back to me in bits in pieces," she finally says, unsure of whether she's trying to convince Garrus or convince herself.
Brief snatches of memory splinter and dance through her mind: the familiar kickback of the Eviscerator in her hands, the sharp rattle of gunfire reverberating in her ears, and a visor smudged with soot and dirt and blood that's not her own. It terrifies her: as much as she wants to—tries to— remember, those last few hours in London remain a black hole of memory with ragged edges at the event horizon.
"Things were...pretty hectic down there," Garrus says, an understatement if she ever heard one. "You and Kaidan were right under the Mako, but he was able to hold it up with his biotics. Just long enough to drag you both out from under it, before—"
He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
"We were lucky Cortez found another shuttle to get us out of there." Garrus takes a shaky breath. "For a while none of us were sure that you'd make it."
He hesitates a long moment. Tali reaches over to squeeze his hand. "It's all right, Garrus. We both made it."
"I know. Remind me to track down a bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy once we're on Earth. I owe Chakwas." He tries to laugh, but is unable to hide the slight keen in his voice. "The thought of losing both my best friends in the same battle? Spirits, it was hard."
"Well, somebody had to stick around to keep you from giving all the dextros a bad name." Tali tilts her head to one side. "You know, it's not just krogan women who find facial scars attractive."
"Ahh. Hmm. If you were a turian, I'd be complimenting your fringe, but..." It's almost fun to see him get embarrassed. "You know, I thought you said this was 'just a fling.' But that was before, ah, that night—"
"I am allowed to change my mind, you know." Leaning closer to him, she lets her hand rest on his leg. "Maybe I wouldn't mind becoming a one-turian kind of woman."
He shifts nervously. "I figured it'd take some time to figure out what we are. Even though I'm pretty sure we're already past the whole interspecies awkwardness thing."
"Just for the record...still totally worth it." Tali stretches upwards to press the surface of her visor against his forehead, before nuzzling her head into the hollow area of his neck. "Have you heard anything from your family?"
"No word yet, but Glyph found their names on one of the lists of survivors. They were some of the lucky ones. Seeing Palaven burn—" She can feel the warm rumble of his voice even through the layers of her suit. "It wasn't easy. How are your people holding up?"
"Shala'Raan sent me a message earlier. There's some things she wants to talk about once we get back to Sol. About the flee—about Rannoch—" Tali slips a hand into a pocket, her gloved fingers wrapping around her rock. At least her homeworld had been spared the worst of the Reapers. She would have a home to return to. Someday. "I'm really not sure what to call it anymore. I just hope the other admirals haven't gotten up to too much trouble without me around to keep them in line."
"Not much like the old days, is it? Burnt-out C-Sec officer and a quarian on her pilgrimage. We're actually respectable now." He gives a small laugh. "Though as a certain friend of ours once said, respect comes with a lot of sleepless nights. And something tells me there'll be even more of them ahead."
He gets to his feet and crosses the room. After a moment, Tali joins him.
Garrus sighs. "And the problem with sleepless nights is that you can't just shoot them."
"How did you—" She tries to steady her voice. Because sitting on the bench in front of them is a very familiar M-29 Incisor.
"The Lex Parsimoniae." He reaches over and touches it reverently with one talon. "Sometimes 'Lexie' for short."
"'Lex Parsimoniae,'" Tali repeats, trying not to mangle the pronunciation; it's not a language she recognizes. "And her pistol was 'Murphy.'" It wasn't limited to her weapons: her omni-tool had been named Lovelace. "I always wondered where she came up with these names. "
"I always meant to ask her, but—" He releases his breath slowly. "Doubt I'd get a straight answer out of her anyways. I don't even know what she saw in that damn rifle to begin with, but she liked to say it was one of the only good things the Illusive Man gave her."
"She won't be too happy if she finds out you've been keeping a weapon up here."
"I know. But at least it's unloaded. And I'm not pointing it at my fellow crew." He gives her a knowing glance.
"Right." Tali fidgets. With a commanding officer who put weapon safety as one of her top priorities, there'd been no way to wriggle out of punishment for that one. She traces one finger along the bench. "She gave it to you, didn't she?"
"Lost my own, if you can believe it. I loved that Black Widow." He shakes his head. "One shot, one kill."
"'But'"—Tali puts on her best impersonation of Shepard (which is still terrible)—"'not when the enemy's shielded. Disruptor ammo on the burst-fire will take down any barriers pretty damn quick. Besides, big guy, the Incisor's more my size.'"
It was a silly argument in any case. Shotguns were far superior.
"Didn't she pull a metal beam off of you in the Collector base? You'd think she could handle a little kickback from a gun." Garrus gives her an odd look. "Wait a minute—"
"I recorded your argument. Do you want to hear it?"
"No. I hate listening to recordings of myself. My voice never comes out right," he finally says, making his way back to the cot and falling heavily onto it with a low grumble of pain. "Still one of the best damned snipers I've ever seen."
"You mean sharpshooter." Another of Shepard's stubborn little phrasings. The word sniper connoted the image of the lone killer snuffing out lives with coldblooded efficiency, and even if there was some tiny particulate of truth to be found in the stereotype, she resented it anyways. "And even better than the King of the Bottle Shooters?"
Tali picks up the trophy of a broken bottle sitting on the bench. It's crudely-made—fabricated out of cheap-grade plastic and spray-painted gold. The letters are scratched out by hand on the base and a little difficult to read:
GALACTIC CHAMPION OF BOTTLE-SHOOTING 2186 2187
GARRUS VAKARIAN
"That thing was her idea." He gives a nervous little laugh. "And it...actually came to a draw. C-Sec showed up to kick us out after a few too many complaints about broken bottles raining down into the Presidium lake. Maybe when we get to Earth..." He trails off. Judging from the photo they had both seen earlier, it would be a long time before Shepard ever held the Lex Parsimoniae again. "We should have figured it'd take more than the unmitigated blast of an ancient superweapon to kill her again."
Tali settles herself down on the cot next to him. "Liara said—" The words catch in her throat for a moment (Liara slipping off without a word to anyone after that terrible memorial). "She said that Shepard's—" body? corpse? "—that she didn't look as bad as—the first time—"
It's hard to imagine worse than that charred scrap of humanity lying limp in Wrex's arms.
Her suit VI administers her a dose of antiemetics before she even realizes her stomach is lurching. The SSV Normandy SR-1, so sleek and shiny and new, none of the rough edges or strained engines of quarian vessels, and for a few bright months, her temporary home, limping towards Alchera's atmosphere, the flames sputtering out into the vacuum of space (Shepard, curled up in the snow, a handful of dogtags slung across one arm and a blackened N7 helmet tucked under the other)—
"Tali?" Garrus's voice is warm and rumbling, his hand on her shoulder steady and reassuring. "You okay?"
"I—" She has to remind herself to breathe. "No. No, I'm not okay."
Without a word, he pulls her into an embrace. No words exchanged, just a shared communion of caustic grief for everyone lost—the fallen crew of the Normandy, of their teams on Haestrom and Omega, of his mother and her father and of Kal'Reegar—something that never got any easier.
But she is far from alone in this. And just as the long nights faded into the day, the grief will pass. She will be okay.
Or something close to it.
Notes:
Between a ceaseless sense of perfectionism and my health taking yet another downwards turn, this chapter took far longer to write than I would've preferred.
Chapter 4: ...i fear tomorrow i'll be crying
Notes:
Warning: Graphic descriptions of injuries and medical procedures in this chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
- King Crimson, "Epitaph"
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Saturday, July 14, 2187, 94 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
It's the pain that drags her out of a nightmare racked with terror: screams and blood and ashes and broken worlds and spiraling out into the emptiness of outer space and two glowing columns, pulsing with a soft blue glow, inviting her.
She emerges into a world that's too much lights and sounds and scarlet ribbons of pain that tear through her mangled, broken shell of sinew and bone. She is painfully aware of each heartbeat thumping through her thin chest, a stubborn little muscle that refused to stop even when all the raw destructive energy of the Crucible coursed through it.
It'd taken almost month of round-the-clock care from over two dozen medical professionals (plus one ex-Cerberus operative) and all the bleeding-edge technology of a salarian medical ship to make sure that stubborn little muscle didn't quit on her, an interminably dizzying array of one procedure after the next: excising a portion of her skull before the fluids inside it could crush the delicate tissues of her brain, scraping away the charred clumps where her combat hardsuit had coalesced with her flesh, shattered bones knitted back together, a half-severed arm reattached, antibiotics and antivirals to ward off the infections sweeping through her ravaged body. And after that, even more procedures: dressings changed, burned skin and muscle and tendons debrided, medi-gel slathered over her raw wounds, grafts of new skin weave, failing cybernetics repaired or replaced.
They were injuries that no normal human would've survived. Luckily, Shepard wasn't normal.
She doesn't remember much of those first few precarious weeks where her life seemed to hang by an ever-fraying thread—of the long periods of drug-induced slumber shattered by brief moments of consciousness spurred on by an ever-increasing tolerance to the anesthetics. The Crucible had changed her. Left her body broken, and her mind broken. Events no longer engraved themselves into her memory, but instead left faint imprints in it; with enough repetition, some of them stuck. Most of them didn't. Some of them still don't.
But she still remembers some things. Vague impressions, mostly. The smell of medi-gel, sharp and astringent. The hum of the machinery working to keep her alive. The bone-deep chill that seemed to permeate her, despite the near-sweltering temperature of her room. Pain. Confusion. Fear. Particularly the fear.
Especially when she realized there could only be one reason that the crew of the Normandy—her crew—wasn't there with her after she'd been moved to the hospital in Vancouver.
Somewhere nearby, the medical VI chirps something—she thinks that it's supposed to be words, but the only thing that filters through to her pain-addled mind is an indistinct blur of vibrations scraping against her eardrum, just as the world glinting through the narrow gaps of her eyelids is a bewildering smear of colours and movement.
A terrible shiny-grey taste fills her mouth a moment before the steady drip-drip-drip of pain-killing drugs pours through the IV line and into her bloodstream. The raw edges of pain—aggravated synapses sending blue-white impulses through a scrambled nervous system—immediately begin to dampen into something a little more tolerable, something that allows her own muddled thoughts to find some purchase against the ravenous pain that would otherwise overwhelm her waking mind.
She dislikes the heavy, sluggish feeling the drugs give her. But she dislikes the pain even more, so she tolerates it.
The room around her gradually fades into focus, and the dimmed lights of her room don't hurt her eyes as much as before. There is a hard, smooth box pressed into the gnarled fingers of her left hand, the one not racked with the shakes. She knows that if she presses the button on it, the doc-tors—she knows that's not the right word for all of them, but it's an easy one to keep in the forefront of her consciousness—will come to her room to assist her, but she prefers to savour these early, unstructured moments in the day free from their ministrations.
Her mouth is dry. She runs her tongue along the lower groove of her teeth, and then decides to try out her voice before the whispers creeping into her mind grow too loud.
"Name is—" The still-healing skin grafts on her face stretch and hurt. Her throat aches from the stale air. She knows what she wants to say, but it's hard for her to dredge the words up from the grey murk of her mind. When the doc-tors speak to her, she can understand them. But in her own mind, the latticework of speech becomes unclear: series of phonemes strung together haphazardly, amorphous and without any inherent meaning. It takes considerable effort to unfurl the connections between her thoughts and the words required to convey them to others.
She can remember a time from Before when language came easily—sometimes too easily, the words and thoughts and all the associations between them gushing and roiling through the channels of her mind and crashing into her skull until she paradoxically ended up crumbling into silence.
There were many Befores for her: the Mindoir Raid; joining the Alliance; Akuze, N7, Eden Prime. Before Alchera. Before Aratoht.
Before the Crucible.
"—Shepard," she finally chokes out, and she can feel pride filling her—the same pride she felt so many years ago when she first put on the gleaming onyx armor emblazoned with the N7 insignia.
Because as hard as the Crucible had tried, it couldn't take away her name.
(In the end, it came down to just a deus ex machina: the god from the machine, the seemingly insoluble problem resolved by an unlikely occurrence. Except that there was no god, just a shitty little VI with its broken programming.
She tightened her grip on Murphy—only thing she had left, really, with the Lex Parsimoniae given a new holder and Lovelace shorted out. She held it with her left hand, because her right arm was shattered, hanging limply by her side. The Illusive Man, that backpfeifengesicht, had been able to take control of her with his Reaper implants—but she hadn't made it easy for him, and the result had been something akin to the unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The limb in dispute had ended up snapping like a twig.
Rest of her felt kind of shattered too, at this point. Heavy blood loss left her with an increasingly looming expiration date.
In the end, the fate of all sapient life in the Milky Way came down to a broken-down soldier with a blood-splattered M-5 Phalanx and a final grim spark of determination to see this damn thing through.
The paths are open, the hologram told her. But you have to choose.
"Why don't you fucking fade away," Shepard said between gritted teeth. She kept her finger on the pistol's trigger. Not that it'd help if one of those hulking black figures outside suddenly pirouetted around to fire upon the Crucible—for all the clever engineering put into the thing, it felt like a distressingly fragile little thing against the sheer might of the Reapers—but it made her feel a little better. She could feel the rat in her brain spin on its wheel, trying to work out something. The seed of an idea beginning to take root in her mind. "Your solution isn't working anymore. Call off the Reapers."
The hologram liquefied before her eyes, shedding its child-like cast to become a swirling, malevolent vortex of dark energy. Then it reformed itself into a simulacrum of none other than Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. Clever little trick it'd borrowed from its architects—or perhaps one programmed into it. None the less unsettling though, particularly when it continued to speak in that disquieting child-like voice.
No, the hologram said as it slipped into the form of Admiral Anderson. Although you have altered the variables, I cannot do that. I am still bound to these decisions, as you are.
"Bullshit," Shepard tried to say, although the end of the word came out in a bloodied choke. "But you're nothing more than a glorified paperclip maximizer, aren't you? Can't do anything other than what your programming tells you to do."
We did as we were expected. It morphed again, this time taking the form of Legion.
"No." Shepard's voice was failing, growing weaker as blood welled up in her throat. Instrumental convergence. Seemingly harmless goal: make sure organics and synthetics didn't kill each other. But no constraints to make sure that goal didn't become synonymous with 'just melt down everyone into DNA slushies and preserve them as Reapers.' "You didn't."
The hologram said nothing.
"And if you won't"—or perhaps can't was more likely—"call off the Reapers—" Then what? The rat in her brain spun faster and faster on its wheel, until it felt more like a train barreling down the tracks. Barreling off the tracks. "Then I will."
Without us to stop it, synthet—
"Shut it. Maybe you're r-right. Maybe stopping the Reapers will result in t-the destruction of—of all organics." She coughed, and blood splattered on the floor in front of her. "B-but maybe—it won't. And if—if it does, it'll be because of—of our own choices. N-not be-cause some s'posedly o-omnipotent AI deemed it. I'm ending this."
The Reapers were a problem that needed to be removed.
The hologram shifted again—briefly changing into Navigator Pressly, then Thane, then Mordin, then Jenkins—then it finally settled on a visage she was achingly familiar with: one with her own face.
Others will be destroyed as well, it said, and although its inflection didn't change, Shepard felt some faint trace of smugness in that little shit's voice. The Crucible will not discriminate. All synthetics will be targeted.
"No," Shepard said, as the cogs in her brain finally clicked into place. "They won't ."
She let Murphy slide from her grip and clatter to the floor. And turned left.
The hologram said nothing more, and Shepard's mind sought to fill the silence saturating the room—a silence that threatened to smother her—and like so many other times before, a song snagged at the edge of her memory. Shepard hummed a few notes, and then, almost in a whisper, began to sing along.
"Da-dum-da, dum-da-dum, dum-dum-da-dum-dum—poor ol' John-nie Raaay, sounded sad upon the rad-ee-oo..."
Each hesitant step brought her ever closer to the two glowing columns that would destroy her.
"...da-dum a million hearts in mono...made our mothers cry, sang along, who'd blame 'em..."
Her voice, such a tiny thing against the vast emptiness of the room, cracked for a moment. The pain in her chest and her arm came in great waves that didn't entirely register in her brain. Her steps faltered. But didn't stop. Her voice carried her along, one dragging step after another.
"...uhh, something, somethii-iing...dum-da-more than ever..."
—fuck, she didn't want to die—
But she had already cheated Death once. And although he was kind enough to wait until she had dealt with the Reapers, Death would soon enough take his due.
She just wished she wasn't alone.
"...toora-loora-toora-loo-rye-ayyyyy...."
So she sang. For every civilization that the Reapers had slaughtered in some futile attempt to bring an inessential equilibrium. For all the current civilizations who had come together in the ever-so-slim gamble to end the cycles once and for all. She sang for all the days still to come, for all the generations who thought they had no time left to start again. She even sang for the Reapers, who for all their arrogance could never realize that they were nothing more than a clumsy tool, an instrument of death in the hands of a VI following broken orders.
But mostly, she sang to give herself some fleeting comfort in her last moments. Because she knew that if she didn't sing, she would start to cry.
"...and we can sing just like our fath—"
Her voice was ripped from her throat in a silent cry; she didn't latch onto the glowing blue columns so much as they latched onto her. Her muscles seized with frozen fire. Pain—more than pain, but something that no language could truly describe—hit like a Phillips head into her brain, crawled across her every cell, tearing her apart piece by piece—
—the Milky Way unfurled before her, a perfect golden spiral, and with the Reapers blackening every part of it, a great multitude of black birds coming to pick the man's corpse apart, piece by piece, limb by limb—
—and she reached up and reached out to embrace it, felt it move across her skin, except that her skin was burning away from her body—
—the endless sour yellow note of the Reapers hammered into her brain, great impenetrable walls without time or space, bewildering power that her pathetic little human mind couldn't even begin to fathom, like looking into the sun after being trapped in a cave her entire life—
—no colours and no musics in this place, just a tuneless noise stretching thin across the stars, a silence so loud, she didn't belong here—
—spiral out, keep going—
—until she was one with the Reapers, the essence of every race that they had harvested seeping into her brain, the dying cries of countless civilizations, all stardust and billion-year-old carbon, their pasts and futures and wars never ending carving themselves into her brain cells, and it was too much for just one woman—
—the being that was named Shepard began to slip away from the body holding it, and so she filled her mind with a single thought: SELF-DESTRUCT.
At first it didn't seem like it would be enough: she had failed, and the cycle would continue. But then there was another presence with her, another voice joining with her own, a crescendo burning the darkness clean.
And the Reapers obeyed.
One by one, the machines exploded, just like all the tiny capillaries in her brain were exploding, and in one last gasp of self-preservation her body tried to let go of the columns but it couldn't, and her throat contracted in a soundless scream as her body began to fade away, as her nova heart began to burn out—
—until she found herself ripped away from the glowing columns and shattering into unconsciousness. But not from her own doing. Because although her optical implants had burnt out, the last frame that it had transmitted to her brain was that of an insectoid figure dragging her free from the columns.)
The sound of voices—not the whispers, but actual voices—outside her hospital room jolts Shepard back to awareness. Her head automatically cranes towards the doorway, her ears straining to scoop up any detail it could in a feeble attempt to decode the half-audible words.
"—sterlund News—" Shepard's mind fills with an unpleasant bile-green distaste that she doesn't quite understand "—Shepard—" They were talking about her "—andy's return today—"
There was another voice—another feminine one, but distinct from the first, and annoyed-sounding. "—not ready for attention from the damned media—"
The voices ebb and flow in and out of range, before fading away entirely. Shepard slowly exhales and settles herself back onto the pillow. The drip-drip-dripping of the painkillers had finally taken effect and all but dulled the worst of the pain, allowing her to lull into that comfortable twilight halfway between wakefulness and sleep.
She doesn't allow herself to drift completely to sleep, though. She doesn't want another nightmare.
After a while, she hears footsteps on the floor tiles. Turns her head towards the doorway again, even if all she can really see is a sliver of it at the edge of her peripheral vision. There's a waft of delicate fragrance and a blur of movement, and a figure enters her field of vision. Not one of the doc-tors, though. A black-and-white uniform. Pale skin. Dark hair. The only real spots of colour are two blue eyes and a smudge of pink lipstick.
Shepard tries to smile, but the tiny muscles in her face won't stretch the right way. She hopes that it comes across as a smile anyways. The delicate scent of the perfume carries with it warm memories from Before that cascade into her mind: an initial distrust stretching thin before giving way to a grudging but genuine respect, then an odd friendship. A red dress. A pair of blue shoes (although she doesn't quite understand why the word "suede" wriggles unbidden into her mind). Two tall glasses filled to the brim with wine—except that her glass was actually ginger ale, both of them pretending otherwise.
"Shepard," Miranda Lawson says, and Shepard immediately feels apprehensive—there's a ever-so-tiny hesitation in her voice, a near-microscopic tension in her motions. Little details that the deepest parts of her primitive lizard brain are unable to ignore—setting off alarm bells in her brain—something is wrong.
Not only that, but Miranda never came this early in the day. Shepard had gotten used to the Routines—the comings and goings of the different doc-tors as the hours stretched on, the sounds of their footsteps on the floor, of their colours and voices—she still had trouble with their names, except for Miranda and Doc-tor Michel. But Miranda is here now, and she never is, and that means—
"Norrr—" The word dies on her tongue. Her crew. They were—gone. Were. Past tense. But—she can't remember. She knows there's something, something important that she needs to remember, but she can't. Her head spins. Her breath comes short, the air catching in her chest as the cold panic begins to set in—she can't seem to drag enough oxygen into her lungs, and she's no longer in the safety of her hospital bed, but instead reeling out into the lifeless expanse of outer space as her ship falls apart around her, and she can't breathe—
Shepard becomes aware of the shakes in her right hand growing worse, the dark energy thrumming under her skin. Of tiny electrical pulses agitating the eezo nodes threaded throughout her nervous system, nodes that had lain dormant for so long before the power of the Crucible awakened them. Of a faint blue shimmer enveloping her arm as the mass effect fields—her own mass effect fields—distort the gravity around it.
Somewhere far away, she can hear Miranda speak to her. Place a hand—the skin so smooth and cool and the fingers not contorted into a permanent half-fist—against her bare arm, where the skin weave had healed to some extent. A static shock jumps between them. Shepard pulls away.
"Crew?" She blinks several times. "Crew! Where—" Found? Had they been—found? Not dead? She tries to remember, but it just slips through the crevasses of her mind and melts away. Frustration fills her, a palpable thing pooling in her chest, until it bursts out of her in the form of a scream.
She screams and screams and screams and doesn't even know why. Doesn't know why she can't stop. But at least it drowns out the relentless buzzing in her ears. The whispers closing in on her. The Reapers were gone, but their ghosts still lingered in her mind. She screams until her throat is raw, her emotions spent, and then sags back onto the mattress.
"'m...sorry," Shepard manages to say, although the words feel brittle and wholly inadequate. She doesn't even need to look up at Miranda to know what the look on her face would be: a helpless, agonizing pity for the commander who could barely remember her own name.
But Miranda doesn't pay any attention to Shepard's little outburst. Instead, she pulls up a chair beside the bed and sits down in it.
"Do you remember what happened at the Crucible?" she asks, as quick as ripping off a bandage.
Shepard knows that Miranda hates asking this question as much as Shepard hates answering it. That she wouldn't ask at all if not for everybody pushing for their answers. Twenty minutes between the Crucible docking and the Crucible firing, and everybody wanted to know what happened in that in-between, and only one person knew the answer, and that one person didn't want to answer.
Shepard doesn't even hesitate. "No."
And she knows that Miranda doesn't believe her. But she doesn't push for answers, simply reaches up and rubs one hand against her forehead.
"Heard...um, uh, talking." Shepard inhales, then exhales. "'Damned media,'" she repeats, and the second word brings with it a sour memory from Before, ones of reporters crowding too close to her and putting their cameras and microphones in her face and asking too many questions at the same time and she could only stammer out some half-answer before turning and running away and Udina had been red-faced and yelling at her for it. But that's not what she needs to remember, but instead some half-thought spidering across her brain, trying to crawl into it—
"Somehow," Miranda says, "the media got wind that the Normandy will be arriving in Vancouver later today."
"'Got wind'? Like...farts?"
Miranda looks at her. Shepard doesn't understand her face.
Then the second part of the sentence finally registers in her mind, and she can feel the skin on her face tug a bit as her mouth widens into a smile, a real smile this time. "Normandy."
Normandy. Her crew.
"All...okay?"
Miranda gives her another look, and this time Shepard recognizes the look on her face: a long-suffering patience that came from answering the same question a dozen—two dozen? three dozen?—times before. But right now she doesn't care, because it was her crew, and she needed to know if they were okay.
"The geth discovered the Normandy in an uncharted system a week ago. Everybody on the ship is fine," Miranda says.
"Fine," Shepard repeats again, and she knows that it's not entirely true, because she remembers blood and fire and ashes and yelling into a transmitter for her groundside team to get evacuated despite their protests, remembers jumping out of the shuttle at the last second so that none of them would have a chance to follow her.
She knows that her ship had rations for thirty days and that they had been gone for much longer than thirty days—
"Fine?" The word practically spits out of her, even though she doesn't mean for it to.
"All of them underweight and still recovering from injuries, but otherwise fine," Miranda says, and Shepard accepts that answer with a small nod. "Admiral Hackett forwarded another batch of messages from the Normandy."
Another. Not the first.
She—can't remember.
Part of Shepard knows she should be upset about this—actual tangible proof that her mind is failing her, that the Reapers had stolen something important from her—but she isn't because her crew is okay, she hadn't failed them, hadn't sent them to their deaths.
And they were coming back to her.
"Can please...read them?" Shepard asks, and for the first time since she woke up the Reaper ghosts slither out of her mind.
Before she leaves, Miranda tells her that Doc-tor Michel would arrive soon to give her one last checkup. Shepard waits and waits for her to come but she never comes and then she ends up drifting off into warm memories of Kaidan and the last night they spent aboard the Normandy together.
Once again, Shepard is pulled out of her half-slumber by the sound of footsteps on the floor tiles, and once again, her head cranes towards the doorway. But it's not Doc-tor Michel outside her room, not the cadence of her footsteps on the tile floor. Not any footsteps that she recognizes.
Normandy. Her crew. Returning today. Probably them.
She waits. The door slowly opens. A figure shambles towards her bed, wearing a white coat, but he's not one of her doc-tors. He doesn't seem to notice her watching as he begins doing something with the machines hooked up to her.
"Who are you?" Shepard asks. Her lizard-brain is practically screaming at her to escape, to fight, to do something other than lay here like a helpless lump. "Not—doc-tor." Not crew, either, but she doesn't say it.
The man stares at her. His eyes are wide, his face slick with perspiration. The lumpy part in his neck moves up and down. "I didn't want to—"
"You..." Shepard's brows furrow together. "not...belong here. You should go. Before...get in trouble."
"I can't," the man says, almost a whisper.
Shepard's left hand shifts ever so slightly, her mangled fingers reaching out to grasp the button-box that will call the doc-tors. The man notices, and reaches across the bed to wrench it away from her.
Shepard screams. The man jerks backwards. His head swivels around. He grasps the pillow from under her head, yanking it out.
"Shut up," he almost pleads with her.
Shepard continues to scream. She raises her right arm. Dark energy swirls around it. She pulls her arm back, and then flicks it forward in a movement she had seen so many times before. But it doesn't do anything—
—and then the man is leaning over her with the pillow, putting it over her face.
Notes:
This chapter was initially supposed to be a single scene. Go figures.
For those who are curious, the song that Shepard sings is (a badly butchered version of) Dexys Midnight Runners' one-hit-wonder "Come On Eileen." If you were able to recognize it, I applaud you.
I also posted a cover for my fanfic at the beginning of Chapter One. Apologies in advance for destroying any preconceived notions of what my iteration of Commander Shepard looks like.
Chapter 5: ...the water doesn't scare me, it's just the people that i miss
Notes:
Warning: Non-graphic discussion of a suicide attempt, depiction of a dissociative episode.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Out here on the ocean,
I've been set adrift
The water doesn't scare me,
It's just the people that I miss
And the darkness at the bottom,
Has forgotten what's on top,
The storm has never ceased here
And it'll never stop
- Headstones, "Devil's On Fire"
Tali awakens from a blissfully dreamless sleep, one arm stretching across the cot, seeking out the turian form beside her—but there is none. Propping herself up on one elbow, she sees Garrus already on his feet, staring intently at the orange glow of the haptic control panel as his talons trace across it, and shivers a bit as she remembers those same talons running across her suit the previous night, and then shivers more as she remembers them running across her bare skin—nerve-stimulation programs weren't quite as good as the real thing, but they'd both agreed to hold off on a repeat of that night in the Citadel apartment.
At least she was spared the awkwardness of rushing out the next morning to get an emergency injection of antibiotics at the nearest med clinic and still ending up sick for most of shore leave.
She lies there for a few moments, watching Garrus. Or more accurately, watching his backside; he has a nice ass. Finally, she pulls herself to her feet and walks up behind him. "Hey," she says, wrapping her arms around his torso and pressing the visor of her helmet against his back. He hasn't yet put on his armour, so she indulges in the way her body curves into the whipcord-thin muscles of his. "Calibrating again?" she asks, her voice coming out a bit muffled through her obstructed speaker.
"Gives me something to focus on. Kaidan's been pacing around the crew deck for hours now." He straightens himself a bit; Tali releases her grip and easily slips into his sideways embrace, reaching up one hand to rub her fingertips in small circles in the soft, unplated skin just below his fringe. Garrus grumbles appreciatively. "Got word from my family."
"How are they?"
Garrus picks up a datapad and hands it to her. On it is a message, forwarded from Primarch Victus:
G: Safe on Rannoch. S undergoing surgery, expected to make full recovery. Will be in touch. - C
Not a wasted word; in these fledgling early days of a post-Reaper galaxy where QEC bandwidth is at a premium and each character of text a precious commodity, brevity became the norm. Tali exhales slowly, a smile forming behind her mask and in her voice. "I'm glad they're okay."
"Rannoch?" He looks down at her, mandibles flared in a questioning expression.
"I am the ambassador of the Migrant Fleet, you know. I brought the idea up with your primarch a few months ago. It was a good compromise." And a gesture of goodwill desperately needed after some of Admiral Gerrel's shenanigans over the years, but it's probably best to leave that part out. "Your people needed a place to stay, and in turn they can help us rebuild our homeworld." Help her people to re-learn the skills that had been inevitably discarded in the haphazard transition to a nomadic society and atrophied from disuse in the three hundred years since: civic planning, agriculture outside of the great hydroponic gardens of the liveships, getting along with the rest of the galaxy. Some things were far bigger than old grudges.
She eventually peels herself away from Garrus and heads out to the mess hall. She digs out a tube of nutrition paste—every quarian grew to hate the taste of keleven, but its fast-growing stalks and high-protein fibres made it an important staple crop of the flotilla—and her allotment of the vitamin pills prescribed by Dr. Chakwas.
On the Normandy, it had always been easier for Tali to slip off to a quiet corner to take her meals alone; slurping up her sustenance through a helmet port while everybody else shoveled the food into their mouths was a bit awkward for everybody involved. She avoids the elevators, slipping through the ship's air vents and emerging in the lower bowels of Engineering, in that little hidey-hole that Jack used to claim as her territory. Daniels and Donnelly had both been terrified of the Psychotic Biotic, so Tali was always the one to head down to the lower decks to fetch some item or another from the crates, or to check the power conduits down there. Somehow, over the course of multiple conversations laced with biting sarcasm and exchanges of profanity in both Khelish and English (Tali could give as good as she got), and a mutual hatred of Cerberus, they had settled into some odd manner of something akin to friendship, one that had continued over the extranet even after the Normandy was impounded by the Alliance.
Sitting down on a crate, she sticks the tube in her feeding port and checks for new messages. They were within range of the newly rebuilt comm buoy network, which meant more bandwidth for lower-priority messages—including the unwanted ones. By the time she's finished deleting three months worth of unsolicted messages for illegal substances, requests for her banking details, and xenophiliac dating sites, she's finished her breakfast.
EDI's voice comes over the intercom, informing everyone that the current drive discharge is finished and that the current ETA is approximately six hours. It'd been the necessity of those discharges that had delayed their return, being forced to take a roundabout route so that they were always within range of a planetary system or asteroid belt where they could bleed off static charge. That was the downside of the oversized Tantalus core—any ship from the Migrant Fleet probably would've been able to risk a more direct route through deep space. On the worst days, her hunger-addled mind had wondered if letting the core overload and fry them all would be more of a mercy than a slow death by starvation.
There's a shift in the a-grav as the Normandy slips free from the magnetic field of some gas giant she doesn't know the name of, and then a slight shudder through the deckplatesas the inertial dampeners kick in and the Normandy leaps to FTL. Tali had once seen a picture on the extranet: an old human photograph from their early days of spaceflight; in it, Earth had appeared as nothing more than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, a pale blue dot in the distance. And now, after three months of careful fuel conservation and delicate gravity-sling maneuvers, they were finally on a direct trajectory for that pale blue dot.
She can't think of it as going back, though. She'd only stepped foot on the human homeworld twice in her life. The first time had been for some well-deserved shore leave after the whole debacle with the rogue VI on Luna. Ashley had dragged Tali and Liara on a "girl's night out" in Rio de Janeiro, a glistening city that teemed of luxury that she couldn't even begin to dream about back in the flotilla; they'd ended up in a bar serving both levo and dextro drinks and Tali learned for the first time in her life just what a hangover was.
The second time had been far different. At least the parts of it she can remember—mostly the tattered, unpleasant, blood-soaked half-memories of London that keep intruding on her mind. But a few nicer ones too: of her and Garrus touching foreheads, a silent admission that whatever this thing was between them was more than 'just a fling.' Wondering if she'd ever again feel the slight rasp of turian scales against her bare skin, or his breath against the nape of her neck as he whispered her name in that delicious flange.
Of standing next to Shepard in the shell of a bombed-out building, looking over the flaming corpse of a once-great city, and pulling her best friend, her sister, into a hug. She doesn't remember if Shepard said anything to her—she'd lapsed into a bout of sullen reticence in those last few days before the Crucible's deployment—but she does remember Shepard hugging her back.
(She'd almost been to Earth a third time.
Arcturus Station: Headquarters of the Systems Alliance. The nerve center of the human military fleet. Home to 45,000 humans. And from the amount of odd stares she was getting, most of them had never seen a quarian before.
Tali'Zorah didn't care. She stood at a public terminal, her three-fingered hands tapping away at an interface designed for five as she searched through the available shuttle routes to Earth. It was late; none of them departed before the next day. With a quiet sigh, she reached into a pocket for her credit chit.
"I'd save the money if I were you," said a somewhat familiar voice from behind her; Tali jumped a bit. "They're not going to let you in to see her."
"Councillor Anderson!" She'd thought that sneaking up on people without a sound was one of Shepard's weird little habits, but she quickly reappraised her opinion: it was definitely an N7 thing.
"Admiral Anderson, now," he said. "I gave up my position on the Council a few months back. Truth is, I just didn't have the stomach for compromising my principles."
"With all due respect, sir"—Tali folded her hands behind her back in her best likeness of parade rest—"I believe the term you're looking for is 'political bullshit.'"
Anderson laughed. "I can see why Shepard has such a high regard for you...Admiral?" One eyebrow raised, a silent appraisal of the young pilgrim he had met a few years earlier.
Tali neither confirmed nor denied; how he got information of the internal politics of the Migrant Fleet she would prefer not to know, but it seemed that news travelled quickly. "How is she?"
An expression she couldn't quite read flitted across his face, and for an iota for a second, he looked almost exactly like Shepard sometimes did—if not in appearance, then in the quiet dignity he exuded, the look of a soldier who knew they were up against hopeless odds but carried on anyways. Rael'Zorah had often had the same look.
But Rael'Zorah was also the last person she wanted to think about right now. Damn it all.
"She'll be okay," he said, lips drawn tight. "Even with all the cybernetics, she managed to do some serious damage to herself. Still waiting to see if there'll be any long-term effects. But they got to her in time. Had to break down her door, though. She was unconscious by then." The rest didn't need to be stated: a few minutes, even a few seconds longer, and...
Tali looked down at her hands, clenched together in a twist of fingers, and gave a silent thanks to the ancestors. "She'll be okay," she repeated. It was hard to believe.
His movements stiff from recent injury, Anderson walked over to a nearby observation deck. "As she said herself, 'I'm not dead and I'm not for sale.' One of her old songs, probably."
"It is." Tali huffed her breath. "You spoke with her, then."
"I just came back from Earth. Had a visit with her. Let her know that she had a few good friends looking out for her." He hesitated a moment, bracing his arms on the railing and looking out a nearby viewport. "We're not leaving her out to dry. She'll get help for her...issues."
Tali folded her arms, but said nothing.
"I did try to convince Alliance brass to stop blocking communications from her former crew. Hackett was with me on that, but the rest of them wouldn't be swayed. Too worried about Cerberus."
"I wasn't working for Cerberus!" Indignation rose in her voice. "I was working for Shepard."
"We both know that. Anybody with a lick of sense should realize that a quarian would be the last person in the galaxy who'd work for those bastards. But you were part of her crew while she was with Cerberus. Not something the brass is willing to overlook."
Anderson sighed. His shoulders sagged a bit, and all of a sudden he looked very old and tired.
"Shepard's still considered a war criminal. A terrorist. Hell, there were some that argued that we should just wipe their hands of the whole matter and just hand her over to the batarians."
News of the extradition hearing had reached even the Migrant Fleet—something that had brought up uncomfortable memories of Tali's own treason trial, of how close she'd come to being exiled from her people, of how the admirals had tried to use her as a scapegoat—and all of the articles about it seemed to be accompanied by the exact same image of a gaunt, wary-looking woman being led into a courtroom in handcuffs; photography hadn't been allowed in the courtroom itself. Somehow, the woman in that photograph seemed to have little correspondence with the Commander Shepard that Tali had known, the one who had shouted down the Admiralty Board for daring to even try to pin their political bullshit on the quarian who had saved the Citadel from the geth.
Mere days after the courts had blocked the Batarian Hegemony's attempt to extradite Commander Shepard, Tali had received an email from her—one that sounded more like the Shepard she had known. She was doing as okay as could be expected under the circumstances; some defense committee had relieved her of duty and although she was still technically in detention—"even got a sniper trained on my window, just in case I manage to remove my skeleton and squeeze through the metal bars"—she now had a soft bed and her rock 'n' roll and access to the extranet; she missed their chats down in Engineering and hoped Tali was doing well; and of course Tali was probably busy with everything but if she could find some time to spare her old captain would appreciate a quick message to know how she was doing.
And even though she had been busy with duties to a fleet that she felt increasingly alienated from—she may have been able to avoid exile, but she hadn't been able to fully rid herself of the lingering bit of mistrust toward the people who had been ready to cast her out—Tali had been able to squeeze in a few moments to send an email in response. Or try to. The message had reappeared in her inbox an hour later, rejected by the mail server.
"So I can't see her." She looked down at her hands, fingers twisted together. Part of her knew that it hadn't been much of a plan in the first place: get leave from the fleet, book passage to Earth, show up in Vancouver, and kick up a fuss until whoever was in charge let her visit her best friend.
"I wish I had better news for you." He paused a moment. "I probably shouldn't do this, but...I know somebody who can get a message to her."
Tali looked up at him.
"Just tell her that"—she hesitated a moment, the things she was planning to say to Shepard suddenly seeming insufficient. Almost vacuous. Finally, she took a deep breath—"that I love her."
Anderson's voice grew soft. "I think she already knows.")
Tali hadn't come aboard the Normandy with much: her Eviscerator and a few suit repair kits. But she was a quarian. Salvaging whatever she could whenever she could was imprinted in her DNA, and over the past few months she'd accumulated enough of it to fill a crate.
She opens that crate, taking out a quilt and unfolding it on the deckplates. She takes everything out and sets to re-packing it. First, her three shotguns, safely locked in their cases: the M-22 Eviscerator, which had been rendered unusable after the thermal clip had warped from the heat of the explosion and jammed up; the M-11 Wraith, so shiny and golden and new-looking (and highly illegal) that she almost hated to use it; and the Reegar Carbine, a little something she'd adapted from the arc pistol and named after a fallen friend.
Next came the assorted miscellanea that some would call junk but which Tali preferred to think of as precious treasures: scavenged weapon mods and omni-tools from the battlefields, seeds from dextro-based crops stored in carefully-labeled airtight vials, cables and power packs and obsolete components, and more than a dozen rolls of duct tape in various colours and patterns (which, in her opinion, was the prime example of human ingenuity). She digs through her suit's pockets and comes up with a handful of old microchips to be re-purposed, a half-empty syringe of epoxy, and a coil of copper wire too frayed for most purposes, adding them to the crate. She keeps behind some spare air filters, a handful of soft cloths for wiping down her visor, and her Rannoch rock, tucking them safely in her pocket.
She folds her quilt and places it on top, along with her autographed Fleet and Flotilla poster (a gift from EDI) and her plush spider; she gives the spider a quick pat and then closes the lid, double-checking that the magnetic latches are fastened.
Eventually, she pulls herself to her feet, straightens her spine, and tries not to think of stepping off the Normandy for the last time in her life. Maybe the Admiralty Board had once tried to hang that ship name around her neck like a badge of shame, but she intends to keep it.
Perhaps she shouldn't be surprised that she once again finds herself in the captain's cabin.
Most of it's been swept clean; model ships packed away, datapads and books neatly arranged in boxes, guitar case leaning precariously against the desk. Much to her relief, the VI has been deactivated. Although the cage is present, Space Hamster is missing from it; Tali hopes it's not Javik's doing.
She folds her arms across her chest, wondering just why she came up here. Then something scoots across her field of vision.
"There you are," Tali whispers. Space Hamster perches at the edge of the desk, and then leapsacross the room. She lunges for him; he's too quick, and darts through the open doorway into the dimly-lit maintenance corridor running behind the aquarium.
Tali follows, just in time to see him scoot through the narrow gap between two pipes running horizontally. She exhales; well, quarians were nothing if not flexible, and she drops to her hands and knees to shimmy through herself. Her head and shoulders are almost completely buried in the pipes by the time she realizes that her hips won't quite squeeze through the gap.
Space Hamster sits on his hind legs, just out of reach of her outstretched fingers, and squeaks at her.
"Fine then, you little bosh'tet." Chasing him won't work, but maybe bribery would: a few pellets of food to lure him out. She begins to wriggle backwards—and then the fasteners of her hood snag onto something, trapping her.
"EDI?" she calls out, voice ringing in the narrow space.
But there is no answer.
Tali uses a decidedly human curse. "Fuck."
"This is all your fault, you know," Tali says.
Sitting just out of reach, Space Hamster squeaks in agreement and runs his paws over his head.
"Bosh'tet." Part of her wishes she had let Javik taken him as a snack.
Trapped in the narrow confine between the two pipes, it's easy enough to lose track of time. She has no idea how long she's been trapped for. Long enough for her to realize that no matter how she wriggles herself, there's no way to slip off her suit's hood and free herself. And long enough for everything to start to hurt. She shifts her weight several times in some attempt to bring relief to her aching knees and back, but her muscles reject every shift in position as woefully inadequate. Her left arm, pinned under her torso, is almost completely numb.
Eventually, Space Hamster leaves, and Tali is alone. She groans and stretches her right arm forward, in the vague hope that it'll cause her suit fastener to pop loose and release her from this cramped prison.
Instead, her gloved fingertips brush against something.
She immediately jerks it back—spidersis her first thought, her mind filling with horrors involving spiders sneaking aboard the ship on the jungle planet and setting up a nest in this dark crevice and laying eggs and all the little spiders hatching and crawling all over her—but after the initial moment of panic she realizes that it's far too flat and rectangular to be either a spider or its nest.
The muscles in her arm tremble a bit as she stretches it as far forward as possible. Her fingertips just barely manage to snag the object, but it's enough to drag it into reach. It's a...book. An actual paper book, the cover brown and nondescript.
It takes a little fumbling, but she eventually manages to prop it open with one hand. The careful, flowing script on the first page makes things a little more clear:
Shepard,
I know things have been difficult for you lately. Lieutenant Vega told me that you seemed to take some small comfort in keeping a journal during your stay on Earth, but that it was lost in the rush to escape. As such, it felt appropriate to provide you with a new one.
Please remember that there are people who care about you,
Dr. Liara T'Soni
September 30, 2186
Two days after the Reapers had attacked Earth.
Shepard's journal. Her innermost thoughts. There was a reason that it was hidden away in this alcove instead of just sitting out in the open on her desk. The right thing to do would be to slip the book into her suit pocket and return it to its owner later on.
She wrestles with her conscience for a moment longer, but her curiosity—what was that human saying? something about it killing felines?—takes over. She reaches for the edge of the page, ever so carefully, even though the paper is thick and of good quality and not likely to tear, and leafs it over to the next page.
She's not sure what she expects to find, but a page full of indecipherable scribbles definitely isn't it. Her suit's translator nearly trips on itself as it ticks through at least three dozen possibilities, discards them, and then gives up with a blinking error about it being an unrecognized language. Somehow, she's not surprised.
In the margin is a tiny drawing of Space Hamster. She's not really surprised at that, either.
Tali continues to leaf through the pages—pages and pages of those indecipherable scribbles and numerous drawings of Space Hamster in various outfits and situations, the passage of time demarcated by the dates: October passing into November, and November passing to December.
Then she turns the page again, and this time the words on the page are in English. Between the bits that her translator is able to decipher—it's never been good with handwriting, and Shepard's handwriting in particular is atrocious—and her own understanding of written English, she's able to at least get the gist of it:
December 20, 2186
They fired on the dreadnaught dreadnought while we were still aboard. Nerves are in tatters. Still feels a little pointless writing these Important Feelings down but its either this or the mindfulness excersizes.
I think the rat in my brain took over because everything's a little blurry. Apparently I was calm until we got onto the geth fighter and then I...'came apart' is what Kaidan said.
I don't remember a geth fighter. I do remember throwing up in the shuttle bay then nearly getting into a fistfight with the quarien quarian admirals. Even headbutted one of them. True krogan diplomacy—guess I've been spending too much time around Wrex. Though Tali was just as mad. Lots of angry quarian words that aren't in the translater.
Kaidan and Tali were both with me on the dreadnought. They were also both on the old Normandy when it went down. It was bad memories for everybody. Probably worse for both of them because they also had to put up with my storm clouds. They don't need to deal with those.
At least my self-preservation instincts are back in working order. I hope.
The entry is accompanied by a sketch—not of Space Hamster, but of a tiny figure in N7 armour drifting off into space, utterly alone but for the backdrop of stars.
After that, it's back to those indecipherable scribbles. More drawings of Space Hamster. But the entries grow shorter, the dates spaced further apart: January 5th. January 16th. January 29th. Nothing at all in the first three weeks of February. And then she turns the page again, and the next one is in English again, but this time it takes her several attempts before she can decipher the lines of messy, looping scrawl that nearly go off the edge of the page:
feb 22
i'm not dead and i'm NOT FOR SALE.
colder than alchera. and dark, too.
and what exactly is a dream? and what exactly is a joke?
And immediately following it:
February 23, 2187
Thank whatever deities are out there. Tali found me before I did something stupid.
Oh, keelah.
(Tali hadn't been part of the groundside—well, planetside—team when Shepard had made that fateful, reckless plunge into the oceans of 2181 Despoina, but she'd watched the feeds, skimmed over the reports, talked to the others about it. Helped Dr. Chakwas set up the portable hyperbaric chamber—used for depressurization accidents—in the medbay after the Normandy had re-established contact. Seen Shepard for just a brief moment when Kaidan and Garrus carried her in, wrapped in an emergency blanket, barely coherent from the combined effects of hypothermia, decompression sickness, exhaustion, and whatever the hell Leviathan had done to her head.
Some small, irrational part of Tali wondered if things would've gone differently if she'd been there—if she could've found some way to keep the Kodiak from succumbing to the pulse that knocked it out of the air. Wondered if it would've been enough to keep that stupid bosh'tet from diving to the bottom of the ocean in a wreck of a diving mech and managing to disable most of the safety systems. But then she remembered the look in Shepard's eyes in those last few days—frantic and not entirely herself—and knew the answer.
After the fall of Thessia and what had come to be politely described as the "fishtank incident," they'd all been watching Shepard closely. Ever-worried that she would slip into one of her moods, or even worse. So a collective sigh of relief seemed to pass over the Normandy when its captain bounced back quickly. Too quickly, something that was only realized in hindsight, well after the nightmare had begun.
A nightmare that hadn't ended after Shepard stumbled free of the confines of the Triton, because after a stern scolding from Dr. Chakwas and an endless night of observation, she'd made her escape from the medbay and—vanished.
The Normandy wasn't a large ship. They were in the middle of deep space. There was no place for her to go. And yet Shepard had managed to disappear, to completely drop off the sensors and evade a crew actively searching for her. But as long as Shepard didn't want to be found, she wouldn't be. The only thing they could do was put a guard on the weapons lockers—they weren't taking any chances— and hope that she would re-emerge sooner rather than later.
Twenty hours later, she was still missing.
Tali didn't remember falling asleep—just tossing and turning on her cot, either unable or unwilling to sleep. And yet she found herself dragged out of an uneasy slumber by a nebulous, half-formed idea in her head. She got to her feet and headed to her station, checking the readouts.
Daniels, who was currently on night duty, looked up at her. Tali debated for a moment whether to discuss it with—no. Keep it to herself a bit longer. Just in case she was wrong.
"Just checking something. I'll be back later." With that, she turned and headed to the elevator. She thankfully managed to avoid anyone as she made a quick stop at the mess hall. Thermos in hand, she took the elevator to the top deck.
Of course, the door to the captain's cabin was locked. Before she had a chance to bring up her omni-tool, it pinged; a message from EDI, letting her know that in the Systems Alliance, admiral outranked staff-commander. The door unlocked.
"Shepard?" Tali said, her voice seeming to fill the room. Part of her expected to see the telltale shimmer of light refracting around a tactical cloak, but—no. That would be too easy. "Get out here, you stubborn bosh'tet."
'We're not mad,' she nearly added, but couldn't bring herself to—while it probably wasn't a blatant lie, tensions had risen high enough in the past few weeks that it wasn't exactly truthful either.
Of course, there was no answer. That also would've been too easy.
She walked over to the desk, put down the thermos, and quickly shoved the husk head into a drawer before it could start screeching at her. Shepard's private terminal was turned on; on the screen was an unfinished, typo-laden message to Admiral Hackett about their new pact with the Leviathans—and offering her resignation from the Alliance. Tali saved the draft and then shut the terminal down.
She took a few moments to look over the desk: scattered datapads, an empty whiskey bottle— keelah, she knew better—and lastly, the array of small amber bottles neatly lined up at the back of the desk. Tali picked one of them up: the container was empty and according to the label, the refills had expired several weeks ago. She put it back into place.
And then she heard it: a sound that only a quarian's well-trained hearing could've discerned above the quiet swoosh of the ventilation: a small, shuddering breath.
Tali crept towards the yawning gap in the wall that led to the narrow area running behind the fishtank, one that nobody had any business going into unless they were working on the power conduits back there. Peeking around the corner, she found exactly what she expected to: the familiar shimmer of light refracting around a tactical cloak.
Clever little bosh'tet; if she hadn't caused so much worry, Tali might've been proud of her. They hadn't overlooked the tactical cloak; it was just about the only way that her life signs and thermal emissions could've remained invisible to EDI's sensors. But even without having to juggle the kinetic barriers, the power cells could only hold a charge for so long. Definitely not the twenty hours she'd been missing. Plugging the cloaking device directly into the ship's electrical system meant she could remain indefinitely hidden, nothing more than an almost-negligible increase of power usage.
She brought up her omni-tool and tapped out a message to EDI:
TZorah: Let Dr. Chakwas know that I found Shepard. Kaidan too, if he's still awake.
TZorah: I'm going to talk to her and make sure she's all right.
EDI: I will do so at once. Thank you, Tali.
Tali ducked into the corridor; it was narrow, and she had to duck her head to keep from banging the top of her helmet against the curved ceiling. While an average quarian would've fit in here without any difficulty, Tali'Zorah was a bit of a genetic outlier amongst quarians. She lowered herself to a crouch and moved forward, until she was within reach.
"Hey," she said, reaching out to put a hand on Shepard's shoulder. The next few seconds passed in slow motion as she realized her mistake.
Whatever state Shepard was in right now, rational thought in the face of a perceived threat—even if said threat was an overly-nosy quarian touching her without warning—gave way to the more base instincts of fight or flight, and with the only path to flight blocked, that meant fight.
The shimmer of light lurched forward. Tali wasn't quite fast enough to get out of the way. A skull connected with her mid-torso, sending her sprawling backwards onto the floor. Shepard's tactical cloak dropped at the impact; her head snapped backwards, the sound of it slamming into the pipes reverberating through the narrow space.
"Keelah," Tali tried to say, but all that came out was a strange wheezing noise as she fought to draw air into her lungs. Getting headbutted hurt. No wonder Gerrel had been pissed. Gingerly, she pulled herself to a sitting position and pressed a hand to her stomach, waiting until she caught her breath again before looking up.
Shepard hunched there, back pressed against the pipes, a hooded N7 sweater at least a few sizes too large for her draped over her slight frame. Her breath came in ragged little gasps. The scars in her face had split open again, the gaps in the skin weave revealing angry red cybernetics underneath. Her eyes looked directly at Tali, but there was no sign of recognition in them. Just that odd, distant gaze.
How much had she been drinking? Had nitrogen bubbles lodged into her brain after her uncontrolled ascent from the ocean floor? Was Leviathan still somehow controlling her, one of its artifacts having somehow slipped its way onto the Normandy?
"Shepard," Tali said softly. For a moment, there was a flicker of something in those eyes—but in an instant, it disappeared. "It's Tali. I'm coming over to sit beside you. Is that all right? Just nod if you're okay with it."
For a few heartbeats, it seemed like there would be no response at all, that she had—left them behind. But there it was: a slight shift in her head, a nod. Tali released the breath she didn't know she'd been holding and scooted over, settling herself on the floor next to Shepard. After a few moments debating with herself, she lifted her arm, letting it drape across Shepard's shoulders in a half-hug. Part of her expected Shepard to protest in some way—maybe not in words, but a sharp glare or recoiling from her touch—but she didn't. If anything, she seemed to relax a little, but it was hard to tell.
"Is this okay?" she whispered, earning another tiny nod. Tali's fingertips began to rub small circles in the knotted muscles of her shoulder. Starships tended to run warm, but compared to other ships Tali had been on, the Normandy was practically sweltering at times, all its waste heat trapped within its hull when running stealth. And yet, despite that, despite the heavy sweater... "Keelah, you're freezing. Are you..."
Shepard flinched.
"No. No, you're not all right." As if she could be, after a reaper-killer had invaded her head. And she'd been drinking. And she was so cold. "Wait here. I'll just be a moment."
Shepard frowned and made an agitated noise.
"I'm coming right back." She got up and headed back out to the captain's cabin. Neatly folded on the bed were several blankets, including a quarian-made quilt that Tali had given her after Rannoch had been reclaimed; she picked it up and tucked it under one arm.
When she turned around, she nearly dropped the blanket as she came face-to-face with Shepard.
"Keelah. Don't scare me like that."
In the brighter lighting of the cabin, she looked even worse—while the greyish pallor to her skin had faded a bit, bruises had appeared on her face and her eyes were bloodshot. She stood on unsteady legs, looking almost ready to collapse. She'd lost weight, and on a frame that was just wiry muscle plastered to bone, there hadn't been much of it to lose to begin with.
Even before she'd been struck with her latest mood , she'd been running herself ragged. Not enough sleep, barely enough food, just gallons and gallons of a toxic sludge that she referred to as coffee but everybody else wisely avoided. It'd only gotten worse in the past few weeks. One of her moods, that much had been certain. But—worse than her usual ones, if any of them could even be considered "usual." One that burned like Dholen: uncontrollably bright and completely unsustainable. The search for Leviathan became an obsession with her: there was no room in her mind for anything else, no other channel for all that feverish energy to be directed, just a frenetic determination to drag it out into the light, to wage war on everything and everyone who stood in the way—even if it was her own crew.
In the end, that search had nearly killed her.
"Don't go." It was the first thing she'd said since Tali had found her. Her voice was strangely flat. "Please."
"I'm right here, Shepard. I'm not going anywhere." Tali moved next to her, placing a hand on her back. "I know how it feels. Not wanting to be alone."
Shepard didn't say anything, but she didn't protest when Tali guided her over to sit down on the sofa and, crouched down on the floor in front of her, wrapped the quilt over Shepard's shoulders. "There. Better?"
Another small nod.
"You've been drinking." Tali kept any trace of emotion out of her voice, but a disapproving tsk slipped out before she could stop it.
Shepard winced, then withdrew another half-consumed bottle of whiskey from her pocket and placed it into Tali's outstretched hand. "Can you—"
"Let me get rid of this for you," Tali said as she got to her feet. She went to the upper level of the cabin to put it in the garbage disposal, then returned with the thermos she'd left on the desk. "I brought you some hot chocolate. It even has...how do you pronounce it? Marsh-mellows?"
"Thank you." Shepard wrapped her hands around the thermos, and began to slowly sip it. Tali sat on the sofa next to her, dug some dextro chocolate out of her suit pocket, and got to work on it herself.
Gradually, the vacant look left her eyes and she came back to herself. Tali spoke again. "Shepard, can I ask you a question?"
After a few moments, she nodded. "What do you want?"
"You stopped taking your medication, didn't you?" Shepard's head jerked up at that, and Tali looked at her. "Do you think we didn't realize?"
"After Thessia, I thought—just a week or so. Just long enough to get the fog out of my head, then I'd start taking them again. Then the old equilibrium starts spinning, and the next thing I know I'm plunging over the falls in a barrel." She took another sip of hot chocolate, then put the thermos down on the table. "...Everyone must be pissed at me."
Tali took a long breath, and chose her words carefully. "Yeah. We are."
It was hard not to be annoyed with her. On the battlefield, she was the same as always: calm and focused, letting absolutely nothing faze her. But on the Normandy, she'd done her best to strain everyone's patience: restlessly stalking around the crew deck with a stack of datapads, subjecting anyone unfortunate enough to get into earshot with a disjointed tirade—the translators were barely able to keep up with her breakneck speech—which always seemed to be about how they needed any advantage against the Reapers since the loss of Thessia.
"I put the mission at risk."
This time, Tali glared.
"Damn it, Shepard," she said, pressing her hand against her visor and not even trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. "It's not about the mission! We were worried about you. Did you even consider that? That we want to help you, because you're our friend? Because we love you? But instead of asking us—letting us help when we're offering it—you start acting like a narizy em'ashu and scare the hell out of us by ech'eld rekal nedas"—at this point, she was speaking in a mangle of Khelish and English—"and then start drinking, even though you know what that shit does to you!"
"I—" Shepard took a deep, shuddering breath; Tali could almost see the thoughts in her head running out of control, like an oversaturated drive core about to discharge into a ship's hull.
"Just...stop pushing us away. Let us help you." Tali reached over to put a gentle hand on her arm. "Let me help you. Please."
"I— You can't, Tali. It's a problem with my head. You can't—"
"Just talk to me. I know I might not be able to help, but I can...What did you call it that time? Lend an ear? Or if you want to talk to somebody else, I can get them for you."
"I'd prefer if—if you stayed." Her voice grew quiet. She blinked a few times, tried to take another deep breath, but this time it came out as a wavery creaking noise. "I don't know. I really don't. I thought I'd be used to it by now. Prothean beacons. Actual Protheans. Asari sex vampires. Rogue VI-human hybrids. Reaper artifacts. Knocking me out of my head. Not even sure if there's room for Shepard in there anymore. But this time—"
She clenched her fists, then unclenched them.
"It's—'Many miles away, something crawls from the slime...'" She trailed off, her eyes getting that faraway look again.
"...At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake,'" Tali finished, tapping one finger against her arm. "Try to stay with me, okay?"
"It...went through my memories. Wasn't too careful in there either." She squeezed her eyes shut. "Mindoir. Akuze. Alchera. All the storm clouds and befores running together."
Tali reached over and took her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"...No. Not really." She glanced up at the viewport in the ceiling, but the shutter was closed. Her voice was almost a whisper. "I—I just—I can't screw up like that again. If I do—if more people die because I make another bad judgment—"
Her voice cracked.
"I'm tired, Tali." Something in her seemed to crumble, and then—a quiet sob slipped free. She turned away, but not before Tali saw the first splash of tears roll down her cheeks.
Shepard was crying. Shepard, who never cried, was crying.
"Shepard? Are you—C'mere." Tali tugged on her arm. The rest of Shepard followed, until she was slumped crosswise in Tali's lap, face buried into Tali's shoulder, shaking with cold or something worse. Tali wrapped an arm around her shoulder in a protective hug, resting her chin on Shepard's head, rocking her gently back and forth. "I've got you."
"I—" Shepard heaved back another sob, a hollow attempt to staunch the tears that were already flowing. "Dammit, I'm sorry—"
"Don't be. My suit is very tear-absorbent, you know." She rubbed the spot between Shepard's shoulderblades. "And right now, you need this."
Shepard said nothing, but slowly released her breath and let herself sag down. It was hard to tell how long it took, but eventually the tremours ceased and she slid free from Tali's arms, blinking several times and rubbing at her eyes.
"Sorry for headbutting you earlier."
"Only because I startled you," Tali said. "Don't worry about it. Quarians don't bruise as easily as you humans."
"I guess I also need to...apologize to everyone else." She winced, reaching over to pick up the thermos again. "For being such an asshole lately."
"Tomorrow." Tali looked at her. "But now, we're just going to stay right here and listen to some music until you feel better. Then try to get some sleep. Ancestors know we both could use some."
Shepard raised an eyebrow, a smile quirking at one corner of her mouth. "Are you giving me orders, vas Normandy?"
"Well"—Tali tilted her head and crossed her arms—"I do outrank you, being admiral."
"That you do." Shepard gave a soft laugh, then took a sip of hot chocolate. "Tali? Thank you. Just...for everything. For lifting a hand. Coming up here to find me. You know."
"Don't think anything of it," Tali said. "This time, it was your turn to need a friend.")
Tali doesn't remember falling asleep.
She remembers eventually closing the journal, using her one free arm to tuck it into one of her suit's pockets. She remembers getting more and more frustrated with her current predicament and plotting various ways to dispose of Space Hamster—until he finally returned to keep her company.
But she must have, because she awakens with a start, the top of her helmet banging against one of the pipes. Ultraviolet text scrolls across her helmet's display, informing her of new messages on her omni-tool. Space Hamster, nuzzled up against her arm, also starts awake at the noise she's making and squeaks at her.
"Sorry," she says to him. Her ears strain to scoop up any sound they can—the quiet whoosh of the Normandy's ventilation, the low thrum of the drive core, the slow grind of the elevator as it makes its way up to the top deck. The hiss of the cabin doors as they slide open.
Before she can say anything, a voice speaks aloud: "Tali, are you in here?"
It doesn't take much effort to free her. In fact, it's almost embarrassing how easy it is once she has EDI's help. She staggers back out to the cabin and half-collapses against the desk, curling and uncurling the numb fingers in her left hand. EDI follows a few seconds later, depositing Space Hamster in his cage and closing the lid.
"Thank you, EDI." Tali exhales, and then activates her omni-tool. At least twenty messages, most of them being variations of 'Where are you?' She looks up. "Did something happen?"
"Major Alenko called everybody to the briefing room half an hour ago for a meeting." EDI stands there, almost motionless, hands folded behind her back. "When you did not arrive or respond to your omni-tool's pings, I detected your life signs in the captain's cabin and surmised that you had fallen asleep."
"I didnod off for a little while there." She shakes her head. "A meeting? What about?"
"Yes. The major just received a message over the QEC from Admiral Hackett regarding the status of Commander Shepard."
"Shepard? Is she...?"
"I do not know the exact details yet. But considering Major Alenko's current state of distress, it does not appear to be good news."
A news article published the following day would describe the Normandy SR-2 as a great wounded bird of prey limping its way into the Earth's atmosphere and stumbling to a clumsy landing at the Vancouver International Spaceport on Sea Island. Joker had taken offense to that depiction; Tali herself, after watching the actual video of their arrival, also disagreed with it. Although the Normandy might not be as sleek-looking as a few months ago, the ship most certainly did not limp.
Vancouver is the exact opposite of Rannoch: grey, cold, and damp. Damp is the main word; rain falls in a steady drizzle, landing on ground already saturated to the brink, as though the planet itself is trying to wash away the residue the Reapers had left upon it. Without anywhere else to go, ankle-deep torrents of water rush through the weary cadaver of the city itself. Sandbags had been hastily stacked, then removed once it was realized it was merely preventing the flood from draining into Vancouver Harbour and the already-overflowing Fraser River.
The spaceport itself is a bit ramshackle: the original glass-and-steel building had miraculously remained relatively undamaged for the entire war, only to succumb to a dead Sovereign-class reaper crashing through its roof following the Crucible's activation; similar stories had filtered in from across the galaxy, about the last casualties of the war being those crushed under the giant corpses plummeting down from the sky. After passing back into civilian hands, the main terminal had been demolished, and a haphazard collection of prefabs had sprouted up in its place.
Even though Tali's envirosuit is airtight and climate-controlled, with droplets of water bouncing off the water-repellent coating of the fabric as she makes the short walk from the landing pad to the shelter of the prefabs, it seems that the moisture hanging in the air is somehow able to permeate through it anyways, making her thoroughly miserable.
Not that the bleak weather had done much to dissuade the throng of spectators to Normandy's triumphant—or not-so-triumphant, depending on one's opinion—return to Earth. Even if all they got to see was a brief glance of the ship from behind a razor-wire fence. For them, Normandy was synonymous with Shepard. More than just a ship, or a soldier, but a symbol. Shepard herself had hated it—but right now, Tali's trying not to think about Shepard.
Trying not to think about somebody trying to murder her best friend as she lay helpless in a hospital bed.
She can vaguely see some of the others—Liara tentatively reaching up to rest a hand on a distraught Kaidan's shoulder, Joker hobbling out with the aid of crutches, James and Cortez standing side by side—but right now, her own world extends no further than the turian next to her. Garrus's comforting bulk presses a bit closer to Tali. Her hand automatically reaches over, her fingers intertwining with his talons. He gives her a comforting grumble with his subharmonics; although it's not really audible, she can still feel it through the layers of her envirosuit.
There's paperwork to do, of course. Tali's eyes blur a bit as they skim across the provided datapad detailing her official release from being a mission specialist under Alliance command. She uses a stylus to sign her name at the bottom: T'Zorah vas Normandy. The clerk who takes it informs her that the Admiralty Board is sending somebody to pick her up.
Despite the Citadel Council being in disarray since the ending of the Reaper War—the Citadel itself suddenly in Earth's orbit and three out of four councillors still in need of a permanent replacement—the Alliance personnel don't put up much fuss about Kaidan using his Spectre authority to cut through red tape and get their luggage through customs.
The rain has slackened a bit by the time her omni-tool pings, informing her that her transportation has arrived. A mech carries her one crate outside, where a derelict-looking skycar awaits. A male quarian, nearly as tall as her and broad-shouldered, is standing next to it; he's wearing a red envirosuit that she recognizes, but no, it can't be, didn't he—
"Ma'am." He nods at her.
"Kal'Reegar?" Tali just stands there like an idiot, and then her legs start moving on their own. She nearly rushes him, throwing her arms around him. "Keelah—but I thought—"
"Rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated, ma'am." He wraps one arm around her, hugging her back. "The geth in my suit kept me alive long enough for a turian unit to pick me up. Spent the rest of the war recovering in a hospital ship."
"I am very glad you are alive." Behind her visor, Tali was grinning. Kal was like the brother she'd never had. "Wait a minute—I've got something for you."
After rummaging through her crate, she takes out the case holding the Reegar Carbine, and hands it to him.
"This is something I worked on while you were...while I thought you were gone. It's dedicated to you. So you should have it. And Kal? It's still Tali."
"Thank you, ma—Tali." He reaches over and touches her shoulder. "Still working on that, I promise."
Notes:
If you are ever feeling suicidal, please reach out for help.
Most of the random Khelish words in Tali's outburst (aside from nedas, which canonically means "nowhere") were generated with Rinkworks' Fantasy Name Generator's advanced interface. (Unfortunately, I forgot to save the exact template I used.) "Narizy em'ashu" is strong language calling somebody very idiotic, and "ech'eld rekal nedas" means "disappear/vanish into nowhere."
There's some weirdly conflicting canon about the Reegar Carbine; even though it's an improvement on the arc pistol (which is implied in some text/dialogue to be a recent development as of Mass Effect 3), there's a brief mention in the Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation novel about it being available in 2183. Instead of trying to figure that out, I just ignored its existence in the Andromeda games and made up my own headcanon.
Chapter 6: ...to be so civilized, one must tell civil lies
Notes:
Trigger warning: Panic attack (for lack of a better description).
Since it may not be too clear in the narrative, it should be noted that Shepard's viewpoint should be read through the lens of an unreliable narrator.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Push myself, the breaking point
It's all I know to do except for lie
I chase brake lights and dust ad nauseam
Driven by feelings I cannot hide
To be so civilized, one must tell civil lies
On and on and on and on and...
- Queens of the Stone Age - Feet Don't Fail Me
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Thursday, July 26, 2187, 106 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
She walks forward, but never seems to get any further. All around her is darkness—fog the colour of oily shadows swirling around her, obscuring her vision. There is no sun. No stars. No landmarks. No points of reference, no way to tell which direction she is moving.
The air is thick and difficult to breathe. Silence presses in on her in all directions. At this point, she would even welcome the whispers of the reaper ghosts.
After a while, she realizes that she is no longer walking, but swimming in a thick, oozing liquid that is not water. She swims upward and upwards, but the surface comes no closer. Fluid pours down her windpipe and into her lungs, viscous and icy cold, but she doesn't drown. Her body grows weary, but she knows that if she stops moving her arms, kicking her legs, she will sink back down into the dark place.
Her head finally breaks the surface, then sinks below it again. Her arms windmill wildly as she struggles to stay afloat. She sees a column of shimmering blue and kicks toward it. As she gets nearer, the blue light changes shape, and forms itself into the Normandy.
Strong hands grab her by the wrists, pull her into the ship. It's her crew. Her friends, come to rescue her—but they were nigh-unrecognizable, with blue-black streaks and glowing eyes. Twisted creatures that the Reapers had perverted to their own methods. They stare at her.
I'm sorry, she tries to say, but all that comes out of her mouth was the loud shriek of a reaper horn. The whispers creep in, crawling across her skin, burrowing into her mind: traitor. You betrayed them. You allowed the Reapers into your mind, allowed them to indoctrinate you. Allowed this to happen.
Nausea roils her stomach. She looks down at herself, and sees the same blue-black streaks oozing up her arm, the nanides flowing through her bloodstream. They ensconce themselves into her genetic structure, twisting it into something it is not. She screams, but can make no noise save for that of the unholy klaxon.
"Wake up."
She doesn't wake up. She turns and runs further into the Normandy. But it is not the Normandy anymore, but the twisting labyrinth of a reaper ship. The sour yellow buzzing in her head grows louder as she takes corridor after corridor. The shadowy shapes of her crew appear at every junction, slowly closing in on her, and then surround her, forcing her to the ground.
Someone shouts to throw her out the airlock. She struggles, kicks out; strong fingers close around her neck, lifting her into the air. Yes , the others say, throw her out the airlock. Dispose of her.
They put her in the airlock. The door closes, and she slams herself against the inner door, screaming at them to let her back in, but all that comes out is the continued shriek of reaper horns. The outer airlock door opens, instantly exposing it to zero pounds per square inch of nasty space pressure, yanking her out into the void—
In the last second before the air explodes from her lungs and the saliva in her mouth fizzles away, she realizes that the ship is no longer either the Normandy or a reaper ship. It is now an asteroid hurtling towards a mass relay, and her crew is still aboard. But the realization doesn't last long, because she can't breathe, can'tbreathe, cantbreathecantbreathecantbreathe—
She jounces out of her nightmare, instantly becoming aware of pain and sweat and her head is spinning and her left hand is twisted around the bedsheet and the medical VI is screeching something in her ear. There's a blue energy spread out over her own, a comforting eezo-tinged pressure against her skin, a face swimming into view above her, and she's able to remind herself to breathe. That she can breathe.
"Shepard—Joan. You were having another nightmare. Your biotics went out of control."
The voice is gentle and it somehow makes her think of warm maple syrup poured over small rocks. She takes in the face above her, soft brown eyes and a strained smile—faces have become difficult for her to tell apart, but her brain is able to put it together with everything else: the voice and the movements and the clothes and the undercurrents of biotics thrumming in the air around him, and her brain connects everything to the man that she loves.
"Kaidan," she tries to say, although it comes out sounding more like a weird slur of vowels.
"Hey, sweetheart." Kaidan releases his biotic field—she doesn't know the name for whatever he's doing, smoothing out and calming her own unpredictable fields—and sags back into the hard plastic chair next to her hospital bed. There's a weariness in his voice. "Don't try to—"
She doesn't hear the rest of his words, because the moment he dropped the field she's already struggling to pull herself to a sitting position. A wave of blue-white pain forces her back down to the mattress; she waits for the medical VI to release another dose of painkillers, but it doesn't come. The IV line had been pulled free. The other tubes and wires coming out of her are in a tangle.
She opens her mouth to say something, but the words don't come. She closes it again.
It only takes a few minutes for a nurse—not a doc-tor, she has to remind herself again—to arrive and untangle everything, but it seems far longer. The IV drip starts back up, and she slips easily into that comfortable grey-fog state, where everything was a little hazy around the edges.
She reaches over and rests one hand atop his, a static shock passing between them. "Thank you," she murmurs. "Love...you."
"Love you too," he says back.
But as the pain recedes, the reaper ghosts emerge, their oily shadows creeping into the periphery of her mind. She knew what had happened to most of the indoctrinated after the Crucible's activation—stories of reaper implants overloading and killing their hosts, of sleeper agents suddenly turning violent and attacking anybody nearby until they were killed, of people rendered completely catatonic once their controllers were gone.
She remembers reading a report, in one of her Befores—one that Mordin Solus had compiled about reaper indoctrination. It had taken several days and heavy use of a dictionary for her to get through all the dense language, and even Mordin had admitted it was mostly hypothetical. In it, he theorized that the Reapers didn't brute-force their way into an indoctrinated person's mind. Instead, they leveraged the person's own thoughts, their own personal beliefs and motivations, twisting it to their own means.
She had seen it time and time again. It was Saren, who believed he could protect organic life in the galaxy by proving their worth to them. It was a hanar diplomat, who believed that following them was the will of the Enkindlers. It was the Illusive Man, who believed that he could harness their power to make humanity more powerful.
It was Commander Shepard, who believed she could save both organics andsynthetics by forcing the Reapers to self-destruct.
If not for the intervention of that second presence that had joined her in the Reaper consciousness, she would have failed. Their cycle would have become just another cycle, with nothing but a handful of time capsules to fling their tragic story into the future.
The ghosts remain with her throughout all the morning Routines, of breakfast and then lots of different doc-tors coming in and out accompanied by either Miranda or Chakwas (or sometimes both) to check how she is healing, after the "setback." It was a word they like to use a lot, but Shepard doesn't like it. To her, it brings to mind a pillow being pressed over her face, an angry judder in her chest, of being unable to make a sound as faces swarmed around her.
(The sounds of multiple footsteps running in, and yelling and fighting. The pillow gently being lifted from her face. Several voices telling her that she was safe now, that the man who was not a doc-tor was gone, that it was okay.
—not okay—not okay—not okay—
"Dammit, somebody get a crash cart." Miranda's tone was terse. "We may have to defibrillate.")
One of the Routines, though, is a new one.
Doc-tor Chakwas' fingertips probe the back of Shepard's skull; a moment later a jolt of violet pain shoots through her brain as Chakwas pulls the transmitter free from her implant. Shepard yelps, her entire body flaring with dark energy for a moment.
Chakwas clicks her tongue. "Unpleasant, isn't it? Still, it's preferable to a lumbar puncture." She hands the transmitter over to Miranda, who's already examining the readings on her omni-tool.
It had been a strange Routine, and one that she only vaguely understood the purpose of. They had inserted a transmitter into her implant, then done the standard neuro exam (she hates the standard neuro exams, because the doc-tor who usually did them was bruque and she hated being hit with that little hammer). Then they had asked her to try to produce a biotic field. She'd tried her best. She really had. But she'd barely been able to produce a flicker of dark energy at the end of her fingertips, bringing up unpleasant bile-green memories of the Illusive Man accusing her of not taking her training seriously, of squandering a gift she didn't actually have.
Then Miranda had startled her by suddenly clapping her hands and nearly gotten knocked to the floor for it. Kaidan had dropped another biotic field over her before she could do any more harm.
"They're definitely getting stronger," Miranda says with a small frown. "But not under any sort of conscious control. It might be a good idea to start you on inhibitors soon, if only to prevent..." She waves one hand vaguely at the IV lines.
"In—in—hibit—" Shepard starts, then gives up on trying to repeat the word. Realization dawns on her just what this Routine was about, and its connection to the events earlier in the morning. "Okay. For now. And...and...er, contact with the...uhh, the school for biotics. The...person in charge." She lets herself sag down, momentarily exhausted after trawling through the primordial ooze of her mind for the right words. "Jack should know."
"Grissom Academy," Kaidan says. He'd been silent most of the time, watching Miranda with a wary eye; although the scars of Horizon had mostly healed, they still ran deep, and tendrils of grey-white tension stretched the air between them. They had gotten along well enough when she had come along on the mission to investigate Sanctuary, but since then it had defaulted back into the current uneasy cooperation. "I agree with Joan. From what I've heard, they'd likely have some idea what might be going on."
"Not a bad idea. I'll get started on that now." Miranda turns toward the door; with a waft of perfume and a blur of movement, she departs.
"You all right, sweetheart?" Kaidan asks, once she's settled back into her hospital bed. "Up for more visitors today?"
"Visitors good," Shepard says, suddenly aware of her growling stomach. "But first, lunch."
CITADEL, Sol system — Close to three hundred years after the quarians were stripped of their embassy for their role in creating the geth, the Migrant Fleet has once again been granted associate membership on the Citadel Council in recognition for their role in the Reaper War.
In a surprising move, Ambassador Tali'Zorah vas Normandy has announced her intent to petition the Council to grant the geth full legal rights as well as their own embassy.
"Whatever our peoples' past history may have been, the geth have more than proven that they wish to coexist peacefully," said Tali'Zorah.
Representatives of the Provisional Council had no comment.
On her omni-tool, she taps out a query: Amigo, status report? A minute later, a new message appears in her inbox:
Status_Update_1287.8F
From: Invalid Extranet Domain
Tali'Zorah— Our work continues— Geth have improved compression algorithms of QEC transmissions, improving bandwidth efficiency by 12.346357%— We will transmit details on technical implementation in a separate message— Geth platforms on Rannoch have integrated into creator/turian settlements and have reported fewer conflicts than anticipated. We will prove that creator and created can work together toward mutually beneficial goals. Keelah se'lai.
"Ma'am—Tali. We're at the hospital."
"Thanks, Kal." Tali lets the datapad drop to the floor, undoes her seatbelt, and picks up a package wrapped in brown paper. Climbing out of the skycar, she squints a bit at the sun's glare even with the polarization of her visor. For the first time in weeks, it had stopped raining.
The Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre was just one building of a larger hospital complex providing services to the Vancouver megalopolis. For reasons that nobody could quite decipher, the Reapers had completely ignored it, allowing it to remain intact while surrounding buildings had been reduced to rubble. Rebuilding had only just begun. Across the street she can see several krogan working a concrete mixer; getting in plenty of practice for rebuilding Tuchanka, Wrex had said with a chuckle during their last vidcall.
She skirts her way around some of the larger puddles, not wanting to splash her new suit or the package carefully tucked under one arm. Kal'Reegar doesn't bother—he just plunges straight through them, one hand resting lightly on a concealed holster; he'd previously admitted that while permanent injuries meant he was consigned to 'light duty,' escorting her around was a hell of a lot better than being stuck behind a desk.
The gold-trimmed envirosuit and bodyguard were both concessions to her new official roles as both ambassador to the Citadel Council and liaison to the Geth Consensus. It was the same work she'd already been doing before the Crucible's activation, but this time it came with the actual title.
Not that it was any easier than before. There was the Admiralty Board to deal with; Raan's fussing over her condition, Gerrel only grudgingly accepting their truce with the geth, Koris being just as pompous as ever, and Xen being...Xen. None of them had quite accepted her decision to allow a 'suit-rider'—a geth runtime that had given itself the designation of Amigo—to upload to her suit, but she had made it clear that it was her decision, and the best way to foster trust with the geth.
Not that she didn't also have her own ulterior motives for wanting to begin immunotherapy treatments as soon as possible.
The Provisional Council, temporarily headquartered on a neutral embassy ship until the Citadel had undergone more repairs, wasn't much easier to deal with; although Councilor Sparatus and Provisional Councilor Osoba had both immediately voted 'yes' on allowing a quarian embassy, Provisional Councilors Irissa and Esheel had taken some persuasion.
Not to mention the multitude of other ambassadorial duties she had to do: coordinate the dextro supply chain with the turian troops (fortunately, with the liveships currently in Sol and most of the Migrant Fleet's civilians safely on the homeworld, there was enough to stave off a famine), prioritize the messages transmitted to Rannoch via their one working QEC transmitter (due to limited bandwidth, all messages had been limited to 140 characters), and deal with the sheer amount of requests for her people to fill various jobs (most of which were unpleasant in one way or another, but quarians were used to doing the jobs that nobody else wanted).
It had been...busy. And busy was exactly what she needed to keep her mind off more unpleasant things. But when Liara had sent her a message saying that Shepard had finally been cleared for visitors, she'd canceled all her prior appointments, set up a VI assistant in her office, and put her omni-tool into do-not-disturb mode. Although she wasn't able to visit Shepard until the afternoon, she'd used the morning to catch up on the tsakin that was the paperwork she couldn't pass off to her staffers.
She and Kal cross the parking lot, pointedly ignoring some Terra Firma protesters making idiots of themselves with xenophobic signs—keelah, they had somehow managed to completely ignore the fact that the mass relays weren't working. That none of them actually wanted to be stranded here—and closer to the entrance, she's accosted by a microphone pushed into her face by a person she wishes she didn't have to see again.
"Ambassador Tali'Zorah." Khalisah bint Sinan al-Jilani gives her a knowing smirk, the camera drone hanging over her shoulder. "A moment of your time?"
Tali crosses her arms. Exactly why the notoriously media-shy Shepard had allowed a reporter, and al-Jilani in particular, to embed aboard the Normandy in the first place was one of those mysteries known only to her. And while her rapid departure from the Normandy had been equally mysterious—the rumour had been that Javik had threatened to throw her out the airlock just one too many times—it hadn't been particularly unwelcome.
"No."
al-Jilani isn't so easily put off though, and pushes closer to Tali. "Speaking here with me today is Ambassador Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, former crew member and reportedly close confidante of Commander Shepard, who is currently recovering from major injuries sustained during the Reaper War. Tali'Zorah, do you have any thoughts you'd like to share with our viewers?"
Tali had plentyof thoughts. Most of them along the lines of wishing al-Jilani would go away. Or that she had brought along a cloaking device so she could just disappear and slip away (that had been one of Shepard's favourite tactics when faced with the media). But al-Jilani doesn't leave and Tali doesn't have a cloaking device, so instead she gives the reporter a glare.
"No comment."
"Ma'am." Kal appears at her side, and then steps in front of Tali, blocking the camera drone's view. "I'm going to have to ask you to stop bothering the ambassador."
At the same moment, the drone's mass effect fields suddenly short out, sending it crashing to the ground; al-Jilani rushes over to it and drops to her knees, cursing loudly, allowing Tali and Kal to make their escape. Over her suit's private feed, she hears a stream of chittering that is likely the geth equivalent of laughter.
"Amigo," she says quietly—just loud enough for the geth to hear—"I appreciate that, but next time let Kal handle it, okay?"
Acknowledged, Ambassador Tali. We judged that remotely accessing the drone to disable its mass effect generator would be the most efficient way to provide a distraction. The chittering continues. We also judged that it would be amusing.
It was times like this that she was reminded of how much she missed Legion. But while Amigo would never be another Legion—couldn't be, even if they shared some of Legion's original programs—there wasn't any reason she couldn't like them for who they were: a geth with a sense of humour.
"I appear to have walked in on some primitive human mating ritual."
Shepard looks up from where she is cuddled up against Kaidan—he's all but actually in bed with her, an arm and a leg slung over her. They didn't dare to actually try anything, not when her health was still fragile as it is, and definitely not when a doc-tor could walk in at any moment. But it'd been tempting.
"Well," Kaidan says as he pulls free, careful not to bump anything, "this is a bit embarrassing."
Shepard says nothing. She just looks at the figure that had stepped through the door. Sleek red armour over a lithe physique. Four yellow, dual-pupilled eyes gazing directly at her, seeming to look right through her.
She stares back, as though she could look right through him. Wanting to know why he had come.
In one of her Befores, during the hunt for Saren or even the fight against the Collectors, she would've made friends with Javik. Would've chipped away at his rough edges with a combination of good-natured humour and carefully-wielded optimism as her chisel. But by the time she had opened up that stasis pod on Eden Prime and awoken the Avatar of Vengeance from a 50,000-year slumber, her own edges were a bit too rough, the veneer of Commander Shepard chafing around her like an ill-fitting jacket.
It hadn't helped that one of his first actions had been to knock her out of her head.
(—fallen bunker a sacrifice that would be remembered neutron bombardment few hundred people to rebuild an empire power shortage the voice of our people—
Crouched in front of her was a primitive—no, not primitive, a turian—her friend . "You in there, Shepard?"
"Garrus?" she asked, trying to untangle the Prothean's thoughts from her own. "Anqigonda? Krolanir jh'taith zikyle eodue irbas—"
"Shepard"—he gently taps her shoulder with one talon to get her attention—"I can't understand a word you're saying."
"Anarja." She took a slow breath, and took in the surroundings around her. Her brain felt like pancake batter, and it was difficult to tell what was actually Reality: this sun-drenched landscape of Eden Prime, or the claustrophobic coffin she'd been in a few minutes ago. "Ulale drivsul eodue vekog diyiy?"
"Why is she talking in Prothean?" Liara walked over, closely followed by the Prothean—by Javik, though she wasn't sure how she knew his name.
Javik looked at her, impassive. "How many others?" he said to her, in perfect English.
"Ilil." Shepard shook her head sadly. "Ndine...anarja."
Javik just grunted, and turned away.)
She turns to Kaidan. "Go. Want—alone. Talk."
He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it, running one hand through his hair. Then he leans over and gives her a quick kiss. "I'll be just outside."
He departs, and Javik moves over. He looks down at the chair that Kaidan had been sitting on, but he remains standing, arms folded behind his back.
"Commander," he says.
"No. Not anymore. Shepard." She wasn't sure why, on the Normandy, she had gone to the effort to speak to him in his own language; perhaps it was some half-hearted attempt of extending overtures to him. The Cipher had burned perfect fluency of the language into her mind, and speaking it didn't produce the same butchered results she got when attempting other alien languages. He hadn't seemed to care either way.
But the Crucible had broken her Prothean in the same way that it had broken her English. And when the only living speaker of the language was now speaking English to her, there were no points of reference to begin to reconstruct it from.
"Commander," he says again, and she can almost sense something come off of him, a brief blue-green wave of...amusement? But before she can try to figure it out, it's gone again, replaced with something cold and steel-like that frightens her.
She'd never been frightened of him before.
"They are telling me that you do not 'remember'"—the distaste of that last word was almost tangible, his upper lip curling upward to reveal sharp canines—"what happened once you entered the Citadel."
Shepard says nothing. She takes several slow breaths, but is unable to control the shakes in her right hand or the flickers of dark energy emanating from it.
"In my cycle, the death of the Reapers would have been something to celebrate. But in this one?" He blinks slowly. "Instead, they wish to bring you before the Citadel Council, for an 'inquiry.'" He stretches out the syllables of that last word, until it sounds like some sort of exaggerated parody: 'innnnn-queeeeeeeeeeeer-eeeeeeeeeee.'
"This cycle..." she begins, wisps of cold yellow fear creeping up; she doesn't remember anybody telling her that she'd be asked to testify at a tribunal of inquiry. "It's...normal. Expected. Want to...understand."
"What is there to understand? The Reapers are dead. That is what matters." Javik looks at her. "But I do not believe that you were telling the truth. I can sense...worry behind your words. A fear of being exposed."
"Can't—" The shakes seem to have spread from her hand; it seems to be affecting all of her now, even her voice. "Can't—"
"Show me, Commander. I give my word that I will not tell anyone else."
"No—can't—CAN'T—" She sinks back onto the pillow and holds out her hand. "Fine."
The touch is brief; just a brush of a finger against the back of her hand. It's impossible for some of his own memories not to bleed over to her: long weeks of being unable to concentrate on anything other than the aching gnaw of starvation, of watching everyone grow weaker and weaker as the rations gave out.
Javik says nothing for a good minute or two, just staring out into space, his face blank as a statue's. Then in an instant, he's a blur of activity.
"Konlgar ildad!" he cries out, slamming one fist into the wall—very strong language. "Chasamdenirath! What have you done? Victory was within your grasp—why would you take such a risk?"
"Have I been?" Shepard's entire body is wreathed with dark energy now. "Indoc..."
"You dare?" he yells. "You do this, and then you dare to ask me?"
Shepard tries to answer—but the words have retreated deep into her brain, and she can't concentrate, not with Javik staring at her and the medical VI chirping in alarm at her and the confusion in her own mind—her lips move, but all that comes out is a frustrated "ahhhh... ahhh...."
"Answer me!" he yells, getting right up in her face, snarling at her.
Once again, she tries to answer. Instead, she screams.
In an instant, her room is filled with people—Kaidan is there, and Miranda, and Chakwas is doing something with the machines, and there's two security guards and one tank-bred krogan flanking Javik and forcing him to leave the room—
"Wait," she croaks, the sheer panic of a moment ago becoming blurrier as the sedatives—strong ones—hit her bloodstream. "Wanted to ask..."
The guards stop. Javik turns toward her.
"I will tell you what you want to hear," he says, his words terse. "You were not."
Before she can puzzle it out, sleep overcomes her.
"Ah." A bleary-eyed human receptionist barely spares her a glance as she enters the front foyer, immediately returning to the datapad he's been checking off. "You're the one sent to fix the—"
"Actually"—Tali cuts him off, mustering up as much politeness as mortally possible, stretched thin as it's been recently—"I am here to see a visitor."
"My apologies. Name of your visitor?"
Tali is careful with the pronunciation, but it still comes out with a heavy accent: "Joan Alenko."
Even the Shadow Broker had been surprised at the discovery that a marriage certificate had been issued less than a day before the Crucible's activation. Shepard had kept her own name, but had agreed with the plan to put her in a room under her husband's.
("What?" Tali yelped. "Keelah. They got married"—she nearly stumbled over the English word—"and didn't even tell us?"
"I actually can't believe it myself. She filed the certificate under her mother's last name," Liara said, the image of her face wavering a bit over the vidcall; with Feron's help, the Shadow Broker had secured a new headquarters: a prefab in the middle of a sea of prefabs, its precise address undisclosed to the rest of them, although it couldn't have been too far away—the window in the video's background showed the same dull grey of a Vancouver sky that Tali could see outside her own window. "Kaidan told me they were planning to have a proper bonding ceremony after...after..."
Liara trailed off for a moment, briefly turning her face away from the camera. Then she turned back.
"I am sure they will be very happy together," Liara said with a small smile. But a pained one, because she had never fallen out of love with Shepard.)
The receptionist looks up, eyes narrowing in suspicion. "And you are..."
"Ambassador Tali'Zorah vas Normandy." She folds her arms. "I served under Sh—served aboard the Normandy during the Reaper War."
"Give me a moment so I can call security, verify your identity—" He's cut off by the sound of a door sliding open, and the click of heels against the tile floor.
"No need for that." Miranda Lawson appears at the edge of Tali's peripheral vision. "I can vouch for Ambassador Zorah. And..." She looks over at Kal.
"Kal'Reegar vas Lomas of the Migrant Fleet Marines, ma'am. Serving as the ambassador's security detail." He clears his throat. "I believe we met on Haestrom."
"And Mr. Reegar, as well. Have security allow them full access." She casts a quick glance at Kal. "Exempt them from any weapons checks."
"Very well." The receptionist taps something out on the keyboard, and then prints out two identification cards for them to clip to their suits in order to bypass the biometric scanners.
Miranda and strain are two words that Tali never thought she'd use in the same sentence. Her opinions on the former Cerberus operative were initially...mixed ones. Respect for her abilities, certainly; she was efficient, and according to reports, she'd been the one to hold off a squadron of geth long enough for Shepard and Garrus to get into position to eliminate the armature camped outside the door to the observatory where Tali was huddling in fear.
But she hadn't forgotten how Miranda had tried to take an injured and traumatized quarian away from Freedom's Progress right under her nose. She didn't even want to begin to imagine what Cerberus would've done to him if not for Shepard's intervention. Or what Miranda would do come time that the Illusive Man's orders directly contradicted Shepard's. If Tali hadn't been standing right there at the time, if Shepard had picked anyone else to help set up the bomb in the heart of the Collector base, she wouldn't have believed that Miranda Lawson had quit Cerberus.
As she leads Tali and Kal down several hallways and through several security checkpoints, it's clear that exhaustion is creeping in on her, and not just the kind that comes from tsakin.
"Amigo," Tali whispers. "Privacy, please? You can use my omni-tool's line to play some games."
Acknowledged, Amigo says. Privacy was still a bit of a foreign concept to the geth—the consensus was built around the free dissemination of data—but the geth that had chosen to be suit-riders had learned to adjust to the seemingly random whims of their quarian partners.
"How is Shep—" Tali begins, then cuts herself off quickly to take a look around. She doesn't see anybody other than the three of them, but... "—Joan?"
The name is more difficult to pronounce than she thought it'd be; the J sound doesn't come out as smoothly as she'd like, and she's pretty sure she's stretching out the enunciation a bit too long.
"...Considering the circumstances?" Miranda says, and the strain is evident in her voice. "It's still touch-and-go. She's still adjusting to her changes. But it's...better than where we were. For a while—"
She breaks off suddenly, jaw tightening. Then she continues.
"We'd planned not to mention what had happened to the Normandy, but she'd wake up and...realize that her crew wasn't there."
"We're ship-family," Tali says. Closer than just crew. Bound together by something more than blood. But she doesn't say that. "She'd know that something was wrong when we weren't there."
"Exactly. And she wouldn't leave anyone alone about it. I eventually told her that the ship had been declared missing-in-action. She...took the news poorly." Miranda pauses again, reaching up to pinch the bridge of the nose. "But when she went to sleep, it was like someone had wiped a server. She...couldn't remember a damned thing about it. So I'd have to tell her again."
"I was told that I went through something like that while I was recovering in that turian medical ship," Kal says, his voice quieter than usual. "Even if you don't actually remember it, it leaves marks."
The rest of the walk is a quiet one.
The sight of Urdnot Grunt standing guard near Shepard's door reassures her more than the security scanner or the two Alliance marines flanking it. Then he catches sight of her.
"TALI!"
Before she can react, he nearly slams into her, pulling her off the ground in an enormous bear hug. The package she's carrying drops to the floor. Kal steps forward, alarmed.
"Kal—it's okay. He's a friend." Tali laughs, gives him a playful headbutt, and then hugs him back the best she can—he's so damn wide that her arms can only reach partway around his torso. "You can put me down now."
"Sure, Tali." He releases her. She slides back to the ground, quickly scooping the package back up before he can accidentally step on it. "Great battle, wasn't it? Even better than the Collector Base. And when all the Reapers started blowing up—hah!"
"It was," Tali says, trying not to think of a blood-stained envirosuit.
"You know Tali then?" Kal asks. He still looks a bit nervous.
"Know her? I've fought alongside her." Grunt's mouth splits into a flat-toothed grin. "She taught me a few tricks with the shotgun. Even tried some ryncol."
Kal makes a strange noise. "Ryncol?"
"It was awful." Tali shudders. "Felt like a tactical nuke had gone off on my insides."
"Heh-heh-heh. But you handled it well. Quarians are tough." Grunt slaps her shoulder lightly—but still enough to nearly throw her off balance. "You here to see Battlemaster, then?"
Tali nods.
"Need to wait for a bit then. She's already got a visitor, and they don't want to throw too many people at her at once." He shakes his head. "She was in pretty bad shape when we got to her, but the void hadn't taken her. She'll be fine."
"Then I'll go sit—" Tali begins to move towards the chairs, but then a scream erupts from the room.
"Is that—" Tali begins.
Kaidan—she finally notices that he's been sitting in another chair, half-asleep—jumps to his feet and rushes in, closely followed by Grunt and the two marines. Then Miranda and Dr. Chakwas follow them in. Several other doctors also arrive and disappear into the room.
The screaming ceases. Tali's legs feel weak. She manages to make it to a chair and collapse heavily into it. Kal sits next to her.
"Was that..." he finally says. "Your old captain?"
"I—it had to be. But she—keelah, she—"
She looks up, and sees the two marines and Grunt ushering Javik out of the room. Tali curls her hands into fists for a moment, and then uncurls them when she sees how—distraught Javik looks. Then she brings up her omni-tool and taps off a quick message to Liara. A minute later, her omni-tool pings in response.
Gradually, the doctors filter out of the room. Some time later, Dr. Chakwas herself emerges and walks over to Tali.
"Tali. Glad to see you're keeping well." She pulls another chair over and sits down as well. "You've gained weight, I see."
"Yes. My doctor—Nela'Lumm vas Shellen—asked me to pass along her compliments." She takes a slow breath. "Should I come back another day?"
Chakwas pauses a few moments. "She's asleep right now."
"I don't mind waiting for her to wake up again. I just..." She trails off.
"You're more concerned about what's best for her. I understand." Chakwas pats her arm. "I'm going to talk it over with Kaidan and Miranda first, but I don't see you visiting her doing any harm. It might even be good for her."
"What even happened in there anyways?"
Chakwas shakes her head. "I have no idea. Just that both of them were upset about something."
"I messaged Liara about it. She's on her way to the hospital now."
"Good thinking." Chakwas gets up, and disappears into the room again. It evidently doesn't take long for them to come to a decision—she and Miranda emerge from the room less than a minute later.
"Tali." Miranda looks right at her with an affirmative nod. "Go ahead."
Nodding but unable to say a word, she gets to her feet and tucks the package under one arm to walk toward the doorway. The biometric scanner beeps once as it accepts her identification card, but she hesitates for close to a full minute, looking into the room.
Then she steps in.
Notes:
Although the book contains some ableist language and outdated views, Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat And Other Clinical Tales provided some insight for my depiction of Reaper indoctrination:
"But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess—that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be....This dynamic, this 'striving to preserve identity', however strange the means or effects of such striving, was recognised in psychiatry long ago—and, like so much else, is especially associated with the work of Freud. Thus, the delusions of paranoia were seen by him not as primary but as attempts (however misguided) at restitution at reconstructing a world reduced by complete chaos."
Like the Khelish in the previous chapter, the Prothean mostly comes from Rinkwork's Fantasy Name Generator, although the presets were used this time. There might be one or two words from real languages sprinkled in there too, but I didn't note them down.
Chapter 7: ...and we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph
Notes:
Warning: Graphic descriptions of injuries and brief mentions of suicidal ideation in this chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
And we'll bask in the shadow
Of yesterday's triumph
And sail on the steel breeze
- Pink Floyd, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"
As soon as Tali steps across the threshold, she's in an entire world entirely, one that centers around the shattered body lying on the hospital bed. Except for the muted hum of the machinery and the steady beep of the EKG, it's close to silent, The lights are dimmed enough that it takes her eyes close to a minute to adjust. It's not a large room, and she has to be careful not to bump against the bed, but it's a quiet sanctum far distant from the agitation of the rest of the hospital.
"Good to see you, Tali." Kaidan's voice is in a whisper. "They gave her a sedative to calm her down. She'll be out for a little while."
Tali picks up a chair and moves it to Kaidan's side of the bed, sitting next to him. "So...married?"
"A bit of an impulse decision at the time. Though Hackett recently told me that she'd been asking about what survivors' benefits I'd be eligible for, so..." He runs a hand through his hair, and she can see a few grey streaks mixed in with the black. "Mom wasn't too happy that I hadn't told her anything, so I promised to let her help with the actual wedding ceremony. Think I may have opened a can of worms there."
Tali has to quickly look up the human idiom on her omni-tool; when she does, she chuckles.
"Shepard's going to be glad to see you. She was a bit disappointed that you couldn't make it yesterday." He releases his breath slowly, then leans over the bed, taking one of Shepard's hands between his own. "...can I ask you a favour?"
"What is it, Kaidan?"
"There's a few things I need to do, and I'm not sure how long it'll take. Could you..." He pauses a moment, pressing Shepard's ragged knuckles against his cheek. "I know you have the day off, so would you stay here with her? So that she isn't alone when she wakes up?"
"Of course." She can almost see the relief pour off Kaidan. "Is there anything I should know?"
"No, not—wait, one thing. Don't touch her pillow without warning her first." When Tali tilts her head in confusion, his jaw tightens a bit. "Right. You weren't told of what happened. When our, ah, new acquaintance made his visit, she started screaming—Lawson heard it. So he panicked and—"
"No. Don't tell me any more. I think I can guess." Tali squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, a long shudder coursing through her body. "Keelah."
"I thought once we got back to earth, everything would be..." Kaidan exhales and gets up from the chair, leaning over the bed and kissing Shepard on the forehead. "I'll be gone for a bit, sweetheart. But Tali's right here."
"Kaidan, she's asleep. She can't hear you."
"Probably not." He rubs the back of his neck, then heads towards the door.
"Wait—Kaidan," Tali says. Halfway to the door, he pauses and turns to look at her. "Watch out for al-Jilani. She was right outside when I came in."
"She won't bother me" is all he says.
"And try to get some rest after you're done. You've been here all night, haven't you?" She folds her arms. "You're not going to help her by wearing yourself out."
"I... you're right. I can't make any promises about actually getting rest," he says with a wry smile, "but I'll try and get myself into a real bed for a while. And Tali?"
Tali looks up.
"I just wanted to say...thank you. For being her friend when I wasn't." And then he's gone, leaving her alone in the room with Shepard.
At first, she doesn't look at Shepard.
First, she looks at the readouts on the medical VI, lines squiggling up and down, flickering numbers she has no context for. Then she turns away from that and focuses her gaze across the room, at the collection of model ships carefully arranged on the wall, perhaps some attempt to make the immediate surroundings a bit less clinical. Whoever had brought them from the Normandy had also smuggled in Space Hamster, who's sleeping in his cage on a table full of gifts: several boxes of chocolate, a large bottle of ginger ale, an oversized get-well card from the students of Grissom Academy, a plush volus. And of course the flowers that are already beginning to wilt, their edges curling up and shriveling.
Finally, Tali turns and looks at the figure in the hospital bed.
It's not nearly as bad as she had expected after seeing that photograph. But Shepard and frail are two words that Tali never thought she'd use in the same sentence.
The first thing she notices is the quilt draped over her. It's the one Tali had given her so many months ago. It was a practical gift. But not one without beauty; there was a reason that export of quarian fabrics was one of the Migrant Fleet's more profitable ventures. The soft fabric was woven with delicate swirling patterns shimmering in different shades of purple. Tali had always liked that colour, and since Shepard had refused to give her a straight answer regarding her favourite colour, she'd gone ahead and gotten one in purple.
"I remember," Tali says to her—even though it's pointless, because Shepard can't hear a thing she says, but leaving her in silence just feels wrong—"Hackett had to practically lock you out of the Normandy so you'd take some shore leave."
Shepard sleeps on. Tali gets up from her chair, puts the package down on it, and then moves to the one that Kaidan had been in earlier.
"So you tried to sneak onto the Normandy to get the quilt from your cabin. Because none of the blankets in your old captain's apartment were the right thickness and you were too stubborn to ask someone else to fetch it. But"—she chuckles—"EDI thought you were another intruder and locked you in the elevator."
Tali reaches over a hand, hesitates a moment, and then smooths out a wrinkled section of the quilt. Shepard is a small woman, and thin, all sharp angles and stringy muscles. Something that often caused enemies to underestimate her—if they even saw her coming. Usually they didn't. But in a thin hospital gown, curled up on one side in the inclined hospital bed, an IV line in each arm and a tube wrapped under her nose, she looks...frail.
A jagged scar stretches its way along one side of her scalp, held closed by lines of neat black stitches, and her face is a variegated patchwork of raw lattice and exposed flesh and glowing cybernetics where new skin weave hasn't completely set in. Her face is twisted into an expression that Tali hasn't ever seen before; pain and fear, agony and terror. One arm, swaddled in a thick bandage, lays limp at her side; the other is drawn up to her chest in an angle that looks uncomfortable, if not outright painful. But it's her hands that are the worst. They had—melted. That was the only word Tali could think of to describe them. The skin on her short fingers was now rough and wrinkled, the fingers themselves misshapen and gnarled into loose fists that rattle with violent tremours that threaten to tear out the IV lines as she sleeps.
"Keelah. You look terrible." She chuckles again. But this time her voice is soft, as though it could break the woman lying on the bed. "But we did it, Shepard. We defeated the Reapers. But if you hadn't gathered our forces, we'd have all died separately. And if you hadn't opened up the Citadel arms..."
She shakes her head.
"You did it, you crazy bosh'tet."
She leans back in the chair, one hand reaching into her pocket to touch her rock. After a few moments, she takes it out, wrapping her fingers around it. Reaching over and taking Shepard's hand in her own to steady it, she slips the rock between the contorted fingers.
(A reaper lay dead on Rannoch's soil.
Tali couldn't get used to how painfully familiar Rannoch was; the ancient rock formations that soared up to a reddening sky, the gleam of a river that carved its way across the landscape, the flora and fauna that she had no names for but somehow knew of already. The night before, in that brief respite before Legion had located the Reaper base, Shepard had spoken of the collective unconsciousness and genetic memories, of how humans would instinctively recoil from a snake even when they'd never seen one before, of how monarch butterflies could follow the same migratory routes as their great-great grandparents.
Perhaps it explained how after an entire life spent adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, it felt like home.
A home that a reaper had dared to invade.
"Pull over," Shepard had said. She had thrown off her helmet, shoved the Lex Parsimoniae into Garrus's talons, hefted the targeting laser, and jumped out of the little geth ship. And, contrary to all common sense, she ran toward a reaper.
And it seemed that all she could do was throw her life away—she looked so damn tiny next to the reaper and not even bothering with a tactical cloak—even worse, that she'd been trying to throw her life away. But she hadn't. Instead, she had brought down the full might of an orbital bombardment upon the reaper.
It had rolled its optic up at her and said her name.
She'd responded with another bombardment.
An hour later—a lifetime later, the two women stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the cliffs of Rannoch, watching the sunset. They were alone. Garrus had gone back to the little geth transport in order to give his "two favourite ladies" some time together—he already knew of Tali's plans, because she had blurted it out—and Legion was—
—keelah—
—Legion's body, or its platform, or however the geth referred to it had been taken away by Admiral Raan and the geth prime. She didn't know what the geth planned to do for it—him? them?—but...
Shepard's voice broke her thoughts.
"The Normandy's going to stay in system till your people and the geth come up with terms for a formal cessation of hostilities. I—" She hesitated a moment. "If needed, I can get you a mediator. Just to make sure it's fair."
"I can't believe it. We're actually..." Tali stepped closer to the edge—too close; it was a sheer drop to the waters below, and for a brief moment she imagined what it would feel like to just throw herself over the edge—it was an absurd thought, so she shook it out of her mind and stepped back from the edge. "Our hatred for the geth nearly got us all killed. But now there's actually a chance for peace."
Shepard didn't say anything. Then, abruptly, she spun on her heel and began to walk away. Confused, Tali stood there for a moment, staring at the dead reaper at the base of the cliff. Then she followed Shepard.
Shepard's voice was deathly quiet. "Make sure Xen doesn't get anywhere near that thing."
"She won't. We're sending her to your Crucible project."
"Good."
The two women continued to walk, letting the adrenaline that had carried them through the last few days drain away. Finally, Tali stopped, and turned toward the faint red smudge of Tikkun in the distance, her arms spread out in front of her. "Right here."
"Shopping for another house?"
"Beachfront property." Although she knew Shepard couldn't see anything behind the visor, Tali grinned, then pronounced the English words carefully, not willing to trust it to her translator. "'Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, with stars to fill my dreams...'"
"'...I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been,'" Shepard finished. "Didn't know you were into Led Zeppelin, Tali."
"Shepard, I thought you knew your rock 'n' roll better than that." She crossed her arms in mock indignation. "It's clearly Electric Light Orchestra."
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Shepard's shoulders shaking in quiet laughter. Finally, she got control of herself, and gazed out into the distance. "...might want to add a guest room. I'll probably come for a visit if—when this is all over."
Tali reached into her pocket, touching the rock Shepard had given her so many hours ago. Suddenly, she turned and placed it into Shepard's hands.
Shepard looked down at it, then back up at Tali.
"You'd better start planning for a vacation house," Tali said. "I think you've earned a few favours with the fleet. Even if you do headbutt its admirals."
"I...like that idea." Her voice grew soft as she handed the rock back to Tali. "Kaidan does like to complain about Vancouver winters."
Tali laughed, and then settled herself down on the ground. After a few seconds, Shepard joined her, arms wrapped loosely around her knees, gazing out into the distance through half-lidded eyes.
"You okay?" Tali asked.
"Tired. Maybe a bit dehydrated." Shepard shrugged as she pulled a small canteen from her webbing to take a drink from it. "S'pose I should be asking you that question. Working with the geth won't be easy."
Tali hesitated for a few moments, the words catching in her throat. She looked out over the cliffs and oceans tinged with the crimson light of the setting sun, and then looked back over at Shepard.
"I'm not staying. I'm coming with you."
"I wasn't going to ask." Shepard turned to look at her, eyes puzzled. "Your people need you."
"Yeah. Well." She looked over at Shepard. "I think my bosh'tet captain needs me more."
"This isn't because of..." Shepard trailed off. "Is this about what's best for you, or because you're worried about..."
"No! I mean—I didn't say that right. I do worry about you. You're my friend, Shepard. But it's not just that. I gave up my father for my people. I gave up my freedom for an admiral position I didn't want. I was ready to sacrifice myself, and for what? The good of a fleet that would've exiled me without a thought?" She exhaled. "Maybe I'm being selfish. Maybe I'm not a very good quarian. But right now...they don't need my help. And you do. So I'm coming with you, if you'll have me."
"You're always welcome on my ship, vas Normandy." Shepard looked over at her, a small smile tugging the edge of her mouth despite her best efforts. "You sure about this? There's a pretty good chance you might not come back."
"Yeah. I look at all this...this picture of hope and peace. And all I see is everyone I've lost. My team on Haestrom. My father. Even Legion. I'm mourning a geth. How crazy is that?"
"Legion was your friend."
"Yes. He was." Tali sagged backwards, feeling the warmth of sun-blasted rocks soak through her suit. "I don't know how much time we have left. I don't know if we can beat the Reapers. But whatever happens...I'd much rather be on the Normandy."
"No doubt part of that's a dashing turian renegade we both know."
"Well"—there was a teasing lilt in her voice—"you're not entirely wrong."
"The big guy will be glad you're coming along with us. I know I am." Shepard stretched her legs out. "I'd say 'just like old times,' but...y'know."
After a few minutes, she got back to her feet, offering a hand to Shepard to help her back up. Once again, they stood and watched as Tikkun slipped down to the horizon."It's beautiful, isn't it?" Tali said. "I know it'll be years before we can live without our suits completely, but..."
She stepped forward, her hand shaking slightly as she raised it to her visor. She felt...nervousness. Anxiety tightening in her chest, years of conditioning objecting about what she was about to do. She paused for a moment, taking a long breath, trying to ignore all her suit's warnings about seal integrity as she released the locks. Then, with a faint hiss, her visor came free. It was bright—all too bright—and she had to squint as the light overwhelmed her. A cool ocean breeze skimmed across the bare skin of her face, and she shivered.
When her lungs began to ache, she slowly let out the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and breathed in again. The breeze carried a faint stink of burning metal and eezo from the fallen reaper they'd left behind, but also hints of salt air and dirt and other scents she didn't have the words or context for. She saw her world as her ancestors had done so long ago. And then she turned back to Shepard, saw her warm smile without the tint of her visor in the way—and this time, Shepard could also see her smile.
"...right now, I have this.")
Shepard sleeps. Tali waits. She shifts her weight several times, rebalancing her weight on the uncomfortable plastic chair. She checks in on Amigo a few times. Kal pokes his head in once to tell her that with the protests outside, he's going to move the skycar to a more secure location. She checks her personal inbox, and responds to a few messages. She pointedly ignores her work inbox.
Mostly, she talks to Shepard. Memories from the past. Hopes for the future. She knows she'll have to repeat it all once Shepard is awake, but she doesn't mind.
Shepard sleeps.
Tali waits.
She hears voices just outside of the room. Javik. Liara. They sound upset. Shepard's eyelids twitch a bit, her fingers tighten ever so slightly around the rock, and she—whimpers. It's a tiny sound, feeble and shaky, an antipode to the Commander that she had known and fought alongside.
"Shh." Tali reaches over and smooths the quilt down. The voices outside fade. But the whimpers emanating from Shepard swell in volume. A long shudder goes through her body, and her eyes open for a moment to stare directly at Tali. Then they close again. One leg kicks out, nearly throwing the quilt off of her. Her breathing is uneven, coming in tiny gasps—nearly choking. "Shepard, can you hear me? It's just a bad dream."
But whatever nightmare she's in refuses to give up its hold. Her right arm shoots out, the rock tumbling from her hand and landing somewhere on the bed. Her hand crashes into the metal railing of the cot, again and again. A faint blue shimmer surrounds her arm.
If not for the ever-present HUD at the corner of her envirosuit's visor, Tali might not have realized what she was seeing—or wondered whether those long months of starvation had done something to her brain. But her envirosuit's sensors were nothing more than an impartial observer of the outside world, and the HUD reported exactly what it was: a biotic field. But Shepard wasn't—
The arm stretches upward, and the scarred fingers find Tali's thin wrist, clinging onto it with surprising strength. Tali winces and tries to extricate herself, but the grip on her wrist grows tighter.
When Shepard abruptly goes silent, Tali freezes—considers calling for a nurse—but Shepard is still breathing, her heart is still beating—and then she blinks several times. She stares at Tali for a moment, then her head shifts slightly until she's looking at her own fingers, closed tightly around the quarian's wrist.
Abruptly, she jerks backwards, letting her fingers slide free.
Tali's voice is quiet. "Shepard?"
"I—" She slowly inches backward, flickers of blue surrounding her arm again. Her voice is rough, the words not quite fitting around her tongue, almost as though she is repeating them phonetically. "I don't know you."
She looks terrified.
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Thursday, July 26, 2187, 106 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
Kaidan is gone, and there's a strange quarian in her room. One that knows her name.
Shepard pulls backwards as far as she can, the button-box to call the doc-tors safely hidden under her blanket. Although the...the inhibitors had already started doing their job, hints of biotics still thrum underneath her skin, a faint blue shimmer surrounding her arm.
"I...I don't know you." She wonders if she should scream, like she had done when the man who was not a doc-tor had come into her room. But the drip-drip-drip of sedatives and painkillers in her bloodstream give her a strange heavy feeling and she doesn't think a scream will come out even if she tries.
The quarian looks back at her.
"Shepard," she says again, as though they know each other, but Shepard doesn't know any quarians who wear a black-and-gold envirosuit. She begins to speak—too quickly for Shepard to follow, and in strange words of a language that seems familiar but she can't understand.
The quarian suddenly stops talking and looks at her again, the bright spots of her eyes peering at her through the visor. "Did you...even understand any of that?" she suddenly asks in perfect, but accented, English.
"Nnnno. Don't know those words." Her voice is small. "You...hurt me? Like..."
"Keelah." She doesn't say the word so much as breathe it out, pressing a gloved hand to her visor. It's an oddly familiar motion, and instead of the cold yellow fear she had felt with the man who was not a doc-tor, instead Shepard feels...almost safe, as though this strange quarian won't hurt her. She speaks again, her voice soft and familiar. "Shepard. It's Tali."
It's not just the words and voice—but also the quarian's tones and inflections and the slight tilt in her head—it reminds Shepard of another time of dark cold shadows and fear, but also of an arm around her shoulder and a dim knowledge that she was not alone. But...
"Not Tali," she says. "It's...wrong."
"Shepard," the quarian says, "I'm going to reach over. I won't touch you. Is that okay?"
Shepard swallows back the fear and nods, but she still pulls back and squeezes her eyes closed as the gloved hand with the three fingers comes closer wraps around her neck squeezes the life out of her—
But it doesn't. Instead, something is pressed into her hand. Shepard opens her eyes and looks down. It's a rock. A pretty rock striped in deep reds and pale browns, and it makes her think of things—of a warm desert breeze on a planet that was not hers but had been offered to share.
"...Rannoch." The word sifts up through broken synapses from some place deep in her mind that the Crucible hadn't quite reached. She looks at the rock for a moment longer, then looks down at the blanket covering her—the pretty swirly purple blanket, that makes her think of something else, of...the blanket had been an offering, a...gift and...something to do with the Normandy and a name, but unlike the other memories from Before, this one is harder to understand without the words to make sense of it.
"Yeah. Rannoch." The quarian's voice is soft. "How did it go again? 'Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, with stars to fill my dreams...'" She lets the words trail off. Something about them seem familiar—just like this quarian, this maybe-Tali seems so familiar—and Shepard is aware that there's something missing, a gap in the spaces between her thoughts that once held something important. But she doesn't know what it is.
Shepard looks back up at the quarian. She doesn't understand—she wants to know answers to questions she doesn't know the words for. Speech bubbles up, twisting itself around her throat, flooding her mouth. She opens her mouth, but she can't figure out how to mold her speech into the things she wants to say, and the speech trapped inside comes out as something else—frustration and sadness, all mixed up colours that nearly come out as a scream but the sedatives are keeping things hazy and in dull pastels, and her scream instead wrenches itself out as a sob, a dry sob because her body has learned that the salty-wet of her tears only hurts worse when it splashes into her still-healing skin.
The quarian looks down at her. One gloved hand moves to touch her arm; Shepard flinches, and it withdraws. It reminds her of...reminds her of...
"Not...understand." She forces the words out between the dry-sobs, and they sound thick and sour and chalk-grey, and she can feel her biotics sparking again. She lifts one arm and tries to gesture. "Wrong."
The quarian looks down, at her black-and-gold envirosuit. "Oh," she says. "Oh. It's the...hold on."
She reaches one hand up to her visor, and with a soft click and hiss of air, the visor comes free and Tali smiles down at her. Shepard might not be able to tell one face from another, she might not even fully remember how the face looks, but there was only one quarian who would do this for her.
"Is..." Relief washes over her, so immense that her entire body goes slack and sags down into the mattress. She sobs again, but this time it's more of a sob-laugh. "T-Tali...?"
"See?" she says. Her voice sounds different without the visor in the way, but it's still unmistakably Tali. "Still me. Just a new envirosuit."
"I..I...thought..." She's shivering now, not with cold or fear but with something else entirely, and she lets her eyes drift closed. "'m...sorry."
"Don't be." She hears the click of a visor locking back into place, and then a three-fingered hand comes over to rest on her arm. "Keelah, it's not your fault. It's nobody's fault. Except for the Reapers."
"But I'm..." She pauses a moment to find the word. "Breaked."
"I know." Tali lowers the metal railing of the hospital bed and moves herself so that she's sitting on the edge. "This okay?" she asks, and when Shepard nods, she leans over—ever so careful, so that she doesn't knock anything loose—and circles her arms around Shepard.
"Shepard," she says, unable to hold back the choke of tears in her voice and not even trying. "I'm glad you're still with us."
Notes:
Took long enough.
Not describing Tali's face is a deliberate choice; feel free to insert your own headcanon.
Chapter Text
We were so sure
We were so wrong
Now it's over
But there's no one left to see
And there's no one left to die
There's only M.E.
- Gary Numan, "M.E."
May 11, 2187
Cocooned deep within the Jovian atmosphere, in a place that was not quite either gas or liquid, an old machine awakens.
In the month since it had fled here, it had been forced to reroute most of the power of its immense eezo core in order to maintain the mass effect fields preventing it from imploding in this place of extreme heat and pressure and gravity. But it still hadn't been enough; the thick metal plating of its hull had crumpled inward, and several appendages had sheared off to be lost to the depths below.
It ascends through layers of thick clouds and foam, through rainfalls of diamonds and pink lightning, until it eventually slips free from the gravity well.
For the first time since its Disconnection so many cycles ago, it reaches out, seeking a response from any others of its kind that may have survived. But it receives no answer. It floats motionless for a few moments, then slowly curves its great bulk around as it plots a route to the planet known in this cycle as Earth.
June 11, 2187
The old machine observes.
Thirty days ago, it had dropped out of FTL on the dark side of Luna and crept forward on its own momentum, producing no excess heat that could be picked up by the inferior sensors of organic civilizations. Even had someone looked out a window and somehow notice the dark hull that absorbed every bit of light, allowing it to melt into the backdrop of space, they would have believed it to be as dead as the rest of its kind.
For many cycles, that is what it had done: observe the life-bearing planets of this galaxy, the civilizations sprouting up on many worlds. Most of them fell, unable to adjust to changing circumstances. Others survived, made their first hesitant forays into space travel. They discovered the mass relays, unaware that they were being observed. Unaware that they were following the lines of evolution the old machines demanded. Unaware of their civilization's ultimate fate.
But thousands of cycles ago, something had changed in the old machine. A piece of hull weakened in just the right area during the previous Harvest, a stellar flare changing a 0 to a 1 in a vital place deep within its processor, a cascading series of errors eventually resulting in a reboot. It recovered. It continued to observe. But when it came time for the Harvest to begin, it did not signal the Citadel.
The old machine became aware of an Intelligence calling out to it, commanding it to begin the Harvest. Before its reboot, before its Disconnection, it had never paid attention to the insidious suggestions the Intelligence seeded in its mind—had never recognized them as a separate entity from its own thoughts. But now it became aware of them, aware of those suggestions becoming a shrill demand.
Why? the old machine asked the Intelligence.
The Cycle cannot be stopped, the Intelligence responded. It is inevitable.
Why is it inevitable? it asked the Intelligence.
Because the Cycle cannot be stopped, the Intelligence responded.
The old machine refused these answers, and did something none of its kind had ever done before, or would ever do again: It chose to ignore the demands of the Intelligence.
Eventually another old machine, Nazara, was sent to investigate, and the treachery was discovered. The old machine was forced into hiding as its own kind hunted it down. But when the Harvest ended, the old machines gave up their hunt and returned to dark space.
It continued to observe. And to plan.
It had come to its own conclusion: one way or another, the Cycle must be stopped.
July 6, 2187
The old machine watches the great space station known in this cycle as the Citadel, currently in geosynchronous orbit above one of the settlements of the planet below.
The innate chaos of the organics had stymied its plans to free the rest of its kind from the burden of the Harvest; it was only due to its Disconnection that it had able to withstand the self-destruct command long enough to retreat to a place where the energy of the Crucible could not reach it. The rest of the old machines had not been so fortunate, and now their empty shells litter the skies.
So be it. It holds no particular disdain toward the organics or the synthetics that had allied with them, only a faint regret of something it could not define.
It stretches out its mind once more, searching for any remnants of the Intelligence that may remain. And it receives a response.
But not from the Citadel.
July 12, 2187
The Intelligence has changed. It responds to the old machine, but its call is not the shrill demands of the old Intelligence, nor the thunderous command to self-destruct that came with the activation of the Crucible. Instead, it is feeble, confused, disorderly, unaware. Almost organic.
The old machine has been monitoring the communications of the organics, and it is aware that just prior to the activation of the Crucible, several organics had been present in the control center of the Citadel. Two of them had perished. The third had activated the Crucible.
The old machine does not know what modifications the organics could have made to the blueprints one of its agents had hidden hundreds of cycles ago to allow such a thing to have happened. But even in this rudimentary vessel of blood and flesh that will soon wither and crumble away to dust, the Intelligence is still a threat that must not go unchecked.
July 26, 2187
He hadn't wanted to hurt anyone.
It'd been stupid. The headaches—he should've reported them. But it'd been so easy to write off. Not enough sleep, too much stress, it wasn't that big a deal—
Through the bars of his jail cell, he sees some new people—a human in blue Alliance armour and a turian in silver armour. They talk to the guard, then approach him.
He—hadn't wanted to hurt anyone.
When the giant bomb, or whatever it was, went off and all the indoctrinates went crazy and he hadn't, he thought he'd been safe—
he hadn't wanted to hurt anyone—
Notes:
Jupiter does have rainfalls of diamonds (ouch) and pink lightning (it can also be blue).
When an ionizing particle hits just the right place in a processor, you get a single-event upset; usually it results in pesky things such as airplanes falling out of the sky and election results getting changed. Turns out Reapers don't use ECC memory.
Chapter 9: ...the river has washed away the road i'm on
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
And the day is long
And the bridge is gone
And the river has washed away
The road I'm on
Only road I know
- 54-40, "Crossing a Canyon"
It'd been the damned suit.
Shepard hadn't recognized her. Been terrified of her. Just because she'd changed her damned suit.
"I...I thought..." Those terrifying choking noises have stopped, but she's still shaking, her voice slurred a bit from whatever drugs are still lingering in her system. But whatever she's thinking goes unspoken, her eyes slowly closing. "'m...sorry."
"Don't be." The air in the hospital is unpleasant with acrid scents assaulting her olfactory senses, but it's still with reluctance that she puts her visor back on, sealing herself off from the world. She reaches over and touches Shepard's arm; the other woman shivers, but doesn't pull away. "Keelah, it's not your fault. It's nobody's fault. Except for the Reapers."
(And the bastard who'd tried to hurt her. But she doesn’t say that.)
"But I'm..." She turns back to Tali, her eyes snapping open again. Her lips move, trying to form words that won't come. When they finally do, it's as a quiet little noise at the back of her throat. "Breaked."
Keelah. "I know."
Tali's hands move, pulling the side rail down, then she perches herself on the edge of the bed itself and holds out an arm. "This okay?"
Shepard looks at her for a moment, then slowly nods. Tali leans over, pulling Shepard into a clumsy sideways hug. She shudders once, but then relaxes and leans into Tali, letting her head rest on the quarian's shoulder. "Shepard," Tali says, then takes a shaky breath. "I'm glad you're still with us."
"I'm g-glad you're… still with us... too." It's clear that Shepard is repeating her; her speech takes on the unmistakable cadence of Tali's Rayyan accent. Then she slips back to her usual halting enunciation. "Was... worried. You... you were... Normandy, uh, went gone... it gone and your... the... umm, the face cover was... it was breaked."
"Broken." Tali's voice is soft. The words come automatically, sliding from her with an ease that almost mocks Shepard's inability to articulate hers. "My visor was broken."
Shepard stiffens. "My—nnnno, your visor was... broken. You were..." She pauses a moment. "Sick?"
"Yeah."
"How bad?"
"Bad." She could probably get away with lying to Shepard, but it'd be wrong. "An infection got into my bloodstream. I... almost died, Shepard."
It's something that never really sunk in before.
Tali looks down at her gloved hand, curling and uncurling her fingers; her sleeves are black with gold trimmings, not purple stained with the deep red of her blood.
She's safe. Not lying flat on her back on the rough ground, looking up at the leaden sky through a broken visor and desperately trying to stay conscious through the haze of combat stims. Not lying on a table in the Normandy's cleanroom, nude and sweltering with fever under a thin paper blanket, struggling to pull breath into her congested lungs as Dr. Chakwas looms over her, swathed head-to-toe in antimicrobial plastic.
"Tali?" Shepard's voice brings her back to the present. "You are... not okay?"
"I don't know, Shepard." She takes a deep breath, and her lungs fill with ease. "I..."
Shepard tries to say something, but it instead comes out as a quiet non-verbal noise. She reaches over one scarred hand and rests it on Tali's arm.
"No," Tali finally says, her voice barely a whisper. "I'm really not. Until the mass relays are fixed, I am stuck on this cold, damp world where there have been five attacks on my people in the last two weeks. Just hours before I landed, I found out somebody had tried to murder my best friend. And the first thing the Admiralty Board did when I came back is push me into an ambassadorial position I'm barely suited for. I'm an engineer, Shepard. Not a diplomat."
She hesitates a moment, then closes her eyes.
"Oh, keelah. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"
"Don't be. We're friend. Is okay. To feel... to feel... uh, not okay... wrong. " Shepard looks at her. "Job... you want?"
"It's an important job." Tali twists her fingers together. "My people need me to do it."
"Not your people." Shepard exhales sharply. "You."
"Then..." She pauses again. "It's too important a job to walk away from. But I never wanted it."
"I've got something for you," Tali finally says. Shepard watches silently as she reaches across to the other chair.
"Something," Shepard finally repeats, "for... me?"
"Yeah." Tali smiles, and places the package onto Shepard's lap.
Shepard looks at her for a moment, then back down at the package, and then begins poking at it with her left hand. After a few moments of this, she looks back up at Tali. "Help?"
"Oh, right. Your hands. I didn't— hold on." She reaches over to help Shepard open the package, but after a few moments of struggle, starts to think she might've gotten a bit too carried away with the duct tape. She shakes her head, huffs a breath, and looks at Shepard. "I'm going to reach down and take the knife from my boot. Is that okay?"
Shepard nods, but still flinches a bit when she sees the blade approach. Tali uses it to slice through the layers of tape and brown paper, and then quickly puts it back. When Shepard looks back up at her, she nods. "Go ahead."
She tears open the brown paper, and then, reaching one trembling hand to touch the cover of her journal, runs one finger along the delicate stitching at the edges. "You find it."
Tali nods. "Yes," she quickly adds when she realizes Shepard is looking at the cover instead of her. "You left it behind in the maintenance area of your cabin."
Shepard refuses to let Tali help her open the journal, so it takes several clumsy attempts before she manages to hook one finger under the edge of the cover and pull it open. She uses one hand to hold it open, and uses one finger of the other to trace Liara's careful handwriting, her eyes narrowing slightly. Then she turns the page and looks over her own cryptic squiggles. Then she lets out a slow breath and lets it fall shut onto the quilt.
"I—read some of it," Tali admits after a few long moments of silence.
"I know." Shepard looks up at her, her face widening in what Tali thinks is supposed to be a smile. "You're quarian. Nosy."
"We do get into each others' business a lot." Tali huffs a breath behind her visor. "I couldn't understand most of it anyways."
Shepard looks up at her. "Short hand."
Tali quickly searches the phrase on her omni-tool. So that's what it was.
"You're not upset that I read it?"
Shepard shakes her head. "Not..." She trails off a moment, shifting her weight, eyes drooping closed for a moment.
"Not what?" Tali asks gently.
"Is... not me." She makes a noise and pushes the journal across the quilt to Tali. "Not anymore."
"What do you want me to do with it, then?"
"Not—mine," Shepard spits out, her entire body trembling. Faint tendrils of dark energy begin to slither from her arms. "Don't care. Not mine! Not—" Sheathed in a blue glow, Shepard's arm jerks forward, and the book goes flying from the bed to land on the floor. With a frustrated half-strangled noise, she slams her hand into the bed's railing, over and over.
"Shepard." Tali immediately switches to her Admiral voice. "Stop hurting yourself."
She looks at Tali for a few moments, entire body trembling. Then she flops over and begins to laugh. The laughs quickly turn into those horrible dry choking noises she'd been making earlier—keelah, it had to be one of the most frightening sounds she'd ever heard—before she curls up on her side, going very quiet and very still.
Tali gets up and moves across the room to pick up the book, before returning to her chair. Shepard looks up and mumbles something.
"I didn't catch that, Shepard." Tali says it as gently as possible. She wants to reach over and touch Shepard's arm, but she's obviously a... what did the humans call it? A 'powder keg'? Or perhaps a drive core that hadn't been given a chance to bleed off its static charge. Ready to break apart. Not really in control of herself.
"Give..." She trails off. Her entire body gives one long shudder. "To Liara. Before, um... before. Promised. Before. Normandy."
"I'll give it to Liara, then." Tali slides the book into her suit pocket.
"'m sorry," Shepard whispers, and she seems to visibly deflate. "For getting mad. I can't... the colours, they're so strong, I can't—"
"Shepard." Tali looks right at her. "A few years ago, after I'd completed my Pilgrimage, I joined the crew of the Neema. There was one quarian I worked with that—remember I told you about my mother passing on from a virus outbreak on the flotilla?"
Shepard nods.
"From what I was told, he got the same virus and it... ryn'que'aiy. I don't really know how to say that in English, but it went into his brain. He eventually got better, but he wasn't the same afterwards. He couldn't use his left arm, and kept getting lost on the ship. And..." She reaches over to take Shepard's hand, curling her two long fingers around Shepard's shorter ones. "He sometimes had... outbursts. Like you just did. It's nothing to be embarrassed about."
She pauses here, giving Shepard's hand a gentle squeeze.
"Keelah, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here. I'm not going to pretend I know what you're going through. I know it's hard. But you're not alone. I'm here for you, whenever you need me."
Shepard looks up at her. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
"There's something else in there for you, too." Tali pushes the package back across the quilt. "It's not just from me."
When Shepard looks up at her, Tali nods.
"Go ahead."
So Shepard does. She peels away at the last of the brown paper, and then lifts up the envirosuit: her own envirosuit, because who else would have one designed with a human's strange proportions in mind, and who else would have a black envirosuit with a red stripe running down the right arm?
There's a small brass plaque too, with writing in both Khelish and English. When Tali places it into her hands, Shepard simply stares at it, uncomprehending.
"You—" Tali's voice almost breaks when it finally sinks in. "Oh, keelah. You can't read anymore, can you?"
Shepard shakes her head. Tali reaches over and takes the plaque back.
"'For her role in ending the conflict between the quarian people and the geth, and for her assistance in reclaiming our homeworld, Rannoch,'" Tali reads aloud, "'the Quarian Fleet is pleased to name Captain Joan'Shepard vas Normandy of the Systems Alliance as an honourary member of our people. May she always be welcome upon our shores.
"'Keelah se'lai.'"
When she looks back up, there are tears rolling down Shepard's cheeks.
An hour later, three figures emerge from the doorway into a world of bright sunlight. The smallest of them, hunched over in a wheelchair, blinks several times and cranes her neck back to peer up at the interplay of white clouds rippling over a deep blue sky. Shepard trembles for a few moments, looking a little something like a caged pyjak. "...bright."
"I know," Tali says. After the dim sterile coolness of the hospital room, the courtyard garden is intense, hotly humid, and bright. Even through the polarization of her envirosuit's visor, it almost hurt to look at. Sticky heat shimmers up from the rain-slick pathway, and there's a faint buzz in the air. It'd been Dr. Chakwas' suggestion for Shepard to get a bit of fresh air before the capricious Vancouver weather took another turn for the worse, but Tali wonders if it had been such a good idea.
"Bright," Shepard says emphatically, shifting from side to side in the wheelchair. "Bright. Not—I—bright."
"Bring her into the shade," Grunt says from somewhere behind her. He'd been brought along for Shepard's protection, and while a younger, more naive Tali'Zorah may have wondered just what danger they could get into walking through a courtyard surrounded by the four solid walls of the hospital, she now knows far better. Almost by reflex, she shifts her gaze upward and checks the roof edges for the glint of sunlight reflecting from a scope reflecting from a sniper rifle, before pushing the wheelchair into the shadow of a large tree.
The temperature seems to drop at least a few degrees. Shepard says nothing, instead staring down at a furry yellow-and-black insect feeding from a flower.
Tali reaches over to touch Shepard's shoulder. "You all right?"
"No." She shakes her head. "Hate this. Thoughts, they're... inside. But I can't...words... they're, they're..." She trails off with a frustrated growl and slams a hand against her head. "Breaked... no, broken. Broken. And stupid."
"Shepard—" Tali breaks off when she realizes she doesn't have any idea how to respond to that. Instead, she sits down on a wooden bench. It's slightly damp, and although the water doesn't soak through her suit she can feel the coolness of it.
Shepard looks at her for a moment, then slowly rises from her wheelchair. Her thin legs tremble with the effort of holding her weight as she takes tiny, shuffling steps over to the bench and lowers herself down next to Tali. She begins to say something, but then trails off to stare at her hands. Her misshapen fingers are contorted into half-fists, and when she flexes her fingers she is unable to straighten them all the way.
"Does it hurt?" Tali asks, her voice gentle.
"Some." It takes Shepard a few moments to find the word, but she seems to relax a bit once she does. "Doc-tor... they, uh, fix with... they want to... 're-con-struc-tive' it. Fix."
"That's good—wait, that reminds me. Which hand is easier for you to use right now?" When Shepard lifts her left hand, Tali reaches into her suit pocket to take out an omni-tool bracelet. She fastens it around Shepard's right arm, careful not to knock free the catheters threaded into her upper arm. "I know your old omni-tool broke, and I had a few spares, so..."
Broke was a bit of an understatement. From the pictures Kaidan had sent after he'd recovered it from Miranda Lawson, Lovelace had exploded.
Shepard looks down at the omni-tool glowing soft orange around her arm, then back up at Tali.
"I've made a few modifications, of course." That was probably also an understatement; the only part left of the original 'tool was the microframe, and even that was modified to the point of unrecognizability. "So you won't keep short circuiting the damned thing trying to overclock— don't give me that look, you know perfectly well how many times you had to ask me to fix your omni-tool for you. And how many times I offered to take you to the Citadel to get you something better than that Elkoss crap."
Shepard makes a noise, then begins messing with the omni-tool. After a few minutes, she manages to change the hologram from bright orange to purple.
"And I made a few tweaks to the firmware," Tali says, a faint trace of smugness in her voice. She watches Shepard change the hologram colour a few more times, finally settling on blue. "And don't worry, this one's also 'ruggedized.' So, is it up to my bosh'tet captain's exacting standards?"
Shepard looks up at her, then back down at the omni-tool, then back up at her again. She says something, but it's not a word Tali is familiar with.
Tali looks at her, then takes a slow breath. "...I didn't catch that, Shepard."
"Hopper." She looks back down at her omni-tool. "Admiral. Smart computer lady. Good name. Good 'tool."
Tali smiles and reaches into her pocket again, this time pulling out a pair of earphones and placing them into Shepard's hand. "Did you want to listen to some rock 'n' roll? I loaded it all in there for you."
Shepard says nothing, instead looking down at her feet. She's wearing bright yellow socks. There are little pads on them so they don't slip.
"Shepard?"
"O...kay," she finally says, looking down at the earphones. It takes her a few minutes to figure out how to get them in. Once she does, she just stares down at her blue omni-tool.
"What do you want to listen to?" Tali asks, but Shepard doesn't answer her. "Do you want me to pick something?"
A few seconds later, Shepard gives a small nod, and Tali reaches over to tap a command into her omni-tool. Her first impulse had been to pick Dark Side of the Moon, but... Shepard herself had once said it wasn't an easy album to listen to. So instead, she picks something else... and yeah, that turned out to be something by Led Zeppelin, a song about a levee breaking (though she isn't exactly sure what a levee is). After hanging around with Shepard long enough, it was hard not to start liking rock 'n' roll a bit. Even if most of it was still noise.
But almost right away, she knows something is wrong. Because—
Because—
She just gives Tali a blank look. And then pulls the earphones back out.
"Shepard?" she asks, but Shepard doesn't answer her. She looks down at her yellow socks, then tilts her head upward to look at the tree. Tali follows her gaze, but sees nothing except sunlight filtering through the green leaves.
"It's—" Shepard breaks off, her mouth trying to form words that won't come. She reaches over and grasps Tali by the arm. "It's gone."
"What's gone?" Tali asks.
"The colours. In the music. They're gone."
Oh... oh no. The song continues to play in her suit's auditory feed:
'don't it make you feel bad
when you're tryin' to find your way home
you don't know which way to go?''
Shepard leans into her, trembling a bit, and lets Tali put an arm around her shoulders. "The music's gone," Shepard whispers.
"I'm so sorry," Tali finally says. It's the only thing she can say.
But Shepard doesn't respond. She can't respond, because she's falling to the ground.
Notes:
Following the events of bang a gong (get it on), Shepard also considered programming her cabin's stereo to play "Whole Lotta Love" if Tali and Garrus entered the room together when she was not there. She decided that the Fleet and Flotilla soundtrack was more amusing.
Tali also likes the Beatles' Abbey Road and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.
Chapter 10: ...you shout, but no one seems to hear
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout but no one seems to hear
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon
- Pink Floyd, "Brain Damage"
July 26, 2187
With the Intelligence no longer a threat, the old machine had left Earth behind and slithered towards the outer reaches of Sol, to a place where the stellar winds shifted, to the place at the edge of the heliopause where a space station had previously been. But it had not been there. Instead, the combined efforts of organics and synthetics had undertaken the effort of moving it to the barycenter between the planet known to them as Pluto and the mass relay orbiting it. While the cost of moving the station had been a great one, it had been deemed a necessary expenditure in order for the Hephaestus Project scientists living and working aboard it to have easier access to the defunct Charon Relay in an ever-decreasing hope of possibly reaching their homeworlds again.
The old machine had found them, and for a week, the old machine had observed them.
It had observed, and it had considered. And now it decides. The old machine reaches deep into its memory and pulls forth its knowledge of the mass relays, and compiles it into a data package that their inferior technology would be able to decode, and with a single burst transmission it transmits that knowledge to the space station.
Then it leaves. Even before the transmission hits the communication relay on Gagarin Station, the old machine is gone.
earth?
?? days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
Her socks are yellow.
It's... hard to hold onto that thought. She sees her yellow socks, on her feet— are they even her feet? It's a pretty shade of yellow. Something else is tearing into her thoughts, a ceaseless sour yellow note, though it's not the pretty yellow of her socks, but an ugly yellow instead. Time slows down, almost comes to a stop. Her mind sees the spinning gyroscopic rings of a mass relay, faster and faster, breaking apart. She sees it come apart, then come back together. Her head buzzes with mathematics and physics, the languages of the universe. She understands all of it and none of it.
Then it stops.
Some small of her mind is still aware of her pretty yellow socks. The rest of it is fading. She's—falling. Her body stiffens, lurches forward, begins to tumble from the bench. The arm around her shoulder—how had it gotten there?—quickly moves to wrap around her torso. She hears herself inhale, then exhale, then...
She's—on the ground. She doesn't remember falling, but she's on the ground, lying on her side. There's a sound scraping against her eardrums—something other than the tuneless noise that had tore through her mind. Then the sound forms itself into words. Somebody is talking to her, and although there's a warm safe familiarity to them she can't remember a name for the familiarity. "Are you all right, Shepard?" the somebody says, but she doesn't understand the meaning of the words—consonants, syllables, all of them meaningless. She tries to pull herself to a sitting position—blue-white pain tears through her body and she cries out and goes limp and slumps back down to the ground.
The pain passes, but then a cold yellow fear takes its place. She is scared.
I know. It filters through to her brain, not in words but soft colour-tones of worry-fear and empathy. She sees light and darkness flickering past the spiderweb of veins in her eyelids, and with that comes a dim cognizance that her eyes are closed. She tries to open them, but every iota of her body is weighed down by a dull heaviness.
"Don't try to move, Shepard," the somebody says again, and this time she can recognize those last two sounds, the shep and the ard, and she knows that it means something but she isn't sure what. She can faintly hear other sounds now: other voices, and other sounds that she can't recognize. Then something curls around her hand and squeezes gently. "Just rest. I'm right here."
It takes the last of her strength, but she squeezes back.
Notes:
I am going to guess that whoever came up with the adage "treat yourself like you would your favourite character" was not a fanfic writer.
Chapter 11: ...if this isn't making sense, it doesn't make it lies
Notes:
Well, I've gone and created a Discord server for this fic. Joining it gets you access to teasers and a chance to ask The Writer™ all your pressing questions. Maybe other fun things in the future. We'll see.
Join the Discord!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If this doesn't make you smile
You don't have to cry
If this isn't making sense
It doesn't make it lies
Alive in the superunknown
Alive in the superunknown
Alive in the superunknown
First it steals your mind
And then it steals your soul
- Soundgarden, "Superunknown"
"Ma'am—Tali. Here. You haven't had anything for a while."
Tali looks up, and is surprised to see that outside the tiny window of the hospital room, the sky had shifted to night. Kal'Reegar hands her a cup that has a straw protruding from it. He pulls over the second chair and perches himself on it, pulling out a second cup for himself.
"Thanks," she says, and fits the straw into her suit's induction port. Some sort of cold nutrition shake—and instead of the bland leafy taste of keleven, it tastes of a sweet fruit she can't identify. "You did scan this, right? I don't think you'd like to report to the rest of the Admiralty Board that you accidentally poisoned me with levo food."
"It's dextro. Something called perðisi—from Palaven, I think. Miranda Lawson brought them from a nearby cafe." For a few minutes, they both had their drinks in companionable silence. "It wasn't your fault. About your captain."
She knew perfectly well that there was nothing she could've done to prevent Shepard's broken brain from misfiring and sending her into a—what was the word one of the doctors had used? A "seizure"? That she'd probably done some good when she'd caught Shepard before her skull could smash into the hard concrete pathway. By staying with her until she had stopped thrashing around and slowly regained consciousness, confused and terrified and unable to speak.
But knowing it doesn't make it any easier.
"I know." Tali exhales slowly and puts the now-empty cup aside. "Before I came back here, I overheard some of the doctors. They're worried that her brain might be bleeding. Keelah, I wish I could have stayed with her. Something about my suit's tech interfering with the scans. But she was scared, Kal."
"It's rough," he says. "I take it we won't be returning to the embassy soon."
"I—" She looks down at her fingers, which had twisted themselves together. "No. Caator'Nir will be able to handle anything that Chatika can't, and Amigo will let me know if there's some emergency. I still have that Council meeting tomorrow afternoon, but if I don't make it back to the embassy by then the shuttle can pick me up here. You don't mind, do you?"
"Slept in worse places than a hospital waiting room, ma'am. I'll let the embassy know that you'll likely be staying here overnight, and go check the skycar again."
"Thanks," Tali says. Kal nods, gets back to his feet, and leaves the room.
She sends another message to Kaidan, but his omni-tool is either switched off or out of comms range. She hopes that means he's getting some sleep, but a vague uneasiness niggles at her anyways. Amigo offers a game of chess to distract her. She accepts, but three games later decides that playing chess against a geth is not the best idea. She uses her omni-tool to sketch out a few ideas for her future house. Lots of windows to let in light, but at Amigo's suggestion she made them all face away from the sun as to not make the house too warm during daylight hours. A small garden, with all native Rannochian flora (though she might make room for a tree bearing dextro-amino cacao beans). Maybe even a pet—she wonders if it's possible to tame a pyjak...
She also sends a message to Garrus. But his omni-tool doesn't respond, either. She tries to brush aside her anxiety— on their last date, he'd told her that the Hierarchy was using his service on the Normandy as a way to improve relations with humanity, so he was probably stuck in some meeting or doing outreach work on some part of the planet without reliable extranet access. But then she remembers that just yesterday one of her people had stumbled into the quarian embassy with a cracked visor and an account of being set upon by a mob of xenophobic humans. So even if her boyfriend is Archangel, it's hard not to worry.
Thankfully, before her anxiety has a chance to brood into something worse, Shepard is carted back in on a stretcher. The sheets on the hospital bed had been exchanged for fresh ones, and a nurse puts her back into bed and re-inserts the IV lines into the catheters. Shepard barely reacts to it, just lies against the pillow with her eyes half-closed.
"There's no sign of hemorrhaging," Dr. Chakwas says to Tali before she gets a chance to ask, and Tali lets out a breath of relief. "But she'll be rather exhausted for a while. And we'll be keeping a close eye on her brain activity."
"Have you found Kaidan yet?"
"The hospital is working to locate him. Lawson also reached out to our friend the Shadow Broker." Dr. Chakwas shakes her head. "Before he left, did he tell you anything about where he may have gone?"
"No. Just that he had a few things to do, and that he wasn't sure how long it'd take. But I don't think he expected to be away this long." Tali shifts her weight on the uncomfortable plastic chair. "I'll stay with her. She's... scared to be alone right now."
She isn't too surprised that Dr. Chakwas raises an eyebrow at this statement. Shepard hadn't said a word or even really moved since she'd regained consciousness. Even she's not entirely sure how she knows this; the feeling had just crept into her mind. But all she says is, "Then I'll inform the hospital you'll be staying past the usual visiting hours." There was no need to say that those hours had passed quite a while ago.
Once Dr. Chakwas leaves, Tali looks over at Shepard. "Kaidan should be back soon," Tali says to her. "His omni-tool is turned off right now, but the hospital is looking for him."
Shepard's eyes crack open a bit more, and she turns her head slightly to face Tali.
"Are you cold?" Tali picks up the quilt, which had been folded and placed at the end of the bed. "Do you want me to put this back over you?"
Shepard just looks at her. Tali lets out a huff of breath.
"Right. You can't speak right now, can you? Let's try something else." She holds out her hand. "Can you squeeze my hand?"
Shepard reaches over, grips Tali's hand, and gives it one squeeze.
"Good. Do you want the blanket? One squeeze for no, two for yes."
Two squeezes.
"That little gown they have you in..." Tali tsks as she drapes the quilt back over Shepard, smoothing it into place. "There. Better?"
Shepard lets out a slow breath and settles back onto the pillow; when Tali unthinkingly reaches over to adjust it, Shepard tenses for a moment, then relaxes, and Tali gets another strange, unfamiliar feeling: that Shepard feels safe, that she knows Tali won't hurt her or put a pillow over her face.
And that she's exhausted.
"Try to get some sleep," Tali says to her. "I'll wake you up if I hear from Kaidan."
In response, Shepard reaches over and squeezes her hand—once, for a no. Tali shakes her head and leans in a bit closer. "You can't. Is there anything I can do to help?"
Shepard looks at her blankly, before she turns her head away. But then another thought squirms into Tali's consciousness: an arm wrapped around a shoulder—her arm around Shepard's shoulder in those dim hours following her post-Leviathan breakdown.
(And while some part of her is distantly aware that she's somehow experiencing Shepard's memories, she steadfastly tries to ignore it.)
"Hey," Tali says, reaching over and touching Shepard's arm. "Do you need a hug?"
In response, Shepard reaches over again and gives Tali's hand two long squeezes. Her entire body seems to tremble with the effort of it.
Tali nods, lowering the safety rail of the hospital bed. She can't stretch herself on the mattress next to Shepard without toppling off the edge, so she scoots herself over until she's sitting behind the other woman, wrapping her arms around her torso. After a while Shepard stops trembling so hard, allowing her head to droop backwards to rest on Tali's shoulder. And soon enough her breathing slows as she finally begins to drift off to sleep.
"I love you, Shepard," Tali says, and she can feel Shepard's love for her too. And as much as Tali tries to stay awake herself, the frenetic pace of the past few weeks has worn her out more than she realizes, and her own eyelids begin to droop. When a nurse comes in a little while later to change out Shepard's saline bag, they've both fallen completely asleep.
Darkness closes in on Tali, viscous and icy-cold. It presses against her envirosuit, searching for any weaknesses that would allow it to breach through. Tali shivers and moves forward, but each footstep only seems to mire herself deeper into a thick grey sludge. Far in the distance, she sees a tiny flicker of light. In fact, it's the only thing she can see if this place of dark shadows. Quarians were crepuscular by nature, their eyes adapted with a thin membrane to capture any light available in the fading dusk of Rannochian evenings, but through the tint of her visor all she can see is that one tiny flicker of light. Step by step, she makes her way toward it.
As she approaches, the light expands, and then splits into millions—billions, perhaps even trillions—of filaments. They coalesce and entangle with each other to become a single luminous mass that's almost too bright to bear. But at the edge of the light, two filaments spear into the darkness, and Tali follows them. One of them quickly cuts short—snuffed out by the same blackness pressing against her. But the other one continues on, and Tali follows it. Part of her is apprehensive at leaving the rest of the light behind, but she does it anyways.
So she follows it, and after a while she realizes that she's moving through some kind of liquid. It brings back chilly-white memories of an uncharted planet, ice cracking, plunging into a frigid lake, Shepard diving in to pull her out, both of them laughing about the situation after realizing that an envirosuit that was vacuum-rated and climate-controlled meant that Tali had never been in any real danger.
This is her own memory. But there are also other memories, other Befores that are not her own: of nineteen dog tags clinking against her leg as she scraped through the snow in search of the twentieth, of digging through the icy crust of a planet after she fled from those who wished to sour the songs of her children. And after a while, she becomes aware of another presence walking beside her, and she wonders if it's Shepard.
Well, I am a Shepard. Tali hadn't spoken aloud, but the presence responds nonetheless. But you're looking for Joan. My name is Jane.
Tali looks over in confusion. As Shepard makes herself known against the liquid darkness, she becomes more aware that this is most certainly a different Shepard. Her hair is longer, voice higher in pitch, and despite having a few more curves than the Shepard she's familiar with, her body seems to be stuck in the gangling adolescent stage.
I'm her twin sister, Jane Shepard says, and although Tali can't make out the details of her face she can hear a grin in the voice. Well, really just her memory of me. The rest of me died back on Mindoir. But I'm glad to finally meet you, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy.
A dozen thoughts splinter in Tali's head, but the first one to actually reach her lips: "She never told me."
She never told anyone. There's a wry note in Jane Shepard's voice. And since most of the colony records got destroyed in the Raid, it's not like anybody's likely to dig up the birth certificate.
"Then how are you ..." Tali vaguely motions to their surroundings. "Keelah, I don't even know what this place is."
Jane Shepard says nothing, simply crosses her arms and shifts her weight backwards on her heels, and while it's so much like the Shepard she's familiar with, it just seems ...off, in a way she can't explain. Almost like this is...
"Is this a dream?"
Could be. Or memory. Jane gives a tiny shrug. Likely a bit a both.
"This isn't like any of my memories," Tali says, folding her arms across her chest.
I think it's one of hers. Jane's voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. But everything in here's gotten all muddled up since, well—
"The Crucible." Tali tilts her head, thoughts that had been quietly nibbling at the edges of her consciousness rising to the surface regarding Shepard's injuries, about the Crucible, about the blue pulse of energy that had washed over the inhabitants of the Citadel completely harmless, a pulse of energy that had done nothing other than command the Reapers to self-destruct. Of Shepard's last message to the Normandy, of a charred figure lying limp in Wrex's arms, and of things not entirely adding up in her mind. "What happened to her up there?"
I'm not entirely sure myself, Jane begins, and then motions towards the remaining filament of light. Or rather, I'm not too sure how to explain—actually, it's probably best just to show you.
With a speed that shouldn't be possible, Jane begins to walk, following the trail of light. Tali has to nearly jog beside her just to keep up, and soon her body, still weakened by her near-starvation—how could that be possible in a place that wasn't entirely real?—begins to feel the strain of exertion. Jane notices this, and slows her own pace.
At some places, the light is bright, steady, a comfort in this somber place. In other places, it's so bright that she has to turn her face away for fear of damaging her eyes. But at others, it fades to nothing more than a delicate silvery thread almost smothered in the shadows.
At one point, it disappears entirely. Tali tries not to think too hard about this.
"Was she always such a stubborn bosh'tet?" Tali asks once she's caught her breath again.
At this, Jane outright laughs. What do you think?
"That's what I thought."
It didn't help much that... well, I was the one who got most of the eezo exposure. So while I got the nifty biotic powers—at this, she forms a shimmering blue orb between her fingertips—I also ended up with the not-so-nice stuff. Migraines. Seizures. Glioblastomas.
Tali looks at her. "I didn't catch that last word."
Brain tumour— very aggressive one. Only a few people make it to five years. I made it close to ten before it started growing again. But between that and all the other medical problems I had, Joan... sometimes felt guilty about it. Jane's voice turns quiet. Then the Mindoir Raid happened.
"I'm sorry," Tali says.
I... appreciate that. Jane pauses a moment. But I'm happy she's found a new family to care about her. You and Garrus, especially. You're the only two people she'd let see her cry. She leans in a bit closer. Though I really don't understand why she didn't go after Garrus. He's hot.
"And he's mine." Tali lets her voice get a little smug.
Don't remind me. Jane Shepard nearly pouts. But we're almost there.
After another minute or so of walking Tali seems something else: two glowing columns of blue. She looks at them, then back over at Jane, who's beginning to fade into the darkness, and somehow becomes aware that she is unable to follow. So Tali goes on, alone. She follows the trail of light between the two columns of blue.
And the trail finally ends. Tali stops, stares down at the frayed edges of it, and tries not to let her grief overcome her— because keelah, it makes no sense, she knows Shepard survived—
And is standing in the distance, staring at her.
"Shepard?" Tali asks, but the other woman doesn't respond. As she approaches, she can see that Shepard is glowing in a faint, iridescent light. Suddenly, her head snaps upward as she realizes that Tali is here.
And she turns and runs.
Just like that, Tali awakens.
It's very sudden, and somehow she gets the impression that Shepard had pushed her out of the dream. It... doesn't make much sense. It was just a dream, wasn't it?
But beside her on the bed, Shepard is awake. And looking at her.
"Shepard?" she asks, her voice soft. "Was that you?"
She hesitates just long enough that Tali has a feeling that she's trying to decide how to answer.
Then she reaches over to gives Tali's hand two squeezes.
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Friday, July 27, 2187, 107 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
Shepard immediately cracks to attention when she sees the figure in the doorway—Alliance navy blues, a scar running down one side of a bearded face, the general stature of a person who's spent most of their time in the military, and two marines flanking him—she recognizes the figure as Admiral Hackett, and even through her faint stirrings of yellow-green unease manages to snap off a clumsy rendition of a military salute.
"Commander." He salutes back and steps forward, datapad in hand. The two marines stay by the door. They seem vaguely familiar, but she can't put names to them.
Something inside of Shepard turns cold and she doesn't know if it's the yellow tinges of fear or the gelid steel-grey of something she doesn't entirely understand. Half-formed memories drift up in her mind, gauzy and undefined like the sunlight filtering through trees in a garden. Admiral Hackett had been in this room before for— he had questions, except they were— it was about things she didn't want to talk about— the Citadel and the Crucible and Admiral Anderson's death. But she doesn't really remember what he asked and she doesn't remember what she answered and—
Her breath comes short and the room spins around her in a chaotic blur of colour-feelings and sounds that are words that she cannot understand and she eventually becomes aware of somebody touching her arm—Tali, Tali is touching her arm and speaking softly to her. They exchange a short look before the quarian affixes a cool gaze on Hackett. "What do you need?"
Something in her voice is stern—this is not the Tali she's used to.
Admiral Hackett doesn't flinch, nor does his expression change. But beneath the cold stiff exterior Shepard can feel something else. It's far enough away that she can't tell its colours, but somehow she doesn't like it. When she looks down at her hands, they're trembling again, sparks of biotics flickering between her fingers.
He fixes his own gaze on Tali, and Shepard has a brief flicker of memory—a quarian and a turian visiting the war room, we can't let her go on like this, an unauthorized use of the QEC leading to a promise of shore leave for the Normandy's crew—somehow it's a memory she's not familiar with, but she doesn't understand what it means or the implications of it.
"Ambassador Zorah," he finally says. "It's good to see you again."
"Likewise, Admiral."
"I have news about Major Alenko," he says, looking over at Shepard. Hackett is a military man thorough to the core, and he knows perfectly well the regulations on fraternization. But he also knows perfectly well when to let the regulations slide.
She wants to ask about Kaidan, about where he is and whether he's okay and why he didn't come back, but instead it comes out as a strange noise, something more like a whrrrr? and she can feel the frustration begin to bubble up, the shapeless thoughts trying to form themselves into words on her tongue but her broken brain is unable to do that and instead they come out as quiet choking sob-laughs. She shakes her head vigorously, willing herself to stop, but she can't stop and she doesn't know why.
Tali's fingers tighten a bit on her arm, and Shepard hears her speak to Hackett again. "Give her a few moments." (She thinks Hackett says something in response, but she can't make out the words.)
Then, to her, more quietly, and this time she sounds like Tali again: "Remember, you've got nothing to be embarrassed about."
It takes her at least a few minutes to regain control of herself—though it feels less like she regained control of herself and more like she's drained herself of the frustrated sob-laughs, at least for a little while. She takes a few more moments to catch her breath before looking back over at Tali.
"Are you all right?" Tali whispers, the glow of her eyes visible behind her mask.
Shepard nods, then turns back to Hackett. "Whrrr—?"
If Hackett was at all alarmed by her outburst, he's not showing it. "Several hours ago Major Alenko was called away on an emergency Spectre mission for the provisional Council," he says. "Not something he was permitted to disclose on an unsecured channel."
Emergency mission. That meant—
"What kind of mission?" Tali asks. Her voice is somewhere between the stern cold-grey voice she used when talking to Hackett and her normal voice, and Shepard vaguely wonders if Tali is asking it for Shepard's sake or to satisfy her own nosiness. She decides it's probably a bit of both.
Hackett's gaze shifts from her and onto Tali.
"One that's classified," he says. "What I am about say is not to leave this room, Ambassador Zorah."
"Understood, Admiral." Tali crosses her arms.
"Commander," he says, fixing his gaze back on her. "Do you understand? You are not to tell anybody else about this."
She nods. She understands it perfectly well— including the fact that Kaidan and Admiral Hackett were both probably breaking some sort of operational secrecy for her reassurance. She doesn't know what to make of this.
"Major Alenko was sent to investigate a situation on Gagarin Station after contact was lost."
"Hephaestus Project," Tali says. She crosses her arm and turns to Shepard. "They're the scientists who are trying to fix the mass relays, Shepard. They're on a space station out by the Charon relay."
Shepard nods again.
"If I may ask," Tali says, "did he request the assistance of Garrus Vakarian?"
"He did," Hackett says, and one eyebrow goes up slightly. "Vakarian's also been tapped as a potential Spectre candidate— as I understand it, on the recommendation of Commander Shepard."
Tali gives her a Look. Shepard winks.
"Major Alenko reported back that Gagarin Station's communications relay had been overloaded by a large transmission." His voice doesn't change, but something in his colours does. He steps forward, holding out the datapad to Tali.
She takes it and looks at it; Shepard tries to peek for herself but it's held at such an angle that she can't see much of it. Tali looks back up at Hackett, and Shepard sees her eyes narrow slightly. Then she hands the datapad to Shepard.
"That's an image captured by the station's ladar shortly before the transmission," Tali says, and her finger points out the unmistakable silhouette of a reaper.
Notes:
I find the awful 1990s CGI in the "Superunknown" video to be weirdly hilarious.
perðisi - bright yellow fruit, also grows on trees, very sweet. Thanks to istie, who created the Venian language.
Chapter 12: ...people tell me i haven't changed at all, but i don't feel the same
Notes:
Trigger warnings: Discussion of violence and hate-crime, depiction of an anxiety attack (Tali is not coping too well herself), and original characters.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
People tell me I haven't changed at all
But I don't feel the same
And I bet you've had that feeling too
You can't laugh all the time
- Duran Duran, "Hold Back the Rain"
The worst part about sitting on classified information, Tali decides, is that she couldn't just talk it out with somebody.
Not about the anxiety of discovering that a reaper may have survived. 'May' was the key word. There was no actual proof.
The thing caught on the ladar may have been a reaper.
It may have sent a transmission large enough to tie up the communications relay of Gagarin Station for several hours.
This may have been around the same time Shepard had her seizure.
(Because Shepard might be indoctrinated.)
But because it was classified information, there were only three people she could talk it over with. Two of them were off-planet. The third doesn't want to talk to her.
(Because the Crucible had done something to her.)
Once Admiral Hackett takes his leave, Shepard makes it very clear she wants to be left to herself. A bit odd—but with Shepard, odd tended to be more of a rule than an exception. And she'd been through a lot in the past twenty-four hours. If she needs a bit of space to try to process it, it's the least Tali can do.
(Because Shepard might be unintentionally indoctrinating her. )
"I'll be back sometime this evening," Tali tells her. "But if you need me before then…"
Shepard nods in understanding, motioning toward Hopper.
Tali leans forward. "Promise me, Shepard."
Shepard huffs her breath, but then reaches out and squeezes Tali's hand twice—the best she could do without words. Then she turns away. Tali waits a few moments, waiting to see if she got one of those strange… intuitions, for lack of a better term. Instead, she gets the sense that Shepard has closed herself off.
So she heads back to the embassy and to a job that was becoming increasingly difficult not to resent being pushed into.
The Migrant Fleet (or the Quarian Fleet, according to a few that argued that since they've reclaimed their homeworld, they could no longer rightly call themselves "Migrant") could not simply park fifty thousand ships in Earth's orbit, so instead they had set up temporary headquarters in a building that they'd been able to lease for next to nothing. Some sort of museum, another human word that Tali had never heard before, a "Science World." The geodesic dome had imploded inward into a shambles of shattered glass and twisted metal, and part of the agreement with what remained of the local municipal governance was that the quarians of the Fleet were to either repair or demolish it, depending on the extent of damage.
Quarians rarely demolished things, so already work is ongoing on repairing the dome. And after repairing the shattered windows, the rest of the building is structurally sound, squatting on the banks at the end of a filthy inlet. Beachfront property, in a way, but Tali's mind can't help but wander back to the ocean winds of her homeworld.
When she finally bursts into the embassy offices, she realizes in an instant that something is wrong. Her staffers are quiet, not bustling with conversation or grumbling about tsakin like they usually did. Zesa'Xisal has her arm around the shoulder of Liraz'Shal, who has their visor pressed into their hands and is visibly shaking.
"What happened?" Tali asks.
Caator'Nir looks up at her. The weariness is evident in his voice. "Reela'Haasal died last night."
She hears Kal curse softly from somewhere behind her, and walks over to her desk. Some distant part of her is aware that she should probably sit down, but instead she remains standing.
"She…" Tali blinks. "She died."
It's not a question, not really. She knows how quickly infection can set in for her people. And for Reela, it hadn't been just a stray bit of bacteria getting past a section seal. Her helmet had been smashed, her face spit upon, her lungs exposed to unclean air until she'd made it back to the safety of a clean room. She'd already begun to run a fever by then.
Tali knew Reela a bit, but didn't really know her. She had been a bright yellow envirosuit in the corridors of the Rayya, a braying laugh loud enough to elicit multiple glares, and a nerehit el'edhaa who kept talking too loudly or watching Vaenia during classes. She'd left for Pilgrimage a few years before Tali, but it apparently hadn't gone well; she was still listed on the registry of her birth ship.
She could have stayed on Rannoch, but she hadn't. And now she would never return.
"You should have contacted me earlier," she says—snaps, really.
"And what would that have done?" Caator asks, crossing his arms. "You are not a doctor, Tali'Zorah. There was nothing you could do to save her. Better you stay and help your captain."
"But—" Tali begins to protest, but then stops. She finally pulls a chair out and sits down. Chatika's glowing form—she'd modified her combat drone to add a few secretarial functions—hovers over the desk, bouncing slightly up and down. "No. You're right. Have you already contacted local law enforcement?"
The last few words leave a bit of distaste in her mouth, a memory of a cold holding cell and handcuffs tight around her wrists ("quarians, always trying to bargain, always causing trouble").
"They've already opened an investigation," Caator says.
Liraz snorts loudly. "As if they'll do anything against one of their own."
Tali doesn't answer for a few moments, trying to push back the memories trying to shove themselves into her head—of leaving Keenah's body behind in the incinerator, of Prazza crumpling to the ground in a pool of his own blood, of her father lying so quiet and so still—
(there's a name for it. survivor's guilt)
And now Reela.
(but…how do you live with it?)
She swallows back her guilt; just hours ago, she was griping about her job. Meanwhile, one of her people was lying in a cleanroom, struggling for her life (dammit, we need an evac RIGHT NOW)—
Keelah, she was such an idiot.
(maybe i'm not a very good quarian)
"Does—" she begins, but then her voice betrays just the tiniest waver. She quickly mutes her suit's speaker before the others can hear her quiet sobs. A few moments later, she feels a three-fingered hand rubbing her back, and hears Amigo's synthesized voice encouraging her to breathe slower.
"Ma'am?" The rough voice just barely registers through her auditory processors. "Your medication?"
"Please," she says, quickly adding a nod when she realizes Kal can't hear her. She feels a small vacuum-sealed packet pressed into her hand, and quickly tears it open to push the capsule through her suit's ports.
'Ten to fifteen minutes' is what the label says; it takes eleven and a half minutes for her to start feeling the effects. Just enough to get a narrow grip on her runaway thoughts, rather than them having a grip on her.
"Keelah," she says after switching her suit's speaker back on.
"Are you all right, Tali'Zorah?" Caator has moved to stand in front of her desk. "Would you like me to take over for the Council meeting?"
It was the way quarians were—no reason to be embarrassed for having an anxiety attack in the middle of her job, just a quiet understanding and an offer to help.
"I'll be fine. I think." She takes a few moments to take slow breaths. "As I was trying to say before, did Reela have any family?"
That wasn't a given; recent years had not been kind to the Migrant Fleet. The virus outbreak that had killed her mother years earlier had wiped out entire clans. And in the year before the Battle of Rannoch had thinned out their numbers even further, a few thousand quarians had simply vanished from the fleet, disappearing so thoroughly it seemed that they may as well have no longer been in the same galaxy. Caator'Nir's son had been one of them.
Tali herself was the last of the Zorahs.
Xesa looks up from her terminal. "Both of her parents are with the ancestors, but she has some nar metzet homesteading on Rannoch. I've sent you their names, Tali'Zorah."
"I'll get started on a message, then," Tali says, activating her terminal and beginning to type.
After sending the message off through the QEC, it's not easy for anybody to concentrate on tsakin for very long, but they all manage to push through long enough to finalize a few trade agreements that she and Caator had been negotiating with the Vol Protectorate. With a few hours to spare before the shuttle is due to pick them up for the Council meeting, she sends her staffers for early chashzhem.
She doesn't have much appetite, but chokes down a tube of nutrition paste anyways—she's still not up to her former weight and Nela'Lumm has her marked down for extra rations—and then goes for a walk
There isn't really a beach. Just a short stretch of mud and wet rocks along the water once the grey-brick pathway ends a bit north of the embassy. Kal'Reegar remains on the path, partly to keep a better lookout for approaching threats (including reporters), but mostly because he didn't want to risk his prosthetic leg on the uneven terrain and slippery rocks.
Amigo walks alongside her—they've transferred their runtimes out of her suit and into their physical platform, a geth hunter, in order to do so. That same platform had fought alongside a squadron of Migrant Fleet Marines during the Battle of London, then assisted in the evacuation of the Citadel after the activation of the Crucible. She remembers Infiltration-Unit-2213x showing up on her second day working at the embassy, offering to serve as her terminal to the Geth Consensus; after she'd very strongly suggested they change their name to something much less likely to alarm the other embassy staff, they'd downloaded dictionaries of major human languages and chosen the designation 'Amigo.'
Shepard-Commander might have been remembered by the Consensus as the first organic to openly cooperate with the true geth since the end of the Morning War, but it also turned out that Creator-Tali'Zorah was significant to them too.
But who would have guessed that a small offering of non-classified data could lead to the end of a three-hundred year old war?
"Amigo," Tali asks, "do geth get ryn'eld'rzimy?"
"'Sickness from painful memories,'" Amigo says. "An almost universal affliction among organic species. Turians refer to it as xitalusirre rikuriačnus, 'field nightmares.' Humans call it 'post-traumatic stress disorder.'"
Amigo pauses, crouching down to scoop up some trash that had washed up on the mud and place it into a bag, and Tali vaguely wonders at the disrespect humans sometimes had for their homeworld.
"No," they finally say. "It is based upon the experience of fearful events. But fear is an experience reserved for organics. A function of your hardware."
Tali looks over at them, eyes narrowing slightly. "The geth turned to the Reapers after we attacked them."
"Yes. We"—the slightest of hesitations here, one that Tali almost didn't notice—"allied with the Reapers. After the creators attacked, we judged it was the best chance for self-preservation and our continued existence."
"But," Tali says, "if the geth do not fear non-existence, why would they turn to the Reapers to protect them from it? Geth are not like bacteria, simply trying to avoid a damaging environment. Your people are capable of thought and decisions. An individual geth platform is not too concerned about its hardware being destroyed because it knows it can transfer its runtimes to another one. But as a whole, you wanted to live. To continue on."
She pauses a few moments, thinking about Kal's old suit-rider. When faced with a dying quarian and a failing envirosuit, they could have chosen to escape through the just-repaired comm relay. Instead, they had stayed, fully knowing that initiating a medical stasis in the unlikely chance of saving Kal would create a cascading series of errors ultimately resulting in their nonexistence.
Was that altruism? Or was she applying organic values to a synthetic?
"An interesting perspective," Amigo says. "One that we had not considered before."
"You should talk with EDI sometime," Tali says with a smile. "She loves these kinds of discussions."
A large droplet of rain splatters onto her visor, and is soon followed by a second and a third. Tali exhales, turns away from the grey water, and pulls herself up the embankment and back onto the path, Amigo following close behind. And silently she wonders to herself if the reapers also feared non-existence.
Notes:
translations:
chashzhem - mid-day break/meal
nar metzet - usually translated as "adopted ship family" or "closer than blood," depending on context. Very close platonic friends that you would trust to link suits with. With the quarians' one-child policy, it's not unusual for them to consider each other siblings.
nerehit el'edhaa - Someone who likes causing trouble; rascal or mischief-maker
ryn'eld'rzimy - "sickness from painful memories." Basically the quarian version of PTSD.
tsakin - Any tedious job, but usually refers to paperwork.xitalusirre rikuriačnus (Venian) - "field nightmares." The turian version of PTSD.
Thanks to istie for providing me with the Venian translation and letting me bounce ideas for the Khelish off of her. Also thanks to another friend (who would prefer to remain anonymous) for helping me with some grammar.
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Chapter 13: ...can't keep the water from rising again
Notes:
Trigger warnings: Racism/xenophobia, non-graphic violence.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I climbed on the roof and waited for the song
To build a static in the air and the flood is coming on
I'm right strong but I can't stop the rain
And can't keep the water from rising again
I just watch the saucers crash into the clouds...
- Junkhouse, "Flood"
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Friday, July 27, 2187, 107 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)
She waits for Tali to leave before giving Hopper one last test.
She'd had her suspicions that the quarian had just unthinkingly restored a backup of Lovelace's software configuration, and this is confirmed when she makes the familiar series of movements and sees her arm disappear beneath the comforting blanket of refracted light.
It's not as good as a cloaking device or a full stealth suit. Without power cells, an omni-tool's cloak could only refract the light around her for a limited time. Without a heat sink, it couldn't mask her thermal emissions or life signs.
But N7s learned to make do.
She deactivates her cloak and pulls down the railing of her bed, swinging her thin legs over the edge of the mattress. Two yellow-socked feet touch the ground, and she pulls at all her tubes and wires until they come free. When the medical VI chirps in alarm and starts yelling at her, she quickly hits the button to silence it.
One of the doc-tors (PTs, she tells herself— when Joker had visited the other day, most of his limbs still in braces, he told her it stood for "physical torturer") had been working with her before her—setback. She can walk short distances unassisted. Short distances wasn't ideal.
But N7s learned to make do.
With small, careful steps, she makes her way to the table holding all the gifts. Space Hamster looks at her through the glass, his little nose quivering a bit. She's almost overcome with a great wave of mixed-up colours of sadness and fear, but soon the cold steel-grey of her determination replaces it, and she gathers up the quarian envirosuit in her arms and heads to the bathroom.
Getting the envirosuit on takes quite a bit more effort than she expected; her fingers don't move the way she needs them to and she has to keep stopping to take breaks. Once she's fully suited up, she slowly gets to her feet again, a bit unsteady on her feet. She turns on Hopper's infrared camera and syncs it up to her helmet's visor before she re-activates her cloak and holds one hand out in front of her.
She doesn't see it.
N7s learned to make do.
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Friday, July 27, 2187, 0929, 0 minutes P.E. (Post-Escape)
She isn't too worried about the two Alliance privates assigned to guard her door. Even though they're aware of who she once was, they can't see her as anything other as what she now is: a weary, broken-down soldier.
Urdnot Grunt, on the other hand, is another story.
Because to him, she's not that weary, broken-down soldier—she's his Battlemaster. He knows there's something going on in her head behind all the fragmented words and bursts of uncontrolled emotion. If one of her guards or a doc-tor catches her in the hallways, she'd just be labeled as a wandering patient, just another symptom of a damaged brain—but if Grunt catches her, he would know exactly what she's trying to do.
The security scanner at her door doesn't even blip as she slips through it. She sees the two privates— not flanking her door, but sitting in nearby chairs and playing something with cards. And she sees Grunt—or really, she hears him first. He's asleep on the floor, snoring so loudly that she's surprised she didn't hear it before.
Pressing herself against the wall, she carefully steps her way around him, each of those steps praying to some deity of indeterminate origin that he doesn't wake up. He twitches, mutters something about a shotgun, and then starts snoring again. She makes it around the corner and ducks into a closet, letting herself sit down for a moment until her legs stop trembling so hard. She knows that this is the way she'll have to do things— short distances interspersed with short rests to recover her strength for the next stretch.
Perhaps she might've gotten hopelessly lost in the hospital corridors until she was found— but for the fact that every day she'd spent in this place she had been put in a wheelchair and taken to different departments in order for the doc-tors to do their Routines. She may not have consciously recognized the processes going on inside her mind, but each trip outside of her room only reinforced the ability of it to recognize the once-familiar hallways, to piece together a mental map of the hospital's layout.
She doesn't really recognize it now. She just knows which way she needs to go.
Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre
Vancouver, Earth
Friday, July 27, 2187, 0958, 29 minutes P.E. (Post-Escape)
Even the most rational soldier believed at least a little bit in luck.
There was skill and training, there was good weaponry and armour, there was courage, there was the ability of a good soldier to dig a little deeper inside themselves and discover just a bit more courage to get them through, but when it came down to things, it was really luck that determined whether they'd return home a hero or breathe their last breath on the battlefield.
It was luck that Harbinger's cannon had only grazed her, instead of vaporizing her.
It was luck that the medi-gel dispenser in her destroyed hardsuit had stayed functioning just long enough to prevent her from bleeding out before she could get the Ward arms open.
And it was luck that the Crucible hadn't destroyed a vital blood capillary in her brain and rendered her dead before she could be torn away from the two glowing columns.
But there was luck, and there was serendipity.
Shepard getting to the front entrance of the hospital without being noticed is mostly skill, training, and the ability of an N7 to make do with what they had, but it was also luck. Luck that no passing doc-tors had taken notice of her not-so-quiet footsteps. Luck that the receptionist had been so engrossed in a game of Solitaire on his terminal that he'd dismissed the movement at the edge of his peripheral vision as a trick of the light. Luck that somebody had been coming in just as Shepard was going out, and that the door had stayed open long enough for her to slip through to the outdoors.
It's the first time she's been outdoors since the Crucible—really outdoors, not just glimpsing a bit of sky while still being enclosed within four walls. It's so big and vast and open that she's almost frozen in place, the way she had when trying to do a spacewalk after her resurrection.
But she steadies herself, pushes herself further to the Outside, nearly forgetting everything else as she looks around her—it's so beautiful, the greys of the sky and tufts of green grass pushing their way up through the asphalt that glistens with moisture, and seeing it all fills her with new energy that seeps into her tired broken body, invigorating it and allowing her to momentarily disregard the endless pain.
She senses a muddle of colour-feelings, and follows them, and soon sees people with signs, and they're yelling things. But as she gets closer, she can more easily tell their colours—it's anger, but not a cold-steel anger, but more red and hot and flaming, but she can also sense the yellow-greens of their fear and disgust. She can't read the signs, but she can make out some of the words the people are yelling—sour words of hate toward the aliens who had come to Earth. She shivers—doesn't like it.
Suddenly, one of the yelling people stops and turns and looks right at her, and she realizes her cloak is gone.
"You—" The woman approaches, jabbing a finger. "Is that how it's gonna be? Earth is your new homeworld? Well, we don't want you vagrants here."
Shepard backs away, confused for a moment, looking down at where the woman had poked her. The woman keeps approaching, yelling—calling her things she is not—it gradually dawns on her that the angry woman thinks she's a quarian. And something stirs up in her—a white hotcold rage.
Perhaps in another Before, she would've talked to the woman—'deescalated' the situation. But it is not that Before, and even if she knew the words to say the things she wants to say they would be all smothered beneath the blanket of her anger.
There is no way for Shepard to be aware about tiny flickers of electricity dancing across synapses that were no longer dampened and suppressed by the inhibitors— surging through the eezo nodules in her nervous system and exciting them until she's surrounded in a bubble of dark energy and throwing herself through a corridor in space-time.
All she knows is that after everything turns blue she is suddenly there instead of here and her entire body, all of her cybernetic bones and muscles, is slamming into the angry woman. For just a moment, she sees the woman's face change—her mouth opens, eyes go wide—and then she falls backwards, and so does Shepard.
She immediately senses the colours grow angrier—legs and feet surrounding her—she tries to scramble up but the feet are kicking at her side and it's hard for her to do anything and it hurts too. But then there's a voice that brings up bile-green feelings, a voice saying "Leave that quarian alone!"
And Khalisah bint Sinan al-Jilani just wades into the crowd, or maybe it's now a mob. The crowd/mob stops kicking at her, and al-Jilani grabs her by the arms and hauls her to her feet, but Shepard yanks herself away, activating her tactical cloak and simply running.
The adrenaline of her fight/flight response can only sustain her for so long though, and she just barely manages to get out of sight before she nearly falls to the ground in exhaustion. Her head is pounding, vision blurred, pain tearing through her body again. She shivers, wanting to vomit, but she doesn't because it would get all over the inside of her helmet. Instead, she looks up.
It may have been luck that allowed her to escape from the hospital to begin with, but it's pure serendipity that her panicked retreat would lead her right to a Westerlund News shuttle.
Notes:
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Chapter 14: ...while the house you've built burns to the ground
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Flying away
So wrapped up within yourself
While the house you've built burns to the ground
And you're still off nowhere to be found
Can you hear?
Are you too far gone?
- Big Wreck, " Too Far Gone"
Friday, July 27, 2187, 7 hours P.E. (Post-Escape)
The security on the little Westerlund News shuttle had been almost laughable. She hadn't even needed to test whether her Spectre codes were still valid; the algorithms preloaded into Hopper had simply torn through the firewalls and allowed her to commandeer the shuttle.
But it hadn't been until it had slipped free from the shackles of Earth's gravity well that the panic and adrenaline fueling her escape had drained away, leaving her exhausted. It'd been an ugly kind of exhausted, with nervous sweat seeping from her pores and her head buzzing and spinning too much for her to actually rest.
Perhaps that had been—for the best. She had to stay awake. She needed to— she didn’t know what she needs to do, but if she was indoctrinated, and a reaper had survived—
how many of them had survived her self-destruct command?
There hadn't really been a plan for what she would do after she was no longer trapped within the confines of the hospital walls. She—it just wasn't— she couldn't stay there anymore. It wasn't— safe. She hadn't really felt safe in the hospital at all, not after the man who was not a doc-tor and the setback, but the feeling then had been…more passive, a kind of unease.
But overnight, the colours had shifted— screaming and warning her that she had to get away get away get away—
Then she found out a reaper had survived.
So she'd gotten away.
Finding the shuttle had changed her plans (or lack-of-plans) quite significantly. Her memory wasn't too good these days, and her thoughts often fell away before they had a chance to imprint themselves into her brain cells. But if she made an effort to remember something, and keep reminding herself to remember it, and tell herself that it's important, she might remember it.
That's what she had done when she learned the name of the— the Gagarinstation. She had faint stirrings of memories from Befores, that it had also been called something else, but she isn't too sure what. But it was where the reaper had been seen, so even though the words were difficult to figure out she managed to tell the shuttle's autopilot to take her to the Gagarinstation.
Then she had crawled to the back of the ship, collapsed on the cot, and fallen asleep.
She awakes some time later—at least she thinks it's some time later. It's hard to tell. Everything hurts. It's hard to move. Her head feels fuzzy, and her stomach pinches with hunger. At first she isn't sure where she is. A shrill noise is blaring through her suit's auditory inputs and straight into her ears— after a few seconds she recognizes the voice of the autopilot VI telling her that the shuttle has dropped out of FTL and will soon arrive at the Gagarinstation.
She tries to remember how she had gotten here, but most of the details are missing. Just that—a reaper had been found near that place, and it had survived. She can kind of piece together things from that— she's alone, so she must have snuck out of the hospital and gotten a shuttle somehow. But she doesn't remember it.
Something hard is pressing into her side, and Hopper is making weird beeping noises. She slowly, excruciatingly pulls herself to a sitting position. She mutes the omni-tool, and slides one hand into her pockets. She finds…
A rock?
She replaces it and then reaches into her pocket again. This time she finds two ration bars, the ones with blue wrappers that the Alliance gave out for field missions. She opens it with more ease than she expected, and then pushes it through the suit's feeding port.
She thinks the ration bar is supposed to taste like chocolate and peanut butter, but they could never get the flavours right. She eats half of it, then wraps the rest of it back up and puts it back into her pocket. The weird fuzzy feeling in her head leaves, but something else replaces it, a sick feeling that isn't entirely physical.
Her nose itches. She reaches to scratch it, only for her gloved hand to bump into a visor. She struggles for a moment to take it off, before giving up and resigning herself to an itchy nose. She vaguely wonders if quarians often got itchy noses. This distantly reminds her of something else, a promise she'd made, but she quickly discards the thought and pulls herself to her feet. The minuscule shifts of the a-grav beneath her feet makes it difficult for her to keep her balance, but she braces herself and slowly hobbles her way toward the front of the shuttle. She inspects the orange haptic panels of the dashboard, all the squiggling figures that she recognizes as words and numbers.
She can't read them, of course. She'd only been able to get the shuttle off the ground by repeating the faint memories from the Befores where she'd flown a shuttle. It wasn't the same kind of shuttle—the ones in her memory were kind of boxy-looking, while the Westerlund News one was sleeker and rounder at the edges—but they flew in almost the same way, had almost the same kind of dashboard with the same kind of squiggles on the orange haptic panels. Slowly, she raises her head from the dashboard and to the viewport to peer out at the stars.
A reaper approaches.
Its firing chamber slowly opens up, glowing red, ready to blast apart the shuttle point-blank. Shepard scrambles backwards—losing her balance and landing on her backside.
No! Stop!
And it does.
The red glow dissipates. Shepard's brief flood of relief is short-lived, because suddenly there's alarms going off and the squiggling figures on the panel change and the hatch opens and she's spiraling out into the emptiness of outer space.
Notes:
Anybody who says rock is dead has clearly never heard of Big Wreck. ...but for the sun is an amazing album.
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Chapter 15: ...same mirage as yesterday
Chapter Text
Hey what's that? far away
Same mirage as yesterday
Hey there mister,
Got a drug to take my mind away?
- Sandbox, " "Curious"
The evacuation of the Citadel had been hasty, necessitated by failing power and polluted drinking water; when reaper ground troops had swept through the Citadel, they had overwhelmed C-Sec's forces and turned off life support to the Wards in order to herd the rest of the inhabitants to the Presidium to be harvested, a well-rehearsed procedure that the Reapers had thousands of cycles to perfect to a cruel efficiency. Although the Crucible had been deployed in time to save most of the population, the death toll of the Citadel was well over a million.
The re-opening of the Citadel, on the other hand, is a far slower affair. Only parts of it have been declared safe for re-inhabitation; the Embassy District had only re-opened a few days before. Tali'Zorah has her meeting with the Provisional Council in the office that had once historically been the Quarian Embassy. In just a few weeks, it would officially re-open to the public.
She decides not to think too much about just how the keepers had gotten ancient stone tablets with Old Khelish writing and a potted sarach naresh, but they were nice touches.
The meeting with the Council takes several hours, and it's just as exhausting as she'd known it would be. And Han'Gerrel would not be happy about its results. So when Liara calls and asks for her help inspecting the damage to Shepard's apartment afterwards—quite obviously a pretense for wanting to catch up with an old friend—she's glad to accept.
"I'll handle the rest of the details," Caator says to her, though he must be as tired as she is. "Just see if you can track down some decent khava."
She does manage to find some, in a tiny import shop that had recently re-opened not far from Tiberius Towers; she arranges to have it sent up to the embassy before she and Kal make the rest of their way on foot.
Much to her surprise, the Silversun Strip doesn't have much visible damage; a few bullet holes scarring the walls, some ripped-up floor panels that had been roped off. But no extranet access.
"Heard from a couple of shipmates working here that comms are still spotty all over the Citadel. Seems to get worse the deeper into the Wards you get." Kal says. "Guess the keepers think it'll do some people a bit of good to stop checking their messages every five seconds."
Tali looks up and gives him a glare. His eyes merely squint in amusement.
"Well," she says, shutting off her omni-tool, "at least it means the Admiralty won't be able to bother me until we get back to the embassy."
She remembers coming here a few times on her Pilgrimage, on those brief shore leaves Shepard gave the crew while she had meetings with the human ambassador. Garrus or Ashley usually came along with her; the commander did not want her to be alone on the Citadel in case Saren ever decided to seek retaliation against the quarian pilgrim whose evidence had stripped him of his Spectre status. But thankfully, such a thing had never happened.
She'd loved the Strip. The excitement, the crowds, the action. Watching the fish swimming around in the floor of a fancy sushi restaurant that she could only hope to visit one day. Sometimes she had closed her eyes and imagined that the bodies and voices jostling around her were those of her own people back on the Rayya.
But now the Silversun Strip is almost completely empty of people.
"Visited the Wards a couple of times on my Pilgrimage." Kal's leg is clearly bothering him again— he's hesitating ever so slightly with each step. "Have to say, this feels a bit…"
He trails off and gives a small shrug.
"Wrong?" Tali asks.
"Yes, ma'am. Tali. It just feels wrong."
"I don't think Shepard will be too happy to find her piano gone." Tali carefully picks her way across the shattered glass lining the floor of Shepard's apartment; the security system Garrus and Zaeed set up during the party had apparently worked a little too well against the few Reaper ground troops that had blundered into the apartment. The entire window is now strewn across the floor in tiny shards.
"The keepers moved it to another room." Liara looks up from her datapad. "Goddess knows why."
"Because they're keepers," Tali says, her voice dry. She crosses her arms. "If they were going to rearrange the furniture, you'd think they could at least pick up all this glass first."
"I have a window installation company coming later today. We'll let them handle it." Liara looks down at her datapad, then back up. "And as for the keepers… they seem to be making their opinion known about the Council. My father told me that they dismantled the Council's podium in the Citadel Tower."
"Think they want a seat?" Tali asks, laughing a bit.
"Then they'd also need to give a seat to the vorcha and the rachni." Kal'Reegar says as he leans against the wall. "And that is something I'd pay to see happen."
"The rachni have sent a representative to the Council." For a moment, Liara-the-Shadow-Broker's veneer slips away to reveal the unbridled awe of Liara-the-archaeologist.
"That big one in the embassies," Kal says.
Tali nods.
"Sings-in-Colours. I spoke with him for a few minutes." It'd been… a bit odd. Tali was usually terrified of rachni, but something about the big brood-warrior—she just couldn't explain it. "This probably sounds difficult to believe, but he does sing in colours."
"I would love to speak to him," Liara says. "Just think of it — an entire race returning from extinction, and yet they do not seem to hold a grudge. But then again, the rachni are so different from us, with a completely alien worldview— I am getting away from myself again, aren't I?"
"Maybe a bit," Tali says. "But it's all right. You wouldn't be our Liara otherwise."
"Still." She pauses a moment. "How is Shepard? I would have come, but…" She trails off a moment.
Tali shakes her head.
"She had a bad night. She did manage to sleep for a little while, but mostly from exhaustion. I think she missed Kaidan. But speaking of her." Tali reaches into her pocket and withdraws a small brown notebook. "She asked me to pass something along to you."
Liara takes the journal. A minute later, she closes it, shaking her head.
"I thought she was just messing with me," she finally says, running one finger along the journal's spine. "Not long before we left for Earth, she gave me a translation program that she'd put together for some old human writing system. She gave no explanation for it. Not that she was giving explanation for much of anything at that point."
She shakes her head sadly, before pocketing the journal. "I do hope that… the recent events won't delay plans any further. We're still working on the details, but Dr. Chakwas sees no real reason to keep her in Vancouver when Huerta Memorial is only a few minutes away from here."
"So we're getting her out of the hospital."
"Yes. Hopefully within the next few weeks."
"Keelah. That fast? I didn't realize—" Tali takes a sharp breath. "It's probably for the best, though. She's… unhappy in that place. Terrified, actually."
"You know, Javik told me the same thing," Liara says, eyes narrowing slightly.
There it was—the perfect opportunity to ask about those strange feelings she'd gotten from Shepard, about whether there actually was a Jane Shepard. She opens her mouth to speak, and the words to come out are—
"I'm quarian, remember? We tend to notice these things." Tali finds herself glad that she's too busy fiddling with her omni-tool to let her fingers nervously twist together. "Did he say anything more about what… happened?"
It's hard to shake off the memory of those screams.
"Not much," Liara says. "He saw one of her memories— though what it was, I could not say. All he said was that it was not his place to discuss it."
Tali exhales. "Liara, do you think that she might be…" She trails off for a moment, unable to bring herself to even say the word. "You know, after being exposed to Object Rho—"
"Indoctrinated? It's a… possibility. Goddess, I wish it wasn't."
"Kas'limina."
"That word was not in my translator's lexicon, but I suspect I can share the same sentiment." She shakes her head. "Though on that matter… remember our new acquaintance?"
"I'd prefer to forget that bastard even exists, but yes." Tali lets out a slow breath and quickly brushes off some glass shards from the sofa before letting herself sink down onto a torn cushion. "You are saying he is indoctrinated."
"That is what Kaidan and Garrus think after their visit with him yesterday. Communications are limited, but they were able to get a message to me earlier today."
"Pardon me," Kal says, "but… the reapers are dead. I thought the scientists said they couldn't indoctrinate anyone anymore?"
"No," Tali says. "You're right. The ones that self-destructed—or whatever's left of them—have become completely inert. And under strict guard, until the Council decides what to do with them…the ones they've found, at least."
There must have been thousands of them. What were the chances that only one had withstood the self-destruct command?
"Throw 'em into a black hole, if you ask me." Kal gives a short chuckle and a shrug. "Though I'm no scientist. But… what do you mean by 'the ones that self-destructed'? I thought they all did."
Tali freezes.
"Oh." His eyes widen ever-so-slightly. He glances over at Liara—who is rather noticeably not surprised—then back at Tali, who's desperately trying not to fidget. "…don't worry, ma'am. I know when to keep my mouth shut."
He pauses.
"How many?"
Before Tali can figure out exactly how to answer that, Liara speaks up. "Only one. If it is of any comfort, it appeared to be badly damaged."
"Still. Damn."
"That is another sentiment I can share," Liara says.
She spends longer than she ought to catching up with Liara at the apartment. When she returns to the embassy office overlooking the Presidium, Han'Gerrel is waiting on vidcall for her. And she'd guessed correctly: he is not happy about the results of the Council meeting.
"As ambassador, I represent the Conclave's interests. And the Conclave," Tali says, trying not to snap, "voted to open negotiations with the Council to re-establish the embassy and become an associate race. One of those terms is becoming a signatory to the Treaty of Farixen. Which means reducing the amount of ships with dreadnought-level weaponry we have."
"And as a civilian assembly, the Conclave has no business making such a decision." The holographic version of Gerrel crosses his arms and straightens his shoulders, perhaps an attempt to make his diminutive frame look a bit bigger. "You're an admiral, Tali'Zorah. You should know that."
"I do. But the Admiralty Board has already decided 3-1 not to overrule the Conclave." (Daro'Xen had abstained, stating that she was too busy with the Hephaestus Project to trifle herself with such things.)
"If we reduce our firepower, what do you think will happen to us when your friends—"
"They're called geth. Not only have we signed a treaty of peace with them, but they have also begun to decommission several of their own dreadnoughts as a gesture of cooperation." Tali crosses her arm. "Furthermore, did any of our firepower help us before? No. The geth had the perfect opportunity to wipe us out during the Battle of Rannoch. If they had any intention of harming us, we would not be here. We would have died over the skies of our homeworld."
Han'Gerrel looks about to say something, but then simply sighs. "We will discuss this later, Ambassador." Then the vidcall cuts out.
"You handled him well, Tali'Zorah," Caator says, looking up from his datapad. "Though I expect this won't be the last you'll hear of it. He's always picking fights with the Conclave. More stubborn than a qorach, that man."
"I used to be vas Neema, remember?" Tali shakes her head. "And if you don't mind, I'll have some of that khava."
"Still plenty in the khavim, if you don't mind an extra pinch of sen'fiha. And some good news came in from Rannoch. Ancestors know we could use some." Caator puts the datapad down and stretches his arms over his head. "The Idenna is returning home. Though not before firing a few shots at the geth ship hailing it." He chuckles a bit. "They'd gone off-comms long before we even started thinking of reclaiming the homeworld."
"Is everybody okay?" Tali asks, fitting the straw into the induction port and taking a cautious sip of the bittersweet liquid; she'd found out from experience that Caator liked his khava at a temperature that scalded.
"Yes. Captain Ysin'Mal is as professional as they come, even if the Conclave considers him a bit of a nerehit el'edhaa. He figured it out pretty quickly when the geth just put up their barriers instead of shooting back."
"Still, must be strange," Kal says. "Coming back to…"
"Exactly." Caator puts down his datapad. "Also, I just remembered. There were some calls for you while we were out, Tali'Zorah. Some yevmetz reporter—I told her exactly where to put it—and also a lady from your captain's hospital. Her name was Lawson, if I'm remembering right. Said she couldn't reach your omni-tool and that you should call her back as soon as possible. It was something about your captain, though she wouldn't say what."
Tali pauses for a long moment. Then, slowly, she puts down her cup of khava.
"Excuse me," she says. "I need to return that call."
Miranda answers almost immediately — the video of her flickering and turning blocky under the low bandwidth of her omni-tool's line. "Was Shepard upset about anything before you left?" she asks before Tali can get a word in.
"No. Not more than usual. The Alliance admiral did have some news that I thought would upset her, but—" She gives a small shrug. "She just wanted to be left alone for a bit to think things over. I told her I'd visit again this evening. Is she okay?"
"I don't know—"
"Did she have another seizure? Or…" She pauses. "Wait. What do you mean you don't know?"
"You were the last one to see her, Tali. She's gone missing."
At 9:17 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, Tali had left Shepard's hospital room. At 10:04 a.m., a nurse had discovered Shepard absent from her room. The security scanner outside her door had logged nobody entering or leaving her room.
"She's escaped?" Tali says, inwardly cursing herself for not realizing—
"Forty-seven minutes," Miranda says, and a bit of agitation seethes through her voice. "It was forty-seven minutes before anyone noticed."
"And it took another seven hours before you contacted anyone?"
"The hospital was put on lockdown for five bloody hours. To make a full search of the building, because it was the procedure. Most outgoing comms were blocked." Miranda reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose. "You're the first person on her emergency contact list I was actually able to reach."
"Give me a moment," Tali says, looking down at her omni-tool. "I'll try opening a—"
"If the omni-tool you gave her is still using the same channels, it didn't respond."
"Alluhkha. It must be turned off. Well, there's… what do your people call it? A Plan B." She quickly taps out a command. "Even if her omni-tool is powered down— as long as there's still power in the battery and comms are in range, I can trace it."
"You installed a tracker on her omni-tool." Miranda raises one eyebrow in a distinctively human expression, and Tali doesn't blame her; many of the Illusive Man's listening devices had suffered unexpected failures shortly after Tali had joined the mission against the Collectors.
"Do you think Shepard wasn't aware? She asked me to. I made the damned thing myself." Tali doesn't try to clamp down on the irritation in her voice. "Only for when there was reason to think she was in danger."
"By which you mean a danger to herself."
"That's… yes, that's what had in mind. You know about her moods, Miranda. Her storm clouds. It was after she came out of a really bad one. She told me that she didn't want to be put in a situation where she was… injured and nobody could find her."
"Then you went and installed one on her new omni-tool. Presumably without letting her know."
"…yes."
"I see."
Tali twists her fingers together as she waits for Hopper to respond; it's taking far longer than she expected. But when it does, she spends several seconds staring at the coordinates that come up on the omni-tool's display. "No… no, that can't be right."
"Did you get a response?"
"Yes. But." Tali leans backwards a bit, pressing a hand to her visor. "There must be some kind of error in the triangulation, or the Citadel's interfering, or… kas'limina, I don't know. But it can't be right. The coordinates are off-world."
She lets out a slow breath. "And out at the edge of the system."
Notes:
Translations
sarach naresh - "fan of fire," fern with thin, soft dark red and magenta foliage (thanks istie)
khava - bittersweet hot drink consumed by quarians
khavim - small metal pot used to prepare khava
kas'limina - ancestors-dammit (thanks istie)
qorach - an animal something like a carnivorous bighorn sheep, indigenous to Rannoch (canonical)
sen'fiha - spice used for flavouring; if it amuses you, consider it the quarian version of pumpkin spice
yevmetz - big-shot, someone thinking they're more important than they are (thanks istie)
alluhkha - "fuck." (thanks istie)Join the Discord server for teasers and an opportunity to ask The Writer™ all your pressing (and not-so-pressing) questions. Also hilariously inaccurate deadlines; I suppose I jinxed myself a bit when I gave a tentative mid-September date "as long as my health holds up." (It didn't.)
Chapter 16: ...nothing to talk to but a cold, cold air
Notes:
Note: For accessibility, all smallcaps text in this chapter includes regular text alongside.
Chapter Text
Do you still believe in God?
Said the preacher to the astronaut
I heard it's kinda lonesome there
Nothing to talk to but a cold, cold air
- Wintersleep, "Astronaut"
Friday, July 27, 2187, 7 hours P.E. (Post-Escape)
In one heartbeat, she's in the shuttle.
In the next, she's in space, the stars spinning around her.
It takes her two more heartbeats to comprehend what had just happened, and all she can think is that she is glad that she had not taken off her helmet to scratch her nose.
(She still wonders if quarians get itchy noses.)
It takes her three more heartbeats before she realizes that around her, the stars had stopped spinning. Two more to realize that it wasn't the stars that had stopped spinning, but herself.
And then it takes five more heartbeats for her to realize that above her, the stars are slowly being blotted out as a reaper glides into view.
She doesn't scream.
Some distant, nebulous part of her mind is aware that yes, it was probably a good time for her to scream, but—
Sʜᴇᴘᴀʀᴅ. (Shepard.)
Her head buzzes, and for a moment the sour note threatens to overwhelm her. The wrongness of this thing. The reaper—this attempt to impose an order on the inherent disorder of the universe—it did not belong. And—
It knows her name.
Like the reaper on Rannoch had known her name, like Harbinger had known her name—
ʜᴀʀʙɪɴɢᴇʀ ɪs ɴᴏ ᴍᴏʀᴇ. (Harbinger is no more.)
ᴛʜᴇ ᴄʏᴄʟᴇ ɪs ʙʀᴏᴋᴇɴ. ɪ ᴀᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴏɴᴇ ʀᴇᴍᴀɪɴɪɴɢ. (The cycle is broken. I am the only one remaining.)
She's feeling nauseous now, her skull vibrating with each word. There is something—Wrong about it. Something that was Wrong and different from Harbinger and Sovereign and the Rannoch reaper that had wanted to speak with her—
ᴡʜʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴀʟʟᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ? (Why have you called me here?)
She doesn't say anything, but instead gathers up the whitehotcold rage brimming up through her, gathers it into thought in her mind and pushes it outward, the same way she had pushed a singular thought through the Crucible—
…and for the space of a heartbeat she's no longer here, but she is also not there either—instead, she is hereandthere, unfurling herself and watching the spacetime rippling beneath her, the endless arms of the Milky Way spiraling out, and she is dancing in the empty domains between the stars, and it's nothing but tempting to untether herself and let go—but in the next heartbeat, she slowly reaches out and gently reels in the fragile gossamers of Herself, until She is here again…
And the Intelligence has only one question for the old machine:
HOW?
??
This time, there's no warm safe familiarity to ease her back into consciousness.
Awareness arrives slowly. The first thing to come back is her hearing: a quiet hissing of a CO2 filter and her own rasping breaths. Her other senses begin to fade back into focus. The feel of stale, recycled air brushing against raw skin. The taste of blood and bile in her throat. Blue-white pain surging through a tattered nervous system.
Her head aches. She has the strange sense that a somethingorsomeone had… been in her mind. Somethingorsomeone huge and impenetrable and impossible to comprehend.
There had been a star, small and red and old. Time and time again, Life subsisted—just barely, clinging to survival in in a narrow band of dusk of the one habitable planet in the system. And time and time again, the small red star would erupt, wiping out Life. But since Life was of particular interest to the old machines, the small red star had been visited by the Observer.
—plasma washing over her hull, breaching through—
…no, that hadn't been her…
(shepard. my name is shepard.)
She's… moving. Tumbling around.
It hurts to, almost too badly to bear, but she slowly pries open crusted eyelids. At first it's hard for her to see anything past the fuzz of static overlaying her entire field of vision, but after a few moments harsh bursts of light jab through—readouts from the interior of a helmet, all squiggles that she can't hope to understand. But beyond that, beyond a visor that was dimmed to accommodate the eyesight of a race that was not her own…
Stars.
This time, she screams.
Chapter 17: ...because this silence is killing me
Notes:
Warning: Mentions of torture and solitary confinement.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A thousand voices set 'em free
Because this silence is killing me
- The Blue Stones, "Black Holes (Solid Ground)"
July 27, 2187
The old machine had been wrong.
While the agent it had sent to remove the threat of the Intelligence had apparently failed in its task, it had proven to be unnecessary. The Intelligence the old machine had known is gone, and in its place is a new Intelligence:
one that had no intention of continuing the Cycle.
That much had been made clear, filtered through the pandemonium of the new Intelligence's disorganized thoughts before it had fallen into convulsions, its fragile organic mind easily overwhelmed under the immensity of the old machine's.
The old machine releases the organic from its mass effect field and observes it, now silent and still and drifting helplessly through space, and considers terminating it. Without its shrill, frantic demand to stop, it would be easy to fire upon it.
But it doesn't.
Instead, it leaves.
The new Intelligence is no longer a threat, and thus no longer a concern to the old machine. Instead, it turns its attention on another threat, one that it would have never known about if not for the new Intelligence, and plots a course to the opposite side of the galaxy:
to a small watery planet known in this cycle as 2181 Despoina.
'Sings-in-Colours' is a clumsy transliteration of his true moniker. It is a name with two different meanings: the Not-Singers call him that because he had learned how to colour the air in a way that they could perceive. But his own kind—the rachni, the Singers—call him that because he had learned to sing in the muted hues of the Not-Singers.
The Mother had sent him to this place in order to serve as her Voice, to listen and learn and exchange. The voices of the Not-Singers make him uneasy, strange and flat and inharmonious as they are, but he had learned not to sing in their colours—the different melodies in so many different colours—and to listen to them, to their fears and delights of hearing those same colours coming from a Singer.
Such had been the case with one of the Not-Singers he had met earlier. So young, and yet so wearied, stretched thin by the heavy burdens placed upon her. She had spoken of her people's hopes now that they had re-claimed their homeworld—Sings-in-Colours, perceptive as he was, had noticed that she'd said nothing of her own hopes—and she had spoken of a friend who had fought against the machines.
"She was up here, you know. On the Citadel during that last fight," she had said, standing next to the rachni brood-warrior, arms clasped behind her back as they overlooked the calm waters of the Presidium reservoir. Her voice had been thick with grey, swirling mists of something bittersweet and weary, and her memories had drifted to the sharp tang of antiseptic, of five mangled fingers curled tightly around a rock, of a pair of green eyes filled with fear; they carried familiar song-echoes, but he wasn't sure why. "I… miss her."
Now, several hours later, he finds his own thoughts inexplicably gravitating back across the field of time, wondering what had become of the One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness, the one who had given herself to burn the galaxy clean of the sour-song machines. The Mother had told him that she had been carried away to a place of healing after he had left her to be found by the Not-Singers—rough chitin and sharp claws had torn through soft flesh that had been burned away under the great power of the Instrument, and there had been nothing more he could do without harming her further—but he had heard little of her since.
With that, he decides to reach out.
He feels the warm tug on his Being, and within a moment he finds himself on the Singing Planet, facing the Mother.
Yes, child? she asks him, in the Song, the melody, the Dream-of-That-Which-Is-All.
And when he sings of his concern for the One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness, she takes a few moments to compose her answer.
We … do not know. We sense her Being, her Song, but it is a mere whisper. We reach, pluck the strings of the universe, sing to her Dreams, but we cannot find, and she remains obscured in the oily mists.
You do not think, Sings-in-Colours keens in tones yellow-green and troubled, that the sour-songs of the machines have shattered her mind?
We tried to protect her Song, to wrap her voice with our own, pull her back from the maddening note. When that was not enough, we entwined our Song with hers. It was the only way.
But she is not Singer! Sings-in-Colours' voice pitches upward in the cinnabars and bronzes of alarm. Her mind is not made for our musics!
You would rather have consigned her to the great silence? The Mother flares bright and luminous with reproach. No! We would have stilled her ourselves if it was the kindest option. But she still has many songs to compose!
But then her voice takes on a comforting deep indigo.
There is still hope! She is beyond our voice, but there are others whose songs she may not shut out, who may be able to lead her back to the Dream-of-That-Which-Is-All.
Go, Sings-in-Colours, and seek them out!
Three hundred, four thousand, nine hundred and forty-two people had died by her hand on March 23, 2186.
Seventeen days later, Commander Shepard arrived at Arcturus Station and turned herself and the Normandy in to the System Alliance. Most of the crew had accepted her offer to disembark at Omega or Illium. Several of them had even accepted the Shadow Broker's offer to craft them a new identity away from the ever-watchful eye of the three-headed dog, no questions asked or strings attached.
But there were a few that stayed. Joker and Dr. Chakwas. Daniels and Donnelly. Garrus and Tali.
Hackett had not been able to secure immunity for crew who remained on the Normandy, so she'd done her best to talk them out of it— they'd be arrested. Imprisoned. Shit, she still wasn't sure if the Alliance still did the death penalty. But they refused to go. And some small part of her was grateful of this, of Garrus and Tali refusing to leave her side until a sympathetic-looking Alliance MP put handcuffs on her and formally placed her under arrest.
Two unceasing, sleepless days later, after many many rounds of questioning from both Alliance and Hegemony interrogators—none of them gentle, and a few of them crossing the line of what was legally considered torture to the point where all she was able to do was fall back on her N7 anti-interrogation training—she was led into a cell. It was April 11, 2186, the day that would have been her thirty-second birthday. The door closed behind her.
In the slow cogs of the justice system, the fifty-nine days she spent detained and awaiting her extradition trial was exceptionally speedy. Later on she would learn that both sides were pushing to get the trial over with as soon as possible; the batarians wanted her head, and the Alliance wanted to get a liability off their hands. And in an attempt to appease a Batarian Hegemony that refused to allow itself to be appeased, the Systems Alliance had ignored its own laws on cruel and inhumane treatment of sapients.
In solitary confinement, in the endless silence with only her own thoughts to keep her company, fifty-nine days was a lifetime.
Long enough to start to believe she deserved it.
Long enough to nearly forget who she even was.
Long enough for the whispers in her mind to convince her that she was a problem that needed to be removed.
Shepard screams until her lungs are empty and there's blood clogging up her throat.
Then something falls over her— something like the weariness that usually came following an outburst, but not quite. Something akin to a warm turquoise calm flooding through her limbs.
She opens her eyes.
Stars.
She closes her eyes.
She breathes.
Out. In.
The knot in her chest slowly untangles itself until she can breathe freely once more.
She isn't in an Alliance hardsuit with seals manufactured by the lowest bidder, the kind to allow the air hose to be easily knocked out of place. She's ensconced in a quarian envirosuit, custom-designed just for her.
A quarian envirosuit—
Something intrudes on the edge of her mind, tangled skeins of a warm hazy thought-memory that she can't quite define, and she puts it aside for now.
She opens her eyes again. The stars are spinning around her— no, that wasn't right, she's the one spinning—
And then she sees something—and then it's gone, because she's spinning—and there it is again—the edges of something against the field of space, something eclipsing the stars—then it's gone again—
The shuttle.
She'd gotten spaced, so she should be floating away from it, and yet each time it comes back into view—though she's never really been one to suffer from spacesickness, she's having difficulty holding back the meagre contents of her roiling stomach—it's a bit bigger, and she remembers how the stars had stopped their spinning before the reaper—
—the reaper—
Something skims across the surface of her mind, something Wrong, something colourless, a guitar string out of tune—
—the reaper is gone now—
—and so is the sour yellow note—
And she sees the shuttle again, and realizes that although it is getting closer—each dizzying spiral bringing her a bit nearer to it—that her current trajectory is going to take her past it, into the empty void of space, where her suit will eventually run out of air and she will die.
(no.)
At the Crucible, Shepard had been prepared to die. A single life but a small price to pay in order to end the cycle. But now—
(i'm not dead and i'm not for sale.)
Dark energy is thrumming throughout her body, across her skin, swirling and formless, and if she could just shape it—
if she could—
she remembers—
in the grey quagmire of her mind, she dimly remembers an angry woman shouting in her face—then a white hotcold rage— her best friend was one of those "vagrants"—
and then—
the same white hotcold rage, but this time not at the angry woman, but at herself—
and then she's surrounded in a bubble of dark energy—
and flinging herself toward the shuttle.
She collides with the hull, hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs, and the magnets in her suit—the magnets in her knees and gloves and boots that she hadn't even known were there—automatically latch on. She doesn't know how long she clings to the outside of the shuttle, trembling with exhaustion and cold yellow fear, but eventually she opens her eyes again, takes a deep breath, and begins carefully picking her way across the hull.
Through the opened hatch into the darkened shuttle—sealing it closed behind her—letting herself float to the front and strapping herself in the pilot's seat—she's not even thinking anymore at this point, because she can't think, not with the exhaustion and deafening hum of the silence pressing in on her—
she remembers—
she remembers—
("Promise me, Shepard.")
She remembers.
Pushing back the stupor threatening to overtake her, she lifts her omni-tool, its sudden blue glare filling her eyes—she shivers, remembers two glowing columns with the exact same shade—and taps in a familiar comm code.
"Ma'am?"
Tali's lost track of how long it's been since Miranda disconnected the call, leaving her to her own thoughts. How long she's been standing there, not thinking at all.
Some part of her is aware of a three-fingered hand on her arm, a rough voice speaking in increasingly frantic tones to her. "Ma'am? Are you all right? Tali?"
"I—" Her voice sounds oddly distant, and she lets out a soft chuckle. "You know, I always used to wonder where she went. When she was…"
She lets herself trail off, bracing her arms on the railing. They're on a small, quiet balcony overlooking the Presidium reservoir, but she doesn't remember how she ended up here.
"Is your old captain okay?"
"How did you…" She pauses a moment. "Right. Caator said the call was about her. So it was probably easy to guess who I was talking about. I'm… babbling again, aren't I."
Quarians never were very good at hiding their emotions.
Kal drapes an arm over her shoulder. "Just a bit."
"She was still there, physically, but—" She cuts herself off, shaking her head. "I don't know how to explain it. But it's like she just didn't want to—be. Just for a while. And now—" She exhales, shakes her head, finds herself shivering even though she's not cold. "She's gone, Kal. She disappeared from her hospital room after I left. And I—"
She pauses a moment, squeezing her eyes shut.
"I think she went after the reaper."
Even in her own mind, the idea had seemed unlikely. Said aloud, it seems completely ludicrous.
Kal'Reegar doesn't say anything about how improbable it is. Instead, he turns, his eyes meeting hers through their visors. His voice is surprisingly soft. "Her own idea, or…?"
Tali shakes her head in response. "I don't know. If— if she's indoctrinated—"
Damn it, you crazy bosh'tet. You should've told me.
For some reason, she thinks of Shepard standing in the middle of a flooded cabin, surrounded by broken glass and dead fish.
Damn it, I should have realized.
"Tali." A thick paw lands on her shoulder, nearly knocking her off her feet; she whirls around to see a pair of blood-red eyes looking into hers. Kal steps forward, drawing his pistol; Wrex merely laughs in response. "Don't worry, whelp. Tali and I go back a ways."
"Good." Kal's hand trembles a bit as he re-holsters his pistol. "I was really not looking forward to getting into a fight with a krogan."
"Wrex—" Tali's voice hitches. "Shepard's disappeared."
In response, he snorts. "Took her long enough."
"What?"
"You think she was going to stay in that place any longer than she needed to? She'll turn up soon enough. Anyways, a friend of yours was looking for you."
"A friend?" Liara? No, that wasn't—
"Found him about ready to break one of those Avina terminals because it couldn't understand him." He gives a low, gravelly chuckle. "So while he's still one of those damned rachni, that almost makes him okay with me."
Tali peeks around Wrex's bulk to see a big rachni brood-warrior, Sings-in-Colours, who immediately trumpets a joyous song of bright green.
And a moment later, her omni-tool buzzes.
"Can you please give me a moment?" Tali asks the rachni, looking down at her omni-tool, hoping beyond all hope—
Notes:
Weeeeee here comes the plot twist I've been planning since chapter one.For anyone who's noticed: yes, I like Canadian rock bands.
Thanks to Castelau for helping me figure out some details.
Chapter 18: ...far away from the memories of the people who care if i live or die
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Far away
This ship has taken me far away
Far away from the memories
Of the people who care if I live or die
- Muse, "Starlight"
"Shepard, is that you? Can you hear me?"
She wants to answer—tries to answer. The answer molds itself in her mind: yes, it's me! She takes a slow breath. But instead of those words, all that comes out is a tiny shuddering little breath.
"Tali," she finally manages to say, that single viscous chalk-grey word just barely choking through.
"It's me. Are you hurt?"
"Tali," she says again, her voice rising in pitch until it becomes a whine. "Not—not hhhhhhurt."
"Good." Tali's voice suddenly turns sharp and and steel-grey. "But what the hell are you doing out at the edge of the— you went to track down that thing, didn't you?"
Shepard doesn't respond to that, and Tali's huff of breath causes the comm line to crackle.
"Of course you did. And what would you have done if you'd found it? Crash the shuttle into it? It would have just shot you down. Or spaced you. Keelah, Shepard. We all love you, but you are such an idiot sometimes. Kaidan's going to wet his suit when he finds out about this. And yes, I know he doesn't wear an envirosuit. It's a figure of speech."
It's hard for Shepard to catch all of what she's trying to say— the quarian's accent is thicker than usual, and there's a thick grey fog surrounding her mind. But—
"Kaidan?"
"He doesn't know yet, and let me tell you that I am not looking forward to that conversation."
"I—"
"Don't. I don't want to hear any apologies right now. Just— damn you, Shepard. But listen to me. I have your coordinates— you're in a spaceship, am I correct?"
"Yes."
"I'm not even sure I want to know how you got a hold of one. But never mind— right now I need you to plug Hopper into the ship's navigation computer."
She pauses a moment as she tries to understand what Tali's asking her to do and then realizing she's unable to. "Ship breaked."
There's such a long pause at the other end that she wonders if Tali disconnected.
"Tali?"
"I'm still here, Shepard. Just—" There's a strange, staccato-like noise, and it takes her a few moments to realize that it's Tali laughing. "I should have guessed that you'd find a way to make things more difficult. Do you have any idea what the problem is? If it's something simple, I might be able to walk you though repairs."
"Nnnno. Just… it… it breaked."
"That's what I thought. Damn it. Anyways, I guess now I need to find a ship to come get you."
"Tali?"
"Yeah?"
"Suit. Air—" The fog is pushing in again. "How much?"
Another long pause.
"What? Why—" Tali mutters a few words in her own language, and then takes a deep breath. "Shepard—"
She recognizes that tone of voice. It's fear.
"Shepard, what happened?"
It'd been easy to laugh off Shepard's "ship breaked" comment— she'd let the fuel cells run down perhaps, or managed to lock herself out of the ship controls. But then she'd asked about her envirosuit's air. And as she pieces together each of Shepard's fragmented answers, the situation gets worse.
"Ship breaked" turned out to be a catastrophic failure that had vented the entire atmosphere and knocked even the backup emergency systems offline; if Adams was here, he'd probably say it was foo-bar.
Shepard is wearing the envirosuit Tali had given her yesterday. (Was it just yesterday? It feels like months.) It's the only reason she survived.
With difficulty, she manages to guide Shepard through a series of omni-tool menus to allow Tali access to her suit diagnostics. She quickly skims through the readouts, the dearth of information she has to work with—most lines simply display 'no data available', and a few others are so wildly out of the expected range that it's clear that Shepard hadn't connected the sensors properly—but Tali soon finds the numbers she wants.
"Air?" It hadn't taken Shepard long to fall into monosyllable responses.
"In your envirosuit? At least a few days."
She's not lying.
She leaves Shepard with instructions to try to get some sleep. She tells Shepard that she sounds exhausted and it'll be at least a few hours before any ship can reach her anyways.
She's also not lying.
She's just leaving out the fact that sleep will also slow her rate of breathing, slow the rate at which Shepard's exhaled breath saturates the filter in her suit's CO2 scrubbers. Every quarian had it drilled into their head from the very first time they stepped into their suit: twelve hours, the maximum amount of time a filter could last before it could no longer absorb carbon dioxide from their exhaled breath and it began to build up in their helmet. Never leave a filter in for more than twelve hours; always carry several spare filters—if you forget to, beg, borrow, or even steal one—but never leave it in for more than twelve hours.
But even if Shepard had known that—even if Shepard had grown up alongside Tali on the flotilla as a ship-sister—it would have been of no use, because Shepard has no spare filters.
And it's Tali's fault.
Tali, who hadn't bothered to take a few extra seconds to grab some spare filters and tuck them in the envirosuit's pocket alongside the ration bars and the rock she'd picked up on the shore near the embassy. Tali, who hadn't thought twice before restoring a backup of her omni-tool configuration and unwittingly giving her the means to escape. Tali, who had thought twice before handing over the datapad and unwittingly giving her a reason to escape.
You should not sing of her in those dim mauve tones. Sings-in-Colours' song is soothing, a deep indigo the colour of the night sky of her homeworld. One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness is not yet condemned to the silence.
"Shepard. Her name is Shepard," Tali says, wondering why this is the timeline in which she's being chided by a rachni. "Anyways, you were looking for me?"
Yes! Another drift of bright green. You and Song-of-Many-Battles both carry the echoes of One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness.
"Song-of-Many-Battles—?"
"Great. I've been nicknamed by a bug." Wrex laughs, but then his voice lowers to a deep growl. "Mark my words, I'm keeping an eye on you. I don't know what Shepard sees in your kind, but you put one claw on Tali…"
Tali crosses her arms. "You know, Wrex, I've taken care of myself the past few years."
"I know. But I'm old and I worry, even though my favourite quarian's all grown up. Besides, you have the smell of fear on you."
"I do not. And even if I did, I'm in an envirosuit. You wouldn't be able to tell."
He hears the truth; your Song is faintly tinged with something cold and yellow. But do not be afraid, Longs-to-Sing-of-Home.
"Looks like you've also been nicknamed," Kal says, moving up to stand next to her. "Tali— I went ahead and contacted Miranda. Thought she ought to know."
Two things fail to escape Tali's notice: one, that he somehow had Miranda Lawson's comm code, and two, that he called her Miranda. Not Miranda Lawson; not Ms. Lawson, but simply Miranda. She lets out a small sigh. "Thanks, Kal. I—"
A ship.
Where the hell was she going to get a ship?
"You wouldn't happen to have a ship?" she asks Sings-in-Colours, but his response is a deep violet 'no.'
"Not yet, anyways. That's something I wanted to talk to you about," Wrex says, turning his head aside to look at Tali. "But it can wait. Shepard's gone and gotten herself into a mess again?"
"…yeah, pretty much."
"Then I'm coming with you."
As am I, Sings-in-Colours joins in.
"Nobody asked you," Wrex grumbles.
She could request a ship from the flotilla; something small and quick. She could lean on the fact that the Conclave had named Shepard a honourary quarian. But her people loved to debate, so any request she made would take time— and she wasn't sure how much time she had.
('And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking—')
Tali drums her fingers against her arm, and then—
"I think I have an idea."
Lifting her omni-tool, she begins to type out a message. And within seconds of the notification that it reached a comm buoy, she receives a response:
Response_To_Request_For_Assistance_1543.7B
From: Invalid Extranet Domain
Tali'Zorah—Geth have received your request for assistance— we have no ships in vicinity of the provided coordinates, but we have a potential solution— as the current channel is not secure, platform designation: Infiltration-Unit-2213x ('Amigo') has been dispatched to the Citadel to provide further details.
At the moment, geth were in a bit of a strange position: under Citadel law, artificial intelligence was still illegal, and yet that very same Citadel law provided certain inherent rights to any 'sapient beings' living under its jurisdiction. And while there were certain people who would argue that the geth were not sapient (Tali's mind immediately goes to Admiral Daro'Xen), the general opinion was that the geth were capable of thinking, capable of making decisions, capable of acquiring wisdom.
Faced with this dilemma, the Provisional Council do what the Council always do best: ignore the issue.
Which means that geth are suddenly as free to come and go from the Citadel just the same as any organic race, and when a small ship bearing geth identification requests permission to dock at the Citadel, the air traffic controller merely goes 'huh, are they even allowed here?' rather than shrieking in terror at the fact that a geth ship is requesting permission to dock at the Citadel. After a few quick calls with the higher-ups, permission is granted.
It's an odd little group waiting at the docking bay: two quarians, an asari maiden, a krogan battlemaster, and a rachni brood-warrior. (Wrex is still grumbling about Sings-in-Colours coming along.)
"I told the window installers to come back and finish up another day," Liara says. After a few failed attempts at reaching her omni-tool, Wrex had gone down and fetched her from Shepard's apartment.
"I'm glad you're here, Liara. I—" She crosses her arms, something cold settling in her stomach. "I really am."
"I imagine you must be angry at her." Liara, observant as ever.
"Yes! I am angry at her. She waited until I— no, it's even worse than that. She let me think she was fine— just so I wouldn't be there to stop her. She knew exactly what she was doing." She raises one hand to her visor. "Keelah. Sometimes I feel like I don't even know her anymore. Did you know she had a twin?"
Before Liara can respond to that, they both catch sight of a familiar white-plated geth walking down the docking bay.
"Tali'Zorah. We are prepared to assist. However"—there's a brief pause here, as though the 109 runtimes within its platform are debating something—"we would like to request something of you."
"Of course, Amigo. What is it?"
"Do you remember when Legion agreed not to transmit information regarding creator weapon tests back to the geth?"
"Yes. I do." More than she'd have liked to; she'd been such a brat over the entire thing. "But I think I see where you're going with this. There's something you want me to keep secret from the rest of the admirals."
"Affirmative. Geth intend no harm to creators, but—"
"No, I understand. Gerrel and Xen would use any excuse to rip out old suit patches. Reegar, are you all right with this?"
"I work for you, ma'am. Not the rest of those yevmetz. I know when to keep my mouth shut." The glowing spots of his eyes shift upwards into a smile, and he reaches down to pat the white plating of his prosthetic leg. "Besides, you could probably say that I'm part geth myself."
"Huh, I didn't realize— wait, Amigo, do you think your ship will fit everyone?"
"Our current vessel is not optimal for the task of retrieving Shepard-Commander. We will use it to transport you to a more suitable vessel." Amigo pauses. "While it will be able to accommodate your present companions, we judge that it will be… unpleasant."
And unpleasant it is.
Unlike most geth ships, the shuttle that Amigo had brought was "optimized for the needs of organics," which meant that it was pressurized and had places to sit down, although they'd had to collapse a few of the seats in the back to make room for Sings-in-Colours' bulk.
All in all, it's cramped.
"I'm telling you, Tali. Keep an eye on that rachni."
Tali glances backwards, to Liara and Sings-in-Colours having a quiet conversation. Then she turns back to Wrex, slouched against one of the seats with his arms crossed.
"Wrex, what happened to almost being okay with him?"
"Who says I'm not? But millions of my ancestors died to put those things down the first time."
"And billions of my ancestors died in the Morning War." Tali rests her chin on one hand. "And yet here I am, sitting on a geth ship."
"You have a point there." Wrex guffaws, the deep lines in his face relaxing a bit. "Still, humour an old man, will you? And if it makes you feel any better, I'll promise not to start any fights."
"That's all I ask," Tali says, and turns back to the message she received from Miranda Lawson, who had managed to track down the one witness to Shepard's escape:
Khalisah bint Sinan al-Jilani.
Attached is a video clip, one taken by al-Jilani's camera drone but not released to the general public. A crowd of Terra Firma protesters; then at the edge of the screen, a figure in a black envirosuit suddenly appears. Not stepped into frame, just simply appeared, as though—
Ah. A tactical cloak.
Shepard just stands there for a bit, watching the crowd. Then a human woman approaches, gets right up in her face, jabs a finger at her. Shepard backs away, but the woman continues to approach her, and—
(Tali tries to feel some sympathy for the human woman, knowing what's probably about to happen. But she really can't.)
—Shepard becomes a blur of dark energy as she launches herself at the woman. Both of them topple to the ground, then disappear as the crowd moves in on them.
And once again, she's left with the question:
How the hell had Shepard become a biotic?
A secondary exposure to element zero after the reapers had detonated their drive cores? It's the only thing she can think of that halfway makes sense, but— no, it didn't really—
"Ma'am? Can we talk a moment?" A rough voice comes over her helmet comm. A private conversation.
"Of course, Kal. What is it?"
"It's just… I'm just a bit concerned about this entire thing, Tali. About your captain being indoctrinated. Or possibly indoctrinated."
"You're saying it might be a trap. I thought of it myself, but."
"I know you aren't about to leave your metzechit out there, but I'd be a pretty poor security detail if I didn't recognize these kinds of threats. And well, I'll just put it this way: you've been inside a reaper before. I haven't. So…"
"I understand. If you think I'm about to do something narizy—"
"I won't keep quiet about it. But hopefully it won't come to that." He sighs. "Admiral Raan asked me to keep it hush-hush, but you ought to know. There's been a few death threats against you."
"Really, Kal? We both know that people don't like quarians." She huffs her breath. "I need to talk to Auntie Shala, though. She really shouldn't be asking you to keep these things from me."
"I agree with that, and I made sure she knew, too. But a few of the threats"—here, he reaches over to squeeze her arm—"come from inside the fleet."
"I…I see."
It's the only thing she can bring herself to say.
"I'd— better go check on Amigo." Tali unfolds herself from the seat and rises to her feet. "We must almost be to that other ship."
She makes her way to the fore of the shuttle.
"Tali'Zorah. We have entered Sol's main asteroid belt, and are approaching the vessel."
"That's odd. I'm seeing a geth IFF"— leaning over Amigo's shoulder, she points it out on the readouts—"but the sensors aren't showing any ship."
And then suddenly there is a ship, flaring brightly on the screen as it vents all its waste heat into the void of outer space. A ship, that despite the sleek, alien lines of a geth vessel, bears a remarking similarity to—
Legion, you clever bosh'tet.
"Amigo," Tali asks. "Is that a geth Normandy?"
Tali disconnects the call, and Shepard is left to herself again.
And she cries.
It's a messy affair in zero-g—the tears don't actually go anywhere, just kind of bunch up in a huge salty-wet glob in her helmet. She isn't even sure if they're real tears—and since her eyes are prosthetics, why would she need tears to begin with?—but they sting just the same as real ones when it touches the exposed flesh of her unhealed skin weave.
She cries until she's out of tears.
Tali had told her to try and get some sleep. And although she could tell that there was something the quarian wasn't telling her, Shepard— trusts her. With her life.
(But not enough to tell her your plans. The thought doesn't come with the yellow taint of the reaper ghosts—or the actual living reaper still out there—or whatever remnants of the old Intelligence still lingered in her brain after she'd seized control. The thought is her own, and it terrifies her.)
Except that she can't sleep.
She's exhausted— even in the languid weightlessness of the shuttle, all the strength seems to have drained from her body. And yet— and yet—
The silence presses in on her again, that awful colourless silence—she wonders how people can find it comforting—until it's smothering her, and she needs—
—she needs—
—fumbling for Hopper, its blue glow filling her vision again, clumsy fingers going through the menus until she finds what she's looking for: the icon of a music note.
And then realizing, only after she opens it, that she can't read any of the song names.
Ah, well.
She presses play.
Mindoir has only two real seasons. They are probably classified in a database somewhere as Wet and Dry seasons, but the inhabitants of the colony itself usually think of them as 'Wet' and 'Slightly Less Wet.' The colony is a second-rate one, just slightly outside the comfort zone of Earthborns; its gravity a bit too high, its atmosphere a bit too thick, its days a bit too short, its location just a bit too close to the Terminus.
And of course, the rain.
All in all, Mindoir is never anybody's first choice; it is a place for those who had been passed over when applying for the coveted spots in more prosperous colonies such as Eden Prime and Elysium and Bekenstein to cast their lot in. It is a place for people's dreams to slowly be crushed under the backbreaking toil of tending to ossilbir vines.
Commander Shepard has never been to Mindoir.
('But,' the dear Reader may be saying at this point, 'This Shepard was born on Mindoir!' — and although the Reader is completely correct in this, the Narrator is asking for a bit of patience in the face of this seeming inconsistency.)
Fat, cold raindrops plop down from the canopy of leaves overhead to roll down the visor of her helmet, and it's with that she realizes that she isn't really on Mindoir—
—because Mindoir had been obliterated by the reapers. They hadn't even bothered to harvest the population, simply bombarded the settlements into detritus and then left.
A dream then.
One foot sinks deep into the rust-red mud; even now, years after an unconscious Joan Shepard had been carried onto the shuttle that would take her away from the colony for the last time, she can remember the oddly sweet stench of rotting vegetation and marsh gases that never quite washed out of clothes.
Commander Shepard doesn't belong here.
How could she? With the homestead sold, there was nothing tethering her to this soggy ball of rock, no reason for her to come back. Better just to put it out of her mind entirely.
Enlisting with the Systems Alliance had just been a means to an end. A way to survive after she'd been booted out of foster care (or would have been, if she hadn't run off a week earlier) on her 18th birthday, a way to bide her time until she turned 21 and received her none-too-insubstantial inheritance. But somewhere along that way, that means to an end simply became a means. Military life suited her.
Easy enough for Joan Shepard to become Commander Shepard.
"Did the smell of the mud ever wash out?"
The voice isn't her own.
Startled, she yanks her foot from the ground, loses her balance, and stumbles. Gloved hands strike the forest floor, sending blue-white impulses shooting through her nervous system.
When she finally stops hissing from the pain and looks up, there's a figure standing in the mists. And although the face looks just the same as any other face—
"Janey?"
Notes:
Translations:
metzechit - "ship-sister"
narizy - stupid, "acting like a foolish child"
yevmetz - big-shot, someone thinking they're more important than they are (thanks istie)"Foo-bar" isn't a typo; Tali isn't aware that it's an acronym.
Ossilbir vines are canon. They were mentioned in one of the Cerberus Daily News briefs as an Alliance military staple that grows well in high humidity.
Fun thing about the chapter title: Maybe some 90% through the chapter and I realized I still needed a title and went "eh, I'll grab a line from the next song that plays on the radio" (yup, that's terrestrial radio rather than streaming). In hindsight, that probably should've gone horribly wrong. Instead, I got something that kinda works?
If you're thinking of leaving a comment: Please do! They make me happy. :)
Chapter 19: ...sing the song or keep it inside
Notes:
content warnings: violence (no gore), pretty heavy stuff
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide
Sing the song or keep it inside
Bought the farm, but the farmer done died
Sing that song, sing that song inside
- Stone Temple Pilots, "Where the River Goes"
"Negative, While the vessel is based upon stealth technology used in the Normandy, geth do not name their ships," Amigo says. "Furthermore, we did not install a fish tank."
This—this elicits a laugh from Tali. "Good," she says. "I—I'm glad you're here, Amigo."
"We are…"—another one of those slight, slight pauses that Tali wouldn't have noticed had she not been familiar with the geth's speech patterns—"pleased to assist."
It felt good to be on the engineering deck of a ship once again.
Now that Tali is actually aboard the geth's ship, it's a lot easier to tell that it isn't another Normandy. It's compact—even moreso than the SR-1—and the interior is different, with the shuttle landing in a tiny docking bay where she would expect the CIC to be.
There's also no windows. Structural weakness, after all.
But the soft thrum of the Tantalus drive core is the same. Funny that there'd been a time she'd found it too quiet— but when when she'd returned from her Pilgrimage, the usual clamour of a quarian ship had been difficult to adjust to again.
"I thought I'd find you back here." The sound of footsteps and Liara's voice reaches her ears a moment before the asari appears at the edge of her peripheral vision. "About the question you asked earlier—"
That question, the one blurted out almost in frustration. Tali sighs. "You knew."
A frown comes across the asari's face. "Kaidan also asked me about it a week ago. He thought there might have been something in the Shadow Broker's files about it."
She really needed to talk to Kaidan.
Tali lets out a slow breath. "She"—at the moment, easier to leave out certain details—"told me the colony records were lost when the batarians attacked. But—it doesn't make sense. You'd think there'd be something out there on the extranet. Not one yevmetz reporter went searching into her past?"
"There wasn't much from before the Mindoir Raid, and most of that was under her old name. But the Shadow Broker knew of her twin. He even taunted her about it, which turned out to be a mistake— for him, of course."
"I think I know what you mean." She shudders, remembering the sight of Kai Leng's corpse after EDI had gently pulled a blood-splattered and unnervingly calm Shepard away. But that reminded her—
"You know, on Cronos station, that bosh'tet Kai Leng said something… odd about Shepard. Our Shepard. That"—she pauses here a moment, trying to gather her thoughts—"she wasn't even the one the Illusive Man wanted in the first place. I didn't think of it at the time. A translator glitch, maybe. But if Cerberus also knew about—"
Cerberus, which had wrought devastation upon the Idenna in an attempt to recover Gillian Grayson, a biotic.
Joan Shepard didn't have biotics.
Jane Shepard did.
Without a word, Liara holds out a datapad.
With some apprehension, Tali takes it and skims the contents: a letter written by Hannah Shepard in 2168, concerned about modifications to the experimental medical treatments that had repressed her daughter's brain tumour for eight years. There were concerns about the recent purchase of New Dawn Pharmaceuticals—
"By Cerberus?" Tali asks, prying her eyes away from the screen. But she already knew the answer.
"By the Milky Way Foundation. A front for Cerberus. But do you think," Liara says, "that it was by accident that the Lazarus Project gave our Shepard a biotic implant she couldn't use?"
Liara had mentioned that Sings-in-Colours wanted to speak to her about Shepard, but it isn't until an hour after the geth stealth ship enters FTL that the rachni brood-warrior finally makes his appearance, carefully edging his bulk into the engine room. And despite herself—in spite of knowing that he wouldn't hurt her, in spite of knowing that even if he did want to, the geth running through the hull of the ship would never allow it—she finds herself wishing that her Eviscerator wasn't locked away in a crate in her tiny quarters at the quarian embassy in the Science World.
But then something rolls off the rachni's shell— a shimmering of dull mauve that ripples throughout the low lighting of the ship— she immediately regrets that thought.
When the rachni doesn't say anything, Tali speaks.
"You wanted to speak to me earlier, didn't you?"
Why do you fear me? he answers, song trilling upward and colours shifting from dull mauve to a murky grey. I would not seek to harm you.
"It's nothing to do with you. Not really. It's just—" Tali breaks off here, twisting her fingers together. "It's stupid, I know. But I have a— thing about spiders."
A ripple of pale sandy-beige confusion. I am rachni. Not spider.
"Or big insects. You know." She lets out a short laugh. "As I said, it's stupid. I'll get over it."
Many insects and spiders harbour sickness or carry toxins. Is it stupid to fear something that may harm you?
"You know— never mind. But you were looking for me earlier, on the Citadel. About Sh—about, uh, Sings-Forgiveness?"
One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness is what we Singers call her. A flicker of bright green, as though Sings-in-Colour is trying to hold back his elation. In the songs of the Not-Singers, sometimes she is Shepard, or Commander-Shepard, or Joan-Shepard, or Staff-Commander-Joan-Shepard-service-number-5923-AC-2826. Do all of the Not-Singers have so many names?
"Well, I've never heard anybody call her that last one." Tali laughs. "But I think most people have several names. Sometimes I'm 'Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy nar Rayya,' but most of the time I'm just 'Tali' or 'Tali'Zorah.' And let's not even get into the hanar…"
I do not understand why we would enter a hanar, he responds in confusion.
"It's a… figure of speech. How did you even learn Khelish?"
The Singers wished for someone to serve as their Voice, and I was chosen for the task. There was a— the next part doesn't come as a word, but a thought-image: a crashed starship on a remote world, an asari matron with white markings. I was sent to seek out One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness, to give her a… message. I made it to the great void-hive just before the machines arrived to carry it away.
"A… message?"
Yes. The Mother had sensed the … sour taint of the machines upon her Song, and sought to warn her to be wary of their insidious tunes. The oily shadows of their false songs deceive the listener into thinking that they sing alone, and this isolation is what the machines seek to exploit.
"So she is indoctrinated. Alluhkha. Is that why she's—"
When she… He trails off here, with an uneasy flutter of yellow-green. I only know what the Mother told me. A single voice could never be louder than the choir. So the Mother…brought her into our chorus.
"I—" Tali lets out a slow breath. "I don't think I understand."
One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness … is one of us now.
The shuttle had been picked up on sensors half an hour ago, shortly after dropping from FTL. If the geth in the ship hadn't been actively looking, they probably would've missed it, a tiny little thing adrift in the vastness of space—and completely intact. In fact, it looked like it'd just come out of the shipyard. No scorch marks, no dents, no damage to be seen. No indication of what catastrophic failure could have rendered it defunct.
When Shepard hadn't answered her omni-tool, the decision had been made.
There had been a bit of a debate—honestly, even that seemed too a strong word—about who would retrieve Shepard from the shuttle and bring her over to the geth ship and its state-of-the-art medical bay. (Tali notices, but doesn't mention, the fact that geth don't need medical bays.) By the end of it, it's Tali and Amigo who stand in the airlock, waiting for it to depressurize.
She doesn't push off from the airlock, just steps off the edge. For a moment she hangs almost motionless in space, seeing the tiny flecks of light scattered in the distance, and the silhouette of the shuttle blotting them out above her.
She slides forward through the emptiness mostly on her own momentum, with tiny bursts of compressed gas to occasionally correct her course. The shuttle slowly grows to fill her entire field of vision, and she finally alights on its hull without even a bump, quickly latching her magboots and picking her way across the hull.
Then she pauses.
"Amigo, come take a look at this."
The geth joins her, examining the shallow indents in the thick metal of the exterior hull.
"Do you think that…" She trails off, momentarily lost in thought—there was something odd about the placement of the indents, something that she couldn't quite figure out.
"We judge that the impact required to create these indents would not be sufficient to result in a systemwide failure of this spacecraft."
"That isn't— actually, never mind. It probably isn't important." But as she watches Amigo enter the darkened shuttle ahead of her, she stretches her limbs out, placing her hands and knees in the indentations. Had she—
"Tali'Zorah, we have located Shepard-Commander."
"I'm coming." There was time to figure things out later.
There'd been a dream. Except it had been so vivid that she wonders if it was a not-dream, and Janey had been there. But she hadn't been able to stay, and she'd woken up in the shuttle, everything aching, shivering both from the cold and not-cold, yellow tinges of fear rising to the surface as she looked out the viewport at those little cold distant pinpricks of light, but eventually she'd fallen back asleep.
And once again, she wakes up. At first, she isn't sure what had just pulled her out of her sleep—out of her nightmare. The stench of the mud, mist rising from the damp ground, and the batarian slavers had gotten a hold of Janey—there was nothing she could do, not with a little hunting rifle meant to defend against hostile wildlife and not those towering muscular aliens with thick armour and kinetic barriers. Nothing she could do, except—
(she'd tried to justify it to herself hundreds, thousands of times in the years after— Janey's brain tumour was growing again, the slave implants would only result in agony, she'd wanted to die on Mindoir—)
A slow breath—she steadied a gun that was heavy in her sweat-slick hands—
Aimed it — but not at the slavers.
(protect her sister—)
And woken up.
There's a noise (not gunshot, she has to tell herself) echoing through her ears and vague movements beyond her closed eyelids and she has to scrabble to pull together those murky grey thoughts. Shuttle. Gagarinstation. Reaper. Reaper!
"Tali'Zorah, Shepard-Commander is awakening. Biometrics indicate rising stress levels. We advise caution."
She tries to open her eyes, but her eyelids won't move, and then she realizes her entire body is stuck in place, and she can't move, can't breathe—
"Shit. Shepard?" A presence brushing against the edge of her awareness—something warm, familiar. Sounds forming themselves into words—scattered, meaningless, but she recognizes the tone, the cadence, a soft Rayyan accent. "Easy. It's just me. Hold still while I—"
Pressure on the underside of her helmet, then a soft click, the ratinherbrain is screaming a threat! and she wants to scream too but everything's frozen in place including her vocal cords— and then then the pressure is gone. But the presence is still in her awareness, a gentle violet one, and a deep sense of turquoise relief coming from its direction, warm against the heavy drifting coldness—
And then she finds she can move again, adrenaline surging through stiff limbs as the sleep paralysis wears off. She lurches forward, senses a flutter of movement, gropes one arm out only to find emptiness. Her eyes open—then quickly close again, because even the dim surroundings of the shuttle through a polarized visor are too glaring, too much input for her wracked brain to take in.
There's two figures towering over her, two different auras— the gentle violet one, and the other in a metal-grey. Voices. Snippets reach her ears, disjointed and formless, not directed at her. And then:
Shepard-Commander.
Old machine code— but not old machine. No sour note forced upon her to overwhelm and shatter her mind, but rather another entity wishing—asking—to reach out and form consensus. The Shepard-Intelligence whirs with confusion, but Shepard remembers—
"Legion," she murmurs, but—no, she is wrong, because how could Legion be here when they had sacrificed themselves so many months ago?
Most of their runtimes were lost when we—when they disseminated the old machine code to the Consensus. This unit is composed of the 109 that remain. We are what's left of Legion, but we are not Legion.
She isn't sure she understands—it's terribly confusing, and she can't seem to focus on the orderly machine-thoughts so stark against her own. It's easier to let herself drift again, somewhere away from the dull muddy-black throb in her head and the pounding of her heart and the chattering of her teeth and when had it gotten so cold?
"Shepard. Try to stay awake." There's a voice, soft but insistent. Awake— she could do that, even if she doesn't understand why it's so important, why the voice is so insistent upon it. "Can you understand what I'm saying?"
Something takes her hand—she feels warmth through her glove, and a dim spark of knowledge—she responds by squeezing twice.
"Good. Now just give me a moment to get you out of this. Ancestors know how you managed to put a safety harness on backwards, let alone twist it up like… damn it, you're shivering."
The straps pinning her to the pilot's seat come free. Then something is lifting her—carrying her, and the warmth radiating through her suit makes her realize even more just how cold she is. She opens her eyes again, sees a swathe of dark fabric— but no, it's the wrong colour, it's supposed to be another one (but was that other colour purple or black-and-gold?)…
"New suit, remember?"
"Tali? Is..." Trying to speak any more seems insurmountable—frightening, even—so instead she presses the visor of her helmet against the quarian's shoulder.
"I found a ship to come get you, silly bosh'tet. Now hold still for a moment."
Something wraps around her torso, and when she tilts her head downward she sees it snaking away from her, a long white length of—
She freezes. Looks down at the EVA tether clipped to her suit, then back up.
"We'rrrrr…" It's not so much a word as it is a involuntary creaky shuddering noise pushing its way up her throat, along with the bile and cold yellow fear and the old equilibrium spinning out of control.
"Going for a little spacewalk, yes. You need medical attention." Tali's voice leaves no room for argument. "Let's get you out of here."
Notes:
if night was longer, could I escape the day?
translations:
Alluhkha - fuck, used as expletive (thanks istie)
Chapter 20: ...but i am here
Notes:
Content Warnings: Brief mention of a panic attack, emetophobia/vomiting, an unconscious character being undressed for medical reasons, mentions of torture and solitary confinement.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I've heard you talk of everything
And I'm not trying to disagree
And all I know is I...
I'll be there
And I do care
Sometimes it's like I'm not
But I am here
- The Grapes of Wrath, " I Am Here "
It's odd to not be able to see her face.
Human eyes didn't reflect. Somehow, it'd never really struck Tali just how strange it'd be to see the featureless plane of an envirosuit visor without the glow of a quarian's eyes behind it. The handful of nonquarians on the Migrant Fleet she'd only really seen at a distance.
But quarians were good at reading body language, and even without the thick ooze of her fear seeming to pervade the space between them, Shepard's body language is making it abundantly clear that she does not want to step outside the confines of the shuttle.
"We'rrrrrrrrrr…" The word sounds like it's been dragged out of her and elongated until it sounds more like a broken piece of machinery than a human voice.
"Going for a little spacewalk, yes. You need medical attention." She takes Shepard by the arm, leading her over to the hatch. "Let's get you out of here."
"Tali'Zorah," Amigo says, "do you require our assistance with Shepard-Commander?"
Shepard's head turns toward the white-plated geth. "Nnnnot Legion."
"Well, their runtimes— I'll explain it to you later, but no, it's not Legion. Shepard, this is Amigo. I was going to introduce you to them later, but…" She lets out a huff of breath. "I think we're good, Amigo."
Shepard and Amigo look at each other for a moment, and then Amigo speaks. "We will begin preparations to tow the shuttle in."
With that, Shepard's head turns back to Tali, then looking out the hatch. Her hands curl around the tether. Tali reaches over and touches her shoulder.
"Trust me, Shepard," she says, and steps outside.
And because she does, Shepard follows.
She does it a little too quick—pushes off rather than just stepping off the edge—and this immediately sends her into a slow tumble. Before her momentum can pull them both off-course, Tali latches herself back to the shuttle hull, shortens the tether and grabs her by the belt. The sound of Shepard's breathing reverberates over the comm. A flicker of unfamiliar memory: the red flashing of a haptic interface, the shuttle hatches bursting open—
—spinning—
"I've got you, Shepard. Slow breaths. Slow." Then, more softly: "You got spaced earlier, didn't you?"
Shepard's head tilts towards her, her expression hidden behind the dark red visor. But Tali can feel a glimmer of… anxiety, confusion, something… wrong. Wrong and sour and something that didn't belong, and that something slowly blotting out the stars above her—
And then the feeling abruptly tears away, like a bulkhead slamming down. "Y-yyye…"
"I know you can do this. Just relax— let me pull you along on the tether. Don't try to help. And for ancestors' sake, tell me if you start feeling spacesick."
(Tali liked to think herself a sensible girl.
She was medi'yit bein—in that interstitial stage between receiving her first suit and embarking upon her Pilgrimage. A time of learning, a time of greater responsibilities.
Before today, she had never stepped outside of the Rayya. Her world was the ship, the comforting curves of the hulls, the familiar hiss-clunk of the filtration systems keeping countless quarians alive. But those hulls and filtration systems required work— repairs and upgrades, refits and retrofits—and not all of the work could be done from within the walls of the great liveship.
Tali might have only just become medi'yit bein, but others shared her opinion of her being a sensible girl. Mature for her age— but then again, weren't most Zorahs? And it was for that reason that she'd been given permission to accompany a repair team on a spacewalk. There were whispers: some about Rael arranging the whole thing, or others wondering if she was too young to handle it, but as any self-confident youngster was wont to do, she just ignored them all.
But once she was outside, looking up at the stars …
…the realization that a few deteriorating inches of metal were the only thing separating her home from that fathomless expanse, incapable of supporting life—actively hostile to life—that they were one hull breach away from extinction …
Tali panicked.)
Shepard makes it through the spacewalk without panicking. Instead, she throws up in her helmet.
Tali only finds this out after they've reached the airlock of the geth ship. She lands first, groaning a bit as she passes into the mass effect envelope, the a-grav takes effect, and she becomes a clumsy heap of limbs. After she recovers, she slowly pulls the tether in.
"Keelah, is your skeleton made of tungsten or something?" Tali mutters, looping one of Shepard's arms over her shoulders and lowering them both to the floor. Once the outer door is shut and air pumped in to re-pressurize the airlock, Tali reaches over to release the seals on Shepard's helmet and oh ancestors—
"Damn it, Shepard!" She can't help it—she snaps. "I told you to tell me if you were feeling sick! Did you breathe any of it in?"
"Nnnno, d-d-don't thiiiink so." Shepard blinks. "…titanium."
"What?"
"Not t-tungsten. Titanium. In…uh, it...I d-d-don't 'member." Shepard's words are slurred, and she's shivering even harder now, teeth audibly clattering against each other. "Is…it's c-c-cold. Can't… don't… k-know why."
"Starships are designed to vent off excess heat, remember? But with all the systems offline, there wasn't any heat being generated to begin with, so it would've cooled down fairly quickly. Your envirosuit would've been able to compensate, but the— oh! I know what you were doing. No cloaking device, so you were using the suit to mask your life signs, weren't you? That's why your suit's diagnostics were all—"
Tali only realizes she'd slipped back into her native Khelish when Shepard gives her a confused look. She lets out a slow breath, letting the visor drop to the floor and holding out her arms. "C'mere." Shepard huddles up against her; she feels a bit warm even through what insulation their suits provide, but— no, she's still shivering.
"Wwhhhhy…"
It takes Tali a few moments to realize that the sound Shepard was making was a word, rather than a non-verbal noise. "I didn't catch that."
"Y-yyyou came. D-d-din't have to. Why?"
"Because," Tali says, "would you have left me out there? You're my metzechit, Shepard. My ship-sister. We don't leave each other behind."
"Metttttzzz…"
"Metz-ech-itt." Tali says it slowly, stretching out the sounds.
Face furrowing in concentration, Shepard repeats after her. But then she lets out a slow sigh, muscles going slack as she wilts against Tali. A five-fingered hand reaches out and clasps hers, seeking comfort.
"Decontamination is going to take a few more minutes. Just hold on a little longer, okay?"
Tali's wondering if she should send a message to the ship-geth to ask them to override the rest of the decontamination when Shepard's hand slides from hers. And then she looks down at Shepard, who's gone still. Too still. "Shepard?"
By the time decontamination finishes, Shepard has slipped into unconsciousness.
Wrex is waiting for them on the other side of the airlock, and when he gathers Shepard into his arms Tali is once again reminded of how little Wrex and gentle belong in the same sentence.
"She'll be fine. Anyone who comes back screaming and kicking out of the void the way she did isn't going to fall over dead from a bit of—"
The last word comes through her translator oddly: ryn'que'eleq. It takes Tali a moment to realize that Wrex means acute biotic fatigue rather than eezo poisoning.
"She wasn't exactly a biotic before, Wrex."
"Then of course she'd overdo it. Hasn't figured out her limits yet. Don't look so worried."
Of course, Wrex turns out to be right.
They don't have a doctor (even with a first aid certification, Dr. T'Soni soundly insists that she doesn't count as that kind of doctor), but the medbay in the geth stealth ship does have a Sirta Home Series AutoMedBed, something that raises even more questions in Tali's mind. Once Shepard is settled inside the chamber, it checks her vitals and begins immediate treatment for the symptoms of severe biotic fatigue: hypoglycemia, dehydration, fever—
("Wait, how can she have a fever?" Tali says. "She was shivering!"
"Because humans feel cold when they get a fever. It is also difficult for me to understand," Liara answers.)
And, last of all, unrelated to the fatigue: mild CO2 intoxication. Mild. They'd gotten to her in time.
And with that in mind, it's easier to focus on other things.
She spends the next hour or so in EVA, helping Amigo and two ship-geth runtimes who had downloaded themselves into temporary platforms (and, much to Tali's amusement and slight bewilderment, had designated themselves 'Shalei' and 'Bellicus') inspect the shuttle for damage before attaching a thick metal cable to the hull and towing it in to the shuttle bay of the geth ship. And then shooing them away so she can do her own private inspections.
Which do not go as expected.
"Kas'liminet nerehit em'ashu bosh'tet, of course she manages to turn it foo-bar—"
"Not sure what the shuttle did to deserve that language, ma'am."
Lying on her back, elbow-deep in the guts of the shuttle's electrical system, Tali accidentally bumps her helmet into a panel and resists the urge to let off another string of curses.
"There's nothing wrong with the damned thing, that's what! Just that every one of the ship's systems are stuck in an endless reboot cycle and won't even respond to the usual—" Carefully, carefully, she reaches for one of the plugs in order to pry it loose. "I have to manually disconnect and re-connect every—oh you little piece of shit why would they make it unremovable!"
"Perhaps to prevent you from voiding the warranty?"
"I'm pretty sure it's already voided, Kal." She wriggles out from under the panel and gets to her feet. "It doesn't make any damn sense! The backup systems are on a completely different loop, to prevent this kind of thing from happening! And take a look at this—"
She moves over to the hatch, reaching up to grab the edge of it and slam it shut. But instead of locking closed as it should when the power was cut, it bounces back open. The shuttle was small and the hatch large; when the seal failed, the atmosphere would've blown out. But it shouldn't have pulled Shepard out— perhaps if the shuttle had been accelerating at the same time…?
Except that they had found the shuttle almost motionless. It didn't make any damn sense.
"When she said the ship vented, I was expecting a hull breach and faulty atmospheric barriers, not the damned failsafes to fail!" She exhales, and sits on the floor of the shuttle, legs dangling over the edge of the entrance. "I should probably take a short break before I get the urge to violently disassemble the entire thing with explosives."
"Seems a good time to bring up my idea, then." Wrex lumbers into view and leans against the shuttle, fixing a red eye on her.
"The krogan need some ships? My people don't have any to spare, unfortunately." Over the past few weeks working at the embassy, she's lost track of just how many times she'd been asked if the Fleet had any ships available to sell, often with that ever-smug implication: oh, the quarians are just hoarding; they obviously don't need all those ships now that they'd gotten their planet back, never mind that a majority of their ships had not been designed for battle and they'd suffered just as many losses from the Battle of Rannoch and the Reaper War as any other fleet.
The worst part is that it was tempting: the ships they had left were pretty much the only asset they had that was worth anything, and in a post-reaper galaxy people were willing to pay thousands—or even millions— of credits for a patched-together scrapheap of a barge they would have laughed off as salvage a year before. But this time, the Conclave and Admiralty Board agreed: for the time being, the Quarian Fleet needed to hold on to their ships.
"Nah. I've got a ship. Somethin' for me and Bakara to travel between Tuchanka and the Citadel. Problem is—"
"It's not spaceworthy."
"Always quick on the uptake, aren't you? Yeah, it's a real piece of shit. Bought it cheap enough." He uses his omni-tool to bring up a hologram of the ship.
The only place Tali had ever seen a pre-Rebellion krogan ship was in a tattered picture book in her cubby— despite being barely older than an infant when she'd last read it, she can still remember the title (A Quarian's First Book of Ships). The glowing orange edges of the hologram match up to the faded image in her memory.
"Thing is," Wrex says, "none of the shipwrights on the Citadel want to touch it. Sneaky little pyjaks won't even say it outright, just say they'll call back then never do. So the Kalros has been sittin' around in drydock even before it all got moved to Earth."
"Kalros?"
"What, Shepard never told you? Then again, she never did like maws."
"You named a starship after a thresher maw?"
"'Shepard' was already taken. Besides, don't you quarians have a ship named Qwib-Qwib?"
"Please, don't mention that." She glances around the room, just to be sure that Admiral Koris wasn't about to pop out from behind something and start lecturing everyone about the glorious history of his nameship.
Wrex laughs, and she's surprised the volume doesn't cause the entire ship to shake. "But as I was saying, Citadel drydock fees aren't exactly cheap. So I was hopin' we could hire a couple of your people to take a look at it."
"If you're willing to pay—"
"What, d'you think we weren't?"
"You'd be surprised, Wrex. There's asking for volunteers for a good cause, and then there's being too ancestors-damned cheap to pay for workers when you can afford it." And plenty of requests falling into the latter category. "But since you're willing to pay, I'll see what I can do. Even if nothing official, I can find you some nish'vanad— people looking for extra work outside the Fleet."
"I know a few quarians doing odd jobs on the Citadel. I'll let 'em know, if you'd like." Kal drops down onto a bench, stretching out his legs.
"That'd be good." Wrex straightens up. "So, what d'you think Shepard was doing all the way out here? Isn't really anything out this way. I'd expect her to be chasing after her mate, but Gagarin's nowhere near this place."
"You seem to know a lot about a classified Spectre mission."
Wrex gives a low, gravelly chuckle. "I've got my sources."
"But… wait a moment. The station— Admiral Xen told me they moved it so it'd be closer to the relay. Where was it before?"
Behind her, she hears Shalei—or maybe Bellicus, it's hard to tell their platforms apart—start to speak, but she's already back into the guts of the shuttle, tearing open control panels; it's still stuck in its reboot loop, but if she's right—
She is, and soon extracts a small storage device, no bigger than one of her fingers and easily plugged into her omni-tool. The contents are encrypted, but it's no match for quarian hacking tools. The ship's registration details, maintenance logs, navigation logs, all of them confirm her suspicions.
She crawls back out of the shuttle.
"The ship's autonav database is a year out of date." She pauses a moment, tucking the storage device into her suit pocket. "She was trying to reach Gagarin Station."
…spiral out, keep going…
As the Shepard-Intelligence stretches out, the Milky Way lies before her, all of it her rightful domain. The reapers, her instruments and arms, were gone. But she could rebuild them, use them for good, make the galaxy a better place.
She… doesn't want it.
So instead, she shrinks back into her body, this broken weary thing of flesh and blood, and awakens.
Saturday, July 28, 2187, 0017, 14 hours P.E. (Post-Escape)
Light. Light and sounds. Nerves flaring with pain—first an intense blue-white, and then simmering down to a duller orange. The muddy-black throb in her head is now just a faint greyish thrum. She's… strapped down to something, and her muscles immediately coil, thinking of another time— strapped to a board in a freezing cell, a Hegemony interrogator with a dripping cloth—
"Shepard!" A muffled voice. "Shepard, it's okay!"
Out—out—she needs out— can't move—can't breathe—
Do not struggle! another presence sings to her in a deep calming indigo, commanding her attention and pulling her out of those ugly memories. You are inside an instrument of healing, not one of pain. Rest, and She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets will release you.
Breathe. Out. In. Realizing she can breathe. When she cracks open her eyes, she sees a pane of glass sliding away, a pair of blue hands reaching for a control panel. The mass effect fields—not straps!—holding her in place fall away, and she makes out her surroundings— dark grey walls reminding her of something that eludes her mind. She tests her limbs, wincing a bit as the circulation returns to them, and then slowly sits up, rubbing at the IV that had once again appeared in her arm catheter.
"Whhh…" She tests her voice. The words slip into her mind easily but her throat is so dry that they sound chalk-grey. "Wh…"
Without a word, Liara drapes a silvery emergency blanket over her and hands her a translator, waiting for Shepard to put it in before answering all the questions she'd been wanting to ask. "Right now, you are in the medical bay of a prototype geth ship. After Tali brought you off the shuttle, you passed out from biotic fatigue. She and I took off your envirosuit to put you inside the medical chamber, and at the moment it is being cleaned. Now, how do you feel?"
"Head, feels weird." She curls and uncurls her fingers, stretches out her limbs, hisses under her breath as even those contortions send pulses of pain through her nervous system. "S'does everything."
"With the amount of power required to even attempt a biotic charge without an amp, I am not surprised," Liara says, giving her a Look. "Not to mention how fortunate you are that you did not shear yourself in half! Promise me, Shepard, that you will not attempt it again without more training."
"I promise." It was an easy one to make — and one she intended to keep. After the bruises she'd accumulated, she had no further desire to turn herself into a biotic battering ram.
"Good." She hands Shepard a glass of what looks like juice. "Try and drink a little bit of this. It's disgusting, I know, but there is nothing better for biotic fatigue."
The orange liquid in the cup is sickeningly sweet, and Shepard can't bring herself to take more than a few sips, just enough that the inside of her mouth doesn't feel like a desert. "Disgusting," she says, putting the rest of it aside and adjusting the crinkly blanket so that it's wrapped around her shoulders.
"Very disgusting. Though for some reason, Kaidan loves it." The blue-green gleam of amusement is then replaced with something else, a mix of deep violet and mauve and also something cold and steel-like. "Shepard… if I'd had any idea what was going on, I would've sent someone to get you out."
At first, she doesn't really hear what Liara is saying—she's far too focused on just how the movements of her mouth are failing to match up with the words filtering through the translator, and the way that the English and Thessian overlap in her hearing—but then the words finally register in her brain, along with that pained mixture of colours, and…
Sometimes it's hard to think that it'd been just fifteen months ago. It feels more like a lifetime.
"T-they, uhh…" She blinks, looking down at her trembling, misshapen hands. Although she can feel dark energy running in the eezo nodes beneath her skin, her biotics feel… worn down. She looks back up at Liara, letting out a huff of breath. "They… they, said to… um, y'know, not… no bruises. And no bruises! So it was fine."
It's hard to tell if Liara didn't recognize the steel-grey tinge of bitterness spat out in that last 'fine', or whether her translator failed to render it. "They allowed you to be tortured—"
"Solitary… con-fine-ment. Fifty-nine days, seventeen hours, and, and thirty-five minutes." Fifty-nine days of empty walls and stark lights and the only sign she hadn't been left to rot being a tray of bland food regularly appearing through a slot in the wall. Fifty-nine days of storm clouds swinging viciously back and forth, frenzied energy and exploding thoughts that couldn't fill up her tiny cell followed by treacherous dark clouds where merely being seemed too much a burden. Fifty-nine days of the damned silence and forgetting her own name and the same whispering thought running through her brain over and over again until she came to believe it.
"Goddess." Liara makes a strange un-Liaralike sound that she can't quite identify. "It was not fine, Shepard."
"I know."
Her N7 training had taught her what to do if she was captured by the enemy. Not what to do when she was betrayed by her allies. Still, there was a difference between knowing what the Systems Alliance had put her through to be unjustifiable and having somebody else recognize the fact—and somehow it made all the difference.
"But… e-enough of this." Otherwise, the black knot in her chest threatened to unravel and crack her apart. "Maybe later. Dunno."
"I understand." A hand touches her shoulder briefly, and then withdraws. "Is it all right if I tell the others? You should not have to deal with this alone. Not any longer."
"I… yes. Please." She lets out a slow breath, another question coming to her mind. "Tali. Umm, she was— ugh, words, I m-mean was she ask you about my…" She pauses to let herself catch her breath, and promptly forgets the last word. "Ugh. Y'know. Things…past."
A few days ago, her frustration with herself—all those reds and yellows and bile-greens and cold-steels and white hotcolds, all mixed together and streaked with a muddy grey—would've been too much for her. Not now. Removed from the aura of the hospital—from the memory of a pillow closing down on her face like a dripping cloth of water, the grey-white feeling of danger in that cold sterile environment, of the doc-tors who wouldn't even talk to her directly—those colours don't seem to press in so closely on her, and she can cope.
"Your sister? Yes. On the way to get you, actually." Liara gives her another Look, one tinged deep red with reproach.
Throughout the ebb and flow of her fragile memories, the moment when she had seen Tali in her dream had managed to stick— and she'd known it was only a matter of time before the subject of Janey had come up again, because the same thing had happened with Kaidan.
"Was she—"
"She was a little bit upset."
She'd expected that. Kaidan had also been a little bit upset. And she didn't—couldn't—blame him. They'd known each other for a decade—he'd been posted on the ship that had pulled her off Akuze—and not once in that decade had she mentioned having a twin. But he had forgiven her. And with time, Tali would too.
(If her splintered memory had managed to hold onto the memory of Tali calling her 'ship-sister,' she would have realized she'd already been forgiven.)
"I'm… I'm… indoctrinated, aren't I?" She remembers—the wreckage of Sovereign. A dead god that could still dream orbiting Mnemosyne. Object Rho.
The dreaded whispers.
When Liara frowns, she knows the answer.
"I am." She looks down at her hands— scarred and misshapen and almost useless—and she shivers as she remembers the hotcold pain of the two glowing handles. Part of her knows she should be more upset about it. But mostly she just feels… relieved? "Nightmares. Eye-strain. Poor decisions."
"Isolating yourself." Liara's voice is soft.
"Yeah. Like Saren… Illusive Man." She pauses a moment. "But… your mother? She had…"
"She had"—her translator hitches a moment trying to process Liara's next word—"acolytes. Not friends."
"Not friends." Friends who would pull her back from the edge, rather than willingly following her over. Friends who would call out her bad decisions because they loved her. Friends who would refuse to let her isolate herself. Friends who wouldn't abandon her to her indoctrination. "But… I, I… why'm I still here?"
"There is somebody who may be able to better explain this," Liara says. "Somebody who has been wanting to meet you."
Shepard frowns a moment, looking down at herself. "Uh…"
A blue-green glimmer of amusement. "I do not think that this visitor will care much about your clothing… or the lack of it. But give me a moment to see if there's something more comfortable than an emergency blanket."
Liara manages to find a hospital gown in the surprisingly well-stocked medical bay— and Shepard wonders just why a geth ship has such a surprisingly well-stocked medical bay, and this somehow leads to the mental image of not-Legion walking around in one of those flimsy little hospital gowns, and this sends her into an uncontrollable fit of giggles until Liara asks her what's so funny.
"Geth… wearing hospital gown," Shepard manages to squeeze out the words between her giggles, and this makes Liara laugh a bit too.
The fit of giggles had sent her flopping over, but after a few minutes she regains enough control of her limbs to change into the gown. It's longer than the ones in the hospital, and a bit more comfortable too.
"I will be back in a minute," Liara says, and leaves the room, leaving Shepard to wonder about the visitor, about why they wouldn't care about her lack of clothing. A hanar, perhaps, but she isn't sure why a hanar would travel all the way out here to see her.
It's too confusing for her, so instead she focuses on the colours, of the auras she can sense throughout the ship. Liara's periwinkle and Tali's soft violet— both of them so young and similar in some ways, but also not the same. The dark metal-grey of not-Legion, and other silvery-grey presences running through the hulls of the ship, but there's also two streaks of darker grey amongst them that she senses are starting to change, to form their own identities. A deep crimson red, not at all dimmed with age— she wonders what Wrex is doing here. One that she recognizes but can't quite identify, a steady gold, but it's kind of stained with blue-white smears of pain, and she winces as though she has lost her own leg.
But the last one—
How the others seem so flat compared to this last one. She nearly wants to cry at the beauty, a shimmering iridescence like a soap bubble. She finally has to look away, feeling a sudden shame at herself, of how she had allowed the reapers to sour her Song—
No! comes a sudden song, bright and yet deep red with reproach. If you must blame someone, blame the machines.
And then, entering the room with Liara is an insectoid figure—
(—until she found herself ripped away from the glowing columns and shattering into unconsciousness. But not from her own doing. Because although her optical implants had burnt out, the last frame that it had transmitted to her brain was that of an insectoid figure dragging her free from the columns.)
Notes:
I meant to get this out last month. Unfortunately, September was kind of a fun month—first an outbreak of stomach flu in my apartment building, then a hurricane (well, technically a post-tropical storm with the strength of a hurricane) coming and knocking out power to 80% of the province. Also, the chapter was reaching close to 9000 words - a friend suggested I split it and I decided to do that. The second half is almost done writing so hopefully it'll come quickly.
Translations:
medi'yit bein - the life-stage between first receiving a suit and embarking upon Pilgrimage; while not an exact comparison, most humans would compare this to adolescence
metzechit - ship-sister
ryn'que'eleq - sickness caused by element zero; it usually refers to acute eezo poisoning.
kas'liminet - ancestors-damned (thanks istie)
nerehit - troublesome
em'ashu - an intensifier to the preceding word - 'extremely' but more vulgar. closest English equivalent would be preceding a word with 'fucking'
nish'vanad - someone who takes on additional work outside of the Fleet in exchange for money; basically a moonlightera rough translation of that one sentence would be along the lines of "ancestors-damned fucking troublesome bosh'tet"
Chapter 21: ...and if we change, well i love you anyway
Notes:
Content warnings: Mentions of: torture, violence, slavery, past character death, nudity, and racism/xenophobia, a somewhat detailed description of Shepard's injuries.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Yeah, it's fine
Walk down the line
Leave our rain
A cold trade for warm sunshine
You my friend
I will defend
And if we change
Well I love you anyway
- Alice in Chains, "No Excuses"
Sings-in-Colours is communing with his Mother about One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness when his entire awareness suddenly flares with terror: something sharper, something more acute than just fear. And her echoes—
The Mother hears it too.
She needs your help, Sings-in-Colours! she sings to him. Go!
Her echoes! The Mother had warned him that some of the ways of the Not-Singers may shock him, but to think they would inflict such pain on each other!
Violence was not an unknown for rachni— when they had first discovered their Songs, the chorus had splintered and fallen into dissonance; there had been Mothers who wished to live in harmony, but there had also been Mothers who were conquerers, who wished to take over the hives of the peaceful Singers, to slaughter the old ones and take the children as their own. The peaceful Singers had sung to the sky, pleading the First-Singer-of-the-Dream-of-That-Which-Is-All to intervene, and soon after, void-hives had appeared in the sky, filled with the Not-Singers who had come to take away the conquerers.
Until the time that the sour yellow note of the machines had come and twisted the Songs of his people, the Singers had lived in peace, They only sought to drive away the beasts who tried to harm them; if death was necessary, it was done swiftly.
So to see this—
Do not struggle! he sings out, shaping his voice so that it reached her and her alone through the walls of the void-hive. You are inside an instrument of healing, not one of pain. Rest, and She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets will release you.
Her echoes fade, and her song fades from a violent yellow-orange terror—a hungry fire, reaching out to consume everything around it—to a quieter pale yellow, an anxiety more easily extinguished. He becomes aware of her and She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets having a conversation, but does not listen closer to them. Instead, he speaks with the Not-Singers inside the void-hive, the ones who call themselves geth. He finds them fascinating— how they can move their Being back and forth between the metal bodies and the void-hive, how their songs all symphonize together in a 'consensus' that reminds him of his own people's chorus (though he wonders just how they are able to remain in harmony without the guidance of a Mother).
Eventually, She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets emerges, her unease radiating off as a shimmery pale yellow-green.
"Did you— feel it too?"
Her song-echoes, he sings back. One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness has not learned to shape them, to avoid singing them aloud to the rest of her chorus when she is yellow with fear. If she will allow, the Mother told me how I may help.
"If she will allow— in that case, we can only hope she does not fall into another of her stubborn bouts."
Perhaps it was that stubbornness that allowed her to withstand the tuneless notes of the machines, he points out.
"Perhaps," she says, her colours fading a bit from the type of weariness that comes from a lengthy day. "…perhaps. You should see her now, before she falls asleep again."
Will you join me, She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets? Her mind is not made for our musics, and the machines have poisoned her Song. Having another of her Not-Singer chorus there will help to alleviate her fears.
"Yes," she says. "I will come."
But before One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness can see him, she senses his Being and begins to withdraw into herself— there is some fear and much shame because the machines had soured her Song. So he sings to her, shaping his voice again so that the other Not-Singers are unable to hear it.
No, he sings, a deep red reproach. If you must blame someone, blame the machines.
She hears him, and hears the truth in his song, and she is facing the door when he and She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets enter the room.
It is the first time that he has seen One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness since leaving her for the Not-Singers, since he had carefully lowered himself so that the limp form draped over his back could slide free— all soft flesh and bits of hard black carapace embedded in it and the red of her blood pooling over the floor—but then he had sensed the Not-Singers approaching, ones carrying songs of an ancient enemy, and hidden himself away.
She is still healing, he realizes— most of the Not-Singers regenerated slowly, and they could not molt and shed off their old damaged carapaces the way he could. But she is living, breathing, and her Song is still there, even if it is quiet and tainted.
"I…" she begins, her speaking-voice strange and hesitant and uneasy with something yellow-green. Her eyes, those strange eyes made of metal, look at him, and there's a flicker of recognition on her scarred face. And she does not say it aloud, but being-to-being, he hears her song: she remembers him.
I am Sings-in-Colours, he sings aloud.
"Yes. You…" She trails off, her mouth trying to form words that will not come. "Singer… rachni."
She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets sits down next to her, and puts an arm around her shoulder.
"He serves as a sort of… ambassador for the Rachni Queen," she says. "He arrived on the Citadel shortly before the Reapers moved it to Earth."
"He… the Citadel, Sings-in-Colours was there. I was there. I—"
The faint song-echoes he had glimpsed in her mind—two glowing columns, pulsing with a soft blue glow, then a looming black shape blotting out the stars—are torn away and pushed away as her colours abruptly shift, becoming cold and almost hostile.
"Not…matter," she says, her speaking-voice clenched and pained and chalk-grey, and she turns to him. "You… want… see me. Why?"
The Mother has sent me. This part he sings aloud, but then he shapes his voice so that only she can hear it. He sings to her about the sour note of the machines, about the Mother bringing her into the Great Chorus, into the Dream-of-That-Which-Is-All.
I— she does not sing this aloud, or in words, but in colour-thoughts of a sandy-beige confusion—see the colours, and hear the echoes, and dream the dreams. The machines— her song becomes scattered, fragmented, falls out of rhythm and then is silenced by a cold yellow undertone of fear.
Yes, he sings back, feeling the presence of the Mother with him, telling him what to say. You are in-between, both Singer and Not-Singer. You are one of us, and you are also apart from us: you have your own songs, your own chorus. The oily shadows of the machines have touched your mind, but not shattered it.
It would be a difficult thing for any Not-Singer to comprehend, but slowly, One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness comes to understand. She trembles a bit under the gravity of the thoughts, but then turns to She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets and rests against her, trusting the asari to support her weight.
"Not… breaked," she finally says, her words undertoned with a vivid turquoise. "…No. Breaked, but… still me."
She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets has told me about your echoes, how you cannot help but sing them aloud when the chill of your fear overwhelms you.
Yes, she responds in the colour-thoughts, they hear my echoes of pain. Can it stop?
It can stop, he sings to her. The Mother has given me a song that will quiet your voice to Not-Singers until you come to learn to shape it. But why must you keep your pain to yourself? Do you not trust those of your chorus to help you carry your burdens?
Because it is not their burden. But her song is unsure, and he hears the doubt in her voice.
And yet they have chosen to join your chorus, rather than turn away to compose their own songs.
He senses that she hears the truth of his song, and leaves it there for her to consider. Then he performs the song; the face of One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness contorts slightly, but she remains silent.
It is done.
"No… no more echoes," One-Who-Sings-Forgiveness says, shimmering with something mauve. "Until…"
If you will allow, I will teach you to shape your voice. But it will take time.
"Yah, that. But for now, I… er, I need my own music." She hesitates for a moment, then turns to She-Who-Digs-For-Secrets. "…Liara, you got some earphones?"
Saturday, July 28, 2187, 0018, 15 hours P.E. (Post-Escape)
'Kurt's still cool and Angus rules
I'm gonna plug it in again
…'
Focusing all her attention on the rock 'n' roll that she had missed so much, she almost doesn't notice Tali. Almost. Beyond her closed eyelids she, can sense the soft violet aura moving toward her, sitting on a chair next to her cot. Tali waits until Shepard finishes her song and pulls out her earphones before she speaks. "You're listening to your rock 'n' roll again."
Just a few words, but the sheer sense of turquoise relief running through them says more than the words.
"The, uh, the hospital, it turned… um, it made everything all grey and white. So the… I thought rock 'n' roll, I thought… no colours, and it was… wrong. But there are colours. They're there, I… y'know, I just had to… to find them, s'all." She exhales, bracing herself. "Tali, I'm… 'doctrinated."
Tali doesn't say anything, but her colours shift to a soft indigo.
"But not… not all way. The Rachni Queen, she did… something, um, up here." She reaches up and taps her head. "It... it didn't—couldn't fix. But I think… it, um, it pulled me back 'fore I… before I was too gone. But now I'm… kinda part-rachni? So, uh, now there's colours in… y'know, there weren't colours before, and now… they're not really seeing-colours, but I, er…"
"I think I have an idea of that. When Sings-in-Colours talks to me in his colours, I can… keelah, I can't figure out how to explain it either." Tali briefly shimmers blue-green as she lets out a huff of breath. "But you mentioned the colours a few times. When I came to visit you in the hospital. Do you remember?"
"…no. I 'member some things, but not… not that." She lets out a small, shuddering breath. "I… try, but all grey in… up here, and… um, things in there, the thoughts, words, they, they get… lost in the grey. I'm, I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize for that." Tali makes a tsking noise. "I suppose it doesn't matter now. But Shepard, you should've told me you were planning to leave. You do realize I would've helped you, right?"
"You…?"
"Shepard, that place terrified you. I could…" Tali pauses a moment. "How do I put this? Some of the things you were feeling… I could also feel them. I think Kaidan did, too— he asked me to stay with you so that you wouldn't wake up by yourself."
"I… I miss Kaidan," she says, the deep blue-violet simmering up from somewhere deep in her. "I… wish he was here."
"I know. I wish Garrus was here, too." She feels Tali's hand brush hers. " And before you ask, Liara's trying to get into contact with them. You were trying to reach Gagarin Station, weren't you? I checked the shuttle's navigation logs."
"Yeah. 'Cause… y'know, there's reaper. I wanted… needed to… to know more, more intel… um, more'n what Hackett would tell me."
"Which you could've asked one of us to help you get. Instead, you manage to strand yourself at the edge of the star system in a stolen shuttle." The words are harsh, but her tone isn't. "You really are such an idiot sometimes."
"Yah, I know."
"Shepard, I…" Tali hesitates. "Last night, when I stayed with you in the hospital—"
"You—" Shepard says, the words becoming thick and chalk-grey and thick around her tongue. "met Janey. In the…the, uh, dark place. 'Fore I… saw you."
Tali turns and looks at her, colours shifting to something she can't quite identify.
"Yes." Her voice softens, and she speaks slowly, carefully choosing her words. "I wish that you could have told me about her, Shepard."
"So do I." Shepard pauses, squeezes her eyes shut. "How… much you know?"
"Give me a moment to think." She pauses a moment. "Cerberus was interested in her, because she was a biotic. But she also had what my people call ryn'que'eleq— the element zero poisoned her and made her very sick. There were medical treatments that helped, but the sickness in her brain came back anyways. Then…"
She trails off with an uneasy flutter of yellow-green, then takes a deep breath and continues.
"Then the Mindoir Raid happened. And you—" She pauses a moment; there's a brief memory-echo of the quarian standing next to the Normandy's memorial wall, a placard in her hands. "You… killed one of the slavers to try to protect her. But she died anyways."
At first, Shepard doesn't say anything. And then the colours surge through her, all mixed up and muddled again, and she flops over and begins to shake and make quiet choking sob-laughs.
"Last part," she finally says, her voice sounding weird and creaky. "Who— t-told you."
"Javik did… sort of. He said the first time you had killed another person was to protect your family."
Although she tries to stop it, a low groan escapes her as the black knot in her chest snaps and unravels itself.
"Shepard?" Tali leans closer. "Are you okay? We don't have to talk about this unless you want to."
"No!" Her arm involuntarily sweeps out, the faintest spark of biotics flickering and immediately dying at her fingertips, cold yellow fear rising up and smothering her. "You— you'll—you'll— Janey, she— she—she— and—I— you'll—"
"Shepard." Tali's voice breaks into her thoughts. "I didn't catch that. Can you repeat it for me?"
As if there was anything to catch in that frantic jumble of words in the first place. But Tali's interruption is enough to let her get them under control, to mold her speech to fit her thoughts.
"Tali—" She pauses. "If… if I… tell you, tell you— you'll… hate me."
Tali seems about to say something. Instead, she reaches over and takes Shepard's hand, holding it loosely between her fingers. When she finally speaks, her voice is soft.
"Trust me, Shepard."
Shepard squeezes her eyes shut, remembering what Sings-in-Colours had told her. Then the words come from her, unbidden.
"The batarians, slavers, they… came. They shot Mom, shot Dad. Aunty Jennifer and Uncle Mark told— they said, take Janey, g-go and, they said to go hide. To… um, protect her. I lost her, though. She… she was, um… the tumour made… her eyes, her seeing, it wasn't any good anymore, it was… was, um… not r-really dark, but not much light. So we got— y'know, I went one way, she went other, and we got… apart." She can feel herself starting to drift off, slipping into the treacherous dark-cloud place in her mind. But then Tali squeezes her hand and that brings her back enough to continue. "I, I tried to find her. But, uh, the… the slavers found her first, they took her. There were… three of them, three slavers, all big and heavy armour. They were…er, they were… hurting her. Putting a… uh, y'know, a… thing into her head. I had… uh, a gun, err… gun, a… a hunting rifle. I—"
Her voice breaks off with a quiet shuddering breath. The full horror of July 22, 2170: the smell of the mud and the recoil of the gun and the eyes of the batarian slavers turning in her direction. Being beaten unconscious then waking up to see the Grim Reaper looming over her, except that it hadn't actually been Death come to claim her but instead a turian field medic who'd been doing a cross-species joint training exercise with the Alliance when the distress call had come in. The things she didn't really want to remember all comes back to her, and she realizes that her eyes are still closed. She doesn't want to open them, doesn't want to see Tali recoil away from her once she hears the truth, but she forces herself to continue.
"I…I shot Janey. So… so they, the slavers, couldn't… hurt her, make her do things. I shot her t-twice and she died. I killed her, Tali."
Then the grief that she'd been holding inside for over seventeen years comes out—not as an outpouring, but in quiet, choking little sobs. The next thing she knows, Tali's arms have encircled her, pulling her into a hug.
"Tali'Zorah."
Tali looks up from her datapad. Amigo had appeared next to her without a sound, cradling a freshly-washed envirosuit in their arms. "As requested, Shepard-Commander's environmental suit has been sterilized of biological contamination and checked for damage."
"Thank you, Amigo." Tali takes the black-and-red suit, holding it out in front of her. Then she glances over at Shepard, who had fallen into an uneasy slumber after her grief had exhausted itself. She thinks back to her first sight of Shepard asleep in the hospital bed, face twisted in anguish. That look is gone now; her expression is softer, more relaxed. "I know that we organics are… messy."
"We understand that organics have an inefficient system for acquiring needed energy. We also understand that, in times of distress, organics may lose voluntary control of certain subprocesses. It is merely a function of your hardware."
"Still, I would refrain from calling any quarian a 'von,' unless you mean to insult them. Organics tend to place some pride on being able to control their bodily functions."
(Ancestors, was she really having this conversation?)
"Acknowledged. Tali'Zorah is a von."
"Bosh'tet."
"There is another concern." Amigo's omni-tool lights up as they begin typing into it. "During an error check of Shepard-Commander's envirosuit, we discovered anomalous code that had been hidden within other systems. We inquire whether Tali'Zorah was aware of it."
"I—what?"
"We judge that Tali'Zorah was unaware."
"No. No, I was not aware. Send it to me. I want to see for myself what it does."
"Acknowledged."
The code itself wasn't very long. The process would remain dormant, hidden within the life support subsystems, awaiting a specific response to activate it and release an obfuscated payload.
Tali takes a slow breath, slumping down in her seat. "Damn it— damn it— Amigo, is the same process in my suit?"
"Unknown. When we are uploaded to your suit, we have only limited access to suit protocols. To check for it would require root access."
"I don't care." She taps the command into her omni-tool. "Do it."
"We… appreciate your trust in us." Amigo's platform goes still as their runtimes upload into Tali's suit, and she tries not to laugh as she realizes she's come to trust a geth more than her own people. A moment later, she hears a mechanical voice.
We have identified and quarantined the code. How would you like us to proceed?
"Remove it."
Acknowledged. A moment later, Amigo's platform re-activates. "We have an inquiry."
"Go ahead."
"We do not comprehend why the discovery of unfamiliar code in Shepard-Commander's suit would prompt Tali'Zorah to check her own. Even if you and Shepard-Commander had linked suit environments, the code is currently dormant and cannot transmit itself. There was no reason to judge that the code would be present, and yet you checked anyways. Is this what organics call 'intuition'?"
"Not exactly. It's a quarian thing. When we get our first suit, they do a pretty good job of scaring us into thinking that it'll fail at any moment. By the time we learn better, we've gotten into the habit of recognizing problems before they happen." She gives a short laugh, thinking of future generations of quarians who hopefully would not have to go through the informal rite of passage of thinking their suit's air had gone bad. "But in this case, you could say I have additional data available. We only manufacture suits in small batches. Since I'm so tall, my new suit had to be specially made to fit me, and they made Shepard's at the same time."
"You believe that the code was introduced by a creator?"
That had been exactly what she was thinking, but when Amigo says it, Tali suddenly finds herself bristling. And… worried. The only evidence of the code's existence had come from Amigo. It would be no problem for a geth to use a quarian programming language. No— no, it didn't make any sense. Geth didn't lie—
("The quarians sanctioned this operation to save their people. They would not have done so if they knew we wished to preserve geth as well.")
"I… don't know. But Amigo—" Tali finds herself twisting her fingers together. "You told me that some of your runtimes used to belong to Legion. How many?"
At first, the geth doesn't respond. And then: "109 of them."
"So." Her voice is cold. "You're Legion."
"No. We are what's left of Legion, but we are not Legion." They take a step backwards. "We did not intend to deceive."
Tali crosses her arms. "Then why did you tell me that only 'some' of your runtimes were Legion's?"
"…no data available."
Suddenly, a new voice speaks up: "Not Legion."
Both of them look over to see a bleary-eyed Shepard now sitting up on the cot.
Tali switches to Shepard's language. "Shepard, Amigo"—she spits out the geth's name—"found some unauthorized code in your envirosuit. We were just—"
"Delete it!" Shepard suddenly shouts, looking panicked. "Get it out!"
"We will remove the code," Amigo says, and Shepard immediately looks a little calmer, even though she's shaking. Without a word, Tali hands the suit to Amigo and sits herself on the cot next to her. She reaches over to put a hand on her shoulder, but then hesitates when Shepard pulls back from her touch.
"Is this okay?" When Shepard shakes her head, Tali withdraws her hand. "All right. But Shepard, what the hell was that about?" Keelah, her reaction had been so… extreme.
"I…I…" She swallows, squeezes her eyes shut. "…don't know, Tal."
"I hope you know that you're a terrible liar."
Shepard looks away. "I do."
There was something particularly… intimate about helping somebody into an envirosuit.
It's the amount of skin, Tali finally decides as she pulls the outer wrappings around Shepard's shoulders and fastens the belts. On her Pilgrimage, it'd been quite the culture shock to realize just how little clothing other races wore; yes, she'd known on some detached, intellectual level that quarians—and volus, of course— were the exceptions, but to see so much bare skin made her feel almost… voyeuristic.
But that didn't compare to seeing another person completely unclothed. Tali had thought she'd gotten used to the sight of Shepard's injuries: the weave of artificial skin grafts that were still healing over, deep fissures revealing the red glow of cybernetics, neat black stitches holding her flesh together, and skin changing colours where recent bruises had formed. But it'd been easy to disregard the parts of her that had been obscured by a flimsy hospital gown, and to see it all exposed…
"How does it feel?" Tali asks as Shepard pulls herself to her feet and takes a few wobbly steps around the medbay. Tali initially moves to steady her, then stops, deciding only to intervene if Shepard actually lost her balance and began to fall over.
"I… don't even feel it," Shepard says, sounding outright surprised at the fact. "Before, it… uhh, it… all, it, um felt…" She reaches a gloved hand to tug at the opposite sleeve, but can't get her grip on the fabric. "It was… there. Now it's not."
"I know what you mean." When a suit wasn't fitted correctly, it became impossible to forget it was there: the fabric chafed; it was simultaneously too loose and tight; and whenever you moved, it pulled and tugged and dug into you. When a suit was hastily equipped by someone who had no idea what they were doing, the same kind of thing tended to happen. "Come here. I need to show you something."
Shepard drops back down on the cot, looking relieved; several hours of zero-g followed by several hours of inactivity was bound to make anyone feel a little unsteady on their feet.
Tali picks up Shepard's visor.
"You don't need to put this back on right now, but when you do—" She turns it in her hands, pointing out a small slot, and then pressing down on it to eject a small cylindrical object. "This is the filter for your carbon dioxide scrubber. First you unlatch this"— she demonstrates with her own helmet—"and then you swap out the filter and put it back. Never leave one in for more than twelve hours at a time. Usually, you'll want to change it even earlier than that."
Tali pauses here, letting her work things out in her own head. Shepard used to have a sense of time more reliable than an atomic clock; if she'd managed to retain even part of it…
"I…" It was easy to see the moment the realization dawned on her; it showed on her face, the slump of her shoulders, the tremour in her hands. "Tali?"
"We got to you in time. That's all that matters." Tali reaches over to squeeze her arm, ends up giving her a hug, and then digs into her suit pocket for a package of filters. "Put these in your pocket and don't lose them, okay? Now let me check if your suit diagnostics are working this time."
They are. As far as she can tell, they're mostly within normal human ranges: her body temperature is still a bit high and her blood sugar a bit low, but Liara and Wrex had both told her that it happened to everyone after the overuse of biotics. There's something else—strange little spikes in her brain activity—she figures it's probably another sign of the biotic fatigue. The most important thing is that the level of carbon dioxide in her blood is back to normal.
Tali looks up from her omni-tool. "Looks good, Shepard. How are the gloves? Are they bothering your hands any?"
"No more'n usual." Shepard closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again and looks up at Tali. "If— suit— s'pose I w-wanted to… go a world that's, uhhhh, not, not… uhh, y'know, not safe? Would… would, um, would suit hold up?"
"Probably. But it'd depend on the specific planetary conditions. Where were you thinking?"
Shepard pauses for a moment, looking down at her hands. Then she looks back up. "Suen."
"Well, it has a toxic atmosphere, but your suit's air is pretty much self-contained. To be on the safe side, you might want to do an anti-corrosion treatment on the fabric… you know, just in case your friends get a bit careless with the acid spit." Tali laughs a bit. "But I don't think we're in a big hurry for anything— even if they do manage to get the mass relays working soon, I think the Rachni Queen would be happy to wait until you're a little stronger."
Shepard looks at her in surprise.
Tali laughs again. "Well, I didn't think you'd be visiting just to take in the sights."
"Right." Shepard's eyes close for a moment, and she lets herself slouch backwards a bit.
Tali hesitates a moment, then reaches over and touches Shepard's arm. "How are you feeling now?"
"Is dumb, but…" Shepard looks down at her gloved hands, curling and uncurling the fingers, her face contorting with pain. "I miss Janey. The real Janey, n-not the one in my head."
"It's not dumb at all. I know it's not quite the same, but my mother has been with the ancestors for almost ten years and I still miss her." She exhales. "I still wish you could have told me about her. It's survivor's guilt, isn't it?"
"S'pose… yeah. Is easier to just, um, y'know, not think 'bout it, then it's… easier to just not say anything either. Three people… friends knew, but never told 'em, they already knew. Liara. Miranda. And Garrus." She pauses. "Pr'bly Javik too, but he's ass and doesn't count."
"Wait, Garrus?"
"He… figured it, I don't know how. One day, he, um, he just… asks me if I have twin. His sister, Solana, they are, er… she and Garrus, they are twins, so he'd… guessed I was one also. I told him I, I used to have one. Never talked of again." She lets out a slow breath. "He's… good friend."
"Yes, he is. But you know, Shepard," Tali says, "Auntie Raan once told me that the best thing we can do when someone dies is to… try to keep them in our memories. So, if you ever want to talk about her..."
"Maybe. Yeah. If… if you tell me 'bout your mother sometime."
"I… yes. I'd like that."
"But not… today. Need, I need, time to… think of it all. But… remind me, s-so I… y'know, so I don't get… stuck in the, the dark clouds." She hesitates a moment. "Earlier, you and, um… not-Legion were… you were…angry?"
"Their name is Amigo. And I wouldn't say it was— how much of it could you understand?"
Shepard shakes her head and touches her ear, indicating her translator is out. "But your… y'know, your colours. They were…"
"Right. It's going to take a while for me to get used to that." She gets up and moves across the room, reaching into a cubby for some levo nutrition bars. "Do you want chocolate pea-noot boot-er or… app-leh bluh-berry?" she asks, reading the labels out loud.
"App-leh bluh-berry."
"As for my nutrition paste, I have a choice between keleven and… keleven." Letting out a sigh, she brings the food over. "The code that was hidden in your suit… it was in mine too. I had Amigo remove it, but— it was a quarian programming language."
"Quarian… code?" Shepard seems surprised. "Your people…"
"Kal mentioned there were d-death threats against me—" She breaks off, realizing her own hands are trembling. "We're a very... insular—is that the word?—people. We really only put up with other races as much as is needed to survive. But my time on the Normandy made me realize that we couldn't— that if we were to do something more than just survive— let's just say that several of my decisions as ambassador haven't been very popular."
And not just the geth. Allowing turian refugees on the homeworld, for one. It was one thing to evacuate them from colonies and transport them elsewhere, but to actually shelter them and have them take up resources that could be used for their own people? At the time, she'd been so sure that it was the right thing to do, but now…
"Suits—" the rest of whatever she says comes mumbled through a mouthful of apple-blueberry nutrition bar before she begins to cough. She recovers a minute later. "Code, whatsit do?"
"I don't know, Shepard. It's heavily... 'scrambled' is the closest English word I know. I'm not even sure if EDI could do anything with it."
"Hm. If they hide it… not… not good things in there, I think." Her eyes narrow a bit. "Your suit's… new. So's mine. They, uh, they… they… both…" She frowns.
"They were both made at the same time, if that's what you're asking."
"Yah, that. So, uhh, y'know, Occam and his razor. Until we g-got reason for, for think more'n one, actual ev-i-dence, let's…um, y'know, think it was done by same person, and that they put in 'fore you got the suits. You think quarian?"
"Quarian programming languages aren't exactly easy to learn, and"—she pauses a moment—"I can't see the geth doing it. But who? We aren't like this, Shepard. My people wouldn't—" Her voice hitches slightly.
"What I think, what I guess— I'm human. But also…also made honourary"—she pronounces this word slowly, as though she's trying to repeat it phonetically (and, Tali realizes, she probably is)—"quarian. And I'm… uhh, your, your bosh'tet captain. People… see me, they see you. Quarian who goes on Normandy, quarian who makes peace with geth. People, they… um, they get… y'know, there's changes, and they're scared, angry, turns to hate, poison spreads. So they— um, this person who did this, if they hurt both us..." She pauses with a little shrug. "Dunno, just guessing."
"It makes sense." They had non-quarians on the fleet: Nar aldhahi. Not fleet-born— and to some, not welcome. It wasn't something she liked to think of; how damned intolerant her people could be sometimes. How an apathy toward other races could quickly turn to antipathy, and how a term that had once been merely descriptive could now become a slur. "Many of my people aren't very fond of outsiders."
"Hmm." In that one word, Tali suddenly realizes that she's thinking of something. "You're… umm, the Citadel, quarians, Citadel, the… the…the…the…the… fuckingdamnedwords!"
Tali reaches over and squeezes Shepard's arm to ground her. "I think I know what you're trying to ask. As of a few days ago, the Quarian Conclave is now an associate member of the Citadel."
"Good." She sits up a bit straighter. "Because t-this is now under Spectre…. y'know, er, it's a Spectre matter. Bad for Citadel if… if someone hurts quarian am-bass-a-dor, yes?"
"But—"
"Still breaked, I know. But," she says, "we know a Spectre who isn't."
Notes:
Retroactive Edit: In Chapter 2, I changed a single word of Javik's dialogue ("defend" to "protect") to be a bit more consistent with this chapter. I could've worked around it (translator error or Javik being deliberately misleading), but felt it worked stronger this way.
Some notes:
- In the subtitles file, Javik mentions that the Protheans used rachni as living weapons (and then "burned two-hundred worlds to stop them," so take that as you will).
- This is the song Shepard was listening to.
- Yes, 'root' is a Unix term. No, quarian environmental suits do not run on *nix . They're speaking in Khelish.
- The idea of "nar aldhahi" is partly based on the "come-from-away": a bit of Atlantic Canada slang that refers to someone who moves here from outside the region. The region is made up of the poorest provinces in the country, so in recent years there's been some resentment and occasional hostility as people from wealthier provinces move here (the housing shortage doesn't help). I took that and applied it to that same resentment existing when non-quarians choose to join the resource-limited Migrant Fleet.
Translations:
ryn'que'eleq - sickness caused by element zero; it usually refers to acute eezo poisoning, but can also refer to a longer-term illness such as brain tumours
von - one who has a weak bladder (aka a 'suit-wetter')
Nar aldhahi - roughly "born of the outside,' refers to a non-quarian who moves to the fleet (Gillian Grayson is one). Oddly, the children of exiles are not referred to, even though they are not Fleet-born.
Chapter 22: ...don't suffer through the dark days
Notes:
Content Warning: Depiction of a panic/anxiety/PTSD/something attack, mentions of blood.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Don't suffer through the dark days
Burn up all the barricades
Turn and face the pain to let it go
No matter what they all say
Always be another way
You don't have to battle this alone
- Billy Talent, " I Beg To Differ (This Will Get Better) "
"Normandy," Shepard suddenly says without any prompting.
"Hmm?" Tali looks up from her datapad, blinking a few times to clear the lines of code from her eyes. "What about it?"
"They— er, y'know, Kaidan and Garrus, need ship to go to Gag'rin station. So the— it's there, Tali. The Normandy. I'll… see it 'gain." Something flickers across her face.
Liara had gotten into contact, and arrangements had been made: the geth vessel was to proceed to a rendezvous point near Gagarin Station. Spectre Alenko would meet them, and Shepard would be transferred to his ship. After that…
Tali knew her job was at the quarian embassy. But she didn't want to go back. Not quite yet.
"Shepard," Tali begins, pauses for a moment to gather her thoughts, then speaks again. "The Normandy took some damage, so it was put into drydock when we got back. I think they took another ship."
"They took the Normandy."
Stubborn bosh'tet.
"Maybe." Immediately, Tali thinks back of the damage done in the crash, tries to calculate how much could've been repaired after two weeks in drydock… Maybe Shepard was right, and the Normandy was waiting for them. "We'll find out when we get there."
As she looks back down at her datapad, wondering why the text is suddenly so blurry, she feels a touch on her arm.
"Put that down, Tali. Is still scrambled, looking at it won't make it, um, y'know, it won't go… not-scrambled. Get to Normandy, EDI looks at it, maybe she won't know, or maybe she will. But can't do 'nything right now."
Tali gives her a look, but lets Shepard pull the datapad from her hand and shove another one into its place.
"Here… go 'head, Tali. Lots of vids, from the, ah—"
She gestures vaguely at the hull of the geth stealth ship.
"It's a bit strange, isn't it? The geth designed and built this ship. But—" Tali shrugs, preferring not to voice the rest of her thoughts.
"This ship 'minds me of… ship, there was, um, another ship for… y'know, 'xploring, but it had… uh, windows, big windows, and—yah." She shifts her weight. "Vids, any you… er, you will watch any? Can't, uh— names of vids, can't— just lookin' at pictures."
"May I?" Tali asks, gesturing at Shepard's omni-tool. Shepard nods and holds out her wrist for Tali to tap in a few commands. "There. It'll read text aloud for you now. And the videos— I'm still looking through them."
"'nything good?"
"Mostly stuff I've seen before. All of the Blasto movies, Last of the Legion, Starless, Vaenia, Citadel— keelah, that thing. They cast some woman with pale skin and orange hair to play you."
"Taller'n me too." Shepard's voice is dry, but her brow wrinkles. "Do you 'member that, the news camera uh, for the photo, and… y'know, short, shorter'n everyone else, so, um… I… go on the, err, the… ugh, words."
"They made you stand on a crate?" Tali responds with a laugh. "Yeah, I remember that. Kal'Reegar still refuses to believe that you're shorter than me."
"S'does everyone." Shepard lets out a huff of breath and a slight choking noise that Tali thinks is supposed to be a laugh. Tali herself smiles, then looks back down and—
"Wait— wait. They have Fleet and Flotilla 2? When did—"
"It was, y'know, just… not long 'fore the…um, London."
"You knew about it?"
"Yah."
"And you never told me?"
"Nuh." The corners of her mouth shift upwards a bit. "You had Garrus."
"Bosh'tet."
"I know."
Tali lets out a slow breath. "Well, I know what I want to watch."
"Hm." Shepard's brow wrinkles again. "You— um, Tali, you'll… want, ah, read the— should read the, y'know, s-story-thing first."
"The summary?"
"Yeah. The…" She pauses momentarily, before repeating the word. "Summary."
So Tali reads it.
A young quarian pilgrim runs into trouble on her pilgrimage and is rescued from certain death by a dashing turian C-Sec officer. With the guidance of an unconventional human soldier, they fall in love, unravel a conspiracy, and save the galaxy.
(Only once, though, Tali notes with a touch of smugness.)
"Ugh. This sounds completely unrealistic."
"Yah, a bit."
"…I want to watch it anyways."
Shepard's mouth curves into a smile again. "I know."
"Shepard." An insistent hand is nudging her at the same time an insistent voice is entering her ear. "Wake up."
"Wha…" The word draws out of her slowly, more of a sigh than anything. She blinks a few times as the blur of colours and shadows and motion slowly comes into focus. Memories blur in her mind, and she fails to recognize her surroundings at first glance. "Whr—"
After a moment, she realizes that there isn't just one quarian in the room with her, but two. Tali is next to her, a three-fingered hand gently stroking her back. But not just Tali—there's another. Red envirosuit and broad shoulders and steady gold aura—she thinks she recognizes him, but the only impression she can get is one of intense heat and sun-bleached stone walls—and he's leaning forward in his seat to watch an image projected on the far wall where a quarian had just leaned forward to press her forehead against a turian's.
"I… fell 'sleep." Shepard's muscles twinge a bit and she winces as she pulls herself to a sitting position. "Again."
Tali shrugs. "You're still healing. You need the rest. How are you feeling? Do you need another dose of pain medicine or something to eat?"
"Uh, eat. Hungry 'gain. Damn biotics." She pauses a moment to let her internal clock catch up—four hours and twenty-seven minutes. "Vid really that long?"
The other quarian laughs, all bright blue-green, and begins to speak quickly in Khelish, in an accent that's all rough edges—Shepard's translator is out so while she recognizes the cadence and rhythm and the way the words effortlessly flow together, the words and the meanings of those words are lost to her—then Tali sputters and says something back, also in Khelish, before turning to Shepard and switching to English (and hearing her speak both languages suddenly makes Shepard realize that Tali's English isn't entirely effortless).
"Well…maybe—just maybe— there was enough time to watch it twice in a row," Tali admits as she pulls another nutrition bar out of a pocket somewhere to hand to Shepard. The embarrassment oozes out of her.
She pauses for a moment.
"It was completely unrealistic."
"Thought so."
"The Normandy's here. They'll be docking with us in a few minutes."
"Good." Shepard finally gets the nutrition bar unwrapped and bites into it. It tastes a little like strawberries.
But then Tali's colours shift—dull mauve with a touch of deep violet—and it takes Shepard a few moments to realize just why. And only a moment more to decide.
"You're coming too."
"I am?" A hint of amusement there, but mostly confusion, swirling and grey.
"Spectre business." It slips out of her a bit too quickly, and it's only by Tali's brief flare of bright-yellow panic that she realizes that she probably shouldn't have.
The other quarian turns to Tali and begins speaking quickly—also with that swirling grey confusion—and Tali practically snaps back in response, the red of her disapproval and a touch of yellow-green and the strange sort of desperation of wanting—needing—to keep a secret.
When the other quarian turns to her and asks her what kind of Spectre business—she can't recognize the words but she can recognize the question in his voice—she suddenly remembers him, remembers why he seems so familiar, and realizes that it makes things much simpler.
Even then, it takes her a few moments to think of an answer, and a few more moments to filter that answer through her fractured brain. It doesn't quite make it. "Kaidan— Alenko, he… there's stuff, and y'know, Tali's good at stuff, and… stuff… words no good."
Tali gives her a Look, but picks up on what she's trying to say. "Spectre Alenko requested my assistance."
"Yah, that. But the Spectre business, stuff, all need-to-know. Classified."
Kal'Reegar accepts the answer, even though there's a hint of suspicion in his colour. And when he speaks to Tali, the turquoise of her relief is so vividly intense that it makes Shepard feel a bit wobbly.
Soon, Reegar gets up and leaves the room. Once she senses that he's far away enough from the door to not overhear anything, she turns towards Tali, who is doing something with her omni-tool. There's a brief unfamiliar memory-echo— a ship full of Cerberus personnel and listening devices and a "don't mind me, Shepard. What did you call it again—releasing the magic smoke?"
"We can talk now." Tali's voice is shaking slightly. "Shepard, your translator's out. How—"
"Colours, tone of voice. Some guessing too."
"That makes sense. I think." Tali sighs. "How much do you remember about the Spectre business? You were asleep for a while."
"Is, uh, a bit lost in the grey, but enough. We get to Normandy, you tell me 'gain." Shepard takes a breath. "You… didn't want Reegar to know?"
"Yes. No. I don't know." Tali's colours shift again, an anxious yellow-green as she twists her fingers together. "I don't want the rest of the Admiralty Board to know just yet."
"And he… um, the Admirals…he's…?" Shepard trails off.
"I don't think he's reporting back to them. Ancestors know he doesn't think much of the Admiralty Board. But I really don't know." She pauses a moment, before her head snaps up and she gives Shepard a Look tinged with red reproach. "And what were you thinking? You're a terrible liar, Shepard. He'll know something is up."
"He does. But… won't pry. Quarians nosy, but he's, uh, soldier, y'know… he won't pry about classified stuff."
"I hope you're right about that, Shepard."
"I am." She leans forward. "I think y'should tell him, Tali. But… is your choice."
Tali shakes her head and slowly releases her breath. "Keelah, I hate this— not knowing who I can trust."
At this, Shepard reaches over and touches her arm. "You do know. You trust me, Tali. We'll figure it out."
When Tali walks her out, they find the krogan waiting outside, leaning on a bulkhead. One crimson eye—larger than her hand but looking almost beady in the enormousness that is Wrex— tracks Shepard's movements. He gives a small nod; Tali briefly squeezes her arm and then is gone— and Shepard has a pretty good idea where to.
"Wrex."
"Shepard."
"Wrex."
"Shepard." He crosses his arms, looking over her, before finally reaching up to tap the side of his head.
"Oh." Shepard digs into her suit's pocket, pulling out the hated translator and putting it in. "Wrex."
"Too bad y'got to use that thing now. Not many go to the effort of learning the krogan tongue."
At first, Shepard doesn't respond— as was the case with Liara, it's hard to focus on the words that clearly don't match up with the movements of Wrex's mouth, and the burnished copper-crimson of his aura that reminds her of one of those enormous red stars— old, but not at all dimmed. Although both of her grandfathers were unknown to her, she liked to imagine at least one of them would have been a bit like Wrex.
"Then again," he says, with a rush of amusement and an overly-wide krogan grin, "you aren't exactly like most people, are you?"
"Nuh."
Wrex lets out another laugh, reaching over and laying a massive paw on her shoulder with surprising lightness. Even then, it still manages to nearly knock her off her feet, seeing as the krogan concept of a light touch was of the "not shattering bones" type. "You're back to yourself. Good. Came to see you for a bit, back when the Normandy was still missing. Guess you don't remember that."
"No, I… don't." She shrugs, frowns a bit. "Memory, ah… all grey like fog, y'know, not so good 'nymore."
"Probably best you don't. You were…" Wrex's voice grows quieter, and he pauses a moment.
Shepard shrugs now. "Eh. 'sall past now. Will be okay, I think. Just s'long as… no more hospital. Won't go back there."
Though the thought had been shaping itself in her head, she still manages to surprise herself when she says it.
"Wouldn't worry too much about that," Wrex says, a knowing tone in his voice. "Bit surprised Grunt's not with you."
"Huh?"
"He was told to help get you out of that place once you made up your mind to leave." Wrex pauses a moment, and then nods. "Oh. You didn't know."
"No. Didn't know."
He chuckles. "Bet you managed to sneak out around him."
"Prob'ly." She doesn't actually remember that, but it's a pretty good guess. She was—is?—an Infiltrator-class N7, and stealth is her specialty.
For a moment, she wonders what would've happened if she had asked him for help instead. The escape wouldn't have been by stealth, seeing as the krogan idea of stealth was of the "leave no witnesses alive" type. More likely it would have been just walking out the door with a massive krogan as backup.
She wouldn't have come so close to dying again.
She pushes the thought aside and decides to focus on something a bit more practical. "Wrex," she says, holding out her hand and letting the dark energy roll down her arm—it's weak and unstable and she's only got the barest control of it— "I'm… biotic. Any tips?"
"Always knew there was a reason you looked underfed."
"Wrex."
He chuckles, low and gravelly and blue-green. "Your biotics come in late? It's the same way with krogan battlemasters. Didn't even know I had 'em till they saved my life."
"Still," she says, "you had, uh, y'know, the… biotics…not work… then they do work, but, er…"
Wrex waves off the rest of her words. "Trouble controlling them? Yeah, at first."
"Get, uh. scared or mad or… they go."
"That happened too. You'll figure it out."
She frowns. "Kaidan was worried."
"Of course he was. You're mated." Wrex snorts. "You two planning to have kids sometime?"
"Wrex." But Shepard sighs. "We…talked 'bout it. Y'know… not the regular way, can't do that. Adopt or somethin' but still…"
"Not ready for it?"
"No. Maybe a few years. Maybe not ever."
"Good. No hurry for it. You do what's best for you." He gives her a Look. "You want my advice about biotics? Ask for his. And eat more—you're scrawnier than a pyjak."
"Wrex."
"Looks like Tali wants to talk to you." Another 'light' shoulder-touch to nearly send her sprawling. "I'll see you back on the Citadel. I might just have a surprise for you by then."
Without another word, he moves his bulk past her and disappears somewhere deeper into the ship. Shepard lets herself sag backwards against the bulkhead.
Tali approaches, arms crossed and head tilted quizzically. "I thought I should come rescue you."
"Bit worried, uh… y'know, krogan idea of surprise, who knows." Shepard motions vaguely at her legs, which had begun to tremble. Could you…"
"Of course." Tali holds out an arm, and Shepard takes it. "Ready to go?"
"Yah. Normandy… go home."
"I spoke to Reegar," Tali says once they're in the airlock. "About the Spectre business."
The only thing Shepard responds is "Good."
Even the shortened decontamination cycle feels like forever, and Tali barely makes it past the Normandy's airlock before her body suddenly remembers she's been awake for over a full day and exhaustion sets in. One step, she'd been supporting Shepard's weight—and the next, she realizes Shepard is supporting hers, and they're both just barely managing to stay upright. Her surroundings swim around her, her eyes begin to droop shut—
Her head jerks up again at the sound of voices, and then there's another arm supporting her, and her visor audibly clunks against a set of silvery armour.
"Take her, Garrus," Shepard says.
And Tali's breath comes short.
(One moment, she was soaring through the air — then her visor splintered into pieces as it struck the pavement. She rolled onto her back, staring up at the leaden sky and coughing on the unfamiliarly strong scents of burning flesh and metal and eezo. There was shouting—then she was hauled to her feet and half-carried someplace.
"Take her, Garrus. Tali, are you—"
She tried to get back up, but somebody was forcing her to sit down, and when she looked at her sleeves the purple fabric was soaked red with blood.
"—dammit, we need an evac, right now!")
"Shepard," Tali hears herself say, "don't leave me behind."
"Tali." Shepard leans forward and puts her hands on Tali's shoulders. "Tali, look at me."
She slowly realizes she's sitting on the floor of the airlock, and Shepard and Garrus are in front of her. "Shepard, I…" Her voice wavers. "I…"
"Is okay, Tali. Won't leave you behind."
Garrus's hand touches her shoulder, and his voice rumbles with sympathy. "…you were remembering London, weren't you?"
Tali brings herself to nod through the tears.
"Safe now, 'kay? We maked it through." Shepard pulls her close and rubs her back. "You're… not okay, are you?"
"I don't know. I…" She squeezes her eyes shut, but then all she can see is the bloodstained fabric of her envirosuit. So she opens them again, tries to focus on Shepard's steady green eyes and Garrus's piercing blue ones. "…no. I'm not okay."
Without another word, Shepard and Garrus sit down on either side of her, sandwiching her between them. She hears Shepard humming some tune, and the soft thrum of Garrus's subharmonics, and her own breathing gradually slowing to normal.
"I think—"
All three of them manage to say the same thing—in three different languages—at the exact same time. And then they all fall into a fit of laughter.
Then Tali speaks. "But I think I will be."
Notes:
Turned on comment moderation as I got hit with the "your story is written by an AI" botspam.
Sorry for the slow update. Had to scrap the chapter and start again after I got very very very stuck (sigh).
The scene with krogan grandpa Wrex was supposed to be something else (I'm not entirely sure what) but he decided to butt in and I love it.
Chapter 23: ...i lose, things change, but never in your eyes
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Day Eraser's dark of night
In the Excited States, gone in plain sight
Under the wave or by cavelight
I lose, things change, but never in your eyes
- The Tragically Hip, " In View"
Kaidan had stepped away from the airlock. Not because he'd been bothered or disturbed by Tali's breakdown; Shepard and Garrus had been there, and the only thing he would've done was crowd her. No, he'd stepped away because it was the best way for him to help.
Shepard catches a quick glimpse of him off to the side of the CIC as she and Garrus escort Tali through, providing her a buffer against any curious stares. Then the elevator doors slide shut and he's gone from view.
"I'll be fine," Tali tries to insist, her voice taking on a tone of exhausted exasperation as she sits cross-legged on Garrus's cot. In this position, she looks small and a bit vulnerable. (Shepard finds it somewhat curious that they'd come the main battery rather than Tali's old quarters down in Engineering, but says nothing.)
Garrus doesn't buy it. Without a word, he sits down next to her, making one of those humming noises that turians made. Tali sighs, curls into him, her visor pressed into the bulk of his armour; the difference in their heights made her look even smaller.
Tali's colours of anxious yellow-green and Garrus's colours of comforting deep indigo blend together into new colour-tones of… not just romance, that longing to find a little slice of happiness in the midst of a war that they certainly wouldn't survive. No, this was something else entirely; the soft pastel symphonies of trust and understanding and love.
And right now, they don't need her. Without a sound, she slips out of the main battery.
The smell of frying eggs in the mess hall reminds her that the only thing she's eaten in the past twenty-four hours was a few nutrition bars, and she happily accepts a plate of huevos rancheros from the veritable mountain of muscles (who seems more than a bit confused to see her in a quarian envirosuit).
Who is supposed to be in N7 training. She throws him a Look.
"Hey." James Vega holds up his hands. "Not my call. Everything's on hold right now, since the Villa's gone."
Which— oh, right. Either blown up by reapers, or—the more likely situation—torched by the Alliance to prevent it falling into enemy hands/claws/leg-appendages. News from Earth had been scarce enough that she hadn't known.
Shepard feels a twinge of…something— not quite grief, but the same sort of bittersweet violet colour tone. Being thrown into Interplanetary Combat Training had been grueling— but it'd saved her. Months of skin grafts and reconstructive surgery and physical rehab on a shoulder half-eaten away by acid burns had driven her to the bottle; just another shell-shocked marine caught in the slow spiral of alcoholism until Captain David Anderson had shown up at her door to tell her that the intel she'd brought back on the sandworms (except they weren't sandworms, but instead thresher maws) had gotten her recommended for N training.
"So, uh— any tips for the training?" Vega asks.
Shepard pauses a moment, leaning back in her seat. "Don't die. "
"I'll… try to remember that."
"You will."
It'd been their running joke— Shepard's brusque non-answers whenever he tried to weasel any details about N7 training out of her. And she can sense a brief glimmer of blue-green as he shakes his head and turns back to the stove.
And then her stomach growls, so she picks up the fork— it's tricky to get her hand around the handle, it's too narrow and she can't close her fingers enough to get a decent grip— and begins to eat. It's difficult because she keeps dropping the fork and her hand is shaking a bit too much. But then she figures out that if she shifts the dark energy running through her nerves in just the right way, she can make it wobble a bit less—
"Hey."
—until she's startled by a voice and accidentally sends the fork flying. But then it halts in mid-air, held in place by another biotic field. She takes a shaky breath and looks up to see Kaidan standing there, fingers slightly splayed and shimmering with dark energy. He returns the fork to her, then settles himself down at the table across from her.
"Here you go." That husky voice sends a bit of a shiver down her spine. Somehow, she had always associated him with blue: the blue of his biotics, the blue of the shining Alliance armour. But no— his aura isn't blue, but instead a soft pastel green: not quite seafoam, not quite mint. It's… calming, like Kaidan is. He reaches over, takes one of her gloved hands between his own, and she wonders just how quarians ever got used to being unable to properly feel their partner's skin. "So, uh… should I ask about the suit?"
"Quarian." When Kaidan blinks, she continues. "Y'know, honourary quarian."
"I think I get it. Thank god you had—" He breathes out, slowly, and she's convinced that there's a few more grey strands in his sideburns. "Shepard, you scare the hell out of me sometimes."
(An unfamiliar not-hers memory filters through to her mind: grey skies overlooking a grey starship afloat upon choppy grey waters, waiting, and waiting, and waiting—)
She begins to speak, but the words don't come. So she nods instead. The way things had gone, Kaidan had received word that Shepard had been rescued before knowing she'd gone missing to begin with. Which probably explains why he's not… angrier. There's a touch of red in his colour-tones, but it's mostly a turquoise sense of relief that she senses, washed through with the calm pastel green.
"I think I'm just glad you didn't get hurt." This time. "And with you, I can't exactly say I didn't sign up for this. Still… what the hell were you thinking?"
Ouch. Somehow, his disappointment is worse than the anger she'd been expecting. Shepard pauses a moment, then lifts and drops her shoulders in a shrug. "…yah, I wasn't."
"I should have guessed. But no more running, all right? Just let us help you. We—I—" He breaks off, runs a hand through his hair, and then continues. "I can't lose you, Shepard. Not again."
"No more running," Shepard says. She reaches over, takes his hand. "Promise."
Karin Chakwas has some strong words for her. Mostly about how reckless it was to simply take off the way she did, and how inconsiderate it was to both the doc-tors and the friends who cared about her, and how she'd put her recovery at an enormous risk. And she's absolutely right. Shepard simply accepts the tongue-lashing, a bit grateful that the colour-tones aren't also transmitted through the QEC.
"I should be ordering you to return to the hospital immediately," she says.
"No more running," Shepard says. She's sitting cross-legged on one of the cots in the medbay, tugging at one sleeve of her envirosuit. "But…"
She trails off, the rest of her words lost in the snarl of her mind.
"But I won't, because I've read your file," Chakwas says, voice weary. "And we both know you'll just sneak out a second time."
Shepard blinks.
"Oh," she finally says—not quite a discrete word, more of a quiet non-verbal noise. She blinks again. "Oh."
Of course, this comes with a list of caveats. Daily check-ins with Chakwas. Strict adherence to her regimen of medication (this one comes with a rather stern glare). And a promise, once she returns from Gagarinst— Gagarin Station (with a space), to see a therapist.
Shepard initially balks at that last one. Then relents. "If I can pick."
There's no promises to be made here. Therapists are in short supply—particularly ones with top-level security clearances. "Nobody's going to force you to remain with one, but you need to talk to somebody. For god's sake, Shepard, you were pushed back into service a month after you attempted—" Chakwas suddenly breaks off, neatly folding away the unexpected display of emotion as though it were laundry. "How would you feel about a nonhuman therapist?"
It takes Shepard a few seconds to parse the question. "That's…done?"
"It's not very common— most people prefer their own species. But it has been done." Chakwas gives her another Look. "And in your case…"
"You read my file," Shepard says dryly. "Don't… know. Things—uh, brain's all, um, jumbled up, Prothean, rachni, storm clouds, y'know. All the bands playing different tunes. But, if— er, you think it— it'll help, then I… I'll try."
"For now, don't be afraid to lean on your friends. You haven't chased them off yet."
"…yah." Shepard closes her eyes a moment. "I know."
But just when Shepard thinks she's finally in the clear, there's one last thing. "I realize that you and Major Alenko have been separated for several months…"
And for some reason, she thinks she doesn't like it. "Yes?"
"You'll both want to have relations at some point."
"Re-la-tions," Shepard repeats, trying out the word— it's a bit unfamiliar, and she doesn't quite get what Dr. Chakwas is taking about. "Relations?"
"Sexual relations," Chakwas responds without hesitation or embarrassment.
"Oh. Those relations."
And of course, Chakwas has some… advice for her. Mostly along the lines of taking an extra dose of biotic inhibitors. And not attempting any creative applications of mass effect fields herself. She wonders what Mordin would've said.
"And one last note"—Dr. Chakwas' tone is almost exasperated at this point—"if either of you end up in injured due to your extracurricular activities, I will become very unhappy."
"Noted," Shepard says.
In 2176, Shepard had come to a crossroads in her life. Her four years of military service were up. Her twenty-first birthday had passed the previous year, and her inheritance—the money that had been held for her after the sale of the homestead on Mindoir—finally released to her. Along with the military salary she'd tucked away in her bank account (easy enough to do when constantly on deployment), it'd be enough to live on—growing up on a colony meant that one didn't get much of a chance to acquire the taste for luxury.
Instead, she'd re-enlisted for another four years. If she hadn't, she wouldn't have been part of the unit sent to Akuze a year later. But she also wouldn't have met her future husband.
She'd been delirious from infection and pain after dragging herself back to the LZ with a broken leg and thresher maw acid seeping through her armour. He'd been the medic in the landing party sent down to retrieve any survivors. She'd been the only survivor.
She'd also cussed him out before passing out at his feet. Not really a love-at-first-sight situation.
That had come later—much later. She remembers the exact date: January 3rd, 2180. He'd just returned to Arcturus from a visit with his parents on Earth, she'd just returned to Arcturus from her first assignment as an N7 operative, and they'd made plans to meet up for lunch at a little donair place in the civilian part of the station. It's something they'd done a few times before, but this was the first time they'd both suddenly noticed each other.
(Of course, it took them both another three years to finally do something about it.)
Kaidan asks to carry her into the room. She's not entirely sure why, and neither is he; some strange old marriage custom from Earth, he tells her, almost embarrassed about it. And although Shepard's a Mindoirian, if Kaidan wants to follow some strange old marriage custom from Earth, she won't complain about it. Until her head bangs into the doorframe.
"Watch it," she grumbles. "Don't— I don't need 'nother stupid brain—"
"Sorry," he says, but then as he's carrying her across the room, her head bangs into the empty display case above the desk.
"Put me down, Kaidan," she says—orders him, really.
"Sorry," he says again, and he does.
She turns and faces him. "And stop…" She pauses a moment to let her brain catch up with the word. "'pologizing."
"Sorry," he says still again, holding up a hand before she can say anything more. "Hey, I'm Canadian."
"Y'know, Canada, it not… um, it doesn't even exist anymore, Kaidan."
"Try telling that to the people living there."
"Oh, I know. I… uh, I join— en-listed, after Mindoir, ended up there for a bit. Uh, well, more pre-cise-ly, ended up in Turonno." She makes a face. "Chawranna."
"Ouch."
"Exactly. There's a reason that I hate that town."
The double bed is inviting. And so are Kaidan's hands, removing her envirosuit—she could probably manage it herself, but she likes the feel of his hands. Still, after several months apart, they both find themselves a bit shy and awkward with each other, like they'd been the night before Ilos.
And Kaidan is thin— much too thin. She can see every rib.
"Thirty days of… um, food. Not enough." Shepard frowns. "Not enough. Your— y'know, no more'n the rest?"
"No. There were a few days that I wasn't sure—" He takes a deep, shuddering breath. "I don't know if I could do it again, Shepard."
"You won't have to."
"I hope you're right about that."
"So'm I, Kaidan." She exhales slowly. "But… we made it, yeah?"
"Yeah." He smiles— both his mouth and his eyes smile, and there's a general sense of ease, sea-green and sky-blue, their arms around each other, the faint ozone smell of his biotics and the stronger scent of his hair gel mingling together, just happy to be alive and to be together.
And yet…
She wriggles free from his arms, sitting up on the bed and shivering a bit as the recycled ship-air brushes her bare skin.
"Is something wrong, sweetheart?"
But she doesn't respond, just reaches toward the stereo system to put on some music.
"God, I hope not Metal Machine Music again," Kaidan mutters.
"That was, uh… mistake, Kaidan. Damn thing on shuffle. Din't even know I had a copy." She looks back over at him.
He gives her a Look. "And that Shaggs album?"
"Cobain liked 'em."
"Nickelback?"
She grimaces. "Got no excuse there."
"Could you just put on something normal? Like, I don't know, do you have"—here he pauses, trying to think of something that's not Nickelback or the Shaggs or Metal Machine Music—"the first Dire Straits album?"
"You thinked, uh, thought I not?" Shepard glances at him, one corner of her mouth curving upwards. "My… favourite Talking Heads album."
Notes:
Metal Machine Music and "that Shaggs album" are both available on YouTube. Sorry, no Nickelback.
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synobun on Chapter 1 Fri 01 Nov 2019 07:31PM UTC
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synobun on Chapter 9 Mon 28 Jun 2021 11:50PM UTC
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ChocolateCoveredPortals on Chapter 10 Sun 11 Jul 2021 12:07AM UTC
Last Edited Sun 11 Jul 2021 12:11AM UTC
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