Work Text:
"Keelah," Tali says, and grins. It doesn't really carry the same meaning, that interjection, now that they're working on making the homeworld home once more. Then again, aliens regularly invoke divinities they don't personally believe in so perhaps the language will keep it.
She waits at the crest of the pass, marveling at the valley rolling out in front of her.
"Some view," Kal says from behind Tali's shoulder, a few minutes later. The butt of his walking stick sinks into the dry dirt with a crunch when he leans his weight on it.
He's getting stronger, day by day, though the limp will probably never go away completely. Their almost-daily treks into the hills around Tali's nascent house (and the heavily dented pre-fab they're re-using in the meantime) are helping to restore his stamina but progress is slow. Not being able to keep up frustrates him, obviously, but Kal refuses to hike if Tali dawdles to match him. They compromise: Tali will surge ahead at her naturally speedy pace, periodically pausing or taking detours off the main trail to prevent her leaving Kal too far behind.
"Isn't it?" Tali spreads her arms to embrace the vista and sighs. "Hello, back yard!"
Kal snorts. "You're claiming this one, too?"
"I'm claiming everything I can take without contest." She turns around to look at him. "If you ask nicely I'll share."
"That's very generous of you, ma'am."
Tali starts picking her way down the other side of the saddle, beaming. So many new words to learn, now that she lives here, names for things she'd never even thought about. Words like scree (a span of loose rock like the one cascading down the lee slope of the hill farther up the valley), and forb (non-grass herbaceous plants), and karst springs (water 'pots' connected to cave systems and underground rivers).
There used to be maintained trails here, washed out or overgrown in places now but identified by badly faded signposts, crumbling remnants of stairs and bridges, and gravel path-shoring. She's found a few cabins, too, and a road leading to the ghost town she has yet to explore. Those are unsettling; they leave Tali feeling torn between salvaging what she can for study and preservation or leaving everything in situ. She can't help wondering what the cabins' former occupants would prefer, if they had a say in it. She assumes they're okay with Tali and Kal following this wavering line of flat-topped stones that runs between low plants and boulders, at any rate.
"There's a new one," Tali observes to Kal, pointing and carefully picking her way towards an unfamiliar shrub. She squats down for closer inspection. "Look at the way the leaves cluster, just like a tiny foot."
"Maybe if you squint." Kal follows her but does not attempt to crouch. "Nice color, anyway."
"Somebody thought it looked like a foot," Tali says, twisting to hold her arm where he can read the entry in the botanical field guide she's pulled up on her omnitool. "One of the old folk names is 'toe bush'. And it's edible—at least, the berries are. Too bad we missed the season."
Kal jabs his walking stick through the holo display to disrupt it. "Take a break, enjoy the view. Appreciate the beauty of nature. You can always run inventory later."
Tali rolls her eyes but stands, dusting off her hands.
"It is awfully beautiful here." She turns a slow circle, soaking in the full panorama. "I think this might be my favorite place on Rannoch so far."
Kal laughs. "You've said that at least ten times already."
"And every time I meant it." Tali stops face to face with Kal. "I'm glad that you're here to see it with me."
"I'm glad the turians jumped the gun on declaring me KIA." Kal hobble-steps a little closer, planting his walking stick next to Tali's foot and placing his other palm on her hip.
"That is part of what I meant about you being here, yes." Tali frowns.
It's a slow process, verifying rosters of the missing and the dead, especially slow when a person's last known whereabouts was in another species' territory. Errors might get caught and corrected but that change is rarely for the better. Tali recalls with perfect clarity the call from Garrus that kicked her legs out from under her:
"You didn't really go to the trouble of contacting me just to talk about architecture, did you, Vakarian?" Tali'd teased.
"As it happens, I did not." Garrus had turned abruptly serious, then, in the link's stuttering visual feed, evidently unsure of his words. "That marine on Haestrom, the one who was sweet on you—"
"Kal'Reegar," she'd breathed, and felt her face go numb. "You've recovered his body?" Tali's mind had jumped immediately to logistics, contacting his family, sourcing transportation, arranging whatever it would take to bring him home and put him to rest where he belonged. Absorbed in mapping contingencies, Tali was slow to register what Garrus said next, and slower still to make sense of it.
"Recovered, yes, but Tali—that body is still breathing."
"What?" Tali had blinked. "You mean he's—"
"In bad shape, from what I hear; could be a while before the doctors are willing to release him and I suspect a lot of the damage will be permanent. But he's alive, and determined to stay that way."
"Keelah, Garrus, are you sure? The reports seemed so certain . . ."
"I'm not clear on all the details but it sounds like he was on his own a while before anybody found him. It's the same Kal'Reegar, that much I'm sure of."
'Bad shape' was being generous: Kal was a wreck. Anywhere but Palaven he'd have been unlikely to pull through, and even on Palaven his odds weren't great. But pull through Kal did, and now, months later, he's sliding his hand around to the small of Tali's back and trying to steer her down to the ground.
"Here?" Tali objects. "All the plants will get squished."
"So?"
Tali tilts her head skeptically. "I find it somewhat disturbing that your idea of appreciating something's beauty involves crushing it into pulp."
Kal brays with laughter. "If you say so, ma'am."
Tali slips out of his grasp and dances back onto the main trail. She resumes her hike, with an extra dose of hip-sway to ensure Kal is watching her ass (of course he is). Careful to check her suit's elbow seal first, she detaches a glove and peels it off, allowing her bare fingers to trail through the soft and scratchy grass stems that line this part of the path. Tali grins again when the stick-scuffle sound picks up tempo as Kal hurries to catch up with her.
"I take back what I said, about appreciating the beauty of nature. I hate nature. These plants deserve to get crushed."
"Is that so?" With her exposed hand Tali pulls a head of wild grain and turns around to tuck it between hose attachments on the side of Kal's helmet, allowing her fingers to graze the rim of his faceplate.
Kal nods. "They are wicked, naughty plants."
Tali snickers and hugs his ribcage.
"Come here," she says, leading Kal by the hand towards a scattering of boulders. "Not that one!"
She tugs Kal away from the first conveniently seat-height boulder he tries to sit down on. "Why not?"
"Do you have any idea how long that lichen took to grow? You can't just go carelessly scraping it off with your butt."
Kal groans. "You're terrible!"
"You like it."
"I do," Kal admits when Tali finds a rock she judges suitable and pushes him down to sit on it, then promptly sits herself between his legs, pressing the posterior that he's so fond of right up against his crotch. Tali swirls her hips and Kal produces a comically blissful sigh. He leans his walking stick on the side of the rock so that both hands are free to roam Tali's body over the surface of her environmental suit.
The nerve stimulation suites inside the suits do a respectable job of translating sensation from the suits' leathery surfaces to their wearers' much softer skin—something Tali knows now because she has felt the same touches unadulterated. A respectable job is, well, respectable; it's a long way shy of sublime. Still, as much as the innovations they've received from the geth and other species have steepened the acclimation curve, they're years away from living suitless all the time. Out here in the wilderness especially (wilderness! where Tali lives! on her own homeworld!) there are too many potential contaminants to strip down very far or for very long, so Tali and Kal have been exploring ways to make the most of the contact they can get. Kal is an excellent (and very engaged) student of Tali's body, as she'd like to think she is of his, and his hands rub confidently over Tali's curves. He lifts Tali's leg over his good one, opening her to his touch, but he spends a little longer stroking her ribs, breasts, hips, belly, and thighs, before long fingers zero in on her drive core.
Tali trills happily and rolls her body against his, seeking out more of his touch. Her bare hand comes up to stroke the edges of his visor while the other grips the edge of the rock for leverage. Tali shivers at the way Kal moans just looking at her exposed skin and nuzzles his mask into her palm.
Kal's hand between her legs rubs harder, faster, and Tali grinds against him with purpose. Plenty of time for teasing and slow, decadent caresses later, keelah se'lai; right now Tali's too wound up to take her time even if they had the option. Kind of a good thing, really, that the risk of these al fresco quickies is such a large part of their thrill; it makes their urgency pleasingly autotelic.
Tali releases the internal locks on her suit's intercrural panel and feels the muffled click that means Kal has done the same.
In a delicious rush of speed and grace Kal is off the rock, whirling Tali around to brace her arms on the ledge they'd just been sitting on, and driving into her from behind. It feels a little off-kilter, the way his injury forces him to do more of the work of standing and fucking with one leg than the other. Tali is not complaining, not with Kal's careful hands on her waist and hip, his almost aggressively eager thrusting, and all the honest enthusiasm he puts into fucking her warming her soul like a sunbeam.
The press of his faceplate between her shoulder blades tells Tali Kal's close, his body curling to fold his torso over hers. Tali hears his heaving breath as a roaring surf in her helmet's audio inputs, feels it as a pulse against her spine that stops, suspends, as a shudder runs through him, then resumes at a decelerating pace. Tali's not far behind him, her body tensing around that low tight coiling. Touching herself with her own bare fingers tips Tali over the edge and she gasps, her nerves flaring in a luminescent burst that arcs her back and pulls her up onto her toes.
Her body is still tingling, flickering with sparks and shocks, when Kal clumsily disengages. Tali helps him to hop closer to the rock, then turns immediately to clean and reseal her suit at the groin. She replaces her glove with some reluctance, wincing at the stinging heat of the sterilization protocol.
Tali looks forward to the day they can linger naked under the sky, limbs intertwined, until they're damn well ready to get dressed, but for now they don't have the luxury. They make do with cuddling fully clothed, Tali leaning on Kal on the boulder, the skin of her back and shoulders inside the suit buzzing under Kal's gently petting hands.
After a while thin clouds move in and Tali nuzzles deeper into Kal's chest. "Do you want to go back to the house now?" she asks.
Kal takes a deep breath and looks up at the sky. "If you want to. I thought we'd at least make it to the other side of this valley."
Tali grins and pushes away from him, stooping to retrieve Kal's abandoned walking stick. "I told you you'd like hiking."