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Shepard paused just short of the engine room hatch’s motion sensor threshold, and ran back over the speech she had been struggling so hard to devise. It all sounded fake, overly dramatic. She wasn’t rallying her men and women on the eve of combat, she was talking to, well, her girlfriend. That somehow made it much, much harder.
She nearly took that final step once, twice, three times, pulling back each time, her thoughts roiling around her like a storm. She was about to deny Tali the opportunity to repay in kind Gilina’s spirited defense of her innocence on the flotilla little more than a month ago. Shepard had gotten very good at reading those things that Tali’Zorah vas Normandy was unable or unwilling to give voice to, and one of them was that, despite everything they had gone through together, she still felt like she owed Shepard a debt for her actions at the trial, one the young quarian was desperate to repay.
The terse, succinct words of Hackett’s message replayed now in her mind. “With my authority as Commander-in-Chief, Alliance Navy, I hereby order you to return with your vessel to Alliance space, in order to face a disciplinary hearing before the Alliance Defense Committee for your actions of a week ago in the Aratoht System, as well as your conduct and association with the terrorist organization Cerberus. None of your crew will be required to attend, and the Alliance will pursue no charges against them, pending your cooperation. It is the expressed desire of the Alliance Defence Committee that word of these proceedings not reach beyond Alliance space, and any non-Alliance crewmembers may be detained if they arrive aboard the Normandy SR-2, until such time as your status is resolved. We await your response.”
It was full of bureaucratic jargon and legal implications, but Hackett’s message effectively meant the end of the most eclectic yet undeniably effective crew Shepard had ever served with. They had fought legends and won. Now they would be torn apart by protocol.
Shepard leaned slightly too far forward, and the hatch opened. At least it made her decision for her.
Tali stood, as she always did, before her engineering console. Shepard’s eyes traced over the delicate contours of her environment suit, trying to remember this moment. Either she made a noise, or Tali had somehow felt she was being watched, because the young quarian spun around, relaxing only when she realized who had been standing awkwardly behind her.
“Shepard,” she said, sounding startled. “I was just going to see you.”
That stopped Gilina dead in her tracks, the apologetic preamble of her speech stuck in her throat. “You were?”
Tali nodded slowly. “Shepard…Gilina,” she amended, closing the distance between them and taking Shepard’s bare hands in her gloved grasp. “I just got word from the flotilla. Something big is happening, or will be happening. They want me to return.”
“Oh,” was all Shepard could manage.
Tali looked down at their hands. “I’m sorry. With the Collectors defeated, my assignment to serve with you was technically over. I just…I just hoped we’d have more time. Especially after…” she waved her hand vaguely, “everything that’s happened recently.”
“When do you leave?” Shepard asked, her train of thought completely derailed.
“We’re heading to the Citadel to drop off Thane so that he can visit his son, yes? The flotilla will have a ship waiting.” Tali shook her head furiously. “I tried to stall them, Shepard. I don’t want to leave the Normandy. Not when…not when I would be leaving so much behind.” She gazed into her lover’s eyes, and Gilina could see the emotion in them even through the opaque faceplate.
Tali dropped their hands, and turned away. “Back when we…started this, I told you quarians don’t have the luxury of being selfish. This is one of those times when I really wish I wasn’t a very good quarian.”
“I understand, Tali,” Shepard said, and as part of her breathed a sigh of relief at not having to be the one to start this conversation, another part was ashamed of her cowardice. Commander Shepard can face down Reapers, but flinches in the face of being honest with the woman she loves.
“You do?” Tali sounded almost surprised. She paused. “You wanted to tell me something too, didn’t you?”
Shepard smiled ruefully at her perceptiveness. “I did.”
“What?”
Shepard stared hard at Tali for a moment. “I have to go back to the Alliance, anyway. I’ll probably be dropping off crew in the next week.”
Tali was suspicious. “What aren’t you telling me, Shepard? Is this about the relay?”
After a pause, Gilina nodded.
Tali stiffened. “They aren’t charging you, are they? I know they were worried about the backlash if word got out you were involved. Shepard, you didn’t have a choice. Either you destroyed the relay, or the Reapers overwhelmed the galaxy in days. Earth would be burning. The flotilla would be nothing but a debris field. You made the right decision. The only decision you could.”
Shepard looked away. She knew Tali was right, but that didn’t mean the deaths rested any easier on her conscience.
Tali reached out her hands again. It was something she did often now; a kind of casual intimacy that Shepard had come to realize meant as much as an embrace or even a kiss coming from a being who was effectively imprisoned in an environmental suit. Shepard took them gratefully.
She’d had a few lovers since Mindoir, Ashley being the most recent. Even they had not had much time together, though they had certainly taken advantage of the comparatively light duty they were given after defeating Saren. Well, at least, light until the Collectors had come calling. She had never been one for public displays, but it was almost an advantage, the way Tali could offer her most sincere affection and comfort without drawing the attention of those around them. Tali’s six gloved fingers ran over the skin of Shepard’s bare hands, darting around almost aimlessly. Gilina was going to miss this.
“I know, Tali. But this is something I need to do on my own. And you have to go back to your people. We both have responsibilities.”
“Sometimes I wish we didn’t,” Tali murmured. “Sometimes I wish we could both be selfish.”
Shepard smiled ruefully. “Yeah, me too, she said.
She noticed out of the corner of her eye an irritated Engineer Daniels almost physically manhandling Ken out of the hatchway.
Tali noticed too, and managed to give her a look that, despite the opaque visor, was best described as coy. “So. We don’t have much time left, do we?” There was a slight tremor in her otherwise playful voice, subtle enough that it would go unnoticed by most beings. Tali had watched and read way too many clichéd romances in her time before the Normandy. It was cute, but it also resulted in some rather awkward moments when she tried to imitate actresses with the kind of effortless grace that neither of them possessed.
“Tali,” Shepard said, sighing. Yes, she did want to drag the quarian back to her cabin, strip off that beautiful but oppressive suit, marvel at the unfamiliar cool hue of her lover’s skin and trace with her eyes and fingers the network of subcutaneous blood vessels that decorated her body like abstract tattoos, reveling in the mix of the alien and remarkably familiar that characterized quarian physiology. Or, at least, Tali’s physiology. She still wasn’t sure if the ‘quarians’ appearing in the ‘informational’ videos sent by Joker (worryingly, with EDI’s help) were the genuine article.
She wanted to wrap herself around the woman she loved in a tangle of arms and legs, bury her face in Tali’s sleek, almost rubbery hair, and for one blessed moment, forget that any illusions of peace were just that. What Shepard had found in Tali was not just a capable and deadly comrade in arms who she trusted to watch her back. Nor was she just someone who intuitively understood that wordless emotion of loving the memory of a home but no longer truly belonging anywhere - even if Tali’s own home had not been razed to the ground fifteen years previous, but had instead been lost with her own innocence and bitter acknowledgement of the grievous faults of her father and her people. And to Gilina Shepard, Tali wasn’t even just someone whose presence she found so intoxicating that any concerns about sharing her innermost self with someone not of her own world seemed to vanish when she heard the quarian’s voice, or first saw beneath her helmet. Tali was solace, and that was something Shepard was ill-prepared to give up.
Tali had once described her as the only cover against a storm. That had been before the full extent of their feelings had become manifest, but it was as true now as then.
They always leave you, a voice whispered. A voice she loathed with every fiber of her being. The voice of doubt. The voice of betrayal. The voice of Mindoir and Akuze and Alchera and Horizon. The voice of a life where the people most important to her were eventually taken away, or worse, left her of their own accord. Even her.
“Shepard?” Tali asked, breaking her reverie, her quasi-seductive body language replaced by worry. “I’m sorry, I wish I could stay.”
“So do I, Tali,” Shepard said.
“It might not be long,” Tali said, trying to inject a note of hope into her voice. “They might just want to debrief me on the Collector Mission, on my dealings with Cerberus, with you. Signs out of the fleet are…confused, right now. You saw how things were at the trial. Most of my people think we are standing at a crossroads.”
So are we, Shepard thought sadly. It had been, what, three weeks since the Omega 4 Relay? Maybe a little longer since she had finally acted on her growing feelings for the woman standing before her, since Tali had confirmed something she had long suspected, but just as long been uncertain how to address. Her relationship with Ashley had been risky enough, as her junior in rank and experience, and a part of her would always wonder if the decision to leave Kaidan Alenko behind would have been quite so tactically obvious if there hadn’t been other considerations at play. “I’ll miss you,” she said lamely.
“I’ll miss you too,” Tali said. “But I’m not leaving yet. And I know you have a lot on your mind, but I want to make the best of the time we’ve got left.”
To hell with it. She felt her face breaking out in a wide smirk. “Lead the way, Miss vas Normandy.”
__________
Much later, her arms still wrapped around the still form of her lover, Shepard struggled to sleep.
She wished that she could touch Tali’s skin while they lay like this, but the unfortunate truth was that while Tali seemed to have adjusted to the biology of Shepard’s body well enough, the same could not be said of her quarters. And so far too soon after they had ridden out the last wave, Tali sat up and dressed herself, before slipping back under the covers, craving at least the pressure and warmth of indirect touch. Sometimes Shepard would at least put on her underwear, knowing that she could be called to the bridge in a moment’s notice. This time she did not.
Warmed by their shared body heat (though quarians ran significantly cooler than humans), the interlinked tapestry of metal, leather-analogue, fabric and plastics rested comfortably against her skin. Tali was even scrupulous about cleaning off her boots when she came in, though Shepard thought it hardly necessary.
She ran her fingers along the hood of Tali’s suit, imagining she was playing with her hair. It was roughly the same thing. Tali slept soundly, hopefully dreaming happier dreams than the ones that paid Shepard nightly visits.
Since Hackett’s message, they had only been getting worse. She didn’t need Kelly’s degree in psychology to know that the guilt of the massacre of the Aratoht system was eating away at her. Shepard was military to the core, had been since she was eighteen, but her respect for protocol and steady, if at times grudging, respect for her superiors had first been instilled by her mother, a retired fleet officer who had taken down four batarians with a pair of kitchen knives before her head was turned into a bloody ruin by a krogan mercenary. As much as she wanted to run, aware she wasn’t even a member of the Alliance and Hackett technically had no authority over her, she knew she would never forgive herself if she disobeyed him.
One of the first things Shepard had learned after her promotion to ensign was the importance of leading by example. Bad leaders were usually hypocrites, demanding sacrifices of their subordinates they were themselves unwilling to offer, demanding courage and showing cowardice, taking their soldiers’ lives for granted. It was that conviction that had nearly broken her after Akuze, the belief that she should have died with the rest of her squad. It was the reason she had berated Ashley after Virmire, probably the same reason she’d forced Garrus to spare Sidonis. Perhaps it was even one of the reasons she had paid far more attention to Tali after Haestrom than she had during their time on the SR-1. She knew that particular kind of survivor’s guilt intimately, and also knew how dangerous it was.
She would have to break the news to the rest of the crew. It occurred to her than very few of her team really had anywhere to go. Jack, Miranda, Mordin, Kasumi, Garrus, Grunt, Jacob…only she, Tali, Thane, Legion, and perhaps Samara really had a clear next step after their harrowing journey. They had all been united by loss. Even Zaeed, she mused, had seen his entire life yanked from underneath him. As it turned out, he would never have a chance to get it back, though Shepard had sworn a vow to herself that if she ever came across Vido Santiago, she’d put a bullet between his eyes. She owed Zaeed that, even if she couldn’t say she ever liked the man. For a soldier, how someone died could mean worlds more than how they had lived. And Zaeed had died a hero, even if he could scarcely have been described that way while he still drew breath.
Tali shifted in her sleep, and Shepard found herself pulling the quarian into her body, holding tight. They were at a crossroads, every one of them, but ultimately their paths would take them to the same destination.
That was the thing about the Reapers. No matter when they finally came, no matter how their war unfolded, not a single living being whose people were capable of space flight would really have the option to stay uninvolved. Apathy meant certain death.
Fear was a powerful motivator. Whether it would be enough to break the cycle was yet to be determined.
Let them come, she thought fiercely, the woman she loved drawn tight against her.
Life without choice was no life at all.