Note: Title taken from Apollo by Emily Palermo
Ashley helps Tali to the Med Bay, no matter how much Tali assures her that she's fine. The Normandy shakes and rattles around them, and when the pair stumbles into the room, Doctor Chakwas can barely stay on her feet due to the turbulence.
"She's hurt bad," Ashley tells the doctor, easing Tali onto one of the cots.
"No, I'm not!" Tali protests. Her voice shrills into her modulator. "We have to go back! Shepard! He's—"
"If he's still alive, he's reached the conduit by now," Ashley says, lowering herself onto the cot across from Tali. "He'd be at the Citadel."
"Then we have to—"
"What, Tali?!" Ashley demands. "Crash into the derelict Citadel and hope he's nearby?"
"Why don't you care about this? About him?!"
Ashley meets her eyes fiercely. "You do not get to tell me how much I care about the commander. What you do get to do is cooperate for five seconds so Chakwas can make sure you don't bleed out."
Tali still wants to throw a fit. To limp back up to cockpit and demand that Joker drop her onto the Citadel and help with whatever Shepard is trying to do right now.
But Ashley's right. It won't help.
With a final, emphatic groan of reluctance, she eases herself onto the cot. Chakwas gets to work, feeling around the sections of her suit of ruptures.
"Just hold on a little bit longer, Tali'zorah," Chakwas soothes her. "We're almost home."
I have a home.
Shepard possesses no delusions regarding what the concept means to Tali. She'd fought to the teeth for home since he'd known her. And now she fights that hard for him.
Come back to me.
He wants to. Even now, hurtled through space and barely standing, he knows he wants to. Part of him wishes he could have climbed on the Normandy with her and made off into the stars to find a place they could call home together.
But Tali had fought so hard for her planet, her people. And, with all the good humor he has left, he ponders that he will not be outdone.
Destroy. Control. Synthesize.
On another day, in another time, on another world, perhaps this decision would have been simple.
But when he thinks of Tali, it isn't.
He eliminates the control idea fairly quickly. He does not like the idea of imposing his will on free beings after fighting so hard for his own freedom, and even less so does he like the idea of some mindless, husk of him walking around controlling Reapers.
And destroying synthetic life…well, that destroys synthetic life—destroys EDI and all the geth helping rebuild Rannoch who just lobbied for peace, who agreed to help him fight for his people.
Or there was synthesis. And in synthesis, no one gets hurt.
But…
His runs his gaze down the length of the bright, green beam and is fairly certain he would not survive the process.
And taking control—the version of him left wouldn't be him.
But destruction—maybe he could survive that.
And normally, he would not give so much weight his own life in the grand scheme of war, but if these were his last moments, he insists on thinking them through.
His thoughts wander back to the Normandy, wandering the crew deck, talking to his friends. He'd passed by Chakwas and Adams locked in a debate over the quality of synthetic life.
Adams, a man of machines, had passionately put forth the notion that synthetic life was truly life. And Chakwas, a woman of medicine, posited that synthetics merely emulated life.
He thinks of all the conversation he'd had with EDI the past several days, where she'd ask him to explain human behaviors, and she'd rewire herself accordingly. She'd make comments on altering her programming constantly. That sounded like emulation to him. But how was that different from a man changing his mind?
Kasumi would have an answer for that.
Shepard allows himself a small smile at the thought of Kasumi. He wishes she could've been at the final push with him. He misses her and her commentary on everything aboard the ship, and surely she would have commentary on this quandary.
Kasumi was very clear on where she stood about synthetic life. Despite finding EDI funny and enjoying her presence aboard the ship, Kasumi had always insisted that she was just a computer. She'd harbored no guilt over gunning down geth, insisting they were comparable to security mechs. You could not just open up a man's brain and rewire him, she'd say.
And Ashley. A woman he once felt something for, and maybe still did in some ways. She'd been vocal about not being a comfortable around aliens in the past, but never much expressed her opinion on synthetics. She mostly just shot at them. However, if her opinion on aliens had been so rough, he imagined her opinion on synthetics followed similar logic. Also, EDI's form had beaten her skull against an evac shuttle. That might inform her opinion.
But…
Ashley's opinion about aliens had shifted. Shepard had seen it. She'd been relieved to see Liara on Mars. She'd expressed that she thought of Tali as a little sister. If her opinion on aliens had changed, maybe her opinion on synthetics had as well.
Still, at the expense of Shepard's life, he imagines she would barely hesitate about what to do. Plus, she'd react poorly to the idea of synthetic nonsense being wired into her brain.
And Tali. The premiere machinist of the Normandy. What would she think?
Her people had built and wired and programmed the geth. She'd villainized them for the majority of her life. A handful of days ago, she would have jumped at the chance to wipe out all synthetic life, and it would have helped her regain her homeworld.
But now…
On Rannoch, in Legion's final moments, she'd told him he had a soul.
He hopes it was just a comforting platitude, a last sentiment born of remorse. It was intelligence that set Legion apart, he reasons, not a firmer grasp on life.
But he's fairly certain Tali wouldn't believe that.
He eyes the bright green beam again, imagines how it would feel to throw his entire body into it and let it burn up, wonder when he'd stop feeling it, when his nerves would wither away, and when he'd just be falling.
Come back to me.
No matter what Tali actually thought of synthetic life, she'd asked him to come back to her. And her organic life means something. And his life means something. And every life fighting for earth meant something.
He hopes that he's not making the biggest mistake of his life, and he prays that, if this is the last act of his life, it isn't an act of genocide.
He finds the strength to move forward, to shuffle one foot in front of the other. He ambles to the left, away from the green beam. He's still not sure if he should feel remorse, if he can face his God if he doesn't survive this.
He lifts the pistol in his hand. He's not even sure it's his. He'd picked it up, half-conscious, in front of Harbinger's beam.
He fires a bullet at the interface. It sparks into a burst a flame.
The owner of this pistol could be dead, could've died fighting for his planet, could've died believing someone would make it and end this.
He fires another shot. The glass around the interface sparks and shatters.
This is what Anderson would have done. Shepard almost wishes he'd lived to make the decision for him. He would've been so sure. He'd died thinking it was over, and that they'd won.
Shepard lifts both hands to the pistol, steadies his shots into the interface, unload the contents of his gun, winces at the shrapnel that flies back into his already-brutalized face.
With the last remaining bit of good humor he didn't know he had left, he considers Joker, and that maybe he owes him one.
And the interface detonates.
Honestly, while that Catalyst kid was delivering his explanatory monologue, he could've let him know to shoot this thing from far away.
Shepard barely registers the deep, guttural boom of the explosion, barely notices the heat and debris digging into his skin on his face and arms, before his remaining hold on consciousness slips away.
Tali feels the ship jolt beneath her, and she barely keeps from rolling of the cot. Chakwas nearly falls down onto her.
"We must be leaving earth," Ashley considers.
"But—!" Tali begins to protest.
"You know Joker," she cuts her off. "He wouldn't be leaving without good reason. Garrus probably had to pry him off the controls."
Tali thuds her head back against the cot with a heavy sigh. She feels the ship rumble and pick up speed.
"It seems we're not out of the woods yet," Chakwas notes.
The women grip onto what they can as Joker maneuvers the ship, picking up speed every time Tali is sure they ship is going as fast as it possibly can. The turbulence builds and builds, until the med bay is rattling around the group of them.
"Hey Tali," Ashley manages to say, gripping onto the edges of her cot.
"Yes?"
"In case we crash land and die," she says, "I want you to know, you were like a little sister to me."
Tali stares up at her. She never expected such a sentiment from her.
"And I have, like, a million sisters, so that's not actually that touching."
Ashley dispels the moment smoothly, and Tali chuckles.
"I appreciate that, Ashley," she replies.
"Keelah se'lai?" Ashley says after a moment. She says it uncertainly and her non-Quarian accent stretches brushes past the vowels oddly.
But Tali hadn't even known that she knew the phrase.
By the homeworld I hope to see one day, as they raced away from Ashley's homeworld, from the man Tali loved, perhaps never to return.
"Keelah se'lai," Tali agrees.
Eventually, the ship reaches a point of turbulence that makes conversation ineffectual, and the women resign themselves to waiting it out, praying for the best, whatever that may be.
Tali had gotten out to check out the planet they crash landed on. It was pretty, which she barely remarks upon. She's in no mood to admire scenery when Shepard could be…who knows what he's doing.
She takes in the greenery because she doesn't know what else to do. Joker takes it in with her wordlessly.
"Can she still fly?" Tali asks him after the silence stretching out between them becomes too distracting.
"I think it's fixable," Joker replies. "It'd be faster if we had EDI, but…" he trails off with a grimace.
Garrus hops out of the ship behind them. He gives Tali and tap on the shoulder in an attempt to comfort her without drawing attention to the problem. She smiles tightly before remembering he can't see that. She probably seems as numb and unresponsive and she feels.
"I think we just won," Garrus comments beside them, a bit of wonder in his voice. "I think we won the entire war."
Joker seems to barely hear him.
"What's wrong with EDI?" Tali asks him.
"The ships internal systems still respond to commands but…" Joker trails off again. "EDI's mobile unit isn't responsive anymore."
"That doesn't have to mean anything," Tali says. "There was a lot of turbulence during the crash. Maybe the mobile unit was just damaged."
Liara steps out of the ship behind Garrus. They all turn to her, eager for a change of subject.
"We're having a sort of…ceremony…in the crew deck. If you'd like to join us."
They had given her Shepard's nameplate. As if she should be the one to hang it up, be the first to accept that he was dead.
They all stood around the memorial wall. Ashley had said a prayer for them all, and now they all waited in silence for Tali to hang Shepard's name beneath Admiral Anderson's, beside Thane's and Mordin's and Legion's and Kaiden's. She'd barely had time to accept their losses as truth, and now…
This is as good of a first step as any.
She walks up to the memorial wall. She feels the crew's eyes follow her, and their pity bores into her back. As hard as it is to lose their leader, at least they didn't love him. Not like she did.
She stands in front of the wall, loosely clutching the nameplate. She runs a hand along the letters of it. She tries to muster the will to lift to, to hook onto the center of the wall.
She doesn't find it.
She has no proof that he's dead. He could be traipsing about the Citadel right now, waiting for them to come pick him up after heroically saving the day.
She smiles at the thought. And lowers the nameplate.
"Tali?" Garrus asks, concerned, unable to see her face. But her failure to not mount the nameplate didn't come from grief. It came from hope.
"Joker, how long until we're space-worthy?" she asks, the girlish optimism in her voice taking some of the crew by surprise.
"Uh, awhile?" he offers unhelpfully.
"Well, that's how long we're waiting," she decides. "And then we're going back."