Author's Note: I realise that there are quite a few, ahem, 'leaps of imagination' that need to be made in order for this story to actually be able to happen, some of them pretty large and pretty glaring. This started as a writing exercise at 3AM when I couldn't sleep and by the end of it I just didn't have it in me to find a workaround for those problems. Hopefully you're able to look past them and enjoy the rest of the fic! :)

"Shepard, I…"

Tali took a deep breath. She knew that this wasn't going to go down well. Oh well, better sooner rather than later.

"You know, if I was still on the Fleet, I'd already be a mother."

Smooth, Tali. Real smooth, you bosh'tet…

Shepard looked up, puzzled at the sudden comment. "How exactly do you figure that one out?"

"Well, keeping a stable population was something we had to take quite seriously on the Migrant Fleet, so by my age I'd already have been… paired up and, well, ushered into the uh, well, the breeding chambers."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "I see. Where exactly are you going with this, Tali?"

Here goes nothing.

"I want a baby. A Quarian baby."

That got his attention.

"Well… I can understand that Tali, now that you have a homeworld to repopulate and all. And I know the war was a few years back now, but there are still a lot of Quarian orphans looking to be adop-"

"Please, Shepard," Tali cut him off, "don't make me feel any worse about this than I already do"

That definitely got his attention.

"I want a baby. A real baby that's really mine, my own flesh and blood. I want to give birth, Shepard, not just adopt, as selfish as that probably sounds."

"Well how are we going to go about that? I mean, we already know that our amino acids don't mix as well as we'd like, and-"

Keelah, was she going to have to spell it out for him?

Shepard paused for a moment. "Oh," he finally muttered. "Oh no no no no."

Tali nodded. "A Quarian child would require a Quarian father…"

"No, Tali, you cannot be fucking serious."

"Shepard! This means a lot to me! You of all people should understand that."

"Maybe so, but forgive me for not being too thrilled about letting you go off and fuck some Quarian stud."

He was always so vulgar when he was upset.

"Quarian mating is very sterile, Shepard! Very clinical! It's not more than business for us, a lot of the time."

"Yeah, maybe when you were on the Fleet that's how it was, but now that you don't have to limit your population and with the Geth helping your immune systems, from what I can tell, Quarian mating recently became a lot more exciting!"

"Well that's not what I want, Shepard!"

"Is this because a Quarian will already know how everything works down there, is that it?"

"Shepard, that's not what this is about! Believe me, you're very satisfying…"

"Because I don't want my dick going where some Quarian spunk's been against my will!"

"Your dick will go where I want, when I want, and you'll be fucking grateful for it." Tali coldly replied, staring the Commander down, hoping, no, praying that he'd shut the fuck up right about now.

"I mean should I just go off and fuck Miranda hmmm, get her knocked up? Or maybe Jack, does that sound reasonable to you? Ooh, how about-"

"YOU ALREADY DID FUCK SOMEONE ELSE WHILE I WAS IN LOVE WITH YOU!"

Her words slapped Shepard hard in the face. He looked at her stunned, his mouth gaping like those stupid fish he insists on keeping in his cabin and not feeding.

"T… Tali?" She blushed and turned away from him. "What do you mean, Tali?"

She took a deep breath. "Before we hit Ilos, you and Ashley slept together."

"How do you know about that?"

"Keelah… With her suddenly strutting around like she owned the Normandy, and you with that smug 'I just got my dick wet before a suicide mission' look on your face that I've come to know and love, it's a miracle that no one else picked up on it."

"Is… is that why you never really got along with Ash?"

"Well it certainly didn't help, but that weird passive racism thing was probably what got us off to a bad start."

Shepard paused briefly, not knowing what to say, all the words he had just a minute ago had sunk back into his lungs.

"I'm sorry, Tali."

"It's… yeah. Wrex found me sobbing on the engineering deck, and he managed to cheer me up."

"He... never mentioned this to me?"

"Of course not; I asked him not to."

Shepard stared at his feet, feeling far too guilty to look his girlfriend in the face.

"When we first got together, I had a pretty obnoxious 'take that!' feeling, but now I just feel sorry for her. Even after your death, and all the shit with Cerberus, she still cared about you."

"I know." Shepard finally dared himself to meet Tali's gaze, "but I chose you."

"Well," Tali laughed, "who could resist my confidence around the subject, right?"

"I do love you Tali, you know that right?"

"And I you, Shepard."

Shepard was the one to take the deep breath this time "So… who have you chosen to be the father?"

"I'm uh, thinking of asking Kal'Reegar."

"Reegar's a good soldier, and a great man. I'm… I'm alright with that."

"He will just be a surrogate though. I want you to be the father, please believe that."

"I do Tali, I do."

"Besides, you know what they say about SPECTREs, right?"

"What's that?"

"They always go in deep, and they always go in hard." Tali winked.