Disclaimer: Not mine; never mine.

Warnings: Suicide and character death; ME3 ending spoilers.

Dried-up Hopes

And the taste of dried-up hopes in my mouth
And the landscape of merry and desperate drought
How much longer, dear angels...?
- Drought - Vienna Teng

"Tali -"

Her helmet's external microphones don't stand up well to windy conditions, and Garrus' voice is barely audible above the piercing screech of feedback. The translator has given up completely, so that the only thing rising above the background noise is a string of foreign words punctuated by her name; she can guess from context that they're expressions of concern, but the tone is incomprehensibly strange, all at odds with software-generated Khelish. Everything here is strange. This new insult hardly registers, as lost to the static as the words that carry it.

"Tali'Zorah -"

She takes hold of a branch just above her head, pulls herself up, and ignores him.

There (are, were, might still be) no trees on the liveships, and no sky to climb them towards. But the branches are sturdy and her balance is good, and sheer force of will makes up for the rest - she has no shortage of that, even now. It's everything else that's gone horribly, indescribably wrong.

It's been two weeks since the Normandy crashed on this nameless planet, and short of a miracle she will never fly again. Most of the crew could live here indefinitely, sustained by the abundant plant life and clean water near the crash site. But Tali has only the thirty-two pouches (she counted, twice) of nutrition paste tucked away behind the Alliance-issue MREs; Garrus, cursed by his people's fondness for solid food, has even less.

The humans will survive - maybe even thrive - but Tali's best-case scenario is a month of constant hunger leading to inevitable starvation. It would almost be better to rupture her suit and die of the resulting infection. At least that would be quick.

There is nothing for her on this planet - no food, no answers, and no hope. Shepard might have saved the galaxy, or he might have failed; she has no way of knowing if he even survived. She's come to terms with the not-knowing, but to live without hope... she would rather die. And if she has to die, she'll do it on her own terms.

"Uh, Tali?" The input from the external mics drops in volume so she can hear Joker's voice over the radio. "I don't know what you're up to out there, but Garrus is flipping his shit - something about a tree? I'm going to laugh my ass off if you've fallen out of a tree. I mean, unless you're actually hurt."

It's been so hard to talk to her shipmates - her family. Everyone is so happy, so carefree, and even Garrus refuses to talk about how grim things look for them both (though whether that's to protect himself or her, Tali can't tell). The humor that comes so easily to Joker makes Tali's chest ache, and she's glad for the mask that hides her face as it scrunches up against her will. She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment and tries desperately not to cry.

"I'm not going to fall, Joker." Her voice only shakes a little. "I promise." She settles in a solid fork in the branches, pushes aside the leaves that form a canopy above her.

"I just... wanted to see the sky."

The stars are all wrong, though; distant, unfamiliar, and worst of all unmoving. Even being aboard a dying ship would be better than being trapped planetside, so far away from the life she's always known - if she'd wanted that she would have stayed on Rannoch. But there's comfort in them, too, and it solidifies her resolve.

At least a part of her will return to the stars.

Tali's been to Shepard's cabin uninvited dozens of times, but this time it isn't Shepard she's looking for.

No one's been up here since the crash; all she's been able to get from the crew is that it would be disrespectful, though she doesn't quite understand how. Would Shepard want them to waste resources, saving a room for someone who will never come home? It would have been easier, she thinks, if they hadn't been so "respectful". If someone had thrown away the coffee still sitting on Shepard's desk, or put away the sweatshirt thrown carelessly across his chair... even the fish are still the same, swimming up to her and following her fingers when she drags them down the tank. They still have plenty of food, at least. Lucky little bosh'tets.

But like everything else in the room, the fish are only a distraction.

There isn't any real reason for her to be here, specifically. It's private, but so are the empty cargo bays, the crawlspace beneath Engineering, and the huge empty planet that will be the Normandy's grave and hers as well; she could be and probably should be anywhere but here, away from the distractions. Except they're the very reason she is here.

There's more of Shepard in this room than there is anywhere else. His presence hangs heavy in the air, surrounds her like a faint ghost of his embrace, and she can't think of any place more fitting. With Shepard's help she became an adult. In this room she first bared herself to him, sacrificing her health for the fleeting touch of skin on skin.

Now she's just sacrificing a little more for... well, a little more. She is a quarian, after all. Sacrifice is in her blood, in her bones.

She frees her Katana from its place at the small of her back, and the cold, metallic sound it makes as it unfolds echos in the quiet. Nothing is stopping her from getting this over with now, she realizes. All she would need to do is take down her shields and aim for a weak point in her suit. The shotgun's blasted through worse quite handily, and that's with moving targets. But something stills her hand.

If she does this now, her shipmates won't have any explanation as to why. Doesn't she owe it to them to explain, as much as she can explain something she doesn't quite understand herself? She would want to know, if she were on the other side of this - and there's something almost comforting about the thought of doing this properly, taking one last chance to feel air on her skin, to see and hear without the buffer of her helmet. Mind made up, she sets the Katana down on Shepard's desk, turns her back on it, and pushes back her veil with trembling hands.

Taking off her suit would be a clumsy, fumbling process even if her hands weren't shaking. It's really a two-person job at the least, and awkward even then. On her own she has to grab blindly behind her head, tugging at the tubes connecting her helmet until they reluctantly give way. The helmet itself attaches to the rest of the suit at the back, too, and it takes a few tries to find the fastenings hidden in the folds of her veil. Then it comes off, and she shivers violently as the cool air hits her face and the back of her neck, making her skin prickle and a shudder run down her spine.

The rest of the suit is easier, once she deals with all the clasps on the back. It peels off piece by piece, first the armor and then the padding beneath; torso, arms, legs, and then she is naked, vulnerable, and very, very cold.

The sweatshirt on the chair catches her eye, and it solves two of those problems when she slips it on and pulls it tight around her. It's much too big, but it's warm, and soft, and it smells like the man who used to wear it - like soap and gunsmoke and metal, and a foreign, musky scent all humans seem to share. The hood falls into her eyes and the sleeves cover her hands, but she doesn't mind. It's a comfort. And like the room, it's... fitting.

A little warmer than she was, she curls up in Shepard's desk chair, legs tucked underneath her, and sets his personal terminal to record.

She's had too long to think about this, long enough that she has words enough for the entire tiny crew; she addresses them individually and by name, though she can't always bring herself to look at the camera. The engineers she thanks for embracing her as one of their own, when so many would have accused her of trying to steal secrets and commit sabotage. For EDI she has an apology, though what, exactly, she's apologizing for seems too obvious to mention. To Lieutenant Vega she confesses that she can think of a lot of nicknames worse than "Sparks" - and so on through the entire crew, save two.

"Garrus... I'm so sorry." For the first time her voice catches, just a little, and tears start to prickle behind her eyes. She wrings her hands and struggles to find words, to make him understand what she's doing for him, and why. "But the crew needs you. And I... I'm not strong enough to watch you starve. Watch you die."

Garrus is so much stronger than her, older and wiser, too, and she knows one more death won't break him. It will hurt - of course it will, all death hurts, and the pain is a thousand times worse when it's family. But he's strong enough to bear it, and Tali knows she's not.

"I know nutrient paste doesn't sound very appealing. You were right not to try it, all those times I dared you to." A tiny laugh escapes her - a trembling, broken sound. "But it will keep you alive just a little bit longer. And maybe... maybe that will be enough."

Maybe it won't. But that would make her sacrifice worth nothing, and Tali isn't willing to let that be an option. Some good will come from this, if not for her than for Garrus and the people he can help; that makes it worthwhile. That makes it something ever so slightly less than selfish.

She sits in silence for a long while after that, curled into a miserable little ball wrapped in Shepard's hoodie. It seems silly to record a message for someone who's no longer here, but she can't bring herself to stop the recording, either.

"Shepard," she finally tries to say, but it comes out as a choked sob. It feels very strange to cry and have the tears stay on her face, slipping down her chin without her suit suctioning them away. "John'Shepard, captain, love..." That last word is in one of the countless human languages, the one Shepard speaks - spoke - and what she heard, sometimes, whispered softly in the darkness with their translators off. She knows the feeling of it, if not the exact meaning. It fits.

"Keelah se'lai," she whispers, and then, "I'll meet you in the stars."

She's out of words, now, and there's nothing more to say. The finished recording sits open on the terminal, waiting for whoever has the awful luck of finding her - she harbors no delusions about this being a pleasant thing to find. But it's necessary. She can only hope that the crew will understand.

The Katana is cold and heavy in her bare hands, its familiar weight more of a comfort now than it's ever been. It's kept her alive through geth and husks and Cerberus; now, it is the only thing she trusts to kill her quickly, without pain.

She tips back her head and sets it against her chin, closes her eyes

and pulls the trigger.