"Hey Shepard. Remember that time you found me here after Miranda died? You know how you told me that drinking about it wasn't a 'good coping mechanism'? Well I'm back. It's your fault though, so you can't be mad at me."

Tali sat alone at the Normandy's bar. She was about a quarter through a bottle of turian whiskey. She had intended to drink the entire bottle but was starting to realize she was still very much a lightweight. Next to the bottle rested one of Shepard's dog tags.

"I made some improvements on my emergency induction port. Or the…the…what'd you call it. Something with an 's' sound." Tali waved her glass in front of her face, trying to get the straw to catch onto the small port toward the bottom of her helmet. The straw bounced off her visor a few times before she gave up and manually put the straw up to her mouthpiece. Tali took a long sip and sighed.

"I've been trying to decide whether it's time to give Garrus your dog tag. You said to give it to him only if you didn't make it back. We all saw the blast, but you have a way of coming back from impossible situations, so there's plenty of reason to hold on to it. But…I think we need to be prepared for the worst. The Extranet is still down, so we don't really know what's happening on Earth, let alone if the Citadel still exists. We lost time getting the Normandy up and running again. I just…

"Listen. One of the human crew members explained your military's tradition that nobody gets left behind. We all took a vote and agreed our current mission is to find you. So we're on our way. I promise. We're going to get you back." Tali started to tear up. "We have to get you back because I'm afraid of what will happen to you if someone else finds you first."

Tali sat in silence for a while, hands flat on the countertop. Eventually snapping out of her thoughts, she snatched the bottle and shoved the dog tag into a pocket before stumbling out into the hallway. The ship was in night mode, so the corridor was dimly lit. Tali tried to walk quietly so she wouldn't wake the sleeping crew. She made it two meters before losing her balance and slamming into the wall. Realizing she was drunker than she thought, Tali pressed her right hand against the wall for support and began sliding along the edge of the hallway. As she got closer to the main battery, she became more confident in her steps. Her three fingers trailed along the wall until they hit the main battery door lock. She keyed in the code and the door slid open.

Tali peered through the doorway. "Garrus. Garrus Vakarian. Are you in here?" she whispered loudly. Silence. She stepped into the battery and looked around. "I should've guessed." Tali turned back down the hallway and headed toward the elevator.

A few minutes later, Tali walked with relative stability from the elevator to the commander's cabin. She banged her fist on the door, no longer caring about being quiet. "Garrus. It's me. Let me in."

The door slid open to reveal the most depressed looking turian she had ever seen.

"Hey."

Tali raised the bottle of whiskey. "Hey."

Garrus eyed the bottle. "Can I have some of that?"

"Well, it's yours so, sure."

"You're so generous." Garrus stepped aside to let Tali in.

They walked over to the corner of the cabin that served as a living room and plopped down on the couch. Tali passed Garrus the bottle and he took a large swig. "You know I was so careful trying to be mindful of everyone sleeping and quietly make it from the bar to the main battery," Tali complained. "But you just had to leave your post and make me come all the way up here."

Garrus snorted. "Why didn't you just message me first?"

Tali glared at him. "I'm drunk."

"That's fair. Give me a minute and I'll catch up." Garrus raised the bottle and knocked back a few gulps. When he handed the bottle back to Tali, it only had about a quarter left.

"Keelah, you really are having a bad time. You look like shit by the way." Garrus's head fringe was severely chipped on the sides and dotted with dark blue scabs. When Garrus handed back the whiskey bottle, Tali had noticed a matching dark blue crust under his nails.

"Thank you, that's just what I needed to hear right now. Though, I think you're the only one here who's noticed just how bad I'm doing. Humans are not exactly good at picking up on signs of turian emotional distress."

Tali placed the whiskey bottle on the coffee table. "Wait can I say something about humans?"

Garrus grinned. "Go ahead."

"What is the point of putting a bar on a ship if nobody ever uses it?"

Garrus leaned back into the couch. "Ah this goes back to human military customs. They're only supposed to decompress on shore leave."

"Look, quarians by no means have a perfect society, but at least we understand that when you live on a ship, you have work time and personal time!" Tali was gesticulating vaguely towards the direction of the Quarian Fleet. "And it shouldn't be a big deal to be seen having a few drinks during personal time!"

"You know the funny part? The crew still drinks, but they hide their beer and liquor with their personal effects. If we dug through the crew's quarters right now, we'd have enough booze for the two of us to stay drunk for three weeks straight. Well, we'd get sick trying to drink it, but you know what I mean."

Tali dragged her hands over the face of her helmet. "It's so stupid though. The Normandy isn't even a military ship anymore."

"I'm pretty sure Shepard handed the Normandy back over to the Alliance around the time she was on trial."

"Nooooo why would she do that?"

Garrus waved a hand in the air. "Between working for Cerberus so, colluding with known terrorists, and killing 300,000 Batarian civilians, a war crime, she had to get back on the Alliance's good side."

"They're Batarians, that shouldn't have counted."

There was a beat of silence before the two of them started giggling. The laughing crescendoed until Tali was laughing so hard she was crying. Garrus cackled so hard he lost his breath and started coughing.

Garrus sighed. "Ah this is nice. I wish Shepard was here." The two of them looked down at the floor. Garrus shoved his hands into his lap. One thumb began picking at the skin on his wrist. "I'm sorry. We were having a good time. I shouldn't have brought down the mood."

"No don't apologize. The whole reason I came here was to talk to you about Shepard." Tali pulled the dog tag out of her pocket. "She wanted me to give this to you in case," she paused trying to find the best way to phrase this, "the worst happened."

Garrus looked at Tali as if she had slapped him across the face. "We don't know if the worst has happened yet."

"I'm not saying it has. Believe me, I don't want that to be the case. But we need to be prepared in the event Shepard didn't make it out of the Crucible."

Tali unwrapped the chain around the dog tag and passed it over to Garrus. He held it with both hands. Despite himself, he let out a small chuckle. Still gazing at the dog tag he said, "I know we had joked about it, but I didn't think she'd actually go and do it." He ran a talon over the raised text. Shepard had customized her dog tags. On the last line, she had changed her religious affiliation from "No Preference" to "DNR".

"She still has the other one, so if someone else finds her hopefully they'll respect her wishes and let her rest."

Garrus turned his attention back to Tali. "You don't think they would?"

"I don't know. At every point, the Council, the Alliance, they all just kept demanding more of Shepard. If she didn't make it out of the Crucible, I doubt they'd let her go that easily. They'd probably keep a clone of her around to do their bidding until the end of time."

Garrus grabbed the whiskey and took another swig. "Did Shepard talk to you about her implants? The Cerberus ones, not anything biotic related."

Tali drew her knees up to her chest, curling up into a ball. "A little bit. I know she's been self-conscious about her facial scars, especially over the past few months when they started getting more prominent. She didn't bring it up, so I didn't say anything. But yeah, I could tell they upset her."

Garrus didn't look at Tali. He wasn't looking at anything. His eyes glazed over like he was retreating into himself. "I'm going to tell you something, but you have to promise to keep it between us. Absolutely no one can know about this."

"Of course. I promise." Tali felt a knot form in her stomach, dreading whatever she was about to hear.

"When Shepard, EDI, and I were on the Cronos Station mission, we came across some data Cerberus didn't get around to scrubbing. One of the files was about the Lazarus Project – the one where they brought back Shepard. Cerberus didn't save Shepard from the brink of death. Shepard was dead. Completely brain dead. It took them two years to heal Shepard because they were regrowing her corpse, and supplementing whatever was too decayed to fix with cybernetics."

"That's impossible." Tali refused to believe what she was hearing. Secret high-tech medical facility that could heal what were currently considered mortal wounds? Sure. But to completely rebuild someone based off their corpse? That was science fiction at best.

Garrus shook his head. "Miranda found a way to do it. At one point they mentioned that Shepard's helmet had preserved her brain. My guess is that's what made it possible."

The implications of that kind of technology were too much to think about. For her sanity, Tali decided to shelf it for the time being. "How did Shepard handle it?"

"In the moment, as well as anyone could. We still had a mission to complete, so she just took it on the chin and kept going. But once we got back," Garrus took a long sip of whiskey, "she had a breakdown."

Tali was about to tell Garrus he didn't have to talk about it anymore, but the look in his eyes told her if she didn't let him continue, the memory would eat him alive.

"After we got back to the Normandy, I stopped by the battery to check on things and drop off my stuff. When I finally came here, I found her sobbing on the bathroom floor." Garrus resumed picking at the skin on his wrist. "She was crying so hard my translator could barely understand what she was saying. I asked her to look at me, but she wouldn't open her eyes. The only thing I could make out was that she kept calling herself 'the fucking ship of Theseus'. So, I sat on the floor and held her until she cried herself to sleep.

"After she woke up, I asked her why she was afraid to open her eyes earlier. She told me when she looked in the mirror, her pupils were red. That was the thing that broke her. It confirmed to her that the video log was true, and that the cybernetics were more extensive than she had let herself believe. She asked me to cover the mirror for her so she could mentally keep it together for the final push."

Tali touched Garrus's arm gently. "Garrus. You're bleeding."

"Ah. Thanks." Garrus wiped his hands on his shirt. He continued, "That's when we talked about the whole 'do not resuscitate' thing. Shepard was serious about it. Not as much about the conventional life saving techniques, but she really did not want to be brought back from the dead again. With all the fucked up stuff we've seen over the years, she said she was scared she'd wake up as a brain in a jar. I said if that happened, I'd make a little backpack to carry her jar around and make sure she still got to be a part of things." Garrus gave a pained smile.

Tali leaned back against the couch, emotionally exhausted. "And all this, Cerberus Base to Crucible, happened in what, two days?"

Garrus nodded. "I never thought so much shit could happen in 48 hours."

"It doesn't end, does it?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, at least we can focus on our current mission. We're going to find Shepard, and no matter how we find her, we'll take care of her."

Garrus squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. "Yeah. I…I think it's time I try to get some sleep."

"I guess I should too." Tali took her cue to leave. She gave Garrus a pat on the shoulder and headed towards the door. Tali passed the bathroom and saw a towel still hung over the mirror like a shroud.

Just as she opened the front door to leave, she thought she heard Garrus say something. She turned to hear a scratchy, stuttering sound. She almost walked back into the cabin before she realized what she was hearing. Instead, she shut the door behind her and trudged back to her quarters. Garrus was crying.