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Owing to her eclectic schedule of tinkering, Tali kept slightly unusual hours.
This meant that when she went creeping up for what was (by ship time) a late-night snack, she did not run into anyone. Well, almost.
"Shepard, what are you doing?"
She asked this because, on getting her snack, she'd turned and found him sat alone at the table in the galley, frowning in intense concentration at an egg in his hand. Nearby was a box that had originally contained a dozen but appeared to be about halfway through. The rest were not in a good way.
"Hang on..." Shepard said, eyes narrowing as his focus peaked.
Crack.
"Ah fiddlesticks," he said, grimacing, more egg joining the large amount of egg already pooled in front of him. Dropping the crushed shell onto the small pile of other equally crushed shells he wiped his hand on his shirt and then frowned, looking down.
"Think I just made a bad situation worse," he said, sighing, sitting back and looking over at Tali who was still patiently, quietly waiting for an explanation. "So you know I died, right?"
She did rather wish he wouldn't be so casual about that.
"Did you? I hadn't heard," she said, folding her arms.
"It wasn't that big of a deal, walked it off. Anyway, one of the benefits of being a cybernetic revenant is that there's scope for upgrades. My most recent one involves, well, a lot of technical details that kind of make my head hurt, but the practical upshot is I am now ludicrously strong," he said.
"That's good?" Tali ventured, and Shepard nodded.
"I think so. Can juggle a M-98 around like it's a water pistol, which is a win in my book."
Given that that particular anti-materiel monster weighed about as much as a small child this was no mean feat. Shepard had, in Tali's experience, always been in the habit of wandering around with far more guns than was strictly necessary but these days he really seemed to be stepping it up a notch.
He continued:
"There are drawbacks though. Basically, I don't know my own strength. Nearly broke the poor doctor's hand while thanking them for a job well done. So I'm practising."
He picked up another egg, holding it between forefinger and thumb, bottom and top. He held it up demonstratively for a second or two before, giving an experimental, tiny squeeze, he cracked it immediately.
"With limited success," he said, not looking at the goopy mess in his hand.
"And this is worth staying up late for?" Tali asked.
Given everything that was going on - coming back from the dead, working with a known and capricious terrorist organisation run by bastards to fight back against inscrutable and mysterious aliens, gunning down scores of mercenaries seemingly every time they made port, etcetera - she'd have thought Shepard would have taken whatever opportunity to grab sleep he could.
Instead, eggs.
"I'd say so. It's important because I don't really want to hurt anyone else," he said, only to then realise what he'd said and thus feel forced to clarify and expand: "Well, you know, no-one else I don't have to hurt - hurting people is, sadly, rather my stock in trade. But I'd prefer to avoid nearly breaking anyone else's hands. Mean, imagine if I hurt one of the crew. Imagine if I hurt you! I'd never forgive myself. So, practise."
Now there was a thought that gave Tali a minor jolt - did this mean no more hugs?
Not that, you know, there had been a particular abundance of them before (unfortunately), but there had still been more than none and they had been - ahem - pleasant. In an entirely platonic and professional way, obviously.
Not for the first time Tali was rather glad that her helmet did such a good job of covering up the more telltale of facial expressions. She swallowed, and decided to be casual. After all, his motivations were sound, it was just his methods that were questionable.
"It seems a little wasteful, if you don't mind me saying," she said, tactfully, as Shepard picked up another one to try his luck with.
"Well maybe, but it's Cerberus that's paying for these eggs so-"
Crack. Sigh.
"...maybe you have a point. Alright. I'm going to go wash my hands. Back in a second. Wait here."
"Okay," Tali said, waiting obligingly as Shepard got up and dashed to the facilities. He returned momentarily, hands now clean.
"That's better," he said, retaking his seat, smiling over at her. She smiled back. Not that he could really see it.
Neither of them really knew what to say after that. The small, congealing pool of white and splattered yolk between them kind of made it a bit awkward. Or possibly that was just an excuse.
At length, Tali was the one to break the silence:
"How are you coping, Shepard?" She asked. Shepard cocked his head at her.
"Coping? With what?"
This was rookie-level deflection and Tali wasn't taken in for even one moment.
"You know what I'm talking about."
He swallowed. He did know what she was talking about.
Not much sense pretending otherwise.
"It's - I try not to think about it too much, honestly. Just concentrate on the task at hand. Easier that way. Think about it too much and, well..."
A fair few dreams about trying to breathe and breath not coming. And falling. And burning.
And that was just the dreams!
Waking up two years later. Whole galaxy thinks you're dead, galaxy still chock full of problems, Reapers still coming, only ones doing anything about it the guys who you spent a good amount of time tracking down and shooting, the same guys who brought you back from the dead.
"...it's just a mess. So. Task at hand. Collectors. Something I can just focus on."
"I'm always here for you, you know Shepard. For anything. Even if you don't think you should bother me with it. You don't have to be there for everyone and not let anyone be there for you."
"That's a very good line, Tali," he said, sighing again. "I know. And I know you'll always back me up. One of many reasons why I like you, heh."
That gave her a little lurch, again well-hidden.
"But no, I'm fine. Really. Well, mostly. Fine enough for what I've got to do. It's a big job. Big enough to keep me distracted, give me something to sink my teeth into. Even if I do spend most of my time shooting people at least it'll all end up with a positive result, right? Protecting the galaxy, righting wrongs, using my unique and uniquely violent skillset of brutality and meditation to hopefully just...make things better somehow."
He smiled, but it looked like it took effort, and it didn't last. He slumped deeper into his seat and rubbed his face with both hands.
"Still have trouble believing that I'm working with Cerberus. Goddamn. I mean really, two years back, the number of their rinky-dink operations I shut down, the number of their staff I gunned down. Remember that time we found them trying to use Thorian Creepers as, what, a labour force? Soldiers? What the actual hell were they thinking?" He asked, arms raised to the ceiling in a fruitless attempt to solicit answers from a higher power.
That had been back when most of Shepard and co's planetside diversions had taken place in those endless underground modular bases and also before Cerberus had gotten the spiffy new uniforms. Tali did remember the particular one that Shepard was talking about, too.
What had they been thinking, exactly?
"Suppose it's the prerogative of all evil organisations to act on bad ideas," she said with a shrug.
"Ah well, of course, Cerberus itself isn't evil - as I'm told endlessly - and anything evil they've ever been found to do were done by rogue elements that had nothing to do with the pure, chaste main body, the one that only has humanity's best interests at heart," Shepard said, putting a hand over his own heart and sitting up straight, jaw proudly jutting forward. Tali snorted.
"I still don't trust them," she said.
Shepard dropped his hand.
"Of course not! You shouldn't! The Illusive Man can spout off for hours about how all the bad stuff was done entirely under his nose this but I'm not buying it for a second. Very handy that the litany of terrible things that were done were all done by bad eggs he knew nothing about. Lucky, that!"
Shepard grumbled and rapped his knuckles on the table, then pointing over at Tali and continuing:
"I am willing to bet you anything that, just before we set the core to overload or set up the bomb or whatever it is we're going to do once we find and get into where the Collectors are coming from that the Illusive Man is going to call me up and slide in with a 'By the way, now that you're there...' and try to talk me into keeping the place so he can get his grubby mitts on it. I bet you anything. It's very easy for him to say we're going in to destroy it now, but when the time comes..."
"And what'll you do?" Tali asked. As though she even needed to.
"Tell him to go stick his head in a pig, obviously. But I'll also tell him that you put me up to it and that I was totally on board with doing as I was told until you manipulated me with your honeyed words," he said.
"What?!" Tali spluttered.
"Oh come on, Tali, it'll be a laugh! Actually, it was kind of a toss up between whether I was going to blame you or Garrus for it, but you got here first so, here we are. He dodged a bullet on that one, Garrus," Shepard said, nodding towards the battery, wherein which calibrations were likely occurring.
"You're the worst," Tali said, shaking her head.
"Hey! I died! You can't be mean to me!" Shepard protested.
She could let it slide one time, but he was pushing it now.
"Please don't joke about that," she said.
"Sorry."
Rather knocked the wind out of the conversation, that one. Ship seemed almost painfully quiet all of a sudden.
Seconds passed. Tick tick tick.
Then all at once Tali rose and, before Shepard could ask where she was going, circled around the table to take the seat right next to his, reaching out for his hand and pulling it towards her, putting one of her own into it. Shepard winced.
"Ah, careful now," he said.
"I trust you."
"I wouldn't..."
"Hold."
"We kind of need those hands in working order."
"Hold."
"Alright, alright..."
Gingerly and with great delicacy he closed his hand around hers, very, very slowly. Again, Tali was thankful for the helmet, for as much as she trusted Shepard (and she trusted him more-or-less to the end of the galaxy and back) she didn't fully trust his body to be entirely comfortable with what had been done to it lately, at least not yet.
His hand closed fully about hers. He even gave her a little squeeze. Her hand did not break.
Both of them let out breaths neither noticed they'd been holding.
"There, see? You can do it," Tali said.
"It was all the practise with the eggs," he said.
"Sure it was."
Their eyes met, then, and stayed met for what felt like an awfully long time.
At least until Shepard realised that what he was doing was sitting there, holding Tali's hand, looking deeply into her eyes with no-one else around. He didn't know what sort of messages that might send, or if messages were being sent at all, or if that was something he should be worried about, or even what he was truly thinking about at all.
Panic, basically. He let go immediately and stood up sharply.
"Right, well, bedtime for me, probably. Things to shoot in the morning, you know," he said, accompanying it with the single-worst pantomime yawn that had ever been performed by anyone in history up until this point and likely forever.
"You are going to clean this up, aren't you?" Tali asked, sweeping a hand over the eggy mess.
In all the excitement it had entirely slipped Shepard's mind that it was there. But he pretended otherwise.
"Yes! I just haven't got around to it yet," he said.
"Hmm," said Tali, as the mess remained non-cleaned up. Shepard grunted.
"Ugh, alright mother, I'll do it now..."
He then stomped off to try and find some sort of space-cloth. Tali, smirking, watched him do this, then looked down at the hand he'd held.
Odd night.
Not a bad one, though.