Work Text:
"So," Tali suddenly asks her, "what's your favourite colour?"
Oh, she tries to pose it as a casual question, the kind of thing that one friend would ask another without any sort of plan in mind that might involve the knowledge of that favourite colour. But her voice slips a little too much from the Deliberately Neutral tone for it to sound actually sound like a casual question. Instead, she sounds like she's planning something.
They're sitting on the couch in Shepard's cabin, listening to Abbey Road and putting together a model ship—rather fittingly, a model of a quarian liveship that Shepard had bought on the Citadel back in October but never found the time to actually put together. Well, it's mostly Tali putting it together. Shepard's fine motor skills had an annoying tendency to suddenly degenerate whenever there was a tube of cyanoacrylate within proximity, and Tali would not let her forget about the time she accidentally glued the Destiny Ascension to her hand.
"Hm." Shepard takes off her reading glasses and began wiping the lenses on the end of her shirt. "Prob'ly ultraviolet."
"Uh-huh," Tali said, reaching into her pocket and handing Shepard a soft cloth. But then she pauses, and slowly turns to give Shepard a Look. "Wait. Humans can't even see ultraviolet light."
"Yes, that is a bit of a problem."
"Bosh'tet."
The Normandy spends a further week in Tikkun to assist with search & recovery efforts while the quarians and geth negotiate an armistice. Not quite a peace treaty—that's the sort of thing that doesn't occur in a single week. Still, it's a step. While the optimistic stardust part of her brain immediately tries to follow that with "forward," the cold-logic part of it tells her that at the current time there wasn't enough information to evaluate whether it was a step forward or a step back. Right now she chooses to believe the optimistic part.
Not that it was always easy to believe that part. Most of the Normandy's search & recovery efforts focus on the lifepods that had gotten flung across the system. Sometimes they find survivors huddled in said lifepods, terrified and exhausted and (usually) grateful for rescue. Most of the time they don't.
It takes its toll on the crew. It especially takes its toll on Tali. Once, Shepard finds her in that little cubbyhole in Engineering where Jack used to hang out, just… huddled up, her arms wrapped around her knees. Shepard doesn't have her translator in and Tali tends to lose her grip on English when she gets upset, but while it's difficult to figure out the exact meaning of what she's trying to say it's easy enough to get the general one.
Shepard plops down next to her and holds out an arm, and Tali leans into her unwieldy half-hug, pressing the face of her helmet against Shepard's shoulder and taking quiet, shuddering breaths that aren't quite crying but something close to it. Shepard doesn't say anything, because there's nothing she could say at a time like this. Maybe later, but not now.
But what she can do right now is be a friend.
Still, Tali keeps trying to find out Shepard's favourite colour.
And Shepard keeps giving her non-answers.
"Hm. Depends on whether you're using RGB or CMY."
"The colour you get when you send white light through a prism."
"Any colour you like."
It's a very interesting way to learn Khelish vocabulary not included in the translator's standard dictionary.
A few days later, during her rounds, Liara tells her that the Shadow Broker had received an anonymous request to purchase a very odd, very specific piece of information about Shepard, one that she didn't actually have.
Shepard raises her eyebrow. "Let me guess. My favourite colour?"
"I'm not even going to ask." Liara shakes her head.
"As a wise man once said, 'We used to see in colour, now it's only black and white. It's only black and white 'cause the world is colour blind.'"
She pauses for a moment.
"You know, I'm still not sure if Weiland was thinking about achromatopsia or if he just didn't understand how colour vision deficiency usually works."
"Or perhaps he was just using what humans refer to as 'artistic license.'"
"Hmm. P'rhaps. So what do you plan to tell your client?"
"That, despite their best efforts to locate it, the Shadow Broker is unable to provide that information."
"Good," Shepard says.
The day they're set to leave Tikkun, Tali finds her in the medbay, hooked up to an IV drip. She nearly drops the package in her arms as she rushes over.
"Keelah. Shepard, what happened? Are you all right? You didn't show up for your rounds—"
"Just a touch of dehydration," Shepard looks up from her datapad with a small, wry smile. A frustrating part about keeping busy was that it was quite easy to forget about things such as proper hydration. And with the meds she's taking, forgetting about proper hydration tends to be a pretty bad idea; she'd woken up in the middle of the night with a massive headache and nausea crawling its way up her esophagus, and Kaidan had dragged her to the medbay (though she'd put up a minimal protest just to make sure he was fully aware that she didn't enjoy being dragged to the medbay). She still wasn't entirely sure that she needed the rehydration drip as she'd felt much better after the electrolyte drink, but a certain event she preferred not to think too much about had left her kidneys in a bad enough state that Dr. Chakwas tended to play it safe.
Tali huffs and gives her a Look, and it gives her an uncomfortable feeling, a reminder of a Before where her visits to the medbay were just a bit less frequent. But then she plops down on the cot next to Shepard.
"So," Shepard says, tossing aside her datapad and pulling out her earphones, but leaving her glasses on. She looks down at the package Tali is carrying; it's big and kind of floppy-looking, and the paper she'd used to wrap it with was damn near completely covered in duct tape. She makes a mental note to warn Engineer Adams to hide the damn stuff from her.
"On the Flotilla," Tali begins, "when moving to another ship and taking on its ship-name, it's the custom to give their new captain a small gift—nothing as big as a Pilgrimage gift, of course. More of a token."
She pauses a moment to look down at the package, then back up at Shepard.
"You know how I kept vas Normandy?"
"It was a nice surprise," Shepard says. "I was expecting you to change back to Neema."
"Yeah. Well." Shepard can hear the smile in her voice, even if she can't see it. "Anyways, I never got around to getting you something after my trial. But now…"
Had she been standing, she'd probably be bouncing on her heels as she hands Shepard the package.
"Huh," Shepard says, digging her multitool pocketknife (she's not entirely sure if it's an actual Swiss Army Knife or just a very convincing bootleg) out to get all the duct tape apart.
"Tali," she says once she does, "I'm fairly sure this is more than just a token."
It's a quilt. A quarian-made quilt, the fabric in a beautiful swirly design. She'd seen quarian fabric for sale on the Citadel, and knew exactly how many credits it went for.
"I hope you like purple," Tali says with a soft laugh. "But you did say 'any colour you like.'"