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“What are the chances that the three of us would wind up together?” Tali asked. The question was mostly rhetorical in nature, and addressed chiefly to the ceiling in Shepard’s apartment as she sprawled back, sofa cushions soft even through her enviro-suit. “I mean, the two of you rescuing me from a rogue Spectre in a back alley on the Citadel? Pretty unlikely, right?”
“The two of us and Wrex,” Garrus corrected her, “but I think he’s plenty happy on Tuchanka.”
“Guess we’re lucky you’ve got enough scars for the both of you,” Shepard teased, and pressed a kiss to the cheek in question. “Anyway, that reminds me about something I read about forming collections–”
“Fish,” coughed Tali just as Garrus muttered “model ships.”
“I don’t know why I put up with the two of you.” She ran her palm along the center stripe of Tali’s enviro-suit anyway, applying just enough pressure to make her girlfriend purr with pleasure. “I guess I should just be glad you didn’t make a joke about the Collectors,” she sighed, then continued. “Anyway, it talked about how, when you’re forming a collection, it doesn’t start with the first piece - it starts when you decide to collect it. When you decide this is something you want.”
“Mm, I think I started to have inklings back in that alley,” Tali countered. “I mean, I’ve made you watch Fleet and Flotilla - a handsome turian just happens to sweep in and save my life? I was pretty primed for a teenage crush. And Shepard, you were in charge of the mission; it’s practically a rite of passage for a young quarian to catch feelings for their ship’s captain. Of course,” she continued, stretching out fully, catlike, on the sofa, “most young quarians don’t get an appropriate chance to act on them. Guess I’m just lucky,” she concluded.
Garrus hummed to himself as he perched on the arm of the sofa by Tali’s feet, idly rubbing one of her calves. “I think it was a lot later for me - or at least that’s when I let myself think about it. I knew things would be different aboard an Alliance ship - even among our little group of specialists - than they would have been in a turian crew. Less of the heated sparring - I still can’t believe that anecdote worked for you - and even less of the post-match fucking. So I kept a lid on that sort of thing for a while - I don’t think I fully realized it until you started recruiting us for your suicide mission, Shepard. My squad on Omega…we were close and all, but it wasn’t until Haestrom, really, that I realized I was feeling the same relief at seeing you again, Tali, that I had felt when Shepard had showed up at my little hidey-hole. The feeling like I was home again - like I knew my place in the world again.”
“We all seemed so young on that first mission,” Shepard murmured. “Everybody was so young - everybody except Wrex, of course. It felt like we had so much time ahead of us to figure things out.” Reflexively, she tangled her hand in Tali’s headscarf. “I think it took me dying to get my head on straight. To realize that I could and should just pursue what I wanted. And what I wanted was my two best friends, who had been with me through it all.”
Tali snorted. “In that case, I retract my earlier statement. The real unlikely part is that you settled on the two of us out of everyone who would have shared a bunk with you out of the crew.”
Shepard flushed. “Wait, hang on, how many people are we talking about here?”
Garrus and Tali just shared a long, wheezing laugh, and, when they had finally caught their breath, began listing names.