Once more, with feeling

[mm_lettie]

For quite some time now, Tali'Zorah had been feeling under the weather. She hadn't taken the necessary precautions with a hole she'd torn in her suit (well, that a stray bullet had torn in her suit) and she had been illThe problem with this wasn't the fact that she felt sick, for quarians spent a distressing percentage of their lives feeling 'under

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[gofor_theoptics]

Talking about what her father had done was -- embarrassing, to say the least. Garrus didn't seem like the sort of person who would judge her for it, but it was still not something that she wanted to discuss in public. She glanced to the elevator as it opened.

"I -- come on. We can talk somewhere else." She was still irritated and twitchy, and it showed. She took a few quick steps toward the main battery, hoping that Garrus would join her because -- well, at least he was half-agreeing with her. If he knew the whole story, would he still agree? The thought of him thinking badly of her bothered her much more than she had anticipated it would. Wasn't that lovely.

Once the door had closed behind her, she turned back to Garrus. She was tense again, her hands in tight fists at her side. Admitting this was going to be ... challenging.

"My ... father," she began, "He was preforming experiments on the geth - trying to reactivate their neural networks." She turned away from Garrus, looking absently at the flashing lights of the nearby console. "It was -- is -- in violation of sacred quarian laws."

[turiansnarker]

Whatever Garrus had expected to hear going into the main battery with Tali, it hadn’t been that. His mandibles flares briefly in surprise, his head jerking back a little. For all that geth were and are machines, they were for all intents and purposes a sentient race, however far removed from organic understanding of life. Experimentation on the geth - live geth with higher neural function - was akin to war crime of the highest caliber. Even among turians, who dedicated themselves to the idea of total war when brought to it, held the rules of engagement in highest honor. The quarians were not at war, per say, with the geth. They had lost. Torture for information was one thing… weaponized experimentation though… even turians didn’t…well… He wasn’t going to say they were free of blame either.

But he understood why she wouldn’t look at him when she revealed it to him.

“The geth,” he began carefully, “took everything from your race, Tali. Regardless if they were provoked to it or not the fact remains and your father…” Garrus paused. “Well, I never knew the man, but I know you. In whatever he did, right or wrong, I’m certain his first thoughts were for the survival of your people.” Garrus didn’t say that made it okay, but… now wasn't the time. The wound was too fresh to discuss the moral philosophy of necessity.

“I assume… Legion found the files about what your father had done to its people? That’s why it went against Shepard and tried to take the data from you, one of his crew?”

[gofor_theoptics]

The only other people who knew about this were the ones that had come on the mission. Mordin had no place to judge her, and Jacob seemed to be enough of a soldier that he understood necessity. Garrus, though -- he had to understand what she was going through. The turians had released the genophage on the krogan, and it had seemed necessary at the time ... but that didn't mean other races didn't judge them for it.

She swallowed thickly, still facing away from him. Her voice was low and uneven when she spoke next. "My father ... he promised me when I was young that he would build a home for us on the new world we would settle. I think that he became blinded by this fixation, like half of the flotilla." She took a deep breath. "I am only glad Shepard did not turn this information over to the Fleet. It would have torn them apart." She crossed her arms over her chest, still watching the lights on the console briefly.

"And ... yes, that is what happened. I know that what my father did was not right, but if it was transmitted to the geth -- who knows what that could do! It could start a war." Another war that the quarians would certainly not win, and might not even survive.

[turiansnarker]

“Shepard… didn’t allow Legion to take that information, did he?”

Garrus didn’t believe that the Commander would do something so reckless as that, but on the other hand he hadn’t believed he would seriously take an active geth aboard the Normandy. Lately, he was starting to think that the commander was not all together the same man he’d met on the Citadel two years back… given he was certainly not the same frustrated C-sec officer from back that. Now he was a frustrated vigilante. Nevertheless, Shepard kept surprising him on things he would have rather not been surprised on.

“Because you’re right, Tali. There is no way for us to gauge how the geth will reach consensus on something like that. If you have the research then this whole thing might stop with you anyway… but if your father’s research does make it back to the hands of the Fleet that’s an eventuality we can’t focus on right now. We have greater worries without you and Legion starting gun fights in the AI Core.” The last part was a bit comic, but he was serious enough.

[gofor_theoptics]

"I would have won," she muttered only a little childishly, furrowing her brows underneath her suit. "And no, Shepard -- forced a compromise, as I am sure you know the Commander does. I gave it some unclassified information." She still wasn't happy about that, though. If Legion wanted to have information on the quarians, it should have figured out its own way to get that.

She tugged the edge of her hood and finally turned back to Garrus, having calmed down significantly once she was sure that he wasn't going to turn on her and start accusing her of things. He trusted her that much, and that was -- good. Very good.

"As I said - Shepard has allowed me to keep the data. I'm not sure what I should do with it." Destroying it would mean destroying a part of her father, in a way -- a part of him that she might not have wanted to face, but a part of him nonetheless. She knew it was dangerous to have it, though.

It struck her suddenly as a little strange that Garrus hadn't told her anything about his...mission, but she didn't suppose she had any right to ask about it.

[turiansnarker]

“I don’t know what it is about this team and finding dangerous things, but there are some things, Tali, that are too big to make a choice… but then we have to anyway.” He shrugged. “You have the research. Maybe your people won’t dig up the rest of your father’s work, maybe they will. The point is right now you have a choice that you need to make that could affect the lives of many.” He let her think a moment before he went on. “I think you’re well equipped to make that choice. You’ve worked with the Commander, you have some sense of the scale that one choice can effect.”

There wasn’t much beyond that he could offer on the subject of the data or Legion. He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

“So how angry was Shepard at the two of you for fighting on his ship? As angry as he was about Jack and Miranda or step below? Because he went and go drunk after those two went at him for taking a side.” Not that Garrus blamed him. Both of those women were insanely scary in their own way.

[gofor_theoptics]

"Knowing my father, it's unlikely that he would have left anything other than what he left for me," she said quietly, shrugging her shoulders and letting her eyes flicker to Garrus' face. "And I think that you trust me too much." All that pressure on her -- she was younger than people tended to think and sometimes she felt her age, overwhelmed with other things.

She was glad for the change of subject. "Oh, pretty angry. I think he is probably with Kasumi right now getting completely ... what's the word, 'smashed'? Right now it doesn't seem like such a bad idea." She felt badly for driving the Commander to drink, but maybe if he had a hangover tomorrow then he'd feel bad about siding with Legion.

"I mean, quarian alcohol isn't exactly easy to come by." They worked too much to have time for things like that. Tali had admittedly ... never had much to drink.

[turiansnarker]

Garrus snorted, partially because the idea of the Commander getting smashed again was not his idea of a good time - peeling the man off a Citadel bathroom floor was not how he liked to spend his down time - but mostly because the idea of Tali drinking seemed like theoretical impossibility. The quarian tended to be so caught up in things, her Pilgrimage, her mission, her responsabilities, her whatever the hell it was she was doing, that she was wound tight as a spring most of the time. Turians tended to work hard to play hard and understood the need for both. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Tali really relax.

“Well, if you need to blow off steam after all this mess with Legion, I do have a stash of Palaven whiskey that my sister mailed me a while back. Haven’t had the occasion to break it out but what the hell. I’m a bit wound up too.” He hadn’t been sleeping since he put that bullet through Sidonis’ skull. “You said you have a quarian-grade purifier didn’t you?”

[gofor_theoptics]

Tali never really relaxed. Sure, Kenneth had invited her to play poker with them - and it had been fun even if the Commander had wiped the floor with the lot of them - but the fact was that she just didn't trust that many people on this ship ... and at home, not a lot of people trusted her anymore.

She furrowed her brows and blinked when Garrus spoke again. She'd always been curious about the flavors of the more exotic turian liquors, but again ... she'd never had much occasion to drink anything at all, let alone turian liquor.

"I ... do," she said with a nod, "In my quarters." Drinking in public did not altogether appeal to her, which meant that either she was going to have to invite him to her quarters, or he was going to have to invite her to his. "I could -- go get it," she said a little too quickly, glancing to the exit of the battery room, "Unless you want to drink in a room full of wires and circuit boards."