Work | Narrative
Work for Tali meant twenty hour days with standing naps. It meant humans asking her for help, it meant feeling about as productive as wrangling varren trying to get all of the Admirals, human and quarian, turian and krogan, to work together.
It meant having the geth walking around and she still had that undercurrent of terror when a prime stopped to communicate: ask questions, share calculations. She remembered Shepard telling EDI that of course people would be wary - not too long ago, her mobile platform had been shooting at members of her team. Somehow, that made her feel better, that Shepard had recognized that disconnect. An ally, maybe even a friend could make you uncomfortable... Not that this feeling was reserved to the geth, of course. She still felt wary towards Miranda, for example.
Work meant sending letters to the families of the dead and reading the lists. She had a VI for that now (the sending, not the reading). Once she had tried to write the letters customized for every soldier that had died on her watch, but that was different when the numbers were five instead of five hundred or five thousand in a day.
It meant getting notices that someone had their suit rupture whereshehad assigned them to a human medical camp. Or approved of their assignment. Or asked the quarians to get involved with the battle for Earth at all. She knew why, she knew, logically, that it would have been so much worse if the quarians hadn't been there that day (the turians, for example, didn't have the vast amounts of dedicated agricultural space on their ships). Quarian soldiers, engineers, scientists. But because she had asked (well Shepard had asked, but Tali had laid the groundwork), they were rebuilding Earth while their homeworld was unreachable.
Work meant falling asleep on her feet because she had run out of stimulants and her heart still trilled too fast in her chest while she sought another one.
It meant doing a different kind of work on her brief times off. Just because it wasn't so immediate didn't mean it was less important to know what the geth knew about the lingering Reapers.
But it also meant listening to the krogan and the turians share communication, a salarian STG who lectured a mixed group on medicine, engineering, reappropriation of war assets. This included young krogan... did she see Grunt there, watching with a soldier's vague disinterest?
So there was hope, buried in the exhaustion.
