The waves crashing on the beach were almost soothing, shades of blue and aquamarine blending together to wash as foam against the white, sandy shore. The sun was yellow, bright and shining in the clear sky and seemed to shine without burning. The foliage was thick and flawlessly green, stretching on for uncharted miles and provided ample, comfortable shade over the soft earth. The air was light, dancing merrily around the beach's new guests and blew without picking up the scouring grains of sand and buffeting softly against the hull of the crashed starship.

It was a pretty lie.

Tali's arms wrapped tightly around her chest as she stared out over the beach she could not swim in, the trees she could not touch, and the wind she could not feel. The polished, opaque violet glass of her visor hid her features from the uncharted world and from the other surviving members of the Normandy's crew too busy pretending to be complacent in this false paradise. Her silver eyes, bright as distant stars she could no longer see through the faceless blue sky, narrowed as she watched the small, distant shapes moving up and down the shores. This place was wrong. The sun was too bright, not like the soft orange glow of Tikkun. The sea was too blue, unlike the dark waves stretching out beyond the rocky cliffs of Rannoch. The trees were too large, stretching upwards with leaves too wide and gaudy unlike the desert flowers and brush of the rust-red sands. It was foreign. It was a lie. It was not home.

Stepping down from her rocky vantage point, her suit creaked slightly as she observed the twisted wreckage of the Normandy, the ship she called her home, her arms pulling tighter around her chest in a shudder. The crash had all happened so fast, the ship exiting from FTL and losing control in the sudden shift of gravity. The fact that as many of them survived as they did was a miracle; a miracle they were complacent with. A tremor of anger ran through the quarian's body as she remembered Joker's smile, his nauseating grin at the sight of the beach. Only he could smile after EDI's body collapsed onto the deck. Only he could smile at leaving his captain to die a second time. Only he could keep smiling after Shepard...

Shepard.

The name almost slipped past Tali's lips, closing her eyes as she entered the torn-open shaft of the Normandy's airlock. They were so close. Her words to him before the assault still rang in her ears, only now understanding their terrible prophetic nature. If only she had more time. Shuddering again as she crossed the fractured space of the Combat Information Center, the holographic display of the damaged sections of the Normandy flickering in and out of focus around loosely-hanging wiring, the quarian crossed through the halls towards the quantum entanglement communicator. The desperate dash to reach the conduit on Earth had been cut short by the towering figure of Harbinger, the supposed leader of the Reaper forces. Sliding to a stop in the blackened dirt and mud, Shepard had turned his face towards her, shouting something at the very last moment before the crimson beam had gouged through the earth and sent a rolling Mako flipping over and nearly crushing her beneath its weight if she hadn't moved in time. The scar in her suit now patched from the blast stood out as a dull gray line in the black mesh, remembering clearly the blood leaking from her open wound and painting her form even as Shepard hoisted her onto Garrus' shoulder. What came next would haunt the quarian until her dying days.

"You've got to get out of here."

The staccato beat of gunfire.

"I can't stay behind..."

The horrible roar of the Reaper.

"Don't argue with me, Tali."

Screams of horror and pain all around.

"D-Don't leave m-me behind..."

Silence.

"I need you to make it out of here alive, Tali... Get back to Rannoch... Build yourself a home..."

The beating of her heart.

"I h-have a h-home... Come back to me..."

The humming bass of the Normandy's engines.

It was all a blur after that. Against his own will, Joker had brought the Normandy into the Arcturus Relay and they crashed here. Wherever 'here' was.

Observing the thorough damage done to the delicate communication system of the QEC, Tali took a slow inhale, the sound warbling softly through the voice modulator of her helmet, before cracking her knuckles and bending down to undo the access panel at the base of the semi-circular console. Igniting her omnitool and displaying multiple haptic windows running diagnostics on the damaged systems, the quarian set herself to work once more. The ship hadn't been as damaged as she'd feared. The strange pulse of crimson energy that had seemingly completely deleted EDI and left her construct body and core empty had, at first, deactivated nearly the entire starship's systems. But it seemed the AI had hand-designed built protocols into the Normandy's core mainframe in the event of its- her... death... a simple manual restart reactivating all the essential systems. The work would go quickly, thanks to EDI's departing act to save them all. She hadn't been the only one to have lost something in the final, desperate bid for survival. But it would go quicker with help. It seemed she was the only one interested in fixing the Normandy, Joker and Garrus and the rest of the crew heading down to the shore supposedly to get a lay of the land. Tali snorted. Unlikely. Ignoring the bitter, unfair thought crossing her mind and the twinge of guilt at knowing what happened was nobody's fault, Tali seared a frayed wire together, testing the conductivity with a nod.

Tali had gotten used to working alone since her time on the first Normandy. The quiet would keep her awake for hours, time best spent working on the drive core or maintaining the engines. Her mind would usually wander in the minutia of her work, usually to the many other micromanaged tasks she attended to or the daunting mathematic formulae she had been doing automatically in her mind since she had first picked up a starship part. Often, however, her mind strayed to Shepard. The thought of him, for the longest time, kept her sane in the dangerous and often suicidal adventures they went on. Adventures she wouldn't trade anything for. But now... Now she only felt pain. One three-fingered hand brushed the suit pocket where she kept the small, brown-red stone Shepard had plucked from the ground on Rannoch, letting her carry home wherever they went. The ocean beating against the cliffs, the view from their future living room window, the words they shared as he lept from the turret and faced the towering Reaper, it was all perfectly, crystalline clear in her mind. And it all hurt so much to remember.

But she couldn't think about that right now, reaching her omnitool forward and scorching another fragmented wire and sealing a small breach with a dab of omnigel. He was alive. She knew it. Somewhere in her heart she knew the man she loved was still alive and she'd find him again. If she had to pull this entire ship apart and build a whole new one, she would. And they'd build their home together; a place where they could be together away from the galaxy after fighting as hard as they had to save it. And she'd start with the living room window, the measurements running through her head as she worked to repair the damaged QEC and a single tear pattered against the glass of her visor.

And somewhere far away, in the midst of smoking rubble and blowing dust, a man in pitted and scarred black armor, his N7 tags hanging loosely around his neck, took a breath.