Chapter Text
1507 hours, April 7, 2187, Terran Universal Coordinated Calendar
Uncharted Space
SSV Normandy SR-2
He’d calibrated the whole damn ship.
The Whole. Damn. Ship.
Tali’Zorah was constantly on his case about how he couldn’t calibrate the whole damn ship because not everything on a ship needed calibrating, but he didn’t much care. She usually gave up, throwing her hands in the air and calling him a stubborn bosh’tet.
Every piece.
He’d always been a bad turian in an awkward, “please Dad, I’m really trying” sort of way. He questioned everything – not because he refused to accept it, but because he refused to accept anything without understanding it first. One of the turian ‘things’ he’d been worst at was their ‘religion’, if you could call it that. He had a very hard time accepting that everything had a spirit of some sort – turians, asari, salarians, sure, that wasn’t hard to process, he was alright with the idea of a soul – but a ship? A battalion? A planet? That was harder to process. He thought he understood the concept of Palaven’s spirit, a sort of universal turian mother, but you would never have caught him praying to the Normandy.
Until now.
That was what he meant by calibrating the whole damn ship. Garrus had spent so much time fixing it, patching up wires, holding up panels so Tali could get into the walls properly, having long discussions with EDI about the parts of the Normandy that she still couldn’t access… that eventually he’d started talking to the ship. Somehow, he’d separated EDI from the Normandy, though that had been an all-day debate with the AI. The ship itself was different from her somehow, in the same way, he supposed, that a corpse was different from a living being.
Except not. The Normandy, without EDI, would still be the Normandy. And it wouldn’t be. He didn’t fully understand it yet, and part of him was certain that he was still hanging on to the differentiation because he wasn’t comfortable praying to EDI – but there it was.
He had fixed every square centimetre of that ship until he could feel it existing anywhere he went. He calibrated it until it was alive again.
He was beyond certain that that was why it was flying again. Somehow, deep in his mind, there was the certainty that even if they had fixed all the systems, restored power to everything, re-coded EDI so very carefully to bring her online again (Tali’Zorah was truly a genius), and scavenged all that eezo to fix the drive core, it wouldn’t have run if he hadn’t calibrated the whole damn ship.
Lifting off that lush, verdant planet that reminded him too much of Aeia, he had never felt more alive.