Tali'Zorah vas whatever (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
keelahselai) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisavrou_log2016-08-18 12:33 am
keelahselai) wrote in thisavrou_log2016-08-18 12:33 am
(no subject)
Who: Niko Bellic vengeance_driven and Tali
When: Backdated, slightly earlier in the month
Where: Mero #02
What: The events of the past little while finally beat Tali.
Warnings: Mentions of slavery, sexual assault, torture
Two weeks ago, she returned to the Moira. Two weeks, an uneasy normal she settled into like faulty atmospheric settings in an envirosuit - breathable, but wrong. She was busy, always busy, and she'd always liked busy, ever since she was little and her idea of fun was making mini-drones and doing engineering homework. It had rung a little hollow for a long time, though. As artificial as the personalities she'd program into those drones as a kid.
Even sleep had lost its comfort. When she found it, it taunted her with dreams that verged on nightmarish, but were never enough to wake her, settling themselves into prickly, uncomfortable dozing as she oozed in and out of consciousness. She never remembered what they were when she got up in the morning, only that, once again, the night hadn't been a restful one.
The same thing that night - only the dream dug its claws into her, made itself remembered. She flickered between places - a pen on that outpost, a convenience store on Aqada, the incinerator on the Citadel, but in all of them she was cornered. Cornered and knowing she could fight or die - or give herself and live. Not just give herself up, but give herself. In Tali's dreams, she was almost always wearing her suit, even now - in these places she was naked, and when she shuddered awake, she could feel hands on her as vividly as if they were just there.
They weren't there, but she could feel them in the places her skin crawled - her jaw where her mouth had been pulled open, and grinding her teeth didn't make it feel better; her waist where she had been grabbed, pulled as if she weighed nothing, and furiously scrubbing at the skin there with her fingers didn't soothe it; her thighs where her legs had been pulled apart where she stood, and pressing her legs together till the muscles hurt didn't stop a phantom hand scraping the skin of her inner thighs, the ghost of a rough palm at the apex of her thighs.
She'd been calm for two weeks now, and part of her must have known it would end.
A soft part of the back of her mind told her it was fine, she was fine, it could have been worse, it could always be worse. Was it the first time her body had been invaded? Nanomachines crushing her organs, blood in her throat-- she had flinched hard and earned a slap on the thigh that had made her bite her lip, tasted blood then too--
Rolled over, buried her face in the sheets. Rolled over again, foetal position, face in her arms, legs curled to her like her limbs could protect her. The sobs came before the tears, great shuddering efforts to breathe under a great weight, and that Niko was next to her probably asleep was forgotten as the those sobs wracked her body.
vengeance_driven and TaliWhen: Backdated, slightly earlier in the month
Where: Mero #02
What: The events of the past little while finally beat Tali.
Warnings: Mentions of slavery, sexual assault, torture
Two weeks ago, she returned to the Moira. Two weeks, an uneasy normal she settled into like faulty atmospheric settings in an envirosuit - breathable, but wrong. She was busy, always busy, and she'd always liked busy, ever since she was little and her idea of fun was making mini-drones and doing engineering homework. It had rung a little hollow for a long time, though. As artificial as the personalities she'd program into those drones as a kid.
Even sleep had lost its comfort. When she found it, it taunted her with dreams that verged on nightmarish, but were never enough to wake her, settling themselves into prickly, uncomfortable dozing as she oozed in and out of consciousness. She never remembered what they were when she got up in the morning, only that, once again, the night hadn't been a restful one.
The same thing that night - only the dream dug its claws into her, made itself remembered. She flickered between places - a pen on that outpost, a convenience store on Aqada, the incinerator on the Citadel, but in all of them she was cornered. Cornered and knowing she could fight or die - or give herself and live. Not just give herself up, but give herself. In Tali's dreams, she was almost always wearing her suit, even now - in these places she was naked, and when she shuddered awake, she could feel hands on her as vividly as if they were just there.
They weren't there, but she could feel them in the places her skin crawled - her jaw where her mouth had been pulled open, and grinding her teeth didn't make it feel better; her waist where she had been grabbed, pulled as if she weighed nothing, and furiously scrubbing at the skin there with her fingers didn't soothe it; her thighs where her legs had been pulled apart where she stood, and pressing her legs together till the muscles hurt didn't stop a phantom hand scraping the skin of her inner thighs, the ghost of a rough palm at the apex of her thighs.
She'd been calm for two weeks now, and part of her must have known it would end.
A soft part of the back of her mind told her it was fine, she was fine, it could have been worse, it could always be worse. Was it the first time her body had been invaded? Nanomachines crushing her organs, blood in her throat-- she had flinched hard and earned a slap on the thigh that had made her bite her lip, tasted blood then too--
Rolled over, buried her face in the sheets. Rolled over again, foetal position, face in her arms, legs curled to her like her limbs could protect her. The sobs came before the tears, great shuddering efforts to breathe under a great weight, and that Niko was next to her probably asleep was forgotten as the those sobs wracked her body.
no subject
"I don't know. Maybe if you defended her, you can at least demand she say to you why she hates aliens." Which was weak, yes, but... something. Tali had been walked on, used, not taken for a person. That was a question she deserved to ask, that she had a right to.
no subject
But thinking about that wasn't going to help anybody, much less Tali herself. Either of them.
"I don't want to confront her." She said it bluntly, more so than she usually would have. Maybe she didn't have the right to hear why Shepard didn't like aliens, but at the same time... "I don't think I want to know why, and I don't want to hear it in her voice.
"But I should just stay away from her from now on." That much was clear. "It's probably better for everybody."
Shepard, the one who really acted like her friend, was already here. There was no need to keep trying and keep feeling a little pathetic for doing so.
"I'm sorry she said that to you, though," she offered, her lip curling, voice raw. "You shouldn't have heard it either."
no subject
Tali might have her own biases, but at least she cared about learning more about the people around her. Not so much in changing (even if that was inevitable), but in figuring out why other species did what they did, why they could care about each other despite it.
That shepard didn't care to.