A snort escaped her. Her mind was already locked and hidden away in the little vault that it had been kept in most of her adolescence. It had been the only way to survive. The only way to keep some shred of herself intact while her humanity was being stripped away. Layer by layer by layer. Turned into something that wasn’t meant to be human.
That was the whole problem. She was not viewed as human. Her life had been a constant rehash of test project, of guard dog, of go here and do this we own you, you do what WE say no one else.
"I’m not the one constantly poking the damn bear," she retorted. She did quite well just keeping herself too busy to think about what comes after the war. What comes after she is no longer needed much less wanted. What was she to do? Sit on ice, sit on the shelf, wait until a soldier is needed. All she knew was fighting. By design.
"There’s a huge difference between seeing the future and having some foresight. You can’t just go ‘oh we’re going to kill 49 of this person’s friends but then less than a decade later we’ll try to get them to join us and when that doesn’t work we’ll bring them back from the dead oh wait why doesn’t this person want to be around us? Oh, right, those experiments way back when’," she said, her voice dripping with derision and sarcasm but little other emotion.
There was a distinct change in posture and voice. She wasn’t cowering like when she was a kid, but neither was she putting everything into things. She had long found that there was little point in doing so. And she needed to ground herself. She couldn’t sink into an episode. Not now. It was the last thing she needed, to be left vulnerable because of a disorder she had thanks to the very people who brought her back.
"Nobody ever asked my opinion. I wasn’t given a choice. I can fault anyone for not giving me a choice, even the Illusive Man. If I had had my choice, I would’ve stayed dead. It might’ve been a good idea to just allow that, at any rate. I don’t fault him for not seeing the future. I fault him for knowing what my choice would be and brushing it aside, deciding the bridge would be crossed when we all got to it. I fault him for apparently somehow thinking that bringing me back would make me grateful.”
There’s a long pause then, and the change to her entire way of holding herself is almost shocking, knowing the type of person she was. She looked empty. Not defeated but not confident either. Just… empty. back to being the dog she had been a good portion of her life.
"I’m not human. I’m Frankenstein’s monster." Her voice was astoundingly strong, steady, and perhaps heart-breakingly full of certainty that she was speaking the absolute truth. "And The Illusive Man will never be one of my own. There is no one like me. There is only me. People like the Illusive Man made damn sure of that. Or haven’t you heard? They don’t say it very loudly, but they do say it. I’m post-human. Transhuman. Metahuman. A different breed.” Malati had used the word Übermensch once… she still hated that. It put a bad taste in her mouth. Fucking Nietzsche.
Leng tilted his head, listening, not really caring- it was hardly the nature of a snake to care about the plaintive howling of a wolf that never looked down to see what coiled beneath its paws in the grass. Not until there was an exposed belly to strike at.
Her last words had a sneer curling his mouth.
He leaned back in his chair as he eyed her countenance in the holo, and held out his hands again.
“You and I both hate it. I loathe it to the point where it makes my blood burn under my skin and it fuels my drive to be rid of you, Shepard, but you are not a singular breed of your own. You’re daft if you think that.”
Plated fingers reached up and removed the visor that hid his gaze, and electric blue eyes bore into hers.
“If you’re a monster, that makes me so much worse. How does that make you feel, knowing how similar we really are?”
areudirty
kaledo-art
baratheonpilled
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
