Always making noise, hoping to drown out the sounds. Always making snide remarks to build up her persona of defiance. Yet here she is, with a new batch of students to replace the ones that died & trapped in an era where the woman she knew as Commander Shepard was neither human nor her friend. Jack is a mind that rages against the cosmic wind only for it to ignore her or the suffering she has endured. She is a thread on a loom that is being woven together with the rest of creation, pulled tight, & controlled by the hand that belongs to the person who told her to shoot Aresh on Pragia.
From the organization that experimented on her to the Emperor that will hollow her out & fill her body with sinister technology, Jack was never free.
It has always been her fate to be rewritten, reborn, & perfected. Cerberus was the root of Jack’s pain, but this exquisite existential dread that pulses through her brain is from revelations about the Shepard that she nor the others were prepared for. That anguish, that agony, that anger primes her for what it is to come. It will make her brain easier to open when she is on the operating table & the cybernetics immediately graft to the grey matter.
The future for Jack is better than the one Cerberus had intended, for the Emperor knows how to turn women into machines, how to bless them with augmentations & elevate them to beyond human.
The future for Jack is terrifying because she will become everything she fears, everything she has tried so hard to get away from, everything she hates. Powerful, but not free. To have her personality ripped out of her.
Her question is not answered, the Shepard simply stares at her from where she is. The tone of the white noise changes, something deeper & darker, the sounds of static like maggot crawling all over the woman’s brain. She observes how Jack reacts to the darkness of her presence, how her bones sing in their aching to be ignited with biotic power, how her veins expand to let blood flow easily. To have strived all one’s life for pure freedom, unbound & unshackled by law or military or obligation. It is a cruel thing to take it all away from her, to tell her that her fate was planned out eons in advance, a destiny that she could not escape.
But the Emperor is cruel. Amor fati, Jack.
❝ No, you don’t. ❞ Her reply is harsh, like a tent spike being hammered into the woman’s skull. Only now does she rises to her full height from the chair she was seated in. The tones of the static shift into notes that should not exist, the shadows begin to boil & writhe in response to the change in her position. Things are happening. Things are about to change.
A cloying dread begins to eat at her consciousness, at first she ignores it. as if not acknowledging it would keep her safe. from what? the what wasn’t yet discerned. her brain continued to attempt to process, to understand. she couldn’t--- ( even if every cell of altered frame tells her to FIGHT ) it would be one she’d lose. over and over again, until her body lost the will to get up and try. while it might not have been the smartest idea she’s ever had; however, the urge to fight was ingrained into her as a youth. no one else would fight her battles for her. they wanted her to be the strongest, to kill off the others to make herself better. what kind of backwards logic was that? ---cerberus’.
A bitter ‘how would you know’ remains muted on wet muscle.
After all of those years fighting she’d be put right back into those shackles cerberus constructed for her. If she had the capability to think about the overwhelming loss she’s suffered, maybe Jack would come to some realization that this was what the universe had intended for her.
That no matter how much she fought it, she’d always be caught within what she was created for. Imperfect, now. Stuck beneath the alliance’s thumb, no longer seeking vengeance for what was done to her. Content. Now without her students, Jack was suffocating in shrouded pitch. Alone. Doubting that the tapes would show any of this, Ariel. That static she both felt and heard would prevent any evidence of what was occurring. Not that she knew.
Jack flinches, searing pain flourishing just beneath her skull. Sound fluctuates, at first it is subtle, then it grows in pitch. Erratic, unstable, loud. unbearably loud. the biotic is nearly brought to her knees; inked palms moving to grip her head. Why?
‘ Is that what you want? For me to kneel before you? ’ She’s surprised how far off her own voice sounds.
Perhaps the Reaper Emperor had come to take back that which was sparred previously.
There’s a swell of fear brewing in her belly--- it takes her back to when she was a child. Being forced to watch while the other’s played, that uncomfortable feeling of her skin not quite fitting her bones. Of the power that ached to be freed in a fright-induced rage.
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
prguitarman
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
areudirty
dededos
