Husk
Pale bleak fluids danced across his field of vision during brief moments of consciousness. Then the fading would return, sometimes violently with a sudden jab, other times gently with a buzzing; a comforting buzz that made him feel safe, though he didn't know why. Thoughts were difficult, broken things that made his head feel impossibly heavy, even if the rest of him felt like jelly. Time had little meaning as each moment of clarity was marked by the same recurring vision, a gray, translucent, gelatinous blur obscuring anything beyond.
Sometimes he tried to look at his hands, to see if he had a body, or if he was just a collection of thoughts sifting in and out of wretched fluid. His hands, or what he thought to be them, remained unclear like everything else, but certain instances in between each phase marked themselves with what looked like wiry fireflies. They moved when his hands moved. After enough fading out he realized they were his hands. He screamed, but nothing came out, sound couldn't reverberate through lungs filled with god-only-knows.
Then the buzzing became a voice, it said; "Isn't it beautiful? Don't you feel better being apart of everything? Soon everybody will be one, and nobody will be alone. Doesn't that make you happy? Doesn't that make you happy? Doesn't that make you..."
"Shut up." was all his mind could muster to think; it was a weak and enfeebled resistance. In the moments of clarity the voice grew louder, more insistent.
"Look at how brightly you glow! You glow blue like your daughter! Wouldn't she like to see you this way? Wouldn't you like to be with them, united, forever?"
"Yes, but..." His head throbbed and pulsed in painful rhythms. He wrenched his body in pain, again screaming without sound. The voice became many; they began to drone endlessly in the unresolved nothingness. He couldn't understand how they didn't shake the gel of his form, talking so loudly in the middle distance. They started to sound like his family. They asked him to wake up, claiming he would be happier. He began to concede, to allow the glow to take him, but a tiny resistant nerve suddenly connected:
"No, you can't be them. They're on Illium, and I'm fighting Cerberus and the Rea..." A thunderous volley of children's voices attacked every receptor cell in his body; he felt as though his brain would begin to run out of his eye sockets at any second. The loudest child's voice shouted, "you will know me!" over and over again.
Then, darkness. A dream without memory.
He awoke among shards of glass on a cold, rusted-out floor. The grayness he had seen before was replaced by broken machines, countless devices of unknown construction and purpose. A bright light attracted his attention. At first he thought it was his hands, but then he realized it was the sun, breaking into the room through arbitrary holes in the ceiling. Vegetation seemed to have sprung up through floor panels, obscuring the room's size and shape. Still on the ground, he looked behind himself. Some kind of strange container stood broken open behind him; it was in the best condition of anything he had seen thus far.
Gathering his thoughts, he remembered that he had a body. Looking down at his hands, he saw them in perfect grisly detail. Where skin should have been there were only metal strands intermingled with blue, glowing points of light that seemed to permeate the inner most parts of his "flesh."
He started to cry, only he didn't know why. It wasn't because of his hands, he knew that much. It was as if something lurking in his subconscious was hitting his emotions, like all the actualities were innately aware to him deep down, in spite of his confused state. The sobs shook his body until he felt dizzy and vomited; it splattered red, violet, and silver on the tarnished floor. The temporary tearing motions of his insides made him stop weeping. He curled up on the hard metal beneath him for what seemed like an eternity, the light vanished from the ceiling holes twice before he began to show signs of life once more.
He moved, uncurling from his fetal position; not because he wanted to, but because noises had begun to echo down a hall on the far east side. They were light, snappy, not distinctly military. Civilians? Researchers? Perhaps. As they grew closer they started to sound feminine. The words made no sense; out of habit, developed long before the grayness, he touched his ear. He involuntarily tried to check equipment that wasn't there. No earpiece, no digital translator, without it their words could only be nonsense to him. Yet, the banter possessed inklings of coherence when he tried his hardest to listen.
Finally moving to his feet, he stammered back and forth before regaining his balance. His legs felt like rubber; they looked like death. Each leg was predominantly covered in grayish or ungodly pale flesh, with the occasional patch that had turned like his hands: strands of metal and wire that looked vaguely like muscle. Moving his view up his legs he came to the sudden realization he was entirely naked. Looking around the dank, darkened machines, he could see nothing remotely resembling clothing or cloth.
The female voices grew ever louder. Two of them. He thought as he ducked behind a mass of pipes protruding out near the hall the sound emanated from. They walked into the space nonchalantly, omni-tools out, moving their gaze from the display screens to the surrounding area. One looked clearly human, her hair a sandy blonde. The other he didn't know what to make of; her hair looked human enough, long and black streaming down, but the legs were all wrong, appearing almost Turian in form, and the eyes had a strange phosphorescent glow to match her pale complexion.
As confusing as all of it was to him, it quickly vanished when he fixated on the colors of their research uniforms. "Yellow, white, and black." he said through grinding teeth, "They want to finish me. I won't let them."
He paid no attention to the lack of Cerberus symbols, or the simple fact that an alien wouldn't be seen cooperating with them. The situation had rendered him down to his basic survival instincts. He felt tired, disoriented, and more than anything else, frightened. The sequence of events that followed came out solely through an primal mode of operation.
He glided along the natural shadow cover offered by the buildings dilapidated state. He slunk along until his body, not his mind, told him he was within striking distance. Before she even had a chance to turn around, he had jumped up from his hiding spot and slammed the blonde's head against a metal vat on her left. She fell in a limp mass on the floor, unconscious.
He might have thought to finish her, but the other, the strange looking one, shrieked in confusion. Reflexively he closed the distance before she could fire off an incinerate from her omni-tool. He grabbed her by the neck and pinned her against a concrete wall a short distance away; her feet dangled several inches off the ground.
She gasped in shallow breaths, trying to speak frantically through constricted vocal cords. Her words possessed a throaty, almost sing-song quality, despite her physical duress.
"I don't understand!" he yelled out in frustration and contempt. His grip began to tighten, he could see her starting to black out. But something was wrong, the expression on her face, he couldn't make sense of it.
"This isn't the look of somebody who knows why they're being attacked...She's Cerberus, she should know why I'm doing what..."
His gripped loosened. She fell to the floor, choking for air. He stepped back and looked as perplexed as when he first awoke on the floor.
"She's not one of them. They aren't..."
He looked over to the blonde collapsed on the floor, a patch of dark red ran down her right temple. He looked back to the dark haired woman. She was trembling with wide eyes, glowing eyes, full of disbelief.
"Who are you people? Why are you here? Where is my squad?"
He only received a few short, sporadic blocks of words. Again, all nonsense to him. He was about to begin yelling in frustration once more, but then he saw the translator on the other woman's ear sticking outward. He moved over to her; the strange woman gained a brief moment of bravery, she pulled out a concealed firearm, ready to fire if he took a step closer to the unconscious body. He raised his hands up as a sign of innocence; it was all he could think to do at that moment.
"I'm just going to take off her translator. I just want answers." he said in the best calm, coherent voice he could muster. She seemed to understand. She lowered her pistol slightly, but stilled maintained a fixed gaze on his movements. Her expression indicated confusion, but also some peculiar fascination.
He picked up the translator and inserted the bud into his right ear, almost instantly her words become complete thoughts.
"Now back away!" she said with a forceful, but still fearful inflection.
"What are you?" was the first question that popped back into his head.
"What?" she replied back, as if she didn't know what he was referring to.
"You aren't human. I know that much. But everything else I can't place."
The confusion spread across her face even further. "I'm...I'm a Quarian. How could you not know that?"
It was his turn to not understand, "A Quarian? Why aren't you in a full enviro-suit then? What about your immune system?"
"My immune system?" she said, utterly perplexed, "My species hasn't worn those in over 400 years, not since we retook Rannoch and made peace with the Geth."
He felt his mind race. In just two sentences his entire frame of reference was shaken to its core.
"Rannoch, retaken?...Four hundred yea..." he felt a fuzziness swarming in his brain.
His legs felt weak again, and all sense of balance became null and void. The entirety of the disheveled area started fading to black. "That's...not..." was all he could muster before collapsing to his side." In muffled tones, he heard the strange woman's voice weakly ask, "What's happening?" Just before everything vanished, and he slept once more.