The migraine hits her from nowhere, and that's the first clue. Not for the first time, Shepard wonders what she pissed off to deserve a life like this; just a little peace and quiet, just for once in her damned life. Call it shore-leave, call it a vacation...
...Call this, this hallucination, or memory, or psychic trauma reenactment what it was; torture.
Shepard finds herself standing at a strange remove as, very like to a stage, the scene played out again and again, the horror isolated like a spotlight in a sea of shadows. There was an edge to it, where detail bled away, one wall clearly visible, the other obscured by real darkness, or else merely forgotten. But the chair is clear and brightly-lit, and the rest of the equipment, and their faces, wan and sweating and eager and desperate. Shepard is reminded of... Miranda's voice and the Cerberus logo, a haze of agony all her own, Faron's screams, and the howl of the wind against lighting-vanes, Liara's gasp of horror. The surgical lab on Teltin, and Jack's voice a little too quiet, a little too flat; This... this is a bad place.
But this wasn't Jack. And Shepard wasn't Bucky.
"I see you weren't kidding about the science experiment thing," Shepard says, eventually, when she has mastered herself enough to speak calmly. It's not an especially calm sort of calm, but it's the best she's going to have.
no subject
...Call this, this hallucination, or memory, or psychic trauma reenactment what it was; torture.
Shepard finds herself standing at a strange remove as, very like to a stage, the scene played out again and again, the horror isolated like a spotlight in a sea of shadows. There was an edge to it, where detail bled away, one wall clearly visible, the other obscured by real darkness, or else merely forgotten. But the chair is clear and brightly-lit, and the rest of the equipment, and their faces, wan and sweating and eager and desperate. Shepard is reminded of... Miranda's voice and the Cerberus logo, a haze of agony all her own, Faron's screams, and the howl of the wind against lighting-vanes, Liara's gasp of horror. The surgical lab on Teltin, and Jack's voice a little too quiet, a little too flat; This... this is a bad place.
But this wasn't Jack. And Shepard wasn't Bucky.
"I see you weren't kidding about the science experiment thing," Shepard says, eventually, when she has mastered herself enough to speak calmly. It's not an especially calm sort of calm, but it's the best she's going to have.