[Short Fiction] The Dream Dispelled

[TomatoMarrow]

"I'm sorry," I say, and I try to speak, to ask for her to repeat herself, but she knows what I need from her, and she gently cuts me off.

"I understand. Please forgive me. This is who you really are--a Tenno. More than human, but once a child, like any other."

I have looked more at my hands than at much of anything else since I awoke. I look at them again. Still encased, but not in the alloy and polymer that I was so sure was me, but under a thin layer of pliant material, the stasis suit that I have been in for longer than I can comprehend. And under that, there is skin, flesh, blood, bone. Me.

I can still feel where the Stalker's hand gripped my neck.

"What do you remember?" the Lotus asks.

I remember laughter and holding hands with my sisters and brothers as we ran full tilt down the deck of the Zariman, chasing comets. I remember the restraint and the urgency with which my teachers taught us, and I remember the hair-raising feeling their urgency brought me as I tried furiously to keep up. I remember my mother's strong hands and my father's bright eyes as they looked out into the depths of the galaxy, when the Void was just the void. I remember sunlight, on Earth, before.

And some time after that, I remember, inseparably, pain and blinding light. I remember reaching out to touch someone I loved and burning them, and crying, and curling up in a crawlspace beneath the deck, squeezing myself as small as I could, content in knowing I would starve to death and never hurt another living thing.

And I remember, as though it happened in another life, emerging from a long sleep and falling to my hands and knees, staring down at a metal-shod foot, feeling the awful electric clamp of the ascaris around my ankle, and hearing, wrapped around Captain Vor's laughter, the voice of the Lotus for the first time. My friend and guide. Reminding me, almost without words, that running was second in my nature only to killing.

She has been with me every step of the way as I've carved my mark on this system. I did it for her, but also because it was the only way I knew to be alive. And now she is here before me, asking me to dredge up what I know of the time before we knew each other.

"I remember being loved, despite everything."

The Lotus's eyes are covered, if she even has them, but it is still plain to me that her guards have dropped, that for the time being, she isn't mission control—she's just herself. She smiles, just a little, and sighs, just a little. It has been so long since I have seen someone show this kind of happiness.

"You were aboard the Zariman Ten Zero." I can hear her happiness in her voice, too. "During the Void jump accident. It was years before the ship was recovered." Her smile fades, but her gentleness and her patience persist. "It was drifting dead in space, all of her crew gone...except the children."

Like nausea, this reminder of what came before rolls over me and sinks into my stomach, folded over in thick, heavy knots. I swallow.

"The ones who found us didn't know what to do,” I say. “They thought we were monsters. They tried to kill us. We didn't understand. We were only trying to protect ourselves. Only she knew that...what was her name?"

"Margulis."

Immediately there's a lump in my throat. I try to speak around it. I don't do very well. Margulis. That was her name.

"They killed her?"

"Yes, they did. They used her work to create Transference. Your mind, projected into a surrogate strong enough to withstand your power."

I remember being the Warframe.

I remember picking up the sword and knowing how to carve a person to ribbons with it. I turned it over in my hand and admired the glint and swung it in the way I knew would cripple an infested Ancient and bring it to the ground for the killing strike. It is little wonder that I never questioned where this knowledge came from. It was a part of the frame itself. Before now, before waking up, it was just as much a part of me as my hands and feet.

I remember Valkyr's rage, bubbling beneath her skin, barely contained. I remember Frost's's deathly calm in the midst of battle, Mesa's effortless calculations as I leveled a pair of pistols at an airborne foe. I remember Equinox's dual selves, like variations on an aria, and I remember something deep within Oberon that called to the world around him, just as it called to something deep within me.

"It felt like waking up," the Lotus continued, "but it was just a lucid--second--dream."

[TomatoMarrow]

Hi folks; thanks for reading.  Hope you enjoyed.  :}

I took a liberty or two--I don't think Earth was habitable at the time of the Zariman, but hey.

[SarcasticShepard]

Well done!