glimpse the unknown for a moment...

Too weightless to drown; too heavy to die. Story of his life.

How scary fast a man became a thing.

Shepard had turned away from her but that put him right in front of the reflective window, which made his skin crawl worse. He came back to the mad scientist, drawn to the answers he didn't want to hear but would get anyway. Or wouldn't. It didn't matter, actually. He was here but he shouldn't be, and that was the gist of it: the how was secondary.

You would think.

Only the how was what kept pecking at the membrane of his brain like a starving bird in winter, a thing he had only ever seen on screens, the winter and the bird. Back home, red desert earth didn't know any seasons; and it was too early yet to introduce them under the domes.

Too early for somethings.

Too late for others.

He wasn't meant to see it happen now. He wasn't meant to be here, to hear, to speak, to breathe air into lungs that had to be stitched back together only so they could function. How do you come back from that? It occurred to him what his great-grandmother with her rosary beads would say: You don't because you shouldn't.

And then it occurred to him that a photograph of him would have been on the family altar for these past two years, offered incense and cempazuchitl in the annual ofrenda, and something about that,

something about that drove it home:

He was dead.

He had died.

His bisa would have things to say about Project Lazarus as well, he reckoned; and none of them good. Her rosary beads clicked,

clicked,

clicked.

An echo in his brain. Words seeped through. And Shepard had too many questions to filter through the bottleneck that was his overwhelm. A fast-blur haunting: a torn hull; the klaxons blaring. Joker unwilling to let go. Kaidan unable to, until Alex addressed him as a soldier and not a–

He looked for purchase in the correlations.

       A long moment of silence followed her words. Herta watched him turn away from her, coming face to face with that reflective mirror before ultimately shying away from it. In all these many months of careful research and delicate reconstruction along with her team of cutting-edge doctors and biologists, Herta hadn't really had time to consider all of the possibilities of how Shepard might react to being brought back. Perhaps a part of her had expected him to lash out as that fictional scientist's creature had, but this stoic, contemplative silence was different and, if she was completely honest with herself, a little unsettling.

       Though not as unsettling as it was to wake up after learning that you had died, she supposed. Besides some lingering scar tissue, anyone not already in the know couldn't have guessed that this was a dead man brought to life — but, upon being presented with Shepard's recovered corpse, much of it had needed to be replaced by organic tissue from matching donors. Where her own body was in biological reverse and stasis after her experimental meddling, Shepard's was... almost entirely new.

       Shepard spoke, and Herta blinked back into the room. She nodded, before humming thoughtfully in response. “ There were a lot of zeros on the offer the Illusive Man made me. I had freedom from financial constraints and certain moral arguments that would have been had in the Alliance around a Frankenstein project like this one. Cerberus wanted you brought back to life and it's hard for me to say no to a challenge like that. ”

Then, a sigh. It broke the spell. Her face hardened again.

"Flint won't be happy about it, but that can't be helped. I'd rather he is alive and pissed off than dead and unconcerned."

Any hint of the Alliance was usually enough to set his blood boiling; and while there were enough rumours to set tongues wagging across all the districts of Omega, Eleanor knew that she had to discount at least three quarters of them.

The truth?

The truth was harder to pin down than an old sailor's yarn spun and spun and spun again until it's frayed. Eleanor only had bits of it. That he had trained as a soldier was impossible to miss. An Alliance background then. His accent made him harder to pin – a hodgepodge of every station of his life, she would assume; but sometimes, that old-timey lilt and tilt of the Inner Planets came through. Did he have a family? She doubted it, but he had someone somewhere; he was prone to disappearing and reappearing as he saw fit, so what else was she supposed to think?

As to who he was when he was at home, when he didn't have to wear the mantle of pirate captain – that was the meat and bone of the man that Eleanor had yet to understand.

       Alive and pissed. Yeah. That was surely going to be the outcome at the end of all of this, but Eleanor was right. It would not have sat easy on Varric's conscience to leave Flint and his crew to such a fate after the distress call they'd received from Nagata. And besides, Madam Herta wasn't the devil, despite the captain's itchy trigger finger where the Alliance was concerned. If she said she was capable of making a difference and asked for nothing tangible in return, then he had no reason not to put his complete faith in her ability.

       It didn't take long for Eleanor's question, surprising as it was, to set Varric back in that all familiar territory of sharing intel. “ Well, as I'm sure you know, everyone has their theories. It makes it hard to trace the tall tales back to the truth. ” His informants had told him all sorts over the years, but Varric had never managed to completely pin down the facts. “ We know the name Captain Flint first started popping up here in Terminus around ten years ago. He became a captain very quickly, from what I'm told. Makes me think the rumours of him once being high up in the Alliance's ranks are true. But as for what made him turn his back on that life... that's anyone's guess. ”

ONE UNBLINKING GLASS EYE trains itself onto its subject, the lens mirroring what appears — at least in rounded miniature reflection — to be nothing more than human. but the camera misses many things. & gabrielle raps claws as lethal as eagle's talons on the arm of the faux leather chair daniel has seated her in. a roadie leans in, affixes a microphone to the lapel of her faithful khaki jacket ; the scent of warm blood in their throat provides a sudden distraction from the rest of the crew bustling around the darkened set. water everywhere & not a drop to drink. after centuries spent avoiding humans in favor of untouched wilderness — what little of it remained — to be so close to so many still overwhelmed gabrielle's senses.

but it simply wouldn't do to make meals of her maker's well-paid entourage. so she sits, drums her nails, & ceases inhaling through her nose until the mortal backs away. another approaches as if to smooth her short-shorn but still unruly flaxen hair with some kind of clear gel, but gabrielle warns them back without words, projecting into their occipital lobe a lurid vision of hand severed from wrist the moment it reaches for her. the blanched & troubled expression the stylist wears as they slink timidly away only makes gabrielle chuckle to herself.

       A soft chuckle escaped Daniel from where he sat in his chair, surveying his newest subject. Where did he fucking begin with this? While wrangling Lestat himself into that same chair was proving to be an insurmountable task at present, surrounded by his entourage and all the bright lights and excess of a mediocre rockstar as he was, something equally as interesting had just dropped into his lap from the sky above. Lestat's mom. Someone who knew Lestat before the blood, the vampirism, before the gregarious ego and Byronic overreaction to his and Louis' book.

       Why she had showed up here on tour with him was anyone's guess — Louis hadn't even mentioned Lestat's mother during their sit down in Dubai — but this was Daniel's first route in, beyond the puff documentary set-pieces, and he was determined to sink his claws into it. No matter the unsettling contrast between his new subject and the human production team that surrounded them both. From the way Gabrielle was eyeing them, Daniel could tell what she was thinking. He'd had to work to curb those exact same thoughts over recent months.

       There was a brief hesitation as Daniel weighed up his starting point, pushing his sunglasses back up over the bridge of his nose. “ Gabrielle: would you mind taking me through some of your own background first? I understand you brought Lestat up in late eighteenth century France and were turned by him later, but before he was in the picture— I can imagine being a member of the aristocracy at that moment in French history was difficult. Even more so for a woman. Could you tell me more about that time in your life? ”

I think it was finally getting something out of him. It was the story. That has been Daniel’s entire life. Getting to the truth.

I don’t think the callousness was as explicit when he was alive. It was there, but it wasn’t so obvious. Vampirism heightens cruelty and so you could argue he was being as direct as he needed to be with Louis, but with Lestat, who he also obviously also finds frustrating, all ethical journalistic responsibilities went out the window.

This fucking guy has been leading him on for weeks with one recording session filled with bullshit after another and finally he’s cracked him.