What does a monster feel?
It is among one of the only and most simple answers he could be asked, yet somehow the most difficult. Contrary to the cacophony of colors and sounds he'd heard back when ( how long ago? ) his mind was little more than a muddled mess of a husk, there wasn't anything to think about. To feel. There was something nothing, Harbinger and nothing, the hive mind and nothing. His very body, from toes to horns to the inner workings of the fragmented pieces of his mind feel like the equivalent of a complex gadget in the hands of a child. How strange it is to remember just how old he really is. Even thinking of all that has passed, all the time, it feels even more surreal than anything else.
It certainly doesn't feel like only yesterday was fifty thousand years ago. The only thing that makes sense is that the amount of time that has passed feels accurate for all that he's waited. It feels like it's been an eternity since he's even spoke, and he supposes it has. What's the difference between eternity and a thousand lifetimes, after all?
Everything feels blurred and broken. Everything feels in the wrong place; he feels like a puzzle with pieces forced to fit where they should not. He remembers only the very foundations of some identity he used to have, what must be half a name in the deepest refines of his memory ( a half-choked shout fading too soon for him to hear it completely ) and the species to match it. Prothean--- as if it should mean anything to him other than it being what he used to be, the last species to be completely and utterly erased from the galaxy from the Reapers.
That much he knew. If he didn't, he would have had someone else to tell him. The man he met yesterday who called himself the same thing--- Prothean. The last one, it was said. Obviously, he doesn't count. Even the day after they had met as he stands in front of the doors that lead to the ship of the Normandy, it still feels as if he's struggling to create something of an emotional reaction to it all, as if even though he was calling thing, it, creature, even as he felt what must have been turmoil and fear and confusion, he has a hard time feeling anything if it isn't the anger in the back of his mind. They spoke, but it was brief. How much conversation can you have, after all, when you barely remember anything to begin with?
So, what does a monster feel?
Confused, mostly. No higher intentions, no ties holding him to a singular, violent goal. All he wants are answers he can make sense of.
As he's escorted into the ship, he's moved to the lowest confines in a back room, one where he may be contained, one where he is alone without others and without the chance to maim or to hurt like his kind is so well known for. He had no intentions of it anyway.
The Collector glances back over his own shoulder as the door hisses shut and clicks with a lock, only looking away once he approaches a basin of water, bowing over it and peering at his own reflection.
A chitin-covered mask stares back at him with green-lit lights illuminated against the water’s calm surface, as stoic and as featureless as ever.
