... They definitely saw humanity and anything like humanity as weak. And every other shitty thing you could be... Reckless. Disgusting. Illogical. You name it.

[He presses his hand to his head, pressing his thumb into the soft indent of his temple hard. The headache has been off and on for the last few hours, but despite the panic he'd initially felt, the doctors and Sabriel had promised him the precursors really were completely gone and that he was stable and himself. Now the creatures had just left an empty space, an area of his brain that was still trying to cope with how they'd gnawed on it, scraped it through the mud.

He's really lucky he's not a vegetable right now, he knows.

Really, really lucky.]

They say drifting — sharing minds, I mean — that it's a two-way street, back home. But it was only two-way for them if they allowed it. Sometimes I could feel it, though, when they let it bleed through. I could feel their hatred for... for humanity, and by the end of it, before they took over completely... it was like I could feel that spite seeping out of me.

Sometimes I'd wake up and felt as if everyone on this station wanted me gone.

[He scrubs his face with his hands.]

They kept changing me. Things about me. Made me stop loving things I loved. Made me hate when people touched me. And I really believed all those thoughts were my own. I thought something was so fucking wrong with me.

I guess something was. Just... not what I thought.

[What a relief to know it was never him at all.]