Chapter Text
Awareness comes in increments.
Hearing first.
The blaring alarm system, the furious hiss of broken wires spitting sparks, showering heat onto tempered metal. Voices, several people speaking. They sounded young, suspiciously so, full of … disgust? The gleeful kind, evoked from watching worms wriggle in the mud, or the glimpse of a rotted corpse on the roadside. Unaware of death, yet caught in the thrall of its decay.
And panic. The helpless kind, calling for someone. A child yelling for their parent to come kill a spider.
Why were there children?
Then came the smells.
She felt her nose twitch, agitated at the confusing combination. Burning, electrical circuits broken, hot metal wafting against her skin, plastic ornamentation catching flame.
Blood, old and stale, the lingering sweet rot of Clem’s corpse where it stuck to the linoleum floors.
Something like lavender and citrus. The itchy, synthetic kind. Had one of the Drosera gotten loose? Myrine remembered some of Bronski’s notes, on how the strange fauna – and that had been a funny conversation in the lab, watching Bronski’s face curdle when the Drosera had turned out to be fauna – on the specimen releasing a pheromone when hunting. Not entirely unpleasant, but distinctly unnatural to the human nose.
There was something else. Something that was making the back of her neck itch with old-new impulses.
She huffed again, throat spasming, possibly from shock. Must have slammed hard against the glass containment unit when the ship crashed, wherever it crashed. Could feel the webs of pain, somewhere along her ribs. Felt her nostrils flex, heard the flustered noises getting louder, sputtering, steady footsteps echoing from somewhere far. Or was that near?
The smell was more blood. New. Fresh.
Was it on her hands? They felt sticky – no, no, that was the gloves. She hadn’t taken them off after she moved Clem. No point. But she was touching something now.
Touching the weight of whatever was in her lap. Small and warm, seeping through her pants, thrumming against her skin. Her fingers absentmindedly stroked over it, palpating the form. The small curve of a skull, a pointed ear that twitched under the stimulus, the grit of fur. The cat?
Myrine hadn’t interacted with Rascal much, just those quiet nights locked in her quarters where she lay battling with a fever that didn’t so much break as it ebbed and flowed, a quiet, warm body tucked against her chest. Felt the steady purr in her chest, her throat, little paws kneading away at her skin. It was the only time she ever came in contact with the sweet boy. A pity, that. He was a companionate thing, docile, eager to be transferred between hands like a limp rag.
But why was he here? Rascal knew better than to come to the lab. Myrine had watched as he sniffed down the hall only to turn and take a longer, more inconvenient path to the mess. Spooked by the specimens, no doubt.
She ran her hand further down his spine, and that's where she started to catch on – slow, she was reacting so slow, had she hit her head? –
The flesh was mangled, soft knobbly vertebrae exposed, ragged skin dimpling under her soft touch with an indelicate squish. The back legs were twisted, as if someone had taken Rascal’s lower half and spatchcocked it.
And yet the bloodsoaked, furry little body in her lap was purring. She could hear it if she focused, ignored the gagging and mechanical rioting all around her. Broken, off-tune, stuttering as if the sound didn’t quite fit anymore. Alien.
Her eyes snapped open, despite the glaring light, a heaving breath rattling her chest at the shock of sensation. Felt the tacky cling of blood on her eyelashes, trying to glue her lids shut.
Ignored the five bodies in the room, their dusty blue utility suits – not Weyland-Yutani, they preferred black, slate, hid all the blood – and looked at the corpse in her lap.
Ocella stared at her from within Rascal’s mangled face, tendrils coiled into the pulped flesh around the socket, a half-hearted attempt at camouflage. It was far too large for a cat’s skull.
“Enjoy your walkabout, Cella?” She rasped, hips shifting as she tried to shimmy up the glass wall she was slumped against. Winced at the throbbing pain it sent through her neck and head. A concussion, at worst. Whiplash at best.
Ocella’s pupils blew out, the ends of a few tendrils tapping the exposed orbital socket in a manner that reminded Myrine of drumming fingers. Stilted, and perhaps a little impatient? One slipped free, stretching long to meet one of Myrine’s fingers, wrapping around her latex-clad fingertip and tugging.
Definitely impatient, but for what?
Ocella tugged Myrine’s hand again, and she moved with the motion despite her confusion, unwilling to test the limits of the eye's strength. Her finger was nothing compared to the hard bones of a spine, the heavy pressure of a skull.
The last time Myrine had been able to touch Ocella had been brief, fleeting. Myrine remembered being so, so gentle, coaxing Ocella free of that human socket, all blood clots and confusion, like a spider luring a fly into its web.
She slowly brushed her fingers over the cusp of Rascal's skull, pausing at the borders of ruined skin. She didn’t have a face shield this time. Nothing to protect her if Ocella decided Myrine would make a better host.
The tugging came again.
“Oh,” Myrine gasped, felt the manic bubble of childish glee seize her by the throat. “Really?”
Gently, she swept her gloved hand over the orbital socket, applying loose pressure onto the bone. Listened to the gush of blood and aqueous humor as Ocella slipped free, fluids smearing over the glove, puddling in her palm.
Like some contented pet, Ocella sat, arms curling around her fingers in a loose hold. Did little else but stare, pupils split into those seven rotating irises, watching everyone else in the room as Myrine made her slow ascent from the floor. Stumbled, just a little, over the pins and needles that erupted in her ankles.
There was an excess of containment units, thankfully. Back-ups in case of incidents like the one that led to Ocella’s temporary freedom. It felt oddly indulgent, lowering her hand into the open container, fingers wiggling gently to loosen those deceptively sinister tendrils. Ocella tightened its hold for a brief moment, a final, strange caress before plopping down on the bottom of the container with a splatter.
“Fascinating,” A voice disrupted Myrine, her hand coming down a little hard on the table at the startle.
It flowed like water over smooth stone, frictionless, almost meditative. Had her turning her head before she could process the movement.
The first thought was that he didn’t belong. He was too precise, clean. The ship was a crumbling, screaming thing, snapped beams, vents leaking coolant, wires writhing like snakes along the walls, and there he stands. Unruffled. Something out of an old photograph, that monochromatic palette of his, a shock of white hair, the uncanny indifference painted across the planes of his face.
“And who,” He started, the words emphasized the way she might’ve done to a specimen that had acted against expectation. “Are you?”
“Myrine Whitlock. Science Officer.” Like a script, waiting for the correct phrase that keyed her response.
Something in his brows eased, an unseen tension surrendering. It brought the slightest bit of light to his features, introducing a louche quality that made her think of dangerous things. The faintest quirk of pleasure that creased his mouth was a distraction, a quiet sadism that thrilled and chilled her in equal measure. She knew that expression. Had worn it when she heard Chibuzo was dead.
Satisfaction.
“Who are you?” Information, information was always good. He certainly wasn’t with Yutani, that Myrine knew.
“Uh,” A younger voice cut in, from the gaggle crowded against the wall furthest from her. “That’s Kirsh, and I’m Tootles— and that’s Nibs, and Curly, and Smee.”
The boy pointed at each of them as he listed names, and he couldn’t have been more than a boy despite the body suggesting some semblance of adulthood. Adults didn’t carry that tone of voice, meandering and overemphasized, pantomiming practiced civility.
“What was that?” The ginger one, Nibs? piped up. A knife clutched in her hand, the hilt half covering her mouth. She was holding it wrong. “The, the thing you held, what was it?”
“Trypanohyncha ocellus, a burrowing parasite.” Myrine murmured, eyes flicking back and forth between the man in front of her and the rest of them. Peeled the gloves off her hand, if only to escape the sensation of warm blood.
“It tried to get Nibs when we got close to you.” The other young man, Smee, piped up.
Which didn’t make sense.
“Perhaps it thought she would be a suitable host, undamaged, free-moving. Unlike the cat.” Myrine mused. It was the only reasonable explanation as to why Ocella would have left her alone, vulnerable, and unaware as she was.
But then, why hadn’t Ocella tried to burrow into her skull when she woke up?
“And you held it,” Kirsh stated, dry, almost disapproving from where he kept her stare. “Named it.”
“It’s more than intelligent enough to warrant a name.”
That seemed to make him pause. Head tilting, like a cat deciding whether or not the mouse was worth mauling. Saw something shutter in his gaze.
“Intelligent?”
“Mm,” Myrine shifted back against the table, a soft, contented groan escaping her lips as she took the weight off of her ribs. “It displayed critical thinking skills and long-term memory. Of all the things we brought back, I would classify it as the most dangerous, excluding the Xenomorph. Who is running loose…”
She trailed off there, gaze snagged elsewhere. Towards the gaping pit she could see out the lab door. Concrete and rebar, the faint blistering of sunlight pouring down a center stairwell. Could hear traffic and the stuttering of aircraft. A city. They’d crashed in a city.
That was bad. For several reasons. Older footage, from failed colonization missions Yutani had provided, came to mind.
Empty hallways transformed into something beyond human invention. Metal subsumed in something thick, viscous, sap or perhaps wax, synthesized in the mouths of adult specimens. Human bodies trapped within, pale and wane, just healthy enough to play brood comb.
A few Xenomorphs had the capacity to restructure entire halls in just a matter of days. When they had eggs and unsuspecting victims to lay them in, faster still.
Myrine lurched as a hand touched her face. Gentle, but firm, ghosting the edge of her jaw and forcing her to look at Kirsh.
“You’re distracted.” He murmured. Reprimand was in the overtone, a sort of displeasure, but beneath it was something else.
Something she couldn’t parse, because she was too distracted by the feel of his skin against hers. There wasn’t the typical texture she associated with a human, too smooth, frictionless, without the force behind it. The give, as well, was too shallow. Hard ridges hiding just beneath, a continual sensation of movement that lacked the rhythm of a heart.
And there, hiding in the shadow of his sleeve, was a port. A hollow socket of circuitry delicately exposed in the crease of his elbow.
A Synth.
“The escaped specimen,” She starts, jaw ticking because his hand wasn’t moving away. He keeps her attention, hemming her in with gentle, barely there fluctuations of pressure. “Needs to be caught. Quickly. Before it finds suitable hosts for the Ovomorphs.”
“Hosts?”
He was being awfully patient with her, even though he could have more than likely downloaded the necessary basics from the ship’s manifest. Or maybe he had? She wasn’t certain. Time always had a way of slipping away from her. Still, he watched her with a strange dispassion that didn’t quite fit the awareness creasing the corners of his eyes, small, perfectly molded crows' feet crinkling with every minute shift in his brow.
“The eggs respond to organic life, heartbeats, heat signatures, and the like. Once attached, there is no point in removing them. It’ll only speed up the host's death. Not that it was a very large window to begin with, considering how fast they grow into adulthood. And if we landed in some sort of residential area—“
She paused there, trying to parse if she assumed right.
“Correct,” His hand twitched, eyebrows raising. Surprise, maybe? Myrine doubted the treatment of Synths had changed all that much from when she was last on Earth. He rewarded her with the smooth glide of his thumb over her cheekbone, old blood flaking away. “The USCSS Maginot landed in New Siam, a Prodigy-owned sector. It is currently in the lower levels of a commercial residence district.”
The noise that left her was somewhere between hysteria and absurd delight. Hysteria, because no matter how malicious she had let herself be, ignoring the ticks long enough for them acquire a host or letting Ocella scramble through the dark like a demented squid, she would have never allowed it for the noxhydria. The ticks were quickly retrieved and easily found, so long as there was blood. Ocella, even if she did find a host, was also relatively easy to recover.
Xenomorphs, distinctly, lacked all bidability. They consumed without remorse, hunted without empathy, bred without ceasing. A capitalist dream, in an exoskeleton that punished all attempts at resistance.
Absurd delight, because she couldn’t change what she was. The scientist who valued discovery, watching death crawl out of its cage and seed its brood into a drink. Saw the precipice of disaster, was invited to look by its flower-eyed architect, and turned away because she wanted to know what happened next. Looked at the dead or almost there bodies of co-workers she had endured for sixty-five years and wondered, if she cut them open, what would she find?
Who had taken home the clips Yutani provided on prior Xenomorph encounters, citing research and behavioral study.
That hadn’t been why. Not really.
Sure, she had watched draconic bodies glide through shadows like water, noted the change of crests, tried to differentiate one drone from the next. Made files on various vocalizations caught by the gritty microphone, tried to assign some form of sanity to each. Hummed in harmony with static screams she had heard a hundred times as she worked to calculate just how much force it took the embryos to burst free from their prison of flesh.
All convenient truths from which she wove her lies. Convinced herself that the spit in her mouth was just nausea, the quivering in her chest, her stomach, anxiety. The trickle down her spine, fear. Speculation giving way to fantasy, that distant, digital, catacomb reality creeping its way across time to impress upon her.
If she didn’t think about it, let the thoughts slip through her fingers like sand, she could tell herself she believed it.
The twinge of a bruise on her inner elbow said otherwise.
“You’re going to want to secure the eggs, if you haven’t yet.” That’s all she could say. All she had to say. She knew he understood. Could see it in the way his eyes went vacant, his sight turned elsewhere. Running scenarios of all possible outcomes.
It reminded her of Morrow, when it had just been the two of them in the mess. Myrine, kept awake by curiosity yet banned from the lab out of concern that her exhaustion would cause her to make a mistake. Morrow, hollow, still grieving a daughter whose death was new to him, despite missing more than a decade of her life. This heightened need for awareness, unwilling to give Morrow the rope he would inevitably try to hang her with, as they talked about the crew.
The only difference that Myrine could see was that Morrow was human, distractible. Kirsh, distinctly, was not. Misdirection was nothing more than a data point to be categorized.
Morrow was also more likely to kill her if he got his hands on her for what she was doing. Which…
She gently lifted her palm to nudge at Kirsh’s wrist, felt the heat of his body as she did. He released her after a moment of consideration. Polite. At least for now.
Ignored the soft, coiled chirp of metal springs and synthetic bones flexing at the sight of her going toward the gun at her hip. Had the off-hand thought that she shouldn’t be able to hear that, not unless she was pressing her face against his subcutaneous padding. Was more focused on running her nail against the electric clip, feeling for that tiny, distended patch of circuits.
It wasn’t something she was supposed to know about, she knew. Chiyo Yutani did not like to leave her tools without a few hidden tricks; she knew the best way to maintain control was to ensure that those who might oppose her were kept distracted, usually by pitting them against each other.
It wasn’t a cruelty her daughter had inherited. Yume had been more like Myrine, disinterested in anything but her research, that strange obsession with old Weyland tech. It’d been through Yume that Myrine understood the possibilities that lay within Morrow's cybernetics – Clem had also been of considerable assistance, the boy never did know when to keep his mouth shut – because of Yume, that Myrine had this chance at all.
If there were anything that Myrine was going to miss, it would be those conversations in the basement of Wey-Yu. Hushed murmurs about blending biology with circuitry, the language of life translated into code. Adaptation, evolution, when was a machine no longer a machine? How Yume seemed to bloom when she discussed the old David models. Waxed poetry over the advanced AI integrated into their systems, meant to anticipate, adapt.
Those days were long gone now. Chiyo had already been ancient when the Maginot left, imperious with the knowledge she would not be forced to see if they succeeded or failed. And Yume? She wouldn't have survived without Chiyo’s long shadow to hide her, Myrine knew that. Yume had been good, the way Myrine could never be.
Being good never saved anyone.
She lifted the small circle, translucent as Morrow's cybernetic sleeve, denying him the passive perception Synths and their skin suits benefited from, up for Kirsh to see.
“The security officer.” He stated, plucking the offending device from her fingers and crushing it between his own.
So he had read the manifest. Good to know.
“He’ll be awake by now.” Gunning for the loose Xenomorph, no doubt. Cargo above crew.
The white-haired synth turned, voice modulated in a way that spoke of expectation. “Smee, go find Slightly and secure the Cargo Hold.”
“Wh- Hey! Why do I have to go?” Smee sounds so young, petulant. Complete with slumped shoulders and the almost-stomp of a foot, striking like metal on metal.
“Now.” Kirsh reiterated, his words coming slow, a pointed enunciation. Myrine had never known a Synth to grow exhausted, and yet here the man stood, carefully articulated hands on his hips. An exhausted father, at first glance. A passive observer, on the second.
“Hey, Science Lady,” The other one, Tootles – good god, whoever was naming these poor children must have something wrong with them, who named anyone Tootles – caught her attention. “Do you know what the thing in the hallway is?”
That told her absolutely nothing. “You’re going to have to be more specific, there are quite a few things onboard.”
“It’s planty, green, hanging from the ceiling. Has uh, a weird–” Here Tootles made a strange motion with his hand, fingers wiggling in front of his mouth. And as if to round it out, spoken like an afterthought, “It also smells funny?”
“ Ah,” She paused, lips curling in bemusement. “That sounds like the Drosera, which isn’t a plant.”
“It’s not?” Tootles – T, she was going to call him T for her own sanity – shifted closer to her, skirting around Kirsh, who stood sentinel above her slouched figure.
“Plants don’t have the capability for locomotion, for one.” She, admittedly, was a little charmed by the wide-eyed enthusiasm. Someone who didn’t know and freely admitted it, who took eager steps to correct that gap, was such a strange novelty. “And it’s carnivorous the way mammals are, capable of processing bone and developed tissue, though it’ll eat other plants if necessary.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Kirsh move, a hand traveling up to the small nodule behind his ear. Watched the soft sub-groupings of his muscles go lax, the neutral displeasure that seemed to be his default expression suddenly more pronounced, overhead lights casting cruel shadows along his jaw.
“Hows it eat?” Curly slumped over T’s shoulders, squishing her synthetic cheek against his jaw and ignoring the way the boy batted at her to ‘get off’.
“It lures its prey in with that scent, which we speculated was reminiscent of some sort of fruit or other edible organism on the planet we retrieved it from. Uses the stamen to snag its prey and hold it there until it expires from strangulation or exhaustion, whichever comes first. Snaps it up into the central well of its leaves, plops down somewhere on the forest floor, and the enzymatic breakdown kicks in.” Myrine’s hands were moving now, despite the protesting of her ribs. Fluttering sweeps mimicking the unique hunting technique of the foreign specimen. There really was nothing exactly like it on earth, though it had some rather remarkable resemblance to the hunting methods of deep-sea fish and worms.
“Awesome,” T murmured, starry-eyed and likely imagining something much more visually interesting than the process truly was.
Absurdly, as she watched the two get into a minor slap fight, backing up towards the still cowering Nibs, Myrine realized she had a concussion. That the fuzziness of her gaze was not in fact her bloodied eyelashes or a quality of the room, but her brain refusing to input certain details. Was that why she was running her mouth?
It’d make sense; she rarely talked this much, but the strange conglomerate of goons that made up her present company and their whipcord minder was encouraging less-than-stellar behavior on her part. Mm, well. In for a penny and all that. Not that they used pennies anymore.
At least it wasn’t anything too serious, the kind of injuries that would risk skin exposure. The kind that would have her squirreling away from medical professionals' hands, the ones who’d have questions she was not interested in answering. Prodigy may have been a Tech and AI company, but Myrine wasn’t quite sold on that. Petrovich might have been a fool, but he was no idiot. What, exactly, were the chances that the Maginot lands in a large, overpopulated city owned by a rival company after their fuel pods were blown?
Wey-Yu had sent the crew major news from Earth when the transmission connected. Outdated and several years behind, but news all the same. Prodigy had come up in conversation several times, especially after that interview. Claiming that the company wasn’t in competition with Wey-Yu, and instead was focused on making the world they lived in ‘better’. Anybody with half a brain could see the lie for what it was. Everyone competed with Weyland-Yutani. That was the point.
And from where Myrine was sitting, she supposed Prodigy hadn’t exactly been lying. Why compete with a company when you could steal from them?
“Enough,” Kirsh cut them all off, slinking closer than any human would, encroaching on personal space as if it were something that never occurred to him. It was utterly distracting.
Never, in all her years, had she enjoyed others slipping into her space. Not even as a little girl, snarling and spitting when some nattering auntie wanted to pinch her cheeks, self-assured in their welcome because what was the opinion of a child compared to an adult's temporary pleasure? Hadn’t liked it as she worked her way through college, stooping stilted into her father’s hands, craving his closeness but going rigid under his touch. She sure as hell didn’t care for the casual closeness of the Maginot’s crew.
Hated the flirtatious over-familiarity of Bronski and Clem, those early days, when she was still a stranger. Sneered when Rahim swung too close, drunkenly fumbling for stability on his bad days, reeking of cigarette smoke and sweat. Loathed Teng with every cell in her body, the way he made her feel disgusting with just a look, the lecherous desire evident in every shameless stare. She didn’t know how he had died, in the crash. She hoped it was slow.
But Kirsh slotted himself into her orbit as though he belonged there. An obelisk of truth, shining and white. What was the point of questioning the why, when he simply was.
It settled some quiet part of her. The concussed part, grasping for solid ground and finding him. He kept reminding Myrine of her lab at home, shiny and clinical, everything in its right place. Her palace of logic and fact, condensed into a single form.
It made the rest of her want to scream.
“Dr. Whitlock,” His tone made her shudder. When was the last time anyone said it like that, that little tinge of respect, of understanding?“The CEO of Prodigy has declared that the Maginot and all things aboard it are now under Prodigy jurisdiction and thus his ownership. You will be taken with us, with the expectation that you continue your research.”
How fun.
She scrubbed a hand slowly down her face, head lolling to the side as she looked at him. Couldn’t be any worse than her previous employer, she supposed. “Not like I’m going anywhere.”
“Good.”
The children were chatty. Magnanimously, Myrine had decided it was interesting. For now. She reserved the right to change her mind; children were notoriously exhausting. And finicky.
Nibs still wouldn’t come closer to Myrine, despite Curly and T bumping in and out of her space like a pair of bumbling fools, eager for direction and every scrap of praise she had to offer. Could see it in the way Curly tilted her head up, smug, when she figured out the specimen containment without Myrine's direct input. The way T sidled closer like an over-enthusiastic puppy when she answered his questions, the why, why, whys most adults found exhausting. Most adults clearly had never met a scientist.
Instead, Nibs kept staring, wide-eyed like a dead fish at Ocella. Flinched, in that synthetic body of hers, like something made of flesh and blood was a threat. Like Ocella was the proverbial monster that had crawled out from under the bed, intent to ruin Nibs fragile existence.
And it was fragile. Myrine had sat in enough shrink's offices to know that. She wasn’t a big fan of psychologists, really, not when they were a marked waste of her time. She was more than aware of what was wrong with her, could trace the paths of her history, and slam pins at every point something went wrong. Could be overly dramatic about it, if she so pleased.
Every session she ever had was lip service after all. It didn’t matter what psychologists put in her file to hem her in; the result was always the same. Myrine would be cut loose back into the pool of company scientists, a white coat in a sea of hundreds, her difference marked only in efficiency and a greater familiarity with the name Yutani.
That didn’t mean that Myrine came away with nothing. Was helped by the fact that, at their most basic, humans were just impulses and meat. Animals. She knew animals.
Knew that the over-exaggeration of Nibs' sclera looked like a dog's whale eye in the face of discomfort. The persistent nibbling on her lips, the handle of her knife, her fingertips, said something like anxiety. Concentration. The way her gaze kept shifting ever so slightly from Myrine's hand to Ocella, then back again. The kind of thing no self-respecting Synth would ever be caught doing.
It was an interesting project, she could admit. Transferring the human mind into a machine. She also couldn’t help but sigh at the short-sightedness of it all. Who let a prototype walk out of a lab into such a high-stress scenario?
There was also a matter of growth. The hybrids, as they called themselves, were young. Not children, or innocent, not anymore. That was lost the moment they became ill, death encroaching on the blissful ignorance of youth, chances for growth stunted by a rotating door of medical professionals and sterile white walls. Lost when they were set loose in an active crash site, dead bodies draped like set dressing over every available space, not quite experienced enough to understand the consequences of what they considered to be an exciting outing.
And that’s really what it came down to, wasn’t it? Experience, education.
As she watched T slam his head on the low doorway of the lab, still unused to all that leg, Myrine got the distinct feeling that these hybrids weren’t taught much at all. Not how they should be. All that strength, paired with the fragile, reactive, emotional mental state of sick children, finally being allowed to see the world? Hah, she didn’t want to be in the room when that exploded.
But where did Kirsh play into this? He wasn’t a caretaker, not by design. He couldn’t be. Patient, certainly, a wall to rail against, to exhaust yourself at the foot of. Steady, but not nurturing. Not intentionally, she didn’t think. Or maybe he was, it just wasn’t something she was supposed to see.
He certainly knew the meaning of discretion, unlike his youthful charges.
Absentmindedly, she rang her fingers over Ocella’s cage. Traced swirls in a line of sweat and tacky skin, listened to the thrum of Ocella following along, little patters like feet on pavement.
“Why doesn’t it scare you?” Nibs abruptly cut through the murmur of the lab, her voice soft, wavering.
“Ocella?” Myrine tapped the glass gently, just to clarify. There was plenty about this that could be construed as frightening to a child. Like the corpse in the glass room behind her, brain matter and blood devoured by bloated monstrosities that Myrine had T and Curly carefully tuck into individual containment units.
“Mhm.” Nibs jerkily shook her head, slowly uncoiling from her position on the wall.
Why wasn’t Myrine afraid? Fear was a constant; it existed in all things, even when there was no name for it. Nobody liked endings. The notion that they could just stop. Wasn’t that why some clung to faith? They needed something to justify their absence. To make life, miserable and beautiful and so full of fear, worth it. They wanted to have meaning.
“Because I find it beautiful,” Myrine said beautiful, but she meant new, unique. Different from when she called Xenomorphs beautiful, hard-shelled, and sinuous. They held the beauty of a natural disaster, an inevitable calamity. “Most people try to destroy things that frighten them, but I’ve always wanted to understand the things that scared me. No matter how horrified or disgusted it might make me, I don’t see the point in killing something for being alive. Change is inevitable, no matter how much it scares people. Besides, fear is…”
Myrine trailed off, lips pursed. Fear was exciting, reminded her she was alive, and sometimes… sometimes it became more. Something had gone wrong with her, along the way, wires crossing. Nightmares that drove her from rest often left her hungry. The kind that only skin on skin could satiate. Panic became adrenaline became desire. Addictive.
Not the kind of things explained to a child. Or anyone, really. Some things were best kept to oneself.
“Fear is for animals.” Kirsh’s voice oozed from the walls, a marching echo of footsteps as military-clad men crept out of his shadow with body bags and rolling carts for the specimens.
“What does that make you, then?”
It was strange, watching the cultivated humanity bleed out of Kirsh, quiet, indifferent civility sliding loose like a snake's skin. Watched the inhuman arch of his neck as his head tilted, bird-like, the bright white points of his hair reminiscent of bristling feathers.
“Elaborate.” His tone was genial, but they both knew it wasn’t a request.
“Sure, humans are animals,” Myrine couldn’t argue against that point, not when she agreed. Humanity might have evolved a consciousness, but that didn’t detract from their reactivity, the desire for neutral stability, living and loving and fucking all for the betterment of the individual. For prolonged survival. “But we’re intellectual animals, who made synthetic life in our image, a desperate flight from death. If fear is for animals, what does that make you, born from humanity's desperate attempts to forestall the inevitable?”
Kirsh’s presence only got sharper, his spine straighter, the more she talked. His gaze didn’t waver, not like a human did, didn’t wobble or shift to consider the thought. And then he smiled—perfect, unblemished teeth shining in the light, a little rictus in its shape. Utterly inhuman, in the way it didn’t move his features. Mimicked joy stripped of human markers, outside of the lift of those shadowed brows. A baring of teeth.
Reflexively, Myrine mirrored the motion. Felt her mouth curl in half-joy, the scrunch of her nose. The joy of cutting sharp edges against someone who wanted the challenge had been something she had been deprived of for a long time. Morrow had never liked making arguments for the sake of arguing, thought them exhausting, and Myrine hardly wanted to talk with her fellow science officers. They were too prone to getting their feelings hurt.
Realizing, as she watched the dark of his pupils blow, perfectly crafted lenses swallowing every careful scrap of light, that her teeth were exposed. The sharp, bright fang points of her canines, the jagged crests of her molars just barely peaking past the pale seal of her lips. There was no fooling him.
Synthetic memory didn’t stutter.
“A unique thought process,” Kirsh murmured, voice buzzing strangely to her ears, like the whine of TV static. He righted himself in a series of computed impulses and minute decision-making, rearranging that wild, inorganic expression into something human.
Walked slowly towards Myrine, steps even, measured. Extended a hand, fine boned, perfectly sculpted, toward her. She raised a brow at the offer. It seemed an excessive act, coming from him. Strange. He caught the hesitancy.
“Transport leaves in ten minutes, and you are currently suffering from a minor concussion and two fractured ribs. It has already slowed your expected range of movement by 10%.” He certainly had a way of making an injury sound like an inconvenience, and yet there he was, hand still open. Even twitched his fingers in an expression that seemed almost playful.
Myrine watched the other assorted men begin to file out, corpses heaved between them in black bags. Specimens wheeled in new-old containers, the vomitous flies, ticks expelling blood into pools at the bottom of their tanks, and Ocella. Patient and ever-watchful. Tiny tendrils flicking in her direction. A menagerie of horrors, slowly marching outside of her reach, if she didn’t act quickly.
She took his hand. Couldn’t help the soft brush of her thumb against the soft, pliable skin of his wrist, a mimic of his earlier touch. Felt the artificial warmth of him – Synth’s didn’t run hot unless they chose to, or something had gone wrong – the unnatural stillness. Inert, explosive potential. A predator in a very dangerous skin.
Let herself lean into his hold, unmoved by her weight, hydraulics holding her the way she might a kitten. Tried to slide off the edge of the table, unwilling to lose what few scraps of control she had by standing on her own two feet.
Her body disagreed.
The moment she centered her weight back on her feet, her vision blurred. A blinding spark of blue pain writhed in her chest, clawed at her lungs in such a way she faltered, tipping backwards to attempt to brace on the hard edge of the hard steel counter to break her fall.
Her shoulder braced against a hard chest instead, jostling her hard enough to hiss in pain. Kirsh had stepped in between her and the possibility of lost progress, jaw creeping into her line of sight as he stood behind her. She felt his other hand ghost down her spine, knuckles catching on loose fabric, and push. Forced her forward a few more steps so he could properly support her.
His breath ghosted along her ear, disturbing the frazzled strands of dark hair. She could feel the steady rhythm of perfected machinery replicating the beat of a human heart against her back, the soft, barely there thrum of cooling fans rising and falling like lungs.
It shouldn't have been comforting.