Chapter Text
Kristen had always loved to look at the stars. To literally be able to see into the past of light from suns so far away that the light she saw was from stars already long passed. Yes, she had always loved to look at the stars, but she never meant to look at them this closely.
She had been minding her own business, walking to the sandwich shop on the corner that had the little cute bear mascot, when she was snatched up. It didn’t happen like in the movies, with a beam of light that defied logic and lifted her up and carried her off. No, it was much more difficult than that. The aliens had shot a little fluffy purple dart at her then threw her down with a launched net. She honestly felt nothing from the little dart, but she was knocked off balance by the net and hit her head on the way down.
She woke up slowly to a cacophony of noise and too-bright white lights. Kristen was pretty sure that she had a concussion, because she kind of felt like she had a particularly bad hangover… not that she knew what that felt like or anything… Rather than try to open her eyes and make her head pounding worse, she moved her arms around and focused on what she could feel. What she could feel wasn’t great.
She was lying down on some kind of cold metal flooring, and there were two walls beside her that she figured meant she was in some kind of corner. Her head was right up against one wall and she could feel her feet hit the opposite wall with her knees not quite fully extended. This was a pretty small room then, because she wasn’t very tall. After her headache calmed down a bit more, Kristen opened her eyes cautiously. She wasn’t prepared for what she saw.
She was in a little metal box that was barely a room, with some kind of clearish window in the side opposite of her with a door to one side of the window. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a cell. No, that wasn’t quite right, a cell would be even just slightly better, because this room looked like a cage . Her memories of what had happened were fuzzy, but she wasn’t sure just what she could have done to be put in a literal cage . And then the answer stepped right up to the window.
Kristen could feel her headache coming back full force, because she couldn’t be seeing this. It had to be some kind of hallucination, because aliens weren’t real. Or at least, they hadn’t made contact with humans before- before now anyways, because Kristen is pretty sure this counts as ‘contact’. They may not have pulled her into a ship like the classic alien stereotype, but they certainly looked like the regular alien stereotype pushed by pop culture. They had scaly looking pale gray skin, that could actually just all be scales now that she was looking closer. This creature had huge eyes that were inky black and took up a good third of the thing’s face, and they were staring directly at her.
She looked directly into this thing’s eyes and it flinched back like it hadn’t been expecting that. Actually, the strange foggy window might have been supposed to be a one-way window, that she had casually just looked through and scared it. Good. It should be scared for thinking it could put her in a cage and get away with it. Not that she could really read alien body language, but it seemed a bit scared of her as it moved to a panel that she hadn’t noticed before and started messing around with it.
Then the room started to flood with some kind of white smoke type thing. She tried as hard as she could to not breathe it in because she was sure that it was not a good thing, but eventually her burning lungs convinced her to try and live and she swallowed down air that vaguely tasted like cotton candy. At first nothing happened, so she assumed that she would be fine, and tried to move back to her corner only to fall over entirely. She didn’t feel tired or anything, but she definitely couldn’t move- so it was some kind of paralytic gas. That wasn’t terrifying at all or anything.
A few moments after she fell over, the door to the room opened and she watched as two more of those gray scaled aliens dragged another person, another human into the room. They were definitely struggling to drag the person and just decided that barely entering the room was good enough and dropped them into the room, their head dully thudding on the metal flooring. Kristen winced, she knew that was gunna hurt for a while. The aliens left and having nothing better to do, Kristen observed her new cage -mate while trying to occasionally twitch her fingers to see when the paralytic would wear off.
The more Kristen looked at her new roommate, the more enraged she felt. They were tall, with a pretty golden mop on their head, dressed in a red and white t-shirt and cargo pants. Most noticeably about them though, was how young they clearly were. This poor kid couldn’t be more than maybe 16 and the thought enraged her. Not only had these things taken her, they had taken some poor kid as well, and who even knows how many others? Her fingers took that chance to start responding to her desperate movements.
She got to the point where she could slightly curl her hand when the poor kid started to wake up. She could see his confusion of waking up in such an unfamiliar place with an aching head. Kristen definitely knew what that felt like, having done the same not even an hour ago. She let the kid wake up a bit more before she started to talk to him.
“You alright there kiddo?” She gently spoke with a dry slightly cracking throat. The kid whipped around to face her with wide blue eyes, that relaxed slightly upon seeing her.
“Am I alright? Why the f*** would I be okay after being kidnapped by f****** aliens?!” Then he seemed to take a closer look at her and spoke again, “Why are you just lying there?”
Kristen sighed. He definitely sounded young - and British but that part wasn’t really important at that point - and she spoke up, “They got me with some kind of cotton candy tasting gas. I can’t move right now, although it is going away, I can sorta move my hands now.”
They both paused for a second just observing the other before she spoke up again, “My name’s Kristen, what’s yours kiddo?”
He looked offended when she said kiddo and spoke up indignantly, “I’m the biggest of big men, I’m not some ‘kiddo’! And the name’s Tommy!” Kristen could see that while he spoke confidently and loud that his voice was pitched slightly up and his hands trembled slightly. Her heart broke for him, and she vowed the first thing she was going to do when she could move again was wrap Tommy up in the biggest hug that she could. Their situation was literally world-shakingly bad, and she had a feeling that it was going to get worse before it was going to get any better. And she was very correct.
They spent a very long time aboard that ship. The lights never went off, but her and Tommy were given some kind of ration bar twice a ‘day’ or so they could figure. The ration bar was hard as a rock and tasted like slightly moldy cardboard. It wasn’t really enough for either of them to keep their body weight and Tommy became like a stick figure very quickly. She lasted alright a little longer, but being almost literally starved was quick to enact its vengeance. It didn’t help whatsoever that these monsters took them each day into a room, drew a vial of blood, then made them run until they couldn’t anymore, and then took another vial of blood before tossing them back in that accursed cage .
In those walks to and from the ‘tests’ they had to endure, they were led down a long hallway filled with others, and they all looked much worse off than her and Tommy did. Quite a few of them had missing limbs, many were violently sick or clearly dying. They were packed in like sardines with ten to fifteen to a cell. The worst was the bodies though. The aliens left a few of the dead where they breathed their last and seemed content to let them decay where they were. It was in these walks that she realized what part of the test Tommy and her were there for.
They were the ‘control’ group. They were given much better treatment and more food and water, and their cage was even kept at a more comfortable temperature than the others. All the other humans that were alive enough to care also realized this, and she could feel the burning glares on her back as they frog marched her to and from her rather mild ‘tests’. The aliens did have some sense and made sure to keep just her and Tommy together because they seemed to know that their control samples would be attacked for their ‘preferential’ treatment.
Over the long weeks on this cursed ship, Tommy and her had grown closer. Honestly, if they ever got back to Earth, she was going to adopt Tommy, and laws or regulations, or country boundaries be damned. She would give Tommy the world if she could. He was such a strong kid, and focusing on each other had helped both of them stay sane in this hell. She told him one ‘night’ that if he wanted to, he could call her ‘mom’ because she already considered him her son. That ‘night’ they just sat and sobbed with dry eyes, not having enough water to produce tears.
It was that night that she promised Tommy that she would get them out of there, no matter what. That they would die far from that cage and they would be free again. After roughly four months - as far as they could tell - it was finally time to show these aliens just what they invited onto their ship.