Chapter Text
In your room
Where time stands still
Or moves at your will
Will you let the morning come soon
Or will you leave me lying here
Cronus: err severely.
The cool night air feels good on your fins as you sneak out the fire exit of the Beforan Embassy. Nights on this planet are weirdly bright, even though they only have the one tiny white moon—light pollution, apparently, courtesy of a diurnal race who hasn’t gotten over a superstitious fear of dark-dwelling predators. The garish orange smear of Albany on the horizon is almost too bright to even look at.
No one’s around this area of the compound, thank fuck. You find a low bench by the boundary wall, brush the dew off the slats, and settle down to contemplate your prize. The three goldfish left in the bowl swim in aimless circles, staring stupidly back at you with enormous goggly-eyes. Some kind of goodwill gift you got from the natives, though it took like half an hour to clean the musky ape-smell off the bowl and out of your office enough that you could even think about eating any. Also, there used to be twelve. Did the unappreciative pack of midblood incompetents you are forced to call your team appreciate your generosity in letting them all have one? Like shell they did.
You rummage around in the bowl till you snag one glossy little fish by its lacy tail, then flip it into your mouth and enjoy the crunch. They really are pretty, you think. And they taste great. This planet isn’t a complete shithole. If only it didn’t have so many humans all over the place.
As if to spite you, a human chooses this exact moment of much-needed peace and tranquility to climb over the wall. You munch another goldfish and watch the ape squirm down a rope, kind of creeped out. Their shoulders just... hinge differently. It’s not right. At least most of the natives you have to interface with in the course of your assignment have the good taste to move slowly and not climb up and down things, which you suppose must be kind of hard for them considering how close humans are temporally to their tree-dwelling origin, but this one is just making its way down the wall like gravity isn’t even a thing.
When it touches down you can see dark lips, a slight curve of the chest-- the milk glands their females bear instead of proper vestigial thorax padding, and her hair is styled a bright anime pink. By all visible markers, you’ve got an alien girl on your paws.
“Hey, miss,” you call out. Never let it be said you’re not a gentleman, even to pushy broads with no conception of a guy’s right to some quiet time. “Are you lost? Because I’d like to inform you this isn’t somewhere humans should be.”
The female startles all over, and her eyes are as wide as a human’s can get. They don’t see well even the most negligible darkness, which is kind of hilarious. You wave, hoping she can at least detect motion, and she does fixate with her head turned in your direction. Oh, ick, it’s one of the translucent humans. You can see the haze of red capillaries just right there under her ghost-pale epidermis. Gross.
“I mean, I’d be more than happy to help you back to... wherever it is you need to get,” you continue, heroically. “It wouldn’t do for a pretty girl like yourself to be just going around anywhere unescorted, you know?”
“Yeah,” she says, loudly. “Yeah, okay, Mister Troll, thank you for your offer. Could you please come here? I can’t see.”
You finish off the third fish really fast, then sigh just loud enough to let her know this is kind of an imposition but not such a big imposition you’re actually mad at her or anything. It’s not her fault she’s from a species who needs like an entire sun’s worth of light to not go blundering around and climbing over perfectly obvious things like enormous twelve-foot walls.
“Seriously, miss,” you say, going over close enough that she can hopefully see you, “The actual entrance is on the whole other side of the compound. There’s a reason we installed a gate in the wall.”
“And like, does the reason for the wall itself have anything to do with anti-troll activists?” she asks, and she takes your arm.
“Uh,” you say, trying to hold your breath.
“Because I got some bad news for you, Mister Sushi.” Then she says “Lol,” in a very unpleasant tone of derision and you feel, even more unpleasantly, something round and hard shoved against your back, just under the start of a gill covert.
“Is that a gun,” you enquire. Suddenly the rank human smell isn’t your biggest priority. Air is a priority, and you’re not getting enough of it.
“Yep,” she says.
“Humans aren’t allowed to have guns!”
“Yup.”
“...Are you going to shoot me?” you ask.
“If you keep being such a fuckin’ bitch, yeah.”
“I could scream,” you say. You could totally scream, in fact, you are completely certain that any minute you are actually going to scream.
“Go for it, big boy,” she says, and does something that makes the gun go click and kind of vibrate against your back. “D’you guys have lungs that still work with extra holes in ‘em?”
“Oh my god no, babe, don’t shoot, I won’t scream, don’t give me any holes,” you babble. “I’ll be good, just let me go!”
“Huh,” the girl says. “Fuck. Hang on.”
She kind of awkwardly hauls you back to the wall where the rope hangs.
“Jane!” she calls over. “What do I do with this troll now?”
“There was actually a troll there?” someone else calls back.
“Oh my god, I thought she was just joshing with us,” someone else mutters.
“Hang on, Rox, I’m coming over,” yet another person calls and how many humans are there, blundering around and assaulting people? Also why hasn’t anyone come out to find you yet? Right, because you made sure no one would know you were gone so you could get some private time to enjoy the remainder of your Earth fish and now you are probably going to throw up anyway and everything will have been utterly for nothing.
You are starting to get really scared.
Another pallid human comes over the wall, sliding easily down the rope. This one's bigger than the first one, orange hair sticking up in a spiky crest, and his bare, speckled arms are corded with muscle. When he lands you realize he's almost as tall as you are.
“Fuck,” he says, looking you up and down in exactly the kind of way to add insult to a guy’s injury. “Roxy, you sure know how to ball up a plan and slam dunk the shit out of it. How do you expect to pull off the heist if we’re babysitting this asshole?”
“Let’s kidnap him!” one of the guys on the other side of the wall calls.
“Jake!” hisses the other person on the other side of the wall. “What in blazes!”
The guy in front of you looks at the girl behind you. “Hmm,” he says.
“Oh my god,” she says. “Let’s totally kidnap him.”
“Roxy,” the guy says, and then she’s spinning you around by your elbow and the last thing you see for a while is her arm drawing back, shifting to hold her gun like a club.
Jane: do damage control.
“This is the stupidest thing we have ever let Jake talk us into,” you say, “and I was under the impression that the thing with the Colombian drug lords was our personal nadir!”
“Wow, harsh,” Dirk drawls as he finishes tying the troll's ankles together, but at this angle you can see his eyes behind the shades and he’s just as freaked as you. He clips off the last bit of cord and you hold the alien’s limp, rubbery-skinned hands up to be tied next. He feels more like a dolphin than anything, slick and dense. He has a really astonishing amount of gold rings on, and it’s making you nervous—did you kidnap someone important? Most of the trolls you’ve seen on TV don’t wear this much gold. Dirk strips the rings off once he's secured the troll's wrists behind his back, and you dump him on the van’s flooring.
“Should we tie his ankles to his wrists?” Dirk wonders.
“I don’t think they bend like that,” you say, tugging on the body. “God, this is the dumbest frickin’ thing we’ve ever done.”
“This is the coolest thing we have EVER DONE,” Jake hoots from the front seat. “Independence Day, here we come!” The van skews back and forth as he wobbles the wheel, and Roxy cackles, shooting finger-pistols at the van ceiling.
“This was supposed to be Independence Day,” Dirk grits out. “Find alien computer, bring D. Strider alien computer, figure out alien computer, question mark, question mark, question mark, fuckin’ profit, and yet it seems that we are entirely missing an alien computer and extravagantly surplus one alien.”
“That’s jolly well what happened in Independence Day though,” Jake argues.
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it was—”
“Jake, you were high as balls when we watched Independence Day,” Roxy interrupts. “Don’t even front. You were so high you tried to eat the dvd afterwards.”
Jake slews the van back and forth petulantly, and you grit your teeth and count slowly backwards from ten.
Then you announce: “We are going to all decide, reasonably and politely, what we are going to do with this alien we just hijacked, or so help me the title of our movie will be three unhelpful young adults found with their heads ripped off in a van in upstate New York my goodness how could such a thing have happened?”
“I don’t think that would fit on the dvd case,” Roxy says thoughtfully, and you smack the back of her head. “Ow! Frick! I dunno, maybe we can ransom him?”
“He’s seen our faces,” Dirk says.
“It’s night, though!” Jake says.
“They’re nocturnal,” Dirk growls. “And he’s heard some of our names, too. We can’t just let him go.”
There’s an unhappy silence.
“We could just shoot him,” Roxy finally suggests. “I mean, like, I was gonna. We could just, like. Bang. Pow.”
There’s a longer, even more unhappy silence. He’s an alien, he’s the enemy, lying there with that smarmy fang-filled ‘oh we’re just here to help’ grin knocked right off his face but he’s still... too much of a person. And you guys are getting desperate but you’re not sure if you’re that desperate. Not yet.
“Do we really want to be the guys who cross that line,” you finally say.
“They crossed that line,” Roxy says angrily. “They crossed that line like that line was a nun who just saw a lesbian shit on the fucking altar, Jane.”
“So shoot him,” you snap, and haul the troll’s head up by one crooked horn. “Go ahead, Roxy, if you want to be so gosh-darn hardboiled, you get to be the one to pull the trigger!”
“Fine!” she says, fumbling her pistol up. “Maybe I will!”
“So do it!”
“I’m going to!”
“Ladies,” Jake says nervously, “can I at least pull over—”
The troll moans. You squeak “Ohmygod!” and drop him with a meaty thunk.
“Fuuuuuuck,” he slurs, curling up. Dirk lashes out and pins him to the floor of the van by his neck. “You can’t do this to me!” the alien chokes out regardless. His face is sheened with a weird, almost iridescent purple as he hacks and thrashes.
Dirk throws you a panicky look. Whatever script he’s going off of in his head just caught fire, and you need to do the talking now.
“Stop struggling,” you command. “You’re just going to make things worse.”
“Get your thug off me, you hairy bulge-sucking dirt-ape bitch,” the troll spits out. “Cut all this nonsense out right this instant or you are going to be in so much trouble your twisted bones’ll be dust by the time they’re done culling you.”
“I’m gonna shoot him,” Roxy announces, and the troll just thrashes harder.
“No one’s shooting anyone!” Jake yelps. “I’m still driving!”
“I’m important!” the troll wails, which does nothing for your nerves. “You can’t do this to me!”
“Pull over,” Roxy snaps.
“Roxy, shut the fuck up,” you say. “Put that thing away.”
“Wow! Rude!” she pouts, but she holsters the gun.
"Let me go," the troll insists again, and that's it, you've had it, you just lash out and kick him in the ribs before you can stop yourself.
"SHUT UP," you yell at him, and he wheezes for breath, making an awful choking sound. You're shaking. You stuff your hands in your lap to try to make them stop doing that. "Jake is right. No shooting in the van. But that doesn't mean you can make trouble, buster! We can make you plenty sorry without putting any bullets in you."
The kicking seems to have made him take you seriously, at least. He lies still, even when Dirk lets go of him and sits back enough to watch him suspiciously. The van rattles on in the dark, your headlights the only ones on the road.
Dirk clears his throat eventually. "Engineering to pilot, what's our course?"
Jake laughs, and you think even he sounds a little less than perfectly at ease. "This is your captain speaking, and we are on course to land at Ms.—at Roxy's old place."
"You don't even know what the shell you're doing," the troll says, which might be true but is aggravating as anything to hear. "You're just—you're just making it up!"
"If I can't shoot him, can I at least gag him?" Roxy asks.
"Yes," you say without hesitation. You'll probably all feel less of a need to shoot him if he just stops talking.
Cronus: get nowhere.
It feels like it takes forever of being left to lie like a sack of grubmeal on the hard, cold, rattling surface of the primitive human transportation device before it slows and stops. Your jaw aches, and you spent most of the last chunk of eternity trying and failing not to drool on yourself, and the thick gamey fug of humans and automotive petrochemicals feels like it’s sunk into your brain. You’re thoroughly sick. The tiny brown girl that’s been doing most of the deciding gets you by the shoulders and the big pink guy with the shades gets you around the waist, and when they open the doors and your feet touch dirt you should be thinking about non-confrontational conflict resolution and you should be thinking about how primitives are as much victims of their violent cultures as the trolls that happen to be witness to said violence but actually you think fuck this and start thrashing.
“Shit,” the guy huffs, and you clock the girl in the jaw with the side of one of your horns. Her grip loosens a little and you kick out, shouting incoherently, and they drop you.
You’d forgotten that you wouldn’t be able to actually go anywhere with tied-up ankles.
“Okay,” the guy says, and his voice has none of the ripsaw harmonics of a growl but you’re pretty sure you’re listening to mad as hell. “Now I am going to wreck your fucking shit.”
You growl as threateningly as you can around the stupid gag. He kicks you in the face, practically where they’d rammed you earlier to knock you out. You don’t go under again but the world goes wobbly and rainbow with pain, and when the guy kicks you over and over in the sides and back you just lie there, stunned.
“Dirk—Dirk, okay, enough! Enough! You’re going to kill him, enough.”
You realize, dimly, that you’re making a really humiliating amount of pain-related noise for someone of your social station and general cool guy attributes. You swallow wetly and taste blood and dirt. Your face just throbs, all over, you’ll never not be in pain at this rate. You’ll never feel the comforting touch of a moirail’s hand. You are ruined. Your life is basically over.
"Not quite as tough as he thinks he is," says the other male, the driver, coming over to stand above you. Now that you can see him you can tell he's nearly the same shade of brown as the girl you just headbutted, and you wonder if they're the same bloodhue, or whatever the human word is, and whether that means he's going to feel honor-bound to kick you in the head too.
"Guys, come on!" Roxy says, before you can find out. "We need to get Crankypants the Troll inside."
You squeeze your eyes shut. The injuries to your dignity are the worst.
Roxy: redecorate.
You and Jake strip the downstairs bathroom as fast as you can, while Dirk and Jane have their own prim and proper version of a screaming freak-out in the hallway, which involves holding hands very tightly and using words like ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ while trying not to cry. You swear, no one would get anything done around here if it weren’t for you. And Jake, you guess. Kid has ideas almost as fine as his flawless posterior sometimes. You guys actual-facts kidnapped a real alien. Aliennapped. Bugnapped? Score one for the revolution!
Everything in the room but the fixtures has to go, though. You’ve got the shower curtain down and most of the fancy soaps and bottles and stuff thrown inside, and Jake’s fussing awkwardly with the mirror. Anything can be a weapon if you believe in yourself, and shit. Jake gets the big mirror off the wall with a splintery crack that takes chunks of wallpaper and plaster off with it.
“Oops,” he says, looking guilty.
“Sorry, Mom,” you say blithely, and toss another thing of old shampoo in the curtain. “Stop wibbling, Jake, the alien’s probably going to do worse.” It’s a good thing you guys don’t have to use the upstairs bathroom for this. This room’s long since stopped smelling even a little bit of her. Of course, so has the upstairs one, too. But it’s kind of the spirit of the thing.
“He’s pretty ornery,” Jake says. “Jeez, I didn’t think they’d have that much spirit! They seem like right wet blankets most of the time.”
“Well, this wet blanket we get to beat like a rug,” you say, which is not your finest joke but still gets a laugh. You unscrew the drain and taps off the tub so your fishy friend can’t flood the bathroom, while Jake scrapes cleaning supplies and rolls of toilet paper out of the cabinets, and you’re pretty sure you’re done. One little bare-ass room with a toilet, a sink, and a tub. He’s not going to be able to do much of anything to himself in here but maybe die of boredom.
When you and Jake haul the curtain-sack of junk out into the hallway Dirk and Jane have largely gotten over their feels, and are muttering to each other in words of only three or four syllables.
“So, when do we start dissecting this bad boy?” you ask, which makes his funny gold eyes go super wide. Dirk rests a foot on his shoulder, warningly.
“After the interrogation,” Jane says. “If the prisoner doesn’t cooperate, of course.”
“We’re sure he’s going to be excruciatingly helpful,” Dirk says, “after some initial persuasion,” and he grinds his heel down. The guy whimpers low and pretty and strange, and Jane smiles at you, eyes glitter-bright, and lets go of Dirk’s hand.
God, Jake has the best ideas.
Cronus: hurt.
You keep trying to pretend this is just some kind of awful dayterror. You'll wake up any minute and go bitch to Kankri about how being on this planet is bad for your sensitive temperament. Any minute.
Not this minute. This minute the humans are shoving you into a scraped-bare ablution block that reeks of unfamiliar, cloying-sweet chemicals and letting you just fall on your front like a miserable mistreated tool. Like every other room in this hive it’s too bright, insanely too bright, and every possible surface is a crisply menacing cream-color. The light drills right through your eyelids to sizzle off the back of your thinkpan, and when you try to squint even a little you feel like your pupils are going to contract themselves inside-out.
"Huh," the small female says. You're increasingly sure she's the leader. "His hands look a bit weird."
You try to flex your fingers and it hurts, all pins and needles. Dirk leans down over you and grips your stiff fingers for a second, then pushes your sleeve up enough to hold your forearm instead. His hand is so creepily warm and soft, like half-baked dough. "Feels like the cord's cutting off circulation. This stuff isn't meant for long-term bondage."
"You have something that is?" she asks. You can't see him answer but he must do something, because she says, "Get it."
He doesn't move for a second, like there's kind of a power struggle going on there, but then he does get up and step away. You listen to him stomping off, and try to roll over so you can look up at the others. The way they stare at you, it's like they're a pack of wild animals who've just spotted dinner. Fuck, how is this your life?
If they're going to interrogate you—which sounds straight-up horrifying, you won't lie—then they'll take the stupid gag out of your mouth at least. You should start thinking about what you're going to say. How you're going to make them understand that they're making a huge mistake and they should let you go. How you’re going to make them understand that they just can’t do this, they can’t possibly get away with it, your people are going to be coming for you. Any minute. Any minute, fuck, please. Someone’s got to be coming for you.
Dirk comes back and hands some things to the leader. You catch the glint of a blade, dazzling-bright, holy shit. "Hold those for me?" he asks, and kicks you over onto your stomach again. He kneels on your shoulders and you feel like the breath is getting crushed right out of you.
"Wow," Roxy says, "jeez, Dirk, you keep all kinds of freaky shit in your toybox, huh?"
He's wrapping something thick and sturdy around one of your wrists. "Should I have brought the freaky shit, too?" he asks. Roxy giggles. You're painfully aware that they’re treating all of this like a fucking game.
"Dirk," the leader says, "do I want to know why you would have a lighter in your toybox?"
"Candles," Dirk says absently as he messes with your other wrist. "Fearplay with torches. Cigarette burns." He twists your wrists and you hear a heavy, metallic click. "Knife?"
The girl hands it to him and you cringe again, trying not to let yourself whimper—but he doesn't cut you, you're pretty sure. He just saws through the tight cord around your wrists until it pops free, and then ow, your hands start tingling all over with the pain of bloodflow returning to them.
Dirk pushes off your shoulders and stands up. "I had plans for those," he says. "But that does look pretty good."
Roxy snickers. "Keep it in your pants, big boy."
"Roxy," the leader says. "I want you and Jake to—" you can't make out the rest, as she leans in and whispers in Roxy's ear, but Roxy nods when she's gotten her orders and slips out the door. "All right. Let's get started."
Dirk manhandles you into a sitting position up against the wall. The girl stands in front of you, giving you a cold, angry stare. Your head pounds. Dirk tugs at the knot of the gag and finally gets the whole gross rag out of your mouth.
"This is a big mistake," you say, and it comes out a croak. Your mouth is so fucking dry. "My people will have noticed I'm missing by now and they'll be looking for me. You can't really believe you didn't leave evidence."
"Speak when you're spoken to, fishboy," Dirk says. He holds up his knife so you can see light sear off the blade. "We want answers out of you, not bluster." You go quiet and wait.
The girl clears her throat. "What happens to the people that you make disappear?"
You stare at her in utter poleaxed confusion. "What?"
She frowns. Dirk moves, a blur at your side. You feel his fingertips catch the edge of your fin, gripping hard, and you take a breath to yell and then the pain goes hot and sharp and so terrible you can barely see. He flicks something into your lap, a little gray triangle oozing violet out one edge oh god oh fuck that's a PIECE of your FIN and there's a sound happening in your throat and you can't make it stop.
The girl says something and you just can't even deal with it. You're bleeding and it hurts so fucking much, you didn't know you could hurt that much, it's just a tiny little piece of you, sitting there being dead meat and not part of you anymore and you can feel the blood oozing down your fin and trickling along the line of your neck and you can't, you just can't—
A hot, small hand grabs one of your horns, hauling your head back—baring your throat—and you gag and sputter and finally catch your breath.
“Let’s try that again,” the girl says, so surreally calm. “What do you trolls do to the people you abduct?”
“You abducted me,” you protest, and your voice breaks in the start of a sob. You wish to god you could hold the tears in, you don't want to look this weak, but it hurts and it's terrifying.
She takes a step backward. "I'm going to give you a few minutes to think about that answer," she says. "When we come back, I hope you'll be willing to cooperate." She jerks her head toward the door. "Dirk."
He stares at you for a few more terrifying, miserable seconds, then gets up and follows her as they leave the room.
Jane: regroup.
Dirk puts a hand on your shoulder as soon as you get clear of the... holding cell. "You okay?" he asks.
You're already shrugging him off as you shake your head. You bolt for the back door of the house. You need to get out.
You just make it outside before you get messily sick. You crouch there for a minute and shake, spitting to try to clear the taste out of your mouth. The air out here is cool and crisp with the smell of evergreens, and you stand still, breathing it in, trying to calm down.
The door opens and closes again. You don't look. "Seriously, you okay?"
“We have an alien in Roxy’s bathroom and are torturing him for information,” you say.
He shuffles over and rubs your back in hesitant, geometrically perfect circles. “There, there,” he says, carefully, like he’s reciting lines he’s not sure about. “...There.”
“This all made so much more sense when he wasn’t crying,” you admit.
"Do you need to not be there?" Dirk asks. "I can handle the whole thing myself, if it's going to bother you."
"No," you say. You don't want to be there, but you're pretty sure you can't just leave it in Dirk's hands. Not after everything you've seen so far. He needs somebody to rein him in when he gets... focused like that, and Roxy has too fierce a grudge against the trolls to do it, and Jake doesn't think hard enough about consequences. It's going to have to be you. "No, I'll stick it out. Let's just try not to push too hard too fast, okay?"
Dirk nods. "He did flip out really hard there."
"You cut a piece of him off," you point out. You're pretty sure you wouldn't do any better, if someone—no, stop, you can't afford to think about it like that. "I asked Roxy to do a little research for us and see if she could turn up information about how this sort of thing is done. Maybe we should see what she finds, and use that to go more slowly next time?"
"It's worth taking a look," Dirk says. He runs his hand down your back, stiffly and awkwardly soothing. "Let's go see how she's doing."
*
Cronus: break.
You don't know how long they leave you there alone. Long enough that the pain in your fin has gone from screaming panic to dull throb, and you've started to get a really nasty headache from the bright light in the room. The walls are all white and there are three gleaming brilliant bulbs high up on one wall, way too much light for comfort even with your pupils slitted as tightly as they'll go. It's not helping you think. The question they were asking before still doesn't make any sense.
You've been trying to wrack your pan for anything in your pre-landing schoolfeeds that could possibly help you out here. You wish you'd paid more attention to those instead of trying to figure out your odds with the other cadets. That's all turned out to be a lost cause so far, and now you could probably actually use a helpful breakdown of how to deal with hostile natives.
When they come in, you can’t help the reflexive cringe. It’s like your whole body just... curls, like a wiggler scared of thunderclaps, knees to chest, elbows straining against the cuffs to tuck in further, horns forward.
“We come in peace,” you get out all in a rush. That line you can remember, at least. “We come in peace and goodwill, and, and in good faith, and we’re here to help. We come in peace.”
"Humans have been going missing since your people arrived," the girl says. "Heads of corporations. Hollywood executives. Just disappearing. Where do they go?"
You look from her to Dirk involuntarily, and you can't see the knife, but you didn't see him move before he used it the first time. "I don't know," you whisper. Dirk doesn't move. "Do you—why do you think we had anything to do with it? I mean, I-I mean, I've seen the figures, the violence, you people just, you kill each other. A-a-a lot."
Dirk's fist is in your hair and yanking your head back, for all that your shoulders try to hunch up to protect your neck. All you're doing is hurting. "This is different," he says, and you're starting to recognize human growling and that's it.
"I didn't do anything. I don't, I don't know anything." A tiny scrap of your crisis schoolfeeding comes back to you: Make it personal. Help them see similarities. Exchange names. Talk about what you have in common. "I. I'm. My name is Cronus Ampora. I. I came to Earth to," you'll sound like such an ass if you admit the truth. "To s-see more of the galaxy, and, and learn a-about new cultures, and." Your voice cracks. "I just want to go home."
Dirk lays the cool flat of the knife blade against your cheek and you whimper. "If you want to go home, it would be really smart for you to come up with something useful to tell us."
“If you stopped suppressin’ all the quadrupedal apex predators ‘round here you could shut down the United States Fish and Wildlife Department inside nine sweeps,” is all that comes out. “Then no one would have to go kill any hoofbeasts themselves, it’d all be managed naturally.” It was the last report you were working on before you snuck out to eat your goldfish.
He backhands you across the face and you catch the metal plate of his glove right against the cheekbone. Your horn scrapes against the wall in this way that vibrates right up through your skull and everything is terrible. "If you want to be a smartass, we can do this the hard way."
“How isn’t this the hard way!” you wail.
He hits you again. You need to just maybe not say anything.
The girl sighs, low and slow and patient. “Cronus. Is that how you say it? I'm Jane. Cronus, key figures in a number of different industries and occupations, all tied together by, ah, reservations about the Beforan presence—”
“Interference,” growls Dirk.
“Occupation?” Jane asks.
“No,” you blurt out. “No, no, we’re here to help, not to stay, I don’t want to stay, I don’t even like it here, please—”
“The missing people go to work and don’t come back,” Jane says. “You need to tell us what you’ve done with them.”
Your head’s swimming. “I don’t know where your friends are,” you say miserably. “We can’t have anything t-to do with anything like that. We don’t. We wouldn’t. You guys are the savages—”
You’re hit again. It proves your point but you don't say so because you're too busy swallowing blood from this punch to want another one. You wish they’d hit you anywhere but your face, it just hurts so badly.
"Not just friends," Jane says. "Family. Some of the most important people in our lives. We would do just about anything to get them back safely."
Family. Family, okay. You know that word, humans use it a lot, it’s their fundamental social unit of genetically and romantically related caregivers and dependents, they all go pretty much shitmaggots off the fucking wall when those bonds get so much as threatened, as early assistance teams found out in a number of embarrassing cultural misunderstandings. And now these guys, these guys with their knives and their fists and their cold blue eyes, think you’ve been deliberately breaking family units up.
You are so fucked.
"Oh god," you say. You don't mean to, it just happens, you never could hide your feelings worth a damn.
Jane nods like that was the right answer. "You see why we can't let this go. So. Let's say we believe that you personally haven't kidnapped anyone. Who did? Who could have? What would your people have done with them?"
"Nothing bad," you say immediately.
She does a thing where she bares her teeth and it’s nothing like a smile and everything like a flat-toothed threat display. "How," she asks really calmly, "do you know?"
You just gape at her. Why would any of you have hurt anyone? That’s not what you do. That’s not what you came here for.
They don’t believe you, and you can’t find any of the right answers to get them to. They come back around to the same questions over again and you still can't help, can't even guess at what they want to hear. They take turns asking, put the questions in different orders, until you're too rattled with pain and fear to make your way from one of a sentence to the other. You just go “I don’t know,” and “We come in peace, please stop, please don’t, I don’t know!” and none of it helps. They just back up and try from another angle, fucking obsessed, relentless. Where did the missing people go? Where did they go? Where the hell did they go?
At some point in one of the rounds of questioning you figure out that they're trying to find their guardians, their relevant adults, which means that technically they're probably still juveniles? There was so much stuff in your orientation about handling human juveniles, and all you can remember is that you weren't supposed to. You're not sure if anyone said why. If the instructors had said because they'll beat your face into grubloaf and carve you into pieces you'd have paid a lot closer attention.
Would it even have done any good? This planet hates you. These violent, unstable, merciless aliens are going to kill you. It was all their idea to drag you away from safety in the first place. Fuck everything so much.
You've lost track of how many times you've answered the questions wrong—I don’t know, I wish I knew, I’d tell you if I knew, I promise, I swear—when the door opens and Roxy comes back in. You wonder if they're going to let her shoot you now. You wonder if it would be a relief. "Break time," she says. "Brought you some snacks to keep your strength up."
"Thank you," Jane says, and goes to take some packets and plastic bottles out of Roxy's hands. They kiss. "That'll be a big help."
Roxy leaves again and Dirk backhands you across the face one more time—like you might have forgotten he was there or something, fuck, that clips your wrecked fin and you can't help whimpering—before he goes to investigate the food. The two humans huddle on the other side of the room and feed themselves, while you wonder how much blood you've lost and whether you're dehydrated or anemic yet and if not how long before they'll get you there. You try to just breathe, just focus on calming down. They're not hurting you right now. They're not even threatening you. It's such a relief.
In the movies whenever someone was captured by enemy forces it was always framed as a graceful fade-to-white scene and then rescue by a devoted quadrantmate, and there was never any real suggestion of torture. The heroic captive would be a little dirty and determined looking, maybe scuffed up, but nothing like this.
You don't feel heroic at all. You're beyond scared, you're made of bruises and your gills are swelling on the side where you got kicked the most, and your fin oh god what's left of your fin is burning so when Dirk cracks his knuckles and steps up like he's ready to hurt you more you can't face it. You just break down sobbing.
"Please," you choke out, "please, please, no more, ask me anythin’ else, please ask me anything else, I'll do whatever you want, please don't hurt me anymore, please, I’ll tell you anything you can, really I will," and you're still tasting your own blood. You swallow it and cringe as he gets closer, but then, thank god, thank god, Jane touches his elbow.
"Okay," she says slowly. "If you promise you won’t keep being so uncooperative, perhaps we’ll try that." You nod frantically, trying as hard as you can to look like the most cooperative guy to ever have hatched, and she asks, "What are your people's long-term plans for humanity?"
Oh you're going to be sick. "I don't know," you choke out, the last three words you want to repeat right now. Dirk’s’s already cocking his fist back again. You can’t stop staring at the dark smears of your own blood spattering his knuckles. "No, p-please, please, it's, it’s true, I don't know-w any details about your l-long-term development, I'm not, not, not one of the career guys, I just signed up to do my coming of age service with CivCorps, please don't. P-please."
He doesn't relax, but he holds still. "Tell me about CivCorps," he says.
You sniffle. They made you memorize a fucking mission statement and everything when you signed up and had your training period and you can't remember, just like all the other shit you should be remembering right now, you can't think about anything except the pain. "I-it's a, a s-service group for m-midbloods, mostly. The. The Galactic Civilization Corps. Our job. Their job. Our r-responsibility. As representatives of, of an advanced culture. Is t-to go in on class two and three worlds where we’ve established a diplomatic presence, a-and w-w-work to b-bring up the local. Standard of living."
"Are you fucking serious?" Dirk asks. "The alien peace corps has decided that Earth is a third-world country and they need to invade us for our own good?"
You slump as far as the cuffs will let you and just cry. You weren't even supposed to be here. You shouldn't have gotten an on-planet assignment in the first place. You should have been in an office somewhere, on board an administrative ship, and you would have been except that you thought stupid Kankri fucking Vantas was actually interested in you when he suggested that you join the corps with him so you signed on for the same tour he was taking. And now you're being tortured to death by filthy fucking mammals on a horrible backwater planet that thinks war is a reasonable thing to do and it's all Kankri's fault. He never even kissed you.
Jane pulls your head back by one horn again and you’re so stressed it’s like foil on your fangs. You can’t believe they’re just... hauling you like this. It feels so fucking dirty. She asks, "What's the standard of living you generally try to impose?"
You gasp for breath, trying to clear your head, wincing at the way your swollen gills try to flare. "B-basic health stuff," you say. There's a fucking list of priority milestones to establish with a new subordinate culture and your pan is too scrambled with terror for you to remember them all. You don’t think you ever did more than skim the list. "Proper diet. Um. P-pacification. Removal of, of prevalent toxins and diseases. S-standardized appropriate, uh, um, appropriate schoolfeeding and re-education.”
There’s a minute there where you all look at each other. Re-education. That never sounded ominous before.
“Oh god, please don't kill me," you moan.
"Man, who said anything about killing anyone yet?" Dirk asks. "We're just getting warmed up over here."
"I-I don't know any secrets," you say again, miserably. "I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything. I signed on for a three-sweep tour and that's all. This was my f-first posting."
"So just talk to us about Beforans in general," Jane says. "Dirk, no, you're not going to need the knife any more. He's trying to cooperate." You smile at her in desperate gratitude and she nods. "You said CivCorps was mostly for midbloods. What does that mean?"
Okay at least that's not a hard one. "Middle of the hemospectrum," you say. "Greenbloods, mostly. Green and teal. Rust is the bottom and...and the Empress is the top."
Dirk reaches for you open-handed and you cringe, but he just wipes blood from your split lip and looks at it. The violet of your blood makes a stark contrast against the gross peachy color of his fingers. "Rust at the bottom, green in the middle, and you're purple," he says. "Sure makes you seem important." He flicks your uninjured fin with one finger and you flinch. "Or do these mark you as some kind of outcast?"
Oh, that does it. "Fuck you!" you snap back, too egregiously insulted to remember how frightened you are. "Being a seadweller makes me goddamn royalty, you ugly pink monkey!"
Your head whiplashes back and fresh pain blossoms through the whole right side of your face. You didn't even see him throw the punch but it hits like an avalanche. The inside of your mouth just got shredded on your fangs and you're drooling blood down your front and one of your teeth might be loose and you're going to die.
"They really should have given you more lessons on communicating diplomatically," Jane says mildly. You sniffle. That wasn't a question so you don't answer it but, yeah, they really should have. "Are there any other significant features common to seadwellers?" she asks. That you don't want to answer. It'll just give them more good ways to hurt you.
"Here, let's check," Dirk says. He looms over you, reaches down, just tears your shirt open down the front like he's a blueblood with something to prove. You really, really have a bad feeling about the turn this conversation’s taken and you squirm but you can't get away. He yanks your shirt open far enough to expose your gills. "Looks like a yes." His fingers press against the swollen spot and you moan with pain. "Sensitive, too."
Jane nods. "You wouldn't think that would be a difficult question to answer," she says.
Dirk smiles faintly. It's the first expression you've seen from him and it terrifies you. "Our boy's stubborn. Maybe he likes playing rough." He pops the top button of your pants. "More sensitive spots in here, tough guy?"
You're going to die of fear and misery and shame, because your most primitive instincts are kicking in, the ones that say that if you're about to die then you need to pass on your genes right this instant. It feels gross and terrible but when he pulls your pants open the sheath of your bone bulge is dilating and your bulge itself is starting to emerge.
"Damn," Dirk says slowly, not touching it, just staring. Your bulge coils further out, seeking, already dripping wet in case there's anywhere for your genetic material to go. You hate your body so much, this human has a knife and is willing to use it to cut pieces off of you, fuck, if you had your hands free you'd be trying to physically stuff your bulge back in right now. "We get lucky here, mister royalty, or you guys all have a hentai handshake down there?"
"I-I don't know what that means," you stammer.
"That's enough, Dirk," Jane says, and you could kiss her, you're so grateful. "Let's take a break for a while."
"I'm just furthering our understanding of xenobiology," Dirk says, but he steps away from you. "But I guess that can wait for next time."
He doesn't do your pants back up. But they don't hurt you anymore. They just leave.
Dirk: touch base.
You put some distance between yourselves and the makeshift interrogation room. Give it a minute to settle. Then you ask. "Jane? You'll let me know if I'm crossing lines, right?"
It takes a second before Jane nods. You watch her putting her thoughts in order. "I'm trying. I'm... glad you stopped. I don't want us to do anything gratuitous." She grimaces. "More gratuitous than listening to Jake in the first place."
"Fair." You're weighing your own words carefully, examining your motivations. "I'm in control of what I'm doing. And we're still sort of feeling him out at this point. Getting a sense of how we'll get through to him. I don't plan on pushing any one tactic too hard until we know which ones are really working."
"Okay," Jane says, and gives you a one-armed sideways hug. "That's what I wanted to hear."
You lean down and kiss her hair. "You should keep being the good cop to my bad cop, though. I think that's going pretty well."
"You got it, Mister Strider," she says. "I'm going to go poke through the kitchen and see if I can rustle up something approximating a decent meal. Care to join me?"
"I'll meet you there in a few," you say. "I want to go wash the alien panic off first." Jane lets you go and you slope off to the showers.
Jane: seek comfort.
You slam around awkwardly in the kitchen, too nauseous for anything already prepared, too rattled to cook. You end up in the corner of the kitchen by the oven, holding half a cup of flour and feeling like the whole world is going to come apart on you if you so much as breathe too loud.
You’re wet—absurdly, horribly wet, to the point you can feel the slick cling of your panties with every breath.
Roxy wanders into the kitchen, opens the fridge, stares into it. “So how’s my Janey-girl doin’ tonight?” she asks the refried beans.
“She wants a hug,” you say, and your voice is embarrassingly squashed and tiny. You sound all of six, a lost little girl.
“Oh, babe,” Roxy says, and is on you in an instant, between your legs. Her wiry arms are warm and her lips are sticky, and when you shiver at the press of her mouth to your neck she laughs, kindly.
You catch one of her thighs between yours and squeeze, and you're so on edge you can't stand it, can't bear to even think about how it feels or why. "Okay. Maybe more than just a hug," you admit.
“Shhh, shh, baby girl, shh,” Roxy murmurs, “I’m gonna take care of you, don’t you fret,” and she’s whispering lipsticky kisses all down your throat, working her way under your shirt. Her long fingers are chill from the fridge, and you gasp when she slides them over your breasts. You can feel the shock of it pulse all through your cunt, you’re wordless before Roxy even hooks your bra down and fastens her warm, clever mouth over a nipple.
“There’s my girl,” she murmurs, cupping between your legs. “There’s my sweetie.” Everything is molten heat and the electric pounding of your pulse and you whine in frustration when she stops to tease you. You want something inside you, something to bear down on. You bite her ear and she laughs, and you hear—dimly—someone else laugh, too. Jake, Jake’s watching.
“Get over here, English,” you rasp, and he’s beside you in an instant, sinking his teeth into your lower lip as Roxy finally deigns to work two fingers up your hungry cunt. You come screaming, wordless, clawing at both of them, wild with the relief of it all.
“God,” you finally manage to pant, juddering all over with overstimulated aftershocks as Roxy keeps working her fingers in and out of you. You knee her gently away. “Goodness, wow. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Jane,” Jake says, laughing a little.
“I did all the work,” Roxy protests, and clicks her teeth at Jake’s nose.
“I was there for moral support,” Jake says, and shoots finger guns at her. “You’re welcome, Roxy!”
“I’ll show you moral friggin’ support, you pompous good-lookin’ blowhard,” Roxy growls, and launches herself at him. “I’m gonna support your head right off your shapely neck!” They go rolling across the kitchen floor with far more enthusiasm than grace, laughing and kicking and shedding articles of clothing.
You’re still holding the half-cup of flour, like a talisman. You carefully set it on the counter, then join the fray. Someone’s got to take care of things around here.
Dirk: continue.
You have to hand it to Dame Lalonde: she knew how to trick out a crib in style. The upstairs bathroom is plush, with shiny fixtures and towels as fluffy as kittens, and the shower has water pressure to kill for. Metaphorically speaking. "Things you would kill for" is a less hypothetical category than it used to be.
You strip off, step into the hot spray, and get to work scrubbing that long session of interspecies cooperation off your skin. You're already learning a lot from this experience. Frankly you're learning things about yourself that you were pretty content not knowing.
Still, there's no point denying it now and letting yourself get frustrated enough to fuck something up. You run a hand down your torso and get a loose grip on your cock, which is not exactly standing at attention but at least registering some obvious interest. You think about watching the troll's arrogance crumble, the way his protests just fell apart over the course of that session. You think about the moment when he started saying please. It sounds alien in his voice, with that weirdly liquid accent.
I'll do whatever you want, please don't hurt me anymore. His hands cuffed behind him and the tension across his shoulders from holding that pose. His sharp teeth and split lip, his eyes stunningly intense with their yolk-yellow sclera and silvery purple irises. His cool too-smooth skin and the fact that he has gills and the fact that his junk was squirming around and drooling on itself while you had him completely helpless.
You knew you liked power stuff. You knew you liked some kinds of nonhuman stuff. You somehow weren't expecting crucial revolutionary efforts to strand you in the heart of Boner City.
Well. Once you're there, the quickest way out is a direct assault.
You imagine him panting out more of those desperate offers. I'll do anything you want. You wonder if you could trust him with your dick between those spike teeth. You picture the mix of fear and anger on his face if you said something like that out loud. You hold onto your cock tighter and start pumping, steady and slow.
You wonder what that tentacle dick of his would feel like, whether it would have the same cool pliability as the rest of him, whether the stuff dripping from it would feel slick or sticky. You squeeze your cock rhythmically and wonder if it's anything like he would feel. Does he have a hole you could fuck him in? You think he must. There must be something. He'd be weirdly cool around you, reminding you how inhuman he is, and he'd be so helpless, so eager to please. Anything you want.
You picture him loose-jointed and weak, the way he rolled easily in your grip when you carried him to the van. Easy, soft, willing as a puppet in your hands and that spike of heat in your groin almost hurts. Yeah. Like that. Your puppet alien prince, spilled out in front of you, legs open while you work your way into him and thrust into cool smooth strangeness, let him know what he's fucking for, let him know that if he's here to take care of humans like they think they know how to do then this is what that actually means, giving it up, letting you pound him, letting you, god, your breath quick harsh pants and your forearm aching and your balls tight, letting you drill his pretty alien ass until you come, stifling the noise so it doesn't echo off the shower walls.
You take a few deep breaths, stick your face in the shower spray, shake your head like a wet dog. Fuck. Okay, you've got a weird boner for the captive alien. You know that. You can handle it. Jane's right; you don't want to do anything grosser than you have to. You're fucked up, but you have it under control.
Keep it in your fantasies, and keep it in your pants when you're actually interrogating him. It's a plan. You can stick to it.