Chapter Text
Nobody goes into space because they want to go into space. You, personally, went into space because there was nothing left for you on dismal dirtball Earth. Anybody you ask will say the same; not in the same words, not in the same dolorous tone, but you all have a generically kindred mythos. They have their own stories. You have yours. You don’t care what they did, what happened to them, at what point in time nothing beckoned more than the blankest, blackest slate available, because you know what you did and what happened to you and that’s already far too much, so you indulged your avoidant tendencies one last time. Now you have been on this disgusting, echoing ship for three weeks. You forget what fresh air tastes like. You also forget what fresh food tastes like.
You could really appreciate a fat peach right about now. You’d let the juice dribble down your chin and everything.
*
Dave Strider, you have surmised, is an intolerable parody of a gentleman but he is also brilliant so you do not mind him too much. He can keep pace with you. His brain goes fast enough that he can bring a conversation to full fruitation with you at any time, the only highschool dropout to ever do so. Only person at all, really, to do so. A lot of people don’t notice him like he deserves because all they hear is his Texan accent and his impudence before writing him off as trailer-park trash, but you think he likes it that way; when it’s just you talking to him from the bunk over his during the designated rest periods, he has no problem dropping the accent completely.
The two of you run a very snide, very illicit commentary on your superiors most of the time. You start off the initial critique with a scathing overview of how so-and-so handled this situation or whatnot, and then Dave takes your spark and twists it into this lucid looping metaphor that you have to actually concentrate on so that it makes sense from beginning to end. He should be a writer, you tell him. A writer, or a journalist, or a comedian at the very least. From his responses to these suggestions, you guess the reason Earth never worked for him was because of this subliminal sort of self-loathing he employs.
You do not outright ask him why he left, because that would be rude. Nobody talks about things like that here.
*
Instead of being worried by seeing honest-to-God aliens, you are relieved. You had no doubts that there were aliens out here to bump noses with; any way you dice it, existence is too big for just humans to embark upon the spacefaring age. Their appearance puts your mind at ease. You had worried that when you encountered aliens, they would be so utterly unreal you couldn’t tell what was head and what was tail, what was proboscis and what was fin. If they were carbon-based at all, that is. What if they were just clouds of intelligent gasses floating around, shot through with an approximation of nerves? What if they were blobs that gurgled for means of communication? What if they were made of something else entirely, something that your human brain couldn’t fathom?
But the aliens are tall and sleek and undeniably humanoid as they worm their way up from your minute docking bay, their shuttling ship seething with biotechnology. They have two arms, two legs, they have faces and necks. They even have what looks like hair, wild and shiny black, coarse enough that it seems to be more like plant fibers than any hair you have ever seen. They have fangs, sure, and claws and horns and their eyes are bright gold in inquisition, with different colored irises on each one: maroon, teal, green, and there is no way to tell what the base coloration scheme is at work behind their irises. They speak in a language where the sounds all seem to come from the deep hollows of their chests, and every so often a beautiful noise is produced straight from their mouths, at the brim of pellucid, so high and perfect you become petulantly jealous; you couldn’t have even orchestrated such a note on your violin.
Then they begin to kill everybody in sight and you take off. Of course such interesting creatures would want to kill. Their muscles flow together with such heavenly polish, and their eyes flicker so fast, that they could only be made for murder. Their brutality astounds you, their drive to wipe out a pacifistic group of the unprotected that they have never before encountered. They do not seem to care if you could have offered them something, if you could have stricken up a cultural exchange. Theirs is not a race that dwells on scientific findings, you think as you work with Dave to pry the covering off of an air vent.
The one shortcoming of these aliens is their size: even their shortest is a good couple of inches taller than your ship’s tallest crew member. The air vents, barely big enough to fit Dave and you, could never admit one of them. You shuffle as far back as you can on hands and knees, so that all the sounds of massacre are muted off of the trembling sheet metal, and sit it out with Dave. Neither of you talk because there is nothing to talk about.
From that point on it feels as if you are, for lack of a more gender-sensitive term, dead men walking.
*
You sit in that vent until the ship goes completely silent. Then Dave shifts, slowly, slowly, and starts to crawl back out. You are so sore from being crammed in here, and he is much taller than you so you can only imagine how sorry of a state his back must be in. The hall outside has…remains in it that, at times, are more liquid than solid (there are shards of bone, shards of goddamn human bone, at the toe of your boot). There is only more around the corner.
You hold you nose and Dave doesn’t look down.
You walk the entire ship with him (every crawl space, every broom closet, every dormitory, every lab) and there is nobody left with a pulse, though the corpses are in no short order. Just you and him, abandoned in space. You go to the control room and manage to send a few messages back to Earth, but they will take days to arrive, then an additional three weeks for any sort of rescue mission to reach you should they have a ship and crew ready to leave at the drop of a dime. If they decide you are worth rescuing at all. You don’t say that there are only two people left, hope you convey the insinuation that there are enough people left to justify plumbing the dregs of space.
There is plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of air. This ship is stocked to sustain over three hundred people for half of a year. You have no chance of dying of natural causes.
Is boredom a natural cause, though?
*
You hole up in the captain’s room. It is decorated to give some semblance of nobility, but under the wall hangings there is heartless metal. It’s like somebody took the sterile room in which the lethal injection is administered, put a vase of sunflowers in it, and called it a home. But the bed is big and soft, so you twine up around Dave and fall asleep.
The air is so, so cold in space that it makes a warm body next to yours all the better.
*
You find the alien survivor soon after.
There are a few of their corpses left behind (they didn’t even bother with their dead) and you and Dave poke them, study them. Their skin is tough and their jaws are too long and their tongues are even longer than that. Their blood is all different colors, correspondent to their eye color. They don’t have bellybuttons. All of their horns are different. Dave insists on unbuttoning one of the corpse’s pants just to see what alien junk looks like, he says, but you leave him there.
That’s how you run across her—you think it’s a her, by the small pads of fat on her chest, but you can’t be sure with aliens. You’ll just call the alien a her for simplicity’s sake. She is stretched out in the mess hall on top of one of the tacky tables. She stares at the ceiling with overlarge eyes, cold as so many insects, and breathes very, very shallowly. Her breathing sounds like nothing that would issue from a pair of lungs; it sounds much more complex than that. Maybe she is full of chambers, maybe their abdomen is like one big heart, an organic crescendo thrumming and squishing in an unbearably complex synchronicity…
Somebody has taken the initiative to shove something through her midsection; upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a horn snapped clean off of some other alien’s head. Well. This must be humiliating.
“Hello.” You greet her cordially, sitting on the table next to her. She doesn’t make any noise. There is blood on her dark mouth, fresh blood, shimmery green blood. “My name is Rose.”
Of course she doesn’t understand a word of what you’re saying. She blinks slowly, shifting her tongue around in her mouth. Fangs poke out over her bottom lip.
“Would you like me to remove that? It looks detrimental, not to mention painful.” You gesture at the horn. She glances down, not raising her head. Then she makes a very unhealthy hissing noise from the back of her throat. You decide you should try to pull the horn free. Maybe then you could snatch a glimpse of the thoracic bellows that may be waiting underneath her skin, or something even more fantastic.
You yank it out quickly and without any warning. It’s barbed on the end and only tears her up more and she is so cold, permeating cold like space, and she screams in this strange bubbling way. She immediately lashes out. Her fingers don’t have the pretense of fingernails; it just seems like the already hard skin hardens even more into five darkly stained claws that snag into your side and take out a more than adequate serving of your skin, soft as soap and twice as white. She looks at your blood in amazement, glistening bright red on her fluted hand.
Ow.
Ow .
Dave runs in. He heard her scream, obviously, and now he sees you bleeding quite profusely all over your neutral white-gray-beige clothes, the ones immediately issued when you took your inaugural step onto this ship. He curses as he scoops you up, sparing the alien a disinterested glance while he whisks you off to the captain’s—to your room. You are dumped hastily into the adjoined bathroom, left with harried instructions to get your shirt off and get in the tub, if you can manage such a complex task (he doesn’t put any snark into his jibe, and it was a lazy effort anyways). Dave leaves you alone, off to get whatever else, and you do as he says, sitting as primly as you can in the bathtub as you don’t stop bleeding. You feel a bit unsteady.
Looking at your soggy shirt on the floor puts four quarts of blood into bitter perspective.
He returns with supplies from one of the first-aid kits that are hanging in the halls. He turns the water on, grabs the showerhead—it’s one of those detachable ones—and starts rinsing at the gashes along your ribs. He talks to himself the entire time.
“Don’t fuck up again.” He says once. “Goddamn it, Strider, just…not this. Not twice.”
*
You don’t die, which you are very happy about. The scratches hurt a lot, but they aren’t too deep and Dave wraps you up so tightly with gauze and Neosporin that it is more like wearing a Victorian corset than bandages. He’s done this before. His hands are so steady, with scars on his knuckles, that you can’t help but trust him as he works with precision stoked by mania—who knows how much he likes you, but nobody wants to wait three weeks in space all alone.
When you go to bed, he keeps his arms around you. He’s protecting you, and it’s such a compassionate idea (a foreign one, too) that you push back against him and wedge your head under his chin.
“You can relax, Dave.” You say just a little louder than a whisper. “I’m fine now.”
He gives a disbelieving grunt and holds you tighter.
*
When you wake up, you demand to go see the alien again, see if she’s still alive. Dave doesn’t want you to get out of bed. You remind him that your legs were at no point injured and that you are in near perfect physical condition exempting your five new trophies of interspecies diplomacy. He concedes. You shortly realize how involved the entirety of your body is in just walking and it takes you much too long to get to the mess hall, his hands skimming at your waist the entire time in preparation for what he has convinced himself is the inevitable.
The alien is no longer on the table, but you can follow the trail of jade green blood and find her in one of the storage closets, passed out on an industrial-sized bag of white rice. She doesn’t look very good. You sit by her head and poke at her ridged cheekbones that curve in funny ways around her eyes. It takes a while, but she drags herself back to consciousness.
When she wakes up, she croaks out something in her native language that you would bet translates roughly to ‘oh God, not these jokers again’ (or, alternatively, ‘is dying in peace too unreasonable a thing to want?’). She closes her eyes in her equivalent of annoyance.
“Hey.” You grab her around the chin and shake her head a little. She groans and slits her eyes open so all you can see is a crease of bright gold and green on her pale gray face. Paler gray than it was the last time you saw her.
“We should just kill her,” Dave says. “You know, like a pity kill.”
You sigh heavily.
“Seriously. Look at her. She’s pretty much dead right now.”
The alien says something more, but this time you can’t guess what she means. Her tongue moves in expressive ways against her long teeth, in ways yours never could, to make these bright, trilling noises to compliment the deeper sounds. She seems alert, she seems smart even.
“My name is Rose.” You repeat from yesterday. “Rose.” You point at your chest. Then, more slowly, “Rose Lalonde.”
Dave groans in dismay behind you. “Please do not go Dances with Wolves on me; space madness isn’t supposed to set in this early…”
“Rose.” You repeat, looking her in the eyes and pointing at yourself. She clears her throat a little and makes a sound that could be misconstrued as your name. She tries again, this time making it more believable. Then again. She ends up close enough, hissing the ‘s’ and curdling the ‘r’ in her throat like a strange hybrid between a French and Russian accent.
Dave snorts. “Tatanka, tatanka.” He chirps mockingly behind you, hunching his back and sticking his pointer fingers above his head in a distasteful emulation of buffalo horns.
Without missing a beat, you point at him and say, in the same clear voice you used to get her to understand your name, “arrogant fuckwit.”
*
You convince Dave to help carry her to your room. She’s too tall for just one of you to manage, probably six and a half feet you’d guess. You grab her under the arms and lean her neck and head back against your stomach. Her horns—asymmetrical, but with svelte enough curves to retain similarity—poke your chin if you aren’t careful. He takes her around the knees and you awkwardly stagger down the corridors like that. She protests a little at first, snarling, but then lapses into coughing and the wound in her stomach starts to bleed a little. Once you get her on the floor of your room you roll her stiff, armored shirt up. It feels like it’s made of something living, with a thickness akin to rhinoceros skin.
When Dave sees the hole in her stomach, he makes a low whistle and shakes his head.
“Where’s the first-aid kit.”
“She’s done for, Rose; we’d just be wasting resources.”
“Why do I not hear compliance?”
“Rose…” He warns.
“Yes, what is it, my most docile, agreeable Strider?”
He sighs and puts his hands up a little in defense, a gesture that says he’ll humor you by at least trying to save the life of an alien who probably killed people you used to work with. You know she’s doomed as well but it would be cruel not to try.
*
As Dave attempts to patch her up, she points at herself and makes a lovely, almost nebulous noise that you take is her name. There is no way you can possibly get it right, but you scratch out the rough idea of the tintinnabular ensemble, like a poorly translated text: “Kanaya?” She seems to accept that you are physically incapable of proper pronunciation and settles for that.
You talk with her while Dave works, because if you were in her situation you would appreciate a distraction as well. You point to yourself and Dave and say “Human. We’re human.”
She says it as hee-oo-mahn, with a strange gurgly tinge towards the latter part of the word. She points to herself again and makes a noise that you smooth out to fit your vocal chords. It ends up as troll.
From then on, you two become Rose Human and Dave Human. You call her Kanaya, but Dave insists on returning the favor: Kanaya Troll. It plays out like a very shitty sci-fi movie. You decide against broaching surnames for now.
Do trolls even have surnames?
What about simple familial ties?
Blood relations?
Mothers?
*
On the third day, or the third whatever passes as a day in deepest space, Kanaya is dead. Neither of you are surprised. You wrap her up tightly in a spare sheet, dabbing the blood from her mouth, and put her out in the hall for lack of better ways to dispose of her. There are already too many bodies in this place.
What does surprise both of you, however, is when she does not remain dead.
*
You are sitting on the edge of the bathtub and Dave is knelt at your side, stripping back your bandage corset to let the wounds breathe. There is a polite knock on the door and both of you freeze; his fingers shaking ever-so-slightly over the puckered edges of your gashes. Then Kanaya pokes her head in, literally glowing a gently pulsing diamond-white, and smiling triumphantly.
“Oh, what the actual fuck…” Dave mutters. You blink a few times and then gesture for her to walk into the bathroom all the way. She does. There is still a gaping hole in her stomach, though it has stopped bleeding completely. She seems to have poked her organs back inside of herself. How sentimentally macabre, how undeniably professional.
“Rose Human? Dave Human?” Then she starts babbling in her language, very excited, and you and Dave share a questioning look. She finally gives up on failing to express herself through words and lunges forward. Dave tenses immediately, but she only wraps an arm around each of your necks and hugs you both. You can feel her smile against your shoulder.
Note: smiles and hugs are universal gestures.
You feel like you have just made the biggest discovery in the history of humanity.
*
You and Dave are unable to figure out what happened to Kanaya. You watched her die; you even held her hand and closed her eyes when she stopped breathing. But she is perfectly fine now, bursting with energy. She flits around the bedroom and bathroom, sponging blood stains from the floor with stray towels and dusting. It turns out she is an utter busybody and doesn’t stop moving until both rooms are as perfect as they can be, given the materials.
She leaves the room after a while. You sit next to Dave on the bed.
“Now what?” Dave asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what do we do with her now that she’s not dying? She could decide to kill us at any moment.”
You gesture at the newly tidied room, at the perfectly made bed you are sitting on. It is all done with your trademark surgically adroit sarcasm. Dave huffs.
“Seriously. It could all be a ruse. She came here with a bunch of people looking to kill us.”
“Kanaya’s indebted to us; we could have just let her die alone, but we—”
“Rose. Rose, you’re being stupid. In case you haven’t noticed, she is a goddamned alien and that means she has an alien moral code. All the rest of them came in and killed us without trying to talk first. She doesn’t think like us; she isn’t human.”
You almost say something about how she used a hug as a gesture of kinship, of thanks, of happiness. Then you realize that saying that would be just about the weakest excuse you ever cooked up. It isn’t rooted in anything solid. It doesn’t actually mean anything. You just feel like it should, though.
*
Kanaya returns streaked in slimy blood. You put a warning hand on Dave’s shoulder to keep him from lurching forward and attacking her. She is smiling still, mutters something as she darts into the bathroom to wash up. She comes out with a clean face and the stains on her shirt diluted to an entirely grim shade of pink.
She starts walking over to you, like she wants to join you on the bed, but Dave takes you by the arm and leads you into the hall. He closes the door on her puzzled expression.
“What are we going to do about her?” He demands. You shrug, glancing around. This is a mistake, because you see all the bodies in the corridor, stretched out like speed-bumps. They are beginning to stink.
“Nothing. She seems fine.”
“She’s pretending.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I know that.”
“Dave. Don’t be difficult.”
“I’m not being difficult, I’m being realistic.”
You glare at him and he glares right back. You turn and start to walk down the corridor. He seethes behind you and then follows at a distance.
That is when you notice the bodies. One body in particular; there is a fresh, faultless bite mark on the side of the neck, and then another on the calf when whoever bit realized that when humans die, their blood pools in their legs. Your brain immediately jumps to a supernatural-themed conclusion about what happened to Kanaya.
Good Lord, no. This is just too ridiculous.
*
Turns out, though, it’s true. You, Rose Lalonde, really are drifting ass-backward through space awaiting rescue with a chipper alien vampire with an eye for interior design. And Dave Strider too.
You are almost embarrassed over this. It’s just so stupid and improbable. It sounds like the plot-hole riddled carcass of an old sitcom. It sounds like the next month of your life.