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There was a mad scramble; fervency, blood dripping from its white lips, hands clawing against snow and steel. A vicious moment where it, in its desire, took hold of someone so similar to itself and saw the red shine in their visor as its delight came to a horrific, beautiful climax. A scream.
Searing, hissing, snarling, bubbling. Blood melted through material, through flesh, through bone. It only ever took a moment. Always, always a moment. It trapped the oh-so-familiar face beneath itself with an embrace so close its host body’s memory thought it love. Maybe it was.
The awful crinkle of thick material—the song of metal as it cleaved through air. Then, its self. Oh, the blood was wonderful. It was wonderful. Six hands, urgent and clawing, urging it to let go. It never wanted to ever let go. The body was in love with warmth.
The others, each so familiar and so lovely, dragged it and its victim through the snow, towards something—towards home. What is home? A place to return to. It was okay, it really was. Even though its host’s memory built into a plethora of feelings, there still was something awfully calming about the murmur of voices, constant and unending. The body beneath itself was broken. Melted into pieces of the warm creature it once was.
That was alright. When the others let it be, it would put them back together again.
Oh, it was so happy.
_
“Look,” B-12 said, shakily. The mimic should’ve been dead with a blow like that. But it only bled. B-12 swallowed as she observed the trail of thick, blackened blood left in the snow as they all dragged the corpse and the terribly still mimic back to the ship. It was the only thing they could’ve done. The shovel had melted into halves the moment the thing’s blood splattered against the wooden handle, and the metal was already far too warped from previous encounters to be of much use. Leave the entity here and they’ll be fined for the corpse and have to deal with another possessed entity. Take it, and at least they can trap the two for a while longer so that they could gather more scrap. It was a horrible situation all around.
C-20 was shivering. “I’m going to miss Jay,” they said, even as they heaved the dead man’s limp corpse through the thick snow, ignoring the remnants of the mimic’s boiling blood even when it stained the outsides of their gloves. This job instilled a sort of ruthlessness into you. It was kind of awful to witness.
The mimic itself was hugging the corpse like a large, gruesome plushie. B-12’s seen much worse on her travels, but things like this really never fail to surprise her. You could see a Bracken playing rock-paper-scissors with a Jester over who gets to kill someone first and you’d think you’ve seen it all. You haven’t. You really, really haven’t.
It was awful. Just awful. V-3 heaved a long sigh as they, too, observed the mask. They’d pried a mask off of its host once and only once; it gave them nightmares for years. The mask melted the flesh and bone beneath itself in order to create this gaping hole, thick with wiry strings of flesh, digging deep into the host’s body like veins. The hole itself was just where the foul entity hacked up the boiling blood and occasionally melted hands if people were dumb enough to reach in, even after the mask’s removal. There was nothing beautiful about it in an outright sense.
They still thought it pretty, if in an awful way. The kind of way that made them wake up screaming in the dead of night.
The ship was just a moment away. There was a shadow in the distance with gleaming white eyes. V-3 gestured hurriedly, ignoring how the arm they had been hauling flopped to the ground limply. The other two in the group glanced and turned their heads away from that general direction, murmuring vague thanks. V-3 kept staring at the mask. Organisms like it could make one question the existence of god, if one dared to believe in one in this strange universe.
V-3 hauled the body viciously up the rungs of the short ladder, ignoring the fleshy pop they heard from the joint of the corpse’s arm. The mimic’s mask clashed against the metal with a solid, ringing thunk. It gurgled thickly, boiling blood spilling over the white lip of its mask, frothing blood-bubbles spattering small dots of red against anything it touched. B-12 flinched away from the dark substance, hissing slightly as it burnt a small hole in her glove.
There was an unnerving moment of silence as they worked in tandem to haul both the mimic and the corpse into the ship. Locking them in here would mean that the entire crew couldn’t return until the doors opened on their own, or the two mimics (there would most definitely be two the moment the dregs of the crew stepped away) figured out how to open the door and wandered back outside. C-20 shuddered as he clawed the two equally dead things past the hydraulic doors, into safety.
It was terribly strange, to bring danger into comfort rather than throw it out. It really was. In the end, B-12, V-3, and C-20 were left standing in the entrance to the ship, feeling an odd dissonance. On the floor of the ship, a mimic embraced the corpse of someone who was once a friend. It was almost beautiful, in this terrible, strange way. V-3 wondered what they looked like to the entity, framed by darkness and snow. Faceless, nameless, dying things, probably soon to be just as dead as it is.
C-20 got ready to dart in just to tap the button that closed the doors. The mimic raised its head from where it had been pressed against the corpse’s chest. V-3 was haunted by the blood that dripped from its hollow eyes, a foul mimicry of tears. A smile so wide that they could imagine it was real.
The door slammed shut with a groaning, damning sound. V-3 flinched.
_
Love is violence. That is its basest core concept. Violence, in its human definition. The body has no meaning; the corpses, the bones, the blood. It has no meaning. The mask is the one thing that gives a dead thing meaning. A heart.
The body is cold. The corpse is warmer, even though it, too, is rapidly cooling. The ship thrums like a beating heart, and the mimic clicks at the thick steel door, an odd sound that pushes blood from its throat and onto the now-cold body beneath it.
Love is destructive. It loves and loves and loves. It only knew what love was the moment its host put it on, smiling, in love with death. Reaching for it. Its host was so happy. It was, too. The corpse beneath it isn’t happy. It’s quiet.
The mask reaches one stiff hand out, touching the half-melted air filters. One side leaks blood. The other, a frothy, black substance. It’s beautiful.
It can see the red glow against the exposed meat, shiny within the blood. Pulsating for a moment, a hiss of air escaping its decimated esophagus in what might have been a laugh, if it had anything to facilitate such a thing. Human instinct lingered within the body.
The corpse jerks violently, kneeing it in the side. It doesn’t move. It’s grand. It’s beautiful. It’s everything.
Pale white bone pours forth like liquid mercury, searing flesh and blood as it forms the shaky shape of a mask, lovely and new. It attempts to wipe away a stray chunk of flesh from the pristine white surface; it only ends up smearing red blood against the fragile material. The corpse writhes, and shrieks—guttural sounds that wheeze and gurgle from its poor lungs—and it trembles violently beneath its friend, keening and whining.
Its friend is so new. It’s almost fascinating. The body goes still. The new friend reaches up, hands shaking, and pulls it down until their masks clink together, like marbles against porcelain. A specific sound, perfect and perfect and perfect and—
It’s lovely. It lightly presses into it, uncaring of the small scratch that mars itself and its friend. The friend is so new, so bewildered by existing. So fragile. It would take a tiny little impact to shatter it, frail and thin as it is.
So new. It was rare, that there was anyone new. It was so happy it thought it would melt in the heat of it.
Its friend chattered, a rhyming little gecker that sounded more like a series of sharp clicks than anything else. A questioning sound, gentle in its presentation. It rattled a response afterward, delighted by its friend’s voice.
Where? The new friend had asked without words.
Home, it had clattered back, a distinct sound—almost like scraping silverware against porcelain. And they were home, because home is the place you go back to. The bodies always returned home, to the ship. It made sense that it would find comfort—no matter how foreign—here.