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Test Tube always knew she would be the one to bring Fan back. Even if it was cruel and unnatural.
As a scientist for her entire programmed life, she relied on logic to tell herself, “Zombies are not real. Like ghosts and spirits, they’re just made up to avoid the inevitable.”
Now that her best friend and love of her life had become a zombie, Test Tube’s beliefs had to shift.
The first thing Test Tube noticed when Fan stirred was how his fingers twitched against the metal table, like paper caught in a draft, fluttering unevenly. His edges were singed black from the lightning strike. She tried to smooth them out with careful hands, but the charring remained, little fractal burns branching like dark rivers across his once-vibrant red surface.
He didn’t speak when his eyes opened. He just stared at her with pupils that were too wide and too still. She had expected screaming, begging, maybe even gratitude. Instead, Fan's gaze slid right through her, lingering somewhere beyond the lab's flickering lights. When she touched his wrist, his skin didn’t feel like paper anymore—it was cool and slightly sticky, like glue left out too long.
Her hands had started bleeding from the constant wall punching at some point. The scabs always broke whenever she clenched her fists. The blood smeared differently on Fan’s skin—thicker, slower, like ink pooling on damp paper. Test Tube watched the crimson trail of her fingertip drag across his collarbone, mesmerized by the way it clung to him. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t breathe. He just kept staring at that distant point beyond her shoulder, his singed lashes casting shadows on his cheeks.
She told herself this was science, observation, documentation of post-resurrection physiology. But when her thumb brushed his lower lip—parting it just enough to glimpse the dark hollow of his mouth—her pulse jumped in a way no clinical term could explain. His tongue, when she touched it, was dry like parchment.
The kiss wasn’t sudden, just inevitable. Test Tube had been leaning closer for minutes, hours, maybe days, her breath shallow as she traced the strange new shape of Fan's body. When his mouth finally moved against hers, it wasn’t the warm press she remembered. His lips parted like pages in an old book, crackling faintly at the edges where the lightning had seared him.
"I love you," Fan said, his words slow and thick, as if pushed through molasses. His voice lacked the nervous tremor it used to have, the one that made Test Tube want to bundle him in blankets and hide him from the world. Now it was just there. A statement. A fact as unchangeable as the charred lines on his skin.
Fan's hands found her waist with mechanical precision—no fumbling, no hesitation—just the cool, deliberate press of his fingers against her glass. Test Tube shuddered as his thumbs traced the ridges of her measurements, those raised markings that had always made Fan murmur "beautiful" before. Now he said nothing. He just tilted his head, blackened lashes lowering as he leaned in to lick a slow stripe up her side, where condensation should have been. His tongue left a sticky trail, half-dried blood mingling with the faint chemical tang of her surface. Oh. He was licking the blood off her fingers. Should she be disturbed?
She gasped when his teeth grazed the edge of her rim—not sharp, but persistent, like he used to worry at the corners of sketchbooks while concentrating. Except now his mouth was everywhere at once, methodical, as if cataloging her reactions for some unseen experiment. Test Tube's hands scrabbled against the metal table, her own breath coming in sharp, uneven bursts. This clinical dissection of intimacy shouldn’t have felt good, but when Fan's knee slid between her legs with calculated pressure, she arched into it with a sound that cracked in her throat.
Fan’s mouth was colder than she remembered, but no less hungry. He bit her lower lip with enough pressure to make her gasp, and the sound seemed to register somewhere in his hollowed-out consciousness—his pupils dilated further, black swallowing gold as he licked into her mouth. Test Tube could taste copper and something faintly electric, like ozone after a storm. She wondered distantly if this was how lightning felt before it struck.
It started with Fan's hands—those delicate fingers now curling around her hips with a pressure that made the glass of her body sing a high, thin note of warning. Test Tube gasped as he lifted her onto the metal table, the cold surface kissing her thighs where her lab coat rode up. His movements were jerky, like a puppet with half its strings cut, but there was an undeniable hunger in the way his palms slid up her sides, leaving smears of rust-dark blood in their wake.
Fan's mouth found her neck, teeth scraping where the curve of her glass met her shoulder. She expected hesitation, the careful thought he had always shown in life, but this version of him bit down hard enough to crack her surface—just a hairline fracture, just enough to draw a bead of viscous fluid that wasn't quite blood but close enough. He licked it away with a sound like dry leaves rustling, then used his thumb to gather more from the wound, painting it across her lower lips with the same precision he once used for watercolors.
The metal table groaned under their combined weight as Fan pushed her down, his movements now fluid in their desperation, like ink spilling across parchment in one irreversible stroke. Test Tube’s breath hitched when his knee pressed between her thighs once more—not gentle, just there, the pressure unmistakable even through layers of fabric. His fingers curled around the hem of her lab coat and tore it open with a sound like beakers shattering, buttons skittering across the floor. Cold air kissed her exposed glass, but Fan’s hands were colder, mapping her curves with clinical precision until they found the seam where her body softened.
Fan didn’t pause. He just pressed inside with a slow, unyielding push that made Test Tube’s vision fracture at the edges, her normally articulate mind reduced to static. Her body arched, not away but into him, glass meeting paper in a way that should have been impossible, should have hurt—but all she felt was the electric wrongness of it, the way his dead flesh yielded and clung. Fan’s hips stuttered forward, his breath rattling like wind through autumn trees. When his teeth found her shoulder again, she didn’t stop him. Let him bite. Let him break. The cracks spiderwebbing across her clavicle were just another experiment, another data point.
Fan’s grip tightened, his fingers leaving bruises that weren't bruises—just dark smudges where his touch lingered too long, where her glass fogged under his palms. He moved with a rhythm that wasn’t quite human, his thrusts uneven but relentless, each one punctuated by the dry rasp of his breath against her neck. Test Tube’s hands scrambled at his back, her nails catching on the charred edges of his paper skin, peeling away flakes of ash that drifted to the floor like burnt petals. She could feel him unraveling—not just physically, but fundamentally, the ink of his essence bleeding into her in ways her textbooks had never prepared her for.
Test Tube's vision splintered into geometric shapes when it happened—Fan's fingers digging into the dip of her waist like he was trying to fold her into origami, his mouth a dry gasp against her throat. She felt it first in the shudder that wracked his paper-thin body, the way his hips stuttered against hers with the jerky rhythm of a wind-up toy losing its tension. Then the wet heat, unexpected and impossible, seeping between them like ink spilled across blotting paper. Her own climax hit as a silent burst of static—no sound, just the violent shiver of her glass body arching into him, cracks spiderwebbing from her shoulders down to her hips in delicate lacework fractures.
The moment stretched between them like molasses—Fan's thumb pressing against her lower lip, leaving a wet stripe of his darkened blood. Test Tube's tongue darted out instinctively, tasting iron and something faintly chemical, like old ink left to dry in a forgotten well. His gaze, still eerily vacant, tracked the movement of her mouth with the slow intensity of a dying camera's shutter.
The words came out wrong—not in pitch or pronunciation, but in texture. Fan's voice scraped against her ears like charcoal dragged sideways across paper, the syllables uneven. "I... love..." A pause that stretched into the space between heartbeats. "...you."
Test Tube went very still. Her fingers, still tangled in the burnt edges of his paper skin, froze mid-tremor. The declaration wasn't new. He had whispered it against her neck last summer after lovemaking in a field full of fire flies and daffodils. But now it felt different. It was like a hypothesis she couldn't quite disprove.
Fan's hand lifted, slowly, like sediment settling in one of her discarded beakers. It pressed against the left side of her chest, where her heart would be.
Test Tube didn’t know what the future held. But she knew one day, she would find a way to bring Fan back. To the way he was.
“I love you too, Fan.”