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The escape wasn’t even about timing. It was more for the fact that Shane had access to so many key cards, a job he hadn’t finished, a life he was leaving behind, and the knowledge that his superiors would think he did this for nothing.
Nothing was a pair of wide brown eyes that looked at him in terror through pale milky glass only weeks ago.
Now he’s hard wet skin in Shane’s arms, strangely built in faulty and fragile ways; those brown eyes are now half shut and dreamy from the fumes outside his tank. Shane takes each step down the damp, black tunnel with purpose, his footprints in the warm damp impressed by the weight of this theft; this rescue. Shane breathes condensation in the hot dark, looking down at him and tries not to marvel, to be distracted at how small he is, how silent he is in the haze of shallow breathing.
Strange to see him in silence when Shane will never forget how his voice sounded the first time he spoke.
It had been hard to hear him through the tank’s walls, but he’d screamed so hard and so earnestly around his feeding tube that it had to be like how music sounded, wailing words and feeling, just feeling sobs and fear. The officials back home used to say that music was supposed to be about love and Shane heard it when the specimen opened his mouth and uttered a twangy, wet slurring language with sharp edges. Just the shrill palpable agony sound of it alone and Shane knew.
There had been forty-five different rooms and five hundred tanks to clean in total with creatures in each one he had never seen before. While the silence, cool empty rooms, fluorescent bulbs glaring down the hallways, white walls, and glass of the tank windows was some comfort to him, the idea of having no one to talk to had chilled him the most.
So Shane took his lunch break next to the one creature that hadn’t learned to stop screaming.
When he’d slipped on the gas mask to enter the tank, his eyes had still watered and through the haze the creature looked at him and he was beautiful. In life colour, and teeth long like a monster in the stories he’d been told as a boy.
And he screamed like Shane was meant to hear the love in his lungs.
Now Shane carried him through the lab’s threshold, out into the desert, orange and damp, one long route to freedom, knowing he’d need to cross the field of fungi. Hungry mushrooms without mouths that still tried to eat, mashed themselves to suffocating crumbs against your heels and skin trying to eat without teeth.
He knew the creature could breathe in this climate; there was enough water in the air that the burning gas that it was composed of, that made his fragile cage of a chest swell and contract as he gasped, would be their saving grace.
Shane made a soft crooning noise at him, felt appropriate like he’d saved a stray because brown eyes blinked past the tears from his coughing and croaked out a query in his language, red lips curving out the shaking words.
“I don’t understand you,” Shane murmured at him with a rueful laugh. “But once we get to the pod there might be a receptor that’ll translate those cute little sounds you make.”
He was babbling at Shane excitedly, still a little scared but looking around at the terrain curiously, glad to be free and Shane smiled until he quieted, damp head leaning against Shane’s chest. He knew he was safe and that meant everything to Shane.
The field of fungi crawled at them like it was waiting. Shane placed fingers lightly over the creature’s smooth soft lips, shook his head as he covered his eyes with his palm as well. “Don’t let the fungi in,” he told him, hoped he understood in some way.
The white crumbs began to swell up in piles as the fungi crowded Shane’s ankles, the folds of mushroom flesh stuck and clung as Shane stomped on them, trudged through the miles ahead of them to where the exit base was set. He could feel some of them touch his skin and he shuddered, but he kept his eyes fixed on his rescue, fixed on the feeling of surprisingly strong arms roped around his neck, tightening as Shane’s steps quickened.
The pod was an old model and Shane had only had to pilot one once to get to this base, but his focus was on two things. Peeling the mushrooms off their skin, watching with some morbid curiosity how the alien creature shook himself vigorously to get them off, made sounds of distress that sounded like an old man trying to make it up stairs, and looking around for a receptor.
His rescued alien made a lot of protest when Shane opened the needle in the receptor and jammed it in the place where he was sure his voice was coming from, but it was worth it to hear the sharp turns of his strange alien language become soft and intelligible with the first words he’d ever hear from him.
“What the actual fuck did you just stick in m–oh…” Brown eyes widened. “Oh, I’m…I’m speaking like you now. I can–”
Shane couldn’t stop grinning, felt like he’d been looking across a ravine at him since he met him, but now it was a closed distance. “Yeah, you can,” he breathed, closing the pod door behind him,
“You saved me,” He was breathless, and Shane marveled at the sight of his smile, spilling across his features, reaching his eyes in a friendly, affectionate squint. “Why…?”
Shane was lost for words. It wasn’t natural but he was on board for what it meant. To fall for an alien just because he was beautiful in every gesture. “Tell me your name,” he said, reflexively, sharply. He had to know.
“Ryan.”
What a weird alien sort of name. Shane told him his name. Shane wanted to tell him he loved him, wanted to tell him he was going to protect and take care of him as long as he had to, but instead he said, “This pod will take you to your home planet, but you need to know its name. I didn’t check your file when I stole you so you’ll have to give the computer the navigation.”
Crestfallen. His face was so expressive. Ryan grimaced. “I don’t even know where I am now, how am I supposed to get back to…”
“If you like,” Shane began, trying to sound unrehearsed, trying not to make it sound so purposeful when all he wanted was to be with him, witness his existence. “I could go with you. I would help you. I know the circuits, know the planet names before the expressway to the outer unexplored places.”
“Unexplored…” Ryan echoed, looking at him. “What’s in this for you? I don’t want to drag you away from your home.”
“This isn’t…” It would be so hard to explain. The science behind it; the reason they’d take a creature like him, need to keep him to understand his genetic makeup. How people would freak out if they knew about him. All the secrets involved in keeping their studies to this remote planet so people back home would stay ignorant. Shane had known he was done with it, with his dumb government the moment he’d cracked the glass in Ryan’s tank. “This isn’t my home.”
Ryan’s hands came up over his face, ran through his strange shock of hair on the top of his head, touched lines Shane was curious about himself. “Then come with me?” he said, softly like he was doing something wrong.
“Of course. The pod is small but if you sit close with me, l-let me hold you, we can travel safe together.”
He received the gift of an amused glance and a swallow. Ryan drew near him, like it was nothing, like he had become accustomed to the touch of their skin together, strange as it felt and pulled Shane close by his arms before settling between his legs a bit awkwardly in front of the navi board.
“Dude, as long as you’re taking me home, I’ll let you do anything you like.”
Shane tried not to melt into a subspecies like substance when the bones of Ryan’s back curved against his chest and a hand rested on his leg for balance. “Noted,” he said and wondered why Ryan smelled so good; salty and like water. It was different than carrying him; it was like Ryan was tucked against him in an intimate embrace; he couldn’t possibly know he was flexible in a way that made Shane like a piece of him. He locked the pod door and that immediately triggered the rumble of its fusion engine.
“What’s the planet name,” Shane mumbled, pointing at the navi screen. “Say it to the speaker so we can find out if it’s even in this sector.”
Ryan had intertwined their fingers, done it the shake of the fusion engine had startled him. He held tight like Shane was the compressor restraint device he might have used if he was alone. “Ok. It’s…” he leaned forward and his lips touched the speaker. “…it’s called Earth.”