Chapter Text
It was the long, cold nights on an alien planet, his sole comfort being the presence of someone he’d once thought he could trust, and still wasn’t completely sure he couldn’t. It was the monotony, day in and day out, doing endless tasks and endless maintenance. The same systems that continued to malfunction day after day. The bitterness, because they were just another crew full of working bodies who had been sent up and left to die. The tired eyes, the accusatory looks and pointed fingers after they’d found the horribly mangled body of someone who had once been considered a friend. The terrified screams as they’d forcibly thrown one of their own into the lava pit, simply because he was the only one who hadn’t been accounted for. The fear and the guilt when another crewmate turned up dead, and everyone realised that they’d executed the wrong person. It didn’t matter now anyway. They were all as good as dead.
There were four of them left. Brown, Purple, Lime, Black. Their previous identities lost behind the colourful suits and the aliases. Four crewmates, and him. White. The one responsible for all the killings so far, the one who mimicked a human face and human emotions. Who had the whole crew convinced that he was just another one of them, just as scared and oblivious as the rest of them. Black knew better. He never would have suspected that the same man who held him gently as he cried at the loss of Pink, the same man who whispered sweet nothings in his ear late at night when they were alone, would be capable of so much thoughtless violence. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself; White looming over the body on the ground, his pale suit splattered with blood and gore. His face was inhuman as he’d turned to look at Black, a grin full of large sharp teeth stretching unnaturally wide across his face. At first the impostor had advanced on him, growling threats of all the horrible things he would do if Black accused him. Later, in the dark, when they were alone, White told Black that he loved him as he pushed him onto the bunk. Black could almost forget about what he’d witnessed earlier as White whispered those same sweet words in his ear, but the words were laced through with low chuckles that sounded almost mocking. He felt numb.
White became his constant shadow, trailing him wherever he went. Making sure he didn’t tell anyone what he knew. Black went about his daily tasks, but there was even more of a sense of despondency than before. He was distant from the crewmates he’d been close to before; he knew they were innocent, but they didn’t know that he was. His only beacon of hope on the mission had been the man he’d loved, but he wasn’t really a man, and Black didn’t think he loved him anymore. But when he felt White grip his arm in a tight hold that left bruises as he did something the impostor didn’t like, he knew there was nowhere to go. Help wasn’t coming for them.
Black pulled the thin, scratchy blanket tighter around him as he huddled in White’s embrace. The impostor’s skin felt cool and almost damp, and in the small metal room they both slept in, Black felt very cold. He felt slow, lingering kisses against the back of his neck and shivered, not out of anticipation or any thrill, but at the chilled and inhuman feel of them.
“We can leave, you know,” White rasped against the nape of his neck. “Go far away. I know you hate this.”
“No one’s coming for us,” Black responded with little emotion in his voice.
“Not your people.”
Black didn’t respond. He couldn’t bring himself to care about the implications. Maybe they’d finally kill him, and he’d be free, in a sense, from all of it. Even though White had threatened him so that he wouldn’t tell the others about him, Black knew that the fallout if he did would be on his fellow crewmates, and not on himself. White had a strange attachment to him for some reason. He wouldn’t kill Black unless it was absolutely necessary. Black found himself numbly waiting for that day.
“Then let’s go,” he finally mumbled. He felt White grin, sharpened teeth digging into the back of his neck as the impostor did so. The air in the room felt dark and sinister all of a sudden.
“Just one thing first.”
The knife felt hot and heavy in his hand. His footsteps were muffled and dull against the moss-like plant life that covered the planet’s surface. He’d checked the cams to find his target, and he’d found her conveniently alone. She should have known that that was a risky move, especially with the crew as dwindled as it was. Maybe she’d done it on purpose; maybe this would be freedom for both of them. As Black walked almost robotically, a weather node came into view, and beside it, Brown was busy doing the usual maintenance. She sighed as she finished and turned around, beginning to greet Black when her eyes suddenly fell on the knife in his hand. She glanced back up at his face in shock, her expression a mixture of betrayal and terror.
“No, please,” Brown whimpered as she backed against the weather node behind her, hands stretched out defensively. Black approached her slowly, without a word as tears began leaking from her eyes. He raised the knife.
“So it was you all along?” Brown sniffled, one hand on the node behind her now as if she needed it to support herself. Black hesitated briefly, feeling a sudden urge to defend himself, but he shrugged it off. It wouldn’t mean anything, in the end, and it certainly wouldn’t make any difference to Brown. He suddenly lunged forward, burying the knife between two of Brown’s ribs. She screamed, a shrill sound filled with panic, and as Black pulled the bloodied knife back, a whistling sound became clearer. He’d punctured a lung. Panicking now, worried that Brown’s scream would alert the others, Black went into a frenzy. Her scream became gurgled and cut off as he buried the knife once in her throat, and she fell to the ground bonelessly as blood sprayed from the wound almost rhythmically with the beating of her heart. The mossy ground around where her body had fallen was staining from a dull purple to deep wine colour as the vegetation soaked up the blood.
He felt a presence behind him, but he didn’t turn. There was a large hole in the ground nearby, and Black stumbled into it, knees feeling weak. He fell for a short distance, and landed hard underground. The knife that he was still clutching in his hand nicked his arm. He couldn’t be bothered to pick himself up as he heard the loud sounds of tearing flesh from somewhere above him. He closed his eyes. This was his ticket out of here, he reminded himself. They suspected him anyway, he told himself. It was one among many things that White had whispered to him two nights ago, claiming that the rest of the crew had been planning to throw him into the lava pit. They knew it had to be someone, White had said, and they’d decided that he was just a little too suspicious for their liking.
Something landed loudly beside him, and Black felt a pair of cold, strong hands yank him to his feet. He opened his eyes in time to see White’s smiling, blood-splattered face looking back at him. White kissed him, and it tasted like copper. Black felt the knife slip from his hand. It hit the bare ground of the tunnel with an echoing clatter. White muttered praises into his ear, and for the first time in weeks, they sounded almost genuine. White pulled away from him but grabbed his arm in a firm grip and began running further into the tunnel, into the darkness. Black watched the small pool of light made by the large hole above fade into the distance as he was half-dragged away, and wondered if there were two other mangled corpses laying somewhere out there for the next poor crew to discover. Black’s hands still felt uncomfortably sticky, and they collected dirt as he was pulled through the darkness.
He hoped they’d at least let him wash the blood off before they killed him.
And that they made it fast.