Chapter Text
All lost its sheen under the shadow of who- of what- stood before Pauline, blocking the light from the full wall-length window.
For what it was worth, Pauline had come to resent the white gleam that clung, stuck like glue, to everything in this room. It was the visual equivalent of when new car smell gave the impression of being poisonous. There existed the stereotype of walking into the office of one’s new position and theatrically, smugly, throwing oneself onto the “boss chair”, made of that quality leather nobody used anymore when creating that which had once been reputed for its durability. The cliché of replacing the name plate on the desk with one’s own. Of informing one’s new assistant that, starting today, “the usual” when requesting coffee meant something different to whatever it had been before.
On the morrow of her surprise election victory, though, Pauline had been unfortunate enough to experience what it meant to achieve a lifelong dream; when she walked into the mayor’s office it had already been entirely emptied, short of a rather cheap plastic chair and a basic white desk with an incidental key-scratch down the middle. Never meet your heroes, so they said; and if one was Pauline, never be your hero, or you might encounter the brutal reality, the one that held there was to be no theatrical fulfillment of any mayor’s-first-day stereotypes.
She had been reassured that “you can decide how you’d like to decorate your new office, Mayor Pauline!”, and the ecstasy of hearing that title uttered, not only towards her but with such reverence, had soaked up the dejection - leading her to spend the majority of her first day all but dashing around the city for handsome desk lamps and antique “boss chairs” made of that quality leather nobody used anymore. She’d been followed around all the while, the one holding the microphone never having the same face, asking questions about how she was planning on tackling the over-bureaucracy issue that had caused the fantastic electoral upset the previous night.
At that time Pauline had felt herself a glimmering woman, a star of sorts. Politics had never been portrayed as the sector of the glamorous, but Pauline’s hunch that charisma would resonate with people had been, as evidence suggested, a blood-red and surgically accurate instinct. And, when she’d set up everything that she’d bought herself, accented with that crimson velvet she considered something of a personality trait, the sheen of newness had been as though it were reflecting Pauline’s glimmer back unto herself. It was all, even if occasionally from the antique shops, entirely shiny and new. Much like Pauline herself. She had achieved her dream, the one she considered indicative of her having wiped whatever fallible slate she’d been working with originally. That was, she had finally, in her life otherwise marked with her own vulnerabilities and victim status, achieved, full stop, and that was why she glimmered so when she pushed her hair pointedly over her shoulder, or laughed confidently when answering some journalist’s question, and why her office supplies shone with novelty just as much.
That shine became markedly less worth celebrating when Pauline had stumbled upon the next brutal truth about the realisation of dreams; a shock victory and a promise of change did not suddenly mean that everything you said was henceforth regarded as invincible by those who reported on them. That was to say, it had been a bit of a “hm” moment, for the Mayor Pauline to open the newspaper some days later and discover that a person or two had a counter-argument for something or other she had said. She’d known it would happen, on an intellectual level. It had happened on the campaign trail. Yet, the deeper, emotional reality that to cross the finish line in first place did not magically place her on a pedestal in the minds of the entire world, despite the stereotype of what happened to first-place winners, had caused an unwelcome push against the foundations of her new self.
She had begun to wonder whether her platform had ever made much sense. Whether crimson velvet was such a charismatic style or just tacky. And the newness, the sheen, of her things started to feel less impressively glowing and more unimpressively amateurish.
She preferred it, though, to the dull lack of luminosity in her office now, and she most certainly preferred crimson to purple.
The white glare of the eyes of these- well, Pauline wanted to say of these women, in that they appeared, on some level, to be vaguely humanoid, wearing matching pink dresses with bejewelled crowns - loomed over Pauline’s head, as they ceaselessly screamed at her in some language Pauline couldn’t even hope to make heads or tails of. One was around Pauline’s own height, and she nearly looked like a Princess. The other was the size of the wall, thereby preventing the entry of light, and in her need to hunch over to fit herself under the ceiling she nearly looked like that animal from all those years ago. That much accentuated the terror, though Pauline’s nervous system sure didn’t need much more encouragement.
For she was forced, for lack of anywhere else to go, to stay firmly seated in her “boss chair”, made of that quality leather nobody used anymore, her back facing the door and curling her nails into the skin of her knees, pleading with whatever these things were to not hurt her for the tiny, fleeting hope that maybe they understood her language, and the far tinier, more fleeting one that they had some instinct towards mercy.
Pauline, for all her concerns and pre-planning for what it would be to get to this point, had not assumed she would be assassinated after a week on the job. Certainly not by what she could only assume were aliens.
She got the impression that she had slipped into the role of an unwilling participant to their screaming match, too, because whenever she said anything – for example, “please, is it money you want?! We have money!” – they would respond with more meaningless noise. Their “voices” sounded like that of an old man who had been a lifelong smoker and also happened to have a cold.
“W-We… we have police! We have police! They’ll be coming any second now! You’ll be surrounded!”
More sounds. Their lips were not only impossibly large, but when speaking they moved in impossible directions. Pauline inadvertently wiped at her lipstick with a finger before bringing it back to dig at the skin in her legs.
Again, for the slight familiarity that the taller one exuded, Pauline did not feel it too far-fetched to assign human emotion to these seemingly-not-human creatures’ expressions, and at this current moment she saw a flash of irritation on both of their faces.
“S-s-s-someone will come to save me soon! And you don’t want to be here when that happens!”
Pauline felt quite sick, when those words left her mouth. The subject of that sentence could really have stood to be her. That had been the whole point.
“Or I’ll- I’ll- I’ll!”
For the first time, she found herself hoping that the two didn’t understand what she was saying, because she lacked anything in the way of a threat she could reasonably make, and to implicitly admit as much tasted foul. Mouldy. Her stomach kept churning.
The shorter one stuck her arm out abruptly, shoving a claw into Pauline’s face and yelling something. Pauline yelped, then bit her lip in self-reprimanding. The hand then moved, to indicate some command to her, towards the hole in the ceiling through which the two had originally entered, and when Pauline followed it with her eyes a ladder made of string flung itself down, connected to a large metal structure hovering above.
Pauline shuddered. Not assassination, but abduction?
She snapped back to face her assailants and shook her head with great vigour. It occurred to her vaguely that, if these creatures were indeed aliens, there was no reason whatsoever to assume that shaking one’s head meant anything to them, but she had a notable lack of time or energy for pondering semiotics. When the response came in the form of another garbled yell, Pauline hoped it was their word for “understood, we’ll be on our way. And keep it up, champ, you’re a shining red star”.
It did not appear to be so, if the way the taller one arched her back to turn her head further towards Pauline and all but spit on her was to provide any insight. Instead, two of her notably-more-than-two arms came to latch on either side of Pauline’s face.
“Hey!”
They were cold and slimy and a wide range of other awful sensations for which the words escaped her. They felt past their use-by date to the touch. Pauline felt, suddenly and inexplicably, a collection of chilled stones in the flesh between her stomach and the skin trapping it inside. And a shattering in her legs. And her hair falling out, and her nails extending-
“Hhheeeeyyy…”
The only heat she could feel, harshly juxtaposed with the alien extremities pressed against it, was on either cheek from where everything else was being extracted. Her words, and her brain. All besides became like stale cake, unmoveable and made of wood.
Oh, Pauline thought, quietly and without charisma, I’m dying.
For it to end now.
There was something to be pondered, and irony to be mocked, perhaps by some uncharismatic intellectual some ten years from now – the helpless woman, the famous victim, who got herself to the office of Mayor and then promptly died. Pauline wasn’t exactly doing that pondering herself. She was mostly coughing. And coughing. And coughing. And exhaling. And coughing.
“Help…” she hacked. Her tongue was pre-sprayed baking paper.
It did not enter Pauline’s cognisance for some time that the creature had relented, and that Pauline had slumped back into the “boss chair” made of that quality leather nobody used anymore, out of the taller creature’s grasp, and so when it did eventually occur to her that she had been released, it was not clear how long she had simply been sitting there, untouched, waiting to die.
Waiting to die.
Crimson velvet was better than purple, she could vaguely remember somebody she cared about once saying, so Pauline tried to launch herself upwards, out of her chair, but the sponge of her flesh sunk further into the crevices of exhaustion. For failure, she tried to bite the inside of her mouth instead, and her teeth merely stung at the mental command.
She did not mutter “help” a second time. Rather, she moved her pupils manually to point in the direction of the two before her, and compelled her chin, at mental knifepoint, to move upwards and downwards. The nod she sought eventuated.
“I’ll go wiiiiiiiiiiii-“ Pauline slumped forwards, out of her “boss chair” made of that quality leather nobody used anymore, and face-planted onto the floor.
She had sufficient energy, and not a bit more, to mentally bargain with herself that it was better to be taken and save herself later than to be found dead in this office. When that was exhausted, she could only sense, on some rational level, her body being carried upwards and outwards. She was, logically, thrown onto the larger one’s back, and her last thought was “exactly like.” before she fell into what could best be described as pseudo-sleep.
Like if hospitals were purple instead of white. That was the description Pauline would give, if she ever made it out of here alive and got the opportunity to provide it to somebody who asked.
Pauline certainly felt like she needed to go to the hospital. She had gained some dexterity in what parts of her body’s strings had previously been cut, as if to slowly and patiently grow a vine along a steel rod in replacement, but only so much as to slowly roll over on the floor to which she’d been relegated among other incidentally acquired pieces of space junk. Her being here also did not necessarily mean she got to realise anything regarding what, exactly, she had found herself entangled in. Pauline had known there would be a scant window to eavesdrop on any enlightening conversations, with the language remaining nonsense, but it would have been agreeable to have, at the very least, a big evil cartoon detailing some big evil plans from which Pauline could extrapolate her relevance and, by extension, her exit strategy.
But the ship – if that was what this was – insisted on its bareness, on its uniformity in shape and design, on its apathy to Pauline’s situation. Much like a hospital. If hospitals were purple.
Pauline felt an unrelenting dizziness which made her want to lie down, in spite of her already lying down. Her nose was too close to the rest of her face, the rest of her body vanishingly far away. When her eyes were closed, shapes made of transparent exhaustion fluttered and swung around, bending in and out of shape, changing her own body’s size relative. It reminded her, oh so eagerly, of being woken up at the worst possible time in a sleep cycle, the timing where the back of one’s brain was left switched off for the rest of the day, lower eyelids left layered with nail polish remover.
Which meant, she could surely, surely get up and out of here. She’d resisted exhaustion like this for less. For waitressing shifts and meetings with people whom she hated.
Her new job flashed in her mind, with the most clarity she had experienced in quite some time. Her achievement. The “boss chair” made of that quality leather nobody used anymore, the one from which she’d slumped down.
She rolled her body across the floor again, managing it largely because at that precise moment the ship tilted, allowing her to push herself a meagre few centimetres and allow the rules of physics to do the rest on her behalf. The rules of physics were all too happy to contribute, so much so that Pauline was quite aggressively slammed against the purple wall. It hurt, in theory. Pauline wasn’t sure whether it actually did.
Out. Out. Out.
Pauline could only open her eyes in second-long intervals to observe, what with some ink abyss in the centre of her head pulling her eyes inwards from the sockets. There was what looked like a hatch next to her, with a crank that was somehow more aggressively purple than its surroundings.
It took a good few tries just for Pauline to finally move her arm, so she probably should not have felt exasperation to discover that she lacked the ability to even grip the crank properly, let alone turn it. She sensed some floating in her fingers, and the rest of her body, which was a side effect of tiredness Pauline had not encountered before this, that much she could say.
She kept on this way for the better part of- of some length of time. Pauline did not have the resources to notice much of anything, to have a subconscious keeping track of anything while she swayed. She pushed harder, probably. Maybe. She pushed harder. Against the thing. She twisted it, in all likelihood. The certainty was that she, out out out, she, she needed, she, out. Not again. Don’t stay. Don’t die. Don’t wait to die. Out.
There was at some point, as far as could be reckoned, a squeal from the, from the. And an opening, and there was a slumping forward, not onto the floor and not out of a “boss chair” made of something or other Pauline couldn’t quite remember right now.
Out was a very bad idea, Pauline could think sharply and with conviction, because humans could not survive space unassisted, and this certainty, this dollar-for-dollar betting rate, of failure and irony, was the last thing that had any clarity.