Work Text:
Honeydew wasn’t sure when it happened, or why he hadn’t noticed sooner. As the new Jaffa Factory began to take shape, he noticed that there was something oddly sinister about it. The angles just looked off somehow and the whole building had a sense of wrongness about it, especially at night, when the queer light of Duncan’s silverwood trees lit up the surrounding area with that ghastly glow.
Duncan was another issue all together. He made it a point to avoid him on nights like these, when the scientist would wander through the grounds tending to the saplings. Duncan had always been a little strange, but lately his smile was just a little too sharp, his eyes a little too calculating, like he was mentally dissecting you. And as he prowled among the trees on these evenings, bathed in sickly pale light, his lab coat still stained with blood from where he’d hacked off his own arm at the elbow to make room for his “power tool,” well… Honeydew just preferred to stay out of his way.
The most disturbing thing about this whole situation, however, was Xephos. Honeydew would have been fine with all of this, if he still had his best friend to laugh about it with, but the space man seemed to bask in the new macabre atmosphere. He worked on strange new machines with the fury of a mad man, at all hours of the night. Honeydew wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but even he knew fusion reactors and nuclear weapons had nothing to do with jaffas and no one even bothered to lie to him anymore.
As he ducked inside the factory, eager to get away from Duncan’s roaming, he froze as he realized that the lights were all off. A rhythmic clanging told him that Xephos was hard at work on one of the machines in the main room and he approached with some trepidation. He entered the factory proper and immediately spotted his friend in a corner, wrenching open one of the battery boxes. The only light source in the room was cast by Xephos’s eyes, and he could only make out his vague silhouette as he crouched over his work.
“You alright, mate?” he called, his hands trembling as fumbled along the wall looking for a light switch. The clanging stopped and he saw Xephos slowly stand, turning his luminescent gaze on him. “You’ll get snuck up on in here if you’re not careful. What if a creeper spawned?” He choked out a nervous laugh, hands now scrabbling at the wall. Never, throughout the course of their entire friendship, had he feared his friend but, right now, the thought of being alone with him in the dark made Honeydew’s heart hammer in his chest.
“Don’t touch the lights.” The command was sharp, and Honeydew went motionless. Seconds ticked by as the two stared at each other, and Xephos’s next words were soft but no less terrifying. “I prefer it like this.”
With that, he slowly turned back to his work and, once he had gathered the courage to move, Honeydew fled the factory. He didn’t stop running until the factory was just a dim glow in the distance and, doubled over and gasping, he made the decision to go to Hanna’s island tonight.
Something was dreadfully wrong with Xephos.