Chapter Text
“Woah, woah! How did you get out!? Or… up, for that m-?”
“Where the HELL am I? WHERE IS THIS?”
The bloodied man backed up against the wall of the lab, searching desperately for an exit. Well, he wasn’t bloody before, but he had seemed to have re-opened some wounds and was now bleeding onto the plastic patient gown that Armando had given him.
“Rocky, stay back there! You’ll freak him out!” Grace commanded with his hand out. This guy was not ready to see an alien!
“Grace stupid stupid! Rocky will-”
“Rocky! Rocky, I’ll give you, like, 5 gold stars for this, promise!” He looked back to blood guy and cautiously got closer.
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
As the bloody man shouted roughly and swung his arm wildly to clear space and he backed to the far wall of the lab, Grace saw his face… shift.
The downwards curl of the man’s mouth stretched upwards and open on the left side, revealing extra rows of thin, long teeth. A whole bloody mouth extended from his cheek, gnashing and hissing. The veins on the side of his face rippled, as if blood was shooting towards the teeth to supply with extra, what? Power? What would be the biological purpose of extra blood? And his eyes, well, mostly the one, seemed to chromatically darken. This was all not there when they put him in the med bay.
Grace’s jaw dropped.
He crouched a little to get a better look at him. This was a medical anomaly. Scratch that-- this was a medical miracle that this man could have such a mutation, a jaw with teeth like that and an open gash that didn’t just pour out his insides and still be up and at ‘em. It could be that adrenaline was keeping him upright, or-- OR! Was it adrenaline that triggered the teeth to grow and his face to split? Like a self defense mechanism, providing him a weapon. Or perhaps it was simply a deimatic display, a false show of what could be danger to scare off his attacker and buy him time to run away. But what was the blood doing? Was it necessary to change his face like this? Was it quickly replacing something it used? Was it even blood in there? Did this guy have some other fluid in his veins? Was this guy even human?
Throughout the rapid medical queries that shot through Grace’s brain, he had begun to lower himself, bending his knees and leaning to the side, and shuffling forward to get a better look at this guy’s facial structure. The bloody man looked perturbed, and backed further into the corner, his arm still out in defense.
“Where in the world do those teeth grow from? Can you talk like that?” Grace’s jaw still hung open, but now had a dream-like smile.
“Wow,” he said, breathlessly.
“The fuck?” The guy sneered. Sweary guy, isn’t he? “The hell is wrong with you? Get back!”
He made a show of lunging forward to scare Grace off, and Grace made a slight movement of dodging on autopilot, but angled his body more to see under the bloody man’s jaw. Grace even hazarded another step forward. The man shoved himself back into his corner.
“Certainly doesn’t hinder your speaking ability. And English! Have we mentioned the English part? How freaking lucky is that!” Grace inhaled, then trailed off. Once again, he voiced his amazement. “Wow.”
The man said nothing, just glared in a firm frown, teeth jagged out of his head.
“Hope it’s not a parasite. That’s not a parasitical organism right?” The man stiffened.
“Probably not human teeth, so… gosh maybe. Hope not.” The man located where Grace was staring at and brushed his fingers against the mouth. He jolted back like it had scalded him.
“What the fuck? What the hell is wrong with me?”
He went to touch again, but mentally stopped himself, like there was a barrier. His fingers shook before he gave up and dropped his hand. “It…”
Grace’s eyes danced all about the man’s face, and finally, he decided he had gotten his fill and straightened back up.
The man shifted back into an aggressive position, to make it known he was still ready to pounce if needed. Grace smiled and softly clapped his hand into a clasp.
“Alrighty! Well, it doesn’t do you much good to cower in the corner like that and for you to not, you know, trust me. Especially if we’re going to be sharing this space for…” Grace chuckled with nervousness under his breath, their flight to Erid still had a few months left. “...a while. So-”
He took a few steps backwards, not taking his eyes off of the man, and steadily projected his actions as he rolled a stool over and took a seat, hoping to appear less hostile.
“Let’s start with introductions! I’m-”
The man hissed. “Leave.”
Grace frowned.
“I understand you’re scared-”
“LEAVE!” he growled. “Get out!”
Grace chuckled and adjusted his glasses.
“It’s my lab, you know,” he said, more to himself than to make a point or anything. Actually, asserting ownership of this place wasn’t helping his case of ‘I’m not going to hurt you let’s be friends.’
“Doesn’t matter, sorry, forget that.” Grace sighed and closed his eyes.
The man’s eyes took this chance to flicker around the room to search for some sort of weapon, before snapping right back to Grace the moment his pupils appeared again. Grace crossed his arms and put one foot over the other.
“I’m Doctor Captain Ryland Grace of the-”
“Doctor?” The man asked for clarification in disbelief.
“Yes-”
“So you’re gonna run me through some fucking tests, huh? Like your own personal fucking lab rat?”
Grace furrowed his brows.
“No…” The personal lab rat part of his accusation filled Grace with a bit of dread, but his accusation that Grace wanted to test him… well, it was kind of his scientific duty, if he had to argue his case for wanting to take samples of this guy.
“God… hah,” the man laughed in a broken way, finally taking his eyes off Grace to stare somewhere far off.
“Just exchanged one hell for another, huh? Stiiiiill just- fucking,” he half-growled-half-huffed to himself, “expendable.”
Grace’s heart ached at that one. Oh.
“Just your little… asset.” The man said simply. He lowered his volume but the rage that seeped through his words had not lessened.
Grace stared at him from his chair for a while, arms still crossed. His eyes searched the man, looking for just where this overwhelming despair had first injected itself and took root. The point of entry was impossible to find, however, long buried under new scars and bruises. And blood.
Asset, expendable, hell, lab rat… Grace thought back to the first astrophage tests in the white room filled with argon. It felt like forever ago, but also so near. ‘Am I expendable?’ he had asked, and the underlining answer was that yes, he was. He did their research anyway. Proved himself wrong. And that’s when his whole life tumbled out of control. But it looked like this guy had suffered much, much worse.
“Couldn’t get your black box, so the freedom thing is revoked, right? You didn’t get it? S‘this the new way to pay?” Simon reasoned.
“What are you testing?”
Grace parsed through his speech, making a mental note for ‘black box.’ Those kept data from airplanes so if the plane crashed, they could figure out what went wrong in the aftermath and make future flights safer. It was also known as an information dead-zone in some fields, where information was passed into the box, changed in some mysterious way, and output a product. Grace wondered which it was.
“You COI?” The bloody man asked, since Grace still hadn’t replied.
“I- I’m what?” He hadn’t heard that one before.
“C. O. I.” He said simply, if not a little rude in the way he over enunciated.
With Grace’s lack of answer he scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Fuck off.”
“No I, uh, don’t know what that means. Sorry. It’s an acronym, right? Or a word?” The man said nothing and Grace wracked his brain. “Acronym. COI. C… cuh… company of… industry- no that’s not, uh- company of…”
The man stared blankly.
“Do you think I’m dumb? Or are you the dumb one?”
“No, I’m the-” Grace cursed the name of a candy under his breath and grimaced. Out of the two options he was given… “I’m the dumb one. I guess.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what the COI is and I don’t think you’re dumb.”
They held their gazes, Grace’s plain if not a little tired, and the man’s in distrust that was faltering. The man dropped his gaze to the ground and Grace shifted his feet.
“Consolidation of Iron,” The bloody man whispered, before looking back up to Grace. Grace shook his head.
“I don’t know them. What do they do?”
“Fuck if-” the man sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”
“They…” Grace tried to pick a phrase carefully. Nothing good was coming up. “...made you… expendable?”
The man cast his gaze off to the side, eyebrows dropping into a pained and deeply sad expression.
“I… think I did that to myself.”
Huh. Grace carefully ejected painful memories from his brain’s metaphorical airlock.
Made himself expendable. Another mystery of history layered onto the already exciting and intriguing mystery of this man’s biological anomalies. This one was… less exciting. Less fun. It, unfortunately, hit a little close to home. Grace wasn’t going to share that one though. This wasn’t about him right now.
“Okay,” Grace offered softly. “Well, I’m not with them. And I’m not going to do tests on you unless you agree.”
The man alerted and shot him a glare. Okay. Why was that still a problem? Grace raised his eyebrows in question.
“That just means you’re going to make me agree.” Like, force him? “I know how you Consolidation…” he faltered. Grace wasn’t COI or whatever, and for some reason that put this guy at a loss.
“Well, that wouldn’t be nice of me, would it?”
The man laughed.
“Nice? God-” he huffed and glanced at the ceiling in disbelief.
“No one is doing anything or not doing things because of ‘nice’. To be kind? To be decent? Get real.” The man flinched at his own phrase of ‘get real,’ before shaking his head.
Grace sat a little straighter, readjusting himself as if he were getting to a breakthrough part of lecture. This man was revealing what kind of culture he came from. And it wasn’t looking… good.
“People do things because they have to. Not for any other reason. There is no more reason than necessity. Not enough for us all.”
Necessity was the word he used. Nothing but what was needed. That meant no time for pleasure, no time for rest unless it proved to make someone more efficient. Grace gathered that times were rough, really rough, wherever this man was from. Probably dealing with extreme scarcity too if the bits of fabric that made up his clothes or the scraps of metal that created his vessel said anything.
Grace drummed his fingers on his elbow while the man leaned back on the wall in silence.
He stood. The man merely looked at him, but did not flinch as hard this time. Good.
“Well, sir, I’m lucky, and now we are lucky,” he takes a breath, “to be living in abundance.” The man’s face did not change, as if Grace was merely telling a fictional story.
That was fine. Grace began to pace, not getting any closer to the man’s corner, but just between the two lab tables that made up the middle of his workspace. He pressed the pads of his fingers together.
“Not in great abundance, I’ll give you that. The supplies we have on this ship are limited and we won’t be getting any more for a while, but it seems to me that we have a lot more than from where you came from.” Grace tapped his fingers against each other a few times, then shot a look back towards the man.
“Did everyone dress like that there?”
The man said nothing, seemingly unsure what ‘like that’ meant. His face was also a little softer than before, less angry. Grace was making progress. Grace clarified his question:
“The uh, fabric made of scraps. Miss-matchy- sorry. I don’t mean to be judgy. I liked the colors, actually- um. Knit is nice, sorry we had to, uh,” He rambled. Sorry we had to cut them up and give you a weird plastic patient gown.
The man nodded and he stopped.
“Okay,” Grace confirmed and continued to pace.
“So. With this abundance, this gives me the amazing opportunity, the amazing privilege… to be nice.” Grace stopped and turned towards the man. “So I’m gonna be nice.”
The man watched him for a few seconds, took a look around the room at all of the delicate, shiny, and costly tools and machinery, before dropping his gaze to the floor.
He spoke just above a whisper, “Okay.”
Grace smiled softly. This was going good!
“So, that means, no tests without your permission. You gotta tell me I can. And if I can’t- no tests!” He raises his arms “That’s fine! No tests for Grace, all good. I’ll just-” he chuckles, “die from curiosity, hah,”
The man’s eyes darted up at the last part. Was he sensitive to the word ‘die’ like Rocky was?
“No die. Not-” Grace grammatically corrected, “not die. I won’t die. That would be silly, I mean-”
“But you want to?” The man asked. “Run tests?”
Oh, so that’s why he looked. Grace expressed his curiosity. God, he was horrible. He didn’t want to manipulate him into anything… He sighed.
“Yeah, I mean, I won’t lie, I would absolutely love to run some tests with you. But…” he carefully made eye contact again to express his earnest meaning. “Not until you say ‘yeah that’s alright.’ Which can be never! by the way. You’re allowed to never do tests ever.”
The man grew restless and shifted his weight, sighing “What do you even want to test on me, man?”
“Oh ho ho, I wouldn’t be testing something else on you, I would be testing- like- you! You get what I mean? Like, I wanna know more about you.” Grace leaned forward with a smile, shoving his hands in his labcoat pockets.
The man blinked, not getting what was so cool about getting to know a guy who had freaking cool teeth. “Why?”
“Well, it’s,” Grace sighed, glancing off, before he took a step forward. “You are extraordinary, really. I’m a biologist- er, micro… biologist, anyway, but I know that with, uh, what you have,” he skirted around the words ‘condition,’ ‘anomaly,’ ‘weird,’ and ‘your face.’
“You shouldn’t be alive right now. But you are! I want to make sure you stay that way. And not only that but…”
Grace trailed off as he got closer, coming to a stop before the man, who stood tall to show his strength. Grace didn’t mind a thing he did, staring at his face, his scars, the teeth, his jawline.
“...you’re just beautiful,” he said breathily.
The man tensed, and Grace saw it this time. He backed up immediately whaaaaat was he SAYING?
“In- IN A SCIENCE WAY!” He clarified as clumsily as his footsteps, which led him to whack his leg into the stool. “Gah- in- in a science way. Scien-tific. You are- uh, beautiful in a science way I did not mean to like, hit on you? Or, like, um… um…”
“What…” the man said, softly, confusion written on his beautiful face. Correction. Scientifically beautiful face. Oh god, no, that was worse!
That was, like, declaring he was objectively pretty like a freaking fact or something. Like, if Grace wrote this up, he’d be obligated to say this guy was beautiful or else it would be Bad Science. Which- well, wouldn’t be false.
Well, hang on.
Grace takes this guy in for once, crossing his arms again. Is he doing a blatantly obvious once-over of the guy? Yes. Does he do this normally to every random human he meets? God no, but this was for… science! And science was saying…
Grace’s smile dropped.
The man looked at him, his mouth parted slightly in lost confusion, his eyes displaying the same but with a hint of amusement. His long dark hair framed his face in a messy and effortless way, the blood matted to small pieces here and there. His stubble traced the outline of his lips and followed his remarkably defined jawline. His jaw connected with a strong neck that connected to his thick chest that connected to his built arm that Grace needed wrapped around him yesterday and--- Oh man.
Grace blinked and let out a small sound as he tried to think of an exit.
“UM- ahem, and uh, so- you’re- uh, you are medically interesting… and I won’t be running tests even though I want to. I’m being honest here because I think lying would, like, freak you out, which is super fair. I don’t exactly like lying either.”
The man nodded, his shoulders dropped. He looked much calmer than when he first woke up. “No lying,” he asked, though it sounded more like a statement.
“No lying,” Grace repeated like an oath.
“No… secrets,” he ventured.
“No secrets. No hiding things from you.” That meant a whole list of things to Grace. Their food rationing problem, their mission, the reason why he’s on this ship, his cowardice, his selfishness, his inability to put others over himself, the alien…
The alien. Rocky. Grace pressed his lips together. “Ummm… speaking of not hiding anything there’s, um…” Grace tilted his head forward slightly and mussed up his hair with his hand. The man cautiously stood a little straighter. “You’re probably wondering why there’s these xe- uh, glass tunnels everywhere, right?”
The man nodded, slowly.
Grace exhaled, “There’s an… alien? On the ship.”