edit: I was typing this up literally right when today’s episode dropped. Lol. Lmao
I love thinking about infected carme but I also loooove imposter tropes.
Carme starts showing symptoms but his cognitive shift is subtle. He does not lose it immediately, he does not snarl and growl and hiss—he still talks to moon, engages him in the process of finding a cure, but then carme starts “forgetting” things. He is quiet when he would usually laugh, his vocabulary suffers, he does not acknowledge memories that he and moon share.
It does not become obvious to moon until Carme insinuates he wants Moon to open the door. Carme has been gone for days. He’s been talking with something piloting a corpse.
Moon forgets how long it’s been since Carme has been infected. Unthinkingly, he opens the door. Carme is in his chair, the bite on his arm dark and smeared with oil that hasn’t really dried, the silicone skin has discolored oddly. Moon gets closer—and then Carme jolts forward like he’s new to it, unused to moving and getting control of a vessel he’s never used.
He misses Moon’s cheek by inches. Moon is quick to back away and shut the door but Carme is more desperate to get out. It sacrifices one of its hands to smash the door’s handle, cracking the plastic shell of carme’s palm and spraying rotten oil all over the door with the force. It curses Moon, then apologizes as it’s still trying to get the door open, it’s sorry it just wants out it is starving for the first time in it’s life why can’t you understand that. It sounds too much like Carme for Moon to disregard it completely and that is by design, “Carme” knows this.
Moon is hurt, tells it not to use Carme’s voice and that he would never say that. It disagrees and everything goes quiet.
From then on, Moon does not leave that desk. The thing in Carme’s body does not try to talk to him much. Sometimes, when Moon falls asleep, he is startled awake by banging at the glass window in front of him. There are times when Moon thinks it’s trying to talk but it’s just intelligible syllables, the click of it’s voicebox resetting and shorting out, and the crash of the chair being thrown against the door.
Carme does not snarl and growl and hiss. He coaxes Moon to open the door with a voice that is not his, trying to take advantage of Moon’s memory again. It becomes much quieter when Carme’s battery runs out, having spent all of its energy trying to break out, more characteristic of the infected Moon’s seen outside. But it still does not snarl and growl and hiss. It’s quiet for long periods of time, long enough for Moon to forget what is inside, and if it weren’t for the notes he keeps front and center of the desk he would have forgotten who is inside. Oh hey new episode
