Alien Virgil and Remus and their "service human" Janus, who was assigned to them for reasons but only ends up making them panic a bit more because humans are so squishy- STOP GETTING HURT! What are you doing! GET DOWN FROM THERE! You don't have any exterior plating you could get hurt!
While Janus is just like What? I'm not even doing anything bad? It's just a minor cut from making dinner. Well excuse me for being short and having to climb the counters! Not all of us are 7 feet tall!
But if you even DARE insinuate they need a better human and that Janus isn't doing a good enough job for them. They will fight you.
warnings: fear, miscommunication, guilt, mentions of theoretical gore/injury, dehumanization, referring to a person as 'it', general angst
-
For the fourth day in a row, Lady Macbeth had spurned him.
Roman frowned, pulling the strap of his messenger bag over his head and tossing it over the back of a kitchen chair.
Lady was old, smug, and occasionally very cranky, but she wasn’t deaf like Ophelia-- she always came prancing over once she heard his keys rattling in the lock, delighted at the opportunity to smear cat hair all over his pants and get her claws stuck in his shoelaces.
Yet here he stood, catless.
For the past few days, too, she hadn’t been in the house at all when he got home. He’d been downright worried that first day, uneasy until she strolled back in at dusk.
They had an expansive backyard that their younger cats took delight in frolicking in, but their second-oldest cat was a rare visitor to the outdoors. Lady was first and foremost a homebody, and she preferred a warm body to sit on. Their squishy heat-generating human bodies were the only reason she hadn’t assassinated them all in their sleep by now, according to--
Roman cut the thought off sharply, feeling familiar grief pit up in his throat. He shook his head, the motion harsh enough to make his neck twinge. There was no time for standing about and pondering! He had a cat to locate!
A determined jut to his chin, he grabbed what supplies he would need for this perilous journey-- cat treats, a catnip toy, even a tempting cardboard box-- and strode confidently out the backdoor.
For the next half-hour, he wandered around the acres of their property, greeting each of the goats and chickens by name as he checked all the most common cat hidey-holes.
He’d almost given up by the time he stumbled across the old barn, pant legs covered in burrs and the beginnings of a sunburn across the back of his neck. Whatever delightful cat secrets Lady was so busy with, surely he could discover them when it wasn’t the middle of summer.
Just before he could turn around, though, he noticed that one of the doors was just slightly ajar.
Roman felt his brow gradually scrunch up the longer he stared at it. It had been locked up after the last of the old supplies had been moved from it, hadn’t it? The last big storm had proved it wasn’t weather-worthy, his dad had plans to take it apart for timber, ones that had seemingly been forgotten after… afterwards.
Petty inconveniences of getting there forgotten, Roman crept closer on light feet, grip tight on the catnip mouse in his hand. The wind died down at an eerily perfect moment, and he strained to hear beyond those old wooden walls.
Not everything is a grand conspiracy, a voice in his head reminded him, sounding suspiciously similar to Specs, it could simply be someone without housing that took the opportunity for shelter provided by the abandoned barn.
Roman sidled halfway through the ajar door, and froze at the sight of an upright humanoid figure only a few meters away. Something about it wasn't right, instantly putting him on edge. He kept staring, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
(“I’m telling you, these lights were strange even by my standards! Almost… alien.” An unsettling grin that was a beat late.)
The figure’s head was dropped forward, but he could tell even from this distance that it wasn’t human, with shiny purple-grey segmented skin and legs with knees facing the wrong way. It had spiky shoulder joints, but its arms seemed to be tucked behind it.
(Roman had shoved him off the couch, sour about being taken in by one of his tales, and he hadn’t brought it up again.)
Most alarming of all, there were four long, spindly limbs stretched out into the air behind it, seemingly spawning from its back. The legs were spider-like in nature, but shiny instead of hairy, and each one ended in a sharp point. As he watched, he could see the limbs shifting slowly, pairs of them lifting and falling in odd synchrony with the creature’s slow breathing.
(Roman had been freaked out, and his brother had dropped the subject. He should’ve asked, he should have known something was wrong--)
“Miaow.” A plaintive voice called, nearly startling Roman out of his skin.
He tore his gaze away from the (alien) mystery intruder, and felt his jaw drop as he took in Lady Macbeth’s current position. Loafing on the feet of an insidious intruder?!
For shame, he mouthed silently at her.
Lady blinked slowly and continued to purr, unbothered by his accusatory stare. One of those spider limbs shifted again, making Roman swallow nervously. He really didn’t want to see what sort of automatic reaction an extraterrestrial’s stabby-arms would have to finding a cat in its space.
He waved the catnip mouse enticingly. Lady gave him the bland look of a cat who had preferred those expensive feather toys for as long as he had known her. Roman resisted the urge to facepalm.
The insanely dangerous method it was, then.
Putting all his sneaking skills to use, he sidled further into the barn, dropping into a crouch and beginning to creep across the dirt floor as slowly as possible. Each step was carefully placed, almost entirely silent, and whenever those freaky appendages twitched, he froze in place for a full thirty seconds.
The alien’s head remained lax (asleep?) as he drew closer, but Lady refused to entertain his desperate motions for her to leave her ill-chosen bed. At this rate, he’d have to pick her up off of it, and hope that she didn’t complain too much on the way out.
He shifted his weight forwards, and suddenly all four of the arms were still, almost taut in the air. Only a couple feet away, the alien’s head bobbed slightly. His time was up.
Clenching his teeth, Roman made a gamble.
He tossed the little mouse toy directly at the space above the alien’s head and dove for Lady.
There was a whistle, like a whip or an arrow sliding through the air, and Roman made the mistake of glancing up as soon as he had his hands securely around Lady’s body.
All four of the spider limbs had jabbed into the same point, skewering the toy from several different angles. The alien was certainly awake now, and it had four times as many eyes as any one person could reasonably need. Between one heartbeat and the next, those huge dark irises went from staring at the poor mutilated toy to staring at Roman.
Terror shot through him and he gave up on subtlety, throwing himself back as hard as he could and hoping that he made it out of range.
He landed on his back with a whomp that knocked the wind out of him, and flinched as that terrifying whistling sound split the air again, ending in a muted thump. He was so wired with adrenaline that he couldn’t tell if he’d been hit or not. Locked in his arms, Lady writhed and complained loudly.
“Not going anywhere,” Roman wheezed, “you little fiend, con-- consorting with the enemy.”
There were several more whistle-thumps, which was either very good or very bad for him. He rolled to his side, pushing himself up on an elbow and taking stock of himself, braced for the worst.
The alien was still standing there against the central support beam of the barn. Half a foot from Roman’s leg, it's very sharp extra arms had left holes pierced in the hard-packed dirt of the barn’s floor.
“But no holes in me,” Roman cheered weakly, and then shifted Lady to the crook of one arm and flipped the alien off. “Nice try, Space Invader.”
The alien made a deep clicking rumble, but stopped trying to impale him. Instead, it moved to hold all those limbs high up in the air menacingly, ready to stab down at any point. The remains of the toy mouse sat near its feet, cotton innards spilling everywhere like a grim warning.
Roman got to his own feet, wincing at the feeling of Lady’s claws poking into his ribs as she attempted to kick her way to freedom. He took a moment to stare once he was back upright.
The alien’s skin plates had gone completely pitch-black, only the slightest hints of purple between the plates to prove that there’d ever been any color to it at all. Roman was abruptly glad that he hadn’t encountered it in the dark of night.
Its eyes were just as dark, with only the slightest difference in shades of black to indicate the difference between iris and sclera. Despite his artistic eye for color differences, even Roman couldn’t tell where its pupils were. If it even had pupils.
It also was still stuck in one place, despite its legs seeming totally operational. Roman slowly shuffled to the side of it, making sure to keep a few good steps clear of stabbing range, and found that it did in fact have normal arms and hands.
Well. Mostly normal. There were five fingers, but they were all way too long and ended in thick, claw-like points. He thought they also maybe had one or two too many joints.
More to the point, the alien couldn’t do anything with these arms because they were bound together at the wrists and tied tightly to the central support beam of the barn. It was stuck there, and going by the aggressive rumbling it was doing, it knew it.
Roman pulled out his phone and managed to take a shaky video of the alien, circling around it to both get a better angle and prompt it to threateningly twitch those back limbs some more. He knew his sci fi tropes, including the one where the alien mysteriously disappears the moment the plucky protagonist tries to tell anyone about the danger. He wasn’t going to be called crazy again.
Once he was content with the amount of evidence he had, he made the trek back to the house at a near-sprint, the cat in his arms protesting all the way. He burst through the back door, letting the screen fall shut behind him, and finally allowed Lady to walk on the power of her own four paws. She beelined for the screen door, stood up on her hind legs, and rattled it expectantly.
“Absolutely not,” Roman told her firmly, nudging her away. “I don’t know what it is with you and courting death via Xenomorph, but you are henceforth banned from the outdoors.”
If angry little kitty looks could kill, Roman would be as dead as King Duncan.
Shaking his head, he went over to the ancient landline phone in their kitchen, lifted the phone from its cradle, and paused.
Who was he going to call?
He’d had some half-conceived notion of calling his parents, or that infuriating police officer, or even just 911. What would he even say? ‘Hello operator, my emergency is that I have an alien in my barn, I promise this isn’t a prank’? Even the dial tone wouldn’t believe that.
And what if they did get someone out here to verify that there was a real alien? There was little doubt in his mind that law enforcement and then the government would quickly step in, whisking the evil version of E.T. away into some distant Area 51 lab. Roman would never see it-- or get any answers from it-- ever again.
He hung the phone up with a solid click, and turned to face the kitchen.
If he was going to interrogate a hostile alien, he needed to arm himself.
---
Shockingly, when he returned to the barn, the alien was still there.
He had crept up quietly again, hoping to catch it unawares, but this time it had been staring unerringly at him from the moment he peeked through the door, those smaller, rounder eyes wide open under its main ones.
He pushed the door open further with a dramatic flourish, pretending like he hadn’t been sneaking at all.
“Alien scourge,” Roman greeted, wincing at the crack in his voice. He cleared his throat, ignoring the way the alien’s dark gaze sent chills down his spine. “I don’t know how you ended up here, but I do know that you’re going to give me the information that I need.”
He pointed the end of his weapon of choice for emphasis, and the alien recoiled with a hiss, quickly jabbing out at it with those back arms.
Just as he’d hoped, however, putting vegetable oil on the already-slick plastic handle of the kitchen broom had made it basically impossible for those single-pronged limbs to stab or grab it. He grinned triumphantly, poking the alien with the end of it. The playing field had officially been evened.
“Now, unless you want me to introduce you to the Earth concept of piñatas, you better tell me what you’re here for.”
The alien was entirely silent, watching him with those shiny, pitch-black eyes. Behind it, its spider arms were vibrating with tension, probably in preparation to stab out the moment he slipped up.
“I’m serious,” Roman warned, poking it a little harder and getting exactly nothing for his efforts, not even a glare. “I know what I saw that night, and there’s no way it’s a coincidence that now you’re here. It was an abduction."
He paused for effect, and the alien let out a series of clicks and low, warped sounds that sounded like meaningless nonsense.
"I don't speak alien." Roman frowned. "Tell me what happened. Why were you-- or, your-- your brethren or your shipmates or whatever, why were they taking people? Where did they take them?”
The alien made what sounded like the same exact series of noises. Roman groaned in frustration.
“In-- In English! You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? If aliens are real and have the technology to infiltrate Earth without being detected, they have to have some way of communicating! An insta-translator or telepathy or math nonsense or something!” He threw his arms out in frustration, making the alien twitch.
He paced back and forth for a moment, before coming to a stop in front of the alien again and leveling it with an accusatory stare. “You’re faking it. I don’t believe that you can’t understand me.”
The alien just kept staring at him, flat plates where its mouth should have been, not a single expression visible on its face. It was about as convinced by Roman’s argument as everyone else in his life, which was to say, not at all. He felt a surge of white-hot anger, and levered the broom at its neck threateningly.
“Tell me, right now!” he demanded, stinging tears building up at the corner of his eyes. “Tell me where my brother is!”
He shoved the broom further forwards, and the alien snapped its limbs forwards and knocked it away, startling him into stumbling back. It hissed at him again, stabbing at the ground like a warning. He scowled, swiping at his face with a sleeve, and swung the broom handle at it sharply.
The swing went wide, more than a foot from touching any of it, but the alien showed the closest thing to emotion he’d seen so far, half of its eyes flinching closed in anticipation. Roman felt a sickening twist in his gut, some odd mix of guilt, anger, and vindication, and he turned away sharply.
Not for the first time, he wished he’d been the one that had been taken.
Remus wouldn’t care if the stupid cops didn’t listen to him, if their parents didn’t believe him, if the whole town thought he was insane. He would know how to convince an alien to talk, would threaten to-- to crush its extra eyes or cut off limbs or do something Roman was too squeamish to even think up.
If it was Remus, it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t know what to do. He’d at least do something.
He wouldn’t be going through the motions of life like everything was the same.
Pretending had always been Roman’s specialty, after all.
Roman cast a furious glare over his shoulder at the alien, resentful that it was still staring at him even as he was in the middle of a breakdown, and tossed the broom into the corner.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, swallowing back the thickness in his voice, “and every day after that until you tell me.”
Threat delivered, he stormed out of the barn and slammed the doors shut behind him.
