Alienfam AU - Chapter One
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Chapter One: The house lay still and empty beneath the overhanging trees when Hitoshi approached on the road.
Just as he'd planned. He didn't want to talk things out right now, just wanted to quietly fume for a while because didn't he deserve it? Having a parent who always tried to understand everything sucked sometimes.
And some things couldn't be fixed by talking.
Hitoshi unlocked the front door and toed his shoes off. He was immediately greeted by the welcoming meow of their cat, Coffee. For once, he didn't immediately lean down to scratch her head, and she seemed mildly perplexed at that.
Hitoshi just ignored her and moved past into the kitchen living room combo. There was a covered bowl of something sitting on the counter, along with a note.
The note read 'if you need to talk, text any time. i'll see you tomorrow otherwise.'
Short and to the point. Hitoshi looked at it for a long moment. Then he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.
He ignored the food, too, instead grabbing a pack of cookies from the snack drawer - he deserved comfort food right now.
He hated fighting with his dad. He didn't want to snap at him, ever, but it had been happening more and more lately. Sometimes, Hitoshi couldn't stand his worried looks, his prying questions, his 'your teacher called again' this and 'you don't need to shut me out' that.
Hitoshi wasn't six anymore. He knew his dad couldn't just magically make everything better.
Besides, it was fine. He was fine. He just wanted to be left alone for a change, was that too much to ask?
Except... no, that wasn't quite right, was it?
The crux of the problem was that Hitoshi didn't have anyone. Aside from his father and the cat, that was. Maybe Aunt Nem when she wasn't off traveling.
And Hitoshi didn't like to socialize, either. But sometimes... sometimes he just felt entirely alone in the world. Mostly when everyone else in school ganged up on him, calling him names, whispering about him, even throwing things at him or breaking his stuff, sometimes. He hadn't told his dad about the broken spinner keychain yet. He didn't want him to get angry and make a fuss with the school. No, this was Hitoshi's own problem to deal with and he was doing just fine.
He sat on his bed and booted up his laptop, wrapped in a comforting cocoon of blanket, cookies in his lap. Maybe a good horror movie or something would help. No way was he sleeping yet, despite being bone-tired. He wouldn't be able to, anyways.
Hopefully he'd collapse some time close to the early morning hours so he wouldn't have to pretend to be asleep when his dad checked on him. He never quite believed he was all that convincing.
Hitoshi clicked his way around Netflix aimlessly, nothing really catching his eye. Not even his usual comfort movies seemed to hit the spot. There was just... nothing. Staring at the one slightly off colored spot on the ceiling all night was starting to sound tempting.
But he had to think back to the insults thrown at him by a handful of boys in his class today. Well. Not at him. More like they'd all grouped together and talked about him so loudly he'd be sure to hear.
'Obviously she didn't want him. If I were stuck with him, I'd try to get rid of him, too.'
Since they'd learned about his mother, things had only gotten worse.
It was fucking unfair. Hitoshi had done nothing to them and he couldn't understand how they didn't even have the common fucking decency to not make digs at family stuff like that.
He didn't even miss his mom. He hadn't known her. His dad had always been enough.
But the fact that they had dared... he'd gotten so angry. He hadn't gotten physical, he'd never been the type and the martial arts classes his dad had signed him up for helped channel any of that sort of energy into something safe. But he had cursed quite a bit as he'd shot back at the boys, talking about how one of their dads was probably fucking his secretary who always picked him up from school, and how another would die alone in a ditch somewhere by twenty-five, high out of his mind.
They had laughed. But the teacher who had overheard him hadn't been so amused.
And neither had his father.
Hitoshi closed his laptop forcefully and fell back on the bed. No one gave a shit about his opinion. He couldn't even fight back - all they ever did was laugh and not at all take him seriously. That feeling of complete and utter powerlessness, combined with how much he just wanted a single friend... it was overwhelming enough that he felt his throat tighten painfully now, and tears shooting into his eyes.
It wasn't fucking fair.
The universe had it out for him specifically.
... said universe chose that moment to make itself known.
The bright light outside the window flashed up so suddenly, and was so strong, that Hitoshi instinctively wrenched his arm up to protect his face and still only saw little dots of light for a good few seconds, long enough to almost panic. A cacophony of noise followed, cracking, frantic beeping, something... impacting.
Then silence.
His vision returned, and Hitoshi was left blinking into the darkness of his room. The hair on his arms stood on end. Not only from whatever shock this had been, but because the air felt almost charged with... something.
He slowly sat up and looked towards the window.
Nothing. He couldn't have just imagined this, could he?
When he stood, his knees buckled underneath him for a moment. Huh. He walked over to the window and peered outside.
There was no more glow.
But the forest that started beneath their house seemed... oddly shaped against the dark night sky. He couldn't see much, but it seemed like some trees had been forcefully bent out of the way of... something moving through them. As he watched, one of them slowly leaned further to the side and finally, with a loud crack, broke and fell.
Hitoshi stared for a long moment, his own heartbeat loud in his ears. A... meteor? Did that kind of thing happen outside of tv? Didn't people have ways to predict their flight patterns now, so they would've been warned?
Except... what if it wasn't a meteor?
Hitoshi wished his dad was here, but only briefly, as he scrambled to find his phone buried under his sheets. He shoved it into his pocket and all but sprinted to the front door to pull on his shoes.
Hitoshi didn't believe in aliens. He didn't believe in much of anything, really. Only in himself and his dad and maybe that cats had nine lives.
But he wanted to know what was going on, and if it was something weird, the area would be off limits soon enough. He just wanted to be the first to get a look. Just one look.
The event had shaken him from his self-pitying stupor, so he felt like he had to keep the momentum going.
Coffee was nowhere in sight even though she normally tried to slip out at night if he wasn't careful about the door. T he crash must have freaked her out, too. Hitoshi made a mental note to check on her when he got back, even as he rounded the house and jogged towards the edge of the woods.
The faint smell of smoke lay in the air. Was something burning? There was a... metallic note to it. It almost bit into Hitoshi's nose as he breathed.
He climbed over the low fence separating their backyard from the woods, and then he was off, following the path he'd followed hundreds of times in his life, deeper into the woods.
The smoke in the air got thicker as he walked, until it was bad enough that he had to stifle coughs, but there was a faint flickering of light visible through the underbrush now, and he just wanted to catch a glimpse. Then he'd turn around. Just a glimpse.
Hitoshi climbed over a fallen tree, pushing through the branches that made up its crown. As his feet hit the forest floor again, his field of vision was finally cleared.
And... fuck.
Hitoshi stared.
Coughed against the smoke.
Kept staring.
That... wasn't a meteor.
In front of him sat a crater, with smoldering fires dotting it here and there, and there was an object resting in the middle of it. But said object was not a large rock like he'd expected.
It was a spaceship.
It was undoubtedly, irrefutably, a spaceship.
Or what was left of one anyway.
It didn't look like just some piece of space station trash, either - there were thrusters and what looked like a windshield, or whatever you would call that on a spaceship... fuck, it was a spaceship.
Hitoshi shook his head. His eyes were stinging from the smoke, but they weren't fooling him.
He really needed to get out of here. What if the authorities came and decided to silence him or something, because he'd seen too much? A Men in Black style mindwipe would be the best outcome in that scenario.
He took a slow step backwards, not taking his eyes off the wreck.
And then the latch on its side opened with the hissing of decompressed air.
Hitoshi should have bolted right there, but for the first time he understood why deer didn't just run off the street when a car came barreling towards them. He felt rooted to the ground.
A hand appeared, grasping onto the edge of the opening Hitoshi couldn't quite see into from this position. Then a second hand. There was a soft noise of effort, and then out came tumbling a small figure.
The alien hit the ground with a pained, high-pitched cry, and stayed curled up there, face turned away from where Hitoshi was standing.
It looked... human. At least its shape did. There were four limbs and the hands had looked just like normal hands, even if they were small.
The alien had silvery white hair that was splayed about it in a messy tangle now, and it was wearing some kind of white, shapeless tunic.
It wasn't moving, but Hitoshi could see it still breathing.
He closed his eyes and counted to ten.
Then he begun his descent into the crater.