#i'm gonna go hide because i can't believe i just wrote 2k about alien!mingyu

[lxveille]

May I have Mingyu + 70 for the 100 ways to say I love you? Thank you!

100 ways to say i love you (requests closed)WC: ~ 2360 ; paranormal!au

It’s almost three in the morning when your phone goes off. You stumble out of bed and only just read Somin’s name on the screen before you answer wearily.

“You need to get down to the research center now,” she tells you, something electric and anxious in her voice.

“What’s going on?” you ask, still rubbing sleep from your eyes.

“They finally got one.”

That wakes you up.

You’ve been working under Dr. Nam at Central Research Center of the Preternatural for almost a year. Your department has long been underfunded and ridiculed quietly by others for its distinct lack of actual study subjects. You’ve run analysis of trace remnants of extraterrestrial activity and gone on numerous dead-end trips following calls reporting UFO sightings. But there’s never been a successful, proper study done an alien life form. It’s hasn’t been possible without any captured beings.

Now, evidently that has all changed.

You stand next to Somin on one of the upper walkways of the facility and stare down at the shatter-proof glass walls of the enclosement. You’ve passed it so many times, never sparing it a glance, because it had always been empty. Now that there’s a living creature inside, it looks smaller than you remember.

“It looks… human,” you comment in a whisper, unable to tear your eyes away from the unconscious form that lies in the middle of the sanitized, closed-in floor.

“I know,” Somin answers, “Dr. Nam says it might be some kind of cloaking adaptation. But look at the preliminary vital scans.” You force yourself to turn your attention to the chart your colleague is holding out. Your eyes widen at the information it contains. From body temperature and the double-pulse alone, it’s evident that whatever’s inside the enclosure is not native to this world.

“Certainly not human,” you murmur, and something about Somin’s smile in response makes you feel a bit queasy.

You’ll admit that work was less stressful and exhausting before subject A01 came in. Budget constraints mean most of your time on the observation deck is spent alone. It only takes a few hours of your first shift before the first time you find yourself speaking out loud to the extraterrestrial.

It’s a silly thing to do. A01 still seems a bit delirious from being knocked out during those first few hours after he comes to. He barely looks towards where you are, and seems more preoccupied with running his hands over the smooth glass that traps him in. He doesn’t seem to come back to full awareness until the second day in the facility.

Several hours into your second shift, you comment lightly, “A01, I don’t know about you, but I think the doctor’s got his hopes up a bit high if he thinks there’s gonna be an 02 or a B anytime soon.”

He shows his teeth; some of them sharper than a human’s would normally be. Then you realize he’s smiling. Almost chuckling even – at what you’d said, or at you, or something. You press your clipboard flat into your lap, staring at the alien with surprise.

So begins your working theory that A01 understands human language.

You run it by Somin first, who quirks her head and looks at you like you’re the one who ought to be in the enclosure. “I’ve never had A01 even respond when I’m doing linguistic runs,” she tells you.

It’s decided then it’ll be good to keep the observations to yourself. At least until you have more to go on, you tell yourself.

The worst is when you’re tasked with checking vitals or sample collection.

There’s a button on the panel beside the door into the enclosure that releases a gas into the chamber that renders A01 unconscious. Protocol says you should never open the door if the alien is awake. It’s too hazardous for the study, as well as for the security of the research center as a whole.  

But there’s a look of recognition on A01’s expression whenever you approach the panel that tugs are your sympathy for the being. And there’s a rough time he has coming back after the fact, the hazed and uncomfortable stares he gives at blank spaces of the glass, barely responding to any stimuli at all for many hours afterwards.

He’s been at the facility for two months when he comes right up to the clear wall just as you approach the control panel. He places one hand against the glass, looking at you imploringly, and you swallow thickly, fingers already position to release the knockout gas.

You move your hand away from the panel, and your gut twists when you see him smile softly in response from the other side of the glass. Tilting your head back, you scan the overhanging walkway for anyone else.

“I’m sorry,” you say, pressing one hand over your heart to try to emphasize your sincerity before it moves to push the button.

When he comes back too, freshly bandaged from the blood sample you’d taken, you’re still on observation duty. He stumbles over to the spot closest to where you’re sitting and sways slightly where he stands, steadying himself with one hand against the transparent walling.

“A01, do you understand what sorry means?” you ask; you’ve tried, since Somin first told you about her differing experience with him, not to speak so much to him. While your theory about his comprehension still lingered on your mind often enough, it seems like a bad idea to try to prove something the linguist on your small team already seemed convinced of.

But he nods, and mirrors your earlier gesture of place one hand over your heart. In his case, you realize, it’s only one of his hearts.

You stand slowly, leaving the clipboard behind on the bench as you come up to the enclosure. Standing toe-to-toe to him, with only several inches of industrial strength glass separating the two of him, you let yourself ask, “Do you call yourself anything? Anything different from A01?”

His eyes scan over you and you think you must have broken some kind of protocol when you hear a low voice answer, “Mingyu.”

Or if that hadn’t been against regulations, it’s certainly some kind of wrong when you leave the interaction out of your observation notes.

Two weeks later, you’re assigned to take vitals once more. Dr. Nam had recently put in changes to the nutrients being provided to A01 – to Mingyu – and is looking now for any changes in his system resulting from that.

Mingyu comes up to the same spot he’d been the last time, when you’d apologized before knocking him out. He gives you the same beseeching look he’d had last time, and this time you waver more than before. A few long minutes go by of you checking that there’s no one else in this sector before you place one hand on the glass of the door.

“If you promise to stay away from here, Mingyu, I don’t have to use the gas.”

He takes several long strides backwards, retreating from the door.

This is a bad idea, some more practical voice inside your head chimes in. It does not win out.

Mingyu seems taller, somehow, without the glass between the two of you. Anytime you’ve been this close to him before, he’s been unconscious, unable to watch you as closely as he is now.

You start with pressing the thermometer to his forehead, taking note of his usually cool temperature while trying not to meet his gaze. He doesn’t say a thing, standing still and cooperative as you listen to one of his heartbeats.

It’s just as you’re switching to check his second heart the Mingyu lifts one hand up to your cheek suddenly. You look up at him abruptly; practicality says you should get away now, but you stare at him instead, speechless as his cold fingers brush lightly over the skin of your face. There’s something almost gel-like in his touch, and you wonder how it is no ones taken note of his skin exuding any kind of substance before.

“You’re warm,” Mingyu notes, hand coming to rest on the side of your neck with fingertips still pressing lightly at the underside of your jaw. He’s smiling once again, and somehow you feel more like subject than scientist.

“Why don’t you verbally respond to Somin or Dr. Nam?” you ask, trying ground yourself back in the priorities of the study. He removes his touch from you, his fingers curling slightly as he looks at his own hand as if looking for something. “Mingyu?” you prompt him for a response, and he glances up from his hand to smile a little wider at you.

You think you might be in trouble.

Sometimes Mingyu will be the one to say something first now.

He asks, for example, if you’re still warm. If you’re tired. If you’re happy.

Most troubling is when he asks if you’re still sorry.

He peers at you through the glass, looking not at all like he meant for the question to send as strong a pang of guilt through your system as it does.

“This is my job,” you reply as steadily as you can. He may not know what jobs are, you realize only after you’ve already spoken.

“That isn’t an answer,” Mingyu says, hand coming up to the glass. It leaves behind a small smudge of something – perhaps the same secretion you’d felt upon your skin – when he drags his fingers down a few inches. It makes you nervous for a reason you find difficult to place. But it’s the same kind of nervousness you felt in middle school, back when your science teacher paired you up for a project with the class president.

Somin calls out sick the next day Mingyu’s due for his vitals checked.

He smiles when you tell him as much as you come up towards the door. He doesn’t come up towards the same area to meet you, and you presume he hopes you’ll still allow the same deal you’d given him last time.

Just as before, he stays still and lets you go about with all the measurements and procedures you need to do without complaint. Even when you go to take a sample of blood from his arm, he simply holds out one hand and watches as the syringe fills with the dark, thick fluid that runs through his veins.

“Can I touch you again?” he inquires as you’re packing up all your supplies. It draws your attention back to him immediately, your eyes widened with surprise that he’d ask such a thing. He smiles when your eyes fall upon his face, and you stand up straight to come back to your prior spot in front of him.

It’s for research, you try to reason as you nod. He brings both hands up to your face this time, eyes fluttering shut for a millisecond when he first makes contact with your skin.

“Can you tell me…” you start hesitantly, shuddering lightly from the chill of his touch and gel-like substance he smooths over your flesh as his fingers move from your cheeks to your shoulders and down to your arms. You aren’t sure if you’re glad or not that you’d worn a short-sleeved shirt to work today.

He gives a small, puzzled-sounding hum that reminds you to finish your inquiry.

“What is it on your hands right now?” you finish at last, and you feel a familiar flutter of nerves when he chuckles breathily.

“It helps to understand,” he says vaguely, lifting one hand back up to your jaw. His palm drags forwards slightly until only the very tips of his fingers are left on the underside of your chin, tilting your face up so you can’t avoid eye contact. “To be with.”

Your brow furrows. “I don’t understand,” you admit, as if it weren’t already obvious from your expression.

“I love you,” Mingyu tell you calmly, like it’s the same as saying he enjoys your company or commenting on the differences in your natural body temperatures.

That’s enough to make you stumble back from him, your heart suddenly thudding with a confused panic. This is wrong, impossible, and against every regulation there is in the facility.

“You don’t know what that means,” you accuse, and Mingyu frowns.

“I feel it,” he offers as if it will make everything clear. Long legs carry him across the space between the two of you easily. You ought to turn and run, lock the door to the enclosure behind you, and maybe even press the panic button. Mingyu raises one hand and lets it hover just over your cheek; not touching, but asking for permission to do as much. “I want you to believe me.”

He sounds saddened, hurt by how quickly you’d denied any meaning to his words.

You glance towards his hesitant hand and back to his eyes before nodding faintly. He doesn’t smile, his features too focused in on taking in every micro-moment of your reaction when his hand cups your cheek again. He rolls his lips together contemplatively as he watches your shoulder loosen slightly.

His feet shuffle a little closer to yours and his face comes in closer than he’d been before. He murmurs another I love you just before his lips press against yours. It’s different, almost inexplicably, from kissing a human. Something in the texture of his tongue and the taste in his mouth is utterly foreign. For a brief moment, it occurs to you that you ought to panic; that you don’t know if his species may be capable of salivating something deadly upon will.

The worry melts away when you feel his thumb brush against the juncture of your ear and your neck, rubbing a trail of something new that leaves an odd, warming feeling against the soft skin.

Mingyu releases your lips just when you think you might lose yourself entirely to the sensation.  He pulls back just far enough that he can take in your expression. His mouth quirks up into a curious smile.

“Do you believe me?”

You’re definitely in trouble.