#okay so really I'm just on an alien bandwagon

[clenastia]

What’s this? Clena, writing many original things!

If only my fanfic would be this productive.

Prompt: “It’s been over an hour since you were bit, and you still haven’t turned into a zombie. You’ve also been oddly nonchalant about the whole thing. Your group is starting to suspect you weren’t human to begin with.”

Fic below the cut!

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It itches. You try not to scratch it, try not to drag attention to it, because if the rest of the group finds out they’re going to flip.

You’re not even sure if they’ll let you try to explain, although what you could possibly say to make the situation any better is… a bit beyond you.

But by all the stars does it itch.

“Alright, sound off, how’d the run go.” Aaron barks, a crisp order from a man who’s had too much pressure on him for too long.

You almost miss the young man who was your college roommate once upon a time.

It feels like a lifetime ago.

“It was all clear for us!” Sarah chirps, clinging to her peppy attitude with a tenacity that is almost desperation.

Her sister was bit two weeks ago, and sometimes you wonder if she’s going to do something stupid.

She’d probably have the worst reaction, you know, if only because of how fresh her pain is.

It’s not like you could have done anything, but you’ve come to learn that for humans, that often doesn’t matter.

They just need something to blame, sometimes, and you don’t want to be that ‘something���.

Your fingers twitch, a desperate need to scratch, but you know it will fade in a few hours.

This isn’t your first bite, although you hadn’t yet found Aaron and the others, last time.

You really should have been more careful.

Everyone else gives their reports, and you’re about to offer your own, when Mike says those damning words.

“-but I thought I saw Tannik go down, coulda swore you were dead man, til you clawed your way out. Nearly gave me a heart attack!” 

Mike claps you on the back, and you fight not to groan.

You know the procedure as well as everyone else.

If you try to cover it up, you’ll only look worse, so you just nod brusquely. 

Aaron’s face falls.

No, rather, he looks nearly in tears.

You shift awkwardly on your feet, a human gesture that was… picked up unusually quickly, if you’re honest.

You hold out the bag.

“I was in charge of medical supplies - I had to at least bring them back.” You offer, trying to play it cool.

If they behead you you’ll die, but they usually only do that to people too far into the bite’s thrall. As long as they just shoot you through the heart or something, you’ll survive, and you can strike out on your own later.

You can’t give them reason to think you’ll need to be beheaded.

You try not to think about how lonely it was, before you found Aaron again, how much you’d missed your roommate and the bustling human activity.

You got bit, and worse, you got seen.

And more than that, you know what S’thalissae did. The humans don’t know where their plague came from, but you know what will happen if you tell the truth. Even if you betrayed them, it’s not going to matter to the people who’ve been living like this constantly asking why.

“It’s been over an hour though,” Alice murmurs - she’d been with Mike, and she’s always been good with time.

You should be much further along in the infection after so much time.

You have to try and convince them of- something, anything, you can’t protect them if they actually kill you (you ignore how likely you are to get caught, if you follow after them)

(it’s not important)

“I- guess it has, yeah,” you return, and finally, finally give into the urge to scratch. “Itches like the fucking devil, but that’s all it’s done so far.” You offer - scratching is a symptom, but it’s not a severe one, hopefully they’ll think it was just a delayed response-

Aaron clings to that statement with a desperation that terrifies you.

“An entire hour and you’re only at the itching stage?!” he asks, voice pitching up in hope.

This is not what you want. “I- well- I haven’t actually looked at it, been a little scared to, s-so-”

He leaps forward with fervor, ignoring the calls of the rest of the group, jerking up your sleeve.

You close your eyes.

You know what it looks like, after all.

“It’s- not swollen?” Aaron stumbles over his words, twisting your arm this way and that.

You crack open an eye, taking in the very faint green lines twisting out from the bite.

If you watch them for long enough, you know, you’ll see them shrinking slowly back towards the bite zone, and eventually leak out of your arm entirely.

Your body, for all the tech and magic you’ve used to hide it, is not human. The poison can’t find an anchor, no matter how hard it tries, and it’ll bleed out in the end. 

You might get a minor infection from the general unsanitary nature of a zombie’s mouth, but the poison is nearly more a curse than a biological process, and it can’t hold you.

“Do you think it’ll heal?”

“Aaron! Don’t be stupid! There’s no saving him, there’s no saving anyone!” Sarah snaps, hands trembling.

You fight not to react.

Once her sister was bit, there was nothing you could do. Not that there’s much you can do before anyone’s bit either, you don’t know where the cure is kept or if it even exists.

Your people have perfected the art of creating biological weapons that don’t affect them. 

Half the time, they don’t even bother to invent cures.

You try not to think of how long you helped them without thought, until Aaron and that college dorm.

Somehow, humans are just… different.

Or maybe it’s just Aaron, who was such a different person before all this, always willing and eager to help you as you struggled through college courses when you barely knew how to speak any human language.

Even the math is different, and you’d been under the impression that math never changed, and-

Humans are just so needlessly complicated, but Aaron was so invested, even from the very beginning, helping you learn more than you ever thought there was to know-

You were wrong, you know now. All those other planets, all those other species, you’ve come to learn that you were wrong, but.

There’s nothing you can do to help them.

You’re pretty sure there’s nothing you can do to help the humans, either.

Perhaps it’s selfish then, to want to keep these humans alive, as best you can. It’s your information that damned their species, that gave your superiors everything they needed to craft the virus.

Your conscience came far too late to do any good, and at this point you’re not even sure your death will absolve you of the crimes you committed against all those other worlds. All those other people.

Aaron and Sarah keep arguing, but-

This is your fault. Maybe not directly, because if it hadn’t been you, your superiors would just have sent someone else, and you know you can’t beat them, can’t overthrow them, but it was you, here, and so it has to be at least a little bit your fault.

Aaron shouldn’t defend you like this.

“He has a chance Sarah, please, let him take it-”

“You didn’t let my sister take it-!”

“She was dying, there was nothing we could do, but it’s been an hour and he’s not that bad, he has a real chance, Sarah please-”

“Just because you-”

“Wait! Are those marks… fading?” It’s Alice who grabs your arm, just as you reach for your knife.

Everyone turns to look, Alice dragging your arm into better light and staring with intensity at those faint green lines. The curse is trying to seep deeper, you know, trying to find some piece of humanity to latch onto. It’ll start draining out soon, though for now the itch is almost unbearable.

“I don’t know what it’s doing,” you lie, desperate to keep the truth from them, to keep your friends just a little while longer.

You know they’ll hate you if they learn the truth.

“But I don’t think we should take the chance. Just- just kill me, and get out of here. Yeah?”

“Absolutely not!” Aaron all but snarls, grasping your arm tight enough to hurt, staring with wide-eyed desperation at the bite. You don’t know what else you can say to convince them.

You just know you can’t tell them the truth.

It may be what you deserve, after so many planets and so many innocent lives on your hands, but you’ve always been a coward.

“Aaron, it’s not safe.”

“I’ll be the judge of that - or are you going to change your mind on electing me leader?” He addresses the question to everyone, and you close your eyes.

They won’t, you know.

You wish they would, but Aaron’s got them through too much, led them too well. They’ll keep you under observation, and the truth will spill out with all that unnatural green poison.

Perhaps-

Perhaps this is no less than you deserve.

Mike and Tommy argue with Aaron, enough to have you tied up, just in case - you almost wish it would be necessary, but you know it won’t.

The lines grow fainter, and then darker.

Watching Aaron’s face swing from bright hope to utter despair is painful, but you know it’ll only get worse.

Sarah nearly has him convinced to kill you, when the first drops of unnatural green drip uncomfortably out of the wound.

Everyone freezes.

They crowd around, almost too close, and watch as the cursed poison that’s all but destroyed their people leaks out of you, drop by painstaking drop.

“That- shouldn’t be possible.” Tommy offers. 

Everyone looks at you, and you play dumb with a desperation that borders on madness.

“Well it’s certainly not something that came up in med school,” you grin, and realize only too late that perhaps reminding them about your course of study in this sort of situation is a bad idea.

“Yeah. You were in med school, weren’t you.” Sarah says, deadpan and bordering on angry. Your entire being seems to skip a beat.

No no no no, please no, you beg to whatever silent gods bear witness over this world.

You never did quite figure out humans’ religious ideology.

Some planets are easier than others, but humans have turned out to be especially complicated.

“Yeeeeees?” you finally manage to respond, a question as much as a stall for time.

Humans do that sort of thing all the time, when they want to pretend they don’t know where you’re going with something.

You know it won’t work, but-

You can’t just tell the truth.

“Come on Sarah, I was in med school too! I don’t think that has anything to do with this! He’s just- lucky, or like, I dunno, fucking real-life Ellie or some shit, it’s- I know you’re still upset about Susie, but this is a good thing it’s-”

“It’s fucking suspicious is what it is! He barely eats, Aaron! And everyone knows he’s creepy-fast and have you seen the way his eyes glow at night? At least, before he started wearing the fucking goggles! Maybe he’s the- the fucking antichrist or some shit, maybe he’s actually Ellie fucking Williams but I’m certainly not trusting him until I get some answers!”

Sarah points aggressively in your face as you try not to cringe.

Have you really been moving faster than normal? You didn’t think so, you’d studied human limits very thoroughly to make certain, but-

There have been a few times, when Aaron was in trouble, or one of the others-

Perhaps you’ve been a bit careless.

You really should have been more careful with your eyes though, the goggles were too little too late.

In your defense, humans have a bit of a wider visual spectrum than the last two species you helped destroy, and you’re a bit out of practice.

You sink back against the tree you’re tied to, hoping that if you don’t say anything they’ll just kill you.

But then Aaron turns to face you properly, eyes wide in realization as he puts together facts no one else in the group would have.

He’s been your roommate since the very beginning, after all.

He knows you barely spoke the language, that you never claimed a nationality, that you’d sometimes make noises in your sleep that a human throat couldn’t quite mimic.

Aaron’s never really thought about it, you know, because humans are selectively blind like that.

He’s thinking about it now.

You can practically watch as the betrayal creeps across his face.

He knows just as well how deeply you studied human biology and infections, even though you hadn’t been in the college long enough to specialize in a particular medical branch.

Suddenly, you need to explain - before he gets the completely wrong idea, before he decides that you’re responsible for everything (even though you are, even though you did, you may not have given the orders but you made the choice to obey them)-

“I tried to stop them- I swear, I swear Aaron I changed my mind and betrayed them and tried to stop them I didn’t want to help anymore-”

You bite your tongue.

Duck your head.

You don’t-

You know that’s a pathetic excuse.

You could have tried harder to stop them, but you wanted to find Aaron and make sure he was safe.

Maybe, if you’d fought more, you could have stopped them.

A fist slams into the tree above your head.

You hunch your shoulders.

You’d have rather died while everyone was still your friend.

It hurts more, you think, to know that your death won’t be mourned, but celebrated.

You hunch deeper into yourself, curled close to the tree trunk.

You hope it’ll be quick, the way the others’ were, even if it won’t be mourned.

Your hopes die with Aaron’s harshly snarled question.

“Who did this?”

So it will be torture, you think, distancing yourself. You’ll answer, of course. But you doubt they’ll believe you.

The humans have such a glorified opinion of their so-called ‘aliens’, how could they ever take the truth seriously?

But he’s your friend, they all are, so you can only answer.

Your hopes for a quick death die more swiftly than you will, you’re sure, but you can at least cooperate.

You can at least give them that much, when everything’s your fault.