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There's nothing to fear. There is nothing to fear. He knows England, knows London, knows how to walk in sunlight as a free man and do all the work required of him. He won't be going back to the straps and the shocks and the stark white rooms that crawled with nightmares only he could see. His Master saved him from all of that, pulled him out of the darkness and gave him a home and a purpose and will never abandon him, not if he does his job well, not if he is obedient and faithful - he is nothing if not faithful -

A racking cough shakes apart his train of thought as he curls into himself, gasping for air, something scratching at the back of his throat - is one of the little lives he's allowed to feed on trying to make its way back up? Or is he coming down with some illness, some mundane weakness of his still too human flesh?

Please no. He can't be ill. He has too much work to do.

He closes his eyes. Deep breaths. In, out. One day he will be more than this. One day he will sit at his Master's right hand and eat at His table with the rest of the family. One day his body will be transformed, made new, made perfect, and he will have eternity to spend at his Master’s side, to be faithful, to be cherished, to be loved -

"Hhhk-!"

The next breath never comes.

Something rises in his throat, wedges itself into his airway. A thick mass, soft around the edges but unyielding, scraping at the walls of his throat as he spasms around it. Can't cough it up. Can't swallow. Can't scream.

He pushes himself to his knees, drives balled fists into his stomach. Once, twice, again. No good. Black stars wheel across his vision, he's going to pass out soon, no no please I can't, I can't die, no, He promised! He gave me a job to do! please I want to live I want to live I want to live -

Only one thing for it.

Fingers force their way into his throat. Gagging, lungs burning, he claws at the thing, tears away a few tiny useless fragments before finally, finally, he finds a firm grip and pulls. It won't move, and then it does move but with agonising slowness, tearing at him every inch of the way as he drags it out into the light.

He pulls the thing out of his mouth with a hideous wheezing gasp, retches, barely has the presence of mind to turn his head so that he vomits over the side of the bed and not onto the sheets. Collapses shuddering to the mattress as he gulps in air with broken sobs, staring at the puddle he's made on the stone floor, blood and bile and iridescent wings and...

...golden petals.

Slowly, he turns to look at the thing in his hand.

It's a sunflower head.

Renfield can't understand where it came from. Just as he can't understand why the next thing he does, before even trying to clean up the mess he's made, is to walk to the window, hold the flower out into the darkness, open his hand and watch as it falls past the edge of the cliff and out of sight.

He can't understand why the sight makes his eyes burn with fresh tears. A sunflower. What could that possibly mean to him?

Warning tags: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Darkfic, Whump, Captivity, Biting, held at knifepoint, One-Sided Attraction, Torture, Scars, forcible stripping, Non-Consensual Touching, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Amputation, phagocytosis gone horribly wrong, Body Horror, Choking, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, unwanted arousal, Victim Blaming, Vomiting

Warnings for this chapter specifically: attempted rape, non-consensual touch both sexual and not, unwanted physical arousal, victim-blaming, general violence, and one brief scene of vomiting.

@badthingshappenbingo​ prompt: hair matted with blood.

Red grinned, and pressed a finger to where her lips would be if the helmet wasn’t in the way. Cyan sighed, and tapped the button on her tablet that quietly updated her game status. Almost immediately, a chat notification popped up.

MelloYello: i think it’s because they’re threatened by our skills

Red climbed down into the maintenance shaft and slipped away, headed for either Medbay or Security. Cyan glanced back at the distributor, all three of its controls spinning again, knocked out of alignment when she’d startled at Red’s attack. She’d deal with it in a moment.

cyan: We are too dangerous to live. lol.

MelloYello: did white get you too?

cyan: Red.

MelloYello: ooh i knew it

MelloYello: she always goes to admin first when it’s not her

MelloYello: she didn’t this time

MelloYello: and i know bc i was trying to get the card reader to work for abt five minutes D:

cyan: Red caught me doing distributor. D: D: D:

MelloYello: oof

Reluctantly, Cyan turned back to her task. Yellow dial, click. Blue dial, click. The dial that shared her colour span once, twice, and Cyan readied herself for the final press as it whirled round again…

An alarm blared from her tablet. EMERGENCY MEETING.

Her finger slipped again. All three dials started spinning.

Cyan groaned, and headed for the cafeteria.

~~~

Red fell backward against the cafeteria window, arms slowly flailing, mouth open in a pantomime of a scream. With a final gasp, she slumped dramatically down to the floor and lay motionless, legs splayed apart.

Then she sat up, giving Cyan and Yellow a rueful smile. “Okay, I deserved that. Should’ve known Brown would be keeping an eye on the door to Security.”

“Serves you right for killing Cyan mid-calibration,” Yellow scolded her, but they were smiling too. The remaining living crew members were leaving the table, heading back to their chores around the ship – all except White, who seemed to have his eye on Green as the next target.

“I don’t mind,” Cyan said, quietly. She looked out of the cafeteria window, at the stars receding into the distance. Despite everything, a small pang of homesickness gripped her hearts when she saw them.

Red shifted closer to her, her reflection in the mirror looking concerned, brow creased in a frown. “You sure? I didn’t mean – I wasn’t trying to pick on you or anything. If I really upset you, then it won’t happen again.”

“No, it’s fine.” Cyan turned away from the window and gave Red a faint smile. “I know you do things like that to everyone.”

“Well, sure, but that’s no excuse to keep doing it to you if it bothers you.” Red’s eyes were downcast.

Cyan shook her head. “No, I mean… I don’t mind it because you do it to everyone. I don’t feel – lesser. I feel… this is Red who likes to annoy her friends, and I’m her friend.” She sighed. “That’s – not what was bothering me.”

“Then what’s up?” Yellow asked.

Cyan leaned back against the window, feeling her helmet bonk softly against its surface. “I want to be home.”

Red and Yellow glanced at one another. Yellow cautiously reached out a hand, and Cyan took it, giving it a gentle squeeze.

“If you want to get back to your world, then – that’s okay,” Yellow said, slowly. “We can help you…”

Cyan shook her head firmly. “Not there. I don’t want to go back. I want to be where people think of me and listen to me. Where what I have to say matters. Where how I feel matters. I want to be here. I want to be home, here. But we’ll be landing in a few weeks time, and – I don’t want to make trouble for you all, having to explain me. I literally am the impostor among you, after all.”

“I won’t hear that kind of talk about a crewmate on my ship, Cyan,” said a new voice.

“Captain!” Cyan got hastily to her feet as Black approached, Yellow and Red following suit.

“I did mean what I said before,” Black went on, concern in her tone. “These ship-wide games are supposed to maintain morale and group cohesion. If any member of this crew feels excluded, that’s antithetical to…”

Cyan shook her head frantically, and Black paused. “No – no, I like it!” Cyan stammered out. “It’s exciting, working with you all to solve the mystery. Or to cause the mystery, I guess. Even though I’m very bad at that.”

“You’re getting better!” Red rested a hand on Cyan’s shoulder. “I didn’t suspect you at all last time.”

“I didn’t kill anyone last time,” Cyan pointed out. “All I did was close the doors.”

Black cleared her throat. “In any case, Cyan – after you’re all done with this round, meet me in my office. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how to… introduce you to HQ, but I need to know what you want before taking action.”

Cyan closed her eyes, feeling them grow damp. It was strange. Emotional tears weren’t a response that her body had had before, but the longer she stayed in this shape, the more aspects of it began to seem natural to her. She opened them again. “You don’t have to go so far for me…”

“I’m aware that I don’t have to, Cyan,” Black said, her tone more gentle than Cyan had expected.

“Oh.” The lump in Cyan’s throat was new, too. “Okay.”

Black nodded. “We’ll talk later. For now, I have to get back to work, and you three –” she looked at each of them in turn “– have tasks to do, don’t you?”

“Red’s an impostor,” Yellow pointed out, with a mischievous smile. “She got caught venting again.”

“I don’t always get caught!” Red protested.

“Yeah, but when you do get caught you always get caught in the vents.”

Black raised an eyebrow. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I?” She turned to leave. “Good luck.”

“If we ever have to use the maintenance tunnels for actual maintenance, you’ll be the one who gets sent down there,” Yellow commented, as the three of them made for the exit. “You must know them better than anyone else at this point.”

“I wonder if I can fit into the real air vents,” Cyan mused. “Not in the game, of course. That would be an unfair advantage.”

“Well, if you get stuck in there, don’t – ooh, Blue and Purple are in Elec together.” Red tapped a button on her pad, and Cyan heard doors hiss closed further down the corridor. “That ought to confuse them.”

“I needed to go back in there,” Cyan complained, but she didn’t mind too much. It was nice to have an excuse to put off the distributors for a little longer.

No, he knows. It’s because they don’t want to see. They don’t want to believe the thing that ripped Orange in half, left his guts strewn all over the table in Comms, is walking around with their buddy’s face. Pink felt the same way, once. Before his time on the Skeld.

He’s seen too many crewmates die because those monsters weren’t stopped in time. Because of inaction, hesitation, skipped vote after skipped vote. He’s not going to have any more innocent blood on his hands. Not this time.

If the others won’t listen, he’ll take care of the problem himself.

The crew aren’t issued with weapons. As if HQ thinks refusing to acknowledge the problem will make it go away. They’re supposed to rely on the voting system. They’re supposed to use caution.

Screw that. Pink’s found his own solution, hanging down from the roof of the lab. It shouldn’t be hard to track down Yellow before it melts.

He’s – no, it’s in O2, doing something to the tree monitors. It doesn’t look up when Pink enters, and Pink doesn’t hesitate. He drives the sharpened icicle into Yellow’s back, right where its heart would be, pinning it against the tree. It gasps and chokes, hands clawing at the air.

Pink draws back and lets it fall. It crumples to the floor, still twitching, mouth moving like it’s trying to speak. Pink plants a foot on its chest and tries to stab the icicle into its throat this time, but the point’s already too melted to penetrate. He turns it around instead and clubs the damn thing in the head with it, again, and again, and on the next blow the whole thing shatters.

Yellow gloves claw at his leg. Pink screams and stamps down on its face, shattering the visor and its nose in one go. “Die, you fucker!” he snarls, ramming a heel into its chest, feeling bones crunch and splinter. “Die and leave us alone!”

“…Pink?”

Pink turns to see Red standing in the doorway. Her eyes are wide, face ashen with horror. “Pink, what’ve you done?”

“I – I got him.” Pink steps back, off the body. It isn’t moving any more. His throat feels tight, suddenly. “It’s over.”

“Pink…” Red’s voice is tiny, barely louder than a whisper. “Didn’t you come to Medbay? Yellow wasn’t – it can’t have been him…”

“…what?” Pink stares at Red, at the body, his own feet, his hands. Yellow must have screwed with the oxygen levels, he thinks from somewhere far away. There’s no air in the room.

Red’s taking out her tablet. “I – I have to call this in, Pink. I’m sorry.”

The alert echoes all through the outpost.

Blue should have known it wouldn’t be so easy to escape.

Her stomach clenched and writhed. Bile rose in her twin throats.

She’d planned for what would happen if High Command realised that she was still alive. That the humans hadn’t discovered her and ejected her into space before she could carry out her mission. That instead, once she’d earned the trust of the crew as her orders instructed, she’d just stayed with them, travelling in secret until they reached the next inhabited world they were headed to, and then fled into a new world, a new life.

That had been her fear. Being dragged home to be punished as a coward, a deserter and a traitor. She’d thought of all that.

High Command had undoubtedly thought of it too. That was why they’d left out one important detail in her training.

She doubled over the toilet bowl and retched again, spitting up a wad of pink mush. It had been a source of excitement to the real crew. Burger night. A break from the usual pre-packaged fare the cafeteria served. Blue had forced hers down, her stomach gnawing at itself as she made her false face smile.

They’d told her the humans were omnivores. That they would eat practically anything. Maybe it wasn’t a ploy to trap potential deserters. Maybe Blue just hadn’t thought through the implications well enough.

Meat was expensive, on the human worlds. Hard to produce, hard to preserve. On a small vessel like this, it was so much easier, so much cheaper, to use substitutes. Plant proteins, engineered and shaped to have the taste and texture almost of real flesh.

It was just as good, Lime had said. Probably healthier. For them, Blue was sure that was true.

For Blue, it might as well have been a mouthful of sand.

She collapsed to her knees, trembling, a cold, viscous sweat coating her skin. She was a week into her mission. It would be two more at least before they landed anywhere.

She wouldn’t make it that long. Even now, black stars exploded across her vision.

Someone knocked on the door of the bathroom stall. Blue flinched.

“Blue? You okay in there?” It was Lime’s voice. Lime with the soft coils of hair and warm brown eyes. Lime who had walked the shy and distant Blue through her tasks, told her stories of their family and friends, made a point of making her feel welcome.

Lime who was flesh and bone and blood and so close and alone.

“I’m okay!” Blue called back. Her voice warped in ways a human’s wouldn’t have, and she did her best to cover the mistake with a cough. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“You don’t sound okay.” Lime’s voice was filled with doubt. “If you’re throwing up, you ought to go to Medbay…”

“No!” Too fast, too hoarse and harsh. She coughed again, but that would only worsen Lime’s suspicions. “Please, just – go. Just go.”

“Blue…” Lime gave a soft sigh. Blue heard a faint clunk against the door, the sound of their helmet resting gently on the metal. “If something’s wrong, you can talk to me, okay? I won’t say anything to anyone you don’t want me to. Promise.”

“Don’t…” Blue stared down into the bowl. “I – I can’t. I – it’s nothing. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t making any sense, words failing. Her mind was in a haze.

She was starving.

Lime wanted to help her.

Lime could help her. Lime could feed her.

Lime trusted her.

Lime didn’t know. Lime would call her Impostor and alert the crew and have her thrown out of the airlock, if they knew.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. Lime was kind.

Lime was easy prey.

Lime was a friend.

Lime sighed, beyond the door. “Okay. Just – I’ll be in my quarters, okay? If you need me.” Blue heard them step away from the door, and then pause, and then continue walking, down the corridor and out of Blue’s hearing.

Blue stood up, on trembling limbs. She fumbled for the toilet flush, sending the evidence of her sickness out of the ship, to drift through space.

Maybe the airlock would be a kind death. It would be faster.

She didn’t want to die.

She didn’t need to die. All she had to do was her job.

Blue opened the door. She stepped outside, her shaking hands clenched at her sides.

“I already got you access to the ship’s systems. You – you said that would be the end of it.” The words falter despite their efforts, and Purple hates that too. “You can’t expect me to kill for you!”

Pink scoffs. “What, you thought I was just gonna stroll in here and take over without the rainbow squad putting up a fight? I need them out of the way.” He steps closer to Purple and puts a hand on their shifted form’s waist, above their hidden mouth. Purple freezes rigid at the touch, skin crawling under his hand. “You can’t tell me those fangs of yours are just for show, buddy.”

Purple hisses. “That’s different. I hunt for food. You’re asking me to murder.” There aren’t words in the aliens’ language to express how obscene the comparison is, but the disgust they let show on their face says enough.

“No.” Pink grabs the back of Purple’s neck, pulling them close so that their faces almost touch. If it weren’t for the helmets, a watcher might think that their mouths were about to join in an alien display of affection. The thought turns Purple’s stomachs. “I’m telling you to do it. And you’re going to do as you’re told, because we’re in this together now. You know what’s going to happen to you if I go down?”

Purple nods. “‘Strapped to a table at HQ’,” they recite, because Pink likes to make them say it if he thinks they’re getting ideas, and at least this way they get to choose their own words, they won’t have to include the parts about the scalpels and the needles. Their fury is still there, but it’s being drowned out now, replaced with sickly, hopeless dread. They’ll do as they’re told and they’ll loathe themself as much as they loathe Pink for it, but they’ll do it, because the alternative is so much worse.

“Heh.” Pink steps back, giving Purple a little shove away. “Maybe not, all the way out here. Maybe they’ll just toss you out the airlock, watch your lungs explode.”

“I don’t have lungs,” Purple mutters, fists clenched tight, glaring down at the tiled floor. They don’t trust themself to look Pink in the face right now.