kindness can save a life

intrusive thoughts! i already made a post talking about this and this one is admittedly kind of self indulgent because i myself am an intrusive thoughts haver. but cmon it is SO fitting. he'll be in the middle of something completely normal and his partially-assimilated brain will spit out something about what the hive wants. like, cooking food for Emma and thinking about how he could taint the food and infect her. it really freaks him out and he feels guilty for it (i don't think this man knows what intrusive thoughts are or that they're like...not actually indicative of Secret Evil Inner Desires.) paul doesn't want to hurt/infect anyone and he knows this, but then why does he keep thinking about it when he's otherwise lucid. why does he keep thinking about how easy it would be to infect Emma when they kiss, or when they eat, or when they're just having a nice quiet moment together. it stresses him out, and he hasn't quite figured out how to cope with it.

FULLY HIVE-CONTROLLED EPISODES BABEYYYYY! i am a huge sucker for the possession trope and all the angst that comes with it so of course that's gotta be a factor here. they don't happen super frequently (and sometimes there are warning signs before it happens...that's spoilers for my fic though so im not telling you <3) and well. i say possession trope but it's not exactly full on possession? it's sort of still Paul but not really. he's Heavily influenced into a mindset of how being infected is so great and wonderful and isn't singing just so much fun and don't you want to be happy too and you'd understand if you just let me show you. it's a very "owner trying to take their pet to the vet even though they're scared and don't understand its for their own good" vibe. he may try to act normal at first, but the hive can't quite get acting like Paul right and then the facade drops when it becomes clear Emma isn't falling for it (the hive can still have some fun and make some drama while it's in the driver's seat, even if it won't have an easy chance to infect Emma.) he sings and he calls Emma "Em" (this would be such a cute nickname but unfortunately at least in guy timelines it originates from inevitable so they both don't exactly have great associations with it.) and he's really touchy with her but more rough and forceful, not gentle the way paul normally is with her. in the moment he fully believes everything he's saying but he's horrified as soon as he snaps out of it. it's really scary for both of them.

he's functionally cold-blooded. his body doesn't really produce heat anymore. since the air around him (and by extension, he himself) is pretty much always colder than what his body is Supposed to be, he feels cold All The Time, and tends to seek out external sources of warmth (blankets/warm clothes/etc don't really do anything cause those insulate your body heat and He Has None. he does have a tendency to wrap himself up in blankets sometimes though, just out of like. habit. getting a blanket is a normal response to being cold, even if in his specific case it. doesn't help anymore). he's a lot more touchy and physically affectionate with Emma than before/than he otherwise wouldve been as a result. she's warm and it's nice! also his blood, like the other infected people, is blue (fully infected people are also cold all the time, but they're not bothered by it like paul is.)

his heart does still beat, just...really slowly. Usually. when he's singing (or if other infected people are in close enough proximity and they're singing), his heartrate adjusts to match the song. his heart is always in a perfect steady tempo, even when there's no music. the infection repurposes the heart into a metronome basically.

he doesn't technically need to eat or sleep, for like, survival purposes, but he does still feel negative impacts from Not Doing Those Things. he gets hungry/weak from hunger, and he gets tired, he just won't like. die from it, or pass out. the infection keeps his body going, the show must go on! he does eat, but. well. not as much as he should. elaboration on that in the next point. (fully infected people don't need to eat/sleep At All. they don't feel any impacts from not doing it.)

he's also nauseous all the time. pretty much all of his bodily systems are some level of fucked but his stomach is especially so. since the primary method of spreading the infection is vomiting, infected people are kind of always primed to be Ready To Do That. it's not that all the infected people are also perpetually nauseous, but their stomachs are full of pretty much exclusively blue shit. paul, however, still has some stomach acid in there and it is trying and failing to digest the blue shit and it's just Bad. it feels really bad. he can still eat/drink but he has to be careful and not eat too much/too quickly or he Will vomit. sometimes it happens anyway no matter how careful he is. cleaning up the resulting alien biohazard mess is always a fun ordeal.

this one might be my favorite: he regularly quotes musicals without realizing. the hive has all the memories of all the infected people, so it's got a lotttt of material to pull from. any musical an infected person has seen and remembers well enough basically (i have, like, an entire Very Long list of a ton of musicals that wouldve been out in 2018 that i want to watch/rewatch so i can note down lines for my fic). this man has said "the whole being dead thing" in reference to his half-infected state, like, multiple times. He Doesn't Know. it's a completely subconscious thing that happens when paul is otherwise completely himself. he doesn't notice for a while (because obviously he hasn't seen that many musicals to recognize what he's saying as a reference) and when he does he kind of has a crisis about it, because if that's been happening this whole time and he hasn't noticed, what else has the hive changed about him without his knowledge? it's a really funny concept until you think about the horror of realizing you've been subtly changed and now you don't even know what of your own behavior/thoughts you can trust. because what if that other thing you thought was normal for you was actually tainted, implanted there by an external force, and you didn't even realize

every individual "symptom" independently fluctuates in its severity (ex. some days the chattering could be louder but the nausea could be milder or vice versa). the explanation i'm running with for my fic for how the hell he even Can be half-infected is that while destroying the meteor didn't destroy the hive, it did significantly weaken it (and probably severed the connection to pokey entirely, just because i think it'd be fun. how the hive continues to function after that is a whoooole other tangent though)

paul's infection just never got finished, it didn't progress past the point it was at when he threw the grenade, and his connection to the hive is Very unstable. the physical changes are always there but the mental effects are especially shaky.