#alien squad

The thought occurs to him a few hours into a road trip he never wanted to make, with less company than he would have counted on having. The Ruby is driving - could probably have driven the whole time while Juno collapsed in the backseat, probably, but Juno needed an illusion of control before he started doing something stupid like screaming or having a breakdown - and Juno is prodding at the mess of his shoulder. It looks like a fair representation of the state his heart is in, punched through and weeping, and there are a couple of people who might give him grief about staining the upholstery if they were around to care. They aren’t. The inside of the car, if you want to call it that, is as quiet as the outside.

Juno looks at the blood. He should feel sick, and maybe somewhere he does, somewhere he can’t reach right now. Mostly he feels a detached curiosity, like the injury in his shoulder is a specimen for study. His head hurts. He feels familiar and unfamiliar in his skin, and the crawling in his mind isn’t even the part that’s unfamiliar, and he wonders how many times a brain can be invaded and still keep its own thoughts in the same shape. Juno can’t answer that. Juno can’t even put his own blood under a slide and find the thing that makes it wrong, and the person who could is so far out of reach that he can’t begin to think of how he’ll ever see her again.

Maybe he’s not human.

It’s something to chew on while he cleans the blood, while he does what he can to bandage the hole with the little box of first-aid supplies he fished out of the glovebox. Maybe he’s been changed so much, so many times, that by now the original copy is corrupted - like the stream he tried to watch a few months ago, on a little stick of memory that had been used and uploaded and downloaded and rewritten so many times that it bled together with different stories and didn’t make sense as one thing anymore. And she’d been so upset, too, almost started crying about the original she’d never get back -

He pokes into his shoulder a little too roughly, and hisses like that’s the only thing that hurts.

That might be Juno. A collection of different influences making themselves known in his head, bending him out of shape. An unidentified something else in his blood, amplified, combined, used, created… A ringing in his ears that hasn’t gone away since his body wrenched itself to the ground to avoid a fatal blast without his permission. That might be Juno, now, an alien sitting in another alien, a radical unknown fleeing into space.

How much of him is Martian, is cybernetic brainwashing, is the cure for all disease? How much is made of the people who are still there in his head, even when he’s trying not to think about anything? How much of him was ripped out and dragged across the stars?

Juno’s shoulder looks awful. It’s going to scar, leave another big, ugly mark behind it like all of the others scattered across him, like spaces in his mind that used to be his and belong to something else, again. How many more holes can I take before there’s nothing left, he wonders.

ZIM AND EVIE!!!