Everything is burning.
For too long he doesn’t move. His limbs are leaden, pulled heavily to the ground, and his neck is too weak to keep up his head. Smoke curls in the air and settles sleepily into his lungs. Shredded metal and broken glass glint and shine under the full moonlight, and through his half-lidded eyes it looks like stars. Every inhale is laborious, but the churned earth feels shaped to the contours of his body, like a mattress designed specifically for him. He could close his eyes, just for a moment, and rest, recover from the strain of the crash before moving forward. It would be easier. Just a short rest, a moment to sleep, to heal.
Sounds of a forest surround him. A steady chirping that must be crickets, a hooting that can only be an owl. If he strains his ears farther, there’s the chittering of something scurrying up and down trees, and the heavier thumps of something bigger stomping about. Behind that, there are voices.
Shouting. And the bark of what has to be dogs, and the ever so faint revving of vehicles, slamming doors.
Get up, urges a voice in the back of his head. Get up now.
He tries to comply. He cracks open his eyes – when did he close them? – and hisses at the onslaught of light, of beams of searching torches and painful flashes of red and blue. All of a sudden he’s made aware of the flames inching closer to his legs, and the wing of his ship, torn off the body, pressing him into the ground.
“Not good,” he croaks, trying to wiggle his toes. Thankfully, he can, although movement reminds his body of itself, and the aches and pains start to come alive – his entire head pounds, and nausea coils around his stomach, and something burns and pulses in the meat of his calf.
But still he can move.
Forcing his arms to function, he grounds his hands under him, pushing upright. His body feels heavier than it has ever felt before; the task feels herculean. The unrest in his stomach becomes violent, swirling, and he has to stop before he’s even sitting upright, eyes stinging, teeth clenched, breathing deliberately and sharply through his nose until the nausea settles again. The world spins, when he’s finally sat upright, and he has to give himself a moment for that to pass, too, but the shouting voices and stomping feet get louder, and he knows he doesn’t have much time.
“Okay,” he whispers to himself, praying that Perseus and Ursa and Leo guide him. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
He curls his gloved fingers under the ruined edge of the wing, careful of the sharp shards of torn metal, and heaves, pushing and biting back a loud cry as the effort of freeing his legs tears something in his shoulders, hurts something in his back. The wing is heavy and he’s lucky he’s merely trapped under it rather than pinned; if the ground wasn’t supporting so much of its weight then the onus would be on his legs, and he’s sure he would lose them. His body is sorer than it has ever been in his life, and everything hurts, but he is grateful for that at least.
With the freeing of his legs comes the hard part. He doesn’t trust them to hold them, at least not at first, and he’s scared of what might happen if his brain tells them to move on their own. So he wraps his hands around his ankle and pulls, so his foot slides close to his rear and bends his knee, and does the same with the other, so he is sitting with his knees nearly pressed to his chest and his feet flat and steady on the floor.
“Okay,” he whispers again to himself, shaky this time. He bites off any other words, snapping his mouth shut, focusing on breathing. Okay. He braces his palms on the cracked and sparking remains of the control board the pushes with all his strength, steadying himself on wobbling legs and knocking knees. He holds himself steady, breath held in his lungs, for the count of fifteen ticks, carefully testing with his hands still steadying himself, the ability of his legs to hold him up.
Carefully, nervously, he lifts up his hands. He sways, for a moment, but manages to stay upright. On the high of that success he straightens to the best of his ability and surveys the smoking remains of his crashed ship. It’s not very salvageable. Scrap metal, maybe, but everything else…
He swallows. It has been two deca-phoebs since he left home. Six pheobs since he last passed a satellite up to date enough to talk to his family face-to-face. He hasn’t seen home in so long that sometimes he struggles to remember what it felt like to lie in his bed, not just the nest he built in the cab of his ship. The ship, with its purple glowing lights and well-worn buttons and weird old sounds and familiar walls is the only piece of home he has left. Maybe forever, now.
He shakes himself. The voices are closer, now, the barking of dogs closer still. He doesn’t have time to dwell. He forces himself to shift around some of the ruins, digging through cracked polymer and cracked glass to find anything salvageable and portable; anything he can find in under thirty ticks. He manages – thankfully – to find his pack, half-burned as it is, that he knows holds some clothes and supplies. He finds his comm, too, although it’s cracked clean in half. He brings it anyway.
His head swivels to the treeline as he hears a barked order that sounds like it’s barely out of eyesight. He has to go. He doesn’t have any more time.
Choking back tears from two different kind of pain, he stumbles his way out of the wreckage and sprints for the trees, as far away from the voices as he can manage. He only hopes that he’s not trailing blood – and that the humans aren’t faster than he is.
———
Keith grew up on stories of Earth.
His father told him hundreds. It’s like a hundred planets in one, he liked to say, and when Keith was young and still fit in the crook of his father’s arm he’d look at him with wide eyes and try to imagine it. Dozens of nations all trying to coexist in one space. All the culture and language you could ever dream of, naui jag-eun tamheomga, everywhere, at once.
When Keith was a kid he couldn’t get enough of it. When he was a teen he couldn’t, either; he’s never not been fascinated with the heritage he’s never shared with anyone he’s ever known. His bedtime stories were of scientific discoveries his father witnessed in real time, of athletic feats of which Keith could barely conceptualise. And when he ran out of real stories, he told Keith stories of thousands of years of myths, of gods and angels and monsters. And of course when Keith had the first inkling of an opportunity he packed a ship, kissed his mother goodbye, and flew off on a several hundred million lightyear journey, his field journal blank and begging to be filled and his father’s voice echoing in his head.
His father prepared him for everything. Keith knew every star on the journey, recognised the curve of every planet in the solar system. Upon sight of the Great Blue Dot he could barely contain his excitement, thrusters at full force.
His father told him everything. As far as Keith knew and has always known, his father knew everything.
His father didn’t tell him that the second his ship showed up on government scanners, he’d be shot out of the sky.
Keith found that one out the hard way.
———
There’s a light up ahead.
It’s yellowed, and old. The bulb has not been changed in a long time, and dead moths pile inside the class lamp cover. Cobwebs wrap delicately around the iron frame. The light seems out of place with the cottage it guards; not in appearance, but in liveliness: the cottage is dark and well-maintained. The ancient beckoning of the lamp post seems at odd with the sleepy youth of the red-bricked little house.
Keith is starting to get a little delirious, maybe.
Stumbling, he approaches the cottage. He has long since lost the voices and hunters, if that’s what they were, distracted no doubt by the remains of his ship. He hasn’t heard them in hours.
But the moon crests higher and higher overheard. And the torn flesh of his leg – cut deeply by a shard of shrapnel – bleeds sluggishly with no sign of stopping. And he is tired, and every step is harder, and the adrenaline only continues to fade, and the point in which he will no longer be able to go on is rapidly approaching.
And, most damning. Humans are pursuit predators. As far as he goes – if he is not sheltered, they will find him. Now or days from now, he cannot stay hidden.
He’d like to choose the terms in which he is discovered.
He forces himself to the cottage, injured leg dragging behind him, vision getting blurrier with every step, breaths getting shallower and shallower. The steps are real wood, cured and stained and worn, and Keith mourns for a moment that he is about to ruin them with the spill of his own blood and the tracked mud and grease on his clothes. His father wore a necklace, every day of his life, a leather cord with a rubbed-smooth charm of carved wood. In all the many planets Keith has visited, he has never seen real wood. Dried plant matter, in abundance, and every kind of polished stone, polymers created from nothing and glass melted from every kind of sand, but wood is, at least as far as anyone knows, completely unique to Earth. Keith has always been fascinated by it.
His strength leaves him at the door. Like his strings were cut, he falls to his knees with a heavy thud, and must claw his way close enough to knock. The tap of his fist against the worn green door is hardly loud enough to be audible, but it is all he has strength to do. He slumps against the doorframe and mentally apologises to whatever old lady lives in this house, because she is going to have the fright of her life seeing his corpse on her doorstep when she wakes up in the morning. That, or a trail of blood from where the people who shot him down are going to drag him away.
Either way, not good.
He’s sad, as he lay there dying. That is of course not a revolutionary feeling to have, but it’s of no consequence. He wishes he saw more of Earth. He wishes he got to stop at all the places his father talked about so fondly. He wishes he was able to tell his mother goodbye. He wishes, perhaps most urgently, that dying hurt less. He had been too shocked to hurt, when he first crashed, but it’s been hours now and his body won’t let him forget it. Everything hurts, and his throat is dry. He hates it when his throat is dry. The wooden doorframe digs into his back, at least, and it’s not a pleasant sensation but he reaches out and strokes the grain of the wooden door anyway, feeling the chipped away pent, squeezing his eyes shut and pretending he’s running his thumb around his father’s pendant.
The texture of the wood suddenly disappears, and his back hits the ground. His eyes flutter open, whole seconds after he is laid flat on the ground, and hovering above him is the blurry silhouette of a man glowing gold; curls of hair shining flinted silver in the bright light of the moon, stars dotting the apples of his cheeks and bridge of his nose, mouth curved like the arm of the Milky Way, and eyes the deepest, darkest, widest brown he has ever seen, like two glowing black holes boring into his soul.
“Oh,” are Keith’s dying words, faint and echoing and awed. “Dad was wrong. Angels are real.”
———
The tips of cool, uncalloused fingers brushing under his hairline rouse him from slumber, frowning. Mom must be wearing – gloves? But that doesn’t make sense. He’s never seen her wear gloves before, even when he’s been sick. Her claws tear right through the fingers. It doesn’t make sense.
“Mom?” he murmurs, voice scratchy, trying and failing to force open his heavy, heavy eyelids.
“Go back to sleep,” she whispers, not sounding like herself at all. She must be sick, too. “You’re still all fucked up. You need it.”
Keith’s eyebrows furrow. He wanted to talk to her. There was something he wanted to say to her. There’s something faint and muted pulling at the back of his mind; something about his mother, about talking, about pain and sleep and sorrow. He needs to wake up.
But he’s so tired. And his eyelids are so heavy. And sleep pulls, at every corner of his mind.
“Okay,” he sighs, and sinks back into it.
———
“Whatever the hell you are, you’ve made a mess of yourself. Dumbass.”
———
There are voices again. Arguing. Fear pricks at Keith’s veins, and it’s enough to propel him out of whatever blackness he’s been resting in, enough to force his eyes open. He squeezes them shut again on reflex, hissing at the onslaught of sunlight pouring in from the wide, open window, counting to three before opening them again under the shield of his hand.
He doesn’t recognise the room he’s in.
It’s strangely shaped. Almost cave-shaped, really, with rounded edges instead of sharp corners. Except the window is so big it bleeds light into every single crevice of the room, leaving no room for any cave-like impressions. The walls are painted with soft, muted murals, of hanging vines and falling leaves and ants marching a line on a tree. Dozens of shelves are filled with more rocks than Keith has ever seen in one place, even in his godfather’s labs and archives. The bed itself is huge, taking up half the room, enough so that Keith could sprawl if he pleased and not touch any edge. The comforter is huge and thick and almost stiflingly warm. The door is contrasting to the energy of the rest of the room, covered in vibrant stickers and sprawled in messages and almost graffiti-like lettering. It’s cracked open slightly, and through it Keith can hear two voices arguing: one stiff and demanding, the other angry and shrill.
“I have no idea what the hell you’re on about,” hisses the angry voice, defensive. “No one has shown up at my door. I’ve seen nothing strange. Everything is as normal as it always is. The only odd thing is the slew of trespassing assholes dressed in uniform who won’t leave me the fuck alone –”
Keith’s head lolls backwards, strength seeping out of his body. The sunlight is warm and smells good. The fear that had dragged him awake has ebbed, somewhat, because the voice – the angry voice – is protective. There is someone guarding Keith’s six.
He lets sleep swallow him again.
———
He dreams, finally, of flying on wings of hollow bones and stretched skin, and being shot out of the sky. And of a bright yellow canary, snatching him from his freefall and floating him gently to the earth.
———
“If you woke up soon I’d appreciate it, you know. I’m running out of excuses to buy saline bags. Shit is getting suspicious and if the local town thinks I’m a vampire trying to keep my personal bloodbag alive, I’m fucked.”
———
Keith awakes, finally and fully, in the middle of the night. A half moon shines bright into a bedroom that feels unnervingly familiar, like the watercolour memories from a dream. The cloudiness that’s been ever present in his head has finally faded, and the only thing rolling in his stomach is hunger. There’s still a heavy ache in his leg, but it’s manageable. It’s dark enough that his eyes don’t sting.
His mouth tastes like something died, then was revived, then shat on his tongue. It’s unpleasant.
Nervously, fully expecting a half-movement to crumble his body to dust, he peels back the disgustingly fluffy comforter, slowly pivoting his half-upright body until his feet are planted on the rug-covered floor. He rests there a moment, frankly a little breathless, but braces on palm on the nightstand and one on the bedspread and readies himself. Teeth grit in determination, he pushes, leaning on shaky arms until he trusts his legs to hold up his body.
They do. His one leg aches in a pain he’s only felt in Marmora training, but it holds him, and when he tests a tiny step forward, it holds him then, too.
Slowly, conscious of his space and his body, Keith inches forward.
It takes him longer than he would like to cross the minimal space between the bed and the door, but he does it, and he ignores the sardonic voice in his head that wants to do anything but celebrate. He rests again at the door frame, hand clutched at the top of it, stretched out in a way that feels unbelievably good (well, as stretched out as he can be with his head brushing the doorframe). His lips quirk up when he realises it’s made of wood, half-remembering his dying internal rambles. He wonders if building with wood is a common Earthen practice, or if whomever owns this cottage is just unbelievably wealthy. Maybe all Terrans are.
Once his breath has evened again and he thinks he’s good to go, Keith peeks down the hallway, nerves dancing down his spine. The two rooms branching off are dark and soundless, but there’s a small light on at the end of the hall where it opens up, and the soft sound of clinking glass. Someone is awake.
He closes his eyes, pulling back from the doorframe and closing his shaking hands into fists. “Just do it,” he whispers to himself. It’s not like they don’t know he’s here – someone has been keeping him alive, after all. He didn’t just recover – well, half-recover – from a massive crash by himself. That kind of thing kills a person, actually. “Stop stalling.”
Jaw set and shoulders square, Keith stalks forward. It’s hard to stalk with a heavy limp, but he thinks he manages. His cousin has always told him that power comes from audacity, and she has plenty, so. He should be fine so long as he emulates her, which he would rather crash from space again than admit but he does often.
He turns the corner at the end of the hallway and it opens up into an open kitchen and living space. There are no overhead lights but lamps and candles litter the space, making everything glow quietly. A light floral scent fills the air, but Keith isn’t sure if that’s from the candles or the bouquet of purple flowers that might be lavenders placed carefully on the centre of a – wooden – table. More shelves line the walls, filled with more than just rocks this time, and the walls are painted with bright swatches of colours; muted in the low light but visibly more sunshiney and abstract than the bedroom. The fridge is covered in photos so thickly that the door isn’t even visible. The counters are a mess of opened ingredients, some of which Keith recognises, and a slew of utensils and bowls in various states of disarray.
A man stands at the centre of it all, back turned to Keith.
Keith clears his throat.
The man whirls around, startled, and when he sees Keith he screams at the top of his lungs, mixing bowl clattering to the ground and splattering batter all over the floor and half the cupboards. Keith steps back, heart pounding in his ears, hands held defensively in front of him, mind screaming with various iterations of oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. He’d thought he was safe, that his presence was known, that –
“Oh my shitballs,” the man wheezes, hunching over slightly. “Oh Joseph and Mary and Sweet Baby Jesus. Fuck. My heart just clawed its way up my esophagus and threw itself out of my mouth, actually. Holy shit.”
“What,” Keith croaks, still frozen in fear.
For a moment there’s silence. Then the man still stands crookedly, but straightens enough to look Keith in the eyes. And Keith –
Keith stops breathing, because he knows those eyes.
The deepest, darkest, widest brown he has ever seen, like two glowing black holes boring into his soul.
“I am. So sorry,” he says, “for yelling. That is my bad. That is On Me. Probably freaked you out good.” He sighs, bending back down and scooping up the mixing bowl. He stares for a long moment at the mess of batter, weighing, then sighs again and more deeply and reaches for a rag. “I don’t mean to be xenophobic, promise. I swear I knew you were there. I just. Haven’t slept. In so many days. Would’ve screamed if anyone popped out, promise.”
“What,” Keith repeats, a little desperate.
The man doesn’t seem to pick up on his tone, though, continuing to work on the rapidly drying mess and rambling.
“– and it’s not your fault, anyway. Been a rough couple of weeks. You really freaked the hell outta the military, huh? I’m glad you’re up now because there was only so much I could do to keep them away. I’m sure they’ll come knocking again eventually, but we’ll figure it out then. Or you’ll go home? I’m honestly not sure. Whatever works. You can stay. I dunno. My brain’s on three percent at this exact moment.”
“You’re…not sleeping?” Intentionally, Keith avoids the whole military thing the man mentioned, because. Well. That freaks him out, if he’s being entirely honest, and he really doesn’t want to hear it. Right now he’s pretending that’s a problem for someone else. He has enough shit to deal with.
The man sighs. He looks dejectedly at the mess. Slowly, so as not to startle him again, Keith walks over to the sink, careful to avoid smears of whatever the man was making, and wets a rag to help him.
He figures it’s the least he can do.
“Yeah, well. I’ve never slept great outside of my bed. It’s cool, though. Sometimes I blink for a few seconds longer than usual and it’s like a micro-nap.”
Keith looks at him in concern. He’s staring off into space, rubbing at a spot that’s been clean for at least two doboshes now. Keith’s not even sure if he’s noticed him beside him. “That seems bad.”
“Eh. Now that you can move around, I can sleep if you’re ever up. All is well.”
“...Wait.” Keith shifts so he’s deliberately in the man’s space, which makes him startle, proving Keith’s earlier guess. “I’m sleeping in your bed?”
“Well, yeah,” he says, like it’s obvious.
Keith flushes purple. “I didn’t know I was in your bed!” It’s not that he’s…you know…never slept in anyone else’s bed before, but usually he knew he was doing it. And never a stranger’s, as evidently kind as this stranger has been.
The man blinks. “I have a guest bedroom, but you’re too tall for it.”
“Still!”
“Dude. You showed up at my door in the middle of the night after crashing into the woods so hard the trees shook, bloodied to hell and back and near death. I couldn’t just – shove you in a bed too small for you. It was my bed or the floor, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to make an injured person sleep on the floor.”
“That’s…fair, I suppose,” Keith concedes. But he’s still a little troubled. “But I’m good, now. I can – sleep in the guest room?”
He trails off a little as he suggests it, realising, abruptly, how absurd this whole thing is. He doesn’t know this person. He’s shown up as an unexpected guest to his home – hell, to his planet. And now they’re…making sleeping arrangements? Arguing about sleeping arrangements? Is Keith even planning on staying? What are his other options? How is he going to get home? What happened to his ship?
His head starts to pound again. The man must notice, because he softens.
“Man, just sleep in my bed,” he says. “You’re still hurt.” He gently pries the rag out of Keith’s hand, tossing them both into the sink and standing. Hands still gripped together, he pulls Keith up too, careful of his hurt leg and generally aching body. He begins to tug Keith back to the bedroom, guiding him around the mess on the floor.
Keith squares his shoulders stubbornly. “No.”
“Oh, for the love of –”
The man pinches the bridge of his nose, staring at Keith in exasperation.
“This is what I get,” he says, shaking his head. “For not listening to Hunk about the light. I deserve this. This is Karma.”
“I’m not just going to steal your bed and let you be sleep deprived,” Keith insists.
“Well, I’m not going to let you not steal my bed! And it’s my house, so checkmate!”
“Not doing it.”
“I’ll drag you,” the man threatens. “I did before. I will do it again, do not test me.”
“You dragged me when I was a deadweight,” Keith points out. He straightens to his full height, ignoring the screaming burning in his leg. He has a Point to make. “Go ahead and try when I’m actively resisting.”
The man glowers at him, arms crossed over his chest and fingers drumming on his bicep. He has very long fingers, Keith notices. Kind of – elegant. In a scrawny way. Keith kind of gets those vibes from him as a person.
“Oh,” the man says triumphantly, standing to his full height, too – although he still has to look up to meet Keith’s eyes. “I’ll just sleep on the floor. So you’ll have to use my bed. Ha.”
Keith shrugs. “I’ll just sleep on the floor, too.”
The man glowers at him for several doboshes. Keith stares right back, eyebrows raised.
“Are all aliens this annoying?”
“Are all humans this stubborn?”
A smile twitches at the corner of the man’s mouth. “This is stupid.”
“It is,” Keith agrees, smiling back.
“Just – sleep on the bed.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“What if I sleep in it, too? Compromise.”
Keith’s cheeks heat again, although this time he doesn’t look away. That would be – embarrassing. Far more embarrassing than simply sleeping in someone else’s bed – sleeping with them in it.
But it would get them both to sleep faster. Plus, Keith would be unconscious, so how embarrassing could it be, really? And the bed is huge, so double plus! They probably won’t even be that near each other.
“Compromise,” Keith relents, finally. The man beams, but notably there’s a bit of a flush to his ears, too.
“Come on,” he says, reaching down to grab Keith’s hand again. He does it very easily. Keith tries not to notice. “God, I’m so pumped. I love sleeping. This is going to be the best.”
“...Right.”
Keith follows him, meekly, down the hallway, straight through the second door on the left, and into the bedroom. It has remained unchanged – the comforter is turned over as Keith left it, and the light curtains are swaying, slightly, in the breeze from the open window. The man wastes no time crawling right in, on the right right, sighing loudly as he sinks into the soft mattress. Keith is much more hesitant.
“There,” the man says, as they’re finally settled side by side. “Hopefully it’s not – the worst.”
“It’s not,” Keith tries to assure, voice strangled. He lies as stiffly as he can, careful to keep his limbs to himself, not to crowd. He doesn’t want to – suffocate the man, or something. Who knows. This is a real-life human. Mom says they are largely fragile.
“Goodnight,” the human whispers, several doboshes later. His voice is hushed, sleep-thick. Keith chances a look, and finds him melted into the pillows, eyes closed, face lax. He doesn’t seem to be – bothered. By Keith. By his clawed hands, or big ears, or height. Or proximity.
Keith exhales, and lets himself relax.
“Goodnight,” he murmurs, and sinks back into unconsciousness.
— — —
next
later in the universe
