AN: So first, yeah, to my long-time watchers, I'm sorry this isn't To All Ends. This is the preliminary exploration of parallels between Wikus van de Merwe of District 9 and M. Kruger of Elysium. Two very different characters on the surface, but I divined up some parallels into which this idea has spawned.

Huge angst warning. This is not a happy tale. A happy ending, maybe, eventually, but until then. It's tragic. It was painful writing it. Please bear with me on these first chapters – how it's writing itself/the format hasn't been leaving a lot of room for dialogue. Just lots and lots of exposition and narrative, for lack of better words. It's all terribly necessary, I'm afraid, to get to where we actually want to be, where the plot actually picks up.

And without further ado,

An Honest Man

Three years came. Three years went. District 10 and the departure of the ship made headlines, and then it faded from the public's eyes. People went about their lives, celebrating life, mourning death, and trudging through their existence with their little goals and hopes and dreams and tragedies. Three years isn't a long time in the grand scale of things.

It was, though, for Wikus van de Merwe. It was mind-numbing, hopeful, desperate, tedious, heart-breaking, and resigned, all not in any particular order. He spent three years waiting in line with Prawns for handouts. The first year he spent between hiding in the rubble in D9 and then alone in a white tent in D10, and then the Prawn population started to grow, and now he sits with three others in a white tent, eating and sleeping and whatever else Prawns did.

He fought for three years, fought with his own changing nature and the alien environment, the culture. He had come to understand the Prawns through Christopher and to foster a better informed attitude and empathy with them. They loved his purposeful kindness and how he went out of the way to try and make sure everybody had enough. He tried to teach about things and integrate, well, humanity into them. They rarely killed each other, the Prawns, but they still weren't helping themselves when it came to human relations. All the same, none of them knew who he was or what he'd done. Whispers went about the district, but nobody knew what had happened to the human that had helped Christopher and his son. They only knew his name. Some spurned it. They remembered his role in the initial evictions and his MNU body armor. Others, though, they seemed to try and understand. He fought to help them and so, came to understand them, so they, in turn, came to try and think of him more kindly.

But he was not one of them. And even against unfavorable odds – being turned into an alien and trapped within an unsuitable environment – he refused to let himself become one of them.

He had actually hid in the wreckage of Christopher's shack to wait out the rest of the transformation before emerging. While District 9 still sprawled over the edge of Johannesburg and the likes of Piet Smit and other suited individuals debated its future, he isolated himself, finding ways to bide his time that didn't involve drudging up painful memories. Instead, he devoted it to the future.

Tania van de Merwe would find the products of his efforts in the form of tiny metal flowers and trinkets crafted from tin cans and scraps of metal. Each one he made symbolized in his mind the day when he would be able to return to her, his angel. It was his way, too, of showing her that her husband was still alive. That he hadn't forgotten her. And that he would return one day. He intended to give her hope, and in turn, kept hope alive within himself. The trips into the human part of the city were dangerous, and he almost got caught once and was chased by dogs out of the sight of their handlers until he escaped over the fence back into D9. But it was worth it. He wished he could stay and see her reaction, but that required him to stay until daylight. That was too dangerous.

Now and again he would recline on a pile of dirt or sit up against a collapsing shack to daydream of that return, how triumphant it would be. He didn't have to wonder what her expression would be. He knew Tania better than he knew himself. She would be crying but laughing and smiling at the same time, and he knew he would do the same, and they'd run to each other and he'd be able to hold her in his arms and kiss her and say everything was okay again. And he'd be able to go to the police and tell them everything illegal about MNU and the things they did to him and to the Prawns and then, boy, would Piet Smit be laughing out of the other side of his face then. Then they'd see…

That kept him going, even when he went four days without food and a group of men came into the camp and singled him out because he was alone and an easy target and hit him for an eternity with pipes and other things. This only happened once. The next time, he threw one of them across the compound and smashed the other one so hard on the head, the skull collapsed around his fist. They chased him afterwards for a bit, until he made it back to the destroyed shack and pulled out the chain gun he'd unearthed from the wreckage of Obesandjo's compound. They avoided him for good after that.

But three years ran out. And then four. And then five.

He watched D10 turn into a bigger, messier version of D9. They began taking Prawns out of the camp and relocating them to other, less hospitable places in the world so the officials in Johannesburg could start to hope to be able to control them there. The population kept growing in spite of 'determined efforts' to control them. It made Wikus ill now to think on it.

He fidgeted for those extra two years, but he didn't quite lose all hope. Some days were better than others. Maybe Christopher had been waylaid. Maybe they had their own form of bureaucracy on Prawnworld or whatever it was called and they were caught up in red tape. Maybe Christopher had an overseer like Piet Smit. Or maybe they were building warships to come destroy the planet after hearing of the hardships of their people at the hands of the citizens of Earth.

It was all very troubling and most lines of thought bottlenecked into these worst-case scenarios. So he gave up thinking about it for a while and tried to continue occupying his thoughts in other ways. His grip on his humanity tightened like a vice.

One day, there was a commotion at the gate. Somebody was trying to come in. It looked like a rights group, or volunteers of some sort. They all wore the same collared shirt. The gatekeepers wouldn't let them. Most of the Prawns just took a second to glance in their direction, and then kept on doing Prawn-like things. Wikus observed for lack of anything better to do. They'd tried to get rights groups into the district to clean it up and volunteers to drop off donations, if that was really a thing and not just media hype. Wikus had his doubts. Piet Smit always made a show of hiding his intentions with pleasant words.

He stared, slightly bored, until a sight made his heart or hearts or whatever sort of organs he had jump and do summersaults. A blond woman with her hair pulled back stood in the front of the teaming rights group, arguing with the gate keepers. She looked tiny compared to the guard with his armor and rifle, but her mannerisms screamed of familiarity. His first thought flew to Tania and his heart leapt into his throat. He had to get closer to see, just so he could know for sure. He started to run to the gate but stopped, seeing the guard finally achieve success in turning the crowd away. Wikus wished fervently for telepathy but screamed her name in his head all the same.

The woman stood fixing the guards with a judgmental angle to her hips and said something before turning to depart. Wikus's stare must have caught her attention. She paused and looked in his direction, and Wikus thought he might pass out from the heady cocktail of sadness, pity, and anger in her eyes.

It was Tania, and for the first time in a long time, Wikus attempted to smile. But there was no recognition in her eyes, and Tania turned away and left.

The unexpected visit from Tania boosted his spirits for some time after that, in spite of only being able to see her for a few precious seconds. Maybe she'd found everything out. She'd never wanted to visit D9 before and only asked now and again about the Prawns and if he could teach her any of their language. But there she had been, trying to get into D10. Maybe she had indeed found out all the things MNU had done and started a grassroots movement. Maybe one day she'd get in he could see her up close without having snuck through Johannesburg and without scaring her. Maybe.

But still Christopher did not come. He didn't come in 2015 nor 2016 nor 2025 nor for a long time after that.

Wars divided and destroyed countries physically, politically, and financially. The wealth gap increased, and people like Piet Smit decided they needed to find a shelter from the time bomb that Earth had become and the development of something big began in 2085.

News of the human world did not trickle through the Prawn districts. D10 had become the largest settlement of Prawns on the planet with satellites in other parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and southern Russia. And the Prawn became a global presence.

That is, until the plague. Patient Zero, a Prawn named Jason Nesbitt, fell ill. The sickness turned his eyes white and black fluid leaked from them. He died within a week. The Prawns, those old enough to remember beyond 1982 recalled it as the Weeping Death, and it spread like wildfire. The Old Ones laughed bitterly about it from their beds. It was only inevitable, they said. That was how they ended up on Earth to begin with, when the Weeping Death claimed the ship's crew and left all but a few of what had once been a great workforce. It had been a workforce to be proud of in those days, they said. Then they would look around at the squalid conditions and primal instinct ruling their people now and then only sigh.

By then, management of D10 had fallen apart with the wealth gap, and Prawns more or less moved around as they pleased, or at least weren't forcibly contained within the district anymore. When the Weeping Death started two tents down, Wikus didn't wait to see if it'd pass over Unit 825-X8. He fled D10 and did not enter the company of another living being until the Weeping Death had passed. The plague killed millions of Prawns the world over. Nobody really put effort into trying to cure them; it would not spread to humans. Besides, the human world was too preoccupied with saving its own skin. By the time the plague ended its tirade, three quarters of the Prawn population had been decimated. A small community remained in Johannesburg, returning to the original site of D9 and rebuilding there.

Something in the Prawn people changed over those years. As Wikus worked among them, he could feel it. Christopher Johnsons showed up in congregations, directing work efforts and trying to salvage what little Prawn technology was left. Wikus would nod to himself. They had all turned out okay.

Except him. In 2085, he turned 102. Something in the Prawns was unbelievably long-lived, given the right conditions and the right mindset. Wikus's own humanity, tucked away somewhere in his brain, ended up saving him, but it was a heart-breaking prospect. He was guaranteed to outlive anybody he'd ever known.

He lost track of Tania in 2029. She left Johannesburg for some reason, and he only found out when he managed to make it to their house one night only to find the windows and doors barred up, the car gone, and the metal flower he'd left last week still lying on the welcome mat. He hit his scaly knees there on the porch, alien sobs ripping at his throat as he scrabbled for the abandoned flower with his thumbless hand.

Piet Smit perhaps had something to do with it. Maybe they went after her, too. He refused to think she'd given up hope on him, but he stopped making the flowers. He tried searching for her some years later, when the wealth gap had first become noticeable enough to start conflicts. He hazarded walking out the front gate just to see if it was true, if they really could just walk out, and he did. The money to pay the guards had all run out. There were no means of communicating with the outside world from inside D10. He tried finding newspapers. He even went into a library one day, to the horror of the people inside, and tried looking her up on the Internet. This was very difficult with only five digits between two hands, but after much swearing and frustration, he managed to type passably. The appearance of the police interrupted the quest, though, and he had to flee to avoid being arrested or beaten.

He also managed to trick a detective type into searching for her by lying and saying a human could work a Prawn weapon by taking it apart, pulling out a piece, and putting it back together. Luckily, the man fell for it and agreed to get the weapon upon coming up with results. He returned with bad news. No news on any Tania van de Merwe, but a Tania Smit was killed in a car accident near a small community thirty miles north of Johannesburg. Wikus didn't even fight back later when the man returned with the gun in pieces, swearing and hitting him with the pieces and leaving him bruised and bleeding on the floor.

Then, as he lay there numb with Tania's ghost hovering over him, Wikus really began to lose hope.