Disclaimer: All characters and ideas coming from The Host by Stephanie Meyers are being used for entertainment only. Original characters are mine.
Title: Human Tendencies
Rating: T
Summary: When a soul never wakes up after insertion, the human host's thoughts are all that are present. What happens when the paranoid rebel humans get a hold of this anomaly?
(I redid the summary, I realized I wrote it while I was in a hurry and it wasn't very good.)
All the pairings from the book appear in this story. I wanted to flip Wanda & Mel's situation and see what would happen, and was interested in all the funny, inappropriate ways a human with soul eyes would convince rebels she was not a seeker. I'm not sure where this is going, but I do know I want whumpage.
This is my first Host fic... not so sure how this one's gonna go.
Prologue
Seven years. It had been seven years since the end of the world. The planet's inhabitants had been taken over by parasitic aliens that were implanted in the back of the human neck, and then wound into the nervous system. The aliens, 'Souls' would be considered benign by a human's sci-fi novel's standards. That was of course, unless you were a human who was around long enough to figure out what was going on.
A Soul would fear a surviving 'rebel' human, just as that human would tell you how awful and violent a 'Seeker'- the souls that hunted down the last of humans- could be.
There were complications. There were some human tendencies that would survive neurological domination and bleed through to the aliens. There were simple things, like what person or 'type' the host body was attracted to, or a tendency towards gluttony. Those problems were worked through with the help of Healers, the Soul version of therapists or counselors.
Then there were bigger problems, ones that couldn't be handled quietly like addictions, violence that went beyond the superficial human habits, and the most offensive to the souls, self mutilation. Those hosts were most often abandoned and the Souls re-implanted elsewhere.
But even worse were the problems that were unique to the rebel adult hosts. Tendencies to keep secrets, or secluding oneself, and of course a resistant host, that could overtake the Soul placed in its body. These were the rarest, and the most dangerous to both parties.
Austin Swanson didn't have any of these problems. She had been implanted with a Soul named 'Spins Glass Colors' from the Bear World just over 2 years ago after fleeing from the Pacific Northwest to Japan with her parents. The implantation was uneventful and there was only one voice in the head of this 24 year-old body when it woke up. Uniquely, Spins Glass Colors had never woken up. The only voice in this host mind was Austin's.
More tomorrow, methinks.