Title: Invasion [One-shot]
Fandom: V-2009
Unbetaed!
Pairing: established Chad/Anna
Genre: smut, character study
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: spoilers for the final minutes of 1x04
W-count: ~2500
Disclaimer: The universe where the Vees will eat us does not belong to me.
Summary: Anna's and Chad's (not quite) last night on Earth.
Invasion
***
She watches him sleep and she's in awe. She never thought it would come to this but she wishes he could stay. She's going to miss him.
However there is no choice, because Chad Drecker is stubborn and he refused being healed by the V. Instead he went to human doctors, to human hospitals, was operated on by them and even though he got out of the surgery damaged, with speech disturbances, he still refused to be "tampered with" as he called it.
Anna can't understand him. Sometimes she thinks that if she told him the truth, he would agree, but then she knows for sure that if she told him the truth he would first and foremost reveal it to the whole world, whole of this Earth. Then she laughs at her own sentimentality.
She stands up and the movement of the bed wakes him.
"Uh," he blinks, squints. "Hey."
"Hey, sorry. I thought you were asleep already."
"I was." He used to be a reporter, talking was his life: quick witty questions, short and snappy comments. Now all she can get out of him are one-word sentences. Surprisingly though it didn't break him, didn't turn him into a self-pitying grouch. It might seem he didn't change one bit.
"You should go back to sleep." Anna sits back on the edge of the bed and smiles.
"I will." He reaches out to caress the naked skin on her arm, then gently pulls her closer.
It's strange how sensitive the human skin is. The longer it stays on a V, the more neural pathways connect with the brain. Their own skin, when they are in their own true form is like a shield: tough, impenetrable. Even when they shed it from time to time the experience is different, because this is usually done in seclusion; they are careful to be protected. She remembers that when she first put on this human form, she was scared, overwhelmed with sensations, couldn't name the multitude of them. She learned later -- hot, cold, soft, scratching, warm, grazing, caressing, wind, feather, kiss . . . Chad showed her the kiss.
It will be hard to shed this skin, she thinks. Tomorrow.
Now. Now Chad kisses her again, with the lips that are warm and wet and she doesn't want to resist. She has obligations, plans to wrap up, final preparations, but she doesn't want to break this moment because it is the last. It's the last time ever that she kisses him, the last time ever that she feels his soft palms on her shoulder-blades. The last time she ihas/i shoulder blades in fact.
"Why won't you let us heal you?" she finds herself asking, looking deep into his gray eyes.
His lips curve in a twisted smile. How many times have they had this conversation?
"You know," he mouths.
"I don't want to lose you," she says and catches herself too late. Cover it, cover!
His brow creases.
She touches his temple with the tip of her finger.
"What if it happens again? I don't want you to die. I like you too damn much," she smiles. She's said the truth.
"Like a pet?"
Oh! The way he says it! It's all in the way he says things. He's not bitter; he's amused. He thinks of himself as her pet and he finds it funny.
"I love your cynizm."
"Mhm. That, and my brain ju--" he struggles to get the words out, closes his eyes, the veins on his temple swell. "ju--just the waaay it is," he breathes out. He opens his eyes again and they are bright, so bright. There is no hurt in them, no pain, no regret; only self-awareness. Only "that's how it is -- that's how it has to be". He had a choice; he made his decision.
Anna can't deny, this is exactly why she she's so taken by him. She doesn't want to lose him, but she knows she'll loose him either way -- to death if he keeps this up, or to contempt if he changes his mind. It's better to remember him like this. It's better to at least keep the respect.
He pulls her in again and she climbs on top of him, straddling him, feeling his warmth through the skin that is not hers, but that she grew accustomed to. She touches his skin and she wonders how he feels, how he experiences those sensations. Is it like a burning rod piercing through his spinal cord and bursting in fireworks inside his head? Or is it like being squeezed by the uncompensated gravitational field? Or like when the light barrier is crossed and you turn into the energy filling the universe and become one with the farthest stars?
She doesn't know and she will never know; all she can feel is what her skin allows her. She's learnt to love it. At first it was only a game of power -- procreation rituals give the power in human world just as much as they do in the V's world, only different. Within the V's her power is unquestionable; she is the Mother. In human world each female could be a mother. It made her curious.
And it made her surprised when Chad gained a power over her with his human procreation rituals. No V male could ever have power over the Mother.
It is the skin. It's because human skin makes her experience sensations in human way, it even makes her act in human way in moments like this. They thought it was just how the humans looked, because they couldn't fathom the way other species ifeel/i. They had the data, the brain activity analyses, but it was not enough, it's never enough.
Her skin responds without asking her conscious mind's opinion. It's getting wet down there. It's getting ready to admit him inside, as his hands dance over her back and arms and hips. As his lips press against hers. His tongue parts them, requesting allowance to enter. The inside of a human mouth is a wonderful thing. The warmest, the most welcoming, embracing. She kisses Chad and she feels ready to explode. She wants to keep him, hold him, make him be like this forever.
When he slowly enters her from the other side, when they become joined by both: the lips and by his phallus in her vagina, she thinks the ecstasy is just like when she procreates with her own kind. Just like when she is about to conceive a new life. Exhilarating.
She can feel her skin reacting with electric currents. What had always been a very inside experience -- the burning rod, the fireworks-- now, in this human form it finds a new dimension. She's burning everywhere, from the tips of her toes to the roots of the hair on her head. Chad's fingers penetrate her short curls making her jump. His hips hit hers in rhythmic waves, in sync with her heart-beat and his heart-beat. And each. Hit. Is. Like. A. Blast! One more, one more. Each brings her closer to the contact with godlike infinity. The divine transcendence. The Bliss!
Her own Bliss given to her by Chad . . .
When it's over and their sweaty skins cling to each other with heat and passion and he strokes her hair and softly kisses her earlobe, Anna realizes she's never going to experience Bliss again. Tomorrow she won't be human anymore and tomorrow Chad and all others who weren't touched by the V medicine will be dead.
He won't stop it. Even if he knows now, he won't be able to stop it, it's too late.
Anna's mind, in its post-orgasmic lethargy, allows her skin to take charge and her skin is very human, sentimental and in love. She wants him to appreciate her, she wants him to think she's beautiful just as she is.
"Don't fall asleep," she whispers and gets up. "Don't fall asleep now . . ."
She wants him to see her true form.
***
He's close, so close he can smell it.
He's a journalist, now fighting with a written word, which is not as powerful as the images, but he doesn't regret his choice. His example showed a lot of people that you can stay human, you can stay how you are, and even in sickness, even with disability -- still lead a good life. The number of people who decided to not take the V's treatment after his resignation from his job as a tv reporter due to speech difficulties caused by brain surgery was enormous. Of course Anna managed to turn it around quite quickly, she had enough wit and power.
It didn't prevent him from finding new followers though, now in a more secretive ways and eventually let him to real, large and well prepared underground resistance.
Chad stayed close to Anna. He can't understand why she wanted to keep him near -- probably because they got into that weird, lusty, physical relationship months before his surgery -- but he doesn't complain. He's one of the most valuable assets of the resistance. He knows things no one else has ways of knowing. And right now his journalist's sixth sense tells him they are on the brink of something huge. Something enormously huge. He's felt it for days. Erica has felt it too, as well as Ryan and Jack.
Chad feels he's going to be the first to see it for real though.
They've just had sex, him and Anna, a great, breathtaking, wonderful sex that always makes him feel that he could never betray her, he could never face up to loosing what he has with her -- it feels like a sacrilege to hope she feels like this too. And then she's said, "Don't fall asleep." It made all his hairs stand on end. He couldn't fall asleep even if he wanted now. His heart is hammering in his chest, his head pounds like on the verge of impending migraine. Oh, even if he pays for it with a migraine of all the migraines he longs for it to happen, whatever iit/i is.
He waits a minute, five minutes -- it feels like hours -- gazing at the streak of light cutting out the shape of the door to the bathroom. Shadows move, sounds . . . Strange sounds reach his ears. He wants to know.
Anna didn't say -- wait here, don't look, don't . . . She said, "Don't fall asleep."
Slowly, timidly -- Chad has never been timid, but this thing feels like the one he should show consideration for – he sits up and gets out of bed. He wraps himself in a sheet because he's shivering, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the excitement. He takes a step, two steps . . . and he stops dead when he hears Anna scream!
"Anna!" he's at the door to the bathroom in one huge leap, throws them open and . . .
Glares . . .
Anna's all broken, he can't find any other words to describe what's happening to her. Her skin cracks, bulks up, something that's inside her skin grows and grows. It's greenish, sleekly, cold. It looks cold. She's with her back to him but he knows that she knows he's right behind her. She turns around and her face is crooked on her had, like a wrongly fitting hat. From a gap between her nose and her ear, where her cheek cracked in two, an eye watches him. Golden eye with a vertical pupil. With intelligence and power boiling inside, brimming, overwhelming him.
Chad takes a step back. He wants to escape, even though he knows he won't escape. Now that he'd seen the true form of the leader of their captives, he won't live to tell.
When he remembers this moment days later, he'll laugh at how naïve he was. Seen her true form, indeed. He's nowhere near!
Anna's skin keeps cracking and falling off. The large greenish form inside becomes even larger. Her face, the face that Chad thought was so beautiful, lands on the floor amidst all the other parts, like a shred, like a forgotten, used paper tissue. Anna is now almost nine foot tall and still growing. Her head, freed of the constrains of the human flesh changes, shapes anew and Chad thinks he's seen this somewhere. In drawings, paintings. Even in comics books. Only it has never looked quite like this.
The head is triangular, with narrow jaw full of sharp teeth, the narrow nostrils are red inside, look like they are burning. The eyes are golden and shining, placed wide and high, with bone horns adorning her brow, five on each side, from smaller to large, like spears.
Her skin is not green as it first appeared. When the air brushes her, it sparkles with all shades of rainbow, changing with each movement of the muscles beneath it. It's covered with scales, like a snake, and is equally sleek and shining. She vibrates then, shivers, sheds the last remnants of Anna Chad used to know and makes one, final transformation.
She's over ten feet tall now and can barely fit in the room. When she shrugs her arms though and spreads her wide, strong, magnificent wings and waves her long tail, the room shrinks even further.
She doesn't belong in those confinements, she belongs in the skies. Larger than life -- Chad always thought that of Anna, but now the words get a brand new meaning. She's larger, more gorgeous, more striking than anything he'd ever imagined.
She's a dragon.
On some level Chad understands that she is the only one, that there is no other like her, at least not on Earth. That all the other Vs wouldn't match her. Even though all he wants right now is to bow before her and kiss her clawed feet, he remembers about his own kind. This is a proof they've been waiting for, this is what Ryan warned them about.
They won't show their true form until it's too late, until the invading forces come. Chad is certain that Anna jump-started this, that she wasn't meant to change yet and in it he sees his chance.
"I love you," he whispers to her, not knowing if she can understand him in this form.
Not knowing if he has the slightest chance of escaping, he grabs his cloths and runs out of the apartment in hope that he can reach the resistance and tell them to get ready.
***
.end
A/N: I have no idea where the creators intend to take the story. The description of "true" Anna is from my own imagination.
.