RAPT

CHAPTER EIGHT

They'll talk about us/ All the lovers/ How we kiss and kill each other.

David heard it first. The ping was an alarm they had set; the timing of its announcement was the only element of uncertainty. David was prepared for the events that would now surely unfold, but a hazy wariness hovered on the edge of his mind. There were fragments of his new life that he was determined to keep, no matter what happened on their journey.

David raised his head from the crook of Elizabeth's neck and took in her languid expression. It was good, this ease between them. David was not ready for it to change; still, they had a mission to complete. The last mission David would have assigned to him. After this, what would he do? What would they do?

"Listen," David murmured, and Elizabeth immediately noticed the quiet tension in his voice. Tendrils of sleep caressed her as she laid in the android's warm arms, and it was not an easy thing to brush them away. But she did so, focusing on the noises that reached them there in the cubiculum.

The hum of the ship; David's breathing; her own heartbeat; distant water bubbling in the baths. And something else. Something new.

A ping. Sort of a melody, not quite an alarm. It was softly insistent, and with its presence came stark attention and thrilling realization.

"Oh, my God." Every muscle in her body went rigid as Elizabeth locked eyes with her companion. "Is that—"

"Yes. We programmed the ship to alert us if it detected a habitable planet. And so it has." David had not moved. He was reluctant to abandon his position, reluctant to abandon the vague routine that had drawn them together.

Elizabeth was not.

"For Christ's sake, David, let's go!" Elizabeth said loudly, struggling to extricate her limbs from his. David withdrew with an internal sigh, rolling to the side as Elizabeth leaped from the bed and wrapped the nearest blanket around her body. She hastened to the control room without a backward glance, trusting that David would follow.

He laid there for a second. Two. Three. Then he stood and mimicked Elizabeth, throwing a blanket over his shoulders and padding off after her.

No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David. To part is to die a million small deaths. To die is to be alone. Do not forget.

The android's mantra, the result of his system failure and subsequent self-led reprogramming, constantly repeated itself in the back of his mind. No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David. No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David. It was the foundation upon which he led his new life; he would not abide by any cracks.

When he reached the control room Elizabeth was seated, gazing open-mouthed at the hologram of a planet that lit up the enormous space. David went to her side, leaned against the enormous chair. He scanned the data screen suspended beside the planet, written in the fluid hieroglyphs of the Engineer's language.

"What does it say?" Elizabeth asked, her voice a choked whisper. Her fingers gripped her thighs, knuckles white. She was not sure what to hope for— upon seeing the planet, reality had slammed into place, and for so long she had separated herself from its hold. Here in the face of imminent change, Elizabeth felt horribly off-kilter.

David relayed the information expressionlessly. "Class Four habitable planet. Relatively small— maybe half the size of Earth. Ninety-percent water. Warm. Looks to be completely sustainable for human life. One continent present, essentially a large island. Unnatural structures detected on the surface, but no signs of advanced technology, certainly not technology adept for space travel. No detectable radio transmissions of any kind. While there are clearly inorganic structures, the only signs of life are botanical."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"It means that the only living things are the flora, the plants. Yet it would appear that was not always the case."

What if it's another military base?

Instinctively she threw up a mental wall against the memories that arose with the thought, but they struck it like a thousand battering rams, and she could not avoid glimpses. Janek's easy smile, smoke curling from his cigar. Ravel and Chance throwing bets and friendly insults back and forth in the corner. The reverence in Ford's voice when they found the head, her skilled fingers manipulating tools in their lab. Vickers' glacial beauty. Weyland's wasted body, his utterly removed bearing. And Charlie, everywhere Charlie—cradled in his hypersleep pod behind her as she slid into her own; stealing eggs off her plate that first morning awake; drunk and despondent upon finding their Engineers gone; black-veined and shrunken, reaching for her even as he staggered to his death.

Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head once. No. No more of that. She cleared her throat, rearranged her thoughts, voiced her query.

"Does that mean it's another base?"

David shook his head. "Highly unlikely. I believe it would be designated as such in the data." He read closer, eyes widening as he reached the bottom of the screen.

"Hm."

"What?"

"It says something interesting at the end, here." David gestured to the final line of text, which glowed with an ocher tint, setting it apart from the rest of the screen. "I can't be sure of the translation, but it's something along the lines of Classified Extinct."

A sharp pang lanced through Elizabeth's chest, and she hunched in on herself. What if they had found them, and they were all dead? Their entire mission, the sum of their pain, all of the lives lost in indescribable terror and agony— was it all for nothing?

She turned to look up at David, found herself unable to read him.

He met Elizabeth's gaze and saw everything. The heartache that went beyond anything most humans would ever experience. The fear that had piled up and up and up until it shattered some sort of ceiling. The subsequent psychological torture that had reshaped this woman until she was unrecognizable to herself, a titanium shell that still carried the echoes of her former cheerful self.

David reached out and smoothed Elizabeth's hair from her face, leaning in close. This was a crucial moment in their timeline, he knew. To be or not to be. To have and to hold. Mine, all mine, always. He would have to proceed carefully.

"We will look, Elizabeth. We will find the Engineers on this planet, or we won't, and then we will continue the mission."

Elizabeth's eyes were glossed with tears, and she reached for David's hand, pulling it to her lips.

"I thought I could handle them being dead, David," she whispered brokenly. "But now I don't know what to do if they are. I may as well join them."

Charlie, Janek, Ravel, Ford, Vickers, Chance, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. The names of the dead, engraved on her soul. Elizabeth knew that if their mission was left incomplete she too would die, even as her body continued to breathe.

But David was not about to allow such a thing.

No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David.

A lively, angry intensity entered his voice, the likes of which Elizabeth had never heard from a synthetic.

"If they're dead, Elizabeth, you keep living to spite them. You keep living to honor yourself. You keep living because it's what you humans were made to do. And you keep living because I'm damned if you will abandon me here in deep space."

Elizabeth's breath caught in her throat as she stared at David, stricken by his words. He was right, she knew that beyond a doubt, and a wave of guilt crashed down upon her.

"You must think I'm horribly selfish. I'm sorry, David." Elizabeth's voice broke on his name. David smiled at her, a small smile that did not reach his eyes.

"Not selfish. Human. While my programming may not allow for such self-destructive thoughts, Elizabeth, I can quite appreciate the strength of human emotions that bring them forth. Your species is ruled by this underlying darkness, more often than you would like to think."

David wasn't wrong. Something twisted sharply within Elizabeth at his words, the words of a being who had spent his existence being held as contemptibly other, at the whim of human emotions. Well, no more. Not from her.

"I'm sorry, David," Elizabeth said again. "I promise you, here and now, that I will not leave you. We've been to Hell together, David, and I owe you my life and my sanity. I will not betray you by abandoning you."

No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David.

David's face softened even as a wildfire roared to life beneath his manmade skin. He kissed the human woman who had him caught in her orbit tenderly, victory bells tolling in his ears. He was reminded of the first time he sat at a piano and brought forth triumphant music. Now Elizabeth would forever be his muse, here in the solitude of space.

No David without Elizabeth and no Elizabeth without David. To have and to hold, in sickness and health, as long as we both shall live. And my dear, my dear, my dear darling girl, we shall live forever.

They drew apart. The android spoke.

"I promise you the same, Elizabeth. As long as I exist, I will be at your side."

Elizabeth was amazed to see tears sparkling in David's lashes. She reached a trembling finger up to capture one, and he chuckled beneath his breath.

"We'll need to prepare," David said in a low voice. "It looks like we're approximately two weeks from the planet. We must increase your fluency in their language, to start."

Elizabeth nodded, still entranced by the moisture on her fingertip. She spoke as if in a dream.

"Yes. We have a lot of work to do."


A/N: Hello hello, thank you all for returning! A few notes on where this story is headed: I have read the Covenant novelization twice while researching for this fic (it's a lot better than the movie, at least) and I know that my timeline between the departure from the military base and the arrival to the Engineer homeworld is skewed, but I'm leaving it that way. I'm trying to stick close to some of the information we were provided in the little "prologues" for Covenant and the movie itself, but I'm not concerned about all of it, so if you see any continuity errors regarding the actual plot, trust me, they're intentional. Just wanted to say that real quick because it's something that would probably bother me in places as a reader. Anyway, I'm so excited to get into the next few chapters. I was on vacation for a week without my laptop, and the whole time I was writing this fic in my head. Thank y'all so much for reading, I hope you are continuing to enjoy! Feel free to drop a review, it truly makes my day when you guys tell me what you think about the story! x