A/N: Welcome to Act 3, Part 2! After this, we've got an epilogue and then a Rook/Ben twoshot. Then we're done! I mean it for real this time. Also, warnings for gore in this chapter. I don't think it counts as body horror, but I might have gotten carried away with the descriptions, so be aware.
I've been making a lot of progress with this fic in recently and I'm happy to say that I've almost reached the end. I have two more chapters and the epilogue to write, giving us a grand total of forty-five chapters. This fic will conclude in April of this year with the epilogue. I hope to see all of you there!
Calm down.
It didn't exactly help, considering that Ben found himself in the void of space, but he took a deep breath with Big Chill's frigid lungs anyway. The reflex soothed the part of his mind that was still human. As for the rest of it…
Severe injury. Blood loss is a life-threatening risk. Fix it.
A very straight-forward idea, Ben thought, but he was having difficulty focusing on how he was supposed to "fix" anything when there was a hole in his abdomen and a hook curling up against the inside of his exoskeleton. It was tempting to panic, but he didn't want to move and risking tearing something important. He wanted to flap his wings, if only to keep the pressure off of his stomach as he was dragged back toward the station, but the action made his back muscles shriek in protest.
As much as he hated to go back to it after being so close to escaping, Ben knew instinctively that he wouldn't make it if he tried to leave. The Omnitrix could only do so much for him. It was glowing brighter than he'd ever seen it with the effort of delaying a timeout. The energy might have actually burned, had Big Chill not been fire-resistant.
One step at a time. Locate a safe area to recuperate.
The instinctive thoughts came easier than his normal ones as a Necrofriggian. No other alien made Ben feel so calm, to the point that it worried him sometimes. Big Chill's species had instincts so strong that they came almost like a second voice or a different person in his head. He understood, as a Necrofriggian, that it was an evolutionary advantage.
All for the betterment of the younglings.
But that wasn't Ben's main concern, even if the thought of future generations made something unfamiliar swell in his chest. Getting side-tracked while impaled wasn't exactly his smartest move. He could picture Kevin rolling his eyes from inside that escape pod.
They are safer further away. Self-preservation must be prioritized now.
On the plus side, distracting himself had kept Ben calm. He needed to let himself get closer to the ship before…
The Omnitrix crackled, sending electricity racing down the length of his spine. Big Chill winced, bringing one sleek, clawed hand up to the messy hole in his chitin. Necrofriggians didn't have advanced healing. And especially not while he still had the thing inside of him.
He understood, vaguely, what his intestines were like. The blow hadn't punctured one of his hearts, but Ben was more worried about how the injury would translate to a human body. If he had been injured as Swampfire or Diamondhead, it would heal itself. But Ben knew that switching forms wouldn't heal him. It was all he could do to stay as Big Chill.
The station. Temporary safety. Heal.
Even his thoughts were beginning to grow short and sporadic. Ben might have been worried if he had the strength to spare.
His hexagonal eyes flickered toward the station. Yes. He would need somewhere better than the vacuum of space to heal. A human wouldn't survive more than a few seconds in a void. Just his luck, as whoever had shot him was pulling him closer to the hulking structure. Ben at least had sense enough to remember how timing worked. A few more feet, maybe, and…
Now.
Intangibility washed over his body. It was the only time that Ben ever felt cold as Big Chill, with reality slipping through his fingers without so much as a flutter or wrinkle. He choked on the agony of forcing himself to expend more energy but managed, clenching his jaw tight against the scream building in his chest. It took a monumental amount of effort to flap his wings, fire licking down his spine and scorching every nerve.
Miraculously, when the intangibility gave out, Ben found himself inside the station. He had no idea what room it was, eyes picking up walls and a ceiling just before his body collapsed to the ground. Necrofriggians didn't sweat, but Ben could feel himself shaking with exertion. His hands were trembling so badly that he was amazed they would still move when he wanted them to. Reaching for that cold between his lungs, trying to will it out as a sputtering breath, ached dull and deep. The sort of pain that didn't necessarily hurt, but left Ben wanting to claw himself out of his own skin for the persistence of it.
Needle. Stitches. Fix. Heal.
Human concepts, maybe, but Ben had the feeling that his Necrofriggian instincts were more concerned that he stay alive than how they felt about medical procedures.
He had never tried to make something so delicate before. The lack of energy seemed to help him though, as Ben placed a finger near his mouth and, struggling not to wheeze, very carefully exhaled. As he did, he pulled his hand back and was faintly relieved to watch a thin tendril of frost go with it. They would melt, eventually, but Ben could make the ice dense enough that hopefully his human body would clot the wound before then and it wouldn't be an issue.
He tried not to consider that the wound was too deep for surface-level stitches and he was going to have to bleed out slowly while his intestines squelched out onto the steel floor.
Once he no longer had the breath to produce ice, trembling and panting, Ben tapered off the end to a point so exact that it was near invisible. That was all that he could force out of himself. He slumped, barely able to keep his eyes open through the prickling agony, and a wave of green light washed over him.
As expected, melding the lithe form of a Necrofriggian back into a human didn't do wonders for improving that injury. If anything, it only made Ben feel worse. His vision swam, normal human eyes seeing in doubles and then triples as he swallowed the urge to vomit. He folded over himself, clutching the bleeding wound in his side.
"Fuck," Ben hissed, swallowing pained tears, because nothing else seemed appropriate. At least the gravity was somehow back on. Big Chill hadn't been affected by it one way or the other, but as a human, the change was noticed.
Carefully, Ben managed to fall backward instead of forward. He knew that if he let himself collapse or relax for even a moment, he would slip into unconsciousness. As tempting as it was, he knew that doing so would practically be a death sentence. He had locked the injury into his human form, grafting it over his actual skin and flesh. No matter what he turned into, the extent of the injury would be the same. Which meant that it had to be taken care of while he still had enough of his wits to remember how.
It would have been nice to have a heavy voice in the back of his mind telling him what to do, but that sort of evolutionary crutch only came with Necrofriggians. As a human, Ben was painfully alone.
First things first, his shirt was removed. It wasn't easy with the fabric sticky and heavy with his blood, but Ben managed to wrestle it off without aggravating his side too much and set it aside to help stem the bleeding. He felt around with one hand for the needle that Big Chill had made. Ben knew when his fingers brushed it not because it felt cold, but because his hand almost immediately went numb. Hopefully, that meant that stitching his side up wouldn't hurt too much. The biggest problem was that his hands were shaking and it was hard to get a steady grip with his fingers caked in blood and sweat, but Ben only had two hands so he would have to make due.
Through the sharp, stabbing ache in his side, Ben tried to force himself to focus on the technical side of his injury. He had to know how bad the injury was before he could fix it.
Thinking step-by-step helped. Hopefully, he would be able to keep it up.
Fingers skittering anxiously down his side, Ben felt his breath catch as he felt the sheer size of the injury. It wasn't all that wide, or even too long. It might have been worse on Big Chill, but his injuries scaled with his size. Maybe he would have been grateful had it not been for the fact that there was a hole in his body. It was deep. Deep enough that Ben felt sick as he hesitantly pressed his fingers into his side. He pulled his hand back as though burned as soon as he felt something familiar.
Ben had helped his dad grill steaks before. He knew what fat felt like.
Any blood still in the upper half of his body drained from his face. The cut was deep enough that he could feel fat. And further than that would be muscle. But, beneath that… Ben didn't even want to think about it. The few first aid classes that Gwen had made him take back when the Highbreed were a threat had never said anything about what to do if you could feel your intestines pulsating against the membrane that held them in place.
Dimly, Ben registered that he was having an anxiety attack. Being aware of it didn't help him stop. He kept trying to breathe, faster and faster, but it felt like the harder he tried, the less air he had. If he had been able to spare any breath, he would have laughed. If he had anything in his stomach, he would have thrown it right up. And if he had anyone with him, he would have told them through chuckles and tears that he was dying, and wasn't that just the funniest and most ironic thing ever?
But none of those were options. Ben stuck himself in the side with the ice needle still clamped between slippery fingers. The sharp cold made his ribs ache but it also helped ground him back in the pain. That might have been counterproductive, but as long as it was agonizing, Ben had the motivation to take steps toward fixing it.
He was glad that Big Chill's species didn't have glands or insides that were equivalent to what a human had. He had been hooked through the side and out the front, barely to the left of his belly button. Ben could feel his large and small intestines gurgling, the torn muscles that helped them move making his abdomen burn as they tried to squeeze and push. At least there wasn't a hole in that — just in everything else. Layers of skin, fat, muscle… but nothing life-threatening.
Not if Ben could remember how to sew, at least. He took a measured breath and started to pull.
Dragging a needle through his skin felt a lot like dragging a needle through his skin. Ben clenched his teeth against the discomfort. Compared to the way his side was lighting up with fireworks, a little prick from the needle felt like a comforting hug. He was probably doing an awful job with how he was shaking, forced to push his hair back with one bloody hand while the other continued mechanically.
In, out, in, out, in, out, don't think about it, don't focus on what you're stitching, don't stare for too long, just do it, get it over with—!
Human thoughts were far less coherent than a Necrofriggian's. Or maybe it was the blood loss finally getting to him. With the world spinning and everything looking bloody, it was hard to say.
He didn't bother tying the stitches shut when he finally finished — Ben stuck himself again above the wound, right near his ribs, and did it again to form a loop around a sliver of skin. He had another hole to patch up, but at least the one in front was smaller. The ice he had used in place of stitches had numbed his side so well that Ben was a little worried about giving himself frostbite. But at least if that side of his body died, it wouldn't be bleeding anymore. He was too exhausted to give it more thought than that. He would worry about one problem at a time. In his current state, Ben could barely handle that much.
He snapped the rest of the ice thread with a pinch of his thumb and forefinger. It shattered like glass, digging into the pads of his fingers, but Ben had so little feeling in his hand that he could barely flex them and a few more drops of blood didn't spike his interest.
In a haze, Ben repeated the in and out motion again and again. The smooth skin of his flat stomach swam in front of him, but he aimed for the pink-ish spots in between the oozing blood and muddled through it.
In and out. In and out. Don't think about it.
He tied the stitches off the same way that he did it on his side, only wincing slightly. It felt so incredible to be done. The pain hadn't lessened any, but Ben immediately snapped what little remained of the icy thread and dropped it to the ground, going limp. He could feel cold inching up his torso, making every heartbeat ache and his lungs feel as though they were being squeezed. Between that and bleeding out, though, Ben felt comfortable with the trade-off.
The shirt that he had discarded wasn't very thick, but he didn't have much else laying around. He grabbed it without jostling himself too much and messily folded it before pressing it against his side. Applying pressure didn't help his frayed nerves, though it did help the bleeding somewhat. The thin tank top was quickly soaked. Ben folded his arm down to hold the fabric in place and it wasn't long before every movement came with the wet squelching of his bloody shirt. It was difficult to tell if that blood flow was slowing or not. Everything felt like a challenge with the way his entire body throbbed like he had a headache.
The hardest part was over, though. Ben let his hand rest over his stomach and tried not to mess with the stitches. He tried not to think about how only his sloppy patch job was standing between him and his insides. He could picture those cartoony diagrams of human anatomy from middle school science class, could almost see it all seeping out of his body and to the dirty floor.
As nice as it sounded, Ben knew that he couldn't let himself sleep. If he died of blood loss during a dream, Kevin would never let him hear the end of it. And Rook would probably blame himself and Gwendolyn would cry for months and Grandpa Max would curse that amazing summer they spent together as the thing that killed his grandson.
Ben forced himself to sit up, trying to think beyond the feeling that his intestines had been filled with burning bearing balls. His stomach was cramping. He thought for a moment that it was simply the spasms of torn muscles, but realized that it was a familiar pain.
His stomach pulsed right alongside his heart, clawing and filling with a heat that felt as though it was expanding. The back of his throat felt empty, bizarre because his throat was supposed to be empty, but it was suddenly all Ben could do to keep from folding over himself and dry heaving over the ground. There was nothing in his stomach to expel which, Ben realized, was the problem.
That had been the worst part about being captured. For whatever reason, Murowa hadn't tortured him. There had been a lot of jeering, some non-too-friendly pokes and prods, but she hadn't gone out of her way to cause Ben pain. The IVs in his arm — the ones that he had yanked out — had been used to filter his blood, pump him full of nutrients, and administer sedatives when necessary, all through the small machine that she kept near his platform.
They had kept him from needing to eat or go to the bathroom, except for one small thing. Even if Ben wasn't technically starving, his stomach was completely empty. The hunger pains had started up not long after he first woke up in captivity and they had only gotten worse since then. Ben had no idea how long he had spent locked down to that table, but it was far too long for a person to comfortably go without food. Instinct nearly bowled him over with the force and all Ben could think about through the uncontrollable salivating and the cramping in his esophagus was that he needed to eat. Anything.
He smacked a hand against the wall, fingers digging into the solid metal for purchase. There was none. Getting to his feet with his hands slicked in warm blood wasn't exactly easy, and the world was doing a very convincing impression of a spinning top by the time Ben finally got his feet underneath himself, but he managed. By force, if nothing else.
His own breathing echoed, his ears ringing through the headrush. Panting, chest heaving with such force that it made his stitches sting, Ben let his eyes close and relaxed his overheated skin against the cool metal. It took an incredible amount of focus to open them again and, even then, Ben only kept them that way long enough to flicker around the room and gauge where he was.
It looked like he had stumbled into some sort of alien living quarters. There were no beds, but bizarre, monstrous-looking purple pods arranged neatly in rows. In the darkened room, it was hard to tell, but Ben could have sworn that they were filled with slime. He tried not to look any closer than that. The pods were arranged up and down the walls, stacked in pairs like bunk beds, and were crammed in to occupy as much space as possible while still having somewhere to walk.
Ben found himself leaning against a bloody smear on the wall in between two of the pods, tucked away in what was almost a little alcove. He didn't see a door, not with how much space the pods took up, but he spotted something that stood out from everything else and headed toward it.
Progress was slow. He wiped his hands against one of the pods in some attempt to keep from leaving a trail everywhere he walked but, when he touched one of them, was shaken to realize that it felt like a shell yet was warm and moved steadily, as though breathing. After that, having dried blood on his hands seemed a lot less important.
Every step felt as though his feet were made of cement. Ben had to practically drag himself forward, clenching his jaw against the groan that followed every centimeter. His shirt wasn't doing a good job of stopping the bleeding — or maybe Ben was aggravating the wound too much.
It took either a minute to cross the room or twenty. Either way, Ben was all but unconscious when he finally arrived at what had caught his attention. It was a closet, thrown open with uniform clothing torn out and tossed to the floor. Apparently, the mercenaries on board had only bothered with clothes for a minute before realizing that cloth wasn't going to help them get off of the station alive. Then turning the gravity off had only made everything messier.
Some of the shirts had room for six arms, or the sleeves all on one side, or it was so complex that Ben couldn't even begin to imagine what sort of creature was squeezing their torso into it. It didn't matter. He nudged the clothes into a pile with shuffling feet. The hunger pains had died off somewhat, certain to resurge in a minute or two, but he could at least sit down for a few minutes and try to ride it out. At the very least, some of those shirts would be able to fit him and everything else could be used as a bandage.
He swayed on his feet for a moment, staring at the pile he had made with a frown. How was he supposed to get onto the floor without tearing something? With his torso as numb as it was, Ben wasn't feeling much pain anymore, but that also meant that he wouldn't be able to feel if something was wrong.
He considered this for a moment before, slowly, bending his knees. It wasn't easy on his muscles, but at least when his legs gave out, he was low enough to the ground that there was only a soft grunt and a light jostle as he settled into the clothing pile.
With the pressure off of his body, Ben let out an audible sigh of relief and sank into his makeshift bed, leaning his head back to stare blearily at the ceiling. He couldn't tell if the exhaustion was fading or he was simply growing used to it. Neither could be a good thing. Ben wasn't exactly an expert in taking care of himself, but he had a vague idea that people who were injured ought to get plenty of sleep and feel pretty miserable in general. He didn't feel much of anything at the moment, which was no doubt a temporary reprieve.
In a move that took far more energy than it should have, Ben grabbed a pair of pants made for an alien twice his side and tossed his bloodied, Plumber-issued tank top to the side to press the heavier fabric around him. What was good about pants was that they were much easier to hold in place. He folded the legs around his abdomen, right over the stab wounds, until he ran out of fabric. They were tied together over his chest, sloppily done but already doing a much better job at stemming the blood flow.
At the very least, the injuries didn't immediately turn the fabric red on the outside. Ben considered that a good sign.
Another plain, grey shirt nearby was about the right size to fit a human and had armholes in the correct places, so Ben slipped that on gratefully. He closed his eyes, determined not to fall asleep but needing to focus. He had to have some priorities if he was going to get anything done, especially with his body in the state that it was. Those injuries would carry over into his alien forms and he knew from experience that no amount of advanced healing would help him out there.
That sort of limited Ben's options. He held no delusions of immortality: the Omnitrix could protect him, but it couldn't keep him from bleeding out. His alien forms were perfectly capable of dying. He had lived through that at least once and it wasn't pleasant.
Unfortunately, Ben doubted that he had months to wait for himself to heal. Murowa and Argyle would be after him. On top of that, they still had Petrosapien prisoners and some sort of long-term goal in mind. Ben wasn't going to kick up his heels and let them continue working on that without at least attempting to stop them. He wouldn't be able to do much physically, but if he could find a communication method that would let him get in touch with Rook or the Plumbers, then he could at least give his location to someone who could do something. That was better than nothing.
First things first, Ben knew that he was going to need something to eat. He briefly considered eating one of the shirts just to have something in his stomach, but human teeth weren't very good at ripping up fabric and he didn't want to try his luck and end up choking on it. That would be a humiliating way to go.
Relaxed at least somewhat, Ben held his left wrist up to his face and toyed with the Omnitrix's dial. He didn't want to risk talking, afraid of how his voice might sound after all that he had just been through, but it didn't matter. His attempts to sync with a nearby Plumber frequency fell flat. It wasn't surprising, considering that Argyle had control of the Plumbers in Petropia's star system and logic would dictate that he could cut off all communication satellites if he wanted to, though it was still disappointing.
It was never easy, was it? Ben was always being forced to do things the hard way.
He put it off for a moment longer before begrudgingly turning the Omnitrix off. He wanted to get in contact with his friends but he didn't know how to connect with whatever frequency Rook was using with those headsets and he also didn't want to make it any easier for Murowa to track him down and probably finish disemboweling him. He couldn't imagine what other use she would have for him and it seemed pretty likely that she was the one who had shot Big Chill in the first place. If she was going to insist on trying to kill him, there was nothing saying that Ben had to be idle prey.
Although, in his current state, Ben doubted that he would make for an exhilarating hunt.
Lowering himself down had been difficult, but getting back up proved to be a feet comparable only to breaking a mountain with bare hands. By the time he eventually managed to drag himself up onto shaking legs, Ben's head was pounding and he had broken out into a sweat that made every bit of him feel feverish, even the frozen parts. He was uncomfortably aware of each tug against his skin from the haphazard stitches. They burned in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the blood oozing out between any possible crack.
Nonetheless, being back on his feet brought with it some level of dignity. Not that Ben had much left to go around. He was briefly thankful that no one was there to see the Hero of the Universe struggling to stand, then quickly banished the thought. No, Ben would have loved if someone was there to see him. He was putting on such a pitiful display that Vilgax himself might have tentatively offered him some help standing.
And then he would have immediately crushed Ben's head like a grape. But it was the thought that counted.
Though successfully standing, straightening up was out of the question. Ben walked with a sort of hunch in his back. It was easier than when he had walked to the closet in the first place, though he had no way of knowing whether that was because the wound was clotting or because he was learning to push on through the agony. Frankly, either would do. He needed to keep moving. Although, at the very least, he wasn't trailing blood everywhere anymore.
With his new angle, able to see down the long rows of beds, Ben was able to find the door. He walked over to it, setting his hand on the wall with every step to avoid touching the pulsing pods. The green slime inside of them wasn't much better — Ben could have sworn that it was moving in there, and that was another small motivation to walk as fast as he could handle. Granted, it still wasn't very fast, but at least Ben could manage a sluggish pace considering that he was fairly certain he could feel his intestines nudging the inside of his cut with every step.
The door was small enough to be comfortably human-sized, which was good. It was unlocked, which was also good. Ben examined the crack that, hopefully, would let him out into a hallway. It was crooked, which meant that the door was broken and had been left partly open in the panic to leave the station when the power went off and there was that explosion.
That was less good. Ben wasn't an engineer, but he knew that the bottom of a sliding door was horizontal and that a diagonal rectangle would not be easy to scrape across it. Under ideal circumstances, then maybe, but Ben was having trouble seeing how he was supposed to pry it the rest of the way open with the injury that he had. His ice stitches would be durable, but Ben wasn't stupid enough to think that pulling on them would be a good idea.
He lined himself up with the door anyway. As far as he could tell, it was the only way in and out of the room, and he wasn't going to die because he had been unable to squeeze through a little crack. He slipped his shoulder into the gap, biting back a grunt of effort as he carefully pushed back and rested his weight against it. Doing so didn't hurt, thankfully, but there was an awful, piercing grating sound as Ben dragged the metal together to make a gap big enough for his head to fit through. He winced but forced himself onward. As soon as it was open enough for him, Ben stepped through and left the door as it was. It didn't seem worth the effort to push it all the way open. Setting up base in a room covered in his blood and that also happened to be the last time his Omnitrix sent off a signal seemed kind of stupid.
Ben sighed, propping himself up against the wall on the other side for some sort of support while he caught his breath. It would be a while until he ran out of oxygen, but he was going to need to find water and food quickly. His mouth felt like it was dead and his lips probably could have been used as sandpaper by that point.
That was the force that drove him away from the wall and further down the hallway. As nice as it felt to take a break, Ben was at least starting to get the hang of walking. With one hand pressing against the knotted clothes stemming his bleeding and the other trailing along the wall, Ben stopped at door after door to peer into their rooms for something useful.
Evidently, he had landed in something of a fully-fleshed out living quarters. Some of the doors were still closed, but enough had been left open, gapping, or torn right out of the wall for Ben to get a good idea of what he was looking at. It was difficult to tell at first because the bathrooms were unrecognizable compared to what humans used, and the exercise equipment in the training room looked like some bizarre fetish thing. There were plenty more bedrooms too, all looking like a tornado had gone through them.
He hadn't stopped to properly notice it when he had been busy trying not to pass out while stitching himself shut, but Ben took notice of the green slime covering nearly every inch of the bedrooms and how everything that had been left behind was either scattered or in pieces or both. A side effect of turning the gravity off, no doubt. Either way, Ben didn't run into any other living things, which he took as a blessing.
Going through the rooms took longer than it should have but Ben eventually found himself at the end of the hallway without a single, measly scrap of food. The odds weren't looking good. The hunger pains continued to pulse on and off but they were getting worse. His head was swimming and ached as though it was pressurized and going to explode, his tongue throbbing with thirst as he leaned against the wall and struggled not to dry heave. With nothing to throw up, he doubted that letting himself vomit would turn out very well. He didn't like the idea of aggravating his stitches for nothing.
He couldn't say that he was lucky because, based on his current situation, Ben most certainly wasn't, but at least something had gone right for him. At the end of the hallway was a large, open room that doubled as an almost cozy, open kitchen and a sitting room. What such a room was doing connected to what he thought was barracks, Ben had no idea. Maybe it was one of those cultural differences that Rook was always lecturing him about. Ben didn't really care. The most important thing, to him, was the box tipped over on its side that unmistakably functioned as a fridge.
The faint promise of food did something funny to Ben. The pain that had all but paralyzed him, making everything from the tip of his hair to his toenails feel bruised, suddenly meant nothing. Human instinct could be very single-minded in that way.
All he knew was that one moment, he was eyeing the fridge with apprehension, and the next, Ben had the door flung wide open and had a tube of alien food clutched in his hands. Cold air washed over him and Ben shut the fridge only because he was still aware enough to understand that letting the food rot would be a bad idea.
The tube that he had grabbed instinctively looked like something that Grandpa Max used to cook with. Ben had no idea what it was or what it was used in those recipes for — its single appeal was that it was the only thing immediately recognizable as edible.
The writing on the side was blocky with some squiggly lines here and there to break up the monotony of all the straight lines. It almost reminded Ben of Chinese, except it was far simpler. He couldn't read it so he didn't know how to open the tube, exactly, but knives seemed to be universal because there was a stack of them on the counter near the knocked over knife block. The material that his food was wrapped in felt like some sort of plastic, soft and malleable to the touch but holding firm when he tried to get his nails into it. The point of the knife pierced it easily and, mouth watering over something that smelled like dirty feet, Ben tore the packaging open in one smooth upward swipe of his hand.
Immediately, Ben shoved a chunk of it into his mouth. It had the consistency of cookie dough but tasted like dried-out paste. It did nothing to help his craving for water but, almost as soon as he choked down a mouthful, his stomach stopped twisting up and he could think so much more clearly. The tube had weighed about a pound in his hands but Ben had it all down with a few ravenous bites. He wasn't sure if he was still hungry or not, but at least he didn't feel empty anymore.
Turning back to the fridge, Ben grabbed the first thing that looked like a liquid and made sure that the door was sealed correctly behind him. No sense in letting his only source of food heat up even faster. He shook the bottle experimentally, taking his time to open it and sniff the faintly-glowing contents before taking a tentative sip. It smelled bitter — not unpleasant, but nothing like what was found on Earth. The taste wasn't too different, though it made his tongue tingle and it burned all the way down his throat. The effect was almost like it was numbing him, but when a few minutes passed and Ben didn't die, he shrugged and downed it all. Swallowing, of course, wasn't very easy when his tongue and throat were numb and the muscles didn't want to cooperate, but Ben managed. His motivation to move was gone but at least he didn't feel quite so dead with proper food and water inside of him.
Mission accomplished, Ben rested in the form of leaning over the counter and pressing his forehead on one of the parts that didn't have things spilled all over it. He let out a slow breath, feeling his chest rise and fall and the answering twinges of pain from his abdomen. He knew that he ought to sleep, but there was still so much to accomplish. A hero wouldn't let a small thing like an injury get the better of them.
Even as resolute as he was, it was with an exhausted sort of acceptance that Ben straightened up. He must have moved too quickly because vertigo made his temples throb and the world spun beneath his stumbling feet. Ben almost knocked himself over, only to grab hold of the counter at the last moment. As soon as it did, there was a burning sensation along his side and he let out an involuntary whimper through tightly-clenched teeth.
Shaking, Ben was far more careful in getting himself up the second time around. He felt heat against his frigid skin, like warm chocolate dribbling down his side. Instinctively, he pressed his makeshift bandages tighter against him but that didn't help Ben feel any steadier. If anything, it only made him hyper-aware of the blood.
He could take a hint. A break it was, then. There were worse things in the world than taking a nap — not that reminding himself of that made Ben feel any better about shuffling over to the couches.
Well, they weren't couches like what was on Earth. They were more like stiff, raised platforms that sank in on itself to accommodate Ben's weight and mold itself around his shape. He selected one that had a view of both doors in the main living area but also had a back that cast him in shadow and made him difficult to spot with a cursory glance. He forced himself to lay down and hold still, not that it helped Ben fall asleep at all.
It was hard to relax when all he could think about was how royally he had screwed everything up this time around.
A/N: UAF establishes that Ben retains his injuries that he gets when he turns human, and also that they don't heal when he turns into other aliens. Omniverse never establishes anything to make me think that Azmuth fixed this feature. My personal headcanon is that injuries will heal as best they can with an alien's natural healing abilities, but it is better for the host to turn back to their natural form. If they do, they only heal while not transformed. This feature helps to ensure that the host's DNA doesn't become contaminated and to prevent something from healing incorrectly. If you kept cycling through aliens and healing in equivalencies, something is going to go wrong or not line up correctly. So Ben is going to have to get used to being stabbed.
I apologize that this chapter is kind of slow, but I had to make sure that Ben wasn't going to bleed out. Things will pick up in the next chapter, look forward to it!
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Dead in the Water