Sleeping sounded like a good idea on paper but quickly started to seem like an impossibility.
Not for a lack of trying — Ben tossed and turned on that couch as gently as he could with his injury burning its way up his torso, but he couldn't relax. He began to feel hot even though his hands were frigid and damp with sweat, resisting the urge to curl up around his abdomen as exhaustion smothered him like a blanket and the world was swimming even after he closed his eyes.
His body was trembling no matter how long Ben spent trying to make it stop, focusing so hard on making his hands hold still that he gave himself a migraine. Every breath came out wheezing and slick, like it was going to be his last one. His heart was hammering so hard that he could feel it, hand resting against his collarbone to feel the skin and muscles twitch with every rhythmic beat of his pulse.
Asking himself to relax had been a mistake. Ben didn't have the energy to stand anymore, though he doubted that doing so would have helped.
Eventually, after who knows how long of laying there in agony, the pain ebbed away. It never entirely faded, but it became slightly easier for Ben to think about other things. He managed to unclench his fists, stretch his legs out, and then he was asleep within minutes.
Not that it was a good sleep, granted. It was bizarre.
Behind his closed eyelids, Ben found himself in a place that he recognized. He didn't know how he recognized it — there was absolutely no light and he couldn't see a thing — but it was familiar. Warm. Comforting. The darkness felt like the embrace of an old friend and Ben felt no reason to distrust it. He wasn't wearing the Omnitrix, his wrist far too light and empty, but it felt good. He wanted to close his eyes forever and just drift.
The pleasant warmth in the air, cushioning him like a blanket, became hot. Ben brushed his hair back absent-mindedly, surprised to find the strands damp with sweat and his shirt sticking to his skin. The world grew hotter still, burning up, inside and out, until it felt like flames were licking up his sides and his skin was melting away, boiling over his bones and sliding through his aching fingers like water. The heat meant nothing — there was only the persistent, desperate thought that everything was wrong.
He heard himself, sobbing and cursing, clutching at layers of muscle and fat and organs in some vague attempt to keep everything in its place. To keep himself whole. His eyes turned to mush and slouched out of the sockets without feeling, but Ben could see again. He could see the chamber he had been locked inside for so long, forced immobile, treated no better than a dog. And compared to the feeling of his nerves becoming goo under the heat, making a sick splattering sound as they leaked out from between his icy bones to splash into the bubbling skin pooled at his feet, Ben would have felt safe in chains all over again.
Anything to make it stop. To make the pain leave him. To get the horrible, echoing laughter of everyone he had failed out of his ears.
Anything.
It couldn't have been any longer than an hour or two spent asleep until Ben was woken by the sound of something snapping. He started, making a move to jerk up into a sitting position, but even bordering on unconsciousness, his body wasn't having it. He winced as his stomach muscles clenched, flopping back down onto the hard couch, boneless. It was damp with his sweat, pooling uncomfortably with the contours of his body because whatever the couch was made out of apparently wasn't absorbent.
Ben pondered for a moment what could have woken him up. Not that he was all that averse to it or anything — he couldn't remember his dream but trying to think about it gave him the distinct feeling that he ought to just forget it. But being happy to be awake didn't change the fact that something had woken him up. And on a section of the ship that was supposed to be dead, that wasn't a good sign.
Holding his breath, head tilted to listen for any modicum of movement, Ben realized a split-second too late that the sound of crashing was coming from beyond the soldiers' quarters. He had just enough time to recklessly throw himself to the ground — swallowing an audible yelp of pain as he did so, clutching his side on impulse — pressing so close to the couch that he blended into its shadow, just in time for the door to swing open with the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound of metal being torn apart like paper.
He didn't dare risk looking up to see who it was. Doing so would probably be a death sentence if they could tear doors out of the wall like that, especially with his Omnitrix off. Ben didn't want to use it, knowing that it would only make his present condition worse, but he hovered his hand over the pop-up dial anyway as he struggled to listen for those barely-there flutters of movement. It was better to go out on his own terms, having fought, than let himself be killed. Or, at the very least, he could use the Omnitrix to get away or win their inevitable fight so that he would still have a small chance of surviving.
Though, the odds didn't look very good. Ben had no idea how much blood humans could lose before dying, just that the mess he left in the room where he stitched himself up was awfully big and the way that his vision was tumbling and twisting couldn't be a good sign.
Whoever was in the room, they weren't very noisy. There was virtually no sound as they moved, not even the faintest patter of footsteps. Ben knew that they left only because he heard a door down the hallway he came from being torn off. His current hiding spot wasn't going to cut it if the other person started looking thoroughly — which they no doubt would after the stains of Ben's blood were found in the other room. Most aliens didn't bleed red. It wouldn't exactly be difficult to puzzle that one out. Then again, Ben had an awful sinking feeling that whoever it was knew exactly what they were doing and who they were looking for.
He winced at the sound of another door being removed. They moved fast. Ben didn't have a lot of time to waste, considering that there were only eight doors down that hallway. He wracked his brain for somewhere else that could be a good hiding spot. His heart leapt into his throat in realization. The fridge! It was big enough to fit a person and, more importantly, no one would ever think to look for him in there. His wound was already throbbing at the idea of scrunching up into a small place but Ben knew that he didn't have much choice. If whoever was hunting him down looked over the back of the couch, he was finished.
He waited for a third door to be forcibly taken off before making his move, crawling army style on his stomach across the floor. Thankfully, the living area rested at a level just below that of the hallway, sort of on an incline. Ben wasn't going to question alien architecture, especially when it benefited him.
He paused, abdomen burning, and tried desperately not to pant. It was difficult. Ben was wearing a shirt and shorts and he felt like he was being smothered under a dozen blankets, his skin slick with sweat and burning to the point that the cool concrete ground beneath him ached to touch. He was all too aware of the fact that he was out in the open, where anyone could enter and see him, but his muscles were screaming in protest. Lungs heaving, arms shaking, Ben relaxed a fraction when he heard the fourth door come off and continued his trek to the kitchen.
By the time he actually got there, it didn't hurt to move so much anymore. Mostly, Ben thought, because he was so beyond pain that his body was having a hard time deciding if it was even possible to hurt more. He knew that he was never as athletic and nimble as Rook or Gwen, but Ben couldn't help but feel pathetic. It was just a little wound, right? He had handled it, with stitches and bandages and everything. Why did he feel worse than before?
The eighth and final door was torn out, tossed and sent clattering with a teeth-chattering bang down the hall, and Ben shuddered as he forced the fridge open with weak arms. It wouldn't be an easy fit with all of that alien food crammed in there, but Ben quickly pulled out the shelves, dumped it all on the bottom of the fridge, and stacked them against the side while his pulse quivered in his throat. Squeezing himself in, Ben was pulling the door shut when he heard an all-too-familiar laugh that sent chills down his spine and reassured him that he had made the right choice by moving.
"Come on out, hero!" Murowa trilled. The sound of her mocking voice sent shudders of anger and humiliation up Ben's spine. "It's only making things worse for itself by hiding. It can't be that stupid."
Ben might have held his breath, but it was hard to hold what he didn't have. He wheezed, out of air, and felt himself starting to hyperventilate. His hiding spot was so small and so cramped. His knees were pressing against his chest, crushing his lungs. He twitched his fingers, trying to calm himself with the slight motion, but it was a fight not to slam his limbs against the door and force his way out. He couldn't move. And suddenly, Ben craved the ability to stretch out more than anything.
A loud thump startled him out of his swirling thoughts. He could hear the fluttering of her wings, mere feet away from Ben's inconspicuous little prison. Had it been joined by the hum and whir of complicated machinery, he doubted that he would have been able to keep himself from devolving all over again.
"I know that it's here — it should come out, if it knows what's best for itself," Murowa called. The only reason that Ben didn't step out of the fridge was for the sharp thought that if she knew where he was, she would have dragged him out kicking and cursing by that point. He heard her hum thoughtfully, drilling her nails against the counter above him. Had he the breath for it, Ben might have screamed. "No one is coming to save it. No one is going to look for it. They'll only be searching for that fancy watch, and it knows it."
It felt as though he was watching someone else's life play out. Ben wrapped his arms around his legs and stared directly ahead of himself into pure blackness. He wanted to protest — because his friends would follow him to the edges of the universe and beyond, they had before, and they would do it for him, not the Omnitrix — but his tongue was thick in his throat and he couldn't muster up the passion to disagree.
She had repeated those sorts of statements ad nauseam while Ben was her captive. He had thought that he was over it, that he understood she was lying, that it was fabricated tactfully to get under his skin, yet…
He buried his face in his knees, swallowing a shaky breath as he fought to keep the world from twisting and what little he had managed to eat in his stomach. If Murowa said anything else, Ben didn't hear it. He was too busy struggling to keep himself grounded. It was so tempting to drift away, to be somewhere else, but Ben Tennyson didn't run. He refused it, biting his lip to the point of drawing blood just to keep himself focused on the cold, oppressive walls of the fridge instead of how good it would be to go home.
At some point — slowly, shakily — Ben pushed open the fridge and let himself sag out like a boneless mass of putty. He blinked, stunned even by the dim light, and looked around. Murowa was nowhere to be seen. He was hoping that she had moved on to a different part of the ship to search, but Ben somehow doubted it. She would be nearby, probably for a while.
The thought wasn't relaxing in the slightest.
Standing up took so much energy that Ben almost fell right over again. It didn't hurt as much as he was expecting, but his limbs had never felt so heavy. It was a physical strain to keep his eyes open, like those days where Ben would doze off in his high school physics class. Only he had at least been able to focus on what the teacher was saying when he did that. At the moment, all Ben could process was the static buzzing in his ears and the overwhelming urge to lay down against the cool counter and soothe his flushed skin while he dozed.
Instead, he forced one foot in front of the other, struggling against the lethargy in his limbs. The sharp burning in his side felt like the least of Ben's obstacles in comparison.
As tired as he was, the desire to get off the station for real was stronger. Ben was tired of laying around and wasting time. It almost got him caught once. He couldn't keep doing that or else it would quickly catch up with him.
He made his way to the exit of the block he was staying in, facing the torn open door with apprehension. Idly, Ben thought that it would have been nice to know ahead of time that Pesky Dust had super strength. Or maybe he had always known and simply never made the connection to try it out. It was hard to keep the instincts of all those different aliens straight in his head sometimes.
Setting his hand carefully on the jagged metal of what used to be a door, Ben peeked his head out into the hallway. Gravity was still on, which was nice, but he could tell that the air was still off and there was no light except dim, barely-there emergency lamps. Even those would probably be completely gone soon enough, so he had to hurry.
Getting to a part of the ship that had power would be a good first step. Ben shot a longing look at the alien couch, imagining summer days sipping smoothies with Rook, Grandpa Max affectionately ruffling his hair, lounging with Kevin and Gwen and feeling as though he had never been so content in his life. The warm thoughts turned bitter and chilled Ben from the inside-out. He grimaced, looking away.
He wanted to go home.
The hallway had other doors ripped apart and clawed open, several on either side of him. Ben considered his chances for a moment before shrugging and heading right. It was better than standing there and waiting to become the next clawed-up thing.
The silence was unreal. Ben had never heard anything so quiet in his life. The only noise was the padding of his feet and his quick, shallow breaths. He stopped often to relax, leaning against the wall, and it was so muted on the station that Ben's ears ached and strained, humming with insistent white noise as nothing else reached them.
Ben had no idea how big the station was, but he got the feeling that it was fairly sizeable. He had gotten a pretty good look at it as Big Chill, out in the vacuum of space, and the sheer size of it was mind-boggling. He knew that walking the length of it would take far too long, especially when he had no idea if the direction he was heading in even led to an area with power, but what else was he supposed to do? Using the Omnitrix would be tricky. Big Chill didn't have accelerated healing, so changing back was inevitable. Unfortunately, since all wounds carried over and refused to heal unless Ben was human, well…
It wasn't going to be pretty. Whatever Ben did, he would have to make it fast. He didn't want to change back to human only for his stitches to be gone. Bleeding out wouldn't be fun.
He stopped, thinking about which of his aliens could be helpful. XLR8 would be good for running. Murowa could track the Omnitrix, but he doubted that she could travel at the speed of sound. Then again, he didn't know where he was going, and Ben had no idea if Kinecelerans could bleed out, or if it even happened faster for them. With his luck, Ben wouldn't have been all that surprised.
So, what else? AmpFibian could go through walls, like Big Chill, but his body was very fragile and Ben didn't want to try his luck with that. Jetray was faster than XLR8 but, in the cramped space station, Ben didn't feel like risking it. Goop probably wouldn't be at risk for bleeding out, though he wasn't particularly fast or sneaky, either.
Eyes straying toward a gap in a fizzling control console, Ben stiffened as an idea came to him. Upgrade. He could be inside the wiring, cross the ship to get exactly where he needed because he would be the ship…
He worried for a moment about the state of a Galvanic Mechamorph with a hole in its body, but they were a pretty tough species. Besides, what other choice did Ben have?
Resigned, he brought his hand to the Omnitrix, hovering over to the control panel. He would have to be fast. Murowa could track him, obviously, but she wouldn't be able to grab him if he was on the other side of the station and embedded in the walls. Any other day, Ben might have smiled at picturing her frustration, but he didn't have the energy or the good-will for it. He wanted everything to be over.
With a deep, resigned breath, Ben turned the most powerful device in the universe back on and began sorting through his playlist. When he came upon Upgrade's familiar outline, Ben selected it and pressed down carefully on the dial. He held his breath, but it went rushing out of him as his lungs dissolved.
There was a twitch of pain that Ben was unfamiliar with experiencing while in the middle of a transformation. His bones were goo, his muscles were non-existent, and his organs melded into sticky circuits, but the only thing that hurt was the strong pulsating in his side.
Upgrade concluded swiftly that it was because his kind was artificial and had very limited use for nerve endings. It was the ghost of pain, his human thoughts nagging incessantly about how he was split open, that really hurt. Being Upgrade was never easy — torn between mechanical observations and the weighted perspective that came with humanity.
With his singular eye, Upgrade blinked down cynically at the hole in his side. It was surface-level. Green liquid, slime-like in texture, oozed out of the wound. Thinking about it as though studying someone else helped calm his nerves. It seemed safe to assume that, because the Omnitrix worked in equivalences, he wouldn't have any injury into muscle or fat or intestines because Upgrade possessed nothing that was even remotely similar to those things. He had a mild equivalent to human skin, noting with an idle brush of his hand along the tender area that the wound was far less extreme than it was with his human body.
He felt weak, but not at any risk of dying. Good. It left Upgrade with no further qualms about touching a hand to the control panel and slipping into the ship's wiring.
There was nothing to see, so Upgrade didn't bother processing vision. He knew that his mind, still bogged down by notions of mortality and flesh-and-blood, would be unable to process the view of an electric current without suffering a seizure or a mental breakdown. Even so, that didn't mean that Upgrade wasn't looking. His body, little more than data collection points at the moment, pulsed as fizzled-out bits of electricity washed over him. Through the busted and misbehaving wires, Upgrade measured the intensity and frequency, gauging power and distance. His decisions were made near faster-than-light, purely instinctive, so that his mind wouldn't have to scramble to catch up.
The objective was to find an area for communications. It was imperative, ranked above such things as finding food or water or an escape route. What would escape accomplish when there was still so much work to be done on the station? Criminals to be taken in, people to be freed, crimes to be punished… Upgrade processed it all with the sort of weariness of one working a day-to-day desk job.
He skipped around damaged wires, avoided dead-ends, and found himself speeding toward the area with the most energy output. Which might have been stupid by some measures, certainly, but Upgrade didn't have time to waste dancing around miles and miles of busted cables. He was certain that he could find a dead communications room with enough time, sure, and easily make it work, but the lagging of his thoughts told him to make it fast. Upgrade had forgotten, in stepping out of his human skin, that the wound wasn't the only thing that had left him feeling drained.
It was with a burst of determination and a reflexive intake of air that Upgrade found himself in a room with light and oxygen. Disoriented, he looked around, noticing the empty hallway and branching off doors. His center was humming in some vague representation of a beating heart. The closest thing that Upgrade could compare it to was an over-exerted harddrive, heating up and fan whirring as its output began to inch closer to its limits. Upgrade had never felt tired before, but he knew how to recognize it. Traveling any further through the circuits would have to wait until he had rested. Though, by all estimations, Upgrade figured that he had put at least a few miles between himself and Murowa, in a matter of seconds. That would have to do.
Lagging with lethargy, Upgrade felt the energy buzzing in the air until he came upon another access panel. Next to it, embedded in the wall, was a high-security computer terminal. Upgrade wandered over to it, considering them both before shoving his hand into the computer screen. The glass rippled as his body spread out over it. It might have been a second-skin, except then the rest of Upgrade's body followed, tugging his consciousness along with it. He wasn't simply covering the glass, he was glass. And he was steel and cables and ones and zeros that meant nothing yet everything to him.
Nestled in the command center of the station, Upgrade had to steady himself against the onslaught of commands and directives. Had his body been physical, it would have trembled with the force of managing them. Orders to redirect power… memos being shared from one terminal to the next… Route adjustments… Cutting back on comforts and directing all power to the thrusters… Upgrade felt each bit of information pass through him, in and out, all-consuming for the moment they were inside of him and forgotten as soon as they weren't.
He tried to focus on the task at hand but it wasn't that easy. His thoughts refused to remain steady, shaking on their foundations with the near-constant pulses of commands. Upgrade didn't have to bypass security codes or provide passwords. The computer couldn't keep itself locked out, after all, and Upgrade was every bit the software as he was Ben Tennyson. The name lost its meaning when he was so consumed by hundreds of thousands of lines of code to pass on.
But there, Upgrade had found it. In relaying commands for power redirecting, he had unknowingly stumbled right into the blueprints for the station. He let out a pleased warbling from his core, a sound not unlike radio static. The computer terminal that he was occupying quavered.
The blueprints were downloaded and processed within a few seconds, which was exactly how long it took for Upgrade to realize that they weren't complete. Or, more aptly, that the station was too big to contain only what was shown on the digital scan. That implied that quite a lot of construction had been done, though Upgrade couldn't tell the extent of it without merging with the entire station. And given how managing a computer terminal alone was already making him more exhausted than he was before, the idea of trying made an emotion flicker through Upgrade's circuits that he recognized as "displeasure."
He flicked his ocular sensors over the map, quickly locating a small drawn box that was labeled in an alien language that his human mind didn't recognize. No matter — Upgrade scanned the security code, tiny numbers printed in the room's outline, and was immediately able to recognize it as a communications room. That meant that it would be connected to a satellite that would transmit his message. Argyle may have been able to block the Omnitrix from access (or maybe Murowa yanked those wires out when she was fiddling with the device's core) but it was doubtful that he could safeguard his own ship from a Galvanic Mechamorph.
Satisfied, Upgrade glanced over the route one more time. It would be a little less than a mile's walk. The prospect made him groan internally, but there was little that he could do about it. His strength was waning. He wasn't used to having to take care of his human needs in the middle of a tense situation.
He pulled away from the computer, morphing back into a loose approximation of a physical form. As soon as he did, the Omnitrix beeped weakly and Ben was deposited on shaky legs. He swore that he felt his insides slip around before settling back in their proper place and the feeling made him shudder. He did not need a physical demonstration of having his heart in his throat.
After a moment, when he didn't immediately kneel over and die, Ben let himself relax a fraction. He leaned against the wall, double-checking that no one was nearby before he lifted his shirt and, hesitating only a moment, tugged away the pants that he had used as a bandage.
The wound didn't look as bad as Ben thought it would. To be fair, he was hardly a trained medical professional, but he knew what infections looked like more-or-less. The skin around was red and inflamed, but so long as it wasn't turning yellow and green and leaking pus, Ben figured that he was alright. Unfortunately, he had been right about the niggling doubt that transforming would mess with his stitches. They were noticeably looser and beginning to drip water as they melted. The cuts were still bleeding, which Ben knew couldn't be good, but he had no idea how long wounds that deep took to stop bleeding and at least it wasn't gushing out of him like before. It was better out than in, at least. He didn't want his insides to flood. The odds of surviving that weren't favorable.
Eyeing it all was starting to make Ben feel queasy and clammy. He wrapped the wound again with the non-blooded part of the pants. The result was that his lower back was squished with uncomfortably lukewarm blood, but that wasn't the most unbearable thing that Ben had put up with for the last week so he shrugged it off.
The path that would take him to the comm room flashed in Ben's mind. He muttered a quick thanks for his eidetic memory and made a mental note to look out for some sort of infirmary on his way. He would have used the computer console to find one but Ben had been running on low energy and Upgrade tended to hyper-fixate on a problem when they were in a hurry. There was probably a mechanical reason for that but, frankly, Ben didn't care.
He pushed away from the wall, regretting it as exhaustion made the floor twist out from under him. Vertigo made his head throb, temples pounding, and Ben clenched his jaw against it before pushing himself down the hall anyway.
Of course, he almost tripped and landed flat on his face, but rest wasn't really an option. Ben begrudgingly turned the Omnitrix back off. Had he not been at risk of passing out and turning back into a human while in the void of space, Ben might have considered leaving. He wouldn't have regardless, determined as he was to finish what Argyle and Murowa had started, but still. It was with a guilty thought that Ben imagined having the energy to coax Jetray faster than light and get back to Earth.
When he was done with everything, he was convincing his parents to go camping for a weekend. Ben had never paid much attention to the scenery on Earth before, but the steel walls and the stench of his own blood made him ache for grass and an open night sky.
One benefit of wasting so much energy to cross the ship was that the doors were a lot easier to open when they weren't stuck in the ground and refusing to budge. He had expected them to have I.D. scanners, but he supposed that would be impractical with how big the station was and the sheer number of people who populated it. Not that any of them were still on the ship if they had any common sense, but still.
As it turned out, hitting the control pads by each door worked very well to open them. Or maybe they were just motion sensors and Ben was being obtuse because he couldn't read the latest squiggly alien language. He didn't think that it mattered. As he walked, clutching his aching side with one hand, Ben smacked his palm against door scanners and wasted a second idly glancing inside before continuing.
It didn't slow him down — it was difficult for Ben to get any slower than he already was. Actually, checking out the rooms gave him a way to justify taking breaks to himself. Ben knew that he wouldn't have allowed himself to do so otherwise, as much as the pounding of his heart and burning in his lungs ached for it.
Somehow, by some sort of miracle, Ben did manage to find what looked like an infirmary. It was hard to tell at first — there was nothing about it that was similar to the stereotypical human hospital set-up. There was no examination table, no neatly packed drawers of bandages and gauze, and no jars set out along the counter with cotton balls and q-tips and a box of store-bought, cheap plastic gloves. There wasn't even a first-aid kit with a giant red cross on the side. In fact, Ben had been about to overlook the room entirely when the glint of a bottle on the floor caught his attention.
The small infirmary — either for private or emergency use, Ben assumed — was just as destroyed as every other room he came to. He couldn't tell if it was because it had been raided for supplies before the people on board abandoned ship, or because the temporary loss of gravity across the station had knocked everything out of place. Either way, Ben was relieved to find enough things set out for him to scrape together into an emergency patch job.
His setting wasn't exactly ideal, but, well… There was nothing that Ben could do about that other than deal with it. The stitches had gone fairly well the first time, though now that Ben had light, he could tell how bad the stitch job was. Shirt and bandages still on as he dug through containers for clean-ish gauze, Ben grimaced at the memory of his oozing wounds. He never had been very good at sewing. He knew there were places where the thread was too far apart or even doubled back and looped around itself, sometimes straying too far from the cut and other times getting so close that Ben had stitched into the side of the wound instead of the layer of skin. Not that he had felt it, granted, with how numb he was with cold and the unfathomable amount of pain and panic that he had been choking down. But, still. Looking back, it was pretty inexcusable.
Sifting through sideways boxes and smashing glass tubes that had some sort of alien opening mechanism that Ben could not figure out for the life of him, he eventually managed to find something semi-useful. The aliens on board were too good for regular, absorbent gauze, apparently, because all Ben could find was a tub of warm, adhesive gel that cooled rapidly and formed a green-tinted but mostly transparent seal over his skin. He got the feeling that pouring it into an open wound would do more harm than good, but after he somehow managed to stitch himself back together properly, he didn't think that it would be too much of a concern.
Not that Ben was concerned or anything. He was only bleeding out slowly. What was there to worry about?
By the alien equivalent of an examination table (more of a raised section in the floor that, based on its multiple hinges and retractable parts, could be adjusted to fit most humanoid-sizes) Ben dug out something that functioned close enough to stitches from a hatch in the floor. It seemed unsanitary to him, but maybe it was one of those accommodations that had to be made in space or aliens weren't as susceptible to disease as humans were.
The stitches were obviously some sort of attempt at a "one-size-fits-all" type of care. They were thicker than what was typically used for human skin and there was no needle — instead, Ben was left with what looked like a cross between a sewing machine and a stapler. He was sure that the labels on it would have helped operate the device but, again, Ben couldn't read it or even begin to guess at the meaning. He didn't want to use it without having any idea how to, but he reasoned that practicing on fabric a few times wouldn't be too bad and, hey, it wasn't as though he had a lot of better options.
Ben was in the process of attempting to find a salve to help him through the no-doubt painful stitching process when the sound of footsteps caught his attention. He immediately set down the illegible bottles, grabbing a long, thin slab of metal that he assumed was for setting broken limbs, much like splints back on Earth. He had set it aside figuring that he might need a makeshift weapon, but he hadn't expected to use it so soon.
He glanced at the small pile of gathered medical supplies, but easily decided that it wasn't the time to take them with him. Ben had left the infirmary door cracked behind him precisely so that he could hear someone approaching, the downside being that it was obviously cracked and had the lights on.
Breathing hard, buzzing with nervous anticipation, Ben pressed himself against the wall next to the door so that he was out of sight. With any luck, whoever it was would keep on walking. It couldn't have been Murowa, as Nemuinas didn't fly or sound nearly that heavy, but that didn't mean that Ben was all that eager to fight anyone else. He hated having to turn tail and run. It was even more frustrating to know that he had been backed into a corner and was out of options — in his current state, fighting would be a death sentence. Ben wasn't nearly stubborn enough to deny that.
He forced himself to stop shaking and panting, letting out a slow, even breath as he stood and waited. If whoever it was opened the door, Ben would swing the metal slab that he had over his shoulder like a baseball bat, taking the opportunity to run. If the person kept walking, then he wouldn't have to worry about it.
His fingers tightened subconsciously as the steps drew nearer, clicking with steady thuds against the steel ground. They stopped, right outside the door, and Ben forgot how to breathe.
The second that the whir of small engines announced the opening of the door, Ben stepped out from behind the wall and swung with all his might. Shockwaves raveled up his arms and down his spine, jarring Ben's body so badly that he dropped the metal reflexively and felt his abdomen pulse in discomfort. Had he been able to see it, Ben wouldn't have been surprised to see an increase in the blood flow as a result of the tremors.
After spending so long surrounded by nothing but peranite, Ben recognized it when he saw it. For a moment, he thought that he was looking at Argyle, but no. The proportions weren't right — and Ben was still breathing, so it wasn't the Magister.
Never before had Ben felt so relieved to see a virtual-stranger. He smiled hesitantly at Popigai, as well as he could manage. The metal strip at their feet was bent practically at a ninety-degree angle whereas the Petrosapien didn't look hurt in the slightest — only perturbed and very concerned.
It felt so good to see someone looking worried for him. At the very least, it had been a few hours since Ben got himself stabbed. A day, at the most, and he already missed his friends terribly. Seeing Rook and Kevin for that brief amount of time had been bittersweet.
"Hey," Ben greeted the cadet after an awkward pause. "So, uh, quick question: how good are you with stitches?"
A/N: Was Ben on the verge of a panic attack in this chapter? The possibility is strong.
But I'm not sure how to properly write panic attacks so I'll have to do some more research. Perhaps in later chapters.
Chapter Thirty: Saving Grace