Kevin was in and out of consciousness for a while after that. Fever still burned hot in his blood, and it grew difficult for him to judge how much time was passing. Whenever he closed his eyes, once he opened them again any number of minutes or hours might have slipped past. However long it was, though, and however deep his sleep, he always knew when Javier left his side.
Mercifully, that wasn't often.
The agony Kevin felt whenever they lost contact was almost overwhelming. It had graduated from nausea and pain in his joints to a deep, paralyzing ache that seemed to drill right into his bones. Each time Javier returned the pain began to recede. Despite the distant awareness that Javier was somehow responsible for that pain, Kevin never could stop himself from burrowing gratefully against his partner's side. More and more often, when he did, Kevin would feel a strange twitch or shudder beneath his flesh—sometimes deep inside himself, sometimes right below the surface. He had tried not to think about it, but his delirium conjured the image of some angry, ravenous thing that had slipped inside of him. A vicious, gnawing something that was trying to hollow him out from the inside, and fell quiet only when Javier was there.
In his fevered sleep he sometimes had nightmares about it.
"Talk to me. Please," Kevin begged him once upon waking, "Tell me about this. Tell me about...what you are."
Because he still didn't understand, and if he was afraid of what he might learn by asking, he feared the empty silence threatening to drag him back into the darkness of sleep even more.
He felt Javier tense beside him. Kevin managed to lift his head enough to look up at him. If Javier noticed he didn't acknowledge it, eyes locked on some point on the far side of the room. It might have been the fog clinging to his thoughts, but Kevin couldn't remember the last time Javier had looked him in the eye. His partner's eyes were pained and a little distant. Distant the way they had been the night that— Kevin still wasn't sure what had happened, but he thought Javier's face was written with the same vague uncertainty. Like he was trying to translate a thought he'd never before had to express.
"I don't know what I am," Javier told him finally, "not for sure. I mean, the alien thing...it's just a guess. The one that makes the most sense, if you can believe it. But...I remember a time before who and what I am now. I remember a sky, and stars, and air, and soil that aren't like anything on Earth..."
"Maybe that was some other planet," he said quietly, eyebrows knitting together in something that was almost confusion, "but it could just as easily be another dimension, or the distant past, or the distant future..."
"It doesn't matter," Javier said eventually, shaking his head. "I don't know where it is. I don't know how I got here. So it all adds up to the same thing."
He paused, wetting his lips.
"I don't have a name for that place or for what I used to be," he continued slowly. "They don't have anything you'd call a language. They're...kind of like animals, really. The most complex configuration might be as smart as a two-year-old—maybe—but for the most part they act on instinct. And they live in...hives, I guess. Colonies. Like ants or termites almost, only..."
Javier shook his head again, eyes widening a little as they stared off into nothing.
"Like a hive only...more. Because a hive of insects is made up of individuals working like a single animal, but the hive I came from was more like a single animal split into pieces..."
Sometimes when Kevin was out he suffered strange dreams. He dreamed about a sky that was the wrong shade, sliding into a cool, dark blue-green, and a tiny white sun that flickered vainly to keep it lit. He dreamed of hot, humid air with an acidic flavor and nights filled with far too many stars. Of fields of rusty, spiraling growths, flecked with colors beyond the edge of purple that shouldn't actually exist to his eye. On the edge of his sleep, sometimes he heard the insect-like buzzing of distant creatures he could not name, though he could picture them clearly and knew even what they would taste like. He dreamed of tunnels that closed around him—warm, snug, and breathing—and hungry, hooked things that slithered past him in the darkness. He could feel the grasp of their questing limbs at times. Smelling, tasting. Connecting. Recognition sparking through nerve-like channels that words could only hope to translate as "part-of-Me".
Kevin woke up once with his head on Javier's shoulder. For once the other man was sleeping. Thoughts still dull with fever, he brushed a hand over Javier's chest. Where their skins touched Kevin could feel little pinpricks of sensation, like the returning awareness of a sleeping limb. He shouldn't have understood what it was, but he thought he did. It was Javier's cells inside his body, connecting with Javier. Communicating. That communication wasn't clear. Not yet. He was still too human—still too much Kevin Ryan—for real understanding to be possible. The thought made Kevin shudder.
He wondered how long that would still be true.