If this mother-of-all-misadventures had taught her nothing else, it had most certainly taught her that she was still capable of being startled into gobsmacked, brain-dead silence. It was as though the gears in her head had ground to a screeching halt, sand thrown amongst them by none other than the Gods she had sought with a million questions on the tip of her tongue. How ironic that he had, in fact, been the first to ask a question – that question – and how it had completely knocked the wind from her sails, wilting before the black of his eyes.

The intensity of his stern expression never wavered as he watched her lips flail uselessly. There was fire in his gaze, the same fire she'd seen ignite when it had finally dawned on him that there were intruders on his ship; unmoving, the creature's demeanour had changed so rapidly she couldn't stem the tide of adrenaline that flooded her veins once more, mind concocting yet more ways in which she could meet a grisly end.

Silly girl, you thought you'd earned his trust. Why on Earth did you think that?

Rather preferring not to get another taste of the creature's deadly anger, she pried her deer-in-the-headlights gawp from his black glare and focused on the page in front of her. A small part of her that had broken away from the moment, standing alongside her as her hands shook, mused the reactions of people back on Earth having brought with her a pad of scribbles between her and a creature that had never set foot on the planet; the rest was at this point absolutely convinced that moment would never come, and that her time was now.

How many more times would she stand before the gates, waiting for them to swing by and let her in?

More importantly, why was she here?

To ask questions.

What questions?

Why they made us.

She pursed her lips tightly. That's a bit heavy a conversation for right now, isn't it?

She squeezed the pen grip. His glare narrowed.

Answer him, you damn fool.

Fingers shaking as her breath hitched, she fumbled with both the pen and tablet as she took a wild guess at a more diplomatic answer than what she had attempted on the bridge of his vessel.

His scowl morphed into a perplexed squint as she handed him her answer.

To find you.

Glancing twice between the tiny Human and the page before him, he seemed as much at a loss for words as she had. Eventually he cast his gaze outside, scrutinising the landscape outside that had gradually become faintly visible in the dying gale; the storm would surely have dissipated enough to be passably safe to be outside in soon. Sucking in a breath, he quickly scrawled a response.

Why me?

She found herself chewing on her bottom lip once she'd translated his question. It struck her as enormously selfish at this point, in the context of another attempt at First Contact, to be asking her own questions and speaking from her own perspective; she was the only Human representative here, before the only survivor of another, and with that, her horizons were suddenly so far-flung she could no longer see them. It was hardly as liberating as she imagined it would be.

It led her to wonder just why Humans did any of what they did. 'Because we can' was always the most easily-cited reason, but it would translate terribly. 'To see what would happen' was a plebeian way of posing a hypothesis but belied the intelligence that went with the latter. 'Because we wanted to learn something' seemed far more honest, but a little saccharine. What it all boiled down to, she realised, was curiosity.

To find anyone. We are curious.

His scowl all but completely obscured a thousand emotions as he picked the page apart with his dark gaze; for a brief moment he seemed almost saddened by what he was reading, but a perplexed disbelief dominated his pale features. The air hung like stone as multiple questions seem to fade from his lips as soon as they formed. That wasn't the reaction she was hoping for.

He murmured something under his breath, then heaved a sigh into his hand as he slid it down his face, pressing it against his mouth in agonised thought. An overwhelming sensation of foreboding overcame her, dousing her in cold, sickening guilt. She felt like a child that had been caught stealing for the first time, facing the ire of a parent that didn't even know where to begin with discipline. If this had been any situation less important, she might have cried. She had half a mind to scrawl the word sorry on the page has he stared down at it.

Aeons passed before he pressed the pen to the page again, though he barely got halfway through writing a response before immediately scratching over the top of it with hasty, irritated strokes that embossed the page beneath the metal nib's pressure. What he eventually wrote was a longer message, filling the rest of the page; this was going to take her a while to translate.

Hesitantly accepting the pad as he handed it back, she set about deciphering the foreign scribble; this time, she wrote the English translations below each character, knowing she hadn't a hope of remembering what she'd found three words earlier as she sought the next.

You shouldn't be here. This place is dangerous. How are you still alive?

Immediately recalling the number of times she very nearly hadn't been, she sucked in a breath as she tried to think of an appropriate response. Brute force and ignorance? No, that was entirely inappropriate – honest, but inappropriate. Dangerous had been honest, too; they had set off with the promise of knowledge, hoping to cash in on an ancient invitation from a far more advanced species that had, once upon a time, shown Humanity plenty of love and patience. It had been on her word too, she mused glumly. They were here because of her hard work, her discoveries, and her theories.

Well, she had been right about one thing. There were Engineers here, long ago. Unfortunately, it appeared that invitation was no longer valid.

A far more recent magazine sitting at the top of the stack on the far side of the table caught the corner of her eye. She knew what she wanted to say, and grasped at the tablet once more, pen in hand; flipping the page over, she pressed the nib to a fresh leaf.

We wanted to meet our creators.

She handed the pad back to the Engineer, quickly followed by the Nat Geo that had caught her attention. The cover was a dark, somewhat moody photo stained in night-time blues, its narrow focus honing in on the weathered lines of a cave drawing that was all-too-familiar; one man standing among several far smaller, pointing to the stars. How she missed this the first time was beyond her; she had been on that dig – this was her work.

Jaw slack, he seemed to stare at the magazine cover without comprehension; eventually his blank expression morphed into another disbelieving scowl, apparently refusing to believe the words she'd written on the page, either. She swallowed, wondering if this was when she ended up like David, wanting to take it all back, wishing she could have written something far less honest, wishing her blind curiosity and desperation to believe hadn't sealed her fate and put her on on this horrendous, drawn-out suicide mission.

A laugh snapped her from her anxiety-ravaged thoughts. It was a harsh, hollow, humourless laugh, devoid of amusement, echoing as a silent shake in his chest as he ran his hand over his face. He stood without warning, rolling his head toward the ceiling in apparent exasperation and immediately paced away, mumbling – cursing – under his breath as one hand clawed at his head.

Indignant tears stung her eyes as she watched him, aghast; he paused halfway across the room, turning to stare back at her as he shook his head like a scorned lover, sucked in his bottom lip as his vision trailed elsewhere, and resumed pacing as he spoke, at length, in his own tongue. His gaze seemed to scan the length and breadth of the room, back and forth, lost in a world of contradictions, half-truths and wildly unreasonable aliens. He shook his head at the half-stacked bookshelf before getting briefly lost in the tendrils of crystal hanging from the ceiling beside his head, the myriad of bottles stacked behind the bar, the imposing frame of the piano.

He wasn't angry, she soon realised. He was disappointed.

The expression on his face when he finally looked back at her stung more than she was prepared for. Despite herself the tears lurched free, rolling down her cheeks in hot, thick rivers down her cheeks as her chest silently spasmed. She gripped at her face with both hands, unable to face the creature. She knew that look. God, she knew that look.

It was the look her Uncle had etched across his greying, wrinkled features when she announced she wanted to follow in her late father's footsteps and pursue Archaeology instead of something 'more sensible', something that would 'give her a nice, easy life'. It was the look her Master's professor had shot her when she first posed her Thesis topic, before gently but firmly pressing her in a different, less outlandish direction. It was the look, very much the look, her dig leader hadn't even tried to disguise when she first posed her theory on the true origins of life on Earth; the thoughts had just slipped past her lips as they formed, and he had quickly shot her down with a detailed rant about the Theory of Evolution until she was so humiliated she'd cried.

Charlie had given her that same look when she spoke to him later on, but Charlie had been different. He'd placed a hand in her hair, kissed her cheek, and told her to think it through more carefully before posing it to her next audience – that she needed to keep her own thoughts from tarnishing people's' opinions of her in the field, hit 'em all at once when they were fully formed. She'd cried as they made love that night, though she could never decide if it was from the persistent humiliation that stood in her shadow wherever she went, or whether she'd never had someone respond to her thoughts like that before, instead of outright dismissing them as folly.

The look on the Engineer's face was a twisted but restrained gawp of patronising disgust and vague, humourless amusement. She was so, so used to that look; she had even weathered it aboard the Prometheus, but she had expected it from a ragtag group of scientists that had just been told that Evolution was a lie. She may as well have stood in the middle of a Church and declared life to be random, godless chance that had rolled in their favour.

"I'm sorry," she murmured despite herself as her voice, wet and wavering, hitched in her throat. "I'm sorry."

Clearly he had not expected her reaction, either; his expression softened as his shoulders fell almost imperceptibly, regarding the sobbing creature in total silence. There was no way he could have understood how much this had meant to them, to her. His own animated, insulting reaction had been enough evidence of that. Outside of her own sobbing, clawing at her cheeks, she wondered just how rejection by something she could barely communicate with had hurt so much.

The Engineer appeared to give the room one last, disbelieving scan before near-silently pacing back toward the table and retrieving the pad he'd cast aside. Through her tears he seemed to cast her an almost guilty glance, hesitating as he observed her before pressing the pen to paper. Once he'd slipped it onto her lap, he stood again and stepped toward the windows, releasing a heavy sigh as he stared out at the landscape beyond the lifeboat.

The wind had all but died in the immediate area, scrabbling weakly at fine dust and gently scattering it between the chunks of debris the storm had brought with it. By now enough particulate matter had settled that the towers were visible in the distance, beyond the hulk of the crashed but remarkably intact vessel almost out of view from the bay windows, debris fragments pulled loose in the fiery impact and ensuing crash glinting in the afternoon sun. His dark eyes had fixated upon its haunting form, teeth tugging at his bottom lip as ideas undoubtedly raced through his mind.

Shaw had somehow wrangled some semblance of coherency amongst her self-absorbed grief, smearing the tears from her eyes with the back of one hand as she diligently set to work translating the Engineer's latest message. He didn't move from the window the entire time she worked, though he seemed to be observing something different every time she glanced back at him. At first, he appeared to marvel at the pink-hued gas giant swallowing a segment of the sky above, tinting the blue sky with hints of violet beyond the thin scattering of cloud in the wake of the storm. The immense mountains in the distance, almost beyond what could be seen from the windows, ensnared him next, albeit briefly. As she managed to narrow down the last few words, his shoulders slumped as the bare ground within the sprawling valley before them met his gaze. One hand pressed against the glass as his forehead hung beside it, she could only wonder what was going through his mind.

His message said exactly what she had suspected before she was even halfway through deciphering it.

You came to the wrong place for that.

She ejected the pad from her grasp with an exhausted, defeated sigh that she could have sworn came from her toes. The awkward scrawlings of two creatures unfamiliar with their chosen common language stole the last of the life from her fingers as they slid across the table in a flurry of leaves; she slumped heavily against the back of the couch, too defeated to squeeze another tear out, too humiliated to find words to speak.

The Engineer eventually reached down toward the table, flipping leaves of scrawled paper from the top of the pad and tugging a fresh page free. She heard him pick up a pen and wander back to the window, only peering up with puffy eyes when the sound of rushed writing scratched at her ears. He had pressed the sheet of paper against the glass, pausing now and then to stare back at the ship before engaging in another spurt of hurried scribbling. For all intents and purposes he appeared to be composing a list, the scrawled lexicons too small and too haphazard for her to have a hope of translating as they flowed down the page. Her tired eyes soon realised they weren't Sumerian, either; they must be in his native tongue.

Her blood froze for a terrifying moment as he cast her a dark look over his shoulder, seemingly sizing her up for a bemused few seconds before returning his attention back to the task at hand. What was he doing?

As quickly as he started, he finished scratching away at the sheet and tossed the pen onto the table, folding the list in half, then in half again, forming a tidy rectangle that he then tucked up the ruined sleeve of his biosuit alongside his bicep, clear of the tear in the material. He stepped past the table and couches with several inhumanly broad paces, paused, turned back, and hastily scribbled two characters on the almost-full top page of the pad.

The first she recognised by now; the second, she quickly found. It was surprising how fast one could adapt, once one was familiar with the source material.

Stay here.

He had already turned to walk toward the airlock by the time she deciphered the message. "Wait," she murmured, casting a quick glance at the shadows outside as they began to stretch in the afternoon sun. He ignored her; she sat up straight. "Wait, where are you going?"

Still ignoring her he paced past the bar, tilting his head away from the chandelier crystals that brushed against his shoulder.

"Za'il, wait!" She all but shouted his name, or at least what she hoped was his name, as he prepared to duck for the airlock tunnel.

He froze, only turning as she scrambled to her feet; confusion twisted his pale features as she skittered across the deck, but as she came within a few metres of him, he responded with something in his own language, deep and authoritative.

Eyes as frustrated as they were pleading, she spoke again. "Where are you going? Why don't you take me with you, I can h-..."

Repeating himself, the Engineer pointed over her head toward the couch. She knew she was being told to stay put, but that wasn't good enough. She waved an arm in the direction of the airlock instead. "Look, it's different out there to what you remember, and if you're going back to your ship I'd like to retr-..."

Scowling, he repeated himself once more, punctuated by an clumsy Lee-zuh-beh, before adding something else in a distinctly terse tone. It wasn't his words that startled her, though; it was the two huge, white hands that grasped her upper arms delicately but phenomenally firmly, pushing her back toward the couch with strength she found incomprehensible from a humanoid, resisting her writhing as if she were a ragdoll. Her boots squeaked against the glossy floor as she lost her footing, but she wasn't dragged backward for very long before being lifted off the floor and unceremoniously plopped onto the couch in a mass of limbs and hair.

Staring up at him with aghast and insulted chagrin, mouth open, she tried – and failed – to come up with anything to protest with. As much as she wanted to tag along, it had become patently obvious at this point that he was so much her physical superior she may as well give up. It was little wonder her crewmates had perished when he had barely flinched. Clearly he had realised the same, thinking little of her protestations and shifting her about like an inanimate object.

He cast her one last warning glance before keying the exit for the airlock and stepping out into the afternoon sun. As the doors slid shut behind him, returning the lifeboat to complete, deadly silence, she wondered if the Engineers were more resistant to the effects of carbon dioxide, or if he was going to suffer, unaware of what the atmosphere was like out there after several millennia.

As much as her ego stung from today's less-than-ideal exchange, and as much as her arms burned from where he had pressed his thumbs against her biceps with enough force to bruise them and then lifted her entire weight off the ground, she couldn't find it in her heart to hate him for it.

You better come back alive.

The afternoon shadows had grown distinctly longer before she had decided what to do with herself; kissing the calm, still valley beyond the lifeboat in gold, the sun had since begun its final descent toward night. Arcing toward the heavens, the mighty snow-capped peaks had taken on more of a vibrant orange beneath the glow of the gas giant that had all but disappeared from view – without the constant wind and rain, funneled into a damn hurricane in the confines of the valley they'd crashed in, there was something undeniably, insanely beautiful about this place, formed by tectonic rage over the aeons and now proudly on display for one, lone Human.

She had since busied herself assessing the damage to the lifeboat, setting the systems for a deep scan and displaying the litany of warnings on the tablet. Sitting against the window to catch the last of the afternoon sun, she picked through the worst of the errors one by one, scanning through the vessel's blueprints for reference with each that came to familiarise herself with the location and nature of each incident. It soon became apparent that the engines had sustained some damage after the vessel had ejected, with one of the port-side nacelles likely being smashed beyond feasible repair. There was more than enough water, food and power for an extended stay if she did have to patch it up enough to get her free of the moon's orbit, but she hardly thought she had enough sanity left in the tank to withstand that sort of project. Besides, it would mean she would be relegated to stasis for the trip home, which she hardly fancied as a concept.

Forcing herself to her feet with an embattled groan, she tossed the tablet aside and staggered toward the food dispenser. It seemed she would dine alone tonight, and frankly, at this point, it would be a welcome change. Her arms still ached from where the Engineer had picked her up and dragged her across the floor, her head ached from thinking and crying and being lost in despair, and it was all she could to do resist the urge to suck down an entire bottle of liquor herself and be damned the consequences.

Chocolate mousse and ice cream for dessert it was. Be damned the consequences.

Throwing her feet on top of the magazines still scattered across the table, she set about demolishing the gooey muck piled high in her bowl with determined annoyance, washing it down with a tall, strong glass of what remained of the Gin. They made odd bedfellows, but stuff it – she was alone, there wasn't a soul to judge her, and she would eat whatever she pleased.

Oh, but she had been judged today – quite harshly. She knew when she was being determined to be an idiotic zealot and a dreamer. It wasn't like it was a particularly odd occurrence in her life. She just hadn't prepared herself to get more of the same from an alien. It was as if it was her lot in life to be flogged before the crowd for daring to speak.

She bit down on the spoon angrily as she stewed on the day's events, entertaining the growing fury at the Engineer's smug treatment of her once they had started to communicate. She almost preferred him before she'd peeled back the layers, wishing she could bask in that pleasant ignorance that had allowed her to project human feelings onto him – empathy, concern, caution. Somehow, in their forced closeness, she had forgotten just how alien he truly was.

Or, perhaps, she was missing a piece of the puzzle. Perhaps her poorly-articulated responses to his questions had fallen foul of the mark just as they had aboard the Engineer ship, but he had actually tried to understand instead of reacting with violence as he had the first time. He'd told told her the moon was dangerous, which wasn't something one would logically tell another they wanted dead, or didn't care either way. Regardless of how obvious the statement had been, surely he was far more knowledgeable as to why. It certainly gave credence to his manhandling her back onto the couch and refusing to let her leave. He could have snapped her neck instead, or thrown her across the room, but all he did was leave bruises.

Damnit, it was so easy to judge him. She still had no clue as to his motivations, or even who he was, apart from an arbitrary name. By now she was certain he was the wrong person to have encountered throughout all of this, but it wasn't like they'd had a choice. The others were all long dead, to the point of fossilising.

Without a clue how long it would be before she would see the surviving Engineer again, or whether he intended to come back at all, she pondered the validity of penning a somewhat more coherent message. Maybe she could tell him more about her people, ask him about his, explain that they really did just want to find out more about their place in the galaxy. Weyland aside, they had meant no malice. They were scientists, not military grunts in search of conquest.

Hunting down the pad and a pen, she set to work trying to word a far more articulate message. She tore the top two pages free, dropping them on the table before scuffing toward the piano and perching on the stool. Though the lighting on this side of the room was less than ideal, at least the cover over the keys was at a better angle to write with; her back and what remained of her wound had since tired of slouching over a coffee table for hours.

Rather than distract herself with translations straight off the bat, she opted to start in English and work her way back from there. This would take hours, if not days, but something told her she would have all the time in the world to think about this between now and whatever the Hell was next.

Sucking in a breath, she pressed the nib to the paper.

I feel like we got off to a bad start. I'd like to try again. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, and…

Pursing her lips thin, she squinted at the line for a moment before scrubbing it out. What was this, a highschool make-up?

I hope we didn't offend you with the way we woke you.

Nope, nope, nope. Scowling, she scrubbed that line out, too. Of course we fucking offended him.

Drawing a breath, she tried again.

I realise we have very badly failed at First Contact with your people, and for that I apologise. I would like to try again, and introduce ourselves properly.

Better. She pressed on.

We are a very curious species, and we have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. In the last few years we finally invented the technology necessary to travel faster than light, and it has made our curiosity more intense than ever. For centuries we have wondered if we were alone in the universe, and recently we realised we weren't. This is why we sought your people.

She half-wondered if it was worth elaborating on Humanity's discovery of his kind further, but it wasn't ultimately important. Or was it?

He had clearly been fascinated by multiple aspects of the lifeboat in his relentless pacing, and it hadn't been what she'd expected. He had ignored her more than he'd paid her any attention, and he'd shown only passing interest in the food she'd offered. She'd caught him thumbing through books at one point, squinting at their contents before quietly shelving them; the magazines had clearly consumed him once he found something familiar within. The chandeliers, the paintings, the sculptures had drawn him in repeatedly, halting him in his infernal pacing for swathes of time.

Expressions of the Human condition that did not require words, every item that had piqued his interest was of some kind of cultural significance…

Straining for words despite the thoughts becoming cogent, palpable, she stabbed at the pad with keywords as the came, slowly evolving into a haphazard mind-map diagram, lines snaking from one concept to the next as they flowed from her tired brain. A mighty, almost debilitating yawn rocked her without warning, mouth wide enough that she could almost place her hand inside it; she needed to wring out as many ideas as she could before she fell asleep, intending to jog her memory tomorrow morning after completing a survey of the lifeboat's exterior and planning a repair and escape plan.

Slumping on the piano stool as her eyes began to droop, she propped her head against her left wrist against her cheek; the ideas, as hazy as they had suddenly become, kept coming, and she had to get as much down as possible. Gravity swayed and lurched beneath her as the day's grasp upon her refused to yield, and before long, it was not just a battle to keep a good grip on the pen, but to merely keep her eyes open.

Maybe I'll just close my eyes. Just for a bit, she reasoned as she placed her head against the piano cover. Just a few minutes.

The familiar hiss of an airlock activating snapped her from her sleep. Dazed, squinting in the light, she glanced about the room in a fuzzy stupor. One hand sleepily clawed the mouthful of hair from her lips whilst the other groped at the surface she'd fallen asleep on, immediately realising just how cramped she had become; snatching a yawn, she stretched long and hard with both arms above her head. Reaching back down to rub her face, she became aware that she had the edge of the bad embossed along her cheek in what was likely a thick, red line.

Kthunk.

Vibrations rolled through the deck as something exceptionally heavy landed on it by the airlock. Shifting on her seat, she craned her neck past the piano to catch a glimpse of what was going on; she assumed the Engineer had returned, but hadn't the foggiest what he was up to.

Thud.

Another heavy object hit the deck, followed by a heavy clomp of a large boot stepping up and boarding the small craft. As the airlock hissed shut, Shaw was aware of the adrenaline starting to creep into her bloodstream; fingers jittering at the piano cover, she held her breath as several more boot-steps echoed through the hall leading into the main room.

Her heart caught in her throat as the immense figure of a black-clad humanoid ducked beneath the outer frame of the corridor and stepped into the light. But rather than the dark gaze among pale, translucent skin that she'd come to recognise, she was met with the beady, elephantine visage of an alien monster.

Jerking away from the piano, she screamed in pure, terrorised fear.

Author's Note:

This is progressing far faster than I thought it would, which means...I might actually finish something for once.

You may notice that while I like Elizabeth to be somewhat a ball of feels, I also like her being able to fend for herself and get-up-and-do-stuff. I also like to maintain the Engineer's rather rough hand because reasons.

Also, some disambiguation in case anyone is wondering: yes, italics covers emphasis, thought intrusions, and any dialogue that isn't physically spoken in the main story language (English here, thanks to Shaw).

More to come...I seem to enjoy writing instead of working.