It seemed such a waste to sleep the day away, out cold for the sunniest hours amid calm weather when it was never certain when the next violent sandstorm would sweep through and force them inside for days on end, but Shaw had battled long and hard over this decision, agonising over it far more than she ought to have, before resigning herself to a quick nap to keep her going. It felt as though her life revolved around the basics at this point, lost in the world of her own head as she drifted from meal to meal, sleep to sleep, gradually making headway on some sort of plan to leave this place, but never quite far enough to begin building hope.
Rather than plucking arbitrary times to sleep from thin air, simply staying awake until she couldn't keep her eyes open, it made sense to bring some sort of order to the chaos that surrounded her. Naturally, she was left trying to choose between the disconcertingly short days, their shifts not too far from that of Earth but enough that it fought with her own, longer circadian rhythm – or to submit to pure guesswork, sleeping when the Engineer slept and hoping he woke her up once he was done. Neither were ideal, and she realised just how much she'd taken the days on Earth for granted, no matter how long, no matter the season; however, given her priority lay with finding a way off this planet, it simply made sense to at least try to spend as many waking hours as possible with Za'il.
It wasn't because she enjoyed his company, mind. Their struggle to communicate was exhausting at the best of times, and more than anything she longed to have a simple conversation with someone, anyone, that didn't involve rubbing her finger raw as she scrolled up and down through an ancient, supposedly dead language with no living speakers aside from a two thousand-year-old alien, when it wasn't even his native tongue. It was just the only link either of them had remotely in common. It was so goddamn lonely stuck here like this. She may as well have been the only being left alive.
Really? Was that really how she felt?
No. Absolutely not.
Had she truly been alone, she doubted she'd still be alive at all – and it wasn't just for the fact that he'd sealed the wound that would otherwise have doomed her, and inadvertently help her slay a monster that would also have otherwise doomed her. Had she somehow, somehow overcome either of those two significant roadblocks in her survival, she wasn't entirely sure she'd have remained sane enough to go on. It was all too easy to simply step out of the airlock without a helmet, and let fate have its way with her…
Regardless of their language barrier, the enormous alien had kept her mind churning the entire time he was on board, providing a myriad of distractions from her own despair as best as anyone could and then some. As much as his ways and his technology were confoundingly different, his body language had been strikingly Human – if that was a fair comparison to draw. He ate like her, slept like her, felt his emotions like her, grieved like her. He had eventually shown a fascination with art and music that left him seeming that much less alien in her eyes, and she had to admit, the past day had been oddly pleasant with his subtle shift in demeanour she struggled to clearly articulate, other than that he seemed more patient, more interactive, more willing to accept her. It had been reassuring to no longer be all but ignored, and she'd felt it in a deep, fundamental part of her being she couldn't quite identify.
It was during times like these, she realised, she was most reassured by nestling up against Charlie and rambling endlessly at him as he held her, quietly responding in the affirmative at something approximating the right times, sometimes so overwhelmed by the ferocity of her emotions that she found herself, embarrassingly, mumbling through a flood of tears. As ridiculous as it was, it always felt so refreshing – there was power and validation in releasing a torrent of feelings better shed than held, and seeking solace against another person's skin.
A twisted, disobedient part of her mind had the audacity to grapple with the idea of doing exactly that with the creature snoring in the next room, snuggling against the Human-like flesh she now knew lay beneath his biosuit, ejecting a nonsensical stream of consciousness that he wouldn't understand a word of, simply taking reassurance from the closeness of another living–
Good God, Elizabeth, she fumed. How can you even consider taking such liberties! You can't just touch people without their consent, and good girls don't just...just…
Good girls don't mourn their husbands by fantasising about cuddling up to strange men!
Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself to her feet. She hated how needy and pathetic her mind could be at times, especially when sleep-addled and disoriented. You're a grown bloody adult, Doctor. Time to start acting like it!
Perhaps a shower would snap her to her senses. Perhaps it ought to be a cold one.
Padding silently through the bedroom as she tugged at the mess her hair had become with one hand, she noted the Engineer was still fast asleep, sprawled diagonally across the King bed and yet still needing to curl his legs to stay entirely on the mattress. Still in his biosuit and having ignored the blankets, his arms coiled around the pillow she hadn't used while his head remained perched at its very end. It wasn't the most elegant sleeping position, but it seemed he had at least a little more room to move than he did on the couch.
Feathering the drawers as quietly as she possibly could, she set about collecting more fresh clothes to change into; she found a pair of shorts that were perhaps a little too short for her tastes but would likely fit, a singlet, and a soft, hooded jacket that would allow her a little more freedom of movement than the turtleneck clinging to her form. It would do. With that, she silently slunk into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
With the last shower's meltdown never far from her mind, she stripped and stepped beneath the raindrops with the express intent to wash away the last two hours of restless, awkward sleep from her body and nothing more, using it to leverage a little more wakefulness and absolutely not using it as an excuse to mope. To keep herself on task, she slipped the temperature down several degrees and forced the strangled shout of surprise to catch in her throat as everything she owned stood on end beneath the relentlessly cold droplets.
It was certainly a fast way of washing her hair, she thought to herself as she raced to rinse the shampoo from it. All-consuming and utterly distracting, it was both the coldest and quickest shower she had ever had; it was also the most effective at achieving its end goal, because she was in and out without having descended into the whirlpool of thought she'd feared would grip her once more.
Quaking as she dried herself off and patted at her hair, she shuffled across the floor with the bath mat gripped between her toes, casting her reflection a passing glance along the way. At least she no longer looked like death, though hunched and shivering was not much of an improvement.
She stole a moment to stare at the pouting woman beyond the glass, wondering what the Hell she was doing presenting herself as the sole example of Humanity to alien eyes. For all the we come in peace and please enjoy our culture her species had engaged in during the last near-two centuries of space-age shenanigans, sending messages out into the aether in the hopes that someone, somewhere was listening, it struck her as laughable that the most extended, most meaningful interactions in history – or at least the last few millennia – with aliens of any kind had been between between a gawky, socially awkward scientist with no business being in space in the first place, and a two thousand-year-old pilot on a mission to destroy her planet.
Given it was safe to assume he was a military man, a soldier of sorts, she believed it was also safe to assume they couldn't be any more different as people, with next to nothing in common, and no reason other than mutual strife to form any sort of meaningful bond.
And yet, to assume as much was to write of the entirety of the last few days.
God, why was she so paranoid about being rejected?
Besides, they had shared things in common. The blasted earworm playing merry hell with her psyche in the furthest vestiges of her mind was a testament to that.
She was sure he had been asleep for at least six hours by this point; perhaps he wouldn't mind a bit of a ruckus. God knew she needed to create one; a distraction was long overdue, and an old itch had made itself known ever since the Engineer had invaded her dreams with his slow, sombre, heartfelt enjoyment of the admittedly over-the-top piano taking up an inordinate amount of space in the main body of the craft.
Patting her hair dry and tugging her clothes on with renewed fervour, she kicked aside the day's dirtied garments and slipped out of the bathroom as quietly as she could, as if she wasn't about to wake the poor bastard with what was doomed to be a fairly shoddy attempt to blow out the cobwebs after all these years.
Her fingers grabbed and flexed with excitement as she slid the bedroom door shut behind her and shuffled over to the piano stool, faintly amused at her own enthusiasm, struggling to remember a time she was so eager to just stop, relax, and enjoy a tune or three. In fact, she could barely remember the last time she'd even played a piano, such was the pressure to focus on her violin, and such was the subsequent pressure, once she was old enough, to focus on her studies. Even if much of that pressure had been purely self-inflicted.
The keys were cool and smooth beneath her fingertips, nothing like the scooped, weathered, stained ivory of the instrument in her recent dream, and a far cry from the plastic of the electronic unit she'd last played. It didn't take much to come to the conclusion that the baby grand was new, almost completely untouched, save the odd tune-up and the Engineer's earlier playing.
It didn't take much to assume that it was an expensive example, either. Delightfully weighted and ringing out with the most magnificent of sounds, the first notes her fingers fell upon immediately sent a chill down her spine.
Unprompted, her hands set about pecking away at the first thing that came to mind; an easy song she had not played in a very long time found its way to her fingertips as her eyes drifted closed, muscle memory taking control and leaving the rest of her to drift elsewhere.
And elsewhere it drifted.
In a breath she was in the sticky heat of a Mediterranean summer evening, perched upon a metal stool in the outdoor section of a restaurant she could only describe as 'cute', the cool silken touch of the keys becoming iced, dewdrop glass against her fingertips and memory flooding her nostrils with the crisp bite of limes and mint. The tune at her hands had been played by someone far more rehearsed and skillful that night, dancing across far more weathered keys as it fought for dominance over the hubbub of clinking glasses and clattering cutlery, at one with the burble of the bustling cobblestone streets beyond the wrought iron curls and twists of the restaurant's outer street-front gates.
The scent of parmesan and tomato had since given way to limoncello and vanilla as the moon rose high and full in the sky, bathing the paths weaving down the coastal cliff face in pale blue and bringing with it the lightest of summer breezes; the ocean beyond had stilled, twinking in bright, shiny ripples beneath the evening light, constantly drawing her eyes toward it as the sultry sound of the piano became one with her as the night dragged on. It was one of the few times she could recall truly being present in the moment, not bothering to commit it to memory as she let it envelop her psyche in the full knowledge it would remain with her for aeons for simply being so tangible, a delight to every sense she possessed.
Faces had faded from her memory, such was their irrelevance to that moment. There had been several at the table, discussing the dig they were on at the time, lamenting their discoveries so far and musing those yet to come. At that stage, she realised, she'd already begun focusing on other, more important discoveries, chipping away at her theories in secret, attending these digs with a paycheck in mind, slowly accumulating the funding required to push herself in a new direction. It had been a turning point of sorts, when she had finally realised that blithely churning ahead in a preselected march, dancing to the beat of the drum assigned to her, was not the only viable way to go about life. In a way, perhaps, it had been the first time fire had made itself known in her belly; it had upset the veritable apple card laden with should and duty and sensibility, replacing it with a driving want, an itching need for something greater.
Her fingers paused against the keys as a thought struck her; that drive had led her straight here, to this very moment, sitting alone on an alien world, mulling over everything that had laid the foundations to this supremely unenviable position.
Sticking one's neck out against the advice of others leading to tragedy and calamity; what a novel thought.
Shut up, Elizabeth, she scolded as she idly plucked nonsense with her right hand. Focusing on everything bad that's happened is going to overshadow any good that can come of this.
Ah yes, good. Lots of good has happened in the last few weeks. Let's list some of it, shall we?
Fingers freezing against the keys again, she pursed her lips together firmly as she drew a blank. Why was she even entertaining the idea?
Her breath was quick to follow suit, hitching in her windpipe. It's a bit harsh to forget about the one, singular living Engineer, isn't it?
He has a name, damnit.
When she thought about it, marinating in self-pity really was washing out any of the good that had happened, painting discovery in grey. What had initially been a murderous, violent creature had turned out to be far more complex and nuanced in nature, and in confusion that paralleled her own, had somehow become a remarkably reliable ally. Once again she stumbled upon the realisation that her position was thus far unique, and despite the carnage that had befallen her, she really ought to be far more grateful than she currently was.
So much of her simply ached to reach out, to place a hand against his chest and grasp at his soul, to truly understand him as time pushed him further and further from the podium of a god to the flesh and blood of a mortal no different to herself.
Once again her fingers idly plucked at random, caressing the slick surfaces beneath their tips as they slid from key to key. It was unfortunate, really, that she'd never truly thrown herself at music. The ability was there, but her interest had wavered enough that nothing ever came of it and she was left marvelling at the outstanding abilities of others. When presented with sheet music her playing had almost infamously grown stilted and robotic, with her best reserved for moments of ad-lib or tapping out a song from memory, often unrelated to the instrument she had at hand.
The desire to toy with the latter overcame her as her hands set about it on impulse, quietly massaging out an old tune that occasionally showed up as an earworm in dark moments where a few feel-good lyrics found themselves in hot demand. Soft rock or not, her mind made light work of transmuting almost anything to whatever she had her hands on, and it wasn't long before both hands were bringing it to life, dragging her eyes closed once again as the music drew her in with fervour she hadn't felt in years and years.
Sound flowed from her as a burst dam, binding every inch of emotion she'd felt these last few days into something far more tangible, rippling from her flesh to the air, from memory to resonating sound; it was release in every sense of the word, with only lyrics missing with the distrust of her own voice, refusing to allow it to trip up the rest as it came.
Had her playing become so loud, so involved, that she'd missed the soft pad of footsteps from further down the vessel, missed the soft, awestruck breaths that lingered nearby? Her eyes squeaked open to find the enormous figure of the Engineer standing at the far end of the piano, utterly transfixed as a thousand emotions played amongst the black of his eyes, his pale, sleepy face contorted in a mixture of confusion and wonder.
It occurred to her that this was a new benchmark for how much attention he could pay her. In fact, this might be the most anyone had ever been so consumed by anything she had done apart from the most obvious, intimate examples that would now remain forever with the dead; something in her belly stirred beneath his intent gaze, offering him an unbidden quirk of the lips as her hands dug into the keys with renewed strength. Ah, yes, the cobwebs were most certainly torn apart by now.
A new song came to mind just as the last came to an end; her grin broadened as he shifted in kind, eyes never leaving her as he crouched out of arm's reach beside her. Perhaps more mellow, perhaps more uplifting, she didn't quite know where her hands would take her as she begun to play, but with such an avid audience, she suspected a little showing-off may come in to bat as the tune progressed.
What a strange thing to have done to have achieved his undivided attention.
Words hung silently about her lips as her eyes fell closed once more, but no longer seeing him seemed to only amplify his presence. Oh, whoops, there goes the showing-off part. She could have sworn she heard him suck in a breath.
Perhaps he wouldn't notice the fumbling amongst the showboating. It had certainly been a while.
When she glanced back at him amid a crescendo of noise, she noted his eyes were squarely upon her hands as the danced. Her own followed suit reflexively, more carefully watching the keys as they demanded more of her, dragging the tune from the bowels of her memory, suddenly regretting leaving that section of her trusty playlists to gather dust. Once again, she was left wondering just how he'd had the infinite bad luck of this particular Human as his sole experience with the species.
Another came to mind before she had any intention of leaving her perch. An old classic wrapped in a thousand enigmatic messages, open to any interpretation one could make of it, the melody flowed from the end of one song and straight into the next. Its lyrics hung against her lips as she mused her own interpretation, verse after verse, its distinct lack of any repeating chorus an endless fascination point for her and the world over; while she knew she was in a minority, she had always thought the tale of the song to be a warning against fake gods, against taking the tangible and the man-made as a replacement for faith, for God Himself. She simply didn't buy that it could be a rumination against worship as a whole, that it could take away from the Human spirit rather than amplify it. In fact, she preferred to ignore the entire commentary on the Human condition. Instead, she focused on distracting herself with a more intense assault on the keys before her.
For some reason, playing it seemed that much more poignant before a creature that she had regarded as a god for so long, hardly neon, hardly of her own creation, but one she had belatedly taken beyond the scriptures to the point he may as well be.
Her pale god had wide, damp eyes. Kneeling before her, it was if he had seen her, truly seen her, for the first time.
How apt.
He remembered to breathe as her fingers stilled, drifting away from the keys as she cracked her wrists one after another, gaze drifting back to the Engineer with a grin that was far more pleased than smug. He returned it with something vastly more complex – the same awe as before, but almost haunted, woven amongst what could only have been understanding.
She squeezed his shoulder with a broadening grin as she stood, taking a little too much pleasure in his frozen gawp.
Diverting past the food dispenser on her way to the couch, Shaw ordered another coffee with an extra espresso shot, heaped an overzealous teaspoon of sugar into it, and sought her seat out, stirring the powerful concoction the whole way across the room. She noted that Za'il had barely shaken himself from his stupor, having only dragged himself back to his feet as she sat down, and seemed to prefer to linger by the piano in catatonic awe. Part of her wondered if he'd finally blown a headgasket after her little performance.
A press of a button had the holographic projection of the lifeboat shimmering back into existence with a faint fizz. To no surprise, nothing had changed since the last time she viewed it; the port side of the vessel remained several flavours of ruined. She sipped at her coffee as she ran through her list of dead-ends once more, trying to find a way to refloat either vessel by any means, scratching around at the depths of her mind to find options that hadn't yet been explored. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to accept that they'd done all they could.
She was preoccupied enough that she barely noticed Za'il finally find a seat on the opposite couch, barely acknowledging him as he poured himself a glass of water and threw it back in one go. The Engineer simply shook his head as he observed her, silently pondering the situation himself as she twisted and turned the holo to and fro, eventually reaching for an object somewhat larger but otherwise similar to the projector he'd brought on board and left sitting alongside hers.
The utter silence of the room made it all the more startling when his eyes grew wide out of nowhere, dropping the device in his hand as he bellowed something short, sharp and deafening enough that it left the glasses from here to the bar ringing. He descended into breathless, incoherent babble as Shaw recoiled as if burnt, instinctively huddling on the couch as the mighty Engineer stood abruptly and paced toward the window in three inhumanly broad strides.
Her ears rang long after the glasses had stilled; a voice like that could wake the dead. It made sense, she supposed, that his roar would be that much louder than a Human's, particularly in a quiet, confined space; his lung capacity and vocal chords alike must be significantly larger and more robust than her own, and she'd expected as much from the first time she heard him speak on the bridge of his own ship. Nevertheless, logic could not offset the overwhelming shot of adrenaline his sudden burst of unnecessarily loud activity had brought about, leaving her hands shaking.
Punctuating the end of his rant with his own name and emphasising it by slapping his forehead with an open palm as he stared out the window, awareness finally picked at his frustration as he turned toward the cowering Human on the couch. His eyes widened when he finally noticed her hunched, shaking poise despite the vague understanding in her eyes, frantically waving a large, white hand as he repeatedly murmured what she assumed to be an apology – she had heard it several times by now, and the context was similar to previous murmurings. Expelling a long breath, tailing off into a distant hint of exasperated laughter, he paced back toward the couch and sat down with another heavy breath as he shook his head.
Huge fingers snatched at a pen and dragged the pad back onto one thigh. Chewing his bottom lip for a moment, he glanced back and forth between the woman on the couch and the paper before him, finally shaking his head again in apparent disbelief and writing her a note.
I'm an idiot.
This is a military base. There will be other ships.
She couldn't help but mirror his expression once she'd translated, one hand entangled in her hair as she, too, shook her head and laughed. Knowing that would have saved them both a fair bit of anguish.
Before she could ask him where by way of awkwardly-scrawled foreign lexicons, he had pulled up a holographic projection of a different kind on his own tech; a map of the tunnels she had explored days earlier wove its way through thin air in beams of light, quickly etching well past what she had grown to recognise and into the depths of the towers they hadn't had a chance to touch. The underground network was huge; it struck her as pure, unadulterated luck that they'd landed where they had, explored where they had, and stumbled upon the one, single survivor of whatever had happened aboard a docked ship as quickly as they had. They could easily have explored from the other end for months without ever having found him.
It left her wondering whether they would have suffered an entirely different fate had they simply landed at the other end of the facility, exploring the tower at the far end rather than the one they'd started with.
A bright, white, pulsing dot toward the south end of the projection showed the location of the lifeboat as it sat, with the crashed Engineer ship looming between it and the bulk of the towers streaking to the north in a long, symmetrical line. Za'il almost immediately set about twisting the hologram about, pursing his lips in a thoughtful pout as his fingers traced an array of circular hoops ringing the outer edges of the network. Those, she presumed, would be the hangars throughout the base.
Pausing to grasp the object he'd thrown several minutes ago, the Engineer stood back up and held it in the direction of the towers as he stepped toward the window. Gradually, the detail in the map above the table fleshed out with blips of colour, bleeding and wisping into the outlines of unfamiliar vessels and pods, flooding the occasional room with light, and laying a small handful of pinpoints of green throughout the structure. It took more than a minute of patience before the process finally resolved, but once no more new detail came to light, Za'il finally returned to his seat and set the device aside.
Her initial impressed awe faded as she took note of the deep, troubled scowl opposite her, illuminated by the haze of light hanging over the table; a pair of index fingers and thumbs dragged apart as they pinched different sections of the map, rapidly zooming in on individual hangars and tracing their tunnels to the next. Most of them didn't capture his attention for long, even the ones containing ships with recognisably similar configurations to the one the Prometheus had deliberately crashed into. One, significantly smaller and rounder than the wreck in the canyon, earned more than its fair share of interest; alone at the furthest reaches of the fourth tower from the south, almost as far from the lifeboat as possible,it lacked any of the blips of dark blue that the other vessels had scattered through their interiors in sporadic smatterings. The path to it was also devoid of colour, unlike the tunnels further south that were speckled, if not bathed, in green.
The second ship that caught his eye was almost directly connected to the first via two tunnels that met at the north edge of the fourth tower. This one shared the same huge, horseshoe-shaped configuration as the crashed warship, and, like the smaller, rotund blob, lacked any colour. None of the blue blips, none of the green rings.
His scowl deepened. There was one, singular green-cyan blip in the tunnel leading away from the smaller vessel.
"What does this mean?" She raised an index finger to the blip in the tunnel. The fact that her question had caused him to jump was not lost on her.
Expelling a long sigh that vibrated his lips, his gaze froze on the pulsing pale point as his hands reached for the pad. Pressing the nib of the nearest pen against the paper, he proceeded to simply make a heavy dent in the page, unmoving and caught in thought. Eyes darting between the blip, the nib and the Human, he appeared completely lost for words.
Eventually he settled with tearing the messy page at the top free and exposing a new leaf, tossing the pad onto the table and leaning over it with an intently thoughtful expression on his face. The very tip of his pale tongue appeared at the corner of his lips as he traded lexicons for a series of arcs and lines, filling almost a quarter of the page with what was steadily evolving into less of a string of foreign words, as she'd come to expect, and into more of a drawing.
When he turned the page on its axis and pushed the pad toward her, she was struck by just how much detail he'd crammed into the space. He was no artist, but he was clearly handy enough with a pen that she could readily make out the shape of something vaguely humanoid – or at least bipedal. The head of the drawing was absolutely bizarre, eyeless where its face ought to have been and ending, rearward, in an excessively long, tooth-like point. The thing's back was peppered with similar triangular spines, and the rest of it appeared almost insectoid with its armour-like, all claws and bones and ribs and sinew.
Its featureless face was a sight to behold, to the point she wondered if this was all artistic license. He had gone to the trouble of filling the horror's mouth with bizarre, terrifying teeth. Was he trying to make a point?
Her eyes darted between the page and the Engineer; hardly joking, his expression was grim. Pinched. Nervous. Her offspring flashed to mind. Horrifyingly, he was deadly serious.
"The Hell is this thing?" She whispered, holding up a straightened hand parallel to the floor. Raising and powering it as she prodded the drawing with her other hand, she hoped he would elaborate on the size of whatever the thing was.
Having regarded her for a brief moment as the cogs turned, he gently took the pad back and etched a second figure, recognisably Humanoid, followed by a third, far smaller creature. The latter lacked the second's robust torso and featured subtle curves instead, and...Medusa-like ripples emanating from its head. The faceless additions lost every inch of mystery the moment he returned the drawings to her; the taller of the two had the vague outlines of an Engineer in something approximating a biosuit, a head shorter than the monstrosity on the right-most side of the page. The figure to its left, despite the clumsy and amusingly inaccurate attempt at replicating hair, was clearly intended to be her, barely standing as tall as the centre figure's waist.
She drew a long breath. Nausea tugged at her innards. The alien creature was huge.
Reaching up as Shaw stared, her jaw agog, Za'il continued exploring the network of hallways and hangars glowing in white. Much to his very obvious disappointment, the majority of the tunnels either led to empty hangars, ships dotted in blue, or were festooned with a haze of lime green; no amount of sliding, pinching and darting about seemed to reveal alternatives. Even with the enormity of the base, their options were apparently severely limited.
Finally tearing her eyes from the abomination with a visceral shudder, Shaw caught the Engineer's gaze again as she raised a hand toward one of the dark blue blips at the forward section of the ship closest to her. "I'm not sure if I want to know now, but what do the blue dots mean?"
This one, apparently, he could translate. At the bottom of the page, he penned a few lexicons – the latter he eventually scrubbed out with hurried strokes, replacing it with two somewhat more familiar-looking characters, and turned it back to her.
Died in deep sleep.
That made sense, she supposed. Taking the liberty of zooming the projection back out with fumbling hands, mind fighting them as they sought to use the Prometheus' user interface style, her eyes traced the hangars lining the perimeter eventually finding the crashed ship outside. Three blue blips sat toward the forward section. She presumed they were not Ford, Jackson and Weyland, but rather, the corpses of his less lucky crewmates..
Blue dots littered all but three other vessels, the third sitting to the west of the second tower, barricaded by a tunnel choking on fluorescent green. She raised a hesitant finger to the mess, her trepidation mirroring the Engineer's.
Taking back the pad, Za'il pressed his lips thin as he began sketching a fourth figure that consumed much of the space remaining at the top of the page. This illustration immediately appeared less clear, his hand hesitating over details and scrubbing to correct them as he debated just how they should be. Still, whatever he was drawing was heavily detailed regardless. He paused on several occasions to suck in a breath, apparently holding it for extended periods. This was clearly a task he was not enjoying.
The figure he finally decided upon clearly had no translation that would make any sense to her innocent, Human ear; larger, heavier, more deadly than the pointed creature on the right, this monster exuded death even in rough, awkward pen strokes. Its whiplash tail and bulbous, cylindrical head were so significantly alien she found her mind's eye coming up blank for what it might look like in person, aside from terrifying.
Shaw regarded the illustrations with frozen horror at length, responding only when she felt the Engineer's gaze burning at her skin. Hand grasping at the tablet, she snatched a pen with the other and scratched a question in a free space well below the horrifying drawings.
Can we sneak past this one? She handed the pad back, poking an index finger at the right-most, pointier-looking creature.
He shook his head, penning a response.
No, it will try to kill us on sight. We will have to strike first.
She swallowed, flicking through the dictionary as she pressed the nib to paper again.
Is there any other way around?
No, he scratched. The hangars are isolated.
Chewing on a lip as her knee bounced, Elizabeth grasped at any idea that came to mind, rolling the hologram back and forth before her as she entertained every silly thought that surfaced. Each option faded to obscurity, however, as she realised there was a very long way indeed to even get there in the first place. She filled more empty space with another question.
How do we get to the first hangar?
"Uh," he Engineer mused aloud before expelling a heavy sigh. With nothing forthcoming, he eventually scrawled a hasty response with one hand as he gripped his head with the other.
Good question.
Frankly, she was unsure she even had the physical prowess for any of what was required here; she could barely fend off a foot-long raging octopus, let alone a ten-foot tall bipedal nightmare exuding certain doom. The walk alone would probably kill her, well before she even got to see what the monstrosity looked like in the flesh. The hangars were damn near impossible to reach from what she understood, having traipsed through kilometres of tunnels to stumble upon the one they'd found Za'il in, and that was by far the closest to the lifeboat. These were at the opposite end of the base, and the tunnels leading to them were foaming with green haze that she could only imagine were many, many examples of the leftmost monstrosity he had sketched for her benefit. In fact, even being near one of the hangars opening up had damn-near killed her–
Suddenly inspired, she scribbled the most horrifically asymmetrical circle known to Man, complete with the jagged, curved teeth of a half-opened hangar. He squinted at the awkwardly-shaped maw as she added two tiny stick figures on one of the teeth, one twice the height of the other, finishing with a hooped arrow pointing from their heads to the abyss at the centre of the circle before handing the sketch back to Za'il.
Glancing between the mess on the page and its creator several times, the Engineer appeared to consider the logistics of it all before declaring something a fair bit louder than he really needed to, punctuating it with an impressed laugh and reaching across the table, through the hologram, to give her upper arm an enthusiastic clap that jolted her from her perch on the couch. She couldn't help but mirror his broad grin regardless, warmed by how much it lit up his pale features. She was patently aware of the fact it was the first grin she had seen on him. Not so secretly, she hoped to see many more.
Scribbling enthusiastically across the rapidly-filling page in a fresh spot, Za'il penned a question and slipped the pad back onto her knees expectantly.
Do you have weapons and… The last word proved to be a mystery after scrolling from top to bottom a couple of times.
He slipped his thumb beneath the heaviest, metallic section of his biosuit, tapping at it with an opposing fingernail. At her best guess, she presumed, in context, he was asking if she had armour. Of course, she had nothing of a sort, and shook her head.
Sizing her up briefly, he exhaled and dragged himself to his feet as he motioned for her to follow. Heading straight for the crates by the airlock, he slipped the lid off the one closest to the main room and knelt as he began rustling through its contents, returning his gaze to her a handful of times as she stood, arms folded across her chest, silently observing him in his refreshing, albeit overwhelming renewed enthusiasm.
Lips quirked to the side, he dragged a small biosuit from the bottom of the box and held it alongside her by the shoulders. Without question it would drown her, its knees dragging by her ankles. An amused snort escaped him, the observation not lost on him either. Murmuring something off-handedly in his own tongue, he cast the suit back into the crate and resumed digging.
Several dark, sectioned individual pieces of gear hit the ground as he upended them from the box one after another; after a little more searching, he turned to fetch a vaguely triangular, torso-shaped group of metallic segments that flexed against each other as they moved, articulating about a set of rib-like bones that gave the whole item form. With the aid of a small handheld device, the outermost segments unclipped themselves and clattered to the deck with deep, resounding clanks. Having started off vastly too small to fit him anywhere, the article quickly became ludicrously tiny when he held it up for inspection.
After a moment of quiet observation, the Engineer reached an arm out and tugged gently at the thick, baggy jacket obscuring the upper half of her before holding up the modified chestpiece demonstratively. Of course. If he's going to modify something to fit me, he's going to need it to be at least somewhat accurate. A deep red crept across her cheeks, leaving them burning as she unzipped the jacket and let it drop to the floor; she was thankful that today, of all days, she'd chosen to wear a singlet underneath. Alien or not, the last thing she had on her mind was standing around in her underwear in front of strange men.
The Engineer froze in place as he raised the armour to her, eyes transfixed on the blotchy, purple, finger-shaped bruises encircling both her biceps. Following his gawp, he realised she'd all but forgotten about them; he, on the other hand, must have only just realised how much stronger than her she was.
Expression obviously mortified, he raised a hand to one of the bruises, fingers lingering an inch from her tarnished flesh as the gears in his head ground to a shuddering halt. The bruises aligned perfectly with the digits he held before them, the dim light above casting shadows in their image in the exact position of the mottled, purple mess.
Drawing a breath as words refused to form, he finally expelled a heavy sigh and whispered, several times, words that she had come to recognise as an apology. Not that they were necessary; his eyes spoke them without needing translation. It twisted at her gut. They widened as she grasped at the hand hovering before her, uncomprehending as she offered a gentle smile. "It's fine."
His huge fingers felt like jelly against her grip, limp and yielding. His eyes refused to meet hers. She insisted. "Hey, it's fine. I know you didn't mean to hurt me."
She led the flaccid hand back to the armour still grasped in his other hand, watching with the most compassionate expression she could muster as he focused intently on the item, swallowing hard. He apologised again, offering a weak smile that was more of a grimace.
Getting the armour over her head was simple enough, even if the convolutions of the panels insisted in getting stuck in her hair and pinching it as they moved. Fitting it properly also seemed straightforward, with more sections being shed and rejoined as the chestplate was altered to conform to her body. His suddenly nervous, kid-glove handling of her quickly irritated her, though, and after painfully slow, apprehensive progress, she let out an annoyed grunt that he apparently chose to interpret as impatience. Luckily, the process was all but complete; with the armour trimmed to fit her almost perfectly and reassembled with several other components, he snapped it open along the front seam and released her from its confines.
Quickly tiring of his guilt-wracked, worried expression, she padded across the floor the moment she was free and snatched the pad, tablet and nearest pen from the table. Pacing back over to him as he pointedly fiddled with several other pieces of equipment, she crouched against the crate and assembled a message as hurriedly as she could.
I'm fine. Let's move forward. What's next?
He offered a solemn nod after observing her words for an uncharacteristically long moment, whispering one last apology before timidly extracting the pen from her grasp and filling the last of the open space on the page.
Let's see if we can get this ship off the ground. It's better than walking.
She couldn't help but grin, giving his shoulder a firm tap with one hand. "That's more like it!"
Much to her relief, he grinned in kind. She'd have tapped him across the face if he'd given her even one more infernal apology.
Author's Note:
Two in one weekend, lucky you guys. Please don't expect such rabid updates for a wee while yet. Life has been swamping the living crap out of me of late, and this sudden spurt of activity is just to make up for nearly two weeks of inactivity.
There are four songs Elizabeth plays in this chapter. They can be anything you like, anything that suits the description, but if you're curious as to what the inspirations are, here they are in order. Because of FF's draconian editing of links, I'm going to post the YT codes...just replace the code in a video you already have open.
P2K7D-uMH2g
tqDyxqHXoy8
7OedmOUsRTc
qwc-PBgh8-w
I'm a fandom n00b of the highest order, and a catastrophic chicken, so I'm having to resort to rather intense research so I can get my morphology even remotely accurate.
Also worth noting I'm almost always gunning for the upper estimates of creature size, as is my preference with any given fandom. Seems to be little agreement on the size of the Engineers, with some taking the actor's height literally, and others using the drama of the clever camera angles. I want Za'il to stand toe-to-toe with my Enderman character (they meet, good LORD do they meet), and given J'shx is a significant lad at 9'5" (pretty close to Minecraft canon, at 2.9m), that pushes the Engineer into the 9ft bracket at minimum. Just, you know, to make Elizabeth feel reeeeeeallll small.
Final note. I'm somewhat active over on DA, and I'm slowly chipping away at one of two images that might become a cover for this story. Hunt down MiraiKazuya, and eventually JamesShale over there once I start posting finished stuff, if you're after eventual artwork.