The plan was going to fail.
Not only that, but the plan was going to fail embarrassingly. Possibly fatally. It was the sort of plan, Phil realised, that should only have been pulled off the drawing board to be laughed at and forgotten. It was a plan that should only be enacted as a quality jape, taken to the board directors of madcapery to be lauded with rapturous applause before being shoved ceremoniously in the bin. But no, here they were, standing on the doorstep of ignoramus failure, ringing the doorbell wearing the silliest hats they could find, waving a banner which proclaimed in large, holographic text 'WE ARE DUMB AND BAD AT PLANNING'.
These revelations all came to Phil a shade too late; they were all crowded in the pool of light before the Sundae residence and footsteps were sounding from inside. The handle was turning.
"This is gonna be good," murmured Zach in an undertone, the star at the centre of a solar system of moths.
Smiley's mother opened the door. On the step, bold as tarnished brass, stood her daughter, her daughter's friends, and three bloody strangers. Somewhere in the distance, a clock rang midnight.
Now, it was not altogether uncommon for Smiley to return to her mother's from time to time, and it wasn't unheard of for her friends to accompany her. It wasn't even that strange for them to turn up late at night without warning—the city being what it was, it was oftentimes safer to crash there after a night out than it would be for everyone to straggle their disparate ways home. In short, none of this was unusual.
Except the air tonight smelled of boiling tin, and there was alien blood streaked across her chest, and her shoulders ached from dragging an unconscious adult for several blocks. Like an inexperienced actor in a quickly improvised scene, Smiley stood in the limelight and tried to remember her practiced lines.
As the mind will always manage in a delicate situation, hers drew a blank.
Smiley stared at her mother, who was peering at the scene around her with an air of increasing wariness. The resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny, and she had always rather liked the certainty of knowing her face would one day resemble the one before her. Now, however, standing before her own, older countenance, feeling the uncertainty of her own, black eyes boring in to her, that familiarity made her feel smaller. It was as though she were withering before a phantasm of judgment from some future version of herself.
"Smiley?"
In a spur of the moment decision, Smiley decided that, of all the possible ways to explain the situation to her mother, the best course of action was to avoid it all together. With that incredibly illogical thought bouncing in her frazzled brain and flare born in the heat of the moment, Smiley gave her perplexed mother the widest smile she could manage. It looked a little psychotic.
"Hi mum! Lovely night, isn't it?"
Even before the crash, the night had been average at best. Now, the only thing remarkable about it was its sudden ugliness. The fumes of the crashed spaceship had painted the attractive navy of the sky with liberal streaks of grey and black which less swirled, as smoke is expected to do, and more splattered like a thick, cloying ink. It was about as attractive as a biro moustache scribbled on the Mona Lisa. Mrs Sundae blinked in the very deliberate manner of someone who is wondering, in the politest possible fashion, what the hell is going on.
"Hello sweetheart." She leaned out of the door, casting an appraising eye over her daughters friends and the ragged strangers they were carrying. "Smiley darling, you know I'm always happy to see you but... what is this?"
The older woman sounded patently baffled and, had he not been as tired and fed up as he was, Phil might have felt sorry for her. As it was, he was couldn't help but be exasperated by another delay; Viz was heavier than his build would suggest and his motivation for keeping the mad dictator off the ground was dwindling. As surreptitiously as he could manage (which wasn't very, standing, as he was, in the spill of light from the open door) Phil lowered Viz to the ground. The alien hit the top step with a toneless thud but remained completely catatonic. Phil whistled his innocence.
Looks were not the only commonality shared between Smiley and her mother; nobody could call the old woman foolish. She was a small, bird-like figure—dexterous and quick—and the grey hairs at her temples and the pinched marks on the bridge of her nose lent her a permanent affectation of shrewdness. Certainly, she knew well enough to know when her daughter was attempting to hide something—not that Smiley was making that deduction particularly hard. Her voice sweet with something stern and something protective, Mrs Sundae cut easily to the heart of the matter, neat as a surgeon with a scalpel.
"Who are your friends?"
Smiley blanched.
"You know them mum. Phil, Phred, and Zach, same as last time."
Her mother's smile was dry. She did indeed know them—had known them all since their shared childhoods. In many ways, she considered the miscellaneous three as bonus family. This was not, however, her question, as her dear daughter knew damn well.
"Your other friends, Smiley."
Smiley chanced a glance behind her, vaguely hoping the scene waiting for her had changed to something less incriminating. It Had Not; aliens aside, her friends were coated in soot and worryingly ambiguous grime. Without her permission, her eyes lingered on the limp shapes, her clever words sapping from her throat.
"They're... friends."
Mrs Sundae widened her eyes in comic surprise. Phil silently hoped she was a better doctor than she was an actor.
"Oh? I've never seen them."
"... They're from... out of town." Smiley gave a cheerful laugh that bordered on hysterical, an uncomfortable stock sound that did not belong in the scene at all. "We met quite a while ago, you see."
'When we were in Elementary, actually. They kidnapped us to see if Earth was worth obliterating. I thought we killed one of them. They probably hate us. Good times...'
"I see..." Mrs Sundae delivered in the slow, pensive tone of someone who does not, in fact, see.
Smiley took her third Very Deep Breath. Behind her, she could hear the scuffling of Phred and Phil trying to swat away Zach's small army of moths without tripping off the porch steps. It was the sort of mundane shenanigans that followed the little group everywhere and, for a moment, she tried to pretend it was a night no different from any other. Just another night out which ended in them at her mother's front door asking to be let inside. Then the taste of metal caught at the back of her mouth, a gulp of molten copper that coated her insides in an unhealthy iridescent sheen and dragged her roughly back to a present where she was to dredge up her mother's past as a surgeon to minister to enemies who had quite literally fallen out of the stars.
"So... here's the thing; they got a little... beat up—totally nothing weird! Like, it was a completely normal... mugging." 'Why is that my excuse? Is that really what I'm going with? They look like they were hit by a car. Multiple cars. And a bus.' "We...we were kinda hoping they could... stay with us... for the night..."
With moth-wing frailty, the end of the request gave out under its own inherent ridiculousness and Smiley fell silent. There was a gulf between her and the nice, normal, real world her mother inhabited, and she could feel the languid stretch of it, the faux-tired yawn as years of watchful pretence fell away.
'Here are the things I never told you about, my ravens home to roost,' she thought self-pityingly. 'Why couldn't it have been something normal like shoplifting?'
Silence leant back and kicked off its shoes, and nobody said a word—aside from the unutterable truth, there was very little else to say.
Squinting slightly to fully appreciate the gallery of weary, worried faces presented to her, Mrs Sundae began a careful process of consideration:
First and foremost was the issue of the strangers; they didn't look dangerous—they looked dead. Having said that—to address the technicolor elephant in the room—there was obviously something... off about them. The minor fact that two of them had four arms, for example, or the small matter of one of them being blue.
Second was the recent commotion, the meteorite that had frenzied every news outlet with a voice. Sirens continued their hollow-throated wails in the distance, not far enough away to be completely uninvolved in whatever this odd development was. Mrs Sundae was far from being a fool and her daughter's lies were as gossamer is to scissors. 'Out of town, indeed.' It was as colourfully clear as a stained window that these were not human strangers.
Were it offered to her by any other, she would have dismissed the situation with a blithe flick of her head and a door locked in triplicate; she was not unfeeling, nor was she without a sense of charity or compassion, but aliens is a very reasonable place for a person to draw The Line.
But this wasn't a stranger, this was her daughter asking. Smiley. And perhaps she was being asked to leap blind in to some unidentifiable trench, but the hand stretching from those dangerous depths was one created to fit in hers, one she had held since its infancy, and she could not leave it unanswered.
"Smiley, are you in trouble?"
All the deep breaths were released in a single sigh, and Smiley, much deflated, looked at her mother with defeated eyes. She still couldn't think of anything else to say or a better way to plead their situation without announcing the full, bewildering impossibility of it right there on the doorstep, but as she met her own, black eyes, staring back at her with worry, she realised she didn't need to.
"Sort of..." Her voice had lost its mad vibrancy, the late hour finally exerting its ponderous weight. "it's hard to explain, mum."
Well, that decided it. Had it ever really been a choice? All the good sense and reason in the world seems very trite in the face of one's child. This is a fact as immutable as it is unfortunate.
Coming to her inevitable decision more swiftly than she would have liked and certainly more swiftly than was advisable under the circumstances, Mrs Sundae stepped out of the doorway and opened up her home.
"I need to know who they are," she stipulated, frowning at the figures on the floor. "And I need to know why they're here." Somehow, without any actual emphasis, the word 'here' had stretched to encompass both the general suburb and the wider world beyond. Smiley felt her throat tighten with gratitude and a convulsive urge to embrace the woman before her.
"... Yes mum. I'll explain. Everything."
With the feeling they they had been committed to some indelible, invisible contract, the group dragged into the house (in the cases of the aliens, this was literal.)
Now, the idea to take the aliens to Smiley's was not some simple whim. Originally, when they had anticipated three mostly functional hellions, they had planned to coax them back to Phil's for parley and chips, but the unprecedented mangling had rather scuppered those designs. Collectively, the total medical knowledge shared by the group amounted to a decently sensible awareness of how to apply plasters, and that wasn't going to cut it this time. Mrs Sundae, however, had a solid chance of knowing what to do; in her youth, the woman had been an army doctor who worked in the field hospitals in Europe. A vet might have been even better for dealing with non-human biology, but Phred's cousin was something of a blabber mouth.
It was also somewhere out of the way, a nondescript neighbourhood of a reasonably respectable community where the most interesting thing that happened, on a general basis, was a fight between tomcats, or the bin-man tripping over his trade. All in all, it was the last place you would expect to find alien terrorists. It was the last place you would expect to find anything.
Entering the living room, Phil was struck by the supreme normalcy of the place. Outside, there was a wrecked, alien ship and federal scientists running amok. In here there was a fake Persian rug, beige walls, and a multifaceted lamp with one dead bulb. They heaved the disorder of the evening in to the room with them and still the normalcy persisted, unaffected, their interruption as reprehensible and yet ultimately ineffectual as a bad jazz band in a cathedral.
With the same surprisingly genuine consideration with which she'd dragged him through the streets, Smiley tried to lie Diz across the sofa. The alien seemed to seize up, hissing in pain but still refused to wake. Smiley flinched guiltily and stepped away as if burned. Following suit, Phil shrugged Viz to the side once more, lying him untidily across his lieutenant. Quiz completed the awkward lattice of unconscious bodies. All three were still, entirely still.
Stood grimly in the cheerfully lit living room, splattered with greyish fluid and reeking of smoke, chemicals, and the thick mulch that gathered in the corners of the alleyways, the four humans surveyed their bounty. Improved lighting did the aliens no favours and finally being able to put a visual to the anonymous bits of 'slimy', 'wet', and 'squirming' his fingers had discovered in the dark was making Phil feel rather sick.
Smiley's mother bustled in after them, her face still sternly set, cast an appraising glance over the room and somehow seemed to address everyone at once with the commanding air of a schoolmistress. If the sight disturbed her or gave her any more pause than it had initially, she gave no sign.
"Names. I need their names."
Phil almost sighed in relief. That question, at least, was easy to answer—it was the whys and the how's and the where-for-afters that he was hoping to avoid. After a brief conference of glances, during which he was nominated speaker, he gave a concise summary that offered as few specifics as could be managed.
"The red one's called Viz—he's kind of the leader. Umm... he's kinda mean, kinda snarky. That one's Diz, he's—"
Apparently unable to resist, Zach helpfully cut in:
"A lying, treacherous arsehole."
Phil waved a hand, sweeping the statements to one side but not bothering to deny it. There were few better ways to describe Diz.
"He's the second in command, from what I know. Both of them might be kinda bitchy and... agitated if—when—they wake up. Just... just call me; I'll handle them."
Thoroughly unimpressed, Mrs Sundae looked deliberately from the slumbering pile of burn tissue to the boy making bold claims, and raised a slightly incredulous eyebrow. Belatedly, Phil realised it was a little presumptuous to assume she couldn't look after herself in the face of three almost-corpses, be they otherworldly, world-conquering corpses or otherwise. Regardless, he felt better for having made the offer.
"... Right." Mrs Sundae jabbed a sharp finger at the last, unconscious lump. "And that is?"
"Quiz. We like Quiz." Thankfully, she seemed to accept that as fact so Phil didn't have to elaborate; besides irritating his co-workers, he wasn't entirely sure what Quiz actually did.
There was a little more poking, a few more questions. Then, with the manner of someone chivvying their brood, she chased them off to bed. It was a little humiliating, a little humbling, and they would have ribbed each other about it for hours had they not been rather tired.
And that's how Phil Eggtree and his assorted cronies ended up wearing borrowed pyjamas, sat on a half inflated air-mattress in Smiley's mother's house at one o'clock in the morning, discussing possible ways for aliens to conquer the world and impossible ways to retaliate.
"So what do we do with them?" Phred asked. It was the fourth time one of them had posed that question.
"Gear up for the next round of Space Invaders IRL," Zach suggested, eyes glassy with tiredness. He pulled idly at a loose thread in the stripy sleep shirt he'd been given. "'Earth Goes Boom 2: Electric Boogaloo."
This was the fourth time the question had been answered in a chronically unserious fashion. Vigour and sense, having been kept up too late, were seeping out of the room; Phil was beginning to feel they might all pass out before reaching a resolution.
"Cut the jokes Zach," he mumbled, massaging his eyelids until red and purple stars burst inside his eyeballs. "We're trying to actually plan things here."
With an immense sigh of lethargy and scorn, Zach turned his leaden, husky-blue stare to the ceiling for a moment before looking at them all again, playfulness gone. He spoke flatly, factually, as though they were all stupid for needing him to explain.
"Fine, you want it real? We're fucked. You think someone like Viz is gonna stop if you ask him pretty please? No; all we've done here is brought dangerous madmen in to Smiley's home."
Phred waved a grim hand, sprawled on his back with his legs perpendicular, feet propped on the door handle. "He's got a point. I mean, even Quiz took some convincing to give Vizion up. Viz and Diz actively want to continue the project. What can we do about that?"
Phil sighed. There was the problem underscoring every other issue: what can we do? They hadn't considered that. Now that the world was settling from its adrenaline fizz, he was realising there were a lot of things he hadn't considered.
"I don't know... Threaten to turn them in to the authorities, I guess." He shifted in the mattress dip, reaching out to brush his knuckles over Smiley's fingers. "Diz seemed pretty freaked out by being stuck in that facility—pretty sure the prospect of being vivisected by scientists would give him a pause."
"Oh yeah, oh that'll work." Zach put his hand to his face in a facsimile of a phone. "'Excuse me, emergency services? Hi, yeah, so we brought a bunch of crazy spacemen home and now the whole neighbourhood is incredibly dead. Can the cops come put them in time out? No it's not a prank. Yes I can hold.'"
Phred laughed; without looking, he tried to offer Zach a high-five and succeeded in slapping the other boy in the stomach.
"I now desperately want someone to give Viz the riot hose." With a sigh, Phred folded the arm back beneath his head. "I'd still say it's the best long term solution we have."
"No point in long term when short term is coming for our asses."
One second. Two... Three...
"So what are we gonna do?"
Up to this point, Smiley had been silent, but at this fifth repetition of the age old question, she gave a shivery little sigh. With a creaking of springs, she heaved herself upright on her bed and, with a lightly shaking hand, reached under the frame. There was an air about her now, of tearful determination, as though she were preparing to do something awful but utterly necessary; the delirious jocularity bled from the air as she pulled out a shoebox and threw it gently down on to the carpet. The thing inside made a leaden, metallic chuckle.
Phil flipped the lid off and immediately felt a liquid, electric shudder course down his spine. Phred flinched back as though electrocuted, falling off the mattress. Zack uttered a hushed curse, both prayer and condemnation.
Lying in the box with a coy, sneering strength was a well-worn revolver, the wooden grip smooth and polished, the barrel greased and glimmering. In the small apertures of that barrel, Phil could see the confident gleam of six, silver bullets. All at once the room felt too hot, too cold, too large, and suffocatingly cramped; it was as though the massive contradiction of someone as mild as Smiley owning a weapon was attempting to cram itself into that one space.
"Smiley," Phil said slowly, his voice so steady it came out as guarded, almost irritated. "Why do you have that?"
Smiley didn't look at any of them; she was staring solemnly in to the box. Her lips wobbled, but when she spoke, her voice was unwaveringly firm and she was stone-faced when she finally did turn to look each of them in the eye.
"It was dad's." The airless atmosphere tightened a little further; Smiley never spoke about her father, a dead paratrooper she had never met. The invocation of him now cranked the severity of their situation to an unbearable degree. "I found it under the stairs—I think it's for burglars. Mum doesn't know I have it."
"... But why?"
"In case they make trouble." Very tenderly, she reached out and ran a finger over the metal shape, tracing it the way a lover would trace a photograph, her face doleful and bitterly resolute. "I don't want anyone to get hurt this time around."
They looked at the gun and it, with dreadful arrogance, looked back. It was the severity of their situation manifested, without any varnish or nicety to disguise it's ugly edges or awful potential. Slowly, carefully, Phil placed the lid back on the box.
"Look... I think we're all getting ahead of ourselves. This isn't going to go horribly wrong... at least not right away. What were aren't going to do is panic. We beat these guys before; doing it again will be easy." His voice, though not resonant with certainly, was firm enough to convey some confidence in his words. Their history with the aliens stood behind him like a shadow, not reassuring but a solid reminder that not everything was yet lost.
"Sure," Phred whispered.
"Yeah," Zach nodded, sarcasm muted if not gone entirely. "These punks couldn't handle us in Primary. I'd like to see 'em try now."
Silently, Smiley tucked the shoebox back under her bed and lay back down. The look on her face was that of someone very far away from her body and she stared in to the ceiling as though the plaster had thinned in to translucence to let her see the equations in the stars. As he lay down, Phil imagined that he could feel the cold eye of the muzzle trained on them, like a pin-prick pupil watching as they slept. Phred's muffled voice spoke up in the dark, apprehension burnt there in black.
"Easy, huh?"
The night passed in contemplative silence. Nobody got much sleep.
Downstairs in the dark living room, Ada Sundae surveyed her surprise patients. She had drawn the curtains to avoid prying eyes and had switched off the downstairs lights to avoid drawing attention to the house. Normal houses had their lights off at this hour, and she wanted more than anything to seem normal. Outside, faintly, she could still hear the warbling drift of sirens and speeding cars. From the sound of it, there were even more now than the last time she bothered to listen, like carrion birds flocking to a corpse. Every breath tasted of verdigris and river water, and she knew instinctively that it was the scent of blood, despite the fact that no earthly creature had blood that smelled that way.
Under close inspection, it became very clear that, had the strangers been human, they all would have been dead. Perhaps they were—perhaps the shallow rise and fall of their chests was not the result of breathing but the failing convulsions of some unknown organ. How would she know? She attempted to take an average of their pulses but found no steady beat, only veins flinching against her fingers in strange, liquid ripples. All the little signifiers she could have relied upon were gone, plunging her headlong in to the dark. The exposed meat and muscle inside them was the colour of bruised orchids. Her hands were quickly coated in a fine, sticky film of that strangely scented blood and it was cold, as though it came from something already dead. That alone was enough to reignite the arthritically nervous twitch of her fingers.
'Focus. Calm down. Assess and prioritise.'
There was once a time when she could do this without thought, she remembered. A lifetime ago, in memories baked hard under burning sun, she had strode about a dilapidated camp, plucked bullets from bodies, flooded veins with morphine, and flirted shamelessly with blood flecking her face. Strange how much the years can take away, All the easy, little things, so reliable, so integral, falling out of your proverbial pockets like loose change and lint.
She spent a little time making immediate fixes to whatever seemed sufficiently urgent (what would have been deemed urgent on a human patient) before sitting back and assessing the tools at her disposal.
Courtesy of her experience and a certain amount of paranoia, Ada's first aid kit was extensive, full of everything one could find in a pharmacy and many things not offered commercially—surgical masks, non-latex gloves, absorbable sutures, medical clamps, and more medications than it seemed advisable for one person to have. She retrieved it from its place on the bottom shelf in her office down the hall, it's weight and solidity as grounding as it was frightening. In that same office sat an angle poise lamp that had potential to substitute for a surgical light, so she grabbed that too.
It was likely unwise to conduct procedures in a living room, she decided eventually. Lacking a bathtub, the linoleum floor of the kitchen was her next best candidate for a temporary surgical suite if she would be willing to clean it quickly with bleach. As its windows faced the back of the house, looking out only in to her own garden, she would also get away with having the lights on.
Moving them was not itself a difficult task, but doing it delicately took some struggling, their long, weirdly slender limbs antagonistic and discordant as they dragged along the carpet and caught on the skirting board. None of her impromptu patients so much as stirred as she worked, and perhaps that was for the best. She had no idea what she would say to them if they woke: 'what are you?' rather than 'who are you?' would likely be first from her lips, followed closely by an endless cavalcade of 'is this supposed to do that?'
Finally her makeshift set up was complete, the scent of strange blood replaced by an astringent, lemony Clean, and she had exhausted her supply of delays. Ada felt her clinical demeanour fell back in place, as though it had never left, a worn pair of boots, broken in and intimately familiar. The slight but ever-present quivers of her fingers stilled.
The first patient to fall beneath the now-steady knife was the green one. There was something slightly curious about the figure's sides. In the places where a second arm should have sat, the naked sides of his torso were thick with scrawls of scar. Feeling for a chest injury, she pressed delicately in to his ribs (or where his ribs should be) and found things her fingers didn't understand. It didn't feel entirely organic, but she had no frame of reference to assure her one way or another.
A little exploration through a cut in his chest revealed it to be a material she didn't recognise grafted in to the skeletal structure, very clearly old and deliberately done, half healed in to the bone. It wasn't anything she had to concern herself with or remove.
This established, she turned her attention to the wound in his stomach, full of glass and metal like teeth in a predatory mouth. 'No time like the present.'
Fire from the gas hob sterilised the tools, and the savoury reek of burned blood soon joined the verdigris and bleach. Each shard clinked as Ada deposited it in the pyrex bowl she had designated for foreign objects and for a while all sound shrunk to just that; the musical sound of glass on glass, the small, snappish sound of the tweezers, and the labouring of the lungs she could faintly see nestled in the cut-open chest. Then—
"Wow, that is horrifying." In a gesture almost violent, Ada's head snapped up; Phil Eggtree stood in the doorway looking, as most people do, a little soft and comical in his borrowed pyjamas. He raised his hands placatingly, but his eyes remained transfixed on the body. "Sorry."
"Oh good." After coaxing the last shard free, Ada switched to unpacking a box of sterile, catgut stitches. "You can be my nurse."
Phil blinked. In the absolute, night-dark quiet, she could hear the wet click of his eyelids meeting.
"I don't suppose I can get away with just grabbing some water?" His voice was slightly weak, but he was already casting about for a place to put down his glass. He scrubbed his arms with soap and antiseptic up to the elbow without instruction or complaint.
"No—I need a second set of hands for this mess." Ada threw a packet of sterile gloves at the boy, which he caught with a slightly resigned expression. "And anyway, I wanted to talk to you. I know you had a hand in this."
Looking slightly affronted (an expression impressively conveyed around the mask), Phil gave her a performative 'who, me?' gesture that might have been more convincing in literally any other circumstance.
"Whoa, what makes you think this is my doing?"
"Because it always is, Phil." 'And you just told me, you ridiculous boy.' "You're never not in the middle of things, particularly when it's the four of you. You're their ringleader—now I've been roped in to the circus and I think I deserve to know what act we're on."
"Fair enough." He paused, watching as she ran the length of a long, curved needle through a blue flame. "Just to warn you, it will not make sense."
"That's fine. Pinch these edges closed—harder, there you go."
Phil wasn't wrong; the explanation, told in between instances of Ada guiding his hands, did not make a single, solitary lick of sense. But as unlikely a tale as it was, she didn't think he was lying; wrist deep in a man's split open torso, the boy was as green as his favourite hoodie and she doubted he had the capacity for such elaborate dishonesty. There were a few details she could feel being left on a mental cutting room floor, but they could be chased up later, at a more opportune, less grisly time. Several times he paused, and she couldn't always tell if it was because he was hurriedly filling in some gap in his tale of if he were trying to calm his errant nerves.
Still, Phil was doing very well for a novice, and she had the distinct impression that having to focus on speaking was one of the few things keeping him from some violent rejection of a dinner hours past.
The smell was the worst thing—thick, warm, and damp, the gamey reek of something living mixed with the memories of rotting copper wishes lying at the bottom of a well.
"If you vomit in my incisions I will be deeply unimpressed."
"Doing my best here, doctor." Obediently, he let her move his hand to clamp down on a squiggle of vein buried in a jagged slash of muscle so she could stitch it back to the torn end nestled under some sort of organ. "Oh god, oh god, that is... that is a texture that I can experience... ohhh this is the worst. Fuck, it's moving. You better not just die after all this, Diz, I swear to god."
In that fashion, they progressed from wound to wound, bone to bone. Eventually the story was over and 'Diz' was as stable as she could manage without medications. Ada gave Phil a minute to breathe as she reshuffled the bodies beneath the lamp, deliberately turning her back in dismissal to let him sneak out if he felt like it. When she turned around, however, he was still standing there waiting and, with a slightly nauseous set of finger guns, he rejoined her to work on the red alien where they were met with much of the same. More torn flesh, more evidence of incredible violence (both past and present), more thick, black blood.
Phil kept up a constant gabble as they worked, desperate to distract himself from the sights and sensations of alien viscera. In the face of the silent strangers, with their inexplicable, chill anatomy, he was reassuring to a degree that was almost necessary. Alone, Ada had the suspicion she would have started jumping at shadows and sirens; her charges were still breathing, but she felt as though she were standing in a dreamlike mortuary modelled on her own home.
Blood was dribbling from beneath the alien's staring glasses. Any attempt to remove them was met with stiff resistance until she found the catch that latched them onto the side of his face, at which point they fell away easily. Beneath lay an open black eye, vacant and peppered with dust, and an empty socket crammed with varied pieces of unidentifiable tech, with a long, trailing wire like an artificial optic nerve. Ada set the apparatus gently to one side and carefully wiped the blood pouring from a cut just below the hollow eye.
"They're part of his head?!" Phil stepped away, gagging slightly, staring aghast at the motionless red figure. "Someone ought to tell him there's such a thing as taking A Look too seriously."
Ada ignored him in favour of feeling over the stranger's skull. No breakages—none that she could find at any rate. Carefully, she rinsed the open eye with a saline solution and slipped it closed.
"Actually, someone ought to tell Viz there's such a thing as going too far in general."
"Why did you go back for them?" Ada asked, in a rare moment of quiet; they were taking a short breather after the exertion of reorienting the broken leg. Phil was stood by the alien's head, staring down at him with a peculiar expression which said the boy didn't recognise him at all. "Why bring them to me at all?"
"I... I don't really have a good answer for that." Sighing, Phil scrubbed a hand over his face, promptly cursed, and went to fetch a fresh mask, set of gloves, and rewash his hands. "Look, I got tossed in the deep end with these guys showing up and I did what I did partly 'cause it was a cool space adventure, but also 'cause I didn't want anyone to die. And, unfortunately, that apparently includes bastard aliens." His eyes met hers, terribly frank. "I don't really want anyone to die if I can help it."
"How noble," she snarked. 'How human' she thought fondly.
"You know, you and Viz are probably gonna get on—that is exactly what he's gonna say about all this."
Finally they came to the blue alien, who seemed to have gotten off comparatively lightly—which is to say he only looked to have been put through a meat grinder once compared to the other two's twice.
"You like this one?"
"Think so." Phil had stopped complaining about the feeling of flesh under his nails, though he was still rather pale in the brightening light. "The other two were a lot more aggressive. I think I can work with Quiz and if I can convince him, he can maybe sway the other two. Or at least, he can sway Diz, who then influences Viz... we're going for dominos here."
He snapped the alien's lower arm back in to place with a resolution of manner which said this injury in particular had been bothering him.
'Convince him to what? Sway them to what?' She did not ask and he did not answer. Her tongue and mind felt like glue, lathered with tiredness. Later, she would ask him later; there would be time to figure this out later, when people weren't dying and her hands didn't smell of blood.
By the time it was over, the hour had gotten so late it had looped right back around to being early, and the little clock on the mantlepiece in the living room sweetly told out five chimes, the conductor to a growing chorus of birds. Exhausted, the pair surveyed their macabre works: the sink was full of bloodied tools and surrounded by basins filled to the brim with shrapnel and discarded gauze packing; despite valiant efforts, the false tiles of the linoleum were tacky underfoot with flaky blood; debrided flesh from a colourful variety of scorch wounds had been collected in a Tupperware and both parties were somewhat at a loss for how to discard it; cleanest of everything were the vials of medication, ultimately unused after Ada realised she had no way of estimating their effects. Before them lay three bodies, still breathing, looking somehow more peaceful in the predawn light.
Silently, Ada took Phil's filthy gloves and worn mask and set them aside in the pile of things to quietly dispose of. She helped him find a clean shirt from the linens cupboard, and gently wiped a smear of something dark and sticky from his forehead. This is as close as she would come to telling him 'well done' but she thought it many times.
"Back to bed," she told him mutedly, and he agreed with a languorous stretch that cracked every bone in his spine.
Phil paused at the stairs, spoke without turning; the rising sun cast him in honey pale gold.
"You know, for nearly a decade now, I've been waiting for this to happen. It's like a game I never finished and couldn't find again for the longest time; I've just been thinking about it for so long. Is it awful that I'm kinda stoked to finally have a chance at getting answers?"
Her tongue and mind felt like glue. 'Later, later, later...'
"... Goodnight Phil."
"Good morning Doctor."
Silently, Ada crossed over to the kitchenette's window, drew the blind and watched the world turn grey with daylight. Like a statue, a monument to a life long ago, she stood, once again, amongst the bodies of strangers, the scent of damning copper heavy in her nostrils and her mind thick with half-forgotten sounds. She hoped she had done the right thing. She hoped her daughter knew what she was doing. She hoped Phil's game was the sort a person could win.
Morning took those hopes and turned them hazy, the sun a white jellyfish drifting damply in to the wet paper sky, trailing its promises behind it.
