Trouble In Paradise; A Ben Mason/Falling Skies Fanfic

Chapter One; The Beginning

I'm losing my memory of how my life used to be before it all happened. How ‘normal’ everyday life played out, before, you know, the whole extraterrestrial invasion thing. Its been three years of surviving between now and the invasion. Now, i'm in a good place. But it took a Long time to get here. I'm here to tell you about the not so good days. The days it seemed like 'Trouble in Paradise'.

I'll start with the day that my life took a change for the worst. You may be expecting that i'm thinking of the invasion. Surprisingly, that was not the worst moment of my life. Because before the invasion, there was nothing good for me there, either. I had no friends, no hobbies, bad grades, my life sucked. The day that i'm thinking of is the day that those aliens, the skitters, that took over our world, killed my parents.

We had found an abandoned house. It had been six months since the invasion, I was only about 15, and terrified. We had been surviving off of supplies left behind in abandoned houses. I remember I had been complaining about how starving I was. Now, i'm just so used to being hungry all the time, that I don't know anything else. I remember that it was dark out, when we heard something outside. There was a rustling and that terrible  noise that I just know all too well. It was those goddamned skitters. Of course my first instinct was to run. I had always taught myself to run away from my problems. Even before the invasion I was always on the run. But running never works with skitters. You would never stand a chance against those six legged monsters. But we didn’t know that at the time. In the beginning, we didn’t know anything about them.

The noise kept getting louder, and it surrounded the house. We knew that there were more than one of them out there. I still remember seeing the pure terror and fear in my parents eyes. Dad whispered frantically for mom to hide me somewhere safe. Mom grabbed my hand and pulled me upstairs. She was trying her hardest to hold back her tears. “Okay, Riley.” She was trying her hardest to hide her fear. “Riley, I want you to hide, okay?” I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t understand that there was no single chance that we could have all gotten out of that situation alive. The skitters had tracked a human scent all over that house. My parents knew what they had to do, in order for me to survive. “Riley, promise me that no matter what you hear. You don’t come out of this closet, okay?” She whispered to me as she pushed me into the closet. I looked into her eyes, I had never seen her like that. I didn't want her to leave. We had encountered skitters before. Usually we would hide from them. One time, Dad and mom fought off two skitters, and got away with just a few scrapes. But there must have been 8, maybe 10 skitters surrounding us. “Just remember, your Dad and I will always love you.” She said to me, and kissed me on the forehead. I was truly terrified at that moment, I had seen movies like this, that never end well. “Plug your ears, and don’t come out for a long, long time. Do you understand?” I nodded, and she kissed me again. “We will always love you, Riley.” That was the last thing my mother ever said to me. Then she closed the closet door.

I don’t remember much after that. The closet felt cold and dark, even though it must have only been September. I lost track of time, crying and plugging my ears  as hard as I could, until they hurt, but I still heard, what must have been the last shriek of my parents. I must have sat in that closet for the entire night. In my subconscious I guess I knew what I was destined to find, when I walked down the stairs of that strange house. Nevertheless, it didn’t make it any easier to find my parents mangled bodies. I found my mother first, in the kitchen, her legs where indistinguishable through the gashes and terrible slashes. Somehow, just by the way her body was laying, I could tell she put up one hell of a fight. Both of them. I found my father on the porch. His throat was slashed. He still had a kitchen knife in his hand, that he had probably used against the skitters. I also found four dead skitters. Which, in a twisted way, made me feel pride for my parents.

All I remember next was running. For hours I ran, until I hit a thick forest. The sort of forest that might make an appearance in a horror movie, but I thought it could be good cover. And so I ran. I jumped over fallen trees, and swerved around rocks. Until I came across a sort of shelter, some trees had stacked on top of each other.There, I finally let my feelings come through. I cried for hours, until another day came.

The next few days, I came to the painful understanding that I would have to fend for myself. I wasn’t aloud to be a dependent quiet 13 year old girl anymore. I was alone. I had to be a soldier, in order to survive. In that realization, I had to build up a wall, to hide my feelings. And put on the mask of a fighter. I knew that if I didn’t eat I would become weak and eventually be hunted down and killed by skitters, the way my parents had been. But I couldn’t think about my parents, I didn’t have the luxury of mourning. I had to survive. 

Cold and hungry I hid for a month making short nighttime journeys to find food. I would always go back to that hideout under the trees. As the days dragged on, I got worse emotionally.  Stuffing my feelings farther and farther behind that protective wall.  Survival was costing me my mind. I was going insane. The repetition of always being afraid and paranoid, had gone on too long, I thought. I couldn’t keep looking over my shoulder another day. My mind was filled with terrible thoughts. I just wanted revenge against the aliens. But how could I ever avenge my parents if I just sat in this godforsaken forest day after day. How could I get revenge against a skitter, if I hadn’t seen one in a month! I was pathetic, sitting in my little hideout. Hiding from the world. I had no idea what to think, about anything. I didn’t even know how many humans were left in our country let alone the world. Was this the extinction of our species? What was the point of my existence  if I was just destined to be killed by skitters like my parents?  It would have been so easy for skitters to come along and rip my tiny body apart. Especially in that moment when I had no will left to fight.

I was so sick of feeling alone. I just wanted to be with my parents. I knew the only way I could ever be with them again, was to die. I decided to kill myself or more accurately let myself die.  I didn’t have the guts to cut my own throat or shoot myself even if I had a gun, but I could let nature kill me. With no water and food I knew it would only be a matter of days before I was with my family again.  I realized it was the only way to stop the pain.  So in that moment I let go of the will to live.  After two days without food and water, I suspected it wouldn’t be long now.  I was ready. In mid afternoon of the third day to weak to raise my head, I heard something in the distance. At the time, I thought that I had heard that terrible clicked noise of the skitters, but maybe it was my subconscious playing tricks on me. I truly thought it was a skitter here to take me out of my misery, and I wasn’t about to fight it. All of my willpower to fight, had been overclouded by my selfishness to get away from all of this pain and loneliness.  But as the noise came closer I could hear that it was walking on two legs. It must be another human. Then came the voice, “Excuse me?”

I moved my mouth but nothing came out but air. I can't describe what I was feeling in that moment. Weather it was relief, sadness or gratitude. I must have looked scared to death, which was mostly true. “I don’t want to hurt you,” He said.  He dropped his rifle to the ground and slowly walked towards me, offering me his hand. “My name is Ben Mason.”