—
The mug warms his fingers as Joshua holds it close. He watches steam curl from the surface of the hot chocolate and sinks himself deeper into the stiff cushions of the couch.
A fair exchange, Marlowe had called it. The warm drink in exchange for his blood. The drink in exchange for getting Joshua to comply with what Rosalyn asked them to do. In exchange for not getting in trouble.
A fair exchange his ass.
Joshua rubs at the bandaid on his upper arm. The sweetness of the hot chocolate doesn't quite wash down his bitterness, which sits on his tongue like a foul after-taste of compliance.
The couch is a dark green corduroy and smells faintly of old mothballs. The green is dark enough to hide any suspicious stains that might arise in a place like this, Joshua assumes. He'd hate to find out what's hidden between these cushions, other than stale breadcrumbs.
He resents sitting in it, this couch, but he's too tired to do anything but stay here where it's comfortable.
The questionable couch is situated in front of a small coffee table, with an armchair on either end it. It's in one of these chairs that Marlowe sits now, snuggled cross-legged into their seat with their own mug to their lips.
Both the chairs and the couch are adorned with square tapestry pillows, each with a different scene of flowers. Even Joshua is able to figure that, of what he knows of the scientists, these pillows were likely chosen by Rosalyn.
The whole deceivingly-comfortable space is situated in a little room buried in the depths of the catacombs of the facility.
Behind the couch and the armchairs is a wooden table that seems to be a hand-me-down dining table, set up with four chairs and everything. Above it, just slightly off-center, hangs a green-glass lamp which casts the room in a yellowish, greenish dinge.
Across from Joshua on the couch are cabinets which line the whole side wall. He'd watched Marlowe whirl through these cabinets as they'd made the drinks. Marlowe had used their keycard to unlock a cabinet at the bottom—the only locked cabinet of the bunch—and had unsuccessfully tried to discreetly sift through the clinking bottles of alcohol to reach the tin of hot chocolate.
"This is Rosalyn's cabinet," they'd explained awkwardly when they had caught Joshua's stare.
Apparently, Rosalyn lets Marlowe use it to hide their hot chocolate mix because Marlowe had been worried about the other scientists getting into it. None of the other scientists' cards have access to the cabinet, a fact which Marlowe is very proud of.
"In fact, they give me the cold shoulder and make fun of me, but their cards can't access half the things mine can. I'd say I do pretty well, for an assistant." Marlowe had smiled proudly at him, showing off the card at their coat pocket.
Joshua got to wondering what the card could unlock, if it has access to so much. Can it unlock any door? The way out?
He watches Marlowe a little more closely, trying to read into their every movement. The problem, though, is that he can't tell. They offer to help him with lying to their boss and make him hot chocolate, but they're also terribly devoted to their boss, and won't go so far as to help Joshua and Sundo escape. What's their real motivation here?
Joshua peers at the assistant scientist from where he sits on the far end of the couch, nursing his still steaming drink. His hair is still wet from the shower, which had been in yet another room of this maze of a place. (Thankfully, he was able to do it without surveillance, though he wouldn't put it past this place to have found a way anyway.)
He'd grudgingly changed into the clothes Marlowe handed him afterwards: a new set of scrubs, these ones black.
He hasn't said anything to Marlowe since getting out of the shower. He'd let them lead him to this room, which he assumes is some sort of breakroom or lounge for the needleheads Marlowe works with.
Because of this silence, the air between the two of them is tense. As though the tension is a physical thing suffocating them, Marlowe has been valiantly trying to relieve it through useless chatter. While walking down the hall, while making the hot drinks, while sitting down across from Joshua. They talk about everything from poetry to sci-fi tv shows to the lavender NASA tee they're wearing now.
Nothing about Sundo, nothing about the facility or Rosalyn or Bennett. Nothing of use to Joshua at all.
He can hardly stand it.
"Why are you helping us?" He asks, startling Marlowe mid-sentence.
"'Scuse me?" Marlowe asks after a moment, as though they hadn't heard him quite right. A worry line is forming between their brows.
A flash of irritation sparks in Joshua, and he frowns, lowering his mug.
"Why are you helping us? Do you even really care about what happens to us?" His temper is flaring, and he knows these are words he shouldn't be saying, but he says them anyway.
Marlowe's eyebrows shoot up, before rocketing downwards again. Their rainstorm eyes look torn between being hurt and affronted.
"Joshua, of course I care. I wouldn't try to help you if I didn't. Rosalyn—"
"I get it. I do. You care so much about what your boss thinks, even though I can't fathom why. She's a bitch, you know that? You shouldn't have to care what she thinks. You—"
"You're not so great yourself, you know that?" Marlowe interrupts with a scowl, finally settling on affronted.
Joshua blusters. "That's not my point. I know I'm not. You know I'm not, so why the hell are you helping me? I don't understand! If you care about your boss and your job so damn much, why risk it all for some angry asshole and his alien?"
Marlowe's scowl is firmly in place. They have their mouth open to reply, but then they stop. Something flickers behind their eyes and the scowl eases. They look at Joshua a moment, searching, before dropping their gaze.
Joshua is still fuming, and he doesn't recognise the shift and Marlowe's demeanor until they speak again.
"It's the two of you," Marlowe says, lifting their gaze. "It was the way you acted on the stairwell down here. You were scared, and he held your hand. When he was scared, you protected him. You two just..."
Marlowe struggles for their words, flicking their gaze away from Joshua again. His glower has fallen, and he stares at the assistant with an uncomfortable feeling of wonder.
Marlowe takes a sip of their drink to give them time to gather their thoughts.
"You two are so gentle with each other. Soft, careful, considerate, and just... I don't know," Marlowe gestures in front of them with their free hand, as though they could find the word in the air. "Compatible. You two work together. You clearly need each other, and it was just... moving.
"And then you explained your history. How you got where you are, together." Marlowe clutches their mug with both hands. "I could hardly stand hearing about that struggle, and then seeing where you are now.
"We don't have those kinds of relationships here. The kind you two have. Everything's sterile business and perfunctory work. We have jobs to do and we do them. But you two... You two don't care about any of that. You throw a wrench into this whole careful system, and I just, I don't want to watch you two fall apart."
Marlowe looks to Joshua with eyes that pour into him, and he doesn't know where to look, what to do or what to feel.
"But it's hard, Joshua, because I still have to do my job. You understand that, don't you? I want to learn about Seth as much as my colleagues do, because he truly is something amazing. Do you understand? I don't want you two hurt, but I can't... I can't just let you go. And I know that's what you want from me, but I... I can't."
Marlowe finishes gazing down at their mug. Joshua stares at them incredulously.
"That's it?" He asks all at once, startling Marlowe into looking up. "You're helping us because you think we're sweet?"
Marlowe's expression twists, and they open their mouth to elaborate, but Joshua doesn't let them. He's heard everything he needs to understand.
"If you really cared, you wouldn't keep us locked up here. You'd let me see him again. You'd let us go."
Marlowe's expression stays tight. "Don't," they say quietly.
"What?" Joshua snaps back.
"Don't do that. Don't guilt me into betraying my job, my life. I understand you, Joshua, but I can't help you that way."
Marlowe's freckled fingers are white against the porcelain of the mug. Their eyes sear into Joshua's, and it only frustrates him further. He pushes to his feet, slamming his mug down onto the coffee table with a heavy thunk and the sloshing of luke-warm cocoa. He pays it no mind as he exclaims, "You can't keep us here!"
Marlowe jerks up with a retort on their tongue, but they stop before it leaves their lips. They glare at Joshua as they shut their mouth, and carefully, they set their own mug down.
"Do you know," they say with strangled calm, "how much clearance and dedication it took to even earn the right to work down here? I can not throw that all away just so you and your boyfriend can run free on the streets, gay and extraterrestrial and a potential threat to society."
An offended sound escapes Joshua, but Marlowe plows on.
"Seth truly is amazing. Don't you understand that? He should be impossible, yet he's here! There's so much we can learn from him, so much that even I want to learn from him. I don't want to hurt him, but I don't want to lose him either!"
"So what you're saying is..." Joshua's voice is steadily rising. "You don't mind—no, you'd rather—lock him up forever and study him like some thing. Would you hurt him? You say you don't want to, but that means nothing when it comes down to it. Tell me, Marlowe." He takes a louring step forward. "Would you hurt him if the science required it?"
Marlowe takes an involuntary step back. At least, they try to. Their heel bumps into the armchair behind them, and they sway to an uneasy stop.
"Joshua, that's an unfair question—"
"To hell with fairness! You threw that away when you forced us here against our will! Answer the question! I need to know: would you or wouldn't you hurt him if the science required it?"
Joshua is definitely shouting now, all the frustration of last evening, last night, and today exploding in one devastating detonation.
He watches as Marlowe's expression closes off. Their jaw sets, and they tilt their chin upwards.
"For science..? For knowledge..? Yes. Is that the answer you wanted?" Marlowe replies with stiff defiance.
In the aftermath of his outburst, Joshua's fury abandons him. He sees the closed way in which Marlowe regards him and realises his overstep. A silent feeling of hopelessness settles over him like a smothering blanket, and his belligerence bleeds from his face and his shoulders. He takes a step back.
"No," he answers, his subdued quiet stark on the heels of his heated shout, just a moment before.
He doesn't look to see if Marlowe's expression changes. He doesn't feel optimistic enough to want to know. Instead, he runs a hand through his drying hair and turns towards the door, leaving his half-touched mug where it is.
"If you wouldn't mind, please unlock the door so I can go to bed. I'm tired of... all of this." He gestures wearily around the room and at Marlowe, as though gesturing to their conversation.
Marlowe doesn't argue any further.
They help Joshua to his room, and he refuses to speak to them once more. He sits down on the bed with the groaning wheeze of cot springs and immediately rolls onto his side, facing away from Marlowe and the door. He waits for the light to shut off and the door to close, indicating Marlowe has finally left him alone, to close his eyes.
It might be due to sheer physical and emotional exhaustion, but he's able to sleep that night. Not at all well, however.
* * *
Around the same time in the evening, Seth sits straddling the backwards chair in front of the table in Bennett's lab, resting his chin in his palm. With a heavy-lidded gaze, he watches Bennett pace back and forth, reading excitedly through notes from the day's tests.
Seth's limbs feel heavy with ache, and he can feel his heart beat in his muscles. The institution scientists worked him to the bone today seeing the limits of everything he could do, from running laps to holding his breath underwater to withstanding steadily increasing gravitational pressure. His ears are still popping from that one, each time he opens his jaw.
It's like they found everything strange and weird that they could to see what makes him alien, everything just short of actually opening him up and pulling it all out. At first it was quite nerve-wracking, every odd thing they asked him to do, one after another. But eventually he stopped worrying about each test, mostly because he grew too weary to keep caring.
He stopped trying his best somewhere along the line, and that he can blame the scientists for. If they wanted to see his best, they shouldn't have lined up sixty different tests one after another.
Now that Seth finally has the chance to just sit and rest, his eyes keep blinking closed every couple moments, before he wearily forces them open. He wants to keep an eye on Bennett while he can.
"Incredible..." The scientist is muttering to himself, rustling through papers. "Incredible. Sundseth, you're incredible."
Bennett looks up at him with a glowing expression. Seth gazes blearily back.
"Wow. That's incredible," he replies unenthusiastically.
Bennett is unfazed by his lack of delight and crosses over to Seth, perching atop the table behind him while crossing his legs at the ankles. Seth feels compelled to turn in his seat to face him, and he leans back in it, crossing his arms.
"We have almost everything we possibly could have wondered, already! This is going to look great in the reports, Sundseth, truly. You're doing so well so far! You should be proud of yourself!" Bennett thwaps the papers down beside him to beam at Seth, who drops his gaze.
Gloomily, his gaze lands on the meteorite set on the far side of the table, away from him. His meteorite. He hasn't been able to get ahold of it since yesterday night, when Bennett took it from him when they left this laboratory room. He'd been so reluctant to part with it, yet now when he looks at it, he doesn't know how to feel about it.
What should it be to him? Truthfully, it's just a rock. Even more truthfully, it's so much more than that.
It's everything and nothing at the same time, and it's as much Bennett's and this institution's as it is Seth's. And Seth wants nothing to do with Bennett and the institution. As desperately as he wants it to be this all-solving key, it's not. It's not the key to finding himself and it's not the key to finding the rest of his kind.
Yes, it gave him life, in its own confusing, unknowable way, and still, it's just a rock. He's more than it is now, and it's not going to tell him any more answers than it already has.
Seth stares at it from across the table, these thoughts drifting through his head, and he doesn't know what he should do about them. He wants the meteorite; some odd part of him burns at him to grab it, but what good will it do him? Bennett will chastise him and take it away, or he'll want to study the reason behind this feeling. Seth doesn't want to have to deal with that, so he stays where he is. He lets the meteorite stay where it is.
An impasse.
Bennett is still speaking to him, though Seth is no longer really listening. That is, until one set of words finally sticks in his head.
"Now," Bennett says, "there's really only one thing we have left to wonder..."
Seth tenses. His attention snaps back to the moment, to Bennett, and he rakes his gaze back up to the scientist. He clenches his jaw, bracing for what it is Bennett wants. Part of him already knows, yet that dumb, hopeful part of him tries to convince him otherwise.
"Yes, soon the only thing left will be for us to have you shift into your—"
"No."
The word is ripped out from him. Seth sits up rigidly, all weariness burned from his mind. It resonates through him with strong conviction: No, no, no, like an echo of his heartbeat.
Bennett blinks at him, startled by this sudden response.
"What?"
Bennett hasn't had a reply with such feeling from Seth since he pulled the alien from that hispanic kid in the interrogation room. He leans a little more forward, peering down at this strange creature in his seat, this creature with life and convictions where rightfully, by the laws of nature alone, he shouldn't. This creature who, knowing this, has life and convictions anyway.
Seth stares Bennett down with an intensity that should sear the tie from his shoulders. He doesn't reply to that uttered "What?" because there's nothing for him to say. Bennett heard him.
"What?" Bennett says again with more feeling, inclining his head inquiringly. "What do you mean 'no'?"
Seth lets out a breath that shudders with the heat in his chest. "I mean," he says slowly, with emphasis, "no. I won't do it. Have me do anything else, but I won't do that."
Bennett stares at him in incredulous wonder.
"That can't be," he says finally, as though struggling to reconcile Seth's words with reality. "You have to. It is a part of you, an important part of you that we must see. We must gather data on it, don't you understand? More than anything else, it's what makes you—"
"Alien?" Seth finishes for him, incensed.
He stands up, pushing the chair back from him with the scraping of legs on concrete. Bennett leans back from him with a quick breath.
"That's all I am to you, isn't it? An alien, a thing. Nothing more, nothing less. An alien. You know, for a little while I thought meeting you could be a good thing, Bennett. Yes, I thought meeting you could help me somehow, finding a father."
The word is like acid on his tongue. It burns, and he spits it out like he wants nothing to do with it. His own face burns, and he feels hot tears welling up behind his eyes, but he fights against them, fights to get the words out.
Bennett remains at the table, stunned into silence.
"But you're no different from any of them, aren't you? I don't want this, Bennett. I want to go home. I want to see Joshua again. Do you even understand that? Do you even care? I don't want to be here, but I have to be here anyway, because you won't let me go. To you, I'm property. Aren't I? And I know this, and I have to do what you say even when I don't want to, because then maybe, maybe if I do, you'll let me see Joshua again. I hate you for that, do you know?"
The tears are there now. He tries again to fight them, but it's harder than before. His throat is closing up on him, and he swallows past the croak in his words. He tries to imagine actually shifting willingly for the scientists, and vehemently, he recoils. He'll never do it. Never.
Fiercely, he presses forward again. "But this, this I can't do. I won't do this. All the bribes in your awful facility won't convince me. Don't try to make me."
Seth glares murder at the scientist, and Bennett swallows, discomfort clear on his face. For the longest time, he doesn't seem to know what to say.
Finally, he says quietly, "you... You must, though."
He doesn't get to say anything else. All Seth's frustration bursts from him in one strangled, angry cry. He storms for the door, knowing if he stands here any longer, he'll hurt one of them.
"Let me out," he snarls thickly, his back turned to Bennett, unable to face him. "Let me leave. I can't stand you anymore."
His fists are clenched, his form trembling. He can feel the monster shifting and churning through him, creaking in his bones, and he squeezes his fists tighter against it. It's exactly what he doesn't want to happen. He doesn't want to give the scientists the satisfaction or the data.
Bennett hesitates. Seth can hear the catch in his movement as he almost audibly bounces thoughts back and forth. Finally, Bennett shifts off of the table and moves towards the door in cautious, wary steps, as though approaching an unstable animal. It only frustrates Seth further, and for a serious moment, he considers lashing out at the infuriating scientist.
He manages to reign himself in, fortunately—or not—and watches as Bennett fumbles with his keycard to unlock the lab door.
Seth is still fuming as Bennett leads him down the hallway, down the familiar way to his cramped cell of a room. Neither of them speak to each other. They have nothing to say, even as they have everything to say. They'll never be able to change the other's perspective. They know it. They know this, and yet the burning need remains, like a smoldering coal lodged in their chests.
Seth doesn't look at Bennett as he locks him in that room again, on the mat beneath the metal chain-loop. Resentfully, he refuses to acknowledge even the apologetic way the scientist does up the handcuff. He stares at the floor, all but burning holes into the mat as Bennett leaves him.
He makes the decision: they're getting out of here. He and Joshua are going to get out of here, and he's going to figure out how. His plan starts here.
.
.
.
It really is like a tug-of-war, huh? Who's going to win?
(The song is Coyote by Mako! I'm really liking this song lately, it really works with the story. It just has the right vibe, y'know?)
This is a necessary stepping-stone chapter for the next, which I think is the one you've been waiting for! (I'm excited : )
June is Pride month 🏳️🌈🎉! And!! I wanted to do something special! So the next chapter will be out next Friday, to celebrate the last Friday of Pride 2019! I think it'll be a perfect chapter for it <3
Till then, all the best!
❤🧡💛💚💙💜