Chapter Text
You knew what you were getting yourself into.
In theory.
As you were quick to learn, it was quite different to experience the danger in practice.
The day you had been plucked from your easy and relatively safe rounds, checking on and feeding and recording reactions of the very easy specimens you had been assigned for the last several months, you knew something was up. You almost never saw the lower levels, and with good reason. If anything down there were to try to get its claws in you…
Well. You knew help wouldn’t be coming.
You actually thought you’d maybe lucked out when you were roughly handed a new case on the deeper level, until you looked at the hand-written notes in red in the margins.
Subjects 6856 and 6857. (In red next to it, as though to make sure no one could miss it, were the words “KEEP TOGETHER FOR SAFETY”.) Great, a pair.
Object Class: Euclid (Followed by half a dozen question marks, and “See analysis”.)
You looked briefly over the notes, which were sparse (Do not approach the glass, do not enter the containment, requires regular feeding of subjects), and glanced up at the monitors showing the subject sitting in the corner of the containment, looking back down to the notes before freezing.
Looking up again, you eyed the little body. About the size of a ten year old kid, bright yellow and red skin dim in the dark light of the containment. Eyes closed, clearly napping. Inside the room, you could see the D-Class, a lanky subject that was glued to the farthest corner from the creature, eyes darting around frantically. You paused, taking a moment to swipe the mouse and move the camera left and right, looking at the nesting materials around the bright yellow creature, the small items likely included for “enrichment”, peering closely into the corners…
Swearing to yourself, you got to your feet.
You needed to see what happened to the other subject.
Later, upon reflection as you shakily cleaned your lab coat and shirt in the facility’s bathroom, you would realize this is where you fucked up.
You tried peering through the two-way glass, missing the way pale eyes watched you from cracked eyes, tried examining the dim interior, but you could barely make out anything. Cursing softly to yourself, you decided to say screw it. You needed to make sure it hadn’t gotten out somehow.
An escaped Euclid was bad enough.
An escaped possibly-worse-than-Euclid was a disaster.
You needed to know if you needed to sound the alarm.
You swiped your badge, relieved when it pinged green, the door to the airlock opening to let you in. You waited until the outer door closed and pressurized, providing verbal authorization and placing your hand just so on the scanner to get a good read, waiting for the door to ever-so-slowly hiss open as you kept your eyes peeled.
You had been prepared for whatever the subjects might throw at you, but you hadn’t anticipated for pure human desperation. Stepping through the door, your gaze had just landed on the yellow creature not thirty feet away, instinctively smiling at it as it lifted its red and yellow head, a soft trilling mrrp echoing in the room as you started to assure it you weren’t there to harm it when something struck the back of your head, sending you sprawling to the floor with a dazed grunt, hearing the D-class rushing into the little airlock and frantically trying to hit buttons.
You could just hear him snapping, “Ain’t no way I’m dyin’ in this shithole!” as you tried to sit up, hand shaking as you tried to soothe the throbbing in your head. You could hear the scanner buzzing angrily at the D-class as he tried to get away, but your head hurting made it very hard to focus on him.
You stumbled to your feet with a soft groan, blinking blearily as you squinted in the dim light. You heard a shuffling, turning and almost jumped out of your skin when you saw the yellow creature standing not two feet from you, having crossed the room without so much as a sound, peering up at you with large, pale eyes, white irises staring up at you as you felt your heart leaping into your throat. Broad quills around its head twitched and fluttered slightly, like the rays of a sun from a child’s drawing, but infinitely more terrifying. A soft frill of red draped around its shoulders and another around its hips as it quirked its head at you, offering another, slightly louder trill that sounded more and more like a question as you tried to remind yourself to breathe.
Euclid, you reminded yourself. You needed to treat it with the utmost care and respect, lest something befall you.
“I… h-hello,” you managed to squeak out, staying rooted to the spot for a moment before you reached out and did the dumbest thing you could have.
You patted the creature gently on the top of its head, watching as it cautiously laid its quills back to accommodate the touch.
When no teeth appeared to latch into your arm, you cautiously gave it another pat, watching as its eyes drifted closed, the creature’s head rising to bump into the touch like a cat who just realized it could get head-pats.
“Get me the fuck outta here!” the Class-D snapped behind you, making you jump a little bit, the yellow creature’s eyes opening just to slits to peer into the little airlock, a low growl emitting from them as you anxiously withdrew your hand, small hands reaching out to grab your hand and put it back on his head, moving closer to you, red frills fluttering as it emitted another little trill that you could have almost sworn was a purr.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” You jumped again at the shout, a hand lashing out to grab you by the hair and yank you back with him towards the door. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna die here while you decide to make nice with the fuckin’ thing!” he hissed, dragging you with him, trying to extricate your hair from his grasp as you felt tears prickling at the corners of your eyes.
You couldn’t let the Class-D out. Too high a risk of the subjects getting free. A fact you were trying to tell him when he tried to shove you towards the handprint console, only to succeed in knocking your head against the wall, stars dancing across your vision as you stumbled, your world thrown for a loop as he shouted at you to get him out already.
With pain bursting anew from your forehead now, you did the only thing you could think to do, letting yourself simply slump into deadweight against him, doing your best to cover your face with your hands to hopefully avoid another blow when you refused to help the idiot.
A low snarl froze your blood in your veins before the pressure on your scalp disappeared, sending you sprawling to the floor again with a groan. You decided to just stay there, hoping you wouldn’t get hurt too much further before the end as your monkey hindbrain told you to hold very still and pray that whatever dark and unknowable thing above you that uttered an angry clicking screech wouldn’t pay you any further mind, feeling a spray of blood streak across your back and into your hair as the Class-D behind you gave one final scream and then fell silent.
Your eyes closed tightly as you hoped it wasn’t hungry for seconds.
You didn’t move when you heard the ripping and tearing stop, didn’t move when you felt it shifting and stepping around you, didn’t do more than let out a tiny whimper as you felt something move its gaze to you…
Your heart threatened to stop at the feel of a weight moving over you, settling over your lower back, your breath coming in and out in ragged gasps as you heard what might’ve been purring but was likely another low, clicking growl in the creature’s throat, a hand with distinct fingers and dangerous claws pressing into your side and you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything…
***
You came to in the infirmary an hour later, and except for blood drying in your hair and a series of small shallow puncture wounds on your side, you were, as the medical professional put it, remarkably unharmed. Later, when you spoke to another scientist who had been occupied not far away, you learned that, for the most part, you had been deposited safely into the airlock and the subjects had been safely asleep on the other end of the containment, easily able to be extracted from amid the viscera that remained of the Class-D. And judging by the gore you were rinsing in the shower from your hair and skin, you could believe it.
Surely, though, you wouldn’t be assigned to those subjects again. You had practically wet yourself when that thing had moved over you, and you could still only barely remember to breathe now that you were several levels and a number of hours away from them. You didn’t even know which of the two subjects it had been, but you had been reassured that both were visibly content and present when you had been extricated.
Surely you would be given back your normal rounds, with your safe subjects who mostly ignored your presence and didn’t scare the shit out of you.
***
Surely this was a joke.
When you’d received the email stating you had been reassigned, all of your prior subjects handed over to others, and your entire workload was reduced to two particular subjects.
Your supervisor, however, was very clear in his email, that this was not only not a joke, but that this change was permanent. The subjects in question had proven to be difficult after you had gone, taking your mandatory four days mental recovery after a close call to lie on your couch and watch some mind-numbing nature documentaries about cuttlefish and endangered birds in the rain forest and strange frogs that lived in an isolated little cave somewhere in the world and eat some cereal and just spend as much time as physically possible not thinking about what you had so narrowly escaped.
Your evaluation with the psych unit went swimmingly, which was a plus, but when you gathered your equipment, cart, and folders for the day and found everything shockingly light, you had realized you needed to check your messages to see what was up.
And there it was, in your email inbox.
“Your only concern for now is going to be subjects 6856 and 6857. Please review the attached documentation and familiarize yourself with your new responsibilities going forward. Your pay will be reflected accordingly.”
Fuck the pay, you told yourself.
Then you got paid.
… Okay, maybe you could handle this for another day or two.
Then you read the documentation as you boarded the elevator to make your way down.
Your blood ran cold as you saw the new categorizations, as well as a number of grainy photos of something with far too many limbs crouching low over a fallen form, the night-vision filter revealing little in the way of details other than a number of tentacles—honest to god tentacles, what the fuck were you getting yourself into—and the glint of sharp teeth… Your stomach dropped as you realized that it had been crouched over you.
A final photo of two forms huddled together in their little nest, the bright yellow one nestled up next to a darker form almost curled around it, sat at the back of the folder, almost sliding out as your hands shook.
It hadn’t left the containment.
It had been in there with you, and you hadn’t even seen it.
Your phone rang, making you jump before you fumbled your phone out of your pocket.
“I trust you got your new materials.”
Your boss. Great. Just who you didn’t want to talk to right now.
“Y-yes sir,” you said, taking a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “Can… Can I ask why the reassignment? I’m not really comfortable with this kind of a change—this is more than a little beyond my abilities…”
“Yes, well,” the man said, choosing his words carefully before he sighed. “Under normal circumstances, I would agree with you. However…”
“... However?”
“They specifically asked for you.”
A pause.
“I… beg your pardon, sir?”
“The subjects. They… You’ll see it soon enough… Look, they’re willing to talk and are able, but you are the only one that’ll do. You have your objectives, you’ll have whatever resources you need, but this is your only responsibility now.
“Sir, I don’t understand,” you said, stepping off the elevator and pulling the cart with you as you made your way to the containment at the very end. “What do you mean they asked… for…” your voice trailed off, looking up through the two-way mirror and freezing again, eyes wide as you took in the scene before you. “What the fuck…”
Someone, or, more likely, something had painted your name in viscera on the far wall. You could see where it looked like it had been written and cleaned off the wall a few times, evidence of… something having been torn apart inside.
In the middle of the containment cell, watching you with large pale eyes, sat the yellow creature, whose little mouth was stretched wide into a smug-looking little smile. The bright red frill about its waist fluttered happily, dancing as if in some unseen wind as it seemed to wiggle like an over-excited puppy.
The red frill shifted again, and you almost jumped as you finally saw it, another figure seeming to emerge from the yellow one’s shadow, midnight blue almost black in the dim room, head cocked to the side, tentacle like a victorian sleeping cap draped over one shoulder as it eyed you lazily from where it sat, an unimpressed expression on its almost-human-but-not-quite face.
“... As you can see,” your boss continued, “they asked for you.”
***
Groaning to himself as he stepped off the elevator, Senior Researcher Shawn McGregor stretched the kinks out of his back as he strode languidly down the hall towards his office. As a matter of principle, he didn’t like to leave a new subject in the hands of junior researchers or, worse yet, interns, but something at that grant dinner just hadn’t agreed with him, and he hadn’t had a choice in the matter. After a long night of singing oaxaca, being married to the porcelain throne, and a few other distasteful slang phrases for the unfortunate things his body made him do, he’d needed almost another week just to recover and set his sleeping pattern back to rights!
But now! Now, he could finally get to work on a breakthrough with the latest subjects that had been placed in his care. Now, he would start to make some progress!
They had been so stubborn.
If he’d had his way, he would’ve found the nearest cattle prod, but given the electrical signatures that these… things had given off, he wasn’t so sure that would do much of anything…
Sighing at the idea of finally getting to do some real work, he opened the door to his office, striding inside and sitting confidently at his desk, reaching for the manilla envelope that he’d placed on the corner.
The folder was not there.
It wasn’t under the other folders either, or hastily tucked into a drawer.
Ah, he had been out for some time, likely they would have collected it for the temporary care teams to be able to keep them alive with the proper food sources and everything. That made sense. He would just open his email to see where the file had been taken so he could retrieve it.
Only a slight delay.
A slight delay that turned into rushing into his supervisor’s office, face turning an alarming shade of red as he breathed heavily in the calm man’s direction.
“What. The. Fuck.” he started to say, barely able to get a word out with each breath, teeth grinding and hands clenching into fists.
“The transfer is already complete, McGregor,” the man said, not even bothering to look up from the requisition sheet he was looking at.
“Those are my subjects!” McGregor bellowed, not caring who heard. “How dare you give them to some pissant nobody!”
“That really isn’t your call,” he said, only barely glancing up as McGregor seemed to be amping up his tantrum. “You’re taking this far too personally. You need to calm down.”
“I am calm!” McGregor lied through clenched teeth. “Those are my subjects! I tracked them down, I set up the expedition and accompanied the field team to acquire the subjects, this project is mine!”
“And all of your contributions have been well-documented up to this point!” setting the form down, he calmly folded his hands over the top of his desk and peered up at the furious McGregor. Really, he did not get paid enough to deal with grown men having tantrums to rival his toddlers. “Just because you located them and brought them back here doesn’t mean this was only ever going to be your project. And let’s be real here, McGregor! You’ve had them in your roster for, what?” He let the silence hang in the air for several seconds. “Six months. Six months and you only have a handful of theories and guesses about these two subjects that, might I remind you, you spend a lot of this Facility’s funds to capture and bring back here, and so far all we have to show for it is two dozen dead D-Class, and a laundry list of things they refuse to eat.”
“Some subjects are harder to study—” McGregor began, sputtering angrily as his boss opened a folder next to him, flipping through the pages.
It took McGregor only a few seconds to recognize his own folder, pages that had been filled with photos and scrawled notes.
Only to see a lot of them annotated. Corrected. Whole passages crossed out.
“The new researcher has been quite successful in getting them weaned down to chickens, though the dark one needs D-Class once in a while still, though we suspect that’s a personal choice rather than a dietary necessity. They respond well to their new handler, and they are making great strides!” Letting the many added pages flutter back into the folder, McGregor’s boss made sure he could see him closing the folder, showing where McGregor’s name and credentials had been amended on the front to the new researcher’s name instead.
“I think you need to move on, McGregor,” he said seriously, frowning deeply. “You’ve had a number of years here at the Institute, where you’ve been recognized time and again for your outstanding accomplishments… But not everything has to be yours.”
Hands curling into fists, McGregor could feel the finality in his boss’s words before he turned to angrily storm from the room.