Note: This is a prequel of sorts to my other fic "Dusk Til Dawn", though they can both stand alone.

The passing of a full year was a strange realization.

It came to Lex not with the counting of days or weeks or the names of months, but with the moon. This day was marked on her calendar with a little white circle, and it was the twelfth one since that fateful hunter's moon over Antarctica. Lex sighed at the calendar's generically pleasing landscape photo and turned away, focusing instead on the cooling autumn sky outside her bedroom window. The calendar's boxes and numbers were meaningless. Turning the pages did nothing to chase off the serpents she still saw grinning at her from the shadows. She wondered distantly what time had meant to her before, as if she were reminiscing about someone who had died. That calendar would have been full of scribbles and crossing-outs. She had been a busy woman once. Reservations for her services as a mountaineering guide and instructor were booked months in advance. Her environmental research had earned her accolades and ever-increasing responsibility.

Now those calendar pages were as blank and white as the full moons Lex both dreaded and longed for. She hadn't been able to stomach leading another expedition after her rescue from Antarctica. Every time she looked into the faces of her clients she saw a serpent hissing over their shoulder and she was powerless to save them all over again. Her head had swam and she had reflexively clapped her hands over her ears to drown out the screams echoing in her memory. Clients canceled. Word got around that something had happened to Alexa Woods, that she was unwell. Clients stopped contacting her altogether.

The hefty check Lex received from Weyland-Yutani had made the loss of business more a blessing than a curse. She could simply remain here, in this cabin in Montana, and exist. The remoteness of the location suited her. She had always preferred open sky and unmarred wilderness to the racket of urban life. There was no comfort to gain from human company, either. Her occasional attempts at socializing left her feeling drained and even more detached than before. It was exhausting to lie so habitually about where she had been, what she did, how she was feeling. Everything. Her forced smile was a painful gash that never reached her eyes. She'd tried self-help books and researched coping strategies. Ultimately they all pointed in the same impossible direction: get help. Talk to someone.

And Lex couldn't. Whatever she felt now would be nothing compared to a life of interminable boredom and numbness confined in an institution. What else would a doctor do with a tale like hers? She'd be branded a lunatic. There was no one in the world she could talk to.

No one in the world. The weight of that loneliness closed in around Lex and she let herself slump onto her bed. She breathed deeply and focused on the details of her room: the wood grain in the walls, the texture of the blankets beneath her, the shape of the rafters above her. She was here. This, right now, was reality. One hand came to rest on her cheek, a fingertip tracing the two smooth marks where her unlikely partner in survival had marked her. Scar: a nightmare turned savior.

Abstractly, Lex knew that she had been afraid of Scar at some point. When he'd first shown himself, when she was desperately alone in the pyramid's lightless corridors, she cowered before him. It was only later that she realized how effortlessly he could have killed her, and had chosen not to. And how effortlessly she could have left him to die to guarantee her own safety, but had chosen not to. It had never occurred to her to leave him behind. When the serpents attacked him at the base of the tunnel her fear had evaporated, sizzled away by rage. She refused to be alone again. The thought of losing him had, in the few short hours they'd spent surviving and fighting together, become unbearable. Impossibly, he'd shined a light into the worst depths of her fear and made her smile. That moment, when he'd played the prank on her with the dead serpent's maw, was when she remembered that she could feel something other than numb horror.

Safely on the surface afterward, overwhelmed and exhausted, Lex had been incapable of more than looking at him, watching the snow-reflected moonlight play over the hard-cut lines of his body. When he'd unfastened his mask to reveal his profoundly alien face, she didn't flinch. She vividly remembered the sight of his deep-set yellow eyes and the first absurd thought in her mind: forward-facing eyes, binocular vision. Like a human, or any predator species. When he reached for her, she didn't shy away. In the frigid antarctic air his hand had felt feverishly hot on the side of her face. His skin, thick and leathery. Talons resting in her hair. He'd lifted one of the serpents' severed fingers near her cheek and tilted his massive head in a gesture so familiarly, almost innocently, inquisitive that she had smiled again. She understood what he was asking, and the gravity of it. She knew that this experience had been a ritual of deep importance for him. He had marked his own mask and face accordingly. He offered her the same rite. She accepted without hesitation, moved by the depth of his respect for her. He'd left her shortly after. His own people had come for him. The spear had been his parting gift. He'd lowered his head, purring, and pressed the weapon into her hand. He and the rest of his kind vanished in a roar of engines and blinding light.

Lex hadn't seen him again. She didn't think she would and forced herself not to hope for it. The fact that she hoped for it at all surprised her at first. Scar was far from innocent in the deaths of her expedition teammates, after all. Though he was unquestionably sentient and intelligent, he wasn't human. Lex slowly massaged her temples and gave a wry smile at the realization that she currently shared deeper understanding with an alien she knew next to nothing about than with any human being. She tried to discourage her interest by recalling Sebastian's words: that Scar's kind viewed humans as nothing more than cattle. That approach backfired. During her rare trips into town for supplies, Lex had overheard conversations between ranchers. If there was one thing they did not take kindly to, it was wolves among their herds. This idea became a twisted source of comfort to Lex. It helped her face the dark every night; looking at the stars and knowing that somewhere among them, Scar existed.

Impulsively she groped under her pillow until her hand closed around a familiar metal cylinder. As she done countless times before, she studied the spear, retracted and harmless-looking in its current state, turning the feather-light steel over in her hand before tightening her grip. Aside from the mark on her cheek, this was Lex's only tangible reminder of her ordeal, and of Scar. It had been his weapon, but it was she who raised it and slain one of the serpents. She hadn't felt the least bit brave at the time, but Scar had obviously considered her so. She supposed his esteem was contagious. Even now, holding the spear gave her a feeling of centeredness and reminded her that she was alive and that she was in control. When she woke in the middle of the night screaming, it was the first thing she reached for. Lex brushed her lips over the smooth, cool metal. No one in the world, she thought, her loneliness falling away like a shroud, But he doesn't have to be.

TBC