Title: Stranger

Warnings: Sex between an alien and a human in later chapters. Xenophilia and mild violence. Body horror I suppose? I think that goes with the D9 territory.

Disclaimer: I do not own District 9. All characters are property of their respective copyright holders and I am making no profit from this work of fiction.

A/N: Another /coq/ story that made its way over here. This monster started with the idle musing of what would happen if Wikus ended up landing on the prawn's home planet. My longest single story to date. This thing just would not end. However it's been a rewarding journey. Thanks to everyone over on /coq/ and the District 9 lj community for their support and enthusiasm. I've been a bit unsure about posting this story here, as it does wander into fairly explicit territory later on, though I'm not sure if it qualifies as too explicit. For now, I'm going to go ahead and post it, since the majority of the story doesn't have any explicit material. I'll clearly mark the chapters so that readers may avoid them if they wish, and if it becomes an issue I'll remove the story. You can still access it on my lj account(linked on my profile page). Happy reading, and please excuse the odd formatting. It's also divided a bit differently than on lj, to increase the length and cut down on the number of chapters.

o

It started with Ross.

They'd all been so excited to find the new planet, to finally see green after the endless black of space and the unnatural colors of the gas giants. They'd barely waited for the atmospheric test to come out positive before they were tumbling out of the ship, Ross in the lead.

The plants were massive and the scenery picturesque, but for Wikus, the real enjoyment had been in watching Tania light up at the beauty around them, reaching for her journal and hunkering down in front of something which resembled a bromeliad on steroids, her pencil already flying over the page.

He smiled, running his thumb over the lump of the wedding ring to which he was still becoming accustomed.

The only sign of animal life they'd found was a single species of small primate, a bit like ugly spider monkeys and Ross, stupid, newbie Ross, had tried to feed one. The creature took the food and even submitted to being picked up and manhandled. They'd taken photos and samples and left and not thought much of it.

The atmosphere was dense enough to interfere with transmission, so they'd spent two days taking samples and launched, planning to return the next day.

That night Ross had gone to Phyllis, the medic, with a headache. She gave him some pain pills and he'd gone to bed.

The next morning, Clive went to the sick bay with a slight cough. Phyllis gave him an antiviral; colds were an easy thing to catch in the ship's close quarters, but it was better to nip it in the bud than be laid up for a few days. Time was money after all.

They were preparing to land again when Thomas pointed out that Ross, cheerful, always hungry Ross, never made it to breakfast that morning.

When Phyllis finally found him in his berth, he had a fever of one hundred and four. His sheets were soaked with sweat and stained with blood from where he'd been trying cough up his lungs.

She'd initiated immediate lockdown. Anyone with flu symptoms was to self isolate. She took samples of Ross' blood and mucus and locked herself in the sick bay; told them she'd be out when she had a cure and not before.

They'd encouraged her, but they all knew that viruses were tricky bastards, and that the chances of her succeeding were slim.

Wikus was one of the next to get sick. It hit like a hurricane and left him weak and mostly delirious. His memories of the time were vague and confused. He recalled seeing Tania sitting beside him, masked, fluorescent lights a blinding halo around her gold hair. He tried to call her, angel, angel, but his mouth was full of blood and the words wouldn't form.

.,.

He woke suddenly, fever broken and cool for the first time in what felt like forever. Tania was stroking his head and he startled her when he asked for water. His throat felt like someone had taken an electric sander to it. He drank until he felt he could speak again and asked what had happened.

He thought that Phyllis might have found a cure, but Tania told him that the rest of the crew had broken into sick bay after three days to find her in a pool of blood.

Ross was already long dead.

One by one, it took them all: Clive, Thomas, Les and James.

All gone.

He clutched her arm, asked how she was. She pushed him down, soothed him, looking over the line of the surgical mask, and lied to him, said yes, yes, I'm fine, not sick Wikus, sleep now.

He woke alone, still weak and aching, desperately thirsty.

He staggered from the room and tripped over her. She was sitting propped up against the doorway, skin pale and grey, surgical mask soaked through with blood.

He'd sat on the floor staring at her, then reached out and touched.

She was ice cold.

He didn't remember screaming, but he did recall the silence and the taste of blood when his throat gave out.

The next several days were a blur. Everywhere he went he saw them, dead eyes staring, slack mouths stained with blood.

He was trapped in a metal coffin.

Half-mad with fear and grief, he staggered into the control room with the idea of getting somewhere away. His hands trembled as he punched the familiar sequence of buttons and watched the cursed planet recede until it was swallowed up in the vastness of space.

He slumped down in the control chair, covered his face and sobbed.

.,.

It was a shock when the gravity well of a planet snagged his ship. Engines screamed in protest as the ship was dragged off course and Wikus was thrown to the floor. He scrambled for the controls on pure instinct and tried to pull up, but he was nearly out of fuel and the engines couldn't muster the power to fight the pull.

The ship bucked like a dying thing and plunged into the atmosphere.

Superheated air glowed at the edges of the windows and clouds whipped by.

A terrible, dark feeling welled up inside him and Wikus gripped the controls until he thought they would break, howling in wordless defiance. In the background he heard the screech of metal tearing.

"Left engine gone," Les murmured in his ear.

The ground loomed before him.

"Reddish. High iron content," commented Thomas.

Trees snapped against the hull of the ship as it tore along parallel to the earth.

"Bears some resemblance to Mimosoideae," said Tania "Isn't it incredible, Wikus?"

He hit.

His head rebounded off the control panel. Stars exploded in his vision.

"Orange giant system," Clive remarked, "A bit cooler than our sun. Must be why the planet's closer."

Wikus sagged into the chair and passed out.

o

Wikus came to slowly, awakened by the light streaming through the windows of the flight deck. His head ached and he felt gingerly along his hairline, wincing as a forming scab broke beneath his fingers and fresh blood ran down his face.

It was utterly silent. The engines must have shut down.

Shaky, he rose to his feet, feeling the dull ache the virus had left in his muscles beneath the sharp pain of new bruises, and made his way to the hatch.

He hesitated a moment before opening it. Every bit of training was telling him to wait, test the atmosphere, check for hostile life forms.

"Fok it," he said aloud, "you want to kill me, you fokking go ahead."

He twisted the lever on the hatch and pushed.

It gave with only a minimal effort, clanging against the hull of the ship. He blinked in the bright sunlight and took a breath.

When that first breath didn't kill him he leaned out of the hatch and peered about. Towards the aft of ship he could see part of the swath he'd cut through the grove of trees.

He'd thought he was in a forest, but beyond the trees he could see open grasslands spreading into infinity. In the distance he could just make out a group of dark shapes moving through the grass, alive.

He went to James' cabin and dug through his things. The captain was a big nature buff; Wikus knew he'd have binoculars.

He avoided looking at James' bloated body, still tucked into his berth.

The binoculars were huge, heavy around his neck and bumped against the hull as he climbed the ladder rungs to the top of the ship, pausing every so often and just clinging when dizziness overcame him.

At the top he settled into a seated position and lifted the binoculars, cursing as he tried to adjust them for his vision. Why the fok did James have to get binoculars with so many knobs?

The blobs jerked and leaped in and out of focus as he fiddled with the knobs. When they finally came in clearly, what he saw made him check the knobs again.

They were big, he could tell that from here; the binoculars revealed brown and black armor plating that shifted over high domed backs. Their legs were hidden in the long grass, but the way that they moved was smooth, almost gliding along the ground.

"Could be indicative of multipedal locomotion," James observed "only organisms we've got on earth like that are—"

"Shut up," Wikus muttered.

He turned the binoculars toward one of the nearby trees, scanning the branches. Near the top of one he spied a colorful flash of green and purple. A creature, roughly the size of a parrot as close as he could tell, was buzzing about the tree, feeding on bright flowers through a long proboscis.

The binoculars clunked against the hull as he put them down and flopped against the ship, groaning as the movement jarred his aching head.

"Bugs," he said, "it had to be fokking bugs, didn't it?"

"Cheer up, Wikus," said James, "at least it isn't snakes."

.,.

Wikus would have been content to simply lie on the top of the ship and sleep forever, but eventually thirst drove him back inside. After escaping and seeing blue skies, a strangely comforting parallel in a place so utterly alien, he was more reluctant than ever to return to the metal tomb.

Out of habit he checked the control panel to see if any power remained, but only received a blank screen for his efforts. It was possible that some fuses had blown and he could revive the ship with a few replacements, but he wasn't sure, especially with the engine gone.

Ross had been the engineer.

He uncovered a few bottles of water while rooting through storage and nearly drained one before he came to his senses. He wasn't sure whether there was a water source nearby; he should save some.

With his thirst eased, another matter which his mind had been shying away from came to the forefront. Namely the problem of what to do with his friendscrewmateswife, the bodies.

Wikus swallowed hard. He wasn't ready to deal with this.

"Introduction of heat and airborne organisms can accelerate the decomposition process," Phyllis announced.

"Scent may attract predators," James chimed in.

"God," Wikus whimpered, clutching his head, "I can't…"

"The emergency tarps are waterproof," said Tania, taking pity on him, "and there are plenty of them. It's okay, Wikus."

The tarps were a lurid orange, meant to be seen by emergency crews, but they were wide enough, and had ties along the edges.

He did Thomas first, then James and Les, rolling them off their bunks onto the tarps and wrapping them in the cabins before dragging them into main room. Clive had collapsed near the door of sick bay, so he did him and Phyllis next. Then Ross, during which he dropped the kid three times to go be sick out of the hatch of the ship.

It took him two hours to work up the nerve to go to Tania.

Finally he had them lined up like strange orange sausages in the control room. Lacking a means to carry them down and not wanting to toss them out the hatch, he strung some light rope through the grips on either side of the hatch and lowered them as best he could.

He strapped a collapsible shovel to his back and climbed after them.

He dragged James, at least he thought it was James, he had forgotten to mark them and he wasn't about to check, several hundred feet from the ship, where the trees opened up into waving grass.

"Fewer tree roots to interfere with digging," said Tania, "Be careful of your back, love."

He had no idea how long it took him, hacking at the dirt as he scooped out a shallow grave for each of them, ignoring the burn of the sun on the back of his neck. His head was pounding by the time he rolled the last of them into a hole, scooping up the dirt into a crude mound.

His legs gave out from under him and he sank to the ground, staring through bleary eyes at the seven graves.

He was so tired.

Logic told him that he was exposed, at risk in the open, especially so close to the scent of death, but grief told logic to shove it. He slumped over; half propped on his shovel, and fell asleep.

o

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