Chapter Text
This is Murmur Radio, now playing... ‘Disease’ by Lady Gaga
Fragments of shattered glass covered the lab floor.
Shining, their every sharp edge covered in a dark liquid. Not quite blood, though sharing the same iridescence under the flickering emergency lights.
There was a stillness to the destruction.
Like a held breath.
Released slowly.
The beads of black liquid dripping, dripping and soon pooling together, forming a vast ocean of night on the linoleum. Squares of white that were kept pristine, trod only by scientists in sensible lab shoes, eaten up by the darkness.
A darkness that grew.
And grew.
Till it towered, taller than a man ought to be.
Though like a man, it had a mouth. With teeth sharp as razorblades.
“I can help you, too.”
The darkness spoke to him.
From his heap on the floor, having curled in from the impact of the initial explosion – or he supposed, implosion - he shook his head. Caught between disbelief that really, this had to be happening to him, and examination. One bite from those sharp teeth would cleave his head from his shoulders. A swipe from that muscular, slightly too long arm, well it would send him flying through the wall and out into the crisp Seoul night.
‘I can help you, too?’
Is that what the darkness had just said?
Did that mean that it had heard him before, as he had absent mindedly collected the other lab-workers notes to photocopy and had found himself gently tapping on the glass test tube. The home of the lab’s favourite subject at the moment. SAMPLE 1117, NON-EARTH. It had moved, and wriggled within. Back then merely a heap of black goo.
He had spoken to it out of some sort of pity. Some sort of need for company, in the dull laboratory, which he had assumed they might share.
Really, he had only hoped to tell it – if it could understand, which at the time, he had highly doubted – that if it would stop lashing out at the scientists during their tests, maybe he could sneak it back onto a shelf. Out of sight, out of mind.
This wouldn't be the first time he had released a test subject.
Chicks and mice vanished all the time.
Why not give this strange goo a reprieve?
But the goo had spirit. And its spirit seemed mostly filled with spite. Everything the scientists threw at it, the darkness – well, it seemed to eat it up and lash back out with it.
Electricity.
Water.
It was too powerful to be left alone, they had claimed.
“Don’t you want me to help you?” The darkness asked, like a curious child, though its voice was dreadfully, ear splittingly deep. More growl than voice, really. “I can smell your sickness.”
It was with that same curiosity that its arm reached out from the unmoving figure – extending the limb across the lab – to grab the terrified listener to whom it spoke. Holding him high, dangling him side by side with the swinging overhead light.
Its muscles were solid, and its skin, if it ought to be called that, was cold. Like satin, or latex.
The captive did not scream.
Lost his voice at the sight of strange, white eyes that came into view atop the creature's head.
Opals.
“What are you?” Terrified out of his mind, he started to think something about curiosity, and cats, and boxes. Peak inside, see. “Why- why would you want to help me?”
The darkness blinked.
“Because,” it said, as if the answer were obvious. “I’m bored. And unlike the rest of them, you did not poke, or shock me.”
“Right, well-”
“And I’m hungry.”
And just like that, it swallowed him whole.