There once was a child and an alien who made a deal in darkness, both to save each other's lives. A deal with an unknown devil to forge a new fate that would go on to become something far greater than either could fathom. The two of them would live with one another for the next twenty-seven years. They would join the military, they would be transferred all the way to Arizona, to a small town that was once forgotten by the majority of the world, all to find a large cave that grew deeper with every passing minute. The two, conjoined as they were, would split apart for the first time in years, their bodies no longer one. There would be something empty where once there was something full.
Rose would be alone. Lost in a desert. Waiting for it to call out to her again.
She would wander, like a zombie, doing her daily tasks, barely aware of who she was. She would breathe in the deep summer air and it would stay a little longer in her lungs, lingering like a cold that she couldn't quite get rid of.
Oh, how there were once were two.
In the darkness now, Rose knows only the one that they've merged into being. And she knows only the brisk reply she's obtained.
I will not join you, Rose. The answer felt colder than anything else. She couldn't see anything, could barely hear anything beyond the rushing of her own ears, but still, she knew the dripping sarcasm that came from her own tongue as she did speak.
"Isn't it a shame that you'll always have more hairs on your body than sense behind your eyes?"
There is no answer to fighting here.
"Let me go then."
The darkness dropped. They were no longer in the deep portion of the cave, but back again at the front entrance, towards the door. The creature moved so much faster than she did. If she had years, she could study the way it traversed, the way it cut across the floor, the way it could move without its feet making a sound at times. Did it use all fours? Could it fly?
The creature was like her in so many ways, but in just as many, it was not.
Without the darkness, she could see, and when she could see, she drew close. She wanted to see clearly, one last time before their time was truly complete.
"You were me, once," she said. "And I was you."
Our souls carried each other when we were growing. Your body was a vessel for my arrival on this planet. You were the key to my survival.
"Is that all I was?"
The silence between them grew. The creature regarded her as she regarded it. Perhaps it too took into consideration what she looked like–her long curls, its stone body; her two legs stood the same as its own, her arms hanging the same as its; her head tilted to one side, its mouth open to the other. It had a crystal inside the center of its chest, and a large crack that seemed to cut open the chest. This was new. It had never been cracked before.
Were they made of crystals? Their bodies were unique, but their minds felt so similar. When it was inside her, when it spoke to her, its voice felt like a friend. She could melt inside its touch. When she was younger, it spoke like a child. As she aged, it grew with her. She thought at first it was a figment of her imagination. A friend she'd made up. Something that all children did.
Then, in Idle, a friend consumed and awoke within the caves, and imagination didn't call to her the way the dry desert air did. No, there was something different. It was real.
Everything she'd ever known was real in a way that made perfectly incomplete sense.
And yet, when she looked up into the multitudes of eyes of a beast, a creature, an alien, a friend, she could not find an answer to her own question.
