Panspermia [Chapter 1/?]
Title: Panspermia
Author: zetastation
Beta: the cosmically amazing matturemuser
Pairing: Belldom
Setting: England, 2052.
Rating: PG-13 for this one.
Warnings: language, a intergalactic red-haired being with a weird behaviour.
Summary: “Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets and planetoids.”
Feedback: Yes, please <3
Disclaimer: I don’t own Muse. This is a work of fiction and it never happened.
Author's Note: I'M BACK! But not for so long xD I'm really happy to be finally updating my LJ again! Actually I wanted to update TP, but I received another inspiration from the cosmos instead, so, yeah, here you have more alien stuff with a hint of comedy :) I hope I didn't get carried on with the technical terms, so I inserted external links and I hope to make them clear. It's not a long chapter, 2464 words. I'm flattered by the awesome feedback this fic got on its prologue and, if any of you still remember this fic, I hope you'll enjoy this chapter as much as I did while writing it <3
Dedicated to millionstar because *red-haired Matt* and nuraicha because she said she loves the idea!
Special thanks to matturemuser for being an awesome beta and pwopahnetazeta for sketching Matt's suit (here and here) <3
Prologue
***
“Finally!” Dominic exhaled loud when he set foot in the laboratory building. He glanced quickly at the red-haired man he had just rescued and caught sight of a curious pattern of lines on his face. Even if he found himself intrigued by what he had just seen, Dominic knew he would have plenty time to pay attention to the man’s appearance later. For now he just had to concentrate on putting themselves in a secure place and take care of the stranger.
Still on the first floor, they went through a quick decontamination in a room just before reaching the lift. It was a default procedure every time someone entered the building. Decontamination included a quick, hard blast of air to remove dust and dirt, and to turn the skin overdried. Of course that was not all that the decontamination system could do; there were many other options, but considering the situation, Dominic opted for the quickest available option.
After being decontaminated, they proceeded to the lift. Dominic pressed the buttons for the floor where his laboratory was and then rested his back against the cold metal of the wall. “God!” he whispered, panting, “Do you speak my language?” he tried to communicate with the man once again, but no answer came from him. Dominic turned to face the guy, but he looked to be in shock. He was breathing heavily, staring at the floor. Dominic frowned when he looked down and spotted the huge blood stain on the man’s side. He wondered whether he’d be able to help him in time.
The lift stopped and Dominic carried the stranger inside the laboratory. Walking towards a parallel entrance, they got to a small room with a sort of large stretcher. Dominic hurried to place the man onto the stretcher and heard him hissing as he tried to lay down.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” he tried to say, reassuringly.
Dominic quickly stripped out of his protective suit, kicking it to the corner of the room. Still with adrenaline running through his veins with all this unusual situation, Dominic sought for sterilized scissors and a bunch of other materials to check the man’s injury. He tried to cut the fabric of the stranger’s suit, but it felt like iron and ended up warping the blade. Looking terrified at the scissors, Dominic thought of trying to undress the man instead. He carefully pulled the guy up and looked for a zipper or fastening of some sort, but didn’t find anything.
There were these neon blue lines that started from his eyes, went around the man’s ears and the side of his neck, at the base of it. Each line went down to the collarbones, tracing them, to each shoulder and down his arms. There were also these two lines, from the same colour as the previous ones, that started from the middle of the guy’s bottom lip, went straight down his chin and the front of his neck, each line on both sides of his Adam’s apple. These lines continued straight down the chest, separating just above the groin area and down the front of each leg.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?!”
Before Dominic could think of another way to gain access to the injury he meant to treat, the red-haired man cried out as a sharp pain struck him right in his wound, making him fall back onto the mattress, pressing a hand on his sore flesh and with a pained expression in his face, squeezing his eyes shut and biting on his bottom lip so hard that it actually ended up cut.
“Oh, shit!” he ran a hand through his hair and, to his surprise, he watched when the injured man moved one hand to his right temple, as if pressing it slightly, and half of the man’s suit withdrew down to… nowhere? Dominic blinked a few times before trying to process what he had just seen.
It looked like, when the man pressed his temple, his suit quickly pulled down by itself, as if it was vanishing from his skin, dematerializing; and now it looked like the man was dressed only in trousers with the same material of the suit.
Dominic also realised that the lines he had seen in the man’s face moments earlier were now gone, as if they were part of his clothes.
Well, actually now only the lines of the legs remained, giving that the top was gone.
It was quite an exquisite, foreign suit. Dominic had never seen one like that before. It was a suit that previously covered the whole body of that man, going up his neck to the base of his head, the back of his ears and up to his hair line. It was a really tight material and it looked like it sort of stuck to the skin. It was completely shiny white, except for those unexpected neon blue lines that actually had a fluorescent effect.
After a quick glance down the man’s body, Dominic noticed his skinny frame and extremely pale skin, but soon his eyes caught sight of the injury and Dominic remembered what he was supposed to be doing at the moment.
Now that he had full access to the wound, he handled a little scanner, that looked like a barcode reader, towards the injured area. Passing it a few inches above the injury, a green light scanned it and Dominic paid attention to the record in the little screen. That device was used to scan little fragments that could be inside wounds and, since Dominic didn’t know what happened for the man to get hurt, he wanted to know if other measures would be required.
The green light soon turned red and a bip came from the device. Dominic sighed in disappointment; there was a little fragment inside the man’s flesh.
While he gathered the proper tools to remove that piece, Dominic tried to recall the navigation cabin and see if he could remember any broken thing, but since everything had been dark and he’d been anxious, he couldn’t remember anything helpful.
After cleaning the injury, Dominic quickly prepared the anaesthesia, injecting it in a serum bag beside the stretcher, setted an oxygen mask and stepped closer to the red-haired man who was wriggling on the stretcher. “Hey, look at me...” he placed a sympathetic hand on the man’s shoulder and received a pained look from the other; cosmic blue eyes meeting stormy grey ones. For one moment Dominic found himself speechless, but soon shook his head and cleared his throat. “You’re going to undergo a fast procedure, okay? There’s nothing to worry about, it’ll be over soon. I’ll put you to sleep for a while then.”
The man actually nodded and closed his eyes, even if Dominic had sworn the other didn’t understand a single thing he said. With the anaesthesia already going through the man’s veins, Dominic put the oxygen mask on him and waited a few minutes until he finally had fallen unconscious.
“It’ll be over soon...” Dominic said under his sigh as he cast a last glance at the strange man before looking for his scalpel.
***
A few hours had passed since Dominic finished the surgery in the man; he removed tiny pieces of glass and general smithereens from the guy’s flesh. He only now could relax a bit from the previous tension and, when he went to check outside the big window of his laboratory, he realised it was raining and the fire in the forest was nearly over.
Now that was curious.
Sitting back on a chair, he started feeling his muscles relaxing and the incoming pain that was going to bother him for his physical effort after walking a long path wearing a heavy protective suit and with even more extra weight helping to support another person.
Dominic’s dry throat reminded him that he needed to drink something cool. Reluctantly, he stood up and left the laboratory; there was a vending machine outside in the hall and Dominic picked a bottle of water. While he refreshed himself with the liquid, his thoughts wandered back to the stranger in his laboratory.
Who is that guy? Where is he from? What does he do? Why is he here and what happened for him to crash there as if he was a divine being sent from Heaven to Earth? What a silly comparison.
Well, but those man’s eyes certainly were heavenly, thought Dominic.
And then he thought again about the man’s weird suit. Alright, it’s already the year of 2052 and clothes are not the same as they were thirty years ago, but Dominic had never seen any designed like that. Not to mention the extraordinary consistency of the fabric, which seemed super resistant.
Was that man and his crazy aircraft and suit part of any secret government program? If so, they obviously would be looking for this guy right now. Would it mean Dominic was in trouble?! What if they find out that he rescued the man? They certainly will know about that. The government knows everything.
But, fortunately, there was something that could leave Dominic safe for a while; he was in protected territory. Even if the locations of the building he worked at were in England, the whole property corresponded to a research area and, since 2035, when the United Nations for Research and Scientific Progress was created, all laboratories and research establishments that joined the UNRSP became stateless. The laws from the countries they are located in doesn’t have immediate effect on these properties.
If the British government wanted their pilot and aircraft back, they must petition for a writ of mandamus plus the right authorization to inspect the area of the International Centre of Scientific Research, where Dominic worked.
Would they bother doing it? Dominic was too tired to think straight, so he decided to shrug it off for now. He could burn some neurons later, after a good nap. He had not slept in… what? Thirty-six hours? He surely knows the harm of sleep absence.
Checking his digital wristwatch, he realised it was already six in the morning. As soon as Dominic entered the laboratory again, he was surprised to find the man trying to stand on his feet beside the big glass table at the centre of the room.
He was still shirtless and bandages covered him around the waist. His hair was completely mussed and, when he lifted one arm and rubbed his eyes, Dominic noticed that the hair in his armpit was as red as on the man’s head. Quirking an eyebrow in curiosity, Dominic couldn’t stop himself from lowering his gaze until the man’s navel, where a sparse amount of light red hair could be seen.
Even there…? Dominic thought how curious that fact was because the man was not gingery, he had a really hot shade of red and that colour could only be achieved with dye.
‘Hot’. That word lingered in Dominic’s mind for a while, making a connection with the man before his eyes and, oh well, that’s not very professional of Dominic.
Clearing his throat, he looked up at the guy’s hypnotizing blue eyes, “H-hi,” he clumsily tried to make contact, but the man only kept staring at Dom. “Eh...” he decided to step closer to the red-haired man, holding up a hand to him, “I’m Dominic Howard.” Offering a friendly smile, he waited for the man to shake his hand.
After all, a handshake is a universal greeting, isn’t it?
Well… Maybe it was not…
Let’s just say that Dominic got pretty confused, and unintentionally aroused, when the red-haired guy stepped forward with an equally ‘friendly’ smile on his face and, surprisingly, placed a hand between Dominic’s legs, lusciously squeezing him over the fabric as he tastefully licked the blond’s face, from his bottom lip to the end of his right cheek.
Dominic just stayed there, with a raised hand, not to mention another thing that had risen as well, speechless and caught by surprise by the literally warm greeting from the guy.
“iHi, Dominic! MIa hama kuba SikaNkulunkulu Owinileyo Mnganelihle. Jubili kini nazi. Kini bambithe kuh!”
Still shocked by what had just happened, Dominic didn’t utter a word. “iHi?” The guy tried to talk to the blond. “Oh!” he facepalmed himself, chuckled and looked back at Dominic, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten you have no idea what I’m saying!”
Dominic’s expression could not be put into words. Besides the harassment he had just gone through, now the man who previously spoke a foreign language was perfectly speaking English. He looked at the guy, astonished, before finally organizing a bit his thoughts, “What the hell did you just do?!”
“Hm?”
“What the hell did you just do?!” As if he had just realised the world around himself, Dominic spoke aloud somewhat between anger and confusion.
“What?”
“I can’t fucking believe you just- You just licked my face, man! And touched my things!” he stepped back and tried to wipe off his face with the sleeve of his lab coat; realisation finally struck him. “Who the fuck are you? Why did you just do it to me?!”
“I just greeted you! But, well, I reckon this is not an acceptable way of saying ‘hi’ on Earth? And I had said my name is SikaNkulunkulu Owinileyo Mnganelihle. Nice to meet you and you taste good, Dominic,” he smiled politely, despite his weird behaviour.
“What the…? What are you talking about? And what’s your name again?!”
“SikaNkulunkulu Owinileyo Mnganelihle!”
“What the hell, man?! Where are you from?” Dominic could not figure out how to pronounce that odd name.
“I’m from Nezwe, but according to the files I read, your people call my planet Gliese 667 Cc…? That’s a really weird name to call a planet, you know? But we’ve been calling yours Throwu for ages. I guess we’re even now,” he chuckled slightly and Dominic was still shocked. He even wondered whether he was so tired that he had started hallucinating. “To be honest, maybe my name can’t be pronounced by people like you. If I ever had the chance to translate it to some human name, what would it be…?” Tapping his chin with his fingers, the stranger looked thoughtful for a while, “Oh! What about Mathewu uJakobe Bel Amy? Is it an acceptable name?”
Not a word from Dominic.
“Shit… If aTLaS were here he could search in his files some human names… Let me think better… Hm, I think Matthew James Bellamy could be the closest translation of my name? The meaning is similar though.” ‘Matthew’ glanced back to Dominic after hearing a thud, just to find the blond sprawled on the floor.
He just passed out.
***