Chapter Text
Polished. That was the only way he could describe it. Like oiled wood mixed with rubber.
The three thick fingers slid over each other easily, each ridge fitting neatly along another as he moved them, rubbed and spread them apart, nausea roiling in his gut.
Revolting.
The stink of melted plastic drifted from where a fire burned outside, not far, and broken springs dug into Wikus’ back as he turned on the old, blood-stained mattress that had become his own (his bed, not just his blood) and held the hand up to the light.
It looked black as a new-born prawn. Bald and smooth as one, too, Wikus knew.
He had seen all variety of prawns growing up in Johannesburg, working at MNU. Towering and tiny, alive and dead - every one of them with thick, chitinous skin in shades of brown and yellow and red.
The hand fell back onto his chest. He cradled the awkward weight of it as his gaze travelled to the other side of the shack.
Christopher’s carapace was green. A mossy colour in the day, but the bluish light of the monitors gave it an almost ethereal glow, sliding like water over his long arms as he worked, over his strange, protruding hips. The colour of stained glass, of moonlight on a still ocean.
Wikus stared.
He found himself doing that often now, at moments like these, when the child was asleep in the other room and all the world around them seemed to shrink away. It was a kind of morbid fascination, he thought. The kind someone might get walking through a taxidermy, or watching a long-forgotten prisoner through the bars of their cell.
That is what you will become, a vicious voice in his head whispered. A monster, unknowable and unlovable.
When Christopher moved as though to glance back at him, Wikus turned away, faced the wall of rusted steel and forced himself to sleep. To dream of his wife, of the life he needed desperately to return to.
It had already been too long.
By some miracle they’d made it out of the MNU labs alive and with the fluid, but not without a rain of bullets and helicopters close behind. They had gone underground, literally, in the dropship beneath the shack and stayed there for two weeks.
It was a hard time for Wikus. The days passed slowly trapped in a four-square-metre room of metal with only aliens for company. It was cold, the air tasted stale and strange, and after a week of hearing only his own voice outside of the clicking of mandibles, he stopped speaking altogether.
Despair unlike any he had ever known gripped him. On days when he found no reason to rise from the cramped corner in which he slept, Christopher was the one who brought him water, who pushed him to eat a mouthful of the grisly 20-year-old vacuum-packed meat paste that was all they had to sustain them, who moved him onto his side so he could clean the oozing mess of Wikus’ mutated arm.
He’d lost 8 kilos and grown a patchy beard by the time they emerged and found the district had grown quiet, proof that even MNU eventually tired of aimless searching.
The shack had been thoroughly tossed. Computer parts lay heaped on the floor, shelves overturned and trampled over, but a thick layer of settled dust told them it was mercifully vacant.
They'd put it all back in place without a word. Christopher discarded his conspicuous red jacket in favour of a muted blue vest hung open at the front, the sort a hundred other prawns might wear. The remnants of a torn old curtain served well enough to hide Wikus’ arm, which he wore like a cloak, draped over his left shoulder and tied under his right armpit with a frayed power cord.
There could be no doubt that Koobus and the rest of MNU’s first battalion were out there somewhere, watching for any sign of them, but for now they were just another prawn and homeless human who called District 9 home.
Still, it wasn’t enough. They needed to replace what he’d wasted, Christopher told him. Too much had been lost.
“We will have to search the district,” he'd clicked calmly, though the edge of frustration in his voice wasn’t lost on Wikus. “For more of my people’s technology.”
Rummage through mounds of garbage piled years high with decaying refuse in the hopes of finding more fluid, is what he meant, and Wikus had no room to argue. Not so long as he was squatting under the prawn’s roof, relying on him to provide the only cure for his condition and the medication to prevent it worsening.
They were a type of immuno-suppressant, or so Christopher had claimed, as he placed one of the heavy, spherical tablets in Wikus' hand their first night underground.
“This will help stop the change, but less if you are badly injured,” he had told him, which Wikus took to mean he was going to grow more prawn parts if he wasn’t careful not to get kicked in the arm again.
The tablets were bitter and the texture of them was strange, like little slimy marbles, but they worked. His arm was still a grotesque mess of jutting exoskeleton and peeling skin, but it no longer bled through every shirt he found, and the pain was easy to manage when he was able to find a few drops of whiskey or (to his great shame) some unfinished cat food.
In the end, it would all be worth it. If crawling through filth and taking alien poison to stop his body from bursting was what would get him home, back to his life and his Tania, then that was what he would do.
Time went by. They rose each day, Wikus from his mattress by the door, Christopher and the child from the only other room the shack contained, and walked to new and farther corners of the district for more junk to pick through.
The child came with them more often than not, his tough little feet climbing mounds of trash quicker than Wikus could take a single step, reaching now and again for his father’s hand to tug it, to gaze up at him and chatter excitedly each time he found something new.
Once, he tried reaching for Wikus’ prawn hand. Wikus snatched it away like he’d been burned.
“Fook off,” he growled, with a glare he’d thrown at the boy before, one that warned him not to try it again.
Christopher watched him from afar and said nothing. If he disapproved of Wikus’ behaviour, of his constantly sour mood, he gave no indication of it.
Perhaps he knew better than to push it, lest Wikus lose his composure all together. Lest he finally break into a deranged frenzy that drew the wrong kind of attention and fucked it all up for both of them. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
At the end of the day, they traded what little valuable scrap they’d found for a goat’s head. As his portion roasted over the fire pit Christopher had built for him, Wikus took his pocket knife (found in a discarded tool box only a week prior, a precious find), sliced the snout off and held it out to the kid without so much as looking at him.
The boy was ecstatic, of course. He ate up any attention Wikus paid to him, but knew better than to say anything as he plucked the meat gently from Wikus’ soft human fingers.
Christopher lingered a little longer that night, after all the monitors were powered down and Wikus had already turned away to sleep. He felt the prawn’s gaze on his back, and his heart thumped in his chest, unease blanketing his skin.
“Sleep well,” Christopher said at last, and closed the rickety plywood door to the bedroom, leaving Wikus to the darkness and a restless night of little sleep.
Weeks came and went before he had his first real find: a black box, similar in shape to what you’d recover from an airplane crash, but small enough to fit in the palm of his human hand. He’d almost missed it underfoot, but the little orange symbol engraved on the side had caught his eye, unmistakably alien.
“Christopher!” He shouted, “come here, Christopher!”
Heavy footsteps and the sound of scattering tin, and Christopher was beside him.
“Yes,” he took the box from Wikus, turned it over and examined it closely. It was tiny in his hands. “Good, very good.”
Wikus beamed. “It’s good, right? It’s what we need?”
“Come,” Christopher said, already striding away, his long, angular legs covering twice the space in half the time it took Wikus to jog behind him.
He watched on anxiously as Christopher extracted the fluid. The process was long, but excitement kept Wikus hyper-focused, and he couldn’t even find it in himself to mind when the little one grabbed his pant leg, let the child hang on to him as they waited.
The dropship’s chemistry station was not so unlike the one Wikus had seen in the shack where he’d discovered the fluid, what seemed a lifetime ago. The one that had belonged to that dead prawn whose body probably lay at MNU even now, dissected, mutilated.
Wikus had spent so little time thinking of that prawn (had tried not to, forced himself not to), that he wondered for the first time if he had been more than Christopher’s co-conspiritor - perhaps even his friend. He imagined them together, wandering the district as he did now, standing close and speaking in hushed tones as they secretly planned their escape. Wikus told himself it made no difference, even as a tense, resentful feeling coiled in his gut.
After distilling and tempering and an incredible amount of patience, a single, black drop fell into the tube. It blinked once in acknowledgment, and Christopher closed it shut.
“That’s it?” Wikus asked in disbelief. “All that for one little drop?”
“Patience,” Christopher told him. He hesitated a moment, then placed a hand on Wikus’ shoulder. “Even a small amount does many things. A few more like this, and we will have enough.”
The prawn squeezed his shoulder so gently that he barely moved at all, and when he let go, it sent a ripple of warmth cascading down Wikus’ arm to the tips of his fingers.
Christopher’s maxillae spread out from his face and retracted again slowly, the prawn approximation of a smile, and Wikus nodded, but couldn’t bring himself to look him in the eye.
Something was changing. Something deeper and more wretched even than the black scales bursting out from beneath his skin. It left him lying awake at night, skin flushed as he slid one thick, leathery hand down to where he was hardest and pretended it belonged to someone else.
Then, always when he was done, images of butchered prawn bodies on cold metal tables would flash behind his eyelids, and he would shrink into himself in loathing.
One morning, as they scavenged an overturned freighter and Christopher was bent low, examining the gutted transmission while the sunlight glinted on the hard plates of his back, Wikus suddenly couldn’t take it anymore.
“I aborted your babies, you know. I laughed,” he found himself saying, unprompted. “I killed a prawn with one of your own weapons.”
Christopher stilled. Wikus expected him to rise from the refuse and fly into a rage, but when he looked back at Wikus, the prawn’s eyes shone with a terrible, wrenching pity. As though it were Wikus who was hurt, Wikus who should be angry.
And he was. Pain rose from the farthest depths of his being, seized him in a vice. He threw down the broken headlight he was holding, glass shattering over the dirt as he stormed away.
He couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to go home now. He needed to hear Tania’s voice, damn them all, before he forgot how it sounded.
He crashed through the door of the shack, overturned his mattress and found the mobile phone, dusty and forgotten, crammed into a rust hole in the wall. He held down the power button, watched it flash briefly and go dark.
“Fook,” Wikus swore, shaking the phone, slamming it against his palm as though it might jump back to life. “Come on, come on,” he pleaded and shook it again, squeezed it until the screen cracked in his alien hand. “Fook!”
“It’s not functional.”
Wikus jumped, whipped around to find Christopher standing behind him.
“It needs repair,” he clicked softly from the door.
“You can repair it?” Wikus asked, piteously. His heart beat against his ribs like a trapped bird.
“No,” Christopher shook his head just slightly, a human mannerism. “I don’t have the needed parts.” Carefully, he added; “cell phone towers do not reach this far into the district.”
Furious anger flared up in Wikus once again. “That – that’s not the point, man!” He shouted, jabbing one finger at the prawn’s broad, hard chest. “That’s not the fooking point!”
“Calm down,” Christopher tried to reach for his arm, instead grazed his fingers over the man’s skin as Wikus flinched away, sending a rush of heat from where they touched to the pit of Wikus’ belly.
“You,” Wikus croaked, eyes suddenly pricking with tears, “you don’t understand, you’re nothing but a disgusting creature!”
Wikus shoved him as hard as he could once, twice, until Christopher’s back was pressed against a mouldy bookcase.
“You fooking worthless prawn, what do you know about it?” Every inch of him was shaking. His hands, human and prawn, trembled where they pressed against Christopher’s ridged sternum. “You know what it’s like to have a wife waiting for you, hey? To want to be with her, and not in this stinking shithole full of – of lowlife criminals, huh, man?”
Christopher’s smooth, powerful hands held Wikus steady, but didn’t push him away. “No,” he said, “but I know what it is to want to go home.”
Wikus scoffed dismissively, but the fight was already leaving him. “You’re nothing,” he said weakly as his arms gave way and he fell against Christopher, lay his wet face on the prawn’s solid chest in a way he had never, would never have done before.
He blamed Christopher for so many things. For the transformation ripping him up from the inside out, for the idiot prawn who didn’t hide the damn fluid well enough in the first place, for Tania who hadn’t tried to call him for months now, who might never call again. Christopher was silent, simply held him as he wept.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” Wikus rasped at last wretchedly, self-hatred finally swelling to the fore.
It felt like hours later that Christopher picked Wikus up in his arms, carried his boneless body through the narrow doorway and laid Wikus down in his own bed.
Wikus felt Christopher draw a thin sheet over his shaking frame, could smell the earthy musk of the prawn on the pillow beneath his head, could sense him hovering close by, and it took almost no time at all for him to drift away.
In sleep, he was himself again. No hard carapace piercing through bone, no skin peeling off the muscle, just as pink and doughy as any human ought to be. It was the other body, the one that moved above him, that slid slowly down his soft flesh and made him moan, that was the one made of hard plates and clicking mandibles and strong, stony green limbs.
The sky had darkened into early evening by the time he woke. Only a thin stripe of orange framed the roofs of the shacks he could see through the window.
Christopher was still there. He sat leaning against the door, his head tilted toward Wikus.
He didn’t look away when Wikus met his gaze.
“You were dreaming,” he said, and there was something in it, something in the tone of Christopher’s voice and the tender look in his eyes that sent a wave of unexpected panic through Wikus.
He dragged himself up from the bed but winced in pain when his prawn hand throbbed, falling back with his elbow pressed into the hard pillow.
Christopher was crouched beside him in an instant.
“You need rest,” he urged, hands hovering near Wikus’ shoulders but not touching. “Stay here, I will bring you water and food.”
“I don’t want any fooking food,” Wikus snapped. His entire being buzzed with a strange, desperate energy. He didn’t know why, but he felt sure that if he didn’t leave now, something terrible was going to happen.
Christopher didn’t back away, instead pulled Wikus’ cloak aside carefully. “You’ve torn the skin,” he said, revealing where a new stream of blood trickled down Wikus’ forearm onto the thin, discoloured sheets.
The prawn rose to his feet, took the coffee tin full of medical supplies from a shelf on the far wall and sat beside Wikus again, a little closer.
Wikus leaned away from him as though repelled, but Christopher’s hands were steady and gentle as they took his arm, dragged cloth soaked in antiseptic down his perforated skin in long, precise swipes.
“I can clean it myself, man,” Wikus protested quietly, but he didn’t try to tear himself away. The antiseptic stung, though Christopher was careful not to apply too much, his fingers clasping Wikus’ forearm as lightly as if he were made of glass, like Christopher thought he might shatter under his touch.
“You will have to be cautious not to reopen the wound,” Christopher told him without looking up. “You shouldn't move so-“
“Why are you helping me?” Wikus cut him off. “What do you get out of it, hey? I already got you the fooking fluid back from MNU. Your boy’s a better scavenger than me.”
Christopher was looking into his eyes now, seemed hesitant to answer. “I don’t get anything out of it,” he said.
“Then why do you fooking care?” Wikus demanded. His breath was coming hard and fast. Christopher’s hand suddenly clenched his arm as though afraid Wikus would pull away.
“Because you care,” Christopher clicked, the accusation soft and cutting.
And that was enough. Wikus closed his hand around the collar of Christopher’s vest and pulled him down.
It felt like they were drowning. Christopher’s hands slid beneath Wikus’ shirt and down the back of his pants to knead his flesh, a high chirring sound echoing from his chest. Wikus clung to him desperately, dug his nails into the grooves along Christopher’s back and bucked up against him like an animal as the prawn hurried to pull the clothes from Wikus’ body.
He was harder than he could ever remember being, his cock straining against Christopher’s thin, armoured waist as he bore down on Wikus, pushed him firmly into the mattress and held him there. Within moments a slick shaft was sliding against Wikus’ naked backside, the head thick and ribbed, leaving a sticky trail on his skin as it travelled between his cheeks, and before he could even process the pain of it breaching his body, it had already buried itself inside him.
Wikus cried out like he'd been sliced open, but his legs closed tight around Christopher’s waist to keep him there, heels digging into the prawn’s powerful thighs. Christopher inhaled sharply against Wikus' neck as he wrapped his arms around the man’s back, holding him as he began to rock shallowly into him.
In the space of one gasping breath to another, the agony gave way to shocking, blistering pleasure. Wikus writhed with it, moaning aloud as Christopher’s phallus moved against the sensitive bundle of nerves deep in his rectum that he had never allowed anyone to touch, not even himself, not even Tania.
Christopher quickly lost control, thrusting relentlessly into Wikus while the man rutted up against him, his rough chest plates rubbing Wikus’ skin raw as the human scrambled for any purchase he could find that would allow him to press his aching erection against the prawn.
Wikus' orgasm hit him like a punch to the gut. A choked wail ripped itself from his throat as he came, coating both their stomachs without so much as laying a hand on himself. Christopher followed almost immediately, one hand gripping Wikus’ hip tightly as the prawn buried himself deep and filled him with a wet heat.
One last stab of pain rippled through Wikus as Christopher pulled out of him, his intromittent organ already retracting back into its sheath behind the bony plate that covered his groin, and mortification rolled down Wikus’ spine at the sight of it.
Christopher slumped on the bed beside him in the same moment Wikus leapt to his feet. He was still trying to catch his breath, chest heaving as he wrenched his clothes from the shack floor, couldn't get them on fast enough, didn’t even bother with his cloak or shoes as he tore the bedroom door open.
“Wait,” Christopher called, but Wikus was already gone, had found the child playing in the grimy dirt outside and felt a cold wave of shame wash over him as he stalked away.
He walked for close to an hour, to the very edge of the district where a crumpled chain-link fence was all that separated the citizens of D9 from the rest of the world. He ducked through a hole in the wire and made his way to the river that ran beneath the city overpass.
He stank of sex as he discarded his soiled clothes on the riverbed and climbed into the water, submerged himself in it's coldness and let it wipe the memory of Christopher's touch from his skin.
It was like dying, in a way. He looked down at his chest chafed by the alien body he'd pressed to his own and hips bruised by alien fingers and felt one of the last parts of him that still resembled the man he used to be disappear, washed away in the river with the sweat and blood and Christopher’s viscous black semen, humanity unravelling from him like so much string.
How could he ever go home after this? The cruel voice in his head whispered to him.
Who could ever love him now?