Chapter Text
When Max ran away from home, he expected to get at least somewhat far.
Maybe a town away. Hell, a whole state. He could even make it into Canada if all went well. Whatever got him far, and across as many disagreeing jurisdictions as possible. All he needed was to get out of that goddamn house or die trying. That plan, without even having to say so, never had the scope of leaving Earth– much less the entire fucking galaxy. Because aliens weren’t supposed to be real- or even if they were, didn’t seem to give a flying fuck about humanity.
If anyone was still looking for him. Anyone at all. The trail would’ve gone dark in the nowhere town of Sleepy Peak.
It was just supposed to be a layover. He’d taken a city bus out as far as it went with the spare money he’d stolen and scrounged from odd jobs. Then got on the next one. And the next. Winks of sleep came here and there, but he had too much to lose to get caught unaware until he got really into the sticks. He wasn’t even an idiot about it! Max was rotating his shirts to make himself harder to identify. When he could, he kept his hoodie drawn and his demeanor completely forgettable to the apathetic passersby.
By the time he was in Sleepy Peak, he was the only one left on the bus aside from the driver. Once it got into the town formally, it would turn around. Max managed to negotiate just a little further. The old man looked at him strangely, and even clarified with him if this was the place he was intended to go, and Max dissuaded his suspicion with a polite nod and the excuse of a summer camp.
That, as it turned out, had been the wrong thing to say. Sleepy Peak, for such a lacklustre place, actually had multiple summer camps. When asked for clarification, Max just shrugged and said it was a nature camp and he’d figure it out if he was dropped nearby.
“That one?” The man asked, glancing at him from the mirror, “Wasn’t it shut down after it was unveiled as some big money laundering fraud?”
Max chewed his cheek. Either risk real people checking his backstory or just get dropped off at a place that doesn’t exist anymore. “It’s under new management, I think. They’re doing a lot of scrambling to get the place usable so my admission was late.”
“If you say so.”
He was let out on a gravel road that bordered nothing but trees in either direction. The guy didn’t even want to go down the washed out driveway that led into the camp for fear of getting stuck and having to find a tow truck that far out. It didn’t really matter because Max had no intention of trying to go down there and get eaten by an animal. Maybe he’d come back if he needed to squat somewhere, but Max had seen enough horror movies to know to stay the fuck away from an eerie as shit abandoned summer camp.
In hindsight, he actually would have been better off there, but instead, Max took one look at the setting sun and just started walking.
The bus may have stopped, but he wouldn’t. That had been the last one of the day, and he had nowhere to go until the next one in the morning. Either he’d find a remotely safe looking car to hitchhike with, or he’d make it to the bus terminal the next town over. Yes, he could feel tingling nerves and waves of paranoia telling him that this topped the list of bad ideas, but Max had been in fight or flight so long that he really didn’t have it in him to stop and have a complete breakdown at the side of the road. At some point, he really was just too emotionally and physically drained to care. Shit happened. He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and do the one thing he was good at: Surviving.
The lights came after dark.
Max hadn’t seen a single car on the road. Not one.
They weren’t the average set of headlights, and they sure as hell weren't shooting stars with how overcast the day had been.
“...The fuck?” he asked no one in particular, voice scratchy from exhaustion and dehydration in equal parts. A warm gust of wind blew his way and amidst the fresh air and pine, Max smelled ozone.
Hopefully it was just some fucked up noiseless airplane. Or some dumbass tech startup testing out drones. All he could make out were dots, shifting and moving, but generally keeping in alignment. They probably couldn’t see him, and even if they did, he must have looked creepy walking in the dark like that, so hopefully no one would bother him. A sleepy kid in Sleepy Peak wasn’t anyone’s top priority,
The lights got bigger.
Illumination spilled so easily that he could see further down the road, now. Hear every crunch of his sneakers on the gravel since all the animals had gone quiet. The bullfrogs and crickets wanted nothing to do with this, and he was inclined to agree. With every second, the dots grew, coming closer to the point where Max halted his movement and squinted in his bleary stupor.
That was something to hide from, he decided. The thought had barely executed in his exhausted mind when a spotlight as bright as the fucking sun landed on him.
“Shit!” he hissed, hands flying up to cover some of the blinding glare. Being flashbanged out of nowhere was as jarring as it was disorienting, and there was no way in hell that this was going to be a pleasant interaction, no matter who it was.
Yeah, fuck that noise.
His first instinct was to duck and run, but Max was caught off guard to discover that he couldn’t. Like a nightmare, it kept him fixed in place and rendered his efforts useless. Just as he tried again, the weight of his body shifted strangely. The entire thing felt off and wholly wrong in a way that had his hair standing on end. It took him a solid, incredulous second to realize he was slowly being relinquished from gravity. That feeling was pressure being taken off his joints, muscles and bones. His backpack even lifted from his shoulders.
“Wha-” He blinked, feeling his feet leave the ground, “Oh, fuck. Okay- Shit!”
Helicopters couldn’t do that last time he checked. Nothing could, actually. The whole night felt a little dissociative with all he had going on, but being lifted into the air was too much, even for him. As Max struggled, his sharp breaths were the loudest thing on the empty road. Everything was too bright. Too foreign. Max would have thought he was being fucking raptured if it weren’t for the fact that he didn’t believe in god. Nothing made sense, but that couldn’t change the fact that it was still fucking happening to him-
“What the fuck!” he hollered, at least two metres from the ground and climbing. He still couldn’t see much through the blinding light, but he hoped whoever was piloting it could hear him, “Motherfucker- Put me down!”
There came no response, and his increasingly scrambled brain decided only the government would have the bullshit money required for a fucking tractor beam of all things, “I’m an American fucking citizen, asshole! Shouldn’t you be doing this shit in Area-51?”
Nothing. And the pull was speeding up.
Saving his breath, Max shielded his eyes as much as possible and tried to see his abductor better. The cold unnatural light made that next to impossible, but the more he looked, the more it seemed like the night sky warped unnaturally above him. In the toss-up between ‘rip in spacetime’ and ‘billion dollar cloaking technology’, Max picked the latter and primed himself for confrontation, or getting shot in the head, or literally anything else that happened when the American government abducted brown kids off the street.
Being dropped at this height would probably be terminal. If whatever freaky tech shit let him go now, Max became scavenger food. It was no use flailing in place anymore if he was that fucked.
The view of treetops and Lake Lilac was all too quickly replaced with all-encompassing white light and Max knew he’d reached the source. All he could do was ward away the pain by shielding his eyes and ducking low. The feeling of disorientation increased, and something in his instincts didn’t like not knowing which way was down. Sensory deprivation made him particularly aware of the hammer of his heart and the smell of ozone that had been steadily increasing since his ascent.
Something pneumatic hissed shut below him. The first sound given by the strange craft.
In the next instant, the light was off. The pink shade of lumens seeping through his fingers was traded for comparative darkness. Max didn’t even have the time to open his eyes before gravity seemed to heave back to normal and sent him squeezing them shut again.
“Fuck!”
Instead of dying on that nowhere road, Max hit a metallic surface with a pained noise. He was on the floor almost as soon as he realized he was falling, so it couldn’t have been that far. Dull pain radiated up his shoulder, but thankfully he didn’t smack his head. He had to blink to clear his vision, letting his eyes adjust to a more sane level of brightness and-
He was in a fucking cage.
A box?
Whatever the semantics were, he barely had room to stand in the cube of frosted glass he found himself inside. It still let light in, enough so to recognize thin lines inside the material (possibly reinforcement?) that seemed to pulse every now and then. The floor was smooth and vaguely cold, and the once fresh air from outside now held an off note. That particular detail concerned him because there didn’t seem to be any visible air holes outside of what looked like a shower drain on the ceiling.
“Hello?” Max called, beating a fist against the glass a few times, “Anyone wanna fucking tell me what’s going on?”
Anything outside the box sounded muffled and unintelligible, but he made sure to glare at the vague shadows he could make out. There were noises, though. Someone was there.
“You hear me?” Max snapped, letting the barrier between them work up his nerves, “I don’t know what the fuck this is supposed to be, but you picked the wrong fucking kid!”
Every second they ignored him was just another heap of conclusions he could jump to. The chemical smell seeping into the box was beginning to make his head hurt and there were a million and one reasons why that was not a good sign for him. Mostly because the CIA didn’t need nearly this much fanfare to kill one kid. Or anyone, for that matter. Either Lockheed Martin just got a lot better at not bragging about their superior technology, or Max was a little more fucked than he wanted to think about.
He took a steadying breath and- wow, damn that had a little kick to it. Maybe he should hold off on more of those for now. Which meant no more yelling. Fuck.
Okay, maybe this screamed aliens.
Which was fucking stupid, but increasingly probable. As far as Max knew, aliens only became relevant to Earth whenever big agencies wanted to cover something up. Something like, he didn't know, snatching children from the middle of nowhere with technology they weren’t supposed to have? If he were watching this on TV, he’d be able to call bullshit immediately, but-
Now Max really needed to breathe. His vision was getting weird.
The pressure in his lungs grew to something unignorable, and the bodily reflex of ‘stop suffocating yourself you idiot’ kicked in hard enough to make him break and steal a shambling gasp. It tasted fucking sour, hitting somewhere deep in his nose like gasoline and it sure as hell didn’t chase away the spots gathering in his vision. If anything, all of it just got worse. The pulse of pain in his head grew to match every breath, and Max could do nothing but sink against the frosted wall once his balance was compromised.
“Not… good…” he rasped, before promptly passing the fuck out.
– – –
It was no surprise that he felt like shit when he woke up. Saying he ‘woke up’ felt a little too gentle for jolting into consciousness with a shout and having to immediately lower his head back down when a wave of pain and nausea greeted him. A protesting shoulder, cottonmouth and that strange lingering headache greeted him when he came to. Max was more surprised he woke up at all.
“Ow.”
Blinking his eyes open, Max realized he was somewhere else. In the time he’d been out, his captors had moved him. Instead of a box, he’d been upgraded to something more akin to a jail cell. The white room remained largely unfurnished, but he could recognize a few things despite the weird… engineering. There was a thinly stuffed rectangle on the ground he was going to assume was supposed to be a bed, a partition with no other purpose than to obscure… yeah that was a squat toilet if he’d ever seen one, and more of that foggy reinforced glass as a sad excuse for a window.
“Delightful,” his voice sounded like sandpaper, but hearing himself speak out loud felt strangely grounding. That, and the backpack around his shoulders reminded him of his reality.
Damn, the universe had to fuck him over one last time, huh?
His shining reward for taking charge of his own life was being kidnapped, knocked out, and put in a cell. Was it telling that he didn’t think of crying for his parents? The police? Anyone? The only thing that made water prick his eyes was his own disappointment and frustration. Because of course begging, borrowing and stealing would only land him under a new oppressor. This time, he might not get lucky. All of that, and he was just going to die here- because Max was a realist. And in real life no one came looking for kids like him. Not in time, anyway.
He finally got the wherewithal to drag himself into sitting upright after a while. Standing felt like a lot right now, so he kept his legs crossed and glared in the general direction of his foggy window again like a bad CSI show.
Except the window was suddenly a lot less transparent now.
“Jesus fucking christ!”
What looked back at him either had to be some demented CGI artist’s version of a prank or an actual fucking alien. The eyes that met his own were yellow and slitted like a reptile, but the rest of the ‘face’ was entirely fish. Like they somehow managed to give a northern pike hormonal acne and a bright red waddle on its head to boot. The thing was so ugly that it actually reminded him of a shithead teen who gave him a black eye once in school.
“Give a kid some warnings before you show something like that!” he snapped, a cocktail of bitterness and adrenaline sharpening his tongue for him. Speaking hurt but some things had to be known.
The abomination’s mouth moved, throat shifting beneath the khaki collar of the strange clothing it had on, but no sound made it to Max. He got the sense that it was talking about him instead of to him, tapping away at a holographic device in its reptilian hands and only three fingers. There came a clunky sound from the flat space of wall beside the window, and the alien - because let’s be honest here, that was a fucking alien- walked towards it.
All too quickly, a doorway hissed open where the wall was supposed to be. Without any barrier separating them, Max could see beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was built fucking wrong. That thing was now in there with him and Max could recognize a weapon when he saw it strapped to a backwards facing leg.
“Fuck,” why freak out at the existence of aliens when he could freak out at the more pertinent issue of one of them approaching him, “Alright, shit, that was mean-”
The alien managed to rattle out a lisping string of nonsense. That tablet(?) or whatever it was shot a flashlight at him, and Max felt his anger flare. The light was nothing compared to the tractor beam, so he could more or less just raise a hand to it and be completely fine.
“The fuck is that for, you asshat?”
The light turned off, and the alien seemed to take a few notes. All it did was add to his mounting confusion. He didn’t even have the time to think of another remark before the damn thing got a weird look in its eye and fucking lunged.
“Shit!” he blinked at it with wide eyes as the alien took a step back again and made a strange, gargling laugh at his expense.
Okay, that guy was just an asshole trying to scare him for kicks. Sue him if he tensed, alright? He didn’t want to be involved with that much ugly. And besides, considering the alien wrote something else down afterwards, it was probably a test. Maybe they were making sure Max was still all there in the head? He didn’t know if he liked that idea. Mostly because he didn’t have a good track record when it came to any evaluation, educational or otherwise.
It turned to leave.
“Hey! Wait,” Max got to his feet, ignoring the way his body ached, “You’re seriously not going to explain anything?”
The alien wasn’t as tall as most adults he knew, but it certainly looked down at Max as it unholstered its weapon. Maybe the shape of a gun was more universal than people gave it credit for, because Max caught the gist of the next unintelligible string of noise it made without understanding a word.
He was being threatened.
“Alright! Fine,” he hissed back, “I don’t get to leave. Got it.”
Something in the alien’s gaze must not have trusted that sentiment, because the damn gun was trained on him until he was out the door and the wall was back to its seamless white. Max couldn’t entirely blame them. Because when- and not if, when, Max got a hold of whatever that was, he would be fucking shit up asap.
But that could come later. Max needed more information before he did anything profoundly stupid. Or, more frankly, any information. He didn’t even think aliens existed until today and he still wasn’t sold on it completely. Everything seemed too stupid and fake, but that didn’t get him out of the room or up his chances of living. The semantics around his abduction could be saved for explanation after he got out of there… wherever he was.
Regardless, the alien still reminded him of that shitty bully, so Max appropriately dubbed that one Edward Pikeman. It was a petty victory over someone probably doing much better than he was right now, but a victory nonetheless.
“I honestly can’t believe I still have my backpack,” he muttered, unzipping it.
The window had gone frosted again and the alien seemed happy enough to leave him unsupervised. That was fine. He was used to it. Either there was nothing he could do to help himself or he could figure something out. Hopefully, it was the latter. There was a reason that no teacher wanted him out of their immediate sight.
Okay, so cash and clothes didn’t do much for him there. While Max had enough brain cells to take a knife or two with him on the road, he just wasn’t sure what that would do when Pikeman had a motherfucking space gun. For all he knew, that shit would turn him inside out while he was still alive. Mr Honeynuts was decent moral support, but wouldn’t save them. At the very least, Max had a half-empty water bottle and two remaining granola bars. His prognosis was bleak.
“Well,” he addressed the bear, holding him under the arms to make proper eye contact, “I have a lumpy pillow and something to kill myself with.”
Max and all his things ended up lying on the rectangle in the corner of the room. It was only marginally softer than the floor, but something told him it was more than he should have expected anyway. As much as waiting for someone to come in and shoot him in the face was fun, it got pretty old after the first hour or so. Time wasn’t really a solid thing for him when he had nothing to reference. Was he hungry? Yeah, but Max was always rationing food, so that hardly meant anything.
All that waiting eventually led to Pikeman again, but this time he brought company.
Two more short, one tall. All nightmare fuel. They poured into his little cell like a ghoulish parade and Max could easily tell that none of them were the same species.
“Have you heard of knocking?” Max was already in the corner, so his defensive position couldn’t really improve much, “And Christ, it smells like shit in here now. Which one of you did that?”
One of them- short and squat with rectangular eyes and round buck teeth made a low, nasally sound at him. Every bloated pore seemed to be slick with oil, and whatever appetite he once had was long gone now.
“Oh, so it was you,” Max said, keeping up the conversation if only to help fight the anxiety of the aliens closing in, “I’m gonna call you Fartz forever now. I hope you know that.”
Fartz didn’t seem to understand him and Max couldn’t spare him the time to figure it out when the tallest of them reached for him. Fucking hell it was like a naked mole rat got jacked on steroids. This one didn’t talk. Not even when Max ducked away from their sausage fingers and nearly ran into Pikeman. It just stared at him all beady eyed and then tried to do it again.
Thankful he’d put the pocketknife in his hoodie, Max unsheathed the blade and tried to look more menacing than he felt, “Alright, shitheads. Anyone who doesn't want a new orifice can take a step back.”
Pikeman’s blaster was level with his face and Max tried not to feel the headrush of adrenaline that came with it. He smelled a bluff. After all the work of putting him in a longer-term cell, they seriously wouldn’t-
Something stuck him in the back.
Sharp. Thin. He felt skin break, and distantly, the knowledge that the needle had to go through two layers of cloth to get there. Max whipped around to look at the fourth and final alien. A cyclops and a snake had ugly sex and made whatever that was. It was the only one he hadn't paid much attention to because it seemed the least interested in him, but lo and behold, there was an empty syringe dangling from its fingertips.
“Oh fuck this,” Max snarled, tightening his grip on the knife, “You’re first!”
Snake brandished the pointed needle at him, but Max was already seeing red. Despite their similar heights, Max was thinner and moved in too fast, digging his fingers into that scaly wrist and trying to stab him through the plating as the alien began to shout in alarm. Whatever that drug was, it was making quick work of his motor functions. Regardless, Max twisted the knife just enough to get past a few of the scales and draw forth deep blue blood before he was forcibly pried away.
He hissed when the tall one knocked him into the unforgiving metal wall, “Fuck! The element of surprise isn’t very fun, is it?”
They began trying to take his weapon, but Max held fast until he was shoved into the wall a second time. By then it was hard to keep his fingers tight around it. Or have any tension in his body at all for that matter, but stubborn willpower accounted for a lot. In order to take it from him, they had to grab his arm… which meant getting closer to the knife. It was inevitably pried from his fist, but not without more shallow scrapes along their arms to show for it. He got the message across.
Whatever terrible chatter that they produced meant nothing, but violence seemed to be a universal enough language to show that Max was the farthest thing from willing. He wound up being dragged out of the cell half limp from the drugs, but still mostly lucid from the adrenaline, snarling and cursing in slurred speech the whole time. And for good reason, too! Those motherfuckers hauled him into some lab room and stole like, a quart of blood from him! It took three tries to find the vein!
He wound up back in the cell exhausted, bleeding, and with some random MRE package thrown in after him. Max didn’t even have the energy to eat it; he just hauled himself to the bed and crashed until the drugs wore off. His first twenty-four hours had really set the tone for Max’s stay with that band of idiots, because things didn’t get much better from there.