#to the second where he sat next to guillermo and just draped himself all over him

[gerandor]

Nandor babygirl you were so unhinged for this

gifs by the ever awesome @deliciousnecks

[sparkmender]

Here’s the first chapter of Close Encounters, the Faebug/Hive AU series I’ve been working on. I’m gonna cross post most of this stuff to Tumblr too just in an effort to keep things organized. :>

It’s Monday night—

The last Monday night before the end of the world, not that anyone knows it—

And there are two blue, pupil-less eyes the size of the headlights on her beat up VW Beetle staring at her through her bedroom window.

They blink out almost as soon as Charlie twitches. Whatever it was probably got spooked off by the fact that she jolted upright in bed and stared right back at it, compelled by— something. That feeling of being watched. The remnants of a nightmare. Whatever.

If whatever the eyes belonged to made noise as it departed, she couldn’t hear it over the buzz of the heavy fan her mom helped her drag into the big bedroom when she moved in to the old Ochoco house. It might as well not’ve been there at all.

Except for the fact that she saw it, and all the hair on the back of her neck and along her arms stood like she’d rubbed a balloon over herself to see the static electricity.

Lots of things had been a little weird since yesterday, though. Especially in the upper Northwest. It’s not exactly every day that a volcano goes off in the United States. Even if Oregon is a state away from Washington, Sunday had been stressful, to say the least. Some part of her had anticipated another explosion at some point. Guillermo had teased her for being a worry-wart and then started listing off all sorts of possibly apocalyptic events from most to least likely on his fingers. He got to ‘alien robots who disguise themselves as kitchen appliances’ before Charlie threw a shoe at him.

Under the quilt next to her, Guillermo sleeps as he always does, an arm shoved under his ridiculous stack of pillows and his long legs tangled in more than his fair share of the sheets.

Maybe it’s all in her head. Dreams were supposed to be how the brain processed stuff that happened during the day, right? So.

So she’s not crazy. It’s just her brain trying to make sense of the whole active volcano thing compounded by childhood fears and the well-ingrained camping habit of keeping an ear out for bears trying to pilfer your supplies.

Probably.

Charlie doesn’t sleep the rest of the night, or she could have sworn she hadn’t, but between this blink and the next the alarm is going off on the nightstand and Memo’s already in the kitchen, fighting with the coffee maker he can’t stand to get rid of because he bought it with his first paycheck from his magazine gig. (Who knew speculative sci-fi nerd writing not only paid, but paid well, with the right kind of publisher?) If he’d heard anything in the night, he doesn’t mention it.

After pulling her socks on but before shoveling flapjacks into her mouth, the eyes are forgotten.

If they’d ever existed at all.

————

In fact, the eyes remain forgotten all the way until her third break of the day, hanging out with two of the older rangers who’d come back to the main office after clearing out a couple of downed trees off the Crater Lake hiking trail. Samson Jr.— who usually went by ‘Spike’— was a lanky, shaggy brunet a few years older than Charlie who still got carded at every bar they went to, with a permanent sunburn across the bridge of his nose and a personality so sunny it bordered on obnoxious. On the other hand, his father, Samson Sr., was a warm, stocky man who worked construction before throwing his lot in with parks and recreation and could have been anywhere from his mid 40s to his late 60s. They’d both been there when Charlie had started as an intern in college and were probably both going to still be there if she ever decided to leave or get transferred somewhere warmer, like California, or something.

She liked the both of them. Samson was more of a family figure to her than her stepdad Ron, and he’d helped her get a permanent spot on the team. Sometimes she and Memo went out with Spike and his girlfriend Carly, and Memo and Spike had more than a few interests in common. Mainly Star Wars, but also stuff like He-Man and tabletop games and computers. Most of it went over Charlie’s head— she’d grown up a music nerd thanks to Dad and a car fanatic thanks to Uncle Hank, never much one for pulp fiction— but she and Carly enjoyed teasing the two of them for being ‘Oregon’s own X-Files department.'

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Spike brought up his perennial fixation, Bigfoot theories, again.

“I don’t know,” he’d started, mouth full of half of a Snickers bar as he waved the other end of it around for emphasis. “I don’t know. But I don’t think that those trees just fell over for no reason. I mean, there were some aftershocks from the eruption, right? But nothing out here. It kind of looked more like some kind of impact hit them, sort of like a boulder had rolled down the hill and toppled ‘em over. But that doesn’t make any sense either, since there’s no loose rocks large enough to knock over three whole fir trees on that side of the trail. Maybe it was a Sasquatch. I bet they mark their territory by brushing up against trees like the bears do, and this one just got over-enthusiastic.”

Samson snatched the other half of the candy bar before Spike could accidentally smack Charlie with it, just to toss it back into the basket of goodies on the windowsill again.

“First of all, stop raiding the candy stash. That’s for visitors, and last I checked, you haven’t been a visitor since you were 16,” the older man scolded, but he couldn’t quite keep the amusement off his face— Spike had to have gotten his enthusiasm from somewhere. “And something tells me that if there really was a ‘sat-squash’ or whatever it is, it probably wouldn’t be hanging around where there’s regular humans coming and going all day, every day. At least if it knew what was good for it. It was just a regular tree fall, it’s been cleared, and now we’ve got more firewood for the campers.”

Though mourning the loss of his candy, Spike was quick to poke a finger in the air triumphantly at Samson.

“Okay, but how do you explain the fur clumps we found scattered there, huh? Way softer than any regular sort of wild animal.”

Charlie had been absently nodding along to their pseudo-argument, only to perk up at Spike’s outburst, dropping the pen she’d been fiddling with. And then curse herself out silently as both of the older rangers turned to her at the way she’d reacted. In the back of her head, she remembered: that split-second glimpse of those unnaturally big eyes, framed by fluff and set into a broad, flat face.

“Uh.”

Spike grinned.

“See? Charlie agrees with me—”

“She said ‘uh,’ Junior, that’s not an agreement—”

“I mean, maybe,” she blurts out before she can stop herself, heat flushing her face at the outburst, awkwardly picking up the pen she’d dropped to snap the cap over it again. “I don’t know what’s out there. You know what they tell us when we start ranger training; don’t go off the trails.”

God, it’s like Charlie can’t help herself, suddenly, as superstitious and paranoid as one of the characters Memo would write into his stories. It was all just stuff the trainers would tell them to haze the kids starting out, the sort of shit teenagers joked about or camp councilors made up to freak out their campers. None of it was actually true. But in another life, maybe, to someone more interesting or smarter or less lucky (or luckier, some stupid impulse wants to say) than Charlie—

For a moment, vivid and shining, Charlie felt some spark of pure terror in her.

The thing in her bedroom window. Was it still near her house? Was she going to come home to find Guillermo missing, or worse?

“Sure, some of it is just common sense safety guidelines, but what about the weirder ones? The rules about not climbing random staircases in the woods— don’t stop to listen to any music if you’re not near a registered campsite, like that’s ever been a thing? Or never telling someone you meet without gear on a trail what your name is? I mean, there’s got to be some kind of a reason for these things, or else we wouldn’t all have them hammered into our skulls over the course of three years,” she rambles, pulse thudding in her ears. “Nobody makes up how-tos about things for no reason.”

In the quiet pause in conversation that followed, Charlie felt the embarrassed burn on her face spread to her ears and creep down the back of her neck.

“…Or it’s an opportunistic raccoon?” she squeaks out.

“Probably a raccoon. Damn.” Spike finally relents, shoulders slumping with a dejected sigh. He really looks genuinely disappointed, soon ambling over to drape himself over Charlie’s desk in the hopes of some sympathy pats as Samson chuckles in the background about how today’s cinema is rotting everybody's brains out their ears.

————

Nobody notices the candy basket on the windowsill going missing as they head back out to do rounds of the campgrounds.