It seemed as though Elizabeth's time on this planet had been spent leaping from crisis to crisis, each of increasing magnitude and seemingly designed to test her structural integrity with increasing brutality. While nothing could have prepared her for any of this, what struck her was how well she seemed to absorb the blows.
The scientist within reasoned that each disaster she survived taught her new things, etching increasingly spectacular survival skills into her very being as the current emergency waned and left her with just enough space to reflect - but never quite enough to properly mope. Realistically, she was a different person to the Dr Shaw that almost cried whilst lying in the stasis pod awaiting sleep. She was certainly a different person to the Dr Shaw that had hurled her guts up waking up from that two-year hypersleep fiasco, and bore only physical resemblance to her innocent, absent-minded namesake back on Earth.
The rest of her was something akin to the remnants of a high-speed crash, twisted metal and shattered glass in the wake of tragedy, frayed nerves and overtaxed faculties. Her hands still shook against the straps of the backpack as she marched across the dusty landscape, sand and silica whistling about her ankles in the dying light of dusk, rocks beneath her toes stained an otherworldly orange from the gas giant setting against the horizon. Her ears still rang, unable to claw from them the alien, incomprehensible shouts that had boomed across the Bridge and engraved themselves into her psyche. Her breath rattled in her throat with every gasp, though she wasn't sure if it had more to do with the weight of David's head in the pack behind her, or the residual terror that raked at her chest on the wake of the afternoon's turn of events.
Their march back to the lifeboat had been in stony, heavy silence, with the enormous Engineer remaining several paces ahead of her at all times and damn-near refusing to look at her unless he absolutely had to. After distracting himself with several consoles on the Bridge and, she presumed, downloading as much data as he could, he had finally returned to the issue of the broken android with as much reluctance as she'd ever seen in a man.
Communication had been predictably patchy around the issue as she avoided saying anything that had a snowball's chance in Hell of pissing him off and he intimated he would avoid answering any of the questions she might have had on the subject, but a solution had nonetheless been reached. She'd quickly realised that David's power source must be in his body rather than his head; she'd also realised immediately afterward that he was much heavier than she was. Even without the pack slung over her shoulders he was all but impossible to move beyond dragging across the floor, and despite his previous ranting outburst, Za'il had begrudgingly intervened before she'd managed to wrangle the decapitated body halfway across the Bridge.
His mighty sigh and grim expression hadn't been lost on her, nor had his refusal of eye contact.
With the android body slung over his shoulder, the Engineer had made short work of exiting the crashed vessel the way they'd come in, apparently unencumbered by the extra weight even as they abseiled back down to the planet's surface. He needed only one arm to shift the deadweight about, and did so as if he were lightweight cargo; Elizabeth had hardly been able to move him.
Like she needed any of these constant reminders of the Engineer's obscene strength.
Who knew how much time their disagreement had lasted; the sun was gone by now, with only residual light hanging about the sky as they reached the lifeboat airlock. She didn't quite know what to make of him standing by the door as she struggled to catch up. He'd followed her inside after a breath, barely making it past the piano before unceremoniously dumping the headless body in the middle of the floor beside it and nudging it aside with a boot as he pulled his helmet off, expression still lingering on the sour, offended side of inscrutable.
Shaw dropped the pack alongside the body with far more grace than he'd bothered with, lips pursed in thought for a moment before sauntering back to the airlock to remove the suit that had all but adhered to her sticky, sweaty flesh. The cool, crisp air aboard the lifeboat was a welcome change to the increasingly moist, stuffy microcosm beneath the scuffed polymer dome, but not cool enough to make sitting about in the scant clothing beneath the suit uncomfortable. It tugged at her limbs as she extracted herself from its confines; tonight's shower was going to be bloody well-earned.
The Engineer hadn't made himself at home yet, she noted as she watched him pace. He'd barely stood still for a second as he pried the heavy armour from its fixings along the biosuit below, pacing all the while, and only moved across the room to place it back in the crate it came from after she had exited the airlock alcove and set about freeing David from the pack sitting alongside his body.
Still refusing eye contact, it was safe to assume he remained tremendously unhappy. She had noted on several occasions to date that he preferred space between them, but this was a significant increase to the point of metres keeping them apart at any given moment.
How she wished, she wished she could simply ask him what she'd done wrong. She hadn't created David; was merely fraternising with him a cardinal sin amongst Za'il's people?
This did not bode well for any attempted mission to the Engineer homeworld; if she'd so seriously offended just one member, how many other faux pas would she stumble upon in her travels?
David's head was heavy and cool to the touch, though his skin - if it could be called that - was upsettingly realistic beneath her fingertips. Unseeing eyes open but glazed, in the brighter and more familiar setting of the lifeboat he seemed far more like a corpse than she'd cared to notice whilst aboard the Engineer vessel. It took all her might to suppress another visceral shudder, actively reminding herself with every heartbeat that he was an android, not a dead body, and that this was just fine.
Just fine.
Placing the head down mere inches from its correct place, it became far easier to see the extent of the damage; while didn't appear to have a recognisably Human skeleton per se, what stood in its place appeared to have sheared off during the decapitation process, twisted metal split between what passed as vertebrae. Every single cable had snapped in kind, torn upward and hanging loose both from the gaping hole between the shoulders and below what remained of the neck. A significant volume of coolant, or android blood in a manner of speaking, had flowed out of the severed pipes to the head and flooded the damaged components throughout the torso.
This was going to take a lot longer than she anticipated. Not that one could accurately anticipate the significant damage left after decapitation.
A quick trip to the medbay yielded a few basic tools after a quick rummage; she'd recalled, in the distant vestiges of her mind, stumbling upon some repair equipment as she hunted for ways of sealing her own horrifying wound days earlier. David himself would likely end up doing the majority of the repairs once he was able, if he was able, but for now this would have to suffice.
The Engineer, she noted at a glance, had settled on the couch in a tense, hunched crouch as he fiddled with equipment of his own, still pointedly ignoring her. At the very least, perhaps he was restraining himself, or preparing to with the knowledge that the abomination would soon be alive once more; she was not looking forward to the inevitable firestorm when David choked to life.
Pulling on a pair of thick, insulated rubber gloves, she set about making some sense of the matted mess of torn wires and conduits dangling from both pieces of android. The brief crash course in Weyland Android maintenance had seemed excessive at the time, but she had been quite impatient to get the mission underway in the days leading up to takeoff. As determined to pay attention as she had been, a frustrating amount of knowledge had slipped from her grasp and into the abyss that was the pacing, over-thinking, planning, hand-wringing slurry of the final preparation for Prometheus; brief, she noted in hindsight, had been exactly that.
Still, it was enough to allow her to identify the android's power management. A thick rope of conduit hung from the centre of something analogous to a spinal cord, torn upward as the head had been snapped from its body; while some of the cabling had been ripped and left frayed, this cable's severed ends seemed far more uniform. It was as if they had been sliced all at once with an incredibly sharp blade.
Or, she remarked, as if they had been pulled out the end of a plug.
A quick scout in the android's neck found exactly that. Round, metallic, the plug had remained with its mate during the violent disassembly, the cables on the body's end ripped free of their fixtures.
Could be worse.
As she worked on popping the plug halves apart, the Engineer had apparently busied himself with the results of the scan aboard the other vessel. A projection of the smaller vacant ship, far more blob-like in its semicircular form, hung above the coffee table in significant detail, showing every nuance of the hull and each internal system snaking below its surface in shades of white and cyan; his dark eyes drank it in with almost artificial intrigue, tracing every feature as if it were the only thing in the room, checking and re-checking system after system.
Choosing to follow his example, she decided to ignore what he was doing. They may be able to straighten out a few things once David functioned again, she reasoned; until then, it was no use doing anything to make matters worse.
Once she was sure the plug had correctly seated itself, she prepared to snap it back in place; this was the moment of truth, the moment everything would change, the moment two became three. Her hands shook as they lingered between the two halves of the plug. She hoped she would not regret this.
Nothing for it.
With a metallic click, the two halves unified between the tangle of wires and shredded edges of bioskin, and...
...nothing happened. The android's head remained frozen in time, staring at nothing, transfixed upon the ceiling. It was if he was too far gone, too broken to save - or, perhaps, simply too broken to have been so easily fixed. There had to be a manual for these confounded things in that pile of books, there had to be some kind of bloody instructions for how to reassemble-
A faint artificial whirr snapped her from her cascade of consciousness as she was about to stand; nothing followed for a few seconds, leaving her hovering between kneeling and crouching until an electrical pop echoed about the deck, startling both her and the giant on the couch, leaving them both in a wide-eyed gawp as the android's pale gaze finally found focus. Moments later his lips fluttered, words fading from them the moment they formed, stammering silently as his pupils shrank to the size of pinheads then wildly dilated. Frozen in shuddering catatonia, the android fought the brink of death for an indeterminate period as Elizabeth held her breath.
The part of her that considered David to be a person - and it was, she conceded, a significant part of her - found the process to be disturbingly grotesque. If he could feel, he would undoubtedly be feeling substantial pain. If he hadn't already, soon he would realise he was still severed in two and could do nothing about it. It seemed inhumane.
"Elizabeth, y-you're alive." The voice below was a series of mechanical croaks, disjointed and almost incomprehensible, slow and deliberate and clearly forced. Silver eyes had finally focused on her, moving from their fixated, forward-facing gaze. His mouth still quivered. Yes, if he were Human, he would be in absolute agony.
But he wasn't; projecting that onto him would serve no useful purpose, she scolded herself.
She smiled gently. "Yes, I am."
A lengthy pause ensued as the android continued to analyse his surroundings, analyse himself. "You've r-reconnected my p-power supply."
His voice hadn't improved; she took a moment to interpret the crackling, low-fidelity sounds he'd ejected at her. "I have. You're really badly damaged, it's going to take me a while to put you back together."
"I unders-s-stand," he croaked, shivering mouth finally finding purchase and pulling itself into the faintest quirk of a smile. "I will be more useful once m-my b-backup has some charge."
Slipping from her crouch, she eased herself onto the cold, polished floor below. "How long do you think that will take?"
"Perhaps a-another thirty s-seconds," he stammered; there was a more Human tone to his voice by now, despite the metallic crackle that remained. "My s-secondary systems a-are c-coming online now."
Shaw drew a heavy breath, daring to cast a glance toward the Engineer; as she could have expected he was still staring intently at the holo over the table, but there was a deep, irritated scowl that lingered. For some reason, that annoyed her. There was no doubt he was perfectly aware of what was going on around him, that there was a new person - person! - in the room, but he refused to acknowledge either of the smaller beings.
"Elizabeth," the android started again after another long pause, his voice by now recognisably his, "I have quite a few questions to ask, if I may."
"Sure," she quickly replied, tugging the gloves from her hands and placing them on his chest.
The first apparently took a while to form. Perhaps it jostled for pride of place at the front of the queue. Regardless, he took his dear, sweet time in asking it. "Am I to assume circumstances have changed, given the presence of the Engineer aboard the lifeboat?"
If he was perturbed by this discovery, he hid it well. She offered a humourless smile. "You could say that."
"Is he friendly?"
Is he friendly... to be honest, she didn't know. Patiently offering her medicine before mending his own broken arm had seemed pretty friendly at the time, as had sharing a much-needed meal and a drink afterward. The direct, unyielding line of questioning the moment they discovered a common-enough language hadn't been kind, nor had his reaction to her sharing perhaps a little too much of her objectives with him. His manhandling of her in the immediate aftermath had been downright hostile, but seeing him collapse in a catatonic heap in finally learning his own fate had damn-near broken her. Perhaps she had been a fool, but their sharing of music had given her hope they had common ground, that they could be friends...their teamwork and negotiation afterward had reinforced that, only to have it smashed to smithereens when she'd tried to recover the blasted creature asking these questions. A heavy sigh escaped her. "Friendly enough."
His icy eyes pried at her with an astuteness that left her uncomfortable. The polite gentleness in his voice only multiplied the effect; he probably didn't realise just how patronising it would come across. "I can see an awful lot has happened while I was non-functional. Are you alright, Elizabeth?"
"I'm fine," she scowled. "I'll fill you in when I have the time. I don't mean to be rude, but we're running to somewhat of a schedule. We're planning on leaving this planet tomorrow, and I need your help. First, I need to help you - where do I start with repairs?"
"It's complicated," he eventually stammered, gaze once again upon the ceiling. "The broken sections of my spine can be replaced easily enough, but every major system going to my head has been severed, as you can see. I imagine many of the conduits are torn in a manner that could make reconnection challenging."
"They are, yes," she responded glumly. "Lots of ripped parts. They look too fragile to do much with."
"Quite all right," he enthused with a forced smile. It was odd, watching his facial features move entirely normally with his head fixed in place. After a moment's reflection, the smile became palpably genuine. "Perhaps we'll start by replacing the torn ends with new joints and connect them that way, should you be able to find the master repair kit. Far less fiddly work for everyone."
"That sounds like a good idea," she nodded. "Where do I start?"
"In the medbay there should be a tool kit in a blue metal case." He struggled to follow her as she stood to begin her search; she quickly left the range of his gaze, unable to turn his head to track her. A series of opening and slamming cupboards followed, interspersed by determined rustling. "It should be on the bottom shelf of one of the instrument cupboards. It's quite large."
A surprised, strained grunt immediately followed the scrape of metal against polymer and a heavy, bassy thunk. "You don't say."
"I would help you if I could," he offered with an apologetic smile.
"Of course you would." Her voice couldn't hide the strain as she hoisted the case off the ground and quickly shuffled across the hall back to the separated android. She placed it down by his chest with a grunt. If there was ever a time to be immensely grateful for her fully-healed state, it was now. "Right. How do I go about this?"
"In the second tier, there should be an assortment of titanium connectors," he stated, jarringly matter-of-fact. "There is also an assortment of blades. The best place to start would be my coolant conduits; slice a clean edge at each end and affix a connector, it'll make reassembling me on the fly quite straightforward."
"Roger that," she quipped, and immediately began rummaging about in silence.
The silence dragged on, with the android's gaze darting about the full dome of view available to him; both living beings went about their tasks wordlessly fixated on the technology they were tasked with, a tension about both that was not lost on David. He was left to presume what might be normal behaviour for an Engineer, but this he knew was out-of-character enough of a Human like Elizabeth that it warranted further investigation. As connector after connector fell into place, he finally dared to break the silence. "Elizabeth, your survival instinct is quite remarkable. May I ask - how is it that you've come to be uninjured?"
"Our new ally had a hand in that," she eventually murmured as she severed another shredded, messy conduit end. "Engineer medicine is remarkable."
"He offered you medicine?" His intrigue was overshadowed by grim nuance. "Mr Weyland would have been so pleased to have seen it. It was what he was see-"
"Say that name again and I'm sticking this scalpel right into your power cord," she spat darkly, albeit barely above a whisper. The Engineer's gaze snapped to her, briefly wide-eyed and questioning, darting between the woman, the blade and the startled android head beneath her. "It's his fault we're all in this mess. He's dead, David. Isn't that
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