Oneshot challenge

Can be any fandom and any characters

- Prompt is 'friendship'

- Must contain a conflict that A) brings the friends together or B) shows why the person(s) better from the conflict.

- Should incorporate at least one or more of the following ideas and/or items : Omnia Vincit Amor (love conquers all), friendship rings/bracelets/necklaces, pictures, summer, some sort of group activity, and discussion.

--

Words: 1643

Incorporates: love conquers all, summer, group activity (?), discussion

Shows why the person is better from the conflict

The Room

The first thing Hannah noticed when she awoke was the smell. The air was thick with the heavy odour of sweat and blood. She coughed, the combination of metal and salt making her gag, and then slowly opened her eyes, the faint light filtering into the room almost blinding to her weakened eyes. The dark gloom stretched out around her eternally, crushing her down onto the cold floor, holding her captive. Hannah turned her eyes to her arm, which was splayed out from her side, and stared at her hand, trying to register the blue tinge of her chilled skin. Slowly, she twitched her fingers, rubbing them against the ground she was lying huddled on. It felt like a hard, smooth surface...most likely steel, from its silver-grey colour. She shivered, her body sticking to the floor, cold sweat covering her body, a dull sheen in the murk of her prison.

She blinked, her grey eyes searching around desperately for an explanation, and then winced as the crust of sleep got in the way, causing them to sting. Hannah whimpered and dragged her hand towards her face with difficulty, her muscles aching in protest as she shakily brushed the irritant from her eyes. Then, with a gasp, she let her arm drop heavily, exhausted, making a loud clang upon impact.

“Hannah?” a voice whispered, and Hannah froze, terrified. There was a shuffling noise as a figure began to crawl towards her, their legs stretched out uselessly behind them as they moved. “Hannah, are you awake? Please say you’re awake...I’m...I’m so scared.”

“Casey?” Hannah replied, recognising the voice. Casey moved into the light, and Hannah shuddered, shocked by her friend’s appearance. Once a chubby girl with blue eyes and shiny brown hair cut into a sleek bob, Casey was now a shadow of what she used to be. Her cheeks, once round and rosy, were now gaunt and pale, and her bright eyes now dark, with deep shadows around the sockets. Her hair was longer, greasy and straggly, with patches missing from it, and with streaks of grey present. Her lips, which used to be pink and full, were now thinner and severely chapped, with scabs at the corners.

Casey scrabbled over to her friend; her body stick-thin with her clothes hanging lopsidedly off her shoulder, and helped Hannah sit up. She clutched desperately at Casey, the world spinning violently as she was forced upright, swallowing continuously to fight the overwhelming urge to vomit. Then she caught sight of herself in a dirty window, stunned to see she looked almost the same as Casey...a living corpse, but with black hair instead of brown. She was haggard...aged...like time had taken away her youth. She choked a sob, and Casey held her tight, the sharp scent of body odour barely registering as Hannah wept. She couldn’t remember anything; it was all blank, and yet she knew she was in terrible danger.

Hannah glanced across the room, to see a spider-like creature on its back, its fleshy legs furled up tight, in the corner of the room, still and dead.

“What the hell is that?” she croaked, her dry throat hindering her ability to speak. Before Casey could answer, however, a voice echoed around the room, startling the girls and making them hold each other in fear.

“That, my dear,” it said, the scraping sound of the noise source setting Hannah’s teeth on edge, “is one of our most valuable specimens. We wanted to study how humans react to the parasitic embryo being present in their bodies...whether there were any changes to behaviour upon infection. However, both of you have been unconscious too long. I fear the spawn will erupt soon, and we have had such little time to analyse you.”

“In-infect?” Casey stuttered, shaking violently. “Which one of us did it get? Is it both of us?”

“There was only one, and it dies after laying its offspring in a host. The subject with the black hair was the one our specimen chose.”

Hannah’s body went numb at those words, her lips trembling in fear. She had heard the stories of what happened to the hosts of these...things...before she had been taken here. She felt her memory slowly coming back to her. She and Casey had been dragged here as part of a series of scientific experiments, taken from their colonies when ransacked by the Company who was now torturing them. They’d been locked in this room, and the monster had been let in, before gas had been released into the room. Then she’d woken up here.

“Will it burst from my chest?” she asked, trying to keep her voice level, although she couldn’t keep the hysterical tone from rising up. “Will it? Answer me!”

“Yes, it will,” the speaker replied nonchalantly. “However, we’re going to offer your companion a choice.”

A hatch opened in the ceiling, and a pistol fell out, falling to the ground with a weighted clatter.

“When that specimen erupts, it will be pure agony for its host, and will kill anything in the room with equally horrific pain. You have a choice. You can kill the host and spare her the torture yet to come, but at a cost to yourself. The parasite will erupt soon, and so no longer needs the host to be alive. It will kill you whether you shoot the host or not.”

Casey and Hannah looked at each other, their faces paling.

“Or,” the voice continued, “you can kill yourself, sparing yourself the pain, and leave the host, who will die anyway, I might add, to suffer by herself until the specimen is ready to leave her body. The choice is yours.”

The microphone turned off with a click, leaving the girls in silence.

“Casey,” Hannah said, beginning to cry again, “I don’t want it to burst from my chest. I don’t want it to hurt. Help me...”

Casey stared at her friend for a moment, and then nodded, sliding over to the gun and picking it up. She raised it to Hannah’s head, and Hannah bit her lip and closed her eyes, tears dribbling from them. Then Casey shook her head and lowered the gun again.

“This isn’t right,” she mumbled. “You can’t die like this, in such a shitty place.”

“I haven’t got the choice,” Hannah choked, opening her eyes again and looking down at her lap.

“Yeah you have.”

Casey sat beside her, putting her arm around her.

“Remember last summer, when we went on holiday with our families to Earth?”

Hannah nodded mutedly.

“And remember we went to that little market place where they sold those huge lollipops-?”

“Lollipops the size of our heads?”

“Yeah, in all flavours, like strawberry, orange, cherry-”

“Lemon, mango, and raspberry?” Hannah continued excitedly. “And there was candyfloss and homemade chocolate, and we ate so much that we had to go lie down for a few hours in a field and make rude things out of the cloud shapes!”

Casey laughed, and, with the arm that was behind Hannah’s back, slowly brought the gun up to the back of her friend’s head, inches away from touching her skin.

“And then we went to that thing...they called it a fair, right? And we went on all the...rides? Yeah, ‘rides’, and then we camped out near the woods. Oh, Hannah, that was such fun-”

There was a deafening crack as Casey pulled the trigger, and Hannah’s head jerked up as the contents of it flew out through the exit hole now in her skull. Then she slid forward, still. Casey threw the gun away, and then dragged herself to the other corner of the room, so she wouldn’t have to look at the girl she had just murdered. Then she began to sob.

Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her chest, and doubled over, gasping for breath. It lessened, and she relaxed, certain it was just her body reacting to her exhaustion. Then the pain came again, much more powerful than the first one, and she screamed in agony, falling onto her back and writhing as another wave followed.

“What's happening to me?” she shrieked, her eyes wide, her body rigid with shock.

“Our test was to see the human reaction to a parasite,” the voice said calmly. “You reacted unexpectedly, choosing to sacrifice yourself for another’s wellbeing. It was actually you the specimen infected.”

“I-I kill-killed he-he-her f-f-for n-n-n-nothing?” Casey gasped, barely able to speak as her mouth locked open. There was a pause.

“Yes,” the speaker said simply, before turning the microphone off once again.

Casey’s whole body arched upwards as the parasite made its final push. Blood mixed with saliva spewed from her lips as it ripped straight through her internal organs, snapping her ribs as if they were plastic. She let out a long, shrill scream as an explosion of pain ricocheted throughout her entire body, and the specimen burst from her chest, sending a stream of blood, scraps of organ, and shards of bone into the air. Her world went black and her body slumped, its duty done for the abomination that was slowly crawling from her ruined carcass.

Behind the one way glass, scientists took note of the host and her companion’s behaviour. The host, it seemed, always wished to be killed first, at the expense of the other, and yet the one who had to make the choice was always in power. Some did kill the host, but only because they could not bring themselves to commit suicide. This subject had been the first to choose sacrifice because of love and friendship. Love conquered all, apparently. The head scientist leaned away from the microphone and signalled to one of his staff.

“Clear out the room,” he called, “and bring the next batch in."

Author’s Notes: As I’m sure some of the more well-read of you are aware, the death of Hannah is quite similar to the ending of ‘Of Mice and Men.’ I loved the scene in that book, and felt it appropriate to mimic.