The fact that the next day was entirely uneventful was almost a little disappointing. Ira soullessly did his job inventorying the storage units and keeping track of all their supplies, before he left his work for the day and returned to his room for a nice long nap. It seemed like nobody was even pretending to keep track of time anymore. Nothing interesting happened during this time.
It was the calm before the storm.
Ira had a lovely time.
Inventorying storage units and their supplies were sufficiently mind-numbing that he didn't despise it. He could do it entirely on reflex — he was sure that he could even do it in his sleep if he wanted to. After he was done with that, he returned to his room to find that the entire space was sparkling clean.
Silas had been busy.
When Ira entered, he hummed in appreciation. His eyes drifted over the floor, to the walls, to the bed with its changed sheets and nice clean smell. It sounded like Silas was in the bathroom, so Ira headed over and threw himself down on the bed. It didn't bounce under him, because this was a space bed and comfort wasn't a priority, but the sheets were nice and clean and smelled like heaven. Ira loved it.
He sighed wistfully and looked up at the low metal ceiling above him. He could hear as Silas exited the bathroom and returned to the bedroom proper, and he felt him sit down on the bed next to him. Ira rolled over so that he was looking at Silas and waited for the man to do something.
It didn't particularly matter what he did, Ira was just curious. It felt a little bit like, for a long time he had just been going with the flow and doing whatever happened to him. And he was fine with that, truly. He wasn't interested in humans or their silly little lives with their silly little problems and he didn't care for their stupid wars and their battles and their ridiculous missions. So he was fine with it. Truly.
It wasn't even like he had an interest in this Host of his. Honestly, Ira didn't even remember his name. Sure, this Host hadn't done anything to him, but there was a reason he was assigned to Ira.
People didn't get assigned to him unless there was something fucked up with their heads.
So this Host could die or whatever and Ira really wouldn't care; he didn't want to interfere with that bastard. He had no interest in whether this mission failed or succeeded, the result would be the same. It would just be a new mission somewhere else on another world and based on prior data, Silas would be there.
And yet, still, Ira was filled with this restless need to do something. What, he couldn't even begin to divine, but the need still itched under his skin. He wanted to move, he wanted to say something, he wanted to just—he didn't know. And that was the most annoying part.
Sitting up on the bed, Ira sighed deeply. Silas looked worriedly at him and held out his hand; Ira gripped it without a second thought. He squeezed that hand, that warm surprisingly pleasant hand, and felt no need to barf or run away or do anything else that he usually felt when things were getting gooey and cheesy and just, stupid.
Silas wasn't as comfortable as Ira would have liked, his skin was too rough and his muscles too hard, but he was a fine specimen to cuddle with. Ira was genuinely a little surprised at how much he liked cuddling since they hadn't really done a lot of that before. But he liked it.
He let Silas pull him into his embrace without saying a word. Closing his eyes, Ira tried to focus on those weird feelings of his. He'd let them go unacknowledged for far too long and it was a little frustrating to realize how much that had changed about his feelings concerning Silas while he hadn't been paying attention. Well, they hadn't changed that much — Ira already knew that he like cuddling with Silas and he enjoyed the way that Silas spoiled him and just let him exist, without asking for anything. It was nice, and maybe that feeling had grown on him a little.
"You know," said Ira and squeezed his arms around Silas, enjoying the temporary peace of the moment. "I don't hate you."
This was a glowing recommendation.
Silas reacted by squeezing Ira harder against him, obviously having no idea what he had said. That was cool, Ira didn't need him to know. He just felt like saying it out loud.
Thankfully, this made the itching need to do something fade away. Still, he was comfortable enough that he didn't feel the urge to move and since nothing was happening anyway, Ira just stayed here with Silas and relaxed. He enjoyed the warmth surrounding him and the sensation of being surrounded by something that he liked. Yeah, he was pretty sure that Silas was an okay person.
Though it was kind of annoying that this not-hating-Silas feeling had snuck up on him without him noticing. It made him feel a little like he'd been tricked.
After he got his full share of the cuddles and had returned to the cargo hold for a quick snack, he surrendered to the insistent begging of sleep. When Silas noticed what Ira was doing, he immediately approached and squeezed down into the bed next to him. Being held close, Ira quickly fell asleep.
The next morning it turned out that he had missed nothing. Things were still uneventful, nothing had happened at all, and it was basically just really dull. People had been dying so quickly that Ira hadn't even had time to keep up with who was dead and who was alive and now that he had a moment of peace, he counted and it turned out that only eight people were still alive. That was including him, the Captain, Nylo, Ira's Host, and some other people whose names he didn't remember. That was a lot of people who died really quickly. They had been here for what, a couple of days? It felt like it should have been longer, but it really had only been like a week at most, hadn't it?
Ira had breakfast in the cargo hold again and was once more witness to an alteration between the Captain and the highest-ranking medical officer on the ship, but that was as exciting as things got. So once he was done with breakfast, Ira returned to his job of inventorying their supplies since he hadn't finished yesterday. The ship was gigantic and it was carrying a shit-ton of stuff, and as he was doing all this in the mortal way it was taking a very long time to do a complete inventory.
It was weirdly fun. Ira contributed this to the fact that it was not his job and he was using it as a substitute for TV. It didn't really make sense when he actually thought about it since he had a lot of shows and movies downloaded, but he wasn't going to think that much about it. Let's just go with it.
This time, Silas didn't stay in his room. Silas instead wandered around the ship, sneaking around the humans so they wouldn't notice him and by the time an hour had gone past, Silas had made his way through the entire ship and was now on his second lap around.
Ira had no idea what he was doing.
Out of courtesy and because his own actions were also being monitored for his report, Ira decided to check in on his Host. What that dude was up to, he had no idea. So when he was in the middle of writing down a list of everything that was in storage unit 25B.1, which was murdering his wrists by the way, Ira focused and concentrated on his Host. In his mind's eye, he could see as his Host carefully moved through the ducts.
Well, at least he wasn't having sex. There was nothing worse than being forced to watch humans have sex, it was so gross. Sighing to himself and wondering where this need to sigh so often came from, Ira watched as his Host carefully reached a room and climbed down the wall, almost falling in his haste to get down.
His Host was doing that sneaky thing again, where he was walking super quietly and dressed to blend in. He was most definitely doing something that he wasn't supposed to. That fact made Ira mildly interested in what was going on. He was, in fact, interested enough to keep watching as his Host left the room he had come out of and made his way to the ship's bridge.
The bridge had been hit pretty hard when they crashed and it was not in a good state. It was very obvious that most of the controls weren't working, multiple screens were plainly broken, several chairs had been thrown about (which shouldn't be possible since they were nailed to the floor), and there was a lot of blood on the ground. Not to mention the frayed wires sparking in the exposed walls where the metal plating had come loose and now laid here and there, and the smoke that was coming from a corner to the left. Ira did not see the appeal. There was essentially nothing working in here.
But his Host wasn't discouraged. He walked forward like he had a map of his own like Ira's. Walking straight ahead, he sat down on his knees when he reached one of the consoles and unscrewed the wall-thingy in the front of it. With the mechanics behind it exposed, his Host immediately reached in and started fiddling with it.
Then he took out the USB drive and Ira's interest was officially peaked.
His Host fiddled some more and put the USB drive into the mechanics' USB port that he had unveiled when he broke through the wall-casing. The fact that he was extremely focused on what he was doing was clear to see, and Ira slowed down his inventorying in order to pay full attention to what his Host was up to. Once the USB drive was secure in its location, Ira's Host took out a small portable tablet from his utility belt and connected it to one of the other ports in the mechanics. Booting it up, he then started fiddling with the tablet that he had pulled out.
His eyebrows were furrowed together and he was concentrating fully on the tablet in his hands, his fingers swiftly sweeping across the screen as he entered some kind of code on it. Ira zoomed in a little closer now that his curiosity had been piqued, and found that the tablet was connected to the USB drive somehow. Likely the mechanics of the wall that his Host had broken into had decrypted the USB drive and allowed the tablets to divine its contents. (Unless it hadn't been encrypted in the first place and the tablet simply didn't have a USB port? Who knew. Anything was possible. And Ira wasn't interested enough to find out.)
The USB drive contained a buttload of files. Ira was not particularly interested in what they contained or what they would do if unleashed. Perhaps this was some kind of computer virus? And he wasn't interested in that so much as he was interested in what his Host was going to do with it. As Ira observed, his Host carefully looked through the files on the tablet and selected one, opening it up.
From Ira's vague glance in its direction, it appeared to be some kind of report concerning something to do with DNA and monsters. Oh, it probably had to do with those gross monsters that kept killing everyone.
He knew there was a conspiracy.
His Host carefully read through the entire file, his frown getting bigger the more he read. The information was obviously shocking to him and Ira found some brief joy in the knowledge that his Host was dismayed.
Then there was a loud clatter by the door as several of the surviving crew members forced their way into the bridge. "Freeze!" the Captain called out with his gun in his hands pointed straight at Ira's Host.