Rite of Passage
folder
M through R › Predator
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
1
Views:
4,171
Reviews:
1
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
M through R › Predator
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
1
Views:
4,171
Reviews:
1
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own the Predator movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Rite of Passage
Rite of Passage
Author: DasTier
Fandom: AvP, pre-movie
Warning: xenoslash
***
“Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your front to me".
A Russian fairytale magical formula to enter the trial ground.
***
Ever since the very first minute of birth, pain was the axis of his life. It was pain that drove him to take a first breath; pain made his little heart shudder in a spasm of the first heartbeat that slowed gradually to a cautious, alert pulse as he waited for the pain to return, unaware of its regularity and yet already certain that a new wave of white, throbbing ache couldn’t be far away once he was out of Mother’s womb. They all were born with this knowledge in their blood, all of his kin, generations of winners that bore the marks of this crucial lesson on their scarred skin.
Slowly he learnt the rules, and the links, and the usages a clever warrior could make of pain. Yes, the main rule was that it was always practically applicable: pain was the gauge of life, of manners, of behaviour. A misdeed was followed by retribution with sure promptness, and that alone made the course of life predictable. Thus the vast ocean of chances was made navigable; the objects were labeled clearly in terms of danger and safety, guiding him into a comfortable, familiar routine. The degrees of pain phasing in were his Mother being displeased with him, and her satisfaction was the absence of even a dull ache that made his body feel light like a feather floating in vacuum.
Not that it happened too often for him to get used to it.
As he grew old enough to face the Elders, he often wondered how they were going to tackle one problem he had long realized, at least in regard to himself. He told himself he had learnt all that there was to learn about the aches, and the stabs, and the pangs – they were old familiars that could bring no surprises, petty nuisances he could easily hide from behind a barrier he built in his mind, his body suffering alone as if he and his flesh were two separate entities. He had become so good at it that he doubted the Elders could find anything effective enough to break into his mental seclusion.
It took them less than an hour to show him how much he was wrong. He admitted the fact through his clenched teeth, then with a deep growl, and then with his whole body shouting surrender, throat hoarse with screams, and still they would not stop. They wanted the lesson branded onto him, deeper and better than the marks of good upbringing his Mother had taken care to leave on him. They overrode all the conclusions he had made, thrashed and drained him, turned him inside out and threw away to see if he was strong enough to recover himself from the shards that their knives and whips and scythes had spared.
Too stubborn to give up, he pieced himself together anew in the dark, silent hold of the spacecraft. The stars shone their cold light on him, bright only enough to make the darkness visible. And even their dimmed, dispersed light was painful to his eyes, and instead he listened, for once more curious than alert, quite certain for the time being that whoever happened to be near him couldn’t hurt him any more than the Elders did.
There were shufflings, and stirrings, and subdued groans, which he could have echoed if only it didn’t mean still more disgrace. He wrapped himself in silence as if it could substitute the protective shield of the armour that they had ripped off him. Momentarily he preened himself for this stoic reticence, but every inch of his slashed skin, every bone and every abused nerve reminded him that it was helplessly belated. When it was time to be stoic he had screamed and he had begged, and writhed on the floor at the Elders’ feet, praying for them to stop. His shredded honour would feel no better if he tried taking shelter in self-delusion about his courage now.
The darkness was so complete that he could see no walls around, and the patch of stars at the far end of the hold was a bottomless well towards which he seemed to be drifting. The illusion made him dizzy, and he focused on the movement nearby – a tangible presence in a thick musky smell of anguish. The Elders must be tired after schooling several youngsters on the same day, he thought with a smirk which he regretted at once as the contortion resounded in all fibres of his body like electricity.
He traced the spasmodic movements as his companion, yet unseen, struggled with pain and weakness, conquering the feet that separated them as if each was a ferocious beast. He had to credit the stranger with a strength that surpassed his own: he, for one, was unable to move even if he wished to. He watched the stranger approach, the bulk of his body slowly shaping into a heaving, groaning darkness that blotted the stars as it reached the wall and fell beside him with a satisfied grunt.
“I did it.” There was a tinge of childish triumph in the stranger’s rusty voice.
Petty victory, he could have said if only he was sure his own voice wouldn’t fail him. And besides, wasn’t it against the survival rules to form bonds of friendship on a migratory ship laden with unblooded youngsters, all boiling with unreleased urge for challenge and rivalry and high aspirations? His Mother had warned him; he still felt her claws puncturing the strict moral on his hide.
“They must’ve been gentler on us if they want any of us to win in the Hunt. But again, it’s a long way to the hunting ground. Time enough to heal.”
The Hunt. Not that he was surprised; he knew it deep in his guts the moment the smaller spacecraft left its dock on the mothership, swift and determined. He was never sure about his attitude towards the Hunt – it was a traditional rite, established eons before he was born, and bound to exist long after the last of his blood had dried into dead rust. Measuring his life against the scale of pain had made him frugal about wasting any bit of energy in thinking of things that didn’t depend on him. The Hunt was one of many such things, and when sometimes he did think of it, of the killing and the transition, and the entrance into the new unknown, his mind wanted to turn blank.
“Are you afraid?”
He wouldn’t answer even if he could speak. Fear was another of those things not to be dwelled on. You couldn’t conquer it with thought, and yet foolish were those who denied it. Now inside he admitted feeling fear as easily as earlier he had admitted having been disgraced by the Elders. There was no use in chewing on the old facts: what was done, was done.
“What’s your name?”
The stranger was asking too many questions. Cautiously he rolled his head to get a better sight of the dark form near him and was relieved to estimate the other’s body to be a deal smaller than his own. A thinner, wirier built that showed more stamina where his brawnier flesh had let him down. All of the stranger’s lean, sinewy muscles seemed to be tense with ambitious anticipation that was the norm with the young unblooded ones, sometimes strong enough to become real hunger for kainde amedha – the ‘hard meat’ that was hidden in the long black crescent skulls of the xenomorphs, glistening with slime.
With a somewhat detached interest he peered inside himself in search of this hunger. Deep, under all the layers of recent pangs and older aches, behind the scars of his childhood fights was the need that, he concluded, could qualify as such. A promise that he had given to his Mother by the single fact that he was born. A challenge to prove that he was worthy of all the investments her clan had made in him. Pain was the price to pay in order to obtain the privilege of maturity and freedom from the debt in which he had been all his life.
He clutched onto this thought hoping it’d shut off the searing torment that kept circulating through his body with every heartbeat. The distant calm of meditation he had so often cheated his Mother and aunts with now seemed unattainable. Instead, every little vibration from the engines that went through the spacecraft’s bulk resounded in his body tenfold, shuttering whatever concentration he had built. Images popped up in his memory, disjointed flashes of light in rhythm to the pulse of the ship and the words of a tale his Mother used to tell him:
“He took the child and took out his eyes. His sister began to cry. But he put him into the kettle to boil. His sister said to him: 'Please, give me his bones to bury them. With his flesh you can do whatever you want to!’”
His own sister had grown almost twice his size last year; now, right while he was heading for the Hunt, she would be readying for her first mating – a relentless duel for dominance, where he wasn’t sure whether to call the winning male lucky or be sorry for him. Of all improbable things, the last would be her crying over her little brother, to say nothing of worrying about his bones.
“They’ve been rougher on you than on any other of us.” White pain shot through him like a dozen of sharp arrows when the stranger touched his shoulder tentatively. The touch was meant to be light but it pained him surprisingly more than the hard prods of the Elders.
“Leave me alone,” he finally brought himself to growl.
“They must be so severe with us to prepare us for the Hunt. We must be ready to see and feel what we’ve never felt before.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“We must go without fear, and in order not to fear, we must be beyond pain.”
“Leave. Me. Alone.”
The stranger’s musky smell enveloped him, poignant and tingling with the appetite for battle that made his body tense in response beside his will the way it had so often done in a stubborn rejoinder to his Mother’s lessons.
“And if we win, they will grant us breeding rights. Would you like to have a female?”
“No!”
He didn’t know he had strength to shout. The lean stranger backed off slightly, tilting his head in curiosity, his long braids falling on his shoulder in a dark mass.
“I bet you’re a born survivor. I’ll stick to you for luck, if you don’t mind. But first we’ll have to see that you get better soon.” There was an amused growl, and he felt the other’s dreadlocks brush against his face as his head was lifted to repose a moment later on the nameless stranger’s arm.
He wanted to protest the way his well-bred dignity dictated him to, but the final outburst had sapped the last strength out of him. Cradled against the stranger’s shoulder, he thought that his Mother had never held him in her arms.
To see and feel what had never been felt before. Yes, that had to be the essence of the Hunt.
***
End.
Author: DasTier
Fandom: AvP, pre-movie
Warning: xenoslash
***
“Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your front to me".
A Russian fairytale magical formula to enter the trial ground.
***
Ever since the very first minute of birth, pain was the axis of his life. It was pain that drove him to take a first breath; pain made his little heart shudder in a spasm of the first heartbeat that slowed gradually to a cautious, alert pulse as he waited for the pain to return, unaware of its regularity and yet already certain that a new wave of white, throbbing ache couldn’t be far away once he was out of Mother’s womb. They all were born with this knowledge in their blood, all of his kin, generations of winners that bore the marks of this crucial lesson on their scarred skin.
Slowly he learnt the rules, and the links, and the usages a clever warrior could make of pain. Yes, the main rule was that it was always practically applicable: pain was the gauge of life, of manners, of behaviour. A misdeed was followed by retribution with sure promptness, and that alone made the course of life predictable. Thus the vast ocean of chances was made navigable; the objects were labeled clearly in terms of danger and safety, guiding him into a comfortable, familiar routine. The degrees of pain phasing in were his Mother being displeased with him, and her satisfaction was the absence of even a dull ache that made his body feel light like a feather floating in vacuum.
Not that it happened too often for him to get used to it.
As he grew old enough to face the Elders, he often wondered how they were going to tackle one problem he had long realized, at least in regard to himself. He told himself he had learnt all that there was to learn about the aches, and the stabs, and the pangs – they were old familiars that could bring no surprises, petty nuisances he could easily hide from behind a barrier he built in his mind, his body suffering alone as if he and his flesh were two separate entities. He had become so good at it that he doubted the Elders could find anything effective enough to break into his mental seclusion.
It took them less than an hour to show him how much he was wrong. He admitted the fact through his clenched teeth, then with a deep growl, and then with his whole body shouting surrender, throat hoarse with screams, and still they would not stop. They wanted the lesson branded onto him, deeper and better than the marks of good upbringing his Mother had taken care to leave on him. They overrode all the conclusions he had made, thrashed and drained him, turned him inside out and threw away to see if he was strong enough to recover himself from the shards that their knives and whips and scythes had spared.
Too stubborn to give up, he pieced himself together anew in the dark, silent hold of the spacecraft. The stars shone their cold light on him, bright only enough to make the darkness visible. And even their dimmed, dispersed light was painful to his eyes, and instead he listened, for once more curious than alert, quite certain for the time being that whoever happened to be near him couldn’t hurt him any more than the Elders did.
There were shufflings, and stirrings, and subdued groans, which he could have echoed if only it didn’t mean still more disgrace. He wrapped himself in silence as if it could substitute the protective shield of the armour that they had ripped off him. Momentarily he preened himself for this stoic reticence, but every inch of his slashed skin, every bone and every abused nerve reminded him that it was helplessly belated. When it was time to be stoic he had screamed and he had begged, and writhed on the floor at the Elders’ feet, praying for them to stop. His shredded honour would feel no better if he tried taking shelter in self-delusion about his courage now.
The darkness was so complete that he could see no walls around, and the patch of stars at the far end of the hold was a bottomless well towards which he seemed to be drifting. The illusion made him dizzy, and he focused on the movement nearby – a tangible presence in a thick musky smell of anguish. The Elders must be tired after schooling several youngsters on the same day, he thought with a smirk which he regretted at once as the contortion resounded in all fibres of his body like electricity.
He traced the spasmodic movements as his companion, yet unseen, struggled with pain and weakness, conquering the feet that separated them as if each was a ferocious beast. He had to credit the stranger with a strength that surpassed his own: he, for one, was unable to move even if he wished to. He watched the stranger approach, the bulk of his body slowly shaping into a heaving, groaning darkness that blotted the stars as it reached the wall and fell beside him with a satisfied grunt.
“I did it.” There was a tinge of childish triumph in the stranger’s rusty voice.
Petty victory, he could have said if only he was sure his own voice wouldn’t fail him. And besides, wasn’t it against the survival rules to form bonds of friendship on a migratory ship laden with unblooded youngsters, all boiling with unreleased urge for challenge and rivalry and high aspirations? His Mother had warned him; he still felt her claws puncturing the strict moral on his hide.
“They must’ve been gentler on us if they want any of us to win in the Hunt. But again, it’s a long way to the hunting ground. Time enough to heal.”
The Hunt. Not that he was surprised; he knew it deep in his guts the moment the smaller spacecraft left its dock on the mothership, swift and determined. He was never sure about his attitude towards the Hunt – it was a traditional rite, established eons before he was born, and bound to exist long after the last of his blood had dried into dead rust. Measuring his life against the scale of pain had made him frugal about wasting any bit of energy in thinking of things that didn’t depend on him. The Hunt was one of many such things, and when sometimes he did think of it, of the killing and the transition, and the entrance into the new unknown, his mind wanted to turn blank.
“Are you afraid?”
He wouldn’t answer even if he could speak. Fear was another of those things not to be dwelled on. You couldn’t conquer it with thought, and yet foolish were those who denied it. Now inside he admitted feeling fear as easily as earlier he had admitted having been disgraced by the Elders. There was no use in chewing on the old facts: what was done, was done.
“What’s your name?”
The stranger was asking too many questions. Cautiously he rolled his head to get a better sight of the dark form near him and was relieved to estimate the other’s body to be a deal smaller than his own. A thinner, wirier built that showed more stamina where his brawnier flesh had let him down. All of the stranger’s lean, sinewy muscles seemed to be tense with ambitious anticipation that was the norm with the young unblooded ones, sometimes strong enough to become real hunger for kainde amedha – the ‘hard meat’ that was hidden in the long black crescent skulls of the xenomorphs, glistening with slime.
With a somewhat detached interest he peered inside himself in search of this hunger. Deep, under all the layers of recent pangs and older aches, behind the scars of his childhood fights was the need that, he concluded, could qualify as such. A promise that he had given to his Mother by the single fact that he was born. A challenge to prove that he was worthy of all the investments her clan had made in him. Pain was the price to pay in order to obtain the privilege of maturity and freedom from the debt in which he had been all his life.
He clutched onto this thought hoping it’d shut off the searing torment that kept circulating through his body with every heartbeat. The distant calm of meditation he had so often cheated his Mother and aunts with now seemed unattainable. Instead, every little vibration from the engines that went through the spacecraft’s bulk resounded in his body tenfold, shuttering whatever concentration he had built. Images popped up in his memory, disjointed flashes of light in rhythm to the pulse of the ship and the words of a tale his Mother used to tell him:
“He took the child and took out his eyes. His sister began to cry. But he put him into the kettle to boil. His sister said to him: 'Please, give me his bones to bury them. With his flesh you can do whatever you want to!’”
His own sister had grown almost twice his size last year; now, right while he was heading for the Hunt, she would be readying for her first mating – a relentless duel for dominance, where he wasn’t sure whether to call the winning male lucky or be sorry for him. Of all improbable things, the last would be her crying over her little brother, to say nothing of worrying about his bones.
“They’ve been rougher on you than on any other of us.” White pain shot through him like a dozen of sharp arrows when the stranger touched his shoulder tentatively. The touch was meant to be light but it pained him surprisingly more than the hard prods of the Elders.
“Leave me alone,” he finally brought himself to growl.
“They must be so severe with us to prepare us for the Hunt. We must be ready to see and feel what we’ve never felt before.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“We must go without fear, and in order not to fear, we must be beyond pain.”
“Leave. Me. Alone.”
The stranger’s musky smell enveloped him, poignant and tingling with the appetite for battle that made his body tense in response beside his will the way it had so often done in a stubborn rejoinder to his Mother’s lessons.
“And if we win, they will grant us breeding rights. Would you like to have a female?”
“No!”
He didn’t know he had strength to shout. The lean stranger backed off slightly, tilting his head in curiosity, his long braids falling on his shoulder in a dark mass.
“I bet you’re a born survivor. I’ll stick to you for luck, if you don’t mind. But first we’ll have to see that you get better soon.” There was an amused growl, and he felt the other’s dreadlocks brush against his face as his head was lifted to repose a moment later on the nameless stranger’s arm.
He wanted to protest the way his well-bred dignity dictated him to, but the final outburst had sapped the last strength out of him. Cradled against the stranger’s shoulder, he thought that his Mother had never held him in her arms.
To see and feel what had never been felt before. Yes, that had to be the essence of the Hunt.
***
End.