Chapter Text
“You just like watching me suffer,” John says, huffing as he's forced to take his hands off his shivering arms to slap the cornstalks out of his face. He really shouldn’t have come out here in the middle of the night in a tank top and shorts, but light, tight workout clothes are all he owns.
“Yeah, I do.” Sam’s heavy green jacket and jeans protect him better from the cold and the scraping corn stalks, and he casually pushes through them on his way through the cornfield.
It’s not long before the green wall splits to reveal a clearing. Not a natural clearing—it’s still part of the cornfield—but a clearing where the stalks have been flattened in grand swirling patterns.
A smile breaks across Sam’s face. “See, I told you! A crop circle. Isn’t this cool?”
“It’s…interesting,” John says, shoving his hands in his pockets to warm them while he contemplates the flattened corn. “But I don’t believe aliens did it.”
Sam frowns. “If they didn’t, then who did?”
“I don’t know, man. The farmers? Artists? They do weird shit like this all the time.”
“Mm. You do always say you don’t understand ‘artsy fartsy types’.”
With a shrug, John takes a deep breath of the cool country air. “I mean, I try to understand. Art is like…working out. And paintings are like…the artist’s version of sculpting their abs?” He lifts his tank top to reveal his finely honed six-pack, snapping Sam’s eyes down to it. Then the cold bites his exposed belly and he covers it, shuddering.
Sam laughs. “Yeah, sure.”
They spend ten minutes strolling around the crop circles, Sam admiring the patterns and John mustering as much interest as he can. At some point, Sam flops on his back and sprawls out to admire the full moon and sparkling stars, pausing when he catches John jogging in place, huffing and puffing.
“Trying to keep warm?” he asks.
John doubles his pace. “Trying to keep fit. UFO hunting just isn’t enough exercise, you know?”
Sam rolls his eyes. Rolling over, he hops to his feet and brushes the soil off his jacket. “Fine, let’s go home. You want to crash at your apartment, or mine?”
“Mine,” he says, taking off into the corn with the momentum he built up.
Another laugh in his throat, Sam saunters after him. Hand lifted to brush a stalk aside, he’s about to slip through when a buzzing noise prickles his eardrum and stops him in his tracks. Sam turns on his heel, gaze darting around the crop circle. Didn’t sound like an alarm, or a farmer coming to chase them out, or anything familiar, really. He’s not sure what he just heard.
John pokes his head back into the clearing. “I thought we were going.”
On alert, Sam shakes his head. “Did-…Did you hear that?”
For a moment, John’s confused. Then he forces a smile and gives his buddy two enthusiastic thumbs up. “Yeah, it was totally the aliens, dude.”
“Don’t jack me off here, man, I’m serious. I really heard something just now.”
Smile sinking, he steps out of the corn and gazes around, scratching his head. “Mm. Don’t see anything.”
Sam shrugs. “Yeah, I guess whatever it was is gone now.”
John opens his mouth to reply when the buzzing comes back in full force, right in the man’s ear, about scaring him out of his skin. A flower of light blooms from the noise, sweeping over John and engulfing him from his right arm, up over his head, and down across his left leg. The light dissipates, and so does the sound, alongside his last startled gasp as John vanishes.
Stunned, Sam blinks as he processes what the hell he just witnessed and his eyes readjust to the darkness. “I-…John? John?!”
He looks left and right like he’s about to cross a street, but the other man is nowhere in sight.
“Fuck. Fuck, oh fuck…!” Hands slapped to his cheeks, Sam shakes off the mental freeze and sprints into the corn, shouting John’s name as he searches for him.
He jumps to see over the stalks, looping around near where they came in and back to the clearing, burning through his energy until he’s out of breath, drenched in sweat, and falls to his knees in the center of the crop circle.
“Give him back!” Sam screams up at the heavens, fists raised like he’s going to punch the stars out of the sky. “I’m the one who’s into aliens! Take me instead!”
Only the crickets answer his cries.
Sam breaks down sobbing, slamming his fists on the flattened corn. After a few minutes, there’s another buzz and a flash of light, and Sam snaps his head to the right just in time to watch John be dumped onto the bed of cornstalks like a sack of flour.
“John!” He staggers to his feet, stumbling over to his friend.
John’s not looking so hot. He too is soaked with sweat, as if from a strenuous workout. Skin flushed red, he shudders, staring absently up at the stars like he doesn’t realize he’s been returned to Earth. Also, his clothes are on wrong. Tank top backwards with the clothing tag tickling his throat, underwear hiked up too high, and his shorts are on upside down with the cuffs pulled up his thighs and the waistband around his knees.
Kneeled beside him, Sam pats his cheek. “Hey. Come back to me, man. You okay?”
He blinks a few times. John’s eyes are wet and red from crying, but at least they regain some lucidity. Before he can reply, his stomach visibly lurches, and he rolls over to puke his guts out. A mixture of bile and the chilli dogs from dinner, topped with a glob of glowing blue slime.
With him turned over, Sam spots the glowing blue wet spot on the back of his underwear and connects the dots. “Uh…Did-…Did they probe you?”
Choking, he stays hunched over on his hands and knees, retching and slurring his words. “Iwanna go hhhome…”
“Okay.” Sam takes his friend’s arm over his shoulder, helping him stand. He’s heavy, being the larger, more muscular man, but Sam manages. “Would you rather go home or to the hospital?”
“Home,” he croaks.
Sam nods. It’s slow going, but he helps his friend stagger out of the crop circle and through the cornfield toward the car. Halfway there, John regains enough composure to be fed up with his stupid shorts making it hard to walk. Sam gives him a minute to take them off and slip them back on correctly, adjust his underwear so they’re no longer giving him a wedgie, and awkwardly slip his arms inside his tank top to turn it around without taking it off. By the time he’s done, he looks like he’s about to collapse, and it takes all of Sam’s strength to haul him back to the car.
They somehow make it over the fence, out of the farmland and back to where they parked the dented green Toyota by the side of the highway. Sam hefts John into the passenger’s seat, quietly closes his door, and jogs around to the driver’s side. Then he speeds down the road with an air between them like ‘I can’t believe we’re walking away alive’.
Road’s hard to watch with how freaked out and worried Sam is. He steals a glance at John every few seconds, frowning at the way he holds his stomach and rocks back and forth. “Dude, I don’t mean to pressure you here, but are you absolutely sure you don’t need a hospital?”
“No hospital,” he snaps, fingers digging into the fabric of his tank top. “Fucking lot of good it would do. They’ll just think I’m crazy. Put me in a psyche ward.”
Sam nods again. After a long pause, he asks, “You really got abducted by aliens?”
John worries his lip.
“Thought it’d be obvious I of all people won’t think you’re crazy. Dude, even if I hadn’t seen you get teleported…”
He sighs.
Fingers drumming on the steering wheel, he eyes John, then looks back at the road. “Little green men from Mars?”
“No. Big,” John gasps, shuddering as he remembers. “Very big. Not green. Uh, dark grayish blue.”
Wonderstruck, Sam lets out a little gasp with his mouth in an excited O shape, but he doesn’t press his friend further. John’s so obviously not in the mood to talk about this. They must’ve done horrible things to him—probably worse than the obvious.
They pull up to John’s apartment complex, and Sam helps drag him upstairs and unlock the door for him. He lays his exhausted friend in bed and heads to the kitchen to make him a hot chocolate. With marshmallows. While the water’s boiling, he digs through the closet for a clean washcloth and wets it to clean up the sweat and slime. By the time he returns to the bedroom, John’s out cold, still fully dressed, having not bothered to shut off his lamp or pull up the blanket.
With a sigh, Sam moves a stack of sports magazines off the dresser to set the coco there, wipes the sweat off John’s face, pulls the blanket up to his chin, and shuts off the lights.
Paused in the doorway, he lets himself worry for a minute before heading to the bathroom. He has a toothbrush and some other things in John’s bathroom, so staying the night won’t be a problem. John’s probably fine now, but…something in Sam’s gut tells him it’s not a good idea to leave.
Meanwhile, something in John’s gut stirs him in his sleep. He groans, rolling over and placing a hand over his abs. A soft blue glow, not enough to have penetrated the blanket and caught Sam’s attention, radiates beneath his fingers from deep within John’s core.