He felt strange when the car came to a halt — as if something other than the seatbelt were pressing him to the seat. Ian was still strapped to his own seatbelt, hanging upside down, apparently unharmed.

But his eyes were closed.

And he wasn’t moving.

“Ian. Ian!” Fuck, no, no, not now, not ever, not like this. “Ian, please, God, please. Wake up!”

When his husband blinked awake, Quentin’s relief manifested in a hysterical fit of laughter, even though humour was the last thing he could find in the situation.

“Are you alright, love?” Ian was the one who’d just been unconscious, and still Quentin was his first thought. “Did you hit your head?”

Why couldn’t he stop laughing? “I’m okay,” he managed at last. “You’re the one who was out like a light.”

“I’m fine,” Ian said, just before all the blood drained from his face — and if that wasn’t just the funniest thing, considering he was upside down and blood should be rushing towards his head.

Quentin tried to take a deep breath, but found he couldn’t breathe deeply at all. His second inappropriate fit of laughter of the night subsided. A part of him didn’t want to know what Ian had seen when looking at him, or how it might relate to the weird pressure spreading to his chest, that had Ian blanching. He didn’t ask.

Ian twisted himself in various ways, too calm and collected, and managed to release his seatbelt without falling on his head. Quentin hadn’t made any progress with his own, hands shaking too badly to even try.

“I’ve sent for help,” Ian said, fiddling with the nexus, voice gentle and... And terrified, Quentin realised. “They’ll be here soon, love. You’ll be okay.”

“Ian, what...” Quentin glanced downwards — upwards — and saw it, then. A piece of twisted metal had speared him like an arrow and lodged itself in his sternum.

Pain burst across all five senses — now that he could see it, he could feel it, hear it, smell it, taste the pain, even. A distant sort of panic hovered on the edge of his awareness, and he almost laughed again: He wasn’t going to make it.

Ian knelt on the ceiling, adjusting the nexus until a bright light flooded the car. “I’m going to take a look, love, just to make sure, but you’ll be alright. It can’t have hit anything important.” His tone belied his words. “TrackerEvac are on their way and then—” He never finished that sentence.

Quentin blinked, his eyes protesting the glare, and added “blinking” to the list of activities that caused excruciating pain. He needed to speak — to say something, tell Ian how much he loved him one last time — but the words all caught in his throat. It wasn’t fair. They’d just moved. They’d decided when Ian was going to retire. It wasn’t fair. “Ian—”

When he was done blinking, Ian had a gun pointed to his face.

“Where is he?” He’d never heard his husband’s tone like that.

“Ian?”

“Where’s Quentin?”

Ian must have a concussion; a dangerous combination with the gun. Quentin spoke calmly through the pain, trying not to spook him. “I am Quentin.”

The gun pressed right against his forehead.

“I have no need to destroy you if you cooperate. Where. Is. My. Husband?”

“I am your husband,” he pleaded. If he was going to die from the crash, he didn’t want his last minutes with Ian to go down like this. Not like this, he thought for the second time that night. But then—

“You’re not him. You’re one of them.” Ian waved the gun the slightest bit, allowing Quentin to get a better look at his wound.

It was—

There were—

It couldn’t be—

Layers of flesh and bone, of sinew and blood. And, glinting underneath it all, inside of him, a part of him, the mechanism. A BioSynth mechanism.

And the world in front of his eyes exploded in a cacophony of information.