24Summary: It was the same story, different hunters. Lex finds a new respect for the myths of the ancient past as she thinks over what happened at the Antarctic pyramid.
A/N - Yeah, I'm another one of those who are royally P/O that Scar died (WHY!?*bloodcurdling scream of bottomless fangirl agony*).
After reading such beautiful and magnificently AWESOME pieces of AvP fanfic as those authored by the fabulous Solain Rhyo, CassieKnight, and the queen of making me roflmfao known to all as Zippy The Avenger, I figured I'd had enough of leaving myself out of the fray and decided to jump on in. No, Scar's not alive in this one... or is he? It's intended to be a one-shot, set not that long after the movie events, so no one knows.
Since I've been an avid devourer of world mythology ever since I was twelve, I couldn't help the inspiration to do this piece - no, it's not a crossover, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief now. *Insert your relieved sigh here* It's just a déjà vu-flavored piece as Lex is thinking over past events.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Alien franchise, the Predator franchise, the Alien(s) versus Predator franchise, any of the movies, or any of the characters, including the all-too-awesome Scar & Lex, and if I did own my own Xenomorph or Yautja, I wouldn't have to deal with nearly half the bull$#!^ that I currently do!
I also do not own the myth of Artemis and Orion; that belongs to the far-ancient Greeks, and they're all LONG-dead, making the story open-domain.
And finally, I don't own the term "frisblade" in reference to the object known as a shuriken - that one was coined by Zippy The Avenger (all hail!).
I make no profit - monetary or otherwise - for writing this fanfic, just a happy fangirl feeling. Now, enjoy! :)
Another nightmare. Another restless sleep where Alexa Woods, mountain-climber extraordinaire and slayer of aliens, would find herself again in a three-dimensional maze of certain doom, fighting for her life as all around her her comrades fell, and she would be forced to re-live it all. Again, she would feel one of the interstellar hunters kick her against the wall right before a slimy, spiny, serpent-like creature from the deepest recesses of a nightmare impaled him its barbed tail. Again, she would be running for her life from monsters - predatory humanoid beings and the things that they hunted. Again, she would have to look Sebastian in the face - knowing that there was nothing she could do to save him from the alien offspring incubating in his chest - and end him, the sound of the gunshot reverberating in her brain. And again, she would have to watch him die - the alien hunter that she had run alongside and fought with. After all they had come through, repeatedly dodging certain death and bringing down an alien queen together, Lex could only watch as he lay there in the snow, gasping for breath, bleeding from a fatal stab through the chest from the queen's harpoon-like tail-tip, his neon green blood glowing against the Antarctic white. Lex could only kneel by his side, helpless to do anything for him, watching him slip away, having no hope of saving her friend... Her friend?... Yes, he was her friend, wasn't he.
Lex opened her eyes, her mind still clutching the image of a mottled, crab-mouthed face crowned with ring-adorned dreadlocks and a pair of soul-burning sandy brown eyes, eyes that held an uncharacteristic softness when they regarded her. Her hand automatically went to her left cheek, scarred with a stylized "T" symbol, put there by her hunter friend. She had first seen the symbol when he had marked himself and his helmet with the acidic blood of his alien kill - marking himself as a warrior and a worthy hunter. After they had killed the awful, shiny black creatures and escaped the pyramid together, the hunter had taken off his mask and shown Lex his true face - even roared at her to test her reaction. When still she had shown no fear he saw fit to mark her as he had marked himself... But then their moment was broken by the alien queen, the sole creature to survive the explosion from the bomb that the hunter had left in the pyramid when he and Lex escaped.
Lex needed air, she got out of bed and pulled on boots over her feet and a parka over her pj's and went outside. The wintry world outside was awash with moonlight, the ground and the trees - everything - was frosted like a wedding cake with glittering snow. One would think that Lex would become uneasy around snow, after all that had happened at the Antarctic whaling station of Bouvetoya, but it wasn't so. No, she still loved the snow and the mountains, and climbing up and down dizzying rock-faces. In spite of everything that had happened to her, she wasn't changed all that much. Lex smiled softly to herself and looked up. Constellations sparkled above, each one hanging in the sky with its own mythic story of how it came to be there - the most prominent of all of them being the magnificent Orion.
Orion... How did that story go again? Orion the hunter, famously tall and even more famously skilled at what he did, died in battle proving himself against a monstrous scorpion, summoned by the sun god. Lex scoffed and gave a brief, bitter half-smile. Now hadn't she seen that story before? She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath of the chill air. She could still see the tall hunter clearly in her mind... could still see his luminescent blood on the snow as the alien queen's wicked, barbed tail whipped around and jabbed into him viciously, inflicting a lethal wound.
Lex had never put much thought into ancient fairy-tales and myths of days long forgotten, not before; but after standing in that room in the pyramid, with Sebastian, as he read the hieroglyphs detailing the story of how 'gods' from beyond the stars came to this world to show the mere mortals how to build great and beautiful empires, in exchange for their willing part in what the 'gods' loved most - the Hunt... She would be lying if she said that she hadn't come to see the old stories in a new light.
Lex opened her eyes again, tearing up from the cold night air... or was it from something else? What crime had Orion committed to deserve having Apollo the sun god summon such a horrific creature against him anyway?
Ah yes, Artemis, that was it. The sun god's lunar-oriented twin sister, the supreme goddess of the Hunt. Lex sniffed wryly. Orion, the mortal hunter, had shared a very special connection with the hunter moon-goddess... Hunter's Moon... Sebastian's voice echoed his past words into her thoughts and Lex stared up at the shining crescent; burning with cold fire, curved and gleaming, like - like...
Like one of the blades of his shuriken... Lex remembered the flying frisblades that Scar - as the predator had been dubbed, for the marks he had bestowed on her and himself during the whole incident - had let loose on the ugly black alien creatures. She remembered the soft shink-shink sound as they fanned out in a wicked display right before the hunter let them fly at his prey. Lex felt herself sinking into the memories and shook her head to try to clear it.
Artemis had sworn herself to eternal chastity so that she could never marry and thus never be the subservient property of any man, as all wives had been back in those ancient days. But Orion was different, he was the one man - besides her father and brother - that she had held respect for... and the one man that the immortal huntress had ever loved... or so the story went. Lex pulled her arms tightly around herself against the frigid night, as she worked to call more of the story to her already-occupied mind, images of slick, black monsters and tall, armored hunters with dreadlocks still dancing and clashing around in her brain.
But of course Artemis' love did not go unrequited. How could it? Orion lived for the Hunt, and she was its goddess - the Hunt personified. If anything, he loved her and what she stood for above all else, just as she favored him for his unmatched honor and skill... Lex had to tear her eyes away from the star-speckled sky above and looked instead at the frosty ground. She recalled how Scar had been willing to let Mr. Weyland go - he must have seen that the man was sick, defenseless, not worth the killing - but that had changed of course once the old man almost literally lit a fire under the predator's ass using his oxygen inhaler. Lex couldn't help a small but wistful chuckle at that. Scar had also spared her life - repeatedly. He could have killed her when she returned his gun, but he didn't; he could've refused to let her accompany him and just dashed her aside, let her fend for herself entirely, but he didn't; and he could have let her die at the jaws of the alien queen, but he didn't. Instead, Scar saved her life, came to her rescue as much as she came to his, and even marked her as one of his own in the end, regarding her with nothing but respect, glowing in his deep-set, brownish eyes. Lex blinked furiously. The story, Lex, she shook herself mentally, remember the story.
Artemis and Orion were constant companions after they met, best friends, hunting partners, the perfect pair - or as much as could be expected when one is a goddess and the other is a rather tall mortal. Or an alien and a human, Lex couldn't help adding mentally. But then Artemis' twin brother found out about them, and the sun god would not accept Orion and his sister's relationship. He declared that it threw Artemis' honor into question and that a mere mortal man was simply unworthy of her, and then, unbeknownst to Artemis, Apollo confronted Orion with a challenge. The sun god summoned a monstrous black scorpion, and it would be Orion's task to battle it to the death - to prove himself worthy of the hunter-goddess, or otherwise die trying... And here Lex's mind flooded again with long, whip-like, spiny tails with spear-like points - tails that belonged to creatures that would make scorpions seem sweet and cuddly.
She closed her eyes, and saw again the slick, black, oblong heads of the alien creatures and their snarling jaws. Saw the cold shine on the predators' armor and the wan light reflecting off the eyes of their masks and the rings on their dreadlocks. She heard the chittering growls of the hunters and the zhink! of the wicked, curved blades extending from their gauntleted wrists, and the screeeech! of the serpents that they hunted - as tooth and blade, muscle and claw, clashed and danced, and tore and stabbed at each other in flashes in her brain; around and around in technicolor surround sound, growing louder, brighter, deeper, until it all threatened to drown her like it did in all her nightmares since leaving Bouvetoya - and then one thing stood out from the rest and seemed to slow the maelstrom. The soft flex of clawed fingers, which then flexed again out of habit. The slight, curious tilt of a head draped in rubber-esque dreads. A soft, but deep and throaty purr. A tall, graceful, muscle-bound figure that conveyed intention with its every move. Scar... Lex took a deep, shuddering breath and held onto that one thing in her mind while she waited for everything else roiling about in her head to still, and when the moment was over and all was quiet within her again, she reluctantly let it go, and called herself back to the here and now.
But then Lex very nearly had to fight back tears as she recalled where she left off in the story, the parallels of what happened next hitting almost too close to home for her, because Orion had failed; he was stuck in the back by the scorpion's great stinger-tail during the battle, and by the time Artemis discovered what had transpired and had gotten to her fallen hunter's side, it was too late. He was already gone, and all her powers as a goddess meant nothing then, because she still did not have the power to bring him back, so the moon-goddess grieved relentlessly for him, as she hung his lifeless form as a pattern of stars in the winter sky, to be remembered always in honor.
Funny, Lex thought, how the story never changes after ages passed.
Battle the spiny, black, stinger-tailed monster from Hell; prove yourself worthy of the Hunt that you so revere.
It was the same story, different hunters. Lex sighed, her breath escaping in a long, cloudy white puff on the cold night, and she regarded again the starry aspect of the great hunter before her, but her mind was still on the hunter that had run with her and fought at her side. Both tall and glorious, both possessing skill worthy of legend, and both leaving behind a woman to look at the stars and mourn their falling. But Lex was no Artemis, oh no, she was no hunter goddess. If anything, she was merely an oread, a nymph of the mountains and the hidden caves and grottos of that realm... Yet somehow, Scar had seen something far more in her that night, she thought as she again touched her marked cheek absently, something in her that made her worthy of the Hunt and of the fierce warrior's respect.
Lex remembered again how he had looked at her when he gave her the mark of the hunter, the look in his eyes. Those eyes... dear God! When would she ever cease to be haunted by those smoldering, unearthly eyes!? The tenderness and pride that shone from them - when they had thought that the struggle was over; the regret that they held as he looked up at her while he lay dying, while she could only look back at him, unable to do anything for him.
Lex couldn't fight it anymore, she wasn't really crying, but regardless, the tears were flowing, and she let them.
For Artemis and Orion there was no happy ending. For all as well, both of them were doomed before they had even said 'hello.' The goddess Artemis would ever afterwards spend the rest of her immortal life after that essentially alone, and her hunter... her hunter...
Her hunter was dead because he had been stuck through by the spined tail of a monster, dead because he loved and lived for the Hunt and was more than willing to prove it; dead because the woman he'd shared the most respect with still couldn't save him after all the two of them had done.
A/N - For those of you that would like to argue the finer details in my rendition of the myth of Artemis & Orion, I have only this to say to you: "Same story, different versions, and all are true!" ~Tia Dalma, Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (neither of which are owned by me).
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