The (After) Life of the Party [6/?]
Title: The (After) Life of the Party [6/?]
Author:
xxdance
Fandom(s): Fall Out Boy/Panic! At the Disco
Pairing: Pete/Ryan, Pete/Patrick.
Summary: Ryan's just another dead starlet. Patrick's just another overworked detective. Pete's just another shady character. Sort of.
Rating: R. [Violence, drug use, language.]
Warnings: Crack. Slash. Language. Violence. Drug use. There's quite a bit of interesting anatomy in this chapter. I do not mean in a sexual way--I mean, if you're squeamish with anatomical details (it's not that bad, but I figure I'd at least warn you), I'd suggest skimming or something. If you're a doctor or pursuing medcine, I warn you that I am talking out of my (and wikipedia's) ass here. Most of this is not physically possible. But erm, context will excuse it. Extreme amounts of crack behind the cut. You have been warned.
Author's Note: Forwhatchamacall1t, because she, without fail, saves me from looking like a goober and encourages me to lay on the crack as thick as possible.
one two three four five
Once Joe and Andy had ceased their howling laughter and Patrick had coaxed his face from beet red to a rosy pink (his temper was never quick to fade), things nearly returned to normal.
Then the phone rang.
"Detective Stump speaking," Patrick answered, already prepared to extol the virtues of every color but maroon.
"Hey, it's Brendon, I was wondering if you're busy?"
Patrick wracked his brain for a moment--oh, Urie, the coroner. "No, I'm free--why? What's going on?"
Brendon, sounding breathless, replied, "You're not going to believe it."
"Why am I not surprised?"
Brendon ignored him. "Look, just don't tell anyone about it--I've done something rather...unorthodox, shall we say, and I'd rather not get my license revoked, so--"
"What?" Patrick asked, trying to keep his voice down.
"No, sorry, no way--I mean, what, phone lines could be tapped, I don't know, you work at a police station, right? Shit, I didn't even think of that. Just don't arrest me, okay, I did it because I needed to know, and--"
"I'm not going to arrest you," Patrick assured him, hoping that whatever he'd done wasn't so bad that he'd have to. "I just need to know what's going on."
"You'll just have to come down," Brendon replied, sounding distracted. "I can't talk about it, it's something you have to see. Bring your partner." He hung up.
Patrick twirled a pencil in his fingers for about thirty seconds before his curiosity got the better of him. "Joe, c'mon," he said, pulling on his coat. "Back to the morgue."
---
Once Patrick finished emptying the meager contents of his stomach into a trash can, he realized just exactly how (and why) illegal this was.
"You," Patrick said, pointing a shaky hand at the monstrosity on the table before him. "You did that?"
"No," Brendon said, eyes wide, shaking his head. "Well, yeah, I guess, I cut him open, but what you're seeing there, not seeing, rather, has nothing to do with me."
Patrick had seen his share of dead bodies. He'd seen pieces of people from one end of a room to another, he'd seen heads without bodies, he'd seen bodies without heads. He'd seen intestines strewn about like streamers, bodies disemboweled and left for the birds. At least then, he'd seen the guts.
Joe, who had, until this point, been chewing nervously on his thumbnail, asked, "So, what, he was somehow disemboweled without cutting him open?"
"No," Brendon repeated. "Look, it's all connected. He hasn't been disemboweled. Did you ever heard of cattle mutilation?"
Patrick felt sick again.
"No? Anyway, people used to say it was because of aliens. Like, they'd find these cows all over, no blood, all their sex organs gone. Bizarre," Brendon explained. "That's not exactly what we have, here, but they're both pretty fucking weird."
"What does this have to do with aliens? Did aliens take his organs?" Somehow, even beneath a veritable ocean of nausea, he managed to be sarcastic.
"I don't think so," Brendon replied earnestly. "Look, don't lock me up or whatever, because I realize this is pretty fucking weird of me to say, but this guy's not human."
There was a brief moment of silence before Patrick chuckled nervously.
Joe, for once in his life entirely serious, said, "Um, Patrick. Please come look at this."
Patrick looked. Looked again, just to be sure. Screwed his eyes shut and pretended it wasn't happening.
"That's--that's--"
"That's a respiratory system," Brendon said, pointing. "Lungs, trachea, et cetera. That--" here he pointed at the space within Ross' chest, "is where the digestive system should be."
Ordinarily, Patrick wasn't at all squeamish. Blood and guts were normal things, natural things. This? This complete lack of anything? This was not normal.
Brendon made a noise something like a chuckle. "Explains why there wasn't anything wrong with him. There's nothing to be wrong with."
"How can he--he can't survive without organs," Patrick said, voice shaking. "He can't, you--nobody can, it's impossible."
Brendon nodded. "Tell me about it, right? But it's all finished. It's not cut out or removed--his body simply doesn't have it. What we're dealing with, here--"
"Please tell me there's a medical term for this," Patrick pleaded.
"--is something completely insane. If I had to, and I do mean had to, because if I said this to anybody who hadn't seen the body I'd be laughed out of the profession, I'd say he's an--"
"Please," Patrick begged, "please don't say it."
Brendon paused. "What, would you rather me lie?"
Patrick nodded.
"Okay, he's perfectly human. Not an extraterrestrial of any kind, nope. Definitely homo sapien."
"I'll be right back," Patrick said, stepping out of the room and taking a deep, not-saturated-with-weird breath. Fingers shaking, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed his home number.
---
"Patrick Stump's residence. Pete Wentz, interior design speaking."
"Did you ever notice anything remotely abnormal about Ross?" Patrick's voice demanded. Pete could almost see the scowl.
"You'll have to be more specific than that," Pete replied, rolling his eyes.
There was silence on the other end for a moment. "Care to elaborate?"
Pete rolled his eyes. "Don't go all detective on me now, Stump. I mean, what specifically? Idiosyncrasies? Mood swings? Questionable taste in haircuts? I mean, fuck, you strike me as weird."
"How do I--" Patrick cleared his throat. "Physically speaking."
"Yeah, he's got a mole right to the left of his--"
"Other than that," Patrick cut him off hurriedly.
"Nothing I ever saw," Pete replied, inspecting his nails. "And I can honeslty say I basically saw it all, y'know?"
"How about his eating habits?"
"Dude ate like a pig. No, a bear maybe. Complete carnivore. I'm dead serious, he wouldn't eat anything unless it was still a little bloody on the plate. I don't know if he was taking pills to keep the weight off--I know he had the money to, but I never saw him take one--but he was the tiniest fucking kid I ever saw."
"How can you--" Patrick paused. Pete could almost feel the tension through the phone line. Whatever Patrick had cut himself off from was something Pete was fairly sure he didn't want to hear. "I think we're going to need to do some more questioning, Pete--things aren't adding up."
Pete groaned, "Look, Ryan knew all kinds of people, yeah? Why aren't you questioning them?"
"Because it's you things aren't adding up with, Pete."
Pete chewed a thumbnail nervously. When he finally spoke, his voice was subdued. "Look, I need to make a few calls--"
"It's not because I have it out for you or something," Patrick blurted, almost making Pete smile. "I want this to be over as quick as you do, but until signs start flashing something other than your name--"
"I'm a suspect. Got it. But I'm serious about the calls, I gotta--"
"Right. Yeah." There was a pause, both waiting for the other to speak. "Don't run up my bill," Patrick said, and hung up.
Pete stared at the phone, squeezing it in his fist. Of all the stupid, asshole--
He dialed a number, pacing anxiously across the floor. "Travis? Hey, it's Pete, just wondering why I'm still in this mess."
At the familiarity of Travis' voice, he sat down.
"Oh. Pete man, I'd love to chat, but I'm really busy right now, so--"
His wan smile faded as he asked, "Why am I not top priority?"
Travis' voice sounded distracted, rushed, as though he wanted the conversation to be over as quick as possible. It wasn't like him--normally he was all casual and easy. Pete wanted to meet the being that had Travis riled up. "Come on, man, this isn't the time. You gotta--just hang on--"
"What's that supposed to--no, Travis, you hang on. I'm in over my head here, the sups know it, you probably fucking know it--why am I in it on my own?" he demanded, clenching and unclenching a fist. Travis responded vaguely, voice edging on annoyance.
"Calm down, man. Christ, you're gonna make it all worse. This isn't--it's all going to hell, man. We've got to cut our losses, okay?"
"I'm the best they have," Pete hissed. "And you can tell them I said that. Fuck it up, fine--but when it all goes to hell, I'll be laughing."
Pete hung up, putting the phone back calmly before punching a neat, fist-sized hole in the living room wall.
---
"All I got out of him--"
Joe, grinning like he'd inherited his own harem, asked, "Him?"
"Wentz. He said Ross--"
"Wentz, huh?" Joe's grin grew wider. Patrick wondered how easy it would be to grin with a broken jaw.
"--only ate meat. Is that even physically--I mean, you need other foods to live, right?"
The coroner sighed, peering into the chest cavity as though it were a particularly fascinating puzzle. "You want to hear my theory?"
"No," Patrick replied bluntly. Ignoring the nausea creeping up on him, he inched closer to the corpse. "I want you to tell me, step-by-step, what's in there. And what should be."
Brendon shrugged. "It won't make any more sense, but sure. Let's start respiratory, yeah. Mouth or nose to trachea. Trachea to bronchial tree. Bronchial tree to alveoli--that's these little sac things in there, they gather up the gases and exchange them for what we need, and ship that off to the bloodstream. Your leftovers go back up and out, or hang around and poison your lungs. Anyhow."
Patrick, swallowing heavily, leaned closer. "So that's all there?"
"All of it. Now, circulatory. That's a heart."
"I'm not stupid," Patrick pouted.
"Yeah, well, most people are. Now, staying away from actual processes of the heart, 'cause I don't feel like Latin and chambers and shit today, we'll just say the heart pumps the blood out, right. Goes right through these tubes, all over your body. Then it comes back. Now, our boy here's missing some things that deal with the circulatory system, but somehow it's still working, because he was bleeding at the crime scene. So his body's managed to work around the sheer batshit anomaly that are his organs and allows him to live without parts of his integral systems. Digestive, for one--don't know how the fuck he's eating without anywhere to put it. I mean, he's got the esophagus, here--"
Patrick winced as Brendon picked it up with two gloved fingers.
"But it leads into this little thing, here--don't know what that is. Primitive stomach, maybe, but that's got a funny little tube thing in the back that runs right to the heart. Neat, huh?"
"So, what, if you punched him in the stomach he'd like, give way?" Joe asked, looking horrified.
"No, no, no," Brendon assured him, shaking his head. "There was a mass of...something there, some sort of--oh, you might want to cover your ears, here--" he said to Patrick, who ignored him, "alien thing, I don't know, a sort of biological placeholder?"
"And that is...?" Patrick's mouth asked, his brain occupied with screaming in mental anguish.
"I threw it away," Brendon shrugged. "Didn't want something like that laying around--do you know the kind of trouble I'd get in for--anyway, it's gone now and there was nothing remotely interesting about it, I scanned it and all I was getting was healthy cells, aside from the virus. Kind of like the regular human muscle wall, but much thicker.""
Just as Patrick was about to ask why he would throw something like that away, because for one, evidence, and for two, possible evidence of alien life forms, Joe interrupted.
"So, wait. What's your theory?"
Brendon grinned, pushing his glasses up with one finger and smoothing the front of his lab coat. "I'm rather proud of this one, actually, but it's a bit of a doozy. So, my theory is that Ross here's an alien."
Patrick felt a migraine coming on. "We've established that you should not be in charge of investigating dead bodies, yes."
Brendon forged on ahead anyway. "Ross is an alien. This body is not his real body. Or it is, rather, but modified in such a way as to allow him to survive temporarily on this planet. So, like I said, he's got the circulatory system to keep him warm and moving, he's obviously got a nervous system, and he's got a respiratory system to breathe and snort cocaine. Or whatever. So he's pretty much set, right?"
"Yeah, but--"
Brendon cut Joe off. "No, I'm not finished yet. See, he's got no digestive system, so he can't eat, but he obviously does. When I read the readout on his autopsy, his red blood count was a little low. Not enough to qualify as anemia, so I didn't make a fuss about it, but with the information you just gave me, about the meat thing, I was thinking--"
Fuck migraine--Patrick's head was imploding.
"--that little tube that connects from his neat little--" Brendon made a sort of oblong gesture with his hands, "--sac, thing, there, I'm thinking what that does is process the blood from the meat, make it fit for him to use, and pumps that into his heart to support the blood coming in from his marrow. Whatever made him didn't make his bones ready for producing blood. I ran some old-school--and I mean fucking vintage, dude, why can't we do shit like that anymore?--tests on him and found that his bone marrow was churning out minimal amounts of red blood cells, so he supplements it with the meat, and, voila, we have a goddamn fucking bonafide space vampire here," Brendon, grinning, bent neatly at the waist in a tiny bow.
"Yeah, okay," Patrick said, sarcasm dripping from every word. "Except for the part where that's impossible."
Brendon shrugged. "I'm probably wrong on bits of it, you know, but I'm the one with the doctorate, here."
"And I'm the one with common sense," Patrick retorted, frowning. "Space vampire. What's next, killer clowns from outer space?"
"From what I saw, he did like to slather on the makeup," Brendon replied, leaning a hip against the examination table with a grin.
Joe inspected the palm of his hand. "Patrick, I realize you're all about normal and rationality and whatever, but for just two seconds, can you imagine that this is possible--just imagine, Patrick, I know it's hard for you--and tell me what, exactly, we're supposed to do when we're faced with a murdered alien? Who do you call?"
"Ghostbusters?" Brendon volunteered, unhelpfully.
Author:
xxdanceFandom(s): Fall Out Boy/Panic! At the Disco
Pairing: Pete/Ryan, Pete/Patrick.
Summary: Ryan's just another dead starlet. Patrick's just another overworked detective. Pete's just another shady character. Sort of.
Rating: R. [Violence, drug use, language.]
Warnings: Crack. Slash. Language. Violence. Drug use. There's quite a bit of interesting anatomy in this chapter. I do not mean in a sexual way--I mean, if you're squeamish with anatomical details (it's not that bad, but I figure I'd at least warn you), I'd suggest skimming or something. If you're a doctor or pursuing medcine, I warn you that I am talking out of my (and wikipedia's) ass here. Most of this is not physically possible. But erm, context will excuse it. Extreme amounts of crack behind the cut. You have been warned.
Author's Note: For
whatchamacall1t, because she, without fail, saves me from looking like a goober and encourages me to lay on the crack as thick as possible.one two three four five
Once Joe and Andy had ceased their howling laughter and Patrick had coaxed his face from beet red to a rosy pink (his temper was never quick to fade), things nearly returned to normal.
Then the phone rang.
"Detective Stump speaking," Patrick answered, already prepared to extol the virtues of every color but maroon.
"Hey, it's Brendon, I was wondering if you're busy?"
Patrick wracked his brain for a moment--oh, Urie, the coroner. "No, I'm free--why? What's going on?"
Brendon, sounding breathless, replied, "You're not going to believe it."
"Why am I not surprised?"
Brendon ignored him. "Look, just don't tell anyone about it--I've done something rather...unorthodox, shall we say, and I'd rather not get my license revoked, so--"
"What?" Patrick asked, trying to keep his voice down.
"No, sorry, no way--I mean, what, phone lines could be tapped, I don't know, you work at a police station, right? Shit, I didn't even think of that. Just don't arrest me, okay, I did it because I needed to know, and--"
"I'm not going to arrest you," Patrick assured him, hoping that whatever he'd done wasn't so bad that he'd have to. "I just need to know what's going on."
"You'll just have to come down," Brendon replied, sounding distracted. "I can't talk about it, it's something you have to see. Bring your partner." He hung up.
Patrick twirled a pencil in his fingers for about thirty seconds before his curiosity got the better of him. "Joe, c'mon," he said, pulling on his coat. "Back to the morgue."
---
Once Patrick finished emptying the meager contents of his stomach into a trash can, he realized just exactly how (and why) illegal this was.
"You," Patrick said, pointing a shaky hand at the monstrosity on the table before him. "You did that?"
"No," Brendon said, eyes wide, shaking his head. "Well, yeah, I guess, I cut him open, but what you're seeing there, not seeing, rather, has nothing to do with me."
Patrick had seen his share of dead bodies. He'd seen pieces of people from one end of a room to another, he'd seen heads without bodies, he'd seen bodies without heads. He'd seen intestines strewn about like streamers, bodies disemboweled and left for the birds. At least then, he'd seen the guts.
Joe, who had, until this point, been chewing nervously on his thumbnail, asked, "So, what, he was somehow disemboweled without cutting him open?"
"No," Brendon repeated. "Look, it's all connected. He hasn't been disemboweled. Did you ever heard of cattle mutilation?"
Patrick felt sick again.
"No? Anyway, people used to say it was because of aliens. Like, they'd find these cows all over, no blood, all their sex organs gone. Bizarre," Brendon explained. "That's not exactly what we have, here, but they're both pretty fucking weird."
"What does this have to do with aliens? Did aliens take his organs?" Somehow, even beneath a veritable ocean of nausea, he managed to be sarcastic.
"I don't think so," Brendon replied earnestly. "Look, don't lock me up or whatever, because I realize this is pretty fucking weird of me to say, but this guy's not human."
There was a brief moment of silence before Patrick chuckled nervously.
Joe, for once in his life entirely serious, said, "Um, Patrick. Please come look at this."
Patrick looked. Looked again, just to be sure. Screwed his eyes shut and pretended it wasn't happening.
"That's--that's--"
"That's a respiratory system," Brendon said, pointing. "Lungs, trachea, et cetera. That--" here he pointed at the space within Ross' chest, "is where the digestive system should be."
Ordinarily, Patrick wasn't at all squeamish. Blood and guts were normal things, natural things. This? This complete lack of anything? This was not normal.
Brendon made a noise something like a chuckle. "Explains why there wasn't anything wrong with him. There's nothing to be wrong with."
"How can he--he can't survive without organs," Patrick said, voice shaking. "He can't, you--nobody can, it's impossible."
Brendon nodded. "Tell me about it, right? But it's all finished. It's not cut out or removed--his body simply doesn't have it. What we're dealing with, here--"
"Please tell me there's a medical term for this," Patrick pleaded.
"--is something completely insane. If I had to, and I do mean had to, because if I said this to anybody who hadn't seen the body I'd be laughed out of the profession, I'd say he's an--"
"Please," Patrick begged, "please don't say it."
Brendon paused. "What, would you rather me lie?"
Patrick nodded.
"Okay, he's perfectly human. Not an extraterrestrial of any kind, nope. Definitely homo sapien."
"I'll be right back," Patrick said, stepping out of the room and taking a deep, not-saturated-with-weird breath. Fingers shaking, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed his home number.
---
"Patrick Stump's residence. Pete Wentz, interior design speaking."
"Did you ever notice anything remotely abnormal about Ross?" Patrick's voice demanded. Pete could almost see the scowl.
"You'll have to be more specific than that," Pete replied, rolling his eyes.
There was silence on the other end for a moment. "Care to elaborate?"
Pete rolled his eyes. "Don't go all detective on me now, Stump. I mean, what specifically? Idiosyncrasies? Mood swings? Questionable taste in haircuts? I mean, fuck, you strike me as weird."
"How do I--" Patrick cleared his throat. "Physically speaking."
"Yeah, he's got a mole right to the left of his--"
"Other than that," Patrick cut him off hurriedly.
"Nothing I ever saw," Pete replied, inspecting his nails. "And I can honeslty say I basically saw it all, y'know?"
"How about his eating habits?"
"Dude ate like a pig. No, a bear maybe. Complete carnivore. I'm dead serious, he wouldn't eat anything unless it was still a little bloody on the plate. I don't know if he was taking pills to keep the weight off--I know he had the money to, but I never saw him take one--but he was the tiniest fucking kid I ever saw."
"How can you--" Patrick paused. Pete could almost feel the tension through the phone line. Whatever Patrick had cut himself off from was something Pete was fairly sure he didn't want to hear. "I think we're going to need to do some more questioning, Pete--things aren't adding up."
Pete groaned, "Look, Ryan knew all kinds of people, yeah? Why aren't you questioning them?"
"Because it's you things aren't adding up with, Pete."
Pete chewed a thumbnail nervously. When he finally spoke, his voice was subdued. "Look, I need to make a few calls--"
"It's not because I have it out for you or something," Patrick blurted, almost making Pete smile. "I want this to be over as quick as you do, but until signs start flashing something other than your name--"
"I'm a suspect. Got it. But I'm serious about the calls, I gotta--"
"Right. Yeah." There was a pause, both waiting for the other to speak. "Don't run up my bill," Patrick said, and hung up.
Pete stared at the phone, squeezing it in his fist. Of all the stupid, asshole--
He dialed a number, pacing anxiously across the floor. "Travis? Hey, it's Pete, just wondering why I'm still in this mess."
At the familiarity of Travis' voice, he sat down.
"Oh. Pete man, I'd love to chat, but I'm really busy right now, so--"
His wan smile faded as he asked, "Why am I not top priority?"
Travis' voice sounded distracted, rushed, as though he wanted the conversation to be over as quick as possible. It wasn't like him--normally he was all casual and easy. Pete wanted to meet the being that had Travis riled up. "Come on, man, this isn't the time. You gotta--just hang on--"
"What's that supposed to--no, Travis, you hang on. I'm in over my head here, the sups know it, you probably fucking know it--why am I in it on my own?" he demanded, clenching and unclenching a fist. Travis responded vaguely, voice edging on annoyance.
"Calm down, man. Christ, you're gonna make it all worse. This isn't--it's all going to hell, man. We've got to cut our losses, okay?"
"I'm the best they have," Pete hissed. "And you can tell them I said that. Fuck it up, fine--but when it all goes to hell, I'll be laughing."
Pete hung up, putting the phone back calmly before punching a neat, fist-sized hole in the living room wall.
---
"All I got out of him--"
Joe, grinning like he'd inherited his own harem, asked, "Him?"
"Wentz. He said Ross--"
"Wentz, huh?" Joe's grin grew wider. Patrick wondered how easy it would be to grin with a broken jaw.
"--only ate meat. Is that even physically--I mean, you need other foods to live, right?"
The coroner sighed, peering into the chest cavity as though it were a particularly fascinating puzzle. "You want to hear my theory?"
"No," Patrick replied bluntly. Ignoring the nausea creeping up on him, he inched closer to the corpse. "I want you to tell me, step-by-step, what's in there. And what should be."
Brendon shrugged. "It won't make any more sense, but sure. Let's start respiratory, yeah. Mouth or nose to trachea. Trachea to bronchial tree. Bronchial tree to alveoli--that's these little sac things in there, they gather up the gases and exchange them for what we need, and ship that off to the bloodstream. Your leftovers go back up and out, or hang around and poison your lungs. Anyhow."
Patrick, swallowing heavily, leaned closer. "So that's all there?"
"All of it. Now, circulatory. That's a heart."
"I'm not stupid," Patrick pouted.
"Yeah, well, most people are. Now, staying away from actual processes of the heart, 'cause I don't feel like Latin and chambers and shit today, we'll just say the heart pumps the blood out, right. Goes right through these tubes, all over your body. Then it comes back. Now, our boy here's missing some things that deal with the circulatory system, but somehow it's still working, because he was bleeding at the crime scene. So his body's managed to work around the sheer batshit anomaly that are his organs and allows him to live without parts of his integral systems. Digestive, for one--don't know how the fuck he's eating without anywhere to put it. I mean, he's got the esophagus, here--"
Patrick winced as Brendon picked it up with two gloved fingers.
"But it leads into this little thing, here--don't know what that is. Primitive stomach, maybe, but that's got a funny little tube thing in the back that runs right to the heart. Neat, huh?"
"So, what, if you punched him in the stomach he'd like, give way?" Joe asked, looking horrified.
"No, no, no," Brendon assured him, shaking his head. "There was a mass of...something there, some sort of--oh, you might want to cover your ears, here--" he said to Patrick, who ignored him, "alien thing, I don't know, a sort of biological placeholder?"
"And that is...?" Patrick's mouth asked, his brain occupied with screaming in mental anguish.
"I threw it away," Brendon shrugged. "Didn't want something like that laying around--do you know the kind of trouble I'd get in for--anyway, it's gone now and there was nothing remotely interesting about it, I scanned it and all I was getting was healthy cells, aside from the virus. Kind of like the regular human muscle wall, but much thicker.""
Just as Patrick was about to ask why he would throw something like that away, because for one, evidence, and for two, possible evidence of alien life forms, Joe interrupted.
"So, wait. What's your theory?"
Brendon grinned, pushing his glasses up with one finger and smoothing the front of his lab coat. "I'm rather proud of this one, actually, but it's a bit of a doozy. So, my theory is that Ross here's an alien."
Patrick felt a migraine coming on. "We've established that you should not be in charge of investigating dead bodies, yes."
Brendon forged on ahead anyway. "Ross is an alien. This body is not his real body. Or it is, rather, but modified in such a way as to allow him to survive temporarily on this planet. So, like I said, he's got the circulatory system to keep him warm and moving, he's obviously got a nervous system, and he's got a respiratory system to breathe and snort cocaine. Or whatever. So he's pretty much set, right?"
"Yeah, but--"
Brendon cut Joe off. "No, I'm not finished yet. See, he's got no digestive system, so he can't eat, but he obviously does. When I read the readout on his autopsy, his red blood count was a little low. Not enough to qualify as anemia, so I didn't make a fuss about it, but with the information you just gave me, about the meat thing, I was thinking--"
Fuck migraine--Patrick's head was imploding.
"--that little tube that connects from his neat little--" Brendon made a sort of oblong gesture with his hands, "--sac, thing, there, I'm thinking what that does is process the blood from the meat, make it fit for him to use, and pumps that into his heart to support the blood coming in from his marrow. Whatever made him didn't make his bones ready for producing blood. I ran some old-school--and I mean fucking vintage, dude, why can't we do shit like that anymore?--tests on him and found that his bone marrow was churning out minimal amounts of red blood cells, so he supplements it with the meat, and, voila, we have a goddamn fucking bonafide space vampire here," Brendon, grinning, bent neatly at the waist in a tiny bow.
"Yeah, okay," Patrick said, sarcasm dripping from every word. "Except for the part where that's impossible."
Brendon shrugged. "I'm probably wrong on bits of it, you know, but I'm the one with the doctorate, here."
"And I'm the one with common sense," Patrick retorted, frowning. "Space vampire. What's next, killer clowns from outer space?"
"From what I saw, he did like to slather on the makeup," Brendon replied, leaning a hip against the examination table with a grin.
Joe inspected the palm of his hand. "Patrick, I realize you're all about normal and rationality and whatever, but for just two seconds, can you imagine that this is possible--just imagine, Patrick, I know it's hard for you--and tell me what, exactly, we're supposed to do when we're faced with a murdered alien? Who do you call?"
"Ghostbusters?" Brendon volunteered, unhelpfully.