Work Text:
She was just as Ada remembered. Slightly more unkempt than usual, maybe, but then Annette had never regarded her physical body as much more than a distraction. Her long hair hung limply over her shoulder, ashen in the artificial lights of the control room, her face sunken and pale. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days, but somehow the effect was offset by her eyes, which were anything but tired. They were electric; more than alive – reanimated. Ada had seen that look countless times before in the office at Arklay, when Annette would grab the notes from her hand and start flicking through them feverishly, muttering under her breath, “Don’t you see what this means?”
Ada stood in the doorway, watching without speaking. This time, she didn’t see what it meant. Both labs had been laid waste to – surely there was nothing left to discover except a way out of the city.
Yet Annette ran her finger down the topmost of a stack of files on a clipboard, her lips moving slightly, giving every impression of being consumed by an idea. If she was aware that Ada had followed her through the sewers, she didn’t let on.
Ada had hoped for this: to find Annette alive, to force the hand of fate into giving them some kind of resolution. There had been too many unanswered questions left between them. But now that they were together again, she didn’t know how to proceed.
Finally she spoke.
“So you finished G.”
Annette didn’t startle at the sound of her voice. She didn’t even look up.
“William finished it,” she said shortly. “I’m cleaning up the mess.”
Ada crossed her arms, leaning against the door-frame. She had expected a better reception – in fact, she had pinned more hopes than she would admit on this meeting – but Annette always confounded expectations. It was one of the things Ada enjoyed about her, though that didn’t mean it wasn’t sometimes infuriating.
“Picking up after him. That always was your job, wasn’t it?”
Annette didn’t respond.
She wasn’t ashamed of how she had spent her days at Umbrella, even if the product had unleashed hell upon the world – hell that she now planned to undo. Nevertheless it stung to hear it all reduced to picking up after a man like a housewife.
It was true she didn’t have too many feelings about the fact that her husband had ceased to be human, but that did not mean their marriage had been a sham. It hadn’t been love in the conventional sense, perhaps, but there had been respect and admiration between them – fraternity, in a way, as strange a quality as that might seem between lovers. And even as their whole lives had come to cave in on themselves over the last few months, her high opinion of him had never faltered.
He never lost his curiosity, for one. That was rare in their profession: the rule was publish or perish, and Annette had seen so many promising young scientists sell out for the safe bet, the guaranteed result that surprised no one but kept their careers ticking over. White bread, she called it, those flimsy little papers that only the most minor of journals deigned to print – empty calories, offering nothing but bland fuel.
But William never sank to that level, never had to. Once every month since they’d moved to the NEST he went back to the lab at Arklay, not out of envy or insecurity or in pursuit of his own advancement, but from simple scientific curiosity. He wanted to see the frontier of discovery.
Annette went with him, of course. The visits did not interest her. Though her husband seemed to have at least a modicum of respect for what his successor had done at Arklay, she considered Dr John Clemens an idiot: educated and well-connected, perhaps, but dull, irredeemably dull. She accompanied William only to prepare herself for the wild tangents that his mind would shoot off on afterwards. Forewarned was forearmed, and forearmed was what one had to be when dealing with tempestuous, unrestrained genius.
Fed with inspiration, William’s mind would strike out like a toddler, without warning and completely oblivious of consequence. It bore fruit through instinct. That was what made him brilliant. Annette was the other, less-appreciated type of brilliant. She worked well within constraints, her mind requiring direction to be roused towards a solution, and there was no better direction than that set by her husband. Making sure that William didn’t fuck up became her life’s work – a fact of which he had always remained ignorant. As he forged ahead with each new iteration of his virus, Annette reverse-engineered vaccines at every turn. It was difficult work, perhaps even more difficult than her husband’s obscure attacks of inspiration; but no one had ever realised that.
No one except the woman she was now faced with.
Ada crossed the room towards Annette and planted herself against the control panel, trying to insinuate herself into the other woman’s line of sight.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said lightly.
“No, I’m not,” Annette muttered. Her eyes were still running over the documents; her mind as always hovering out of reach. “You being here only confirms my pet hypothesis.”
“Which was?”
“You’re not a scientist.”
That surprised Ada, but she smiled gamely. “What gave it away?”
“Details,” Annette replied, tapping her pen as if the subject bored her. “Habits. You studied well, I’ll give you that, but you can’t fake experience.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that next time.”
Annette snorted. “You’re optimistic. From what I’ve seen we’ll be lucky to make it until tomorrow.”
This time it was Ada who didn’t reply. She stared absently at the sewage her high heels had tracked across the poured concrete floor. After everything that had happened, she had imagined that coming face to face again might prompt some honesty, some emotion – something. If not from genuine feeling then at least from the shock of seeing each other. Instead they were sparring like when they had first met.
It had happened on one of the Birkins’ visits to Arklay.
“I must introduce you to my new postgrad,” John had told them at once, ushering them down the corridor towards his office as if it were a matter of even greater importance than his research.
Annette shared a look with William as they followed him; ‘you don’t even need a PhD to work on the t-Virus any more,’ it said, and, ‘why does he think we’re interested?’
She saw why soon enough. Dr Clemens was thoroughly enamoured with his new protege. Ada was sitting at his desk when they came in, tracing the lines of an electrophoresis photograph with a fountain pen. She was young, goodlooking – what more did Annette need to know? Perhaps he thought the Birkins would find it touching, that they’d see in his insipid infatuation with this near-schoolgirl the likeness of their own bond (as he imagined it), and be moved by it. If so, he had misjudged his audience.
Ada looked up beamingly, in what Annette would come to know as a most uncharacteristic expression, when she saw John, and got to her feet as the Birkins shuffled in behind him.
“Ada, I’d like you to meet William Birkin. My predecessor. William, this is Ada Wong.”
“A pleasure,” she smiled, extending her hand to him. “John’s told me so much about you.”
Shaking the proferred hand, William shot a suspicious glance at John. “Has he really,” he replied without humour.
Annette had been looking off at the photograph on the desk throughout the others’ exchange; she had no aptitude for the performative niceties that this kind of situation called for, and in any case it was usually William that people were interested in meeting. When she glanced up again she was surprised to find Ada watching her expectantly, the same smile fixed on her youthful face. Ada didn’t seem disingenuous, at least no more than anyone else did when they were being polite to a stranger, yet her manner gave Annette pause, and she held out her hand only reluctantly.
“Annette Birkin,” she said. “I used to work here before we got transferred out.”
She couldn’t help but notice the glossy manicured nails as Ada took her hand. Not many Umbrella employees had time for things like that. Annette considered the possibility that Ada had set out to allure John from the beginning; well, if so, more fool him for taking someone on fresh out of college, she concluded with amusement.
“What’s your alma mater?” Annette asked, expecting that the girl was too young to see this for the insult it was.
“Princeton,” she replied sweetly. “And you?”
Annette blinked. At this stage in her career, where she had studied was irrelevant. Could Ada be returning her own barb? “No one’s asked me that in over ten years. I’m a senior researcher at the new facility.”
The men, who had been busy talking throughout, took advantage of the brief silence that had fallen to take their leave. “Well, ladies,” John said, placing a reverent hand on Ada’s back, “if you’ll excuse us – I have something to show you, William.” The two of them went off out of the office together.
Now that they were left alone, Ada resumed her seat behind the desk and gestured to Annette to sit opposite her. She obliged, though she couldn’t deny it was a galling position for someone accustomed to being on the other side of the desk. That was the second time this woman had rubbed her the wrong way within two minutes.
“Care to see what I’m working on?” Ada asked.
“No.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the vague hum of machinery from outside the office.
Annette cleared her throat. “How do you like it here so far?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “You seem to have made quite an impression on John.”
Ada rolled her eyes. If she’d been reading the situation correctly, Annette had as little patience for John as she did, and was equally stunned at being cast off by the men so quickly. “Believe me, it was unintentional,” she said.
Despite herself, Annette chuckled.
From there, the tide turned. It was easy enough for Ada to gain her trust. Annette was an opportunity for her to gain knowledge of Umbrella’s other operations and let her expand her sphere of influence, perhaps even rise through the ranks – that much was undeniable – but the situation was more complex than that.
If the truth was that Ada’s loyalties were with the Organisation and her relationship with John was pure fiction, then in Annette the two melded. It was impossible to disentangle her feelings from the practical benefits of their relationship. It might not have been reality, but it was as close as Ada could get until the day she was finally called back to her real employer. In the meantime, to enter into the dim office at the back of Arklay was to suddenly be able to breathe. There, she could cast off her false relationship with John. They laughed together, exchanged ideas, and came to some understanding of each other. Only in that brief window – once a month, then twice a month, twice a week – was she independent of the illusory life she had created.
For Annette’s part, she found her suspicions that Ada had an ulterior motive mattered very little to her. Deception was nothing special at Umbrella: everyone wanted something. If you didn’t want to drown in it, you had to take your pleasure where you could find it.
Now, though, they couldn’t even touch each other. It was as if any memory of their relationship had been consumed in the Arklay lab explosion along with the physical evidence; or at least Annette was determined to act as if it were so.
Ada leaned back against the control panel and crossed her arms. “So you suspected all along. Yet you never mentioned it till now.”
“I have better things to do with my time than tattle on-”
“- Spies threatening to compromise your research?” Ada laughed. “Interesting set of priorities.”
Annette shrugged, but Ada felt a thrill of victory, of having her now, and went on.
“I think you had another reason to keep me around,” she said, letting the words fall as slowly and inevitably as drops of honey. “And I think we-”
“I don’t have time for this,” Annette interrupted, whirling around to study the wall of monitors, her lab-coat billowing behind her. “Why are you here? For G?”
“That’s right.”
“Won’t happen. Leave while you still can.”
Clearly, the situation was going to require some tact. “Annette, I know how much it means to you,” Ada said, lowering her voice in the hope that her words would sound genuine.
“You know nothing about that!” Annette spat. “What have you ever created?”
“That’s not the point,” Ada persisted, “I know you; and I know William was going to sell G to the military. What difference does it really make if it goes to another organisation? Let me tell you, they’re all as bad as each other.”
Annette finally looked Ada in the eyes then. Her gaze was empty and businesslike, the gaze she usually turned on other people. “You really are clueless. I’m not keeping it for myself, I’m destroying it. What happened here can never happen again.”
Ada stiffened. “Don’t play the hero, Annette. It doesn’t suit you.”
“So what, then? Run away? No. All I’ve ever done is run away, deny the truth. It ends now.”
“It won’t make any difference! Been outside lately? You can’t fix this, it’s already done.”
“I don’t care.”
“Come off it, Annette,” Ada scoffed, drawing herself back up to her full height. “So you blow up the lab, then what? You really think Umbrella didn’t keep tabs on everything in the NEST?”
“William had ways around it. He was very careful with his work.”
“You know, I saw him tonight: what happened to him. I recognised him. You can’t tell me that was being careful.”
Annette looked away, her face drawn. “That was… a lapse in judgement,” she admitted.
Ada nodded to herself. She wondered whether that was how Annette would describe them – a lapse, an error. She didn’t have the nerve to ask.
It wasn’t really cheating, Annette had made that clear – at least, not between her and William. The crux of the Birkins’ marriage had always been their joint commitment to science, not to each other, and that remained inviolate. More than their daughter, G was the real product of their union: their legacy. The fact was, as Annette put it, almost anyone could make a child; it took no special skill. Making a virus, on the other hand, was an achievement. It was worth something. No doubt some would find that an abhorrent statement, but Annette dealt in facts without apology, and Ada did not doubt that it was a fact. The Birkins had done something extraordinary.
William and John had suspected nothing. Ada and Annette were not above suspicion but below it: they were not interesting enough to reach the level of being speculated about. Week after week (for the visits grew more frequent after Ada’s arrival), the men were only too happy to leave the women alone: it was a luxury for them, those great men lonely as god, to talk without their subordinates, without tempering influence. They spoke in language that in their hubris they imagined was theirs alone. They meant no slight by it; it was simply the way things were.
Meanwhile, the women formed their own dialect.
Ada saw that there were, or could have been, other realities than the one she had chosen. Annette’s cool grey eyes, usually slow-moving and remote as an artist’s model’s, would dart through her notes and dance across radiographs, reanimated by unseen electricity, with the glint of salmon leaping upstream – “don’t you see what this means?” – her voice rising in excitement, unguarded and almost unrecognisable.
And Ada did see, that was what most surprised her: this work, their work, interested her. She had studied extensively to prepare for the job, but while it had never been boring, she had never imagined it could become a passion.
“How would you test it?” she’d ask hungrily, no longer caring if she was blowing her cover, if it was something a graduate should have known. For the first time in her life she was not afraid of seeming gauche. She wrote down screeds of ideas, which Annette, leaning across the desk, would ornament with her annotations in barely-legible pencil.
Ada found herself swallowed by it easily. She could have become this, if she hadn’t been working against it.
Annette’s hand on the sleeve of her lab-coat as she stood to leave, urging, “Tell me what you find, straight away.” To anyone else, it was a casual gesture; in the private culture they had built in that office, it was love.
They knew what they had could not last, whether they named it or not. Both felt the pall of impending doom when they were together, because each of them intended to bring it in her own way. Annette was going to betray Umbrella to the military, and Ada to the Organisation. Their relationship would be collateral damage.
But the end, when it came, was from an unexpected quarter: an accidental outbreak of the t-Virus.
It missed Ada by luck. At least it had seemed like luck. She’d taken a sick day to feed her employer the latest information she’d gathered, and received the news a few hours later that the operation was compromised. A little probing revealed the whole truth. Her mind flew first to Annette: there was a chance she had been visiting the facility at the time of the outbreak.
Ada was ordered to leave town immediately. On her way she took a risk and drove past the Birkins’, just to see; she slowed down, she didn’t stop, catching a glimpse of Annette’s car in the driveway – and that had to be enough. She had to disappear.
The news of the incident escaped Annette until a few days later: Umbrella was exacting in its damage control, drip-feeding information on a need-to-know basis, and apparently she didn’t meet the standards for needing to know. William told her over dinner one night after Sherry was in bed. He didn’t even stop eating.
“No survivors,” he said, shaking his head. “Of course, it was inevitable with the way John managed things. I anticipated something like this sooner or later.”
Annette had excused herself from the table.
Now she stuck her pencil behind her ear, her eyes refocusing on the image of her mutated husband stalking across one of the screens.
“John’s dead, you know,” she said suddenly. “Or so they say. Obviously a body was never recovered. I don’t suppose that matters much to you.”
“Not really,” Ada replied. She had assumed as much. “Don’t tell me you shed any tears?”
“No.”
“Not even for me?”
“Not even for you. In fact I thought you might have had something to do with it. The outbreak.” Annette’s voice was tired – hollow – like she knew they were only raking over the ashes of matters that had long since become irrelevant. “Feasible idea, on the face of things. You took what you wanted and let the rest burn behind you.”
“This was never my plan, Annette.”
“Maybe not. You’re not an orchestrator, you’re a parasite – a vulture. Opportunistic. You waited for it to happen.” Annette’s back was turned, watching the screens, but Ada knew from her tone the contemptuous expression she must have on her face. Another little scrap of knowledge that would soon be just a useless memory.
There was no point trying to tell Annette that her initial plan had been to extract the Birkin family. She would never believe it, and even if she did, it was meaningless now. It was too late. Ada ran her gaze one last time over the ash-blonde hair turned resolutely against her.
“You know my daughter’s infected?” Annette went on. Her hand floated to her pistol, fingertips grazing it indecisively. “Parasitised actually, most likely, by her father. She needs the vaccine. But even that’s not enough to distract me from destroying G, and neither are you.”
She turned around, her grip tightening on the gun, but Ada was gone. The click of her heels echoed through the sewer.
Annette did not follow.