Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The darkness strikes him first.

His mind comes online in stages. The heavy weight of his body, the hanging suspension—a faint, leftover sense of vertigo. He is upright. He is—he tries his arms first, then fingers, more carefully—restrained. Utterly. Swimming in some thick, ungiving mass that holds him snugly.

A cold draft across his face—his nose, mouth. He huffs, cautiously darts his tongue out, tastes stale air. His airways have been left clear. Whoever, whatever, has him, wants him alive. For now.

He tries to think, remember how he got here, but it’s like wading upstream and through a deep, heavy fog. A sense of foreboding, a chill down his spine—the tingle of gunpowder burns on his hands, a bone-deep ache in his left wrist he can’t explain. His wife—Mia—

Mia, gone, disappeared, never coming back. No, not so, Mia, alive, but different, speaking in a voice not her own, a knife in her hands—

But the current pushing him back into the black, gentle as it is, is still as unavoidable as it is persistent. Like reckoning with the tide.

The darkness breathes in. He breathes with it.

Ethan—

He tries to blink against heavy eyelids, and—his body fades away, his eyes don’t open, but he sees.

A man stands before him, and he seizes, consumed by instinctive fear. His body remembers first: fist to the face, boot to the head—welcome to the family, son—shovel through a wall, running, running—pay attention, boy, you’re about to see something wonderful—

“Ethan,” the man says again, and slowly, his mind catches up to the rest of him. Jack Baker. But—

“Hey, hey,” Jack says, raises his hands and makes a shushing sound when he flinches back. Takes a slow seat with his posture still ringing of surrender. A trick, it’s always a trick— “I know, I know, I know—I’m not going to hurt you.” Jack grimaces. “Hell, I never would have if I could have helped it.”

He breathes, tries to calm his racing heart. His vision roams around the room, one he’s seen before, catches on Zoe at her father’s side. She won’t meet his eyes, but Zoe—Zoe is safe.

Zoe, who he left behind. God, she can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, trapped in a nightmare, and he just left her—

He looks back to Jack. Something inside him forces him to take air in, out, and his voice manages to come out steady. “What do you mean?”

There’s a smile on Jack Baker’s face. Small and sad and completely different from everything he’d seen on the man that had hunted him all night. “I’m no killer, son,” he says gently. “Neither is Marguerite, nor my boy, Lucas…” He puts a careful hand on his daughter’s knee. “Or even Zoe here.”

Zoe pulls away, goes to the window. She won’t look at him, won’t look at her father. She just stares out, into the black. Her face is blank. Jack watches her go with some quiet despair, then looks back to him. “That girl, Eveline, she did this.”

Eveline. A whisper on the wind, an outline left behind in the notes he has found scattered around, a ghost at the corner of his vision. Boots at the other end of a crawlspace, childish laughter fleeing. The one inhabitant of this strange and cursed property he’s yet to properly encounter. A girl, Jack says, and the paper trail agreed, but he’s quickly found out very little is what it appears to be in this place. “What the hell is she? What did she do to you?”

“She infected us with her gift. That’s what she calls it,” Jack says, and Ethan thinks of limbs reattached, walking corpses, black mold living, breathing—“I found her near a busted-out tanker in the bayou. Everything changed after that.”

A tanker. A looming, rotting ship before him. Mia had been on a ship, for her job. He’d seen it in the video. His head leaps with sharp pain as he prods at a connection his conscious mind doesn’t want to make.

“So she infects you, and then she takes control?”

Jack sighs. He seems so…tired. Old. “No, not exactly, son. She just—she forces her way into your mind and your soul and—you can’t fight back. You are connected to her and—you can’t resist the urge to…” A helpless gesture, a slight shake of the head. “Oh…you’re a—you’re a different person after that.”

“Just like Mia,” he says, and it’s some small comfort to know his wife doesn’t actually want to chainsaw him in half, at least. “So Mia sent me that message because of Eveline.” But—why?

The look Jack gives him is half pity, half desperation, imploring him to understand something he can’t yet see. “Listen, the—the girl just wants family of her own.”

Jack, pacing holes in the floor of his workshop—I was going to be her father. Now she says he will be her father…

He had wanted to be a father, once. After a lifetime spent running and ducking, not daring to count on his next breath, his next meal…then having found Mia, found some safe harbor in their tiny family of two, he’d dared to dream. And then she was gone, before he’d ever been confident enough to reach out and grab that wish with his hands.

There’s a puzzle here, some greater context to all this—this night of peculiar and unrelenting hell—but he can’t seem to quite put together the pieces, and Jack Baker’s imploring eyes give him no time to try and work it out. “She’s the key, alright? You find her and you stop her. Ethan, free my family—please.”

He breathes in, tries to answer, and the tide pulls at him, darkness taking him away once more.

As the picture fades, the black envelops him, expansive. In the back of his mind, he can feel his waiting body, still stuck, but the rest of him turns to face the dark. Breathe, it commands him, once more. In, out. Push beyond your prior limitations, past what you know.

Mia, he thinks, recalls with sharp clarity a whispered confession—you were right, I did lie to you, but—and reaches, reaches. Straining for truth, for his wife. He wants to save her, came here to save her, must save her—

What the fuck are you, Mia? he’d asked the monster wearing his wife’s face, and a dark, quiet corner of his mind had rattled in its cage and asked, just as pressingly: who are you? A question he’d dared not to consider too closely all night. There’d been no time. And it didn’t matter, he’d tried to convince himself. He loved her. Loves her—

Something in the dark reaches back, prods him curiously, and he startles, feels a gasp escape his faraway body into the damp air. Like veins, strikes of lightning, the dark lights up, and he can feel so many other minds turn to him, connected by thin strands, a complex web. The Bakers, faint voices of strangers, Mia—

And something else, something larger, which stretches out dark, long hands of influence, pokes at him again. It’s a brief flicker of impressions on his mind, a flash of childlike curiosity, glimmers of trodden, worn innocence, and overwhelming, bitter malice. A desire to make the ones who have hurt you, and anyone else who gets in your way, suffer that he knows too well.

Oh, the darkness says to him. A child’s voice, and no voice at all, just a feeling. She didn’t tell you.

Tell me what? the dark corner whispers, as the rest of him rebels. No. He doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t need to know. Can’t know, because he’s lost so much, and he’ll cling to what little he has left, even if it’s only false memories, till his dying breath.

This is too good, the darkness snarls with vicious delight. She’s a liar. To me, to you. Liar. Liar.

No, she isn’t. He doesn’t want her to be, doesn’t want to admit to what he already knows.

Mommy lied, even to herself. She made herself forget. But I won’t let her. I made her remember. She doesn’t get to run anymore.

“I’m telling you everything I know,” Mia had said, and he’d wanted to believe her, so much.

She doesn’t want me. It’s practically whispered, fury with a tinge of heartbreak. But she wants you. So you have to know, too. She doesn’t get to forget again.

“No!” he yells, feels his lips almost twitch to life on his listless body, while the rest of him screams: please.

The deep darkness extends, envelops him completely, and he feels the flicker of the lightning connections feeding his way, turning his world into white, and he—he—

Mia, in white, sitting in front of samples in a sterile room. Mia, holding a newborn infant, with some trace of tenderness being slowly consumed by scientific fascination. Mia, and a toddler, and faceless beings in lab coats—tests, tests, isolation rooms, experimentation—hold still, Eveline, be quiet. See? It doesn’t hurt that bad, does it?—Mia with a gun, with a vial. It’s her tissue samples, for the toxin. If it comes down to it, don’t hesitate. Mia on a ship, with a child. The girl calls her Mother in front of the workers, she smiles and laughs and pinches a cheek with affection and there is nothing, nothing behind her eyes. Ship alarms blaring, Mia running, the heavy weight of a machine gun in her hands. Okay, Evie, I’ll be your Mommy. A lie. A kill switch in her palm. An explosion. Water.

Three years of breaking and breaking. Mia’s manic eyes, her fractured mind. The Bakers. The child reaching and reaching and reaching and Mia running, running, running.

Can we be a family, like before? His wife’s eyes catalogue the silhouette of the little girl she raised, see a monster. No, Evie, we are not a family. We will never be a family.

The girl has dark hair. Wears oversized boots and laughs too much, like she’s trying to prove something to anyone, to herself, about joy, or about fury. The girl has nothing behind her bright eyes, either. A void pulling everything in out of sheer hunger, the kind of nothing that is learned and practiced. Emulated.

In the black, he reaches out, strains, grabs the bright thread of his wife and pulls her around to face him. Sees the face Mia, née Peterson, PHD, wore when she was not Mia Winters.

The darkness breathes. The Bakers, the corpses, the lives stolen, breathe. Eveline breathes. Mia breathes. He breathes. And as he untangles himself from the lies and the pain and the living death enough to be sure of what is him and what is not, he—

Breathes. And remembers.

Ethan Winters remembers, and wakes.

Chapter Text

Ethan opens his eyes. Mold greets him, so close it brushes his eyelashes. He can see nothing else.

Faint, but nearby, he hears a voice. “Eveline, stay away from him.” His wife. His Mia.

He’d met Mia Peterson in college. She was working on her PHD in genetics. He was a late student. The tortoise finishes the race first, in the end, he’d told her. She’d laughed. He’d fallen for her laugh, first. The rest came quickly after.

“Why? He doesn’t love you. I can make him love you,” the girl’s voice says. The one that has caused all this pain. The one Mia had—had helped make.

He had loved her. Loved Mia. So much.

He was from South L.A., he’d told her. It was an easy, practiced lie, and not entirely untrue. He never said he was born there. She was from Texas. She’d described the bright, open skies, the dry air. It had sounded so good, on the sole principle of being thousands of miles away from rain and smoke and every memory of the quarantine zone. He hadn’t hesitated to follow after her.

“Don’t—don’t hurt him.”

They got married quickly. They were young and dumb and it had felt so good to make the kind of reckless decision that was expected for men his age. They made it work. He was good with his hands, and even better with computers. Mia had struggled to find work in her field. Nobody wants to hire academics, she’d said in good humor, without a flinch to her sunny disposition. Her thesis had been on experimental genetic modification at the cellular stage of development. Imagine a world without fatal genetic conditions, she’d said. No more Tay-Sachs. No more dead babies. Companies courted her, occasionally. I don’t want to make designer babies, I want to change the world. She was a genius who wouldn’t settle, and he’d admired that.

“Silly—I told you. I’m not going to hurt him.”

She’d told him it was a trading company. Imports and exports. They were happy to snap up anyone with half a brain and a good degree, regardless of field. Just to pay the bills, she’d said, until something better came along. She wasn’t good at sitting still. She took a lot of work trips, and then more and more. Lots of rich people at this company, they’re always looking for a babysitter. It’s extra money in our pockets, and I like kids, so I don’t mind.

“Don’t you dare!”

He’d liked kids, too. He’d wanted to have them with her, someday. Soon, he’d always told himself, soon. It had never been the right time. Once she found that dream job, once they’d saved up more. Once he was able to man up and tell her the truth. He didn’t want to live a falsehood, bring new life into this world on a lie. Even if it was hard, if it choked him, even if it was for their own safety. He’d tell her about the virus, being fourteen and running, running—always running, with a nuclear cloud at his back. When the right time came.

“Or what? You’re not my mommy—remember?”

And then she’d disappeared, with nothing but a video that told him so little and left so many questions—you’re right, I did lie to you—and he’d shut down, refused to let himself think. He’d been told often, growing up, that he was stubborn as a mule and undeniably clever, but not particularly inquisitive. He’d have agreed, said knowing when not to go prodding around was what had kept him alive. He’d abused that nature of his, in the aftermath, to keep Mia alive—his Mia, as he knew her—if only in his head.

He hears Mia’s voice, arguing with the girl, but Mia Winters crumbles in his mind’s eye, leaving behind something else. And then there’s a grunt, a wet, tearing sound, and the ooze in front of him gives way as a woman in front of him—a woman he’s starting to dare to admit he might not know very well at all—rips away the mold binding him, setting him free.

He falls into her arms, and for a second, it is warm. His nose brushes her hair. Somehow, after all this time, he can still catch a wisp of her strawberry shampoo. He’d missed her so much. Misses her. But—

He chokes on all the unspoken things, still staggering in her grasp. She’s already whirling him around, her direction chosen. She’d always been like that. Knew exactly where she wanted to go and was going to get there, with or without his help. Another quality he’d admired.

“Mia?” he mumbles, for nothing better to say. “Mia, how?” Why?

“There’s no time,” she shakes her head, barely meets his eyes. There’s desperation there—that urge to protect him back that is heightened beyond anything from their old life, but still so lovely in its fleeting familiarity. “You have to get out of here and find her. Here, take this.” She passes something into his hand and he stares down at it. A vial, sporting a familiar shape and color. The darkness had shown him a carbon copy. Tissue samples.

“What?” he says, struck dumb—half question, half statement. What does she…? She can’t want him to—

She shoves him, and he stumbles back hard, through a doorway. She backs up, grabbing onto heavy metal and dragging the door shut. “Wait—” he says, can’t think, can’t form his lips into all the words that suddenly need to be said—Why did you lie? What are you giving me this for? What do you want from me? “Wait—what are you doing? What are you doing?” his voice pitches frantic as Mia closes the door. He could stop her, he knows, in some distant corner of his mind. He’s stronger than her. He’s faster. She’s good—better on her feet and with a gun than he ever knew—but he’s better. She learned these things on a payroll, on the clock. He learned them as a means of survival.

He could shoulder the door open, grab her, beg for truth—but he remains frozen, still feeling half outside his body in a way he hasn’t, before this night, in a long time. The lock clicks with an ominous finality.

“Saving your life,” Mia says, her face changing. A gray pall taking over her skin, dark and deadly roots crawling as veins underneath. “You need to go. I won’t be able to resist for much longer.”

“No—” Ethan says, as his mind stutters, stops. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something over his wife’s shoulder. A shape that is, in moments, a young girl—dark hair, dress, boots…the black, dull, lifeless eyes he knew nothing of until what feels like both a lifetime and seconds ago, and now feels he knows more intimately than almost anything—and at other times, mere shadow. Eveline. Eveline Eveline Eveline Eveline—

In that fraction of a moment, and the lingering of that dissociative state, he’s struck by only one thing: she really could pass for Mia’s child. It’s like staring down this whole other life—where Mia was what she said she was, and, perhaps, Ethan was too, and they’d bought that house on the coast, and she’d had the spare room for her art and he for his computers, and they’d passed their days walking on the piers with a dark haired, dark eyed child who held all of Mia and none of Ethan—exactly as much of himself as he wanted in his children, because if they didn’t carry his face perhaps they would also never have to carry the burden of all his secrets—and whose small hands they held so that they could swing her between them. Like the postcards he and the other survivors had burned for warmth in that tourist shop they’d raided during the week where his first life had died.

Exactly like that, actually. Artifice and illusion—a beautiful illusion—torched by the cold hand of reality, starved for fuel.

“Now go kill that little bitch.” Mia Peterson says, as that little thing inside Ethan Winters who had still believed in dreams burns, shrivels up and dies, for the second time.

“No—no—” he says, feels some tendril inside him still tied to that great black with all the other minds push up to cry you made her, you made her, you made her, why, why, why why why. But mold creeps over the door, obscuring Mia from his vision, and him from hers, and he knows she cannot hear him. He slams his hands against the door—hard, rattling and jarring. “Mia—no, wait—”

I can’t.

—(((())))—

He stumbles out of the tanker in a daze, the vial still clutched close in his hand, as if a relic of something he cannot let go of—or, as his fingers tremble, something he cannot quite yet embrace.

He moves on automatic. He knows how to do that—learned almost two decades ago now. Just put one foot in front of the other. And the next. And the next. Keep moving. Don’t think. Don’t look. Don’t look back. Breathe in and do not allow room in your heart or mind for the smells of smoke and ash and wet, rot, decay. Do not listen—not to the screams, not to the roars, not to the sirens or crashes. Do not listen for help. No one is coming.

It’s all too easy, in a way, to hustle himself out of the ship, as if he understands where he is going or what his plan is. He’s good at pretending. But he knows. He has—he has no idea. No idea what comes next. All he can do is clutch the vial close, lingering in indecision, and keep walking.

Only one thing gives him pause, on his way out. A scrawl of dark on a ship wall—written in black, writhing fungi: “It’s all your fault.” A message, clear in its intent and in its delivery, as well as whom it is from and who it is meant for.

He knows something about fault, about blame. He’d blamed himself for many things—for his mother, for every person he ran from or left behind or simply could not save during that bleak week where everything fell to ruin. For—the things that came after. For Mia’s disappearance: being unable to find her, or not doing something, some undefined thing, to stop her from leaving on that godforsaken trip in the first place.

Ethan also understands, objectively, what the child, the girl, Eveline, means in this moment. He is the one who came into the Baker property and tore her life, her ‘family’ apart. He burned Marguerite Baker to a hollow corpse and left Jack Baker’s mutated form calcifying to ruin. He sent Lucas running, conspired with Zoe, took Mia and ran and shot every molded monstrosity that got in his way. He took the twisted, broken little thing Eveline had formed as her own, as the one solace and comfort she had in her short, horrible life, and snapped it. It was a necessity and a mercy, even, for what remained of the Bakers’ minds, but he remembers being a child. Can picture this as some larger, more warped version of the sudden fury and grief and frustration of someone bigger and larger and uncaring getting in the way of something precious. His mother had been a saint. The boyfriends she kept rarely half as much so. He’d lost art projects and Legos and beloved stuffed friends. A hamster in an incident that bore not repeating, even now. When that had happened, as he’d sniffled and buried Snuffie in the dank patch of earth behind his apartment building, he’d darkly contemplated the ways he could fetch the big knife in the high drawer in the kitchen and make the loser currently warming his mother’s bed pay. If he had power like Eveline’s, he’d probably have done a lot worse. It’s all a child’s logic, and a child’s sense of justice—swift, blunt, and at times a touch cruel.

Yes, he understands all of this. But what he thinks when he sees those rotting words on the wall is: is it his fault, after all? Could he have stopped her? Should he have seen? Should he have known? Would it have changed anything? Anything at all?

He doesn’t know, and so he lets his body move while his mind goes elsewhere. One foot after the other. Keep going.

His mind catches up with his body in flashes, brief moments. The distant whir of helicopters overhead as he flinches on instinct, the fourteen-year-old buried inside the thirty-three-year-old remembering the sound of the ‘copters coming in and thinking hope, and then learning: death. The military had dropped bombs and shot indiscriminately, after the ground teams went down but before the nuke. They’d taken everything moving on the ground below as enemy, as infection to exterminate. The few choppers that did land on the roofs of buildings, that did collect survivors, those were not for people like Ethan. When the world is ending, everyone is assigned a number. Some people are just worth more alive, at least to those in power, than others. It’s not fair. But it is the truth.

Hadn’t he made that same call, when he injected Mia with the serum? Now that he knows what he knows, that thing inside him now loose from its cage rattles and screams even more—he knew what he did wasn’t fair. He’d just had no idea at that moment how much so.

But he couldn’t—wouldn’t leave Mia to die. Isn’t sure he could have chosen anything else, even if he’d known. Love is a dangerous thing.

Another brief, jolting stint in his body, wading through water. Dead fish float on the surface, and his stomach twists.

Is it pollution from the tanker? From the mold?

They’d kept finding dead fish in the river that passed through the city and beyond as they followed it west, ducking between trees anytime they heard blades overhead. Nobody had been allowed to eat them, even if they looked fine otherwise. Radiation poisoning.

It’s like stepping back in time. Or, perhaps more accurately, that his past has found him once more, reinserted itself into his current reality. A mundane life slowly dissolving over three years of waiting and searching, and then its corpse shot to pieces in one brutal night. He should have known normal was never going to exist—at least not without some terrible price. Not for him.

The fish. Endless fish. All that time spent trying not to remember, and now it’s all coming back to him at once. You can’t run forever. No one can. Not even him.

Not even Mia.

Reality—all five senses of it, the pounding of his heart, the weight of his body—finds him properly with the sharp, loud crackle of radio static, throwing him back into his skin. He blinks around. He’s in a shack—salt mines, a sign says. In front of him, an old, clunky radio flickers with a single green light. Outdated, rusty, but still working.

“Alpha 1—” a voice says, the kind of sharp, confident tone that betrays a military bent. “This is Bravo 1—do you read?”

“This is Alpha 1. Report. Did you find anything?”

As the voices speak, he feels his body grow tenser and tenser, chest stuttering to a halt. They’re here. They’re already here. Whoever they are—it doesn’t matter. Faceless government soldiers or mercenaries or whatever, people with guns and with bullets aplenty and here to clean up the mess. He knows how this story goes. He’s lived it before—just barely got to the end of it, at that.

“A thorough search of the Baker property revealed zero survivors—” Zoe. No, no, Zoe. “Repeat, zero survivors. We did find evidence of a skirmish.”

Zoe Zoe Zoe no please, God, please, no, not again, he hadn’t meant to, he hadn’t had a choice—

He’s choking. Choking on his own panic, his own lies, his own failure.

Breathe, whispers the echo of the black from before, still tugging faintly on him by those tenuous threads. He manages it, just barely. Feels his lungs inflate. Then exhale. His vision spins just a little less, though his mind doesn’t stop, or quiet. Spend enough time forcing it silent, looking away, embracing the worst and most stubborn and even willfully blind parts of your own nature, and it seems once you turn it back on again you can’t stop. Can’t stop thinking. Can’t stop wondering. Can’t stop screaming.

“Eveline?”

He jolts, looks around wildly, as if she’ll suddenly appear in the room with him. In his hand, the vial of her tissue samples burns.

“Negative.” Is she fleeing? Hiding? Does she know, like he did, like the other kids who got out did, when to cut and run? With all she’s survived, her instincts would be even more finely honed, surely. But when he considers the Baker property—the insanity of its confidence it can stay there, unmoored from the world, unknown, forever—and the feral ferocity with which the Bakers, as dolls on strings, a makeshift family, have defended their secret so far, he’s not sure. Eveline wants her family, this delusion she’s so desperately clung to the same way she did Mia right up until the end. With all that nothing behind her eyes, he’s not sure she understands what survival above all else means, if it denies her the one thing she wants most desperately. If loneliness was her ghost, she’d find no reprieve running from the rest of it all, with all her ‘friends’ dead.

The voices continue on. “However, we did find several encrypted messages from the Baker’s son, Lucas, to an unknown third party. You can probably guess who that was.”

“That’s just great. We’ve had reports he’s in the abandoned mines south of the property. I’m gonna go have a look.”

The mines. Ethan is in the mines. If the voices, the men of the blades overhead and the gunshots he knows will come, must come, are headed this way, then he has to get out, double back, run—

…Run where? All that’s behind him is the bayou, inaccessible without a boat, and the tanker. Where all that remains is rot, corpses, and buried truths. He cannot go back there. At least not without—

His right hand flexes nervously around the vial. Eveline’s tissue samples. If what the darkness had shown him was true, he could—

His mind stutters over it once more.

He could save Mia. That’s how he tries to look at it. This is how he saves Mia.

But he—he can’t—he doesn’t—

Do you love your wife? some cool, rational part of his brain—the part that conducts computer systems with the artistry of a perfectionist, that makes friends through honed small talk with people who will never know who he really is, that drives his car and brushes his teeth and wears his human skin like a suit—says. It’s a part of his brain entirely separate from that gnashing, feral thing inside him—the thing that grabbed his mother’s gun from the safe and ran, the part that lopped off his brother’s hand to keep him alive, the part that learned to lie and lie and lie, that screamed that Mia Peterson was not what she looked like every minute of every day for years—that is now free of its cage.

Do you love your wife? Because this is how you save her. This is how you get your life back.

Yes, he does love her. Yes, he wants to return to before, with a ferocity that shakes him. Yes, yes, but he—

“Roger that. We’ll meet you at those coordinates. If you encounter Eveline—orders are shoot to kill. Repeat—shoot to kill.”

Ethan watches the radio give the instruction to terminate the small girl who could have been his wife’s child, in another life. Who has been trained, and honed, and maimed every moment of her life until Louisiana. Remembers the echo of orders picked up on the radio his brother had rigmaroled into picking up the military frequency. The screaming in the streets when the bombs started falling.

He wants to go back. He’s just not sure he can.

—(((())))—

Picking off the molded as he makes his way through the salt mines—headed in the direction of God knows what, but not away from the helicopters, because he’s insane apparently—is the easy part.

Ethan Winters knows how to handle a gun. His mother was the kind of practical, taciturn woman that had made her as suited to surviving single parenthood and life as a lone woman in a major city as anyone could be. She’d kept her revolver in a safe in her bedroom closet. The passcode had been Ethan’s birthday. She’d taken him to a gun range when he turned fourteen, and taught him how to shoot. Then sat him down and given him a long, firm lecture on the few instances where using a gun was acceptable in her eyes and the many it wasn’t.

“I hope to God you never pull that trigger outside this range,” she’d said. “But if you do, make sure it’s because it’s the only avenue currently available to you to save your life. Your life, do you understand me? Because when you fire a gun at someone, you are taking their own life in your hands. You are taking a life. That has an incredible cost. Their life is worth no less than yours. None of ours are. So you only use that gun if you have no other option, all right? Nothing else is remotely worth it. Not money. Not property. Not dignity. You do not want the burden of blood on your hands, if it is avoidable.”

Somehow, he suspects that when she gave him that talk, none of what he would use guns for come the rest of his life was remotely what she had in mind.

The heavier stuff, he’d learned later. His mother certainly hadn’t kept anything bigger than a 9 mill in the house. God forbid. But the military had left plenty of toys behind when the ground teams scattered. The RPD as well. And he’d had lots of time that week in Hell to learn. Experience under pressure is the best teacher, and all that.

At least, he thinks, the molded don’t look human. That had always been the hardest part about the T-virus. Even if he’d known deep down they were gone, there was still nothing easy about pointing the barrel at a human-shaped face and firing death at it.

His Aunt Delia had never hesitated. Even though it grieved her. Even though she woke screaming and begging forgiveness almost every night for the years after they’d left the city, while Ethan was still around. She hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t once looked away.

It had seemed like an injustice to avert her eyes, she’d said to him once, years after the fact. These were human beings—or they once were, at least, before the virus had gotten hold of them. She wanted to see them, acknowledge their humanity and the pain and the grief and all that the world had lost with each infected, lost soul, before she pulled the trigger. It was the least she could do.

“You remember them?” he asked.

“Each one,” she’d said darkly. “Every face.”

She wasn’t actually his aunt. They’d never even met before the infection broke out. His mother had died on the second day. The day before—the first day, September 24^th, 1988, a date he’d know ever since better than his own date of birth—she’d come home in the morning, barely three minutes after leaving for work, panting and grim-faced, and bolted the door. “Something’s wrong,” his mother had said to him. “Something’s wrong.”

She’d stepped outside the front door of their building to see a man lunge for another in the street, take his throat between his jaws and rip the skin and muscle loose with his teeth. She’d seen the reports on the news about the mountains, about the strange crimes. She’d turned right back around and ran to her apartment. Chava Rosenberg was a practical, taciturn woman. She had not survived life as well as she had, until that day, by being stupid.

They turned every lock on the front door, pushed the big bookshelf up against it for good measure. “Shut the windows,” she’d told Ethan. “All of them. Push furniture up against them. Shut both the bedroom doors. We’ll stay in the living room. We can fold out the couch. Get the gun.” She had not even kept up the pretense that he was not supposed to know the combination.

She’d called 911. They’d waited. Nobody answered. Nobody came. From time to time, screams filtered through all the barriers, echoing from the streets below. At other times, sirens. Gunshots. Alarms. His mother kept calling the police until she didn’t. The sirens had stopped by then, late afternoon light peeking through the cracks around the furniture.

By night, the city was in chaos. Ethan had pressed his ear against the window-covering chest of drawers until his mother had pulled him away. He swore there were flames, dancing in the distance, in the edges of the city between windowsill and wood.

“We’ll wait,” his mother had said. “We’ll wait. Someone will come. Help will come.”

They waited. They were as prepared as anyone could have been, as cautious as was possible for civilians. They had at least a week’s worth of canned food because it was flash flood season. They had a gun. They had each other.

It hadn’t mattered in the end. The water—they hadn’t known. How could anyone have known?

Ethan’s mother had had a bad habit of drinking straight from the bathroom sink tap, cupping her hand and bending low. She’d picked it up as a kid, she said, and never grew out of it.

Ethan hadn’t inherited it. He liked his water chilled. They kept a big pitcher in the fridge that would last him days at a time. It was what saved his life, in the end.

He’d woken up that second day to his mother at his throat—her skin pale, her eyes milky and unseeing. A snarl, a pounce—he’d twisted and run, screaming, into her bedroom, locking the door behind him. Had pleaded with her and cried as she slowly, steadily, broke the door down, making inhuman noises with her teeth bared and scrabbling fingers reaching, reaching—

He hadn’t even realized he’d picked up the gun when he ran until—well.

No, it definitely hadn’t been what Chava Rosenberg had in mind when she taught her son to shoot.

Aunt Delia had picked him up on the third day, found him tucked between filing cabinets in the abandoned south city fire station and trembling out of his mind. It had taken half an hour for her to coax him out. “It’s okay,” she’d said over and over—patient, far too patient for a woman with anxiously darting eyes and a shotgun slung across her back, knowing she was at the end of the world. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

She hadn’t been his aunt, then. Just Delia. In the same way his brother hadn’t been his brother or his sister his sister. But Ethan had been her first. The first foundling she picked up, as they picked their way through the ruined and ruining still city.

Ethan doesn’t know why he thinks of her as he holsters the shotgun and hoofs it through the salt mines. Except, also, he knows exactly why.

His heart pounds, his footsteps move at an even rhythm. The vial now in his breast pocket seems to beat with its own intent, and he does not allow himself to dwell on what comes next, just—aim, shoot, reload. Aim, shoot, reload.

Delia had had him loading and unloading shotguns in the dank basements and abandoned apartments where they hid those first few days until he was perfect at it. A well-oiled machine.

“I can’t,” he’d stuttered out the first night after she picked him up, fingers sliding clumsily along the stock.

“You must,” she’d said, with a firm ferocity that had reminded him so much of his mother he’d wanted to cry more than he’d wanted anything in the world until that moment. But he hadn’t. And he wouldn’t. There was no time for tears.

There is no time for tears, Ethan reminds his aching heart, reminds the roaring thing inside his brain, every time he remembers Mia’s face through the window, changing, changing. Becoming something other than what he knew her as—something unnatural, but yet perhaps closer, to who she really is.

Ethan does not cry, he does not dwell. He shoots and shoots until there are no more monsters left to shoot, and then he finds a flight of stairs, and pushes his way through a creaking door, into a room that is within these abandoned mines but most certainly does not look like anything that belongs in a mine.

There’s dim, fluorescent lights. Tubes and cords. Specimen jars and…specimen tubs. Some kind of lab. On a table, a laptop sits open, its screen illuminated. The voices said Lucas had been down here, he remembers.

He makes his way over cautiously. On the screen, the only application open is a series of sent emails. He flips through the messages, stomach turning over on itself as he reads.

“You guys really need to work on fixing that. Not only does she look like a little kid, but she’s about as stupid as one, too.”

Lucas. Eveline. This is about Eveline.

“Is this whole ‘family’ obsession something you guys programmed into her? It’s kinda fucked up.”

Ethan tries to wrap his head around the realization that Lucas Baker is not infected—left his family in Eveline’s grasp, left them to die, and is apparently just like that with all the brutality and sadism that comes with it without any help from anyone else. As difficult as it is, it is still easier than picking over the other words, the ones that sit low and heavy in his stomach: little kid. Stupid. Family. Fucked up.

Now go kill that little bitch, Mia’s voice echoes. From her strand in the darkness or from his own memories, he doesn’t know.

“She thinks Mia’s her mommy,” the emails had said.

He turns away. Pushes through another door. This next room is freezing, the kind of way you only get from cold storage, like the inside of a walk-in freezer. Or a room meant to store biological material. Documents litter every flat surface, but what his eyes are most drawn to are the photos on the wall. Test subjects in agony, and—Eveline. Unmistakably Eveline, even smaller and younger looking than she is now. Eveline in the hands of strangers wearing masks and gloves, as they poke and prod her. Eveline in an isolation room, pressed up against the glass as a tiny, solitary dark figure while bodies in protective gear observe her. He tries to even imagine it—an entire life behind glass. Every touch cold and clinical. Every moment of contact thwarted by rubber and nitrile. The unmitigated joy and feral freedom of real clothes, real shoes, real people and the open ocean and fresh air and actual, real, skin-to-skin contact.

Ethan had learned the hard way to destroy to survive. He suspects Eveline had, as well.

Beyond the photographs is something like a briefcase, connected to some serious hardware—tubes and wires and what looks like an entire fucking freezer strapped to its underside, billowing smoke. He can’t help but wonder if it’s actual tech from the assholes who made Eveline or something Lucas has rigmaroled together. Either way, he can’t seem to stop himself from approaching it.

The vial presses against his heart. The codex on his wrist beeps—Zoe, still looking out for him, it seems. His hand trembles as he opens the briefcase. “E-Necrotoxin,” the paper taped to the inside says.

“Destroys cells of any subject based on the E-series bioweapon model.

Use only for disposal of E-series assets.”

Disposal, like taking out the trash.

Ethan fingers the vial inside his pocket, removes it on autopilot. Inserts it into the chamber on the left in the heart of the case. Like the key to yet another puzzle inside the Baker house, easy to solve. He likes the solution even less, this time.

He stares down at the case as the necrotoxin is produced. Between the two chambers lies the mummified corpse of something small and long dead preserved under glass. A fetus, he thinks. Or a newborn baby. If Eveline was the E-Series perfected—what about A through D? How many came before her? How many died?

The corpse shrivels up as the toxin passes through it. Yet another thing, already thought consumed, taken from even more by the powers that be. Like licking the bones clean from the corpses just for the sake of it. Produce, profit, destroy. Bomb what remains so no one can ever know.

Really, this is nothing new. Ethan’s seen the corpses of young children before. Picked and waded his way through them at times during that week when he was fourteen. Children were slow, easy pickings for the infected. Delia helped those she could, as did other survivors, but she couldn’t save them all.

They picked up Ethan’s brother the day after Ethan himself. He was older, nearly seventeen, armed with a spiked bat and bared teeth. Michael. He’d jumped from a second story window to escape an army of the infected and Delia and Ethan had fished him out of the river half a mile downstream. Somehow, he’d managed to avoid inhaling any water. He’d been guarded and incredibly wary of them, but Delia had food, and he didn’t. A family made.

They’d picked up the girls somewhere between that same night and the next morning—that iffy space between times, with no clocks to go by. They were younger—ten and twelve, actual sisters. Noor and Ava. They’d barricaded themselves inside an abandoned mosque. Nearly stabbed Michael out of panic when he smashed a window to get them inside. Delia had soothed all three of them as Ethan had boarded up the window. Somehow, despite not being the oldest, perhaps by virtue of being the first picked up, he’d become her second in command. They always had been and always would be the closest.

They would join up with another group of survivors late on the seventh day, and another, until the caravan that had escaped the city on the eighth and final day was formed, but even then they had stuck together—their own small, forcibly knit-together group. Even a few days together in Hell made for an intimacy of connection that whole lifetimes in the old world could not form.

Ethan had limped his way out of the city, gripping Delia’s hand, his left arm useless in its sling. He’d been bitten on the fifth day. Delia could have shot him—should have shot him. It was the sane thing to do, the reasonable thing to do. No one would have blamed her. Like putting down something rabid. Merciful. Necessary.

Instead, she’d had Michael hold Ethan down as she took her knife and brutally cut off a thick chunk of muscle around the shallow bite on his upper arm. It was quick, messy, and vicious. The work of furiously-stolen seconds. Ethan bled profusely. He shivered and shook and flinched away from Delia for days after and it would be months before he could use his arm again—and it would never be quite as it was. But he lived. Delia loaded him up on painkillers and cleaned his wound hourly with bottled water—only bottled water, they had learned not to touch the taps—and he lived.

Others, they crossed paths with, met eyes across streets, before strangers were tackled by the infected, bitten and torn. There were plenty they could not help. Ethan watched them plead and then scream and then turn, milky-eyed, before Delia lined up the gun across the road and pulled the trigger. Mercy. Necessity.

Michael got bitten on the sixth day. On the hand. Ethan brought his newly-acquired machete down on it without thinking. He was quick. His mother had taught him to be quick. Delia and Hell on Earth had made him even quicker. Michael had screamed and swore and cried as they wrapped his amputated limb with everything they had spare, and Delia had hoisted him onto her back in an impressive feat of strength when he passed out. They’d broken into a clinic, raided the cabinets for painkillers and bandages and antibiotics.

Michael had lived, in the end. But Noor hadn’t.

She was the youngest, the least understanding. Ethan hadn’t meant to—he was supposed to be watching her, her and Ava, who was catching up on well-earned sleep, but he’d gotten distracted picking through a cabinet for more meds to sooth his aching arm, and when he’d looked back, Noor was gone.

They’d searched the clinic desperately, calling her name, until they’d found her. Found them. Noor and the walking corpse of what had been a doctor. The infected doctor had been forced into an office, its gaunt form scrabbling at the glass pane in the door, as Noor’s small, bloodied form lay propped up against the other side of it.

It was a tableau that left little doubt about what conclusions to draw. The blood, the chunk torn from Noor’s shoulder, another from her upper arm, told all the stories they needed to. Somehow she’d forced the thing back through the door and shut it before she lost her strength, but it was long too late now.

She’d looked up, made a vicious, snarling sound, tried to scramble to her feet to get to them. She was slow. The virus did a lot, but it could not make a small, sickly girl anything other than a small, sickly girl at her core. Delia had backed them out of the room quickly, scooping up Ava and carting her out when she screamed and fought, trying to reach her sister.

“It’s too late,” Delia had said softly, pushed the weeping Ava into Ethan’s arms and then locked the door behind them. “I’m sorry. It’s too late.”

Ethan had watched Delia, as she stared through the glass at Noor’s small form, as it dragged itself across the room, clawed at the door.

“Delia?” he’d asked. Delia was very practical, very much like his mother. They’d have been friends, in another life. She did not leave things to chance. She did not leave the infected walking.

Delia’s face had shuttered, and she laid her hand over the door, still watching Noor, and shook her head. “No more death,” she’d said, voice cracking, as if every self-assured remark about mercy and necessity had finally crumbled in the face of an infected who was more than stranger. “I can’t. No more.”

Ethan remembers this, remembers it all, as he looks down at the case with the shriveled corpse of an unburied child, and the chamber on the right opens up to reveal the sickly green necrotoxin.

He takes it carefully in hand, stares.

He knows something about mercy killings. More than most ever will. He remembers the girl in the visions the darkness had showed him—the reaching and reaching and the nothing. This does not feel like a mercy killing.

“Fuck,” he says vehemently, encompassing every messy feeling and half-formed thought into the most versatile—and, as of this night, frequently used—word in his repertoire.

His eyes stray back to the set of photographs. Another young girl behind glass.

He’s moving before he really thinks about it, back to the desks, the papers and photographs, rifling through with more urgency and significantly more thoroughness than before. In the back of his mind, Ethan knows he’s on a ticking clock. That somewhere miles behind him, Mia is waiting, fading, that he came here to save her and promised he would, and—

The documents, the photos, they move through his hands. Somewhere, at some point, he sits on the floor, kneeling, sifting through the growing pile he has created. A written and documented tableau of the life unlived of a fighting and desperately frightened little girl with dark hair, dark eyes, and so much heartbreak inside her, so much hate.

“The resultant organisms were referred to as “candidate specimens” and graded based on usability, from the impractical and faulty Series A through D, to the perfected E-Series.”

The feral, uncaged thing inside him bristles, snarls.

“Eveline, the current E-series model, was artificially conceived and gestated, and genetically altered to encourage rapid growth both at the fetal and post-birth phases. By setting the natural ‘aging’ lifespan to a much shorter period of time, a suitable candidate at the decided-upon age appearance for E-Series bioweapons could be produced at almost 1/3 the time it would take to normally age an asset to the appearance of a ten-year-old child. With the ongoing provision of Eveline’s shots to stimulate regeneration, her appearance and mental status can be maintained for many years to come.”

“Eveline shows a remarkable intellect in puzzle-solving situations, as expected of her predetermined IQ and personal characteristics. In the perfected scenario, E-Series assets should be intelligent and clever, while remaining obedient to their handlers and compliant with authorized instruction. By having E-Series assets imprint on a handler, this provides a measure of control over the E-Series assets at all times.”

“In attempts to better acclimate Eveline to combative environments, the necessary procedures have been approved to mitigate her pain sensors. While blocking fear-producing enzymes has also been considered, we do not want Eveline, or other assets, without an understanding of life and death. Recognition of mortal fear is important for the survival of an asset, but pain is not, and may interfere with maintenance.”

The clinical, thorough writing is sinister in its blandness, and Ethan runs his fingers over each page, wondering—did Mia write this? Did she write this?

He can’t recognize any of it as his wife’s writing. But at the same time, he’s not sure he would.

The documents paint other pictures as well. Of Eveline’s immense power. The dangers she poses to everyone she interacts with, and the havoc she could reap. Hallucinations. Delusions. Control. Loss of Ego.

Sadism as means to an end.

She is, in many ways, terrifying. But what did he expect? She is, after all, a bioweapon. Ethan knows what bioweapons can do. Has lived it.

But still—

With every page flipped, with the necrotoxin still sitting in his lap, he hesitates.

“What’s been interesting to observe in Eveline’s behavior is her obsession with the concept of family.
In experiments, we found on multiple occasions that infected subjects were compelled to act as her ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ treating her as if she were really their daughter.”

“—a sentimental sort might suggest that she’s making up for a perceived lack of ‘love’ in her quarantined upbringing. A parent’s love.”

He hadn’t cried for weeks after they escaped the city, hadn’t dared let himself. He was fine, he’d told himself. Fine, fine, fine. Until Delia had sat him down and cupped his face carefully between her trembling hands, and he’d dissolved into hitched, violent sobs for everything lost and left behind.

“I’m alone,” he’d said, trying to picture a life, any kind of life, ahead of him without his mother. As it was, they barely dared to think past the next few weeks, still ducking and running, avoiding the military trucks or the other people in scrubs and in white coats who said they were not government but undoubtedly were. But even past that, when he dared to hope, to dream, he came up blank. The apartment was gone. His things, his bed and his comics and his baseball glove. The art on the fridge and his mother’s records. His mother.

“You are not alone,” Delia had said fiercely. She had not let any of them out of her sight once those few weeks, told them they could go with other adult survivors or could go with her, but would not go alone. “You will never be alone. I will not leave you, I promise.”

Family, he’d learned, was not always blood. But family was necessary.

Mia—his Mia, Mia of Texas sunshine and iced coffee and jubilant laughter—had been his family, too. Now, he’s not so sure. He loves her, still. But he’s not confident love alone is enough. Not after this.

He studies the necrotoxin, the discarded documents—thinks about love and about family and about alone, about the memories of an old life he’d tried so hard to bury under some veneer of normality he’d dared not even let himself think the words Raccoon City for years, until tonight. He knows what the faceless, uniformed bodies in the helicopters have come here to do. He knows what Mia expects him to do.

Wonders how long he has before the bombs fall this time. Wonders if he can even make it. But—

He has to try.

“No more,” he says quietly, studies the necrotoxin. He could take it with him. It would be the sensible option. The practical one. He knows to always take every weapon to the fight, to keep every avenue open. A last resort. Always, always, have a last resort.

The nuke had been a last resort, too.

He snorts at the thought. Tightens his fingers around the necrotoxin, then lifts his arm and throws it across the room, sending it rolling between papers and discarded junk, out of sight. Out of mind.

When Ethan was fourteen, his world went up in flames. When he was fourteen, he took his mother's gun and escaped the city with a wagon of other survivors who knew better than to betray their names or faces to the smiling people in uniforms who claimed to be aid workers. He learned early that help is not always help, and that people are rarely who they claim to be, or even who they think they are.

He learned early not to let anyone else decide for him the difference between monsters willing and monsters made.

If he can’t—If he can’t stop it, if he can’t stop her, so be it. The military can do what they came here to do. But he will not be their volunteer executioner, or Mia’s loaded gun. He will not do their dirty work for them.

“No more death,” he whispers. “No more.”

Chapter Text

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Ethan says, after he kicks open one final boarded up doorway in the mines—the last, hopefully the last, he’s so tired of running and the molded just keep coming—and finds himself back in what is clearly the Baker guest house basement.

He’d have put money on the mines leading him back to the Baker property, of course, don’t get him wrong. That had felt like the inevitable course of things, and he’d also just…known, somewhere deeply twined inside his bones. But still. He wasn’t expecting something quite this direct.

All roads lead to Damascus, he thinks with a slight twist of irony, or—something.

How had the Bakers—minus Lucas, it seemed—not noticed this? How hadn’t he? Ethan paid attention to his surroundings out of force of habit—the taste of the air, the pull of humidity or lack thereof around him, temperature, wind—he should have noticed an entire cave system at his back while actively looking for an escape route.

Then again, the first time he’d been down here had been right after he found Mia, and he’d been in a daze at the time—utterly lost, confused, and undeniably terrified, as instincts he’d not needed for years and years had prickled to life in the back of his mind and he’d realized he had entered a place of death and foul things. He had not been in his best shape.

There’s no Mia here this time, though, as he limps quietly into the basement, wincing slightly at every pull of his torn skin and aching ribs along his left side. Why is it always his left side?

One of the molded had gotten him on his way out of the caves. All things considered, for what he was up against, only one skin-breaking hit wasn’t bad. He wasn’t bleeding out—his ego was probably more bruised than anything—but still, it definitely fucking hurt. At least Eveline’s infection doesn’t seem to pass through open wounds, he reminds himself, leaning up against a wall and fumbling in his stolen backpack for painkillers. Better than the virus.

He’s still not entirely sure how the mold works. He’s assuming, for now, that the mold has to be ingested in some way to really take control. It’s the most reasonable explanation for why he seems fine so far, minus mild side effects that pale in comparison to Mia or the others’—and his theory is supported by the weirdness he’d experienced when he first woke up in the main house. Marguerite Baker had been desperate to make him eat his supper. He suspects now he knows why.

Ethan breathes a sigh of relief as the painkillers kick into his system just a little, and presses a careful hand against his ribs. Not too much bleeding. He’ll wrap it later, once he finds actual bandages and not just numbing agents so powerful that they’d make dentists weep—to the point where he’s not entirely convinced he isn’t just dousing himself in really good moonshine.

No more death, he’d told himself. He just wishes Eveline had gotten the message as well. She had not wanted him leaving the mines alive, that much had been clear. But then, assuming she had any idea of what Mia had sent him here for, he couldn’t exactly blame her. It’s not as if she could know how violently Ethan had shied away from the idea until he’d tripped over the remnants of some moral compass he’d long thought lost.

But he’s here—and he just has to pray he can find her now, before the men in the helicopters do. Preferably without dying in the process.

His eyes stray to an empty, old-fashioned wheelchair in the corner of the emerging room as he limps his way forward. The old woman’s chair, though she’s nowhere to be seen. He really hopes he doesn’t have to fight her, too. Killing an old woman doesn’t sound much better than killing a child with no real understanding of what she’s done.

“Eveline…?” he calls softly, feeling somewhat stupid, but pushing on into the room.

He’s prepared for a lot of things. He’s not prepared to spy Mia’s greyed-out, echoing ghost in his periphery, looking around the room and uttering the same frightened shrieks she had when they’d first been here. He flinches, whirling around, and she vanishes.

A flashback? But Ethan is well familiar with PTSD. This feels—different.

He can’t—he’ll deal with whatever this is later. He presses onward, through the door and upstairs.

Zoe’s landline lays innocuously on its stand as he passes it. It does not ring. Ethan swallows heavily. He shouldn’t have left her. He should have—figured something out. Anything.

There’s a slight hum to the air—no, in his ears, he realizes—and this time he manages not to flinch as he again sees Mia’s washed-out form in front of him, reliving a memory. He’s seen worse. He’s always seen worse. He has to keep moving.

As Mia’s ghost stalks off into the room off to the side, another figure behind her becomes visible. A young girl in a dress, her face in shadow. Ethan’s heart beats double time. Slowly, he puts his hands up, remembers all the ways Delia had learned to make herself smaller and less threatening when approaching him and the others, the ways he had learned in turn. Ava and Noor had been so tiny, even to a fourteen-year-old boy. He approaches, as he did then, carefully, palms facing her and every finger visible—see? No weapons. “Eveline,” he says quietly. The girl at the end of the hall looks up at him as he gets closer, dead eyes staring, before she vanishes. Not running away, just—dissipating.

Bioweapon, he reminds himself, sucks in a deep breath, keeps going.

“This is your fault,” a young child’s voice suddenly snarls, so close it feels like she’s standing right next to his ear, and Ethan looks around wildly, finding nothing still.

“Why am I—” he begins, and shakes himself off. In the faint distance, though it could just be his frightened imagination, he swears he hears helicopter blades. He really is on a short clock, now that he’s made his decision. He needs to hurry—to whatever ending this is. He won’t kill her, but—he has no idea how this is going to play out otherwise. Still, he can’t just walk away, it’s like a punch to the gut to imagine it: fleeing and saying he’s clean of the act because he left her to the men in uniforms. He can’t. He has to try. In some way, mixed up between the bleeding guilt of the things he’s done wrong this night and every warning sign he failed to notice in Mia and everything, just everything, about Raccoon City and his mother and Noor and every bullet fired, this feels like his last shot at some kind of—forgiveness. Redemption.

“Eveline!” he calls again, starting to jog as he pushes through another door. He sees her silhouette again in front of him, reaches—

“Ethan!” Mia’s pale visage appears out of nowhere, her hand grabbing onto his—so real, how is it so real? “It’s okay, it’s me—” No, this isn’t right, he’s done this already—“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“Kill him, Mommy.”

Mia throws him against the wall, snarls for the second time that he shouldn’t have done that, and it’s not until he’s on the floor staring at his intact hand where he swears the knife just went through, pinning him, that Ethan understands.

Hallucinations, the documents on Eveline and her powers had said. Powerful, persuasive hallucinations. Surrounded by the mold, breathing it in all night and having his wounds exposed to it, he must be just affected enough. Just enough for this. Eveline’s last gamble.

“He doesn’t want to be my Daddy?” Eveline’s ghost asks, staring down at him, yet another hallucination, another memory—this time intact, clearly, but from where was she whispering in Mia’s ear the first time? “Then he can die.”

The hallucination leans right into his face as she says it, nose scrunched up against a snarl. So violent, but still so much a child. It’s a toddler’s logic—he’d tried to take Mia away, which meant he must have been trying to punish Eveline in some way. Had she even understood he couldn’t see or hear her before? After three years, she must have been so used to everyone around her not even needing to be near her to know her thoughts or her whims.

He should be frightened, angry—staring at this volatile child with the powers of a god. It had all been so easy for her, to try to kill him, to nearly succeed.

All he manages, though, is a kind of quiet mental ‘oh’ as Eveline leans in close, before vanishing. Her eyes aren’t brown. They’re green—a soft, deep shade of green that reminds him of the woods outside Raccoon City and the algae in the duck pond near the house in California, the one they’d settled into when they finally felt safe enough to stay in one place. His mother had green eyes. He’d forever been angry as a child that his eyes were more blue than green. He’d wanted every day to look more like his mother, less like the man that had abandoned them both.

It’s so easy to be angry, especially when you’re little. It’s a simple emotion—simpler than others, at least.

If you focus on being angry, you can pretend it’s not really about hurt.

“Now it’s Mommy’s turn to kill you!” Eveline’s disembodied voice rings out in singsong—memory or present, he can’t tell—and again he thinks: anger. Hurt.

“Eveline, please,” he says quietly, gets back up. “Please stop hiding. You don’t need to scare me off. I’m not going to hurt you.” He flexes his once-damaged hand. Always his left. Did that make him lucky or unlucky?

Lucky, he prays, following downed lights directing his path into the kitchen, please let him be lucky. Lucky like Delia prying him out between the cabinets with gentle words. Lucky like them fishing Michael out of the river undamaged. Lucky like Ava never once blaming him for Noor. Lucky like—like always being the survivor, even when he feels he shouldn’t, and sometimes wishes he wasn’t. Lucky like let me help someone else survive for once. Let me do more than destroy.

In the distance, Eveline giggles.

“I know what Mia told you,” Ethan says as he walks, keeping his tone measured but his guard up, eyes alert. Liar, the darkness had whispered of his wife—and among all the lies, he thinks that really was the most awful, what she told Eveline in that crumbling ship. To promise something while actively calculating how to best aim the bullet between the eyes. “I know what she—what she did. I came here to get her, Eveline, but I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. I didn’t know about any of it.”

There’s a growl, and when he comes round a corner, Eveline flashes into view once more. “No!” she yells. “You’re just like her! You took my family!” A wicked, empty smile splits her face. “But you’re going to be one of us. You will! And then maybe you’ll play nicely!”

“This isn’t a game, Eveline,” Ethan says, presses a hand to his aching ribs. “You know it’s not.” Even her puppets had known—Jack Baker’s borrowed corpse had laughed and laughed as he hunted Ethan, but he’d been as empty inside as his ‘child.’ Somewhere deeper, sleeping in black, the real Jack Baker had long given up, and even the infected, conscious part of him had understood this house was built on a fantasy that could never sustain itself. And that one crack in the foundations would send it all tumbling down—helicopters overhead, a slip in Eveline’s control, or even just a man called Ethan with a gun and no idea what he was walking into—anything. This was a delusion, a carefully crafted one, but it had never been a game.

“Shut up!” Eveline says, and Ethan presses forward, trying again for nonthreatening. If she really wants him dead so badly—why isn’t she attacking?

“You know, Eveline,” he says. “Listen—” the silence of the house, the distant choppers. “It’s…it’s over. But I’m—I’m not—” How does he even begin to talk down a child who has never known help or protection she hasn’t had to forcefully create for herself? “I’m not Mia. I’m not…like them. I’m not like any of them.”

No, he is not Mia Peterson’s loaded gun, and he never will be. And he is not the Bakers, either—she doesn’t need to string him up to keep him from running. He will—he will reach back, the way she’d looked to Mia to, as his wife turned away and turned away, always away. He might get killed trying, but—fuck it. He was supposed to die a long time ago. He barely lived through the weight of all the abandoned and betrayed of Raccoon City. He won’t live if he walks away from this.

Eveline narrows her eyes. “But you are. Everyone is,” she says, in a bitter, resigned way that feels bigger than he can understand—bigger, even, than a lifetime of the horrors she has been through, with every adult in her life manipulating her at every turn. Something in the back of his mind, tied to the darkness he had slept in before Mia found him, prickles. “Enough! You’re no fun anymore. I want you to start playing by the rules!”

The air around him this entire time has been notably still, but suddenly it feels—heavier. Like the deep humidity of a summer day before the storm finally breaks. Eveline watches him with dark, focused eyes, her little hands clenching into fists and her mouth thinning, as the air grows heavier and heavier, pressing in. In that black space in the corner of his brain, the darkness—that heavy, encumbering darkness, as relentless as the tide—sweeps in again, trying to sing him to sleep.

…Sleep does sound nice, he’ll admit. His bones ache. His entire body is one big bruise at this point. But still—he knows, in the way he knew when to wake, and how to rest lightly so as to be ready to rise, during that week in the city—this isn’t the time for sleep. He can’t rest yet. The bodies in uniforms that haunt him worse than the infected ever could are coming.

Yes. Rescue mold child and himself now, he thinks, somewhat deliriously, as the darkness presses in. Rest later.

Rest later.

He shakes his head roughly, throwing off the pull to sleep, and—he can’t help it, sneezes wildly, eyes clenching shut with the impulse. When he opens them, sniffling, Eveline is staring at him in some kind of mute disbelief, eyes wide.

“How are you…” she says, and pales, taking a step back. For the first time, she looks truly frightened—the only thing that keeps Ethan from stepping forward. His hands hover in the air between them, with no clue what to do. How is he getting this so wrong? “No!” she shouts suddenly, spinning away and vanishing into smoke once more. “Stay away from me!”

“Shit,” Ethan mumbles, turns his way back into the stomach of the house. “Eveline! Eveline, I’m not going to hurt you, I swear, but—”

He finds himself cut off as a heavy force plows into him from behind, and he hits the ground rolling. When he looks up, he sees Mia in the kitchen doorway, screaming and snarling, chainsaw in hand. His stomach lurches for a moment, and then his hands find and steady his gun before his mind catches up.

Hallucination, he reminds himself, as his finger tightens on the trigger, fires. Mia is back at the tanker. This is nothing more than a ghost. And he does not have time to indulge it.

Mia’s figure vanishes as the bullet passes through, and Ethan pulls himself to his feet, gun at the ready, as he calls for the girl who created the apparition.

“Eveline!”

Through the kitchen, down the hall. Another Mia. Another bullet. Breathe. Breathe.

“Eveline!”

Is this how she sees his wife, deep down? Is the Mia that hunted and cut him just the child’s monster-under-the-bed silhouette of the woman he knew? The woman who raised and fed Eveline, tested and experimented on her?

Up the stairs. Hurry. Hurry.

“Contained,” Mia’s monster snarls when she next jumps out at him next, chainsaw swinging wildly. “She must be contained!”

Like taking out the trash, he remembers having thought, when he read the documents about Eveline that he would never know if his wife wrote or not. It’s almost easier, this time, somehow, to swing out the shotgun and fire off a shot that scatters her image into a thousand pieces.

I love you, he thinks, watching her vanish, and knowing something is over. His chest, his heart and throat, ache with so much unsaid and so much unheard. I love you so much. So fucking much.

He forgives her.

I love you, I love you, I love you, and I—

But he was never the one she needed forgiveness from. And he knows she will never be willing to face what she’s done, and the repentance she owes.

I am never coming home.

He takes the stairs to the attic two at a time.

—(((())))—

In the farthest, most shadowed corner of the attic, Eveline is hiding.

She is good at hiding. She’s had a plenty of practice. The handlers had taught her a lot about it, when she lived in the lab. They wanted her to have infiltration skills, for her purposes in the field—can’t always blend into a crowd—and had educated her accordingly. They’d stopped being impressed over it once she started using those skills to try to hide from them. It wasn’t funny or clever anymore, then. Just bad.

She’d made it all the way into a vent once, wondered about all the places it could take her that were not the same endless white walls, before Dr. Ciobanu had dragged her out by her ankle and shook her so hard she dislocated Eveline’s shoulder.

Mommy had been the one to pull her free, snap that’s enough, Miranda, and take her to medical without even holding her wrist too hard. She’d waited the whole time while Dr. McCarthy gave Eveline the shot she’d need to heal herself—she was due for it, anyway—and Eveline had stared at her distant face watching the clock and thought, with certainty, this must be what love was.

On the ship, she’d played at hiding even better than ever. Tucked herself into corners and the spaces between pipes, giggled when Mommy and Alan passed by, calling for her, because they would play with her now. The ship was magic like that. Mommy was Mommy finally and Alan wasn’t horrible for once and all the ship workers—so many faces she’d never seen even once before!—would smile at her and call her little girl and sneak her chocolate when her handlers weren’t looking.

On the ship, she could sit for hours on the deck and feel the wind in her hair and the sun on her face and breathe and breathe and breathe. The world was so big. So big. It had been impossible to imagine, impossible to even understand, at first. But she could never get enough of it. At night, she’d hide too, in hopes of keeping Mommy from putting her to bed, so she could sneak back out to the deck and watch the winking stars. All for her and hers alone, so long as she hid well.

She’d gotten better at hiding the longer they spent on the ship, because the longer they spent on the ship the closer they got to South America, and she knew—she knew—

No more stars, soon. No more wind.

Until the night of the storm, when she’d raced out onto the deck to feel the wind and the rain, and Alan had grabbed her forearm roughly, went to pull her back, swore at her, and she’d thought—never again.

She did not want to go South America. She did not want to go back to living in a lab. She did not want to go back she did not want to go back she did not—

The wind and the rain and thunder and lightning had come alive with her, made her alive, and she let the nature of the world and the nature inside herself she’d been kept from for so long speak to her, tell her what needed to be done. She’d pulled on the thing under her skin the handlers called mutamycete and that she called home, dark, safe, fury, power, want—

And she had ground the ship where it stood. Ripped apart anything that got in her way and taught Alan a lesson he’d never forget—remembered every unkind word and every backhand and every it, not she, spoken over her head as she did it—and thought: free, free, free free freefreefreefree.

No more cages.

Then she’d hid, hid so well she knew even Mommy could never find her—not until Eveline wanted her to, at least—and she’d played the game the best she’d ever played it and proved just how good and strong she was, and Mommy had said “okay, Evie, I’ll be your Mommy,” and Eveline knew she would never need to hide again.

Until the world had come to remind her: everyone lies—liars, liars, liars—and she could turn and twist and reshape them any way she wanted but she could not make them something they were not. She could make her Mommy her Mother, but she could not make her mean it.

And so now, once again, she is hiding, breath caught and fearing to be found. Nothing had really changed, had it?

“Eveline?” she hears the man call, hears the creak of the attic stairs as he climbs them, and she tucks further inward, pulling darkness and shadow around herself. The man is dangerous: destroyed her family and cannot be controlled—why can’t she control him, it doesn’t make sense, whywhywhy—and she does not know what he will do next, only that he isn’t safe. He has weapons and killed Daddy and killed Mama and took Mommy away, and—

“Eveline?”

Why won’t he stop? Why won’t he just leave?

She curls tighter into her ball, holds her breath. She doesn’t need to breathe. Not really. She just likes it. But choking is better than dying. Eveline knows plenty about choking, too. She’d choked for a long time on the bleach stench of the labs, on Dr. Ciobanu’s bitter, rotten-fruit perfume, on herself and all the ways her mold had shifted beneath her skin and cried to be free.

Please, please, please. She ducks her head, feels pain brewing between her brows from how tightly her eyes are closed. Don’t let him see her, don’t let him find her. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to, she’s not ready, she wants to live, she wants to breathe, just a little longer, please, a little longer, please, please—

Deep inside, her body is screaming out in agony—reminding her that she doesn’t have the dexterity to hide like this anymore, that even if she tried she’d never make it back onto her feet without help—and she blocks it thoroughly from her mind. That’s not true. That’s not—that’s not her. It’s not. It’s wrong and a lie, the worst kind of lie, and that is not her body—

The man’s footsteps stop with a creak on the wooden floor, his breath hitching.

Please—

“Eveline…” he says softly, so softly, so carefully, and it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t make sense when she knows what Mommy handed him in that tanker, knows what he is, what he did to her family. He’s a liar. She will not be tricked, never again.

She draws the shades and shadows around her, twisting his mind as much as she is able—she can’t control him, but she can keep him, keep herself, from seeing—and rears up, the looming monster she knows well how to be. Her best game.

“Stay away!” she shrieks, and reminds herself the time for half-measures, for conserving her energy, is over. No point having power to spare if the man is still on his feet. Even if it kills her trying, kills her to take him out, so be it. She will not die to Mommy’s precious Ethan Winters. Eveline tore apart and rebuilt the rules of the world to give herself a life on her own terms. She will—she will die that way, too, if she must.

And so she pulls on the air around her, every floating, mildewing molecule and every drifting mold spore, left coating the air of the Baker farm from the years she has made it her castle, her fortress. She gathers it to her, manipulating it like the expert she is, the only one who can ever truly understand it, and turns it back on him, knocking him off his feet. “I said go away!”

The man grunts in pain as he gets up, and she can see blood staining his shirt, but it doesn’t seem to stop him—doesn’t even seem to give him pause. Instead, he shields his face with his forearms, and starts forward again, feeling his way out with his feet.

“Eveline!” he shouts against the wind, and she can feel him in the black web that is her and her mold—where her family lingers and sleeps, always tied to her, always, because she will never be alone again—and he is reaching out, reaching. His thread, his pulse, his mind, it is—is warm, and bright, and says don’t be afraid, you don’t have to be afraid. And she—doesn’t understand. Can’t understand.

Even Mommy couldn’t lie this good, in the times where she could shake Eveline and the dark mold and the love Eveline pressed desperately onto her off, and run. Even when Eveline couldn’t stop her, couldn’t bring her home to Eveline’s side, she always knew Mommy’s heart. Even when she didn’t want to.

“Eveline!” the man yells again. “Eveline, please, stop. I know you’re frightened. I know you’re—I know you don’t have much reason to trust me right now, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for what I did to—your family. I didn’t have a choice. But—”

“No!” she yells, because she doesn’t want to hear it. Not when he took Daddy and Mama from her. Not when—when she knows sorry and swear and promise are things built to be broken. The handlers taught her that, as they taught her everything else. And she learned every lesson perfectly. “Don’t!”

“Please—” he says, and sounds so much like her heart as she’d curled up in every corner in every stolen moment of her life and begged: let this be the last time. Please, please, let something change. Or let this be the end of it.

He’s so desperate, so—reaching and seeking and broken. His spot in her mind between her and her mold, his data in the record she was constructed to keep perfectly, whispers and sings and tastes like ash and rain and hope and just keep going, and she doesn’t—she doesn’t—she doesn’t understand. He came here for Mommy. He has her now—she turned Eveline away, told her the truth at last: we will never be a family. All he has to do is—is leave.

“No!” she screams as he keeps edging closer and closer, blind against the pulsing wind of Eveline and the tiny, shedding pieces of herself and her mold at her control, but he just…keeps coming. Eyes screwed shut, arms braced, hands—empty. Where is his gun? She knows he has it. She heard it go off downstairs.

She buffets him back. He braces, slides, stops. Steps forward again. Again. Relentless.

He’s going to be close enough to reach out properly soon, she realizes, close enough to touch. And she can’t—she can’t—no, no, he can’t touch her, he can’t know, can’t see—she doesn’t want a single other person on this earth to see—

Why can’t she die? She’s been dying for so long. Why can’t she just die, before someone else does it for her? It’s not such a big thing to ask. She’s asked for so little. She really has. And she’s been good. She’s tried so hard.

“No, no, no!” she wails one last time, as Ethan Winters closes in, and then he’s there, darting forward and arms reaching out, and she knows this is how she dies. The wind falls, and she braces—

But nothing comes. No bullet through her sandpaper skin, no knife to her neck. No injections or RAMRODs or any of the ways the handlers had designed to control her, entrap her, end her—

Just—weight around her, closing in. Tight, but not painfully so. And warm. So warm. She’d forgotten how cold it was—she was—having gone so long without warm. It was easier to forget.

His arms are around her, she realizes, in some messy facsimile of a hug. She can’t remember her last hug. She’ll never forget her first—her Mommy, when they took her from the lab to the ship, smiling that half-smile and promising her everything would be fine and good and a grand adventure. But her last? The Bakers had stopped touching her, after a while, if it wasn’t moving her from room to room. It was easier that way. She turned their minds away from…it, let them follow her ghost instead. Even the lack of touching was still better than having to acknowledge the skin and the muscles and the beating heart that now felt foreign, made her want to cry, want to be sick on herself, to crawl into some dark hole and never come back because this was not who she was supposed to be—

But the man, he does not know, and she cannot stop him. He just—holds her. Pants heavily in his exhaustion, his rapid heartbeat thumping against her head where she is pressed to his chest. And she…listens, stills.

Breathes.

Around her, she can feel the shadows fade, her last tricks to bend his mind like bouncing light from the truth giving out, and she slips her aching eyes shut, feels tears escape.

“No…” she whispers in the voice that is both hers and not, and feels the man—Ethan Winters, the Daddy who was not her Daddy and took her Mommy away but is holding her more carefully now than Mommy ever had—stiffen up around her.

It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, she thinks, if it all just stopped now. Before he turned his eyes down and he let her go. It would be an okay way to finally slip, sleep. Never come back.

At least she’d still be warm.

—(((())))—

Ethan has no idea what he’s doing, as he faces the storm head-on.

No idea if this will work, no idea where to go from here, but it’s all he has, as he braces himself and keeps pushing forward against the onslaught. He surrenders himself to his instincts—finely-tuned as they are, and with respect to how long they’ve kept him alive against all the odds—and every unspoken thing inside his body that says she’s afraid, she’s afraid, she’s afraid, you know what afraid is. Keeps going, doesn’t let Eveline’s screams or warnings or the heavy blasts of spore-coated air that constrict his chest and steal the breath from his lungs stop him.

It’s muscle-memory to reach out, grab onto the small body before him and hold tight, ducking his head into soft hair and breathing deep. Nineteen years lost and many variables changed, but the body never forgets. Could never forget Delia reaching out when he flinched away, pulling him close and giving him comfort when he had been resigned to death, or his clinging to Ava after Noor, as she screamed and sobbed and hit him with her little fists until her voice broke and she whispered, I should have been there. Why wasn’t I there?

It was my fault, he’d said, and she’d shook her stubborn little head against his chest.

Shut up, you oaf. Just—shut up. But she’d not let go, and he’d not let go. And Michael had reached out and not let go, either, and Delia had never, would never, let go, so long as they needed her to keep reaching, straining, catching them when they fell, whether they knew it or not.

Ethan knows how to cling, to surrender, and wait out the storm, and that’s exactly what he does.

And slowly, surely, the wind dies, and he is left only with his shut eyes and his pounding heart and the sobbing girl in his arms. And then—

“No,” the fragile body in front of him says, and he feels his heart stop at the sound. That is not Eveline’s voice. That is not—

He lets go, lets go just enough to take a step back, so that he can look down, and—

The world stutters to a halt, and his mind along with it, as he looks, as he sees.

“You,” he says, before he can stop himself, staring down at the old woman. The granny who had sat at the Bakers’ dinner table, followed him around the house in slow, creaking measures. Had never said a word or interacted with her family or attacked him once. Just watched, and watched, and watched.

This isn’t right, his brain says. This can’t be right, this doesn’t make sense—but then the woman breaks into renewed tears, coughing and heaving as she does so, trying to lift her thin arms between them to hide her face, and he knows.

This is Eveline. It is impossible, inconceivable, but her all the same.

“No,” she mumbles, in that old voice with just a whisper of the girl underneath, still looking away, and Ethan’s heart breaks in a way he never knew was possible. “No. Don’t look. Go away. Go away.”

Distantly, he feels himself sink to his knees, the old woman’s form sagging with him—can she even stand on her own? How did she get up here?—and as the splintering wood of the attic bites at his knees through his pants, he lifts a shaking hand, brushes the thin, white strands of hair from her face. She flinches away.

“Eveline…?” he says. “But how—” It clicks, then. The documents he had read.

If the injections are skipped for prolonged periods of time the Product will age rapidly—24 X's faster than normal. Eventually the Product will become insane and a danger to all around it. No tests have been run on subjects depriving them of maintenance chemicals for more than 6 months, as the situation became too dangerous for observation.

And, God, Lucas’s emails—

Evie’s looking sick or something. Her skin is getting all wrinkly and she’s getting grey hairs. Is that supposed to happen? It’s almost like she’s getting old all of a sudden.

“Your medication,” Ethan whispers, and Eveline’s body curls tighter, leaning away from him. “Without it, you…your genetic alterations, they…” He sucks in a breath, runs out of words to say—‘I’m sorry?’ How can sorry ever be enough for this? What had Mia been thinking?

“Stop,” Eveline simply says tiredly, still refusing to look at him. “…stop.” Stop looking, Ethan realizes. He recalls how the Bakers had shifted blindly around the old woman like she wasn’t even there. Had she hidden her real body from their minds as much as possible, just to keep up the illusion of normality? It’s sobering, but—what else could she have done, he thinks—and what would anyone have done? He tries to imagine being a child, but with the body of an adult—worse: the body of someone on the brink of death, with no autonomy of their own—and his mind shudders to a halt at the mere concept. It’s impossible to picture. Impossible to comprehend.

This is wrong, he thinks, looking at the quivering form of a ninety-something woman housing the mind of a ten-year-old girl. Just—wrong. Wrong in the way the virus and the blood in the streets and the bomb had been. No—wrong in a way that violates every facsimile of order or balance or nature. Perhaps the most wrong thing Ethan has ever bore witness to, and God and the Heavens and the Hells on Earth and below know Ethan has lived and witnessed more wrong than scant few other human beings on this planet ever will.

Ethan Winters knows wrong, and he knows evil—and he is looking at it now. Not the terrified, warped, spun-rabid young girl hiding before him, but what has been perpetrated onto her.

How—even after everything Eveline has done—could Mia ever have asked him to kill her? How is this right?

Eveline is—is old and frail and flinching and clearly on death’s door, and still he cannot imagine it. Even knowing what he knows now, it is not and could never be mercy.

“Eveline…” he says, hands in front of him, before her, flailing. Uncertain. “Eveline, I—”

“Don’t look!” she screams, her voice cracking and a whisper of the wind and the child’s voice carried with it, and Ethan slams his eyes shut, retracts his hands but keeps them up in the universal sign of peace, of surrender, of do no harm.

“Okay,” he says carefully. “Okay, okay. I’m not looking, sweetheart, I promise I’m not looking. But—fuck, shit—” and he knows, he knows this is already a thousand miles past his now distant-feeling resolution made not more than an hour or two ago to simply do no harm, no more or no less, but still he can’t stop himself from saying—“How do I—How do I fix this? How do I help you?”

There’s a bitter laugh, one that starts up an old woman’s chuckle and falls into harmony with the young girl’s familiarly manic cackle, bouncing around his ears as if part of the air itself, before petering off. “You think I haven’t tried?” Eveline’s voice—her real voice, the child’s voice—hisses, and this time Ethan does not begrudge her subjecting him to her hallucinations. Not when a hallucination is so much more comfortable for her than reality, than her warped body, could ever be. “I’m broken! I can’t be fixed.” She says it scathingly, but there’s a flinch of raw vulnerability underneath, all panic and all fear, and Ethan’s making a hushing noise before he can help it, reaching out a hand that a soft wind bats back.

She’s being honest, he’s sure. She has no reason to lie now, not about this, and of course she tried. He has no doubt about that. Of course she fought at every inch to retain the body she was supposed to have—tried and tried and tried to stop it, to heal herself, until she accepted the hopeless battle. You can’t stop time.

But this…this isn’t time, isn’t natural—and he refuses to believe there’s no way to reverse this. Will not accept that. Cannot accept that, not when his entire being is crying out at how wrong this is, and when he knows how intimately his own wife is responsible.

Ethan has seen the impossible many times. Lived it. Witnessed it plenty this last night alone. He put an axe through Mia’s neck and she was on her feet in five minutes. Watched Lucas Baker’s arm get chopped off and reattached with hardly a blink. Saw Jack Baker put a bullet through his skull and get back up, take twenty to the chest and get back up, get sawed in half and get back up.

Not to mention his own arm—whatever the fuck happened there, because boy, oh boy, is Ethan not thinking too hard about that one right now. There’s more pressing issues at hand. He’s fine. He’s got four functioning limbs at least, clearly. That’s the definition of fine.

But still—if there’s one thing tonight and the Bakers have proved, it’s that Eveline’s mold is nothing to sneeze at when it comes to repairing the unrepairable. If it can regrow Jack Baker’s body from the waist up, surely it can—it can fix this. Reverse ageing. Repair Eveline to who she was, who she’s supposed to be.

He just—he just has to find a way to make that happen. Right?

He has to—he has to try, at least. He has to try.

“Eveline…” he begins slowly, carefully, and there’s a roar of blades overhead that stops his mind in his tracks, makes him cower on instinct. They’re here, he realizes, as the penny drops with a fateful clang. And as his eyes fly open, forgetting Eveline’s words and racing to the window, he already knows he’s out of time.

He crouches at the base of the singular attic window, watching the sky with his heart in his throat, as one, two, three helicopters circle overhead, surveying the property. Looking for Eveline, for survivors—witnesses to be eliminated, the terrified fourteen-year-old inside him whispers—or for a place to land, no doubt.

“Fuck,” he swears vehemently, and when he turns back into the room, he only startles a little when he sees the hallucinated, wraithly young form of Eveline staring up at him, her face flinty with suspicion.

“You brought them here,” she says accusingly, and Ethan desperately shakes his head.

“No, no, I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t—” Another helicopters veers overhead, and Ethan can’t help the heavy flinch that escapes him. Eveline’s eyes narrow, her mouth thinning. What can she read in him? Can she tell how fucking honest he’s being right now? Even if he’d wanted to kill her, he never would have called for this kind of help or backup—not once he knew what this was. There are no random civilian survivors of bioweapon outbreaks, not officially, and not if the government or the ones who caused it have anything to say about it. And Ethan likes being alive, thank you very much. “I heard—a radio, in the mines. They’ve been watching this place for a while, intercepted emails—”

Eveline jolts like a live wire. “Mommy?” she asks, and it takes Ethan a minute to catch on, but—

“Not her. Lucas.”

“Lucas?” Eveline says incredulously, but Ethan is already darting back to the window, peering out. There are logos on the helicopters he can still see as they circle the sky, and he narrows his eyes, trying to make them out.

“Eveline, please, I know you’re angry with me, but right now if either of us want to get out alive, we need to work together. That logo—is it your creators? The—fucking, what was it—Connections?”

That gets her attention, and she moves to the window. Can she even see, if this isn’t her real body? But she looks out all the same, gaze focused. There’s a rumble in the foundations of the house, and Ethan wonders—can the mold see for her?

“No,” she says, sounding both relieved and confused at once. “No, it’s not.”

Great, Ethan thinks, looking back to the helicopters. Who, then? Military? Another company? One of the helicopters’ paths takes it closer, and he strains his vision, near-pressing his face to the glass. That logo, the colors, it’s so—so familiar in a way that tickles the back of his brain, if he could only—

And then it clicks, and as the helicopter dips even closer, Ethan practically throws himself back and to the floor, praying not to be seen.

Umbrella, his brain whispers in horror, because the truth had come out eventually, even if in partial, redacted ways—even if its core was only spread through government channels, and through the word-of-mouth of survivors who pieced together what they could, playing telephone-tag with the secrets of their survival, what they saw, what they heard.

The company had collapsed, he knows, and then rebuilt under a new name, a new face. He keeps up with the news of his own childhood monster-under-the-bed, and always has. He can’t help it. It’s reflexive, the needing to know—what are they doing now? What will they do next? How prepared does he need to be for disaster, for apocalypse, for running and never looking back?

They clean up other people’s messes now, along with their own. Some half-hearted, corporate attempt at redemption. Most recently they were working with—

The BSAA.

“Fuck,” Ethan mumbles again to himself, because as far as he’s concerned they’re not much better. Not when you’re just another loose end with nothing to offer them.

“What?” Eveline’s young voice rings out, high and agitated. “What?”

“BSAA,” Ethan says, and pulls himself to his feet as quickly as he can, makes for the body in the corner shrouded in shadow once more. “Bioterrorism Security, Eveline. You understand what that is, right? They’re here to—” he cuts himself off, stops at the old woman’s form, who whines and raises defensive arms when he reaches for her. “Please, I know, I know, okay? You have no reason to believe anything I say, you have every damn reason to hate me right now, but that’s going to have to wait. We have to get out of here.”

“We?” Eveline’s old woman voice rasps incredulously, asking so much in so little, and Ethan stops, feels some queasy, heartbroken thing boil in his stomach.

“…I’m not leaving you here, Eveline,” he says softly, and he’d barely dared to admit it to himself, but as he says it, he knows it to be true. “Hate me all you want, but I’m not. I’m not leaving you here to die.”

“I’m dead already,” Eveline says with just a touch of sad humor, and Ethan huffs out just once, shakes his head, leans in and scoops up the old woman’s body in his arms. Braces her back, one forearm under her knees. He stands, and she is painfully light. The wind, the particles of mold, buffet him lightly as he does so, as if in warning, but she doesn’t fight, not really. And as he braces, straightening up, it stops.

“Not yet,” he says, and turns, limping his way toward the stairs. He has no idea how he’s going to get out of here, with all those helicopters over his head, and his car—who the fuck knows what Jack did to his car. But he’ll try. He’ll run if he has to.

Ethan is good at running.

Eveline’s child form flashes into view before him, blocking the entrance to the stairs, and they stare each other down. Her hands tremble at her sides.

“But—why?” she says, without understanding, and Ethan feels the left side of his mouth tug up, just a little. A smile—he knows everything else about him reeks of fear, but still—smile, smile for the frightened child. To let her know everything will be okay, as was once done for him.

“Because leaving someone to die when you can stop it is wrong,” he says simply. “And because—because you are human, and your life is not worth more or less than mine.”

And there’s all the other things he could say—about how wrong what has happened to her is, and how what Mia did to her feels like his fault, and how every soul he has destroyed or abandoned this long night makes Eveline feels like his last chance at redemption. He could say: because you are more than what they made of you. He could say: because you are a child. He could say: because I have walked this road before, and I think, deep down, I see you, all of you, as much as anyone could. But he knows she can’t understand, that it will take her a long, long time to understand, so he just adds, “There’s been too much death tonight. I can’t take another one.”

Eveline’s face shifts, her narrow eyes studying him, and then she moves out of the way, and he darts down the stairs. In his arms, her elderly body breathes raspingly, and on the stairs behind him, he can hear the light thumps of her oversized black boots as Eveline’s mind follows.

“…Lucas has cars,” she says haltingly behind him, just loud enough for him to hear. “Trucks and things. In the barn. I would watch him work, sometimes. He keeps the keys there, too.”

Ethan nods, never stopping his movements. The barn, he can do that. He can—he reaches the ground floor, stops before the door, hesitating. He can still hear the helicopters overhead—they’re not landing, just…searching. Searching for Eveline.

He looks to Eveline—her mind, her soul, not her body. “We’re going to have to run.” He’s going to have to run, really, but it’s the thought that counts.

Eveline stares up at him for a long moment, gaze unreadable, and then she huffs—a single, irritated, childish sound.

“You better not be a liar,” she says, and then she closes her eyes, bends slightly as if bracing herself, and her hands flex and open, palms splayed towards the ground. In his arms, Ethan feels the old woman’s body convulse just a fraction, before stilling.

And somewhere off in the distance, there’s a thunderous crack, something enormous and earth-shaking taking root, growing, reaching. Ethan stumbles as it rocks the ground, and he hears Eveline let out a wild little laugh.

“That’ll keep them busy!” she says, and when the sound of blades overhead suddenly grows more distant, Ethan dares to finally nudge open the door, sticking his head out and watching the Blue Umbrella helicopters move away from the Baker homestead, heading in the direction of a massive, moldy substance, like the roots of some great beast, breaking through the treeline and stretching toward the sky, nearly half a mile away.

“Jesus,” Ethan can’t help but mumble under his breath, watching it grow. The virus had nothing on this.

Not for the first time in this already short span, he wonders what the fuck he’s doing, breaking Eveline out from the trap people much more qualified than him are laying.

But his feet don’t turn, don’t even waver, as he takes the first cautious couple steps outside.

Fuck them, anyway, a corner of his mind mumbles. What the hell are qualifications, when it comes to this? He strongly invites anyone who thinks they understand anything about qualifications when it comes to bioweapons and who can handle them, who can survive, to meet Delia Winters and the barrel end of her shotgun.

He takes another step, and another—remembers being fourteen and flying down the streets of the city, terrified and wounded but stubbornly alive—and then he’s jogging, picking up speed, running, sprinting.

Behind him, next to him, in front of him, everywhere around him, Eveline’s form flickers and darts, arms thrown wide to the wind and breathless, bright laughter escaping her that is all kind of hysterical and all kinds of furious but not at all about hate. Just—that taste of freedom, when you’re so sure you’re close to death, and then you realize, no, it’s not quite over yet.

“Do you trust me?” he can’t help but ask, as Lucas’s barn comes into view, and Eveline snorts, practically shrieks.

“No!”

And Ethan laughs then, too, hoists her frail body—he’ll fix it, he will, he’ll find a way—higher and closer, more secure, as he makes it the final few meters to the barn, kicks his way past the door and slams it shut behind him just before he hears more helicopters, backup probably, fly overhead.

“Good,” he says breathlessly. “Smart kid. Trust gets people killed. You probably shouldn’t trust some asshole you barely know and who—yeah.”

“So?”

“So,” he shrugs, stares Eveline and her blue dress and black boots, her dark hair and glimmering green eyes, down. “Trust should be earned. Make sure I earn it.”

Chapter Text

In the darkness, Mia Winters rots.

It’s choking, cloying—she can feel its tendrils, Eveline, it’s all Eveline, enclosed around her, crawling through her skin and into her mind, connecting her to the dozens of other souls caught in Eveline’s web. They whisper and murmur, echoes of pain and fear and anxiety rebounding back and forth. Words, feelings, impressions.

It’s so much louder than it was before, now that she’s had the serum. As if her mental fortresses were repaired just enough to make her aware of the lingering invasion, but powerless to stop it. It’s—it’s too much. Entirely too much.

She can hear them all, now. Feel them. The Bakers, and the souls of those they had ensnared in this bayou and dragged, screaming, into their homestead. Pain, they whisper, pain, fear, pain, too much, stop, help, hurt, help—

They ebb louder and quieter, come and go. Most of it doesn’t really feel addressed to her, just—projected. They are all as tied up in each other as the next and cannot help but bleed over.

Your fault, the occasional whispered snarl comes, more stringently directed at her than the rest of the background noise. The message wears different voices—those that she helped kill, when she was lost to this monster inside herself that Eveline planted; those that stayed intact long enough to discover some of the truth of Mia’s role in all this. Most often, her verbal assailant sounds and tastes—in that cloying, sickly-rot sense the mold leaves behind in her mouth, always—like Zoe Baker.

Your fault.

“Please,” she whispers, digging her hands into her eyelids and pushing her pounding head against the cool metal of the tanker floor. “Stop.” Sometimes, her body feels far away, as she surrenders and floats in the black. Other times, it is a most heinous prison she cannot seem to escape. Everything hurts.

It was easier, she thinks, before this. Crazy had looked good on her. It kept the others out, at least. Hard to think about the strings of interconnected, deadened, dying minds tied to your own when your own is barely there in the first place. In her more together moments, the whispers had been haunting. When she surrendered to Eveline’s whims, stepped into the puppet-role of the mother Eveline wanted—blissful silence.

Now? The serum appears to have left her halfway between, and without her paddle.

The worst part isn’t even the echoes or impressions, or the voices, or what they say.

It’s the knowing.

She’s awake now. Awake for the first time in three years, and Mia Winters and Mia Peterson and the thing she can only call Mommy all stare each other down inside their shared consciousness, trying to make sense of one another.

She’s not experiencing a break in personality, she knows that much. At least—she doesn’t think she is.

But she’s….she’s together and apart in entirely new ways from her last three years of Hell, or the lies before that, and inside herself, tangled up in the web and being yanked apart and forced back together again before they are ready, Mia-the-good-girl-beautiful-daughter-clever-girl-angel-loving-wife and Mia-smart-woman-powerful-control-see-me-Agent 4210, Clearance Level 3, must make their amends, all while the shrieking, banging thing inside her Eveline’s love and desperation and delusion have created rattles in its cage and screams killhuntprotectcontainwhereisshe—EvelineEvelineEvelineEvelineEveline—

“Stop,” she whispers again into the stale air of the tanker where her carefully constructed life fell apart, for all the good it does. “Stop.”

Your fault—pain—fear—no one is coming—the man—what is he doing?—Zoe—Jack—stop—liar—

The voices of Eveline’s victims murmur, shriek, scream, in tandem with her rapidly unthreading self, and Mia can do nothing but sob.

With every remaining measure of her sanity, she clings to Ethan, grapples for his thread within the web of Eveline’s influence. She’d found it there, in the darkness, after their initial encounter, when she’d come to and found herself lying in the muddy ground outside the main house and realized, remembered—Ethan, Ethan, her beloved Ethan, her gullible, naïve, so beautifully good husband. Here. In Louisiana. In Hell.

His reaching, careful hands. Her screaming, broken, shambling body, trying to drag them to freedom, until—Eveline, a knife in Mia’s hands, a chainsaw, God, what had she done—

She’d run, fleeing Jack or Marguerite’s inevitable return, and crouched in a dark corner of the property, trembling until a new, tenuous vein in the black that stuck like flypaper to the back of her mind had caught her entire focus. Ethan.

No, her fragile, still-human heart had whispered inside her monster’s body. Ethan, one of them? It couldn’t be.

She’d given up hope for the millionth time over, then, of ever seeing the outside world, resigned to her continual mental and physical decline until the inevitable day Eveline’s dying body finally gave out, and then—who knew what? Perhaps she’d finally die, too. Anything, anything but this.

She’d been a woman of science, once. And now her mind, her memory, was patchy, full of holes. Those first few weeks she’d fought to retain every memory of Eveline’s genetic code and the parts she had designed herself and every medical procedure she could do with her eyes closed, until she couldn’t fight anymore. That’s what she had resented most of all. Even more than the violence, than the disgusting slop and slush of the mold infecting everything around her. Even more than Eveline’s stupid, pathetic game of pretend. Losing her mind. A mind that could have changed the world, now reduced to…this.

All of that, again, she’d thought over, as she realized her husband—the one truly good thing in her life not tainted by her work, and the only decent legacy she’d had left to carry on her memory—was a dead man walking now, too.

Ethan, it had seemed, had not gotten that message. She’d picked up on that at about the time something crashed into the garage door and dented it out from the inside with a thick, sick crunch, and an explosion of fire had erupted behind the broken, high-set windows, and she’d felt the lurch of pain, fury, hate, whatdoesthatstupidboythinkhe’sdoing—before Jack Baker’s thread in the darkness went blissfully quiet, if only for a short time.

Ethan was still fighting, she’d realized, and somehow, she’d found the strength then to get back on her feet, grab a camera—always leave documentation behind, the scientist in her whispered, while the wife screamed he needs to know he needs to know it wasn’t me—and keep moving. Keep fighting, just a little longer.

So that’s what she tells herself, curled in a fetal ball against the floor of the tanker, abandoned to Eveline’s web, clutching at Ethan’s thread and the brief moments of emotion and sensation and sparks of life she can feel flickering down it. She does not pray. She will not pray. Mia Peterson-turned-Winters was never a praying woman and never would be, but she dared to cling, and whisper fight, and hope.

Ethan would save her. Ethan was good, and pure, and loved her, and didn’t know, and he would do what had to be done because he was so much more capable than she’d ever given him credit for, and she just had to hold out a little longer—

Go kill that little bitch, she’d said, says, in her heart and mind, over and over. Go. Hurry.

She believes in him. She has to. It’s the only thing she has left.

—(((())))—

It feels like it goes on forever.

She keeps what’s left of her tied up in Ethan, listening, waiting, hoping, hoping—

But he’s so quiet, sometimes.

Cold, furious parts of her—the parts that ran through the crumbling tanker with gun in hand and promised Eveline she’d be her mommy while thinking where can I shoot to incapacitate her on the first hit, the parts that had held a newborn babe and pushed down every frightened maternal instinct and declared you are changing the world—well up from time to time, lashing out. What is taking him so long? Why is he taking so long?

Did—did something hurt him? Did something get to him?

He’s not dead. Not—properly dead, at least. Not gone. She’d know if he was gone. But Zoe and Lucas are still out there, Eveline is still out there, and they’re all dangerous and pissed as hell in their respective ways. Any one of them could have stopped Ethan from finishing it.

Ethan’s thread does flare from time to time, though. Little things—gunpowder burns and the stench of rotting fish, his pounding heart, memories of a vaguely familiar woman with red hair and a shotgun, grime smeared across her cheek—and then big things. Giant, panging tugs of agony that frighten her as much as they confuse her. A soul-heavy, wrenching moment of whywhywhywhy he spins out into the web probably without even realizing he’s doing it, because it takes a while to understand how it works, and then another, more mournful pang that shakes her to the core—no more.

Quiet again, leaving Mia alone with her shakes and her shivers and her splitting skull, and then, spilling out rapidly from Ethan—pain, worry, fear, frustration—leaving her flinching out into the darkness.

Finally: reaching, reaching, hope, hurt, comfort, don’tleave, won’tleave, run, run, needtogo, trustpleasetrust, promisepromisepromise—

And then—nothing. Stillness. Dead silence. Like he’s wandered off so far into the bright horizon that would surely open for Ethan Winters and all the mundane good he stood for, and never for Mia Peterson, Clearance Level 3, that she’ll never reach him again. He gets fainter and fainter, the bond thinning out in her hands.

She doesn’t understand. He’s not dying. Not—unraveling. Just…somehow pulling back like none of this affects him at all, because why would it—since when has the mortal world ever touched Ethan Winters, the man who walked into the Minotaur’s maze that had imprisoned her these last three years and blown it open like it was nothing. What is he doing, Agent 4210 snarls, and Mia, the small, frightened part of her that is simply Mia, cries: don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.

It gets so quiet again. Even the other voices fade out, like they’re retreating as well. Or waiting.

And then something pokes her. Something dark, and strong, quieter and infinitely more frightening than everything else caught up in this black is. Her charge. Her captor. Her Eveline.

Did you do it? the-child-that-is-not-a-child-is-her-daughter-is-not asks.

What? she whispers back, weak and confused.

Did you do it? Did you tell him to do it? Is this a trick? Is this a trap? Liar? Liar. Liarliarliarpainnotagainneveragain—

The words descend into an awful cacophony of pure feeling, and within her distant body, Mia shrieks, clamping her hands over her ears, for what little good it does.

What is Eveline asking? What is she talking about? She can’t—can’t make sense of it. Is Ethan doing it? Is he enacting the plan? Then why is Eveline here, talking to her?

Why isn’t she dead yet? Why isn’t Mia free?

The poking and prodding of Eveline’s influence stops suddenly, pulls back, as if burned.

Oh, it says. A small, short sound. Nothing more. In the darkness, pain floods out, and resentment and—resignation. In some hysterical corner of her brain, Mia suddenly recalls with vicious clarity her father’s dog from when she was a child. How, after the man went and got himself killed driving his truck home drunk after a night out with the boys, his dog had continued to wait at the door, every night, for years. Until the day it just…stopped, as if it had finally figured out he wasn’t ever coming back. That moment of calm death on its face as it just—padded out the next morning to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back.

The resignation lingers, so thick and cloying and destitute it’s suffocating, until finally, it fades. Then, like a drop of sunlight in darkness, a small, shy hope that Mia cannot even begin to make sense of blooms.

Oh, the voice says again. And just like that, it’s gone.

No, Mia realizes, when suddenly her body goes limp against the tanker floor, as if her strings have been cut, and relief and quiet comes to rest in her head. Not just the voice. Not just Eveline. All of it: the echoes, the whispers, the phantoms, the web, all of it, just—gone.

For the first time in three years, she is alone in her mind, and Mia Winters weeps openly. She weeps with utter, unfettered joy. She is free.

Ethan did it, she thinks wildly. He did it, he did it, she’s gone.

She curls up, a miserably relieved, exhausted ball, shivering in the cold of the tanker, and waits. She’s too injured, too damn tired, to stand. She can wait. She can rest, and wait here, for him.

He’ll come. Ethan will come. He’ll always come.

—(((())))—

She sleeps.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she must, because the next thing she knows, she’s startling awake to the rumbles and creaks of the tanker taking on more weight than its slumbering corpse has in years, and the thumps of men’s boots on the metal floor in the corridor beyond the room where she lies. Heavy boots, paced steps. Military, or military-adjacent, she can tell instantly. Alan had walked like that, even when playing the part of the father on their ill-advised trip on this same ship. He just couldn’t help it.

Ethan? she wonders again. Had he called the police?

There’s the murmur of voices in the corridor, the words too quiet to make out. A flash of light pierces through the mold covering the porthole, causing her to wince and shield her face with her hands.

“On three!” she hears, and as the count ticks down and a thunderous crash suddenly echoes out as the door shoots open, knocked in by a military-grade rammer, she throws her arms up on instinct.

“No, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and then, as engrained training she’d thought had been utterly lost to her kicks in, as if her suddenly entirely-independent mind had hard reset itself back to who she once had been, she opens her mouth once more, and rattles off a string of letters and numbers taught to every Connections employee of a certain level, meant for sudden rendezvouses and emergencies just like this. A quick way to identify friend from foe, and the outsiders from those in the know.

The men storming into the room slow, stop, guns trained on her but not firing, at least. She’ll take what she can get. As her eyes dart around the room, though, a curl of anxiety begins to form in her stomach. These aren’t cops, she can tell that much. And they don’t look like they’re from the home office, either—she almost curses herself for playing her hand before it’s time. If they’re not Connections, she doesn’t need them to know how she’s tied up in all this.

One of the men steps forward, his face obscured by his anti-pathogen mask. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Mia keeps her hands up, considers how to play the part being offered to her—an innocent kidnap victim of the Bakers’, she could sell that, but—it’s so quiet, inside her head, and she doesn’t see her husband among these bodies and they don’t know who she is—“I was—the Bakers, Eveline, she—where is Ethan, do you have him?” It’s not that hard to put on the desperation—in truth, it doesn’t feel that faked. Her heart leaps in rabbit bounds in her chest. Ethan, Ethan. He can’t be dead. “Please, my husband, we were…we were trapped here, and then—he was in the mines, he was going back to the house—”

The man who spoke to her lowers his gun slightly. “Your husband? Who—” He stops, and though she can’t see it, she can still feel the considering, unsure frown. “That was a code, what you just said before, wasn’t it.”

“I—”

“I know what a code sounds like, Miss.”

“Please—”

“Vanderwalker, the primer,” her interrogator barks, and one of the other men in the room takes a hand off his gun, slides a small tablet out of his bulletproof vest and passes it to the first. He shuffles his gun and takes the tablet with a free hand, flipping through something she can’t see on the screen. “…Huh. Mia Winters. We thought you were dead.”

She freezes. “How—”

“The Annabel’s passenger manifests, and what records we could seize or hack from the Connections. They’ve been dodging us a while, Ms. Winters. Did their best to keep this all under wraps.”

“Please,” she shakes her head. “I wasn’t—I didn’t.” The Connections knew? This whole time? And they just left her here?

What did you expect? some snarky, bitter part of her that is all Eveline whispers.

“I didn’t know,” she finishes lamely. “Whatever they’ve done—I don’t—I’ve been here since the Annabel crashed. I’ve been—I was kept captive. I haven’t had contact with anyone from the Connections.”

“Oh, we know, Ms. Winters,” the man passes the tablet back to the other soldier. “BSAA intercepted emails between Lucas Baker and your former benefactors, as well as other third parties, some days ago. We know perfectly well your role here, as well as the conditions you’ve been kept in.” He chuckles a little—almost nervously—breaking the cool, military demeanor. “They uh…really left you out to dry, huh?”

Mia’s stomach rolls over on itself. The BSAA. That’s—fuck. Just…fuck. Everyone at the Connections knew what the BSAA was, what they did. If they were here, it was well and truly over, on every level.

“If I cooperate—” she beings automatically.

“We’ll see what we can do for you,” the man confirms smoothly. “You’re not the first to end up in this kind of situation, I assure you, Ms. Winters. The BSAA has made informants and even agents out of worse. First, though, I think you’ll be needing medical attention, and we have work to do.” He signals to a couple of his men, who slip their guns into their holsters and approach her, no doubt to escort her out.

“Wait—” she says quickly, sharply, hearing the crack in her voice as she backs away just a little. “Wait. Wait. What about Ethan? What deal does he get?”

“Ethan?” the speaker stops. “We didn’t have an Ethan in the list of the missing. Is he new?”

“No,” she snaps, feeling herself losing patience. “He’s my husband, I told you! He came here looking for me. He’s here! He’s here and he could be in danger, and you need to find him!” The man makes a gesture upwards, and she shakes her head. With a sudden pang, she misses her old team. They were terrible at niceties and a few of them had cruel streaks that ran deep and wide—Miranda especially—but she’d never doubted their competence. All communication among the E-001 researchers, handlers, and guards had always been quick, efficient, and to the point. “Not here,” she all but snarls. “He went back up through the mines, to the house!”

The BSAA agent in front of her tenses a little, then lifts a hand to his temple, tapping his helmet where a built-in earpiece might be. “Hey, Chris?” he says, and she hears a muted voice on the other end. “Yeah, yeah, I know you’re about to head into the mines, but—y’all done searching the house?” Another pause. “All of them?” The tinny voice on the other end of the line sounds irritated when it replies this time. “Yeah, I know, it’s just—I’ve got Mia Winters here—Yes, that Mia Winters, and she says that her husband—” A sigh. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

Mia Winters, finding herself at the end of her rope, feels it stretch thin, string out, snap. She is tired. She is dirty. Her head hurts and she is cold and she has been through one of the worst nights of her life, and she wants Ethan. “Give me that,” she snaps, in the tone that belongs solely to Agent 4210, sticking out a hand. The agent in front of her, and the soldiers around her, stare. Her fingers flex tensely, palm still up, and she grits her teeth. “I know the layout of the property better than any of you possibly could, so just—”

The man in front of her reaches up, presses at the side of his helmet, and a small radio earpiece pops out. He fiddles with it, and a voice fills the cavernous silence of the room. “I told you, we’ve searched the whole damn property, twice. There are no survivors present, and the only body we’ve recovered in full so far is Marguerite Baker’s—if you even want to call it a body.”

“Have you searched the whole grounds?” Mia says coldly. “The main house, the guest house, the old house? What about the storage shed, or the barn? The trailer? The docks?”

There’s a long pause. “Graves, what the fuck—” begins the voice.

“My husband is there,” Mia yells before anyone can begin to protest. Now that she’s pretty confident they won’t shoot her, so long as she has information that might be useful, she’s run out of any pretense of niceties or personas. “He’s there! He left me here, and he went to stop Eveline, to save me!”

Mia has not spoken to her mother in many years, but suddenly she can imagine her rolling her eyes, snorting. Yes, play the irate woman, why don’t you, dear? That’ll work so well for you.

“…To stop Eveline,” the voice on the speaker repeats, not a question. “Graves, do we have a visual on Eveline yet?”

“No, boss, we haven’t swept the tanker yet. Kind of got—distracted.”

Mia feels a heavy weight inside her sink from her throat, to her chest, to the pit of her stomach. “She’s still alive?” she whispers. “You—you think she’s here?”

“She isn’t?” the newly-identified Graves asks.

“No, of course she isn’t! She wouldn’t even be able to—” She cuts herself off angrily. “The only person here is me. Eveline isn’t here, that’s why Ethan went back to the house.”

There’s a very tired sigh from the other end of the line. “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got men already in those tunnels and I’m not leaving them to deal with Lucas Baker and possibly Eveline as well on their own. I’m heading out, I’ll take a team down. If we find Eveline, we’ll eliminate her. If we find Winters, we’ll bring him back up. Otherwise, someone else figure this out.” The man audibly cuts his connection to the line, muttering about goddamn bureaucracy, and goddamn Blue Umbrella especially, as he does so. After an awkward moment of silence another, this time female, voice steps in.

“Um, Graves?”

Graves makes a despairing sound. “This was supposed to be a secure—yes, Ramos, what?”

“So, um, don’t panic. We do still have that tanker and the mines to search, and if she’s down there with Baker God knows Redfield will get the job done, but—”

Mia watches the speaker warily, feeling more like a cornered animal than she has this entire encounter. The back of her mind is a panicked thrum, making her tense, ready to run. Eveline Eveline Eveline, alive alive. But—but she’d felt the darkness, the web go. She’d felt it leave her. Surely—”

“Just tell me, Ramos.”

“So my guys were searching the barn again, and uh—well, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, figures they’d have more than the one car, but—”

“Ramos.”

“…Lucas Baker had his own little garage set up in here. A few cars and—other stuff—he was working on. One of them’s…missing.” Graves grunts an affirmative, and the woman continues softly. “Now, there’s been a lot of mold around here, obviously, and someone um…someone bleeding. Maybe a few someones. Makes for good footprint impressions.”

Graves groans. “Don’t tell me Lucas Baker is currently in a getaway car, Ramos.”

“…No, Sir,” says Ramos, perfectly calm in her speaking tone but her every word ringing of a barely-concealed panic that Mia can only hear because she’s lived that feeling, lived this life, before it all went wrong. She knows how to say her yes, Sirs and no, Ma’ams and clean up the mess where it’s made and keep moving even as things implode. That’s what she was paid so well for, after all. “No, it’s definitely not Baker. Chris’s lot has eyes on him down in the mines, we know he’s there. It’s...it’s two tracks, Sir. Male. Size 10 or 11. Probably between 5’9” and 6’ even. Even stepper, limping a little. And—just one of the other set, Sir, he must have been carrying her, put her down for just a moment, probably to hotwire the car—”

“Her?”

“…Women’s boot imprints. Small. Size 5 or 6 maximum. It’s—well, there’s only two female occupants of the Baker residence currently unaccounted for, Sir, and we have no reason to believe Zoe Baker would need to be carried, or that she’d be wearing shoes several sizes too small.”

It takes a moment. A moment of stillness, silence. She doesn’t want to believe it, Mia thinks. Can’t believe it—can’t make sense of the mere concept. Not Ethan. Not her Ethan. He’d rallied so well, resisted Eveline’s influence like it was nothing. He wasn’t—he wasn’t like her. Ethan Winters was unfailingly good, and kind, and clean, and had never let a single person in his life make him do something he didn’t want to do.

But that’s when it clicks. The flashes of emotion, the reaching, the hope. The sudden, inexplicable quiet as she felt Ethan’s thread in the web pull further and further from her, until suddenly all of it, Eveline included, was gone. Not dead. But gone.

“Well—fuck,” Graves says with feeling, somewhere far away from where Mia swims in her disbelief, and her dawning realization.

Everything around her goes dark and fuzzy, and she feels herself pitch sideways—not fainting, she is not that weak and never will be again if she can help it, but...off-kilter—as a couple of the BSAA agents rush to steady her.

Ethan, she thinks, wails, keens, through the haze. Ethan, what have you done?

Silence, the abandoned web, is her only answer.

And Mia Winters, née Peterson, feels her heart shatter.

Chapter Text

Among the many things Ethan would not have previously imagined himself thinking within these last twenty-four hours, ‘Thank God for Lucas Baker’ would almost certainly rank among the most unlikely. He could provide a very comprehensive list for his reasoning there, starting with “literally everything Lucas had done to him, at him, or in his vague proximity,” and ending with “he’s just a fucking dick.”

But still, think it he does, as he plows on through the dense swamplands beyond the Baker grounds, the daybreak sun rising over a muggy Louisiana morning, while Ethan desperately tries to remember everything Delia had ever taught him about driving stick.

If he manages to crash this car, he thinks, his aunt would have his head. She’d been an engineer in her first life, and a mechanic in her second, and had made sure her surrogate children were as prepared for everything and anything about handling cars and all the ways they could go wrong as any person could be. She would not suffer to mourn him if he managed to die by flipping a Toyota Tundra driving through a little bit of swamp.

Not to mention, perhaps more pressingly, that if he crashes this car he and Eveline are both done for regardless. It’s their only way out of here.

The car handles like a dream, at least, save the few miscellaneous, unlabeled, and therefore ominous buttons that have clearly been installed by Lucas himself during his modifications—meaning nobody could ever pay Ethan to touch them. The tires are large and clearly made for off-roading, the steering is meticulously calibrated, and, most importantly, it’s quiet. Save the crack and murmur of exposed roots and dead branches under-wheel, Ethan can’t hear much of anything, and that’s just how he likes it. No need to give Umbrella and the BSAA any more chances to track them than they already have. As it is, he shudders to think of the obvious tire marks and trail he must be leaving behind, and weaves and swerves as much as possible—dipping into shallow ponds and streams whenever he can—to avoid making it easier for them.

And so, reluctantly, think the same words again and again he does as he guides the truck between trees and over earth, over mud, pooling water: Thank you Lucas Baker, for the one decent thing you’ve probably ever done for this world, albeit accidentally.

Still doesn’t make him hate the man any less, though. Maybe the BSAA will do him a favor and put a cap in the sadistic fuck.

Eveline has been silent much of their ride, save the occasional moan or murmur of pain from her body. He’d set the old woman up in the backseat—strapped in tight and buffered on all sides by every soft thing he could snag from the barn’s quasi-garage. There hadn’t been much, but—Lucas seemed to have a bad habit of leaving his dirty laundry wherever he pleased, literally, and it was better than nothing. Ethan had figured better some stink than broken bones, and Eveline hadn’t argued.

The hallucination, her girl form, is curled up in the passenger seat, legs tucked against her chest and chin to her knees—unnaturally still in a way that belies her true incorporeal nature, even if nothing else does—as she stares out the window. She hasn’t looked at Ethan once during the drive as they roughly work their way through these few slow, but precious, miles of pure wilderness beyond the Baker homestead. She just watches the swamp pass them by, her little face reflected in the windowpane just enough for Ethan to catch glimpses of it when he darts his eyes over from time to time, trying to gauge her mental state.

He’s not at all sure where they stand—they’ve hardly had time for proper conversation, after all—and Ethan is…nervous, to initiate it now. He doesn’t need Eveline getting upset and—well, he’d seen what she’d done to the tanker. A car would hardly pose a problem for her.

He’s not afraid, exactly, just…attempting to be practical. They need to get away from the BSAA. A car makes doing that much, much easier. Therefore, it would be optimal if Eveline did not flip, destroy, or otherwise rend the car unusable by way of Ethan accidentally triggering her temper.

So he keeps his mouth shut, focuses on driving, watches her when he can through stolen glances, brief moments.

Despite her silence, he can tell she’s not zoned out—gone into some half-sleep or surrendered her mind to white noise. Her face has been saying plenty—changing and shifting as she picks over some thought or other within her own inner world she’s retreated into. She’d gotten into the car hesitantly, at first, then watched the retreating Baker farm blankly, with quick, sideways glances at Ethan, as if she couldn’t quite believe they were actually doing this. After a while, she’d retreated even further inward, drawn herself tense as she glared out at the world with furrowed brows and a set jaw. Thinking, clearly. Considering…something. There’d been flashes of other emotions across her face in moments—aggression, confusion, naked despair Ethen hadn’t even begun to know how to quell. The whole thing had felt all too tenuous to try and break the silence until they were well away from the Baker residence.

Eventually, something else had crossed Eveline’s small face—resignation, and then a touch of shy surprise—before it had petered out into a kind of lost, unsure haze in her blank eyes and the tilt of her mouth as she continued, without fail, to keep her gaze on the window, and everything they were passing by that had made up her life for the last three years.

She’s still thinking, Ethan can tell—can practically feel her brain furiously abuzz through that black, ebbing space now intertwined with his brain. But that, too, feels like something entirely too much to even attempt to parse in this moment.

And so, in silence, lost in their own thoughts, they drive on.

Ethan turns his mind into where they go from here—not in the long-term, he’s entirely too tired to begin to figure that out, but in the immediate coming hours and days. He retreats into that sharp, clear mindset that kept him alive when he was a teenager as well as through this last day: Survivor’s Checklist. They need shelter, somewhere to rest and regroup. Food and supplies. Gas, that’ll be needed eventually, too. Ethan will have to find a map, figure out the best route westward through Louisiana and far away from Dulvey. There are small towns aplenty to stop off in, but they’re more likely to remember unfamiliar faces. Conversely, if he limits himself to larger cities, there’s more surveillance, but more places where anonymity can be paid for by the hour. And if they can get to Texas fast enough, he’s still got a couple spots sporting the paranoid stashes he never grew out of setting up, and places they could stop and rest, if only momentarily. All this, of course, assuming they can get there before the BSAA figures out who he is, and where every bit of property he’s ever owned, rented, or even passed through is. None of his safe spots are in his name, of course, but that’ll only keep the powers that be off his back so long, and—

Shit, fuck, he realizes, with a moment of heart-stopping dread. His family. It won’t take the BSAA and Umbrella that long to come up with his name—even less time if they find Mia, and she cuts a deal, which he can only imagine she will—and trace every single person he’s ever been connected to. His brother. His sister. Delia. Not to mention the other survivors they’re connected to, and—

For the first time, Ethan properly stops to consider how many people he’s put at risk, how many lives he’s put in danger, with his incredibly impulsive decision to take Eveline and run. For nineteen years the survivors of Raccoon City have kept their heads low, their new identities intact, traded secrets and safehouses to ferry people into new places, new names, new lives, when necessary. There have been losses, of course, but the network of survivors Ethan knows and the networks beyond that have proved just how stubborn, ingenious, and resourceful the common man can be when their back is up against the wall, and when they suck it up and work together.

And now, after all this time, and with one stupid act, Ethan has blown it all up.

He needs to—to get to a phone. A burner, preferably—something that can’t be easily traced—and call Delia. Call Michael. Tell them to be alert and ready and that they may need to go underground at any moment, tell them to pass the message on to do the same to everyone they’re in contact with, anyone that could ever be tied back to Ethan. Hopefully one of them can reach Ava, wherever she is, whatever the fuck she’s doing now, he can’t get another sister killed, he can’t—

Ethan doesn’t realize he’s hyperventilating, vision growing distant and blurry, until Eveline screams, and then his sight clears, and Ethan narrowly swerves to avoid a massive white oak tree, only to brake hard as a bald cypress rises to meet them. It only works so much as it keeps them from hitting the tree at full-speed, and for a moment Ethan’s world is only two things: white, and Eveline’s frightened screams.

His brain comes back online in stages, pushing past the static trying to take him over to save him from his panic, and he manages to lift his hands, push down the inflated airbag enough to dig out his pocket knife, puncture and deflate it. The next thing he registers is small fists pounding his side, and Eveline’s voice shrieking “You dummy! You dummy! Stupid! Liar! Nearly killed us!”

“I’m sorry,” Ethan whispers, everything feeling hazy as he stares at the trembling form of the girl next to him, furious tears leaking down her face. “I’m sorry, Eveline. I didn’t mean to.”

“Stupid!” Eveline just wails again. “I hate you!” And Ethan braces, instinctively, for attack, but she just turns away, shoulders tense, and curls up in the passenger seat as far away from him as she can get. Ethan feels himself relax, just a little, before he sags forward, forehead thumping against the wheel. He tries, and mostly fails, to take deep breaths, feeling his own frustrated, frightened tears threatening to escape.

How was it that not twenty-four hours ago, he had been on the phone with his brother, driving through Dulvey, excited and more full of hope than he had been for three miserable, long years? He’d dared to dream, just once, that something could go right in his life. That the universe might finally grant him one miracle, one boon. How naïve he’d been.

They sit there for a long while, the wheel forming an impression in Ethan’s skin, as he tries to breathe, calm himself, and Eveline sniffles in the seat next to him.

“I’m sorry,” he eventually says again, when it feels like he can open his mouth without screaming. “I really am, Eveline. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m so sorry I frightened you.”

Eveline makes an irritated, disbelieving sound, but inclines her body a little more towards him, peeking carefully at him out of the corner of her eye. “…Not frightened.”

“…Okay,” Ethan says, smiling just a little. “Well, I’m sorry I startled you.”

Eveline just scowls at him, and Ethan decides to count that as a win. Really, given how volatilely he’s seen her temper play out in action, or when she sees something as a threat, he’s lucky she didn’t just rip him apart the moment the car crashed. It seems she understands that, for the moment at least, her best chances of survival involve him alive. It’s hardly trust, but he can work with it, for now.

Whatever keeps them both breathing.

He leans back slowly in his seat, carefully rolling his neck and eyeing the dashboard, trying to assess both the state of his body and the car. He seems uninjured, given some inevitable bruises that will surely pop up. As for the car…

Well, he’ll have to get out and check properly to be sure, but it doesn’t look good.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, and adds on, almost off-handedly. “Better the car than us, I guess. You okay?”

Eveline is conspicuously silent, and Ethan feels his heart rate pick up.

“…Eveline?”

Her eyes flit to him, and then to the back of the car, before she shakes her head slowly, grimacing. “…Hurts.” Is all she says softly, and Ethan feels his stomach lurch as he swings his head around, towards the back of the car where Eveline’s real, old, incredibly fragile body that he’d somehow forgotten about rests. The old woman stares in mute agony back at him, trembling between the now-displaced old couch cushions stolen from the barn and Lucas’s rank laundry. Her shoulder, where the seatbelt lays overtop, sits at an odd angle, and a thin smear of blood mars the corners of her mouth.

“Oh God,” Ethan says, practically scrambling out of the car and wrenching open the back door, hands fluttering unsurely as he stares at her body. “Oh—Jesus. I’m sorry, Eveline, I didn’t—what was I thinking—”

Eveline says nothing, her apparition watching Ethan and her body with an indecipherable expression from the front seat.

“Am I going to die?” she asks, almost blandly, like most people would ask about the weather, and Ethan tamps down a hysterical laugh.

“No,” is all he manages, as he leans forward and unbuckles the seatbelt. “No, you’re not. I promise. Can I move you?” As hesitant as he would be to move an accident victim with potential physical trauma under normal circumstances, these are not normal circumstances, and he can already smell leaking gas coming from somewhere underneath the car. He and Eveline need to get away from the vehicle, and fast.

Eveline merely shrugs in response, her own small face looking worse by the moment—sweat beading on her forehead and even paler than before—and he hesitantly scoops the old woman out from the backseat, cradling her in his arms. She coughs and moans in pain, body spasming and eyes rolling before they slip shut and she falls still. When Ethan next looks around, Eveline’s hallucinatory form is gone.

—(((())))—

Ethan walks for more than an hour through the swamp, left only with the lucky sense of direction that hasn’t failed him yet, and alone save for Eveline’s unconscious body, and a few alligators. Those, he gives a wide berth to.

Eveline’s child form never returns, and that worries him even more than the increasingly grey pallor of her body’s skin, or her wheezy breathes—which, it should be said, worry him plenty. He has no medical supplies left, though, and no safe place to stop. All he can do is keep walking, and pray to both his mother’s God and all the others that never seemed to answer him that he hadn’t taken Eveline from the Baker residence in hopes of saving her just to destroy her in a goddamn car crash, and that, just this once, he doesn’t get another person who doesn’t deserve it in the slightest killed.

Eventually, though, he spots something, fleetingly, ahead of him, and as Ethan doubles-down and near-jogs towards it, he feels his heart leap as the clear outline of a rugged cabin comes into view. He has no idea what it’s doing all the way out here, and it’s seen better days, but it’s shelter, and at this point that makes it practically divine intervention.

He edges towards it carefully, once he gets close enough. He sees no signs of life, but there’s no such thing as too careful. Still, no human or monster, or anything otherwise, appears as he finally rounds his way to the door on the far side of the structure, and when he hesitantly nudges it open with his foot—unlocked, somehow, is he sure he isn’t dreaming?—only silence and stale air greet him.

Quickly, he slips inside, flicking on the light with his elbow. At least there’s power, and as he surveys the single, mostly-bare room, he find his other primary necessity: a bed. He lays Eveline’s body down on it carefully, propping her head up with the couple thin pillows available, and then hovers over her, unsure what else to do. She remains utterly unconscious.

She needs medical treatment, he knows, but even if he could get her to a hospital, how could he ever explain the situation? He has no documentation for either of them, and even with a clever story, BSAA would be on them in no time. No. Hospitals are out.

What Eveline really needs, most desperately, he knows, is her medication. Whatever her creators had been giving her to supplement her regenerative abilities and override the alterations in her DNA that cause her rapid ageing. That would solve all their problems in one.

Except—yeah, he has no idea where to get that. If there was any brought from the ship to the Baker farm, he assumes Eveline blew through it already. And he has no idea where he can get more.

Exhausted, overwhelmed, his head spinning, Ethan sits back on his heels in his crouch by Eveline’s bedside, buries his face in his hands.

What is he doing?

He’d really like a phone right now. Zoe calling him up with more cryptic but concise instructions—not that she’d have ever helped him with this—or Mia’s calm, collected, soothing voice letting him know everything will be okay.

He snorts involuntarily at the thought. Yeah. That one’s not happening, either.

What he really wants, deep inside where the scared child who never really left Raccoon City sleeps, is to call his family. His aunt, who has never once wavered in the face of the impossible, or his brother, who always took being the oldest very seriously. Ethan Winters is thirty-three goddamn years old and counting, but all he can think in this moment is: I need an adult.

Almost looking for a Hail Mary, he gets to his feet, his eyes roaming over the room. In a seemingly-abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere, a phone, he knows, is incredibly unlikely—he was lucky enough to get working power—but he still can’t help but look. With Eveline asleep at his back, and no idea where he goes from here—how much further can he carry her before it’s a death sentence for both of them?—he has nothing better to do than pick through the cabinets built into the little kitchenette on the far wall.

He doesn’t find much. A few cans of miscellaneous foods, half past their expiry date, a couple knives in no better shape than the one he has, some handgun ammo with no gun attached. A blank journal save a few scribblings that look like some kind of military shorthand. Boxing gloves. A photo of a couple young kids who could be Zoe and Lucas, but he’s honestly not sure.

Who built this place? Jack Baker? Why?

The tail end of his search turns up one boon—a map of Dulvey and the swamps beyond it along the coastline, littered with annotations and hand-drawn landmarks. He studies it desperately, trying to pick out anything that might be helpful—rivers that connect out to the gulf, caves and cabins, entrances and exits dotted about to the salt mines.

“Are we in one of Joe’s cabins?” a young voice asks next to his shoulder, and Ethan startles hard, whirling around and meeting eyes with Eveline’s apparition as she stares curiously up at him. She still looks pale and wan, but alert, all things considered, even if her body is still mostly comatose in the background, its rattling breathes a discomforting background noise.

“You’re awake,” Ethan says in surprise, and then thinks to tack on—“…Who’s Joe?”

Eveline gives him another one of her unreadable looks, and turns, walking over to a cabinet and hopping up onto it, her legs kicking and swinging in the air. “He’s Daddy’s brother. I never met him. Mama said he lives out in the swamp like a hobo, but Daddy said he’s…” She wrinkles her nose, looking for the right word. “Nomadic. A hermit. He and Daddy don’t always get along, so they don’t visit much anymore. Daddy said he built lots of cabins and stuff out here.”

Oh, great, Ethan thinks wearily. Another Baker. At least this one isn’t infected with the mold, though Ethan suspects he’d still be on Joe’s shitlist if he knew what he’d done to the rest of his family.

Eveline looks unbothered, though, and he marvels at her words and demeanor. She’s got empathy problems, that’s not even a question, but still…in moments like these, when she talks, she really does sound like a normal kid, repeating what she’s picked up in osmosis from her parents’ conversations.

“How are you feeling?” Ethan asks her softly, and her brow creases, before her eyes dart to her body and back to him.

“…I don’t think…I don’t think it can last much longer,” she says, carefully placing the distancing language between herself and the old woman’s physical form. “It’s injured, and the further we get from the rest of the mold…”

“The what?”

Eveline makes a kind of wide, sweeping gesture at the ground beneath them, moving her arms out from her body slowly. “The mold…likes to spread. We like it—being…free. It grew all around the houses, after I came here, and underneath. That way, I could see everywhere, be everywhere.”

Ethan recalls the enormous, moldy roots that had sprouted from the earth to divert the helicopters’ attention, and…yeah, that checks out. Terrifying to consider, no doubt, but…it checks out.

“And the mold…” he begins slowly, and Eveline shrugs.

“…Keeps it stable, I think? It should have kept…ageing. Until—” she shifts nervously, her eyes flitting away. “But it didn’t. I managed to stop it. But I think, the further we go from the roots of the colony…”

“The harder it is for your body to hold itself together,” Ethan finishes, and then swears vehemently, burying his face in his hands.

He can’t move her, he concludes. Can’t take her any further. Not without great risk of killing her.

“You need your medicine, Eveline,” he says, muffled into his hands, and then spreads his fingers to peek an eye out at her. She watches him, her own little brow furrowed in thought. “It’s the only way I can think of to fix you. If you had it, could you heal yourself?”

An uncertain shadow crosses over Eveline’s face, and she is silent for a long moment, before, quietly, unsurely, she simply says, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Maybe isn’t yes, but it isn’t no, Ethan reminds himself. It’s a chance—a shot. And he doesn’t have any better ideas.

Where to get it, though, that’s the problem. He has no idea what Eveline was actually being given, and can only think of one group who’d definitely keep the chemicals on hand.

“Where’s the nearest Connections outpost?” he asks her, and Eveline sneers.

“What? Going to give me back to them? I won’t! I’ll—” her face screws up. “I’ll kill you, I will!”

“No,” Ethan shakes his head quickly, holds his hands up. God, how quickly one can get used to death threats. Despite knowing her power, she’s still less frightening than the same words coming from Jack had been. “No, of course not. But you need your medicine, Eveline. If—if I can break in, and get it for you, then…”

Eveline’s face shifts, softens, just a little, and then—looks away, shrugs.

“…I don’t really…I don’t know places, very well,” she says quietly. “Daddy had a book of maps, and I looked at that a little, but…the doctors, they didn’t say that much in front of me.”

“What about where they were they taking you?”

Eveline makes a helpless gesture. “Honduras.”

Ethan curses everything that comes to mind. They’d never even get past the border. “Anywhere else? Try, Eveline, please. Anywhere they ever mentioned offhand? Anywhere—anywhere Mia mentioned?”

His wife had to work somewhere. She took endless trips, yes, but even when she didn’t she was going into an office, so surely—

Eveline’s face furrows in thought. “New…New Mexico…?”

Ethan quickly runs the math. He and Mia had lived on the western edge of Texas—talked endlessly about moving down southeast to the gulf and finding a place on the shore, but never did—and it wouldn’t have been impossible for her to have been traveling into New Mexico for work. Not impossible at all. A long drive, but…if she’d wanted to disguise her workplace, that was certainly a way to do it.

“New Mexico, okay,” he says, nodding. “That, yeah, that—” And then his eyes track over to Eveline’s body, and he knows, with certainty, in the condition she’s in, she’d never make it to New Mexico. “…That’s not going to work,” he finishes, and groans, leaning back against a cabinet and slumping to the ground. His hands find his hair and tug lightly, as if the pain might clear his head, give him some new ideas.

Desperately, he runs through everywhere he’s been in the last twenty-four hours, turns over every location in his mind’s eye. The tanker? Mia must have been transporting some of Eveline’s injections for her, and it’s possible Eveline wouldn’t have thought or known where to get them from. But—that place is surely crawling with BSAA soldiers by now, and even if not, Mia is presumably still there. His heart lurches at the thought, worry seeping through, but—she got the serum, she’ll be fine.

The house…surely, as he’d previously thought, if there’d been any at the house, Eveline would have gotten to it. That doesn’t leave much of anywhere else for regenerative chemicals to be hiding. There’s nothing out here. Just the swamp, and the mines—

His brain stops. Doubles back. And Ethan feels his breath catch.

The mines.

Lucas had clearly been working in collaboration with the Connections. They’d practically had a whole outfit down there, between the documents and photos, the microscopes and tubs, and the necrotoxin processor. And Ethan had hardly searched the whole place—he’d been so focused on getting to the house, finding Eveline. He’d found a map later on, just before he’d found his way back into the guest house. There were offshoots he hadn’t even checked, places where more lab outfits could have been hidden away, and—

There were documents there that more than implied experiments were being run. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, then, that they had a supply of whatever chemicals they were treating Eveline with. It’s just chance—only a chance, but—but it is a chance. A chance that exactly what they need is right below them.

Ethan scrambles to his feet, pulling the map of the mines out of his bag, and laying it out flat on the counter, next to the annotated map of the area Joe Baker had left behind. He traces them both with his fingers, mapping similarities, barely daring to draw breath as he does so.

“What are you doing?” Eveline asks, half-suspicious, half-curious, and Ethan feels her hallucinated form brush against his side, trying to see what he does.

Ethan turns to her, wild-eyed, and points at a spot on the map, an entrance to the mines, not more than a mile from where they now stand.

“I think I know where I can get you your medicine.”

—(((())))—

Eveline, it should be said, is not enthusiastic from the start at the idea of being left behind.

“Take me with you,” she says shortly, and stubbornly, where they sit together on the dusty ground of the shack, the maps between them. They’d graduated to the floor so Eveline could better see as Ethan explained his idea, and now Ethan gets a clear view of her child form sitting cross-legged and arms tightly wound in an angry knot, glaring between him and the maps with half a pout set on her face.

“No,” he simply says, carefully circling areas of the mines that are the most likely hiding places of other pop-up labs, and then folding both maps and sliding them into his shirt pocket. He turns to quickly reorganizing his bag, prioritizing weaponry while leaving enough space for as much medication as he can carry. He reloads his guns quickly, efficiently, while considering the heavier pieces. Lucas’s hellish homemade grenade launcher is cumbersome and loud and probably overkill, but if the man who made it is still down there? Yeah, he’d like to have it on hand, he thinks. Show his appreciation, as it were.

“Take me with you, or I won’t let you go!” Eveline’s face screws up into a mask of frustration. “I won’t! I’ll—I’ll—”

“I can’t,” Ethan says with as much patience as he can muster, cutting her off before she can start in on the death threats again. “Your body isn’t well, Eveline. It can’t walk on its own, and if I carry you I’ll move a lot slower. More importantly—I can’t carry you and protect myself.”

Eveline narrows her eyes, obviously considering this, and then snorts. “Fine. It can stay here, and I will go with you.”

A more reasonable demand, certainly, but instead Ethan just finds himself grimacing, unsure how to talk her through this. “I need you…not to expend more energy than you absolutely have to, right now,” he says, and it’s true. Eveline’s body is in an incredibly frail state, and being separated from the rest of her mold may be jumpstarting her deterioration once more. Not to mention her injuries from the crash. He doesn’t know how much energy it actually takes Eveline to project her hallucination onto his mind, but given how lifelike it is, and how he’s seen her body react when she has to use her powers, he’d put money on it at least being a slight strain right now, and he’d rather not take his chances. The further they get from her body, the greater the energy she’ll probably have to expend to keep up the illusion.

Not to mention the fact that Ethan’s not even sure she can follow him, tethered to his mind, into those labs. Eveline’s presence—her molded, her voice, her power—had leeched into every crumbling wall and cavern of those mines, except in the labs themselves, where she was curiously absent. It’s obvious she has no idea Lucas wasn’t under her sway, or that he was working with the Connections, and that makes Ethan suspect the labs are…hidden, in some way. A blank, fuzzy spot in her mind’s eye she turns away from without even consciously realizing it—the same way she’d turned the Bakers’ minds from her ailing body.

He explains as much to her, as gently as he can, and watches the crease in her brow grow sharper and sharper. He can tell she’s deeply unsettled by the concept of a part of the Baker residence, or what lies underneath it, not within her control, and what’s more—

“Lucas wouldn’t,” she says softly. “He—no. I’d know.”

“I saw the emails, Eveline. He was definitely working with them.”

“No!” She glares at him, suspicious once more. “You’re lying! He couldn’t have been—you said they cured him, but I could still talk to him, I could still feel him!” In the back of Ethan’s mind, the dark, entangled thing that he is starting to suspect—no, starting to already accept, on some level, despite its worrying implications—is Eveline’s tie to him, her link to his mind, stirs and shifts and ebbs and flows. That soothing darkness that he had slept in before Mia found him in the tanker, and that he had pushed back in the guest house.

She’s in their heads. She’s in all their heads. The spider at the center of a web with her many caught, wriggling flies.

As soon as Ethan has the thought, he shoves it away. He’s never liked spiders. It is probably supremely unproductive to both his and Eveline’s mental health to compare her to one. She’s not trying to eat them, at least. Her intentions are much more complex, and both much more naïve and more nuanced than that.

And no matter what Mia had believed, Eveline is not some small bug or venomous beast to be crushed underfoot.

“The Connections tested your abilities a lot, right?” he says carefully. “Isn’t it possible they created some kind of vaccine that allowed someone to be infected, but not under your mental control?” Eveline’s face shifts as she obviously considers this, and he presses on. “I’m not lying, Eveline. There were emails, reports. He was documenting your….your decline, and what was happening to the—others.”

“But…”

“There’s one way to be sure, right?” Ethan says, and prays that once more he can just barely slide through another one of Lucas Baker’s dangerous, well-disguised traps. “You can…try reaching out for him. See if he answers.”

Eveline watches him, for a long moment, each silent second making Ethan both painfully aware of the dangerously short clock already ticking away for him to get into the mines, find her medicine, and get back before the BSAA either catches him or finds her, and of the fact that this conversation is entirely necessary to have. Finally, Eveline nods, and closes her eyes. Her faces shifts over time once more in those increasingly familiar patterns—searching, surprise, rage, grief. And then her eyes fly open, her little face dark with fury as she jumps to her feet, the cabin around them taken over by another rush of shifting, spore-ridden air. Less powerful than that of the Baker house, but dangerous all the same.

“Liar!” she screeches, through her flurry, and for a moment Ethan’s heart leaps into his throat and he thinks he is going to die out here, in this cabin in the middle of nowhere, before she continues on: “Bastard! I hate you, I hate you—“

And he knows she is not talking to him.

“You’re a horrible brother!” Eveline screams out to someone who is not listening, will never hear, and would never care one way or the other. “Evil, horrible brother! You don’t do that to family! You don’t—”

Ethan wonders, almost distantly, how he’ll ever explain to her that the Bakers weren’t her family. That unwilling captives can never be your family, even if you love them. Because he has no doubt her love is real—as real as it can be for her broken psyche, at least—but that doesn’t make someone your family. Family is chosen. A mutual, reciprocated love and solidarity. Eveline—terminally lonely, lost, reaching Eveline—couldn’t make complete strangers under her control into a true family for her any more than she could make Mia, who studied and feared and loathed her, a loving mother. The Bakers were good people, Ethan now believes that firmly, but at the first opportunity, they probably would have run from her, too.

As for Lucas, well—that’s another matter entirely. He’d more than proved he’d probably never loved a single person in his life.

Then the ground starts to shudder beneath him, and Ethan snaps back to life, to the present moment, and quickly flings himself forward, grabbing onto Eveline’s still disconcertingly solid apparition in something that is half bear hug, half careful restraint.

“Shhh,” he manages, half an attempt at comfort and half a warning plea. “Shh, Eveline, please. I’m sorry—I’m sorry—but you have to stop. You’re going to draw attention to us.”

The practical argument, he suspects, will work more in his favor here than anything else. Eveline is not ready for the kind of conversation they will need to have about the Bakers and her relationship to them—what she did to them, and to the others who came to the homestead—and frankly, Ethan isn’t ready for that conversation, either.

It seems he’s chosen correctly, after all, because after another couple moments the trembling in the earth below them grows still, and the spore-wind dies. Eveline breathes heavily, her back pressed to his chest, and her little hands grasping desperately at his wrists. Not to push him away, but to draw him closer.

“I don’t understand…” she whispers, but before Ethan can try for words, she continues on. “If he was cured, why didn’t he cure the others, too? Zoe didn’t want to be my sister. She kept trying to leave all the time. He could have helped her.”

“…I don’t think he really cared,” Ethan says honestly.

“But he’s her family.”

“I’m not sure that mattered much to him,” he says. “Sometimes—sometimes people are just…monsters.”

Eveline stills very rapidly, and Ethan realizes he’s said the wrong thing.

“Am I a monster?” her voice comes out flat, almost more statement than question, and Ethan knows with certainty that it is a word she’s heard before, flung at her or whispered above her head, from her creators or the victims they had her make or the ones she and the Bakers later sought out.

“…No,” Ethan says eventually, his voice cracking a little in the uncertainty of it all. Eveline has done…irreparable things. Devastating, horrible things. And, worryingly, because of Ethan’s decision to save her, if he can’t somehow undo years of intense brainwashing and the kind of violence-as-survival that’s practically been stitched into her soul at this point that he knows himself all too well, she may go on to do many more terrible things.

But—she has been the victim of unimaginable horrors that would break the spirit of even the most stubborn old soul, let alone that of someone born and raised into an environment that taught her nothing about love or compassion, and everything about how willing people not under her power were to hurt her. And she is a child. She is only a child.

“No, Eveline,” Ethan says. “You’re not a monster.”

Eveline relaxes, if only marginally. He can’t see her face from here, but he can feel her head press back against his sternum, and on the cot in the corner the old woman’s watching eyes gleam.

“Okay,” she says. “…Okay. You go. I stay here.”

Ethan breathes a deep sigh of relief, and releases her. He tries to ignore the way his hands are shaking as he makes his way over to his bag and grabs it, cinching the straps tight once it’s on his back. Everyone’s still breathing. Just keep on breathing.

When he turns back to Eveline, her form is sitting on the foot of the cot, next to her body, and she watches him with some mix of unsure suspicion and blank, naked fear that is all that of children who know abandonment more intimately than they have ever known trust.

“How do I know you’ll come back?” she says, the how do I know this isn’t a trick, that you won’t just leave if it gets too hard going unsaid.

“I promise I’m coming back,” Ethan says, and her brows furrow once more.

“But how do I know,” she says, clearly searching for the practical arguments that have worked more in Ethan’s favor thus far, and he gestures hopelessly to the pile of discarded supplies he deemed less necessary for this trip.

“I left my stuff here?”

Eveline’s eyes roam over the messy, odd-end pile of shit Ethan had picked up in the Baker house that was useful at one point or another. “Yeah, but you don’t need it. It’s replaceable.”

It’s true enough. About the only thing in there that’s neither a key Ethan will never need again or supplies Ethan could easily pick up more of at any good superstore is Mia’s Driver’s License. And, well—Ethan probably shouldn’t carry that any further from this place than he has already. Just another thing better left behind. Unnecessary baggage.

So yes, in a way, he understands Eveline’s point exactly. And he thinks on it for a long moment, remembers what it had felt like to be an insecure, frightened child, waiting for the adult who picked him up—and who promised him all the right things but who he couldn’t trust because he barely knew her and he didn’t trust anyone—to eventually discard him.

Eveline needs a reason to know he’s coming back. Something more than his word or a pile of useless keys and spare bullets or the picture of a woman he’d loved and just left behind, anyways.

“…Here,” he says, and comes over to her. He moves his hands to above his shirt collar, fumbling for a moment, before he find the clasp stuck to the dried sweat down the back of his neck, and manages to unhook it. As he pulls the chain free, the silver star at the end catches the faint light in the cabin.

He hadn’t even remembered taking the thing off his mother’s body. Had completely blocked it from memory, likely for his own sanity. Only days later had he looked in a mirror and caught a gleam of interlocked silver around his neck, and realized. His mother’s necklace.

It dangles in the air now—bright, if a bit dirty from the night’s events. A simple, six-sided star on a plain chain.

He’s not entirely sure why he still wears it. It’s not that he wouldn’t consider himself Jewish at all anymore, but—most of the time, he treats the kid who lived in Raccoon City like a dead man. It’s hard to really try to be that person again, in any regard.

He’d adapted. Took on his new name and his new, faked life story and picked up the voracious, deeply blasphemous swearing Delia was prone to as an ex-Catholic. She certainly hadn’t stopped any of them from religion—never would even consider it—it was just…practical, to Ethan’s mind. They didn’t need the attention or connections to organizations that were not survivor’s networks. They didn’t need anything else that drew attention to how obviously unrelated their makeshift family was.

And then he’d been an adult, and his life had kept moving, and he’d just never really stopped to think about it too hard. It hurt, yes, to think about any of it too much—enough that he just tried not to. He went to temple sometimes, for the holidays, before he’d married Mia, but that had been about it.

Judaism, his mother’s Judaism, had been a practical and at times cynical faith, much like her. He severely doubted she’d judge him for his choices, if she could have ever known them. And, well—it was very hard, after all, to believe in much of anything when you’d met Hell on earth. To say there was no such thing was a beautiful lie. Because Ethan had lived it. Maybe not the fire and brimstone Delia’s once-faith favored. But Hell all the same—manmade and borne on the wings of nuclear heads.

Ethan had called to his mother’s God that week in the city. It had never answered. Nothing had.

Now, it feels like another desperate cry, one last chance to go yet again unanswered, as Ethan holds out the necklace to Eveline. But he doesn’t need a god’s favor in this moment. He just needs Eveline to trust him for now, to stay here and be safe, and he needs a weapon to protect himself as he descends back into the depths. That’s all he needs.

“You can hold onto this,” he says, and drops it into her hands. Her eyes are wide as she looks down at it. “It was my mother’s. It’s very important to me. Not something I’d just leave behind.”

Eveline runs a thumb over the sharp lines of the six sides of the star. “You’re coming back?” she asks one last time, cautious and hopeful.

“Yes,” Ethan says with all the certainty he can muster. “I’m coming back.”

Chapter Text

The mines…stink. 

That’s truly the only word for it that Ethan can muster—and he feels that’s saying something given the last time he came to the mines he’d had to wade through an oil-slicked inlet of dead fish to get inside. Dead fish smell. This is a fact. The mines had smelled, too: musty and dank with abandonment and disrepair. Now, though? They reek.

Reek of death, and decay. Something earthy and primordial that Ethan can’t fully explain but only describe as undeniably fungal—like the odd, sludging, rotting stenches of the Baker house but multiplied exponentially. There’s undertones of smoke and sulfur, sensory markers of recently-fired explosives, and it wafts from somewhere onward and darker down, as Ethan goes further and further from the small, boarded-up entrance in the swamp he’d hacked his way into, and descends deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. 

The smell is annoying, and makes Ethan’s nose itch something terrible, forcing him to halt from time to time in his paced jog to sneeze violently. As he gets further into the mines, he becomes able to see the floating spore particles wafting in the air—which is thicker, foggier, almost with a taste to it reminiscent of sweet-rot. 

Of course, the entirety of the Baker estate is likely crawling with airborne spores, but this is…more concentrated, like that of Eveline’s defenses, and not something Ethan had encountered previously in the mines. At first, he chalks it up to simply being in a different section, but as he goes—

As he goes, from time to time, the earth trembles under his feet, like distant explosions, and Ethan begins to reevaluate. 

He knows Lucas was down here—is still down here, maybe. And that Umbrella and the BSAA were looking for him. Combine that with Ethan’s first-hand knowledge of how much Lucas loves bombs, traps, the mold, and generally being a massive dickhead, and Ethan would put good money on Lucas currently being engaged in some kind of half-combat, half hide-and-seek, with the BSAA. It would certainly explain the explosions, and the spore-filled air billowing out like it’s leaking from concentrated canisters.

Good news: this means the BSAA and Lucas will likely both be so distracted by each other they won’t even notice Ethan is down here as well. Bad news: this also means everyone who would like Ethan dead is down here as well.

At least Lucas’s newest weapon seems to be doing fuck-all. It cheers Ethan up immensely to imagine Lucas unleashing his airborne mold spores, intent on infecting and, probably, killing, only to find all he’s done is give some heavily armed, already-pissed paramilitary soldiers mild hayfever symptoms. It’s a sharp, unexpected point of amusement that almost makes him laugh, and he clings to that mirth as he goes, using it to push back the growing anxiety and panic stirring in his bones. He doesn’t want to be here—doesn’t want to actively walk towards danger when he could be running away—but he has to. It’s Eveline’s only chance. 

He just keeps reminding himself that, as he runs and runs, pushing through the sneezing and coughing and the wobble in his legs from the quaking floor, always keeping an ear out for any sign of danger. He has to. He has to. 

It’s the same mantra that had gotten him through the night previous, through the hell of Jack Baker’s mocking laughter, through Marguerite’s bugs, through Lucas’s traps and every molded creature that had leapt and swiped at him. All while knowing that, if he really wanted to, he could almost certainly climb the fence or steal a boat himself or find some other way out of the house—without Mia. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t, for the same reason he can’t now—

She’ll die, if he doesn’t at least try.

The situation at hand remains the same, even if the subject has changed. Be it Mia or Eveline, there’s still someone who needs him, someone who needs to be saved. And fuck, if there’s one thing Ethan has learned about himself, it’s that he has an unfortunate habit of trying to save people even when sense and reason and instinct itself scream he shouldn’t.

So onward he goes, through tunnels and down rickety sets of scaffolded stairs, reminding himself of all at stake. Eveline. Eveline. A desperate, shattered child, suffering a fate almost worse than death. He cannot let her rot away in that body. Cannot condemn her to that. She deserves a better, second chance at life, and if he has to go crawl past the soldiers who haunt his nightmares and a lunatic with bombs as they tangle with each other, so be it. It’s crazy, yes, but Ethan is almost uncomfortably used to crazy. He’s survived it before.

Hell, if he’s really being honest, dragging himself through the crazy and coming up gasping for air and for life on the other side, bruised but alive, will always make more sense to him deep down than anything else will. His normal life—the picture of Ethan Winters, engineer and loving husband, arm-in-arm with his equally loving, blissfully regular wife—maybe that was the anomaly all along. 

A lie, if nothing else. Mia had made sure of that.

The air grows thicker and thicker, denser and darker. Putrid. It makes his eyes water, and he’s so busy constantly wiping at them, pulling his sleeve down over his hand to drag across his face, that he almost misses it. The little tunnel, off to his left, emanating snatches of washed-out, blue light. Ethan skids to a halt. He considers it, he turns, he follows it down. 

And there, in front of him, it is. Some kind of makeshift barrier obscuring the rest of the passageway beyond him, plastic over canvas and metal stretched out between the cavern walls, with an air about it not too different from the science fiction movies Ethan had grown up watching in his old life, before they stopped being intriguing, stopped being funny. An attempt to seal off some kind of contaminated area—or to keep one out.

Set inside the makeshift containment wall is a heavy door. On its face, printed in neat, painted-on signage, it says: Warning: Biohazard. Authorized Personnel Only. Ethan stares at it in slight dismay—not the sign, but the handle of the door. 

He’d expected some kind of fancy electronic lock. Or at least a keyhole. Nothing. It’s—he tries it. 

It’s not even locked.

For some reason, he recalls with vicious clarity a word he’d read in a book not long after Raccoon City—Hubris. The hubris of man. It had been his first time encountering the word, and long after he’d poked Michael awake and demanded a definition, he’d sat there in the dark of the abandoned house they were squatting in, rereading the page the word sat on by flashlight, over and over. It had been used in a grand context—the assumptions of human superiority and the powers of science and nature and how easily we trip up on our own ego as a species—but all he’d been able to think about was the streets of the city, the falling bombs and the soldiers in their helicopters and the burning of it all. Not that he’d been able to think about much else in general, but still. He’d thought about that—and how sure they’d been in their superiority, in their tactics and in their powers of destruction, they hadn’t even thought about the little people down below. Hadn’t thought about the cleverness and stubbornness of normal people, who had hot-wired cars and taken motorbikes and even stolen horses, what few there were, or save all else, walked and staggered and carried each other out of the city. That was how the beating heart of the people of Raccoon City had survived. Because the men in the sky had been too confident to even look down. 

And now, Ethan thinks, it’s the same thing all over again. The Connections—those people who made Eveline, who created this mess Ethan and the Bakers and all their victims had been dragged into—considered themselves so above all this. In control of the situation. They had the power to create humans who were not human, the ability to manipulate nature into a twisted aberration, a kind of control over life and death itself. They could make contingencies and roll out cover-ups and wipe their hands clean—claim Eveline’s escape was all according to plan and turn it into a field-test—but it was the little things they always missed. An experiment’s desire for freedom and family being more than just programming. A background check on the husband of an employee.

A lock, for a door no one was ever supposed to be able to find.

 Ethan takes a deep, steadying breath, pushes down on the handle more firmly, and—when the door opens a few inches and then sticks—leans his good shoulder against the metal and shoves forward with all his weight as hard as he can.  The door creaks, something heavy on the other side scraping roughly along the ground, and then, with a lurch, the weight disappears, and Ethan stumbles through the open doorway with a tiny, smothered yelp, onto the other side. 

The change in the air is immediate—the heavy stench of the contamination immediately disappearing, at least for now, and being replaced with the smell, taste, feel, of clean, cool, air-conditioned, clinically stale oxygen. Ethan looks up, and sees a hall: a perfectly normal hall, like that of a university research center, complete with lockers and taped notices to employees on the walls. If Ethan didn’t know better, he wouldn’t even be able to guess he was deep inside a mine.

It’s uncanny, it’s unfamiliar, and, most importantly—

It is, undeniably, a lab.

Next to him, Ethan hears a recognizable squelching sound that is somewhere between cough and snarl, one that makes his hair stand on end on instinct, and he turns to see a medical gurney—apparently what had been blocking the door before Ethan dislodged it—with a molded strapped to it, snarling and writhing as it attempts to get free.

“…Huh,” Ethan says, slowly, almost distantly, and then raises his gun, and prays wherever Lucas and the BSAA are playing their game of chicken, they’re too far away to hear the shots ring out.

—(((())))—

The labs are—big. Much bigger than the section Ethan had passed through sometime between the end of night and the break of day, where the necrotoxin producer had been located. Big enough to make him a little nervous, moving quickly down hallways with his gun ready and checking every blind corner as best he is able before making turns or entering rooms. But also—big enough to be reassuring, in a way, as well. This clearly is the main setup down here, it has to be, and so if there is anything he can use to treat Eveline…it must be here, too. 

He’s still not quite sure why the Connections would set up multiple outposts within one mine, but it’s not like any of the architectural experiences Ethan has had in the last 24 hours have made much sense at all. Maybe he just missed a door, somewhere, connecting this place to where he was earlier. Or maybe he’s just—unlucky. And fate thought it would be funny to make the bioweapon scientists as batshit in their design choices as the Baker houses had been.

Just please, he thinks, let them be sane enough to have kept their biological materials used in experiments within the same place as everything else. Let something make sense for one goddamn second—and let something be a little easier on him.

He picks through the rooms, making cursory sweeps and jimmying open drawers and cabinets here and there. He finds a lot—tools he’d expect in a doctor’s office, scattered personal effects, documents he’d desperately like to read over or at least take with him if he wasn’t short on both space and time—but not what he needs. He’s searching for…something. A fridge, maybe, some type of cold storage like the necrotoxin processor had been connected to. Or a walk-in unit of some kind, something with an extra layer of security or with its own decontamination process. But he finds nothing—nothing that even looks right.

He doesn’t dare look at the codex on his wrist with its little clock face. Doesn’t want to consider whether he’s been down here one hour or four, when it feels like both and neither at the same time. The only check-in he allows himself to have is the occasional light tug at that dark, seeping space within the back of his mind, that tenuous connection to Eveline. Not enough to alert or panic her, not enough to take him into that black, endless space he refuses to really allow himself to stop and dwell on. Just enough to know she’s still there. Alive.

Other than that, he keeps moving. 

And keeps moving. 

And keeps moving. 

Keeps…

Moving.

And then nearly jumps out of his skin when he slides open a door, and from down the hallway before him, hears a loud whoop, so excited it’s practically panting with anticipation, come from a familiar voice. 

Lucas, a tense, frightened part of him whispers. A part that remembers all too clearly that this man made various attempts to blow him up, chop him with a giant swinging blade, and then burn him alive, all within the span of a single hour or so. And all, apparently, without Eveline or the mold infection making him do it. Just natural talent. Nice guy, obviously, and one every instinctual, fleeing, survivalist part of Ethan is very keen to firmly avoid for the rest of his life. 

Another part of Ethan, of course, would also like to go and shoot Lucas Baker between the eyes as many times as it takes to reassure himself that the man will never hurt him or another person again, but—well—he’s not here for that. He’s not, no matter how tempting the thought is. 

There’s another loud, obnoxious whoop from whatever room off this hall Lucas must be holed up in. Snickering laughter. The clack of a keyboard. The almost uncomfortably distinct sound of popcorn being shoveled into a hungry maw and consumed. 

Someone, it seems, is having a grand old time.

Walk away, Ethan, a voice inside himself, touched with a tinge of Ava’s icy pragmatism, reminds him. Lucas is probably in some kind of control room—and thus is wildly unlikely to also be where the chemicals Ethan needs are. And as much as threatening Lucas might produce some helpful directions, it’s also an unnecessary danger. Lucas and the BSAA are both a threat to him, and they are better left to eat each other alive while he gets in and out with what he needs.

Far away, with the tinny overtone of a noise from a screen, something explodes, and Lucas cheers. 

Ethan shivers. He remembers what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Lucas’s good times—and he’s seen the end result for the poor bastards less fortunate than him. He feels a tiny flicker, a touch from that black web connected to his mind—a scattered impression of sympathy, pain, hope, youcanstopthis. He does his level best to ignore it, and the flicker pushes harder. Firmer, and still somehow…scrupulously polite. For some reason, Ethan thinks—feels?—another scattered set of impressions, images: mild manners, nails bitten to the quick. The heavy weight of a camera. The agony of being eaten by fire. 

He remembers a videotape. Someone else’s death, saving his life.

He groans, just a little. 

“There are no voices in my head,” Ethan whispers, at the same time as he holsters his pistol and draws the Mag. Zoe’s Mag. “There are no voices in my head, and they’re not real.” 

He starts down the hallway, anyway, moving on cautious, quiet feet. In the back of his head, the web flickers pleased, with a tiny bit of smug.

Ethan ignores it. He is, no matter what the web thinks, generally quite good at ignoring things. 

It’s not hard to find the door to Lucas’s room, given how much noise the man is making. There is, thankfully, a window as well, and Ethan ducks down beneath it once he’s in view, crouched and peering up carefully. On the other side of the glass, Lucas sits with his back turned to him, happily typing away at a laptop connected to a larger desktop computer and a set of monitors. The monitors display maybe a dozen images of the mines, and Ethan finds himself retroactively grateful that Lucas has clearly dedicated the entire security system to whatever cruel games he’s playing, and thus hadn’t had eyes on the cameras littered around the labs—even if Ethan had done his level best to avoid them. 

Just more proof he should walk away, leave Lucas and the BSAA to entertain each other. 

On one of the screens, a single, well-armored man is fighting off a hoard of molded. He’s good, very good. But clearly struggling. As Ethan watches, Lucas chortles, and types out a new set of commands. On another screen, a cage-like door opens, and a large, bloated molded—white, why is it white? That can’t be good—ambles out, turning off a passage and into the cavern where the soldier is slowly, slowly only now just beginning to gain the upper hand.

“Let’s see how you like this, soldier boy,” Lucas says, and Ethan suppresses a flinch.

Slowly, he rises to his feet. Places a careful hand on the handle of the door.

Shoot the glass, begs a more reasonable train of thought. If you absolutely have to intervene, just shoot him through the glass. One and done. The world would be better off for it. 

You’ve killed people far less deserving. 

He turns the handle, and inches the door open, barely daring to breathe. 

But the explosions and shouts and gunfire on the monitors are much louder than the slight creak of the hinges or the incremental squeak of Ethan’s shoes on tile, and Lucas, in a moment of uncharacteristic stupidity, also did not seem to deem it fit to lock his door.

Ethan crosses the room in three quick, quiet strides—sinking into that place inside him that kept him alive last night, that knows how to tiptoe past death, how to hold his breath as the monsters pass by—and puts the gun to the back of Lucas’s head. 

Lucas freezes. 

They stay in that position for a long moment—the both of them like mannequins, poised in a tableau they have no hope of escaping from. Ethan’s arm does not shake, his fingers do not tremble, as he keeps the tip of the Mag pressed firmly against that place between the base of Lucas’s skull and the top of his spine. Lucas, exercising his first display of rationality Ethan has yet to see, does not move either. His eyes just track up, moving from the keyboard to the monitors—catching the glimpse of Ethan’s reflection in the screens. 

“Hi,” Ethan says, for lack of anything better to say. And then, somehow managing to pull words together when all his body seems to be otherwise capable of is rabbit-leap beats of his heart and a kind of white noise static inside his brain, he says: “I’m thinking you stop doing whatever you’re doing with that keyboard.”

Lucas does not take his hands off the keyboard, just narrows his eyes at Ethan’s reflection, and says, almost thoughtfully. “Huh.” Then the grin—that dark, cruel grin spreads back across his face. “Well, well…Ethan, Ethan!” The sickening, mocking sing-song is something he and Jack seem to share in common, and Ethan pulling back the hammer on the Mag doesn’t seem to make any difference—Lucas just plows right on. “Figured you were dead, when I kept picking up Evie’s biosigns—figured she’d torn you apart, once she realized you wouldn’t play Daddy. But damn! You really are one hard sonofabitch to kill, aren’t you?”

Ethan presses the Mag harder against Lucas’s skin. “The keyboard. Now. I’m serious.”

Lucas practically giggles, but raises his hands—a few inches. “Or what? You’re gonna kill me? You could barely handle the old man, and his head was practically full o’ holes already. You really think you can take me on?” Lucas’s hands twitch, just a little, and Ethan watches them—watches all of Lucas—carefully.

“Well,” Ethan says meaningfully, hand steady and eyes ever moving between every dangerous finger, “I seem to have done okay so far.” Lucas snorts, and Ethan feels himself bristle. “Your puzzles aren’t that clever, Lucas. And the minute it was just you and me, you turned tail and ran like a bitch.” The phrase feels awkward coming out, and doesn’t mean much of anything—God knows Ethan could write an essay or three on how terrifyingly lethal the women in his life are and always have been, and how much better at all this Delia or Ava would be—but Lucas gives off the impression of being the kind of smug, dumb asshole who loves to be sexist, and Ethan is practically itching to get under his skin after all the hell he’d put him through—put Zoe and Mia through. “Your mother put up more of a fight than you—and was a hell of a lot scarier.”

It has the desired affect. Maybe a little too much so. 

Lucas practically leaps to his feet, hand going for a knife he draws from his hoodie pocket, and snarls, “I ain’t some kind of pussy, Winters,” before trying to twist and swipe at him. Ethan—who has better reflexes and a lifetime more experience of fighting, really fighting, than Lucas ever will—turns the gun, shoots at Lucas’s hand holding the knife, and when Lucas drops it with a sharp cry, grabs Lucas by the shoulder and forces him back into his chair.

“Don’t move.”

“You shot me!” Lucas shouts, pulling his bleeding hand, down a couple fingers, back to his chest—and Ethan ignores it, he ignores it, swallows down the bile, because he may have experience with the fucked-up-ness of hand trauma but by God if anyone deserves it it’s Lucas Baker. Lucas sounds more offended than hurt, but Ethan has seen him have his arm sawed off and barely blink, so perhaps that’s to be expected. 

“What did you think was going to happen?” Ethan yells back, hating that there’s just a touch of defensiveness in his voice—but at least the gun does not tremble an inch from its new home pointed at Lucas’s chest, and Lucas eyes it this time with a touch more caution. 

There’s another long moment of silence as they stare each other down—Lucas clearly thinking, and Ethan at a loss for words once more. Why can’t he just shoot Lucas and be done with it? He’s reaped so much death tonight—what’s one extra? But his finger won’t budge on the trigger. 

No more death, he’d promised himself when he reached out to Eveline. The darkness hisses that Lucas is different, is dangerous—and God, Ethan knows, knows no person who could ever be redeemed would watch their family suffer a slow and torturous death of mind and body over years and simply laugh about it—but it’s still…

He remembers Jack Baker’s kind face in that sleeping place. The real Jack Baker. Remembers he would not be here without Zoe. He’s taken so much from this family, and Lucas may not give a shit, but they clearly love him, how can he—

Lucas’s hand inches towards the keyboard, and Ethan takes an automatic step forward, gun digging into Lucas’s skin once more. “Don’t.”

“Oh Jesus,” Lucas rolls his eyes. “Can’t you see I’ve got a show here to get back to?” He gestures at the soldier on the screen running circles around the giant white Molded. “Why are you even down here?! If Evie hasn’t squashed you, shouldn’t you have taken off with that bitch wife of yours by now? The fuck are you poking around here for?”

“Maybe I wanted to clean house.” 

“Uh-huh, then why’s lil’ ol’ Evie still kicking around? Could have sworn I got a notif’ that the necrotoxin processor got used. And I can’t figure those BSAA boys would be down here if they thought Evie was still running around, either.” Lucas’s eyes narrow. “…Hey…No, really, why hasn’t she killed you yet?”

Ethan shrugs, goes for the easiest lie. “Haven’t been by the house yet. Lucky me.”

“Oh,” Lucas’s shark grin splits his face. “Boy, if she wants you dead, she doesn’t need to get close. She just up and does it.” He shrugs. “Like poor baby Zoe. You think Evie could have made it out onto those docks? Please. Zoe’s one of her dolls on strings—and she reeled in that string and taught her a lesson she’d never forget.”

Ethan doesn’t feel himself move until he already has—until he hears Lucas’s choked breaths and blinks and sees his hand pressed right against Lucas’s throat, the other pressing the gun to his temple. 

“Do not talk about her,” he snarls. “She’s your sister! She’s your little sister, and you let her die.” Noor, the blood pooling. Ava’s screaming, her struggling in his arms. The years of heavy silences, his sister vanishing when she was barely an adult and hardly ever returning because she was and still is searching for something she’ll never get back. The steely looks that always made him wonder—does she blame him? Does she think it’s his fault as well? “Who the fuck does that?”

Lucas wheezes, hands scrabbling and trying to shove Ethan off, and with a lurch of disgust—at Lucas’s grubby fingernails and all the hellish things those hands have wrought—he backs away, gun still trained. 

“Business is as business does, Ethan,” Lucas says, coughing a little. “Zoe never inherited any of the brains in this family. She should be grateful she had a part to play in something as big as all this.”

Ethan scoffs. “She’s worth a hundred of you.” 

“Maybe, maybe not,” Lucas says cheerfully. “All I do know? I’m certainly going to be worth a whole lot more than any of my family ever was, once I sell off Evie’s data to the highest bidder. Hell, maybe I’ll sell her off, too. Since you couldn’t follow a single damn instruction and kill her like that dumb bitch told you.”

The words—their greed, their malice—sink into Ethan’s skin, and his stomach twists. The worst part is it’s all too easy to picture it. How Lucas would have picked off the BSAA soldiers one by one from his hidey-hole, then cajoled Eveline back to his side, playing on her love for big brother—fucked up love or not. Found some careful, sneaky way to compromise her power—a sedative, or something of the like—and then handed her off to the greediest hands with the fattest checkbook. Passed her all too happily back into the care of those who would torture her, warp what little good still remained—those flashes of childish innocence, of shy surprise and hope—until all that was left was the monster, the weapon, they wanted.

Ethan growls without thinking. “You will never, ever, get near her again.”

And when Lucas’s eyebrows tick up, he knows he’s misstepped. Shown his hand. 

“Oho,” Lucas’s delight grates. “So you’re under her spell, after all! Shame. And here I thought you were different from the other sorry sods she made the old man drag home. It was the only interesting thing ‘bout you.” Ethan swallows heavily, ignores the rapid beat of his heart—he’s not under Eveline’s control, he knows he’s not, knows that even if she’d shown him the truth about Mia, she isn’t capable of touching the things inside him, the dark memories of Raccoon City, that truly solidified his inability to kill her—and Lucas’s eyes narrow. “…Unless…” The unfinished thought hangs in the air between them.

And then Lucas whistles—a sharp, high, surprised whistle. “Well goddamn! Guess I assumed too much.” He leans back speculatively in his chair, like a lord overlooking his kingdom and not a man held at gunpoint. “No, you’ve still got free will! You’ve got free will and you’re protecting her, anyway. Oh—you’ve been by the house, all right. You took her from there. No wonder them Umbrella boys are running around like chickens missing heads. You snuck her out and hid her and now you’re—what—looking for some cure for wrinkly-old-lady-syndrome?” Lucas practically cackles, literally slapping his thigh as if this is all some wildly funny joke. “Fuck me sideways, and they call me crazy.”

Ethan thinks about how nice it would probably feel to shoot Lucas Baker. Thinks about what it might be like to play the cool, collected soldier—to tell Lucas to just shut up as he’d like to and then kill the monster and go home a hero. 

Thinks about Eveline.

“Where is her medicine?” he asks, his voice calm. The gun does not tremble. Guns in Ethan’s grip never have and never will tremble. The one thing in his face or body he refuses to let Lucas read into. 

Lucas snorts, eyeing the gun skeptically—and Ethan realizes with a doomed certainty that Lucas has already determined that if Ethan let him talk this long without shooting him, he won’t at all—and says, “Sorry, buddy, but I’m afraid that’s a little above your pay grade.” 

And then he dives for the computer.

Ethan tackles him, a split second after Lucas hits a single key, and Ethan tries desperately to ignore the whirring and screaming coming from the monitor as he grapples with Lucas. They fight dirty, knees and elbows, and the both of them scrambling to get a grip on the gun. But Ethan is stronger. He already knew that. He may not be any trained soldier, but neither is Lucas, and you can take the kid out of Raccoon City, but you can’t take the city out of the kid. He’s sweat and bled for his beating heart more than Lucas Baker ever has.

It’s not even thirty seconds of messy tussling before Ethan has Lucas pinned, knees planted on his arms and the Mag pressed against his chin. 

“Go on, shoot me!” Lucas snarls, eyes wide and wild. “Shoot me! Shoot me! C’mon shoot me, you son of a bitch—“

The metal of the gun glints in the beam of the overhead lights. Zoe’s gun.

Ethan mashes his free hand over Lucas’s mouth, retracts the gun.

“The only reason I’m leaving you alive,” he snarls, “Is because, whether you deserve it or not, your sister loved you—and I owe her something I can never pay back.”

Lucas’s eyes flash. He struggles. Ethan hits him, hard, with the butt of the gun—and he finally goes still.

With a weary sigh, Ethan gets to his feet, looking over Lucas’s setup—he can use the spare computer cords to bind Lucas’s arms and legs—before his eyes are inevitably drawn to the monitors above the laptop. 

There are images there—ones that he knows in some distant way should horrify him, but he feels oddly numb, like his brain is still stuck on the manic light of Lucas’s eyes—his malice and his beseech for death. On one of the screens, there’s two men in a room that might be better termed an execution chamber. One is strapped tight to posts, unable to move, while the other is mashing the side of a machine gun against a sharp, whirling saw attempting to descend down onto the first. The one using the gun to block the saw is strong—really strong, to manage this—but he won’t hold out forever. That much is obvious.

The screaming and the cursing is distant. Tinny to Ethan’s ears. He thinks he might have a concussion from his floor-wrestling Lucas. Or he’s having a panic attack. Whichever.

“Fuck,” he more feels his lips say than hears. 

Walk away, Winters, some distant part of him that is content with the numbness—a part of him that sounds like Mia, in this moment—mumbles. Walk away. He knows, after all, deep down, that leaving the soldiers to Lucas’s death traps is his best bet for his own survival.

The man on the monitor, so close to death, is sobbing. The one using the machine gun as a makeshift barrier shouts under the strain.

Ethan’s eyes dart to the keyboard. He is—was—a systems engineer. In the life he lived with Mia, and after she was gone. The life he knows is dead and buried now. But—he’s good with computers. He’s really good. Even if the lie of that life has now burned so sharply and suddenly to ash, that part will never change.

You need to hurry, he thinks. You don’t have time for this. You have to save Eveline. 

But almost without his permission, his body moves anyway, and he takes a seat in front of the computer.

—(((())))—

Chris Redfield is not having a good day.

Now, to be clear, he is aware that lots of people have plenty of days that are not good—days that they might even call bad—all the time. That is a part of human nature. However, most people are not Chris Redfield. When most people think of or experience a bad day, they are talking about missed buses, dropped ice creams. Bad dates and broken dishwashers. 

When Chris Redfield has a bad day, he is generally talking about one of the following:

1. Someone he cares about or someone he is supposed to look out for has been shot at, blown up, poisoned, knifed, or otherwise maimed or critically injured.
   
   
2. He has been shot at, blown up, poisoned, knifed, or otherwise maimed or critically injured.
   
   
3. He has been assigned to a job he doesn’t want to do, working with assholes he hates, and the outcome is so vitally important he can’t possibly avoid said job.
   
   
   
4. Someone he vastly preferred alive has ended up dead, and it might possibly—probably—be his fault in some way.
   
   
   
5. Jill has called him to scold him.

Chris Redfield has experienced not one, not two, but all of those things so far today. So, to be absolutely fucking clear, when he says he is not having a good day, he really does mean he is not having a good day—got that?

He is, in fact, having a terrible fucking day. 

Now, if he was going to be fair, he’d acknowledge he knew from the start this would be a shit day. From the moment he woke up in his bunk as the brief file hit his face, and some suit or other he was too damn groggy and too fucking tired to positively identify saying “Get up, gear on. We’re moving on Louisiana,” he’d known this day would only get worse. And it had. From dragging on his unwashed clothes and strapping on his newest set of tactical gear—still uncomfortably shiny and smelling of plastic and kevlar, all reminders of the Godforsaken source his new armor and the BSAA’s latest healthy funding check had come from—to piling into the helicopter with that hateful logo on it, color palette change be damned, he’d continued to hate and further hate this fucking day. He’d glanced around at the wash of unfamiliar faces mixed with the few others he could clearly pick out as BSAA and not Umbrella, all of them looking equally unenthusiastic about babysitting a bunch of private ‘soldiers’ who were all essentially either completely green or just U.B.C.S. boys given a new coat of paint, and thought, with as much sarcasm as he’d thought anything in his life: god bless the fat wallets traded between the shadow-hands that kept the world spinning. God bless whatever bastard had written a big enough check to convince the BSAA to give Umbrella’s new ‘reparations initiative’ the time of day, and god bless whichever stupid fuck he apparently took orders from who had accepted it. 

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to work with these people. And yet, here he was. Funny that, he’d thought, as he idly contemplated the open doorway of the helicopter and wondered how far down the fall was. He’d survived worse, and come out on top of stranger odds. 

He’d eyed that doorway even harder when they’d handed him his earpiece and he’d slipped it in, and a familiar voice had floated into his ear. 

“Hey, Chris.”

“Christ,” he’d muttered quietly, slouching back in his seat and trying not to look like a pouting child. “Don’t tell me you’re my handler for this shitshow.” 

“Have I ever struck you as the kind of person to play ‘girl in the chair’?” Jill’s patient voice had said on the other end of the line, her amusement palpable. He’d grunted some kind of non-response, and her laughter had rung clear as a bell, somehow both filling and carving out more of that hollow space in his chest. “I’m still in Honduras, cleaning up the mess the Connections left behind when we raided their labs and they ran.” 

“And how’s that going?”

“Slow. There’s a lot of sensitive material. It’s taking time to decrypt it all and get it sent over to the BSAA. Luckily, one of Carlos’s guys is some kind of computer genius, and he has been unbelievably helpful. If it wasn’t for him we never would have found the correspondence we needed to get the drop on this…experiment of theirs in Louisiana.” On the other end of the line, he could hear another voice ask Jill a muffled question, and her voice had gone faint and distant, as if she’d cupped her hand over the receiver. “—Sorry,” she’d said a few moments later. 

“That him?” he’d asked—knowing who it sounded like he was asking about and also very much knowing who the hollow spot in his chest had in mind. He’d met Carlos Oliveira a few times over the years. Nice guy. Excellent soldier. Jill smiled whenever he called. 

“Hm?” Jill had hummed distractedly. “Oh, no. Just an assistant.” 

“So what did you need?” Chris had asked, aiming for not-too-soft and landing somewhere on the far side of gruff. Gruff was fine. His eyes strayed to the doorway, the Louisiana landscape flying by underneath. Drop time soon—soon enough, at least. And then the work would start. He already missed his bed. 

“I just…wanted to talk to you, before the operation.”

“You mean they wanted you to talk to me.”

“Chris…” the exhaustion in her voice had stung. “This mission, it’s important. It’s really important.” 

“I know that,” he’d snapped. He’d read the damn brief. And then some. “I’ve been working the E-series case for months. I fucking know it’s important.” He’d narrowed his eyes on the unfamiliar faces around him, the unfamiliar helmets and their accursed logos, and lowered his voice even further. “Which is why I’m not particularly thrilled about the company I’m keeping here.”

Jill had sighed. “I know… look, it wasn’t my idea to let them have this mission. I was…very much against it. It’s too important to trust them with.”

“But you agreed to work with them in the first place,” Chris said, mulishly. He knew he was picking a fight for the sake of it, knew how this already went. He didn’t care. 

“You make it sound like I was the sole deciding factor here,” Jill had said tiredly. “I am hardly the guiding hand of the BSAA, Chris.” 

Chris had thought again of shadow-hands, of money and whom it makes the masters of the world, and shivered. ‘I know,’ he didn’t say. ‘I know it wasn’t your idea, or your fault, and I know you’re doing what you think is right.’ “It was your pet project,” he said, instead. 

“You make it sound like I, personally, decided on this just to railroad you,” Jill says, a layer of ice creeping into her voice. “You’re a founding member, Chris. You got a vote, just like everyone else.”

Chris Redfield had snorted then, so loudly eyes from across the helicopter had flickered his way. He ignored them. “Founding member, my ass. I’m just the guy they send to pull the trigger and clean up their messes.” Almost reflexively, he fiddles with the anti-bioweapon handgun clasped between his hands, like an object of prayer, checking it over, that it’s fully loaded. “…None of us get a vote, Jill. Not really.”

“…No, we don’t,” Jill had said, voice softening as the ice melted and the stream of her enduring patience, her warmth, flowed again. Chris’s chest throbbed. “I was just faster on the uptake about that than you.” 

Chris just grunts. He can’t argue with that.

“…We—I need you to behave, on this, Chris.” Jill had said quietly. “It’s not about—it’s not about the fucking funding or keeping in good graces. You are the eyes and ears of the BSAA on this mission. Everyone else wearing our badge there answers to you—same for the ones who don’t…at least in theory. I need you to be careful, and be alert, in case they try anything.”

“A test, huh?” Chris had mused—and wondered: for them, or for me? Maybe it was both. “…I don’t trust them.” 

“I know,” Jill had said, a hesitancy to her words that left much unspoken—I’m not sure I do, either. “But I need you to…try. There are…there are good people on this project, Chris. Good people who had no idea what Umbrella was doing and want to make amends.” 

“I’ll believe in a good Umbrella employee when I see one.” 

They’d sat there for a long moment, silent except for their breaths across a line stretching halfway around the Americas. He tried to picture her, pacing in front of some monitor in Honduras. He hasn’t seen her in months. Then, quietly, she’d said—“When I left Raccoon City,”—when you left before I did, when you left me behind, rings unsaid, in her voice, in his ears—“I met four Umbrella employees. If it weren’t for three of them, I’d have never made it out of there alive.”

“Despite all efforts by the fourth to the contrary,” Chris said, the words bitter in his mouth.

“Chris—“

“I’ll behave, okay?” He’d cut her off, and sighed—long and low, and tired. “I’ll…do what I was sent here to do. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Jill had huffed a laugh. “I always worry,” she said, and Chris had tried to let it feel like an insult rather than affection. “…Your handler for the drop is a Blue Umbrella employee. She’ll connect to you once I hang up. Her name is Kyung-Sook Ahn. She’s very helpful, very good at her job. Please…try to be nice.” 

And then the other end of the line went silent, and she was gone. Again. 

Moments later, his earpiece had clicked, and a calm, collected  voice had filtered into his ear. They’d made their introductions—stilted and polite as they were—and as Kyung-Sook had launched into a review of what they could expect, or might encounter, when they hit the ground, Chris had leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and thought with certainty: Yes, today is shaping up to be a fucking pain.

That feeling had only persisted, and grown, as they swept the Baker grounds from on high, as the first teams hit the ground and reported into the line—no survivors, no survivors, no survivors. When he’d slid down the rope himself and looked over the ruined waste of a family home, felt bullet casings shift in the mud beneath his boots. When he’d gotten the call about the woman in the tanker—Mia Winters, a presumed-dead Connections agent and one of the perpetrators of this entire mess, apparently alive and well, joy—and when she’d screeched down the line about her husband and Eveline and he’d realized: great, the deadly-ass fucking bioweapon we were sent to neutralize might be on the loose below our very feet, with Lucas fucking Baker for company. 

When he’d told the others to fucking figure it out, as his palms sweat and his heartbeat ran too quick and too tight in his chest—he’d sent men into those mines already, what if he’d gotten them killed? Could he go one fucking mission, one fucking day, without getting someone killed?—and he’d turned and signaled for four of Blue Umbrella’s most reasonably competent-looking soldiers from his helicopter’s group to follow him down into the mines, spread out, search. 

He’d just not considered how much worse this whole thing could, would, get—until he’d slipped through a heavy, sound-sealing lab door, and seen one of the men he’d sent down here on the floor, had ran toward him, and Lucas Baker had reared up and strapped a bomb to his hand and then blown up his man’s head. 

And then Chris Redfield had well and truly thought it:

Fuck this day.

Chapter Text

Despite what many people in his life—Jill included, he suspects—would believe, Chris Redfield is not actually crazy. So as he lays there on the dirty ground in that lab within the mines, still stunned from the blast of Lucas’s bomb and hearing just barely through the ringing in his ears as Lucas threatens him and makes it clear that if he’s followed there will be repercussions, he thinks: reinforcements. Lots and lots of reinforcements. There’s more than four dozen soldiers running around the Baker estate right now and if Lucas’s whole plan is to strap bombs one by one to people’s body parts, numbers are in their favor here. Lucas is one man—a clever man, apparently and annoyingly—but one man. Chris has fifty. 

And then the supposed air filtration system above his head clicks over, and a green-ish, thick gas erupts from above, flickers of dust and organic matter scattering as it pours into the room. Chris knows poison gas when he sees it—whatever type this may be—and he swears vehemently as he staggers to his feet.

“…I’m picking up airborne spores,” Kyung-Sook says, quick and professional, and Chris holds his tongue from snapping one of your coworkers just died, don’t you feel anything at all? 

He knows she’s here for a very specific purpose: to keep him alive and informed the best she can. It’s her job to remain calm and collected even when he isn’t, not to get emotional. “It’s the E-type mutamycete. Your mask will switch automatically to rebreather mode… Keep an eye on your oxygen tank to be safe.”

Great, Chris thinks. Airborne bioweapons. Just his luck. 

He looks around the room, in case an off-switch might suddenly appear in sight. You never know. His gaze reaches the door he just came through, and he eyes it in consideration. The door looks designed to be airtight, as any decent lab outfit working with biohazards would have. If he props it open, the airborne infection might dissipate in a wider space—which would be good, given he has no idea how far the ducts above his head spread, and his oxygen tank is limited. Or…it might spread to the surface, and stay just as deadly. Not everyone on the surface has a rebreather fitted to their suit, and he has no idea if this gas will just infect, or kill, but he’s not keen to find out. Especially when they know Eveline, still unaccounted for, can control those sharing her infection. In some ways a gas that kills would be kinder.   

“Your oxygen tank is at fifty percent,” Kyung-Sook says helpfully. Motherfucker, he thinks sourly, turning to the door Lucas just bolted through. Babysitting indeed. He kicks the door open, and starts to hustle. He’d like out of this gas, either way. It can’t go on forever. 

A few more doors, and the air clears. “…Looks like you’re clear of any contamination,” Kyung-Sook says, with just a touch of relief. “You should head back and get that bomb on your arm deactivated.” Chris snorts. If he was planning on going back, he’d have damn well done that from the start—and if she’d thought that was the best call, she should have spoken up sooner. 

“There’s no time. I don’t want to give that asshole a head start.” Not when Lucas still has—as far as Chris knows—two living men in his clutches, and when he has no idea what else might be loose down here. Every minute is crucial when it comes to bioweapons, and is often the difference between life and death. Every second, sometimes. He’s learned that lesson over and over, in the most brutal ways possible. “…You should round up the men I had searching the rest of the tunnels, send them my way. And whoever else up top who’s equipped with rebreathers. We can’t let Lucas get away, especially with Eveline missing. He could have her.”

“…And the bomb?” Kyung-Sook asks skeptically. Chris is already moving for the next door, but he spares the bomb a glance. “I’ve dealt with worse. I can handle it. The blast seems very controlled—but if you’re worried about your men, they can stay twenty paces back at all times. I don’t care.” 

“That’s not what I was—“ Kyung-Sook sighs. “…You’re right. We’ve just finished analyzing the data we intercepted from Lucas. It’s like we thought—the son of a bitch has been sending status reports on Evie to the Connections. If Lucas has her, capturing him and neutralizing her is paramount. Give me a minute. I’ll change lines and get in touch with the ground teams.” He hears a click as Kyung-Sook disconnects. 

Chris keeps moving. A few moments later, as he clambers into a rickety old elevator and begins his descent further into the mouth of whatever waiting trap Lucas has laid, Kyung-Sook rejoins his line. “Okay,” she says bracingly, and Chris already knows this will be nothing good. “So—“

“Just spit it out.” He’d perhaps feel some type of way about snapping at someone doing their best to help him, except—well. Kyung-Sook Ahn, whoever and wherever she is, is sitting comfy at a computer. He’s the one with a goddamn bomb strapped to his arm. 

“There is no backup coming.” Fucking great. “And the men you came down here with are being recalled back up top as we speak.” 

“What?” Chris growls, less question and more statement. Why is he surprised? Of course Umbrella would stick him down here with the hard job and leave him to rot. 

“…So are you,” Kyung-Sook finishes. “You’re to turn around and head back to the Baker estate.”

“Why?” 

“Now, Chris.”

Chris bristles on principle. “Tell me why or I’ll break this earpiece, and you can explain that one to your fucking bosses.” All these years, and he’s still getting cryptic, bullshit orders from people he doesn’t know and doesn’t trust, and he’s just expected to comply. At least Wesker had made some effort to disguise the monster he was. He’d trusted him, once, with his life. Chris has trusted a lot of people over the years—half of them ended up stabbing him in the back at one point or another, and most of the rest had ended up dead. “What about Lucas? We just let him escape? We let him keep doing all he’s been doing?” He scowls. “You sure you just don’t want to recruit him?”

Kyung-Sook makes an irritated noise on the other end of the line, her composure stretched thin, it seems. “We’ve been over this.”

“Maybe the BSAA is convinced. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be here, but—“

“You’re being sent back because Eveline isn’t in the mines,” Kyung-Sook snaps, cutting him off. “I got in touch with the ground teams, and they told me there’s evidence—very good, very compelling evidence—that she’s escaped the estate in a vehicle. It’s possible she infected Ethan Winters and is manipulating him to facilitate her escape.” She sucks in a discontented breath. “You aren’t being recalled because we don’t care about capturing Lucas Baker, Chris. You’re being recalled because neutralizing a bioweapon as dangerous as E-001 before she reaches a civilian population is more important.”

That draws him up short. He stares at the cave wall, watching it pass by as he descends, and then empty out into a tunnel. The elevator clicks to a halt. He blinks slowly. 

“Chris?” Kyung-Sook asks on the other end of the line, sounding nervous, perhaps worried he’d really gone and destroyed the line, and he sighs, feeling the flush of shame crawl across his cheeks.

“…I’m here.”

“Can you head up to the surface, please?”

There’s littered junk and broken machinery in front of him. His eyes trace bootprints on the ground, barely visible through the wet moss and dirt and mold clinging to the rock underfoot. Multiple sets of footprints. 

“What about the men still down here?” he asks softly. He understands consolidating resources, and he knows—not to stroke his own ego, because god knows he doesn’t actually care and it only makes his life harder—he’s the best damn soldier they have on this mission. It makes sense to call him back up to deal with the mess above. 

Kyung-Sook hesitates.”…It is regrettable,” she simply says. “But our priority has to be protecting the surrounding area from a bioterrorism threat.” 

He knows. He does. But—

“Eveline has the mind of a child. Lucas doesn’t. He’s infected. He’s still dangerous.” And then he adds, more quietly, “…We only saw him kill the one man. The other two could still be alive.” 

“Chris—“

Fifty soldiers up there. One down here. Strength in numbers.

“They have a short clock before Lucas kills them. If I go back up top, they’ll be dead long before it’s a priority to send anyone down here again.” He pauses, lets the words sink in. “There’s dozens of soldiers up there, and eight of them are BSAA agents. I promise you, they’re good. I trained them myself. One more person doesn’t make much of a difference.” 

There’s silence from the other end of the line.

“…I’m not asking for backup,” he finishes. 

For a long, agonizing moment, there’s nothing. He remembers what he’d said to Jill on the helicopter—none of us get a vote. Not really.

Then—

“…It seems, Agent Redfield, the elevator you just made use of is broken,” Kyung-Sook says, smooth and calm and perfectly even. “You will have to find another route out of the mines—which, naturally, could take some time, which I’ll pass on to the ground teams and HQ. And, of course, if you run into Lucas Baker or our operatives during your departure, and are able to complete your original mission parameters without a delay to your exit, we would be most grateful.”

Chris feels his lips quirk up in the barest semblance of a smile—his first one all day. “Of course,” and though he doesn’t say it, he tries to imagine that the true meaning of his words is conveyed: thank you.

—(((())))—

Lucas’s little pit of hell—artfully decorated with rusting, scrapped machinery, scattered and discarded barbed wire, and dozens of half-assembled bombs—doesn’t exactly make Chris’s top ten list of worst locations he’s ever been in, but that doesn’t mean he’s keen on the place. Fuck finding keys and fuck weird machinery and fuck whatever that clown spray paint is about. No thank you.

He tries to cheer himself up over it all by picturing the kind of ridiculous commentary Claire would make of the situation given the chance. Something about the Spencer mansion—that evil place where Chris’s whole world fell apart and remade itself—at least having some class. How Lucas needs to take some lessons from Umbrella on presentation. 

All that does, though, is remind Chris he hasn’t called his sister in four months, and that Lucas Baker left his own little sister behind to die without a second thought. Not very uplifting.

And that’s before he finds one of his men strapped to an upside-down v of metal beams rigged to machinery that just reeks of torture device. He’s not sure which of the men this is, underneath the helmet and this far away, and he had been too preoccupied—not shaken, preoccupied—to even identify which of the men had gotten blown up earlier, so it really is a roll of the dice on who’s who—but he can at least tell the guy is alive. Bloodied, breathing slowly and painfully, but alive. 

That’s something. Chris can settle for that. For alive.

“Hey!” he calls, picking up his pace from a fast trot into a full jog as he nears the metal door separating him from Umbrella’s soldier—his fellow soldier, right now, which is what matters in this moment. “You okay in there?”

The man on the other side of the door barely flinches when he hears Chris’s voice, but does look up. “…Redfield?” he asks slowly, painfully, through an audibly dry and abused throat.

Chris puts a hand on the door and pushes, and then when it doesn’t move, jiggles it carefully. Locked tight. He could probably force it, but… he eyes the clearly visible wires taped along its edges. It’s almost certainly rigged to blow if Chris just charges it or kicks it in with all his might.

In this regard, at least, Lucas is very much like many of the other megalomaniacs Chris has met on his always-growing list . They want you to play their game, and will do their damned best to make it happen—even if it requires cheating on their end. Brute force doesn’t tend to work out in these situations.

He doesn’t know how cognizant of all that this soldier is—probably just some dumb kid with no idea until now what he’d gotten into, based on the team profiles he’d reviewed for the mission—but the last thing he wants to do is panic an already-injured and vulnerable man. “Don’t worry,” he says calmly. “I’m gonna find a key to this thing and get you outta there.”

The man says nothing, merely nods slightly and sags his head once more, and Chris doesn’t have anything else to say, either. There’s no time for empty platitudes or extra reassurances—and Chris no longer makes promises he’s not fully confident he can keep. Instead, he turns, and he runs down the corridor in search of a key.

It’s always fucking keys.

It doesn’t really take that long to find it, though, what with Lucas’s worryingly helpful sign pointing directly to it, after a short elevator ride. It’s a clear trap, guarded by a couple dozen molded that Chris swiftly eliminates. He’s not a fan of those things, either. Easier to kill, perhaps emotionally speaking, than those infected monsters that were visibly once human. But physically speaking, they’re harder to put down and much more unpredictable. To an unexperienced person who’s never dealt with bioweapons before, they’d be a death sentence. 

But Chris is not inexperienced, which makes this whole thing feel…too easy. Lucas didn’t strike him as the type to underestimate people. Especially someone like Chris.

Things begin to make more sense when he’s about to retrieve the key, though, and the giant white…thing that can only be described a fourteen-foot-tall blob of mold and ooze invites itself into the cavern. 

“Please tell me what I’m looking at,” Chris asks Kyung-Sook, grateful for the first time to have her on the line as he throws a hand grenade at the behemoth and then dives out of the way. Behind him, the creature roars.

“…I have no idea,” is all Kyung-Sook says, though, and then Chris is a little less grateful. “It’s something new. Exercise extreme caution.”

Thanks, that’s what I was planning on, he thinks sourly, before opting to exercise a little less caution than she likely had in mind. The faster this thing goes down, the better.

But it doesn’t. It won’t.

“Chris,” Kyung-Sook cuts back in a few frantic moments later. “This new white variation is extremely resilient. Normal ammo isn’t going to cut it.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” he snarls, as he ducks beneath a swipe of its claws. 

“You’ll need RAMRODS to stop it from regenerating lost tissue.” Kyung-Sook follows up with some of his least favorite words: “You’re going to have to fall back.”

Chris grits his teeth, but nods, even knowing she can’t hear him, and as he ducks the monster again, he grabs the key, and he runs. 

He’s not here to kill molded, after all. He’s here to get his men out.

The molded doesn’t appear interested in pursuing him beyond the cavern—perhaps it’s guarding something?—and so Chris escorts himself out and back up the elevator.

The soldier behind the door doesn’t even react when Chris reappears and unlocks the door, which is an even further cause for concern on top of the man’s sorry physical state. He approaches him carefully, and puts what he hopes is a comradely hand on the man’s shoulder. “Everything’s alright now,” he says simply. Words he doesn’t get to say enough, and the feeling of this success—small as it is—is a bright bubble. He made the right choice, coming down here.

The soldier in front of him only heaves a ragged breath. “That’s just what he wants you to think. I’m just the bait—and you fell for it.”

Chris feels the tiny, fragile bubble burst. “What?” The man in front of him just lowers his head, waiting.

…For a few seconds, nothing happens. It’s a long enough period of time that Chris feels something in him relax—just paranoia from both of them; expected, of course, but just that—and he takes another tentative step closer, going to untie the Umbrella soldier and get him the fuck out of here.

And then there’s an automated click from the vents above their heads, and the spores descend. 

“Ah,” Chris simply says. “Shit.”

The man in front of him—younger than him, definitely, from the sound of his voice—says with force, “Take the filter, on my mask”—and something about the urging resignation in the words gets to him, because this is just yet another fucking green kid, a good kid, in this moment, making calls that no one should ever have to make—“Hurry!”

And all Chris can think to say, stupidly, is—“But you’ll die!” As if they don’t both already know that. As if that’s not the point of this conversation, this urging.

But he still protests it, even knowing that, even when it comes out ridiculous and short-sighted. He can’t help it. He’s so tired of death.

The kid just shakes his head. “I’m dead either way.”

And then, with no warning whatsoever, machinery whirs to life, and a saw so far above their heads that Chris hadn’t even clocked it until now begins to lower rapidly towards them, at an angle dead set to hit the restrained man in front of him. 

The soldier begins to scream. 

There’s no word from Lucas from the speakers attached to the walls—no laughter or taunts—and somehow that’s almost worse. That deadly, grim, uncaring silence as the saw descends.

It’s Kyung-Sook, screaming his name in a panic, echoey and far-away at first but then getting louder, that snaps him out of his reverie. 

And with a shout, without pausing to think, Chris dives forward, thrusting his shotgun up at the descending saw, wedging it in between the blades and pushing up with all his might. 

The saw fights to descend with robotic determination, and he shouts under the strain, feeling his feet begin to slide against the damp stone beneath his boots. The saw jams against his shotgun, which stumbles and slides with Chris’s slow loss of firm stance, and he bites back a scream as the blades of the saw momentarily cut into the fingers of his left hand, before he manages to realign the position of the shotgun.

He’s holding. He’s not lost yet. But he is losing—fighting a thing that he cannot out-reason or out-muscle. He knows he is losing. Losing ground, losing strength.

Next to him, practically smushed against his shoulder now, he can feel the soldier sobbing. “Please, please,” he hears,  distant over the roar.

Chris feels some kind of screech escape his mouth—more animal than human, all of it the angry, broken thing that his life and the path STARS and Wesker set him on so many years ago has made of him—and he clenches his eyes shut as he fights for every inch he has. He will not surrender. He has never surrendered.

What would Claire say? That tiny and hysterical part of his brain asks even now. Something about Atlas and the weight of the world.

And then—and then— 

Just when he was sure this was one of the times the trap would finally win him out, the time he couldn’t be clever or strong enough—

As suddenly as it started, the whirring of the blades stops, and the inevitable weight of the saw bearing down suddenly disappears, stopping its fight to descend. The saw retracts upward at blistering speed, and without the counterweight Chris had thrown his everything into holding up, he falls, collapsing into a broken form on the ground. 

His head rings when it strikes the stone floor, even through the helmet. All other sound comes back to him slowly, tinny and wobbly. The hysterical crying and pleading of the soldier above him, Kyung-Sook’s voice calling his name in his ear. 

But not Lucas. He doesn’t hear Lucas. And he still feels himself bracing, waiting for the trick to unfold and the trap to spring again.

But nothing comes.

After a period of time he can’t even quantify, he slowly manages to push himself to his hands and knees. “I’m fine,” he mumbles to Kyung-Sooks’s increasingly-concerned overtones, and then louder, almost waiting, he asks the room at large. “Lucas?”

The soldier above him shushes him frantically—no longer the grim, resigned man of before and clearly desperately afraid  Chris is about to jinx their sudden reprieve, but nothing else answers Chris. Just his own voice echoing on the rocks.

—(((())))—

Chris drags the soldier—Gutiérrez, the man identifies for him helpfully on the way, meaning of the currently dead man and the possibly still-living one left, one must be Chapman and the other Goldburg—back to the relative safety of the main cavern and its abandoned machinery. 

Gutiérrez smiles gratefully at Chris through his sweat-stained face when Chris rustles through his limited medical supplies and manages to conjure up an injectable painkiller and some bandages to wrap the kid’s—because he is absolutely just a kid, really, once he pries his helmet off—splintered and bleeding ankle. Lucas had clearly done everything in his power to make sure Gutiérrez wasn’t going anywhere even if he did manage to untie himself, though Chris resists the urge to tell the kid he should be glad Lucas at least didn’t deign him worthy of a bomb around any of his body parts.

 “I need you to tell me about the other soldiers, the ones you came down here with,” he says instead, his voice steady, professional. Neither of them has said much about what had transpired in that torture room—at least, Chris hadn’t. Gutiérrez had babbled his thanks as Chris limped them both back here and Chris had nodded and grunted until Gutiérrez had developed the common sense to stop talking.

“One of them is dead,” Chris continues, not seeing any point in beating around the bush. “Lucas blew his head off with a bomb.” Across from him, Gutiérrez rapidly loses what little color his face still had left, his skin pallid and clammy. “I’m choosing to assume the other is still alive, but I don’t know where he is. And we don’t know why Lucas let us go or how long it will be until he wants to resume his game, so the faster I find whoever’s still alive, the better.”

Gutiérrez tries for a nod—it’s more of a stuttery jerk of his head than anything else, and his voice is shaky when he opens his mouth—but he talks, answers plainly. “He ambushed us. Used those white molded to separate us and run us into his traps. I don’t… I don’t know where the other guys are. I fucked up my ankle on one of his trip wires and he knocked me out with a goddamn…pipe or something. Woke up to him tying me to that damn cross and fucking…narrating. Said he was putting together some puzzles for you,” and here Gutiérrez snorts with more irony than humor, “…’Hair-scratchers for the Hero-man’.” 

Chris feels the scowl darken his face before the kid is even finished talking—carefully flits his eyes between the three garage doors he can access from this cavern. Three puzzles, or traps, if he had to guess—and three men. Or at least there were, before Lucas blew one of them up. 

“He was keeping you alive to bait me, right?”

“Yeah.” Gutiérrez winces as Chris finishes tying off the splint on his ankle. 

“And he killed one of the others to bait me into chasing him down here in the first place,” Chris continues, working it out in his own mind even as he speaks. In his earpiece, there’s a considering hum—Kyung-Sook, quiet but still clearly listening in. “So there’s a good chance the last man is still alive. At least for now.” He doesn’t add any more, just flickers his eyes up to the two remaining garage doors meaningfully, and Gutiérrez follows his gaze.

“You going to be all right on your own?” Chris adds carefully, as he leans back. Doesn’t get to his feet quite yet. Gutierrez studies him, and he can see the guy knows it’s more a question of common courtesy than anything—Chris has to keep looking, and Gutiérrez isn’t mobile enough to be anything but a hinderance. No two ways about it. But the kid nods regardless, visibly steeling himself. 

“Yeah.”

“Good,” is all Chris says as he straightens up, though Gutiérrez’s careful hand fluttering at the loose fabric of his bodysuit around his shin gives him pause. The man below him falters—half weary soldier, half terrified kid—and Chris waits.

“You should actually take my mask’s filter, this time,” Gutiérrez says, and then chuckles with faint humor. “I’ll uh… trade you it for a grenade, if you’re willing. I know you can’t spare a gun, but if those things come back…”

He doesn’t say any more. Doesn’t need to. They both know he’s in no condition to fight—but better to have a means, a way to go out on your own terms if necessary. Chris can understand that—he understands it intimately.

He feels something in him—that little something deeply buried beneath the exhaustion and apathy and goddamn frustration the years have left him with—the thing that still knows hope, but mostly fear, soften. 

“Yeah, kid,” he says. “I can do that.”

—(((())))—

Chris picks his way through the garages with efficiency. Spares a pause only for the first white molded that comes rearing out at him from the dim, and then dodges it and every one of its kin that follow with brisk, if not brash, confidence. Can’t even find it in him to feel particularly glad when he finally finds a set of RAMRODs along with a night vision lens for his HUD. He only feels that prickle of irritation that the overseers for this operation hadn’t had the foresight to engineer enough RAMRODs for every soldier they were dropping onto the Baker estate. What good were those weeks of observation and planning—all for this moment—if they couldn’t even adequately assess the threat and equip their ground teams as needed? 

There’s no man with the supplies, and no body. Clearly these were taken off one of his men, left here as some kind of reward for completing Lucas’s little maze, but he has no idea if they were taken off a living man or a corpse. He chooses to read the lack of blood and viscera on the items as promising, if only for his own sanity. Moves On. Keeps playing the game. 

What’s more disconcerting than anything, though, is the utter lack of active Lucas Baker specialties to slow him down. He passes automated gun turrets that are dark and motionless, firing no bullets—comes to the third garage after a quick check on Gutiérrez, and finds pressure plates littered with wires cold beneath his boots when he carefully prods at them. All these traps set up and waiting, and no one to trigger them. 

His suspicions rise higher again when he comes across one of Lucas’s tripwires and tries to shoot out the box. He shoots it, all right—but nothing happens. Bullet in, bullet out. No explosion. He frowns, creeps closer, tweaks the wire carefully. Still nothing.

It’s been deactivated.

And Chris isn’t stupid, especially when it comes to this stuff—he’s already noticed the traps before now hadn’t just failed to work, but had appeared for all intents and purposes shut down—but now he’s sure. Gun turrets and pressure plates could theoretically be remotely triggered, rather than automated. But not trip wires. It just wouldn’t make sense, even accounting for Lucas’s unorthodox approaches to killing his enemies. No. Lucas isn’t just forgetting to to trigger his traps at the right times. They’ve actively been remotely deactivated.

Someone has deactivated them.

It still could be Lucas, could be part of some long con to get Chris to let his guard down—wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened—but it doesn’t…feel right. The whole thing scratches at him, like an itch under the skin. A question he can’t answer.

“You’re sure no one else is down here with us?” he mutters quietly to Kyung-Sook as he finds the key that should open those doors marked with the Clown graffiti, stuck in an equally ugly-ass clown mannequin. No accounting for taste, but it does seems be the right kind of thing for a guy like Lucas. Creepy, but not for any real purpose. Just disconcerting to look at for the sake of it.

“No,” she says, weary but with an admittedly fair amount of patience given this is the third time Chris has asked her. “I swear, Chris. You’re not even supposed to be down there. Why would we send someone else?”

“…Anyone unaccounted for up top?” 

“They still haven’t found Eveline or Ethan Winters. I’ve told the other operators to notify me the second they do.” She pauses, clearly thinking. “…They also haven’t found Zoe Baker, or her body.” 

Chris makes a skeptical noise. He’d read the file, seen her pictures. What they’d intercepted from the Connections made it clear she was not a willing participant in this experiment, and potentially the only lucid infected member of the Baker family still in relative control of her mental facilities. But still—“You really think she could take her brother? She didn’t look like the fighting sort.”

Then again, neither did his own sister at first glance. And Claire could bring empires to their knees if she wanted to—kind of already had. 

“I think she survived three years in hell when pretty much everyone else around her died or went insane,” Kyung-Sook says grimly. “I think there’s not much she wouldn’t do if it could get her out of here.”

Chris considers it. Growing up around Lucas, she might have the technical skills necessary to shut down his traps, and it’s certainly a nicer thought—that she took down her own brother and is now trying to help. Nicer than the likely reality of her death. But the thought doesn’t fit that paranoid itch he has inside.

“We’ll see,” is all he says.

Paranoia or not, relief wins out when he finally finds his third, until-then missing soldier—unconscious and lying like a discarded doll on the cold ground, but still clearly struggling through stuttered breaths—surrounded by deactivated trip wires. Another trap—or it had been. Instead of precious minutes wasted trying to pick his way through the room without getting blown up, he can rush straight to his injured man, rolling him over and feeling a sharp prickle of relief when he touches the man’s shoulder and he groans—exhausted, confused, but alive.

“Hey—“ Chris says, can’t help the touch of relief in his voice. “Hey, you still with us?”

It’s slow, takes some help, but the man in front of him sits up, seems cognizant, if a little dazed. “Yeah…it’s you…thanks. I was beginning to think we’d been left behind.” 

Chris feels the barest hint of a smile cross his lips, allows himself a brief flicker of pride—pride that for all his faults, his stubbornness today had done some good. Has saved two men’s lives. 

“Not yet,” he says honestly—can’t say never, even if he’d like to. “I have Gutiérrez. He’s taken a beating, but he’s going to be okay.” He flickers his eyes over this last soldier he’d sent into hell, calculating his injuries, stealing a glance at his name tag sewn neatly onto his vest. “…I’m glad you’re okay as well, Goldburg.” 

Goldburg sags in front of him—palpable relief. “Thanks… thank you for coming to get us.” He hesitates, inclines his head towards a door. “I think—I think we can get out this way.” He limps towards the direction he just indicated, seemingly desperate to be out of here, and Chris follows, more cautiously. “Lucas is a fucking psycho. Not sure what’s worse—him or those things.” Chris watches him scan the room warily, before shaking his head. “I was half-out of it, but—couldn’t believe my luck when I heard those damn trip wires turn off. That was you?” 

Chris blows out a heavy breath. “…No.” 

“…Shit,” and now Goldburg certainly looks more on edge. “So Lucas is still…? Shit. We gotta get out of here.” 

“…Yeah,” is all Chris says, and follows him out the door.

—(((())))—

It takes more than a few minutes for Chris and the limping Goldburg to get back to the main cavern, but they get there, and Gutiérrez is still breathing when they do. Even gives a jaunty little wave when he sees them coming and everything—seems fucking thrilled that Goldburg is alive, and Chris watches their cheerful reunion with only a touch of bitterness for all the reunions that never were. At least these two are alive. They deserve to be happy about it—and so does Chris, maybe, but not yet. Not until he’s sure there are no more threats. 

Goldburg has a bomb collar looped around his neck, same as the one on Chris’s wrist, and all Chris can do when he inspects it is grimace. Tech never was his strong suit—right up there with chemistry among his greatest failed pursuits in  school. He’s always been more than happy to leave the hacking and its like to someone more suitable. 

“Thoughts?” he asks Kyung-Sook as he carefully turns Goldburg’s head from side to side—now another sweaty, fear-pale face divested of his helmet—and there’s a considering click of her tongue over the earpiece as she presumably inspects the collar through the view on his HUD. 

“Well, if you found some liquid nitrogen around…”

“That might work for my hand,” Chris says, almost amused, “But I don’t think Goldburg wants to stick his head in a tank of that shit.” Goldburg, unable to hear Kyung-Sook, audibly jumps under his hands, and Chris simply raps on the side of his own still-on helmet, near his ear, figures the message is clear enough. Goldburg seems to relax, at least.

“Then the best thing to do is take them up and get them both deactivated.” 

“I don’t see a blinking light,” Chris points out. “You sure they’re still active? Pretty much everything else got turned off.”

“You really want to take that chance when it’s a bomb around your hand?”

Chris grunts. Fair point. “…And Lucas?” Even if his traps have been turned off, Chris doesn’t think the bastard is just lying dead somewhere. Seems too easy. And if he is—who killed him? Who deactivated the traps? And if they’re really a friend, and not a foe, why haven’t they identified themself? Anyone clever enough to remotely disarm those traps should be able to figure out a damn loudspeaker. 

Kyung-Sook audibly sighs. “…Chris. You came down here to rescue these men. You’ve done that. It’s over.” 

Chris shakes his head, fights to keep the irritation from his voice—she’s been good to him, so far. Many handlers wouldn’t have let him stay down here. She’s…on his side—right now, at least. “We both know it’s not over if he gets away.” 

Kyung-Sook is silent for a long moment, because she does know, he knows she knows, before she redirects. “You and I both know Goldburg and Gutiérrez won’t make it back up the way you came on their own.” 

He stands up, surveying them critically. “Gutiérrez has a busted ankle and a sprained wrist. Goldburg has two broken ribs, a fucked knee, and a…minor concussion. They’re not going to keel over if they go another hour without medical attention.” He steels his gaze at the two men. “Right?” And they are quick to nod their heads, nervously seeking his approval. “They’re nodding.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Kyung-Sook says snippily. “I’d remind you Goldburg also has a bomb around his neck.”

“Which Lucas might set off if I try to take him out of here.”

“No, which Lucas is more likely to set off if you go after him!”

“That’s not him and you know it,” Chris snaps. “He could have made a run for it when we stormed the property hours ago. Instead he lured me down here and taunted me. He wanted to drag this out. He’s a fucking sadist and he was enjoying this. It doesn’t make sense for him to change his mind halfway through—or to suddenly start deactivating his own traps.”

Kyung-Sook doesn’t respond, and Chris scoffs, starts to pace. “Two options. Either this is a long con—in which case he’ll blow us up as we try to leave—or he’s up to some other shit we need to stop. Or, someone took him out and is helping us—but we don’t know who, and we don’t know why. If it’s Zoe Baker or another unaccounted for hostage, they could be injured and in need of assistance. If it’s not…” he hesitates.

“…If it’s not?” Kyunk-Sook asks. 

“If it’s not, it could be something…worse.” He braces himself. “Lucas could have an accomplice, or… there could be a mole on the ground teams. Given Lucas got enough of a tip-off to disappear into the mines before we even landed, I’d even count on it.”

“Jesus, Chris,” Kyung-Sook says, and she’s angry now, he can tell. “I know you have issues trusting Blue Umbrella, but are you seriously—”

“I have trust issues because my own captain was a spy for Umbrella back in Raccoon City, and said captain tried to kill me more than a few times following that,” Chris bites out. “The enemy can be anyone, even someone you would never expect. So yeah, call me a fucking asshole if you want, but I’m not holding my breath on Blue Umbrella being completely devoid of spies and rats.” 

It could be anyone. Could even be you, he doesn’t say. He knows he probably sounds paranoid—that a spy probably wouldn’t take the time to disable the traps for them—but it’d hardly be the first double-agent he met with a ‘conscience.’ Even without one, Wesker had always seemed helpful, until he wasn’t. 

“…Chris,” Kyung-Sook says after a long moment, and she sounds hesitant, if not surprised—he has no doubt she got his long, storied file of his colorful history before being assigned to him. Wesker probably featured prominently in there—the things he’d done to Chris, to Jill. The way he’d hidden in their sight for years—respected, even revered. 

“We don’t know unless we look,” Chris finishes, softer now—trying. Trying. “If I don’t go after him, Lucas gets away, as well as whoever else is down here—along with whatever information on the Connections and Eveline that Lucas has.”

Kyung-Sook just sighs, and Chris knows he’s won. “I can’t buy you time forever.”

“Can you buy an hour?”

“…The ground team recovered some maps of the mines in Lucas’s hideout in the barn. There should be a room behind the shield machine. I’d bet that key will fit that console you’ve got there, get it to open up.”

Chris just nods, even if she can’t see it. Eyes his two injured men—they’re definitely sitting this one out. He can come back for them. He will. “Got it.”

—(((())))—

He finds the rest of the actual goddamn lab. It takes crawling through a goddamn air vent in the room behind the shield machine to get there, but he finds it. 

It’s slow, claustrophobic work. Made worse by the silence. It would almost be better to have Lucas chattering obnoxiously in his ear, making threats and putting him on a timer upon pain of death. Instead all he has is Kyung-Sook’s quiet directions, his own ragged breaths as he pulls his way along. 

He’s struck by the stillness of the labs once he kicks the door down and enters. The rooms he’d seen before were grody, slowly rotting. Piled up with sludge and discarded scientific instruments. Like something that had been left to die years ago. 

This place isn’t. It’s cleaner, more sterile. Feels like it was actually used by real people. And all the stranger for it. His eyes rove over organized rows of lockers, sterile medical tables and gurneys, hanging lab coats and dime-a-dozen medical safety posters scattered along the walls. It could be a hospital. If not for the slashing splatters of blood here and there on the walls, and the dark veins of mold and rot just starting to crack through the floor tiles. 

He’d heard his sister’s and Jill’s descriptions of the Umbrella NEST labs underneath Raccoon City—the pristine, perfected white walls and machinery, smeared with blood and gore—and he’d thought about the labs hidden beneath Spencer Mansion, how even there the strangeness and decrepit style of the manor had crept in. At no point while trapped in the Arklay Mountains had he ever thought he was anywhere else—it was a unique, unescapable hell. Now, he feels like he finally has a better point of comparison to their stories. 

He creeps slowly, gun trained and edging around corners, but there’s no one here. Not even bodies. Just a few molded trapped in isolated observation chambers. Whoever worked in these labs, they’re long gone. Or long dead. Yet the sensation that any moment a doctor or nurse could come rounding the corner with a clipboard lingers—the place simply hasn’t had long enough to decay, vacuum-sealed off and hidden away from the worst of Eveline’s influence. 

The harsh glare of the industrial lights overhead just further calls to attention every small place with trace evidences of past violence, and Chris honestly isn’t sure if the place would be better or worse for some less…illuminative lighting. Like, perhaps, a power outage. It would feel more familiar, at least—he’s used to creeping around in the dark, blending among the shadows as he searches for monsters in the dim. But literally every light here seems to be turned on, and there’s something about it that makes him twitchy and anxious—knowing that as much as the lights means he’ll see any enemies coming that much quicker, so too will others see him coming. There’s no hiding from security cameras when there’s no dark corners to hide in. 

Maybe that’s the point, he thinks, side-eyeing the bright ceiling lights, the metallic shine of the boxy security cameras. He finds cameras in every room—notably can get into every room, because the electronic locks that should only be unlocked via keycard or by remote access are all flashing green and open easily under his hand. Someone has unlocked the doors in this facility. All of them.  It leaves him with that same tingly, suspicious feeling that the disabled traps had given him. Lucas Baker is a smart man, but smart in that jagged, puzzle-obsessed and monologue-desperate way megalomaniacs often are. Chris has met enough to know what they look like by now.

Lucas Baker would thrive in the dark. Shadowed corners and heavy locks that require rummaging through a desiccated corpse for a keycard. Traps and tricks and, of course, the grand speech to introduce it all. A man who loves running his mouth and loves treating people like mice in a maze.

Lucas Baker would not leave the lights on, or unlock the doors—the same way he wouldn’t disable his own traps. There’s no doubt someone else is here, someone clearly not working with Lucas—someone just as clever, but in a different way. Someone who wants to see the enemy coming, who knows to watch the cameras carefully, who knows unlocked doors mean Chris can get in that much easier but also that they can get out. Worryingly, unlike Lucas, it reads as someone who knows when to run, and how. 

He suspects Kyung-Sook has concluded just as much, based on her careful intake of breath every time he finds a new camera. He doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t either—they don’t know who might be listening, and with so many cameras here any one of them could pick up on their words.

So Chris pushes on, picks his way through the abandoned lab. Finds progress notes on Eveline that track her mental decline—notes that just make him all the angrier that the Connections knew what was happening and the danger Eveline and the Bakers posed, and they just watched their ‘experiment’ continue. Finds records on the white mold experiments and the journals that document the lives of the workers here that Lucas killed after he got bored of them. 

Finds dolls that bear an uncanny resemblance to Mia Winters and Eveline, based on their profile photos in the brief, and quickly puts the toys back where he found them with a shudder. 

And then he finally finds it—a small room with an impressive computer setup and a good dozen monitors each displaying four camera views of the labs and the caverns where Chris had rescued Gutiérrez and Goldburg. The monitor room. There’s an overturned chair lying on its side on the floor near the desk. Scuff marks along the ground, a small splatter of blood. 

There are no bodies, but he can track the path of the altercation that clearly happened here.

“Kyung-Sook,” he says quietly, doesn’t see any point in silence anymore—whoever was here is long gone.

“Yes, I see it,” her voice answers, grave now. Likely noticing the same things he is.

He steps cautiously in the room, scanning for traps, finding nothing—checks one, twice, three times to be sure. He lowers his gun without dropping his guard, allows himself to properly follow the tableau left behind—the aftermath of… “An ambush,” he says, confident now in what he’s looking at. “The door’s not damaged. It was either unlocked or they had a keycard. Snuck up on him...” His eyes catch on the overturned chair, the bullet hole in the wall next to the computers. “They tussled—the ambusher shot Lucas once, non-fatally.” Definitely not enough blood for Lucas to be dead, fucking unfortunately. He eyes the blood spatters contemplatively. “I think they broke his nose as well,” he adds, more cheerfully.

“How the hell can you tell that?”

“Pattern of that blood spray there,” he points it out on the floor. “Just a guess. They were definitely grappling, though.” 

“Do you think they knocked him out?”

“Must have.” He doesn’t see Lucas as being the kind to go quietly. No, he’d have had to be unconscious. He casts his eyes around the room once more, lands on a tangle of spare parts and computer cords that looks half-empty. “They could have bound him. Maybe with the computer cords.”

“And dragged him out of here?” 

Chris glances down at the floor again, can see the faintest marks of something heavy dragged over the cheap tiled flooring. “Yeah.”

“Shit,” Kyung-Sook says softly. “So definitely not a friend of his, then.” 

“No,” Chris agrees. “Money’s out on whether that makes them our friend or not, though. Given they ran before I got here, I’m not holding my breath.”

“At least it eliminates the possibility of a spy. They’re clearly not working with Lucas.”

“Lucas betrayed the Connections and intended to sell Eveline’s data—maybe Eveline herself—to the highest bidder,” Chris points out. “A spy for the company, or for a third party, would have every reason to tie him up and drag him home to whoever they’re working for like a trussed turkey.” 

Kyung-Sook’s hum is considering, but reluctant. “A third party?”

Chris can’t help the snort that escapes. “Yeah. It’s not like the Connections are the only people in the business. There’s plenty of others with their own people to send sniffing around this stuff, right under our noses.” 

“But why turn off the traps?” Kyung-Sook pauses, then adds on, skeptically “…A spy with a conscience?”

Chris hesitates, finds his body pulled back to the computers. The middle screen is still blinking with lines of code. Commands. Someone sat here and took the time to disable those traps, all to give Chris and his men a fighting chance. “…It happens. You ever read any of the files on Ada Wong?”

“I’ve—a couple. I’ve heard of her.”

“Yeah, well… she’s never been my problem, but I know people who’ve dealt with her. She’ll save a life as easily as turn on them. The codes of these people aren’t always…clear.” Not like Lucas Baker is, at least. Sometimes the sadists are more straightforward.

He thinks of Wesker—and Wesker and Jill—then puts the thought away. 

Sometimes they’re not, he knows.

“So…you’re saying Ada Wong broke into the mines right under our noses and kidnapped Lucas Baker?” And now Kyung-Sook sounds really skeptical.

“No!” Chris snaps, feeling defensive now. Why does he ever even bother opening his mouth? He jerks his head away from the computer, glares at the monitors for a moment as if they’ll reveal the answers to this brewing headache. Nothing shows itself, of course. “It was a goddamn example, as a point of comparison.”

“Chris—“

“I mean, fucking hell, do you Umbrella people think I’m down so many loose screws that I—“

“Chris,” Kyung-Sook says more urgently, louder. “Shut up.”

He stills. 

“What?”

“Look up,” she says in a rush. “Top row of monitors. Left corner.”

He does—without hesitation. Turns his gaze to where she wanted it and feels that something inside himself go still and cold in the way it does whenever he encounters caution, danger. On the top left monitor, its screen divided among those four camera views, the topmost one sits empty. Black and cold in its frame. 

It’s the only camera view not in operation. Telling in its blankness. 

“Shit,” he says, knows. “These cameras around it, are they adjacent—“

“Yes,” Kyung-Sook says. “Go.”

—(((())))—

Kyung-Sook guides him, using a photo she took of the monitors through his HUD. Studies them and matches them to the hallways as he traverses them, gives him quiet instructions to go left, or right, or through a door. He moves as quietly as she speaks, both of them cautious and near-silent once more. Hunters stalking prey. 

He hears the voices before he sees anything. Slips around the side of a passageway and then freezes as he hears the tell-tale drawl of a familiarly-accented voice. 

“Wrong!” 

It rings out loudly, gratingly, and Chris flicks his eyes to the room it came out of—down the hall, coming from a cracked-open doorway, lights spilling out from the opening onto the tiles of the passageway. There’s a single small window that looks attached to the room. If he moves below waist-height, he should go unnoticed. As long as no one sees him through the crack in the doorway. 

He takes a step, then another. Pauses. There’s no response to Lucas’s loud declaration, but as Chris strains his ears he can hear—rustling, the quiet scrapes and clicks of things being picked up and put down, or pushed around on a shelf. There’s a near-silent sigh, barely caught. 

“Wrong-o!” Lucas’s screech comes again, loudly. “Bzzt! Incorrect! Nope!” There’s a short pause between each exclamation, between which is the clinking and shuffling of whoever else is with him inspecting objects or…searching. 

Another long moment of silence. Then—“Ooh, yeah, go for that one, that’s a great idea. That totally won’t kill her.”

This time there’s another sigh—louder, more aggravated. 

“Will you please shut up?” A second voice—male, neither young nor old sounding, with an geographically-indeterminable American accent—snaps. “I can’t even hear myself think.”

“That’s the point, Ethie-boy!” Lucas’s voice sing-songs. “Tell you what, I’ll shut myself up if you—“

“I’m not untying you, Lucas. I get you think I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid.” 

Chris remains in his crouch by the wall, every muscle tense as it finally clicks for him—and Kyung-Sook’s surprised inhale over the line tells him she’s figured it out as well. “Ethan Winters?” she whispers. “Mia Winters’ missing husband? Why would he be down here?” She pauses, clearly thinking. “Is he…does he think his wife is still infected?”

Chris furrows his brow, thinks. He taps the side of his helmet, over his earpiece, three times in response. Maybe, but even as he does, another thought occurs to him—Kyung-Sook’s words from earlier, about why he was being recalled back to the Baker estate, and he jolts. Taps twice—no—more firmly and frantically.

“…Oh,” Kyung-Sook says, catching on. “Eveline.”

Chris taps once. Yes.

“…But why send him down here? What could she—how would she even know this place exists? Shouldn’t it have been hidden from her influence?”

Chris doesn’t respond—not much he can do there with only yes or no, and he’s really not sure. None of it adds up—why Eveline would send Ethan down here, or what he’s doing. His speaking style doesn’t seem erratic in the way the records said an infected person under Eveline’s control would be. And the traps—why did he disable all the traps? He doesn’t have any good answer that explains it all. Carefully, once more, he begins to creep forward, sights set on that window.

There’s more rustling from the room, before the second voice, Ethan, speaks again. “Oh my—you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Lucas begins giggling, and Chris can hear the skid of feet turning around swiftly. “You had serum sitting down here this whole time?!”

“Uh, yeah? Bet you’re feeling pretty stupid right about now, huh—“

“Why not just give it to her, Lucas?” Ethan’s voice is taut now, choked with some unspecified emotion. “Why not just give it to her, and let her leave? It was too late for your parents, but… All she wanted was to leave.”

There’s a snort from Lucas. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

“…She was your sister.”

“And?”

There’s a bitten-off, angry attempt at a laugh. “Yeah, and. Fuck, why am I even asking you? I already knew the answer.” There’s some clinking and rustling—vials going into a bag? 

“Why the fuck are you taking that? Really think that’s gonna help you? God, you’re stupider than you—“

“I know I don’t need it,” Ethan says sharply. “I’m not infected. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth having, or not useful.” 

Lucas breaks into high-pitched, manic laughter before Ethan is even done talking, giggling and gasping for air. “You think you’re—fuck, you really are brain dead. You and sweet little Evie are perfect for each other. Two of the stupidest, most gullible little frea—“ Lucas suddenly cuts himself off, voice going frantic. “Hey—hey! Why are you looking at me like that? Stop it!” A rustle. “…What the fuck are you—no, no! Don’t come near me with that shit! Winters, I swear to God, I will make sure you die slowly and painfully if you even think—“ There’s the click of determined footsteps, and Chris risks it, has to know if he needs to dive in there and intervene—not that he gives a shit about saving Lucas’s life, but the job is the job—and sticks his head up towards the bottom of the window into the room, eyes just above the rim.

There’s a sandy blond man inside, with blue eyes and a nose that’s crooked in the way that means it got broken years ago and never set quite right. He’s wearing a collared shirt that was white, once, but is now so covered in gunk, filth, and blood it’s now a stained reddish-gray more than anything. And he has Lucas Baker—who is trussed up in computer cords at the wrists and ankles and tied to the leg of a floor-bolted table—by the hair as he forces his head to the side and none-too-gently sticks a thin syringe in his neck and injects its contents. 

Chris tenses again, ready to rush through that door and tackle Ethan to the ground if he needs to, but—Lucas doesn’t seem to be on death’s door, or even really in pain. He’s kicking and hissing and spitting, but more in the way an angry cat that’s just been scruffed does, not an injured one. Ethan pulls the syringe out from Lucas’s neck and steps back, practically smirking, as Lucas kicks out at him ineffectively with his bound-together legs and snarls. 

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Lucas.”

“Fuck you!”

“Guess you’ll have to be more careful the next time someone wants to cut your arm off, huh?” Ethan’s grin is tight and angry, but not without an edge of humor as he walks back over to the row of cold-storage refrigeration units he was apparently going through. Opens up what must be the next one on his list and sticks his head in. 

“You—“ Lucas’s fury is palpable, but his movements seem slower, more sluggish. Like the injection knocked some of that boundless, violent energy out of him. “…Once I’m outta these ropes, you’re toast. I’m gonna gut you like a fish.”

Ethan just hums noncommittally, taking out another vial from the refrigeration unit and inspecting it carefully, mouth silently shaping whatever words he’s reading on the label, eyes narrowed in concentration. He frowns, shakes his head, puts it back inside the refrigeration unit. 

“…Chris,” Kyung-Sook says softly. “This doesn’t make sense.” He would be inclined to agree. “His body language and behavioral pattern are completely different from what we have on those infected with the E-series mutamycete. He’s not—this doesn’t feel like E-001’s signature.” Chris frowns, taps his helmet again three times, this time as a question. Could we have got it wrong?

Maybe Zoe Baker had helped Eveline escape. She was a relatively tall woman, probably closer to Ethan’s size than not. They could have misread the shoe imprints. And they knew she was infected, even if she had been fighting the mental control. Maybe Ethan Winters really wasn’t infected, and he really had come down here looking for a cure for his—

“Ughhhh…” Lucas groans. “C’mon, I can’t do the silent game, I’m bored.” Another long silence. “….Jesus, her shit ain’t here, man. Give it up already.”

A snort from Ethan. “Because I’m totally going to believe that coming from you.”

“It’s the goddamn truth!” 

“Oh yeah?” And this time Ethan turns, waving another vial with a sludgy, black liquid inside. “I could give you back that ‘gift’ you loved so much. Then maybe you could tell Eveline that yourself. I’m sure she’d love to talk.”

Lucas pales considerably. “…You wouldn’t.”

He and Ethan Winters stare each other down—Lucas belligerent, Ethan considering and…sad. And then Ethan shakes his head, turns away. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“…Hah, loser!” And again Ethan doesn’t bother to dignify Lucas’s response with a reply, just rolls his eyes.

“Chris,” Kyung-Sook mutters nervously, and Chris merely taps once. Yes. He heard it—Eveline. That’s enough to go on. Ethan Winters is down here at her behest—strangely normal mannerisms or not—which means he needs to go down. He lowers himself from the window, creeps towards the doorway. He can see Ethan through the open crack, back to him now as he opens up another refrigeration unit. Chris stills. Considers. He could burst in there, raise his gun before Ethan is even turned around. He’s not keen to kill a man who seems mentally intact, but if he’s infected he might not have a choice to shoot non-fatally. 

“We need him alive, Chris,” Kyung-Sook whispers, as if reading his thoughts. “If he dies, we’ll never have the full picture of how he was involved in this mess—and we may not find Eveline fast enough. He knows where she is.”

Chris nods, eyes Ethan through the doorway again. He doesn’t know whether to sneak in or just swing the door open and dive at Ethan to take him to the floor. Ethan’s definitely armed—he’s got a gun wedged in his belt like it’s a shoddy gun holster, and Chris can see the end of a shotgun glistening on a table next to Ethan’s backpack. If he wants to get the jump on him, he’ll have to be quick enough to not get shot. 

Lucas is another factor—but he’s well-bound, by the looks of things, and focused entirely on Ethan, all his energy given to verbally berating him. Carefully, oh so carefully, Chris hooks his fingers around the doorway, creaks it open further. Readies himself to lunge at Ethan, and—

“Oh shit!” Lucas’s voice suddenly screeches, and Chris turns his head to it on instinct, see Lucas staring right at him, eyes wide. “Fuck! Ethan!” 

Chris jolts, goes to lunge for Ethan Winters—and Ethan whirls around, a hefty-looking magnum pistol pointed right at Chris, dead-center to his helmet. Chris freezes, less than two feet from Ethan, body trembling with the sudden turn from movement to the fullest effort to hold still. He’s not stupid—his visor is tough, meant to take a beating. But a bullet from this close up straight at his face, while not a certain death threat, is still a threat.

Ethan Winters is staring at him, eyes wide and panicked, flitting about Chris’s body as he takes in the measure of him, but the gun doesn’t waver one inch from its mark between Chris’s eyes. The hand holding it is steady, hammer cocked and finger poised over the trigger. 

“…Fuck,” Ethan mumbles, looking panicked and frightened and—regretful. He backs up a careful step, back hugging the table behind him. “I should have known you guys would get here soon.” His eyes flicker to Lucas, to the refrigerated units, back to Chris. “Thought I had more time.”

His eyes study Chris—and Chris knows, that he’s weighing up the odds. How to incapacitate Chris, whether he can. Whether he has no choice but to shoot him, whether he’s willing to.

Chris knows. Knows what it looks like to try and make that decision because he’s done it before. Somehow almost always comes up with the wrong answer while trying to find the one he can most live with.

He’s not in a rush to figure out what decision Ethan Winters will arrive at, and whether it would be the same as his own. Especially not when Ethan by all likelihood has the mutamycete crawling through his veins, and a bioweapon whispering in his ears.

The voice in his own ear, Kyung-Sook, hisses out quietly—“Chris, talk him down.”

Slowly, he takes his own step back, raises his hands. “Easy,” he says. “Easy. It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

Ethan snorts at that, rolls his eyes. Inclines the pistol just slightly. “We can skip that part, thanks.” His gaze flits down Chris’s chest, catches on the patches on the vest—the one where his name is stitched in, and the logos for the BSAA and Blue Umbrella. “Redfield?”

Chris studies the man in front of him in turn—trying to calculate the perfect steadiness of that gun against Ethan’s comparatively soft appearance, against the way he’d spoken to Lucas, all idle threats and exhaustion. It’s a stupid idea that comes to him, knowing this man is infected by Eveline, and under her sway—because it’ll mean nothing to her, what Chris does here. But he seems so…human. Strangely, confusingly human. 

Carefully, knowing it’s a risk, he reaches a hand towards his helmet—watching Ethan track his movement—and flips the switch to open his visor. 

He doesn’t have much to gamble with, but he’ll have to work with what he’s got. Place his bets on Ethan Winters looking Chris’s own clear humanity in the face and being…more hesitant, less likely to panic and fire off a shot. Hopefully. 

Kyung-Sook’s panicked whispering in his ear lets him know exactly what she thinks of this plan. 

“Chris,” he says, and Ethan’s eyes roam over his face, half-curious, half-fearful—narrowing slightly when Chris says his name, as if it’s almost familiar to him, like a long-lost acquaintance he can’t quite place. The grip on the gun doesn’t loosen, but it doesn’t tighten.

“…Umbrella or BSAA?” Ethan Winters asks after a long moment, and Chris blinks. 

Eveline wouldn’t know those words. And he has no idea how Ethan would know them with such familiarity, either.

“…BSAA,” he answers slowly, and is caught off-guard by how Ethan’s jaw tenses—proverbial hackles raising. 

Ethan jerks his head toward Lucas. “You came here for him.” Not a question.

Chris nods, still slow. Cautious. “Yes. And for you.” It’s not a lie, technically. “…We found your wife.”

That gets reaction—Ethan’s eyes widen, shoulders raising somewhere between nerves and defensiveness, the gun twitching a little in his hand. 

“She’s—she’s okay?”

“She’s fine,” Chris says. “Last I heard, at least. One of our teams was with her. They probably took her to medical.”

And interrogation, immediately after. But that’s probably not the best thing to say. 

Ethan’s reaction is—strange. There’s an immediate, visible surge of relief. But then his body tenses once more, something conflicted—half worried, half frightened, all skittish—darting across his face. He still makes no move to lower the gun even a little.  

“I spoke to her,” Chris adds on, carefully. “She was asking about you.”

There’s a visible twitch across Ethan’s whole frame, and he blinks, shaking his head, and Chris isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean. Ethan says nothing to clarify, and Chris breathes out slowly. He looks again for another opening, vision catching on a gnarled scar on Ethan’s forearm, set with chunky staples that look less medical and more industrial. The cut looks deep—like someone tried to hack Ethan’s arm off and got pretty close to the bone. But there’s no blood, no bandages, despite the wound surely being only hours old. Not even any irritation on the skin around the staples beyond a little redness.

Advanced healing, then. Another point towards Ethan being infected. But when Chris glances back at his face, he sees none of the signs listed in the brief—dilated pupils, greying skin, a putridity to the flesh like the top layer of it is at risk of sloughing off like dead tissue. Ethan looks human. He looks—healthy, if a bit worse for the wear. 

None of it makes a single lick of sense, and Chris is left scrambling both for answers and for what to do here, how to get the gun out of Ethan’s hands and restrain him safely. He—doesn’t want to kill him. He genuinely doesn’t. Ethan seems…too human, too cognizant, and entirely not violent enough for Chris to be okay with putting a bullet through his head. The guy just looks freaked the hell out, more than anything. 

Maybe he’s like Zoe Baker. Infected, but able to shake the mental hold for the most part. Most of the time.

Still dangerous, though, if that’s the case. 

“Look, Chris says, tries to keep his voice calm and even. “I’m sure you’ve had…one hell of a night. Nothing a civilian like you ever should have gone through. But we’re here to help. If you put the gun down, I can get his sorry ass—“ he jerks his head to Lucas, “to the people who can put him under lock and key, and you to a doctor, and your wife.” 

Ethan’s eyes narrow, and he shakes his head again. “I’m not going home with Mia. She knows that.” 

And that—yeah, that throws Chris for another loop. Point again for Ethan being under Eveline’s sway. Fuck. “Okay, well—” 

“Look,” Ethan says suddenly, sharply—voice only a little tremulous, but a certainty in his posture Chris doesn’t like one bit. “I don’t—I don’t want to hurt you, okay? But I’m not going anywhere with you,” and there’s an anger there that Chris doesn’t know how to untangle, that seems bigger than this moment, than Chris himself. “I just—I just need to get something, and then I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again, and that’s a promise. I’m not interested in making trouble. I just want to get my stuff and leave.” He nods at Lucas. “You’re welcome to him. He’s what you came here for. All you have to do is let me go.” 

“Chris,” Kyung-Sook says in his ear, half-warning, half-fear, and Chris—knowing it’s stupid and also knowing he has nothing else to offer, just shakes his head. 

“Go…back to Eveline?” And there Ethan flinches, truly flinches, and that’s all the answer he needs. “You know I can’t let you do that.” 

Ethan hesitates, gun wavering. “I—“

And fuck it, Chris thinks, and he dives at him, weight shifting forward and down. Lucas screeches in the background—half-excitement, half-panic—as they hit the ground, Chris’s arms around Ethan’s waist as he scrambles to knock the gun out of Ethan’s hand, get him restrained—Ethan didn’t shoot, he didn’t shoot, why didn’t he—

And Ethan kicks and twists madly, shouting and fighting Chris with everything he’s got to get away. He’s smaller than Chris, though, and weaker, and Chris knows if he can just get both of his arms pinned at his sides, he can—

Ethan’s spare hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, skitters out of his reach, dives into his pocket, and then comes back up in front of Chris’s face—a detonator in hand, thumb poised over the trigger, and Chris stills instantly. Ethan stares up at him with wide, panicked eyes, hand trembling as it clutches the detonator between them, fingers white with how hard they’re holding onto the barrel of it, thumb tucked over that button. 

Chris remains frozen, doesn’t even try to grab for it, because he knows what that detonator is.

“Get off of me,” Ethan says—snarls, really—and slowly, Chris does. Backs up as far as he can preemptively—clear across the room, only a few feet from Lucas now. He’s not going to risk running—doesn’t know how far the signal on that thing reaches. Hell, it could still reach Goldburg too, for all he knows. Ethan gets to his feet, staggering under some definite bruises and sprains from being slammed into the ground, but he’s steady once he’s up, hand on the detonator as he crouches down and picks up his gun, pointing that at Chris as well for good measure. 

“You’re going to stay there, and I’m going to get what I came for, and then I’m going to leave,” Ethan says bluntly. “And in exchange I don’t use this thing—because I really don’t want to, but I will. Okay?” 

“Ethan—“

“Okay?”

Chris says nothing, but holds up his hands in the universal sign of surrender, hopes that’ll be enough. Ethan eyes him warily, and then backs up, detonator still clasped in his hand as he uncocks the Magnum and shoves it into his belt, before he cautiously sidesteps his way back over to the refrigeration unit and—eyes still locked on Chris, barely risking to dart away for more than a few scant seconds—opens it, starts pulling out handfuls of random vials and syringes and test tubes and, without even stopping to read the labels, begins shoving them all unto the open mouth of his backpack. 

“Yeah, just take a bunch of random crap, that definitely ain’t gonna backfire on you,” Lucas says dryly from his place on the floor, because he’s apparently incapable of keeping his mouth shut, and Ethan’s eye visibly twitches. 

“Enjoy BSAA custody, Lucas,” he says primly, still not stopping in his shoveling of whatever test samples and shots he finds—but Lucas’s own reaction to Ethan’s words is more than visible as he stops moving for possibly the first time in this entire encounter. Frozen, eyes wide, body still. 

“What? No—No, fuck no. You gotta cut me loose. Those guys’ll lock me up in some place that don’t even have a zip code and fuckin… Hell no! C’mon, Ethan—you gotta—we bonded, right? We played some fun games together.” He coughs nervously. “Or—hell, you and Zoe bonded! You said you owe her. How can you just leave her only brother in the hands of them BSAA sons of bitches—“

“You left your sister to die. I owe her, I didn’t kill you. We’re more than even,” Ethan says dryly, kicking closed the refrigeration unit he was rooting around in and going for the next. He’s still tense, eyes trained on Chris, just as Chris is on him—Chris looking for even a second of opportunity, Ethan knowing that and looking to deny him.

“Fuck that!” Lucas shouts, twisting wildly again now, trying and failing to get out of his restraints. “Fuckin’…son of a bitch! Fuck it! I’ll cut a deal. I wanna cut a deal.” When Ethan doesn’t respond, Lucas’s flailing only increases. “You hear me? I wanna—“

“That’s for you and him to sort out, Lucas. Not my problem.”

“Not with them!” Lucas snarls. “Fuck them! I’ll cut a deal with you.” He pauses, flits his eyes to Chris, who glares down at Lucas—unable to do anything, doesn’t know if even talking to Lucas will make Ethan trigger-happy, can’t justify risking it when it’s not just his head on the line. “I’ll tell you what you need to treat Eveline.”

That gets a reaction out of Chris before he can help it. “Like hell you—“

Ethan twitches. “Shut up,” he says simply, and Chris, brain catching up to his mouth, does, his eyes back on that detonator. Ethan’s eyes flicker to Lucas. “You’ll just tell me to take the wrong thing.”

“I won’t!” Lucas says—half-affronted, half-desperate. “I am a very genuine—“ At Ethan’s deadpan stare, Lucas grimaces, starts over. “…Look, I don’t fucking like you—at all. If things had gone my way you’d have had your ass blown to pieces in the party room. But things ain’t gone my way, and if my options are Evie with you, or with them government boys, I’ll take you.” An unsettling grin stretches across Lucas’s face. “At least if she’s with you there’s a nice, solid chance she’ll just kill you and make a bunch of molded out of some assholes in a Walmart. It’ll be some entertainment to watch. Unlike with them.” He jerks his head at Chris, who grits his teeth, trying his damndest to hold his tongue as he watches Ethan’s eyes narrow, mouth pursed in consideration. 

“Ethan,” Chris tries one last time. “You don’t—“

“What’s the catch?” Ethan asks Lucas, ignoring Chris.

Lucas’s grin turns predatory. “I know you aren’t gonna untie me. No point in asking. So we’ll keep it simple. You toss me one of them same bottles you’ll take for Eveline on your way out the door, and we’ll be square. I meant what I said. I ain’t going into BSAA custody—at least not without a show.” 

There’s a long moment of silence, and then Ethan nods. “…Deal. If you screw me over on this, I’ll—“

“Kill me, yeah, yeah,” Lucas rolls his eyes. “You want the white mold samples. In that there fridge on your right. We created them by treating Eveline’s mold with the same chemicals that they used to keep her accelerated decay down. They’re meant for advanced cell regeneration—ended up with molded that were basically unkillable without some form of neurotoxin, it was great.” Lucas wiggles his eyebrows, and Ethan shifts, opening the refrigeration unit Lucas had indicated skeptically. “It’s a product instead of the original stuff, but it should work just as well with enough of it—it’s just her mold and the same chemicals she would have gotten anyway. If she absorbs enough of it, it should work.” 

Ethan eyes Lucas for another long moment, but seems convinced by whatever he sees, or heard, and he nods again. Begins pulling out small vials of a familiar white substance and shoving them into his backpack—quickly, but carefully. Not just a handful, at least a couple dozen, and this stirs Chris again, because he can’t just let Ethan walk out of here with all of that—but the second he starts forward Ethan is glaring at him again, fingers tight around that detonator, extended out from his side like a visual reminder, a promise. 

Chris stops. Again. Can feel his heart pounding, body shaking with the urge to just charge Ethan, stop this, but he can’t.

Once he’s done, Ethan zips up his bag, slings it over his shoulder and collects his shotgun as well, slips its strap onto the opposite shoulder from his bag. Carefully, he takes one more white mold sample from the refrigeration unit, holds it out towards Chris and Lucas, matching it in position to the detonator in his other hand.

“Think fast,” he says—to Chris—before chucking the vial at Lucas, and then lunging out the door, disappearing into the hallway.

Lucas lunges at the vial of mold as best he can with his restraints, body hitting the floor hard as he tries to get his teeth near it—somehow succeeds, fucking hell—and Chris has no choice but to dive onto Lucas as well, scrabbling at the wiggling man in a messy attempt to get the vial out of his mouth before he can break the glass. He succeeds, yanking it away from Lucas and throwing it clear across the room as Lucas yells and thrashes about. Chris doesn’t spare him another thought, scrambling to his feet and running for the doorway, gun cocked.

But when he gets there, Ethan Winters is nowhere in sight. 

On the floor just outside the doorway, lying abandoned, is the detonator. 

—(((())))—

Chris searches the hallways, he does, but he finds nothing to tell him where to go. Isn’t even sure what direction Ethan went, which is no help at all. And by the time Chris makes it back to the control room, even running at full tilt, there’s no sign of Ethan on the cameras. Those unlocked doors were a gamble that paid off, after all, it seems. Ethan Winters is long gone. 

Kyung-Sook talks Chris out of searching the labs again, arguing with him until he gets his head out his ass about the whole thing. They both know he’ll find nothing, and she promises that they’ll have people posted at every exit and entrance to the mines that they know of as soon as possible.

“We’ll get him, Chris,” she promises, and he just grunts in response—too exhausted to argue further, to acknowledge the gut feeling he has that Ethan Winters, whatever he is, is far too smart to get caught so easily. 

So he trudges himself back to Goldburg and Gutiérrez, with Lucas—now comfortably sedated to make Chris’s life easier—slung over his shoulder like a trussed turkey. He finds his men. Gets Gutiérrez to lean his weight on Chris’s spare side as Goldburg hobbles alongside them, and they make their way slowly back through the mines. 

He brings his men back into the light. 

Brings Lucas Baker into BSAA and Blue Umbrella joint custody, tries to feel good about it. 

He wants to comb the Baker property, head for those mine exits, try to help find Ethan, or Eveline, or even Zoe Baker—but the tech people get just as hyper about the bomb collar strapped around his wrist as they do the one around Goldburg’s neck. They force them both into a hastily-constructed operations tent, call over the best EOD specialist on-site to come get the damn things off them without blowing them up. 

It only takes the EOD guy a few minutes of prodding for his face to screw up in a strange, confused way. 

“What?” Chris asks tiredly.

“It’s weird…” The guy says. “You didn’t do anything to this, did you?”

Chris shakes his head. “No.”

The tech frowns. “Then someone was playing you. This was already disabled—not manually, remotely. Definitely disabled though. And it’s completely cold to the touch—must have been hours ago.”

Chris swallows—half-bitterness, half-dismay. 

“I really don’t want to,” Ethan had said, playing poker with a chip that he’d already silently surrendered, “but I will.”

“Oh.”

Chapter Text

There is a soft, dark place, and in it, Ethan sleeps. He’s warm, and content, and dreaming. He knows he’s dreaming. But it’s so nice to dream.

He dreams of rest, and of peace, and his family. He dreams of a hiding place, all of them curled in together, huddling for warmth and comfort—to remind each other they’re still there, still breathing, and to make sure no one vanishes in the night. It’s hazy, and blurry, as all dreams are, but he still knows this well—can place these feelings, this situation. The way they slept in the weeks after Raccoon City, in the single motel room with its king bed they could afford from the meager cash Delia had had on her when everything went wrong, and that they’d found abandoned in the city. They’d never had the stomaches for looting bodies, even the safe, uninfected ones—and hadn’t had much need for cash, in their small apocalypse, outside of when vending machines were the only source of bottled, uncontaminated water available.

That they’d need money once they got out, in order to keep moving, never really occurred to any of them. The idea of the world, safe and sane, outside Raccoon City, had felt further and further from reality with every hour in the city that had passed, every day. It wasn’t until they were well out, miles past the shakily-erected military blockades, past what would eventually become the quarantine line—dodging anyone in a uniform because how could they know who was a soldier, who was a doctor, who was Umbrella?—that it occurred to them they might need ways of paying for things that weren’t tracked back to credit card companies.

So they’d scraped by with what they’d had, thieved when they needed to. Hence the single motel room, the single bed.

They’d squish together at night like spooked rabbits in a burrow, cowering from the foxes outside. Their bed shoved into the corner, every time—better to know your back was at the wall, that the enemy could only come from one side. Ava, the smallest, the most vulnerable, slept the furthest in, curled into Ethan, her face pressed to his chest to hear his heartbeat and his nose buried in her hair. Michael at his back, a guarding arm around both of them. And Delia, her own back pressed to Michael’s, sleeping at the furthest edge, facing the door, gun under her pillow. Four frightened people made into a fortress.

It was a survival mechanism, borne of necessity, but there was comfort in it, too. Something solid and tangible in holding onto each other, being held. The glow of body heat and the pulse of beating, living hearts. Ethan would sleep with one arm wrapped around Ava, hand pressed against her stomach to count her breaths, and his other hand wrapped around Michael’s wrist, fingers fluttering over his pulse. He’d needed to know they were okay, these near-strangers, these people he’d known more terribly and intimately in a mere week than he’d ever known anyone in his life, or would ever know since. They had no words for the way they clung to one another in the night—too traumatized and too bitter to ever think of words like love or family—but they clung all the same, and in its own way, that was enough.

This is what Ethan dreams of, as he floats, heavy in that still black—those small snatches of rest, between the terror of the past and the unknown of the future. He dreams of Delia’s soft snores, Michael at his back, and Ava in his arms: this sharp-edged, all-elbows-and-knees child of bruises and bandages, a hot little ball of fear and fury sleeping softly with murmured half-words from her nightmares muffled into his shirt.

The warmth of Ava grows, burrows closer still, even as the rest of it fades away, stolen by the shifting haze of sleep, and he clings back, content with his duty to guard the girl in his arms as they rest. 

And then the warmth fades, Ava slipping free of his reaching grasp, and that is when the dream ends.

Ethan wakes, as he always must.

He comes to on the bed in the cabin, dizzily at first, unsure where he is—until his eyes catch on the warped wood of the wall, his fingers tangling in the rough knit of the blankets—and he breathes a small exhale of relief, relaxing. His mind is still coming to full alertness, but he’s awake enough to know he’s in a safe place. He sighs, rolling from his side onto his back, and freezes, blinking stupidly up at the ceiling above him.

Suspended from the ceiling, right above his head, dangles a massive, ruptured pod—clinging to the woodwork like a wasp nest, and more than big enough for a grown man to climb inside. He’s reminded distinctly of the bug hives in Marguerite Baker’s old house, though this one is also coated in a slimy, black, viscous liquid, hardening to a white film on top and around the edges of where the pod has split open. The ruptured nest gapes down at him, a looming, black maw, and Ethan stares back, entirely confused and extremely perturbed by its appearance.

“Oh good,” a young voice suddenly says, sharp and acerbic in its tone. “You woke up. You didn’t want to, before.”

Ethan turns towards it, bleary confusion still leaving him spinning, ready to give Ava a sharp retort, and then his breath catches in his throat.

That wasn’t Ava.

Eveline sits on an overturned box that doubles as a seat beneath the singular window in the cabin, the filtered light coming through the paltry sheet pinned up as a curtain catching on her outline. She’s the same as always—the same small, young face, the same hitching upturn at the end of her nose, the same bright green eyes, all of it scrunched in a half-hearted glare—but there’s a…solidness to her, a weight to her presence as she stares him down that Ethan never even knew was missing until he’s seeing it, now, and can suddenly recognize its previous absence.

There’s one other, much more marked, change—Eveline’s hair, that pitch black that had spilled over her shoulders and hidden much of her face like a veil, now hangs in curtains of white around her cheeks. It’s limp and dirty, desperately in need of a wash, but the color is still clear—the same of that of her elderly form…and that of the white mold Ethan had rescued from the labs hidden in the salt mines.

Eveline sits there, surly and glaring, arms crossed and stark white hair flashing in the light from the window, and Ethan can’t help it—he laughs, loudly, relieved and grateful and free.

“It worked,” he whispers, and he knows it with every cell in his body to be true.

—(((())))—

The period of time after Ethan had fled the labs in the mines—fled the BSAA agent he’d encountered; Chris Redfield, the man had called himself—is all a bit of a blur in his mind. He remembers the fear, certainly, the heart-pounding terror and the rush as he’d chucked down the disabled detonator and sprinted with everything he’d had in him. He remembers running through the lab, slamming through unlocked doors as he retraced his steps through the maze of abandoned equipment and endless, white hallways. He remembers reaching the mines, slipping through and tasting when the air went sour with decay once more. Still running like the devil himself was after him—which, well, he kind of was.

After that, things get a little…foggy. Slipping through his fingers in snatches when he tries to recall details with any clarity. Faint memories of reaching the swamp, slowing down just enough to breathe. Clambering over tree roots and between the mangroves. The relief that hit when he finally saw the cabin in the beckoning gloom of the late afternoon—strange to think, in retrospect, how much had happened since the sun rose that day and yet how little time had passed.

He remembers locking the door behind him, at least, when he let himself inside—and brief snatches of Eveline’s frightened face when he’d all but collapsed as soon as the lock was bolted. He has brief sense memories, more noise and light and touch and feeling than anything clear of dragging his bag into his lap as he sat propped up against the door, rummaging through it and skimming his fingertips over vials, syringes, test samples.

Something white in his hands, the sheen of a clean syringe, Eveline’s wide, expectant eyes and the rasp of her body’s labored breaths. Impressions of safe, okay, heal, help, when the memories of words spoken elude him entirely, his hands holding Eveline’s—one old and real, one young and imagined.

The image of her face sliding sideways as he, in all likelihood, fully keeled over.

After that, it’s pretty much black.

If he had to guess, that’s about when the last of the adrenaline he’d been running on for over twenty-four hours had finally given out.

Sitting here, now, though, it’s hard to feel any real regret—or even concern for how close he came to collapsing before he made it back. No real worth in wasting thoughts on how he’d pulled it all together in the end, even as his words and senses had started to fall from him like dominos. Not when the end result is sitting in front of him—living, breathing, scowling with the face she’s meant to have, and not one foreign to her own mind and identity.

“It worked,” Ethan says again, and the solace of that knowledge is tangible, as a choking weight he hadn’t recognized until it was gone is suddenly lifted. Its loss, that relief, is so staggering, he can’t even calculate when that weight first came to bear—was it the weight of realizing what Eveline was, what Mia had done, and swearing to fix it? Was it the weight that had come to him when his wife had vanished, and he had felt that distinct pang from childhood of wondering if he’d always bury too much of what he loved in life far too soon?

Maybe it was something else entirely. A shackle born when Noor had died, and Ethan had sat and thought it was my job, I was supposed to be watching her, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, and that thought had rested with him for the next nineteen years of life, reverberating in bitter echoes every time Ava ran and they didn’t hear from her for months, never knowing what might have happened—that bitterness bursting sharp on his tongue once more the day Mia’s ship went missing and he’d received that video message of her in pain, begging him to stay away, and when every call and every reward and every begging plea to the world in the years since spent looking for her had amounted to nothing. That weight, heavy and hurting, of thinking himself useless, unable to protect what most needed him, and doomed to never be able to save anyone.

Yeah, he thinks, that might be it.

“Eveline,” Ethan says, and she jolts in a surprised way, like she’s not sure what to make of the relief and joy in his voice. And when her sullen glare sours even further, eyes narrowed suspiciously as she clearly tries to pick apart his tone, his laughter, Ethan shakes his head ruefully, swings his legs over the edge of the bed, and goes to stand—to go sit next to her and finally talk a little of the craziness of their entire situation out—before falling forward promptly onto his face as his legs immediately buckle and give out.

“…Oh,” Ethan says, sound smushed against the floorboards, as his body and mind finally fully connect and he is suddenly intimately aware of the fact that every muscle in his body hurts. “…Ow.”

The noise Eveline makes is distinctly unimpressed, and Ethan wonders vaguely if that kind of scornful judgement he’d expect from any other surly ten-year-old is a good or bad sign.

At least she’s not made any mold people or threatened to kill anyone, yet. He’ll take it.

—(((())))—

Eventually, once the pins and needles in his legs have come and gone, and with some reluctant help from Eveline, who grumbles the whole time about it, Ethan manages to finagle himself, with minimal flopping, into a sitting position, and then gets to his feet once more, this time successfully. He stretches out his aching limbs, and then pulls the rough-hewn wood table that is the centerpiece of the cabin into the patch of filtered light cast by the window, places the chairs at either end for himself and Eveline.

Sunlight, Ethan decides, is a glorious thing he is never going to take for granted again. Not after yesterday’s long night, where he’d feared to never see the sun again, to die in darkness and decay.

Eveline sits in hers carefully, regarding him unsurely as Ethan flops in his and rubs a weary hand over his face. He feels remarkably well-rested, all things considered, but the aches and pains in his body are definitely not minor. What he probably needs is food, and water, and yet more sleep, in all honesty, but while he’s certainly going to prioritize the first two, he’s not hedging his bets on getting more of the third. It’s already lucky the BSAA and Umbrella haven’t found them yet.

When he pulls his hand away from his face, Eveline is still staring silently at him, and Ethan realizes he has no idea how to even start this conversation—what needs to be said now to get them situated and out of here without her freaking out on him, and what must come later—and flounders. “Uh…” Great start, asshole. “Sorry you couldn’t wake me up earlier. I’m…not usually such a heavy sleeper. Next time just kick me awake, or something.” The second it’s out of his mouth, his long history of reacting violently to being awoken forcefully occurs to him, and Ethan winces. “Actually, wait, don’t do that.”

Eveline just keeps staring, and he coughs awkwardly.

“How long were you waiting for me to wake up?”

Eveline finally breaks eye contact to look at her hands, fidgeting with them in her lap. “Don’t know. A while.”

“Shit,” Ethan mumbles. With the cursed ambiguities of kid-speak, that could mean anything from thirty minutes to hours. “Sorry. You must have been…” Don’t say scared. “Hungry?” It comes out sounding more like a question than anything else, timid and unsure. He tries again. “I mean…it’s probably been a while since you ate, right?” Hell, the last meal they’d both been present for had been Marguerite’s god-awful rotting carcass of a dinner, and he severely doubts Eveline ate any more than he did. Though, in retrospect, maybe the rotten food was good for people who were infected? Mold grew on rotten things, right? Fuck, he’d never been that good at the biological sciences. He was a computer guy for a reason.

Eveline is looking at him again, though, half-wary but seemingly half-intrigued by the concept of food, so he plows on. “I know I’m hungry, at least. Starved,” and he manages a half-hearted laugh that quickly trails off. “What about you?”

“I ate,” Eveline mumbles, not really answering the question, and points a finger out behind his shoulder. When Ethan glances over, he notices for the first time a couple empty cans on the bench next to the sink that look like they’ve been practically licked clean, as well as several empty test-tubes scattered about with the remnants of black sludge clinging to their glass sides, and winces—both at the clear picture being painted of Eveline having to feed herself what was in all likelihood cold beans while he took a fucking nap, as well as at the…other stuff.

He’s not going to ask Eveline if she ate mold samples. He’s not. If only for his own sanity.

“Okay,” he says after a long moment, “But…are you hungry?”

Eveline shrugs, and he takes that as a yes.

Emerging dietary concerns about what, exactly, he’s supposed to feed a kid who has a symbiotic relationship with an unidentified type of mold that literally grows inside her aside, Eveline seems amenable enough to the chicken soup he manages to find in its dusty can in the small pantry, and he catches the wide, subtly excited set to her eyes as she watches him heat it up on the stove. He bites back a grin at the sight, focusing back on divvying the soup up into two chipped bowls. He places those, and two glasses of water, down on the table, and the gusto with which Eveline digs in reassures him that regular food is edible to her, at least.

He eats pretty rapidly himself. He’d expended a lot of energy last night, and had little to nothing to eat during that time. He wasn’t kidding when he told Eveline he was starved—he’s ravenous. The soup fills an empty ache inside him, even if only part-way. But they can’t eat too much at once, not when he’s this banged up and she’s…changed… this much. They could make themselves sick.

“I’m really sorry you had to feed yourself while I was asleep,” he says again as he gets towards the end of his bowl, and Eveline glances up sharply. “But, I am proud of you for looking after yourself.” He thinks that’s the way to go about it—the way Delia always approached it with him. Apologize for what you couldn’t do, affirm what the kid has done for themself. Let them know you want to be there to help, but don’t talk down to them.

Eveline glances down at her own bowl with an unreadable expression, sitting silently for a while, before spooning up another mouthful and shrugging. She seems to like using that as a safe half-answer. “You needed to mend,” she says. “I did, too. I was just faster.”

Ethan smiles half-heartedly at that, putting aside the odd phrasing. ‘Mend’ isn’t wrong, per se. “I can see that,” he says, aims to sound comforting, reassuring. “You look…better. I’m glad.” Eveline almost smiles at that—almost—so he’ll take it as a win. “I uh…” He fishes for more gentle things he can offer, words that don’t sound like battle plans or interrogations, catches on the way Eveline keeps raising an awkward hand to her hair, fidgeting with the unfamiliar white strands. “I like your hair. It’s very retro-superhero.”

Eveline’s nose scrunches up. “It’s…what?”

“You know, like, X-Men? Storm?” Ethan smiles a little ruefully. “I think my sister would have killed to have hair like that when she was a kid. She loved X-Men.” Eveline stares blankly at him, brow furrowed in complete confusion, and it’s only then it occurs to Ethan that Eveline’s entire experience with literature and pop-culture would be whatever the Bakers had owned. And it hadn’t seemed like any of them were comic people. “…Right. You probably don’t know what any of that is.”

“I know what a storm is,” Eveline grumbles. “I’m not stupid.”

“No, no, I meant—” Ethan sighs. “Y’know what? Never mind. I’ll just buy you a comic book once we reach a town, or something.” He eyes her speculatively for a moment, noting the odd drape of the clothes intended for her elderly form on her child frame. Eveline hadn’t really grown when she got old, just aged, so they weren’t too large, but they did fit her poorly—all the wrong shapes for a skinny little girl, and the wrong styles for a child that young to boot. She looked like she’d raided her own grandparent’s wardrobe. “We’ll need to get you some new clothes, while we’re at it. Hit up a Walmart or something.” He loves Walmart. No one ever asks questions in a Walmart.

Eveline seems perturbed, and she shoots him a hesitant look. “We?”

“Well, you can pick what you want,” Ethan says with a shrug. “But I’m paying, so it’s kind of a group effort.” That, and he’s not about to leave Eveline alone in a store. He may be protecting her, now, but he’s not completely insane. Right now leaving Eveline alone with other people runs at least fifty/fifty odds of her deciding to infect them and kidnap them into the ‘family.’

They’re…going to have to talk that one out of her system eventually. He just has no idea how, and certainly doesn’t have the mental capacity for that type of planning right now. Logistics are easier. He mentally runs through how much cash he remembers having in his wallet. He always keeps cash, a habit never broken from the months his family was on the run. It’s only a few hundred, but it’ll get them somewhere. Better than using his bank cards. He has no doubt there’ll be a silent warrant out for him within the day, if there isn’t already.

…Shit, he’ll need to find a phone. Calling Delia and Michael still has to be top of his list. If the BSAA is looking for him, they’ll look for them, too.

“…You…you’re taking me with you?” Eveline pipes up quietly, breaking him out of his train of thought, and he blinks, turning back to her.

“Yes?” He says, confused about why this is even a question, but at the conflicted, half-hopeful, half-frightened look on Eveline’s face, he softens. Technically, he supposes, he’d only promised to get her out of the Baker house, and to get her medicine. They’d never discussed what comes next. “Of course I am. I mean, I can’t make you go with me, but I’d prefer if you did. The BSAA will be looking for you.”

And it’s not safe for other people for you to be on your own, he doesn’t add.

Eveline cocks her head, narrowing her eyes consideringly at him. “And you won’t give me to them?”

Ethan can’t help but roll his eyes. “Eveline, if I wanted to do that, I never would have taken you with me to begin with.”

Eveline seems only half-mollified by that answer, still suspicious. “Then where are we going?”

“…Uh…” Ethan balks at that, scratching at the back of his head. “To be honest, still working on that part. Texas, first, probably. I’ve got a place there with some…stuff. Cash, among other things. Then I’m thinking…” he winces, his eyes catching on the suspended pod on the ceiling he’s still entirely too wigged out by to ask about—but he’d still noticed the empty test tubes caught up in its goop, other tubes and syringes littering the floor. “Do we have any more of your medicine, or is it all gone?” Eveline hesitates. “It’s okay if it’s all gone, Eveline. I just need to plan ahead.”

“…I used it all,” she mumbles, and Ethan nods, eyes the pod for another moment before biting just a little bit of the proverbial bullet.

“What happened with that, exactly? I don’t really remember.”

“You came back…” Eveline says carefully. “And gave me a shot, in my arm. Then you fell over. You didn’t wake up. The shot made me sleepy, but when I woke up I felt better, so I took the rest of the same stuff. I ate it.”

“…You ate it.”

Eveline scowls at him. “Yes.”

“And that…works?”

Eveline glances away from him, narrowing her eyes at the table as if recalling something overheard. Her words come out stilted, terms too big for her mouth but clearly learned by careful listening. “Dr. McCarthy, he said my mold interacts with both my blood and my….gestro-intentional—”

“Gastro-intestinal?” Ethan guesses, and Eveline shoots him a glare, but nods.

“…Gastro-intestinal system. After I make my mold, it can move through my skin out from my blood,” she waves a hand, and Ethan can’t help the way he tenses, just a little, when a small blob of something black and viscous suddenly seems to slide out of the pores of her skin and around her fingers. With another flick, it vanishes. “But most of it starts in my stomach. When I need to make a lot of it real fast, I can vomit. Sometimes I vomit anyway.” Her face scrunches up. “Dr. Ciobanu said it was because I have defects.”

Ethan blinks. “I thought you were…uh…’perfected’?”

“I am,” Eveline insists stubbornly, ire clearly rising at the question. “I’m better than all the other girls. They couldn’t handle their mold! They rotted! I didn’t. But Dr. Ciobanu said my defects are—emotional.”

Ethan winces. “Oh.” There’s an awkward silence for a long moment. “So since your mold is grown in your stomach…you can take your medicine orally?”

“Yes. It’s slower, because it has to go to my blood after that, but it still works.”

Ethan nods. “So you ate the rest of the white mold, and then…?”

“We slept.”

“…Right.” Ethan looks at the pod once again, decides he really doesn’t want to know. “I guess it probably took a lot of work for your body to repair itself. And I was so exhausted from…everything,” he laughs awkwardly. “I guess we’re lucky we didn’t sleep for a week, huh?”

Eveline doesn’t laugh at his, admittedly, pretty half-hearted joke, and he chooses not to take offense. Turns his thoughts instead to where they will actually go next. He wants to go home, to California, but he has no idea if that’s really an option. Not with the danger it could put his family in. And if Eveline is without her medicine, she’ll begin deteriorating again sooner or later. They’ll have to find more, somewhere.

He turns to Eveline, to ask her how long she used to go between her shots, and frowns when he sees her counting on her fingers, an intense look on her face.

“Eveline?” he asks, and she looks up at him with a glare.

“It’s not funny,” she says sourly. “I’m not stupid! I know how many days are in a week.”

“What?”

“You’re not funny!” Eveline snarls. “Don’t make fun of me. It’s not funny! I can count! Seven days—there’s seven days in a week.”

There’s a faint ringing in Ethan’s ears.

“…What?” he asks, again, hoarsely.

“I checked your watch. Seven days.”

On autopilot, Ethan lifts his wrist up, eyes glancing down to the codex Zoe had given him, its date in a corner.

The ringing gets louder.

“I counted,” Eveline tacks on, and it’s the last thing Ethan hears before everything goes black.

—(((())))—

Ethan wakes to Eveline staring down at him dispassionately once more.

“Stop doing that,” she says, stroppy, and Ethan blinks slowly up at her, before it all returns in a rush.

He sits up with a gasp, head spinning, mouth dry. Eveline backs away a couple steps, still staring skeptically, as Ethan scrambles again for his codex, staring down at the date in mute horror. It still hasn’t changed.

“No,” he mumbles. “No, no—oh God, no. Fuck. Oh fuck.” He scrambles dizzily to his feet, staggering. “Fuck.”

“Stop it,” Eveline grumbles, eyeing him as if she expects him to collapse anew. “If you fall over again, I’m not mending you. You just got fixed.”

“A week,” Ethan says despairingly, head in his hands. “We slept for a week.”

A pleased light enters Eveline’s eyes. “See? I counted right! I told you.”

“How?” Ethan mumbles. “How did we even—” and then logistics fall away in the face of a much more pressing concern. “Oh fuck—Delia.” Against logic, he begins opening the drawers of the kitchenette, scrambling through the sparse supplies as if a cell phone might suddenly produce itself. God knows why he’s looking. He already searched for one when he first brought Eveline here. But, in his desperation, he’s willing to renew that search just in case he got it wrong.

He didn’t.

He falls back heavily against the kitchenette’s bench, hands tugging fruitlessly at his hair. He tries to remind himself to breathe, not to panic, but it’s difficult. All his air feels caught, chest tight, lungs burning. He can’t. He can’t breathe.

A week.

A week could be—would be—more than long enough to rustle up his papers and track down his family. They had Mia in custody, for God’s sake. She knew the house’s address. He’d had a twenty-four hour head-start, at best, to get to a phone and warn Delia and Michael. To tell them to get to Ava too, if they could. And he’d spent it asleep.

His family could already be in custody. They could be dead.

They could be dead. Delia, Michael, Ava. Delia and Michael would never turn Ethan over to protect themselves. Ava would never let herself be taken into custody period. She’d sooner die.

He’s killed them.

Oh, God, he’s killed them—just like he killed Noor. Limp, bloody bodies abandoned to congeal and rot—dead eyes and cold skin and Noor’s empty hands and it’s his fault—

“Ethan!” a voice shrieks, and a pair of small hands smack his cheeks.

He blinks.

Eveline squats in front of him, where he’s apparently slumped to the ground. She scowls at him, cool palms pressed to his face, and there’s a calm suddenly compelled upon him he can’t explain, emanating from that small sliver of skin contact. Her tiny fingers are cold, dry points of focus for him as his breathing slows, and she stares him down intently, green eyes narrowed in focus.

“Stop.”

The panic recedes, and Ethan closes his eyes, actively focusing himself now on taking deep, slow breaths.

You don’t know anything, he whispers back against the panic—the wounded animal in his heart that spins in frightened circles without its pack. You can’t assume anything. Delia and Michael are smart, and brave, and Ava is brilliant. They know how to run. Even when unexpected, they’d never let themselves get caught.

It’s only moderate comfort—not enough to shake the certain knowledge any running his family has to do is still his fault—but it’s enough to allow him to get his shit together.

“I’m okay,” Ethan gasps. “I’m okay. Sorry.”

Eveline sits back, letting go of his face, and Ethan pushes himself to sit up more fully, rubbing fretfully at his face. “Thanks for that.”

Eveline just stares. She looks…not frightened, exactly, but certainly unsettled. Unthinkingly, Ethan leans forward, ruffling her white mess of hair. It’s softer than he expected, given how badly both of them need a bath. Eveline flinches at first, and then just freezes under the contact, looking more lost than he’s ever seen a person look. Something in it breaks his heart all over again, while at the same time he reprimands himself for touching the volatile child bioweapon without asking, as he carefully-casually withdraws his hand.

“…Thinking out loud here,” Ethan says, trying for relaxed—and desperate to cling to any topic for a short moment aside from the panicked question of what they do now—“But we might need to invest in some hair dye for you, if that’s okay. The new color is neat, but uh—distinctive.”

Eye-catching and bright in even filtered sunlight. Really the last thing two fugitives need.

“Oh,” Eveline says, after a moment’s pause. And then her nose scrunches up in concentration, and she flicks her head a little to the side—liquid black suddenly scrambling down her hair from her roots with the movement. The same dark color as before. “Better?”

Ethan blinks. “Uh.”

Hesitantly, he reaches out a hand, and when Eveline doesn’t lean away, he takes a strand of her hair between his fingers. Darkness creeps out from it to meet him—viscous and slippery—to twine around his skin. He flinches back, pulling his hand away, and the mold hovers in the air for a moment, as if reaching out to him still, before it slips back into the fine sheen of Eveline’s hair.

Ethan clears his throat. “Better,” he says faintly.

—(((())))—

He sets them back up at the table, as they were before his meltdown, uprighting his chair with shaking hands. His panic is still a visceral thing in the back of his mind, his throat—practically something he can taste—but he staves it off with practicalities, and with the weight of Eveline’s unsure gaze on him, reminding himself he now has a charge in his care who doesn’t need to see him flip his shit any more than she already has. Trust is a fragile thing between them at the moment, and an impression on Eveline’s end that Ethan is unreliable could be a death-sentence—possibly both for that trust and for him.

He’s strangely calm about that part, at least. It’s not his own death he’s ever feared, really. Not in a long time. He’d vastly prefer living to dying, certainly, but if he has to die, he’ll die. It’s everyone else he fears for. His family. Mia. Eveline, now. Even the lives of the soldiers that stand between him and Eveline and freedom, he supposes, to an extent—death is death, in all its ugliness.

He’s no fool. The only thing currently standing between Eveline and those Blue Umbrella soldiers ripping each other apart is him, and his careful interference. If Ethan hadn’t been at the Baker house, that’s surely how this would have played out.

So no, he doesn’t fear much the possibility Eveline may yet change her mind about him, for him. Just the rest of the world.

And he fears for Eveline herself. Because the world will destroy her, if he doesn’t do this exactly right.

Ethan doesn’t mind being buried, if he must, but he never wants to live to bury another person again.

So he shoves it off, knows his panic is greater hinderance right now than help, and tries to center himself on next steps—one foot in front of the other. He was good at this, once. He moved through the screaming, burning, decaying streets of Raccoon City with a knife in one hand and the other gripped tight by Delia and felt nothing. Nothing is what he needs now.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, he tells himself, nothing but what comes next, as he spreads back out the annotated map of the Dulvey Swamplands on the table. Traces his way through the maze of marked marshes and mangrove forests with a finger. This map helped him find a way into the salt mines. Maybe it offers a way out, too. It doesn’t mark any towns—any property other than the Baker residence, and a few other cabins—but there’s clear markings for where coastline gives away to the bayou that filters out into the Gulf, and Ethan can at least realistically rule out trying to leave that way. He doesn’t know anything about boats, even if he could find one, and if he fucked up, Eveline and him could end up stranded in the Gulf. A bad idea.

No it has to be over land, whatever the risk, and logically he knows where they need to go if they can get there—Texas, first. A place Ethan knows and can lay low in. Then New Mexico, quite probably. Which means west. North, as well, out of the swamplands. Northwest.

It’s just getting out of the likely well-established-by-now quarantine zone that will prove…difficult. For all Ethan’s escaped a quarantine zone before, he was one of hundreds—thousands, even—last time. And no one was looking in particular for him. This time, everyone is.

Fucking hell. The fact that he and Eveline haven’t been found already is a miracle.

He shoots her an unsure glance then, remembering the massive, writhing root of mold she’d unleashed in another part of the swamp to distract the helicopters when they fled the Baker property. Eveline stares down at the map with interest, tracing the shape of the coastline in abject curiosity, and Ethan risks the question.

“Eveline?”

“Mm.”

“How far from the Baker house has your mold spread? Into the swamps, I mean?”

Eveline shoots him a secretive, pleased look, almost preening. “Very far.” She traces the map clumsily—first the Baker house, then the curved inlet near the salt mines where the tanker crashed. “My mold can grow from any root, once I leave it there. It spread from the ship,” she sweeps her fingers outward, “and from me.” She blinks, suddenly more somber, and retracts her hand. “We never could grow, before. So now we grow everywhere.”

Ethan shivers. Pushes it down.

“Right,” he says. “And your mold…does it—can it act without you instructing it?”

Eveline wrinkles her nose. “Yes,” she says, the attached ‘obviously’ well-heard if unspoken.

“Even when you’re asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why—” he hesitates. “Your mold it—I kept thinking we were very lucky the soldiers didn’t find us while we were asleep. These are big swamps, but still… But if your mold…”

Eveline stares at him, and Ethan pushes through.

“Is your mold keeping the soldiers away?”

Eveline smiles then—a smug little thing, to be sure, but he’s seen so little of anything but abject terror or anger on her face that he’ll take it—and nods. “My friends protect me,” she says proudly. “They kept us safe.”

Ethan half-grimaces, half-smiles. “That’s—” he thinks of the horrors of the Molded in the Baker homestead—both in what they did and in how some, possibly all, were apparently made—and then sets it aside. Now is not the time. Survival first. “That’s—great, Eveline. Thank you, for keeping us safe.”

Eveline’s delight at the praise is a weighty thing—the way she puffs up, both shy and proud, and preens.

Now comes the hard part—almost more for Ethan and his conscience, than for anything else. Still, he thinks, between the Molded and a rampaging Eveline back at her full strength, surely the soldiers would rather wrestle with the Molded.

“Eveline—” he begins, stops, already stumbling over the words. “Eveline, can they—can you—”

The Molded might be able to clear a path northwest for them. It’s the best chance they have. He just has to ask—

You’re killing them, you’re ordering their slaughter.

No, he argues with himself, no, I’m not. They just have to clear a path—distract the soldiers, lead them away—

You think Molded understand that? They’re dead husks, zombies in another skin. They know nothing, other than hunger and Eveline’s demands. If you ask Eveline to send them, they will kill whatever they find. Even if they could understand what it means not to kill, Eveline will not know how to ask any different. You are butchering them, killing them all the same. You’re just doing it indirectly.

Ethan puts his head in his hands.

“What?” Eveline asks.

“One second,” he says, digs his fingertips into his eyelids. He has the worst headache. Probably the multiple head injuries, if not the immense moral quandary as well. He’s never felt so indecisive. There’s just too much noise in his head, buzzing contradictions like bees.

There’s no good answer here, is the problem. He doesn’t want to be the cause of deaths, but if he and Eveline can’t get out of the swamp, they will surely die themselves. As well as others, when that time comes. Eveline will never go quietly. Neither will Ethan, in all honesty. He knows there’s no version of this story where he walks free after this if he submits to BSAA custody. And he’d rather die fast and ugly than slowly in a cell.

No, there’s no version of this where someone doesn’t get hurt. So surely he has to choose the option that most lessens the risk to himself and Eveline—

“Ethan!” Eveline says, nervous now instead of prompting, and Ethan blinks, looking up to her.

“What?” he says, and then he hears it.

Footsteps outside the cabin. Heavy and sure. Approaching.

He doesn’t think, body moving before his mind has any say in the matter. His body, at least, knows to choose survival. He practically throws himself out of his chair, grabbing his shotgun off the kitchenette bench and then Eveline herself by the arm. She squeaks in shock or offense or perhaps both, but doesn’t fight him as he pulls her to the back corner of the cabin, shoving her behind him and then taking the shotgun in both arms, cocking it at the door.

“Eveline listen,” he says frantically. “Listen to me. I’ll clear a path. You run. Understand me? Don’t fight, just run—”

Eveline gets a mutinous look on her face, trying to push in front of him. “Stupid! I can destroy them—”

“You run! That’s it!” Ethan yells, eyes not leaving the door, and Eveline snarls in wordless, furious reply—and then the handle turns, the door begins to open.

Ethan fires on instinct, but Eveline’s angry scrabbling, trying to push him aside, sends the shot wide, and it buries itself loudly in the wall next to the door. Whoever is opening the door yelps, jumping back, and a loud voice with a heavy southern accent yells, “Jesus H. Christ!”

Ethan stops. Blinks. That…doesn’t sound like a soldier to him. At his side, Eveline freezes, too, her fingers gripping at his arm in confused indecision.

There’s a furious roar, and then the door is kicked open, a muscled, older man with a strong resemblance to Jack Baker shoving his way in, fists raised and teeth bared.

“You think you can shoot me, you private army sons of bitches?! I’ll put you in the ground, you—”

And then the man clearly spots Ethan and Eveline, because his words die as well as he stares at them blankly.

They must make quite the sight, Ethan figures. Even before you factor in the biochemical waste strewn across the floor and the giant pod on the ceiling.

“What the hell?”

The man goggles at them, fists still raised, and Ethan can feel Eveline’s nails digging into his skin, her small frame tense as a strung wire next to him, and all he can think to say, desperately, is—

“Don’t.”