Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wake up. 

He’s sure he’s not breathing. His mouth is all blood and cold metal. All of it down to the throat and teeth, and it’s impossible to breathe through it. There’s a vague sensation burning throughout his body that is telling him he should probably be in pain, but he can’t feel anything except the blood-wet scrape of his face against the carpet.

Wake up. 

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. And he doesn’t quite remember dying, but he is sure that it had happened. Each sucking breath through his nose takes in another wash of saltwater-blood down his throat and there’s metal lodged there like shrapnel. Is this what death is supposed to feel like? Is he supposed to be awake for this part?

Wake up, Cesar.

Cesar wakes up wrong. 

___

Mark doesn’t get to go home often, these days. It’s more of a special little treat that happens to him a few days per year when he’s ahead on the paperwork and none of his lab interns have caused a site-ending disaster within the last two weeks. Fingers crossed they make it to three. He’s not very hopeful, though.

Since graduation, he estimates that he has been home for a total of maybe 13 hours. Even less after the lab had been left entirely under his control. Today is an especially rare situation; it is their sixth day in a row on-site with no deaths and Miller had offered to hold the lab’s nightshift. His first night home in months. He comes home every day to keep it tidy and civilian-adequate but he hasn’t slept outside the site quarters in years.

He traces his fingers over the film of dust that’s gathered on every surface within the house with the carefulness of a man whose fingerprint ID is protected. He doesn’t dare touch the house that is technically his anymore. Everything is a museum for his parents, down to the calendar with their anniversary circled in red ink that’s still pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen. The yellow notepad with a half-finished list of groceries left on the living room table. Special containment procedure outlines on the whiteboard in the hall.

He can’t bear to clear it away. So he leaves the house as it is to collect dust, like a little snapshot in time, a memorial for a few doctors that had been killed in the field of action long ago.

The little plastic telephone set on the coffee table lets out a shrill shriek, and Mark glares at it murderously for a few seconds as he sets his bag down on the floor. The transmitter crackles as he holds it up to his ear impatiently.

“Is this Mark Heathcliff?”

He grumbles under his breath. “Yes. Heathcliff speaking.”

“This is Lieutenant Johnson of the Mandela County Police Department.”

Police department. He glares at the telephone as if he could cause the officer on the other end of the line to hang up by sheer force of will. Hopefully, the department hasn’t tapped into a hazardous information leak or some other ridiculous garbage, because they tend to spread contagiously and he hates dealing with the civilian cleanup.

“To what do I owe this call,” he drawls, probably a touch too rudely, but this is most likely his only night home all year and he’s impatient.

The officer’s tone does not comfort him. “It is our regret that we cannot deliver this notification personally, Mr. Heathcliff.” He almost has the reflex reaction to bark it’s Doctor Heathcliff at him, but he isn’t a doctor here. Just a civilian with strange jobs. “Were you a friend of Cesar Torres?”

Were.

“Yes.” His fist is white-knuckled around the phone, and he knows, he knows what’s going to happen, but the feeling is dull and far away like he doesn’t quite believe it yet. 

“I have been asked to inform you that Cesar Torres was found dead this evening in his residence. Investigation into the cause of death is still ongoing.”

Mark listens to himself stop breathing.

“We, of the Mandela County Police Department, extend our sincerest sorrow and sympathy for your–”

The phone hits the ground, and the line goes dead when Mark smashes the base under his foot. The plastic dial pad buttons pop out with tinny pings and scatter across the carpet.

He is a Heathcliff, and he doesn’t grieve.

Wires splinter under his foot as he grinds his heel into the ground to watch the transmitter of the telephone crack into little pieces.

He doesn’t remember how to grieve.

Investigation into the cause of death is still ongoing. Liar. Liar. He’s heard that before, said it, had it come out of his mouth. Distantly he is aware that he’s having some sort of bodily reaction that is displeasing him, something involving a pounding headache and a damned inability to get enough air into his lungs, but it seems almost too far away to care about. 

His heel digs into the floor until he can feel plastic and wire tearing through the soles of his shoe like if he pushes hard enough he can erase what the officer had said, take it back, cut the fabric of the universe to undo it. He could, he thinks almost absently to himself, watching the frantic rise and fall of his chest with a clinical detachedness. At indescribable cost, he could, and the fact that he considers it for even an instant is dangerously out of line. 

The one thing he’s spending his entire life working against and he can’t even save Cesar when it matters.

Dr. Miller finds him sitting quietly in the lab at 4:52 am, hands folded neatly over his desk, the perfect picture of doctorly excellence. The only indication of anything is held in the constant ticking tap of his thumbnail against his pencil, digging into the wood in brutal scores. 

“I thought you were returning for the night,” Evelin says curiously.

Mark isn’t looking at her when he talks. “There’s work to do.”

He doesn’t go home anymore after that.

__

Cesar woke up wrong and he hasn’t been able to rest ever since. 

He’s not sure how long it’s been. Days. Years. Everything is one hazy blur of blood and running and running. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, he’s faintly sure that he’s died but somehow he’s still walking, and part of him wonders if this is what the afterlife is for him. An eternal wanderer. One second his throat was full of blood and metal, wet and bitter, and in the next, he–

He…

He doesn’t know.

When he touches the collar of his shirt it’s tacky and rust-red, flaking off in particles onto his hands. What is wrong with his hands? They didn’t look like that before. What is wrong with the mirrors in his house? He had shattered every last one before leaving, and shards of mirror-glass are stuck to the palms and sleeves as he runs. He’s positively filthy, he’s sure mamá would scold him for looking like this, but mamá isn’t here and he can’t stand to go back. Every so often he pauses to look up at the trees, trying to find something familiar, trying to ground himself, but nothing is working. One minute ago he was dead but now he’s dizzy and confused and his body is all wrong, all wrong. 

“I’m scared,” he says out loud, to no one in particular. 

Nobody answers him.

He can’t be dead, he’s walking. Is he even a person anymore? He doesn’t feel like one. No matter how far he walks nothing seems to come into focus. He barely even remembers who he was before he had died– and he’s sure he had died then, drowning in his own blood, absolutely sure he had –but he’s pretty sure it wasn’t this creature that looks back at him in his reflection. 

Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s feverish and delirious and dreaming before brain death. 

There’s the hiss of the forest cover being disturbed behind him, and he ducks down instinctively like a hunted animal. He feels like prey here, disoriented and lost and fucked up beyond belief, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. There's the distant crunch of feet against fallen pine needles, and Cesar presses his back all along the spine of a Douglas fir in fear, baring his teeth reflexively.

Something is here with him. 

__

“Theta-6 to Actual, this is T6-0 on comms check.”

“Command Actual to Thatcher, you’re loud and clear. Confirm position in Oregon, Mandela County.”

“Confirmed.”

__

It seems like every goddamn task brought into his site is always ‘of severe importance’. Mark doesn’t think there could statistically be this many tasks of world-ending importance that only he can handle, otherwise, the world would’ve ended ten thousand years before he was born. 

“Theta-6 has a new skip,” Evelin announces from the doorway of the lab, apropos to nothing. “You’re supposed to be doing the initial screening.”

Mark sets his Erlenmeyer flask down with violence. “Tell them I’m busy,” he snaps. The Amnestics Department wants him titrating their new Y-909 derivative and damn anything that slows him down at his job. This is the third task ‘of severe importance’ brought to him in the last 12 hours.

“Can’t, sorry.” Four and a half years of sharing a lab with Mark has made Evelin immune to his temper. “You’re the only Keter-cleared guy on site today.”

“You’re Keter-cleared, Evelin.”

“Not for cognitohazards,” she sings. “Besides, it’s a new thing, a real weird one. Gave Thatcher a tough time, from what I heard.”

Mark takes off one of his gloves to press his goggles against his brow bone in frustration. “Give me the rundown. If it isn’t lethally important then it can wait until I’m done.”

Evelin grins victoriously. “The standard 5-3’s looking skip, but it bleeds. Red and everything! I’m here to do PCR on the samples we got.” She gleefully presents a blood sample tube from her labcoat pocket, which is probably in violation of some sanitation rule but they both don’t particularly care. “If it’s got tissue, can you even imagine what that would look like?”

Mark acquiesces his interest with a reluctant nod. “Mmm. How much trouble did it give Theta-6?”

“Not much in terms of psychological damage, mostly in brute strength. It’s in concrete containment for that. Probably sapient, definitely some sort of cognitohazard, but I’m more stuck on the bleeding.” She’s still holding the tube of blood up. “And it’s got a face.”

“A face?”

“Yeah, or at least it holds the appearance well.” Evelin sets the blood down on a sample rack at her lab station with great care. “Talks, too. Barely intelligible words, but from what I’ve heard it isn’t mimicking anyone just yet. I’m thinking it probably has some sort of organs or at least adipose tissue inside. They took it down with a few etorphine darts.”

Now he’s vaguely interested. “They had to use elephant tranquilizers to take it down?”

“Three of them! That’s 6 milligrams!”

He glances back down at his titration setup and sighs. It looks like he’s not getting the tests done today after all. “Did they already administer diprenorphine?"

"Ms. Weaver gave it a good 7.8-milligram dose earlier, it should be awake by now."

Mark reluctantly deposits his gloves into the hazardous waste disposal bin. "If this screening takes longer than 20 minutes I am leaving. I'm busy."

Evelin hums, shooing him out of the lab. “Yeah, yeah, Dr. Heathcliff. I hear ya. Now move.”

Probably insubordination to some degree. Not that Mark particularly cares. It’s just a single skip; they call everything that comes into his care Keter class but there’s a difference. He doesn’t want the busywork skips, he didn’t spend six years getting an illegal degree in cognitohazards and memetics for nothing.

“Do not touch my centrifuge, I’m using that,” he warns Evelin as he leaves. “Also don’t open the autoclave, there’s probably lethal chemical fumes in there right now.” She waves off his warnings dismissively, already accustomed to a healthy lab environment with at least six deadly materials in her proximity at all times.

Mark grumbles as he shuts the hermetic lab door behind him. He moves to collect a big sheaf of paperwork files from his desk, the kind that he laboriously has to fill out every single time someone brings in something new and weird. 

At least this thing bleeds. That's a novel thing. He hasn’t studied anything that bleeds in years, not since he moved on from dissecting cadavers.

Just an in-and-out procedure. And then he can return.

Chapter Text

Is that–

Is that–

__

Oh, he thought he was afraid before, but now he can’t breathe. 

“Come back.”

His mouth tastes like iron. 

“ Mark. Come back. ”

That was Mark, that was Mark, he knows it was, and he doesn’t understand. Mark in a white lab coat and eyes dark like death, older than he remembers, but who knows how long it's been since he’s last seen him anyways? 

There’s nothing but floor-to-ceiling concrete and bulletproof glass here and he was sure he was going to be killed but if Mark is here then something must be happening. There must be something wrong with Cesar but nobody will tell him what and if he can trust anyone, it’s Mark. 

So where did he go?

He paces along the left wall, the furthest from the glass window, still close enough to see if anyone else comes in. He can’t hear anything other than the repetitive click of his shoes against concrete but he’s almost sure they can hear him. It makes him feel a little like a caged animal, something contained. 

Maybe that’s what he is. He would understand why.

His back drags a long stripe of maroon blood down the concrete walls as he sinks to his knees. He’s not even sure where he’s bleeding from, but it follows him in a path around the room, an irregular loop of faint footsteps. Rust red. He touches the collar of his shirt and the red that flakes off is the same color.

Time had passed through his fingers before, but now Cesar can feel every second dripping down his back. He’s finally aware of his surroundings and all there is to be aware of is concrete and his own hands. There’s a big shard of mirror-glass that’s stuck in the muscle of his thumb and if he twists his fingers he can just barely feel it sting. 

He’s sure his hands didn’t look like that before, but it’s been long enough that he can’t remember if they’ve ever looked different.

__

It rains so hard that night that the old sycamore tree in Mark’s backyard shudders and drops dead branches on the overgrown lawn. Mark watches them fall, little dark shapes in the night, leaves shedding and sticking to the windows.

There are still bits of plastic on the floor, tangled into the carpet. Wire and telephone cord pieces all sprayed on the carpet, collecting a thin sheen of dust along with everything in his damned house. His mom’s shoes are tucked neatly by the door, her open-toed sandals that aren’t– weren’t –allowed in the lab. 

He hasn’t been home in three years. 

A Foundation veil agent must be working overtime to cover his house, Mark thinks to himself absently. The flimsy fence and curtains are still intact, the window and front door carefully wiped to give the illusion of use. Mud stuck on the welcoming mat as if he is a civilian that returns home every night. Nothing inside is touched, though; they know better than that.

He runs his fingers along the top of the dining table and rubs the film of dust that comes off. 

Three years.

Cesar’s been dead for three years. 

And despite it, he refuses to stop haunting him.

__

“Mark,” it calls him.

Mark, Mark. It knows his name. A security risk in and of itself. It drags out words in Cesar’s grating voice and it won’t stop calling him by his name, Mark, Mark, please.  

He’s seen everything, anomalies with his parents’ broken faces staring back at him, beast-things that have sunk their nails deep into his psyche and come out bleeding, and despite it, this is what hurts him. 

“Mark, it’s me .”

Being called his damned name.

He’s survived virulent lethal memetics and torture, but some anomaly with Cesar’s voice is the first thing that makes him ache since his parents.

__

“Mark,” Jonah calls, knocking on the door to his office with both hands and then his foot. Mark slams the door open with one hand, more violently than strictly necessary.

“It’s Doctor Heathcliff,” he snaps. He hasn’t slept for more than an hour at a time since that damned skip came in and he’s not exactly in the mood for visitors.

“Okay, Dr. Heathcliff. Yeah.” Jonah hops from foot to foot impatiently. “Adam put in a report six minutes ago and you didn’t respond so I’m here.”

Well, that is because six minutes ago Mark was passed out at his office desk. Courtesy of the previously mentioned lack of sleep. “Get to the point, Marshall.”

The use of his last name seems to make him snap to attention because he clicks his heels together resolutely and tilts his chin up like a private delivering information. Bad news, then; Jonah only acts like a soldier when the situation entails it. “SCP-30303, Keter Wing, reporting unresponsive charge, sir. Permission to enter containment denied on grounds of standing order.”

Unresponsive. Mark squints his eyes at Jonah, but he seems resolute, and no matter how flippant he is Jonah doesn’t lie. “Vitals?”

“Can’t be read, sir.” 

Then it’s his job. 

“Notify Dr. Miller on 10-54 and submit a report to Officer Thatcher.”

“Understood, sir.”

__

It even looks like Cesar. In stillness, in the sterile silence of the containment cell, the shape on the floor has Cesar’s hair, his ink-dark silk suit, the last thing he had died in. Not his face, though. Not his face, just ink-dark static noise where his smile used to be.

__

“It has tissue, Mark,” Evelin rambles, with endless glee. “ Adipose tissue, and so much of it! Did you see that? Fascia and everything!”

She’s waving her bloody lancet around in a probably-unsafe manner, and Mark moves to the side to avoid its path. Yes, he had seen it. Blood and fatty tissue and all. 

Like a person.

It’s horrifying. 

“It needs water,” Mark says, almost absentmindedly. He hasn’t had anything under his jurisdiction that needs water in a long, long time, other than maybe Jonah and Adam. It’s looking less like the destructive memetic things he has to manage and more like an animal ( like a person, his traitorous self utters). 

“Do you think it needs to eat?” Evelin, who has far more experience with biological things than him, seems exceptionally happy with the turn of events. “I wonder what for?”

“Didn’t see any atrophying or muscle tone loss. I don’t think so.” The thing can get dehydrated. Like something alive . Not alive in the grotesque, animate, antithetical way most alternates are, but alive like something with flesh and neurons, and that almost disgusts him as much as it scares him.

No. It can’t scare him. He’s a Heathcliff, and he’s seen far, far worse.

“Did you ever finish sequencing the original blood sample?” He asks Evelin tiredly, unwilling to think about it for a second longer. Maybe it’s an effect he needs to document.

“I did, but we didn’t have any criminal matches.” Evelin rolls her heels back and forth absently as she walks, a cheerful little half-step now that the new skip is securely within her realm of interest. Living things. “They’re looking for DNA evidence from altercations in the past five years that could match.”

Mark keeps his gaze steel-honed ahead, blank and unmoving. “It calls itself Cesar Torres.”

Evelin hums a little in agreement, not noticing the stiffness in his posture. “We haven’t gotten to the Torres household yet. The case is so old that I’m having a hard time finding DNA that isn’t degraded beyond recognition.” She waves her hand around dismissively. “It can have Torres' face, but blood is a whole other thing. Do you think it stole a body?”

Mark makes an uninterested noise in the back of his throat. Whatever it is, it’s not Cesar. Not Cesar. His own thoughts are starting to betray him sometimes. Maybe he should get a psych eval soon. It can have his face and his voice but not his blood (of course not his blood, Mark saw him there on the floor, all shock-cold and tense with rigor mortis, they never could’ve gotten to it). Not the flesh and bones. Alternates are emotionally charged things and DNA sequencing usurps whatever similarity it may hold to Cesar.

“Mark, it’s me.”

His voice and his silk suit can be stolen, but Mark saw the body. Cesar with his sickle-gouged neck. 

He tells that to himself over and over, and it’s sardonically comforting. How sick does he have to be that the thought of his friend dead is a comfort to him? A cruel little soothing thought he repeats to himself, that Cesar is gone , and so this thing can’t be him. That life has taken all of him away, and so there is nothing else to take.