Chapter Text
Arthur woke up five seconds before his alarm went off. He sat up in his single bed, staring at the blank, white, wall in front of him, before turning to turn off the beeping device. It told him that it was quarter past seven, which meant he had the same forty-five minutes as he had every day to get ready for work.
After giving himself two minutes to continue blankly staring at the wall, before forcing himself up and into the bathroom. He blinked at the mirror, and his own, tired reflection blinked back.
The showerhead rattled as ice cold water poured out. Arthur cursed, almost slipping, but gripped at the off-white tiles of the cramped shower to regain his balance. His brown hair was oily after a week of work, so he scrubbed it thoroughly with the last drops of his shampoo.
The sink rumbled twice before coming to life. Arthur washed his face and spent the compulsory three minutes brushing his teeth, making sure to get his tongue, too.
Stepping out of the bathroom, Arthur shivered at the cold air raising goosebumps on his skin. He went through his wardrobe, only then realizing that all his clean coats were in the laundry, and the only one left was his old, dusty one from his intern days.
With a grumble, Arthur had no other choice but to pick it out, knowing that at least one higher-up would write him up for improper uniform. He decided that this wasn’t anything to fuss over and shifted his focus into trying to tidy his hair in front of the mirror.
When he padded down to the dining room, Arthur was surprised by the sight of his brother sitting at the dining room table, blankly staring at the wall with a spoonful of food left waiting in his hand.
“You’re daydreaming,” said Arthur, snapping Kyle out of his daze. “Don’t let them catch you doing that.”
Kyle grunted in return, shoveling the spoon into his mouth. The school-issued uniform he wore was messed up: the sleeves were rolled up, tie worn loose, and first two buttons left undone.
“You’re still here,” he pointed out. “Shouldn’t you be on the way by now?”
The digital clock on the wall displayed a red 8:03.
“Tired,” was Kyle’s sole reply. “My tooth still hurts.
“Kyle. Eight hours. And we’ll get it checked up later.”
Arthur unfolded the little step-up chair they had under the sink and climbed on it, reaching at the top cabinets to grab the orange bottle he had stored there. Arthur unscrewed the tube of pills and left them by Kyle’s plate. “Drink.”
Kyle hummed.
“You have to start remembering to take them by yourself. I won’t always be there to remind you.”
“It’s not even mandatory, anyway,” said Kyle.
“I’m a BL/IND worker. We have to set a good example for the rest of The City—and fix your uniform, please. I don’t want another report about you acting up in school.”
“‘S nothing wrong,” he mumbled.
“Take your pills.”
A silent battle of eyes followed. When they were little, they had staring competitions every time they fought about who got the mousekat figure for the hour, and Arthur always had the meaner stare. That still proved to be true.
“Fine.” Kyle swallowed the pills with a gulp of water. “Happy, now?”
“Satisfied,” he nodded.
Kyle finished his breakfast as Arthur prepped his own. He hadn’t gone to the Sunday Market for a while, so he dumped a can of artificial meat into the leftover stew they had for dinner and toasted some bread.
When he turned, Kyle had already grabbed his schoolbag and was in the middle of slipping on his shoes. He’d fixed his uniform, at least. The last thing he wanted was for his little brother to stick out at school. It was too risky.
Kyle was already reaching for the doorknob when Arthur finally noticed something was missing.
“Kyle,” he said pointedly.
His brother turned around with a roll of his eyes. “What?”
“Your headphones.” Arthur gestured at the black BL/IND-issued pair charging on the shelf.
“Do I have to?” he almost-whined, though did walk up and pick the pair up.
Arthur went back to his food. “Don’t—“
“—question it,” his brother completed, a practiced mantra they’d argued over countless times. “Whatever. Bye.”
“Be good, Kyle.”
Kyle slammed the door behind him in response. Arthur only sighed, heading back to the kitchen to clear the table of his dirty dishes.
He wasn’t a stranger to his brother’s attitude. He’d always been the quiet one. Even when they were small, Arthur was always the one standing up for him, dragging him along. He’d just expected Kyle to grow out of it, by now.
And he wished that Kyle’d be more understanding, at least. Of him. Of Battery City.
The ride to the office was harmless enough. His work provided him with housing in a good-enough neighborhood in the middle of The City, 20 minutes away from work, where there were only blackouts two times a week instead of every other day. If he keeps up the good work and get on Redfield’s good side, then maybe he’d get that promotion, and they’d finally get an apartment in the Upper Charges, where electricity flowed 24/7, and there weren’t Undergrounds straggling and vomiting in every intersection and corner.
Arthur followed the flow of the morning crowd towards the train station, the flat feminine voice ringing through the speakers, listing departure schedules and train delays.
He stared through the window as the train zipped across The City, watching the monochrome buildings pass by. Being an employee of BL/IND, Arthur was not oblivious to the fact that the sky was a false one. It wasn’t a secret either, that Battery City was enclosed by a dome that projected images of the sky and protected them from the dangers of the desert, but he didn’t think that most people dwelled on it, or even bothered to find out at all. The scientists at climate control were in charge of scheduling the weather. Today, they had settled on grey and cloudy, like almost every other day of the week.
BL/IND headquarters was a menacing building, smack-dab in the heart of The City, the giant smiley-face looking down over all of them, a reminder of who exactly was in charge in this city.
The lobby was packed with workers when he got there, people with matching white coats running around to get to their station, boots clacking in a melody against the tile floor. Grand white pillars stretched towards the ceiling, where a large metal chandelier hung.
Mai, the blonde receptionist—though her black roots had started to show—smiled as he passed the front desk. She paused from typing on the sleek computer to fix her round glasses. “Hi, Arthur.”
Arthur smiled back, but couldn’t spare any time for formalities because the giant silver clock in the lobby read 9.15 and Redfield was about to kill him.
He tapped his foot impatiently on the elevator ride, anticipatingly staring at the numbers slowly increasing, until it halted at fifteen, where he threw himself out of the elevator and down the halls. It was more of an awkward quick stride rather than a run, at the risk of being written up for running in the hallways. Arthur navigated through the floor with practiced precision.
His gaze lingered on the glass door with the scarecrow printed on it, though he hurried past towards the lab at the end of the hall. It was better not to dwell on it. He’d wanted to be an exterminator, part of the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W division when he was a small kid. Every kid in Battery City who wanted to be anything wanted to be one. Who wouldn’t? Posters of them littered The City, praising their hard work, and they all looked so cool to him. The protectors–the heroes of Battery City.
He’d been so close, too. All of his school grades signified that he was on the right track to get accepted into the training academy, but his parents had died right before his application, and he had to shift all his efforts to Kyle’s wellbeing, and there wasn’t anything else he had rather been doing. So he applied to the general college instead, and had landed himself in BLI/ND’S science department. But every morning, on his walk to the office, he can’t help but stare at the door and wonder…
Never mind. It’s as close as he or anyone else could get.
“Arthur!” Redfield greeted him as he entered the lab. There was no affection in his tone. “Good to see that you’ve made it.”
Redfield was this tall man, with blond hair styled in a short undercut and an unpleasant expression permanently etched on his face. His white lab coat was pressed and pristine, contrasting Arthur’s own aged and wrinkled one.
Arthur consciously fixed the lapels of his coat. “Good morning sir,” he said quietly.
“You do know that your schedule is set from nine to five, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it is currently…”
“Nine-fifteen sir.”
“Right,” Redfield nodded. “I expect my employees to meet a certain standard of professionalism, Arthur. Your being late…It’s unacceptable at the office.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“And fix your coat.”
Arthur felt like a child being scolded by his teacher. He’d never treated him fairly, like still the nineteen year old newbie in the department, even if he hadn’t been that kid for years now.
He shook him off, heading to his desk. Somehow, he had been lucky enough to be assigned to a cubicle in the corner of the room. It was nice, provided him enough privacy, and was far enough from everything else that barely anyone passed by to make their ‘small talk’.
His desk was empty, just as he left it last night. Nothing new was assigned for him, same as it had been the entire week. Arthur sighed, logging into his computer to see two email notifications. One about a seminar on workplace bullying set for next week, and another from the marketing department about a new recruitment campaign or such that he couldn’t bother to read through.
The post-it on his monitor told him to finish the lab report on the newest round of pills, so he opened up the file and tried to look in focus as he let his brain slip into autopilot.
Mentally, he checklisted everything he needed to do. He barely noticed the figure peeking over the cubicle wall.
“Arthur,” Hayami whispered. “Red’s calling you.”
Arthur blinked, fingers pausing on the keyboard. “What?”
“I don’t know. But he’s calling for you.”
“Where is he?” he whispered frantically, standing up.
Hayami pointed at the entrance of the office, where Redfield was staring at him, that scary look in his eyes. Arthur gulped almost comically.
“Right. Thanks.”
Redfield was standing next to a man, one head taller than himself, and blindingly bald. He was wearing a scarecrow uniform: a long grey trench coat with matching slacks and desert boots. Arthur’s eye strayed to the man’s belt, where there lay his blaster and badge. An exterminator then. What was an exterminator doing here?
“There you are, Arthur,” he said, unnaturally bright.
“Do you need me, sir?” Arthur tried not to address the scarecrow, half out of fear of his boss, and half out of anxiety of meeting an actual scarecrow.
“Arthur here is going to help you,” Redfield said, as if it explained everything.
“I am?”
“Arthur, this is Korse. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard what happened to his team last night in the Zones.” He said that rather pointedly, more of an accusation than anything.
Right. He had. He’d heard on the company news radio. A scarecrow unit had busted a killjoy base, a supermarket in the third Zone. They had gone in, armed and loaded, prepared to make the arrest, when it imploded. Something had happened, and everyone in that building, every killjoy and exterminator dropped dead.
Redfield handed him an armful of case files. “I want you to look over it. Figure out what it is, and record it. Korse here is your official correspondent. He’ll stay in the lab. Get to work,” Redfield said, then left.
Arthur stared at Korse for an extended moment, blinking blankly as he tried to process the instructions his boss gave him, until he figured that he should at least make friends with the guy. “Nice to meet you, Korse,” Arthur said, holding out his hand.
“You, too,” said Korse, shaking it.
Korse’s hand was rough and unusually warm. Almost no one in Battery city had callouses like the man did. Not unless they spent hours underneath the scorching desert sun, hunting down killjoys. Arthur quickly withdrew his hand, shoving it in his lab coat pocket.
“So, you’re a scarecrow, huh?” He asked rather awkwardly. “You get a lot of field work?”
Korse nodded. “How’d you know?”
“You look like the type,” he said.
“Thank you?” Korse said hesitantly. “I’d assume that was a compliment.”
“Well, it was. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Korse nodded solemnly. “They were good scarecrows. Even better men.”
Arthur opened the file, and was met with horrifying photos of the people that had died. Their skin was yellow, eyes empty and open, faces slack, and mouths open as if they were gasping for something. There were rashes and lesions littering their bodies. Black, red, bubbling, and raw. They covered their necks, hands, and feet. The worst part was the blood. He flipped to a photograph of an exterminator, fresh out of the academy, from the looks of it. He was bleeding out of every single orifice: eyes, mouth, nose, ears. His eyes were so bloody, and his pupils… They were barely visible. Just a mound of red, shiny flesh.
Arthur inhaled sharply. “Wow… I’m… I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”
He flipped to another page. A killjoy now, from the looks of it. Young. Barely even twenty. He was curled up in himself, showing the exact same symptoms as everybody else, except that there was something in his hands.
“They found a killjoy, fifteen, holding a tube with a vaporous substance,” he read. “Poison?” Korse nodded. Arthur flipped the page. “Blood loss. Toxin unknown.”
“The killjoys got their hands on an unknown substance, and good men died from it. We want you to find out what.”
Arthur closed the file. “And you’re here to supervise me?”
Korse shifted. “Oh, I’m not in charge of anything. I’m just here to help you with your findings if you need anything.”
“Right, then. Do you have the toxicology report?”
“It’s in the file. It shows nothing, though.”
Arthur couldn’t help but smile. “Nothing that we currently know of. Let’s get started.”