Chapter Text
PART ONE: WINTER
Ethan Winters had no idea how long he had been here. He didn’t even quite know where here was, at the moment.
For a while, he had been floating in an unpleasant, nauseating nothingness. The last thing he remembered was cradling his baby, his Rose, one last time before passing her off to Chris Redfield, slipping the detonator from Chris’s hand into his own, blackening with mold as the minutes passed. He remembered no pain, as the mold consumed him. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he had anticipated some pain as his body and mind were eaten away.
Instead, there was only all-consuming exhaustion, deceptively warm and safe. It was the exhaustion of settling back on the couch after a long day of work, and a long night of taking care of Rose. It was the safety of Mia wrapping her arms around him and pressing a kiss to his cheek, tucking her legs up beside his as they turned the television on.
It was a feeling meant to make Ethan lean into it, drop all his guards and surrender to the Mutamycete for good.
But the mold was split seconds too late to stop him from pressing the detonator’s button with his ruined hand.
As the Mutamycete consumed him, promising safety and rest, everything went up in an explosion of flame. Ethan’s mind burned, his nerves, newly-fused with the superorganism, sizzling and incinerating along with it. Along with Miranda, and Eveline, and everything.
Ethan wasn’t sure, but he thought his last thoughts were of Chris and Rose, standing there just beyond the barrier of possessed, molding roots and vines.
❛ ━━━━━━･❪ ❆ ❫ ･━━━━━━ ❜
When Ethan surfaced from the murky blackness of death, his first thought was one of confusion. He hadn’t known you could surface from death. Wouldn’t it just…continue, eternally? Even as he tried to pursue this feeling, these thoughts, they floated out of his grasp again.
❛ ━━━━━━･❪ ❆ ❫ ･━━━━━━ ❜
Another surfacing, and this time, the flames were back, licking masochistically at the inside of Ethan’s skull. He thrashed, the emaciated ridges of his spine clacking painfully against the rigid hardness of whatever object he was laid out on. He couldn’t move, and even if he could, the concept of voluntary movement escaped him. The only reason he was moving at all right now was in a futile attempt to escape the agony, worse than agony, coming from inside of his head. Pain bled from every nerve.
This time, he wasn’t lucky enough to slip away again before he could grasp what was happening. Instead, his consciousness had him in limbo, unable to open his eyes, but just awake enough to recognize pain, more of it than he had ever dreamt of. Pain illuminated his body, giving him knowledge of his arms and legs and chest through crackling, searing bolts of agony that ripped through every limb in throbbing waves. In this way, he found he couldn’t move, his arms and legs immobilized while his hips and shoulders and back arched desperately, trying to push away, push out the pain.
Around him, the low buzz of stressed voices. He thrashed and writhed, unable and unwilling to make out anything anyone was saying.
Agony lit up his right arm, and he thought he heard someone say something like decay. His right arm came loose from its bonds, and warm, sticky liquid splattered onto Ethan’s chest, providing a temporary, grotesque balm to the sizzling, searing feeling stuck to his ribs like honey. The liquid wasn’t blood–it was too viscous, and it dripped too slowly. The taste of it was wrong, too; the liquid on Ethan’s face dripped onto his lips, into his mouth open wide in a shriek of pure agony, and it tasted like the gardens preceding the Beneviento mansion.
The pain overloaded his brain, and Ethan thought he could almost hear the snap as his body shut down, blew like an overused generator. Ethan couldn’t even remember everything fading to black again.
❛ ━━━━━━･❪ ❆ ❫ ･━━━━━━ ❜
For an unknowable amount of time, Ethan existed in a limbo between painful, dizzying wakefulness and a deep, all-consuming tug of unconsciousness. At some point, from flashes of cognizance in those more-wakeful moments, he began to think he was in a hospital. Plastic tubes lay across his body, cold on his bare skin, and sometimes a monitor beeped steadily. He couldn’t understand how he had gotten to a hospital—how he had gotten not dead—but it hurt his mind to think too hard about anything. He was all too happy to continue existing as he had been, letting the ebb and flow of consciousness pull his body like a corpse in the sea.
❛ ━━━━━━･❪ ❆ ❫ ･━━━━━━ ❜
Slowly, Ethan began to wake for longer periods of time. Being awake wasn’t easy—the first time he had opened his eyes, fluorescent lights bombarding his senses, he had nearly ripped the tubes from himself in his terror. Each time he awoke, some new hurt made itself apparent to him: chills, wracking his body, a migraine so severe he felt paralyzed with pain, and most recently a tendency to immediately vomit up anything the nurses coaxed him into eating, so they had had to shove another needle under his skin, administering nutrients his body was too weak to keep down.
Despite it all, in an almost-ironic way, Ethan began to feel better little by little.
Which led him to where he was now.