Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The air is almost unbearably humid and the heavy protective wear you have on right now isn’t helping. Sweat accumulates on your brow, and your breathing comes in and out through the filtered face mask. Still despite the filtration, you can still smell the underlying scent of sulfur in the air as you all cautiously travel through the lush green thicket of the rain forest. A low hanging dense fog rolls around you, obscuring your vision from up ahead. The muted grey sunlight cuts through the canopy of the trees, dappling the forest floor with beams of light that are disturbed by your own and the small group of people with you’s footsteps. Leaves swish, and boots scuff on the unusually black dirt and stones along the ground. The foliage is so dense in some areas that you can’t see the tops of your boots when you step into them.

The small team of BSAA agents were assigned to armed to well and highly alert despite the expected lack of imminent danger. Not that you don’t appreciate the wariness they exhibit, but the mission was going to be longer than it needed to be if you all kept at the same speed as you were now. There’s only five of you total as it is, and there was no record of human life being present on this island. You’d done your own research on the place before coming here already, and you highly doubt that that had changed. The small archipelago that hosted this land had experienced a violent volcanic eruption in 2009 and wiped out any all kind of life within the vicinity. However as destructive as volcanoes can be the ash and soot they leave behind provides a good nitrogen rich soil for new plants to grow. And while the plants have recovered over the last twenty years, the animal life is hardly diverse. Anything that exists here now is only birds, crustaceans, insects things that are capable of making it to the island by sky and sea.

No one else has visited the island, not even planes actively fly over this area, the only true worry any of you have to worry about is if the suspected virus that the BSAA sent you out to collect samples of might still be present in the air. You have your suspicions this isn’t the case, but your higher ups had dismissed you when you attempted to explain that you doubted a lost crate from some virus would actually survive a volcanic eruption. The heat alone most likely destroyed it, and if not the heat then living without viable hosts for twenty years certainly would. You’re a virologist, they pay you to explain these kinds of things to them, but you don’t get paid to make these kinds of calls.

Whatever though, you’re getting a decent bonus by doing field work for once instead of staying coped up in one of the research facilities. You can’t really complain about that, well aside maybe this heat though, your clothes underneath were going to be soaked in sweat.

“It’s starting to get dark, we’ll make camp for the night.”

There’s a collective groan and various mutters under the groups breath as the head lead of your mission makes the call. Shoulders relax, as everyone starts to set down their large packs on the floor and others begin to talk amongst themselves while they set up. You yourself follow suit, your head looking up toward the sky and twisting tree branches up above. You can’t see the sun through the barrage of heavy clouds above, but it’s much darker than it was earlier and the shadows were only growing darker. When you bend down to start looking through your pack the muscles in your legs crying out as they shift. The fact that you have to get up tomorrow and continue your trek again in the morning is a daunting task you don’t want to think on. However there is little else to think about, aside from trying to eavesdrop on the other’s conversation while you start to get your tent set up.

“Man thank God, I had to piss so badly if we weren’t able to stop, these camo pants would be a whole lot darker.” One of the men says as he shuffles the straps of his backpack off from his shoulders and sets it down on the ground.

“Dude shut up, no one wants to hear about how badly you were about to piss yourself.” Another helmeted man replies, he’s kneeled, hands mid search through his own bag to pull out the materials for his tent.“Speak for yourself, Haynes-” A different man says, arm clasping over the back of the first man who spoke. “C’mere Smith I’ve got a nice open mouth for you.”

“Don’t tease me like that.” The man responds and the two laugh, voices muffled through their head gear.

“Stop messing around, go relieve yourself if you need to Smith. West, Haynes go set up a perimeter.” He calls and the other three all give small dips of their heads towards the older sounding man and go about to do their business. The BSAA agent coming up to you next and you stiffen up a little as he approaches, to where you are on your knees trying to get the tent materials in your pack sorted.

“Need a hand?” He offers, but you shake your head. You’ve never really set one up before, but it can’t be too difficult, you have two master degrees after all. A tent shouldn’t be that hard to get up by yourself.

“I think I’ll get the hang of it.” You start to say, however the soldier already started to grab from the materials you had laid out before standing to start getting your tent in order.

The whole ordeal doesn’t take anything more than just three minutes total, and when all is said and done you just say a small, “Thanks.”

You hadn’t really bothered to learn any of their names on the small hangar you all arrived in and while you know the man who just helped you was the lead of your operation, you don’t know his name. Or any of the other’s names really, it’s hard to differentiate between all of them anyways when all you have to go off is the slight differences in height, and masculine voices. You stick out amongst the four, your gear isn’t as bulky as theirs, not used to carrying the same weight as them, and rather than carrying a heavy grade rifle, you only have a small hand pistol that’s strapped to your side.

You took a rather basic course on gun training and safety as was required of you when you first got your job at the BSAA, but that was five years ago now. You aren’t too sure if you remember everything that went into those five weeks of training then, but it’s not like you were going to have to use it for this mission. The most threatening thing you’d probably come across is the terrain itself, that or if the virus was still somehow present on the island, then that would be cause for concern.

Which now that you think about it, you had your own duties you had to get to. Kneeling down beside your bag and going through the numerous zippers you pull out a small device. The piece of technology is black with a small screen, and a few buttons on the bottom. Standing up with it in hand, you click the power button in the center and the screen flickers to life. The battery symbol in the top left corner let’s you know that the gadget is fully charged, and you wait patiently as it starts to calibrate to the surrounding climate. Numbers begin to slowly pop up on the device, indications of air quality, humidity levels, and you start to use the bottom buttons on the tool to click through different stats. Briefly examining one after the other before you determine that the air quality is fairly decent. No trace of viruses, it was safe to breath here at least.

You click the power button to conserve it’s power, before you place it back in your bag, and your hands reach up to undo the straps of the helmet on your head. You shake your head after, droplets of sweat freed to the air and you wipe away the wetness of your face with the back of your arm. You take in a deep breath of air, before exhaling out the tension in your shoulders lessening. Your hand moves to go over your hair, smoothing it out despite the heavy in the humidity in the air making it frizz.

You eagerly go through your pack to pull out your water bottle, it’s long since gone warm, but you chug down a good half of it before you stop to breath. Wipe away a droplet that escaped your mouth, and finish off the rest of the drink and sigh.

“Hey there uh…” You look up from your kneeled position to see one of the soldiers has approached, his voice trailing off for a moment before he speaks again. “Doc, is it safe to be taking our helmets off now?” He questions and you nod.

“Should be, just checked the quality. We’re in the clear.” You confirm and you can hear an exhale of relief leave from him. His hands coming up to undo the straps on his helmet, in a similar state to you his dark skin is slick with sweat. His black textured hair is shorn short, almost military-esk, but had grown out just a tad. His hand comes up to wipe from forehead to chin the sweat off in one swift motion,“Ah thank God.”

“Need a drink?” You offer and he quickly nods, and you dig through your pack for another water, leaning up to hand it to him. He gives you a small thank you before twisting off the top and downing the whole bottle in one go, not even stopping to breath.

“Perimeter’s clear.” A solider calls out from off to the side as two footsteps trudge back over to where everyone’s set their bags down. Seeing that you and the other agent have already taken your helmets off they follow suit. Sighs of relief leaving them as everyone starts to sort through their bags.

Night has fallen, a small fire set around the tents as everyone eats into their pre-packed cheap meals for travel. The taste is bland, and you have to bite back the urge to complain or even retch when the texture of the slop gets to you every so often. You should have just stuck to eating a protein bar, you’re not used to consuming what you can only assume is just one level of quality above dog food.

Shadows dance and move from the flicker of the flame around you all, and you aren’t exactly sure when or how you can move to slip away back to your tent without it being too awkward for you. Instead you just wait, hoping that someone else will be the first to retire to bed and signal for the rest of you all to go to sleep.

“When do you think we’ll make it to the local Haynes?” Your leader asks, and you assume now is a good time as any to at least attempt to put faces to names while everyone has their helmets off. Your lead of the operation is visibly much older than anyone else here, at least pushing his forties by your estimates. The black of his hair is dusted with silver pieces, it’s short, but not quite military short, there’s enough of it that he has to come over to one side. His skin is tanned, and there’s a ghost of a five o’clock shadow on his jaw.

Haynes, you assume, looks up and over towards your leader, shaggy blonde hair moving as he does so, his skin is pale and freckles dust his features, particularly concentrated over his cheeks and nose. “Let me check.” He replies before he reaches over to his bag resting by his legs. He unravels a map from the confines, laying it out over his lap. One finger trails from one section to the other, and glances down at something on his wrist as he mutters under his breath.

“If we are, where I think we are, and we keep the same pace that we covered today we should make it to the location by…” He tapers off, brown eyes staring at the paper for another long look, before he looks up. “Tomorrow night.” With that he starts to put away the map.

“Man, that means it’s gonna take us another two days just to make it back for pickup then.” The man who complains, has brown shorn hair, and olive toned skin, there’s a small scar right above one his brows that cuts directly through the thick hairs of his eyebrows.

“Quit your whining West.” Your leader chastises and West gives a small exaggerated pout, before Haynes elbows him and the two start to jostle one another.

When your leader calls you out by your last name directly though you turn your attention from the two men rough housing to the older man. “Hmm?” You hum out.

“We only have to keep going till we find the virus right?” He questions you and you nod, that’s the whole real goal of the mission. If you could find it then you didn’t really need to stick around, but you all had been given a very specific location to investigate.

“Yes, assuming we find it, but I doubt that.” You say and the bushy eye brow of the older soldier raises.

“Why’s that?” He asks.

“Well, from what I was told, supposedly the virus that was left here was abandoned just shortly before the volcano local to this island had erupted. The chances that it could have survived that level of heat is slim.” As you begin to divulge what you know and think, your eyes drift down to the flame before you. In the now cool of the night air the rain forest had taken on, you no longer mind the warmth it provides. “And no one has been in here in over twenty years, without a host viruses just can’t typically sustain themselves for that long. Not under these harsh conditions at least.”

“There’s birds I’ve seen overhead, can’t they be carriers?” You see West’s head turn towards you to address you from the corner of your eye and you look up to meet his gaze from across you.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of information that the BSAA had, just confirmation that some deadly virus could be here and a few pictures so that I can identify it under a microscope and a few key details. So while I can’t say for certain, but from what I understand this virus is highly selective, it would only work on humans. It just wouldn’t survive inside an animal for long if at all.”

He hums in response, nodding his head and a silence falls over everyone. You can heard the distant chirp of frogs croaking and insects buzzing about. Several moths flit over the light of the dwindling fire and you can hear the collective sounds of everyone’s soft breathing as you all are quiet for a long moment.

“Welp if anything we can make it to the destination, take some samples even if you don’t find anything and get back to the extraction point.” Your leader plans, and everyone gives some kind nod or look to one another in agreement.

“Speaking of, it’s getting late, me and Smith will take first watch shift, the rest of you, go to sleep.”

Rain comes down heavily upon you all, soaking into the fabric of your gear and wear as you all trudge forward. Water droplets bounce off large leaves from above and come down to splash your already soaked forms. Mud from the ground making each step harder and harder than the next, as the ground itself it feels tries to suck away your boots. You noticeably are starting to trail behind the group as whole, you just can’t quiet keep up with trained soldiers. Still you don’t want to be the reason for everyone being held up and despite the ache in your legs from yesterday’s trek you try to push on ward. You still are at the back of the pack, but you can maintain keeping a few paces behind them for now.

The distant sq-waking of some bird in the distance has yourself and a few of the others turning to look around briefly before a sudden surprised shout from the group ahead has everyone startled.

Ahead of you, looking between the other men have stopped in their tracks, one appears to have part of his foot partially sunken into the ground a good foot or so in. Hands grasp around the stuck soldiers arms as they tug him out from the earth and pull him back out and he hisses out a curse as he’s tugged out. His boot is absent when he’s freed and you can see a dark reddish stain already starting to pool around a cut in the fabric of his lower pants.

“Aw shit…” You hear one of the soldiers say under his breath, and they help to shuffle the other solider off to the side. They rest him up against the trunk of a tree, and one of the men kneels down next to him and taking his pack off and rifling through it. You come up next to him, having to slightly push past one of the soldiers to get closer, as you kneel down as well.

You start by rolling up the sleeve of his torn pant leg, a large gash that extends from just above his ankle and tapers off through the whole length of his calf. You look for a small white from your bag and start to apply pressure around the wound with your hands. Rain water still coming down falls from above and hits him, blood and water soaking into the rag and drips down to the forest floor below. However a shadow coming over you and the other two soldiers suddenly limits the amount of contact you have with the water. The BSAA agents, arms interlocked with one another helping to stand over the injured soldier so that the rain water doesn’t keep hitting him.

“Hey you got a light in your pack?” West, you think says beside you and you nod, with one hand you blindly search through your bag before pulling out the mini black flashlight and clicking it on. You shine it over the area of he wound and scoot over as he shuffles to take your spot, and you slowly remove the rag, now soaked in blood from it’s spot. You watch and help where you can as the man begins to stitch up the man’s leg, swiping away blood, and helping keep a hold of the soldiers leg so he doesn’t jerk too much.

Eventually the leg is wrapped, and everything that can be done has been. You stand, and along with West’s help you both go to support the other solider as he gets to his feet, noticeable not putting any pressure on the injured leg.

There’s a moment where uncertain lingers in the air as the sound of the rain still coming down on you all and the quiet sounds of the forest echo out before you all.

“C’mon, we keep moving.” The injured gruff voice of the man finally commands, and you recognize him as your team leader.

“Captain Fern, but your leg-” West tries to say from his side, but he shakes his head.

“We keep moving.” He repeats, and your eye glances down at the bandaged wound, the pants still stained and torn from his injury.

“I have to agree with agent West, Captain. It would be detrimental going forward like this, if the virus is still around and you get near it with an open wound, you have high infection chance. We can’t risk that.” You speak up, looking into the visor of your captain’s helmet. It’s too dark to make anything out from it, but you still stare as if the two of you can make eye contact.

“You said you didn’t even think the virus was still around.” He mentions.

“Even if it isn’t, other regular viruses and bacteria do exist, you can easily contract gangrene without proper medical attention.” You advise and there’s another pause, seemingly weigh his options, before he stands up a little straighter.

“Just more reason to keep going forward and to keep this trip short, West you’ll help me keep pace.” He orders, and the man nods his head in reply, readjusting his grip over his arm to help him keep standing. The captain then says your own last name,“Worry about yourself, you already have enough trouble keeping up with us.” With that he takes his first step forward, slipping out from under your support.

“We keep moving.”

The sky is darkening above you, night threatens to fall soon and force you all to stop. The heavy rainfall from before has luckily come down to just a light sprinkle. Your soaked clothes along with the cooling temperature as nightfall encroaches has your jaw clenched, teeth chattering, and muscles involuntarily shaking. The muscles in your leg cramp and cry out for a pause, but others keep going so that means you have to, even if you’re starting to fall behind your injured captain.

“Stop, stop.”

“I think we’ve made it.” He lowers his binoculars I think we’ve made it. He calls out your last name and shuffle forward and he hands you the optical instrument. You take it, squinting your eyes as it’s a little harder to see with it through the visor of your helmet. However sure enough beyond the fog of the rain forest, you see how the land sharply slopes down, the trees and other plant life in the area dramatically thin out as you see the edge of a dark lake ahead. Although the fog down there is much more dense. A hand motions you to step forward and you're handed the binoculars to see it for yourself.

“That’s it, this is where the crater is.” You confirm although you keep holding up the binoculars for another moment longer. The sight before you beautiful in an eerie and otherworldly way. The way the plants thin out from the lake ahead as if mother nature herself were afraid to approach the waters. Even now as you stand at the edge before the land starts to slope down you can feel a certain warmth that emanates from the remains of the volcano. You can only imagine the kind of heat and temperatures that reach high down there as the magma still stirs under the earth and boils the water. You slide your pack off, and dig through it before pulling out your air quality checker, holding up and hitting the power button you wait until the numbers on the readings stabilize. “Air qualities pretty bad here, heavy traces of sulfur and carbon, can’t say I recommend taking our helmets off tonight.”

“Best not to waste anytime then,” “You, Smith, and Haynes go down and collect samples. West and I will stay behind to setup camp.”

You and the others slowly start to break away from the other two continuing on, but your movements are even slower than before having to carefully trek down the slope to avoid taking a hard tumble. It’s not like the distance is that far, but you know how much of a pain it’s going to be getting back up. Your legs shake as your foot rests on some unstable ground, a rock tumbling out from underneath you and before you can try to find surer footing the floor becomes loose. You fall onto your back and skid several feet down, the other two soldiers calling out towards you as you go. Your hands desperately trying dig into the muddy earth, but your gloved hands slip past any kind of purchase you could have held onto. Your body flipping and turning as you loose more and more control of your movement and speed.

When you finally come to a stop, you are left dazed, the air in your lungs being kicked out from it and you gasp through your mask filter. You feel your body ache, bruised and skin slightly torn, but as you lay there attempting to recover you don’t think you’ve damaged yourself severely. You slowly turn, flipping onto your back and you let out a large groan of pain, staring up at the sky.

“Hey, hey!” You hear being called out to you, along with your last name and the rushed footsteps of two individuals as they come up to you and you slowly come to sit up on your arms.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” You huff out and with both of their help they get you to stand. “There’s no tears in my gear right?” You ask and one of them looks you over before shaking his head.

“No, you’re clear, but we should head back up, have West check you out to make sure you’re okay.” You hear Smith say.

“Fuck,” You mutter under your breath.

God. You’re legs were already in so much aching pain prior, the soles of your feet feel worn, and the last thing you want to do is have to march back up the slope only to come back down again.

“I don’t wanna head back up there and have to come back down here all over again, I just wanna go home already. Let’s just get this over with please.” You plead and the two turn towards each other before looking back to you.

“Alright. C’mon,” Smith comes beside you and tries to offer you to lean against him to help you walk, but you make a small hand wave to gesture him away.

“I’m fine, I think I’m just a little scuffed at worst, I can walk on my own.” You say and you force yourself to keep moving, as you two head down to the muddy banks of the lake ahead. The heavy thick fog around you all is so invasive you can’t anything beyond a few meters ahead of you. When the dark waters of the lake become apparent you squint your eyes seeing that rock like structures jut out from still liquid.

“What is that?” You hear Haynes mumble what you’re all thinking, and you take another tentative step forward trying to make out what it is. The rock that sticks out almost has a glassy looking, black texture that comes out in sharp shards and points towards the sky.

“It’s… obsidian, and I’m no geologist, but I don’t think it naturally forms like that.” You eventually reply and it’s quiet between the three of you as you all just stare at the odd formations. You can’t see all the way to the other side of the lake, but pieces appear to be smaller towards the edges and grow in size further in.

“Do you want us to grab a sample?” Smith questions.

“Sure, I mean we’re going to have report this back to BSAA, they’re going to want one. Let me check out the water first though.” You kneel down, the muck sticking to your pants as you slide off your bag and start searching for the water test, clicking it on and uncapping on end of it. You reach forward to place the uncapped end in the lake and wait. After a few minutes the numbers and stats start to show up and you pull it out to read through what’s on the screen.

“No the virus we’re looking for isn’t present in the water, but still be careful. There’s some natural chemicals in the water, the only thing that should exist in there is just some extremophiles.”

“Extremophiles? What kind of kink is that?” An awkward smile spreads on your face that you’re glad the other men can’t see through your helmet.

“Shut the fuck up Smith.” Haynes grumbles as he starts to wade his way into the water.

“You’re just upset that I’m funnier than you.” Smith says, and the other man turns his head

“Absolutely nothing is funny about your square flat as-” The other man’s reply is cut short by a sudden yelp of pain he emits and Smith’s chuckling comes to an abrupt stop.

“Shit, Haynes, are you okay?” The soldier questions and the smile drops from your face as you both wait for a reply. You see the other man in the water reach down, feeling around one of his legs before he answers,“Yeah, fuck, something just cut through my boot.” You watch him fiddle around his side for a bit, before suddenly his body stiffens and stands straight up.

“Haynes?” Smith calls out again, but he’s silent, his helmet seems to stare off into nothing.

“Agent Haynes, are you okay?” You try to call out, a little louder than the other soldier had, but still he remains silent. Not even the water ripples under his presence, as he just stands there in the warm water.

“Haynes, respond.” You call out again, and finally his head turns towards the both of you.

“I-I don’t feel so well.” His voice gurgles, as if he were speaking with water in his mouth.

His body ripples, you can see under his uniform as something shifts, as if snakes were suddenly running rampant through out his whole body. You watch frozen in place, only able to take one staggering step backwards, before you watch as parts of the body underneath his gear bulge while he stands eerily still. His helmet suddenly flying off, there is no visible head left behind of the solider. Black oily tentacles frantically whip the air where his head once was, viscera flying in his vicinity making small splashes into the lake. You scream, your adrenaline finally kicking in as you glance from the soldier next to you who appears frozen to the staggering body left behind of man formerly known as Haynes. Hands clutching the rifle in his hands shakily before he finally lifts it up and starts firing. The loud sound is deafening as the gun rattles off, sharp sparks of light from the gun, briefly illuminating the foggy area.

With shaky legs, your hands feel around for the strap on your side, numb fingers trying to equip yourself with the pistol as you struggle in your panic to get it free. You glance up to see that Haynes’s body falls into the water and sinks in, almost like he was being consumed by the lake itself.

Pistol finally in hand, you take a small step closer to the other solider, “W-we, we have to go, now.” Your lips tremble as you speak, your voice wavers as you try to urge the solider to start moving, but he stares out distantly to where his comrade had just fallen, before solemnly nodding. Not saying a word as you both go to turn to leave. Your mind still frazzled your hand comes to clutch around his gloved hand just looking for anything that might help stabilize you, however before the two of you can make any headway from the lake. You feel a tug, and Smith with a small yelp falls flat onto his stomach. Your eyes looking from him back to the lake to see that a tendril has wormed it’s way from the surface and wrapped itself around the agent’s leg, dragging him towards the water. You attempt to help soldier up, his hand digging into your arm as you pull. But with the muddiness of the bank your boots can’t find good enough solid ground to stand and you slip as well, the tentacle dragging you both closer.

You try to steady your gun, aiming towards the black tendril that tries to haul the soldier away, your bullets going flying, and the shock and recoil from only having one hand on the weapon sends ripples up your arm. Several bullets just don’t hit the target at all, and one instead lands into the agent’s leg. A string of blabbering sorries and apologies leave your mouth as you try to gain any leverage to yank him back. You see Smith tries to brandish his own rifle, firing further away into the water, but your shots do nothing to deter whatever horrible creature it is that is trying to drag all of you into the lake. As you both are pulled ever close, you feel his hand unclench from your own, and you fall backwards into the mire. Coming to stand again to try and reach for the soldier, you see that not just one, but now multiple tendrils were holding him down as his gloved hands raked into the mud trying one last ditch effort scramble to get himself out. They rip away the helmet from his head, as if to personally terrorize you by making you meet the wide, desperate eyes of the soldier before he's taken.

“Go! Go! Warn the-” His words are cut off as his body is dragged away into the warm embrace of the lake and you see a few bubbles escaping up to the top, before they quickly cease all together.

Short trembling breathes leave your chest as tears blur your vision as your left alone, turning around and starting to run. But as if the ground itself is trying to help whatever the hell it is that’s in the lake, your leg partially sinking into the wet soil. You grunt as you try and yank your leg back up, gloved hands digging into the muck to help get yourself loose.

A tentacle wraps around your free leg, and you chance a glance backwards to see what you can only imagine is the visage of carnage itself. Haynes and Smith’s bodies haphazardly mashed together with one another, limbs and skin melding together as if they’d been melted into one another while tentacles writhe under the skin. Puppeteering the corpses of the two agents as they move to drag you into the lack as well. You fall on your face, mud hitting your helmet and obscuring your vision as more tentacles lash out, grabbing a hold of your limbs as despite all of your thrashing starts to pull you in.

You cry out, trying to call out for help that echoes in the valley of the crater, small rocks in the slippery earth rip and tear up your gear and skin as you feel the warm waters of the lake begin to surround you. A tendril, comes crawling and wraps around your neck before ripping your helmet off and leaving it on the bank as you’re tugged further away. The scent in the air burns your nostrils and throat, each labored breath feels impossibly hot and you aren’t sure if you should close your mouth to block it out or get whatever small bits of oxygen that you can in your system before you go under. You try to lift your head up to keep it above the water as another tug forces you to close your mouth and screw your eyes shut as you’re pulled under.

A brilliant burning pain, burrows it’s way into your body, through your shoulders, and creeps into your veins. Your arteries feel like they’re on fire as something starts to hollow you from the inside out, bubbles leaving your mouth as you can’t hold in the urge to scream. Accidentally inhaling the warm, salty water of the lake that makes you gag and choke. The digging sensation inside your body reaching further and further inside you, coiling around your organs, squeezing them as if to test the feel of each one, and crawling further towards your head. Water starting to fill your lungs as you breath in gulp of it that burn your throat and insides.

Just as this unbearable sensation is reaching it’s fever pitch, swirling around into your head, as if whatever has made it’s way inside you threatens to split your head open. Among all the pain that you desperately hope will eventually make you pass out before you die so that you don’t have to experience this anymore, you hear one thing inside your head. A voice that despite the chaos of your flailing form is low masculine and measured, calm and clear despite the panic coursing through your body.

Compatible? Interesting.

With that feel one finally surge as something delves just a little further in through your veins, before you manage to finally lift up from the surface of the water. Violently retching up water and bits of blood as your hands dig into the ground pulling you out. You have to spend several minutes beating on your own chest to expel all of the liquids stuck in your throat and onto the muddy bank of the lake. You then collapse, your legs still in the warm water, you try to shuffle your body further away, just so you aren’t touching it.

Get up.

The voice commands, maybe some inner part of your survival instincts attempting to urge you forward. It was right after all, you needed to get away, it still wasn’t safe. Like a freshly born deer you come to slowly stand on shaky legs, rubbing the thick sludge of mud off your face as you take one staggering step forward after the other. You helmet sits where it’d been torn off from your head and you bend down to pick it back up and secure it back on. The filtered air, much more preferable to the heavy scent of chemicals that’s present here. Your eyes glance to look back towards the lake to see it still as ever, there’s no trace that anything occurred at all. No blood on the banks, no half-fused body of the two agents you were traveling with, and there’s no more odd stalagmites of obsidian, they’ve vanished.

That’s not important right now. Move.

Right, right that didn’t matter now, you needed to move. You needed to get back to your captain, you all needed to get off this island. With each step forward in an odd way you feel, invigorated, any ache or pain that was in your system slowly fades away into nothing. Even your legs don’t protest when you begin your ascent up the slope, you don’t even find yourself having much if any trouble putting in a little extra effort to go at a steady pace upwards or maneuvering around the terrain. Maybe you were dying and you didn’t even realize it, your body blocking out all your pain receptors just so you can finish one last task before finally succumbing.

Check for yourself.

Your hands reach behind you, feeling along your arms and back where you originally felt your body being torn into only to feel smooth untouched skin. Your gear and uniform had been torn up a bit, but you are unharmed beneath it all.

A voice calling out your last name from just a few feet ahead of you has you looking up, to see one of the remaining members of your crew. You just stand there for a moment looking at him before he calls out,“Respond.”

“West-” Your voice croaks quietly.

Is he a threat? Kill him.

You almost shake your head from the thought that just entered your mind, God were you so on edge you actually considered for a moment killing one of your only surviving teammates left?

“West,” You speak again, louder this time as you start to move again getting closer “-we have to leave now.” He gets closer as well, meeting you half way.

“What happened? Where’s Smith and Haynes?” He questions, dread spilling into his voice.

“They, they’re gone. We have to go.” You urge again and you watch as his body goes taut, and you hear through his mask and air filter as he takes a deep breath in and out.“D-do, do you have their tags?”

You shake your head.

“No, and I don’t think we can get them, we need to go. Please listen.”

“Fuck.” He curses, voice wavering, “Alright c’mon.”

You both start to head up, pushing past foliage and digging your heels into the unsteady ground as you make your way up.

“Are you alright?” He asks quietly, his voice lacking it’s energy that he once held.

You’re fine.

You did feel physically okay, despite everything. Aside from a lingering pain of having coughed up all that warm chemical lake water.

“I’m fine, I think, I took a bad tumble early before everything, but I’ll live.” You confirm, but he doesn’t say anything back and it goes quiet, just the sounds of both you walking.

“Christ all mighty, what happened down there?” Your captain says as the two of you come back up to see the state of the half prepared camp. He stands from his position where it looks like he was in the middle of trying to start a fire, leaning most of his weight on his uninjured leg.

“We need to leave Captain.” You quickly say, coming up closer to your leader who puts up a small hand to gesture for you not to come any closer.

“I asked for an explanation, not what you think we should do, I’ll be the one determining that.”

How annoying.

Your scrambled mind attempts to put together what exactly happened, you try to ignore your knee jerk thoughts to be mean. You needed to cooperate right now, your leader just wants to know why only one of three people he sent down came back up.

“We were getting samples, and there were these pieces of obsidian down there, I thought we should take some. Haynes went to grab them and then…” Your voice tapers off, the sight of his headless corpse standing in the water coming to mind.

Hush.

With that simple thought the image vanishes from your head and take in a deep breath to calm yourself.

“His helmet came off and there was these tentacles and it dragged Smith down and I- I tried to, but I couldn’t save him and-” Your lips tremble as you try to speak, tears slipping past your lids as you explain, but your leader cuts you off before you can divulge anything else.

“Did it touch you?” He queries.

“What?” You ask back softly.

“Did those tentacles touch you, get into a cut, or get inside you in any way possible?”

Lie.

You know you felt it. Those tendrils burrowing themselves inside you, invading every inch of your insides and settling themselves into your very core. However your back had felt fine, as if nothing happened, you don’t even feel any pain anymore. It’s all evaporated into nothing.

If you don’t lie, he’ll try to kill you.

Your inner voice urges, but you try to shake it off as just being your paranoid nerves from everything that’s transpired.

“I-I don’t think so.”­

You see a shift in your leader’s stance, his hand resting over his rifle.

“You don’t think so, or you know so?” He interrogates, and your eyes are hyper focused on his grip on the gun. He wasn’t going to shoot you was he?

“Sir, I promise you, I feel fine. I’m fine.” Your words are even though as you speak, as if you’re trying to convince yourself more than you are him.

“It looks like your gear’s been torn up pretty bad.” He says gruffly and you two hold each other’s gazes despite not being able to see one another through the helmets.

When his hand moves towards his assault rifle you feel as if everything slows down. The small trickle of rain still coming down from the darkening sky comes to a near stand still, you feel your muscles tense and relax all through out your body. You watch as your leader’s hands come to properly grip the gun and aim it directly towards you.

The bullet that comes out is comically slow and yet still you can almost see the way it breaks the air around it as it whizzes towards you, but you easily sidestep out of the way. Time seems to resume to it’s normal speed as you look up brows furrowed at your leader.

I told you so.

Your inner voice echoes.

“West, shoot her now.” The captain commands. You whip around to see that West seems to be tense, his arm griping the rifle, but he seems unsure if he should follow through on the order. His hands visibly shake.

Your hand feels around for your pistol, but it’d been lost and abandoned sometime during your struggle with the tentacles in the lake. More bullets come flying at you from the Captain, lighting up the canopy of the rain forest with their shots, you feel your body being twisted and jerked around without your direct own movements to avoid the metal piercing your form.

“Captain, I swear- I’m fine I-” You try to force your body to remain still, as something writhes and moves underneath your skin, but you hold it back as best you can. This time one of the bullets hits your shoulder making you groan in pain, your hand coming up to staunch the warm flow of blood that trickles past your hand. The time seems to come to stand still once more as the Captain’s gun is re-positioned and aimed for you, a bullet heading straight for your head.

If you can’t do it, then let me.

You don’t understand this inner voices demand, but his voice is calming amidst all this chaos, it is tempting to just keep doing as it says. What did it want to do exactly?

Don’t worry about that, just give me control. It’ll be over in less than five seconds. I promise.

You let go of whatever tense leash you felt like you’re pulling back on in your extremities and the moment you do it feels as if you yourself are pushed away from the forefront of your own head. Your body moves, not with the jerks or tugs of a leashed dog, but they are precise now as your form moves with a level of grace you’ve never known yourself to possess. In just three quick strides you make it to the captain, and your hand is forceful burrowed into his chest and exits from the other side. You don’t even have time for your eyes to linger on his body as it immediately crumples and sloughs off your limb. You- No, whatever was possessing your body turns towards West and in a similar fashion easily closes the distance. Your hands, warm and stained in both your own blood and the captain’s pull the last soldier’s head down and into a tight headlock, before you hear a sharp crack. His body falling limp and off to the side.

You feel whatever had possessed you retreats back after that, as you are left alone. The rain forest is quiet as you fall to your knees.

What had you done? Why had you done that? What was wrong with you? What was inside of you, that was better question. Your hands come up to take your helmet, off the air up here above the lake still burned the back of your throat, but not nearly as much as it had down below. Hot tears fall over your cheek as you bring your hands up to wipe them away. Mud, blood, mucus, and sweat all combines into one sticky sludge substance as you rub your face. Whimpers and pleads that fall to no other ears than your own make their way past your quivering lips.

When your eyes chance to look around the destruction wrought by your own hands, you dry heave, and gag, but nothing comes up. You swipe away the bit of drool that does, as you try and calm yourself, arms wrapping around your body as you look down at the forest floor immediately in front of you and not the bodies further out.

Are you done? The voice asks not necessarily rushing, it’s just quizzical, like it’s waiting for your to be finished so that it can start something else. Maybe urge you, or help you in something else. It’s in this odd perplexing calmness that slowly washes over your body, that you have time to think. Although your thoughts feel so quiet and empty, as if there was physical space inside your mind that echoed outward. That voice, an oddly masculine one, maybe it sounds like someone you used to know, that’s why it was somewhat soothing to listen to.

You still have a bullet in your shoulder, you need to remove it.

That’s… right. The voice is right and your hand comes up to feel around the crusted area of your military clothes, a dull ache radiating out from the area.

“I must be really going crazy…” Your sore voice creaks out as your fingers pry open the tear in your shirt to show the bullet hole.

I detect that despite everything, your mind is still very in tact.

“Thanks voice in my head, that’s… very reassuring.” You mutter out sarcastically, a small laugh tickling the back of your throat that quickly fizzles out into nothing.

Believe what you will, but I’m telling you the truth.

You don’t bother to respond this time, instead just trying to figure out in your scattered state how you were going to manage to pull out the bullet from your shoulder.

You need tweezers.

You did.

Although you abandoned your pack sometime in the struggle at the lake, but the other two’s packs should be around here somewhere. Your body feels drained as you stand, and you try to keep your eyes off from the corpses as you step forward. You try to not think too much as your eyes finally find one of the backpacks and you rifle through it. Finding the same tools West used to patch up the Captain with.

Don’t think about them. Focus on yourself, remove the bullet.

You follow the voices instructions, partially removing the top of your uniform to see the wound. Strange in this light the red of your blood nearly looks black in the dim light. With a pair of tweezers, you tense and grit your teeth as the metal dips past the wound of your flesh. You blindly scrape at the inside of bone and skin as you try to get a hold of the bullet inside you. When you finally feel the clink of the tweezers against it, you readjust your hands grip on them, before in one swift motion you pull it out. It falls with a new flow of blood seeping out from your shoulder and your and drops the tweezers to pull out the roll of gauze from the bag.

You have to awkwardly angle yourself to wrap up the injury. You debate putting back on your top, it’s nothing more than just shreds of bloodied fabric at this point. You decide it’s not worth it, the black undershirt you have on is good enough.

Good job. Now, you need to eat.

Oh God last thing you want to do is consume any of those horrible pre-packed meals, you don’t care how hungry you are, those were so God awful. Besides you probably do deserve to starve for-

Not that.

You feel your head being jerked up and to the side to stare at the body of your former Captain. Blood soaking his uniform and forest floor beneath where he lay.

Would you like me to do it for you again?

You rip your gaze away from him,

“N-No, no. I’m not- I won’t-” Your voice cracks as you can’t believe that- some part of you, whatever this voice was would even suggest such a thing. To eat the people you just killed? What was wrong with you? How could you think like that?

Hush. I didn’t mean it so barbarically like that. Just let me do it, you can even turn around. You won’t have to see a thing.

Maybe this wasn’t even real at all, you were having a horrible nightmare. Although you don’t feel that dream-like cotton-headed fog that you think usually clouds your mind when you sleep. You are very very unfortunately highly aware of everything around you. This is no dream, but your voice, this voice inside you rather has proven… helpful. You are hungry. Very hungry now that you think about it. You can just turn around, like the voice said, and it can deal with it. Not you. You don’t want to.

“You promise?” Your voice is no louder than a whisper, but you know it hears you all the same.

I promise. Let me help you.

The voice is so calm, the opposite of your own uneven croaking voice, it is a voice of tranquility undisturbed by your perturbed state. It would be easy to just let it do as it wishes, and you want to. You want to fall back on it and let it handle all of these horrible things. It did protect you after all, the Captain was going to kill you and it saved you.

Turn around, close your eyes.

As if already knowing that you have agreed to it’s proposition it gives you another set of orders that you wordlessly follow. You feel that tug and pull against your skin as you close your eyes, something slick slithers from under your shirt, raising the skin as it trails along the ground. You can feel it, like it’s apart of you as it moves feeling around the ground, before it coils around something and you can feel burrow it’s way inside something warm.

The longer it stays the more, full your already feel, your stomach’s cramping from emptiness starting to dissipate.

Rest. I’ll take over for now.

“Okay.” You mumble out, not even really thinking about where to sleep, just laying down on the ground as you were. The voice would handle everything. You’re sure of it.

Chapter Text

As you slowly come to you find yourself already walking, your eyes don’t blink open so much as your consciousness finally wakes up as you come to sudden halt in your trek, confused and disoriented as you look around. The morning sunlight comes in through the rain forest, whatever area you’re in now has a much lower density of fog than you were in before. And despite supposedly having found yourself in the middle of sleepwalking, you don’t feel particularly tired or sore. There’s a blissful moment where in your still groggy awakening head that doesn’t quiet remember or recall anything that happened the previous night, but as you start to remember what did happen you feel your heart beat start to quicken. You frantically look around you as if you might still find your teammates around you, but you are alone.

Images of black coiling tentacles dragging Agent Smith into the lake, the headless body of Haynes before his body was rained down with a hail of bullets, the Captain suddenly turning on you, the blood staining your gloved hands. You bring them just to check for yourself only to see that there is no blood staining your gloved hands. You aren’t even wearing gloves anymore, but they’re clean, immaculate even, no dirt or mud from all your crawling around is under the nails. The over coat of your camo shirt is gone, and you don’t have your helmet anymore. But what you do have is backpack behind you and an assault rifle strapped around your shoulder.

It suddenly feels like their isn’t enough air around you, you find it difficult for your eyes to focus on anything. The edges to everywhere you look all become one vague green colored blur as you take a step back. Away, you wanted to run away, but your limbs all seize up frozen in place, you can still hear it. Distantly Smith’s scream, the gurgle of Haynes’s final lamenting words, Captain Fern and the warmth of his blood, the beating of his organs as you shoved your hand straight through his chest and it’s your fault.

Your fault.

All your fault.

Maybe if you had just decided to head back up to West to get checked out after your fall none of you would have went down there again. Maybe you all would have realized something was terribly wrong. But no. You wanted to get it done. You were selfish, you were so selfish and it got them all killed. You killed them.

You killed your captain, viciously- should you be lucky that you didn’t see his after your pierced his chest with your hands? -and West, so coldly- you aren’t sure if even had the moment to comprehend what was happening to him before you snapped his neck. The way his body went limp on the ground, a whole life taken in an instance. And it was your fault.

Your fault.

Your fault.

All your fault.

Your own name being called out, has you snapping out from your trance as you look ahead of you to see someone you thought you saw die.

A person you thought you had killed by your very own hands.

You see the brown shorn hair, and olive toned skin, the small scar above his brows that cuts directly through the thin hairs of his right eyebrow. He doesn’t have his helmet on, and he looks a little tired, but he’s alive, breathing. Still even has his pack and his gun on him, and not a scratch or bruise to be seen.

“West?” You quietly say, almost more so to yourself than you to him, you almost can’t believe it, and you say his name again louder, breaking into a fast walk to get closer to him.

“Oh, oh my God, thank God, you’re, you’re alive.” You say, your words wavering as you come to stand just in front of him. He gives you the smallest hint of a smile as he looks at you.

“I thought you were dead too, you just ran off last night, and I tried calling out for you after everything, but you just kept running.” Your brows furrow, you didn’t recall running off. Last you remember you were falling asleep. Then again when you just ‘woke up’ a few minutes ago you were in the middle of walking.

“Running? I, I didn’t run off, at least, I don’t… think I did…” Your voice tapering off.

“A lot happened last night, I’d be more surprised if that head of yours wasn’t just a touch frazzled.” He says and you feel like that was a bit of an understatement. Even now your head still has this… distant fuzziness to it, that you can’t really describe or place it’s origin from.

“What… did happen then? I thought… I thought you died. I, I saw it… I…” You confess and your eyes search his, you still almost can’t believe he’s alive in front of you.

“Well, after the Captain ordered me to shoot you I froze up a bit, I didn’t know what was going on or what to do.” His eyes look down to the floor of the forest, before turning up to meet yours again. “But despite being shot at you were still trying to reason with him, and I just had this feeling that you were being honest. I was able to distract the Captain for long enough while you ran off, and he ended up tumbling down the slope toward lake. I went to try and look for you after that.” He explains.

You knew it, you just weren’t capable of doing something like that. And besides throwing your entire fist through a grown man’s chest would take an extreme amount of force, a force which you certainly didn’t possess. And dodging bullets mid air? You were just lucky to have only been shot once. And hearing that voice in your head? Maybe you all were experiencing some kind of mass hysteria? Or even something about the chemicals from the lake was getting through your air filters and making you hallucinate. The more you think on it, the more it makes more sense to you, it’s why you felt all that pain, but when you checked for damages nothing had been even done to you. Whatever the case maybe though you must be far enough away from the source now that it’s no longer effecting you, you don’t even hear that ‘inner voice’ anymore ordering you around, telling you to kill or even eat people.

“Well it’s good to see you well, we should head back to the extraction point, we need to report all of this to the BSAA.”

“Right, let’s get going.” He agrees.

It had taken a bit of deliberation and looking through the somewhat ruined map in your pack, before the two of you took an educated guess as to which way the extraction point way. You weren’t much of a navigator, but you both decided as long as you could make it to the island’s beach you could figure your way out from there. You feel that it’s quieter now than it was before, but then again there used to be three other men traveling with you all. It’s expected that it’d be so much more quieter with just you and West. And while you hadn’t known the other men for long you miss hearing their occasionally banter with one another already, even if you didn’t directly get yourself involved. It was enjoyable to just listen to, like white noise.

“I never did ask before, I didn’t really want to bother any of you guys, and I’m not the best at well, talking but can I ask you something about yourself West?” You speak up, viewing him from your side eye, not making direct eye contact with him as you walk.

“Sure.” He replies plainly.

“What’s your first name?”

“Alan.”

“Alan West…” You repeat under your breath, you don’t know if you’ve meet another Alan before. It’s not like it’s an uncommon name you think, but you still don’t think you’ve personally known one. Not that you are close with many people at all. It does make you think on what the other’s first names were, and you realize that Alan probably doesn’t even know your own first name. You say it softly at first, and he just gives you a hum in response, probably not even understanding why you’re saying your name. “That’s my name, it’s,” You say it, the full thing and you see his head dip ever so slightly in acknowledgment.

It grows quiet between the two of you again, but when all you can is the sound of your walking again, you feel like you have to fill the silence with something. After all you just asked him his name, and that’s it? Was he expecting you to carry the conversation? Did he just want you to shut up? Were you bothering him?

You remember the way his voice cracked and wavered when you said that Smith and Haynes were gone. But maybe they weren’t gone, you could have hallucinated that whole scenario as well. Your jaw clenches when you see the imagery flash over again in your mind, you can practically still taste that acidic chemical water filling your lungs once more.

“And, can I ask another question? I’m sorry if I’m annoying you, but I don’t want to think about what happened last night and I feel like if I listened to something else right now, I could kind of distract myself.” You say and when he doesn’t immediately respond you start to apologize preemptively, “I’m sorry, that’s selfish of me to ask for isn’t it?”

“I don’t see why not. As long as I may ask some questions in turn.” He finally replies and you have to hold in your sigh of relief,“Of course, that seems fair.” You agree.

You then realize that you hadn’t even really thought a question to ask. Your mind scrambling to find a decent enough question, nothing to invasive of course. Think. Think, you have two masters degrees it should not be this hard to think of a normal, regular question to ask another normal regular human being.

“Um… what made you join the BSAA? If there’s even really a reason.”

You’re a failure. What are you some job interviewer? What kind of question was that?

“I was recommended the position. I spent several years in the USA military before joining.”

“Did you do anything before that?” You question, he hums for a moment before answering.

“No, as soon as I turned eighteen I went straight to the military. May I ask now?” He queries back and you nod your head, perhaps a little harder than you needed to.

“Oh, yeah of course.”

“What made you get into virology?” He inquires and you make a small hum sound as you think, “Well… I guess just you know, with how crazy bio terrorism is now a days, it was a horrifying thought to me as a kid the kind of things you’d hear about on the news or the TV. Viruses popping up, decimating whole cities, changing people, and the cult stuff too.” It has never personally impacted you specifically where you grew up, you got lucky that you never ended up in any areas where bio terrorism attacks occurred but that doesn’t mean it still didn’t get to you. Your family didn’t exactly monitor your internet access as a kid and more than a few times did you stumble on videos or articles that showed the uncensored destruction and gore that was happening from outside the safety of your little picket fenced house. You’d have nightmares for weeks about it after, yet you’d still be curious enough to go looking around for the videos again. Sometimes just playing them on repeat several times, over and over again, both in terror and awe at the upper limits of the human body. He didn’t need to know that last part though. “And this may seem childish, but I feel like once I understand something, I’m not as scared of it. Besides, since I’m knowledgeable I can actually do something about them, you know? So learning exactly how viruses worked kind of put to rest most of my fears.” Well, you still do have the occasional bad dream about being trapped in some enclosed area with mutant monsters. “Most of them at least, I still work with a decent amount of caution around them.”

Your eyes flick over to gauge his reaction, but his face been pretty set in stone for the most part. You guess he had the helmet over his head most of the time so you couldn’t really see his reactions, but was he always this stoic? Or maybe you’re just weird for looking at him, you avert your eyes again. You hope you aren’t a bother, but he probably wishes it was one of his soldier friends that survived and not you. Not like you can blame him if he resents you in someway over that, you almost wish it was them and not yourself to.

“Interesting, and how long have you been working for the BSAA?” His question cuts in through your thoughts.

You have to think on that for a moment, counting back in your head and trying to recall what time of year it was you joined. You were twenty-nine to date, and you think you joined around when you were twenty-seven meaning…“It’s been about…two years now, two and a half to be specific.” You answer.

“What about you?” You quiz back.

“About three years.”

“Have you then, dealt with anything like this before?”

You know bad things can happen on missions, you’ve received and worked on samples, that came from those ‘bad missions’. Read through the reports, when you had the access to see them. The terms used would be extremely formal, distant, such as describing how a solider died in action it may be phrased as ‘a member from the active mission was infected during a scuffle and subsequently terminated.’ From that phrasing it’s easy not to give too much thought to the human life that died. It’s ‘just a member’ is much better than hearing their name, or how they were infected- if they were still cognizant enough before they were mercy killed.

This wasn’t supposed to be one of those ‘bad missions’ though, you were reassured plenty of times it would be quick. It would just be a few nights and then you could go home, that’s why you even researched what you could about the island before going just to reassure yourself that nothing bad was going to happen.

“I thought you didn’t want to think about last night?” He reminds you and while that was true, you didn’t want to think about what you saw last night, but hearing some kind of confirmation that this experience is something that Alan has survived and lived through, would give you more confidence about your current scenario. That bad things have happened, and he’s still made it through.

“No, not really, but like I said before, I feel like if I understand what happened better, then it’s not as scary.” You explain and your eyes glance from ahead of you to catching his side profile from your eyes.

“I’ve been through worse than this.” He validates.

“Do you think Smith, Haynes...Do you think they might still be alive? I thought I saw them die… but maybe they’re still wandering around somewhere. Lost.” You ask, this time daring to look fully towards the man, and his head turns to look back at you, he flashes you a smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes though, doesn’t go beyond creasing the corner of his cheeks.

Well you can at least appreciate the attempt to comfort you.

“We can always report them as missing, the BSAA will be able to send out a search party for them, and with our packs they should have enough food to last them a couple days.”

“Right, thank you Alan.”

The sun is setting as the two of you finally make it to the beach of the island. The soil giving way to softer warm sand, the beach is free of any fog and for once no grey clouds are to be seen above you. The orange and red light from the sunset warms your skin as the two of you get closer and closer towards the shore. You’d never thought you’d be so relieved to smell sea water before. You slide off your pack from your bag as you start rummaging around for the radio inside, and you pull it out trying to check for any damages but the device seems to be okay. You press the power button and orange screen flicks on in response, a low static coming from the speaker.

“I’m gonna radio in for pickup, they should be able to dispatch off a plane to us I think by nightfall, or maybe morning. I’ve never had to call in for these kinds of things before, so I’m not sure…” You trail off. Alan must know though right? Military people used radios all the time didn’t they? “…Do you know how to?” You can’t bare to look up at him as you ask instead just pretending to fiddle with the dials on the device.

“Would you like me to teach you?” He offers and you see him take a knee next to you while you mess the radio. “That would be nice.” You reply.

“Good, do you know the right station?” He questions and you nod, actually paying attention to the dials you’re fidgeting with until the static clears. You look over to him, for guidance.

“Do as I say.” He starts to instruct, “Start off by announcing the team name, and then identifying yourself.” You hold up the microphone of the radio, clicking the button on the side to speak into it.

“This is Research & Recovery Team Omega C, reporting in, I, I’m-” You say your full name, “The team’s assigned virologist.” You then let go of the button, and glance back to Alan.

“Wait for a response.” He directs and after a few moments you hear a small static click as the line is picked up, the a feminine voice crackles over the device. “We hear you Research & Recovery Team Omega C, please report status of mission.”

“Tell them the mission failed, we have several MIA and we are requesting emergency pickup.” He says and you click the side of button again, “Mission has been a failure, we have three men MIA and we’re requesting emergency pickup.” You parrot back to the woman, and there’s a moment of silence again before you hear the person on the other side turn on their microphone again.

“What is your current location, Research & Recovery Team Omega C?”

“We are awaiting at the designated extraction point.” You relay back.

“Are there hostile entities in the area with you?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?” She asks again and you validate your response. “Yes.”

“Were you attacked at all? Do you have any injuries?”

“No, we suspect that due to a chemical gas that bypassed our air filters in the area we were sent to investigate had made several members act irrationally, injuring one another before running off. I was attacked by one other member who is currently MIA, and I have sustained one bullet wound, but I’ve been stabilized and treated.” Your eyes awkwardly keep flicking up toward Alan just to see if he gave you any sort of look of approval, or disapproval by what you were saying, but through out everything his face remains set in it’s usual tight lipped line.

“Roger, we’ll have a plane sent to your location in three hours from now.” With that the line fully goes silent and you start to put pack away the radio in your bag, before looking up to the soldier to ask him.

“How was that?”

“Good.” He commends and you feel a bit of heat come to your face that isn’t just from sun’s warmth.

“Thanks Alan.” You mumble back and you hear him reply back with a much more confident and cool,“It’s no problem at all.”

Once you have the radio packed away again, you set the bag in your lap, and sit down properly with not much else to do. If you get any sand anywhere unsavory then you’ll deal with it later, you didn’t feel like standing right now anyways. Now that you think about it, your legs aren’t even as sore as they should be from all the walking you’ve been doing. Not like you were the most active person in the world seeing as you spent much of your recent years hunched over a computer monitor and frothing at the mouth looking at virus’s under a microscope. Guess you should take what little comforts and blessing you have right now though.

“You know you look a bit tired. Why don’t you set up your tent and rest? I can wake you up when the plane comes.” You hear Alan say, you can feel his eyes on you but can’t find it in yourself to look up to meet his. Instead just content with messing with the straps on your bag instead.

“I don’t think I could rest one bit right now. I really want to just get home and then pass out, but I know once we touch base it’s just gonna be a whole debriefing and everything. Maybe I’ll sleep a little once we get on the hangar.”

You couldn’t wait to get home, you want to sleep in your bed and take a nice long hot shower, actually maybe a bath. You might be a little nose blind to your own scent right now, but you can imagine that taking a dip in a chemical lake and trekking around the rain forest these past few days has not done you any favors. You’ll do a bubble bath and you’ll buy yourself an expensive brand of lotion afterwards to make your skin extra soft and supple that night. You’ll even put in laundry beforehand so that you can slip into fresh warm and clean pajamas after and order a big takeout meal that you can eat left overs from for the next few days after. Maybe you should throw in your sheets too so you can sleep in fresh clean sheets, but maybe not, you don’t want to have to go through the tiresome process of having to put your bed together again afterwards.

“Perhaps you don’t feel tired, but you certainly look like you could use it. You should at least eat something, maybe you’ll be in the mood to rest afterwards.” He suggests instead, while you guess you could eat something, you aren’t in the mood to eat the other stuff you guys have lying around in your pack.

“Well maybe just a protein bar, I don’t know how you guys can eat that other stuff. I nearly threw it all up the first night.” You concede as you start messing around the pack again trying to find where it is you put the bars at. Though when he doesn’t respond you curse yourself, that was probably a bit too much information for him. Why did you say that?

You pull your pack into your lap, going through several zippers trying to find the something edible. You pass by medical supplies, gauze, and scissors, and tweezers, but towards one of the final pouches you check instead of food you find a small plastic card and you pull it out to read over the info.

There’s a small picture in the left hand corner that shows the smiling image of Alan West, except…

That’s right… this wasn’t your bag.

It was way too big to be your back pack, you left yours all the way back at the lake. You didn’t have it with you when you caught back up with West. And the stuff inside, none of this was yours, you didn’t have medical supplies in your bag, you had air quality checkers, a small pack-able microscope, things to look for the virus, not medical supplies. You don’t even remember packing a radio.

This was West’s bag.

But West was wearing a bag. His bag, but… you have it?

Well West apparently also wasn’t named Alan.

And this assault rifle you have, you could have only picked it up from either West or the Captain, you only came here with a pistol and you also lost that at the lake. But Alan had said that you ran off, after your leader shot you. Where did you get it from then?

You don’t remember.

“What’s wrong?” Alan asks and as you look up you see that the scar on above his eyebrow is on the right side of his face, you glance back down at the ID. The scar was on the left side in the photo.

“You’re not West.” You whisper out, one trembling hand going to clutch the rifle strapped to you as you drop the ID in favor of arming yourself with the gun. Hands awkwardly holding the large weapon, the heavy weight of it sits uncomfortably in your arms as you aim it up towards ‘him.’

There’s no reaction on his face though, no surprise or fear, he merely looks back at you with cold indifference and as he sits there you start to notice more things than you hadn’t before. Like how there is no shadow that he produces despite the bright fading lights of the setting sun that should be drawing a long shadow beside him. You don’t see the movement of his chest going up and down to breath, it’s as if he’s a static image, just something projected in front of you.

He sighs, and what you think might be a flash of disappointment crosses his brow “For the record,” He starts off, and when you blink he’s vanished.

I was trying to make things easier for you. That voice echoes out in your head.

Your fingers, uncoordinated fumble with the rifle trying to shot the trigger to where he was just sitting, but it only clicks, and you look down to see that the safety is still on.

I ask that you refrain from wasting the bullets, it’ll make things much more easier for us in the long run .

“Where the hell are you? Stop talking inside my head, c-come back out here!” You shout towards the empty beach, as you come to stand your fingers messing around with the gun until you finally undo the safety and try to look around frantically for where ever it is the fake West went.

I quite literally am inside your head. If you’d like me to project my voice via auditory hallucinations again then I maybe persuaded given that you are complaint. The voice says, his tone edging on barely masked mild annoyance. As if this is all just an inconvenience to it.

But that this can’t be true, it was just lying, trying to make you believe it had more power than it actually did, it couldn’t be inside your head. You weren’t even near the lake or chemicals again to be hallucinating like this again.

Must you be so persistently stubborn? I can explain things much more clearer to you if you can just calm down, after all both of our freedom and general safety is now at risk.

Both of you were at risk?

You don’t understand, you don’t understand at all, each thing it says just makes more and more unanswered questions come to mind. They pile over one another, a long scrambling incoherent list in your mind, as you try to piece together what information you have to make sense of the mess you find yourself in.

Alone on some nameless beach, with the one person you thought was still alive having vanished into thin air, just some impostor of someone you only briefly knew.

“Show yourself again then, I want to see you.” Your voice is low and quiet, almost unsure if it’s heard you, but some part of you does know that it heard you. It acknowledges anything you communicate or have the slightest notions of letting out, consciously or not.

Would you like another visual hallucination? Or the real thing?

You didn’t want to see another fabricated image of someone you know pretending to be them, or wearing their face. To see is to know, and despite your fear, and the way you can feel your pulse in the back of your throat, you want to know. You want to understand.

“T-the real thing.” Voice still quiet, as you feel the palms of your hands have become sweaty against the rifle you hold. The metal feels so cold under your fingers.

Very well.

You feel a pulsing from your right arm, and as your hand looks to the affected limb you watch, wide eyed as something moves under the skin, twitches and ungulates as painlessly it breaks through the surface of your flesh. Those same black tendrils you saw from the other night worming their way out from your arm, coiling around one another and waving in the air. Their slick warm on your body as they writhe in place, unable to sit still.

That’s a fraction of myself.

It’s disorienting, like your mind rejects the image displayed before it. It’s not right, it’s not you, it’s not anything that should have come out of you. It’s inhuman and your hands clutches against the gun desperately want to rip them out from your arm and forget that such a thing had crawled out from your body.

I’m afraid we’re in for the long haul. Your DNA is a rare one, less than a percent of the total population holds the right genes that you do that make you compatible with me.

You’ve seen and you still don’t understand, a gathering of tears at your waterline finally fall over. Sliding down the curves of your face, before falling down towards your arms still wrapped around your gun. As if it can protect you from whatever this thing was inside you.

But I’ll pull back seeing as viewing me is giving you such a visceral reaction.

With that the tentacles slowly slip back inside, no pain, only a vague pressure you feel as they slink back inside your body and disappear under your skin. No trace left behind that they were ever there, and despite seeing them just a moment ago, you want to believe they never appeared in the first place.

You want to believe that you’ve just gone crazy. That’s the only viable explanation to you at the moment, you’ve lost it and it wasn’t the chemicals making you insane. It’s just you.

However there’s this uncanny clarity you feel, your mind feels like despite it’s stuttering due to your fear and panic, that it’s still as sharp as ever. Well as sharp as it can be with everything that’s transpired. It’s like you inherently just know that you aren’t going crazy, and that just makes everything else all the more upsetting.

You don’t have any sort of viable explanation. You don’t know.

“Is this more suitable for you?” It’s the sound of the voice, not in your head though this time, it’s away from you. It’s outside from you, and you look to where ‘West’ used to be sitting to see a man standing before you. You don’t recognize him at all, but he’s tall, broad shoulders, blonde slicked back hair, pale skin, and a face with angular features, his thin lips set into a firm line. Dark rectangular shades sit high on the bridge of his nose and obscure his eyes. He’s dressed in a black leather trench coat, with a black undershirt that has a zipper that starts from the bottom and goes all the way to the top of the high collar top. Long black pants and boots complete the look.

“It’s carbon fiber.” He says, and you feel your brows furrow together.

“What?”

“My clothes, they’re carbon fiber, not leather. It’s a much stronger material than leather.” He clarifies and it takes you a moment to realize what he’s referring to.

He’s another hallucination. Of who you aren’t sure, but maybe this is just how the voice ‘chooses’ to present itself, and is also very particular about the details- even down to the kind of material it ‘presents’ itself to be wearing.

“Who, who are you, or is.. what are you a better question?” You inquire, your fingers still tight around the rifle, although the comfort it brings holds little value. It wouldn’t do much to shoot something that isn’t even really there.

“Why don’t we make a deal?” He offers instead, head tilting to one side, and you wait, letting him speak further on what he is planning to say.

“I will inform you on who I am, and what I want. I will guide you and ensure that we both remain relatively unscathed. In exchange, you will be complaint with my demands, inform me of any relevant information you are aware of, and otherwise be subservient towards me.”

He speaks as if it’s just right, like you’re just naturally supposed to submit to such orders, and just accept his words for what they are. You don’t of course, every thing he just said, rubs completely opposite to you.

“That’s… that’s such a terrible deal for me. Who would ever agree to that?” You question, almost befuddled by his low par offer.

“Fine, elaborate on what it is you want then.” He states, head turning back from it’s tilted position.

“I want to know who you are, what you are, what you want, what happened last night, and I’ll hear you out, but I’m not going to mindlessly comply with your orders.”

He’s quiet for a few moments, as if analyzing every detail to what you’ve just said, before he lets out a small hum.

“I’m amendable to that, so long as you are compliant that you give me any information that you are aware of and I desire. Do we have a deal?” He tries again, and he even extends a gloved hand out towards you to shake on it.

“No.” You say it, before you can even really think about it for a solid moment. It was just a knee jerk reaction more than anything else though, and he drops his outreached hand.

“Well what else is there that you want?” He tries to ask, but there isn’t anything else more that you want than answers. Also to never ever see those tentacles coming out of your body again, but that’s on a slightly lower spectrum of your current priorities.

“N-nothing, I, I have no idea what the hell is going on right now, I could just be losing it and talking to myself.” You say instead.

“I mean technically you are speaking to yourself. No one else is here,” His hand makes a large sweeping gesture towards the empty beach before the two of you, “I’m just projecting a vivid hallucination within your mind, but you know that, and I also know that you’ve already come to the conclusion that you’re still relatively, sound of mind.” His hand drops, and his shoulders shrug lightly,

“Either way you’re going to have to come to some kind of decision sooner rather than later.”

You really didn’t. Would it be hard to ignore a very vivid hallucination? Yes, but you’re sure you can just keep your mouth shut and find some way to get rid of him. There must be something you can give yourself, a vaccine, a cure to whatever this thing is that’s invaded your body. You just needed to get back to the BSAA, and they can help you. They’ll help fix you.

“I know you haven’t taken a look in the mirror as of late, but you might want to. You’re not just going to get a free pass back home to a nice bubble bath, looking like that.” He hints, before he points one finger towards the ocean. Your eyes follow to where he points as you look at the waves gently lapping against the sand. You look back to him once more holding his gaze, although it’s hard to say if you really are given his shades obscure his eyes, then turn to the beach again and start walking over. The apparition following you in stride. Your boots make contact with the edges of the waves as you step just a few feet in, the wet sand giving way under your weight, before you focus your gaze on the reflection of yourself in the water.

The original color of your eyes is gone, replaced instead by vibrant red-orange orbs and cat like slits that contract and expand as you stare at yourself in the soft waves of the ocean. Dark spidery veins are present along the skin of your eyes as well, and you think you can almost see them move and pulse as you look.

You blink, as if just like West it’s just another illusion and will go away if you will it. But nothing changes besides the movements of the tides. “I told you so.” You hear the illusion chastise, his boots apparent in your side eye, but his reflection doesn’t appear alongside yours in the water.

“I can’t undo that by the way, I can’t control your physical appearance at all. Unless you’d like me to make you hallucinate again that everything is fine and dandy.”

It’s similar to when you saw the tentacles, to a much lesser extent, but the pang of distant fear and revulsion is still apparent. You can’t quite will yourself to look away from it either, like looking at a train wreck.

“You know the BSAA, you’re not a regular person anymore. You’re infected with a rather deadly virus. You’re just another threat to them, another target to be wiped off the board.”

Infected? No, no you couldn’t be infected. What kinf of virus would you even be infected with? The one you were sent here to retrieve?

"Getting warmer." He teases.

The virus you were sent after was supposed to be deadly, lethal to any human it came in contact with. If you were infected, then you should be dead.

There are always exceptions to the rule though, you’ve heard that in some one in a million, or even one in a billion chances that someone has some gene or natural resistance that makes one a carrier and not effected by a virus. There’s even benefits to be had in some cases, although the risks are usually far too grand to really be worth testing.

You know those tentacles were real though and you know that the vision of yourself before you is too, and if the virus was back in that lake, then there was little chance that you weren’t infected. That Smith and Haynes were also infected and were violently killed off from the nature of the virus acting as it should have for you. You were just lucky that unlike the other soldiers you had some gene that made you able to bare it instead of be ripped apart by it. However if you were infected then, your eyes finally look away from your visage in the water to stare at the hallucination of a person next to you. He- It, No he, this is a he, you… know that somehow, was then some kind of projection of the virus itself.

It- He, he was self-aware.

A self-actualized virus, intelligent enough to plan, speak, and coordinate and even make attempts at deceiving you. He even has his own strong sense of identity, he’s even gendered himself. You’d be amazed at such a thing, awe struck even to learn such a thing existed, if it wasn’t actively inside you.

As his host body.

You can almost feel his smug grin from inside your own mind as you finally come to that conclusion.

“You are so close, yet not exactly right, but you are working with very limited information. I can applaud you for coming to that conclusion though.” He credits before asking, “So what’s it going to be then? Will you come to co-operate with me, or will you just make things difficult for both of us?”

You hate that he’s right. You’ve seen it personally yourself. Soldiers coming in back from a mission, not yet knowing they accidentally got some kind of hazardous fluid on them, inside a cut and came to base already damned. It’s not like there’s much that can be done once someone is infected, they have to be… terminated. Processed. It was just protocol, and they know it themselves, they sign off a waiver when joining that should you get infected and there is no cure or vaccine available. It’s for the safety of the whole, could you imagine the kind of out breaks that would have happened if someone was kept alive? But now the tables have turned on you, you’ve signed off that same waiver when you came to work for the BSAA. You’re not some mindless zombie though, you still have your wits, you can still think, you can still comprehend and act. You don’t even feel any sort of pull or desire to infect others, you just are. Would they still try to terminate you? If you went willingly maybe…

“Come now, you and I both know that’s not what will happen. At best they will experiment on us, and toss us to the side once we’ve expended our usefulness, perhaps make us heel to them and turn us into a weapon for them to use and at worst? Well…You have a rather active imagination.” He muses.

At worst…?

You imagine yourself in the position of a lab rat, trapped in a white sterile cage, where the only touch that greets you is the harsh sting of a needle, or the rough texture of straps keeping you held down, knives are taken to your skin. You’re flayed open, still conscious, while an IV drips in some substance that keeps you alive despite the fact that you should have been long dead.

That’s what would happen to you if you went back to the BSAA like this.

Your hand finally peels away from the gun as your grip around it relaxes, the limb comes up to rub at the temple of your head, before dropping down loosely to your side. You inhale sharply through your nose, before letting out a long exhale through your mouth.

Your breath is still shaky.

“Alright, I’ll…I’ll cooperate with you.” You finally relent, and the hallucination extends it’s hand out towards you expectantly. Your hand opposite to it raises, meeting it half way and you feel the phantom sensation of a strong grip around your hand as he shakes it briefly before letting go.

“Excellent.” He commends as you both seal the deal, however you can’t help but briefly realize that you just shook hands with the air. Regardless of what the hallucination in your head is making you see, hear or feel, it’s not like he was really even there. Thank God there is no one around here to witness you acting like a madman. Well aside from a sentient virus, but he was an active participant in this pantomime.

“So, what’s the plan then? What are we going to do when the plane gets here?” You question.

“Kill the pilot and apprehend the plane for ourselves.” You were expecting the two of you might have to discuss somethings, maybe come up with a plan to be a little more discreet, but that is…

“That’s… the worst plan I’ve ever heard. Oh my God.” You guess sentient virus doesn’t exactly mean it’s smart enough to try and not be so brazenly violent.

“It’s very sound to me. What issue is there?” He genuinely doesn’t seem to know what’s wrong with a plan like that, he speaks without a speck of doubt.

“One, I’m not killing anyone, two, I have no idea how to fly a plane, so even if I agreed to the first part of the plan-” You pause to clarify emphasis, “-Which I’m not, the second part would automatically fail.”

You see one corner of the tight lipped of the man’s mouth dip into a frown.

“Speak for yourself, I’m knowledgeable on how to pilot most air crafts and before you ask I can take control of your limbs with your permission and steer it for us.” He explains and while you aren’t sure how he could possibly know how to do something like that, you have other pressing matters to ask about. Would the pilot even comprehend what happened if you just knock them out fast enough? Whose to say they’ll even notice you were infected? You could have just gone rogue for all they know and just randomly attacked them. As long as you leave no trace of the virus behind, you would be fine.

“Well we don’t have to kill the guy, we can just knock them out can’t we?” You try to argue and you see the image of the man’s arms shift to cross over his chest as he contemplates your words,“I suppose, depends on if there is food available on the plane, as well as how much longer I can hold out.”

You get the feeling that you will not like the answer to this, but it begs to be asked.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ll explain in greater detail later, but biologically speaking we have a… symbiotic relationship. With it, we are both extremely strong, resilient, fast and can regenerate at a very high speed. However it is highly dependent on our caloric intake and in particular living bio-mass is the most potent kind of energy source for us. It took much of what I had stored, along with what I gathered last night to fully repair our body and make sure you lived through the whole ordeal. Hence why killing and consuming the pilot is a worthwhile expenditure.”

You were right, you didn’t like it one bit. Well, the actually logistics on how he was functioning as some kind of organism that was co-existing and not just leeching off of you is interesting. Viruses are supposed to act as parasites to their host bodies, unable to reproduce without them. Inhuman and non-living, so the fact it was providing such a benefit and was acting with a human level of intelligence is nothing short ofremarkable. Something you’d like to hear more on if it wasn’t happening to your body.

“This-” Your hand moves to gesture towards your torso, “-is still my body, and no. I-I’m not doing that. I’m not even hungry right now.” You counter back, however he’s just as quick to reply back.

“You didn’t put up this much of a fight about consuming your old teammates last night. What’s one pilot?”

His words make you swallow back any kind of fast reply you could have made after that.

“I was…” You trail off, trying to find the right words “I was confused and scared last night… I hardly understood what was happening, I was in no state of mind to…” Your voice tapers off and he cuts in before you can get another word out.

“Excuses. You let me do that, lie to yourself if you like, but I know the truth.” He hisses out,“And while you may not feel hungry, I certainly do. I’m just not exposing you to that same hunger at the moment. I’m unsure if you could handle it, seeing as how willing you were to accept my proposition when you started to feel just the inklings of it.”

You made a mistake last night. It was just a mistake, but you wouldn’t repeat it. Your head is clearer right now, you can think more rationally, you are capable, you can reason and argue.

You’re not a bad person.

You’re not.

“You can’t really expect us to leave someone alive, the pilot will make a report about us if we leave them still breathing. We can’t have that kind of loose end hanging around.” He urges.

It would leave a lead, but that doesn’t mean you had to stoop that low did you? You don’t want to. You don’t want to do it. Not again.

“I can do it for you again. Just let me deal with them.” The virus says trying to offer from another approach. His voice going softer, almost to just a whisper.

Just how you remember it urging you last night.

It’s not like it’d be you then, it wouldn’t be… your fault necessarily. It’s the virus whose doing it, not you. You’re just… trying to survive, who can blame you for that?

You could. You could very well blame yourself, and you would, because it would be your fault.

Yet again.

“I-” You start off before you correct yourself, “We aren’t killing anyone.” You affirm, and you see the apparition open his mouth to speak, but he decides against it. Perhaps conceding that he’s lost you on this ‘point’.

“So, so what then after that? We can’t go back to the BSAA, and I don’t know if we can just land the plane on some random coast in Africa.” You inquire instead, trying to redirect the conversation away.

You hear him hum, not from the hallucination though, internally within your head, as he thinks.

“Is a company called Tricell still around?” He eventually asks.

“Tricell? They got shut down like ages ago for multiple human rights violations and doing secret deals in the bio-terrorism black market.” It was a name you hadn’t heard in a very long time, you don’t know the exact specifics yourself, there was a lot of government tape put over anything that came out from the various lawsuits they went under. You were probably only around ten or eleven yourself when it was all over the news, but all of the talk points were more or less the same.

“We’ll find some coast to land on in Africa and make our way inconspicuously through Europe via train and boat rides. I have an emergency nest egg of funds in France, with it we can purchase a private plane ride to USA and attempt to check out a few safe houses I used to own.” The virus deliberates, and you can't help but heavily critizes how a virus has well, any sort of funds, or property.

“Used… to?” You echo back softly, and he nods.

“I wasn’t always just a sentient virus, I had my own body at some point.”

Was he a real person then? How would he have even been turned into a virus then? That kind of process, if one even existed should have completely obliterated him, well any sense of self that would be for sure. He had to be manufactured, artificial in someway right?

His sharp voice cuts between your thoughts,“We can talk about that later, I’m starting to get ravenous and I need some quiet now. Try not to think too loud.”

With that the next time you blink and the man is gone from vision, leaving you alone. Only the sensation of the warm ocean lapping against your boots remains.

When you hear the distant sound of the plane coming closer to the island, you perk up from where you were resting. Having used your backpack to prop yourself up as a makeshift pillow while you tried to distract yourself from everything. Your fingers had been starting grow tired of drawing circles and patterns into the sand to pass the time. Your eyes look toward the night sky above to spot the small plane approaching. Everything seems more clearer than you remember it being, like you can see in finer details despite great distances. The night itself doesn’t seem as dark as it should be, the moon’s only half full, but there’s a vibrancy present that you’re almost sure wasn’t before.

Benefits to hosting a certain virus you presume.

As you stand and collect your bag up and throw it over your shoulder you get an odd ‘stirring’ feeling inside of you that indicates to you that the virus you are hosting inside of you is finished with being silent. He’d been unusually quiet the whole time you had been waiting around, and wasn’t even responsive when you made a small attempt at trying to speak with him in your head prior. Now though you can sense he’s presence better, as if he’s woken up.

Yes, I am awake now. You hear his voice confirm.

Did he fall asleep? Can he do just do that?

It’s more like going dormant, but it’s a kin to slumber.

You wouldn’t have figured that he would need to, or that he has the means to, maybe he’s somehow borrowing some space inside your brain to rest. Or it may function entirely separately from yourself seeing as you didn’t really feel tired in turn while he was ‘inactive.’

“Do you need to do that?” You ask aloud.

Not really, you rest enough for the both of us and we don’t even require that much sleep to begin with. Now we should move, the plane is making head way. It looks like it’ll land… about there.

You feel a gentle pull along your face, your eyes being guided to rest along another part of the beach up ahead. You’re about to open your mouth to agree with him, but his voice cuts you off before you get the chance to do so.

You know you don’t need to verbally respond, I can parse through most of your thoughts.

“It feels weird when you just pop into the middle of my head while I’m thinking, and my thoughts sometimes don’t have clear ends or beginnings like when I speak. I feel like when I say something out loud it’s more… organized I guess.” You also aren’t exactly sure what he does, or doesn’t hear. You think he gets the majority of it, at least going by your past correspondence so far. Other times though, you think he’s jumping to conclusions, or your thoughts are getting so scattered that you have a hard time keeping track, so it’s hard to know what part of your thinking process that he’s replying to.

Fair enough.

He seems content to drop the topic off at that as you start to walk to where he indicated, the sound of the plane drawing closer by the minute. Your eyes briefly look up at the approaching aircraft before you force them to look away. You swore you could see the outline of the pilot’s pupils as he spotted you from up above.

Don’t think about it.

You just have to knock him out.

That isn’t a bad thing, you’re doing it so that you can avoid giving him a worse fate.

You feel your chest tightening and your hands clenching by your side with every step you take forward. No amount of clear air helps to make it go away, although you desperately wish it does.

Calm down.

“Huh? What?” You ask and you get a pang of annoyance that rings true in the back of your mind.

You know what I’m talking about.

And you do know, you just don’t want to acknowledge it, you don’t want to think about what’s about to happen.

“If I could I would.” You mumble back as you try to keep a steady walking pace, your gaze glued to the sand trying to find something to affix your vision to, a sound to distract you from the whirring of the plane and the beat of your heart.

“Hows this?” You look to your side to see that a new set of steps has joined, the same hallucination of that blonde haired man walking beside you. He doesn’t even really look to you, his eyes, or shades you should say are facing forward past you as you hear him speak.

“Humans are social creatures still, even if I’m physically apart of you, seeing me is better than just a disembodied voice, correct?” He queries again.

“I guess.” You agree, although you don’t put much thought to it. The factuality of his words is not for you to argue. Either way, you’ve always been pretty nervous around other people, and you guess you can now add sentient viruses to that as well. Disembodied voice, hallucination or not, either way now that you’re very aware that it’s just not you in your own head, he’s a separate entity, he’s just in your body. Still physically seeing and hearing him outside of yourself, does give you the illusion that you have your own piece of mind. You’d rather have that kind of relief and put up with worry that interacting and being around others gives you.

And you still don’t even know what he is other than a virus. He made reference that he had a body, but still uses a term like ‘Humans’ as if he’s different. You guess if you got turned into a virus, you might not exactly refer to yourself or include yourself under the classification of human anymore. Could he even still be classified as virus? It might be deserving of an entirely new term, a different kind of microbial life all together.

“I am, I’m far beyond the scope of what humanity could have ever hoped to achieve. To refer to me as human would simply be inaccurate. The same goes to you of course, but to a much lesser extent.” He divulges. You wonder what it looks like inside you, if you had a CT scan would your internal structures be largely the same? Or would they look alien and new to yourself? Things still had to have the same kind of functions for the most part, you can still feel the beat of your heart, your pulse, so it has to exist still, or at least an analogous structure. Your DNA must have also been changed as a result of virus inside you as well, you wonder if you can somehow get a hold of your own old blood samples for comparison. Those were tucked away back in the BSAA base though, locked away in some dark storage unit collecting dust.

“I’m more than willing to aid and research the extent of our new body, we can plan out the logistics though at a later date once we acquire the means to do so.” He admits and you recognize something in the back of your head that feels like… excitement? No, that wasn’t the right word, it’s…

“Eagerness. It’s been a long time since I’ve even set foot in a lab, I’m very keen to do so again.” He finishes for you. Before you can question him any further on his statements you hear the plane is rather close and turn from him to look up ahead.

You see the plane has landed several meters ahead just at the shore of the island and your steps slow down as you get closer and closer. All too soon you both approach the landed small sea plane resting just a few feet into the water of the beach, the waves rocking the plane gently. You can see the pilot waving you over from inside, a gentle smile resting on his face as you catch his eyes from the window. You take in a deep breath and look to the apparition of the virus next to you, who just dips his head in a slight nod, before he vanishes.

The entrance to the seaplane slides open as the pilot is there to greet you, his hand hanging on to a part of the railing above him to stabilize himself as he holds a hand out to help pull you up on board. Small lights behind the man from inside the plane itself illuminate the person’s frame in a warm yellow light. He’s an older fellow, pushing his 50s with deeply tanned skin, and prominent nose and grey full locks of hair. He wears a bright blue polo shirt he wears that bears the BSAA logo, and long beige cargo pants.

The pilot greets you by the term of doctor and calling you by last name, “I thought there were supposed to be two people I was picking up?”

“He… went to use the bathroom, it’s a long flight to get back home and he wanted to go before you know everything.” You reach your hand up to meet the pilot’s gloved hands grasping yours as they help to pull you up and into the hangar as you clamber on board. He laughs when he hears your lie, and you see him walk over towards a small built in mini-fridge within the aircraft. “Ah smart kid, we can wait then. You hungry? Thirsty? You must be.” He offers as he starts digging through it.

Go on.

The virus pushes as you nervously take a step towards the pilot, one fist balling in your dominant hand. Just one good punch, as hard as you can so you hopefully knock him out in one go, and don’t have to struggle with him.

You just need to do it.

One foot takes a step back before your rear your fist back before you send it flying forward.

Wait don’t-

Whatever warning he was going to give you is cut off by the sudden red mist that splatters against your face and clothes. When realize what’s happened you yank your fist back out from the bloodied mess of gore that is now the pilot’s head, a sizable dent is made into the wall above the mini-fridge. His body slumping over and falling to the ground without your hand’s support as your eyes widen looking from the corpse to your hand.

“I- I- I-” Your lips quake unable to form the words as you take a step back and another, before bumping into the wall of the aircraft behind you. Trembling legs unable to support your weight as you sink to the ground, eyes stuck staring at the body as blood pools out around him.

You didn’t mean it.

You didn’t mean to do that, but it doesn’t change the fact that you did.

You killed him.

Not even by any influence of the sentient virus, or an altered state of mind.

You did that.

It was your fault.

Entirely this time.

Your tears feel cold against your red hot cheeks, the back of your arm coming up to wipe them away, spreading the drying blood over your face as your chest heaves and shakes as you sob.

An urging tug in your mind only slightly brings you out from your hysterical blubbering. It’s him.

The proverbial leash you’re holding onto him by, he’s asking you to loosen your hold, to go limp and let him do as he pleases. He doesn’t need to speak with a voice in your head, or even create the illusion of it. He’s requesting administrative access. You just have to accept.

Not like you can trust even yourself it seems not to mess things up? What’s the harm in letting him do as he pleases.

Your body relaxes for a moment, before it rights itself, your posture changes, and when you stand, it’s more rigid, and your hands securely holding your rifle now- no they are properly holding it, in the correct position. You were just always holding it wrong before.

It’s uncanny to feel your body move without your direct say so, and you imagine this is how he might feel as he backseats to your actions. No effort in the movements on your part, he’s handling all of that now. The flood of tears has stopped and the hiccups in your voice have died out into silence. He holds your head higher than you would have, his strides are wide and confident, there’s even a different rhythm, a sway to his walk that is dissimilar from your own.

He is… uncomfortable? No, unused to this feeling more like it, perhaps it’s disorienting moving around in a body unfamiliar to him. Arms move to slide and set your pack down on the floor away from the body, before assessing the inside of the plane itself. The space was cramped as is to be expected, there’s six available seats lined in rows of two excluding the pilots chair. Your legs move forward, first to turning to shut the sliding door of the plane and then stepping over the corpse before seating yourself on the pilot’s chair. There is something relaxing about feeling such a simple pleasure like a cushioned seat after a long time such as this, your back practically melts against it.

It’s both of you, you both feel this way and yet you feel the sentiment rings more true for him than yourself, like it’s been a very long time since he’s sat down like this. Once he’s done soaking in the sensation, he sits upright, leans forward as you see your fingers flick and check certain dials on the plane that you don’t understand what they do and or what they are for. However you get brief impressions here and there as he works, like one of the monitor’s he’s looking over is in correlation to the surrounding air pressure. However when your fingers move over what you think is the GPS you see that the location of the plane and identifying where it is you are at the moment. He turns several of the settings off, until your location no longer flashes on the screen.

What are you doing? Your inner voice as you speak is hushed, as if afraid someone else might hear it.

“Turning off the transponder. They’ll be able to track where the plane is going if we leave it on.” You hear yourself respond.

Oh that was… odd hearing your own voice talk without it, being well you. It sounds more posh from way he uses it though, he enunciates his words differently from how you would say them.

As he starts the plane up, the engines starting to rev loudly and he straps your body into the seat and you try to focus away from feeling of a tentacle slipping down from your arm and going to search behind you to find the corpse. When you feel it grasping and burrowing inside of something warm you have to suppress the shiver that crawls up your spine.

You can feel it.

Eating.

I’m going to rest.

You’re aware of the small tingle of acknowledgment from him, but he doesn’t speak nor make his thoughts clear for you otherwise.

Chapter Text

Wake up.

The voice is distant and quiet and it doesn’t take much to simple ignore the call.

Wake up, you’ve been resting for over twenty-four hours now.

It urges again and while it takes more effort this time to ignore it you still do. You don’t want to be awake.

I know you can hear me, I can feel it. The voice calls again.

Now.

Get.

Up.

You feel a sharp pull, as if your conscious is forcible being dragged to forefront of your mind and you gasp, stumbling backwards into a wall, as your eyes snap open. Bright florescent light above you makes you squint and blink several times. You find yourself in a small bathroom stall, graffiti scrambled in patchy dry black ink or forcibly carved into the wall itself, checked cracked tile floor, blue stall walls as you peel your back away and right yourself.

Your clothes have been discarded into a pile on the floor, next to a black backpack. The only thing you yourself are wearing is just a pair of underwear, and a pair of boots. You stare dazed for a moment as the cool air of the room flows over your body, making light goosebumps appear over the skin of your arms. A flush of shame and prickling doubt runs it course through your body, “Where, where am I? Why am I naked?” You ask, your voice echoing in the stall, as your hands come up to cover your chest and looking up to avert your eyes away from yourself.

Be more quiet, or don’t speak at all. We’re in Cameroon. He hisses back.

“I, I don’t know where that is.” You say in a more hushed tone.

It’s a country in Africa, that’s all you need to know.

You’re knowledge on African countries isn’t exactly in hot supply, so you aren’t surprised that you don’t really know. All you do is recall is that when being deployed for your mission initially you had flown in from the USA to a country called Gabon, before taking a smaller sea plane to get to the island.

Gabon was one of the countries nearest to the coast of the island itself making it ideal, but it wasn’t the only country close to the island meaning Cameroon is probably close to Gabon itself, if not neighboring it.

“What did you wake me up for then?” You question and you feel your sight being guided to look towards the small hook on the stall door. A few sets of clothes hang from it.

We’re in a bathroom, change. He demands and your hand moves to grab some of the clothes off to look them over. There was a long sleeved black top, and baggy cargo pants, alongside multiple pairs of monochrome bras.

I didn’t know how the sizes worked so I grabbed several that seemed like they would fit.

You go through the bras, checking the back tags for their sizes, and while most seemed like they’d still fit you, only one of them is your actual correct size. You start to undo the clips in the back of it,“I still don’t get why you woke me up.” You mumble out.

I don’t know how to put a bra on.

“What..? You just-” You start to say, almost not believing him, but he cuts you off.

Quiet. I accidentally broke the first two and I didn’t want to waste anymore. They were expensive.

Sure enough when you look over towards the closed toilet lid two black bras lay in tatters, the adjustable bands having been snapped on one, and the other looks like the back clips have been bent out of shape.

However you also realize that the assault rifle is not on you nor in the immediate vicinity, in fact where had the virus even put the plane, and where was the original backpack you had on? The one you had on you had a camo pattern, it wasn’t black. You also you weren’t carrying cash on you prior, much less whatever currency they might use here in Cameroon. How did he get this stuff?

“Where did you even get these, what did you do with the plane, and where’s the gun?” You inquire each question one after the other as you slip on the bra, reaching behind you to redo the clips.

When we landed I scouted out a village that was near by and traded the plane and gun for cash and supplies. Got a ride to Yaounde- which is just further inland of Cameroon, this is where we currently are. It’s one of the largest cities in the country, so if you have anything you want or need, request for it now. We’ll be heading off to a train station afterwards, it can take us through most of the country, but we’ll have to get off and cross the border into the next country ourselves.

As he speaks in your head you see small flashes on images in your mind, like him landing the plane with your body, speaking with locals in what you think is a mixture french words interspersed with english. You see yourself sitting in the back of cab, staring off outside the window as you pass by green savanna along a dirt road. A map in your hands as you walk through a thick crowd trying to keep your head down and low so as not to draw too much suspicion.

You were awake for it, sort of, you were distantly present and you can remember more pieces clearly if you think on it, but it’s mostly just long distances in a car or walking from one place to the next. However with it you do have a better understanding of where exactly you are. Although you can’t immediately think of what it is might need as you slip on the black top and pull on the edges of it to smooth the cheap polyester out over your skin. Your hand reaches up to feel along your shoulder, the spot where you remember being shot, where warm blood pooled around your clothes and hot signed flesh burned. There’s nothing but smooth skin in it’s place though. No scar, no bruise, not even an iota of pain when you press your fingers to it.

It seems he’s taken care of pretty much everything. There’s still some money in the backpack, he stopped at a hotel and snuck into a room to shower; all though thankfully it seems he’d been rather respectful and just washed up quickly, not even sparing a glance at your body and looking ahead. You can be grateful enough for that, there is one thing that you can think of that while you don’t need at the moment, you eventually will.

“Alright. I mean I think we might need…” You trail off not wanting to voice the words aloud.

Feminine products? He finishes and you nod as you grab the pants from their spot on the hangar and start to awkwardly guide your boot through it.

Do you know when your next cycle will be?

“No, I had a tracker on my phone… but that’s…” Gone, left in a storage locker before your trip in the USA. Just like a lot of things it feels like, everything you ever really owned is left back there. Your apartment, your lab coat with the little stain on the sleeve you could never quite wash out, the succulent you kept by your desk, and your little key chain with a few different knick-knacks and charms attached to it. You know exactly where it is, you can even still recall the pin to the storage locker.

Alright, we’ll stop by a convenience store and acquire some, anything else?

You pull up the pants, a size too small for you, but you suck it in and zip them up.

You feel an aching clench of your stomach as the organ growls out. Not loud enough to be heard outside your body, but it doesn’t need to be that loud for the virus to acknowledge the shared feeling.

We’ll grab something for your stomach on the way to the train as well.

With that out of the way you bend down to scoop up the back pack from the ground, opening the zipper before packing away the rest of the clothes and bras. However right as you pick up the last piece of clothes to put away, a pair of black shades is revealed, sitting folded up on the floor.

Put them on.

Your hand reaches for them, unfolding them as you look at the dark glasses. You see in the reflection of the shades, unnatural orange-red hues staring back at you. They still look uncanny as ever on your face, as if your real eyes had been claimed and replaced by an impostor. You stare into the abyss, and it too stares back.

The night sky above is heavily clouded, not allowing a single star to shine through the veil. Your boots make contact with concrete as you move walk past small groups of people with their own bags over their should or packs of luggage resting beside them while they wait. Groups of people shuffle out from the red and white cart of the train itself, holding up their items as they depart. A few embracing and chattering as they see friends and loved ones, greeting each other with large hugs and offering their hands to take the weight of their carry-ons. The textures and fabrics of the people here are much different than you are used to, brightly colored with intricate geometric patterns, long and flowy materials. Some have their hair bound and kept in head wraps, other’s dress more plainly in simple white or black garbs and plain jeans or cargo pants. The view has been muted by the shades sitting on the bridge of your nose.

Despite the sights, despite what you see before you though, as you watch people living, it feels as if there’s miles of sea and land between you. People breathing, existing, and doing everyday ‘normal’ activities. Your eyes are drawn to a young child, all smiles across her face as she swings a doll in her hands. The toy’s hair a mess, cut into different chunks and uneven ends, what might be marker or pen ink is scribbled all over her face, until it’s almost unrecognizable. Yet still she bares a smile on the mold of her plastic face, even when the girl accidentally drops her. She’s picked back up, dusted off, and swung into the air once again.

Your eyes divert away from them as you keep looking forward, there’s a plastic bag in one of your hands and ticket in the other one. It bounces against your side as you quicken your pace, glancing from the ticket’s number to the cart numbers stamped on to the train carts. When you finally see the matching numbers, you make your way into the line of people who wait to board on. The line of people ahead means you have to awkwardly stand in place and wait as the crowd slowly disperses ahead. People behind you bump into you unintentionally, their skin or clothes brushing up against you. Each time you almost try to curl in yourself, or move your body in a way so that you can avoid as much contact as possible. Each fiber or cold piece of skin that touches you though makes you roil at the intolerable sensation.

When you finally get to the train attendant waiting by the entrance to the train cart, he says something to you, a soft tired smile on his face. You don’t understand him though, almost thinking you might not have heard him right, when the virus finally speaks up.

He’s asking for the ticket.

You hand it over to him, eyes quickly glancing at the numbers, before he nods his head and hands you the ticket back and then pats you on the back to get you moving forward. Stepping on the train itself, the stairs give and shake a little as you walk on them. People ahead of you move and shuffle forward, placing their items up above in the storage place, while others get themselves seated or help their children get settled. It takes a bit of meandering and waiting behind other people before you get towards the back, a private compartment. A woman dressed in the same red uniform as the man at the entrance stands there and you hand over the ticket again. She only looks at it briefly before she reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a key opening sliding door of the small private room for you and gesturing for you to go.

She says something as you slip inside, but with the language barrier you don’t understand what it is she says, just dipping your head to acknowledge her and whisper out a small thank you.

When the door is closed behind you the sounds of people become only a little muffled as you walk in further. The private room has two small beds to one side, one above the other with a ladder further into to access the top bunk. Each has a pillow and thin white sheets over them. A small sink is on the other side and a window with which you can see green rolling hills further out has a small black curtain to close for privacy. Above it is a steel rack for storage and a singular light fixture casts a yellow glow over the room.

You pocket your ticket, and move forward dropping the plastic bag off on one the lower bed as you approach the window. Shutting the curtains closed tight and slipping off your backpack to place it above on the steel racks. Turning back towards the bed, you sit down the edge and start to rummage through the plastic bag. A large variety of snacks is inside, they have words on them that you can’t understand, however some of the packaging or branding you still can recognize. Popping open a pack of Frito’s and start munching down on the snack. The salt and crunch of the thick curled processed chips is a bliss you thought you’d nearly forgotten.

You practically shovel the next bite into your mouth as you start to chew and swallow. The food sliding down your throat, only amplifies how empty your stomach feels at the moment. Each bite though hardly dulls the hunger,

Is this what you’re going to be like now, just eating and sulking?

“Why can’t I?” You ask. If it helps to distract you, if it isn’t bothering him, why bother you about it? You don’t want to think let alone be conscious, yet at the same time the pull of rest or sleep is far away from body and mind a like. You’d be there right now if you could, dreamless adrift away from your own sensations with your mind deaf to your own situation.

Is this what your on about?

You smell blood in the air, the feel of it warm and sticky between your digits. The spray of red mist that followed, the way his body, the sound of the smack as he fell to the ground. Not even the time to comprehend he was dead the moment he was sent out on that plane to retrieve you. To help you. All the sensations are brought to you, served before your meal and you have to hold back from retching up the chips you’ve just consumed.

“P-please, please don’t make me see it again.” You plead and a distant hum sounds in your mind.

It was by accident, but you made the right choice all the same. We would have been having to deal with the BSAA already if you didn’t kill him. Besides, while it was messy, it was a quick death. You did well.

You… loathe the way he speaks, his voice even and unbothered, meaning to praise you for your sins. Congratulate you for what you’ve done. But more than that, you hate the way his commendations made you feel a modicum of lightness in your chest that ever so briefly lit up.

“Yeah, well you’re just some ghost of a man… trapped inside a virus and left to rot on an island.” At least that’s the best you can summarize of him. No name he’s given you, no face besides the one with dark shades covering his eyes. You can’t even be sure if that’s even real or true either, could be another lie. “Sorry if I don’t exactly hold your opinions in high value.” Any words to be said that might rebuke or deny his approval of your actions.

“I should have just let them take me…” You start to lament. Why did you ever think you were worth the trouble of sparing yourself from such a fate?

Selfish of you again. Your mouth opens to speak again, your lower lip quivers in anticipation of the words it’s going to babble out uselessly. “I-”

You listen well, He cuts off as he materializes before you. Eyes looking down at his black boots before you slowly look up to see him, standing very close in front of your seated position.

“You think the BSAA will just euthanize you like some sick dog? You think it will be swift and painless? Think again.” You feel it, the rage and heat that bubbles with every word he spits out.

“They’ll use you till there’s nothing left, you’re skin and bones and still they want more, because the moment they can’t learn anything else from opening you up; only then will they maybe give you the grace and dignity of death, and even then they might still keep you locked up just so they can have you…like some macabre collection of their conquests.”

His breath is your breath and it runs hot like the chemical waters you found him in, it burns with how much vitriol he speaks with.“You go and try and run back to them, you know what happens, we talked about this before. But maybe I should give you a taste, from my own personal experience.”

Your vision is taken from you, limbs long and gaunt, her head is overtaken by the leathery faces of so many others stitched and sunken sallow skin hang on like a calloused tumor. She’s constrained by rusted metal, and all she has to cover her body is a pale blue tattered hospital gown that hardly hides her scrawny body beneath. Ribs and veins show through her skin, she should be dead but the sounds she makes proves otherwise. The sobbing, harrowed and croaking, each cry out trudges through broken shards of the last sorrowful wail. Her voice threatening to die out into nothing more than dry low death mewl, but still she cries. Louder and louder, and there are people who hear her, they hear and they stand behind glass panels observing her. The scratch of pen to paper, cold indifference to the horrific visage that this person has become.

For a moment, through the hanging leather flesh around her face, you catch her eye, not one of the many empty holes that droop and hang from around fashioned human skin around her, her real eye. A yellow film pasted over it, you aren’t even really sure if she can see you. It moves in the dim light, searching for something, anything. But when she fines nothing, a tear rolls over her cheek, smudging away the dirt and filth that covers her.

When the vision, hallucination, memory, or fabrication fades you find yourself having backed up to the wall of the train compartment. Your knees close to your chest, arms wrapped around your form, as a tear slides down your cheek.

“That’s what will happen to you.” The virus’s apparition menaces as you take in deep shaky breathes of air. Your vision blurs around you, but despite it he remains crystal clear. Your eyes flutter, and he moves from standing at the edge of the bed to hunched over you caging you against the wall. Gloves hand wrapping and your neck. But rather then being greeted by the sensation of cool leather, you feel something warm and wet tangle around you.“And for the record, this ghost of a man, has a name.” The grip tightens, your esophagus wheezing. Your hands come up to try and grab at his wrists to pry him off, but they pass right through him.

“My name is Albert Wesker.” He claims, as you stare up into the black shades above.

“Say it.” He demands, but his grip is tight and you hardly comprehend his words as he speaks. There’s a distant ringing in your ears, that drowns out the chatter you could hear from outside the compartment, or the rumble of the train’s engine.

“Say. It.” He orders, teeth gritting and jaw clenching.

“Ah-ah-l-bert, We- Weh, Wes-ker.” You whimper out, hands still searching to find purchase on his snaring grip. Fingers digging into the damp and warm tendrils closing around your throat.

“Say it properly.” He knocks your head against the wall, rattling your mind. Your fingers tremble as you fight to give yourself enough space to breath. Each attempt to fight though is enough with a stronger squeeze, the vice growing tighter. The space within your trachea diminishing, vision growing black at the edges before you relent. Snot and tears, bodily fluids dripping down your face.

“Al-bert, Wesker.”

“Again.”

“Al-b-bert, Wes-ker.” Your lips tremble out.

The snare neither grows tighter, nor lessens as you say his name a final time.

“I don’t wish to be so savage you know.” He sighs, and the limb finally relaxes just a bit, but the hold is still strong.“This… partnership can be amicable, I’ve been attempting to make it as amicable as I can. But if you want to be difficult, then I can be difficult right back. Do you understand?”

You nod your head as best as you can with him clutching your neck.

“Very good.” He praises and finally he fades away from your sight, black tentacles from your own skin retreating back into your body. The sheets a mess beneath from the struggle, chip bag tossed to the side with half of the contents spilled out on the firm thin mattress.

Now eat your food.

You cough, spit dripping from your mouth as your lungs fight to take in as much oxygen as they can, hand beating on your chest to help alleviate the sensation. However no amount of aching pounding that you deliver unto yourself limits the touch of elation you feel from his condescending approval.

It’s been a week since then, seven days existing like this, trying to police your own thoughts in fear that he might retaliate. Privacy is something you have in little commodity now a days, while showers have been infrequent it didn’t mean you still weren’t perturbed by the whole thing, and just using the restroom is humiliating even if he doesn’t make any comments about it. Such simple actions before are now something you rush to get through, just to save yourself from the shame. You speak little to one another, mostly just asking where you’re going, or what you need to do next and fall into a routine if you can even call it that. Around the early hours of the morning you’ll sleep and rest for just three to four hours, you’d do more if you could, but your body hardly allows you to be resting for any longer than that before you’re pulled from slumber. When you do awaken, sometimes you’re still in the same place, or area walking around. Other times you’re behind the wheel of a car that you aren’t sure how Wesker acquired. Sometimes on a bus, or another train ride, if he deigns it he’ll give you updates on where you are and where you’re going. Listing off northern African countries or areas whose names you don’t always recognize. You’ll take a look around where ever it is you’ve ended up and he’d let go of the body to let you handle things when you wake up.

You wondered why he’d even do such a thing, since he seems so adamant on keeping a tight leash on you. That’s when he mentioned that it does take a considerable amount of energy for him to move your body in comparison to yourself, particularly so when you slept. So beyond giving you directions or helping you translate something he left you in control. You’ve also been eating a lot more, mostly cheap processed stuff that’s filling and has a lot of calories, but the hunger remains constant, around the clock. No matter what you end up eating, it’s just never quite enough to really feel full.

However where you find yourself waking up next is unexpected to say the least. The room you’re in is well lit, not with the dingy yellowish glow of an old bulb, or grey sunlight that comes in through a dusty window. This light is pure, florescent and upheld by two wall sconces in the room. Two circular windows on the farthest wall from you, opened to show nothing but the sea ahead of it. You stand up, from the small desk you were sitting at, the chair pushing back up as you stand and look around the room. A large fluffy white bed at in the middle of the room, a towel folded in the shape of swan with a piece of wrapped chocolate resting in front of it. You glance around the room as you approach the windows, placing a hand upon the glass as you look beyond at the late morning sunlight glittering off the water.

“Where, where are we now?” You ask.

We’re on a ferry boat headed for France. We’ll get there in two days.

You recall he had spoken to you about heading for a boat to get to your next location, but most of the rides and things you’ve been on have been of low quality. The first train ride had been a rare exception that you even got a small private compartment, but everything that followed was just waiting at the back of a bus, riding in cabs, or stolen cars that were on the verge of falling apart and didn’t always have AC.

And you know that there’s no way you both still had money to afford a cabin suite of this quality. You close your eyes as you attempt to reach back recalling what it is he did exactly did in your absence. You see yourself briefly looking at prices for the ferry, finger pointing to guide your eyes along the pamphlet, when your eyes glance down to see an ATM machine just hanging by one of the walls. You see yourself keeping a bit of distance from it, occasionally watching people stop by to use it, pulling out cash and leaving. Your vision jumps to see that you are holding a debit card- several different cards in fact as you start to punch in various memorized pins into each one, drawing out a few notes of euros from each one as fast as you can, before casually walking away from the machine altogether and randomly discarding the cards in various places.

Oh my God, how much did you steal? You think as you replay the foggy pieces of memory over in your head.

If you want to feel guilty about it then do so, but don’t let it ruin the one chance we have to finally relax a little.

Well… it’s not like you did that, and he did already spend the money so it would be a waste to not take advantage of your current circumstances.

Exactly, now first things first, take a bath, we reek.

You didn’t have to do a sniff test to know that, and you glance around, before your gaze is drawn towards a small door near the bed. Opening it up and flicking on the lights the bathroom is small, but more than serviceable. A small card on the white sink, reads something in french that you think might be some small greeting message, but what you are more interested in is the small basket next it. Floral scents hit your nose as shampoo, conditioner, lotion, soap, and even a bath bomb right in the center of it. You scoop it up, setting it down next to the tub before you fiddle with the handles, trying to figure out how to turn it on and finding out which setting was for hot water. Then peeling the bath bomb from it’s packaging before you toss it in.

The red ball starts to fizzle, a deep rich crimson color floods the water as hot steam from the liquids filling the tub start to steam up the room. Peeling off your clothes and tossing them onto a pile on the floor. Your hands reaching up to remove the shades from your face, and you squint in the light of the bathroom. You’d become heavily reliant on them, without them everything was too bright, too colorful, just too much. You can only ever bother to tolerate seeing things when it was night or dimly lit and even then you still preferred to wear the sunglasses. You flick off the lights to the bathroom, darkness surrounding you with just a bit of light that peeks out from under the door. It’s still more than enough to still see for you though.

When you dip your toes into the near boiling water you let out a deep sigh of relief. Slowly wading yourself in until your fully seated down, only your head and shoulders above the water. You lean back to rest your head against the edge of the tab and the wall. Sometimes the wires cross and you get vague ideas of what he feels, and while you rarely sense you both are on the same page of things you certainly are on this. You think you can actually feel the tendrils resting in your body actively ease up as you just soak up the sensation of what a warm bath is. You vaguely consider if he can really feel it, if the virus is so thoroughly infested inside of you that there’s little difference from what he feels to you.

You know he must be connected to your nerves at least, to have such control and be able to show you such vivid delusions. Although despite what he can influence and show you, you still have control of your limbs.

It was still you who did that, not him. You can’t blame him for that.

Yet when you lift your hand up, droplets of water sliding down your arm, you look at the palm of your hand, nothing seems to have changed at all. You don’t sweat, you lack any clammy palms, there’s been no ache or sickness within your guts, far from it you’ve had nothing but hearty appetite as of late. Nasal cavities blissfully free of any congestion, there’s no physical response present in your body that it’s even attempting to fight off any kind of viral infection.

Are you curious? Would you like to see?

Except the lack of privacy within your own head, if you can even consider that as a symptom. Your fingers move in a wave just confirm it’s you who has control on the limb still.

You would like to though, the way the tendrils bulge under the skin, before peeking out, no pain, only the vague pressure of their existence. Muscles tensing around them, as if to pull them back, but you can’t deny that despite the way it makes your body tremble, you want to see it again. You’re reminded of an old video you’d seen once in your adolescent. A summer’s night, the time on the computer screen you were transfixed by letting you know it’s way passed to your bed time. Your breathing felt too loud, each squeaky creak of the office chair wheels makes you tense and wait with baited breath. Ears alert for the sound of footsteps, the opening of a door, but all you were meet with was the sounds of the night, and the groans of your family home. The video that plays at just 1% volume, the title at the bottom read; ‘raccoon city abandoned, 1998’. The footage wasn’t the best quality, it cuts out and distorts at times, but what you did see fascinated you more than any text book image could ever hope to compare. More than boys or girls your age, more than the sweets you’d buy from the convenience store on your walks back home. Rotten flesh, necrosis skin, dead cells still living, the camera zooming to show how the corpse of a person drags what’s left of it’s upper body along the street. Fires raging in the background, but it cares little for the heat. Still breathing, still existing, bodily fluids leaking from the mouth, pale eyed and crooked jaw with bleeding gums and exposed white teeth. Then it ended. It was barely a minute long, but you kept watching it over and over, and when it finally bored you, you found other videos like it. They showed you things you thought weren’t possible, things that were in horror movies and the scary paranormal sci-fi books you’d read. Except this was real, this was reality, and despite the nightmares it gave you, the trouble with sleep you’d get, you so badly wanted to know more, to understand it. So you’d stay up until the early cracks of morning light peaked through the windows and you hurriedly cleared the computer’s history and scrambled back to your room.

That same fascination hasn’t diminished all these years later. Neither has the heavy weight that follows such morbid thoughts and feelings. If anything your curiosity has gotten worse. Would it be so terrible though if those thoughts are for yourself? Or does that make it worse somehow?

Not at all. He answers for you, and while you’re unsure if he’s right, you doubt he is simply because it’s him who says them, but the words in your mind are enough to justify your desires. That he won’t judge you for satisfying yourself.

“S-show me then.”

You keep your hand up, it reminds you of leeches the way it moves sliding under your skin. Pushing outward, your skin warping around the protrusions, darkening before it finally exits out from the crux of your elbow. The single tendril curls around your arm, until it rests in the palm of your hand, wriggling warm and alive along your surface. A heat radiates out from them as the pad of your fingers grace over the edges of them. Not to grasp, just to feel, and they easily bend and the ‘skin’ of the tentacle gives under your touch. You vaguely feel the touch yourself, but it’s distant more akin to touching your own hair than feeling yourself.

There is still something alien about touching something that wasn’t always part of you but now is. Your other hand comes up to slowly trace down the side of the appendage, until where your own flesh meets the black obsidian of the tentacle. You feel more the closer you get to the apex of where you are joint. Skin melds to it and vice versa, cells locked and conjoined together, what part is you and what starts to become him is unclear.

“Are we stuck like this?” You ask and there’s a quiet hum you hear in the back of your mind before he answers.

No. Well you’ll always be infected with the virus, regardless of my personal presence.

You figured as much, unless you developed some kind of cure than your body would still hold the virus itself. Besides your genes are already altered so even if you did make something that eliminated the virus, you might be worse off depending on how exactly the virus has already altered your body. There is an issue though if him leaving your body would be too much stress on your cells, depending on how much space he takes up in your body. You can’t imagine it’s too much though right? Your physical body has remained more or less in the same shape.“Roughly how much mass do you think you take up in my body?”

The tentacle wiggles a little more, and you feel part of it tugging at some muscle and nerves in your arm that make you perk up.

About 15-ish percent? It’s difficult to discern some portions. Your eyes widen at that, that was way more than you bargained for. Him leaving would completely obliterate you, assuming that he left instantly and didn’t slowly or gradually be siphoned away from your form. Your cells just could not possibly be able to keep up with losing 15% of your whole mass. Not in thirty minutes.

“15% of my mass in thirty minutes would literally roast me alive. If the heat from the cell production at that level doesn’t melt what’s left, then the rampant chance of genetic mutation or my telomere’s burning the end of the candle trying to replace all those cells will put me one foot in the grave.” Your mind buzzes with so many other issues and complications that could cause, or even may currently be causing. Where is storing himself in this 15%? Is it evenly dispersed? Is it concentrated in certain area?

The virus’s affect on healthy cells injects them with a sequence of genes that allows for it to dedifferentiate should it become damaged. He explains. Dedifferentiate is the process in which a cell regresses back into an earlier stage in development, becoming more like a stem cell. It’s how lizards and some amphibians can regrow limbs, and there are some very specific cells in the human body capable of this, but not for every single cell. Cells are always dying or being damaged in one or another, just as part of natural processes.

“That’s constantly happening though, I should have a fever right now.” The back of your hand coming up to feel your forehead, and while it does feel a little warm it’s not fever warm. You could also be running a little hotter due to the water though.

Our body temperature consistently averages around 102-103 degrees.

There’s many complications, you can only in the moment fathom a few things, but if you gave it more thought you’re sure that there’s also other issues this all causes your internal body.

“What gene is expressed then that prevents the virus from killing it’s host then? Resistance doesn’t seem likely… I mean, I feel like it wouldn’t be compatible if I had something that actively rebuked it.” Your immune system would be overworked and you’d be bed bound if your body was continuously trying to fight off the virus. In fact your body probably doesn’t even recognize the virus as a threat given that you basically have no symptoms.

It’s a gene that regulates the mutation and production rate of the virus to an acceptable level that is tolerable to the body. When the virus infects you it rewrites codes in your genes to synthesis proteins, and encourages the body to metabolize at a faster rate without that specific gene this process is not limited in any way. In fact it exponentially keeps ramping up with no control, that’s when you’d melt from inside out.

It was all very precariously balanced then, ­your body is probably at as peak proficiency as it can possibly get or ever be without it out right killing it self in process. Human anatomy pushed to it’s very limits without loss of cognizant abilities or higher brain functions. The BSAA would be kicking themselves right now if they understood just what it is they missed out on. However as he speaks, you realize his knowledge on this goes beyond what a normal person might understand or know. Not anyone just understands the scientific jargon or could well explain to you how this virus worked without an intimate understanding on the subject. Not without having some background in virology, or at the very least biochemistry or microbiology.

You’d be right. I have my doctorate in virology.

“How did you…” Your voice trails off, you were going to ask how he got a degree, but he did say he was a person before, and he seems to have the comprehension to know his stuff. So you redirect, to something you don’t really know or understand yet. Something he’s never clarified to you in passing. “How did you ever end up on the island?” The tendril around your hand twitches in response.

You see yourself, but your frame is different, your clothes are different with that odd texture that Albert wore- the carbon fiber. You were seeing things from his perspective, his hands clutched around a woman’s leg as air around him violently pulls and whips around his body and face. Wind whips violently against his face, his whole body, you feel his jaw is clenched, his heart is pounding, and his head- dear God his head hurts. Like someone’s drilling into it and noises of the plane’s engines, the sound of bullets, and even the hearts of the two different individual in the hangar with him are overwhelming. A cacophony of sound, his mouth opens to speak, but even he can barely hear his own voice above the chaos. His grip slips and his gloved fingers try to dig into the metal of an aircraft, but don’t find purchase as you feel yourself from his perspective be violently tossed out from the hangar of the plane. A sweltering heat coming to greet him as he free falls. You blink and you’ve been harshly shunted out from the memory.

It’s a long story, best saved for another day.

His words are clear, he doesn’t want the subject to be approached again, not unless it’s on his terms at least. You can still distantly feel him coiling around your throat when you even fathom trying to reproach him on the topic again. Nothing similar has ever occurred since, but you’ll make it a point to do your best not to antagonize him into doing it again.

It grows quiet between the two of you, and you shift your position in the tub. You bring your hand raised up with the tentacle a little into the water. It jerks at first when the water laps around him, before easing and squirming around your arm. Languishing in the comfort the warm water provides.

“Well… if we aren’t stuck like this, and this isn’t permanent…then what happens after all of this?”

He still needs a host at the end of the day, and if your genes that make him compatible are so rare you can’t imagine you’d have an easy time finding a replacement. Although it wouldn’t be fair for anyone else to have to go through this kind of thing. It was you who found him in the first place, you who gave the okay for the soldiers to go trudging around in a chemical lake without a second thought.

You can ask why you all you want, but at the end of the day if the BSAA never sent you it was going to be somebody else. Maybe it’s even fitting, you most likely deserve all of this and deserve what ever it is that happens once you make it back to the USA.

I have plans.

Different words the same meaning, he doesn’t want you to press the topic any further than that. Even the small glimpse you got from his mind, was overwhelming in all aspects of the senses. You can understand him not wanting to divulge just how exactly he’s ended up as he has, it might be horrific. In fact it most certainly is given that he was once a man and has been reduced to this. But still, you wished your connection wasn’t such a one way street, that you could glean more things from his mind as he does yours. That small memory you saw from him was unexpected and you’d never seen something like it from him before. However in contrast it seems so easy how he’s able to peer past the veil into your thoughts. In turn you can’t trust one way or the other if his plans for you are nefarious or not.

For all you know your well on your way to becoming like that thing- that woman he made you see.

You sometimes still see her visage in your dreams, along with all the other kinds of man-made horrors you’ve witnessed through the safety of a computer screen.

I don’t have plans of that kind for you. He tries to reassure, but you hold little confidence in his words.

“A-and how can I trust that?” You dare to ask, your gaze looking to the tendril relaxing in the waters as if it might help you discern his intentions.

If I had plans to just treat you like some science experiment, I wouldn’t have bothered getting us such a nice room now would I?

It could still be all a trick though, a ploy to lure you into a fall sense of security, to make it easier that you listen and just do as he says. A shepherd’s dog protects it’s herd just as much as it corrals that same flock toward the slaughterhouse, nipping and barking at their heels to make them bolt right towards their own demise.

Stop thinking and try to ease up for once. It’s what I’m doing. Various other tentacles start to crawl out from under your flesh and fill the tub. They spread out, pulsing under the dark red water, you sense a shiver of satisfaction roll through them before it to reaches you. With one deep breath you drop your hand, allowing it rest inside the warmth of the tub your head leaning back to soak, the scent of cherries from the bath bomb greeting your nose.

Fresh and cleaned, not just a quick scrub in some hotel shower you snuck into or getting drizzled with rain and having to take that as ‘being cleaned’. You’ve had a real bath, scrubbed away at every inch of your skin, the scent of artificial candied fruit and rose petals clings to your body. A towel fluffy and soft, not some rag you had to use that barely could wipe away all the filth, the sweat and dirt build up, one that could actually cover your body as you wrapped it above your chest. You’d left your clothes discarded in the bathroom, not wanting to slip back into them, only taking up the black shades to wear.

Check our bag.

You were going to anyways check it without his directive, but you still comply. Picking the bag up by it’s strap and setting it on the bed and going to rummage around, but at the very top there’s a set of clothes that you don’t recognize. You pull them out, taking the shirt out and holding it up in front of you. The texture is soft in your hands, no unpleasant textures as your fingers parse through them.

We need nice new clothes for where we’re going once we get to France.

They’re black like almost every single article of clothing he’s bought for you two is, but you can hardly care about the color. It’s new and it doesn’t smell like bus seats and sweat, you eagerly start to tug the clothes on. The texture is heavenly on your new and clean skin.

Your hands run over the material several times, smoothing out the wrinkles, tucking in the hem at the edges. Everything about you feels new and reinvigorated, even the air you breath doesn’t feel so heavy or weigh you down.

You go over to the small desk in the corner of the room, sitting down to look at yourself in the mirror, hands going over your damp hair, fixing it this way and that until you’re satisfied by the way it sits. It starts with a hand, before the form of the virus- Albert materializes in the mirror itself poised to stand directly behind you. Although he’s absent of the black carbon fiber garb you’ve only ever seen him present himself with. It’s more formal, not so combat oriented, but he still wears black. A simple dark suit with a turtleneck underneath, a comb in hand fixing back his hallucination’s already perfectly coiffed hair. Still wearing those same black shades. You haven’t physically seen him present himself to you since your last altercation and you keep an eye on his visage as it moves.

It takes you a moment as you look at him in the mirror to realize how ridiculous it is for him to be doing such a thing. There was absolutely no need for him to do so, much less show you this. To what end you aren’t even sure.

“I’m not allowed to view myself thriving?” He questions, as he pockets the comb, head tilted down to look back at you in the mirror.

“I didn’t say that.”

His head dips,“You didn’t, you thought it though.”

Not exactly, but you’re just glad he’s not taking any offense to it.

“Never mind all that, let’s get something to eat. There should be a section on room service in this pamphlet.” He redirects, and his hand taps said small blue plastic item on the table.

“We have room service money?” You ask and he nods. The thought of a warm meal, something with some actual give and weight to it already has your mouth salivating as you open it up. Flipping through the it, and having to go through a few pages individually before you find it.

The main words are written in french, but thankfully there is small pictures as well as some words in smaller italicized text in english. Your eyes skimming over different meals, what was available for the time of day and the prices. You still try to look towards the less pricey items on the menu, but your eyes keep getting drawn back to the steak dinner meal.

Ask for it, if you want it.

“C-can we get the steak?” You inquire, your finger lingering on the image of the juicy meal.

“I don’t know can we?” He asks, stressing emphasis on the last two words and you look up from the booklet to look at him directly, deadpan. All he shows a smug smile on his face as he waits for you to correct yourself.

“May we?” You try again and he hums, dragging it out, still waiting for something.

“...Please?” You quietly add on.

“We may.” He permits.

Albert had done the ordering at that through you of course, just to get through any issue of the person at the other end of the not understanding english. Afterwards you’d tucked yourself comfortably in the bed, the mattress under you soft and with some actual give to it. You practically melted back into the thing as you turned on the TV and flipped through various channels. Most you can’t understand being that they’re in different languages, but you do stumble upon one nature documentary on African wild life being narrated by calm voiced British man.

You made room on the side in case Wesker wanted to sit, or rather view himself relaxing as he wanted, but he opted for seating himself by the chair and desk just next to the bed. Legs spread and arm propping up his head as he makes himself look to ‘watch’ the TV. Sounds of a hyena’s cackling, as it calls out loudly with only one other pack member by their side. An unusual sight, hyena clans usually numbered much higher than just a pair. It’s inter cut more so though with clips from a small lion pride that’s recently lost it’s pack’s male.

“Do you tend to enjoy watching documentaries?” Albert asks you, his visage still looking forward towards the TV.

“On animals and wild life, yes. People not so much.” You respond.

“Why is that?” You shrug eyes flicking back to the TV, “Just not as interesting, and the people who are interesting enough to get documentaries tend to be the worst kinds of people. Like Tiger King.”

“I’m unfamiliar.” He states.

“He was this guy who had a tiger sanctuary, and he’d take cubs from their mothers, abused the animals, mistreated them, fed them rotten meat, illegally bred them stuff like that. There was some more serious allegations I think, but I can’t recall them at the moment.” You’re certain there was worse, much more crimes potentially involved but all of that was years ago, you aren’t even sure if the guy is still alive or if he ever got charged for anything. People like that though always seem to escape justice, or have enough money to buy themselves free though.

“I like this more. No one’s really evil, it’s just animals being animals, though some wild life series like to portray it as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ for the drama of it I guess, but that’s just not how it works.” You mumble out towards the end. The hyena’s nip playfully at one another, they have the bite force to do much worse, and sometimes in fights between them they do. A high ranking female member had no issue with biting off the face of a lesser male if provoked, or even perceives a slight against them.

“And how is it that you think things work? What’s good and evil to you?” You see from your peripheral that he’s adjusted his head to look at you. You heard that question a lot during a period of your life that you don’t exactly love to recall.

“I remember… I had to take a philosophy class for a certain credit I needed for my degree.” You can’t even really remember what it was for, but you do remember the teacher. His sharp nose, and sunken beady black eyes, face paler than a sheet of paper, with one mole on his upper lip and black hair, well what was left of his black hair, greased back with you can only assume was kitchen grease.

“There was a concept that had been introduced to me, that for something to be ‘good’ it serves its purpose and does so well. Like a pen, a good pen should be able to ink clearly and be able to be used to write legibly on paper. Conversely, a bad pen might not write well if at all.” The concept was more so drilled into you then just mentioned or introduced, it was practically the only philosophy you still remember in detail.

“So you take the stance of teleology?” He questions and you adjust yourself on the bed, to face him directly. You pickup the remote and turn down volume,“Not at all, because a pen was manufactured. It was created and why should the pen be deemed as ‘evil’ if by circumstances outside of it’s control it cannot perform it’s function, it cannot be good. Or when it’s ink runs out, is the pen bad for outliving it’s usefulness? For being made and unable to complete it’s task set out by forces higher than itself?” You ask rhetorically, “You know, there’s a movie series, you’ve probably heard of it, but it’s called Saw, in one of the movies, this character is drowning in a tank that’s fitted to his head. In an act of ingenuity, he takes a pen that was in his pocket and performs a tracheostomy on himself.” You remember being young and covering your eyes at first when you saw a clip of the scene, but then you always liked to re-watch it, because it was just so clever to you. You didn’t usually care for movies, horror movies especially, but that scene for whatever reason always struck accord with you. “You could argue from the stance of teleology that the pen was bad because it didn’t serve it’s intended purpose, but it still saved a life. It did more than it’s purpose was ever meant to be for…” Your voice tapers off at the end, realizing you’ve been speaking a little too loud at the tale end of your rant. Your eyes darting to look away from him, and your fingers ghost over the buttons of the remote. It’s a little sad actually, that you aspire to be as good as a fictional pen. Even sadder still that you haven’t been as good as it even. Not even close.

“And what if the pen intentionally performs badly then, is that evil? Or what if it refuses to participate in serving it’s purpose? Makes no attempt to try?­” He questions, and you pick your head back up a little. The hyenas on TV drag away their kill, having managed to protect it from being stolen. The narrator lamenting the loss of the food from the lions, and how tough this will be for the big cats, pride wounded as the hyenas eagerly dig into the body. An eerie sound track plays as they cackle and whine, mouths bloodied almost smiling with how they show their off-white teeth.

“…Well that’s just the thing, we gave it that purpose. We set the requirements and qualities of what determines a ‘good’ pen from a ‘bad’ one. Who are we to make pens and blame them for their short comings when they don’t perform well enough by standards we make up ourselves?” You pause to breath in and get your thoughts align, as you watch the lion pride walking away, sad music plays while the sound the hyena’s biting through bone can be heard.“Who are we to say they are evil, because they don’t fulfill the purpose we design them to do? Or when they find purpose for themselves?”

He doesn’t say anything after that for a long moment, you aren’t sure if he’s contemplating your words or trying to find another hole to prod in your argument. Although who are you to say your argument is any good to begin? It’s just your opinion at the end of the day, that’s mostly what philosophy was, one’s own world views and outlook by a set of standards they make themselves. To be right or wrong is subjective.

“Would you say you’re a good pen then?” A small huff of air leaves your nose at the question.

“Hardly. I’ve never been able to fulfill anyone’s expectations of me.” You laugh, although it’s short and lacks any real mirth to it.

“You have two master degrees in scientific fields, and you used to work for a high-profile international government agency.” He states plainly and you shrug.

“And it still wasn’t enough. Still a bad ‘pen’.” You lament. You always sometimes wonder if you could have done more, if you could have been better. You find faults, errors, little slip-ups you’ve ever made, yet even still if none of these little cracks had existed you can’t imagine yourself in any other position besides the one you’ve ended up in. Failure always seemed inevitable, doomed to mess up, doomed to be bad. Yet you still tried, did that ever count for anything?

“But even though you disagree from a teleology perspective you still are under the assessment that you yourself are ‘bad’? You just argued against the whole philosophy.” He points out. Your eyes flutter, something threatens to spill over your waterline if you don’t.

“I just…” The words are lost to you now, “I don’t know what philosophy if there’s any I exactly subscribe to, but I’m still bad.” Still not enough. A cut above the rest, but not cut out to be good enough. It’s funny, a little bit. Or maybe you just tell yourself that, because the alternative is worse. You didn’t want to think about it so you turn the question towards him.“What about you? Are you a good or a bad pen?”

You feel it, not just your chest, but you sense him, moving around, the black tendrils shifting inside your arm trying to get comfortable.. There is no comfort to be found though, now way to sit or right themself in way that would make him do so.“I never fulfilled my intended purpose. Although I tried to.” Desperately. The last word is whispered so quietly you aren’t sure if it was him who said, or you who thought it.

“I suppose that makes me a rather poor product correct?” He summarizes and you feel his eyes on you, but you look down at your palm, not towards his apparition.

“That makes two of us then.” You accept.

Chapter Text

Your fork clinks against the plate, every single morsel you could possible scoop up has been, only juices from the steak and what little is left of the mashed potatoes from the dinner is left as you finish eating. You still feel like you could eat more, but the warm meal makes up somewhat for the lack of quantity. One finger slides against the surface of the stains on the plate, before bringing it up to lick it clean. If Albert has any qualms about the action he remains silent.

The nature documentary was still playing on the TV, showcasing a lone lion.

“Is there anything you wanted to watch?” You ask aloud. No response comes though and you look to the side to see the apparition of your virus is no longer sitting by the desk.

“Albert…?” You call out again curiously.

Nothing, no response, not even an internal nudge or tug from his tendrils.

Ah he’d gone dormant.

It’s just you.

It’s been awhile since it’s just been you, alone with your thoughts. You lean over to place your empty plate on the desk. Turning the TV off and flopping backwards onto the bed, the mattress bouncing slightly as you hit it. Staring up into the ceiling of the suite, the surface above lacks any details. None of the popcorn texture that plagued the family house you’d grown up in. When you close your eyes though you can almost imagine it though, that you’re back there. That the mattress beneath you is the same one you used to sleep on, the one you’d groggily wake up from and stumble out of bed. Alarm of your phone ringing by your bedside making sure you wake up, stretching your body out before your feet hit the beige carpet floor. When you moved through your house you’d act just as you always had since you were child, not to make too much noise or only turning on as many lights as was necessary without disturbing your parents. Careful treading around boxes and stacks of items that crowded the tight hallways and living spaces. You’d get to the fridge and lament about how you wish you’d bought more groceries, should have got more fruit, or cereal or whatever it is you want in that moment but you almost never end up getting said groceries when the time comes to it; just sticking to the exact same things you usually get. You take a hot shower that you spend a touch longer than you need to in, and you dress yourself before getting in your car.

You’d get to work, panic for a split second wondering if you accidentally left your ID on your ID back at the house. Although it wouldn’t be too much of an issue to just go back and grab it. It was the embarrassment that would come with having to make a u-turn in front of anyone else to witness you entering the lobby, and also possibility of returning back home to parents who were awake. Either way you found it or had to make a u-turn back to your house. You’d get checked in, before pulling into the same spot, the one that was three rows down from the third row down in the lanes. There was no particular reason, no one even had special assigned spots aside from a few top department heads at BSAA for the base you worked at. It was just the first one you parked at when you started working there and you just stuck to parking in the same place every single time. You don’t even fully know or understand why when the one time someone else parked there you broke down crying. In retrospect it was extremely childish, and a little funny even that you sobbed over having to park one space away from where you usually do so.

After signing in you’d get to the lab, drop off your bag by your desk and read over any reports made, new focus tasks, going over research notes, reviewing peer work, analysis reports, it was really the only thing that ever changed ‘day to day’ so to speak, but even then it was mostly just more of the same. Well expect for, those days. Testing days and coronary examinations to be specific, not that they were necessarily different from routine, they happened fairly regularly, but they were the only days you’d actively be excited for. What you saw while morbid, reminded you of all those videos you used to watch late into the night. Dead cells reviving before your very own eyes under a microscope, new samples to analyze, some new virus to research and study, to really prod at and dissect. A new conversation topic to listen about or go over.

Not that you talked to or spoke with any of your co-workers at length. You didn’t’ really know any of them and conversely no one really knew you. You just weren’t really great at speaking with people beyond the simple small talk, or just talking about work. Which you liked talking about work, but not everyone liked talking about work twenty-four seven like you. Not that no one tried, you recall a newer hire at one point, you can’t remember his name, but he had freckles and light brown hair. Tried to make it a routine to greet you everyday, ask about how you were doing, even asked you to go out with him and some of the others after work a few times, but you always declined. You’d have to ask if your parents if you could, and you both didn’t want to have that conversation with them, or mention to your co-worker that you needed their permission. So you’d just say, ‘sorry, but I’m busy’, eventually, slowly he just stopped trying.

You wanted to reach out again, sometimes you’d wait by a corner and look to his desk and fantasize about going up to him and asking him for once how he was, but you never did it. It’d be too embarrassing, and what if he just blew you off? What if he was ‘done’ with you and didn’t want to talk to you anymore. You’d already blown whatever chance you had at connecting with someone. So you never did talk to him ever again. You think Albert might be one of the only people you’ve even spoken to at length who isn’t a family member of yours.

When you’d clock out from work, you’d sit in your car for a long minute, just making sure you had everything, but also because you got to be alone just to yourself with no one interfering. Then you would drive back home, hopefully on a good day, no one would bother you when you made it back. You’d slink back to your room and you wouldn’t leave till morning for work again if you could absolutely help it.

You wonder how exactly your parents are holding up at the moment. Depends on if they’ve been given word confirming you’re missing or dead, or something along those lines. You aren’t sure what the protocol is when an agent goes rogue. If they even suspect you of such a thing. But there should have been enough money in your bank to cover for this month’s mortgage and most of the other bills so they should be fine this month, after that. Who knows? Your mother doesn’t work, and your father kind of goes from one job to the next, sometimes he gets good pay, sometimes he blows it all on everything but bills.

You know if things get really bad he can pull through and mange to scrounge up some money, but consistently? He hasn’t done that since… a long time, maybe back when you were in middle school. You’ve all been through tougher times though, they could manage without you, maybe they could move somebody into your room and get some extra cash. Sell your car for a few grand to make next month’s payments, after that hopefully everything could be settled, maybe your mother might have to pick up a job again. They’d get on fine without you though, you just made things easier for them, you were younger after all and you had a good job, stable income.

You wish you could give them one last call, just to tell them you were okay. It’s not your call though to make, it would be Albert’s and you doubt he’d let you call them just for sentiment’s sake. You wouldn’t have made it this far, or anywhere at all without him. If you’d just been infected without any guidance from him you’d be sitting strapped to a vivisection table with your organs on display while some other lucky scientist pokes and prods at your organs. Not that you probably don’t deserve it, but you also don’t want to meet that kind of torturous end. And If Albert does end up doing the same to you well then, damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

It’s just easier following what he says, you don’t think you’ve even made a single impactful decision since you’ve had Wesker. But you won’t stray from that, despite the fact that you’ve been given the rare opportunity to plan without his interference, but you still won’t try to. There’s comfortability in familiarity and he is your new normal. Listening to someone else is soothing, that they know better, that they can care for you where you can’t. It’s almost intimate to you, even if he’s only helping you to help himself, he’s still choosing to help you. Where he could be awful to you, he is accommodating, he’s even asked after you for things you might want or need, and that must count for something.

Your hand reaches up, to grace the skin of your throat, you still remember the pressure, the tightness and his closeness. The hallucination felt real enough that you recall the warmth of his breath, the snare he had over your neck. It hurt, it was cruel, but maybe it’s just another thing that you deserved, you did provoke him. You were talking about wanting to go back to the BSAA, to turn yourself in, so selfish that you hadn’t even considered what that would mean for him. Someone whose been trapped on that island for God knows how long.

For now though as you sit in the darkness of the room, only moonlight coming from the two small circular windows, like eyes opening out to the wider sea ahead, you can think. You can ponder, by yourself for once, yet you almost yearn for his active presence. You wouldn’t dare to think so creatively or outlandishly if there was a force present that made you rescind such thoughts as these. Not here though, alone as you can be.

When last you saw the USA the end of summer’s waning heat was still in effect, but now the crisp orange leaves of autumn are falling and grace of winter’s touch to come blows through the air. Despite the night, you drive still with the dark shades muting your vision. The road ahead is long and empty, curves with the natural dips and turns of landscape. Large trees line the sides of the path, only broken open by large plots of fenced in farm land and green road signs that catch the lights of your high beams. You’ve hardly passed any other car on the road in this area and you’re all the more happier for it. Anytime a car did pass by you’d worry that they would somehow recognize you, or pull you over. You didn’t exactly have your driver’s license with you at the moment, just a fake one and while you don’t want to resort to violence if you can help it, Albert certainly has no problems with doing so.

His apparition sits in the driver set behind you, black garb, a little more thicker, a scarf wrapped around his neck as if to help shield him from the cold. He smokes a cigarette in one gloved hand, occasionally taking puffs from it. You can actual smell the smoke and your finger actually hovers over the window button so you could roll down his side, before you recall it’s all in your head anyways.

“You’re getting really good at that.” You say quietly, eyes focused ahead on the road.

You only hear a small hum of acknowledgment in response and you sit up a little better in your seat. You’d been driving for hours, and your legs feel numb from sitting for so long, more than that though you’re actually starting to feel mentally exhausted. You’ve been to not one, not two, not three, but seven different old ‘safe houses’ Albert knew of. However it seems during his undisclosed amount of absence he’s been though they’ve either been resold to other people, demolished for infrastructure, or had been destroyed in natural disasters and left as they were. Wesker assured you that there was more locations he knew of, but that would require that you drive several more hours to get to yet another state and check for another safe house. Which for all you know could not exist anymore due to the above mentioned reasons. At that point you’d rather just find a hotel to sleep in for the night, but Albert has been stressing against staying in any place for too long. While he had initially enjoyed the ferryboat and the relaxation you both first got out of it, by the second day his anxious nerves were actually slipping into you. Couldn’t leave the room as a precaution against anyone on board getting a good-look of your face, but also the fact that you were also stranded on the boat itself left him on edge. He started going over various escape routes, and plans should the boat itself be targeted and where you two should head to if that happened.

Nothing did end up occurring of course, but that didn’t make him any less paranoid. You two haven’t stopped after getting off the ship since then. Back to always being on the move, straight to a private bank and after answering a laundry list of very specific questions and pin numbers, you got access to that ‘nest egg’ he was talking about. A lump sum of five-hundred thousand dollars, a fifth of which had to be used to get a private plane ride back to the USA, with ‘no questions asked’ and getting you past any border control, or TSA regulation guidelines. After that another little bit had been spent buying a bunch of high calorie high protein snacks like jerky and trail mix to keep both of you sustained along with a fake driver’s license.

“I never planned for this scenario exactly. It was more so just in case I needed to anonymously access funds, the intended plan was that I could send proxies with the pin codes to retrieve the money without alerting anyone as to my whereabouts.”

Was his response when you asked him how he ever perceived needing to access money in this particular way.

He was adamant though.

No money trails, no cards, no outstanding purchases unless we could afford to also pay some ‘hush money fees’, nothing. A car for travel was fine, but purchasing a house was off limits, and similarly renting was out of the question, he didn’t want any landlords potentially causing the two of you any trouble. He’d also mentioned something along the lines of doubting most houses had some particular amenities and features he wanted, but after all was said done you hadn’t tried to speak more on the point further. Just goes to show that he knew what he was doing and if you didn’t want to get caught you needed to do as he said. Even if that meant you had to use a physical map instead of a GPS, because he wanted to be one hundred percent certain that nothing could track either of you.

Just as you blink and you feel a strain come to your eyes from being so focused on the road ahead, it starts to curve upwards, the trees around being extremely thick and foliage more dense that you can no longer see any roaming hills of farm land. Leaves and stick crunch over the old cracked road until you come to an old rotting wooden gate and the car comes to a slow rolling stop. You glance over to Wesker scent of the cigarette heavy on your tongue and nose as he expels it from his own nostrils, his head tilts to you and feel him tugging your eyes to look ahead once more. Beyond the gates lies the tall structure of a house, grey brick stone and chipped black roof, vines reclaiming, reaching up from the sides of home. Gothic medieval windows show no lights from within, instead all you can view from here are curtains drawn on every single one. Long tall trees create a halo canopy around the imposing home, with a long gravel driveway that’s covered in the autumnal leaves of this season.

You put the car in park, opening the door, your boots delightfully break firm leaves and dry sticks. Until you stand just outside the gate. A rusted chain link keeps the entrance closed, a warning sign deteriorated from it’s time exposed to the elements hangs loosely, but you can still read the faded letters. PRIVATE PROPERTY. You reach your hand up to grab at the around the chain, and squeezing hard until you hear a ‘clink’ as it breaks into pieces in your hand. The remains clatter loosely to the ground as you let go. With a small grunt you pull back the gate, the old metal screeching and whining against your force as decades of disuse are ripped away screaming, until it’s opened wide enough.

You turn back to the car, Albert still sitting in the passenger seat, the corner of one side of his lips turning up as you stare back into this shaded gaze. You were just glad that it didn’t seem like you’d have to drive somewhere else. You walk back to the driver’s side, slamming the door closed and begin to slowly pull into the long winding driveway of the property.

Two duffle bags slug around each arm, you close the doors and double check the car is shut off with a small click of the key as you step up to the concrete steps of the house. Despite it’s aged appearance one singular piece of more morden-ish technology is present. A keypad based lock around the door, although the numbers are a fair bit faded and dirt and dust collects around each numbered button.

“The code should be 4-3-5-2-3-9-1-7-2-7.” Albert’s apparition replies, waiting arms crossed beside you and you go to start putting in the numbers, having to squint your eyes to gauge which numbers are which on the old pad. When you feel yourself already forgetting more than half the numbers he’s said, you hear them echo again in your mind.

“How do you remember all these different passwords…” You mumble as your fingers have to press particularly hard on some numbers just to get the device to register your pressing them.

“I have a set mnemonics I base my passwords and codes on, depending on the location I assign an idea that has a set of numbers I always attach to it, the second set of numbers is determined by another factor such as a personal nickname I give, and the last number is dictated by whatever quantifiable set it falls under. This was the seventh house I ever purchased, as such the last number in the code is seven.”­ Seven houses? What kind of job did he have that he could afford seven? And given the fact that he possibly had more of these safe houses meant that he probably still owned more than that. You made decent money but certainly not buy seven houses, and have a private bank in France kind of money. Although if there was seven or more places he owned, what was he even naming all of them?

“What’s this house’s name then?” You ask and he’s silent as the door finally unlocks, and you have to jiggle the handle a bit until it opens. Creaking with the weight of years passed as the door swings open and take a few steps inside. A tendril leaves your back from your neck to close the door behind you.

The walls have a dark green and golden marked wallpaper that boards the deep rich dark wood accents of the trim wall. There’s a small black empty and dusty shoe rack just a few feet away from the door itself. A moth bitten rug that’s faded with time rests at your feet, a staircase that leads upwards just ahead of you along with a hallway that extended further into the house. Two doors are also on either side of you lead to other undisclosed areas of the home.

“Nidhogg.” He finally says.

“What?” You question looking towards his apparition as it starts to ascend the stairs and you go to follow. The wood groaning as you take the first step, disturbing it’s long rest.

“It’s a serpent like creature from Norse mythology.” He clarifies, and you while you’re no mythology buff yourself, there’s only one serpent you think you know of from said mythos.

“I thought that was Jörmungandr?”

“Different serpent, same mythology. Jörmungandr was a child of Loki and was wrapped around Midgard’s seas, biting it’s own tail. Nidhogg was a serpent like dragon that gnawed at the bottom of Yggdrasils roots.” You make a small ‘ah’ sound as he explains to you.

Last thing you’d take Albert for was as a mythology buff, goes to show you still don’t really know him still. Or maybe just that he doesn’t want you to know much about him unless he chooses to reveal to you that information.

“Would you really want to know?” He asks from up ahead, as you two come up to the first landing, the stairs still go up, but he pauses to turn and look at you as catch up with him. One foot up on the first step, body half positioned to you. His face is seat in that tight lipped line, no smirk or raised eyebrow, no condescension, or frown, he’s not giving away anything through the apparition or even through you’re very physical bodily connection to another. He’s just waiting.­

Whether in the way a snake coils itself ready to strike, or bathes in the sun to warm it’s cold blood, you are unsure.

You do want to know though, but you’re afraid of what he’ll say. Sometimes it’s better not to know things, but for you, you can’t help it. Even if time after time, knowing things has hurt you, you are drawn to the familiar action, again and again. So you nod and a smirk crosses his lips, you feel him internally nudging within you to keep walking and his apparition vanishes.

A hall she saw standing, far from sun’s light, on Corpse Shore she arrived. It’s door looks north, He starts to say, louder than usually, his voice even echoes off the walls.

Where there fell drops of venom, from the smoke-vent up above, the walls ladened by serpent’s spines.­ When you blink, the walls start changing, turning from wood to ivory bones, the stairs beneath you becoming piles of skeletons and shards of their remains. There’s a scent in the air of vile putrid rot that makes you want to gag. You try to pause panicked by the sight, but Wesker tendrils move beneath your skin, they surge, they want you to move. He wants you to keep moving, he wants you to see this.

There she saw wading, onerous streams men pleading and persuading, perjurers, wolfish murderers, and the hundred lies of adulterers. You can hear it as he speaks, the cries of many, of millions begging to be spared, no one voice can heard clearly above the other, but Albert’s voice is clear above them all. The bony hall shakes and quivers as up ahead more and more bones are added to the pile. Bits and pieces of people trickle down from the top and cascade past where you stand. When you dare to look behind you it appears endless. This ziggurat of corpses is both bottomless and endless, vaster than life and death itself. There Nidhogg sucked corpses of the dead, the monster tearing men to shreds. You hear it, the swallowing. There’s no crunch, no snap, snakes didn’t chew after all they swallowed things whole.

It’s eating.

Do you still seek to know? And to what end? The hallucination ends and you find yourself standing before a door. Your eyes look around to see you’ve already reached the top floor of the house. Your eyes looking back towards the top of the stairs, you’re gaze lingering in that spot.

When you eventually snap out of your trance fully, you look to see him beside you, probably waiting for you to open the door. However while you don’t fully understand why on Earth he would show you that horrific vision, you think it might be he was attempting to show you his interest. Funny way of doing so. You did say ‘yes’ to knowing more about him, this is just his way of going about it. Maybe it was intentional to try and scare you off from ever asking about him again, but you are still… intrigued. Besides the words he spoke were… poetic, he’d simply given you a vision to accompany whatever poetry this was. Perhaps his own? Another thing you wouldn’t see him doing, but you’ve been proven wrong before.

“Did you come up with that yourself?” You ask and while he maintains his thin lipped line, he does open his mouth to respond.

“No, I don’t write poetry. It’s from the Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous poems from Old Norse, the one I quote though is called Völuspá. Just a small section of it though, translated and edited somewhat to still rhyme despite the language difference.” He elaborates.

“Who is the she then in the poem? Or is it made unclear?”

“An unnamed wise woman, she’s risen by Odin to foretell the fates of the Gods. To prove the validity of her foretelling she starts off by going over the start of everything, and even reveals she knows secrets that Odin himself did not know anyone knew of. In the last line I spoke, she asks him if he still wishes to know of his fate. She then gives him the prophecy of the coming of Ragnarok.” You know that, Ragnarok, nothing specific exactly, just that it was like an apocalypse, like the rapture.

“It is not like the rapture.” He quickly clarifies, a frown gracing his lips and you can’t help but laugh just a little from his knee jerk reaction, that you dare compare Ragnarok to the biblical rapture.

You open the door to the room, stepping inside the floors here are the same of the rest of the house. A large kind bed is pushed up to one corner, the pillows and sheets still largely intact. The head and back board are made of intricately carved wood and large posts. A small circular nightstand beside it holds an antique lamp with a large book shelf next to it. A window against the wall opposite to the door, has a large set of curtains half closed. You set down the duffle bags to floor sighing.

“Ragnarok involved many cataclysmic events leading to the death of many a deity and the world itself, however promised rebirth and renewal of the cosmos itself. A fresh new start to everything.” You start to shrug off your top and fold it up as he rants.“The rapture is an interpretation of bible in which the Lord takes away all believers from the earth and makes the rest suffer his final judgment. There is no rebirth, no restart afterwards, just those in the heavens, and the ones doomed to hell.” You place the old clothes into one of the bags and pull out a somewhat cleaner top to change into, a looser plain black t-shirt, more comfortable for sleep. “Two separate kinds of events.” He finishes off and kick off your shoes resting them by the foot of the bed before you stand. His silhouette standing before the partially opened long ornate curtains. The light has changed subtly from blue moonlight to the being tinged pink with the coming earls of dawn.

“Well, they’re both still apocalypses aren’t they?” You questions back and he scoffs as you start to slip into the bed, practically melting over how soft the bed dips in against you as you get comfortable.

“And I suppose esonophiles and netrophils are they same because they both kill foreign objects in the body, correct?” He retorts and you have to think a little through your sleep brain to understand what he means. Yes, both did do that job, but one is specialized towards bacteria and fungi, while the latter is more so does parasites and allergic responses. To say there the same would be a gross overstatement, would certainly make you fail a test if you mixed the two up.

“Okay… fair.” You mumble out as you lie your head into the pillow behind you, you don’t see him do it, but you feel the smug satisfaction he gets when you relent to his point at the edges of your mind.

“Tell me… more about Ragna-” You can’t suppress the yawn that comes, “-rok then.” You finish.

“You’re literally about to pass out.” He states matter of factly as he goes to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Then tell me more… in the morning…” You lowly mutter as you bring the sheets up over your head to avoid any coming in morning sunlight from reaching your eyes.

And yet you still seek to know.

You hear him say, but you’re far too tired to consciously acknowledge anymore of his words.

Chapter Text

He’d gone over the house a bit after you’d slept and apparently there had been some issues with the house. Which was to be expected it’s been abandoned for awhile. There was water damage in various parts of the house, and some kind of issue with the pipes. Along with that of course came mold issues, and there was a pest problem of moths pretty much everywhere in the house.

Old security camera’s he used to have set up had long since been damaged and the wires busted, but he said he could fix that himself if you guys picked up a new system, and the AC unit was broken as well. That would be fine for now in autumn but when winter rolled around, you both agreed you’d rather not deal with freezing temperatures. He’d gotten a pre-paid visa before hand and paid off for the water and light to house through a burner phone you two had so while things were somewhat functional, the place needed a lot of work before it’d really be livable long term. So you two were heading into a small town that was forty minutes out from the house. He was hoping you’d find some small local repair shop to pay for everything in cash and get things sorted out. You two also needed to go to some IKEA, or homedepot to get a fridge, the one currently in the house was… not good, it had food in it before Albert disappeared and it was not pretty all these years later. You were going to have to take it to a dump at some point. You also needed to do grocery shopping, proper grocery shopping, not eating convenience store food for, however long you’ve been traveling. You had one real meal at the ferry and that was it, you want real food.

How long had it been exactly that you’d been on the move? It was around mid August when you left for the mission, the exact day you can’t recall anymore, and you think it’s… October? More than a month, but certainly not more than two months you know that. There’s something nagging the edge of your brain that isn’t Albert as you think about it, but you don’t know what it is. So you try to focus in on what he’s saying next to you. In middle about how Fenrir, some wolf god, you think, another child of Loki, would devour Odin and one of Odin sons would avenge his father in turn. Listening to him speak as you drive the car, trying to make your way to the nearest local repairs shop, but everything in this area seemed to be more than thirty minutes out to get anywhere.

“What ever made you get into Norse mythology?” You ask him, when he pauses in his recount of Ragnarok for a moment.

“I enjoy many mythos and old pagan folklore not just Norse mythology, although it is a favorite of mine. As for the why, it was just the one elective I was allowed to pick myself when I was in school. There wasn’t much thought behind it when I initially picked it, just happened to seem interesting to me.”

Weird, you recall for your own schooling you definitely had a lot more options, the issue was just with getting all your credits you needed. You had skipped a few grades on the way though, a few teachers recognizing you as some intellectual, and the regular and gifted classes for your grades at the time weren’t very challenging for you. But you were just very interested in academics, and you tended to get very into writing essays and doing projects.

“You didn’t have another elective? I remember growing up, we got to pick two electives, and then we had to pick a language to do for two years.” You mention, although to be honest the two years you took of Spanish did not stick with you well. You know how to ask for the bathroom and that’s about it.

“I had a mixture of private schooling and private at home tutors growing up. It wasn’t really my choice to choose what I was studying. Except mythos that is. It was just for a year, but it interested me enough to pursue as a subject to read up on in my free time.”

“Oh.” You say softly. Your parents didn’t necessarily tell you what you couldn’t or could not pick for classes, as long as the class itself was ‘prestigious’ or impressive on the books, said something like ‘advanced, gifted, or AP tagged on next to it and you maintained straight A’s. You got a C on a test once. Never again after how they freaked out about it. Before you can ask him anymore questions you both come up to a plaza, the strip showing various different shops along the strip.

“Over there, park.” He points out to you.

There’s a small bell that jingles above you as you enter the repair shop, it smells like fresh pine and tires inside as you look around at the wood shelves that hold various different little tools, supplies, cans, and parts for things you don’t have a clue about. Up ahead on the front register sits an old man, cheeks and nose tanned red, a cap that totes the shop’s logo on the front and comes over his silver white locks. A newspaper in hand, he only gives you a small look up from the counter before looking back down at his paper.

Your gut tenses as you slowly approach the counter, your mouth opening and closing for a moment as you think on how to start.

Come on. Albert urges and you finally open your mouth to say a very quiet.

“Um hello?” Your voice cracks as you speak, and you instantly hope that this old man did not just hear that and that you can clear your throat to try again, but he unfortunately looks up at you.

“Ain’t seen yer face round here, what can I do for ya miss?” He questions, his accent deep and heavy.

“I was just wondering, if, uh you had people that could do like… home repairs?” You ask back.

God, you are awful at speaking with people. He admonishes and you desperately wish he would either go dormant or just do the talking for you if he was going to scold you for how you spoke with people.

“Depends you know what kind of damage you got? Or ya need to send someone out to go take a look.”

“Uh, no no, I looked at it already. Got some water damage, um, a mold issue…” You trail off, your mind trying to remember everything Wesker had been over with with you. Your eyes slowly drift away from the man and look down towards the wood of the counter.

The AC. He reminds you.

“Oh oh, and the AC I think is busted.”

“Hmm, well I can have one of the boys in the back get your address and come by later today to check out the issues just assess what we can do, how does that sound to ya?” You queries and you wait for Albert to let you know if that was okay.

That’s fine.

“Yep, sounds good.” You say, faster than you mean to, but the words quickly fly from your mouth before you can pace them right.

“Good let me get your address, your name, and your number.” He hands you a small card and pen off a holder from the counter top.

Give them the fake name from the ID and explain that you’re between phones at the moment.

You do as he says, writing down all the needed info,

“By the way, we-” You pause to swiftly correct yourself. “I, I don’t really have a phone at the moment? Just between ones, is, is it fine if I leave the phone number part- area- line- blank?” The man gives you an odd look but just nods, mutters a small ‘that’s fine’ under his breath, before you hand him back the card.

“Alright, assessment will cost 50$. I’ll have a guy come by around 4 pm that sound good to ya?” You nod, messing around in your pocket for the cash you brought with you before handing him three twenties and he opens up his own register to give you your change.

“Repair guy will be seein’ ya then.” He confirms.

“Thank you.” Your voice squeaks out and you turn after that, wanting to be finished with the interaction as quickly as possible and fast walk out of the store. You get turned around for a moment about to walk straight back to the car, but you two still needed groceries and re-correct yourself. Your eyes looking around to see if any other bystanders might have seen you mess up.

What was that? Why are you like this? You’ve never been like this before when speaking.

You were hoping he’d just not say anything about it and leave you be, but things are never that easy for you are they?

“Because you’re the only person I’ve really spoken to in awhile, or consistently, you’re different. I’m used to you now, and I don’t like people. Can’t you just take over if we have to talk to others?” You say in hush whisper and you feel Albert’s scolding words, before you hear them in your head.

Get the burner phone out. Pretend you’re talking to someone over the phone.

“Oh… you’re right.” You admit as you pull up the phone from your back pocket, pressing it to your ear to make it look like you’re talking to someone as you walk down the shopping strip.

Also I’ve been over this, me moving around your body rather than you controlling expends a lot more energy. I did it before more often because you didn’t know the languages, but we’re in the states now. I’m not taking over unless it’s absolutely necessary, or you’re asleep and I want to get something done.

That was true, and you remember him explaining that to you before, but still you liked when he spoke for you. You didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing, or fumbling over your words, or what the other person was saying, because he was doing those things. And he was good at it. He’s proven he’s much better at talking than you are, and you’re a bit out of practice with talking with strangers.

How on Earth did you ever get by like this?

You’re not completely oblivious to the fact that you were not well socialized as a kid and maybe your parents did baby you quite a bit. They did a lot of things for you that were uncomfortable for you, like speaking for you. Your mother did that mostly though, like when you’d go out to eat sometimes, or ordering food, or anything really, that wasn’t speaking to them. You recall once she had made a joke that her job was ‘being your translator.’

You have two masters degrees, how did you manage this? Did you not do debates? Presentations? Peer review work?

You take a deep sigh forcing the memory from your mind, and trying to mentally throw Albert’s prying eyes away from your head.

“Well that’s different, I can talk for hours about things I enjoy, like my old job. I loved my old job…small talk, having to… just ask people for things, people I don’t know and…It doesn’t help that we have…” You make a vague motion with your free hand from up your chest towards your body. “This…going on.” You explain and you hear him scoff.

Well I don’t like talking to other people either, but it’s a basic skill, it’s time you learned.

You sigh,“If we eat more, can’t you do it more than? Since you know, we can expend the energy for it?”

No.

“Please...?” You squeak out.

No. I just spent the past several weeks speaking for you. It’s your turn now. He restates more firmly.

“Fine…” You grumble, your eyes looking up more so ahead of you and to the upcoming entrance to the grocery store. Pulling out a cart from a rack and entering through the automatic doors, cool air blowing over your form making your back shiver.

There was a lot you were going to need to need to get to be able to stock up for at least a good while. First things to come to your head is eggs, bacon, and maybe some kind cereal, and some water bottles. “Is there anything in particular you want to get from the store by the way…aside from the basics?”

Coffee, cigarettes, and candy.

“I’m not going to start smoking.” You state plainly.

Just get one pack, I don’t even chain smoke.

“No, I’ve never smoked in my whole life. I don’t want to start now.” You really didn’t need to be picking up any bad habits or addictions anyway.

I’ll do it when you’re sleeping if it’s such an issue.

“That, that doesn’t make things better…” You trail off as you start to look up at big signs over the aisles trying to look for the right sections to start shopping in. The shop itself isn’t exactly very busy at the moment. You know back where you used to live, the most busy times people got their goods was early morning. As it stands it’s mid-afternoon, in early October, and you can spot a little section of pumpkins for the holidays already set up. Although it looks as though no one has really any said vegetable yet for the occasion.

Fine. At least just get a nicotine patch. He demands.

“Haven’t you not had a smoke in a long time anyways? You’d think that you’d have rid yourself of the habit by now.”

You would think, but I never really considered it a common habit of mine. I only had a smoke every… once in awhile. Just to take the edge off of things.

You’re standing outside of a building, it’s late and you’re exhausted. There’s a bit of rainfall, but you stand just close enough to the structure behind you that you aren’t getting wet. Ahead of you appears a fortress of trees, there is nothing to see beyond them. Less so apart of nature and more like a wall surrounding the area. The trees themselves are so tall they disappear into the dense fog as water trickles down from the sky. The scent of the rain itself is not necessarily pleasant, but it’s different from the cold clinical medical scent of the building behind you and for now that is enough for you. Your hands come up to cup around a lighter and cigarette held between your lips, having to snap it a few times before the thing lights.

Pocketing the lighter, you take little white stick in between your fingers and inhale deeply, letting the smoke coil around your organs, before exhaling out. It’s only as you get that breath of grey smoke out that you feel any tension leave your body. That you can even acknowledge the magnitude of the weight finally easing upon your shoulders as your shoulders ease up. With each eager breath it gets just a little easier, the smoke carries away off into somewhere you don’t know. Somewhere you wish you could be.

You snap back out from the memory, from Albert’s memory that is. You stopped pushing the cart at some point, just having mindlessly stood staring at some bag of chips down an empty aisle.

“Okay, well we can get the nicotine patch, what kind of candy do you want?” You relent.

You ended up having to settle for a mini-fridge for now until you could order a proper actual refrigerator. Not like the car you had was even equipped to carry an actual fridge now that you thought more on it. A fresh new nicotine patch on your arm while you wipe down the dusty cobweb cabinets so you can actually put away the groceries you do have. Mainly a lot of meats, Albert was very insistent on the high-protein diet you both would have to commit to. So there was a lot of meats, well as much meat that you could pack into a mini-fridge. There was other things too like spices, oil, cooking spray, butter, bread, coffee grounds, a new small coffee maker, and the bags of fancy high quality candy Albert requested. Again another thing you wouldn’t have taken him for was a man-virus thing that had a sweet tooth, but you decide not to question him on it. He likes what he likes, there doesn’t have to be a reason just because it doesn’t match what you imagine he likes. Just as you’re finishing up and ready to start putting things a way you hear a knock at the door.

Pulling away from the counter top, you make your way from the kitchen to the front door. When you open it you see a man, probably a bit older than you, scruff along his round jaw, curls of black hair, wearing a pair of overalls that frame his stocky body. You can see a truck parked a bit away from the entrance closer towards the gate entrance.

“Hi miss, name’s Harold, I’ll be doing your assessment today. Just walk me through the house, I’ll ask you a couple questions and I’ll take a looks around.” You nod, opening up the door wider for him to step inside and close it behind him as he steps inside. You were kind of hoping he’d just look around and you could hide out in the kitchen or something until he came back with whatever assessments he needed to do. He whistles as he looks around the front area.

“Big property, you know how old this place is?”

It’s old.

Well that wasn’t very specific.

Oh my deepest apologies for not being able to recall how old one of the many houses I bought decades ago is. However shall I recover from this blunder?

“Uh, no, not exactly. It’s… pretty old though, I think.” You say, trying to keep a straight face as you speak.

“Could tell that just from the smell, you know where the breaker is by the way?” You didn’t, but from whatever corner of your head Albert’s lurking in he points out to you in your mind’s eye where it is.“Down the hall… to the right. Panel’s behind a painting of some flowers.”

You trail behind him as he walks, gloved hands taking off the picture off the wall and setting it to the ground, asking you if it was fine to keep it there and you just nod, before he opens up the panel underneath.

Your eyes wander to anywhere, but him as he’s looking through the AC unit. Metal and junk being moved this way and that as you wait. Either for him to finish or for him to ask some question you probably don’t know the answer to. Occasional the guy flashes you a small smile and you try to awkwardly reciprocate it back, but you feel your lips are tugging a bit to tight and your body is way too stiff. You can’t wait till this is all over, you’re getting pretty hunger too.

As am I.

Yeah, you could honestly go for some eggs and bacon right now, and toast with warm butter. Maybe some sausage too, oh who are you kidding you could eat pretty much everything you have stuffed into that mini fridge.

Those are breakfast items, it’s five pm.

And? You’re an adult, and Albert is… however ancient he is, besides your sleeping schedule isn’t exactly consistent anymore anyways. Morning is just a time period of the day.

I am not that old and fair enough, I could go for a cup of coffee anyways.

Maybe you could slip away for a bit then, ask if the guy wanted a drink and go make a pot, but before you can he looks up from the AC unit and opens his mouth to ask you a question.

“You recently bought this place, or it’s been in the family?”

Say it’s been in the family.

“Um, Yes.” You quickly reply without thinking.

“Yes to… what?” He questions and you fumble for an answer.

“Yes, yes it’s been in the family.” You confirm.

Nice going.

Please do not do this me, you think. It was already hard enough to talk to some stranger you don’t need him heckling you for your mistakes.

“Ah, you planning on staying in the area then, or you just fixing things up to sell off the property?”

Keep it vague.

“Not really all that sure just yet. Still deciding.” You say your hands reaching up to readjust the shades on the bridge of your nose.

“Well it’s great place out here, things are a bit far from each other, but there’s a farmer market, good flea market too not far from here. Also got a decent bar just a block away from the town square.”

“Sounds nice.” You mumble out, crowded loud areas like he just described aren’t really your scene. You’d prefer just being by yourself or going somewhere quiet, like taking a nice walk around a quiet neighborhood while you listened to music. You miss going to this nearly desolate mall that existed a bit of a drive away from your home or town. It was hardly ever packed and any store that wasn’t name brand pretty much would disappear over night, but that meant there was usually some kind of sale going on. Also less people meant there was never any lines you had to wait in and the food court was always pretty nicely kept up. Maybe something like that existed around here.

We can do some driving around later this week to check somethings out and get a better lay of the area.

You wonder if you two can also can get some new clothes, you’ve been kind of cycling through the same four outfits and you also didn’t own anything that was really meant to be slept in. You could also really use some bras that fit a bit better on you.

We may.

The repair man looks up from looking around at the AC unit to look at you leaning against the wall while he worked.

“Well maybe you’d like to come with me to the bar sometime then, are you free this weekend?”

“What.” It comes out more harshly than you intend it to though.

“Sorry, didn’t want to come on too strong, you’re just pretty and I’d like to take you out sometime. Drinks on me.” Your mouth opens and closes like a gasping fish, your mind blanking as you try to think of a proper response, if there even is one to be had. You can't even hear Albert for once, if he even is saying anything, there's nothing but a low static hum you can hear inside your head.

“I…” You start to mumble, “I-I’m not- um, No, thank you.” You blurt out.

“Are you-” He tries to ask, but you quickly cut him off.

“I said no thank you.” You repeat again. 

“Alright, alright, don’t have to be so rude about it.” He huffs and you can’t help but furrow your brows your eyes trailing down towards the floor.

“Well, I’m trying to be polite actually.” You grumble.

“Well maybe where ever your from it’s polite, but ‘round here it ain’t.” He says and you can feel his eyes on you. You want to physically grab the feeling and tear it away, really dig your nails in and scrape away the sensation. Chip it off till not even any remnants remain.

“How can you get anymore polite than a ‘no thank you’?” Your words are jumbled and fast as speak them, hardly even thinking them before you say them. However you have trouble at the moment thinking of anything that isn’t current or present in this exact second.

“You should think twice about what you say next miss.” He lowly threatens.

Your muscles tense tightly, familiarly, in way that hurts, in the way you remember you prepped yourself to throw a punch.

The last time you threw a punch.

You can still smell it, like the scent is stuck inside your nostrils, the iron scent of blood and the ocean mist. The sea breeze blowing in from the opening behind you, and the yellow-orange lights in the plane casting an eerie tint over the scene. The way your muscles tensed, forcefully bunched up till tendons burned and ached from the pressure. They remain frozen that way, bound and coiled in on themselves, as if your muscles might break your bones, to crush everything between them till nothing remains. Till your nails dug into your palms trying to grasp for stability that doesn’t exist.

Not until you feel him asking for permission, distantly from some unseen crevice in your head. His pull is gentle at first, but he’s quick to dig in. Biting and scratching if needed, asking goes to demanding, he needs to take control again. Just like he did before for you, but you can’t let go. You can’t unfurl your palms, you can’t even blink.

It isn’t until you feel Albert practically rattling your core, itself, shaking you out from your trance that you go limp and let him take over. Your body relaxing, and moving as he moves it, readjusting from being leaned up against the wall and standing tall. The repair man giving you odd look as your demeanor switches.

“You know what you’re right, that was terribly rude of me.” He says in your voice, attempting to match your own cadence and intonations of how you speak. “I’m not from around here, please forgive me for not wording things a bit easier for you to understand.” He explains, and he tugs your lips into a small smile. The repairman sees to ease up just a bit, smirking even as you seemingly relent to his point.

“It’s just you see, I’m actually married.” Your left hand is held up, a black ring around your ring finger, which you present forward. However you can feel it, moving around your digit, it wasn’t any material ring, it was part of him, part of the virus wrapped tightly around your finger. “I thought it’d be embarrassing for you if I had to point that out, with the ring and all and that you’d missed it, so I tried to just decline naturally.” He chuckles, but not a hint of mirth is present in the dry laugh and your body is made to step closer towards the man. Less so walking, the way he maneuvers your body, one deliberate step after the other. Like the way a predator carefully steps so as not to disturb it’s prey due to it’s presence.

“It seems I’ve made a fool out of both of us. I am so sorry, Mr. Harold. I should have just pointed out the fact that I was married to my wonderful husband in the first place.” Your left hand placed over your chest as it still shakes with your laugh. Fingers splayed out, “He works long hours doing all sorts of security and military work, but he should be here later tonight. Why don’t you stay for dinner? He’d love to hear about this funny little mix up.” You offer, but the throughout all of Albert’s words the smirk that was once present on his lips is slowly diminished.

“Ya’ know what? I’m, I’m alright miss, let me just finish up here.”

“What a shame.” You sigh.

The pot of coffee is fresh and steaming as you take it out from the maker, and pour it into a freshly cleaned mug. The scent of cooked food in the air makes your stomach turn as reach for the another mug and pour another cup up to the top. With a gallon of milk and a bag of sugar at your disposal you go about fashioning your coffee to your own tastes. You bring it up to your lips, softly blowing on it to sip just to make sure it’s right, the liquid burning the tip of your tongue.

“How much milk and sugar do you want for yours?”

None for me.

“You want it black?” You question.

Yes, is there an issue with that? Your eyes drift towards a cupboard where you’d stashed a majority of the brands of various hard candied and luxury chocolates that Albert had requested during your grocery haul.

“Not really no, I guess. I just, I thought you had a sweet tooth.” You state quietly, as you got to put away the milk and the sugar respectively.

I like eating sweet things, I don’t like drinking them, it’s too much.

You nod, acknowledging his words as you scoop up both of your cups of coffee and bring them towards the small round wooden dining table within kitchen itself.

You settle yourself down into a seat, along with the feast of eggs and bacon stacked onto a few different various plates around the table. Your fork clinks against the porcelain but you can’t find it in yourself to eat anything yet. Your stomach turns at the thought. A tendril sneaking it’s way out from your neck to wrap around the coffee mug, before the tip dips inside the cup to drink. Another slips out from it to start eating directly from the plates in front of you.

You can feel the warmth of it going inside your neck, entering you as he drinks, and his apparition appears in the chair opposite to you. He’s dressed a tad more… simply then he usually tries to present himself, just a plain black turtle neck, and some accompanying slacks. Still wearing his shades and pair of gloves though of course. Pulling out a phantom cigarette that he pantomime lights before he starts to smoke it. He even takes a few times to light it, before it actually gets lit. You guess if he can’t quite get the real thing, he’ll still try and pretend as best as he can that he does have it.

You find your mind still wandering back to the repair man, he’d left around two hours ago after finally giving you both your quote for the repairs and scheduling a day for fixes. You don’t even recall his name, but you still can’t help but recall just about every other detail about it.

How humiliating. You should have just shut up, why did you say anything? Why were you getting so upset? Had to go and make scene and Albert had to step in to save you from your own mistake. And even then you almost weren’t able to do that. How useless must you be? You thought him the parasite when you first meet, but it’s you who always needs his help.

“That’s what your worrying about right now?” Albert asks from across from you and you feel heat rise to your cheeks.

“Yes, is there an issue with that?” You parrot back, and one side of his lips quirk into a small smirk.

“No, just surprised you aren’t stressing about other things.”

Of course you were, there was a lot to be stressed about, but you get the feeling he’s getting at something… in particular.

“Such… as?” You trail off waiting for him to finish.

“The house, if the BSAA find us, your menstrual cycle, the future, how will manage money, will need to acquire a job at some point, just about-”

“Okay, okay, first I am stressed about all those things it’s just you know, one thing at a time. But what about my menstrual cycle should I be stressing over?” You question incredulously.

“It’s been nearly two months and you haven’t completed a cycle, although I suspect this is just due to stress. The hormones in your body haven’t exactly been stable for awhile, and we also have been in a caloric deficit for several weeks. So any issues should clear up soon once we start eating regular meals like this. Still though you haven’t really given it any thought since… around when we first meet.” He elaborates as you chew through a crispy bite of bacon.

“As you mentioned there’s been other things to worry about…” Like what exactly was next, you both have seemingly escaped capture from the BSAA. Wesker mentioned he had plans, but you only ever know what step you’re currently on, never the ten or so other ones he seemed to have planned out. And…. also you are realizing just how reliant you used to be using an app on your phone to warn you when your period was coming. Although you can’t say you’re exactly thrilled to be experiencing it again any time soon even if it’s a sign that you’re in good health.

“Well, as for next steps…We still need to lay low, we should have enough funds to subsist off of for at least a few years. In the meantime I’d like to get started on some research better understanding our current biology at the moment.” You perk up a little bit at that.

“We’d need to buy some equipment though, and supplies like that won’t come cheap, or be easily concealed.” You aren’t even sure what kind of store you would stuff like that from, you might have to order some things online. Maybe you guys could get a postal box to deliver to and pick up items from.

“We only need to acquire a few things actually.” Wesker clarifies, and you make a small “Hmm?” sound to urge him to explain, but he doesn’t.

“Be patient. I’ll show you after dinner.”

A tendril pushes the plate in front of you closer to yourself.

“Eat up.”

You had eaten very quickly after that, consuming your fill and then some, it’s been awhile since you’ve actually felt full for once. You’d left the dishes in the sink to clean later, instead insisting that Albert show you whatever it is he wanted to show you. You follow his form, through the old house, you still aren’t entirely familiar with the whole layout as you walk towards the back of the home. You both come to a large door at the back and you go to open it for the both of you. A tendril leaves from your neck to reach along the surface of the wall of the dark room next to you, flipping on the light. It takes a moment for the light itself to flicker on, revealing a small personal office. Dark green walls decorated with framed pictures what appears to be old anatomical depictions. A bookshelf covers one of the walls, books that once sat on it are splayed out on the floor, half chewed on. The yellowed pages are stained with water marks and stuck to the wooden boards. It smells vaguely of mildew and mold as you look around, you remember entering here for a moment with the repairman who gave a cursory look around and pointed out some water damage from the ceiling above, before moving on.

However your eyes are drawn back towards the bookshelf itself, and you step over various fallen books to zone in on one of the few remaining titles on the shelf itself.

“The River of Acheron.” It reads through faded white letters on blue dyed leather.

“Getting warmer.” You hear Albert say under his breath and your hand reaches out to grab the book. There’s a gross layer of dirt around the object as you attempt to tug it out, however the you have to pull rather hard for it to budge. When it does give way, the shelf shakes and you step back as creak of old wood screeches against itself and you grit your teeth at the horrible sound. The book shelf moving off to the side to show a dark set of stairs that lead down into the earth itself.

Wesker’s apparition begins to start walking down the steps pausing when you don’t immediately start following him down the dank concrete staircase.

“Come along.” He urges with a small tilt of his head and when you start to hear the book shelf starting to close you step forward slipping inside before it closes on you. small fixtures of light from the concrete ceiling above are dim, flicker, or don’t work at all resulting in stretches of darkness.

The lights from behind you fading, you slip off the tinted shades and tuck them into the collar of your shirt to see in the poor lighting. Your pupils muscles flexing and opening as they shift to take in as much as you can.

Down below at the end of the stairs, where Albert walks towards you can see a metal door.

When you reach it, there’s a pad where the lock should be, similar to the one on the front door. He stands aside so you can input the code.

“It should be 8-1-4-5-19.” You pause before you tap the code in.

“What mnemonic is this code based on?”

“Hmm. Take a guess.”

“Well, not the same numbers as the front door… and it’s a lot shorter.” You observe first as you try to recall what it is he originally told you how he decides his codes. So was this the nineteenth code to some secret area he had? But that didn’t make any sense, this was his seventh house, and maybe not all the houses he owned had something like this, but that should mean the end number should be equal to or less than the amount of houses.

“You also made a point to say nineteen instead of one, nine even though the pad only goes from zero to nine itself.” You murmur while you try work it out.

“Getting warmer.” He confirms and your eyes stare at the pad. It’s faint but there’s three sets of letters under each number.

“Is it… is it supposed to be a word?” You try to guess.

“Hotter.”

Okay then, but what word then. The book on the shelf didn’t fit the code, and even shortening it down to just river or Acheron didn’t work either. You don’t recall Albert having ever mentioning it to you before and neither do you know what significance the river held either.

“Getting hotter, although if you really don’t know anything about what Acheron is, then you won’t be able to guess what the password means.” He finally relents and he leans down slightly towards the pad, pointing a finger towards it. A tendril coming out from your hand to input the code as he speaks.

“It’s a simple A1Z26 cipher, the numbers stand for Hades. S is the nineteenth letter of the alphabet so that’s why I specified it that way. Acheron is a river in Greece, but it was believed to be one of the various entrances leading to the underworld, or in other words to Hades.” The door beeps and the metal jostles as it becomes unlocked.

“Didn’t keep with the same whole Norse mythology theme for this code like the one above?”

“No, I like to mix it up.” He admits and you have to pry your fingers into the edge of the door, as it gets stuck from sliding open fully part way through. The concrete thresh hold changing to tile as you get inside. Florescent lights from above automatically flicking on as you step inside.

The light reveals a large space ahead, various large giant tubes with thick wires and cables connects them to various panels towards the bottom or the walls they’re pressed up against. A wall of six sets of screens that only flicker on to show static or read out faintly a red blinking message of ‘No Signal’. Towards the center of the room is a large metal vivisection table, with unlit operation lights hanging overhead the empty surface. Various medical tools, scalpels and syringes are knocked and scattered to the floor covered in rust, dirtied water and mold that clings to some dark corners of the area. Another wall hosts closed and labeled shelves of filled items, chemicals, labels with the universal yellow and black symbol let you know there could be some dangerous mixtures in there.

“Is this… a secret underground lab?” You ask quietly, your voice echoing in the space as you walk further inside. His apparition following you, “Excited are we?” He questions and you breath out shakily giggling a little as you approach one of the large tubes.

“Yes, this is-” Your hand touches the surface of the glass and comes away with some unsuitable substance that sticks to the pad of your fingers. “Well it’s outdated by a couple years, and it needs a serious deep clean but I mean still-” The edges of your lips turning up, it’s practically everything you could have wanted as a child with a personal lab. “This, this is amazing.”

“God, look at these tubes, you could fit a whole person in here, and they’ve got temp monitors, pressure regulators, drainage system, the works…” You mumble as you kneel down looking at all the dials, and screens attached to them at the bottom. The BSAA had something a little similar looking to these for the purposing of cloning materials so that you had ethical sources of testing for. However these are clearly somewhat outdated. The models more bulky and cumbersome compared to the more sleek designs you’re used to seeing. You stand up from the tub, going towards the center of the room, sitting a little off to the side of the metal table at the center is a desk that holds a beige bulky computer, the black office chair next to it has been knocked over. You go to pick it back up as you eye the old PC.

“Oh this PC is old, but…” You press into the power button, waiting for a minute as you hear the fan start to whir and before the screen of the computer flicks on. “Still boots up! Man they don’t make things last like this like they used to.” If you had to guess the PC itself is easily over fifteen years old based on the appearance, and the fact it still has floppy disks inserted into the computer tower itself.

“They don’t?” He questions and you shake your head as your fingers trail over the keyboard. Robust as well, the satisfyingly click loudly when you experimentally press one of the keys.

“Late stage capitalism, it’s more profitable to sell something more prone to breaking so the consumer has to buy it more frequently. Things just aren’t really built to last anymore.” You quickly explain as you move away from the PC, wondering over towards the metal table, having to step over small pools of stagnant water.

“Ah.” He says softly as you get closer to it, the table itself is fairly clean, only the legs of the table hold any rust. Sharp bits of shattered glass from some broken vial or other tool had accidentally fallen from the floor.

“Still you seem more than ready to get started already.” He says as you take in every little bit of the lab, before you look back up towards him to address him as he appears to be looking around the place himself.

“We have to clean before we start using it, I’m not going to use a lab that I could get fungal infection just by looking at it… Also these are decent clothes I’m wearing, I don’t want them to get messed up while fixing up this place… it’s going to need a lot of bleach.” A lot of bleach, what you had on hand now wouldn’t compare to what you’d need to get this place in a workable condition.

“Might have to go out again for more cleaning products…oh and a lab coat and googles, we need gloves too, and syringes, face masks, hand sanitizer, beakers, ah- I-I need to make a list.” You quickly say as you start taking in a mental note of what needed to be replaced, what you could feasible still clean and use. What you should even start cleaning to begin with, you needed a heavy duty mop, might have to go through several of them to get this place spotless. You also needed to potentially find a way to dispose of any of the chemicals that had gone bad in that storage cabinet, can’t just toss those away into a trash bag and forget about them.

A low laugh echoing out from Albert makes you turn your head, eyebrows furrowed as you see him chuckle.

“What?” You ask confused, you didn’t look stupid did you? Silly even?

“Nothing, just your eagerness…” He clears his throat. “It’s infectious.”

Chapter Text

There’s a new routine, one much more preferable to the one from being on the run. You clean, and move things around, there’s a growing pile of things you’ve tossed outside that are deemed too damaged to keep around and need to be taken to a dump, or you need to call some kind of garbage company to come dispose of everything. At night you cook one large meal to eat at the end of the day since trying to cook several meals through out the day just takes up too much of your time. Although you and Albert still do snack on things to help stave off any hunger here and there. Mainly sweets, but you certainly didn’t mind that one bit.

Every other week you go into town to do some shopping for some food or some miscellaneous items for cleaning or doing small little repairs yourself. Like fixing in some small cracked pieces of tile in the lab with caulk. Fall is well underway, and the start of November is here.

Right now though you’re relaxing in the bedroom, pillows supporting your neck and back as you look up at the screen ahead of you.

The animal documentary observing a group of penguins was failing to capture your interest at the moment, or rather it’s you whose too busy thinking on things to really get invested into what was being played on screen. You don’t want to seem ungrateful though, you practically had to beg Albert for cable and to re-purpose one of the old security TVs from the basement to use for entertainment. He’d been very adamant at first that you two ‘didn’t need TV, because he never cared to really watch anything, so you should just deal going without it too’, but eventually he allowed it and set it up for you. Said screen was propped up on a tall dresser across from you on the bed. You’re lied back, above the covers as your eyes are glazed over unfocused on the flightless avians waddling over blank white hills of snow.

Instead you were thinking about something that had been just bothering you for a bit. Not out of any fear or even annoyance, just out of a want to understand. Because from your angle, you don’t comprehend how things would have turned out.

What is it? Not interested in this one? Just change the channel.

You knew it was bound to happen, anytime you start to think a little too much or worry over something. He was bound to nag you, or directly question what it is you’re wondering about eventually. There’s little use in trying to hide anything from him, not that you were to begin with. You were just trying to figure out yourself.

“What was the original plan?” You ask and you don’t hear and immediate response. He’s thinking and the next time you blink he’s standing at the edge of the bed in front of the TV. He even casts a shadow over you and obscures the TV itself.

“For what exactly?” He questions back, one eyebrow arching above his shades.

“When you tried to trick me, when we first met. What were you planning to do? Just keep me in the dark as long as possible? Then what? You couldn’t have kept that up forever.” At least you don’t think he could have, you would have realized something when you both got into the sea plane and the pilot wasn’t able to see ‘West.’

He’s silent for a bit again after that, debating if he should tell you or not, but he eventually opens his mouth again to speak,“I was making it up a bit as I went along at first, I just knew I needed a way to guide you without you distrusting me.” Well you would have distrusted him regardless, at least you think you would have. You can feel him rolling his eyes at you. “The idea was to keep up appearances for as long as I could with you, and that hopefully by the time I’d have to reveal the true nature of things you’d come to an understanding that ultimately you needed me.” As he speaks he comes out from the blocking the light of the television, and goes to sit on the edge of the bed. Head tilted to look at you.“Turns out your rather naturally inclined to be obedient.” You make a small face at that. “Don’t be weird, you don’t have to say it like that…” He just shrugs, a smirk pulling at his lips.

“You asked. I’m just being honest.” His head then looks away from you, towards the window in the room, the curtains have been tightly drawn so that not even moonlight seeps in through.

“Although I admit you have every right to be upset me. I would be absolutely livid if I were in your position.” He mentions quietly.

“Why? You helped me? I wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

“Hmm.” Is all he says in response.

“That’s it? You’re not going to answer.” Wouldn’t be the first time Albert just decides he isn’t going to answer or reply to something, but it still doesn’t mean you don’t get a little annoyed when he does so.

“If you can’t figure it out on your own, then perhaps that’s for the best.”

Was it about… how you two meet?

“Yes it is.” He confirms.

Well it’s not like you’re not upset… about that. You would just prefer not to think about it. It’s easier to just let things be as they are right now. You like right now, the present that is. Things are simpler that way. Besides, Albert is good company, better than that even, he’s amazing. Even if he’s still rather secretive about a lot of things, that was fine though. You still have other things to talk about and discuss that wasn’t directly related to him. He’s quite literally a living virus, well former human to virus thing, and that was fascinating, and you’d like to think you’ve mostly gotten over the unsettling fact that you’re his host. You don’t even really mind the tendrils anymore when they pop up to eat or when you bathe. In fact you’ve become comfortable with bathing and stuff like that in general with him around. You’ve literally never been closer to anyone else before, but also relationship wise too. You’ve never gotten along with someone else better that didn’t go beyond just simple pleasantries or work talk. And no one else has ever known you as well as Albert probably does now.

Given that your current predicament was rather permanent, there was definitely worse people to have attached to you. And you’d like to think under different circumstances, or in another universe something along those lines, you two would have still become friends.

“Friends?” Albert suddenly questions and you look eyes with him again. Waiting for him to elaborate, did he not see you two as being friends? It feels odd to consider yourselves as acquaintances, and you don’t know what other term to use if you feel into neither category. “I still need a host body. Well by technicality, I don’t, but what I had prior to our meeting only barely counted as existing. This is a marked improvement, and I have no plans to return to that former mode of living.”

“I just I thought you, I thought we…” You mumble, not sure what exactly to say, the heat of embarrassment fanning your face. Had you misinterpreted things? But he’s been so nice to you.

“A bit of advice, save yourself the trouble of thinking this anything more than partnership of circumstance.” He cuts through your thoughts harshly, “You’re tolerable to enough to be around, but make no mistake, I’m not your friend or your companion.” He affirms and your lips quirk to speak.

“But-” He cuts you off, any smirk he had prior is completely wiped off from his face, as he looks at you head on from the edge of the bed.

“I’d have killed you by now if you weren’t necessary. If your genes weren’t compatible with mine where do you think you’d be right now?”

You recall the pain, that bright hot blistering pain when he’d carved into you, the water filling your lungs while tentacles burrowed into your body. The phantom pain makes your muscles tense and that scent of harsh chemicals blinding, burning your lungs. Your hands grip the comforter beneath you, nails ripping shreds into the sheets. Tearing under your touch, you hear Albert’s laugh, cold and mirthless.

“Exactly, any form of affection or care you’ve perceived has just been a means to an end, or in getting you to do exactly what I wanted. Nothing more, nothing less.” You can’t bring yourself to look up at him your eyes blurring with tears.

“At best you’re nothing more than an amusing obedient pet I have to care for, at worst- you’re a liability I have to deal with.” He voice sounds closer, as if he’s leaned in to whisper the words to you, but even as softly as he says them they land directly into your chest. Blunt and forceful your lungs tighten and you let out a shaky breath as tears start to roll down your cheek. You’re on the precipice between a sob or a laugh. Of course he didn’t care.

Of course he didn’t. You were just too stupid, you were reading into things, you were… useless. Just because you thought he was interesting and funny, didn’t mean you were any of those things. It didn’t mean you were nearly as enjoyable to be around. Clearly you weren’t before, and you still aren’t now. Nothings really changed about you, you just have different company around these days.

You’re just getting in the way of things, you weren’t wanted, you were simply needed. If you weren’t needed you’d be dead.

“I, I get it. I get it, just stop. Please.” You beg, your voice quivering, “Please just stop. Please. Please.” You sniffle and your arm comes up to wipe away the snot and tears cascading down your face. You then grab for the remote shutting off the TV, and you quickly start to lift up the covers to bury yourself underneath them. There is no room to run to, to even get away from him, just to have some quiet to and to distance yourself from the harsh reality of his words. A headache forming in the back of your mind as you grab the pillows to sob into them, reaching for anything soft to hold onto. Your touch tears everything apart, too forceful and harsh, you can already his disapproval from you ruining his things. You pull the covers over yourself fully.

“I’m sorry…” You mutter out into the pillows, but there’s no response. You suppose it’s not like you deserve one.

That was fine though.

You weren’t going to bother Albert ever again.

Albert is rarely surprised by many things. However when you didn’t wake up after five hours of resting he was a little perplexed. It was annoying having to wait, but you did tire yourself out crying yourself sleep. He was hoping in the morning you could get over all of this, except you didn’t wake for the next ten hours, which became fifteen hours, and now it’s been three days.

You’d gone dormant, completely.

If you wanted to throw a childish tantrum than that was fine. This was ideal for him anyways, he was just being cordial, polite with you. He was even being honest, not even attempting to manipulate you and this is how you react? Pathetic. If he knew of someway to guarantee that this body wouldn’t turn into a pile of slithering tentacles upon your expiration then he would have done just that from the start. You weren’t needed anyways, you’ve proven to be more a liability than anything else in fact. Can’t even speak to people on a regular basis, your own constant worries and fears he has to feel bleeding into through your shared connection. Better off like this, with you forever dormant while he takes control. Fully, as he always should have done, he should have considered pushing you to this point prior.

The tendrils grip tightly within your nerves as he starts to puppeteer your body to stand from the bed, peeling away the sheets. Rubbing away dried and crusted tears and snot from your face. As your feet hit the ground he stretches out, before grabbing the pair of shades off from the nightstand, wiping them briefly with the hem of the shirt before he puts them on. The tinted view easing the eyes and he goes about getting prepared for the day. Shrugging out of the more comfortable pants and tossing them into a small hamper, he pulls out a pair of pants from the dresser. Slips on a pair of boots and ties the laces firm and tight.

The scent of bleach clogs his senses, stings the eyes, burns the back of the throat. He finds it a little difficult to pull at the more minute details of the body. Clearing your throat to cough is a bit of a chore to do, but it must be done. The sound that is made is abhorrent, unseemly and he has to force your mouth to swallow back the bit of mucus and phlegm that comes up with the action. He takes the moment to try and adjust all over, re-affixing the latex gloves around the hands. The fingers still feel uncomfortable, too tense, not the right size. Like they can’t relax or sit right, as if your body knows it’s not you in control and rebuffing the his efforts to attempt to

The basement lab still needed a lot of work, grim and little pests and cobwebs still littered the area. However most of the floor had at least been cleaned, or rather drenched and scrubbed with bleach. The clothes worn bore the markings of the stains, proof of the time already spent trying to get the place and the house in general to a more acceptable state. Basic repairs had already been done, but still the house is quiet big, and he’s regretting past him for buying this house in the first place. Sure it had been out of the way, away from the hustle and bustle of any city and the view was nice, it was already mostly furnished and original basement was nice and wide before he’d done any renovations to it, but it was a bit ostentatious. Three different floors, various rooms and guest rooms that had gone largely empty with long narrow halls. Everything was simultaneously too close and together and wide and foreboding. Too much of either, it was rather annoying. He should have redecorated the whole place when he had the chance too and he had more expendable funds.

He wasn’t going to waste money on such a pointless thing now though, he could deal with it, even if he didn’t like it.

He goes back to scrubbing along the walls, grime and build up from years of neglect coming away revealing the white surface beneath. Still somewhat smeared by the stains, he has to keep a careful balance with your muscles between pressing firmly enough and not exerting too much strength that would break the cleaning brush in his hands.

It’s menial work, but it has to get done. Although each movement he makes now echoes loudly in the large space, reverberates into your ears. The sound is repetitive, the bristles scrapping against the surface, it’s not particularly loud though. The noise holds no meaning either, there’s nothing to focus on about it, nothing to cling to, or analyze. It’s just the same noise, over and over, and over…

He can’t see.

He doesn’t know, but he can guess still. He can think, and dreadfully so he can still feel. He can feel everything.

It’s wet, warm and heavy around his… body. Whatever’s left of it, it’s simultaneously bigger than it was prior, and also slimmer, like he’s been stretched out. Stripped. Barren. Just only the barest necessities of what qualifies as ‘him’ remain. He doesn’t dare move though, not unless he senses something. Not unless he feels something beating, something living enter in with him.

He can feel the chemicals burn around him, he feeds on it. Like some kind of low-life extremophile, he feeds on it. He can’t even taste it. It just burns, but it’s the only thing that keeps him alive and being alive is better than death. At least he thinks it is, he doesn’t want to fade away, even if it hurts. Even if it is slowly killing him in the process, just balancing on the precipice of what is considered alive or dead. Even if this is hardly living, slipping away into the abyss terrified him in way he’s never experienced before. He has no heart that can beat faster, no breath that can quicken, he simply is. And that unfiltered, raw emotion is stronger than anything else he’s felt before. Yet he can’t make a sound to voice it.

He can’t speak, there is no mouth, no teeth, no tongue, no throat, he himself hardly exists in the tendrils that make up his ‘body’. And it’s quiet, he can’t hear anything, anyways even if there was any sound.

It’s just too damn quiet.

The brush in his hands in snapped in two, the plastic digging into your skin and drops the broken thing. Pieces clattering to the ground.

Albert decides he’s done enough in here for now, besides the chemical fumes are getting to be a bit much for him.

There had to be some alternative to bras. Said fabric now lies in two separate pieces, he’d been attempting to take it off so he could bath and wipe away the scent of bleach and sweat from the body. This was the fourth bra he’d accidentally broken. Whatever, he didn’t need to wear them, he’s in the confines of his own home anyways, and the one person who might judge him isn’t really mentally present to do so.

He catches the view and the mirror and quickly looks away, his gaze initially looking down before he quickly averts it to the tub. He recalls vaguely the first time you both had to resolve the issue of bathing there had been some fears and worries he felt through the connection that he’d be some kind of lecherous cretin. He was nothing of the sort, and even now he felt no inclination nor any pleasure from looking down to peer at the body before him. As he sinks into the warm water he’s even grateful that it obscures your form into a more vague wavy blob.

It was easier to ignore before, when he wasn’t in control, when there was distance between the definition of him and your body, but now it’s becoming a nuisance. Your form isn’t his original one and it becomes more and more readily apparent now as he lathers over unfamiliar curves. They dip and shift in ways that make his tendrils coil tightly around your muscles and nerves.

He closes the eyes trying to focus, trying to remember how he looked in his eyes, but when he opens them he can’t find enough focus or control to project the image he’d like to see. A flat broader masculine chest, not the feminine one in front of him and he resolves to just keep his eyes closed as he washes the body. He can still feel it though, and without your presence to mute the sensation so he can divert his attention away from… this. He can feel that his body is fundamentally different. He can’t control the way your back shudders when he has to delve down between the apex of your thighs to clean the body properly. Something is missing, even if for your body, it’s perfectly ‘normal’. It’s missing for him, it’s wrong, it’s not… complete.

Your body lies on the bed, eyes up staring at the plain ceiling above through tinted lenses. Albert let’s out a small groan as he shifts around on the bed, pulling the covers more tightly over your body. Fall was slipping away and each day grew colder and colder. Any exposed skin feels frigid to the stale air, the heavy comforter keeping in whatever heat is produced.

The body was exhausted, lethargic, and strained. The physical strain grew greater every day and while he assumed it as an initial symptom of him being in control of the body full time, it didn’t fade with time. He also observed other symptoms, trouble eating, restlessness, and overall general distress. Food was hardly enjoyable, and he struggled to get you to swallow it down, or even keep it down some days. Forced to resort in consuming through the tendrils, but even that only helped so much.

Whenever he tried to sleep, he found he couldn’t rest for anything more than a few minutes, maybe an hour if he was lucky. Part of it was the body just waking him up and booting him from any rest, but the other part was out of some sensible amount of fear. A benefit to your former partnership when he went dormant was that he could rely on you being awake to rouse him if needed. Now though, when he got whatever little rest he did get, there was always the fear- the caution rather that he wouldn’t wake to a threat that got into the house.

Still the body should have acclimated to the shift by now, some of the symptoms like lethargy would still be apparent, but it shouldn’t be this bad. If the lab was in more working order he could maybe figure out what was wrong. However any cleaning or repair efforts were at a bit of a pause.

He’d made a misstep down the stairs the other day ago and took a hard tumble down. Nothing was broken, but he was also feeling sore now on top of everything else. He just couldn’t find it within your body to do much of anything, but rest and eat at the moment.

He couldn’t be sick though, you ran no fever, you had no congestion, besides Uroboros could easily eradicate most of any other bacteria or virus you came in contact with. Besides these only started cropping up since you’d gone dormant, so it had to do something with that. It could be some kind of hormone regulation issue, the body could still think it’s resting and over producing melatonin making him feel exhausted and lethargic by extension. That could explain the tiredness, but it didn’t explain the lack of any real hunger response and this awful anxious feeling he felt gnawing into your guts. Burrowing it’s way up into your chest and invading him, making him feel… how you felt. That little tingle of panic and unease he used to feel through you, now in full force.

He knew it, you little conniving thing, pretended to be some naive, unassuming woman, but you were doing this to him on purpose. Acting as if you were completely dormant while you made him feel like this. Plotting to get him to bend he knee, what were you expecting out of this an apology? No, no, you wanted control, this was your revenge on him for what he’s done. He can’t help, but allow the smile to spread across his lips as he comes to understand just exactly what was transpiring.

He’s almost impressed. He’d fallen for your little act that you were some innocent anxious ridden woman with no ulterior motives. You were good, he could give you that, but he was much stronger than this. Far more resilient than this, a little bit of discomfort was nothing. He wouldn’t grovel for you like you probably want so badly. It would be you who groveled to him.

Could you perceive his thoughts in this moment? Did you know he figured out your miserable little plans?

It mattered little. He would out last this, he could outlast you. He spent twenty years already suffering in a hellish murky limbo. A few weeks without you was nothing in comparison.

Snow was starting to fall, the soft flakes of coming winter blows through the air and sticks to the window of the car, before the wipers sweep it away from his view. The body is still tired, but he has enough energy to fight through the fatigue and keep the eyes focused on the road. It was just a quick trip, needed to stock up on food, then he could return to the bed and try to rest again. Some radio morning talk show is blasting in the car, the sounds the hosts make are grating, and he can barely think above the noise. However it’s better than the silence. Anything is better than the silence, so he bares through it during the drive. Sometimes flip flopping still between turning off the radio and adjusting the audio volume.

When he finally pulls up into the parking lot of the grocery store, he parks the car as close as he can to the entrance. Pulling out the key and shutting off the car, he adjusts the jacket around your body before stepping out. He pushes the shades up the bridge of your nose as he starts to walk towards the store. Grabbing a shopping cart, the air inside is cool, but not quiet as chilly as outside.

The chocolate, it was a favorite of his and it had grown to be a favorite of yours as well.

He shouldn’t care about that, you wouldn’t be ruining this for him. This was his, he liked it first, you apparently had never even had the chocolate prior to meeting him. The golden laced words staring back at him through the packaging as he maneuvers gloved fingers to look it over.

You two had been sat down to eat dinner, he had his apparition sat across from you on the table. It’d become a bit of habit to do so even if he was still ‘really’ eating with you. A tentacle extended out from the back of your neck, eating his own plate of rice and pork chops.

It’s quiet between the two of you, except it never really is. You’ve always got something wondering about in that troubled mind of yours. He can see through your eyes the way your vision keeps trailing back to a small half-opened bag of chocolates in the middle of the table.

“Get one for me, won’t you?” He asks and points towards the sweets and you nod.

Your hand reach to help him peel open the wrapping of the treat, before you present it to the black tendril which eagerly reaches for it. Eating it out from your finger tips. Thoughts barely concealed as you look at the sweet disappear before you. Still he waits.

He wants you to work up the nerve to speak first, part of his ploy to get you better with speaking. However if within the next few minutes you don’t say anything, he’ll try and ask you directly about what you’re thinking to nudge you in the right direction.

“Albert… can I have some?” You finally ask and manipulates the hallucination to smirk towards you.

“I don’t know, can you?” He questions back, and you roll your eyes huffing, but still a small smile tugs on your lips.“May I please have some then?” You try again, although much more flat and lacking the respect he’s well due. He hums, and he has to stop himself from smiling any bigger as you wait buzzing with impatient anticipation.

“With less attitude maybe.” He states, and you sigh. Putting your fork down and placing a hand over your heart.

“May I, Doctor,” You state your full name,“Please have some of your nice fancy chocolates, Doctor Albert Wesker?” You ask again and he hums, he draws it out this time. He’s already made his decision, he just likes hearing the quiet internal begging you’re doing in the mean time.

“I suppose, that is adequate enough.” He muses and a tentacle reaches out to grab the bag and bring it closer to you.

“Thank you!” You quickly say and start to unravel one of the chocolate delights and pop it in your mouth.

Even if he didn’t eat it. He should still get it, you liked it well enough. Perhaps when you came back, and you had sufficiently apologized to him, he could reward you with it.

And you would come back to him, he was sure of it. You needed him, besides you couldn’t just remain dormant forever, you had to wake up eventually. You just had to, what were you even doing? Dreaming restlessly? You’ll come back to him, begging pathetically and he would so graciously accept you back. Or perhaps he should deny you at first just so you had a real good taste as to the suffering you’ve put him through.

He should go dormant in fact, give you a taste of your own medicine, you’d do so much worse than he was currently handling things. He doubt you’d last longer than a few days at most. You would be so lost, and clueless without him. However as much as he likes the idea of it, he shouldn’t. You’d risk getting yourselves caught, or even turning yourself in if he wasn’t present to remind you how much worse things could really get for you.

No when you eventually came back, he just needed to ‘train’ you better, so that you wouldn’t ever do something like this ever again. And you liked these chocolates, so he could save them as treats to help give you certain pushes in the right direction and reward you for ‘good behavior.’

That’s why he’s getting him.

For when you come back.

He places the chocolates into the cart and starts to walk away down the aisle.

Morning grey light peaks in through the curtains of the kitchen, he’d long since drawn them tight and closed. He can see snowfall coming down from outside despite the layer of frost that coats the window. The scent of food brushes along his senses, along with the faint hint of bleach that seems to now permeate every inch of the house. No matter how much he cleans the body, it reeks of the chemical, as if he personally scrubbed your skin raw free of anything else. Just bleach.

He stares down at the plate of food, any steam or warmth in long gone. He knows he needs to eat, he can feel your stomach growl in hunger, but when he scoops up a bit of food to swallow it sits heavy on your tongue. The texture is off, it’s cold and wet and he has to grit his teeth and force down the bite, a tear threatening to slip out from your eyes. He sighs after, nearly retching the bite he took, and yet despite the violent jerking, you still don’t even nudge an inch into consciousness from the motion.

There is nothing though. No response, no feeling, there is nothing. Drifting away somewhere in unconsciousness, you lie beyond the brink of what is tangible. You hold no influence in this state, just as much as when he is dormant, he cannot reach back unless awoken. Still.

He was never away for this long, and you’d never been asleep, or dormant for this long either. It’s been more than a month now. Thirty-six days to be precise. He survived years worth longer than that alone, the time in total you’ve spent together is not even one twentieth of the time he spent stranded. Yet still he… longs for it, to hear your thoughts again.

You were supposed to be asking him about the house, about the password to the computer in the basement, or studying more about the nature of your current biology. You two would have finished the cleaning and repairs done down by there by now, but he can’t even stand to do it anymore. Not even out of any lethargy he feels, it’s everything else. The smells down there, the silence, the way your image is reflected back in the half-cleaned glass of large tubes.

All reminders.

He remembers how excited you sounded, how excited you felt when he showed it to you. How he felt your joy trickle into him, actually make his tendrils hug around you, he had to restrain himself. That you were making him feel in such away, it had been so long, he couldn’t recall the last time he felt such a thing like that. Who were you to make him feel so light, to give him a taste of relief, the barest impression of your sweetness. Like Tantalus between a fruit of trees and the fresh water below him, he’s so close to it, physically bound to your presence, yet denied to quench any of his hungers all the same.

You were supposed to be overthinking every little thing, he was supposed to be sitting down across the table and pulling your attention away from all those frivolous things so that your worry didn’t seep into him. So that he could feel at ease through you, so he could just have you and so that you had him. You needed him too.

Now he doesn’t have you, not actually anyways, not in the way he wants. He has your body to himself, but it’s not enough, it’s not what he wants. Physicality is nothing when his tentacles are so firmly entrenched inside your body, besides he can’t feel your muscles and tendons holding him back, they’re limp. There’s nothing new there, and without the degree of separation from you controlling the body in comparison to him, he’s left feeling rather discomforted in this body. No, what he craves are your thoughts, he wants to feel through you again, he desires to listen to your internal monologue again. The comfort and reassurance you offered wordlessly, even thoughtlessly at times, the way you just admired him, naturally. Just for you to listen to him, so that he could even speak to someone, anyone at all. He hates you for doing all of that for him, for doing something no one else had been able to offer him, but he loathes your absence even more.

Now he wonders if this state might even be permanent.

That you might be brain dead or even comatosed. He can still feel your presence though, it was faint, but it’s there, like how he felt when you slept. Still that might not mean much, you’ve never been out for this long before. The only thing that came close was the twenty-four hours you’d slept through during the plane ride to Africa. You’d always woken up though, you just had to. You had to, there was no other option for you, he couldn’t allow it, he wouldn’t allow it.

It can’t be just him in this body, it can’t be, it’s not even his. He can’t be alone again, just him.

You had to be there.

You just had to.

Just one more, day you’d come back on your own. He looks up at the table, an unopened bag of chocolates sits there, the golden words staring back at them.

You had to.

Moon light threatens to peak in through the curtains, but they hold it back. The light being held at bay, he’d shut them tight, he fiddled with them several times prior to make sure that nothing came in or out. Only the light from the TV plays, some animal documentary about frogs or something he isn’t really paying attention to is playing.

He’d been waiting, just for you to pop back up and here was doing things like this just in the hopes that you’d randomly wake up. You don’t though, but the sound of the TV is enough for now to fill the silence.

It just isn’t really the same without you, without the murmur of your thoughts, and how he’d pick up little tid bits of information you didn’t voice aloud. Sometimes he’d prod you into speaking a little more, just to hear you talk to him. Other times just so you would engage with him and give him some attention. However the longer he just lays there, tired, hungry, and… this unnamed feelings that’s buried itself in his chest, rather your chest and woven around his tendrils. It grows, threatens to write it’s presence into the genetic code of what’s left of him. Clings around as if it will consume him and drag him down, whether that be further into you or himself, he isn’t sure. However neither is preferable and as he narrows his eyes up at the screen of the TV. The one you begged him to put in place, the edges of your lips furl downward.

He couldn’t take it anymore not for another instance. You dare leave him? Just like that, you so badly wanted to claim him as your ‘friend’, as your ‘companion’ and so you just left? How insolent of you, how inconsiderate, the fact you had the nerve to just do that to him. Him. He helped you, he did everything for you, he listened to you and… you.

You listened to him, you… spoke to him, bantered, you were… loyal. He ruined your life and like some stupid obedient dog that didn’t know any better you just rolled over and showed him your belly again and again.

What the hell was wrong with you? Who does that? Why did you do that? Why were you interested in him? He didn’t deserve it. He deserved none it and he was the one trying to save you both the trouble. Didn’t you realize that?

No of course not. Of course you didn’t. If you did, you would have had the common sense to know that he was trying to do something that was in both your own best interests.

There was something awfully and terribly wrong with you in that sense. You weren’t normal, you were weird and abnormality. People don’t just act like that. You should have hated him. You should have been fighting to break free of him. And he hates it. Just how he hates how you make him feel, how you make him not feel with your absence, damned without you and damned with you.

It wasn’t fair, he never needed anyone before. He was self-sufficient. He needed for no one, not a single person. He prided himself on his own ability to survive, to lack relying on others intimately like this. Now he feels himself crumbling at the seems just because one woman, one woman he’s known for a few months, decides to leave him.

Yet now he wants it, but he pushed you away. You were right there, so willing, so perfectly just there and he ruined it. Should have kept his mouth shut, just ignored that he’d heard you refer to him a friend, that you had seen things that way, but he couldn’t help it. The moment he heard that thought he just saw red.

The thought that you really were so naive, should have put him at ease, should have reassured him that you had no plans of betraying him. That his manipulation was working, that despite what he’s done to you, you still saw something good in him. You saw him as your companion and he, was well himself. In any other universe he’d probably have killed you. In any other time period of his life, at best maybe you’d have known him vaguely, but you certainly wouldn’t have been even an acquaintance of his if you didn’t serve some usefulness to him. That or he would have ignored someone as bad at speaking to people as you were. At worst? He’d kill you.

It was just the truth. If your genes were just a bit different he would have killed you indiscriminately from the other BSAA agents you came to him with. Eaten you actually, he was rather starved living off of chemical water from the hot lava stirring underneath the earth.

Doesn’t change circumstances though, doesn’t mean he isn’t living in this current universe, the one where he didn’t eat you. He’s in the one where he’s been consumed by you and he didn’t even realize just how deep he was in.

And here he is deluding himself into thinking you’d come back on your own. You wouldn’t. Not with how he knows how he made you feel. He’d be lucky if you didn’t really start to hate him once he reached out to wake you up.

Better now than never then.

He whispers your name into his mind, as if to gently rose you from slumber, but when you don’t respond immediately he urges you to wake more harshly. Tendrils pulsing inside of him as he tries to get you to wake up.

No response.

He tries again, and again, till he finds himself using your own voice to call out to you. The sound of, but it’s not quite right, he can’t move your mouth in the right way to sound like you. There’s faults, his accent slips through your lips, and the register is a little different from how you would speak.

However you still don’t wake.

He doesn’t even sense much of well anything from you.

And it doesn’t even feel like you’re dreaming.

There’s absolutely nothing.

It’s quiet.

He feels your breath quicken when he creaks out your name with your voice one more time. As if it will be any different from the previous times.

Only the sound of the TV playing sounds, animals noises and whatever track it plays in the background. But it’s not you.

He find that he tightens your fingers around the remote until he feels the plastic crack under the pressure hurls it towards the TV. Breaking the screen, the sound still plays though, despite the now flickering screen dancing colors in his vision. He feels your pupils shrink and contract as he stares forward, sight blurring and sharpening with each ragged breath.

The action doesn’t soothe his rage one bit. Just makes him bitter, and he has to swallow down the feeling. Yet it still doesn’t go anywhere. Doesn’t move, doesn’t change. He suspects even if he tried rip it out from your chest too it still wouldn’t leave him.

He would be damned though if you thought you could just leave him.

If you weren’t going to come back on your own, then he was going to take matters into his own hands. If it happens to kill you both, well then- he’s just doing you both a favor and putting you both out of your miseries.

Chapter Text

You awake with a violent cough, your body feels torn asunder, hollow and the quick shaky movements, you first make, cause you immense pain that surges forth from shoulders and up through your limb to the tips of your fingers. Spittle and mucus, the taste of copper on your tongue as you spit up, hands fighting to beat on your chest to help relive the cloying itch in the back of your throat. However each minute move brings an echoing ache that rockets your body, pins and needles digging into the spaces between your muscles, and you force your eyes open. Your vision is blurry, you can’t make out anything, but you can smell. Where ever you are reeks for bleach and in your panic and confusion you find yourself fumbling off whatever surface you were lying on and landing harshly into the floor.

When you can clear out your throat just enough to stop your hacking fit, you swallow thickly, eyes rapidly blinking to try and clear your eyes. It does little to help and growing pain through out your body makes you cry out. Failing several times in attempting to pick yourself up by your forearms, but repeatedly sliding back down, unable to hold up your own weight.

“Al… bert?” Your voice croaks out, and you can barely hear your own voice, a buzzing sound nearly drowns out any noise and you groan as the pain in the back of your head blossoms.

You receive no response though as you blindly feel around trying to understand where you are. Were you two being attacked? Had Albert gone dormant himself and you’d been forced to the forefront? You don’t know. You can’t feel him. You feel so… empty, so dreadfully empty.

You stop struggling for a moment to heave, each breath feels exhausting to do and you press your forehead to floor which in comparison to you feels ice-cold and helps soothe the pain. Your eyes drift to look off to the side and gaze at your arm. The limb is closely enough for you to see it clearly beyond the haze of your sight.

Several large holes gape from around the arm, blood trickling out from the wounds as you see small black tendrils writing beneath saggy flesh. Parts of the limb look deflated, as if missing crucial structures and your weak breath hitches as you see the damage. You weakly call out for Albert again, but you receive no response.

Your body finally fully slumps forward, heat rising through your form, and the only reprieve you have from it is by pressing yourself as much as you can to the cool floor. Sweat building up on your brow and your damaged limbs, occasionally a wave of pain makes you groan and grit your teeth. It burns, like lava pouring through your body it burns so much. You can’t even escape it, the pain is sourced entirely from yourself.

Your only hope at relief is that you somehow fumble back in unconsciousness and squeeze your eyes shut tight as if to help will yourself back into blissful oblivion. However there is no reprieve. There is no easing of this ache. There is only enduring it. Your breath starts to come in through slow clenched pants between your teeth as you groan.

You can see somewhat, you vaguely recognize yourself as being within the basement laboratory, but that doesn’t quite register as much as what you see just a few feet in front of you.

A writhing mass of black tendrils they wrap around in on themselves, swarming something orange and glowing within it’s center. A slick tainted slimy substance trails from you to it and as you watch the tentacles shift and move. You feel your pupils shift and contract as you spot the mass, and clear out your throat once more to try and speak.

“Is… that, you?” You quietly question, crawling forward towards it, your body protests, but you can’t help inching closer. Like living ferrofluids, pulsing and shifting, both liquid and solid matter at the same time.

“You’re beautiful…” You murmur as you watch how the tendrils almost melt into one another, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. Just cyclical, no stop or end. You can’t bring yourself to look away from him or stop your slow crawl to approach him.

You guess he was done with you as a ‘host’, you served your purpose, now he’s leaving for what you aren’t sure. But he probably has a plan, Albert always has a plan and knows what to do.

You just weren’t apart of them anymore.

Not even your body was useful anymore.

That realization as you stare longing into the tendrils makes your chest shudder and your shoulders slack as you fall limp to the floor just shy of him.

“If it’s not too much ask…” You feel tears welling in your eyes and your lips quiver as the words struggle to leave your throat. “Was I good? Was I, at least… good?” You ask, but you receive no response. The tendrils remain shifting in place, swirling around that ethereal orange light. Your head is starting to feel light and faint, the edges of your vision burned away into a dark static patterned buzz, still your reach a hand out towards the mass.

Fingers falling short the first time, your depth perception out of order, as you try and fail several times to reach out, the limb slapping against the ground.

The moment your hand does actually graze across the tendril, it stiffens before it shoots out towards you wrapping around your fingers, nearly pulling your arm from your socket and it tugs you towards it, dragging you across the floor towards it. You feel smaller tentacles, worming their way inside the holes in your arm, filling them in as the tendrils enter inside of you. Burning as they stretch, as they fill your veins and enter inside you. But it doesn’t feel so empty anymore, you feel full, you feel whole as it enters you. Wraps around your muscles and nerves, holding you tightly, promising to never let go as it squeezes itself into you. When a tendril prods your lips, despite your gritted teeth, and the groans leaving your mouth, you open them just wide enough to let them slip through. Caressing along the sides of your gums and inner mouth. Sliding down your throat before it enters in past and through your flesh and you swallow it down eagerly.

Your body spasms uncontrollably as the living virus rights itself inside your body, getting itself reacquainted with you. Then you go still, and the pain slowly subsides to a lingering heat and a sore ache that radiates through every surface. You lie there for a long moment, just pressed against the tile, taking deep breathes that gather perspiration on the floor next to your mouth.

“Albert…?” Your voice wavers out, echoing in the empty area and you close your eyes trying to sense for his presence.

He’s there. He’s very much present, more so than you’ve ever felt before.

“Albert, please… answer me.” You try again, but your voice is even more cracked and hoarse than before. Had you lost it? Lost the ability to hear him? You don’t want to be alone.

God you don’t want to be all alone again.

I’m here, quiet.

“Oh thank God… What, what’s happening? Why were you-”

That’s not important right now, we need to eat. He cuts off, before you feel him urging you turn to look behind you. You muster the strength to flop over, before forcing yourself to sit up on shaky arms. Your gaze wanders mindlessly as you feel your pupils restrict and contract.

You were in the basement lab, laying on the tile covered in sweat and some mucus and dried bits of blood with your clothes clinging to your skin. Your gaze is directed to look by the entrance and focus in on it.

The dead and upturned carcass of a cow lies there, limbs limp and head bent at a sharp angle. It’s pushed off slightly from the side of the entrance to the lab itself and you stare at the corpse for a long while before you feel Wesker pushing you to start moving towards it.

Confused, you still shift, trying to stand, but your muscles immediately give out under any heavy amount of weight you try to put on them and you land on your knees with a grunt. They too buckle though and you fall flat unto your stomach pushing the weak air that fills your lungs out of your body.

Go slowly, your body just endured a great deal of stress.

You nod, cheek pressed against the floor then swallowing dryly as you crawl forward shifting slowly towards the corpse, tendrils slip out from your body to help push you. You collapse when you get close enough to touch your hand to it, nails scraping against the hide and a tentacle juts out from your palms and makes a wet squelching sound as it digs into the cow’s body. You see as it eats swallowing down gulp after gulp of meat and let out a long sigh pressing your cheek back into the floor as he eats for both of you.

You find it hard to think much of anything, your ears are still ringing, but you’re more at ease still. You have Albert again, although you aren’t sure why he left your body only to return to it, that doesn’t matter much to you. He’s here.

Your memories a little fuzzy when you try to recall what exactly happened before this. He had been upset with you. Or rather you made him upset with you, terribly so, and God how embarrassed you had felt. So you decided to leave, mentally at least going to sleep or dormant or whatever. You’re vaguely aware of things Albert did during the time spent away, but images are not well formed and deteriorate the further on you look into it, until there isn’t much of anything. Just him going about business as usual, going to the store and cleaning the lab and eating. Getting on just fine without you. At least from the glimpses you can parse.

Had your body rejected him with you being ‘asleep’ or dormant for so long? That’s the only reasonable thing you can imagine. He doesn’t really need you otherwise, he’s made that very clear to you.

No.

No? Why else then? Was this punishment? Was he still upset with you?

A tendril slips out from the side of your neck and trails up to cup side of your face trailing over your warm skin.

You abandoned me. You dare to question if I’m still upset with you?

Your brows furrow and you struggle through the disorienting fog of ache and weariness to respond.

“But I thought, I thought you didn’t want me around, I was just a necessity- I, I was-”

Quiet. I’m aware of what I said, I didn’t ask you to repeat it and I do not need you reminding me of it either.

The tentacle feels up closer to your eyes wiping away the trail of tears from your cheek.

You really are hopeless without me. You need me, you nearly wasted away attempting to get away from me. Just look at the state of yourself, what I had to resort to just to help you.

Your vision still isn’t the best at moment, especially when it’s blurred and distorted through the big tears welling up in your eyes. You feel what he means though, but didn’t your body hurt from him leaving it? Or maybe part of this ache is from you having gone dormant. Did it physically hurt him to be the one in control? He’s mentioned before it becomes difficult to control your body over long periods of time. That it got ‘tiring’, but that didn’t mean it hurt right?

Oh God, had you been hurting him?

“I wasn’t trying to leave, I just-” You stop yourself short not wanting to repeat what he said again. “I just thought this was what you wanted.”

The appendage soothes over your face up and down the sides of your cheek, tilting your head to look up and you can just barely see the visage of the shadowy form of Albert attempting to manifest behind your eyelids. The tendril replaced by leather clad gloves as he tilts your face up to stare back at him, into the black reflective surface of his glasses.

“I know, but that’s why you require me to function.” A finger rubs against line of your jaw, “Even just being unconscious isn’t good enough, you need me. Physically and mentally, in all aspects and forms, lacking one without the other might as well be lacking both.” He laments, although his tone somber a sharp smile cuts across his square features, he lets out a soothing sigh,“However you managed to exist and live before must have been a complete miracle, a fluke. You require me as much as you need to breath, it nearly sickens me how your own body can’t even go on without you around experiencing my presence first hand.” The hand drops lower, digits trailing over your beating pulse, you thickly swallow.

“You’re weak.” His voice states plainly, as fact, and you know it to be true, how easily you melt into nothing like sugar spun in water. The tendrils, his hands, his everything they all tighten and constrict around your neck, inside your body, beneath your skin. Not just to threaten harm, but to seep further into you, as if to bond himself to every atom and never let go.

“You have no idea how much I want to wipe you away like a spreading stain.” His voice growls out through gritted teeth as his face draws closer to yours and you feel the heat of his silent rage grace your face. Stronger than the warmth of the steam coming from your wounded form. Your breath is no more than a weak wheeze yet you don’t pull away or tense in his grasp. For all the force and pressure he holds you with is not pure in it’s violence. The weight that is put upon you feels tainted, gloved padded fingers rub over the thrum of your beating circulatory system. Feels along your arteries and veins, gingerly, tenderly. The tendrils as tightly as they squeeze around your organs, as if preparing to choke out every single one and devour you from the inside out, they care to rub inside your skin. Along soft inner portions like the small of your back and right behind your ear, sending a pleasurable shiver down your spine.

“Yet I’ll admit-” His voice softens, “I still… require you, and I find your company tolerable enough.” Features shifting, before reforming to what you are most familiar with, his tight lipped stoic gaze. His pressure doesn’t relent, but it stops invading any further, movement coming to an abrupt halt.

“… And you won’t ever do something so foolish again will you? I can’t have my favorite…” His words trail off, trying to search for the right word.

“-pet… dying on me.”

The frames do not reflect back, pure rectangular holes of darkness that you stare up into as if to hope they might swallow you whole. You wish that they will.

You shake your head fervently, leaning in to press your face into his hands, but you still feel the wet and warm touch of the black tentacle it really is moving against you. You press back against every tendril, every living bit of viral tissue that chokes you, cradles you with a touch that wants you the way a beast desires to lick it’s bloodied lips after a kill.

His mouth remains in a firm line at your silent response, although given the weight on your neck and the wheeze that it produces you can give no other reply, one corner finally cracks.

“Hmm, I suppose that’s a start. Now try not to move too much.”

You nod, and he guides your head back to lie on the cool floor. The pressure relents just enough for you to suck in a gulp of stale hot air, but remains ever present. A relief from the heat you are generating, the body is still healing, you can’t imagine things would have gone great though if you didn’t have something to eat immediately or if your body wasn’t able to handle losing so much mass. You severely underestimated just how much it seemed that Albert took up inside of you. Didn’t he say something prior like it was roughly only fifteen percent or something like that? You felt much emptier than fifteen percent, but then again you don’t exactly have a wealthy database of judging how ‘hollow’ you physically feel.

“That was several weeks ago. This is now. I estimate I make up roughly twenty-five to thirty percent of your whole mass now. I don’t expect to get much bigger than that though I just take up a large portion of your muscles and fat tissue, the growth rate has substantially abated from what I’m aware of.” He explains from above you and you feel a tendril trails from the top of your shoulder down to your side to emphasize his words.

And what if you didn’t wake up? What if you died…? What if somehow it ended up killing… Albert? Your voice squeaks to voice your concerns, but it seems your thoughts are rather transparent for him right now.

“A calculated risk, it worked in the end. That’s all that really matters.”

You still could have died. Although maybe with everything you’ve done you probably deserve it. He’s gone through so much effort just for your sake. You don’t deserve this, what did you do to earn this? You remember what he said, you were burdensome, even now as you lay on the floor, you don’t even have the energy to walk. His tendril soothing over your face as your eyes look up towards him kneeled over you, he’s never offered something quite like it before as you feel it wriggle over your skin leaving warm trails of mucus. Physical evidence of his presence left behind in case you needed it.

“Don’t question whether you are deserving, I deem you befitting and you want it, don’t you? So take it.”

“Okay.” You croak out in response, your voice run raggedy from his- excessive, touch around your throat.

What words could even accurately define this feeling in your chest. One that makes the edges of your lips curl up, that just breaks through the sludge of this exhaustion, a budding plant along the crack in a sidewalk. You don’t recall if there was ever a time you had been so kindly caressed like this.

The feeling is foreign, but certainly not at all unwelcome and your fingers twitch wanting to reach out. To attempt to provide this same… affection? Care? Tenderness? Whatever this was you want to reciprocate, it’s the least you can do. Although you don’t have the strength to squeeze back as tight as him, you can try.

“Can I- May I?” You correct yourself mid-sentence and you hear the small stifled breath of air leave his inner voice in your head, before he replies.

“No.” He replies tersely.

Your lips tug at the edges bordering a frown, but as much as it nears it never passes into that. So you stay as you are, eyes looking up at his visage.

The hallucination is not quite as perfected as usual, perhaps from a lack of practice on his part, or from your near death experience making the edges of your vision fuzzy. Probably a mix of both, but the effect it grants while not realistic, is ethereal. Like a dream or a memory, there’s this glow he has to his skin and the dark parts of his typical black clothes weave in and out, like dark ether, like seeing shapes behind your closed lids.

He truly was magnificent. The edges of his form shifting like a real microbial life, yet he’s more than human, more akin to a biblical angel. Undefined by conventional standards, radiant.

You hear him scoff at your sincerity.

“Don’t think such saccharine thoughts will be dissuading me completely from my wrath over this stunt you’ve pulled.”

“I’m sorry-” You try to mumble out again, but the attempt is swiftly cut down.

“No sorries. I don’t want to hear them from you.” He cuts in quickly, your eyes crack open staring off to watch the virus play with your arm. His head cox to one side, “For now at least, I’ll have to punish you properly for this whole thing you’ve done. But I’ll be merciful…” He pauses, then you feel a sudden tight grasp around your arm. He extends a hand out once more to press his ghostly digits into your cheeks making you look up at him, and he stares back for a long minute before he speaks. “...for now given your current state.” The grip lessens to a gentle caress once more, as if it were incapable of harm in the first place.

“Okay.” You quietly say and you take in a deep breath, slowly blinking. It’s as soft and gentle as it can be despite how unusual the sensation is. Even as he violently digs into and consumes the carcass before the ones upon your skin awkwardly caressing your limb with an aggressive tender kindness you both seem to be unfamiliar with as you languish in his touch.

You have questions still, but you’re too tired to speak again. Besides the way he touches you is all consuming. You didn’t think with all the excess heat your body is producing you could feel any warmer, but you stand- well lay- corrected.

You hope he doesn’t stop though, this felt so good and among all your numerous bodily aches at the moment, it was near blissful. Your gaze does drift over to the body of the deceased animal before you. Skin sunken in already from the large tendril hard at work consuming and digesting for you. Feasting, and in turn healing you.

Would it be a little too greedy to desire to cut open the flesh to see just how the tendril eats? Does it liquefy the proteins like a spider before slurping them up? Or is it in chunks? Left for some other function of the tendril to deal with breaking down? If so what means are those? Does it use your own stomach? You never feel full in your stomach when he eats like this, so you don’t think so, but maybe he releases some hormone that suppresses that feeling?

One other question did beg to be asked as you stare at the cow,

“Albert, how did you get a whole entire cow in here?” You see in your side profile his expression remains unchanged.

“I stole it.”

The edges of your lips jerk into a small small as a wheeze of a laugh leaves you.

“That was not what I asked, but okay.”

Your body still aches.

It’s to be expected, but just because it is predictable it doesn’t lessen the sting by any means. Physically all the unsightly gaping holes had closed up, without even a scant trace of scar tissue. But the pain remains and lingers in your muscles. It remembers where the flesh won’t. However there are certain things that lessen the pain.

That mainly being the new found ‘affection’ as you call it that Albert occasional gifts you with. His touch is random and fleeting, and if you give it any large amounts of thoughts he retracts the small graces of adoration he gives to you. It is torture, but you would rather accept the small bits of affection he offers than get none at all. He is touching you, at all times after all, throughout your whole body and sometimes you’ll dare to flex a muscle around his tendrils inside you so that he can feel you too. He never makes any mention of the touch, or pressure rather, but it’s how you show your own odd brand of affection for whatever it is you two have going on now.

Neither of you had made exactly direct comments about the incident since it occurred. You aren’t sure if he simply doesn’t feel the need to clarify anything else, or if he just isn’t sure himself, although you doubt the latter. You certainly aren’t going to bring it up though, mainly in fear he might stop doing it entirely if you verbally mention it or bring it up in anyway.

You wouldn’t admit it yourself, but the sensation is… nice. Maybe because you are not used to being touched kindly in that way. Not like you have a ton of experience to begin with, you never realized it before, but you might even be just a bit touch-starved. Twenty-nine years without any personal relationships that weren’t familial might be the issue, but you never considered yourself to be so desperate for such a thing before. You were always more interested in spending your days at home on the dark web trying to find more leaked videos of virus outbreaks than oggling over people your age. Perhaps the fact that Albert is the only other person you’ve been ‘close’ with not just physically adds on to that factor. Or even the fact that he was a virus himself is crossing a few wires in your head. Although thinking about that is unpleasant so you don’t. Instead you think about the fact that the TV had been gone from it’s usual spot when you ‘came back.’

Strangely enough it had been missing when you finally managed to hobble back up the steps to the bedroom to rest properly, although Albert had been rather insistent only letting you sleep for very set, small, and spaced out periods of time from now on. Another monitor ended up having to be taken from the basement to have as another makeshift TV.

Your body had still been recovering for the past few days, and beyond musing the small changes and fixes to the house and getting back into getting the place cleaned up it was more or less just business as a usual. Like cleaning up the mess that was left behind in the lab after everything. You already took a sample of some of the unusual fluids left behind on the ground from the whole ordeal and while they are no doubt tainted, you wouldn’t be passing up such an opportunity when you finally got the chance to look into the substance.

Right now was time for rest though.

Namely being laying in bed while you both watched a documentary on hyenas late into the night. Albert’s apparition was beside you watching the TV, the phantom sensation of his hand steadied against your scalp and occasionally deciding to scratch the surface softly.

You can tell he is paying attention, somewhat at least to be following along with what the narrator is saying, but he certainly isn’t invested.

“We can watch something else if you’d like you know? Is there a channel or something I can turn it too?” He doesn’t turn his head towards you, but he still acknowledges your words.

“Hmm. No this is fine.”

His words do little to abate your worries though. If he was just saying that for your sake and secretly seethed and loathed having to put up with your interests and hobbies like this.

“Hush. I was never really one for television prior to our meeting that wasn’t just the news or the weather report and your interest in watching canines duking it out to become top alpha male is unusual, but intriguing none the less.” He elaborates, actually tilting his head towards you this time.

“Actually hyenas are more closely related to felines and mongooses than canines and they fall under their own order of Hyaenidae and that isn’t a male. That’s a female.” You can feel him move your eyes to focus back on the screen for a moment to confirm something before he speaks again, “But it-”

“The females have pseudo-penises and they are larger than the males, females hold more power in their hierarchy and choose who they mate with. Actually they can’t mate at all without the female’s express permission since it’s pretty complicated getting things to work with how it is.” You elaborate.

“And you just happen to know this? Particular interest in hyenas or from watching so many animal documentaries?”

You pick up a lot of ‘fun facts’ watching so many documentaries, but also somethings you somewhat just know from just being curious late at night and having a phone to satisfy said curiosity.

“A bit of both. Hyena’s have a very unique social structure, sure you have things like queen ants, or bees and they’re interesting in their own rights but they don’t really hold any actual power. They just are cared for and reproduce offspring. The workers widely make the most decisions like that. Hyenas though? The highest ranking female along with her eldest daughters hold the most status, they get to eat first, get to choose the best males, and they lead hunts.” There’s not a system you know of that is like it in that aspects, perhaps elephants with their matrons? Yet they don’t really hold any power the same way hyena’s do, and beyond males tussling for females, there’s not much infighting.

“They get a really bad wrap honestly, but they’re really interesting animals…”

“We just watched a group of them tear the head off the alpha hyena’s daughter to usurp her.” He mentions bleakly, and your eyes flick to the screen to see the scene is still somewhat being played out. The hyena’s head, tossed in dry savanna dirt as it discarded and played with casually.

No more than a mere plaything. “I know right! That’s such an intelligent thing to do, they aren’t even challenging her directly, but they are being underhanded. To kill her eldest daughter, it’s a clear sign to disgrace her, to show she no longer holds power.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t turn out to be a zoologist.” Well the interest of viruses has always held more attention in your heart anyways. Sure there was something fascinating about the raw power and sheer force and might of animals. How they tear into bodies, how they thrive, how they survive, but viruses, microbial life. It was almost alien in way they look and live. The extremes they exist in, their reproduction, how they affect and altar bodies, how they kill. That’s what really interests you.

“Well I still like viruses, very much, just, you know. Not the topic at hand.” You say quietly, and you hear a hum come from Albert as he contemplates your words.

Thinking the conversations over you turn your attention back to the TV, but he pipes up again.

“Uroboros.”

“What?” You question, unsure what he’s referring to.

“That’s what it’s called, the virus, Uroboros. I realized I never told you.”

“Oh.” Was that another mythological figure? Or rather a concept you think, the snake that eats itself. You aren’t sure of the origin, but for all in tenses purposes the name is very befitting of it’s namesake. Although, the more you think on it, you don’t recall the BSAA ever telling you an exact name for the virus you were looking for. You wonder if they ever actually knew themselves, or they had actively withheld information for you. Did they know the task your team had been assigned might have been a suicide mission? They did inform you all the virus would be dangerous should anyone get infected, and you were given enough to information to identify it, but nothing beyond that. A list of symptoms for the infected, a small old picture taken captured from a microscope that had a certain dated look to it.

They must have known the name then, to have that much information they surely must have known the name, the circumstances regarding to how it wound up there. Everything you had been given though was sparse pickings. But why keep it from you then? You weren’t some small research assistant, or intern, besides the name Uroboros virus didn’t ring any bells to begin with.

Nothing like the infamous Tyrant virus outbreak of Raccoon City, Golgotha or the various different strains of the T-virus itself. Hell even BSAA used highly modified and selected strains of Tyrant for use of ‘disposable personal.’ It’s just efficient, T-Virus has a vary particular knack for reviving dead cells, just there is issue when getting it to work effectively, as in trying to minimize any rampant mutation, as well as prevent a cycle of cytokine storms from taking place on host bodies. Or ‘making’ host bodies that are tough enough to resist such effects. Although technically the general public isn’t really supposed to know that, you didn’t sign off on a bunch a NDAs before you went to work for the BSAA for nothing. You aren’t one to complain about that though, not at all, if anything you do miss those days when you went work.

That was neither here nor there, you didn’t know even what BSAA’s ultimate goals with obtaining a sample of Uroboros were going to be. Not that it really mattered now anyways, you didn’t- or rather Albert certainly has no plans to go to them. Though what Albert’s plans beyond the short-term is rather ambiguous, or rather entirely unknown to you.

You don’t actually have a faint clue at to what the long term is.

While sure, being a little oblivious is nice. Ignorance is bliss and all of that, but you don’t actually still know what his goal for the future is. If he has one in mind, but given all the through planning Albert seems to be one top of, he must have something he’s trying to attain. Seperation of your bodies from one another? Finding another host body? Last incident has all, but confirmed for you that you don’t want Albert leaving your body ever again. Even if he were to check out permanently mentally, you aren’t sure if you could coop, much less survive.

“Go on.” You hear him encourage from beside you. How much he’s understood from your rambling thoughts you’re never exactly sure, but it seems to be enough to know you have a question in the back of your mind. If he will actually answer it you aren’t sure though. He’s rather avoidant about topics like this. You know as much as you’re supposed to, as much as he let’s on and nothing more.

“Well, I’ll either answer it, or I will elect not to, that’s the worst possible outcome.” He adds on, and you suppose he won’t be too upset then, if you just ask. He might even have a vague idea from whatever thoughts he hears from you what you’re going to ask.

“It’s just, I know we have plans once we get the basement fixed up to figure our more about the virus, Uroboros, specifically how it affects the both of us, but what’s after that? What is the long term?” Assuming that figuring all of that out wouldn’t take years. It may very well take a long time, but even then you and Albert couldn’t subsist off of the nest egg he had forever. Particularly if you both still required to eat large amounts of protein on a regular basis. You’d need to get a job at some point, and then would come the issue, you’d at the very least need to get some fake doctorate degree, that is if you went back into a field of study like virology. Maybe that would be too suspicious though, might need to actually learn a new field of science.

Then again maybe knowing this, just isn’t for you know. Something you’re not supposed to be worried about, because Albert has this all planned out already.

“Relax.” He finally says.

“Oh, sorry.” You mumble, and you try to steady yourself and quiet your thoughts.

“No, that’s not what I meant.” A faint huff of a laugh exhales from his nose, and his fingers slowly move languidly over your head. “My goal, my long term goal is to relax.”

Did he mean like retirement? Can a virus even retire? That’s probably a dumb question to ask.

“I spent twenty years, trapped within a chemical lake, alone with my thoughts. Normally the latter of which I prefer, but without breaks, without something- anything else to do- I nearly went mad, if I haven’t already. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if I really existed, or if I was in some purgatory or my own personal hell for-” His voice had quickened in pace, a bite of anger, a pang of resentment as your heart beat raises in your chest as he speaks. He stops himself short at the end though, before he raises his voice any higher. His grip on you had suddenly turned a bit too harsh, grabbing your hair, before his palm relaxes. The image of himself wavers before you, blinking in and out of your vision. He let’s out a sigh, through your mouth, to help expel this nervous energy in your body. “I’ve had… much time to consider my actions that lead to my death, and I’ve decided that my goals at the time were…” His voice much more quiet, the next word comes out like a ghost’s last whisper before vanishing into the ether.“Foolish.” He admits, you can still see the projection tense as if it were his real body. The visage doesn’t turn to look at you, and instead stares ahead at the wall of the bedroom ahead.

“Ideally I want…” He stops to search for the right term. “… mundanness. Perhaps pick up a few new hobbies, if we can craft a new identity for ourselves, then get a job and attempt to live ‘normally’.” He confides, before you hear a tickle of a dry and cold laugh leave your lips. Not from you, it’s from him.

“We’ll as normally as we can in this state if it comes down to it. That’s what I desire, that’s my new goal.”

You were fearing the worst, so all in all his goal is fine with you. Despite being with him twenty-four seven you still only really know small bits and pieces about Albert pasts. He gives out such information sparingly instead preferring to pry you for info, but you surmise that at least for right now this is all you’re going to know. All you deserve to know, beyond the small fragments of memories you sometimes get. He did something he regrets, maybe… making the virus? But you don’t understand why he would, it’s allowed himself to survive for this long. Allowed you to do so as well, and not only that, but given the way it acts it could be classified as a whole new type of virus. You wouldn’t ever regret that, and besides he’s been prideful in the past about it before, what’s changed now?

Regardless now he just wants to just ease up on things. That was fine with you. You could do without the running from international government agencies, killing people if they inconvenience you, and being in the middle of some foreign country miles away from safety or home or anything that is remotely familiar to you. You’ve had a taste of it and you can’t say you’d be going back for seconds any time soon.

“I sense this is agreeable to you?” He inquires and you nod, although there’s a certain implication that his current desires leave you questioning just what his life was like prior to meeting you, or rather prior to be a virus. You hear him sigh beside you and the petting pauses.

“What is it now?” He inquires.

“It’s just, what you want now, you know it implies these were things you weren’t doing before- living ‘ normally’.” A brief flash of that memory you glimpsed from him, when he was falling out of what looked to be an aircraft. The pain, that awful headache, the blind rage, the drop in his heart when there was nothing left to cling onto, just air beneath and around him. Definitely not normal everyday activities, maybe that’s why he desires them now. Something he was severely lacking in his previous life that he wants to set out to experience now.

There’s a long moment of silence as he takes in your words and you look to him waiting for a reply, but his face shifts to look back towards the TV. His hand on your head, along with the extra help a tendril that slips from your collarbone turns it to look back at the television as well. The sensation of his hand drifts away after much to your chagrin.

“That’s enough talking and reminiscing for now pet. Watch your TV.”