This fic was requested by my little sister. We've been playing Resident Evil: Revelations. For all the trouble that they caused and the horrible things they did, we really felt kind of bad for Veltro when we got to the end and realized that they'd been trapped alive down there for an entire year. I can't even begin to imagine what that kind of isolation must have been like for them.
Also I might have been drinking a little while I wrote and edited this. I wasn't drunk, but I wasn't completely sober either, so if anyone notices any mistakes, would you kindly point them out to me so I can correct them?
They had been submerged underwater for...how long was it now? They were taking tallies so that they'd never forget what day it was, but they'd become too numerous to count at this point. They must have been trapped in the Queen Dido's air pocket for almost a year now. Every creak of the ship would cause them to freeze in place, worried that something unpleasant was about to bust through the wall from the sea outside. Every splash or thump they heard from down below reduced them to a primal sense of dread as they sat back and waited for an Ooze to make its way towards them. They never did. The T-Abyss mutants didn't even seem aware that there was anyone left alive in there. It seemed as improbable to them as it did to the actual survivors. The fact that they were still alive to this day was nothing short of a miracle. By all accounts they should have drowned or become something less than human by now.
The food that they'd managed to stockpile in time was beginning to dwindle and they could not risk eating any fish that might have somehow found its way past the mutants lurking in the flooded parts of the ship. Even if they didn't show any outward signs of infection, who knew if they were maybe just more resistant to the T-Abyss and would eventually mutate into something even worse than what they'd seen if left alone? There might have been more food somewhere in the flooded rooms, but they couldn't risk trying to swim to them knowing what was waiting for them down in the depths. Besides, they'd been submerged underwater for probably a year. Unless they were in vacuum sealed packages, most of the food was probably unfit for consumption by now anyway.
They had little in the way of entertainment at this point as well. Hashim had with him an old Gameboy that he'd borrowed from his daughter for his trip with two games for it. He allowed the others to take turns playing with it until they exhausted all the replacement batteries, which hadn't taken long since they had pretty much nothing else to do. They also had what few books that had been safe in the room when the rest of the ship was sinking, but one could only read A Modest Proposal so many times before it stopped being funny and started making a frightening amount of sense. At this point they were entertaining themselves by coming up with their own stories, recounting tales from their childhood, or playing card games. They had so much free time they actually invented their own with its own complicated set of rules and everything.
They wanted nothing more than to go home. It pained them to know that they would almost certainly die trapped down here and no one wanted to be the last one to go. Being able to say that you outlived the others didn't sound as fun when you considered it also meant you had to watch the others slowly die around you while you were helpless to do anything about it. After being isolated from everyone but their Veltro companions, no one wanted to have to face being scared and alone down here, waiting for death with no one to comfort you.
They were pretty much a family, united by their beliefs and their cause. The members of Veltro had always felt a remarkable degree of closeness to each other, part of which might have been appealing enough to help them gain more members. Many had joined after feeling a sense of belonging with them. Even the most awkward of social outcasts could find a home with Veltro. It was thanks to Veltro that Gilberto and Lidiya had even met in the first place and most of their wedding guests were fellow Veltro members. Jack Norman himself had attended.
Gilberto and Lidiya Leone were both lucky to still have had each other. This almost wasn't the case. Gilberto searched frantically for his wife, finding her in just the nick of time submerged under several feet of water in a flooding room. He managed to revive her and carried her back to the safer part of the ship before the Dido sank completely. The rest of the surviving Il Veltro members didn't have anyone aside from each other to call family. Most of their biological family members were thankfully still safe and alive back home, like both of the Leones' children. Perhaps they were worried sick, many unaware that their children, grandchildren, siblings, cousins, had been a part of Veltro to begin with and therefore terrified that they may have been abducted or murdered when they failed to so much as make a phone call for a year. A few of them had family that were also members of Veltro, which felt even worse. As far as they were aware, everyone that had been within the air pocket were the only survivors. Cafer constantly had to live with the knowledge that his little sister was probably a mutant and Ugolino never stopped thinking about his cousin that had been aboard the Queen Semiramis.
One of their few surviving members had decided that he couldn't take the constant fear and isolation anymore and he'd offered to try to swim for help through the flooded parts of the ship. They had begged him not to go but he insisted, promising to return with outside help once he'd made it to the surface. He never returned and the help he'd promised never came. To this day they had no idea whether he drowned attempting to swim to the surface without the proper equipment, got eaten by a T-Abyss mutant, or became infected and turned into one of those mutants that was currently swimming down below, almost taunting them to come into the water so they could eat them. Part of them wanted to pretend that he'd made it back to the surface and safely reunited with his brothers back home. It was almost painful thinking that he might have survived and abandoned them, but in the end they'd rather pretend that he was alright than admit that he was undoubtedly dead.
They'd lost another a few weeks later. Faced with the fear of infection and the realization that no one was coming for them, he seemed to snap into a fit of despair. He disappeared in the middle of the night (they think it was night, anyway- they hadn't seen daylight in a very long time) when he was supposed to be on guard duty with Ekrem. According to Ekrem, he'd left the room claiming he was going to the bathroom and then would be right back and never returned. Once everyone was awake and it was safe to leave them, he went off into the other unsubmerged parts of the ship to search for him but he just wasn't there. He might have let himself drown or get eaten, feeling that it was a better alternative than staying alive in their current state.
It was then that Norman had realized just how dire the situation was getting. He'd already lost two good men and loyal friends in a very short time span. He could not risk the rest of his Veltro family committing suicide or attempting to escape when he knew it was impossible for them to even hold their breath for that long. He forbade anyone from leaving his sight unsupervised, hoping that if they were always with at least one other person to look out for them, should they try anything the other would stop them. They didn't have much privacy to begin with in the small confines of their ship so they didn't think to protest his decision. It seemed to be working as maybe three or four months had passed since they lost their friends and no one had died since.
Soon he wasn't sure if that was enough. As he watched their morale harshly drop, he knew he had to do something or he could lose all of them. He started promising them anything. He promised that he'd find a way to get them all out of here alive. Someone would eventually want to investigate the remains of the ship and find them...he'd find a way to safely get a message through...anything to give them some hope. He knew realistically that if anyone were to come find them it would most probably be the FBC coming to kill them under Morgan's orders, but he would rather them think that a rescue was possible even after being stuck here for so long than face the truth. Even if they died, they would at least die thinking that their friends would be rescued eventually. Norman hoped to God that he was the last one alive. He didn't want any of them to realize he was lying and have them die alone.
He began to think about their ideals. Il Veltro had been called everything from a cult to a terrorist organization, but they themselves didn't view their cause as anything but noble. It saddened him that the world refused to listen and forced them to do the things they did, but he was certain that someday they would look back on the Terragrigia Panic and realize that Veltro was right. The more he thought about them, the more he considered that Morgan's betrayal was evidence that they were right. To Norman, who valued loyalty more than anything else, betrayal was the worst sin you could commit and Morgan would forever burn in Hell for what he did to them. He knew from the start that he wouldn't be able to completely trust him, which was why he took what he considered to be necessary precautions. He never would have trusted him to begin with if it weren't for the fact that it was the only way his people could get ahold of the virus they needed to exact their brand of justice upon the world. Morgan was neither Veltro nor a supporter of their cause and was only in it for his own gain, so to them he was an outsider. He felt nothing but anger and guilt for not having considered that Morgan might have a few "necessary precautions" of his own to ensure they don't expose him. He let his people down and there was nothing he could do to save them except keep them alive and happy for as long as he could.
The FBC had surprised them. Even though Norman had expected them to show up and finish the job someday, he still hadn't been prepared for when they finally did make their way in. Thankfully the intruders seemed just as surprised to see them as they evidently had assumed they'd be searching for corpses in a completely submerged ship, so they were able to get the jump on them and fend their attackers off. What they hadn't expected was that the bastards would bring the infection into their little haven with them.
At least one FBC agent had somehow become infected while swimming through the infested waters of the rest of the ship, which had somehow gone unnoticed by his fellow men, despite the fact that they were supposedly trained to be able to detect signs of infection. He managed to infect the rest of them. Norman wasn't sure how, it all happened so fast. Norman had been forced to execute his friends as they slowly began mutating to save them from having to live like the rest of their Veltro family, as an amorphous blob swimming in the lower decks.
Lidiya had turned first. Her husband at first tried to deny that she was infected even though she begged him to kill her which eventually led to his own infection. He eventually couldn't deny it anymore and had been forced to kill her himself and had given up all remaining hope for survival, going with her shortly afterwards. Ekrem had held out the longest and was determined not to leave their leader alone after the deaths of the others. He had actually convinced himself that he wasn't infected despite the fairly obvious bite wound on his leg and even considered that he might be immune. Norman said nothing to discourage him of his belief. He knew that in the end it would be proven that he was just as susceptible to the virus as everyone else and Ekrem would become one of them as well, but instead of panicking him, he did his best to keep him calm and under control, playing along with his delusion that he was okay until he had been forced to mercy kill him as well. He admitted that his resistance was very impressive and estimated that it had taken him two hours after the others had already been euthanized to even start showing signs of mutation. Norman almost began to believe that Ekrem was immune himself.
That just left him. He was alone now. Everyone else was dead. He didn't want to keep going on with no one to talk to and his only reason for living had been taken from him by the FBC. He almost hoped that Morgan himself came down here to retrieve his PDA, though he knew that Morgan was too much of a chickenshit coward to do so. He hadn't gotten what he wanted so Norman knew he'd eventually send more agents when the previous ones failed to return with the evidence he'd sent them to retrieve. He welcomed their arrival and wanted to slaughter as many of them as he could. If it were possible he would have swam to the surface himself right now to find them and have his revenge on them.
He stopped and considered that maybe if he were infected he would be able to make it to the surface on his own...the T-Abyss mutants would ignore him since other infected weren't a valid food source to them and he wouldn't have to worry about drowning if he didn't need to breathe. He had enough of the unused virus still with him that he should be able to induce a strong enough mutation to prevent becoming an ordinary Globster or a run-of-the-mill Ooze and become an actual, valid threat. He'd seen it before himself- the more of the virus you used, the more dangerous the result.
When Morgan inevitably sent more of his agents after him, Norman hoped they brought better guns. They were going to need them.