Anima
Ada is not her name. The sound of it makes her lift her head in confused and foreign wonder. Her vision swims and sinks as a ribbon of hot, vitriolic blood sears a path from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
"Do you know why you're here, Ada?"
She hears his voice, but her movement was too sudden, her head too foggy, heavy. She gags, drops face-forwards, her shoulder joints twisting smartly, as her arms are held up by guards at either side. She sways drunkenly and vomits a black effusion of blood onto the floor before her. As she retches, her captors drag her back into a sitting position to face him. Her body shudders from the exertion. She steadies herself, smiles, and frothy blood dribbles down her mouth.
"I don't think it matters," she says at length, her voice wet and haggard from the blood bubbling up from her esophagus. "I know you'll inform me as to why you've brought me here, either way."
Wesker rises to his feet. She sees him in disjointed, dreamlike waves, an unfocused and unmerciful tide that pounds against her as it ebbs and swells. He appears simply as a black blur, flanked by another formless, shaded apparition that doesn't move. She knows by the sedulous proximity: Excella Gionne. Wesker's link to Tricell Pharmaceutical Company. His new pet.
Wesker steps closer. She feels the hard gaze behind his glasses. Her chin drops to her chest. Simply holding her eyelids open is taxing. She's spent.
"You know why you're here," he says. Takes another step. "Quite well, I'm sure." Pauses.
"And I want you to know—it was futile. Your actions are meaningless now. Though I commend you for your effort." Three more steps. He's standing in front of her now.
She mumbles. Her lips move, but she forces nothing but a weak stream of air out of them.
"What was that?" He hooks a finger under her chin and pulls her head upwards to face him.
She spits in his face. Then she sits back and smiles in bleary delight at the flecks of bloody saliva on his cheekbones and lenses. As she slumps forward again, he kicks her. She feels a rib snap. The pointed toe of his boot digs deep into her abdomen in that instant of contact. She cannot scream. She can only gasp for breath. Gasp. Choke. Another torrent of dark, viscous blood spilling from her mouth to the floor. Unforgiving pain floods her lingering awareness as a black fog creeps into her periphery.
She faints into blessed unconsciousness.
When she wakes, the world is white and cool. She has forgotten where she is, who she is. Reality hangs suspended over her for long, still moments, slowly surrounding her like a descending haze. Memories and fevered dreams piece themselves together like a patchwork blanket, the fiction that is these last few weeks of her life.
"Ada?"
That name again. Not her name. Only one person calls her that, who doesn't know better. She doesn't want to hear it right now—and yet she wishes she could. She's can't make herself wake up, and she wants to fall back into mellifluous, quiet oblivion.
There's a needle being pulled out of her arm. She feels the bitter metal slip out of her skin, feels a smooth rivulet of blood oozing out behind it. She groans weakly. She wants to roll away, but can't force her gelatinous muscles to obey.
"I know you can hear me."
She's waking now, and she can't avoid it. Her mind is rousing, reality and dreams steadily disentangling from one another. Reality comes as a storm of nausea and pain. She dreamed of a bed with cool, white sheets, the breeze from an open window, the sound of the ocean in the evening. She sees instead a stark, sterile room with white walls and floors and dim lighting. Hours may have passed. Days. Maybe minutes, seconds. Soon, she perceives that she's lying on the floor in a pool of her own sticky, coagulating blood.
Wesker is sitting in front of her. Above him and behind him are a myriad of screens and panels, spitting out data and diagrams and maps and satellite images. He is sitting back to regard her, holding his chin between index finger and thumb, elbow propped up on an armrest, and one leg folded over the other knee. He sits up when he sees her waking.
"Wasn't there something you wanted to say? I'm very eager to know what you had in mind."
She smiles, delirious, like she's sharing a joke with herself. Brusque hands pull her off the floor and onto her knees. There is a deep, jagged pain in her side, though it is now dull and muted by the painkillers she knows were just injected into her, and she remembers her broken ribs. She knows they've punctured vital organs, and that soon her body will flood itself. She struggles for a moment to find her voice.
"I wanted to say," she pauses to steady her withering body, "that it was worth it."
Wesker says nothing. Just regards her in stony silence.
She sees that Excella is still standing near him like a sculpture poised in the background. Wesker says nothing, but Excella speaks from her subservient corner.
"Why would it be worth it?" she asks, her voice heavily accented. "An artificial Las Plagas sample? Whatever you were trying to thwart, you've failed at it. We have Las Plagas, and now we have you as well. And you will pay dearly for trying to betray—"
Wesker silences her with a wave of his hand. He watches his captive through tinted lenses. She stares back, smiling her sanguine smile. The intensity of his stare and of her agonizing pain is crippling, but now she has nothing to lose. She is defeated. She knows Wesker wants her to answer the question, even if he hasn't posed it. He is waiting, and she indulges in these pathetic, meaningless moments of power over him.
"Even if you have Las Plagas," she says slowly, "so do the people that I believe should have it. Which means that your plans have been thwarted."
Wesker continues to watch her for a long, lifeless moment. Finally, he rises to his feet, laughing softly to himself.
"You think I wasn't aware of what you were trying to do? I know precisely to whom you gave that sample. And I want to assure you that you haven't the slightest idea of what I'm planning on doing with the Las Plagas parasite, even if you believe that you do. Your employers don't either. You've failed."
He approaches, circling her.
"I want to make that perfectly clear to you, Ada."
That name again. She doesn't wonder why he uses it. She knows why already.
"You have," she says.
The world is shifting again. From black to white. From white to black. She feels herself slipping. The temporary effects of the injection are fading. She welcomes the void that her death will bring, the blissful peace and the end to her pain. Spinning vertigo becomes a dive into an endless chasm as she collapses head-first to the floor. As blackness closes in to smother her, she hears a woman's voice, distantly, demand, "Don't let her die."
She wakes again. Alone. Her eyes won't focus. There is only an incarnadine, muddy light that throbs around her, refusing to separate itself into distinguishing and recognizable forms.
Frenzied delirium seizes her—she does not know where she is, and when she tries to move, she finds that her arms and legs are strapped down. She tears against her restraints until her wrists and ankles are rubbed raw. Heaving, she accepts that she is trapped. She decides to wait until her palpitating heart has settled before trying to make sense of her situation.
She is on something flat and cold. Metal. A gurney, she guesses. When her blood is no longer pounding in her ears, she thinks she hears water dripping somewhere nearby. She takes deep, steady breaths, collecting herself. She turns her head to the side, squinting, waiting. Her eyes slowly adjust to the faint lighting, and she begins to make out the tiles of the wall.
She is in a narrow room. There is nothing in it other than herself, the gurney, and a single bulb floating above her; like a pendulum swinging down to slice her apart, she imagines. The walls were once white. Now they are rust-colored. From dried blood splattered on them, she is suddenly aware. There is a single, solid door that looks more appropriate for a fallout shelter. That is all there is here.
She tries to remember why she is here, but can't.
Her only covering is a thin medical gown. It swathes her loosely, and when she shifts, it falls off her abdomen to reveal a line of stitches like a snake writhing its way up to her chest. She cranes her neck painfully to see it and finds, too, the dark discoloration of her flesh around the suture.
Ribs. Broken. She starts to remember. They healed her wounds, mended her fractured bones. She isn't dead.
Panic threatens again. She closes her eyes and concentrates on keeping herself calm, detaches herself from her surroundings. Yet she cannot escape the knowledge that the remaining days of her life will be spent in inconceivable torture—perhaps she will even be a test subject, an experiment, the recipient of a newly developed pathogen—until, in spite of the limitless remedies and restoratives that they will use to keep her alive, her body finally fails and she dies.
Ada. The name resumes prominence in her barely-conscious mind. Like a demand. She knows who that is. A persona. But that is who she will be for these remaining days, she decides. It is one of the last things she remembers, in her fragmented and perishing memory.
Only one person calls her that, who doesn't know better. He thinks it's her name. He doesn't know otherwise. He never will. She cannot stop her thoughts from wandering to him, from recreating the last time she saw him. A bed in a hotel in Bucharest, him sleeping, tangled among pale, pastel sheets as she dressed soundlessly and abandoned him in the early hours of the morning. He had tried that evening—unsuccessfully—to pry answers from her. She would reveal nothing, and she left him angry and defeated. The memory was bittersweet. She thinks she might have imagined it. Maybe it hadn't happened. Maybe it had.
She thinks back to him. By now, the information should be piecing itself together for him. Her betrayal, the fake Las Plagas sample, her true employers, her contributions to his anti-Umbrella efforts. She has left sufficient hints behind for him so that he is certain to know. He'll know what she's done, who she really is. She is contented with that thought.
Wesker knows all of this, too. And she knows that that is why she is here.
But her work was not in vain, she thinks to herself. She leaves it in capable, trustworthy hands. Her days of agony and torture will end soon enough, and all of her efforts will be successful in the end. She hasn't failed.
She is calm now. At ease. She relaxes, settling into her metal deathbed. She drifts back into fitful sleep, dreaming of the retort of gunfire, of the screech of a metal door being forced open, of a flurry of hands and arms releasing her from her bonds, pulling her up, forcing her away. She sleeps, waiting for the dreams to vanish and for reality to materialize again.
Author's Notes: I've been nearing the four year mark since the last time I posted a fanfic. While this is yet again another oneshot and not one of the many longer projects that I keep trying to convince myself to write, I simply feel accomplished to have completed this piece. I would like to thank both Neuromance and Ada Adore for their patience with me, for their encouragement, and for reading this and helping me finish it. Additionally, I am deeply grateful to those that take the time to review.