At first, the nightmares were lucid and they were always the same.

He was in the mansion, trying to escape as the Baker family voices teased and taunted from beyond the walls. "Ethan, Ethan! You ain't ever gettin' away!" and "You've got to find a way out of that house" and "I'll kill you! I swear to fuck, I'll kill you!" looped over each other discordantly as Ethan rattled every door knob, feeling hope fade and fear mount with every locked passage. Their footsteps shook dust and plaster from the ceilings. As he dodged and navigated to try and find a way out, the looming black bodies of mold staggered around him, around every corner, and down every hall with hellish, plethoric ubiquity. He didn't have time to pull out that old survival knife by the time the next ones appeared. Most of them he could outrun, and he darted between their dank, fibrous, pungent bodies and wrestled with the handle on the next locked door until they caught up with him. They threw their heads back with open mouths screaming with once human voices and sprayed black spittle into the air. They slashed at him and clicked their teeth with anticipation as they drew nearer to him. He bolted to the next door that he already knew wouldn't open, trying it frantically so it shook silently on its hinges. The voices crescendoed louder and louder until he couldn't think straight anymore. Panicked desperation mounted with every step they took towards him until he resorted to beating the windows with his fist, hoping his wedding ring might help to break the glass. He punched through in the nick of time, sawing his wrist on the shards of glass still lodged in the pane as he grasped for the handle from the other side. The molded were upon him now, sneering and throwing their heads back, lunging. He kicked at them, trying to buy just a little more time as his middle finger graced the smooth brass doorknob. He kicked again, feeling a scream buzz in his chest, soundless under the Baker's voices. One of the monsters slashed at his leg. He felt his hamstring ball up behind his knee. Crossing his arms in front of his face, he collapsed to the floor, and the monsters' box-cutter fingers and needle teeth tore him into a bloody pulp. As the scene faded to red, Jack laughed "you missed a spot! You missed a spot!"

Then he opened his eyes and expected the afterlife, but saw only darkness. The ceiling fan whirred placidly overhead and Mia's somnolent breathing was something to mimic until his heartbeat slowed and the cold sweat dried. He swallowed heavily through labored breathing and sat up slowly, pressing the heel of his hand to his temple. The Dulvey Incident ended last August, but it persisted in his nightmares ever since, and made it feel like it had never really ended. Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, he visualised that black mold buried dormantly in the creases of his brain. Sometimes he could swear he felt it spreading throughout his body like bugs crawling across his skin. He had a scar on his right arm from when he had tried to break out of his own body, but that was before the doctors. That was before things went back to normal, an idea that was only something hopeful people suggested when they couldn't even begin to fathom the hell that someone else had gone through. He had hoped Umbrella would have had some fucking idea.

He laid back down and turned onto his side, clearing Mia's dark hair from her face so her fair, moonlight visage shone dimly in the dark room. The locks of her hair cast a shadow over her face as he moved it, redolent of the spiderweb veins that circled her eyes before her various attempts to kill him. His brow furrowed with the pang of the memory, but he couldn't bring himself to be afraid of her. Eveline was dead, he had given a dose of the serum to Mia, and if worse came to worst, it was the same old song and dance. He brushed another lock of hair from her face and it occurred to him that killing his wife shouldn't be something he had gotten used to.

Mia stirred and inhaled deeply as she awoke. She blinked her eyes half open and smiled softly like she was gazing at a waking dream. She put her hand to his cheek, reaching out to see if he was real, and drew a sigh of gentle relief through her nose as she felt his solid jaw, smooth cheeks, the warmth of another person beside her.

He placed his hand on top of hers and turned his head to kiss her palm, then closed his eyes with that same concerned crease in his brow.

"Can't sleep?" She asked through a drowsy shroud that toned her voice higher.

He opened his eyes slowly and looked into hers, dulled by her recent waking, as if they could speak the volumes that his words couldn't. He closed them again and shook his head no. In the dark she felt his answer in the palm of her hand, heard it in the friction between his skin and the pillowcase. "Not since August."

"What's on your mind?"

A stretch of silence followed, bearing the same weight that the question did. Eveline's mold was on his mind, in the blackened creases of his brain. Jack's taunting that drowned out his own screams was on his mind and reverberated in his head like camera flashes popping one after another, and lastly, how sometimes when he looked at her, all he saw -if only for a moment- was that inhuman monster she had become at the Baker's. Each of these lived within him like a parasite that might kill him if he wasn't careful, but that concept was neither foreign nor intimidating now. "I didn't mean to wake you up," he dismissed quietly. "I know adjusting back hasn't been easy for you, either. Go back to sleep, and I can tell you in the morning if you still want to know."

Mia propped herself up on her elbow and shifted closer to him. "Ethan," she hummed. "If there's anyone to understand what you're thinking about, it's me. I was there. I saw it all, too." Her tone was sweet and knowledgeable and intuitive with no doubt as to what his stress pertained to. "You can talk to me."

"Yeah," he replied, and gave her hand a squeeze, dragging his thumb across her tapered, human fingers. His concerned look melted and he coughed a shy laugh. "Of all the people I could be fucked up with, I'm glad it's you."

"That's the spirit," she smiled, and the warmth of it gilded her voice. "I wouldn't have wanted to go crazy with anyone else."

The energy settled into something more sober and charged, as Ethan pressed the tip of his tongue to his lower lip and practised articulating the words he was about to say. "Mia-" he started, then cut himself off as every question he had accumulated over the months collided in his mind. There was too much to say, and he couldn't think of where to begin. The hesitation spoke louder than any following sentence could. "I've been having this recurring nightmare every night since Dulvey," he started suddenly, submitting to Jack's echoing call. "I know you have yours, too, but every time I'm killed in the dream, I get this really weird feeling that it's not quite a memory nor an interpretation of one." Probing curiously, he slowly asked, "do you still feel her?" He took the inhale to say more, then dropped his subsequent thoughts in an exhale and waited for her to answer.

"Feel her influence?"

"Yeah, you'd know better than anyone," he repeated. "Do you remember who you were before Eveline? There's no way we walked out of that as the same people we used to be." He placed a hand on her shoulder and took a curious pause. "Do you think everything that happened just changed you? Or can you still feel her?"

"The three years are a blur," she answered calmly. "I only began to get my memories back when Evie showed me around the Annabelle, and even still I don't know what was real and what was her." She thought to herself for a moment, scratching at the walls she had built in her mind to repress the memories that dwelt there. To feel two consciousnesses occupy her mind, to lose control of herself with no way of knowing when she'd regain it, to be forced to become that which she was not: a mother; an abomination. It was a feeling she recalled from the darkest labyrinths of her mind, and one that had not been easily forgotten, too pointed and too abysmal to replicate outside of Louisiana even in the faintest repercussive echoes. There were crippling flashbacks, hellish nightmares, and a slew of ticks and habits that she had acquired after the Dulvey Incident, but none came close to that horror she had underwent when Eveline infected her psyche. "No," she said finally. "She's gone, Ethan. You destroyed her with the Albert. Anything I go through now is just the result of trauma." She put her fingers in his coarse blond hair and pushed it across his forehead, as if it would help to expose the inner workings of his mind. "It's not her."

"Okay," Ethan said thoughtfully, and left it at that so he could process her words before speaking again.

"Why?" She pressed, and ventured a guess for fear he wouldn't otherwise tell her. "Do you think you'll lose me to her again? That I'll hurt you like I did-"

"No, no," he cooed over her elevating voice as she scared herself with the thought. "I'm not worried about that. After all, I gave you the serum. I saw you resist her, and, baby, you were great. You took that serum and you stopped your infection." He drummed his fingers lightly on her shoulder. "I didn't stop mine."

"Come on," she said patiently, almost tempted to laugh, whether from the absurdity of his suggestion or the fear of what he was implying, she wasn't sure. "You stopped everyone's infection when you took Evie down. Umbrella co-"

"I don't think it's over," he muttered under her gentle reasoning, but it killed the voice in her throat. "I don't think it's over," he iterated, knowing that she wanted to mishear him. Eager to try and prove it, he asked, "tonight, before I woke you up, what did you dream?"

Mia shrugged lightly and shook her head. "I don't remember."

"Try."

She pursed her lips tightly and scoured the recesses of her recent memory for one of many dreams that felt so drainingly repetitive night after night. "I think I was at the boathouse. Marguerite was there, yelling some terrible things. I jumped over the railing to get away from her, but some molded rose up from the water and pulled me under. I was drowning when you woke me up."

"What was she saying?"

"I don't know, I don't remember."

"Was it 'you missed a spot?'"

"I don't remember," she insisted. "It was just a dream. What would that mean, anyway?"

"I think it means we have unfinished business in Dulvey," Ethan convinced himself, turning onto his back and watching the ceiling fan whir through narrow incredulous eyes. "It's too real to be a dream. It's happening there, and Jack's telling me about it in the same way he told me about Eveline back in August."

"It's been eight months," Mia reasoned. "Umbrella has been in there cleaning up this whole time. I don't think there's going to be anything left of the house at this point. Not to mention Redfield already got Lucas and Zoe. What's left?"

"I won't know until I go," he stated, so matter-of-factly it became inevitable. "But if there is something I missed, then Umbrella's down there cleaning up a mess that hasn't ended yet, and it's only going to create more victims."

"Hold on, think about this. You can't just up and leave on a hunch that you got from a dream."

"I've thought about it for eight months, Mia," he said tiredly. "I'm going. And if we're lucky you can say you told me so and I'll be back within a day."

Mia looked at him a moment longer, saying nothing, knowing that any words she might conjure would be futile in changing the outcome. She surveyed him like it was her last moment to take in those little details about him that she had fallen in love with, from the patches in his facial hair he'd never entertain, to the gentle kiss he had set in her palm, to his strong spirit that now tore away from her. When she had her fill counting every idiosyncrasy she could think of, she turned over, shut her eyes, and left him once again in the dark room, where his mind ran untamed without the word of another. The thought of returning back to Dulvey put a foul taste in his mouth, filling his gut with dread and anticipation. He milled it over and over in his mind as the ceiling fan above spun in its same familiar circles, and hummed with an energy known only to itself.