The fit of their wedding bands hadn't changed, but it took longer than expected to adjust to the new weight and scuffed shine of their old rings. Both had sat dustless at the bottom of Mia's jewelry box and they now glinted like children begging for attention.
Mia twisted hers absently as the stone set in the center flashed rhythmically in the clinical fluorescent lighting of the waiting room. It clinked quietly against the stacked engagement ring. Personnel murmured and shuffled papers distantly. A blanket of silence covered them like the temporary deafness that follows a gunshot, so dull and muffled it could induce claustrophobia.
"I'm surprised you kept yours," Ethan confessed. His voice sounded low through the din of her thoughts. "I thought Eveline had made you take it off or something. Or it had fallen off with the shipwreck."
Mia shook her head. "It was to protect you, really. I didn't want anyone using it for leverage. The Connections was a dirty game to play and I didn't want any competitor to target you. Blackmail me to get to Evie." She twisted her mouth to the side and gave an embarrassed chuckle. "So much for that, though, keeping you away? I never did thank you for coming to get me."
"Sure. You're my wife, Mia." He took her hand and laced their fingers together warmly. "You know I'd do anything for you."
She looked to his face and smiled before watching the gentle strokes of her thumb over the back of his hand. "I was so scared you'd given up on me." She laughed with a nervous plinking, like a trilling of notes on a piano. "I was so scared you'd hate me after everything. I wouldn't blame you if you did."
"Come on, I could never hate you. I hated what happened to you, and who did it." He looked at her face but she didn't meet his eye, drumming her fingers with a pensive, nervous tick. "You were a victim in a huge corporate game," he continued, "but that's over now. Let's just work on moving forward."
Mia nodded, as a smile spread timidly on her face. "Okay," she agreed. "Thank you, Ethan. Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve you."
He smiled with a released breath, but before he could form the words to answer, a door opened, and a nurse dressed in solid blue scrubs balanced a clipboard on her hip. "Mia Winters?" she called. "Come on back."
Mia turned her head at the sound of her name. "I'll see you later, baby," She kissed his cheek and a smiled lingered in the light of her eyes. "I'll meet you in the car afterward."
"Sure," he concurred, as she tucked her loose dark hair behind her ear and gathered her things. "Good luck, babe."
She blew a kiss to him, then followed the nurse back behind the door to the examination rooms. The door closed, and she was out of sight. A different silence swelled in her absence. The clock on the wall ticked gratingly and as he twisted the ring he'd never thought he'd wear again. He blew an impatient sigh so his cheeks puffed out. An anxiety buzzed within him as if his blood had been electrified. Even without speaking, Mia's presence had been comforting. The anticipation of a medical exam began to feel more like a test he hadn't studied for. Failure meant the worst, and he had himself and Mia to think about. A swirling of what-ifs polluted his mind. What if the virus was still active? What if he lost Mia to Blue Umbrella research? Sure, this was the beginning of their new life together, but what if that new life led them someplace dark?
"Ethan Winters?" He jumped, and the nurse acquired a more apologetic tone to his voice when he announced,"We're ready for you."
His heart rate didn't slow as he followed the nurse back to one of the many rooms along the hallway in the back. "Right in here, please," the nurse gestured. "I'll be back in one moment."
Ethan hesitantly lifted himself up onto the examination chair and looked around the room. The paper underneath him snickered as he shifted his weight and tried to ease his nerves and simmer his racing thoughts. A jar of cotton balls sat non threateningly by the sink, until Marguerite's mutated form corrupted their likeness to sacks of insect eggs. The gauze was fine until it reminded him of the white veins of calcified mold. There was nothing offensive about the tongue depressors, so he kept his eyes on them, counting them, until the nurse came back into the room.
"How do you feel today, Mr. Winters?" he asked politely.
"Fine," Ethan answered. "Glad that this is the last visit for a while. Feels like Mia and I have been in and out of here constantly since Dulvey."
"Glad to hear you're doing well. We've definitely been thorough with the case of you and your wife," he said pleasantly. "You've been responding well to the tests so far." He switched on a light board and began to hang up black and white scans. "Your MRIs came back as expected."
"Let me guess," Ethan said dryly, looking to images that wordlessly defined pathophysiology. "No good news?"
The nurse maintained a professional face. "There's still ample E-series matter in your biomass," he said, and gestured to a few dark blotches on the film. "It should be benign considering E-001's termination. We've got Alpha and Charlie teams investigating the scene as we speak to ensure the virus doesn't spread. If their report comes in continuity with yours, then we won't need to run any further tests. Until then, we'd like a blood sample to pair with your scans, so if anything should change we have you on file."
"Sure," he agreed. "Makes sense."
The track marks from the steroids still freckled his arm, and the white line and dots on his wrist textured his skin like road paint. He rolled up his sleeve while the nurse prepared the needle and the vacuum sealed test tube. All the scars that newly decorated him settled into his skin with a dull ache, but the initial pain was lost. He couldn't conjure the pain of the slashes from the molded monsters, or the crunch of his nose under Jack's boot, or the chainsaw tearing through the bones and ligaments in his wrist. He leaned back at the nurses instruction and a vapid, clinical, sterile smell filled the room and cooled the crux of his elbow. He could relive everything: the darkness of the house, feeling the rough splintered surfaces to navigate, while Jack's high-pitched laugh shrieked through the growling of the vibrating walls. The wet smell of rot and blood permeating through the house and the redolent taste of the Baker's supper indelibly stood out. He didn't blink when the needle bit into his veins. There it was: fresh pain. It didn't dredge any memory from the depths. It only paled to something insignificant, amongst a recollection he had no access to. He watched the blood stain the flexible rubber tube, ooze down the vessel, and darken from crimson to maroon to near black. At least it hadn't come out black, he thought, as the meniscus of his blood crawled steadily higher. He wondered if it would take long to heal the needle into his arm, and if it was already too late.
"Okay," the nurse said, pressing gauze over the sunken needle and withdrawing it at an angle that tugged playfully at his skin. "That should be all we need from you today. Do you have any questions?"
"Yeah," he answered distantly as a box labelled "biohazard" was opened, and the used needle discarded. He traced the symbol over in his mind, the grand tapering arcs that came so close to connecting, like three pairs of razor pincers emerging from the inner circle, a common space from which these teeth scoured for flesh. From which boxcutter claws swept for a clean kill. From which mutilated bodies spilled from their cooled morgues and rose, inked and corrupted.
"Okay," the nurse prompted. "Ask away."
Ethan blinked the gruesome visions from his mind's eye. "Yeah," he started, "sorry, yeah. You mentioned that if Blue Umbrella's report comes in continuity with my testimony then there's no need to do further tests."
"That's correct, yes." The nurse checked under the gauze and retrieved a roll of medical tape.
"What if it doesn't come back the same?"
"Then we'll do our best and handle your case as well as we can. One of the missions for Alpha and Charlie is to retrieve samples of the E-series so that an antidote serum can be made. You and your wife will receive the serum as soon as its created just for good measure." The tape pressed the gauze into the new bruise, the small puncture wound already clotting. "Full contamination takes about two weeks. You haven't had any episodes since extraction, have you?"
Ethan shrugged with a confused resignation. "I can't tell what's a hallucination or, I don't know, PTS memory. I know full infection takes two weeks, but," he searched for the words. "I feel like my symptoms escalated so quickly over the course of the night. I don't want to turn into the same things the Bakers' did. I've been having these nightmares."
"That would be common following an experience such as yours."
"Yeah, but they're not unsimilar to the one I saw on the ship." He laughed with a kind of nervous disbelief. "I know it's gonna sound crazy, but I feel like they're trying to tell me something."
The nurse tipped his head and picked up a clipboard on the desk beside him. "What do you think they're telling you?"
"I don't know," he muttered. "It's like… it's like when you're standing on a high ledge and you get the impulse to jump. It's like something in me that's not me."
"What's it telling you?" he pressed.
Ethan pursed his lips. The words he kept in his mouth left a bitter taste, until the pungence became too potent and he confessed, "that I should go back. Well, not that I should. That I want to."
The nurse nodded in professional understanding and clicked the pen at the top of the clipboard. The ball of the pen scratched woodenly at the paper pinned to the stiff backing. "We were going to prescribe this to you anyway," he began. "Considering your experience and circumstance, Blue Umbrella thinks it prudent to put you in a few sessions of mandatory counselling. It'll be a good space to get a more in-depth look at this phenomena you've been experiencing." He handed Ethan the paper he had written upon. "Is there anything else you'd like to ask?"
Ethan read over the slip slowly a few times, then looked back up to the nurse. "Nothing I can't run past a shrink," he said icily, with a cordial smile.
"In that case you're all set," the nurse replied neutrally. "Here's a copy of the procedures done today. You can check out at the front desk."
His mind was so crowded with a mix of thoughts all running into each other that he hardly remembered interacting with the receptionist. He left the facility in an absent daze, walked out the parking lot, and shut the car door a little too hard. Mia jumped and put her hand to her sternum. "Jesus, you scared me."
"Sorry," he sighed through his teeth.
A look of worry crossed her face and she tipped her head and tried to read his expression. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah," he dismissed, twisting the key in the ignition. "Remember what I said about moving forward? Talking about what happened just puts me on edge."
"That's fine, I felt the same when I got out," she said. "No bad news, I hope?"
His veins felt like whining pipes fit to burst. His elbow ached stiffly where the tape and the clotting restricted his movement. "No," he said, and forced a quick smile to his face. He pulled the gauze off and watched the blood bead at the site, crawling down his forearm like a red leech that left a trail. He took a slow sigh, too gentle for Mia to hear, relieved that it hadn't healed instantly. He wondered if he could see the black flecks amongst the crimson, or if it had only stayed up in the creases of his brain. "Everything is fine," he answered finally. Mia smiled and the lines by her eyes crinkled. They spiderwebbed out from the sockets, and the sun on her face washed her complexion to a ghostly, haunted white.