"You know," Rose says, "I have the strangest feeling that this is a bad idea."
She's kneeling on the ground in the apartment building, gun at the ready as she glances around the hallway. Lu is still picking the lock with a paperclip and a bobby pin, both rusted and battered by the elements. "It's too late to turn back," the younger girl insists, with only half a waver in her voice. "Hang tight. I'll figure it out."
A rustle comes from down the hallway, and Rose whirls her gun around to face it. It's not a zombie, thankfully, but just the walls settling. That's not much better, not when the yellowed wallpaper started to fade into green moss the closer they got to Henir's apartment. Rips and tears like claws in the wallpaper show the virus has settled into the crumbling drywall, too.
In all honesty, Rose and Lu should be dead.
But here they are, trying to get into Henir's lab. Despite the fragile state of their team, Elesis gave them the go-ahead with the reconnaissance mission anyways, and Rose would be lying if she said she didn't resent her a little for it. We're on the verge of falling apart, she thinks mournfully, and she's still trying to be the hero.
So then they argued, all seven of them, for hours over who gets to head into the fray. Elesis herself wanted to make the trip, and was immediately shot down by Ara and Ain both. Lu volunteered because she's the lightest and the fastest and has gotten the most cumulative sleep lately, and Rose offered to come with her in a bit of an awkward reconciliation over the convenience store disaster that they've both sort of accepted. It's not like they had a lot to talk about while getting to the apartment complex.
But actions speak louder than words, and Rose hears the forgiveness in Lu's vulnerability. She's got all her attention trained on the door lock, her furrowed brow and pouty lips trapped in a cute childhood innocence. She's trusting Rose to watch her back, and Rose isn't about to let her down when this building is literally ground zero.
Her medical mask crinkles with each slow breath she dares to take. The seconds tick away erratically, a far cry from the hours she spent staring into oblivion that night in the pizza joint.
This is for humanity, she tells herself. We're doing this to save everyone. Once it's over, I can go home.
And yet, home isn't her tidy suburban house in Empyrean anymore. It stopped being that tidy suburban house when she left, when Papa died and she decided to stop being that little girl. Home is with this ragtag bunch now, this little family that took her in when she was on the verge of shattering. Home is complaining about dead electronics with Add, and talking about food from Before with Lu and Ciel, and trying on newfound clothes with Ara to see who can wear them, and correcting Ain's broken Empyrean. Home is at Elesis's side, watching her swing that baseball bat in a shining arc and matching it with a spray of bullets.
She wonders if anyone else feels that way.
Lu swears under her breath, and the door clicks and shrieks as it's forced open. A wave of some inhuman stench floods out, and for a moment in the world of festering flesh and crumbling walls Rose nearly loses her balance. "We're good," Lu announces to the not-quite empty hallway, and Rose sighs and gets to her feet shakily. "Let's go."
The first thing Rose notices is the clock on the wall. In life, it might have been beautiful, a cuckoo clock with a trellis of roses and a moon upon its pendulum among dangling stars. Now, in its death, it is a ghost of its master craftsmanship, blanketed in viral moss and festering, bubbling with life.
This wasn't always a lab.
It was, once upon a time, a home.
"We can't stay here," Rose murmurs, and Lu doesn't quite respond. "Let's try to find something useful and dip as quickly as we can."
Her lungs burn as she dares to take another shallow breath and inhales the pungent scent of science gone wrong. It was cruel, cruel of them to come here in the first place, to think that they could last longer than this virus. She turns over a spatula on a green-veined table and finds virus seeping into the rotten silicone, eating away at the wood inside the handle. It falls to pieces in her fingers, and she lets it drop to the floor soundlessly.
Rose hates it in here. She's supposed to not be afraid of death, but here she is, not quite cowed by what transpired three years ago but practically frozen in the face of what has grown since. Try as Ain might to convince her that viruses aren't technically living things, the world of the undead still terrifies her horribly.
This isn't right. No one should be capable of making something so awful, and yet Henir apparently has, apparently did. Giant glass pipes run the height of the kitchen; Rose uses the fragments of the spatula to scrape off the layer of moss growing on one, and nearly throws up as a human eyeball floats suspended in the murky liquid inside.
"That one's was a kitchen," Lu says, coming out of a nearby room. Seems right; Rose can make out the shape of a stove buried under a mountain of moss. "There's a bathroom over there, you can tell because the bathtub is full of chunks." She swallows. "Rose, I… I'm scared. There's far too many rooms in this apartment for a single man."
Something clicks in a moment. "The files that we found in Altera," Rose recalls, "they said that Henir was divorced. Do you think…"
"He lived here with his partner and child? Absolutely." Lu grimaces. "I think I've got something of a layout memorized. We should go as soon as we can."
Rose stares into the hallway leading to the other rooms. It doesn't seem right that it ends in a wall, a dead end, not when this was once a fairly affluent neighbourhood. "Lu, how many of the rooms seem to be bedrooms so far?"
"Uh, one." The younger girl points to the door in question. "Don't bother going in. There's also another bathroom, actually, but…"
They approach the second bathroom together, Lu clinging warily to Rose's shoulder. The door barely moves, and it's dark as all hell, but when Rose swings her flashlight into the dark, something not quite liquid gurgles from in the bathtub and splashes over the edges like some witch's brew come to life. Lu whimpers, and in that moment Rose reaches out with lighting-fast reflexes and slams the door shut.
And then there's the matter of the end of the hallway. The wall is covered in moss, but if Rose squints, she can just make out the shape of a door handle, hinges on the other side. "Stay back," she tells Lu, who obliges happily and retreats a safe distance away.
Every inch of her is burning. The world around her is so horribly not-dead, so horribly alive that the walls feel like they're breathing. Rose is terrified of this world and furious that someone made it this way, that she has to live through it now in fear just to see another day—
Her boot goes right through the rotting wood of the door, and as she pulls it back through the hole she's accidentally made, the entire door falls off the hinges and collapses to the ground.
And then it gets worse.
"This room is completely untouched by the virus," she gasps, as Lu rejoins her hesitantly. "Wha— where is this?"
"Henir had a child," Rose says, and thinks she'll be sick to her stomach. "There are two bedrooms. It's the only possibility I can think of."
It is so horribly empty, and in the too-silent void of the empty room flooded with sunlight Rose feels like the world is going to tip over and bring her down with it. A too-small bed, with sheets still carefully laid out in now-faded patterns of dinosaurs. A crumbling corkboard with a child's earnest crayon drawings, colours fleeting in the sun. A framed photo, browned in the cruel sun, of a woman's laughing face and the soft smile of a young boy.
If this apartment is ground zero, then this room must be the eye of the storm, a terribly untouched oasis in the living nightmare. Lu looks at Rose with such a pained expression, and Rose nods, and they run, away from the walls that pulse like heart muscle and drown their lungs in virus where they stand. Rose doesn't dare breathe until they've made it far out of the room, the hallway, the building, the entire accursed neighbourhood.
Lu scrubs her hands until her gloves fall off, and tears the medical mask off her face. She's crying. "I want to go home, Rose," she whimpers, and every bone in Rose's body aches but she still gathers the younger girl into her arms and holds her tight, grateful to be even alive. "I just want to go home."
Rose agrees with her. She really does.
But after seeing what home was to Henir, she's not really sure she knows what kind of home she wants to return to.
A/N: *laughs nervously* happy 2020
so i've been dead for like a whole month, and i'm just wondering in deep confusion how i ever overcame nanowrimo burnout in the past. i uh did in fact win nanowrimo 2019 (i'll be putting it on ao3 instead of here for formatting reasons) and then i got slammed with finals. uni's been weird but i'm getting along. also the winter break was weird and i spent most of it asleep
but yeah it be 2020! i'm gonna try and finish WtWE this year, because i don't want to lose steam on it before i finish it. also as you can probably tell my entire posting schedule has been thrown off, but i'll try to keep things on track from now on! please hold me to it. send me angry reviews if i disappear again
let's make 2020 the year of good writing
~Marg