Chapter Text
Over the course of his life, Ethan had had many different perceptions of death.
When he was nine his grandfather died. Having only met the man once or twice, he felt more confusion than grief at the prospect of someone so solid and real being now unreachable. 'What is death?' was such an unwieldy question for a young mind to grapple with, and it quickly frustrated him that none of his relatives could give a definitive answer. The closest they came was endless platitudes of it being painless, that there was some pleasant land beyond the physical, populated solely by the thoughts of the dead.
For the longest time his thoughts were shaped by that, the idea of wide, white plains, opalescent sands, diamond seas, eternity stretched out bare for a hundred souls to trek across. It was a peaceful, compassionate place, cherry blossom and cool, clear waters on the senses. To face eternity without concept of what lies inside it is a daunting thing, and for a while the fabricated heaven, stitched together from scraps other people's fearful dreams, was comforting.
At sixteen, his aunt got into a car accident and one of his cousins—Max, the eldest—was crushed, and Ethan could only watch as mortality brought it's cruel gavel down upon his life once more, hammering it flat and grey. Death stood before him, ruinous and complete, and in the lee of its shadow lay only a barren darkness. That was where Max had gone, white bones swallowed by ink. Anything else was a lie.
It was the same when Mia disappeared. Polite fantasy fell apart and the void gaped its maw and she vanished in to it like a magic trick, leaving behind a conciliatory letter from her bosses and a video message that said 'I'm coming home'. Death was not a place, but an absence at his side, a woman in photographs, a calendar date—pick Mia up from the airport—that passed quietly by without event.
Death was hollowness. Death was seashells on the beach, hard, and empty, and eventually scraped away into nothing.
Then 'Three Years Ago' happened. Ethan was not a philosopher; he had never anticipated this question bothering him beyond a tertiary wonderment, idle existentialism, a morbid curiosity to pick at until the world inevitably called him away to other things. It was beginning to annoy him that death and its accoutrements were such prominent fixtures in his life and yet he understood precisely nothing about them.
What was death? Was it The Baker's strange afterlife, a sitting room crowded with the cold comforts of family, verdigris green and blue, ice-cold with unspoken sorrow and rimed with guilt? With strange shadows cast on the walls from wet light coming through windows that looked out on to nothingness the colour of lake-water, and a rushing susurration like waterfalls of satin where silence should have lain. Or was it Eveline's flattened, frozen world of mould, absolutely level, choked with fog that clung to him, cobweb-clammy, until its misery permeated his skin and became part of him?
What really waited for him beyond the curtain?
Now he knew.
Ethan stood alone in a forest made of midnight colours—navy, indigo, all the shades of dusk—with trees thin as needles, their branches curling like cat tails. They weren't anything he recognised; their limbs and trunks were spindly, with silver leaves shaped like eight-pointed stars. Gauzy, amorphous shapes hung from the boughs like strange, delicate fruits, filled with a lustrous, other-worldly sheen as though they were shafts of moonlight made physical. They danced the dreamy dance of seaweed, caught in a pensive current of breeze that Ethan could neither feel nor see affecting his own clothes; the hands of the wind, and indeed the whole world, seemed idly preoccupied, unconcerned with the bewildered man wandering aimlessly through its midst.
With absent curiosity, Ethan had run a finger along the nearest drape of luminescence. It rippled and blanched beneath his touch like a living thing, something flighty and uncertain of him. It didn't feel like anything, and didn't seem to like him touching it, so he left it alone.
It wasn't necessarily an unpleasant place to end up, just very...strange. The air had a very distinct scent to it, something somehow similar to both mint and lavender, lulling and cutting, and soon Ethan's head was dizzy with it. There was a syrupy thickness to it, almost as though it were smoke and not air, suffused with the pollen and nectar of the curious flowers that turned trumpet-like faces up from amidst the roots, speckled like robin's eggs. Aside from the satin sheets of moonlight glistening from the trees, these flowers were the sole source of illumination, dim, blue phosphorescence, the air about them algid. They stretched away, far in to the distance, apparently endless.
This must be death.
Death was beautiful.
Ethan started to walk. He had no destination, no direction, only an insistent need to get out, like a fishhook piercing through his naval and leading him onwards. As he went, the branches seemed to unfurl and rake softly through his being. It didn't hurt; it felt like loose hair being brushed away by tender hands, like dry leaves being plucked from the creases in his clothes. The further he walked, the more he lost...
Very quickly, he stopped being Ethan at all.
-X-
Time had passed. Precisely how much was anyone's guess, but he was certain he was no longer where he had started, and that meant that time had to have moved, like a boulder he dragged with him.
All awareness of the world he had known before was muted, somehow, the curtain separating it from him thickening from gauze to silver damask. He could trace the patterns and know what he would find before his searching fingers reached the grain, but he could no longer call images to mind as easily as he thought he should.
it didn't bother him. It should have.
Where before the sheets of moonlight had shied from him like nervy horses they now billowed invitingly towards him, some now coming close enough to stroke his face with clammy, gossamer fingers. He wanted to let them.
The sheet closest to where Ethan stood was a swathe of iridescent, green-tinged air that moved as though it were breathing. The closer he came, the more detail he could see—it was not, in fact, smooth, but textured like hair—and the more the scent of mint and lavender faded; the air surrounding the sheet smelled like rain.
Ethan glossed a hand over its surface, and it rose to meet him like sea-swell. It's skin, permeable as mist, was frothy and cool and alive.
Memories flew into his face, dandelion-seed soft, tangling with his own, pictorial, tastes of colour, flashes of sound, taking root in his core. Hot shrapnel, shrieking men, the thunder of massive engines. A searing, splitting pain in his spine. Sea water, dark and potent, pouring into his mouth, his ears, his eyes. Ethan snatched his hand back, but the feelings clung to the inside of his eyelids and persisted long after he had walked away.
The second time was more accident than design, as a gust of that intangible wind—or was it intangible? He was growing aware of subtle variances in pressure as he moved around—sent strands of a second sheet through his shoulder. A garden in summer, the sun blazing, the world smelling of boiled roses. His sister, Claudia, was there beside him—they were having a picnic. She was laughing, then coughing, then doubled over. There was blood on her chin when she looked up. She daintily dabbed it away with a handkerchief, took a bite of apple, and smiled.
These memories weren't his. But who's were they? Ethan looked around and saw no one, saw a world of trees and their strange fruits, saw a world in which he was the lonely occupant.
He pushed forwards. The trees grew denser and the winds grew stronger and were knifing. Stranger's recollections passed through him like shadows.
A ballroom filled with men and woman in elegant apparel. Their sly eyes pricked at him, each glance quietly deriding, not so much that he would be able to make a fuss, but enough to make apparent the fact that he was not welcome. A fearful confusion filled him; they used to be so well-liked. He stuck close to his mother's side and tried not to look to closely at the worried creases in her falsely smiling face.
Floorboards, gritty and splintered, dug into his face. His laboured breath sent little cyclones of dust across the room. He had to stay quiet. Mother told him to be quiet. No matter what happened, no matter what he heard, he had to stay here, stay silent. His heart was painful in its cage, bruised from beating so hard. Father had been screaming—why wasn't he screaming anymore? It was more frightening to hear nothing.
They told him he wasn't going to get better; he was paralysed, it was permanent. They were sending him back to Romania, honourable discharge. As he lay immobile, he thought of his village—chilled, and mountainous, his family too cold to rot where they lay in the ground—and the burn of tears joined all the other little agonies settled in his battered body. He should have died. Why hadn't he died?
Claudia wasn't talking anymore. Her breaths were harsh and fast, and her face was wet and pale. The only colour on her was the burgundy dotted around her lips, and every wracking cough brought up a little more; she had already coughed up so much blood, he was surprised there was any left for her veins. Fear fluttered uncomfortable, feathery wings within his chest, tickling over his ribs, but he did as he had been told and stayed, his sister's blue-tinged hand limp in his own. He couldn't be afraid, he would feel foolish for fearing later; father had sent for Mother Miranda. She would fix things.
There was a body lying on the kitchen floor. He saw it as she dragged him away. He knew why father had stopped screaming.
Drowned by memories that weren't his, Ethan had no awareness of the growing thicket of blue flowers, or the trees crowding ever closer. No knowledge of what was coming, what he was so placidly walking towards. Something—something gold, that flashed into existence and vanished a second later—caught about his feet and sent him sprawling to the ground, where he was once more engulfed by the smell of mint flowers, a cold-water shock from the rain-roses-perfume-metal miasma of the strips of moonlight.
Blinking a world of another's dreams from his eyes, Ethan stared over the edge of an abyss, a deep pit from which the wind originated and about which the forest clustered. Ethan felt far too light, as though, if he didn't have his hands meshed with the roots beneath him, he would drift away into the black sky. He wasn't frightened of falling—he wasn't certain he could fall.
No, the precipice before him wasn't what caused his blood to quicken or his throat to turn dry. It was the wind,
Which wasn't wind—was never wind. It was voices and they screamed.
"—My daughters! What have you done to my daughters?! Why aren't they coming home?—"
"—anything, why can't I see anything, why can't I see anything, why can't I see—"
"—would never do this to me! But it won't stop, it's killing me, oh god, it's killing me!—"
"—I have to get out. I haven't finished, it's not over, I have to get out—"
"I can't think..."
"I can't breathe..."
"I can't stop..."
"I'm dying."
They howled and raved, a dreadful, caterwauling melody, tuneless and brutal, a hurricane frenzy of rage, pain, grief, and fear that sent the strips of soul caught on the boughs fluttering like carnival flags. Ethan's head was foggy with their memories—too foggy to know if he recognised the voices for what they were, or if they were simply so integral to him now that he felt as though he knew them. His life was braided with theirs until all melted in to indistinction. He wasn't himself; he was a vessel through which desires flowed and very few of them were his own...
I need to get home. I need to get to Rose. That was him. That was Ethan. Nothing else mattered.
For the first time in hours, Ethan turned around. Behind him, in a trail stretching what seemed to be miles, he could see glistening strands trailing from the trees, and recognised the colours and contours as being parts of his own soul, torn off as he wandered.
With the desperate ravings of people he didn't know but whose lives he remembered as cleanly as his own calling after him, Ethan began the walk back, on shaky, infirm legs, collecting up the glistening fabric of his self as he went.
With every step he took, the cries grew fainter, their memories sloughing from Ethan like snake skin, losing their lustre and flaking apart like the pages of an ancient book. It felt as though they had latched on to him in absence of their owners, filling the gaps left behind where his own life was forgotten. Would he have forgotten everything and fallen into nothingness with those others, everything he had been thoughtlessly abandoned?
The blue flowers glowed serenely. Ethan quickened his pace. This place, whatever it was—death, limbo, insanity—it wasn't safe. He had to get home to Rose.
Each piece of himself was textured like a sun-warmed pebble, not completely smooth, pleasantly warm, but it smelt pungently of black mould.
The trees ended, their wrought-iron thicket becoming sparse quite suddenly, and the black ground beneath Ethan's feet unfolded in to a meadow made of galaxies—nebulas, and constellations, and a million stars, all strewn about the floor, abundant as wild flowers.
Ethan turned his eyes to the sky, which hung above him, perfectly blank, like a table cloth with the crumbs shaken off it, laid out fastidiously smooth. Where there should have been a moon, there lay instead a pair of immense hands—short, thick hands that were somehow very familiar—golden like molten metal. In their grip was what seemed to be sewing equipment; a needle longer than most men were tall but thinner than the width of a finger, a bobbin of crimson thread, and a cushion of pins with pearl heads the size of fists. The hands toyed with these items, almost absentmindedly, as though they had been waiting for something and we're keeping themselves entertained in the mean time.
As Ethan stepped from the cover of the trees, they sprung apart in apparent recognition and floated down to hover level with him, fireplace warmth emanating from them in waves. Unlike the flowers, which had become perversely threatening these past hours, the hands, though massive and terrifyingly spectral, did not frighten him; to trust them was instinctive.
The hands, quite expressive for faceless phantoms, gestured for the scrunched up fragments bundled in his arms and Ethan numbly passed them over.
The two then passed an odd but companionable few hours, wherein, every so often, Ethan gave the hands a fresh scrap of his spirit and watched as it was pinned and sewn back together with red thread, until the forming whole began to once again resemble something human. With every fragment returned, the world surrounding Ethan lightened and grew indistinct. Already the fringe of trees had melted away.
Three fragments left. The galaxy of flowers on the ground was winking out one star at a time, leaving complete blackness.
Two fragments. The red of the thread and gold of the hands were the only thing real things left in the world.
The last piece. It melted in to the rest and the whole was suddenly suffused with light, which bled outwards in an oceanic swell, obliterating everything in its path, Ethan included.
For a long moment, the hands were the only thing left, hovering in the void. Then they too blinked out and were gone. The screaming continued, unheard.
-X-
Something sounded like rain, but the world was burningly warm as it reformed. The air was made of boiling sand and compressed everything with the weight of a city's worth of ashes, as though he were one of the human statues of Pompeii, bones encased in a hundred layers of flaky stone. Blisters rose up under his eyes, under his nails, all across his skin as life surged back into the dormant body before, all at once, the prison fell away and Ethan was left blinking in something that was not quite sunlight.
In front of him sat the Duke, his massive silhouette outlined in all the shades of fire, one hand outstretched to steady Ethan, the other curled loosely around an irregular shape that had far too many needles sticking out of it for Ethan to really want to know what part it had played in bringing him back. He'd had enough trauma for one day.
"Where...Duke? Is that you?" Already the things he had thought he'd seen were burning away like mist on a window pane in the face of the rising sun. Had there been flowers? Stars? The part of his mind that remembered that place was shiny, smooth, and pale, like scar tissue.
"Ethan Winters." Duke's avuncular smile broadened, his steady grip moving from Ethan's bicep his shoulder where it squeezed in a gesture that conveyed both welcome and relief. "So good to see you! For a moment I feared...ah well, it doesn't matter; you're here now." For a moment, Duke's joviality wavered and the look he levelled with Ethan was one of absolute sincerity. "I am so very glad to have you back."
With the grey crust of mould crackling off, Ethan could see his skin, flushed pink with every appearance of life, the veins blue and warm in his wrists. Looking at him, nobody would have known he was anything other than perfectly human. Nothing about him was unusual, let alone indicative that he was a creature composed, in his entirety, of an ancient fungal monstrosity.
He felt like crying. Would those tears be mould too?
"Great to see you too, Duke." Ethan gave a breathless little laugh, a bubble of hysteria swelling like a cancer in his chest. "How the hell did you pull this one off?"
"I've become rather adept at fixing things over the years. There are some incredibly valuable things that require just the slightest repairs to keep their worth." Duke turned Ethan's head gently from side to side, eying him critically. "I'll admit, I've never done souls before, but rest assured, you are well worth the trouble." Duke released him. "Forgive a humble merchant for being so congratulatory of himself, but for a first attempt I think I've done a remarkable job."
It was so surreal to be back there. He felt as though only a few minutes had passed, and yet the world that reformed around him was barely a shadow of what he remembered, with all Miranda's efforts reduced to rubble and ash, cenotaph sculptures of mould grimly raised in defeat. Nothing of the village or its surrounding structures had been spared.
Was it cruel to be so elated to see an entire way of life destroyed? Ethan's face hurt, stretched over a smile that didn't feel like it belonged to him, a fizz of manic joy filling his throat and sealing it. It was over...
"You're fucking brilliant, Duke," Ethan rasped, stumbling over the rough ground towards the waiting horse and cart. "Where's Chris? Did everyone make it out okay?"
"To my knowledge, they're all fine," Duke reassured him. "Your family was in a helicopter when the detonation went off. If I'm right—and I often am—they're headed back to the head quarters of whatever organisation you were operating under. I'm sure they'll be taken care of."
Solace filled Ethan like cool water, taking the sting out of all the ruinous wounds he had sustained in the name of his family's safety. With a sigh heaved from the very depths of his soul, Ethan flung himself down on the bench, and was promptly jolted back to the floor when Duke sat down beside him.
In another world—another life—it might have been nice to just sit, breathing in the smokey air and revelling in the lack of things out to get him, but the absence of his little family was a splinter dug deep in his breastbone, and if he didn't at least make plans to move again soon, Ethan knew he would simply sit there, exhausted, until the shard sunk in deep enough to kill him.
The BSAA headquarters...they had been taken there after the Louisiana incident to be decontaminated, debriefed, screened, and sworn into secrecy. His memories of that place were whirlwind smears, and Chris hadn't been very forthcoming the few times Ethan had brought it up during one of the soldier's routine 'check-ins', but he was content with the idea that such a place would be safe. Rose and Mia would be secure and looked after; all he had to do now was get there, then they could be reassigned a location, and his little girl could grow up never having to know the awful truth of what her family was. What her father really was.
No amount of counselling, mandated or voluntary, would repair the hole left in him by that particular disillusionment. Neither Rose nor Mia could know.
The hole gaped larger. Ethan turned his thoughts away.
"How am I supposed to get there? My phone..." From his pocket he unearthed something that might have once been a phone, but was too badly shattered for him to have any confidence in that assessment. Lamely, he proffered it to Duke, pieces falling off as he did so. "Don't suppose you can fix this too?"
Duke took it obligingly.
"No. No, that is quite unsalvageable," he agreed, humming as he turned the charred rectangle over in the sepia light. Ethan cursed. "You're very welcome to accompany me—I was headed away from here in any case. Though..." And now his tone was somewhat forbidding. "I will warn you, I will likely have finished reviving the Lords by morning. I would ask that you try to get along."
The world halted and hung on its axis, suspended numbly at a tilt, the land slipping dismally into the sea.
Ethan only realised he had stopped breathing when Duke, rather worried, reached down to poke him.
"'Get along'? With the freaks that ripped my daughter up?" Was that his voice? They were his words, but the voice that said them was brutal. It wasn't the voice that Mia had coached in to singing their daughter to sleep, or the one that woke her up from her nightmares. It wasn't even the voice that had raged at the Lords until it was ribboned with hoarseness. Whatever this was, it was hideous with its hatred.
Duke sat there, apparently unfazed. Ethan was struck again by the vertiginous realisation that he stood before someone who had stayed, quite happily, in the heart of Miranda's territory, in open defiance of her, and had not only survived but profited.
"If you wish to be pedantic, I believe it was Miranda who quartered Rose." He looked searchingly at Ethan's increasingly murderous face. "But I see you'd rather I didn't split the details."
Levity aside, Duke was regarding him cautiously, concern lining his pleasant face.
"'Reviving' them," Ethan spat, and felt a distant relief when his voice was once again something he recognised.
"Yes."
"No."
"I'm afraid it must be done."
"No. They're dead." If he said it firmly enough maybe it would stay true, though Ethan's current 'firmness' lent more in to savagery. "I killed them. They're going to be fucking decent for once and fucking stay dead."
"Hmmmmm." Duke had about him the air of a teacher who is searching for the best way to explain to you the ways in which you are wrong, "Do you remember when you killed Jack Baker?"
"Which...?" Ethan started, realised where the sentence led—which time? Tumour-filled hillbilly, or rotting swamp freak?—and trailed off. "Shit. You aren't telling me they're going to come back worse?"
'Worse' was something that should have been impossible to conceive, and yet the mind swam with murky possibility: Dimitrescu, draconic, made of teeth, with a thousand screaming, snake-tressed heads; Beneviento puppeteering entire towns, clouds of sweet-smelling hallucinogens rolling through the streets; a leviathan Moreau lying, waiting, in the deepest trenches of the sea for ships to pass by above, his back a mass of writhing tentacles; a gargantuan amalgamation of metal and flesh roaming the continent for fresh meat to assimilate, Heisenberg's roaring laughter hollow and metallic over the loud speakers. The nightmare of Louisiana would be visited on an unsuspecting, unprepared world.
"Oh no, I'd never allow that." Duke sounded quite offended by the prospect. "I take great pains to ensure my products only cause the harm they're supposed to, and frankly the Lords are already a little destructive for my tastes. No, no—" The half-formed ideas of grotesquery were dismissed with a careless wave of Duke's hand. "Their return is, indeed, inevitable but I can control it to ensure they won't mutate further. They'll be their old, unpleasant selves, no more, no less."
"You make that sound like a good thing."
"Their entire world has come apart." Duke's voice was stern and speculative. "They have no leader, no home, no reason to keep going. I'm curious to see how they'll turn out, without Miranda's influence."
"Monsters," Ethan said, softer now, "They're just monsters, Duke."
"Like it or not Ethan, you are part of the mould. Indeed, now that Miranda's gone, you are the most powerful of its successors, and will be until little Rose matures to her full potential. Like them or not, you are stuck with the Lords. Either as they are, or as something much worse."
With a slight, involuntary shudder, Ethan thought of the pit; the specifics of the place he had visited were beyond his reach and growing ever further away, but he knew of the hole and it's many tormented voices, and was struck suddenly with the dreadful knowledge of what it was. It was a well, in to which the distilled essence of the infected was poured.
Wherever he went, he would meet them again.
Duke's satchel hung down from a peg, the bag dangling a scant foot from his face. Beneviento's doll stared dumbly out over the cloth lip, it's painted mouth ajar as though it were surprised to see him again. The urge to smash it was maddening.
"You can't just...make them stay like that? As crystals?"
"No," Duke lied gently. "I'm afraid not."
"I...I won't start anything." Saying that tasted bitter, like a betrayal of all the blood split in those last twenty four hours, as though that one concession were the surrender that would lose him a long fought war.
Twenty four hours...where had he been twenty four hours ago? Telling Mia that her bedtime stories were too scary...
But it hadn't been Mia. She'd been a monster, wearing his wife's smiling face.
"Good to hear!" Duke clapped a hand to his shoulder. "Who knows; if you prove to be a better leader than Miranda, you might gain yourself some useful allies."
Ethan laughed. Ethan laughed with manic and despairing enthusiasm until his ribs split apart in his chest and tears rolled down his face. They looked as diamond-clear as any other tear, but they were mould, just as everything was mould, and Ethan swore he could feel them clinging to his cheek in strands. It made him laugh harder.
The hand stayed on his shoulder.
-X-
'You're already dead...dead!'
He didn't understand what that was supposed to mean anymore.
Good thing was, it didn't seem to matter.