Marigold was trying very hard not to think about how easily she had adjusted to no longer waking up alone.

It wasn't working very well.

She kept coming back to those studies about touch starvation that had come across her desk back in the day. Children who weren't touched enough, early in life, would wilt and wither, sometimes to the point of death. Human touch, basic intimacy, it seemed, was a necessity of life.

Marigold had imposed her own moratorium on human touch long ago, as her virus matured within her body and made contact a dangerous gamble. The parties she attended back then, once she understood the risks, did little more than to slake the maddening edge off.

Poppy, her devoted chambermaid back home in England, had been exposed early and seemed to have developed a reservoir tolerance for her presence. It was still dangerous, but they had taken up a ritual where she had combed out Marigold's hair every few nights when she was at home. Utter bliss, for back then. If anyone had figured out that she was awake and out without prompting, it was likely Poppy. She hadn't dared reach out to anyone back home, not yet.

Every now and then she would indulge for real. The village and her staff back home were out of the question- that was just asking for trouble. Sweet, confident Kate, wanting to explore and play in a way rarely afforded to her, had been a bit more (she'd had her favorites, even as she tried to spare their minds).

After a while, her body had stopped craving touch quite so much. She'd grown a little colder, a little crueler. A little more imperious.

No wonder she had shut down at being handled. Marigold's body had gone into shock at the sudden, violent abundance, like an overdose.

And then, it had happened again with that first encounter in the gym. Her body had simply taken what it needed. The primal abandon of it had been horrifying…and breathtaking.

Afterward, goaded into attacking, she'd been forced to look closely at that euphoria. She'd trailed after Wesker, straight into his bed, almost drunk on the sensation. Marigold had felt so damned clever at the time.

She hadn't slept in her own bed once since that night.

Five days. Five nights.

She should have been worried. But, true to his word, she had slept. And, for a little while, the nightmares were held at bay.

She still dreamed, of course. The feeling of floating. She dreamed of people she had known from her past life, an age ago.

Kate, dozing off in a car.

Poppy, sitting in her old rose garden, watching the sunrise.

A young bureaucrat she had met in Eastern Europe years earlier, now a cabinet minister.

A desk, with a pale gaunt hand holding a snow globe. A cold, cold place, and that feeling of floating. A dark room, in terrible pain. Bound, helpless. Always cold.

The deeper sleep held her down in those places, made it slower to rise to the surface.

Then, every time Marigold rose to the surface, that watchful, predatory presence seemed to roll into a state of languid hunger. She'd wake to her own whimpers, halfway into that first cresting peak.

No two mornings were the same. On the fifth day, after seemingly exhausting themselves, Wesker had turned her face to his and kissed her, long and deep. She froze - this had meant something quite different, more weaponized, to her for ages. The monster that lived under her skin, however, had all but purred at the gesture. After a moment, Marigold had finally relaxed into the kiss, letting it deepen, harden, and soften.

More than anyone, he'd walked into this with open eyes. And if things went badly- more than anyone, he'd get what was coming to him. This all but sealed it. So why not enjoy the moment?

After a moment, Marigold had relaxed enough to let her hands wander, and Wesker had hummed in approval. Continuing this very important business of exploring her mouth, Wesker wound his fingers through her hair at the back of her head, near her scalp and pulled, forcing her head back so that she had to arc even harder into his mouth. It was the sort of move that had always turned her bones to water, a very long time ago in a slightly more innocent time. She had moaned into the kiss, shivering.

Wesker had paused then. When she opened her eyes to look at him, his eyes had a glow to them. Nearly feral.

She had stared, eyes wide. Swallowed hard.

Wesker gave her that fucking smirk again.

That was all the warning she got before she found herself pressed facedown into the mattress, holding on for dear life while Wesker pounded into her from behind.

She'd tried not to scream since they had fallen in bed together. As much control she had ceded over the short-term, she'd held back on that. Call it pride, but there was a practical element as well. With her moods as they were, it had been dangerous to let go back home, at the manor, with so many people nearby, and she had an image to uphold at Umbrella.

But then, without breaking pace, one of his hands slipped up, squeezing gently around her throat. He'd bent forward, trailing his mouth along her spine before sucking hard at the join of her neck and shoulder. Wesker sank his teeth into the bruising flesh, hard enough to make her hiss out in pain. Letting his weight settle across her back, keeping up the relentless pace. Marigold didn't tell him to stop. If anything, she arced up into the pressure, shuddering violently at the overwhelming sensations.

God help her, it felt like being marked. Claimed. The dual sensations of pleasure and pain swirled, amplified, primal. The orgasm tore through her so fast that there was no time to react, only release. Marigold had turned her face into the mattress to try to muffle the raw cries, to very little avail.

An hour or so later (or five minutes, or a hundred years; time was indeterminable in that state), he had showered and headed over to his office. Marigold was free to return to her room and read, or head back to the gym, so long as she agreed to daily vitals and tests. She headed back to her own room, to get a shower of her own and change.

The quality of the books had improved somewhat. She was working her way through a battered copy of The Sicilian before an ear-shattering whining drone burst out in a whine of static from down the hall. Marigold had heard it before, but somehow it was even louder. I'm fairly certain that dial tone had already broken under torture by now. Not sure why it hasn't already told you all where it keeps the narcotics, she thought, sardonic.

Then a feeling, like startled surprise. Something clattered to the ground down the hall. One of the muppets yelped in alarm. Then, in reply, Wesker's voice in her head. Now that is interesting.

Oh.

Bollocks.

"They're smaller now. So it sends pictures through a phone line?"

The muppets looked torn between being amused and aghast. The shorter one spoke, timid. "Were you homeschooled or something?" Wesker snorted in the corner. She glared at him. The taller muppet had the good grace to cough, sheepishly. "It's a network, miss. We send work through it." He glanced nervously at Wesker.

She also looked at Wesker. "Are there any other massive shifts of ubiquitous technology I ought to be aware?"

"That's the largest one, I believe," he allowed, from the peanut gallery. She got the distinct impression he was laughing at her.

"Hmm," she replied, then pivoted back to the machine. If she was 'broadcasting', she'd need to figure out just how blurred the line was. Standing around ruminating could be a problem if she aimed it recklessly.

She looked at the taller, braver muppet. "How does it work?"

Which was how she found herself with a slightly older, wiped machine in the examination room, isolated from the network. This was one of the rooms she could explicitly come and go from. The tech opened up a blank writing document, then a spreadsheet file to show the utility. "I think there's a CD-ROM of Encyclopedia Britannica kicking around," he muttered.

He explained the basic commands- copy, paste, save, close- and promised a list of key commands later. Partway through his jittering explanation of the TAB key, she leaned forward, ignoring the nervous tech in her fascination. "I used to do all of this by hand."

The tech- Stattler? - laughed, nervous. "I guess you could estimate a few of the baseline readings, eh?"

"Eidetic memory makes you dull at parties, but it's useful for a few things." She tentatively navigated the mouse around the screen to the spreadsheet window. "Charts? Ah, I see…"

"Show me," Wesker said from the doorframe. The tech jumped up, spooked at the silent approach.

Marigold ignored the theatrics. "Which ledgers did you actually recover?"

"December 1968 through to the following October."

Marigold wrinkled her nose at that. "First year in London." She had had a few…incidents…early on, while working out the finer details of her abilities. At the time, she had been required to be present at the London office. She'd managed to make her own name and start to bolster the investment profile of the nascent company back then. A few pompous young men at the office didn't like being shown up that way.

She'd dealt with it. Quietly. But, truth be told, not gently. One of the perpetrators became her greatest supporter back in those days, a true ally. The other, well…she'd had to figure out what she could do to Marcus somewhere.

"That book's a bit rough. Inconsistency and the data itself." was what she said aloud. She'd learned shorthand partway through that particular year, which had likely annoyed her keepers. Curious, she decided to just ask. How much are you picking up?

She could almost feel the contemplative tilt of his head. You murmur to yourself quite a bit. Hardly any definition there. I heard you complain earlier, clearly. And now, of course. Is that a problem? Smug*.* Possibly a bluff. That wary feeling was back.

Perhaps only unaccustomed to the abyss looking back from this angle, she snapped back. In a cool tone, she said aloud, "I'll see how much I can do with an hour or so."

They left her to it. The tech lingered a moment, but she waved him off. "I'll work it out, go on," she gestured to the machine. "If It's so terrible, I know where you are."

After a few moments of tentative exploration, Marigold began to type. That much, she could manage at least. The keyboard orientation was about the same as an ordinary typewriter, with more options to navigate and make changes. She fell into a rhythm of filling out a table with her readings from that year.

In the back of her mind, she fretted. Another variable. Marigold would have needed to know what would happen when interacting with other intelligent beings afflicted with the virus- and truth be told, she could do worse. She thought back to that morning and bit her lip. Much worse.

Marigold might have assured herself to be careful, but that ship had sailed. More worrying were the hormonal repercussions of prodding her stress responses and libido like that. She'd never fully given in before, and the first…symptoms…hadn't even shown up yet.

Maybe she'd get lucky, and they wouldn't come. This was the first time in ages she'd let her instincts take over. But she hadn't been lucky so far.

Taking a deep breath, she counted down from twenty before refocusing on the work.

Her thoughts drifted to her family. Alexander, keeping secrets, absconded to one of the most remote parts of the world to focus on building his Veronica. Alfred's neglect, trailing after his sister. Alexia's single-minded poise and drive. Even at eight, the girl had questions for her about pheromone responses, asking for endocrine data over the telephone. She had mused on contractile strength in individual muscle fibers.

Her monthly calls with Alexander had begun growing terse whenever his children were concerned. Isolation had been hard on her, and she had people around her all the time. Alexander had chosen the location of his exile. The children had never chosen any of it for themselves. **Marigold suspected a rift might have grown had she been given more time.

Deep down, Marigold had started to become very anxious about what sort of fate awaited her if she did end up at Rockfort at the end of the five years grace period that she had promised Alexander. Marigold had pushed the idea away at the time- what else was she to do? But the anxiety remained.

The full scope of the horrors had only manifested for her quite recently. It hardly mattered now that the only one left was a shattered shell of a man who facilitated Spencer's grip over the massive company, possibly as a means of keeping his hand in. Like Alex did. Like his father.

"There are incidents. Accidents. ..Do you realize that there's a whole paramilitary arm of the company now? Who do you suppose is more than happy to manage their training? I suppose watching you work all those years, he wanted to put a new spin on an old family recipe." Wesker's words, goading her into an attack.

Except…Antarctica wasn't empty. She had cast her mind out in that direction just before Wesker had…corralled her in, felt their presence there. She had briefly touched two minds.

Alexander, gone. Alexia, felled by her research. Alfred, broken, alone, cryptically warning her that a strategy was in play.

She stopped typing.

Oh god no.

In her mind's eye, she thought of a December day back in Rockfort, when Alexia had been so small, yet impossibly bright already. "Reputations are fickle things, dear. If the company finds out about me before I'm ready for them, then your hands will need to be clean."

What had they done?

Wesker's own sense of detachment had alerted him to the effect that Placidia- Marigold, he corrected himself, this wasn't Arklay- had in others carrying the stable T-virus. Fluid exchange strengthened the connection. Saliva shouldn't have quite that strong an effect…except that was also the primary vehicle for T-virus infection.

The coupling of oxytocin from a kiss with latent transmission seemed to amplify the effect to the point of telepathic connection -an extreme effect for a social bonding hormone. First a candle, then a torch.

That implied interesting things about Ms. Everett, who had only been a floor away. Interesting, though as it turned out, no longer truly relevant. Looking back, that effort had drained Marigold greatly, and she had still put up a solid fight. Had she not been taking suppressants, they might have lost the facility.

Without the suppressants, she took on a rather different set of vulnerabilities. Biochemical analyses, done regularly since her arrival, had produced some fascinating hormonal surges from her blood samples. She'd hesitated to ask for her medication on arrival, and hadn't said another word about it since. Still trying to hide the cards in her hand.

Marigold's viral expression had an interesting ability to heighten eusocial traits in those she held contact with. No wonder her niece had gravitated to studying ants, trying to harden the loose human eusociality into something more stringent. The family had held the blueprint all along.

He'd need to develop something to counter how his own system responded to her, of course. In a poetic turn of events, the neurology of the sort of person who rose to the top at Umbrella was likely resistant to the more domineering aspects of exposure to her. The enhancement of the T-Virus prior to exposure seemed to have gone a long way toward leveling the field.

Wesker had no intention of becoming another mindless automaton like he had seen back when Marigold had stepped into the initial trap. Yet…that near-encounter at the edge of the forest in Arklay was instructive in its own right. He'd scented her adrenaline in the air when realizing she was being watched, had felt a push of resistance emanating from her then.

Had her nerve broken and made her run, Wesker's newly heightened predatory drives would have overrun his restraint. Loathe as he was to compare himself to Marcus, the only true difference there in this regard was that the woman had managed to alter Marcus' paralimbic physiology before he had been exposed to the core virus. Wesker himself was inoculated just enough to hold the balance.

That constant impending threat of self-control had been a problem. Fortunately, the solution had some rather gratifying side effects. Gratifying enough that maintaining the solution would not create an undue burden on his other projects.

Speaking of which- his other work was meeting with mixed results. Sergei's intervention at the mansion had greatly set back his projections for HCF. All of that data. What he had managed to bring in had given him some tenuous footing with the organization. Just enough to give him probationary status. Just enough to redeem himself.

Getting William to come over would be a coup. Getting a hold of Ashford had been unexpected, and an amazing display of how arrogant Sergei, and by extension, Umbrella- had become.

Spencer had his reasons for keeping Placidia away from research, of course. The man could rationalize anything. The Tyrant program had been experimenting with means of controlling their behemoths for years. Parasites and computer chips implanted in the brain had both been used to moderate success- to replace minds that had been destroyed. No one knew how it would interact with a working mind, much less one that had developed viral equilibrium independently of their control.

And that last part- the part where Marigold had worked out the tenor of Spencer's intentions, if not the details, was the crux of it. Spencer had cut off his own nose to spite his face out of sheer pique. Punishing the surviving Ashfords had only confirmed the worst for the survivors. He'd forgotten that they were of the same stock- just as patient, but with the sense to keep the circle small enough to manage. There was something to be learned from that, but Spencer had chosen to react with a heavy and reactive hand.

Distantly, Wesker could feel Marigold struggling to maintain focus. A sharp spike of anguish came from her direction. Wesker was glad they were at an isolated facility for this part, at least. This would take some getting used to. In the meantime, the walls that his charge had built firmly around herself were crumbling down around her.

T-Veronica was real, completed. Wesker was sure of it. He'd been feeding Marigold just enough information about the surviving Ashford heir to direct her line of thinking to some rather dark conclusions. Dark, though very likely true, should his theories prove correct.

And if he could drive that particular fox into that den ahead of the hunt, he might just be able to take it. Birkin would make his move anytime now; HCF was already reporting suspicious activity happening around Raccoon City. If he could secure her fidelity, he could make up the shortfall from the mansion quickly.

As if on cue, a whisper came through from Marigold. I miss my knives. It had the air of a confession.

In his office, he grinned. There was nothing soft in that expression, nothing tender.

Spencer had been envisioning soldiers in his arsenal, a cadre of loyal thanes serving a central sovereign. When one emerged almost organically out of Marcus' malicious incompetence, they had trapped her like a feral animal and set her in storage. And now she was asking him for weapons.

This afternoon, they would test out just how well she knew how to use them.