October 3, 1998
Ada Wong stirred, then opened her eyes to the mid-morning light streaming g through her window. The recovery wing at the HCF facility she'd been transferred to was reasonably upscale, by hospital standards. A swath of country estate, completed with trails, manicured groves of trees, and ponds, was visible out the window.
A small card had been set on her nightstand. More orders? Ada picked it up to find that it was an actual embossed greeting card, advising her to Get Well Soon in a spidery scrawl. The plain card was signed with the initials MA. Ada studied the handwriting thoughtfully. The woman who had provided them cover at the RPD station hadn't bothered to refute any insinuations of her identity.
An attendant was putting away sheets on the other side of the room and finally noticed that she was awake. They noted the card in her hand. "Oh- there was a lady come by here yesterday. Asked me to leave that." They seemed on edge. "They'll want to talk to you, now that you're awake. The operations team, I mean. I'll get the doctor," they said and hurried out of the room, task abandoned.
Everything hurt. In the constant unceasing panic of the outbreak, Ada had constantly been moving, medicating her pain, and focused on getting out with both the sample and her life. Adrenaline had helped. Knowing that she had to be ready to fight for her life at any moment had buoyed her system into a state of constant readiness. Now, after several days of apparently chemically-induced rest (from the look of the IV in her arm), she'd finally been able to stop moving. 'Motion is lotion, rest is rust' - a proverb of the quaint little drill instructor at the Simmons' estate. It was fitting to this situation. Trying to sit made her feel like her spine had rusted through while she slept.
She pulled herself upright anyhow. That attendant had been under orders to find a superior the instant she awoke. There was no avoiding it. She'd likely spend at least the next week in debriefing, going over and over what she had seen and found in the now-dead city.
Ada Wong refused to look weak if she had any say in it at all.
Several long minutes passed. Finally, the man who had arranged her exit ride out of Raccoon City appeared in the doorway, dressed in a crisp black suit, with dark glasses. "Ah," Ada said, her cool, slightly bored mask firmly in place. "I see I merit a personal visit. Should I be flattered?"
Albert Wesker ignored the comment. "That was adequate work. If a debriefing were scheduled for this afternoon, would you be ready to begin?"
Ada shrugged. "I might as well. There doesn't seem much else to do around here." She gave the card a little glance. "That girl you sent back in was a trip. She needs real training, but she improvised well in the field. Seemed like she could stand to get out a bit more though." She paused a moment, contemplative. "My previous affiliates had some very interesting questions before they cut the phone lines to the city."
Wesker stilled, just for a moment. Then, "I'm sure they can add that to the report. Good day, Miss Wong."
Then he left.
Ada waited for the footsteps to recede, and spared the card a tiny smirk. Once her spine felt like it wasn't filled with broken glass, she would have to track that girl down. She'd committed to something here, after all.
And she was going to owe Ada a favor.
The mid-morning air was warm as Marigold's feet began to pound across the manicured trail of the parkland around the facility. She'd made three circuits of the winding road, spread across a dozen acres. She'd make several more before giving up for the day.
Her headaches had come back with a vengeance after she'd finally released her tension, despite them not coming back earlier while pushing herself in that doomed little town. She didn't have the clearest memory of what had happened after Wesker had stepped in the shower with her following the end of the mission - only that the tiling on the walls had been cracked in several places when she snapped back into alertness, afterward.
Marigold wasn't sure yet whether she preferred it that way. It hadn't been a blackout like before, more a sinking shifting into something that shunted aside trivialities like rationality and inhibitions. It had felt like her mind had ceded all control of the situation to her libido, and to him. Something about that felt significant.
The fresh air was helping the headaches. The appearance of her eyes had stayed the same, but the people at the facility had (nervously) scheduled an ophthalmology consultation later that week. Before her life imploded in 1981, her eyes occasionally showed signs of temporary nerve damage and bleeding after pushing herself too hard, but this time they haven't reverted after resting, or bleeding off energy. Before, it was an incredibly rare occasion when someone was on hand to work out what was happening. Very nearly all of her recovery work had been therefore based on guesswork and extrapolation from her own notes and drawings. Alexander had done what her could when she had visited with her armloads of paperwork, but such had only gone so far.
She was stabilizing now, under close observation. The mission had earned her a little space, so long as she did not approach employees or attempt to leave the grounds. A monitoring bracelet mag locked on her wrist tracked her movements at all times.
So. She'd run their little test track. Earned a little space. What now? Now that she'd shown that it was in their interests not to make her disappear into an observation room for the next seventeen years, how would that be used? She hadn't run screaming to the nearest payphone or wept in terror at the sight of that pack of hunter beasts. What would be the point? Everyone who had any power in that catastrophe had looked away.
She wondered, not for the first time since the bombing had happened, whether Jill Valentine had made it out alive. Ada might know, if Ada were inclined to tell her. Not for the first time, she wished that she had told Valentine the whole truth, that her ex-captain was alive, that she barely knew a damned thing.
But where would that have led? Valentine had been determined to find half a reason to stay back and help. Giving her a focus that she could reach, rather than one lurking out there in the dark when she had to focus on her more immediate survival, would have been cruel. And the STARS officer would have had so many questions, would have tried to follow.
Wesker hadn't had to threaten much to assure himself that she wouldn't run, when he was setting the terms of her venture into the city. Knowing that the man who managed and programmed the orders of the Tyrants she had seen on first awakening - Sergei Vladimir - would be a short distance and an anonymous tip away had been harrowing enough to hold her to a strict schedule.
And then there was Wesker himself. He had stayed away from her since they'd rendezvoused at the sprawling HCF facility, but she knew he was around.
He had kept asking about the twins, before. Rockfort's training ground, built in the late 70s, and matured when Alfred had grown old enough to manage it. Alexia's research and the culling of her family tree. Marigold had deflected the questions and repeated her usual lies of distancing herself from the family. Back at the other lab, he'd pulled it back at the last moment, but those targets were clearly viable to HCF.
Wesker would circle around again. HCF would want to strike Umbrella while it was weakened.
For the moment, Marigold had to hope her warning to Poppy was enough. If her little trick at the police station had worked, the network, the collection of people within the organization and around it whom she had cultivated over the 1970s, would finally be in play.
Hours passed. Marigold pounded over the same ground over and over again until she finally started to feel lightheaded. A light lunch appeared in a nylon sack on the bench that defined her starting point. The staff here had taken note of her habits, and someone had been notified to bring it out here to take outside as soon as her pace had begun to dip. Those within this company, HCF, seemed to be assessing her from a distance. It was an oddly familiar little routine; the staff at the house back in England would do something similar when she was out tramping about the moors at all hours of the day and night.
When she returned to her quarters, she found Wesker seated in the small living space they'd created for her. The furniture here was subtly, but suspiciously, reinforced. As if she hadn't worked out how to coexist with the world yet, and were making 'accommodations'.
Marigold paused in the doorway, unsure of how to proceed. The precious bag filled with journals was stashed under her bed. Somehow, the bag had escaped Wesker's notice in the wake of what they'd done. The contents of the chest, and the video feed of the encounter with the hunters had been enough. His focus, in proximity to herself, had…narrowed.
So the bite had been enough, then. Before then, all she had managed to do was bind herself to him. Reinforcement would be required, of course.
She didn't imagine he would be terribly averse to the delivery mechanism.
Wesker rose from his seat when Marigold finally stepped the rest of the way inside and shut the door behind her. She watched him warily as he walked toward her. "I imagine this isn't a social call."
"Not exactly," he allowed. Ah - the mutation.
"Oh. I think it's settled in." She shrugged, as if the mutation were of little note. The mottled coloring of bright autumn leaves remained in her irises. "I'm writing it off as a training injury. They'd been threatening to do that for years, but my medication kept it under control."
He stepped in closer, crowding her. Marigold stepped back automatically and felt her back hit the door she had just passed through. She felt the small ring of amusement roll off of him as he considered the response. "It activates under strain, then. You easily could have asked for them again."
Her seeking out family, allies, anyone who was still alive in her network - that was still something she had kept almost entirely hidden from Wesker. Kate was the only exception, and Kate was safely tucked away now. Keeping those options open meant continuing things as they were. Marigold intended to keep it that way, but he would know if she lied outright. So she told the broadest version of the truth possible, the one that lay at the core of the rest of it. "I know. I didn't want to." She looked away, letting the lingering sense of self-loathing she'd always felt in the past finally rise to the surface. "There's a snapback effect…after. I've never let it get away from me like that before."
Wesker might have been a statue for how still he had grown, but the surge of possessive greed that rolled off of him then was unmistakable. That same hunger. She looked up then, letting her face stay just that smallest bit crumpled in. Sooner or later, she'd have to ask for something in return, or they'd get suspicious of her. He certainly would. "I need to know what they did. Down in that lab." Her voice remained small. It wasn't entirely an act. "I need to see my data."
Wesker looked down at her. Marigold had slid down against the door a few inches, unconsciously trying to make herself smaller. "We'll see what can be done about that." He said quietly. He stepped in and reached up to wrap a hand around her throat once again, watching her breath catch.
He was feeling indulgent- enough to give the request some thought. Reciprocity would open a gateway into how her virus worked. Belatedly, he realized that she'd been too afraid to voice the fear of having been altered during her slumber until now.
For the most part, he found most people to be weak, malleable, and insufferably predictable. Marigold had developed herself in a unique way where her own quarantine measures could be turned against her - and she knew it, even as it was happening, if irritability mixed with rising black lust were anything to go by. It was a pleasure to peel apart someone who had a unique insight into the mother virus, even if she struggled to voice them.
Meanwhile, the talents she had developed in darkness were extraordinary. No one else had known what had transpired with William before Marigold had, and they'd had time to get into place because of it. She'd require a light touch, but, as he'd been gratified to discover, not a gentle hand.
After all, she was more than a little bloodthirsty herself.
Wesker would have to manage how often he visited from here on out. His own viral levels seemed to spike after encounters; he'd need a clear head in the weeks to come. Thankfully, the spikes subsided quickly.
If there were little details of her behaviour that seemed suspicious, his mind had begun to slide away from them. The bag under her bed was a mere memento, irrelevant, something she had clung to as one of her few material possessions. She'd clung to the few scraps of space and dignity he'd given her enough to know she'd behave in his absence.
HCF had approved his proposal to go after Umbrella's paramilitary holdings - her nephew's territory. Leaving her here, in place, was risky; Umbrella had not yet been defanged, and it was quite possible that the upper echelons at Umbrella had been alerted to her survival. A corporation like HCF was a tighter ship, but it wasn't impermeable. If she could be contained, then the shard of an idea to pry open the family's secret holdings might bear fruit.
He'd have to plan carefully. But…that could come after.
Wesker bent to claim her mouth hard, hand tightening on her throat. He'd left what he'd started in that tiny warehouse office space unfinished. Marigold whimpered under his hand, arcing, molding into him in spite of her trepidation as his other hand drifted downwards to draw her closer into him.
Her capacity for rational thought was dropping away faster each time he engaged Marigold in this fashion, fully submitting to his control. The last time, in the warehouse she had dropped into a near-feral state that might have killed a normal human. As it was, they'd only damaged the shower in that warehouse. He'd have to start restraining her soon, at this rate. Given their history, the context of doing such would have to be carefully managed.
It would be a shame, not to enjoy a taste of the bounty he'd worked for.
After all, Wesker had requisitioned the reinforced furniture in this little space for a reason.
