Victor could hear the muffled echo of conversation from the other side of the door at his back, hushed mutterings of many voices grouped together as one, but for as good as his refined sense of hearing served him he paid the murmurs no heed. There was no reason to, really. Not anymore.
He sat upon the floor in the middle of his private chambers, legs crossed and hands on his knees in almost a meditative position, the headpiece of his hazmat suit removed for the moment and resting by his side on the ground. The once bright blue vitalus that sustained him now clouded in the tanks riddled throughout his form, murky, almost teal in colour and rife with the diseases that throttled his body. He would have changed his tanks more than an hour ago, and in fact the good doctor had been gearing up to do just that, but mere moments before he could clear the transfer pipes and bolt them into the access ports on his shoulder he had just… stopped.
Perhaps most of it was merely muscle memory by this point, but it was on this day that Victor Lazarin realized that every infusion he'd made, a ritual he had performed every day for almost eighty years was a choice, a pledge to go on, so to speak, but like every other pledge it could be broken; disavowed. He'd remained like that with the pipe in his hands for goodness knows how long, until the chemical stench of vitalus began to emanate from the tubes and into the open air, so he dropped it. Dark artificial lifeblood ran onto the floor; made a small puddle beneath his workbench. Irritating.
Someone behind him had come up around that point, could have tapped him or placed a hand on his shoulder and he thought he might have snarled and reacted in a way to make that body skitter away without another syrupy, plying word, but all he could remember clearly now was how he had packed the rest of his vitalus away for another to use, lurched to the center of the room, and then sat down. That would be enough. He was done.
Lucy was dead and he was having a hell of a time trying to think of a reason to go on. When the strain had crept into the laboratory many had died to tooth and claw and infectious mutagen. His hazmat suit had protected him from the worst of it and he'd killed many of the foul creatures in a mad rush to reach the synthesis chamber, but eventually one of the strain corruptors crept in too close; sinking yellowed teeth through the barrier of his suit and into his leg. He'd gone down, unable to regenerate the damaged, dead flesh quickly enough to stand again. He'd killed what he could from the ground and soon the lab fell silent again, free from the corrupted squish of flesh and the pained cries of fallen and overwhelmed exiles close by.
All save for the sound of Lucy over his commlink, screaming.
He'd blacked out for a bit then, under the extreme duress of pain and the strain creeping into his wound, surrounded by the bodies of friend and foe alike. He'd done something else at that point too, gotten his hands around a soldier's weapon of some sort, the same thing that had flushed out the spiders and webbing from the exo-lab. Flamethrower, still with some juice left. He'd burned the growing strain off his leg, deep enough to cleanse and cauterize, but painful. Unsightly. It could be repaired later.
And then his assistant had come, why, no, had he called them? He could not remember now, but they had brought weapons and bore the half-mad, eager for carnage glint in their eyes that he'd come to expect from such a helper. He'd implored them to ignore him and find his daughter. His little girl.
Gods. He could remember a time when she'd been so small and healthy and all the years stretched out before her life spoke only of her brightness and promise. His wife had succumbed to darkness due to the complications of her birth and he'd never thought he would be able to juggle single parentage and a full-time career at the same time, but as his minutes ticked down in the present it was so clear to him now; the memories.
Long days and nights in the lab, minding a toddler and then a small child playing with rubber tubing and empty beakers under his feet, mixing up water with various dyes added so she could pretend to be a chemist. Hastily made, poorly implemented food until Lucy had grown enough to cook for the both of them. Alchemical journals and scientific reports instead of bedtime stories and fairy tales, but she had loved them just the same.
Perhaps it was no wonder she had turned out just like he was. He could never have been prouder of her, but in that it had spelled her doom.
A gentle pattering dusted the floor on the far end of the chamber. Victor detected it almost immediately, but it didn't mean much to him now. By this point he was getting hungry, it felt like he hadn't eaten anything in days. Was this it? It felt somewhat like that night on Grismara all those years ago, when he had in desperation concocted the vitalus serum before he could go mad. The ravenous onset… did it bring him fear, or a sense of peace?
When the contagion had spread lighting fast across his home world, carried in the blood and fluids of those unfortunate enough to have supped on his everlife elixir it did not only leap from body to ravenous body as sharp incisor met unprotected flesh; after a while it had begun to pervade the very air they breathed. Grismara fell into a fetid, grey-green shroud, and of the cognizant mordesh left over to the plague it was the children who first started to choke on its fumes.
They'd retreated to a bunker deep underground where the contagion could not possibly reach, the Widow had hoped, and they had vitalus now for treating the sick, but it could not push back the physical corruption that had already set in. He'd still been whole back then, sitting by Lucy's bedside whenever he had a spare few minutes to dedicate to her between treating others and searching frantically for a stop-gap cure, holding his daughter's perfect, light-pink hand even as the green-tinged decay of the contagion wormed its way through her.
"Lucy, my child," he had croaked, enclosing her small fingers in his, "forgive me. This is all my fault."
And what did she say in response, her eyes half-lidded in wretched weariness? Ah, he remembered now.
She had smiled at him without blame. "It's okay, father. Alchemy is fickle. Endemic with errors. You… you were only trying to help."
Sometime later, when his own flesh began to rot and wither and his hair had started to fall out it was honest to goodness a sort of relief to feel such twisted pain. Fair. Just. He deserved this for what he had done.
Just as she had never deserved such an agonizing, bewildering way to die. It should have been him instead!
More movement, this time noted from the corner of his eye. A small, squat shadow, low to the ground. Victor made a mental note of it. God, he was starving. Starving for meat.
His hands clenched into claws. He gritted his teeth.
It was almost time.