It was dark, though not the sort of dark he would have expected. He had been indoors, last he could remember, and so when Ingram was finally able to coax his own eyes open, he was surprised to find himself in the almost foreign but natural darkness of evening, rather than the enclosed, hollow blackness one often found within four walls. After some effort, he tilted his head back against the cold, slick tile of the floor beneath him, an attempt to get a better look at his surroundings. Part of the building had come down around him, walls and ceiling crumbled to bits to make up the great spread of rubble that now stood where he distinctly remembered lab equipment.
What had happened? He closed his eyes and tried to remember. Valentine had been in his custody, he had come willingly in exchange for the release of Caraway. It wasn't the outcome Ingram had expected, but it had served his purposes just fine. Vincent was a fascinating specimen in his own right; Ingram had been planning to give himself a chance to study Hojo's unique piece of work since hiring him onto the expedition back in Edge. Whether Lyla had offered herself for the trade or Vincent came in her stead, Ingram had what he wanted. In the case of the latter, Lyla should have come running after them to try and save him the second they were a step ahead. Ingram had worked with her long enough, knew her well enough to be sure of that. His former assistant was a bleeding heart if nothing else, he was sure he knew what to expect of her. She would come running and then he would have the both of them in his grasp, everything he needed to continue on with his work.
So where exactly had he gone wrong?
He groaned softly. Valentine had been strapped to the operating table, and then? … then what? He frowned to himself, studying the night sky above through the faint haze from the traces of pollution, the signature left behind by the defunct reactor the building was attached to. It irritated him that his memory was not only fuzzy, but seemingly non-existent. He recalled being interrupted before he could make the first cut. … that's right. Someone had come to interrupt them, but it wasn't who he had expected. He would have welcomed the arrival of Lyla and the president's dogs, Eve would have been ready to apprehend them at a word, and everything would have gone according to plan.
He had not expected Sephiroth. The name alone was enough to conjure up a clear image of the man, Prometheus himself, all ire and cold fury as he had descended upon them. What then? Ingram frowned to himself, unable to remember. He shook his head to clear it – or tried to, finding his neck too stiff to move properly.
Unable to sit up, he could not tell how badly he had been hurt, and sighed heavily as he found himself forced to admit that whatever had happened, whatever it was that he could not remember, was more than just a minor setback. He reached up to ghost his own fingers over his face, his palm bearing open gashes and too much dried blood for his liking as it passed over his eyes. He grabbed for his opposite shoulder, an attempt to rub some of the persistent pain from it, momentarily baffled when he was met with nothing and felt his hand touch the cold tile of the floor instead. He snorted softly and felt a little lower. Still nothing. He paused in his movement. … no arm?
"Well, damn," he groused, tangling bloodied fingers in his blond hair. There was blood there, too, dried to a stiff and tacky substance, evidence that he had been unconscious for some notable length of time. Yet another problem to solve. Well, unless Sephiroth had carted it off, it had to be around here, somewhere...
"Looking for this, Professor?" A woman's voice pierced the oppressive silence amongst the rubble, and Ingram directed his attention towards it as best he could, still hindered by the pain in his neck and mangled shoulder. The soft tread of boots moving across tile sounded, and he saw Eve appear amongst the debris, approaching steadily with his severed arm, still whole, cradled in both hands. She stopped short of where he lay on the floor, giving him a critical look with narrowed eyes, as though unsure of whether or not she dared to come closer.
"Yes. Thank you, Eve," he said wearily, frowning as he caught her analytical expression. "I'd like you to tell me what happened here. Is something wrong?"
She stared blankly at him, unmoving. "Is it you?"
Ingram looked perplexed, anxiously eyeing the limb in her grasp. "Of course it is. Who else would I be?"
She seemed to consider this a moment before closing the distance between them, kneeling down beside his battered form and laying the arm beside him, mocking where it should have been. "You're telling the truth," she said coolly.
His first thought was to ask what, exactly, she was talking about, but he took a moment to prioritize instead. "Is the limb atrophied?" he asked, forcing his neck to move just enough for him to critically look over the end nearest him.
"Not yet," she told him. From what little she knew about biology, she was certain that atrophy should have set in long before now, but she had found it caught under some debris awhile earlier and was surprised to find it still moving as though it were still attached to the doctor's nervous system.
"Good. Slide it up an inch or so – there. That's a good girl. It will knit itself back together." He grimaced as he felt bone and tendon struggle to mend themselves, and let out a low, measured exhale to try and distract himself from the pain. It was only temporary. No doubt he would experience worse in the days to come, but healing was never a comfortable process. "Was that the only injury?"
Eve hesitated, then shook her head, idly using bloodied hands to smooth her hair back and gather it at the base of her neck as she took a moment to remember. "No. Both legs off and most of your torso missing. I put the parts here and they moved on their own. You fixed yourself without trying," she recounted, looking only mildly uncomfortable. "I didn't think you could repair that much damage. They used a bazooka." She paused. "You were not yourself."
"I gathered something had been amiss when you were hesitant to come near me. Who used a bazooka? Did Valentine's friends come to take him back?" He stopped himself and chose to rephrase it all into a single question. "Eve. Can you tell me what happened?"
"You changed when Sephiroth came," she told him plainly, reaching to straighten the sleeve of his torn and stained labcoat, as though such a thing would make a difference. "It was like you left your body entirely. … Hojo. They both called you Hojo," she continued, and her expression darkened, eyes less vacant than they had been when Vincent first saw her in Costa del Sol, voice less hollow, much closer to being a person now. The look she gave him then was hateful. "I would not follow his orders. Never again."
A frown flickered across his lips, concerned, and yet intrigued at the same time. Her mention of following orders served as a reminder, and he carefully reached out with his newly-mended arm to lay a hand over hers. "When was the last time we gave you your medicine?" he asked, his tone warm and good-natured despite the situation.
She blinked, making no move to pull away. "This morning. Should I continue?"
"Of course. Help me up and I'll fetch it while you tell me the rest." With her assistance, Ingram managed to get to his feet, finding himself unsteady at first, but straightening up after a moment or two of being upright. He carefully made his way over to the console along the wall that was still partially standing, thankful that the computer itself still seemed to be functioning. At the very least, the monitor was on, and all of the necessary lights indicated that everything was in working order. He would investigate that later. He reached into the black bag that sat beside it instead, fumbling around until he produced a small, silver case from within. He flipped it open to reveal a syringe and a small bottle made of brown glass, full nearly to the stopper with a clear liquid.
"I wouldn't help him," Eve was saying, watching him passively as she turned a fallen chair right-side-up and helped herself to it. "Then the others came. Sephiroth left before they reached the lab. They set your specimen free and one of them shot at you while you fought with the rest. That's why there were so many pieces."
"Which of them came?" Ingram asked her tersely, drawing the liquid into the syringe before capping the bottle and setting it safely aside. "Did Lyla come?" If she had made herself available and he had missed the opportunity to capture her, he just might have to break something.
Eve shook her head. "No. The pilot and the two men in blue, the cat, and a woman you hadn't mentioned before."
Ingram frowned decidedly as he moved behind her, taking her hair and carefully moving it aside without invitation. "I see. Hold still, now," he told her, and the woman closed her eyes and gripped the arms of the chair as she felt the cold prick of the needle at the back of her neck, sinking deep as he injected its contents. He withdrew the needle and she relaxed, shoulders easing as she leaned back in her chair. "How's that?"
"Better," she told him, and her voice was hollow once more, distant, as though no one was home.
Ingram smiled to himself. Well, that had been a near miss. If he had been out much longer, his newest toy might have run off on him. It was an incredible stroke of luck, really, finding her when he did. It had been the day after the scuffle in his office, though he had been tracking her movements for some time. A woman like Eve tended to draw a lot of attention. Violent, brash, indiscrete, making headlines every now and then with the trouble she'd start wherever she went. He had first noticed the paper trail a year before, when reports of a woman with unparalleled strength causing a number of nasty barfights ending in critical injuries kept popping up in the local paper. It seemed worth looking into, even if she didn't turn out to be the other missing Pandora project.
His chance had come, remarkably, immediately after Lyla had stormed into his office to share her revelation with him. The Kalm Tribune had announced that the woman who had been the plague of the areas bars and backstreets for months had been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Ingram had made his way to Kalm immediately, presenting the authorities there with an ironclad alibi and insisting that the woman they had taken into custody was his sister. He had paid her bail, with an additional cushion of hush money, and that was all it took for the police to deliver her into his hands. How convenient, he thought, that the law was so corrupt these days that even innocence could be bought.
Eve, while grateful for the assistance, had been just as angry and bullheaded as the reports had suggested, and so Ingram was glad he had come prepared. Her gratitude was genuine, but that wasn't enough to keep her from running off on him, and that was something he simply could not allow. The drug was something he had developed in anticipation of having unruly projects to deal with; it was a sedative more than anything, though he supposed the extent to which it worked might have suggested mind-control to some. It had been a great help in keeping Eve relaxed and cooperative. Much easier to control.
Three days in his care was not enough time to build true trust and loyalty, but with the help of medicine, it was enough to manufacture it.
"Now," he began, circling around to stand in front of her, crooking his index finger and tucking it beneath her chin to lift her face towards him. "What are we going to do about that troublesome bunch? They have what I need."
"Kill them?" she suggested, hollow and yet somehow hopeful.
"How very base," Ingram chided her, "Although if you happen to dispose of one or two of them in the process, whose to say it's not an accident? We need Lyla, and I want Valentine. We need to get them back to someplace secure. If I have her, Prometheus will come running on his own," he reasoned, "And we'll be ready this time. I was caught off-guard. I need time to find out what happened to me." He frowned again. He did not care much for losing control, least of all over himself.
"You're falling apart," Eve observed blankly. "You need to rest. You can't work like this."
"Perhaps you're right," Ingram agreed, heaving a sigh. He looked Lyla's mirror over and smiled. "Though leave it to a woman to fuss. I'll rest, and let them play with Prometheus for a day or so. I'm sure they'll make headlines whenever Sephiroth catches up to them, at any rate. After I've had some sleep and something to eat, I'll look into this Hojo business. Very curious. … very disconcerting," he mused aloud, reaching for the bag he had left beside the console.
"Back to Edge?" she asked him with a slight tilt of her head, an odd and rigid sort of motion, a little too inhuman to be called natural.
"Capital idea," he told her, holding a hand out to her. "Let's go home, darling. Back to work tomorrow."