Author's note: Author's note: When I started Calendula Chronicles, I stuck to canon and left Edward's death in 1968, but used ambiguous wording about the actual event. ' narrative hinges on that happening somewhat later. The following chapter is how that gap gets resolved :).

October 15, 1968: Umbrella facility on the outskirts of Paris, France.

The cab driver looked out into the dark, panic-stricken street. The driving rain made it hard to tell what was happening, but something had gone wrong in the non-descript complex he'd been directed to park in front of. "I think this is your address, but-" he turned, starting to address his charge in French. The passenger - pale, thin, in a long wool coat, fedora, leather gloves, and a grey suit - thrust double his fare into his hand. "Yes," the person hissed, pulling the scarf up over their face. They had some sort of contraption with them, and the driver realized in that moment the person's voice was distorted from their slipping on a gas mask as they'd approached this place. "Get away from here."

The driver blanched at the bizarre display, and the passenger was out the door, almost before the other man could process what had just happened. Another was rushing for the taxi - they were probably trying to get more vehicles, the passenger thought - and the driver seemed to come to his senses, pulling so fast from the curb his tires shrieked. Smart man.

Someone shouted at the new arrival, tried to catch their arm, but the passenger wrenched themself free, making a beeline for a small group of distressed scientists huddled under a cluster of umbrellas. The man tried again, surprised when the thin figure caught their wrist in a hard grip. They turned. "What," they snarled through the mask.

The Umbrella scientist - panicked and beside themself, the figure observed dully - was taken aback for a moment, them found their pique again. "Who sent you here? This is a secure area, you can't just walk in -"

"Where's Ashford." The figure growled. "Harman called."

The scientist's face fell, and the strength seemed to run out of him. "He was inside the lab. Oh…the son made it out. Over there." He stepped back, shaking. Finally, the man glanced down and saw the satchel the figure carried. "He sent for you to help?" The little broken note in the man's voice, and the commotion all around them was telling.

The figure stared for a moment, then turned to where the scientist was pointing without another word.

Scott Harman, personal valet and butler to Edward Ashford, turned as the figure approached. Alexander followed his gaze and blanched, then swore. "Don't react." He said in a low voice still thick with shock. "Act like you know them, that you sent for them."

Scott glanced back at the young man. "Do I? Your father doesn't have bodyguards on staff. Did things change while I was in America that much?" Present tense. The accident had just happened. He wouldn't…Alexander was barely a man yet, and Edward Ashford had been hale and hearty not an hour before.

"That's not a guard, and you do know them. I'd wager that's my coat," Alexander directed that last waspish line at the figure closing in on them, ducking in under the umbrella to joint the two men. Edward had told him that there had been some sort of exposure on the recent trip to Africa, but that it was something to keep quiet until they could confirm stability.

"Hat. Shoes. Coat. I can keep listing things. We're the same height, prat." The figure said through the mask in greeting. The rain was coming down hard enough to give the three of them a small bubble of privacy, but Harman still did a double-take when it clicked. "Miss Ashford? Poppy said you'd taken ill." Harman's residency with the family had only just begun a few years earlier, and primarily in the presence of Doctor Ashford himself, acting as his valet. He'd met Edward's elder scion in passing - so some surprise, as he'd been under the impression the girl would be occupied in London, rather than meekly being kept in a townhouse nearby with the family. She'd seemed so strangely fragile them.

Not so now. "And a lovely alibi it is." The figure - Marigold - replied. "You said there was a leak. Have they confirmed it?"

"They have men in there now, getting the ventilation working again. There was some malfunction on top of everything else, and…" Harman said, slightly stunned. "They've pulled…" his face hardened. "They've pulled a few bodies out from the perimeter. They're all going straight to cremation, they're saying his lab's a total loss. Not…I'm so sorry." Alexander looked down, fighting to keep his face from crumpling.

Marigold looked from Harman to her brother. "You know the same things I know."

"Probably know a great deal more than you," Alexander retorted automatically, taking comfort in his sister's sniping before his eyes widened. "The exposure."

"I know you can't lift worth a damn." She pushed the satchel into Scott's hands.

Scott, meanwhile, automatically pulled the satchel open, still shocked that the meek young girl he'd met last week was doing this. He gaped at the contents. "Miss, going back in there is still incredibly dangerous. The men they've found so far who were exposed…" he trailed off, unsure now of where the young lady's sensibilities even were anymore.

"If anyone's safe to go in there, it's me, but no one else knows that. Get me inside. If there's a chance that he's not…" Marigold choked a little on the words behind the mask, then forged on. "We must go now. Are you with me?"

"I have questions," Scott muttered from under his own mask. Marigold had kept the heavy coat and hat on, making her look like a poster of some hoodlum strolling through the London Underground back when the city was being shelled during the war. Dr. Ashford had kept a few as mementos. Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

They both strode with steady purpose through the halls of the lab, ducking under caution tape. Another figure in a mask paused when running by, but seemed to recognize Edward Ashford's trusty retainer enough not to detain them.

No one was lingering in these halls if they could help it. A pair of guards at the front door had moved to question their entry, but Marigold had snatched the arm of the man reaching to bar their entry and squeezed. The guard's expression had quickly shifted from blustery suspicion to pained. Harman had flashed his ID at the other guard, and they'd been waved through after that.

Marigold shouldn't have been able to hear him under the layers of plastic and rubber, but somehow she had a response. "You'll get answers. Later. Soon." The door to the main laboratory was covered in a plastic sheet. They stood before it. "I can hear the main fans running. They started more of them up when we entered the building. That's good news."

"How can you hear that in that thing?" Scott glanced at her, them back at the door. Beyond this point was going to be rough - worse than he'd seen during his recent tour of duty, perhaps. Marigold seemed wound tight as a spring next to him. "Why are you doing this? I want to hope as much as anyone, but if you know about the work, you know there haven't been survivors."

"Father told you there was an exposure?"

"Yes, but…"

"I made it through alright."

Scott slowed, but Marigold kept moving, and he was forced to keep pace. "Your illness."

"It's the word we're going with, at present. The circumstances were suspect. Father wants…he was going disclose it to the others soon." Her tone sharpened. "People are coming."

Harman turned to see a group of four men, all in masks - two guards, two scientists - wheeling a gurney covered in body bags. They stopped on seeing the two of them, and a scientist stepped forward. "More hands, I see. Ashford's party plucked up the nerve to assist?"

Harman sensed rather than saw Marigold tense up beside him, and spoke first, injecting as much irritated authority as he could into his muffled voice. "The fans are on. We need to confirm. Before you lot destroy the scene."

The man snorted behind his mask. "Suit yourself, then. Take some fucking bags with you at least. There's few enough willing to come in as it is." None of them wanted to go deeper a moment sooner than they absolutely had to, Harman realized. Margiold reached forward and snatched several bags from the gurney, turned and pushed her way through the plastic. She paused, seeming to steel herself, and began to make her way forward into the dark room. Scott broke eye contact with the scientist, hand creeping away from his own weapon to the heavy flashlight in his coat pocket, switching it on to illuminate the path ahead.

There were at least a dozen fallen men scattered across the dimly-lit space. The red glow of the emergency lights made the entire room seem bathed in blood, although it seemed like they had all simply fallen where they stood. The figure ahead of him stepped gingerly through the space like she was traversing the moor behind the manor at the ancestral home. Slowing, she turned to Harman. "Where did he..." she was keeping her voice artificially low, he realized, now that they weren't alone in the deadly silence of the room.

"That way," Harman pointed his flashlight towards Edward's work station. He and Alexander had been working on cultivating viral samples to run through some sort of genetic analysis all week. If Alexander's primary sequencing equipment hadn't been with the basement servers, Harman realized with a sharp pang, they would have lost both of them in here.

The obnoxious man at the door shouted at them. "Are they any less dead over there?" In spite of the bravado, the other men with him were clustered near the door, afraid to go further. The faces of the dead were webbed with dark spider-like veins, he observed, trying to keep the thought distant. They went quick, at least.

He shook his head at the other man, then hurried to catch up. The young lady's nerve was holding up well enough, but he couldn't count on that holding out for too much longer. Shock was something that wore off faster than people anticipated, and then there would be only pain for the poor girl. They had to finish their work here fast, if there was anything left to do. Looking around, Harman was very quickly coming to the conclusion that all that was left was to collect the poor man's body.

Ahead of him, Marigold stopped, circling around something on the floor. She'd gone very still. Here comes the break, Harman thought, grim.

The break didn't come. Instead, she knelt by the desk. From his angle, he could see a single arm splayed up from behind the desk. That same virulent webbing was faintly visible when he trained his light on it. Taking off her glove, Marigold very gently reached down to take the arm by the wrist. She was checking for a pulse, he realized. She stilled again, moving her had up to his face. Harman knelt next to her, hardly willing to hope.

After a moment, she looked up at him, face hidden behind the gas mask. "We need to get him out," she said. "Those men are blocking the door. With the incident in Africa, Father was starting to worry enough to tell me a few things about the project. Is there a fire exit?" Gently, she rolled her father - just barely breathing, face webbed with that awful pattern like the dead surrounding him - over onto his side.

Harman reached for a bag, laying it open. "Yes," He whispered back, pausing when the slight woman next to him lifted the unconscious man onto the bag with a slight grunt. "We'll see it done, miss."

December 28, 1998 - the Antarctic facility's infirmary

Steve turned away as the group of them - Claire's people, who'd come armed to the teeth to rescue her - gathered up their improvised incendiaries. Claire was animated. "I know, I should have waited for backup," she was saying to her brother. "But when I got in touch with the others, I was already checking out the Paris installation. Rebecca's information was really good. The fire exit I got in through had a bent frame just like she mentioned, and no one had ever bothered to fix it. That old lab was like an empty crypt. I got pretty far into their old records room."

Jill, the hot one, gave the younger woman a sidelong look. "And yet…"

Claire gave an embarrassed little laugh. "I had some bad luck when a security guard recognized me. Things got a little crazy."

"Just a little, huh," her brother remarked in a dry voice. Unlike the forces on the island, or the poor bastards they'd come across in the facility, these two seemed to move around the dead facility like it was just another raid.

Claire shrugged, beaming at him. "I think they overreacted," she retorted, earning herself a sharp bark of laughter. She looked around at the facility. "This place had to have been build in the seventies, or maybe even earlier. Did you guys get any special insider shortcuts for here?" She looked hopeful. and Steve couldn't help but turn his head to look at them.

Jill's face was grim. "No," she said quickly. "They didn't include this place. I think this place is going to turn real rough for everyone here if we don't get you out as soon as possible."

Steve couldn't help himself. "What?!" He tightened his grip on the beakers in his hands. "Don't you fight these things? Isn't that the whole point?"

Chris' face was impassive. "This is a rescue mission," he said, keeping his voice carefully lowered. "Charging in blind means losing a lot of good people. Those poor assholes back there are proof of that. Besides, nothing is getting far from here anytime soon. We can get back to the mainland and order in a strike team, if Umbrella doesn't bomb the shit out of this place first."

Steve fought to get control of his face. Everything that had happened in the last few months, his dad, this place, and the British bastard was going to be left to his own devices.

Claire saw this. "They aren't getting away with it, but there's only a few of us, Steve."

He sighed, nodded at Claire. Claire, who'd had his back through this fucking nightmare. She'd go on to do bigger, better things. "Guess so," he mumbled.

In the hall, the first of the ant-infested zombies were making their way toward them. In his pocket, Steve felt the hard edges of the key card he'd stolen off of Alfred. He wouldn't get another chance. Steve lit the first of his improvised molotovs and lobbed it hard, into the swarming mass of the creature's face. Afterward, the chaos and blaze took over everyone's focus.

None of them noticed him slip away.

Marigold and Segers rode in silence up the elevator. Segers reached out, hitting the STOP button. Marigold, watching with a sense of detached interest, let him.

The elevator ground to a halt, and a long, tense moment passed. Marigold finally spoke, her voice flat. "I imagine the threats are coming next." At Segers' stony expression, she sighed. "Is your friend alright?"

Segers stared daggers at her. "He's alive, as far as I know. Wasn't fit to stay on the mission though."

Marigold nodded slowly. "That's unexpectedly kind of them to let him stay back, all things considered." She pursed her lips. "There's a treatment."

"Bullshit."

"Do you think I came down here for fun?!" Marigold snapped, her voice rising as she finally looked at the mercenary.

Segers expression never wavered, but there was a minute tightening around the eyes. "I think that thing was released at a convenient time to clear us out."

"I'll file your complaint with HR." Marigold gave a bitter laugh. "Oh, wait. I suppose they've been eaten already."

"What did you just say- sign?- to...I assume Alfred, just now?" His hands were tightening on his weapon again.

Marigold rolled her eyes at the terrified bravado. "That the noisy idiot following me isn't a threat, mostly. You'll be glad for that soon enough, I think." She reached out, ignoring his flinch, and pressed the STOP button a second time along with her floor, resuming their upward journey. "You're not trapping us in here, thanks."

After a moment, she added, "…we didn't do this. That squad we passed. The twins want to deal with him..the creature down there… even less than I do. Especially like…that. They didn't do that to your people."

"We?"

Marigold shot him some cut-eye. "I already said that coy doesn't suit you. You're alone in here, until he wakes up again, aren't you? Are your hands steady?"

Segers tensed up, ready for an attack. "Why the fuck do you want to know."

"Oh my god, I'm not a rabid animal. Take the bloody olive branch."

Marigold held her hand out to inspect it. They were beginning to get light tremors from the exertion. "One hour. Maybe two. You walk away with a chance to rest and a way to avoid going mad from breathing the air down here. It's probably the only chance you'll get to dodge that last part."

Segers' expression had finally begun to crack as she spoke, but only just. His composure reminded her a little of Scott Harman, back at the beginning. "You seem pretty confident that I won't shoot you."

"I know," she replied. The elevator doors chimed open, and a couple of zombies turned within range. None approached. Marigold swallowed, finding her focus. This would go fine if she moved slowly and didn't agitate them. "Panic, and I'll leave you behind," Marigold said, taking Seger's arm to lead him out into the dark corridor.