Chapter Text
It wasn't that Ethan didn't understand wanting to bury the past. Bury parts of yourself that you weren't proud of. Lord knew he'd spent most of his life hiding from things that were out of his control. But he couldn't let go, couldn't move past what'd happened in Louisiana. Most nights it was like he still existed there; his nightmares never seemed to go away. Up until a few weeks ago, Mia had been the same way. She woke up some nights, wide-eyed and afraid, believing she was still at the Baker house.
Ethan thought she understood.
Something had shifted when he wasn't looking, something had changed. Mia had been acting different. Where she'd been caring once, she brushed him off. Told him to move on. To forget. She slept soundly through the night now.
He wondered some days if he was the problem now. Mia went through so much more, hadn't she?
But she'd always had to be the strong one.
Maybe she was getting tired of it- taking care of him, a weak little omega. Ethan may have smelled like a beta because of his suppressants, but he could only hold up the facade for so long. In the safety of his own home, on a good day? He let his instincts take over. Allow himself, just for a little while, to be softer. He'd always been ashamed to give in to that part of himself, but Mia had always tried to make him comfortable.
He'd always worried that someday Mia would get tired of it, but she'd always been quick to reassure him. When they'd had Rose, he'd never been more sure that she really meant it, that she really loved him. Going through the shame of pregnancy, the shame of being seen for what he was, was all worth it for little Rosemary. He thought it'd been worth it for Mia, too.
He hadn't let his guard down in a while. Something had to give, and he'd be damned if it was gonna be him. He wasn't going to whimper and beg forgiveness for whatever he'd done wrong. He hadn't done anything wrong, no matter how much Mia made him feel otherwise.
But it was happening again; Mia read their daughter a horrible story, and completely dismissed him when he wasn't happy about it.
Who reads a scary story to a six-month-old baby?
"I'm not paranoid," he said, "I'm just cautious,"
"Then go cautiously take your daughter to bed," Mia replied. Ethan took his daughter into his arms, chest tight.
Your daughter
Was that meant to slight him? Did she regret that they couldn't have children together? She'd known that before they got married. Mia was a beta, he was an omega. He couldn't get her pregnant. And Mia had been the one to suggest he carry the baby instead of her. She knew how much carrying Rose had meant to him, even if he'd been embarassed to admit it outright. Did she regret it?
He was overthinking again.
Ethan walked up the stairs, cooing at his daughter when she stirred to lull her back to sleep. He put Rose down gently, and she slept soundly.
"Don't worry sweetheart, I'll be right downstairs. Daddy won't let those fairy tale monsters get you," He murmured. Ethan turned the baby monitor on with a soft click. He watched her for a moment, then headed back down.
Whatever Mia was cooking smelled good, but he wasn't really looking forward to dinner with her. She was in a bad mood, and so was he. They were going to fight; it was unavoidable, even if he tried to play nice.
"Is she okay?" Mia asked when he walked into the kitchen.
"She's uh, well, she's sleeping like a baby,"
"That smells good, what's that?" He asked.
Chit-chatting about dinner and the wine was only putting off the inevitable.
"You have to stop worrying," Mia finally said.
"It's just- finding you in Louisiana, moving here, the military training, the pregnancy- it all happened so fast, y'know?" Mia rolled her eyes.
"Well, at least we're all together. You, me, Rose- everything's going to be-"
"Seriously? You think we can just forget what happened? I thought you understood, Mia, I-"
"Ethan, it happened so long ago, I don't know why-" A window broke, and a bullet ripped through Mia's shoulder.
She didn't react, and neither did Ethan. The blood soaked into her shirt.
"Mia!" He said, finally, "Get down!" But there was nothing to be done. There was more shooting, from so many directions Ethan wasn't sure what was happening. But most of them hit their target.
Mia was practically convulsing with the number of bullets that were ripping through her body. She cried out; the guttural sounds of pain were perfectly underscored by the sounds of glass breaking and bullets whizzing past his head. Blood was splattered on the floor. Blood was splattered on him, though he didn't know it.
The bullets stopped. Mia was still moving. Not a lot, but enough for him to know she was still alive. Ethan heard approaching footsteps, and forced himself to look away from Mia. There was someone just on the other side of the table. With very little effort, they pushed the table out of the way.
"Chris? What the hell?" Ethan yelled. Chris Redfield, a man Ethan had considered a friend up until that moment, was standing before him. Looking down at him.
"Sorry Ethan," He said, and shot Mia five more times.
"What- Why?!" Ethan yelled. Chris didn't bother to dignify him with an answer. Two more people came up to flank him, guns trained on him. Ethan looked back to Chris. The two grabbed him, keeping him restrained, and Chris walked away.
"Chris-!"
The masked agents forced Ethan toward the front door, where Chris stood waiting. He heard a baby's cry, and he paused.
"Go on, move!" The man behind him said, pushing him forward.
"All clear," one of the agents reported to Chris. Another came down the stairs, holding his daughter.
"Rose?" He whispered. He broke away from the man's grip.
"What the hell are you doing with my daughter?" He yelled.
"Package secured, sir," Ethan watched in horror as his daughter was handed over to Chris.
Package?
Chris looked at him woefully. "Get him out of here," He said. Ethan rushed forward, grabbing the man's arm.
"I said get your hands off her!"
"Ethan, no," Chris said. The agent who'd been holding him back pulled him off Chris, and before he could react, he felt something connect with the back of his skull, and everything went dark.
It was cold. Cold enough to burn. Ethan groaned, opening his eyes. His body ached, and the fact that he was lying in the snow was doing him no favors. Gingerly, he pushed himself up onto his knees. He held his hands up to look at them. His fingers were numb, and the skin of his hands was burning from the chill. He flexed his fingers, trying to get some feeling back. They were stiff, and once the feeling started to come back, it was just more of the same burning. He held his hands to his mouth, breathing into them in an effort to warm them some. A phone was ringing nearby.
The body of one of Chris's agents was laying in the snow. The ringing phone was under their arm. Ethan pushed their arm out of the way, wincing. The body was stiff- and despite everything he'd gone through, the touch of a dead body in never got better.
"About damn time! What's your status? Is the package safe?"
Package?
Rose
"What are you talking about? Where's Chris Redfield? And Rose?" He asked.
"Who is this? This is a secure channel, you are not authorized-" The man on the other end cut off. Ethan pulled the phone away, looking at it.
"Battery's dead," He mumbled. He dropped the phone back into the snow. He flexed his fingers again. The burn was only just starting to subside.
"What- what the hell happened here?" He said through chattering teeth. The van he'd been in was overturned. The agents watching him were dead. He was alone, and Rose was gone.
His daughter was gone.
It took all of his willpower not to collapse right then and there. He couldn't let himself fall apart.
"She's out there," He mumbled. He looked around, spotting footprints in the snow.
"You're not getting away from me," Ethan said, through gritted teeth. He followed the footsteps.
The forest was quiet. No wind, No birds. Just the sound of his own labored breathing, and the crunch of snow underfoot. There was only the slightest semblance of a trail. He picked through the brush carefully, taking care not to step in any holes and roll his ankle.
He paused. The snow was red. As clear as day, there was a splotch of blood on the snow. He stepped forward. There was more red.
He felt ill. The ground was littered with the corpses of crows, twisted and mutilated. He was so busy looking down he didn't see the one hanging in front of him. He yelled and fell back, putting his hand right into the corpse of one of the crows, the rib cage breaking like an eggshell under his fingers.
"What the fuck" He said. He scrambled to get up, wipe his hand off, and rushed forward. There were more, hanging just at eye level. He ducked under them, trying to get away, and ran right into another one- but the last one was alive, and very upset at him for getting in its way. The bird's caw was deafening in the quiet, and then it was gone.
This isn't happening He thought. Couldn't be. Things this fucked up didn't happen.
But they had in Louisiana, hadn't they?
He could almost laugh. Vindication, though Mia wasn't there for him to say 'I told you so'.
He wondered, absently, what Chris had done with her body. Was it still on the floor of their home, cold? More likely they took it with them, to experiment on. Because that's what this had to be about. Louisiana. The mold.
It always came back to that.
Ethan pressed on, until he came to a house. Though, he supposed, house wasn't the right word. It was a shack, more like. He didn't bother to knock, just pushed his way inside. No one home. He looked around, checked the basement. Nothing. He turned to go back upstairs and leave, but there was a bang upstairs, and he swore he could feel the building shake. There was more crashing, accompanied by the rasping sounds of... something. Some kind of animal, and a big one at that.
Ethan held his breath, waiting for the noise to stop. For whatever was up there to go away, and not come downstairs.
Even once it'd quieted down, he waited a full minute before he started moving. Slowly, he went back up the stairs. He gaped when he saw what'd become of the little shack- it was completely trashed. He had to crawl underneath a cabinet to get out. There was fresh blood on the floor.
"What the hell did this?" He asked. He looked down at his hands, now coated in blood that wasn't his.
Amongst the mess, there was a hole in the wall. Not a small hole; a hole that looked to be the size of whatever it was that'd caused the mess. Big enough for Ethan to walk through without ducking.
He knelt down in the snow, using it to try and clean his hands off. It was lighter out now; dawn was coming.
They'd been sitting down to dinner when Chris showed up. How long had he been unconscious? 10 hours?
There wasn't much of a path to follow, but he did his best. He could see light up ahead, where the brush cleared. He pushed through, and found himself standing on the edge of a steep hill. A valley lay quietly ahead of him, a village in the center of it. A grand castle was looming on the other side of the valley, standing proudly.
"Where the hell am I?"
It was a rare occasion for any of them to visit the village. The Lords of the village had no reason to, really. Least of all Lord Heisenberg; he had no interest in any of the villagers so long as they were alive.
It didn't necessarily mean he'd wanted them all slaughtered by lycans, but what was done was done. Perhaps they'd deserved it anyway; blindly following Mother Miranda could only lead to one conclusion; they were just too deluded to see it.
The smell of ash and blood permeated the village now. He could smell the fear in the air. Lycans, distantly, ate their fill of the people who'd resided there. The growling, the chewing, bones breaking in between their teeth- the sound carried through the air as clear as a bell in the quiet of the morning, and in the absence of any other sound; there was no one left to make any other sound. If there was anyone left alive, they wouldn't stay that way for long. Lycans were good at exactly one thing, and it was the wholesale slaughter of any human they came across.
The slaughter was why he'd come down from his factory in the first place. He walked the streets, hammer slung over his shoulder and a cigar between his lips. He wanted to survey the damage, and contemplate the fact that it was more likely than not he'd be joining the villagers soon. He may have been lord over them, but Miranda was lord over him. She didn't need the villagers anymore, and soon she wouldn't need him.
A small part of him wished he was as blinded by Miranda as his siblings; at least he wouldn't see it coming then. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
A gunshot sounded off nearby, taking the lord out of his reverie.
Someone still alive? Now isn't that interesting, He thought. Another gunshot.
Someone alive enough to get more than one shot off?
Very interesting indeed.
Heisenberg had been given a curse by Mother Miranda. She, and his siblings, would call it a gift; it didn't matter what it was called, he supposed. A rose by any other name; the cadou was what it was. Part of his dear mother's gift was his uncanny ability to bend metal to whatever his inclination with his mind. He waved a hand in front of him, gathering metal debris; he used the bits as a staircase, getting himself onto the roof of the nearest house, so he could get a better look at the commotion.
He took a drag off his cigar. There hadn't been any more gunshots.
"What a shame," He'd been hoping something entertaining would happen. A lycan snarled nearby, followed by the sound of screaming. Not too far away, a man was pushed through a wall and out into the open. Heisenberg could smell the blood. He watched the man stagger to his feet and open fire on the lycans. Six shots, seven, eight. The man was either a terrible shot, or Lycans were more resilient than he thought. Heisenberg dropped the butt-end of his cigar on the rooftop, putting it out with his boot.
The man clearly wasn't local. Wasn't dressed like one. Wasn't helpless like one. Heisenberg leisurely went from rooftop to rooftop using metal debris to practically walk on air, and followed the man's progress while staying out of sight.
He could smell the human from where he was on the rooftop; an exceptionally bland version of beta, he was. He was starting to wonder if the bland human would survive the onslaught. He'd put down nearly a dozen lycans at that point. Truly impressive. Heisenberg was starting to wonder if it wasn't the man trapped down there with the lycans, but the lycans trapped with the man. At least until he heard heavy footsteps approaching.
"Well, that's that I guess," Heisenberg said. He watched the human's reaction to the new development; a giant lycan who wielded a hammer whose proportions dwarfed his own had arrived. Urias had come to join the fight. The human didn't stand a chance, though he'd put up a good fight. A fitting end to the battle, being crushed by the biggest and baddest lycan. Except, that's not what happened.
The blond was surrounded, impaled with an arrow. Urias even made a good show of jumping off a roof and roaring. But bells sounded off in the distance, and the lycans pulled back, leaving the man sitting in a stream of water.
Disappointing, he thought.
The blond man visibly sagged with relief once he was alone. From his vantage point, Heisenberg could see the extent of the damage- the man had lost half his hand at some point during the fight.
He stopped watching a moment to light anther cigar, relishing the feeling of the smoke in his throat and the taste on his tongue.
But in the brief moment he'd looked away, the blond man had disappeared.
"The fuck?"
He listened to see if he could hear any more commotion (surely the human hadn't gone looking for more lycans to fight?) when he heard talking, only a few houses down. He used metal bits as stepping stones to the next rooftop, trying to get close enough to hear.
"Hey, can you hear me?" The man said. To who, Heisenberg couldn't see.
"It's you? The child's father!"
Heisenberg pulled the cigar out of his mouth.
The child's father?
Oh, this was interesting. Ethan Winters, heroic father. It was enough to make him sick.
I should bring him to the bitch, shouldn't I? He thought. It was Winters' fault he was about to become obsolete, wasn't it? As soon as the ceremony was done he'd hit his expiration date. 'Mother's precious child', as Moreau would call her, would be resurrected, and what use would Miranda have for her failures that she deigned to call her children?
He was loathe to admit it, but he was furious. And the only person he could take it out on was Ethan Winters.