Chapter Text
The darkness strikes him first.
His mind comes online in stages. The heavy weight of his body, the hanging suspension—a faint, leftover sense of vertigo. He is upright. He is—he tries his arms first, then fingers, more carefully—restrained. Utterly. Swimming in some thick, ungiving mass that holds him snugly.
A cold draft across his face—his nose, mouth. He huffs, cautiously darts his tongue out, tastes stale air. His airways have been left clear. Whoever, whatever, has him, wants him alive. For now.
He tries to think, remember how he got here, but it’s like wading upstream and through a deep, heavy fog. A sense of foreboding, a chill down his spine—the tingle of gunpowder burns on his hands, a bone-deep ache in his left wrist he can’t explain. His wife—Mia—
Mia, gone, disappeared, never coming back. No, not so, Mia, alive, but different, speaking in a voice not her own, a knife in her hands—
But the current pushing him back into the black, gentle as it is, is still as unavoidable as it is persistent. Like reckoning with the tide.
The darkness breathes in. He breathes with it.
Ethan—
He tries to blink against heavy eyelids, and—his body fades away, his eyes don’t open, but he sees.
A man stands before him, and he seizes, consumed by instinctive fear. His body remembers first: fist to the face, boot to the head—welcome to the family, son—shovel through a wall, running, running—pay attention, boy, you’re about to see something wonderful—
“Ethan,” the man says again, and slowly, his mind catches up to the rest of him. Jack Baker. But—
“Hey, hey,” Jack says, raises his hands and makes a shushing sound when he flinches back. Takes a slow seat with his posture still ringing of surrender. A trick, it’s always a trick— “I know, I know, I know—I’m not going to hurt you.” Jack grimaces. “Hell, I never would have if I could have helped it.”
He breathes, tries to calm his racing heart. His vision roams around the room, one he’s seen before, catches on Zoe at her father’s side. She won’t meet his eyes, but Zoe—Zoe is safe.
Zoe, who he left behind. God, she can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, trapped in a nightmare, and he just left her—
He looks back to Jack. Something inside him forces him to take air in, out, and his voice manages to come out steady. “What do you mean?”
There’s a smile on Jack Baker’s face. Small and sad and completely different from everything he’d seen on the man that had hunted him all night. “I’m no killer, son,” he says gently. “Neither is Marguerite, nor my boy, Lucas…” He puts a careful hand on his daughter’s knee. “Or even Zoe here.”
Zoe pulls away, goes to the window. She won’t look at him, won’t look at her father. She just stares out, into the black. Her face is blank. Jack watches her go with some quiet despair, then looks back to him. “That girl, Eveline, she did this.”
Eveline. A whisper on the wind, an outline left behind in the notes he has found scattered around, a ghost at the corner of his vision. Boots at the other end of a crawlspace, childish laughter fleeing. The one inhabitant of this strange and cursed property he’s yet to properly encounter. A girl, Jack says, and the paper trail agreed, but he’s quickly found out very little is what it appears to be in this place. “What the hell is she? What did she do to you?”
“She infected us with her gift. That’s what she calls it,” Jack says, and Ethan thinks of limbs reattached, walking corpses, black mold living, breathing—“I found her near a busted-out tanker in the bayou. Everything changed after that.”
A tanker. A looming, rotting ship before him. Mia had been on a ship, for her job. He’d seen it in the video. His head leaps with sharp pain as he prods at a connection his conscious mind doesn’t want to make.
“So she infects you, and then she takes control?”
Jack sighs. He seems so…tired. Old. “No, not exactly, son. She just—she forces her way into your mind and your soul and—you can’t fight back. You are connected to her and—you can’t resist the urge to…” A helpless gesture, a slight shake of the head. “Oh…you’re a—you’re a different person after that.”
“Just like Mia,” he says, and it’s some small comfort to know his wife doesn’t actually want to chainsaw him in half, at least. “So Mia sent me that message because of Eveline.” But—why?
The look Jack gives him is half pity, half desperation, imploring him to understand something he can’t yet see. “Listen, the—the girl just wants family of her own.”
Jack, pacing holes in the floor of his workshop—I was going to be her father. Now she says he will be her father…
He had wanted to be a father, once. After a lifetime spent running and ducking, not daring to count on his next breath, his next meal…then having found Mia, found some safe harbor in their tiny family of two, he’d dared to dream. And then she was gone, before he’d ever been confident enough to reach out and grab that wish with his hands.
There’s a puzzle here, some greater context to all this—this night of peculiar and unrelenting hell—but he can’t seem to quite put together the pieces, and Jack Baker’s imploring eyes give him no time to try and work it out. “She’s the key, alright? You find her and you stop her. Ethan, free my family—please.”
He breathes in, tries to answer, and the tide pulls at him, darkness taking him away once more.
As the picture fades, the black envelops him, expansive. In the back of his mind, he can feel his waiting body, still stuck, but the rest of him turns to face the dark. Breathe, it commands him, once more. In, out. Push beyond your prior limitations, past what you know.
Mia, he thinks, recalls with sharp clarity a whispered confession—you were right, I did lie to you, but—and reaches, reaches. Straining for truth, for his wife. He wants to save her, came here to save her, must save her—
What the fuck are you, Mia? he’d asked the monster wearing his wife’s face, and a dark, quiet corner of his mind had rattled in its cage and asked, just as pressingly: who are you? A question he’d dared not to consider too closely all night. There’d been no time. And it didn’t matter, he’d tried to convince himself. He loved her. Loves her—
Something in the dark reaches back, prods him curiously, and he startles, feels a gasp escape his faraway body into the damp air. Like veins, strikes of lightning, the dark lights up, and he can feel so many other minds turn to him, connected by thin strands, a complex web. The Bakers, faint voices of strangers, Mia—
And something else, something larger, which stretches out dark, long hands of influence, pokes at him again. It’s a brief flicker of impressions on his mind, a flash of childlike curiosity, glimmers of trodden, worn innocence, and overwhelming, bitter malice. A desire to make the ones who have hurt you, and anyone else who gets in your way, suffer that he knows too well.
Oh, the darkness says to him. A child’s voice, and no voice at all, just a feeling. She didn’t tell you.
Tell me what? the dark corner whispers, as the rest of him rebels. No. He doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t need to know. Can’t know, because he’s lost so much, and he’ll cling to what little he has left, even if it’s only false memories, till his dying breath.
This is too good, the darkness snarls with vicious delight. She’s a liar. To me, to you. Liar. Liar.
No, she isn’t. He doesn’t want her to be, doesn’t want to admit to what he already knows.
Mommy lied, even to herself. She made herself forget. But I won’t let her. I made her remember. She doesn’t get to run anymore.
“I’m telling you everything I know,” Mia had said, and he’d wanted to believe her, so much.
She doesn’t want me. It’s practically whispered, fury with a tinge of heartbreak. But she wants you. So you have to know, too. She doesn’t get to forget again.
“No!” he yells, feels his lips almost twitch to life on his listless body, while the rest of him screams: please.
The deep darkness extends, envelops him completely, and he feels the flicker of the lightning connections feeding his way, turning his world into white, and he—he—
Mia, in white, sitting in front of samples in a sterile room. Mia, holding a newborn infant, with some trace of tenderness being slowly consumed by scientific fascination. Mia, and a toddler, and faceless beings in lab coats—tests, tests, isolation rooms, experimentation—hold still, Eveline, be quiet. See? It doesn’t hurt that bad, does it?—Mia with a gun, with a vial. It’s her tissue samples, for the toxin. If it comes down to it, don’t hesitate. Mia on a ship, with a child. The girl calls her Mother in front of the workers, she smiles and laughs and pinches a cheek with affection and there is nothing, nothing behind her eyes. Ship alarms blaring, Mia running, the heavy weight of a machine gun in her hands. Okay, Evie, I’ll be your Mommy. A lie. A kill switch in her palm. An explosion. Water.
Three years of breaking and breaking. Mia’s manic eyes, her fractured mind. The Bakers. The child reaching and reaching and reaching and Mia running, running, running.
Can we be a family, like before? His wife’s eyes catalogue the silhouette of the little girl she raised, see a monster. No, Evie, we are not a family. We will never be a family.
The girl has dark hair. Wears oversized boots and laughs too much, like she’s trying to prove something to anyone, to herself, about joy, or about fury. The girl has nothing behind her bright eyes, either. A void pulling everything in out of sheer hunger, the kind of nothing that is learned and practiced. Emulated.
In the black, he reaches out, strains, grabs the bright thread of his wife and pulls her around to face him. Sees the face Mia, née Peterson, PHD, wore when she was not Mia Winters.
The darkness breathes. The Bakers, the corpses, the lives stolen, breathe. Eveline breathes. Mia breathes. He breathes. And as he untangles himself from the lies and the pain and the living death enough to be sure of what is him and what is not, he—
Breathes. And remembers.
Ethan Winters remembers, and wakes.