ETHAN WINTERS & EVELINE BAKER resident evil 7 : biohazard, 2017

he does not dwell on it much, perhaps not enough, how the organization that put time and money into caring for mia and him will react as the weeks and months roll on. sometimes it feels like everything just happened, that maybe no one has made the report yet. the phone calls were few and far between in the last six months, mostly he was submitting emails about how rose was developing and mia was recovering. pregnancy had dragged her through relapse, aggression and food aversion something ethan had thought they were done with suddenly rearing their heads again. night sweats that required him, through groggy placating towards her, to strip the bed and help her into the shower. some days were not bad, she had a plump glow about her that was how it should be, an expecting mom during her nesting phase, holding up swatches of paint trying to decide between buttery yellow, soft minty green, baby's breath blue. but he was always on edge, waiting for the sickness to return, to deform her face, sink her eyes into obsidian and the waxy, sallow sheen of hot, humid july to manifest again.

if ethan puts a face to it, the only one that he bothered to remember, being the one he would like the most to put his knuckles to, he can almost justify it to himself. maybe... maybe he had been wrong about chris and the guy was covering for them, letting them put space and time between them and the gluttonous war machine begging to render him down into something replicable. it is always a fleeting thought, not even one worth jotting down in his journal when the blank pages stares up at his hovering pen point. would chris hunt them down? would he come back with his team of black-clad shadows? another hail of gunfire, this time perhaps, with ammunition meant to sedate him. every vial of blood taken from his inner arm was encyclopedias of information that they had discovered. what if there was already a whole shelf full of pulsating embryos in petri dishes; an entire warehouse with steel cages of men just like him, each one as capable as him? it ferments inside him, an abstraction of jealousy. whatever they took from him and incubated into a product, is his by right.

" who fucking knows what they're doing. maybe they don't even know we're gone. " a shrug, if they want him, they will have to fight for it. but he will drag every twisted-limb monstrosity out of the swampy graveyard inside himself to militate against them ever finding mia or rose. " eh-- your dogs will probably eat them anyway. " the lycans, in their rags of clothes caught up in the matted hair sprouting all over their bodies, have grown emaciated in these last few weeks. how much of their former diet consisted of villagers caught like foals, has been cut off. the ones he had seen through cracks in the walls chewing upon the corpses strung up by leathery entrails from some ceiling far above what his eyes could make out in the cavernous chamber. hungry guard dogs made the best sentinels, they will hear the gunfire, screams and bestial howls long before they see the soldiers cascading down the crags in the mountains.

" right. " he snaps his fingers, the index straight as an arrow pointed towards the man leaning against the sturdy frame of the doorway. he haunts the blueish shadows like he is avoiding the beams of light caught on motes of hundred year old dust kicked up like silt in cool waters. the hanging fetus lays in wait for them, beyond the cave of diaphorous swords, over the icy river, through the long note held in vibrato hum of the sleeping and not yet dead god, it festers. his mask of ruthless confidence slips incrementally. the thing is a void, yawning open, ready to swallow them whole. knotted limbs like that of a fetus suspended in a stone womb, he cannot help but remember the thing that lumbered after him below the floorboards of the house in the mist. ethan can feel his chest tighten, the ribs in their strange new formation shrink away while the wriggling worm encased in shiny metal carries on its work of circulating blood as if nothing effects it grueling work. a blind sisyphus performing the pointless task of keeping a dead man alive.

a slight curl of his upper lip is all that is displayed. no wide eyes, no backing into a corner, just a dimpling of scars over his mouth as utter revulsion flickers across his pretty features.

" oh--uh, i'm not sure. " he is blindsided by the shift in conversation, from the promise of whetting his appetite for violence to the minefield of separation. at all times he is reminded by karl's hemming and hawing about the fact that he is stuck within the invisible dome of this necropolis, meanwhile ethan can and has proven that escaping beyond the transparent wall has no ill-effects on him. he can step beyond the line of crystalline corpses like warning beacons and return again when he wishes. " probably soon. i want to be out of here before the twenty-fifth. her birthday is the second. " he rubs his hands together, a moment of self-soothing, a nervous system prickling with excitement and trepidation, the scarred palm providing slick friction against the heel of the other, his warped hand folding its two fingers over the edge of the other leaving his thumb free to work out some knot of tension. " tsk-- whatever. " he playfully dismisses, a roll of his eyes as he strides around the corner to begin the unnecessarily complex turning of nobs to activate the archaic shower. the screaming of pipes far below is muted but not silent, a long, low, wet hiss from the shower head, which shakes violently as the first trickle of rust-red water splatters the dull white tiles like a bloodbath.

" i need time to hike out of here, then get a ride into the nearest big town. " he announces as he steps back into view, hooking his fingers into the waistband of his pants. his favorite pair of jeans had been rescued from the house when last they had picked over the remains. the zipper has grown slightly rusted from washing it in the heavy river water without softeners, stiff as he forces the tab down the metallic teeth and drops down to one knee to begin untying his boots. the laces intertwine along his fingers as he continues, looking upwards occasionally as he speaks. " a lot of farmers' markets going on so hitching a ride will be easy. roads were always packed whenever i'd try to go shopping, an absolute nightmare that fucking was every time. " the influx meant a greater selection but it came at the cost of rural farmers shouting at him in romanian. the usual shop owners knew he was slow to speak but the guy trying to sell lamb's legs the size of an infant did not have time to adjust his speed. his favorite was the shop girl that always gave him extra peaches and plums with his order ' for thee missus. ' she would say, and later ' for thee babey. ' in her soft, spoken english that was rounded out in the romantics of her native tongue.

he succeeds in freeing one foot then sets to work on the other, the assiduity with which his level eyeline hovered on a prize he finds himself hungering for noticeable, he is sure, between batting of his long lashes, rather than watching his fingers pinch and pull at the boots caked in mud from the trail leading to and from the glittering corpse of the certainly not dead but just sleeping god. as if he had saved room in his belly for an extra indulgence.

" was planning on three, maybe three and a half weeks. probably won't even notice i'm gone. you'll get to hide out all day working on your contraptions. while i'm gone i'm gonna try to get in-touch with someone about files from those other guys: blue umbrella. after they picked us up, i never heard from them directly again but sometimes i'd find their addresses hidden in email chains. " he lifts his eyes from the space where karl's bowed legs meet, just below the protuberance of his gut, along the strain of fabric struggling to hold him in, up towards his face finally. " i've got a funny feeling they knew something was going on there way before some random backwater deputy didn't come back after making a house call. "

there is no threat from men with guns — he fears the cage, not the wound. broken bones and incision sites, all of them suffering the same dull ache, far less of an irritant than the starshower of blinding light imprinted upon the backs of his eyelids when the sun is too bright as if experience has shaped the reaction of his body: a tolerance built for pain, the expectation of the strike from the hand that feeds or, perhaps, a gift from the horrid worm that has made a home of him, fight-or-flight instinct devoured, the wounds received a mere inconvenience — a severed throat barely registers, but the itch of a healing lesion drives him to the edge of madness. idiots with more ammunition than brainpower and all of them viewed under the patronizing gaze of a man whose lifeline has been extended longer than it should, rendering them naught but children playing soldier, do not frighten him. if they come, as they did before, too late to be of any use and unwilling to listen, he will kill them. if ethan doesn't.

brows furrow, scars and the etchings of senectitude both along his forehead pulled down as the comment is examined, the rapid disembowelling done with as little consideration as the corpses upon his table, unsatisfied with the implications: not the benefit of distance that comes from the pitying of villagers kept under the thumb but instead that he knows fear intimately, that he bought into propaganda dictated from the word of a self-made god / that he, too, has played his role as tyrant gleefully. both are, were, shades of something true. whatever organ is responsible for guilt has long since fallen prey to the wrought-iron revolution of his own body, but the implication, real or imagined, that he belongs under the same category as those who had made their faustian bargains sits inside him like a led weight, an anathema too intricately woven to be removed.

it is, however, soothed by the salve of ethan's words — the ease of how we, us, our falls from his tongue. to imagine them as the only two inhabitants of this commune is an idyllic thought he often must remind himself is not true, not when the beast-men and the ophidian-tongued women still mark the landscape though their numbers have fallen into the scant few, nor the giant merchant whose laughter shakes the snow and dew from the divaricating branches of mold that sprung up overnight as if god had remade the world anew, the old trees replaced by something sinister. ethan is much more conscious of it, be it paranoia or habit, knows that even in the depths of factory that they are not the only ones whose heartbeats reverberate tenfold in the dark ; we, us, our, another notch in the bulwark of his isolation, a thing depreciating over months as meals are shared, conversations indulged, bodies learned, scars gained. gifts that he does not yet understand — unable to hold them, unable to occupy them, not like the titanium heart or the home with dusty halls and stained windows filtering yellow light that ethan's lithe figure somehow blocks as if, whilst unaware, his vision whittled down and blinders strapped upon his head so that it is focused entirely on the man before him.

to find himself as treated — as acknowledged — as under the aegis of the newest saint to grace this village and not, as he had been, thrown to wolves and nature is an odd feeling. the warming paraesthesia, that accompanies it more so.

"how ruthless," the amphitheatre of his mouth, ever crowded with stained teeth, wide and adoring, "i like it." the last lord is not responsible for the fault lines in his partner, cracks in the foundation of his personality far before they knew of each others existence nor the ones that made themselves known after the disaster of dulvey, the same that had led the cryptogenic abattoir of ethan winters to his home, bloody hands around the barrel of the wolfkiller, but he feeds the infection of it nonetheless — repayment for his own, the rosy hues of affection that have bloomed inside the meat of him, a malady administered no different to the rot. he would do the same for any, he thinks, and oh, how he had tried. the apparition of a girl could not be summoned as a vengeful spectre and the lonely leviathan would not invite their mother to sleep upon the bed of his tongue. how much better their lives would have been if they had listened and allowed the iron steed to sow the seeds of discontent, iron caltrops and barbed wire. any sympathy that could be roused in the presence of a man who has lost everything would be ill-spent: ethan still has his wife, ex-wife, still has his daughter, his free will — never did he find himself fettered by eveline's roots like he had the gilded saints — and yet, he encourages the metastasis of justice. vengeance. so it may be another thing shared between them — ours.

"haven't run away from you yet, papa," ever has he been the dog at ruined altar, too proud to beg, too hungry to bite. "a team," the shape of it odd in his mouth when not ersatz, spoken like an invective, "with all its little benefits." self-satisfied, the purr of his internal engine reverberates along his throat and further still, to words elongated unnecessarily, whilst he leers unabashedly. the vacuum left in the doorway taken up by himself, left hand returning to its futile effort to push errant hair back out of his face whilst the other hovers, idle and unoccupied. "still, might be that they're too embarrassed. that's twice they've fucked it up - a real shitshow, both times - " but then again: third times the charm, or so they say — whoever they are, "regardless. we'll deal with it. we've got bigger fish to fry."

their objective one he finds much harder to concentrate on as ethan sheds his outer layers with an air of causality that is striking in how foreign it is, unlike the frenzied effort when they are body to body that has, more often than not, resulted in dishevelment rather than disrobement. he watches, grinning, imagining an array of fantasies: his penchant for voyeurism catered to by a private show, not of fingers on ivory keys but skin and bone; the idea that ethan will keep going, down to bone and muscle, the honesty of being as they truly are, amalgamations of rot clothed in fleshy layers. how unlike himself to consider the complexities of intimacy, a thing he has not known nor considered prior — he assumes it another facet of his ego, starved and slavering, a need that has developed teeth and not the softer qualities of him that had been expunged under god's scalpel. to be naked with another an oddity, only out of habit, another victim of his self-imposed isolation, not culture, shame a thing he has no use for. a nonchalance found in abundance this side of the world but ethan is not simply another person, another body. how hard it is to concentrate when the other is illuminated in the golden gaze of the waning sun — the approaching distance that will separate them a far more irritating splinter than that of men playing soldier. "so," left hand waves, dismissively, to keep itself occupied, "when are you going?" it sounds pathetic, sounds clingy, as if it is not a simple question asked but the whine of a child unable to care for itself. the embarrassment an aftertaste he can barely swallow. this must be how it felt to be his siblings, always begging for reassurances that would not come, afraid of being abandoned. "don't want to start something just for you to fuck off in the middle of it." a half-truth, bandaged over — time becomes irrelevant at the bottom of the earth.

“what’s romantic/sexual about nearly dying from blood loss? :/” get a load of this guy. He doesn’t get it

THE TRIAL 🌿 resident evil village, 2021

i dont talk about rosemary enough but tbh it's b/c im a sensie when i put myself in that place. most ppl already know i got kids & like, it is great to have that mindset of a parent already, i hope it lends weight to my portrayal but at the same time, it means i literally tear up when i think about it for too long.

i am a mia winters defender & i am absolutely willing to die on that hill. i wish there was an active mia b/c i want to talk about rose's first steps & her first word & all those little firsts that parents cherish for so long. it makes me emotional to think about how he doesn't get to see that as even in my main canon verse, he is only getting to watch her from afar.

currently she is w/ mia ( & maybe zoe, but lbr zoe is not a parent or someone u can really depend on. not that i dislike her for that, i really like zoe & for my own blog, ethan has inherited through the mold a sense of family w/ her. she is his sister in mold ) & he is going to be visiting w/ rose & mia as often as he can, birthdays & holidays. over summer break once rose starts school ( which i think really adds to the hades / demeter dynamic that i've got going on w/ @blitzkriegers, like hades, he doesn't like when his lover leaves but he doesn't stop him either b/c he knows if he even tries to, it would be detrimental ) but that's still not being around to watch his kid grow up. there is a divorced parents angle that has to be observed but it isn't bitter / resentful ( i hope. i really think they would still love & support each other ) but it isn't all the time either.

once rose is older & in control of her powers, i'd love to see her return to her old childhood home. it will be cringe to meet dad's new husband b/c he's a gross, stinky, weird old man but OTHER THAN THAT PLEASE DON'T ASK QUESTIONS ROSE HONEY, it would be sweet to have them hang out & maybe even have rose help really kill the dark god once & for all.

idk, i feel like i should talk about her more but then i start crying at the keyboard like a loser thinking about how heartbroken i'd be if i hadn't been holding my kid's hand on her first day of preschool. bro it's get me now. i gotta stop.

persistence is, if nothing else, an undaunting aspect of him, the flip side of the coin of stubbornness that comes from a lifetime of getting what he wanted. a childhood as the prized only son of a small family, with older parents that both worked to exhaustion and gave in to his whims of self-indulgence. not wealthy, not exorbitant the way he imagines that a young lord would be. the shade cast by the war, the reaping hand of the great factories that churned out killing machines and the ammunition needed to perforate the enemy front, wrung the pins from hair-dos and the tinned cans from shelves of the poor, not the ones that sat on the top of the heap. for how he looks now, maculated with black, like some void has left its fingerprints all over him. the shrouded figure of death that had grabbed hold of the man's ribs and dragged him down to the floor-- or had that been ethan's own pale fingers sent into him, through the burning insides of the mechanized man? it is right there, like the forgotten melody of a song, the lost lyrics that he cannot remember beyond the infinitely looping chorus. the world between here and there, life and death is obscured slightly. perhaps it is just him, pushing everything out, finally having his mind to himself again, not an overcrowded theater where dozens and dozens of victims stitch their memories into the slick film snaking through the projector of his brain.

if an apology is what karl expects, it will be a desire left sourly unfulfilled. he had none to gift like flowers on a grave to mia when he sent an ax through her throat, nearly decapitating her. expiation like confession only an act performed because he wanted the promised reward of what lay beyond pearly gates. he is only ever sorry when he sees the carrot dangling in front of him.

rough fingers dig into his neck, pads like sandpaper attempting to scrub off the various clusters of moles and freckles that gather there as they do in so many other parts of his body, too many of them bulldozed over by scar tissue, shiny and uneven. great knots of tough skin in response to damage done, not forgiven by the mold. it too, refuses to say sorry. it is no more real than a dream, he has the higher consciousness to know that, the privilege of omnipotence to feel the strings of the great web shivering with movement, the bend in the fabric of space and time, everything heavy with value falling deeper. he is constantly battling the pull of gravity to drag him out of this stratosphere. manifesting here is taxing but worth the indulgence of wiry hair bristling along his chin as his space is invaded once again. it feels more real, more solid than anything else in these endless, compounding layers of hell.

" do you have any idea how hard it was to get here? " he wields the truth like a weapon pressed to the soft underbelly of his companion's jaw. soulless things roam the place, no safety found in how hands reach for him for a salvation he does not have to offer them. he wonders if it is because of the thread leading back to his body, stiff and cold somewhere above him, or if through their eyeless vision he looks too much like miranda. if they mistake him for the woman that situates herself in the lowest point, at the point of the inverted spire that is this great underworld, playing the queen of pandemonium. " but i found you. " the implied promise or threat that he always will, he has caught the scent of the iron lord and he will doggedly pursue him until he catches him by the throat once again.

a dagger's point paired with the same hand that had killed countless hordes, the replica of the weapon he remembers, nothing but falling glitter as he frees his hand and brings it to the side of karl's face, deftly the backs of his fingertips brush the matted and mottled hair out of the way so that his smooth palm, only marked with lifelines and the heel of his thenar, pressed to the curvature of the face he has committed to memory, pages and pages of his journal devoted to studying their perfect composition. perhaps his hand should pass right through, ghosts that they are, memories replaying a hundred other times they have started in this opening dance position before the heat of the moment carried them to an undecided destination. throwing one another against a wall or to the ground, it was the whims of hormones and compliments. of being the only ones they had for company, the only target for frustration. his mouth pressed to his beloved's, as close to an apology as he is going to get. an appeal for forgiveness complete with teeth and tongue, ravenous for something that he had thought, even if momentarily, lost forever. relief from mourning not in joyous tears but in heavy breath and low moan from the hollow place within him being filled by reunion that could just as easily leave him dead as the one in that swamp that started it all.

" think how pissed she'd be if-- " his words are muffled, pressed into the mouth of the other as much as his own immature chuckling, " if we fucked in her stupid fucking paradise. " his crude humor, as always, treated as the highest art, ethan is the cleverest man he knows. self-aggrandizing in his own right, not as much a show-boat has his lover but not much less either. " the fact that you're still... you is a good sign. " some little recesses of his mind resigned to the possibility of a collapse, a complete loss of his consciousness. that whatever made him who he was, was a thing tied to the chrome organs that vibrated in his body, that hummed constantly without rest. it is more than many, than most in all honesty. those of dulvey were few and far between, mostly just the bakers. their faceless victims in a list he has written on a page in his journal somewhere beside his body, they were harder to come by. there has been no one that he knew from the village, no elena or her brutish father. no kindly luiza ushering him into the facsimile of her house before flame razed it to the ground.

the castle itself, sat in glistening abandon marked the golden tip of the compass, always it was the one visual landmark by which ethan traversed this side of the world. when going through the sinking swamp it was mostly a mass of turning halls that doubled back on themselves, built in strange and unsettled geometry, crossing each other or having repeating doors that opened into the same room; the revolting livingroom, a table blooming with grotesque meal set for four, the closest chair to the door topple over, but through every window, seen between the wooden slats and newspapers pasted over the glass, was the imposing outline of the listing annabelle.

" you are still you, right? " more than once a voice he had heard call out to him, a jovial announcement that there was to be games to be had, a great hunt in which the prize of a rabbit would be served, through televisions dripping with black ooze or laying face up in a snowbank. it was never the voice he wanted to hear, just the ear-splitting cackle of the horrid marquee compressed through the tinny speakers of the sets was salt in the aching, lonely wound of him. he wonders if karl knows, if he is aware that whatever the grand thing is that looks like the duke in costume is, has taken to borrowing his theatrics.

soft, brown eyes strain as if they might see right through the face his hand holds, into the soul that has remained unchanged now that it has been severed from the constrains of a body. yellowed sclera, like his teeth and nails, from years of smoke and grime, seem just the way they always were. he supposes it could have been worse, he could have found a sad child here, whatever he was before that worm was pressed into the base of his skull by the insane woman that sits far, far below them. there could have been an angry kid with no memory of him curled in this dark corner of the room with its many tally marks decorating the walls. maybe that stolen boy was that part of him that was taken to heaven, rescued by a god that abandoned him temporarily and reunited him with his real family. there may be solace in that, just the way he likes to think that whatever part of him died in dulvey, was released and this ghost he is, is free from judgement because his immortal soul has already been saved.

" what was the old safe word we had? " karl could say anything, he honestly forgets but the question itself is a moment between just them, in the aftershocks of learning that truly, death could not hold ethan down. some little phrase that would serve as a trigger for the kill-switch that would keep another from walking around in ethan's skin. a trust placed in a stranger that had given him back his rose.

no one could ever replicate ethan winters but the man himself, too complex a creature to be crafted by the hands of a woman who has been blinded by her own vision — that in itself a thing of delusion, every body a tool that fails to measure up to the idealised image of a little girl lost before she had ever completed the metamorphosis into person — his executioner and lover both lacking in sharp angles besides the bony curves of protruding hipbones that he has ground himself down upon time and time again and yet, composed of more than softness, despite patches of velvet skin and wry smiles, bearing barbs beneath his tongue and the blunt force of stubborn will. the last lord, another title taken from him now when he has fallen like the left, knows that the mad saint's attempts to get under his skin would be far rougher: she has torn him open time and time again, patchwork made of skin and muscle, her attempts to cater to his ego so obvious in its saccharine offering that it turned sour. the comfort of ethan and his inclination to argument is of little comfort, weighted by umbrage, but a comfort nonetheless.

"to -" white-yellow eyeshine and matted hair, his voice as it always has been whether or not his vocal chords exist the way they once had: savouring drawl spoken between the hammer-strikes of his own aggression, a poor imitation on the rhythmic pounding of steel-plated skull. "i've spent my whole fucking life trying!" bang. "trying is what got me here!" bang. "a lifetime. two. under that bitch's thumb!" perhaps if he had bent the knee, she would have crushed him sooner — his freedom now a failing organ in the body of their rotten god, surrounded by ichor atramentous and all of it calling him with siren songs of oblivion. he would rather that than submission, but resists all the same; karl heisenberg did not spend a lifetime, two, scavenging for retribution only to have his reward taken from him.

it is the inversion of his lovers life, severed too soon, dulvey the tragedy that stained the remaining pages of the story — his tragedy written in the exordium. this, he supposes, their denouement. no amount of yelling, whether his own voice or the rising cacophony of the false factory, distracts from the truth, the wriggling worm of something human he has ignored but never lost: he is angry, he is fearful, he is — dead, but not defeated. on the verge of it, the divaricating angles of his feet firmly upon the mountains edge, but not yet doomed to follow impulse to its decisive end.

i'm with you. as if speaking to a version of himself still young and full of live, free of all the wrinkles and scar tissue life has given him, a remnant from a time when he pinned glossy photographs to his board, resentment carving the statement into each one if they aren't with me, they're against me. it feels distant here, now, a memory of a memory interpreted by electrical impulses taken from a brain that was, at one point, his. again, the repulsive tide turns inside his gut: how much of him has been taken to be fit inside another? what had been shaven off and discarded? memories and skills and facets of his personality left to rot on the butcher's floor, swallowed by the starving god.

he looks to ethan, all warm gold, the offered hand and curve of cupids bow devoid of all the wounds received. ethan winters, remade in his own image, the sculpture of a man made whole. not like him, the ironworker casting his own skin, the feral dog chewing his own bones. vanity never ranking in the top ten, or twenty, in the list of his priorities but it is another question met with only silence — he had forgotten what he looked like before miranda planted the seed of god in him, has half-forgotten what he looked like after. the madman hunting little rabbits hides the swirling void of his entropic face behind the pale mask — that is what he feels like. the raw, exposed nerve of him caught between spirals of steam and smoke. that too, a sense of wrongness, his life spent between the hard angles and edges of metal and earth, the softness of a body only ever felt with his fist inside a ribcage and the offered hand upon him.

jealousy rears its emerald head for but a moment, insignificant beneath the ticking of his thoughts. this is not his ethan. the one he pulled from the earth, bloodied and broken and wrestling with the truth. this is hers and yet — and yet he has stormed the impossible factory and speaks as if it has only ever been the last heisenberg.

no, not heisenberg. karl. karl. he remembers. ethan took his name with the barrel of the wolfkiller, embossed in gold lettering: thy will be done. of all the angles, ethan has always been michael, beautiful and bequeathed with flametongued sword.

"you're persistent, i'll give you that." appraisal or insult, both — his sarcasm ever tempered by the traces of approval found between his teeth. "wallowing in my - that's rich, coming from you." he does not take the offered hand, instead hooking filthy claws into the neck of his companion — physical but not, the coolness beneath his fingers as real as it is imaginary, the contradiction of this false world a thing his brain refuses to ignore but, more importantly, still desiring teeth and tongue and a firm hand that points the way.

ethan winters is a stubborn, self-righteous fool. karl heisenberg was — is — no different. worse, perhaps, if he were honest.

a pleasure it had been to be killed by his lover, an intimacy unrivalled, but too long has he gone without it, too long has he spent attempting to parse the memory to see how much of it had been the other man, how much of it the mother who rejected him and how much of it the god that had placed the fettered weights around his ankles.

he does not want pity. nor an empty hand devoid of scars, unfamiliar in its perfection, face-up as if offering scraps to a wild dog in performative gentleness.

deeper dig his nails, the greys of his knuckles under the aged leather of his skin half-stained by soot and oil, into the pleasant slop of a pale neck and bony shoulders. he offers no true loves kiss, instead, he inhales the others breath, or imagines it / replays the memory of what it was like, close enough for the steel wool of his beard to scratch the others jaw. "at least give me a proper reunion, papa."

ETHAN & ROSEMARY WINTERS resident evil village: shadows of rose, 2022

CA-160, Antioch, California.

ok 1 more thing i swear to god, & then i'm done but i know that he has a lot of issues w/ his marriage & mia specifically b/c it plays such a big part in donna's house.

if he was already checked out of the relationship in his mind & was only w/ her b/c of rose, it wouldn't have been there. donna's house is a representation of his psyche & this is y we have the monster at the lowest, most bare part. that in his heart & soul, he refuses to believe that rose is going to be anything other than a monster due to the mold in mia ( not him, though, he's very normal & not infected ). it is accessed through mia, he has to pull mia apart ( see above when i mentioned that she wanted to bury it like a body & he needs to take it apart to understand ) & find the truth inside her & that include their marriage as well as rose.

of he was over it & maybe just blamed her for rose being a moldy baby, it would manifest in another way, it might have her as walking around like in SoR. it is obvious that rose believe her mom is to blame ( she's not, she's just the only parent a teenage girl has to blame for anything ) & sees her mom as holding her back, trying to stop her from living a normal life ( getting the crystal in this instance ) but he doesn't. he sees her as visions always walking away from him w/ rose or a body on a table or a voice whispering secrets on the radio ( similar to hearing another voice over a device... hmmm interesting how those aspects also overlap ) . similar to finding her in dulvey where he may have thought he found her corpse.

he wants to make it work, it is obvious he does. in my own canon, i do have it that before she announced she was pregnant, he was considering asking to separate through the bsaa & get sent to a different house, but it wasn't b/c he didn't love her, it was b/c he knew that she was never going to tell him the truth & he was going to drive her crazy constantly picking at it. he wanted time & space to think & again, that is totally normal. mia getting pregnant changed that instantly b/c he's not the type to walk out on a woman carrying his child, especially a disabled woman that needs a caretaker & body guard b/c she's being targeted by a terrorism group.

there is a lot in donna's house about mia that shows he has conflicting feelings & he doesn't have the tools or time to go through it so we get him falling back into the old habit that kept him alive before, violence. he is not gentle when dealing w/ the mia doll. he pulls her arms off, he removes her eye, uses rusted scissors he is going to use to kill angie later to cut through the bandages rather than just unwrapping them, removes one of her breasts & steals the thing in the place of her heart. it is a replication of his own wounds as much as it is foreshadowing that his own heart will be ripped out. if he was given proper time & counselling in a normal setting, he would get over it b/c he & mia love each other, no doubt. the circumstances of their lives have dictated so much about their healing process that it just isn't going to happen unfortunately but he does love her

HE DOES LOVE HER.

HE WILL ALWAYS LOVE HER.

somewhere down the line, even after living & dying w/ karl for who knows how long, he's always going to love her. there will always be a place in his heart for her, specifically.

in this episode of things i think about that i dont think anyone else does ( besides my beloved b/c he's in my walls & we share a braincell):

ethan must have been recovering from mia's "death" fairly well after 3 yr.s not to say that the moment she was dead he just ran out screaming at the top of his lungs " GUESS WHOSE SIIIIIIIIIINGLLLLLLLLEEEE?!??! " but like, the very opening of re7 has him on a phonecall w/ a friend that says " oh hey, you alright? you just disappeared the other night. " which implies ( most likely ) that he was hanging out with friends.

i dont think this is someone he is very close to for a couple reasons,

first & mostly the fact that ethan states his name. idk about u but when i get on call w/ the love of my life, the first words out of my mouth r not " HELLO THIS IS CJ. " like, no you just jump right into the conversation b/c u both know each other's voice.

secondly, it seems like someone that he knows casually enough to give his name but closely enough to tell him what happened. you would think he would call a family member to tell them about his " dead " wife returning from beyond the grave to send him an e-mail but i think: 1) his family has been exhausted by this. he most likely spent at least the first yr or so chasing every lead & telling them about it so he doesn't want to get their hopes up or 2) will try to talk him out of it b/c they know that every time it turned out to be a dead end, it starts him back over in the grieving process. i think by reaching out to a third party, a co-worker in the case of my canon, it allows him to get that non-judgemental feedback so he won't to talked out of it but still have someone that he touched base w/.

thirdly, the conversation is not so awkward that he has to explain what happened, which would have been actually helpful for a first time player. especially in games these days, things r overexplained b/c most casual players don't want to have to dig for it ( i.e. they dont want to read notes or visit an official website & read sketchboards w/ dev's notes or in-character journals my beloved ). in the promotional stuff for re7, we got the seeds that mia disappeared / died but it still could be missed by someone just picking the game up from the shelf based on the re title alone. it would have been well in vogue to have ethan say to this guy he only seems casual friends w/ " yeah i uh, got an email from my wife... mia,even though she died three years ago. " but he doesn't add that, almost like he's still not willing to say it out loud and a co-worker that maybe knows from ethan taking time off that mia went missing three yr.s ago wouldn't know all the details. instead he ignores the almost absolute impossibility of someone being lost at sea being found rather he just says " she's back. she's alive! "

which...

no, she isn't. to both those points. if she was back, she would have come to u & i promise she's not alive. she has like 7 or smth lines of dialogue during her fight telling ethan " i'm dead. we're all dead here. and if you stay, you'll have to die too! " so on & so forth. she isn't just saying that b/c she knows ethan was told she drowned at sea, she has no idea 3 yr.s elapsed let along who told ethan what.

lastly, he isn't wearing his wedding ring. it is possible that he could have been wearing it up to like,, march / april, somewhere around there b/c there had to be enough time for the skin beneath the band to regrow. as anyone that has wore a thick-banded ring for more than a yr can tell you, it takes awhile for that skin beneath to dry out & regain color. or he could have taken it off shortly after she died.

i tried looking up statistics b/c i kno i read while in my gender studies psychology class a couple yr.s ago that most of the time after divorce / death, men tend to keep their rings on longer than women as usually women tend to trade the rings in for something new they will like as a gift to themselves & help moving on. it is pretty typical for women to usually go through the grieving process quicker than men, who put it off until it overwhelms them. men tend to throw themselves into work whereas women reach out to others around them for emotional comfort right away, mostly due to the unfortunate societal pressure for men not to consider their own emotions & not seek out comfort when they need it, which personally, i think ethan is happy to tell ppl what he's feeling all the time b/c he loves to complain, so i tend to learn more towards he kept it on until early 2017 b/c after 2 whole yr.s of searching & digging & finding out that a lot of what mia told him was all bullshit, he finally just started to accept that either she was alive & didn't want him to find her or she was really gone.

anyway all that to say, i think that he was just starting to use his free time to make new friends & go out to social events when he got that email & still-- STILL, he dropped everything instantly & chased after an email that he knew was probably not real but had to go, just in case. i think that is incredibly important t his character that no matter what, no matter how selfish he can be, no matter how good things r going, he will drop anything & everything to be w/ the person he loves.

Adrian Samson - Interview

@blitzkriegers has entered the mycelium!

you missed my birthday.

no. no i didn't i definitely have a surprise for you over, uh... in the house with the red roof. it is there, take your time-- you know, look around, move things. open drawers. it's in there somewhere, for sure.

piggybacking off of that, for my money, ethan didn't have any relationships while mia was gone. like, three yr.s of marriage would take a long time to get over even if it had been an amicable split. the fact that she was missing / presumed dead definitely would have put a crimp in his social life.

we can gather from stuff he says to mia & stuff she says to him ( e.g. " you were right. i did lie to you. " ) that he had been questioning her for awhile & at some point, i probably will go into how / when he started to realize she wasn't telling him the truth about where / who she worked for. it might be in the next miscellaneous headcanon post b/c it would be very funny to have it be not that deep, although at the same time, i will probably have a lot to say about it, but it is obvious that he had known for awhile & it was something that mia noticed as well. she has a couple voice lines that make it very clear she knew he was trying to figure it out.

anyway, i think i'll go into a breakdown of the timeline a little clearer as to when / how he started to figure things out & the fact that his friends & family were pushing him to move on & get back out there again won't be included ( i say that now but probably in the heat of battle, i'll throw it in there,,,, ahhhhh the fever dream of headcanon posting ) but i definitely think that a lot of ppl in his close circle were absolutely exhausted by him constantly chasing these leads & telling them that he thinks he's close to finding out what happened to her / who she was working for & for their own mental wellbeing & his mental health, i'm sure that they tried to get him out more, away from the computer so he might chill out a little.

especially his mom b/c she comes from a traditional background & would have wanted grandkids. i envision her as constantly bringing it up the longer the marriage went on, not in like a negative way but gently bringing it up how nice it would be for them, that mia & ethan would make amazing parents-- which, she's right! so in her own way of coping, she would push him to move on, find someone else & have kids but he would use the excuse of work to get away from it & when he can't use work, he threw himself into digging for the truth of everything in a very " mom, i can't go meet your co-worker's recently divorced daughter for coffee tomorrow, i've got a zoom meeting with an interpol agent that may have some information on the ship mia may have been on. " type of way. everyone wants him to move on for everyone's benefit.

but he didn't. w/ time he would have & i kno anyone that looks at my blog will think i'm a huge hypocrite b/c 90% of my content is this train wreak of 2 fruits that can't stop fighting or fucking to do literally one thing-- but that comes w/ the caveat that this time he

1) saw " mia " die & in my timeline, he doesn't meet up w/ chris. he doesn't even kno chris is alive for sure until way after. he thought chris got eaten by moreau so as far as he was aware, this time mia really did die. 2) the scientifically proven relationship between nematodes & fungi is undeniable like the red string of fate twisted into a hangman's loop 3) everybody grieves differently 4) village proves that while he loves & cares for mia, nothing is ever going to get him to let dulvey ( & all the lies previous to it ) go. he is going to keep asking questions & mia is exhausted by it. they were never going to be able to last when their coping skills are diametrically opposed. mia wants to bury it & move on, ethan wants to pull it apart to understand. no one is right or wrong in the situation but it is a hurdle that they were never going to get over without outside help & they can't get that. 5) karl offers everything that mia refused, for better or worse, the man encourages ethan to ask questions & dissect him ( maybe literally winky face ) it is very much a case of imagine only ever being told ' no ' your entire life anytime you ask for anything then comes along someone that not only says yes but wants you to actively ask for more & more outlandish things. karl is an enabler in many senses. 6) karl is an incredibly rare collection of habits & traits that ethan was probably never going to run into in the real world w/n his little bubble. there isn't guys like that in l.a. or houston or new york or any big city someone like ethan would choose to live. they kind onf people he would be running into while mia was missing would never snag his attention enough to get him to give up on her & the truth that she represents.

so like yeah, if someone wants to say " i can't believe ur gonna say ethan didn't hook up w/ anyone between 2014 & 2017 but he was fucking that old man 3 days after his house was raided & his daughter was kidnapped. " i'd say you got it!

like yeah, i do, b/c it is a completely different situation despite how similar it may look at first blush. & tbh, he still is working on figuring out what mia was really doing & who she was working for b/c we don't know how much she told him. she may have told him nothing, she may have told him everything but unfortunately once someone is a proven liar it is really hard to believe them when they tell you " i promise, that's everything. " karl could be the biggest liar in the world but as far as ethan is aware, he is a gross, sweaty mole-man but an incredibly honest one at that.

tl;dr, ethan didn't date or see anyone while mia was missing b/c he was too busy trying to dig up dirt on her so he could confront her w/ it when he found her b/c he was sure he was going to find her eventually.

in this episode of things i think about that i dont think anyone else does ( besides my beloved b/c he's in my walls & we share a braincell):

ethan must have been recovering from mia's "death" fairly well after 3 yr.s not to say that the moment she was dead he just ran out screaming at the top of his lungs " GUESS WHOSE SIIIIIIIIIINGLLLLLLLLEEEE?!??! " but like, the very opening of re7 has him on a phonecall w/ a friend that says " oh hey, you alright? you just disappeared the other night. " which implies ( most likely ) that he was hanging out with friends.

i dont think this is someone he is very close to for a couple reasons,

first & mostly the fact that ethan states his name. idk about u but when i get on call w/ the love of my life, the first words out of my mouth r not " HELLO THIS IS CJ. " like, no you just jump right into the conversation b/c u both know each other's voice.

secondly, it seems like someone that he knows casually enough to give his name but closely enough to tell him what happened. you would think he would call a family member to tell them about his " dead " wife returning from beyond the grave to send him an e-mail but i think: 1) his family has been exhausted by this. he most likely spent at least the first yr or so chasing every lead & telling them about it so he doesn't want to get their hopes up or 2) will try to talk him out of it b/c they know that every time it turned out to be a dead end, it starts him back over in the grieving process. i think by reaching out to a third party, a co-worker in the case of my canon, it allows him to get that non-judgemental feedback so he won't to talked out of it but still have someone that he touched base w/.

thirdly, the conversation is not so awkward that he has to explain what happened, which would have been actually helpful for a first time player. especially in games these days, things r overexplained b/c most casual players don't want to have to dig for it ( i.e. they dont want to read notes or visit an official website & read sketchboards w/ dev's notes or in-character journals my beloved ). in the promotional stuff for re7, we got the seeds that mia disappeared / died but it still could be missed by someone just picking the game up from the shelf based on the re title alone. it would have been well in vogue to have ethan say to this guy he only seems casual friends w/ " yeah i uh, got an email from my wife... mia,even though she died three years ago. " but he doesn't add that, almost like he's still not willing to say it out loud and a co-worker that maybe knows from ethan taking time off that mia went missing three yr.s ago wouldn't know all the details. instead he ignores the almost absolute impossibility of someone being lost at sea being found rather he just says " she's back. she's alive! "

which...

no, she isn't. to both those points. if she was back, she would have come to u & i promise she's not alive. she has like 7 or smth lines of dialogue during her fight telling ethan " i'm dead. we're all dead here. and if you stay, you'll have to die too! " so on & so forth. she isn't just saying that b/c she knows ethan was told she drowned at sea, she has no idea 3 yr.s elapsed let along who told ethan what.

lastly, he isn't wearing his wedding ring. it is possible that he could have been wearing it up to like,, march / april, somewhere around there b/c there had to be enough time for the skin beneath the band to regrow. as anyone that has wore a thick-banded ring for more than a yr can tell you, it takes awhile for that skin beneath to dry out & regain color. or he could have taken it off shortly after she died.

i tried looking up statistics b/c i kno i read while in my gender studies psychology class a couple yr.s ago that most of the time after divorce / death, men tend to keep their rings on longer than women as usually women tend to trade the rings in for something new they will like as a gift to themselves & help moving on. it is pretty typical for women to usually go through the grieving process quicker than men, who put it off until it overwhelms them. men tend to throw themselves into work whereas women reach out to others around them for emotional comfort right away, mostly due to the unfortunate societal pressure for men not to consider their own emotions & not seek out comfort when they need it, which personally, i think ethan is happy to tell ppl what he's feeling all the time b/c he loves to complain, so i tend to learn more towards he kept it on until early 2017 b/c after 2 whole yr.s of searching & digging & finding out that a lot of what mia told him was all bullshit, he finally just started to accept that either she was alive & didn't want him to find her or she was really gone.

anyway all that to say, i think that he was just starting to use his free time to make new friends & go out to social events when he got that email & still-- STILL, he dropped everything instantly & chased after an email that he knew was probably not real but had to go, just in case. i think that is incredibly important t his character that no matter what, no matter how selfish he can be, no matter how good things r going, he will drop anything & everything to be w/ the person he loves.

You have roots inside of me.

in this episode of things i think about that i dont think anyone else does ( besides my beloved b/c he's in my walls & we share a braincell):

ethan must have been recovering from mia's "death" fairly well after 3 yr.s not to say that the moment she was dead he just ran out screaming at the top of his lungs " GUESS WHOSE SIIIIIIIIIINGLLLLLLLLEEEE?!??! " but like, the very opening of re7 has him on a phonecall w/ a friend that says " oh hey, you alright? you just disappeared the other night. " which implies ( most likely ) that he was hanging out with friends.

i dont think this is someone he is very close to for a couple reasons,

first & mostly the fact that ethan states his name. idk about u but when i get on call w/ the love of my life, the first words out of my mouth r not " HELLO THIS IS CJ. " like, no you just jump right into the conversation b/c u both know each other's voice.

secondly, it seems like someone that he knows casually enough to give his name but closely enough to tell him what happened. you would think he would call a family member to tell them about his " dead " wife returning from beyond the grave to send him an e-mail but i think: 1) his family has been exhausted by this. he most likely spent at least the first yr or so chasing every lead & telling them about it so he doesn't want to get their hopes up or 2) will try to talk him out of it b/c they know that every time it turned out to be a dead end, it starts him back over in the grieving process. i think by reaching out to a third party, a co-worker in the case of my canon, it allows him to get that non-judgemental feedback so he won't to talked out of it but still have someone that he touched base w/.

thirdly, the conversation is not so awkward that he has to explain what happened, which would have been actually helpful for a first time player. especially in games these days, things r overexplained b/c most casual players don't want to have to dig for it ( i.e. they dont want to read notes or visit an official website & read sketchboards w/ dev's notes or in-character journals my beloved ). in the promotional stuff for re7, we got the seeds that mia disappeared / died but it still could be missed by someone just picking the game up from the shelf based on the re title alone. it would have been well in vogue to have ethan say to this guy he only seems casual friends w/ " yeah i uh, got an email from my wife... mia,even though she died three years ago. " but he doesn't add that, almost like he's still not willing to say it out loud and a co-worker that maybe knows from ethan taking time off that mia went missing three yr.s ago wouldn't know all the details. instead he ignores the almost absolute impossibility of someone being lost at sea being found rather he just says " she's back. she's alive! "

which...

no, she isn't. to both those points. if she was back, she would have come to u & i promise she's not alive. she has like 7 or smth lines of dialogue during her fight telling ethan " i'm dead. we're all dead here. and if you stay, you'll have to die too! " so on & so forth. she isn't just saying that b/c she knows ethan was told she drowned at sea, she has no idea 3 yr.s elapsed let along who told ethan what.

lastly, he isn't wearing his wedding ring. it is possible that he could have been wearing it up to like,, march / april, somewhere around there b/c there had to be enough time for the skin beneath the band to regrow. as anyone that has wore a thick-banded ring for more than a yr can tell you, it takes awhile for that skin beneath to dry out & regain color. or he could have taken it off shortly after she died.

i tried looking up statistics b/c i kno i read while in my gender studies psychology class a couple yr.s ago that most of the time after divorce / death, men tend to keep their rings on longer than women as usually women tend to trade the rings in for something new they will like as a gift to themselves & help moving on. it is pretty typical for women to usually go through the grieving process quicker than men, who put it off until it overwhelms them. men tend to throw themselves into work whereas women reach out to others around them for emotional comfort right away, mostly due to the unfortunate societal pressure for men not to consider their own emotions & not seek out comfort when they need it, which personally, i think ethan is happy to tell ppl what he's feeling all the time b/c he loves to complain, so i tend to learn more towards he kept it on until early 2017 b/c after 2 whole yr.s of searching & digging & finding out that a lot of what mia told him was all bullshit, he finally just started to accept that either she was alive & didn't want him to find her or she was really gone.

anyway all that to say, i think that he was just starting to use his free time to make new friends & go out to social events when he got that email & still-- STILL, he dropped everything instantly & chased after an email that he knew was probably not real but had to go, just in case. i think that is incredibly important t his character that no matter what, no matter how selfish he can be, no matter how good things r going, he will drop anything & everything to be w/ the person he loves.

BIOHAZARD SCENERY 11 / ?? resident evil 7 : biohazard, 2017.

his gaze darts between golden eyes, set afire by the last afternoon sun as it catches on every reflective surface on its way to them. the cool blue of the dull shadows, the dusty gray world of this house that has gone undisturbed for decades only interrupted by starbursts of sunlight on the rosey hued mirrors and the polished bedposts, the worn track that shows exactly where ethan's feet carry him through the house: all through the service kitchen and the sunroom he has turned into his study, the one bedroom that had a working fireplace he could feed split logs with black rings and bursting heads of mushrooms growing on them, the bathroom that is their or at least his own destination, with its strange skeletal structure of rusted brass and yellowed tile, receding grout that is lined, like everything else, in fuzzy mildew. just when he feels like his retinas will burn out from gazing at the twin suns burning into him, he finds relief in the wolfish grin, of too many teeth all crowded and overlapping at unpleasant angles. as always it makes the rings of teeth marks on his body burn with the memory of how they felt sinking into flesh, like pressing on a bruise to watch the blue-black cloud disappear for a moment whilst pale white blooms before it returns and with it, bloodflow and a strangely addictive release.

" unfortunately, they've got enough manpower to fuck up in multiple places. " karl savors his jokes, feeding into the reverberating rhetoric that so many other people around the world indulge in. whittling down the country of his birth to bullies and loudmouths. it was the same stuff he heard as a kid from his cousins when he would go with his mother back to her homeland for the summer, but somehow it stung more back then. maybe it was just the rose-colored glasses of childhood when everything feels like a personal attack or maybe it was the fact that every morning he was required to stand beside his desk, place his right hand over his heart, angle his body towards the little plastic flag hanging flaccid in a corner of the ceiling and recite the pledge of allegiance. from kindergarten to the last day of high school he repeated those thirty-two words that were drilled into his head and even if he has not spoken them in that exact order in nearly twenty years, he bets he could regurgitate them now with perfect clarity. " they're an international organization, they can be wherever they want and with everything else happening, people are scared. they want to help or they want protection. fear is the best propaganda anyone can harvest. imagine you know that more than anyone. "

it seeps through his newsfeed and is absorbed in social settings, when he still engaged in a living world that was not the half-scorched remains of this village or the mechanized necropolis below. every day there was stories of monsters washing ashore from the china sea or small outbreaks along the blurry line between eastern europe and northwestern asia. there was outbreaks everywhere that were slipping out, not to mention the ones he had heard about from various agents. the tragedy of the annabelle and the baker homestead was not an anomaly but a growing statistic that could no longer be ignored. before he chased an email sent by the ghost of his beloved, he refused to believe it, foisting it off on drug-fueled attacks and misidentified attackers reported by traumatized survivors-- then the inhumanity was brought right to him, or he stepped into it, he supposes.

karl has lived in this liminal space of humanity and monstrosity for longer than he has not but also, he has not seen how the outside world has suffered from it. the trappings of the old world wars show how out of touch he is, like his use of goggle-eyed televisions sets always in need of new cathode rays, he is still catching up, stuck just behind the speed of sound and unable to produce the sonic boom that will bring him into the modern century. he has no idea of what the molded were, of how they worked outside the reports and ethan's own failing descriptions... and the thing that he has the capacity to become. the stories he has heard, the news reports, the forum posts, everything he used to brush aside while he drank his double shot no whip, oat milk cappuccino now the soul focus of his life.

" of course we take their shit. " he agrees, indulging his companion's hoarding tendencies a might too much but only having the energy and time to break him of one bad habit at a time-- also they owe him all they have and more for failing to carry out one simple directive. " if they aren't gonna be useful or get killed before we ever even make contact, their crap is forfeit. anyone that crosses those fucking mountains are on our turf. " he has set his horn-head down and locked his knees proclaiming himself king of this hill, forgetting entirely too easily that he very entrance into this place was stumbling through the snowdrifts and carving a path of blood and crystal to karl's front door. " they'll be useful to us, one way or another. "

there it is, like a vein of glittering gold woven along cavernous wall, that ruthless streak in him. something he cannot remember as always being there but a remnant gained just the way he has a mangled, warped edge to his left hand or the tangled scars that bunch up when he smirks. his hands lift the bottom hem of his shirt out of his waistband where he dutiful tucks it. the clothes that are found not worn through by the hungry mouths of moths that leave their sticky cocoons in the folds usually do not fit him quite right. some that fit through the shoulders lift to expose swathes of skin along his wrists and midriff while others absolutely swallow him whole and he has to tuck and roll them to make them fit correctly. the angular hem drops free and nimble fingers deftly push each button through the frayed hole, every action leaving more of his skin exposed. the fabric has soaked up the sweat and soot from cooking and then cooled during his private concert, now stiff and itchy, specked black with charred splinters of wood and ash that will need to be scrubbed out.

" as long as we're on the same page, i'm feelin' good. don't want us running in two different directions when they show up. " -- and truly, it is a matter of when. the bsaa or their buddies blue umbrella, any of those that worked with the connections or whoever else, is not going to walk away from a precious commodity like the mold, offering immortality and neigh complete control of those infected. ethan peels the shirt from his back, the fabric pulling away like velcro before he drops it onto the sunken seat of a near-by chair. " we're a team. you and me. " there is no worry once the fighting starts, both times they have had an opponent to face they have fallen instantly into a rhythm like dance partners, but neither of them should jump the gun when there is the possibility of coming out with the better end of the deal.

a plain statement, rife with what he feels is derision — something in the shift of expression, perhaps, or the residual ache of wounds collected over a century of indiscreet insults levied at him. it would not be the first time an idea of his has been rejected nor the first time he has been looked down upon, as if he a child at the table of those far more knowledgeable than he. it is an exercise in restraint to let it simmer rather than pull it out of man by force so he can examine it at all its angles: he trusts that ethan will be blunt with him if he is upset.

gaze briefly wandering to the shadowed reprieve of the walls that frame his companion, his own voice scratching questions amidst the rusted walls of his mind: when did you start caring whether someone was upset?

the difference between them, he supposes. what the last lord has to lose is the same as it always has been, his life and freedom. decades spent calculating the risks of every interaction, with his wretched family and those beyond it, so much so that it has become second nature. a survival instinct taken to its zenith. it should be the same for ethan and yet, despite the little victories claimed, the acknowledgement of a life left in tatters remain a sore spot he has not the grace to tiptoe over. the risk of death means little to a man in the honeymoon of his immortality — a thing stifled by ties to the living, a family he yearns to return to, a family he seeks to protect. an uncomfortable truth, that ethan worries for them and not for him — ethan does not need to worry about him at all, he thinks, because he is not a burden, he is more useful than any other could be ( and he will, as he always has, fight his way to the top of the list if he has too ) — that he prefers not to acknowledge unless it must be exploited.

all the cards up his sleeve rendered unnecessary and yet, they remain tucked there, encased in glass: break in case of emergency.

"mhmm," disinterest seeps out of him — for the topic at hand, not the body in front of him, no longer the alluring figure stretched out before him with a smile only illuminated at its edges but nonetheless distracting, "not to discredit your skills, of course, papa. if you could get into their systems then we'd have little need for others." how far the world of technology has moved, how outdated he is. curiosity cannot fill the voids in his knowledge, not until he has learnt how to adjust his magnetic field and ethan, stubborn as always, refuses to let him experiment on the single rectangular screen and keyboard he taps away at. somewhere, beneath the stacks of rolled parchment illustrating the warped bodies of her subjects and the leather-bond tomes tracing back the blood of kings, beyond the endless diaries full of delusional divinity written in his mothers scripture, sits the far more useful bounty. addresses of the places she crept off to for a week or two, the garments of the black god traded for the stark white of a labcoat. phone numbers or email addresses of her correspondents, an archive of printed reports sent to her chronicling the birth of the little girl who had mired ethan in the offspill. it is a matter of time until they find it, a resource they have more than any other.

of what he has, those pinned upon his board and those scattered across worktops and steel-checkered plate, much of it means little without context: names and dates, locations and coordinates, all utterly useless to a man tethered to the metastatic heart of this village and unlike those they could uncover from miranda's archives, most of them connecting to the man before him and not the rot that lies within him. the alternative, of sending ethan across the mountains to his homeland, unthinkable — luck ever in his favour and a talent for murder aside, the man needs a guiding hand, one painting the yellow ring in crooked circles around the target.

if they could get someone else to do their dirty work, they could use that time for something else. something more enjoyable. hands guided not around the grip of a gun but his own neck, until ethan's thumb presses against the scar there, until the ravenous thing inside him is finally sated ( the greater fear, more than any armed intruders: that the thing in him never will be ). his own hands move to ethan's waist, bony hips far narrower than his own, before they jerk back, abrupt, caught unawares by the bristling of his lover. "okay, okay, ex-friend, whatever." the attempt to hide his grin, so wide in verges beyond smug in the splitting of his maw, the crowded tombstones of his teeth on display, is a skill he has never quite perfected. never come close, either. as if the very spirit of schadenfreude made manifest. it is a comfort, that notion by itself an oddity, to know he has no rival for his affection — attention, however, he has yet to confirm. the blinders of vitriolic anger one he knows all too well.

"now, now. this is all hypothetical, of course. it's more likely they'll fall face first into that black shit covering half the village and get chewed up for dinner. or maybe they've moved on to fucking up something else. that's the american way, after all!" a statement as true to the last lord as it is hilarious, his laughter amplified in these empty halls, nothing but concrete and the body of his companion to dull the brontide, pattering out to nothing but the warm purr of his engine reverberating along his throat.

he likes this plan, simple as it is, likes that ethan defers to him. he would not have it any other way — at least, not outside those few occasions where a firm hand is appreciated and an order, however trite, sounds so appealing when strung on cupid's bow despite its crooked scar. should that follow the bloodshed? even better. "and good at it you are!" both hands lift to pat against the others chest, hefty in its approval, "my, how considerate of you. i do like to watch. put on a good enough show and i won't even have to join in to enjoy myself." all the splattershow performances in the world won't bring the same exhilaration as watching each wretched tyrant fall from their marble pillars, but if it is a choice between repeating that or the frenzied, viscera-covered scowl of his lover as he straddles him, as skilled with his fingers as he is the ornate length of the wolfkiller, he will pick the latter. "i'm still stealing their shit, though, if they do show up."

should they be close enough, he could follow the ripple in his magnetic field until he finds more of them or, perhaps, wherever they came from. expecting some little base, rife with new toys to play with — for the both of them — and information like those attached to plastic clipboards half-buried under the crumped corpse of the wrecked truck back out in the woods. "never know what might be useful. but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, huh? don't worry your pretty little head over it, papa."