Chapter Text
Ethan Winters dreams of everything and nothing, a chorus of voices seething inside his head.
His head?
He hangs suspended in a state of slow suffocation, a strange taste clinging wetly to his lips. It stings his tongue when he licks them; petrichor and pitch. Something sucks tight to his face with every shallow breath, filmy and amniotic. He's inside it, whatever it is. It's all around him: a cocoon.
How long has he been here? Why isn't he gone? He remembers detonating the bomb. He remembers the incandescent pain of skin seared from bone, bone shattered by heat and flying apart. He could hear the ringing even after his ears were burned away, and then he didn’t hear anything at all. There should be nothing left of him.
He tries to reach out, groping blindly. His arms are pinned to his chest by the slick caul of the cocoon’s walls. His fingers slip through something warm and thick, curling and clawing until finally the surface is breached and he spills unwholesomely out. He shivers like a newborn on the floor of a dense and tangled wood, coughing up slime.
Crawling is all he can do, and just barely. His bones are like jelly, and he can’t think about the slick, soupy black trail he’s leaving in his wake. He can’t. He can’t think at all. It’s easier just to be a body twitching and squirming on the ground. He digs his fingers in, the surface powdery and pale. Snow? Ash?
“Well, look who’s finally awake! Couldn’t have timed it better, Winters.”
The sudden sound sends a spike of pain through the misfiring meat in his skull, leaving him jerking and hissing and clenching his eyes shut. The crunch and snap of booted feet moving through brush meanders closer, unhurried and circling. There’s an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu churning in the pit of his stomach. Why? His thoughts are swarming like flies, buzzing and indecipherable. What is he remembering? What is he forgetting?
The stranger clicks their tongue, coming to a stop beside him and prodding him with the toe of a sturdy boot. The world pitches and spins, and gray sky engulfs his field of vision as he’s rolled onto his back. Gnarled, black branches sway in his peripheral vision, but he can't feel the breeze that animates them.
The figure stooped over him is blurry and indistinct; solid, broad-shouldered, shaggy, faintly jingling. It straightens and begins to circle again. Metal clicks, something sparks. He smells smoke and the cloying sweetness of tobacco.
"You're just full of surprises, aren't you? You really are something special, Ethan."
Something about the voice nags at him, a prickle of recognition gathering at the base of his skull. Where has he heard it before? He tries to blink, to clear his eyes. It's a monumental effort. His throat clicks, spasmodically swallowing without his input.
The figure pauses, sinking into a crouch to scrutinize him. A smoky chuckle ghosts over his face.
"Poor papa…"
Realization strikes like a lightning bolt. He does know that voice. His eyelids crust and stick with each blink, but details of the silhouette begin to resolve themselves now that he knows what to look for. Wide-brimmed hat, wild hair, the glowing cherry of a cigar and a mocking, feral smile.
Heisenberg.
Ethan tries to speak, but all that comes is a weak gurgle. There's a gloved hand on his face, grip firm, discourteously twisting it this way and that, pulling his mouth open to look inside. Heisenberg is still talking, but Ethan’s checked out; it washes over him like static. By the tone, it seems as though the Lord is just enjoying the sound of his own voice. He clearly isn't expecting a response from Ethan, and that's fair enough. Still. Still.
He forces up another sticky, burbling cough, then a long, slow fricative wheeze between teeth and lip, trying and failing to speak. Heisenberg leans closer, head inquisitively cocked and finally silent. He smells like leather, iron, salt, smoke.
“Fffff…”
A little slap to his cheek jolts him, disorienting and making his head drunkenly loll. Heisenberg’s tone squats somewhere between teasing and sneering when he croons, “Go on, Ethan. I know you’ve got it in you. Tell me all about it.”
Ethan grits his teeth and spits the words. “F-fuck. You.”
God, it hurts, but he’d keep saying it if he could.
The last thing he hears before passing out again is the man's barking laughter.