Chapter Text
It’d been 2 months.
Two months since they’d escaped and destroyed that hell hole in Romania.
Two months since Chris ran back into that damned village with sweat on his brow and his heart beating erratically. Rose was crying, but the closer they got to the blast sight the calmer she became. He knew. He knew in his heart Ethan was alive. He had to be.
When Chris found him he couldn’t quite tell what was him exactly. Pieces of flesh were strewn here and there, all mangled and bloodied, but somehow, still held together, or more like connected. Thick tar-like black strings seeped from the pores of the once dead flesh, and slowly, but surely crawled back towards each other, and settled in a congealed mass of pulsing mold.
Ethan was alive.
Or was he?
His mass had been scooped up by Chris’s team and was immediately treated as a bioweapon instead of the man they’d trained beside for months on end. He was put in a containment unit on an offsite facility that held a limited staff and too many empty liminal spaces for him to be comfortable. For the first month, they watched, poked, and prodded. They couldn’t find a heartbeat to measure, or brain waves to signal any kind of life. There was brief talk of disposal, which Chris shut down immediately.
They took Rose away after some testing too. Somewhere where’d she’d be safe and cared for, though they didn’t care to tell Chris where. He figured he could ask, but at the time he was more worried about Ethan.
The first month passed, and slowly Ethan reknit himself. The black mass of mold and fungus slowly pulled all the pieces back into itself, and limb by limb his body reformed. They found a heartbeat, and eventually brain waves to signal he was present. And then there was nothing. No movement no flick of eyelids. He didn’t react to outside stimuli at all. Chris couldn’t watch any longer.
He joined his squad and made a return trip to Romania. A clean-up crew, to sweep away any monsters or otherwise that remained hidden in the woods with a hope to survive. His mind wasn’t on the mission. He was too busy wondering whether or not he made the right choice to come back here. They wouldn’t do anything to Ethan right? Not without his say so, and god help them if they disobeyed.
He didn’t hear it stalking from behind, not until it was too late. A quick snap of a twig from beyond the darkness of the tree line was the only warning he had before his body was on the ground and a flash of pain seared into the meat of his shoulder. There was yelling and gunfire, and quickly enough the varloac was cut down, leaving Chris bleeding and breathless on the cold ground.
Two weeks later, and two months after saving Ethan, he sat in a containment unit adjacent to the man he’d saved. He’d been poked and prodded and tested and given dose after dose of antidotes in the hope that something would stick.
So far he’d shown no signs of anything. No sprouting extra limbs, no hunger, or uncontrollable desires making him feel less than human. Still, on his insistence, he stayed where he was. Maybe he liked having the downtime to himself, or maybe it just felt nice to be so close to Ethan.
After three weeks in containment, Chris began to feel something was off. Not the turning into a monster kind of, the kind that only years of training and a lifetime of being on high alert could tune him into. The halls outside his cell were quiet, there had been little interaction from the scientists or his team today. He hadn’t heard the door to Ethan’s room next to him open in hours, which was irregular. They usually had someone check vitals every hour.
The fluorescent lights overhead beamed with an unnaturally loud hum. He could practically feel the electricity coursing through them and dissipating into the room below. HE sat propped against the wall, feet dangling off the edge of the twin bed and tapping the sanitized floor below. His eyes stayed trained on a particular spot on the opposite wall, where he knew just on the opposing side Ethan lay motionless.
He could picture him without needing to truly see. Blond hair swept up off his face, long lashes closed in a blissful sleep, the steady rise and fall of his chest, the rest of his body, the one that Chris had spent months remaking and shaping into something that could defend itself, just lying there waiting for him.
Christ.
Being isolated was getting to him. Or so he told himself at that moment as he forced his eyes to wander away to count the tiles on the ceiling for the hundredth time. He didn’t want to admit those things to himself, or to Ethan. He’d liked him for a long time he thinks. Maybe even since he pulled him out of the Baker house. How could he not? He’d survived so much and still somehow came out with his heart on his sleeve. He went back to take care of his family even though he was being trained to kill bioweapons. Chris couldn’t imagine doing something like that, having the strength to juggle both, but he longed for it. To feel that desire to protect and care for someone. He’d tried various times but mostly had been resounded to flings or poor endings that tore him up enough he couldn’t allow himself to let anyone close.
But Ethan could defend himself. He was a bioweapon, after all, one that could pull itself back together after being blown to bits. Maybe something like that could survive him.
There was a dull beep in the background. The weak heartbeat of Ethan slowly pumping life into his body. It was steady, but quiet, and far slower than the average should be. Chris listened to it like a melody, letting it soothe him from the outside in. He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax as the monitor chimed.
Like a steady metronome it ticked, and he counted the beats in a minute, and then with some frustration on his part, recounted. There was one extra this time. He listened again and recounted. Another extra. He could’ve been imagining it, but from what he could hear, Ethan’s heart rate was increasing.
His eyes flew open as his own heart began to race. He flew from his cot and to the door. A fist-raising to pound. Charlie, one of his team members, was at the door in an instant.
“You alright?” he asked urgently.
“IT’s Ethan. You need to check on him.”
“The doctors just did their rounds a few minutes ago. They said nothing had changed.”
“His heart rate is going up. I think he’s waking up.”
Charlie took a step away from the door.
“How do you know that?”
“What are you talking about? I can hear it?”
He raised a skeptical brow.
“Through 12 inches of concrete and rebar?”
Chris swallowed down a lump in his throat, trying to to think much of it.
“Just check on him for me will you?”
With a nod, Charlie turned and disappeared to the right of Chris’s door. He stepped away as he listened to the door squeak open, and followed the sound of his footsteps ad he went to investigate Ethan’s body. Chris listened with his breath still in his lungs, hope making his heart beat erratically.
“Holy Shit,” he heard exhaled lowly.
Chris exhaled a sigh of relief and then toppled over, clutching his ears to try and block out the ear-splitting sound that suddenly erupted within his ear drums.
The beat of Ethan’s heart pounded in the back of his head as the high-pitched wail of the monitor pierced his eardrums. He fell to the floor cradling his palms around his ears and tucked his chin into his chest. The room around him felt too bright, the fluorescent lights felt like a spotlight shining down on him. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth as the ringing in his ears grew louder and louder.
There was an ache in his jaw, whether it was from his own clenching or something else he didn’t know, but he tasted the tang of blood not long later, thick and hot as it coated his tongue. The overstimulation was too much to bear. He yelled, the sound coming from deep within his lungs as he curled into himself on the floor.
HE heard a cavalcade of feet running towards his and Ethan’s cells. He couldn’t move, couldn’t look up to see who was entering his room all dressed in sterile whites. They surrounded him, their hearts racing, only adding to the chorus of sound beating behind his eyes. There was a brief jab of something into his shoulder and slowly his body began to relax. The last thing he heard before going under was a weak voice waking from its long slumber and whispering a name only he would hear.
“Chris.”