Chapter Text
He wakes, head pounding as he blinks his eyes. Cold water creeps in through his jacket where he lies on his side in the snow. Suppressing a shiver, he tries to sit up, but his body protests the movement. Looking around, he watches the snow fall from above. His eyes begin to focus on his surroundings as he regains his strength.
There’s a body in front of him.
Someone covered head to toe in tactical military gear. Ethan’s heart starts pounding, and the fear gives him the resolve to scramble away from the body and towards the – oh. The upturned van.
Everything from earlier comes rushing back to him – Chris, Mia, and – Rose. They killed his wife. They took his daughter. Dread fills his chest, and the rage from before seeps into his veins. Where is she? Why is this happening?
The dead agent in front of him still clutches onto a phone, someone still trying to communicate on the line. He shakily picks it up and holds it to his ear.
“About damn time! What’s your status? Is the package safe?” A voice he doesn’t recognize says.
Ethan frowns. “What are you talking about? Where’s Chris and Rose?” He pulls his jacket tighter around him; the wind is picking up. He feels very small suddenly, sitting on his butt in the snow, surrounded by dead bodies and gnarled trees.
“Who is this? This is a secure channel, you are not authorized to use this –” The line cuts out. He drops the phone back into the freshly packed snow.
Throughout the interaction, he felt a strange sense of familiarity. The sight of the mangled van, the biting wind, and the conversation on the phone all seem like they happened to him before in a dream. Or, maybe he’s just disoriented from the crash. It looks like he’s the only survivor, and he’s cold, wet, and confused.
Feeling uneasy and shaky on his feet, he rises. He knows there’s only one way to go – down the path laid out in front of him. He feels like a fish being strung through the water by a hook. Shivering, he begins his journey forward.
*
It hurts his head to think about why, but he knew something bad was going to happen in the village even before the lycans came. He felt his stomach drop the second he saw smoke curling in the distance, but he knew he had to keep moving forward. The snarling and gurgling sounds hardly bothered him like they should, like they’re something he's used to hearing. When the village caught fire, he was secretly grateful for the warmth, in spite of the hollow grief he felt for the villagers.
The same voice from before urges him that he’s experienced all of this already; he’s watched Elena and her father die in front of him before, the old man too. They had been dead the moment the van crashed outside of the village. No matter what, they always die; he can’t save them. His head buzzes.
One of the lycans took half of his left hand, tearing off his pinky and ring finger with ragged, misshapen fangs, swallowing them along with his wedding ring. His remaining stumps throb in pain, and he keeps his hand wrapped tight, hoping that it won’t get too infected. He’s no stranger to missing body parts, though, and the pain doesn’t even fog his mind like he thought it might. It’s not the worst injury he’s had, but it’s the first where he wasn’t able to reattach the limbs he lost. He’s already getting used to aiming his gun one-handed. It’s strange to look down at his hands and not see his wedding band, though.
His relationship with Mia has been strained for the past 3 years, ever since Louisiana. It’s hard to believe that she’s dead. They were almost incompatible in their grief; Mia refused to talk about what happened to them in that house, and Ethan couldn’t move on without that conversation. Their coexistence is so fragile that lately he’s been wishing that someone (probably him) would crack the shell and the ugly truth would come spilling out. He’s not sure if that would’ve fixed their relationship or broken it, but nevertheless, he’s sad to see the wedding ring lost to a hungry lycan. Not, he thinks, as sad as he should be.
Still, the only thing Ethan can do is move forward – the more he stalls, the less time he has to save his daughter from – from….
*
“In life and in death, we give glory, Mother Miranda.”
He meets a man wielding a laughably large hammer. Or, the man stabs him with a metal pipe and kidnaps him. He’s then put on trial in front of a room full of mutated freaks masquerading as a congregation. He knows (from past experience?) that the man, Heisenberg, “wins” the right to kill him from Mother Miranda.
Although he still asks, he knows that he doesn’t get a say in this. He also knows that that means he has to run after the hammer comes down between his legs. He remembers which directions to take when there are forks in the road, the ones that won’t lead him directly towards the jaws of a lycan, and he knows how to find the alcove that allows him to escape the meat grinder, because of course that’s something they have.
He wonders if these freaks have Rose. He knows they do.
Later, when he’s not actively being chased, or trapped, or taunted, he breathes out, his hands trembling as he leans against the village gates. He wonders why the layouts and directions come to him so easily. Maybe he experienced this all before, in a bad dream, or maybe, he died and woke up in hell. While he’s busy thinking about everything he’s done wrong to end up here, wooden shutters slam open behind him, making him jump.
“Ah, Mister Winters,” a jolly voice rings out. Ethan turns around, frantic. “So good to see you again!” A humongous, barefoot man smiles at him from the top of his caravan. Again? Even though he has never met this man in his life, and all parts of him scream at him to be wary, a deeper, more primal part melts in relief at the sight of him.
“Who are you?” He asks, shoulders tensing. He thinks he should know who this man is, but trying to remember makes him feel dizzy. It’s on the tip of his tongue, but thinking too hard about it makes his head throb.
“Oh, Ethan,” the man fixes him with a sad look, almost pitying. Almost immediately, like it never happened, his initial, jovial smile returns. “Forgive my manners, call me the Duke. Now, to business – anything you desire, I can provide.”
It would be crazy to trust him, but somehow, Ethan can’t help himself. He sells him some of the junk he looted off of some dead lycans, buys some extra shotgun shells, and starts to go on his way towards the castle.
“Give the Lady my regards.” The Duke waves after him. It never even crosses Ethan’s mind that he never told him where he was headed.
*
Ethan's hands ache, and he feels like someone hit him with a truck. The cold air blowing on his face sobers him a little but does nothing to ease the horrible feeling in his gut. Why is this happening again? He thought he’d escaped back to his normal life, that Louisiana marked the end of the horrors haunting him and his family. Romania was supposed to be a fresh start. Somewhere he and Mia could raise Rose without any reminders of the past. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Could never be the case.
He’d felt like something was off when they moved, like there was something he was overlooking. He hadn’t jumped for joy at the thought of moving continents and raising his daughter somewhere he had never been before, but Mia had wanted it. She said it would be safe here; even Chris agreed, and who was he to argue? Sure, he wondered, why here, why middle-of-nowhere Romania? In hindsight, it seems impossible that Chris’s team didn’t know about the ‘village of shadows’ before they moved them here. He wishes he’d listened to his gut.
His skin was already reknitting itself together where the meat hooks split his hands apart. That pain was almost worse than losing his hand for the second time from the sharp blade of Dmitrescu’s claws. Luckily, Louisiana taught him one thing, and it was how to react when a mutated freak sliced off his hands. If he had a nickel for every time that’s happened….
The feeling of bone and flesh rejoining themselves was something he would never get used to, though, and a deep itch presented itself under his skin. An itch he can never scratch, reminding him that he’s not normal and he never will be again.
What’s left of Dimitrescu’s corpse sparkles in the sunlight pouring in through the rubble, the only evidence that he truly killed her. Her mutated, fleshy form turned to ash once she finally fell from the sky and died, leaving nothing but a jagged crystal of her former body. The air felt strangely quiet now.
“How dare you talk about saving your daughter when you murdered mine?” She had said to him. Tough shit. He figures that under any other circumstances, he might have felt some sympathy for the woman, but now, all he can do is stuff what was left of her body in his bag. He’ll get a hefty price from the Duke for something like this.
When his eyes meet the dirty flask in the rubble, something akin to terror seizes him.
He takes it in his hands with a carefulness that seems out of place among the ruins. For a moment, he cradles it in his arms and feels a horrible, gnawing fear. When the moment passes, and the flask becomes a flask again, he stuffs it in his bag too, just in case it’s something valuable.
*
“Why, you have your daughter right in your own hands.” The Duke tells him.
Ethan blinks. “What are you saying?” He says, ignoring the way his head starts buzzing again.
“Take a closer look.”
He brushes the dirt off the glass and reveals the label – Rosemary W. Head.
The buzzing becomes unbearable as his vision turns static-y around the edges. He drops the flask – his daughter – into the snow. Quickly, he bends to retrieve it, holding it gently in his hands. His baby, in a jar. In several jars. His stomach flips.
He’s dimly aware that his conversation with the Duke continues, but he’s not present for it. He feels like a hollowed-out puppet being flung around an empty stage.
“She can be saved, you know,” the Duke says, eyeing him knowingly. Ethan gets the impression that there’s another meaning to his words.
“How?” He demands, feeling suddenly very desperate. If his eyes are lined with tears, the Duke doesn’t mention it.
If she’s not dead, then there’s no need to cry over her. He sniffs and gathers his resolve. He’ll fix her.
The Duke fixes him with that same, strange look for a beat longer, and then tells him the story of the four lords. At least he knows where to start.
*
He breezes through killing Beneviento and Moreau. Similar to how he felt for Dimitrescu, he feels a distant pity for them, but not enough to dampen the rage he feels at their resistance to give up their flasks.
He told them he would go away, that they didn’t have to fight, if they just gave him his daughter. He thought about telling them that he knew how this would end for them, not from a place of arrogance, but just because he knew. He knows how this ends because it ends the same way every time – he harvests their crystals and takes his daughter back. But there’s no reasoning with monsters, and they choose to follow the script, so he does too. He kills them quickly and finds that he doesn’t feel guilty like he thought he might. He has a mission, and he can’t give up now, even though it all feels horribly futile.
*
He reaches the factory. The cigar smoke waters his eyes from outside the barn doors that mark the entrance. The metal man with the silly hammer, Heisenberg, told him over the intercom that this was a test. Well, he certainly feels like he’s being tested by some higher power.
Somehow, this moment feels important. His head buzzes, like it always does when he thinks about things that aren’t right in his world, and he thinks of Rose. He thinks about his life with her, about raising her into a young woman. He thinks about the glass of wine they’ll share once she’s old enough and all the albums he’ll play for her in the car on their way to school.
His chest suddenly wrenches in pain, and he almost falls to his knees. It feels like his heart is being ripped out of his chest, ribs cracking, organs shifting to compensate for the empty space, warm blood streaming down his front, splashing bright, violent red on the snow –
Ethan stumbles. Dazed, he stops where he stands, his mangled hand getting ready to push the door open.
Whatever he just experienced felt too real. The voice in his head screams at him now, to get inside, just get inside, follow the script. He gets the feeling that something is mad at him, that he’s not doing what he’s supposed to. But the vision causes his thoughts to spiral. He knows what it feels like to have his heart ripped out of him and to watch as the blood is squeezed out of the still-pumping organ onto the face of–
The static becomes too loud. Shaking his head, he decides to focus on breathing. It doesn’t distract him much from the dread of the memory of how it feels to collapse into the cold ground knowing the last thing he’ll ever see are those horrible black feathers. Fuck.
Why would he remember that? It hasn’t happened. Yet, the voice supplies.
Goddamnit, he doesn’t have time for this. He has to keep moving if he wants to kill Miranda and save Rose. The buzzing eases at this thought. He has gained approval from the something that was mad at him before. All is right again. Now he just has to –
The factory door opens in front of him. His eyes meet a dirty trench coat and a tattered hat. Heisenberg. Immediately, he backs up and aims his gun at the man.
“Winters,” he drawls, “welcome to my humble abode.” He spreads his arms wide and grins like he’s showing off a mansion and not a dilapidated, rusty workshop.
Ethan stares at him, unsure of what to say. He settles on “What the fuck.” He doesn’t put the gun down.
“Let’s talk. Inside, if you don’t mind,” He walks through the doors, not even watching to see if Ethan followed. “You ruined my surprise, you know. I thought you’d come barging in, but instead you just froze up outside, so I had to come and get you.”
Ethan doesn’t reply as he follows him inside, not really knowing or caring what he’s talking about. Entering the workshop, his gut clenches as he feels a strange sense of deja-vu, finally naming the feeling that’s been haunting him all day. He lowers his gun, not feeling actively threatened with Heisenberg’s back turned to him and also knowing that it offered him no protection anyways.
“Listen, Ethan.” Heisenberg begins, shutting the door behind them using his powers. “You’re being played.”
Ethan hesitates a beat. He’s felt like this whole day was just some sick game he’s being made to play. There could be some merit to the freak’s words.
“What are you talking about?” He tests the waters.
Heisenberg laughs, the sound ugly and hollow. “Don’t you see? Miranda wants you to join her family. Wipe us all out, resurrect her Eva, and play house for all eternity. Well, fuck that!” He slashes his arm violently, and a knife flies out and buries itself into the barn door.
Ethan's head is buzzing again. He gets the feeling that something is off. It reminds him of the Spot the Difference games from the Highlights magazines he read when he was young. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.
“What the hell do you want me to do about it?” He scowls. “I just want to fix my daughter.”
“So do I! Do you have any idea how powerful that kid is? Even Miranda’s scared of her–” Heisenberg’s musings are cut off by a loud whirring sound coming from below, like someone’s playing with a chainsaw in his basement.
Annoyance passes his veiled features. “Excuse me,” he mutters as he turns to a hatch in the ground. “Shut your fucking hole!” He hollers down. The sound stops. “Sorry about that.” His expression manages to look sheepish despite the sunglasses.
Ethan almost wants to laugh. The situation is ridiculous. Either the buzzing in his ears or the sudden hysteria he feels bubbling up inspires him to ask the question that’s been bouncing around his head all day. The one that makes him dizzy to think about.
“Heisenberg. Why the fuck is this happening again?” He barely recognizes what he’s asking as the words tumble out of his mouth.
The look that crosses Heisenberg’s features reminds him of how the Duke looked at him earlier. Hints of confusion, anger, and complete understanding somehow conveyed themselves all at once in the man’s brow.
“Can’t say I know what you’re talking about, Winters.” Heisenberg lowers his voice.
“Cut the shit. I can tell you know exactly what I’m talking about.” Now that he’s spoken the feeling out loud, flashes of scenes– no, memories– start to come back to him.
A giant machine – Heisenberg, his brain supplies – yells in agony as he sparks and stutters in the pouring rain. Miranda appears in front of him, her raven feathers flapping and unfurling as she rips his heart from his chest and pours the blood over her face. He holds Rose, newly whole again, for the last time before Chris takes her away to safety. He’s on his knees, looking up at the megamycete, like he’s kneeling towards a monarch, or a god, the black god; it’s shaped like a fetus, curled tight, asleep, and as he kneels, he presses the release for the bomb–
Ethan comes back to himself. He understands now why he felt the importance of this moment before he walked into the barn. This is the moment where he makes a decision, one that will either lead to the memories he relived or some other new outcome.
There are fingers snapping in front of his face. “Winters? Ethan?” Sometime during his out-of-body experience, Heisenberg must have taken off his sunglasses. His pale eyes crinkle with concern, and a frown frames his scarred face. “The fuck happened? You have another fit?”
“I remembered,” his voice comes out ragged. “What happens, how this ends. I kill you, and then Miranda kills me.”
“What are you saying?” Heisenberg’s face turns deadly. The air turns static-y and the hair on Ethan’s arms stands up.
“I’m saying –” He sighs. “This time, I need your help.”
Heisenberg laughs at him again, mean and joyless. “Funny, I was gonna ask you the same thing.”
Ethan glares. “Well?”
“Well? I suppose we’d have to work out the details, papa. I’ll save us some time and assume that you’re not interested in using our greatest weapon available.” He sneers.
“Rose is not a weapon.” He says harshly, then quieter, he asks, “but does that mean you remember too?”
Heisenberg surprises him and freezes. He looks strangely vulnerable for a moment before he quickly puts his glasses back on. “Then we don’t use her. Instead, we find another way to kill Miranda.”
Ethan looks at him. The man in front of him looks uncharacteristically wound-up. He wonders if his usual persona is all a front, something created to withstand everything Miranda’s done to him. It doesn’t escape him that Heisenberg didn’t answer his question, but he doesn’t press.
“Good. Then we’re on the same page.” Ethan relaxes a little. It doesn’t mean that he won’t still keep a close eye on the flasks.
Heisenberg holds out a gloved hand. “Deal?” he asks smugly. Ethan feels like he’s making a deal with the devil, but he grabs his hand anyway.
“Deal.”
His grin upticks and his expression looks disturbingly inspired. “The bitch won’t know what hit her! With my brain and your… prior knowledge, she’ll never see us coming. You and me, Ethan, together we grind Miranda into paste and escape this hellhole.” He waves his arms theatrically as he talks. He’s still holding on to Ethan’s hand, flinging it around wildly.
“Sure. Her ass is grass.” Ethan retreats his hand. “There’s something you might wanna take care of first, though.”
“Hm?” he grunts.
“Chris is planting the factory full of bombs right about now.” Ethan remembers watching the factory explode in flames from the field where he fought a mutated Heisenberg. He really doesn’t want to jinx them now.
Heisenberg’s grin falls. “Oh, that motherfucker – I’ll kill him.” His voice fades off as he leaves the room dramatically, trench coat flapping out behind him.
Ethan feels like he’s in a horrible play. But, hopefully, one whose ending is about to be rewritten. Although the buzzing in his head is gone, the feeling that some kind of force is mad at him has increased tenfold. The force is furious with him now. He chooses to ignore its thrashing and clawing in his mind, and begrudgingly, he follows Heisenberg into the depths of the factory to begin bomb disposal.