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Blood was everywhere. Her shirt, her hair, her hands, her shoes—all painted in red. She didn’t know how much of it had been hers, how much of it had been from those flesh-eating creatures, how much of it had been—God, how much of it had been Emily’s. The mere thought of the little girl’s name made her knees buckle.
“Grace? You’re home?”
The door flung open, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the knob tighter. It was a wonder she still hadn’t plucked it off the slab. Oh, well. Another tell of her weakness.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
Hesitating hands hovered over her arms, almost too afraid to actually touch her. Though she wouldn’t have minded. She doubted it would even hurt. Or maybe it would. She wasn’t sure. Her adrenaline had long since washed off the second those armored men had dropped her off at her apartment’s doorstep and her body had been buzzing in sporadic pain.
“Who did this to you?”
The voice continued talking. Grace couldn’t understand a single word. It just kept going on and on and on about needing to know a name and perpetrating a killing spree—somewhere, sometime—Grace didn’t know.
“Grace?” Before she knew it, her face was caged in between soft, familiar palms, and eventually, she remembered she knew how to move her eyes. Gold. Black. Tattooed forehead. Grace breathed out a trembling sigh when she realized who this person was, and just like that, it was like a warm blanket had been draped over her shoulders and eased all the heaviness away.
One look at Bela’s eyes and all hell broke loose. Grace let out a broken sob as her weight fell on her lover’s body. Bela was quick to catch her, her arms already circling around the small of Grace’s back.
Bela’s gaze softened when she found that her immediately coming to the rescue was the last thing Grace needed tonight. She just needed to be held. To feel safe. So she stopped her tirade about getting back at whoever did this to the woman she loved dearly, and simply decided to be here. With Grace. For now.
“Okay,” sighed Bela. “Okay. You’re okay, my love. I’m here. You’re safe. I love you. I love you.” She kissed Grace’s head and continued to murmur sweet nothings through her bloodied hair. “I love you. No one’s going to hurt you here, I promise.”
“I– I… I’m–” Grace struggled through her sobs.
She hated this. She hated that she was crying. She hated that she could hardly breathe. She hated that she didn’t believe Bela’s promise even if she tried. Someone could take her away at any moment. Someone could claw at her back and bite off a good chunk of her flesh. She couldn’t afford to be complacent now. No. What if they were still alive? What if they followed her home? What if they hurt Bela at her expense? What if—
“Hey, shh…” Bela’s thumbs gently grazed her cheeks. “Let’s get you cleaned up, hm? I’ll run you a bath. How’s that sound?”
Bela didn’t wait for Grace to verbally respond.
It all happened in a blur. To Grace, at least. She had no clue as to when and how she ended up in the bathtub, with all her bloodied clothes discarded and thrown somewhere in the trash, but with Bela perched on the ledge and carefully lathering her dried, matted hair with shampoo, Grace couldn’t be bothered to ask.
“Your boss took you away for two days, and this is how he returns you to me,” Bela said. Hearing the ire in her girlfriend’s voice, Grace reached out to reassuringly pat her thigh albeit shakily. “I should pay him a visit, no? See if he—”
“N-not… necessary. It’s not– it’s not his fault.” Despite pushing her to face her trauma and ultimately putting her life in danger, Grace wouldn’t wish Bela’s wrath on Dempsey. On anybody, really. “Please, Bela. Just– just be here with me.”
Bela paused to consider this, and then she sighed.
“As you wish, my love,” she replied, although Grace could tell she wasn’t too pleased being told to sit still and do nothing to punish the people involved in Grace’s pain.
“Thank you,” Grace said, leaving a peck on Bela’s thigh that was resting on the tub ledge.
Bela hummed and continued to soothingly caress Grace’s hair. “I knew I should’ve gone with you. This,” she leaned down to kiss the skin above the lurid bite on Grace’s left bicep, “wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Never on my watch. I regret letting you go alone.”
“Y-your mother needed you at the castle.” Grace desperately wanted to close her eyes as the feeling of Bela’s fingers combing through her scalp was making her eyelids heavy, but she couldn’t. Not when every time she blinked, flashes of red and soulless eyes would play in darkness, reminding her of what she had done and everything she had lost.
“You needed me more,” Bela insisted. She pushed herself off from where she was sitting, kneeled down against the tiled floor, and placed her elbows on the bathtub’s ledge. “You don’t have to tell me everything tonight, but… what… What happened? Who did this to you? Please, my love, I won’t ask for anything more. I just… I need to know.”
Grace averted her eyes. She looked down on her lap, frowning just the slightest when she was met with her reflection through the water. It’s not like she didn’t want to tell Bela the truth. She wanted to. They had their fair share of secrets, but they never kept one from each other.
It was the guilt. The shame. The pain. All in one place and they took residence in her mind. You’re the reason for its destruction, Zeno had once said as he was staring at the silvering horizon of Raccoon City. While she knew it wasn’t entirely true, she couldn’t shake that there were others—innocent people—that had paid the price of The Connections’ machinations in search of something that was merely a result of a specious misunderstanding. Their blood was in her hands. Her mother’s blood was in her hands. Alyssa Ashcroft, seasoned journalist and investigative reporter, reduced to nothing but collateral damage.
“I… I don’t know where to start,” Grace’s voice cracked.
“Start by telling me the name of whoever is responsible for these,” Bela’s fingers carefully hovered just above Grace’s scars that hadn’t been there before. Grace flinched instinctively, and Bela’s hands immediately moved away from her skin to grip the tub.
Shaking her head to clear her mind, Grace glanced at the frustration building up in between Bela’s eyebrows. She wasn’t frustrated at Grace. That much was obvious.
“They’re all dead.”
“They?” Bela frowned. She couldn’t even fathom the thought of a fly attempting to hurt Grace, let alone a group of people successfully doing it.
Grace nodded. The pads of her fingers were beginning to prune, so she clenched her hands into fists.
Despite not being forced to, Grace did decide to tell her lover everything even if each word that slipped her mouth sent excruciating pain to her throat. She knew Bela wouldn’t be able to rest if Grace were to really keep her in the dark. She could only imagine what was running in her girlfriend’s mind right now. Possibly the worst case scenario her brain could instantly come up with—as one typically did when the person they loved came home wounded and covered in blood after disappearing for two—almost three days. Bela needed to be needed by Grace tonight no matter what extent, and Grace was more than willing to give that to her.
She told her about Emily. She told her about Elpis. She told her about Leon, about Victor Gideon, Zeno, and the truth about her mother. How she’d been adopted by Oswell E. Spencer himself as an act of penance and how that alone made her a valuable target to anyone greedy enough.
She cried through it all. Cried when she got to the part where she had thought she’d really lost Emily, cried when Leon said they could still save her, and cried even harder when they actually did.
Emily was safe. She was well and healing—yet the grief stayed with Grace anyway.
Because Emily being alive did not erase the fact Grace had watched her die.
Once she was done, once it was all out and she remained there laid bare, Bela seemed calmer than she’d expected. She didn’t cut her off once to spew out threats as Grace had thought she would.
Bela just looked… sad.
Grace was no fool and she wasn’t entirely innocent either. She knew what her girlfriend was capable of and how many had suffered through it. She’d killed people before, took great pleasure in it even, and felt no remorse. If angels did exist, Bela wouldn’t be one. She was more of a succubus, Grace knew that much.
What she was seeing now was a stark contrast to the version of her lover who once decapitated a man with her sickle with no hesitation because he’d made the mistake of following Grace home late at night.
“I… I truly hate your boss,” Bela spoke after a moment, which then rewarded her a light chuckle from Grace.
The sound alone was enough to smooth out the lines on Bela’s features. Perhaps if she couldn’t do anything to sate the urge to get even with the people who inflicted pain on her beloved, then Bela would settle on helping Grace ease the heaviness away by making her laugh even just for tonight.
“He’s not that bad,” Grace said with a small smile this time.
Bela hummed as she straightened up, grey eyes following every inch of her movements.
“Agree to disagree,” she said, reflexively pulling the towel off the rack next to her.
Grace shrugged indifferently before she realized she was being guided out of the bathtub by cold, steady hands.
As she stood, her breath hitched in her throat as she was met with a version of her she’d never met before. There stood in front of her through the bathroom mirror was still undoubtedly Grace Ashcroft, yet pale and battered with wounds and bitemarks.
Consciously covering her naked stomach with her forearms, Grace trembled as she avoided looking into Bela’s eyes.
“Thank you. For telling me. I… I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” Suddenly, she felt the weighted warmth of a towel draping over her shoulders. Grace glanced into the mirror, and bit back a broken whimper when she saw Bela standing behind her, hugging her back and leaving sweet kisses through her hair down to her nape. “You’re the bravest person I know, Grace Ashcroft. Thank you for coming back to me.”
Then the dam was broken down by whispered words. Grace sobbed again, but this time, she turned around to tuck herself in Bela’s body. Normally, she would apologize for getting her girlfriend wet both with her tears and the water that clung to her skin, but she figured it didn’t seem to bother Bela in the slightest. Instead she tightened her arms around her, gently nudged Grace’s head with her chin, and kept quiet.
They just hugged in the bathroom for quite a while until Grace started trembling due to cold air. After all, she was still very much naked and the only thing keeping her warm was her girlfriend and her towel, which didn’t really do much if she were to be frank.
Bela led her to the bedroom and clothed her the way an artist would their canvas. She was careful as she did so, and respectfully quiet as she blow-dried Grace’s hair. They didn’t talk much as they got ready for bed with Grace being too tired to even open her mouth and Bela not wanting to make things worse for her beloved.
“I love you very much, you know that?” Bela whispered, running her fingers through her girlfriend’s hair. “You can rest now. I promise no one will hurt you as long as I’m here.”
Grace had her eyes closed now, her breathing even as Bela settled beside her, humming a tune she’d learned from her mother as she watched over Grace in the quiet.
“Whatever you need, I will give it to you,” Bela continued, bending down slightly to kiss Grace’s forehead. She smiled when her girlfriend simply rewarded her with a nose scrunch. “Just not space. I don’t think I can do that tonight.”
“Or ever,” Grace spoke suddenly, opening one eye as she let out a rasped giggle. It didn’t startle Bela at all, and she did like that she’d been successfully coaxing out little smiles and giggles from Grace tonight despite the circumstances.
“Or ever,” Bela echoed, letting out a chuckle of her own. “Get some sleep, my love. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Instead of doing as she was told, Grace brought her gaze up and timidly reached for Bela’s unoccupied hand. “When– when um… when you told me you’ll give me whatever I need…”
“Whatever you need, yes. Anything.”
Grace didn’t know this, but Bela would give her the world if she asked.
“Uh… okay. Um– r-remember Emily?”