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If Clancy thinks about it too much, he can feel it itching underneath his skin. Can feel its growth as it slides between his bones and tendons, licking wounds closed that shouldn’t ever be able to heal. Reattaching limbs, fixing the jagged openings in his skull where the saw blade tears it open, blood and bone and brain matter all remade anew.
He doesn’t want to think about it as much as he is, though. Because if he can feel it restructuring his body, he can also feel it whispering in his head. Not that he has much choice in his current activity, seeing as Lucas had decided to leave Clancy trapped in his death machine, watching the very much actually dead corpse, and wishing it was him.
Who would have thought a draw could go so bad.
The fact remains, though, that Clancy can hear it, (Her, her, her, his head pounds.) humming away within his skull. It’s some sort of song, he’s sure, but he can’t hear it over the other things in his head. The screams, the crying, the calls for Ethan, Ethan, Ethan -
He knows that other people are trapped here, but not just as a passing thought in the back of his mind. He can feel it. An extension of himself, his own limbs, his own thoughts.
Except they’re not. He’s just feeling what she - it - feels. The echoing tendrils of Eveline burrowing themselves into him. Curling between his joints, settling within his eyes.
He loses time often like that, drifting. His body doesn’t feel quite his own anymore. He’s sharing it. His life being sustained for some unknown purpose. He finds himself hoping it’s not just for entertainment. That the purpose of all this isn’t just so Lucas can hurt him more.
He has an odd feeling he isn’t going to find much mercy here, though, even within himself.
He should never have come to Louisiana.
Zoe sometimes still thinks about her parents. What they were, what they became.
(What they still are, a part of her brain whispers, a part she desperately wants to shove down. The BSAA had told her it was gone, the mold eradicated, and no one would still be trapped, but, but, but….)
Some of her wonders if maybe Lucas had a point. That maybe they all were hardwired like that somewhere deep inside. Violent. Cruel. Monsters.
Maybe it’s just because her brain can’t separate those three years completely from her childhood. Can’t unsee the people desperately trying to escape. Can’t forget the voices of the people she tried to help calling desperately through the phone. Can’t forget the feeling of her own family infecting her, killing her.
It’s unfair that her brain thinks of Ethan, when she thinks of cruelty. Zoe knows he didn’t want to hurt her. Didn’t mean for her body to be encased within itself, limbs hard and painful. Didn’t want Eveline to hurt her. He was just saving his wife.
Besides, by now Zoe should be used to being the second choice. The afterthought.
(She isn’t to Joe. He took her in. Loved her with all of himself. In some ways, she has a dad again. In all the ways that matter, though, she doesn’t.)
Yet some nights Zoe stares into the mirror and thinks of her parents.
As a child, she used to be told she was the spitting image of her mother. It’s only grown more true as she’s gotten older. Lucas was always the one that looked more like their dad, early balding included. But Zoe always had his eyes, the signature Baker eyes. A nice green shade, looking like the trees around their property in the summer.
They don’t match anymore. Just one more piece of her family chipped away.
Fall sends all the bugs skittering inside. It’s a fact in almost any place with insects. This includes Romania.
Normally this isn’t a time of year that particularly bothers Ethan. But it’s their first first fall in their new home, far away from Louisiana, and that unfortunately means all the nooks and crannies are uncharted territory for Ethan.
Not, though, for the spiders.
He wouldn’t have called himself arachnophobic a year ago. He also didn’t have a scar on his arm and leg a year ago, permanent blemished that will forever mark what he’s been through. Alongside them sits several pock marks in his skin, from bites and stings and legs digging into flesh, trying to eat him alive.
He still remembers how it felt to have a swarm of spiders jump in his face, biting away as his cheeks, trying to get to his eyes.
So when he finds a rather large, mean looking spider in the corner of their kitchen, he resolves himself to kill it before it can truly start to send chills up his spine. It’s simple work to grab one of his boots, hefty and large. The poor thing hardly knows what’s coming.
But when he smashes it, he isn’t left with a smashed bug on his floor. Instead, something else starts moving. Hundreds of tiny little spiders flood from the newly disturbed egg sack that was previously hiding behind their mother.
Ethan’s mind screeches to a near halt as he freezes, watching them scatter to the winds, far too fast for him to catch them all. His breath hitches, fingers wrapping tighter around the top of the boot, nails digging in hard enough it’ll likely leave marks on the leather.
He doesn’t sleep well for the next few nights.
All the mirrors in the house are covered up. Mia hasn’t seen her own reflection in months. Neither of them can stand to stare at their own faces. Can make themselves see what all has changed.
Mia knows why she flinches away from the person in the mirror. Every time she gazes at herself she can see the blue within her own eyes, and she knows.
The BSAA had given her back her driver’s license - found in some storage chest somewhere in the main house months after the fact. Chris said something about it being a memento. Mia just can’t believe they of all people didn’t notice.
Beside her picture, in neat text upon the plastic, her eye color is listed as brown.
She had looked into the Bakers’ records, a few months after the incident. Had double checked on birth certificates and official state IDs. All she could find. Jack Baker had green eyes, and so did his children. Marguerite was the only one with natural blues.
Even though she’s forgotten so much of the Baker house, nothing but the whispering call of Eveline in her ears, she doesn’t think she’ll forget the startling blue of Jack Baker’s eyes. The same blue that looks back at Mia when she looks at herself in the mirror.
And when she looks at her husband’s face.
Ethan also cringes away from his reflection. Won’t even pose for pictures anymore. Can’t stand any reminder of his own appearance. Mia wonders if he can see it too. If he knows the moment he died and came back.
They don’t talk about it. Mia can’t bring herself to ask, and in all their arguments about what happened in Dulvey, Ethan never mentions it.
When Rosemary is born, her eyes are blue, and Mia once again knows. She doesn’t talk about it either. She just moves on, and tries hard not to think about the past.
Rose looks so much like Eveline did at that age.
After fessing up to what happened within the sample of the megamycite - and after the grounding that came as a consequence - Rose asks Chris about her dad, and Dulvey Louisiana, and the Bakers.
And about Eveline.
Chris is hesitant to tell her. It’s a long, slow process to get him to spill all he knows. It takes even longer for him to let her look at files, to read the impersonal documents about these people whose lives were stolen.
He tries to outright forbid her from doing anything when she asks to go to that house in the bayou. She just reminds him who her father is, and asks him how well telling Ethan to do anything worked. He folds rather quickly after that.
So she finds herself in the sticky heat, staring up at a building in shambles.
It’s familiar in a way Rose can’t quite describe. Having gone through the depths of the hive mind, she now knows it’s someone else’s knowledge trying to leak through. Muscle memory leads her down a side path, past a long since abandoned van, to an even more destroyed building.
Looking at the crumbled pieces of calcium all over the ground makes Rose nauseous, so she looks away, instead going inside the best she can.
Everything is in splinters from some cataclysmic event from before her birth. She’s not even sure what room would have been what, and nothing inside her gives a clue either. Finally her feet kick something on the ground, ceramic scattering over wood.
Kneeling down and picking it up finds a part of a face, hair still slightly intact. A glass doll. One that is familiar in a way that isn’t so strange, after all, Rose has seen it before.
“I’m sorry,” Rose says to the doll, no easy way of ever telling Eveline on her own, no way to express that she knows just what she wanted so dearly and her got to have.
”I’m sorry you never got to have a family.”