Chapter Text
He must have, blessedly, fallen asleep sometime after that. Woke disoriented and groggy a handful of hours later, not too far off from dawn, and lay there in the dark listening to Karl snore and trying to smother the anxiety that bubbled up as soon as he’d remembered where he was, and why he was there, and what they had ahead of them.
A whole lot of fucking driving, it turned out.
Chris had said head north. Zigzag. So that’s what he did, or intended to anyway. Got on I-85 and landed immediately in standstill traffic. Karl hadn’t even noticed at first; had been too enrapt with the radio, scanning through the channels just as he had on the drive to Braşov.
Ethan had settled in to wait, watching southbound traffic zooming on past them. The noise from the radio tumbled from one station to the next–short bursts for music, which Karl didn’t seem immediately interested in–and longer stretches for commercials or news broadcasts. Ethan wasn’t sure how long they’d been sitting there before Karl finally looked up and frowned at the pickup in front of them.
“Traffic jam?” he guessed, and Ethan made a noise in the affirmative. He waited a bit, scanning the other cars. After a moment the pickup rolled forward half a car length and Ethan followed. Karl watched the rest of the cars around them move forward that miniscule distance and then turned back to Ethan, looking something close to incredulous. The radio was playing an ad for car insurance, just this endless repetition of an 800 number. “There’s space right there,” Karl said, gesturing to the shoulder, “just drive around them.”
“Pretty sure that’s illegal,” Ethan said, watching from the corner of his eye as Karl’s expression managed to get even more incredulous.
“Who the hell’s gonna stop you?”
Ethan blinked, turning to face him more fully. “The cops?”
Karl just continued staring, his expression tipping ever more towards frustrated and annoyed, and all the while it was sinking in for Ethan how little a deterrent “the cops” would actually be for a guy whose problem-solving go-to was to frankenstein an army.
“We’re supposed to be laying low, I’m not about to get us immediately arrested for driving on the shoulder,” he said.
Karl made an exaggerated show of looking around them, the insurance ad ended and another for some local barbeque place started up. “Not seeing any cops, Ethan,” Karl said, tapping his fingers against the dash, the radio station changing in time with the gesture.
This was it, Ethan reminded himself. Exactly what he’d been thinking last night; stuck in a car with Karl for the foreseeable future. “If traffic’s stalled because of a wreck, there’ll be cops ahead.” Karl scoffed, a single unimpressed snort, so Ethan continued. “There’s a BSAA office back in Atlanta, I’m not willing to risk one of us being identified or our IDs being flagged when we’re this close.”
The pickup crawled forward again, so Ethan followed, turning away from Karl.
They sat in silence for a while, save for the rhythmic drumming of Karl’s fingers against the dashboard and the radio host–Karl’d turned it to NPR–introducing a composer Ethan had never heard of.
They inched forward, painfully slowly, so slowly Ethan would have been going out of his own skin if he wasn’t trying to act calm to prove some kind of fucking point. Karl’s finger-drumming increased in tempo, a glaring counter to the sleepy strains of whoever-the-hell they were listening to.
There was an 18-wheeler just a car behind Ethan that was rumbling, even as it idled, snorting and huffing every time they’d creep forward, followed by the wheezing creak of its brakes as each car drew to a stop once again.
Chris hadn’t given them any kind of deadline, Ethan remembered, staring fixedly at the array of peeling and faded stickers and decals on the truck in front of him. He could see the driver gesticulating wildly through the back window, evidently just as pleased with being stuck in traffic as everyone else.
There’d been some suggested cities, places Chris had mentioned would make for good stopping points. None of them had BSAA offices anywhere nearby. Most of them were bigger cities than Ethan felt comfortable bringing Karl to.
Traffic inched forward again and Karl made a noise that could only be described as a grumble, the tapping of his fingers having slowed to an occasional heavy thump .
Ethan thought again about just asking him about the deal, trying to get a destination if nothing else, point them anywhere other than the vague north, zigzag directions Chris had given.
“Wake me up when we get out of this shit,” Karl said eventually, turning away and leaning back against the seat.
Soft, soothing piano continued in the wake of Karl’s drumming. The other vehicles hummed around them, and a little more than a half-hour later, when they finally got to the site of the wreck, and police vehicles were lined up along the shoulder, a stretch of flashing lights, Karl was asleep, hunched against the passenger side window.
**
The GPS announced they’d arrived at the motel but Ethan had his doubts.
He’d looked the place up the night before, had made reservations, knew it was still in operation, and yet, as he pulled into the parking lot, the car bouncing and shaking across deteriorated and potholed asphalt, he was giving serious thought to the possibility that he had the wrong place. He hoped he had the wrong place.
Driving past the pool, or what was probably supposed to be the pool, he imagined he could smell it through the car, coming in the air vents; rot and the weird paper mill stench the whole town had smelled like.
Karl continued munching on his second Big Mac, the wrapper crinkling, the occasional turn of his head the only indication he was even looking at their surroundings.
Ethan parked the car in front of the office, eyed the flickering neon Vacancy sign and the spilled Icee right there on the sidewalk, melted ice and cherry syrup puddling in front of the door like a mock crime scene.
“I’ll go check in,” Ethan said, turning off the car.
Karl gestured him on, still eating.
The sun was setting fast, but the light coming through yellowed curtains was dim and sickly, and when Ethan opened the door to the office the smell of cigarettes was strong enough to eclipse the paper mill, which was really something.
The woman at the front desk looked up slowly from the paperback she had set in front of her, the spine broken so that even when she took her hand off it it stayed put.
“Can I help you?” she asked, squinting at him.
Ethan crossed to the desk, ignoring the multitude of stains polka-dotting the floor, the sagging ceiling, the boxy computer that looked like it had been parked there sometime during the mid-90s and never moved. It had its own collection of stains.
“I reserved a room,” Ethan said, still fumbling over the fake name.
The key cards she gave him had some kind of residue on them, something not-quite sticky, and he didn’t want to pocket them so he just held them awkwardly until he got back to the car, and then he didn’t want to set them down anywhere for the same reason, so he ended up driving down to their room with the cards sticking up from between two fingers, Karl merely arching a brow and loudly slurping the last few drops of coke from Ethan’s drink.
The door to their room was dented, and it was taking so long to get the damn key to work that Ethan eventually gave up and had Karl come unlock the door with his powers.
There was an odor that hit them as soon as the door was open. Ethan couldn’t place it, didn’t particularly want to, either, but Karl was pacing around the room with his nose scrunched, empty drink cup in hand, eventually pronouncing “Smells weird,” in a confused tone.
Ethan was realizing he didn’t want to bring their luggage in when this place was almost guaranteed to have bed bugs.
There were stains on the ceiling, stains on the carpet. The comforters on the beds looked melted in some places, burned in others. The air conditioner had had its cover ripped off and blew out dust and debris when Ethan turned it on, so he had to quickly turn it back off.
“Bathroom smells worse,” Karl told him, so Ethan warily went to join him, standing next to him in the doorway while Karl idly shook the remaining ice in the cup.
The bathroom did smell worse. Ethan thought there were bathrooms in the Baker house that had looked and smelled better.
“Just,” Ethan said, still refusing to catalog what he was smelling, “try to touch things as little as possible.”
Karl snorted, turning to catch Ethan’s eye, “If you take a shower in there, do you think you’d end up in a turf war with the resident mold?”
It took Ethan a second, and then he wasn’t even sure if he was more offended or amused. “I think that I am absolutely not going to find out,” he said.
**
He didn’t bring their luggage in. Ended up laying on the top sheet in the same clothes he’d been driving around in all day, exhaustion tugging at him but unable to sleep.
He’d woken from dreams–his own for once, not Karl’s–and had been too on-edge and too uncomfortable after to fall back asleep, had just sat there with directionless dread–the dream fast-fading–sinking down into him and making his limbs feel leaden, frozen, atrophied. It took a while before he could even lift his arm to grab for his phone on the nightstand, fingers brushing scratchy sheets, his pillow still smelling sour, like wet laundry left to sit too long, and the scent was clawing something back from the dream, and he didn’t want to remember.
The screen lit up, a blinding beacon, and he squinted his eyes against it, going to tap in his passcode but freezing on the lockscreen.
Mia and Rose, smiling. From that one day on the beach in Constanța.
They’d both been so caught up in the wonder of it, cataloging Rose’s firsts. The first time she’d eaten solid food. The first time she laughed. Her first trip with them to the market, to the store. (They didn’t count the first trip to the doctor, to the specialist, to the other specialist, to the hospital, each new test.) Rose’s first trip to the beach. The first time she held a seashell, saw the ocean, heard sea birds calling above them, saw the smaller ones darting back and forth along the shore.
Ethan had checked the time and left the phone locked, turned off the screen and set it down on his chest. Made the decision not to sit there and wonder if Mia would have ever told him any of it if the BSAA, if Miranda, hadn’t forced her hand. He felt, not for the first time, the desire to pick through every single moment of their marriage in an effort to pinpoint every single lie, or, even worse, try to determine the times Mia was genuinely happy.
There wasn’t any point to it, was there? Not that knowing that curbed the impulse any.
Rose had been happy, at any rate. She’d been wide-eyed that day at the beach, taking everything in. Her chubby little fingers grasping the shell Mia had picked up for her. Ethan had kept checking her cheeks, making sure she wasn’t getting sunburned. But she’d just babbled happily, and then kept trying to put the shell in her mouth. It was probably still back at the house in Romania, he realized. On the shelf with all the keepsakes from their outings with Rose.
It was incredible, he thought, how much it hurt thinking of someone throwing those things out. Clearing the house of every memory they’d shared with Rose. All those small things that held so much meaning to him, to Mia, that would mean nothing to whatever BSAA agent got stuck with cleanup duty. Less than nothing, not even worth a second of wondering.
Ethan didn’t want to think about that, either.
So he’d just been laying there, listening to a stray cricket chirping somewhere in the room and trying not to dwell on everything his brain wanted him to dwell on, to remind himself that there was nothing he could do to help Rose or Mia, that being back in Romania, or wherever they’d ended up, wasn’t an option, that his presence there would only make things worse.
He just fucking hated this.
He hated knowing Rose was in danger and that he couldn’t do a damn thing to help.
He hated feeling that every time they stopped for more than a second that would be the moment that he slipped up, tipped someone off. He’d fumbled the fake name in the motel office earlier and even now he was imagining the woman working the desk had noticed, that she’d called someone, that each passing car Ethan heard would end up a BSAA vehicle.
He hated thinking that it would be him that would fuck up, that would put Karl in danger.
His thoughts kept circling to Miranda’s lab, to the factory, the BSAA agents crawling over every floor, searching.
He kept thinking that Karl was only here because of him. That if he fucked up, that if the BSAA found them, that would be it. They’d be on the run forever. He’d told Karl that, way back at the dam, and he’d been angry then. He’d thought that it was Karl’s decision to stick with him and that was the end of it.
But he knew what Miranda had done. He’d seen a bit of what the Connections had done, back in Dulvey. If the BSAA got Karl–
Ethan didn’t want to think about what they’d do to him; could only too easily imagine it. If they’d been willing to blackmail Mia into getting pregnant just so they could use their child as a ready-made megamycete, Ethan didn’t think there were any lengths they wouldn’t go to.
Not that Karl would just roll over and let them take him. He’d been ready to fight Chris, after all; had been ready to stay and fight back at his factory. It was hard to imagine normal BSAA agents armed with guns able to stand a chance against him. Hard to imagine anyone getting the upper hand against him unless they could use the megamycete as a muzzle.
Or knew how his powers worked, like Chris did.
Ethan felt a chill just remembering it. Chris wasn’t working for the BSAA anymore, Mia had been clear on that, he wouldn’t still be reporting to them, would he? And if Chris didn’t say anything, and Ethan had taken Miranda’s notes on Karl’s powers, then there was no reason to think the BSAA would even have a way to counter him, even if they suspected he was still alive.
He’d worried before that the BSAA would have found more in Miranda’s lab than Ethan had, but as long as they believed Karl was dead, there’d be no reason to try to recreate something like that fucking riding lawnmower would there?
It felt stifling in the room with no air conditioner going. It wasn’t even hot, was still very much spring, the temperature mild, but the stale too-thick air of the motel room felt suffocating all the same. The cricket still chirped steadily, and Ethan lay there awake, running through what he could remember of Karl’s taunts from their fight, the recoil of the cannon, the still-hot metal he’d grabbed for desperately as he was thrown and twisted about, only so much debris, the red glow of Karl’s exposed machine heart the same as the Soldats, a screaming weak point he aimed for without much thought, Just like Jack’s eyes .
A car pulled into the parking lot, its lights cutting through the thin curtains, its engine seeming overloud in the otherwise quiet night.
It didn’t even have to be some ridiculous weapon, Ethan thought. If the BSAA found a way to deal with Karl’s powers, it would only be a matter of numbers, which wouldn’t be all that much of a problem for the BSAA if they were really producing B.O.W. soldiers now.
Chris had seemed pretty confident that his sniper would be able to stop Karl, Ethan remembered. If he’d found a way to counter Karl with much more limited resources than the BSAA in such a short amount of time, Ethan could only imagine how quickly the BSAA would be able to roll out something once they knew that Karl was alive and what he could do.
Provided they didn’t already. Provided there hadn’t been more in Miranda’s lab than Ethan had had time to find.
A quick succession of car doors slamming; muffled voices a few doors down, raised as if in an argument. Ethan was distracted for a minute, listening instinctively for any words he could make out. The motel room door slammed and Ethan could barely hear the voices any more at all.
Karl’s bed creaked as he turned over, muttering, sounding half-asleep, likely drawn out of sleep by the arguing couple.
Ethan wanted suddenly to call out to him, felt just as suddenly foolish, and tamped down on the impulse. What did he even have to say to him? Sorry I’m going to inevitably fuck up and put you in danger. Karl would laugh it off. Sorry I don’t know what the fuck to do now. Sorry I couldn’t do more to check Miranda’s lab. Sorry we’re in this mess because of me, because of Eveline, because of whatever the BSAA thinks they can make of us.
Karl had started snoring again, the sound much louder than usual, likely due to the stuffiness of the room. Ethan felt just as much relief as he did disappointment.
He’d been thinking, couldn’t really do much else when he was driving and Karl wasn’t pressuring him to break traffic laws, and he’d tried to come up with alternatives to Chris’ orders.
Every single idea he’d come up with just seemed worse than the one before it. They all ended the same way too, with the two of them being captured, taken apart, maybe locked up exactly like the threat the BSAA had made to Mia.
Maybe strapped to a metal slab, Ethan thought, remembering the vertical scar tearing down the dead center of Karl’s back. Maybe dissected, Ethan thought, remembering the photograph he’d seen in Miranda’s notes, remembering her neat handwriting, her clinical description of torture. Maybe Karl would just end up reliving all of it, everything he’d escaped from, and it’d be all Ethan’s fucking fault.
He remembered Mia bringing up the necrotoxin, figured the BSAA had all of her notes on the one he’d used to kill Jack. Remembered how quickly it had worked, how for all of Jack’s seeming immortality it’d put an end to him in a matter of seconds. Ethan remembered the agents he’d overheard in Miranda’s lab saying they had taken lycans, lycans formed by the same cadou implanted in Karl. Was that enough to create a necrotoxin? Once the BSAA got what they wanted from Karl, they could just–
He felt sick just thinking it. Felt a stab of something in his chest, knew it was fear.
For Karl, and he couldn’t– He wouldn’t let that happen.
Back in Bucharest, in that cramped fitting room, feeling the guilt from his own stupidity and obliviousness like a blow, all the ways he’d failed Karl when Karl had had his back, he had been ready to take on Chris and his team alone so that Ethan could get Rose out, and he could hear Karl’s thoughts like they were his own. Practically indistinguishable from his own panic and fear, and he’d gotten so little from Karl. Knew so little, still, even after all the time they’d spent in close company. The realization like a weight lighting on Ethan’s shoulders and dragging him down, fixing him immobile there in the knowledge of how much he had missed, how much he still didn’t know about what Karl had gone through, what Karl refused to tell him, how helpless he was to actually do anything to help.
Ethan had reached out to him, desperate, not really knowing what to do except that for that split second that Karl had left the link open and he’d felt that disorienting hurtpainanger , something growing, a yawning depth that felt like it would eclipse everything else, even Ethan, if he didn’t do something to stop it.
And he couldn’t even think about it, not when Karl was awake, not unless he wanted to blast every thought Karl’s way. Even with Karl asleep in the bed next to his he kept going to shut down his own thoughts, out of habit.
So he’d drive north, just like Chris said. Zigzag, what the fuck ever. He’d follow Chris’ orders to the tee if it meant he could keep Karl from ending up right back in the hell he’d just escaped from.