Chapter Text
Heisenberg spent quite a lot of time figuring out what exactly happened after returning to the safe zone. He was right there, at the best moment in his life so far, ready to tear the arrogant outsider into shreds along with all the other trash wastes, and all of a sudden he was shot by a canon from the sky? It wasn't that he didn't know that shot was fired by that artillery, but he spent some effort accepting the fact that Ethan Winters got on that thing in the air; as a scientist and manufacturer, this kind of physics-ignoring sort of thing really pissed him off, and so did the unbelievable luck. That shot had wounded him badly, but it wasn't fatal, so he managed to return to his human form and slipped out of the metal shell before it exploded, and went all the way back to his own factory through an underground secret tunnel, hiding in his dugout, licking his wounds and cursing that mad, stubborn fuck Ethan Winters.
He had to say that he was very far-sighted, because the dugout sheltered him from the following great explosion. Even a shelter as sturdy as the one he built was shaking when it happened, indicating the fact that the whole village must have gone to ruin. He waited for another while, only coming out when the ringing in his ears had stopped and the agents outside had left. The factory was affected by the explosion as well, but its sturdiness and secluded location preserved most part of the structure, with only a small section suffering severe damage. Limping through the ruins, watching his life's work put to the flames and the village in the distance charred and burning, Heisenberg felt a strange and unexpected peacefulness in his heart.
Miranda was dead. He could feel the Cadou in his body going into a sleep as deep and deadly as a hybernation, no longer reminding him of its presence with its proud, aggressive tentacles. No doubt the shackles that imprisoned him for decades was gone, although he didn't win this freedom by himself.
He slowly made his way through the ruined village, searching for possible survivors on his way to the ceremony site. The result was predictable; there wasn't another living soul in this place except for him, and both Miranda and the Megamycete had disappeared. Heisenberg collasped in the middle of the ruins and slowly started chuckling, until it turned into a fit of maddening laughter.
It's all over. The sweet vengeance he dreamt every night for past decades was someone else's achievement now, and none of his effort mattered anything in the end. He didn't get the chance to split Miranda into a thousand pieces with a chainsaw, nor did he get to set fire on that forest of mold with his own hands, watch them burn and twist and bend so he could smash them into dark ashes beneath his boots. No, Ethan Winters ended this, taking all his joy and the rebellion that should've been his to lead. And at this moment that bastard must be on his way home with his wife and daughter on an aircraft, leaving Heisenberg here, alone, having lost everything. He let out a furious growl and kicked the crystal shards on the floor. "To hell with Ethan Winters! Ungrateful little bitch! Fucking outsider, fuck, fuck!"
After cursing at thin air for a few minutes, the anger in his chest seemed to have cooled down just a bit. Heisenberg sighed and sat back on the rock, playing with the crystal shards with a foot like an upset little kid, wondering what he should do next.
...Wait, crystal shards?
At first Heisenberg thought he saw it wrong, but the more he nudged at those shards, the more they started to look like the crystal pieces of Rose that Miranda had given to the Four Lords. Of course, some Molded also crystalize after dying, but...
Driven by unknown emotions, Heisenberg hurriedly bent down and picked up the shards to take a closer look. As soon as it was observed closely, the patterns of human skin was obvious, and judging from the smoothness of it, it belonged to a normal human being instead of a lycan. Heisenberg's heart beated so fast his chest was starting to hurt. He tried to piece out a relatively complete shape, but he wasn't in the state to solve such complicated three dimensional jigsaw puzzle when his heart raced and hands shook. His immediate goal was to confirm if these shards belonged to the person on his mind, so he started looking for some sort of recognizable trait.
An almond-shaped piece attracted his attention after a while of searching. He looked at it closely and put it beneath the sun, and saw clearly the shape of eye, and the beautiful, light greyish-green iris.
"Fuck," Heisenberg mutter in his shock. "Ethan Winters."
There were so many questions in his head, but he didn't plan to think about them here. He took off his coat and collected all the shards he could see, checked the nearby areas for any missing piece, taking any if it looked like one no matter if it really was one or not. He ran back to his office in the factory with his bag full of trophies, placing the shards on his workbench, and...
And he froze in his chair.
So what's he gonna do? Piece him back? First and foremost, he didn't even know if the man's still alive. Rose could reassemble, but he wasn't sure if Ethan had the same level of power; it's entirely possible that he was just staring at a pile of remains. Secondly, even if Ethan was still alive, why should he piece him back anyway? He was a fool to want to team up with him; if he had accepted his offer, the daddy of the year might end up better than he was right now. Not that Heisenberg was planning to let him and Rose go when they finished, since Rose was a precious resource, but...
Fine. He deserved it.
Great, just great. Now the ending of the fairy tale was "the hero sacrificed himself to save the world" instead of "and they lived happily ever after." Heisenberg toyed with the crystal eye in his hand, and he recalled his negotiation with Ethan at this very office, the fearless, firm and a little crazy look he gave him. Mad, but without cruelty or darkness, only the superhuman resolve. There was a similar madness in Miranda's eyes, but hers were inhumane with nothing of Ethan's tenderness. And when Ethan Winters retrieved his Rose after conquering so many obstables, he chose to give up the chance to live on with her. Perhaps he didn't want his beloved daughter to see his embarrasing state, though Rose was more of a monster than he ever would be.
Perhaps he sould destroy this all, thought Heisenberg, a malicious smile emerging on his lips. Destroy this perfect ending of noble self-sacrifice and drag the hero up in the heaven back on the mortal earth, and make Ethan Winters taste the feel of living like a rat. "Taste the life I lived for the past fucking decades, Winters," he said to the eye in his hand. "You're gonna love it so much."
He started repairing the damage of the factory, and during his spare time he would play his little jigsaw puzzle. Ethan was shattered quite completely, but Heisenberg had deep enough knowledge on human anatomy for the work to continue progressing; although complicated and time consuming, he gradually managed to piece together a vague human shape. He did his own work or went out hunting at day, and at night he would play with those crystal shards and glue them together with the medicine Ethan used to cure his wounds.
At first Heisenberg wanted to start with the hands, but under the situation in which he was the only survivor in the village, loneliness drowned him like the heavy snow in the mountains. He was a little talkative in the first place, and at least he used to have the Dimitrescu big woman to fight with, and sometimes he would go to the village too, but now he didn't even have an object to help him with talking to himself. So he first pieced out Ethan's head; a little spooky, but now he could finally bitch about things to it every day.
"By the way, how exactly did you end up like this, Winters?" he asked as he lit a cigar. "Most molded just die when they're killed, you know, only a few would leave behind crystals, and usually just the vital organs. The entire body crystalizing is unheard of, unless Miranda was doing it herself. Was it your little Rose's doing, perhaps?"
It's actually possible, considering how powerful Rose was. If so, then there's a great chance that Ethan was still alive. Maybe Rose turned her daddy into crystals to save his life. The child was still little, of course, but everything unreasonable could be explained by love. Since meeting Ethan Winters, Heisenberg had learned to use this weird but flexible logic under some situations, mainly to explain things he couldn't understand. It's love, period. When something had to do with this word, thinking about it too deeply just led you nowhere.
It took him about a year to get the factory back in decent shape. Though much work had to be done, the ability to control metal had saved him a lot of trouble, and during this time he finally pieced together a complete Ethan Winters. By the time he finished, the smell of the herbs in the medicine had seeped into the very walls of his office, and it was just impossible to go away anymore no matter how hard he ventilated the room. The day he was done, Heisenberg sat by the workbench staring at the crystal human-sized Ethan model, waiting for some sort of miraculous ressurection to take place. But after a few hours nothing happened, and the crystal man was still the same crystal man. At first he thought he didn't use enough medicine, so he made another pot and splash it all over the crystal man, but still nothing happened. Heisenberg felt complicated; on one hand he thought it was useless, his entire year of work had been wasted, but on the other hand he thought perhaps it wouldn't happen that fast and he should wait a little longer. At last he chose to wait, and fell asleep on his couch in the office as he waited.
The next morning he woke with a headache, and spent quite some time completely sobering up. Realizing that he had fallen asleep, he immediately looked towards the workbench, and found the crystal man gone. The blood in his body went cold, but just as he tried to get up, he noticed something on his lap and let out a high-pitched shriek.
Sitting on his lap was a greyish green unknown creature in a rough human shape, and for some reason he didn't feel it at all until he saw it with his own eyes. It was only about as big as the doll Donna used to carry around a lot, with the contours similar to a little boy and body completely hollow on the interior, only consisting of a thin layer of dark green hyphae, as if it weighted nothing at all, like some sort of little spirit or fairy in the storybook for children. It had no feature on its face, only two dots of leftover crystals as decorative eyes, and those eyes were staring directly at Heisenberg, unmoving.
"What the hell?" Heisenberg cursed and dared not to move. "What are you? A new type of molded? How did you get in here?"
The little spirit looked at him silently, and somehow he saw childish curiosity and confusion in those crystal eyes, as if it was the one that was observing what Heisenberg was, not the other way around.
Heisenberg looked at the empty workbench, and looked back at the little spirit.
"No way. Ethan?"
The little spirit gave no response. It kept observing Heisenberg, and even reached out a hand like a cat to touch his fingers -- its hands had no fingers of their own, just a little pointy end, and it made it looked even more like some fairy tale creature. Heisenberg abruptly withdrew his hand, fearing any kind of weird infection, and the little spirit dropped its head as if it's upset by his reaction.
It's actually cute, though.
Heisenberg pinched a hyphae on the back of its head, lifting it up to the level of his eyes. The little spirit was as light as a paper.
"You're really Ethan Winters? Not some weird shit left by Miranda? That old witch lived for a long time, if she's not that easy to kill I get it."
The spirit just looked at him with wide eyes, and it made no move to prove its innocence, nor did it show any sign of actually understanding what he just said. Heisenberg thought for a moment, went over to the box on the table to pull out a photo of Ethan's wife and daughter, putting it down on the workbench along with the little spirit. As soon as it saw the picture, the little spirit quickly crawled towards it in excitement, clumsily touching Mia and Rose's faces with its little hands.
Yup, it's him.
Heisenberg sat down on his chair, watching the spirit playing with the picture with furrowed brows. It was trying to pick up the picture, but the little spirit was so light that it didn't even have the strength to do that. For some unknown reason, Heisenberg reached out a hand and gently scratched the small cluster of hyphae on its head, completely forgetting his previous fear for infection. The little spirit's eyes glittered, and it started occassionally lifting its head from the picture to steal a glance at him.
"How did you turn into this?" Heisenberg asked, though he knew he wouldn't get an answer.
The state Ethan was in right now was kinda like some of the remains of the mold hyphae. If so, perhaps it was becasue Ethan took too much damaged before turning into crystal, so he couldn't retrieve his original body even after he was pieced back together?
But anyway, his mission was accomplished. Heisenberg stood up and stretched a little, grabbing his toothbrush and cup and made for the bathroom. He only shrugged when he noticed the spirit's eyes following his movements. "What do you expect? You think I'm gonna take care of you until you're back to normal? Don't forget, you refused my offer and then shot me with a canon, I'm being very generous here to just put you back together. Honestly I was just doing this for fun; if you think I'm taking this seriously, you're mistaken. I'll think about what to do with you in a while, but I won't let you out 'cause the wind will blow you away. But I won't take care of you until... who the hell knows."
He left Ethan in his office and went about his usual business. He wasn't planning to stay in the mountains forever, but he got to have some capital if he wanted to do something big in the outside world; he wouldn't want to start from zero. His research on humanoid bioweapon would no doubt be useful, but in the past he mainly relied on the mutation brought by the Cadou, now he must focus entirely on the mechanical engineering field. As far as he knew, the B.O.W. field was pretty messy and dangerous, and might be quite difficult to tread completely on his own, so he better turn to other careers.
When he returned to his office at night, Ethan didn't look at him when he entered, just sitting on the workbench with its head lowered, looking at the picture. Angry? thought Heisenberg. But he couldn't understand, right?
But when he woke up the next morning, Ethan was still in the same position, not moving even an inch. Heisenberg immediately sensed something wrong, and when he rushed to looked at it closely, he saw many of the hyphae on the spirit turned grey or black, and some were even completely dried out. "Fuck," he cursed. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" He looked around and grabbed the one bottle of med left on his table, pouring it down on Ethan's head.
A few hours later, the hyphae on the little spirit turned back into the pleasant light green. Ethan shook his head like a cat shaking off water on its fur, lifting his eyes to gaze at Heisenberg, looking confused.
Heisenberg stared back, and sighed in annoyance.
"Fine, fine! I'll take care of you!"