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midori-laboratories · 2 years

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Demons in the Dark - a Calendula Chronicles One-Shot

The angst follow-up to `Downtime` (both are also on AO3, along with the longfics and anthologies!). CW for childhood trauma, abandonment, nightmares, mentions of miscarriage.

Summary: They both have nightmares and parts of their childhoods they don’t remember- Marigold Ashford faced an early loss in a deeply traumatizing manner, leading to some deep-seated abandonment issues, translating into her fierce protectiveness towards her surviving family. Wesker has memory gaps from Project W, trauma which has been repressed hard in his quest for power. Both are unreliable narrators of their own earlier years due to untold, buried trauma that has slowly begun to bubble back up to the surface…

@whateverthefuckyouwantiguess, @mydisenchantedeulogy, @momma-vi, @shions-new-blog-of-stuff, @lottathoughts, @organs-fanfics

December 10, 1998: An undisclosed location in the northeastern United States

“Demons are born out of the deepest pain you can imagine. The one we kept house for wasn’t any different. She just had better self-discipline.” - Poppy Higgins, 1982 private memorial service following the ‘death’ of Marigold Ashford.

“Are you sure about this? It won’t go the way you think it will.” - Marigold Ashford, 1981; 1998

Marigold:

Chaos outside, and then they had left her behind in that dark little room.

Liesel Ashford cried for the ambulance personnel to get her daughter as they loaded her into the vehicle. Liesel was showing all of the signs of an entrenched polio infection, and was well into the throes of a miscarriage. This would have been her third child.

Near the end of her second trimester, her husband had been called away to London on some urgent matter, and she had decided to spend a week at the seaside, visiting friends with her eldest. Little Alexander would have been too much of a handful in her state- the household staff could mind him for a few days- but at seven years old, Marigold could mind her well enough.

They didn’t realize the small seaside town was in the throes of a polio outbreak until well after the quarantine came down. Not until Liesel woke up on the third day of their visit, throat sore, barely able to sit up…and beginning to bleed. Marigold was standing listless at the door of her room, looking pale and feverish as their hosts milled about in a panic, finally calling for an ambulance. They chivvied her out of the way to get the child to lie down.

The staff, while professional, had not thought to look inside the house; the people who had contacted them had retreated away from the scene as soon as possible as if burned. The ambulance staff tried to gently soothe the woman, rapidly bleeding out, that the child dying inside of her was fine. Inside the house, the people left inside were beginning to feel rapidly worse.

The woman died within the hour, in a sterile white room, alone. During the polio outbreak of the summer of 1956, she was far from the only one.

It took hours for anyone to reach out to Lady Ashford’s home. Her husband wouldn’t be reached until late that afternoon, upon hearing about the outbreak from a colleague and putting two and two together. Their local health network was simply too overwhelmed.

Two days later, they had sent someone to collect the child, while Edward Ashford fought to get into the hospital and identify the body. They found the girl curled up in a soiled room, dehydrated, weak, and half-feral in her despondent panic. It would be weeks before she said a word to anyone again.

Marigold woke with a start from the dream, hand reaching down automatically to spread across her belly.

Still flat. Still not showing. Based on secondhand information from the scores of friends and former schoolmates who’d rapidly all got enormously pregnant at twenty, she was likely only a few weeks away from something beginning to show.

The hormone patches Wesker has been using on her, to keep her pliable, have been problematic to her ability to focus, lately…but they have likely masked what was really going on inside her. He still didn’t know. Hell, if the timeline weren’t so tight she might be inclined to actually relax into to situation a little more. The extra hormones in her system had certainly given her libido a firm shake - as if it needed any more encouragement.

As if he needed any encouragement.

Ever since that faint double line on the test appeared though, not two weeks earlier…something deeper had been bothering Marigold beyond the potentially harrowing situation looming up fast. She’d started dreaming about her mother again.

Was it a real memory, or something she had constructed? Marigold barely remembered that trip to the seaside, but she’d heard about the aftermath. Her unborn sister had never drawn breath, and her mother died alone, due to complications from the onset of polio. Marigold’s own polio infection, back in July of 1956, had been suffered in the dark. She’d barely been able to make it to the bathroom for a drink of water, much less reach the wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen - and after a while, she hadn’t been able to manage even that.

The ‘friends’ had retreated from the rented cottage in a panic as their own sicknesses had set in. The hospital at first reported that the daughter the woman had been calling for had died during the miscarriage. It wasn’t until Lord Ashford confronted the doctors in cold rage that the fact of the missing seven-year-old child was fully realized.

Next to her, Wesker slept on, twitching fitfully. He’d been growing incurred to the effect her nightmares had. After a moment, he continued to twitch in his sleep, turning toward her with a grimace. Without the guard of his conscious mind, she could sense a faint roiling anxiety, if she focused on the feeling.

Wesker hadn’t woken this time, because he was trapped in a nightmare of his own. This had been happening more and more lately - relaxing into whatever this was between them meant that he was easing up on that iron grip of his self-control.

Letting down one’s guard was when the nightmares came. Marigold was more than a little familiar with the situation.

Bloody, goddamned hormones. If the next few weeks were to go as expected - no, as hoped - the last thing she needed was to be getting attached to this man. But look into the abyss, and the abyss looks back. In her case, that maxim was a touch more literal.

She ghosted a hand over his temple, more to focus her attention. Go deeper. She thought. Whatever happened is over. Go past it and sleep. After a moment, Wesker’s breathing evened out, and he settled. She stared, biting her lip. She’d begun to play with their connection via sensation (that had been fun…and also incredibly instructive), but this felt wholly more intimate.

She could almost let herself regret what she was about to do to him.

Just a few more weeks, now. What was left of her family needed her.

What she wanted couldn’t be allowed to matter.

-----

Wesker:

he was five years old, and they hadn’t come back for him.

The ‘lessons’.

A ‘sister’, a brief ally before that too was ripped away. Only the fittest would be allowed.

The dreams were never quite the same, united only in creeping dead and shards of broken memory.

The training facility, where a dream position had rapidly descended into a nightmare. The dead eyes of his classmates, begging for a quick end.

The dream was fragmented, shards of something that his mind knew to be significant but was unwilling to hold on to. In his waking hours, the shards would fall away.

The dreams were simultaneously sharp and suffocating, things that would jar him out of sleep too quickly to retain. Lately, though…he was moving through them more slowly, passing through them on the way to deeper sleep. A whisper in the recesses of his mind carried Marigold’s voice, trying to return the favor of the previous few months.

Albert Wesker woke several hours later, oddly refreshed, and with the oddest sense that he had almost retained something important. He had pulled Marigold to him in his sleep, tucking her under and against him to crush her against his chest. The evenness of her breathing and the way she had angled her face into his neck suggested that she’d hardly protested the development.

Albert Wesker was not a sentimental man. He didn’t have room for it. Yet the woman he had brought back from Raccoon City with him had brought with her a sense of reciprocity that ran bone-deep, all the way down. Marigold was inherently British about her emotional state, burying it under a sharp tongue and a sharper sense of deflection. The chemical nature of their connection was not remotely lost on either of them. Over time though, she seemed to be accepting the circumstances she had been dealt. Relaxing into them, even.

Being around her brought a sense of warmth that he scarcely recognized. STARS was the closest thing he had the compare, but his relationship to them had been a careful fiction that he’d dismantled - violently, irreparably. This woman knew Umbrella, and had known where he’d started out. Umbrella’s ways were something she knew intimately.

And yet somehow, that sense of warmth came whenever she looked at him.

Next year, sometime early, he’d need to find a place that was more of a home. The crowds at the HCF facility were an intermittent necessity, but the dorm-style living was wearing on Marigold. It would be necessary for a while after the next mission. That particular blow would only be softened so much, especially if her brother’s children were as obstinate as they had been in their teens.

He almost felt a pang of regret over what he was about to do to her. The hormone patches, and his other little backup plans, would need to be enough to keep her carefully contained.

Once the primary objective of pacifying Rockfort was complete, a follow-up objective would be quietly appended to chase down his suspicions on T-Veronica. Marigold’s presence, at the right moment, could be enough to shock the surviving twin into cooperation - or at least, create an opportunity to strike.

Just a few more weeks, now, before he secured everything he’d wanted since the beginning.

What he wanted for himself was finally beginning to be allowed to matter.

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