[fic wip] wintersberg time loop au
Apr. 22nd, 2023 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hexmix25000 lei. Turns out that’s all the bitch was worth in the end. She’d probably owned carpets worth more than that.
There was a sort of humor in it, something worth having a laugh over, if he now wasn’t wondering just how much Ethan’d gotten for him.
He could ask him, except he couldn’t ask him. Wouldn’t get anything like an answer. Furrowed brows and a scrunched up nose maybe. Another Are you sure you’re alright, Karl? he’d just have to smile through, and keep on smiling and smiling and fucking smiling until Ethan stopped shooting looks at him, misplaced concern.
This was one of the worst ones, he thought.
He squinted out from under the brim of his hat at the Duke; watched the way he smiled real bland and through some miracle didn’t drive Ethan insane with his cryptic bullshit.
Karl felt insane. Felt he’d be insane if he were in Ethan’s shoes.
25000 Mother. Fucking. Lei.
He’d have to tell her. Make it a point to tell her, even if she’d just think he was crazy. She needed to know how little her hoity toity, high-horse-riding ass was worth. He hoped it was less than him. Wanted to ask Ethan--Couldn’t ask Ethan. You’ve been through this, Karl.
He watched Ethan in profile. He was frowning down at his map--the Duke’d had it for a moment; handed it back. Must have marked something on it for Ethan. Villa, Reservoir, Factory, if he was remembering right. Ethan didn’t look happy. Was walking towards him. Really not looking happy.
“Well, Winters, what’s the verdict?” he said, hoping to cut him off.
No dice.
“You didn’t tell me you were one of the--” He was bound to work himself up if Karl just let him continue like that.
“Course I didn’t. Would you have agreed to work together if I had?” he cocked an eyebrow at him. Harmless, matter-of-fact. No trouble here, Papa. “Doesn’t change anything, anyway.”
“What--How does it not--”
Karl held up his index finger. “We’re still getting your daughter back.” Added a second finger to the first. “My goal’s still the same; your goal’s still the same. My old job doesn’t change that.” Third finger. “You see me attacking you? In fact,” he added a fourth finger, for good measure, “Miranda’s likely out for my ass now more than she is yours. You’re welcome for drawing that fire for you, by the way.”
Ethan looked like he was working through several emotions at once, and not much caring for any of them. “You still should have told me,” he said at last, voice gone thin and tight.
Karl rolled his eyes behind his glasses. “Yeah,” he said, “I should have.” Kept his voice neutral enough Ethan could take that any way he wanted.
Took it as an apology, apparently; Karl owning up to his misdeeds or what the fuck ever, because he nodded once, like everything’d been neatly resolved, and said, “We need to go to the Villa next.”
They sure did.
++
He hadn’t actually gone inside the castle with Ethan before. He didn’t think it would change anything, because nothing he did seemed to fucking change anything, but he was willing to give it a shot anyway. What, after all, did he have to lose?
“And you’re sure she has Rose?” Ethan asked again. Karl hadn’t bothered trying to shake him out of his tunnel vision this time around. He didn’t really see the point.
“Yep,” he said, exhaling sharply at the persistent sharp stench of the place. It was floral, but chemical, like a perfume, and one that had aged, and aged some more, and gone sour.
Ethan nodded, and strode forward, gun at the ready, uttering a quick cut off yelp when Karl grabbed the hood hanging down over his coat.
“Hold your fucking horses,” he griped, returning the glare Ethan turned to throw at him with one of his own. “What the hell are you planning here?”
“I’m going in there,” Ethan said, slowly, like he thought Karl was stupid, “and I’m getting Rose.”
Karl snorted, and tugged at the hood again. Ethan swatted at him, grimacing a little when he connected with his bad hand.
“You’re not going to get far like that, her daughters will be able to track you down in no time. Now come on,” and he turned and headed right for the closest window.
“Daughters?” Ethan asked, but followed obediently, falling into step at Karl’s side almost instantly. It was hard, sometimes, to remember that Ethan didn’t remember all the loops, that none of it was carrying over, what with the way he just fucking trusted sometimes.
“Not by blood,” Karl said, and then reconsidered. “Possibly by blood. Not too sure on the particulars, but she created them, I guess, and that counts.” He turned when Ethan didn’t say anything and found him frowning right at Karl. “What?” he asked, feeling his patience already thinning. And he’d only been in this loop a few hours.
“She has children?” Ethan hissed. “Here?”
Ah. Well, of course he’d worry about that, only the most pointless shit. “They’re not human,” Karl said, “and they’re not even children, don’t worry about it.”
Ethan didn’t look particularly mollified but he handed his gun over when Karl asked for it, his eyes widening when Karl flipped it, grabbing hold of the barrel and smashing the window in with the butt of the grip.
Glass shattered, tinkling down onto the floor. He shook bits of it off his sleeve and passed the gun back to Ethan. He thought he heard something, probably a door, opening on the floor above.
“Thought we were trying to avoid detection,” Ethan grumbled, rubbing his arms as he was hit by the gust of frigid air pouring in.
“We’re avoiding you getting your ass cornered immediately,” Karl said, and set to work on the decorative bars still filling the frame, twisted them aside with a gesture, a swirl of a field spun into existence just to force the bars aside.
He shoved his hammer out the window first and hefted himself out after. They were on the ground floor, so he had to fight with some dead, gnarled bush, but he made enough room to look up, gesturing Ethan through when he just continued to stand there.
“Gotta go up,” he said, “hurry the fuck up.”
“I’m hurrying, goddamn,” Ethan said, hefting himself up out the window but taking Karl’s proffered hand. It was his bad hand, and Karl had to smother the sudden urge to just sit Ethan down and do something about it. He wasn’t bleeding any more at least, but the bandages were soaked through with it.
Ethan smelled like blood, and Karl hated it. It made him think of failure.
“Her room’s upstairs, good a place to look as any,” he said.
“That’s where the Duke said Rose would be,” Ethan agreed. Karl had his own doubts about the trustworthiness of anything the Duke had to say, but he hadn’t been privy to this before, so maybe the flask would be upstairs, who fucking knew. “How are, uh. You don’t expect me to climb up there, do you?” Ethan continued, looking up the stretch of the stone wall.
“Course not,” Karl replied, grinning. “We’ve got an express lift right here.” He forced the field he’d been building outward and tugged, grinned wider at the shriek of metal as more and more of the decorative bars crossing the windows tore free and shot straight towards his outstretched hand, the locus of the field.
He wove them together, forming a haphazard kind of platform, but something that would do the job, and dropped it to the ground between himself and Ethan.
“What,” Ethan said.
“Heisenberg!” someone screeched, and when he looked he found it was Daniela, standing framed in the broken window, her hands fisted at her sides, her eyes wild as ever. “Mother,” she said, her bloodied lips splitting in a predatory grin, “is going to be very, very cross with you.”
“Yeah?” he said. He wasn’t sure the last time he’d even seen one of Alcina’s darling experiments; this one didn’t seem like she’d changed at all in the interim. “Well,” he said conversationally, “she can eat a dick.”
He stepped onto the platform as she cackled, her fingers flexing, like she wanted to reach out to them. Too bad she was too chickenshit to brave the cold.
“Oooh,” she laughed, the sound practically bouncing, “so, so cross,” the final word dropped into a hiss on the last syllable, and just like that she dissolved into flies, the black cloud of them swarming back down the hall and around the corner, presumably straight to tattle to Alcina.
“That one of the daughters?” Ethan asked, not sounding anywhere near as impressed as Daniela was probably hoping he’d be. He allowed Karl to pull him forward onto the platform, looking from the empty window to Karl’s face when he grunted in confirmation. “Why didn’t she…?” and he gestured to the stretch of space between the two of them and the open window.
“Flies don’t like the cold, as it turns out,” Karl told him, grinning at the way Ethan furrowed his brow, puzzling it out.
“Now hang on,” he added, “We’re going straight to the top.”
**
“Bats in the belfry,” Ethan muttered, staring down at the map they’d taken from one of the upper rooms.
“What’s that?” Karl asked, far more interested in skewering the Samce with more decorative window bars as they flitted about.
“Nothing,” Ethan said, rising up out of the squat he’d dropped down into, “only it’s, you know,” and he made a flicking gesture at the bell tower, “a belfry. A real one.” He looked kind of lost for a moment, like he wasn’t sure where exactly he was or how he’d gotten there. “It’s like being in a damn movie,” he continued, raising his voice over the dying gurgles of a Samcă that had dropped nearby.
“Thought you’d be used to shit like this,” Karl said, still only partially paying attention, “Considering.”
He didn’t realize what he’d said until the silence had stretched long enough between them that it was impossible to ignore. When he turned back to Ethan it was to find him fixing Karl with a narrowed, suspicious look. “Considering what?” he said.
Ah, fuck.
“You know,” Karl said, deciding at the last second to be honest, and trying for nonchalant. If it blew up in his face he could just punt Ethan off the roof and start the loop over. “After everything that happened in Louisiana.”
“How the hell do you know about that,” Ethan said, and his voice had gone hard, angry, and that caught Karl off guard a little bit. He hadn’t been expecting it, not really. Not when Ethan had been almost blase about it the other times Eveline had come up in these loops.
“Miranda,” Karl replied, carefully watching the way Ethan’s expression changed as he spoke, “She had a mole with the BSAA. That’s why she targeted you in the first place, she knew about Eveline.”
Ethan flinched at the name. It was something slight, almost imperceptible, but it was there all the same. Part of Karl wanted to poke at it, see just what was festering behind that wound.
“And what, Miranda just send out a memo? Tell all of you about…about me and Mia and Eveline?”
“Uh,” Karl said, “not as such.”
