Chapter Text
She was trembling before the club, shivering not from the cold but fear that was so strong it felt palpable about her very form. Nervousness radiated from every fiber of her being, such that no creature born of Earth couldn’t tell, mammal or otherwise. But she could do this. She knew she could do this…
“Come on Ashley.”
Especially when she had her support group right there.
Her roommate Maddie was waiting for her at the steps, besides Kate and Jane. The trio of Sigma Gamma Phi girls were dressed for the night and already well into their pre-party plans. Maddie was as much a scene girl as Ashley, hair dyed pink and purple for the evening with stockings that had been tastefully ripped and long black skirt that matched the color of the band shirt she’d worn. Supposedly they were going to be in town as part of a tour next week, though-
For a moment discongruity reared its ugly head, and Ashley thought about how that band had already broken up, never to tour again. An error in memory, but not one that she would allow to ruin such happy recollection. Not when-
Her other friends were beside Maddie, Kate with her hair down and Jane sporting a short cut beside her. Neither had gone for the bolder fashion of their senior Sigma Gamma Phi sisters, but Ashley wasn’t going to tell them that a campus jacket and pants weren’t good enough. It was cold, even if the weather wasn’t why she still shivered slightly, hands fidgeting upon one another as she took each step out of the shadows and into the light closer to the entrance.
Well, not hands, not really.
Her claws were fidgeting, even with the tips dulled down through careful filing. The same for any unwanted and abrasively threatening spike or protrusion along her chitinous exoskeleton. Thankfully her last molting had reduced the number of spikes, as well as getting rid of the last of that unsightly ‘see through’ look some of her softer skin had had.
The gray-white flesh didn’t look like it used to, but it looked healthy. And why wouldn’t it?
She was as healthy as they came, all six foot two inches of her (not counting antenna of course). Growing over half a foot from one unexpected European vacation had been quite the shock, not discounting the wings either, which were now pulled tight against her back, making her somewhat more aware of her shirt and jacket than she’d otherwise would be. The design was bold, perhaps even in bad taste given her appearance otherwise but she liked their music. Hell, they sounded better now for some reason, especially when she turned it up loud and closed all five of her eyes to let the rhythm envelope her.
“Ashley, it’s not getting any earlier.”
“I know,” she said, her voice pitched with a slight hiss before she coughed and adjusted it back to something normal. Mimicry seemed to come naturally to her, thank God. “I’m coming.”
She stepped out of the shadows, the green glow fading as the natural (or unnatural, but certainly normal for her now) night vision faded and she walked up to join her friends. Fully revealed one could now see where she’d tried her best to dress for the night. Even an attempt at makeup, Maddie’s help was much appreciated. Antenna’s painted pink-blonde color about halfway down while they’d spent some time trying to find a way to make chitin work with eyeliner. Before giving up and going in an entirely different direction. She thought it somewhat silly, but it worked with the rest of her outfit even if it was more like painting the dye-on tattoo onto her skull about the base of her antenna to shift the color into a very bold highlight that contrasted with the gray-green of her body’s more armored surfaces. With her outfit in black and shades only a bit lighter, it was a spot of color that she actually had thought looked good as they’d left campus.
Her feet were uncovered, the claws tapping lightly on the sidewalk as she walked. But wrappings of cloth mimicked nylons, holes cut for her still spikier bits about where her legs bent in a slightly awkward way. The shorts were of course further modified, tails being what they were, but on the whole it wasn’t too different from what she would have worn if she was still human.
What she had worn when she was still human and had gone here in the week before…
Ashley closed her eyes, all of them, feeling the suffocating wrongness of it… and forcing it to pass.
Of course this wasn’t real.
Of course it was just a dream.
She’d been declared dead when she’d come back, Maddie had probably gone to her funeral and cried over an empty casket, she’d only heard about the other members of her old sorority briefly when she’d come back into the public’s notice and there’d been a rush to find out about “The Real Ashley Graham.”
But it was nice to pretend, to imagine… to dream.
It wasn’t real.
On some level she always knew this wasn’t real, couldn’t possibly have been real. But it was a nice dream. A nice fantasy to pretend that things had impossibly gone back to being normal when she’d come home. At the edges of her mind Ashley remembered the press circuits and the interviews of the last year which had been her true return to some sort of public life. A voice to what had been a voiceless multitude, the living victims of modern bio-weapon research. A number that was frightfully higher than any wanted to admit and grew greater with every new incident it seemed.
This had to be a dream… and nothing more.
“But as long as it’s my dream I’ll enjoy it,” she thought to herself, ignoring the ridiculousness of it all and joining up arm in arm, wings slightly spread and walking into the club with her antennas wavering high. The smells, or at least how she imagined them, were strong the moment she entered. Strong and human, alcohol and sweat, adrenaline and life. Compared to the nightmare of death and blood and the acrid acid of the Plaga which had been her baptism into her new senses in that Hell it was heavenly. No one stared, not at the freaky bug nor at the President’s daughter. Tonight, in this night, it was like she remembered. A little bit of fun before she headed home for Fall Break.
That she’d never get there, never sit through the pomp and circumstance of another Washington D.C. Thanksgiving, that instead she’d be whisked off by traitors within her security detail and delivered to a madman as part of some bargain… that didn’t matter right now. She was here, she was safe, and Leon had saved her.
Like Leon was right there.
Okay, he was dressed like some kind of theater actor and his hair was bleached white, but Ashley supposed that just made him look like a matradee. Coming up to serve her a drink on a silver platter.
“Drinks for our guests,” he said, in an accent and voice that wasn’t quite right. “And one for the lovely senorita. On the house.”
Leon winked, and Ashley’s antenna’s pulled down as she tried not to think about how silly it was to mix up the two men that had come to rescue her that had-
-Luis, dying, holding his hand out as she crawled over. Unable to talk, her voice a warbled cry of insectile hissing. He looked at her with such sadness in his eyes, a living testament to his many failures, to the abject scale of monstrosity he had abetted and aided throughout his life. He leaned up, forcing himself close so she could hear his voice. He coughed, blood trailing from his lips, human blood, no scent of the Plagas.
He said something, he tried to say something to her and-
-Ashley pulled the drink close, letting herself fall into the comforting illusion of her friends (who weren’t her friends anymore and had thought she’d been dead for half a decade) asking her where she knew that hunky guy from.
A good dream.
A pleasant fantasy.
One she wished, so very desperately could be true…
Ashley pulled the drink to her lips, her too long tongue snaking out to taste the fruity smelling liquid. It was in a silver goblet for some reason, but that was just class and-
Foul.
Wretched.
Wrong.
She’d tasted this before, felt it flow down her throat, her human throat, the mouth of a young woman with two eyes and soft pink skin and normal teeth and-
They’d forced her to drink it, that bastard, that monstrous inbred freak and his castle of insane lunatics had-
She threw it to the side, coughing and hacking, mandibles wide as she tried desperately to vomit but could not. She feared that she felt it move within her, the thing that wasn’t there and hadn’t been for years. Not since Luis Sera’s drugs had caused it to change its nature. His hope had been to stop the growth, the maturation. But instead it had simply merged into her, and replaced all that she was with this alien body.
She felt hands upon her, pulling her up. Her friends? They were calling out to her, but all she heard was her own heart, her rushing blood… and a droning, maddening, sound. Shifting, pushing, folding down around her. A cocoon of awful sensation, she threw them off, her wings spread wide, her own voice shrill and loud above the cacophony. She screamed.
And was rewarded with silence.
And then footsteps.
“Well done child.”
“No… no.”
“You truly are a miracle.”
“It… it can’t be.” Her earlier confidence, acceptance of this falsehood wasn’t there. As if by choosing to believe in the lie of the past she had foregone her right to deny it, Ashley couldn’t pull herself away from her fear. No matter how irrational, no matter how impossible.
She’d seen him die.
She’d felt him die.
He stepped out of the shadows, one pair of glowing blue eyes below a hooded cloak. While around him every other pair began to shift and move, red dots as sky of awful and horrid stars behind his form.
“But dear,” Osmund Saddler said, “it is time for you to come home.”
“Not real… it can’t be-”
The drone was back, the hum and buzz and sound that was swallowing her up from every direction. She turned away from Saddler.
And saw her friends.
But not, not as they were. Not as they should be.
Red eyed and changing. Human flesh pulling loose and away from armored carapaces. The cracking and shifting of skulls deformed about the Plaga’s will. Kate’s jaws snapping open and splitting, newformed mandibles trailing blood and acidic saliva as her wings tore free of her back and through her clothes.
Ashley’s own nightmare, her worst memories that were mercifully a blur of pain and trauma replaying before her thrice over.
She stepped back, away from them as they crawled towards her. Not to attack… but to join her.
To join him.
To join them.
A hand fell upon her shoulder, just above her wings, stroking a softer portion of her body between her head and neck. Saddler’s voice was so close, just behind her as she froze, taking in the sight in all its awful spectacle.
“It’s time to come home Ashley.”
------
Light greeted her, bright and clear as she awoke. Her body felt as if she’d run, or perhaps flew, a marathon. The knot of tension in her wings was the worst part of it.
“Miss Graham, are you alright?”
She turned towards the voice, the black suited figure of one of her security detail looking at her with concern. Ashley had been about to speak, but noticed as before she did how tight her mandibles were pressed together. And how tight her hands… her claws were upon her chair. Hesitantly she pulled them loose, fabric and bits of plastic coming along from the hole she’d pressed into her armrest during that nightmare.
“Sorry,” Ashley said, clicking her jaw as she sat up and adjusted the seatbelt. Trying once more to find a comfortable position for her extra limbs and only somewhat succeeding. How she’d managed to fall asleep she now wasn’t even sure. He was still looking at her so she continued, “I must have dozed off.”
He looked down at her claws before looking back at her. The question lingering even if unsaid.
“I’m a little nervous about being back in Europe,” Ashley lied.
Or perhaps not.
She was more than a little nervous about this whole affair. But this was looking like the first major breakthrough in rolling back the laws against certain types of biomedical research. Laws which many nations, including her own up until the last few months had put in place that more often than not disqualified her as a human being and made the treatments that would allow someone to end up like her a “Crime Against Humanity.”
As if it was so much better to just let a weaponized Plagas parasite eat out your cerebellum and vomit out a neurotoxin poison that left the victim next to braindead without the parasite controlling things. Or that the “Last Minute Vaccines” for certain forms of the T-Virus might not let you recover without other changes in physiology, from loss of hair or tail… or even gills in some cases.
Ashley looked out the window, almost expecting to see protestors already waiting for her, signs up and saying things like “Go Home Bug”, “Better Dead than a Mutant”, “Burn Umbrella’s Spawn.”
“Guess the DSO really did keep this under wraps.” She trusted Leon of course, so she shouldn’t have been surprised that they’d come through and managed to make her entirely official arrival in England sufficiently quiet that no one outside of the local BSAA representatives there for pickup would even know. Not that that would last once she was publicly walking around the conference she was scheduled to speak at. But it was in her hotel, which itself was purposely chosen for both its location and security.
The local paparazzi wouldn’t be a problem.
She sighed, seeing part of her reflection, extra eyes and insectile features in whole.
“The only thing I have to worry about is how I’ll get them to listen to me.”
------
“They’ve landed.”
“You’re sure this is the right plane?”
“No question, contacts stateside confirmed it before they took off.”
The bald man set his binoculars down, walking away from the chain link fence near the London International Airport. Almost to his car before the voice came over his earpiece once more.
“Well then… I suppose it’s time to see what part our little survivor will play in the show to follow.”
He nodded, adjusting his sunglasses as he sat down and started the engine. “Do you want me to follow them?”
“That won’t be necessary. I know exactly where she’ll be going. Now it’s just a matter of… patience.”