Daniel came home on Thursday without much fanfare.
It was midday, which was to be expected. Rebecca was at work, if his memory served, but that wouldn’t last forever. He let himself inside and closed the door behind him, slower than usual, then stood there for a moment with his hand still on the knob. The apartment was quiet. Not peaceful, just empty. It gave him too much room to think, and that was what he’d been trying to avoid.
This was the part he hadn’t wanted. Not the injuries themselves, not the discomfort, and not even the questions that would come later, but the return to a space that still belonged to the version of him who’d left. There was nothing here asking anything of him. No immediate problem to solve. No threat that demanded his focus. Just the familiar layout of the place, the furniture he and Rebecca used every day, and the knowledge that she’d see him soon enough, stripped of momentum and pretense, unable to pretend he was fine.
He took his time setting his things down, slower than habit dictated, aware of every compromise his body made as he moved. He avoided sitting at first, unsure if he trusted himself to get back up once he was down. Instead, he moved through the apartment in a loose circuit, not really checking anything so much as reacquainting himself with the space. It grounded him, a reminder that this place still existed unchanged even if he didn’t feel the same way walking through it.
In the bathroom, he stopped in front of the mirror and took stock. The damage was obvious. Bruises layered over one another, their colors already fading but still extensive. The bullet wound in his side was impossible to miss. The herbs had helped reduce the swelling and infection, but the entry wound was still there, clean and unmistakable. The round hadn’t carried enough force to reach his stomach. If it had, he wouldn’t have made it back. It still didn't make him feel any better about it, one more scar to add to the collection, one more lucky brush with death that would live in his memories. Just another thing to repress, to crush down until he could pretend it didn't bother him.
The rest of him hurt in less dramatic ways. Cuts on his arms and legs pulled when he shifted. His ribs and back carried a deep soreness that made every breath feel achingly deliberate. His left ankle was burning, sprained badly enough that he couldn’t forget it, even standing still. The Exoframe had left its own damage. Dark bruising ran along his thighs and hips where the scaffold had bitten in hard enough to support his weight and movement. It had done what it was supposed to do. That didn’t make the marks any easier to look at, the nature of the machine leaving its mark along his flesh.
He didn’t linger in the mirror. What he saw there was familiar in an old, unwelcome way, the same persistent aches and half-healed damage he’d tried to sleep off in the relative comfort of his hideout. Days spent sweating through herb sickness and restless sleep hadn’t done much to blunt them, and standing here now only confirmed what he already knew. There was nothing new to learn from it.
The last four days sat heavier on him than the injuries ever could. He’d spent most of that time shut down, letting his body recover while his thoughts stalled out. He’d slept almost an entire day away after he got back, exhaustion taking precedence over everything else. When he’d finally woken, he’d gone out only long enough to pick up what he needed, keeping his head down and avoiding anyone who might look at him too closely. He’d delayed coming home as long as he reasonably could, but there was a point where avoidance stopped being practical. He’d passed it, and he knew it, so here he was.
Calling off work had been inevitable. The response had been exactly what he expected. They told him not to worry about coming back. He hadn’t felt much of anything about it. Money wasn’t an immediate concern. He had valuables he could sell if it came to that. Maybe the Survivalist could hook him up with a fence, or just do it for him, for a fee. Playing around at his day job felt like a luxury that had run its course, and he hated how many hours it consumed, the time wasted when he should have been using what little he had wiser. He'd convinced himself he had plenty, and that was the biggest lie of all.
What stayed with him from the incident was the way it had shaken something loose inside him. Not fear exactly, and not regret in any clean sense, but a deep, unsettling awareness that the ground under his feet wasn’t as solid as he’d believed. He felt stretched thin, raw in places he didn’t know how to process, carrying a quiet dread that hadn’t been there before. Success, for what it was, hadn’t brought him any relief. It had left him more exposed, more aware of how easily things could slip past his control, and that knowledge clung to him no matter how he tried to push it aside.
It hadn’t landed all at once. The understanding came after he was back, after the adrenaline burned off and there was nothing left to distract him. Sitting on the cot with his gear stripped away, he’d finally let himself register how close he’d come to not making it. The response had been raw and uncontrolled, a delayed reaction he hadn’t been able to suppress. He didn’t dwell on what that said about him. It had happened, and it explained why the last few days had felt the way they did.
He hadn’t touched his gear or gone through the recovered data until days later. Even then, he’d struggled to stay focused. He kept losing track of things, staring at his hands without realizing it, pulled back into fragments of memory he didn’t want to examine yet. Sleep hadn’t helped much. When it came, it was uneven and restless, filled with dreams that blended too easily into waking recollection, leaving him more tired than before.
And threaded through everything was the knowledge that he’d killed again.
This time, there’d been no ambiguity. He’d made the choice deliberately. He told himself the Umbrella operatives had been trying to kill him, and that was true. He told himself they’d known what they were part of, and that might’ve been true as well. None of it erased the memory of what he'd done to them. He remembered aiming. He remembered firing. He remembered how easily it had happened. There’d been no pause to reconsider, no hesitation. Just action, followed by consequences he couldn’t just smother under the thousand justifications he kept at the tip of his tongue.
He had to live with it, whether he liked it or not.
Killing people wasn’t the same as killing monsters. The zombies were already gone. The other creatures he’d faced didn’t register as human at all. Even the Axeman, for all his brutality, felt less complicated in hindsight. The Umbrella soldiers were different. They were people who’d made choices, just like he had. That difference mattered, and he couldn’t ignore it without lying to himself.
He stood under the shower longer than necessary, staring down at his hands as the water ran over them. They looked the same as they always had, scarred and callused from years of use, but they didn’t feel the same. He’d scrubbed them raw more than once already. It hadn’t helped. He didn’t know why this bothered him more than before, only that it did, and that the feeling wasn’t going away on its own.
At least Alyssa had survived. That fact gave him something solid to hold onto when everything else felt overbearing. She’d been sick for days, coughing up foul sludge and burning with fever, but she’d pulled through. She’d called him when she was supposed to. He’d made sure she had an extra dose of T-RXR in case things turned bad, but it never came. Each day after that, she’d sounded steadier. Still cautious, still very rough and in recovery, but alive. He understood why she kept her distance. If he was barely holding himself together, he couldn’t expect anything else from her.
He’d told her she didn’t owe him anything. If she wanted to leave the city while she still could, he wouldn’t blame her. She hadn’t given him an answer. If anyone had too much on their plate, it was her. The unsatisfying end to the nightmare she'd been living with for the last few years, the sudden revelation of her once-partner now mutated into the monster that hunted her, and his end, all of it was a weight she'd have to bear for the rest of her life. That she was little more than a side project to a delusional psychopath had burned her just as badly, too.
He could use the help, but he knew what he was asking was more than most people could carry. Even for him, it was already too much. He just didn’t know how to step away from it, or if stepping away was even an option anymore. But that was the joke of it. There never was an option for him. He started all this because... because he was afraid that Umbrella would destroy the world just to spite it. A world he was now a part of, tangled inexorably into it, like a fly trapped in a spider's web.
The data he’d recovered reflected that frustration back at him. It looked promising at first glance. In practice, it was mostly technical documentation and internal reports stripped of any usable context. Communications and memos referenced 'the company' indirectly, always careful, always coded. Whoever had written them had known exactly how much to say and how little to reveal. Whatever system they’d used to organize it all was gone with them, leaving only fragments behind.
It wasn’t worthless, to be clear. Far from it. Technical data, progress reports, logs and sample information about T-JCCC203 appeared often enough that it painted a complete picture of the virus, down to its structural coding. There were details about its virality, its behavior, and its classification as a mutagenic antagonist. It was nearly everything someone might need to make their own monsters right there in their garage, if one were so inclined and had a billion dollars in gene editing equipment, but to him, it wasn't useful. Valuable? Absolutely, but not damning.
Everything else was fragments, the result of safeguards he’d tripped without realizing it until it was too late. Whatever protections the system had been built with had reacted violently to intrusion, tearing files apart, scattering them into partial records and useless stubs. Somewhere in that wreckage were things he wanted badly, names, locations, instructions that might have pointed somewhere real. Instead, he was left with shredded pieces that refused to line up, rendering them all but worthless. It had been incredibly frustrating to find out, especially when he was sure somewhere in those damaged files were the silver bullets he was looking for.
In practical terms, it meant paydata. Information he could trade to the Survivalist for coins, then turn around and spend on more specific intelligence. It felt inefficient and circular, but it was the best he had. There were already people he wanted dossiers on. Local figures. Names that might connect to other names. He remembered enough of the larger players to know where to start, even if the details were fuzzy. It wasn’t satisfying, but it was something to work with, and something was better than nothing.
That could come later.
He stayed under the shower longer than he should have, water beating down on him while his thoughts unraveled in slow, uneven loops. There was no order to them anymore. Frustration bled into exhaustion, exhaustion into anger, anger back into a hollow sense of disbelief. He kept circling the same point no matter how hard he tried not to. He’d risked his life for almost nothing.
The truth of it settled heavier the longer he stood there. He hadn’t come back with answers. He hadn’t come back with leverage or proof or anything close to what he’d needed. The files had torn themselves apart in his hands, leaving him with fragments and technical detritus. He'd bled for it, been battered for it, been made to struggle and nearly die for it. Worthless! It felt obscene that this was all he had to show for it.
He’d saved Alyssa. That mattered. He knew it mattered, and the thought was the only thing that kept the bitterness from swallowing him whole. But it didn’t erase the rest of it. It didn’t balance the scale. He’d taken lives too, real ones, and that weight didn’t vanish just because he told himself they’d deserved it. The math didn’t work. One life saved didn’t cancel out several ended, no matter how he tried to frame it.
The water kept running as the questions pressed in harder. What had it all been for? What was he actually accomplishing? Every step forward was like slogging through mud, pulling him down and under no matter how hard he tried. He was trying to stop something too big for him while barely holding himself together. He was chasing whispers and shadows while the cost kept rising, paid in blood and fear and pieces of himself he wasn’t sure he could afford to lose.
He felt trapped, caught in a whirlpool that pulled him in deeper with every passing day. That it was never going to ease up, that it would only demand more from him, again and again, until there was nothing left to give. The realization left him shaking, anger and despair knotted tight in his chest with nowhere to go. He hadn't even registered the pain until he saw the red going down the drain, his bloodied knuckles having cracked a tile. He hadn't even remembered hitting it.
He hated himself just a bit for that, that pointless little outburst, but he couldn't swallow down the waves of despair that hit him. Why did he have to do this all alone!? Why did he have to suffer!? It wasn't fair, and that thought alone pulled a hysterical, vindictive laugh from his lips. Fair was a word other people used. Nothing was fair. If it was he'd be back home in his own time probably enjoying a beer and remaining blissfully ignorant of this whole fucking thing.
By the time he finally shut the water off, the steam had filled the bathroom and his skin was raw, but none of it had helped. The frustration was still there, coiled and unresolved. He dried off mechanically, movements stiff and distracted, and stepped back into the apartment feeling no more grounded than before. If anything, the quiet pressed in harder now.
He took a moment to bandage his split knuckles. Felt the uncomfortable stretch of the skin under the gauze as he took another dose of green herb, the cooling heat of the strange chemicals washing away the pain with an almost euphoric burn.
Ultimately he decided to lay down. If he was going to take a slow roll down the hole he might as well be comfortable doing it. Sooner or later, Rebecca would walk through the door. He’d have to face her, eventually. He knew that trying to brush off his sudden trip and just as rapid return wouldn't go well, and to be honest? He hated lying. He did. He just... didn't know how to tell the truth. But he needed to figure something out. Later. Because right now all he wanted to do was embrace the dark, and think about this shit no more.
000
Rebecca knew he was back the moment she saw the overtly fancy SUV sitting in the lot.
It hit her all at once, a rush of relief tangled up with irritation and a tight knot of worry she hated herself for feeling, all of it crashing together the moment she recognized the vehicle. Relief rose to the surface first, cutting through the rest of it with blunt force, because if his car was here then he was alive. He might be hurt and he was almost certainly exhausted, but he was alive, and that single fact outweighed every other fear crowding in behind it. She held onto that truth as she parked and gathered her things, letting it steady her hands and slow her breathing. By the time she stepped out of the car, she’d forced herself into enough composure to walk inside without giving herself away.
Danny had been a constant presence in her thoughts since his call, lingering there no matter how hard she tried to focus on anything else. He’d sounded strained, forcing his voice into a careful steadiness while small, familiar cracks slipped through anyway. She recognized that tone immediately, because she’d heard it before more than once and never by accident. It was the same voice he used after his nightmares, once he’d managed to collect himself just enough to turn his concern outward and try to calm her instead of letting her see how shaken he was. He always believed he hid it better than he actually did, convinced that effort alone was enough to mask what he was feeling. She heard the truth underneath it every time, and this call had been no different.
She wished she could be angry about it, because anger would have been simpler to deal with and easier to justify. Anger had direction, and it came with a sense of... something other than just idling, like she wasn't stuck in neutral. What she felt instead was a dull, persistent weight lodged behind her ribs, a quiet hurt that refused to sharpen into anything actionable. He was keeping something from her, and that knowledge stung even as she understood the reasoning behind it. Danny had always believed that carrying the burden himself was the right thing to do, even when it cost him more than he would ever admit out loud.
That belief sat at the center of who he was, and it frustrated her precisely because she recognized it so well. He took responsibility onto his own shoulders until they bowed under the strain, convinced that sparing her the weight mattered more than sparing himself. Watching him do it again, even from a distance, left her feeling helpless in a way she despised. It wasn’t that she doubted his intentions, because she trusted those completely. It was that his instinct to protect often came at the expense of trust, and that cut deeper than he probably realized.
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on her, no matter how much she tried not to dwell on it. She was a STARS officer, for Christ sake. A rookie, maybe, but she'd earned her spot all the same. Knowing that, being kept at arm’s length by the person she cared about most felt almost absurd. The frustration that came with that realization didn’t cancel out her understanding, but it did make the situation harder to swallow. It was one of the few things that still annoyed her about him.
She’d spent days turning her questions over in her head, reshaping them, softening their edges, trying to find the right balance between invasive and probing, because she knew that if she pushed him the wrong way, he would just deflect. She wanted answers, needed them, but she didn’t want to come at him like an interrogation. She was afraid she'd lose him if she pushed too hard, not in the way of leaving her, but in making him retreat further inward, convinced he was sparing her something. She didn’t want that distance, measured and censured and careful as he was about it. She wanted honesty. She wanted him to let her in, even if what he had to say was ugly.
Even if it was illegal.
That thought made her stomach twist, but she didn’t shy away from it. She didn’t know what she’d do if it was something truly unforgivable, but she had to believe Danny wasn’t capable of that. She was going to approach this as his girlfriend, not as Officer Chambers. She would be careful. She would be kind. Whatever had happened, she knew it was tied to the last time he’d left. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Objectivity helped her think, but she knew it would only get in the way here.
So long as he hadn’t crossed certain lines, she was willing to look the other way, and the realization unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. It wasn’t a decision she’d reached lightly, or one she felt comfortable standing on, but it was there all the same, solid and unavoidable. She knew he tried to avoid putting her in that position at all, dancing around the truth so she wouldn’t have to choose. That knowledge made her chest ache. Damn him for being that stubborn, and damn herself for being willing to bend.
She almost laughed under her breath as she headed for the building, the sound more tired than amused. Jill’s voice surfaced in her thoughts, carrying that quiet note of concern she’d heard more than once before. Jill would say she was getting attached too fast, that she was compromising too easily, and Rebecca couldn’t pretend those worries hadn't haunted her in the early hours of the morning. But Jill didn't know Danny like she did, didn't see his warmth or his attention or his care. She didn't know how he would twist himself up to make things just a little easier on her, and how he asked nothing of her but what she gave freely. If he were the type to ask her to do that, to look the other way, to compromise like she was willing to, well, it wouldn't be a concern, because she wouldn't still be there. That was the difference.
She cared about him. Deeply. Enough that the thought of losing him made her breath catch in her throat, and if that was unhealthy, well, nobody was perfect.
The door to his apartment was unlocked, confirmation she hadn’t needed but took anyway, because seeing it still sent a small jolt through her. She slipped inside without calling out, letting the door click shut softly behind her. She wasn't sure if Danny was sleeping, and she didn't want to wake him. Call her a coward but she didn't want to jump into anything too quickly anyway. For all her dark thoughts and frustrations, she was genuinely happy he was back, and wanted to enjoy that before things got tense. If anything, he was probably at least a little burned out, and that was never conducive to heavy talks. She'd learned that watching her parents argue far too often.
She took in the apartment at a glance, instincts kicking in whether she wanted them to or not. It didn’t take much to see his path through the space. Kitchen first. There was a mug on the counter and a plate that hadn’t made it to the sink. He’d been tired enough not to bother with the cleanup. That told her more than she liked. He was usually pretty meticulous, and liked a clean living space. That he didn't even have the energy to put his dishes in the sink spoke volumes.
From there, the bathroom. The smell hit her before she reached it, and she grimaced despite herself. Sweat, with a coppery undertone and the scent of cordite. It was a very him kind of scent, but the connotations were worrying. His discarded clothes were piled where they’d fallen, and as she looked she spotted the shift in tone in the drab material. It looked like blood. Not a lot, thankfully, but there was seepage.
Her gaze snapped to the trash. Bandages, bundled together, red-stained but not too soaked through. She closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath, forcing herself to stay calm. It had been treated. Field dressed, by the look of it. She recognized the materials. That told her enough. Danny was surprisingly adroit with first aid, which shouldn't be terribly surprising considering the number of times he played assistant/test dummy for her bi-monthly seminars, but the depth of the injury still grabbed her.
That it was still bleeding was concerning, she'd need to take a look at it, but at least it wasn't like last time, where he was just dripping everywhere and ruining his sheets in the process. That had been a nightmare and a half for her, and she still had no idea what could have caused those injuries, but that was in the past. Now he was back and hurt again, and this was just more confirmation. She tossed the remains back into the bin and washed her hands, before turning to the only place she'd been avoiding.
Coming up to the bedroom, the one place she’d been skirting around since the moment she stepped inside. She paused in the doorway, hand hovering over the handle longer than she wanted to admit, and the hesitation irritated her even as she understood it. Opening the door meant seeing him, and seeing him meant making everything real in a way she wouldn’t be able to walk back from. It wasn’t fear of him that stopped her, or any lack of desire to be there, but the knowledge that once she crossed that threshold there would be no more distance to hide behind. She almost cursed under her breath for standing there at all.
She forced herself to stop spiraling and remember why she’d come in the first place. She wasn’t there to interrogate him or try to force a conversation about what was bothering her. Those would come, but they would come after she made sure he was okay, after she made sure they both were, because above all else that was what mattered most to her. She cared about him, and that was all there was to it. She was there because she’d missed him, because the absence had left a hollow space that no amount of rationalization could fill. That truth settled her enough to move.
She twisted the handle and pushed the door open slowly, letting it swing inward without rushing, as if giving herself one last breath before stepping fully into what waited on the other side.
He was asleep on his back, sprawled awkwardly across the bed in a way that spoke more of sheer exhaustion than anything else. Even in the dim afternoon light, she could see the bruising clearly, his entire torso a mess of dark purples tinged with the yellowing of healing, more than it should have been, but still extensive. It told her he’d been dosing himself with green herb, enough to cover up the worst of the injuries, but not enough to make a dent in the bulk. It was turning into a worrying habit of his, that he thought she hadn't noticed, using green herb like it was a cure-all, and while it had some potent restorative properties, it was hell on the kidneys and liver, especially the way he was starting to abuse it. Just one more thing to talk about, but later.
Her gaze dropped to the patch on his side, and her heart clenched despite herself, the sight of it pulling all her earlier worries into sharp focus. She caught the smell as soon as she got close, sharp and pungent, some kind of antiseptic layered with something meant to keep bleeding and infection in check. Nothing was seeping through the dressing, and that alone kept her from panicking, but it was thick enough that she doubted it would, at least not now, fresh as it was. His breathing was even, marked by a faint snore, and when she touched him, she could tell his skin was warm without being feverish, another quiet reassurance she held onto.
She sat on the edge of the bed, moving with deliberate care so she wouldn’t startle him fully awake. The mattress dipped under her weight, though, and that was enough to pull a reaction from him. His brow furrowed, face tightening as he surfaced just enough to sense that something had changed. She watched the tension gather in him before he even opened his eyes, and it made her chest ache all over again. He never really rested anymore, not completely.
“Becca…?”
She leaned down and pressed a kiss to his forehead, letting it linger instead of pulling back right away. “It’s me,” she whispered, keeping her voice low and steady so he wouldn’t drift back into whatever had been chasing him in his sleep.
His arms came around her immediately, reflexive and desperate in a way he’d never admit to while awake. He pulled her in close, and she let herself be drawn against his bare chest despite still being half in uniform. He was warm and solid beneath her, grounding in a way nothing else ever managed. She breathed in the familiar scent of his soap and tucked her head against his shoulder, letting herself settle there as if this was the most natural thing in the world. For a moment, the knot in her chest loosened, replaced by a quiet, fragile relief.
“Missed you, sunshine,” he murmured into her hair, words slurred with sleep but heavy with feeling. “Missed you so much.”
His grip tightened as if he was afraid she might vanish if he didn’t hold on hard enough. She wrapped her arms around him in return, careful of his injuries even as she let herself sink into the embrace. His breathing evened out again with surprising speed, the tension draining from him now that he knew she was there. It was the same pattern she’d seen before, the same instinctive reach for safety once the fear ebbed. Seeing it again made her swallow hard.
It was just like after a nightmare, the kind that left him shaken long after his eyes opened. The realization settled heavily in her chest as she stayed still, letting him cling to her without comment. Whatever he’d been through had followed him home, lingering beneath the surface even in sleep. The one thing he wanted right now was simple and painfully clear. He wanted her close, wanted the reassurance of contact, wanted to know he wasn’t alone in whatever he was carrying.
She studied his face as he slept, taking in details she’d missed at first. The lines were deeper than she remembered, etched by stress and exhaustion rather than time alone. He looked older like this, worn in a way that scared her more than any single injury ever could. He’d always had a softness to his features that made him seem younger than his years, but now it was buried beneath fatigue and pain that hadn’t had time to fade. The sight of it tightened something in her chest that she couldn’t quite name.
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She stayed there, holding him while he slept, unwilling to move even as minutes stretched on. When tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, silent and unguarded, she brushed them away with her thumb, slow and gentle. Questions crowded her mind, sharp and insistent, demanding to be asked and answered. She pushed them aside with deliberate care, knowing that now wasn’t the moment for them. Whatever answers she needed could wait a little longer.
Right now, Danny needed her. He needed warmth, and reassurance, and the simple certainty that she wasn’t going to pull away. She stayed where she was, arms around him, letting her presence say what words couldn’t. And for as long as he needed her there, she wasn’t going anywhere.
000
Daniel was grateful that, for all the questions she might have asked, she decided to wait until the next day to ask them. The first night back had been harder than he wanted to admit, harder than he’d expected even after everything he’d been through. Sleeping in his own bed should have felt like a relief, but without the thin distractions of movement and routine, everything he’d kept at bay came rushing in. He’d spent days doing everything he could to distract himself, and once those distractions were gone, there was nothing left to hold the door shut. Rebecca had stayed with him through it without pushing, without commentary, just present in a way that let him unravel safely.
He appreciated that more than he could put into words. She hadn't gone digging, or tried to push him while he was still reeling, even if it would have made things easier for her. She’d just held him while the tension drained in uneven waves, letting him breathe and reset at his own pace. It reminded him why he trusted her, even as that trust made everything harder. When he finally slept, it wasn’t because the thoughts were gone, but because his body had run out of strength to keep fighting them. That kind of exhaustion settled deep and stayed there.
At some point in the night she’d slipped out of her STARS uniform and left it where it fell, ignoring habits he knew she normally cared about. He knew she hated going to bed "work-gunky" as she once put it, so her forgoing that was a kindness. He noticed it in a hazy, half-aware way and filed it away with a quiet resolve to make it up to her. He didn’t know how yet, and he knew she’d say it wasn’t necessary, but he would anyway. Something ordinary, something uncomplicated, if their talk didn’t go sideways. The fact that he even had to think about that told him how much he’d let things drift from normal.
He knew the conversation was coming whether he liked it or not. He’d been rehearsing fragments of it in his head since before she’d even walked through the door the night before. Every version fell apart once he followed it to its natural conclusion. He hated lying to her, but he hated the alternatives more, and he couldn’t see a path that didn’t end with one of them hurt. The truth was too large and too strange to hand over without context he didn’t have. That left him caught between silence and a half-truth that would still sound insane.
Worse, he was a killer now. There wasn't any doubt about that, and of all the things he could tell Rebecca, that one was... it was one thing that he couldn't. What made it worse wasn’t only the act itself, but the certainty of how cleanly it would all be erased. There would never be bodies for the police to find, no scene to investigate, no trail that led anywhere but into an unmarked grave. Umbrella would sweep it up, bury it, and whatever questions might have followed would die before they ever formed. If there were any reprisals, they wouldn’t come in the form of questions or warrants or courtrooms. They’d come suddenly and violently, at the barrel of a gun, as a bunch of black-masked thugs kicked down his door. It would have to stay buried.
What troubled him more was how impossible it would be to explain any of it without sounding detached from reality. He could imagine a dozen reasonable sounding cover stories, all of them dishonest in ways that would rot whatever trust he and Rebecca had. A family emergency that escalated. A fight that went too far. Something cinematic and vague enough to avoid follow-up questions. None of it sat right with him, and Rebecca deserved better than a lie crafted to put things to rest. He just didn’t know what better looked like in practice.
He’d long since abandoned the idea that she was meant to be part of whatever he was stumbling through. That kind of thinking felt reckless and unfair, especially now that the stakes were clearer. Rebecca was a real person with her own life and responsibilities, not a character in a game that he only knew through a screen. She didn’t deserve the weight of what he’d seen or the things he wished he could forget. She was young and capable and stubborn in her own way, but that didn’t mean she should be dragged into his mess. Wanting to protect her from that felt natural, even if he knew it came off as patronizing.
The memories didn’t need much prompting to resurface. They clung to him in flashes and impressions he couldn’t fully shut out. The sense of being hunted. The constant awareness of the threats around him. The knowledge that one mistake would have ended everything. He knew the symptoms for what they were, even if he didn’t like naming them. Those experiences had left marks that weren’t going to fade just because he wanted them to. If he could keep her from sharing that weight, he would, even knowing it was probably a losing battle.
The worst part was how little it amounted to once he stripped away the adrenaline and wishful thinking. He’d gone into the weekend expecting to find something concrete, anything solid enough to justify the risks he’d taken and the lines he’d crossed. What he came back with barely qualified as evidence at all, just scraps and broken fragments that suggested there might have been something useful once, before it was torn apart. Whatever safeguards had been tripped had done their work thoroughly, reducing anything actionable little more than dust on the wind. He’d nearly gotten himself killed for it, and all it did was leave him feeling cheated.
He’d convinced himself that stopping Umbrella was a real possibility, not just some vague, feel good ambition but something he could actually fucking do if he pushed hard enough. Saving the city, or at least getting ahead of what was coming, had felt attainable when he let himself believe his own bullshit. Protecting the people he cared about had become the backbone of his drive, a brutal, simple equation that made sense in the moment. Now, faced with what he actually had, that belief looked paper thin and stupidly na?ve. He didn’t have a clear target or a defined path, just momentum, dead bodies, and the sickening realization that none of it had brought him any closer to an end.
If the Survivalist kept his word about being able to provide information, if he managed to actually find a smoking gun, a silver bullet, a hint even, and if he managed to somehow avoid alienating Rebecca and the others while he desperately tried to find some kind of evidence to prove the frankly insane claim that the dead were rising and the cause was the fucking band-aid company… and worse he didn’t even know how to get the word out to begin with. Alyssa might know, might be his In, but she was shaken to hell and back from the revelations she found concerning her own past. He was half expecting her to tell him to lose her number and move far, far away from the city and its burgeoning zombie problem.
he put his head in his hands and forced down the sense of pointless despair that gripped him.
Time moved on whether he was ready for it or not. When he glanced at the clock, he realized Rebecca would be finishing her shift soon. The thought anchored him in the present in a way the larger questions hadn’t. He moved slowly, setting a pot of coffee to brew, knowing the small gesture would be appreciated even if she teased him for it. He needed the caffeine himself, if only to keep his thoughts from slipping back into the crushing frustration he'd been wrestling with.
He was pouring a glass when he heard the door open. He turned in time to see her come in, already shrugging out of her jacket to reveal comfortable clothes underneath. She’d changed at the station, which told him she’d planned to come straight back. He crossed the room with a mug in each hand, but she ignored both and reached for him instead. Her arms looped around his neck and she pulled him down into a firm kiss that left no room for doubt.
“Hey sunshine, rough day?” he asked, smiling despite himself.
“You have no idea,” she replied, resting her forehead against his chest before pulling back.
She accepted the coffee then, grateful enough that it said more than words would have. They kept things light while she warmed up, trading bits of silly conversation without touching the larger questions hovering nearby. Rebecca moved around the kitchen with practiced ease, already committed to making dinner. She talked about work, about Barry stirring up some kind of ruckus over Wesker ordering in new weapons that he would have to clean and catalogue, about Chris being excited about his baby sister coming to visit for the holidays, about Jill complaining about her lack of anywhere to be for Thanksgiving. All of it was so mundane, so relaxed, filling the space with the familiar hum of little things and amusing stories. He listened and responded where he could, letting the normalcy settle his nerves.
The domestic rhythm soothed him more than he’d expected. They ate together without rushing, comfortable in the shared silence. Later they settled on the couch and put on one of her favorite movies with the volume low, more background than focus. It felt good to exist in that space without planning or strategizing. For a while, he could almost pretend that this was all there was.
Eventually, though, she looked at him and asked the questions he’d been bracing for. The shift was subtle, but unmistakable, and he felt himself tense even as he nodded for her to continue.
Her fingers traced his bandage as she coaxed him out of his shirt, taking in the damage with a practiced, unflinching eye. He really was a mess of bruises and cuts, some small, some decidedly not, especially along his leg, but those weren’t what held her attention. She’d insisted in the early hours of the morning that she check his wound, and no amount of him brushing it off as minor had dissuaded her. The moment she saw it, she knew exactly what she was looking at, even if she kept her reaction carefully hidden. The entry wound, the faint stippling, the shallow tunnel beneath the skin all pointed to the same conclusion, one she couldn’t pretend away.
It wasn’t deep, but it was wide enough to be unmistakable, and that alone was enough to set her on edge. The angle told her it had passed through something before reaching him, robbed of the force that would’ve made it catastrophic, but still very much a gunshot wound. That knowledge sat heavy with her as she worked, methodical and controlled, refusing to let him downplay it into something smaller than it was. Whatever else he wanted to avoid talking about, this was real, tangible, and dangerous, and she wasn’t willing to let it slide just because he said it was fine.
It wasn’t a significant injury, and that was the only reason he wasn’t lying in a hospital bed right now. It wasn’t more than maybe half an inch deep, nowhere near enough to pierce his organ sack, and any other day she might have called it lucky. That didn’t mean she was happy when she finished cleaning and rewrapping it, because luck didn’t erase the fact that a bullet had torn through his side. She’d bandaged it with the same precision and care she brought to everything, steady hands and a level voice, but the process only confirmed what she already knew. This wasn’t something she could let go, not this time, not after everything else, and the time for putting it off had passed.
So she stopped circling around it and asked the question she’d been holding back, the simplest one that still managed to carry the most weight. “What happened, Danny?” The words landed and filled the space between them, and she could almost see him bracing, his mind already reaching for ways to soften it. He hesitated, and she tapped her fist against his chest, gentle but firm, enough to pull him back into the moment. “No, Danny. Please don’t do that. Not to me,” she said, meeting his eyes and holding them. “Don’t try to soften it. Don’t hide. Just… just tell me.”
“It’s not that easy, Becca,” he said finally, the hesitation stretching just long enough for her to hear it. “Things are… complicated.” The word came out tight, pulled through his teeth like he was trying to keep it from cutting him on the way out, and he could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to be enough. He shifted under her gaze, rubbing a thumb along the edge of the couch, buying time he didn’t really have. “I’m not sure where to start, if there even is a good place, and not just…”
“Then don’t,” she said, not unkindly, but without giving him any room to retreat. “If you need someplace, start at this weekend. You said there was some kind of family business. What does that mean?” The words came quickly, driven more by focus than frustration, but that only made the question heavier. She was offering him a foothold, even if it was a narrow one, and watching closely to see if he’d take it.
“Family business… it’s… also complicated,” he admitted, exhaling as he said it. Rebecca gave him a flat look that made it clear she wasn’t impressed, and he sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I wish it wasn’t, Becca. I really do. Because it’s not just me involved, and it’s not some small thing that I can sum up with a neat explanation. It’s… big. Very big.”
“How big?” she asked after a moment, the pause deliberate, as if she was bracing herself for whatever came next. Daniel dragged a hand down over his face, fingers pressing briefly at his eyes before he dropped it again, and god did he feel tired in that bone-deep way that no amount of sleep would help.
“Really big. Hence why its-”
“Complicated, I know,” Rebecca finished for him, glancing away before looking back, her jaw set. “Twice you’ve gone off to deal with it, and twice you came back beat to shit, Danny. Last time you were so sick I thought you were going to die, and this time… Danny, you got shot.” Her voice was tight now, stripped of patience. “And don’t bullshit me, Daniel Carter. I know what a gunshot wound looks like.”
“I realize,” he said, trying and failing to lighten the moment. The attempt died as soon as she leveled a flat look at him. He sighed softly and shook his head. “Look, I’m not trying to bullshit you. Honestly, you’re smarter than I am, so I suspect that wouldn’t go over well.” That earned him the briefest flicker of a smile before she schooled her expression again. “I did get shot. That was part and parcel with the whole… complicated thing. The issue is that-”
“I’m a cop, or at least in training to be one, and what happened was illegal?” She said, and for the first time he heard some heat in her voice. “I know. I told you, I know people look at you differently once you get a badge. I just… I wish you weren’t one of them.” She said, and Daniel felt a pain in his chest at her words. Her tone was hurt, even though she tried to mask it.
“That’s… not entirely it, Becca. Not really,” he said, and the pause before the words felt deliberate, and there was something there, something... unwilling. She watched him closely, suspicion sharpening her gaze as he continued. “I’m less worried about you being a cop and more about you thinking I’m crazy.” She snorted at that, a quick, incredulous sound, but he didn’t stop. “No, I don’t mean that casually. I mean you may think I’m factually insane, and I don’t have a good way to prove otherwise besides going ‘Trust me bro.’”
“Danny, this may surprise you, but I have a pretty vivid imagination,” she said, exhaling through her nose. “Maybe just tell me and let me decide for myself?” She wanted it to be that simple, wanted to believe that hearing it out loud would make it easier to place, but even as she said it she could feel how tangled this already was.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Becca,” he said finally, the words landing with the weight of something he’d clearly rehearsed more than once.
“And you don’t think I’ll believe you without this proof,” she replied, the edge in her voice slipping through despite her effort to keep it even. She sighed and brought her hands up to her face, rubbing at her eyes as if she could physically push the frustration away. “You do realize how that sounds, don’t you?” She dropped her hands and looked at him again, voice tightening. “I wish you would just trust me, just a little. I’m not going to go gestapo on you for Christ’s sake. I care about you. I care about you a lot. Probably more than I should after a month and some change of dating, but goddamnit, you look like someone tied you to a chair and beat you with a pipe. Again!”
“It’s not-”
“Don’t you dare fucking tell me it’s not that bad.” She had climbed up into his lap, pinning him, literally and figuratively. “Do you know how much it hurts seeing you like this? Seeing that you clearly went out and got into a fight, a bad fight, where you got shot and came back looking like you did? That you won’t give me a straight answer about the how or the why or anything?” She asked, plaintively, her arms going around his shoulders and her head resting against his. “Danny, someone hurt you. Twice. They hurt you bad, and all you keep doing is trying to deflect. Don’t. Don’t protect whoever it is, don’t try to protect me from them. I’m STARS. I can handle myself, and I’m the one who should be protecting you, you big idiot.”
Daniel let her catch her breath, holding still while the weight of what she’d just said settled between them. It had all come out in a rush, her words spilling from barely an inch from his face, and he could see the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes despite how hard she was trying to hold herself together. The closeness made it worse, not better, because there was no distance to hide behind. She was right, and he knew it. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but that didn’t magically hand him an answer he could live with.
“Fine,” he said at last, and the word hit the space between them like a hammer coming down. He tightened his arms around her waist, grounding himself in the contact, and met her gaze head-on as she blinked away the tears she refused to let fall. “I can’t… tell you everything. But I can tell you something. I just… need you to keep an open mind.” The admission cost him more than he let show, a measured retreat instead of the full surrender she wanted.
“I can do that, Danny,” she said, and he could hear how much resolve it took for her to accept just that. She hated having to use what amounted to a hail mary on him, hated that this was what it took to get him to stop deflecting, but it cracked those miles-thick walls just enough to matter. She wasn’t demanding everything anymore. She was asking for something, and she could accept that, for now.
“Then I’ll start with this,” he said, leaning back slightly, the tension in his shoulders still coiled tight. “All my injuries are the consequences of my own actions. There was fighting involved, but I involved myself.” He paused, choosing his words with care. “I… got myself involved in something. Something I didn’t have a choice in being involved in. But I was.”
“What was it, Danny?” she asked, softly this time, and the question lingered between them, heavier for the way she’d stripped the anger out of it. He didn’t answer right away, and the helpless look he gave her told her more than he wanted to. It wasn’t indecision so much as restraint, the visible edge of a line he refused to cross, and she could see how much effort it took to stay on the right side of it.
“It wasn't supposed to be anything. It wasn't ever supposed to be real, you know? But it was, all of a sudden. I wish I could explain it better, but I can't.” His voice was steady, but the words were soft, uneven. The look she gave him was just as complicated as his own, suspicion and worry tangled together. “Its so much more than I can even describe without running into things that sound unhinged. People are involved, Becca. People with a lot of pull. People with a lot of pull in the city, even.”
“What?” The word came out sharp before she could stop it, but the naked confusion on her face softened the edge almost immediately. “People like who? Is someone threatening you?” There was nothing but tension in that last question, her mind already racing ahead to possibilities she didn’t like. Danny tightened his arms around her, a quiet attempt to keep her from spiraling.
“No, but if they knew what I knew, they wouldn’t waste time with that,” he said finally, the certainty in his tone unsettling. “And some of them are… connected… in ways that make this hard for me to talk about with you.”
“Because I’m a cop?” she asked. This time there was no heat in it, just a careful curiosity as her thoughts started slotting pieces together in ways she didn’t at all like.
“Please don’t make me answer that, Becca,” he said, the plea understated but real. She shook her head anyway, unwilling to let the thread drop completely.
“Danny, if there’s… something going on at my job I need to know,” she said, choosing her words with care. “Just… just give me a direction, okay?” And wasn’t that a loaded question, Danny thought bitterly as he tried to figure out how to approach it. Because her knowing without the context, the understanding of it… if she acted wrong, tipped him off… There were too many ways for Wesker to hurt her before she could verify anything he said. And she would try, because that’s who she was. She’d want to make sure Wesker wasn’t on the up and up, and the blonde fucker was too good at what he did to not notice it.
“I don’t have one that would mean anything to you, Becca. That’s the problem. There are people there that I can't trust, that I can't risk even knowing that I know,” he said, frustration bleeding through despite his effort to contain it. “There’s a scope to this, and I only know the bare basics. I keep… trying to find more…”
“Is that why you went out this weekend? To try and find more evidence?” she asked, and the way she framed it made it clear she was already connecting dots she didn’t like. Daniel could only shrug, the motion small and useless, his shoulders tight with the knowledge that she wasn’t wrong. “Danny, that’s not your job. You’re… you’re a butcher,” she went on, the word catching slightly as she said it. “Christ, this sounds…”
“Crazy? Yes, and here we are full circle,” he said, letting out a tired breath that carried more bitterness than humor. “Rebecca, let me ask you this, no bullshit. What would you do if you found out something terrible was happening, but realized that in order for it to happen, it would need a coverup at an institutional level to work?” He watched her closely as he spoke, gauging the impact of each word, knowing there was no way to soften the nature of the question.. "Like with Tuskegee, or when they did radiation testing on civilians, or when they ran those experiments on people that were institutionalized. But worse. So much worse, and much more widespread."
Rebecca blinked and fell quiet, her expression shifting as she actually considered it instead of dismissing it outright. Putting aside how insane it sounded on the surface, she tried to imagine knowing something was wrong and realizing that everyone who should’ve stopped it was either compromised or looking the other way. The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to admit, and the silence stretched as she turned it over in her mind.
“Danny, are you saying that the government is up to something? That they're doing some kind of experiment, some kind of testing, and it's trying to cover it up?” she asked finally, the words coming slower now, weighed down by what they implied. She was trying hard to hang onto her trust in him, but that… it just sounded wrong in a way she couldn’t immediately articulate. But at the same time, those things had happened, they were real, she'd read about them in her medical ethics classes as a textbook example of why had to ask questions, had to ask why. But it still left so many questions, so many holes.
“I don’t…” she started, then stopped, because she almost watched in real time as the energy drained out of him. The slump in his shoulders and the dulling of his eyes hit her harder than any raised voice would have. She didn’t know how to parse it, because the idea itself was staggering. Some kind of conspiracy on that scale, something her boyfriend was not only aware of but actively trying to uncover, her butcher boyfriend who worked at a supermarket and looked almost afraid to say the words out loud, felt impossible to reconcile with the man sitting in front of her. "Danny, I'm trying to understand it. If you have proof that the government is doing something unethical, then there are ways to bring that to light, ways that don't have you running out and getting yourself beaten half to death."
"There... there isn't. It's not that simple, and it's not just the government. I've been trying to find something solid, something that I can verify, something I can... I can use to prove it's happening at all." He said, and she could hear the defeat in his voice, the pain, the failure. And she hated to admit it, but that was the greatest issue of all, wasn't it? Proving that it was happening. And she would have to verify it, and he knew that, because she could, she had the connections, the inroads and the know-how to find it.
"Jesus, Danny." Rebecca sighed, as something occurred to her, "Is that why you were sick, last time? You were trying to find something and you got exposed to something toxic?" The words she spoke were chilled as a look of horror crossed her face. "Do you even understand how dangerous that is-"
"I am, Rebecca. I'm intimately aware. I was there, remember?" He sighed, and that was the first time she'd heard him say her full name in a long, long time. She didn't like it, not when he said it like that. He wasn't angry, he was resigned, and that scared her more than anything. Because it was the tone of someone who wouldn't stop. There was something damned in his voice, and it brought him right back to the start again.
It was a hard pill to swallow. Honestly, it wasn’t even that, because swallowing implied there was something solid there to choke down. If he hadn’t come home twice in the condition he was in, battered and hurt in ways she couldn’t explain away, she would have dismissed it outright without a second thought. But those injuries were real, and they forced her to take the idea seriously against her will. At the same time, everything in her training and experience screamed that this sounded like a load of horse shit. Stuff like that wasn’t supposed to happen in real life, not on this scale, not without someone noticing.
It smacked uncomfortably close to delusion, and that thought made her stomach twist, but he seemed so convinced, and there was just enough evidence that he might be onto something. There was the gunshot wound, real and undeniable, and the other injuries that weren’t the kind you picked up by accident or coincidence. When she tried to square those facts with what she knew, all she ended up with were more questions and empty spaces where answers should have been. Where did he go? What did he do while he was there? Every attempt to follow the thread led her somewhere darker and less certain, and she could feel the conversation drifting further off course. For the moment, she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep asking, not when every answer seemed to open three more doors she wasn’t ready to walk through.
But there was also that whisper in the back of her mind, in the voice of her father. He had believed in something to, believed it so hard that it consumed him, ate him alive, until there was nothing but a hollowed out shell. She remembered the fights, the arguments that she hid in her closet to avoid, as he fell deeper and deeper into his delusions, convinced of something so achingly similar as what Danny was talking about. Conspiracies, paranoid delusions, the absolute certainty of something, despite it's absence, or maybe because of it. She tried not to see the two overlap, her father quietly convinced in the same manner that Danny was, so much so that he threw his everything in trying to find the proof of it. Proof that hadn't materialized, no matter how hard he tried, until the despair killed him. She didn't want to imagine finding Danny hanging from a rafter like she did her dad.
The mirror was there, staring back at her. Danny suffered from some pretty severe PTSD, which she still had no idea what the source of it was, just that it was very real. Nightmares that dragged him awake, nights where sleep never really came, and that constant edge under his calm that never fully went away. There was a lot there, layered and messy, and she wasn’t sure what it all added up to. Her father had the same trauma, the same hidden pain. The same need to validate it or justify it, convinced that it was something from outside of him, instead of something burning away his insides.
Danny was paranoid about it, scared enough that he fought himself just to say anything at all, even as he admitted he didn’t have evidence he could put in her hands. That didn’t line up cleanly with fantasy or delusion. People who made things up usually clung to them harder, not hedged them with doubt. Insanity wasn’t self-aware like this, not usually, but if he was reliving something, mistaking memory for present reality… fuck. The thought sat heavy, because maybe the explanation was right in front of her and she just couldn’t see it yet.
She wanted to believe him, badly enough that it scared her, but her training kept pushing back. Danny was intelligent, sharper than he liked to let on, even if he joked about her being the smart one. What if he wasn’t wrong? What if what he was talking about was real? Some kind of conspiracy, something big enough that it didn’t look real until you were already inside it, and he’d stumbled into it without any way back out. It sounded like something pulled straight from a movie script, and that alone made her want to dismiss it, but she couldn’t make herself look at this objectively. She knew she should. She just couldn’t. She cared about him too much, wanted him safe, wanted him solid and whole and hers, not fraying under something she couldn’t name.
And that was why she knew she couldn’t sit on this alone. She had to talk to someone, even if she hated the idea. She had to talk to Jill, maybe talk to Wesker too. Chris was in the military, she knew, so maybe he might have something, and Barry... Barry was his friend. He trusted Barry, so maybe he'd open up more to the older man.
She trusted them. She trusted STARS, trusted the people who had become her second family. A part of her wanted this to be real more than she would ever admit out loud, because if it was, it meant Danny wasn’t broken or imagining things. It meant there was an explanation that didn’t involve losing him. Even knowing that the odds of that being true were slim didn’t stop her from hoping.
“Danny…” she sighed, quietly, “That’s… a lot to swallow. But… thank you for trying.” She said, as she leaned in and kissed him gently. She cuddled into him, her arms around her man, holding him close, letting his body warm hers in the late-November evening, her mind on fire with all the possible implications as to what Danny told her, far too many going down dark roads, and sad endings.
Later that night, tucked into bed, her arms around him, Rebecca found herself awake, her mind spinning over the things Danny had told her, and moreso, the things he hadn't. The conversation had petered out after his admittance, but all it did was give her more questions than answers. She didn’t want to think Danny had some kind of mental illness. Those injuries certainly weren’t imaginary, and too extensive and varied to be self inflicted. Danny wasn’t self-destructive like that, and he had none of the hallmarks for it, so she was confident that they weren’t made by his hand, but that just left the question of who was responsible?
Her STARS training had given her her fair share of bruises, cuts and in one case, a dislocated arm, but what he had was beyond that. It spoke volumes of his pain tolerance if he was able to move around the way he did despite looking like someone had decided he’d make a good pinata, and the injuries were… she didn’t like thinking about it. He certainly didn’t shoot himself, either. If that round had gone deeper it would have punched through his liver, and no amount of herbology would fix that before he wound up bleeding to death. But that didn’t make his story about an apparently government-spanning conspiracy any easier to swallow.
She didn’t discount it out of hand, to be clear. History was enough to show that, but the way Danny talked about it, it was a much more intimate, much more present danger that he was aware of. He refused to explain how he’d gotten involved, just that he was in it almost from day one of coming to Raccoon. She’d asked him if that was what predicated his moving there, but he’d gotten cagey again. She knew better than to push, but if what he said was true, then he’d uprooted his entire life to come here just for that. If he believed it enough to do that, then maybe there was something to it.
But he still didn’t trust her with the whole thing. He held a lot back, and her first instinct was to keep digging. At least her first instinct as a cop. As a girlfriend…? She just wished she could help him. And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? She wanted to help him, because… because she really cared about him. Maybe even loved him. She could say it in the quiet of her mind, just not out loud. She wanted what was best for him, for him to trust her, for him to be safe, and not to go out just to come back a bit more broken than the last time.
He called it complicated, and she was starting to grasp just how inadequate that word really was. Complicated wasn’t a puzzle with a solution waiting at the end of it, it was a moving thing, shifting every time she thought she had a handle on it. She would trust him, because she had to and because she wanted to, even if that trust came with an edge of fear she couldn’t ignore. At the same time, she would watch, not out of suspicion, but out of care, paying attention to the things he didn’t say as much as the things he did. She would try to pull more understanding out of the gaps, try to make sense of a situation that refused to sit still, and most of all she would stay. For better or worse, whatever shape this took, she would be there for him.
