#you have got me brain worming about what robbie finding out about gabes uh. INFECTION. would look like

[wazzappp]

First of all

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Ok, with that out of the way.

/“I appreciate the gesture,” Robbie said, keeping his voice level and his eyes facing the camera of his BSAA-issued laptop, “but please don’t send us any more legs.” --- “M-my brother has sensory issues. He doesn’t eat meat anymore. I won’t eat it in front of him.”/

Oh yeah its for sure Gabe with the issues dude for sure. Also him not wanting to eat meat anymore after the uh. ''''food''' on the Bakers estate makes SO much sense dude holy shit.

/“There’s some stores near the military base that cater to Americans,” the agent offered, and Robbie died a little inside. “I’ll see if we can order through there. How about vegetables?”/

GOOD NEWS you no longer have to pay for groceries BAD NEWS you are no longer the one buying groceries

/The BSAA hadn’t asked before enrolling Robbie in the University of Barcelona’s undergraduate correspondence program, anymore than they’d asked Gabe before signing him up for remote learning with the local equivalent to middle school. “Pick?” he asked hesitantly./

Oh my god. Robbie 'I didn't think i would get to go to college' Reyes. YOU CAN PERSUE!! HIGHER EDUCATION!!! <33 you probably wont ever get to USE IT or have a real job but HEY! EDUCATION. Makes sense they would do that to make sure he stays busy. Idle hands do the molded's work or something or other

THE CLEANING OBSESSION OF COURSEEEEEE. NO MOLD OR MILDEW IN THIS HOUSE NO THANK YOU BEGONE T H O T. 'He may have a problem' YEAH NO DUDE YOU FUCKIN T H I N K???? The bit about two okays never being ok ohhhhhhhh shittttttttt. Translating his dealing with social worker experience to dealing with bioweapon management agent the skills transfer the skills transfer big time.

/No.” It was a daily BSAA-issued pill. The first day on his antifungal, Robbie threw up black mold into the toilet until he passed out and slept for ten hours. Better out than in, he’d figured. The next day, and every day since, had been fine./

AAGHHHHH OK OK THATS. HORRIFYING. CAUSE HES NOT THROWING UP FOOD. HES ACUTALLY THROWING UP. HIMSELF. THAT IS THE MOLD THAT MAKES HIM UP HE IS THROWING UP THE EQUAL OF HIS OWN FLESH OH SHIT OH GOD OH FUCK OH FUUUUUCKKKKK AAAHAHHHAAAA. Oh my god has he figured that hes infected at this point??? or is he still in denial and thinking thats just like. part of him getting better??????? cause holy FUCK. And did The Mold just adapt to this antifungal? Because thats fucking TERRIFYING. I mean i could totally see it being able to do that its a fairly novel deal and the only shit that really worked well against it is medicine synthesized from Eveline's failed siblings. Oh shit fuck YEAH it would TOTALLY make sense for it to be able to just gain resistance its a super fungus why NOT. God thats good thats SO GOOD AAGHHHHHHHH

THE WHOLE BIT ABOUT NIGHTMARES. AND GABES LATER 'Cause it gave you my nightmares' ARE. ARE THEY SHARING NIGHTMARES BECAUSE OF A CONNECTION THROUGH THE HIVEMIND??????? WOOOGHDJKL. AJKJOHHHJFKLS:AAAAAA. GABE IS HAVING NIGHTMARES ABOUT ROBBIE NOT SURVIVING AND GETTING CHOPPED UP AND SERVED TO HIM TO EAT HOOOOOOOOOLY SHIT THATS FUCKING AWESOME well not awesome but you understand AAAAA HOW DID I NOT THINK OF THAT YOU GENIUS AAAAA THATS SO GOOD THATS SO FUCKING GOOD FROTHING AT THE MOUTH SCREAMING BITING SCRATCHING CLAWINGJFKDSL:JFKSDL:JFKLSD:JFKL:SJKF:UWIOE:FJKWL HFIUSDPJF KLSDJFIOEOJFIEOP

Gabes room always smelling a little mildewy because of his practice with planting sclerotia pods outside ohhhhhhh lets fucking GOOOOOOO MILDLY OFFPUTTING GABE FTW

/Robbie tried to calm himself. Just because Gabe had left the house, didn’t mean he was going to wander over the hills and disappear for two days. Again./

He fucking WHAT.

Robbie having trouble adjusting to Gabe being able to move freely without limitation godddd. It would be so totally surreal to him. He would be so used to helping Gabe move at this point honestly it must be strange for BOTH of them jesus christ.

/watching Gabe mulch and water them as they unfurled their leaves and their flowers set into fruit made them more trustworthy, somehow, than the bitter green things sold chopped up in bags at the grocery store./

OKOK LISTEN I CANT TELL IF ITS JUST 'ah yes I watched these grow I like that more' OR IF ITS THAT HE SUBCONSIOUSLY TRUSTS THIS FOOD MORE BECAUSE ITS GROWTH WAS ENCOURAGED BY GABES SCLEROTIA PODS AND THE MOLD THAT MAKES UP HIS BODY IS GOING 'MORE OF US!!! MORE OF US!!!!' i like both but i think you know what one I like just a little teensy weensy bit more

RObbie experiencing cannon Gabes fears about 'oh what if thats not my brother oh god oh no' hogoh. wohoohggh. OW. I MEAN YEAH THE SCAR FROM YOUR PREVIOUSLY DISMEMBERED ARM THAT WAS STAPLED BACK ON WOULD BE A PRETTY SHITTY REMINDER OF THAT.

Robbie. Robbie honey this. this is not what mushrooms look like

IGNORANCE IS FUCKING BLISS I GUESS.

/Gabe stared down at the stomped remains of the mushroom. “I’m not creepy?”/

AAAAAAAAAA GABE BEING AFRAID. OF SCARING ROBBIE WITH HIS ABILITIESAASFJKASAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHH. F U C K. oh god how is that conversation gonna go. I mean I dont think Gabe would just TELL him so Robbie would have to walk in on him mid Glowing-Mold-Making-Session which would be. uh UNFORTUNATE. JUST A LITTLE FREAK OUT INDUCING.

/“You can do that?” Robbie had heard that mushrooms were easy to grow with a kit, but he’d never seen it done. He felt a swell of pride at the gardening knowledge Gabe had absorbed from his tablet so quickly./

AHA. AHAHA. FUCK.

GR/RE7 AU fanfic: Weird Fungus

Referencing this piece of meta explaining @wazzappp's amazing All-New Ghost Rider/Resident Evil fusion AU, here is a little fic about Robbie and Gabe settling in to their little off-grid house where the BSAA stashed them after they survived Dulvey, Louisiana, and developed a cleaning compulsion (Robbie) and a sudden desire to wander away where no one can find him physically, audibly, or psychically (Gabe).

To set the scene, imagine some well-meaning BSAA agent sends Robbie this thing in their regular food delivery.

“I appreciate the gesture,” Robbie said, keeping his voice level and his eyes facing the camera of his BSAA-issued laptop, “but please don’t send us any more legs.”

The agent on the other end frizzled out into pixels and cocked her head on a two-second delay. “Legs? Oh, the, uh.” She tapped on her screen. “Jam-on serano? It’s supposed to be really good with wine.”

“Jamón, ham, the leg. With the foot, and the bones and, uh.” Robbie swallowed as he recalled opening the weekly food delivery and finding the top half of the box occupied by a skinned, cured-and-dried, but still massive animal limb, the thin flesh just below the toes still printed with rope marks. He could see the seams between every muscle. He could see its kneecap. At the opposite end, he could see the severed end of its thigh bone. “M-my brother has sensory issues. He doesn’t eat meat anymore. I won’t eat it in front of him.”

The BSAA agent made a note. “We can accommodate special dietary needs if you let us know. Is there anything specific you would prefer?”

Robbie fought the urge to tear at his hair. “Um. Tomato soup? Like, regular tomato soup, not gazpacho? Macaroni noodles. Some kind of cheese that doesn’t get all stringy as soon as it cools down. Frijoles, you know, normal refried beans? He likes those but not the ones that come swimming in the weird broth. Um, fish is okay—as long as it doesn’t have heads or bones in it. Potatoes are good. Eggs are good.”

“There’s some stores near the military base that cater to Americans,” the agent offered, and Robbie died a little inside. “I’ll see if we can order through there. How about vegetables?”

“His garden is growing really good. We’re good for vegetables.”

“Wow.” Robbie wondered if he’d said something wrong as the agent made another note. “Very nice, I’m glad you two are settling in.”

Not much of an option, being on house-arrest, Robbie thought. “Thanks.”

“Are you excited to start classes?”

Robbie knew this script, a back-and-forth he’d muddled through with a half-dozen social workers back in LA. “Very much. I value my education and I will complete my assignments independently and on time.”

She chuckled. Robbie wondered if he’d said something wrong. “You know, this is the real world, not high school. You can ask for help if you need it. Have you picked a major yet?”

The BSAA hadn’t asked before enrolling Robbie in the University of Barcelona’s undergraduate correspondence program, anymore than they’d asked Gabe before signing him up for remote learning with the local equivalent to middle school. “Pick?” he asked hesitantly.

“I think you’ve still got a few weeks to think about it, and you can always change majors, but, yeah, you might want to contact their guidance department if you’re not sure what courses to sign up for.” Now it was Robbie’s turn to make a note. “Chris will be over today, you can try asking him.”

“Oh.” Mr. Redfield’s visits were always on short notice, but Robbie usually had more than a matter of hours to mentally prepare himself. “Uh. We also need more bleach, please.”

“You just got two liters last month,” the agent said. “You know it’s bad for the septic system?”

Robbie kept his face blank, open. “It’s for cleaning. I’m not pouring it in the drains.”

“You know you’re supposed to dilute it?” the agent pressed him.

“One to ten,” Robbie recited, realizing as he said it that he’d managed to use about five gallons of disinfectant in a single month. He may have a problem. “I’m keeping the kitchen clean. The counters and the refrigerator. And both bathrooms. The grout. Under the lid for the cistern. Door handles.”

“Okay, okay.” Robbie winced; two okays was never okay. “I’ll send you more bleach. And some gloves.”

“Thank-you.”

“You sleeping alright?”

Loaded question. Robbie’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the BSAA-issued Alexa perched on a high shelf in the kitchen. “I’m sleeping.”

“Bad dreams?” The agent’s image pixelated again before stabilizing, and Robbie took advantage of the brief signal disruption to press his face hard into both palms. He could control himself during the day but of course their bugs heard it when he woke up screaming.

“Yeah.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Robbie doubted she would take no for an answer and doubted his own ability to prevaricate. He shrugged. “Louisiana. Dinner table with Momm—Mrs. Baker, and her husband and Eveline.” That was an odd feature of his recurring nightmares: he identified Mr. and Mrs. Baker in his thoughts as Mommy and Daddy, and his fear of them was twisted together with familiarity, even gratitude. “They had my body chopped up in pots.”

The agent made a sympathetic noise. “They tried to eat you?”

“Could be worse,” Robbie said, shrugging again. At least the people they ate didn’t turn into fanged piles of black sludge and stagger around their decaying home for eternity. “I think I’m just…” He glanced around the study: empty, except for the big table and the bookshelf full of Spanish novels that had proved embarrassingly challenging. “I’m, like—in my dreams I’m looking down at myself in the pot and Mm-Mrs. Baker tells me to eat up. I mean. They didn’t have any real food.” He crossed his arms and dug his nails into his own elbows, fighting vertigo. “It was all rotten. No cans left. The animals were all dead.”

“You’re worried about what your brother went through,” the agent said, and Robbie straightened.

“No.” He held his breath, grasping for some plausible argument. They killed dogs that ate people, didn’t they? The BSAA’s hold on their lives now was absolute. “They only had him a few months. I, I mean. It’s my dreams. Making things up.”

“Any problems with your medication? You have the list of side effects to watch for?”

“No.” It was a daily BSAA-issued pill. The first day on his antifungal, Robbie threw up black mold into the toilet until he passed out and slept for ten hours. Better out than in, he’d figured. The next day, and every day since, had been fine. “I mean, no side effects. We’re okay.” A bird warbled and piped from outside, loud and close. Robbie hadn’t left any windows open overnight. He straightened and turned, just as he heard the side door click shut. “Gabe?”

“Should we cut this short?” the agent asked, helpful for once, and Robbie nodded.

“I appreciate it. It’s probably nothing.” He ended the call and checked the dining room, where Gabe often read or watched laggy videos on his own BSAA-issued laptop, and Gabe’s room, where a cornucopia of superhero collectibles spilled from the bed to the floor and a faint (illusory, had to be) scent of mildew lingered despite Robbie’s vigorous daily whole-house cleaning schedule. “Gabe?” He must be outside. Robbie tried to calm himself. Just because Gabe had left the house, didn’t mean he was going to wander over the hills and disappear for two days. Again.

He stepped over the threshold, out from the hundred-year-old walls of his new home and into the alien wilderness: hot sun and rocky hills, no sound but the wind in his ears and birds chattering in the spicy-sweet desert shrubs. He squinted downhill, to the south: shrubs, cliffs, the Mediterranean sea glittering up at him. He peered west: shrubs, hills, the distant remains of a shattered stone fort and the faintly visible danger signs surrounding a radioactive ghost town. He checked north: shrubs, gravel driveway that carved switchbacks over the hills until it disappeared over the horizon, still no Gabe. Assuming that it had been Gabe shutting the door behind him and not the wind, he’d only left the house a few minutes ago; he couldn’t have run out of Robbie’s sight that fast. He might be crouched down to examine some plant or insect, or he might be hiding. (It was still so strange to see Gabe doing these things: running, climbing, hiding. The goddamn study had never even suggested their treatment would do anything for Gabe’s physical limitations, just save his life. When he’d first found Gabe in the Baker house, strong and agile and trying his best to stab him to death, he’d thought Gabe was literally possessed by a demon. The little girl’s mental influence was gone; the abilities she’d given Gabe remained.) He circled around to the east side of the house, reassuring himself that he could always run back inside and climb out onto the roof to get a bird’s eye view (Gabe could just crouch down below some fragrant desert bush and almost disappear), and then all the air rushed out of his lungs with a strange little wheeze when he saw Gabe hunched over and kicking something in the garden.

“Hey, Bud.” Gabe hated being snuck up on after Louisiana, and honestly, so did Robbie. (Gabe could sneak up on him now.) Robbie picked his way through the sprawling jungle of the vegetable garden: beans twining up gnarled bushes and driftwood stakes, tomato vines heavy with fruit stretched out over the sandy ground between lush bunches of lettuce, mellow paprika peppers blazing like Christmas lights from leafy stems. Most of Gabe’s plants, he’d started by planting left-over stems and seeds from their weekly meal prep shipment directly into the dirt with a handful of rotting food-scraps, and they never failed to sprout with a few days of watering. Robbie found himself happy to eat these home-grown vegetables; watching Gabe mulch and water them as they unfurled their leaves and their flowers set into fruit made them more trustworthy, somehow, than the bitter green things sold chopped up in bags at the grocery store. If he’d known growing his own food was this easy, he’d have dug up a roadside strip back in Los Angeles years ago.

Normally there were bees buzzing around the pepper and tomato blossoms, but Gabe’s kicking had scared them off. Robbie approached slowly as Gabe grabbed his digging stick. He hated the tingle of fear down his spine. He had to concentrate to keep from grabbing the scar on his left forearm, reminding himself as he so often did that Gabe was a physically normal kid now. Normal kids could be violent. It didn’t mean anything was wrong. It didn’t mean this wasn’t Gabe.

Gabe side-stepped to hide what he’d been kicking from Robbie, shoving dirt over it with his well-worn stick. Robbie still saw a flash of something red, fleshy. He swallowed. “What is that?”

Gabe dropped his stick and rubbed his face in the crook of his elbow, breath hitching. Robbie stepped closer and saw that the red meaty object was not, to his profound relief, an animal. He wasn’t sure what it was: narrow, spongy, bruised and moist from Gabe’s shoe, with dark gray parts and a tapering red stripe on each of its wedge-shaped segments, looking like a dog’s mouth or one of those bizarre tropical flowers that only blooms every hundred years. “Weird fungus,” Gabe managed.

Robbie knelt down to look at it. He’d never seen a wild mushroom before; he didn’t expect them to be so big, or to be shaped like an open mouth. The colors were a bit like the red and white mushrooms in cartoons, though. “Is it poisonous?”

Gabe shook his head. “It helps the vegetables,” he choked out. “But, I. I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you got nightmares. I didn’t mean to.”

Robbie covered his mouth. This was his fault; he hadn’t checked that Gabe was in his room before his call with the BSAA agent. He had to get it through his head that Gabe could move quickly and quietly now, that this was their normal. “I’m so sorry you heard that,” he said. That wouldn’t undo that Gabe had heard that. “Buddy. Gabe.” He reached up for a hug, and Gabe hesitated, staring at his left arm. “That’s just a dream. That’s just my brain trying to make sense of things that make me unhappy, and I’m unhappy about what the Bakers and, and Eveline did to you. Not anything you did. Okay?” Gabe sniffled and rubbed his face again, and Robbie kept his arms open, waiting. “I’m so proud of you for making it out of there. For surviving. I’ll never blame you for anything you had to do to survive.”

Gabe stared down at the stomped remains of the mushroom. “I’m not creepy?”

“No, never. You’re my little bro,” Robbie assured him, and Gabe sat down and flung himself against Robbie’s side. “Why’d you kill the mushroom?”

“Cause it gave you my nightmares,” Gave mumbled. He must mean, nightmares about me, an accurate deduction that would make Dr. DaCosta back home intensely proud of his social reasoning skills, except that Robbie had never seen this mushroom before. Robbie figured that before Gabe smashed it, it must have been nightmarish to look at, in a Hot Topic sort of way. “It’s creepy.”

“I think it looks cool,” Robbie remarked. Spain was full of cool things, now that he had the time and safety to sit back and contemplate them: bugs. Seaweed and weird critters that washed up on the beach. Flowers. Birds that sang—he’d thought their reputation for “singing” was an exaggeration, but it turned out that birds actually do sing. An infinite carpet of stars stretching out overhead, pinks and blues and yellows and so many tiny white lights that the black night might as well have been splashed with foam. And now, huge mushrooms that looked like toothy mouths. “You said it helps the garden, right? I’m not scared of mushrooms that aren’t poisonous.”

“Sure you’re not,” Gabe muttered.

“I’m not scared of mushrooms outside the house,” Robbie qualified. “Will the vegetables be okay?”

Gabe looked up and bit his lip. “Maybe. If I water more. They can’t use the seawater.”

“I’ll calculate how much we can spare from the cistern without running low,” Robbie offered. “We can take shorter showers.”

“I’ll just grow another one.” Gabe poked at the fragments of mushroom with his shoe.

“You can do that?” Robbie had heard that mushrooms were easy to grow with a kit, but he’d never seen it done. He felt a swell of pride at the gardening knowledge Gabe had absorbed from his tablet so quickly.

“It’s really easy,” Gabe said. “But. You gotta tell me if you get my dreams again. Okay?”

“Okay.” Robbie hugged him tighter. “I won’t take your dreams.”

“I don’t think you can do that.” A bee circled overhead and landed on a bean flower. They watched as it nudged its whole head inside the petals, wings and legs fluttering industriously.