Archive of Our Own

One day Captain Wesker comes into the office and won’t look Chris in the eye.

He’s been the captain of the newly formed S.T.A.R.S. division for ten months now, and Chris’s impression of him so far has been… fine. He’s composed, professional, aloof—not quite cold, but his demeanour doesn’t often nudge the mercury much above room temperature. Maybe inscrutable is the word. When Wesker had told him point-blank yesterday that insubordination hadn’t flown in the Air Force and wouldn’t fly here, his expression hadn’t betrayed if the pun was intentional.

Chris knows what his record says, the kinds of things an other than honourable discharge conjures to mind; comparatively, insubordination is such a kind word. Someone could lose whole levels of insinuation between those drawn-out syllables. He had bitten his tongue, then the inside of his cheek when he tasted blood, and gone home fuming.

But a nice, long shower and nice, long stress dream about the aimlessness of unemployment later, he can concede the captain’s point, if not his arch tone. And he isn’t actually aiming to hit every branch on the fall down the ranks to traffic cop.

So he’s at the office bright and early for once, a full fifteen minutes before he has to be, and when he spots Wesker at the coffeemaker, he puts his best foot forward all the way across the grey carpet.

“Hey, Wesker,” he says, trying to think of how best to casually mention his punctuality. “It’s early out today, huh?”

Wesker sort of spasms, a suppressed twitch, his head bowed over his K-Cup coffee as if in prayer.  “Chris,” he hisses into the lid. There’s no warmth to it, the name thin and spat through clenched teeth. Sounds like he pulled something with that tensing manoeuvre.

“Listen, about yesterday, I just wanted to say—”

“I don’t have the time for this,” Wesker says curtly, and tosses his coffee into the trash can, already striding off. “Go bother someone less important for a change.”

He doesn’t slam the door to his office, but it shuts behind him with a firm, final click, the blinds shivering in the breeze before he draws those, too.

“What the hell?” Chris says, bewildered, to the abruptly empty room. The desk lamps offer him no insight.

He glances in the garbage on the walk of shame back to his desk. Lying at the top is Wesker’s mangled Styrofoam cup, bleeding out in its own little caldera atop a mound of used Kleenex.

That might not be where it starts, but it’s where Chris starts paying attention.

He had always thought that Wesker was sparing with praise. He hadn’t noticed the superlatives until they dried up: Chris, you’re the best shot we have, you’re the best one for this job, you’re one of my best men.

But if Wesker was never exactly warm before, now he’s downright subarctic. It’s not like he’s avoiding Chris; he’s much too deft for that. He just so happens to always be leaving whichever room Chris is entering. Chris sees more of his back than he ever wanted to, but it’s better than the alternative; at least he can convince himself to believe in coincidence, unlike the afternoon Wesker comes into the shower room to find him towelling off his hair and Chris gets to witness firsthand the abject disgust that twists his face in the split second before he pivots and stalks off.

Despite himself, an icy finger of fear slides between Chris’s ribs at the revulsion in that look—like he’s diseased, something lower than a cockroach and with less right to the facilities. But the funnier bit of that story is how Wesker was still wearing his sunglasses before he fled, so that’s the part he regales Joseph and Forest with later, over drinks and shit-eating grins.

And Chris wouldn’t be worried about it—isn’t worried about it—except that performance reviews are coming up, and he’s no longer actually sure what Wesker’s comments will look like. Wesker hasn’t called him the best at anything for a while now. A thought that makes him sound like a teenage girl to say out loud.

“Teenage boy, maybe,” Jill grunts.

“Aw, c’mon, Jill, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Like a schoolgirl after gold stars from our captain?”

Chris twists in his chair to scowl at her. “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

They’re working at opposite sides of two parallel desks so that their chair backs almost touch, talking without looking at each other like a pair of prisoners conspiring through a cell wall. Now it’s starting to feel more like a pair of prisoners presented with a dilemma in a psychology textbook.

Jill turns her chair, too, revealing her sardonic smile in profile. “You picked the simile. I mean, you could have chosen worse.” She hums in faux thought. “He kind of looks the type, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean. And no, he doesn’t.”

“Relax, he’s not here,” she says indulgently. “Probably.”

“Well, isn’t it weird that we don’t know where he is? I don’t think he’s said two words to me since Tuesday, and those were basically fuck you.”

Jill’s expression sobers. “You’re right, Chris. I’m sure Wesker woke up one morning with a burning hatred for you. I bet he’s in his office right now, stoking the fire you kindle in him.”

“That’s—” Chris’s face burns. “You’re editorializing.”

“You’re editorializing his behaviour. He’s probably just having a bad week.” She gives his shoulder a companionable pat and spins her chair back around to face her computer. “Look, you know I’d tell you if I thought something was off.”

“Yeah, of course,” Chris says. He swivels back to his own work and turns his glower on the W key, tapping it a few times to seem busy, a little obsessive string of mountains and molehills across the monitor.

The thing is, he’s sure she would. Shit-stirrer she may be, but he trusts her to have his back.

The thing is, it’s not just that Wesker seems determined to ignore Chris’s existence. It’s that when he doesn’t, it’s with an intensity that makes something in the pit of Chris’s stomach clench.

He never noticed how often Wesker says his name. It’s not affectionate; Wesker has a way of snapping it like a curse, and not a mild one. Chris is uncomfortably aware for the first time of how many harsh sounds his name contains: hard C, sharp S, a word full of escaping air.

“Chris,” Wesker snarls, after Chris makes the mistake of standing in the hall he’s walking down. He doesn’t even glance at Joseph, guilty of the same crime.

“Sir,” Chris says, and for an instant, something furious and unformed contorts Wesker’s features.

Then he adjusts his sunglasses, and it’s gone. “Tell Irons I want to speak to him.”

“I will if I see him.”

There’s plenty of room in the corridor, but Wesker almost hesitates as he leaves, a barely-there slowing of his stride, before just brushing past Chris, not quite knocking into his shoulder but still somehow forcing him out of the way.

“Chris,” Joseph mimics in a stage whisper the second he’s gone.

Chris snorts—and maybe it’s because of its proximity to a joke that he can’t shake the way Wesker said his name, deadly serious: like a puncture wound, like a last breath.

The RPD has an arrangement worked out with a local gym—Irons’s personal suite is a priority, apparently, but a weight room is out of the question. S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team is assembled in front of dusty gym mats emblazoned with faded Planet Fitness logos, a regular galaxy.

That makes Wesker some kind of errant comet. He’s pacing up and down the line, his arms clasped behind his back. He stops and turns back before he reaches the end, where Chris is standing beside Jill.

“You all need to know how to subdue an assailant armed with a knife,” he intones. “Which, evidently, you do not. So I need to teach you.”

Something itches at Chris about his orbit. Although he tells himself he’s just being paranoid, his hunch holds true on Wesker’s third lap, then his fourth: he’s not walking in front of Chris, not even looking in his direction. The gym might as well end at the patch of air just above Jill’s left shoulder.

It doesn’t matter. It’s probably for the best. It’s just so utterly petty that when Wesker asks for volunteers, Chris steps forward and says, “I’ll go.”

A muscle flexes in Wesker’s jaw as he finally drags his gaze over to Chris. “You.”

“Yeah, why not?” Chris tilts his chin challengingly. “Hit me with your best shot. Unless you’re scared.”

“Very well,” Wesker says, at length. He hasn’t even taken off his sunglasses. “Ready?”

“Ye—” Chris starts, and then Wesker’s right in front of him.

He barely gets his arm up in time to block a strike aimed for his throat. Pain jolts up his forearm—Wesker’s not pulling his punches. Chris lashes out with a closed fist in a motion that’s admittedly closer to a punch than a stab, and Wesker sidesteps and grabs his raised wrist, wrenching his arm behind his back. Chris’s shoulder groans. He tries to throw an elbow into the solid weight at his back, but Wesker kicks his legs out from under him, swift and merciless, and he hits the mat.

A pressure on his lower back as Wesker sets a knee on it, pinning him, still twisting his arm behind him, then slings his leg over Chris’s side, settling down more securely. Although his thighs are tight around Chris’s hips, his fingers on Chris’s wrist are cool, almost clinical.

“Holy shit,” Barry says.

“Ow,” Chris grunts into the mat.

“As you can see,” Wesker says, sounding bored, as though he didn’t just take Chris to the ground with brutal efficiency, “you want to establish a firm grasp on the assailant’s wrist. This will allow you to better control the knife’s direction.”

His legs are still digging into Chris’s sides. He seems content to sit on top of him as he lectures Alpha team on proper form, possibly forever. Chris knows he’s supposed to be a subdued suspect, but he squirms mutinously.

Wesker shifts his weight minutely, then tightens his grip on Chris’s arm. Those strong fingers lose none of their professionalism as they push his shoulder past the point of pain. Chris grits his teeth against the dull ache.

“It’s imperative to protect your centre,” Wesker says. “A blow to the heart can be disastrous. Of course, that’s not so easy when your limbs are being restrained, is it?” Chris can’t tell if his voice is closer or if it’s the blood pounding in his ears, but the words pool like cold air on the floor around him. “You likely won’t realize you’ve been stabbed at first. It will feel like you’re being punched until you see the blade.”

When Wesker stands, he doesn’t offer Chris a hand up. “All right there, Chris?” he says, mocking, but there’s no satisfaction in it. He looks—disappointed, Chris tries not to think.

“Yeah, never better,” he mutters, gingerly rolling his shoulder and grimacing at the twinge of pain. His mouth tastes like stale sweat and sour humiliation, plus whatever diseases he’s probably contracted from licking the mat.

“What could Chris have done to prevent that?” Wesker asks the team.

“Not have volunteered,” Joseph offers.

He’s obviously joking, but Wesker nods seriously. “Yes,” he says. Chris finds his own defiant face staring back at him, twinned in the depths of Wesker’s sunglasses. “He could have simply not involved himself in matters he doesn’t understand.” Wesker turns back to the line. “It goes without saying that you shouldn’t attempt to take on an armed opponent barehanded, but needs must. Who wants to be next?”

 “Maybe we could practice on each other,” Brad suggests.

Chris limps back to his place in line next to Jill, who’s too busy determinedly fussing with the straps on her gloves to look him in the eye, letting him preserve what little dignity Wesker didn’t publicly wring out of him. He’s overwhelmed by a sudden rush of gratitude toward her. It’s a balm that can’t completely soothe away the sensation of Wesker’s weight pressed against him, Wesker’s legs a vice flush with his hips, the pain now throbbing where Wesker tested his strength against something hidden deep within his body and found it wanting.

Chris is packing up for the weekend when Wesker looks up from the filing cabinet. “Chris,” he commands, and Chris stiffens. Jesus Christ, he’s downright Pavlovian. “Not so fast.”

“Yes, sir?” Chris says reluctantly, one jacket sleeve already on, the other flapping limply by his side.

“You have outstanding reports.”

“Thanks. I’m sure yours are good, too.”

Wesker’s face hardly moves, but Chris has become something of a connoisseur of his annoyance lately: that eyebrow twitch, that nostril flare—he’s decidedly unamused. “Overdue reports. I would say about three hours’ worth.”

“C’mon, Wesker,” Chris protests, fully aware of how childish it sounds. “It’s Friday.”

“Mm. A pity that didn’t occur to you earlier in the week.”

“This isn’t a one-man job. I’ll be here until tomorrow.”

“By all means, try to find some company for your misery.”

Chris glances at Joseph, already halfway to the door. “Joseph?”

“Hey, you heard the man,” Joseph says, flashing him an unrepentant grin. “Work fast, maybe you’ll even get out in time to foot my bill.”

“Barry?”

“Sorry, Chris. While you’re lying in the bed you made for yourself, I’ll be sleeping in the bed my wife made for me.” Barry winks. If it’s an innuendo, it’s one Chris didn’t spend long enough in the Air Force to grasp.

“Your wife makes your bed?” Brad asks.

“Well—we sleep in the same bed, y’see. So. It’s sort of a play on a popular saying.”

“No, yeah, I got that. I just think the delivery could’ve been a bit clearer.”

“Jill?” Chris tries, somewhat desperately.

She at least has the decency to say a See you on her way out, although it’s immediately ruined by the kindergarten-grade thumbs-up she follows it with, the implied, patronizing Get along.

“Some help you are,” he grumbles after his valiant team’s retreating backs. He sighs and spins his chair around, only to jump at Wesker, suddenly looming behind him.

Chris looks up at him and fights the urge to lean back. He hasn’t been alone with Wesker… ever, potentially, but certainly not since the guy made it his life’s mission to ensure they never breathe the same air. Up close, his stillness doesn’t seem quite so impassive. There’s an odd tension to his posture, as if locking himself in place through sheer force of will. A sharp, artificial scent clings to him, almost like hand sanitizer.

“So,” Chris says. “Misery loves company, right? What first?”

Wesker stares at him a moment longer, then says, “Work quickly.” He turns abruptly and vanishes into his office. The click of the lock in the silence is damning, though Chris isn’t sure for which of them.

Not that he was actually expecting company. But he thought Wesker might come check on his progress at some point, or just come out. It’s perfectly silent in the office, save for the ticking of the clock and the annoyed sounds Chris finds himself making to fill the space. A thin strip of light spills from underneath Wesker’s door. Its wood doesn’t seem like it should be thick enough for this kind of hush. If Wesker were anyone else, Chris would think he’d fallen asleep.

He doubts Wesker would even know if he left early; if he said fuck it, packed up his stuff, and went home. Still, he doesn’t. He fills out occurrence reports, then moves on to his timesheets, neat rows of the hours of his life, and the light doesn’t waver once.

Wesker won’t let them touch the thermostat.

The RPD may operate out of an old art museum, using up every square inch of available space, pushing up against the heritage-protected walls like an aggressive intestinal cancer, but the S.T.A.R.S. budget is a free-flowing font, for at least as long as it remains shiny and new. The thermostat in the office is a sleek, space-age looking thing with a digital screen that’s permanently stuck displaying eighteen point five degrees Celsius.

Chris just assumed he lacked the technical know-how to change it, that the march of air conditioning technology had outstripped him at the ripe old age of twenty-five, but recent talk is that the master control is in Wesker’s office, where he guards it jealously as he slow-freezes their balls off.

“He’s a total control freak,” Jill grouses one afternoon, after she’s kicked back to the home screen for the third time in a row. She pulls her uniform fleece tighter around herself. “It’s colder in here than it is outside—it would be cheaper to keep it higher. Does he just hate the taxpayer?”

With impressive prescience, she adds, “It’s not weird, it’s just annoying. You’re almost as bad as he is.”

“What?” Chris says, offended. “I am not. I don’t hate the taxpayer.”

Admittedly, it is a bit hard to connect that one to active malice. But Chris has never shied away from a challenge, and he’s not about to start now.

“Jesus Christ,” Brad says, lowering the newspaper.

Chris has a feeling he knows what Brad’s talking about even before he glimpses the front page. Raccoon City has precisely one local paper, a subscription to which apparently came free with the S.T.A.R.S. appointment—no less than three members of the team and counting have arrived with identical copies, shoved into their bags or tucked under their arms. It makes Chris wonder if he was supposed to have been reading the paper all this time.

Looking distinctly nauseated, Brad refolds the paper and adds it to the stack on the break room table. The headline declares, in lurid capitals, BODIES FOUND EATEN.

“Hikers,” Jill says, leaning over the composite wood to read. “This says they were found on the northwest side of the mountains, but aren’t most of the trails closer to town?”

She looks to Chris for confirmation. “You’re right,” he agrees, because she probably is.

Barry rubs a hand over his beard, frowning deeply. “So they were cutting through the woods, got mauled.”

“No, that’s my point. Cutting through the woods to what? The wrong side of a small mountain? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe they were dumb tourists. It’s awful, obviously, but stupid people have been known to wander off.”

Jill presses a fingernail to her lips. “What if they didn’t wander off?” she muses. “What if they were taken?”

“What kind of animal drags its prey for miles?” Brad asks. The nervousness in his voice manages to make it sound like a genuine question.

“It says here the bite marks were elliptical, with rectangular incisors. That doesn’t sound like wolves. It almost sounds like… well. We have two large omnivores here, and the second one is bears.” Jill scowls down at the page. “It’d be nice if they let us see the pictures. I know they can’t print them in the paper, but a scenic aerial landscape? Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Chris says slowly. “Isn’t it weird that this is the first we’re hearing of it? This happened last night, and we had to find out about it from the newspaper.”

“We found out about it from the newspaper,” Barry reminds him. “You found out about it from us.”

“Okay, but we still haven’t seen any of the evidence listed in this article.”

Barry shrugs with affected gruffness. “We aren’t park rangers.”

“Park rangers?” Jill says incredulously. “They were eaten.”

“Did I say rangers? I meant police. Same difference.”

Brad, seated facing the door, straightens. “Wesker,” he says, equal parts greeting and warning.

Wesker’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed. He never enters a room—just sort of materializes. Jill rounds the table and presents the newspaper to him. “Have you seen this, sir?”

One corner of his mouth ticks upward as he scans the page. “Hm. Thursday already.”

She gives the paper an insistent shake. “No, the headline.”

“Yes, Ms. Valentine, I can read, thank you.”

He seems to care as little that the BODIES have been FOUND as that they’ve been EATEN. For reasons he can’t fathom, Chris blurts out, “They’re saying it was wolves.”

Wesker’s head swivels to lock onto him like a gun turret. “Are they now.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“And what do you think, Chris?”

He hesitates. Under the scouring intensity of that gaze, Jill’s cannibalism theory seems a bridge too far. “I mean, we do have wolves here. It’s probably just animals.”

At Wesker’s elbow, Jill looks affronted, but Chris is more focused on how Wesker cocks his head and actually smiles, faintly, as if at a private joke.

“Yes,” he says, in a low tone that could almost be mistaken for pleasant. “Occam’s razor. Best stick to the simple solutions.” He turns to leave, but pauses in the doorway, half-turning his head.

“That reminds me. Irons ordered me to tell you that he brought homemade jerky samples and would appreciate if you tried some.” His mouth twists. “You may want to get it while it’s hot, so to speak.” With that, he sweeps out of the room in a chilly draft.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” Barry says, once Wesker is safely out of earshot.

Chris meets Jill’s eyes. “Weird,” he says again.

“‘Probably just animals’?” she demands.

“Jerky’s not supposed to be hot, is it?” Brad says anxiously.

“Figure of speech,” Barry says, clapping him on the shoulder. “C’mon, Chickenheart, don’t tell me you’re scared of free food.”

It is not, in fact, a figure of speech.

The jerky gives everyone who eats it food poisoning. Irons apologizes profusely—or at least, he sweats profusely, and says the word accident, which would be alphabetized right next to it—and explains that the jerky was stored at an unsuitable temperature, but not before managing to bristle that it might have all been fine anyway if they had just eaten it earlier. Presumably he means when it still had a pulse.

Wesker stands off to his left, looking sleek and self-satisfied. When he takes note of Chris, sitting sound at his desk, his expression flattens.

Chris takes note of him right back. He dares Wesker to cry insubordination. It’s not like he ordered them to eat Irons’s jackleg jerky, and he can’t prove that the only reason Chris didn’t is because Wesker was the one to tell him about it.

Besides, Wesker seems fine, too. He must not have eaten it either.

Chris can’t say he’s surprised to see him unwilling to put his mouth where his mouth is. Maybe he would have been, before Wesker’s true colours bled into his conduct like a permanent marker through paper, but now he knows: Wesker’s fickle. Wesker’s vindictive.

Wesker’s in the hospital with a broken arm and ten stitches.

“He tried to grab a steel girder,” Jill says, bemused, when Chris asks. He’s Alpha team’s point man—even a few months ago, he would have been there to see it happen. Instead, he was halfway down the block, watching a side entrance, as per Wesker’s increasingly incoherent orders. “It was falling, and he just—lifted his hand. Like he was going to catch it or something.”

“Really?” Chris says.

“Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“Weird,” she echoes.

Wesker’s back in the office the next day, arm in a crisp white cast and chin tilted imperiously, but Chris catches him scowling down at it a couple times—like when he, disgruntled, is forced to make two trips to the fax machine—as if its uselessness disgusts him. Worse: as if he’d forgotten about it, the betrayal all the fresher for the reminder. Chris can’t help but think it’s not so different from the way Wesker looks at him nowadays.

“You know, my uncle was an alcoholic,” Barry says, apropos of nothing.

They’re at their usual bar, the five of them plus a selection of Bravo team, minus their new child-prodigy recruit, who can drink in most European countries and the less popular Canadian provinces, as she’d primly informed them. The others are clustered around the pool table or playing darts, or else getting refills at the bar, leaving Chris and Barry the de facto guardians of their table. On the muted TV above the bar, the Raccoon City Badgers are down 10-17. Chris fidgets with his beer and wonders if it would be insensitive to take another sip.

“Damn,” he says, when no other response is forthcoming. “How’s he doing now?”

“He’s not. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Shit. The drinking?”

“No, he was hit by a car. Freak accident. Never caught the guy.”

Chris hides his face behind his glass as he takes a deep swig.

“But that doesn’t matter,” Barry says, waving a hand impatiently. He’s had a bit much to drink himself; his gestures are sweeping and uncoordinated as he holds forth with 80-proof authority. “That’s the thing about addicts: they never wanna admit they got a problem, right up till it kills them. They do some bizarre shit to hide it. I got fond memories of good ol’ Uncle Jeff ducking out into the garage to take drinks from the canteen he kept in his truck during family dinners.”

Come to think of it, Chris isn’t sure just how freak that accident was. “What brought this up again?”

“Wesker,” Barry says, as though it should be obvious. When Chris just raises his eyebrows, he sighs and scratches his nose. “I mean, he’s definitely got something going on, if you know what I mean.”

“What, you think he’s an alcoholic? Does he even drink?”

He’s not out with them now, anyway, which Chris imagines would be the perfect pretext for overindulging. Not that he can picture Wesker even indulging in anything the normal amount.

He tries, for a moment: to visualize Wesker pouring himself a couple fingers of whisky in the solitude of his office, or else a house or an apartment; incandescent light and cut glass cradled in a loose hand; the shape his limbs might relax into with the omnipresent tension leached from them. But the whole thing dissolves somewhere around the face.

Barry shakes his head and rubs his nose again, more vigorously. He sniffs exaggeratedly, then coughs as something catches in his sinuses.

“You think Wesker’s on coke?”

“Think about it,” Barry insists, through watery eyes. “He’s always at the office before we arrive and there after we all leave. I’ve never seen him sleep.”

“You’ve never seen me sleep.”

“Then what did you call that at the shooting range earlier?” Forest calls from the bar.

Chris flips him off, good-naturedly. He knows he’s the best shot the S.T.A.R.S. have—and not because Wesker told him so, what feels like a lifetime ago.

“He’s always disappearing in the middle of the day,” Barry continues. “And when he does grace us with his presence, he’s manic as all hell. You know that when that beam crushed his arm, he hardly reacted? Should’ve hurt like anything, but we only noticed when he shifted his holster to his right. I bet you could set a techno track to his heartbeat.”

“Maybe he’s cracking up from the stress.”

“Maybe.” Barry narrows his eyes conspiratorially, leaning over the table. “Or maybe he’s cracking up.”

Chris scoots to the end of the booth—and out of Barry’s radius—as the others drift over from the dartboard and drop into the empty seats. Brad sets a full pitcher on the table. Jill holds an expectant hand out, and Joseph grumbles and slaps a crumpled five-dollar bill into her palm. “‘Played a few times,’ my ass,” he mutters. “You’re a damn shark, Valentine. Chris was bad enough. At this rate, I won’t have anyone left to play against.”

“Ever think the problem might be you, Joseph?” she says sweetly.

Forest picks up a glass and pours himself beer from the pitcher. “We gossiping about Wesker? I got a few for the suggestion box.”

“Barry thinks Wesker has a drug problem,” Chris says, rolling his eyes, but Brad nods thoughtfully.

“He’s got a problem, that’s for sure.”

“I’ve always thought he had migraines,” Richard says reflectively. “What with the dark glasses and the rubbing his temples. That’s why he’s so pissed around Chris.”

Chris straightens. “You’ve noticed that, too?”

“Yeah, man. You’re always… roughhousing and carousing and shit. Loud noises, not good for headaches. I bet you make him see people’s auras every time you open your mouth.”

“You seriously think I’m louder than Joseph?”

“Well, my theory is that he needs to get laid,” Joseph announces, loudly. He looks meaningfully at Jill. “What d’you say, Jill? Feel like taking one for the team?”

“Sure, if he’ll bend over,” she says, stone-faced.

“Yeah, fuck him yourself, Joseph,” Forest jeers.

“Or better yet, just go fuck yourself,” Jill says into the rim of her glass behind a fixed smile.

“Nah, you guys got Wesker all wrong,” Kenneth says, shaking his head. “The man’s found God or something. I was late the other day, and he was pretty decent about it, except when I went to go to my locker, I heard him saying something to himself about… a winnowing fork and chaff. And unquenchable fire.”

“Clearly the product of a sober and rational mind,” Barry intones.

“What do you want us to do?” Chris says, more sharply than he intended. “Sign him up for NA? Hold an intervention?”

Barry raises his eyebrows at him, obnoxiously sage. “You know, enablers do no one any favours.”

“Why so skeptical all of a sudden?” Forest says to Chris. “You were our canary in the coal mine about all this. Feel like sharing any more insights with the class?”

“I’m still waiting on my ‘I told you so,’” Jill adds.

“I don’t have any insights. I just don’t get why we have to talk about Wesker now,” Chris says, trying not to sound defensive and landing somewhere north of oversensitive. He doesn’t particularly feel like discussing what he suspects Wesker’s real issue to be, with the class or anyone else. “Isn’t it bad enough we have to be around him at work? None of us are actually going to do anything, so there’s no point in talking about it. And if there is something really wrong with him, shouldn’t his, I dunno, friends or family do something? Whatever’s going on with him, it’s a personal problem. It’s not my fault if something crawled up his ass and died.”

The other half of the table has split off into their own conversation, but they look up at that, exchanging a glance. “Hey, man,” Richard says, raising his palms, “we’re just shooting the shit. Y’know we don’t mean anything by it.”

Jill’s looking at Chris with a concerned line between her brows. If this is how she feels all the time, he envies her composure. He vows to swear off saying that he didn’t mean it like that.

“I know,” he says, thudding a heavy elbow on the table. “I know. Sorry. I’m in a fucked-up mood tonight.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Kenneth says. “And hey, maybe Barry took it too far.”

Barry’s scowl says he thinks otherwise, but he doesn’t jump in to the contrary, which is as close to acquiescence as it’s possible to get from him.

On the TV, the ball goes soaring silently through the Badgers’ goalposts, and the team scatters like drowning ants. “This is just embarrassing,” Forest complains.

“They haven’t been the same since the name change,” Richard says.

“It’s that sponsorship money. They’ll be the Umbrellas by this time next year.”

The conversation picks back up tentatively, finding its footing with a newfound caution: the former service dog Barry’s wife wants to train up for pointing; whether Richard is an idiot for thinking two-for-one is a better deal than fifty percent off; the twenty-year-old who stole the stop sign outside Jill’s building, but saw her coming home in her uniform and bolted, only for his dad to solemnly report to her and insist on lingering in her apartment to give a statement, thanking her for scaring his son straight and drinking all her Earl Grey. Stupid shit. Stupid shit like whatever Wesker’s deal is.

The vinyl booth gives a long-suffering groan as Chris slouches down in his seat, glowering at the scuffed tabletop. He should be glad that the others have noticed something off with Wesker—and he is, except in the traitorous corner of his gut that pulls taut like a fishhook every time Wesker’s gaze seeks him out first in a room, that used to crack wise to hear him sigh through his nose. The part of him still pinned face-down on an old gym mat, a bad taste in his mouth.

Despite the alternative, he supposes he doesn’t actually want Wesker to be suffering some kind of mental breakdown.

It’s a hot and humid late spring afternoon when Chris steps out into the parking lot and sees a squirrelly, dishevelled man loitering by the NO LOITERING sign.

The sun slants low over the pavement, glints off cars’ curved roofs; he shifts his bag on his shoulder and squints into the light, shading his eyes. There’s a second silhouette standing with the loiterer. To Chris’s chagrin, he recognizes the cut of Wesker’s jaw before he does the shock of white strapped across his chest.

Their voices don’t carry over the rush of cars on the street, but they look to be having an animated conversation, or at least the nervous-looking man is. He gestures emphatically to Wesker’s cast, then rakes an agitated hand through his hair, pushing it into a new level of disarray. Wesker seems unmoved, unmoving. His companion’s wild gesticulating only makes him seem steadier in comparison. Their shadows stretch across the asphalt, one a skittering windmill, the other sharp and still as the blade of a sundial.

The man casts a furtive glance around the lot, one hand gripping the opposite elbow, hunched in on himself in a way that looks painful. Wesker takes a step back toward the car they’re standing by—an SUV Chris has never seen before and doubts he’d remember even if he had, white and nondescript—and opens the passenger’s side door, gesturing to it. There’s a long, bright scratch along the side, like someone vigorously scraped a decal off and took some of the paint with it.

The man hesitates. He looks… well, scared in general, but scared to get in the car with Wesker. Wary.

He doesn’t vacillate long, though; he pauses by Wesker, speaking lowly, before circling around the car and opening one of the rear doors himself, crawling in. Wesker tips his head back in a way that Chris imagines means he’s rolling his eyes.

One hand on the driver’s door, he tilts his head again, then turns to Chris. The setting sunlight obliterates any details of his expression. For a moment, he’s a slit pupil in the red eye of the sinking sun.

Chris tears his gaze away, stomach lurching, feeling inexplicably caught. By the time he looks back, Wesker’s gone, and the car and man with him, the sun staring back at him unfocusedly.

In a way, it would be a relief if Wesker weren’t in the next day. Some kind of break; a tangible dislocation of normalcy. But by the time Chris dumps his bag in his locker, Wesker has already installed himself in his customary position behind his desk, answering email with an unperturbed expression and both hands. His cast has vanished, as if it never were.

The attacks don’t stop. The police implement a strict curfew that no one follows and then a couple teenage idiots turn up dead in the ashes of an illegal bonfire, necks bitten almost down to the bone. Talk shifts from terms of killings to those of murders. People start obeying the curfew. The whiteboard in the briefing room populates with sentence fragments—bears, exposure—and then along the bottom, in three separate hands: Cannibals? Cult? Cult?? and Jill looks more grim than vindicated.

Chris has half a mind to add vengeful ghosts. He’s been seeing them, anyway: strange, immaterial men in the parking lot; the stillness that comes over Wesker sometimes, like he forgets he’s alive; the faint spectre of recognition behind his implacability when Chris sets his jaw, when Wesker fleetingly looks haunted himself.

And still, against the mounting body of evidence, not to mention the mounting bodies, he refuses to send S.T.A.R.S. in.

Chris is doing his damnedest not to let it get to him—and doing a pretty admirable job, he’d say—until he makes eye contact with a missing poster taped to a magazine rack in the grocery store checkout line. Have you seen this girl?—like a goddamn milk carton. In the photo, her hair drifts in a cloud around her head, frizzy and a shade darker than Wesker’s, a comparison that annoys Chris so much that he barges into Wesker’s office the next time he sees the thin slice of light beneath the door.

The eyebrow Wesker raises at him over his computer is equally thin, and about as welcoming. “Chris. To what do I owe the… visit?”

“You haven’t done my performance review,” Chris blurts. He doesn’t realize it’s true until he says it. “I want it. I’m requesting my review.”

The smirk vanishes from around Wesker’s mouth. “Your performance review,” he says slowly, as if Chris is a fascinating new species of idiot.

“Yeah,” Chris says, crossing his arms. “Jill got hers a few weeks ago. It’s… what did you call it? Overdue.”

Wesker’s lip curls. “Outstanding.”

“Exactly. I’d like to know where I stand.”

With extreme reluctance, Wesker unfolds himself from his chair and retrieves Chris’s folder from a filing cabinet. He flips it open on his desk without glancing at it and leans backward, steepling his hands before himself, making no motion for a pen. Chris waits to be offered a seat, then takes the one in front of the desk when he isn’t.

“So,” Wesker says, jaw tight, like he has to press each word into shape before speaking. “You’d like to discuss your performance.”

“That’s right.”

“Would you say you’ve achieved your goals recently?”

“Yeah, I think so. I’ve been showing up on time, putting in the work. And I think Alpha team has really started to cohere.”

“And you attribute this progress to yourself.”

“I mean, I like to think I take on a leadership role in the team.”

“I’m sure you do,” Wesker says acidly. “Unrelatedly, what would you identify as your greatest weakness?”

Chris blinks. “I don’t know.”

“Ignorance. Duly noted,” Wesker drawls, although it’s not: he hasn’t written anything down, hasn’t so much as disturbed the contents of Chris’s file. His ID sheet is still sitting at the top. Chris frowns. Where his photo should be staring out at him, stone-faced, there’s blank paper—the page’s been slipped in the wrong way around. Wesker smoothly slides the folder shut. “Are we done here?”

Chris scowls and tries to imagine he’s delivering his answer to a neutral questionnaire rather than Wesker’s frosty superiority. “I guess I can be a bit… hot-headed. Maybe even”—insubordinate—“disobedient.”

“And how do you plan to fix that?”

“Honestly, I don’t know that it needs fixing. Sometimes someone needs to take initiative, make a command decision.”

“Hm. There’s a point at which ‘unwilling’ starts to look like ‘incapable.’ Personally, I have yet to see this alleged leadership material. I see immaturity and self-righteousness. Baby fat you will never outgrow.” Wesker tilts his head. “Does that feel true to your experiences?”

The back of Chris’s neck is so hot he half-expects the psychotic AC to kick in. “I feel like you’re supposed to be telling me how to improve, not just insulting me,” he snaps.

“What would you have me do, Chris?” Wesker pinches the bridge of his nose. For a delirious second, Chris thinks he’s going to remove his sunglasses, to look him right in the eye, but he just refolds his hands on the desk before him, locking them there. “I have given you chance after chance, yet you refuse to change. This preferential treatment cannot continue.”

“This is preferential? What’s unfavourable treatment, a bullet in the head?”

Something stills in Wesker’s face, and then he leans forward and smiles, close-lipped and cruel. “I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell you. I’m having you transferred to Bravo team.”

Chris gapes at him. “What? You can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid I can. In fact, I’ve already put in the request with Irons.”

“But— we’re Alpha team,” Chris says, lamely. Bravo are fine, but Jill, Barry, Joseph, even Brad—they’re his team, and he doesn’t trust anyone to have their backs like him. “You can’t shunt me off to the B-team.”

“Oh, please. You know the designations are purely for convenience. That being said, I feel you are not contributing constructively to my team.”

“Me?” Chris demands, shoving himself out of his seat. Wesker’s chin lazily follows him up. “I get along with everyone perfectly fine. It’s just you who has a problem with me for some reason.”

“I can think of quite a few,” Wesker says coldly. “You have no idea how lucky you are that I’m allowing you to remain with S.T.A.R.S. at all.”

His tone sinks into Chris. A chill slips down his spine, and he sits back down in his chair, numb.

“What about morale?”

“What about it? I expect the others will get over your loss without too much fuss. They are, after all, our best and brightest.”

And while Chris is sitting there, feeling his insides congeal and freeze into one solid lump, Wesker returns his attention to his computer monitor, as if he’s a problem solved. Not yet, he isn’t.

“Fine,” Chris grits out. “But I want it in writing.”

“Pardon me?”

“The performance review form.” He jerks his chin viciously at his closed file. “You didn’t fill it out. Do your job.”

Wesker’s fingers twitch on his mouse. “Of course,” he says. Chris doesn’t need to see his eyes to know his smile comes nowhere close to reaching them. “Don’t you worry, Chris. I will.”

Chris corners Irons by the soda machine later that same day. He’s not stupid—Wesker’s word isn’t law, no matter how smugly he lays it down.

Irons’s expression sours when his eyes land on Chris. He might hate his guts as much as Wesker does; has ever since he joined S.T.A.R.S. That gets him bonus points for consistency in Chris’s book these days.

Irons tries to dodge past him, a manoeuvre he is nowhere near nimble enough to pull off. Chris sidesteps into his path—Irons might have girth on him, but he has the advantage in height, and Irons is forced to either abort or accelerate to ramming speed.

“What is it?” he says irritably.

“Are you transferring anyone in S.T.A.R.S.?”

“What?” Irons furrows his brow, mistrustful. “Where did you hear that?”

“From Wesker. He said you’d already signed off on it.”

Irons’s blotchy red face goes pale. “He did? I mean—he did. That is, I did. I don’t know how I could have forgotten.”

“You don’t sound sure about it.”

“I am,” Irons snaps. “I’m a very busy man, if you’ll excuse me.”

This time he’s not to be deterred; he gets his shoulders up to his ears and shoves past Chris bodily.

“Who was it, then?” Chris calls after him.

“I won’t be harried in my own station,” Irons shouts. “Watch it, or it’ll be your ass next!”

The woods are a dark, impenetrable wall beyond the yellow bloom of the gas station’s sodium lights. The mountains rise somewhere behind them, black against the black sky. They don’t look particularly sinister, Chris thinks.

“So this is what’s been eating folks,” Forest says, leaning against the side of his car, cigarette flaring in his hand as he takes a drag. The smoke hangs in front of him, slowly unfurling in the humidity. The summer air is stifling and unusually quiet for a Friday night—people don’t go out much lately, or at least those who don’t carry guns. It sits heavy in Chris’s lungs and against his skin. His thin T-shirt is still sticking to him, although the sun set hours ago.

“Yup,” Joseph says from the gas pump. He hands back Forest’s credit card. “Hard to believe I used to sleep out here when I was a kid. Well. Out there.” He waves vaguely toward the darkness.

“Fuck off, you were not a Boy Scout.”

“Never said who I was sleeping with, asshole.”

“Your mommy?”

“What, your mom jealous?”

“Unbelievable.” Forest shakes his head. “You hearing this, Chris? And from a Boy Scout, no less. Shameful, what’s happening to our fine American institutions. Chris?”

“Right,” Chris says distractedly, watching the treetops sway in a breeze that dies before it crosses the asphalt. There’s a car parked at the edge of the lot where pavement and underbrush are separated by a flimsy wire fence, similar make and model to the one Wesker and his friend took off in—the gas station must be getting a delivery. The logo’s intact on this one: interlocking red and white triangles. Maybe Barry wasn’t as far off the mark as he seemed, though Chris wonders at what magnitude of painkiller addiction a pharmaceutical company lets you co-opt their vehicles, then curses his thoughts for turning to Wesker again.

He hasn’t said anything more about Chris’s demotion—transfer is such a kind word—but he’s strategic, probably biding his time for the worst possible moment, and the anticipation clings to Chris like the heat. So much for blowing off some steam.

Joseph fumbles with the gas pump, cursing. Forest leans over, the cigarette cherry flickering between his teeth. “Aren’t you our maintenance tech?”

“Your lazy ass is welcome,” Joseph snaps. “There’s something wrong with this goddamn pump.”

“You have to hold the handle down,” Forest offers sagely.

Muttering, Joseph eventually works it out, then shoves the nozzle back into the jack, wiping his hands on his jeans. For a moment, they all stare into the forest, the overlapping shadows. The lights’ artificial buzz cuts across the chirping of crickets.

Forest crushes his cigarette beneath his heel and pushes off the side of the car. “All right, this shit’s boring. We doing this or not?”

He and Joseph hadn’t needed much convincing. If there’s one thing they love, it’s a bad idea. Hell, from this vantage, from within the haze of smoke and gasoline and the tightness of his skin, it’s not seeming too awful to Chris, either. Hunt some monsters, hit some bars, who gives a shit, he can always beg off later with a headache. It won’t even be far from the truth if his temples keep their aching up.

It's darker between the trees, though not any cooler. The leaves whisper among themselves. Forest and Joseph keep up a constant stream of bicker for the first few minutes, but in the thick hush, their voices are small, farther away. Joseph flickers his penlight at Forest, a rapid-fire coquettish wink, and says something Chris can’t make out.

It’s not like they’re going to find anything—any murderers with ears could hear the two of them laughing it up from a mile away. Chris can’t blame them for their big talk and light shows, for shouting into the underbrush where honest people disappear with both feet firmly planted on its fringe. He presses onward, his boots sinking silently into a carpet of dead pine needles.

He’s so preoccupied with exonerating them that he doesn’t notice their voices fading beneath the wind until they’re gone. He’s never been great at multitasking. When he hears the growl, he almost replies to it. He turns in a slow circle, and his light catches on red eyes in the darkness.

They flash feverishly as the coyote—the wolf—the dog slips from the undergrowth, black lips pulled back over wicked teeth. Dark fur is matted to the side of its face and shining slickly, almost like the forest is a body it’s ripping itself from.

“Hey,” he says, in a low, stern voice, carefully backing away. The dog follows him pace for pace, growling in the back of its throat.

Something snaps off in the forest, and its growl revs up into a snarl. It crouches, ropy muscles flexing, and Chris just manages to get his hands out before it launches itself at him.

The impact takes him to the ground, the dog on his chest. He shoves at its throat as it snaps at him, his flashlight beam skittering wildly across tree trunks. Its rancid breath washes over him, roadkill on a sunny day, its panting gone thin and hoarse as it strains forward, heedless of the motion crushing its windpipe against Chris’s palms as he struggles to keep those fangs out of him—canine teeth, not blunted, not what’s been killing people. He would laugh, if the landing hadn’t knocked the wind out of his lungs: here lies Chris Redfield, killed by a rabid dog while dicking around, in a completely unrelated incident.

A gunshot cracks in the air. The dog lunges forward, jaws falling open. Chris squeezes his eyes shut and twists his head to the side, and its weight slumps on him—its dead weight, rending claws gone suddenly nerveless. Its head lolls onto his chest, a clumsy headbutt.

He shoves it off him and rolls away, breathing hard. The damp body jerks with two more shots for good measure, its legs still twitching like a dog dreaming of running. Whatever it is, though, it’s not a dog: even with his flashlight lost somewhere in the duff around him, Chris can see how its skin has worn away in places, revealing gleaming sinew.

He looks up from the spasming corpse to see—Wesker, standing on a rise, made ghostly by his pale hair and the wash of his penlight in the murk, his gun still trained on Chris.

“Thanks,” Chris manages. Wesker’s presence should probably be more surprising to him than that his captain acted to save him.

Slowly, Wesker lowers the gun. “You can return the favour,” he says tightly. “Behind me.”

As if on cue, eerie howls drift up from the copse of trees on the ridge, raising the hair on the back of Chris’s neck along with them. Wesker starts forward, tucking something into an interior pocket, not sparing a glance for the dead creature, and Chris scrambles to his feet to catch up.

“Wait,” he says, although he doesn’t slow, doesn’t want to risk a run-in with more of whatever’s making those noises. “Joseph and Forest—”

“Will be well on their merry way to the nearest bar by now.”

Despite everything, the certainty in Wesker’s tone settles something in Chris. He trails him through the dark woods until the glimmer of streetlights appears through the trunks. Wesker already has one long leg swung over the waist-high fence when Chris stops short. “You’re leaving?”

“You aren’t?”

“Those… things are still out there.”

The wind whistles in the branches, the sound high and cold, and Chris fights back a grimace. He keeps expecting to hear teeth in it.

“Planning to vanquish them all single-handed?” Wesker’s voice curls with derision, his hand on the top of the fence. “How heroic. Far be it from me to prevent you from martyring yourself, but one seemed more than a match for you.”

The leaves shiver in another breeze, and this time Chris does tense. Wesker checks his watch and huffs. “Come. I’ll give you a ride.”

He strides off without a backward glance. It takes until his boots hit the pavement on the other side of the fence for Chris to realize he’s following without a second thought. Wesker leads him into town, past storefronts closed for the night: neon signs advertising Mediterranean pizza, oil changes.

Half a step behind him on the sidewalk, Chris asks, “What were those things?”

“Wolves.”

Chris laughs incredulously. “Wolves. Yeah, sure.”

“Yes.” Wesker is inscrutable behind his sunglasses. “You should hope so.”

He’s parked on a side street, in front of an A-frame sign announcing free eye exams. His car—if it is his—is sleek and dark, a far cry from the company vehicles cropping up at the edges of local parking lots like boxy white mushrooms. Wesker unlocks it and slips behind the wheel wordlessly. Chris thinks of the frightened man crawling into the backseat, his cringing wariness, and squares his shoulders and slides into the passenger seat.

As Wesker pulls away from the curb, Chris is struck by the fact that not only is the car different, it’s nice. The engine is quiet, the leather upholstery like cool skin against his when he sits back. “Uh, take a right here,” he says, but Wesker’s already flicked his turn signal on.

Chris peers out the window as he gives directions. Further into town, the emptiness is more eerie, unoccupied streets gliding past behind Wesker’s reflection in the dark glass. Chris studies it, staring at him without staring at him. He’s tucked his sunglasses into the collar of his shirt to drive; Chris can’t tell the colour of his eyes in the window—pale, definitely, blue or grey. The streetlights cast cyclical shadows over the angles of his face.

Wesker’s hands flex on the steering wheel. Chris is certain that he knows he’s being watched, can feel the second-hand stare, but he keeps his own gaze fixed on the road until he pulls up two doors from Chris’s house.

The air is taut and electric when Chris steps out of the car—one of those summer nights that feels like a storm. He turns toward his stoop, then hesitates.

He can see it, running out before him like the identical townhouses up and down the street: how he’ll sit awake at his kitchen table, and Wesker will vanish along backstreets the way he came, and come Monday, the dark lenses of normalcy will have descended once again, leaving Chris with only the adrenaline quickening his pulse to speak otherwise.

He leans back down, one hand on the top of the car door. “Do you want a drink?”

It’s bizarre. Chris knows it’s bizarre, which makes it a known quantity. If Wesker wants to jerk him around and fuck with his head, well, two can play that game. No, he can read in Wesker’s raised eyebrows, no forming on his lips. No, he can already hear hanging in the still night air between them.

“Yes,” Wesker says.

He seems almost as surprised as Chris to hear himself say it. He shadows Chris up the steps to his door, stands utterly still as Chris fumbles with his keys, hyperaware of every detail of Wesker’s presence at his back. He drifts inside as Chris pulls off his boots.

Chris straightens to find him surveying his surroundings like a man at a museum, or one of those reenactment pioneer villages, examining the composite parts of Chris’s life with a curiosity usually reserved for the remnants of a primitive civilization: the dusty lamp shades, the unmade pull-out couch in the living room.

“I’m still settling in,” Chris says awkwardly.

Wesker tilts his head to study the scattershot holes in the drywall, a bombed-out no man’s land where the previous owner hung reproduction Group of Sevens and which Chris has neither filled nor covered with other décor in the embarrassingly long interim. “Fascinating,” he murmurs, one hand hovering at his side, like he might start sticking his fingers in them.

Chris clears his throat. “Is beer good?”

“Hm?” Wesker blinks. It’s surreal to be able to see him do that. “It’s… fine.” He casts a dubious eye over Chris’s living room and amends, “I have no preference.”

As Chris opens the fridge, he glances out the window above the sink. The sight of Wesker’s car in his driveway sends a strange, disjointed frisson through him. Unbidden, the image of Wesker sprawled loosely, glass in hand, arises again, this time with the setting coloured in: Chris’s house, Chris’s couch.

He grabs a couple Heinekens—as safe a bet as any, he figures—and slams the door, only to take an apprehensive step back. Wesker has followed him into the kitchen, and is leaning against the counter, inspecting the photos taped to the fridge door.

There are a couple of Chris and the guys from back in the Air Force; a scattering of postcards, all of the Grand Canyon—Greetings from the top of rock bottom, Claire’s a real comedian; one of him and her on the steps of her red-brick high school, taken by an endeared mother, her in a graduation gown, him waving her cap in one hand.

“That’s my little sister,” he says, not really knowing why.

“Yes,” Wesker murmurs. “I can see the resemblance.”

Chris doubts he can. It’s not a very good picture, all things considered: the edge of the overzealous mom’s finger is a tan blur across one corner, and the shadow of the hulking building behind them swallows any shared facial features—his grin, her smaller smile. It makes him seem like a grandma, having it stuck on his fridge like this, but he figured her grad photo should be up on someone’s fridge, and the pickings aren’t exactly plentiful. But he guesses that’s just the sort of thing you’re supposed to say about someone’s family.

“She’s in college right now,” he says. They’re the first words that come to his blanking mind—he’s used to talking about Claire when conversation turns to family, or at least the idea of Claire, the spunky younger sister, bachelor’s-bound. “First year.”

“Hm. What is she studying?”

“Uh. Something humanities.”

“Not the sciences? Shame. She seems like a bright girl.”

“She is.” The pride is reflexive. So is the guilt. “She worked out all the logistics herself. Kept talking about how set she was on going it alone, even though she basically already was—I’d already moved out here when she was applying to programs. But you know when people won’t stop talking about how fine they are with something? I don’t know. I could’ve seen her off, helped her unpack.”

A ringtone trills, staunching the flow of Chris’s stream-of-consciousness rambling. Just in time: a few more seconds, he might’ve bled out. Wesker pulls a cell phone from his pocket and glances at it, then scoffs, snapping it shut.

The bottles are sweating onto Chris’s palms. He thinks about handing one to Wesker, then sets it on the counter between them and reaches in a drawer for a bottle opener. “S.T.A.R.S.?”

“Nothing that matters now. My parents are dead as well, my… father relatively recently.”

Chris almost misses the divulgence, Wesker throws it out so casually; has to begrudgingly admire the cold read. All he said was that he didn’t see his sister off to college, Jesus. “I’m sorry,” he says honestly.

“Don’t be. You didn’t kill him.” Wesker wraps his fingers around the bottle’s scrawny neck, lips twisting wryly. “It was his time. Old men grow weak and die. Such is the way of the world.”

“I guess. It still sucks.”

“He brought it upon himself. He succumbed to his own poisonous aspirations—for me, for himself through me. He wanted… a legacy. I denied him one. It’s been quite the task, finishing up his affairs.”

“Oh. Yeah, it can be a headache. Kids are… well, let’s just say my sister was enough for me. She’s always been pretty independent, but, I mean, what teenager wants to suddenly be his little sister’s legal guardian, you know?” Chris rubs the back of his neck, laughs awkwardly. “I could’ve been better about it, at first.”

Wesker snorts. “I’m sure you’ve always been the picture of fraternal duty.”

“Barry gave me all kinds of flak for the college thing. Apparently, she’ll resent me when she’s older. Or maybe it was when I’m older—you know, once I hit thirty and she starts looking at retirement homes.”

“Ever the family man, Barry,” Wesker says with absolutely no inflection. “How will that paternalism pay off for him, I wonder.”

“I figured, he has kids, he can’t be talking out his ass all the time.”

“You’d be surprised.” Wesker nods to their embracing figures on the fridge. “He could give Claire an object lesson in resentment.”

Chris pauses. “Did I tell you her name?”

“Of course. Claire Redfield, graduating class of ’97, pictured with her doting older brother.” Wesker manages to make doting sound venomous. He pushes a thumbnail under the cap of his still-unopened Heineken, lips thinning when it doesn’t budge. “You don’t realize the borderline suicidal devotion you inspire in others. Give it a few years, they’ll need curative surgery to separate the three of you.”

Chris is so stupidly pleased by even that bitter, backhanded compliment that he says, “Finally felt like giving my real performance review?” before the second half of that thought registers. “Wait, three?”

“You, she, and Ms. Valentine—quite the little nuclear powerhouse.”

“Jill?” Chris frowns. “She’s great, but I think you have the wrong idea. Her and Claire have never even met. She has a picture of her boyfriend on her desk, right?”

“Is that not her dog? Regardless, I feel rather uniquely qualified to say that she would take several bullets for you.”

“I don’t think you know us as well as you’re trying to imply.”

Wesker chuckles and glances at him, eyes startlingly bright against the blue of his shirt. “Oh, Chris. You have no idea the things I know about you.”

It’s like having the wind knocked out of him for the second time in as many hours. There’s a clarifying quality to the blow, the way the nonsensical line of questioning jars into alignment—Jill, family, Barry—as if he’s been walking around with a dislocated shoulder all this time and Wesker’s just come along and ruthlessly popped it back into place. It stings, sure, but that’s it, the worst possible moment has arrived, and at least it’s left him with something he can actually use.

He sets his beer on the laminate countertop and shifts to face Wesker head-on, the long line of his body deliberate and unconcerned under the cheerful lighting of Chris’s own kitchen.

“So,” he says. “You spoke to Barry.”

Wesker tips his head, thumb stroking idly along the slick glass of his bottle. “He can be useful when he wants to be.”

“Then you know we served in the same unit in the Air Force.”

“I was aware, yes.”

“He’s the reason I joined S.T.A.R.S., you know. After I was discharged, I drifted for a while. He tracked me down, told me I should move to Raccoon City. That’s what he was worried about—not that I left Claire to unpack by herself, but that I’d spin out and leave her in the same position our parents left me.” Wesker’s still watching him with that academic fucking cant to his head. Chris grits his teeth and says, “I know, Wesker.”

“Do you now.”

“What you’re getting at. If there’s something you want to say to me, I guarantee I’ve heard it before.”

For some reason, that causes a faint smile to twitch onto Wesker’s lips. “I’m sure you have,” he drawls. “Am I really so transparent?”

“Sorry if you were trying for subtlety.”

“Still, I didn’t think you’d ever catch on.” Wesker sneers. “It seems I continue to underestimate you, Chris. I must say, you’re taking this very well.”

Chris snorts. “It’s not exactly new, is it?”

“No, I suppose not.” Wesker gazes at the bottle opener contemplatively, but makes no move for it. His finger is still tracing slow circles around the rim.

In his silence, Chris can see it: Wesker, giving him a warning in April; Wesker, eyes catching on those three little words on his record; Wesker, not letting it be, investigating. Wesker, recoiling at the doorway to the shower room.

“Look, I don’t know who else you got to gossip with you, but either kick me off S.T.A.R.S. or cut the shit.”

“Kick you off S.T.A.R.S., and you drift off and disappear. Amusing”—and to his credit, Wesker does seem legitimately entertained by the suggestion—“but no, that wouldn’t solve the problem.”

“Sure, Wesker. Feel free to try to solve it yourself. How’s that been working out for you?” Chris sets his jaw, and despite his vestigial survival instincts pulling for the contrary, keeps talking. That’s always been his real problem: deeply held convictions not buried quite deep enough. “Honestly, I don’t even think you could kick me off S.T.A.R.S. if you tried—definitely not now. You’ve overplayed your hand. Do you really think anyone on the team would side with you over me anymore? This pathetic, irrational hatred of yours has wrecked your credibility. I hope you’re satisfied.”

A bottomless chasm opens behind Wesker’s expression. For a second, he is completely, utterly blank. Then he shakes his head, setting his beer down in line with Chris’s.

“You never change, do you,” he says to the bottle, almost fondly. “Forever intertwined, indeed.”

His hand finds Chris’s neck like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He slams Chris into the drywall so hard the cupboards rattle, and Chris grunts, vision flickering.

“If anyone could understand, it would be you,” Wesker snarls. “Yet you refuse to see. You claim to know, but you’re as ignorant as the rest, too small-minded for the truth.”

He’s very close, and very warm, the strong lines of his body flush against Chris’s front. Chris can feel his pulse hammering in the press of Wesker’s fingers, still cool from the condensation. There’s a sharp, brittle light in his eyes that’s hard to look away from, and not just because their faces are scant inches apart.

“I thought it would get easier to look at you. But it’s the same every time. Do you know what it’s like to burn, Chris? To be run through? What it takes to claw one’s way back? I may be relentless, but you are… unrelenting.”

Barry must be onto something, because Chris thinks he has a contact high going on, a weightless, electric feeling rising in his limbs. Or maybe that’s the asphyxiation. His mind lurches with the realization that he’s misread something.

“You have frustrated my every effort,” Wesker spits. “You are the throughline of countless hours of turmoil, the motif tying together all my misery, and you find me irrational? If not for you, I wouldn’t still be this. You are so infatuated with your nature, with its baseness, that you drag down those who would rise above, who would be better. Who have been better. You couldn’t fathom what would satisfy me.”

He’s close enough now that his breath ghosts across Chris’s cheek. Chris barely has to turn his head before their lips are brushing together.

Wesker stills. He might stop breathing. His lips are rigid against Chris’s.

Chris shoves him back, and Wesker’s grip allows him the movement, suddenly slack on his collar. He looks floored, eyes wide and unmistakably blue.

It wasn’t exactly a kiss. It wasn’t exactly anything else, either. Chris’s throat clicks as he works to swallow. “Wesker, what the fuck,” he says, not really hearing the words, just that they’re coming out of his mouth. “I don’t—”

Then Wesker surges forward, and his mouth is on Chris’s, and Chris’s hands get pinned halfway up to a defensive position as Wesker crowds in to press them both against the wall again.

There’s a frantic energy threaded through the demanding way Wesker seals their bodies together, matching Chris limb for limb. He mouths at the corner of Chris’s lips with a directionless, desperate appetite. It’s overwhelming. It’s probably a sign of some impending nervous breakdown. It’s six foot three of his attractive captain bearing down on him like a switch in his head has flipped to sexuality crisis, and Chris would love to be able to say that he hesitates, that what the fuck gives an encore performance, but the truth is that he opens for Wesker the way he’d followed him: without a second thought, eyes wide open.

The kiss turns hot and bruising immediately. Wesker kisses Chris like he hates him, like he’s starving for it, tongue and teeth. His hands grip the sides of Chris’s jaw, less caressing than holding him in place, warm just above where his handprint still aches over Chris’s windpipe. He bites Chris’s lower lip none too gently, licking past his parted lips when he gasps, swallowing the noises it pulls from the back of Chris’s throat. His mouth is slick and hungry, and not unskilled. Chris makes another sound into it, lower, appreciative. He slips a thigh between Wesker’s, stepping into the hold, and slides a hand up Wesker’s back, feeling the flex of muscles through the fabric of his shirt, his feverish warmth.

A shiver runs up Wesker’s spine under the touch. He breaks the kiss, breathing heavily, head bowed. “Chris,” he hisses, a hint of teeth against the sensitive skin of Chris’s throat.

“Yeah,” Chris says nonsensically, and then, “Oh, wow,” as Wesker seals his mouth over his pulse point, sucking slow and stinging over the imprint of his fingers on Chris’s throat, throbbing fast and then faster in time with his heartbeat.

The sterile note has vanished from his scent, Chris notices distantly. Wesker smells like the sweet night air and hair gel and heated skin, sweat and arousal under the sting of smoke. Like a man and something burning.

Wesker’s turned-on—it would be impossible to miss from this close, his cock a hard line against Chris’s thigh—but it’s more a function of their position than any drive on his part. He hasn’t removed Chris’s leg from between his, but neither is he moving against it; just leaves it there like a fact, like they’re sparring again and Chris is about to perform a leg lock on him.

Chris is most of the way to hard himself, and the ravenous kiss coupled with the weirdly utilitarian hold leave him dizzy and aching for more. So he takes the initiative.

He walks them both backward until the backs of Wesker’s legs hit the pull-out couch; gives into temptation and hooks a leg around Wesker’s, taking them both down on the futon. Wesker moves like he’s not used to giving ground. He wraps his legs around Chris’s hips and flips them in one fluid movement. It would be laughable how easily Wesker pins him, except that Chris isn’t fighting him this time. His thoughts are more of an appreciative bent as Wesker straddles his thighs.

Wesker rests a hand on the exposed strip of skin where Chris’s shirt has ridden up, and his abdominal muscles jump under the touch. Wesker rucks up the thin cotton, then makes an irritated noise, tugging at the hem. “Take this off,” he commands.

Chris bristles at the order even as it goes straight to his cock, buzzing in the little chamber Wesker’s carved out of him with the cutting edge he puts on his name. He decides to split the difference and take it as a step in the right direction.

He sits up, a strange new sort of partner sit-up that brings his face dizzyingly close to Wesker’s, and pulls his shirt over his head. “Your turn,” he says.

Wesker unclasps his holster and drops it to the floor, then settles back on Chris’s thighs, as if they’re equally bared. Maybe they are. Wesker looks remarkably composed, fully clothed and unrumpled, but his eyes are dark, and when Chris leans back, abdominal muscles flexing, he can see how closely they track the motion. Wesker’s hair is still immaculately styled, and Chris is seized by the urge to mess it up.

“Don’t even think about it,” Wesker growls.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Chris says. He hooks his hand in Wesker’s collar instead, brushing his thumb down the thin edge of his sunglasses’ lenses, and tugs at them playfully. “Not too late for you to put these on.”

An unreadable shadow passes over Wesker’s face at the word sir. He finally leans back down to seal his mouth over Chris’s, frustration rumbling in his chest—shutting him up, Chris knows, but he doesn’t particularly care, not when it gets that warm, solid weight against him again.

Wesker’s lips find the dip of Chris’s collarbone, shortly followed by his tongue. His sunglasses press into Chris’s bare chest, a cool point of contact trapped between their bodies just below the hungry heat of his mouth. Chris tightens his grip on Wesker’s shirt and rolls his hips up against his, slow and deliberate, the drag of their clothed hardnesses so good Chris could groan. Wesker’s breath stutters against his throat.

“Oh,” he says, sounding almost surprised. Either he’s completely absorbed in the task of sucking bruising kisses into Chris’s skin or he has the worst bodily awareness of anyone Chris has ever met.

One of those is kind of hot. The other makes Chris falter.

“Yeah,” he says, resisting the urge to cross his arms defensively over his bare chest. “Have you… ever done this before?”

Wesker licks his lower lip, eyes flicking to Chris’s, then away. “I haven’t,” he admits.

“Kinda figured. Okay.” Chris has resigned himself to his life with S.T.A.R.S. imploding—he takes a certain vindictive pleasure in the knowledge that whatever half-assed façade of normalcy Wesker’s got going will be collateral damage. The spiel is sour on the back of his tongue, a dish served hot and cold and never eaten, but he’ll deliver it dutifully. “If you don’t want to—”

“But you do.”

“What?”

“You do.” Wesker’s gaze has found the bulge in Chris’s jeans, marvelling. “You… want.”

It might be a losing battle against the crossed arms. “Yeah, no shit. You don’t have to be an asshole—”

Chris breaks off, because Wesker has cupped a hand over the swell of his clothed erection. His eyes are dark and fascinated as he presses down, rubbing in a slow arc. Chris sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“Wesker,” he says, voice rough.

That seems to decide Wesker. He undoes Chris’s fly one-handed, in a way Chris would call hurried if it weren’t so coordinated; shoves Chris’s underwear down and gets a hand around his cock. His strokes have the same fervour as his mouth—it’s too much, too fast, the pleasure tempered with dry pain. From the look that crosses his face when Chris grunts in pain, he can’t be sure that isn’t the intent.

“Hold on,” Chris manages. “I have—” He fumbles in a side table drawer and emerges with a packet of lube.

Wesker raises his eyebrows. “In the living room? Really?”

“Hey, I’m a red-blooded American male, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh, I can tell,” Wesker says drily, but he accepts the packet. The coolly efficient way he tears the foil open and pours some on his fingers shouldn’t be so appealing.

With the added lubrication, his relentless pace has Chris tilting his head back against the mattress. He doesn’t think he believes Wesker about never having done this before—his movements are sure, on the right side of tight, nothing ginger there. The sound is obscene: the slick slide of Wesker’s hand over him, Chris’s breathing gone ragged around the edges. Wesker’s silence is a palpable absence. He’s studying Chris with avid interest, like he’s memorizing every reaction and minute twitch.

Chris aches for something more to occupy him than squirming beneath Wesker; entertains the ridiculous idea of getting handfuls of that tight ass to feel Wesker stiffen against him—but then, Wesker currently has a hand around his dick like it’s a lifeline, so maybe it’s not so ridiculous. He doesn’t really know what’s allowed. He props himself up on his elbows, only for Wesker to make an irritated noise and press him back down.

“Stay down,” Wesker says crisply. He squeezes Chris from root to tip, twisting wickedly around the head, and Chris can’t stifle his punched-out groan.

“Wesker, fuck,” he says shakily. He digs his hands into Wesker’s powerful thighs—never let it be said he can’t compromise. His hips are starting to shift into the grip, little abortive thrusts, chasing the slow-cresting pleasure. “I’m gonna come if you don’t stop.”

Wesker’s hand halts so abruptly that a bereft noise escapes Chris’s throat of its own accord. He leans down across Chris, supporting himself on one arm, and presses his mouth to the edge of Chris’s jaw, just below the ear. “I think I’d like to see that,” he murmurs.

“Would you,” Chris says, but it comes out more unsteady than snide. He’s surrounded by Wesker, boxed in by his scent, his taste, Wesker’s mouth dragging up to lick into his own and Wesker’s thumb sweeping light, teasing strokes into the underside of his cock that roughen out quickly, impatient. Chris is grinding into Wesker’s hand and up against his body now. He can feel his side of the kiss getting clumsier, until he’s just panting into Wesker’s mouth, eyes sliding shut.

A strong hand digs into the hinge of his jaw. Chris finds himself blinking up into Wesker’s hungry gaze. The ring of blue around the pupils seems to gleam, predatory. “I said I wanted to see it.”

Chris’s eyes stay open mostly out of surprise, the push of Wesker’s thumb and forefinger parting his lips. He honestly has no idea how he would fare for longer, but Wesker says, “Good boy,” mocking and satisfied, at the same time as he adds a twist to the downstroke, and then Chris’s hips are stuttering, his back arching, and he’s coming over his stomach and Wesker’s hand in long pulses. Wesker works him through it, wringing thoroughly undignified noises from him, until Chris twitches away from the overstimulation.

He just lies there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, Wesker a steady weight on his legs. He feels boneless and flattened out. The corners of the room glow with a pleasant warmth.

Wesker lifts his hand to his face, studying it. He rubs his fingertips together contemplatively, then reaches over and wipes them on Chris’s balled-up shirt.

Chris groans, laughs. “Come on, seriously?”

That utter stillness again. Wesker slips himself off Chris’s lap and makes as if to stand. He shoots Chris a sharp look when he catches him by the arm.

“Where’re you going?” Chris levers himself up to a sitting position, lazy and postcoital, and nods unabashedly to Wesker’s cock, a hard ridge straining the fabric of his pants. “Didn’t you want me to return the favour?”

Wesker looks faintly disbelieving, but he lets himself be reeled back in; doesn’t move from the edge of the pull-out when Chris sinks to his knees between his thighs, just hisses, “Chris,” warningly, when Chris’s fingers graze his fly.

His underwear is slick from how much he’s been leaking, his cock hot and heavy in Chris’s hand, painfully hard. Chris rubs over the head and feels it stiffen further in his grasp. When he dips his head and drags his lips over the tip, Wesker inhales sharply. “Chris,” he breathes again.

He’s staring down at Chris with his head set to one side, pupils blown, expression wondering and almost reverent, and a little afraid. Chris grins up at him. “You really like saying my name, huh? I kinda like it, too,” he says, and whatever retort may have been on Wesker’s tongue gets lodged behind a shuddering breath as Chris takes him in his mouth.

It’s been a while since he’s done this, but the basic motions are familiar. He wraps a hand around the base of Wesker’s cock, flattens his tongue against the underside. Wesker’s hand finds Chris’s jaw again, the side of his neck—that has to be some kind of fixation, Chris thinks, a control thing—smoothing a thumb over the curve of his cheek, the obscene bulge of himself.

“Fuck,” Wesker says hoarsely, and heat prickles down Chris’s spine. It’s less the vulgarity—although that is new—than the fact that Wesker curses the same way he says Chris’s name, like a substitution. He almost regrets bringing it to Wesker’s attention.

Hé can feel how close Wesker already is in the thick heat of him on his tongue. He’s not fucking into his mouth, but Chris can read how near a thing it is when he smooths a hand up Wesker’s inner thigh, trembling with the effort of stillness. He pulls off momentarily, sitting back on his heels.

“Hey, Wesker,” he says, and then swallows him down to the root.

The noise Wesker makes is strangled, like he’s the one with something caught in his throat. Chris is a man of many talents, only some of which fit on a resume: when Wesker’s cock bumps the back of his throat, he barely gags, just relaxes and takes it.

Wesker’s drip-feeding him a steady stream of precum and the most uneven breathing Chris has ever heard from him. Taking Chris out at the knees, no problem—but turns out all Chris had to do to make him break a sweat was get to his knees by himself. When Chris glances up at him through his eyelashes, Wesker has a hand pressed over his own mouth, looking wrecked and coiled tight, a livewire feeding back into Chris. His other hand closes on Chris’s shoulder, squeezing a painful warning, but Chris doesn’t let up, just hollows his cheeks and sucks, insistently, insubordinately.

Wesker curses brokenly and bites something that stings like Chris’s name into his fist, and then salty cum hits the back of Chris’s throat. He drinks both down greedily.

Chris finally pulls off, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, coughing. He flops back onto the futon inelegantly, body feeling loose-limbed and used the way it does after anything worth doing. Wesker settles himself back slowly. For a moment, they lie there, catching their breath—not touching, but Chris can feel Wesker’s body heat radiating across the thin strip of mattress between the sides of their arms, smell the smoke and sex clinging to his clothes.

“You smoke?”

“No.” Wesker sounds surprised to be asked. Or at least surprised to be asked this first. From the decisive distaste in his tone, Chris can anticipate the clean-living lecture—those things will kill you, you know—but he just says, “Slow way to die.”

“Better than a fast one.”

The noise Wesker makes could mean anything. He shifts and slants Chris a considering look. “How long,” he says, “could I have done that for?”

There’s a slight curve to the ceiling fan blades Chris has never noticed before. He stares at them resolutely. “I thought if you don’t ask, I don’t have to tell.”

Wesker lets his head fall back against the futon and laughs. It’s different, less restrained than Chris would have expected; not that he’s devoted much thought to how Wesker’s laughter might bounce around his small living room—same as he’d never pictured how his brow might furrow as he came—but this has an uncontrolled edge to it, almost crazed.

Wesker presses the back of his forearm over his eyes. Chris wonders if it’s some instinct, developed after years of perpetual sunglass-wearing, to think better in the dark, with even the dim kitchen lights blocked out. Maybe. Wesker looks like he’s trying to press himself together through sheer physical force.

“Well,” he says, once he composes himself. “This has certainly been illustrative.”

He pushes himself up on one arm over Chris. For a moment, Chris thinks he’s going to kiss him again, but his gaze just flickers down to the toned plane of Chris’s stomach and then back, so quickly he isn’t sure he didn’t imagine it. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

His phone, if possible, has gotten even louder in the interim. The ringtone shatters the moment so thoroughly that Chris jumps a little.

Wesker huffs through his nose, irritated. “Some people just don’t know when to quit,” he mutters, leaning over the edge of the pull-out to grope for it.

Chris takes the opportunity to admire the shift of muscles under his untucked shirt, then turns to dig through the drawer in search of the pack of cigarettes he knows must be in there somewhere. What can he say, Wesker’s sparked a craving.

As he does, he becomes aware of how the cum drying on his chest is sticky and turning gross. He’s loathe to follow Wesker’s example in turning his shirt into a jizz rag—but then, it is all his cum, and his shirt. He could just throw it into the washer right after.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Wesker straighten, phone dark in his hand and still ringing, strangely muffled. Something clicks.

Chris’s body reacts to the glint of a gun barrel before he consciously recognizes it. He freezes, Lucky Strikes in hand, a neat red bullseye.

He can’t tear his eyes away from Wesker’s finger on the trigger: he’s holding it in his left hand, his clean hand, not the one he touched Chris with, and it’s with a cold hard dread that Chris remembers all the things he hadn’t struggled to do when his right was in the cast.

“Wesker,” he says, heart beating in his throat. “What are you doing?”

Wesker regards him again. The phone is still shrilling away somewhere beneath their discarded layers. He hasn’t replaced his sunglasses, but Chris—yet again—has no fucking clue what to read in his face.

“You always said I needed to shut up,” Wesker says thoughtfully. “It wasn’t bad advice.”

And then he presses the gun to the soft underside of his own jaw.

Chris shouts and lunges for his wrist, scrambling, and—

One day Captain Wesker comes into the office and smiles right at Chris.