Chapter Text
Tomsk, Russia.
“Da. He lives.”
The woman on the phone barely spoke any English, so that’s all Claire knew about Chris’s current health conditions during the ten and odd hours traversing the distance between Washington DC and Northern Russia.
Right after that, no time to rest—not that she could think about it. Claire asked more questions, getting rude enough to see the very green eyes of the young private, who had received her, tear up a bit.
“He got shot in the left ear,” the private managed to babble. “And been through surgery.” His accent was so heavy that Claire could only deduce the rest of the words, but ‘induced coma’ and ‘delicate’ made it out in one piece.
After another two hours rocking in every possible direction inside a military Humvee—which had chains in its tires to deal with the icy roads ahead, only to make it even more rocky—Claire finally arrived at the distant military base where, as far as she understood, Chris had received primary care, and was still interned at, too unstable to be moved somewhere closer to civilization.
In the end, a hospital was still a hospital anywhere in the world—and she had been to many, both for her own injuries and for friends.
But especially Chris’s.
She always joked that Chris toured hospitals as a pastime, as he had been to one at least once in every continent, save for the South Pole—not for lack of trying, but because there weren’t any in there.
But she didn’t feel like joking now. She felt like slapping the receptionist’s face when he told her to wait; she felt like knocking the door that was closed to her down with her bare fists, and she felt like screaming at the top of her lungs that she had been awake for the last 24 hours and all she wanted was to see the man who had once hid her inside his coat when they had lost their parents and her world was turned upside down.
Her foot was tapping like a beaver’s tail on mud, and her face was soaked with nervous tears when the resident doctor finally arrived. International conventions had made her the kindness of translating his name to the Roman alphabet—Viktor Malev—and the fact that his English was fairly decent hit her like a breath of fresh air.
“Miss Redfield?” The doctor didn’t smile, but offered her his hand in greeting. “Your brother is stable. We ceased the sedatives yesterday; he should be waking up any time.”
Claire let out a breath she had been holding since Washington. “It's Mr.s Redfield-Kennedy now, but… Can I see him?”
“In a minute.” Doctor Malev held up a hand to hold her fire. “I need to put you up to par with his condition first.”
She wrapped her arms around her torso, as if bracing for impact. Chris was almost 60, in the field since he was 23; he had been shot everywhere in his body—hell, he had received injuries worse than gunshots. But a shot in the head was different; the woman who had first called her used the word ‘fatal’ right out of the bat, and it took Claire a while to realize he wasn’t dead yet.
This was huge. In every possible, bad way.
“He’s out of commission, right?” Claire blurted, afraid to hear the answer.
“The shot ruptured his left cochlea,” the doctor kept calm for the sake of keeping her calm. “It’s the organ responsible for hearing, and it also guides your hand-eye coordination, balance, and reflexes. He will wake up disoriented and probably unable to even look straight at you. Therapy will help it settle, but since the cochlea is an organ that is unable to regenerate, his physical condition will never be the same again. So yes… I don’t think field work is in his future anymore.”
The hand that reached for her forehead went up almost unnoticed, a mere reflex to find footing under desolating news. “Shit…” she said, “His life is the field!”
“I am really sorry, Mrs. Redfield-Kennedy,” the doctor said, no sentiment in his voice, then offered as a consolation prize, “Let me accompany you to your brother's room.”
Claire didn’t reply, just nodded in agreement, and followed Doctor Malev through pristine white hallways, smelling of cleaning chemicals, with restless steps.
The doctor opened the very last door, and Claire was welcomed by a gust of warmth from the heater and the beeping of monitors and machines. Her heart broke, like it always did, when she saw Chris lying motionless in the hospital bed, several wires and tubes attached to his body, head propped up to avoid blood clots, and the entire left side of his face covered in bandages.
Her heart used to mend as soon as he recovered and got back to his business. This time, though, there was no full recovery on sight.
Doctor Malev let her in and closed the door to give her privacy. Claire felt like she was walking on eggshells as she got to his bedside; one crack, and it would all go to waste.
She wrapped her fingers around her brother’s hand, his skin paper white and cold. A brief glimpse horrified her: that was probably what he would look and feel like on the day of his funeral, and it took her a while to shake that image off, even though the EKG monitor showed a steady heartbeat.
“Shit, Chris!” Claire cursed, her thumb running gentle circles on his wrist, more to soothe herself than him. “Why do you always have to get hurt? Why don’t you think about the people who love you? I didn’t even have the time to tell the guys…”
Claire felt her forehead again and closed her eyes as the pressure of tears forced their way out of them.
She squeezed his hand, tight. That was the same squeeze she gave his hand when they returned him from Edonia, confused and lost, and she could only hope he would recognize her. The same she gave it when she found him hiding in an off-grid cabin in the Rockies, looking at a handgun with way too much adoration, while still lamenting Piers’s death.
Mongolia. Finland. Romania. Fucking Raccoon City, all over again. She had always been there, picking up his pieces, and the touch had always managed to bring him back.
This time, she wasn’t so sure it would work.
“I know you’re fucking there, Chris…” Claire growled between her teeth. “Just look at me in the eyes. One last time, if you have to. Just don’t leave me hanging. You never did. Please…”
Claire leaned over his chest, her anger not reflected in the gentle embrace she gave him.
He was warm enough. His chest still moved up and down, if ever so slightly, and his heart was definitely beating.
That gave her solace.
Enough to let go for now.
However, she had barely raised her eyes to face him, and he started to stir.
His one visible eye opened, amber gold dulled by heavy medication and trauma. He tried to look at her, tried to smile, but Claire could see in that eye that the room had immediately started to spin for him, and he hadn’t signed up for the ride.
“Who the fuck turned on the roto-rooter?!” Chris barked, trying to keep down the dry heaves.
“Whoa, take it easy!” Claire pushed him down in the hospital bed. “You lost all your hearing on the left side, that’ll do that!”
Chris closed his one eye, breathed in and out, very deeply. When that eye opened again, he tried to look at her one more time, but barely made it an inch away from the axis of his own head.
“Can’t even turn my head, Claire…” He lamented, the crack in his voice breaking her heart down into sand grains.
Claire took a deep breath of her own. She wanted to curse at him, like every other damn time she had seen him stretched over a gurney, but…
She never did.
Instead, Claire found her footing and offered hope.
“Might take a while for your system to relearn how to do things, Chris.”
“Why do I sense there’s a ‘but’ at the end of this sentence?” Chris retorted without skipping a beat.
“You’re not going back to your peak, Chris,” Claire also did not skip a beat. “Fuck, Chris! You haven’t been at your peak for the last 20 years! At least now I’ll know where you will be at all times…”
She saw Chris wince. He tried to bring a hand to the level of his face, but apparently, that was also way too much.
Chris wasn’t that great at talking things through. Claire was still surprised by how long he stuck to therapy after Lanshiang. In the end, she did the talking for him:
“You’d have to stop at some point, Chris. You… You did more for this war than anyone else! Shit… I know… I know that when Piers died, the guilt made you believe that you could never stop…”
“You talked to my therapist, haven’t you?”
“But you’re getting old,” Claire ignored him, “and you should be counting your blessings that you survived this!”
“Survive for what?!” It was second nature to Chris to lose his temper, just as it was instinct to turn his gaze to fulminate at her.
But the nausea and dry-heaves came so bad Claire had to reach for an aluminum basin nearby in case Chris spilled his guts out. After being fed nothing but protein paste for the last week, thankfully, nothing came.
Still, Chris recoiled back to the position Claire had found him in heart-wrenching misery, and all she could do was reach for his hand again.
“It’s going to be okay, big guy…” She said in a shushed, hushing tone. “You deserve a quieter life.”
“You’re making me feel like an old racehorse, being put to stud after winning the full circuit,” Claire smiled bitterly at the lightness of the comment.
“Well, maybe it’s time for you to find your brooding mare,” Claire joked back. “The Redfield Bloodline needs to continue somehow.”
“I’m too old,” Chris slowly brought his hand up again, and this time managed to touch his face. “Hell, we both are.”
Claire pulled out a stool. It was too high and as stiff as diamonds, but it would have to do for now.
“It’s never too late for men,” she said, trying to adjust herself in the seat. “My baby factory closed years ago.”
Chris looked like he was pondering it for a second. After a while, he said with a deep exhale, “Wouldn’t want to have a child and die while they’re still young.” A pause. “Like our parents did to you.”
Claire braced herself. Save for the few months after the car crash, when she struggled to settle under Chris’s care, they hardly ever talked about their parents.
“I miss them,” she said under her breath.
Chris took another deep sigh. “The old man was a hard pill to swallow, but… I miss them too.”
He stretched his hand forth. She took it. Suddenly, she felt like she was fourteen again, but this time, she was the one who wanted to hide him inside her coat.
“You always took care of me, big guy,” she shelled her hands around his. “Now it’s my turn to take care of you.”
“This feels so fucking wrong…” Chris lamented. “I’m not really used to having others take care of me.”
“You just have to allow yourself to be vulnerable for once, Chris,” Claire said in a tone of warning.
And Chris grew deeply quiet to that.