Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chris finally gets a taste of Wesker’s truer self when they’re out running an errand together. Over time, Wesker exposes who he really is- and what he really wants- in a way that Chris later recalls only as being a series of knuckles.

That morning, it’s Wesker’s hands fisted around the steering wheel of a police car, white knuckling it so hard that his skin goes waxy and purple. Chris’ eyes flicker over, following the curve of his fingers. Slender but strong; he’s seen them reverse a dislocated hip out in the field. He’s felt the crush of them on his own windpipe while practicing restraints. They curve around a cup of coffee like they’re trying to choke the ceramic to death, and they twitch when they hang at his sides, almost as though they dislike not being in use.

“…Why did you pull me out of work?” Chris asks hesitantly, eyes flickering over to Wesker’s face. Even from the side, he can’t see anything behind the dark sunglasses except for the frown pressed into his face.

With a glance at the rearview mirror, Wesker clicks on the whole affair. Flashing lights and screaming sirens.

“Somebody needs a clearer message,” he responds tightly.

“Okay…” Chris answers. He watches them snake a path through the traffic, cars pulling off to let them pass. He isn’t even sure that Wesker has the clearance to be using the alarm, let alone the vehicle, but he’s learned that it generally yields the same result to not even bother to ask.

An hour later, when they’re back in the car, parked in a no-stopping zone downtown, it’s Wesker’s knuckles again, scattered like a string of pearls running red on a marble floor. They’re cracked and bleeding, the skin pulling apart. Another man’s DNA is still fresh on his skin. He’s a little disheveled, strands of blonde hair splayed out of place, his back slamming against the seat as he jerks the car into drive.

“What the fuck,” Chris breathes out, wild shock in his eyes as he wrestles the seatbelt over his chest. “Wesker- what the fuck?”

“Christopher,” Wesker says, stopping to address him. He lifts the broken sunglasses onto his head and green blooms in the whites of his eyes, so minty and floral that Chris’ breathing immediately smooths out. “Do you trust my authority?”

Chris remembers the last twenty minutes in flashes.

Flashes of Wesker presenting his badge at the security desk and being led up the stairs. Not even looking at the man who greeted him at the door to one of the private offices; just grabbing him by the neck and walking him backwards into the open room, barking for Chris to guard the door behind them.

When he emerged, it was flushed and battered, red blooming bright across his pale jaw. A crack in one of the lenses of his glasses. An inturned bend to his shoulders, the posture of a predator, breath escaping his throat in ragged bursts.

“Jesus,” Chris had said, stiffening in shock. His hands had come up but not known what to do- whether they were meant to prepare to fight his captain off or help steady him on his feet.

He’d never seen Wesker like this before. Out in the field running STARS through drills, sure. Locked in an off-road combination drill that became a battle of wits, prediction, and tactical history, but never like this. Never something so brutal and unforgiving.

“Don’t gawk, Christopher,” Wesker had scoffed, swiping the blood from a burst nose across his face. “Or do. It’ll help with the sleight of hand.”

For fuck’s sake, Chris doesn’t even know if he would have noticed Wesker drop the wrapped parcel into his breast pocket if he hadn't preceded it with a remark.

“What is that?”

“Much needed information,” Wesker offers, looking around, distracted. With one great swing, he slams the door shut. “Many thanks to the penny-pinching CEO who decided to store it in an office building as opposed to a maximum security facility.”

“Wesker-”

“I did tell you why I asked you to accompany me, didn’t I?”

“I-”

“Barry is as competent at hosting barbeques as Jill is at doing things by the book. Rebecca is attentive and exceptionally intelligent, if a little naïve. Should I go on, or shall we skip to you?”

“Wesker,” Chris tries again, not sure what he’s bargaining for.

“You are the best member of my team, Chris.” Wesker’s arms drop at his sides but they don’t relax. There those fingers go, twitching like electrical impulses are zapping them over and over again. “You have a spine. You’re not afraid to go against the grain. Your center of gravity and your soundness of mind make you an invaluable asset. How long have we known each other in this capacity?”

Despite himself, Chris feels his chest buzz with the praise. It warms the spaces between his ribs and then keeps going, making him feel almost lightheaded. He opens his mouth and hears himself speak. “Five months.”

“Five months indeed,” Wesker nods. “Half a year, almost.”

“Wesker,” Chris begs, his superior’s name like a strangled whine on his tongue, and this time Wesker looks him over, his calculating brain so evident that Chris is surprised he can’t see the equations written across the dark lenses of the glasses.

“Let’s speak in private,” his captain offers.

And here they are now, in the car, driving away from the city, Wesker spinning a tale about the corruption of Chief Irons.

“Wait,” Chris says, slowing him down. He’s calmer now, the gears in his brain turning with something more than fuck fuck fuck fuck. “You think Irons is working with a company manufacturing bioweapons?”

“I know he is,” Wesker answers, teeth ground tightly together. “You might not understand this, Chris, but when you get to be my age, with all the experience I’ve had, you learn to question things. And that means snooping around your superiors sometimes.”

“Does that extend to you?” Chris asks wildly, trying to will his eyes to stop popping out of his head.

Slowly, a smile spreads across Wesker’s face. It’s a gentle one- still a smirk, but not so razor-sharp that Chris fears getting cut on it.

“Yes,” he says, taking his eyes off the road to look directly into Chris’ soul. “And that line of questioning is exactly why I have chosen you to be my right-hand man.” All at once, that smile ghosts off his lips, replaced by their usual tight grimace. “What I have on this thumb drive will show every project he’s signed off on and used RPD funding to finance. It’s not pretty, Chris, but the truth never is.”

When Chris looks at Wesker- at his desk, or demonstrating a series of kicks on a punching bag, or even gripping the steering wheel with his hands all cracked and bloody, Chris feels so small. Inadequate. Like he can only stand in the presence of greatness in order to ever taste it. Like he’ll never know what it is to embody authority.

When Chris makes decisions around the office, he feels so clunky and unsure. Arranges the goddamned office supplies and then questions his judgement. Reads his reports thrice over before submitting them, and then still frets about them at night. Laboriously click-clacks his way through the emails that Wesker asks him to send on his behalf, jittering each time he finally hits send.

He never used to be like this. In the airforce, he was so sure- so sure of himself.

But he was young then. Young, and mobilized, and never having to worry about stopping for so long that he'd have a chance to think. And he’s still young now- young enough to know all of the fucking things he doesn’t know about this world. And still, at the same time, not old enough to have the confidence and experience that he needs to be a competent leader.

Sometimes, Chris feels like he’d never known what it meant to have true power until he felt the cold shadow of Wesker falling over him.

It progresses so slowly that he doesn’t even realize it’s happening. Ultimately, it happens because Wesker has spent the last five months priming him for it.

Over the course of those next few days, Wesker breaks him in.

That day, it ends with another set of knuckles. Not Wesker’s, then, but this time, his own.

Wesker stops for coffee, swinging around a red-and-yellow-bricked McDonalds drive thru. On the way out of the parking lot, Chris hisses, scalding hot coffee splashing out of the loose lid and all over the top of his hand.

Wesker’s fingers flick out. He takes him by the wrist and brings Chris’ knuckles to his mouth.

With his tongue pressed flat to the burn, Wesker drinks the coffee out of his pores. Uses the muscle of his tongue to apply pressure to the wound. Soothes it with the cold spill of his saliva down the pulsing hot injury.

By the end of the week, he is completely and utterly a pet for Wesker. Completely reliant on him. Completely starry-eyed and trusting, ready to follow him wherever he goes, ready to adhere to any command he could give.

Then Wesker shows up at his house and dumps a dead body on the floor.

Chapter Text

It’s not all dead bodies, not all at once. For the rest of that week, it’s mostly late nights in the STARS office, working privately with Wesker, the two of them digging through piles of information.

“Chris,” Wesker broaches one night, looking wearied and unsettled. He runs a hand over his face and swipes his glasses onto the top of his head, exposing another unusually rare offering of eyes. Chris is so distracted by their hollow, green lightness that it takes the following question a few seconds to catch up to him. “How well do you know Barry?”

“Oh. Uh. Well,” Chris answers. He’s got his elbows planted on the table, funny bones cushioned by the stacks of documents papering Wesker’s desk. He lets the loose sheaf he’s been reading hang limp in his hand. “Really well.”

“Yes, I imagine your air force days would facilitate a sort of… brotherhood, between you two.”

“I mean, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Chris grins sheepishly. “But yeah, I know the guy.”

Wesker’s eyes snap onto his like it’s Velcro. “Would you know if he were hiding something?”

“Uh,” Chris says softly. He blinks and Wesker’s office seems to sharpen around him, the buttery yellow light defining the edges of the long, wooden desk, the endless paragraphs of inked letters scattered on top of it, the harsh lines of Wesker’s skeleton where they form his cheek bone and carve out two sinkholes for his eyes. “I might.” He swallows. “…Why?”

Wesker answers with his usual brand of swift and unrelenting bluntness. “I suspect Barry may be working with Irons.”

The paper drops from Chris’ hand. Incredulity crashes in. “What?” he snaps.

Wesker fixes him with a look. “Don’t be naïve, Chris. Willful indignance isn’t an attractive look.”

“If I’m naïve, then you’re senile,” Chris barks back. “Barry would never. He would never.”

Wesker’s eyes harden to such fiery pinpoints that Chris feels his temper back down, lowering its head in deference. All at once, and so unexpectedly it feels like he’s been bit, Chris is unsure of himself.

Half a second ago, nobody and nothing could have convinced him that Barry would ever be involved with a project concerning bioweapons. But all of a sudden, the way Wesker’s looking at him makes him want to double check everything he’s ever believed about the other man.

“I am not suggesting that Burton is nefariously plotting against STARS in favor of bolstering Irons' stake in bioweapons race,” Wesker clicks out. “I rather think he may be falling prey to blackmail.”

“Blackmail,” Chris echoes.

“His family would be a particularly vulnerable spot for him. Or do you disagree?”

“I…” Chris says, eyes swimming in thought. “No, yeah, I could see that.”

“I want you to talk to him,” Wesker suggests. “Do not even hint that you have any notion of any of the things I’ve shared with you.” He tightens his lips and drops the glasses down over his eyes again, thinking. They’re sleek and glossy once more, the shattered lens now whole again. “I think perhaps if you drum up a conversation about your relationship with authority within the RPD, poke around a bit to suss out how he views his superiors… Well. You’re an intuitive man, Chris. I think you will notice if something is amiss.”

The next evening, after Jill and Barry have headed home for the night, Chris knocks politely on Wesker’s office door. When he’s asked to enter, he shrugs in the doorway, clenching his teeth.

“It seems… it seems like he’s hiding something, yeah,” Chris tells him.

Wesker eases himself into Chris’ head so slowly and gradually that Chris doesn’t even notice it happening. All of a sudden he is just so there that sometimes, Chris feels like Wesker is the only thing he’s able to think about.

Even tonight, walking home with Jill, Wesker is looming in the back of his head. It always sort of feels like Wesker might show up, out of the dead of night, at any second. His car emerging from around the corner, headlights blooming in the dark, asking Chris to get in.

At home, Chris grows hyper-aware of his windows. He leaves the shades open and moves through the house with purpose, wondering if Wesker is out there somewhere, watching him.

It’s less of a stalker fantasy and more of a boyish brand of wishful thinking. He wants Wesker to show up. Surprise him. Be there, be asking for him, wanting to get him alone in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with work.

“You seem distracted,” Jill says, drawing him back. There’s a gentle concern on her face, her lips pouted but still smiling. She drapes an arm over his shoulder and brings them to a halt on the sidewalk.

The air is getting crisp as everything gets colder, going fiery shades of red and orange. A breeze that feels like pumpkins and Halloween masks whispers through his hair, sending chills down his body. If Wesker were around the corner, what would he think of this display? Would he be jealous? Would it make him angry?

“I’m just tired,” he answers honestly, smiling back.

Jill’s eyes grate back and forth over his face, searching him. “You've been staying behind a lot of nights this week,” she murmurs. “What are the two of you getting up to in there?”

Chris’ smile grows some teeth.

“You know,” he answers. “Just working overtime.”

“Barry seems a bit frazzled recently, doesn’t he?”

The expression on Chris’ face relaxes into a frown. Instinctively his feelers come up, seeking more information. “I agree. He seems jumpy.”

“He seems scared,” Jill supplies, her words and her expression both as clinical and straight-to-the-point as a surgeon’s scalpel.

Chris’ frown deepens. “I noticed that too.”

“I mean, Barry and I have worked here for a while but all of a sudden he just gets so quiet whenever he’s around. Even when Wesker’s just in the same room as us, it’s like he turns to ice.”

Chris stops. His face twists, confused. “Wesker?” he returns. “You mean Irons, don’t you?”

Jill’s face suddenly matches his in perplexity. “Irons? No, I’ve never even seen them in the same room together.”

It’s quiet between them as they both search each other, confused. Jill breaks the spell by stroking a set of fingers across his cheek.

“Chris,” she says, her breath visible in the chilly night air. “Why do you say that?”

Chris furrows his brow, looking away.

“I dunno,” he answers, gently taking her hand and pulling it off him. “Just a thought.”

Chris and Wesker stay late into the night to dig through Barry’s desk, waiting until even the late-shift cleaners have come and gone.

The kill time in the gentle glow of Wesker’s office the same way they always do: Wesker working on something at his keyboard, his attention buried in a report, Chris passing the time in one of the chairs on the other side of his desk, going over his notes or reading a book or flicking his yo-yo while his head swims with thoughts.

Tonight, Wesker rips himself out of a file to look across the desk at Chris.

Chris is balancing a coffee mug on his knee, legs draped over the arm of the chair. He feels himself swallow, wondering if Wesker is going to tell him to sit up properly, but instead, what his captain says is, “You have a cocksure look on your face, Christopher. What are you thinking about?”

A flush immediately waterfalls over Chris’ skin, splashing red onto his cheeks and nose.

“Oh,” he says, grinning nervously. “No, I was just… remembering something.”

Wesker cocks his head slightly, like he wants Chris to go on.

“Oh,” he says again, “Well, I was remembering growing up with Claire.”

“Foster children,” Wesker says in a hiss, like he finds them to be some sort of fascinating species.

“Yeah,” Chris answers, the awkward smile on his face gaining even more teeth. “Went through six households until they decided we needed to be split up.”

“I take it that didn’t happen,” Wesker states, and Chris shakes his head. “I take it you two were troublemakers.”

“Oh yeah,” Chris laughs. “That’s what I was thinking about- how we were always getting kicked out of homes. One time we had this really mean foster father and Claire set the dude’s hair on fire. Not that he even had a lot of hair, I mean, his bald spot was the biggest thing on his head.” He shrugs. “I threw water on him to put it out.”

Wesker gazes at him from across the desk, a softened look on his face.

“Self-reliant,” he states, and Chris instantly feels his stomach tumble a little, that roller coaster sensation, like he can tell just from the look on Wesker’s face what’s coming next. “Resourceful. Both a caretaker and a survivor. I’d imagine you two took to the streets.”

Chris pauses. Nods.

“I’d imagine you found a rag-tag group of kids who could take care of each other. I imagine you became a big brother to all of them. Learned how to manage your resources well enough to get you through until you could work your first legal job bussing tables.”

“I…” Chris falters. “Did you dig that up about me?”

“Yes,” Wesker answers, and Chris should not feel a gentle lick of excitement and curiosity in response. Instead, he should feel violated. Double-crossed.

He doesn’t. All his belly does is simmer with the praise.

“I find you captivating,” Wesker says. “I think of you on the streets, alone, and I only wish I’d known where to find you then.”

“Wesker,” Chris says delicately.

“But at least you have found your way to me now,” he goes on, every word punctuated with a hard syllable. “All the same, I am sorry for what you must have gone through, mired in such a circumstance.”

“It’s fine,” he responds, confounded by the way Wesker offers sympathies without an ounce of emotion in his tone. Like his feelings are facts, not actually feelings. Again, he shrugs. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“RPD is the final frontier,” Wesker agrees with a bolt-cutting, supercilious smile. He rolls back in his chair and gets to his feet. “Though, for our sakes, let’s hope that isn’t necessarily true. Shall we?”

“Sure,” Chris murmurs.

Wesker leads Chris into the darkened office like he’s taking him somewhere luxurious, a place for them to waltz and explore each other, a grand event that only happens each blue moon.

“Ready?” Wesker asks, stepping up to his friend’s cubicle.

First, they dig through Barry’s drawers. Chris feels ashamed as he does it, rifling through office supplies and glossy family photos and a few silly trinkets, the most interesting of the lot being a rubber duck with a gun fused to its chest.

They find nothing out of the ordinary in his desk. They each take mounds of documents, flipping through them and scanning them for anything that stands out before stacking everything on the desk to return to their folders in perfect order.

“It’s all just the reports we’ve been working on this quarter,” Chris says, and Wesker hmm’s in concurrence.

From afar, Wesker almost always looks cold. Stiff. Like he was encased in a cryogenic freezer and has just broken through the ice, his skin still half-transparent, so silken that every glow of the blues and purples rolling within his veins seem to light up his flesh like a bioluminescent liquid.

Standing this close to him, though, Wesker feels warm.

Chris can feel the heat on his skin. Can hear, and almost taste, every warm breath that releases from his lips as his eyes run back and forth over the text in front of them. He smells smoky and masculine, like he spent the night curled up next to a fire, woodsmoke and charcoal clinging to his pores. Chris’ body takes on the consistency of tv static, swaying closer to the older man, enrapt by how tall he is, how far away from the ground he is, how badly Chris wants to crawl up him like he’s one of the hundreds-of-years-old trees he and Claire used to climb to the top of in public parks.

“Alright,” Wesker sighs, placing the last sheaf of paper on the top of the pile and effectively breaking the spell. “Next order of business.”

He leans in, shoulder brushing Chris’ arm as he does, grabbing hold of the mouse and bringing the computer screen flaring to bright, eye-killing life in the darkened room.

“Any idea what Burton’s password might be?”

“Oh,” Chris answers.

It feels wrong, hearing Barry being referred to by his surname as they search through his things, seeking out treachery. How can Barry be their adversary? How can he turn on a dime from Chris’ friend, into a name on a file that they might have to seal one day? The gravity of all of this comes into startlingly sharp focus for him, and not even the clandestine thrill of what he and Wesker are doing right now can smooth that over in his heart.

“I can try,” Chris offers uncertainly, leaning in. Wesker takes a step back.

He gives a low, thoughtful rumble before setting his hands on the keys. He types out a series of dates; birthdays and anniversaries that he pulls from the most shadowy corners of his mind. Nothing works.

Then he tries the simplest possibility: his wife’s name.

Her first name doesn’t work. Nor a combination of her first and last. But when Chris types in her full name with her middle initiate sandwiched between the Kathy and Burton, the log in screen fades and Barry’s desktop snaps, bright blue, onto the screen.

Wesker laughs.

The sound is brief, like a rubber band snapping, and Chris is so amazed by the scarcity of it that he forgets to feel guilty. He feels a gloved hand clap down on the top of his head, drenching him in praise, and then like all good water it runs, slipping down the back of his skull and curling around his shoulder.

“Very good work, Christopher,” Wesker growls, leaning in with his hand still cupped possessively around Chris’ neck. He takes the mouse, not even bothering to remove Chris’ hand from it first, and with a pointer pressing down between Chris’ spread fingers, opens Internet Explorer.

Barry’s email service is pinned to the bookmarks bar. When Wesker clicks on it, his account opens right up.

“Let’s see here,” he purrs, cursor darting through the folders at lightning speed.

It doesn’t take very long for him to find what he needs. There, buried in the sent folder, are a series of emails that Barry has fired off to Irons.

Can we set up a meeting?

I’d like to follow up on what we talked about.

I placed the document in your mailbox at 2:06pm today.

Chris’ heart sinks. “He told me the last time he’d even spoken to Irons was when he was hired.”

Wesker draws back from the computer and straightens, turning to look at Chris.

“I’m hoping you did not lead the conversation with such tactless bravado,” he says coldly.

“No!” Chris says, bristling. “No, he offered that information out of nowhere. I didn’t even mention Irons. The conversation I started was just me complaining about bosses.”

Wesker’s expression goes focused. “Covering his tracks,” he muses, frowning. “Setting up plausible deniability before he even thinks anyone is onto him.” His attention comes back, honing in on Chris, and suddenly he is smiling again.

“Smart boy,” he purrs roughly, and Chris realizes all at once that Wesker’s hand is still gripping him. It slips back up onto his head, pressing down with just enough pressure to communicate praise, the leather cool on his scalp. “I genuinely apologize. I will not question you again, Christopher.”

Chris looks up at him, and although he can’t see Wesker’s eyes through the glasses, he feels like they are connected through their sockets. The string tying them together is so palpable that Chris is certain he could reach out and run it beneath his fingers.

Chris is gazing at him, his eyes full of him, and Wesker does not fail to notice.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks steadily.

“Um,” Chris answers, swallowing. He blinks and his body glazes over with heat, heart beating like a hummingbird struggling to thrash its way out from beneath his ribs.

All at once, the pressure on Chris’ head increases. He feels himself being pushed down, all the way to the ground, his weak knees buckling until he’s being brought to them, kneecaps hitting the linoleum floor. He angles his head up and sees Wesker tilting his jaw, like he’s curious to see what Chris will do, a gloved thumb stroking back and forth through his hair.

“Captain,” Chris murmurs absentmindedly, watching Wesker’s hips shift in front of him, lining up with his mouth.

He opens his lips over the dark fabric, the cold tang of the metal zipper brushing his bottom lip, the grate of the cloth rough against his mouth. A hungry groan spills out of him.

“No,” Wesker rumbles from above. His hand comes down to curve around the side of Chris’ face like a hook, stroking his cheek. “I don’t want it to be like this, my pet.”

Chris wants to grab Wesker’s zipper with his teeth and pull it down. He wants to press his mouth into the bulge between Wesker’s legs and suck at him through the fabric, get him to loosen his stiff stance for once, make him needy and loud and hungry for more of Chris.

Suddenly, Wesker is dropping down to his level, the bones in his legs popping as he does.

Chris is shaky with lust; he feels lightheaded at the way Wesker pulls his own glove off with his teeth and spits it back out, using his bare hand to glide the back of his knuckles all across Chris’ face.

“You deserve better than the STARS office,” he says.

“Maybe I don’t,” Chris whispers, murmuring a sigh when Wesker’s fingers trace the shape of his lips. He opens them and takes one of Wesker’s fingertips between them, sucking gently at the digit, running his tongue along the curve of Wesker’s fingernail. “Maybe I like it like this.”

Wesker’s other hand scoops around to hold the back of his head.

“Go home,” he says quietly into Chris’ ear. “Take a cold shower. Jerk yourself off.” Chris shivers. “Then come back here tomorrow and tell me what you want.”

“Alright,” Chris whispers, mind clouded with lust.

“Alright,” Wesker answers back.

Chris stands alone, hunched over, in Wesker’s office.

It’s going on ten; not even close to the kind of hours Wesker and Chris have been staying until, but late enough that everyone but the night-shift cops are out of the building, and late enough that Wesker has not yet returned from a dinner break.

Chris is elbows-deep in one of the drawers of his desk. The bent barrette (a trick he picked up from Claire during their street days, this one in particular stolen from Jill’s desk) sits discarded on Wesker’s desk, having done its job.

Chris rummages through the items Wesker keeps behind lock and key, fingers dragging over each new discovery.

All at once, the empty space in the doorway fills. That shadow returns, looming, towering, speaking into the silent room.

“I need you to put your hands where I can see them, Mr. Redfield,” Wesker says.

Slowly, Chris draws back from the desk. He raises his hands to eye-level. Fixes Wesker with a hard look.

“Just making sure you weren’t hiding anything from me, captain,” he says.

Wesker’s head tilts, and Chris is once again being thoroughly examined. “I do remember encouraging that behavior in you,” he says. “Did you find anything?”

A little grin flickers onto Chris’ face. He nods. Then he draws the bottle of whiskey out of Wesker’s desk and into the open.

“That cocksure look,” Wesker growls, pleased. “I take it this means you’ve made a decision.”

Chris sets the bottle down on the desk, as though he’s offering Wesker’s own possession as a gift.

“I have,” he says, and what begins as another night buried in illicit paperwork ends with Wesker’s tongue buried down his throat, Chris licking his way through his captain’s mouth, only able to taste the honey of his saliva, not yet attuned to the flavor of the lies that Wesker keeps trapped up behind his sparkling teeth.

Chapter Text

When he’s alone, Chris dreams of Wesker’s hands.

Not so much his knuckles- though he does mentally flash back to the state of them after the fist fight sometimes, both empowered by and afraid of them. Instead, he mostly dreams about what they feel like. Wrapped around the back of his neck. Gently petting his head. Languidly running from the hollow of his throat, nails dragging all the way down, over the t-shirt covering his chest.

They find their way into Chris’ sleep almost every night, clawing through the barrier between imagination and reality. He dreams about them undoing his shirt, unbuttoning his pants, touching him below his clothes. He wakes up panting with how badly he wants them. He groans hungrily into each clandestine kiss they share within the privacy of Wesker’s office, secretly begging for more, wishing he was brave enough to ask for it.

But he isn’t brave, and Wesker’s lips always leave his mouth with a string of saliva dangling in the air between them. Wesker sends him home, and sometimes even back to work, still thrumming with heat, his dick throbbing in his pants and his head fuzzy with lust.

He’s found that if he tries hard enough, Chris can balance himself right between sleep and wakefulness, suspended on a razor’s edge. If it didn’t sound so stupid, he would say he was meditating.

Tonight he lies on the couch, spread out, thighs open with his knees to the ceiling.

The tv is off; everything he wants to hear is already in his head. He imagines that Wesker is here with him, in his home. He shifts against the cushion, exposing his throat, imaging Wesker kneeling over him with his mouth on his neck.

He turns his head and rolls his face into the couch cushion, releasing a breathy whine.

He wants it to be Wesker’s breath instead of his own. Hot and wet, dipping down from his throat to his chest, moving his shirt out of the way. He’d take it anywhere. Exploring any part of him. Tongue dragging through the concave dip where his ribs meet. Lips skuttling all the way down to his waist.

Chris buries his face into the cushion, slipping his hand into pants. His fist circles around his cock and he groans at the way it pulses in his grip, starving for touch.

Every time Wesker touches him, it’s like a new pit opens up inside of him. More hunger. More thirst. The thread of his hair in Wesker’s fist; the way Wesker presses up into him when he’s seated on his lap, their mouths locked. Instead of satisfying him, it all just makes him want more. It yawns inside of him and his skin weeps, cock leaking, moans tumbling out of his mouth as he starts jerking himself off, hips bucking up into the motion.

“Please,” he begs, and he doesn’t know who he is begging to, what he is begging for. All he knows is that he wants. Nights like this, he can’t do anything to distract or delude himself of it. He wants so bad it feels like he’s going to tumble into fire and burn away into nothing.

He wants Wesker here. He wants Wesker giving him everything he needs.

And then, as though he’s grabbed hold of the universe and demanded this of it, there comes a knock at his door. Three loud, rapping knocks, knuckle slamming against the wood.

Chris shuttles to his feet, heart pounding. He’s dreaming. He’s sure that he’s dreaming. This can’t be real.

“Christopher?” he hears, then another set of knocks come. “Christopher, are you here?”

Wesker. It’s Wesker. Chris’ head spins so hard that he doesn’t even think. He lunges for the door.

“Brace yourself!” he hears Wesker roar out as the door swings inward, and what enters his apartment is no wet dream. Not the hungry, powerful Wesker that stands tall in his mind, looking like he wants to lower his head and drink from Chris’ body. Instead, what he sees is an exhausted man with his hair and collars disheveled. And even that would make Chris pained with lust if Wesker didn’t already have another man in his arms.

He holds the body bridal-style, arm muscles quivering at its weight. Wesker staggers forward, neck straining and teeth clenched, and as he drops the man onto the couch, Chris realizes something that sends him staggering back in horror.

“That’s-” he starts, and hears his voice become tinny and distant, like his living room is suddenly very far away.

It’s Barry.

“He’s-” Chris tries, and the shock doesn’t even linger for a second before he hears his chest catch, a sob heaving out of his mouth. “Is he-”

He doesn’t have to ask. Wesker doesn’t answer. Barry’s head is lolling on a loose neck. He’s not moving. He’s not even breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Wesker says, and Chris looks up at him with eyes wide and unseeing, a sheet of tears undoing his vision.

“What-” he begs, and then he’s swaying on his feet and Wesker is darting forward to catch him.

Vaguely, Chris feels the man’s hands on his shoulders. Holding him up. Keeping him from collapsing onto the floor into a pile of disbelief.

He doesn’t understand what’s happening. What he’s seeing. It can’t be. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

He looks back at Barry and his chest heaves again. “What happened?” he begs, his voice so small he can hardly hear it. “What-”

Something cool presses against his cheek. Chris blinks and Wesker’s hand is there, cupped around him.

“Stay with me,” he says gently.

There’s a thud. Chris jumps, slamming forward, and his boss catches him against his chest.

Barry hits the ground and sprawls out on it, limbs all twisted, his eyes closed. There’s a horrific burst of color around his neck, a dozen bruises that have swollen to the sizes of golf balls, and Chris knows in that moment that they’ll never heal. He stares, feeling his vision start to cut out, until Wesker takes him by the chin and turns his head away.

“Steady,” he growls, guiding Chris’ eyes into his chest so that he cannot see anything. “Hold steady, Christopher. I can’t imagine what you must be feeling right now.”

“He was murdered,” Chris quavers into Wesker’s chest. He feels like a little kid. His voice, strained and gasping, sounds like it belongs to him years ago, back when he still had parents, when he was afraid of the dark but unwilling to turn on the light and wake his little sister.

“His neck was broken,” Wesker affirms, and Chris sobs. Wesker’s fingers clench down around a fistful of his hair. He tightens his hold, embracing Chris harder. “I found him in the STARS office after returning from dinner. The place had been ransacked. Chris- I don’t want to alarm you, but the situation we are in right now is dire.”

“We- we have to call the police,” Chris stammers, then realizes how foolish he sounds. “I mean, the state police. We need to bring in more help. Wesker,” he begs, hearing himself start to hiccup with sobs.

“No,” Wesker answers, the word raining like a cold storm over Chris’ grief. “What we need to do is get you out of here.”

“Wh-why?” Chris asks, his words trembling. He draws back and Wesker looks down at him, eyes hidden behind the sunglasses.

“I believe that Irons has discovered what we’ve been up to. And I am certain that he has framed you for Barry’s death.”

“What?” Chris demands weakly.

“Barry was on the floor beside your desk,” Wesker says, and Chris doesn’t know how he can talk about it like this, so evenly and coldly, like these are facts comparable to any other. “The arm of your jacket was wrapped around his throat, like you’d used it to strangle him. And on your computer screen was an email. Almost as though Barry had read something he wasn’t supposed to.”

“Wh- what? What email?”

“It was an email addressed to me with the data from twelve preliminary bioweapon trials attached. The very same that I procured from the Umbrella-affiliated office downtown.”

“I- I didn’t!” Chris exclaims.

“I know that,” Wesker snarls, running a hand down the back of his head. “What I suspect is that Irons has caught wind of what we’re doing, and is now tying up loose ends. Framing us for his crimes. Chris, I need you to think. Did you say or do anything that might have gotten back to him and tipped him off?”

Chris’ world goes dark. His head races to seek out what he’s done wrong, what mistake he’s made, the room spinning so fast he’s sure he’s going to faint.

“I don’t know,” he squeaks. “I don’t- I don’t think-”

If he did something that caused Barry to die, then-

“Never mind,” Wesker says, breezing Chris beneath his arm and circling them towards the door. “We need to go. We need to get ourselves somewhere safe.”

He moves to walk and Chris stays snagged, crying, so much grief in his chest he doesn’t know how he’s going to live another day.

Barry’s wife. His children.

Wesker turns to him, folding his body over Chris’, and Chris wants Wesker to swallow him whole. Smother him in his body, in his authority, in his utter ability to tackle anything life throws at him, no matter how horrific, and hide away there for the rest of his days.

If this is what life is, Chris doesn’t want to live it anymore. If life is just an endless cycle of losing innocent people. Of sitting back while you watch yourself get all the ones you love killed.

He realizes he’s not breathing.

“Chris,” Wesker says, shortening his name so sweetly, and the air is knocked back into Chris’ lungs so suddenly he starts to hyperventilate.

Wesker is holding him tight. Running a hand up and down his back, raking his nails back and forth through his hair, and Chris thinks about how this is all he’s wanted for a week now: Wesker’s hands on him. Wesker’s body around him. Wesker, holding him tight and saying, “It’s going to be okay. I promise that it’s going to be okay.”

And though Barry is lying mangled and dead on his living room floor, and though Wesker is about to steal him and hide him away from the world, in that moment, Chris truly believes that what he says is true.

Wesker drives until the sun starts to come up. He’s unusually bedraggled by the time he pulls off the highway to check them into a shitty motel, an old-fashioned diamond-shaped keyring dangling in his hand.

With his boss’ help, Chris makes it to the bed before collapsing. He slumps down on top of the mattress, tears taking away his vision, and Wesker has to roll up the other end of the blanket just to get something soft and warm over him.

Beside him, Wesker sleeps on top of the bare sheets. He pulls Chris’ body, (bug in a rug Chris thinks deliriously to himself over and over), into his chest and shivers all morning with Chris bundled up in his arms.

They check out of the motel after a couple of hours, and for the next week, that repetitious kind of movement becomes their life.

They drive, Chris catching glimpses of exit ramps and street signs through the haze of horror rendering him blind to the world. He lets Wesker put him into hotels and always goes straight to the bed to lie down, all of his guts bunched up in his throat.

He eats something for the first time on day three.

The past 72 hours have been Wesker tipping cups back against cracked lips, making him drink. Wesker treating him like a baby, spooning him things like apple sauce and smoothies, easy asks that he can take while lying on his side, staring at the wall.

That day, the hunger kicks into him so fast he flies into a panic, grabbing for Wesker, all of his stunted misery exploding out of him.

“I know,” Wesker comforts him, the edge in his voice as sharp as ever. More solid than anything Chris has ever stood against. “I’m sorry for what this has come to. I’m sorry that I have put you in this situation.”

“It’s not your fault,” Chris whispers, his eyes clenched.

Tears rain down his face, wet and hot and fast, a guttural, angry cry roaring out between his teeth.

“Do not be afraid of your anger, my pet,” Wesker tells him. He presses his knee onto the bed, into the space left between Chris’ legs, and cups the sides of Chris’ head. “Let it heal you. Let it help you gain some clarity of mind.”

Chris releases another pained snarl and Wesker’s forehead grinds down against his.

“You’re so beautiful when you cry,” he murmurs, breaths warm against Chris’ face. Then he licks the tears off Chris’ cheeks, pressing his tongue flat into the corners of each of his eyes to catch them fresh as they roll out of the ducts.

“Kiss me,” Chris begs hoarsely, his voice a pathetic whine.

Wesker’s lips press over his mouth and he parts them, moaning. Wesker’s mouth is salty and wet. Chris tastes the crystals of his own grief mingled with the other man’s saliva.

He reaches up, taking Wesker’s face into his hands, too. He tugs off his glasses and throws them onto the bed. He lets Wesker bend him back into the bed, making him gasp, but even with Wesker’s knee pressed into his groin, cock swelling against that little bit of contact, Chris is shaking with hunger and exhaustion.

“Let me get you something to eat,” Wesker murmurs, stroking his face, because Wesker knows. He always knows. He looks at Chris and can tell that he’s about to get thirsty. Knows how late into the night he can stay at work before he gets too tired to be productive. Wesker looks at Chris and he immediately knows everything.

Chris watches him pick up the hotel landline and order room service for the two of them. He doesn’t curl his fingers flirtily around the spiraling cord. He knuckles it like he’s pinching the life out of the plastic.

Chris sleeps that night with Wesker under the covers.

He’s full; his belly both warm and slightly ill, too much eaten after so many days of too little. Most nights he takes the blanket and bundles himself up in it like a cocoon, leaving Wesker to brave the cold on his own or dig through the closet for extra bedding, but tonight they are sheltered beneath the same comforter. Wesker wraps around his back, curled up behind him, so tall it’s like being encased in a protective covering. He imagines himself a tiny pea in a looming shell. A soft fruit protected by a curved, blonde skin.

Wesker kisses the back of his neck and Chris gives an automatic whimper, pressing back against the other’s body.

“How are you?” Wesker murmurs in the dark. His fingers wrap around Chris’ chin, stroking him gently. “Are you full?”

Chris remembers Claire rationing stolen food with him. Always making sure he had something to eat before going to sleep. Always finding something for him, even if it was just a crumb, so that they never went to bed on empty stomachs.

Chris nods.

“Good,” Wesker rumbles, his voice so low and rough that Chris’ body turns to shivers.

He reaches up and takes Wesker’s hand in his own. Then, emboldened by his heartache, he places that hand on his chest, leaving it curved around a nipple.

Wesker makes a considering sound in response. “Do you want me?” he murmurs into Chris’ ear, hand squeezing down.

Chris groans out a yes, shifting against him, searching for the shape of Wesker’s cock against his ass. When he finds it, hard and curved and pressing between his cheeks, he gives a grateful sob.

“I absolutely want you,” Wesker returns. His other hand comes to life, gripping onto Chris’ hip. It trails over his thighs and then slips between them, palming Chris through the fabric of the boxers that Wesker picked up for him at a nearby outlet.

The more aroused he becomes, the harder he cries, sobs bubbling out of his mouth even as his hips buck into Wesker’s hand, everything electric and hot from the way Wesker is gripping him. He’s so experienced. He teases Chris through his clothes in ways that makes him dizzy with lust.

“Good boy,” Wesker purrs quietly, praising him gently. “Let everything out.” Because he just knows Chris, and he knows that this is exactly what he needs. “Let go of everything and let me have it.”

“I want to be fucked,” Chris whines, heat spilling through him when Wesker slips a hand below his waistband and takes him into his fist, jerking him in slow, pressured strokes.

“Have you ever been before?”

Chris shakes his head into the pillow.

“It might be uncomfortable for you- the first time.”

Chris turns his neck, angling his head to look Wesker in the eyes. He sees them cut like green gemstones through the dark. “I don’t care,” he spits back. “I want that.”

A possessive hand runs flat up his back, making him shiver.

“Be careful.” He sounds like a snake; every syllable rattles with delight and venom. “Be careful what you say to me, Christopher. I might one day lose myself in your words.”

“Good,” Chris pants, voice coarsening, daring Wesker to prove it.

The hand that had been around his face disappears, nails dragging down his back before his fingers tease the dip in his spine, fitting slender between his cheeks.

“Have you thought about my fingers in your hole?” he asks in a hiss. His hand picks up speed. All at once, everything happening in their bed is just forceful enough that he forgets his misery, need surging in to take its place.

“Yes,” he gasps back, pressing back into Wesker’s touch.

“Stretching you open?” Wesker goes on. “Touching you like you’ve never been touched before?”

“Please.”

“You don’t have to beg me, Christopher,” Wesker purrs. “You can have whatever you want. Whenever you want it.”

He feels the pads of Wesker’s fingers against his entrance, rubbing, and after all of this mounting tension and all of the trauma of these last few days, his body starts to unwind, something achingly hot breaking open inside of his chest.

“Just hold on another moment,” Wesker whispers to him. “I want to feel you around my fingers when you come.”

Chris chokes out a strangled reply, whole body tensing, his cock throbbing so hard he isn’t sure he’s going to be able to stop himself.

“Can you do that for me?”

Open-mouthed and drooling all over the pillow, Chris nods.

“Good.” Wesker squeezes him one last time before snaking the hand out of his pants. “Take off your clothes for me.”

The instruction comes with Wesker turning away. He feels the older male roll up into a sitting position, throwing his legs over the side of the bed. He listens to Wesker get up and root around inside of his bag as he strips, shivering in the cold of the air conditioning.

“Alright,” Wesker says, returning to him. He meets Chris in a sitting positing. He presses his chin into the crook of Chris’ neck before lowering him back down, and even as he mouths against Chris’ throat, his hands are at work. Chris hears the bottle pop open.

“You brought lube with you,” Chris states, something horrifyingly suspicious slashing through his mind.

“I keep it in the car,” Wesker answers, and Chris’ mind quiets again. Then he adds, “Ever since I started seeing you,” and Chris’ heart picks up, that startling moment of distrust completely forgotten.

Wesker glides oil down his shoulders. Across his arms. Makes his skin glisten with slickness, then kneads his fingers over him and kisses his muscles.

“Sometimes I dream that I look the way you do,” Wesker confesses around a mouthful of bicep. “But it is even better, I think, to have you instead.”

He lies Chris down again, pressing his back into the sheets, and pours lube all over him.

“Let me work you open first. Then I’ll let you come.” Wesker’s eyes sweep down his front and he coo’s, lips pursed. “Beautiful boy. Yes. I prefer to have you.”

When Wesker’s fingers sink into his opening Chris gasps, arching back into the bed. Wesker teases him for a few minutes, fingertips slipping in and out, stretching him open in scissoring motions with his expression held in the same rigorous concentration he’d allot to any important task at work.

His eyes flicker up to Chris’, looking so suddenly out of place outside of the STARS office that Chris moans, throwing his head back into the pillow. With that, Wesker starts fucking him on two fingers, sizzling heat straight up his core.

“Please,” he begs again, still not sure what he’s asking for, but Wesker knows. He always knows.

Wesker’s hand, slickened by oil, wraps around his cock and starts jerking him with just the right pressure, just the right speed, just the right motions to match the way he’s being fucked, stars exploding beneath his skin.

He flops around on the bed until the orgasm hits him, rolling straight through him like a warm cloud of heat.

He grabs his own arm with his teeth, biting down to stop himself from crying out. He feels cum splatter on his chest but he isn’t sure where one pleasure stops and another begins, Wesker hitting something so deep inside of him that even when he’s coming down he’s still suspended in bliss, the bed angels and Wesker a demon who knows him more intimately than anybody ever should.

Wesker flips him around, plants him flat into the bed, and climbs on top of him.

He fucks like an animal. Like he’s desperate and craving and might lose his mind if he doesn’t give himself what he needs. He growls, breathy and dangerous, into Chris’ ear as he thrusts deep inside of him, clutching the cartilage with his teeth.

“Do you want me to be gentle?” he asks, and Chris shakes his head.

He needs it to be like this. Rough; the bedframe squeaking, the headboard thudding against the wall, his tears wet on his face where the pillow shoves them back into his own face. He needs Wesker’s guttural sounds to keep getting higher and higher as his control falls to pieces. He needs Wesker biting into his neck as he comes, leaving little circular rings embedded in the flesh, making him ache even when Wesker is pulling out of him and smothering his back with kisses.

Chris cries again afterwards, curled up in a ball with Wesker’s lips in his hair.

“Barry,” he sobs, arms wrapped around himself and shaking, his ass on fire and still dripping with Wesker’s come. In a way, forgetting and then remembering again is even harder than the constant sorrow of being unable to forget.

Wesker just keeps stroking him. Whispering gentle, tender things into his hair.

Eventually, Chris gets out of bed to pee. He’s shaky, his eyes puffy, everything drained out of him. He returns to stand at the foot of the bed. When Wesker sees him he rises into a sitting position, reaching out to take his wrists.

“I can’t cry anymore,” Chris speaks into the darkness.

It’s true. He can’t.

His eyes are calcified; his tear ducts are crusted shut. His well of suffering is empty and he can’t access it anymore. Instead, all he feels now is emptiness. Emptiness and anger.

“Irons need to pay,” Chris says between his teeth, and instead of shaking with fatigue, he is now shaking with rage. “He isn’t going to get away with this. He’ll pay for what he’s done, and whatever the fuck he’s trying to do with Umbrella is coming to an end right now.”

Across the bed, inside of the mind of a completely different man, Wesker almost smiles. Almost.

He cannot stand how beautiful Chris is. He cannot cope with the harpy-gorgeous anger on his face. He is like clay that’s been shaped and hardened in a kiln and then encased in enamel. He is like a phoenix ripping its new body out of the fire. Wesker always knew that with a little pressure, he would become like this. Reborn. That temper cultivated into into true fury. That beautiful face crafted into a perfectly deadly man, ready to kill, even if its only motivation is justice and revenge.

Finally Chris is ready.

Wesker kisses Chris’ hand and lets go of him. He rises to his feet.

On the other side of the bed, Chris watches him traverse the room and lean down over the briefcase seated on one of the chairs.

He flicks through the combination lock and then lifts something out of it. A case. Expensive-looking and sleek, larger than a standard store bought jewelry box.

Wesker steps up to Chris’ back and presses himself against it. He runs a hand down Chris’ head and then sets the box on the bed in front of him, unclasping it.

Chris lifts it up. Snaps it open.

Inside the box, sheltered by suede and glimmering in the moonlight, are two pairs of brass knuckles. They look dangerous and luxurious. Sharp, hard, and glistening. Coated in diamonds, though Chris gets the sense that the gems are not just for show.

“I borrowed the measurements from your physical,” Wesker murmurs lovingly. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Chris frowns, looking deeper. There’s something else in there, and it takes a minute for Chris to realize what it is. He strokes his fingers across the scalloped shape until he figures it out; it’s two sets of fangs, meant to be placed over each row of teeth. Made of those same stones, though slightly more pointed than the knuckles. The perfect instrument for tearing out a throat.

“Irons does need to pay,” Wesker agrees, sighing the words into the back of his head. “And I want you to have the honors.”

Chapter Text

Days go by. Weeks. Chris grafts onto Wesker until it hurts to try to peel himself away.

Sometimes Wesker leaves their hotel rooms to take care of business, and even that can be excruciating. The intensity of the feeling varies. Business can be anything from an outing that results in him returning to the hotel with bruises on his skin or documents in his hand or a bag full of takeout from one of the endless rotating restaurants he swings by.

Whenever he’s gone, for whatever reason, Chris always feels his absence. Like he’s a chimera who’s just lost half of his body. Sometimes it feels like that even when Wesker is just in the fucking bathroom, washing his hands.

He remembers feeling like this before. He remembers it being like this with Claire.

Sometimes he would lie down, on a mattress on the floor or on somebody’s couch, and feel like his arms were her arms. His legs, her legs. His brain full of her thoughts, his heart only ever as big as her love.

It can get like that, when it’s just the two of you.

“Us against the world,” he’d tell her, grinning wide for her sake, and it feels like things are just like that again. Except this time, it’s so much harder to trace the seams and figure out where they begin and end. It’s the sexual component. It’s the way that mouths and teeth and moans are factored into it. It’s the way he hears Wesker groaning and he feels himself become vocal too, Wesker’s pleasure pulsing in his dick, fucking feeling the other man’s sensations so intensely that he finds himself nearly coming just from the sound of it alone.

At the end of the day, Chris should not be surprised. He was primed for this.

It’s not romantic. He knows that. It’s co-dependency.

There’s a reason he and Claire decided to make some space between the two of them, and it was not for a lack of love. It was because they both knew they’d never be able to breathe if they didn’t splice themselves apart. They would have never been able to live their own, separate lives unless they forced each other away.

Chris cannot think about the possibility of having to do that with Wesker. If he gets removed from the older man, he will die. He’ll wither. All of his cells will gasp for the air they’ve been taught how to breathe, and without Wesker there to nourish them, he’ll turn gray. Ooze and deflate. Flatten into nothing. Go black and rot, irrevocably alone.

All Chris ever wanted was for somebody to think for him for fucking once. Tell him he was right. Take care of him. Take care of him in that way he always took care of everyone else.

Wesker does that for him.

And still, it somehow does not ever sink down into him and stay. Instead, Chris is simply left gasping with need for more every second that Wesker isn’t there to provide it.

He’s fucked. He knows that.

He’s fucked, and he is not worthy of the man who has taken him into his protection. He’s not strong enough for Wesker. He’s not smart enough, he’s not clever enough, and he sure as hell isn’t good enough.

He wakes up terrified that Wesker will see the truth of him and leave him here, spread out and abandoned like an orphaned child in one of these beds.

He wakes up in Wesker’s arms and even though he’s never felt more whole, he’s also never felt more alone.

This evening, they’re no longer in a hotel; they’re at a five-star fucking resort.

“I want you to relax, Christopher,” Wesker says, shooting a look over at him as he white-knuckles the arms of his lounge chair, teeth gritted and eyes darting wildly around. “It’ll do neither of us any good to have you so on edge.”

Taking a shuddering breath in, Chris turns to focus on the man spread out in the chair beside him. His sunglasses actually look somewhat in place here. They frame his face, turning his blonde hair beachy, syncing well with the swim trunks he has on.

If everything weren’t so fucked up right now, Chris might laugh with incredulous amusement at the sight of him. Sky blue shorts decorated in a pattern of candy-bright bananas. Chris’ aren’t any less tacky, in fact they’re almost worse, all pink and dancing with palm trees. He supposes the gift shop didn’t have too many options.

When he’s anxious, Chris needs action. Sitting in it eats him alive. He goes quiet and bleary, unable to keep his attention on anything, like his body is waiting for something to respond to.

Every time a child screams or splashes, his head jerks slightly in the direction of the sound, eyes widening to fit all the visual information they can in through his tiny eye sockets. In here, the environment should be calming: an indoor pool, bright blue sparkles rippling on the ceiling, the walls cut with windows that pull back to let the outside air in. The warm, pervasive chlorine smell that still manages to cloud the room. The width and length of the body of water, with its decorative partition in the middle that children are climbing onto and jumping off of.

He realizes Wesker is still staring at him, a serious frown pulling taut his lips. “Christopher. Are you relaxed?”

“…Yes,” Chris lies.

“Convincing. Roll over.”

All at once Wesker is standing up, towering over him, and Chris is saying “O- okay…” and rolling onto the plasticky rungs of chair.

“You are not relaxed,” Wesker states when he kneads his hands into Chris’ back and the younger man tenses.

“I can’t just-”

Wesker sighs. “Let me demonstrate something, Christopher,” and Chris gives another unsure okay.

For a second, Chris just lies there, chin buried on his arms. Then he feels Wesker pinching at his torso, fingers twisting around a fistful of tender skin, and he squeals pitifully, clenching into himself.

“We react better to things when we’re not so tense,” Wesker says through his teeth, then starts working into his back with a force enough to make Chris hiss. “I know that all of this is extremely unprecedented, but you have to figure out a way to process and store your stress.”

“It’s just-” Chris says, wincing when Wesker’s claws dip lower, brutally massaging his lower back. His voice lowers to a whisper. “It’s just, I don’t know why you brought us here. Anyone could see us.”

“It’s alright. I wouldn’t have us here if I hadn’t taken the necessary precautions.” He voice takes on that booming, authoritative tone. “We are out of a zone deemed to be at-risk for one of Irons’ contacts spotting us, and I have worked very hard to sever us from our old identities.”

Chris doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even know what he’d say if he did.

Instead, he leans in to the purifying fire of Wesker’s grip and lets the man dig into him until he learns how to tolerate it, pained whimpers turning to huffed breaths turning into silence as he grazes his teeth flat against his wrist and just takes it, allow the discomfort to become a sensation like any other.

It’s the same thing he does with the knowledge of Barry’s death. The truth of their situation.

Just as when he was a kid on the streets, he does not allow himself to suffer by struggling against the truth of the reality before him. He accepts it, in the radical sense. He stops fighting and finds that it is easier to endure by simply receiving what’s in front of him.

When Wesker is finished unknotting him, a ball of rainbow warmth starts to fill him up, spreading out from his chest and into his limbs. It’s trust. Wesker is right; now that the pain of the older man’s hands is gone, he feels relaxed. Unwound. Like he’s floating in a cloud and everything is swaying with a tepid, light, tropical rain.

“There,” Wesker murmurs, running a hand up his spine, and Chris sighs in response.

“Come on,” he says, taking Chris by the hand and setting his glasses down on the longue chair. “Let’s have a swim.”

Swim they do.

Through the pool, treading in place, the water almost syrupy-thick with how warm and full of chemicals it is.

Chris kicks back off the wall and glides, watching Wesker watch him, displaying a thoughtful pout that isn’t quite a smile but is gentler than a scowl, and he thinks, for the first time in weeks, that something loosens within his ribs, and it is no longer like all of the crushing despair of the world has been crammed up to fit inside him.

After the pool, dripping wet from the shower, wrapped in a bathrobe, still thick with the scent of chlorine, Wesker sits behind him on the bed, combing his hair so that it goes “the right way.”

“You should style it like this on your own,” Wesker muses thoughtfully, parting it off-center and stroking it to the side so that he looks like a good boy who folds his hands on his desk and does his homework every night before dinner. “Soften up that rugged appearance of yours.”

Chris feels himself smile a little, a boyish flush rising to his cheeks. “I like that look.”

“As do I. But we have façades to manicure, now.”

Chris can feel, on the back of his neck, Wesker’s warm breath hitting the skin. The brush of his freshly shaved chin when his lips drag close enough to touch.

Chris remembers washing and brushing out and braiding Claire’s hair at night. Picking the leaves out of it. Rising the dirt into a sink. That summer when she decided she was sick of it always getting in the way and had him shave it off, on the balcony of some perpetually drunk foster mom’s apartment, the two of them tossing her hair into the streets below.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Chris hears an alarm bell going off.

Him and Wesker- they are getting too close.

They are getting close in ways that you don’t get close with other people. Close, in that Wesker stands behind him and brushes his teeth for him so that he doesn’t do it wrong. Close, in that Wesker picks scabs off of him and opens his wounds to Chris, letting the younger man lick up the blood before finding a Band-Aid. Close, where Wesker sexualizes everything he does. Smoothing his hands over Chris’ thighs while he’s eating. Straddling him while running a razor across his beard. Soapes him up in the shower with his cock pressed between Chris’ legs, hands working him and then lathering him, then working him again, then conditioning his hair, always gone and back again with such whiplash speed that Chris finds himself aroused nearly all hours of every single day. He chases Wesker’s fleeting touches. He clouds over with memories of that first night. The night Wesker gave him everything he could have ever wanted.

If Chris still belonged to the world he did before, he would call Wesker a cock tease. If he were a little more pessimistic, he would say that Wesker was holding him with it like a collar chained tight around his throat.

But even if it is that, Chris doesn’t care. He trusts him. He’s never been able to lie down and offer his body like this, fully submitting his control to somebody else, and the euphoria of it is so great that it’s a small price to pay for all of the fruits reaped from their arrangement.

The comb drops onto the bed. Wesker’s fingers wrap lightly around his neck.

“Are you feeling relaxed?” he asks again, the question softer now, a mockery of itself.

Chris laughs, but it turns into a sharp inhale when Wesker’s palm slides its way underneath his bathrobe, curving over the shape of his thigh.

Fingertips brush his dick, and what was half-awake is now rock hard, straining against the hotel robe, his mind going unfocused with need.

“Yes,” he answers, leaning back into the touch, and he realizes he’s whimpering. Now that he’s no longer clenched up tight, the last few weeks are spilling out all at once, the desperation in his gut unbearable. “Wesker- please touch me.”

“I thought loosening you up might give you the courage to finally ask,” Wesker returns, pleased.

His fingers go flat and he skates the tip of them up the length of Chris’ cock, peaking over the head, and then runs them down the underside.

He’s already drooling with cum. His cock twitches at just the slight bit of contact and he whines harder, understanding the sounds he’s making and the way he’s moving for what they are. It’s begging.

“I’d like to keep you like this,” Wesker murmurs headily into his ear, pressing his face flat to the side of Chris’ head. “So turned on you’re always ready for me. So aroused that even when you come, it never quite feels like enough.”

“Wesker,” Chris pleads, arching back against him. He presses himself so far back that his head hangs over Wesker’s shoulder, hips thrusting up into the air.

“Alright,” Wesker answers, amused, his hand circling into a fist that he places down around Chris’ cock and making him keen. “I guess it isn’t fair of me to tease you forever.”

Chris groans loudly when Wesker starts jerking him off, hips involuntarily fucking into the motion, melting so deep into Wesker that he feels like he’s being swallowed up by the pool again.

Vaguely, he feels Wesker drag his fingertips along his tongue. Then Wesker’s index and middle finger are on his nipples, circling gently, making them swell and harden underneath his touch.

“Open that up,” Wesker purrs, and Chris hurriedly works to untie the belt around his waist, throwing the robe open.

He feels almost embarrassed at the sight of himself- nipples and cock both erect, unshaved belly and chest making curves along the angled landscape of him.

Wesker’s fist leaves his cock and now there are two hands pulling at his nipples, pressing hard and then pinching, making him squirm. There’s a fire in his gut. It’s swirling and consuming him, flooding both his groin and his head.

Wesker spits into his hand and then he’s wrapped back around Chris’ erection, jerking him off.

Chris squeals. He writhes, pressing himself against Wesker’s front, before gasping at the way Wesker abandons his cock to start rubbing at his nipples with two pointer fingers.

“Oh God,” he moans brokenly, thrusting into the air.

Wesker wraps a hand around his cock again. Jerks him off in exactly three horrifically satisfying motions before returning to his nipples.

He can’t wait for Wesker’s touch to return. Chris gives a strangled cry and feels himself explode.

The orgasm hits him in waves of come that spurt onto his chest, heart beating fast, mouth open for the kiss that Wesker places over it.

Wesker sucks up the desperate crying sounds he’s making. Wesker drinks from his tongue, pulling it into his own mouth and playing with it against his cheek, the older man rumbling with pleased sounds.

“Please,” he weeps into Wesker’s mouth, the sound of crying in his voice even though there are no tears in his eyes.

“Please what, Christopher?” Wesker asks. His fingertips trail down Chris’ stomach, making his muscles leap, dragging the spilled semen across his belly. Drawing spirals with it. Bringing it to his lips to taste.

He teases the head of Chris’ spent cock with one finger and Chris jolts, squeaking.

“Please,” Chris says again, helplessly. “Please more.”

“More,” Wesker echoes, interested.

“I need-” Chris starts, twisting in his lap, and now he’s huffing, actual tears waterfalling from his eyelashes. “It wasn’t enough,” he cries. “I need more.”

He thinks of Wesker licking the tears from the corner of his eyes. He cries harder, wishing Wesker would do that now.

“You will have more, Christopher,” Wesker promises, voice roughening. He squeezes Chris’ chin so tightly Chris gasps. “But right now I have something else for you. Something I’ve been saving.”

“Something else?” Chris asks, and Wesker swings off the bed, leaving him to fall onto his back.

He hits the mattress and groans, even the reverberations of bed below him pleasurable, and Wesker sets to work closing his robe and tying it up for him.

“Come,” he says, and he stretches out his hands like a man in a dream. Dazedly, body both heavy and weightless at the same time, Chris takes his palms and imagines them in a field of flowers, Wesker leading him somewhere magical. He imagines himself as a damsel being saved. Led out of the glass casket and into a heaven on earth.

Lead him Wesker does- but not into a fairytale. Instead, he takes him through a door that makes Chris realize the room they’re in has actually been a suite the whole time. One with an adjoining living room and kitchen.

And there, bound up and lying on his side on the couch, is a man. Chris stops cold. The dream bursts around him.

“What is this?” he asks, his voice far away.

Wesker closes the door behind them, every motion controlled. He gives Chris a pointed look, reminding him to stay relaxed, before stepping up to the body bound in rope.

“This,” he says, eyes full of disgust as they do a sweep over the unconscious man. He’s slumped over, drooling, black hair covering his eyes. Chris doesn’t recognize him. He’s sure he’s never seen him before in his life. “Is the man who killed Barry.”

“What?” Chris hears himself ask.

Wesker reaches down and seizes a fistful of the man’s hair, yanking him into a sitting position.

“His name is Arnold Beaton. Formerly employed under Irons back when he was still a small-town sheriff. Used to sort out witness complications, if you know what I mean. Not an easy man to track down. It would seem that he now lives a very private life on the shore doling out the remainder of Iron’s hush money.”

“How-” Chris tries, feeling himself sway. “How do you-”

“How do I know it was him?” Wesker asks, letting the man’s head drop. It lolls as he slumps limp against the cushions, mouth open and leaking drool. “With some help, I was able to remotely access Irons’ computer. When I saw the flight confirmation Beaton had forwarded him, I got a little curious.” He frowns, pure vitriol in his eyes. “But beyond that-” He shrugs, snarling. “The man confessed.”

“He confessed?” Chris repeats dumbly, the words a whisper.

He feels his heart start racing in his chest. He looks from the disgust on Wesker’s face to the murderer on the couch and his vision starts to tunnel. Barry thumps into his mind. Rolls over the side of the couch and hits the floor of his memory, wet and red like meat. Bruised and welted. His coworker. His flying buddy. His best friend. Meat.

Wesker grabs the man by the hair again and this time, the captive begins to stir. Eyes fluttering, mouth gurgling, he starts twitching in Wesker’s grasp, little electric impulses that Chris finds himself feeling a disturbing kick of delight to see.

“I want you to receive his confession, too, Christopher,” Wesker instructs. “And then I want you to tell me what we should do with him.”

“Me…?” Chris murmurs.

“No,” the man gurgles, voice hoarse and quiet, slipping like whispers out of his lips. “No, please.”

Chris recognizes something in the way he’s lolling around. In the labored breath of his words. It’s the same medication Wesker gives him sometimes when he can’t sleep. A substance that turns him gooey and weak, rendering him barely strong enough to open his mouth and let the words roll out.

“Arnold,” Wesker states, calling him to full alertness. “I want you to tell me again what you did.”

“I’m sorry,” the man moans. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell Chris what you told me,” he says steadily, and the man squeezes his eyes closed, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“For Irons,” he whimpers, swallowing, “Would’ve done it himself. But. I offered.”

Chris feels himself spiraling away from his body. He thinks of Barry’s wife. His kids. He thinks of the empty STARS office back at the RPD, Jill all alone, and Irons still sitting in that fucking chair, getting paychecks addressed to him by Umbrella, working with them to destroy the world.

“You’re not sorry,” Wesker accuses, and Chris feels his hands start to tremble. “Like you said, you wanted this. You’re only sorry that we finally caught up to you.”

Chris thinks of all the helpless sobbing. All of the anxious, jumpy energy in his chest. All of the nights he sees Barry’s body in his dreams.

His vision unlatches and he’s screaming, rushing forward with his knuckles out, and then the soft shape of this murderer’s face is underneath his fists, over and over again, him climbing up onto the couch and getting on top of him so he can hit him with his fists and his elbows, roaring with grief.

Before he can blink, Wesker has him.

Has him under the arms and is dragging him backwards, onto the floor. He hits carpet and Chris a heaving mess of tears and rage in Wesker’s arms, the entire world red.

“No,” Chris barks through his teeth, clamping his eyes closed. “No, he killed Barry. He killed Barry.”

“I know, Chris,” Wesker says, taking him by the chin. He rests his jaw down on Chris’ shoulder and turns inward to face him, lips hot against Chris’ cheek. “In the right pocket of your robe.”

Shakily, Chris reaches down into his pocket and feels his fingers curl around metal. He makes a fist around it and then pulls them out, unfurling his palm to see the pair of brass knuckles gleaming, ruggedly shaped and deadly in the way they reflect his anger back at him.

“You’re not alone, Christopher,” Wesker tells him, stroking his face.

Wesker rises to his feet and pulls the man off the couch. Arnold is bleeding, his eyes busted, nose crooked and breath exiting his lips in rasping gasps.

“I will always be here with you,” Wesker promises, pulling the man against his front. He binds one arm around the man’s middle; takes him by the hair and holds his head in place with the other, angling his own face out of the way. “I will always know what you truly want, and I will always be happy to provide it for you.”

Shoulders heaving, Chris is shaking as he lifts himself off the ground. He feels himself breathing heavily, veins swimming with fury, and he thinks that he might die if he doesn’t finally diffuse some of it out of him.

Evil foster fathers making Claire cry. Foster mothers who weren’t any better. People in offices, in schools, in extracurricular programs who were all supposed to make things better but ended up fucking them up much worse. The revenge Chris always wanted- though, not exactly revenge. Just some fucking empathy. So that they’d be forced to feel the pain they put others through.

He joined the airforce to try to combat it from the other side. Right wrongs instead of taking eyes.

All the same Chris knows, deep down, that this is what he’s always craved. This brand of justice. This kind of release.

He’s not a good person. Wesker has shown him that, and he knows it now. He’s not a good person, he’s just been very good at pretending to be.

“Do it,” Wesker whispers.

Chris slips the dusters onto his dominant fist. He takes in a deep, shuddering breath. Pulls back his arm.

This time, when his fist connects, he hears the man’s jaw shatter on his knuckles.

Chapter Text

When Wesker wakes in the middle of the night, he tastes the tang of blood in his mouth. Feels the crunch of hollow space between his teeth.

Unhurriedly, he rolls over onto his side. Lets his hand stretch out over the indent in the mattress, the imprint of Christopher as warm and apparent as if he’d been lying on a bed of grass, leaving the strands bent in his wake.

There’s an earthy scent clinging to the back of his throat, but it’s not from tonight. It’s memory. He’s not sure if a part of him misses that smooth glide of the shovel into the soil, pooling back dirt to make six feet of room. There was something mindful about it; the chance to ruminate on himself, on his actions, the bigger picture.

But as a young officer stops running coffee and slowly sets his mind to becoming a real cop, Wesker has surpassed the point of cleaning up his messes. Birkin will see to the disposal of Irons’ former colleague. He’s just one door down from them now, prepared to slip in promptly after he’s departed with Christopher in the morning.

Wesker keeps stretching, fingers splaying out, until he’s rising onto his knees. Gradually, so as to not disturb the man curled up on the ground below, he swings his legs over the side and runs a non-intrusive hand down Chris’ back, sewing himself seamlessly into the gap that Christopher left open for him.

“What is it?” he asks quietly.

When Chris doesn’t answer, Wesker gets to his feet.

He clocks the image as beautiful in its tragedy: Christopher leant against the side of the bed, knees pulled against his chest and arms wrapping himself up tight. He’s frowning, eyes fastened on the wall across. The type of expression that acts as the gate for keeping everything sheltered up inside.

“Christopher,” Wesker murmurs, crouching down, and the look that Chris gives him is one of pure, unadulterated anguish.

“Did you take me because you knew I was bad?” he whispers.

Wesker frowns. Slowly, he drops all the way down onto the floor in front of Chris, curving a hand around his cheek.

“What do you mean you’re bad?” he asks slowly.

Chris’ mouth twists. He looks away, angry tears slipping from his eyes. Wesker finds himself in awe of the younger’s endless supply of tears. Each unique and lovely, sparkling like diamonds on the soft of his skin.

“I’m a bad person,” he says miserably, and when he looks at Wesker all of that masking anger slides off and in its place is pleading. He is begging Wesker to tell him if he’s right. “You saw it, didn’t you? That’s why you needed to take me away from everyone.”

“Christopher. No,” Wesker rumbles. He strokes a thumb underneath Chris’ eye, wiping away his tears. “No, I don’t think you’re bad. I don’t think that at all.”

“Then why was that so easy for me?” he demands miserably.

Wesker leans in, gently stroking his face. He studies Chris, holding his eyes for so long that Christopher finally gives in and meets him halfway, those moon-sized pupils gaping pleadingly above a wobbling mouth.

“You are young, Christopher,” Wesker says very steadily. Very quietly. “It’s a very long and difficult path to accepting the truth- which is that there is no black and white in this world. Not in this country, at least.” He purses his lips and watches Chris hang on to him. Clinging to every syllable. “Truly bad people are limited only by their wealth and resources. It is not bad to eliminate the hydra, Christopher, to ensure that its heads do not grow back. In fact, it is a brave and selfless thing to kill when killing is necessary. No matter how awful that truth feels while it’s settling inside of you.”

“I-” Chris says, voice rushed and quivering. “I didn’t kill Barry. I wouldn’t do that. No matter how angry I’d be at him for working with Irons, I wouldn’t. I-”

Wesker grabs at Chris’ face, clutching him so hard the younger boy winces.

A rumble of pulsing heat simmers out from his stomach and into his fingertips. Christopher thinks he could have killed Barry, he realizes delightedly. Christopher isn’t sure of himself.

“Listen to me,” Wesker says sharply, eyes drilling into him. “I know firsthand that none of this easy. Finding out that there are no rules. That everything you thought was true about our ethics is mired in the agenda of our social programming. I understand what you’re going through, Christopher, because I went through it too. But unlike me, I see you navigating it with grace.” He growls, low and hungry, and Chris melts into him. “Anything you want or need, you will have it from me. Forever. I love you.”

“Wesker,” Chris squeaks weakly, but Wesker is watching the clouds clear on his face. Watching this new look of hopeful disbelief crowding out all his doubts.

“I’m proud of you,” Wesker tells him, and Chris huffs out a wet sigh, an orgasmic relief the likes of which Wesker has never heard before.

Chris lies on his stomach between Wesker’s legs, holding the older man’s dick in his mouth.

Wesker is leant against the headboard, attention buried in a report. He’s told Chris to wait for him; that he’ll be with him soon. That he can occupy his mouth and his mind if he wants to in the meantime.

Chris’ head is occupied, that much is certainly true. As Chris lies flat, sucking gently, he thinks about where he came from and he can’t remember exactly how he got here. What logical and temporal leaps he has to do to meet himself here, on this hotel bed, the two of their bodies fitted together in this way. He remembers flirty, silly doodles on the margins of his timesheet. First kisses and effortless banter making his body go weightless and cutesy. He remembers drinks in the office after hours, tracing Wesker’s body with his eyes, imagining what it might look like below his clothes, all while keeping his peripheral vision attuned to figure out whether or not Wesker did the same to him. When did things get so serious? When did putting Wesker’s dick in his mouth stop feeling fun and exciting, and instead, make him feel like he might die without it?

He’s whining. He realizes that when Wesker sets the report down and hooks his fingers through Chris’ hair, dragging them like rakes along the sand.

“What is it?” Wesker asks, and the word jabs out with a clinical sterility. “Do you need some attention?”

Chris rolls his eyes up towards Wesker’s face, a helpless neediness curled up inside of them. He tightens his mouth around the cock and whines again, the sight of Wesker’s eyes raw and exposed with his hair in mussy strings on the top of his head doing something irreversible to him.

“That’s not an answer, Christopher.”

He can’t imagine opening his mouth around Wesker’s cock to speak, so instead he just nods.

“That’s not an answer either,” Wesker says coldly.

“Yes,” Chris finally gasps, and it’s like he’s yelping from the inside of a closet, his voice muffled and thick.

“Yes,” Wesker repeats, pleased, and then he’s taking Chris’ head like it’s a sex toy and bobbing it up and down on his cock, making Chris moan.

“I was reading,” Wesker starts to say, his attention focusing on some point across the room even as he continues to work Chris over his cock until he’s swelled to his full thickness, “That Umbrella is testing the first of their new BOWs this coming month. Preliminary trials are complete. Now it’s just seeing what the ghoul looks like when it rises from the grave.”

Chris should be listening. He should be responding.

Instead, he clenches his eyes shut and tunes Wesker out, catching glimpses of things through the haze like sentient being and tyrannical monster and capable of inheriting the earth, eventually, if not towns and cities.

He doesn’t pick up on the awe in Wesker’s voice, because he isn’t listening for it. He’s listening for lust. For the validation of shallow breaths, for markers of satisfaction, for proof that Wesker, despite all his rambling, still wants him.

If he’d been less broken and more of the man he’d one day end up being, he would have realized right then and there that Wesker had fully made the transition away from him.

Wesker’s desires are no longer settled on Chris, because Wesker already has Chris. Chris does not know it, but his sights are now fully fixed on that of acquiring Umbrella.

The older man cuts off abruptly, gritting his teeth, and then he’s breathing sharply out of his nose and coming down Chris’ throat.

Chris is swallowing. Drinking. Going lightheaded at the strength with which Wesker clutches him, choking because of how far down Wesker pins his head.

“Wes- ker-” he’s trying to say, gagging, tears in his eyes and deep breaths in through his nose to stop himself from throwing up.

“Good boy,” Wesker purrs, the words gravely, stroking his second set of fingers through Chris’ hair.

Chris’ cheeks pinken. A moan rolls out of him.

“Good boy,” Wesker says again, more reverently this time, and slowly his cock softens up to the point where Chris can gently spit it out of his mouth.

“Look at you.” Wesker gives a rumbling murmur, dragging a thumb over Chris’ rosy cheeks. “You look perfect.”

Chris feels his pupils blow wide. His insides melt. His breath grows heavy in his mouth, all of it completely involuntary, his body Pavlov-fucked, his lower half drawn and gartered.

Wesker surges forward, sticking his tongue down Chris’ throat, and Chris moans harder.

Here it is: all he ever wanted. All of Wesker’s attention.

Attention being lathered on him, as Wesker shoves him onto his back in the bed and swings a leg over his chest, climbing on top of him, hands exploring the musculature of his arms before trailing down to grip him by his cock.

“Please,” Chris whimpers, and Wesker throws a scowl down at him.

“You’re prettier when you don’t beg, Christopher. Though I can’t honestly say I don’t enjoy it.”

“Please,” Chris says again, head spinning, the backwash of Wesker’s praise pooling swampy and old in his stomach. He needs more of it. He needs Wesker to call him good again. He needs to be rewarded.

“If you want something so bad, come up here and take it,” Wesker says, face an iron wall, and Chris feels himself start to cry.

“If you want tears, have your tears,” Wesker answers meanly. “But you won’t be getting anything else from me tonight.”

Something in Chris surges and snaps. He lunges up, grabbing Wesker by the shoulders, and flips him onto his back.

Wesker hits the mattress without so much as a blink. He just stares up at Chris, now mounted over him, wild desperation in the younger man’s heart and face, and there is cold approval in his eyes.

“Good,” Wesker growls, and when Chris shoves himself into Wesker’s mouth, Wesker is still talking. Still praising him, even as he takes Chris’ thrusts.

In that moment, Chris wants to destroy him and he isn’t sure why.

As he fucks his face, he wants Wesker’s jaw to break. Wants his skull to split. Wants to slam a hand over his nose and choke him to death on his cock, then take the coiled up hard shell of his body and throw it out the hotel window.

He’s crying again, he realizes. Hot, huge tears racing down his face and raining all over the bed. He wants to stop but he can’t, it’s too late, and the most he can do is pull out and grab his cock before he comes, wrapping a hand hard around the head as it explodes, as if trying not to come on Wesker will stop every vile thought he’s just had from cementing.

“You’re not bad,” Wesker scoffs, hoisting himself up on his elbows, and Chris realizes that he’s repeating it like a mantra, saying it over and over to himself.

I’m bad. I’m bad. I’m bad.

“You’re perfect,” Wesker reminds him, wrapping him up, and Chris dissolves into the arms of Wesker, scrambling at them, too many and not enough at once, like a warrior goddess wielding a different weapon within each grasp. “Exactly who you are was crafted to be perfect.” He settles a palm on the back of Chris’ head. “That’s why I’m here, Christopher. If you cannot see that on your own, I promise I will always see it for you.”

Chris thinks that that’s true. Already, he feels it.

Sometimes, when they’re curled up like this, Chris doesn’t feel like himself. He doesn’t feel the seams on which the two of them meet. Instead, he feels like Wesker has absorbed him entirely, twin on twin in the womb until one’s set of DNA melts right into the other’s.

Tonight, they are not at a hotel. Not locked up in the room, their bodies tangled, wounds mixing and hair braided together. Not down by the pool or in the gym, acting out the guise of a regular guest.

Instead, Wesker has Christopher in his car, and he is slowly dragging a palm along the side of his face to be sure he is ready.

How aged Christopher looks- how masculine. Bulky and chafed where he, only months ago, was merely a boy.

He’s thinking about Barry again. Wesker can see that look in his eyes as he runs a thumb back and forth over the jagged surface of the diamonds decorating his knuckles. He’s thinking of the man’s jaw breaking by his punch. He’s thinking that he’s a killer, now, and Wesker is proud as all fuck, because he knows that before tonight is through, he will be.

“Listen closely,” he urges him, and the way Chris’ head snaps up tells him everything he needs to know. Christopher is broken. He is trained, and he registers Wesker- only Wesker- as his master.

Wesker runs a hand through his hair and Chris melts, mouth parting, eyes going soft.

“What we are about to do is dangerous, my pet.” He sweeps his hand down Christopher’s arm and then trickles his fingers over the brass knuckles, drawing attention to them. “And we will need to immediately go back on the run.”

Chris frowns and looks out through the dashboard, and Wesker knows what he sees just over the edge of the cliff before them: his home. Racoon City. Just the same as it always was, and Chris not even a scrap of the person he was when he left it.

“Irons,” Christopher murmurs, and Wesker nods firmly.

“We get in,” Wesker states, tightening his fingers around Christopher’s wrist, “We collect the evidence. We get out.”

Christopher thinks that they’re going to procure information that implicates Irons. To tie him to Umbrella. To alert the press and blow the doors wide open on their research.

What he doesn’t know, (and what Wesker is absolutely fucking certain of), is that when he sees Irons, he won’t be able to stop himself. Wesker has been carefully priming him for this. Working him up. Seating him on the edge. Teaching him that he has to take to get what he wants, and by enacting the taking, he will be earning what he wants more than anything in the entire world: Wesker’s approval.

Yes, Irons is working with Umbrella. Yes, Wesker wants him out. But not to put an end to the Tyrant Project. So that Wesker can take his place working on it, with his best man seated at the foot of his throne.

Chris isn’t quite ready to understand. Not yet.

But he will be.

Chapter Text

As they creep through the front door, a pair of scissored metal tongs left bent and broken in the latch, Wesker is still holding Chris’ hand. Every now and then, Chris feels the sweep of Wesker’s thumb get lost to the gems protruding from his knuckles. Wesker strokes the flat of his fingertips across Chris’ diamond dusters, back and forth then back again, until the tender padding is rough and peeling when they finally find their way back to Chris’ skin.

Wesker eases the door shut behind him and Chris feels himself come to a stop on the threshold of the house. There’s a cold, liquid adrenaline trickling down his spine, and though this is a home invasion, the cold sweat seeping from his pores has nothing to do with fear. It’s rage.

“Christopher,” Wesker growls lowly, like he can smell it. His voice is as soft as the shadows around them. With an indecipherable murmur, he raises Chris’ hand to his mouth and kisses the diamonds, lips wrapping around each knuckle. In his eyes, it’s as though they aren’t a weapon; it’s as if they were a wedding ring.

“Are you frightened?” he whispers, looking up at Chris through his eyelashes, and Chris lets his vision go unfocused for a moment before snapping back onto Wesker’s face.

“No,” he answers, words shaky but firm.

He lets Wesker scrutinize him for a moment, their gazes licking each other through the deep lens of Wesker’s sunglasses, just long enough for him to feel like a puddle of wax burned down to its catching bowl. As soon as it feels right, Chris lets his eyes drift again.

Irons’ living room is plush. Rich.

It’s been swathed in the kinds of rugs and drapes that could have padded Chris’ way through college had he unraveled them to their dollar amounts. Even knowing how dire this mission is, a part of him wants to lie down on the couch and sprawl out, rub his cheek against the fabric for no reason other than to compare it to the burlap surfaces he’s known in his life.

He’s drinking in the fireplace and its mantle decorated with worldly souvenirs: the clocks with roman numerals, the hand-carved figurines, the crystals exploding from halved rocks roughly the size of his head, when Wesker gently pulls his attention back again. They aren’t here for trinkets. They’re here for a vial of the t-Virus.

“Christopher?”

“Yes?”

“Open your mouth,” Wesker orders in a murmur.

Chris’ eyes flicker up to meet his, both curious and skeptical. But then Wesker pulls the glasses onto the top of his head and all the distrust melts out of Chris’ gaze.

The smoky, minted green of his eyes are more luscious than all of Irons’ luxurious things. Chris sighs brokenly as Wesker’s thumb trails along the bottom of his lip, gently easing it open, then hooks a finger around the inside of his gums.

He feels his heart flutter, head fogging warmly. Perhaps Wesker will give him the chance to lie across Irons’ expensive couch after all.

But instead of easing him to his knees and then guiding Chris’ open mouth around his cock, instead, Wesker reaches into his pocket. Wordlessly, he unfurls his gleaming palm. Then, spanning the breadth of two graceful motions, he seats the jeweled fangs over each row of Chris’ teeth.

Wesker draws his hand back almost reverently, wincing in a way that speaks of painful lust, and Chris hears a sound slip out from his lips.

“Look at you,” he admires, turning his hand and dragging the back of it down Chris’ puffed cheeks. He feels like he did in high school football, clutching a mouthguard the size of an orange rind in his mouth. “My little STARS rookie, all grown into himself.”

Chris tries to speak and finds that he can’t form words around the fangs. Saliva wells up and comes seeping out of his lips, rolling pitifully down his jaw.

Wesker makes another adoring sound. He swipes at the drool, smearing it all over Chris’ chin.

Instantly changing gears, Wesker’s head turns towards the archway where the hall fans out from the living room, eyes narrowing in focus. His head cocks slightly, lips pursing in a familiar way that alerts Chris he is about to speak.

“If I had very little time to guess, I’d surmise Irons keeps the sample in his office,” Wesker poses quietly, a conspirative gleam in his words. “But I’ve kept myself awake with the thought more than once, and I have come to conclusion that he guards it personally in his bedroom.”

Chris tries to speak and more drool spills out of his useless mouth.

All the same, Wesker’s eyes meet his and they tighten, pleased. He answers the question Chris hasn’t even asked.

“It’s what I would do if I were him.”

Wesker’s fingers wrap around his, bony and supple and containing all the power in the world, and as they pass from the living room and into the quiet of the foyer, moonlit crystals of the chandelier spinning slowly and leaping with light, Chris looks down at his decorated knuckles and thinks back to Wesker’s. Bloody and split. Clutching a McDonalds coffee. Holding him by the back of his neck. Squeezing his cock until it’s red and desperate and he’s whining, oversaturated by need but terrified of getting off, knowing the moment he does is the moment it’s over.

But they’ve moved from Wesker’s knuckles now. Now, the focus is on his own.

Chris feels them twitching at his sides. Itchy. Hungry.

He feels the presence of Irons in this home, and he knows that the t-Virus isn’t the only thing he came here for.

He came for revenge.

Easing their footfalls quietly up the stairs, Wesker wants to pull Chris into a corner and kiss the sweet boy until his mouth is swollen and his brain is ruined. He wants to run his hands all over him while whispering praises into his ear, opening up that gaping thirst inside of him again and filling it until he’s spilling over, skin dewy and wet to the touch, before drinking him dry once more.

Perhaps he’s becoming too sentimental, he thinks with scoff. Not that it really matters either way. At the end of it all, Chris will still be his cattle. Bound to him like a fetus in the womb, so powerless that he would likely wither if Wesker were to be cut from his cord.

At the same time, however, Wesker has learned that there is no true exchange of energy that doesn’t open a channel both ways. Wesker might have grafted himself onto Chris, but there are bits of Christopher that stick to him as well. Wesker is aware that to peel the younger man’s adhesive from his skin would hurt like a fucking bitch.

It’s nothing he can’t deal with, though. No minor grief he hasn’t already mastered.

“Come along,” he undertones, taking Chris by the back of the neck and stepping ahead of him onto the upper landing of Irons’ mansion home.

Moonlight strokes in through a window at the end of the hall, painting a long, ornate rug in moonglow. Once all of this is over, and he is seated at the forefront of Umbrella’s favor, he thinks he would like to keep Chris in a room like this.

One underground, albeit where concrete walls keep his pretty voice muffled to the rest of the world and only a sliver of daylight makes its way through the panes sunken into the soil. He’d like to see Chris chained to the floor for so long that his skin glows pale and dull in the moonlight, porcelain and marble instead of the bronze sunstone quality that years of activity have imbued it with.

He wants Christopher’s stomach eating itself. His muscles atrophying, turning to dust beneath his skin. He wants Chris biting at the air for scraps of food, licking droplets of water out of his palm, squeezing his thighs together and bucking helplessly at the hard sole of Wesker’s boot pressing down between his neglected legs.

He wants the full arc of Christopher for his own taking: the starry-eyed go getter who came barreling hot and scrappy into his department at the RPD. The disenchanted, mind-fucked, beautifully rancorous man who he is leading on a leash through Irons’ home. The right-hand man he will become when Wesker takes his place on his throne atop a world overtaken by Bioweapons. And then, at the end of it all, Christopher in complete decay, crumbling so slowly that they will be unable to pinpoint the exact moment where he crosses from being alive to being gone.

Wesker feels a leap of excitement flare through him. Invigorated, he pulls Chris tight to his side and jerks them both towards Irons’ bedroom door.

Beside him, he hears Chris’ breathing start to shallow, picking up in emphatic spurts.

“Christopher,” he begins, and Chris’ pupils are blown huge when they look up at him, hanging onto his words. He’s so pretty. His flushed cheeks, his chocolate-mussed hair, those dark, sunny splashes of freckles. “I trust you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Mph,” Chris answers around the fangs. Wesker wonders if they’re tearing up his gums.

“I want you to apprehend and immobilize him while he’s still asleep.”

Chris’ eyes widen. They flash with something thrillingly close to bloodlust.

“Me?” he manages in a muffle.

“You.” Wesker fixes him with a pointed glare. “You’re ready.”

Chris looks at him, eyes strangely innocent, despite everything. Wesker sees trust inside them, and that is all he needs.

He takes hold of Chris’ shoulder. Angles his shoulder down against the door, dropping low to the ground as he puts the doorknob in his fist.

When he peeks around the corner, sending moonlight spilling into Irons’ bedroom, Wesker knows how everything will proceed. He’ll send Chris swooping over to Irons’ bed as he goes for the sample that he asked Birkin to plant for him. He’ll have his back turned when the struggle begins. Chris is built like a tank, but he is a young tank. Unrefined. Irons will best him in a heartbeat- and that, Wesker knows, is the moment that will put everything in motion. It will unleash something in Chris: that desperate need to shield all of his most primal urges in self-defense. Before Chris even realizes what he’s doing, there will be diamond fangs ripping Irons’ throat to shreds. Wesker will hardly have the chance to blink before Christopher gives in to his anger, and lets himself kill the same way he killed when he thought Beaton was responsible for Barry’s murder.

He runs his hand up the back of Christopher’s head, clawing his fingers through his hair. He is so proud of how far he’s come. He is a dream, almost, carried on waves of lust and suffering.

They’ll fuck on the floor, covered in blood, and Wesker will pour over Chris like he did that first night in the hotel. He won’t tease him, or mock him, or leave him teetering on the edge for so long that he starts to cry. He’ll give his Christopher everything he wants. He’ll teach him that this is who he is. And that there are certain rewards that go along with embracing that.

Except when Wesker turns the knob, sending them spilling into Irons’ bedroom, there’s already a body splayed out on the floor.

He stops. Chris stiffens beside him.

There are two men on the ground, wrestling amongst the canopy bed and polished dressers, twisted up so completely that it takes Wesker a moment to discern who they are.

“What is this?” he snaps out a tightened jaw, and that’s the moment that Birkin’s head shoots up, eyes huge and pleading.

“Boss,” Birkin says breathlessly. He’s sprawled out at the foot of the bed with Irons flailing between his legs. He holds him tightly against his chest, a thin wire cutting into Irons’ throat, the chief’s face bright red, eyes bulging, as his hands grip the wire and struggle to pry it off.

At his side, Wesker feels Chris’ eyes burn up onto him, and for the first time since all of this began, he isn’t sure what to do.

“I don’t know who you are,” Wesker orders coldly, “But you need to let him go.”

“Wesker, please,” Birkin breathes out frantically, shaking. Irons gives a strangled gasp, jerking hard against the wire, and Birkin heaves, tightening his grasp. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let him go.”

“We can go back to the original plan,” Birkin pleads. “He’s just a- a fucking kid,” he snarls, fixing an enraged look onto a very baffled Chris. “It was supposed to be us. You and me.”

Wesker hears a muted thump. He turns, and Chris has left the fangs fall out of his mouth and onto the floor.

“What is he talking about?” he asks shakily.

“I don’t know,” Wesker growls.

“Oh, fuck off,” Birkin cries out, wrapping the wire so tight around his wrists that they start to turn white. “Stop playing house with this fucking child and come back to Umbrella with me.”

“Wesker,” Chris stumbles, and Wesker hears the doubt stretching his mind too far.

“This is clearly a trap,” Wesker states, turning to him. “An elaborate hoax. Irons is setting me up to look guilty the same way he set you up.”

From the floor, Birkin gives a bitter laugh.

“Yeah,” he rumbles in a way that sounds dangerous. Unhinged. “This is a set up.” And then, before Wesker can move to stop him, he arches back, teeth gritted and spit flying, and uses the wire to break Irons’ neck.

“Wesker!” Chris yelps.

Wesker presses his teeth together, jaw twitching, and before he can allow anything else to transpire, he pulls the gun out of his belt and shoots Birkin through the skull.

For a moment there’s silence. A deep, world-slashing silence as things between him and Christopher change forever.

“Cops?” Chris demands frantically, as though he doesn’t know what else to say.

Wesker purses his lips and looks towards the window to the right of Irons’ bed, streetlights glowing yellow in the dark. “Yes. I suppose they’ll be here soon.”

“Wesker,” Chris whispers, the shock thawing from his words, and Wesker slowly turns to face him.

He can see them. The sweet, pretty gears inside Chris’ head turning, his reality shifting, then going back to what it was before, then shifting again. Wesker sees the need in his eyes. The need to be comforted against the sting of this truth; the need to be comforted by the deceiver over his own deception.

The Chris that Wesker used to know would have launched into action. The hot-blooded Chris that entered the STARS office would already be fighting him off.

But this Chris is truly broken. This Chris looks up at him, confused and muddled, his mind so thoroughly fucked that it has no idea what to do.

He starts to cry, body shaking violently, and Wesker drops to his knees in front of him.

“Christopher,” he rumbles gently, taking Chris’ hands into his own and then placing them on either side of his face. He turns his head towards one, resting it there. When Chris doesn’t pull away, or spit at him, or do anything but stand there waiting for him to finish, Wesker knows that he is owned. It’s as good as Irons’ throat ripped apart. It’s as good a time as any.

“Let me explain everything,” he offers.

Chapter Text

All of the hotels have begun to blur in his mind, taking on a swampy mess of remembered ice machines and off-white sheets. It’s all a nightmarish collage of bright blue pools and fragrant soaps; it’s a lovely dream featuring his body coiled up in the blankets, shivering in the cold of the air conditioner whenever Wesker wasn’t there to warm him.

In that way, it almost doesn’t feel real being here now. Not in some anonymous revolving door of temporary king-sized beds where the blankets seem to change themselves and the trash is emptied each time he returns to the room, but here.

Home.

His trash is certainly not empty. It’s as full as he left it, though now spilling over the edge where some rodent must have pawed through it.

He feels a strange urge to quietly walk over, pick up all the moldy wrappers and crumpled napkins, and carry them out to the trash. But even if he did, he has no idea what he’d do after that. Even if he cleaned every fucking room in this unit, turning the entire place upside-down, he doesn’t know what he’d do once there was nothing left to be done. Take the furniture apart leg by leg, maybe. Rip himself to pieces limb by limb, starting with his mind.

Behind him, he hears Wesker speaking. He’s been speaking for a very long time now.

The older man’s words pulse out like light traveling to the ocean floor, and more than anything Chris wants to turn around and fold into them, dissolving into his arms and explanations, but for some reason he can’t stop staring at his couch.

“Barry,” he hears himself say, his friend’s name numb on his lips.

The words stop. He hears Wesker purse his lips.

“What… what happened to Barry?” Chris asks.

He sees him in his mind, slumping off the side of the couch, his neck swollen and inflated, so dead that he ceased to be anything else. All that’s left of him now is a rusty stain on the floorboards.

“He was removed,” Wesker answers concisely.

“By the police?” Chris manages to get out the question before he has to crush his teeth down on his lip, new tears piercing their way out of him. “Or by you?”

“By Birkin,” Wesker states.

All at once, Chris feels himself spin around. He looks up at Wesker, where the older man gazes down at him through his glasses, solid and immovable the same as he’s always been, and Chris feels something collapse inside of him. Like the muscles of belief that’ve been holding him up have finally given way, snapping like cords and tumbling like intestines spilling out of his body. A ragged, desperate croaking explodes from his throat. For a moment he doesn’t even realize that it’s a human, let alone himself, making that noise.

“Chris,” Wesker warns sharply.

“You worked with Birkin at Umbrella-”

“There was a time when I imagined Birkin would serve as my second, yes,” Wesker speaks over him, chin raised just high enough to claim all the wavering power in the room. “But as I got to know you in STARS, it became rapidly evident that he did not have what you have.”

Chris feels himself twitching. His living room is warm. There’s sunlight sunk so deep into the floorboards and the happily mismatched furniture that it feels welcoming even in the dead of night, but Chris himself no longer makes sense inside of it. There’s something ugly fissuring inside of him, turning his mindscape dark with pollution.

Chris blinks. His eyelashes clear a path through his teary vision.

“And what is it that I have?” he asks dryly.

Wesker’s answer is short but precise. “Heart.”

Chris blinks again, mind turning over violently. He wants to stumble back onto the couch but he can’t stomach the thought of being so close to the place where Barry laid dead. He can’t see anything. He’s here, looking at his own home, looking at Wesker, but there’s something wrong with his vision. Everything he sees is vague and unclear.

“Innocence,” Chris supplies disdainfully.

He sees Wesker’s head turn slightly, surprised. “No,” he considers slowly, giving the smallest shake. “No, Christopher. Not innocence. Not after everything you experienced as a child.”

Wesker sighs, and then the glasses are being carefully lifted from his eyes. He sets them down on Chris’ kitchen counter before easing his weight back to lean against the surface. There are red marks on the bridge of his nose from the nose pads, bursts of color that brighten the hollow ping of his milky green irises. He looks worn down- human- as his eyes sweep tiredly across the floor, and against his better judgement, Chris feels a pricking at his heart. A deep, aching need to lie down with him and chase the wrongness away with their bodies.

“I rather believe that you and I think the same way, Chris. You’re smart. Crafty. Complex in a way that makes you capable of arbiting justice on a three-dimensional plane. You just needed some refinement in order to fully actualize that.”

Chris feels Wesker’s hand hooking around the back of his head, and he doesn’t even know how he’s suddenly so close that he can be touched. He’s stepped in, he realizes, closing the gap between them, and now that he’s here he can’t stop himself from keening forward to melt his body against Wesker’s.

“You were working for Umbrella…” A slash of ugliness rips through his chest, but Wesker soothes it with a caress down the back of his head, filling the fissure with flowers of reassurance.

“I wanted to tell you.” Chris feels Wesker’s face hovering close to his neck before it presses in, apologetic prods and kisses peppering the crook between his collars. “I just needed to find a way to help you understand. To make you see what that truly meant.” He sounds pained. Wounded. Like he is tortured by this confession. “I’m afraid that things aren’t black and white the way you were told they were. Things in this world are violent, and senseless, and chaotic, and those of us empowered to make real change are unfortunately required to harness the very beasts that we seek to destroy.”

Chris relaxes, and then Wesker’s hands are on either side of his face, holding him a distance from his body so that he can study Chris’ eyes. He doesn’t sound so tortured anymore, Chris thinks to himself. In a way, he sounds excited.

Chris, on the other hand, just feels tired. So, so tired.

“Irons and I have always sported opposing visions when it comes to reconfiguring the corrupted world; he is a blight on bioweaponry, and in far too prominent a position with Umbrella.” His voice goes rough, disdain injecting a growling passion into his words. “His interests lie only with money and fulfilling his own sadistic pleasures. He isn’t the least concerned with improving the human condition. And he’s been in my way for a very long time.”

There’s silence. The world comes back into focus and Chris realizes he’s drifted, leaving Wesker gazing wordlessly at him.

He thinks Wesker is going to berate him for not listening. Or worse, dissolve with disappointment in Chris, because for once, Chris’ mind can’t snap all the way to being able to fully comprehend.

Instead, Wesker just reaches out and places his hand down on the side of Chris’ face.

“My darling,” he says lowly, a gentle frown on his lips. His thumb strokes across Chris’ cheek, the motion so tender and loving that it threatens to wipe away everything that’s happened tonight. “What happened to that cocksure look of yours? I miss seeing it on your face.”

With a helpless sigh, Chris closes his eyes and leans into Wesker’s touch.

He remembers bantering with Wesker at lightening-speed, volleying philosophies and life stories back and forth. Back in the STARS office, it was like playing with palpable ball of power, just for the thrill of seeing it bounce between them. Now he is nothing like himself at all.

“You don’t want it,” he forces out through his teeth, feeling his face tighten in anticipation of a blow. “You don’t want to know what I’m really thinking.”

“I always want your thoughts,” Wesker counters in a surprisingly gentle tone.

“No.” He doesn’t mean to do it, but the resistance tears itself out of his throat. Childish, useless, and full of tears.

“Yes,” Wesker returns firmly, fingers curling. “I do.”

“I think it’s disgusting,” Chris barks. His body jerks, as if thrown by its own release, and he shivers in the aftershock of its force. “I think you working on bioweapon engineering is fucking repulsive.”

Wesker’s eyes are hard and unmoving on his own. “I understand.”

“No,” Chris flails back uselessly, grabbing Wesker’s hands and ripping them off him. “No, you don’t. How can you possibly understand? You’re the one who did this.”

“Chris,” Wesker insists, leaning back in. He takes Chris by the face, his grasp firmer now, his stature curving so that he arches over Chris from above, like a tree offering shade and fruit and shelter. “I did this because I believe that you will grow to agree that I’m right. I believe that underneath all of the social conditioning, you think the same way I do.”

“I don’t think anything,” Chris snarls.

“I disagree, my pet. I believe that you have much to contribute by way of thought.”

Finally, Wesker’s grasp drops from his face. Chris exhales, all of the tightly coiled tension uncording from his chest. “I don’t want it to be like this,” he whines, feeling the desperation bubbling up inside of him.

He’s grasping. At the air, at Wesker, at nothing. At anything that will make this feeling go away.

He steps back, wrapping his arms around himself, and before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s scratching viciously at his own skin, kneading himself with his fingernails and then ripping up the skin from his arms, helpless pants bursting from his lungs.

For a moment Wesker just watches him. His head cocked, his eyes flickering inquisitively all over Chris’ body, no expression on his face. And then Chris starts to scream and Wesker is stepping in to cage him up in his arms. He clamps a hand down on Chris’ mouth.

“Hush,” he orders, no comfort the command, and Chris dissolves sobbing against his chest.

“Please,” Chris begs, his voice a pathetic hiccup. “Please.”

He feels fingers pull hard on his hair, prying his head back, and all at once Wesker’s open mouth is on his, replacing the hand, tongue shoving past the tears and phlegm streaming down his face. Chris whimpers, surprised, and Wesker fucks his tongue down Chris’ throat, one hand snaking around his shoulders and the other disappearing into his pants, squeezing Chris’ dead cock in his hands.

To Chris’ surprise, he hears himself gasp into Wesker’s mouth. He feels his lifeless dick pulse with blood.

“Wesker,” he breathes out in a strangled cry, body starting to shake. “Wesker, I need-”

Before he can finish begging, both of Wesker’s hands pull back. They reappear to clamp down on his shoulders, and then, with their owner providing a sympathetic click, they begin lowering him to the floor.

“You don’t want to think, my poor boy?” Wesker coos, tilting his head in a way that reminds Chris of kings ordering executions and reptiles scanning for prey. His knees hit the floor and he opens his mouth on instinct, but Wesker is still forcing him down. He drops onto his hands and knees, and only then does Wesker step away to examine him. “You don’t have to, then, angel. Sit back.”

Trembling, Chris folds himself into a sitting position. Wesker is so far above him, now, calling him things that he’s never been called before. Wesker could do anything to him.

“You’re angry with me, but you still trust me,” Wesker voices.

Chris feels his face curl. He doesn’t want to believe it.

“That’s love, Christopher. You may not realize it, but that is an instinctive act of love.”

Chris looks back up through dewy lashes and Wesker seems pleased. Proud. A ripple of pleasure whispers through Chris’ belly.

“I’m sorry, Chris. I didn’t realize it was hurting you this much. If thinking is causing you so much harm, I will happily rid you of that burden whenever you ask me to.”

Chris opens his mouth to speak but all he can say is, “Please.”

When Wesker’s boot presses down between his legs, all light touch with no pressure, he’s already bucking up against it, mewling quietly through his grief. He sees a flicker in Wesker’s red-rimmed eyes, a delight ghosting through the green. Like he’s wanted this for a very long time.

“I know you’re not receptive to this right now, and I don’t mind having to repeat myself tenfold, but all the same, you should hear me out.”

Helplessly Chris nods, and like a reward, the sole of Wesker’s boot presses hard over the shape of his erection.

He groans, eyes fluttering closed. The control gives and he feels his hands land flat on the floorboards behind him, both propping him up and offering his body. The heel of Wesker’s boot presses down on his balls, grinding just hard enough to make his attention flare to a panicked state of alertness.

“You don’t have to buy into everything that I believe. But after everything I’ve done to keep you safe, you owe it to me to at least lend me your ear.”

“Okay,” Chris gusts out, feeling the grooved sole of Wesker’s tactical boot slide up his chest and settle in between his pecs. It’s like he wants to step on his heart and send the yolk of it bursting everywhere, without fear of slipping in the mess. He wants that too, he thinks distantly. He wants it too.

“Alrighty,” Wesker says, stone-faced once again. “Go on, then, Chris.”

Chris stares up at him blankly. He feels himself hanging on to Wesker, and has the strange sensation that if their eye contact were to drop, he’d fall down into a bottomless abyss.

“Go-?”

“Take yourself out of your pants,” Wesker supplies. “I like to keep a rapt audience.”

Chris closes his eyes, heart kicking up. He wonders if Wesker can feel it pounding through the rubber of his soles.

As he unbuttons his pants, wrestling haphazardly to free his dick from the teeth of his zipper, a breeze of a memory flits through his mind, so starkly different from what’s happening now that he can hardly believe it shares the same lifetime.

He sees her- Claire. His younger sister sitting behind him, dragging her long nails through his scalp, the two of them mothering each other in ways their missing parents never could again.

Do you believe we have a conscience? he remembers her asking, the soothing motion of her nails making his brain burst with the gentle pleasure of family love that he’s been starving for his entire adult life.

Like- an actual voice in the back of your head? he’d asked.

Yeah. Something to back you up when you know something is wrong. Something that doesn’t shut up no matter how loudly you sing to drown it out.

Claire, he’d told her with a small smile on his lips. It’s not that bad to steal from the grocery store. They throw shit away every day. Stop beating yourself up about it.

I just mean… He hears it towards the back of his brain, a small ringing that he can’t ignore. Doesn’t it seem like he uses sex to control you?

Before he can chase the thought down, Wesker’s boot slides back down between his legs, destroying every coherent string of words that’s ever existed in his head.

He takes a breath in, altogether fearful and discomforted and savagely aroused at the sensation of the sole pressing down on his exposed cock. There are dirt and pebbles lodged between the grooves. There’s the protrusion of the heel that cuts away to form a harsh edge. He hears himself whimper, not entirely out of pleasure, and Claire’s voice is firmly gone from his head.

Wesker was right. It’s the thinking that tortures him. He needs anything that can shut off the thinking.

“You may have gathered this already- if not from your time on the streets, then I’m sure from our days on the run.” Wesker tilts his head, examining Chris, like he needs to be sure that he’s absorbing this. “Consciousness is the problem. It’s the source of all suffering.”

His shoe shifts, crushing down with a grinding motion, and Chris squeaks.

“Can you attend to two things at once?” he hears Wesker ask him.

With heavy lids, Chris forces his eyes back up. He nods, wordlessly, then lets his eyes hang low in their sockets, keeping them attached to Wesker’s even as the older man leans in, applying more pressure.

“I believe that life should be collective. I experienced that of an orphanage upbringing, you know. A childhood not unlike your own. During my time there, we worked as a unit towards fulfilling our common goals. It was like the STARS office, but the aim wasn’t search and rescue. The goal was to further Umbrella’s vision; to collectively bring it out into the world and see it realized.”

The mention of an orphanage fills Chris’ thoughts with Claire again. All at once he feels like she’s in the room with him. He feels like she’s standing behind him, her nails in his hair, whispering into his head.

Get up, Chris, she tells him.

“There should be a singularity in life. Life should be collective- like a database, or a hill of ants. Like a network of fungi, spreading its web across the entire chain of existence. We should be focused solely on action and advancement. Unburdened by the suffering that will occur whether or not we have the capacity to feel it.”

Chris, she says again, her voice like the conscience rustling in the back of his skull. He is going to crush you.

He opens his mouth to try to challenge Wesker, but Wesker has talked his mind in knots already. His brain churns, moving on its own, and he hates his thoughts for wandering and considering it.

A welling of hatred boils up in his chest. Then Wesker’s boot plants itself down hard on it, striking him back, and all the wind gets knocked from his lungs.

He wants to tell Wesker that he’s wrong. That you minimize the suffering, you don’t fucking destroy the people who suffer. But before he can speak, the sole of Wesker’s boot presses down on his cheek, rolling the right side of his face onto the wooden boards, and his mouth is open and gasping, not speaking, his hand wrapped silkenly around his own cock.

“I want to see my vision through, Chris. But I also want you on my side.” After a moment, Wesker eases up so Chris can roll his eyes back towards the ceiling. “I know better, but still… still, I want you with me. Perhaps that is the greatest weakness my own conscious mind has afforded me.”

Chris lurches up to a sitting position, grabbing the heel of Wesker’s shoe in one hand, and with his fist circled hungrily around his cock, he presses his mouth down on the toe of the boot.

“I want that,” he says around a kiss pressed to the dyed leather. He lets his tongue fall out of his mouth and drags it slowly up the laces, groaning quietly at the sting of the metal, the traction of the hemp, the plasticky chew of the dangling aglets.

Wesker’s heel suddenly presses down on his throat like the blade of a knife, digging into the tenderness between his collar bones.

He glances up at Wesker, asking if he’s about to killed, and Wesker simply returns the look.

When Wesker doesn’t make a move towards crushing him to death, he angles his head back and lifts Wesker’s boot higher so that he can run his tongue along the maze of the grooves below. His cock leaps in his hand at the repulsed swirl stirring in his belly, a helpless groan rolling out of him with each piece of grit that he dislodges with his tongue.

What the fuck are you doing? he hears battering around inside of his skull. Get up.

“Wesker,” he moans.

Wesker leans down, silencing her voice in his head. He takes Chris by the chin, trailing his fingers delicately underneath it, and carefully replaces the boot with his fingers, feeding them into Chris’ mouth one by one.

“You’re a good boy,” he says, making Chris’ whole body sigh with contentment. There’s a release, not sexual but emotional, and he feels his shoulders start to heave, uncontrollable sobs bursting from his chest even as he continues to suck Wesker’s fingers as far back into his throat as the older man will put them.

“This is a lot of stress on your body,” Wesker murmurs. “I’m sorry.”

With an uncharacteristic tenderness, he takes Chris by the shoulders and helps him to his feet.

That gnarled, angry, betrayed distrust blooms almost instantly back inside of Chris. Any second that he is not being completely overwhelmed with sensations is a second that he knows his mind will revolt, piecing their entire history back together from the first time he ever reported to his new captain’s office. His mind turns and then turns again, the grit of all that he thought he knew shaking out. It was beautiful, before. Now it’s all turned ugly with deceit.

“Why would you put me through this?” he demands through gritted teeth, grinding his forehead against Wesker’s shoulder. “I thought- you made me think- you lied to me about everything.”

In one motion, Wesker drops to his knees. He laces his fingers tight with Chris’, the gesture a begging motion, and as he holds them clasped together, he looks up at Chris like he’s seeking supplication from a god.

“Christopher,” he pleads hoarsely, taking Chris’ hands and wrapping them around his own throat. “Whatever it takes to build your trust back- if you need to be angry, defiant. If you need to push back against me while you work through this. Whatever you need- I am at your mercy.”

Chris looks down at him. This man who makes no sense here in his warm, buttery home. This man who used to make him feel like he was gliding joyfully through life and now makes his mind feel like a disgusting iceberg turning over and over again.

He wants it to be okay. He wants Claire to stop pounding at the back of his conscience.

“So what?” he demands cynically, clamping his teeth together to stop the crying once and for all. “What, we just stay here in my apartment? And cook meals, and do our laundry together?”

Wesker’s eyes scan back and forth, searching him. “If that’s what you want, then yes.”

Chris scoffs and looks away.

“We can stay here. Or we can go anywhere you want, my pet.” His hands slip up Chris’ thighs, where a pair of slender fingers wrap around his forgotten cock. “Or… I can take you with me to Umbrella. I can show you all the things I’ve always wanted you to see. I can help you understand.”

“Wesker,” Chris whimpers.

“Let me fuck you,” Wesker insists quietly, pressing a kiss to the roundness of Chris’ belly. “Please, my lovely, loyal boy. Let me give you what you need. That’s all I want to do. You know that is all I have ever wanted for you.”

Chris’ hands tighten around his throat. He feels the bob of Wesker’s adam’s apple underneath his clenched fingers when the older man swallows. Then he hears the creaking gag from his throat when he pulls Wesker’s mouth onto his cock.

He looks down, and with a white-hot flush he realizes that it’s the tears in the corner of Wesker’s eyes making him shiver not with forgiveness, but with desire.

When Chris steps into the doorway of his own bedroom, skin hot and red from the scalding shower, skin pungent with the scent of too much soap soaked into his pores, Wesker is like a vision that stepped out of the imagination he used to nurse months ago. He’s lying on Chris’ bed, propped up against the headboard with his legs stretched long across the comforter. His fingers are curled around a piece of paper, clutching it tight enough to bleed the ink off the page, and he looks both all-too human and simultaneously too large for life, both a waking dream and a walking nightmare.

“What’s that?” Chris asks, the flush of steam still coloring his cheeks.

Slowly, Wesker’s fist crushes the paper into a ball. He looks over, eyes sharp enough to slice. He opens his mouth but Chris stops him.

“Is that part of this plan you’ve been secretly following this whole time?” he deadpans, dread sliding hot and sticky down his core. “Something from Umbrella?”

“Sort of,” Wesker answers simply. He looks like he’s turning something over and over in his head; whatever it was, he settles on frankness. “It’s the genetic sequencing.”

“Sequencing,” Chris repeats.

“For the Progeniture Virus.”

Chris studies Wesker. “What Irons had,” he states, though it feels like a question. “The vial we went to retrieve.”

That was a lie too, he realizes with an electric zap. Wesker didn’t bring him there to implicate Irons by collecting evidence. He has no idea why Wesker brought him there.

There are too many lies. Too many things that don’t make sense, that he doesn’t understand. The idea of trying to sort through them all makes Chris want to lie down and die.

Slowly, Wesker shakes his head. “No,” he offers in answer to this particular question. “No, Irons and I had differing opinions about the forms that humanity should take. I don’t agree with that particular strand of the virus being out in the world.”

“So…” Chris prompts, feeling his words start to shake again. “So… what’s yours? Your opinion.”

Wesker sighs. He turns slightly, then pats the edge of the bed. When Chris doesn’t come, he sighs again.

“I grew up in a place very much like an orphanage,” he explains, drawing off their unfinished conversation from earlier. “A home sponsored by the Spencer Foundation. I won’t get into it- but I will tell you that it was a rigorous environment that pushed us all to the limits of ourselves. We were shown our true capabilities.”

Skeptically, Chris eyes him from afar. He’s a pale swath of color on Chris’ midnight blue bedsheets, glowing like a moon in the sky, or perhaps the reflection of one in a river. Chris wants to trust him. He wants to believe him so bad it’s like his body is pulling itself apart, sacrificing its own brain just for the sake of allowing itself to be deceived.

Chris, he hears Claire say in the back of his mind. Even miles away, and obscured by the veil of memories, she sounds clearer than the man sitting right in front of him.

“And… what were your… true capabilities?”

“Well,” Wesker says, fixing him with a look. “When it came to it- if I had to rise above being human, and become something more- I learned that I could.”

Chris swallows. It gets stuck in his throat.

Wesker’s arrogance. His chokehold on Chris’ world. His surety, and his authority to follow through on that- another swell of disgust rushes hot inside Chris’ guts.

“You want-” he starts, choking on his own words. “You want-”

His former captain angles his head down, like he’s daring Chris to say the words.

“You want to make yourself into a bioweapon,” he spits out.

The unbudging glare of Wesker’s eyes on his is answer enough.

“You’re just like Irons,” Chris hears himself say, something breaking loose inside of him. “You’re- you’re twisted-”

“Irons,” Wesker snaps angrily, “Wanted to make monsters, and thereby, make money for his own wallet. He wasn’t going to accept the responsibility that comes along with a project this significant. He cared about capitalizing on Umbrella’s pharmaceutical revenue; he didn’t want to make this a better earth to live on. He was a coward, completely unfit for the position he was in.”

“Why-” Chris yells it out and then breaks off, biting his tongue. When he speaks again, his words are calmer. Level. “Why am I here, Wesker? Why would you make such an elaborate mess just to involve me in all of this?”

“Because, my darling, I was protecting you. I didn’t want you falling prey to Irons the same way Barry did. And.” He gives a frustrated huff and looks down, letting the crumpled paper roll out of his palm and onto the floor. “Because I want you, Christopher. In ways I cannot rationalize. I would do anything to keep you by my side.”

Chris opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. At first, it’s just a terrible thought passing through his mind. Then it’s a horrified rustling taking root in his throat.

“You killed Barry,” he realizes in a whisper.

Slowly, Wesker’s head cocks. His eyes laser in. Still stroking his hair, Claire murmurs you’re smart, Chris into his ear.

“Why would I kill Barry?” Wesker demands.

“To make it personal,” Chris says distantly, drifting far away from himself. “To use my emotions against me. To radicalize me.”

For a moment Wesker just stares at him, those green lights drilling into him.

“That,” he finally responds, his words measured and tough, “Is awful to hear, Christopher. You really believe that I’m evil? After all the ways you’ve gotten to know me, you really think I would do something like that?”

Chris’ mind slips, melting back into Wesker’s reality. He squeezes his eyes shut and makes a grasp for control, trying desperately to steady himself, but all at once, and all of a sudden, it’s like the spell has worn off. He hears Wesker, and his mind aches to believe him, but suddenly he can’t.

It’s because of Claire. It’s her voice in the back of his head.

He can’t always believe himself. He can’t trust his inner self. But he can trust her, because he’s always known her to be true.

Suddenly Wesker’s convoluted lies and crafty manipulations feel so obvious that he’s ashamed of himself for ever falling for them. He’s falling apart, coming completely unfasted, ready to destroy the Wesker in his brain before making his way towards the one taking up space on his bed, but then he makes the terrible mistake of opening his eyes- and when he sees the hurt on Wesker’s face, he immediately wants to drop to his knees and apologize.

He’s unworthy of the ground he’s standing on. With all that Wesker’s done for him, and in all the ways he’s continued to doubt him, he doesn’t even deserve to even feel the warmth coming off the older man’s skin. It’s his doubt that’s evil. He’s already a monster, without ever needing a vial of anything injected into his blood.

“You know, you can be very mean sometimes, Christopher,” Wesker says, the accusation biting. "You have a great capacity for cruelty.”

Chris closes his eyes again, this time in shame. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

He feels like his brain is being split apart. It’s been dragged in two different directions and it’s going to break.

Snap out of it! Claire screams at him, furious terror in her voice. You wouldn’t feel this way if there wasn’t something extremely wrong.

“If I was as cunning as you seem to think I am, why would I risk everything for you?” Wesker demands. “Why wouldn’t I just kill Irons, and then you, and be done with all of it?”

“I don’t know,” Chris answers honestly.

Because he’s preying on you, Claire tells him. He sick and twisted, and he doesn’t see people as people.

“I’m just bad,” Chris finally says, offering it like a confession that has the power to resolve everything. “I’m just bad, okay? I’m just bad.”

Even though he believes it- even though he knows it’s true, and even though he knows that after all of this is over, he will still be fucked up forever, when Wesker doesn’t move to tell him that he’s wrong, Claire’s words lock into place. She’s right. This man has been dragging Chris around by his cock and by his brain this whole time, and he’s been too selfish and stupid to see it.

Chris steps forward, advancing towards the bed, and Wesker reclines back against the headboard to make the space that he needs.

In the times before, Wesker would already be reaching out to offer him comfort. His arms would be around Chris’ body, pulling him in, and he’d hold Chris against him while Chris sobbed and stuttered, murmuring sweetness to assure him that everything is okay.

But nothing is okay now. Things have changed. Chris’ mind has turned over one last time, spilling out with all that waste and briny water, and this time it refuses to turn over again.

“Apologize,” Wesker commands him.

Chris’ face hardens. He shakes his head.

“Apologize,” Wesker hisses.

Chris grabs Wesker by the shoulders and drops down on top of him, pinning him against the headboard. He dives forward, clamping his mouth over Wesker’s.

“Chris,” Wesker orders.

Something snaps. “I’m not sorry!” he yells, jerking forward threatening.

“Oh, is that so?” Wesker growls back.

“Shut up,” Chris barks at him, sinking his nails into Wesker’s skin. “Shut the fuck up.”

To his surprise, Wesker murmurs out something encouraging and leans back, parting his lips. “Make me,” he purrs, his words like steam seeping out of a valve.

Emboldened by rage, Chris leans in and runs his tongue over Wesker’s, feeling the older man’s jaw slacken, and hears a pleased humming susurrating out of Wesker’s mouth and into his. It’s a sound he’s never heard Wesker make before. Despite himself, he feels a ripple of excitement flare down his spine.

He shifts, kissing Wesker with a renewed voracity, and this time Wesker groans.

The older man’s hands land on his chest, cupping them like tits, and then travel up his arms like he’s measuring his muscles.

“You’re a man, now, Christopher,” he says, his tone sharply flattering. “You weren’t that way when you first came to me.”

“Yeah?” Chris asks, an angry flush falling across his face.

“Yes. You were a fumbling, starry-eyed boy. So unsure of himself that he second guessed if he was making a pot of coffee correctly.”

The anger spills down all around him. “You’ve been watching me for a long time.”

Breathless, Wesker nods. “Yes,” he agrees in an exhale. “I’ve always known you were special.” He pauses, then draws back. “What do you think?”

Chris obeys his magnetism, pulling back in turn. He lets himself look at Wesker: so stoic, so tall and in control, now juxtaposed by his own appearance in Chris’ bed. His eyes are exposed and bloodshot, bearing that weakened look that people sport when they finally take their glasses off. Chris knows his muscles are lean and strong, but here, they’re left looking almost feeble beneath the soft white t-shirt he’s wearing.

For just a second, Chris feels strong.

He doesn’t know if he’s bad. He isn’t sure if there’s something inherently dark about him; if his willingness to fall for Wesker’s treachery was a choice that his instincts deliberately made for him, or if he’s a helpless fly who was guided like an idiot into the spider’s web. It doesn’t matter. In the end, he’s here all the same. He’s here, and Wesker wants to end humanity with him.

“What do I think about what?” he spits.

Wesker’s eyes dart up, and he realizes he’s still pinning Wesker to the board.

“Shall I fuck you?” Wesker asks. “Like a man, this time?”

Chris’ expression twists. He shakes his head.

“No,” he answers, and he clocks the interested gleam in Wesker’s eyes. “No, Wesker. How about I fuck you.”

Chris is supposed to be the one restraining him, but when Wesker’s hand appears around his throat, squeezing gently, he recognizes that Wesker still has all the power in the room.

“I like to be fucked roughly,” he warns with a growl in his voice. There’s a shift in the dynamic between them, and suddenly Chris feels like a child who has asked to be spoken to like an adult. If that’s what this is, Wesker is certainly obliging. “You’ll need to hold me down and fuck me so hard it hurts, little boy. So hard you make me squeal like a pig. Can you handle that, Christopher?”

The words are mocking. There’s another powerful swelling of rage inside of him, this one closer to pure disgust. He pulls Wesker forward and then slams him back against the headboard, making the older man hiss as his head cracks against the wood.

“Yes,” he answers through his teeth.

“Then you may,” Wesker snarls back.

This is it. He sees it now.

This is the real Wesker.

Something has broken in the illusion between them, and now, for every move he makes, Wesker offers a counter move. Chris traps his hands with his own and Wesker is already sliding them down to grip his wrists and pull them above his head, hitching him forward. Chris grinds his weight down on Wesker’s lap and Wesker is slithering underneath him like a snake, all lithe energy squirming around on the bed Chris has slept alone in for years.

Chris chases him, caging him up with his limbs, and in a happier context, he’d be breathless with laughter. This would be playful, and fun, and he’d splay the other person with kisses all over their face before asking in a whisper if they wanted him to do more.

But this isn’t fun. These aren’t affectionate touches. This is Wesker.

He wrestles himself onto Wesker’s back, knocking the other man onto his stomach with a well-timed roll, and wraps his hands around Wesker’s wrists.

Chris buries his face into the back of Wesker’s head while Wesker sighs, finally going limp enough to give Chris an opportunity to mount him.

He stops, just for a second. Towering over Wesker, with his dick pressed up to the resisting ring of muscle, something inside of him stirs. A fear that even after everything, that this is going to hurt him.

And then a wave of nausea at how badly he wants to see Wesker twisted out of shape.

Pressed into the mattress, with his hands bound and restrained where Chris holds them at the base of his spine, Wesker’s head turns sharply, seething words already in his mouth.

“What are you waiting for?” he snaps. “You’ve spent five months with me, you should at least know your way around a fuck by now.”

With a helpless burst of fury, Chris grabs Wesker around the waist and throws him onto his back. The mattress absorbs the shock, Wesker’s head hits the headboard again and he shrieks through his teeth, and Chris hooks his arms underneath Wesker’s legs, hoisting him up so that he’s nearly upside-down.

He angles forward, giving Wesker another good pull, and forces himself past the resistance.

Wesker throws his head back and hisses, eyes squeezing tight, and Chris grabs him hard around the throat.

“Look at me, Wesker,” he demands.

Five months, he thinks. Has it really been that long?

Five months crawling around inside each other’s bodies, wearing each other’s skins so tightly that the seams separating them have started to grow into each other. He feels Wesker’s organs in his ribcage, Wesker’s double helix in his cells. He tastes Wesker’s saliva when he eats and he sees Wesker’s limbs when he looks down at his own. He feels Wesker in everything that he does, somehow both inside of him and wrapped all around him.

Gradually, Wesker’s blonde eyelashes unfurl. Chris tightens the choke before thrusting deeper inside of him.

When Wesker’s eyes meet his, he knows that what Wesker sees isn’t the cold, expressionless affect of a sociopath, nor the dominant anger of a man bent on taking what he wants. What he sees on Chris’ face is a helpless wildness- a fearful need, etched deeper onto his face than lust will ever be.

Faintly, he feels something trailing up his chest. It’s Wesker’s hand, reaching out between them, to run his thumb over Chris’ cheek.

“Yes,” he pants, stroking Chris’ face with a loving hand. “Yes, Chris.”

With a desperate whine, Chris tightens his hold on Wesker’s leg and hitches him up so he can start fucking him, exaggerated thrusting motions that he uses to expel all of the extra energy that’s been stored up tonight. Desperation, fear, and grief make his motions unusually harsh and erratic, and again, he has a dreadful sense that he has no idea who he is at all now.

Below him on the bed, Wesker lets his arms drop on either side of his head, submitting completely. It’s in that moment that he sees a new side of Wesker that he has never been shown before.

With his teeth gritted in pain, Wesker moans like he’s never felt this much bliss. His face unravels, losing all the sharpness of its defined edges and cutting cheek bones, everything from his jawline to the crow’s feet kissing his eyelids softening out.

Chris adds pressure to the hand around Wesker’s throat, pressing down until the mattress meets his fingertips. Wesker yelps, eyes rolling open, those leafy green orbs unearthing a vulnerability Chris could spend his whole life feasting on, and Chris finds himself thinking that Wesker almost looks… happy.

Wesker turns his eyes up at Chris, finally attempting a raspy inhale that doesn’t quite yield any air, and Chris knows he is wondering if the choke is going to end at all.

Chris thinks about Wesker in his home. He thinks about Wesker at his dining table, groaning tiredly about all of this while Chris lays a plate of eggs down on the counter in front of him. He thinks about watching tv, curled up with Wesker on his couch. He thinks about reading a book in bed, the two of them side by side, attuned perfectly to each other’s breath, and grief twists in his heart. He wants it. He wants all of it so bad.

This doesn’t have to be over, he tells himself. He has a choice.

If he was being manipulated into doing awful things against his own judgement, then that was one thing. But now-

Now, if he knows that he’s bad, and that what Wesker’s doing is bad too, and he decides to rise up to meet Wesker where he stands…

Well. That’s just a decision.

Wesker looks up at him weakly, his eyes begging for air. With a shuddering exhale, Chris yanks his hand away.

Wesker falls back onto the mattress, coughing violently, and Chris stops everything to lean over him and make sure he’s okay.

With jerky motions, Wesker shakes his head against the sheets. “Beautiful,” he rasps out, reaching up to cup Chris’ face in his hands. His head turns, gazing at him, and Chris feels his heart gently pulse and bleed in response to the love Wesker is showing him, a tenderness embedded so deeply in all of this ugliness that he has no idea how he ever found it. Wesker coughs again, then gives a labored swallow. “Don’t stop, Chris.”

By the time Chris is fucking him again, there are tears raining down his cheeks and onto Wesker’s face. This time, it feels like the love in Wesker’s eyes grows from it. This time, Wesker opens his mouth to catch them.

“Good boy,” Wesker coos up at him through wet lips, body moving with Chris’ motions. “Tell me your thoughts.”

“I love you,” Chris says around a sob, leaning down to press their foreheads together, ignoring the way Wesker’s spine curves painfully beneath his weight. “I love you and you ruined me. You ruined me.”

Wesker strains upward, kissing him on the mouth.

“I saw you, Christopher,” he opposes delicately. “I’ve always seen who you were, deep down. And I’ve always loved you for that. Even when no one else would.”

Chris sobs again, but this time, it’s not out of anguish. It’s out of love.

They spend the entire night contorted together. When Chris thinks his body has given all it can stand to give, Wesker’s lips and hands are on him again, coaxing it back to full interest. He fucks Wesker every way he can think of, rutting and grinding until his dick is twitching and he can’t even tell if he’s coming anymore. He soaks resentments and grief and obsession into the pillow until he’s left a sopping mess of empty feelings, coiled up within Wesker’s comforting.

Wesker just holds him afterwards, once he’s too tired to even talk anymore.

Still, at the back of his mind, though, it’s Claire with her arms wrapped around him.

He’s wrong, Chris, she says sadly, and he gives a small, half-asleep cry, seeking the warmth of her memory. This isn’t who you are. I’m the one who knows who my brother really is. I’m the one who loves him for it.

He remembers them: two scrappy kids on the street, with matching dark hair and sun-burnt freckles, the pair of them up against a mean, always-moving world.

Then he sees himself and Wesker, ruling that same world, superhumans destroyed by the chemicals pumping through them, and he wishes Wesker would just love him for what he is. A street kid. A gentle boy, his greatest crime and most complex moral decision when he has to steal fruit for his sister.

Wesker loves what he’s turning Chris into, not what he is. But the way Chris loves him is much worse. Because his body and mind still love Wesker, even after they’ve seen him so clearly.

When Chris wakes in the glow of the early morning, blue light just beginning to seep around the edges of his curtains, Wesker is already awake at his side, stroking a hand up and down his back.

Chris doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here. He feels gutted, like someone ripped his insides out and left him lying there hollow. Everything is wet with tears and semen. His eyes are so crusted and puffy he can hardly get them open.

“What time is it?” he croaks out.

“Early.” Wesker sounds just as tired as he is. It’s a while before he speaks again. “You were crying out for her in your sleep.”

Chris resurfaces, trying frantically to remember where he is. “Who?” he asks, lifting his head.

“Your sister.”

Chris slumps back down onto the pillow. “Oh,” he says. And then it all clicks horrifically back into place. Irons, Birkin, Umbrella. Wesker.

A sick feeling rolls over in his stomach. His mind starts turning again, the constant whiplash just as awful as it was when it first started, and he blindly pushes himself onto his hands and knees and staggers towards the edge of the bed.

“I have to pee,” he says, fumbling dizzily onto his feet, and then stumbles out of the bedroom and into the living room.

They never turned off the lights in the kitchen area, and the orange glow zaps his head with another wave of anguish. He quickly smacks the light switch off and then hobbles towards the bathroom door, catching his face with his eyes before the tears can get out and sting his sore eyes anew.

There’s a darkness circling around and around inside of him, eating up everything. Only the love that Wesker shared with him last night glows pure and beautiful below the ugly mess.

He doesn’t understand it. How they can use their bodies as weapons to try to take each other apart, bringing each other little deaths fueled by their shared hatred, and then make love for hours with those same body parts. He doesn’t like what he’s turned into. He doesn’t like what Wesker has made him become.

He is crazy, he realizes with a helpless gasp. He has let himself become completely crazy.

He sits on the toilet for so long that the birds start to chirp. He clutches his chest and feels like he’s going to die.

His clothes from the other night are still piled on the floor and he reaches down, bundling them against his bare chest. He mourns the person he was when he put them on. He grieves for the world that he believed he lived in right up until the moment that Wesker snatched it away from him, telling him that it all was a lie.

It wasn’t just a lie, though. It was an elaborate plan crafted specifically to lead him to this place. A manipulation designed to guide him so far back into a cage made of love and want and need, that the only way he could ever get out again was to let Wesker kill him, or to kill Wesker himself in the process.

More than anything, he hates himself for letting himself be ruined. If Claire taught him anything, it’s that he is smarter than that.

Maybe not anymore though, he thinks as he gasps, grinding his fists against his chest. Maybe who he was got killed in the crossfire of whatever the fuck this is.

Wesker doesn’t come to check on him. He doesn’t wander out into the living room, quietly calling his name. But when Chris pads back into the room, a bathrobe pulled protectively over his naked body, Wesker is still propped up, waiting sleepily for him to return. Chris closes the door behind him, sinking the room back into a deeper shade of blue.

“Are you alright?” Wesker asks, and Chris’ chest tightens at how genuinely it sounds like he cares.

Silently, wrapping his arms around himself, Chris nods.

“Come here,” Wesker offers softly, and Chris sinks down onto the bed.

He curls up, resting his head on Wesker’s stomach, teeth clamped together hard. For a few minutes he just lets Wesker comfort him with caresses and sighs, nuzzling into the warmth of the older man’s body.

Chris lays his hand down on the bottom of Wesker’s belly, thumb swiping back and forth. After a while, he begins passing his own palm across Wesker’s naked body, stroking his hips and his thighs, his chest and his arms, offering Wesker his gratitude.

He angles his head up and Wesker presses a kiss on the top of his head. Then Wesker groans, shifting, limber legs lifting to glide against one another before spreading flat again.

Tentatively, Chris lays a hand over Wesker’s cock and finds it hard and drooling against his stomach. Wesker sighs and then moans at the touch, tiredly bucking into it.

He’s not surprised. The whole night was spent on Chris, wearing him out, affording him whatever pleasures he wanted. It makes sense that Wesker, left on the backburner all night, is leaping in his grasp, throbbing just from his touch. Grabbing the blanket, Chris pulls the fleece over his shoulders and swings down onto Wesker’s legs, lowering his mouth to Wesker’s hips.

Wesker’s hands find his head. They tighten around his hair, pulling gently when Chris drags his face teasingly along the shape of Wesker’s hip bones. He groans with exhausted abandon when Chris’ face nuzzles against his erection, the bridge of his nose sliding up along the underside of his cock.

“Chris,” Wesker sighs headily, his name spoken as though slipping out from a dream. Chris drags his face back down Wesker’s cock and Wesker actually keens with need, thrusting up into the air.

Chris’ heart twists, and he knows that he’ll never love Wesker more than he loves him now. He’ll never love him any less. And he will never despise him any differently.

He opens his mouth and sinks down onto Wesker’s cock, swallowing him deep in his throat in one go, and he knows from the sudden jolt in the older man’s body that Wesker already knows something is wrong. Wesker goes stiff and alert with a primitive kind of instinct, the soft animal of his body that should be yielding to pleasure and relief pinging, instead, with fear.

Before Wesker can figure it out what it is, Chris is snapping his jaw down, gnashing his teeth together. The diamond fangs do the rest.

Wesker screams, his hands suddenly ripping the hair out of Chris’ scalp, but Chris just tightens his jaw. He bites until he hears the skin splitting below the shrillness of the scream. Until there’s blood filling his mouth, pouring into his throat and down his cheeks. Until he feels the last snap and all he can hear is the ringing of Wesker’s pain in his ears, so piercing and loud he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to hear or taste anything ever again.

He opens his jaw and everything falls out. He doesn’t look. With his eyes clamped shut and his stomach churning, careening backwards against the dresser and knocking everything to the floor, he refuses to look at Wesker.

Wesker is hardly screaming anymore. He’s sobbing, anguished animalistic sounds that Chris will hear every night for the rest of his life.

“Chris-” he screeches, weeping, but the rest of what he says is unintelligible, his words scrambled in a way that Chris cannot parse.

Chris doesn’t open his eyes until he’s out of the apartment and on the street, and even then, it’s not until a siren blares from afar that he finally looks into the early dawn light and sees himself, robe half-open and covered in blood, teeth still bearing the phantom sensation of skin being shredded apart.

Without thinking, he runs. He doesn’t know how he gets to the payphone. Later, he’ll realize he doesn’t even remember punching in her number, nor most of what they said to each other.

All he knows is that while he’s clutching the landline tight, afraid that the rules that keep the world assembled will fall apart if he lets go, she tells him she’s coming for him.

“Chris?” she asks.

He whimpers out a response.

“Chris?” she tries again, more sharply this time.

“Claire,” he whimpers. “Claire.”

“Go hide in the alley behind the pizza shop. You know, where it juts in behind the dumpsters? Where we hid whenever we thought someone might’ve caught us stealing?”

He makes another useless sound. Claire’s voice rains steady on the other side of the line.

“It’ll be a few hours. You’ll wait there for me, though. Chris. You promise?”

Chris tries to speak and just hears himself sob.

“You gotta promise, bro,” she orders.

“Yeah,” he squeaks. “Yeah, I promise.”

After he finally unsticks himself from the phone both, hyper-aware of the blood all over him, it only takes a minute to find the old hideout. He waits for her, and it doesn’t feel like hours. He crawls into the hidey-hole behind the dumpsters, curling into himself, and slowly the entire world seems to shut off, disappearing into the disbelief of a brain that physically cannot process all that’s happened.

It’s only when he sees her that everything bursts to the surface.

She looks like everything. His entire world. She looks like Claire.

She looks like she wants to hug him, but instead she stays back, keeping her distance.

“Chris,” she breathes out, relieved. There’s incredulity in her eyes, like she’s scared to believe what she sees for fear of it all being an illusion. Her eyes trace sharply over the way he wraps his arms around himself and starts peeling at himself with distressed agitation, a sign that always let her know he was about to boil over. “Chris- we’ve been looking everywhere for you. We’ve been looking for you for months.”

He goes to speak and an anguished sound rips out of his throat. Claire whirls around, alarmed.

“Can you wait?” she asks, grabbing him by the hands. “Can you wait until we get back home?”

Forcing his jaw tight, Chris makes himself nod. He pulls it all back inside of him, jamming it up for one last time.

Claire guides him towards the sleek sedan parked parallel to the alleyway. She helps him up the step, then slides in next to him, pulling him into her arms like they can save him from car crashes and evil men and all of the Weskers running around inside of his eyes.

He knows that Wesker’s voice will be in his head now, wherever he goes. He knows that if it doesn’t last forever, this will continue to be Wesker’s world for a very long time.

He made his mark on Wesker, exactly the way he wanted to, but it will never be as deep or as debilitating as the one Wesker left on him.

At some point, he vaguely realizes that it’s Jill driving the vehicle. She’s sending nervous, worried glances back at them through the rearview mirror. He can’t bring himself to even look at her, let alone ask her why she’s here.

Mostly he just feels Claire’s arms around him, trying and trying and failing to melt the Wesker off of them.

Chapter Text

Claire has never seen him this bad before.

Somehow, she always knew this was there, lurking just beneath the surface. She remembers catching glimpses of it, when she was too young to understand what it meant, back when they were both still kids, their childhood skins freshly shed, turning them into the raw and unformed pulps of the people they would be.

There were always clues. She remembers the lovesickness on her brother’s face, flushed and glowing, when he snuck back into the warehouse in the middle of the night. Later on, he’d told her that he was meeting the bus boy at the first kitchen that he worked for, their clandestine hangouts held just behind the abandoned building so that Claire was never truly left alone.

She remembers that halo of brightness filling him up and pumping the life back into him- but she also remembers watching it wither and dim, the light going out between his eyes whenever the other boy wasn’t around.

She thinks about Chris, and Claire remembers a kid worrying himself half to death. He was tough as nails and strong as a fucking missile, but he always worried himself sick over her. Over both of them.

She didn’t want to give him another thing to stress about, but now she thinks she should have told him. Because she has the same problem that he does.

It’s their brain chemistry. There’s something fucked up about the way they make chemicals that gets them all obsessive and co-dependent and voraciously fucking starving for the object of their affections. She doesn’t know what causes it, or where it comes from, but whatever utterly fucked dopaminergic reward center that Chris was gifted by the genetic lottery, there is no doubt in her mind that Claire got it too.

It spooks her a little now to think about it.

She remembers discovering her sexuality in a classroom, the polished fingertips of her teacher’s aide dragging along the side of her hand- an older woman blinding her with flowing skirts and sheer throws, providing her with all the praise and affection her parents couldn’t, wrapping it up in a sweet, euphoric, grossly inappropriate bow that kept Claire’s mind completely enrapt for months.

Claire won’t share this with him, but as she nurses him back to health, she will wrestle with it until it makes her nauseous. How similar the two of them have always been. How deeply she understands exactly why Wesker happened to him.

Right now, she’s fighting tooth and nail to get him out of the car and into the front door. He’s not resisting, but he’s not making it easy on her either. He’s crumbling all over himself, weeping violently enough that Claire thinks he might puke across her front lawn, everything from his face to his fists to his heart clenched tightly enough to destroy the muscles.

With an arm hooked around his shoulder, Claire looks up at where Jill stands on the porch, holding the door open for them. There’s a stricken grimace on her face, like she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s supposed to do. Claire grits her teeth back at her; the feeling is almost mutual.

Putting her head back down, she heaves her brother forward with a forceful push.

“I’ve got you, Chris,” she guides him, even though the words don’t reach. “You’re almost there.”

By some grace of god, they make it up the stairs and into her bedroom.

Claire has herself wrapped around him before he can even fully get onto the bed. She pours over him with her body, grabbing his arms tight so that he can’t rip at himself anymore.

They hit the mattress. Chris starts to scream.

He’s sobbing, banshee wails filling Claire’s room, and Claire grinds her head against the side of his face, whispering hush, that he’s going to be alright, that everything is okay now and she promises to keep him safe for the rest of his life.

Claire never asks him why he’s covered in blood. He never tells her.

They don’t speak at all for the majority of that first week. It’s bad when he’s screaming- when he’s tearing layers of skin from his arms and ripping at his face with his nails, leaving cuts and claw marks all over himself. It’s bad when he’s sobbing, huge wracks that make him heave and tremble, his entire body in a horrible kind of motion that she can’t stop, even lying with her arms around him for hours at a time. It’s bad when he’s begging to god, or to her, or to Wesker.

But it’s worse when he finally goes quiet.

Suspended in a mire worse than death, Chris thinks to himself, vaguely, that he has dreamed of Claire’s arms far more times than he’s dreamed of Wesker’s.

In the loneliness of the night, his mind runs back to her. Whenever something gets to be too much, or not enough, he feels himself seeking her out, like he can pull her away from her new corner of the world and bring her back to him.

It’s a cruel trick that now that he finally has her back, he’s almost too numb to feel her.

Wesker has scorched him. Wesker has slash-and-burned his nerves and his heartstrings, leaving nothing in their wake. She brings him tea and soup but he can’t taste the flavors. When she holds him down and tells him she loves him, he doesn’t feel it.

All he feels is grief, everything in him missing a Wesker that was never there.

Chris’ entire body aches with missing him. Wesker stuck his fingers into Chris’ head and rearranged his brain matter to fit his grip; Wesker threw his shadow onto the wall and pretended that it was the real him. Wesker showed himself, in those last few moments, hideous and demonic and awful, and Chris still felt his heart roll and roll with need for him.

He hates his body for missing him. He gives it what he wants and his nails make Claire’s sheets wet with blood.

His limbs have been peeled off. All of the energy has been sucked out of the air, making everything colorless and tasteless, like the world speaks a different language than he remembers.

He remembers lying in Wesker’s arms, warm with blood and chilled by the fear, his attention wandering off and thinking about Claire. Her hair, her voice. He can remember when that was all that he needed in life.

In a way, it’s all he’s ever wanted.

Even when she’s staring at him, looking so afraid that it breaks his heart, and he can’t speak or death will come spewing out of him and all over her, he feels it. She’s his second skin. She’s the eyes in the back of his head. She’s his companion in life, more of a soulmate than a lover will ever be to him.

She gets up to leave, promising she’ll be right back, and he lifts his head from the pillow.

His arms are scarred from the scratching. His mouth is dry. The world spins and he blinks, eyes raw and stinging, everything still wrong but slowly mangling itself into something that might completely disfigure him, but can still fail at killing him.

“Claire,” he croaks out, his voice strained from disuse, and she turns around and looks at him with wide eyes, like it’s all that she needed to hear.

“I’ve been doing my best to keep the police off you,” Claire explains, a soft ball of memories sitting by his side, “But they’re going to need your statement soon.”

Chris swallows. Looking down at his oatmeal, he gives a little nod.

“What do they know?” he forces himself to ask through shaking breath.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Claire’s gaze go softly onto his face, assessing him. He turns his head, slowly meeting her eyes, and she nearly falters at its unexpectedness.

“Well,” she starts, punctuating with a sigh. “They know that he killed Barry, Chief Irons, and a man named William Birkin? They were also very worried that he was going to kill you.” She takes a bite out of her own afternoon breakfast, then speaks with her mouth full. “The RPD is keeping it quiet.”

Chris frowns. “How quiet?”

“Oh…” she trails off. “Quiet enough to keep Umbrella out of the headlines.” There’s a worried look on her face before she opens her mouth to speak again. “Chris…”

Chris blinks, setting the mug down onto his lap. “What?”

She braces herself before finishing.

“They thought, for a long time- well, that it was you who killed Barry.” She studies him for a few beats before her face changes. “You knew that?”

“Wesker-” Wesker’s name tastes like ash in his mouth. He swallows around a clump of brown sugar and tries again. “Wesker told me. He thought Irons had staged it to-”

He catches himself, biting down on his words. “I mean-”

Reality is twisting out of its old shape and into the one that he knows now. With a desperate hiss through his teeth, he tucks his head into his hands and grips at his hair like he can will his brain to wring the Wesker out of it.

“Chris,” Claire says gently.

“Sorry,” he yelps, breathing hard through his nose. “Sorry, I mean- I mean Wesker staged it to look like it was me.”

It’s true- this isn’t even new information to him. But all the same, his mind warps, spasming as it tries to catch up.

He hates Wesker. He hates him so much it’s burning his brain alive.

He wants him strung up and strewn into a million pieces, so disfigured it’s hard to believe that he was ever human. He wants Wesker shredded and slashed the way he’s left Chris. Not a superhuman with bioweaponry coursing through his veins, but a life form reduced to nothing. Not even worthy of a name, let alone an important title among a circle of murderers.

And still, when Chris is lying alone in Claire’s bed, he dreams of the two of them in his apartment. Making pancakes, watching the morning news. He imagines them talking through a shower curtain and pouring each other glasses of water. He pictures them at the supermarket, the drug store, the library, and he wants it so bad that he forgets to breath.

“It’s okay,” Claire murmurs. With the comforter dividing them, she lays her hand over his.

“How did you know I didn’t do it?” he manages through his teeth.

Claire fixes him with a look.

“How?” he demands.

“Twin-lepathy.”

He’s supposed to laugh but he doesn’t. “We’re not twins,” he responds bitterly.

“Yeah we are,” she counters. “I just spent a few years soaking up the extra fluid.”

She grins crookedly, a familiar crudeness on her face, and Chris returns the look with a half-hearted smile that feels almost worse than no smile at all.

“So what?” he demands, the teeth now wound tight in his mouth. “You figured that Chris Redfield could do no wrong? There was no way everyone’s perfect little golden boy could possibly be the fucked up piece of shit that he really is?”

He watches Claire clock what he’s saying. He remembers Wesker herding Chris into his arms, opening up a pit of violence inside of him and then sheltering him from it. Claire doesn’t reassure him the way Wesker did, talking his head into knots about ethics and nature. Instead, she just says, “No. No, Jill- Barry said something to her.” She produces the words with effort, like they’re difficult memories to access. “He had a hunch, Chris. He knew something was wrong very early on. That’s why he was meeting with Irons. Fucking bastard didn’t move fast enough,” she adds in a grumble.

“Irons and Wesker aren’t any different,” Chris dismisses her, mouth twisted tight.

“If it helps, he went on a fucking campaign trying to hunt the two of you down.”

Despite himself, Chris gives a biting laugh. “So we were on the run from Irons,” he says. “In a way.”

“Yeah…” Claire rolls her shoulders, leaning back against the headboard. “The best lies are always the ones that can be supported with the truth, huh.”

Chris thinks about himself. His bloody fists, his blinding rage. He thinks about how good it felt to have Wesker stroking his head and praising him. Every lie Wesker made him believe about himself was backed with some kind of truth.

Chris tells her about how Wesker brought him home, on that last night.

“It’s weird that he took you back there,” Claire considers thoughtfully. “The risk seems… really not worth it.”

Chris shrugs. “I don’t know. I was surprised my key still worked and everything. I just assumed he’d kept my rent paid or something.”

“No,” Claire says softly. “No, I worked something out with your landlord. That was me.”

For years, Chris will wrestle with the strangeness of Wesker. He’ll wonder, without ever arriving at an answer, if Wesker was made reckless by love, or if every inch of everything that happened was in accordance with his carefully laid plan, or if he was, beyond all else, simply insane.

For now, he sticks what we he does know. What he doesn’t, Claire fills in the gaps.

She’ll tell him about how she and Jill got close while they were looking for him. She’ll talk about the way Irons framed Chris as a victim of Wesker, kidnapped in the middle of the night, likely locked in some basement somewhere, having fallen prey to Wesker’s evil scientific experimentation. He will tell her what really happened, and she’ll listen to him weep about the worst thing that is wrong with him.

“I have this problem too,” she tells him as she cradles him in the middle of the night, her voice low like she doesn’t even want the air to hear her. “I get obsessed with people. I need them. Like food or water, and it kills me.”

“How do you fix it?” he begs.

“You just have to work on it,” she says honestly. “Until you meet someone who finally gives you space instead of suffocation. Who helps you figure it out instead of taking advantage of it.”

And though Jill isn’t in the room at the time, he watches Claire’s gaze swing towards her.

A part of him wonders if they did this to each other.

If all those days on the streets, just them against the world, turned them into people who cannot survive alone. If they needed each other to make things feel right so badly that now things always feel wrong without that other person’s assurance.

It doesn’t matter, they decide together. It only matters that they figure out what to do next.

After an intense few days of wrestling each other, she convinces him not to tell the police about what he did. She’ll shoulder the fallout, she promises. She’ll deal with the guilt.

Indeed, she stays true to that. It haunts him and eats him and mangles him beyond recognition, but she stays by his side the entire time.

All their childhood, Chris took care of her. Now she’s finally found a way to pay him back.

Nobody ever figures out what happened to Wesker. When the police broke into his apartment after receiving calls about the screaming, they found the bed empty, a gallon of blood left soaked in the sheets.

Chris grows out of his agony. He gets his strength back. He nurses his sanity to health.

He gets a team together and they spend a couple years fully invested in shutting down Umbrella. The corporation grows new head and adopts new names, never fully dying, but he makes it his life’s mission to hunt down everybody pushing the bioweapon agenda.

Half a decade goes by, and there is no trace of his former STARS captain. Chris always looks, but his name is never in any of the reports. At some point in the paper trail, the Progeniture Virus falls out of favor, replaced permanently by the strain that Irons reportedly coveted in his corner of the laboratory.

A part of him always wonders if Wesker actually did it- if he managed to transform into the bioweapon he always wanted to be. If that’s how he disappeared right into thin air.

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, Chris wonders if he was one of the monsters they killed on their campaigns through the labs, twisted and gnarled into some inhuman beast that he didn’t even recognize when he put a bullet through its skull.

More years pass, and still Chris can’t overcome the fear that Wesker will show up at Claire’s door, ready to kill everyone he loves. When he moves into a new apartment, he imagines Wesker watching through the windows in the night, waiting to strike. When he transitions onto the BSAA base, he thinks Wesker will appear to him in the form of a solider or a lab tech, blonde hair slicked back, skin pulled by age the same way his own is starting to, dark glasses screaming out who he is rather than concealing it.

It all has to be part of his plan. Men like Wesker don’t come and go; they design every outcome to serve them. Even as time creates doubt in his head, a piece of him always hangs on, certain that Wesker is not done with him yet.

Piers comes into his life, dragging him by the collar out of a drunken stupor, and they spend a couple sweaty weeks twisted up in combat and cots before Piers leaves erupting with boils. In a whirlwind of quick whit and quicker fucks, Leon happens. There are a few tussles with men at bars and on the battlefield, most of it non-violent, some of it even tender, although every encounter just seems to leave him electric, body reaching for something it desperately doesn’t want to miss.

A part of him knows that he’s fucked. That Wesker happened to him too early, and too brightly at that. He’s old enough now not to long for the man that he was, but he’s human enough to crave the impression that he left behind.

In his life, Chris only sees Wesker one more time.

It happens when he’s in a swamp, following the Winters’ tracks as they fight for their lives to survive a mold-infested nightmare of a haunted house.

He gets separated from his team; it’s cold at night in Dulvey, the bog thick and frigid, and he gets turned around, dizzied by disorientation, none of his tech working all of a sudden.

He runs through the swamp, boots sinking into the mud, and all at once the entire world freezes because he realizes he’s not alone in here.

The man is silent. Still. Frailer now but still severe, watching Chris from between the trees.

His arms ripple with leanness, like he’s kept himself in shape, and even though there’s a pair of glasses on his face, Chris can feel his gaze cutting right through him. For a moment, he is so confused that he can’t move. He can’t even feel the heart beating in his chest.

It’s Wesker. Wesker, looking into the depths of him, the same way he always has.

“Look at you,” he says with a sort of reverent harshness, lips pouting after they’ve finished moving, like they can’t stand the sight in front of them.

Chris feels the machine gun slacken in his arms. His body relaxes, loosening, all on its own.

He’s disarmed bombs. Escaped burning buildings. Taken down teams of men the sizes of warehouses. He’s seen evil goddamned fucking people; he’s seen monsters, for fuck’s sake, ripped straight from horror novels towering over him and gunning for his life. But it’s Wesker that makes him tremble. It’s Wesker that turns him into a boy again.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asks, shaking, and he doesn’t know why he can’t pick up the fucking gun and blast this man to pieces.

Wesker watches Chris for a minute, the bog popping quietly between them. Then he tilts his head, looking offended.

“Kill you?” he scoffs. “Christopher. Really, you should know me better. No, my pet. I just wanted to look at you.”

With a violent recoil, Chris feels the sense snap back into him.

“Why?” he screams, thrusting the gun to his chest and stabbing the laser square onto Wesker’s chest. “Why the fuck are you here? Why now?”

“Christopher,” Wesker sighs, like he is being ridiculous.

“What?” Chris screeches. “Tell me why you’re here or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Wesker just observes him for another moment. When he speaks, his voice is level and steady, running cool down Chris’ shoulders.

“I will love you to death,” Wesker tells him, a small shrug lifting up his shoulders. “I guess that’s what you get.”

There’s something bright and warm glowing beneath Wesker’s glasses; it’s like his eyes are lit by a reptilian flame.

It seems he got to become what he wanted to be, Chris remembers thinking. That makes one of them.

Later, when he writes the report, his hand will falter, unsure of how long he laid in the swamp.

He’ll write about the sudden blow to the back of his head while he stood there gawping, knocking him flat onto his face. He’ll recount the shock on Wesker’s face, and how the swamp started dragging him down, everything wet with mud and mosquitos and the blood seeping from the back of his head. How there was no Wesker standing between the trees anymore when he rolled over, moaning for help. How there was nothing in the night at all except for the distant sound of gunshots.

While assembling the dossier, someone else on his team will note how the husband, Ethan Winters, ventured off the Baker’s property at a time coinciding with the latter half of the night that Chris spent lying underneath the dirt.

Chris’ hand will shake, but he’ll write what it felt like when something new seeped into the ground, breaking up all that peat water and muck.

He remembers it even now: tendrils of rebirth, the blooming of decomposers, worming their way first around, and then inside of his body. There’s a time stamp on his app from when his watch, five hours after he died, suddenly picked up the heartbeat from his wrist again. He doesn’t remember much other than that.

What he does remember, though, (and what he can’t bring himself to put into writing), is where his mind went in the moment that Ethan pulled him from the earth.

He distinctly remembers that he was thinking about the philosophy of fungal colonies.

In his head were the mycorrhizal networks, and the beehives, and the complex computer systems that Wesker believed a collective form of human life should resemble.

As he laid there, no pain in his heart, with his body and mind not yearning for anything or anyone for the first time in his entire life, feeling the pulses of energy in the moss and the worms and the trees and the sky and the sound and this most mightily infected man nursing him back to life while digging him out of nature’s grave, the first pinpricks of consciousness slowly needled themselves back into his brain. And for just a second, as he joined with Ethan, and the world, a thoughtless creature entwined in the bliss of connection unriddled by anything but wild abandon, he found himself thinking that Wesker must have been right.