Chapter Text
Explosion. Nosedive.
Fire.
The helicopter whirs, eating air, eating shit. Opening its maw and roaring flames. Opening its doors and listing to the side, sending Barry tumbling out into the canopy below, his entire existence lost in a comically cone-shaped diminuendo.
Barry leaves the aircraft around the same time as Chris crashes to the floor. His shoulder hits and the pain sizzles up his side, zipping electric where his jaw bounces off the metal plates. Shock. Pain. Loss. That scream is in his ears, somehow louder than all of the mechanical screeches and clanks of the crashing helicopter, but even as he cries out in grief, he doesn’t have time to dwell on it. His entire word quickly zeroes in on Jill.
She’s still alive, which he knows because she’s screaming too. And because Chris is who he is, he thinks she’s screaming for him.
It’s a good luck assumption; he reaches out and their hands clasp together, and it is what stops her body from rolling over the edge. Interlocked with his, chewed-down nails clinging like claws until the final fucking second, Jill’s fingers are warm for the very last time.
The thing is, they’re the kind of warm that skin isn’t meant to be. They hold the kind of heat that fills a fireplace right before the logs crumble into ash.
She’s burning his hand. He starts to scream, guttural cries of effort as he orders himself to fucking hold on, but it works. They’re too far gone to know it, but their shared weight is what keeps them safely anchored in the aircraft.
Brad’s on his feet, wrestling with the cockpit. Beneath the screech of the chopper, Chris can’t make out the stream of expletives that he’s whimpering hoarsely underneath his breath.
Whatever he’s trying isn’t working. The helicopter whirlybirds, jerking back and forth as though the air is made of boulders, and Chris grabs instinctively onto Jill, pulling her into his arms. She’s burning, and she’s screaming, and then all of a sudden they are both being covered. In the seconds before they die, Chris rolls onto his back in time to watch as Wesker leaps on top of them both, smothering Jill’s flames with his body.
Through the dripping perspiration in his eyes, Chris sees their Captain’s gritted teeth. The way his hair falls out of its slick mousse, blonde locks wet and stringy. It’s that image, more than anything else, that sticks in his memory of this night: Chris can’t help but gawk up at him, his mouth agape, his hope floundering like a fish caught between two equally strong hooks.
Wesker grits morbidly down at him. At the time, Chris had thought it was a look of defeat. Now he knows it to have been one of determination.
“Wesker?” he rasps.
“Look outside, Christopher,” Wesker instructs him quietly, voice smooth like resin poured over the flames. Beneath him, Jill starts to shift. He feels her body moving, dragging underneath him. Chris doesn’t look outside. He turns his head the other way, and finds Wesker’s hand wrapped surgically around her neck, pulling her out from underneath them.
“She-” Chris flounders, chest rising and falling in a panicked fit. He can’t speak right. He can’t even breathe. “She’s not- Wesker, no, stop!”
“Sh,” Wesker orders, and this time, when he tosses her limp body out from the helicopter, Chris obeys. Her burnt-down hair. Her embrous skin. He fixes his eyes on the open door, staring at all that darkness illuminated by the flames encasing the outside of the chopper.
Then, he shudderingly clamps them shut until all that's left are the whimpers slipping out between his lips.
The helicopter hitches. Chris’ skull hits the ground with a thunk and he moans.
Silently, Wesker scoops both hands underneath Chris’ scalp. “Sh,” he says again, so quietly this time that Chris almost doesn’t hear it.
When the helicopter kisses earth, skipping violently over the ground, Brad goes flying. He stumbles off his feet and crashes backwards, some part of him cracking against something heavy, punctuated in a heavy thump.
Chris chokes on a smoky cry. Wesker flattens above him. Wesker smothers him so hard that when the motion finally stops, he’s not sure if he’s dead.
Maybe he is. He feels himself spiraling out, slipping into that darkness.
Then slowly, slowly, the static of the world phases back in. His vision reknits. His eyes blink open.
Maybe he’s… not dead, he thinks disorientedly. Maybe this counts as still being alive.
Frantically, Chris blinks. The fire is gone, along with the hard metal panels lining the inside of the chopper. Chris can’t feel the whisper of Wesker’s skin on him anymore. Just the insidious burn of the flames, still prickling the palm of his hand.
There’s grass all around him. The back of his head is damp with dew.
Chris lies back, breathing slowly, and carefully feels around the inside of his body. He flexes his fingers, then his toes. He rolls his shoulders back against the dirt. He blinks up at the darkened sky, the tree line indiscernible but the stars a brilliant feast spread across the table of the cosmos, soapy and beautiful and so, so sweet on his eyes.
Inexplicably, what Chris is thinking of then is not the crash, or his roster of dead teammates- but of the murders. He looks at the headlines in his mind, studying them for the hundredth time. Dead campers. Cannibalized bodies.
All of those horrors, seated right here in these mountains. Arklay County, where STARS are the experts. And they barely got over the forest before disaster brought them down.
Strangely calm, even in the midst of all that death, Chris finds himself thinking of the Bermuda Triangle. Of cursed lands where awful things are drawn to its people like a magnet.
He closes his eyes. He rests.
Before he can get his nervous system back online, before he can even consider calling out for help, they’re there. Snarling, foaming, overflowing with rabies. Dogs.
What the fuck? he thinks stupidly as they jump onto him, jaws snapping. What the fuck?
The sound he makes as he jerks himself into a sitting position is animal. He squeals, smashing an arm at one of the canines as it snaps, biting down through his forearm.
Another lunges for his throat, and this time, he screams.
All of a sudden, one of the dogs rips off of him with a whimper.
Gurgling, Chris jams a hand against his throat. He clutches the wound, feeling blood burble against his palm. There in front of him, to his complete bafflement, is Wesker. He watches his Captain yank the dog back by its neck, lift it into the air, and slam it into the ground.
The first thought to pass through Chris’ head is that the zombie dogs are wearing collars. And the second thought- the second is that Wesker is glowing, his skin so bright that Chris can see it in the dark.
In his mind, Chris sees the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of his childhood bedroom. They burn through Wesker’s skin, his past interposed onto his impossible present, as the second dog lunges at his Captain’s fist, snapping its jaw around his hand.
The dog growls viciously, chewing and salivating, gnawing its way up towards Wesker’s elbow. As though it’s nothing at all, Wesker raises his arm into the air and brings it plummeting down, sending the dog rolling away with a canine whimper.
“Wesker,” Chris croaks. When he speaks, his throat pulses with blood.
Wesker throws himself to the ground, scrambling towards Chris on his hands and knees. His glasses are off. His eyes are electric.
Chris cries out, jolting back on instinct. He lets go of his wound. Wesker clamps a palm around the gouge in Chris’ neck.
The other one covers his eyes.
“Your hand, Wesker!” Chris yelps. Then he lets out a scream of agony as Wesker’s acid-hot skin bites at his wound, sending his blood burning backwards through his veins. “Wesker!” he screeches. “Your hand!”
Wesker’s palm pulls back, leaving his eyes.
Their gazes meet. Chris trembles. Wesker’s lips form a soundless sh.
Then he pulls back his fist and slams it into Chris’ face.