Chapter Text
Chris had seen Wesker die more than once.
The first had been in a sterile laboratory, impaled by the very experiment he’d called the ultimate lifeform.
He’d mourned the loss of a Captain he never truly had– the idea of him more than the man himself.
Albert Wesker’s story should have ended there.
But then he came back.
He was volatile. Angry. Intent on punishing Chris for choosing to still see the good in the world that the other had forsaken. It felt like watching him die a second time when he could no longer reconcile the memories of the man who stood before him.
Chris had nothing left to bury the next time.
Chris couldn’t let go of the possibility that Jill had survived the fall from the window. So long as he had hope of Jill being alive, he had to believe that Wesker had survived too. For that reason alone, he mourned neither.
The volcano should have been Wesker’s final resting place. Instead, it feels like an empty grave. He leaves behind the husk of a man– but the memories don’t bury themselves with him.
Wesker continues to die thousands of times in his mind and is brought back with each breath Chris takes.
It was a funeral march that had no end.
Chris knew that Wesker’s final death would come only with his own, with those memories buried alongside him. The world would remember that there had once been a great evil named Albert Wesker. There would be only a few left to remember him as the man Chris had once admired– The Captain he’d respected.
The cycle of memories begins anew.
This time, the sterile laboratory shifts, changing into something unfamiliar. It took the pain of fingernails digging deeper into his palms before he realized that he hadn’t been standing before the Tyrant, still trapped in its glass tank. The body in the cell was much smaller, more human.
Chris thinks it’s a statue at first. His eyes struggle to focus through the harsh fluorescent lighting. The body remained still, back faced away from where he currently stood. Chris notices the blonde hair slicked back in a painfully familiar style. He tempers the burgeoning panic he felt over what was a memory bleeding into his reality.
He’d watched the man die for good, watched the smoke dissipate before charred human remains sank below the lava.
Reminding himself doesn’t make the thudding of his heart lessen.
His thoughts are interrupted when he hears the muffled sound of someone talking in his ear, but everything feels like it is happening far away, like he isn’t even in his own body. He’d been trapped so deeply in his mind that he couldn’t remember what he’d even been doing minutes prior.
Chris struggles to listen to whoever is talking to him. He pauses and tears his gaze away from the unmoving form separated by a thick pane of glass.
His gaze finds the woman’s badge, Dr. Anne Dohler.
That’s right.
He’d received a call from one of BSAA’s research labs…
What was it for again?
Chris focuses on the ringing of his chronic tinnitus.
His eyes fall back to the statue poised in a seated position on the bed. But something was wrong. It had moved. What he’d thought had been a statue had shifted its body, now giving Chris a full look at its profile.
His vision started growing dark around the edges before he realized he’d stopped breathing at one point or another. His thoughts were disjointed, failing to formulate anything besides the name of a man that’d haunted his every waking moment.
Albert Wesker.
Chris feels the memories looping in his mind stutter and distort.
Suddenly, scenes grow intermixed with reality, and his mind goes fuzzy.
Blood is flowing back into corpses as time starts playing in reverse.
Chris feels out of place; his world suddenly shadowed under a resounding sense of wrongness.
It’d been just three months since he’d last seen him. He’d been looking up at Chris from the middle of an active volcano, knee deep in lava. His eyes hadn’t even looked human; they were manic and burnt orange like smoldering coal. His voice had lost that smooth control he’d prided himself on.
His last words had been his own name; his hatred burned into his dying moments.
He’d replayed the moment frame by frame, both waking and in his dreams.
He wants to discount everything as another one of his nightmares.
There was no logical reason why Chris Redfield would be staring at the man he’d watched die over and over again, sitting all in one piece, breathing...
Worse, Chris’s heart knows that it is his Albert Wesker. There was no doubt left for him once he saw the man’s eyes, burning bright and alive. The man’s bearing down to his smallest movements is calculated in ways that couldn’t be replicated unless it was actually him, back from the dead.
Chris feels like he’s going to be sick.
He moves his hand over his mouth, suddenly grateful he’d skipped breakfast.
His mind brings him back to the volcano.
He can feel the heat burning his facial hair, smell the burning sulphur and gunpowder as if he never left.
His form trembles.
When he feels a hand rest on his shoulder, he shoves it off and stumbles back against the wall. He shakes his head, intending to apologize, but he can’t seem to take his eyes off the man sitting in what he now realizes is a B.O.W. containment cell.
Chris can’t get his thoughts in order.
There were plenty of questions he wanted to ask, but the only one to make it past his choked-out breaths was a short, “How…?”
His memories slowly come back to him as the head of the research institute stood tall, face blank as though she hadn’t just completely upended Chris’s life. Right when he was starting to feel as though his life could be fine again, here she came with a phone call on a random Tuesday morning, requesting his “utmost discretion” upon arrival.
She at least didn’t beat around the bush when it came to answering his questions, “We’re not sure… His body was found unresponsive and seriously damaged. He only regained full consciousness recently, but he’s not exactly keen on sharing…” The woman seemed disappointed with her current knowledge on the matter, but she pushed on, “He insisted that the ‘how’ would not bring us any closer to the ‘why’ and suggested we drop it.”
Chris hated how he could still hear those words in his voice with such painful clarity.
He tries to keep himself from giving away just how ruined he was, so he pulls his gaze away from the man in the cell. He turns away from the one-way glass, not fully turning his back to Wesker but also squaring himself center to the scientist.
“Who else knows?”, he steadies his voice in a way he hopes doesn’t betray his worsening mental state. His tone takes on a sharper edge in an attempt to compensate for any shakiness he may let slip.
For what it’s worth, she doesn’t seem to have any concerns for his emotional state one way or another. Her own tone never falters, remaining overly clinical and monotone, “Our researchers and anyone upstairs whose decisions matter.”
He’s almost a little relieved that Jill doesn’t know. That she can remain at peace, thinking that her tormentor was buried in a volcano.
Shit. Jill.
He had to tell her, but how?
Unwilling to continue thinking about how he was going to break the news to anyone, especially Jill, he starts trying to get as much information as he can from the woman who’d introduced herself as Dr. Anne Dohler.
“What am I doing here? Am I supposed to finish the job?”
Her face remains impassive as she gives him a blanket response, “He’s a valuable asset; it would be a significant loss for humanity to forfeit all the research and knowledge Dr. Wesker has…”
He doesn’t let her finish her sentence before he slams his open palm against the wall.
“You can’t be serious! He’s….”, his voice trails off.
Albert Wesker was many things.
Dangerous.
Self-Serving.
Unstable.
Biting his lips as he struggles to find the right words, he turns his body fully towards the lead researcher, his tone severe and laced with threat.
“That man in there is a monster. I have a duty to this world to ensure that man stays dead, that includes anyone who insists on protecting him.”
She stood her ground and didn’t back away, but he noticed her eyeing the room's sole exit.
He’s made her nervous.
Good.
These people are knowingly aiding and harboring a violent, genocidal maniac; screw whatever scientific benefit they thought they could get from that man. The best thing Albert Wesker could provide the human race was for him to die and have his research erased from this world with him.
When she doesn’t say anything, Chris continues to grill her, “You people are foolish to think you can keep him here alive. He’s not like any B.O.W. you’ve dealt with before. He’s smart. Smarter than any of you combined. However secure you think you people are, Albert Wesker is only here because he wants to be. The minute he wants to escape, he will. You people are sitting ducks!”
The woman seems genuinely put off by his anger; she shakes her head and holds her hands up as though to appease a violent animal, “We understand your concerns, but…”
Chris goes to interrupt her, but bites it back as he tries to remain orderly when he notices her flinch at his raised arm. It's the first time he’d gotten a reaction out of her. He lowers it.
Seeing she’s being allowed to finish, she continues, “We have implemented a device called the SNARE. It stands for…” Chris doesn’t waste time and interrupts her. His time in the Air Force acquainted him with many acronyms, and he very quickly realized that all acronyms were a bunch of words cherry-picked to create the coolest-sounding abbreviation. It rarely provided any better context outside of that.
“Just get to the point. I don’t need the Shark Tank product spiel. You obviously didn’t call me here to parade around my monumental fuckup of not killing that motherfucker dead enough… So spit it out.”
While he might be mostly convinced that Wesker can’t hear him through the walls, he still slides his gaze back to the man of the hour, sitting stalwartly on his bed.
He hates how difficult it was to bring himself to stare at Wesker’s face with every neuron in his brain screaming to do the opposite. He begins to monitor him for any signs that he even knows he’s here at all… He’s almost assuaged his worries until, for a heart-stopping moment, he watches those eyes that had seared themselves into the depths of his soul meet his gaze.
They’re still a deep reddish-orange, he thinks to himself.
A sensation like ice water poured down his spine. He feels no relief even as those eyes broke their contact, just fast enough to have been a coincidence.
He knows it wouldn’t have been possible for Wesker to make eye contact with him, much less know he’s here, but he spent enough time with Wesker to never count on the man falling within regular expectations and assumptions.
She clears her throat at his brusque language, pointedly ignoring his other comments, “To put it simply, we’ve installed a collar that provides emergency neutralization.”
Chris scoffed at that. If a missile and being cooked in a volcano didn’t kill the man, Chris fully doubted anything could at this point. Sensing his disbelief, she continued, “There’s lower-level corrections like electrocution, tranquilizers, and…” She pauses silently, eyeing the one-way glass, “...there is an emergency dose of a neurotoxin that would be injected directly to the brainstem; it works similarly to cyanide, causing cell death that theoretically should eradicate human and mutated viral cells, but that would be a last resort.”
Chris feels like he could laugh now, like at any point someone was gonna open the door and announce he’d just been Punk’d.
“So what, you think you got the rabid animal collared, and now he won’t bite? This is ridiculous…”
“We aren’t disillusioned with what we're dealing with here, we’re aware of the dangers…”
Upon hearing those words, years of anger and resentment boiled over, “No. You guys don’t know a goddamn thing!” He’s vaguely aware he’s shouting now, memories come in like a tidal wave, his ears ringing as those nights where he’d wake up hearing the crunching of bones as he watched his comrades fall in that deathtrap of a mansion, the searing betrayal of a man he’d admired and respected, how he was forced to watch Jill writhing in pain as she fought against the P-30 clinging to her chest…
Was every scientist this emotionally disconnected?
He’s sure they’ve read through every single one of those documents, read all those mission reports he’d written with a shaking hand; those nights had been spent reliving the torment. He knows almost every person involved with bioterrorism has read them.
Hell, maybe they only cared enough to skim through the words and just wanted to see the gruesome pictures to satiate their morbid curiosity. That’s all it was to them after all, just words printed on a page. They probably read it over some coffee or tea before going back to their regular life, blissfully separated from the worst days of his life. It didn’t affect them a goddamn bit, but that was his life in those reports, his miseries, his pain, his losses...
And they think they know better than him?
He moves closer into her space, looming over her, “If you care about your lives at all… Hell, if you have anyone on this Earth you give the slightest damn about, you’d go in there and do whatever it is you need to do to bring him down, for good.” He speaks every word with finality; the last word comes up bitter and metallic. He didn’t even notice when, but at some point, he must have bitten his tongue.
She doesn’t back down, “I’m sorry. I know this is a lot to ask, but we need him. Alive.”
She crosses her arms before stepping away from him, grabbing a stack of papers. Chris lets out a shuddering breath as his hand automatically falls to his empty holster. He curses. He should have known better than to give up his weapons at the door. He runs his fingers through his short hair as he begins pacing around the room. The scientist lets him as he mumbles to himself before finally stilling.
“Why am I here?”
The question comes out like a statement; his eyes lock onto the scientist's methodical gaze.
She sighs, like Chris was the one being ridiculous, “I’ll get to the point. We’ve negotiated with Dr. Wesker to continue his research, provided he is willing to cooperate. He’s asked for very little outside of that.”
Chris scoffs; he wants to argue back. Wesker doesn’t negotiate. Wesker wants you to think it’s a negotiation, but it never really is. He decides to bite back his words and listens on. “The device I mentioned previously, we’ve implemented a two-way failsafe. Of course, every correction can be implemented manually via a transmitter. I’ve concluded that there would be a benefit to having a secondary individual involved, one whom Dr. Wesker could be monitored by. Someone who has previous experience and a long history, preferably.”
Chris's fists clench; he is already cursing the direction this conversation is going.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that that person should be you.”
Chris' mind goes blank when he hears her confirm his suspicions, regardless, “Me?”
Dr. Dohler nods her head, miming caring about Chris’s inner turmoil in the slightest, “There were many considerations that went into this. You have very intimate knowledge of Dr. Wesker, and it would be unlikely for you to fall for any manipulations. You have plenty of shared history…”
"Why was I the first option?" Chris interrupts her as she dances around the obvious inconsistency. Chris had already proven why he shouldn't have even been a consideration by jumping straight to advocating for the man's execution. He watches her face take on a look of displeasure at having been called out.
"You were not the first option; you are the last." She sighs, "There have been other attempts... but Dr. Wesker has proven himself to be remarkably uncooperative."
Chris starts painting a picture of the events that led him here.
"He killed someone?"
"Oh no, just almost."
He grows irritated at her lack of compassion, but he knows from experience not to waste his time pointing it out.
“So what, I’m babysitting a genocidal maniac and hope he doesn’t try to take over the world again,” Chris sardonically says the last word with a pointed look at the woman, “...or die trying?”
The woman, to her credit, just nods, “On the surface, it may look to be that way.”
He’d said it semi-sarcastically; he was at least very annoyed that the scientist had just nodded along without even acknowledging just how ridiculous this whole situation sounded.
These people are essentially asking him to be the one to put his life on the line to keep Wesker from going nuclear… For a second time.
And they knew Chris would rather die than let Wesker have his way.
“If I say no…”, Chris already knew he couldn’t, because they would probably just ask someone else. Someone who wasn’t Chris. Someone who didn’t know exactly what kind of evil they were playing with. They’d be sending a baby mouse straight into the viper’s den.
Annoyingly, the woman doesn’t even let him finish his sentence, as she can already tell that her end of the bargain was won.
“You won’t.”
Chris is truly beginning to hate this woman.
Chris looked very slowly at the man sitting up straight in bed. He hadn’t moved this entire conversation. Chris wondered if he’d heard everything with all his viral enhancements. If he did, he didn’t show it. He’d always had a killer poker face.
“You don’t seem at all worried that I’ll kill him myself.”
“There are measures put in place against that. The fatal correction will only be enacted if your heart stops; all other corrections can be manually given through the transmitter device.” She seems a bit too eager to let him know about just how much thought went into this. “Also, don’t even bother trying to bring any weapons or anything to try and get the job done, you’ll be searched every time you reenter the facility. The BSAA intends to keep Dr. Wesker among the living, so hopefully that alone will dissuade you from doing anything out of line.” Chris feels defeated upon hearing that, especially since he knew she wasn’t lying just to dissuade him.
“So you’re telling me that I’d have to die for him to be dead?”
“Although you may not trust that we do have concern for your wellbeing, you would be wearing a heart monitor that, should it stop, would alert the final authority to enact the final correction as a deterrent…”, she speaks as though she were doing him a grand favor and not providing him with the barest of minimum protections, “ Also, should we determine there to be fatal intent to harm you, we can enact it at any time without your death being the driving force.”
How touching, he remarks to himself.
The words that actually leave his mouth are, “You people are insane.”
She shrugs off the insult, “I don’t care if that's how you feel. I have a duty to scientific study and to bettering humanity. I will do whatever it takes; there are no morals I will subject myself to that will interfere with that. I want to save people. You do too, that’s all I need to know.”
Chris runs his hands through his hair, looking between the scientist and Wesker, who’d moved slightly, shifting his neck as though he had a crick in it. Looking closer now, Chris can see a ring of metal around his neck, the majority of it covered by his high-collared jacket.
Chris forces his gaze off the metal collar and back to Dr. Dohler. He wants to argue, but he feels a small seed that’d been planted earlier in the conversation is beginning to germinate and take root in his mind.
No one is forcing him to agree to this; he could just refuse and let someone else take it off his hands.
Hadn’t he done enough already?
Yet the thought of making another person do what had been Chris’s lifelong burden feels wrong. Wesker had always been his problem to solve; he couldn’t lay that burden on anyone else.
When the refusal doesn't make it past his lips, he resigns himself to the lead researcher.
He refuses to shake her hand, leaving her sticking her hand out in front of him. He hates how easily she brushes off his small act of defiance, seeming more interested in getting his signature on documents. By the end of it all, she has a smile painted on her face as she hands the documents to another scientist to be notarized and copied. “We’ll get everything you’ll need prepared for tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll have one of my medical personnel install the heart monitor. You’ll be free to go after. We’ll provide you with an instruction manual to look over how to operate the corrective device.”
He gives her affirmation before letting himself be led down the hallway to another room. He watches the needle go in and push a grain-sized device right underneath his skin.
It reminds him of Claire’s birth control implant that she got done just before heading off to college. She’d asked him to take her as moral support, but he ended up almost fainting at the sight of the comically large needle being shoved into her underarm. He may have failed at moral support, but according to Claire, she couldn’t even focus on the procedure while he was wobbling on his feet. She still brings it up even to this day. He got over his fear of needles, but the memory still gave him the first feeling of comfort he’d felt since the revelation.
After he finishes getting more details and a temporary access badge, he’s let go for the day. He’d rushed out of the building the minute they’d handed him his “study material”.
He knows he’ll break the minute he’s left alone. He sits in his car, taking in deep breaths like he’d been taught.
It doesn’t help.
He lays his sweaty forehead against the steering wheel, and he tries to keep himself centered.
He can’t even look at the building now, knowing what it contained. Chris wants to continue being angry, but right now he only feels numb. He couldn’t bear to look at the papers in his hand before his eyes found an old photo of S.T.A.R.S. he kept stashed in his glove box. It was taken a few months before the mansion; it’d been a team outing, and although Chris had always gone out of his way to ensure Wesker was always invited, he rarely accepted. Chris was glad for that; he could at least have some photos that weren’t tainted by his presence.
His eyes found Jill; she’d been so young in the photo, they all were. His mouth soured.
How is he going to tell Jill?
Should he at all?
She’d been doing better lately. Nothing would ever be perfect again, but he’d seen her smiling even when he knew she’d thought no one was looking. It would be too cruel to take all that healing away from her just when things were starting to look up.
What would that even look like?
Hey, how’s your day going? Oh, by the way, our genocidal maniac bioterrorist ex-captain actually didn’t bite the dust. Brunch tomorrow?
He bit his lip, already painfully raw. The pain didn't help.
His hands shook as he hovered over her contact photo on his phone. They didn’t exactly make him sign an NDA, but it was at least blatantly obvious that he was supposed to keep quiet about it. He couldn’t trust his voice not to shake, or the words from immediately spilling out, so he decided to send her a text.
He should tell her in person anyway.
He sends her a carefully crafted text, emphasizing that he has something important to tell her in person tomorrow and hopes he isn't making a mistake. Maybe he’d wake up tomorrow and realize he shouldn’t tell Jill after all, that she would be better off living her life as she did now. But he couldn’t keep this from her. They’d given life and limb to protect each other. He had to tell her, no matter if it hurt them both.
He makes it home and takes to the bottle as soon as he makes it to the kitchen. If Claire could see him, he’s sure he’d disappoint her. She never liked it when Chris went straight to alcohol before talking to someone about it. Therapy had been a middle ground reached between them. This situation, he feels, is an exception, however.
He’s considerably buzzed by the time he sits down and reads through the manual.
SNARE (Synchronized Neurotoxin Assurance Response Equipment) is a mutually assured defence against hostile entities resistant to other methods of containment and correction.
His vision blurs, and he has to bring the paper closer to force his vision into focus. He skims over the product introduction and finds it gives him no new information.
The SNARE is a two-way assurance device; the “keeper” will have vitals monitored via a subcutaneous device implanted under the skin. The location of this device must be kept strictly between the keeper and the providers. To enact all available corrections, press the button and submit a fingerprint scan to the touchpad located on the back. Confirmation of successful correction will result in a short beep.
He keeps on reading through the document, which was only around 10 pages in length. He can feel the alcohol muddying his brain, but he still manages to keep his head upon him. His eyes are automatically drawn to the last paragraph titled "Final Correction".
Subject has clearly established intent to cause mortal harm to the handler/another person, or the threat of escape is imminent. Without secondary intervention, a fatal neurotoxin will be injected, causing cell death within ten minutes. This correction can be provided while the handler is still alive; the handler does not retain the right to enact this correction without higher approval. The handler understands that while their life is valued, there exists a precedent to seek other forms of correction before this action.
Chris almost rolls his eyes into the back of his head. If his life was valued, why would they be tossing him into this with no weapons, just an overglorified shock collar and pray that Wesker doesn’t just kill him on sight?
Chris still finds it hard to believe that the loss of his life would necessarily result in the scientists choosing to kill Wesker. Especially if they thought his scientific accomplishments were so important to the rest of humanity.
Dead men can’t really complain, though.
He rubs a knot out of his neck while he endeavors to remember which button to press for each correction; his drunkenness begins to noticeably affect his mental fortitude. He thinks about calling it a night when his phone rings. Falling under the effects of the heavy intoxication, Chris picks up the phone without even looking at the Caller ID.
“Chris! What’s going on? What’s with that text? Are you okay?”
Chris is confused for a second before remembering that slightly foreboding text he’d sent to Jill about an hour ago.
Shit.
He totally forgot about that.
“Oh, right… Jill… it’s…” the word nothing dies in his throat before he can even attempt to lie. He wants to say something else, but his mind blanks. Jill, as smart as she is, latches right onto the obvious.
“...Chris, are you… drunk?”
Chris rubs his face and sighs, ready for whatever judgment she’ll cast upon him.
Drinking alone on a Tuesday evening, it wasn’t even 6 pm yet. Jesus, she must think he’s pathetic.
When he doesn’t answer, Jill seems to take that as a silent acquiescence.
“Where are you right now?”, he hears the jangling of car keys and knows this night is probably going to get much, much worse.
“I’m home…”, he doesn’t even finish slurring out his words before Jill responds, “I’m coming over.”
Chris knows there’s nothing he could say to stop her; he doesn’t waste his breath and instead uses it as an opportunity to take another shot. He’d normally admired her for her strong personality, but now it was making him bite his cheek out of frustration.
He hears the sound of a car starting up and accepts his fate, “Okay… Okay…, please don’t tell Claire…” He lets the last part of that sentence come out a little lighter, pleading. Jill doesn’t say anything, but she sighs despondently into the phone before hanging up. Chris knows she probably will tell Claire, but who knows if she’ll even want to have anything to do with Chris after he tells her what he knows and, worse, what he’s agreed to do.
He takes another mouthful from the bottle as quickly as he can in preparation for the shit storm he can feel brewing. He runs his hands over the manual before stowing it away out of sight. He stumbles over to the front door and leaves it unlocked before sitting down in his living room.
Jill doesn’t knock, but he also didn’t expect her to. She barges in, eyes quickly scanning the room to identify any possible threats, a habit of their lifestyle. When she sees him breathing, her shoulders relax minutely before she tosses her things to the entryway table and marches over to Chris’s sorry form on the couch.
“Chris… What’s going on?”
Chris expected her voice to be angry; he probably would have preferred that. Her voice was concerned, sad even. He hated to be the reason for her sadness, knowing that he was about to make her even more upset brought him even more pain. He goes to speak and finds that the only sound that comes out of his throat is a choked-out apology. He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for. He hasn’t even told her anything yet. But Jill doesn't ask for a reason; she just pulls him into her arms. He doesn’t lean into the hug, but he feels the tension he’d been carrying all day release just a bit. He feels the couch cushion dip as she siddles up next to him. She pulls him even closer until he feels her heart beating against his arm, right where that thing had been implanted over her chest. He feels the helplessness he felt back then return with a punishing intensity.
He was useless. Wesker was still alive; he’d failed her.
He knows he needs to tell her, and part of him sobers up at that realization. After what could have been five minutes or five hours, he pulls away; her eyes are shiny too, she may have begun crying already, or just about to. Just thinking of the words he had to say made his throat burn. He takes a deep inhale when Jill stops him. “You don’t need to tell me anything right now, I’ll stay the night, you can tell me in the morning…”, hearing her voice so caring and so understanding only upsets him further.
He shakes his head.
“No… I have to tell you…”
Jill looks expectantly upon him now, but Chris can’t bring himself to meet her gaze. He finds anything else in the room to stare at that isn’t Jill’s eyes. He struggles to say the main point, so he starts where he can with the beginning of the story. He likens it to writing a mission report to make it easier, “Today I got a call from a research laboratory funded by the BSAA…”
Jill’s eyebrows knit together in confusion, millions of possibilities flooding through her brain, and he can see her quickly working through the most likely scenarios. Jill nods as she places a hand over his own. He didn’t even realize he’d been shaking that badly. “Is it… a new outbreak…?”, she asked guardedly. He shakes his head, then laughs a little, “I wish… I really wish it was…”
He decided to go through his day up until he walked into the observation room. Jill doesn’t interrupt him and doesn’t rush him, just looks at him with those understanding eyes.
“I was led down to a secure containment facility, no one would tell me anything, and I was starting to get angry…” He almost wants another couple of shots before he continues, but he decides to soldier through the worst of it.
“Then the lead researcher shows up and doesn’t say anything, she just pulls me to an observation room and shows me…” He gets choked up yet again before he has to take a few deep breaths.
“Jill, they have Wesker. He’s not dead.”
The room goes silent, and only the hum of the HVAC unit is between them and silence. He looks carefully at Jill, studying every microcosm of her face. His heart twists as he watches her face go blank. It reminds him of the day he first saw her in Africa, a helpless puppet under Wesker’s control.
“Okay.”
Okay?
Chris had run through thousands of different reactions, everything from breaking down to her grabbing a gun and blowing through the facility where they were keeping Wesker.
None of those were as hard to imagine as the blank indifference he saw on her face.
Jill closes her eyes, then opens them again. She studies Chris’s face closely, “We’re sure it’s…”
“It’s him. I saw him with my own two eyes, Jill.”
He sees a myriad of thoughts forming behind her eyes; she doesn’t ask, but Chris can see the moment that she connects the dots.
“They want him alive.” Jill nods silently, as she’d already expected that answer.
They sit in silence.
He feels her grip around him turn painful, but he doesn’t say anything.
“How could they… After everything he did…”, her voice is worse than angry, it’s defeated.
Chris shakes his head; he doesn’t have anything to say to make her feel better. She looks over at him, wide eyes searching to make sense of the situation.
“Why call you? What’s their game?” Her voice is even, but he hears the struggle to maintain her bearing. It crushes Chris to know that the calmness she was showing him was only for his benefit. Chris was hoping she wouldn’t ask him this, but she was too smart not to see through his obvious skirting of the whole truth.
He clears his throat to try and keep his voice from shaking, “I… agreed to monitor him while he continues his scientific research, not sure what exactly.” He decidedly leaves out the part where his life was technically forfeit for the matter.
"You... agreed to do that?"
Chris winces; he can't bring himself to do anything but nod. He goes to apologize, but Jill firmly shuts him down, "No. I don't want to hear it. You agreed to do it. I don't need you to explain yourself or give me excuses..." Chris witnesses the anger he'd been expecting all along. Chris wonders if this is where Jill will tear into him.
When Jill doesn't break her embrace and rests her face into the side of his arm, Chris grows worried, but then he feels wetness gathering on the corner of his shoulder. Chris stays still, afraid any movement will be the end.
He was so deep in his own ruminations that he almost missed a biting quip that was said underneath her breath, “I knew we should have nuked that volcano…” It was almost a whisper, but it felt like a shout to him at the moment. Chris was at a loss for words as he watched her launch herself off the couch, grabbing the bottle he’d been nursing for the past hour and chugging it. She eventually reaches her limit, and she pulls the bottle away as she coughs through the burning sensation in her throat, “Thanks for telling me, Chris. I know it wasn’t easy. I’m sorry you were alone today.”
“You’re… not mad?” He asks, still a bit on edge. He waited for something to break.
He tries not to startle at the sudden, sharp laugh Jill lets loose, “Furious,” she pauses before looking between Chris and the bottle of bourbon he now guiltily eyed, “But not at you. Never at you, Chris.” She pulls him into another close hug, and only then does Chris lean fully into her. His worst fears were washed away with only a couple of words. After a couple of minutes, they break the hug, and Jill eyes him up and down, “You reek of alcohol.”
“Sorry. I’ll try to get it all in my mouth next time.”
She glares at him before jabbing him in the ribs, “Next time I’ll call Claire and see where she thinks it should go.” He groans, but he’s just so relieved that Jill isn’t mad at him. She could rat him out to his sister right now, and he wouldn’t have cared in the slightest.
She stands up, holding the bottle up and waving it towards him, “Looks like I’m not driving home. I’m spending the night, nothing we can do now!” She ceremoniously knocks the bottle back before adding, “I’ll take care of this for you; you’re cut off for the rest of the night.”
Chris lets out a shuddering breath before cracking an amused smile, “Yes, Ma'am, no arguments here. And you’re always welcome at the Redfield Inn. Hope you enjoy your stay.”
Jill smiles; their banter was just barely covering the worst of their emotional turmoil, but it was comforting. She twirls around to grab the stuff she’d tossed at the front door, “Let’s call it a night, we can throw on a movie until we pass out.”
Chris groans and nods as he slinks off the couch to try to find the remote. For the rest of the night, they don’t bring up anything they spoke of before, and they don’t need to. The two of them would eventually pass out on the couch midway through the movie. Chris would then wake up to a note with some painkillers left out for him. He didn’t know what he did to deserve Jill, but he knows he’ll spend the rest of his life making it up to her. As soon as he felt mentally and emotionally prepared to leave his house, he made himself look semi-decent and just resolved himself to putting one foot out the door.