Chapter Text
Ribbons of vicious rain scampered through a weather-rotten ceiling, discolouring and ageing the mahogany adorned mural swept across the sky of this long abandoned mansion. Splotches of mould, swamp-like and festering, marred the pretty features of a palesome lady strewn across the span of this Renaissance masterpiece, bathed in rotten blues and the brilliance of gold that had long faded to a noxious yellow.
It was studying this destroyed beauty, so remarkable and such a haunting memoir for life, that Wesker came to understand he would not find Oswell Spencer here. Another dead end, shaped by the walls of another secret residence long abandoned, tucked away in the deepest reaches of the Rocky Mountains.
He swept through the halls with purpose, unchanged by the way that the walls dithered in the cold brush of an unloved home. Dust and dirt found no purchase on his boots, clinging to the leather expanse and then falling away with his next step on shattered tiles, disappearing through the cracks and buried forevermore with the rest of this long forgotten establishment.
There was little to be found in the way of arrows pointing to Spencer. For a man so old and feeble, he certainly made his way around, slipping through Wesker’s fingers like ancient dust.
The very idea of someone discovering Spencer before him made him seethe. It grew more plausible with each passing day.
An ornate music box sat resting on the perches of a rain-sodden table, soaked through with mould, spotty and perforated by the tiny maws of termites. The music box, in comparison, bore not an ounce of wear nor strain, eroded not by time nor weather. It remained the single most perfect object in this house that was no longer a home, and the doll eyes of a tiny porcelain dancer stared up at Wesker with a painted smile. The rigidness of his leather-clad thumb caressed her head, and then he pressed down hard to snap it from her ceramic shoulders. The clay crumbled beneath the inhuman drive of his thumb, dirtying his dark glove in rich white dust.
At the same time, muffled footsteps roused Wesker’s attention. He placed the box back where he had found it, just as it had been, and turned expectantly to the archway that separated this grand study from the foyer.
A gun rounded the corner before a face. Wesker flooded toward it like an avalanche, ambushing the intruder in the flurry of a red mass, hearing the heavy metal of their gun clash to the ground and the familiar voice that rang out through the forlorn halls in retaliation.
Wesker did not initially recognise her, though it had only been a few weeks since their last encounter. Jill Valentine was struck between him and the wall, at the mercy of the hand around her neck that could snap her windpipe in twain.
Wesker cocked his head, angling it to the doorway. He waited expectantly. Waited for the sound of heavy boots, the yell of an equally familiar yet far more sought voice, how it would beat off of these crumbling walls and breathe life back into them.
When he heard nothing but the sound of Jill’s wheezy breaths, increasingly rattling as she fought for air, Wesker felt his gut churn with disappointment. He huffed as he withdrew, straightening his jacket, tailed by the winds of a curious hum.
His dark-veiled stare swept over her; there was something incontrovertibly harrowing about this encounter. Jill Valentine, without the presence of Chris Redfield, bearing no arms to her former captain and present enemy, still with mistrust and hatred in her eyes but no willingness to fight.
Wesker’s head rose as he pieced her together, taking in all of the intricacies of this strange encounter. His shoulders sloped, hands folding behind his back, but there felt to be no pride to gain in dispatching Jill. Perhaps it would draw Chris in closer, but he rather liked their teamwork.
“This is bold.” He kept his voice smooth and unconcerned. The sensation of unease, unfamiliar and disconcerting, began to trickle through the walls of his gut like the rain dripping from the ceiling onto his boots. “Where is our erstwhile pointman? It is unlike him to give up chase and leave you to the burden of it.”
“What’s it to you?” Jill hissed, deploying herself across the room, fending for distance when her gun was blocked by the hard lines of Wesker’s frame.
“I have no interest in this farce without him. Do you really think you can stop me alone?”
“I thought he’d be here.”
Sudden dread struck Wesker like a loft of cold bricks, crushing through the steel clamps of his chest and sinking into his gut like weights in water. In spite of it, his voice retained levelness, outwardly unburdened. “Is that right?”
Jill struck a frown, gritting her teeth in an exercise of visible frustration. Desperation buried in her gaze, nullifying all the sharp edges that the anger tried to portray. “Don’t fucking play games, Wesker. Do you have him or not?”
“Why would I have him?” Wesker fanned his eyes away, consulting the branches dripping through a shattered window. They bristled and shivered in the wind, painted with the iridescence of mildew.
“Not like you to play dumb.” Jill was scoffing, arms folded, cast astray on the other side of the room. She slowed into silence. Wesker stiffened as she stared longer and longer, as if she could see concern rousing on his brow. “.. You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Wesker drew the sharpness of his eye back to Jill. Irritation began to permeate his lips, rendering them stiff and rigid. All of his want for charm and snark began to fall away, murky and muddied.
A dismal silence ticked through the room in place of the obsolete grandfather clock hung up by the west wall, cracked and splintered with shards of lost time. Wesker’s thoughts were racing, strewn together and muddled up like yarn spun too fast on a weaving loom.
He could place the last time that his thoughts ran rampant like this, and the firm press of a guiding hand that brought him out of it. Years prior, half a decade, on the zenith of his betrayal and when Chris’ eyes were still filled with sweetness and adoration rather than the perpetuity of hurt and anger.
Chris was his. The thought of someone else claiming what was his made bloody rage seep like lava through his veins, corrupting the virus aflow in his system and raking out its claws of bonded tempest. Wesker could feel the heat rising behind his eyes, spilling molten gold through a stream of pestilent amber.
A sheet of impassiveness clung to his face, painted in hard edges of white and the sharp outline of obscuring glasses. Behind them, a sea raged corrosively. “Are you saying that Redfield is missing?”
Jill was visibly reluctant to say anything else. Wesker saw the logic in it; he had threatened their lives three weeks earlier, and there was nothing to say that he would not exploit the vulnerability of Chris’ situation. It was easy to anticipate Jill’s line of thinking when she viewed things in such monochrome tones.
Wesker was used to tension. He thrived on it, even, the very thought of brewing discomfort and vitriol left him feeling powerful and in control. Here, though, he had none of that control and neither did Jill. Water speckled the house around them, trickling in through the skylight and windows, and the walls croaked and groaned through the wind with mourning.
“He didn’t shut up about seeing you in Caucasus. I thought maybe he’d had a lapse in judgement and I’d have to kick it back into him. If he isn’t with you, then where the hell is he?”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Since we got back from the mission.”
“Chris is hardly an elusive man, Jill. Are you telling me that you have not found a trace of him for three whole weeks?” Wesker’s voice hardened, though it never rose. He saw something straighten up in Jill’s posture, as if by the muscle memory of her former captain’s ire on a job poorly done.
Where she might have faltered before, though, she filled out into his ire. “I’d like to see you do a better job. I’ve got nothing else to go on.”
There was a benefit to finding Redfield. For him to be missing meant that the biggest thorn in his side was currently defunct, but then there was no thrill. There was no chase, no spectacle to be performed, only greeted by dull eyes and blank faces who could never hope to understand the complexity of his mind. Chris was getting closer to it every time they met.
“Perhaps I will take you up on that offer.”
To have Chris on his side again, after all of this time, was a tempting idea. A chance to show him the wonders of his work, and see the brown of his eyes turn to golden awe once again.
Wesker’s lips twitched into what resembled a smile. He could tell that the worry in Jill’s face was worsened by it, but she had said too much.
“Go on.” Wesker stepped closer, draping his hip to the half-broken dining table at his side. “Tell me what has befallen our dear Chris.”
“It’s been three weeks.” Jill began with a modicum of hesitance, wary in how she regarded the pristine figure of Wesker surrounded by rot and decay. “Since the Caucasus outbreak, like I said.” Her eyes drew away in recollection. “He was quiet on the flight home. After we got back to the base, he went off, and I haven’t seen him since. No one has. He left all of his gear behind.”
A willing disappearance sounded plausible. It was strange to find tension in his fingers that so quickly relaxed when the possibility of kidnapping could be set aside for now. He simply chalked it up to possessiveness over Chris’ fate; if Chris was going to die, should it not be Wesker to draw that hand? There was still so much to say to him, so much to show him.
“What avenues have already been explored?”
“I’ve spoken to Claire. No dice.”
Wesker tilted his head. A brief flash of Chris’ voice came to him, lilted and filled with the fresh breeze of a care-free mind; Claire and I tell each other pretty much everything.
“Nothing at all? And the weeks prior, leading up to his disappearance?” Wesker pushed himself away from the table and stalked to retrieve Jill’s gun, just to see the tension in her shoulders. He was lax with it, idly unloading its bullets and then loading them again, inspecting its quality.
“.. She said he was acting like normal. Nothing of concern.”
Wesker drew his tongue across the back of his teeth. If Chris kept this hidden from his two closest confidantes, then he was surely not looking to be found any time soon. Obvious leads, Russia, the radius of Raccoon City’s ashes and frequented areas of interest could be easily ruled out. Wesker only had to guess that Jill had looked into those options already.
“I am right, after all.” Wesker gave quietly, tossing the gun her way, listening to the squeeze of her padded glove as she caught it with ease. “Only I could hope to find him.”
“Don’t hurt him, Wesker.” Jill was back in action, now that she was armed, as if that metal toy would do her any good. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”
Such fire in her eyes. It pulsed beautifully, lit the bore of her drab blue gaze into something more voracious, willing to take on the whole storm of monstrosities that she had walked into.
Wesker’s boots were heavy enough to crush the damp of the rubble beneath them, grinding it into muggy powder. He watched in delight as Jill’s shoulders grew taut, as that hostility scattered down her arms and finally influenced her to raise her gun in anticipation for an attack.
“I will do whatever I please with Redfield.” The amber glare of his eyes softened behind sharp edges of black frames, letting one and then two drops of rain water fall from the balcony of the second floor before he spoke again. “You should be grateful that I am halting my plans in favour of finding our missing pointman. Perhaps, finally, you will be one pace behind, rather than one hundred.”
Anger brimmed on Jill’s upper lip, and her eyebrows gathered in a fretful frustration. Unlike Chris, any respect that she had had for him had died alongside the rest of S.T.A.R.S., buried in the blighted walls of Spencer Mansion. Wesker drew in a long breath, expanding his lungs, and he sighed the query that had been scratching at the back of his mind.
“You are taking a reckless gamble on your life, seeking me out on your lonesome under the baseless notion that he had defected to my side.”
Somewhere in Wesker’s words, Jill’s face fell enough to almost startle him. The picture of a black hole of worry, all-consuming, vulnerable in the eyes of the man who had contributed a great deal to the destruction of her life. There was hesitance on her lips, pursing and tensing in a way that made her reluctance to share further information obvious.
“If I am going to find Redfield, you ought to tell me everything. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“.. He’s kept that picture of you both, all this time. He looks at it when he thinks I don’t see him. Always say he’s going to get rid of it, and then he never does.”
Wesker stilled, shrouded by a sullen weight to his eyes.
“Just one picture, Wesker, please? It’s my birthday, come on..”
“As you keep reminding me.”
Chris was pressed in close, tugging on the curtain of the shiny plastic booth at their side, biting his lip in a way that dug his teeth into the softness of its lower cushion, spilling mounds of plush pink against the slight off-white of his incisors. Despite Wesker’s best efforts that morning, his hair had gone askew again, sticking up in all directions of scruffy brown that made him look infuriating.
“Just one. Please– just one.” His voice had softened, cotton-spun and warm in Wesker’s ear, dangerously encouraging. Had it been anyone else, Wesker would have known nefarious manipulation, but here he could only see the swirls of caramelised honey lapsing through a sea of chocolate, filled with nothing but affection and a deep want for it in return. It reeled Wesker in, trapped him in the viscosity of rich and warm flavours, sweet yet scorching on his tongue.
“Just one.” Wesker relented with a murmur, catching Chris’ cheeks in his hand, feeling the ticklish scratch of his light stubble beneath his bare fingers and the heat of his unsteady breath cascading between his own lips.
The picture had turned out adequately enough, and yet Chris was enthralled by it. Briefly, Wesker’s thoughts fell into obscurity; whether or not he still had the picture in question, too. Wesker did not recall abandoning it to the rot of his apartment in Raccoon City. Perhaps it had been left behind, after all, lain to waste like their love.
“Nothing more needs to be said.” Wesker quietly remarked, brushing aside the bitterness of forgotten memories, chilled to his core by the comfort they brought him - comfort that he certainly never needed.
Jill was staring at him incredulously, as if she had solved some miraculous formula. “.. Jesus, Wesker. I didn’t think you were still as hung up as he is.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Wesker snapped, fixing the fit of his coat. His eyes darted upward, reviewing the creak of old floorboards that barely held the weight of a marble statue on the balcony above. “The frailties of baseless romance clings to him like a plague. I will be sure to rid him of his wants.”
“.. Right.” Jill relinquished a long sigh. She opened her mouth to speak again, but Wesker intercepted her with quick words and a biting tongue.
“If that will be all.” He turned to the half broken window that splashed the room in a terrible must. A flick of his coat led his boot out of the building and into the cold lash of rain, shattered glass falling away like droplets on his tight suit. “Do not think you will be so lucky to have my mercy next time. I never did take you for a fool.” The sweep of leather billowed with the wind as he descended jagged rocks, weaving between their crag and couloir.