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It is July 1, 2013, and Chris Redfield’s world is distilled into underwater facilities exploding in brilliant flashes of heat and silent ocean waves. The sunset resting on the horizon holds promise for a new day but as Chris looks down at the blood spattered BSAA badge he can only think of a bloody yet genuine smile from a face half ruined vanishing into the ocean depths.
He is barely alert as BSAA rescue choppers reach his position and extract him from the escape pod that could easily have held the two of them. Chris lists off a sitrep almost casually, words automatically relaying the success of the mission objective, the new types of B.O.W. his squad had slayed and the casualties incurred.
Jeff, Keaton, Marco, Reid. The names roll of Chris’ tongue with a numbness he is far too familiar with and already they are reduced to mere statistics- victims to bioterrorism. With a pang of guilt he realizes he cannot recall their last names.
Chris thinks of the men he’s lost tonight- bloody and broken on garbage heaps or in shattered chrysalid pieces on the floor of a dirty Chinese shanty building. BSAA teams would later be dispatched with securing their remains and Chris does not envy the job of notifying the families.
Military funerals with honors would do little for the families whose sons, husbands, and brothers died half a country away, reduced to bloody smears or infected with viral agents that stripped away everything that made them human.
Chris head pitches forward and he kneads his forehead roughly, rubbing at his eyes as if the ward the thoughts away. All idealistic, talented men who committed themselves to the cause and his leadership- and the only thing that got them was a casket.
As the sky shimmers a scarlet gold Chris thinks of Piers Nivans; reasonable, down to earth, yet at the same time capable of supreme stubbornness. It was the young sniper who had kept Chris’ own anger in check and he wondered how many times Piers had saved his life that night.
He thinks of Piers, right arm impaled and pulped in a fountain of blood and metal. He thinks of Piers tearing himself away, leaving his arm little more than a bloody stump as he crawled through water. He thinks of Piers, blood swirling in the water, his face ashen and slick with sweat as he tremulously raised the C-Virus syringe to the red, ragged knob that used to be his right arm and injected himself.
Piers is smiling at him, face bloodied and caked in scummy green J’avo fluid. His eye sockets are welted and purpling, the veins around his mouth and brow thrumming a bright blue. Blood is streaming from his cracked face but Piers is still smiling. His eyes crinkle kindly as well, one brown and still human even as the other flits about, translucent and iridescent.
“You did a real good thing,” Chris mutters.
Piers Nivans is smiling even as the world collapses around him.
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Chris Redfield’s hands are shaking and he needs a drink.
The debriefing blurs together in his head, slurred words and slurrier faces of superiors that Chris cannot name off the top of his head. The information they are able to release is unsurprisingly limited, mainly concerning the cessation of hostilities in China and the immediate dispatch of rescue and retrieval squads. C-virus chrysalids that spawned screeching lizard monsters and multiple eyed J’avo capable of regrowing a face split apart by gunfire are naturally excluded.
Chris rubs at his eyes for what must have been the thousandth time in the past couple of hours. Debriefing and post mission results had already been verified, casualties tolled (when Chris saw Piers name on the list of casualties he bit his lip so hard it bled) and information on C-Virus mutations compiled and handed to BSAA unit leaders for the formulation of strategies.
He had barely restrained his arms from shaking as a lab coated psychiatrist- someone on the governments bankroll, not one of the BSAA’s personal therapists, as it was a face he didn’t recognize- asked questions concerning the death of his squad. The psychiatrist is tall, reedy, with high cheekbones and blonde hair slicked back and for a moment Chris thinks of Wesker. The impersonal manner with which the doctor intones his questions- as if he was some bored telemarketer calling for a survey over the phone- and the thin lips that curl further into a frown with each answer makes Chris think of putting his fist through his face.
Chris had then been shuffled into a sterile examination room after scrubbing his skin near raw in the decontamination shower. Skin still aching, he notes syringes, thermometers, a stethoscope, and other medical tools he is unable to identify on the counter nearby and without a word begins to undress. He is seated on the examining table, hunched over, skin blotted and purpled with bruises, chest and stomach covered in dirt, grime, and blood down to his regulation brown briefs.
He hears the click of heels on tile and as his head cranes towards the door, it moves slowly, creakingly, like he can almost feel the individual movement, the scraping of vertebrae on vertebrae, and he realizes just how bone weary he is.
The door opens and though the woman has her back to Chris as she opens the door, lost in conversation with someone else, Chris is able to immediately recognize her.
“Rebecca.” And despite his exhaustion, his all over, feel-it-in-every muscle weariness, he breaks into a smile.
A tired one, but a smile nonetheless.
There she is, as round cheeked and delicate as she was that fateful night fifteen years ago in the hallways of Arklay; her hair is slightly longer and she’s grown a microscopic amount, but Rebecca Chambers could easily be mistaken for someone years younger. Rebecca turns on her heel, round blue-green eyes meeting Chris tired ones, and her face almost breaks.
“Oh god, Chris.” The clipboard she held close to her hip falls to the floor with a clatter and, all protocol forgotten, she rushes forward to the man who saved her life so many years ago in the Spencer Mansion. Before he knows it she is holding him, small arms wrapped as far as they can around his torso, her face warm against his chest.
“I’m so sorry about Piers,” she manages, trembling lightly and Chris feels tears, moisture beading soft and wet near his heart and he feels like he should be the one apologizing. All pretension forgotten, all weariness set aside, he draws her close to him, enveloping her and returning her shaking embrace, the mottled, ragged expanse of his chest rustling against her scrubs.
After what seems like an eternity but what Chris knows to be short minutes they release each other. Chris, naked except for a pair of tatty standard issue briefs, body bruised and beaten and worn down, covered in scars, some old, some freshly acquired. Rebecca, clad in a wrinkled nurses uniform, hair mussed from lack of sleep, with dark shadows under her eyes.
The warmth the two had displayed, one of two old friends simply glad to be alive another day, is smothered under a sterile, clinical air. Any dreamy eroticism to be found at the sight of the handsome Chris Redfield nearly naked in front of her was extinguished by the haggard, worn down , broken picture of reality.
Rebecca gingerly approaches, her bright, compassionate eyes that remind Chris so much of his sister roving the landscape of Chris’ body for obvious and immediate trauma.
What little distance between them is erased as she places a hand on his cheek with a tenderness that nearly brings him to tears.
“How much more can you take before you break?” She asks him, and he cannot readily provide an answer.
His torso, broad as a barrel, is one big splotch of purple gray. Rebecca is intimately familiar with the scars that crisscross her friends collarbone and pectorals. Near his right nipple a long, diagonal shadow of white, raised skin is the pocked reminder of an insurgent’s slashing knife. Several smaller cuts crisscross across his defined abdomen like blades of grass, raised and bumpy and distorted, and Rebecca notes the ragged crater, still pink and frayed, of a lucky bullet that had found its way through his left bicep.
She is silent as she cares for him, cataloguing the new damage as her eyes sweep across the old, suturing a few fresh cuts that are deep enough to need them. The tiredness that is all encompassing for Chris is evident in the sunken state of his eyes, wrinkles born from a weary sorrow crinkling the corners and making him look older than he is.
He does not react at all to the antiseptic she effectively douses him in, and the expression on his face is unchanging, mute and stony as Rebecca gently sponges away the muck and grime coating his body.
As she wrings out the sponge the water swirls and muddies a pinkish red that slowly gives way to brown.
“All done,” Rebecca says tremulously after a length of time he could not place, the thin, tired smile on her face wavering as much as her even thinner voice.
She procures for him a white crewneck shirt, lightweight, breathable cotton, and it slides over his chest and stomach, hiding the wreckage of his skin.
“I wouldn’t know what I’d do without you, Rebecca.” He tells her, warm gratefulness seeping into his voice that he wishes would spread throughout the rest of his body.
Die, probably. He imagines her saying.
Rebecca takes off the disposable gloves she had been wearing with a startling snap as the rubber gives. She gathers up the medical supplies she had been using and as she disposes of the sharps Chris can only mutely stare at the biohazard symbol on the waste container.
She turns to face him now, arms full of swabs and gauze, the chord of a stethoscope dangling loosely over her left forearm.
“I know what it feels like, Chris,” she tells him in a voice so small, her lips moving so imperceptibly that he wouldn’t wonder later if he his tired mind had imagined it.
No, she is confessing to him, speaking now between friends, not with the careful, calculated manner of a nurse attending her patient.
She tenderly places the supplies in her arms on the counter next to the sink and takes a deep breath that hitches slightly.
“After Arklay, when we got back to the police department,” she says, and he is transported back to 1998; he sees her as she was at 18, tears stealing down her face, glinting as the sun rose over the embers of the smoldering mansion, wearing tracks down her face even as she slept.
“I thought so desperately hard, ‘Why me? Why them, and why not me?’ I wondered how someone so inexperienced, so useless, had managed to survive that night when so many better men had died.”
Chris opens his mouth to correct her, and she smiles gratefully, warmly at him but her eyes implore him not to speak, and the words sink bank down into his throat.
“The pain, the fear, the anger... those feelings stole into my lungs and settled in my chest- every breath I took for myself was stifled, suffocated under those thoughts of self-doubt, of self-loathing.”
“It hurt until it felt like that was all that was left. That I would never feel anything else.”
“But it was you, Chris,” she says, “It was you, Jill and Barry, you helped me to remember. For every person I grieved for, for every dead face I saw in the shadows- you brought me into the light.”
Her eyes hold his now, and though her chin is trembling her gaze is firm.
“You gave me hope. You helped me to understand that the sacrifices S.T.A.R.S. made all those years ago weren’t in vain. That if the work we did, the pain we endured, the friends we said goodbye to- it would all be worth it if meant even one person in the world would not have to feel like we had. ”
He had been unaware of her slowly closing the distance between them and he stiffens in surprise at first as she hugs him again but then softens into her embrace, his burlish frame almost bonelessly melting into the comfort her arms provided.
She speaks, eventually, her cheek squished against the crook of his neck and shoulder, the sound of her voice vibrating against his skin, and he feels a sense of groundedness, of being tethered he was not aware he was missing
“I know it hurts,” says Rebecca, and he knows she is not referring to the wounds on his body, “but there are people here now that hurt for you. That hurt with you. That understand what you are going through, and will be here to support you, even if- especially if- you feel like you don’t deserve it.”
Her voice drops a decibel then, and is almost conspiratorial in its whispered confidence, “And I’m one of them.”
Chris feels her cheeks dimple upwards in a smile as her head rests against his, and for all his flagging spirit a smile of his own breaks onto his face.
They sit for a while, enjoying the quiet, before Rebecca reluctantly disentangles from Chris’ embrace- which had instinctively drawn her further into his arms in one of his infamous
“big brother hugs” as Claire calls them.
She looks at him apologetically before speaking, “I have a few rounds I have to make and some more patients to attend to, but I promise, Chris. I’ll be here if you need anything.”
He is still ragged, exhaustion lending a leaden weight to his limbs. He’s lost more blood than he can accurately recall and the skin across his torso would be mottled in shades of grey and yellow and purple for the foreseeable future.
The loss of his squad- the loss of Piers- is still a bleeding wound, raw and aching, exposed to the air. But Rebecca’s presence lessens the pain threatening to drown him, buoys him amongst the waves of the South China Sea threatening to dash him to pieces.
“Rebecca?” He asks her as she opens the door and she turns on her heel to look at Chris one last time.
“Thanks.”
She pauses briefly as though pondering her next course of action before turning all the way to face him. She brings her right hand to her temple, straight and flat, and snaps into a salute .
“Yes, sir!”
And with a playful smile, she brings her hand down and gives him a thumbs up.