Chapter Text
He was starting to be able to see them more.
Waylon took a deep breath, resting his chin on his palm. The quadruplets were dozing on the grass not too far away, watched over by him and Blake. The reporter was tapping away on a laptop that had been wired up by Waylon. Alnilam would perk their head up occasionally, keeping on eye on him as he watched them.
At the edges of the gathering, he could see the vague outlines of the nanite ghosts.
Chris Walker’s hulking form, Miles’ thinner and slighter shape. Eddie’s broad build was off to Waylon’s right, almost pressed against his knee. There was definite shape to them, now, a deeper shadow and a darker haze. Blake had mentioned, earlier, being able to see them out of the corners of his eyes. Not when he looked straight-on, but when he wasn’t looking for them.
“Here,” Chris Redfield’s voice startled him slightly, making him jump an inch or two. Alnilam, the most awake of the quadruplets, growled quietly until he shushed them. A mug of coffee was being offered forward at Waylon’s left, steaming gently.
“Thanks,” Waylon glanced over at Blake, who also had a mug next to his elbow. The reporter didn’t seem to have noticed.
“So Blake was telling me earlier that they’re starting to show up a little more?” Redfield sat down next to Waylon, glancing across the grass to where the other Chris was. He frowned, staring directly at him for a moment. “…I think I’m seeing them too.” He looked at Waylon, eyebrows raised.
Waylon nodded, sipping at the coffee. “Yeah. Try looking with your head towards me. Don’t look at them directly.”
Redfield turned towards him, pausing for a moment before his eyes went wide and he whipped back around. “What the fuck?” he blinked a couple of times, then turned back towards Waylon, taking a deep breath as he did. He settled into a crouch on the ground, very intently not-staring at the hazes of nanite ghosts. “Okay,” he said after a few minutes. “So that’s Chris Walker and Miles Upshur?”
“Yeah,” Waylon said again. “Eddie is on my right.”
Chris rearranged, settling into position again. After a moment, this time, he hummed and nodded. “Eddie is a lot clearer to see,” he met Waylon’s eyes. “Do you happen to know why?”
“He and I are closer,” Waylon curled a knee to his chest, resting the mug on it. He took a deep breath – it felt like the world was settling down again, calming after a storm. This was his life now. This was who he was, now. Waylon Park, programmer, escapee, survivor, experiment, on the run. “Eddie latched onto me, he’s the one who can switch out with me and take over to get us all to safety. He’s done that a couple of times.”
“I met you when it was happening,” Chris recalled.
“You did,” Waylon nodded. “I don’t know why, but he’s the one I’m most connected to.”
He could see Eddie’s head turning towards him. He smiled at the man.
“The quadruplets can see them as well,” Waylon added on after a moment of silence. “Without having to do the corner-of-their-sight thing. I think it’s a bit like compatible software and hardware – they’re from similar experiments. I was never actually meant to be here. I wasn’t supposed to be the Walrider’s host, I wasn’t supposed to be their experiment. I interrupted. I stepped in because I blew a whistle and that carried consequences.” He took another sip of coffee, closing his eyes as the heat traveled down his throat. “I’m not a compatible piece of hardware but the software has updates and I’m becoming compatible.”
“That’s not usually how computers work,” Chris snorted. “But I think I get what you mean.”
He dropped onto the ground, leaning back on his hands. Waylon watched as he rearranged himself, Chris’s brow furrowed as he picked at the toe of his boot. The other man had something he wanted to say, Waylon realized. He was trying to figure out how to say it, how to put it into words.
Somewhere along the line, Eddie’s vocabulary had slipped into his.
He was picking up mannerisms from all three of them, his own bleeding into the Walrider. The way he pushed up the bridge of his glasses, how he sometimes shoved his hair behind his ear. He could see the Walrider doing the same things, occasionally fiddling with it’s hands. He had a living shadow and he had three ghosts following along.
“We have a mission coming up,” Chris spoke up again, the air going still around them. “I was wondering if you’d come along.”
“When?”
“Three days from now,” Chris looked at him, glancing without turning his head. He’d been so worried the last couple of days – his sister was off on her own for right now, the same fight he was entrenched in. The determined expression on his face was enough to tell Waylon that the man was ready to start a brawl. The BSAA had been impressed with the low mortality rate of his attacks, but Chris would throw himself in fist-first. He didn’t kill but he did use his entire body as a melee weapon. “If you’d come along, that would be a bit of a relief.”
“Small team?” Waylon took another sip of his coffee, glancing over as Castor and Polaris rearranged themselves. The four of them were leagues beyond what they were like when he’d found them. They still didn’t speak but he could approach with just a little bit of warning and they wouldn’t immediately be on their guard. “I’d be leaving the quadruplets and Blake here.”
Blake shot a glance at them, an eyebrow raised.
Under guidance from Waylon, passing along Walker’s lessons, Blake had started learning how to fight. He’d just been a reporter, before, relying on knowledge and intelligence to get himself to safety. The things he had been through had changed that. After Waylon had pulled him out, everything had changed.
They all had.
Eddie stayed closer, these days. New people and new experiences and things Waylon had never thought he’d get involved with. Chris and Miles were hovering around the four, guarding them. Alnilam was recovering nicely from whatever had been done to them. Altair stayed close to his sibling at all times, the other half of his set. From the raids on defunct Umbrella headquarters around the world, the BSAA had found more and more information on the Constellations project. They had been designed to do the sort of missions Chris was going on, though they had also been more in the direction of the Walrider. Sneak in, gather intel, sneak out again. Kill if they had to, sometimes that would have been the mission.
They had been designed as assassins.
Four children, taken from a young mother, altered and tweaked until they were something else entirely. Assassins and spies and mercenaries. Altair had functioned as Umbrella’s mercenary. The other three had shown too much personality to be used in such a way. Too hesitant, too emotional, too unwilling to follow orders. The project had been shelved due to complications.
For the couple of years they had spent with the BSAA, they had found out a lot.
Chris nodded, looking out of the corner of his eye at the siblings, his focus drawn to the other Chris. “They seem like they’ll be well taken care of. Between the nanite ghosts and Blake, they’ll be safe here. The BSAA will protect them,” he shrugged. “My sister should be back to base soon as well. I’ll tell her to look out for them until we get back.”
“I’ll go,” Waylon sighed. “I want both companies gone. Murkoff for what they did to the people I know, Umbrella for what they’ve done to the world. I can’t quite believe how far behind I’ve gotten in social awareness – I hadn’t realized what Umbrella has done.”
“You’ve been on the run for years, Waylon,” Chris snorted. “Of course you weren’t aware. You were fighting to stay alive.”
“Yeah, but you’d think I’d have at least heard—”
“Waylon,” Chris reached out and patted his shoulder, seemingly unaware of the way Eddie tensed up at the contact. “You’ve been running for your goddamn life and doing what you can. I don’t think anyone blames you for any of that. I mean, Murkoff and Umbrella might, but they’re not really my concern at the moment.”
“They’re always my concern,” Waylon felt something like the first touch of winter frost run down his spine. “I’ve lost so many people to what they’ve done.” He fiddled with his wedding ring, worn on a leather strip necklace these days.
There were so many more than just him that had been given no justice.
X
The mission had gone wrong almost from the start.
That was all Waylon could think as he coughed, waving some sort of smoke and smog away from his face.
“Chris, watch out!”
Waylon turned on his heel, lunging towards the BSAA members as the air around them seemed to shudder and roll, the lab they were in starting to come apart at the seams. Barry was backed into a corner, firing into a monstrosity clinging to the ceiling above him. Every few bullets seemed to trigger a sharp tail, slicing towards him. Each time he ducked brought the misses narrower and narrower, a few scratches on his arms bleeding sluggishly.
Chris was being attacked by someone in a lab coat, a two-foot-long blade in one hand, the other holding something that glimmered in the light.
Waylon felt his chest go tight, the Walrider flickering into view at his side before it flew on ahead, slamming into the lab-coated person and knocking them sideways. “Chris,” he hissed out the name, stuttering to a halt as he dropped to the floor. “Chris, wake up, come on,” he grabbed the man’s hand, clenching it tightly.
There was a slash in his pant leg.
Sticking gruesomely out of his skin was the needle that had been wielded against him, an oozy purple liquid inside of it. “Shit,” Waylon muttered touching the skin around it gently. Barry limped over to them, the Walrider following slowly behind.
“Fuck,” Barry crouched down, his cheek bleeding. “Hey, Chris, look at me,” he reached out, slapping gently at his friend’s face.
Chris’s eyes opened slowly, his chest heaving as he seemed to wake up some more. His skin was scalding against Waylon’s, sweat dripping down his forehead. It had only been a few moments, a minute at most, since the needle had gone into his skin and the virus had been injected. “Hey…” he choked the word out, sweat beginning to soak through his shirt. He glanced up, his reactions delayed, as the Walrider curled a little closer, leaning over his head. It looked down at him with the empty sockets that suggested eyes, fingers tapping gently on the ground.
“We have got to get out of here,” Barry muttered, taking Chris’s other hand. “C’mon Chris, get up, you’ve got to.”
Beside him, Waylon could sense the others arriving. Chris Walker was the first to make it to him. ‘An undiluted injection,’ the man’s voice whispered to him. Waylon could feel his blood running cold at those words, the Walrider letting out a panicked noise above him.
“He’s going to die if we can’t find something to combat that,” Waylon reached out, putting his hand on Barry’s wrist. “That was an undiluted variation of a virus – it’ll burn through his body in a short time, rip apart his immune system. Whatever variation they were testing here, it’ll do horrible things to him before he dies. He’ll die in pain,” he looked around, sending up a silent prayer to a god he hadn’t believed in for decades. “Shit,” he muttered again, shaking his head.
Above their heads an alarm started blaring. A short pause followed, a speaker crackling to life and informing them that a self-destruct sequence had begun.
“Pick him up,” Waylon stood, looking around again. There had to be something.
There was always something.
Barry hefted Chris to his feet, the man dangling limply from his friend’s shoulder. The Walrider roared as it passed them, a howl that could chill blood echoing through the facility. Waylon felt that same anger spiking in him, a frightened beast in his gut. Eddie’s hand was on his back, pushing him forward, pushing him to keep up with Barry as he dragged Chris from the room. “We need to get out of here,” Waylon continued looking for something, anything, that would help them. There wasn’t much to see, not much to find.
Nodding, Barry put his head down and doubled his efforts to get Chris to the door, seeming to block out the world as he moved.
Up ahead was a glass tube, connected to various computers and machines. There were readouts printing next to it, the murky liquid hard to see through from a side angle. As they came up closer to it, however, Waylon could see inside of it clearly – some sort of privacy protector like office computers occasionally had.
Inside the tube was a man.
His hair was light, an almost white-blond, and his eyes were closed. There was a mask on his face, connected to an apparatus that ran up and out of the tube. At the edges of his face, there were burn marks, scarring in odd patches.
Waylon couldn’t help himself.
He stopped to stare, the Walrider stopping with him. Barry came to a halt just in time to not run into them, huffing and panting. The damage so far seemed to have stopped in the below levels, but they didn’t want to test it – self-destruct was still active. He couldn’t stop himself from looking, though. There was something about the man, something about him being locked into a tube filled with an eerily green liquid. “That,” Barry looked up at the man, horrified recognition flashing across his face.
Chris, hanging off his shoulder, his legs useless beneath him. His head was lolling to the side, his eyes unfocused.
Even from a few feet away, Waylon could feel the heat coming off of him. They needed to get him to safety, maybe try to find an antidote to whatever virus had been injected directly into his system at full strength. If a patient was getting dosed with a virus to try and combat the one they already had, it was always diluted before being injected.
He had been hit with a full-strength dose of whatever the fuck it was.
“Are you kidding me,” Barry muttered. He was still looking up at the man in the tube, taking several deep breaths before shaking his head. “That…That can’t be him. It can’t be.”
“Barry?”
Barry turned to look at him, a haunted expression on his face, swallowing hard. “That looks like Albert Wesker. A man Chris watched die – he reported back to us about it. He was supposed to have died back in two-thousand-and-nine,” he shook his head. “Chris watched him. He dropped him into a volcano – Wesker took a fucking explosion to the face and got dropped into a volcano and now he’s here?” He looked down when Chris twitched, his back cracking and snapping as he hit the ground, having slipped out of Barry’s grasp.
He shuddered and twitched relentlessly, his hands clawing at the ground. Choked vocalizations came from him, words that guttered out before they could be heard.
Waylon dropped down next to him, a hand on his shoulder as he tried to figure out what to do. Chris’s eyes closed, his head jerking to one side like he was trying to shrug something off. Blood was welling up in the beds of his nails. He looked ready to fall over. Waylon hesitated, looking up at Barry. The other man had dropped to his knees on Chris’s other side, his eyes wide. His hands were clenched on the floor, like he was just as confused as Waylon.
“Chris,” Barry bit his bottom lip. “Chris, c’mon.”
Chris didn’t answer.
Waylon felt a shiver run down his spine, the tell-tale sign of one of the nanite ghosts. Miles’ voice echoed in his head. ‘Look at the man in the tube,’ Miles whispered. ‘Pay attention to him.’
Looking up, Waylon stopped breathing.
The man had orange eyes, bleary but focused, as he stared down at the three of them. He lifted a hand through the liquid, placing it against the glass. Waylon stood up and watched, barely aware of Barry and Chris anymore. The man tilted his head, looking down at them, blinking a couple of times. Each movement was slow. Stilted. His eyes, bright orange, almost glowing, seemed to stare into Waylon.
“You said his name was Albert Wesker?” Waylon asked, taking a step back.
“Yeah,” Barry wasn’t looking up, too focused on trying to get Chris up and moving again. Waylon looked down at them, crouching and pressing two fingers to the ground to help his balance. “Wesker was our captain, way the fuck back. We worked for Umbrella, remember? S.T.A.R.S. He was our captain. He betrayed us all, threatened my family.”
“Cool, cool, alright,” Waylon hummed, his ears perking like he’d heard something he wasn’t aware of just yet. It happened again, but this time he actually consciously heard it.
The sound of cracking glass slipped through the air.
Gulping, Waylon spun on his toes, curled an arm around Chris’s waist, then threw them both across the ground. “Barry!” he snarled the man’s name out as he moved, hearing the glass shatter and liquid splash out across the floor. “Barry!”
“I’m alright!” Barry was several feet away, eyes wide as he unholstered his gun.
Albert Wesker, supposedly, was crouched on the ground and pulling the mask off of his face. The scarring around his face continued across his back and shoulders, going tight when he moved. He had a pair of skin-tight shorts on, was otherwise nude.
Eddie’s presence at his side was sudden and protective, like a shield in front of him.
Wesker’s eyes tracked Eddie’s movements and Waylon leaned a little closer to him, fear trickling down his spine. “Uh,” he took a deep breath. Eddie leaned closer as well, his warmth washing over Waylon slowly. With a soft growl, Wesker took a shuffling movement forward, his hands less-than-steady on the floor as he moved. He seemed to gain strength as he moved, however, his limbs coming back under his control. “Barry?”
Barry’s gun clicked.
Out of ammo.
The other man met Waylon’s eyes for a second before both of them looked back at Wesker. The orange-eyed creature dragged himself across the floor, his breathing harsh.
“Back off,” Barry put himself between Wesker and Chris. His eyes were dark, anger carved into his expression. It was a deep sort of anger, the kind that came from being angry for over a decade. Barry and Chris had mentioned working for Umbrella before, that much was true. They had stopped in 1998, with the disbanding of S.T.A.R.S.
Wesker reached out with one hand and pushed Barry aside, throwing him a few feet.
He brought himself up onto his knees, staring down at Chris. His eyes were clear now, no longer bleary. There was a heavier line of scarring down his back, like someone had dug for his spine with a knife. He leaned down, not even bothering to look at Barry when the man tried to come closer again. Wesker reached out and pushed him back. “Unstable,” Wesker muttered. “Too strong of a dose.”
“I—” Barry blinked a couple of times, frowning. “What?”
“He was injected with a pure version of a virus,” Waylon stepped forward, Wesker’s gaze snapping towards him. “Directly into his bloodstream. I think he might be dying.”
“Yes.” Wesker nodded.
“Do you know how to help him?” Waylon continued, swallowing his nerves. He’d been living this sort of life for so long that it surprised him. Fear in this situation was a normal reaction for anyone who hadn’t lived through what he’d lived through. There was no room for fear. “If he’s dying, I would like him to survive.”
Wesker nodded again, brushing his fingers over Chris’s cheek. “Redfield,” he muttered. “Christopher,” he chuckled, the noise off-note. Dissonant. “Best shot of S.T.A.R.S, messy temper,” He ran a hand up Chris’s chest, his thumb settling over the man’s pulse. “Infected.”
“…Infected?” Barry got to his feet, looking down at Wesker. “What do you mean?”
“Similar virus,” Wesker didn’t look at either of them. He seemed to only have eyes for Chris. “To me.”
Waylon watched as Barry’s face went a dead-looking pale, his hands clenching into useless fists at his sides. “Barry?” He reached out, hesitating before putting his hand on the man’s shoulder. Barry didn’t even look at him, too focused on looking down at Chris. The younger of the two, Waylon had been told, old friends. They had survived through hell and back together, along with a couple of others Waylon hadn’t met yet. Starting in 1998, they had been through more than most. “Barry, we need to keep going. We can do what we can for him, but we need to get out.”
Wesker stared at Waylon, eyes narrowed, his head tilted to one side. He was tracking Waylon’s movements, the steady and heavy gaze of a predator.
Raising his chin, Waylon met his eyes and felt Eddie pressing up against his side. The Walrider hissed, circling around all of them. Miles and Chris – that was still hard to figure out how to label them separately – were off behind him. “You’re coming with us,” Waylon tilted his head down, dropping into a crouch. On the same level as Wesker, he could tell the man would be nearly a head taller than him when standing. He was broad in the shoulders, stronger than his frame gave the impression of being.
“And if I refuse?”
“I’m pretty sure Umbrella would love to recoup their losses here,” Waylon refused to look away. Eddie’s anxiety buzzed in his head, the nanite ghost’s hand running up the back of his neck. “And you were just in a tube in their lab. You were supposed to have died a while ago, I’ve heard. No resources, no clothes other than a pair of shorts, no way out. I’m going to guess you don’t know the layout of this facility.”
Wesker’s lip pulled back on a snarl, his eyes narrowing. “Fine.” He bit the word out, the sound of it coming out chewed up.
Barry leaned down to pull Chris off the floor, arranging the man’s arm limply around his neck. Wesker stood on shaking legs, his eyes now following every movement that Barry made. Chris held his attention.
From what little Waylon had heard, they had always been drawn to each other. Chris Redfield and Albert Wesker had come across each other so many times – fighting across the years. That was all the story that he’d ever heard. Chris didn’t want to talk about him often. Waylon couldn’t blame the man – they’d only known each other for about three years. They’d seen a New Years and a couple of other holidays pass by while working together. According to what he knew, Albert Wesker had supposedly been dead for almost thirteen years.
With a soft cough, Barry caught his attention, jerking his head. It was a small motion, but Waylon nodded and moved forward, catching up and walking on Chris’s vulnerable side.
A quiet growl came from Wesker with the movement, but he allowed it to happen.
Waylon could feel his ghosts walking around him, the Walrider floating overhead. Miles was at his back, standing as a guard. Walker was off on Barry’s other side, a wall of defense for the two men. Eddie was at Waylon’s left, the brush of his hand a static sort of crackle against his skin. “Why are there four people with you?” Wesker’s voice was dry, his eyes bright as the lights flickered. The Walrider hissed, plunging through the wall to cause chaos somewhere else in the facility.
“Because I went through hell and I wasn’t going to leave them there,” Waylon looked at him.
He’d been right.
Wesker was just about a head taller than him. He was muscular, broad at the shoulders, and he moved like he was hunting something small and terrified. Waylon refused to be the prey, refused to be intimidated by the creature walking beside them.
Eddie’s gaze was heavy, directed past Waylon’s shoulder to land on Wesker’s face.
“I’m not the fallout of Umbrella’s bullshit,” Waylon continued. “I’m the fallout of what happened to Murkoff. Chris Walker, Miles Upshur, Eddie Gluskin.” He pointed at each of them. “The Walrider.” He gestured upwards, to where it had last been seen. “I went through hell by sending Miles’ invitation and then I got him killed. Eddie died in front of me. Chris tried to help contain the problem but he was inside and they had been experimenting on him. It got him killed.”
“Murkoff.” Wesker inhaled slowly, his eyes closing for a moment. “Sister corporation.” When he opened his eyes again, something flickered in them. If he’d been asked, Waylon would have sworn he’d seen fear.
Nobody challenged them on their way out, the Walrider rejoining them as they exited the building. The air stank of chemicals and gas and Waylon almost laughed as something deep within the building exploded, fire flaring out the windows. “I’ve made it my mission to take them down,” Waylon told Wesker, meeting his eyes with his chin held high. “Too many people have died at their hands.”
Something like respect grew in Wesker’s eyes as he stared at Waylon.
Another reminder about the self-destruct came over the speaker above them and Wesker sent a quiet sneer up towards the ceiling. With every step, every moment passing, his walking was more confident, his strides stronger. When they came across a small lab, Wesker ducked through the door, shuffling through the jars and vials with steady hands. Waylon followed after him, frowning. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
He got a glare in return, a hard, flat stare.
“Seriously,” Waylon grinned, feeling Miles’ strain of feral anger making itself known. He grinned, imagining himself with sharp teeth. It was beginning to feel truer, these days. He felt dangerous, dancing on an edge. The Walrider curled around his shoulder, leering over him and menacing Wesker. “Do you know what you’re doing? Because if you don’t or if you want to hurt Redfield, we’re going to have a problem.”
“I have a PhD in Virology,” Wesker continued moving, looking away from Waylon to do so. “I was a head researcher for Umbrella.”
“So you know exactly what you’re doing,” Waylon leaned his weight on his hands, on the edge of the table. “If you hurt him…” he let the sentence trail off, a quiet threat in his tone. It was always funnier to see what people pulled out of tones and words, what meaning they derived. He paused, pulling himself back together. That had felt like Walker’s pessimism, the former military officer standing guard at Waylon’s back. Eddie was still at his right side, keeping him upright.
“I do,” Wesker continued working, held a vial up to the light. “Not the proper workspace, not the proper tools, but it will do for now.”
He turned on his heel, grabbing a syringe and needle as he moved.
Filling the syringe, he plunged it into Redfield’s arm before Barry could even react, pressing the plunger down and sending the bright green liquid into his bloodstream. Redfield jerked and twitched, whining quietly, but he quieted down quickly. “We need to keep moving,” Wesker motioned for Barry to lead the way, stepping back. “The facility will be imploding soon.”
“What, they would destroy everything like that?” Waylon moved past him, feeling the Walrider taking off again.
“To keep their research in their own hands, to keep everything contained, to keep their secrets?” Wesker reached out, snagging a coat off a rack as he passed it. “Of course they would.” He adjusted the coat on his shoulders, frowning at the way it fit across his shoulders. His eyes were visibly in the gloom as the power went out, emergency lights kicking in.
They kept moving.