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Ship: Albert Wesker/William Birkin. (Various names are used for this and none seem to be agreed on. I’ve seen Weskin, Birsker—which someone I know thinks “sounds like an IKEA couch”, Wirkin—which was originally meant as a joke, and Willsker, which is usually the one I use.)
Fandom: Resident Evil (gameverse).
Warnings: references to death, brief non-graphic reference to zombies, mad science, general horror stuff but there won’t be anything too graphic, eugenics but not in a..racial sense.
The fandom
Resident Evil is my main fandom, and my favourite for a lot of reasons. Partly the entire setting and idea of it, and all the interesting characters, but also just that it...has enough to be good in its own right while leaving a lot open for fanfic writers/interpretation/headcanon.
Just to warn you, this is a long series of games (been going since 1996 and still ongoing today), various games have been remade, and earlier games sometimes had translation issues (nothing that really affects the ship, but it does lead to debate in the fandom in general).
Also, one of the most important scenes for the ship (aka the only time they’re actually onscreen together) has two versions: the original version in Resident Evil 0, and another version in Umbrella Chronicles (a game that basically retells various stories from other games, generally with improved graphics and voice acting and reworded dialogue, although it does also have some new story content—nothing new for the ship though.) I'll try to keep things clear enough for anyone fandom-blind to understand this, though.
The games that are most relevant to this ship are Resident Evil 0 and Umbrella Chronicles, but Resident Evil 1 (and the remake), Resident Evil 2 (and the remake), and one file from Resident Evil 5 will also come up briefly.
A general summary of the plot of Resident Evil
Resident Evil is set in a world which on the surface doesn’t seem that different to our own, but is actually controlled by various evil corporations that are secretly experimenting on people and making all kinds of Things (zombies and various sorts of mutant monsters, basically, generally referred to as Bio-Organic Weapons or BOWs). The main evil corporation in the early games is Umbrella, which is where both these horrible people I ship started out working. (I mean it, they’re horrible people. But I love them.) Umbrella was founded in the 1960s by a creepy British aristocrat called Oswell (or Ozwell) E Spencer. We don’t know what the E stands for. (Who knows, maybe Evil really is his middle name?)
The heroes of the games fight against these evil corporations, initially just trying to survive against zombie outbreaks and escaped BOWs, but later trying to reveal Umbrella’s actions and take the company down. They eventually succeed at this, but various other companies and criminal organisations spring up to replace it. The setting never really runs out of new conspiracies, crime syndicates, and cults to fight against, but it also (UNLIKE the films, which have very little in common with the games) never turns into the kind of post-apocalyptic setting that is generally associated with zombie stories.
Albert Wesker
Wesker is the main villain of the Resident Evil games, right from the first game until his death in RE5, and his actions influence the plot of various later games as well. He’s one of the most popular characters in the fandom, with huge amounts of fic about him and lots of fanart, and is shipped with a lot of people. Including Will, although in my opinion there isn’t nearly enough content for this particular ship.
While he didn’t know about this until RE5, apparently believing himself to have had a fairly normal background, Wesker grew up as part of the Wesker Project (or Project W)--essentially a eugenics program run by Umbrella. He was raised by people who worked for Umbrella, and secretly monitored throughout his childhood. Wesker was taught to be ruthless and ambitious from an early age.
Wesker was a child prodigy, getting a PhD at the age of 17 (either in bioengineering or virology depending on which files, background material, etc. you use). He immediately started training with Umbrella at their training centre in the admittedly strangely-named Midwestern city where they had several of their main facilities—Raccoon City. This is where he met Will (more on that later). By the age of 18 he was working as a researcher alongside Will.
Wesker gradually started to suspect Spencer was hiding something from him. In 1991, he transferred to Umbrella’s intelligence division to get a higher security clearance so he could investigate further, but didn’t manage to find out the truth of the Wesker Project. During the 1990s he worked as a spy for Umbrella: this included 5 years undercover in the US Army (as an engineering officer).
When Wesker returned to Raccoon City in 1996, Umbrella made him head of a team called STARS. STARS were kind-of-but-not-exactly police officers, but they were mostly independent of the rest of the police department (most of the team, including Wesker, had no police training or experience); officially they were meant to deal with terrorism and organised crime, but Wesker’s real job was to cover up Umbrella’s crimes. The rest of the team trusted Wesker, unaware that he worked for Umbrella.
After two years as Captain of STARS, Wesker was ordered to lead the team into the Arklay Mansion (an Umbrella facility where there had been a zombie outbreak) and betray them, allowing them to get killed by the BOWs so he could gather data on how the BOWs performed in combat. He was then meant to destroy the Mansion and report back to Umbrella. Instead, he decided to steal as much data as possible, fake his own death, and betray Umbrella to go and work for another company. And when I say “fake his own death”...I mean “used an experimental virus Will gave him on himself, let a Tyrant—that’s a huge monster with claws—stab him, then the virus brought him back to life with superpowers and glowing eyes and also made him taller.”
For the rest of the series, Wesker does a lot of supervillain stuff and eventually tries to become a god and take over the world, but this ship manifesto is mostly going to focus on stuff before the Mansion Incident, because soon after that happened...well, Will died. Was killed, actually.
William Birkin
William Birkin was originally the villain of Resident Evil 2. He’s appeared in fairly minor roles in a few other games, but was never as major a character as Wesker, and except for the Resident Evil 2 remake he hasn’t appeared in anything in years, which is probably why he’s quite an underappreciated character.
Like Wesker, Will was a scientific genius and child prodigy. In fact, he was even more of a scientific genius than Wesker, getting his PhD when he was 15. He trained at Umbrella alongside Wesker and by the time he was 16 he was also a senior researcher.
For the next 20 years, Will basically did nothing but research. He did somehow find time to marry Annette in 1985 (which isn’t a problem for my ship as I mostly ship Will with Wesker before then, but I’ll get to that) and have a daughter, Sherry, born in 1986. It seems that originally him and Annette really did love each other, and cared about Sherry, but by 1998 they were both too busy with work to pay much attention to anything else.
Will was desperate to rise up the ranks in Umbrella, but it never quite worked out. He wasn’t much of a people person and it seems a lot of people didn’t really like him. While he was a brilliant researcher, he was never that good at...well, anything else. In 1998, angry with not getting promoted, he decided to sell his research to the US government and leave Umbrella.
Umbrella found out about this and sent an Umbrella Security Service squad to confiscate his research. Will refused to hand it over, and they gunned him down. Will used the G-Virus he’d been researching on himself (as it was meant to accelerate healing and repair dead cells), but transformed into a monster. For a while he retained enough of his intelligence to try and protect Sherry, but soon his mind was taken over completely. The monster (usually referred to as “G”) killed Annette, and was later killed.
Their relationship: canon evidence
After all that, you’re probably wondering why I’d want these two evil people to get together. Well, for a start, I like them far too much… but also, it’s less that I want them to get together, and more that I headcanon that they were together at some point pre-canon.
Honestly I also enjoy platonic content for this ship, as long as it isn’t too insistent that both characters are straight, since canon could be interpreted as them having been in a relationship or just being very close friends. (Fun thing about Resident Evil: there’s a lot of teasing of various ships, and a lot of very ambiguous relationships, but very few relationships are confirmed canon or not canon.) Personally, though, I prefer to ship them.
Wesker and Will met when Wesker was 17 and Will was 15, and they were training to be Umbrella researchers together. They were seen as the two best students in their year by a long way, and quickly became nicknamed “Scholar Will and Practical Al” (Wesker wears sunglasses at night, but he is practical in comparison to Will). They were clearly quite close from very early on, despite the higher-ranking researchers trying to encourage a rivalry between them (they did get very competitive with each other, but apparently only in a friendly way). One of my favourite moments in RE0 is when you can find a file from the Assistant Director saying “I'm going to have them tearing at each other's throats”, while in the rest of the game they’re still working together 20 years later.
When Will was 16 and Wesker was 18 they became joint Chief Researchers at Arklay, and continued working closely together for the next 10 years. Despite Wesker’s usual arrogance and disdain for everyone around him, he clearly respected Will, calling him “brilliant and talented” and “a genius” on multiple occasions (in an official report as well…), and admitting that Will was a better researcher than him (with no trace of resentment). When Wesker started trying to figure out what Spencer had been hiding from him, he noted that Will was “the only one [he] could talk to” as he didn’t trust any of the other researchers.
Will, meanwhile, despite being incredibly paranoid and generally unstable, seemed to trust Wesker completely. It appears that until Will met Annette, Wesker was his only friend.
While Wesker’s main reason for transferring to the Intelligence Division was to investigate Spencer, he also mentions Will as a reason. I don’t think he’d have left the research department if he hadn’t had someone he could trust still working there—someone who was an even better scientist than he was, and could achieve everything that Wesker might have wanted to achieve as a researcher and more (he describes Will’s research as “far above [his] level” or “beyond [his] ability” depending on the translation)
Wesker didn’t seem particularly pleased about Will marrying Annette, but they continued working together even afterwards for several years. After Wesker transferred to the Intelligence Division they didn’t work together as often, although they apparently stayed on fairly good terms. Wesker’s second report describes meeting him at Arklay in 1995 (after having been away for a while, mostly in the Army) as “nostalgic”, although that line wasn’t in the original Japanese document.
When Spencer decided to have James Marcus, director of the Executive Training Centre, assassinated in 1988, Wesker and Will worked together yet again to cover up the assassination and take over his research.
(Wesker and Will talking to Marcus as he dies)
In 1998, Wesker and Will were assigned to work together to supervise the reopening of the Executive Training Centre—apparently Umbrella knew they worked well together, so decided to assign them together even though they technically didn't work in the same department anymore. On the night of July 23 rd , the two of them were called in after the investigation team they’d sent to the training centre were attacked by the (kind of) resurrected Dr Marcus. This is where we get their actual screentime together in RE0 and Umbrella Chronicles: mostly the two of them in a room together watching the events of the game through a camera feed, and in the words of someone on a Resident Evil confessions blog “bickering so much I wanted them to just fuck already.” (I personally didn’t really want that by that time as I don’t want to break up Will/Annette, but...well, even Tvtropes notices the “Ho Yay” in their scenes together.)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EX5Z765X0AAHEHj?format=jpg&name=large (Umbrella Chronicles, it wouldn't display when I tried to embed)
(Resident Evil 0)
During that night, Wesker mentioned to Will that he was planning on leaving Umbrella. The exact conversation is slightly different between RE0 and Umbrella Chronicles, but in both versions, Will’s reaction is basically “you can’t leave, because I don’t want to leave.” Eventually Wesker does decide to leave without him, but neither of them seem too pleased with the decision. It comes across very much as if they both would have preferred to stay together.
The fact Wesker trusted Will enough that when Will told him “here’s an experimental virus, inject yourself with it then let yourself get stabbed, I think it will bring you back to life with superpowers but there’s a chance you’ll die”, Wesker just...did it, apparently without doubting him for a second, is also pretty amazing to me.
In the HD Remaster translation of Wesker’s Report, it’s outright stated that Wesker was planning on having Will rescued before he was assassinated. Even in the original translation (which is closer to the original Japanese script on this point), Wesker says he knew Will was in danger of being assassinated, and then that “unfortunately” the Umbrella Security Service team “was ahead of us”, heavily implying he wanted to send someone to rescue him.
Also, in the original Japanese script for Resident Evil 0, it’s quite noticeable that Wesker speaks much more casually around Will than he does around anyone else, using the casual first person pronoun “ore” instead of the formal “watashi” that he almost always uses with other people...when he’s not using “oretachi”, which means “us”. In general when talking to Will, Wesker uses “us” more than he does “you” or “I” in both Japanese and English. Very unusual for someone generally so self-centred. Same goes for talking about Will, in Wesker’s second report (“from that day on, the Arklay research centre was ours”, “we were the chosen ones”, etc—depending on the translation, of course, but it’s still quite interesting considering how ruthlessly ambitious Wesker was that he didn’t mind sharing the position of Chief Researcher with Will at all). It’s also interesting just how much Wesker talks and thinks about Will, especially in his second report, where he often mentions Will even when it isn’t particularly relevant.
Another important point to note is that Will is referred to as Wesker’s “partner” in a file in Resident Evil 5. While this doesn’t necessarily mean anything romantic, since the game usually uses “partner” to refer to characters who work closely together (Chris and Jill, who could be seen as romantic or close friends, and Chris and Sheva, who are almost universally seen as platonic), the game does put heavy emphasis on someone’s “partner” being the most important person to them, so it’s a very interesting choice of words.
All this, in my opinion, really adds up. My headcanon is that Wesker and Will were in a relationship at some point in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before Will met Annette (and were still at least attracted to each other later.) I don’t know exactly why their relationship ended, although Wesker’s second report shows that by late 1983 they’d been having a quite a few disagreements and Will was becoming increasingly unstable, so it wouldn’t be that hard to explain. While the ship is unlikely to ever be confirmed, it is completely canon-compliant and I don’t see it being denied.
Their relationship: fanon stuff and my own interpretations
Their personalities contrast really well. Wesker is cold, intimidating, confident, charismatic, a master manipulator, and an expert martial artist with military training who is also skilled in espionage. Will is nervous, awkward, insecure, really not good with people, and basically a nerd. I like the idea of Will doubting himself a lot, and Wesker insisting that Will is a genius, the greatest researcher at Umbrella, etc. I also like how they were canonically very competitive with each other, there’s a lot of fun potential with the friendly rivalry, I like writing snarky dialogue between them and like I said earlier I’m almost as happy with them being just really close friends as I am with shipping them.
Wesker’s always been my favourite character in the series, so when I started writing RE fic I naturally decided to focus on him, and it was around then that I started really shipping them as I realised just how important Will had been to Wesker—Wesker’s life would have gone completely differently if not for him—and the huge amount of mutual respect and trust they clearly had for each other, which is so unusual for either of them. I also just really like villain/villain ships in general: I think it’s the idea of two evil people still being able to genuinely care about each other. That, and...well, be gay do crime, right? I soon found myself searching for all the content I could possibly find for this ship. Mostly I found fanart, which varied from funny stuff with them snarking at each other, to some really sad stuff, often involving Wesker’s reaction to Will’s death (which we see nothing of in canon, but I like to think he was more affected by it than he’d probably ever admit).
Both people who ship them and those who write them platonically quite often headcanon that they were roommates while training together as well, which as we all know is an ideal situation for shipping, and completely plausible in canon. That can’t be said for many ships.
This ship really has the potential for nearly everything, from stuff that’s as lighthearted as you’re going to get from Resident Evil (I’ve seen them compared by more than one person to “evil Turk and JD”) to more dramatic or sad stuff (since Will has...issues, their relationship clearly ended at some point, and then of course there’s Will’s death).
Personally, while after Will married Annette I sometimes like to make things...kind of tense (if only because I’m a cruel writer), I think it’s very clear they remained friends even afterwards. And I really like the fanon idea of Wesker ending up babysitting Sherry (Will’s daughter) and her calling him her uncle...I personally wouldn’t leave a kid with Wesker, but I can imagine Will doing so.
(As a side note, Wesker is one of the characters most commonly headcanoned as bi in the fandom. Partly because of Will, partly because of his dynamic with Chris—which I don’t ship but it’s certainly interesting, and probably also because his appearance and voice were both partly based on David Bowie. Before RE6 seeing him headcanoned as gay was also very common, but RE6 revealed he’d had a brief relationship with a woman in 1991 before she left him. As for Will...well, the only image of him not wearing a labcoat shows him basically wearing the colours of the bi flag, although it’s from Clan Master, so not exactly canon. While voice actor statements aren't canon, more than one VA who's portrayed Wesker has suggested they interpreted him as bi, and even made comments about the ship. )
Sherry/Jake
This is not a Sherry/Jake ship manifesto, so I’m not going to go into too much detail here. However, I think the relationship—which is about as close to a canon romance as RE characters generally get—between Sherry Birkin (Will’s daughter with Annette) and Jake Muller (Wesker’s son with the woman I mentioned earlier) has strong parallels with the relationship their fathers had. They form a close friendship (and eventual romance, or at least the writers tease it a lot) while working together, and have become one of the most popular ships in the fandom because of their dynamic. Jake, like his father, is tall, intimidating, and a skilled fighter (with a very similar fighting style to Wesker), quite arrogant, and sarcastic. By the end of the game he’s even wearing sunglasses like his father’s. Sherry doesn’t take after her father quite as much, but she does fit the dynamic in terms of being by far the less intimidating of the two and generally seeming like Jake’s opposite. I can’t help but see the relationship between them as Generation Xerox, especially when how they are different/similar to their fathers (Jake in particular) is such a major part of the plot of RE6.
Resources and Recs
Sadly, there isn’t nearly as much fic on AO3 for this ship as I’d like, probably because Will is generally fairly underappreciated. (That, and the fandom generally prefers angsty enemies-to-lovers ships with Wesker. Which aren't necessarily bad but...I prefer my mad science boyfriends.) I also don’t really like stories that ignore Annette’s existence or have Will cheating on her, which limits my options slightly. However, there are some that I can recommend:
Some Green Color, by Coffin Liqueur. https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062953 Rated T. Summary: “Wesker may or may not have some particularly self-indulgent ulterior motives in a bit of work he’s doing with Ada’s retrieved G-samples.” Oneshot. This is an incredibly well-written story and my favourite of all of these. It is more strongly horror-themed than the others on this list, but not in a graphically violent way.
we will all fall (except for you and i), by frostbittenradicals. https://archiveofourown.org/works/10851216 Rated T. Warning for references to the AIDS crisis, homophobia, and other real-life issues of the 1980s, although they’re all touched upon only very lightly. Summary: “November 9, 1989, somebody’s watching the TV downstairs in the cantina when the breaking news arrives from Berlin.” Oneshot. This story is written in second-person (from Will’s POV), but I’d really suggest not letting that put you off because the story is incredible (if quite sad, knowing that Will dies). I don’t read much second person fic either but I loved this. There is…one subtle reference to Will cheating on Annette with Wesker, but even that didn’t put me off because the fic is so good. The writing style is amazing.
Our Reflections, by cherrytruck. https://archiveofourown.org/works/9827114 Rated T. Summary: “Sherry and Jake watch recordings of a video diary that Birkin kept during his years in Umbrella. As the two take a trip into the past, they are surprised to see that even their bonds and friendship had existed within their absent fathers.” Oneshot. Covers the parallels I mentioned between Jake/Sherry and Wesker/Birkin very well. This author has written a lot of fics for the ship, all of them well-written, but this is the only one I’d personally recommend because some of their headcanons and interpretations of the characters are very different to mine in a way that made it harder for me to enjoy some of their other fics. This one however is really great and well-characterised. If you like it you might want to read some of their others: just because they’re not my thing doesn’t mean they’re not good, after all.
Finally, I have a smut oneshot to rec: On a Limited Time, by oudeteron. https://archiveofourown.org/works/235242?view_adult=true Rated M. Summary: “In their early years at Umbrella, Wesker and Birkin start exploring each other.” (It’s not “early years” enough to need an archive warning, the author said they’re in their early 20s). Another author who’s written quite a few fics for the ship. The main reason I’m not reccing most of the others here is the tendency to ignore Annette and Will’s relationship with her (to be fair, the author has acknowledged that they regret this), but this one is set early enough that that isn’t an issue, and it’s a very good fic. Again, the author’s a good writer in general, and just because their stuff doesn’t all fit how I see the characters doesn’t mean it’s bad, so if you like this you could always take a look at their other stuff.
I also came across this nice short relationship study fic on fanfiction.net: Love, by JosephFrost https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8813241/1/Love Rated M but the one sexual reference is very brief, it could probably get away with being rated T. Summary: “No matter what the one constant within each other’s life had always been each other.” The author has written other stories for the ship, but this is definitely the best, at least in my opinion.
Texts From The BSAA has a lot of content for this ship. Since they’re on the whole a humour/parody series, they get around the whole situation with Annette by making the relationship into an OT3—they live together and everything, it’s honestly...weirdly cute, although I’m too cruel a writer to ever make anything like that happen in my own fic, it's too good for them.
Here’s a fun one from them: https://textsfromthebsaa.tumblr.com/post/187322213901/anonymous-requested-so-the-umbrella-labs-rumor
There’s also quite a lot of good fanart (the ship used to be fairly big on Deviantart in the 2000s and early 2010s, and still has some following on Tumblr):
https://fla-t-line.tumblr.com/post/180155556596/its-throwback-thursday-have-a-birsker
https://kashuan.tumblr.com/post/174839529958/a-lot-of-re-fanart-prob-incoming-now-that-im-on
https://sternevogel.tumblr.com/post/183501566867/i-have-no-idea-what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-and
https://sternevogel.tumblr.com/post/183769652822/just-couple-dudes-being-guys-just-couple-of-guys