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Just as quickly as he'd appeared, Chris was gone. The rotted door hinges still rattling after him.
Luck and hope felt absent in this horrible place, but as Redfield's hurried steps faded away Richard prayed the man was carrying enough of his own to help them see the other side of this nightmare.
Rebecca's back was turned while she rifled urgently through her pack, some scattered items littering the dark floor around her boots. She was still chasing her breath, trembling with every exhale. Her short brown hair stuck flat against the back of her neck, wet with sweat and blood.
She was muttering to herself, faint and definitely agitated, but Richard was having a hard time picking out any specific words. His frantic heartbeat was pounding away in his ears and rattling his clenched teeth. Ragged breath hissing out between them in pained gasps while he lay back heavily against the long decayed wood paneling and watched himself bleed into the dirty carpet. Agony clung to every inch of him. Skin practically alight and riddled with fragments of wood and glass that shifted with every shudder, peppering every tear and puncture. Each mouthful of the humid musty air ushered in fits of coughing, but he fought for as much of it as he could get.
Everything felt heavy. Pressure at his temples building and tightening behind his eyes.
'What the hell just happened?'
He couldn't manage to focus on any one spot in the hall, feeling overstimulated in all of his senses - Rebecca's voice wavering just off the fringe of perception now, but she sounded scared. Her hands were working, blurring into doubles and triples with the swirling shapes in the peeling wallpaper.
"What- what just happened?" The voice was ragged. Pitiful. Richard wasn't sure it was his, and when Rebecca didn't turn or respond he wondered if he'd only imagined it.
"Becca," he hissed out from between tight, chattering, teeth. The voice had been his after all. "We gotta- come on, we have to go." His right hand searched along the floor at his side before finding the still-warm metal of a barrel under his calloused fingertips. Gripping the shotgun at the muzzle, he dragged it closer until it pressed against his leg.
A small, bloodied, hand landed flat against his sternum and he was stilled.
"Sit back," Rebecca ordered, stern and clear. "Please. Just- just sit back. I need you here, Richard."
She was leaning over him now, looking down. The gauzy yellow lamp light at her back creating hazy rings across his vision that hid her face.
Through the mud and fog, a fierce tightening grip took hold of Richard's left bicep like a vice, and he nearly bit his tongue gritting his teeth to restrain a scream. Agonized groans clawed through his lips for several long seconds, until the pounding pulse in his left hand began to recede, and only a creeping numbness remained. Rolling his head to the left, he caught sight of a strip of bright safety-orange. The strap's webbed texture soiled in dark smears; sticky clots creeping in between the stitching.
Then there it was again - her voice.
Rebecca. Right.
Rebecca was here with him. He thought so anyway. Up, through the growing mire of pain and panic, Richard thought he heard her...
'...are you here?'
'...was she asking..."are you here?" Am I not? Where...'
Fighting to reorient himself against the smothering fear and confusion, Richard very suddenly remembered gaping rictus jaws, filled with teeth. Brittle boards enrobed in decades of abandoned cobwebs. Woven fibers sodden in clots.
His eyes squeezed shut. Pressure rising through a tightening chest - pushing down, and down, shortening every next breath. Heat that boiled and bloomed at both temples, seething down the back of his neck through every vertebrae, met by waves of trailing chills. Sweat dripped off his eyelashes onto his t-shirt, long soaked through and clinging too tightly to his skin, as a climbing nausea worked like thick fingers up the back of his tongue, and pushed.
"Richard, look at me. Look at me. Slow down."
Leaning his head, Richard tried to hear Rebecca as she called to him from a distance, somewhere far beyond the dim hallway, and splashes of rainbow light burst across the black before him. Abstract aspects wavering in space, growing and shrinking as they lazily began to merge and take shape. He felt suspended in a waking dream, surrounded by pieces of memories born out of chaotic fragments, spinning themselves into a believable fluid-like reality. Strings of black ichor oozing at the edges of a thousand heated blades in a hanging maw. Burning golden eyes framed in boil laden scales, slicked in an oily sheen. Withering floorboards groaning under a massive swollen body. The vile thing taking shape, shed it's shadows as it twisted and convulsed, rearing back-
"Richard."
His bloodshot eyes snapped open, and the leering tarry aboleth disappeared in the warm dancing light of a flickering yellow flame. Rebecca's face hovered near as she held the small lighter.
"Look into the flame, Richard. Focus for me. Just- just watch the flame," she whispered, low and comforting. The gentle weight of one of her hands resting over his knee. Richard studied the shape of the weathered brass lighter, continually blinking away tears gathering at the edges of his eyes, willing himself to find a place of stillness in the gentle shiver of the light. Steadily, his breathing began to slow.
The reprieve was achingly short-lived, as desperation took hold in the lull, snagging every third breath in a ugly hitch. He was becoming consumed in a hungry need to covet the tiny light's withering comfort, and for a fearful moment that need became everything Richard knew.
To his fortune (and what little there was) the halting obsession of the light couldn't stand up against the curiosity of his gaze, hunting left and right, determined to understand what was happening. The rapid phases of his consciousness were muddying his perception. There was a shotgun resting against his thigh. Rebecca was here with him-
Rebecca was here with him.
Licking his dried lips, Richard tasted a familiar iron tang and the blood on his tongue offered him a fleeting and fragile lucidity.
He'd kept Rebecca safe. Like he'd promised.
Richard's wet sticky eyes moved piteously out of sync from his vision, only realizing too many seconds later that the light had gone. He searched for the medic's reassuring face, but only found her back, tracing the red cross stitched into her vest; the material now torn and smeared in grime. Rebecca twisted, and Richard let his head fall against his shoulder as he watched her quickly move on her knees to sit at his right side, catching an unsteady glimpse as she laid strips of tape over the IV access at the inset of his elbow - the 'AC' she calls it. He stared at the small orange hub and curled tubing as she worked to secure it; he hadn't even felt the needle. He'd always been terrified of needles.
One long blink and suddenly the edges of everything looked...wrong. Glassy. Moments stuttering by like rotted slides.
"Shit," Rebecca spat, her brow furrowed, features all scrunched up in agitation. Sweat was dripping from clumped wet hair at her forehead; her eyes puffy and red, glossy still with the sheen of shed tears. She was pressing one hand heavily onto his arm while holding a package of gauzy dressing in the other, raising it to her mouth and tearing it open with her teeth.
His eyes only half open now, Richard looked down at the small plastic caps and discarded glass ampoules at her knees. He slowly smiled.
He's never heard her curse before.
Rebecca finally stilled, puffing out an exasperated breath through pursed lips, before angling a strange expression at him.
"Richard?"
"You swore," Richard wheezed out between the weak sounds of smothered huffing - he was laughing. Some of the stiffness in Rebecca's frame melted back, and though her face stayed tight with concern, she managed to offer him a thin smile.
Another slow gummy blink stole away a handful of seconds, and Richard felt tired. Heavy and tired. At least some of the pain had drawn back - or maybe it was still there and he'd just stopped caring.
"Chris will be back soon," Rebecca said in small voice, tucking her chin down close to her chest. Richard wondered if the words hadn't been meant for him at all. "He'll be back."
A warm hand ran back through his short hair.
---
Richard never heard the door open.
Submerged sounds of urgent voices chirping back and forth punched through the haze, as four blurry hands took shape. A momentary bite of heat snapped into Richard's right arm and crawled up over his collar, warming quickly in his chest. Eyes fluttering open caused lines of tears to run down the worn routes over his dirty face, and he tasted them at the edges of his mouth. There was an eerie, creeping, sense drawing over as he swept his gaze down and watched a muddy boot kick away a syringe. A tourniquet lay shorn and crumpled by his thigh, stained through and robbed of it's once brilliant orange. The matted textures of the floor were jittering. Muted thudding sending vibrations through the rumpled carpeting - brown and tarnished. Zig-zag patterned. Pulled up and frayed. Blood thickening every thread.
Was this really it? Right here? On this ugly fucking carpet.
'No... '
'...I'm not ready.'
"I'm not ready."
A strong pair of hands grasped his own in a confident grip and gave a comforting squeeze, hiding the shivering just below the surface. The warmth of a bounding pulse thrummed strongly across Richard's cold, clammy, palm.
"For what, Richie?" replied a deep and gentle voice. "You're not going anywhere."
Chris's concerned blue eyes came into focus through Richard's glazed vision.
"We've got you."