Chapter Text
For Ethan Winters, happiness was simple, measurable, and, most importantly, unobtrusive. Happiness was when his Python code ran without errors on the first try. Happiness was the smell of cheap instant coffee in the morning. Happiness was his life plan after graduating from Systems Engineering: getting an office job with an average salary at a logistics company, renting a quiet one-bedroom apartment, and maybe keeping a cat.
He did not want adventure. He did not want drama. And he absolutely did not want the kind of genius that made life unbearable. He only wanted to become one peaceful statistical number in this city's population.
But final semester was the natural enemy of peace. His thesis on "Optimizing Supply Chain Distribution Algorithms in Urban Planning" had stalled. The data he received from the city government was a mess, and his academic advisor disappeared more often than he gave guidance.
That was what brought him to Raccoon University's Central Library on this overcast Tuesday. Not to the crowded main floor, where freshmen pretended to study while trying to flirt, but to the fourth floor. The Special Reference Area. A place where the dust of old books was hostile to anyone with respiratory allergies, and where silence was sacred law.
Ethan loved the fourth floor. There was almost no one there. Only steel shelves rising to the ceiling, the smell of decaying paper, and the low hum of central air. He even had his own "seat of power": an old oak table in the farthest back corner, hidden behind the Bioethics section, right next to a grimy window overlooking the rectorate parking lot.
Today Ethan came armed: his laptop with its peeling stickers, two bottles of energy drink, and a stack of printed data sheets with smudged ink marks. He needed total focus. He needed five uninterrupted hours to clean this raw data.
He walked down the dim aisle, his footsteps muffled by the thin old carpet. He was already imagining himself dropping into that hard wooden chair, opening his laptop, and sinking into lines of code.
But when he turned past the final bookshelf toward his corner of authority, he stopped.
His table. His table. It was not empty.
Someone was there.
For a moment, Ethan thought it might be the library ghost, or maybe some ancient professor who had gotten lost. But the figure was too... sharp.
A teenage boy was sitting in Ethan's chair. He was wearing a secondary-school uniform—Raccoon Prep, an elite private school with annual tuition equivalent to the price of a small house. His black blazer was folded neatly over the chair back, leaving only a pristine white shirt pressed with military precision. His pale blond hair was slicked back so neatly that not a single strand dared leave its place.
The teenager did not look like a truant high-school student. He was working.
The table that Ethan usually littered with papers was now arranged with obsessive-compulsive precision. There was a stack of thick books whose titles alone made Ethan's head hurt: Molecular Biology of the Gene, Advanced Organic Chemistry, and—most strangely—Gray's Anatomy. Beside them were a graphics tablet, a thin ultrabook laptop, and a row of multicolored pens arranged in rainbow order.
The teenager was writing something in a notebook in handwriting so tiny and neat it looked machine-printed.
Ethan stood frozen for several seconds, then cleared his throat softly. No reaction.
He cleared it louder. “Excuse me?”
The teenager did not lift his head. He kept writing, the pen dancing across the page in a steady rhythm. He only raised his left hand and made a slow dismissive gesture, as if shooing away an annoying fly.
Ethan felt his ears heat up. He was already stressed enough about his thesis, and now some arrogant schoolboy had occupied the only peaceful place left on earth.
Ethan stepped forward and dropped his laptop bag onto the table with a thud a little louder than necessary. “Hey, kid. This is my table.”
Only then did the teenager stop writing. He set his pen down slowly, as if a sudden movement might disrupt the molecular structure of the air. He raised his head at last and looked at Ethan through thin-framed glasses that had slid down the bridge of his nose.
Those eyes. Gray-blue, cold, and full of profound irritation. Not childish irritation, but the irritation of a scientist whose experiment had been interrupted by an incompetent assistant.
“Your table?” His voice was low and flat, carrying an accent Ethan could not quite place, but it sounded very... expensive. He looked at Ethan as though Ethan were a pile of trash that had somehow learned to speak.
“Yes, my table. I’ve sat here every day for the past two years,” Ethan said, trying to sound firm even though he felt vaguely ridiculous arguing with a schoolboy. “And this is the university reference floor. What is a high-schooler doing here?”
The teenager glanced at Ethan’s bag, then his old laptop, then Ethan’s exhausted, sleep-deprived face. He let out a long breath, his expression full of suffering.
“First,” he said, his voice as sharp as a razor, “your name is not carved into this wood. Second, I am here under the University’s special credit program for gifted Raccoon Prep students. I am taking Organic Chemistry II and Neurobiology here. And third...” He pointed with his pen toward the small sign at the end of the aisle. “That sign says ‘Silent Area.’ You are not silent.”
Ethan was speechless. This teenager... he was not merely smug, he was a complete weapon. A biochemical prodigy already taking medical-level classes while still in high school? Ethan had not even known such a program existed.
“I need this spot for my thesis,” Ethan said, his voice rising. “I’m a final-year student. My priority is higher than your school assignment.”
The blond teenager smiled faintly, a smile that never reached his eyes and felt deeply insulting. “A thesis? Systems Engineering? I saw the draft you left in the library last week. Supply chain optimization? Boring. Too linear. The calculus is shallow.”
Ethan’s stomach dropped. He had left a few scribbled pages on this table last week. And this kid... had read them? And criticized them?
“You... you read my notes?” Ethan asked in disbelief.
“Hard not to, when you leave them lying around like trash,” the boy replied, taking up his pen again. “Now, if you don’t mind, I am in the middle of a calculation that requires higher cognition, not the whining of a college student having a quarter-life crisis in his early twenties. Find another table.”
Ethan clenched his fists. He wanted to sweep that stack of Gray’s Anatomy books onto the floor. But he knew he could not. If this kid was genuinely enrolled for university credits, he was protected. And that Raccoon Prep uniform... this had to be some rich brat or the child of an important campus official.
Ethan looked at the table one more time, then at the teenager who had already sunk back into his own world, completely ignoring him. A fresh, pure hatred surged in Ethan’s chest. His peaceful life had just been invaded by the embodiment of everything he hated: arrogance, flaunted genius, and elite status.
Without another word, Ethan snatched up his bag and turned away, walking off with deliberately heavy footsteps. He could feel the cold stare of those gray-blue eyes on his back as he left.
He found another table near the elevators. Noisy, warm, and constantly passed by people. For the next five hours, he could not focus. Every time he looked at a line of code, he imagined the smug face of that blond teenager.
“Shallow calculus,” Ethan muttered in mocking imitation under his breath while typing roughly. “I’ll show you what shallow is, you little bastard.”
The cold war had begun. And Ethan Winters, a man who wanted nothing but peace, had just found his mortal enemy in the quiet corner of the library. He had no idea that the boy’s name was Albert Wesker, and that Albert was the rector’s son—the man who held the key to Ethan’s academic future.
But at that moment, all Ethan knew was this: he hated that neatly arranged blond hair.