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The cracking of thunder obscured the wet thump the body of the old man made as it hit the ground, and lay there, twitching, in a puddle of its own blood. He stared at it, dispassionately, narrowed eyes obscured behind dark glasses. Despite the rain and the night the room was still too bright for his tastes; he reached out with the arm he'd used for the killing, slick up to the elbow with sticky crimson, and turned off the lamp on the desk. That's better.
The right to be a god... Such a fool, the old man had been. A god wouldn't have died like that, sickly and pathetic, relient on an oxygen tank, choking and gurgling on blood. A god wouldn't have died at all, he supposed, but one who had the right to be such would have at least gone out fighting. Weak. He supposed Spencer's designs for immortality had never transpired, and he took some satisfaction in that.
...Well. No point in staying here any longer. Spencer's servants wouldn't find him until they arrived in the morning, and there was nothing for him here. Thunder crashed again as he stepped down from the raised dais by the windows, leather boots splashing slightly in the pool of cooling blood.
A cry.
Not a cry of pain from the very dead old man he'd stepped over. A cry of distress.
A baby.
Impossible. A baby couldn't be here, shouldn't be here...
The cry continued, a desperate, gasping wail.
He found his gaze slowly, inexorably drawn to the other end of the room. Lightning illuminated an object he hadn't noticed before, by the bookshelves, in the corner. A crib.
And he found himself moving towards it, tracking bloody footprints across the tile floor, until he was staring down at the tiny life inside.
Squishy, pale-pink, fat as babies tended to be. Wispy, whitish-blonde hair, not yet fully grown in. Big wide blue eyes that looked up at him with innocent confusion as it noticed his presence - undoubtedly recognizing that he was a stranger.
Spencer was far, far too old to have a child - an adopted brat, then. One of his little experiments. It would be ridiculously, pathetically easy for him to kill the thing. For a moment, his thoughts lingered on the idea. Securing his place as the true heir to the old man's schemes for godhood. It may even be a mercy, he thought, as he lifted the child, unresisting, into his arms.
But... on further inspection, the girl bore no marks. No scar along the spine from having Progenitor injected by lumbar puncture, none on the arms from anything else she may have been dosed with. Her eyes didn't glimmer strangely, the way his did before they turned fully red. Other than being scared by the storm outside... she seemed to be a very average baby.
But what on Earth could Spencer have wanted with an average baby? ...One innocent enough to be grabbing for his glasses, even. He found himself allowing it, if only out of the expectation his eyes would frighten the brat. But she seemed unalarmed by the red glow or snake-like slitted pupils, entirely preoccupied with chewing on the arms of his shades with a gummy, toothless mouth.
Well, fine. She can do that, and he'll investigate Spencer's desk a bit more thoroughly... He doesn't put down the baby, though. If only to not hear her wail about the darkness and the thunder, and so his glasses are at arms reach...
And thus Albert Wesker found himself digging through Spencer's desk with one hand and cradling a baby with the other, looking for any possible clue as to what the hell the old man was doing with a little girl... He also found himself positioning the child so she couldn't see the crumpled corpse on the floor. Even if she wouldn't remember it. Even if she was too young to even process what death was.
And finally, he found what he was looking for. Adoption papers. An orphaned little girl. A foundling that he'd named Grace, photos of the old man holding her on his lap, looking at her like she was his last hope... It irritated him. Was Spencer looking for redemption? Now? After all he'd done to the world? How pathetic. Did he really think raising one little girl would absolve him of the crimes he'd committed, the other children he'd tortured in the name of eugenics projects and immortality? That he'd get into heaven, or whatever childish, simple, human belief he may have held onto?
...It wasn't the girl's - Grace's fault, though, he supposed. And Spencer's will, the ink still drying, named some "Alyssa Ashcroft" woman as the one who would take Grace if he died. He thought he recalled seeing her name on some newspaper years ago, though he had no idea who she was... Which meant she was probably a very average woman. A very average baby, to be raised by a very average mother now that Spencer was gone...
He carried her back to her crib, set her down, tucked her in, gently took his sunglasses back from her unresisting grasp, even as she tried to grab for them again with her chubby baby hands...
"...Go back to sleep, then. The storm is dying down."
She seemed to accept this, rolling onto her side slightly, and he returned back to Spencer's desk to tidy it, before staring out across the rolling sea. He needed to think, and it wasn't as if anyone else would be here...
In an hour, two of his former STARS would break down the door and open fire on him when they saw Spencer's body.
In an hour, he'd be falling into the sea with Jill Valentine.
In an hour, Grace would awaken and start screaming her lungs out in terror at the gunshots, and Chris Redfield would be left with survivor's guilt and a sobbing child.
In five hours, the BSAA would be contacting Alyssa Ashcroft on behalf of the deceased Oswell E. Spencer.
In twenty years, Grace Ashcroft would be on a plane with a white-haired man with dark glasses, and be unable to shake the feeling that she'd seen him somewhere before, and yet she would never find out where.