Chapter Text
You suppose you were lucky, in a sense.
You could’ve woken up in the bed she shared with him. In the morning, where all she’d need to do is roll over and see him sleeping beside her. Or mid conversation, over a quiet dinner at their dining table or during a car ride to one of his work events. Or worse, while the two of them were doing what married couples are wont to do, tangled up in their sheets in an intimate act behind closed doors.
But no. You had woken up alone.
The dark wooden floorboards were cold against your cheek when your eyes snapped open. Usually when you came to, you did so slowly, falling in and out of sleep for several minutes before your eyelids stopped feeling so heavy.
When you woke up in their kitchen, you had done so violently. A gasp escaped you as you sat up from the floor, your ragged breaths joining the cacophony of the bubbling pot on the stainless steel stove and the oven’s alarm going off.
For a few moments you just sat there, staring at everything and nothing while the blub blub blub of the pot and the beep beep beep of the alarm kept you company.
The pain came next. It registered slowly, like watching a white plane fly overhead in the afternoon sky, only hearing the faint rumblings of its jet engines half a minute later, until suddenly it built up into a roar in your ears that couldn’t be ignored as the sound finally caught up with your eyes.
Her body--no, your body now, had ached from laying on the ground for so long. The length of your right arm felt like the length of an electronics store aisle, the televisions that sat on its shelves all set to the same dead channel that only displayed static. She’d been laying on top of her arm, presumably after she’d slipped and hit her head, if the dried blood on your brow and on the floor and the sharp pulsing of your right temple were any indication.
There was a lot of blood. Like, a lot. You traced your eyes along the edge of the kitchen island that sandwiched you between the stove, and noticed a dark red stain on one of the corners nearest to you.
Ah.
You feel dizzy. Blood loss, you suppose.
Later you would realize that that was how she’d died. Cold and alone and bleeding out and more importantly, completely off script from the original plot of the game. It was exactly how you had died, in your own life, in your own death.
But that realization would come later. It hadn’t yet occurred to you that this kitchen and this house and this body was not yours. Right at that moment, the only things you wanted were to turn off the annoying oven alarm and the overboiled pot on the stove and lay down somewhere that wasn’t the floor.
Before you could do any of that, someone walked into your field of vision. You hadn’t seen them approaching, your view obstructed by the kitchen island.
It was a woman, short and stout with the thickest forearms you’d ever seen that probably let her give great hugs. She had a purse slung around her shoulder and a brown paper bag of groceries clutched in the opposite arm. When you locked eyes, her freckled face morphed from confusion to abject horror.
She screamed.
“Mrs. Wesker!”
Huh?
The woman scrambles toward you, dropping her purse and the bag of groceries and kneeling next to you. You watch a pomegranate roll out of the bag and its wine red peel contrasts so starkly with the muted grays and black palette of the room. She grabs your chin and tilts your head, probably to get a better look at your injury. You wince, pain shooting through your temple at the sudden action.
Whatever she sees makes her already pale face turn a ghostly white.
She tells you to stay put, and with a speed that defies her short legs, she’s all the way across the room before you can blink twice, ripping the phone off the wall and presumably dialing 911.
You turn your attention to the stove, ignoring the woman’s increasingly panicked voice as she speaks to the operator. You drag yourself closer to the stove and reach toward the central panel of knobs and buttons. You turn the burner off first, watching as the blue flames below the bubbling pot disappear. You then squint your eyes at the many different settings on the panel and wow, when did it get so hard to read? Eventually, the words stop moving, and you see the button labeled Timer. You press it and the shrill alarm cuts off. You sigh, content with your hard earned quiet.
“Mrs. Wesker, I told you not to move!”
The woman is kneeling beside you again. The phone is still pressed against her ear. Confused, you look behind her, seeing that she’s stretched the cord that attaches it to the wall so tightly that its coils have disappeared.
It’s kinda comical, so you let out a small laugh instead of answering her reprimand.
You wonder if all landlines have cords this long. You’ve never seen one before today.
You pause, her words catching up to you.
You feel your brows furrow.
“Who’s Mrs. Wesker?”
This is decidedly not the correct thing to say. The woman starts shouting into the receiver again, tearful sentences like “I think she’s lost her memory!” and “Tell them to get here faster!” rapidly disturbing the quiet of the kitchen that you felt had disappeared too suddenly.
This is how the EMTs find you two, the woman sobbing into the landline with you clutched in her arm, and you, blood caked all over your forehead and hair, dazed from blood loss and wondering when you would get to go home and lay in your bed.
You don’t remember the ride to the hospital, but you suddenly find yourself tucked into a crisp white bed, fresh gauze wrapped around your head and your arm hooked up to an IV.
“Mrs. Wesker, can you tell me what your full name is?”
The woman who’s asking is standing at your bedside, her hands tucked into her starch-white lab coat and her expression displaying the sort of neutral kindness that most doctors always seem to wear.
You state your full name. And then you tack on, “My last name is not Wesker,” to really hammer home a point you’d been trying to make to anyone and everyone who’d been calling you Mrs. Wesker today. The “Mrs.” part hasn’t registered in your brain yet because it operates on a one problem at a time, thank you philosophy.
The doctor nods, her expression never faltering. “And can you tell me what day it is?”
“Uh….Wednesday, I think.”
“And the date?”
“March 25th.”
“Can you tell me what city we’re currently in?”
You do so, and the look in her eyes reminds you of high school and getting called on by your teacher and watching them smile politely before they say: Not quite! Anyone else?
“See!?” the woman who’d found you bleeding out in the kitchen–-Frances, you learned–-exclaims from the opposite side of your bed. She was sitting in a chair and gesticulating wildly with one hand while the other clutched your left hand, her red nail polish flashing briefly under the fluorescent light of the room. “She doesn’t remember anything!”
The doctor gives Frances a look that very much reads one more peep and you’re waiting in the hallway.
Frances huffs.
“This next one is a little different,” the doctor prefaces, her gaze once again kind as it slides back to you. “I’m going to say three different words, and I want you to repeat them back to me in the same order I say them. Make sense?”
You nod.
“Perfect. The words are delta, orange and hopscotch. Repeat them now.”
“Delta, orange, hopscotch.”
Your doctor hums.
“Nothing seems to be wrong with your short-term memory, at the very least. But…”
The professional mask your doctor wears softens, just a little, into something more genuine.
“You got your first name right, but your maiden name is actually Waldorf. Your current legal last name is indeed Wesker. It’s a Monday, it’s April 6th, and you’re currently in Raccoon City General Hospital.”
You take in the doctor’s words. You stare at her. You turn your head and stare at Frances.
You laugh. Loud and genuine and sluggish. The morphine--you were definitely high.
Neither of them join you.
Your smile fades.
“Wait--for real?”
Knock knock knock.
All three of you turn your attention to the door.
“Come in,” your doctor says.
The door is pushed open, and the man who steps into the room takes up almost the entire doorway.
His clothing is dark and pressed and well-fitted. What looks to be a black leather holster wraps around his shoulders. His hair is slicked back, his eyes are obscured by glossy shades, and his brow and mouth are set into a firm line.
You’ve never seen someone cut such an imposing figure.
Another man follows in after him. Towering and sturdy, the brown-haired man’s clothes are different from the man with the shades--muted red vest, gray cargos, brown leather holster--but even so, something about these two is so…uniform. Like they’re a unit.
Authority rolls off the pair in waves. Then it clicks.
Oh.
“Frances,” you whisper behind your hand, breathy and a little panicked. “What are the cops doing here?”
Someone snorts.
You whip your head toward the noise, your eyes wide, and see the brown-haired man coughing into his gloved fist, his eyes crinkled with mirth.
The expression of the man in the shades does not falter, but his stance shifts, ever so slightly, so imperceptible that you’re surprised you even notice. You can’t see it, not with the shades in the way, but you know he’s looking at you.
“Mr. Wesker! I’m so glad you’re here,” Frances cries, clasping her worn hands together like the second coming of Christ had walked through the door. She then tilts her head, an inquisitive sound escaping her. “But I must say, you got here rather quickly! I called you only ten–”
“We were already on patrol,” the man with the shades states.
His voice, low and matter-of-fact, makes you sit up a little straighter.
He then turns to the doctor and holds out his hand. The movement is as barebones and clinical as the room you’re in.
“Albert Wesker. I presume you're her attending physician?”
Your doctor takes the offered hand and shakes it, and man you already found her impressive because she’s a doctor but wow, how is she so composed? If it had been you who had to shake his hand, you’d be scared of him ripping your arm off.
That’s why she’s the physician and you're the idiot with a chunk of your head missing.
“Dr. Spencer. And that’s correct. Your wife suffered quite a bit of trauma to the head after her fall and lost a significant amount of blood, but her condition has since stabilized. I’m optimistic that she’ll be able to be discharged by the end of the day. That being said, she appears to be experiencing retrograde amn–-”
There’s a lot of questions bouncing around in your brain right now, ponderings of why is my doctor telling the cops that I bumped my head or why was Frances able to get into my home or what did she mean you were in an entirely different city from the one you’d grown up and lived in for the past three decades or why do those names–-Raccoon City, Wesker, Albert–-seem so familiar?
The question that spills out first, however, the one that interrupts your doctor’s diagnosis, is:
“Did you just call me his wife?” you ask, incredulous.
Dr. Spencer and Frances don’t appear to be surprised by the question, but the police officers certainly do.
The brown-haired man’s eyebrows jump all the way up to his widow’s peak. Admittedly, the man with the shades hasn’t reacted in an overt way, the basis of his stoic demeanor having not changed once throughout the conversation.
But you see it.
The slight downturn at the corner of his lips.
You realize suddenly that he’s been the focus of your attention since the moment he’d walked through the door. All the details you’d noted about anyone else had been gathered from your periphery. Something inside you, something that isn’t you, is compelling you to watch this man. To pay attention. That you can’t afford to look away. That if you don’t keep him in your line of sight, if you don’t note the details, you might–-no, you will–-
The man’s face finally shifts. The hairs on your arms stand on end as he raises a perfectly groomed eyebrow.
“Is that a problem?”
It’s spoken like a question but it doesn’t land like one.
And you, drugged up and recovering from all the blood you’d bled, are the new kid on the block who just moved in and doesn’t yet understand a threat when you hear one.
“Well, yeah,” you say candidly, and something that isn’t you is clawing at your throat. “How…how could you be my husband? I don’t…I don’t even know you.”
It’s so quiet that you almost convince yourself that you must not have spoken and that they’re all still waiting for you to answer his question.
The man with the shades–-no, the man with the pale eyes, because he’s taking the shades off now. He folds them and hangs them on his shirt collar, and it dips tastefully low because he’d left the first few buttons undone.
The man with the pale eyes–-eyes that remind you of a glass window fogged up from your breath as you press against it to see the blue winter sky–-levels you with a stare, and all it does is convince you further that he isn’t your husband because how could someone who’s supposed to love you look at you so coldly?
You feel a sweat break out along your back. It’s chilly. It’s a prickling sense of deja vu that needles through you, like tiny broken wet bones piercing your skin from the inside.
Wesker.
Albert Wesker.
A cop…no, a captain.
Two cops in the room. Several, actually. In Raccoon City…in Raccoon City Police Department…
A mansion…and a mission…and a death. Wesker’s.
And…Mrs. Wesker’s. She…she died.
No! No no no no no no no. She was killed.
Because…they wanted to know. Know where he was, when he….because they thought she…but she didn’t know…how could she know, she didn’t know a damn thing, about his plan, and certainly not him, this stranger…this stranger that she’d been sent off to marry like she didn’t even fucking matter to her–-
Memories, so many memories that didn’t belong to you, clawed their way down your throat. As if the moment you’d woken up in her body, it’d had to expel them out to make room for yours. But now the memories were clawing back in, scratching and tearing and gnashing down your throat, and you couldn’t–-you couldn’t breathe, oh god, you can’t breathe–-
…..
…..
…..
….when had it gotten so dark?
And this darkness…it felt heavy. An ocean of black and there you were, swaying all the way at the sea bottom.
Maybe you should open your eyes.
…yeah. You should.
So you do.
…..
…..
…..
The room is in chaos when you wake up.
An alarm is blaring somewhere down the hallway. There are hands turning you onto your side and you realize they belong to Dr. Spencer. There’s…there’s a lot more people around you then you remember.
Frances has backed away from the bed. She’s curled into a corner of the room, her hands covering her mouth and tears falling down her cheeks.
The brown-haired man is shouting. He’s shouting and pushing the wall across from you. Another man, dressed in white, is pushing the wall as well. You feel the corners of your lips twitch up. How silly. Did they think it would fall on them?
But then the wall starts shouting, too.
Oh.
That…that’s not a wall. That’s…
…the man with the pale eyes.
Huh.
Everything was getting heavy again.
Maybe you should go to sleep?
Mm…yeah. You should.
So you do.