Work Text:
Wesker considered keeping tabs on Chris unimportant. Something he kept up with just in case. Something to keep to the back of his mind while he was busy with more important things. And yet, he kept the live video feed of that cramped apartment in Paris permanently open, just to watch the man self-manage his trauma. He wasn't obsessed; it was merely routine maintenance.
In the beginning it was a paper file, jammed in the lowest drawer of his desk, slowly filling with photographs, grainy stills extracted from CCTV cameras. Testimonies of Redfield's graceless stomping around.
Chris was many things, but he was not subtle, and he was bound to draw attention to himself at some point.
Really, Chris was practically asking to be under constant monitoring, by this stage. He was a whole mess, barely holding himself together to trudge on one more day. He was lucky that Wesker found out about him, and that he was keeping an eye out for him.
Redfield was being sloppy, leaving crumbs after his passage all over the city, and the Umbrella operatives were going to catch his scent soon.
That's why Wesker upgraded to video surveillance. He had some cameras planted inside the apartment, it wasn't even hard to do. Unfortunately, he had no audio feed, so he had to make do with just the video link and his imagination.
The apartment at 12 Impasse des Marronniers was small, just an open-plan kitchenette with a leather couch, a cramped bathroom and a bedroom with just enough space to walk along one side of the bed. The main room was a testament to Chris's mental state: untidy, cluttered, bearing the signs of all his unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Over the weeks, Wesker checked the camera feeds and watched Chris trying to self-manage his post-traumatic stress in any way he could. He had watched Redfield come back from the street and push his muscles to failure by lifting those ridiculously heavy dumbbells.
The camera filmed all his failed attempts at pharmaceutical solutions. Blister packs of discarded medication lay half-empty and ignored. Chris would give them a try for a day or two, lack the patience to let them actually work, and return instead to his preferred methods of numbness. He lived entirely out of the living room, vibrating on a toxic surplus of caffeine, cheap takeout and neighborly charity, drowning himself in research files.
At least once a week, Wesker looked up at the screen and witnessed the same pathetic scene. The elderly landlady stopped by Chris's messy apartment, her mouth moving soundlessly as she playfully berated him for the state of his rooms.
She was probably not a native Parisian, because she was too soft and far too nice to the dumb American staining her walls yellow with nicotine. She made coffee for the both of them, muttered to herself as she picked up his things off the floor and from the back of chairs, restoring some order in the chaos he was renting from her.
Wesker noticed that for all her meddling, she never touched the coffee table or the stuff on it—leaving Chris's vital workspace undisturbed.
Every Tuesday she brought over a big casserole dish for Chris, gesturing widely, pretending to have made too much, just so she could be sure he had some real food once in a while.
The food must have been good, because Chris always ate every bite.
It was pathetic that Chris had to rely on the kindness of strangers.
Sometimes Wesker checked the monitors at night, and saw that Chris brought home someone. Always a man. Always older. Always undoubtedly French.
At first Wesker referenced their data to see if Chris was building a network of informers in the city, but stopped weeks ago. They were not assets, but yet another unhealthy coping mechanism. Anonymous physical anesthesia.
These specimens were led directly to the bedroom, bypassing the couch and the clutter on the table, to take advantage of the mess on the bed. Wesker doubted Chris made for a good conversational partner with his abysmal French vocabulary, but these worthless, inconsequential men either possessed good enough English proficiency to make the terms of their encounters clear, or they must have made do with the bare minimum Chris could give them:
Oui.
Merci.
Désolé.
Encore.
He still had no audio, so he had to guess from the context or try to read his lips in the dark.
When the men left the bed, so would Chris. He never lingered after their encounters, slipping away to the bathroom to wash off the sweat and the sin before returning to the main room in his towel. He went back to work, unable to forget his goal even after using the men to fill the void in his life.
Every night ended the same predictable way: Chris picked up a file, lit up a cigarette he took two drags off and never finished, and finally passed out from sheer exhaustion on the couch, sometimes forgetting to even put a blanket over himself.
At that point Chris could be counted on to get a few hours of uninterrupted, restless sleep before the cycle started again the following morning.
Wesker really didn't have the time to keep tabs on Redfield, but somehow the video feed remained open on his screen.