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The day his parents died, Chris had thought nothing could ever hurt more. It was the worst day of his life; it felt unreachable in scope, a pain that hollowed him out until there was nothing left in him but a listless fog that carried him through the motions of caring for his sister.
Don’t collapse, don’t break, she needs you, you don’t have the luxury of breaking, wipe your face and keep on going. Do it for her.
This was it, he thought. This is the worst day of my life. There will never be anything worse than this.
But that was before he met Albert Wesker. Before he’d fallen in love with the man that would tear apart the life he’d built after his parents’ death. He’d crammed that life full of the things he’d desperately needed: stability, love, companionship, with Wesker helping him nail everything into place with his steady voice and gentle, guiding hands. Which just made it all the easier for him to send the foundation crashing down at his convenience.
After the mansion, Chris grieved him and hated him in equal measure. The grief burned until it became hatred, the hatred folded back into grief, until all of it compressed into a superheated ball of iron in his chest that he tried and failed to claw out with drugs and alcohol and work, drowning himself in anything that would ease the sting. But it was part of him now, just like the fog that continued to crawl around his viscera when things were too quiet.
Sometimes, he still dreamt of Wesker. Not his cruelty; that was usually reserved for his conscious thoughts, but his warmth, his steady hands, the gentle way he’d kissed Chris, like he was something worth keeping instead of something he could step over without a second thought.
I have you, Chris-
Wesker had never made him feel unimportant during their time together; in fact, in those quiet moments in his office, or at one of their apartments, he’d made Chris feel like the axis of his universe. So sweet and attentive and all of it- god - all of it had been fake, every kind word, their entire relationship, all of it had been a ruse to- what, entertain himself? Chris didn’t know, but the questions were as much of a burden as the anger and grief.
The betrayal ravaged him in ways even his parents’ death didn’t manage to. Maybe it was because this time, he was completely alone in feeling this way. He didn’t have a support network. Wesker had been his support network. He couldn’t ask Claire to deal with these big, overwhelming feelings when he was effectively her parental figure, and anyone else who had survived the mansion incident hadn’t had a relationship like his with Wesker, and he was too ashamed to admit to how close they'd been. So what did that leave him? The bottle, work, antidepressants, and the creeping presence of his own thoughts.
Then came the Antarctic Base. Wesker was alive. He could have done with more time to process it before the man came barrelling at him with homicidal intent, but there wasn’t any time for that. He fought Wesker off, found his sister, and fled the base with her.
There were so many things he’d wanted to scream at Wesker, and he hadn’t had time for any of them. Not even a small, feeble, why did you do this to me? A decidedly pathetic question, but he’d wanted so badly to ask and finally have something in the realm of closure. Whatever mockery Wesker came up with would have been better than the gaping chasm of nothing.
It did help in one respect, though: it gave him something new to direct his grief and anger at. Instead of long nights peeling through information about Umbrella, he began accumulating anything and everything he could on Wesker’s whereabouts.
He made a pinboard and covered it in everything he’d found, and if his throat happened to tighten when he saw a picture of Wesker - that intimately familiar cut of his jaw, the blond hair he’d brushed his fingers through on lazy Saturday mornings - he poured himself whiskey until it subsided.
He had a job to do.
Sometimes, he overdid it. Too much whiskey, too fast, because some days were harder than others; some days, he needed to forget just for a little while, for some reprieve from his burdens.
He didn’t expect those burdens to come to his doorstep. Or, rather, past it, sliding through his doorway while he was too inebriated to snatch his gun from the coffee table. Chris always kept it nearby, these days.
He didn’t know who it was, at first. An intruder, though, that was obvious; even inebriated to the point of incapacitation, he could recognise that. He cursed himself for the vulnerability, never mind that there was no reason anyone - enemies and friends alike - should have this address. He’d chosen this hotel specifically for its seclusion. It was so far away from civilisation that he hadn’t even been able to get cell reception.
Yet, here someone was, barging into the ramshackle room he’d rented for a few weeks while he prepared to delve into traces of Bioweapons activity in Mexico. The wind rattled the ragged ceiling, the hanging lightbulb (it didn’t even have anything covering it, like most modern lights) swinging precariously on its wire. The sweltering heat here had begun to make the plaster peel, and by the looks of it, the owner had tried to fix this a few times with a fresh coat of paint to no avail.
Chris rose from his chair and wobbled precariously, squaring his shoulders to try to look threatening. The floor was stone, covered in nothing but a threadbare rug.
“Chris,” said the figure, and Chris froze. “You’re in a worse state than I anticipated.”
His throat tightened. He raised his hand to it, simultaneously protective and annoyed - how could this man still elicit such a response from him? Even under layers of inebriation, he felt as though the wind had been knocked out of him.
“Wesker,” he hissed. Or slurred, rather.
Wesker clucked his tongue and stepped forward, and Chris carefully took a step back, trying his best not to topple over.
“This is terribly disappointing. There would be no sport in killing you now.”
Chris reached for his gun, but - inevitably - Wesker got there first, letting the bullets drop from the chamber and clatter across the floor. He tossed the empty gun to Chris, useless now, because his other ammo was in the rickety bedside table he’d been provided.
“I imagine you’ll do it anyway,” he said, not scared, not really, because he’d confronted death so often by this point that it’d lost its edge. And this man was practically the personification of it.
“Will I?” Wesker tilted his head slowly and took a step closer. There was nowhere for Chris to retreat to. “And what if I just wanted to catch up?”
“Really?” Chris scoffed. “Last time we spoke, it sounded like you wanted to pull my spine out through my mouth.”
“Oh, I still do,” said Wesker calmly. “But my inclinations change from time to time.”
Another step closer, and his hand reached out, pushing Chris easily - far too easily - back down onto the couch. He held him there with one hand, and Chris hated that he didn’t have the strength to pull away.
“What are they now, then?” he asked, eyes narrowed. “Feel like turning yourself in?”
“You always had such a clever mouth, Chris. One of the things I enjoyed about you.”
Chris’ face warmed, a potent concoction of hate and Pavlovian-like enjoyment. Wesker had ruined him, truly.
“Did you enjoy me ruining your plans?”
A cold edge touched Wesker’s smile. He tightened his grip on Chris’ shoulder briefly, tight enough to hurt, before loosening it. “I didn’t say I enjoyed everything about you.” He leaned down and inhaled. “Whiskey? You really should take better care of yourself, Chris.”
Chris’ head snapped away from the proximity, his shoulders jittering and his eyes sliding to the door. Too far away, and he was too drunk to run and request backup to his location, anyway. He didn’t usually get nausea when he drank, but he could feel it now, clawing up his throat, bile and sewage.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, his voice rougher than he'd intended.
Wesker raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“Just coming in here and talking, like- like-”
His voice cracked and stumbled, no, no, not in front of him, fuck. He pinched his teeth together and sucked in breath through them, looking at the wall instead of the warm body with which he was so familiar.
“Like we used to?” Wesker provided, and Chris flinched so violently that he jostled Wesker’s hand.
“Not like we used to,” he said. “It’ll never be like it used to be.”
“And why not? You don’t have to suffer my presence, Chris; you could enjoy it.”
“I don’t…”
“And I would enjoy yours,” murmured Wesker. "I miss those warm days we spent together. Don't you?”
“D-don't," he gasped out. "You- you're a liar, you're lying to me-”
Though Chris sucked in as deep a breath as he could, his lungs refused to fill, as though dotted with holes, oxygen seeping out of him despite how desperately he was drawing it in. His vision blurred worse than it already was, the bile in his throat coming thicker.
“Chris?”
Wesker’s voice reached him as though through water, distant and muffled. He looked up at him and his two red-orange eyes, glowing like lamplights in the dark.
“Get out.” He clawed the words out of himself. “Get out, please, get out, fuck, please just- get out, I can’t do this, get out.”
But Wesker didn’t leave. He settled down on the couch next to Chris, thigh to thigh, and drew him closer, his overwhelming strength easily subduing any attempts to escape that Chris made.
The urge to scream rattled his windpipe. He fumbled for the ragged remains of his self-control and found he couldn’t get a grip on it, the threads falling between his fingers.
“Hurt me,” he snarled desperately. “Choke me, throw me around, you always do it- that’s what you do.”
When Wesker curled his arms around him instead, he tried to scream, and all that tore out of him was a sob. The ball of iron in his chest felt as though it had expanded to occupy every inch of space inside him.
“Settle down,” Wesker said, soft and soothing and terrible. “I have you.”
I have you, Chris, Wesker murmured, buried inside him, lips warm against Chris' sweat-damp neck. It wasn’t a ‘I love you’, but it was close enough for Chris.
“No,” he breathed. He was crying, pathetically, like a child, the tears leaving salt on his lips. “No, no no no, don’t, Wesker, please.” He writhed and thrashed and Wesker held him through it all. “Please,” he gasped out, his vision blurring to the point that he couldn’t see anything but the vague impression of Wesker’s arms around his torso.
“Hush.” Wesker gently wiped away his tears with a thumb, and it only made them fall harder. “You act as if I’m torturing you.”
This was torture. This was the worst possible torture Wesker could have concocted. This was a gentle peeling away of his protective layers, unveiling the raw pain hidden beneath.
“Why are you doing this?” he rattled out.
“Perhaps I feel nostalgic,” Wesker murmured. He wiped away another tear, his smile a blur of white. “Perhaps I really do miss my best man.”
Chris squeezed his eyes shut. He was only distantly aware of how hard he was breathing, of how much effort each breath took. He couldn’t even struggle anymore, his limbs feeling increasingly like weights that happened to be attached to his torso.
“Don’t,” he tried to command, and it sounded so brittle.
“Surely you’ve thought about it,” said Wesker patiently. “About me.”
“Hate you,” he said. “I hate you.”
“But that’s not all, is it?” said Wesker, his voice a soft, creeping poison. “It would be so much easier if it was, wouldn’t it, Chris?”
At that question, Chris was startled by the sound that tore from him. Something soft and animal that he hadn’t even known he could make. Maybe these were the kinds of sounds you made when everything that had made you human had been meticulously dismantled. Just a creature of reflex, worn down to its base parts.
Wesker pressed his lips to his forehead and stroked his hair, petting him while he gasped and cried. The sheer force of his sobs felt as though they might tear his entire body apart, burst his lungs, his heart, his throat, break him physically as he was emotionally. But he remained - regrettably - in one piece, a weeping wretch in Wesker’s warm embrace.
He didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep. Or perhaps Wesker had rendered him unconscious, somehow. When he awoke, he didn’t feel any more human than he had before he’d fallen asleep.
Wesker was gone. The only vestige of his presence was a pair of black sunglasses, with a fine, metal frame that his fingers slipped on as he picked them up. Chris held the glasses to his chest, thumb rhythmically stroking the lenses the same way Wesker had stroked his cheek.
In the dark, stroking that skin-warm glass, he vaguely recalled the last words Wesker had spoken to him before he’d subsided into the dark. They echoed in Chris' ears.
“Like a stained glass window,” he'd murmured, soft and reverent.