Work Text:
The portrait first appears in Chris's dreams months before they meet again. Nothing special, just a hazy outline of someone he can't quite recognize. They're familiar, he knows, almost painfully so, but by the time he wakes, the dull thrum of background noise in his mind has swallowed the vestiges of any identifying characteristics.
If he were a bit more paranoid, Chris might consider it some virus that he'd unwittingly been infected with, if it weren't for the fact that it seems to have changed nothing at all, as recurring as it is. It's just a room. Well-furnished, with red-brown wood paneling and some manner of natural light. The lines blur and waver, but he can tell it's nice. Expensive. Not the type he'd usually have a place in.
Its crowning jewel is, of course, that portrait. He always seems to appear in front of it. The subject doesn’t grow any clearer, but if he focuses, he wakes up some days with the vague shape of slate blue and pale gold on his mind. He knows that combination, of course, but—well, yellow and blue are a common enough pair.
A tufted leather chair sits beneath the portrait frame, legs a gleaming mahogany. Chris can’t bring himself to sit in it. So he stands across from that oblique smear of oil on what he presumes is a canvas, whiling away the time until he wakes, more tired than he had been before. He can’t say exactly when it stops being just a blur of vaguely pale skin.
The pieces don't click when he finally gets the intel on Spencer’s location—nothing so convenient. But the looming sense of foreboding rises, lining the hazy, jewel-toned spines of fabric-bound books as they begin with creeping slowness, to come into focus.
The Spencer Estate looks exactly like an eight-year-old memory, one that had every reason to stay buried. But evidently His Lordship the Earl’s awful taste in architecture hasn’t changed a bit. Each and every high, domed ceiling peers down at him and Jill with Spencer’s egoistic condescension, and the over-dramatic lighting—not a functioning light source in sight, save for the brief flashes of lightning that spill in from the floor-to-ceiling windows—makes it seem like they’re in a poorly budgeted horror movie.
Still, the lingering sense of apprehension only builds with every BOW they find smeared across the wall in chunks, every expensive door carved out of endangered wood splintered into a thousand pieces. He knows that calling card, and even if he’s spent the last eight years hunting after its bearer, the roiling unease in his gut never gets any easier. But they push on, clearing room after room until only one remains. He should've known, really. Their old captain had always been more fond of theatrics than he liked to show.
When he and Jill finally burst through the drawing room door, Albert Wesker towers over Ozwell Spencer’s crumpled corpse with his back to them, regal against the backdrop of the marble pillars and wrought-iron windows. When he casts the first glance over his shoulder, the storm behind him heralds his presence with a rumbling boom.
Chris will never admit it to anyone, but his first thought is inevitably it suits him .
Wesker’s the same as he always is, serpentine coils of unfathomable strength wound into the shape of a eugenicist’s wet dream. In the three years since Antarctica, his face has recovered to its smooth, unreadable state—he hasn't aged a day in ten years, but then he supposes the virus-borne immortality has to have counted for something. And his fashion sense, all sharp, dramatic angles and sophisticated monotones, hasn’t changed since he was—
Chris cuts the thought off there.
The particular gravity that enshrouds Wesker, warping every place he steps foot in to complement his mysterious image, pulls at the faux-Gothic palace the same way it always has. Even the sky, split open with cracks of lightning, seems to grin jaggedly for him.
Self-proclaimed divinity or not, Chris isn’t so much of a fool as to hesitate with his finger on the trigger. He’ll take any advantage he can get against that monster.
Still, Wesker all but phases through each of their combined attacks, weaving through strike after strike as if it’s some sort of game. For all his stone-faced demeanor, his fighting habits still flaunt far more style than efficiency warrants—an unnecessary flip here, a pivot on one heel there. Despite their combined efforts, the set of his mouth taunts Chris in its boredom. Look at me. Barehanded, it seems to say, and you’re losing this badly?
Even as Chris begins to black out with Wesker’s hand crushing his windpipe, he hears the words on his lips with infuriating clarity. And for a moment, washed in the slate blue tones of the crashing rainstorm, the glow of virus-red eyes behind Wesker’s black sunglasses bleeds into crystalline aquamarine.
“You—” he chokes out—
—his head, inclined to the side as his glasses slip down just slightly, arms crossed—
Jill’s scream snaps him out of his trance, only to watch her crash through the window with Wesker in her grasp.
“Jill,” he rasps after her, but it’s too late.
The ocean below rises to consume them, crashing against the rocks with a voraciousness the color of rotting flesh. Chris watches on helplessly.
He wishes he could believe Wesker was dead, but Jill—no, she wouldn’t die so easily. She’s his partner, after all. She wouldn’t.
Chris delivers his report slowly, and the bruises left around his throat seem to laugh at him with every rasp of his voice.
It’s not until he’s standing alone in that empty room again, blue light streaming in from some window that doesn’t exist, that he truly lets himself think of it. His mouth tastes like ash and something sweet—something red, his mind unhelpfully supplies. A strip of ashen blue fabric lies across the leather chair, and as he picks it up, it disintegrates into the air with a familiar smell that he should hate. He doesn’t dare look up at whatever the portrait has morphed into, but in his upper peripheries rests a pair of folded hands, blurred in dark shadow—
—a pair of black leather driving gloves; the sound of a steering wheel turning; deft, long fingers.
“Chris?” asks a burred voice, laced with mild humor, and he glances up, startled—
No, such things aren’t worth remembering.
They bury an empty coffin in Jill’s name. And even if he can feel his blunt nails digging into his palms, he stands at her funeral and says nothing. Claire just looks tired, and Oliveira won’t look him in the eye. But it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t need them to understand. They didn’t know her like he did. (Didn’t know him like he did.)
Claire cracks open a bottle of wine in Jill’s name after her interment. Something beginning with an M that he can’t quite place, but drinking it coaxes out a sense of warmth to accompany the fog of alcohol. It’s deep purple and a mix of chocolate and blackberries, and though he isn’t all that fond of sweet things, it brings back memories of STARS that he didn’t know he still had. Most of those men and women are long dead. But just for a bit, he lets himself forget.
—
For all that Chris cares about his job, he doesn’t often stay past six. But on that particular evening, four-thirty seemed to have turned into seven in the amount of time it took him to read a few pages of a case report. It’s only the click of the captain’s door as he steps out of his office that snaps Chris out of his trance.
“Terribly diligent today,” the captain greets, and though he’s wearing his glasses, Chris can still delude himself into imagining a look of pleasant surprise in his eyes.
He glances at the office clock and blinks twice, gathering the papers back into their folder. “I lost track of time, sir.”
“Hm.”
For a minute, Wesker merely stands there with his coat draped over one arm, gazing down at Chris. At last, he sighs and loosens his tie—it’s a rare occasion for him to wear one, and Chris doesn’t know what exactly brought it about.
“Have a drink with me,” he says, less a question and more a command. “I’ll drive.”
So Chris finds himself in Wesker’s car (a sleek, black Mercedes with a leather interior), eyes transfixed on the way his hands look in leather gloves as he expertly steers the wheel. In the light of the sunset, the captain’s profile seems all the more statuesque. As the shadows lengthen, the ray of light tracing his cheekbones glows a hundred different shades—absently, Chris wishes he had a camera.
If Wesker notices him staring—and he almost certainly does—he doesn’t comment. The time stretches on in silence for the most part, with the soft thrum of the engine in the background.
“Chris?” Wesker prods, the faintest hint of amusement in his voice.
“Uh—sorry?”
“I asked if you had any preferences for dinner.”
“Not really, I guess.”
“Not making it particularly easy, are you?” Wesker muses, and Chris can’t tell if it’s a joke or not.
Wesker’s an excellent cook, but frankly, Chris would probably have been more surprised if he wasn’t. The dish he makes has a name that Chris couldn’t repeat if he tried—it rolls off Wesker’s tongue, of course, but he speaks some four-odd languages (French, German, and Russian, as he’s more than happy to supply).
In the cool, fluorescent light of Wesker’s kitchen, the wine he pours out (into a decanter first, of course) glitters, white on rich, dark plum. Wesker describes its particulars in a light drawl with a slightly more pronounced undertone of perfunctory disinterest; Chris catches something about it being an Argentinian import, oak-aged for around a year and a half. He’s more focused on the stray notes of disdain Wesker places on certain words.
“Do you usually do this?” Chris asks, after Wesker concludes his recitation.
The full weight of Wesker’s imperious, blue stare lands on him, and Chris’s breath catches.
“Would you like me to say no?”
“Huh?” Chris flushes. “No, I didn’t mean—it’s just that you don’t seem to enjoy this much.”
“How very perceptive of you.” Wesker smiles, wry. “I don’t leave anything half done, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He doesn’t answer the question.
—
The BSAA ships Chris all across the globe for the next three years, from the far fringes of Russia to the southern tip of Chile, chasing after the coattails of whatever birthed itself from Umbrella’s infected corpse. For his part, he throws himself into the work with a single-mindedness that even Claire begins to consider concerning. That far across the globe, though, he can dodge a good portion of her calls.
He passes the tenth anniversary of Raccoon City in eastern Siberia, where the icy autumn wind seems to freeze the blood in his veins solid. It comes with little fanfare.
Time creeps along at an agonizingly slow pace, and for whatever reason, it’s the one day that the BSAA doesn’t give him anything to do. If Jill were here, they’d find something to commiserate about.
Drinking alone is pathetic even by his standards, but at least in the empty living room of his tiny apartment, no one has to see him.
The locals pay him little notice as he buys a bottle of cheap potato vodka, but the rolling notes of Russian remind him more of old ghosts than he’d like to admit. His breath, smoke-white in the night air, curls into ribbons that all end up in the same set of features that he can’t find enough space in his exhaustion to hate.
In his alcohol-fueled haze, Chris finds himself wandering back towards that wood-paneled room and its lonesome occupant. A glass of wine sits waiting for someone on a polished end table he hadn’t noticed before. Something tells him that if he ran his fingers along its rim, it would sing.
The figure in the portrait seems to have changed positions, now peering down at Chris with one hand raised before their chin in pensive observation. Chris stares back, half wishing for it to manifest itself in flesh, if only to have some company.
He read The Picture of Dorian Gray in school, but instead of him growing younger, it seems as though that painting tucked away in his mind grows more clear and youthful with each of Chris’s steps that sinks deeper into the earth.
Somewhere in the blur of winter-white days, Chris turns thirty-four. He takes up smoking again.
—
Saturday mornings for Chris tend to be slow and languid; if left to his own devices, he’ll spend most of them in bed. This once, though, he rises before the sun to watch the last vestiges of the night slip away, and to watch as Albert vanishes into Dr. Wesker, prodigious biochemist, captain of STARS.
But for now, Chris can still imagine that he’s just a man. The dark, rumpled shirt he’s wearing softens out the sharp angles of his silhouette and takes ten years from the harsh lines of his face, even if he still looks more elegant than Chris has ever been with effort. His hair’s still slightly damp, a few strands falling over his forehead, and in the dim light before sunrise, the permanent frown and waxen complexion of his face wash away. The violet shadows beneath his eyes are still pronounced, though. If Chris weren’t feeling too lethargic to break the silence, he’d ask about them.
To put it in more of a pretentious way, watching Wesker gel down his hair, don the mask of perfection, lift his chin to adopt that rigid posture—it’s a bit like watching Michelangelo chisel a marble block into David.
Wesker catches his eye through the mirror. He offers no platitudes, not even the half-smirk he always wears at work, but for a split second, he seems to let down his walls.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” he says, muted but clear. Then the glasses go on, and on cue, the wind howls. He’s gone by the time Chris looks back from the window, leaving behind only the afterimage of grey-blue and the vague scent of pine, leather, and lingering smoke.
Outside the window of Wesker’s plain, Spartan bedroom, the rain begins to fall in sheets.
He thinks he might prefer the raw stone.
—
In 2009, the orders come in from the higher-ups. A lead has reared its head in the Kijuju Autonomous Zone of West Africa—a man by the name of Irving, who seems to have ties to a bioterrorist organization related to Umbrella (to him).
HQ sends him in with a local BSAA agent, Sheva Alomar, as backup for the two actual teams, and even with more manpower than usual, he can’t shake the feeling that he knows how these missions go.
You could still save them, whispers a nagging voice. He read the Los Illuminados report, after all. They sent Kennedy alone for a reason. Chris tells himself that he’s being paranoid. (He’s not.)
Jill’s appearance sends his heart pounding for more reasons than one, and that voice—he’d recognize the sound of that voice anywhere, distorted by crackling static or not. Chris tells Sheva he thought Wesker was dead, even as his breath catches in his throat. He tells himself that the numb feeling in his fingertips isn’t anticipation.
The lingering look of worry in Sheva’s eyes leaves him with a bit of guilt, but there isn’t really an easy way to explain that “Captain Albert Wesker” once held the same weight to him as the blessing of a saint.
Chris can hear the blood rushing through his ears as he skims through the various reports and journal entries strewn across the testing facility. None of them seem to bear Wesker’s particular voice, palpable even in writing, but he still wonders if Wesker’s hiding behind every door and bend in the grime-ridden corridors. He won’t be, naturally, but still.
—
On a night he’s feeling particularly bold—or reckless—Chris asks, “Don’t you ever worry that no one will remember you?”
Wesker cocks an eyebrow and keeps typing. “You make it sound as if I’ll die tomorrow.”
“Even if you do live forever, who’ll remember—” Chris gestures vaguely in Wesker’s direction at the stretch of pale skin exposed on his neck, his languid posture, his slightly rumpled dress shirt. In the low light of his computer screen, Wesker’s hair glows pale gold.
“Does it matter?” Wesker asks, as if Chris is the one being foolish. “Most prefer me without.”
“I guess.”
Chris reaches absentmindedly for the neat stack of books left on the nightstand, mostly expecting them to be fresh as the day they were printed, there for decor. But the one he pulls out—halfway down; he knows it’s bad form, but it caught his eye—has a cover worn and yellowed with use. Anne Sexton, the cover reads in large, red letters. The Awful Rowing Toward God.
The fact that Wesker reads poetry doesn’t come as all that much of a surprise—he wears turtlenecks and trench coats; it’s practically written on his face—but Chris hadn’t exactly expected confessionals.
“Anne Sexton, huh?”
Wesker hums. “Have you read her work?”
“Don’t think so. Poetry usually goes over my head.” He flips through a few of the pages, skimming the text. “Maybe it’d make sense if you read it to me,” he jokes.
The book’s already halfway back to its place on the nightstand when Chris notices that the sound of rapid-fire typing from across the room has stopped. He glances up, slightly startled to see Wesker gazing contemplatively back at him.
“Sure.” The glow of the computer screen shuts off.
Chris blinks as Wesker rolls his desk chair back in place. “Wait, really?”
“Yes, Chris,” he replies, a hint of amusement in his voice. “I’m starting to wonder if you listen to anything I say.”
“I do, I swear.”
Wesker only returns him a knowing look.
Sexton’s blank verse flows through Wesker’s voice like a river, bitter in places and reverent as sugar on the tongue in others. Most of the words slip by him, but some—”holy,” “fallen,” “exuberance”—echo in his ears for days afterwards.
Somewhere in the warm fuzz of falling asleep, he hears the soft creak of the bed as Wesker rises to turn off the lamp. His footsteps trail around to Chris’s side, and he’s not certain if he imagined it or not, but Wesker seems to murmur, “Happy birthday, Christopher.”
—
Wesker looks good , as much as Chris hates to admit it. The muscles of his back ripple with every cat-like blur of movement, and his smirk tells Chris he knows it. Despite his grandstanding, Wesker doesn’t bother hurrying—Chris can hear his own panting, heavy in the silence, but the steady pace of low-heeled leather boots on the stone floor neither slows nor speeds up.
Each of Wesker’s taunts, as shallow and cliché as they are, chip at Chris’s defenses, though probably not for the reason Wesker thinks. No, he was never the sort to think of how others felt.
“You can’t hide forever,” Wesker croons, and his accent, lilting on the Rs with a note that Chris’d call Transatlantic if he hadn’t been born forty years too late, echoes off the narrow corridor. Chris forces down the bitterness in the back of his throat.
The sound of clashing rings from around the corner, and Chris tears his eyes away from Wesker’s back, just around the corridor. He opens his mouth to call for Sheva, until—
“Found you.”
Smoke and leather. Less of the pine now, but Chris can still pick out a note of it, or else Wesker’s cologne has imprinted itself so deeply into his brain that he simply adds it in on instinct. Wesker still towers over him, if only by three inches. Then again, they may as well be three thousand, for all it matters.
“How disappointing. I'd expected better from you, after all these years.” (You are one of my men, he'd said the last time, and Chris remembers the twisted sense of pride he'd felt.)
Chris points his pistol directly at his smug face, and Wesker pushes its barrel aside with one leather-gloved hand. Like the wind, he vanishes and reappears as Chris pulls the trigger.
“Nothing to say?”
“Since when have you cared what I had to say?”
Wesker laughs, low and laced with malice. (Chris should have noticed. He should have noticed. ) He slings a roundhouse kick, yet ruthless in his vast arrogance, and Chris barely manages to duck under it.
“Back then,” he mutters, “I thought we were more different than we were.”
For a split second, that seems to give Wesker pause. But then his hand is on Chris’s throat, and he’s flying backwards into a stone wall twenty feet behind.
“Isn’t that my line, Chris? ‘You and I, we’re not so different? ’”
Chris coughs and fires another bullet towards where he thinks Wesker’s standing. Maybe it’s just an afterimage. “Don’t get it twisted. That was then.”
“Sure,” Wesker sneers. Abruptly, he stops in his tracks and turns his head, as though listening for something no one else can hear. “A shame. Seems your seven minutes is up. Jill,” he snaps, like he’s calling to a dog. “Dispose of those two.”
—
Wesker lets Chris pull his glasses off his face once. Once, in the early hours of the morning on a stakeout. Technically, he supposes he didn’t ask permission, but Wesker’d seen it coming and hadn’t stopped him.
For all their mystique, they do seem to be ordinary glasses—metal-framed, narrow, and rectangular. The lenses reflect the cloud-covered moon in a silvery sheen.
“Find anything of interest?”
Chris holds them up to his face, half imagining that what he sees through them will be astronomically different.
“Not really.” He turns them over in his hands, more to extend the time Wesker’s eyes are fixed on him than anything. “Why do you wear them?”
“Take a guess.”
“Well, I thought there was something special about them.” Chris hands them back, and for a moment, their eyes meet. Quickly, he glances away. “Guess it’s just you.”
A low chuckle rings out from the driver’s seat beside him, but by the time Chris whips his head back around, all that remains of it is the faintest glimmer of amusement visible on Wesker’s lips. The captain reaches over a hand to ruffle Chris’s hair.
“You flatter me,” he says. He tips his chin to glance over the top rim of his glasses, and in the moonlight his eyes glow silver-grey, twin wills-of-the-wisps.
—
The stench of rotting flesh strikes him like a wall as soon as they reach the ship’s top deck. The bodies there must number in the hundreds—the test subjects Wesker’s deemed impure. Wesker’s underlings have piled them up in a careless knot of stray limbs and wide, empty eyes, but the mastermind himself is nowhere to be seen.
“Show yourself,” he shouts. “Wesker!”
But who comes stumbling past the mound of corpses, doubled over in agony, isn’t him but Excella Gionne, lamenting the “new world” she was meant to create at Wesker’s side. She should have known, he thinks, and if it’s a bit vindictive, she’s certainly earned it. No one’s at Wesker’s side. It’s either behind, where he’ll twist and bend them to his pleasing, or against.
Still, he remembers the saccharine coquetry in her voice as she asked after Wesker’s well-being, the way she’d clutched onto his medicine like it was something precious—with a note of bitterness. Wesker had not seemed to return any of her advances, though Chris knows he certainly wouldn’t turn her away either.
Excella’s wails and pleas do, in the end, manage to spark a dredge of sympathy in him, even if his disgust vastly outweighs it. Watching her writhe in pain as Uroboros shreds through her veins isn’t entirely pleasant.
“Wesker doesn’t care about anyone but himself,” he spits, knowing full well that it’s far too late for her to hear him now. But I’ll send him to hell with you.
For all Excella’s done, he can't help but feel a smidgeon of pity. He’d been foolish enough to hope, too. Once upon a time.
He’s not sure if he should be thankful for the abomination pouring out of Excella’s pretty face, consuming body after body, as its black coils expand outwards into the shape of a headless hydra, but at least it’s a distraction from the ringing echo of her after all I’ve done for you?
—
Jill calls him a few days after they get back. They end up meeting over coffee.
“Hey,” she greets, and already he can tell she feels guilty about something. “How’re you holding up?”
“As well as I can be.” He tries for a smile, but it falls flat. “You?”
“Alright.”
Silence stretches between them. When did it get like this?
“Chris—”
—Wesker's last words as the lava swallowed him whole, Chris's name—
“—if you ever want to talk about it…” She trails off.
There never was an ‘it,’ and by the way Jill’s grimacing down at her coffee, he can tell she knows.
“I know you looked up to him more than the rest of us.”
Looked up to him. He smiles, wry. I'm sorry, Jill. “Come on,” he says. “It’s been eleven years. I’m not that hopeless.”
“Yeah.” Whether consciously or not, her eyebrows press together. “Yeah, of course.”
—
“Do you actually like me at all?”
The question comes out more like he’s fishing for praise than he meant, but it’s too late to take it back by then.
“Would I bother with all this if I didn't?”
“Right. Sorry, that was stupid.”
Wesker sighs. “Chris, if you're worried about something, just tell me.”
Chris stares at him for a long moment, and in that moment, he thinks he understands. Wesker was not a god; he did not have it in him to become one. But between the two of them, Chris is not the one with the power to sway others using words. So he only leans forward until his forehead rests on Wesker’s upright back and shuts his eyes to the taper of Wesker’s narrow waist; to where the captain ends and the man begins.
“I love you,” he whispers, and in his ears echoes the rhythm of Wesker's steady heartbeat.
He doesn't know which of the two is a lie.
—
2010 arrives sooner than Chris expects, and for the first time in twelve years, he doesn’t have anything to chase after. It’s as if he’s a bloodhound who’s lost the scent.
England, at least, is a change of pace. Better or worse, he can’t say, not when part of him still imagines Wesker’s drawl in every dropped R he hears.
The portrait comes back to him, once again still and poised, the swan-like arch of Wesker’s neck mocking him. The shadows, tense and dramatic as a Caravaggio painting, cradle his angular face, and in his soul, Chris knows that Wesker will always be this way. Thirty-eight, immortal. The tops of the slate-blue collar of his RPD uniform peek out, a silent reminder of all that he never was, and just above the border of darkness, Chris catches the flash of a silver-blue tie.
The last words Wesker says to him come in a dream. Everything seems to come within dreams, nowadays. Technically, they’re from ten years ago, just before it all went to hell, but Chris only remembers them now.
A gift. Wesker had given it to him in a neatly-wrapped box. You like Malbec more than I do.
It’s not the wine, he’d thought, but Wesker wouldn’t have understood.
For a month, Chris resists the urge to look for it. He doesn’t know if he even still has it, and the wine’s probably turned into vinegar by now.
But he never can sleep anyway, and the boxes in his empty apartment have to be unpacked sometime.
Half of him expects the box to be rigged with some manner of trap, but almost immediately, he dismisses it. Wesker had far too much pride for that.
Inside of the box sits a thin volume of poetry, tucked between the bottle and the pine wood. It opens to a page that Wesker seems to have flipped to several times himself. The left page of the spread is in Cyrillic letters that Chris can’t read—Russian, he assumes, printed on heavy, cream paper. In the margins, Wesker has it translated by hand, and his perfect, aristocratic cursive lines the page in black ink. If Chris closes his eyes, he can still imagine the faint scent of smoke that had always followed him around.
Wesker heads it simply: 4.15.1916. Marina Tsvetayeva. Poems for Blok.
The piece is beautifully written, but Chris doesn’t entirely understand why he’s selected it until—
A stone thrown into a silent lake
is—the sound of your name
The light click of hooves at night
—your name.
Your name at my temple
A vice grip (black leather gloves) wraps around his throat.
—sharp click of a cocked gun.
He can hear it—the way Wesker’s drawl would hiss like quicksand over the consonance, where he’d extend the pauses for emphasis. Still, the words sound more like they’re directed towards Wesker himself, but that too feels as if he’d known from the beginning what their outcome was going to be. All-encompassing in his narcissism.
His hands shake as he opens the note Wesker left for him, printed on a thin, flimsy sheet of paper headed with an emblem all too familiar—
Raccoon City Police Department.
Five words are written on it in the same flawless hand: Wesker’s legacy. For once, he forgoes the pretense.
I did.
Yours,
A. Wesker
He doesn’t know when Wesker penned the note, doesn’t know what he was referring to. But the smell of ashes and smoke and blood reaches for him across the gap of a decade with cat-like eyes of red and gold. And if Wesker’s out there somewhere—if hell does exist—he must be laughing.
I don’t leave anything half done.
(Albert Wesker, Chris mouths, and his name tastes like eternity.)