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“I trust you,” he hears from his terminal, “Wesker.” Again and again, this dulcet, sleepy tone on loop, private audio sample isolated and amplified and gated to remove the insistent hum of machinery.
You didn’t mean to say it.
You certainly didn’t know he was listening to it.
You’d said it after a forty-eight hour bender in which you’d meant to collapse in a sleeping pod and never made it, too consumed by dissecting a Progenitor sample to remember time existed. You’d eventually found his signature in it, but you didn’t understand why he’d change the mechanism he did, and spoke to the open air in a ponderous, soft and sleep-lined sort of way as you examined it, almost intimate.
I trust you—
You, scalpel that you are, slip under his dermis. His breathing changes like you do, anyway, even as he sits perfectly alone with himself.
Each replay stabs at an icy exterior, picks a little more of it away until something overripe and festering is revealed, the slow decay of suppressed longing spilling forth. His facades have been stained with repressed ache, and for how long have they been contaminated with something so unbecoming?
This contagion is a threat.
—you, Wesker.
He shifts in his chair, clicks a pen up and down. Once. Twice, self-soothing between repeats. Revulsion – hot, metallic, branded into him by necessity – burns parallel to urge as it cascades from his face and chest. It is the urge to drag you close – so close your skin would reveal muscle and bare the secrets of your synapses – to make you feel the violent intimacy of being known to him, of mattering to something that was never supposed to need.
A little boy examines his knuckles, the way scars form from having been hit with a ruler until his throat had gone dry so many times past. He knows, distantly, too, that he should feel something when it cracks across them again for failing a biology exam, but instead of feeling there is a hole.
It is a gaping hole, more comfortable to sit with than misery, an emotion undefinable that he has fled to until now, when this hungry thing began to become unable to cease at will. It devours his mornings and steals the stars from the night, leaves him steeped in perfect nothingness.
Featureless, malleable.
When the dissections start, he finds that it is the most comforting thing of all. He no longer mourns the loss of life or fears the needles he must plunge. The stench of death is background noise, now.
Spencer says he’s doing a good job, now.
He gets so many good grades, now.
So, why, then, does he feel the occasional trail of an ache to be comforted, to be known and understood? Why isn’t the ‘A’ enough?
You are an unwitting gallery of his pain.
I trust—
He hits pause, then, nearly breaking the keyboard with the charge of his quiet fury.
Albert Wesker, a meticulously-manufactured weapon and presiding force in the field of virology, was never meant to experience what it was like to desire in such a wholly human fashion that it burns the wick of his rage. He is not meant to interface with humanity. Quite the opposite, really – he is meant to deface it, bound by a fate he has meticulously crafted to avoid its’ contagion. Of error – of feeling.
And yet he remains distinctly aware...
Repression breeds obsession.
He has constructed from you an easily-exploited wound, one that would cave in if pushed and reveal a deeper, darker injury than you’d ever allow stalking inches from your face in the lamplight of late-night TRICELL. It’s only fair, then, that he keep this little tendency of his a secret.
Tucked away here in his chair, cataloged and classified, preserved in soundbites and in the topography of your voice rendered as waveform.
Volatile specimen that you are…
No, no, you’re too precious to destroy… but you’re far too dangerous to release, all the same.
He hits play again.
You, Wesker. Wesker. Wesker. Wesker—