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nshtn · 2 months ago

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wesker washing the blood off of birkins hands

Birkin hadn’t meant for this to happen. It had all gotten away from him, everything; he was caught up in his need to prove himself, to be worthy of attention, of adoration… of something like the love his inner child could never find - the closest he could feel to it, anyways. He needed his peer’s recognition and was done in by it, the very thought of it trickling his sanity from him and leaving behind the crumbs of ideas and moral placations to inch him there.

After a while, Birkin had inched off the edge. A lemming.

2k, tags: blood, childhood trauma & c-ptsd, paranoia, umbrella's indoctrination mentioned, willsker theming

It wasn’t that Annette didn’t provide for him. She absolutely did, and he loved her in a way he could not fully express lest he drown in the thickness of it and forget himself along the way (and he couldn’t – he had to provide for Sherry). Alas, there was no cure to the pools of wrongness that Birkin had been bestowed by the malingering ghosts of the School. His waking mind screamed them as loudly as a blaring kettle at times, at others they'd sneak up and curl their tendrils around his conscious thought. The balm was a careful cultivar, an unstable see-saw of the clawing, raking need to be academically recognized – to be remembered, seen, his presence felt in every crack he wedged in another man’s mask.

To tear down the intellectual work of others was a way to prop himself up as much as it guaranteed he would remain useful and, thus, alive. It was in his best interest.

But with it came that ever-creeping madness, seed planted by the roots of a great, all-consuming rot. And, try as he might to escape it day in and day out of coffee-stained papers and statistics charts, he was not immune to propaganda. Umbrella's was a bitter poison, but Birkin had grown complacent to the downward spiral.

Who was he without his stressors? All he needed was a little push. All he needs is more coffee and more time. All he needs is more funds and more people and more coffee and more time. All that William Birkin needs is his briefcase and more funds and more coffee and more time.

A certain barrenness infected Birkin's candor as the hands of time grew weary of his burden.

He’d been working so fast and so angrily, prodded on by this need, until he’d let it catch up with him, this aching, creeping absolute. His colleagues in this had long abandoned him – seeing no more use in the particular, aggressive strain of T he'd been madly tinkering with – and, left with the blaring signal of his own hubris gone stale, he’d taken his anger out on the periphery of it: a test subject who had no brain activity suggesting consciousness, taken fresh off of life support.

“Live, damn you!” But they didn’t. “I need you… I need this!” His hands constricted them – no, it. It did not cry out as no breath snaked from its' lungs. But it made ATP! It produced mucus and saliva! Death would be a pity undeserved. It slipped away like water through his hands and he made that more tangible, fingers squeezing a lifeless neck until he looked at the blossoming red of them, ran them through the unwashed slick of his hair. The corners of his eyes pricked with tears, something deeply and wholly forbidden, and Birkin found that he was glad he was alone where he could let them fall.

“Fuck! Fucking god damnit fuck – all for fucking nothing. Nothing!” He laughed – and cried, face in his filthy, bloodied hands, falling to the floor as he wept, shoulders taut and shaking with the black hole of his need for support and direction. Who could ever see him for the visionary he was if he couldn’t even keep a subject alive? It felt like they always died if they were wholly his.

And if they didn’t die physically, they died mentally. Braindead, most of the stragglers. Only those whose brain stems scrounged for parts did so much as reach out and try to find something to sate their endless appetite.

It was not good enough – he was not good enough.

He doesn’t register when Wesker walks in. The signature clack of boots on white, pristine ICU tile doesn’t even register until he feels the gentle, blue-gloved hand at his shoulder, the scent of ozone invading the dark cloud of iron.

“You’re covered in blood.” An assessment.

“Yes,” he replies, as blankly as it lands. He can tell, now, practice making perfect, that Wesker is examining the situation without asking for painful context – because Birkin can see him, now, and his head raises a little as his vision sweeps. There are telltale crescent indents around the subject’s neck. The IV has been ripped out of the subject.

“You killed it.” The dehumanization is easy for Wesker – he doesn’t see the late subject as a human being. He doesn’t sound judgmental. Birkin is as relieved as he is furious that he doesn't sound much of anything, aggression redirecting.

“Don’t say it that way,” Birkin hisses, but Wesker has already come to know there’s no bite, and he lowers his towering body into a crouch, shoulders manually relaxing out of the tense state they’d been in before. His grip at Birkin’s shoulder is easy. He can see the way Birkin’s eyes are red-rimmed, but he doesn’t bark at him or punish him, no, not like Marcus.

Birkin expects a lashing or ten, and he receives none. He is an anticipatory porcupine, quills directed and ready to spear, but Wesker is like a thick, warm blanket over the eyes. He hears the other man let out a decisive, thoughtful ‘hm’ that betrays the lack-of in his voice before he feels it: a gentle shoulder two-pat, the request for him to stand.

It breaks him out of whatever road hypnosis he fell into like a sleeper agent, and he rises as quickly as his lab partner does. He has gone through similar before, though never with so much squelching, oozing red. It makes him sick, suddenly, and he makes a choked sort of noise.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Wesker says, grabbing the other scientist's unmarred coat cuff, leading him over to the lab unit's steel sink. Birkin can’t see the way his eyes flicker with the unmistakable recognition of where Birkin’s behavior, unhinged, ultimately leads.

There is a direction this madness follows - it is a dead end, a tornado's path of destruction until it tires of itself and disappears completely, swallowed into mother earth. The damage lingers for decades.

A stray animal, beaten until it has wept with the why, chained and made to act, then put down when it bites because it knows only infliction.

Though Birkin has yet to be put down, there is always the undercurrent of danger that Wesker and him both sense, and Wesker seems to be the only one who steps in to sort out the strands of genius among the discordance that twines evenly down the middle.

These days, discordance wins. It is a lonely victory that self-reports to Spencer - everyone else is always watching. Birkin is a high intellect, and for this there is a target on his back like a hunter tracks prized game.

Wesker turns the faucet on to warm with his free hand and stands there – dead body in the background of seemingly little consequence to him – waiting for it to heat up. His other hand slides from the cuff to inspect the man’s hair, and he lets out a clipped, stressed sigh that bleeds into the open air like a wound.

“Your hair is pink.” It isn't hair dye.

Birkin wants to shrink back with the mounting shame of his own loss of control, but he has nowhere to hide, so he just rolls with a whimper.

Something shifts in Wesker, because he drags his hand through Birkin’s cleaner hair as if to placate and lets it fall to his shoulder, keeping the disgraced scientist close with the strength of his grip as if he means to bolt. “It- it’ll wash out,” he says, voice cracking.

It is a deeply uncharacteristic sound. The tiny crack in his voice, a single stutter, gives way to more than Birkin could hope to read with his eyes. They’ve spent more than enough time together for him to learn Wesker’s minute tells.

“Are you afraid of me?” Birkin chirps, voice a grated warble. He feels like Marcus. The mere thought sends an unwanted shiver cascading down his spine, and he twitches in Wesker’s grasp as it leaves him like a changed man.

“No,” is the instantaneous reply, steadfast and strong as if accused of a crime Wesker did not commit, “it’s just… this isn’t like you.” The unspoken that’s all hangs between them. Wesker wants to say ‘What the fuck came over you?’ and shake him, but he restrains himself. This goes beyond both of them, and he knows it – this is the result of stressors they both know intend to break them into their lesser components, and Birkin’s psyche is fracturing at the edges.

But he doesn't want to lose the only person who knows what he knows. A match with the same end goal - though perhaps they'd both reach the end of their flame before they did, he surmised weakly. It seemed almost as if Spencer paradoxically intended it. He was afraid to admit he didn't understand the man, and that maybe he didn't want to, because to admit this to one's self was to question one's very foundations. Umbrella's foundations. Wesker's purpose.

What came over Birkin could very well descend like a cloud over Wesker at any moment were it not for the alter ego he’d grown an unhealthy fascination with. The only thing holding Wesker afloat was the scant moments alone he got with Birkin when normalcy or more bumped into them both, or when he'd stay late at his office and hear the plucking, self-taught strings of Chris' guitar, infusing him with something like life.

Wesker’s mind had been unthreading, too, for a longer while than he'd care to pour over lest he poured himself out, though he fears he'll never voice it aloud or let it show past his nose. Ever since he, like a bloodhound, caught a whiff of what he believed was Spencer’s intentions with the Arklays, he’d been… he’d felt. He’d felt strongly. But he couldn’t say it – to say it is to open more wounds on someone so thoroughly covered that it would surely skin what remained alive.

Instead, he loosens his grip – and Birkin swears there is a hesitation – letting his hands slide down to both of Birkin’s, splaying them gently and coating his own in frothy, shared sanguine as he brings them to the warm water like a ritual.

It is, to him.

Birkin feels his own shoulders relax at his lab partner’s nonchalance, sighing meekly and letting the paranoia roll off and down him in waves with the water and the feeling of the other man’s nitrile digging into him, bodies huddled close as Wesker runs his thumb through each finger's gap, destroying the evidence of his upset with each practiced swipe.

Leave nothing behind. He'd seen it on a sign, once, when Annette showed him pictures from when she'd gone camping before this mess began unfolding. Time's inexorable march forward spared no seconds.

Next, wordlessly and in no need of it, Wesker's hands find the man's scalp, easing his fingers through and leaning him delicately forward as he cascades a rivulet of warm water over his head. This is a cleansing, and Birkin leans into the touch gratefully. They will burn the body together, he is certain.

A burden shared is a burden halved.

His paranoias drift down the sink as he stares at the suction generated by the drain and every tiny grill-patterned abyss stares back at him.

Wesker doesn’t hate him. Wesker isn’t afraid of him. Marcus isn’t coming. He’s not Marcus.

He just… he just got carried away.

Right?

#this sucksssss i m sorry im sooo tired #/dev/writing/#eeeeeeeeeeee #...#tw blood #resident evil #albert wesker #william birkin

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