#I READ ALL THE CAPCOM LORE BIBLES NOW IM CURSED

[nshtn]

i decided to make it ambiguous for now and did a oneshot to tinker with the concept on a less broad timescale - also far more selfishly, and less introspectively.

but i did find a good base in this Pinterest if anyone wanted to see some vibes i've got brewing up.

here's some of the character dissection i'm thinking of.

i think it would be particularly interesting if he views the people around him like a game he wants to play well, and that "winning" that game is a reward to him, so losing a patient is losing the game. the feeling of losing or winning the game is itself tied to his hyperacademic, trafficked, experimental childhood; he doesn't know how to identify with empathy, or how to distinguish it, or if feeling like you lost the game is good enough to count.

he knows he's different - empty, dead, nothing behind the eyes. he knows something is wrong with him; not inherently, moreover as artificial as the viruses he's tailored, so many different strains in which only one single strain rises to the top in a way not dissimilar to the weeding of his bretheren under Project W - his classmates under Marcus. the scum rises and is scooped, the cream is made pure, the fat is boiled away. to want is to want power, to need is to need air, food and water - everything boils down to power or a lack of it, everything can be summated in the monochrome shades of obedience or a need for it. his inner child pays no mind to spencer's rebels because the rebels are dead and strung up before the dawn can peek through the blinds.

you learn quickly what compassion will earn you. you learn how to let the ice in, and then you learn how to sustain it.

and, then, you forget that you're sustaining it at all.

is he human? he relates more to machines in their cold perfection; in their lack of human error, there is something to be appreciated. albert wesker passes through the aching, rotting civilian city and he walks past a clothing store, and when he peers into the glass and sees the mannequins staring back at him, he sees himself in their featureless, doll-jointed faces.

he sees his reflection in the glass, next, and he flinches.

is there more to life than this? did he feel the way others did, once? 'it's a spiral of ants,' says spencer. but he recalls it, faintly, a time when he felt, truly: laughing... laughing... laughing and kicking. kicking and screaming, screaming and crying, crying and pleading. he stops thinking about it, then.

is it sinful to feel object empathy for a da vinci machine and no human empathy for the man dying across the hall, who had told you it was up to god to save him? is it bad if you stopped believing that god existed before you understood that what you experienced was violence?

what is sin to the man whose eye casts no conscience?

bioweapon. the word concatenates two opposing concepts, uniting oil and water. to be a weapon is to enter a state of purity confined to the concept of violence. to be alive is to enter a state of impurity unconfined by one singular, pinprick goal.

what do you do when meet someone who violates these conventions and makes you question what you feel and how you feel it - someone who makes you feel real and tangible, bloodied and graspable - someone who could slip out of your reach if you do not reach forward and grab them before they can turn tail and run from the monster they find behind the eyes of the director spearheading their case? what do you do when they make you feel an emptiness deep within you, and then their attentions slather ecstasy over that emptiness; a deep and confounding satisfaction; startling, hot, and bubbling to keep their flesh close?

what do you do when someone makes you feel like a raw, debrided wound?

what do you do to protect them when they exist far too close to the line between knowing so much you need to kill them and being so innocent that this city's sins would wrap their good intentions around their neck and pull?

when you've run out of choices to save them from themselves... how far are you willing to fabricate to keep them safe? is ignorance a kinder, gentler fate?

there was nothing, and then there was something, and then there was everything all at once, too bright and bleary; understimulation flipped to overstimulation with a painful crack. why does he even care so much, and when did it all run away from him into this bleeding, razing obsession?

when a weapon develops a conscience, does it gain the burden of morality, too?