I will let you down I will make you hurt.
I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar's chair. Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair.
Beneath the stains of time the feelings disappear you are someone else.
I am still right here.
Johnny Cash- Hurt
For someone who wasn't known for being vain, Claire Redfield spent an increasingly large amount of time starring at her reflection in a mirror. It had become an unconscious ritual whenever she passed one. She would arch her neck and tilt her head from side to side making that her skin was still whole and intact and free from the wounds of the infected, quivering fingers running over her skin to make sure that she was free of infection. She knew it was ridiculous, that there were more subtle ways to become infected than to be bitten, but still the fear lingered on, twisting nerves that were already frayed to breaking point.
Despite the knowledge that she was safe and out of harm's way with every blink of an eye the nightmares began afresh in Claire's mind with all the gut-churning clarity of a film reel. In every moment of quiet solitude she would get the unnerving feeling that despite all evidence to the contrary she wasn't quite alone. It was almost as if her own conscience was stalking her.
Faceless voices merged with the shadows of her home. Ghosts lurking in the darkness waiting for her to let down her guard down, causing her to jump at every unexpected sound like it was a cannon blast. At first, Claire had felt relieved to be home, desperate for a taste of normality after months of terror. But her homecoming had not been the happy ending she had prayed for in the back of a fighter jet. It was like she was becoming a prisoner once more, only this time the walls that held Claire in were that of her own home.
A few days ago- nearly a month after her return- Claire had cut her hand and she had torn the apartment apart to find a first aid kit and iodine to sterilise and seal the wound. The sight of the deep red of her blood sparking an instinctive terror that Claire couldn't control, and it had taken her over an hour to breath normally once more. Each breath she pulled in as painful as gasping in shards of glass into starving lungs and every heartbeat like a drum roll against her ribs.
It was irrational, Claire knew that now. That even now, weeks after escaping the icy wilderness of Antarctica and after the death of Raccoon City that she still felt terror at the thought of infection. If she had been infected she would have long ago started displaying the symptoms but that didn't stop the all encompassing fear. Claire would rub her skin raw in the shower with carbolic soap in order to purify her skin and the fear of infection would wash away for a few hours, only to return with a vengeance.
An anxious and absent, Chris had called in one of his old friends in the Air Force who now worked as a consultant in the VA centre in New York and asked him to check over his sister. A Dr Mick Davis. He was young, helpful and Claire knew that it should be easy to talk to him but something stopped her. Part of her resented the doctor's presence, while another felt anger at the presumption of her brother that she needed help. She had been angry and told the truth, why did that mean she needed help? Nonetheless, she held back from slamming the door into Davis' face.
They had sat in the small living room after Claire had awkwardly let him into her home, her guard already up and wary. The doctor had asked a lot of questions, his words as smooth as silk as he put his best patient voice on. The sound of the old kitchen clock ticking as loud as a church bell in the awkward silence, almost drowning out Claire's voice as she did her best to be honest. Even as the words seemingly scraped out her mouth, Claire had felt sure that she had met the doctor in the past most likely when Chris had returned home on leave but it felt like a distant memory. Dr Davis' face lost in amongst the countless walking dead that Claire had fought against.
A lot of things from her past life seemed hazy these days, and with each passing day it seemed like more and more of Claire's life was being overwritten by Umbrella. But that thought and many others were not for the doctor.
As their coffee grew cold, they had talked about how she was sleeping, eating, how Claire's mood was. How she felt like she was losing control since getting back to the States, how she felt haunted and terrified of darkness and silence. How she lived in terror. But Claire made sure to keep the worst to herself, burying it away with the hundreds of painful memories that dogged her.
Especially the memory that should have been a happy one. When someone had told her that she was loved.
Davis supped at his coffee despite it having long ago lost its heat, his pad and pen in the other hand and he asked her about flashbacks. Everything now came in disorienting flashbacks that made Claire's head ache for hours in the aftermath. At first it was the nightmares she had had as a child dwelling on how her parents had died. The feelings of fear, of being vulnerable and reliant on others and the fear that she would lose Chris too. Then it would move onto feeling like a failure, Claire knew she had let people down. Steve and Sherry had paid the price where Claire had failed.
The other images, Claire held onto, Davis... he didn't need to know the rest.
The walking dead roaming the earth in desperation for living flesh to feast upon, the rapist police chief Brian Irons cowering in his dungeon lying in wait for his victims. Little Sherry Birkin clinging to Claire for dear life as they faced down the macabre creations of the little girl's parents and the rest of Umbrella's deranged scientists. The escape from a secret underground lab and the remains of the dead Raccoon city aflame and then flying to Paris, the torturers paradise Rockfort prison then yet more dying. At times it was like she hadn't left it behind at all. And don't you wish you could have left everything behind?
It was textbook post traumatic stress syndrome, Rebecca had told Chris while they had thought Claire was asleep back in London. And in the present, Dr Davis agreed with the STARS medic's diagnosis. Claire had listened in on the doctor's conversation over the phone with Chris who still remained in the UK. Flashbacks and bad dreams were par for the course with any form of serious trauma Davis had reassured. That it would take time for Chris's little sister to recover from what she had witnessed, but in the meantime he was going to prescribe some antidepressants and sedatives to allow Claire to rest. Davis had went on to ask if there was anyone close who could look out for Claire while Chris was out the country.
Claire knew the outcome of that conversation, there was no-one left aside from her and Chris. They had been alone for years. The two Redfield children had been military brats, always moving with their parents to a new town every year or so with their father who was an officer in the USAF.
They had been living in Germany near the Ramstien Air Force Base when their parents had died in a car accident on base. The familiar helplessness Claire had felt as a child had returned with her return to the United States except this time there was no Chris to look out for her this time.
Staring at the dregs remaining in her coffee cup, Claire continued to eavesdrop on the conversation taking place in the corridor that lead from her living room to the door. "Your sister needs some support right now Chris. She needs you here." There was a moment of silence before Davis spoke again. "I understand Chris, but if you can haul ass back here I would think it wise. Claire is a vulnerable, young woman who needs you here with her until this passes." Another pause. "Well, until you get back I will do my best to keep an eye out and check up on her. But I am no substitute for you. You are her brother. With you here she will make a quicker recovery."
But would she, Claire thought numbly as she came out the shower in her pokey bathroom pausing in front of the mirror as she wiped off the condensation to look at her reflection. Davis had left hours ago and it was now late. Every morning and night Claire looked into the same chipped small mirror with trepidation as if she half expected to see her body begin to decay and putrefy like all the others she had seen in Raccoon. Claire knew it was paranoid and unlikely but it didn't stop the fear or the worry that perhaps she had come back wrong from Antarctica. With each day that past by Claire felt like a little more of her old self was dying away.
The college student who loved motorbikes, cheeseburgers and hot chocolate on cold days was fading. She was becoming a pale imitation of herself. The hopes Claire had had for her life had been lost to the madness that surrounded Umbrella like a noxious cloud. It had left her a shadow of her former self and although everyone tried to act like it was just temporary, Claire knew they were lying, instinct told her that this fear was permanent.
There were those flashes at the corner of her eye, the faint blur of someone always just moving out her line of vision, whenever she tried to look directly at them. The flashes that Claire had known better than to tell Dr Davis about or she was sure he would have had her committed. The scents that appeared from nowhere to remind Claire of death, the smell of the dead, the blood on every surface. It was all overpowering, each and every recollection cloying her senses until she felt like her head would explode.
Heading to the bedroom with the towel wrapped around her still damp torso, Claire passed by her old college books stacked in an old bookcase, and the sight of the dog-eared pages made her remember her old Classics professor and his need to make his students over analyse every word in their prescribed reading. As Claire brushed her fingers over the spines of her old school texts, she wondered how he would describe the situation she currently found herself in.
Would it be seen as the inescapable death of innocence and the growth into adulthood? Or simply the grim realisation that that unlike many a parents late night reassurances, there were indeed creatures that went bump in the night? Or, as Claire was more inclined to think, she was just fraying at the edges and was desperately trying to find things that would explain her increasingly irrational behaviour to herself. Because as accustomed as Claire was becoming to the unusual, even she was the first to admit that recently she had been living far from normality. With a derisive snort Claire turned to wrap her hair in a towel before making sure that her home was secure and that nothing could easily break in.
Claire had met crazy people before. Irons had been crazy. The Ashfords had been crazy. Now she worried that she was going crazy. With nothing else to do she had read up on what PTSD could do to a person and it wasn't pretty, and her stomach churned at the very thought of it. For months she had been able to keep the pain at bay because she had a mission to accomplish. Claire had been determined to find out the fate of her brother and now that she had found Chris, it felt like her talisman against the pain had been taken from her. Once she had been able to finally stop all the fear, pain and anger for what had happened had hit her with the force of a tidal wave, leaving her with this void that threatened to swallow her whole. It had been too much to think she might have been able to come out of all this relatively unscathed. Claire thought looking over the apartment for anything out of place as she turned off the lights; shrouding everything in darkness, save for the dull bluish glow of the street light near the window.
Claire's bedroom was barely lit by a small bedside lamp, and she gingerly sat on the bed to finish drying her hair as the rain started to hammer against the window outside. The room that had once been a motorbike shrine was now covered in a collage of Umbrella Inc related newspaper clippings, and photos that plastered the walls, along with tottering piles of VHS cassettes that stored news recordings from stock updates to new product announcements.
Every night, Claire read textbooks on viruses and studied various medical texts, taking what she had witnessed from surviving two viral outbreaks and building up on her admittedly scant knowledge from High School biology. She wanted to know how Umbrella's creations worked, she needed to know.
After Antarctica, Claire wanted to know what the virus did to a host as it worked its will over the body. She had seen the physical effects, now she needed to know what happened where she couldn't see. So night after night, she sat up late reading at the same desk where she once had worked on term papers and revision, only now her studies were on virions and lipids rather than Tolstoy and Steinbeck.
Claire sat on the edge of bed, pausing before reaching for the small orange prescription bottle on the night stand. With frozen fingers she carefully tapped a pill onto her palm, and for what seemed like hours Claire stared at the tiny drop with a growing sense of trepidation. Davis had told her time was a healer, Claire didn't believe him.
Before she lost her courage, Claire swallowed the pill before shakily turning off her light and waited for the medication to kick in. It didn't take long for it to start to dull her senses. Shaking out her hair, Claire turned under covers and watched the light glimmering off the water droplets that rested on the window pane. The familiar sound of cars swooshing through the water echoing up from outside. In her chest, Claire could feel her heart-rate begin to slow and her vision darkened, like someone slowly turning a dimmer switch. Daring to hope for a respite from her nightmares, Claire closed her eyes and sighed deeply allowing her head to rest into the pillow.
It's going to be alright.
It was an illusion that was destined to be shattered. Within minutes of that thought, Claire's nose caught the old scents of gunpowder and blood and with a start she forced her drugged eyes to open. Just in time to catch a fleeting reflection of a ghost on the rain spattered window.
Why was he haunting her?
She would have saved him if she could.
It hadn't been fair, he had lost everything already.
He had just been a boy, a boy who wanted someone to love him.
He had wanted her to love him.
Claire hadn't loved him, but she still felt responsible for the death of the boy known as Steve.
Steve Burnside, whose ghost now visited her at each of her weakest moments. Claire helplessly slumped back into the bed and felt her vision begin to blur. As she faded off into a stupor the indistinct face of Steve loomed over her as tears started to spill down the side of her face as she gave one last shuddering gasp. Her body shivering as terror took a grip over her and when Claire finally gave up consciousness she could hear her tormentor mock whisper.
"Sorry, Claire, but you can't shut me out that easily."
This is edited from before, I am working on Promise once more and this time its continuous. Oh yeah baby.