She doesn't like it when this happens. It's distracting. She should be working, not daydreaming about a man and a woman she once knew for less than a day.
It still happens.
Six years have passed, and every day bites away at the fringes of her memory little by little. Leon's friendly, open face blurs and fades. Claire's clothes jumble- was she wearing a jacket? Sherry remembers a low-cut pair of shorts, but can't for the life of her remember if there was a jacket.
It somehow seems vitally important that she remember.
Sometimes he comes to see her. Not as much as he used to. When she was younger, a frightened little girl cowering in a sterile, clean jail cell, he could be find staring in through the ply glass almost every morning. Over time she became accustomed to his presence, even came to enjoy his silent visits.
Of course these days, they are far more productive.
(It would have only vaguely disturbed her to learn that his visits were much more frequent than she believed, for her reflection was not the only thing staring back at her every night when she brushed her teeth in front of the mirror. Behind the one-way glass, he scanned her face, her eyes, searching for her father.)
He only spoke to her once. Three years ago.
"It has come to my attention," he said suddenly one morning, shocking her, "that last Saturday you attempted to escape." His voice was a deep, velvet bass. It clashed with his air of quiet sophistication. It was... unnatural.
There had been so many days in silence that she had almost forgotten how to respond. But he was not the type of man who liked to be ignored, and the black lenses he wore challenged her, goaded her to speak. "I," she began, trying it out, "was bored."
He merely stared at her for a moment, hands folded behind his back. Sherry couldn't see what he was looking at- the glasses hid his gaze. They were indoors- why was he wearing sunglasses? It was ridiculous.
And yet somehow she had a feeling that they were best left on.
"I see." he replied.
And then he left.
Sherry turned back to the wall. He was weird. He didn't talk much. He reminded her of her father.
The next day, there was a stack of textbooks laying next to her bed. Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she gingerly picked up the top book on the stack and examined the cover.
Virology: A Beginner's Course.
And when she opened it, a small slip of paper fell out of the first page. Two words were written in flowing cursive, which took a while to interpret. She hadn't read much over the past few years.
Amuse yourself.
She was not often bored after that.
--
But as Sherry bends over the microscope and scrawls hasty notes by the dim overhead light, it's not his face that floats to her vision. The hair she sees is reddish-blonde, the face young and open. The clothes are not a black suit and gloves but rather a ripped RPD uniform strewn with crude bandages.
Most importantly, she sees eyes, piercing and blue.
The capris callum specimen displays a regrettable tendency to devour the host cell despite her efforts to the contrary. She closes the notebook and sighs, leaning back in her chair and rubbing her temples. The clock says it's late, but then her sense of time has been distorted for years.
A bioweapon that degraded itself in minutes was no use for anything more than shock factor, and in a post-Raccoon world the shock factor was difficult to achieve. But she'd been so sure... Capris could have been the new T-Virus. In the morning perhaps her drive will renew itself and she will pursue a different angle, but for now all she sees when she peers into the petri dish is a lost cause.
There is a biohazard disposal chute on the left wall which she drops the dish into, briefly watching in envy as it slides out of the cell, into freedom. They wouldn't install the chute until she was 15, when they knew she was too big to get inside it. He had personally overseen her measurements. She'd planned to suck her waist in and try to appear shorter, but with his dead gaze in the room she merely stood obediently as a young assistant measured her from head to toe.
They didn't take any chances. Ever since then she'd been given extra food, which she quickly learned to finish. Just to be sure. She didn't want to agitate them.
Sherry had never been beaten over the entire duration of her stay, not even after that single attempted escape. She was not tortured. No one laid a finger on her. Not a single threat had been made. She'd quickly figured out the rules, but never had anyone explained the penalty for breaking them.
They didn't need to.
She knew what they were capable of.
Sherry believed that part of the reason for his infrequent visits during the earlier portions of her incarceration had actually been for honest-to-god security, not just his strange intellectual curiosity. There was power in him- all he ever did was stand there and look at her, but she knew it was there. She did not understand, however, why they would feel the need to post a guard for a mere girl. Was she going to explode with muscles and bust a hole in the wall? Was she going to phase through the walls?
She got her answer one day when she was sixteen, already working diligently on her first tentative bimolecular experiment. Two guards were standing post outside her door, and although she knew they had been specifically instructed not to speak while on duty, it was the end of their shift and they didn't think anyone was watching. Nor did they think she could hear them.
One of the voices was that of an older man. "God," he said, "She's so much like Alexia it's creepy. I wonder if Birkin was really her father, she even looks a little bit like Alfred..."
"Alexia?" said the other voice, younger and so reminiscent of Leon that a little wetness came to Sherry's eyes even then. "Ashford? My dad worked for her, he told me stories. Ha! Birkin would be writhing in his grave if he knew his daughter was taking after her..."
They spoke some more, telling each other stories they'd heard or witnessed about the "wonder child" Ashford, unaware that the teenage girl they were guarding could hear every word. After they left, Sherry had laid down in her cot awaiting the dimmed lights that signaled night, unable to sleep for a stubborn memory flitting through her head:
"Yes... YES!" Her father hisses through clenched teeth, his eyes practically bulging out of his head as he scribbles notes. His daughter stands in the doorway with a growling stomach, she'd come to ask him if he would make dinner since Mommy was away, but now she cowers away from this wild man that stands in her Daddy's clothes. Sweat pours down his skin as he wildly jots in his notebook, jabbing at the paper as though jousting with an invisible enemy.
"It's so close... so close..." he mutters to the walls. "Almost there... I'll show you, you little whore..." For a moment Sherry is scared he means to hit her like he did when she knocked over his microscope last year, but then she realizes he's not speaking to her, but to someone who isn't there. "Child genius, they call you? Even in death... Well I've showed you, you bitch! We'll see who the genius is... Just a little bit more..."
Suddenly his questing eyes settle on her and he seems to realize her presence. "What?" he says, almost in a snarl. Her father is a skinny, almost frail man, but to a five-year-old girl he can be downright terrifying. "Do you need something?"
She can't speak; her mouth seems totally dry, and she is aware that she's wet herself, something she quickly learned to stop doing over two years ago. Her father gazes rattishly at her through sunken eyes. "What? What!? Speak up!"
"N-n-nothing, Daddy." she stammers, and quickly runs out of the room before he sees her accident. She can clean herself up, she's been looking after herself for a while now...
Apparently he ignored her departure, for behind her she hears his voice muttering to itself again. "...can't wait to see the look on Wesker's smug face when he sees the progress... Take that, Ashford!"
The camera in her cell watched as she turned over, trying to drown out the memory and the name.
She never saw the two guards again after that.
--
It had not taken her long after receiving the first shipment of textbooks to figure out their intention for her, and despite her own mounting hunger for knowledge she tossed down the books and sat stubbornly in the corner of the room day in and day out. Orderlies came in and tried to talk to her. She didn't speak. The books lay abandoned on a desk.
After about a week, he finally came in. She supposed he had been away. His face looked funny- sort of patched, like a plant growing over itself. He looked harried. When he came in, she deigned to look at him- it was only with him that she would negotiate, and she supposed he knew that.
She immediately regretted it.
When he put the glasses back on, she looked at him with rapt, obedient attention. He spoke, and his voice was like a rattlesnake coiling in the gravel.
You do not want to be useless to us, he explained. Being useless is a very, very bad thing to be around here.
Looking back, she admits that he had done her a favor. She doesn't know the details, but she was certain that her parents had become useless. And look what happened to them.
--
She thinks about Claire a lot more than she thinks about her mother.
There are certain women in the world whose life's purpose is to raise a child, to care for their offspring with love and concern. Annette Birkin was not one of them.
Neither was Claire.
But Sherry likes her better anyway.
The difference between them was that Annette Birkin was not fleeing from a horde of zombies, and could not find time for her daughter, while on the other hand Claire Redfield was fleeing from a horde of zombies and yet still managed to find the time to care for some girl she had never met.
Work was more important to Annette.
Sherry suspected that she was an accident. She didn't know much about childbirth, but she thought that if you were planning to have a daughter, you might set aside time to be with her first. She thought that if her mother had really wanted a child to begin with, she might not look so bewildered when Sherry asked her if they could go shopping together, once. It was the only time.
Of course there was always the possibility that the Birkins had been a different couple when Sherry was born. Time changed people. It had certainly changed Sherry.
She thought that she might not mind having Claire as a mother.
--
She had a dream, once.
Sherry was standing in a burning street in Raccoon City, torn between elation and terror. She was outside, free of the cell for the first time in God knew how long. She savored every breath of fresh air, laced as it was with blood and fire. The stars shone down spectacularly- and how could that be, when she barely remembered what the night sky looked like?
She was delighted to be free- but why here, why Raccoon? She knew it was a dream, knew that the government had blown the city to pieces. The Clock Tower, the park, the Apple Inn where she'd had her first and only birthday party, hastily thrown together by a compassionate nanny who was fired three weeks later, all of it had been reduced to so much ash.
Sudden hatred burned in her for them, with their clever missiles, carelessly destroying everything from a safe room in the Pentagon. She knew it was a nightmare- and yet she did not want to wake up. She was waiting for him.
All around her came the creatures whose faces she saw so readily in her ordinary nightmares, but she did not fear them now. Zombies fell out of burning cars and struggled to their feet, Hunters leaped from window to window searching for prey, beneath her feet blind horrors crept in the sewers and subways. The sky was filled with ravens, entrails hanging out of their beaks, until the stars were blotted out under a deluge of black feathers.
None of them touched her. The undead shambled past her without a second glance, and Sherry knew that they were frightened of her, this time.
All around her people were screaming in pain as their world was devoured. She rocked on her heels, listening to their agony, enjoying it, when two voices rang out of the cacophony and pierced her reverie like a spear.
A man. A woman. Screaming.
Leon. Claire.
She was freed from her trance and ran forward, pushing through a crowd of decaying zombies and feasting hounds, kicking, pushing, shoving, desperate to find Leon and Claire and save them from whatever was hurting them. The horde pulled her down, slowed her advance, but still she pushed through until she burst, panting, into a clearing where a woman in a blue dress was being devoured alive by the things. Sherry wanted to help but she couldn't, she had to find Leon, had to find Claire, had to help them-
"Sherry."
It was his voice and it froze her in her tracks.
She tried to move and couldn't. His voice paralyzed her, and she watched helplessly as the red-haired woman weakly tried to crawl away from her killer. She clutched desperately at Sherry's foot and uttered breathless gasps as the zombie slowly, serenely, reached into her stomach and came out with a fistful of sausage-like intestines. Her gasps turned to screams of pain as the creature raised the links to its face and bit down hard. The woman moaned in agony and sounded just like one of them, her lips turned blue and blood frothed within them, she collapsed at Sherry's frozen feet, and Sherry could see everything, every strand of hair on the woman's head, every splatter of blood on her dress, she could even see a tiny badge fall out of the woman's dress and clatter on the ground, and it said S.T.A.R.S-
He was behind her, watching the whole thing, and Sherry knew that soon she would see him, see his horrible eyes, and it terrified her, but somehow exhilarated her. The zombie raised its head and looked at her curiously, its head cocked childishly, its lips stained red with the woman's blood, and Sherry laughed, hysterical.
A black glove landed on her shoulder and she turned and yes, there he was, but the glasses were on his face. Her gaze fled from him, and she tried to focus on anything else, but what else was there? Only the creatures whose names she had been studying, Cerberus, Hunter, Licker, all of them standing in a circle and watching dutifully like guests at a wedding. Her eyes fled to the buildings, and this was odd, the sign plastered on one said WELCOME TO THE WINDY CITY┘
"Look at me, Sherry." he said.
And she found that she couldn't not.
"Yes." he breathed with his voice like velvet. He towered over her, and she felt like she was shrinking into a child again. He filled her vision. He was everything. He was Authority.
Her eyes flicked to the sign again. Raccoon was a lot of things, but not windy: the mountains saw to that.
But then the sign was gone, blotted out by him, and now she could no longer tear her eyes away from his impassive stare. His face was now only inches from hers, and his breath smelled like the dead surrounding them. The dead who were everywhere... the dead who were no longer only in Raccoon...
"You are correct." he said. She wasn't surprised that he could read her mind, it was, after all, a dream. "This is not Raccoon. Welcome to Chicago." He grinned, and his teeth were white and perfect. "Or should I say, the necropolis.
I must thank you."
"No..." she whispered, but the dark gleam of his sunglasses silenced her.
"You were an invaluable part of our takeover-"
"No! I didn't!" she shrieked, but her words were wild and feeble before his certainty, his authority.
"Without your work, we never could have created the numbers we needed, the T-virus was far too weak-"
"You lie! You lie you lie you lie you LIAR!"
He was quiet. She shook with fear, and her stomach knotted itself as she felt movement behind her: the woman (Valentine, a voice whispered) was rising again. Tears of rage fell from the corners of Sherry's eyes as she twisted her head away from him with Herculean effort. Her voice was tiny and her tone a weak imitation of defiance.
"I didn't."
A single gloved finger alighted on her cheek. His touch was warm, and it was if she were being caressed by the tongues of fire extending from the dying city. He turned her head to face his, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a small smile.
"You did. And you loved every minute of it."
And then he was pressing his lips against hers, and she couldn't fight it, couldn't fight him, best to give in, best to be transformed, she would be making her parents proud-
Leon and Claire were dragged across the clearing by zombies, fighting and screaming, but Sherry could no longer hear them. She was wrapped in his arms, held safe and protected from the death and destruction by forces to which neither of them could compare. Yes, she could believe it: she had unleashed her inherited talents upon this city, all for him, all for this. She could see herself reflected in his glasses, no longer a girl but a woman, the queen of the necropolis.
It was the endless dark of the sunglasses that burned in her mind as she awoke from the dream, sweaty and moaning. Her lower body was on fire, drenched in sweat and- and she was horrified to find her hands vigorously rubbing that place, the place she wanted him to touch.
Sherry tore them away and gazed at the camera with her cheeks burning in humiliation. It had seen all of it, she had probably cried out, they were probably all laughing about it in the monitor room.
Oh God, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with me, she repeated again and again in her head as she rocked with her arms wrapped around her legs, not caring what the camera saw. It was wrong, she would burn in hell, she cursed her traitorous hands and most of all she cursed him.
It was guilt, she tried to tell herself, guilt over her reading the textbooks they gave her. Biology and chemistry, all these meaningless little symbols that somehow excited the deeper parts of her. But she had no choice, they made her do it! She was a prisoner!
So it couldn't be guilt, then? A nasty, malicious part of her teased. Something else, then? She didn't know the word for what it was she had done, but she'd once walked in on her mother and father doing something in bed that reminded her of this. And she'd thought about him, her captor, and why would she do that? It made no sense.
She had been asleep, she reasoned. Dreams never made sense. As long as she didn't think about him... didn't let him get to her... kept thinking about Leon and Claire, and freedom...
Never again would she allow it to happen, she swore, and within a month she was doing it every night of her own accord.
--
And the camera watched her every time, of course, and recorded every moan, every shudder, and one night they must have pieced it all together because she woke up from the fantasy and he was still there.
She hastily pulled up her skirt and retreated to the far corner of the bed, shocked into talking for the first time in ages. "Who- how did you get in-" she stammered, her cheeks crimson in shame.
"My name is Albert Wesker." he said, and she finally knew his name, and that was all it took.
--
That had been one year ago, and although she was not yet free of the cell Sherry supposes it's only a matter of time before Albert trusts her enough to release her. Of course she had told him she would never try to escape, that she loved him, and she supposed he believed it as much as he might believe her telling him that Chris Redfield had come to see him and apologize.
Yes, he had told her much since that night, much about what she was doing, who she was targeting. She wishes she could have met Claire's brother, met this man that Wesker hated with such fierce intensity. Wesker, to whom indifference was the default.
To be honest she has no idea what would happen if they ever let her out. She knows there was no hope of them ever trying to release her, she had already proven herself far too valuable. But to escape? Perhaps. She does still think of Leon and Claire, still daydreamed about joining them and fighting the good fight against Umbrella and its allies. Still dreams about having a family again, one who loves her this time.
Her glasses slip off her nose as she bends down to pick up the microscope and return it to its place on the wall. It's heavy, but they'd installed a miniature gym in her cell and now she hardly needs assistants to help her pack up her own experiments. Sherry works out diligently every day; she doesn't know which way the tide will turn, but physical fitness will be important in the future no matter who she ends up fighting. The gym was just one of the many requests she'd asked of Albert in the past year, and one of the few he'd actually granted her.
Capris was a failure, but she is not disheartened. She had asked Albert last night as they both lay in her cot (now upgraded to a queen size for reasons almost every orderly surely knew about) panting and sweating, asked him if she could look over her father's notes. The G virus is the key, it is her inheritance, and she knows something can- will come of it.
He had told her he'd think about it, which was a good sign. Wesker didn't think about things he didn't find important. It might be his downfall some day.
She's learned how to curry his favor, learned how to answer his "test" questions. Once, when she had called to ask him about the growth rates of certain African viruses, he had the gall to interrupt her and tell her that he had made love to Annette Birkin. Twice.
"Once more than Dad, then," she had replied offhandedly, "Anyway, you said the original inspiration behind the t-virus came from Ebola, I'd like to look into it myself, could be just thing I'm needing..."
He had made no further response on the subject, but inwardly she knew he was pleased at her reaction. She hadn't been acting; she cared little about her parents these days, although she did think he was telling the truth. Annette would have gladly sold herself for some little scrap of information, some favor with some authority.
The notion that she was becoming her mother crossed her mind and was instantly crushed.
She undresses and begins changing into something she can sleep in, a pair of old sweats that had belonged to some female orderly. Tomorrow is a new day. She intends to be ready if she wakes up to find a pile of hastily handwritten notes lying on her desk, freshly delivered. There is a lot of work to be done.
She often wonders what Leon and Claire are up to. Wesker has been asking her a lot of questions about the former lately, about the relationship Leon had with that Asian woman whose name Sherry can't recall. It isn't hard to figure out that both of them are involved in something: Sherry wishes she could find out what.
She still doesn't know who she values more, Wesker or Leon, but every time she tries to make a decision a memory rises in her mind: waiting in a little room in a government building while Leon talks loudly with someone within. Him emerging and giving her one last kiss and telling her everything will be alright. A man in a suit taking her hand and leading her to a limo, a needle sliding into her neck.
Waking up in a little cell with no one there but a man in sunglasses. Whatever else he was, he was real. Tangible. He hadn't spoken to her at first, but that had changed, hadn't it? Oh yes, very much so.
Wesker was here. All the others were only so many phantoms.
It's late, and he's in a good mood, and she dares to ask him a question. "So why did you take such an interest in me?" she says, breaking the silence. "You don't seem to care much for children."
He is quiet for a moment. "You reminded me of someone." he says at last. "Another girl I once knew. Her name was-"
"Alexia?" she teases.
"No," he replies softly, "Lisa."