So this simple story was made for the sole purpose of writing about some of my favorite blonds. Specifically Wesker, before he went completely round the bend à la his RE5 incarnation. Don't expect much deviation from the plot given in the summary.
Warning: Mildly AUish, if only because when rough drafting this I overlooked some details and it would be too much of a hassle to fix them now; hopefully this story doesn't conflict too much with established history. Also, first chapter's pretty slow, so I'm posting the second one too to pick things up a bit.
Matured for language and gore.
None of these characters are mine!
September 21th, 1987
Wesker loathed mornings with every fiber of his being.
He was a night owl; his frequent bouts of insomnia allowed for nothing else. Falling asleep at night had become such a hassle that he had begun to view the rising sun as his mortal enemy, the lightening sky as a personal insult. The only thing that could coax him from the covers, besides his blaring alarm, was an over-sized cup of coffee, thoroughly supersaturated with sugar and caffeine for maximum energizing capabilities.
Of course, he rarely even saw the sun these days. Working alongside William Birkin had forced Wesker to adopt the erratic man's hours as his own, and Birkin literally never slept. He physically passed out eventually, yes, but succumbing to sleep of his own volition was not a lifestyle choice he supported. Wesker was not quite so fanatical in his habits, had adopted them only begrudgingly, and as such usually made the effort to leave the lab at least once in a blue moon for rest. Of course, this arrangement had rather skewered his perception of mornings in general; it was difficult to hate something that one was barely aware of.
He still put in a good effort towards that end, however. If nothing else, few other researchers put in time during the early morning hours, leaving the labs understaffed and silent. Not necessarily a bad thing, by any means, but it did mean that Wesker was often left tackling the grunt work of their research during that time. Birkin wasn't about to sully his hands on such menial tasks, after all, and as much as Wesker hated being the one to do it, someone had to take up the slack if they were to get any shit done.
This attitude had led to his current preoccupation, namely, culture cultivation. Wesker had seated himself at his usual lab bench, looking over several tissue cultures as he hunkered down for what would almost inevitably be another long, drawn out day of glaring through a microscope and trying to hail Birkin on the phone. He'd just returned from a brief sojourn at home, where he'd managed to catch three blissful—and entirely inadequate—hours of much-needed sleep. Perpetual fatigue was a tiresome consequence of the job, and though it had done wonders for defeating his insomnia, Wesker was uncertain as to whether he should condemn or embrace it. Right now he was banking on the former; his mind was running so sluggishly he barely had the energy to do much more than slide the brightly colored tissue tubes around the bottom rack of the incubator.
He yawned, and glanced at the clock as one hand found his mug of warm coffee. 7:48. 7:48 AM, he knew, since the sun had been ascending with Wesker as he'd driven up to the lab. There wasn't much activity going on around him; save for the gentle hum of the incubators and a whirling centrifuge somewhere behind him, the lab was pretty dead. No surprise there, they probably wouldn't be seeing any activity from that quarter until 9 o'clock at least.
So naturally he was surprised when a voice suddenly spoke up, startling his heart into overdrive for a few distressed beats.
"Mondays are the worst, eh?"
Wesker looked up from his microscope slowly, letting none of the surprise he felt show on his face. Standing across the black topped bench from him was a fellow researcher, a decade his senior, but, like most employees there, lower in rank. He was a man utterly ordinary in appearance, from his close-cropped, graying black hair to his average height and unremarkable features. Nonetheless, Wesker recognized him as one Dr. Creed, a sad little family man who'd been recruited by Umbrella back in '83, following the untimely demise of his young son—a car accident, if Wesker was not mistaken. Of course, the company had purposely scouted him out while he was at his most vulnerable; it made it easier for them to convince him to take on what might have sounded like an unsavory job. The doctor had been given the task of supervising the care of Umbrella's test subjects ever since, and in the four years that he'd been working there, he'd never said a word to Wesker. Hadn't, if Wesker remembered correctly, so much as even acknowledged his presence before.
Of course, that hadn't made Wesker any less inclined to study his personal records. As far as Wesker was concerned, in a place so full of treachery and theft as Umbrella, one always had to know as much about the other employees as possible, especially those that shared his lab space. Creed was low on his list of threats, so he'd really only taken the time to study his background information. But as the man looked at him now with bloodshot eyes, Wesker made a mental note to reopen his file.
In the meantime, though, he had to figure out why the man was even talking to him—and it had to be him, Wesker knew, because there was no one else in the lab at present. Perhaps the comment was an opening to a much larger conversation, the type that led to the asking for a favor or some other equally repugnant request. If that was the case, the man was better off shutting his trap and leaving now. Wesker was not in the business of doing anyone favors. Or maybe he was simply trying to create some sort of rapport with the young blond—Wesker was, after all, his superior. If that was the case, though, he was destined for failure. Wesker was not about to waste his time chatting with anyone, especially feeble-minded subordinates.
As Wesker mulled over the subtext beneath those five little words, his pale brows rising steadily above the level of his sunglasses, Dr. Creed simply masked a yawn behind the back of his hand and headed off towards the back rooms. Wesker watched him go, relaxing his guard only when the metal door slid shut behind the older man. He directed a half-hearted sneer in the man's direction for wasting his time, then turned back to the cells pictured in his scope.
Suspended in the pink growth media, the infected spindle-shaped cells were behaving...like cells. Wesker rubbed at his eyes, disappointed. The T-virus exhibited much more exciting properties on the macroscopic scale; on the microscopic level, things were looking pretty normal, as far as he was concerned. But then again, he wasn't the virologist. He didn't like staring at tiny cells all day, and couldn't study them indefinitely like William could. Normally he wouldn't even bother with the things, except for some reason Birkin had insisted on it; he'd probably overworked himself again trying to juggle a number of different T strains in their never-ending struggle to develop the perfect bioweapon.
He leaned away from the scope and moved the cells back into the incubator; William could and probably would double-check them later, but so far they weren't doing anything surprising. They certainly weren't revealing the secrets behind reanimation, unless reanimated cells looked and acted identically to healthy cells. That was obviously incorrect, however, since the reanimated specimens they had in the vivarium displayed the rather obvious characteristics of decomposition. Perhaps the infection wasn't successful, Wesker mused, then shook his head absently. No, T is much too virulent for that to be possible. But then…what is it doing?
Well, there was really only one person who could answer that.
With a soft groan, he stood and tilted his head back, listening as the vertebra in his neck cracked pleasantly. He walked over to the nearest wall-mounted phone and lifted the receiver, waiting for a dial tone before balancing it in the crook of his shoulder. He dialed in the familiar extension by memory, and then waited as the phone rang.
And rang.
And rang.
He ground his teeth mercilessly as frustration flared, and he set the receiver down long enough to retrieve his cup of coffee and take a generous swig. Wesker was admittedly not the most patient of men, and with William being as unreliable as he was, Wesker found himself often fighting to keep his head. One would think Birkin could answer the phone promptly just once in his life...hell, it wasn't even eight yet. What could the young scientist have possibly engrossed himself in already?
A lot, actually, Wesker supposed, especially if he'd been there throughout the night. Still, that knowledge did nothing to soothe his temper as the phone continued to go unanswered.
Wesker was counting out the seventeenth ring when William finally picked up the other line, three floors above. I could have walked up there myself by now. "Yeee-esss?" Birkin drawled distractedly into the receiver, clearly irritated at the disruption.
"William, the cultures aren't showing any change," Wesker reported with the barest hint of exasperation. "The cells look fine."
"Ah-hmm." Birkin breathed out noisily. "Well, you did infect them, right?"
Wesker clenched his jaw angrily. He did not appreciate the implication that he might have dropped the ball. "Of course," he snapped. He'd practically drowned the damn things in T.
"Tch. Well, we ought to keep observing them nonetheless, but maybe we should roll back to the previous version for the next set. I might've spliced in the RNA incorrectly, I don't know," he muttered contemplatively. "Guess I'll have to go sequence it again and check." He sighed, clearly unexcited about the prospect, even though it was extremely unlikely that he'd be the one actually performing the tedious procedure. "Well, the neural cultures I've got going aren't faring much better, if that's any consolation."
"Not really. I'm rather hoping for a successful conclusion to this project, individual victories aside."
"Oh, no," Birkin replied with a dismissive laugh. "You always kept track of that sort of thing before, and I doubt that you've stopped doing it now just because Marcus paired us up on this. You aren't the best team player, you know."
All too true, but Wesker would be remiss to admit to it so easily. "Competition is counterproductive to our goals at this time," he stated instead, letting his back rest against the lab's cold wall. He had to fight to keep himself from yawning again—the conversation was hardly stimulating—and he directed a glare towards the coffee remaining in his mug. More than half gone already, with no apparent improvement to his state of awareness. Useless.
"Yeah. Right," Birkin agreed hollowly, his attention obviously being grabbed by something else in his lab. Any further attempts at conversing at this point would be fruitless, Wesker knew.
The blond sighed and rubbed his forehead tiredly with his fingers. "Unless you've got any objections, I'm going to move on to the next stage and see if this latest T version has any effect on the rodents," he said, knowing that Birkin wouldn't have any and even if he did, Wesker would ignore them.
"If it does, I'll be surprised," Birkin remarked. "But you should hop up here when you're done with that. I want a second opinion on these cultures."
"Fine." Wesker replaced the receiver, and stared harshly at the wall for a moment. Birkin didn't really want a second opinion—even in the unlikely event that Wesker could give him one—and would immediately disregard anything that Wesker might say on the matter. Because, of course, with Birkin it came down to one simple fact: Wesker's field was biochemistry, not virology. As the virologist, Birkin felt entitled to dismiss any of Wesker's ideas on such matters, because it wasn't as if anyone else could know more than him on the subject. Or so he seemed to think.
It was at times like these when Wesker felt more like William's assistant rather than his partner in crime, and he detested it. Granted, he could only just go so far with Birkin, given the limitations of his own training, but that awareness didn't bring him any comfort. He hated that Birkin had more knowledge than him in some areas, hated the fact that Birkin was, in general, smarter than him, and sometimes even hated Birkin himself.
Luckily, hatred was an emotion that he could usually keep contained. Their partnership had experienced its times of strain, but for the most part they'd worked together far more successfully than any other research pair at the facility. With an aggravated sigh, he pushed up his sunglasses to rub at his eyes, then allowed the dark lenses to fall back over his nose. There was no point in obsessing over the differences in their abilities; he had work to do.
Though really it could hardly be called such. Just as he'd initially suspected, it was going to be another boring day of inoculations and observations. Tech work, hardly requiring his level of expertise. He should've just slept in.
Wesker began to turn back towards the lab, the mug of coffee half-raised towards his lips, when a metallic crash sounded off behind him. He whipped around in time to see the door to the vivarium rudely thrown wide open, a misshapen object hurtling straight towards him. The mysterious projectile landed with a wet thump on the lab bench and proceeded to slide down the length of it, displacing test tubes, papers, incubators, and even Wesker's microscope before finally coming to a halt at the end of the table, a glistening smear marking its untimely pilgrimage down the black surface.
It was Dr. Creed, or approximately half of him. His torso had been roughly truncated just above the hips, and blood and innards had spilled out all over the bench and the floor. Wesker stared down into the dead man's wide, glassy eyes, listening as blood fell in steady trickles onto the tiles at his feet. His mind knew that there was something deeply wrong with this picture, but since it was running on only three hours of sleep, it was having difficulties processing it all correctly. Finally, something clicked in his brain, and his eyes rose slowly from the dead scientist to the open doorway across the room.
There was something standing there.
Wesker resisted the reflex to take a quick, fortifying sip of coffee; based on the warm splatters on his face and hands, his brew was most likely spiced with droplets of Creed now. Instead he set the mug down slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving the doorway.
Impossible! his mind roared, exhausted pathways coming alive in the face of such an unexpected encounter. Where caffeine failed, adrenaline succeeded beautifully.
It can't be...
And yet it had to be. That misshapen form, the overly long limbs and hunched back could belong to only one individual there at the facility. Never mind the fact that she'd always been catatonic when he'd seen her, and disregard all the locked doors and security measures she'd been trapped behind.
Their Female Test Subject was on the loose, and if the expression on her twisted face was any indication, she was out for blood.
His blood.
Female Test Subject is Lisa Trevor, but I'm not sure if Wesker ever knew that (it isn't as if Umbrella would bother with the names of its specimens, after all), and this is supposed to be more or less from his point of view. So she shall remain "test subject" throughout the story. Also, the Arklay facility here is not based off the game (I sure as hell can't remember the layout); it's more of a generic laboratory setting that better serves my purpose.