God eat God, a resident evil fanfic

"Belief can be manipulated.
Only knowledge is dangerous."
- Frank Herbert -

God eat God

A white and red bow - nothing more than a line cutting the horizon, the twilight.
Alex's body leaning forward - her right arm raised in the act of attacking him, the left placed at her ribs, where two of them already sprout out.
Her feet are lifted off the ground, her heavy combat boots soiled with ashes and mud - strings of gold and linen around her face.
Wesker stains that balance, a blackish, red smudge - teeth bared in a wolfish grimace.
The shadows of that story move around him, and Chris watches the scene as if it is in slow motion; Alex's knife penetratesing his left orbit, Wesker's fingers opening against her abdomen and press - going through it.

Plotch.

Alex throws up a stream of blood, sinks - surrounds his neck with her thighs and tightens.
Wesker's eye rolls to the ground with a wet, squishy sound; the pupil still dilated in a surprised, confused expression.
Wesker's whole hand now emerges from Alex's back, fragments of skin and viscera on his fingers.
For a moment everything stops: time, breath, death.

"Why are you helping us?"
"To save my brother."
"Wesker can't be saved."

"Self-destruct sequence has begun, all personnel must evacuate within ten minutes. Repeat: self-destruct sequence has been activated, general system failure in nine minutes and fifty-six seconds."

"Salvation isn't something that depends from us, Redfield."

The Tower trembles - shouts.
Wesker falls backwards, Alex rolls on him.

"We don't ask for it, we don't want it - we don't deserve it."

Chris rolls to his left side, avoids an Infect - he shoots the luminescent globe that beats on its elbow.

"And it is precisely this that makes it the only thing that really matters, beyond our miserable desires and childish ambitions."

Claire calls him, Sherry a little girl lost behind him.

"Even yours, Chris."

On the ground, amongst crumbling remnants and bent steel, Chris cannot distinguish where they start and finish anymore.

Cold and black inside this coffin,
because you all try to keep me down.

Worthy.

That single word means nothing - everything.
She should be proud of it.
She should walk as if she was the Queen of the New World, under her shoes the scum, the unworthy.
She should straighten her shoulders and smile: show that arrogant fold with which she welcomed him everyday to the lab.

She should.

Excella collapses on her knees, coughs - she looks for her eyes, her soul.
"Uroboros didn't reject her." Albert says, and his voice is distant - monotone.
"Her genome accepted the virus."
Excella tightens her arms under her breasts, yelps when a blackish filament envelops her wrist and pulls.
Alex can't look away from her hurt expression - from the dry tears on her face, translucent stains that run on her dark and dirty cheekbones.
"Help me." Excella whispers, and behind that tangle of black hair lies the same girl of a lifetime before "I ... I didn't want to ..."
Albert gives her a mildly irritated look, goes back to ignoring her.
"She is part of the new breed." he continues, and takes off his gloves with a smooth, precise movement.
Alex watches Excella raises on her scratched hands, sits on the white floor and starts crying again - Uroboros an obscene beast wrapsing around her back, her hips.
"Alexandra." he calls her.
"Alexandra." he repeats, and that's when she sees it - she notices that detail out of place.
She raises her eyes from Excella's flat stomach, finds Albert.
"It isn't her who is compatible."
"No."

Silence.

Behind them, Excella is already dead flesh for a dead world.

Black and white - pieces fallen from a now empty chessboard.

"Eight minutes and seven seconds at the start of the self-destruct sequence."

Alex inhales, touches her left side - moans when she finds four broken ribs.
The Tower collapses - it folds on itself.
Alex opens her fingers on the floor, under her fingertips glass and cement.
She rubs her thumb and forefinger with each other, crick crick, crick crick - the sound of her failed hopes.
She tilts her face to the right, finding him - his wounded profile.
His orbit is hollow, empty - black and dripping blood with his every breath.
They look at each other, Alex and Albert.
They seek each other as the world collapses - at the end of the day and when everything dies.
Alex softens the line of her lips, begins to cry.
"I'm sorry." she tells him, and it is a whisper without force - heartbroken.
Albert's chest rises in a single, desperate, sob.

How it feels to be forgotten,
but you'll never forget me now.

Excella is a broken toy - a gutted puppet, a disjointed doll.
Uroboros dominates her, making her the pathetic caricature of the Queen she was to be.
She looks at her with confused eyes, young: Latona and all her ofstupid arrogance.
"I didn't want to." she repeats, and she's beautiful, Excella; a cut flower already overblowning.
"I know." Alex replies, checking her exams.
"Help me."
Alex just raises her eyes, an eyebrow.
"Kill him." Excella repeats, and clings to the sleeve of her lab coat.
Alex frowns, shakes her head.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Excella plants her nails in her wrists, pulls.
"Kill him." and her index is pointed at her navel "Or he will kill me."
Alex stares into her eyes, silent - mentally retraces the results of her blood count.
"He's already doing it, Excella."
Her hands sink, a desperate moan - only one.
"He's already doing it."she repeats.
Something stirs and cuts under Excella's skin.

Sherry had known them since Raccoon City still existed and the world made sense.
Sherry had seen them laughing with her father, murmuring words to her mother.
She had been watching them sit at the same table where she ate every morning a bowl of cereal and milk, the sky a lump of clouds without stars, the light of the lamp dyeing their faces with a bloodless pallor.

Ghosts: nothing, but uneasy specters.

"They are dying." she says, and Claire follows her gaze.
Wesker is bent on his elbows and drags himself on the floor like a defeated soldier - the last remnant of a battle he will carry out even alone.
He has got a smashed leg, but doesn't seem to notice, and looks for the only point of white in all that black.

Alex.

Sherry presses her lips into a crooked-shaking fold.
Her memories are already ashes, and as such they will be swept away by their last breath.

Enemies clawing at my eyes,
I scratch and bleed, just to stay alive.

From his throne of bones Wesker observes.
The horizon is bleeding, humanity dies; nothing remains, except for blackish arcs of Uroboros and shame.
He is an already tired king, Wesker, lord of nothing - ruler of a nightmare.

Click.

Alex joins him in silence, pale - beautiful.
"She is dying."
Wesker barely opens his eyes, glides over a distant explosion - gray and white wires clapping the sky and its heavy rains.
"Her body can't bear the intrusion."
Silence.
"You may put a bullet in her head now and get it over with."
Wesker searches for her eyes, only finds a profile lost in the sunset.
Alex avoids him, sighs.
"your son will never come into the world, Albert."
Uroboros ignores all of them and chews.

Watching her was like looking a fucking copy of him.
Transparent eyes, blond hair - Alexandra Wesker wore his scent on her skin, in her heart.
She came to help us, Sherry had assured, I know her.
Flattened arms, tensed muscles, no one had believed her.

"Redfield."
A word - only one.
"Take another step forward and I'll blow your head."
Alex had smiled, holding up her hands and twisting them a couple of times in the air of the warehouse.
"I come in peace, Redfield."
"I don't believe you."
"You don't have to."
"No collaboration can be born without trust."
"So naive, Redfield, so sincere."
Chris had tightened his grip on the rifle, Sherry a creased profile by his side.
"How did you find us?"
"It's not important."
"It is."Claire had barked, a fist leaning forward - fire in her eyes, in her hair.
Alex tilts her chin in her direction, thins her pupils.
"He is coming, isn't he?"
"No. He is too busy playing king to understand that this world is dying."
Silence.
"I want to help you."
The squeaking of the sole of the amphibians on the polished floor, sweat and adrenaline.
"I must."
"Why?" Claire had intervened, slightly lowering her pistol "What is your angle?"
"Everything."
"This isn't an answer."
"I don't have to give an explanation to you."
"And then we'll shoot you."
A half smile; an amused look.
"You can try it."
Claire had straightened her shoulders, her back.
Later she would tell him what had convinced her, beyond her words and those of Sherry.

"All disappointed women have the same look in their eyes, Chris, and Alexandra Wesker is drowning in that feeling."

Chris observes the same woman of six months before dying by the the hands of the monster she had tried to save until her last breath.

The zombies like out at night,
they'll never catch me.

"Take it off!" Excella shouts, and it's a shrill screech, terrified.
"Take it off!" she repeats, and she lays her nails into the soft skin of her abdomen.
"Take it off, take it off!" she begs her, and bleeds - between her fingers, from her eyes.
Excella falls backwards, slams the back of her head against the edge of the table - she flips over her knees and sinks, almost breaking herself in two.
Alex shoots forward, tries to grab her by her elbow - Uroboros hits her in the face, forcing her to retreat.
"Oh God." Excella whispers, and curls up on herself.
"Oh God." she reiterates, and Uroboros wraps around her fingers, her wounded belly - protects its filthy seed.
Alex gets up, bares her teeth - opens the Progenitor and all of its obscene power.
"No." she yells, and Uroboros ignores her.
"NO." she hisses, and the parasite swings slightly - uncertain.
"Stand back, you son of a bitch." she barks, and Uroboros growls - the Progenitor roars, reminding who it is, beyond the clothes of an old and fallen god.
Excella watches the parasite hiding beneath her skin, hiding - a cold, slimy feeling that makes her want to throw up.
She searches for Alex's eyes, reddish threads along her cheekbones, around her mouth.

That wonderful mouth that is now split at the corners, scarified - dry with desires and ambitions.

"Kill me. Oh God, please, kill me."
Alex swallows a cold lump of disgust and insults his name.

He doesn't feel anything from his waist down.

And maybe it's for good.

The serum Alex has inoculated is destroying him - dismembering cells, making mitochondria collapse, smashing organs.
He should be angry, Wesker: furious.
He should just want to see her dead - eviscerated like the betrayer bitch shehad turned out to be.
Yet she smiles at him from a faded memory, a child from a lifetime before - when the power hadn't consumed both, yet.
She smiles at him, and the wounded profile he is approaching is the same - a bent, broken body.

"Five minutes and two seconds at the start of the self-destruct sequence."

He leans to his left, sees his leg reduced to nothing more than a reddish and white pulp.
He laughs (at himself, at what he was - what he wanted to become) and Alex turns to that sound - looks at him with the same confused look of when they were young and free.
He stretches his fingers towards her hand, tightens - observes Alex's tears turn red with blood.

The Progenitor who dies - languid, silent, on the bottom of their tragedy.

"I'm dying." she tells him, and Albert nods.
"We are dying." he adds, and the Tower bends backwards - or maybe it's forward, she wouldn't know for sure.
Alex sets her eyes on the ceiling, opens her lips in a crooked and bleeding smile.
Albert leans over her neck and breathes.

Light it up, light it up, now, I'm burning,
feel the rush, feel the rush of adrenaline.

Alex looks at a dying world.
Everything is burning, everything is being swallow - Uroboros a ruthless reflex of its creator.
She inhales, and the stink of rotten flesh invades her nostrils - it sticks under her tongue, in her throat.
"Did you want this, Albert?"
Wesker is a statue of salt and blood behind her - a man who has lost interest in his kingdom, a god who ignores his own acolytes.
Alex turns around - arms crossed under her breast, around her ring finger a white gold and obsidian band winks malevolent.
"There is nothing left out there worth living for."
Wesker ignores her, his hands entwined behind his back, his jaw rigid.
"Nothing, except for dust and such blackish slime, as your parasite."
Albert gives her a tired look, dull.
"Chris Redfield survived."
Alex opens her mouth, closes it.
"How?"
Wesker moves his weight from one foot to the other, sighs.
"As always, Alex; fighting."
Alex closes her left hand in a fist under her chin, looks away.
"Will you chase him?"
"No."
"Why?"
Albert is silent, lowers his head.
The Progenitor rolls around her heart in a last, delicate, caress.

"The Resistance, uh?"
"I didn't choose the name."
Alex nods, raises both her eyebrows.
"Fantasy has never been your quality."
"Wesker's words?"
Alex looks for Chris's eyes, hardening hers - she clicks her tongue against her palate.
"Sometimes you seem to forget I've always known more than him, Christopher."
"And you seem to forget that we're not friends, Alexandra."
Alex bares her teeth in an unpleasant smile, slightly inclines backwards.
"Sherry trusts me."
"Sherry remembers a different woman."
Alex crosses her legs, and Chris notices tense muscles beneath the fabric - fibrous, nervous thighs.
"Wrong. Sherry remembers the same woman you're talking to right now."
Redfield frees a dry, ironic laugh.
"Sherry tells of a woman who gave her a blue bicycle for her eleventh birthday; she believes in a woman who talks to her mother about how to cook a grilled fillet and about Chanel's last lipstick, and smiles when she remembers the insults you threw at his father for staining your shirt with his chocolate.
Alex tilts her chin in his direction, waits.
"She doesn't see what you really are."
"And what am I, Redfield?"
Chris slides his fingernail along the edge of an empty cup, seems to weigh up his next words.
"A monster; a B.O.W. A torturer."
He raises his gaze, stares into her eyes without fear.
"A woman betrayed and sold off without any possibility of redemption."
Alex hides behind a bleeding smile, brings her hand to her heart.
"You flatter me, Chris: you almost seem to suppose I can experience feelings."
Chris shrugs, stares at the chipped surface of the table.
"But you havefeel, Alex. You have them. They're just too ruined to be recognized as such."
Silence.
Chris smiles - victorious.
"Jill managed to tell us a lot before P30 killed her; she certainly didn't spare herself about you. Or your brother."
Alex stares at him, motionless.

Wounded.

Chris gets up and leaves the room in silence.

We are young, we are strong, we will laugh,
because I'm back, back, back from the dead tonight.

Excella is entering in the second trimester - she will not see the last one.
Eyes buried in their sockets, injected with blood; Uroboros is a disgusting parasite, a beast that has nothing of the Progenitor's refined elegance.
It splits genetic bases, settles itself among her cells like an unwelcomed and noisy guest.
She tried to kill her, Alex; she really tried.

Nothing worked.

"I can't do anything anymore."
Excella swings forward, pressing her hands on the slightly rounded abdomen.
"Uroboros prevents me from."
White teeth, which sink into pale and chapped lips.
"It doesn't matter." she tells her, and Excella's voice is small.
"Thanks, anyway."
Alex runs both hands on her tired face, sighs.
"Are you leaving?" she suddenly asks, tilting her chin in her direction.
Alex raises an eyebrow, stays silent.
Excella points at a Uroboros's branch, coughs.
"It told me. The parasite. You know, sometimes it talks to me; it tells me things: who's been eaten, which city it has destroyed."
Alex puts her elbows on her knees, listens to her in silence.
"I didn't want to." she repeats, and Alex believes her: she really does.
She rises, collecting the latest data - blood count, ultrasound, complete electrocardiogram - aligns them in a beige and black folder.
"How is he?"
Alex turns, frowns.
Excella draws imaginary figures on her sheet, humming something half-way.
"Is he coming?" she continues, and Alex recognizes a symphony - Vivaldi.
Excella looks for her eyes - her hair gathered in a low bun, her face bloodless, without makeup.
Alex opens her mouth - no, he will not come - tightens the file on her chest - he doesn't give a damn of you or of the world.
"Maybe." she replies, and Excella nods "Probably."
Excella releases a tremulous sigh, bends her head.
"I could call him Achilles: he is a hero of the Iliad."
"I know."
"Would he like it? The name."
"Yeah. I'm sure."
Excella smiles, and she is beautiful again - alive.
Thirty-two days later there will be nothing left of her, but a shell without strength.

Two months and five days.
He has never seen her eating nor sleeping.
Bent among her formulas, hidden inside a lab -coat bigger and bigger day after day - Alexandra Wesker was creating a poison that would kill the new god.
Sherry told him she hadn't always been this way; there had been moments - a faint instant - in which she had been nothing more than aunt Alex.

"She taught me how to make a braid." she murmurs, and Chris looks up from the maps he was studying.
"My mother was always too busy - with my father, the lab, Irons."
Sherry sighs, clasps her hands around a warm cup of tea.
"I was four years old, my hair tangled up for gym class, and I wandered through the Umbrella's corridors, forgotten."
A sad smile; somber.
"They never had enough time for me, not my father, lost in his precious virus G. Not my mother, so in love to follow him to the end and beyond."
Chris is silent, listening to a confession tastes like a prophecy.
"I bumped against her. I already knew her, but only by sight."
A half-hearted laugh - bitter.
"Dr. Fayer."
Sherry takes a sip of tea, tapping the forefinger on the edge of the cup.
"At time she was not so worn out; bright blond hair, eyes like a winter sky, and I looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world."
Redfield rotates a shoulder, loosens a tense muscle under his shoulder blade.
"Birkin's offspring, she said, and I didn't even know what progeny meant."
"Where are your parents, she had then asked me, and I had pointed on the ground - below, where I knew Level Four."
Sherry inhales strongly, shakes her head.
"And she smiled at me, Chris," she said, "I thought so, and she took me by my hand and walked with me to his office and laughed, Chris. She laughed with Wesker for something I had done, but without malice. And he had caressed the nape of her neck, and they were so human, so close, so... "

Crack.

Sherry stares at her hands soiled with blood and tea, sinking her teeth into her lower lip.
"I don't know what happened to her, Chris."
Redfield hands her a crumpled napkin, waits.
"I ... I don't think I want to know."
"Albert Wesker."
Sherry closes her eyes, bends her head.
"Here's what happened to her, Sherry."
The blood continues to drip in silence.

Break the skin, you spread like poison,
dying slow when we all attack.

"You will die."
"I know."
"But you can do it without pain."
Leon just lifts his face, a grotesque pulp of blood and dangling flesh.
He stares at her with suspicion, determination: warrior's eyes, not of a martyr.
"You don't trust me."
"No."
"You have every reason."
Bent on himself, scarred by a war that hadn't taken prisoners - Leon Scott Kennedy had resisted pissing on himself until Uroboros had torn his leg in half.
"Tell me where they are."
"No."
"I will not tell this to Albert."
Leon laughs, and it's a dry sound.
"You're his whore: you'd tell him everything."
Alex lowers to his height, raises his chin in a sharply gesture.
"You don't know me. I'm no whore, Kennedy. For nobody."
Leon coughs, stains her cheekbones with blood and saliva.
"No."
"I can save them."
Silence.
"I can put an end to all of this."
"And why would you do that? Isn't this all of you, fucking Weskers are looking for, in the end?"
"No."
Leon inspires - a humid, soggy sound.
"Uroboros will eat you one piece at a time, Kennedy; maybe a hand first, then the other leg: a little of your gut, spleen, a testicle, why not?."
Leon's pupil dilates, his breath increases.
"I can kill you, here and now ... A word, nothing more: just tell me where they are. Redfield and the Resistance."
Leon shakes his head, grinding his teeth.
"You'll tell him."
Alex forces him to look her straight in her eye, sinking her thumb and forefinger into the flesh of his cheeks.
"No, I will not."
Leon listens to his own blood flowing from the mangled leg, he is engulfed by Alex's arctic eyes - and something flexes.
Something murmurs, and cries - a truth that Kennedy can feel under his skin, in the asymmetric beats of his weary heart.
"Where it all started."
Alex releases a tremulous breath, nods.
Leon closes his eyes, waits.
Along his neck - on the back of his head- Alex's fingers are the most delicate thing that has touched him in months.

Alex's crisis catches her unprepared.
A moment before she was explaining how the serum would work, the next one she is bent on the floor, throwing up blood.
Claire holds her by her shoulders (an instinctive gesture) collects her hair on the back of her head (as her mother did with her) - she listens to Alex's back bending from the effort.
Alex coughs a couple of times, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
"Bullshit."
"Have you ever seen a Tyrant having heavy meals?"
Claire helps her get up, she watches her bloodless profile.
"You're sick."
Alex swallows, curls her lips in a disgusted grimace.
"I'm dying, Claire: it's different."
"I thought you were immortal."
"Not me."
Claire watches her sit down, rubbing her heavy eyelids.
"It was for you, right?"
Alex gives her a questioning look, raising an eyebrow.
"All of this." and Claire spreads her arms - indicates the space that surrounds them "Uroboros, the selection of the race, the Great Purga: nothing, but the pathetic attempt to save you."
Alex remains silent, stretches her fingers towards the bottle of water and drinks a generous sip.
"But something didn't work."

Silence.

"Something went wrong, and Uroboros not only rejected you, but also went around nations to chewing people and animals."
Alex breathes slowly, tries to regularize her beat.
"Why isn't he looking for you?"
"I don't know."
"Lier."
"I closed communications with his Progenitor five months ago, I don't know what my brother is thinking."
Claire turns up to her nose at that word - brother - extracts a crushed snack from the pocket of her jacket.
"Excella is still alive."
"Not for long."
"Jill told us she survived the parasite."
"Not her."
Claire discards the snack - a Mars Rocks filled with nougat and chocolate - raises her head.
"Ah." she just says, and Alex presses her lips into a thin, whitish fold.
"Ah." she repeats, and refuses the piece of Mars Claire offers her.
"Those things make me sick. And fat."
"Quite right." Claire replies "Killing and experimenting with people - perfectly acceptable - eating junk food? In your dreams."
Alex smiles, runs a hand through her hair.
The Progenitor slams against the walls of her heart and roars.

How it feels to be the broken,
you took a piece, now I'm biting back.

She finds him where he has always been; on the end of the world.
From the windows of his loft the horizon is a reddish and purple line - a bruise with shattered and swollen edges.
Alex glides over the intact bed, the sheets covered with a light layer of dust.
She stares at him, her bare feet, her eyes turnsed to a dying sun.
For a few minutes they simply remain that way; two statues standing at the sides of an apocalypse without a reason.
Albert is sitting in a red and gold armchair, a ragged throne - absent gaze, the wind the only thing giving him a semblance of life.
Alex closes her eyes, sighs - collapses, yields.
She covers his vision, bending towards his face - she looks for him, she evokes him.
It is instinctive: a movement that doesn't need to be thought - calculated.
Albert spreads his legs, welcomes her in his lap - lifts his chin, breathes.
Alex opens her lips, dies on his mouth - he entwines his fingers in her hair, pulls.
He runs along her side with his fingertips, touches the space between her clavicles - inhales, and it's like coming home.
Wesker is languid under her hands, soft for the first time - devoted.
He lets Alex guide him, a new, different attention in his eyes.
He knows, Alex thinks, and moans when he finds her already wet between her thighs, arches backwards and listens to his tongue rising up from the navel to her pink nipple.
Wesker hides his face in the crook of her neck, soothing her desire - letting her wet his fingers, his heart.
He holds her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forces her to look at him - naked, uncovered eyes.

He knows.

He smiles at her, Wesker.
He smiles at her, and time dies.
He smiles at her, and Alex is there - her thighs blandly closed arounf him, her cheekbones flushed, her breath short.

He knows, and he doesn't care.

He kisses her, and untold words are poison in her throat.
He kisses her, and sinks - devours her surprise.
Alex opens up for him, cuts his skin, his blood under her nails.
The darkness conquers the sky, and the horizon drips black and white - infected and sick tears.
Alex looks for a point of support on the arm of his chair, turns her head - a cascade of gold and white.
Albert presses his hands between her shoulder blades, pushes her towards him - he comes, and gives her all that's left of a dream and a hope.
Close to each other they surrender to a peace as short as that single, desperate, night.

"It had to save you." he has the strength to murmur.
Alex sobs without shame, dull eyes, hurt.
"It had to be our world."
The Tower creaks, breaks.

"Three minutes and twenty seconds at the start of the self-destruct sequence."

"I know." she tells him, and inclines her face toward his.
"I know, Albert."
Everything around them falls and dies.

Deep down, for the count,
I do not give you count me out.

He listens to her dressing in silence, lit only by a milky and fragile dawn.
The Progenitor is an inconsolable cry, a voice without strength.
Albert watches the sky wetting her hips of red and gold, a body generous of sensations and words.
Alex turns, stares into his eyes - languid, aware pupils.
She torments her shirt's buttonhole with her index finger, along the fold of her neck signs of his bites - a feeling so cruel and painful.
They will not say goodbye.

They have already done it.

They will not lie.

The truth is the only thing has remained - for both.

Albert stretches out towards her, white sheets slipping on the floor - a hungry mouth, always.
Alex walks out of his life exactly as she had entered in it: in silence.

"Security systems will be deactivated, but I can't assure you about the Infected."
"We'll take care of them." Chris retorts, checking his ammunition.
Alex nods, looks away.
"You should get ready." Claire suggests, wearing her kevlar jacket.
"I already have everything I need."
"You have no weapons."
"I will not need them."
"You have no protections."
Alex barks a laugh, between her fingers what will reduce a god to his knees.
"They will not be necessary."
"You're going to die." Sherry says, and has a strange intonation her voice - irritated.
Alex looks at her, stops the syringe between the index and the middle finger.
"It isn't important."
Sherry steps forward, moves Chris aside.
"To me it is."
Alex hardens her eyes, tightens her lips.
"Don't be silly."
Sherry slams her leather gloves to the ground, bares her teeth.
"You can't do this."
"It's her choice." Chris says, and is promptly ignored.
Alex turns, now offers her all of her attention.
"You can't tell me what to do, Sherry."
"You're exactly like them." Sherry shouts.
"You are like my father, or my mother: obsessed, devoured."
Alex lifts her chin, inhales.
"You were wrong about me, Sherry."
"Now I know."
Claire opens her mouth, closes it in silence.
Alex doesn't look away, inclines her face in her direction.
"Glad we finally cleared up this point."
Sherry leans her head, bents her shoulders - picks up her gloves, her gun, and leaves the room.
Chris follows her with his eyes, Claire looks for Alex's.
"Why?"
Alex is a stiff profile to her right, pale.
"Why did you lie to her?"
"I didn't."
"But you didn't even tell her the truth."
Chris moves uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Alex puts her hand over her eyes, bends her head.
"The dead can't speak, Claire: no more."
"Not in our world."
Alex's pain is a deflagration without sound.

Never break, never bow,
never beg, not a doubt.

Excella is gone.
Uroboros raises some tentacles when it hears her entering the room, then returns to its revolting meal.
From the large window on the wall she can see a merciless sun - a reddish sphere that illuminates Excella's blood dripping on the floor.
Excella's eyes are wide open, scared.
She didn't shout - she couldn't - she didn't plead - it would have been useless.
Uroboros is a rigid grip hiding her mouth and nose; a liquid and blackish mass boiling.
Alex approaches, frees the Progenitor - a lion showing all of his power to the hideous hyenas.
The parasite bends - still wounded by the last time it had had the displeasure of hindering her, opens up to her.
Alex stops a few inches from the bed, glides over what remains of Excella - an eternally young, frightened face.
She lowers her eyelids, brushing a lock of hair from her forehead.
She Inhales strongly, sinks - reaches the beating heart of the infection and squeezes (massacring, pulping, destroying.)
The Progenitor screams, Uroboros goes off in a rattled gasp.
Dust on her fingers, wet and cold blood under her nails; Alex withdraws her hand, she cleans it distractedly on the edge of the sheet.
She opens the second drawer of the bedside table, pulls out a beige and black folder - she takes her Mont Blanc out of her jacket pocket and writes.
Coins of blood to sanction the last exchange, already dark halos - dry as Excella's tears.
She writes a name on it - Achilles.

Click.

She places the folder on Excella's belly, the pen.

Because everyone deserve a name with which to be remembered - beloved.

She stares at her again for a few moments, transparent eyes - long gone.
"See you in the next life, Excella."

No reply.

Above, the King continues his long march to Hell.

Sushestvovanie burns.
Black and angular rocks - harsh - a lump of earth clawing to the sky, sinking into the icy waters of the arctic seas of the North.
Chris is the first to get off the helicopter, followed by Claire.
"Are we sure he didn't see us?"
Alex just nods, settling the military knife behind her back.
"I changed the tracking and detection system: we were invisible to the Tower's eyes."
Redfield moistens his lips, takes up his rifle.
"Did the others land?" Claire asks, and dozens of other voices come to life in the headset.
Chris glides over Alex, nods abruptly.
"What should we expect?" Sherry asks, and is a cruel reflection of William - a red tie around his neck, wild hair.
"Anything." Alex replies "Uroboros and mutated humans. A normal Tuesday night for Chris Redfield and his gang of heroes. "
"Where are you going?" Claire stops her, grabbing Alex by her elbow.
Alex raises an eyebrow, looks at her sideways - shrinking pupil, fading iris.

The woman reminding everyone of the Beast that hides under her skin, in her heart.

"Leave me."
Claire hardens her eyes, doesn't move back.
"No."
Alex jerks away, pushes her backwards.
"The parasite fears the fire, so get a well-equipped flamethrower, hit the light globes, they are out of the host's vital organs, don't let them crawl under your skin, or you could just shoot yourself in the mouth."
"You can't do this."
Alex turns her back on her, starts walking again.
"In my office on the tenth floor you will also find a complete list of Umbrella's safe laboratories: take them, and reorganize from there."
"Will you kill him?"
Alex stops, uncertain.
Redfield advances, looks for her eyes - the truth.
"You will kill him." Chris repeats, and this time it's no longer a question.
From the top floor of the Tower the Black King observes his White Queen and waits.

The zombies like out at night,
they'll never catch me,
they'll never catch me.

Raccoon City whispers through phantom mouths, observes her with dull, milky eyes.
In front of humanity's last refuge, Alex experiences a mixture of anxiety and admiration - a heavy feeling that crushes her chest.
Walking dead, speaking dead - living dead.

Crick.

"To the ground."
Alex tilts her chin to the left, raises her hands.
"On your knees."
Dry earth, dry land - before her an abyss that swallowed everything.
"Sherry Birkin."
Uncertain steps, creaking.
"How do you know my name?"
Alex flexes her lips in a grimace, turns around.
"Oh, the question is another, Sherry."
Dilated pupils, accelerated breathe.
"This isn't possible."
Her pistol shakes, the safety returns to its position.
"You are dead."
Under a bloodless sky Alexandra Fayer Wesker rises from the pages of a never-ending story.

Tangled sheets, broken glass; nothing in that room has changed since that night.
Alex glides with her fingertips on the blankets thrown at the foot of the bed, remembers - broken gasps, moist thighs, the need to touch and find each other.
"Alexandra." he calls her, and is a shadow, Wesker - a crumpled and worn out profile.
"I'm here."
Albert approaches her, and Alex finds him suddenly aged.
"You look good." he murmurs, and touches her face in a rough, human caress.
Alex flexes under his touch - lays down her cheek in the palm of his hand and sighs.
Wesker caresses her temple with his thumb, snatches the moment from an already dead future.
"Chris is here."
"I know."
"I brought them here."
Wesker leans towards her mouth, breaks her breath.
"I didn't expect anything else."
Alex represses a sob, gets up on her tiptoes and bites - and her lips have the same taste of always, life anddeath.
"So that's how it ends?"
Alex stares at him, looks for him.
"Only if you want."
Wesker smiles, just bends his shoulders.
"Do I have any other choice?"
Gunshots, inhuman screams - in the belly of the Beast the hero and all of his crazy acolytes.
"You always had, Albert."
Wesker intertwines his fingers in her hair, lifts her by the back of her neck and sinks - moans on her tongue when the needle of the syringe penetrates the tender flesh of his neck.
Alex releases a desperate cry and attacks.

I've got to get away,
from the pain that you drive into the heart of me.
The love we share,
seems to go nowhere.

They will not leave in silence.
They will explode - and it will be great.
They will devour each other - parasites of a feeling that has never saved anyone.
Alex snaps, shatters his knee, breaks his tibia, his fibula.
Albert shouts, turns on his healthy leg and hits her in her chest - crack.
Alex can feel her ribs breaking - pulverizing under the force of his fist.
They tear apart, they rip, they bite; the Progenitor is free, without any brake.
Wesker blocks her left upright, reverses back and sinks - Alex's vertebrae flexing under the pressure of his hand.
And they have already vibrated to the rhythm of this violence.
They are burned a thousand times, overwhelmed by waves of brutality that had always left them naked and panting - searching under each other's skin for poisoning and killing truths.
Alex steps forward - fast, invisible: a small white snake, unstoppable.
Wesker loses his foot, retrieves it immediately - jumps, and shatters the adjacent wall, there, where a moment before was Alex's face transfigured by anger.
She stares into his eyes - red and gold, gold and red - tends her thighs, her breath.
"Albert."
Her invocation; her last supplication.
Wesker's pupil is reduce to nothing - they become nothing at all - bared teeth, curled lips.
Alex pulls out her knife and moves forward.

Chris has never seen her fighting.

And it's a terrifying sight.

Pale, hieratic; Alexandra Wesker had shown herself as a statue of snow and gold.
Never a movement out of place, a word not calculated.
Never an expression different from boredom on her aristocratic face, or from annoyance.
Chris pushes Claire and Sherry towards the exit - a spiral of cement and steel collapsing on itself.
He turns, stopping on the edge of the abyss - he sees them for the first time.
Alex is faster, smaller: a white line flexing before his eyes - she cuts his Achilles tendon, climbs up his back and hits, forces him to his knees.
Wesker grounds her on her back with a sharp snap of his shoulders - crack - hits her to the right temple, breaks her zygomatic bone, the orbital one.
Alex slides to her side, Wesker rolls up on himself like a blackish, furious, desperate snake on the corner.
They collide, tear each other, and for a moment - a disastrous instant - Chris understands how it must be seeing two gods fighting.
"Chris!" Claire shouts "We have to go." and Alex unsheathes her knife - jumping from the beam on which she had found refuge.
Wesker looks at her elegant and fluid movement - he opens his arms, welcomes her.

"Self-destruct sequence started, all personnel left please evacuate within ten minutes from the sound of the siren."

They scream, and they clash together - they release a terrifying, inhuman roar.
Chris turns around, starts running - he lives.
Wesker reaches out - her blade sinks in his left eye - and in his arms Alex becomes nothing more than a broken doll.

Breathing your love,
you're ferocious, you're in my lungs.
Your love is thick,
kill me, heal me,
kill me, heal me.

Everything is dust, ashes.
It falls on them like the first snow in winter, crumbs of an existence now on its last lap.
Gray and red - nothing else.
Alex stares at the cracks running through the ceiling, a network of rifts splitting and ripping - glimpses of a sky without a star.
She swallows a lump of blood and tears, closes her eyes - she listens to his breathless rattle.
He touches the fingers of her left hand, squeezes - clings to her, to everything that remains of them.
"I'm sorry." she murmurs, and it's a gurgling blood-stained sound - reddish strands along her chin, between her teeth.
Albert looks for her eyes, offers her a half-profile - a disfigured and vacuous orbit.
"I'm sorry." she repeats, and the Tower collapses - the main structure trembles, bends under meters and meters of cement and steel.
Wesker inhales strongly - a damp, mellow sound - and lifts her, carrying her body to his chest.
Alex is soft in her arms, a torn doll - with four broken ribs and a ruinous hole in the center of her abdomen.
"How did we get to this, Albert?" she asks, and Wesker leans over her - he almost seems he wants to absorb her.
"How?"
Someone shouts; someone dies.
The Tower rumbles around them, expands - a mouth knowing no peace.
Wesker entwined his fingers in her hair, inhales - Alex feels the wet of his blood against her cheek, along her neck.
"We could have everything, Albert: everything."
He massages her nape, collects her against his body as if she was the most precious thing in the world.
"We had nothing."
An asymmetric beat - which no longer has any strength.
Wesker opens his lips, breathes against her temple - he confesses, and when Alex touches his cheekbones she finds the softness of the hollow, blackish cavity in which she had sunk the knife only a few minutes before.
"I know." he tells her, and his voice is so different - so human, weak.

Fragile.

"I know, Alex."
The floor gives way, one of the beams falls and another breaks.
"I was so angry, Albert, so tired."
Wesker reinforces his grip around her shoulders, sways slightly on himself - accompanies the agony of a story reaching its last line.
Alex's chest rises in a disjointed flicker, she coughs, spraying blood and saliva.

"Two minutes and ten seconds at the start of the self-destruct sequence."

"Everything is alright." Albert reassures her, and strokes her back "It's all right, Alex."
She suffocates a frustrated gasp - hot tears, a split heart, torn apart.
"Has there ever been something true, Albert?"
Silence.
A soggy, slimy suction.
Burning fireflies in their hair, crowns of gold and dust.

The Queen has fallen, the King has been taken: checkmate.

"For a moment, even just one: was there anything true in everything you've always promised to me?"
The Tower cries out - it collapses on itself, a useless piece of an inverted chessboard.

"One minute at the start of the self-destruct sequence."

Wesker closes his eyes, opens them again - he doesn't see that good anymore, and everything is reduced to Alex's bloodless face.
He smiles, and it's the grimace of a man condemned to death.

Of a man who lost everything.

He kisses her, and that grimace is always there - a bitter fold telling her everything.
The Tower launches its last, desperate, call - yields under the weight of their errors, their faults.

"Self-destruct sequence has started: containment protocol activated."

Alex tightes his hand, puts her forehead against his.
"I'm scared." she whispers, and senses the floor move - flex.
Albert doesn't stop smiling, leads Alex's face in the crook of his neck - lets her breathe his scent, his truth.
"You don't have to." he reassures her, and the Infected advances - devoid of control, of a firm hierarchy that telling them what to do and when.
"I'm here, with you." he continues, and listens to his heart slowing down - stopping, almost.
"Everything is going to be fine, Alex."
The first Infect opens his mouth, sneezes his teeth - a blackish and greedy mass.
The floor collapses - it takes them away from the hunger of its own creatures.
Alex is already dead in his arms - a beat that fades minute by minute.
They fall together, Alex and Albert; throw out of the Olympus of which they believed to be gods, erased from history - they fall, and burn.
Albert watches the sky getting farther and farther away - a rotten, forgotten hope.

Crumpled.

He closes his eyes, inhales - Alex and a future that has never been theirs.
"Me too." he says, breaking the last moments with his confession "Me too, Alex."
Alex gives him a conscious look - grotesquely happy.
The Tower closes on them like a pincer, burying their story - hiding an obscene feeling, which had poisoned an entire world.

Silence.

Now a King and his last words were resting under the rubble.

The most important ones, in the end.

"And I woke up from this nightmare in which I blindly dragged myself, and I understood what we are made of, Albert: beyond the words never said, the cold breaths left to die on each other's skin, beyond an already written ending. "
"What, my sister?"
"A tragedy, Albert; a beautiful, full of life, tragedy."

Why do I have to beg,
when all that's left
is a memory.

"The labs were exactly where you told us."
Sushestvovanie is silent, bruised only by a cold and sterile wind.
"Untouched, clean, ready to be used."
A raven rests a few meters from the ruins of the Tower, rummages in the loose soil.
"We even found enough canned food for two months."
The clouds break the sky, reddish filaments pulsating like arteries.
"We have reconquered New York, Washington, and even managed to open a radio link with survivors from the west coast."
The forest swings behind her, murmurs.
"Sherry cried for you."
The sea attacks the coast, shatters against blackish and shiny rocks.
"She told me about when you gave her a lipstick, despite her mother not knowing, how much you liked blueberry chocolate."
A half-mouth smile; wrong.
"Barry is still alive, and even his eldest daughter. Chris managed to hook them into a transmission from Canada."
The raven tilts its head in its direction, croaks.
Claire slips with her fingertips on what remains of the Tower, a lump of stones and burned steel.
"You were a terrible woman, Alex."
She bites her lips, waits.
"Despotic, arrogant, cruel; you two deserved each other."
The crow runs towards her, sinking its beak into a tuft of dry grass.
"Millions of people have died for you, for his distorted dream of salvation and rebirth."
Claire sighs, shakes her head.
She pulls a folded sheet from her jacket pocket, slips it between the cracks of a collapsed wall.
"I found it in a lab of Raccoon, the only one left."
The crow extracts a plump, whitish worm from the ground, swallows it in one swoop.
"You looked happy, Alex."

"A photo."
Chris leans over her shoulder, frowns.
"He's younger."
Claire studies William's serene face, a thumb raised toward the camera, the wrinkled gown.
"Twenty-seven years, maybe."
Annette bends under the weight of her husband's arm, smiles - a hand entwined with Birkin's.
Claire overturns the photo, reads the date on the back.
"September ,1990."
Chris nods, waits.
"Thirty years."
Naked eyes, uncovered; a wolf - the same eyes Redfield remembers examining him and breaking him down at the selection interview for the S.T.A.R.S.
"They look ... human."
Alex is an elegant and pale profile - a shoulder against Wesker's, fingers just touching him.
"They were." Claire corrects him.
A blue shirt, faded jeans; Albert Wesker allows her to touch him, he seeks her - his lips folded in the shadow of a smile.
Chris walks away, sighs.
"It means nothing."
Claire remains silent, lost in the reflection of four lives that had changed hers forever.
"Maybe." she replies, and folds the picture "Or maybe it's the only thing that's ever really mattered."
Chris watches Claire pass over him silently.

The helicopter blades swing slowly behind her, the wind changing - mounting, and threating.
"Are you happy now, Alex?"
The raven croaks again, hops over the ruins of the Tower.
Claire stares at the raven, at its small black eyes.
The crow still crackles, turns its head in her direction - blinks a couple of times, curious.

"What has changed?"
Alex raises an eyebrow, doesn't look away from the laptop screen.
"Why now?"
"I don't know what you mean."
Claire moves a chair away, lets it rub on the worn floor.
"Why have you decide to help us now, you. The only one who'd never do that."
Alex taps her fingers on the desk, ignores her.
"I thought you loved him."
A muscle stretching in her neck, bared teeth - a cut on that beautiful pale and aristocratic face.
"You don't know me, Claire Redfield."
"You keep saying that, but after seven months you're here I can affirm with relative certainty that yes, Alexandra Wesker, I understood something of you."
"Enlighten me."
"You don't want to do it."

Other, heavy silence.

"He wants to."
Alex reserves her an elusive, uncertain look.
"It can't be Chris, nor one of us."
Claire runs through a crack in the wood with her thumbnail, exhales vigorously.
"A twisted declaration of surrender: the general delivering weapons to the enemy with all the dignity that is left of him."
She raises her eyes, looks for hers - distant, lost.
"We can't choose who to gives us life, but if we are lucky we can decide who will take it away from us."
"My brother is not a suicide."
"No." Claire agrees, "He is a coward who has given you the heaviest burden."
She gets up, settling her hair in a ponytail.
Alex brings a hand to her chest and tightens.

The crow rises, rotates a couple of times over her head and then disappears towards the bleeding horizon.
Claire watches it be swallowed by the dying light of the sun, shielding her eyes with the palm of her hand.
She listensto the forest whispering, and welcomes the shiver that runs down her back like a silent warning.
"Goodbye, Alexandra."
She turns, turning her back on a sepulcher that never ceases to burn - dead walking, and speaking, and living.
She climbs on the helicopter, closes the tailgate behind her - nods to Josh, inviting him to leave.
Sushestvovanie is getting smaller and smaller, a dark and jagged line - the Tower a chipped, broken tooth.
Claire leans against the back of the seat and closes her eyes.

All I ever needed was a reason to believe,
you help me hold on, you ignite the fire in me.
You always come for me, you know just what I need,
do not make me wait for this, save me from this darkness.

The raven digs, silent.
The raven looks - it is hungry.
An insect curled up on itself, an empty shell; the raven continues to dig, death and death - carcasses without any interest.

Tic. Tic tic tic.

The raven taps on something hard, metallic; collects a band in white gold and obsidian, a promise - it isn't food, and the raven then abandons it in the tall grass that surrounds the Tower's remains.
The raven searches, and meets deformed skeletons, rags of skin and bones.
Insatiable, with no peace, the raven retreats when it meets the resistance of another unattractive object - not human, not alive, not dead.
It turns the small head, open the wings - its feathers shake.
The raven doesn't understand what it sees - it can't - but something causes it to move back, doubtful.
Go away, the voice murmurs, this is no place for you.
The raven still listens for a few moments, then flies away - to death belongs everything else.
Sushestvovanie breathes - a constant tremor under the crust of its inhospitable land.
Among its dark and restless whisperings, their voice never dies.

"You're never more alive than when you're almost dead."
- Tim O'Brien -