Fingers clutched at the cool sheets beneath him, Chris' mahogany eyes sliding open at the slit of sunlight that tried to pry his eyes open. Narrowing his gaze, he slowly turned his head, wincing at the migraine that threatened to consume his mind. That was until his thoughts were wiped instantly clean, and a smile encompassed his being, remembering the night before that clung to him. His limbs were still heavy with fatigue, almost incapable of lifting them, but the ache was a good one. The dull throb in his body of the scratches that riddled his back and chest where Piers' had touched him. Those touches had been so damn perfect. After everything, at least they had that. Exhaling the cleanness around him, Chris furrowed his brow, eyes finally focusing on the white walls surrounding him, the ceiling lined with high power lights and drop ceilings. Where the hell was he? The room they were in was spotless, it was so much so that he could probably eat off the pane windows that covered the wall, showering him with light. "Piers?" The beeping wasn't audible until he tilted his head, looking for the younger man that had fallen asleep in his arms the night before. He was alone... in a hospital. What the fuck? "Piers!" Yanking against the restraints he discovered on his thick wrists and ankles he growled, pulling away, the desperation seeping into his calls. "PIERS!"

A woman's voice stole the silence, musically sweet but twinges of fear laced through it all at the same time. Her voice was all too familiar, clutching a slim fingered hand to his thrashing ankle, calming the giant. "Chris, settle down partner. You're in the hospital. Fought like a gladiator on the helicopter so much they had to sedate you to even get you here." Jill gave one of her sad smiles, drifts of brown hair floating from her pony tail over shoulders when she leaned down to kiss his cheek; dragging a chair up beside him where Chris was heaving, gasping to fill his naked barrel chest, the plains of his body coated with a layer of sweat from both fear and the fever that had taken hold of him. "You've got a few gun shot wounds, and you had a slight heart attack from that beast reported in the facility. Electrical impulse. Otherwise the doctor said you would be okay if we got you to settle down. Of course, I've never known a job yet that was too big for Captain Chris Redfield, right partner? Still... its amazing you got out of there in one piece." Sighing, the nostalgic woman sat beside him admiring and accessing all at once until she could think of nothing else to say; knowing that all too silent look of desperation he was giving her. It was full of that sadness when someone knows something horrible, tragic, but refuses to let it in until they've heard the words. At least it would be her giving him the news, of all people it should have been her. "He's not here Chris. You know that already don't you? There was no other way, the man saved your life."

A gathered pain climbed up inside a body full of fatigue and weakness. So it was a hallucination? Something brought on by he sedatives in his system when they dragged him away from the site, made him leave behind the only reason for his existence. Everything good, everything right in the world was gone, and it was left bare. Those beautiful eyes staring up at him with adoration, devotion, conviction, demanding him to be the man he was suppose to be, but taking every piece of him as he was. Piers had taken in his pain and he'd loved every piece of him, but demanded him to be better... Yet here he was, strapped to a hospital bed, with an ex-partner at his side to let him know... he failed. Those soft loving touches belonged to a man who had given everything, Chris gave nothing. He didn't deserve the perfection that Piers offered him. The life of feeling something other than pain and self loathing was gone, and he couldn't take his partner with him. No, those hands and urgent confessions of love weren't his to claim. "He never made it out... he's gone. He's.." Chris' voice drifted out, loss and pain surging through his countenance until he turned to face away, the feelings and organs inside his body tying together into disgusting knots and turned black to shrivel up and die. "You didn't go back for him then. I told him you'd go back for him. That the B.S.A.A. would never leave him, never let him die alone in some underwater facility with the hope that... that he'd die before he became some kind of monster. He died thinking he was a monster." Outrage seeped in quickly, the horror of his own men leaving one of their own, a goddamn hero, to be alone beneath the water with nothing but the hope of not becoming those things which he had always fought to destroy.

"Chris we couldn't do that. You know better than anyone else what they would have done even if he had been recovered. Would you really wish that on him? The B.S.A.A. followed the regulations they had to follow. The same ones they followed when they presumed me dead at the Spencer estate. They couldn't use their resources to look for a man, who even if he had survived down there, would have been a bio-hazard on his own. They would have had to put him down, worse they would have experimented on him and done things much worse than just death Chris. He was a great man for what he did, he was a wonderful person. He brought home my partner to me..." Jill reached for her ex-partner's hand, her slim little fingers clutching into his slack numb hands, still stained with blood and torn flesh. "Its for the best Chris. If he had survived he-

"I loved him Jill..." The voice in the back of Chris mind clawed at him. It cut her off into subdued silence and refused to let him go while the woman stared wide eyed, huge saucers for eyes boring into that large frame that he simply ignored. Staring out against the hospital walls, he could still see that subtle smile weep over tan features as the door of his escape pod, the harbinger of his doom, swept him to safety; sickness threatening to over take him. "I didn't even know it until the end. I was living for vengeance, all hat fury I kept bottled up, over Wesker, Umbrella, Ada Wong. So much I didn't even see it, even when he tried to tell me. Maybe he even felt the same, I won't ever know, I told him to stop, that I didn't want to hear it." Thinking back on it now it was starting to crush him even thinking of the expression on that young scarred face. What was he going to say anyway? "I stared him in the eye and told him I'd bring him home. I lost him," brown eyes drew shut, a silent ease coming over his face, burying it in the pillow as best he could, refusing to see any judgement in Jill's unknowing eyes. She wouldn't understand this, but he only knew he understood it completely. He felt the gentle push of the girl's hand in his, tucking something carefully into his palm, tight stitching familiar as his thumbs rubbed circles over the well worn standard. Pain lancing through his chest as she peeled away the velcro and belts that restrained impossibly taut muscles, releasing him to pull the piece of fabric up, staring through it. Blood flecks stained it, but it meant the same to him, that blood belonged to a man he had never fully understood until the last seconds of his life. A man who understood every part of Chris without ever having to say a word.

"I'm sure he knew Chris."

SAD END!