Title: Wage Your Wars (2/11)

Fandom: Resident Evil (movie-verse)

Pairing: Alice Abernathy/Claire Redfield

Rating: NC-17

Summary: Claire had loved Alice once. Maybe she even still did. And she couldn't stand the idea of leaving the last person she'd ever known to travel the desolate world alone.

Disclaimer: I don't own Resident Evil, or Claire and Alice.

Notes: Yay, emotional turmoil! That's basically this chapter in a nutshell.

XXX

And if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone.

Youth - Daughter

XXX

Claire's POV

Claire liked mornings where she could slowly reach wakefulness. She liked being able to languidly pull herself up from the depths of sleep and only awake after her head broke the surface. There was a certain rebellion in taking her time, ignoring the numbers on the clock for just a few moments as awareness slowly started stitching itself back in.

In the course of the apocalypse, she had had very few of those mornings. Today was no exception, but she was not jolted awake by a nightmare or the sound of something rustling nearby that could possibly want to kill her. She woke up to emptiness. The bed next to her was no longer filled with the warmth of another body and the soft sound of sleep breathing.

Claire sat up, the cold air hitting her skin and prickling it into goosebumps. She cursed under her breath. Ever since she was four or five, she had suffered from a habit of taking her clothes off in her sleep. Currently, her pants, turtleneck, and vest were on the floor. Her tank top was half tangled around her neck. She stumbled out of bed, adjusting it but not stopping to pull on her other clothes. She grabbed her Glock off the nightstand, panic hot and pulsing in her chest.

Her immediate fear was that Alice had left her. Willingly or not, she had gone. The idea of being alone was terrifying. Claire had lost everyone else. Not Alice too. She couldn't have lost Alice too.

Claire forced herself to swallow down a sob, blinking back the panicky tears that burned behind her eyes. Her hands tightened around her gun, her finger ready to slide around the trigger at a moment's notice. Fear made her skin shift from uncomfortably cold to burningly hot. Her blood pulsed wildly right below her skin.

The living room came into view, and Claire bit her lips in apprehension.

Alice was kneeling in front of the fireplace, dressed in dark jeans, a black shirt, and a worn leather jacket. She sat back on the thick heels of her combat boots, and her dark hair fell into her face as she looked up. Her blue eyes looked surprised, "Claire? Are you okay?"

A blush rose to paint Claire's cheeks. She had totally overreacted. Jesus. Of course Alice hadn't left her. Of course no one had taken her. Claire felt heavy with embarrassment, and she lowered her gun to her side, "Yeah."

"I didn't mean to scare you," Alice told her. She seemed to realize what had just happened in Claire's head. She stood up and took a few steps towards the younger woman. Her boots thumping against the floorboards was a strangely comfortable sound, "I'm sorry, Claire." Claire gave her a nod, and the brunette squeezed her shoulder, "I'll wake you up next time."

"Please," Claire replied, not trusting herself to say more. Alice gave her one of those comforting smiles she had been using so often lately, and it simultaneously made Claire feel at ease and completely pathetic, as though she was a helpless child.

Gently, Alice pushed her in the direction of the bedroom, "Maybe you should go put some more clothes on? It's cold. We can have breakfast after you do."

Claire looked down at herself and blushed again. The underwear and tank top didn't cover her up very well at all. Her nipples were visibly hard and her skin was a parade of goosebumps. Claire crossed her arms across her chest instinctively and muttered, "Yeah. Okay." Still guarding herself the best she could with her limbs, Claire turned and walked back towards the bedroom.

She could have sworn she felt Alice's eyes following her the entire way down the hallway.

XXX

It was nearing 15:00 when Claire decided to go for a walk.

Alice was at the kitchen table, several maps spread out in front of her, her body hunched over them as she marked routes and fuel stops with a thick red Sharpie. She looked so focused and Claire almost smiled. It was sort of endearing. She didn't want to interrupt the woman, however, and simply made enough noise opening and closing the front door for Alice to know she had gone out. The brunette wouldn't be concerned unless she was gone too long.

Claire's Glock was holstered comfortingly against her right thigh, a wicked-sharp survival knife on her left. Usually she preferred to have a shotgun and another backup pistol as well, but she didn't plan on going far and it seemed incredibly quiet through this area anyway.

The first thing that hit Claire was the damp saltiness of the air. It stroked her face and made her eyes water. She had borrowed Alice's parka, however, and it was not as cold against her skin as it had been the day before. In fact, the coat felt almost too heavy. She probably could have gotten away with her vest and a long-sleeved shirt today. The weather changed unpredictably as of late. It had ever since the outbreak really took hold of the world.

Claire had not bothered to wear her combat boots, and the sand felt cold beneath her toes. It reminded her of the Nevada desert and of the Alaskan coast. She let the memories wind around her.

Thoroughly immersed in her thoughts, she walked towards the water, and soon she was in the layer of sand where the bank was still damp and freezing cold from high tide, but where the waves currently couldn't reach her footprints and wash them away. Her feet stung with each step as cold mush slid up to numb her heels and her toes. The wind tugged at her hair, and soon the chill in her face and her feet spread to the rest of her body. She shivered under the parka. Her teeth chattered. Suddenly, it no longer felt warmer than it had the previous day.

The waves stroked the shore as she walked along it, and it took her a long while before she realized that she had been inching closer. By the time she noticed, the water was already closer than she would have liked, and she couldn't jump out of the way before it moved upwards to caress her feet. Claire shuddered at the cold and let out a soft grunt of holy fuck, but she took another step towards the ocean anyway.

A glance to her right showed Claire that the bungalow was just barely visible down the beach. She looked at it and she thought of Alice in there with her maps, and for some reason the mental image of the other woman made her feel ill. She stopped hesitating as the bile rose in her throat and walked into the waves. Soon, the water hugged her legs up to her kneecaps, soaking through her jeans and nearly wetting the bottom of the parka. It was so cold her chest ached and her legs almost instantly started a cycle. For a moment, they were numb. Then an ache built until it felt like her shin bones were about to split underneath it. The cycle continued as numbness slid into her legs again.

Claire could think nothing except that she deserved it. She carried so many lives on her shoulders. Men, women, and children alike. Many of them had been her friends. All of them had been her convoy. And they had all died because she had blindly let them fall into a bad idea, and she had not been as adequately prepared to protect them as she should have been.

Long story short, Claire knew she was a terrible person. A horrible, horrible person. And she wanted nothing more than to allow the ocean to pull her in. She deserved it. She deserved to fade into nothingness as the freezing current and her air-hungry lungs tore her body apart. And really, it would not be that hard. 15 more feet out and the water would be high enough to clutch her throat. Then she would only have to close her eyes and let go and it would all be over.

But she couldn't. All she could think of was Alice. Even though the older woman was the reason for Alaska in the first place, the idea of leaving her killed Claire inside. She had loved her once. Maybe she even still did. And Claire couldn't stand the idea of leaving the last person she'd ever known to travel the desolate world alone.

Claire stood in the water for what felt like hours. But as she started to slowly meander back up to the sand, the sun had barely moved. When she reached the beach, the numbness in her legs faded completely, and she almost collapsed at the ache that tore through them. Suddenly, the bungalow seemed so very far away.

She walked about 100 feet before her knees turned to putty and gave out. She debated just laying there with her face in the sand until the pain went away. But she forced herself to crawl instead, feeling hot with shame. She crawled for a ways down the beach, but when she was close to the small beach house, she forced herself to walk the rest of the way even though she wanted to cry with every step she took.

The front door loomed in front of her, and her shaking hands barely managed to close around the doorknob in order to turn it. She stumbled into the living room, and Alice turned from the kitchen table. Her eyes widened at the sight of Claire, soaking wet and off-balance, sandy and bleary eyed.

Alice rushed over to her and touched her face and her shoulders, blue eyes wide and terrified and completely unsure of what to do, "What the fuck were you thinking, Claire?" She sounded more scared than Claire had ever heard before, and she felt even more guilt somehow begin to stack in her stomach.

Within moments, Alice had her free of her wet clothes, naked except for a bra and underwear underneath two large blankets. She was so close to the fire her face grew moist and shiny with a layer of sweat, and Claire absentmindedly feared the threads of the blankets would catch fire. As Alice tended to her and forced her to finish a bowl of steaming chicken noodle soup, various questions and phrases fell from the older woman's lips. Claire couldn't bring herself to focus on them very well, her fuzzy brain too interested on the tingling and the dull throb that still crawled through her legs.

"...hypothermia..."

"...frostbite...lose your toes."

"You could have died."

"What...thinking?"

"...leaving me..."

At some point, she must have drifted off, because the last thing she remembered was sitting in front of the fire while a worried Alice bustled around her. The next thing she knew, she became aware that she was being carried. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she caught sight of Alice's jaw and the curve of her lips. She smelled the familiar scent of vanilla and gunpowder, and she allowed her eyes to close again.

The feeling of the bed materializing under her hit her next, followed by Alice crawling in at her side. Her blankets were shifted, and the brunette was soon pressed against her, fully clothed. The rough cotton of her shirt brushed against Claire's stomach, and her still-cold body pressed closer to the new source of warmth.

Claire's hands fisted in Alice's shirt like the brunette was a lifeline, and within moments, sleep claimed her once more.

XXX

Alice's POV

The plane glided through the sky, en route to Nevada. There had been very few parts of the state that were no longer desert, but Alice clearly remembered a few, and her search the previous afternoon had found her a small airport in one of these less dead areas. When she told Claire the name of the state they were headed to, she had expected some sort of reaction. All she got was a nod and the redhead was once again looking out the window.

Claire had shown no sign of frostbite or hypothermia once Alice got her warmed up, so the brunette had reluctantly decided she was okay to travel. Claire had not spoken to her since yesterday morning, leaving Alice with no explanation for her actions. Not that Alice really needed one. During the end of the world, people tortured themselves. When guilt strangled her, Alice refused to let herself eat. Claire abused her body by overworking it or, now...walking into freezing water and standing there until her entire body protested.

Alice could still feel Claire's mostly naked body shivering against her under the sheets, and she hated herself for it. Last night, she had been worried about Claire's life, yet here she was, focused more on the fact that the softness of Claire's flesh was imprinted on her. She missed that feeling, wishing she could hold her again without the excuse of providing body heat.

Claire's voice snapped her out of her thoughts. The words were blurted so suddenly that Alice almost didn't catch them, "I'mreallysorry."

It took a second for the words to separate and process. Once they did, Alice shifted so she could reach back and touch Claire's knee, "Don't apologize. Just don't do it again. You scared me."

Claire nodded, looking down at Alice's hand until the brunette pulled it away. Claire then returned to staring out the window, like usual.

Alice didn't know what she was hoping to see. She wished she knew what was going on in Claire's head. Maybe then she would be able to try to fix things.

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Claire's POV

Alice stood at the doorway of the hangar, watching as Claire easily took out the two undead inside with bullets to the head. It was not flashy or fun like she knew Alice enjoyed, but it was precise and impressive in its own right. Alice smiled at the redhead, pleased, then walked over to the far wall of the building, where the murky light from a hole in the ceiling and the doorway illuminated an area with fuel tanks. Hopefully, they would be at least somewhat full.

Claire stayed close to the door as Alice went to work. She watched the woman's expression, and saw it lighten when she found some of the precious substance in the tanks. Satisfied, Claire turned to go to the plane and grab what little supplies they could carry with them.

As she was mid turn, Claire heard a sound. When she had spun fully, her fears were confirmed. In front of her was an undead, what looked like it had once been a fairly well-built man. His face was missing most of its flesh, his pale blue eyes bugging out of his head. The muscles in his face stretched as his mouth opened. Claire heard herself cry out, and she tried to bring up her Glock in time to shoot the creature.

It moved too fast, and she knew the shot would be worthless. Time slowed. Her heartbeat grew loud as it throbbed slowly through her. Her blood coagulated and moved sluggishly through her veins. Teeth opened towards her throat, and everything flashed before her. Faces of her parents, Chris, K-Mart, Carlos, L.J. Everyone she had loved and lost flickered before her like an old movie, cutting through the static in her head.

I'm going to see you all again.

Did I just end it there? Yes, I did just end it there. Uh-oh. What's going to happen to our dearest Claire Redfield? Drop some feedback in that little box down there, and you'll find out. ;)

Because, after all, reviews make my world go 'round. Seriously.