Jack 7:56 p.m.
I left my room and went back to the living room, where Luis was on Helena's phone.
"I assure you, your sister is fine…" "No, I am not a rapist…" "I'm actually gay…" "And I find that offensive!" "She is fine and asleep." "No, we did not drug her!" "You ass, somebody who she trusted tried to rape her! How would you feel?" "Then maybe you should ask your girlfriend!" "Like I said, Helena's asleep." "No, I am not giving you my address! Jack will get her home tomorrow."
I gulped at Luis's last statement. That girl had been with Helena—the one with the reddish hair. She looked familiar, like I'd met or seen her before, but I couldn't remember. I barely remembered anything from before. Luis was always saying how different I seemed—how differently I acted—from before.
Luis continued on talking to Helena's brother. "The man who saved your sister." "Everything we're doing is completely fine with Helena." "She's fine now, asleep in our spare room." I wondered why Luis didn't say my room. Probably because he didn't want her brother freaking out. "Possibly. Have a nice night, Aaron." He ended the call and sighed.
"Relax, or you'll get grey hair." I told him.
"Eat these or they'll go to waste." Luis said and then gestured to the little pastry things.
I sat back down on the couch and popped a spicier one into my mouth. The phone started ringing and my roommate hesitated before picking up.
"Luis Sera, how may I help you?" he said into the phone. I saw his eyebrow twitch—a kinda bad sign. He handed it to me.
"Hey, this is Jack." I said into the contraption.
"Hi, this is Nikita, from the bar the other night. I found something that I think might be yours…" A feminine voice told me.
"What is it?" I asked her.
"Uh, it's a knife with the initials S and B, and M and H on the other."
I frowned. "That's can't be mine. I don't have a knife like that." But something nagged on the edge of my brain—like I did know the knife.
"Are you sure? I was positive it was yours. Sorry for bothering you, Jack." She told me.
"It's fine. I hope you find the owner of that knife. I'll see you around?" I asked her.
"Definitely; bye!" Nikita hung up.
"A woman calling you about a knife is usually not a good thing." My favorite Spaniard told me. He sat down on the couch, fully spreading out.
"You look exhausted," I told my friend. I could hear a worried tone in my voice. I knew Luis could take on three days without sleeping, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen him asleep.
"Si, I feel like that." He replied.
"Then go catch some z's, the world doesn't look like it's gonna end tonight." I told him.
"Wouldn't that be our luck?" He mused out loud. "Buenas noches, Jack."
He shuffled off to his bedroom, and I heard his bed groan as he laid down.
I knew I was the only person awake on our floor. I sighed and turned on the TV, bringing my legs up on the couch and reclining back. I watched some old (as in still black & white) shows before the thought of sleep crept into my head.
I got up and only to remember my bed was occupied. I was about to go to sleep when I heard a shriek from my room.
Something inside clicked, and I rushed into my room, resisting an urge to kick the door down.
But only Helena was in the room, and still under the sheets. She was sleeping fine, normally. There was no way she could've been having a bad dream moments ago.
I took a deep breath, running my hands through my hair. Was I going crazy? Is that why I heard that?
I went back into the living room and laid down on the couch, my feet over the edge. I fell asleep rather quickly, for me at least.
I was sitting on my bunk. I sat on the bottom one, next to the dresser I had to share with Him. There was a picture of Him and a girl with red-brown hair on a park bench.
He had on a flat cap, a black trench coat, and a white & blue plaid scarf. She had a pink jacket and a violet scarf and blue jeans. Snow was in her hair as it was lightly falling around them.
He came in, calm and collected as usual. He caught me staring at the picture.
"That's Claire." He told me.
I looked up at the blonde. "Is she your girlfriend?" I questioned Him.
"No. We just went through some stuff together." He told me. "And kept in touch. We're just friends."
I got up and smiled at him. "Good for you; chicks like you. This whole brooding thing must really work for you." I told him.
His cheeks flamed red. "Right, bye Krauser."
"Bye, short stack." I said over my shoulder as I walked out of our room.
A different place. I felt older; less controlled. But more powerful.
I was in a room with two blondes—a younger girl and an older man.
The girl was on a hospital bed. The man stood next to her, checking her vitals. "Wake up, Sherry. Please." He said to her.
"I'm sorry, I came as soon as I could" I told the man. He turned to look at me.
"Jack! She's…something's wrong. I feel like I'm trying everything." He looked like he hadn't slept in days. "What am I supposed to do? What if she dies? I'd never forgive myself. I'd have lost the last person from the good times."
I went over to him. "She'll be fine. You're smart, you'll think of something."
"It's the G-virus. Will…he was concerned about it wearing off, someday. About every regeneration it helped with being reversed. Think about everything. Think about Sherry's pneumonia, or…or the tumor. What if they come back?" He was a wreck. "I would have failed everyone then." He swallowed hard. "What if she dies?"
"Wesker, don't think like that." I told him.
A single tear rolled down his cheek. "I can't help it. After everything…"
"Have you tried Manuela's blood? What about Steve's, or mine?"
He looked up. "Your blood! That's it! Jack, please let me use it." He looked up at me with red eyes.
I turned over my left arm, exposing the vein. "Take it; what's mine is yours." I told him.
He took a syringe from somewhere and then extracted blood. He turned around and injected it into an IV running down to her wrist.
A second later, Sherry's eyes opened. "Da—Wesker…" She said softly.
He broke down, collapsing to his knees. He took her left hand into both of his. "Thank god, you're alright."
I turned around and walked out. Wesker had his family. I had nothing.
When I woke up in the morning, I was struggling to remember those names—Claire, Sherry, Wesker, Steve, Manuela—they sounded important as I jumped up from the couch and went to the kitchen, yanking a note off the fridge and scrambling for a pen.
"Claire, Sherry, Wesker, Steve, Manuela." I said as I wrote the names down in my chicken scrawl of hand writing.
I looked at the names. I remembered the names—I could put Claire to Helena's brother's girlfriend. She'd known the blonde from the first room. I'd be able to ask her later, if she was there.
God, I hoped she'd be there.
Steve 9:14 a.m.
"Why didn't you tell me?!" I yelled at Wesker as he walked into the room where he'd left me chained up to the bed after he brought me home. "Why didn't you tell me Sherry was sick!? Why didn't you bring me to her?!"
He looked at me. "Don't start with me, Steve. I can't take it right now."
I growled and pulled at the chains. Heavy iron that dug into my bloody wrists. "Let me go!" I yelled at him. "Where is Sherry?!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. I pulled with such force I thought I'd be able to yank the chains from the wall.
They didn't budge.
Wesker turned around. "Shut up! Do you realize that our neighbors probably hear you?" He asked me.
The closest people to us where five miles away. I gulped and went silent for a bit.
Wesker walked around the room, pacing; thinking.
"You saw her, didn't you? That Jill woman." I asked him. His eyes flicked up to me, hatred seeming to gleam. "That's what I thought. Hate me; kill me. Sherry isn't here to protect me anymore, and you've just been dying to shove something into my chest, aren't you?"
Wesker walked closer to me. "No, I don't hate you, Steve. I hate that you're annoying sometimes. But that's not all the time. Steve, you are as close to a son that I would like to possess. I'd only kill you if something went horribly wrong."
"Well that's reassuring." I told him. "So, if I'm like your son, why am I chained up?"
"Because I don't want you to massacre a whole town," Wesker told me.
"Why didn't you tell me you were going to see Sherry? Why let Kollin tell me?" I asked him.
"I didn't want him to do that. I thought that Sherry would have woken up right away, like last time. But she didn't…I think I did something wrong…maybe the blood was too old…"
"Blood? What did you do to her?" I asked, my voice getting louder again.
"I injected her with Krauser's blood." Wesker said, acting as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
"And you did that before? When?" I asked him.
"Four years ago. Right after you got better."
Right after Wesker first got Manuela and Sherry. I was still thinking like an animal then. But he wouldn't really remember that part…
"Why didn't you stay with her? Why didn't you make sure she was alright?" I asked him.
"And stay in the same room with Leon and Chris? No thank you."
I pulled on the chains again. "It's not always about you! Put someone else first for once!"
"I did. That's why I went to Virginia in the first place." Wesker explained. He took a key from his pocket and reached up to my wrists. He unlocked it and I fell to the ground, having been suspended a foot into the air. He knelt down and unlocked my ankles, letting the blood flow back in normally and return feeling to my feet.
I groaned and curled up into a ball, shutting my eyes. I felt pain along every inch of my body, but I ignored that. All I could think about was Sherry.
I slowly sat up. "Take me to her."
"Steve-"
"Please, Wesker, I'm asking you. I'm giving you to options—take me to Sherry or I'll just go by myself." I told him.
"Soon. I just have to finish cleaning up the mess you made." He told me.
He left the room, leaving me on the floor. I slowly got up, stumbled into the hall, crawled up the stairs, and got to my bedroom somehow.
I got dressed in an old yellow t-shirt and khaki shorts. My wrists and ankles were slowly healing, I noticed.
One less thing to worry about.
I laid down on my bed, and was about to sleep again (healing always made me tired, no matter what the injury was) when the door opened.
Manuela walked in. "You're hurt," she said softly, coming over to my bed.
"I deserved it," I replied. "I did put a couple of guys in the hospital," I reminded her.
She sighed and took one of my wrists into her small hands. "You men are always getting hurt. If it's not Wesker in the lab, or Krauser out in the field, or Kollin on one of his missions, it's you being stupid." She told me.
I chuckled, and she smiled before we both remembered something.
Krauser was gone.
She swallowed hard, letting go of my wrist. "I miss him so much," she whispered softly.
"I do, too." I told her.
"Why him? Why not Ada? I know that sometimes he could be really out there, and confused, but he was still Krauser! He was still the guy who saved me and Sherry more than once!" She began to cry, and all I could do was hold her.
Hold Manuela and wish that Krauser hadn't been the one who had died.
That he was out there, somewhere, and he'd be back soon; that this was one big fluke, and the stubborn, hardened, older man would show up on the doorstep, and Wesker wouldn't be mad anymore and then Sherry could come back and we all could live in a simplistic yet wonderfully chaotic life style again.
But Krauser was gone…
…Right?
Author's Note: This chapter is suppose to be just one big example of dramatic irony (the reader knows Krauser is alive, but Steve & co. don't.) So what do you think of Nikita/Ada calling Luis and Jack? And what's up with the knife Jack doesn't remember? Not to mention, what will happen when/if he talks to Claire?
And sorry for the late updates! I just have been really busy, with stupid exams and stuff. But I have some news! I actually won a writing contest(for my district) and got third for the state for my original short story! I am definitely gonna work on my fanfics on...Uh...possibly early Sat. or late Sun. I have a friend sleeping over Saturday night...
Please tell me what you like (about the story) in a review or a PM! : )
~HolleringHawk65