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venomvalley · 5 months ago

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MOUNTAIN MAN — WEEK 3

chris redfield x afab!reader / 4.8k words

summary:

The climax (pun intended) before the fall.

tags: 18+ only!! masturbation, dry humping

notes: sorry this took so long but hopefully this chapter makes up for it :3

here's how you can help appalachian hurricane helene victims

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Evil cannot reach him here.

He tells himself this again and again and again, after every nightmare, every flashback, every time the light hits the mountains just right (he's back in the Arklays some twenty-odd years ago, a flashlight guiding him through blackhole darkness as the hounds chase him). He’s outrun his own shadow to the deepest recesses of civilization, and still, that darkness follows him.

He wakes to warmth at his back. Opens his eyes to the wooden slats of his bedroom wall, almost smothered against it. His bed is small on a good day, barely enough room to fit his bulk, and yet—

The night before rushes back to him with a blink. The steady puffs of warm breath between his shoulder blades, the hand at his waist, the knees pressed against the back of his thighs: proof of your existence in his bed.

Your presence comforts him, strips away the leftover anxiety of his nightmare, and he hates it. Hates himself for being weak, for betraying the life he’s built for the past four years. For allowing your roots to burrow between his ribs.

His heart tenders like a fresh bruise.

At his back, you breathe deep, shifting out your legs as if to get more room. He pinpoints the exact moment you realize your current position. You stiffen up, jerking away from him and throwing your legs off the side of the bed. As your footsteps pitter out of the bedroom, you say nothing, and neither does he.

But he expected this response. He knows his way around impulsivity, and can recognize the signs with ease. No doubt you regret waking up beside him, and he doesn't blame you, measured decision or otherwise.

You don’t acknowledge the night before until long after you’ve both awoken and Chris has chain-smoked through half a pack of cigarettes in a few hours. He shares with you the rest of the pack, harsh wind rustling the trees nearby. A bird camps out on a wooden slat holding the porch roof together, chirping away to its unseen friends.

The day is overcast. Thick, grey clouds that blot out the sun. Blissfully cooler than the heat wave of days past. He’s left the radio inside.

Across from him, you sit quietly, eyes downcast, chewing on the filter of your cigarette. Shivering like a rabbit caught in a hunter’s trap.

Chris doesn’t want to mention the elephant sitting in your lap, and neither do you. Fine with him.

It isn’t until hours later, when you chop up vegetables at the counter to prepare for tonight’s soup, that you finally speak.

“Last night was real stupid of me. I just hope you aren’t too mad.”

He steps up beside you to wash the blood off his recently-sliced meat. Gives you a quick glance before he says, “Not at all.”

“I know you don’t know me too well, but that… wasn’t like me.” You heave a sigh, mouth twisting into a frown as you set aside a diced onion. “I just didn’t wanna be alone,” you whisper, quiet enough that the running water almost drowns you out.

There’s a comfort in the unique way you wear your heart on your sleeve: whole-heartedly. Each muscle of your face a perfect mirror to your inner turmoil, so expressive with your body language that he peers inside your soul just by looking at the line of your shoulders or the placement of your arms. In a way, he envies the depth with which you feel your emotions after years of sanding down his own edges.

For years, his team saved him from the aftermath of disastrous missions. They drank together, they grieved together, they understood each other. Chris was never one to cry. Learned from an early age that anger inspired action more than tears or a snotty nose ever could, and he carried that with him for decades. He took his sadness and shaped it into a sharpened knife. He manifested his grief in bloody knuckles and barfights, in insubordination and training courses. Pushed his body to its limits again and again, and he’s tired. He doesn't want to fight anymore.

“I understand.” He’s beginning to. An effect of your successful poisoning of his brain.

He wants to be angry with you, to push you away yet again, but he has no rejection left in him—nor the will to hurt you even more than you already are. (He knew this was a bad idea from the moment he laid eyes on you. Stupid old man. That’s all he is.)

“Ya know, I’ve been wanting to ask something.” You give him a glance, almost finished with a carrot. “How bad has it been, living all this time on your own?”

“Haven’t though too much about it.”

From the corner of his eye, you set down your knife and shift to face him. Stand a moment in the silence, wiping your hands with a dish towel. “What are you running from?”

He knew this would come up again. You’re too nosy for your own good, too curious about his life. Your interest makes his skin crawl, because he isn’t exactly keen on opening old wounds, but he chooses to offer you a crumb of information. Enough to sate for the time being.

“Nothing tangible, that I can tell you.”

Your eyes burrow a hole in the side of his face, searching for something that he can’t yet unchain. The vulnerability of being known.

“Shit, you’re more Appalachian than I thought.” He smiles at the nudge you give to his shoulder. “Why do you think we’re all addicts? It’s the best way to outrun your own brain.”

He’s had his fair share of dependencies. The cigarettes burning a hole in the pocket of his flannel are proof of that. “That makes sense.”

The two of you spend the rest of dinner prep in relative silence, except for the occasional comment on the state of the ingredients. The evening is companionable and peaceful, and a small, optimistic part of him could get used to this. You, standing in his kitchen, stirring a pot of beef broth, poking fun at him for the way he holds his utensils. Dressed in his clothes, smelling like his soap.

It scares him. The warmth you bring to his little cabin, spaces filled to the brim with clutter yet only lively after you arrived. How lonely he now feels sitting on the porch by himself. The smell of rain might forever remind him of you.

He swallows thick, looks at you from the corner of his eye. You still favor your uninjured leg, your sprain no doubt a little less healed than it should be given your hike yesterday, but you look more relaxed than this morning. Less prone to darting into the treeline like a startled deer.

“Where'd you grow up?” you ask, dipping a clean spoon into the broth for a taste.

“The city.”

“I know that. You can't be a little more specific?”

“I would rather leave the past in the past.”

You mutter a, “So damn dramatic,” under your breath before tasting the contents of the spoon.

With a satisfied nod of your head, you set the lid on to simmer, leaving a small crack for the steam to escape.

His head swims as he stares at your profile, the sunlight from the window above the sink coloring your cheeks. His skin itches, stretched tight over muscle and bone at the memory of your face, crestfallen when he rejected you despite every atom in his body craving the shape of your lips. He recalls the way your eyelids lowered, offering up yourself to reverence, to inevitable sacrifice.

You don't understand why he couldn't, even now, and he doesn't know how to explain it.

But he craves so deeply that his heart aches, bloats in the absence of learning you. He's an impatient man, one without limits. A dangerous combination.

He's bound to break soon.

What Chris thought was a one time occurrence becomes an unspoken routine. Night after night, you join him in bed, and night after night, his resolve shears razor-thin. Worse still are the times you bathe just before bed, wearing a fresh set of his clothes, smelling wholly of him. It triggers something primal, possessive within his bones. Maybe he's lived his most recent days too close to wildlife, and their ways have rubbed off on him.

You act none the wiser, cuddling in close to his chest, your head heavy atop his bicep.

He could stop this if he wanted to. Could order you back to the couch, to the comfort of your dusty stack of books, but he can't bear to part from his own selfishness.

Weak. You've made him weak.

The next morning, he locks himself inside the bathroom while you sleep, gripping the edge of the sink so hard the porcelain threatens to crack. He refuses to let you win, to acknowledge the erection he had unfortunately woken up with.

You've begun to infiltrate his dreams. His imagination draws from your splayed-out form on his bathroom floor and fills in the gaps with mottled brush strokes. You, held up by elbows and knees on the couch, silently reading one of those fucking books as he bottoms out inside you, and the wet heat that whites out his brain sends him into another scenario: a backdrop of pouring rain and humidity, him sat in his usual chair on the porch with you kneeling between his legs, and the suction of your pretty mouth around his cock sends him into another scenario: spooning in bed, your back against his chest, raised thigh gripped tight between his fingers (the give of your flesh enraptures him) as he rocks into you—

He had awoken with a gasp, limbs sluggish, a thick heat curling in his belly.

He stares at the ring of rust around the drain and thinks of metal. The titanium composition of rifles. The steel alloy of knives. The iron tang of blood.

And yet, his body refuses to heel.

He opens the bathroom door and peeks through the crack, eyes landing on your stretched-out form beneath the sheets. Flat on your back with an arm slung over your eyes, the other resting on your belly. His privacy is ensured for the next few minutes.

When he finally fits a fist around his cock, it's betrayal of the worst kind. He tells himself that he does it out of necessity (he can't exactly walk around with a tent in his pants all day), but the part of himself that oversees guilt knows better. Indulgence at its finest.

With closed eyes, he imagines himself a different man, a better one. Worthy of your affections. In his fantasies, he possesses no baggage, no nightmares, no trauma. He imagines the two of you living on a small farm somewhere, in the lowlands of Appalachia, half-asleep after a long day of brute work. The idea of you needing him more than you need rest licks heat up his spine.

You would be so soft for him, smiling sleepily as you welcome him between your thighs. In his fantasy, you lock your fingers together at his nape and your ankles at the small of his back, trapping him in a long kiss. Under your breath, you threaten him with murder should he pull out, the slick clutch of your heat a much-preferred alternative to his calloused palm.

He spills into his fist with a huffing breath, teeth gnashing together. The force of his orgasm putties the joints of his knees, and he teeters back against the wall. As he catches his breath, fist loose around his softening cock, he considers smashing the mirror lest he catch a glimpse of his own sorry reflection.

When he steps out onto the porch a few minutes later, after wallowing in his guilt and cleaning up, a low-lying fog hugs the treeline. The grass glistens with morning dew, the sun not yet high enough to reach the clearing. Already, birds sing. A warm welcome back to nature's routine after weeks of devastation.

Briefly, he wonders if reconstruction has begun—or ended—on the road leading to town, but he can't risk you overhearing even worse news over the radio. You shouldn't wake for a while. Another hike might do him some good (god, does he need the fresh air).

He decides to leave. To catch his breath, to be alone for a while. Falling back into old habits is all he knows to do.

Fetching his gear proves difficult as he sneaks around his room, freezing each time your breathing changes rhythm. But you're effectively dead to the world, heavy and still as a boulder in his bed.

He'll apologize when he gets back.

The smell of death has dissipated from the riverbank you visited the other day, leaving behind mud-smeared bones picked clean. The culprits perch in branches high overhead, black feathery masses that he has to squint to spot.

Beneath the thick of the forest canopy, sunlight fails to reach, and the path grows slippery, ground squelching underfoot. Although the last of the rain ended five (six?) days ago, the low of the valley would surely flood again from little more than a short mist.

And despite all of this—the danger of the terrain, the looming threat of natural disaster—he understands why you love these mountains so much. He's been to many places, but nothing compares to the tranquility of the rolling shades of green that mark each tree on the horizon and the pale blue of an early morning sky. A spot he frequents a few times a week, a naturally-formed overlook carved out of the mountainside. Looking at the size of the landscape always snaps his problems back to scale: minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

He's alone again, but surrounded by more life than he can wrap his head around. Still, after four years, he wonders how this could be.

Maybe he should bring you here someday, when the destruction of your home isn't so fresh and you're physically well enough to make the trek up the path.

(If there is a someday.)

A sobering thought. He can't keep you inside his cabin forever, no matter how badly he aches to solve the loneliness. You would return home once the dust settles, as is your right, and you'll never think of him again. Such is the way of things—specifically, the way the universe tends to work against him.

What he doesn't expect is for you to appear before him, and for a moment he believes himself insane, hallucinating your mirage as you step over to the mountain's edge.

“I've lived here my whole life and I've never seen this before.”

All he can do is stare at you, a fog of confusion muddling his brain. You were sound asleep when he left, and his instincts are still sharp enough that he would have heard you following him.

“Can I bum a ciggie?” Wordlessly, he passes you a cigarette and his lighter, hand outstretched to take the latter back once the end catches fire. “Sorry if I interrupted, but I woke up and you were gone. Had to make sure you didn't end up in the river.”

You grin at him like you know what he's thinking, like you smell the shock in his blood.

Of course you tracked him. You used to hunt with your father.

He wants to kiss you so bad his teeth ache. It seems the perfect time. Behind you sits the backdrop of the mountains, and the sun makes a crowning halo behind your head, and you grin at him in triumph.

You step up to him, so close that the toes of your boots almost touch. “I’ll bitch at you later for leaving me behind. The view’s too pretty.”

From this close, your eyes still retain the slight puff of sleep, cheeks shiny from a freshly-washed face.

And then you turn to gaze out at the landscape, and he can breathe again. And then he curses himself for not reaching out and pulling you close.

His hands tingle.

Coward.

It's all he can think about.

Kissing you. Curling up beside you beneath the sheets and staying there until springtime. The line of your neck, the curve of your belly, the sun of your smile.

You drive him crazy. Fog up his reasoning.

He wants to kiss you.

You cut up an apple and give him the entire bowl as he sits at the kitchen table (he had complained about his stomach growling while the food cooked), and he almost cries at the sight of it peeled. A time-consuming show of care that he doesn't really deserve.

He wants to kiss you, and he's going insane.

You wake the next morning to his tossing and turning, to his groan of pain at the sharp stabbing in his left knee. Without missing a beat, you roll over and head toward the bathroom. Come back a minute later with a damp cloth, blissfully hot against the joint, almost burning his skin, but he needs it that way. Almost hopes it does cauterize the nerves so he won’t wake like this anymore.

“My daddy wrecked his body in the mines. Broke his back and everything.” You grin at him, an active balm to soothe the humiliation that leaks from his pores. “I'm an expert at hot compresses.”

He doesn’t know how to be soft. How to show weakness. It always feels like losing, to him.

You pat the top of his thigh, then settle back into bed.

If only you knew what you've gotten into.

Again and again, day after day, his admiration for you grows. A delicate, precious thing, the silk of flower petals. Budding into something far beyond his control.

He doesn’t know how to stop it. Doesn’t know if he even wants to anymore. Contentment is an acquaintance he hasn’t met in a long time, but when you smile at him from across the kitchen table, all toothy and glowing, he remembers how it used to sit in his chest.

On the eve of the third week's end, you spend the entire day in bed. Curtains wide open, a book in your lap, a cup of coffee on the nightstand. He fiddles with things around the house, sorting clutter to look more presentable, stacking chopped wood, smoking his cigarettes on the front porch. Cleaning up fallen branches and trash blown into the yard by the wind.

A lazy day. Calm. Beautiful, too. Sunny and airish.

He wants to live like this for the rest of his life.

A terrifying thought that his brain keeps circling back to. Such a strange thing, to finally want something. To allow himself the fantasy of choosing selfishness.

You greet him with a smile as he walks into the bedroom, muscles burdened by a satisfying exhaustion as he collects a fresh change of clothes then runs a bath. He doesn't spend long beneath the water lest he succumb to the temptation of your profile, or the curve of your shoulder peeking from his shirt, or the smell of you beneath his sheets.

You’ve set up permanent residence inside his brain and he doesn’t know how to kick you out.

When he finds you after, you're sat atop the countertop, a bottle of whiskey trapped between the squish of your thighs.

You look up at the sound of his footsteps, face twisted into a grimace. “Can't get this damn cap off.” Then you reach the bottle to him, shaking its contents when he doesn't take it after a few seconds.

A bad idea, drinking with you. Dangerous. He's not a nice drunk. Keeps too many scars on his knuckles, a permanent split to his bottom lip as proof. Would never hurt you—god, no, never—but he can't say the same about the furniture.

The alcohol lets the demons loose. He keeps it around for when he needs a good cry, when the bloody well of his chest needs a good emptying.

(He knows what you're doing.)

“You don't need it.”

Your shoulders sag, gaze landing on the countertop. “I’m not—it’s not like that.”

He takes the bottle, and the liquid amber within makes his stomach burn and his mouth water. Reminds him of long, horrible nights and weeks of memory loss.

“This is for special occasions, anyway.”

Really, he has no idea why he still keeps any of it. A crutch, maybe. Scratching an itch. Bone-deep instinct.

He opens the cabinet and sets the bottle back in its original place, and with one last look, he closes the door.

You eye him like you see straight into his soul. All the nasty bits—sludge, blood clots, gunpowder. The sadness and the grief. The heartache.

“I didn't know,” you say, but he understands what you really mean.

You hold him extra tight tonight in silent apology. Maybe you hope you can squeeze out all the bad in him. (You can't. It'll be there long after he rots down to the skeleton.)

“It's okay. You know that, right?” Whispered into the side of his neck, your head a heavy weight atop his shoulder.

The room is pitch-black, darkness so thick he can barely decipher the features of your face.

“What is?”

“Bein’ fucked up. Most people are, I reckon. Just depends on how good you are at hiding it.”

He blinks, eyes trained on the rotation of the ceiling fan. “What are you getting at?”

You shrug, shoulder bumping his ribs. “’m not getting at anything. Just thought you needed to hear it.” You rise onto an elbow, leaning in close enough that he smells the spearmint on your breath. “I don't think you realize how sad you are.”

Against his better judgement, his very nature, he closes a palm over the nape of your neck. Neither pushes or pulls you either way. The decision's up to you.

He isn't surprised when you choose to kiss him. Soft and sweet, a brush of your lips against his. The smallest little peck, more tender than he deserves, and you lean back with a sigh, still close enough that the tip of your nose brushes his.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while,” you whisper, smile woven in the seams of your words. “Can I… do it again?”

His heart aches, full enough to bloat. You’re so sweet. Too sweet for a man like him.

He doesn’t trust his voice, so he pulls you back down, his beard rasping against your chin as you kiss him more firmly on the mouth, tilting your head to adjust the angle.

He allows himself this. The tender hand that you cradle against his head, scratching blunt nails through his hair. The soft skin of your lower back, shirt hiked up by his hands. The leg that you curl over his hip. Every part of you soft and warm, alive, a spectral star.

For the first time in his life, something feels right.

In the darkness of his small bedroom, he's a man born anew. Less phoenix rising from the ashes and more undead breaching the dirt mound of his final resting place.

He lets you take what you need from him. Opens his mouth when you lick at the seam of his lips. Helps adjust your body so you’re straddling his hips. Swallows down your little noises and prays that you don’t notice the growing bulge in his pajama pants.

He hums into your mouth when you begin rocking against him, a slight tilt of your hips, and you might not even realize you’re doing it. But the sensation, the idea that you’re getting off on kissing him, fries his brain.

Finally, you pull away to catch a breath, laying your cheek atop his collarbone. Your thighs tighten around his waist, an instinctual anticipation, and he pins you to him with an arm pressed to your back. Buries his nose in your hair and inhales.

Smells like him.

He’s fucked. There’s no going back from this. You’re as soft and sweet as he imagined, as he dreamt about. His plan’s gone to shit, and it’s all his fault.

But really, he doesn’t care.

“I’ve never actually thanked you for taking care of me.” You nuzzle into the curve of his neck, nose following the trail of his pulse. “So, thank you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do. You’ve been real good to me, even if I don’t really deserve it.”

Before he can respond, you kiss him again. Cradle his face in your hands, thumbs brushing over the skin of his cheeks. He hasn’t felt so… cared for in a very long time. The softness that your touch manifests inside him brings with it a long-felt disgust. In himself. Weakness.

But maybe softness is alright if it’s you.

God, what’s happened to him?

“Can we just—“ you grind into him once again, moving to mouth at his skin where neck meets shoulder. “‘m sorry, I—“

“Hush,” he grumbles, grabbing you by the hips to settle you more firmly against his thickening cock.

He can’t see a fucking thing—the expression on your face, the placement of your hands, the skin that he reveals by hiking up his your shirt. He curses himself for not considering that consequence, but makes no move to stop you and right his wrong with the bedside lamp.

After all, he’s thrived this long on an active imagination. His mind knows well how to fill in blanks.

The friction of your weight jolts pleasure up his spine, even through two sets of clothes. But you’re burning hot between the legs, and he briefly wonders if you’d taste of petrichor, smell like the musk of the forest.

You sit back on your knees, steadying yourself with both hands on his lower stomach, and gasp at the change in angle. He can’t help but meet you halfway, sharing your intensity.

The road to orgasm is borne from equal parts necessity and pining. Two sides of the same coin, if he thinks about it. A long time coming, a steady build-up weeks in the making, and you chase your peak like it’s been lost to you for a long while: frantic and sloppy.

When your breathing begins to stutter, he knows you’re close, and the same razing heat coils in the pit of his own belly. Blunt nails dig into his flesh, and you curse under your breath, thighs parting to heighten the sensation.

Your ministrations turn him into that hormone-filled teenager thirty years his junior. A yowling tomcat. He plants his feet flat on the bed and bucks up into you, huffing as if fueled by adrenaline at the start of a firefight.

You cum with a long whine, curling in on yourself, movements sloppy and rough. And at the sound of your peak, his own hits him. So striking that every muscle in his body tenses up, and he grips your waist hard enough to bruise. Chokes himself on his own gasp.

Jesus fucking Christ. He needed this, too.

You both take a long few moments to recover, willing your lungs to stop their heaving. You kiss him again, breath fanning over his cheek, lips soft and sweet. You kiss him like he might break, like he’s a precious thing.

In the dark, you fail to see the tears that well up in his eyes, and he’s grateful. Says a quick prayer in thanks for his luck.

With a heavy sigh, you roll off of him and spread out on the sheets. What he wouldn’t give to see you right now, blissed-out and boneless, all because of him.

Next time, he vows to turn on a goddamn light.

You clear your throat. “Jesus Christ, I needed that.”

“What, you haven’t…?”

You stare at him through the darkness, the side of his face prickling. “No. I didn’t wanna be weird.”

He exhales a laugh. “Well. No need to worry about that now.”

You slap him on the chest, movements sluggish and lazy, and laugh right alongside him. It sounds like rain and wind chimes and the rustling of trees. “Please don’t tease me.”

His lips curl into a smile, wide enough to squint his eyes, and the muscles of his face ache from disuse. An odd thing, happiness. A fleeting acquaintance.

Hopefully it stays a while this time.

The next morning, he wakes before sunrise on a mission. Top secret, classified.

He takes a desperately needed bath then beelines for the kitchen. Rounds up each bottle of alcohol—whiskey, bourbon, jars of moonshine—and chooses a patch of long-dead grass behind the cabin. And then he pours them out, one by one.

The bottles can be repurposed for later use. Scrub off the label and stuff flowers in them. Use the jars to store animal fat or pickled vegetables. You’d no doubt have many ideas.

And the idea of you, of indefinity or even permanence, settles more comfortably inside his gut. No longer conjures the wave of nausea he’s grown so used to.

Such a realization is both terrifying and freeing, and he wonders how that could be when he’s only thought in absolutes for the past thirty-odd years.

But maybe summoning demons wills them into existence. Maybe it’s time to let go of the past. It’ll never fully leave him. The scars will always remain. But he has a habit of picking off scabs so the wounds never fully heal—a purebred breed of self-sabotage.

Time to see if old dogs can truly learn new tricks.

#resident evil x reader #chris redfield x reader #resident evil fanfiction #x reader #my fics #fic: mountain man #ns/ft

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