#thumbsupgunsout

[bastardsunlight]

Hawker suddenly retches violently and steadies herself on the wall -- it might be comical, the way she rather resembles a cat expelling a hairball, until there's a flicker of something that might be actual distress.

It only lasts a moment, however; she's accustomed to straightening out physiological malfunctions herself (and she's had her share, having perfected her dual mutation alone and with precious little room for helplessness) and so in a rather grotesque display of self-reliance a single black tendril extends from her mutated hand and is shoved, a little roughly, down her own throat to dislodge the cause of the episode.

She snatches it out again with something very like disgust for a creature who has seen many horrific and mutated things and is rather frightening-looking herself; something small and black and twitching smacks with a plasticky sound against the concrete and when the gun light of the silent Apex beside her falls upon it, the harsh blue-white beam glints off the feebly scrabbling legs of what is undeniably a very sickly young Plaga -- as strange as the notion that such a thing can be sickly might be. Its tiny, chitinous body is burned and malformed in places, as if Uroboros sought to consume it before ultimately rejecting it.

Sixteen's boot is upon it almost as fast as it can be identified, the force of the driven heel enough for Chris and Leon to feel even at their distance. His expression as he looks at Hawker is unreadable behind his mask, but must resemble concern to her, because she spits, laughs uneasily, and remarks,

"Wrong neighborhood, Jiminy Cricket."

Her own goggles are pushed back, and it is clear she is avoiding Leon's eyes as she retracts the tendril, resumes the normal use of her support hand beneath the triple barrel of the Hydra, and presses forward.

They both see it—both nearly feel it—as the thing is extracted and crushed with extreme prejudice. The way Leon’s body tenses is something else they both feel, though he is reticent to admit it. He feels a steadying hand on his lower back, but nothing more than that, as Chris nods to him ‘you okay?’

‘Yeah,’ comes the silent response, communicated with eyes only, ‘let’s get moving.’

It’s clear from his expression that Leon wants to laugh. Sarah Hawker is a comedy genius, even at the darkest of times, but this thing… this is something else. Still, it cannot stop him a few yards down the corridor.

“You ever seen Poltergeist 2, Hawk?”

[bastardsunlight]

"No, you're drunk." "Agent Thorne" fixes his pale blue gaze upon Chris Redfield in a convincingly level and accusatory manner from the other side of the whiskey glass he has just drawn back from his lips. As with most of his few words, the intensity is such that one might believe him, had he not just briefly regaled the other man with some rather delightfully incriminating sentiments of his pertaining to one Sarah Hawker -- as if the vicious, chemical-burn scars he wears from jaw to chest do not hint at precisely what manner of reckless behavior he would engage in on her behalf. Chris can drink with the best of them, to include one blessed with Apex's enhanced processing power (of alcohol, namely), and perhaps at this game, the former Left Hand is content to let him win.

"Besides, you're not one to talk. ты любишь его -- plain as day." A sly grin creeps across the Apex's face as his eyes tick, ever so briefly, to Leon. "A rare thing in this trade, yes? -- to complete yourself." His eyes drift to the door for at least the fiftieth time tonight, awaiting the boisterous entrance of the victorious Hyena and her minimal away team, back from a rather profitable convoy bust. The three of them had started celebrating early, and it had been taking less and less convincing to drag Thorne away from whatever he was doing in the armory as of late.

"Without blood or money."

Chris has rarely been called so thoroughly on the carpet—most people shy away from doing so, given his size and the severity of the gaze in his remaining eye. That eye is bleary with drink and his cheeks are flushed with the pleasure of good company. Leon marvels at the change between Chris Redfield and the Apex called Sixteen—or Thorne, if one is being polite.

Sixteen doesn’t have quite the same vehement dislike of his numerical designation, partially because that is what he has always been and partially, Leon thinks, because he is just now learning what it is to be human, really and truly human.

“When you… break in fucked up pieces,” Chris offers, his gaze also falling on Leon, the corner of whose mouth curls upward and he lifts his own class from his reclined position, “it’s hard as hell to find someone willing to handle ‘em… It cuts, y’know? Not just them… Cuts you.”

Chris is one of the gifted when it comes to his inebriation and his deeper soul tends to bare itself with some eloquence. Leon is listening now—Leon always listens—and nodding. All three of them know what it is to be broken into jagged, dangerous pieces. They’re not whole, not quite. Nobody ever is. But they are complete.

“There’s always blood,” Leon points out, “but… It’s good to bleed for someone or something that’s worth it.”

His voice is a bit clearer as his own subtle mutation handles alcohol like it handles everything else: tanking it and shaking it off like water off a duck’s feathers. Still, he’s feeling the haze around the corners of his vision and suddenly Chris is looking very… very good. He watches Thorne’s gaze move to the door and smiles wider.

She’s his someone.

[bastardsunlight]

Do you see it now, Chris? All these years, all this running, all this fighting, and what has it earned you? All around you is death. Your comrades follow you into oblivion. But not you. No, your eyes are wide open, as if you can stare down your fate and make it blink first, because if it does then you might save humanity from its own. While you play hero to a world that would sooner throw your broken mind aside like an old toy when you can’t be fixed any longer, have you noticed that for every victory you earn, mankind only bites down harder upon its own tail? You draw out the process — it is the nature of the living to be selfish, to prolong the suffering of the dying for their own sake. But what has this world ever done for you to make you fear its loss? It forgets you and your ilk the moment the next headline prints. But I do not forget. The unworthy you fight and bleed for will not claim you. Perhaps that’s for the better. Soon you will see the beauty in the wildfire when it cannot be contained, and in the newness that springs from the ash. Soon you will see that you were never a cog in that undeserving machine…but in mine.

He does not miss the ouroboros metaphor—that of the serpent consuming its own tail. His gaze narrows its focus for a moments as he contemplates the rest. There is a crazed sort of sense to it, but then there always was. Insanity springs from sanity. One cannot be insane without first having known rationality, and the most powerful lunatics are the ones who can continue to mimic it.

“I don’t need acceptance—acknowledgement… any of that,” he says quietly, running a hand over his mouth as if mulling over the lunacy that’s just been placed before him. It has allure, certainly. There is appeal, the danger couched in mountains of charisma and a purring baritone he recognizes and misses, in a way.

He hates it. He wishes he did not have to hate—that he could simply diffuse and escape. His mind has long since decided that he will continue to hate and his heart clings to the reason. Maybe if he could be more objective, more ruthless, like some of the friends he has made over the decades of battling bioterror, he could escape whatever this is. But that is not his nature.

Chris Redfield cares—he cares so deeply it makes him ache. What should be distant pity and contempt is impassioned, violent revulsion which seems to seed within itself a yet deeper something-or-other—could it be a need? Without one, the other cannot exist. Without the tail, the head does not consume and without the head, the tail does not exist.

Where does it end, this great serpent-thing?

“I don’t know what I need.” He would not have been comfortable admitting this to himself or anyone else even a few years ago, but Chris has learned much in his late-middle age. “But I know what I don’t need.”

He pulls and lifts the pistol on his hip, leveling it and squeezing the trigger.

[bastardsunlight]

There is so much blood. The copper weight of it is almost physical in the air, the spattering of red outdone only by the hellfire burn of her eyes through the smoke.

Were appearances to be believed, she is in a rough way; her armor is clawed and scraped here and there and some lucky and colossal blow has cracked the grinning bone-mask still guarding her face. She has pushed back the goggles; one lens is compromised and she must be able to see clearly to continue this vicious dance with what remains of Tricell's finest.

She is a demon of war, wreathed in gunsmoke and smelling of hot lead and burnt carbon, her neutron-star density immovable even as the forces which dare to oppose Revenant set upon her. Man or BOW, it does not matter -- all are hurled aside, off the catwalk along which she inexorably advances toward her objective, to the testing floor twenty feet below where her brothers and sisters will finish them. Somewhere, down in the chaos, the steady thundering song of Sixteen's modified rifle tells her the BOWs are still coming. Coming and falling.

The Hyena forces the heavy doors of the control room open with brute strength. There is no hesitation, not even an inkling of consideration for self-preservation as its guards converge upon her, but it is for naught. She is blinding speed and impossible might and it is moments before the last man's viscera depart his body on white, diamond-hard claws honed razor-sharp for the occasion. Across the room, Leblanc's hand hovers over a dial -- one of many she has used to spring this or that subject from containment and slow Revenant's advance -- but Hawker pays her no mind. She has never been so full of hate as when, after thirteen years, she lays eyes upon a man who has far less of a right to be alive than she.

What words are there for this, for the meeting of such bitter enemies? What has Albert Wesker and his ilk not taken from Sarah Hawker, that she should grant him even the slightest pause? What cutting remark or gloating taunt is there that cannot wait until his dying gasps beneath her claws? None -- which is precisely how many moments she delays before she is across that room in a blink, and in her fury, it is as if Uroboros might, this time, be loosed from Apex's restraint and breach her own imitation of humanity, because along with the hate-glow in her eyes there is something like hunger, and perhaps in that moment only, the two understand each other perfectly:

I WILL SHOW YOU GODHOOD.

He can see it in her eyes the moment she enters the control room—that fire she always had, but burning blue-white with unadulterated hatred and righteous fury. He had been seated, as if enjoying a show through the floor-to ceiling, reinforced plate glass window which looked out over the testing floor where his forces—and some of hers—are being fed into a meat grinder of their own making. His chair has swiveled away from that show to this one and as she rushes him, he moves in the blink of an eye to meet her. There is no grimace of rage on his face, but a wide, elated smile.

“I was wondering when you would attempt your apotheosis, Twenty-one!”

Down below, the hammer blow of a pair of Ivan-class Tyrants has fallen hard upon Revenant. They all knew what they were signing up for, and they accept it now, but the pair of agents in charge of the two halves of the squad Hyena has brought with them are not willing to sacrifice anyone without just cause.

Sandman’s team has the left side and includes Sixteen. On the right side of the testing floor—the “Killing Floor”, Sixteen has informed them it had sometimes been called—is Chris Redfield.

They coordinate their strikes as best they can, but the two Ivans are nigh-unstoppable. Once they remove their limiters, Chris isn’t sure how much longer he and his men can last. But he doesn’t have time to worry about that. Worry is a distraction. Right now, they’ve got business to attend. He feels his gaze stray upward, to the control room where he knows… he knows his leader is engaging the source of all their agony. Get ‘im, he whispers, for all of us… For Leon.

[bastardsunlight]

Has he grossly misinterpreted, or is he testing the definition of sashimi? Whatever the case, Sixteen maintains almost direct eye contact with Chris as he deftly slices off a piece of the salmon fillet and takes a bite out of it, scales and all.

"I... was going to smoke that..." Chris has only recently become comfortable with Sixteen even EXISTING, much less in the same space he is occupying.

"Relax," Leon chides from a doorway. "It means he likes you. If he leaves organs, you're a god."

[bastardsunlight]

continued from here with @fortunatesxn

Chris looks Piers up and down assessing and appraising, but without hunger or anything hinting at what he might really be thinking.

“You’re nervous,” he says, “but you’re controlling it—because you’re a good soldier and you know you’ve got guys watching you.”

He folds his arms. “And you… can’t take your eyes off me.”

This last bit is quiet, nearly inaudible, for Piers only. 

[bastardsunlight]

[hawk @ chris] rearrange my noodly guts, Captain.

Chris stammers, goes red, and lifts the bottle to his lips once more, hoping the beer will shield him. This is foolishness, of course. It won't and she'll razz him the rest of the night.

[bastardsunlight]

“Quit squirmin’.”

The Hyena speaking (well, practically growling) seems to surprise even the operative next to her — he’s masked, too, albeit with a bandanna instead of the snarling bones and teeth on the face of the Revenant warlord. Her right hand is holding Chris’s jaw steady as the somehow softer left one tends to his eye. Well, where his eye used to be, anyway. There’s a man who appears to be a medic hovering behind her, and after she clears some of the gore from the big man’s face, absolutely heedless of the fact he probably outweighs her close to doubly, she backs away to let more experienced hands do their work. But only just. Chris Redfield might have found Revenant’s good side tonight, but he isn’t about to run back to his handlers and tell about it.

“Get him patched up enough to move — we gotta go. See if he feels like eatin’ on the road.”

Chris is weak and in pain and his heart is hammering angrily. He had looked into those eyes with his one remaining and he had seen… him. Oh god, he’d seen… He tried to struggle, or what his brain told him was a struggle, but the soldiers who moved in on either side to lift him didn’t seem to have trouble beyond his weight.

“You sure about this ma’am?” The voice came from an operative with no mask but mirrored sunglasses, incongruous in this darkness, but it didn’t seem to bother him. His voice was sharp, clipped, and smooth and the lines on either side of his mouth spoke of relatively advanced age for this kind of field work.

[bastardsunlight]

[a very drunk Hawk @ Chris] “You’re like a potato. I love every version of you.”

"All right, Sarah, time for bed," he responds with a goofy, lopsided grin on his face. Her smile is infectious and her eyes are still bright, even drunk as she is. Gently, he scoops her into his arms and heads off to tuck her in.

[bastardsunlight]

[16 @ Chris] The gears are plainly turning in the Apex's head as he regards first the dead Licker (still twitching), then Chris, then the Licker again. It is quiet -- it was the last one -- and he smells nothing besides burnt carbon and infected blood. Finally, he pulls up the red lenses of his goggles, glances around, brings one hand to his knife and asks -- almost hesitantly -- "Are you going to eat that?"

“Wh-what? No! Wh…” Chris’s eye narrows and he looks Sixteen up and down, trying to detect a joke—almost HOPING there is a joke here. In those icy blue eyes he sees nothing other than a genuine and sincere question. He doesn’t know how to respond, though his instinct to defer to “Hyena” is strong. He swallows and tries to control his facial expression, which wants to contort into a rictus of disgust.

[bastardsunlight]

There is much debate about pestering Chris for this — he ought to be resting, nursing his wounds in the wake of his victory, but with authority comes involvement and the team lead to which he’d handed off surveillance of the crash site at great length calls him, apologetically, to the containment wing.

“We picked up a thermal signature on the southern shore and — well…” This feels stupid, she feels stupid, but she’s sure not telling him would be worse. “We ID’d from the air, confirmed he wasn’t…you know…and.” The overwatch captain gestures to the cell at the end. “No fight, no nothing. Figured we’d ask you if he’s any use before we…” Before we what? Put him down? She doesn’t need to say it.

Even in the hall, the pervading tang of salt water and blood linger. There are guards staged outside the heavy metal door. It is wholly unnecessary.

In plain view of the small window, a black-clad operative sits motionless against the opposite wall, what remains of his kit a stark contrast against the white of the containment cell and the vicious red of blood where he has touched it. At this range and with his many wounds as untended as they are, it is difficult to make out the exact damage that runs from his jaw down his neck to somewhere under his torn shirt, but it is bad — he is deathly pale and his blue eyes are glassy and fixed on nothing, the only indicator that he is still alive the way one hand reflexively clutches at where the damage crosses his throat. There has been little effort on the part of the BSAA to piece him together…and the why becomes apparent.

Blood and gore and a man weathering what should be mortal injuries are not what is remarkable. It is the subdued Tricell insignia on his intact shoulder, beneath which read a damning identifier: 80E16, the only known name of Albert Wesker’s practically mythical Left Hand.

For a horrific moment, Chris Redfield sees the figure and it becomes him. Chris cannot hardly even think his name. Somehow, he’d gotten through the incident in West Africa without these strange, conflicting thoughts and feelings. He assumes it had been due to Sheva’s presence. She had not been privy to his history with… with him, so there had been no reason to drag her into it all. Now, without her at his side, having his back, he feels utterly isolated and those thoughts come back in force. But why? How? He’s dead—I saw him die. Somehow, it is worse now than it ever was before.

But it is not him. It is… perhaps better in a way and worse in others. This is the operative known in some circles as the Left Hand. Whose left hand is he? Chris knows intimately and still the name will not come. His horror is replaced with sudden, explosive rage which he controls only through extreme force of will. There is so much blood, how could he possibly be a threat?

Chris lifts a hand. “I’ll talk to him,” he says, his mouth betraying him utterly and before he can stop himself, he approaches the door, laying a hand on the knob. He smells that tang of blood, but it’s not quite right. It’s not human and he knows it. There’s a little near the bottom of the door, but otherwise it seems to have been contained within the room. Before she can stop him, Chris is through that door, closing it behind himself and standing with arms folded, watching the pale shadow that is the Left Hand of a man who thought he could be a god.

“That injury,” he demands, his mouth once more betraying him. “Who?”

Not "what"... "who".

[bastardsunlight]

She stops him, gently, as he passes her. Sarah Hawker is every inch spring-steel muscle and lethality, but somehow Chris dwarfs her more than usual tonight and her unmutated hand is soft against his wrist.

“Wait…”

Her attention has turned fully from the map spread across the briefing room table, eyes full orange-red among the glimmering white points of Christmas lights strung along the wall to provide illumination that does not overwhelm her vision.

“Can I just…”

She hesitates again, breathes, and at last simply turns her forehead into the hollow of his shoulder. She isn’t leaning into him hard, but there’s a heavy, exhausted quality to it, somehow.

“I just need you for a minute.”

Chris is accustomed to being needed, but not by her. All of his life, he’s been needed. He has been Claire’s guardian—a tough but ultimately joyous job as he adores his sister—and a soldier, where he was needed for his ability to follow orders (he wasn’t very good at that). After that, he was needed for STARS, where Wesker took advantage of his youth and naivete. The BSAA “needed” him to lead various squads because he was an expert in BOW warfare. Everyone always “needs” Chris Redfield and he does not begrudge them this. He is a man of honor, conviction, and perseverance.

But this is a vast departure from that. This is a display of the deepest trust. He lifts an arm and wraps it gently around her, rubbing slow circles in her back, ignoring the plates which, in her exhaustion, are laid flat against her scarred, mutated flesh. He doesn’t speak. What would he say if he did? This is the kind of giving that refills one, in a way, rather than takes something. Her warmth and trust recharge his own weary spirit and he can only hope he offers her the same.

[bastardsunlight]

The Manticore is curled comfortably, feet mostly hidden beneath her bulk in a manner comically resembling a contented cat — her many half-lidded eyes and slow blinks included. There is also an expression of mischief, however, in the form of a low chuckling sound as she makes eye contact with Chris. And it probably has something to do with the mistletoe dangling above their heads, suspended by one out of her thick mane of black tendrils.

“You know the rules,” Sandman observes from across the room, a glass of eggnog in his hand. His chin jerks gently toward the mistletoe in one of Hawker’s many tendrils. As she has grown more accustomed to the mutation, she’s become better at controlling her shifts. This one will not cost her so much, as she is conserving plenty of energy mimicking a house cat.

Chris spots the mistletoe and hears the sound and then sighs. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, setting his own glass aside. He’s not going to miss this sweater and he approaches the great beast. Her resting head is almost the size of a man anyway so it is no great chore to stoop a little and plant his mouth on her snout.

[bastardsunlight]

Chris. Any regrets?

"More'n I care to name." He looks up from a glass of something that might actually be water, though his grip suggests he wishes it wasn't. "Doesn't everyone?"

[bastardsunlight]

It’s too smart, the repeating whisper had been. It knows.

Indeed, it has been eight days. The team does not know what it will find when it eventually corners whatever had taken up residence here — only that it is either big enough or strong enough (or both) to have necessitated the use of a full testing floor, and that said use was for self-experimentation. The laboratory had been incriminating enough, notes here and there — and then the damning hypo gun outside the testing floor double-door lock. The empty vial had simply read URv2.3, but if the dried black gunk here and there within the floor itself was any indicator, it had been an Uroboros prototype which had not killed its user.

Their quarry is clever enough to create barricades, lead them in circles, pass through water to emerge downstream. But Chris Redfield is not assigned amateurs. They are professionals, and eventually they find what they are looking for.

The thing is incomprehensibly huge — that, or it has indeterminate dimensions within a dark space. It appears as a shadow hovering over what appears to be a gruesomely interrupted weapons deal: corpses here and there, a truck flipped on its side beneath the meager shelter of the warehouse roof. All that is apparent about it is that it is tall, dark in color, has many red-orange eyes, and that it is fast enough to have snatched one of its hunters from behind before he could hear it.

He is thrashing and gasp-cursing in the thing’s horrid tri-split jaws, but what blood there is is not his. He’s not screaming nearly enough to have taken one of those dagger teeth to something vital, or to have anything broken. The thing makes no move to bolt off into the dark with him, or shake him, or bite down, or…anything, really; just holds him there, clamped almost delicately between glinting white teeth. It steps forward into a shaft of moonlight beneath the roof, revealing first a massive battering ram of a head, ears pinned back in the manner of an agitated cat, a lion-like mane of oily black tendrils, and the beginning of an obsidian, armor-scaled body that has to equal a big rig in mass.

The man in its grasp claws feebly at its nose. It ignores him, blackish drool running from the split in its lower jaws. There is no immediate mutation, no caustic burning, and it grips its catch deftly and deliberately by the heftiest parts of his armor. It is as if the thing does not intend to harm him at all…

And all of its many, burning, too intelligent, red-orange eyes are fixed expectantly upon Chris Redfield.

They’d searched that facility carefully—found some living spaces that had been occupied, and more importantly even than the notes, which they had of course confiscated, was a stray scrap of paper, wadded up and discarded in a waste bin. On of Chris’s sharp-eyed troopers had caught sight of it and alerted him to its presence. It should have been nothing, but it was not. The coordinates had been to this very warehouse, mentioning that which appeared had been about to take place, a weapons deal.

Except it had gone worse than bad. This was no shoot out. This was a killing floor which had been turned into a buffet platter for the thing now holding one of Chris’s men. But it is not killing him. When Chris feels his eyes meeting those of the beast, he feels a strange sort of intelligence—strange in that it is human and the thing is clearly very much not. He lifts both hands, one in a fist to signal his men to hold, and the other open-palmed, toward the creature. His weapon on a sling, it dangles before him, but neither hand is upon it.

“Sarah Hawker?” This is the very definition of going out on a limb and he feels insane. More than one set of eyes are on him from behind as his men look on with bafflement and incredulity as their captain moves slowly forward.

[bastardsunlight]

She’s no stranger to the harsh elements, but the thinly veiled bitter chill of impending winter is a welcome variation. Hawker has almost forgotten what it feels like after a decade of roaming the world’s hottest reaches, and when she’d strayed far enough north or south to experience seasons besides “sweltering” and “hellish” there had been too much on her mind to allow her to enjoy it.

There’s a lot on her mind all the time, really, like the way she almost misses it and how the walls of the quiet house in the country (courtesy of and certainly heavily watched by the BSAA, of course) feel claustrophobic more often than not. Company helps, especially when it’s his kind: the kind where you can sit in silence and simply share space and it says more than any words ever could.

It’s their usual routine: he comes over, they watch whatever football game is on and neither really care about the game — it’s an excuse for a couple beers and trashy food and a few hours spent in the vicinity of someone who just gets it. She’s waiting for him when he pulls up, flinging the last of the big oak’s deposit of leaves into a heap, and jokingly makes as if to javelin the rake at him before setting it aside to meet him halfway up the drive.

“Made tacos.” She removes her cheap pink aviators to detangle a strand of her hair from where it’s blown into the nosepiece. Her eyes are the color of the leaves that still cling to their branches, lit by the lowering sun.

All at once there is a wicked spark in them, too.

When Chris is abeam the pile of leaves, she warns him only with a childish grin before tackling him bodily into them, a maneuver she miscalculates given the springiness of her intended landing point, and then she is sputtering and laughing raucously with her hair full of leaves and him lying across her legs.

They are laughing like children. Chris had barely any time to set his offering—beer, as always—down before they find themselves tumbled in the crunchy pleasantness of freshly-raked leaves. These are the perfect leaves—not wet at all, many colors with a brown backdrop, and they smell of Autumn. Chris Redfield isn’t a poet by any means, but when he sits up to look at her, awash in leaves and laughter, the color high on her flesh cheek, eyes sparkling and dancing with living embers, he thinks maybe he could be.

They aren’t laughing like children at all, he realizes, as he pushes himself to his feet and offers a hand. They laugh like ancient spirits, like the wind through poplars that have seen many winters, like sand scraping a dune for thousands of years, like the crash of salty ocean waves and fresh lake ones. They laugh like the chitter of squirrels in the trees, like the jays chasing them down and arguing raucously, only to be overcome by the deepest laughter of all:

That of the universe herself....

Of all the sunrises, moonsets, shooting stars, burning galaxies, and the vast void beyond.

They are just two people—people who get it, who’ve seen it, done it, been it, and who, for a few shining hours every once in a while, understand.

And understanding is vast.

His heart thumps hard and he grins, jerking a thumb over one broad shoulder. "Brought beer."