Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

 1945 - Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Oranienburg Germany

There is a special hell reserved just for captured enemies - Chris had watched enough POW footage to know, just grainy stuff where the survivors mumbled some of their lived-horror for the questioning CO - mostly they were too starved and injured to get the words out properly - one survivor, infantry black ops - Chris still recalls he'd been missing most of his bottom lip while he tried to explain what the Nazi's were like behind closed doors - because the image the public had, that was fluff, he mumbled through what teeth he had left. And anyway, there was the way they treated those they saw as inferior and then there was the way they treated those who worked against them - and believe it or not, the solider said with a mirthless laugh, the latter was worse.

Chris gives the restraints on his hands another tug but there isn't momentum enough to get his 170 pound frame anywhere else than where it dangles like a dead pig on a slaughterhouse floor from leather looped around his wrists so tight his hands had gone numb an hour ago and the metal rail above that holds him doesn't even shift it's so well constructed. Constructed to hold up a flailing male body without so much as a groan at it's welding points. This position, he knows, is one they used during the spanish inquisitions. It usually got a witch confession out of young girls within an hour because death was preferable to the pain of shoulders going out of socket. But Chris isn't asked for a confession. He just hangs there, suffering.

He can breathe through the black hood over his head, but just barely. Enough to smell death, to gag on it's thickness in the air. There is screaming, screaming enough that it comes at him from every angle of whereever he is, though it's muffled mostly and somehow more macabre when it finally ends. He knows what dying sounds like, and that's what he hears for the hours he hangs there. There are other noises, too, things that sound more animal than human.

The holding cell is just one room in a cement labyrinth beneath the adminitrative buildings above. Gutters circle the perimeter of the room, permanently darkened by bloodflow, and the air stinks of iron no matter how may times a day they are hosed out.

Chris's bare feet are shy of the ground by only an inch.

A door opens somewhere, then another, then the one that must be to his cell. With each lock turning the sound of bootsteps fall heavier, the slap of a riding crop against their leather cuts sharper - it might instill fear in someone cognisent enough to feel it - that is the only mercy in this hour for Chris in his almost-delerium. sickeningly sweet cologne hits him as someone steps close, and it feels like a reprieve from the scent of bodies the ovens haven't taken yet. The hood, when it is lifted just above his nose, his eyes staying covered, gives him a touch of cool air on his clammy skin that he can't believe he ever took for granted.

"Christopher Redfield, American Air force Pilot in the 52nd division. Sent here to our beloved mother Germany on heinous acts of treason against the Fuhrer." It's said with a heavy German accent, but otherwise, flawless english that sounds almost .. tender.

"I won't talk," Chris rasps over dry lips. Sure, he knows how this will go. They'd been warned about being caught - that suicide was a better alternative - and the corp outfitted every soldier going behind enemy lines with a case of cyanide tabs. But poison was only economical if you could get to it and right now, Chris's lay in the left pocket of his bomber jacket, along with the rest of his clothing.

He hangs naked.

Wesker makes an amused noise. "We do not require you to talk, my American dog. Your co-pilot told us everything before we put him on his knees and shot him in the head."

The sinister roll of the accent paired with the almost amused tone makes Chris's stomach drop further as he thinks of Andy, of Andy's wife, of the send off party they had all attended before shipping out and the way Mary-Ann had grabbed Chris's hand and looked up into his eyes and made him promise to get Andy home alive.

Chris gives another helpless jerk against the restraints which causes the commandant to genuinly laugh, the sound flat against the dead walls as a cold, leather-gloved finger touches to Chris's damp collarbone.

"Then kill me too and get it over with," Chris growls, trying to pull away from the touch. The commandant ignores the venom, circling, each step accented with another slap of his crop against the leather of boots.

"Kill you? After my men worked so hard to extract you from the downed plane alive? Americans are so popular here, you know. I've already had three requests for your transfer to various divisions of testing. You're a regular Marlene Dietrich already. And I have your biggest fan standing right here. You should thank him for convincing me not to send you to the showers. Perhaps sign an autograph, mein hubscher hund." The last line is hissed close to Chriss's ear, a gloved finger sliding down his pec, over his ribs as the circling continues.

To that William Birkin clears his throat where he hovers by the door, impatient with the word play and offended by the commandant's use of English.

"Seine korperliche Konstitution durfte sich bei den Tests als recht interessant erweisen."

Wesker only hums, dragging his hand fully over Chris's backside then back up to his hip.

"He says your muscled physique will aid in our viral testing - metabolics - complexities a dog would not understand," Wesker coos gently, stopping again in front of Chris and tenderly rubbing his face, hand drifting back to his pec to give it a full handed squeeze, leather glove cracking audibly.

"Stop playing with him," William hisses in German.

Wesker simply considers Chris's tight lipped silence.

"Most men would have been screaming hours ago," he says, tilting his head curiously and speaking in his mother language.

"His silence spits in our face," William drawls. "Both of his shoulders are visibly dislocated - he's in agony."

To that Wesker smiles and drops his crop, grabbing Chris by his hips so hard there will be fingerprint bruises by morning, his skin rotting fruit. He gives a hard pull, setting Chris's weight against both dislocations and causing him to scream, finally.

"Do not hold out on us, you must say when it hurts Herr Redfield," Wesker whispers. "Your suffering is the only music some of us have down here." Chris pants through the agony, every breath shaking. Wesker’s hands remain on his hips, thumbs idly stroking the skin as if soothing a skittish, abused animal. Promising touch need not hurt.

Wesker leans in and licks the side of Chris's dirty face, as though he can taste the fear sweating out through his pores, and he hums again. Then there is a vacuum as the cologne receeds to the sound of a knife cutting through the leather restraints. Chris hits the ground hard, legs long ago numbed and useless, hot pain ripping out another scream as he lands on one of his shoulders.

The hood, atleast, finally slips off and Chris blinks up into the ugly, white lights overhead from two caged bulbs. They silouette the commandant in a way that makes him almost cartoonishly handsome, an absurdly beautful aryan nightmare standing over him in full SS regalia, crisp black with silver runes and oak leaves adorning the collar and a red and white swastika band snug over his muscled forearm. Chris can almost see his own bewildered, exhausted reflection in the shine of the man's boots as he elegantly crouches down.

William, in the doorway, rolls his eyes and pushes his messy blonde hair off his forehead and says something more in terse german that only makes Wesker smile again.

"My poor American pilot, my untrained dog." Wesker coos again, grabbing one of Chris's arms and, without warning, lifting it up and in and sliding it back into socket with a sickening pop that makes even William shuffle his eyes to the wall as Chris screams again.

Chris, slipping into unconsciousness, starts pissing himself. Wesker frowns as a puddle of urine collects around the sole of his boot.

"Filthy," He mutters, grabbing Chriss's other arm, jerking his body over and setting the remaining shoulder. That scream takes what remains of the boys strength and consciousness and Chris's head rolls back against the floor.

Wesker watches Chris's face, his pale eyes raking down the stubble on his jaw, down his hard American body, idly wondering what the Ami's feed their men to make them so endowed.

His gloved fingers dip down against the floor, index drawing in the puddle of piss until he pulls it up and tastes it like sampling wine at der weinberg. He'd gone to a few regalia's for the fuhrer in his career, always showcasing the best of the best in food and liquor and entertainment - what Germany didn't produce it looted. Wesker's peers seemed to enjoy champagne, something cosmopolitan about French things that they thought masked their brutality. But Wesker would swear, tongue tasting this American pilots piss on his glove, it is sweeter than anything made by a stinking Frenchman.

He has never before owned something American made, most things from the country seeming cheap and easy to find in better quality almost anywhere. But this specimen, he thinks, is the first high quality product that has ever dropped into his lap from the west. He idly wonders what his betters would think at the next regalia if Wesker arrived with Chris on a leash. He leans over and strokes his hand in the pilots sweaty brown hair, imagining the perfect brand and color for a collar (and, anyway, it would be only half as embarrassing as Goring at the last party with a Jew servant girl following him all night). He could even teach his dog tricks. The Jew girl had not done any tricks, unless you considered the ability to put up with Goring for 6 straight hours a trick (and perhaps that was a talent of its own, as Wesker could not stand the man for more than an hour).

Behind him, William just sighs.

"Barchen," Wesker murmurs fondly. "My little bear."

****

When Chris wakes up it's almost lucid. The first sense to come online is smell, perhaps because the scent down in the cell had been so pungent it had felt like he was eating it whole & every breath had been an effort not to dry heave. Now, though, it is something smokey and cloying and sweet. That cologne again, too, and a clove cigarette mixed in for good measure. Everything that smells good, comparatively.

He blinks, the room around him opulent but dark, something only a high ranking member in the reich might be permitted. He wants to focus on his mission, why he'd come here, but his head is hazy and it feels like all he can do is stare stupidly around to take in the details. Gothic motifs are carved into deep walnut wood paneling & bookshelves line every wall, floor to ceiling, filled with leather volumes. A massive oak desk sits near a flickering fireplace, its surface cluttered with vials and instruments.

A large, four-post bed takes up one side of the room, black silk sheets and carved posts with mournful cherubs looking skyward, and a thick, rustling canopy that makes the entire tableu seem like something out of a dark fairy tale.

He digs his hands - free and moving - down into something soft. A thick black velvet tufted pillow, large enough for a man but unmistakably for an oversized dog. A heavy leather collar encircles his throat, locked with a cold steel padlock that he can feel on his collarbone when he turns his head. A short chain runs from the collar to a heavy iron ring riveted straight into a thick wooden beam in the wall, giving him only a few feet of movement and looking like something too sturdy to free himself from.

Wesker is crouched beside him, easing back. A glass syringe glints in his hand, the plunger already depressed.

“Morphine,” Wesker says calmly, voice cultured. “I do like to watch my pets suffer, but it’s sweeter when it isn’t dragging on all night while I try to sleep. Your body can rest tonight. It will mean so much more with a fresh start tomorrow morning.”

Chris turns, opens his mouth to snarl out an insult or a demand, but the drug is already working. He feels the lucid weight of the air itself deepen. Wesker, satisfied at the quiet, smirks and moves to the bed nearby, lighting another clove as he goes with a silver lighter that casts a momentary brightness over his sharp features before he clicks it shut and tosses it to the bedside table. A large Swastika in gold lays over the headboard of the bed and Wesker settles directly under it like a Reich prince, staring at Chris like he is the man's new favorite toy. Chris lolls his head, squinting toward the desk. What looks like a bleached human skull sits atop several papers along with crystal paperweights and fountain pens.

Taper candles blow, he can hear them flicker in some unseen draft. Chris can't locate them, though, and the window looks closed. He stares in it's direction nearby which makes Wesker smile as he ashes his clove into a crystal tray he gingerly sits on his hard, bare stomach. "We never open the windows, it stinks of the crematory out there," he says lightly, taking a drag and watching.

Chris looks back to him, eyes bleary, one of his hands going up clumsily to the lock at his neck and tugging it. He looks down and sees he is still mostly naked except a pair of tight underwear. Lacerations from the crash are bandaged carefully along his torso and arms and thighs. He has the sense that his hair is wet and he brings a hand to his nose, smelling rose.

He'd been bathed.

Wesker smiles again.

"Tubular rose. They won't grow here because of all the lye but I have a stock of rose oil for the bath that smells incredibly similiar. Made in Austria" he adds in the last part like it means something.

He exhales.

"Are you happy down there, Barchen, or would you like to earn a place up here by your master?" He touches the black silk sheets at his side, the clove circling rings of smoke around his long, pale fingers. They drag down the silk, in Chris's perception, in slow motion.

Chris frowns, shaking his head as if he could dispel the double of everything he sees, the rainbow aura, the buzzing under his skin. The pain is gone, atleast.

"My name is Chris," is all he can manage, which makes Wesker laugh without any mirth and roll over on his stomach, positioning himself just a foot from Chris at the end of his bed. A spoiled king on his stomach, feet metaphorically kicking in amusement at his toy. Clove still pinched in his fingers he reaches out and gently touches Chris's hair, causing him to pull back. The chain rustles.

"No, you are my Barchen. Du bist mein kleiner Bar. My little bear." He corrects, amused.

Chris stares at him with as much hatred as he can muster, though the morphine dulls alot of what his good senses know and all he can really concentrate on is how good looking the man is. Not like anyone Chris has ever laid eyes on. But he keeps his face hard and the gold swastika in the background fades in and out of crisp clarity. He can't even really grasp the dire nature of his own circumstance in this haze.

Where the morphine had gone in has caused a thin blood trail down the crook of his arm and he looks down at it. He'd never even tried smoking pot cigarettes before. He'd enlisted right after school and he isn't even old enough to drink. Not in the states, anyway. Germany, he'd heard, had a younger drinking age.

They are the idiotic thoughts of an eighteen year old boy high and half in shock.

Wesker leans off the edge of the bed and wipes his thumb down the blood trail, hard, enough to sting the injection spot, before lifting his thumb to mouth and sucking it clean, his pale, almost grey eyes watching Chris like a wolf.

"Touch yourself for me, Barchen." He says, sounding bored, taking another drag and letting some of his weight settle on his elbows as he watches Chris.

"What?" Chris mumbles, eyebrows furrowing. He almost can't remember why Wesker has such a strong accent, or why he is in this room or why he has a collar on his neck. "What did you say?" He slurs it like a drunk man who just wants to drag himself home.

Chris just wants to drag himself home.

"Your dick, my pilot. Touch your dick and let me watch you." Wesker is without shame or hesitation, one of the fuhrer's favorites and the commandant of the entire camp. Though he's earned the whispers the really rigid men mutter behind his back about how he's an opportunist, and a snake, and that he really isn't committed to their cause, just his own. He always smirks to that little whisper. As if such small men could even grasp his purpose.

He ashes his cigarette again.

"Zieg mir, zieg mir!" He says it expressively. "Show me. Show me how you look when you masturbate yourself, American."

Chris just stares at him, dumbfounded. He has never heard anyone talk about masturbation out loud. Certainly not in a homosexual context. He is still a 1944 all-American. He talks ball on the diamond, he knows plane models because he'd wanted to fly since he was a kid, his favorite song is "Sunday, Monday or Always" by Bing Crosby. He'd kissed two girls and made it to second base with another - hadn't felt much but figured it would come with age as he got older. Most older guys he knew loved getting to second base.

Wesker licks his lips. "Masturbate your dick, pilot. You belong to me. Do as I say."

"I don't know what you're saying," Chris mumbles. "Where am I?" He sounds suddenly very young and very lost, sitting on his velvet cusion almost naked.

Wesker narrows his eyes. "We start your obedience training tomorrow," He says dismissively, unbothered, rolling away back toward the headboard. He twists and sets a needle on his player to vinyl and a soft song plays and he relaxes back into silk and stares at his ceiling through the sheer canopy.

"Where is Andy?" Chris asks, bolder, his hands searching around his cushion and finding a blanket within reach. He pulls it up and over his legs and stares at this man, half naked and reclined.

"We shot andy in the head, remember little bear? He gave us your mission so we shot frauline Higgins, too. William wanted you for testing but I thought you were too handsome for that." He says it all very simply, he says it like it's another drolling day down in hell.

There is the flick of another clove lighting up.

Chris tries to force his thoughts back to real things.

"Why would you shoot Amanda?"

The mission. A captured spy, a diplomats daughter. She'd been transferred over to the camp. A camp know for medical and scientific exploitations of its prisoners. They had to get her out. Chris and Andy had been sent in.

Chris stares at Wesker's foot, trying to sort his thoughts. He's shirtless but still in his uniform pants and boots. There is a 45 magnum resting in the black silk, certainly beyond Chris's reach. There is a bleached human skull resting on research papers. The ground here won't grow anything because of the lye, because of all the buried bodies rotting just a few feet under.

"Frauline Higgins was very close to breaking, I'm sure we could have gotten something useful from her.." he trails off, waving his hand in the clove smoke floating above his face.

"But she was ours. And Germans.." he seems to search for the right words. "We do not give away what is ours. Der Tod ist besser - death, it's better."

Chris's eyes feel so heavy he can barely take away anything useful from the admissions, the gravity, weskers boredom of it all. Nothing said in a fever, no passion for the horror. Detached reality like another prisoner in this place.

"Gehorchen" Wesker muses, already changing topics. "l will give you a command and when I say gehorchen, you will obey it, yes mutt?"

Chris's head hits the back of the wall and his shoulders slump, and Wesker blows smoke at the ceiling.

"Goring doesn't even have his Jews trained so well, not with just a word."

Wesker smiles, satisfied with himself.

*****

Chris wakes again, this time the morphine worn off and his shoulders already in agony, his head splitting in a headache. The window is closed but the curtains are pulled open and the sun slants in in what looks like still early-morning rays. Chris blinks away from it where he's curled awkwardly, half on the dog bed, everything rushing at him at once as he jolts upright.

He almost collides face to face with a young girl.

She tilts back on her heels and gives him a surprised look.

"Whoa, pilot." She says lightly, still with a heavy accent but in relatively kind english. Chris grabs his blanket and tries to cover himself, but she only laughs, standing.

"I am Sherry Birkin and I got the day off from my lessons today to show you around." Chris blinks, taking in her neat school uniform - she cant be more than ten, he thinks.

"And that," she continues, pointing behind her where a rigid German soldier stands at the door with his hand on his gun, staring at Chris like he's the most pitiful thing he's ever seen, "is Heinrich. Heinrich has orders to kill you if you do anything you aren't told to do, so don't make him do that, okay?" She sounds unphased by the logistics, by the situation. She reaches down and offers Chris her hand to help him up.

He hesitates, then accepts, still holding the blanket at his hips.

"I need.. I need to get home.." Chris tries softly though there's no way the soldier doesn't hear it. But he must not speak english because he just scowls with no real movement. Sherry stares up at him.

"That isn't going to happen, Mr. Redfield. You are in Sachsenhausen. A long way from home and a long way from friends." She thinks for a moment. "But it could be worse. I've seen people have it alot worse." And then she points at the bed.

"Uncle left you the clothes you were found it, all patched up and cleaned. Awfully nice of him." There's a real fondness in her voice.

Chris stairs down at his Airforce uniform, even his bomber jacket - the damage in the crash must have been extensive because he can see the sewing lines, small gaps where the fabric must have been too singed or torn to repair, that even whatever team of women Wesker had put to work the night before to make the clothes wearable could not completely fix.

He looks around the room, bright in the daylight, the gold swastika gleaming, all of the books on their shelves looking expensive and thick and perfectly in order. Outside there is the sound of work, the toil of labor. Chris knows what kind of labor.

Uncle.

He wants to act stupid, to ask who the man is, to feign ignorance the way he was taught if captured. But it all seems so pointless now. Of course he knows who the commandant is, he'd been in the debrief file for the mission.

Chris knows why he came here. The commandant knows why he came here. This little girl probably knows why he came here. Heinrich with his gun at rest definitely knows why he came here.

And now Chris is trapped, far from home and far from friends.

****

Sherry is still prattling on about her father's work as they walk into the pantry of the household. Maids in dowdry dresses and mostly-clean aprons stir pots, chop vegetables, kneed dough on the counter. Sherry points here and there, naming small things in German, barely paying attention to Chris. But when he lags Heinrich gives him a hard shove in the back with the butt of his rifle, signaling he is paying enough attention for them both. The rest of the home is less of a macabre study and normal - quaint, even. It looks mostly unlived in. Chris might swear it was normal if a large oil painting in the foyer didn't make him pause - he knows enough to recognize a Van Gogh and the size, the quality, the gilded frame makes him think it isn't a reproduction. Everyone knows that art had been the biggest thing the nazis had looted from it's neighboring occupied countries. He stares at it's large globs of dry paint in mossy hues, priceless, the smell of fresh bread thick in the air from the kitchen.

Heinrich butts him on the back and he continues on past it, Sherry talking about her mother being even smarter than her father.

"You'll have German lessons from 8-11 everyday, he wants you to be fluent. But you are allowed to go to the kitchen first and pick off what you want for your breakfast. Heinrich will be with you everyday, of course, but he doesn't speak english and even if he did, I don't think he'd speak it with you." Shes bubbly, oblivious to the irony of the situation because at her age this must be most of what she's ever known. Her blonde pigtails bob as she talks and walks in front of Chris, taking his hand occasionally to stress the importance of a room he may not enter or a task he's expected to excel in through the day.

There's no softly folded horror around any corner of this place, though Chris stays tense for it. It's tutoring all day: German, German history, literature and sciences. Sherry doesn't explain why, nor would she be able to. She just states off the roster exactly as Uncle Albert had recited it to her while he brushed her hair and fixed it into the ponytails.

"If you're good," she hums, grabbing onto a banister at the stairwell and monkeying over on it like any normal child would do, "he will let you ride at the stable and swim at the pool." The idea of swimming in front of Heinrich's frown makes Chris grimace.

"Am I going to be killed?" Chris asks bluntly before Sherry takes his hand to lead him outside. She looks back at him, clearly thinking, then shrugs. Genuinely without knowledge on it. You wouldn't teach someone German just to kill them, would you? Chris has to wonder it but he doesn't think staying alive is necessarily any better, either.

Heinrich hits him in the back again as he ers into a troubled thought.

****

Outside Chris wishes the air was a reprieve, but it's somehow worse. There's a soot just on every surface, on every blade of grass, and when they trudge through it it puffs back into the air, clings to Chris's shoes and pants. The large chimney tower at the edge of the property pumps out smoke and Chris tries not to wretch as his eyes brush over the barb-wire fencing of the encampment that is attached, putting faces to tragedy in real time. Soldiers are everywhere, and they all eye him in their own turn with scowls and whispers and nudges. Sherry skips along, oblivious, pointing out important details and more places Chris must never stray too close to.

"My daddy works there," She comments absently, innocently, pointing one small finger to a large building built into the camp, next to the barracks. Her skirt flutters on the wind.

"I'm sure he does," Chris mumbles with a heavy heart. Sherry looks proud, staring at that building. Chris wonders if you're born in a nightmare, do you even know it's a nightmare. Chris looks back at the fenced encampment, at the slow, shuffling shapes behind the wire, and feels something cold and furious settle in his chest. This wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. The world would find out. America would find out. They’d bomb this place into the ground if they had to. But there was no comfort in the future when, right now, Sherry's father fed bodies into that chimney and she hummed a song and leaned over, picking a choked daisy from the dirt.

And then Chris see's the commandant. He walks - strolls - through the camp. Flanked on either side by a cadre in unforms less impressive than his own, all careful to keep up. He tilts his head, listening to one speak, his eyes sweeping the grounds, hands neatly clasped behind his back. His long coat flares with his steps and around him even the most arrogant of men shift when his gaze passes over them. Authority. Supremacy. Ownership.

His eyes stop on Chris and Sherry in the field nearby. Sherry moves to offer her daisy to Chris, thinking he looks sad, but pauses at his struck posture and follows his eyes. "Oh, Uncle," She breathes happily, grabbing Chris's hand and tugging him (his should screams) toward the razor-wired fence that separates the estate grounds from the camp. Wesker moves to meet them, his men all staying a respectful distance back. Chris has no choice but to press right against the fence with Sherry.

Up close the smoke is almost choking but Wesker looks unphased even though several in his party hold kerchiefs over their noses.

A man in black walking his own personal slice of hell like they are gardens that require tending.

He smiles at Chris, a differenant smile than the one that overtakes his mouth for Sherry as he finally looks down to her.

“Sherry, my dear,” he says, voice schooled and smooth.“You shouldn’t tug so hard on our new pet. He’s still… tender.”

Sherry releases Chris’s hand with a guilty little “sorry,” but quickly holds the daisy up toward the fence.

“I picked it for him."

Wesker’s gloved hand slips gracefully between the razor wires. Not a single thread of his wool coat sleeve catches on the barbs. He plucked the small flower from her fingers with two leather-clad digits.

His eyes slide to Chris.

“Komm naher,” he orders softly in German. Come closer.

Chris stands motionless, confused, jaw tight. He doesn't move.

A hard nudge from behind makes him stumble forward. Heinrich’s rifle presses firmly between his shoulder blades, guiding him until his chest is inches from the razor wire. The muzzle lowers and finds the dip at the base of his spine and settles there for the duration of the exchange.

Wesker reaches through the wires again. His long arm extends with elegant control as he tucks the sad little daisy behind Chris’s ear. The leather of his glove grazes Chris’s skin, cool, then rubs the shell of his ear gently. Fingers brush back into his hair, stroking once, twice, before settling on his earlobe, caressing it with affection.

Chris keeps his face blank. Neutral. He refuses to give Wesker the satisfaction of seeing the disgust and humiliation burning in his chest.

“Do you like our new dog, Sherry?” Wesker asks, amused, never taking his eyes off Chris’s face.

Sherry bursts into bright laughter and suddenly throws her arms around Chris’s legs in an enthusiastic hug. The movement jolts his injured shoulder viciously and shoves him harder against Heinrich’s gun. For a terrifying second he teeters forward, the razor wire glinting right in front of his throat and chest. But he locks his muscles and stays upright, breathing through his nose, perfectly still while the little girl clings to him and giggles.

“He’s not a dog, Uncle!” she corrects happily, still squeezing Chris’s legs. “He’s a pilot!”

“Not a dog, you say?” Wesker echoes, the words laced with dark humor, as if she had told a charming joke. His fingers never stop their gentle exploration, tracing the curve of Chris’s earlobe, brushing through the short hair behind it. How soft I can be.

The defiant look in Chris's eyes stokes some fire in Wesker, though; he wants to whisper Gehorchen and put him down on his knees, make him open his pretty american mouth and swallow his lugar. Swallow it until his perfect white teeth hit the trigger, snug around Wesker's finger where he holds all of the power, where he commands life and death. But Sherry stares up at them, the wind catching her fine blonde hair and scattering it over her smiling face, and Wesker does nothing more than stroke Chris fondly.

The moment shatters with a sudden shout from behind Wesker.

One of the camp workers, gaunt, filthy, a number visible on his striped uniform, is arguing desperately with two of Wesker’s officers. His voice cracks with fear and anger as he gestures wildly toward the chimney building. The officers draw their batons.

Wesker’s fingers still against Chris’s ear. He lets out a slow, irritated sigh, the sound almost bored.

“Duty calls,” he murmurs in english, the words meant only for Chris. His gloved hand retracts, sliding back toward the holster at his hip where his handgun waits.

As Wesker starts to turn away Chris lunges forward without thinking. His arms shoots through the razor wire, grabbing fistfuls of Wesker’s coat. The barbs tear hot into his forearms and biceps, slicing deep red lines across his skin. Blood wells up instantly, dripping down his arms and onto Wesker’s wool sleeve.

“Don't!” Chris snarls.

Heinrich screams behind him. “Halt! Zuruck! Get back, you fucking idiot!” The muzzle of the rifle moves as Heinrich tries to yank him away, but Chris holds on with desperate strength, shoulders screaming, blood running.

Sherry stumbles backward, releasing Chris’s legs.

Wesker’s eyes drink in the sight: the blood, the desperation, the sheer stupidity of Chris’s courage.

In one motion Wesker wrenches Chris’s gripping hands free of his coat, only to shove both arms through the wire himself. His gloved fists seize the front of Chris’s shirt, bunching the fabric tight in his grip. He yanks Chris forward toward him.

The razor wire bites deep. One barb sinks into Chris’s cheek like a thorn on a rose, splitting the skin open. Chris hisses.

Wesker leans in closer on the other side of the fence, ignoring everything else. A razor edge nicks his own sharp jawline, drawing a thin line of red that he doesn't even acknowledge. His torn sleeves, now ruined, no longer matter. His face is an inch from Chris’s, separated only by the wire that cuts them both.

“Down, dog,” he whispers, the words so low they are barely more than breath against Chris’s bloody cheek.

He pulls Chris even closer. The barb digs deeper into his cheek, tearing a fresh gasp from his throat.

“Down, my naughty little dog,” Wesker breaths again, eyes burning with dark pleasure.

Then, with terrifying strength, Wesker shoves him backward.

Chris slams hard into Heinrich. Both men crash to the ground. Pain explodes through Chris’s shoulder and face as he hits the dirt.

Sherry let out a frightened cry and spins away, covering her ears with both hands and squeezing her eyes shut tight.

Wesker straightens slowly. Blood, Chris’s blood, stains his gloves and the front of his once-pristine coat. He gives Chris one last long, lingering look, eyes tracing the fresh wound on his cheek and the blood running down his arms like he is memorizing a work of art.

Then he turns away without another word. He pauses at the worker, seeming to think. He glances back at Chris, once, then shoves past the man. How soft I can be. His men all exchange looks but then scramble to follow.

Heinrich is pulling himself off the ground, ready to beat the shit out of the American.

****

Chris spends the rest of the day in the infirmary of the household, a few women who don't dare to even look up at his eyes all working to suture and clean hiss. Sherry stays with him, leaving only once to get a shaved ice from the kitchen and bringing back one for Chris, too. They are striped in blue and red syrups and she points out her cleverness at recreating his countrie's flag colors. There's a window open and a breeze blowing in from the east, away from the camp and with just wildflowers on the air and Chris tries to calm his nerves and take deep breaths of it. The women all chat in german like he isn't there, threading needles in and out of his deeper lacerations and tearing off the twine with their bare teeth before pouring alcohol over them. He hisses at the burn and their eyes look mirthful.

Heinrich stands outside, two bruised knuckles from punching Chris directly in his left eye and knocking him out cold long enough to drag him back inside. Sherry gets him talking about home and he loses himself in telling her about mayberry street and the way the ice cream truck would jingle through the neighborhood on summer evenings, kids chasing after it on bikes - kids about her age - the smell of fresh-cut grass and barbecue smoke. Normal things. American things. Sherr listens with fascinated eyes, asking questions that made him talk even more. He gets so caught up in it that he doesn't notice Heinrich stiffen, and couldn't know the commandant stands just outside the lip of the door, listening to Chris amuse Sherry. His once pristine uniform is still stained with soot and Chris’s dried blood. He pulls a crisp white handkerchief from his coat and wipes the grime from his face. A few strands of his usually perfect hair have fallen forward, shagging messily over one pale eye. He listens, with Sherry, to stories about a place that isn't here.

"Why did you want to be a pilot, Chris? Isn't it scary up here?" Sherry asks, blue syrup dripping onto the floor between her feet.

“Nah,” he answers, voice dropping into a storytelling cadence. “It started when I was a kid. Maybe ten or eleven. My dad took me out to this tiny airfield one Saturday. Nothing fancy, just a grass runway, and a couple of old Cessnas tied down. One of the pilots there was this old barnstormer type, leather jacket, scarf, the whole deal. He let me sit in the cockpit of his plane. He took me up...”

Chris’s gaze goes distant, staring at the far wall like he can see it again.

“I’ll never forget the way the world looked when we took off. Everything that felt huge and impossible on the ground, ugly factories, traffic jams, my dad’s shitty mood after a long shift.. just… shrank. Turned small. Manageable. From up there, the roads looked like neat little stitches holding the earth together. The rivers like silver threads. You could see storms coming from miles away and decide whether to fly around them or punch straight through. For the first time in my life I felt like I wasn’t stuck. Like I could choose the direction.”

He pauses as another suture is tied, wincing.

“After that, I was hooked. I started collecting plane pictures, begging rides whenever I could. Told myself if I could just get high enough, fast enough, I could outrun anything ugly down here. War. Loss. All of it. Up there, you’re free in a way no one on the ground can touch. You’re alone with the sky, the engine. Nothing else matters. The Air Force offered me my first full ticket, said I could make a difference while I was at it.." his voice lists off, staring at one of the stitched gashes on his arm.

Sherry is half listening, but Wesker is listening all the way.

The handkerchief hangs limp. Hair still curls over his eye. Something complicated twists behind his ribs as he listens to the earnest timbre of Chris’s voice, that stubborn American idealism, that hunger for freedom, for escape. A person not of this place, a heart born from something else entirely.

Chris sounds naive when he speaks. Childish, even.

And yet Wesker can't bear to walk away.

Chris gives her a small, crooked smile. “Guess I wanted to be the guy who got to see the world from above instead of crawling through the mud like everybody else. Stupid romantic reason, huh?”

Sherry just shrugs. "It just seems awfully high to me," she quips, finally.

Chris snorts and pushes her with his hurt shoulder.

"That's the whole point, kid."

*****

Wesker returns to the house at dusk, the camp wrapping up to evening and guards posted. A maid waits at the front door, eyes on the ground out of respect (fear), and delivers the days events which include Chris being bandaged, washed and returned to the commandant's quarters and Sherry wanting flying lessons. Wesker’s lip twitches. He and the maid share a brief look, equal parts amusement, before he dismisses her with a flick of his gloved fingers.

He lingers downstairs for some time. The crystal decanter clinks softly against the rim of his glass as he pours himself a generous measure of aged brandy at the ornate liquor cart. He drinks slow, standing by the tall windows that overlook the darkened camp, watching the chimney tower continue its endless work. The alcohol burns pleasantly down his throat, but it does little to quiet the echo of Chris’s voice describing blue skies and impossible freedom.

Eventually, glass in hand, Wesker climbs the stairs. He removes the crop from his belt.

He stops in the doorway of his private quarters.

Chris is leaning against the far wall, chained by the collar to the heavy ring bolted beside the dogbed. He wears nothing but his underwear. The day had left its full record on his body: fresh white bandages wrapped around his forearms, dark bruises already darkening across his ribs and shoulder, and a swollen, angry black eye courtesy of Heinrich’s fist. He looks exhausted. Defiant. Breathtaking.

Wesker’s grip on the whiskey glass slacks. He drains it quickly and sets it to the closest surface top.

Chris's eyes come up to his and they remind Wesker of a dog he had, once. A beautiful dog, a purebred German Shepherd that the Fuhrer had gifted him. Wesker had raised it from just a puppy. He can still remember curling his fingers into it's soft fur as he jerked in restless sleep, in restless nightmares. The dog had been his only constant during those brutal early years of training and indoctrination. He might have had that dog forever if the Fuhrer had not breezed into Albert's room one normal, mundane afternoon. With him he had brought in a girl, dragged by a nameless and faceless soldier. Just an ordinary servant girl, younger than Wesker himself. He had seen her in the orchard picking apples for cider, laughing with her friends. Watched her out at the barnes brushing the mares. She was noone. Another unimportant life in a sea of unimportant lives. They bled together.

Wesker could not imagine why a noone would be in this position. He would learn later it was exactly because she was noone. In this place death was not earned. Life was earned.

The Fuhrer had thrown her at Wesker's feet and then, with grace, untucked a Luger P08 and turned it grip-first to Wesker, to his boy, to his successor, to his perfect ubermensch. He'd taken the gun, of course, but only because he knew he had to. He'd stared up at the Fuhrer in a mix of confusion and what he already knew, deep down, was being asked.

"Toten," the old man had said - at first almost kindly, almost with a laugh. Wesker had just looked at him, the gun sagging in the front from its own weight. "Toten, toten!" The fuhrer had had almost no patience, pointing to the girl. "Kill."

Wesker can remember, though he shakes his head, now, at how naive it had been, saying no.

Nein.

Nein, das werde ich nicht. No, I will not.

The fuhrer had stared down at him, expression unreadable, trying to figure out how to best instill the first lesson of his world order - not the stuff in the books on Albert's desk, not even the formulas the scientists in the rooms down the hall bowed their heads over that he would one day take over.

The first real lesson, and the last.

All things were taught with brutality - there was brutality to the boy himself, to the girl, there were so many ways to make pain speak for him. But the Fuhrer had just smiled because he knew all the best ways to use pain, real pain. He had removed a second gun from his belt and pointed it just behind the boy still staring up at him with his pale, grey eyes. The dog gave only a yelp of surprise before it hit the floor, Albert's body jumping at the gunshot near his face, the immediate ring in his ears. And then the girl, too, sighed out a noise as if she could not have expected her end when the Fuhrer's gun put a bullet through the top of her head. Albert had stood there, gun still sagging in his child's hand, covered in blowback from the servant at his feet, his hound silenced behind him.

The fuhrer had reached down and caressed his cheek, hand smelling like gunpowder.

"Never tell me no again," he had said sweetly. There was a second lesson, too, of course. Not just to obey but that to disobey so rarely changed the outcome.

And now Chris stares up at him with the same eyes of that dog, something that Wesker stands to lose because affection is a liability, it is only used to hurt.

Wesker tosses the crop on his bed and crosses the short distance, kneels down, the leather of his boots making a crisp, tight crunch. He tries to touch Chris's face but Chris yanks away, pushes his back up against the wall, pushes his hands into Wesker's unmovable shoulder - movable only if Wesker allows it - which he does just a few inches, his body jilting from Chris's effort. Humoring him.

"You smell like death," Chris spits.

Wesker pauses, bringing the sleeve of his crisp uniform to his nose and smelling it deeply. There is only the jasmine and umber and oudwood of his cologne. But Chris says it with such spite, with such conviction, that Wesker stands.

"I will bathe for you," he offers.

"You'll never wash that smell off," Chris returns without pause. With hatred. With disgust.

Wesker stares down at him.

"Perhaps because I was born into it, so it is part of me. Just as you will never wash off that smell you have, little American boy." And what smell was that? Doomed heroics? Misplaced hope? Cheap American optimism?

He turns and heads toward the bathroom, not looking back at Chris who's chest heaves, his body having prepared for a fight. His fingers curl down into the dog bed.

"Tod!," he yells weakly at Wesker's back as the door closes. Death. He had learned that word today. Death. He is sure he has the word right, even in his yankee accent.

****

Wesker stands stripped, staring in the mirror.

You smell like death.

Condensation gathers on the glass and Wesker imagines rain. He wishes to god they'd get rain, the air outside is a haze of dust from all the failures in the labs and he knows he smells of them, he knows every person in this place reeks of it.

He touches the moisture and watches a fat drop collect and slide down.

The Fuhrer's perfect Aryan ubermensch.

He knows he isn't that, not really. He knows he will be more than just that. He has plans. He's working on a deal.

And whatever it is that stinks on his skin of this place, of the ideaolgy he was born into, his little bear stinks worse of the other half of the coin. His mortality. His naive goodness. It's sickeningly sweet like rotted fruit fermenting. Wesker turns away from his reflection and smells the door, imagining he can scent Chris through it. He drags his tongue up the wood. There is a clink and a bang - Chris fighting his chain, Chris throwing his weight behind trying to break it, likely bruising his neck against the collar. His fingernails biting into the wood floor for leverage, a splinter or two under his soft skin.

Wesker smiles, water dripping off his shoulders and down his legs, puddling onto the floor.

That yearning for freedom, that indignant fire.

Wesker knows it well.

He can almost bite at the air for it, eyes closed, pressing his warm, wet hips against the wood of the door where his little bear sits just feet away. The reflection of him in the wet mirror is almost absurd; the very poster child of the fuhrer's vision who had outlived the lab, the conditioning, the trials, the faux pedestal of pedigree and all his formative training that came at cost: great, great cost.

Great suffering.

And just beyond his bear suffers, too, and it ignites him. For in that shared pain they know one another, kindred aches. Different causes, perhaps, but Wesker finds pain to be a broad canvas - many strokes create a final piece but they are all laid down on one foundation of suffering.

He licks the door again. He moves his hips, letting his cock rut the wood.

The chain clanks again and Chris makes a noise in his effort to break an unbreakable lock. To remove a chain he can not remove.

Wesker can hardly stand how exquisite it is.

He could take his little bear, like Goring with his Jews. But there's something to be said, he thinks wryly as his leaking cock presses against the door, for civilized brutality. All gentleman, the fuhrer often reminded his men when they'd killed too much, stained with sins so dark it became hard to hold an even face at the dinner table with ones wife and children.

We must remain gentlemen.

Wesker bites into the meat of his own hand where it grips the door, the chains beyond pulling. An almost anguished cry from the boy makes Wesker's breath catch in his throat. He wants to be a gentleman. He ruts faster against the door. If he doesn't cum here he is sure he will wrap that chain around the boys throat, push him face down in his dog bed and fuck him while he suffocates. Wesker is sure, the friction building and the black behind his eyelids taking monstrous shape in fantasy, he would have the best orgasm of his life fucking Chris to death. Knowing Chris's pain peaks to something terrible enough that it might finally match even a day of what Wesker had gone through, injected and strapped down. Dying, he is sure, hurts as much as becoming. Some soft human thing could only understand Wesker in it's worst moment, in it's crescendo of losing everything down to bone and breath.

And Wesker wants so badly to be understood.

He bites deeper into his hand, one canine digging in, sharp enough that it's going to blanch purple tomorrow. To break skin and taste blood with teeth, Wesker knows, takes an almost feral bite. Most people never quite get there. He snarls against his hand, forehead pressed to the door. He wants to taste blood.

"Wesker.." it's his name called out in the Yankee accent. That lonely, confused way Chris's rage takes its final form like the night before. Too young to be confident in it, it peters-out to something sad and broken and in turn, breaks Wesker's fantasy. His eyes open, cock twitching with how close he'd been, his teeth pulling out of the deep indention in his own hand.

"I want to go home.." the voice calls weakly. Another clank.

"I want to go home.."

And suddenly Wesker is just a man again, naked and wet alone in a room. Another persons fate tied around his neck like a noose with all the others.

They both breathe miserably.

****

Wesker steps out of the bathroom without a towel.

Water still clings to his pale skin as he crosses the room completely naked, cock still heavy and hard against his thigh. He doesn't try to hide it.

He climbs onto the large bed and settles back against the pillows. The heavy swastika hanging above the headboard frames him like a grotesque work of art - black of heart, black on black, see how mean I can be. One leg bends at the knee and hikes up casually, the other stretched out. His fingers begin to drum a slow, restless rhythm against his taut stomach.

Chris recoils instantly, chain rattling as he presses his back harder against the wall. He keeps his eyes fixed on the floor, jaw clenched so tight the muscle jumps.

Wesker watches him in silence. He waits for his little bear to finish it's crying.

Finally, Chris speaks.

“I’m no use to you here,” he mutters, staring miserably at the floorboards. “I could just… I could just leave. It could be like I escaped. You could say I slipped the chain, or, or someone helped me. No one has to know. I won’t tell anyone about this place, about any of it. Just… let me go. Please.”

The words spill out stupid and desperate, barely coherent. A man grasping at smoke.

Wesker’s fingers still on his stomach. “I told you already,” he says matter-of-fact: “Germans do not give up what is theirs.”

Chris’s shoulders curled inward. He still won't look up.

Wesker lets the silence stretch. Then he smiles, humorless.

“Look at me, American boy.”

When Chris refuses, Wesker’s voice drops even lower.

“Look. At. Me.”

Chris’s throat works on a hard swallow. Slowly, painfully, he lifts his head. Chris looks wrecked. Black eye swollen nearly shut, cheek split open from the razor wire, fresh bandages wrapped around his forearms, body covered in bruises.

“I’m no use to you like this,” Chris rasps, voice cracking. “I can’t fly. I can’t fight. I’m just… bleeding on your floor. Just let me go. I’ll disappear. I swear on my life, Wesker. Just let me go home.”

The words sound insane even as he says them. Desperate babbling. He knows it. Wesker knows it.

“You’re begging now,” Wesker observs softly, almost amused. “How quickly the proud American pilot falls apart.”

Chris’s good eye flickers with shame and fury, but he doesn't look away this time.

“I’m not begging,” he lies. “I’m just telling you the truth. Keeping me here is pointless. I'm useless.”

Wesker breathes out a dark chuckle.

“You are many things, little American boy,” Wesker murmurs, voice poison, “but useless is not one of them. Not to me.” Wesker knew a pilot, once. His name was Hans.

He let his gaze drag slowly down Chris’s battered body, lingering on the bandages, the bruises, the hurt.

Chris’s jaw clenches. His hands curls into fists against his thighs, but the fight is draining out of him, replaced by exhausted misery.

“I just want to go home…” he whispers again, something almost not-there.

Wesker’s expression doesn't soften. If anything, it grows more possessive at the insistence. At Chris not seeing he is home.

He stands, without any shame, and moves around the room - he sweeps up the silver letter opener from the desk, then retrieves both handguns he’d left on the nightstand. He collects the heavier crystal paperweights, a sharp knife, even the brass candlestick from the side table. Anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon.

From around his neck, Wesker unclasped a thin silver chain. Small keys dangle from it. He uses one to unlock the bottom drawer of the ornate desk, dumps every dangerous item inside with a heavy clatter, then locks it again. The chain goes back around his neck, the keys resting against his sternum.

Only then does he turn back toward Chris, now holding a different, smaller key.

Chris pulls back again though there's really no place for him to go, pressing his back hard against the wall as Wesker approaches him and and crouches.

Wesker chuckles. “Easy, Barchen.”

He reaches out and with a quiet click, the collar lock springs open. Wesker pulls the heavy thing away from Chris’s throat and sets it aside on the floor. The skin beneath is raw and bruised.

Chris stares straight ahead, breathing fast and shallow through his nose. He doesn't move. Doesn't speak.

Wesker remains crouched in front of him, studying the damage. Then, in a tone so fond it is almost shocking, he asks gently: “Did they bandage you well?”

Wesker’s hand rises slowly, giving him time to flinch. When he doesn't, those long fingers settle against the raw, bruised skin of Chris’s neck where the collar has bitten in all evening. At first the touch is light, then it deepens. Wesker begins to massage the aching flesh.

A war rages behind Chriss eyes, the urge to shove Wesker away, to snarl, to fight, clashing hard against the exhaustion and the knowledge that it will only make things worse. His hands twitches once at his sides… then stay still.

Wesker notices.

His fingers continue their almost loving movements, kneading the sore muscles, tracing the deep red imprint left by the steel. He squeezes gently at the sides of Chris’s neck, not enough to choke, but enough to remind him how easily he could.

“Do I still smell badly?” Wesker asks, voice intimate.

Before Chris can react, Wesker leans in closer, rising slightly on his knees. He presses the front of his throat directly against Chris’s face, the damp skin of his neck flush to the American’s nose and mouth. The scent of his cologne is still there, jasmine, oudwood, mixed with clean skin.

“Smell me,” he insists quietly, almost a whisper. His hand slides to the back of Chris’s head, fingers pushing into his hair to hold him there. “Go on.”

Chris’s whole body goes rigid. His injured cheek brushes Wesker’s collarbone.

“Tell me the truth. Do I still smell like death… or have I finally washed it off for you?”

Chris is a kid again, play fighting with his neighbor in the front yard. Billy had pinned both his wrists into the Kentucky blue grass of his parents lawn and panted, staring down in triumph at Chris bested. Chris's cock had twitched itself hard from the contact, from the force, from another boy gripping him and pinning him down.

He is a kid again in the troubled waters of memory, Wesker's throat pressed near his lips, an exhaustion and defeat drumming through his weary body so mighty that his head droops a little at Wesker's nails raking across the back of his head. It's almost paternal until it isn't.

"Please let me go home," The words mumble so close into Wesker's throat that they move his lips like giving a kiss, and Wesker groans and presses himself in closer, his hand pulls Chris's head in.

Chris is a kid again, laying in his bed with a magazine about sports. His hand in his pants, eyes roaming up and down a swimmers body.

"You'll never wash that smell off," Chris mumbles. He might be talking to himself.

Wesker finally pulls back, just enough to hold up a small pill in his free hand from the desk.

"For the pain," he offers, softly. Chris stares at it, breathing harder than he should, but shakes his head no. Wesker just smiles. "It's an order, of course, but obeying can feel so sweet. Let me teach you to obey, beautiful dog." He drags his nose up Chris's cheek, over the barbed cut, enjoying his hiss of pain at their contact before pulling away enough to put the pill on his own tongue.

Chris's fist have gone white, nails making crescents in his palms.

Chris is a kid again, or maybe not a kid at all, watching the guys in basic shower off for the day.

He keeps his eyes locked on the floor and Wesker's hand goes from massaging his scalp to gripping his short hair and yanking his head back roughly so that his eyes must drag up again.

Wesker's skin still feels damp and humid from his bath, naked, hard enough that his cock points up - all broad shoulders and perfect skin that seems to go on forever - so close that he is all Chris can feel, see, smell - taste, he swears he can even taste that cologne. Chris could be no more gay than Wesker could be - a gifted ace pilot, a perfect German soldier - they both have images terrible and beautiful to uphold and neither of them could possibly be gay.

"Gehorchen," Wesker whispers over the pill on his tongue. Obey.

Chris turns his head away as far as it will go - he focuses on the window.

An annoyed look crosses Wesker's mask and he reaches out, grabbing Chris's face hard enough that there will be two more lovely bruises by morning - what is a gentleman if he can't even control a hound?

His tongue forces it's way into Chris's mouth but Chris bites down immediately, his hands coming up to fist against his broad shoulders and, finally, Wesker tastes blood. It makes him smile as he bites back into Chris: his lip, teeth clanking, his tongue. Bitten, devoured. It takes a feral strength to actually draw blood with teeth, Wesker would know, but they both manage it.

Chris bucks beneath him, but Wesker has leverage, weight. He slides a knee between Chris's thighs, forcing them wider, grinding his own aching cock against the American. He shifts, pinning one of Chris's wrists above his head with ease, the other hand sliding down to wrap around Chris - he's getting hard despite everything.

"You hate this," he whispers, almost tenderly. "You hate how much your body wants it." Wesker would know. There is poetry in wanting what you shouldn't - another man, the enemy. There is a poetry in being resigned to one's fate - to one's situation.

Wesker would know that, too.

Chris spits blood at him, the pill going with it. The blood lands on Wesker's cheek in a spray, but he only laughs. He leans in again, licking a red stripe up Chris's throat and retrieving the pill from his chest where it sticks, screaming defiance.

"Swallow it," Wesker orders, pressing his own bleeding mouth to Chris's forehead like a long held, tender kiss while he pushes two fingers into Chriss's mouth, driving the pill back in through blood still pooling, deeper, until he might be gagging him.

"Or I'll force it down with my cock." Which is what he really wants to do.

Chris is too exhausted, too battered to fight properly. Tears swell at the corners of his eyes in humiliating visages of his own weakness as Wesker’s fingers slide deeper, fucking slowly in and out of his mouth. It hurts. Everything hurts.

He swallows, first his own blood, then the pill, forced down under the relentless pressure of Wesker’s fingers. The shame is worse than the pain, or atleast close.

"Good boy," Wesker purrs, not pulling his fingers free. He keeps them buried between Chris’s lips, toying them in and out, touching his tongue, pressing down on it, making him feel the violation on the wounds Wesker ripped into him with his own teeth. Saliva and blood drip down Chris’s chin.

He pushes a third finger in, stretching Chris’s already aching mouth wider. Then a fourth. The sounds of saliva and blood squelching around his knuckles fills the room. Chris gags, fresh tears spilling as the corners of his lips split further.

"I want my cock in your mouth," Wesker whispers against Chris’s forehead. His hips press forward, rutting his thick, leaking cock harder against Chris’s thigh, smearing precum on his property.

Chris fights as much as he can, which isn't much. His hands claw desperately at Wesker’s forearm, nails digging into muscle. He tries to yank the invading hand away. One hand flies up into Wesker’s wet blond hair, fisting it tight and jerking hard. Wesker’s head snaps back slightly, but he only lets out a pleased hum, refusing to pull away. His lips stay pressed to Chris’s forehead while his fingers keep forcing deeper.

"Shhh… I want to fuck your mouth," Wesker repeats, voice rough with lust.

Wesker is just a kid, or maybe he's not a kid at all - another officer scrambling out of his bed as the Fuhrer stands in disgust at his door.

He curls his fingers tighter, pushing, forcing. His thumb almost forces in. Chris’s jaw strains as Wesker slowly, relentlessly tries to work his entire fist past those bleeding lips. Chris’s teeth scrape against Wesker’s knuckles, he hurts himself in the process and does not care.

The Fuhrer's men put a bullet in Han's face before he could get to his feet.

Wesker’s eyes half-shut in dark ecstasy as he feels Chris’s mouth spasming around his fist. His cock throbs against Chris’s thigh.

"So you're flawed, afterall," the Fuhrer had shrieked, beating a cane against Wesker's back. All that effort in Lebensborn, all the work his men were doing to ensure the race was secure. And here he was, the only child from the project for the new world order, fucking men. Schwul. Filthy schwul. He couldn't have had his bodyguards beat Wesker hard enough to express his disappointment, but he was going to try, anyway. Perhaps, he thought, he'd been too gentle with the boy.

He twists his fist slightly, just enough to feel Chris’s teeth again, savoring every weak, broken twitch and tear.

The long barracks at the edge of the compound. They called them Freudenabteilungen in the officers mess, laughing over cognac. Joy Divisions. Every camp had one, even if the name changed with the commandant’s mood, even if they were called something else in their weekly reports down in type. Wesker had been ordered to inspect them intimately, after the debacle. As soon as he had healed enough to walk again. And his camp, when he got one, the Fuhrer said, would have it's own. "Educate yourself on what men do you disgusting schwul."

He still remembers: sweat, blood, fear baked into the walls. Girls, some barely more than children, bent over cots or strapped to benches, hanging from the ceiling, hanging from the beds, crushed under boots on the ground. It looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse. Officers grunting, hands fisted in dark hair. One Sturmbannfuhrer had a skinny brunette, cock hilting while he backhanded her in perfect rhythm.

They always swore the girls wanted it eventually.

“Pain and pleasure are the same if they’re hot enough,” the man had panted to Wesker with a wink, still thrusting. “You just have to burn them right. Until their brains can’t shame them anymore.”

Screams started sharp, then turned into something else, almost moans if you tilted your head just right. Some officers liked to keep them conscious. Others preferred them limp. A few made games of it - how many could they kill with their dicks inside in just one night. How long could you keep thrusting until it felt like a corpse? Was there even a difference with such inferior creatures? What made an object and what made a person? Those questions got tossed around in late evenings over cards and the men would shrug, snubbing out hand rolled cigarettes. Those weren't questions for one another, those were questions for god in your bed late at night while your wife lay beside you.

Wesker had walked those halls month after month, hands clasped behind his back, face blank, nodding approval. Those men disgusted him.

Why am I failed where they are not? he had wondered more than once.

He barely notices he's started crying, as close to cumming as he is, Chris still trying to pull the fist out of his mouth.

A Kapo holding a girl’s head down while two officers took turns. They laughed about how “good German discipline” made even jew cunts obedient in the end.

Wesker groans.

“They want it. They all do, once you burn the shame out.” He says it out loud from memory.

His fist pushes a fraction deeper. Chris’s tears are running down his wrist now.

The memory still claws at him until he can’t separate past from present, until he doesn't know what is real. What he hates and what he loves. What he wants and what he doesn't. Who he is and who he was turned into.

He finally wrenches his hand free from Chris’s mouth. Blood and saliva stretch between his knuckles and Chris’s swollen lips. Chris gasps for air.

Wesker rises higher on his knees, one hand braced on the wall. His other hand wraps around his own throbbing cock and he starts stroking desperately. Desperate just to get it over with.

“Put your mouth on it,” he mutters. “Want it… ich will es… bitte… put your fucking mouth on it and want it.”

German spills out in fragments. If he doesn't cum he's going to kill Chris, he's sure of it.

Chris stares up at him, eyes wide and wet. He’s never seen anything like this. His own teenage shame, jerking off quietly into a pillow while his mom did dishes downstairs with sports magazines… it feels pathetic now. This is something else entirely. A lifetime of rot and horror and denied hunger pouring out of a man. Out of a monster. Neither of them really knows which Wesker is. Both, probably. Both, certainly.

Wesker’s head falls back, he's muttering and begging under his breath.

Chris’s hand moves before he can think.

Trembling, he reaches up and places his palm gently against Wesker’s tense abdomen. This is what he would do to guys he had to take up for training, guys who were losing themselves at the altitude climb, in panic or some dark room of the mind that only they stood inside of. If you didn't bring them down the room grew, the room grew until there was no getting through. Those guys, before Chris learned how to bring them down with a solid touch - a grab on their shoulder or slap on the arm, damn near kicked his plane windows out when they started to really panic in their own heads.

Wesker gasps at the soft, voluntary contact. And then he is dragging out of the halls of joy divisions, he is back out of the beds in Lebensborn where the fuhrer said he'd breed out a better version of Wesker, one not defective, being whipped as he fucked himself into women. He is rewinding to Hans smiling on top of him, kissing him because he wanted to - because that is the only way kisses should come - he is a boy again in his bed with the shepherd.

Chris watches Wesker come back, and encouraged by nothing he can name, Chris slides that hand higher, then brings up the other, both palms embracing sweaty skin. He feels the rapid heartbeat under his fingertips slow down. He pushes himself up onto his own knees until they’re chest to chest.

Wesker’s face is twisted with something like pain - Chris can't believe he's enjoyed anything since walking in this room. Chris cradles it between his hands then moves up, fingers sliding into damp blond hair.

A good American boy shouldn’t be able to stomach this kind of suffering. Not in himself, not in others. All Chris has ever wanted to do is soar above the filth of the world. To live in a world better than the one that the mud and dirt and ground offer - or atleast be so far up that he could believe it's something it isn't. Even flying here, flying over Berlin, you'd have never known the way the gutters were stained red if you didn't read it in the briefings, if the poison tabs in your jacket didn't warn you that once you touched down, the ground was hell again. Once you crashed down.

Chris leans in and kisses him.

Soft. Tender in a way Wesker does not deserve.

Wesker’s eyes open in shock and then he’s cumming. He shudders, moaning helplessly into the bloody kiss as Chris keeps cradling his face, as he whispers some nonsense to gentle the moment.

The kiss lingers even as Wesker’s orgasm fades, as all thats left is the inevitable clarity of just how corrupt desire can be. Wesker would know.

A man who has never apologized for anything in his life suddenly apologizes.

He presses his face into the crook of Chris’s neck and begins to shake.

“I’m sorry…” he whispers. “I’m sorry for hurting you.”

The words sound foreign in his mouth, reluctant. Like they’re being dragged out with hooks (Wesker would know). He says it again, quieter.

“I’m sorry."

Chris feels like he’s slipping under again. The room tilts. His body is heavy, his jaw a throbbing mess of pain, but there’s a strange, warm haze creeping in at the edges - the pill finally taking hold. Shock or drugs, he can’t tell anymore. Everything feels distant. Nothing seems very important.

He nods numbly.

His hands comes up and stroke through Wesker’s damp blond hair. Slow, gentle strokes. The same hand that had been clawing at Wesker’s arm minutes ago now soothes him. Chris doesn’t know what else to do. He’s too exhausted, too overwhelmed, too drugged to process the sheer insanity of Albert Wesker, a monster in the briefings and a monster in real life, breaking down in his arms.

Wesker’s arms wrap around Chris’s waist.

"My little Barchen," he whispers fondly again. "I will not kill you."

I will not. Nein.

Chris supposes it's good enough to black out to.

*****

They have both traded innocuous stories of youth, stories of ambition, stories from the heart, months into it. They understand some things about one another, maybe. Chris tries. God help him he tries as hard as that teacher Hellen Keller had, holding Wesker's hand to a flame and telling him its pain - pulling his face down and letting his eyelashes ghost Wesker's lips and calling it the opposite.

After two months Chris can manage exchanges in german and recognizes a few words when others speak around the household. He has had his arm almost broken once by Wesker but been held by him while falling almost every other night and somehow, call it stockholm syndrome, lilting off to sleep with Wesker's breath on his neck means more than the one almost-broken arm. Chris has trouble holding on to the anger and fear once Wesker comes back to him from his fits.

Tonight, the dour women from the kitchen tell him, when he comes in to pick at their vegetables at lunch time after his German lessons, they will be having dinner together. All of them. Bertha pulls the carrot out of his hand and tells him he's as bad as the children in spoiling his appetite - but Chris snatches the carrot back and runs (as much as he can run before Heinrich yells at him to stop). On queu from school Sherry rushes up the stairs to get a bath and put on a nice dress, telling everyone her father and mother are coming to eat. Chris helps her pick out a dress from a princess-worthy closet. Chris makes the mistake of absently asking her if all the dresses are really hers - they werent always, she simply replies. He fingers one tulle overlayer dusted with glitter and wonders who, then, must be missing them.

"It is never everyone in for dinner," one of the women mutters later to Chris, broken english but trying her best. They like him. Everyone in the household likes him, despite differences and despite his being a filthy American POW spy (one child had yelled that at him galloping by on horseback as Chris took his daily walk in the field by the house and Heinrich had chuckled with his gun at Chris's back. Henrich and the boy, perhaps, do not like him. But Wesker likes him. Wesker likes him first as a trophy, then as a peculiar object of lust, then against all odds: just likes him.

Wesker is not a good person - he says it sometimes in their quiet, just to remind Chris. Chris doesn't need to be reminded. He's as ashamed to watch a man masturbate and enjoy it (Wesker lays out on his bed some evenings and performs, just to watch Chris's eyes watch him - just to tell him to look when Chris's face goes too red and he has to look away - just to give an order) as he is to watch the enemy masturbate.

But there it is. Here it is. The lock clicking open and Wesker reclining again on the bed with his arm open, come, Komme her, and Chris crawls across the silk sheets to to lay his head on Wesker's chest while he smokes his evening cigarettes. He talks, mostly in German - he doesn't want Chris to understand, he just wants to hear him hum while his long fingers rake through Chris's hair.

Chris's cuts heal, his bruises fade - a few pop up to take their place but nothing Chris can't handle.

"The war won't last forever," Wesker had said one night as he stood at the window of his room, looking out over the crematory tower. There had been a conviction in it, a quality, that sounded the same as the one that hit Chris that first day looking over the camp: this can't stand. He'd sounded relieved. "You'll go home then, Barchen." Chris had sat in his underwear on the bed, flipping through a book, but looked up to watch Wesker's back as he spoke of a future that could mean nothing good for himself.

"I thought Germans didn't give up what was theirs," Chris had said without really meaning to. In his head it had seemed light, teasing, but out in the air, when Wesker turned to look at him after the statement, it was not light. Because they both knew Chris was his and that he'd have to give him up if Chris wasn't going to die in this place.

Wesker had simply smiled a half smile and turned back to the window. "Perhaps I will go with you," Wesker had finally offered out. It seemed absurd to imagine and Chris had simply looked back to the book, unaware Wesker was making plans.

****

Dinner feels like something folded out of an old european folktale. Everything is warm with candlelight when Chris comes down, everyone dressed neat and tidy. Commandant Wesker at the head of the table, of course.There is a chair left open next to Wesker and another further down - Chris moves to it but Sherry takes it first, smiling at her place by her mother. So it is. Chris puts his eyes on the table and takes his place by Wesker and as soon as he's seated a comfortable chatter begins - first just the old women of the household and then the birkins joining in. Heinrich ambles on with a few of the officers of the property. There is the clatter of silverware on plates and dishes passed around - it reminds Chris of Christmas time back home, an awkward family seated together who might rather not be and a lot of good food and alcohol to make it passable.

Chris stays mostly silent but uses his new words to ask after the potatoes and the cabbage - his instructor down at the end looking pleased. On Wesker's other side is, Chris learns, Sherrys father. The same William Birkin who had intended to have him for his tests on that first day (though luckily shock and then morphine had taken most of his memories from that day). Building C by the fences, Sherry had pointed out as her fathers lab and which Wesker told Chris he must never go near. He had said it sternly. Never. Chris had happily obliged.

Just having the man sit across from him now, peering through spectacle lenses that throw back the light and obscure his eyes, gives Chris the creeps.

And how William stares.

He drinks red Cabernet at a rate that causes his wife to call down that it is not a race, but he takes another big swallow and stares harder at Chris. Under the table Wesker's hand reaches over and runs one finger up Chris's hand before retreating. Reminding Chris that the others are just noise. That it is the two of them, just them, at the table.

"I hate that uniform," Chris says softly,trying not to even look at Wesker in it, imagining noone but Sherry speaks enough English to understand him. And no one seems to notice except William, who throws his napkin at his empty wine glass and starts talking in punched, annoyed german to the head of table.

Wesker offers a few terse words in response, forking a green on his plate. Whatever William says next is accented with Hauptmann Redfield. Chris knows that one. The officers use it as a joke when he passes them, along with one of those ugly salutes that he hates so much. It's some rank, some play on a rank when Chris is supposed to be the family dog. Most of the table is barely talking by then, trying not to look, careful to listen.

Wesker is getting annoyed - Chris can tell by the fix of his jaw and the way he stares at William as if he's ordering him not to make this into a fight for everyone to witness. If William will not respect the order, Chris will.

"Do.. do you guys like magic?" Chris blurts out loud and fast, trying to talk over the next obnoxious thing William is saying. The interruption to a prominent party member might have earned him a beating but it is Wesker's elbows coming down on the table, forgetting his manners he's so invested, that causes everyone else to ignore the interruption and relax.

Chris swallows.If there is one thing he gleaned from all the footage and field notes he read back on base before the mission it's that Germans love to be entertained. Sure, he could do that.

Chris struggles with his words. "Streich.. Der Streich?" Most of the faces look confused so he stands, thinks, and grabs a spoon. William scoffs loudly but Wesker looks amused, which is enough for everyone else to drink their wine and watch the American boy. Chris does every trick he can remember with what he has on hand, which is a lot of nothing. The spoon bend, a double cork trick, a few coin slight-of-hands that he has to bum a reichsmark from Wesker for and one of the officers throws his hands up: "Now the dog gets an allowance??" The table roars with laughter. The most popular is cups up, though. An officer even clears the roast beef to make room. One by one Chris bests them all. Heinrich gets sweaty, changing his mind several times trying to get all the cups up like Chris did. When he fails, though, everyone just laughs and drinks. When it's Wesker's turn he stands, studying the cups. Chris decides to humor them all and leans in, whispering to the commandant on how to execute the trick as if he's a lovely assistant no one wants to see embarrassed. They all laugh as Wesker performs it flawlessly and all three cups go up.

He looks at Chris over the laughter and something warm passes between them before the moment is swept away by music going on on the gramophone and Sherry running to dance with Heinrich in the livingroom, her dress moving like starlight. The wives follow, pulling their officers. The maids and help all relax, finishing their meal so they can move to clean it up.

William never stops frowning, not when they clap for Chris at the end of his makeshift performance. Not when Wesker leans in to whisper something for only Chris's ears. Not when Chris blushes a deep red in response and fumbles to clean up the cups. Wesker takes Chris's wine glass and fills it and hands it to him, his fingers brushing the boys. William stares hard at it, at wesker's pinky skirting Chris's.

William never stops frowning.

Chris drinks, trying to explain to Wesker he's never been drunk before - it feels light but when Wesker answers by leaning in and gently wiping a bit of wine off Chris's lower lip, dragging it down with his thumb with an intense fixation, William throws his napkin again.

"Wer ist wessen Hund?" He hisses at both of them before storming off. He doesn't go to dance. He doesn't move to refill his wine. He leaves completely, heading back toward Building C. A sour air blows in where he leaves the door hanging open.

Chris's smile fades.

Who is Who's dog now?

****

Chris is a little drunk when dinner is really done, when he climbs back up the stairs and shrugs off his blazer and stares at his collar laying on the floor. Usually Heinrich puts him away after dinner. But this dinner is different and Heinrich is still downstairs.

There's a shift that Chris can't quite articulate. Something has changed, finally.

Chris walks around the room, looking at books because that's all that's really in Wesker's bedroom. Everything is in German, of course. He tilts them off the shelves and lets them drop back into place. From Weskers stories he knows he was trained to be more scientist than soldier. Chris hadn't asked how he ended up here, then. He means to, but supposes the story will be a heavy one. And Wesker still scares Chris when things get heavy.

His fingers trace the spines of the larger tomes. Physikalische Chemie. Molekulare Genetik. He couldn’t even pretend to understand half the words.

The grounds outside are dark, he observes, moving to the window. Just the watchtower lit up and the searchlights doing lazy sweeps. His breath fogs the glass he leans in so close, tracing his index finger through it as he watches figures still shuffling in the dark, doing their work.

It won't stand .

The stairs creak in response.

Chris turns and Wesker stands at the doorway. He looks every inch the archetype - pleased, composed, wicked. The thing Chris had looked at posters of even before enlisting and had known the right words to call it. He doesn't have the words now, and that scares him, too. He has them: evil, awful, killer. But Wesker isn't just those things and Chris finds himself at a crossroads of thought - who is a person, what is a person? His idealism had always been sure and true down a line: what you did was who you were. But lately, he watches Wesker's back as he rounds the camp, a flat expression of misery on his face, and Chris ponders all the ways people wear their chains.

“I hate that uniform,” he mutters, repeating the complaint from dinner. Focusing on just the visceral thing in the room. Not the rest. The rest: vast, unchangeable fabric of all of this that Chris is not poet or philosopher enough to parse.

Wesker’s response is a snort, the corner of his mouth twitching. He steps fully into the room, the door clicking shut behind him with a firm kick of his boot.

“Then come take it off of me, little bear."

Chris hesitates only a second, the alcohol making his movements a touch slower, heavier. Cautious. But Chris has learned in long months that obeying truly is easier. He had joked and told Wesker to try starting with things Chris could bring himself to do, if he needed obedience so badly. Wesker had obliged because he said he did, he needed it quite badly. He turned their evenings into making Chris turn down his sheets, Chris running his baths, Chris washing his back, Chris feeding him grapes (Chris had almost refused the latter but Wesker demonstrated by feeding him grapes, first. And Chris had stared up at him, smiling fondly while Wesker carefully pushed a green grape past Chris's teeth, his finger dragging on Chris's tongue).

"It is nice, yes?" Wesker had asked, staring down at him, touching his lip as Chris chewed the grape. Yes. And Wesker had leaned in and kissed him just enough to taste the juice on his lips and breathed against his mouth. "Feed me, feed me like this."

It may have seemed demeaning from the outside but those simple orders were Chris's order, weren't they?

Who is Who's dog now?

Chris obeys again.

He crosses over and stands just under Wesker, staring up with a face that must be too honest because Wesker's pleasant expression fades to something more comptemplative. Chris starts with the leather cross-strap and belt. His fingers work the buckle open, engraved with the SS motto. The belt slides free with a soft rasp of leather. He sets it aside, holster and all.

Wesker watches him steadily.

Chris moves to the tunic buttons, starting at the collar and working down. One by one they open to reveal the crisp white shirt beneath, the black tie knotted neatly at the throat. He removes it all. The silver aiguillette and medals. Then the shirt buttons, each inch down revealing pale skin with nicks and scars. Chris had already spent one evening pointing and requesting their stories and Wesker had humored him, like a father with his curious son. Chris's finger sliding to the pink scar just under Wesker's left breast and Wesker had sighed, an arm behind his head and a book on his bent knee. "Visceral perforation from shrapnel," and he exhaled bored smoke and leveled his eyes to Chris. Some scars got stories attached. Some did not.

Wesker’s breathing remains even as Chris touches the scars in his effort to slide the shirt off his shoulders but his eyes have darkened with interest.

The boots are last - Chris sits Wesker on the edge of the bed to drop to his knees and tug them off one by one, the leather resisting before yielding with a pull. Wesker had ordered Chris to shine them with his tongue, once, and Chris had obeyed that order, too.

"You are very happy to lick my boots, yes?" He had asked, then.

Yes.

After the boots are off Chris remains on his knees, looking up at him, the haze of drink mixing with something else. With whatever the shift is. He's sure Wesker feels it too. A shift where going back to the collar feels wrong - like it would surprise them both if Wesker could bring himself to turn that lock. Though they both know he will. He will do it simply because it is wrong.

Somehow they are more, now. As if Williams anger and Wesker letting him go had said something about them neither had admitted, before. How could William Birkin be so enraged over just a dog.

He was angry because Chris is not just a dog.

Wesker reaches down, fingers threading through Chris’s hair.

“Better?” he asks.

Chris’s voice comes out quiet. “Who would you have been if you hadn’t had to put it on?” Still kneeling, eyes lifted to Wesker’s face.

Wesker’s fingers keep moving through his hair. For a moment he doesn't answer. Then, with a kind of solemn respect for the honesty hanging between them: “I was made to put it on,” he says simply. “There was never another path. I have always been Faust and you.. you are my Gretchen. In other lives too, I'm sure of it. I am the dark and you are light, forever."

Chris swallows. Wesker had told him about that story once - deals with the devil, innocence tainted. Wesker, of course, had found it erotic as he whispered its cliff notes against the shell of Chris's ear.

He leans in without thinking and presses his lips to Wesker’s knee through his pants, still on. Wesker’s hand tightens in his hair instantly.

Then the other shift comes, as Chris knew it would. As it always does when Wesker spends too long looking at him.

“Suck my cock,” Wesker orders with a sweet lilt like it's a suggestion just for Chris's benefit, his grip trying to guide Chris forward toward his hardening length.

Chris pulls back sharply, irritation flashing through the haze of alcohol. “You don’t have to always talk to me like that. I’m not-”

Before he can build the argument he's been sitting with - the one about them, about whatever the hell this thing between them actually is, about roles and feelings and the way Wesker still treats him like a possession -Wesker moves.

Strong hands hook under Chris’s armpits. In one effortless motion, Wesker hauls him up off the floor and drags him onto his lap. Chris finds himself straddling, huffing in protest even as his body settles against Wesker’s skin. He tries to look annoyed despite his flush.

Wesker doesn't allow the distance or the petulance, though. His hand grips Chris’s chin firmly, tilting his face up so their eyes meet.

“I talk to you like that because I want you to suck me,” Wesker says. Chris opens his mouth to snap back, but Wesker holds his chin tighter. “I want you to suck me because you are beautiful. You are so beautiful I must have you. Always."

Wesker’s other hand joins the first, both sliding into Chris’s hair, then down over his face, long, elegant fingers tracing his jaw, his cheekbones, his lips. There is something almost desperate in the touch, like Wesker needs him to understand.

He leans in and ghosts his mouth to Chris’s throat, kissing the skin just above where the collar usually sits. Slow. Open-mouthed. Possessive. There is a collar that will never come off, it says, no matter the key, no matter the effort.

“It sounds depraved when you talk to me that way,” Chris manages.

“Mmm.” Wesker hums against his neck, teeth grazing lightly. “Depravity is very intimate.”

Wesker would know.

His hands slide down Chris’s back, pulling him closer until their chests press together.

“Look at me,” Wesker murmurs, pulling back just enough to meet his eyes again. “You can be angry. You can fight me. But right now… I want your mouth on me, little bear. Not because I command it. Because you want it. I want to fuck you because you want it. I want you to say you are mine because you want to be mine."

He kisses Chris's throat again.

"Do you want it?" he mumbles, tongue and teeth. Chris's silence makes him pause.

"Say no and I'll never ask again." He pulls back once more. "Say no and I will keep you safe here anyway until this war ends, and then you can go home. I will not touch you again." He pulls his hands away to make his point and the absence makes Chris long for their return.

That is the point, made.

It's so genuine that Chris stills completely. And the idea of when the war ends and he goes home suddenly scares Chris in a selfish way, because this is finite. No matter how much more their feelings grow day by day, it can not last.

And then Chris is crying for a reason in the commadants room that he's never cried for, before. He feels young and stupid, he feels like a traitor to everything, but he just shakes his head at himself as a tear rolls down off his face and a pain grows behind his eyes because he cant say no and it makes him hate himself.

"Say it," Wesker demands, eyes hard."Say you do not love me."

And then Chris is really crying because he does love Wesker.

Wesker presses his face into Chris's wet cheek and inhales.

"I adore your pain," he whispers.

"Then hurt me," Chris whispers hoarsely. "Tell me you love me too."

Wesker hurts him.

"I love you, too, Barchen."

****

The camp is liberated on a Tuesday.

Chris sits with his head bowed, reciting a passage from one of his grammar books. The instructor taps his finger, helping him keep the rhythm and pronunciation.

Chris tilts his head, stretching his neck, and catches sight of two large hickeys just beneath his shirt collar. They stare back at him wickedly in the reflection of the crystal tabletop.

He smiles.

Then comes the explosion.

The instructor shoots to his feet. His face turns ghostly white. Without a word, he bolts for the door, papers scattering behind him. Chris remains alone for a moment, stunned. Then he rises and steps into the hallway.

Chaos already reigns. Staff members scream and shove past one another. Once beautiful vases and silver trays crash to the floor. A crystal decanter lies shattered and the air smells like brandy. Servants run with flushed, excited faces.

Chris moves quickly to the tall window at the end of the corridor.

Outside, across the frost-hardened field, Russian tanks roll forward through the muck. A soldier straddles one tank’s turret, hand raised in a fist. “Svoboda!” he roars. Freedom!

Another soldier hangs half out of an open hatch, screaming “Smert’ nemtsam!”Death to the Germans. He drinks straight from a bottle, vodka spilling down his chin as the tank clears the way.

It's over.

Chris tears himself away from the window and runs through the house, feet pounding over scattered silverware and overturned furniture. When he bursts through the front doors, the scene swallows him.

Russian soldiers swarm the grounds. Several have already seized German officers. They plead, pistols pressed to their forehead. One shot cracks sharply. The soldiers laugh.

Tanks smash through the camp’s perimeter fence, barbed wire snapping and twisting. Men in striped uniforms begin pouring from the barracks, some running, others standing frozen in disbelief or too weak to move much at all.

Chris stands in the doorway, elation surging through him so fiercely it hurts. They are here. They are really here. But the feeling quickly curdles.

He braces one hand against the doorframe, breathing hard.

Chris launches forward, sprinting down the steps and across the torn-up lawn toward the camp.

He spots Wesker near the edge of the officers quarters, screaming orders at panicked German soldiers trying to flee into the woods.

Wesker turns, and his eyes lock onto Chris.

The war will not last. Wesker's voice had been hopeful when he said it, despite what it meant for him.

At that exact moment, two burly Soviet soldiers seize him from behind. One grabs Wesker by the collar and slams a fist into his stomach, doubling him over. The other wrenches his arms behind his back with a vicious twist, nearly popping his shoulder. They laugh loudly as they manhandle him, shoving him forward and pointing toward the open field where the executions are already beginning.

Chris’s head snaps around. He sees the it clearly: dozens of camp officers being dragged across the mud by laughing Russians. Some are already forced to their knees in a ragged line, heads bowed, as rifles are raised in front of them. They deserve it, of course - it's only half of what they deserve. But..

“No!” Chris shouts. He fights wildly as the soldiers start dragging Wesker in that direction, grabbing at their arms and shoulders. “Wait! Stop!”

Behind them, the grand house suddenly lights up in a massive burst of orange flame as something inside detonates. Purifying fire.

Chris desperately latches onto one of the Soviet soldiers’ arms, yanking hard. “I’m American!” he cries, voice cracking. “American! He kept me hostage - This German dog held me here against my will!”

The two soldiers pause, glancing at each other. Chris presses on, tears stinging his eyes. “Please, let me be the one to kill him. Let me do it!”

The soldiers stare for a beat, then burst into roar of laughter. One claps Chris hard on the shoulder, clearly amused by the young man’s courage. The other nods, disarms Wesker and hands chris his gun. Then they shove him violently into the mud for Chris to take.

For a moment, the two of them walk in stunned silence through the surrounding madness, flanked by screaming on all sides. Surrounded by the end, bleeding in towards them at the speed of sound with every shot fired.

Chris’s voice drops to a broken whisper. “What do I do? Tell me what to do. How do I save you?”

Wesker just smiles, calm and strangely gentle. “You do not save me, little bear. I saved you.”

Chris shakes his head. “Stop being brave. Tell me. Tell me. I’ll tell them you were a spy working for us, I’ll-”

“No, little bear,” Wesker says softly.

Chris fights desperately, gripping onto Wesker’s arm harder as they push onto the muddy field. “Tell me how to save you,” he begs, voice raw.

Wesker only sighs and takes his spot on the line. Heinrich is already on his knees beside him as Wesker drops down.

Chris stands before them, shaking his head, the gun hanging heavy and pointed at the ground. Down the line, the shots begin. Sharp cracks, one after another. Chris keeps shaking his head. No. No. He just needs time to think. Just a little more time.

Heinrich takes a bullet straight through the eye. His body jerks and collapses into the mud.

It can not end like this - though Chris struggles to deny it's not a mercy set against the horror.. that even this end is more than what Wesker really deserves.

They both know that. The Russians know that. The dead Germans know that, the soil soaking in their blood knows that where it's soured with lye and rot.

Chris snaps out of his haze and turns back to Wesker, still shaking his head violently. “Tell me how to save you!” he screams. The words are swallowed by the relentless gunfire around them.

Wesker can only smile again. He reaches forward and trains the barrel of his gun in chris's hand to his own heart.

“Do it fast,” Wesker whispers. “That’s an order.”

All around them, the gunshots trickle to an end. The line falls silent. They are the only two left.

Chris is shaking, tears running down his face. A group of Soviet soldiers mumble together and then start walking toward them, rifles raised.

“Ich liebe dich,” Chris says pitifully, trembling, his thumb pulling the hammer back with a sharp click.

Wesker smiles fondly one last time, eyes soft in the firelight of the new world order burning, finally. Finally. .

“How sweet it is to hear in my mother tongue.”

As one Russian raises his pistol, Wesker tilts his chin up and levels his eyes.

"I will see you again, little bear."

An approaching shot misses Wesker by an inch - chris can hear the bullet cut close.

"Don't let it be them." Wesker asks for this last kindness and chris closes his eyes so he might forget, one day, the look on his lovers face when he grants it.

Chris pulls the trigger.

Wesker had pressed his fingers to the mirror, time and time again over the course of his life, and wondered if within him the same heart beat as it did for others. It seemed impossible to imagine it did, with what he had been tasked to do by the devil in this life.

But it had beat in him just the same, and it stops beating, too, just the same, with the one bullet his lugger had had loaded. Loaded for just such an end. For such a long wished release.

Around them, the last of the blackbirds in the dead trees scatter and chris shakes so hard that the gun drops from his wet hand. 

Overhead ally planes fly, liberation day. Chris tilts his head back to watch them, knowing that from up there, up high, none of this is real. Just glittering frosted fields and the sky stretching open on and on and on.