A/N: Just a short prelude for things to come~ Future chapters will undoubtedly be longer. P:

Silence.

Cold, bittersweet, ear shattering silence. It had almost been all that ever greeted Chris, anymore. It was only after the weeks that grew into months of constant check-ins from people who cared, who thought they could help, that he'd abandoned everything. The silence, as painful as it was, had been more preferable to pity. It didn't coddle him or lie and promise him that everything would get better; that it would all be okay when he knew it never could be. Nothing could make it right, nothing could ever settle the ache in his nerves.

It hadn't taken long for it all to become too much. He just couldn't handle the sad smiles or the glittering tears as hands patted away at his back, or when arms were woven around him in an attempted means of comfort. Pity, pity, pity, he hated it so. The pain in their eyes that reflected back at him, no where near the weight of his own as it bore holes in his body, splintering his heart with a dozen nails and weakening his muscles into the useless mush he wanted to become as he stopped everything. Just... Stopped.

No more fighting, no more wars. No more blood on his hands.

There were times when Chris could swear he saw it, the figurative red over his palms as he buried his face in them, willing his tears to wash it all away. Whenever salty rivulets ran dry, he would sit on the shower floor with the water spraying from above and watch as the red flowed from his skin into a swirl as it was carried down the drain. Yet still, his hands were stained.

Red, red, red.

It wasn't actually there - he wasn't crazy enough yet to think it was - but it felt like it, more often than not. His hands were dirty and never to be cleaned. No matter how hard he scrubbed at them, they were tainted by the guilt he clung so hard to.

If he could, he'd have stopped breathing a long time ago. There weren't exactly all that many people left who would actually miss him. Most had already gone long, long before him. Such was his curse, to survive everywhere that others did not. To be forced to push forward when all that he knew crumbled around him into ash and debris. Where all that he had left of old friends were memories and dreams, so vivid in his mind yet so far from his reach. It was always a reoccurring question - why them, why not me? Why did so many expect him to fight, when he was losing all reason to the more the years went by? Why did everything, the weight of the world, the people in it - fall on his shoulders while everyone else was damned to die around him?

His world had collapsed long ago. Chris had already fought for so long, his body was worn and tired, his soul aching and will dying. Regret was a common feeling, bringing forth faces of the past that haunted him on a daily basis. The smiles had faded away into dying shrieks, screams as men fell and became corrupted, converted into monstrosities that mankind had the nerve to create as tools to use against one another. No man should have seen what he had in all his years, and it was nigh impossible to walk away from it unscathed.

Now, Chris sat in the darkness of a cheap ass hotel with stained carpets and moldy walls, where the pipes screamed in protest upon every use and leaked buckets down to the floor. At times, he could hear the creaking from the people in the room above each time they took even the slightest step, yet for the moment there was the same uncomfortably thick layer of silence he'd been sitting in for the last three hours that only served to hack away at the few remaining strings of his sanity. He could feel them at the brink, prepared to give way and he almost wanted it.

His eyes fluttered, he felt tired; always so damn tired. But sleep was a hard thing to come by - it often took days just to taste it, when the exhaustion was too much and his body finally allowed him to give in. Pills stopped working long ago, and it was too tempting to reach the bottom of the bottle that they had become a danger to keep around. He considered it, a few times. But he was so sure he deserved the suffering more than the release.

"Surrender hardly suits you."

Chris would have jumped up at the voice under normal circumstances, when he could will his nerves into twitching, his muscles into moving. Instead his eyes blinked open, where brown oculars settled onto the source of the sound. Obscured by the darkness of the room, the little Chris could make out was a silhouette - shaped only from the small glimmer of moonlight streaming in through the half-open blinds. Chris didn't need to see him clearly to know who he was, to know it was his back that mahogany eyes were addressing in the curtain of shadows they shared.

"You remain here, drowning in your own self pity, while others die at the hands of bioterrorism. Had you shown such lack of concern in prior years, Uroboros would have relieved the world of such human weakness." He turned then, the glare of the moon bouncing off those familiar sunglasses. "That self righteous fire of yours is dwindling. It's only a matter of time before it diminishes entirely."

The most Chris cared to muster was a soft snort, "Then you'll be happy to know that if you're here to take what you want, you won't get much of a fight." Questions that would have plagued him in his right mind did not rise to the surface. No wonders of how the man could possibly be there in the flesh, living, breathing just as Chris had remembered. No curiosity about what happened in that god forsaken volcano all those years ago, after he'd left. There should have been more thoughts spurring into motion, making themselves well known in his mind, but instead there were none. Not a one.

"Now, now, Christopher... Simplicity has hardly ever been in your grasp." The blond turned back toward the window, small streaks of white revealing the curvature of a smirk formed into play. "No... You won't receive so much as a touch from my fingertips until you're teetering at the precipice." There was movement, given away only by the moonlight as Wesker settled into a chair toward the side of the window, now where Chris could hardly see. That was, until two ominous suns flared to life from behind tinted shades, beacons of further light in the overwhelming darkness Chris had found himself trapped within.

"I will make no advances until your mind dissolves so far, you come to me of your own volition and beg to be torn asunder."

Chris swallowed at the thought, still enough in his right mind to feel a chill quake down the length of his spine. "Not you." His voice was quieter now, hardly a whisper of what it had been, what it should be, now bordering on the edge of hearing. "I'll never turn to you." He tried to find strength in the sound, to appear as more than a hopeless soul dwindling at the edge of nothingness, wanting so badly to fall in, but too fearful to do so. Yet he would much rather find solace in the bottomless pit of that abyss, than to be swept away in the arms of the devil who sat mere feet from his bedside.

Wesker didn't reply with words. Instead, Chris watched as those glowing suns moved ever closer where the blond had leaned forward. For a moment, the light had found his pale skin, reignited the glow and unveiled that smug tilt to his mouth which had not wavered.

It was the final sight Chris had before exhaustion consumed him, and brown eyes took a small mercy in the black nothingness hidden behind their lids as his mind followed into oblivion, faintly aware of the soft chuckle that emanated from his side.