Chrisker One-Shots

Bad Medicine

Summary:

After Wesker's death, Chris is trying to go back to his life, getting nowhere. He is still working for the B.S.A.A. and one day a case will bring him some unexpected news.

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Another night spent totally awake. At that point it was much easier to count his sleeping nights. There were the sleeping pills, that was true: the pills blinked from the bottle, untouched, on his nightstand, but he refused to take them as he refused to take the other prescribed pills... the psychotropic drugs.

No, he didn't want to take them, they drove you crazier than the psychic troubles they were supposed to cure. He didn't say anything to anyone, nor about the drugs, nor about the therapy, nor about the nightmares. And who could he tell those things? He doubted someone could listen to him with the necessary sobriety or they could change their attitude towards him, and that was even worse. He could bear to be treated smugly, to not be believed, to be hated even, but to be pitied? No, he simply couldn't bear it.

Jill would pity him, for instance. Who could have laughed of him, he wondered. Even he himself, with stranger's eyes, if he was told "ehi, you know Chris Redfield? He is under therapy and he takes psychotropic drugs too" would have laughed "who?" he would have asked "Chris Redfield? No, not him, for sure!".
And yet, there he was, sleeping two hours every two days, if he was lucky, with pills lurking all around the house and with his therapist's appointment pinned right next the grocery shopping list.

In those last few days, however, he started considering the idea of not going anymore, he didn't feel helped, he just felt uneasy... but he has to think better about it. Those sudden thoughts had already occurred to his mind when he was just back from Africa; he just thought "I could resign from B.S.A.A., in fact what is left for me to do?" as if the problems were over. No, it was wrong and he knew it, but he never happened to care less about what was right or wrong in his life... In the end, though, as it often occurred to him, he had forced himself to do the right thing, to be unselfish, to keep fighting for a greater good and bla bla bla.

For whom was he doing it? That was a goddamn good question to which he didn't want to answer. That would be so much worse for his nerves: to admit that his only purpose was to stop Wesker, the one and only thing that kept him going, the only reason that kept him alive... "god, no, these are things you could say when you lose your life's true love, not when you kill who had ruined it" that thought made him nervous, could he really say that Wesker was the one that ruined his life? Wasn't it how he forced himself to a sense of justice he didn't believe that much in?

He perfectly remembered Wesker trying to convince him, to make him go to his side, it was up to him to decide what to do, so it had been his choice to ruin... he closed his eyes when he thought that statement, he closed them tightly and repeated to himself he did the right thing, he did what had to be done, until he convinced himself enough to keep thinking sensibly.

Going back to sleep was out of the question, so he decided to stand up and open the window. The cold night air cleared his mind a bit... it was a quiet night, some cars drove through the empty streets, there were several lights still on in the near houses, apparently he wasn't the only one awake, but the fact didn't cheer him up. He took a cigarette and lighted it... the smoke flew lightly through the black sky and got lost in the night.

He wasn't crazy, he knew it for sure, he could feel it like he felt the smoke fill his lungs and fly out through his mouth leaving the taste of tobacco and nicotine behind. But there were the nightmares, and he couldn't do anything different than suffer them; every night those inhuman mad eyes sought him, everywhere, monstrous creatures hunted Chris and they were sent from him. At night in his dreams and during the day they were in the voices he gradually heard ever less in his mind and ever more in reality. They were twisted nightmares, that ended evermore often, not with his death, but with Wesker's death... the time dilated itself in that last moment when their eyes met before the end. Did he say something in that moment? Chris couldn't remember, but in the dream he clearly saw Wesker's lips move and say something like "don't go".