ash

He could be sleeping.  That precious necessity that he only ever gets in small bursts.  Exhaustion has become as familiar as the uniforms he wears every day.  A second skin that serves as a dark cloud to hang over him.  He truly can't remember the last time he'd slept in, let alone gotten a full eight hours. 

The bar is… unpleasant.  It isn’t a bad place per se, but it isn’t somewhere he has any desire to be.  The cleanliness is questionable, the volume is obnoxious, the seats reek of beer, and the only reason he hasn’t walked out yet is the fact that you’re sat right in front of him in the corner booth the squad had claimed.

Not all of the team had come out, and he certainly wishes he’d been one of the handful that stayed home, but he cannot deny that there is an enjoyable factor with your presence.  While the others carry on and yap, you look just as overstimulated as he feels.  You’re quiet—you’ve been for a while now—and you’re still nursing the same beer you’ve been pretending to like since the start.

The others had teased you earlier about how slow you’d been drinking it.  You managed to take it from a quarter of the way empty to half on the spot, which prompted both Barry and Chris to clap for you while Jill patted your shoulder.

He’d been wise to order neat whiskey.  Nobody would give him grief for sipping it slowly.  And, even if they did, he’s still their captain and they still know better.

Beer isn’t quite your thing.  Judging by your standard coffee order, a sweet cocktail would have suited you much better.  But he watched your face while you browsed the drink menu, and even he thinks you’re justified in cringing at the prices.  Eight dollars for a standard margarita was absurd.

“Wesker, we gotta ask.”  Comes Jill’s interruption to his thoughts.  There’s a collection of drink glasses and bottles between her and the other two, and the influence of such has tainted her voice with something far more carefree.

“Yeah, it’s important.”  Chris chimes in.

“What’s with the glasses?”  She asks.  “I mean, we’re in a bar with shitty lighting and you even wear them when we end up with a night assignment.  What gives?”

A glance your way leads him to your curious gaze and mischievous smile.

“What glasses?”  He asks cooly, eyes flicking to you beneath his shades. “I don't wear glasses, do I?”  Wesker asks, nodding at you. 

“Yeah, I don't know what they're talking about.”  You look at him head on, eyes locked with his in that strange way you've always done.  Like you can see past the dark tint anyway.  Well, you've seen him without his glasses a handful of times now.  Perhaps you just know what to look for. 

You’ve always had a knack for that.

He takes in the sight of you as quickly as possible, drinking in the image of your outside-of-work persona like water in the desert.  He’s seen you like this before, obviously.  You’ve come in on your days off, typically saying you were simply ‘in the neighborhood and wanted to see a friendly face.’  He’s sure his isn’t the friendliest, but it never seemed that you were there to talk to anyone else.  In fact, it’s never lost on him that you always arrive with some silly drink in hand for him.  Last time, it was a matcha latte. 

The knock on his door is out of place.  He hadn’t assigned work to anyone that needed to be delivered directly, so there must be a problem.  It does nothing for his already subpar mood.

“Come in.”

“Hey, hey,” comes the voice that has grown to be an almost essential part of every workday.  There are two drink cups in your hands.  “Sorry to interrupt.”

“Aren’t you off?”  He asks pointedly.  Exactly what has you here?  You’ve been running on fumes for the last week.  He was finally starting to feel a little less guilty for how he’s written your schedule now that you’ve had a day, but here you are convincing him that maybe he should’ve just been selfish and scheduled you anyway.

“Yeah, but I was in the neighborhood.”  You gently nudge the door shut with your foot and head toward him.  “Needed to see a friendly face.”

You’re quite a sight in your normal clothes.  There’s a strange feeling in seeing you like this.  Like he’s catching a glimpse of a world he’s not quite meant to know but you’re including him in anyway.  Sure, it’s a standard casual outfit, but it feels almost too intimate to see nonetheless.  This odd dynamic between the two of you has always been confined to work.  On the occasion it leaks beyond, it’s…

Well.

He shouldn’t be thinking such things.

And he shouldn’t be thinking them now, but he is.

In a perfect world, he would be a normal man with a normal job and a normal life.  It wouldn’t be wrong to have these thoughts and it wouldn’t be such a miserable thing to sit across from you knowing that it’s all the closer he’ll ever truly be.  There.  There, the thought has manifested and he’s at least admitted it to himself that he’d much rather be sitting across from you at a table for two or in a shared home and—

Dumb…

“I think he just wants to look cool.”

“Or offputting.”

He hardly hears them, but he hears you.

He sees you.

And he needs to get away from it all.

“I’ll be back,” he says absently, making for the exit where the bouncer has nodded off.  He needs air and he needs a minute to get these damned thoughts out of his head.  He rounds the corner to the side with the empty parking lot.

Wesker leans against the cold brick of the building.  His shades lift as he rubs at his eyes.  What in the world was all that?  He’s kept a lid on those thoughts—a damn tight one at that—and all it took was some little outing for him to let them flood his head.  Stupid, stupid, stupid…

This team isn’t forever.  This game you two play isn’t either, and he knows how this ends.  One day, someone will leave.  That is the only ending.  It’s the only one that can possibly exist in the oldest story there is.

There is so much more in the world than this, but none of it has ever been for him.  How can he sit here and even entertain the idea?  It all stutters into that living, beating thing in his chest that has ached and ached for decades now for everything it’s ever been denied.  This can’t be him right now, can it?  No, there’s something wrong that’s making him feel this way.  Maybe he really is that sleep deprived, or—

What the fuck was in that whiskey?

He sinks to the ground and it’s terribly undignified, but at least he can hear the door open and the footsteps that approach him.

He knows that gait and he knows the scuff of those shoes.  He would even know your shadow, were he not still pinching the inner corners of his eyes to protect the reveal that something wet had gathered there.

Pathetic…

He should’ve just gone to his car.

You stand over him for a time—he can feel your presence like the strongest rays of sunlight—and then you do exactly what he knew you would.  You turn your back to the wall and sink down, sitting beside him, shoulders damn near touching.  Something rattles.

“Peanut?”

It catches him off guard.  Wesker moves his fingers away just enough to see your offering of those subpar complimentary nuts rolling around in the flimsy food boat.

There’s a split second where he catches you looking at him, where he knows you saw the redness that rims his eyes, but he pushes his shades back into place as fast as he can and leaves it completely unacknowledged and reaches for one of your offerings to pop in his mouth.

He hopes you don’t ask.

“Peanut,” he echoes in return like some sort of fool.  Why in the world he said it is beyond him, but he did and it sounded like some ridiculous form of agreement that ah, yes, this is indeed the nut you say it is.

At least he gets to hear that little amused huff through your nose.

“I don’t like it in there,” you say so casually.  “Too loud.  Place stinks.  Drinks suck.”

He hums in agreement.

You lift the nuts to him and he takes another.

“Peanuuut,” you nod, chuckling this time with a big grin on your face.  You lean into him, bumping your shoulder to his.

He doesn’t bother to fight the smile.  What’s the use?

He really wishes he could hate this.  All of it.  It would be so much easier to cast it all aside and call it useless, as if it hasn’t been the sustaining factor that’s kept him from succumbing to the exhaustion of two lives.  As if he doesn’t come to work a little brighter when he knows you’ll be there.  As if he doesn’t head to Umbrella with a spark in his stride if he got to walk out of the RPD with you until you both split for your respective vehicles.  Like those lunches don’t get him through the day or those little moments where you poke your head in don’t—

Ah, he’s doing it again…

You say nothing for a time, and he dwells in his thoughts and relishes the quiet companionship.  Every so often, he takes another peanut.  Sometimes he yawns.

“Tired?”

He nods.

“Mm, I mean, they haven’t come looking for us yet.”  You muse.  “I think we can escape and head home.”

You say that like you’ll be going with him.  Like home is a shared place and not just where he goes occasionally to sleep.  The thought is as poisonous as it is sweet.

“I’d like that.”  There’s a grittiness to his voice that only ever comes with exhaustion, and it’s met with you rising to your feet and extending a hand for him to take.  He does so, and you help tug him to his feet.

The two of you round the corner to your cars—coincidentally parked beside one another.  He’s slow to unlock his, watching instead to make sure you get in safely.  When he finally turns the key in the ignition and reaches for the seatbelt, he finds you smiling and waving to him.  Your passenger-side window is down, and he lowers his driver-side one to match.

“Get some sleep, Al.”  

It strikes him in the chest all over again to hear you call him that.  It’s not often that you do—decorum and all that—but, when you do…

“You too.”  He says.  He wants to say more, but he doesn’t know the words.

You shift into reverse.  The best part of his day is ending.

“Be good,” comes your signature goodbye.

“So why do you always say that to people?”

Jill is as nosey as ever, but he can’t say he doesn’t want to know as well.

“Oh, uh…”  You smile and nod your head from side to side as if to sort through the answers in your head.

It’s something you say to him regularly any time the two of you part ways.  It’s a peculiar thing.  As if he’s going to go ‘be bad,’ or some other ridiculous alternative if you don’t tell him.

“Well, when I was younger, I’d go visit my granddad a lot.”  You say, a fond look in your eye.  “Used to swing by after work at my old table-waiting job and bring him soup or something.”  A very distant fondness, one reserved for the kindest memories the mind has to offer.  “He used to always tell me ‘Be careful!  Be careful!’ before I’d leave.  It was how he would say he loves you, but he’d also just actually tell you he loves you before he said that, so who knows,” you chuckle despite the hint of grief that taints it.  “It turned into me saying for him to be good in return, and then I started saying it kinda regularly and, uh… yeah.  I guess it’s my way of saying I love someone when I’m saying bye.”

Oh…

Wesker watches, still parked in the lot, as you back out and take off.  He waits until you’ve pulled out onto the road, and then he waits some more after that.  Not until he knows you’re far, far away does he even entertain the idea of mouthing the words.  But, still, he says them all the same.

“Be good.”