Chapter Text
Jill’s voice filtered into Chris’ ear, just a little crackly, “Be careful,” she said. The comms ran slower since he reached the deeper part of the forest, just enough to put him on edge, so he bit back a retort. A few seconds later, “Intel says there’s a sample somewhere here, doubt it’ll be that easy.”
Chris found himself gripping his submachine gun tighter, made sure to watch his back with each footprint he left in the fresh snow—checking over his shoulder seemed to have become second nature. With the motion he became painfully aware that his team weren’t behind him anymore, instead they were about a few miles back—or, at least, their bodies were.
Fighting the tyrant had been—
Something Chris would rather not think about for a while. The bloodcurdling screaming in his mind was enough, he supposed.
That’s enough. He still had an objective to complete, even if he was four men down.
He sighed and agreed, “It’s never that easy. This why you asked to be on comms?”
A gentle laugh came in, “Call it my personal investigation.”
“Into what ?”
“Into whether or not I’m going to replace you with Matthews,” Chris heard Jill say.
He shook his head even though she couldn’t see him, “Eleven years of friendship, just like that.”
“Start moving and we won’t have that problem. I can hear the grass grow underneath your ugly boots.”
“They’re standard issued —“
Cold. Biting at his fingertips, gently frosting his skin. The clearing was as cold as a snowstorm-ravaged campsite, and eerie all the same. A large, concrete ruin stood in front of Chris and he tensed immediately, because this was not the type of environment a bioweapon should be able to survive. He clicked the button on his earpiece and waited for Jill to come in again, but the only noise that followed was a quiet thrumming, an echoing silence.
“Well,” he said, to no one in particular, “Just me for now,” but the words bit more than the wind, and he pushed away any nagging thoughts of his unit—lifelessly splayed out underneath the gently swaying trees like a ceremonial gravesite; the snow he’d been walking across stained red with blood.
The door wouldn’t budge, of course, but Chris wasn’t entirely sure it’s a door at all. Just a slab of stone cut out in the wall, immovable. The brunette man held his combat knife to it and pushed the blade through the gap, only for it to hit another surface not far in. He sighed softly and returned his blade to the slot on his harness.
Another way around, then.
That was when he heard it—not quite a shout, not quite a whisper. Something breathy and amicable: a laugh, maybe. Painstakingly quiet, but Chris was sure it was a laugh.
His head swivelled around to scan the perimeter but found nothing, just an expanse of frosted trees and white silence—either his ‘observer’ wasn’t there at all, or they were finding reprieve in the shadows, and Chris wasn’t sure which he preferred.
Nonetheless he turned back to the stone building and checked every side for a breeze, or an opening, anything at all that would make this thing worthwhile.
A lithe figure seemed to dart through the tree line, caught only by Chris’ peripheral vision, and his finger moved to the gun stored in his hip holster. He wouldn’t have noticed if not for the glinting of the person’s hair, a silvery blonde, because their movements were light, steps almost completely silent aside from the gentle crunching of autumnal leaves beneath their feet.
“Show yourself,” Chris announced, grabbed his 909 with steady, bloodstained hands, “State your name and purpose.”
Soft footstep echoed throughout the clearing and Jill’s voice sounded in his earpiece, crackly and indecipherable. Something— someone— was messing with the comms.
He backed up, but was met with a chest, and a glinting, razor-sharp blade to his throat, digging into his skin enough to draw a thin droplet of blood. He winced through his teeth, but didn’t drop the gun. If this person really wanted him dead, they’d had the chance, which, perhaps even more concerning, meant they wanted something from him.
“State yours,” a honeyed voice began to speak. The person behind him was a man, no doubt, but he spoke in a tone that was teasing, almost seductive, and Chris repressed a shiver, “BSAA? Must be my lucky day.”
The hold on him loosened slightly—an opening.
“Name and purpose,” Chris repeated, though he wasn’t sure he was really in the position to be demanding things.
“If it isn’t Chris Redfield, thought I recognised you,”the man said. Chris narrowed his eyes; if he moved just a little without his attacker noticing, he could grab him by the wrist and disarm him, just an inch or so.
He began to shift his feet into position, “Can’t say the same for you.”
The figure laughed, “That’s kind of the point. Can’t be a secret agent if I’m not secret.”
“You’re doing a pretty bad job if you’re trying to stay secret. Are you even wearing a mask?”
“I probably should be.”
Chris hummed, moved his shoulder from the deathly-tight grip it was in, grabbed the wrist and swivelled. He tumbled down onto the floor and stumbled hastily back to his feet. This, the man clearly didn’t expect, because a shocked expression appeared across his sharp features for a millisecond before he plastered on a determined scowl and blocked Chris’ jab with his other forearm. His leg, slender and long and clad in a black, flared legging, came up beside Chris’ head in a gracefully-angled kick, but Chris grabbed that as well by the ankle. Without waiting, he aimed a jab at the man’s chest, swore as it was blocked and the man gave him a devious little smile—which Chris clearly couldn’t handle, because he then used his brute strength in an attempt to tackle him to the ground.
The blonde man, as he did so, pulled out yet another blade—the other was scattered somewhere across the muddy ground—and brandished it in defence. Chris’ hand wrapped around the pistol he had unholstered and he aimed it, only to be met with a similar handgun pointed right at his own head. A standstill.
Chris was shaking a little, more out of shock than fear, and the man’s once-sardonic scowl deepened on his delicate features as he began to realise their predicament; two old fighters refusing to back down from the ring, waiting to see who would make the first move. When Chris inched closer, the man circled around. When the man tilted his head to assess the landscape, Chris raised his gun a little more firmly. It had been a while since he had been matched in combat.
“Escape is pointless,” the intruder murmured absentmindedly, “You and I both know that. Why are you here?”
Chris narrowed his brown eyes and took in the sight, “Hopefully the same reason as you. Name and purpose?”
The man standing in front of him was, for lack of a better word, beautiful —a modern day Helen of Troy, which made even Chris want to fall into the flickering flames. He was shorter than Chris but still tall, standing at around 5’10 or so with dirty blonde hair, pale skin and the prettiest blue eyes he had ever seen, and his body— God, that body— looked like it belonged in a magazine. Lithe and toned, covered from neck to ankle in a black bodysuit which was decorated with harnesses all over to holster weapons, a communication device and some medical supplies.
He moved without noise and his body language gave almost nothing away—a stealth agent, then.
The agent must’ve noticed his wandering eyes because he scoffed and looked Chris up and down, “I’d say take a picture but I can’t let you do that.”
Secret stealth agent. He had said something like that, hadn’t he?
“I get the feeling you won’t be telling me your name any time soon.”
“One point to the gentleman in the back,” the agent agreed, “as for why I’m here, it’s probably the same as you. Checking out the ruins?”
Despite himself, Chris nodded. He wasn’t sure when he began to consider the environment safe, but a weight had lifted itself off his chest as the agent slowly lowered his weapons.
“Knives are faster, by the way.” he stated simply, eyes glinting even as Chris scowled. “Think you could help me move this big rock? I think it’s a two-person job.”
Chris, however, didn’t move. His gun was still in the air, barrel directly aimed at the agent’s head. He could kill this man in seconds; this man who had appeared from the shadows moments after Chris’ entire unit was slaughtered by rogue bioweapons in the forest. Suspicious didn’t even begin to describe him. He clearly knew that Chris was here, had he been watching? Had he been orchestrating? Who the fuck was he a secret agent for?
The agent glanced back and beheld the reluctant expression Chris was showing, and he wasn’t scowling anymore.
“I’m DSO. I know you want to ask.”
The DSO. A government agent, then. That didn’t make things any better.
Still, it meant he likely couldn’t have had anything to do with that attack, and he had let go of Chris a little as soon as he found out he was BSAA. That had to count for something.
Chris lowered his gun. Something in his chest was burning. “Lead the way, agent.”
⋆ ⭒˚｡⋆
“Not again,” Chris groaned and glared at the puzzle, “we just did this. There’s always some mental exercise in these things.”
“Luckily for you, I’m here. What would you have done if I never showed up, big guy?” the agent countered. He, on the other hand, was working diligently on the password, eyes scanning the room for clues.
Big guy?
“Just get on with it,” Chris said and moved to the back of the room. It had been, what, an hour? They had spent most of it scanning various hidden rooms in the ruined structure, which turned out to be not so ruined when they stepped inside. It was like a damn maze, every other corridor turned out to be a dead end yet every other dead end turned out to some kind of secret passageway leading to another, bigger maze.
The air in the structure hung damp, heavy and stale. Warm enough to be humid but not enough to be hot, just stuffy. Every step echoed and bounced off the rough walls, but the agent was moving silently in his pursuit of the intricate puzzles they kept coming into contact with. His presence pressed against Chris’ senses like static; he glanced at him for what felt like the fifth time in the last ten minutes. It wasn’t the man’s stealth that concerned Chris, he was used to working in silence, but the fact that he really had come out of nowhere, directly after Jill’s voice had faded away and his colleagues were slaughtered on the ground. The timing was concerning at best and downright catastrophic at worst. His face was a shadow, half-lit by the flickering light of the lanterns and Chris’ flashlight, his lips set in a small, determined frown. He was too calm, Chris didn’t trust it and yet he found himself enthralled by it.
“I need you,” the agent replied, looking at Chris with those curious eyes, and Chris bit back a less than innocent groan.
“What for?” he asked.
“Pressing buttons.”
Chris nodded and surveyed the exit quickly before moving to the centrepiece next to the blonde and placing his hands where he was told to place them, “It’s not doing anything,” he said.
“There’s got to be a third around here somewhere,” the agent muttered. Chris inspected the walls; all dark, thick, impenetrable stone. Just to the corner of the room, though, what was that? One of the pieces of stone was a little lighter, as if it were bleached, and it held a symbol on it.
“Keep pushing,” Chris told the man, and unholstered his pistol. The agent tensed and let out a small shout, indecipherable, but Chris shushed him gently and with one hand held the button down and with the other he aimed the gun at the stone square, and fired.
The slab door in front of them began to inch open little by little, agonisingly slow, and the blonde agent let out a breath.
“Smart,” he commented. He took a while to meet Chris’ eyes and they lingered in a sort of empty silence, but he looked up all of a sudden and—had his eyes dilated? A thin ringlet of blue surrounded his widened pupils and Chris fought off the ache beginning to grow in his chest.
Before he could speak, the agent had set off into the direction of the newly-opened door, slipping past him with that fluid grace that set his nerves on edge. Something about the way this man seemed to know what he was doing—the maze-like tunnels of this building which made Chris’ head hurt, the agent navigated as though he had studied it for years. It made Chris feel reckless in comparison: too obvious, too loud. That wasn’t all, though. Something was gnawing at him from the inside out and he couldn’t tell whether it was apprehension at the sudden appearance of the man or something else erupting from the way he looked at him.
“Think we’re close to the end?” Chris asked, eyeing the tunnel.
The agent didn’t answer immediately, and when he did it was in a short and clipped tone, “We better be. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said, posture defensive from the darkened, narrow corridor, “Are you going first or am I?”
“It’s only right to let you go first. You’ve done most of the work.”
“How gentlemanly.”
The agent changed his pace to an achingly slow meander into the suffocating abyss-veiled tunnel, moved his hand to the blade at his hip—he didn’t believe it would be that simple. And neither did Chris; entire units of decorated soldiers trained to fight against BOWs didn’t just get wiped out by a simple tyrant if there wasn’t something greater going on.
Narrowing even further ahead, the tunnel, scented with mildew and decay, was arched and the walls were carved with tiny little drawings, ancient runes. Its sharp angles and swirling patterns belonged to no recognisable civilisation; a language lost to time. The jagged, wet edges of brick glinted under Chris’ flashlight so that it looked like the stone itself was sweating from the centuries of isolation.
The floor, too, was uneven and littered with debris, broken shards of stone and the occasional piece of rotten wood performing a symphony of unnervingly loud echoes beneath their feet. A cold whisper of air seemed to come out of nowhere and sent a chill up Chris’ heavily armoured back. He had no idea how the agent was doing this in no body armour at all.
“You done this before?” Chris questioned before he could stop himself as the agent ran his hands along one of the pictures.
The man’s hand faltered if only for a moment before he let it drop to his side, “I’ve been around.”
“That’s not answering my question,” a hand itched to move to the base of his rifle.
The agent turned, catching Chris’ gaze in the dim light. For a moment, neither spoke because of the crushing weight of the silence they had opened. Something foreign flickered in the blonde man’s expression—something sharp and guarded that made Chris tense. The tension had become so thick that it buzzed like a live current in Chris’ chest and curled low in his stomach.
“I have,” he said at last, voice silvery and smooth like silk drawn tight over a blade, “I have done this before. Not with the BSAA breathing down my neck, sure, but I’ve been around places like this. More often than I’d like.”
There was a challenge in his tone, unspoken and tantalising. Chris hated how it pulled him in. Years ago he wouldn’t have even entertained the thought of being attracted to someone—let alone a man from the DSO he had known for roughly three hours. How the mighty have fallen. Against his better judgement, Chris found himself stepping closer until they were mere inches apart and the agent matched his fiery gaze with a gentle heat.
“Used to doing their dirty work?” Chris asked, half-sympathetic and half-accusatory.
“Something like that.”
Chris’ gaze dropped to his lips instinctually, a motion which sent heat flooding through him before he realised what he had done. A cheshire smile crept onto the agent’s stupidly beautiful face and Chris snapped his focus away from the appearance of the stranger and back to the task at hand, forcing himself to step back. He was better than this. He had always been better than this.
The further they ventured, the more the walls seemed to close in, pressing down on them with an oppressive weight. The tunnel was ancient, no doubt about it, and it felt it. Every inch of the stone seemed to thrum with unsettling energy, as though the place had a life of its own and was watching them, waiting. The blonde stranger wasn’t the only one with a bad feeling. Chris stared at his lithe back, because that was all his eyes could really go aside from the walls, ceiling and flood, and he was drawn to the gentle yet toned curve of his hip, the small waist and his strong shoulders. He felt as if he was following a living marble statue, begging to be grasped and broken into a thousand porcelain pieces.
He shook the thoughts away. Something about this place was corrupting him, it had to be. The humidity was messing with Chris’ head. The sound of humming machinery echoed faintly from ahead—the only noise that wasn’t the scuffling of their boots or the quiet creak of gear every now and then—but there was no visible source.
Suddenly, the agent paused.
“What’s up?” Chris asked, but the blonde shook his head in disbelief, turning around with an exasperated look in his pretty eyes.
“It’s a dead end. We’ve been walking to a dead end.”
“It can’t be,” Chris insisted, though it was mostly out of his own desperation, “Let me through.”
“Chris—“
“Let me through.”
The agent shifted to press himself against the wall so that Chris could pass through, stifled a sharp inhale of air when Chris’ warm skin pressed against his own and crossed his arms when Chris got past.
Chris placed a firm hand on the stone in front of them, and, sure enough, it was a dead end. There was a breeze, though. A breeze had come through before and there were no other openings so unless there was an invisible ceiling fan in the tunnel they hadn’t come across, it had to open.
“Watch yourself,” he advised and gave a throwaway glance to the agent behind him. The blonde man gripped a pistol close to his chest and moved backwards a little, before Chris angled his shoulder and barged into the stone wall. It cracked, enough to let in a small yet solid beam of light into the tunnel, illuminating a stripe along the agent’s face, which he ducked from. Chris grinned inwardly at his own competence and gave the wall a few more pushes before all of the brick came tumbling down. Whatever was in here had been sealed away for a while, considering the mossy stains left on Chris’ skin.
They stepped through the broken threshold and into a space that was completely alien to the tunnels they had been traversing. The oppressive stones, jagged carvings and suffocating dark that seemed to be something straight out of a Tomb Raider game were lost abruptly to a sterile and clinical expanse of seamless, glassy white walls and searingly bright overhead lights. A few steel desks were littered around the place, only slightly messy with a myriad of abandoned tools left all over: syringes, scalpels, paper files. Chris’ jaw tightened; places like this put him on edge. It felt too clean, too controlled, too artificial. The kind of place where the real horrors were made, in which reality was somehow worse than fiction, and where men with too much knowledge and too little conscience played God. As Chris looked around, a shadow of the past crept into his mind—an unwelcome reminder of the darkness he had attempted to leave behind. Albert Wesker was dead and the corporations were manipulating the legacy of his corpse on silver strings. Somehow, he wasn’t sure which was worse.
“This is bigger than we thought,” the agent muttered under his breath. He glanced towards the man, who has moved to a digital console, his fingers flying across the touchscreen, accessing files and blueprints though the screen was unstable and shaky, “A BOW lab beneath centuries of stone. They’ve been using the temple to hide it in plain sight.”
Chris hummed in agreement, “Nobody tends to go rifling through a government protected historical building.”
“Except for us.”
He felt a little nauseous. The people working here must have known someone was coming to check everything out and abandoned everything as soon as they could. This was what the tyrant was trying to hide; what his unit had given their lives for Chris to find. What came after—Chris was never really sure. He’d contact Jill, get out of this place. Maybe take the agent into questioning before they let him go his own way, as much as the thought nagged at something in Chris’ gut. After that, they’d probably locate the directors of the people who conserved this place and go from there.
It was all quiet, far too calm. Chris probably should’ve seen the disaster coming, but he didn’t. Instead he was completely blindsided as one of the exceedingly polished white walls crumbled to pieces at his left, and out came a tyrant; about eight or nine feet tall, grotesquely muscular to the point where its skin was beginning to rip apart and misconfigure at the sheer size. A dull, watery yellow eyeball opened, because of course it had only one, and it blinked a few times before recognising its two targets who were now darting around the room frantically.
“There’s a door over there!” the agent yelled. As much as Chris wanted to stay back and take this thing out with firepower alone, he had little ammo and his instincts were telling him to go along with what the blonde man had to say. He nodded and followed the lithe figure, dodged a ridiculously huge arm and ripped the steel door open to find an equally-sterile corridor.
He spent a while lingering in and out of his own thoughts, legs put into action. He ran, ran until his lungs were burning with both overuse and adrenaline, until his legs were threatening to collapse on him, and then he ran some more.
They reached a small reception eventually, but the elevator buttons they pushed at least fifty times weren’t responsive at all, and the bioweapon growled as it loomed closer, predatory.
He heard the blonde agent whisper something just out of earshot but didn’t have enough time to figure it out because he threw one of his various hand grenades at the beast, hit him right in the weak spot and shot it mid-air whilst it was flying. The creature was stunned for a few moments, in which Chris raised his rifle and aimed, but was pulled away by the hand before he could shoot.
“Come on!” the agent yelled and began to run back the way they came.
“What are you doing?” Chris yelled back, but a roaring from behind broke him out of his frustration: the creature was growing, mutating, inch by inch until it filled the room with its body and began to crack at the polished walls. “Fuck,” Chris let out and ripped his hand out of the agent’s grasp to start running once again. It was going to bring down the entire structure.
“This thing won’t give up,” the agent yelled, glancing back. His face was smeared with blood and dust but his grip on his handgun was steady.
Chris didn’t had time to answer, mind racing as fast as his legs. The ceiling of the lab groaned under the sudden stress, walls cracked as the bulk of the creature grew. He fired blindly over his shoulder, trying to slow the thing down, but it was of no use. The thing was too fast, too powerful. It crashed through the narrow passage they had entered from and sent huge pieces of rock flying everywhere. It couldn’t even fit through the tunnel, it was crashing through the walls and letting everything collapse behind it.
The blonde pointed ahead to one of the rusted metal staircases they had came down on, which lead back towards the building’s main hall. He took a quick glance behind and felt his stomach drop—the creature was gaining on them. With a sudden lurch, the entire structure of the building seemed to shift violently as the pair reached a railing. Chris vaulted up the stairs two at a time with the other man not far behind him. He could hear the bioweapon’s laboured breathing, feel the heat of its mutated body as it clawed its way up behind them.
A shove pushed him forward when he felt his legs beginning to fail him a little, and he found himself back in the building’s main hall. Archaic stone pillars stretched from floor to ceiling, filtering sun rays that fell onto Chris’ skin, but the entire thing wasn’t going to last much longer. The creature, now a massive, towering monstrosity, filled the space with its mutated body which was smashing through pillars as it advanced. Its mouth opened wide, let out a deafening growl that shook the building.
Chris grabbed the other man by the waist to pull him away from a collapsing piece of stone, felt heat tingle at his fingertips from the touch. He noticed the agent’s eyes dart around the collapsing chamber. There was no time to think, though. No time to plan. Their only salvation would be the snowy forest outside, and even that depended on them escaping this monster with their lives.
“I’ve got an idea,” the agent shouted. He pulled another grenade from his belt and Chris nodded, not needing to be told twice. He sprinted for the exit even as the ground beneath his feet shook violently; with each step the bioweapon took a new crack formed in their path, and the blonde spun around and hurled the grenade toward the creature with all his strength. The small device sailed through the air, bouncing off the floor and skidding to a stop at the monster’s feet. Chris eyed their position—sure, they were at the door, but a collapsing building wasn’t something he wanted to be anywhere near.
“ Come on ,” he stressed, grasping the man by the wrist and diving away into the frigid snow just as the explosion went off. A blast rocked the entire ruin, filled Chris’ ears with a deafening sound, and for a moment it seemed like the bioweapon might have even survived that, but then it let out a thunderous roar and the temple’s ceiling gave way. Stone slabs that had survived centuries of ageing came cashing down, and the creature let out one final, blood-curdling, heartbeat-quickening screech as it was buried under tons of rock and rubble. A cloud of red-stained dust filled the clearing.
Chris gave a short, grim laugh, “It better be dead after all that.”
The agent groaned and pushed himself up, catching his breath as he scanned the destruction. They met eyes but the shorter man’s widened when he took notice of their position—they had landed, hard but alive, but somewhere in the scramble he had ended up lying on top of Chris, straddling his hips, bodies tangled in an awkward sprawl that would’ve looked promiscuous at best from another angle.
The other man gave a slightly awkward laugh from above, face flushed as he scrambled off, “Sorry about that.”
The heat left his lap, and Chris’ mind cleared up a bit from the clouded haze it had been in.
“Not how I thought I’d end up when I came out here,” he muttered, a poor attempt at humour, “Pinned under a DSO spy outside a temple we blew up.”
“Try not to make it a habit,” the agent rolled his eyes, although the corners of his mouth were tugging with a faint grin.
He looked to the ruins and sighed, “That’s a lawsuit and a half.”
“They’ll have to explain why we found a hidden lab underneath it first.”
What should’ve felt like victory had twisted into an anxious realisation in Chris’ chest, “All the evidence is buried. How much can be salvaged from that?”
The agent went silent.
A crackling noise sounded from his earpiece, “Jill?” Chris called out, tapping it. Some broken words filled the device before she could actually be heard, and even that was only half-audible.
“Chris?—silent—hours. We—helicopter—motor—quarter-mile,” she spoke. Chris’ eyes widened, scanning the area, but the agent shook his head and motioned in the direction to the opposite of where he had come from before.
He had to pull the earpiece out if only to silence the grating noise of interference, “They’ll be next to my bike. It’s around there, about a five minute walk.”
Chris nodded, “Let’s walk, then.”
It would be foolish to waste this opportunity, not when he had some alone time with the agent. He should’ve used it to gain intel, learn the inner workings of the DSO, figure out where he stood with the blonde man.
“What type of bike have you got?” he asked instead.
The blonde agent gave him a little grin from his side, “You’re thinking about my bike after all that? Really?”
Chris shrugged and cleared his throat, “Just curious. Something flashy?”
“It’s a Ducati.” the man answered.
The taller man raised an eyebrow, surprised, “Didn’t expect you to be that kind of guy.”
“And what kind of guy did you expect me to be, Captain?” the agent inquired, voice low and teasing. His eyes—really, the bluest Chris had ever seen—ran along Chris’ large figure before returning to the powdered floor.
Chris rolled his shoulders, trying to relieve some of the tension that had settled in his weary joints, “I don’t know. Something more.. low profile? Given your line of work I thought you’d like to go under the radar.”
The agent shrugged, “It’s reliable. What can I say? I like pretty things.”
I’d give you all the pretty things you want , Chris thought.
He didn’t say that, though. Instead he swallowed hard and tried to ignore the warmth creeping up the back of his neck. He hated that the agent actually made him feel something other than unbridled anger, hated that he kept getting caught staring him at the shorter man. There was something magnetic about him, effortlessly graceful, and it drove Chris insane. And when the man turned to him, caught him staring again, he had to look away.
“And here I thought secret agents were supposed to blend in,” Chris muttered, half under his breath.
“I blend in when I need to,” the agent responded, honeyed and teasing. He shot Chris a sidelong glance.
He tried to focus on the path ahead, winter winds tugging at his jacket as they neared the extraction point. In the distance, the outline of a sleek black motorcycle came into view, parked exactly where the man said it would be. Of course he had a perfect plan for this sort of thing. The blonde sped up ahead until he was next to it and ran a hand along the smooth seat of the bike.
“Here she is. What do you think?” the agent asked and sat on the edge of the seat. He looked so—beautiful. Even with blood and grime smeared all over his face and scratches and bruises littered along his body, he looked like something out of a renaissance painting.
Chris paused and selfishly let his eyes wander. He hadn’t even looked at the bike—focused on the agent’s pretty eyes, soft blonde hair caked in blood, lithe limbs and his voice— and quietly uttered, “Definitely something.”
The agent smiled, “Why do I get the feeling you’re not talking about the bike anymore?” His eyes glinted with that spark again, a wretched thing.
He tried to snap himself out of whatever trance had taken over his mind. Wrong time, wrong person, wrong life. The only thing this agent should mean to him was a bit of extra knowledge on the DSO and a shared memory of gruesome, bulging limbs, eerie abandoned corridors and spilled blood.
His throat went a little dry, but before he could bark out a retort the sound of a helicopter approaching broke the tension. His rescue was here and whatever had just passed between them was left hanging in the frigid air.
“Think your bike’ll fit on there?” Chris asked. The agent crossed his arms and swung a leg over the seat, revved the engine. If there were any BOWs that didn’t know they were there, they did now.
“Let’s hope we don’t ever have to see each other again, Chris,” he said.
Chris switched between making contact with one of the handlers attempting to land on the snowy ground and the blonde agent who looked at him as if he were something special, something forbidden. Something he had to leave behind.
He frowned, “Hitch a ride with us. We’ll take you to your station,” he replied, motioned toward the helicopter. Half because he still didn’t trust the guy and also, tucked away in the back of Chris’ treacherous mind, because he couldn’t bear to part with such a man after so little time.
The agent smiled pitifully, “I don’t think you get how the DSO works. Another time, Chris.”
“You never told me your—“ the taller man began, but was cut off by the revving of the bike and the agent’s figure gradually speeding away into the tree-line, fading into a sort of distorted blur that Chris gazed at, feeling a little disappointed.
“You coming?” a voice—Matthews—called out from the helicopter above. A thin black ladder fell from the air next to him, snapped him out of his thoughts.
“Yeah,” he responded, grabbed the sides and lifted himself up a few steps—but when he looked to the ground, hoping to see that little figure darting through the trees, he was only met with the sight of scarcity and crimson red trails.