Title: Alchemy
Fandom: Resident Evil (game 'verse)
Characters/pairing: Annette Birkin/William Birkin, Albert Wesker, Sherry Birkin
Words: 871
Warnings: Explicit drug use, swearing, child abuse (emotional), domestic abuse, drug-use metaphors, mentions of testing drugs on children (canon).
Rating: R
Prompt: Self-portrait, also That which does not kill us makes us old and cranky before our time. @ tamingthemuse on lj
Author Notes: Set slightly pre-RE2, possibly around the time of RE0.
Summary: Whichever way she looks at it, she's married a monster. Literally.


“You’re big now,” she says, on Sherry’s tenth birthday, “four and a half feet.”

Sherry squirms underneath the tape measure, bare feet kicking against the kitchen wall. Annette makes a mark, many, many inches above the mark she made on her ninth birthday. “So big, now.”

-

She holds her daughter tighter each night. “My baby girl,” she breathes into her hair, long after Sherry is asleep, “I didn’t mean for any of this.”

Sometimes, she’s sure William hears her crying, and he turns in bed with a sigh, like this isn’t all his fault.

-

“Sherry,” she says, cutting the girl’s hair, “hold still, I don’t want to cut you.” But Sherry continues to fuss, and Annette nicks the back of her neck with the scissors. She holds her breath as the blood spills out, and then the cut heals as though it were never there. Sherry didn’t even flinch.

“Mama, I want a pink ribbon,” Sherry says. She doesn’t have a clue.

-

She feels weak, like a ghost. Dead, undead. She reaches for a cigarette, for a syringe, for the burn of freedom pumping for her veins. She tries to remember exactly when William convinced her to sell her soul for her next hit, but she can’t be sure, and then she goes dizzy, the smell of smoke rising in her throat, and she’s on the floor, knee deep in lab coats and dirty needles.

Her cell phone rings across the lab, and she opens one pearly eye. Looking at it hurts her eyes, but she picks herself up and pulls it out her pocket. Sherry.

“Oh shit baby,” she says into the receiver, spitting blood on the lab floor, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s half 4 mom,” Sherry says, all sarcasm. Lately she’s been full of the same self-righteous crap that William comes out with. Annette can’t pin down the exact moment she stopped calling her ‘mama’. She imagines the girl outside the school gates, kicking her bookbag into the street, waiting for a mother that’s too high to function.

“I know sweetie, I’ll be there soon, okay?” Annette feels the floor rushing up to meet her, and then she’s face down in her own vomit, the phone still clutched to her ear.

“Okay mom,” says Sherry from a thousand miles away.

-

Annette tries to focus on Wesker as he sways in front of her. Albert. She wants to grip on to his shoulders to hold him still, wants to yell some sense into him.

William is somewhere nearby, sweating and pale and breathing too hard. She hears him like a reptile, hot breath falling onto her neck.

Wesker shines a light in her eyes, feels her throat. “When did you last inject?”

His voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a tunnel, Annette leans backwards on the lab stool, and William catches her, his hands on her elbows. “Yesterday,” she rasps, and it sounds like someone else’s voice, like Alice in wonderland. What a fucking joke…

Wesker reaches into his pocket, hands her a syringe. William peels back her blouse, and together they try to pick an unused vein, like playing connect the dots.

“What is it?” She tries to say, but it comes out backwards.

Wesker turns her face away while he works on her arm, and William presses his lips against her ear. “This’ll make you better honey.” And this time, she barely feels the needle.

-

Before she stops being able to remember, she recalls vial after vial of viral strains running beneath her hands as she sorted and recorded and injected, until their names run together, until she can’t keep track of William’s research anymore, and she’s sure it’s all a big joke, because this kind of shit can’t be real, can’t be logical.

She can’t remember when she last ate without throwing it back up. She’s sure that between the two of them Wesker and William are going to kill her.

She sits in front of her mirror, half-naked, admiring her track marks. This little piggy goes to market… There are shoot-up points between her toes, beneath her kneecaps, in the little ridges around her hips.

Sometimes Sherry hooks her arms around her neck, pulls her down to her level and giggles. She’s such a kid, still so much her baby. “Are you sick Mommy?” She says in her sugar-sweet voice, and Annette can barely nod.

-

When William has a breakthrough, Annette is there to see it. He looks gleeful, clutching a culture to his chest like he’s made gold from iron. He kisses her quickly. He hasn’t kissed like that in years. He’s thin and pale and it hurts when he breathes, but he skips around the lab like a kid on a sugar high.

She watches him twirl, and she knows he’s more drug than human. Before he ever even grows claws, she can see the monster in him. She can’t remember why she married him. She can’t remember who she used to be, before the drugs, before the baby, before Albert Wesker’s grand plan.

-

One day, Sherry turns twelve, and it isn’t until mid-afternoon that Annette realizes, but by then Sherry is long gone.