Chapter Text
“Captain, I’ve confirmed the death of Ethan Winters.”
The words pierced through your earpiece, though not nearly as sharp as the silence that followed. Crisp. Perfectly hollow. The kind that let the background static ring in the foreground for once.
“I wasn’t able to retrieve the body, but I’ve recorded evidence,” the voice on the other end continued.
“Share your screen and I’ll go over the situation.” The Captain’s voice rang precise, steady, briefing the events of the last twenty-four hours with the exact composure everyone expected from a man of his rank.
Yet, on your monitor, the green line tracing the heart rate next to the callsign Alpha betrayed a spiked little secret nobody else in the field that night had the equipment to notice.
“She murdered him,” his voice came through the comms again, a note rougher this time. “And she is not gonna get away with it,” he finished, each word carrying the iron certainty of a man who had already decided exactly how the night would end.
Miranda was not seeing daylight again.
“Goddammit, when does it end?” Both, curse and question, came out lower, less modulated, spoken more to the dashboard of his truck than to everyone else on the line. Your fingers paused above the keyboard. You didn’t need eyes on him to know the lighter was already in his hand. The brief, sharp exhale preceding his words gave it away.
“What’s that, sir? The mission?” The operator’s voice came through again.
There was silence, the question answered only by the metallic, familiar scrape of flint on the Captain’s end.
“All of it. Three years trying to put this thing in the ground.” He paused, and for a moment, all you could hear was the hollow pull of smoke humming softly into your headset. You could picture it without meaning to. The cigarette caught between his gloved thumb and forefinger. The tip flaring amber beneath the permanent frown carved into his face. “Three years too long.”
His voice carried a brand of exhaustion no official report would ever document.
Your eyes drifted across the files crowding your secondary screen.
Ethan Winters.
A three-year nightmare the Winters never truly managed to escape, no matter how hard they tried. Dulvey. The Bakers. Mia Winters first. Then Rosemary Winters. The man had clawed his way through a godforsaken, freak-infested village buried somewhere in the middle of nowhere, only to die believing that, despite his best efforts, his daughter would never be saved.
You lingered on the thought until the heavy, distant thud of a car door echoed from the other end of the line.
“Terminate Miranda, and rescue Rose. That’s the mission.” The Captain spoke again, the exhaustion of the day left to rest in the passenger seat, sealed away behind reinforced steel. “Failure is not an option.” He reminded everyone on the line as much as himself, his words etched with that absolute finality you’d heard through comms a hundred times before. In grey briefing rooms. In the rubble of collapsed buildings. While he was caught in a sea of roaring fire and bioweapons alike. Little did the place matter to a man with the Captain’s name. The same name attached to stories forever whispered through BSAA hallways and classified files thick enough to fill entire cabinets.
As the crunch of boots over frost began crowding the line, your eyes flicked once more toward the vitals monitor. And this time, Alpha’s line pulsed steady. Flat. Controlled.
“Let’s move out.”
Your knuckles hovered for a second above the black steel before tapping it softly three consecutive times. Each knock, brief. Precise. Evenly spaced.
Through the frosted window at the far end of the hallway, the dying day bled vivid pinks and burnt oranges across the floor—a warm, colorful contrast to the harsh blues and artificial whites of the monitors your eyes had been glued to all day.
The weather app kept promising heavy snowfall for tonight, and the morning news had gone so far as to call it a “total evening whiteout.” Yet the pastel canvas melting across the horizon made it hard to believe either was actually on the way.
You couldn’t say you weren’t a little surprised when the muted thud of bare footsteps approached from the other side of the steel.
Despite the ugly forecasts, you hadn’t exactly allowed yourself to expect he’d be home at all.
Your gaze deliberately avoided the peephole before you, despite the way its silver rim caught the sunset light. You were certain a pair of eyes would be on you any second now, checking the visitor’s identity. So instead, you focused on the stack of papers tucked against your chest.
« Christopher Redfield »
The official label hung slightly crooked from the heavy envelope you’d lifted off his desk an hour earlier.
“Give me a second,” his voice called from the other side of the door. Then came the soft rustle of fabric. And a faint smile tugged at the corner of your lips before you could stop it.
Years spent on comms had sharpened your hearing in strange ways. When you spent that much time blind in the dark, you learned to construct hyper-specific images out of audio clues alone.
The shift of tactical gear.
The crunch of gravel beneath boots—and a close approximate of how many pairs of boots were moving.
The metallic snap of a magazine locking into a receiver.
The subtle, strained catch in his breathing whenever he raised that heavy Dragoon of his to block an incoming attack.
And now, somehow still crisp through the muffling barrier of the apartment door:
Cotton dragged hastily over bare skin.
A t-shirt, perhaps?
You guessed just a mere heartbeat before the deadbolt finally clicked open.
Then the door pulled inward.
And there he was.
Looking every bit as exhausted as his vitals had signaled when you’d last checked them a week ago.
“Hey.”
His greeting was a deep, raspy gravel, his voice falling even lower than what you were used to hearing through the high-frequency earpiece. Almost as though it were the very first word he’d spoken in hours. Almost as though he’d just woken up. And suddenly, a sharp prick of guilt stung you for being there at all.
Still, when he stepped back from the doorway, silently inviting you in, you didn’t refuse.
“Captain,” you answered softly, stepping across the threshold. You lingered right next to the shoe rack at the entryway, so you wouldn’t drag the three-day-old slush of city snow onto his floors.
His eyes dropped immediately to the thick stack of white cradled against your chest.
You smiled an apology before he could even ask.
“Investigations sent these over for you.”
“Already?”
“I know.” Your smile faltered into a pained grimace as your gaze skimmed the top folder one last time. Questionnaires. Incident reports. Psychological evaluations. Self-assessment forms that absolutely no one in this line of work ever answered honestly. “And… Research, I believe,” you added, placing the heavy stack into his arms. “Guess the white-coats couldn’t wait until Monday to get their hands on your field notes regarding the…” the word staled slightly on your tongue before it was even spoken, “…samples.”
God.
Was everyone at the BSAA—including you, apparently—physically incapable of not bringing up the mutamycete or the Winters for more than five minutes?
“I can always take them back…” Your offer trailed off playfully, trying to steer the conversation toward safer, lighter shores, “…tell them Captain Redfield doesn’t work weekends. That they’ll have to wait until the next business day for his report.”
Or that they can suck it up.
A quiet chuckle escaped his lips, and the faint smile that came with it carved the lines around his eyes a little deeper, a silent confession of just how poorly he’d been sleeping.
“You really think I’d make a lady waste even more of her already short Friday evening?” he asked, flipping the top folder open to inspect the bureaucratic damage himself. To estimate exactly how much work you’d just dropped into his lap. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
Your lips returned his smile like a mirror, though your eyes drifted furtively past his shoulder. Toward the sofa. Where a green blanket lay tangled across the cushions in a loose, heavy heap. It looked comfortable. Lived-in. Perhaps still warm from sleep.
“That’d be unfair,” he continued, summoning your attention back to him. “You’re not my assistant.”
“Been thinking of applying for the position myself,” you teased, allowing yourself a more detailed look at his face only because his eyes were still fixed on the papers.
His hair had grown out slightly. Not just during the week since Europe, but over the months before that. It was still short by any standard, but nowhere near the buzz cut he’d carried when you first met him.
This suited him.
Too.
The dark strands falling gently over his forehead, still damp from an earlier shower, perhaps. Just uneven enough to frame the experienced lines of his face and the sharp angles of his jaw. If you were allowed an official opinion on the matter, you’d tell him to keep it exactly that way.
“Already tired of the field, Agent?” The faint emphasis he placed on the last word carried the ghost of amusement with it, though his eyes still hadn’t lifted from the paperwork.
Agent.
He hadn’t called you that in years. Hearing it roll off his tongue now, in the quiet of his apartment, while he was dressed in a simple t-shirt and loose sweatpants instead of his usual tight, black gear, made the word sound different somehow.
You swallowed the first response that rose to your throat. You wouldn’t say it. Not to your captain, of course. But… what field? The work you did for him when he summoned you to the “field” differed very little from what you already did back at the office on a normal Tuesday. Sitting behind a screen until your spine cracked. Feeding coordinates into a headset until your voice went hoarse. Tracing vitals, oxygen saturation, and thermals until your eyes dried up. Speaking in a contrived, calm cadence while somebody with a family bled out on the other end of the line…
It was virtually the same, the only difference being that the office came with a proper ergonomic chair, unlimited coffee, and no hostile bioweapons within at least a thousand-meter radius. In your position, the word “field” was just a code name for trading all that comfort and safety for a different type of office: damp basements beneath abandoned shacks, the lonely, cramped back of a surveillance van, or a cave as dark and wet as the one you’d been stationed in last weekend. Jesus. Calling that place a cave felt far too generous. Dungeon seemed a more accurate term for that moldy hole in Eastern Europe. The constant, rhythmic dripping of subterranean water alone had nearly driven you insane.
Even last night, half-asleep in your own bed, the leaking sound of your bathroom faucet had dragged you right back into that nightmare. Damp stone. Rotting wood. Endless black water lapping beneath the dock outside.
And God—that stupid boat.
You’d spent the entire mission terrified some rogue lycan would crawl out the pitch-black tunnels while you sat trapped underground, with nowhere to run except a rotting pier that led to another dead end. Luckily, nothing had happened. You’d thoroughly reconned the area before setting up camp there, but God, the field was awful.
And honestly?
You wouldn’t have it any other way.
Not when it meant being of use to him.
“Not yet, Captain,” was all you settled on in the end, summing up all those thoughts in the small shrug you gave him.
Another chuckle escaped him, softer this time, as he closed the folder and finally looked up to meet your eyes. It was a tired sound—the kind of chuckle people gave more out of politeness than genuine amusement.
Your gaze flicked one last time toward the tangled blanket on the couch, toward the fading warmth he’d surely collapse back into the second you left.
And you hoped he did.
He needed sleep.
Real sleep.
Not just the kind stolen in armored helicopters, or against damp cave walls with one eye half-open.
And the sooner you left, the sooner he’d be able to get it.
You were already shifting your weight back toward the open doorway when his voice stopped you gently.
“You want some coffee?”
The question came woven into a small, rare smile.
“Could really use some myself,” he admitted, raising the heavy stack in his hand slightly to show the reason why.
The invitation settled warmly somewhere beneath your ribs. If it had been anyone else, you might’ve assumed it was just a polite formality—the sort of empty gesture exchanged between coworkers to maintain office friendliness, fully hoping for a refusal. But you knew the Captain wasn’t like that.
He always meant exactly what he said.
“I’d like that very much,” you nodded once, lowering your gaze, partly to slip out of your shoes, and partly to hide the insistent little tug threatening the corners of your mouth.
You shrugged out of your coat as he leaned slightly over your shoulder to close the door behind you. The deadbolt locked you inside his space with a safe, satisfying click, instantly leaving the sounds of the evening commute outside. The distant car honks. The faint chatter drifting up from the street below. The lively city swallowed by a Friday sunset.
The apartment settled back into a heavy quiet. Only the low hum and occasional metallic shift of a washing machine disturbed the silence somewhere deeper down the hall.
“Saw anyone at the office today?” he asked, his voice growing fainter with distance as he walked toward the kitchen.
“Just mister Elba,” Your hand reached automatically toward the entryway closet, opening it without waiting to be offered the space. Not because you spent significant time here. Just enough to remember this was where coats were supposed to go.
Today, however, was the first time it was just the two of you.
“Oh, and Charlie,” you remembered suddenly, hanging your coat carefully beside his much larger, heavier jackets. “He went in today to fill out his forms.”
You knew his question hadn’t really been small talk. In the four winters you’d worked with him, you’d never once heard the Captain make idle small talk.
He wasn’t asking whether you’d crossed paths with the guys.
He was asking if they were doing alright.
After everything.
After… Europe.
“He called me earlier. Charlie,” he said from the kitchen, his voice slightly raised over the distant creak of a cupboard opening. “Said they’re going out for drinks tonight.”
“Tonight?” you echoed, though the air inside the closet was distracting, thick with the clean musk of his cologne trapped heavily among the fabrics. Rich. Woody. Like a cedar forest after a rainstorm. A scent familiar enough to smell sweet. “Well, I guess a little blizzard warning isn’t enough to get in the way of the fearless Charlie Graham and his bustling Friday night—oh?”
A steady, rhythmic buzz drifted faintly from inside your coat pocket just as you were about to close the closet door.
Your work line?
Strange.
“Speaking of the devil,” you murmured, swiping the call open. “Hey.”
“Hey, what’s up? So—I’m at John’s right now and we were wondering if you wanted to join us for drinks tonight.”
“Sounds great,” you answered automatically, already stepping away from the entryway and following the hiss of an espresso machine toward the kitchen. “But are you aware this is your work line… Canine?” You emphasized his callsign pointedly, a teasing warning in your tone.
“Oh, shit. Hang on, let me call you back—”
“Too late.” You shook your head, a smile curving your lips. “You know they’re already listening in.”
“Oh, okay,” he cleared his throat dramatically, and when he spoke again, his voice boomed louder, projectively clearer. “To any hardworking operators spying on—I mean, diligently working the wonderful Friday night shift…”
You could hear John’s strangled laugh somewhere in the background.
“…we’re gonna be here late, and you’re all invited to join. I would send you the location, but I know you can just press a key and pop it up on your screens at your convenience.”
Only faint static answered him. And somewhere farther down the line, the distant clatter of dishes and running water echoed from John’s kitchen.
“Guess they’re not interested,” you said as you passed the living room, the hardwood floors pleasantly cool under your tired feet.
“It’s probably for the best,” Charlie continued smoothly, and you could easily picture him sprawled somewhere across John’s couch. “And you? Doesn’t it sound like a dream? Getting stranded in yet another cozy little snow hell with your beloved, highly dependable teammates.”
You nearly rolled your eyes.
“Oh, you know I’d never pass on an opportunity like that,” you replied.
And you meant it.
It wasn’t every day your entire team got to come home alive after fighting literal werewolves overseas. Occasions like this called for a proper celebration.
The thought hummed softly in your mind as you rounded the corner into the kitchen.
He stood with his back to you, reaching for a jar of sugar in the cupboard—every ridge and valley of muscle in his arms perfectly framed by the golden sunset bleeding through the window in front of him.
You genuinely craved evenings like this. More than you’d realized. The rare times the seven of you managed to exist as something other than military assets. The stories from missions long before you’d ever joined the squad. Those Dion would retell with increasing inaccuracy the drunker he got. Stories that even the Captain eventually felt morally obliged to fact-correct, usually with a beer sweating in his hand and a rare smile on his lips.
“Great,” Charlie said through the line. “Not everyone’s coming, though. Cap’s not showing and neither is Dion. Said he’s couch-locked for the night.” You watched the steam from the fresh mugs curl lazily into the golden air. Just the sight of it made you forget the dirty slush outside. “Told me he was ready to crash the second he got home and last contact was like three hours ago.”
“What? Is Dion past his bedtime already?” you teased softly, and the Captain huffed the quietest laugh at that, though he didn’t turn around.
“My guess exactly—hey wait.” Charlie’s voice trailed off as John muttered something across the room. “Where are you now? Emily’s on her way over. If you’re still at the office, she can just swing by and pick you up.”
You hesitated. Just a brief hitch in your breath, but it was exactly enough time for you to realize that no combination of words could make your answer sound casual to Charlie’s ears.
“I’m at the Captain’s,” you muttered in the end. Because what choice did you have? Spin a random lie while the Captain himself stood within arm’s reach, close enough to catch every word?
A dead, muffled silence answered on the other end of the line, and you didn’t need visual confirmation to know Charlie was currently staring at John and mouthing something unintelligible. The heavy thud of a hand scrambling to cover the phone’s microphone was giveaway enough.
“I’ll text you when I’m on my way, okay?” you added quickly, filling the silence before it grew even louder.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sure.” His words were suddenly strained with the kind of barely-contained laughter that told you exactly what those two would be talking about the second you hung up. “See you then.”
“Alright, see you.”
“No pressure if you can’t make it, though!” he managed to blurt out at the last second before the call disconnected.
You lowered the phone slowly, setting it face-down on the wooden table before pulling out a chair.
After this, you were absolutely never beating the allegations.
That you were secretly fucking the Captain.
Or, at the very least, trying to.
Depending on who you asked.
It had all started with John. About a year ago, during a deployment somewhere at the literal edge of the world. Cold enough that pearls of frost would gather along your lashes every time you so much as stuck your head outside the surveillance van.
The thing about snipers was that their entire craft was built around noticing the minute details other people tended to miss. Tiny, subtle stuff. The shift of wind through a canopy. A shadow buried deep through the brush half a mile away. The slight edge of a shoulder peeking past concrete. And John happened to be exceptionally good at his job. His right eye was trained to catch movements so small most people didn’t notice until he pulled the trigger and a body hit the ground.
And that same impressive, terrifying level of perception extended way beyond the battlefield.
“Why does your voice do that when you talk to the Cap?”
The question had come entirely out of nowhere, sometime around three in the morning, while he was pouring black coffee from a battered thermal flask beside the surveillance monitors.
“Do what?” You’d stared blankly at the screen, particularly interested in one of the dials on the communications panel, despite the fact it had been functioning perfectly fine seconds earlier.
“I dunno,” he’d muttered thoughtfully, as though looking for the most accurate word to explain what his senses had picked up. “It sounds different. Softer. Like Chris was n—”
“Alpha to Polaris, are you with me?”
Your posture had straightened instantly at the sound of the Captain’s voice crackling through the comms, deep and distorted slightly by the glacial wind.
“Yes, sir. Polaris to Alpha. The situation here is contained.” Your eyes had flicked toward John as some sort of traitorous reflex, just in time to catch the playful flint of victory dancing in his eyes.
“Yeah,” he’d mouthed, keeping his voice low enough not to bleed into the active frequency, snapping the lid back onto the flask before pointing it vaguely toward your headset. “Exactly like that.”
Before you could think of a coherent response, he’d simply vanished back into the freezing night, his rifle slung over one shoulder and his steaming coffee in hand.
He never brought it up again.
Not directly to you, anyway.
But you were fairly certain the observation had spread through the team after that. Or perhaps even before then. You tried not to think about it too much.
It was hard sometimes, though.
Just last week, for example. You’d been swabbing antiseptic along the curve of the Captain’s shoulder, where one of Heisenberg’s freaks had managed to slash him during an ambush. Nothing life-threatening. But it was nasty enough to require a localized sample.
He had sat there patiently on a storage box while you worked, shoulder bare beneath your hands, his mind most likely drifting back and forth between Rosemary Winters and Miranda’s mutamycete. The muscle had tightened under your touch, locked with the kind of controlled silence that let you know it hurt a hell of a lot more than he intended to admit.
So you’d sampled the wound gently.
As gently as your fingers possibly could.
Just like you did for all of them. Just like you’d done for Emily earlier that same morning when she’d limped into your station with a long tear along the side of her thigh.
Vitals needed monitoring.
Samples needed collecting.
Injuries needed documenting.
That was protocol.
No matter what anybody else chose to imply.
No matter the look Emily kept giving you from across the room—a smile half-hidden behind her monitor as you worked on his torn skin. Like you were doing something entirely outside of your official job description. Like she knew a little secret you didn’t.
But you did.
You’d known long before any of them had even thought to whisper about it.
The exact extent of your own predicament.
You see, you’d never been the type to ignore hard facts when it was convenient, much less lie to yourself about obvious truths.
And this truth?
You couldn’t deny it even if you wanted to. Which you didn’t.
Because the thing was, long before you ever joined him in the field, before the shared comms, before the long missions, before the endless nights spent whispering numbers into his ear, you had already known.
A truth that anyone with eyes could’ve deduced at first glance:
Captain Redfield was a very attractive man.
What you had indeed tried, however, was not to dwell on it while at work. On that black tactical gear. On how unfairly good it looked stretched over a body like his. Not because you didn’t want to—God, if anything, the problem was precisely how much you wanted to. But because your work demanded focus, and even the smallest lapse in concentration behind your monitors could put any of your teammates in a body bag.
So, you’d trained your attention not to linger on anything irrelevant to the mission at hand. Not on the rasp of his voice rumbling low and hoarse through your earpiece for hours at a time. Not on how much you liked the deep, tobacco-worn registers it could reach.
No.
You kept your attention exactly where it belonged. On monitors. On the shifting green pulse of vitals. On improvised extraction routes. On ammunition counts and thermal signatures and oxygen levels and coordinates blinking across glowing screens…
But eventually, the mission would end. Eventually, you’d go home, kick off your boots by the door, collapse into the moonlit quiet of your own bed, and think about it anyway.
All of it.
The black turtlenecks. The unfair width of his shoulders. The fabric stretching to its absolute limits across arms that had no logical reason to be that large, across muscle that had absolutely no business looking that good on a man nearing fifty. The way the swollen veins in his forearms stood out against skin darkened with hair whenever he rolled his sleeves up to work. The tight pants he insisted on wearing beneath combat straps and holsters like all those inappropriate thoughts you’d heard an alarming number of ladies at the office trade during coffee break weren’t entirely his fault.
And once your apartment finally settled into silence, once the traffic outside quieted to a low hum and the day stopped demanding things from you, you’d close your eyes and hear it linger somewhere deep in your memory. Long after you’d taken the headset off.
His voice.
God. The absolute command in it. The sheer, terrifying competence it carried. The way it never faltered even as he reloaded, even when entire, snarling hordes of bioweapons swarmed the horizon before him. The way he rasped orders into your ear with that same unwavering calm despite the thunder of gunfire and collapsing rubble all around him—as though as long as he was still talking, as long as he was still breathing into your frequency, nobody under his command was allowed to die. It was the kind of voice that curled low and deep somewhere warm between your thighs, keeping you company in the dark until sleep finally took its place.
So, no.
Despite whatever level of clueless denial John, Emily, or Charlie assumed you operated under, you had always been perfectly aware.
Aware of every extra second your attention lingered on his vitals monitor beyond what protocol technically required. Aware of the thick warmth that spread furtively through your chest whenever his pulse finally steadied after a prolonged spike. Aware that the more exhausted he looked, the more worn down life made him, the more the brutal years carved themselves into the creases around his eyes and the hard lines of his forehead… the more something deep inside you ached in response.
Not pity.
Never that.
Something far softer.
The urge to pull him somewhere quiet.
To use your own hands to melt the iron tension locked permanently in his muscles.
To feel the massive weight of his body dissolve entirely against yours for once, instead of just sitting back in the dark, watching him shoulder the burden of failed missions and impossible decisions alone.
And right now, looking at him standing before you—barefoot in the sun-drenched quiet of his kitchen, with the crushing exhaustion of the last three years written plainly across his face—the excuse evaporated completely. Those documents were not what had brought you to his door today in the first place.
“Thank you,” you murmured, accepting the heavy ceramic mug from his hands. Your fingertips brushed briefly against his knuckles. Warm. Scarred. The contact lasted less than a second, yet lingered far longer as you brought the coffee to your lips.
A small, private smile tugged at your mouth almost immediately. Partly from the heat sliding pleasantly down your strained throat, but mostly because he remembered exactly how sweet you took it.
And only then, setting the mug down on the wooden table, you finally let it slide off your lips. The question you’d been meaning to ask since the moment he opened the door.
“How are you holding up?”
His answer came in the form of a sigh—the sound long and heavy, scraping from deep within his chest, as though the chair he pulled out across from you were made of lead.
“Just…” He sank into his seat, his gaze drifting absently over the grain of the kitchen table, as though the right word lay hidden somewhere among the classified paperwork scattered between you both. “Pretty fucking tired.”
The admission came quiet and honest, woven with a feeble smile—just the faintest tug at the corner of his lips—that you returned instinctively despite the complete absence of humor in it.
He rubbed a large, tired hand over his jaw before continuing, his palm scratching against his week-old stubble.
“Feels like it never really ends.” He leaned heavily back into the chair until his shoulders slumped. “Miranda, The Connections, even the BSAA…” he huffed softly through his nose, disappointment shadowing the words. “They’re all part of it, but they’re not the entire problem.”
Lifting his mug, he took a slow, measured sip as if he needed the pause before he could go on. As if saying certain names out loud in the quiet of his home was simply too heavy. Too personal.
The Winters.
“If it hadn’t been them,” he said eventually, his voice dropping to a rough, low register, “it would’ve just been…”
His words faded into the evening air, leaving the sentence bleeding and unfinished.
But you didn’t need him to spell it out. You already knew whose ghost his thoughts were visiting.
Ethan Winters.
Back to the agonizing memory of walking away towards the roaring engine of a helicopter, while carrying a crying, fatherless baby in his arms.
“Somebody else,” you finished softly for him.
He looked up, a single, silent nod passing between you before he let his gaze drop once more, settling somewhere into the pale steam rising from his mug. He cradled it as he took another bitter sip—the heavy ceramic looking small and fragile in his scarred hands—as though the simple, radiating warmth of it might offer some small kind of solace against the oncoming storm.
And watching him sink into the lonely quiet of his thoughts, you only hoped it did.
You had thought about it a lot, too. About Louisiana. Before Ethan Winters ever set foot in Dulvey, at least twenty other innocent civilians had lost their futures to the horrors of that swamp. Before them, Jack and Marguerite Baker had once been normal people, too. And even before that, somewhere else in the world entirely, there had surely been another outbreak, another twisted experiment, another nightmare waiting patiently in the shadows for somebody unfortunate enough to uncover it.
Because the Captain was right. It just never really ended.
The problem had always been so much bigger than The Connections and their E-Series, or Miranda and her Cadou. Bigger than one bioweapon, one ruined family, or one entire godforsaken village. There would always be another rogue scientist convinced they could play God. Or worse, a group of them. Another tragedy.
You suspected the only real ending any of you were ever getting from this line of work was retirement. Or a body bag. Whichever arrived first.
You wished you could offer him something kinder than the truth. But even if none of you could stop the cycle completely, there was still one absolute certainty you could promise him.
“We’ll be there when you call, Captain.”
Your voice remained low, soft enough to suit the golden stillness filling the kitchen, yet firm enough to pull his attention back from the grey haze of his own thoughts.
“We’ll just keep pushing back until we can’t no more.” You held his gaze steadily across the table, refusing to look away from the raw exhaustion darkening his eyes. “Let’s just be stubborn like that.”
He held your gaze for a few, silent heartbeats after that. Longer than you were used to. Long enough for you to notice the perpetual frown in his brow melt just a fraction. Almost imperceptibly. Something so subtle and fleeting you would never know whether you’d simply imagined it.
“I’m not planning on quitting, you know,” he said after a moment, his chest swelling as he straightened slightly in his chair. The sheerest ghost of amusement touched his voice then. Not enough to make it cheerful. The Captain’s voice could never be described as such. Just something lighter. Just a little. “Not yet, at least. I guess sometimes it just gets…”
His sentence trailed off there, thick brows pulling together slightly, not like he didn’t know what word to say next, but rather that dragging it out of his chest required effort.
“Pretty fucking exhausting?” you offered gently, before bringing the ceramic back to your lips.
A quiet huff of laughter escaped him.
“Yeah.”
“Rest is allowed too, Captain,” you reminded him, your words landing softly somewhere among the scattered papers.
He nodded once, his smile small and private. It didn’t quite reach his eyes—it never did—but the late Friday sunlight catching against the bristle of his jaw softened his expression into warm, glittering gold.
A comfortable silence drifted naturally into the kitchen afterward. It didn’t feel heavy or strained. Just thoughtful, the void filled nicely by the distant hum of the washing machine down the hall and the muted car honks drifting up from a couple floors below.
You looked at him over the rim of your mug, trying to reconcile the tired man in front of you with the terrifying force of nature you’d been tracking on your monitors just days ago.
Soon, it would be time to leave. There weren’t many sips left in your cup after all.
What would he do after you walked back out into the night?
You tried to find the answer in the absent pattern his forefinger traced along the rim of the ceramic.
Fifteen minutes ago, you would’ve assumed he’d simply collapse back onto the couch, burying himself beneath the tangled blanket still waiting for him in the living room. But now? Now you weren’t so sure. It was easier to picture something far lonelier: the apartment falling into total darkness, save for the stark blue glare of his laptop screen illuminating the kitchen table long after midnight. You could picture him hunched under the weight of the quiet, eyelids threatening to close between paragraphs, one hand rubbing absently over his jaw before clicking on the next file anyway.
Sometime later, after the moon claimed the highest perch in the sky, he might switch on the television in the living room. Not to watch it. Just to fill the silence. Just to chase both sleep and ghosts away with the mindless murmur of late-night broadcasting.
He’d be there in the freezing hours of the night, his hand only stopping to reach for the stale, cold coffee sitting next to his work phone. Until, eventually, the first blue cracks of dawn would begin to peek through the blinds, and only then would he finally close the laptop and walk down the dark hallway to his untouched bed. Only because the work was finished, never because he had willingly surrendered to the weight of his exhaustion.
And it was not that the paperwork absolutely needed doing tonight. But perhaps because is was a far better, far safer companion than whatever thoughts he’d brought home from that village.
The image settled like stone somewhere deep beneath your ribs. And before you could stop yourself, the question slipped free into the sunlit quiet.
“Have you had dinner yet?”
He looked up from his coffee, his grey-blue eyes focusing slowly as if pulling himself back from a great distance. Then, he shook his head.
Of course he hadn’t. You didn’t know why you’d even asked. You’d be surprised if he’d eaten anything substantial in hours.
“I’ll heat something up later.” He gestured vaguely with his mug toward the papers across the table. “Just wanna go through these first.”
You nodded, your chair scraping lightly against the floor as you stood up.
“Okay, I’ll heat it up for you, then.”
A dim light of surprise colored his tired features.
“It’s fine. You—”
“Don’t have to? Yes, I do.” You smiled softly as you looked back over your shoulder, already carrying your empty mug toward the sink. “I’m the one who dumped half of those papers into your weekend. It’s the absolute least I can do.”
The faucet hissed to life beneath your hands, warm water splashing excitedly against the stainless steel.
“Besides, I won’t be able to enjoy myself at John’s knowing I left my Captain stranded in a mountain of work.” You glanced back toward him briefly, catching his silhouette out of the corner of your eye. “And starving on top of that.”
A light chuckle sounded behind you—or, at least, you chose to think it did. It was hard to tell over the steady rush of the water running through your fingers as you rinsed the mug clean.
You half-expected his polite protests to fill the silence once the faucet shut off—insisting he could manage on his own, that you didn’t need to trouble yourself. Instead, only the gentle rustle of cotton followed, as you dried your hands against the dish towel he kept near the sink. Then, the muted thud of nylon-clad feet as you stepped deeper into his space toward the refrigerator. And finally, behind you, the crisp click of his laptop screen being pushed back open.
A thick warmth bloomed inside you at the sound. That’s right. All he had to do was sit right there and wait. You’d make him something warm. Something filling. Something yours. And only after that, you’d leave him to his private evening, where he could stay up all night chasing his ghosts into the dawn if he really wanted to—but he was absolutely not doing it on an empty stomach.
The rubber seal broke free with a soft hiss as you pulled the steel door open, a wave of cool mist spilling across your face as the artificial white illuminated the contents before you.
A carton of eggs, a couple of cartons of milk, two large tubs of yogurt, one of cottage cheese, and a jug of orange juice missing half its contents. On the lower shelf, a few loose bell peppers sat next to a bag of red apples, another of fresh zucchini, a quart of berries, and a lone, untouched six pack of energy drinks away in the back.
Clean, high-protein, and while a little barer than yours, well-stocked. Surprisingly so. And the bright, cheerful colors of the fruits told you something quietly comforting: he’d actually remembered to get groceries after coming home.
Your fingers hesitated against the shelving.
“The leftovers are on the top shelf,” he called out from the table, a mere second before the rhythmic tap of his fingers against his laptop keyboard filled the kitchen again.
You hummed vaguely in acknowledgment, despite having already abandoned the original plan entirely.
Leftovers.
Your eyes lifted toward the stacked glass containers on the upper shelf, their contents fogged faintly by the chill.
Yeah, sure. Absolutely not. You were not feeding him cold, sad leftovers tonight.
Scanning the shelves again, your eyes landed on a lonely, half-empty jar of tomato sauce tucked into the refrigerator door.
Okay, you could definitely work with this.
You reached for the nearest glass container and popped the clasps loose, revealing several grilled chicken breasts sitting inside. Perfect. A rustic, garlic-and-vegetable pasta using the leftover chicken just to add substance. Simple enough not to keep him waiting forever, and exactly right for a man who’d survived the entirety of his time abroad off cold military rations and bitter caffeine.
You nudged the silver refrigerator door shut with your shoulder, the seal snapping closed with a soft thud. And after laying your haul out across the counter, you filled a heavy pot with water, set it atop the stove, and clicked the burner to high.
The blue flames that licked the bottom of the metal seemed to melt the kitchen into a slow sort of rhythm.
Knife against a cutting board.
Fingers against a keyboard.
Vegetables sizzling loudly as they surrendered their bright colors to the heat.
Outside, the dying day continued bleeding slowly through the glass windowpane—the deep oranges of the sunset slanted heavily across the countertops and cabinets, plating steel appliances in a coat of warm gold.
Inside, the sharp scent of garlic and herbs mellowed into fragrant waves, swirling in the air so insistently it made you realize just how hungry you actually were.
But this wasn’t for you.
The thought tugged gently at the corners of your lips.
Behind you, the steady keyboard taps paused briefly. Then resumed.
It was almost done. He just needed to wait a little more.
You reached for the jar of sauce and gave the lid a firm, confident twist.
Only, nothing happened.
After wiping your hand against the wool of your skirt, you tried again—bracing the glass against your ribs as you gave the metal a counter-clockwise twist.
But it didn’t budge even a fraction.
You stared at the black lid for a second before a quiet smile bloomed across your lips. Of course. The Captain had probably closed this thing himself the last time he used it, applying the kind of effortless grip strength that he used to hold onto moving helicopters or pin bio-fools twice his size against concrete walls. There was absolutely no way you were opening a jar of tomato sauce closed by Chris Redfield himself.
Still, you reached for the dish towel by the sink and wrapped it around the lid for one final, stubborn twist before you had to interrupt him for help.
“Here. Let me.”
The deep, cigarette-worn rasp of his voice echoed suddenly beside your ear.
Close.
Far closer than you’d ever expected.
Had this been anybody else’s voice sneaking up on you in the quiet, the sheer proximity would’ve startled you. But thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark with nothing but his low frequency murmuring directly into your headset, had trained your body to relax at the sound—even if he had never been physically this close before.
Not that you remembered.
And oh, you would’ve definitely remembered.
You hadn’t even noticed the rhythmic tapping of the keyboard had stopped. Or the way his shadow had quietly fallen over yours from behind, swallowing yours whole in the golden light. Had this been an ambush in the field, you would have been finished by now.
But this was just a Friday evening.
This was just his kitchen.
This was just him.
“Thank you,” you murmured softly, so softly the words dissolved into a whisper, your fingers loosening around the jar as his hands replaced yours.
And despite yourself, your attention betrayed you once more—lingering on the sheer size of his hands around the glass, making the heavy glass look like a tiny jar of sweet, indulgent jam. You watched the thick veins of his forearms shift and tighten beneath his skin as he gave the metal one brief, casual twist. And then—
Pop.
Just like everything else eventually seemed to do when faced with him, the seal surrendered easily beneath the effortless strength of his bare hands.
“I thought we were doing leftovers,” he remarked, handing the jar back to you.
“We are,” you smiled lightly, spooning a generous dollop of sauce into the pan, where it hissed loudly against the heat. “I’m using this leftover chicken I found.”
“Well, I don’t remember it smelling this good last night.”
You laughed softly beneath your breath, stirring more sauce through the sizzling vegetables.
“While my culinary skills might not be quite as legendary as John’s…” you lifted the spoon carefully, blowing on it before taking a quick taste just to ensure the data supported your claims, “…it’s definitely miles ahead of Charlie’s.”
That earned a quiet huff of amusement from him. Brief. Rough around the edges from both tobacco and lack of sleep in equal measure.
You smiled despite yourself, the sound thrumming across your skin.
“Wanna try some?”
The offer left your lips before your brain could properly catch up with it, before you could even begin to evaluate the logistics—or the outright impropriety—of the situation.
But it wasn’t every day you got to stand in front of his stove and make him dinner. So maybe, just this once, you allowed yourself entirely not to care.
If the implication of his lips touching the exact same spoon yours had just mere heartbeats ago surprised him, he didn’t let it show. Instead, he simply leaned forward slightly at the waist, accepting the spoon from your hand without visible hesitation.
The small movement brought him close enough for you to catch the clean, distracting scent of cedarwood and soap lingering right beneath the darker trace of coffee still clinging to his clothes.
His expression betrayed nothing, as usual. So you held your breath a little, until finally a low rasp of approval hummed somewhere deep in his chest—a rare, unexpected sound that almost made your smile bloom wider.
Almost.
Because even as his eyes remained locked on yours, something in them drifted miles away. That familiar, distant look settling into the grey-blue of his gaze like morning fog rolling over a highland lake.
“Is it that bad?” you teased softly, an attempt to pull him back to the surface before he disappeared somewhere you couldn’t follow him to.
His eyelids blinked once, focus snapping back as though rising from deep under.
“No,” he answered quickly, “no, it’s wonderful.”
The ghost of a smile touched his lips afterward. Clearly not one he truly felt. Just the practiced kind people wore when trying very carefully not to let heavier thoughts bleed through.
But he didn’t need to spell his ghosts aloud for you to know what their names were.
“Well,” you started, turning the burner to a gentle low until the bubbling softened into a peaceful simmer, “I would hope so.”
You set the wooden spoon aside before turning fully toward him.
“We can always talk about it, Captain.”
About Europe. About the village.
About them.
And the heavy luggage he’d brought all the way home.
He didn’t answer. Only the sauce crackled patiently beside you. The washing machine hummed faintly from the shadows of another room. Your breathing rose and fell alongside his, in a wordless duet of should’ves and what ifs.
Somewhere across the room, his laptop screen dimmed from inactivity, and only then did a different brand of fatigue seem to escape him—the rare sound of surrender exhaled quietly through his nose.
“It’s this.” His hand gestured vaguely toward the kitchen around you. “All of this.” Toward the stove. Toward the pasta waiting in the drainer. Toward the rich, earthy scent of homemade comfort filling the small room.
Toward you.
“He had this.” He paused for a wistful heartbeat before his voice dropped even lower. “She was making him dinner that night.” Mia Winters. “Or, at least, who he thought was her.”
Your thoughts followed his down the dark, snowy path they walked. To a different kind of kitchen. Tucked away in a remote countryside. Far away in both time and distance, yet clearly visible from where you stood: framed traces of happier days still hanging crooked in the dark, broken glass scattered across crimson-splattered floorboards, soft teal cabinets left half-open beneath the cold moonlight, a warm dinner on the table that could never—ever—be resumed.
Not with everyone present at the table, at least.
“That was the last moment of peace he ever knew,” he continued quietly, words delivered with the same brand of poise his voice always carried. But the faint, insistent tension pulling at his brow betrayed the true weight of the thoughts he was bearing. “A normal evening at home. His daughter sleeping soundly upstairs.” His eyes traced their way back to yours, pensive and searching. “His wife making him dinner.”
Wife.
The word landed softly between you. Stinging and warming you all at once. Curling strangely inside your tightening chest.
But that was not important right now.
This wasn’t about you.
This was about him. About how he always volunteered to take the blame, whether tragedies were his fault or not. Like it was instinct.
And perhaps it was.
Perhaps it was his deepest instinct.
To care.
Not only about the Winters. About his men. About field agents he barely knew. About faceless civilians reports would eventually go on to file as casualties.
That was his nature.
You’d watched it play out on a loop for years behind your monitors.
And it was that very nature that also kept carving pieces out of him, mission after mission, hollowing him out from deep inside.
“Captain,” you began, your voice barely more than a quiet whisper, because nothing louder was needed with how close you stood. “None of us could’ve known how any of this would play out.”
He held your gaze through your words, which stayed gentle despite knowing it would take far more than carefully chosen reassurances to truly lighten the burden on his shoulders.
“Just like the manual says,” you went on, “out there all we can do is make assumptions based on the information we have at the time, and hope they’re accurate enough to matter.”
As the words left you, your thoughts drifted once more toward Ethan Winters. Standing inside that kitchen before everything shattered beyond repair. His feet probably aching from a long day’s work. Maybe thinking about nothing more important than eating dinner with his wife and putting his baby daughter to bed.
One painfully ordinary evening.
And you wished too that things could’ve gone differently. That you could’ve done more. That time could walk backward when good people deserved another chance badly enough.
“Rosemary Winters is safe,” you reminded him softly. Even if her situation remained uncertain. Even if the future waiting for her would never truly be normal after everything she’d gone through. Still, she was not lost. Not split inside four flasks somewhere in a backwoods village.
“At least to me…” the smallest smile touched your lips, despite knowing that nothing you said could ever truly chase away the shadows of profound regret permanently darkening his features. “That doesn’t sound like the definition of a failure.”
He held your gaze in the amber quiet. A storm-grey haze still swirling behind his eyes. And maybe you were imagining it—maybe you only wanted to see it—but for the briefest heartbeat, you could’ve sworn you saw a patch of clearer blue peek through the grey.
“I guess it doesn’t.” The words left him in a sigh, optimism worn thin around the edges, but alive enough to make his mouth curve faintly at the corners. “It’s just sometimes I wish this could…” His gaze drifted briefly toward the darkening apartment around you, toward the empty hallway, toward the quiet living room. And you didn’t need him to say the word to know exactly how his wish was meant to end. “…Stop.”
You’d felt it too.
That private little fantasy of wanting the entire world to pause just long enough to let you catch your breath.
Long enough to let you forget.
“Even for a single day.” His words were roughened by regrets and perhaps years of longing for a life that always seemed beyond his reach. “Just for a little while.”
Maybe it was the dimming kitchen. Maybe it was the last stretch of sunlight nearly drowned by the city skyline. Maybe it was the slanted shadows it cast across the walls. Or maybe it was the soft traces of amber it left bleeding across the mature lines of his face.
Maybe it was simply the quiet landmarks of a normal life wrapping around the two of you in the dusk. The blanket waiting on the couch. Your shoes forgotten by the door. His laptop abandoned on the table between his mug and your phone. Your heavy coat squeezed in tight between his on the rack. The smell of homemade food and sweet coffee blending seamlessly with the darker notes of his cologne.
Together, it painted a picture deceivingly convincing:
The illusion of safety.
The fantasy of a life simple enough to allow Friday evenings like this to become routine.
Nothing more than dinner simmering on the stove and barefoot conversations under the sunset glow.
“What if we pretend it does?”
The offer left your lips before the moment could dissolve.
“Just for one night.”