Title: Metal
Fandom: Resident Evil movies
Word count: 739
Rating: G
Characters/pairings: Chris Redfield/Rain Ocampo, also implies Chris/Jill because of reasons.
Author notes: Written for the prompt 'metal' over at residentevilfic; I know Chris/Rain is wildly AU, but go with it.
Summary: Chris, Rain, and a thunderstorm.

Chris and Rain by dim light one ochre night, side by side and cleaning their guns. Weeks of non-stop terror and then this evening of impossible quietness, in which they don't quite know what to do with themselves. They sit, elbows knocking, dismantling their guns with mechanical precision. They have sought refuge in a 7-11, the pair of them the only survivors for miles around, and the sky is cracking static above them. They've been tasting metal all day, dull mercuric tang in the back of their throats as the clouds roiled closer.

 

And then, a crash of noise, cataclysm to match their tension. Louder than hell, something is pulverizing the roof, shaking the building.

 

"Storm's in," says Chris.

 

"At last," says Rain, and doesn't know where to look.

 

They haven't spent a day apart since Raccoon City where Chris, ever the perfect hunter, found her crouching in the godforsaken mess of it all. He'd come looking for Claire, naturally, the two of them drawn together like magnets in a bowl of water, but instead he'd found Rain, grimy, starved, and bullet-pierced. He'd picked the crushed shotgun pellets from her shoulder like a war medic, giving her his hand to hold. "Watch it Redfield," she'd hissed, and now they were still together, a world away from his sister, from the Hive, from Jill freakin' Valentine with her steady come-hither-Redfield glare. Jill always made her feel like a child, with zero-sophistication, and Rain hated that she had felt like the third wheel between them.

 

She'd envied his ability to just quit Umbrella and go rogue, it seemed that Chris had always been vectoring towards his fate as an outlawed, gun-toting badass, all caustic and grown up, and all Rain had was a bunch of dead colleagues and a truck-load of guilt. Before Alice, before the outbreak, they'd talked about breaking out, just walking off one day and never looking back, but Rain had been young, and naive, with her loyalty to the party line, and then JD had happened and somehow she and Chris were in the past tense.

 

The storm carries on pouring, and she gets a quick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a pang of emergency and survivalism. Always on the edge, she's always on the edge, this nightmare never lets up. Chris had gasped when she'd told him about the dogs, about the lickers, about Alice being a goddamned superhero. She knew that very little could shock him now. She remembers the first time he looked at her and didn't want to like her, but they liked each other anyway, to hell with everyone else, just you and me, Redfield, and the end of the world.

 

He slams his hand down with sudden urgency, and her senses are pricked beside him. What has he heard that she's missed? She has long since perfected the art of tuning her body and mind with his, out of necessity and sometimes want; they are point-conscious observers in a world where the dead walked and didn't stay dead.

 

"What is it?" She barely makes a sound. He shrugs.

 

"Just thunder. Probably." That's as close to a guarantee of safety either of them was ever going to get again.They have become a little island cordoned off from the rest of the survivors, a clannish pair of outlanders who go looking for trouble. She knows they can't possibly make it.

 

She clocks her gun back together, the freshly cleaned metal smoothing into place neatly with a familiar click.

 

"I'm heading up," she says, gesturing to the back room where they have set up sleeping bags amid the flotsam of chaos, amid the crushed tins and gone-off cigarette ashes. She gives him a quick kiss despite her better judgement and leaves him to keep watch.

 

In Chris she always feels as though she has met her match, an equal; he's easy to misjudge, difficult to know, he has lost-sister guilt and would hate himself forever if anything happened to her. Rain wants to gather up his hurts and throw them away, send them out into the heavy metallic sky. She wants to rid the world of zombies and messianic superbitches, wants to rewind time back to the pair of them in Raccoon City, back to coffee and paperwork.

 

Having kissed Chris Redfield, she waits for the world to end, with the virus ticking through her body and a gun beneath her pillow.