your memories are not your own, but they are. you remember a city that you once called home- and yet it is not yours. you are not your own, son of god —
hi im percy, you might know me from @/godstrain where i write albert wesker. anyone who has known me for any period of time should not be surprised that i made this blog.
also i write second person for zeno it fits his vibe... if you need me to not do that for a thread just let me know, but otherwise that's what the default narrative style is here!
she's taken by surprise when he kisses her back. when his arms wrap around her waist and keep her pinned against him. she had expected to simply kiss him and then move on with her life. simply a quick peck of the lips and then she could go lay on the floor or something while he processed. but alas, that had clearly been too much to ask.
not that's complaining about this outcome either, far from it. though she agrees she wishes they were elsewhere. somewhere cleaner, somewhere less scary, somewhere less awful and depressing and dreadful. really, anywhere else but here.
she also wishes she weren't filthy. that she wasn't covered in blood and gross viscera and nastiness alike. she doesn't want to be leaving dirty hand prints on his nice clean suit. well... she does a little - as pay back for talking her ear off and putting her in these situations in the first place.
but she doesn't really have the space to regret, to voice any thing, because in an instant he's back to kissing her. as if trying to prove something, either to her or to himself. either way, she's kissing him back until it really strikes her what she's doing and then she pushes him away, panting, breathless, wide eyed.
" i- uh- " she doesn't even know what to say.
what comes out is a bunch of nonsense and her brows frow together as she tries to remember to form a proper thought and then a sentence that actually makes sense.
" n-no i'm not seeing anyone, w-what? of c-course not - " but she feels like he knows that.
she has seen the papers, the notes, the writing. they've been watching her, studying her, following her for years. they set the perfect trap and ambush and got her right where they wanted her and she had been none the wiser until it was too late.
and now she feels guilty. she's kissing the guy that helped kidnap her. the one that helped put her into this mess. the one that was trying to release some super virus or something into the world and her head is dizzy and suddenly it's all too much and she's bending over, hands on her knees as she pants for a very different reason now, trying to concentrate and keep her breathing steady but it's not working because everything is too much. just far too much.
you think that you understand what the issue is. grace pushes you away and stammers- you know she has panic attacks, anyone would have panic attacks in her situation. she's in the ruins of the raccoon city police department, she's endured so much at the rhodes hill care center, and before that, wrenwood. more than that, she knows that she has been stalked.
that's victor's fault, not yours. but maybe she doesn't know that. maybe that's just what you tell yourself so you don't have to deal with the guilt.
she's shaking. you scramble to figure out what to say, what to do. you decide to drape your trenchcoat over her shoulders ⎛ it must smell like your cologne and cigarettes, but that's a better mix than death and decay ⎠
when you were young, you found that a weight over your shoulders, a heavy blanket, made you feel much better. not that it was often given to you, but when you had it, it helped. you hope that it will help her, too. ❝ here, sit down- ❞ you quickly find a chair that doesn't look like it will crumble to dust and bring it over. you take off the suit jacket ⎛ already dirty from the blood and grime on her hands. not that you care, because it's worth it ⎠to use as something nicer to sit on than the rusty old chair. ❝ i ... uh. ❞ you're uncharacteristically flustered. it's almost like you're a normal young adult fumbling around interacting with your crush.
you take a moment to understand that she does make your heart flutter, and you really would like to take her on a date. somewhere nicer. you're also pretty sure that she probably won't want that. it doesn't quite deter you from taking your chance. ❝ we won't have to be here much longer. when this is all done, i can take you somewhere nice for dinner. you know, at a normal pace, like normal people. ❞ but you're not a normal person, and you're pretty sure that she's not, either. she's the key- elpis is the name of a goddess, so you think that she's perfect for you. two divinities meant for each other.
but for now, you try to be normal. it's what she needs, and you are nothing if not a benevolent god.
sometimes, you think about the peculiar situation- it's almost poetic.
you were made by the hands of others and told that you were the chosen one. you died with the ichor draining out of you, and you are reborn because surely, surely it means that your divinity is real. you know ada doesn't really believe that, but she humors you. she was there for you through it all, when you were cold and shaking. when you stared at the decayed chunks of ... who knew what it was, but it felt awful and ada was there to guide you.
she's here to guide you again, it seems. you stand in the wreckage of what used to be one of your many palaces- places where you held lavish parties and showed the world all of the things you were willing to give to it, so long as the people gave you the worship you deserved. and for a time they did.
ada found you surrounded by corpses, some human and some almost metallic. your knights needed tune-ups. you think that you could acquire some of that if you unleashed them on some unsuspecting agents. maybe the bsaa. they were certainly in the way when you wanted to find elpis.
ah, elpis. named for the goddess of hope. there was a time where you had hope, too. now, all that remains is rage.
ada catches you off guard when she kisses you, but maybe that't what you need. when she asks if you want to leave, there's a part of you that wants to stay. you know better than that, so you tell her that yes, yes you want to leave. she makes you an offer you can't refuse. i'll help you, she says. ❝ all of my life ... they told me ... ❞ you're still shaking ⎛ you're grieving the life that you will never know. all you know is what you were made for. that's not fair. ⎠ ❝ yes, i want to make them pay- after everything i did for them ... ❞
they loved you, once.
❝ i don't care what it costs me- ❞ because deep down ... surely you know what sort of person ada wong really is. you no longer have your voice in your head. you would have advised against this, but since she brought you back, there's only what you know from your short, tragic life.
ada wong is the devil, and you can't find it in yourself to care that she'll pluck the feathers from your wings and rip out the divinity from you. deep down you know she will tear you apart until you are as broken and ugly as the depths she calls home, but it will be worth it.
❝ if i cannot be loved, i will be feared. ❞ ⎛ you say it over and over in your head until that scared little boy in the glass box believes it. ⎠
💋 but like in that whole god and devil vibe we talked about??? you know.
2026
There's a beating heart under the corpse of Raccoon City.
This is not a metaphor.
It is sunken beyond layers and layers of concrete, at the bottom of a canyon fault line, wrapped in thick vines.
There's a heart under the corpse of Raccoon City and it belongs to an ever expanding plant that can talk with humans.
The BSAA up top don't go down this far, not without casualties.
You went because the monstrous plant heart asked you to. You had always had a soft spot for great, strange plants, when people wouldn't satisfy you.
This behemoth plant wanted you to come and get rid of something "parasitic", so you came. Among the vermin chewing on it, presented over the warp of the thicket was a headless body that had fallen so far into the depths that the impact had shattered most of its structures.
The head was on one side of the massive, lightless sinkhole it had fallen into, and the rest of it on the other. It was dressed in destroyed, fine clothing. It smelled like cigarettes and poorly kept composure. It made you laugh.
And it looked very much like Jake Muller.
If Jake Muller had ever been a man with money enough to become stupid, he might've looked like this: like he wasn't afraid to die but was too afraid to live truthfully.
You can't help but hold the lifeless head up, the flesh not yet beginning to decay, and laugh in the dark amphitheater while vines and soft squeals from the plant around you tried to put reasoning behind why you were laughing.
You politely ask it to carry the body behind her as a favor for cleaning its roots.
"Hello, Holofernes," you coo at the head, swiping a thumb under the death stiff eyelid on one side while you walked with it back to the rest of the body.
You can smell the oddness of the corpse, and that dry special blood. Faces were more blurry with time, but you remember the strange, pungent amnion-like vinegar of the Wesker progenitor strain, because it was your personal kryptonite. The C-killer. This thing.
The body is bloodless though. An empty shell.
You raise the head up to your eye level and laugh.
"You know what?" you say "There's this part of me that wants to see what you'll do, you copy. You imitation of an idiot man, you."
You peck the curve of the dead man's cheek and coax the vines to release the crumpled body to you. The plant throws him unceremoniously and you toe him under your boot to roll him around for inspection.
---
You peck the back of his knuckles as the thing with Wesker's face limps around. Original Progenitor had been something you worked with religiously, but not in the same context that William Birkin had done. You don't know the Doctor's motivations for it either: why make an immortal? Was it the Umbrella cell they shared or was it love or hate? Was it just a final fuck you?
You don't know. You aren't Birkin. You can't replicate that kind of passion. You don't look at this once again resurrected corpse and think yeah: what a deserving man.
Your charge, hilariously self described as "Zeno", has told you enough about himself that his recovery by way of milling about an open field like a wounded animal is probably an ego blow. The guy thinks he's a god, like the man that inspired his creation. Self described. God. You've never liked people like that.
At least you earned your own title.
You walk behind him slowly, watching this wounded thing that thinks he's truly a gift of celestial origin come to terms with the reality that life, that flesh hurts.
"This... isn't right," Zeno says, doubling over, the seam around his neck seeping wet pus into a ring of bandages. He clutches his stomach and vomits out decayed matter while you slither beside him and pat his back.
"Not yet. You've just come back."
Zeno shivers, for once breaking character, and looking very, very afraid.
A long time ago, a young woman called you "The Devil". You offer something, you give gifts, you test, and never is it without a steep price.
You like the name. It makes you feel much more powerful than a god.
God, in this context, seems to be a weak young man kneeling in a field, lost, and alone, vomiting his guts out repeatedly.
You laugh a little and put your warm palm on the back of his saturated neck and he closes his eyes because it soothes him.
---
The room is filled with corpses bent at unnatural angels. It's an expression of rage built up over a very, very short lifetime, and all that rage had to go somewhere.
For the first time, you think you find sympathy with a man, but it's very brief. These were Connections members, allegedly transporting a new, particularly interesting experiment. Not a problem any longer.
You weren't really here for them, but happening upon the scene was serendipity. Zeno stood in the middle of the room, shivering, and sucking on a cigarette like it would save him from the blood on the walls and the ceiling.
"Hiya handsome."
You wade through the blood and leave behind smearing footprints. He tries to set his jaw, and decide something, but he can't. You pluck the cigarette from his lips after closing distance, easing it out and coaxing his mouth down to yours for a kiss. Your first.
You taste copper, rage, and terror, and things far too human for his "godly" lineage.
"Wanna get outta here?"
There's a heavy hesitation like he wanted to stay, and the shaking hasn't stopped. This worldly monster of a man nods and chokes out a strained "yes" only after a sparking machine broke the silence. You can practically hear a pained insistence behind it. I'm still a god. I'm a god. I'm so angry...
You tug his shoulder and lead him back down a dark set of stairs, blood trailing behind the both of you. You've always enjoyed pulling this type of man to the abyss. You've always liked dragging them into the water, and drowning them.
"I'll help you," you say in the deeper dark, "Destroy everything that made you. And everything that lied to you. What do you say?"
Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider
Tell me a truth about Zeno in the aftermath of re9
there was something incredibly eye opening about the entire situation of the elpis mission.
zeno is young and impulsive and arrogant but he wasn't inherently cruel, certainly not with his origins as a frightened little boy in a glass box. dying and coming back to life didn't fix his weird god complex but it did make him re evaluate what sort of people he surrounded himself with. it made him wary of the connections, wary and angry. he was disturbed by how victor behaved as time went on, but blocked that out with his own ambitions; he's not faultless, but he doesn't go out of his way to just make people miserable.
zeno never thought of himself as any sort of victim. his upbringing was scary, but it was also all he knew so in his mind that was "normal", and when he was allowed to leave, when he was given a name and told he was the chosen one, it was easy to use that as a mental buffer of some sort. the truth is that he was a victim of childhood trauma and just had developed an incredibly toxic view of it.
the elpis situation forced him to confront the abnormalities of his entire life, he wasn't some chosen one, he was a science experiment provided certain things to shape him into a tool for others, and that was something he didn't want to have to confront. he has to grapple with his anger and his fears, and he doesn't know exactly how to do that. it's why he's willing to work with people if they want to take down the connections, because he's mad and he's scared and he's running on a lot of impulse.
trauma is hard to process and it's unique to each person, and essentially there's a component of this which can be said to be "zeno has to learn to open up to others for real, and he needs to learn to critically think through situations," it isn't all about power or worship, and that scares him because now he's trying to move forward knowing so much of what he was taught is a lie.
his biggest fear is that he won't be able to. he's afraid of failing at arguably the most important task of his entire life, and that would change any person.
zeno's other genetic donor is victor gideon (@rhodeshillcare) so when his hair grows longer it shows a little. but he also does have similarities to wesker, who he is primarily cloned from.
sigh i dont have a fancy carrd i genuinely dont have an about page and u guys just have to piece together whats going on with my portrayal thru meta analysis and rp posts im so sorry ill fix that one day
thanks to a handy d100 roll, zeno is 59% wesker genetics and 41% everything else that was added in to repair the degrading genetic sample. victor gideon managed to obtain wesker's dna after coming across the aftermath of a rather messy fight that wesker had with birkin in the labs ⎛ this was more common than anyone would've liked ⎠ and that sample was preserved for a fair amount of time, but clearly by 1998, it had degraded enough that to make viable clones, other things would need to be added in to stabilize the DNA.
it is very likely that the other clones had different percentages of wesker DNA vs whatever else was in there, and not all of them had gideon's genetics thrown in.
zeno's looks are a rather attractive blend of the two genetic donors. he looked more like wesker as a child, the same pale eyes and fluffy hair that albert wilde had at that age. as he grew up, he less of the sharp features that wesker had, compared with pictures of wesker at that age and victor gideon at that age, zeno looks more like gideon than wesker. if allowed to age into his 30s and beyond, his build becomes a blend of the two, he has victor's broad shoulders but ultimately is still mostly lean and lacks the oppressive bulk that victor has. also victor is like 7'2 and zeno is not. zeno is 6'2, taller than wesker was before t virus ... because he was born with it in his DNA.
tldr the blend makes him startlingly attractive, but he is unnerved by how much he can also see gideon when he looks in the mirror and he has to work through that.
the world was a very confusing place. no matter how old she got, she could never quite seem to figure out what was coming next in her life. a feeling everyone shared but she seemed to struggle with. she wished things were mundane, predictable, easy to go along with - but with her anxiety, such things were rarely the case. she rarely left her comfort zone, very rarely allowed herself to do things that were bold or considered out there.
but even she had a limit. she was tired, exhausted, disgusting and covered in so many different bodily fluids and viruses that she had no idea where her skin started and the grossness ended. so it was likely to no ones surprise that being lectured about some super virus and how she was the key to something special was going to get on her nerves. she can't even remember what she had said, just that zen had gotten up in her personal space, talking even more passionately than before about whatever it had been he was talking about.
and grace just could not take another minute of it.
so she did something bold. unlike herself. and grabbed his face, pulling him into a bruising kiss. uncaring if she got his fancy white suit dirty or if he ended up looking at her like she was a gross little alien smushed under his boot. she just needed peace and quiet for a moment - and that was apparently too much to ask so she had resorted to tactics that would usually beyond her. like shutting zeno up with her mouth.
you can't deny that you had wondered what it would be like to kiss grace ashcroft. you had learned so much about her, and yet so little as well. victor was the one who had most of the information and you were fed whatever you needed to know, and as you understood, that was all. you had learned not to argue with that;
all good things came with time.
you remember the first time you saw photos of her. you thought her to be pretty. you still think she's pretty, even covered in blood and sweat. and you are young and impulsive and maybe that's why you got so close. undoubtedly, you wanted her to do something.
this, you think, is the best case scenario. she could've slapped you, and that would've been rather messy. she could've shoved you back, and a part of you expected something like that. everything you knew about grace ashcroft made you think that she would try to find a way to out distance between herself and you, and instead she does just the opposite.
her hands grasp at your jacket, she marks the white fabric with blood and dirt. if it was anyone else, you think you would be bothered. you think you would be angry that they would dare to soil your immaculate self, but grace is different. grace is special, grace is the key to everything you want. or maybe grace is what you want. her kiss is strangely confident, although you think that maybe she doesn't have much experience kissing other people. she's still surprisingly good at it. she leaves you breathless when she pulls back.
❝ how bold, ❞ you say, smiling. you wrap your arms around her so that she stays pressed against you. she started this, but now you're intent on finishing it. ❝ had i known this would happen, i would have picked somewhere more comfortable to talk to you about all of this. ❞
you can't help but kiss her back. even though she's covered in blood and dirt, she's crawled through hell, you still want to devour her. maybe it's the t virus in you, awakened in some way, or maybe it's just because you're young and eager and hot blooded. you want to leave her breathless, too. ❝ i assume this means you aren't seeing anyone. ❞ of course, because she's loyal. you know this from the intel that you've gathered. it's a good thing, of course. it means that maybe ... maybe you want her more than you want elpis, and that's something you will have to work through on your own time.
anyway happy monday here's some fun facts about me
i'm percival you can call me percy unless u are mad at me which is usually when people call me by percival lmao. i'm 32 and my brain runs at the speed of autism.
i know how to fight with swords, ride horses, and i used to do archery. i'm a cosplayer and when i was a kid i went to MIT for summer camp and learned to make robots. i want to design prosthetics one day because i like designing things. i'm also a nurse and work in inpatient psychiatric care.
i roll dice with friends whenever i can. when i said i cosplay i also mean i cosplay wesker and my partners name is chris. chrisker canon lmao.
also i do art and i sing classical and jazz. i also sorta okay guitar and piano and i played flute and learned the french horn that's a long story lmao i did a lot of things huh....
