RE: BLOODLINES SEASON 1
Chapter 4
Time did not move normally after that night. It moved in checkpoints, in calculated decisions, and in locked doors closing securely behind other locked doors. The governing rule of their existence was absolute: no one outside their immediate system could ever know. Because if Umbrella learned what had been created in the shadows of the Arklay underground, they wouldn’t see a child. They would see property. A weapon. Or worse, an answer to a biological problem they weren’t ready to solve.
Albert understood that immediately. William understood it too. They simply handled the horrifying reality of it in vastly different ways.
Over the months, the facility changed. What had once been purely clinical lab space slowly became something else entirely—restricted quarters, hidden monitoring systems, layers of encryption, and physical fail-safes built into everything from access doors to ventilation routes. Nothing existed without a reason anymore. And at the center of this paranoid architecture was Alex.
Alexander Wesker did not grow up like other children. There were no streets to explore, no schools to attend, no peers to mimic. There were labs instead. Depending on who was watching him, these sterile rooms acted as cages, classrooms, or, on rare occasions, playgrounds.
William stood in the center of the subterranean laboratory, watching his five-year-old son manipulate a complex sequence of geometric blocks on the testing table. The boy moved with terrifying, flawless efficiency.
William pressed a trembling hand against his face, rubbing at his bloodshot eyes. Every time he looked at Alex, the phantom scent of subterranean dampness and iron-rich blood crept up his throat. He couldn't stop the memory of 1988 from invading his mind.
He could still remember Dr. James Marcus standing in the doorway of the laboratory, staring at the infant suspended inside the prototype tank.
Marcus had not looked curious. He had looked horrified.
By then, the old man had already begun turning against Spencer and Umbrella’s direction entirely. The paranoia had been there long before Alex existed. But the child had become the final thing Marcus was never going to tolerate.
William recalled the disgust in his voice when he realized what they had built.
Blinding, primitive panic had seized William that afternoon. If Spencer found out, Alex would have been seized, dismantled, or turned into a corporate slave before he ever took his first real breath.
William had gone straight to Albert. He remembered the terrifying, absolute stillness that had overtaken his partner the moment he explained the threat to their son. Albert hadn't hesitated. He hadn't rationalized. He had quietly bypassed Marcus, gone directly to Spencer with a calculated web of lies regarding a coup, and secured the official green light for an execution.
Weeks later, they had stood side-by-side in a rain-drenched training facility corridor while the Umbrella security squad gunned the old man down in cold blood. William had watched Marcus die, knowing with absolute certainty that every bullet tearing through their mentor's flesh was a price paid to buy Alex his next breath. They had dumped the body into the sewers and built a kingdom of lies over his grave, all to keep the corporate spotlight away from a single cradle.
William pulled his hand from his face, his jaw tightening as he watched Alex flawlessly complete the puzzle. The world thought they had murdered James Marcus out of corporate ambition and greed. They were not entirely wrong. But Alex had been the factor that made hesitation impossible.
Alex's life had been bought with a cold-blooded assassination, and William would gladly burn the rest of the world to ensure that transaction remained permanent.
He still remembered the way the drainage water had been cold. Not the dramatic, theatrical cold of a horror story — just the mundane, miserable cold of a thing that had no interest in the gravity of what was happening inside it. The sewer beneath the Arklay Training Facility had smelled of iron and standing water and something chemical that neither of them had bothered to identify.
Marcus had not died quietly. That was the part William could never fully purge from his memory, no matter how many times his brilliant mind attempted to overwrite it with more useful data. The old man had recognized Albert first — had looked at him with something that wasn't quite fear, but was devastatingly close to betrayal. He had said one word before the security squad opened fire.
Not a question. A statement. A final, irreversible verdict delivered by a dying man who already understood the answer.
William had not looked away. He had made himself watch, because looking away felt like a luxury he hadn't earned. Albert had stood perfectly still beside him, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression as composed as if he were reviewing a quarterly report. Only William knew what that composure cost him, because only William had ever seen the man without it.
Afterward, when the sound had stopped and the water had turned dark, Albert had said nothing for a very long time. They had stood in the dim, dripping dark, and the silence between them had been the heaviest thing William had ever been asked to carry.
"It's done," Albert had finally said.
William had nodded. He hadn't trusted his voice.
They had walked out of the sewers separately, as they always did, re-entering the sanitized world of Umbrella's corridors with clean hands and dry faces and the absolute, shared understanding that they would never speak of it directly again. It was the first thing they had ever built together that wasn't Alexander.
Albert was the constant in Alex's life. Alex learned early on that Albert’s presence meant order, structure, and expectation. When Albert spoke, it was usually short, precise, and absolute. He corrected Alex's posture before he corrected his language, and his language before he corrected his emotion. But he always came. Even when he didn’t stay long, even when he left without explanation, Albert was a fixed point in Alex's enclosed universe.
William was vastly different. William came in bursts of chaotic energy. He brought with him disorganized arrivals, late nights, and sudden, prolonged disappearances. When William was in the room, everything felt slightly unstable. But William touched Alex more gently. He checked his vitals longer. He spoke to him like something fragile that was still worth the effort of understanding. He wasn't always present, but he was never indifferent.
There had been a Tuesday — Alex was perhaps four, though the precise date existed only in William's private logs — when the scientist had arrived at the safehouse unexpectedly early. No crisis. No data emergency. He had simply finished his work at two in the afternoon and found, to his own mild bewilderment, that he did not want to go back to Raccoon City.
He had sat on the floor of the study with Alex for three hours. Not running cognitive tests. Not reviewing developmental benchmarks. Just sitting, while Alex methodically disassembled and reassembled a mechanical puzzle William had brought from the city — a navigational instrument designed for adult engineers, which the four-year-old had solved in eleven minutes and then taken apart purely to understand how the solution worked.
William had watched him with his chin resting on his folded arms, his exhausted eyes tracking every small, precise movement of his son's hands.
"You're going to be terrifying," William had murmured, mostly to himself.
Alex had looked up. "Is that good?"
William had considered the question with more genuine seriousness than it probably warranted. "For you?" he'd said finally. "Yes. I think so."
Alex had accepted that with a small nod, and returned to the puzzle.
William had stayed until well past dark. Albert had found them both asleep on the study floor when he returned — William's rumpled lab coat draped awkwardly over Alex's small shoulders as a makeshift blanket, the mechanical puzzle solved and re-solved and resting between them like a shared achievement.
Albert had stood in the doorway for a long moment before turning off the light and leaving them there.
It became one of the memories William stopped letting himself linger on for too long. Because examining it required acknowledging how many Tuesdays had come after that one, when he had finished work at two in the afternoon and gone back to Raccoon City anyway.
What Alex didn’t fully comprehend yet was that the life William lived in the light was nothing more than a meticulously constructed shield. To Umbrella and the rest of the world, William Birkin was a brilliant, slightly erratic family man. His wife Annette and daughter Sherry were the corporate-approved cover, the perfect, mundane camouflage for a man hiding a god-tier biological secret.
But the safehouse was where William’s reality actually lived.
He would arrive late in the night, physically and mentally exhausted, shedding the suffocating weight of his public performance the moment the heavy door locked behind him. After Alex was sent to bed, the quiet in the house would shift. Through the walls, in the dim, secure isolation of the master quarters, the undeniable truth of their partnership remained violently alive. The physical devotion between William and Albert had never once ceased; it had only retreated deeper into the dark.
It was there that the frantic, paranoid scientist would finally drop his armor. William would press Albert back against the closed door, his desperate hands tangling in the dark fabric of Albert’s shirt, seeking the only grounding force he had left in the universe. And Albert would take him—his touch stripped of all its usual cold, sociopathic calculation, replaced by a fierce, possessing heat. They made love with the quiet, devastating desperation of two men tethered together by a twisted, genuine affection, actively betraying the world that believed they were nothing more than colleagues.
Alex was bright early on. Too bright, according to Umbrella’s internal metrics—though the corporation never saw him directly. They only saw filtered data, redacted references carefully buried by Albert inside systems that were never meant to connect. Alex learned languages before he learned games. He learned behavioral patterns before he learned bedtime stories.
But he also learned music. That part hadn't been planned. It started with sound—old classical recordings William would leave running in the background of the lab and forget to turn off. Fragments of symphonies bled through the sterile hum of the machinery. Alex listened, then repeated, then corrected his own finger placements on a cognitive-testing keyboard until the sequences felt right.
The first time Albert heard him play properly, he stopped dead in the doorway. He didn’t say anything at first, which was highly unusual.
Alex looked up, his small hands hovering over the keys. “Is it wrong?”
Albert exhaled slowly. “No.” He took a slow breath, choosing his words carefully. “It is… unnecessary.”
Alex considered that logic, then continued playing anyway.
When William found out later, he laughed—not loudly, but with genuine delight. “He’s not a machine,” William murmured, almost to himself.
Albert’s response was immediate and sharp. “He was never meant to be one.”
As Alex grew older inside this architecture of secrecy, fragmented awareness began to set in. He realized he wasn't allowed outside. He noticed conversations dying the moment he entered a room. He recognized that the name “Umbrella” was treated like a curse, never spoken directly unless they were certain he was asleep.
When he was ten, the questions became unavoidable. He stood in the lab doorway one evening, watching Albert review classified data he was strictly forbidden from seeing.
“Am I dangerous?” Alex asked.
The question stopped the room entirely. William froze first, a vial stalling in his hand. Albert looked up second.
Finally, Albert spoke. “No.” It was simple and absolute. But he added, “But others would think so.”
Alex absorbed the weight of that quietly.
William stepped closer, his movements slower than usual. “That’s why you stay here,” he added gently.
“To be safe?” Alex asked.
“To be protected,” William corrected.
From the outside. From Umbrella. From a world that would reduce him to something usable. Alex looked between the two men who had made him. His fathers.
“You’re protecting me,” Alex stated.
Albert nodded once. William did the same. They didn't say the rest. They didn't have to. Alex was already beginning to understand that their protection was not just an act of love; it was an act of containment.
Time in the safehouse outside Raccoon City didn’t feel like time in the Arklay lab. It lacked the rigid, hourly structure imposed by the subterranean facility. Instead, time spread out—uncertain, quiet, and vast. And within that open space, Alexander Wesker began to notice things about himself that he had never been allowed to examine closely before.
There was a mirror in the hallway, an unremarkable, functional piece of glass placed without any intention of meaning. One afternoon, Alex stopped in front of it and looked longer than usual.
His hair had grown slightly uneven again, falling across his forehead. It was blond, lighter than either of his fathers’, and soft in a way the rest of his existence wasn’t. But it was his eyes that held his attention. He had always known they were different, but only now did he fully grasp what that meant in context.
One eye was blue—clear, steady, and familiar in a way that made his chest tighten slightly if he stared at it too long. The other was green—sharper, warmer, yet permanently unsettled at the edges. He looked engineered. He blinked once, slowly. Then again, as if the repetition of the action might somehow change the result. It didn’t.
William noticed first. “You’re looking at it,” he said, pausing in the hallway.
Alex didn’t turn away from his reflection. “I am looking at what I am.”
“That’s one way to phrase it,” William replied softly.
Alex finally turned to meet his gaze. “Is it correct?”
William hesitated. “It’s accurate. But not complete.”
Later that week, Alex asked for something neither man had anticipated. “I want a piano,” he announced.
Albert looked up immediately from his files. “A controlled interface already exists in the testing lab.”
“I want a real one,” Alex clarified.
A tense pause descended on the room. William shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“And a guitar,” Alex added smoothly.
That earned a much sharper, immediate reaction. “No,” Albert commanded, his voice hard.
“Because sound carries,” Albert replied, his tone leaving absolutely no room for debate. “Because unpredictability carries. Because attention carries.”
Albert was consistency, control, and anticipation. William was variability, insight, and instability. And somewhere between those two opposing forces, Alex struggled to define where he fit.
One evening, while sitting near the rain-streaked window, Alex finally voiced the thought aloud. “I don’t know what I am to you. I am not a tool, but I am not free. I am not a mistake, but I am not natural either.” He paused, looking out into the dark treeline. “Sometimes it feels like I’m part of the house.”
William exhaled slowly, rubbing his tired eyes. “That’s not inaccurate.”
Albert’s voice cut through the room a second later. “It is incomplete.”
Alex nodded once. “Everything is.”
But that containment had a rapidly approaching purpose. Albert became more precise, more absent, and entirely focused on variables that had nothing to do with daily survival and everything to do with long-term contingency.
The heavy curtains of the safehouse were drawn tight, but the distant, muffled thunder of Raccoon City's approaching storm still rattled the glass. Down the hall, secured in his bedroom, Alex was deep in his scheduled REM cycle—or at least performing the slow, measured breathing of it.
But in the master quarters, the atmosphere was completely unhinged. William was pacing the floorboards like a caged animal, his hands clawing at his lab coat as he ranted about Umbrella's internal betrayals, Spencer's shifting oversight, and the impending completion of the G-Virus. His brilliance was rapidly fracturing into manic paranoia.
"The parameters are shifting, Albert!" William stressed, spinning on his heel to face him. "Spencer is tightening the security protocols at the underground facility. If the cleanup crews intercept my private logs, if they trace the anomalous genetic sequencing I hid in the mainframe—"
"Quiet, William," Albert commanded.
He stood by the mantelpiece, entirely motionless, his dark silhouette imposing and immaculate against the dim light. His blue eyes locked onto William with a freezing, unyielding authority that instantly cut through the scientist's hysteria.
"You are letting your panic compromise your calculation," Albert said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "Umbrella's internal politics are irrelevant. We have managed Spencer's scrutiny for a decade."
"Marcus discovered him when he was an infant!" William shouted, his voice cracking with the heavy weight of ten years of terror. "Marcus almost destroyed everything before we even began! What happens when the next chief inspector walks into the lower wing and asks the same questions?"
Albert took a single step forward out of the shadows. The sheer, suffocating gravity of his presence made the room feel instantly smaller.
"No one will ask the questions, because they know the cost of the answer," Albert stated, his tone chillingly level. "Lest you forget exactly how far we have already gone to secure that boy's existence."
William went still, his breath catching sharply.
"We stood side-by-side in a flooded drainage trench while a security squad executed our mentor," Albert reminded him, the words carrying the brutal, unvarnished weight of a historical truth. "We watched James Marcus gunned down in the dark, and we personally dragged his corpse into the sewer line to ensure your genetic architecture remained a ghost. We murdered the pioneer of the T-Virus to give Alexander his infancy, William. Do not speak to me of corporate oversight now."
William swallowed hard, the violent reminder of their shared sin visibly grounding him. The panic left his eyes, replaced by the grim, heavy reality of the wall they had built around their family.
Albert turned his gaze back toward the dark window. "The foundation of his life was bought with blood in 1988. It will not be dismantled by corporate bureaucrats in 1998. Keep your head down, finish the G-Virus architecture, and leave the perimeter defense to me."
