In Vivo
Albert Wesker has such sights to show you behind your eyes, shock collar adorning your neck like the most beautiful noose. You have such sound to give him in return, something he attunes his manipulations to when realization hits.
Where could this knowledge possibly lead?
1.9k, tags: Sadism & Masochism; electrostim, shock collars; Psychological Manipulation; Pheromones; Dubious Science; Obsession; Sprig of Plot Sprinkled over the Pot like an Excuse; Extremely Dubious Consent, TRICELL - NSFW Dubcon / Albert Wesker & Researcher Reader. AO3
Loosely inspired by Three Steps Ahead: 4: Dazy.
“Wesker, I-”
Click.
You feel a shock go through your body. It interrupts your thoughts, drags you to here-and-now. The electricity courses through your nerves like fire, like ice – it carves a home in your bones, in places you didn’t even know could feel pain as if ignited gasoline. Your body shivers with it in its’ timed ticks.
Albert Wesker looks disappointed. “Don’t refer to me as my last name.” It comes out clipped, sharp. No please, he’s not that kind of man – not now, at least, when you feign forgetting over the climbing need to act, to feel.
Surely he must know by now. It cannot possibly be coincidence, or the pretense of hatred, especially not when just twenty minutes earlier you’d had his head in your lap.
There’s a moment of silence as his head dips, remote perched in his left hand, pointer finger sliding over its cool metal. You can’t make out his eyes behind his glasses, filed away from your vision as intentionally as they are everyone else’s, worlds away from you and yet so focused on your very being that you might find the construction of you in them if you only looked in those twin voids long enough.
There is a distinct lack-of within Wesker, one that you’re acutely aware of when you’re not gasping through your clenched teeth. It is at its’ most notable when he foregoes his shades – evergreen in hunger, a force that precedes a blank gaze – and you both know that’s why he doesn’t.
It’s not a vacancy behind the eyes, though – he’s there, too present, always calculating something just beyond your reach. It’s an abyss, like flesh had been scooped from something that had maybe been warm, once, and now the only thing left behind was bitter, yawning pith.
And he had taken to filling the pit with work, and hurt, and black, dripping hatred, anything to placate the burden of this infinite, gaping wound, a loss deeper than anyone was permitted entry and least of all himself, and then… you’d arrived.
. . .
An assistant researcher meant to last until the turn of the month, when PG67 would curl around his tendons like stiff, barbed-wire death, coiling and convulsing and needing of your precious chelated iron and the adipose of your abdominal wall more than he’d need of your brain meddling in his work as it rewrote him, birthed him anew.
You were locked in with him by design. And you had managed to escape your binds, slippery thing that you were... human.
Instead of running, you’d closed the distance between your bodies, wrapped your arms around his shaking frame at its’ most paradoxically fragile and pulled him in like he was the one in need of refuge.
He should have killed you then – when you hadn’t taken to banging on the door’s exit. He should have killed you when the opportunity presented itself, round and swollen with your prior pleasantries, the apple in the pig’s jaw.
He did not kill you. But he did sink his teeth into your shoulder, and you did scream.
Even with a mouth full of you, ready to aim for your jugular next, you hadn’t turned hostile. Were you stupid? Why did you hold onto him tighter?
“It’s okay, gonna- gonna b-be okay, sir,” you choked out, hackles raised, voice fear-stained and smelling deeply of adrenaline.
How dare you put him in this position. How dare you run your hand in pained sweeps from the top of his back to its’ bottom and then to the top again, how dare your fingers sink into his hair as he wept. How dare you drag up from his pith the fruit of his waning humanity at so inopportune a moment – the moment precisely meant for the ritual to commence, your sacrifice to a higher power.
Him.
From that moment onward, the months that commenced had stained him with the color of your kindness, like the light of you spilled onto him and gathered in his nooks and crannies where work and hurt should’ve gone. Of course, it didn’t interfere with his grander plans; it only seemed to rear its’ head when you were around.
You were like a disease to his better judgment, a slow, insidious venom to his singlemindedness that threatened it with another contention – yourself.
His mercy was exclusive to you, malice deferred in your stead. Albert Wesker, man of inhumanity, could scarcely figure why, only how. When.
You should be long dead. You were so smart you could rival him in conversation, dry wit of an aperitif. He found more use out of you than he could have ever bargained he’d get; you were a fine scientist and a finer geneticist.
But you didn’t quite share the length of his views. You did not understand the frenzy in his feet, or the life he lived, shades of casual cruelty that stretched far longer than his own shadow to grease the wheel. He'd do anything to move it forward.
Lines dulled still, then blurred regardless. Professionalism slipped through nitrile gloves and shared overtime and the tending of that bite, like a brand he didn’t quite want to fade without the surety of why.
Slowly, he found he did not like when you were not around – a painful, aggravating realization.
And, slowly, he found that in his free time he calculated the lines he’d cross to keep you closer, to make you understand.
And, slowly, he found one day upon waking up from a dream in which he’d held you the way you’d held him that there were none left at all.
. . .
“You’re more than a coworker to me. Act like it.” But there’s no real venom, no bleeding malice; this is more compliment than complaint. There’s a hint of hurt, almost, in how quiet the last sentence slips from him, though – like the barest taste of something you could make out with finer detail if not for the low distraction coiling through every digit and churning low in your gut.
You wished it wasn’t, partly – this is an inappropriate reaction to being contained like a variable, and regardless of whatever he’d done to your conscious, you were lucid enough to be aware that this should feel like an intense, personal violation on every front.
But it doesn’t. You like the attention. You like the sensation. You’re too fucked and in deep to see this for what it should be, because to you it isn’t: it’s some sick, twisted affection that you want to poke like a hive. Will honey come out, or will you get stung? You hardly care – you're fucked any which way you wander.
By offering you this shock, he does you more favor than harm; your thighs twitch together and you pray to a god you don't believe in that he doesn’t notice the effect it has on you, this filling of a vice. As if there was even the possibility he wouldn’t notice.
Click.
You stumble forward in his abode, calves hitting a black couch before you fall onto it. “Y-yes, sir.” There is pleading to your tone not entirely begging for his mercy – he can smell it in your pheromones.
Wesker tilts his head, lets it raise up as he scents the air. Sir? No cruelty laces his silence – just slow, deliberate interest, diagnostic, disquieting. You hide everything, but your body gives you away in ways you cannot fully fathom.
There is the barest twitch of his jaw, considering; it betrays you now. Then he moves closer, free hand coming up to the side of your head; your tired muscles flinch instinctively and then loosen as leather slides along the side of your jaw, appreciating. His other hand’s thumb slowly circles his options.
Your pulse flutters in your facial artery, pupils dilated. His fingers stroke, and your eyes slit. You know.
“That’s fascinating.” It’s warmer than it has any right to be coming from him, baritone sliding into lower territory than mere fascination suggests.
“Sorry, w-what?” You’re so good at pretending, true property of TRICELL. You could be an actor. He wouldn’t let you. Your performance now should belong to him – and he itches to pull it from you like a snag.
“You see…” he begins, pregnant pause as his thumb ceases its’ circling and hovers on burst, not pressing, just hovering, all intent. Your vision has locked onto the remote in swift recognition. “...your limbic system doesn’t seem to differentiate.”
Click.
"Ah!" You tense up and whimper as he continues to stroke your jaw, unfazed. This is lower than the first, and it pulses, then stops, then pulses again – two seconds on, two seconds off. Your hands come up to his hand, gripping each side tightly, and he allows it with a dark chuckle that seems to echo off the walls like a living thing.
He croons, squeezing your fingers, a sound you’ve never heard before until this very moment. “Cute. Eyes on me, now.”
You oblige him as fireworks of color pop with each pulse, hot across your face and hotter than the timed searing in your body. He lets the remote go, sat in his lap, free hand pushing his glasses down so he’s privy to every minute dilation. They follow each pulse of your pupils – blooming, constricting, blooming again – and your face, lit with the burning wick of your uncovered shame.
This close, he can see everything. Hear everything, too, like the way your breath stutter-stops as another pathetic whimper slides out from your throat unbidden, exposure igniting your arousal utterly.
“Do you want me to stop?” It’s a tone like you’re a pitiable thing, as if he’s about to tut and fuss. Sarcasm leaks in, though, a special, pointed satire. He offers you the rope with which to hang yourself as he picks the remote back up. “You sound so pained...”
“Ple—” To begin again? To stop?
Click.
The next shock burns through your fingertips and behind the lids of your eyes and you moan loud and near-involuntary, a mortifying thing, letting go of his hand to cover your mouth like you’ll curl up and fizzle out of this existence. How spectacular. You are a specimen pinned alive, heart beating for him, knocked so far from your pedestal and the safety of the lab that this act is blasphemy.
In response to your clipped plea, he leans back just enough to continue his observation, just enough to...
Click.
It doesn’t stop. It gets brighter, louder, more painful; the snag is tugged. It’s like lightning is crackling behind your eyes, as beautiful as it is deadly. Your heart hates this, but your traitor of a mind loves this, and now Pandora’s Box is opened. This goes beyond simple conditioning and enters pathological intimacy.
You convulse properly this time, and he cuts it after a second elapses. Safety first. Your hands have fallen to the sides of you in tightly-balled fists that dig crescents into the meat of your palms. God, it burns so good.
“There we are…” Another chuckle, pleased, self-satisfied by the results of his study. Bastard.
He leans in close enough for your noses to brush. You don’t move backwards. Wesker can feel the heat emanating from your capillaries. “Now, tell me…” A brush, pointed nose nuzzling against the side of your own. He’s poised to lean back again, promise of more on the tip of his tongue, lips too close and breath too hot.
Wesker knows your answer before you open your mouth, of course. The click is inevitable. He just wants to hear it spill from your lips – it’s sweeter that way, confirmation of the hypothesis around your neck and between his fingers.
“Would you like another?”