...and let me love you to death.



We are all terrified of something. We can't help it. The second we step into sentience, into knowing right from wrong, the ability to form words, we start to learn.

Fear comes from memories, really. We start to become afraid when we can remember what it is that we fear.

Perhaps we are afraid of the dark places, the dark spaces beneath our beds, the crack of a child's closet door. Perhaps we are afraid of these things because darkness represents the inability to see, and when we cannot see, we cannot face the unknown.

We are all afraid of the unknown.

Or perhaps we fear the sight of the stars - no, no. It is not the stars that we fear, but the gaping, spanning spaces between them, the yawning darkness that we cannot perceive.

One might be afeared of dreams - because most cannot control that which takes place in that sacred space between waking and sleeping. It's all an illusion, but it has meaning, bearing on our lives. More often than not, we cannot grasp what that meaning is - and that terrifies some.

What if your dreams were telling you you were mad?

Many grow out of their fears. We fear things as children because we are ignorant - and with age, we learn that there are no monsters in the closet and beneath the beds. Over time, we are taught of the planets, the stars, the spanning universes - and while there's something to be said about the thought of all of that space, it's relatively fleeting, in the grand scheme of things. We accept the stars, the huge shapes made of ice, dust, and gas, filling the sky with beautiful colors.

And dreams?

They're just dreams.

And all of these things, they seemed unimportant to a deer like Wesker. He'd been through - and survived - so much worse. Nightmares and dreamspaces, the sprawling of the stars - even the monsters, the skeletons that hid in one's closets? Sooner or later, they all die. Or you die, one of the two.

So he did not fear these things. He did not hesitate to tread where shadows lay thick, nor did he ever turn his eyes away from the cold, distant stars.

As he woke up, stirred out of his dreams, it was not those fleeting, fading images that made his blood run cold.

It was the way the body beside him did not feel warm anymore. It was the smell in the air, a sickly, sodden smell, the odor of afterbirth.

And as he opened his eyes and saw Kaoori splayed beside him, belly ripped open? As he saw the sight of his dead, damaged child on the forest floor?

Before he felt the bile rising up in his throat?

It was the taste in his mouth, something that tasted metallic, coppery - a flavor he knew all too well.