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There’s not one part of her that doesn’t hurt. Jill’s throat is sore, a necklace of bruises ripening into what she’s sure is a tender purple by now. Every swallow hurts. Stinging asphalt scrapes, patches of burns along her bare arms, countless little glass splinters… The wound on her upper arm, where the t-Virus had infected her, had nearly killed her, throbs under the soiled bandages wrapped around it.
Except, that’s not right. It hadn’t almost killed her— it had almost turned her into one of those things . She lays a hand over the bandage gently, and it does nothing to ease the pain.
And as she watches the blue flash of the missile streak into the heart of Raccoon City, erupting everything in a terrible, fiery reckoning, the image burns itself into her retinas. Jill shuts her eyes to it as the mushroom cloud billows upwards, the shockwave jerking the helicopter through the air enough to make her think she might throw up.
She doesn’t, thankfully, but the unrest sits heavy in her gut for the rest of the flight. She keeps her eyes closed, and focuses on the ache from looking at the blast until it hurts more than everything else.
Jill doesn’t know how long it is until Carlos sets them down. She thinks she probably drifted off, but she doesn’t know for how long. The sun was just beginning to rise as the missile hit RC. Looks like maybe mid afternoon now.
They’ve landed in a field, nothing in sight for 360 degrees, other than a wide, empty highway and one faraway spattering of trees, foliage going autumn yellow. Carlos climbs out of the cockpit with only a wince and is over to her side in a second, offering a hand.
“The helicopter’s runnin’ low on fuel, and I figured we might want to save some. Just in case. Hope you’re okay with a walk, Supercop,” he says as her hand grips his and she clambers down. Jill doesn’t feel like mustering enough pride to ignore his offer of help. Her legs and ribs hurt too much.
“What’s a little walk on top of all the other shit we’ve been through?” she says, going for a light-hearted tone, and not quite succeeding.
Carlos smiles at her anyway. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s seen in a while.
They make it into the nearest town an hour and twenty-four minutes later. It would’ve been quicker, but three quarters of the way through, Jill couldn’t help but start limping, the muscles of her legs strung tight with pain. And at the end, civilization so tantalizingly close, Carlos starts hugging his ribs and breathing that way people breathe when they’re trying to hide how much they hurt.
They walk by a billboard declaring that Hell is real just outside the town border, and Jill laughs and laughs until tears prick at her eyes and she has to push Carlos’ hand off her shoulder and keep walking so she doesn’t break down right there in the middle of the road.
“Do you have any money?” Jill asks as a rundown motel comes into view a few tense minutes later, a neon red VACANCY flickering erratically under the cold sun. She wipes at the wetness in her eyes with the heel of her palm and then pats her back pocket before remembering, of course, everything she owns has just been destroyed. “My wallet got… incinerated.”
“Yeah, I got some. Don’t worry about it.”
A shifting, prickly feeling of guilt settles into her chest as she watches him buy them both a room, and she resolves to pay him back for this and more the second she’s got money on her again.
“You can shower first,” Carlos says as he swipes their room key and pushes against the sticky latch until the door jerks open.
Inside is a little room with two queen beds, a kitchenette, a desk, a cheap TV, and a door cracked open to reveal the shadowed bathroom. It’s rustic, if she’s trying to think of a nice word. Wood paneling on the walls, forest green carpet spattered with a handful of various stains. Dark mildew spots the corners of the window where wetness seeped in and festered. The pattern of the curtains and the pattern of the comforters couldn’t clash more.
“You sure?” she asks, unholstering her pistol and setting it on the counter. It feels half-weird to enter a motel room and have no luggage. The only possessions she has left though are her gun and the twisted-up vaccine vial. She lays that out too, parallel to the pistol. It looks dead, without the purple liquid she knows it’s supposed to hold.
“Of course,” Carlos assures her, unholstering similarly, always the gentleman. His eyes fall on the vial, but his expression remains unreadable.
Jill makes the shower water ten times hotter than she should, and even then, she doesn’t think she’ll ever really feel clean again. The smell of motel soap slowly overtakes the smoke-blood-flesh-death smell of her though. Everything stings, everything burns. She cries through the whole thing, but twenty minutes later the water swirling down the drain is finally clear and she shuts off the water.
Jill wipes the steam off the mirror with her palm and it’s as though she’s created a window, and behind it is a woman that she thinks she may have met some time, somewhere. Jill leans against the sink and stares into the woman’s eyes like she’s trying to intimidate a perp into confessing. They blink at the same time. The fluttery minutia of their bodies and faces are the same.
She doesn’t move until the room door jostles open a while later and she jumps, heart racing, revealing the woman in the mirror to be her. Of course.
Jill shakes her head. It’s Carlos. It has to just be Carlos. No one else would have the room key.
Still, she wraps herself in a too-small towel, and eases the bathroom door open silently, peering out to check. He’s in the kitchenette with his back to her, a small collection of plastic bags in the crook of one elbow. He’s taken his combat vest off, leaving only the black t-shirt underneath, the fabric tight around his broad, muscled figure. He turns, leaning over to put something in the fridge, and the Umbrella logo shows itself.
Jill cuts her gaze to the floor, and ducks back into the bathroom without a sound.
Breathing in the humidity of the shower steam, she twists around the best she can to look at her back in the mirror— too far and every muscle freezes up, pain lancing through her like lightning. But she can see enough to make out the glittering glass splinters embedded in the back of her upper arm. From when she got blasted off the top of that construction site, she remembers. Her shoulder and hip still ache from landing on her side, giant bruises starting to color horrific reds and purples.
None of the shards are particularly big. In fact, most have fallen out, leaving only a scattering of cuts. But some still remain.
She tries to pull one out with her fingers, only to wince and desist almost immediately, tears pricking at her eyes.
“Fuck,” she mutters under her breath. Behind the mirror, there’s a pair of slightly-tarnished tweezers— left behind by the last person who stayed in the room maybe. Jill grabs them and turns away from the mirror. The thought of putting her disgusting clothes back on makes her skin crawl like crazy, so she doesn’t, instead just holding the towel around her chest with one hand.
“Carlos,” she says as she exits the bathroom, a bit more hesitantly than she meant. He looks over to her, faltering as he unpacks the food he apparently went out to buy, nearly fumbling a packet of microwave rice. Jill holds the tweezers up. “I could use some help.”
He drops what he’s doing without a thought.
They then find themselves sitting at the foot of one of the beds, Carlos at Jill’s back with one hand between her shoulder blades and the other holding the tweezers, gently pulling splinters from her tender skin.
“I noticed your burns, too,” he says. “Bought some Aloe Vera. And some bandages for, just, everything, I guess. We should replace those ones around your arm.”
“Where’d you go?”
Carlos shrugs. “Drug store, grocery store. The store clerk definitely thought I was homeless. Looked five seconds away from calling the cops ‘till I pulled out some cash.” The tweezers pinch her skin and Jill jerks away a bit, not because it hurts, but because it’s a surprise. Carlos pulls his hand back. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, a bit frantically, smoothing his thumb over the nipped skin.
“‘S okay,” Jill says, embarrassed by both her reaction to the pinch that barely felt like anything, and the ease that overtakes her body at Carlos stroking her skin. It’s just ‘cause she’s tired.
Silence falls over the room for several moments after. Jill focuses her eyes on a picture hung on the wall opposite her— the only art in the whole place. It’s a forest scene: a bottle-green river snaking through sun-dappled maples and oaks. Reminds her of the Arklay mountains.
“Got us some clothes too,” Carlos says softly, interrupting her thoughts before they can wind any further down that road. “To last us until we can do laundry here. I checked it out, it’s a couple of quarters per load.”
Jill looks at her lap, feeling her lips curve into a small smile. “Thank you. For… for all this.”
“It’s no problem.” Another splinter. It clinks at the bottom of the cup he’s dropping them in.
“No, I mean… everything. You saved my life. Multiple times.”
Carlos scoffs. “And you saved mine. Let’s just call it even.” His hand, the one resting on her back, shifts upwards towards the nape of her neck, drawing her attention to its warmth, the faint scratch of calluses. She doubts he did it consciously— he’s focused so intently on pulling the glass from her skin.
A handful of minutes pass. Jill’s eyes drift closed.
The cold prick of the tweezers. A clink at the bottom of the glass. “Last one. Let me get you the Aloe Vera.” The bed creaks as he gets up. “And I’ll re-wrap your arm.”
“Carlos.” Jill turns to watch him over in the kitchenette. “I can take care of this stuff. Why don’t you go take a shower.”
Ignoring her suggestion, he shuffles through the collection of plastic bags on the counter, hands eventually emerging with a green bottle and a packet of Ace bandages. “C’mon, it’ll take two minutes, Supercop. Let me help you. I know from experience it’s hard to wrap an arm injury with only one free hand.”
Jill studies a fist-sized stain in the carpet as he heads back over. “Experience, huh?” She glances up at him from under her lashes and her eyes land vaguely on his torso when he stops in front of her, tossing the Aloe and the bandages onto the bed. She jolts up, though, when she notices a wet patch on his shirt, just above his hip. Hardly noticeable over the black fabric, but there nonetheless. Without thinking, she reaches out a hand to brush against it and her fingers come away red. “You’re bleeding.” The concern in her voice is palpable.
Carlos looks startled, like he didn’t know the injury even existed. Recovers quick though, and offers her a grin, as charming as always. “Oh, that’s nothing,” he says. “Can’t even feel it.”
Jill stands up, rolling her eyes. “That’s not a good thing.” She maneuvers them until their positions are reversed and gently pushes down on his shoulders until he sits, bed creaking with the changes in weight. “Let me look at it.”
Carlos puts his hands up in mock surrender. “Yes, ma’am.”
Jill starts to tug at the hem of his shirt before she realizes just what she’s doing. It’s only a second of hesitation though, a blip in the movement of her arms and wrists, before she reminds herself she’s not a damn teenager with a crush. Although she has been suddenly, painfully, and irreversibly reminded that all she’s wearing is a towel. She thinks she would actually care less about it if Carlos would make a joke, but he doesn’t. He just leans back on one elbow, taking controlled breaths.
Gingerly, she crouches so she’s no longer looking down at him, and peels the black shirt up further. Carlos winces. Some dried blood has stuck the fabric to the wound.
“Sorry,” she mutters.
“Hey, never apologize for taking my clothes off.”
The corners of her lips quirk up and she rolls her eyes. There’s the joke.
It’s a knife slash, not too deep, but quite long. Dark blood sticks to the skin around it. “Nicholai?” she asks.
Carlos huffs, looking at the ceiling. “He always did fight dirty.”
Jill hums, trying and failing to dodge the memory of that moment, hurtling into her mind. The vaccine shattering onto her hand. Pointing a gun at Carlos. “Looks like the bleeding has slowed. Needs stitches though.” Jill glances up at him. He looks down at her, eyes soft. “We might want to go to urgent care for this.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. I’d rather avoid the hassle. Could draw some unwanted attention.”
Jill nods. It would be best if Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira died in Raccoon City as far as the world outside this motel room is concerned. And if the past few days haven’t convinced her that she wants Umbrella to think she’s dead, nothing will.
“Did you happen to buy saline solution?”
He gives a two-fingered gesture towards the bags on the counter. “I did, in fact.”
“Good boy,” she says without thinking, and heads over to the counter before he can see the blush warming her face. He’s already rubbing off on her.
She ignores the grin he gives her as she walks back over with a bottle of saline wound wash, and a suture kit in hand.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to a doctor for this? We could figure something out. Use fake names.”
“It’s fine. I trust you, Supercop.”
Jill ducks her head down, flipping the lid off the saline solution with her thumb. “Alright, then,” she says, going for a vaguely flippant tone.
She sprays the gash and wipes gently at it with gauze until it’s clean, trying not to focus on the trail of dark, coarse hair disappearing under the waistline of his pants. She threads the suture needle, managing to not poke her own fingers with it, and, with one hand pinching the silver needle and the other settling cautiously above the wound, she hesitates. His skin is warm. Muscular and hard, maybe, to another human being, but so easily breakable to anything more. Needles, knives. Rotting teeth.
So far, since the second Nemesis burst into her apartment and she nearly died for neither the first nor last time in the past month, Jill has managed quite admirably to avoid thinking further than a few hours into the future. There are people that live in the back of her mind though, and are always there with her. Chris and Rebecca and Barry. Joseph and Forest and Brad. And she doesn’t know when it happened exactly, but somehow Carlos has slipped right in next to the living remnants of S.T.A.R.S., right next to all her friends. A subconscious addition, more of an accident than anything. It must feel easy because he’s charming or handsome or good-hearted or because he saved her life. He tried to save all those people in Raccoon City too, and Umbrella fucked him over for it. Involving him in this shit would be… Unnecessary. Dangerous.
It would be selfish. The most selfish thing she could do.
“Jill? You good?” he asks, startling her out of her thoughts.
“Yeah,” she says, and shakes her head. “Sorry. I’m good.” She readjusts the needle in her fingers, light glinting over the point. “This’ll hurt.”
Jill doesn’t know how long it takes her to sew up the entire length of the gash, but when it is finally finished, knot tied and excess thread cut away, she bandages it and then tapes a square of Saran wrap over the top so he can keep it dry in the shower.
After the bathroom door clicks shut and she hears the water burst to life, Jill throws her towel over the back of the desk chair and digs through the bag of clothes on the counter, gooseflesh running up her naked arms and legs as she does. From the wad of fabrics, she fishes out two identical black shirts. One is much larger than the other, so she yanks the price tag off of both and then pulls the smaller one over her head, wincing as the movement strains her injuries.
She presses her fingers onto the bruises deepening along her side and hip until tears well up in her eyes and she can’t stand it anymore and lets up. She’ll have to sleep on her back.
There’s no underwear in the bag, which isn’t particularly surprising, so she just pulls on a pair of sweatpants and tightens the drawstring, looping it around her fingers and into a crooked bow.
She rewraps her arm by herself after using the saline spray on the puncture. Carlos was right about it being difficult, but she manages fine. She slathers Aloe gel over her burns, gulps metallic-tasting water directly out of the kitchen sink faucet for several moments, and then, inch-by-inch, eases herself under the covers of the bed nearest to the door.
She’s asleep in less than a minute.
When she wakes up next, it is, surprisingly, not because she’s jerking out of a nightmare. Carlos is leaning over her, one hand on her shoulder. She manages to catch a glimpse of the alarm clock before he sets a bowl onto the bedside table in front of it.
Nine P.M. She can’t remember what time it was when she fell asleep. And even if she could, she probably doesn’t have the brain power right now for calculating even just hours and minutes.
“Hey,” he says softly. “You feeling okay?”
She manages to prop herself up on one elbow, wincing and sucking in a hard breath. She gives him a thumbs up instead of talking.
He gives her a little lopsided smile in exchange. “Alright. You want some food?” He gestures at the bowl on the table, steam gliding off the top of it, pushed away by the currents of the A/C. “It’s just the broth out of a can of soup. Figured you might want something light. When’s the last time you ate?”
Jill pushes herself up a little further, shoving a pillow behind her back. “Fuck. I do not remember.” She reaches for the bowl, although it’s harder than it should be with how sore her muscles are. They both ignore the way her hands shake under the weight of it.
“You better have gotten some sleep,” she tells him, ignoring the spoon and instead sipping straight from the rim of the bowl. It’s hot, the steam warming her face. She licks off the salt stinging her tender lips.
“Yeah, don’t worry. I was passed out plenty long. Just barely got up to make food.”
Jill glances over to the kitchenette. A saucepan sits on the electric stove, still hot by the looks of it. Packages of food are scattered around on the counter.
The lamp on the bedside table casts an orange glow over the room, and there’s a sliver of light from the buildings across the street slinking in between the curtains, draping over her bed. She can tell Carlos has been in the other one from the rumpled sheets. The comforter has been cast off, pooling on the floor. She recognizes the sight of a bed after a too-vivid nightmare.
From her periphery, she notices the flickering of the TV. The snow is doing its damndest to obscure the picture, but she can make out some home-remodeling show under all the static. It’s on mute.
She takes a long sip of broth and then sets it back down on the table. “Have you checked news channels?” she asks.
“Yeah. Nothing we don’t already know. Some stuff about quarantine zones and gathering survivors.”
Survivors . It feels like an impossible word to say right now. It feels like no one really survived. Not even her.
“We’re not far from a checkpoint where the government’s been quarantining people, but if we lay low for a while, we’ll eventually be able to get out of the area without suspicion.” Carlos shrugs. “Don’t know how long it’ll take, though.”
Jill lays a palm over the stiff bandage tied around her arm. What if…
“The vaccine worked,” Carlos says, lowering himself onto the edge of her bed.
Jill snorts, looking down at her lap and dropping her hand to instead pick at the pilling on the fabric. She needs to work a bit more on her poker face apparently— it’s gotten rusty. “Maybe you’re just too optimistic.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to let yourself believe it’s finally over.”
Jill watches her hands fist into the comforter. “But it isn’t over. Even if I’m… Umbrella still exists, still has money and influence, and nobody has any idea what the fuck they’re doing or where they’re doing it.” Her fingers sink hard into the dark red of the comforter. It feels like the broad reality of all this shit— the implications, the ramifications— they’ve all finally broken out of some fog inside her mind and are pounding on the inside of her skull now.
No, survivor isn’t the word because have they really survived? Umbrella still has a metaphorical knife at their throats.
Jill’s knuckles have gone white. “This will happen again, there will be another Raccoon City. The only way to stop this is to pull Umbrella out by the goddamn roots, and that’s just—” Impossible .
Carlos leans forward, his hands enveloping hers. Calluses scratch at her knuckles, the heat between their skin striking in the bitter cold air of the room, like the heat of a fever on ice. He runs warm, she thinks. It’s… nice.
“It’ll be okay, Supercop. There’s nothing you need to do about this right now, not right this second. Don’t even have to think about it.”
Jill huffs. “It’s a hard thing to not think about.”
“I know. Just… we don’t have to get started on the all-nighters tonight. Try to leave the future in the future for now, yeah?”
Jill lets herself really look at him for a brief moment, and manages a small smile, since it seems to make him happier. Underneath his hands, her fingers twitch with the sudden urge to brush the curly hair away from his eyes.
Fuck.
Jill sips slowly at the bowl of broth for the rest of the early night, occasionally pretending to watch the TV and occasionally actually watching Carlos. He’s tucked himself back into the other bed, his raised knee a peak under the comforter where he rests his forearms. She wonders if this ease of his is entirely a front, or if he’s really that good at shoving shit into the very back of his mind.
She thinks for a moment about Chris, how much he drank in the time after Arklay, how many times he ignored her calls. Half the time she was paralyzed with worry that he’d get alcohol poisoning and die alone in his apartment. The other half, she wanted to punch him in the mouth and cut her knuckles on his teeth, to shake him by the shoulders until he just talked about what happened.
She’d wondered once if maybe he had managed to delude himself into thinking that it hadn’t happened at all, some kind of amnesiac trauma response. And then a few days later he called her in the middle of the night, sobbing, and she never thought it again.
She and Carlos eat a handful of Saltines each, both wary of accidentally bringing on any nausea, and don’t bother to clean up the crumbs beyond brushing them off the beds and onto the carpet.
It’s only another handful of hours before she gets tired again. Carlos eventually drifts off sitting up. And she would just leave him to rest, but it’s clear from the way his head cranes to the side that he’ll wake up with a crick in his neck if he doesn’t move, so she uncurls from her sheets and leans over to him, squeezing his shoulder.
He hums, cracking his eyes open blearily. “Yeah?” he says, although it comes out slurred almost beyond understanding, and she smiles.
“You should lie down.”
He hums again, shorter. “Yup.” With a sigh, he moves to lay flat and turns onto his side, pulling the comforter up to his face, eyes already closed again. “Good thinking,” he mumbles.
Jill slips back under her own comforter, pulling the beaded cord on the lamp and casting them into darkness, cut through only by the red glow of the motel’s vacancy sign outside. “Goodnight, Carlos.”
“Night.”
She’s in her apartment, fallen out of bed, with sheets tangled around her legs. Wall busted in, broken bricks. Papers are scattered everywhere, lines of string still clinging to what’s left of her corkboard. Dust coats everything in a grey, choking haze. And there’s smoke too. A fire.
There are bodies around her, lying in their own viscera. Torn apart like rabbits ribboned under the teeth of a hunting dog. Everything is red.
Blood pools underneath her, coats her palms with slick, copper-smelling crimson. Her pulse pounds in her temples. It’s spread over her face, mixing with saliva in her mouth and on her lips. She pushes a fat, bubbly clot out with her tongue, and it hangs down from her mouth, a pendulum of gore. She gags, looks up.
Nemesis looms over her, a terrible angel burning sinners, a terrible star in the sky above its head about to fall from heaven and kill the earth.
Behind its legs, acrid smoke is beginning to coil around the prone bodies, devouring them into haze, and suddenly it’s as if she can see their faces, even though they’re all turned away from her. Her friends. Carlos. Dead because of her, because they were standing in between her and her execution.
The heat of the growing fire boils over her skin, touches her eyes until they burn and tears spill out. Nemesis wraps its palm around her face, fingers curl into the flesh of her cheeks, bone cracks. She screams—
And screams and screams, until the room goes dark and the spitting crackle of fire fades and the pressure on her face vanishes.
Someone is saying her name.
A droplet of sweat rolls down the back of her neck and she slaps her hand down to wipe it away, the sensation of it, like a crawling bug, unbearable.
“—you’re okay. C’mon, it’s just a nightmare.” A hand brushes her forearm, settling into the faintest hold on her elbow. “Just a nightmare.”
Jill blinks, and blinks again. The A/C is breathing like a beast, neon red blinking in through the curtains. The sheets are itchy on her skin where her sweatpants have rolled halfway up her calves. This isn’t her apartment.
“Jill?”
The motel. They’re at a motel. Raccoon City is a crater, a deadzone, there’s nothing there anymore, not even Nemesis. The thought of its face over hers makes her wince, spit stringing between its teeth, beady eye zeroed in on her.
Her eyes start adjusting to the dark. “Carlos?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He brushes a sweat-damp strand of hair away from where it’s stuck to her cheek. “It’s okay, you’re okay now.”
Her hands reach out and find his shoulders before she even knows what she’s doing. Her eyes are stinging and her mouth is twisting, and she curls in on herself until her forehead comes to a stop at his chest.
And Jill Valentine cries for the first time since she got out of Arklay.
There’s barely a second of hesitation before Carlos shifts forwards and tucks in closer to her. He doesn’t say anything, just threads his fingers into the baby hairs at the nape of her neck and presses his nose into her shoulder. His other hand rubs in slow circles along her back.
Jill squeezes her eyes shut and pushes her face into his chest, the tears that were brimming along her lashes absorbing into the fabric of his t-shirt.
She tries to hold her breath so that the crying is silent, which only half-works. It’s still punctuated in harsh intervals by heaving wet gasps that shudder through her lungs. The more she folds into him, the more he bends down over her, blocking out the dim light of the room, fitting the crooks of their limbs together. Like he’s shielding her from something— an invisible hail of shrapnel.
Fingers shaking from the grip she has his shirt in, Jill forces them to relax and her hands slide off his shoulders without the effort to keep them there. She lets her arms fall limp at his waist, too limp to even be considered a hug. Her ear isn’t on his chest, but she imagines the sound of his heartbeat anyway.
The night gets melty, ebbing around them as they sit there holding each other, and her sobs fade into quiet tears. There’s rain outside.
“Stay,” she says eventually, voice cracking.
Carlos pulls away just barely, and the warmth between their bodies is flushed out by the A/C. She shivers. The tears have stopped, wetness stiff on her face, the taste of saltwater on her lips.
He brushes the pad of his thumb under her eye. “Okay.”
He shifts where he’s sitting on the very edge of the bed, moving in closer. Stiffly, as if she’d been sitting there for hours, Jill shuffles over to make room for him, lying down as he pulls the comforter up over the both of them. They lie face-to-face.
Jill fists one hand into his t-shirt, afraid that suddenly refusing him any contact would make her seem cold, would tell him that she thought crying in front of him had been a mistake. She’s telling herself that it wasn’t a mistake. Her two sessions of therapy following Arklay, before she canceled the rest and everything went to shit before she could make any more therapy-related decisions, had made a big deal about ‘emotional vulnerability.’
Carlos seems to know how to deal with crying people better than she does anyway.
“Sorry,” she says, and bites down on her tongue. “I… got your shirt wet.”
His hand settles over hers. “Wanna talk about it?”
Jill sniffs, wiping both cheeks off with a palm in two broad strokes. “Not really. Just…” She hesitates. “It’s just RC. It’s hard.” Her voice wobbles the tiniest bit.
“Yeah,” he says. It’s too dark to see his face, only the barest smudge of light from outside falls along the outline of his profile. “It is. I’m sorry, Jill.”
“What for?” she asks, too tired for her tone to carry any of the incredulity she meant it to have. It sounds like a genuine question. “Don’t say ‘cause you were working for Umbrella. You didn’t know what they really were.”
“Should’ve known, I guess.” He huffs out a tired laugh without any humor in it, and they’re close enough that she can feel the breath on her face. “I’ve never known how to make a good decision. Thought Umbrella was going to be the first. Fuck, if Ma knew…”
Jill opens her mouth and then stops. She’s hesitant about trying to pry into his personal life, hesitant to do that with anyone, really. She’s never been the best at getting close to people, not even her coworkers. She bonded with the rest of S.T.A.R.S. through poker and pool games at Bar Black Jack. With the blessing of alcohol-given charisma. “Where does your mom live?” she settles on, after a quiet moment.
“She’s back in Colombia, with my brothers. I just told them that I—” he sighs. “That I got a real job. That the company was ‘reputable.’” His tone implies air quotes. An imaginary phone call flashes through Jill’s head: Carlos on the phone with an aging woman, who has his eyes or maybe his smile. Light is shining through a window onto her. He’s promising that things are going to get better, or that they would at least be okay in the end.
“You should get in contact with her. Tell her you’re okay.”
Carlos hums. “They didn’t know I was… here. Wasn’t allowed to tell them details like that. She probably doesn't want to hear from me anyway, not with bad news.”
Jill wants to tell him that he should anyway, but she just nods instead, a dip of her chin that he probably can’t even see. “Where are you going to go, if not home?”
“I don’t know.”
Jill thinks about Europe. She and Chris, Barry, and Rebecca had agreed to meet overseas in Nantes, get their bearings before going after Umbrella. Barry is probably still somewhere in Canada with his family— maybe he’s heard about Raccoon by now, and has already tried to contact her, maybe he thinks something terrible has happened to her. Chris had left back in August, right after his suspension, and she’s not sure where Rebecca is. She should email someone. She could try their old cell phone numbers too, but something in her doubts they’ll still work. She doesn’t have a phone anymore anyway.
“You?” Carlos asks, in a casual tone that she knows is fake.
“My old partner’s in France,” she all but whispers. It’s not ‘I’m going to France,’ exactly, but Jill doesn’t know where else she’d go but there.
“France,” he repeats, voice soft, and maybe sad, in the dark night. “Alright. Good luck.”
Something catches in Jill’s throat. Good luck, goodbye . She opens her mouth and tries to say something more, but she can’t find the words. She moves her hand up instead, the one twisted up in the hem of his t-shirt, until it rests at the hinge of his jaw. Her thumb skims across the stubble on his cheek, stopping on the little dip that marks the corner of his mouth.
“Jill.” His breath ghosts over her face.
She threads her fingers into his hair, and moves her face closer to his, stopping when their noses touch. He smells like the motel soap.
A pressure on her waist: his hand, mostly his fingertips, settling low and then sliding up her ribs.
There’s something warm and hungry and horrible unfurling in her stomach. The moment comes, the dreaded moment where she just wants to be touched. She just wants everything to go away except for the feeling of Carlos touching her.
“Do you want to..?”
His hand wanders back down her side, then curves into the small of her back. He moves his face, tilting into hers. Instead of just the bare touch of their noses, their lips brush. “Yeah,” he says into her mouth. “Do you?”
Jill slots her thigh between his legs in answer, pushing up against him. He catches her bottom lip between his teeth, hard enough that she can feel the points of his canines, but not so hard to split open the chapped skin and make her bleed. She can taste the slightest bit of blood on his lips though. Cut open on Nicholai’s fist, and not healed yet.
Her fingers weave further into his hair, curling around the nape of his neck so she can push their faces together more, to the point of knocking teeth. Her other hand wanders downwards, where her fingers flutter at the loose waistband of his sweatpants.
His own hand finds its way along the warm, tender skin of her stomach, dipping lower and lower. As he does, he kisses her softly, and sweetly, and she lets him.
The patter of rain outside winds down, and the room becomes quiet except for heavy breathing, and the whisper of the sheets under their bodies, hips jerking against each other’s hands. Jill licks the sweat off her upper lip, and in her head she’s saying come with me, come with me, come with me .
The light of the morning is soft, diffusing through last night’s lingering storm clouds and slipping in through the slit between the curtains. It crosses both beds and paints a pale stripe up the opposite wall. The rest of the room is blueish and gloomy, everything drowsing under a spell of stillness.
Jill is reminded for a second of her apartment, how the sunrise would come through the blinds and light up the disorganized mess on her desk in rosy bands of light. The homesickness is small, for now, but she wants to cut it out before it can get any bigger.
Carlos hasn’t stirred, lying more-or-less where he was when they fell asleep: on his side, one arm draped over her middle and his nose pressed to her collarbone, a swathe of the morning light like a ribbon falling along his cheek and weaving into his eyelashes. She notices a crease between his brows, and lightly presses her thumb into it. This doesn’t smooth it away, but he does shift into her touch.
Jill is sore, mottled bruises even more sensitive now than they’d been the day before, if that’s even possible. Her body wants to escape itself.
She tries stretching, which only sends shoots of pain along what feels like every nerve in her body, so she tries to relax everything instead. There’s tension pooling in her jaw, she realizes, and she forces herself to unclench it, nuzzling into the memory foam of the motel pillow for a moment. She breathes in the detergent smell of it.
After another few moments, she gingerly extricates herself from under Carlos’ arm, and pads barefoot into the bathroom to wipe away the slickness between her legs and splash cold water onto her face. She finger-combs her hair in the water-speckled mirror, gently pulling apart the tangles and fighting the insistent lethargy still weighing down her limbs.
In the kitchenette, there’s a handful of instant coffee packets and a beat-up kettle sitting at the back left of the electric stove. Rust mars the base on one side, a burnished spot speckling the silver. Jill fills it in the sink and turns the stove on, watching the rings slowly heat up red underneath it, leaning her forearms onto the cold grey counter.
Steam starts spurting out a couple minutes later, and she takes it off the heat before it gets the chance to whistle and break the soft quiet of the room. Digging through the cupboards reveals a small collection of mugs, and a half-empty box of stevia sweetener, which is good because there’s no milk in the fridge.
It’s still disgusting, even with the stevia. Worse than the break room coffee at the RPD. It’s warm though, so she cups the ginger-glazed mug between her palms, presses her tongue gently to a chip in the rim and lets the steam rise up into her face.
She couldn’t say how long it is until Carlos shifts in the bed. He sighs deeply, and turns onto his back. She watches him squint under the light and, like she had done, try stretching before freezing in place, his face twisting in pain.
“Want some coffee?” Jill asks, lifting her mug. “It’s pretty shit.”
Carlos blinks, pressing a thumb into one eye and yawning as he sits up. “Sure,” he says, voice a bit rough from sleep. He winces as he swings his legs out from under the sheets and stands. His hand goes to his hip, tenderly pressing a palm to where the stitches are, before meeting her in the kitchenette.
Jill pulls a mug from the cupboard, checking the inside for stains before ripping another packet open and tipping out the dark powder. The kettle is still hot, so she uses a hand towel to grab it and pour the water in, coffee smell wafting up with the steam, caramel-colored bubbles frothing around the edge.
“You sleep okay?” he asks, as Jill slides the mug over his way. His hands settle around its base, not lifting it for a long moment. His dark hair is sleep-mussed, a heavy fatigue in his features that somehow never showed itself when they were together in Raccoon City, at least not as far as she’d noticed.
Jill tries for a small smile. “Okay. No more dreams.” She takes another sip of coffee, nose wrinkling at the taste. “You?”
“Fine,” he says, and then silence settles over them.
Jill feels like she’s on the edge of a cliff, and the ocean below is seething.
Almost against her will, her mind begins to think about heading out and finding the nearest payphone, an ATM, a rental car and a road map. Putting together a comprehensive course of action. She’s had her brief respite, it says, time to move on.
“I can see you about to throw yourself away,” Carlos says, startling her, even though the silence hadn’t lasted that long.
Jill huffs, lips still lingering at the rim of the mug. About to throw herself away. “We haven’t known each other that long,” she says. “And that’s not what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, but…” He shrugs, lifts his own mug like he’s going to drink from it, but stops short. “I think we’re similar like that. You’re gonna put everything about yourself into this one thing, ‘cause that’s how people who want to save the world act. I know you’re not gonna give it up. I wouldn’t either— I’m not going to either.”
He looks up at her. “You don’t have to do it like that, Supercop,” he says. “And I know you wouldn’t be alone, you’ve got your partner, but… I’ll come with you. If you want me to.”
Jill lets her gaze meet his. His dark eyes are soft and unguarded in a way that feels so unfamiliar to her, and strange too, considering what they both just lived through. It feels like he’d had all the faith in the world, back in Raccoon City. Faith in her, trust in her. It feels like he still does, even though she’d failed and the vaccine was lost and Raccoon City was destroyed.
She doesn’t want the brief respite. She doesn’t want to never see him again. She wants to be selfish.
And she knows he’ll forgive her for asking.
Jill reaches out a hand towards him, and he takes it in his.