Nothing feels cold, not even his touch.
A/N: This is an AU based on RE5, inspired by parts of the earlier drafts from the game. It's basically a (dramatically) altered version of RE5 from Jill's point of view.
This story is not told completely chronologically. The pieces are skewed. Sometimes, it doesn't matter. Most of these are moments of Jill's captivity, some are clear flashbacks. Some are events that happen in a timeline, but those should be easy to place.
I'm going to put this into segments because the length was getting out of control. I plan to have it finished and posted in three parts within the next few months. Life might get crazy, but I have most of it written, so it should turn out all right.
Enough author's note from me. I'll shut up now, except to say that I always appreciate feedback!
A Glass Eye
1: beak doctor
No words come out, but she gasps for breath and her vision turns white with the pain. There's blood on her hand, going cold and washing pink to clear in the hard rain. There's an even colder, harder fist pinning hers.
Her body stings with little knives, butchering her until she's left with smiling bone.
She realizes that she has been awake for a moment; she can still feel her cheek buzzing to life where someone's skin thumbed over the scars. Her mind can't move and sticks in funny places, like a tongue numbed on ice. Her thoughts run slow and confused, dirty as street slush (she can remember Raccoon, the snow turning the color of the asphalt-)
For a moment, Jill wonders why Captain Wesker is stitching her up, and then she croaks out his name.
"Captain-"
She can block out the pain. Whatever it is, she can fight it.
"The drugs have addled you," he says, and she hears disapproval. He does not raise his head from his stitching. Her body is covered in cuts: half-naked, the ugliest thing she has ever seen. Dark, wiry threads burrowing into her body like parasites.
He tilts his head to her, and the stitching stops.
"What year is it?"
1998.
She realizes her blunder. She locks her jaw to Wesker – once her captain – and turns away. He grabs her by the chin and turns her back.
"Year."
"Two... two thousand... six," she manages. She's too weak to move any more. It's hard to fight what you can't see, she thinks.
He marks something else then takes another glance at her. But the glance becomes a look and the look becomes a stare.
When she stares back, she notices a pucker under his eye that his glasses can't hide. She notices, too, a twitch in the muscles around his mouth. He does not like her. But at the same time he looks at her with unadulterated greed and pleasure. Like something shiny he found in the sand.
"Like new," he says. Jill doesn't understand. Everything is foggy. He reaches out to touch her face, tracing where he stitched her. She feels nothing. His hands no longer feel cold,
"Are you familiar with mythology?" He doesn't use her name, or tenderness. He turns her head first this way and then that way. She half-expects him to open her mouth and examine her teeth. It's the mad doctor making chit-chat.
"Yes," she says. She struggles to remember. But she liked fairytales better. Back as a girl. Even she used to like them. Between hidden knees, scraped on tree bark, and dutiful piano lessons. She plays chopsticks in her head. It sounds more like a funeral march. She's not normally this distracted.
Or maybe having Wesker handle her like this is just too surreal for her to comprehend.
"Greco-Roman, I suppose."
Her mind runs groggy. All it can come up with, after a moment, is an answer.
"Yes."
"How trite. The Romans were oversexed and overindulged, their deities petty and human. Their gods as themselves – think on that for a moment." Her thoughts are far too clouded to be directed elsewhere. He goes on. "But I suppose I must use an analogy you must understand: you may as well have been born from my skull."
She turns the thought slowly in her mind. She is sure he means something by it, but she can't figure out what. The fog hangs thick, and she can't see for miles. Dead little stars dance in the edges of her vision. "Okay," she says, unsurely.
He snorts and turns back to his clipboard.
She struggles to sit up. When she does, she runs a hand over the scars in her arm. It closes up her throat to air because this mess – this chickenscratch – is her body.
"You will be perfectly recognizable," he says, when he catches her staring. "Back to your regular self." His voice has a sharp edge of irony. She can't say anything back. Her tongue feels like it's full of lacerations - not just her tongue, but the inside of her throat, too. It stings. She stares at her arm and not at him.A man in white scrubs – she hadn't realized they weren't alone - takes her arm and measures her pulse very quickly, then turns her arm over.
"She's not trashing this time – we must have got the right dose." He waits for the slow thump of her heartbeat. "It's amazing." Wesker says nothing in return. "I doubted that it would work – she had permanent nerve injury-"
For a moment Jill fears she won't ever breathe again.
"Yes," Wesker says, and it sounds very different from when she said it: sure and cruel and bored and dismissive. "I can see that for myself. Tend to something else."
The doctor puts his head down and slips away soundlessly as he came. Now Jill strains, and she can make out more sounds. Nerve damage. Her spine tingles. Probably she's just imagining it. It is difficult to sit up, but she won't sit down now. She won't give in. She doesn't consider how long she may have to sit up, only that she has to do it one second longer.
Fuck him.
What game are you playing, Wesker? she wants to say, but the invisible cuts in her tongue only make her choke. She realizes she's wet, and as her heart beats faster she grows colder and colder. The hospital gown – backless – is dry but thin as a whisper. When she moves, she can hear it rustle words unsaid.
He sighs, weary of her company.
After a while her bones are too heavy for her to hold up. Even her eyelids are too much. She closes them. She can still hear doctors bustling around her, but they grown fainter and fainter by the moment. When she feels cold hands on her she starts and almost screams. The pinch in her neck is confirmation of a needle.
Then he's touching the place roughly between her collarbones, and smiling in a way that she doesn't want to think about. The lighting is bright and fluorescent, but he's tipped his glasses enough that she can see something not-right in his face.
She reaches up, like an infant for a mobile. He lets her hand sway and ultimately falter.
"You have glass in your eye," she says.
He smacks her in the side of the face, and she can feel that, just barely, before she falls back. Closing her eyes feels good. If he's still looking at her, she doesn't notice. Doesn't want to notice. If you can't see bad things, they can't see you.
Even she used to believe that she could avoid the monsters if she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.
When she wakes again, he cuts the wires out of her. She can't feel anything at all. She doesn't feel happy, or sad. She can't feel anything except a heart beating fast.
She can hear every sound, suddenly, ever rustle of lab coat and every scrape of a scalpel against the table. She is so much of everything around her that she is nothing of herself.
He stands before her, but she can't focus her eyes long enough to register this. They loll around, distracted and conquered by every smallest thing. With some sadistic urgency, he takes her hand in his and guides it to her heart.
Nothing feels cold, not even his touch.
He has her attention. Suddenly her sympathetic nervous system kicks in – not just kicking, but kicking and screaming. She thrashes agains him. Screams out in hate. No one in the laboratory reacts. Is there anyone here?
She feels some raised machine, pumping.
"Not now, Jill."
She stops.
His fingers are involved, now, careful and excited, and she can feel them against her skin even if she cannot feel how cold they are. Her own heart beats faster, if only because she is afraid at what she grasps.
She does not look down, but she can feel metal there, ticking over the thump of her heart.
She can see him smiling, almost; the closest she has ever seen to a smile, at any rate, and her heart picks its pace up.
"P30," he says, "or at least, that's what they've started calling it around here. I don't think that you care to hear all the suffixes." His fingers grow bored and he pulls away. She's left with her fingers loose around it. She doesn't want to touch it, but it's attached to her. "Now be a good girl and stand up, Jill."
Jill. Her name. She almost forgot.
Without thinking, she stands.
Something in her means she can only focus when he speaks, and this makes him lean in and nearly smile.
P30.
What a simple name for a steel bridle.
With the P30, she sees the world in a new way. Everything is sight and sound. Everything is saturated. It's difficult to focus.
Except on him.
She walks three paces behind him, close enough to hear his every word. Close enough to intimidate. Occasionally the man with him - Tricell CEO, she reminds herself - will glance over his shoulder at her. He may even stroke his beard. He is a tall man, once large, she is sure; but aging. She thinks that if he pulls at his beard any longer it may fall out. From the small smirk on Wesker's face, she thinks that he might be thinking along similar lines. That or he has something more terrible up his sleeve.
He - Wesker - walks with his gloved hands clasped behind his back. She thinks about that old story - not sure if it's true or not - about gentlemen putting their valued guests at their right, to show that they're unarmed. That's what Wesker is doing. It's a farce, and he gleans pleasure from it.
She stands behind them, vision drenched in red. Her hands convulse, unseen under her robe, and she can't tell if it's the memory of the murders she committed or the side effects of the P30. It's nasty shit.
Like him.
She nearly stumbles over the foot of a secretary, standing just as attentively as she is. The secretary is olive-skinned and gray-eyed, with magazine hair and accessories. With a different expression on her face, she could be beautiful.
"So this has all happened under your administration?" The CEO speaks again, finally having had his fill of his surroundings. He turns to Wesker.
"Yes. I do hate to be arrogant, but I've made vast improvements in your staff's processes. Not to mention..."
He looks over at Jill. The CEO looks over as well. He does not look so much unsettled as curious. Jill has never felt so violated as she has felt in the past - how long has it been? She has no means of marking time, and the P30 skews everything.
"Yes," he says. "The subject you detailed in your report."
Jill feels her breath hitch as the needle stabs its dose - quick, easy, regular.
Wesker can hear her. She knows it like she knows her own heartbeat. "Yes," he says. "You may study her for yourself, if you'd like."
Jill can feel the smug secretary holding her breath next to her. She doesn't know why. She senses that the secretary is pleased by her, but also hates her. It seems to be a recurring feeling around the labs.
The CEO is surprisingly gentle as he removes her mask. He must figure he's playing with something delicate that belongs to Wesker, but he retains enough authority not to look in his subordinate's direction. Wesker, for his part, realizes that he is in control. His hands stay behind his back; his smirk plays on his face. Jill can only stare at him. Drenched in red, everything red.
With an equally gentle tug, the CEO pulls down her hood. He examines her.
"What do you think?"
Wesker almost sounds proud.
"A little pale," the CEO says, but she sees greed in his eyes. "And fatigued. Are you sure she's fit?"
"The P30 renders sleep unnecessary," Wesker dismisses, "But her body suffers for it. I personally ensure that she sleeps two hours each day, to keep her from becoming too reliant on the drug."
Jill doesn't know how she could become any more reliant than she is. Her two hours of sleep come via a needle.
"Hold out your arm," the CEO says. Jill does not.
"Jill," Wesker repeats, "hold out your arm."
Arm out, thin and strangely human amidst the folds of her cloak. She raises her head. It's a small effort, but she can catch her reflection in the cryogenics glass. She searches for the faces of the people inside, but they look nameless, somehow like fetuses. She mutes a shivers and studies her own appearance.
Who the fuck is that pale, skinny blonde?
The CEO traces her arm. Even he can't hide his awe. "Gone," he says, "and you told me she was scarred!"
"She was."
"I saw her myself, sir." It's the secretary, with her heavy Italian accent. "She was disgusting, un rotamme, before Albert Wesker's work." Some more words flow in Italian. Jill feels that they are omitted for her benefit, because the Tricell CEO continues to stare at her, even more awed, while the smirk on Wesker's face only seems smugger than before.
"There are some traces," the CEO says, stroking his beard and grasping Jill's arm with his other hand, "but only the merest vestiges of cuts. They are only little white lines-" and he traces one on her arm "-What brilliant work!" He says something in Italian, and the secretary says something back. Jill wants to scream, but the P30 helps to keep it down her throat.
She catches Wesker's eyes. She knows from her reflection that the pale, skinny blonde has eyes like a fish's. He looks at her like she's something else.
His face is still bleeding when he picks her up and lays her on the stainless-steel table. Her breath goes shallow and her brain goes somewhere else, to the light on the ceiling. The anesthesia takes care of the rest. When she malfunctions like this, it's always the same: he lifts her bridal style and takes her to a room where he cuts her up, like some violent parody of a wedding night. Sometimes, in frustration, he rips the metal off her chest and sparks fly.
She's never been this fucking poetic.
It's the drugs.
They trap her in her own mind.
The memories are the worst because she feels more alive in them than in other time.
Chris used to tease her about it. He used to smooth back her hair and ask her how women so pretty ended up spinsters. It would almost have been condescending, if his teasing hadn't been so familiar. She would always knock him in the ribs with an elbow, and he would wince and say that's why.
Also, she said, she had more important things to do.
But in that stark, claustrophobic little lab room, it's just her and Wesker and the beat of the P30.
All her purpose crumbles as Wesker stitches. She's embroidery.
She used to look at wedding dresses - just for fun, sometimes - and -
You're destined to die alone, those magazines had screamed at her. On those nights she was low on sleep, exhausted from training, with white-eyed dead walking behind her eyelids. She was heading into the store late for a bite to eat, alone.
Alone. In a dark room with your heart pounding and your pants hot with piss.
Jill almost believes them now.
The bird sits on the wall and watches everything.
One day, someone shot it down, and then it left its prey and its nest for this life on a man's wall. Its orange eyes, once pulsing, have been replaced. Here is what it would have seen if it still had eyes instead of red glass:
An old man, sitting at his desk.
A sycophantic secretary.
And two murderers.
The murder is quick and clean. Jill snaps his neck. There's no blood, except that doesn't really matter, because her vision is already saturated with it. She steps aside and lets him thud, wrinkled face down, onto his desk.
The secretary is stunned. "That is all?"
"That is all," Wesker says, and Excella stares at him in awe. He is already her god - what is greater than death? To murder, Excella thinks, is truly easy when you have enough strength. When you have wits and power and most of all, trust-
The beak doctor stares at the old man on the desk, wondering when she became this thing. His body doesn't startle her. She doesn't even feel sorry.
When she stares up at the wall, the bird stares back, and she fancies that it can see her. It gives her the creeps. Reminds her so much of something (before), back in the Spencer mansion. What is it with powerful men and dead animals?
Wesker looks at the CEO and smiles.
A kick to the jaw – spit and blood and teeth spew out and his head cracks. There are still five, all in black. She does not think about the faces underneath. Time to run.
So she does. Thud of boot to dry, hard ground, over and over, until she reaches the jeep. He sees her and starts it up, racing away from danger. The car's going thirty before she can stop and, her ribcage aching, she quickens her pace and leaps aboard. Each breath feels like dust and fire.
"Good," he sees, just beginning to relax, "Got 'em good this time. Ha! Those bozos wont' be getting Irving today."
She's starting to catch her breath. Her heart rate normalizes and she wants to close her eyes. Not to sleep, but just so everything will stop being so unbearably bright.
She notices him looking at her exposed boot. It has a heel. A feminine detail, almost. "What's with the mask? You need to keep your face covered or somethin'?"
She notices him swallow. But defiance and his due show in his eyes. He reaches a hand out to lift her mask but she snaps it before he can try.
He bellows in pain, his foot hitting the gas and the wheel turning crazy as he writhes and reaches out to hold his broken wrist with his other hand. The beak doctor steadies the wheel.
"Do your job," she says, and that is that.
Do your job.
It's the only way to live, she wants to tell him.
Back in the office, Excella lounges in the CEO's old chair. Dark leather, the epitome of luxury. Above her head the bird looks at her sadly, as if to say, don't you see me?
Jill doesn't want to give this woman warnings. She stands with her hands a her sides as Irving speaks.
"She broke it," he complains, "my gun hand. She fucking just broke it. I wasn't doin' nothing, and she goes and breaks my wrist. You better get her under control."
Excella looks strange in her chair. She's a tall, full woman, but she still looks oddly gilded in that dark chair. Out of place. Her lips purse like she's tasted something sour.
"She knows what she is doing, and she knows she will be punished for it. You on the other hand-" Excella turns her full gaze on Irving - "need to get your head back where it should be. No foolishness."
Irving looks aghast.
"No one appreciates me 'round here," he says under his breath. "One day I'll show you... I'll show you all-"
Excella snorts, then stands. "You are – how do you say it? Dismissed."
Irving leaves, glancing over his shoulder as he does. Jill moves to follow, but no sooner do her robes swish than Excella corrects her.
"No, no. With me."
Jill waits until Excella exits the door and follows at exactly three paces, her customary length.
It's an easy walk to the labs. A keypad in the elevator allows them access to the floor where Wesker putters. Putters. As though the world were to end in a garden. It opens and allows them access to the fluorescence, which is beginning to feel more like home to the pale beak doctor than does the sunlight.
This isn't the laboratory where he grew her, but it's close enough. Smaller, though, and less busy. Quiet. There are no assistants here. Excella strides toward his desk where he stiffens over his work.
"What is it?"
Jill can hear his nasal tone, his annoyance. If Excella is half as crazy about him as she pretends to be, then she must notice it too.
"The BSAA has noticed our little American friend," Excella drawls, jutting her hip out and placing a hand on it.
"Alas."
"And your experiment has broken his hand."
Wesker gives Jill a cursory glance. "He can do his work without it."
Do your job.
Jill is glad she needs both her hands to kill.
Excella says nothing, but purses those full lips again. Her body tightens on itself: arms crossed, brow knit (there will be wrinkles, the beak doctor thinks, unless the injections continue).
Finally, she speaks, a murmur of Italian. So simple that even Jill can understand.
What she says is so ridiculous that Wesker laughs.
Jill does, too.
She never liked him, she thinks, as she throws him against the wall.
She can smell his sweat, rancid, lingering in the cloth under his armpits. His breath is wet and smells of halitosis covered with mint.
"Anything – anything you want – just – I won't -"
She wants to see him die.
Not her. The P30. And Wesker.
"You will," she says. She shoves the vial into his sweaty palm, and that is that. Another man dead.
She didn't like him, she tells herself. He crumples to the ground, pulling at his collar and breathing fast. He looks up at her, searching briefly for pity, but he knows he will find none. To him she is no more than an automaton. Someone's psychopomp.
She didn't like him.
"I'll need it done in the next month. She knows too much for my taste."
He talks so casually, like a hit is just a business deal. She closes her eyes so she doesn't have to stare up at those searing fluorescent lights. She wishes she could close her ears and pretend she was somewhere else, somewhere without machines beeping and Wesker droning.
"She'll not go down without a fight, if I know her at all."
Jill takes a deep breath. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. Her muscles ripple with longing, and she opens her eyes.
"Yes. Well. I do trust your ability." The person on the other end says something else. Wesker's voice goes lethally flat. "I thought we agreed that names were unnecessary to our little venture."
A scalpel glitters on the table. When she takes it, it feels sharp in the palm of her hand. On the phone, Wesker's voice goes sharp, too.
"You don't understand the delicacy of the situation. The woman is dangerous. She works with the Organization. Yes. That Organization, you fool. I-"
Jill's clumsy movements make the operating table fall, and the tubes in her seem to shriek when they split from her skin.
His cell phone clatters to the floor, smashing plastic, but she's surprised him, and he grunts and struggles against her. She brings the scalpel to the tendons in his neck, but he knocks her back into the wall with an elbow to her stomach. She's not finished. She roars and she jumps back on him again, like a cat. With a burst of energy, he pins her down.
His glasses, last of all, clatter to the floor.
He's breathing hard. She can feel his breath – warm, for once – on her face. His glasses have fallen off, and she can see his eyes – one false and pale blue, one true and red like a wound.
It's a small triumph.
It's all she could hope for.
He leans in and bares his teeth for her. Science has stripped their humanity.
"You try to attack me again-" he yanks the scalpel from her hand, where blood is pooling "-and I will slit your throat. You are nothing but an experiment to me, Jill. You are nothing but bait. Do you understand?"
Yes. Yes. Do it. This way she can go down fighting, the way she intended. She snorts. For a moment, she feels like Jill Valentine again, and not Sleeping Beauty filled with gears.
"If you wanted to kill me, you would've done it earlier."
She thinks of the thing (before), in the mansion, the one that was once a girl with a name and a family. Jill could be like her now. But she isn't.
He stands, pressing hard on her arm to raise himself. He reaches down to pick up his glasses first, giving her his back. She watches him wipe the dust off of them and put them back on. "You should count yourself lucky. You have something that I need."
She struggles against the drug, getting up to face him. "What?"
"You are my key to the new world." Her stomach churns. His smile now is perfectly monstrous. "It is your blood that has made my aim a reality." He stands again, picking up the shards of the tubes and glasses that were next to her bed. With a start, she realizes that some of the glass had red-and-white patterns emblazoned on them.
She feels sick. "You wanted –"
"Wanted to rebuild Umbrella? At one point."
"The P30-"
"Mine. Achieved with TriCell's resources. Not Umbrella's. But it was their research that made it possible." He stands. One hand is behind his back while the other, gloved, turns a shard around in the light. "If I had ideas of rebuilding Umbrella in my image, then rest assured, Jill, my plans have changed." He laughs, low in his throat. "That is why my former associate has become – too dear to live."
He lets the shard of glass drop with a clink. It breaks on impact.
"Remind me to program more frequent doses for you. It should curb this kind of behavior."
He calls in an attendant and walks out of the room. Jill feels the hard tile under her, the ungiving fluorescent over her. She can feel where he bruised her. She can feel where all the needles were stuck in, where all her muscles ache from all the treadmills he made her run.
She collapses.
If only she knew what makes her special. If she can't change it, it's as good a reason as any to die.
The next day, her dosage increases, and from then on she is docile. He even has a new costume for her, a morbid thing that makes her feel like death itself. A crow. She supposes that it's fitting: she'll be the one spreading the very virus she tried so hard to contain.
The P30 and the fear clog her throat. This doesn't usually happen. She's been able to control herself. The fear is a trigger; it does horrible things to her-
Chris.
Right there. It's him, isn't it? This isn't some game, this isn't some trick?
Oh, God. Fucking God. She thought she was over this. She thought she'd resigned herself.
She has, she tells herself, but she can't resign him. Her partner. Her survivor. A last beacon of right.
"Run," she rasps.
"Did you say something?"
Wesker sounds amused.
She can't speak.
Afterward she plays it back in her head, over and over, like an old VCR tape.
Chris. Talking to a woman in head scarves. They're meeting in some dingy old hovel. The woman gives him weapons. They talk. He leans in and gives her some scrap of paper. Together they study it, heads nearly touching.
"They're partners," Wesker says. She doesn't like it when he talks for her benefit. It usually aims to disarm her.
She replays it in her mind:
Chris. Chris. It's really Chris.
She catches her reflection in the dark part of the video screen. One shaking hand reaches up to touch the beak doctor's mask, in the place where Jill's cheek would be.
He knew Jill.
He can't see her like this.
"Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice."
- Hans Christen Anderson
