3 am.
Jill Valentine was awake.
She had never been a light sleeper - it'd been something of a joke among Alpha team, the difficulty of arousing her from a nap. Even when she'd been in training, under constant stress of assessment, she'd never had difficulty getting the required amount of rest. When she slept, it was solid and deep; she rarely remembered her dreams.
Now, though? It was three in the morning and, instead of laying in bed, she sat at the piano. Her mind was restless, and her hands shook. She was grateful, for a moment, that nobody was around to see this - "the master of unlocking" caught with trembling fingers. She picked a few chords out in an attempt to steady both mind and body, let them hang in the air, tried to breathe. Just breathe.
No, it was no good - that wouldn't help. With a sigh Jill rose from the piano bench and moved across the living room, leaving all the lights on behind her. Not like her, to be scared of the dark. Not like her at all, yet the moment the light vanished the smell of mold and decay teased her senses. She was imagining it, she knew. Her brain was tricking her senses into believing they were still beneath the Spencer mansion, feeding her the echoes of a lifetime's worth of nightmares.
The knowledge didn't make the smell any less vivid.
Ever since the Spencer mansion, nothing had been the same. Really, it was as simple as that. The monsters under the bed were no longer make-believe. Nothing was the same, and so it stood to reason that her sleep habits would be added to the list of casualties.
Even now, two weeks after the fact, Jill had yet to come to terms with the human costs of that night. She ran them over in her mind, but had to stop as she realized exactly how many of the victims she would never be able to name. Each infected horror had been a person; each terror had once owned a human face.
Face. Faces. Jill buried her head in her hands and shut her eyes, remembering. She was not a woman who frightened easily, but there were some fears so primal, so raw-
Lisa Trevor. Born 1953, died 1998 (or 1967, depending on how you wished to define "death"). Fourteen when the virus was administered, if the photograph was correct. Jill wished she'd never found that scrap of paper, wished she'd never plugged the girl's name into a missing person's database. The yellowed missing person's report, filed by Lisa's grandmother in October of 1967, was attached to the photograph of a smiling brunette girl sitting on a sofa beside her parents. Matching reports for her parents, George and Jessica, seemed to have been deliberately neglected. In all likelihood money had changed hands there; she was not naive enough to assume otherwise.
Lisa Trevor. If she'd grown up today, at age fourteen she would have had braces and ambitions and possibly a pet cat. Jill shut her eyes, aching for the girl she would never truly meet. The monster in the crypt had not been Lisa Trevor - Jill chose to believe that Lisa Trevor had died years ago. It wasn't any comfort, as the only path left now was to imagine what could have been.
Jill's mind was going around in circles now, but try as she might she could not make morning come any faster. She wandered her apartment once more, tried to turn on the television. A late-night infomercial toted the merits of a new, supposedly superior brand of kitchen knife; she shut it off in a hurry and let the silence weigh her down. Outside, the city was still; somewhere Umbrella still worked, somewhere they were still testing and building and developing, and somewhere there were more families like Lisa's. Her heart ached at the thought, and her hands moved without her permission. Strange, for somebody so deliberate to move without intent. The telephone was cold and smooth to the touch, the number dialed without conscious thought. It rang once, twice, then came the voice on the other end of the line, bleary and confused but as comforting to Jill as a glass of cool water.
"Hello?"
It took Jill a moment or two to remember how to move her lips to form words, and once she did, her voice cracked anyways.
"Hi, mom. It - it's Jill."
"Jill? Is everything alright?" Her mother sounded concerned, worried. Of course she did - given the hour, and Jill's occupation, of course it was natural for her to assume that something had gone wrong. Of course it was natural for her to worry. After all, that was what mothers did: they worried. Jill bit her lip at the thought of Jessica Trevor, just another test subject with no options left. No hope. She wondered if Jessica had known what Lisa would become, or if she had died believing her daughter, too, would quickly succumb to death. Jill's stomach twisted; she hoped Jessica had been ignorant.
The human costs, yes, those were what Jill needed to remember. Every monster once had a face.
That was the moment she decided that, no matter what it took, she would live to see an end to this fight. No more. The Trevor family tragedy would not be repeated - not on her watch. Jill lifted her head, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and spoke with new found resolve.
"Yes, mom. I'm fine. Just calling to say I love you."