Chris sat forward on the edge of the bed with his face buried behind a pair of trembling hands. Was there no pleasant memory for him of Kijuju? His mind was still experiencing rushing down that river with Sheva stapled to his back, shoving away discoloured bodies with a detached mind, as though he was moving away any innocuous float. He ignored his fingers gliding off the rubbery flesh of the drowned, the intrusion of foul water forcing into his pursed lips, his body being torn apart by jagged rocks. He ignored it because he had to, because he had to suppress acknowledging that insanity to pursue life. But now he didn't have to, and there was no distraction of survival to block those thoughts from entering his mind.

A pair of hands wrapped around his wrists and dragged down his hands from his face, a forceful but thankful intrusion. Jill was on her haunches, between his knees, brows furrowed in concern. When she met his tormented eyes, she saw a reflection of her own hell, but he chased away those thoughts with a blink.

"Chris…I'm actually worried about you..." She admitted. "But I'm so glad you're ok." She stood, wrapping her arms around his bare neck in their second embrace of the evening. He was suddenly conscious to the battery his body had taken in her arms, but was glad for the comfort nonetheless. He scratched her back affectionately, running his fingers along her spine and nuzzling his whiskered face against her. This intimacy, though understood to be taken at face value sent her backing out of his arms with the same speed she went into them, reminding him abruptly of the distance that existed between them. He somehow felt her hasty retreat showed how disconnected she was from him and Jill, as usual, was completely unaware of how she rejected offers that did not exist.

Somehow, it still stung. His face disappeared behind his hands again until he felt her added weight on the bed next to him. When he looked at her she was dragging off a pair of sheer leggings from under her light grey skirt, a gesture that would have enticed him several months ago. He dared to meet her eyes but fell short of the target. Jill's eyes were on the clock on the nightstand, concern for the coming dusk creeping up on her. He could trace the lines of worry spreading over her face like fissures, disrupting an otherwise perfect landscape. It was difficult to watch her psyche mend on its own at dawn, and dissolve at the dusk.

At least she had someone to lean on. Sheva's only hope was still waiting to be transported out of the BSAA compound when the dust settled over Kent.

"I can't believe this is happening…" Chris mused softly.

Jill nodded, sighing softly. She hadn't seen Chris so disturbed before, and she didn't know what to do with him. Days past, she could have soothed him without words. A gentle rustle in his hair to get his notice, an empathizing kiss to keep it, an embrace, a precursor to foreplay that led to a passion that she could barely recall in memory. But that was for lovers. The more she watched him, the more he dissolved, and when she noticed his lashes tipped with tears that refused to spill, she could not pick up on the desperation in them and that it meant a man as immoveable as Chris was pleading for her empathy. Chris was her foundation, and if he was collapsing, what would become of her? She plucked her towel off the bed and started for the bathroom, opting to avoid him. She left the door sprawling open though it was not an invitation for him. If he found himself in there he'd be shunned back into the bedroom with a contemptuous look, like a dog being shooed from the couch. But he would have loved to have her arms around him again—any arms, to still his quivering body and ground him in the here and now. But she wouldn't. It was still too early for her to need him.

Jill had so casually snubbed him that he didn't wish to be ignored another moment. Chris got up stiffly, finally buttoning the fly on his jeans and bent to fish through the suitcase at his feet for a utility shirt to slip over his bruised skin. Maybe he had made up his mind back in the church, but he would act on things now.

"I'll be back." he announced. He didn't wait for her response.

His destination was just a jog across the court yard. Outside of the circumstances he would have been able to appreciate the isolated beauty of the BSAA housing development, a mocking oasis amidst the tyranny of a plagued and pitiable Kent, and beyond that Kijuju, understandably detesting this boastful structural testament of western wealth, power, immune to the tragedy surrounding it. It was rich with luxuries, including a pool Chris rounded with indifference, noting how heavily he wore his torment on his face; it surprised him. He managed to ignore the thudding of turret guns being fired in the distance. There would be no one left in Kent before sunrise.

At Sheva's door he hesitated, debating how forward it would be to show up without an invitation. How inappropriate it would be to want her company when she hadn't a moment alone to mourn Josh's passing? He lingered outside her door, far longer than he should have, debating the motive of his visitation, when he found himself knocking. The door cracked and a hazel eye greeted him from beneath the links of a door chain. For a reason she had yet to embrace, seeing Chris standing outside her door brightened her dampened spirits.

"Chris…"

He greeted her with a tired smirk that faded slowly into a troubled frown. The door shut, the chain came down and soon he was staring into an unusually kempt studio apartment, dimly lit and buzzing from the sound of a radio somewhere inside the abode where Sheva stood guard at the entrance scanning him with her eyes. He was as rattled as when she'd left him at the guard house but she stood aside and invited him in.

"Is this a bad time?"

"Of course not." She gestured to a couch in the living room and followed after him. "I just got out of the shower."

Yes, she had. The scent of her shampoo and body wash met him at the door and the khaki shorts she donned left little to the feeble imagination of Chris who had undressed her so many times before he made it to the couch that he was mentally exhausted before he sat and unable to drag his eyes away from her. Her skin was still wet when she slipped on that shirt. He caught on to his staring before she did, thankfully, and turned his attention to his environment. Sheva's apartment was immaculately clean, lacking personality and evidence of occupancy. It surprised him how little of her could be derived from the décor. Or lack thereof. If not for the little black radio perched on her kitchen counter, spitting out static and an aggressive message in Swahili that all seemed cryptic to him, there would be little life. Chris leaned over his knees and knitted his fingers. Where to begin?

"I just wanted to see if you were alright. Today was hard for me, I'll admit."

"I know. I really appreciate you coming by." She took a seat next to him, taking a decorative pillow into her lap as an unintentional divider between them. Chris found a spot between his feet to focus on.

"Yeah? I didn't want to impose."

Sheva made a face he didn't see. "Don't be silly. I'm sorry it's not so inviting in here. It's not usually like this. I've just been cleaning a lot lately…to cope." Cope. What a disparaging word. What an ineffective term to describe a futile attempt at doing the impossible. To cope, Leon Kennedy indulged in women, Barry Burton avoided crowds, and Jill left on lights and refused to close doors. Coping dealt with nothing. It avoided the problem at all costs and was somehow an acceptable mechanism most people employed.

Chris nodded absently. "Sheva…" he started, finally meeting her eyes. "I'm so sorry about everything. About Josh…"

Sheva held his kindly gaze, silently accepting his sincere condolences because at the very mention of his name her throat closed. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

"I know how much he meant to you and I wish I could have been there. I dunno what I could have done but…"

She cut him off softly. "It's okay. We were with a whole convoy and nothing helped."

Chris furrowed his brows and found the invisible spot between his feet again. She seemed to have retreated into herself at the mention of Josh's name. Her focus dimmed as she quietly reflected on the deceased. The more she rooted herself in thought, the less presence she offered. It was still so hard to accept him as dead.

"There is nothing left for me in Kijuju now."

Her sentence came as a ghostly whisper, so heavily laden with sorrow that Chris pondered how much existed between them alive that still kept pulling her toward him in the grave.

"It gets better," Chris consoled, although he didn't know for sure. He absently shot out a hand and found her knee, meaning only to comfort, but when he felt the supple warmth of her skin beneath his heavy hand, he could not suppress the carnal thoughts that seemed to haunt him when she was near. Sheva did not shy away from his touch. In fact, she could feel the gravitational pull between them as strongly as he did, but she did not entertain the notion of romantic possibility. It would be just like her to imagine an attraction that simply did not exist, just because Chris was kind to her.

She made it her business to stand up and feign an interest in the radio that covered the disaster in Kent. She didn't need to listen to it; she was in it. She shut it off casually and went and stood before the large bay windows behind the living room. Chris shifted on the couch. Kent was shrouded in the husky dark hues of dusk, and the exchange of fire in the distance lit the sky like fireworks as disappeared before hitting their mark. Sheva forced herself to smile.

"You know, I used to look out of this window and live vicariously though the people I used to know. I watched the city get segregated behind barbed wire and concrete walls, and structures fall into ruin. Tents erected, isolation starved my people, and somehow, hope swelled in the absence of things. I used to watch the children play with plastic bottles, and they were somehow happy, and I hated myself for being privileged. Idle. Every day they have only one choice. Praise God, or curse Him?"

She shivered when she felt Chris slide his hands up her arms and cup her shoulders. In her dreary reproach of her life as a spectator, he had risen and quietly joined her at the window. She welcomed his intrusion by gently resting her head against his chest, but he turned her to face him tenderly, forcing her to confront him.

Her beauty was bewitching, and the more he drank her in with his eyes the more disenchanted he became with Jill in his mind. He envisioned his hand on her face, passing his fingers over the delicate point of her nose, gliding the balls of his thumbs along the shapely curve of her enticing lips, the feathery batting of her eyelashes on his fingertips. Trying to resist her was like ignoring thirst. She screamed at him with the irresistible allure of a siren, making temptation seem infallibly divine.

He pressed his lips against hers, a gesture that took her wholly by surprise. He lingered against her, waiting, hoping for her to return the favor with equal fervor, but she was too stunned to react immediately. Chris was kissing her, and it could not be mistaken for an accidental brush of their lips, or a friendly gesture of comfort, no, there was a measure of intimacy in this, she was certain. And she welcomed it. He pulled her into him desperately, securing her in his arms, knitting his fingers in her hair, craving for the warmth of her bare flesh against his own. He wanted to devour her.

She glided her hands up his back, feeling his muscles tense pleasurably as her fingers slithered over him, feeling every arch and curve, every bulge of him flexing as his hands discovered her body. She felt him rising as their lips moved in obsessive want against one another. She guided his head away from her lips, allowing him only to shift his focus to her neck, her collar bone, her shoulders, nuzzling against her, pulling her skin gently with each breaking kiss. She was melting in his arms. What kind of lover would he be?

Mentally, she was as disconnected as if she was standing across the room. Could she ignore the backdrop of muffled gunfire? Cries of desperation? Maybe the sound of their lovemaking could deter her from her thoughts, and with ease. The music of his moaning set her alight with desire and a sensation that joined them at the hips where he was begging to be released from his denim prison. But could not a moment pass without a thought of Josh? Had she not loved him just days before? How could she submit to this in lieu of her still bleeding country? And yet, how could she deny herself this man, who had managed to grow more roots in her life every hectic moment she spent with him? She felt the dams of her eyes filling with tears she did not want to fall the instant his hands glided under her shirt.

Chris had managed to slow his lustful anticipation to a passionate crawl. He tasted her in every kiss, savored her every touch and made love to her a thousand times each time he gazed against her, strengthening his arousal to a painful want he could not ignore, burning in the pit of him, but he felt a hesitation in her body he also couldn't ignore. She tensed at the touch of his hand against her warm flesh, and when he finally started massaging her breast, her hand shot up over his in a mix of inviting, aggressive insistence to continue and disparaging plea to stop. He did not want to believe that Sheva did not want him either, but when he felt the moisture of her tears against his face, he knew that their moment had been irreparably dashed.

He eased away from her lips to look at her quizzically, stunned. "Sheva…"

She could not bear to look at him.

"Chris I'm—I'm so sorry!" She sobbed. The collage of emotions she was experiencing at that moment was too much. Lust—she wanted Chris to love her more than anything—guilt—to consider Josh when she was in his arms—shame—because she could not engage in this romance with him because of this guilt—hurt—because there truly was nothing left for her in this country and disappointment—because she had nothing to offer Chris. There was no more she could do but wait for Chris to retreat from her arms and leave her in her depression but there was no such occurrence. The same fingers that knotted in her hair now dried her eyes; the same lips that massaged her own were whispering reassuring words that she barely heard, and the same arms that pulled her into his body feverishly now encircled her in a protective ring.

Yes, like any man he would have rather had her breathless adorations stifled under his bulk, squeezed between the vise of her legs to draw him in deeper into her own body, her fingers piecing into his skin because she didn't want him to retreat, to leave her because she wanted him. The power of thought alone nearly felled him, but the sulking woman in his arms forced those thoughts to retreat. He would never abandon her because he too had been abandoned by a woman he reached into the abyss for, but when she took his hand, it was only to pull him in.

"I know." He mumbled into her ear. He smashed his eyes shut, scolding himself silently for acting on a whim. When she joined hands in the small of his lower back, he suddenly and willingly accepted his simultaneous role as comforter and sufferer, melting into her embrace, and while the kiss she blessed him with was purely thankful, he closed his eyes anyway, and savored it because it meant something.

"Chris?"

The room was surprisingly quiet. When she poked her head out from the bathroom door, the full sized bed in the centre of the room was empty. She could barely see the rumpled sheets beneath the layer of discarded clothes and scattered artifacts. She was alone. Boldness took her as she swept into the room like a gust of wind and went about turning on every available light and drawing tight the curtains to blind her to the obvious; the clock on the end table glowed eight nineteen. It was dark out, and the veil of panic would settle over her mind with crippling authority if she did not occupy herself.

She got dressed hastily and went about trying to organize the mess in the room. She and Chris together were a pair of locusts but while her things were lumped together, he left his things where he shed them. The bloodied and damp dress shirt he wore at Josh's funeral lay tangled in the similarly stained slacks. He would never wear them again. Leave it to Chris to find himself in trouble hours after landing in the country.

She started to fish out the belt from the loops of the pants but stopped mid task with a surrendered sigh and threw them down again.

"What the hell am I doing?" She mumbled.

Going through the motions were torturous. She loved Chris—she knew she did. But in her quiet moments of reflection when she woke up to an empty space beside her, or now in this infinite silence, she admitted to herself that this love did not exist outside her mind. She searched her heart for him but he was no longer there, and worse still, his absence left no void to fill. He had been replaced by contempt for her experience with Wesker—a memory suppressed in the recesses of her fragile mind. Her memories were like driving through heavy rain; every pass of the windshield wipers only offered a glimpse of clarity into a turbulent past that stirred up enough pain to smother all of Chris' noble attempts at healing her. But she did not want Chris anymore. He had faded, she had recoiled and nothing existed between them but convenience and necessity.

The windows behind her rattled gently, reacting to the explosive violence just beyond her sight in Kent, but it wasn't until the lights flickered a warning that she actually wanted him. Kent, like her relationship, was dying around her.