Jill woke up screaming, again. She ran her hands over her face, again and again, nails digging in painfully as she confirmed the only thing she could feel was her normal smooth skin. No wounds, no rotting flesh, no infection. Just another nightmare.

The wood floor of her apartment was cold against her feet as she slid out of bed and made her way into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of water, then sipped it slowly, focusing on her breathing the way Barry said his therapist had told him to. Her eyes drifted around the room as she did so, from the mess on her counters, to the wall with all the information she had uncovered, to the blinking display of 01:25 on her microwave, to the bathroom door, to the- fuck. It was after midnight.

"Happy birthday to me," she muttered sardonically, toasting the air with her glass of water. "Twenty four years old, Valentine, you made it."

Against her will her thoughts went to her birthday the previous year. Chris had been so disappointed when he found out she'd kept her twenty-second birthday secret from everyone that he had insisted on throwing her a party at Jacks Bar for her twenty-third, and by some twist of luck Raccoon City's serious criminals had all decided to take the day off, so Bravo team had been able to attend, provided they remained sober and on call. She still remembered Brad and Richard's game of darts, doing shot after shot with Chris, Joseph, and Forest, the party hats Chris had convinced everyone to wear - even Marini and Wesker. Stumbling into her apartment with Chris, both of them completely wasted, and collapsing on her couch together to watch Alien . And then after Chris had gone home, Wesker had come over and.

She cut herself off there, and began heading back to her bedroom with the topped up glass of water, suddenly eager to get at the pile of sleeping pill bottles she'd kept on her bedside table ever since the Spencer mansion, but she hadn't even made it out of the kitchen when the doorbell rang.

She placed the glass on the counter and stood there for a moment, staring at her door. Who the hell could it be at this time of night? A sudden burst of hope filled her chest, warming her. It would be just like Chris to make a surprise trip back from Europe so she didn't have to spend her birthday alone after everything that had happened. A smile spread across her face as she hurried to the door, unlatched it, pulled it open and… froze.

She mustn't have woken up at all, because there was no way Albert Wesker , her dead boyfriend, was standing at her door.

He looked the way he always had. Sunglasses and inscrutable expression on his face, blonde hair slicked back, confident pose, and dressed in a black combat boots, black combat pants, black leather gloves and a black peacoat over a navy blue button up shirt. Whereas she was standing there in an RPD gym shirt and a pair of Chris' sweatpants, hair tousled from tossing and turning in her nightmares. Well, she refused to be intimidated in her own damn house so she met his gaze defiantly.

"This is a dream, isn't it?"

"What makes you say that?" His tone was casual and his expression hadn't shifted. It was as if they were back in his office, and he had asked her opinion on a case.

"Well you're either a dream or a ghost, and ghosts aren't real." She was reminded then, that she had spent most of her life believing zombies weren't real either, until she was proven wrong by the man standing in front of her and hastily added, "Unless Umbrella… found a way to make them?"

He chuckled at that. "No, Umbrella haven't created ghosts."

She was hit with a sudden wave of self-consciousness, as if one of her dream-neighbours was going to come out of their dream-apartments and notice the whole thing going on in the dream-hallway, and stepped to the side. "You should probably come in."

He did, pausing before he crossed the gap between living space and bedroom, although from where he was standing he could definitely see the pills, and the empty alcohol bottles. She could see him pause to look at them as he turned his head to inspect the room, but it was her wall of research that he approached to inspect closer.

She picked her glass of water back up, sipping from it and focusing on her breathing again. Once it was empty she placed it into the sink and walked over to him, stood next to him with about a foot of space between them. It felt both too much and not enough, the smell of his cologne filling her lungs, threatening to choke her. She felt as though she wouldn't mind if it did.

"Good work, Valentine." He said at last. "You've done impressive research considering the short amount of time and the, I assume, limited resources you've had available."

It was pathetic, she thought, how praise from him still buoyed her up and made her weak in the knees.

"Thank you, Cap-" she cut herself off, corrected. " Wesker ."

He then reached out and poked at the picture of Irons she had taped up. "I would recommend continuing to look into Chief Irons. He's the most accessible target for you, and you're entirely correct about his connection to Umbrella."

It was both a disappointment and a relief to have Irons' corruption confirmed, and despite her dislike for the man it also rankled to hear Wesker so casually name someone he had been personally connected to.

"You're awfully fucking quick to throw a colleague under the bus."

Wesker turned to face her, and she could feel the way he was glaring behind his sunglasses from months of seeing that same glare directed at Chris. "I told you before, I've cut ties with Umbrella. And I never liked Irons."

That was an understatement.

It also only pissed her off more.

Mostly because the implication there made her want to cry.

"So what does that say about S.T.A.R.S?" she shot back. "None of it mattered because you'd cut ties with us and oh you never liked us anyway?"

Wesker sighed in response and a look of irritation flashed across his face. "Jill. Darling. I didn't come here to argue with you."

"Yeah, well. You'd be a pretty shit dream-ghost if you had," she snapped back.

He snorted in response, the same as he had on every occasion in the past when she'd caught him off guard with some kind of quip or comment, and the sound made her chest ache .

"I suppose I would be," and some of how she was feeling must have shown on her face because he said it so softly and reached out his right hand to rest on her shoulder.

She kept her eyes on his hand, because it was easier than looking back at his face, even though he had to have seen the way she was struggling to hold back tears. She opened her mouth to speak and let out a little choked off noise instead, then another, then "I wish none of this had happened."

She paused then, unsure of how to express exactly what she was feeling, what she had been feeling ever since July 24th, and if Wesker said so much as a word she would've given up trying, but he said nothing, just kept his hand on her shoulder in silent reassurance and waited for her to continue.

"I'm sick of the fucking conspiracies, and of Umbrella, and that - that bastard Irons and his fucking stonewalling me at every turn, and of the nightmares ; this is the first time since that fucking mansion that I've dreamt of something other than everyone dying or myself turning into one of those things . And I'm, I'm sick of feeling so alone, I miss S.T.A.R.S, I miss Chris."

Here Wesker's hand tightened on her shoulder and he scoffed quietly, because of course even in a dream she couldn't get rid of his disdain for Chris, of course she couldn't, and she wanted to laugh in response, could feel it building up, but if she started laughing she knew she wasn't going to be able to stop, so instead she admitted the dirty little secret that she'd been holding onto ever since that night.

"I miss you ."

Because she did. Because even after everything he had done, she couldn't stop herself from wishing he was there with her, helping with her side of the investigation into Umbrella; or in Europe helping Chris with his side of the investigation and complaining to her over the phone about how ' Christopher insists on flinging his dirty laundry around the hotel room'; or anywhere doing anything as long as he was just alive . It felt like such a betrayal, to everyone who had died and to her fellow survivors who were handling the aftermath as poorly as she was, that out of everyone who had died it was the man responsible that she missed the most

Jill watched through blurry eyes as he moved his hand from her shoulder to lightly grasp her chin, keeping her eyes averted as he tilted her tearstained face up towards his.

"Jill. Look at me," he instructed, tone firm.

She obeyed reluctantly but she did obey, because she had never been able to refuse an order from him before; shifting her eyes until she was looking directly at her own reflection in his sunglasses.

"I'm right here."

She watched the tentative beginnings of hope spread across her reflection's face, watched the way it faded as she asked, "For how long?"

"For tonight", and the corners of his mouth turned ruefully downwards as he confirmed what she had known since she first saw him standing in her doorway.

She wanted to scream at that, or break down crying, or hit him. Instead she stood up on her toes, used his collar to pull his head down, and desperately pressed her lips to his. Even after everything it still felt right kissing him, as if it was what they had both been made for. It was sloppy at first, her relief and longing at the way he felt the same, tasted the same, too much to control as she twisted her hands into his hair, and Wesker went along with it for a moment before taking the lead, the way he always had.

Eventually they broke slightly, pulling away from each other for air. Jill untangled one of her hands from behind his head and reached for his sunglasses. His hand shot up to grab her wrist, quicker than she'd ever seen someone move before. His grasp was firm, halting her insistently, but not painful.

"Not this time Jill."

She stared back at her own disheveled reflection in confusion, which Wesker took advantage of to simultaneously capture her mouth in another kiss and scoop her off the ground, lifting her effortlessly. He crossed her apartment quickly, again quicker than she thought possible, then lowered her onto her bed and straddled her. Here he paused, as if waiting for her to change her mind, and she probably should , but she didn't want to, and he was perfectly willing to speed back up once she began unbuttoning his shirt.

"Happy Birthday, Jill."


Afterwards, they lay in silence on her bed for a while, Jill fully clothed again because she couldn't afford heating on her crappy suspension pay. She clung to Wesker as if she could stop him from fading away by doing so, arms and legs all twined around his body, while Wesker held her close with one arm slung over her, his hand splayed out on her back and his chin against the top of her head.

"Where is Redfield anyway? I was half expecting him to try and shoot me when I got here," he enquired and of course that was how he chose to break the silence.

"He's in Europe, looking into Umbrella's work there."

"Of course," and now he sounded annoyed, "I try to send you away for your own safety and he calls you back just in time to almost get you killed, and now things are getting dangerous here again he goes gallivanting off out of the country and leaves you behind."

"It's not like that," she snapped back, "and even if it was you have no right to comment. I chose to come back for the Arklay Mountains mission, and we decided, you know, both of us, talking it out together, that it would be better for him to be the one heading to Europe. He has a sister , Wesker, if things get worse here he needs to survive for her."

"You, Jill, need to learn to survive for yourself. The only life that matters is your own."

She would have slapped him for that, but the bastard knew her too well, and as soon as she tried to pull away to do so he held her tighter against him, his tone picking up a sense of uncharacteristic urgency. "You need to get out of Raccoon City Jill. As soon as you can."

"I'm working on it."

"Good."

They lapsed back into silence then, and the familiarity of it all was so comforting that Jill soon found herself starting to drift off to sleep against him. She struggled to stay awake, and surely it should be easier than this to remain awake in a dream , but maybe this was a side effect of how exhausted she was while awake; and wasn't that a depressing notion. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that Wesker was now stroking her hair in the way she had always found soothing.

"You're doing that on purpose," she grumbled sleepily, blinking her eyes back open.

"You need rest Jill," he replied, which was as much a confirmation as she had ever heard.

"I don't want you to be gone again. I miss you," and despite the way her voice wavered, the repeat admission was easier than the first.

Wesker didn't reply to that for a long while, just held her close and continued to stroke her hair. It was only once her breathing had evened out, and her eyes had drifted shut, and she was right on the edge of sleep that she heard it, more dreamlike than anything else that had happened tonight.

"I miss you as well."


Jill woke to sunlight streaming through her curtains. For a moment she kept her eyes closed, as if doing so would mean that when she did there would be some sign of Wesker in her apartment, some proof that it had been real; and for a moment she could've sworn the scent of his cologne was fresher in the air than it had been in weeks. But when she opened them everything looked exactly as it had when she'd gone to bed the night before, because of course it did, what had she been hoping for. Even if he had survived his own creation's initial attack, there was no way he could have escaped the explosion in time.

So she permitted herself five more minutes to just sit in bed and remember the dream from start to finish, and then she tucked it away in the back of her head in a box to be opened later because her investigation was too important to be distracted from. And then there was the outbreak, and Nemesis, and Nicholai, and the destruction of Raccoon City, and she was so busy in the aftermath that she almost forgot about the box. Until the day Chris called her on his way back from Antarctica to let her know that Wesker was still alive.