What Vengeance Really Means

Jill's clone stood alone in the laboratory, supervising the machinery. She was thinking. Jill was not really thinking about the spinning steel gyroscope, gently warming up for its activation though occupy her thoughts it did. No, Jill was thinking about her originator. The woman from whom her own genetic material had been derived, the person whose template she shared. And it consumed her with absolute disgust; that the person who had killed her lover was 'her'. Jill had gotten over the repugnance of her genetic origin a long time ago, but this did not stop her determined vendetta against Jill Valentine and Leon Kennedy. That pair, she thought bitterly, had continued their lives as if nothing had happened. They'd gotten married to other people, and had children. She had a son too, but the boy would have had a father had that group not gotten involved.

Jill's grief had reached a maddening level of hatred for those who had ruined her life, and she had elevated her lover to the level of a Jesus figure. Her son. The son of the son of a god.

Jill mused on her own unique position; soon, she would be exacting revenge. A natural course of action would be to kill their children, or kidnap them. However, Jill was not stupid. Umbrella had tried that once before, and had lost a great deal of research as a result. No, Jill needed to do something better. Jill's plan had initially seemed a little far fetched, but Jill knew that a standard 'kidnap, kill, destroy' using a new strain of virus or whatever was just stuff they would expect. Cliched and very much anticipated; they were resourceful, and as much as those Umbrella eggheads Spencer and Marcus had researched, they were eventually undone by their creations. Not to say that the viruses would not be useful; but it would take more than viral warfare this time. Umbrella was gone; what was left was her.

It wasn't simply Leon and Jill either, it was Chris and his sister Claire Redfield. Add to that Sherry, and Sherry who was no longer just some 'kid'. There were a number of them. It would take more than contrived assassinations to break them.

Her idea had been made possible by the theft of a number of pieces of technology and research, which had taken a few years. It had come together over time, but Jill had kept very level headed about it. The piece of equipment in front of her would be activated soon, and both Jill and her son would be affected by its influence. As would the elite commandos she had put together, but they would be going separately with any luck. She didn't like any of them, but they were single-minded killers which suited her purpose.

This plan would do what needed to be done; fragment them, divide them…which would prevent them from knowing what it was she was up to. This device would put a whole new set of constraints on them, ones that if broken could endanger their very existence.

She smiled to herself. The game would be entertaining.

"Mother."

Jill turned around to her son, who had just walked in through the doors behind her.

"Ah, my boy. What is Cranham's report?"

Leon, son of Leon, reached the control panels by the view window.

"He says we will be ready soon. He reports that our targets were last seen escaping down the Wolf Creek River, thanks to our distribution of the B.O.W's in the forests near that country retreat of theirs."

Jill nodded. It was going well.

"Anything else?"

"Only that it is all going to begin fifteen minutes earlier than planned, mother."

Jill frowned at this. The equipment was only just prototype, and didn't like the idea of Dr. William Cranham rushing it into action. He was a former Umbrella researcher, and those types were often making mistakes on idiotic levels like that.

"Tell him I want it beginning when it should begin; I want the settings checked, double and triple checked. This cannot go wrong. Do you understand, Leon?"

"Of course, mother."

Jill grasped her son fondly, looking up at his blue eyes as she stroked his reddish brown bangs.

"You're making mommy very proud." Jill said.

"I should hope so" Leon smiled "This will be your revenge for the death of father, will it not?"

Jill was proud of the way she had raised Leon.

"Now remember. We will be separate during this assignment; I want you to remember what I've taught you, and I also want you to remember – do not kill the other Leon and Claire."

Leon nodded.

"That would make things complicated, wouldn't it?" he said "Very well, I'll remember."

"We cannot interrupt the natural order of things" Jill said "Not to say I care about any of them, but it is our existences on the line if we fail to do so. Keep that in mind when you break into both of the facilities."

Leon nodded.

"Yes, mother." He paused "When will the shifts happen?"

"Ah, Cranham shall help you take care of that." Jill smiled "Until then, I want you to memorise precisely what it is you need to do. Hopefully our guests should be too preoccupied with their problems to bother stopping us."

Her revenge, she thought, would go further than simply killing them. She wanted them to suffer. She would split them up, put them through hell…and then…well. Jill smiled again, and kissed her son on the head.

My son will have his father back.

"I think it's time for your speech" Leon Junior said, a smirk surfing across his lean face "It's going to be killer."

Jill laughed.

"Oh. It most certainly is"

She turned and walked out of the room, and made her way towards the helipad.

Absolutely killer.

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Leon paced the boat deck.

"I don't like this" he muttered "Why would they chase us onto the river, and then let us go practically unhindered? I haven't seen a movement out of our friends since that helicopter stunt."

Leon found it bad enough that Umbrella still existed in some shape or form, without finding out whoever was behind this had targeted him personally…and what was more worrying was the fact they had targeted the children. This meant that whoever was watching them knew they both had children and where they would take them. Logically therefore it was pretty much obvious that their escape was being engineered. He looked over the faces of all the assembled, with only Sherry looking at him and casting a hopeful smile his way before looking back down at the soles of her shoes. His sister, Sherry, sat towards the back of the boat refusing to look at anyone. A small band of ex-heroes and children, on the run from god knows what.

Steve sat glumly on the side of the boat, looking up at his father. His father was the toughest guy in the world, why should he be worried? Ada seemed similarly forlorn, playing with her shoelaces while Hannah slept uncomfortably against her mother. Jill stroked Hannah's hair, and watched as the dark hills slid by in the night. Chris piloted the boat, desperately contemplating what it was they were going to do next. The last time he had had to save his family was on Rockfort Island, and that had been nearly sixteen years ago – not that Chris doubted his own abilities, but now he had three family members to keep an eye out for. While Claire did not need watching so much anymore, and Jill could very much take care of herself, Hannah was still only young. A child. Chris had never been so scared about protecting the innocent before.

In the bathroom, Claire was wiping tears from her eyes. Not tears of sorrow or despair, but tears of anger. Claire wiped them away bitterly, trying desperately to force herself to stop. She could not show weakness. She simply could not. Claire's anger, already at boiling point, was starting to bubble over. Claire clenched her fist, ready to put it through the mirror, to fracture the image staring back at her.

Why now? She thought of all the times Umbrella, or who the hell they are, choose to show up…its now. Claire had a family now, two beautiful children and a loving husband. As they had watched Steve and Ada grow, Claire and Leon had agreed to never tell them the circumstances of their conception, never to tell them what had happened shortly after they were born, or what it was that had brought their parents together in the first place. They couldn't and shouldn't know. Except that now, they would. They would see the lie for what it was. Claire reached into the cabinet above the sink, and retrieved a bottle of pills. It was a bottle of relaxants she had stowed in the case of having a stress attack, or bad dream. Which she often had. Claire briefly contemplated taking one, to calm down. However, Claire quickly vetoed this. How could she be expected to concentrate on looking after her children if her brain was dying a happy sedative based death? She put the bottle away, and tried to calm down.

So many thoughts, so many people. As bad as things were now, none of them were to know that things were going to get worse. A hell of a lot worse.

Chris peered into the water ahead of them, illuminated by the lights of the boat. The horizon was dark, and they seemed alone on this stretch of water as the boat sped past ever higher growing hills. Spray hit the lights, creating a strange temporary rainbow as the water refracted the halogens, before quickly disappearing. All seemed quiet.

It was therefore a massive shock to everyone when the radio growled into life with a sound like spitting fire. Then, a voice said

"Leon S. Kennedy, pick up the radio."

Leon, eyeing the device cautiously, picked it up. For a few moments he stared at it, and listened to the white noise emanating from it.

He looked at Jill.

"Do you think I should take this call?"

Jill looked back at him, face blank.

"It's probably a bad idea." She said "It's probably from the person who set us up."

Leon considered this, and clicked the transmitter.

"Who are you?" he asked.

Ada looked up at Leon, and wondered why her dad looked so worried. Okay, so she'd been freaked out by those things back there…but her parents had dealt with them okay. She'd never realised how cool her parents were! They'd kicked their asses and had barely batted an eyelid. Ada had known her dad worked for the government in some sort of capacity, but she didn't know he was a monster hunter. She'd never really idolised her parents in the way some kids did, but now they were just the coolest of the coolest. So why was he looking so worried? Steve nudged Ada.

"D'you think mom and dad will kick ass again?" he said, voice brimming with excitement.

Jill gave Steve a sour look.

"If you use language like that, I'm sure they'll do some kind of kicking. Now sit down before I tell your mother."

Steve began to sulk again. Ada stuck her tongue out at him, a gesture that he reciprocated in kind. She quickly turned back to her dad, so she didn't miss anything.

"Guys…" Sherry shook her head softly "Just drop it."

Sherry sat up from her slumped seating position.

Ada watched as the radio crackled out a reply.

"Turn your boat into the bay around the Devil's Rock. We wish to speak to you."

"Do I get a choice in the matter?"

"I don't think this is about choice." The voice said, before cutting the radio off.

Leon put the radio down. Claire emerged from the lower decks of the boat, and saw Leon's contemplative expression.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"I think Leon wants to walk straight into a trap." Jill replied.

"I did not say…" Leon snapped "…that I was going to do it."

"Trap?" Claire's brow furrowed "We're walking into a trap?"

"Well, driving really" Chris answered from the cockpit "But it's Leon's call, really. I can't see what we'll earn by running, they'll just send more creatures after us if they know exactly where we are."

"I don't want them to take the kids" Leon said firmly "But we need to find out why there's a T-Virus outbreak in the woods here, now."

"Got any ideas?" Claire asked.

Leon mulled it over.

The soldiers on the pier locked and loaded their weapons as the motorboat curved around Devil's Rock in a shower of spray and headed straight for the bank of the river. It was a small pier, mainly for fishing, but also had once been a secret supply depot for Umbrella when the company had still existed. Umbrella was dead. Long live Umbrella.

Jill's clone stood behind one of the soldiers, determined to mine this meeting for all the drama she could. She couldn't help but smirk. She was a sucker for drama.

"The boat is approaching, ma'am." The large, gruff sergeant said to her "Do you wish us to fire?"

"No." Jill said "I don't want a single shot being fired. This is merely intimidation. I just need them in the same place for two minutes."

The sergeant nodded, and walked away. Jill flexed her hands. Soon the game would begin proper, and she was relishing it. In her pocket sat the device that would see her through; a device that had been customised over the last few years to ensure it would work by some of the finest scientists and the best stolen research she could find.

The boat was getting closer, and she could hear its motor slowing as the boat began to pull up along the pier. On the boat, Leon checked his Desert Eagle, and nodded at Claire, who knelt down in front of Steve and Ada.

"Okay guys, we want you to go into our cabin okay? Don't come out until we come to get you."

"Why can't we stay up here with you?" Ada asked.

"It might get dangerous." Claire said, not without justification "And I don't want you anywhere near the danger. Now go down there and stay. Hannah's coming with you anyway."

"But mom-"

"Now!" Claire snapped.

Claire shooed them towards the stairs. Steve and Ada slumped down the wooden stairs into Claire and Leon's cabin, and plopped themselves down on the double bed.

"It's not fair" Steve complained "We never get to see any fun."

"Stop whining" Ada said, "Mom and dad are just trying to look out for us."

"Get stuffed" Steve muttered.

The handle of the door twisted, and in walked Hannah.

"Dad told me to come down here with you." She said "What's going on up there?"

"I saw Dad get his gun out." Steve cut in "He never does that in front of us."

Hannah paced the floor, obviously worried.

"Mom and dad might get hurt." She said, quietly.

"Naah." Steve waved a hand "Mom and dad are tough, and so are your mom and dad! They've got Sherry to look after them if they get hurt, 'n Sherry can come and warn us if something happens…" his voice trailed off.

Ada and Hannah remained silent.

Sherry looked at the line of soldiers, and gulped. She had seen monsters before, but at least they had limited attack patterns and were fairly predictable. These were highly trained soldiers, all with itchy trigger fingers and loaded assault rifles. They would have to negotiate extremely carefully.

The air was cold, and she shivered.

"This could end badly" Sherry muttered to herself, as she watched Chris loading his assault shotgun, the one he always kept to one side in case of emergencies. Well, this definitely counted as an emergency. She looked across to Jill and Claire, practically imploring them for a weapon. Despite her insistence she could use guns, Claire and Leon were not happy about her using them in any capacity.

Claire and Leon stepped forward, ready to talk.

"Okay." He called out "Who the hell are you and why are we here?"

A soldier, slightly differently decorated to the others, stepped out of line. He was clearly their leader, of some description.

"Put down your weapons." He ordered.

Chris raised an eyebrow.

"And put away the only thing that protects us from you? Uh, no, I don't think so. What guarantee do we have you won't shoot us on the spot?"

"Because…" an eerily familiar voice said, stepping out from behind the line of soldiers to take pride of place at the head of the soldiers "…I could just order them to shoot you here, but it'd be kind of easy don't you think? If I had wanted to kill you myself I could have hunted you down a long time ago."

There was an appalled silence. Jill's clone looked over her astonished audience, whose emotions were wrestling between abject hatred and pure horror.

"You…" Jill breathed, voice enraged "…How did you survive Burkitt?"

"I escaped on the back of a giant eagle." Jill's clone replied coyly "Does it really matter?"

Leon glared at her.

"Just had to, didn't you? Get yourself involved in our lives again?"

"Well, yes" Jill's clone replied "Even though Umbrella's gone, I'm still here. And seeing how you murdered my one true love…well. Not easily forgiven, that kind of thing."

"'Your one true love'?" Claire laughed "You haven't got any idea what love is"

"It's dedication. It's obsession. It's understanding. It's pleasure. It's everything. That is what he gave me" Jill's clone said, all the playfulness quickly disappearing from her voice "And you took him from me. It's taken me a long time to devise a punishment, and it does not involve hot lead."

She walked up and down the pier in slow paced strides.

"I could have killed your children…no, too easy. Again, I could have killed you…but once I had murdered you one by one, what then? Where to go? Vengeance is not easily sated."

She turned to them, sneering.

"You deserve far more than death."

Leon was quite enjoying this rant.

"So…you want to kill us twice?"

Jill smiled, and looked at her watch.

"No. By the way, you have…one minute, so if I were you, you'd better ask any questions you have. Before you all get separated and never see each other again, of course."

Leon frowned, trying not to appear worried.

"Marching us off to death camps or something?"

Jill considered this guess.

"Possibly." She decided after a while "If you end up where I want you."

End up where she wants us? Claire and Leon exchanged a worried look, while Chris and Jill did very much the same thing. All the while, Steve, Ada and Hannah were sitting down below oblivious of what was happening. Leon realised he was starting to sweat.

Jill's clone checked her watched again.

"Twenty seconds."

Suddenly, there was a sound from the back of the boat, and then Steve, Ada and Hannah ran onto the deck.

"What are you guys doing here?" Sherry gaped.

"Go back below, now!" Chris snapped.

Jill's clone, at first a little uncertain about what had just happened, began to smile. So, these were the little tykes.

"No, do let them stay." She said "This might be quite amusing."

Steve and Ada threw their arms around Leon and Claire.

"We're sorry!" Steve pleaded "But we got scared!"

"Why didn't you stay downstairs?" Leon said, holding his daughter to him "For god's sake…"

Jill's clone again looked at her watch.

"Zero hour" she said, with a grin "Time to say goodbye."

"Zero hour?" Leon whispered to Claire.

That was when it happened. The world seemed to implode around them, and Leon was aware of Steve and Ada screaming as the air swirled in a tornado of light and sound around him. It was like being pounded in the face with a thousand pounds of air pressure.

"Claire…!" Leon screamed out against the gale, despite the sensation of his jaw being ground into his cheekbones.

"I'm here, Leon!" Claire screamed back, reaching towards her husband in an attempt to grab onto his hand, to prevent herself from losing him yet again. No, not again, not again…

She gripped onto Steve tightly as she reached out for her husband…but became aware that his hand was fading from sight in front of her, and to her horror, Leon and Ada began to fade in the maelstrom of light around them.

"No!" Claire screamed as Leon's screaming face disappeared altogether, Ada's own small form following quickly in a rush of light. Claire felt her whole world give, and just as she felt her heart begin to die, there was a crash of incandescence…and then nothing.

Past Imperfect

Chris slowly awoke. He felt very groggy. In the last moments of that bizarre explosion of light and sound, he'd felt Hannah hold onto his leg while Jill had grasped onto his arm and he'd tried to shield them both from the light. Not that it had done anything. Chris ached from head to foot, and it was just as well that he was lying on a bed because otherwise…

A bed?

He sat up, slowly. He was in a small, dimly lit room. By the wall was a cabinet, and what seemed to be shelves of medical jars and chemicals lined up in ordered rows.

"Chris?"

Chris looked to his left. Sitting in the corner, Hannah unconscious in her arms, was Jill. He exhaled. At least they were okay…but where were the others?

"Jill." He said, relieved "You're okay. Thank god."

Jill looked around the room.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"Hard to say." Chris replied, even though there was a smell in the air that he found unerringly familiar and the wall-paper was a disarming shade of greyish green that he knew he had found repugnant once before but couldn't quite remember when. Why did this room seem so annoyingly familiar?

He slowly stood up, stretching his legs. Spying a calendar on the wall, Chris could see that the date was marked down as being 'May 6th'. That was wrong for a start, it was nearly halfway through July. He didn't like what his thought process was implying. Chris had never described himself as the world's greatest thinker, but he knew what was right and what wasn't. He was also relatively bright, and currently that part of his brain that was very bright was niggling away, telling him something was extremely wrong but he could not work out what it was.

Maybe they'd been knocked unconscious, and they had been taken prisoner. It was a funny sort of prison cell though, Chris thought, with a wooden door and medical supplies sitting in an open drawer by the foot of the bed. Chris walked over to the cabinet, and looked at the medical bottles.

Jill, gently laying Hannah down on the floor, stood up and joined her husband.

"What's going on?" Jill said, and looked at the bottles. She frowned, a little unsettled "Those bottles have Umbrella logos on them."

"Who'd keep hold of Umbrella pharmaceuticals?" Chris asked, perplexed "A very weird collector?"

"This room…" Jill said, looking around before her eyes settled on the bed Chris had woken up on "…that bed. It's too familiar. What is this place?"

Jill's eyes finally fell on a photograph that sat beside an old typewriter beside the bed. Jill went over to it, and picked it up. It was a new photo. On it, was a smiling group of men and women, who on a beautifully sunny day, were posing in front of the main doors of a large mansion. Jill froze. The mansion doors. She had seen them before. Once, when she had been running headlong through long grass escaping from an unseen foe…almost twenty years ago.

She yanked the photo out of its frame, desperately trying to find some means of forgery. Something was hand-scribbled on the back of the photograph:

'Dear Henry

Congratulations on your promotion to the Arklay Research Team!

Love and kisses, from Tess.

January 1998'

The Arklay research team.

Suddenly, Jill realised where she was. She desperately tried not to panic, even as her mind ruled out the solution as completely impossible. But she remembered the room, remembered having woken up in this room after Barry had treated her with anti-venom. It was like her worst nightmare come true.

"Chris…" Jill murmured "…I know where we are."

"I think I'm beginning to get it too." Chris replied, gravely "Check out the year on this calendar."

Jill turned towards where Chris was holding open the calendar. It was a calendar for the year 1998. The mansion had been destroyed, though. She'd watched it go up in a huge ball of flame. Which spelled out only one impossible scenario, which Chris spelled out for her.

"We're back in the mansion aren't we?" he asked, voice thick with depression "May 1998, before the frigging mansion blew up. Before we even arrived."

To be continued…

Author's Note: Yeah, I know it's been 5 years since I updated this story, so you may have noticed a few improvements in my writing style. I think it's important to mention that I have kind of taken the events of Resi 4 into consideration, but as far as I'm concerned, Umbrella still exist in an unofficial capacity. Also, the slightly left-field twist is the result of months of deciding how the hell to continue the story. I didn't really want to do another adventure a-la the Umbrella Chronicles simply because I felt I'd exhausted the new virus/city in ruins theme. It's also a fun way to revisit the first couple of games in the series, hehe..