February 6, 1999

It was warm for a February — almost unseasonably so. It barely dipped below the 50s that week, and the broad swaths of whirling snow had melted to rain that pelted the pavement and hid everything under an intimate blanket of fog. March was muscling in on February's territory, just as tired of the crusts of ice and howling blasts of arctic wind as everyone else in D.C.

Jill went for a run outside that day, her first in almost half a year. Something in the world had shifted towards a direction that felt more like sense and less like despair. Answers were slowly filtering in, like the bright emerald green patches of grass persisting through the milky fog. Survivors were finding each other; some of them were seeking justice; some of them were taking concrete steps towards that justice, despite their wounds. The world was starting to make sense, peeking out from under a blanket of hopelessness. And what didn't make sense was starting to look small, less intimidating under the light of day, like a predator which turned out to just be the eyes on the wings of something small, afraid to be eaten.

So, Jill ran, what was once so easy and came so naturally after her high school years of devouring tracks and winning ribbons and medals, and though her body complained and wheezed and ached, it was an ache that felt like it was for a purpose.

She could endure anything, if she felt it was for a purpose.

Perhaps today she'd hop a Greyhound and visit the bank in Indianapolis, and with it, her safe deposit box.

"So Kennedy's got this friend, right," Carlos said, as he scraped a knife full of butter onto his baked potato. Jill truly had no idea how the man ate the way he did and still looked like he did; if she so much looked sideways at half of the things he ate she'd probably weigh about 200 pounds by now. She figured it was the same reason he had eyelashes that were three times as nice as hers that he would never really use, an unfair advantage of male genetics. "College-type, pretty good with computers. She made one of those website things where we can all find each other and give it out to the other survivors to see if anyone is lookin' for us, too. Like one of those bulletin boards where you'd post up pictures of missin' and found people, but on the internet."

Jill's eyebrows lifted, impressed. "That's… a good idea. How do you get to it?"

"He gave me a note with a bunch of letters and stuff. Looks like a code or somethin'. I figured you'd know what to do with it." He dug in his pocket and retrieved a folded piece of note paper with a single, lonely sentence printed at the top in an even, steady hand of tiny letters — a website URL.

"Oh yeah," Jill said, pointing to it in indication, "this is like a pathway. You type it in and it takes you to the website. I can show you how to work it if you want."

"Never been good with that stuff, but I can try. More of a hands-on kind of guy, I guess."

"I might have gotten that impression a time or two."

That caught him off-guard; his chest twitched in a silent laugh, and he cocked an eyebrow at her. "I bet you have."

Jill looked at the note and smiled. It was only a squiggle of random letters and slashes, but to her, it signified something bigger, something like hope and its fleeting glimmer.

"I'm really proud of us, you know," she said.

Carlos finished chewing his bite of food and washed it down with a swig of his beer. "Oh yeah? How so?"

"It's this terrible thing that happened…" she said, "And here still are these every day people, not superheroes, and we're trying to make it right. College students making websites, people like you and me who are pulling… bright spots out of it, I guess." A smile pulled at her mouth, and she let it. "Makes me optimistic for the future. Like something better is coming."

Carlos smiled back at her, a slow thing, like dawning realization. "A bright spot," he said, "I like that."

Jill had said it without thinking about it, one of those things that you only realize you'd given shape and life when the other person reacted to it. Now that it — whatever was going on here, between them — had been spoken into the universe, even just as something as nebulous as this, Jill felt the burning need to correct the record, to get in front of it, to steer the boat to clear waters, free of confusion and omission.

"This is… out of nowhere, I realize… but something's been bugging me."

Carlos' smile faded. The expression it settled into looked remarkably similar to the one from the helicopter, that day. "Okay…"

"You're probably sick of hearing about Umbrella this, Umbrella that…"

She had been. She still was.

"But it's always going to be there, until it's not anymore. There's always going to be three—" in this relationship, she almost said, and one of his eyebrows quirked up, "—what I mean to say is that it's always going to be in the background."

Carlos looked at her, his face neutral, but the flicker of his eyes searching her face spoke something else.

"What're you sayin'?" His voice was a bit quieter.

"We have to be honest with ourselves about how often it'll play a role, because it will be a lot. That has to be something you're okay with, if we're…" Jill fiddled with her hands, lacing them together, unlacing them, then sighed, frustrated. "If we're… doing this. You know what I mean."

Carlos's eyes were downcast, tapping a finger on the table while he thought. "That all that's buggin' you?"

Jill nodded, though he wasn't looking at her. "Yeah."

"You know… you don't come out and say you're sorry, but you're always tryin' to make sure I'm okay with stuff, or you get close to bein' open with me then you pull back real fast, like I'm gonna just decide it's too much and fuck off to Abu Dhabi or somethin'. I was there too. I wanna to put my boot in their ass just as much as you do, but you lost way, way more than I did."

Jill shifted, uncomfortable. "I do?"

"Yeah."

She shook her head, and lied. "I don't know."

"Look. I…" he looked at her for a long moment, stopped himself and breathed out what sounded like defeat, like he was going to say something but thought better of it. "It's a big deal to you, so it's a big deal to me. We'll handle it." There was that sincerity again, so open and unvarnished that Jill had initially assumed it was some kind of act, the good cop routine to his bad cop that never came. If it was an act, it was an extraordinarily long con. "If we can talk about sports or somethin' from time to time."

Jill was no stranger to the motivations of men. Her teenage years had barely begun when she'd noticed the way that men looked at her started to change; suddenly there was an expectant, servile kindness where before there was indifference. She'd been through a few boyfriends before she realized that most of them were the same. They insisted she had walls they were going to get around, like she was some sort of prize waiting on the other side of a self-inflicted prison, a weak girl who'd erected a protective barrier to keep from getting hurt. Always probing for that soft core they insisted hovered just below the surface, willing it into existence if they'd just push, ask, dote, control hard enough.

What none of them realized was that Jill had always been like this, even as a little girl with skinned knees and french braids, chasing off bullies with heavy wooden sticks and rocks hurled from tiny hands. She was tough and no-nonsense, thoroughly invested in saving herself, a lesson drilled into her from infancy by her father. She was the wall. There was nothing on the other side, no maiden fair — just brick. When people realized that, they drifted off, disappointed, like children who'd realized there was no dessert after a dinner full of vegetables. They all did.

And here was Carlos, not trying to knock that wall down, but painting murals on it, leaning against it to rest when his own strength had flagged, picking up the bricks and poking them back into the holes when they'd fall, making her toughness a thing to be celebrated, not defeated. Something that completed her, not kept her from being complete. Something he liked her because of, not in spite of.

And that made all the difference.

"We can do that," Jill said, and realized something had changed; something elemental had ground to a different position under their feet. She wasn't sure what, not at that moment. But something was different. She smiled at him. "But the Giants still suck."

Carlos' eyes widened, scandalized, and he groped, blind, for an unopened straw on the table. "That's a hell of a thing for you to say to me after everything we've been through."

Jill shrugged away, held up her hands when he shot her with the paper covering of the straw by blowing into it, direct on the side of her head. "0-14, last I checked?"

"Right for the fuckin' jugular," he laughed, "big talk for someone whose gonna have to find her own way home."

Later on when dinner was finished and beers were drained, Jill did what Jill did best for the second time that night: she got in front of the unspoken.

"You said you needed help with this, right?" She said, tapping the paper.

Carlos nodded, his fingers laced together. He leaned forward, tilted his head to look at the note, like he was trying to read the code from across the table and couldn't. "Sure it's not hard, but I don't really deal with that stuff a lot."

"Well, I've got a computer, and my internet just got hooked up the other day. If you wanna head back with me, we can look at it together."

Carlos squinted at her, like he was trying to figure her out.

"Don't get any bright ideas." Jill said, balling up her napkin and tossing it onto the table. "This is completely work-related."

"Mhm. Of course… you'd, uh, need some kind of payment for your time."

"That's awfully generous of you."

"You know me," he spread his hands in an approximation of a shrug, "I'm a giver."

Jill nodded. He was, at that. "I'm sure we can figure something out."

Jill and Carlos never had another talk beyond this one — there was no dramatic will-they won't-they are we a couple or not? sort of conversation between them. No affairs from lack of clarity, no distance, just the comfort of things coming together as they did, on their own time. Jill eased into it slower than he did, as was her tendency, freezing and looking for an exit when things jogged her baser instincts. Eventually she learned to stop distrusting his intentions when he'd say something sparkling but stupid, and Carlos eventually realized that maybe freedom — which now read to his brain as uncertainty, as being unhooked from his moors and set adrift — wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Being anchored wasn't so bad, maybe, as long as what you were anchored to was better than the sea. Maybe he was just growing up.

Jill decided she liked having someone who picked up her bricks, planted gardens around them when she felt the world thought they were ugly or unwieldy, and sometimes even threw them at people when she wasn't able to. For Carlos' part, he didn't see a wall keeping him out. He saw honesty and integrity, somewhere he could take shelter if the rain got too cold. And maybe, just maybe, something to take care of when the weather ate into the stone.

May 3, 1999

Things moved slowly, then in a great frenetic rush, as they often did. March rolled in like a bully backed by a street gang of mist and constant rain, gobbling up February's claim to Washington with spills of early daffodils and budding leaves. Jill's birthday came and passed in early April — she'd forgotten it, but Carlos didn't, showing up to her door with flowers and a box full of cupcakes.

The change of the seasons came with other changes, too. Jill took the bus ride to Indianapolis, emptied her safe deposit box of all the files, all her evidence, all the copies of the things she'd stored there after July of last year while the teller watched with uncomfortable surprise. Wesker had taught her early on that having redundancies of redundancies socked in different holes like some kind of small mammal seemed paranoid, but was good sense. How ironic that his own logic would be used against him, one final time.

Jill set her wall back up, a corkboard filled with photos and documents and strings of brightly colored twine connecting the two in jags, sheafs of bloodstained paper collected from final her traipse through Raccoon City stuffed into the periphery, filling the holes. She thought about Chris — he hadn't been in contact for months, since that day when she'd kicked him out of her apartment. No pages, no letters, nothing. Jill thought of calling to apologize and bury the hatchet, but was sure she had nothing to apologize for, and therefore remained unmoved.

The first time Carlos saw the board, he'd looked at her like he was worried about her, like she'd just shown him her prized collection of small animal remains. She knew how it looked, she said, but this is how the police did things. Eventually he sat down and listened to her explain the timeline, and supplanted his own scant knowledge. Mostly, he just listened, with a breed of what appeared to Jill to be shame.

Then, one day in early May, when the wind blew soft and the dogwood trees began to shed their petals, Jill received a letter with an official seal.

They were having lunch in the hangar that same day around that same metal lattice table ringed with benches, burgers and fries and soda from some local fast food joint. Carlos could feel his arteries hardening; these jokers ate nothing but trash, and despite their deployments and all the running and weightlifting and sparring matches at the boxing gym he cared to do, between this and the new-relationship bonding over food that he and Jill indulged in, Carlos had gained about fifteen pounds. Every time he'd try to order something healthy, they'd jeer at him and call him a metrosexual, the new term for men who took care of themselves. Carlos drew the line at drinking soda, though. Even he had standards. That shit was gross.

Carlos was trying to push his fries off on Kennedy, when Kevin slapped Carlos' arm to get his attention, his mouth full of soda, pointing to the newly-installed television that was supposed to be for official business, but mostly just stayed parked on the local rerun channel while they worked. Kevin swallowed, then said, loudly: "Look! Look!"

They all turned to the set.

"Breaking news story coming through from Washington D.C. this morning, Chet. A spokeswoman for United States President Bill Clinton has confirmed to Channel 8 Action News that the Department of Justice will bring charges against pharmaceutical supergiant Umbrella, and that the Department of Justice is suing to disband the mega-corporation, citing crimes against humanity following the incident in Raccoon City, late last year. We're going to our reporter in the field, Marion O'Brien. Marion?"

"Thank you, Sandy. Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist from Raccoon City, has absolutely rocked D.C. this morning with the release of a blistering expose against Umbrella, which she says exposes the incident in Raccoon City not as an accident or a biochemical spill, but an act of war with bioweapons that are clearly outlawed under international conventions. She has released what she alleges is body-cam footage from the incident, but she has refrained to release them to the press without the context of the entire documentary, which we will be airing tonight at 8pm EST."

Carlos sank back against the table, silent. "Oh, my God."

"I KNOW HER!" Kevin cried, pointing at the TV, then leapt to his feet and did a little touchdown dance. "Fuck yeah! Fuck. Yes. That's my girl, Lyss!"

Kennedy stalked away from the table, food forgotten, already on a telephone call with someone else, who was yelling at him in excitement from the other line in a cartoon squiggle of a voice.

One of the other men on the team — Keith, his name was, a huge black man with a voice so deep it sounded like someone had put it through one of those changers they used when a witness came out against the mob — put his hand over his mouth, like he was thinking, and then dissolved into a peal of gasping sobs. Carlos reached a steadying hand to him, tentatively, expecting to be shoved away, and the man leaned in close, cried into Carlos' shoulder. Carlos sat for a moment with his fingers spread and his hand in the air, unsure of what to do, but then simply wrapped his arm around Keith, gave him a heartening shake.

"I'm sorry," Keith blubbered, "I'm sorry man, just…"

"Don't be," Carlos said, "you're good. You're good."

Carlos' phone rang, jingling against his hip, and he pulled it out with his free hand, hit the accept button without checking the display.

"Did you see the news?!" Jill demanded, breathless.

"I saw," Carlos said, his voice full of solemn wonder, "holy shit."

"That's not all," Jill said, "I got a letter today. I'm being ordered to testify in front of Congress."

Carlos fell silent. "What?"

"She did it, Carlos. She fucking did it!"

"Whoa whoa whoa, wait. What? You gotta slow down."

"Hi Jill!" Kevin called, over Carlos' shoulder. Jill laughed, a warm sound, and said, "tell him I said hi."

Then she continued. "Don't you see? It's moving. The case. They —" The grin was evident in Jill's voice, even over the static of the telephone. "The prosecution is collecting witnesses — they're suing them. They're really doing it. The US government is, they're suing them."

"So?"

"So, they sue them and they disband. That's how it works with big companies."

"Huh. You're going to do it?"

"Of course I am. This is our chance, Carlos. This is what we've been waiting for."

Carlos thought about it, between the man against his shoulder and Jill's voice on the phone. Kevin had ambled over and was rubbing Keith's back, trying to speak words of encouragement. Kennedy was gripping his phone, knuckles white, his jaw working and his eyes distant. So many people had been hurt, hurt in ways that would never recover, just… because. Because what? Money? Power? Influence?

Carlos thought of the hitman from January; that skinny, greasy fuck. Put a bullet in my head, they'll send me back. They'll send me back.

Now, with this talk of exposes and subpoenas and trials, it made sense. They knew this was in the works. They surely had their dirty fingers everywhere in Congress, too much money to be made and lost any other way. Umbrella was trying to silence him on that snowy street, trying to make sure those bullets hit his brain or his heart to ensure what had happened in Raccoon City stayed a secret. That what Doctor Bard knew — and in turn what Carlos knew — died in the ashes of that city, along with its people.

No such fucking luck.

"Well, fuck it," Carlos said, "let's do it. Let's get 'em."

"Are you sure?" Jill said, effusive, excited. "You got my back?"

Carlos watched this Alyssa woman, tall and skinny and blonde, but her words were lost under the thunder of his thoughts. He nodded to himself.

"Always."