The water ran cold upon her body. She'd been in the shower too long, trying to scrub away the blood and memories. It wouldn't work.
It never worked.
All those bodies, all those she failed to save in the Mansion, in Raccoon, in-
She was still in Raccoon? The idea seemed odd, unreal, but it was her shower in her apartment. The same cracked tiles on the floor from where she'd dropped her armored vest by accident, her toothbrush exactly where she'd left it next to the sink. The familiarity was tinged with an odd sense of longing…
And contempt.
How could she endure such normality, such domestic simplicity after seeing such horrors? How could she accept all those that had told her that "It hadn't happened like that" or "You must have been mistaken Jill"-
"Jill, are you fully accepting what's happened to you?"
-stupid things like that. Of course she knew what happened! This wasn't denial, far from it. She was the one alive, the survivor, the Witness , she couldn't deny what had happened even if she wanted to.
God, how she wanted to.
But then what, just forget them, all those that she couldn't save, all those that had died because she wasn't fast or strong or smart enough to see through Wesker's bullshit in time? Had led them into a trap and-
- gotten herself captured, almost kill her partner before-
She turned the water off, stepping out of the shower, ignoring how her toes curled on the cold tiles of the floor, the slight scratching sound of her nails on the floor as she-
Jill shook her head, feeling her wet hair sway as she did, putting her hands on the sides of the bathroom counter and looking down into the sink. Remembering those nights she'd been awoken from another nightmare, rushing into here and emptying her stomach of leftover pizza and sleeping pills that never seemed to work. She winced, feeling a tension in the core of her being, her stomach rumbling beneath the towel she'd tossed on after she'd stepped out of the shower. She felt hungry.
The smell of blood, of flesh and death assaulted her senses as she kicked open the door-
The memory only made the pain come back, harder. Stabbing into her gut as her hands tightened onto the countertop. She felt her shoulders shift, a crick in her back popping as the towel pushed back, pulled by some strange force as if another limb tugged it up.
Before it fell off, the movement of her back fin caused it to pool about her waist.
Jill shuddered, air sucked through her gills as the cooling moisture moved through lungs that were stronger, stranger, different than they should be but now her own. She tried to gasp, but something kept her jaw shut, air instead exhaled through the tip of her noistral… and the sides.
She shook her head, trying to disperse the strange sensations, only for the phantom feeling of hair she no longer had to fade away as her hands- claws pressed down tighter and the counter broke apart. She cried out, a low and rumbling growl as the fleshy armor of her face started to peel back. She felt the hardened extremity of her jaw snapping out, nostrils inhaling the scents more clearly as her body shook. Her tail lashing backwards, catching onto the shower curtain and pulling it down behind her in a clatter of metal. It was long, too long for her on land, awkwardly dragging behind her, yet another reminder of what she'd lost.
Of what she'd become.
Jill felt her face reveal more clearly, the second eyelids blinking as the haze of thin membranous flesh parted and she looked into the fogged over mirror. Rising a webbed hand, three long fingers capped by wickedly inhuman claws, and dragged it over. Revealing her expressionless visage in all its horror.
Almost bone white flesh, extending from the deeper blue covering that spread down and across her back. The shift in tones clearly meant to resemble a shark. Her belly a slightly less pale white. Nudity revealed more remaining features than she'd have expected, but then poor Rachel and still looked like a woman for the most part.
Till her head split open and something like lamprey eel pushed out of her twisted skull.
Her jaw opened, the sharpened teeth showing as she sucked in air, her gills flexing along her neck. The scent of blood overpowering her. Covering her hands. All those she'd failed. A city burned because she wasn't fast enough, wasn't smart enough, couldn't convince anyone to believe her until it was too late.
And then so many more, murdered at the beck and call of a mad man.
She dragged them across her body, feeling claws against her flesh. Wanting to rip and tear it away, to bring back the woman she had been.
But then she had already been a monster, hadn't she? Now at least it showed on the outside. Now no one would ever make the mistake of putting their trust in-
She pushed her head out from under the blankets of her bed, feeling her claws poking through part of it once more. An irritated gutteral sound came from her throat as she saw the time on the alarm clock and pulled it over her head once more.
"What's the word for a nightmare you never wake up from?" Not that it mattered. She had something almost as bad as BOW medical examinations to look forward to today.
A mission briefing.
Jill had been adamant on her desire to do something useful, especially since being a guinea pig in a lab did little good anymore now that Wesker's experimentation meant that her immunity to several viral strains was no longer easily or safely used on anyone else. Any future miracle cures synthesized from her blood had risk factor for ending up looking like undersea predator from outer space going by what the scientists had said, even if her body had managed to purge that active portions of the T-Abyss once the P30 had been removed fully and the last of Wesker's immune system suppressants had worn off.
Given that her skills had always been better suited towards field work than administration she'd requested reassignment. Hopefully back into Chris's team, someone that knew her from before and thus would trust her even as she now was. Unfortunately the European BSAA branch had been positively paranoid as of late, perhaps because of all the outbreaks they'd barely managed to contain let alone properly investigate. They hadn't even been the ones to take down those bioterror war criminals from earlier in the year.
The mercenaries that had unleashed BOWs in the Eastern Slav republic eliminated by a series of airstrikes the Russians had done. Probably more to get rid of competitors to their own bioweapons at this point, as the fact that not every Tyrant was an Ex-Umbrella popsicles someone had bought and defrosted was now almost an open secret among their business.
It was screw ups like that which had led to Jill finally being given a chance to prove herself in the field once again.
She just had to get ready for it.
She glanced towards the clock one more time, her jaw moving slightly as her double eyelids blinked at the morning light. Even through the blinds it felt painfully bright. Thankfully she could adjust to brighter environments, but even now she was pretty sure she remembered Wesker cursing under his breath about how "Ill suited" she'd become to being his perfect little assassin in the African savannahs.
Her jaw shifted slightly, not really a smile, but about as close as she could manage.
Thoughts of Wesker's failure, death by incineration, and one or two more pleasant dreams where she'd broken his control after he'd changed her and ripped him to shreds comforted her as she dressed that morning. Shoes and socks were out of the picture for obvious reasons. Nothing would fit and nothing was needed. The tail also got in the way of most other clothes. Some rather heavily modified undergarments and cargo shorts fit for the most part, a belt handling some issues that her tail had created. The shirt was a harder fit, having needed even more extreme alterations and always a bit of an effort to get over her head.
Frankly, if she'd felt daring enough to confront the BSAA with her new body so boldly, she'd probably have had an easier time with tubetop. But that outfit had been incinerated along with Raccoon City, and the replacement was probably stored in whatever box her belongings had ended up in during those long years as Wesker's slave.
Sometimes she considered getting a hat or some kind of hoodie, but even with that news about SBOW rights and laws changing back in the US, most of Europe remained far stricter about the matter. Hardly surprising given how there'd been almost five incidents as bad as Raccoon City in the last decade alone.
Jill took one last look at the clock, her inky black eyes blinking as she turned away and walked towards the door. She was almost late at this point. And while technically the door wasn't locked Chris had told her that there were more cameras and sensors pointed at her than even she'd noticed.
Not that she minded.
It only made sense to keep an eye on something like her.
"Agent Valentine, glad you could make it."
Jill nodded. She could talk, finally, after months of speech therapy. That her voice had quickly gone from a scratchy growl to an almost perfect mimicry of what it had been should have made her feel better about it. Till she started to notice how she talked.
It wasn't normal.
It felt like the surgeries and training had caused her body to regenerate an emulation of speech and not how she used to talk, the sounds coming deeper in her throat, her tongue moving oddly as she relearned how her altered anatomy worked. Part of her wished she could compare it to someone else like her, but there wasn't really anyone like that? Even Ashley Graham hadn't been so unique to start with, and with the use of viral inhibitors in the US as a new treatment she was starting to become less so more and more. Obviously the hope of most medical professionals was for a real cure to irregular mutations like theirs, but in extreme cases it was really a question of what was preferred.
Inhumanity or death.
At one point she'd have gladly taken death. Not now.
Death would be too easy, a cowards surrender after all she'd been through. She hadn't told anyone that, save Chris in those first few weeks when she'd spoken in strange growls and communicated by awkwardly writing on whiteboards. He'd been afraid she'd do something drastic.
She'd only had one question she'd asked again and again.
"Why?"
They'd made a promise, and it seemed in retrospect that Chris had failed to deliver. Even if she wasn't going to make do on correcting that mistake, it still galled her. They'd sworn to one another that if one was infected, the other would… handle it .
In the end he'd only been able to say he'd seen something in her that made him believe there was still hope. Jill had spent hours looking at her face, her new face trying to see it.
She didn't know what he saw.
The kind of sentimental foolishness that would have gotten him killed if Wesker hadn't been such a fuckup in the end.
Quint Brady had none of that at least. The man looked at her with well hidden sense of disgust, professionalism winning out over the primate terror of being close to something that had been created from too many evolutionary nightmares mixed together. Even then she could smell the slight increase in sweat in the air, another little oddity that would have bothered her more if her nightmares about hungering for the blood of humans had been based in more truth than her own twisted fears. Quint Brady had little to fear from her.
That ham sandwich she'd seen in the cafeteria the day before was counting down the minutes before it fell to a sudden Jill attack.
He seated himself in a nearby chair while Jill stood slightly further and to the side. Close enough that her attention to the BSAA presenter was clear but not so close that she was a looming shark mouthed shadow over their shoulder. She'd grown taller after all, though not yet level with Chris's eyes.
"Odd. I swore he used to only be a bit taller than me." She'd have to ask him about that when he came back from the States. Maybe he'd taken to wearing a different brand of boots or something?
"Glad you could make it as well Ms. Valentine." The absence of her prior role did not go unnoticed, but she didn't comment on it. She wasn't technically an agent. Not till they re-activated her commission, as most branches of the BSAA had declared her as dead even if Chris had never given up hope. Hell, most still considered her dead. Not like there were fingerprints or dental records to say otherwise anymore.
"We're looking into an unexpected ABS issue."
"The anomalous biological sample was found along the coast of Norway. At first we weren't certain, but further sightings were detected and we've since put a broad ban on fish taken from over a two hundred and fifty kilometer region."
The projector flipped over, showing a Cod, then another with its jaw open. Tongue sticking out, and splitting apart into a web of strange reddish tendrils. Another, eyes burst open and leaking pustules while another, even more mutated, had lost those same eyes, the featureless flesh now marked with strange new growths that bloated its body.
"As Agent Grady said, we've locked down the region but still have no confirmed source. The fish are heavily mutated, but active vectors are indeterminate. Is it a chemical effect? A new viral strain? Some kind of parasitic infection? All we know is that the currents are spreading it southward and we need to find and terminate the source before we have to shut down all fishing in the North Atlantic."
Jill cocked her head to the side, the unvoiced thought loudly echoing in her mind. This was too good. Given her body's new… abilities, an investigation into a possible aquatic bioterror incident was almost insultingly ironic. But then it did fit with the tight leash that the European BSAA had been holding when it came to her requests for work so far. Anything that put her as a public face had been off the table, anything that put her on point to possible encounter BOW had been vetoed. Hell, they seemed deeply conflicted about even re-issuing her a firearm, as if letting her carry again was some betrayal of their principles.
"Being the backup for Grady taking samples of dead fish fits with what they'd actually let me out to do."
But anything was better than nothing, and nothing was all she'd done for almost a year. And despite Chris's best efforts her legal un-personhood following her mutation and long MIA case had made getting her out of Europe something of a political minefield. One would think that saving the world from Albert Wesker would have counted for more, but apparently a lot of the upper level pencil pushers in Paris honestly thought the threat had been overblown. Probably why they'd been so hesitant to send their own forces down there and left Chris and Sheva to pretty much handle the whole situation on their own.
"So Valentine," Agent Grady said, turning to look at her. His brown eyes met the jet black of her own. "You think you're ready for another field assignment."
She nodded, given an awkwardly clawed thumbs up as she spoke. "Sure. It's just like riding a bicycle."
"Besides, if I don't prove myself out there I'll just be stuck in places like this for the rest of my life."