If Rain Ocampo is certain of anything right now, it's that she can't get more confused.
One second, Matt is carrying her infected ass onto the train because her legs no longer want to support her body weight. Kaplan is getting it running while Alice is grabbing the antivirus.
The next...
It's all hazy. At this point, Rain can barely keep her eyes open. The last of her strength is being dedicated to maintaining consciousness.
Alice is kneeling in front of her. Rain has occasionally poked fun at her for always having the ice-cold hands of a corpse, but she does enjoy her touch. It's comforting, and especially pleasant now that the virus has Rain burning up.
There's a sharp, pinching pain in her arm. A needle is there.
Alice seems so confident that the cure will work, but Rain feels so fucking awful that she's struggling to share that optimism. She thinks about how much it would suck for her last moments with Alice to be ones where the blonde can't properly remember her.
She then thinks that maybe it's better that way. Because if Alice has to shoot her before she turns, it won't hurt quite as much.
A loud noise cuts through the space. It's quick but grating. Matt flinches and—
Everything goes black.
Rain finds herself on the floor.
She no longer feels ill.
She's sopping wet and lying in a puddle of... she doesn't know what. It has a distinctly chemical smell.
It's dark.
The fog in her brain has gotten denser. The world quickly fades out.
Rain wakes up. Again. The lights are on, and she realizes that she's in a lab. A different one. The Umbrella logo is plastered on more than a few things in her field of vision. Probably not a good sign.
With a slight groan escaping her, Rain tries to stand. Her legs actually work this time around, but she's stopped from leaving by multiple sharp tugs on her back.
A load of medical tubing is sticking out of her. It all leads to the top of a large empty tube, which must be where she was being kept.
"...The fuck...?" Still a little more than slightly dazed, Rain yanks all the tubes out. A myriad of questions is beginning to slowly trickle into her mind.
Where's Alice? Kaplan? Matt? Are they alive?
Did they make it out?
Where is she? What happened to her?
She spares a glance at her hand. The deep wound between her forefinger and thumb is scarred over.
God, how much time has passed?
Doing nothing won't help her get answers, so Rain stumbles out of the room and starts investigating.
The building is suspiciously quiet. And empty. Like the Hive was upon arrival.
Almost everything is a bright, blinding white. The walls, the floors, the objects... Occasionally, the color is broken up by red. In some places, it's meant to be there.
In others, not so much.
Rain stares at the blood smeared across the tiles and wishes she had a gun.
A bit more poking around leads her to a huge storage area. It's fully stocked with uniform pieces of varying sizes, as well as numerous types of weapons. Perfect. Grabbing some clothes is also a good idea. She's currently bare-ass naked.
She snags herself a tank top, leather pants, trigger gloves, a bulletproof vest, combat boots, and a tactical belt, which she slips a couple of automatic pistols into. Then, she continues on her way.
Unfortunately, Kaplan isn't here with a (slightly inaccurate) map provided by Umbrella, so Rain has no option but to keep wandering blindly.
She eventually ends up in front of a labeled door.
T.S. — MOS-02
MAINTENANCE
She doesn't have a clue what that top line means, but she intends to find out. She presses herself against the wall beside the door before quietly pushing it open, peeking around and scanning the area ahead with her gun.
It's a long corridor. All sorts of tech lines the walls. Levers, switches, buttons, flashing lights, bundles of wires, panels... But more importantly, not a soul in sight. Same as everywhere else.
Rain makes her way through and past the exit on the other end...
...only to find herself standing in what appears to be a completely normal subway station.
'I guess Umbrella goes crazier with the simulated cityscapes for their live-in employees than I thought.'
When the door closes behind her, she notices there's a placard indicating that it leads to a bathroom on the front. The text is in Russian. She twists the handle, but it's locked itself. Figures.
Rain walks into the station proper. Everything else is in Russian, too, and she's seriously wondering if she's in fucking Russia right now. Umbrella has facilities all over the globe, so it's not impossible.
CREAK.
She whips around to face a hall adjacent to the one she left moments ago. Hurried footsteps become audible, so she brandishes a gun.
"Rain? Is that you?"
A mixture of surprise and immense confusion flashes across her features. She quickly lowers her weapon. "...Alice?"
Alice rushes over. She looks different. Her hair is grown out, which is unexpected considering how often she's told Rain that she can't stand to keep too far past her shoulders. She's dressed in a red flannel and boot-cut jeans that don't quite seem like her style.
'How fucking long could I have possibly been out for?'
"I'm so glad to see you're okay." Alice traps Rain in a tight embrace. After a moment, Rain returns it. She's relieved to see Alice is still alive, but also simultaneously experiencing a sort of hollow disbelief regarding the apparent passage of time that she did not feel. It's finally starting to sink in properly and she isn't sure how to handle it. Alice pulls away. "I'm sorry we left without you. We thought you were dead."
"Uh... no hard feelins', I guess? I thought for sure my ass was dead, too."
Alice gives Rain a once over with furrowed brows. "Where did you find all that?" she asks, indicating her outfit.
"There was a shit-ton of this stuff stored back that way." Rain jabs her thumb in the general direction she came from. And on the topic of clothes, she has to ask, "What the hell are you wearin'?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're dressed like you just walked off the set of fuckin' Poltergeist, Lys." Rain gestures at her.
"I—" She hastily waves the comment off. "None of this is important." She grabs Rain's shoulders. "We need to find my daughter."
Daughter? Alice has a kid?
...Jesus Christ, that kind of hurts to learn. More than kind of. It's like being punched, and Alice has one of the meanest right hooks Rain's ever seen.
'Suck it up, Ocampo. She thought you croaked. Of course she moved on. You can act like a little bitch about it later when you're alone. With access to booze.' Rain takes a deep breath and forces herself to snap into soldier mode. It's not too hard. She's well-practiced. "Alright, where did you last see her?"
"There's a house not too far from..." Alice pauses ever so briefly. As if it's only now that she's processing her surroundings, "here... I had to leave her in it. There was a nasty thing in there with us, and I let it chase me outside to get it away from her. I told her to stay in the closet, but it was empty when I made it back."
"Okay. Are those nasty fuckers still walking around up there?"
"A few are. Not as many as earlier."
"You want a gun?" Rain unholsters a pistol and offers it to Alice.
Alice eyes it with a small amount of nervousness. "I mean... You know how to use it, right?"
"Do I—?" Rain manages in utter bafflement. Does she, Rain Ocampo, who's been using real weapons since she was eleven years old, spends most nights throughout the week honing her skills at the gun range, had the best marksmanship in her class back when she was trying to get into S.W.A.T., regularly enters and places in shooting competitions, and can hit the broad side of a damn fly know how to use a firearm? Please. "Hold up."
Something isn't right here. It's felt off from the start, but Rain figured she was either slightly loopy from whatever Umbrella had her on, or Alice had simply changed a lot.
Rain refuses to believe that Alice could ever ask her that in seriousness. Even if that stupid nerve gas never wore off, she should still know the answer.
And, on top of all that, Alice is never hesitant to handle weapons. What's up with that?
Rain attempts to formulate an explanation, however...
She doesn't get the opportunity to properly try. She signals for Alice to stop and be quiet.
From behind them, there's movement.
Rain aims the pistol already in her grasp. The sight that greets her is quite startling.
It's her. Rain's staring at her own face, but it's attached to another person. She's speechless.
There's a young girl. She might be about seven or eight, and she's clinging to the leg of another Alice, who's dressed in a skintight black suit that's sporting a surplus of straps and buckles.
This new Alice, with a stoic countenance, points a pair of KRISS Vectors at Rain. They have the stocks removed. Alice has always preferred her guns that way.
Is this Rain's Alice?
"...Mommy?" The girl's gaze darts between the Alices. She's becoming visibly distressed, not certain who her actual parent is. The woman she's with has kept her safe and comforted her as her mother usually does.
"Becky!" But the other is dressed in the same outfit her mom had on in the morning, and she's waiting for her with open arms.
"Get behind me," Alice tells her clone. The clone hesitates for a single second before complying, scooping Becky into her hold as she does so.
"Oh, thank god you're alright," she murmurs repeatedly, tears and relief bleeding into her voice. "Thank god."
The Rain in front of Alice lowers her handgun. Alice remembers her from the earlier shootout in suburbia.
These copies... They truly are something else. The innocent ones who avoided an unsightly fate during the Red Queen's activation of the simulations are not so much the issue. Yes, it's painful for Alice to be faced with the good Rain behind her, borderline torture to have to remind herself every time she meets her gaze that she's not the real Rain.
But the soldiers? They have all of kind qualities from the originals removed to make them more ruthless and efficient. They're threats that Alice can't ignore.
"Rain," she greets coldly, maintaining her position. She doesn't want to pull the triggers. Not on Rain. It doesn't matter if she isn't the real one, either. That fact doesn't make it any less difficult than the real task was so long ago, which Matt ended up following through with rather than her.
"Alice—"
Alice steels herself. She needs to protect the others. "So you do know my name. Did you learn it from your prisoner?" She jerks her head toward her clone.
The bad Rain gives her a quizzical expression. "What the hell are you on about?"
"What the hell is happening?" Good Rain takes an almost protective stance in front of Clone Alice and Becky.
"She's a clone."
"I'm the clone?" Bad Rain stares at Alice incredulously. She points to Good Rain. "Between me and her, you think I'm the clone? The fuck?"
A beat passes.
"I need you three to do me a favor and go over there."
Good Rain and Clone Alice exchange bewildered glances before heading to the far end of the platform, taking Becky with them.
"Listen." Alice's voice drops low. Her tone grows sterner. More to drive this into her own brain than anything. "Both of you are."
"I'm not a goddamn clone," Bad Rain insists.
"Of course you think that. You're all programmed to." Alice takes a step closer. "But you can't be the original. Because she's dead. She died years ago."
She watches Rain straighten up in that way she does when she perceives something as a challenge. Her eyes narrow.
'The way your Rain used to do,' Alice mentally corrects herself.
"Oh, yeah? Dead, huh? Well, I sure as shit don't feel dead, Lys."
"What makes you think you can call me that?"
"'Cause I've been callin' you that for forever, and if you didn't like it, you would've told me straight up the first time I did it." Rain moves two paces closer. "If you're gonna make me prove myself to you, then fine. I will. I know you, Lys. I know that you've got a scar under your left collarbone that you've had for as long as you can remember, that you aren't sure where it's from, and for some reason I'll never understand, you don't find that weird."
Partially true. When Alice, rendered amnesiac by the Red Queen's defenses, first got a look at her reflection, she did start to find the scar odd. It's been cut into during every forced stay in an Umbrella facility and healed itself up until Wesker neutralized her T-virus abilities. She has a fresh one at the moment.
The reason why she was utterly unbothered by the mysterious mark for so long still eludes her. Rain is right. It was strange of Alice. Especially since the line is surgical.
"I know you drink your coffee with so much damn sugar that a single sip of it would probably do me in for real."
Well. In this apocalyptic day and age, she doesn't always have the luxury of adding that to her instant coffee. But yes, she does love the taste of far too much sugar in there.
"I know you prefer to buy the cigarettes with the filters, though you'll hardly turn down the offer of unfiltered."
Correct. Except there's no purchasing required anymore.
"I know that every time I let you touch the radio in my truck, you always put on classical fuckin' music. I don't think I've ever seen you choose to put on somethin' else.
Alice recalls how Rain used to make a face or jokingly make a remark about her taste being lame, but would let it play nonetheless.
"I know you read more than anyone I've met."
If Alice finds free time, she often picks up books.
Rain reaches up and pushes the barrels of Alice's weapons away. She's perfectly aware that Alice can kick her ass, but that doesn't mean she's scared of her.
Alice just lets it happen.
"I know your favorite guns are the kinds you can use one-handed. Mostly 'cause you like to have two at once. You always pop the stocks off if you can, and don't like slings."
Guilty as charged.
Alice tries to rationalize. This Rain... She does look a bit older than the good Rain Alice has been running around with. Does Umbrella have the ability to make clones at whatever age they wish? That wouldn't surprise her.
Did Rain look this way when Alice first encountered her on that fake front lawn? There was a bit of distance between them then, and not a whole lot of time to take the scene in before the fight began.
Ada said that Umbrella imprints their clones with memories. She specified that they were false, and didn't make it sound as if putting any in that belonged to their original counterparts is a possibility.
If this is truly Alice's Rain...
"Show me the side of your neck."
Rain blinks at her, quickly catching on. She turns her head to the left, revealing a faint scar left behind by human teeth. "I've got a mark on my hand too if you need to see that."
"You were there with me in the Hive," Alice murmurs, the last of her resolve any notions about Rain being a copy crumbling. She can't believe it, and there are a thousand new questions beginning to brew. "You're..." Her eyes are burning.
"Funny how you didn't even remember that we are—were," Rain corrects herself, because she isn't sure now, "a thing, but you were still all over me."
Alice can't stop the grin that overtakes her face. "I can't help it if I'm so drawn to you."
"Sap."
She puts her weapons away and pulls Rain into the tightest embrace imaginable. Like she's afraid that she'll vanish again if she lets go.
"Do you think they're both clones?" Clone Alice asks.
Good Rain tears her gaze away from the black-suited versions of them. She can't hear any of their conversation. Definitely what the other Alice wanted. Honestly, the more she looks around and thinks about how she ended up here, the more she's starting to think that the three of them are the clones. She doesn't say that, though. "Maybe."
Clone Alice adjusts her hold on Becky. "Do you think we can trust them?"
Good Rain glances back over to the odd scene across the platform and is surprised to find the other Rain and Alice sharing a kiss. Alice is cradling Rain's face in her hands, and Rain has a firm grasp on her waist. Apparently, Rain isn't the threat Alice initially thought she was, and Good Rain trusts her. She's already saved her skin.
(Since Good Rain's always kind of had a thing for Alice, the sight is... strangely jealously-inducing.)
She clears her throat and looks away. "Yeah. I do."
Rain pulls away from Alice. Words cannot possibly describe how much Alice has missed her. She's so happy.
"What've I missed?"
A whole lot. "Uh..."
"I don't like that look you're givin' me."
"You're not going to like what I have to fill you in on, either."
There's an explosion on the ground above them.
"You might have to wait a little longer for me to tell you, though. Think you can lend me a hand with something?"
"Of course."
It's good to have her partner back.