Rain thought she'd known pain before. Scrapes on her knees when she was little, a broken bone from falling down during her one and only attempt to go ice skating at a friend's tenth birthday party. Getting into fights in high school. Boot camp. Special forces training. Being gnawed on by walking corpses, over and over and over again. Each new experience made her sure that this was the most pain she could feel, that nothing could ever get worse than that.

How naive. How utterly, horribly naive she'd been.

It turned out having extensive, horribly invasive surgery done on her entire body without anesthesia blew everything else away. All those old experiences weren't her knowing pain. She knew of pain. She was like a feeble old monarch studying the crude map of the first explorers to reach shores across the Atlantic Ocean, thinking that looking at the vellum with the occasional splotch of ink and a big question mark in one area labeled as 'HERE THERE BE DRAGONS' made them the unquestioning authority of those distant lands they'd never once been within a thousand miles of.

Well, Rain, welcome to the New World.

As far as she could tell, they'd done to her what they'd done to Addison. Most of the skin on her head had been removed. Her lips were gone. One eye was taken out, the socket packed with some kind of fucking electronics, and stapled shut. They'd given her a paralytic agent, so no way of being able to see what they were doing to her below the neck.

She was able to see, at the periphery of her vision, their experiments with Alice. The bastards — Ashford one of them, she recognized his fucking wheelchair — were injecting her with an ungodly amount of the T-virus. Part of her wondered why it basically turned Alice into Wonder Woman and it turned her into the Incredible Skinless Hulk.

Part of her wondered if Matt was just as horribly awake, just as horribly aware, as she was. He only seemed to snap out of Umbrella's control towards the end, as Alice tearfully apologized for impaling him. Rain wondered if her consciousness remaining… conscious, for lack of better phrasing… was a byproduct of whatever it was that preserved her mind and returned it to her body onboard Sanitation's helicopter. She hoped so. It would be comforting to know that all those other damned souls trapped within the Hive didn't still have thinking, feeling souls trapped within their withered husks.

The bastards seemed to finish the work they were doing, as they finally cranked up the anaesthesia and put her asleep for an indeterminate time.

At some point, the drugs were shut off, and she awoke fully for the first time. Her vision was… augmented, somehow. Everything had a hazy blue look to it, and a stream of binary code filtered down off to one side. On the bottom left of her field of vision was the phrase "Nemesis 1.0.0", and on the bottom right was "Functionality 100% Operational". She realized that her body was moving of its own accord, but this was different from those mercifully few moments she'd spent as a zombie. No, that had been all primal instinct coming to the forefront and taking charge; this… this was something else pulling her strings with purpose. Combined with the digital readouts overlaying her vision, it was almost as if she was a character in some godawful video game.

Her movement brought her to the lobby of the hospital, and she recognized the boxes at once: the ones her and the rest of Carlos Olivera's surviving squad had found. "These weren't meant for us," he'd said. How very goddamn true.

Her hands opened the boxes, dressed in the trenchcoat, then grabbed the minigun and rocket launcher that were also inside the boxes. In the upper left corner of her vision, two new displays popped into being. One, denoting her minigun ammunition, showed the number '5000'. The other, reflecting the number of rounds she had for the bazooka, said '6'. This really is some sick rich fuck's video game, Rain thought with utter disgust.

The Nemesis left the hospital; if it had some deliberate destination in mind, it didn't show up on the HUD. All the while Rain struggled to take control of its body, to no avail. What the hell had allowed Addison to take control of it? He was just a fucking civilian! Civilian or not… maybe he simply had more willpower than her. The dude had survived what the rest of Sanitation hadn't been able to, after all.

She was drawn from her speculations when her HUD lit up. "TARGETS ACQUIRED", it informed her. There were 12 members of STARS in a movie theater up ahead, and one civilian. "THREAT: MINIMAL", her HUD concluded. A bullet from a rooftop sniper — make that 13 STARS members — struck her chest, and she didn't register any pain at all. Her HUD reflected a .2% drop in functionality, however.

Rain once more threw herself into overriding the control the Nemesis program had over her body, to no avail. The rooftop sniper was blown to smithereens by a rocket, and the other STARS members poured out of the building and opened fire. Functionality dipped a few percentage points, but started slowly climbing back up again. Neat, regenerative powers, Rain idly thought. And here I thought I'd have to go touch a floating first aid kit to get healed.

A new missive flashed across her HUD: "KILL STARS MEMBERS". NO! Rain mentally shouted, and for a moment the minigun's barrel, which had begun to spin up, slowed down… but the Nemesis program reasserted dominance, and the STARS members were all killed down to the last man.

"Starssss…" the monster occupying her body growled with her mouth.

Amazingly, the civilian was left untouched, and Rain realized it was LJ, one of the survivors she'd met up with at the school where Angela was. They hadn't talked much, but Rain still felt sick at the thought of watching him be murdered by her own hand. (The fact that he'd be back once she inevitably got killed was small comfort).

LJ dropped his guns and threw up his hands in surrender. "Respect!" he said. His designation went from "ARMED CIVILIAN — THREAT: MINIMAL" to "NON-COMBATANT — THREAT: ZERO". The Nemesis turned and left him be, and Rain felt a surge of relief flood through her.

Her boot-clad feet led her unerringly to the underside of an overpass, where she just… waited. It started to make her nervous: here was this hulking, purposeful monster built only to inflict death, and it chose to just wait?

It didn't take long to realize why. Overhead, she could hear indistinct voices in conversation, and when they came into view two of them were flagged as STARS members. Rain realized with horror that one of them was Jill Valentine. She, to her surprise, had liked Jill Valentine. Maybe there were some other kind of vibes there? Hard to tell in such a perilous situation, though that hadn't stopped her and Alice from openly flirting with one another.

"SEEK AND DESTROY STARS MEMBERS," her HUD reminded her, as if she had any say over what her body was doing. She actively fought to stop her minigun from firing, but she still watched the man next to Jill get eviscerated with its rounds. She managed to take control for a whopping two seconds, stopping the minigun and giving Jill enough time to fall back and take cover.

And then Alice stepped into her field of vision, and the threat readout upgraded itself: "MODERATE".

Alice leapt down from the top of the overpass, falling easily a few dozen feet without even a sign of discomfort. She ran forward and fired her pistols repeatedly at Nemesis and Rain barely prevented the beast from shooting her with its minigun; with all her attention on the arm holding the gun, though, it was free to backhand Alice with the other arm as the other woman had attempted to tackle it. She hit one of the support beams with a sickening crunch, but was back on her feet in a second and the minigun spoke once more, chipping away at the concrete and rebar that had been behind Alice.

Alice ran, and the Nemesis chased her, and Rain fought fruitlessly to once again seize control. They leapt through the air like frogs as Alice dodged minigun and rocket fire, her jumping through the window of a police station. The Nemesis didn't bother, charging through the wall in front of it like the Kool-Aid Man. Alice finally disappeared down a garbage chute, and after one last rocket straight down it Nemesis could no longer detect her presence.

Rain knew it couldn't have been that easy, but wasn't about to tell that to the big ugly thing that her body had become.

Before she'd first breached the Hive, Rain didn't really have any strong feelings about her employer one way or the other. They were a corporation, and one was just as bad as the other. Nestle, Monsanto, Boeing, Microsoft, any one of them had a list of heinous wrongs they'd committed that were public knowledge. What had Umbrella done that was any better, or worse? Rain had to put food on her table, and Umbrella had need for the skills the army had taught her. Some years down the road, maybe, she could go to college and switch careers, once she'd built herself up a little nest egg, but she'd had no problem cleaning up Umbrella's little messes.

Then she got introduced to one of Umbrella's big messes, and died as a result. And now reality itself had apparently broken, leaving her to discover all the utterly insidious evils the company had its hands in. Being mangled without anesthesia, being brainwashed, and forced to attack those she cared about was just the latest in a long line of things that just utterly filled Rain with absolute moral outrage, and as her fury grew and grew, she channeled more and more mental effort into overthrowing the Nemesis.

And the Nemesis just… ignored her. Rain's efforts were like a gentle wave lapping at a granite cliffside. She tried, and tried, and tried… nothing worked. It was utterly demoralizing.

She realized that City Hall and its plaza were coming up, and she wondered if Alice and the others had made it this time. She wondered about Kaplan, and Addison. Were they still alive? Something told her that Umbrella had probably just shot Addison and left his body in a ditch somewhere… but maybe Kaplan would be alright.

The Nemesis stood there patiently as Alice was escorted out of the helicopter, her fellow survivors lined up in zipties next to it. She was pleasantly surprised to see Kaplan kneeling there next to Jill and Carlos. She wished she could signal them somehow, but she couldn't get so much as a single finger to twitch now.

The head Umbrella guy looked to her. "Discard primary weaponry," he ordered. The Nemesis dropped the minigun and rocket launcher. She watched as he gave his little spiel about how great it was to watch the two of them fight, then ordered Alice to fight. Alice refused, and he proceeded to shoot Ashford, again filling Rain with no small amount of satisfaction.

And then the fight began. Step-for-step, it went identically to the one she'd witnessed when she'd been crouching next to Carlos. All the while Rain kept fighting for control of the Nemesis, but she did keep taking occasional glances through the HUD to admire Alice's combat prowess. Damn, she wanted to spar with this woman sometime.

Finally, it happened: Alice impaled the Nemesis on the jagged piece of metal it had created itself. Her fist struck the flesh exposed at the collar of the leather trenchcoat —

Bright light

— and there was just the briefest flicker of something, and Alice's face contorted in disbelief. She struck again and again, each blow sending more flashes —

Alice on a gurney

Men in hazmat suits coming through the mansion doors

— of memories. They were Rain's. They were Alice's. Somehow, the T-virus was enabling them to communicate with thought. Rain seized on this and shoved more of their shared memories through the connection.

Alice and Rain first looking at each other on the train

Alice looking over on the operating table, seeing Rain prepped for surgery

Alice fighting the hazmat guys as they hauled Rain away

"GAAH!" Alice grunted, still thrusting her fists into the Nemesis' chest.

Alice watching Rain be placed on the gurney

Rain watching tendrils emerge from her gashes

"She's mutating," one of the hazmat guys said. "I want her in the Nemesis program."

Alice stopped fighting altogether, staring into Rain's lone eye.

"RAIN!" Alice called out.

Alice began sobbing, more memories of the experimentation done to both of them flowing from her into Rain. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "Oh Rain, I'm so sorry," she said.

Rain found she had control of her body once more, and raised one hand up to Alice's face, stroking her chin with the pad of her thumb.

Alice looking into her eyes, holding her face with one hand. "I could kiss you, you bitch," she says.

Alice's eyes went wide. That… that had never happened… had it? She reached up and touched Rain's hand, her heart aching so fiercely all of a sudden with desire. She wanted it to have happened. She wanted, needed, to close the distance between them and kiss her, lips or no lips.

"Finish her," the Umbrella dipshit ordered.

"No," Alice said, turning away from Rain, determined. "No."

The Umbrella dipshit gave a big long speech about Alice's importance, how she represented the next stage of evolution, and together, they could achieve so much.

"What about her?" Alice asked, indicating Rain. Rain gritted her teeth, hoping Alice wouldn't seriously consider throwing her lot in with this shitrag.

"Evolution has its… dead ends," he concluded. "Now finish this. Put her out of her misery. And come with me."

"No," Alice said, with finality.

Rain began to pull herself free from the jagged piece of metal as he proceeded to recriminate her for her unwillingness to use her strength, then picked up the minigun.

"Prepare for takeoff!" he ordered his men. "Sanitation of Raccoon City to commence on my mark!"

Before he could give the order to kill her, Rain let the minigun speak, ventilating him first before sweeping it around, hitting all the Umbrella soldiers in sight. Addison, God bless him, wasn't a soldier, and just didn't know how to shoot well. She husbanded her ammunition better than he had during his final fight, and so when the attack helicopters swung around she had enough to put them down without involving her rocket launcher, thus sidestepping the need to dodge the falling debris.

Finally, the last of the soldiers had been eliminated, and Alice approached her, taking her by her free hand. "Let's get the hell out of here. Together." She smiled up at Rain and Rain nodded, joining her on the big transport chopper, ignoring the nervous looks of the other survivors.

"Are… are you really Rain?" Kaplan asked. Rain nodded. "Holy shit," he uttered.

The helicopter flew off into the distance; it took almost an entire hour before someone high up in the chain of command realized something had happened to Cain and ordered the nuclear strike to commence.

XXXXXXXXXX

I'm not sure if I've bitched about it yet (I probably have, haha), but the movies changed Carlos' last name. In the games, he goes by Oliveira, while the movies have it as Olivera. If you go back and Ctrl-F through the AIR series, I'm 99% sure you'll find both usages; I'm also 100% sure I'm too damn lazy to go back and fix it (to Olivera, to make it consistent with being based on the Anderson movieverse, haha).

And so Rain has finally escaped Raccoon City, and all it took was being subject to horrific scientific experimentation! Let's see if she manages to stick it out for the long haul, hahahaha.