looking back is easy for a while, then looking back gets murky.
It’s the curse of a survivor, you think, when Jill says that. You fight, you live, you move on - but you can never look back. The history of you, and the history of her, and the history of your partnership is one that is told through your bodies - the puncture scars on her chest that she’s been learning to come to terms with, the leathery texture of your skin as it grows back thicker each time. Sometimes you compare scars and stories. This one is from falling off your motorbike, this one from that time you got drunk in Arklay woods, and this one is from Wesker’s son (and it still sounds weird) almost shooting you in the face.
Looking back is easy when it’s brief. Conversations that consist of a single ‘remember when’ before the subject changes, and it always changes. Neither of you want to be the one to bring up ghosts, but you live in a house that you’re rarely in, and you both have boxes under the bed from better days.
You find it unfair that you met because of Forest, but he’ll never be there to make fun of you at the wedding (and you know there will never be a wedding, but sometimes you think of a better life where everything is easy, and all your friends are there).
It gets murky on the long nights of silence where you both sit on a side of the bed and don’t look at each other. Your hands shake and hers pick at her nails. You’ve both given your lives to the BSAA, but they never pulled through for you. You’ve never told Jill you were the only one looking for her, the only one who thought she was alive, but you know she’s smart, smarter than you, and she knows it anyway.
There’s three years of her life missing, and you can see it in her eyes when she talks. Thinking about the past means thinking about those three years, and you can’t imagine what horrors she’s been through. Only know of the ones you were beside her for.
Looking back means talking in past tense about people who should be here with you and stepping around the conversation until one of you says i guess we’re the lucky ones. You’re not. You don’t feel it. Your heart, like your home, is filled with ghosts.
You take her hands and kiss each of her fingers and know no matter how hard you try, she’ll always see them stained black.
You can only look forward (but you know how this goes, how history repeats itself, and you know there’s no future for either of you.)
Jill smiles in the dark with her hands against your mouth.
You have to move forward.
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