#bel.fic

Saturday 25 July 1998, 06:01 CDT

There’s less than a minute left on the mansion’s self-destruct timer when Barry finally manages to drag Jill onto the helicopter.

It's a difficult task to begin with - she's not weak by any means - but compounded with the fact that Chris is still inside the lab, it's nearly impossible. She fights him tooth and nail, even though she can hear the timer too, knows what will happen if she goes back. Umbrella doesn't need to claim another victim, not when there's a chance. S.T.A.R.S. doesn't need to return to the station a fourth of its original size, when they can save a third.

But he manages to pull her in, and Rebecca heaves the door shut; they're already in the air, hoping against hope to outpace the explosion. They do, though it rocks them, sets the forest beneath them ablaze. Jill shoves herself into the corner, takes off her beret to wring it between her hands. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, for lack of anything better, but how could an apology ever make up for having a part of yourself ripped away?

“It's okay.” She doesn't look at him, eyes closed against the rising sun. “He's alive. I just know.”

Saturday 25 July 1998, 17:59 CDT

Chris isn't coming back.

Jill knows it deep in her bones, the same way she knows his coffee order and his favorite movie and the million other little things that made up the fabric of him. No one could survive that. It’s all she thinks about as she stands in the RPD lobby, only half-there while Irons demands an explanation. As she's carted off to the hospital, poked and prodded more times than she can count before they let her shower. As the four of them write up their reports and she adds his name to the list of casualties with a shaking hand. 

Chris isn't coming back. Like a mantra. Chris is gone. Like if she says it enough times it will stop tasting like rot on her tongue. Chris is -

No. She can't go that far. There's a finality about it she won’t yet face.

Barry says something about a memorial, about calling Chris’s sister, and Jill nods along at all the right moments. She's not fooling him, but he doesn't comment, only gently suggests that she get some sleep and offers to drive her home. The idea of going back to her tiny apartment, boxing herself in, constricts her lungs.

“I - ” It's hard to get the words out around the tightness, the thing that's making its home in her chest. “I don't think I can be alone right now.”

For two days she drifted in and out of consciousness, held tight in the iron grip of a fever well over one hundred degrees. When she woke, vision blurred as she squinted against the fluorescents, he’d always be there, watching, giving her the uncomfortable sensation of being trapped under glass, pinned down and magnified for him to study. The fever broke on the third day. It broke because he put the full dosage back in. According to him, if he hadn’t stopped when he did, she wouldn’t have survived. The fever would burn her alive.

It’s been half a year since then. The adrenaline that carried her through her escape has long since faded. She’s soaked in her own blood.

She has no doubts about it: this will kill her.

Chris keeps looking at her. He’s trying not to be obvious about it—her chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with her wounds—but every few seconds he’ll glance over, like he’s trying to make sure she’s real, like if he looks away for too long she’ll vanish. Twice, he opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. The couple feet between them on the helicopter bench might as well be a hundred miles.

when she heads for the door, no one stops her. she makes it halfway down the stairs before the tears come.

stupid, she's stupid for this, for caring so much, for caring at all, but her body disagrees, and the breath leaves her in quiet choked sobs as she sinks to the floor, fingers around the railing. her hair shields her face when she curls forward, hand pressed to her mouth; she'd be unrecognizable now, if any of her coworkers happened by. they wouldn't know what to do with her. she doesn't know what to do, besides hole up in her little researcher dormitory and scream into a pillow until she feels like a person again - but she can't go there either, can she? he's fucking everywhere, even now.

your girl. she's developing a conscience. she'll get you both killed. funny how it hadn't quite worked out like that. funny how jill fucking valentine is in the rpd locker room with barely a scratch on her, and he's -

fuel on a fire. literally, this time.

There were no mages in Velen anymore. Ever since Radovid gained power in Redania, it was one of the most dangerous parts of the north for a mage to be. Most of them had figured that out, and either sought asylum in Novigrad—though that, too, was becoming a less safe choice by the day—or left altogether, fled south. It came as a surprise, then, when several days into his customary journey through the region, Geralt received a message from Keira Metz, asking him to meet her at a small hut outside the village of Midcopse.

I’ve a contract for you, it had said, and nothing more sans the location. Geralt spent three days considering the fact that it could be a trap before he decided to throw caution to the wind and go to the place she had mentioned. He’d found the hut empty, but it hadn’t taken much searching to uncover a portal to what appeared to be her own little pocket dimension, where he came upon her, of all places, in the bath. “Greetings, witcher,” she said, stretching as she spoke, and Geralt looked away, gaze resolutely fastening on a bit of flora to the side of the bath. It had been a long time since they’d seen each other, and even from a brief glance he could see Velen was taking its toll on her—she was thinner, paler, the circles under her eyes sunk deep, though he was certain she did her best to hide these things from the villagers who had come to depend on her, her only source of income. “Hope you didn’t come to gawk,” she added when he looked back over.

“No. To talk. I got your letter.” He cleared his throat. “About the contract.”

“Ah. Yes.” She waved her hand, muttered a few words, and the air in front of him blurred so he couldn’t see her clearly as she stood and dressed, though he could still discern her general outline, the blue and red of the clothes she pulled on. A minute later she dropped it, leaned against the railing in front of him. “Well, we’ll stay and talk about it here, then. Where the walls don’t have ears.”

He nodded, waiting for her to continue. She picked up a brush from a table beside the bath and ran it through her hair as she talked. “I’ve been in Velen for a few months, and in that time I’ve heard quite a bit about some mysterious power who lives in the bog to the west, luring people out to it. At first I shrugged it off as the nattering of so many old women, yet…”

She trailed off, lowering the brush and staring behind Geralt at something he couldn’t see—perhaps nothing at all. He was already starting to regret answering her missive. Keira had always had a flair for the dramatic. “Yet?” he prompted, and her attention snapped back to him. She sighed.

“Throughout my first fortnight in Velen, I had horrible nightmares. Something was calling me out into the swamps. One night, I decided to enter the dream consciously, render it lucid. I confronted the—thing directly. It broke contact at once. Peaceful nights ever since.”

Geralt was starting to get the feeling that this ‘contract’ of hers wasn’t going to be worth all the trouble he’d already gone to, let alone whatever she’d ask him to do next. The fact that she didn’t continue her story, tell him why it was relevant, only heightened that suspicion. “…right. So if it’s no longer a threat to you, why bring me here?”

“Because this isn’t some isolated incident. It didn’t happen only to me. I did some asking around after that, and found some of the villagers heard other mages passing through complain of the same things—nightmares, the compulsion to go into the swamps. Some of them actually went.” She put the brush down and curled her fingers over the railing again, harder this time. “And none of them ever came back.”

Geralt had only been to the swamps once recently, when he’d taken a contract on what turned out to be a foglet. He had ended up nearly choking on poisonous gas and caked in muck from the waist down, an experience he wasn’t keen to relive. “And you want me to kill whatever’s doing this?”

“Not a what.” Keira fidgeted with a strand of her hair, and Geralt felt a pit of unease growing in his stomach. “A who.”

“Think you’ve got the wrong person.” Geralt turned around, trying to find some sort of exit, but besides the portal he’d come in through, which was now an inactive stone archway, there were none. Having no physical escape route only escalated his unease. “I’m a witcher, not an assassin.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” she snapped, fiddling with the ankh on a chain around her neck. He raised an eyebrow, urging her on. “This person…well, I’ll admit I’ve no concrete evidence, which is to say I haven’t seen her with my own eyes to confirm this. But I’ve got every reason to believe that it’s another sorceress, a very old and powerful one. I’m sure you’ve heard all manner of tales about mages killing other mages in an attempt to absorb their power. I’d always thought them nonsense, myself. Until I came here.”

Geralt let out a slow breath. This sounded more dangerous by the minute. “What exactly do you suggest I do, then?”

“You need to find her. Find her and kill her. If my suspicions are correct, she’ll have made a home for herself deep in the swamps. You should be able to find her there.”

“And if I don’t? If you’re wrong about all this?”

“I’m not,” she insisted, hands on her hips. “But…if you go there and come back empty-handed…there’s a Witches’ Sabbath in a few days, on Bald Mountain. It’s mostly for the benefit of the local folk, who wait there in the hopes that the witches will descend from the mountain and bless them, but there is some true power behind the spectacle. And rumor has it that your target is to be the guest of honor.”

He was silent for a few minutes as he considered it, as Keira watched him with steadily growing impatience. It couldn’t hurt to look into the whole thing—if she was wrong, he would’ve only lost a few days and put himself in no danger, and she would pay handsomely either way, despite her current situation. If she was right, though, it could cost him his life. Going up against a mage, especially one as powerful as Keira claimed this sorceress was, was no laughing matter. But his resources were stretching thin, and it had been months since he’d taken on a contract that had paid enough to live on. The war was draining everyone dry.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll look into it. What’s this sorceress called?”

Keira tensed, as though the mere act of naming her would summon her. He had never seen her this agitated before.

The house is quiet, and Jill is alone.

This is the one hundred and eighty-second day she’s been alone, by her estimate, aside from the first few when she tried waiting in the BSAA offices, demanding answers from anyone she thought might be able to provide them. She was stonewalled at every turn. When she’d been visiting for a week straight, Barry stepped in. Encouraged her to go home and get some rest, consider herself back on leave until further notice. It boils her blood even now–he’s got no real authority, they only sent a familiar face to soften the blow–but she acquiesces. She’s been on thin ice ever since Kijuju, and she’d rather not ruin any chance she has of ever returning to the field.

So she goes back to Chris’s house. Their home, he insists every time she calls it that, but it’s hard for her to wrap her head around it–the idea that this place, which had been a sanctuary for him through things she hadn’t, could ever be hers. That peace was stolen from her years ago, wrapped in barbed wire, and she can't touch it without pricking her fingers. They've told her he's alive. That's all they'll tell her. She clings desperate to those two little words, folds them up and nestles them somewhere between her ribs. Protects them, now that they're all she's got.

For most of those one hundred eighty-two days, she refuses to leave, hovers by the phone, checks her email every half hour for even the smallest sign that Chris is okay. She doesn't sleep through the night anymore, only just human, only just expending enough energy to keep herself alive, only just clinging to the barest threads of the life she's rebuilt. She’s underground in her head. Isolated in fluorescent-light rooms, scratching at the holes in her chest.

He's loud in her head, sometimes. Mocking. Reminding her she's ruined for civilian life, asking what she thought she could possibly get out of forcing normalcy. She’s spent years trying to kick him out, but now that the only voice in the house is her own, he slinks back in. Never letting her be, even in death. 

She can't stand to look at herself. She pries the mirror off the wall in the hallway bathroom, stores it backwards in the walk-in and shuts the door, keeps her hair tied back tight. At least this way, she can pretend.

For the first few weeks, she sleeps in their shared bed, but waking up from nightmares is different alone, so she scoops armfuls of her clothes from the dresser and takes them down the hall to the spare room. Most of the furniture there is hers, what Chris managed to salvage from her apartment after she–died–as are the blankets. It's worse, in a way, a room out of time, the scent of his detergent on her sheets, the scratch of the fabric wrong against the new sharp angles of her body. 

(She spent the first year here, too, in this room. Chris never made her feel bad about waking him up with her screaming, tried to push past her constant self-flagellation with reassurances that none of it was her fault. Like she wasn't the one who hurled herself out of that fucking window. Like she wouldn't make the same choice, over and over again.)

A few weeks turns into a month, then two, then six. She could count the number of times she leaves for groceries on one hand, stocking up on things that will keep (because maybe he was right, maybe she isn't cut out for this anymore). It's silent in the house, but deafening in her mind. She takes to leaving the TV or the radio on, just to hear something else, ends up falling asleep on the couch more often than not. Showers half in the dark so she doesn't have to look at herself, turns the lights off completely to wash her hair, covers every reflective surface she can. 

She avoids the master bedroom like the plague, until one day the last thread of her patience snaps and she can't anymore.

It's cold. A little dusty. She doesn't know what she expected, really, but it's almost comforting, the way that nothing’s changed, almost as if Chris will walk in any second. He won't. He's in the hospital. Barry called this morning, saying Chris and dead but not in the same sentence, and it takes her two minutes of near-hyperventilation to calm down enough that it registers. He'll be home soon. It terrifies her.

She turns on one of the bedside lamps, strips the sheets and takes them to the washer, puts new ones on. Loses herself in the rhythm of it. Grab the supplies from under the kitchen sink, dust off the nightstands and the dressers (leave the windows alone, the curtains closed, the air might be stale, but it's safe), start the fan in the bathroom, spray the countertops with multipurpose cleaner and let it sit–

Catch sight of her reflection for the first time in half a year.

She's pale. It’s the first thing she notices, how she looks like a ghost haunting her own house–Chris’s house–wandering the halls, wailing, talking to her fellow dead. The veins in her hands, her wrists, are disconcertingly blue by comparison; it's unsettling, looking at the only part of her she sees half the time and realizing her fingers belong to a stranger. Her face is hollow, gaunt, her t-shirt hangs loose where it had fit her before. Strands of blonde hair, slipped from its bun, settle at the nape of her neck.

It’s not like it’s a real surprise. She knows what she looks like, hasn’t been so careful that she’s developed a blind spot where her body used to be. But it’s different when she has the time to let her eyes catch on every little thing–every way she’ll never be what she was. She’s been picked apart and put back together twice over, unevenly stitched, fraying at the edges. She knows the bare minimum about what’s happened to Chris, but if it’s as bad as her restless mind has made it out to be, he’ll return the same. Too frayed, perhaps, to fit next to her anymore.

The sound registers before the pain, and the pain before the sight: spiderweb cracks slicing her reflection. Blood beading up across her knuckles, smeared over the glass. Ringing in her ears. A throbbing in her fingers that makes her think she might’ve broken something. The whisper in her head, pathetic, the barely-restrained glee that accompanies superiority.

So she’s breaking mirrors now. Christ, when did she become such a cliché?

The blood drips thick and warm down the back of her hand when she raises it, straightening her fingers with clenched teeth. Bruised, then, not broken. There’s no glass in the wounds, another small miracle, but as she’s staring, she hears it: the twist of the front door lock. A key. Three of them exist, they'd given the spare one to Claire, but this isn't Claire. Claire wouldn't come by so late. Claire wouldn't take her time with the lock.

She wants it to be him. The vehemence of the wanting steals her breath. She steals a glance at the mirror, her stranger’s face and red-rimmed eyes, before she leaves, pulling the bathroom door shut with her good hand. If he sees it, he'll ask questions. There are no good answers.

Her only consolation, when she reaches the now-open front door with her hand twisted in the hem of her shirt, is that she's not the only one who looks like shit. Chris has no obvious injuries, but his undereyes are dark enough to appear bruised; the way he holds himself, duffel bag in one hand, screams exhaustion. He stares like he wasn't expecting to see her there–the same way he'd stared every morning for the first few months, when she'd emerge from the room he set up.

“Chris,” she says, cut-glass voice scraping her throat on the way out. The chill from the open door covers her bare legs. “You're okay.”

There’s an unintended lilt to her voice that makes it come out like a question, and she can't help the way she smiles as he steps inside, drops the bag, locks the door. She lingers at the mouth of the hallway, half in shadow, watches him watch her. Returns the grin, but it's flat.

“Yeah, guess you could say–” His brow furrows, gaze slipping from hers down to where she's loosened her grip on the now blood-soaked shirt. She bunches it back up again, but the damage is done. “Fuck,” he says under his breath, crosses the space she's left between them in a few quick strides. “Who did this to you?”

And that's a fucking loaded question, isn't it? She punched the mirror because she hates her reflection. She hates her reflection because it reminds her of the year she spent under Wesker’s control. He controlled her for a year because she hurled them both over a cliff. She hurled them off a cliff because the thought of living in a world without Chris is unbearable. It's why she punched the mirror. So is it her fault, really?

She's spent years trying to reassign blame for the atrocities she committed. She's the only one that blames herself for them. When Chris gently untangles the shirt from her injured hand, prompting a hiss, he leaves bloody fingerprints. The rest spills over into his palm. “Did you hit something?”

When he goes to get the first aid kit, he’ll see the broken mirror. There’s a strange relief in that–the idea that it will do all the heavy lifting; she won’t have to say a word. She nods anyway, focuses her stare on the part of his neck where his pulse beats rapid. He’s warm, his grip on her hand uncertain. She’s not sure how to talk to him anymore, how to say something that won’t come out like an accusation. It’s been six months. She’s worried herself to the point of this. An explanation doesn’t seem too much to ask for.