#renetweek

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.