Residual Effects :: Resident Evil :: PG :: no pairings
Title: Residual Effects
Fandom: Resident Evil
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Genre: General, drama
Word count: 1,822
Spoilers: Yes, for RE5
Summary: Post-RE5. During a moment of recovery, the last three years catch up in more ways than one. Chris, Jill.
“Your hands…”
Chris glanced up at where Jill was sitting across from him, a visible frown in her bright eyes. He followed her stare and managed a half-hearted, sheepish smile. “Uh…” His knuckles and the backs of his fingers were torn to hell, scraped raw and bleeding in places underneath the remaining tatters of his gloves. The right hand was noticeably worse than the left; his palms weren’t much better when he turned them over. “I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you,” he admitted.
He lifted his head again in time to see Jill rise from where she’d been sitting, one leg perched on the edge of her seat with her knee held against her chest. As she stood, Chris noticed that her movements were small, silent, and minimal - lithe, even, as she crossed the short distance between them. She slid onto the bench beside him with almost no sound, crouching in a feline grace on one ankle and dipping casually into his space as she studied his injuries.
Tired as he was, Chris couldn’t hide a deep frown. That wasn’t how Jill moved. He examined her for half a second in turn: the exhausted lines under her eyes; her thin cheeks, much paler than he remembered; the scars on her chest, caked in mostly dried blood. She either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that the V of her suit front was low enough for him to see nearly as far down as her abs at this angle. He focused resolutely on her forehead as she leaned closer, her quick hands seeking out his hip pack without hesitation or trouble and fishing inside it.
A moment later Jill was gingerly peeling off Chris’ gloves, and once done she shook her head slightly as she looked over the damage. “Looks like you beat the shit out of a brick wall,” she murmured.
Chris’ chuckle was partially lacking in humor. “Close enough.” She spared him a skeptical glance, one eyebrow arched, but said nothing and resumed her task. He winced but didn’t make a sound as she applied some antiseptic, and the two of them sat together in silence and watched her work. Jill was quick, efficient, and generous, as always, but with a methodical swiftness to her motions that he didn’t overlook.
His left hand bound tightly and comfortably with gauze, Jill moved on to Chris’ right, but he grunted. “Uh - careful there. I think that finger might be broken.” He paused. “Possibly two.”
She stared at him incredulously. “You think?” she echoed. Shaking her head again, she moved closer to cradle his hand in her lap with better attention. The material of her suit was smooth, cool despite how closely it hugged her skin, and Chris just now noticed the hundreds of tiny circles etched in the fabric. Altogether, he was suddenly and uneasily reminded of a snake’s touch. “I swear, Chris…”
He shrugged, disregarding his train of thought. “You know how it is. Adrenaline, heat of the moment.” Jill didn’t look up, but he caught a smile. His good humor fading some, Chris waited a moment before inquiring, “How’re you feeling?”
“Mostly bruises,” she reported easily. “Give me a few days and I’ll be back up to speed.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Jill stopped. She didn’t pause or hesitate - just stopped, as suddenly as if she were a well-oiled machine he’d just unplugged. She took a few seconds to maybe realize this and relaxed to a degree, glancing aside with a subdued light in her eyes. Strange how they seemed so much more expressive than before.
Her lips parted, but no words came. Jill dropped her eyes, exhaled silently once, and then finally met Chris’ gaze again. “…I’m free,” she said quietly. Her voice was so soft that it stung him, ironically, to hear it. Jill was a tough girl, a fighter, but she was still gentle and kind by nature. The person - thing, maybe, was the better term - Wesker had turned her into couldn’t have been farther from who she really was. That predatory, utterly blank look on her face was still fresh in Chris’ memory.
“That’s… all I’ve wanted,” she went on, returning to his hand. “So trust me. I’m okay.”
Chris wanted more than anything to believe her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He knew Jill, but he’d also known Wesker.
Jill was hurting. Badly. Any human would after what Chris could only imagine she’d been through, but he had caught her blank stares, her body language, her tension when she’d slept. The way she gripped too tightly when holding herself. She hadn’t said anything on it, but he had seen the people in Kijuju. He’d skimmed over the confiscated papers. He remembered the way Jill had stood by Excella like a guard dog, how she hadn’t batted an eye when Wesker drew near or touched her. Two plus two wasn’t a difficult equation.
Chris’ jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt. He forced himself to loosen up and looked at Jill again, but she was still steadfastly set on bandaging his fingers. “Jill.” It wasn’t skeptical, demanding, or questioning. Just her name. She slowed for a couple seconds, but then resumed without raising her head. “Jill,” he repeated, his voice even lower. “I’m not gonna interrogate you for answers, but… don’t fester this kind of thing.”
“I know, Chris,” she replied, all but toneless. “We’ve been through these things before-”
“No, we haven’t,” he countered patiently. “Not like this. It’s me, Jill. You don’t have to downplay it for my sake-”
“I’m not doing it for you,” she said abruptly, almost sharply. Chris stared and Jill looked at him straight, her hard expression torn, and for a second in time that look said more than anything. He saw the pain there, the grief, the guilt, all held back by the wall of her solid will. He saw her inner conflict, restraint sitting on a precarious fence as she judged to keep everything inside and put on a tough face.
After a few seconds, Jill blinked, winced, and sighed. The look was gone. “I’m sorry. I just…” She’d finished with his hand, but still held it between her own as she deliberated.
Somewhere down the empty hall, a door opened. Jill snapped to attention, her back straightening and her head turning faster than Chris could have even moved his eyes. Tension wired her shoulders and her stare was wide, alert, everything about her primed to act. It was only for an instant, and then she recovered, relaxed, and allowed herself to blink as she turned back, her eyes once again lacking that entranced, almost glazed look of intense concentration. The shift in stance was subtle and liquid.
She caught Chris staring at her and knitted her eyebrows, puzzled. He didn’t say anything, but she read his face and something like comprehension slowly dawned on hers, shortly joined by uncertainty and shame. She looked down and away again; Chris narrowed his eyes in pained sympathy, but that didn’t stop him from noticing more small details. Her poise was wrong: she was uneasy, maybe even self-conscious, but there was nothing beyond her face to support that. She didn’t shift her weight, didn’t idly touch herself - she didn’t move at all. Chris was well aware of nervous tics and plenty familiar with Jill’s, few as they were, but now her body gave no sign. It was carefully still, the only deviation the very slight rise and fall of her chest. A perfectly trained pose.
He turned his head slightly. Come to think of it… The way she kept sitting, constantly with only one foot on the ground: it was the position of someone ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Her movements, her reactions - hell, Jill’s own body seemed separate from her mind, and she hadn’t even seemed to be aware of it.
God, Jill. What did he do to you?
A pang of concern made Chris want to offer her something: a touch, a shoulder to lean on, a hug. Anything she’d take. Her invisible injuries aside, though, initiating probably wasn’t the smartest idea. Not when she looked ready and able to reflexively kick his ass at the first sudden movement.
At length, Jill steeled herself into something close to stoic and looked at him again, but her features hinted at apology. “…Not now, Chris,” she said, barely above a whisper. It sounded like it hurt her to say it. “Just… not now.”
Slowly, Chris nodded. It hurt him, too, but for her sake rather than his own. The kinds of things they put up with were never easy to handle or even talk about, especially after the fact, but he hadn’t seen her this closed off before. The idea of trauma deep enough to make Jill immediately shut it away, causing her to snap at him and then only feel more guilt on top of everything else - that alone stirred up a wide range of emotions in him, but anger was at the forefront. Anger at Wesker, anger at what he didn’t know, and some anger at himself. The last of these wasn’t new, but it had been a while since Chris felt it this strongly.
He’d never been particularly good at handling his temper, and the flood of rage induced a number of impulses. He wanted to punch something, wounds be damned. He wanted to kill Wesker again, in a way more personal and brutal than the last, but at the same time he wanted to be able to let Jill do it because God knew she deserved the chance and wouldn’t hesitate to take it. He wanted to go back in time and stop her that night at the Spencer Estate.
He wanted a lot of things, to correct a lot of mistakes and save his partner a lot of pain, but he was only a man. He had his limits, even if they were a bit more flexible than the average person’s.
In the end, his flare of irritation just left him restless and Chris sat back in his seat, distractedly examining the fresh bandages. She’d done good work, of course, the gauze comfortably snug and softening the antiseptic’s lingering sting. His pulse had gotten worked up for a few seconds, making his cuts pump and bleed in time with his strong heartbeat, but the stains weren’t showing up just yet.
Jill moved closer without a word, one leg folded against her front again, until her right arm brushed his left.
After a silent, pregnant pause and as if it were a secondary thought, she leaned a little and rested her head on Chris’ shoulder. He barely felt her weight, but her touch had a calming effect all the same and his tension steadily melted from him, leaving him with just the fatigue and the growing, gnawing sense of guilt.
Fandom: Resident Evil
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Genre: General, drama
Word count: 1,822
Spoilers: Yes, for RE5
Summary: Post-RE5. During a moment of recovery, the last three years catch up in more ways than one. Chris, Jill.
“Your hands…”
Chris glanced up at where Jill was sitting across from him, a visible frown in her bright eyes. He followed her stare and managed a half-hearted, sheepish smile. “Uh…” His knuckles and the backs of his fingers were torn to hell, scraped raw and bleeding in places underneath the remaining tatters of his gloves. The right hand was noticeably worse than the left; his palms weren’t much better when he turned them over. “I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you,” he admitted.
He lifted his head again in time to see Jill rise from where she’d been sitting, one leg perched on the edge of her seat with her knee held against her chest. As she stood, Chris noticed that her movements were small, silent, and minimal - lithe, even, as she crossed the short distance between them. She slid onto the bench beside him with almost no sound, crouching in a feline grace on one ankle and dipping casually into his space as she studied his injuries.
Tired as he was, Chris couldn’t hide a deep frown. That wasn’t how Jill moved. He examined her for half a second in turn: the exhausted lines under her eyes; her thin cheeks, much paler than he remembered; the scars on her chest, caked in mostly dried blood. She either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that the V of her suit front was low enough for him to see nearly as far down as her abs at this angle. He focused resolutely on her forehead as she leaned closer, her quick hands seeking out his hip pack without hesitation or trouble and fishing inside it.
A moment later Jill was gingerly peeling off Chris’ gloves, and once done she shook her head slightly as she looked over the damage. “Looks like you beat the shit out of a brick wall,” she murmured.
Chris’ chuckle was partially lacking in humor. “Close enough.” She spared him a skeptical glance, one eyebrow arched, but said nothing and resumed her task. He winced but didn’t make a sound as she applied some antiseptic, and the two of them sat together in silence and watched her work. Jill was quick, efficient, and generous, as always, but with a methodical swiftness to her motions that he didn’t overlook.
His left hand bound tightly and comfortably with gauze, Jill moved on to Chris’ right, but he grunted. “Uh - careful there. I think that finger might be broken.” He paused. “Possibly two.”
She stared at him incredulously. “You think?” she echoed. Shaking her head again, she moved closer to cradle his hand in her lap with better attention. The material of her suit was smooth, cool despite how closely it hugged her skin, and Chris just now noticed the hundreds of tiny circles etched in the fabric. Altogether, he was suddenly and uneasily reminded of a snake’s touch. “I swear, Chris…”
He shrugged, disregarding his train of thought. “You know how it is. Adrenaline, heat of the moment.” Jill didn’t look up, but he caught a smile. His good humor fading some, Chris waited a moment before inquiring, “How’re you feeling?”
“Mostly bruises,” she reported easily. “Give me a few days and I’ll be back up to speed.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Jill stopped. She didn’t pause or hesitate - just stopped, as suddenly as if she were a well-oiled machine he’d just unplugged. She took a few seconds to maybe realize this and relaxed to a degree, glancing aside with a subdued light in her eyes. Strange how they seemed so much more expressive than before.
Her lips parted, but no words came. Jill dropped her eyes, exhaled silently once, and then finally met Chris’ gaze again. “…I’m free,” she said quietly. Her voice was so soft that it stung him, ironically, to hear it. Jill was a tough girl, a fighter, but she was still gentle and kind by nature. The person - thing, maybe, was the better term - Wesker had turned her into couldn’t have been farther from who she really was. That predatory, utterly blank look on her face was still fresh in Chris’ memory.
“That’s… all I’ve wanted,” she went on, returning to his hand. “So trust me. I’m okay.”
Chris wanted more than anything to believe her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He knew Jill, but he’d also known Wesker.
Jill was hurting. Badly. Any human would after what Chris could only imagine she’d been through, but he had caught her blank stares, her body language, her tension when she’d slept. The way she gripped too tightly when holding herself. She hadn’t said anything on it, but he had seen the people in Kijuju. He’d skimmed over the confiscated papers. He remembered the way Jill had stood by Excella like a guard dog, how she hadn’t batted an eye when Wesker drew near or touched her. Two plus two wasn’t a difficult equation.
Chris’ jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt. He forced himself to loosen up and looked at Jill again, but she was still steadfastly set on bandaging his fingers. “Jill.” It wasn’t skeptical, demanding, or questioning. Just her name. She slowed for a couple seconds, but then resumed without raising her head. “Jill,” he repeated, his voice even lower. “I’m not gonna interrogate you for answers, but… don’t fester this kind of thing.”
“I know, Chris,” she replied, all but toneless. “We’ve been through these things before-”
“No, we haven’t,” he countered patiently. “Not like this. It’s me, Jill. You don’t have to downplay it for my sake-”
“I’m not doing it for you,” she said abruptly, almost sharply. Chris stared and Jill looked at him straight, her hard expression torn, and for a second in time that look said more than anything. He saw the pain there, the grief, the guilt, all held back by the wall of her solid will. He saw her inner conflict, restraint sitting on a precarious fence as she judged to keep everything inside and put on a tough face.
After a few seconds, Jill blinked, winced, and sighed. The look was gone. “I’m sorry. I just…” She’d finished with his hand, but still held it between her own as she deliberated.
Somewhere down the empty hall, a door opened. Jill snapped to attention, her back straightening and her head turning faster than Chris could have even moved his eyes. Tension wired her shoulders and her stare was wide, alert, everything about her primed to act. It was only for an instant, and then she recovered, relaxed, and allowed herself to blink as she turned back, her eyes once again lacking that entranced, almost glazed look of intense concentration. The shift in stance was subtle and liquid.
She caught Chris staring at her and knitted her eyebrows, puzzled. He didn’t say anything, but she read his face and something like comprehension slowly dawned on hers, shortly joined by uncertainty and shame. She looked down and away again; Chris narrowed his eyes in pained sympathy, but that didn’t stop him from noticing more small details. Her poise was wrong: she was uneasy, maybe even self-conscious, but there was nothing beyond her face to support that. She didn’t shift her weight, didn’t idly touch herself - she didn’t move at all. Chris was well aware of nervous tics and plenty familiar with Jill’s, few as they were, but now her body gave no sign. It was carefully still, the only deviation the very slight rise and fall of her chest. A perfectly trained pose.
He turned his head slightly. Come to think of it… The way she kept sitting, constantly with only one foot on the ground: it was the position of someone ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Her movements, her reactions - hell, Jill’s own body seemed separate from her mind, and she hadn’t even seemed to be aware of it.
God, Jill. What did he do to you?
A pang of concern made Chris want to offer her something: a touch, a shoulder to lean on, a hug. Anything she’d take. Her invisible injuries aside, though, initiating probably wasn’t the smartest idea. Not when she looked ready and able to reflexively kick his ass at the first sudden movement.
At length, Jill steeled herself into something close to stoic and looked at him again, but her features hinted at apology. “…Not now, Chris,” she said, barely above a whisper. It sounded like it hurt her to say it. “Just… not now.”
Slowly, Chris nodded. It hurt him, too, but for her sake rather than his own. The kinds of things they put up with were never easy to handle or even talk about, especially after the fact, but he hadn’t seen her this closed off before. The idea of trauma deep enough to make Jill immediately shut it away, causing her to snap at him and then only feel more guilt on top of everything else - that alone stirred up a wide range of emotions in him, but anger was at the forefront. Anger at Wesker, anger at what he didn’t know, and some anger at himself. The last of these wasn’t new, but it had been a while since Chris felt it this strongly.
He’d never been particularly good at handling his temper, and the flood of rage induced a number of impulses. He wanted to punch something, wounds be damned. He wanted to kill Wesker again, in a way more personal and brutal than the last, but at the same time he wanted to be able to let Jill do it because God knew she deserved the chance and wouldn’t hesitate to take it. He wanted to go back in time and stop her that night at the Spencer Estate.
He wanted a lot of things, to correct a lot of mistakes and save his partner a lot of pain, but he was only a man. He had his limits, even if they were a bit more flexible than the average person’s.
In the end, his flare of irritation just left him restless and Chris sat back in his seat, distractedly examining the fresh bandages. She’d done good work, of course, the gauze comfortably snug and softening the antiseptic’s lingering sting. His pulse had gotten worked up for a few seconds, making his cuts pump and bleed in time with his strong heartbeat, but the stains weren’t showing up just yet.
Jill moved closer without a word, one leg folded against her front again, until her right arm brushed his left.
After a silent, pregnant pause and as if it were a secondary thought, she leaned a little and rested her head on Chris’ shoulder. He barely felt her weight, but her touch had a calming effect all the same and his tension steadily melted from him, leaving him with just the fatigue and the growing, gnawing sense of guilt.