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solynaceawrites · 3 years ago

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The Paths I Follow . . .

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: None Fandom: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse) Characters: Jill Valentine, Tyrell Patrick Tags: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied Relationships, Implied Jill/Carlos Summary: Getting infected was hell. So is the recovery. Wandering the remains of the Raccoon General Hospital, Jill searches for answers regarding the actions of the man who’s come to intrigue her so much. Written For: @valeveirazine

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Nothing here but another corpse.

Closing the door with a quiet click, Jill takes a step back and wipes her clammy palm on her jeans. She’d thought after the events at Spencer Mansion she’d be used to just about everything, but seeing the young nurse with her face frozen in a perpetual scream of anguish had shaken her, and her empty stomach churns. All of this suffering, this death and not-death and fires burning in the street, just a hallmark of the callous greed of Umbrella. Knowing who’s responsible doesn’t make the cost any easier to witness; it’s why Nikolai’s betrayal infuriates her, and why her trust of Carlos and Tyrell stumps her. Even now she’s wandering these dark halls because Tyrell had suggested she do so, where the locked doors and blood-splattered walls pay testament to the fight for survival.

“You look like hell, Valentine,” he’d told her with a wry sort of grin. “Bit of exercise and food might do you some good.”

“Where do you expect me to go?” she’d retorted, and he gestured to the doors behind him and the sign next to them that said CAFETERIA ↑ in bold, black letters.

Not that there is a cafeteria, at least not that she can find. While Carlos had taken care of the infected and mutants, leaving her path relatively clear, the journey is no less fruitless. Almost every door is sealed behind a keypad or keycard terminal, and those that aren’t are barricaded from within, leaving her with nowhere else to go but deeper into the hospital. At one hall, gouges run deep into the drywall and the metal doors are ripped from their hinges. A pile of debris barrs her way; when a low, rasping growl resounds from somewhere far beyond it, she quickly moves on. Could just be some pipes, but she’d rather not stick around to find out.

Not when her mouth still tastes like rot.

Not when her vision is still blurry.

Not when death is still looming over her shoulder.

Fucking Umbrella.

Following the only path that she can leads her to a set of electronically locked doors. Unlike the others, however, the keypad’s light is blinking green, so she pushes against it with her shoulder and keeps her hand on the butt of her gun in case there’s something nasty lurking on the other side. Yet the room—a laboratory of some sort—is remarkably immaculate in comparison to the rest of the hospital: a few papers and folders litter the floor, and the lights do not work, but the walls are clear of damage. The only thing out of place is the corpse slumped in a swivel chair with blood pooling beneath the wheels, its expression one of furious terror. A robbery? In the middle of the goddamn apocalypse? Jill snorts as she steps fully inside. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Her cop instincts have her checking the body first. An ID tag pinned to the label of his coat reads Dr. Nathaniel Bard, Research & Virology, and the small photograph matches the man’s face as it probably was five or so years ago. The computer behind him is useless thanks to a bullet hole in the middle of the screen, but a low beeping draws her attention to the back of the lab. She finds another terminal there next to a door marked Restricted Access; accessing it pulls up a list of emails between Dr. Bard and a senator full of increasingly desperate pleas for rescue and promises of a cure for the virus ravaging Raccoon City.

Her brows pinch as she reads the messages again and again. Then she pulls the radio from her belt and turns it on. “Tyrell, you there?”

A crackle of static. “What’s going on, Valentine?”

“I’m in Dr. Bard’s lab. Guess he made a vaccine, but I don’t see it anywhere.” Jill pauses to take a deep breath, her next question setting a pit in the depths of her stomach. “Don’t see a recipe or guidelines to replicate one, either. So how did Carlos manage to make it and give it to me?”

“He didn’t,” Tyrell replies flatly.

“Well, I’m not trying to bite the shit out of you, so he—”

“Don’t get me wrong, he injected you with the cure.” There’s a long pause before Tyrell sighs. “There was a vaccine in the lab, off in the restricted section. Carlos grabbed it and used it on you. Guess Nikolai missed it on his way through. Saved your ass, even if we lost Bard.”

Despite the humor he’s forcing, Jill only feels angry and defeated. Grateful, yes, because Carlos rescued her from the nightmare that’s been plaguing her since the Spencer Mansion, but at what cost? “Did he stop to think how many more could’ve been saved if he got it out of the city?”

“Probably not,” Tyrell admits. “Guy’s got a one-track mind. You were in trouble, he reacted.”

“Goddamn it!” She braces her hands on the desk, struggling to control her temper. This whole shitshow isn’t Carlos’ fault, and she knows that, but all she can think of is Brad holding that fucking door shut so she could get away, his screams of agony as the undead on the other side broke through and tore him apart. “Tell me why, Tyrell. Why choose one over thousands? Millions? This thing is only going to spread, and now we’ve lost our one chance to get ahead of it!”

The answer comes quietly, almost lost in the static. “You really gotta ask?”

“Yeah,” she snaps, “I do. Because otherwise all I’ve got is someone working for Umbrella to get rid of any chance to kill their virus, and that’s not a pretty fucking picture.”

Tyrell’s silence stretches on so long that, for a moment, she thinks he’s put down his comm or plans to ignore her entirely, and she grits her teeth and debates whether or not she could force him to answer. Then, wearily, he says, “You gotta understand this first: all that shit about Umbrella? The viruses, the experiments, the bioweapons? We didn’t know. Every single one of us who got recruited to U.B.C.S. viewed it as a second chance. Not like they were putting their plans on pamphlets, you know?”

“You really think I’m that stupid?”

“Honest to God, Valentine, we didn’t know.” His fervor makes her hesitate, makes her doubt, and she bites her tongue as he continues. “Hell, they offered me the job of a monitor once. Same shit Nikolai is doing. But when they wouldn’t tell me what the hell that meant, or what I’d be expected to do, I turned it down. We were always in the dark, thinking we were just meant to help people. Which, believe me, we wanted to do after the shit we got up to before Umbrella found us.”

Her misgivings and her need to trust somebody war within her. “What shit?”

“You really want to know?” He sounds amused, but it’s hard to really tell through the comms. “Even if it sullies the view of the guy who busted his ass to save you?”

“For my own sake.” Jill swallows her pride. “Please, Tyrell. I need to know.”

He sighs, and she thinks she hears the sound of fingers drumming on a tabletop. “My story isn’t new. Joined the Foreign Legion, got caught selling black market weapons, wound up court martialled and waiting to die. Umbrella pulled me outta that after I tried to contact one of their recruiters. Offered me the chance to turn my life around, and I took it.”

“I see,” she murmurs.

“As for Carlos? Guy was a guerilla fighter somewhere in South America. Got captured and slated for execution. He’s a damn-near wizard when it comes to heavy weaponry and vehicle maintenance, so Umbrella bought his freedom and relocated him.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that; it’s too far from the image of Carlos she has in her mind of a man who’s good-hearted and warm. But he’s a soldier, so is it any surprise that his past is checkered?

“Satisfied now? I mean, as a cop, you’re probably itching to arrest us both and send us to pay for our crimes, right?” Tyrell sounds mocking now, and she doesn’t care for it much,

Still, she says, “No. I should, you’re right. It’d be the correct thing to do. But . . .” Hell, she was never good at this emotional stuff. Never good at sharing her thoughts and feelings, even when she was with S.T.A.R.S. and considered them friends. It’s easier to brush it off and keep going. Putting words to it makes it dangerously real, after all, and she’s always lived in a man’s world, where that sort of weakness would get her mocked. “Out of all you U.B.C.S. guys, he was the only one I could trust from the start. I have to hold onto that, or I’ll have nothing left.”

“He’s a trustworthy sort,” Tyrell agrees. His voice is kinder, less defensive. “Dedicated, too. Once you’ve earned his loyalty, it won’t waver. I mean, unless you pull what Nikolai did and start murdering the people he cares about, anyway.”

“Right,” she murmurs. “Listen, I’m gonna work through the lab, see if there’s anything Carlos missed on his sweep. Valentine out.”

Before Tyrell can respond, she cranks the volume on her radio down to a whisper and hooks it to her belt. She’ll still be able to hear him if he calls for help, but right now what she needs is what little quiet she can get to think. The last forty-eight hours have done more to upheave her world than that night at the mansion ever did; what is she supposed to do against a corporation as far-reaching as Umbrella, one that has the ability to wipe out populations on a whim?

Oddly, though, her mind doesn’t linger on the danger. No, it turns towards her mother.

Jill hasn’t thought of her parents in years, not since she moved out at eighteen to try her hand at college. Her mother always wanted her to go, keeping a critical eye on her studies and doling out punishment whenever a grade slipped a little too low for her liking—not that Jill had ever failed a class, but to her mother, anything lower than perfect was cause for shame. At least she’d had the comfort of knowing it came from love. Neither parent had attended any sort of university, even for a technical degree, and her family had always straddled the line between middle class and poverty. Midwestern America wasn’t kind to immigrants, and it took her parents’ sweat and tears with glee.

So she’d gone. Majored in economics like a good daughter and visited home every weekend without fail so her mother could coo to that small circle of knitting friends she’d made about how her daughter was doing so well, was so smart, was bound to marry a doctor one day and take care of her poor, beleaguered folks. Love and resentment colored Jill’s view of her mother in equal measure. Maybe that was why she’d enlisted in the military right after graduation; it had broken her parents’ hearts without a doubt, though the promise of money sent back weekly helped smooth that over a bit.

Then they died.

It wasn’t expected, which would have been still horrible but bearably so. No, it was an accident, hit and run from a drunk driver that killed her father on impact and her mother in the ambulance, wham, bam, here’s some grief to go on top of drill sergeants shouting all day. She’d buried them, sold their house, and drowned her grief in her work. And that led to notice from Delta Force, and a unique offer, and learning how to pick locks and dismantle bombs and keep her cool when someone had a gun pointed at her face. She’d done well. Survived, anyway, but a call that came too close to being fatal was almost more than she could take. Luckily—or not so luckily, all things considered—someone else had taken notice of her, too, and in 1996 she’d been transferred to a new unit: S.T.A.R.S., right in her hometown of Raccoon City.

S.T.A.R.S., of course, led to Barry and Chris and Brad and Rebecca, led right to Umbrella’s front door because Wesker hadn’t been the kind, dedicated leader he’d made himself out to be. In fact, he’d been so cruel that Jill sometimes wonders how they never saw through him, how that mask of his never slipped. It took a real heartlessness to lead the people who trusted and looked up to him into that slaughter, and she knows that none of them were meant to make it out alive, that they were nothing more than tools to test Umbrella’s weapons. Shit, with that bastard chasing her around Raccoon City, it seems like all joining S.T.A.R.S. did was paint a nice little target on her back.

The real question, she supposes, staring at the blinking cursor on the screen, is was it all worth it? She’d grown. She’d learn to trust her instincts, how dangerous the world was outside of her parents’ sometimes smothering love, and she’d found a place for herself, if only for a few years. S.T.A.R.S. might be broken, but some of its former members are still alive and fighting back against the monsters lurking in the dark.

And now there’s Tyrell, with whom she’s found a wry kinship. Tyrell who works best behind the scenes, but will stand his ground in a pinch and is damn handy when it comes to his rifle. She’s seen bravery time and time again: Barry standing up to Wesker, Mikhail staring death in the face and refusing to be cowed by it even when it meant sacrificing himself.

That doesn’t even begin to cover Carlos, but those feelings—trust and a dangerous sort of longing that she’d sworn never to feel in a world gone to hell—aren’t something she can deal with right now. He’d saved her life without concern for risking his own, had come to her aid time and time again with no expectations of a reward other than, presumably, knowing she was still alive and kicking. Hell, he’d used the one chance they had of stopping the T-virus in its tracks on her. Safe to say that it’s all a bit muddled, but maybe . . .

Static hisses from her radio. Jill twists the knob and catches, “ . . . reception, pronto!”

The urgency is what has her snatching it from her belt and pressing the button so hard her finger turns white. “Tyrell?”

“Jesus, Valentine, you fall asleep?” He sounds angry, and without giving her time to bite back he snaps, “Get your ass to reception. We’ve got trouble.”

“Great,” she mumbles.

After one last, quick search of the room that leaves her frustratingly empty-handed, Jill retraces her steps and follows the few undamaged signs back to reception. Tyrell is still there, but he’s no longer fixated on the computer behind the desk. His body is turned to the television in the corner, and she joins him as the Breaking News Alert finishes blaring its grating tone.

From behind the static screen, a female voice says, “Attention all citizens. Following the outbreak of an unknown pathogen in Raccoon City, the government has decided to use a nuclear warhead in an attempt to stop the infection from spreading. It has a fatality rate of one-hundred percent, and no attempts to contain or cure it have been successful. The missile strike on Raccoon City will occur in just hours. The payload is designed to eradicate all biological material. You will not survive if you remain in the city. Evacuate now. Repeat: evacuate now. This is not a test. Evacuate immediately.”

Her blood runs cold. “What the fuck?”

“You missed the part about blockades,” Tyrell replies grimly. “It’s nice of them to tell us to get the hell out when there’s tanks out there to make sure we don’t.”

“They can’t do this!”

He shakes his head, returning to the terminal. “They can. Umbrella has them in their pocket, and I’d wager they all but demanded a missile strike. How else are they gonna make sure none of this shit reaches the public?”

She can’t accept that. She refuses to, because she’s survived this long and she’ll be damned if Umbrella is going to kill her now. “What can we do? There’s gotta be something!”

There’s an uncomfortably long pause. In it, she realizes that Tyrell has gone pale beneath the grime on his face, that his eyes are a little too wide and his fingers tremble the tiniest amount when he tries to type, and she knows that he’s afraid. Finally, he says, “Carlos went underground a few hours ago. There’s a lab beneath our feet; guess he was thinkin’ he’d make more of the vaccine. I have some government contacts I can try to reach to buy him time, but—”

“I’m going to help him.” Jill spies an extra magazine on the table and takes it before checking the ammo in her gun. “Two hands are better than one.”

“Yeah, sure. But you’ll have to be quick, Valentine, you hear? Even if I get through, there’s no guarantee that they’ll listen or make a deal.”

“Make them listen,” she barks.

He considers her for a moment, and then his lips curl into a dry sort of grin that, oddly enough, settles her nerves a good deal. “Yes ma’am. In fact, I’ll put a boot in their ass, just for you.”

“Better use two,” she remarks. Following his gesture, she finds a small stash—herbs, bandages, knives—and gears up. “The comms should work underground. If not, I’ll leave markers for you to follow in case you have to . . .”

She trails off. In case he has to come after her? Why? Either both of them will succeed, or one of them, or neither of them, and in every scenario all him finding her would do is put him in danger. If he fails, wouldn’t it be better not to know? To live thinking she has a chance until the very last second? “If you need me,” she finally says.

“Sure thing, super-cop.” When she looks up, she finds Tyrell watching her, his expression unusually kind. “Listen, before you go? You need to know that Carlos wears his heart on his sleeve. The guy can’t hide what he’s feeling to save his life, and it’s clear that however he feels about you, you’re more than just a comrade or friend or any of that nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a pass if things get hairy down there. Get what I mean?”

Jill can’t tell if he’s being genuine or yanking her chain. She stands, finishes strapping a knife to her thigh, and cocks her gun. “I’ll worry about that after I save his ass. Catch you on the other side.”

“It’s been an honor,” he replies, and she feels his eyes on her until she steps into the hall and the door closes behind her.

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