Checkmate

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"Day one hundred and twenty...seven." Jill let out a heavy sigh as she checked the date off on the calendar. It was a sickeningly adorable kitten calendar Claire had given her, as though baby animals made her unofficial imprisonment any better. Since returning from Africa Jill had been under what was basically house arrest. She was driven to her shrink and doctors appointments, then brought right back home again with an agent stationed in an all too conspicuous car on the street outside. Her apartment was beginning to feel tiny, like the walls closed in another inch each time she managed to sleep. Sleep... that was yet another punishment. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Wesker's face sneering down at her, taunting her that she would never see her precious partner again. That she was the weak link in the pathetic operation. The only time she truly slept was when she took the pills the doctor had given her. He had promised it would be a dreamless sleep... he couldn't have been more wrong.

Trevor's whole body seemed to grow a little stiffer, though he carried on walking. He'd always known he wasn't the one... it was just difficult to hear her say it. He didn't say anything else, though neither did he put Rebecca back on her feet until they reached the underground parking lot. "Consider this my duty fulfilled, you're safe... we can forget we ever even crossed paths, as you always wished."

There was a quiet chuckle from the cockpit. "Death would come far too swiftly by my hand, boy." He remarked. "I don't simply want them dead... I want them to suffer."

Rebecca made it only to the next level before a dark skinned creature picked her up from the pavement. 

"For what? Because of a fuck up decades ago? Isn't this long game or whatever it is...gone on long enough?" Jake sat in the co pilot seat with a first aid kit in his lap. "The T-480 picked up the bagel..." The last part was said as a question. "Since when did you eat bagels?"

"Since they were sweet and fresh." Wesker replied with a smirk. "And what difference does it make to you how long i play the game for? Those two idiots back there will forever be a thorn in my side if I don't break them first." He added, casting a glance behind him to where Chris and Jill were slumped against each other. "I warned her he would be the death of her..."

"Couldn't you just play a board game like a normal person? Aunt Alex said you and my real mother played hours of chess. Still do online. That seems..." He grunted as he tied the stitch on his abdomen wound. "Like a fun enough long game to me. And as far as the Redfields are concerned... stupid deserve to die. I'm surprised it's taken the guy this long."

"Redfields, yes, but Valentine was smart." Wesker remarked. "Comes from being the daughter of a thief. She had skills I could have used. Instead... She let that idiot boy into her pants and down the path to mediocrity." He paused and watched Jake stitching. "You are too good to have allowed her to do that to you."

"I got her onto the chopper, didn't I?" Jake said with a half smile. "Besides, if I stitch it like the Chambers girl showed me, it won't even scar."

Rebecca opened her eyes, with an odd feeling in her stomach. The room was hot, the sheets clinging to her bare thighs. When she looked around her, it took her a few moments to realize that she was in a very familiar place. It took her another few minutes to gather the breath to scream.

"You can't say the same about your face." Wesker remarked coolly, touching the chopper down at their destination. "Keep them both sedated until you have them in their starting position." He barked at his son. "I can't have the game ending before all the players are on the board." He added, glancing out over a place he once called home.

Jake situated Chris and Jill. He'd spent a lot of time in a place he knew very little about. His father rarely slept but when he did, the nightmares were bad enough to make him never want to ask questions. 
He never went near the mansion in the woods. Once as a child he'd tried. He'd never seen the old man look so angry with him. 

Rebecca was sure she was dreaming. This was worse than seeing Trevor again. Her uniform was hanging in its place on the back of the door. Her medkit was lying open in kitchen. It was all there. Even her gun. She'd lost that gun in the mouth of a Hunter. 
Quickly she jumped up and ran to the bathroom, passing her window garden of green, red, and blue herbs. She threw up and sobbed at the same time.

Jill didn't know how long she had been asleep for, but she knew her head was pounding like the mother of all hangovers. Opening her eyes seemed too much right then, until she felt the cool breeze against her back that quickly made her realise she was naked. It was as she finally opened her eyes that she felt the warmth radiating from beside her and saw Chris was right there too. They were both in bed... in a room that looked far too much like her pokey old studio apartment... in Raccoon City. Jill closed her eyes again, thinking she must just be groggy from... Then she remembered. Jake. There had been several soldiers and a chopper. Naked or not, she shot to her feet and ran to the half open window, sliding it all the way up. It couldn't be.. It was Sigourney's coffee shop right there across the alley. She looked back into the dimly lit apartment, and on the desk in the corner were several discarded lock-picks, gun parts and a police scanner. On the bedpost was her STARS beret with the holster and personalised samurai edge.

Chris was dreaming about his failed missions. The last one was even worse. The boy had trusted him completely and it had cost him . He remembered the time Wesker had told him to lock himself away from everything with breath if he truly wanted to be a hero. Maybe the man was right.

Rebecca had thrown on a pair of jeans and a Stars shirt she'd once stolen from the Captain's office and ran for Jill's apartment down the street. She had to see just how insane she had become.

Jill had left Chris sleeping as she threw on some clothes, smart enough to grab the gun hanging on the bed post before heading out. The two women would come face to face sooner than they realised, Jill also wearing an old STARS shirt; Wesker had truly planned every tiny detail. She had nearly balked leaving her apartment building... it even had the same stale smell of piss and booze, along with the sloppy graffiti on the wall outside.

"Jill!" Rebecca howled as the other women shoved a gun in her face. "I've told you! You can't be carrying that as jumpy as you've been!" Even if she didn't see the world around her as normal, she still rembered her old life. 
She shoved Jill's gun away from her forehead and sighed. "You too, huh?"

Jill didn't ease up even after Rebecca spoke. This still felt far too surreal. She holstered her weapon, then simply poked Rebecca in the forehead, testing she was actually there.

Rebecca made a face at the taller woman and shook her head. "You just couldn't help yourself could you?" She shoved her fingers into her pockets in a nervous gesture. "My  apartment is a mess... It looks like it always did... " She added softly.

Jill nodded in understanding. "It's... creepy. My apartment looks exactly how it did right before RC went nuclear." She confessed. "Right down to the week old pizza sitting in my fridge."

Rebecca nodded. The Captain has left something at hers right before the mansion incident. His badge. 
It had been there on her dresser when she woke up. 
She dug it out of her pocket and held it out for Jill. The other woman wouldn't know the story but it would be significant enough.
Rebecca hadn't survived the mansion the way the others had. Their fight with the Tyrant hadn't allowed them time to return for her. Never the less a week later she'd shown up in the hospital. However, she had never gone back to her apartment. She'd barely had time to recover before the entire city had fallen.

Jill took the badge and turned it over in her fingers. It felt heavy. Like the kind of weight of everything they had survived constantly pressed down on her. She couldn't even begin to understand how all this had been set up. Rebuilding the city without word getting out seemed hard enough, but for their apartments to be the same right down to the tiny details... it left a bad taste in her mouth. "Did you see any people on the way over here?" She asked, handing the badge back.

Rebecca took the badge and stuck it in her pocket. "No..." She looked back behind her, feeling odd about that fact. "What about you? Was... Chris...?" She didn't finish as she looked back at Jill. "Your hair..." She breathed, reaching out to touch her no longer blonde hair.

Not only was Jill's hair no longer blonde, it was also cropped short to her jaw as it had been many years ago. Jill reached up, running her fingers through the shorter length, feeling her stomach drop somewhat; Chris had always expressed a love of her longer hair. For the moment, she chose to simply change the subject. "I left him sleeping... Rebecca, right before we were dropped... wherever here really is, I..." She didn't think Rebecca would believe her. "I saw someone claiming to be Wesker's son."

Rebecca simply nodded. "His name is Jake. He popped up while you were being studied. I didn't want to say anything because I was worried it would upset you." Again she shoved her hands in her pockets. "But...after doing research on him...he's shown up before. When he was twelve. He was here in a run away preteen program that the chief had set up. Do you remember that?"

Jill nodded. She remembered how involved Chris had been with the program, and how much it had hurt him when he found out the truth afterwards. "Well... this kid is out for revenge for daddy dearest now." She confirmed. "Starting with Chris." Something inside her was oddly telling her to keep the news about Sherry to herself, for now.

Rebecca nodded slowly. "I always thought that the program was great." She told the other woman, beginning to pull her toward her apartment. "I knew lots of kids growing up that came from runaway homes. The orphanage was full of them." She added, pausing to glance hopefully at the donut shop ahead. "I never ran away but...I snuck out a bunch of times to eat their blueberry bagels." She laughed. "It's where I first met Wesker." She added. "He was meeting with the Chief about starting up STARS. I sat a table nearby and wrote notes on all the horrible ideas I was hearing from Irons." Rebecca stopped and turned back to Jill, realizing she'd never told any of this to her oldest friend.

Jill had stopped walking, bile rising in her stomach at the thought of teenage Rebecca and Wesker in a donut shop together. "I didn't have to run away... My father did all the running for both of us." She snorted. "Rebecca..." She sighed softly and ran her fingers through her cropped hair. "Promise me, when we've figured all this out... You won't mention the orphanage to Chris?"

Rebecca nodded, her thoughts still with Wesker. "He was the reason I graduated early. He got me put of there. Not everything the man did was bad, Jill." She said quietly. She closed her eyes, thinking of her first stolen kiss in his office. Indeed, somethings he did were very good.

Chris woke to find himself alone in a very familiar room. He hadn't returned here except in his nightmares in many years. This feeling was horrible. He'd grown to hate this place. Nothing about it held happy memories anymore.

Jill was scowling hard at Rebecca now. "Not. That. Bad?" She asked, her fists balled up tightly at her sides. As though killing most of their team wasn't bad enough, the things he had done to her, things he made her do while screaming inside her own head, unheard... "Right, and Hitler was just a misunderstood artist." She snarled.

Rebecca frowned. She never should have said anything to her at all. Wesker was always right. The rest of the STARS couldn't be trusted. After all, they had had no problem leaving her behind when they'd destroyed the mansion. She'd never forgiven them for that.
"What is the plan?" She asked finally. "You don't think there's going to be more familiar places, do you?"

Jill was still keeping a distance between herself and Rebecca. In a short few minutes, their friendship had shifted considerably. “We need to find out how we got here.” She finally confirmed, checking the clip in her gun simply for something to look at other than Rebecca. “Judging by the detail in my apartment, we should assume the rest of the city is as intact.”

Rebecca wrapped her arms around herself in a defensive way,ore than a little hurt by Jill's actions. She stared up at the street lights, surprised that they were on and the city was growing dark. She was sure it had been morning when she'd left to find Jill. 
Bitterly she wondered when the oh so wonderful Chris would show up to save the day for Jill. She hoped a house fell on them. The dark thought made her laugh. The sound wasn't like her at all.

Jill was still thinking about what Jake had told her, about Sherry and the clock tower. It made more sense now, but still the memory of that place filled her with cold dread. That was where her life was forever changed. “Someone is clearly toying with us, and for now I think we should play the game, until we know the rules.” She commented as she finally looked up from her gun at Rebecca. “We should look for survivors, and a way to communicate to anyone outside the city.”

On the other side of the city to where Jill and Rebecca were making their plans, Claire Redfield was slowly waking up. That night she had gone drinking with Rebecca had been her last moment of freedom. In all the months Jill was tracking Chris, Claire had been captive with no communication with anyone. Her food was slid through a slot in the door, and a gas filled the room each night, rendering her unconscious until dawn. Right now as she woke, she expected to see the white sterile walls of her cell, instead she saw a much worse horror; her old room. It was the orphanage where she and Chris had been shipped to as young children after their parents accident.