How does it feel to be back?
⮞ FOR : @biomend
The question is asked with a chipper nonchalance incongruent with the sterile solemnity of the medical room, with the heinousness Jill is back from, as if she’s returned to the world of nine-to-five work, bills, and personal drama from nothing more serious than a long sun-surf-and-sand vacation. The abruptness of it though, the forced aspect to the effervescence so characteristic of Rebecca, reveals the anxiety trembling beneath. Jill hardly notices. More awake than she’s been in the last few days, her head is still heavy with exhaustion, her thoughts made even more cumbersome by the painkillers continuously trickled into her bloodstream. She’s cognizant enough, at least, to discern that there’s no danger in her waxing and waning consciousness, and to embrace the rest is impels her towards ------ but not right now, already struggled into the closest approximation of upright the apparatus of her bed permits.
“Good.” She answers automatically, a broken record of assurances as to her wellbeing, belied by the sluggish reach of her unbound arm, trailing tubes and wires, to massage the spot above her eyebrow ------ as if she might be able to rub away the lethargy culminating there.
Back. Jill oscillates between eager acceptance, relieved beyond the description of words, and wary acknowledgement of the momentousness of the idea and all that it connotes. Safe. Free. Alive. It feels more like a nightmare she could wake from at any moment, a surreal respite from Wesker and Irving and Excella and Uroboros and everything she has done, an oasis created by her consciousness, her family and security within the West Africa B.S.A.A. headquarters an impermanent illusion conjured by nothing more than her own yearning. If others have managed to draw a clean, impermeable line between then and now, if they feel some cosmic shift catalyzed by her rescue, it has yet to solidify for Jill, held almost intentionally translucent for the anguish its dissipation would engender.
Hasn’t that been the last ten ------ thirteen ----- years though? Each development bleeding into the next? It hadn’t ended with Raccoon City, hadn’t ended with Umbrella…
Her head aches.
Her elaboration is slow, slurred by fatigue, but recognizably determined, “It’ll feel better when Uroboros is contained. Are there any updates?”