Resident Evil: Valentine's Partner (Resident Evil X Male Reader)

Chapter 15: The Grim Reaper

September 15, 2002 7:00 AM

Three years had passed. Three years of dead ends. We had been hunting Umbrella and Hunk for an eternity. Every lead we had found had come to a dead end. Every single one. To say we were frustrated was a massive understatement. That was until we got a flicker of hope. We received word that there was an old Umbrella Facility deep in the forests of Austria. Apparently, our intel team was able to discover that Umbrella would be dispatching a USS team to secure some documents from the facility. It wasn't just any team. It was the Alpha Team, Hunk's unit. We finally got our big break. Right now we were in an Osprey helicopter, en route to the forest. Our plan was to set up an ambush to capture the Alpha Team and interrogate Hunk. A plan that was much easier said than done. The USS Alpha Team was made up of Umbrella's elite. There was a tense atmosphere in the helicopter as it approached its destination. We all knew the odds we were going against. We had put together a strike team of the best men Chris had under his command. There were twenty people in the helicopter including Jill, Chris, and I. Jill and I had been outfitted with the organization's uniform. I had on a pair of ranger green cargo pants with a similarly colored button-up shirt. I had my usual black boots, fingerless gloves, drop leg holster, and vest on over the uniform. I also wore a green baseball cap that matched the color of my pants and shirt. I had a black earpiece attached to my right ear. That earpiece was connected to the radio in the radio pouch on my vest. My MP5 was secured to my body with its sling. Jill wore the same base uniform as me. She had on the black tactical belt that she wore during the outbreak. Her drop leg holster was attached to the belt. She wore black fingerless gloves. She had decided to hang up her shotgun for a rifle for this mission. Her weapon of choice was an HK G36C. The weapon was equipped with a foregrip, laser, sling, and a holographic sight. It rested on her back with the sling she wore over her shirt. She leaned back in her seat as she prepared herself for the mission ahead.

Jill and I were still dating, although sometimes it didn't feel like it. We said we would take it slow, but something felt wrong. After three years, we hadn't advanced our relationship at all. We still had date nights every now and then, something that was hard to plan in our line of work, but it felt like Jill was slipping away from me. Whenever I asked her where our relationship was going, she would either give me some blanket answer or would get upset with me. I wasn't sure why. She hadn't even said that she loved me yet. With how long we had been together, it really made me start to doubt things. I also noticed a subtle change in Jill's behavior. She seemed more closed off and isolated. No one else in the organization seemed to notice it. She used to have a fire in her that I had gotten used to being her partner. Now, it seemed like the flame had been extinguished. She still performed well on missions, but outside of missions is when I noticed the change. I could tell something was going on. But whenever I pushed, she always got very angry. I just wanted to help her, but I didn't even know how to start. Maybe I was just being paranoid. We had been through a lot. We still had a lot to do. Our fight with Umbrella was never-ending. I was putting too much pressure on her to advance our relationship when we had bigger fish to fry.

That wasn't the only thing that was bothering me. My nightmares had gotten more frequent. Around once a month, I would have a nightmare. They all followed the same format. It would be some kind of scenario that never actually happened, almost like an alternate universe where Jill and I were still in the S.T.A.R.S. Unit. We were always a couple in these dreams. No matter what the scenario was, it would always end the same. The Nemesis would appear out of nowhere and brutally murder Jill in front of me. The entire time I was powerless to stop it. Then I would wake up. It seemed the more dreams I had, the more aware I became that it was one of my nightmares. Subsequently, the more aware I was of the fact I was in a dream, the less control I had. It was starting to mess with my sleep. The nightmares began to pick up in frequency around a year ago.