She had not been dead when Grandmother hid her body in the cast iron coal box. Or, well, she had been, but death no longer held much meaning since her infection by the T-virus. This was her seventh death, and not even the first by gunfire.
She remembered little of Before. There was who she had been. (had she had a name? she must have. what was it?) There was Leon. There was someone she loved, deeply. There was laughter even amidst the fear and blood. Hope even amidst despair and the dead and dying all around. Then smiling, red-eyed Wesker came with his awful, awful virus, as she had known he inevitably must, and it all fell apart. She had not only been separated from her companions, but infected as well. Forever after she would pose a danger to them. Better that they think her simply dead.
Then there was the family with the ice cream. A father and a mother and their strange, cruel, alluring daughters. They had been like her, she suspected, but not quite the same. The virus liked her better. She had been safe with them for a time, but only just. Hiding went badly for them all. The food ran low; they resorted to eating the hide blankets, and feared the hunting dogs would turn on them in their own hunger. And then, of course, Umbrella came anyway. They always did. You could never hide from Umbrella for long.
She remembered gunfire and the cabin's windows shattering in. Running, bullets, falling. Grandmother hiding her body so at least Umbrella couldn't harvest it, couldn't experiment on it and improve their terrible virus yet again. But she was dead and not dead, and there in the darkness of the coal box she slipped slowly into insanity. She lost language, lost time, lost memory and coherence, yet clung desperately to the knowledge that she had loved and been loved once. It mattered so much, there in the darkness, and she held onto it as long as possible. But nothing stays forever.
So she lay in forgotten stasis, psyche slowly fragmenting, until one day, more than a year later, light pierced her world. Someone lifted the lid from the box and removed her limp, wasted body. They thought her dead, too, just like Grandmother had, and wanted only to bury her properly, until the shallow rise and fall of her sunken chest proved otherwise. Then they exclaimed and hurried to bring her back to what remained of that first found family. Past and present accordioned together like none of the events between mattered - but they did, so very much.
Thought and memory returned only slowly. She could not move, not even to blink. Yet when they delivered her to Leon and she saw the disbelieving hope in his eyes, felt him gather her so carefully into his arms to find her bath and bed, she tried her very best to scream. She tried and failed to claw at his muscled arms that held her so gently, tried and failed to wail, banshee-like, You should have killed me, you should have killed me, you should kill me, just kill me, kill me, kill me. Because she knew he would not, despite the fact that the virus waited within her - had to, for her heart to still beat all these months later - and somewhere else, Wesker waited as well. It would all begin again, and just like before, it would all be her fault.
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