Chapter Text
Summer
PART I
Börek shares the name with an entire class of pastries. Other pastries falling under this classification, such as sigara böreği or su böreği, consist of mostly the same ingredients but are made via different cooking methods and into different shapes. For example, sigara böreği is rolled into a cigar-like shape, making it a perfect finger food. The defining characteristic of all Börek is its use of phyllo dough.
Delicate but full of flavor, Börek has long been regarded as a pure example of Ottoman cuisine. However, new research indicates that it more likely originated with Turkish nomads on the steppes of Central Asia sometime in the seventh century, and could even be influenced by the old Roman placenta, a dish made with two sheets of pastries stuffed with nuts, meats, cheeses, or fruits.
The method of layering thin dough originated from the nomadic lifestyle of the Central Asian steppes. Without an oven, the fluffy and air-filled layers of most types of bread are impossible to achieve. Long-ago nomads created a solution to this problem by stacking thin layer upon thin layer of dough, creating the delicate and flaky layers the world has come to know and love Börek for.
Ingredients
- Eggs - 3
- Plain yogurt - 2 cups
- Olive oil - ¼ cup
- Ground chuck (pork, beef, lamb) - 1 ½ lb
- Garlic - 2 cloves
- Spinach, chopped - 2 cups
- Fresh dill, chopped - ¼ cup
- Parsley, chopped - ½ cup
- Onion, finely chopped - 1
- Grated mozzarella - ½ cup
- Feta cheese, crumbled - ½ cup
- Olive oil - 2 tbsp
- Salt - 1 tsp
- Black pepper - ½ tsp
- Phyllo sheets - 1 1lb. package
- Nigella seeds/sesame seeds) - 2 tsp
Instructions
- To make the yogurt mix: Whisk together eggs, yogurt, and olive oil in a medium bowl. Set aside.
- In a large skillet on medium-high heat, sauté the onion, garlic, and ground meat until the meat is cooked and the onions are translucent.
- In a separate bowl, combine spinach, dill, parsley, cheese, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
- Mix in meat and onion mixture with spinach and dill mixture. This is your filling.
- Preheat the oven to 350 F or 180 C. Brush the bottom and edges of a 9x13-inch pan with oil.
- Separate the phyllo dough into 2 sets (12-14 pieces each) and keep them covered so they don't dry out. Half will go on the bottom of the pie and half will go on the top.
- Place 2 sheets in the prepared pan and brush lightly with oil. Fold any hanging edges into the center.
- Set a third phyllo sheet into the greased pan. Using a brush, spread 2-3 tablespoons of the yogurt mix. Fold any hanging edges into the center.
- Repeat this pattern of 2 phyllo sheets, light oil, 1 phyllo sheet, and yogurt mix until one set of phyllo sheets is used.
- Once one set is used, spread the filling evenly across the topmost layer.
- Repeat the earlier pattern until all phyllo sheets are used up. In the top half, you can use less yogurt mix between layers, as you want to save about ½ cup.
- Using a serrated knife, cut the Börek into 12 even squares.
- After using all of your phyllo sheets, take the remaining ½ cup of yogurt mixture and pour evenly across the top of the burek.
- Sprinkle 2 tbsp of sesame or nigella seeds on top.
- Bake for 35-40 minutes, until golden brown.
- Let the borek cool for 10 minutes before serving.
Baltimore, United States, July 2016
Of course Albert Wesker’s birth parents were from somewhere in the Balkans. It was the last place Jill would have assumed, half convinced that he’d been grown in a test tube somewhere - ironic, considering what she came to learn about Project Wesker. Indeed, the farmhouse lay on a sprawling sixteen acres of solitude just east of a small mountain range, a place so remote and beautiful that she wasn’t sure she was seeing actual photos of it rather than some sort of brochure for a rural cheese tasting tour.
“It’s all there, straight from Spencer’s records.” Ada Wong had told her, a delicate gloved hand parsing over the new passports, the deed to the home, the records that established Jill and Wesker - or rather, Andrei and Anastasia Braga - as rightful owners. “Of course the old bastard held property as collateral for their children.”
Jill looked at the paperwork, her stomach turning somersaults as she considered what her life was about to become for the foreseeable future. This was the price of rescuing a monster. While Chris set about his investigations of exactly who in the BSAA had turned mole for the CIA and assisted with Project Wesker Resurrection - ‘Resurresker’ as Claire had called it in a poor attempt at levity - Jill was on bodyguard duty with a new identity.
All in a day’s work. Jesus.
“Did any of these records happen to include what exactly happened to them? His parents, I mean.”
Ada shook her head, tucking a smooth strand of black hair behind her ear into her fashionable trademark bob. “No clue, but we’re still parsing. If I find more, you’ll be the first to know.”
Jill looked over her shoulder to place Wesker, who was sitting sullenly on the curb, his legs too long and his frame too large for the petulance of the posture. Where was the imposing figure in his too-Matrix look, smacking around everyone she loved and threatening to put an end to the world as they knew it?
Jill didn’t ask the question in her mind, but when her eyes met Ada’s she found sympathy and a slight shrug. “He was never my captain. I would have just put a bullet in him, but I’m not judging. For now.”
Captain. She hadn’t called him that in so long, so painfully long, not since the betrayal at the mansion what felt like a lifetime ago. Somewhere between the horrors of trying to drive a stake in the most eldritch and inhuman works of mad scientists and attempting to keep some semblance of order in her own life, she’d tried to grieve exactly this man in front of her. Not the seething madman with bright red eyes, not the megalomaniac preaching about his own godhood. Just the man, scuffing his boot along the gravel as he waited aimlessly for Jill to finish whatever fell deed she was surely up to.
The Chevy Cruze that Ada had arrived in - dark blue, nondescript, a simple sedan that attracted no attention - sat a few spaces away, and the spy held out the keys for Jill. “There’s a few changes of clothes in the trunk and two packed suitcases and carry ons for the journey. It’s gonna be a long flight, I suggest you both try to get some sleep on it.”
Ada’s motivations were often as inscrutable as she was, but there was a core of morality in there somewhere if not outright goodness. Leon saw it, sought it out with the relentlessness of a bloodhound. Jill could see it too in the right light, a sheen like brilliance on an oil slick.
“Get him out of here.”
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, July 2016
If it wasn’t the longest flight on record, it had to be close.
Jill hadn’t had enough time to peruse all of their paperwork, unsure if the identities came with a marriage license or the implication they were siblings, but she tried to treat him as warmly as she inconspicuously could. Of course, he weathered this with the same suspicion as a beaten dog, his dark glasses protecting his overly sensitive eyes and masking the damage done to his face at least a little. She’d wanted nothing more than to pipe back an Ambien and wake up over Italy, miserably stiff from the evac chopper ride and ready to trade onto another clandestine carrier, but the hypervigilance she lived (and nearly died) by kept her awake most of the time, warily watching him for any signs he might decide to make up for lost time. This Wesker seemed more subdued, more human, but he’d somehow made it from that to a stark raving madman before and she knew better than to let her guard all the way down.
There was bottled water and a few MRE’s in the back of the envoy, and eventually when she needed the leg stretch, she fetched one for each of them. Jill picked hers apart not unlike the way she disassembled bombs. Wesker didn’t so much as take the lid off the water. She sighed, finding the silence unnerving - Albert Wesker was not exactly a chatterbox but he always had something to say, usually at least one good one-liner when he felt like lashing out.
If he wasn’t going to lash out now… when?
Her stomach grumbled again hours later, but she ignored the remaining MRE. The stash of snacks in her mindfully packed go bag was a much better prospect, and something caught in her throat when she fished out a protein bar - the same brand and flavor as the favorites she shared with Chris.
He’d packed her road snacks, even on something as dire as this.
Her heart ached, and she blamed the altitude when a thin line of tears rimmed her eyes.
It wasn’t until she reached for a pack of tissues that she realized Wesker was watching her behind those glasses, wordless but shrewd. Where she had once found the cigarette-cherry red of his irises behind dark lenses, she could no longer discern exactly what was going on behind them, but she knew. His gaze crawled over her like a spider. She looked him over for a long moment, not bothering to hide the tears in her eyes before fishing out a Kleenex.
“Allergies,” she offered, and said nothing else as she blew her nose.
“Hrmph,” was all he returned.
Alexandria, Virginia, April 2016
“That can’t be him…” Jill’s voice felt so small, so weak escaping her mouth, her fingertips reflexively going to the screen before her. “...can it?”
The furnace radiator of Chris’s large frame beside her, Jill huddled in around the glow of the pad’s monitor, the two of them sharing this secret like watching a funny Vine together or halfing a cigarette. If they were anywhere but a cafe, she might have allowed herself the luxury of real, visible shock; instead she snuggled into the crook of his arm, half under his London Fog trench, the two of them huddled in the unseasonably-late chill as steam wafted off their respective coffees. Top-secret case meetings for BSAA topics were held in top secret locations; top secret Jill-and-Chris discussions that involved potential espionage of their own agency happened under the auspices of a date.
“That’s what I thought at first, but it’s him.” Chris’s voice was low, resolute, a lover’s purr she’d missed down into her bones no matter how often she’d heard it in the years since her rescue from Africa. “Remnants pulled from a fucking volcano, they poked ‘em enough and they started regenerating.”
It was quite possibly the worst thing Jill had ever heard. Chris’ hand idly moved up to rub her shoulder, toy with the ends of her brown-again hair.
“On BSAA orders…” she repeated, disbelief coloring her voice no matter how neutral she kept her face.
“I smell a rat,” Chris responded quickly, “That’s not us. There’s no fucking way that was greenlit behind our backs. We’re too close with the board.”
On the screen, the larger-than-life supervillain who had crowed about his own godhood silently howled and thrashed his head against his restraints, the muted video astonishingly clear. One eye wept bloody tears, the other less bright, less piercing than before.
“They’ve been torturing him for weeks.”
“It’s what he deserves,” Jill snapped back without hesitation.
Chris sighed, turned to drop a kiss on the crown of her head, taking a moment to breathe deeply the smell of her, a fancy shampoo and the scent of her sweat that permeated her baseball caps. Not that he had spent an inordinate amount of time smelling her things. Not at all. Especially not when she was gone. Murmuring into her hair, he nuzzled at her affectionately. “It might be, but whatever he knows, we can’t let whoever this is have that. Wong has been hunting information pockets for years and still barely turns up anything.”
Jill’s eyes remained fixed to the thrashing on the screen, suddenly going still when Wesker finally passed out, presumably from the pain. His monitor flatlined and then peaked, his chest lifting from the table preternaturally as if strung like a marionette. Someone grabbed a bite guard from an adjacent sterile tray and the others held him down.
“Say the rest of it, Chris.”
He didn’t move, nose to her hair, ready to confess, heart aching.
“...I can’t leave him like that.”
Due South of Botna, Moldova, Europe, July 2016
It was… wetter than expected, to be sure.
If Jill had bothered to do more than thumb through the materials Ada had been thoughtful enough to provide, she might have read that summer is the rainy season in Moldova, saturating the earth with up to 734mm as recently as 2010. Late July was torrential, flooding the small creeks that came down from the mountains and creating a bumper crop of mud, among other things. It was a necessary step in the agricultural cycles, this deep soak of the ground, and certainly would reap some benefits when fall came if anything had been left growing at all.
Jill had half expected to see barren soil for as far as she could scope, but when they had arrived by shitty Ford Taurus to the driveway, the winding dirt road led through acres and acres of some sort of wild-growing stalks. Sunflowers, the driver had said. This area grows sunflowers. Wheat. Rapeseed. Potatoes. She’d barely said two works to Vasili the Driver and Wesker had said nothing since wheels down, but he’d certainly given her a full rundown of his farm knowledge of the area. Reliable locals with reliable information.
Ada Wong had once told Jill that she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could get to any point in the world and back within 72 hours. She hadn’t quite believed her at the time.
Standing in the ochre mud outside of a surprisingly large farmhouse - smaller than a Big American House, but larger than the Lil House On The Prairie visuals she’d been keeping, somehow bigger than the photos made it look - Jill loosely held the handle of her suitcase in one hand and the duffel in the other.
“Well, Wesker. Home Sweet Home.”
When none of his acerbic wit came firing back at her, Jill turned to see him glaring at her with his one good eye, now as blue as it was the day she met him. The question that had loomed large left her mouth before she could think better of it.
“What did they do to you?”
He held her gaze for another moment, almost defiant, before it went distant. Elsewhere. He turned away from her and towards the wooden steps to the front porch, hauling his bags with nary a word.
Jill watched him fumble with the key as a sudden spatter of rain spit down upon her from the sky, plastering her hair to her head. She sighed.
***
Task one: air out the long-closed house. Shutters were opened, curtains removed to be washed, linens piled into a basket that had seen better days. The home hadn’t been left as completely alone as Jill had feared - twenty years of absolute absence would have surely rendered it nearly unusable - but it had been some time since it had seen a good cleaning. Spencer, his estate, Umbrella - someone on the payroll had been having it periodically serviced. Maybe it had been a hide out at some point.
Ada had assured her it was free use and wiped off the records as of now. That had to be good enough. There was no place else for Albert Wesker to go.
Jill watched as he roamed the house curiously, seeing the broad cut of his shoulders out of her periphery as he avoided her in a way that could only be purposeful. The urge to study him, watch the minutiae of his reactions for any tells, was overwhelming; Jill’s proximity to her captain over the years had gleaned her enough knowledge to read small bits of him. He stirred his coffee to have something to do with his hands when he was annoyed in a meeting. The sunglasses masked a light sensitivity that she now suspected was less migraines, more progenitor virus. Sucking his teeth meant his temper was starting to rise, even if the rest of him was stock still. Lying seemed to have no tells - not only had he successfully bamboozled them all with the ruse of who he really was, he’d wiped the floor with the entire Alpha team in poker. His hands behind his back meant he was keeping up a nonchalant affectation but was feeling awkward.
Wesker moved through the house, boots slowly thudding against the hardwood floors, his arms slack at his sides as he studied the dusty embroidery mounted on the walls. Any signs of a familial existence were gone - no framed photos, no children’s artwork, only some culturally-specific tapestries and decor and remarkably sturdy handmade furniture. The cushions on the couch were tied down in the back, padding filled with what felt like down. A throwback, to say the least.
Jill, who had only ever owned curbside or IKEA couches, dragged her fingers up the arm rests, noting the smoothness of the polished wood. It looked heavy. Real. No particle board asbestos-fest here. The staleness of the air was beginning to lift though the humidity of the rainy season hardly made it feel pleasant.
From the corner of her eye, she watched as Wesker passed a clunky box-sized tv with only a sidelong glance - his glasses were off - before turning to slowly move up the stairs, the old wood groaning with every step.
She wondered if he was as heavy now, as hot. If he felt like a normal person again or if the creature who had slammed her into a bookshelf with barely a nudge was still there. What had the volcano burned out of him, and of that, what was left behind that hadn’t been carved away by whoever had been torturing him?
It struck her as a bad idea to leave him alone for too long, but this was the house his parents had lived in up until…well, she wasn’t sure. Maybe they’d fled for greener pastures. Maybe they were murdered here and buried in the backyard. It was some private part of his story she was interloping on, and the hesitance kept her exploring the downstairs for a while longer.
A farmhouse galley kitchen, large enough to easily fit two cooking people, with a wood powered stove and an ice box straight from the sixties. No fridge. A walk-in pantry that seemed to serve as a mudroom, with a series of stairs leading down into what she assumed was a root cellar. A living room with the couch and a few other chairs, a handmade rug that had seen better days. An ancient television that she was certain wouldn’t work. One large bedroom, a queen sized bed dusty and untouched with a wooden trunk at the foot. Front porch, back porch, cellar doors. Overgrown grass in the yard, with overgrown fields beyond.
What in the fuck had she gotten herself into?
Hands on her hips, she glared into the cloudy sky, the rain having calmed back to a drizzle and making the baked earth smell strongly like home. Rainstorms in the summer were probably the same everywhere, she thought, heart aching as she took stock of exactly how far from Chris she was right now. Momentarily, she felt the gaze of someone on her, a shiver up her spine as she turned to face the house.
Wesker’s tall, blonde figure loomed in a dirty window, distorted by age and dust. His sunglasses were off.
Even from here, even with the distortion, she could see that his right eye was gone.
Alexandria, Virginia, USA May 2016
Jill rested her elbows on her knees, exhausted. The hotel bedspread bunched beneath her jeans as she rubbed her thumbs just above her eyes, trying to stave off the burgeoning headache.
Chris’s laptop was queued up on the side table, remarkably clear footage of Wesker in bondage paused at a point that looks as though a surgical procedure near his abdomen has begun. Chris paced the room, worrying his jaw with his paw of a hand, the dark bags beneath his eyes as pronounced as they were post-Wuyip.
“It can’t be you, Chris.”
He winced, turning towards Jill with a slow pivot. “I can’t ask you to do this on your own.”
She raised her head, tired eyes meeting his. Did he not know by now? Did he not realize that Chris could ask her to dive off the Empire State Building with nothing but a hang glider and a prayer and she’d do it, no questions asked? Had he not realized that an already bone-deep desire to do whatever he felt necessary had dovetailed with her trauma and produced a version of her with no risk aversion at all?
There was still Wesker aversion, however. The thought of his voice, the way he’d controlled her… it still made her skin crawl. Her eyes darted back to the screen, to the fear in his eyes.
Didn’t Chris realize what it meant that he could still feel compassion for Albert Wesker in this moment but she couldn’t?
“If it’s me, there’s plausible deniability. We could blame the P30, say there’s a chance there’s a lingering connection and I was compelled-“
“Wong would do it,” Chris said decisively, arms crossed. “There was always suspicion about her allegiance.”
Jill narrowed her eyes. “Wong is dead per the BSAA, thanks to a report you filed after you shot Carla Radames. Let her stay dead, that’s much more useful to you.”
And she’s fucking earned it, Jill thought. Of course, she never imagined what might have happened if she’d stayed presumed dead after Wesker was defeated. If she’d been in the wind instead of in rehab, court martialed, threatened with lengthy prison sentences and debriefed a thousand times until she was cleared. Of course not.
“Jill…” His voice was pained, his eyes softening. She had him cornered and he knew it. His shoulders were beginning to slump.
“It has to be me,” Jill said gently, standing up and closing the distance but still not touching him, still just barely within reach. “If you do it, you’re never gonna find out who was behind it. They would never trust me with Wesker back on the playing field, I’ll always be a risk.”
“I trust you,” Chris said so quickly it was almost an exhale, brown eyes on hers as his brows knit, his voice soft. “I trust you, always, with my entire life. I love you.”
Jill whispered it back, almost a prayer, as they came together, his forehead to hers, his arms around her.
She knew then what he knew: that this might be a sacrifice.
Due south of Botna, Moldova, Europe, July 2016
If he’d slept, Jill couldn’t tell from looking at him.
Wesker wasn’t hiding behind his glasses, no longer shielding the damage on the one milky eye that had looked entirely absent from the window. Jill paused in the doorway of the dusty upstairs bedroom he’d disappeared to all night, frozen by the way he’d turned his head to regard her from where he sat by the window in an old rocking chair.
It reminded her of Nemesis, that eye. A chill shot through her.
The other, a fading amber that seemed markedly less brilliant, fixed on her in an echo of a memory from a lifetime ago.
He said nothing. He hadn’t spoken since the day before. Hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. Had it been worth it to save him, fly him halfway around the world and watch him starve himself to death?
“C’mon,” she finally summoned, hand on the creaking door frame, “We’re gonna go walk the fields, see what our perimeters are.”
Wesker didn’t move. It inflamed a spark of anger in her that caught quickly on the dry brush of their history. Jill narrowed her eyes, swallowing down the bile of all the things she wanted to say, taking a few steadying breaths. 5 things I can see, 4 things I can feel, 3 things I can hear…
“Why am I here, Valentine?” His voice was hoarse, barely a croak of his usual baritone. He didn’t move his gaze back from the window.
“Because Chris said so. Now get up, we’re going outside.” The harshness of her tone didn’t surprise her, not really, but what did is that Wesker only hesitated another moment before rising from his chair.
***
Jill hadn’t been exactly certain what a sunflower field would look like if not in full bloom - they’d passed fields of bright yellow and orange faces turning towards the rain, a colorful blur outside of the window, but the fields near the entrance to the farm were overgrown and tangled with green running wild. Vines of some kind trailed up and over everything, some stalks standing high enough to obscure the road and others crawling along the ground like kudzu. The back ten acres dipped lower, making the exact perimeters hard to see beyond a vague blur of yellow rimming it. Jill was unsure where the property line started and stopped, so today’s mission was to weather the warm showers that may come in the afternoon and map it out by foot.
A cartographer she was not, but a bomb expert could still put together a convincing piece of graph paper mapping, and she kept it tucked into a messenger back with some graphite in case the weather turned. Her boots laced tight and her pant legs tucked in - who knew the tick situation in Moldova, she certainly didn’t - Jill adjusted the blue ball cap over her eyes and waited for Wesker to join her down the overgrown foot-beaten path between fields.
He stuck out like a sore thumb here in his black cargo pants, any sign of his previous life of sharp suits and rolled-up forearms long gone. The t-shirt he wore wasn’t even fitted. Albert Wesker had once been the most stylish man she’d known - they used to tease the Captain about being ‘European’ since if he was gay, they couldn’t place it. Now he looked like any man in a Gamestop. Sad.
The glower of his face was only partially muted by squinting in the sunlight, the one responsive eye seeming far more light-sensitive than the other, and he slipped on his black shades, sending a quick chill of recognition up Jill’s spine.
Be quick, Valentine, he’d warned, barely a blur as he warped around her to snatch her up by the throat, slam her back against the wall, You’re going to have to be faster than that if you want to keep up.
Jill shook her head quickly as if clearing the image from an etch-a-sketch, desperate to escape the memory. She turned away from him - damned if instinct didn’t still scream at her to not turn her back to him, to keep him in her eye-line at all times - and cleared her throat. “The fresh air oughta do you some good. You don’t get hay fever, do you?”
If he leveled any kind of glare at her, she didn’t see it, refusing to turn around and hoping it would force him to speak. He didn’t. Still, she heard the sound of his boots on the grass and mud and didn’t hover.
“The paperwork said there’s potatoes somewhere, some wheat which I haven’t seen, rapeseed and sunflowers.” She paused, curling a lip in disdain at ‘rapeseed’ but ignoring it for the moment. “There’s sunflowers near the edge I think, I haven’t gotten a good look.”
They trekked in silence for a few more minutes, only the birdsong from the adjacent foothills coming in with the wind passing through the fields. It sounded alive - wild and untouched and distant, not unlike the Arklay foothill paths that they used to train on. Here, however, she had no concern for bears or big game, only briefed on the deer and the elaborate range of birds. Jill always enjoyed hiking for this very reason - no chirping fax machine, no phones ringing, no humming of the ac unit and nobody making demands on her time. Chris was the ideal hiking partner, strong and capable and surprisingly quiet most of the time, but she’d enjoyed her solo treks just that little bit more. Maybe an expedition into the nearby mountain range would be a good idea once she’d familiarized a little more… and ensured that Albert Wesker wasn’t suddenly going to take off or kill himself if left to his own devices. She doubted the man who practically owned stock in hair gel had any interest in a long hike.
As the terraform dipped in a slow slope, Jill could suddenly see just that little bit more ahead of her, signs of a burgeoning field. She pulled out the graph paper with the traced outline of the property markers - this was still their property alright, in so much as any of it really was. Pausing, she double checked to make sure she wasn’t miscalculating.
Wesker moved past her, arms heavy at his sides and his gait steady but disinterested until suddenly, he began to slow. Coming to a stop, he reached up and removed his shades.
Jill trotted quickly to catch up, eager to see what had stopped him, and her breath caught as she came to stop beside him.
A field of full-faced, beautiful sunflowers stretched all the way down to the property lines, and while it was hardly as organized and uniform as the carefully planted fields they passed on the way in, something about the wild tangle of vines passing between the haphazard blooms made it even more beautiful. Sunflowers a foot across, easily, if not more, as far as the eye could see. A sea of bright yellow and blackening centers, their faces tilted up in genuflection to the rainy skies.
“Wow,” she said softly, and something uncoiled in her chest at the sight. Wesker said nothing, but his grimace had smoothed into an almost dreamy countenance, his thoughts apparently tasting better than whatever bitterness he’d been consumed with since she found him that morning.
“You know what this means,” Jill started, hands moving to her hips in that way she did when the determination took over. “We gotta get a working tractor.”
***
It wasn’t a tractor. It was a combine - an American model at that.
Jill had whipped the canvas off the old thing, causing a cloud of dust harsh enough to make her eyes water and her throat seize. Coughing, she stepped back and swatted at the air, bending to rest her hands on her knees and catch her breath. Fuck. So either this barn - the only one on the property and formerly full of livestock, if the empty stalls were any indication - collected dust at an alarming rate, or the combine hadn’t been serviced in enough time to cast doubt on its ability to function at all.
Jill’s natural gift for coaxing an engine into telling her all of its troubles was cast in a shadow of doubt for the first time. She rested her hands on her hips, a gesture becoming more common as the world around her grew more obstinate, and took stock of what she was looking at. Chassis was a faded pea green, just a little too sickly to be pretty, and the lettering had faded from years in the sun. The fine layer of dust was beginning to resettle on the paint, matte with age. At least two of the tires had deflated and several others looked questionable.
This was going to have to be a from-the-ground-up kind of job.
Outside, a deep blue-grey thunderhead was blooming on the edge of the mountains. The deep rumbles of thunder would only grow louder until the storm was again upon them. Not wanting to be caught working on metal during a lightning storm, Jill sighed, rustling up the canvas to replace it before heading back inside.
Wesker had wandered off… somewhere, she wasn’t entirely sure? He disappeared from view as soon as they made it back to the homestead and while part of her was concerned he might just keep walking and try to disappear, the other half hoped he’d try it. Any excuse to do something. Say something.
He couldn’t just stay silent forever. She’d snap and punch him first. Maybe that was what he was waiting for: a fight.
Jill hurried back inside, hoping the hotspot booster Ada had been kind enough to provide since broadband wasn’t yet a thing in this valley would be strong enough that she could feasibly find a Youtube video on Reagan-era farm combines. She was fidgeting with her phone when she made it to the stairs, almost jumping when she noticed Wesker silently standing at the top. His neck craned back as he stared up at the previously-unnoted attic door, face as blank as a stone.
“Jesus christ,” she muttered, wiping some sweat off her brow with the back of her hand. “You keep this up and I’m going to put a fucking bell on you, Wesker.”
“Why haven’t you killed me yet?”
The question was so plain, so without emphasis, that it struck her mute for a long moment.
“...wait, what?”
He turned to look at her, that one milky eye still turning her stomach. The cruelty of his neutral-expression seemed diminished by the way his good eye was dulling back to something almost natural. No little smirk tugging at the corner of that mouth. No haughty regard for the beauty of his presentation, of which he’d always been acutely aware, she knew. No tact, no mirth, not even a hint of snideness. Just a plain question.
“Why haven’t you killed me yet, Valentine?” he repeated.
Jill’s mouth had dropped only slightly open, and it quickly fixed back into a grimace of irritation.
“Great question. I don’t know. Do you plan on helping around here or what?”
Wesker didn’t jump to assist in any way, not surprisingly. He regarded her for another moment with something that looked suspiciously like disappointment, then reached up and pressed the square of wood that brought down the attic ladder. Jill paused, watching to see what he would do, and when he looked back at her blankly she gestured up the ladder.
“You wanna check it out first, or…?”
Wesker walked away, back into the bedroom he’d claimed as his own, and shut the door quietly.
Jill stared.
I fucking hate you, you know that?
***
Very little had been stored in the attic beyond a few boxes of what looked like old manuscripts, all written in a language that looked vaguely Cyrillic but was well beyond Jill’s English-and-French repertoire. A dusty series of folded tablecloths sat atop an even dustier cardboard box, all yellowing with age. The cloth looked hand embroidered, Jill noted, as she reached out to touch the raised bumps of the floral patterns she recognized as local. This sort of thing had a lot of cultural connotation to it, she knew, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how to go about determining what.
Besides, she reminded herself, this wasn’t hers to explore. Not her culture. Not her home. Just a place she was landing while… Well, whatever it was she was doing parsed itself out. There was no other corner of the world that Umbrella or Albert Wesker hadn’t in some way touched, no place else to lay low.
At the back of the row of boxes, something appeared more wood-grain than cardboard. Jill took a few careful steps over the aching creak of the floorboards and kneeled down, swiping away a canvas sheet and moving a few smaller boxes off of what appeared to be a small wooden chest, no larger than the old TV in the living room.
A corroded lock laid against the front panel.
“Score,” Jill murmured to herself, reflexively reaching for the lockpick tines she kept zipped into the side of her boot.
The lock looked fit to fall apart, but the trunk itself seemed sturdy, well made. The grain of the wood was smooth but unlacquered - it had been polished by hand but not painted. The color recalled the furniture downstairs, surprisingly intact during what had to be years of non-use, and she realized that either someone who lived here knew or was a skilled woodworker.
The patina on the lock smelled sharply like copper. She carefully drew the small padlock into her hand and within a few seconds of finessing the tumblers inside, click.
Whatever this was, it had to be good.
The lid groaned as it lifted, the rusted hinging chains rattling as Jill laid it all the way back against the wall, baring the contents. The dusty, beige-brown colors of the attic seemed to fall away compared to the brilliance of the fabric inside - a swaddling of regal red that a series of finely made notebooks nestled into. The stack was high enough to suggest there were at least four or five, and Jill only hesitated a moment before she picked up the first one, fingers trailing over the worn leather of the cover. It smelled like cedar oil, or maybe that was the entire trunk.
Carefully, she cracked open the cover.
Reţete, said the black ink on the first yellowed page. Page two followed a format that was recognizable in any language - a recipe book, with a personal note written along the bottom. Cu dragoste, Mama.
The handwriting was finely looped, feminine. Jill was transfixed. This was not the sort of heirloom that would have made an appearance in her very slapdash family, a handwritten cookbook. But here it was, plain as day. She wondered if the ‘Mama’ in question had been Wesker’s, or his mother’s mother, or some other mother who lived in this house.
The next notebook removed any lingering doubts.
The cover was a soft-worn Italian leather, the kind she’d find in fancy bookshops, with a painted series of grape vines snaking across it and onto the margins of the closed pages. It was stunning, a ribbon fraying from beneath, the feel of the skin of it in her hands not unlike a caress. Opening the unlined pages, she found the same beautiful, slanted cursive in a fine black ink, unfaded by time but sticking together from habit. The first page in the same Slavic script, she traced her fingers over the font in awe, something like envy and joy in her heart as she took in the sight.
“Mama” had a diary.
The fact that none of this was hers had escaped her as Jill turned the page and something sharp went straight to her heart.
Albert.
His name, written in that same flowery script, below a date in 1977.
Albert, love of my life, it began. The doctors say it is best to begin addressing you in English as you will need to know it for your life in America. It does not flow as beautifully as Moldovan, but your education is the most important thing. Doctor Spencer believes you are destined to be a great man.
Spencer. Jill swallowed bile.
I want you to be a great man, but I want you to be a happy man also. I want you to be loved all your life.
Jill snapped the cover closed so forcefully that it might have hurt if it had any weight to it. Her heart hammered in her ears.
Albert, love of my life.
Fishing for the next thing inside the trunk, she found a notebook with far more heft - a photo album. Flipping it open, she ransacked over pages of photos of stern-faced men frowning in the sunshine on faded, browning paper until she reached a larger portrait of a woman and stopped in her tracks. This young woman, surely younger than herself at this point, smiled knowingly into the camera, her lips a dash of color obscured by the age of the paper. Her hair looked light, maybe even blonde, tucked under a kerchief printed with the same patterns she recognized on the moth-eaten tablecloths. The small buttons of her neatly made dress looked elegant, chic. Her cheekbones were round and high, her mouth set neatly below an aquiline nose.
Albert Wesker’s eyes, a spark of something more alive, peered back at her from beneath the soft brow.
There didn’t need to be color for Jill to know they were blue.
Aurelia, 1970.
This was his mother. This was Love, Mama. Her hands shaking, Jill turned the page. Several photos of a glowering baby, very serious of consternation, gave way to a single photograph where the color had held, and there he was. Blonde hair, blue eyes peering, charming already as a toddler.
And smiling.
Jill couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him smile.
She slammed the album shut, heart pounding. This was a violation. These weren’t for her, this was not her story, not her family.
They couldn’t just rot in an attic either.
***
Outside of Wesker’s door, Jill placed the diary, the recipe book and the photo album with a sticky note from her bag.
Start here. There’s more in the attic when you’re ready.