Partners

 Two years later, he feels like he's known her all his life.

They've developed an operational awareness of one another that borders on telepathy. Chris is a natural point man, the first into a fight and often the last out, prone to causing property damage and too damn stubborn to die. Jill's official role on the team is bomb disposal, but she seems to know a little bit about most things and she has a knack for going unnoticed. In the field, it's a sensible partnership; Chris causes distractions and she exploits them.

This comes in handy, because Chris turns out to be dead wrong about the STARS. Raccoon City is some kind of statewide magnet for militias, cults, overzealous protest groups, and the occasional genuine terrorist, which usually means some backwoods asshole with a big sack of fertilizer. They stay busy and they score some real wins, and for a guy who managed to dick himself out of a career as a fighter pilot, it feels good. He's found something he can excel at, and a team in which he feels like he belongs, and it's at least in part because of Jill Valentine backing him up.

He takes her out for a beer a couple of times a week. Chris doesn't ask about her personal life and she doesn't volunteer many details, but he sometimes sees her with other women, before or after work, or when he runs into her in a bar. It's easy to tell when she's dating a girl as opposed to just hanging out with one, because Jill's first reaction when he sees her with the former is to act like she's been caught doing something illicit. She gets over that so quickly that nobody else would catch it, but Chris does.

There's a dumb part of him that really wants to ask her about it, really wants her to go over her relationship history in slow glorious detail with visual aids and a reading list, but Chris keeps a tight lid on that. She's his partner and the last thing he needs is to piss her off.

Then it's July of 1998, and Irons taps them to investigate the Raccoon Forest murders.