take a gamble that love exists

Your hands shook as you tugged at the slick grooves of the sash, trying to get it to close before any more rain could come in. Each breath swirled in a little silver cloud in front of you, and when the window finally gave way to your efforts, it jerked into place with the dull crack of wood on wood. You jumped and looked over your shoulder. Even with the thunder, that could have been heard, and you had the distinct sense that you should be trying to keep as quiet as possible.

The sound of the storm was almost entirely muffled now that the window was closed, the thunder and rain giving way to a lifeless silence that somehow seemed heavy, a suffocating kind of darkness and quiet where something could hide. From somewhere deep in the murky darkness, the faint sound of a chain could be heard - a slow, dragging rattle, distant enough to be missed unless you held your breath and strained to listen.

Sunny.

With a squeak of fear, you whirled around to face whoever had called you. No one was there, but a pale silver light had flickered on around the corner, giving a mix of comfort and wariness as you wondered who’d turned it on. Pressing a hand to your racing heart, you tried to get yourself to settle; the storm was making you jumpy, and the darkness behind you wasn’t helping as it seemed to inch closer and closer towards the little pool of light from the window. The rattling chain sounded nearer now, coming from the direction of the still-dark corridor, and you ventured away from the rain-pattered window to try to come into the light.

Breathing a sigh of relief as you rounded the corner, you finally recognized where you were. The quiet, empty expanse of Rhodes Hill’s entrance hall was hardly cozy, but at least it was sort of familiar; you’d only stepped away from your desk to close the window and must have gotten turned around in the place you were still getting used to. Under the pallid overhead light, you came to the desk and took up your post again, watching the door and waiting for... someone.

You couldn’t remember his name exactly. Something soft and short, something that rolled off the tongue; indistinct images came to mind as you tried to recall it, frosty blonde hair and big, gentle hands. You remembered his eyes, the keen, lonely, wintery blue of them that seemed to soften when framed by delicate crow’s feet or lit by some wry, irrepressible curve of his mouth. You would always remember their color, you were sure. If only you could remember his name.

From the top of the stairs, breaking into the silence so deep it was almost loud, came the sound of a soft, irregular crunching. Your features scrunched in unease as you listened to it for a moment longer, trying to place it - it seemed almost wet, like the sound you’d expect a honeycomb to make if it was split apart, thick and sticky and brittle. What on earth could be making it you had no idea, but you supposed you ought to check it out; minding the entrance hall was your job, as delightful a task as it was, and you knew you couldn’t afford to be remiss in your duties. 

Slowly making your way up the stairs, afraid it was some kind of animal, you stopped in surprise when you saw it was a man hunched over on all fours. His back was to you, but his navy shirt and the gun belt at his waist struck you as familiar, and you hurried to his side to see if you could help.

“Are you alright?” you said, kneeling beside him, the floor cold and unforgiving through the fabric of your tights. “Are you hurt? I can get a doctor if - ”

With a sudden lurch, his right shoulder jerked and bent inward at an unnatural angle, the movement making a noxious crunching noise like the one you’d heard before. You shrank back in fear.

“What are you doing?” Your voice wavered and cracked. “What’s the matter with you?”

He said nothing, his muscles starting to writhe grotesquely under the fabric of his shirt, each twist and jerk accompanied by a dull, wet crack. Jagged, bony ridges appeared under the skin along the place where joints should be; his arms were covered in textured bruises, ash colored spirals crawling up the flexing sinews under his skin. With a nauseating pop, his jaw unhinged at an angle, viscous strings of blood and saliva dripping onto the white floor from his blackened teeth.

“Sun...ny...”

You cried out in horror and grief when he slowly turned his head and looked at you, the bones of his neck and shoulders wrenching and crunching under pale skin webbed with dark, pulsating veins. His eyes were a deep, luminous yellow, sunk deeply into dark sockets, and you were frozen in abject terror as his hollow, lifeless gaze raked over you.

They should be blue, you thought hazily. His eyes should be blue.

He lunged at you, his lean muscle pinning you to the floor before you could scramble back from him, your skull bouncing off the marble with a sickening crack. Stars exploded across your vision, your eyes rolling back in your head as the pain of it registered; he clawed at your wrists, dragging them above your head, trapping you with the weight of his jerking, writhing body. One his his hands found your throat, squeezing until you could barely draw breath; each inhale rattled and wheezed as he loomed over you, the blood from his mouth dripping into yours.

“Please,” you gasped, watching the spread of that dark, ugly bruise as it crept up his neck and spread over his face. The yellow of his irises shone against the spidering tendrils of the bruise, dark, syrupy fluid dripping from his eyes, his nose, his ears, his mouth; he seemed to be trying to speak, but all that came from his throat was a thick welling of blood and a hungry, deadened moan.

His name, what was his name? Somehow, you knew if you could only remember what it was and call him by it, he wouldn’t hurt you - but you couldn’t breathe, and his hand closed tighter around your throat, and you knew you were going to die.

Then, to your complete surprise and absolute horror, he kissed you. 

An agonized groan tore itself from your chest and was swallowed by him, blood and sweat and black fluid smearing in the hot press of his mouth against yours. You thrashed under him, trying to fight him, but you were so tired and he was so big, and there was nothing you could do but let him rake his tongue over your teeth and force his humid, decaying breath into your lungs in an obscene parody of intimacy that seemed like it would never be finished.

“Stop... fighting,” he rasped, his voice multiplied into a jagged, ghoulish harmony that vibrated through your whole body. The scruff on his jaw scraped against your skin, burning it raw. “Say... my name.”

You couldn’t remember it. Maybe you’d chosen to forget it. It was tucked too deeply in some corner of your heart, somewhere you’d locked it away to try and ease the pain of it, and you cried and screamed and begged him to let you go as he squeezed harder against your throat.

“Please - don’t - kill me,” you sobbed, each word a gush of exertion and anguish as tears ran down your face to pool on the icy floor. “I don’t want to die.”

He dragged your limp, heavy arm into your line of vision, and when he pressed his mouth to your palm, the bruise that was spreading over him bloomed on your skin too. When he spoke, his voice was a cold, hollow gasp, meant only for you - 

“Too late.”

-

You came to consciousness with a ragged, choking inhale, your entire body wreathed in pain and the world a wash of blinding light and piercing sound. Someone was pinning you down, their hands on your wrists as you strained and twisted and fought against them. Voices overlapped around you, a bevy of sharp commands and questions, orders to push medication and check metabolic panels and put on hard restraints. The pain in your head was excruciating, some shrill metallic alarm racing in time with your thundering heartbeat, and someone was screaming the name you’d forgotten.

“Leon!”

You only knew it was your own voice because it hurt when you heard it, the syllables of his name like bits of jagged glass as they came from your raw throat. Too late. Too late. You hadn’t remembered. The sickness was killing you too, and wherever you were was a punishment, the end of all things where there was nothing but pain and loss and your heart being ripped from your chest, the soft innards of you squeezed in some merciless hand until you burst like the splatters of blood on the walls.

Something jabbed into your arm, quickly followed by a flood of ice in your veins that suddenly dulled all sensation until you could finally drew a real, gasping breath. Sobbing and groaning, your sweat-drenched body collapsing against the surface beneath you, you watched vague shapes of sterile white and lifeless grey swim before you and felt a leaden weight begin to eat away at every part of you until you were completely numb. You couldn’t stop crying, but reality slowly started to take shape, and your breath shuddered and caught as the out-of-focus face of the doctor from earlier appeared in front of you.

“Okay, kid.” His voice was calm and concerned. “You’re alright.”

He shined a small, bright light into your eyes, and you couldn’t even wince away from it. Hospital. Real one. Not Rhodes Hill. A small armory of facts came under the fog and built a protective wall around whatever shred of sanity you had left. Doctor. Medicine. Still alive. For now.

“Pupils are equal, round, and reactive,” he said. He held a finger up in front of you. “Can you follow my finger with your eyes? Don’t try and turn your head.”

You couldn’t have moved if you’d wanted to, the deadened weight of your limbs a strange, entrapping reprieve from the blinding pain that seemed to sink you ever deeper below some dark, murky surface. With much more effort than you thought it should take, you made your eyes follow the slow back-and-forth movement of his finger.

“Where am I?” you rasped.

“You’re in the medical wing,” he said. “DSO field office. We gave you a sedative, but I’d like to do some checks before I give you anything else. Can you tell me your name?”

“Sunny,” you said without thinking. 

“Is that a nickname?”

Your face was wet, but you didn’t know if it was from sweat or tears. Maybe both. “Yes.”

He hummed in agreement when you told him your given name. “Can you remember what you were doing before you lost consciousness?”

Vaguely, you recalled the agent, the endless questions, the file with Leon’s name on it. Mostly it was lost against the vivid images that flashed through your mind - Rhodes Hill, a rainy window, yellow eyes and dripping blood. Panic almost spiked again at the thought of it, but whatever they’d given you made you feel like you were miles underwater.

He’d asked you a question, and you tried to answer, reviewing the facts you’d gathered. Hospital. Doctor. Still alive. What else?

“Interrogation.” Your voice grated and creaked like something rusty. “That agent was mad at me.”

“She pushed you too hard,” the doctor said, and his tone was frustrated under the clinical calm. “I never would have cleared you if I thought they were planning to treat you like that.”

Kindness. Okay, that one was good. Somebody who cares whether you live or die. It made you think of something else, another thing in your small arsenal that also cared whether you lived or died.

Leon.

You swallowed, your mouth dry and your throat tender. “Where’s Leon?”

“Agent Kennedy hasn’t been brought in, as far as I know.” He took your hands in his, and you could barely feel his grip. “I’d like to do a few motor function tests. Squeeze my hands, please.”

Trying to do as he instructed, you looked at the panels in the ceiling and watched them blur with tears. Hospital. Kindness. Leon. Still alive?

“Do you know if...” You couldn’t quite bring yourself to ask what you wanted to, the hellish vision of his decayed, hungry body transformed with the virus burned into your memory. “If they found him yet?”

“I don’t know, but I can try and find out for you.” He held up his hands. “Push against my hands, please.”

You did as he said, feeling that it took far too much focus to do something so simple. Next he had you hold your hands out in front of you for a few seconds, and though your hands were shaking, it seemed you passed whatever test that had been too.

“GCS 14 after lorazepam,” he said to the nurse who jotted it down on your chart. “Good motor function. Hang another liter of saline, and let’s go ahead and push the toradol.”

You watched the nurse inject something into your IV and glanced back at the doctor. “What’s that?”

“Just pain relief. Does your head hurt?”

“Like a bitch.”

His smile was a touch wry. “Well, we should get that under control pretty soon. Look at the wall, please.”

You did as he said, and he shined the light into your eyes again. Your armory of facts got tucked away for when you needed them, building their stores up in case you lost touch with reality again. You could breathe now, though your throat was still sore, and you didn’t feel that weird, icy grip you’d felt in the interrogation room; with the meds kicking in, you didn’t feel much of anything besides a hollow, carved-out feeling of grief right in the middle of your chest.

“Your CT scan is clear,” he said. “You have a hairline fracture where you hit your head, but there’s minimal bleeding, and you’re alert and oriented.” He glanced at the monitors. “Your sats are fine on room air now that we’ve got you calmed down a bit. Managing your pain is what I’m concerned with right now, but I’m not worried about any neuro deficits or underlying problems. You just gave us a bit of a scare in interrogation.”

“So... what happened?”

“My guess? Panic attack.” He clicked off the penlight and put it in his pocket. “Very common after acute trauma like what you went through last night, and especially in a high-pressure environment like interrogation.”

All that had been a panic attack? Surely not. 

“But I couldn’t breathe,” you said hoarsely. “I thought... something would be wrong with my throat.”

“You do have some swelling, but medically, your airway was clear. That doesn’t mean you didn’t feel like you couldn’t breathe, though.”

A little embarrassed that you’d managed to give yourself a skull fracture because of a panic attack, you touched a hand to your head and winced.

“Are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with...” You glanced at the nurse, not sure who was privy to your exact medical situation. “That other thing we talked about?”

“We’re still waiting on some tests to come back about that,” he said calmly. “As you can imagine, it’s not a diagnosis we see very often in patients of your... level of awareness.”

No kidding. You’d never even heard of a T-Virus infection that didn’t turn someone into a flesh-eating monster within a few hours. Too late. The words in that voice that wasn’t his crept into your mind again, and you felt the awful press of his bloody mouth against your palm as vividly as if it had actually happened. Glancing at your hand, you saw that the bruise hadn’t spread any further up your fingers, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t on your wrist or arm where you couldn’t see it under the brace.

“We’ll keep you on the monitor for a while,” the doctor said, stripping off his gloves and giving your knee a fatherly pat. “Once the toradol kicks in, you should be able to get some rest. I’ll try and find out about Agent Kennedy’s status for you.”

“Thank you,” you croaked. You weren’t sure what news you hoped for, but if you could only know that he was alive, that he hadn’t turned into that... thing like he had in your nightmarish imaginings, that would be enough.

The nurse worked around you for a while, putting the room back to rights after the drama of getting you stable, checking your vitals again and turning down the lights when she left. The dim glow, the silence broken only by the low beep of the monitors, the drugs working their way through your system - all of them left you in a weird half-light of consciousness where the vision or nightmare or whatever it was seemed merely to loom at the edges of your mind. But a dull blade worked as well as a sharp one if it was persistent enough, and this one was digging into you with a slow, inexorable weight that felt like it might kill you before the T-Virus got a chance to.

Leon. His name was a mantra, a warding spell, a sacramental liturgy that kept the darkness at bay. Whatever had gotten a hold of you in the realm of your unconscious mind, you knew it wasn’t him. Part of your certainty came from a logical assumption that it was unlikely he’d turn like that; he’d had it for years, this lingering, dormant strain, and if it was going to do that it would have happened already. It would kill him, you had no doubt, just like you knew it would kill you too eventually - but not like that. 

The other part of your certainty, though, came from a source entirely devoid of logic, maybe even detached from reality entirely. Something in you - be it that daydreaming, romantic nature or a naive, girlish hope that still remembered how warm and sweet that kiss had been before everything else - something in you was sure nothing like that would happen. No virus could change him into something that wanted to hurt you. Nothing could change your Leon like that.

Your Leon. You almost rolled your eyes at yourself with a rueful scoff at such nonsense. But what happened instead was that you started to cry, curled up in a hospital bed miles from home, completely alone in the world with a death sentence written on the palm of your hand. You knew he wasn’t your anything. In the grand total of your experiences together, there was nothing that made Leon and sunny belong to each other, not really. 

But beneath that, beneath the logic and the realism and the certainty that you’d both be dead before long, there was a small, tender place in your heart that wished that he was yours. You’d said you hadn’t wanted to see him again, that it would be for the best if your paths didn’t cross; but that ship had sailed, had left the port as soon as he’d taken your hand in his that first time. Your paths weren’t so much crossed as entirely knit together, at least for you, and you didn’t think you could manage to unwind them now. 

Trust me, sunny.

You wanted to. But you didn't know how, and it didn’t matter anyway. He could be yours for right now, a secret between you and your heart, the last scrap of play-pretend comfort your mind could come up with. Sleep claimed you with tears still wet on your face, a weariness beyond exhaustion and a medicated heaviness dragging you deeply under; you hoped you would dream of him, and if the dream was nice enough, part of you wondered if you wanted to wake back up at all.

-

Wake up.

Leon grimaced as he turned his head towards the sound of your voice, unable to open his eyes just yet. He couldn’t remember ever being this tired, even after back-to-back training exercises or countless hours in the field on some mission or living with a hypervigilance that sapped his battery before he’d even gotten out of bed in the morning. There was something different about this kind of tired, and it hurt - he had nothing left to give, really nothing, and he wondered why you didn’t know that. But maybe something was wrong, and even if he had nothing left to give, he’d find enough to help you if you needed him.

Please wake up.

“I’m trying,” he said. Or wanted to say. All that came out was a groan, thick and clogged with the blood in his mouth.

Oh, he thought. Right.

But that didn’t explain why you were here. Images fit themselves together in his mind - blindingly white epoxy floors, grenade smoke and gigantic cryo-chambers, mountains of biological sludge, those sharp-tongued, raw-bodied fuckers that unnerved him now as bad as they had when he was a kid in his uniform blues. Grace, shaking and determined. Himself, staggering and choking on blood as his one connection to the outside world crackled and gave out the further he went underground.

But why were you here? He’d made sure you were safe. As safe as you could be with that bruise on your hand, he guessed, but certainly not here. Not in the place he’d chosen to die.

He was surprised to still be alive, truth be told. Sherry was right: his body couldn’t take much more. But if you were here, it would have to. He’d figure it out. He wouldn’t fail you this time.

Rousing himself, scraping the bottom of the barrel for the strength just to open his eyes, he saw a wavering, golden glow like rippling water cast on the towering walls. He wondered absently what the real name for that color was. You’d probably know. You seemed like the kind of girl who paid attention to that kind of thing. He knew military colors - army green, ballistic black, oh shit that bastard’s got a laser sight on me red. But things like periwinkle and carmine and chartreuse made no sense to him. He wasn’t even sure why those were in his vocabulary, because, gun to his head, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what color they were.

Boy, he was losing it. Daydreaming about color names when he was one foot in the grave and you needed him.

Leon, wake up. He was trying.

The floor beside him was spattered with dark blood, all of it from his hemorrhaging lungs that seemed overly keen to come up his throat and flop out onto the floor. That’d be a hell of a thing. He needed them to stay put, though, just long enough to get you and Grace out and blow this place sky high. He took a cautious breath, seeing what they would do with that - they protested angrily, flooding with fluid and screaming with pain, but they stayed in his chest for now.

Okay, he thought, gearing himself up. Lungs work. Sort of. For the moment. Now what?

“Come on, Leon, wake up.”

Grace’s voice startled him enough to make him swing his gaze over to her, and he couldn’t make heads or tails of the fact that it was her and not you kneeling beside him. He’d heard you clear as day, but you were nowhere to be found. By degrees he figured it out, and though he was relieved you weren’t really here, the pain in his chest suddenly had nothing to do with his lungs and everything to do with the fact that the comfort of your company was nothing more than a dying hallucination.

Oh well. There was nothing for it, and he knew by now that a lifetime of failure and violence tended to earn little in the way of comfort when it was all said and done.

“Hey you,” he grunted, trying to prop himself up straighter, feeling Grace’s hand on his knee as she tried somewhat futilely to coax him back to the land of the living. “I was just resting my eyes.”

If she knew that resting my eyes was code for very nearly dead and going insane to boot, she didn’t say so. She helped him to his feet, and he didn’t have the strength or the pride to protest when she slung his arm over her shoulders and helped bear his weight. 

For a moment, watching the dance of the light on the walls and feeling his own weakness more acutely than he ever had, he was strangely at peace with death. Elpis was just on the other side of the door, and as long as he could buy Grace enough time to destroy it, he’d be alright. The litany of failures that would come with that victory - not getting Grace out, leaving you to a slow death that he was helpless to stop, not preventing any of this in the first place - those were rough, but God or the universe or whatever was waiting for him would get their pound of flesh before too much longer. Whatever happened, he’d accomplish at least one of the things he came to do and hope it left the world a little safer than it had ever been in his care.

He looked over at Grace. “Let’s do this.”

Her face was pale and strained, but she nodded. “Okay.”

-

Leon, wake up.

Again? He’d thought that was it. That one last barrel-run right at that pretentious bastard hadn’t been his best work, admittedly, but he’d hoped maybe it had given Grace time to get away. He’d figured on trying for that checklist item instead, seeing as she’d blown the other one completely to hell by putting in the right password and putting the virus directly into Zeno’s fancy gloved hand. He wasn’t super excited she’d done it, was in fact very confused and angry that she’d promised to end it and had actually started it all over again, but hey. She didn’t deserve to die for a lapse in judgement, even if the fate of the entire world seemed to hang in the balance.

So, he’d run at Zeno and been tossed to the floor for his trouble, and there he lay gasping and bleeding out for who even knew how long. It had been incredibly long to his body that was ready to be done, blindingly short to his brain that had decided he actually wasn’t at peace with death quite yet. Zeno and Grace and somebody else - fuck, was it Victor? Was he ever going to be shot of that freak? - had argued and threatened and pleaded in turn, and Leon had sunk into whatever was waiting for him on the other side.

But now here you were again, telling him to wake up, and he wanted to say he didn’t know what the hell good it would do. 

Please, Leon. For me. 

Well, how could he argue with that?

Cracking open his eyes, he saw Grace pull the needle-ended vial of Elpis out of his arm. His eyes widened. The last fucking thing he’d needed was another bioengineered virus eating him alive, and he was just about to politely ask Grace why she’d injected him with it when he felt an overwhelming wave of pure relief. All the T-Virus noise in his body was suddenly, mercifully silent. He felt cracked ribs and a concussion and various gashes and bruises, sure, but when had he not? The insatiable depth of that wasting, festering pain was completely gone, replaced with a confidence in the weapon of his body that hadn’t felt in months.

He got to his knees, bracing his forearms against the floor to let this new virus, he guessed, finish getting rid of the T-Virus. With a swift mental calculus born of years of training, he took in Zeno’s headless body, Grace’s pained, protective posture over a wound in her side, Victor’s triumphant stance with a vial of Elpis in hand. The bastard had also found the time to grow a gigantic tentacle arm since Leon had seen him last. Wonderful.

He looked back to Grace as the floor started to rumble beneath them and chunks of debris fell from the ceiling. 

“Grace, what happened?”

She didn’t answer, clutching her side as blood seeped between her fingers; and when the platform started to give way, he figured there’d be time for questions later. 

“Grab something!” he ordered, digging his boots into the smooth floor and finding no purchase. The platform listed violently with the screech and groan of weakened metal, crashing against the hundreds of globes on the wall, sending glass and sparks flying. His stomach dropped when it fell without warning, plummeting towards the bottom of the silo at an ever-increasing vertical angle. Shit.

They slid across the polished surface, scrabbling for something to hang on to, and he couldn’t grab Grace in time. The guardrail was as flimsy as paper beneath his downward momentum, and he kicked through it to land with a practiced agility at the bottom of the vault, instantly scanning his surroundings like he’d been drilled to do. Every nerve was on high-alert, years of training finally of some use in a body that worked: with pain set aside for the mission, a cool, keen vigilance came over him with the same ease it always had, and it didn’t have to fight against the T-Virus to do it this time. 

“Grace!” he called, his voice a strong, rough baritone of tactical clarity and personal fear. The remnants of the platform were halted in their freefall with a billow of smoke and debris. “Grace, where are you?”

No answer. Cataloguing every inch of the wreckage for any sign of her, he came around a pile of sparking rubble and found himself face to face with Victor in all his tentacled glory. Pulling his magnum from its holster, confident that the bastard would stay dead after he’d finished with him this time, he faced down this last bio-engineered nightmare with a scowl and a bright spark of defiance.

“Time to bury Umbrella’s last skeleton.”

-

He buried Victor, just like he’d said he would, and ended up burying himself too. 

The darkness was thick, alive with the last, desperate attempt of the lab not to crumble with a stubbornness that seemed learned from its makers. Concrete and metal and glass settled with the creaking, weighty finality of death, the last sparks of some dying wires popping and flashing in the dark. He and Grace would be underneath it soon enough, two more broken pieces left in the grave they’d fashioned themselves.

He felt the way Grace trembled beside him, heard the shallow intake of her breath and the shuddering release of it. She wasn’t used to this kind of darkness like he was, and neither of them were ready to die just yet. But for all the hope Elpis had given him that he might still make it out, there was nothing to be done for the fact that they would die here. 

Reaching out in the darkness to put his hand over hers, he figured he could try to ease these last moments with a compassion he was still trying to get the hang of after nearly thirty years of shutting it out. His line of work didn’t lend itself to that kind of thing, and as quick on the uptake as he was with military training, police investigation, killing monsters, using any weapon he could get his hands on - gentleness was something he’d had to work long and hard to unearth from how deeply he’d buried it after Raccoon City. When he’d kissed you, he’d done it with that same clumsy kind of tenderness, and he hoped merely putting his hand over Grace’s wouldn’t hurt her like he’d hurt you.

She flinched for a moment, a gasp of surprise and fear escaping her; but then she realized it was only him, and her jittery fingers settled under his as she remembered there was nothing left to get her in this lonely, hollow wreck of former glory.

“L-leon?” she asked, that stumbling in her weak voice making his name sound like something hopeful and fragile all at once.

He pressed his hand closer. “Grace.”

Their names hung in the close-pressing darkness for a while. Her fingers moved under his, not to pull away, but maybe nervous to say something he could practically hear her working up the courage to give voice to.

“Can we talk?” she finally asked. “If... if you don’t mind.”

He didn’t. Not that he’d ever been a great conversationalist - his penchant for sarcasm and little quips didn’t exactly invite intimacy and warmth in return - but he’d do what he could to make it easier for her.

“Sure,” he said. His voice was rough and hoarse. “What do you want to talk about?”

She said nothing for a moment, then gave a bleak laugh. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Kind of hard to think of what you should say right at the end, I guess.”

He’d never imagined himself saying much, truth be told. Staring down the barrel at death tended to make words feel useless, and he’d done it enough times to know.

“I know you said to end it,” she said after a few long seconds. “And I promised I would. But I - ”

“You did end it, Grace.” He turned towards her in the dark. “Just because it wasn’t the way I would have done it doesn’t mean it didn’t work. And you saved my life.”

“It didn’t do much good,” she said softly. “You’re gonna die anyway.”

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But that’s not your fault. And because you didn’t destroy Elpis like I told you to, you bought us enough time to kill Victor and get rid of this lab. That’s more than I was hoping for coming into all this.”

“That’s... kind of depressing,” she said, a wavering note of humor in her voice before it shuttered back into something hopeless. “And humbling, because I was hoping to get out alive on top of that.”

“Well, I figured it was a sure thing I wouldn’t,” he said soberly. “I was hoping you’d get out alive too, but...”

He swallowed against the taste of ever-present guilt. “I’m sorry you won’t, Grace.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry you won’t either, Leon.”

They lapsed into silence then, and Leon had nothing to distract him from thoughts of a life that felt littered with efforts that were too little, too late. The relative successes were outweighed by the overwhelming amount of failure, and even now when he’d finished this thing with Victor and ARK, there would still be those that he’d fail to rescue. Grace, Sherry, you. Any of those with the virus who wouldn’t get Elpis, and he felt responsible for every single one of them whether he knew them or not. The last little vial of it was tucked in Grace’s pocket, and he would have been satisfied - happy, even - if she’d been able to get out herself and give it to someone who would know how to make more of it. If he could be sure that Umbrella’s curse wouldn’t cost any more lives besides his own. But he couldn’t, and he’d go to his grave with the same guilt that had steadily eaten away at him since the first time he opened the RPD’s doors. 

He thought of you in those dark, lonely minutes counting down to his death - his real one, this time, one he didn’t think even you would be able to wake him back up from. The sound of your laugh. The soft feel of your hand. The bright flame of something - innocence, hope, impossibly shy desire - you’d shown him when he kissed you. What would he do if he wasn’t hundreds of feet underground in a tomb of his own making? If he knew the thing he’d thought would kill both of you could be erased, if he knew both of you would live long enough for him to make amends? You’d said you hadn’t wanted to see him again, but maybe it would be different - maybe he could apologize and explain, and maybe you would let him kiss you again, and he’d do it another way entirely. Pull you close, kiss you deeper, not fearing that death would take both of you before he’d even had the chance to know you. 

But it would. 

He looked unseeingly into the darkness, feeling the suffocating weight of every last failure even now that it was finished; and he heard your voice, fragile and sweet.

It meant something to me, Leon. 

It meant something to him too, more than he could tell you. He wished he could, but he knew better than anyone that wishing for things didn’t make them come true.

Leon looked at the scrap of notebook paper for a long moment, his heart in his throat a familiar, numb defeat coiling somewhere deep under his ribs. The faded banner with his name on it stirred slightly in the breeze that sifted through what remained of the RPD’s roof, sun-bleached blue and gold that someone had laid out on the desk just to taunt him. He didn’t need the reminder, not of his short-lived acceptance into something worth fighting for nor of his continued failure to make a difference when he tried. Crumpling the paper and letting it fall at his boots, he tried to get his hands to stop shaking and swallow his heart back down where it belonged.

The last six hours had been something out of a nightmare. Leaving you in pieces, already all but unraveled by the self-hatred that colored his every waking moment, he’d come into the shell of Raccoon City’s outskirts and been mercilessly dragged through wave after wave of ruin, devastation, and death. A thick film of ash and memories clung to every inch of him, brittle skulls and ribs crunching underfoot with every step he took, the rubble of the miles-long graveyard still restless and hungry as it fought to drag him down into it. The dead had hounded him as much as the living, reanimated bodies wasted by years in their shallow graves and grotesquely mutated animals both doing their level best to cut the already too-short thread of fate he balanced on. The city itself festered like an open wound, dredging up unrelenting horrors from the tangle of steel and concrete and glass that was all that remained of it. 

The bike ride into the city center had been a heady jolt of adrenaline, just enough to dull the edges of the gash that was being torn through him, reckless instinct taking the reins of his worn-out body. Watching the dust settle on Gideon’s plunge into a grave of his own making had been a grim satisfaction, slaking his thirst to see at least some measure of justice, but it hadn’t lasted; Gideon was only one piece of the puzzle, and the picture was growing clearer the more he found out. Grace, Elpis, a slew of decimated agents from the BSAA, something called ARK - it was forming itself into something coherent in the back of his mind, but tackling one part of it only seemed to trigger several more to take its place.

Now, in the ruins of the Raccoon City Police Department, he was faced with more than just some masterminded plan to keep the art of bioterrorism alive and well. Pushing the doors open onto the shattered stage of his own ground zero, he’d been assaulted by memories so vivid he could barely keep his wits about him. The nauseating smell of rot and ragged flesh, the acrid taste of desperation and fear, the clinging feel of blood and gunpowder seeping through the brand-new uniform he’d been so proud to wear - it had all but knocked the breath out of him, and he’d heard Lieutenant Branagh’s gasping voice ringing through the empty halls like a death knell.

It’s all on you now, rookie.

Trying to take a steadying breath, he choked on a welling of blood and spat the dark red fluid into the dust at his feet. It was getting more frequent, exacerbated by the haze of concrete dust and thick-lying ash; the rest of the symptoms, the numbness and pain and marrow-deep exhaustion, were no small worry either. It didn’t matter. He’d finish what he started, hoping only to get Grace to safety before the guttering flame of his existence went out entirely.

The laptop on the desk blinked to life, a remnant of the BSAA camp that showed live security footage of three spots in the RPD’s layout. In one of them, he saw two figures, both of which he recognized.

“That fucking guy,” he growled, remembering the man’s distinct look from the footage he’d found on a BSAA bodycam. Tall, sleek, dressed in a white suit and sunglasses like he was expecting a modelling agency to scout him while he was busy blowing people’s heads off. The pretentiousness of him was annoying, but when he saw Grace walking meekly behind him into frame, Leon felt the pit of his stomach turn to ice.

He clicked onto his comms. “Sherry, I found Grace.”

Her voice was unsure. “At... RPD?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at the banner again, allowing himself to track his fingers through the dust on the first letter of his name. “And someone’s been expecting us.”

After a quick check of the security cam’s location, he began to make his way through the rubble towards the office Grace and her well-dressed handler were in. With a numb kind of muscle memory, he performed an unnervingly similar dance to the one he’d stumbled his way through his first time here - scouting the shadowed corridors, searching for ammo, stomach in knots as he took out a few wasted bodies staggering around in their tattered uniform blues. Finding the jack in the library where he’d left it almost thirty years ago, he was struck with a feeling almost comforting in its mundanity - damn, he was old. The decades had been as kind to him as they’d been to this poor old building, both of them grey and empty and lifeless, both of them one wrong move away from crumbling altogether.

You’d asked him, before, how he’d gotten out of Raccoon City. The truth of it was that he never really had, some part of him ripped out of his chest that night and left to wander the halls of this building like the ghost of boyish naivety. He’d been so sure, so confident, so honored to be someone that people would trust and rely on - but that bright spark had been smothered in ash and blood from the very first moment he walked through these doors, and it was too late now to coax any life back into the flame.

He’d felt it, almost, when you came to him in the office. Frightened and confused and needing him so desperately, your trust absolute that he would know what to do and how to keep you safe. For a moment, he’d been as proud and pleased and confident as that bright-eyed rookie had been, determined to prove that your choice to trust him was the right one. And he had, in a way - he’d been honed as a weapon for long enough that getting you out was something he could do without really worrying. But the other part of him, the part that had inevitably driven the knife into that softness you’d shown him while he kept you physically safe, was a reminder that you ought not to have trusted him as much as you had.

I’m sure you did all you could, Leon. Again Branagh’s voice cut like a blade through the silence of the room - a curse, a warning, a final judgement. Even back then, all he’d been able to do was let down everyone around him, and now you were one more bit of collateral damage in the unrelenting failure that hounded him like a wolf at his door.

He shook his head to clear it. Right now, despite the difficulty of the task, the long, merciless plains of memory had to be put aside for him to dwell on later. Prying open the grate on the east side corridor, slipping with practiced ease into the cool, steady, slightly snarky attitude of a soldier who had to be rock-solid or else just let himself be killed, he walked through the inky blackness with a silent tread and his handgun raised in low ready position. A man’s voice, muffled and low, drifted through the debris-cluttered hall.

“I’ll explain everything,” he said, his voice a coaxing murmur. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Leon raised a brow. Whoever this guy was, he’d bet good money that Grace did have to be afraid, and he wasn’t all that eager to meet him himself. Still, ducking carefully beside the doorway of the office, he listened to the explanation the man gave her and readied himself to put a bullet in his head as soon as he’d heard what he needed to.

“Covert military units from every country on earth come to Raccoon City for one purpose,” the man continued, smooth and slick as snake oil. “To find Elpis.”

There it was again, that name that meant nothing to Leon but was awfully important to Gideon and this manicured henchman. Sherry had found nothing about it on any server she’d dug through, and she’d probably been flagged in the system for her trouble; checking the magazine of his pistol, he strained to listen and pick up every last detail of whatever this Elpis thing was.

“W-what is Elpis?” Grace asked, her wavering voice determined even in her unease.

“The power to upset the military balance of the world,” the man said coolly. “The last virus created by Spencer. Designed to control human consciousness.”

Leon rolled his eyes. It was always the same old story, the same attempt at playing god with a virus or a parasite or whatever else they cooked up in those labs of theirs. He should have guessed. He racked his brain for any memory of someone named Spencer and came up empty, but bioterrorist wack jobs were a dime a dozen in his line of work, and he didn’t need to know anything more about him that what he could piece together from that information alone. 

“Mind control?” Grace asked, aghast.

The man pressed a few digits into the keyboard. “They couldn’t let it be stolen, so they launched the missile strike to hide it.”

Yeah, that tracked. He remembered how surprised he’d been when you’d told him you knew there was more to Raccoon City’s destruction than what was said in the party line, and he wondered what you’d say to the twist that it was the protection of another virus entirely that was the real reason for the missile strike. Not that he’d ever get the chance to talk to you again, about that or anything else.

“You are the key to retrieving Elpis,” the man said, drawing Leon’s attention back to the matter at hand. He clicked in another set of keystrokes, and Leon heard Grace gasp.

“Emily?”

“In a way.” The man seemed entirely unfazed by the quavering emotion in Grace’s voice. “But not the girl you met. So many attempts. So many failures. Such a waste.”

The metallic click of a lighter at the smell of cigarette smoke attested to the man’s casual indifference to Grace’s next question.

“W-what do you mean?”

“Copies,” he said, taking a drag. “Crafted to duplicate you.”

That actually did surprise Leon, and he took a second to fit cloning into the as-yet unfinished puzzle in his brain. But why Grace? And for what purpose?

“All useless,” the man continued in a low snarl, disgust and contempt lacing his tone. “All scrapped. They weren’t able to recreate Spencer’s key, but now we have the original. We have you.”

Leon pinched the bridge of his nose, warding off a headache that was coming on stronger with each new piece of information. This poor kid. Whatever her story was, he was sure she’d never known it was as fucked up as all this.

“You can unlock Elpis at ARK,” the man said, his voice moving towards a tone fairly vibrating with lust for power or money or immortality, whatever it was he wanted from all this. “That’s where we’ll go.”

Grace didn’t share his enthusiasm, still stuck on the revelations he’d foisted on her and expected her to take in her stride.

“So... what, I was m-made?” she stammered.

“Correct.”

Some pitiful noise of disbelief escaped her then. “S-so it really w-was all my fault.”

Impatience crept into his voice. “What was?”

She sucked in a gasping breath, her teeth chattering with a shocky chill Leon clocked without even having to see her. “That m-mom was murdered, and... oh, god, that Emily - that she turned into that thing, and - ”

“What’s done is done,” the man snapped, irritated with her anguish and guilt, two emotions he’d likely never felt in his life. “You need to focus on the future.”

Grace’s voice was a heartrending whimper. “Was she even really my mother?”

“It’s time to embrace your destiny!” the man pressed, off in his own psychotic world by now, getting himself started on one of those mad scientist monologues Leon had heard one too many times to give a shit about any more. Deciding enough was enough, he whipped into the doorway and aimed his pistol right between the lenses of that asshole’s egotistically stupid sunglasses. 

“Grace!” he called, rough and urgent, never taking his eyes off his target.

She wavered on her feet, completely dragged under in the tide of memory, eyes glassy and unfocused.

“Mom...”

She dropped unconscious, hitting hard on the dusty floorboards, and Leon didn’t hesitate. Squeezing off three shots in rapid succession, sure that at least one would have hit its mark, he was completely floored by the superhuman speed with which the man dodged every bullet he fired.

What the fuck?

“Mr. Kennedy,” the man crooned, a wolfish snarl curling his mouth. “I had a feeling you’d make an appearance. Sorry, but I don’t have time to spare.”

Before Leon could even react, the ceiling burst in a deluge of concrete and dead wires, cutting him off from Grace and the bullet-dodging menswear model who’d gathered her limp body in his arms. Something huge emerged from the rubble, cloaked in a haze of dust and ash, and Leon’s eyes widened as he froze with that same numbing terror he’d felt as a rookie cop under the dead, hollow gaze of a Tyrant mutation.

“Have fun,” Grace’s captor said, a cool glee spilling into his voice. That was enough to snap Leon back to the present, and though he would have preferred to go after Grace, he had his hands full with the ugly-ass freakshow that had haunted his nightmares for years and now just made him mad.

“Yeah, I remember you,” he growled.

The bullets he fired into the center mass of the thing’s barrel chest did absolutely nothing, an unfortunate confirmation of what he’d already guessed would happen - it had taken a rocket launcher to kill it last time, and Leon was a bit short on those at the moment. Blocking its swing with his hatchet, he wasn’t quick enough to dodge a titanic fist directly to his ribcage and was knocked off his feet into the wall behind him before he could register what happened.

“I remember that too,” he groaned. The Tyrant stalked towards him with that freakishly blank stare, each footstep rattling Leon’s skull, and he almost panicked - it would be a hell of a way to die, smashed to death by this fucker’s unerring, million-ton fists in the same building where they’d so delightfully met the first time. Pulling his magnum revolver from its holster, sinkingly sure that even a whole round’s worth of bullets wouldn’t kill this thing, he shot at the cracked ceiling above the Tyrant’s head and brought a shower of rubble down on top of it. The Tyrant staggered robotically under the weight, quickly buried under the wreckage; Leon was certain he hadn’t killed it, but he’d at least bought himself enough time for the agonizing effort of getting to his feet.

“Fuck,” he managed, pressing a hand to the familiar crunching ache of broken ribs. He’d had worse, but he hadn’t needed one more part of his body to give out right now. Even if he wasn’t being steadily eaten alive by T-Virus, he was already too close death by a set of undead teeth at his throat or a shard of bone in his lung or something else equally unremarkable. Then again, he’d always known he’d go out with little to show for it - and as long as he lived long enough to get Grace to safety and destroy this new engineered virus, he’d be fine if he died without any fanfare.

A spare med injector from his belt did well enough taking the edge off, and he shook his head like a dog as he felt the welcome rush of energy and nervy euphoria flood his system. He almost grinned, thinking of you with your pupils blown wide and your face all pink as you looked at him like he was your last meal - it was a hell of a drug, and now that he was riding it, he caught himself tracing the curves and soft lines of you in his imagination. Broken ribs be damned, he’d like to make you blush on purpose and let you do whatever it was you’d been thinking about when you looked at him like that.

“Alright, Kennedy,” he grumbled to himself, cutting short the blissful high and focusing back on the very real danger of failure that loomed ever more tangibly. “You’re gonna be stone dead before long, and even if you weren’t, she’d just as soon shoot you as look at you.”

It was strange to think of his inevitable death so casually, especially when it seemed a more acute misery now that he’d met you, but years of practice in disassociation and whatever the hell was in those med injectors made it frighteningly easy. He’d also deftly chosen to forget the fact that you were dying too, because he would lose his nerve completely if he thought about that for even a moment, and he had too much to do to crumble like that just yet.

“Sherry,” he said over the comms. “Wasn’t there an orphanage around here?”

“Yes, there was. Why?”

“I’m gonna do some digging.”

All this talk about lab-grown children had tugged at something in his memory, an association between Umbrella and the Raccoon City Orphanage. And if the Elpis research had to do with cloning, the best place to hide it would be somewhere no one would think twice about a bunch of kids that seemingly dropped out of the clear blue sky. The thought of creating children in a lab just to experiment on them was as nauseating now as it had been when he’d figured out why Emily was at Rhodes Hill, and it gave him the clarity of mind and iron-clad determination he needed to put an end to whatever plans were being made for Elpis.

Holstering the magnum and taking out his pistol, he touched a hand to the keychain you’d put on its barrel. A good luck charm, you’d called it, along with that other funny word he couldn’t quite remember but had liked when you’d said it. He missed you, wished almost for the feel of your fingers in his belt loop even if it meant you being dragged back into hell right alongside him.

Some tight, painful something closed its hand around his heart, whatever was left of it. He was glad you were safe, wouldn't have brought you here for all the world even as much as he missed you. Still, it was a comfort to have something you’d given him to take with him into the dark, and he’d certainly need all the luck he could get.

Before you’d even realized what was wrong, your palms had started to sweat and your heart kicked up a staccato beat under your ribs as the elevator began its descent. You had no idea where these big, nameless agents were taking you, and you had no say in whether they took you there or not. The quiet uptick in your breathing was lost in the metallic hum of the elevator’s movement, covered by the occasional creak of tactical gear as the agents shifted their weight and maintained a cool, impersonal silence as your personal escorts.

The elevator opened into a wide hangar of sorts, concrete and corrugated steel housing a fleet of armored black SUVs, a walled-in gun range, and rows upon rows of tall metal shelves holding every kind of gear imaginable. Night-vision helmets, go-bags, crates of grenades and ammo boxes and flashlights, body armor, med kits, combat knives, ballistic shields - if you had a hundred years, you couldn’t have sorted through them all. On the longest wall hung a formidable display of uncountable rifles, shotguns, pistols, rocket launchers, machine guns, and many more weapons you didn’t have names for. 

You’d known that the DSO was a paramilitary operation rather than strictly an intelligence agency, but seeing it in action made it very clear that the government's counter-bioterrorism effort was no mere raving of a conspiracy wingnut. It was a thriving, aggressive network of trained operatives and underground facilities, designed to target threats like the ones you’d heard about from all over the globe, like the ones you’d seen firsthand being made and experimented on at Rhodes Hill. The idea of the sheer scale of its operations was overwhelming, and as you made your way through the hangar, you realized that you were being given a glimpse of a world entirely apart from your own and would surely be obliged to keep what you’d seen to yourself.

Another elevator took you to a less openly hostile main floor, though the maze of dark war rooms lit by computer screens and bullpens of cubicles littered with files was every bit as streamlined for whatever operations the DSO was currently running. As your guards took you through them, following the placards for the medical wing, you caught a bevy of curious looks; no doubt a civilian presence in the compound was a rare occurrence, but when you overheard whispered conversation, you knew it was something else that made you stand out too.

“That’s Kennedy’s civilian, right?”

“Isn’t he AWOL?”

“What was he thinking, going against protocol and trying to run an entire operation by himself?”

You wished you had something more than your ragged dress to hide in, wished you could trust the guards with you and tuck yourself behind their broad shoulders, wished that the fluorescent lights overhead didn’t cast such a stark, cold light on your pitiful figure as you walked through the ranks of government agents who watched you with open surprise and cold interest and swift, tactical judgement. They knew who Leon was, probably knew more about him than you did, and the suffocating weight of being his pathetic little mistake made your eyes sting with tears as you looked at the floor and followed silently to wherever you were being taken.

The medical wing was sterile, bright, and mercifully quieter than anywhere else in the compound. A nurse signed off on your transfer, sternly reminding your guards that until you were medically cleared, they had no business pressing the staff for you to be mainlined to interrogation. You were grateful for that, at least; though the agents had asked you cursory questions at the loading dock, they seemed inclined to let someone at the field office take a crack at you to figure out where Leon was. For the time being, you were still safe from whatever tactics they might employ to get it out of you, and it was with true relief that you let the nurse take you to an exam room and dismiss the guards from their detail.

Because you’d been extracted from a bioterrorism hotzone and active crime scene, the medical staff’s tests and checks and questions ran the gamut of every single possible scenario. You made no attempt at conversation as the nurses had you change into a hospital gown, answering as monosyllabically as possible, feeling a vaguely out-of-body sensation come over you as they moved with practiced efficiency. To your knowledge, had you been bitten, clawed, or otherwise harmed by any of the bio-weapons? No, Leon had made sure of it. Had you been injured at all in your escape from the clinic? Yes, but Leon had made sure it was clean and bandaged. Had you been sick recently, any flus, fevers, coughs, or colds? Only heartsick, but you didn’t think there was a checkbox on their intake form for that kind of thing, so no. The paper on the examination table crinkled with every nervous shift of your bruised, bloody, exhausted body, and you withstood the thermometers and otoscopes and oxygen monitors with as much patience and civility as you could muster. 

A doctor came in when the nurses were through, and you relaxed a little under his friendly, clinical manner. He was older, a shock of white hair matching his lab coat and making the cartoonish tree frogs on his tie stand out, and he pulled up a rolling stool and flipped through the nurses’ notes with an air of unhurried, diligent attention.

“Those bruises on your throat look pretty nasty,” he said, taking the stethoscope from around his neck and scuffing it over his hand to warm it. “Did you lose consciousness when it happened?”

“Yes. I don’t know how long I was out. A few hours, at least.”

He hummed in thought, sliding the stethoscope under the open back of your gown. “Deep breath, please.”

You did as he said, trying not to think of the way Leon had helped you steady your breathing when you couldn’t stop sobbing in the darkness of the storage bay. You still smelled the cold, mildewed air tinged with blood and metal, still heard the ringing gunshots and agonized screams, still felt the way he’d held you against his chest like you were something precious when it was over. Your hands started to shake again, and you tucked them under your thighs and heard the betraying paper crinkle again at the movement.

“I’d like to get an x-ray of your neck and wrist,” the doctor said after he’d listened to your lungs at various points along your stiff back and shoulders. “Just to make sure we’re not dealing with something more serious than we can see right now.”

You nodded. The IV one of the nurses had put in was bothersome, one more irritant in your body that felt worn beyond the point of endurance, and you fought the sudden, violent urge to rip it out. The doctor noticed and gave you a sympathetic smile.

“That drip has about ten minutes left,” he said, checking the clear plastic bag of saline that hung at the head of the examination table. “Once it’s done, we’ll get that out for you so you can get a shower and a change of clothes.”

“Thank you.” Your voice was shot, hoarse from the bruising on your throat and the constant tears that hadn’t really made you feel any better.

With his penlight, he examined the gash on your head and checked your pupils. “Did you lose consciousness when you hit your head?”

“No, that was... before anything happened. I just hit my head on my desk on accident.” It sounded so mundane, so silly, to have one little injury among the litany of all the others that didn’t have anything to do with zombies or kidnapping or running for your life. But you’d found yourself on a precarious edge with Leon even then, baring your childhood trauma to a perfect stranger, exposing the vulnerable parts of you even before necessity made it impossible to do otherwise. 

The doctor took a seat again, taking your hand that had been stripped of the bloody bandage and had the stitches irrigated.

“Whoever stitched you up did a fine job with the sutures,” he remarked. “Very clean work. You’ll have a scar, of course, but it should heal nicely.”

Wonderful, you thought. At least you’d always have something to remember him by.

“This bruising is concerning, though.” He tilted your hand to see it better, and you were glad his weathered hands felt nothing like Leon’s. “I would expect to see some with the sutures, but it’s spread beyond what I would consider normal.”

He looked back at the notes. “Your bloodwork hasn’t come back. You don’t have any family history or prior issues with clotting, do you?”

You shook your head. You supposed your father could have, but you’d never know. Besides, it wasn’t any family history that was making you bruise like that and you knew it.

“Does the bloodwork pick up on T-Virus?” you asked hoarsely.

The doctor’s brow raised in surprise, but his voice was calm when he spoke.

“Seeing as this is the DSO, yes - we have all known bio-engineered viruses and parasites in our system. But that’s a pretty serious diagnosis without any testing.”

“You can do whatever kind of tests you want,” you said. “But unless I’m extremely lucky, I think it’s going to come up as T-Virus.”

“You told the nurses you hadn’t come into contact with any bodily fluids from the infected at the clinic.”

You shrugged. “I don’t think I did, but I guess some could have gotten in my mouth or into a cut or something and I didn’t know about it. But I had this bruise before last night, and I was in Raccoon City the night of the outbreak, and...” You closed your fingers over the stitches Leon had put there. “And the agent who was with me had the same symptoms, though they were further progressed than mine. The files he found said it was a late-onset T-Virus infection.”

He considered that for a long moment. Setting the clipboard aside, he clasped his hands in front of him and gave you an even look.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “But I’d like to get your panels back before we jump to any conclusions, and for now, I think we ought to focus on getting you hydrated and stable so you can get cleaned up and start feeling better.”

You didn’t know how much better you’d feel, but you didn’t say so.

“One of the nurses will come in and remove your IV,” he said. “After that, you’ll be taken to x-ray, and then escorted to one of the patient rooms. My colleagues in the investigative department will wait for me to clear you for questioning.”

“You can’t sneak me out the back door, can you?”

His smile was kind and a touch wry. “I’m afraid not. But I can make sure you’ve had a chance to get settled and at least have something to eat before I throw you to the wolves.”

“Thank you,” you said softly. You knew you couldn’t avoid an interrogation, but the doctor’s willingness to help you prepare for it was a very great kindness when you felt one wrong move away from falling to pieces under his patient gaze.

The nurse who came to take your drip out was tall and blonde, and for a brief, dazed moment, you thought he was Leon. Chalking it up to bone-deep exhaustion and wishful thinking for something you’d said you hadn’t wanted, you tried to focus on the monumental effort of just walking down the hallway behind him, trying not to feel the urge to reach out and grab hold of a belt loop that wasn’t there so you’d be safe and close and protected.

After your x-rays, with your stitches wrapped in waterproof medical tape and a clean set of scrubs set out on the hospital bed, you got in the shower and stood under the hot water for a long time, staring blankly at the pale green tile and the neat grouting between each little square. It seemed too precise, too clean, too even, and you half expected a spray of blood or brain matter to suddenly spatter over it. Eventually, you worked up the energy to scrub yourself down, watching the milky white bubbles wash down the drain with the buildup of grime that had clung to you. 

Every inch of your body was littered with bruises and scrapes, achiness and fatigue hitting you like a freight train when you dried off and got into the too-big scrubs. Someone had brought you a grey DSO sweatshirt, and you were glad for the warmth of it; sitting cross-legged on the bed, swimming in your borrowed clothes with your hair still dripping, you stared at the wall and ran an absent thumb over the gauze on your hand.

Why had he kissed you? You kept turning it over and over in your mind, trying to make sense of that one puzzle that seemed completely unsolvable. Much of Leon was still a puzzle to you, but you thought that with more time and less zombies trying to kill you, you could have figured some of it out. You’d wanted to, had already gone headfirst down the winding paths of imagination as soon as you felt his mouth against yours. Half of it was romance-novel-fueled daydreaming, you knew, but you couldn’t be blamed for imagining something - he’d kissed you, after all, and in your mind that gave you permission to start thinking at least a little bit about what that meant for your future. Then again, that was your first kiss ever, so what did you know? Maybe it didn’t give you permission to do anything at all besides be kissed and left on the side of the road like an unwanted puppy.

I guess I just like your sunny personality. It had been funny in the moment, a reminder that all of this was kind of ridiculous, that neither of you really knew enough about the other to start kissing in such strange and dangerous and decidedly unromantic circumstances. But it had also been sweet, a charming callback to a conversation that felt like a lifetime ago now, a promise that there was more to find out about each other than what you could discover after a few brutal hours of near-death experiences. And you’d thought he’d meant it, both the quip and the kiss, so you’d let yourself be duped into thinking that someone as handsome and brave and competent as him could possibly want something more with someone as fragile and weak and burdensome as you.

What a silly little fool you’d been. Playing right into his hands, letting yourself trust a man you barely knew with something you’d always thought would be special when it finally happened. You didn’t know what he’d gotten out of it - for all your confidence under the med injector’s influence, you were sure the kiss had been passable at best, and it wasn’t like you’d done anything super spectacular otherwise. Maybe he’d felt sorry for you, taking your girlish comment about dying without being kissed as a serious request for him to provide it; or maybe he was just cruel, and he’d enjoyed watching you shatter to bits when he’d thrown it back in your face. It didn’t mean anything, sunny. It had meant something to you, more than you’d been able to tell him, and it was like a slap in the face to hear him give voice to possibly the worst fear you’d ever envisioned after you finally got someone to kiss you.

You ran your fingers over your lips, feeling them chapped and ragged after worrying them so frequently for hours at a time. Damn him, but you could still feel it - the heat of his mouth, the rasp of his scruff against your jaw, the soft bump of bridge of his nose against yours when you kissed him deeper. He’d tasted of copper and wintergreen gum, the metallic tinge of blood on his teeth and something warm and alive and human, something you’d never tasted before and quickly become intoxicated with. And that’s just what it was, you supposed - some irrational, schoolgirl mistake, drunk off the combination of exhaustion and adrenaline and constant, ravaging fear.

An orderly brought you some food, but you couldn’t muster up much of an appetite; a nurse came in with a brace for your wrist and a round of antibiotics and painkillers, and you let yourself be hooked up to monitors and given a new IV and asked a few more questions for your chart. You tried to sleep, but every time you closed your eyes, you saw a grisly parade of mangled bodies, spattered viscera, pools of dark blood and sticky black fluid. Though you were drenched in sweat, bone-deep chills wracked your entire body; and over the sound of the monitors and medication pumps, your ears rang with snarling wails and gunfire and the wet crunch of bone and muscle and teeth. 

You thought of Emily, lying there in the dark and the cold; you thought of Grace, taken by Gideon into the rubble of Raccoon City for something no doubt as horrible as what he’d masterminded at Rhodes Hill. Rain-slick stone, fire eating away at twisted metal, the smell of antiseptic and blood and rot; freakishly mutated bodies, grasping and clawing and rupturing into a tangle of slick, viscous gore. Without Leon, there was nothing to keep the nightmarish visions at bay; and even if he did come back, if he did what you’d told him not to, both of you would be dead before the memories had even begun to dull their sharp, jagged edges.

Eventually, the sliding glass door of your room opened with a quiet, sterile hum, and you were almost glad when a uniformed agent came to take you back to the main hub of the DSO office - at least it gave you a distraction from the images running through your head. In sock-padded feet, you followed the agent to a small, grey interrogation room; the clock on the wall read 10:54 am, and you couldn’t avoid your reflection in the mirrored glass as you took a seat at the metal table. Toying with the velcro strap on the brace around your wrist, you kept your head down and tried not to wonder where Leon was now, whether he was even still alive.

A sharp-featured agent, a woman, came into the interrogation room announced only by the soft click of her boots against the floor. She asked you to state your name and date of birth for the record, which you assumed was being taken by the shiny-lensed camera mounted in the corner. Then, taking a seat opposite you at the table, she tapped her manicured nails against a stack of files, the top of which was marked with neat, typed letters: Department of Security Operations Personnel File - Leon Scott Kennedy. You felt some weird little twinge of an unknown emotion at finding out his middle name and quickly pushed it aside.

“You were engaged in a rogue tactical maneuver with one of our operatives,” the agent said, her voice cool and professional. “Is that correct?”

“I guess,” you said, your voice little more than a tired croak. “I didn’t know it was a tactical maneuver. I was on shift at the front desk.”

“How did you come to be in Agent Kennedy’s custody?”

You grimaced a little. “I wouldn’t exactly say I was in his custody. But I took him to one of the offices to wait for Dr. Gideon, and - ”

“Dr. Victor Gideon?” she asked, cutting across you with a slight uptick of interest in her voice. 

You nodded. She pulled another file from her stack and rifled through it, sliding a picture across the table to you.

“This man?” she asked.

The black and white photograph was indeed of Gideon, though it had been taken before whatever mutations he was marked with now had taken effect. He wore no metal mask, nor did he show any of the scars you’d seen littering his face; and yet, his eyes shone uncannily even in the grainy photograph, his skin unnaturally pale and a faint, enigmatic smile on his grey lips that sent a shiver down your spine.

“Yes,” you said, pushing the picture back towards her. “He doesn’t look like that now, but that’s him.”

“And you set up a meeting between Dr. Gideon and Agent Kennedy?”

You shook your head. “I didn’t set anything up. It was my first shift at the clinic, and I was told that Gideon was expecting Le-...” You couldn’t make yourself say his first name, feeling for some reason that it was too intimate under these harsh lights and the woman’s cool, calculating gaze. 

“A-agent Kennedy,” you continued, your voice wavering a little. “Gideon was expecting Agent Kennedy, and I was supposed to bring him to the office and let my superior know when he arrived. That was all.”

She considered that for a moment. “When Agent Kennedy arrived, how did he introduce himself to you?”

“Um, he...” You looked dazedly up at the wall above her head, thinking of the blunder with the desk, Leon’s steadying hands, that first crooked smile he’d given you when he made sure you were alright. “He said he was with the DSO. But he was surprised when I said Gideon was already expecting him.”

“Did he at any time seem to give the impression that his arrival at the clinic was unauthorized?”

Your head was starting to pound. You didn’t know what to say to try and protect Leon, didn’t even know if you should care about protecting him. You did care, of course, and nothing in heaven or on earth could have willingly made you betray or hurt or endanger him in any way - but did that make you some sad sap who couldn’t see what was right in front of her? Leon had played you, hadn’t he? Saved your life and broken your heart all while running some illicit investigation against direct government orders? What the fuck were you supposed to make of that?

“I don’t know,” you said finally, figuring it was the truth. “I didn’t ask, and he never said. I... I trusted him, I guess.” Much good it did you in the end.

She spent the next forty-five minutes drilling you with questions, asking you about your personal history with Raccoon City and your father’s medical practice, your dismissal by the Elbridge school board, why you’d chosen to work at Rhodes Hill, which staff members you’d interacted with, your kidnapping and torture at Gideon’s hand, what kinds of biological weapons you’d encountered, what personal information you’d shared with Leon and gotten in return, what you knew about a missing FBI agent named Grace Ashcroft. She had you tied in knots and running in circles by the time she was finished, and when she finally got to the discovery of Gideon’s private office, you were pale and clammy and alarmingly disoriented. She was going to get something out of you that you knew Leon didn’t want her to know, but you barely had the strength to stay upright, much less withstand the cunning, razor-sharp interrogation tactics of a seasoned investigative officer.

“After you were found by the extraction squad,” she said, as composed as she’d been from the moment she walked in, “we were alerted by the CIA and the Pentagon about a flag in their system. One of our technical agents, Sherry Birkin, was requesting information above her clearance.”

The words hung in the tense air between you, obviously waiting for some kind of response. When you didn’t give one, she folded her hands on the tabletop and gave you a piercing glare.

“Have you had any communication with Agent Birkin, either before or during your time at Rhodes Hill?”

You shook your head. 

“To your knowledge, did Agent Kennedy have any communication with Agent Birkin while you were in the hotzone?”

“I...” You swallowed. “I knew he was talking to a woman named Sherry through his comms. I never heard her last name.”

She leaned closer, her gaze narrowing. “Are you aware that Agent Birkin is a close personal friend of Agent Kennedy’s?”

You remembered what Leon had said about escaping Raccoon City with Sherry. The look in his eyes when he’d told you about that night flashed across your memory, the way he’d seemed for a moment much younger than he was - scared, vulnerable, every inch that rookie cop who’d found the people he’d sworn to protect all dying of the same disease, wrestling with the truth that he was going to die of it too. It can’t mean anything, sunny. You know it can’t. Because both of you were dying, and it didn’t make sense to even think of something between you. But then why had he kissed you?

You said nothing, and a slight curl of displeasure tugged at the agent’s otherwise unreadable features.

“Agent Birkin was denied higher clearance and told to shut down her investigation,” she said. “We have reason to believe she’s still operating against direct orders, intending to aid Agent Kennedy on an unauthorized reconnaissance mission for a project called Elpis.”

For the first time, you didn’t have to fake ignorance. “Elpis? What is that?”

“That’s what we’re hoping you’ll tell us.”

Hoping was a bit of an understatement, as she’d proven surgically skilled at finding any lies or omissions in your story so far, extracting information from you as easily as breathing. You weren’t at your best, admittedly, but even if you hadn’t just come through hell and back, you had the unsettling certainty that she could have gotten whatever she wanted out of you without breaking a sweat.

This time, though, there was nothing to get, and you told her so.

“I don’t know anything about Elpis,” you said. “I never heard Agent Kennedy talk about that to me or to Sherry. I’ve never even heard of it until now.”

She took a measured breath. “There were files uploaded to Agent Birkin from an encrypted server linked to Victor Gideon. We can’t know for sure it was Agent Kennedy who uploaded them, but evidence suggests it was a further attempt to share information regarding his current maneuvers. Are you aware of the existence of these files?”

The pictures on the computer screen flashed vividly before your eyes, bruised, decaying hands and directives marked with long black redaction lines. All of a sudden, it felt like someone had pressed a cold, tightening grip to the back of your neck. You hunched your shoulders, trying to shake it off, but it only grew more palpable. Fuck. A panicky sweat beaded at your temples as you fought to stay in touch with reality.

“If you are aware of these files,” she said, her voice as smooth and icy as steel, “and if you have any information regarding their contents, you would of course be obligated to disclose that.”

You had no idea if that was true, and nobody here was going to review your rights with you. Feeling your chest start to tighten, you gripped the edges of the table and tried to breathe slowly and steadily, finding it an increasingly futile effort. The bruises on your throat, the ones that matched Gideon’s meaty, reptilian hand, started to throb in time with your racing heartbeat.

The agent pressed harder, her voice sharper. “Did Agent Kennedy share anything with you while you were in his custody?”

The lights were blindingly bright, your head swimming as you heard a rattling wheeze escape your tightening throat.

“He... he kissed me.”

Her mouth twisted in a disgusted sneer. “Good for you. But did he share anything relevant to the ongoing investigation into his unsanctioned tactical operations?”

You tried to suck in a breath and found that nothing would get past the vise of pain in your throat. Your eyes widened in sheer, full-blown panic. The agent had finally lost her patience with you, but her frigid, cutting voice was lost in the woozy ringing vibrating through your skull.

“Agent Kennedy is a government operative acting without authorization, sharing highly classified documents to personal friends without the necessary security clearance.” She stood as if to emphasise her point, the chair scraping loudly against the floor. “Your dedication to protecting him from the consequences of his actions is misguided at best and in direct violation of federal law at worst. Now, without any nonsense - are you in possession of any knowledge pertaining to files uploaded by Agent Kennedy with regard to a project called Elpis?”

You didn’t answer. You couldn’t answer. You couldn’t breathe. Dragging a frantic hand across your throat to try and break the iron grip you felt there, your vision careened in a carousel of lifeless, frigid grey, and you felt yourself sway, completely limp, out of the chair and towards the floor. The solid crack of your skull hitting concrete could be heard even over the sounds of someone calling for a medical team, and stars popped across your vision as you looked unseeingly at the paneled ceiling, clawing desperately at your throat and trying very hard not to die on the floor of this interrogation room when nobody who loved you even knew you were there.

Big, deep breath, sunny. 

Oh, of all the stupid voices to hear as death closed in around you. Still, you tried to do as he said - nothing happened, no catching sob or ragged gasp, just choked, empty silence, and the last thought you had was that you wished he was with you, if only to hold your hand one last time before the end.

“Oh, Leon.” The way you said his name was like the beginning of a eulogy, soft and careful and as fragile as glass. It hit him square in the chest, making his breath catch; just barely, he resisted the urge to hide the evidence of a poison he’d felt growing in him for years from your wide, expressive gaze that seemed to notice everything about him. 

You reached out to touch his hand, and out of muscle memory more than anything else, he flinched away from you. Hardly anything made him flinch any more, too used to gore and sickness and brutality for it to cause him anything but anger; but your little hand, the way it trembled and held to him when you were scared, the way it toyed nervously with anything in reach, the way it tried to be something gentle and good when everything else was violent and dark and hateful - that made him frightened. He didn’t know what to do with it, and he pulled away before you could get any more tarnished with the shadow of death that clung to him in patina.

A vivid blush rose to your cheeks at his movement away from you.

“I’m sorry,” you said, abashed and guilty. “I didn’t mean to...”

To what? Offer him kindness? Overstep a boundary that had been dissolved the moment he took your hand in his the first time? He cleared his throat and tried to will away the strange, punishing heartache that made it hard to breathe when he was with you.

“‘S alright,” he said gruffly. It wasn’t you. It was him, but he didn’t know how to explain that he wasn’t what you thought he was.

“Does it hurt?” you asked.

He shook his head. “No, it’s... completely numb, actually.” That had been a new development during the last few hours, the relief of losing the constant pain in his hand quickly swallowed up by the panic of knowing it was too necrotic now to feel anything at all. He closed his fingers into a light fist, testing his ability to move them, and knew it wouldn’t be long before they were completely useless.

“I just didn’t think you’d want to touch it,” he said after a long moment. He didn’t want to touch it either.

Before he could even think to pull away again, you’d put your good hand in his, palm to palm, fingers twined together. He stiffened, drawing in a sharp, jagged breath - he felt you, warm and soft and brave even when your hands shook, and the contact found every last chink in his armor and reduced him to something more vulnerable than he’d been in years. 

“Is this okay?” you asked softly. “Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?”

It did hurt, sort of, but not in the way you meant. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held someone’s hand like this, skin to skin, not to grab hold of and run but just for the closeness of it; and your hand was so careful and gentle against years of calluses and scars and crookedness, and it felt so different that he didn’t know what to do with himself. Slowly, ever so slowly, giving you plenty of time to change your mind and pull away from him in disgust, he allowed his fingers to close over the back of your hand and felt how his own tremored in response.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. 

“I’m sure,” he said. “I think I’d...” He took a shaky breath. “I think I’d want you to even if it did.”

You put your other hand over the back of his, red bandages over scarred knuckles, and when he met your eyes he forgot how to breathe at the glassy shine of tears he saw there. You were crying over him? What in the world could he have done to merit something like that from someone as good and as gentle as you?

“I’m so sorry, Leon,” you said, your voice all wobbly and sad and sweet. “I don’t know what else to say.”

There was nothing else to say. No hope for a cure, no reassurance that the spreading poison was anything but a ticking clock counting down the hours of his last pathetic attempt at a life that meant anything or was good for anyone around him. He couldn’t have told you what it meant to him to have been given these last few hours with you, how he wished he could have spared you from them but was selfishly glad he hadn’t had to live through them alone. Your world was one of brightness and laughter and hope, soft braids and keychains and innocent trust; and if you had to go through something as awful as this, at least he’d been given the chance to get you out of it. It felt at once like something far too small and far too big, one thing done right in a lifetime of letting people down, less than you deserved and more of a redemption than he could have hoped for. 

He tightened his grip on your hand just a little. 

“It’s alright, sunny,” he said. “This is more than enough.”

Your tears spilled over then, and like he had every time you cried, he wanted to cup your cheek and brush them away and promise he was going to fix it, whatever it was. You’d nudged up right under his heart in a matter of minutes, all clumsiness and pink cheeks and bright, honest eyes, and it struck him as one last judgement for a long-ago failure that he’d tied himself so closely to you so near to the end of his life. Why hadn’t you met sooner? Why hadn’t you met somewhere different? But he knew why, knew that even if he wasn’t running headfirst toward his own death, he would still be too violent and bitter and broken for anything good.

It would have been bad enough to have met you and lost you in less than a day, but as he looked at your bandaged hand where it cradled his blackened one, he remembered something even worse, something he’d pushed out of his mind before it swallowed him whole. You’d asked him about the bruise on your hand, one he’d seen when he stitched your palm, and he’d been too afraid to look at it again when you said it was like the ones in the pictures. He knew he was dying, but the thought that you might be too had been too much for him to bear. So he’d lashed out at you, taking his anger and fear out on you when you held your hand out to him and begged him to tell you it was anything but what you both knew it was.

He could hardly stomach the thought of bringing it up now. But you deserved to know, even if he’d rather go to his ever-nearing grave thinking you’d made it out and lived some full, happy life after being dragged through hell and back with him.

“Let me see your hand, sunny,” he said, making his rough, clumsy voice as gentle as he could possibly make it.

He felt the way you stiffened in fear, could have felt it even if he was already dead and gone. He’d felt everything about you that way, the tug of your shaking fingers at his belt, the weight of your tired body in his arms, the brush of your soft hair against his jaw.

“I don’t...” Your voice broke. “I don’t want to look at it.”

“I know.” He knew it better than anyone. “But you said it looked like those pictures, and...”

He trailed off, not sure why he felt it was so important for you to know. If it was what you feared it was, there was nothing either of you could do. Was it better to know for sure? Or would your last days be happier, just for a while, if you could keep pretending that it wasn’t killing you as surely as a bullet would have?

“I don’t want to know,” you said, so softly your voice was almost lost in the sound of the wind in the trees. “Not... not right now. Let someone else tell me, Leon. Not you.”

He was ashamed of the relief he felt at that request, and in his characteristic weakness, he did as you asked. And then he saw some softening in you, some color in your cheeks and a bashfulness he wasn’t quite sure what to make of, and he waited for whatever you would say next.

“It would be terrible to think I’m going to die without my first kiss,” you said. “So I’ll just pretend for now that I have all the time in the world for something like that.”

For a moment, he was speechless. Stunned that a girl as sweet and funny and beautiful as you could have gone your whole life without being kissed. That couldn’t be true. He’d gone up against a lot of things that defied belief, and that was the most inconceivable one of them all.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Too old to have missed something like that, I know.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I just...” He couldn’t wrap his head around it. “You said you missed it? It wasn’t on purpose?”

“What, like you saving your hands for marriage?” you teased. Your smile was wry. “No, it wasn’t on purpose.”

“You’re screwing with me, sunny. There’s no way that’s true.”

You said nothing for a moment, and he was lost in the becoming rosiness of your cheeks that made him remember what it was like to be shy and eager about something as simple as this. He hadn’t felt that way in a long time, had almost written it off completely; he didn’t have time to ask a question that no one would answer anyway. He’d felt a little stirring of it in Gideon’s office when he gave you the med injector, saw the way you’d looked at him with nothing to hide the want in your expression; and though he’d chalked it up to the drugs and the adrenaline and the necessity of your reliance on him, not to anything real, he wouldn’t lie to himself and say he hadn’t liked it. And you were looking at him in almost the same way now, like you wondered how he would feel if you touched him, like he was something worth studying and knowing and enjoying - and he felt himself blush for what felt like the first time in years.

“I’m not screwing with you,” you said. “It’s the truth. I’ve just never met anyone who wanted to.”

His gaze flickered to your mouth. The idea that no one had ever wanted to was crazy in itself, but the thought of letting himself prove you wrong was categorically insane. Incredibly foolish. Unspeakably selfish. But you thought you’d never met somebody who wanted to kiss you, and he could say without a shadow of doubt that it just wasn’t true now that you’d met him.

He couldn’t have explained it to you or to himself, but there was something about you, something that made him wonder what it would be like to have something tender and sweet in his life. Maybe it was some reckless abandon, knowing he would be dead sooner rather than later, a last cash-in of the chips before the night ended; maybe it was a cruel twist of fate, something he didn’t even know if he believed in, something he was almost certain you believed in. Whatever it was, when he met your eyes again, he felt like he could drown in the depth of them, and it would be a far better death than the one he was looking down the barrel at right now.

“Do you want me to kiss you, sunny?” he asked.

The color in your face deepened, and he felt it like an arrow to his heart. Whatever time he had left, he wanted more than anything to spend it coaxing out your bubbly laughter and your charming smile and your soft, rosy blush.

“Do...” Your breath caught, a sweet little hitch of nervousness and desire. “Do you want to?”

He answered that question in the best way he knew how, and your grip on his hand tightened as a soft little sigh escaped you when he pressed his mouth to yours. You were shy and earnest and careful, as if afraid he might regret it; even if you hadn’t told him, he could have guessed it was your first kiss. But that just made it impossibly sweeter to him, and he lingered for a long time in the softness of you, feeling a thrill run through him when you finally decided he wasn’t going to pull away and moved yourself closer, kissed him deeper, explored the simple pleasure of something that he still couldn’t believe you’d never done before and chosen to do with him.

When you finally came up for air, you looked at him like he was something wonderful, and he regretted making you think he was anything but what he was. But you were so pretty, so trusting, so head over heels for him in a way he shouldn’t have made you feel, and he was helpless to do anything but let himself be looked on like he was a piece of your heart.

“Why did you kiss me?” you asked.

He gave you a lopsided smile. “I guess I just like your sunny personality.”

You laughed, your whole face brightening and softening in a way that made him want to say something else stupid like that so you’d do it again.

You took your bandaged hand from his and pressed your fingers to your mouth, as if savoring the feel of him that still lingered, and he felt his smile fade when he saw the dark, familiar bruises on your knuckles. It was spreading, the same thing that was killing him steadily taking the life out of you too, and it was a misery and injustice too profound to dwell on even for a moment. Both of you would be dead, maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few months - but you’d had one moment of something good, and maybe that was enough, or maybe it was something more cruel than he’d ever thought himself capable of.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, suddenly struck with shame and regret at the lack of self-control or professionalism or whatever else it was that kept him so closed off from all of life’s few pleasures. A bottle of whiskey or a bought and paid for roll in the sack was one thing, and he was no stranger to vices that gave him a break from feeling stuck in the credit roll of a bad action movie, at least for as long as they lasted. But kissing you hadn’t been like that at all. All at once he knew it was wrong to have done it, to have taken the gift of something so important and meaningful to you when he knew it was wasted on him.

He didn’t look at you, afraid you’d see what a crooked, beat-up thing he was, as if you hadn’t seen it clearly enough already. “I’m sorry, sunny.”

You breathed a laugh. “You’re sorry for kissing me? Why? I wanted you to.”

You didn’t understand, and he didn’t have the lifetime it would take to explain it. He barely had the next few minutes, and even that would be over as soon as the chopper arrived to take you someplace you’d never see him again.

“It didn’t...” He bottled a cough in his chest, another reminder of how worthless the whole effort was. If he had more time, he’d try to convince you of what you must already know, that this... thing between you, this entanglement of need and necessity and adrenaline-fueled wanting, was nothing that could survive past the walls of the place you’d met. He wasn’t good enough, and you didn’t even know him well enough to see it. How could you? You’d known him for all of seven hours. You knew how he took his coffee and how good he was at killing things, and you knew how very, very soon, he’d be facedown in the gravel while he drowned in his own lungs or finally took a blow he couldn’t get back up from. In the end, he guessed, there wasn’t that much more to know.

“It didn’t mean anything,” he said, and he saw how it hurt you, but he steeled himself and tried to convince himself it was for the best. “It can’t mean anything, sunny. You know it can’t.”

You held his hand tighter, your expression flickering uncertainly like a candle about to go out. 

“It meant something to me, Leon.”

He gave a shaky sigh. “I know. I’m sorry.”

After a moment’s hesitation, a silent plea for him to take back what he’d said, you let go of his hand. He didn’t protest, didn’t try to hold on longer; it was better this way, he was sure of it. He’d been weak enough and stupid enough to string you along in some desperate attempt at a selfish, stubborn self-satisfaction, but he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He wouldn’t be able to even if he’d wanted to, because he wouldn't live long enough to do it.

As he pulled his glove back on, hiding the evidence of a darkness that was more than skin-deep, he heard his comms click on and was selfishly glad for the excuse to focus on anything else.

“Leon? You there?” Sherry’s voice was strained, urgent, and he got himself to his feet.

“Yeah, I’m here.” He saw you curl in on yourself, a fresh wave of tears tracking down your face, and made himself look away from you before he pulled you to your feet and into his arms. “What’s wrong?”

“I called in for the chopper, like you wanted,” she said, her voice metallic over the comms. “But it got flagged by somebody at the office, and they’re sending a team to bring you in for questioning.”

He swore under his breath. “I don’t have time for red tape, Sherry. I think Victor took Grace into Raccoon City, and he’s moving quick on this Elpis thing. We’ll lose him if I don’t find him today.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m letting you know now. They’ll still do the civilian evac, but you have to be long gone by the time they get there.”

He glanced at his watch. Depending on where they’d sent the bird from, the team could get here any minute now, and he had neither the time nor the energy to tangle with a whole squad of DSO operatives before he got started after Victor. 

“You’re sure they’re sending someone to evacuate her?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m positive. But they’re also planning on evacuating you too.”

“I hear you.” He ran a hand over his face. “I’ll get going. If you can ask for her to be greenlit on any security checks with my credentials, I’d appreciate it. She needs to be sent home as soon as it can be done.”

“I’ll try,” she promised. He heard her typing away, already putting in that request to the field office they’d take you to. “I’m not sure how much it’ll help, since you’ll technically be AWOL, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Sherry. I’ll check in when I’m on the road.”

He heard the comms click off, and though he was confident Sherry would do everything in her power to make the process as smooth as possible on the DSO’s end, the much more difficult task was left up to him. When he turned to you, you were already watching him with a wary gaze, and he knew you must have pieced it together that he was leaving you high and dry to wait for a bunch of strangers to cart you off to somewhere lonely and strange and overwhelming. He’d meant to go with you, at least for an hour or so, to make sure you were settled; but he couldn’t risk getting taken in, and he would be if he was still around when they got here.

“You’re leaving,” you said. It wasn’t a question, and your voice was completely devoid of emotion. He winced.

“They’re sending a team to try and bring me in for questioning,” he said. “I can’t let that happen. There’s no telling what’ll happen to Grace if I don’t get into the city and find her.”

He saw a little flicker of emotion then, more for Grace than for him, and you nodded.

“Okay. You should go ahead and go, then.”

“I’m sorry, sunny.”

You flinched. “I don’t need any more apologizes, Mr. Kennedy.”

You’d called him that before, at first in deference and then in playfulness, but this time it was a cold, clear line in the sand. He knew why you’d drawn it, and he wasn’t going to step over it and hurt you again when he’d already done too much damage already.

You stood and brushed off your torn, bloodstained skirt, trying to hide the shaking in your hands that he could have seen blind.

“I hope you find her,” you said, and he knew you meant it. “And, if you live through this... I think it’s for the best if our paths don’t cross again.”

He knew you meant that too, and he took it like a low, hard punch that knocked the breath out of him. Your smile was crooked and mirthless when you met his eyes.

“Not that I think you were planning on it,” you said, and your voice broke a little, enough to make him hate himself for the rest of his life, no matter how short it would be.

You took a deep breath, shoring up those defenses he’d done his fair share to break down only to leave you shattered behind the rubble of them.

“Goodbye, Mr. Kennedy. I wish I could say it’s been fun, but we both know it’s been anything but.”

He tired to swallow his heart back down to where it belonged and couldn’t quite manage it, wanting to say a million things, settling on the one thing he wished he didn’t have to.

“Goodbye, sunny.”

“There’s got to be a way to the surface,” Grace said, holding Leon’s revolver in a tight, shaking grip. Her face shone with sweat and tears in the flickering, humming light, and you saw her swallow thickly as she looked back at you. “How is she?”

“She’s still breathing,” you said quietly. It was all the reassurance you could give, and she knew it; with a quick nod, she turned back to the dank, dripping maze of the waterworks and took the only path forward. 

On a catwalk above the main channels of the plant, both of you were forced to stop by a mountain of shipping crates and metal shelving and unused steel girders. The wide expanse of loud, rushing darkness seemed at once cavernous and close, the blackness pressing in like a hand on the back of your neck; the only light came from a few hazy spotlight beams and a cold, pale glow from under the grated metal at your feet. 

“Shit.” Grace’s voice was soft and full of fear, and you looked beyond her to the shadowy corridors to see something huge crawl down the wall like a gigantic spider. A wave of nauseated horror turned the pit of your stomach to ice, and you watched it scuttle to its feet and drag a long, rattling chain behind it as it skulked further into the darkness, rasping and growling as it hunted for you. It didn’t seem to know you were there yet, and you held Emily closer as a clawing dread seemed to close its fist around your lungs.

“What was that?” you asked in a stricken whisper.

Grace’s face was as pale as death. “The same thing from the hallway where you and Leon found me.”

You bit back a whine of panic. “But he killed it. It didn’t... it didn’t have a head after he shot it.”

“It came back,” she said, as helpless and terrified as you were. “It has some sort of ability where it can... r-regrow itself. I saw it happen.”

A strange, hollow feeling of pure, overwhelming despair hit you square in the chest at that. If that monstrous creature had survived what you’d seen Leon do to it, if it could regenerate the twisted, gaping socket you’d seen its head reduced to into something that could still hunt and hunger for prey... Making yourself breathe as slowly as you could, feeling the crush of cold and darkness and death around the feeble flame of your existence, you didn’t wonder if Leon would find you - you only wondered if you’d still be alive when he did.

“There might be a way to kill it,” Grace said, but her voice was shaky and unsure. “It burns when it comes into the light. If... if we can find a way to - ”

Cutting herself off, she ran over to the nearby tabletop littered with files. Grabbing one, she rifled through it and read hurriedly through the neatly typed notice to the workers of the plant.

“There,” she said, crumpling the edges of the file in shaking hands. “There’s a control panel that opens a hatch in the roof.”

She went back the way you’d come and found the panel, jamming her palm against the button and making the roof creak and rattle open. The bright glare of morning streamed down from the gap in the toothed hatch, a strange, foreign comfort you’d almost forgotten existed - and then it juddered and screeched to a stop when it was barely open, a computerized voice ringing through the storage bay to alert you to the problem as the panel flashed red.

“Insufficient power. Reset the power distribution units on the lower floor.”

Grace groaned in frustration and exhaustion, running a hand over her face.

“I’m going to try and get the power back on,” she said. “Will you stay with Emily?” 

You nodded, wishing there was something you could do to help, wishing Leon was with you. She looked back to the bay cluttered with forgotten equipment.

“I’ll close the hatch and seal you in,” she said, her hands shaking as she gripped your arm and led you back towards the table where she’d found the file. “I don’t think that... that thing will be able to get you through the door. As soon as I get the power on, we can... we can...”

She trailed off, not knowing what to do after that, and you were no help. You were always no help, and it brought a sickening guilt to be so useless when the burden of merely surviving was so great.

“Leon said he’s coming,” you said, offering the only hope you had. “He promised. He’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” she said, seeming to speak more to herself than you as she latched onto what you’d said. “We’ll get the hatch open, and we’ll wait for Leon.” She touched a hand to Emily’s face and spoke to her gently. “I’ll be right back. My friend is going to take good care of you while I’m gone.”

Your throat tightened against the swell of guilty tears that threatened. You would gladly do what you could, but in the face of such overwhelming odds, what you could do wasn’t very much.

Grace pressed the button on the control panel that closed the heavy, groaning door, sealing you and Emily in the frigid, quiet gloom with all the cheer of a mausoleum. Sitting on one of the flat steel girders, thinking your lap might be warmer and more comfortable for Emily than lying on the cold metal itself, you held her with one hand and wriggled out of your sweater with the other. Wrapping it around her, you cradled her to your chest and pressed few gentle fingers under her jaw to check her thready pulse.

“Where’s Grace?” she asked, her voice as weak and fragile as frost.

“She’s coming, sweetheart.” You touched your fingers to her cold cheek, thinking again of how awful it was that a child had been trapped in such a place, thinking numbly that she’d been rescued from the clinic just to die in this bleak tomb of metal and dark water. “She went to turn the power back on. When she and Leon come back, we’ll find a way out.”

She stirred, her pixie expression flickering with pain. “Leon?”

“He’s my friend,” you said softly. You brushed her white hair back from her ghostly pale face. “He’s Grace’s friend too, and he’s going to help us get out of here.” You knew he would. It was the only flicker of hope you had. Even if you were just a civilian, even if you’d been put somewhere you didn’t belong by some cruel twist of fate, Leon wouldn’t leave you. You, Grace, and Emily - all of you could depend on him to find you when he’d promised he would.

Emily curled closer to you, shivering with cold and weak with pain, and you ran a soothing hand over her back as the quiet darkness loomed around you like a living thing. Your watch beeped, an oddly mundane sound breaking into the oppressive silence - 6:30 am. You’d lived through the night at least, but the thought of the morning sun was as phantasmic and fleeting as smoke. The passage of time was meaningless down here in this cavern of still machinery and unseen rivers, and you held Emily and stared blankly ahead as you listened to her slow, rattling breaths and waited for the door to open again.

“Power has been successfully restored.”

The loud, metallic voice made you jump, and you quickly settled for Emily’s sake and felt a flood of guilt for jostling her even on accident. But she didn’t flinch, didn’t show any reaction at all, and your heart leapt into your throat.

“Emily?” Dread raked its icy fingers down your back as you shook her a little. “Emily, can you hear me? Open your eyes.”

The silence rang in your ears, and you pressed your fingers to her throat to feel for a pulse. 

Nothing.

“Fuck, no, no, no - Emily, wake up, please - ”

Guilt and grief and panic knocked the breath out of you, and you called her name and shook her harder and dug your fingers deeper against her ice-cold skin, praying to feel one little heartbeat, just one, but there was nothing, just an awful stillness, and there was no one else to help her but you.

Trembling violently, you laid her carefully on the frigid steel and knelt over her with your fingers laced and the heel of your palm against her sternum, and you pressed your hands deeply against the fragile cage that held her little heart and tried to make it beat again. One, two, three, four, five. You remembered some training you’d done to be certified as a teacher, some memory from a different life, some naive confidence that you’d never really need to know how to do such a thing because there were always hospitals and doctors and people who weren’t you, people who weren’t useless, people who knew what to do. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. You felt the stitches on your palm strain and bleed anew, felt the surprising give of Emily’s ribcage under your hands, felt the real and awful truth that you’d let a child die in your arms when you’d promised to take care of her. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

Something shrieked in agony beyond the heavy door as the hatch groaned and rattled open, a grotesque sizzling and rupturing and dripping like a hellish harmonic accompaniment, but the only thing you heard was the dull thump, thump, thump of your hands against Emily’s chest. Your entire right arm was numb from the tips of your fingers to the crest of your shoulder, and if your broken wrist protested the deep, difficult effort of trying to keep Emily’s heart going, you didn’t feel it. You didn’t feel anything. The ache in your shoulders, the tears on your face, the bone-deep cold that settled in to make a permanent home in your broken, tired body. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

“Emily!” 

Grace’s anguished cry was like an arrow to your heart, piercing through every last defense, and you let her push you roughly aside and take up the work of trying to keep that small, silent flame from going out altogether. You crouched with your head in your hands, dizzy and sick and hurting and nothing, numb, frozen, empty - for a long time, there was only the scent of blood and cold water and iron, the sound of gasping breath and cracking ribs, the sight of someone beyond exhaustion pushing every ounce of strength she had left into the effort of holding onto something that was already gone. 

“Wake up!” Grace’s voice was raw and shattered, bouncing off the cavernous darkness like a million bits of shining glass. “Please, Emily!”

You didn’t know how long it lasted, but finally, when the shadow of death settled as heavy and quiet as a blanket of new snow, Grace fell to her knees and grasped Emily’s white, lifeless hand and sobbed like her own heart had given out too. Blood dripped from your fingers and pattered on the floor, bright, vivid evidence that you were alive while the child you’d cradled and tried to help was dead. Your sweater still pooled around her small frame, a final taunt that the one scrap of comfort you could give had been too little, too late.

“Emily?”

Grace gasped, a choking, desperate thing, and you saw her hover over Emily as the little girl’s hand jerked like a marionette on a string. You couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t understand how something so impossible could happen, but it did - and Grace pressed her shaking hands to Emily’s face and begged her to open her eyes, to come back, to not let that little flicker of life give out like you’d both thought it had. 

Emily’s eyes flew open, a ghoulish scream tearing from her unhinged jaw, her little body twisting and writhing under some savage affliction of pain and terror. Grace scrambled away from her, hysterical and sobbing; you felt your body move without you telling it to, trying to run, but there was nowhere to go and barricades of darkness and steel that kept you trapped, cornered, pressed against the wall as you watched in abject horror as Emily thrashed and convulsed and turned into something beyond the mind’s ability to comprehend. The little girl you’d held to your chest transfigured into a towering knot of teeth and claws and wet, rotting flesh, and you stood frozen in a miasma of excruciating fear and numb disbelief as you watched it happen right in front of you.

A gunshot rang like a thunderclap through the darkness, and you could do nothing but watch as Leon fired again and again at the hulking mass that shrieked and wailed and heaved its body towards him. Grace clawed at Leon’s arm and begged him to stop, pleading with him to listen that it wasn’t a monster, it was Emily, and he stood with the cold immovability of a mountain and fired at it over and over and over until it finally gave one last, horrible cry and collapsed with a rattling crash.

“No!” Grace ran to the lifeless creature and threw herself on its bloodied, festering body, a sound of pure anguish ripping from her throat. She turned her face to Leon and snarled at him - “I wanted to save her!”

You would have missed it if your gaze hadn’t been riveted on him, but Leon took that like a blow, stumbling back a little under the weight of it.

“You don’t understand,” he rasped. “That’s not - ”

“No!” Grace shot to her feet. “I never would have escaped without her!” She dragged her hands over her face, clawing at her own skin. “This is all my fault, again!”

Leon stepped towards her. “Look, I get it. Trust me, I get it.” His expression was a mask of deep hurt that astounded you in its clarity, the poignant ache of it etched into the lines of his face.

“But we’re still alive,” he said, an edge of unsteadiness in his voice. “We have to keep going.”

Grace didn’t say anything for a long moment. Taking the revolver he’d given her, she tossed it at his feet.

“No.”

His hand flexed at his side as if wanting to reach out to her. “Grace - ”

She left, giving one last agonized glance at the thing that used to be Emily, and he let her go. You didn’t do anything, couldn’t do anything; and it was only when Leon staggered and heavily took a knee that you were reminded you had the ability to move at all, shrinking back in fragile surprise when he coughed up blood onto the metal floor.

“Leon?” 

He coughed again and spat out a mouthful of blood, running his fist over his mouth as he took a rough, shaking breath. “What is it, sunny?”

When you worked up the courage to respond, your voice was weak and brittle, laced with a different kind of fear. 

“W-why did you do that?” 

It was a stupid question, because he was obviously hurt somehow; but in some fractured part of you, you found yourself waiting for him to turn into something horrific and mindless and monstrous too.

He sighed and got to his feet like the weight of the world was squarely on his shoulders, pressing a hand to his chest for just a moment to try and ease the pain there.

“Well, it wasn’t for fun,” he said, his voice shot. He cleared his throat. “I’m alright, sunny. It’s nothing new.”

That didn’t make any sense. You hadn’t seen him do anything like that the whole time you’d been together. You couldn’t understand why he wasn’t panicking, why he looked like it was more of an inconvenience than anything else that he might drop dead right at your feet.

You met his eyes, suddenly angry, a flood of tears making him blur before you.

“If you’re gonna d-die,” you said brokenly, “or if you’re gonna turn into something horrible and try to kill me, you can go ahead and save it. I’ve had enough.”

He shook his head. “I’m not gonna die.” You heard the unspoken end of that statement, the looming not yet that made you even angrier. “And I don’t plan on turning into anything.”

“I’m sure Emily didn’t plan to either,” you snapped, your eyes drawn almost against your will to look behind him at the body of some creature you’d known as a hurt little girl. A sickening wave of grief and despair made your stomach roll, and you pressed a shaking hand to your mouth and hunched over like you could protect yourself from something that was inside of you, writhing and poisonous and ready to strike.

“Sunny?” He didn’t sound surprised at your display, more like he was trying to gauge if he should be concerned or just let it run its course, and you gave a pitiful groan.

“I’m gonna be sick,” you managed.

“Okay.” His voice was tired, understanding, worn to a thin, fraying edge. “That’s alright.”

You turned and leaned heavily with your hand pressed to the wall as your whole body protested the stain you’d put it through, the weight of living through things you’d never envisioned even in your worst nightmares. There was nothing to purge, though, and it was a hard and useless effort for nothing to be any better; when it was over, your tried to scrub the patina of heartache and sickness and misery off your face and couldn’t quite manage it.

“I let her die,” you said, your voice rough and ugly. You ran your shaking hands over your face and smudged the tears and blood and sweat that clung to you. “I was supposed to take care of her. She died in my arms, and I just let it happen.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, so sure of something he hadn’t been there for. “She was hurt before we ever found them, and there was nothing you could have done.”

You looked blankly at the bandage on your hand that was dark with blood again, the discoloration of your wrist as it hung at an unnatural angle. 

“I tried to - to keep her heart going, but...” You coughed and choked again, panting, dizzy. “Why did she turn into that... that thing?”

“I don’t know. Victor was experimenting on people here, and - ”

“Children,” you said, your voice catching on a sob. “He was experimenting on children, Leon.”

His jaw worked. “Yes. And she was one of them. There was nothing any of us could have done to keep her from turning. It would have happened no matter what - and it’s not your fault, sunny.”

An anguished groan seemed to pull itself from somewhere so deep under your ribs that it hurt to give voice to it, and you were so tired, and you would have collapsed on the bloodstained metal at your feet if he hadn’t caught you. Like you were a little girl, he put his arm under your knees and scooped you up and held you, and you could do nothing but put your arms around his neck and cry and cry and cry. 

“Okay, sunny,” he soothed, resting his scruffy jaw against your hair for a moment. “You’re alright. I gotcha.”

Heaving, miserable sobs tumbled out of you so quickly you couldn’t catch your breath.

“I can’t - Leon, I can’t - ”

“I know. Big, deep breath, sunny.”

You tried to do as he said, pressing your face to his shoulder as you drew in a desperate, shuddering inhale.

“Good girl,” he said, his voice low and tired. He carried you towards the door that had been opened and up the stairs to the bright glare of sunlight at the top of them, and if he was taxed by the effort of carrying not only himself but you too, it didn’t show. “I’m gonna get you out of here. We’re almost done.”

“But I - I don’t want - ” You crumpled the fabric of his shirt in your shaking hands, and your voice was pitiful when you got the words out. “I don’t want you to leave.”

He held you a little closer then. “One thing at a time, sunny. We’ll be alright.”

At the top of the stairs, the flood of morning sunlight was blinding and cold and strange. The sky was a pale gold, overcast and windswept; the remains of Raccoon City stood in the distance like a forgotten monument of waste and death and desolation, a reminder that what you’d thought was safely in the past still crawled and hungered in the belly of the beast you’d only just escaped from.

And yet, as the chilly autumn air skimmed over you, redolent of pine and rain and fallen leaves, you felt yourself take your first real breath since all of it had started. You and Leon were alive - for now, at least - and the sun hadn’t fallen from the sky and the morning birds still warbled their overlapping songs that seemed too sweet for all you’d been through. Leon set you on your feet, gentle and slow, and you held the railing of the loading dock as the breeze pulled strands of lank, tangled hair from your braid. 

“Sherry, I need a chopper at the water treatment plant.” He checked his watch and looked out towards Raccoon City. “West side loading dock. Tell them to prep for civilian evac and have a med team on standby at the base.”

Your grip on the railing tightened. When he came to stand at your side, you didn’t look at him.

“Where do you think Grace went?” you asked softly.

He sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I have a gut feeling she’s with Victor.” He nodded towards something behind you. “And I bet you a hundred dollars that’s them headed into the city right now.”

You turned to see a distant helicopter that did seem to be going towards Raccoon City.

“But why?” you asked, barely able to make sense of the pale sunshine and the fact that you were still alive, let alone try to untangle the further mysteries of Gideon’s plan. “What does he want with her? And what’s still in the city that could be worth taking her to?”

“All good questions, sunny.” He groaned a little as he sat with his back to the low concrete barrier that divided the loading dock from the woods around it. “Questions which, after some coffee and a closer look at Victor’s files, I’m gonna try and find the answers to.”

You sat next to him, drawing your knees up to your chest, thinking about the files he’d found on Gideon’s computer. You also thought about mundane things, like Leon in the early morning with a mug of coffee in hand as he readied himself for work, and tried to remind yourself that a quiet moment like that with him didn’t belong to you, even in your imagination.

“How do you take your coffee?” you asked. It was a silly question, meaningless, trivial - but the corner of his mouth tipped up, and the resolve you were trying hard to maintain against falling for him crumbled as quickly as you could shore it up.

“Black,” he said, just like you’d thought he would. “What about you?”

You sighed. “Oh, you know. Lots of cream and sugar. Something seasonal if I can get it.”

He breathed a laugh. “I think I could have guessed that.” Leaning his head back, he tilted his face up towards the diffuse sunlight and closed his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about those waffles you were talking about earlier. They’re starting to sound pretty good right about now.”

You’d lost your appetite completely. Absently, you touched the frayed, bloody edge of your bandage and saw the tendrils of the bruise had at least not gone any further since you’d last looked at them. 

“I’m sorry I looked at the files,” you said quietly. “And I’m sorry I was... in the way.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and you withdrew further into yourself, wishing you hadn’t said anything. Maybe he was still angry, and you didn’t want these last moments with him to be ones where he’d yell at you again.

“I, uh...” He cleared his throat, his hand flexing uncomfortably where he propped it on his raised knee. “I’m the one who should apologize, sunny. It was wrong of me to treat you like that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But the investigation - ”

“There’s not really an investigation,” he said. “Not officially. I’m not exactly working in a sanctioned capacity with this thing, so I have about as much clearance to look at that stuff as you do.”

You looked over at him. “What do you mean? You’re... you’re not with the DSO?”

“No, I am. But I wasn’t told to look into the clinic. It’s sort of a...” He shook his head. “Personal thing, I guess.”

You didn’t know what that meant, but you also knew he wasn’t just somebody off the street looking into bioterrorism for kicks like you’d been for a lot of your life. He was too trained and skilled to be doing something like this as a hobby, and unless Sherry was just an extremely well-connected conspiracy nut herself, he had plenty of official power at his disposal.

“A few weeks ago,” he said, “the DSO caught wind of a string of murders. The higher-ups didn’t think it was anything we needed to look into, and so they left it for the FBI and whoever else wanted it. But Sherry and I dig some digging, and we found out that all of the victims were survivors of Raccoon City.”

Your stomach gave an uncomfortable little twist at that.

“You asked me if there was something personal about Raccoon City for me,” you said. “Is there... something personal about it for you?”

He looked beyond you to the skyline of the city, the grey, deadened shell of a place that used to hold such life, such simple pleasures as work and play and community and family. His expression flickered with the same pain you’d seen him show earlier, when he told Grace he understood the grief of what she thought was a legacy of failure.

“I was police officer,” he said. His voice was low and colorless. “Fresh out of the academy and on my way to my first day of work.” He huffed a mirthless laugh. “I was really late, too. Quite a first impression I was planning to make.”

You said nothing, watching his face, hoping his story wouldn’t go the way you thought it would.

He sighed. “Anyway, I showed up for my first shift at the RPD in the middle of the night on September 29, 1998.” He scuffed his hand over his jaw and avoided your eyes. “I guess you can put together how wonderful an experience that was.”

From what you’d learned in your research, trying to find anything that would help you come to terms with or at least understand why you’d grown up without your father, the night of the outbreak had been hell on earth. Neighbors, friends, family members all turning into mindless monsters, the city in chaos, first responders - including your father, including Leon - all doing what they could to help a problem that was beyond anyone’s ability to solve. 

“How did you get out?” you asked quietly, your voice hushed in respect for the awful loss of so much life that he’d seen first-hand. You’d been there too, but you were too little to remember, and no amount of research could ever come close to vivid, lifelong memories of such devastation and ruin.

“That’s kind of a long story,” he said. “But I found Sherry - she was just a kid then - and a friend of mine, Claire, and the three of us made it out by the skin of our teeth.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-one. Barely more than a kid myself.”

Neither of you spoke for a long time. The sun rose higher; both of your watches chimed as it reached seven in the morning, the end of your shift. He coughed a few times, and though there wasn’t any blood, you still felt a gnawing dread that wouldn’t let go of you at the sound. 

“So, you found out the victims were all from Raccoon City,” you said. “Do you know who killed them?”

He took a deep breath, as if steeling himself. 

“They weren’t killed,” he said. “They were sick. They all had the same black marks like the ones in Victor’s files, but none of the coroner’s reports knew what they were.”

Your heart jumped into your throat, and you put your bandaged hand to your chest so you wouldn’t look at it. 

“W-what was it?” you asked. “What were they sick with?”

When he didn’t answer, you looked over at him and saw a tired, resigned expression that told you he knew and didn’t want to say, and you realized that some part of you knew too, had known all along what those pictures had shown. Survivors of Raccoon City with black marks on their skin. Umbrella’s curse.

“T-Virus?” you said, your voice barely audible. “They died of T-Virus?”

He didn’t say anything. Your ears were ringing, your head pounding as you tried to make sense of it.

“But I thought the bomb killed everyone who was infected,” you said, the words stumbling over each other as your mind worked faster than you could talk. “They didn’t destroy the city just to contain the virus, obviously, but I... I always thought it still ended up doing that while Umbrella or the government or whoever was trying to cover their tracks.”

He closed his fist, the leather of his glove creaking a little with the motion. 

“I thought so too. But Victor’s files said it’s some dormant strain of it that didn’t show up until now, and anybody who got out of the city before they bombed it could be infected and not even know it.”

“Are you sure?” you pressed, almost feeling like you could sense the spread of the virus through your own body as you curled your hand so tightly that it shook with the pain of it. “You’re positive that’s what it is?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“But how do you know?”

He hesitated, then pulled off the glove from his right hand. Your eyes widened.

“That’s how I know.”