Chapter Text
September was reaching its end. This was the first September after he had saved Ashley from Spain. The maple trees on the streets started to turn from green to bright red. The sun seemed less threatening as Leon looked out from the office window. He had to wear a leather jacket to stay warm when he commuted. He should have applied for leave during this time in the past years. By now, he should have already been holding a flight ticket in an airport, ready for his flight to the place where it all started.
He almost forgot how many years the habit lasted. He lost count after the fourth year.
It is because he would get back to that place when he felt lost, too, apart from each September.
He kept revisiting that city in his nightmares. The terror kept coming back and haunted him even now. The place he vowed to serve and protect became a living hell filled with dead and undead. The building holding his welcoming party became a cage that locked the survivor inside out. The superior who gave him some guidance later turned into a monster right in front of him. He managed to focus on how to survive and escape so that he could put the despair and the fear aside at the moment. Claire was just a college student and he, rookie or not, was a trained police officer. He had to do what he could do to protect her.
Then at some point, he met Ada.
He still remembered how his breath was taken away as he first landed his eyes on her.
She just saved him from the infected dog. When he lifted his eyes from the dog, there she was, standing in the dark with the trench coat that hugged her curves perfectly. She walked into the dim light elegantly, and he was lying on the floor panting. He knew nothing about her but he could tell she was confident and she knew what she was doing.
She said she was an FBI agent.
Her voice was a bit lower than he expected, given her height and build. At that moment, the idea of Ada Wong burnt into his brain eternally.
She kept appearing out of nowhere, saying something that barely made any sense but was intriguing, then left him wandering. Yet, she would save him every time when he thought that was the end of him. That was the reason he kept chasing after her despite her cold rejects.
Later he knew none of the things she said about her was true.
In the end, she did not make it. She was left in that hell forever. The small part of her that survived in his memory, was built on the lies that she fed him. He knew her name was not Ada Wong. He knew she was not an FBI agent. Whatever the true identity she had, spy or mercenary, it was buried into ashes along with her body and the undead.
Despite all the lies she said and betrayals she did to him, she walked him through his fateful nightmare. He could never survive without her presence.
From time to time, he could still feel his scar screamed in pain as he was reliving the moment he tried to hold her weight on the bridge. He could feel her hand become colder and colder in seconds even though he was in an enormous amount of pain. His mind was split into half as one part of him memorized every single detail at that moment calmly, and his heart fell into an abyss, it felt like he was the one who was falling off the edge. Every time he was screaming her name waking up, all that he could grab was air.
He remembered the red blood spreading on her shoulder, her face was in shock, she needed to look at her shoulder to fully realize she just got shot.
Too many things happened at that moment. As they laid their eyes on Annette, their ground tilled to one side, then he could see Ada was flying over the edge of the platform. His body automatically jumped to her before his brain could tell what was actually going on. Then all he could do was to hold her slipping wrist.
As soon as she muttered his name like a sighing prayer, he could hear the defect in her voice. She had already given up on life even though he managed to catch her.
He could not recall what he exactly said, but he remembered he begged. He must look pathetic in her eyes. Because he remembered precisely what she said.
“Forget it.”
“It’s not worth it.”
They both knew it was impossible for him to pull her up with the gunshot wound on his chest.
In seconds, he knew there was no more time for pleading her to live. She was inevitably going to die. They just met several hours ago. And he thought she had already known what her death would do to him. He knew it in those two seconds of silence. Her face was apologetic but was filled with relief, she accepted her fate. And in the last of her breathing moments, she tried to alleviate his pain.
“Take care of yourself, Leon.” She said,
Then, she slipped through his grip and fell into the darkness.
The instant she lowered her gun, he thought whatever she was, they could have a future. And all that was gone. The bullet hole on her shoulder, the gunshot wound on his chest, the slipping wrist in his hand, and the splitting pain in his muscle. They all screamed the inescapable truth.
For years, he could not stop himself from wondering the ifs. He knew he would still refuse to give her the sample, but if he chose to confront her in a different place and different time, he would not end up seeing her ghost haunting his dreams and his waking moments for all these years.
He tried to blame her for telling him to take care of himself.
She should have known better that by showing she cared, she would haunt him for years. She thought the goodbye could give him some kind of closure, but it did not. It kept reminding him that she cared. She was free from the cold and calculating shell she built the moment she lowered her gun to him. She cared enough about him to say a proper goodbye to him. And he failed her.
But then he knew that was impossible. Her face was undeniably relieved and genuine. It was like she was tired of her life and she was happy to say goodbye.
In the end, she did not choose to get confronted and shot. It was his choice leading to her shot and falling off the platform.
If she hated her life so much that she was relieved to face her death, all that he could do was to let her live in his memory, the idea of Ada Wong, who gave her mission up and tried her best to alleviate his pain in her final moments, all along with the time they spent together in that rotting hell, the little details that showed she cared. As long as Leon Kennedy lived, she lived with him.
It was her. She made him, he thought. He found out she made a large part of that of the man he became now, large enough that he refused to acknowledge these years and realized once again after she appeared in front of him again.
She marked his skin with a scar permanently on his chest as he willingly put himself between her and a bullet in a heartbeat years ago. She got a permanent place in his heart and his nightmare as she slipped his grip and fell into the darkness. He could not bear the guilt and regret when moments ago she lowered the gun, lowered her guard, moments later she fell down into the abyss because of him.
He forgot how long he had stared at the office window, it was completely dark and raining outside now. The steaming cup of coffee on his desk had already turned cold, and most of the agents had already left the office.
He took an umbrella, put on his jacket, and he stared at the leave application on his desk.
He knew Albert Wesker’s name when he started working as an agent. He knew Wesker’s doing in multiple bioterrorist incidents. Lately, Chris told him that Wesker worked with an Asian female spy on several occasions.
He thought it could have been her.
Another voice in his mind said it was just his wishful thinking. There were so many Asians in the world. He saw it with his eyes, she fell into the abyss in front of him. The one that Wesker worked with just could not be her.
However, he could not help that little hope starting to light up his heart, no matter how hard he tried to smother that spark. Every time he saw a woman wearing a trench coat and sunglasses in the grocery line, every time he walked past some pedestrians wearing red with a similar build of her, that spark just kept coming back.
He could not help to picture how they might meet again. Maybe he met her when he was away, visiting somewhere during his vacation. Maybe he met her in the coffee shop that he went to from time to time. Maybe he met her when he turned in the next corner.
He was conscious of the fact that if she ever survived, she could not escape from the life that she clearly hated so much. The chance of them circling back to square one, with their guns pointing to each other, was way more likely than those wishful thoughts he had.
He understood it was never a choice that he could make, yet he could pay the price in a heartbeat if it meant she could stand right in front of him with a gun pointing to him, breathing.
The storm rolled in, the thunder took him back to the office. The heavy rain hit the windows so violently that he felt calm standing inside. He took the application and walked to his boss’s office door.
It was meaningless for him to visit that place.
He held the leave application right above a rubbish bin.
There were so many things he could mourn for that night, but those were not the main reason that kept him coming back there for years.
The main reason turned out to be still breathing, and she sneaked behind his back, happily pointing her gun to his lower back like it was a flirting game as if nothing had happened for all those years.
He replied to her casual greeting with a knife right under her neck, with his other hand gripping her warm wrist again and took the gun away. The moment he felt her warmth along his arm pressing against her arm, his fingertips holding her wrist to prevent her from pointing the gun to him, her genuine surprise slipped on her face, with the grasp she breathed, the reality of Ada Wong was still alive hit him like a train.
That she was not in his dream. That she was standing right in front of him. That care part of her, instead of the facade she wore most of the time, just revealed inches from his eyes.
Suddenly, it was too much. It was like he was electrocuted by these cues, all he could manage to do was to pretend to be calm, and walked away as far from her as possible so that he could think.
There she was, taking off her sunglasses with a sly smile. “Leon, long time no see.” She said in her husky voice, as if the last time they had seen each other, they were not shot and he was not holding on to her wrist for dear life, and she did not slip into the total darkness beneath them.
All those pain and guilt he bore, all those nights he woke up screaming her name, all those tears falling uncontrollably on his cheek in his weakest moments sounded like a sick joke to him.
Then, he heard himself say, “So, it is true.”
“True? About what?” She asked.
“You, working with Wesker.” he managed.
She admitted it like it was not a big deal. He could not stop himself from asking questions that he knew she would not answer. After that, she left with a grand exit, using a flash grenade and a line of flirt, “See you around.”, leaving him standing and calling out her name.
And with that, a simple rescue mission turned out to be a way more complicated incident unraveling in front of his eyes. She kept coming back and forth in his mission, sometimes saving his ass, sometimes pointing a gun at him like it was the way they were all along. She acted like he should have picked up and accustomed to the nature of their relationship the moment he confronted her on that bridge years ago.
He managed to focus his thoughts on how to make it out alive with Ashley. He was convinced that he was no longer the rookie that she played like a violin years ago. He had the skills and mind to fight her back if he needed to. He would not make the same mistake he did years ago.
Yet, when she pointed her gun right at his head, asked him to hand over the sample, that rookie was back.
The rookie Leon screamed to hand in the sample to her. He could not bear to have the same tragedy happening all over again.
To the trained agent Kennedy, it was clear that the sample was not the main objective in his mission, and he still believed she would never shoot him. He just did not know how she would use the sample. If she put the sample in the wrong hand, it would lead to another bioterrorist incident, and that would be on his conscience.
“Ada, you do know what this is?”
They were the survivors from Raccoon City, they both knew what type of hell would rise from a single vial of a sample. He believed because of the brief moment she showed her hatred to her life years ago, it indicated despite her indifferent facade, she had her conscience.
Since they met again, every time she appeared, he could tell she had her own agenda, she knew what she was doing. She was capable.
Therefore, he was willing to risk it. He handed the sample to her.
When they left the island on the jet, Ashley asked, “Who was that woman?” He tried to deflect the question because he could not give a good answer to that.
If he said they escaped from Racoon city years ago, that would not be true because he left her there. If he said they knew each other back then, that would not be true either because he did not know who she was now, and he did not know what she was back then. If he said they were acquaintances, how could he explain the scar on his chest? Their relationship would be way too intimate than acquaintances given the scar she left on his chest.
All he managed to reply was, “She’s like a part of me that I can’t let go. Let’s leave it at that.”
Any more comments on that would be a lie.
In the beginning, he went back to the memorial site of Raccoon City to give himself a space and time to mourn her. He thought if he tried to restrict the time and place to think of her, she would be less haunted in his normal days.
He was wrong. It did not help. The thought of her still danced into his mind when he was not doing anything that required his active concentration, even though he kept visiting for the first several years. But the visit gave him some peace so it became a habit.
Every time he lost a battle, every time he came back losing his teammates, he would go there. He wondered what her comment would be if she could live and see who he had become. He would pretend she was there, he would ask him if losing her life to someone like him was worth it. He reminded himself he must live up to the standard and make it worth what she paid for. It was the way it was.
He needed to remember that he owned everyone who was buried down there, including the woman who fell into darkness in front of him, to fight the battle that they could not fight, simply because he survived, and they did not.
Sometimes he dreamt he went back to that wasteland where he found her. She just looked into his eyes, said nothing and they just kept wandering around the facility to find a way out together.
She was cold and blunt back in Raccoon City. She kept rejecting him with that distant and stony tone. She acted like she was apathetic with her unbreakable icy facade. Then he came, followed her around, he started to have a glimpse of what was underneath that facade. He could say she was inexperienced because a rookie like him could see what was under her mask.
In Spain, she was more flirty and smiling all the time, as if she was open and approachable. In the rare moments that he got to look into her hardened eyes, he knew better. She wore her facade like her second layer of skin, if he met her now, she would not help him and he would never be able to see through her facade. She was not the same person back in Raccoon City anymore, and so was he.
He was now trained to tackle bio-weapons. He was less naive than the rookie who just had his first day of duty went south and crawled out alive from the hell-hole, swearing to take down Umbrella Corporation for causing all these. He knew better now that there were always compromises and trade-offs in missions. Even if he managed to get a name or get the evidence back on a mission, the government would still end up doing nothing about it. There were never clear good or bad, yes or no when politics was involved.
He was less rigid now. He learned to joke around even in tough times.
He should go.
He should go and say goodbye to their old selves.
He put his leave application in his boss’s inbox.