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There was a special kind of feeling one could only feel when a hero makes their big speech. A typical “we’re not so different” narrative preached by naïve minds and tender hearts. It was almost endearing, like an animal trapped in a cage, baited by the sweet morsel that would serve as its last meal.
Leon was so tired of those stories, of seeing those so-called pests clawing and scratching and yowling at the hands of its captors. He saw himself in their dark eyes, felt his hands quiver as he balled them into fists. It wanted reason, relevancy, grasping at puffs of smoke and flailing as it tripped over its own feet.
He knew that feeling, had known it intimately enough that he could still trace the scars left behind, the sheer need emblazoned on his heart.
It was why he was standing here now, silently staring down the man before him, and waiting for his two cents on Leon’s dubious morality. Why he was like this, what he could be if he chose to care about others, something like that. He knew a few that would have already begun, stepping close with hesitant steps as though approaching a wounded wolf in the woods.
Rebecca was dead, felled by her own inability to adapt, by the broken promises she’d decided Leon was still human enough to make. He wasn’t proud of her death, nor the wasted potential, just numb to the consequences.
And so, here he stood, clad in his best “villain of the week” attire while the BSAA’s best agents kept their fingers poised on the triggers of their weapons. He didn’t raise his own, didn’t even call Uroboros to surface from beneath his skin. Confidence, arrogance, either way they interpreted was fine, so long as he got what he wanted.
And he would.
“Wesker,” he greeted casually, “Gionne.”
“Kennedy,” he replied coldly, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses.
Leon could see his own glowing eyes reflected in the lenses, inhuman as they burned in the darkness, “Ah, so you’ve heard of me.”
“There was no way we couldn’t have,” Excella added bitingly, “You just love to make messes for us to clean up, hm?”
“Always,” he purred, “How else could I get your attention?”
“You certainly have it now,” Wesker agreed, finger still laid patiently over the trigger.
“Tell you what…” Leon drawled, casually glancing at his watch, “Hear me out, and I’ll go quietly.”
“You think we were born yesterday?” Excella growled, “What are you planning?”
“That hurts,” he mimes a pain in his heart, “And here I’m trying to make things easier for you…”
“You have.”
Leon blinks, narrowly hiding his shock as Wesker chimes in, watching him lower his gun in confusion. A handful of files are pulled from his attaché case; they're familiar enough that Leon can easily recognise them despite the distance.
“Found those, did you?”
Wesker raises an eyebrow, “Did we?”
Excella is staring at him with furrowed brows, watching as he casually opens a manila folder while her own hands are still tightly gripping her pistol.
“Blueprints, plans, chemical compositions… door codes,” he stresses, “How convenient that they were laid out so perfectly for your sworn enemies.”
Leon chuckles half-heartedly, “Quite the coincidence.”
“Is that so?” Wesker wonders, “The easiest operation I’ve ever led…and you’re standing at the end of it, unarmed and waiting.”
“It was foolish of me,” Leon guesses, “Is that what you’re thinking?”
“On the contrary,” he answers, “What I’m thinking is that… This was the outcome you wanted all along, wasn’t it, Leon?”
He glares from his perch, and remains silent, but Wesker is like a man on a rampage.
“The Progenitor Virus, Uroboros, they’re the crux of your ‘plans,’ and detailed quite intimately in this little scavenger hunt you’ve made,” he says, utterly confident in the smoking gun he’s seemingly found.
“But this isn’t about either of those, is it?”
“Shut up…” Leon hisses, leather gloves creaking audibly in his balled fists.
“This,” he gestures widely, “Is about the t-Virus.”
“Don’t you fucking say it…!”
He smirks, “This is about Raccoon City.”
In a flash, Leon is gripping his throat, practically snarling, “You don’t know shit about me, Wesker!”
Excella is making to stop him, but Wesker raises a hand, meeting her gaze as he fights the hand on his throat. She stepped back with reluctance, but kept her sights trained on Leon’s head.
“September 30th…1998,” he strained, “You. Arrived. Late.”
Leon sees red, tossing Wesker into the nearest wall and relishing in the audible crack of his skull against the concrete. A splash of blood colours the man’s vividly blonde hair, pouring down his face in rivulets.
But Wesker still wasn’t done.
“An asymptomatic carrier, a one in ten chance…or so you thought.”
“Stop. Talking.” Leon stressed as he approached, leaning down to grip Wesker’s blood-splattered chin, “Or you won’t like what happens next.”
“That night…” He says weakly, coughing through heavy breaths, “Leon S. Kennedy… Cheated death.”
Leon dropped his grip, stumbling back through a hysteric haze that threatened to swallow him whole. Internally, he begged Wesker to stop talking, to stop digging up the memories he’d sworn he’d buried with the rookie cop who survived hell.
No such luck.
“How long?”
Leon nearly laughed, “How long what?”
Wesker leveled him with a stare, a broken lens bearing icy blue eyes that Leon could feel looking through his skin and down to his bones, “How long did it take to find out that you couldn’t die?”
“Fuck,” Leon choked out, hands plastered over his face as though he could keep his ruined psyche from leaking out of his ears.
“You shouldn’t know that…” He decides, cat-like eyes swelling with unshed tears, “How the fuck do you know that?”
“Albert,” Excella queries, “What are you speaking of?”
Wesker sits up in his own puddle of blood, absently rubbing at the wound as though it were a mild headache, “It was nearly ten years ago. A colleague of mine had a sibling who survived the incident.”
Leon froze. It couldn’t be…
“Claire Redfield witnessed Leon Kennedy’s demise that night, dead by the hands of a bio-organic weapon.”
“Claire… She’s alive?” He nearly whispered, “Then Sherry…?”
“Yes,” Wesker answered, “Ms. Birkin was in our custody until she reached the age of majority, she’s now an agent of the BSAA.”
“Jesus,” Leon swears, looking sick.
“Leon,” he turns at the call, Wesker’s taken off his sunglasses, “...Do you still want to die?”
For the first time in ten years…he isn’t sure. t-Phobos, as the mutation was named, robbed him of autonomy long ago. He resented living when they had died, still remembers waking up in a panic on that derailed train, calling out endlessly for two people that would never come. He didn’t have the heart to try and locate their corpses, knowing Claire wouldn’t have wanted him to curl up beside her cadaver and give up.
He still remembers the pain in his heart as it feebly pumped blood around a mortal wound, and that it was nothing compared to the guilt.
He glances at Wesker, utterly lost as his world shatters around him.
“You’re still a terrorist, and you’ll likely be in our custody for the rest of your natural life…” He started, softening ever-so-slightly as he stares at the broken man, “But you’ll be given privileges if you come quietly… Visitation, for example.”
“...All these years I thought she was dead, and now she knows me as an international bio-terrorist,” he laughs a little at the irony, then frowns, “She wouldn’t want to see me now. Neither of them would.”
“You won’t know until you try,” Wesker insists, cringing at how cliché he sounded.
“I have nothing to live for,” he admits, “They’re better off not knowing me as I am now.”
Wesker leans close, pillowing Leon’s cheek in his hand so his thumb can brush away the tears dribbling down his face, “Then prove it.”
“...What?” Leon whispered.
“Prove it,” he reiterated sharply, “You have until we figure out how to permanently stop your heart to figure it out.”
“And then, when the time comes,” he leans in close, hot breaths leaving brands across Leon’s reddened cheeks, “I’ll personally grant you your relief.”
“Promise me,” Leon blurts out, nearly backpedaling.
Wesker pauses a moment, his stare rising in intensity, then nods, “It will be done.”
Leon sags in his grip, his strong arms the only thing between him and the cold hard concrete, and he lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“Sheva’s gonna kill you,” he murmurs.
“No,” he says simply, “She won’t. I cannot be dead. I promised to kill you, after all.”
“You promised,” Leon repeated, fisting a hand in his vest and resting his head on the other man’s shoulder, “You promised…”
Were he a lesser man, he might have crossed his fingers behind his back. Instead, he held Leon up, content with the knowledge that it was a lie.