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Sherry loses her father on a night in February in the same place where she lost her other father, in Raccoon City. It would be ironic and even funny if her eyes weren't red and the tears weren't drying on her parched skin. She holds Leon's cold hand and waits, she waits and waits with all her heart for her to wake up twelve years old again, with the blond man's gentle hands rocking her slightly to wake her from a nightmare (it's always the same, it's always about Claire dying while holding her close, because Sherry knows she would do that and maybe back then that was her biggest fear, and maybe nowadays it remains one of her biggest fears but Claire doesn't know that and she doesn't need to know that).
Leon would hug her and smile at her as she slept peacefully in his lap. He would run his hand through her hair and stroke it until her eyes felt heavy again and she fell into a dreamless sleep. The next morning, he would have made pancakes ("your favorite," he would say, a lopsided smile adorning his face), and hot coffee would be on the table, and they would eat together while he told exaggerated stories and she would laugh until her stomach hurt.
This won't happen because Leon is in front of her, a cloth covering his cold, dead body, beginning to smell of decomposition (a smell she knows so well but never expected from someone like Leon. Always larger than life, always stronger than her, more capable, braver, always a hero, always her hero). She remains kneeling as Claire arrives, the woman's red hair falling to her shoulders without its usual ponytail, her eyes wide and her hands trembling as she grips the doorframe.
Her eyes soften at the sight of her, tears threatening to fall as her mouth opens and the saddest, most broken sound she'd ever heard comes from Claire's mouth reaches her ears.
“Oh, Sherry…”, she says, and Sherry feels like a child again, small, helpless, and clumsy as she throws herself into Claire’s arms and cries and cries and cries (that’s all she seems able to do in the last few hours). Claire hugs her, it’s awkward because of her size, but Sherry can’t find in herself any reason to care because it’s Claire, and Leon is dead.
Dead like her father.
Dead like her mother.
Dead like all of Raccoon City.
Maybe he took a little bit of her with him, too.
Leon signed his soul to the devil for her. There are documents and more documents proving it, videos and more videos of interrogations where they pressure him and pull every button they can find, but he never breaks. No admissions of guilt come out, nothing about Claire's location, about who Ada Wong was, what she was. It never came out, she thinks, Leon never told any of that. But that was never what the suits really wanted at the end of the day, it was always Leon.
He would bend and buckle but never, ever break.
Until she enters the conversation. Sherry is all he has left. The image Leon has of her is obvious: small, defenseless, but undeniably his, and Leon is fiercely protective. He signs off on his own life as if it were nothing; his hand doesn't tremble when he signs the papers, where he practically becomes a government dog, just as they don't tremble when her custody papers are on his desk with her name written in blue ink. Leon is twenty-two years old, and Sherry has just turned twelve, and she has just stolen his entire life.
When he's not enduring government-sanctioned torture in the form of training, he's buying dolls and tying her hair in ponytails. When he's not confronting horrors, monsters that were once human, he's hugging her tightly after a nightmare, cooking junk food for them to eat while watching a silly movie. She clings to him and laughs when a lame joke is told, and he laughs back at the silly joke as if he has no other worries in the world besides her.
Despite everything, Sherry never took his last name. She was always Sherry Birkin, and he was always Leon Kennedy. Nowadays she kind of regrets it; the idea crossed her mind once or twice in the years she knew him, but here, now as they bury him, as Claire holds her hand, she kind of wishes she had his last name, maybe then he wouldn't have been the last S. Kennedy, maybe then he would have been a little less lonely and—and she doesn't know.
She honestly doesn't know.
Grace hugs her tightly. Her wounded arms grip her tightly, and in her ear she whispers, “I know how it feels.”
“I…” Grace begins. “I slept in my mother’s bed every day after she died.”
The admission is quiet, and perhaps it’s the first time Grace has admitted this level of vulnerability.
“It helped.” Her hands caressed her back. “It made me miss her a little less. Even… even after everything.”
“Your mother loved you, Grace.”
“Your father did too.”
It's Hunnigan who returns his remaining belongings from the office. Everything he had left in his office: photos, weapons, albums.
Jake finds her crying the following morning as she looks at how many photos he kept of her, how many he took to the office. From birthdays to graduations.
She doesn't see him die; her calloused hands are typing on keyboards while the agent's heart begins to beat slower and slower. He lies on the destroyed pavement of Raccoon City, Elpis taking control of practically his entire body, the virus destroying him from the inside out. She is far away, just like he wanted her to be.
(“We’re running out of time,” she would say.
“I know,” he would reply, and the virus would claim a little more of him.)
“Leon” comes out as a whisper from her mouth, but it feels like a scream. “Leon.”
She’ll repeat his name a million times if it makes him answer “Sherry,” as he says it, in that intonation she knows is reserved only for her. She sits in her office chair as she imagines Leon, alone, listening to his name being spoken by the little girl he helped save, unable to flutter his eyes open. (But Sherry is a grown woman, and Leon isn't that rookie cop anymore, and she is so far away, yet so close. Sherry stole everything from him, and she couldn’t even hold his hand as he died).
“Leon,” she repeats, feeling tears threatening to fall from her eyes as he remains unresponsive. Leon always answers her.
“Leon,” her voice grows stronger, and the blond man’s eyes slowly open. They wander to the sides, Elpis undoubtedly weakening him more and more. “Leon, answer me.”
“Sherry,” he says.
“I’m here,” she replies. It’s soft, it’s wet, he undoubtedly notices.
“It's ok,” he replies. “I always knew I would go out like this.”
“You’re not dying.”
“Ah, Sherry. We both know that’s not true.” He laughs a wet, weak laugh. “And hey, you’re with me, I always thought I was going to die alone.”
“Stop talking like that, you’re not dying.”
“I hope you grow old, Sherry, far beyond my fifty years.”
It’s incredible how you can sense the life fading from someone, even from afar, miles away, without physical contact, without your eyes meeting those of the dying person. Sherry doesn’t need to see Leon to feel him die; she feels it in her soul, in the way her stomach churns, in the way things seem to have become meaningless for a few seconds.
"There's more to life than this moment, Sherry. Don't let it define you."
It's truly amazing.