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“So, we’ve got a couple of new members with us today,” Leon started, before Chris could set the mood to ‘grim acceptance’ with his own customary introduction. “Firstly, long-time unofficial member, now full-fledged member of the Bio-Organic-Super-Soldier program-”
“Woo!” Claire cheered from the seat opposite him, as Chris sighed heavily into his own chair.
Leon continued amid the fervour of the Redfield Peanut Gallery. “I would like to formally welcome our good friend Sherry Birkin to the team!” He gave a dramatic flourish with his claw at the young woman in question - who had, in theory, been eligible for entry long before even him. The G-virus she had been infected with in Raccoon City may have been cured, but some of its benefits - such as the enhanced strength and rapid healing - had remained.
Exposure to the C-virus had changed that, somewhat. Sherry’s eyes were now very slightly orange, and her veins were visible under some of the thinner patches of her skin. She still looked mostly normal, but having spent most of her life since the Raccoon City outbreak in a lab or under heavy guard, this was a much more relaxed environment - so apart from Chris, Carlos, and Sheva, Sherry was the most normal-looking person here.
She beamed at the sight of Claire, who Leon had cautioned Sherry about - the younger Redfield could no longer see, following an incident with dormant T-virus cells mutating in response to another engineered pathogen. On the plus side, the enhanced musculature and batlike-hearing made her an excellent scout and tracker, and she took a respectable amount of pride in taking care of her claws and currently-masked fangs.
This was the first time they’d met in person since before Claire had mutated.
But from the way Claire rose to meet her, and the way Sherry threw herself into Claire’s arms, nothing about their love for each other had changed.
“You look different,” Sherry mused, and Leon honestly couldn’t tell if the wonder in her voice was genuine or forced. “Amazing, but different.”
Claire stilled. Losing 90% of your skin, including your nose and lips, was always going to do a number on a person’s self-esteem - even if Claire couldn’t see herself in the mirror anymore, it didn’t change the fact that the change had happened. But then the edges of her cheeks - the point where her facemask topped out at - twitched upward in the approximation of a smile she was still able to make, and she hugged Sherry for a moment longer before withdrawing.
“God, you’ve gotten tall.” It felt trite - the stock phrase used by extended family members who you didn’t visit well enough for them to know you. It was a depressingly apt comparison.
“Moving on,” Leon couldn’t smile anymore, not like he’d used to - like Claire, the bottom half of his face gave way to rows of razor sharp fangs, although he had at least gained a set of mandibles that could lock into place as a mouthguard. But the upward twitch of said mandibles was as good of a smile as he could perform, nowadays, and he gestured to Helena.
“Coming to us from the Department of Special Operations, we’ve got the woman who sold the world - Helena Harper.” a chorus of oooohs travelled around the room, courtesy of Claire, Jill, Ashley, Carlos and Luis. And now Sherry, he noticed. Helena shifted from toe to toe. Her own mutation had mirrored her late sister’s - her skin was now a sickly pale green, with a few errant blood vessels criss-crossing her arms. Unsure of the dress code, she’d opted for a pair of slacks and a blazer with a lilac blouse, but had taken off the blazer upon seeing the sweatpants Piers and Carlos had both taken to. In the light, her skin seemed to shine with a slight wetness - when stressed or in a combat situation, Helena had complete control over the slime and appendages she was capable of secreting. At the moment, she just looked like she had mercury poisoning.
“Ah, yeah. Hi,” she raised an arm from the folded blazer and gave a little wave. She’d already met Piers, Chris, and Sherry, but the rest of them were a whole bunch of new faces. And, Leon noted - she was the youngest here. “I was there when Leon shot the president.”
Oh, so it was gonna be like that, huh?
“You what?” Jill all but launched forward in her seat, eyes blown with shock but mouth agape with barely-concealed delight. Carlos and Ashley hooted and Sherry pretended to be shocked.
“Hey, hey,” Claire winced at the sudden noise, and Jill relented.
“Sorry, Claire-bear. Leon, you fucking what?” she all but hissed - and she was capable of it, too, with that reptilian tongue. Her head and face had stayed fairly recognisable, even if the corners of her mouth now nearly reached her ears and her eyes had oval-shaped pupils. The dark green scales on the sides of her head and neck stretched all the way down her back, her core, along her arms with her talons and legs with their toe claws. At her full height, Jill was just about taller than Leon - a discrepancy of a half-inch that she never let him forget - but she rarely bothered to actually rise to it.
Leon answered the question pretty smoothly, he thought. “He was already infected - thanks to Ms Harper’s scheming from under duress.”
“Aw, man,” Ashley pouted, her own mandibles flickering in mock disappointment. “He could have made the team!”
The prospect of former US president Adam Benford coming to these monthly hangouts gave Leon a pang of melancholy. He probably would have fit right in. “Whatever,” Leon waved it away, craving a change in topic. “In any case, don’t get the wrong idea about Helena - she’s actually very compassionate, smart, and resourceful, and it’s good to have her on the team.”
“Hear, hear.” Sheva raised a cup of full-fat soda in approval.
“Yeah, yeah,” Helena groused, but fought a smile. “Fuck you too.”
Carlos laughed again. “Oh, you’re gonna get on great.”
She stuck a defiant hand on a cocked hip. “And what’s your story? What makes you a genetic freak with the rest of us?”
“Oh, I can’t show that in polite company,” came the easy quip, and Jill snorted. Carlos was one of the only two regular, non-BOW people in attendance, other than Chris. Then again, the guy was pretty tough and strong - Leon had seen him in action a few times, and wondered if maybe Carlos had just gotten better at hiding whatever was wrong with him. Or luckier.
Helena took the seat next to Sheva, who Leon had only met a few times outside of the meet-ups, but had rapidly grown to like - and decided that she would be a great point of contact for Helena moving forward. Before today, Sheva had been the youngest - though not the most recent addition, considering Claire’s whole ordeal. Unlike Helena but much like Sherry, Sheva’s mutation had left her largely unchanged - when she kept it under control, which was all the time, her only tell was the slight red-orange gleam of her eyes.
Apart from that, Uroborous had meshed with her physiology perfectly. The only successful subject. Sure, sometimes she’d grab a glass of water or a spare mag with a slimy black tentacle, but they usually disappeared again fast enough for Leon to pretend they’d never been there in the first place.
Sheva had been the one to finally browbeat Chris into talking to them all again. Leon, Ashley, and Luis’s respective mutations had been easy for Chris to compartmentalise, but when Jill had crawled out of the tainted water on the Queen Zenobia, already shedding skin and bones cracking into new shapes…
It had been a shock, for certain - one that Chris never quite got over. So when Jill had ‘died’ before Chris could ever reconcile with her metamorphosis, he obviously hadn’t taken it well. After a few relentless years of mission after mission, he’d become a legend in the BSAA - he and Leon had crossed paths once or twice, but Leon had never managed to get through to him. Even Claire had struggled; so Sheva had been a godsend. Finally, a partner who could keep up with Chris as well as his previous one - and sometimes surpass him.
Then Wesker had revealed Jill, his own pet killing machine, a screaming soul trapped in a scaled suit, puppeted with yet another horrific example of biological warfare (she still had some faint scars on her chest from the device) to commit atrocities in his name. Torture upon torture.
Leon didn’t know quite what had happened next - he didn’t want to ask any of them directly about something that had doubtless been a traumatising experience - but from what he could gather, Jill had been forced to inject Sheva with a lethal dose of Uroborous. But Wesker’s plan of forcing Chris to kill both of his partners - or die at their hands - had been dashed spectacularly when Sheva, her blood rich with the strength inherited from the Ndipaya kings of old, had simply stood back up.
The one thing from that whole episode that Chris, Jill, and Sheva would freely share was the glorious moment when Wesker had realised that the first perfect genetic match for Uroborous had been a Nigerian woman, local to the area where the Progenitor virus had been discovered in the first place. He hadn’t taken the revelation well.
Despite their triumph, Chris had almost completely retreated after the whole incident, unable to get away from the reminders that the people he loved just kept getting caught in the crossfire of his own crusade - and Claire’s drastic transformation into a Licker hadn’t helped matters. It was only a combination of Sheva and Jill giving him a severe dressing-down - aided by Barry and Rebecca - that had finally dragged Chris back into their lives.
And thank god they all had, because these monthly meet-ups - mostly just an opportunity to share gossip or show off battle scars - had been something they all sorely needed. Sometimes Carlos, Parker, or Rebecca would pop their head in to say high, as Carlos had today - but Chris had made every single one.
Because it had been his idea in the first place.
Helena had awkwardly taken a cup of something from Sheva, who had indeed taken the opportunity to demonstrate her own mutation; with a sleek black tentacle she had reached back to the drinks table a metre and a half behind her to pick one up and balance it for the other woman’s benefit. It was likely something sweet - one thing they’d all gained from their various second puberties was an increased appreciation for sugar. Another common thread was juicy steaks and porkchops, but Leon and Jill kept that between themselves and Luis.
That just left…
Chris cleared his throat. “This is Piers Nivans - he’s with the BSAA, I guess that hasn’t changed. We’ve been through a lot together, and he’s a damn good man.”
Jill offered a rare smile of sincerity. “We’ve met,” she referenced the six months Chris had been missing, and Piers had been the only other member of the BSAA who had been both determined enough and security-cleared enough to actually learn he had been missing. Apparently he’d earned her respect after that, and Leon decided he’d have to learn the secret because earning Jill’s respect - while not really all that important to him in the long run - was something that had long eluded him.
“Yep, same here,” Sherry volunteered, getting back to her feet to stride across the space and offer Piers a handshake.
With her right hand.
She quickly adjusted, sticking out her left instead, but the damage had been done. Piers’ own mutation, courtesy of a quite frankly stupidly reckless use of the Enhanced C-virus strain, had given him a brand new arm that looked more like a giant sword. The conductive bone poking out of the bumpy, ragged flesh that pulsed and shifted in the light was a genuinely impressive and reliable built-in weapon - it was practically a lightning gun, from how Chris had described it. The original limb had been cut off, and in its place Piers had grown a misshapen bioelectrical organ that he was still struggling to move around with. It bent in unusual, unnatural ways - but there was no way in hell he’d be able to use it to shake someone’s hand with it.
Leon looked at his eyes, then, and sorely wished he hadn’t - Piers had lost all vision in his right, but that didn’t stop it from getting bloodshot and sunken when he lost sleep or cried. Which, by Leon’s awkward reckoning, was fairly often. Of them all, Piers’ mutation had been the messiest, likely because of how rapid it had been, in a state of duress - the Krauser Effect, Luis had coined it once upon a time. It had been a joke about how Leon’s old mentor had stuck a knife in Luis’ spine, and his body had responded by handing the responsibility of keeping him alive to the fragments of las plagas that remained in his system. It didn’t seem all that funny now.
Luis was regarding Piers now, leaning back in his collapsable chair, pondering. He looked good in that flowery dress shirt and the pinstripe slacks. Their resident parasitologist wasn’t able to wear shoes - not only due to the size of his claws, but the odd bend of his ankle into a permanent tip-toe motion. The digitigrade leg shape was a common theme, with Leon, Claire, Jill, and Ashley sharing in his woes. Jill often wore a pair of specialised ankle socks to take the pressure of her heels, and Claire was able to walk awkwardly in shoes - but for the rest of them, who had chitin in place of skin, going shoeless had become the new normal.
His expression was unusually serious, chin-stroking hand propped up by its elbow in the other hand; the additional digit per hand - he called them his ‘foreclaws’ - retracted into the backs of his hands for now. Either because of the smaller concentration of genotoxin left in his blood at his time of mutation, or as a reflection of his delicate work as a researcher, Luis’s regular human fingers hadn’t been replaced by the same kinds of claws that Leon and Ashley had sprouted - although, Ashley did still have her human ring and pinky fingers poking out of the carapace of her palm, like a permanent pair of fingerless gloves.
Like Ashley, Luis had grown multiple means of threat detection and defences, such as the hardened shell across his back (he often complained it made shirts look strange on him) and the strange sensory organ on his head - it was a membrane across his scalp, normal in appearance but in function it acted as a full-head antenna, with his frizzy curls of dark brown hair now capable of picking up the slightest changes in wind, air pressure, temperature and sound. His hearing wasn’t quite as good as Claire’s, but it was capable of picking up irregularities with much better clarity.
None of them had grown any wings like Ashley had, though. She was still pretty smug about that, even if it made clothes shopping a nightmare for her.
Piers still hadn’t taken Sherry’s outstretched left hand, and the anxiety lanced under Leon’s carapace like lightning. He was about to say something, when Sherry tried to salvage her faux-pas with an apology, disguised as a compliment. “You look well.”
Piers twitched. Leon wasn’t worried about a fight breaking out - they were all more than capable of restraining a single BOSS gone rogue - but he was worried that Piers’ mental state might lead to a confrontation at all, which was a much bigger problem. The young man finally met Sherry’s eyes, and while Leon couldn’t quite tell what the look they shared was, the effect was palpable.
“I’ve felt better.” Piers’ voice was hoarse, and completely unlike what it had been in the brief moments Leon had heard him speak before. “But I’ve felt a lot worse, too.”
He shook her hand. More than one person quietly heaved a sigh of relief.
“Well, I think you look great,” Claire piped up, and Leon couldn’t help snorting in response. Piers blinked, peering past Sherry at the source, and didn’t quite smile.
But it was a start.
A few hours later, when things were winding down, Leon found himself sat next to Sherry as Chris, Claire, and Piers challenged Ashley to her Mario Kart crown - Chris was always terrible, but Claire had been almost as good as Ashley before losing her sight, and was sharing a controller with Piers, who was acting as her eyes. He was smiling more, now, and excitedly calling out obstacles and power-ups for Claire to activate or deal with as he steered their kart on the screen.
Sherry sighed. Leon let his eyebrow rise, and felt the end of his tail flap.
“Something wrong?” Sherry gave a morose puff in response.
“No, just… I guess I should have expected he wouldn’t show.” She sat back on her hands, gaze drawn to the opposite couch where Jill had lazily curled up into Carlos, who was bringing up the rear in the kart race. Her legs were rested on Sheva’s lap, who was at the other end of the couch, elbow propped up on the armrest and half-watching the game with amusement, occasionally heckling Chris for his poor driving.
Leon thought he knew who she was talking about, but let her be vague about it. Just in case. “It’s alright. I felt stupid offering…” Ada. “...Her an invite - but I can’t say I’m surprised she never turns up. They probably think they’ll be tagged and collared if they get within a mile of the place.”
Sherry frowned at him. “Well, yeah. They probably would be.”
He shrugged. “Not like it’s hard to get rid of said collars and tags,” and she gasped.
“Surely you don’t mean-” he smirked (well. He flared his mandibles,) at her scandalised half-question.
“Never said that,” Even if it was the truth. “Just that if someone were to hypothetically slip through the net, do it cleanly and infrequently enough to not cause trouble… no harm done, right?”
She gaped at him, still shocked. “I think she’s a bad influence on you.”
“I think he is a bad influence on you,” he teased, and she rolled her eyes.
“Touché.” The game of Mario Kart had evidently come to an exciting head, as there was suddenly a roar of laughter and applause as Ashley once again defended her title as the BOSS Kart-Racing Grand Champion, Claire cringing slightly at the noise.
“Do you see her much?” He hesitated. He never got to see Ada outside of work.
Officially.
Leon leaned in, fully aware that Claire and Luis could probably still hear him. “Can you keep a secret?”
Sherry nodded, drunk on the heady taste of conspiracy.
“I see her all the time,” That was the truth. “Usually once or twice a month.” That was a lie. A massive lie. He retreated and she stared at him, eyes wide. For a moment, she looked like the kid Claire had rescued from Raccoon City.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he warned. “They might get jealous.” Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Claire go still, perhaps raising an eyebrow. “Especially Claire, - you know how crazy she is for me.” He didn’t need to look in Claire’s direction to know she had rolled her eyes at that. Sherry’s giggle in response was a refreshing dose of Normal to their whole situation, and Leon took the opportunity to commit it to memory.
Maybe things were finally looking up.