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Her demeanor escapes in sly crescents, and what little else that has taunted him peeks through a tiny gap in between her skirt and her thigh-high leather boots. In his mindless musings, he wishes her needle-like heels would get stuck in a grate in the midst of an encounter with a monster— by then, would she need him to hold her?
Despite everything, he really wanted her to.
“Thought you wanted us to go our separate ways?” she starts, mockingly emphasizing the latter part. She leans back on her seat, a stick of lip gloss gliding against her soft (he assumed they were) lips. She sucks in the pink skin, smacks them together, and then purses them forward; her small tongue peeking through, encircling the whole gap, before— “Leon?”
Leon sits straight, averting his gaze to her shiny black hair instead, “Promised me a greeting, didn’t you?”
“Don’t recall you leaving the girl.”
“I did. Just a different one.”
She scoffs, rolling her brown eyes. Then there’s her sneer, displaying the sort of detached arrogance that danced between malice and amusement, like she found this whole ideal silly; she could make a joke out of him if she wanted to.
“You know, the horrible,” she exaggerates, leaning forward, “plight of your rejection weighs less when it comes after thirty missed calls.”
He notices the ink plucking out of her long, curled lashes, smoked around the red powder in her pale eyelids. He notices the leather corset cinched around her waist, how her breasts spilled outwards in its tightness, and the sharp incline of her collarbone pointing towards them. He wonders if she could breathe through the choker that adorned her slender neck. Ada was oftentimes everything but practical; she dressed this way for strangers.
“I need answers.”
“All the more reliable from a manipulative spy.”
“Ada.” he tries to warn, but he is nothing but soft, “Please.”
“What?”
And there go her big, brown eyes, and her dark brows knitted together, sideways when she cranes her head; by then, a purple-yellow bruise squeezes out of her choker, a sight he’d have missed if her sweat hadn’t smudged the skin-colored powder off of it, he presumes.
Well, Ada is also just a person.
And his throat burns.
There are a lot of questions that burdened him— how did she escape from her fall? Why didn’t she look for him after Raccoon City? Did she ever miss him? She remembered him after six years, didn’t she? Well, that must mean he was substantial enough in her life that she ought to? Every waking day he’d had to press on towards his training because that meant he would be the type of person to have been able to save her, did she think the same? Would she ever let him? Then, the bruise on her neck wouldn’t be there, would it? Would she-
“What’s your favorite movie?” Leon asks, instead.
She narrows her eyes.
He hated her. He hated that she was still alive. Hated how selfish he was for not wanting her to be. She should have come for him. She could if she cared enough. He wanted her to care enough.
“The question… I wanted to ask…” he punctuates his sentence with cautious pauses, “Y-your favorite movie.” he curses at himself for the way his voice cracks, and he retracts with a feigned, laid-back, arrogance, “You know. We usually reserve these questions for- criminals you know- like- data collection. Government’s really into these type of stuff.” and jokes, instead.
“That’s your question?”
He keeps her eyes on her bruise.
“If it’s too personal. Then maybe, your favorite dish?”
She scoffs, then grins, then leans in; the motion sweeps her hair over the bruise, hiding it. “How intrusive.”
“Curiosity is usually a symptom of high intellect.” Leon says, and his lips slowly draw themselves in a thin line, and he looks, really looks, at her glossy, brown eyes.
“If you were smart at all, you wouldn’t be wasting my time.” Her eyes widen, there’s a glint of the light bulb somewhere there.
“So?”
She rolls her eyes, “Nikita.”
“Oh,” he lets out a chuckle, “Life imitates art.”
“There’s a dead policeman there somewhere, would you like to imitate that?”
“Funny.” he smirks, “But I’m a federal agent now.”
“Congratulations.” she copies his smirk, “You did make a good lapdog.”
“I would still be.”
Ada sighs, then rolls her eyes, then stands up, “Maybe you shouldn’t.” She walks towards him, and he stiffens, keeps his hands clasped around thin air, “Really? What do you want to know?”
“I wouldn’t get a straight answer.”
“You think so little of me.”
“Never given me a reason not to.”
Ada laughs, finally, and Leon looks right up at her— too eager, probably.
“So naturally, you’d ask me about my favorite movie?”
Leon stiffens, locks his gaze on her eyes, knits his brows together.
She challenges him. Loosely.
It must have been thirty seconds, or ten minutes- no matter, Ada pats his shoulder— the very same one he’d used in 1998 to take a bullet for her, and chuckles, “I love technicolor. I like the pretty people switching around colorful costumes against reds that are very red and yellows that are very yellow, and bright blues that stretch into limitless voids. It… feels- well, 开阔- the opposite of constricting- and I like that.”
And so she tells him she loved cute trinkets, sometimes, she makes tiny bears out of pink pipe cleaners because the stores (and she’s visited tons all over the world) never had brown ones, except in Arizona, for some reason. Her lipstick was Dior, but she’d slotted it in a vintage lipstick holder she’d gotten from an antique store in Mojacar, about a week after they’d escaped from the island, because she preferred pretty packaging. She’d tried learning how to cook, but the instructions just slid through her too often, and so she’d settled for take-out food; in Tokyo, she’d go for convenience store bentos, because she came to whichever home she was appointed to late, and they put discounts in at around 11 PM. If she bought five discounted bentos, she’d have saved 2K yen for her next meals— one time, she got sick because she’d taken too long to eat a spoiled bento. It was frustrating to know more about assembling guns than building a bento herself— but in a way, wouldn’t that be a rebellion to what society expects for women? She laughs. When her jobs dry up and she finally retires, she would like a personal chef— but that was a risky job, she was a mercenary with ruthless management, they’d probably get rid of her chef; so she’d have to find a mercenary who knew how to cook, and had great defense, but wasn’t better at her in murder— but that puts her in the risk of poison. So really, maybe she ought to get married to a person who knows how to cook.
And when she leaves, because it is 5 AM and she’s been talking for 3 hours and she has to catch a flight to Paris: he’s in a stupor, by then, as if he knew something he wasn’t supposed to.
But he remembered, vividly— among everything she’d said and done—
“Leon,” she cooed, mocking him, holding his face against her breast, the leather of her glove chafing against his jaw. She patted his cheek twice, as one would with a sack of flour, “What a pity, I missed you, I really do.”
And she left through his window, the zap of her grappling hook concluding his goodbye.
Leon opens up his laptop, then.
Searches up ‘what rice do they use in Tokyo konbini bentos’.
Ah, I’m in love with this woman— and the thought annoys him.