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“Ada,” Leon said between shots, “Ada, I need to ask you something.”
“Must you?” she said, trying to refocus her sniper rifle.
“Yes,” Leon continued. “Ada, it’s been years. It’s a miracle that you and I are still alive.” He paused.
Another shot cracked through the air.
“Ada, let’s get married,” Leon said, pausing for a moment to turn his head toward her, his hands still gripping his shotgun.
Ada didn’t take her eyes off the rifle, but she could no longer focus.
“Please, Ada—be with me for a moment before it all ends.”
“You are not thinking straight, Leon.”
“Trust me,” he said, “This is the most clearheaded I’ve ever felt.”
“Ada,” Leon said, reloading with practiced speed, “I’m serious.”
The shell slid into place with a metallic click. Another shot rang out from her rifle. One of the zombies dropped instantly.
“In case you haven’t noticed, Leon,” she said flatly, eyes focused on the unrelenting horde of zombies. “We’re currently in the midst of a zombie siege?”
Leon shrugged, pumping another shell into the shotgun.
“Timing’s never been our strong suit.”
Three more of the turned stumbled over a broken barricade. Leon fired twice. Two fell. The third kept coming until Ada’s bullet punched through its skull.
The silence lingered for half a second. Ada now felt the warm weight of Leon's gaze on her.
“Also,” he added, “I figured if I waited for a calm moment with you, I’d be waiting another ten years.”
Ada exhaled sharply through her nose. It might have been the closest thing to a laugh she allowed herself.
“You assume I’d say yes.”
“Well,” Leon said, firing again, “you haven’t shot me yet.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
The horde pressed closer. The street below them was a sea of reaching arms and gray faces.
Leon checked his ammo.
“Look,” he said, quieter now, “we’ve spent years chasing this stuff.”
Another blast from the shotgun echoed down the street.
“I just thought,” he continued, “before one of these things finally gets lucky… it might be nice to know I didn’t waste my shot.”
Ada lowered the rifle just enough to glance at him. “You are unbelievably sentimental.” She studied him for a moment.
Up close, she could see the changes time had written across his face, subtle but undeniable. The soft fullness that had once rounded his cheeks was long gone, carved away by years of exhaustion. Light stubble shadowed his jaw now, darker along the chin. Several threads of silver had appeared near his temples, catching the late sun whenever he turned his head. The dark circles beneath his eyes had deepened in recent years, faint bruised shadows that even sleep, when he occasionally allowed himself any, never seemed to erase. He looked older than he had the last time she saw him. But his eyes were the same.
Then another wave slammed into the barricade. Ada sighed and raised the rifle again.
Of all the ridiculous things Leon S. Kennedy had ever said to her, that one might have been the worst and most dangerous.
Ada adjusted the scope and fired again.
She had been doing this longer than him. Long before Raccoon City, before the rookie cop with the hopeful eyes and disarming naivete, she had already learned the rules of survival. People like her did not get normal lives, not after the choices they made. They certainly did not get marriage. Marriage implied permanence. Espionage required the opposite.
She had spent decades disappearing from one identity into the next—corporate operative, independent contractor, double agent, sometimes even something close to a hero when it suited the mission. Names were temporary and loyalties even more so. But Leon had remained.
Another shot cracked through the air.
Ada had lost track of the number of times she had saved him—and he her. The first time had been Raccoon City, when he was twenty-one and still believed the world had rules. She had watched those rules break in real time. Leon in his R.P.D. uniform. The careful way he held his handgun like someone who had studied a textbook. She remembered the way he had looked at her then—as though she was ultimately good. As though she belonged on the right side of things. He had been wrong.
Ada knew exactly what she was. Leon did too, now. And somehow he was still asking her to marry him.
Another corpse dropped.
Ada’s mind moved with the same efficiency as her rifle. It was not speculation that told her that if she married him, one of them would eventually die because of it. Enemies accumulated in her profession like compound interest. Governments, corporations, private militaries, criminal syndicates—she had crossed too many lines, stolen too many secrets. Anyone close to her became leverage. Which was why she had never allowed anyone to stay close. Not even him. Especially not him. Because Leon had always been the one variable she could never quite eliminate. She knew he hated her. There had been enough reasons, lies, disappearing acts, and betrayals on a professional and personal level. He should have walked away years ago. But for some absurd reason, he was still loyal, stubborn and deeply, catastrophically sincere.
“Ada,” he said again beside her. Even over the gunfire, his voice carried that same steady note. It was irritatingly calm. He always sounded like that when he had already made up his mind about something. She did not look at him. If she did, she might remember things she preferred not to. The night in Raccoon City when she had nearly died. The way he had caught her, tried to save her, even though she had betrayed him.
Ada fired again. The zombies were getting closer now.
In another life—one where she had never entered this profession, never taken her first job, never learned how easy it was to sell information for the right price—perhaps this moment would have been different. Maybe she would have married someone ordinary. Someone who worked in an ice cream shop. Someone predictable. Someone who did not ask her to marry him while reloading a shotgun during the apocalypse. Things that should not work. And Leon Kennedy had been the most persistent mistake of her entire life.
Ada pulled the bolt on the rifle. Another zombie fell.
And yet. If the world ended tonight, if this rooftop became the last place she ever stood, the last voice she heard would be his, the last person at her side would be Leon. Ada hated how much sense that made.
“Okay,” Ada murmured when she was certain Leon could not hear her over the gunfire.
Leon did not react. He kept firing. The rhythm of the shotgun remained steady—load, fire, recoil. Reload, fire. The movement had long since become muscle memory for him.
Ada exhaled slowly. Good, he hadn’t heard. The word had slipped out of her before she could examine it further. It was a careless concession, she thought. Something she could still retract should she want to.
Another zombie fell, then another. The horde was thinning now.
Ada worked the bolt of the rifle and watched through the scope as the last few staggered forward. They were not slow; hunger was propelling them forward with astonishing speed.
A moment later, the final one collapsed, its skull snapping back under the impact of Leon’s last shot. And with that, silence crept back into the street.
Ada lowered the rifle slightly, her eyes scanning the empty roadway below. Smoke drifted from overturned cars. A single body twitched and then stilled.
They had survived… again.
Ada opened her mouth to say something, but before the thought could fully form, Leon moved. One moment he was beside her, reloading. The next he had crossed the small distance between them. His hand caught her arm, firm and warm through the sleeve of her jacket, and before Ada’s brain could fully register what he intended, Leon kissed her.
For a fraction of a second, she froze. Not because the action was unfamiliar, but because it had been years. Years of near-misses, unfinished sentences, half-confessions buried under missions and lies and departures that were always a little too abrupt.
So he had heard her.
Ada’s first instinct was to push him away. Leon’s hand had slid to the back of her neck, steady, like he was giving her the opportunity to flee. Ada hated that he knew her well enough to do that. It made the moment harder to escape. For a brief, traitorous instant, she let herself remain there. The rooftop smelled like smoke and gunpowder. Leon tasted faintly of sweat. His heartbeat was fast—she could feel it through the contact between them. Alive, he was alive. The thought slipped through her defences before she could stop it.
Ada pulled back first, though she remained in his arms.
“You’re making assumptions,” she said coolly.
Leon didn’t look remotely apologetic, in fact, he looked pleased.
Ada exhaled slowly, brushing a speck of dust from the sleeve of his jacket.
“I only agreed, because I feared you’d join the horde if I refused.”
His expression was bright and boyish, the same one he had worn the first time she saw him twenty-seven years ago.
“And you were just rescuing me,” he said, “as always.”
Ada met his blue eyes. For a man who had just proposed marriage in the middle of a firefight, he seemed entirely too pleased with himself.
“You realize,” she said, meeting his blue eyes, “this changes nothing.”
Leon nodded easily.
“Sure it does.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” he said, eyes dancing in the glow of the dying sun. “Now when you disappear for months at a time, I can officially call it a marital problem.”
Ada almost rolled her eyes. Instead, the corners of her lips lifted into a smile.
They stood there, wrapped in each other's embrace for a moment longer, watching the sun sink behind the ruined skyline. The quiet interrupted only by the faint metallic ticking of cooling weapons.
She did not know the exact moment they separated and began gathering their things. They both did one last scan of the rooftop out of pure habit—two professionals making sure nothing had been missed. Satisfied, Ada turned toward the metal door leading back into the building. The hinges creaked faintly when she pulled it open. Leon fell into step beside her.
Ada stepped through the doorway first, the dim stairwell swallowing the last of the evening light behind them.
Without looking back, she started down the stairs and said over her shoulder, “It's not too late to turn back, Leon.”
Behind her, she heard him laugh.
"Not a chance."