Chapter Text
The rain found Lisbon before Leon did.
He stood under the awning of a closed café, collar up, watching the cobblestones turn dark and slick. His extraction wasn't for another six hours. The op had gone clean, cleaner than anything DSO had sent him on in months, and now he had nothing but time and a quiet that sat wrong, the way silence does when you've been moving too long to know what to do with it.
He smelled her perfume before he heard the clack of her heels.
"You're off the grid." Ada stepped beside him, not quite under the awning. She let the rain catch her shoulders like she didn't mind. Like weather was something that happened to other people. "DSO thinks you're in a safehouse outside Porto."
"DSO thinks a lot of things." He didn't look at her. "You've been following me since the airport."
"Since Madrid, actually." A pause. "You made me in Madrid."
"I made you in Madrid."
She smiled at that. He caught it in his periphery, how it arrived and left quickly. She was in black, something that followed her lines in a way he didn't let himself dwell on, and he made himself study her face instead. Not tired — Ada never was. But there was something behind her eyes he recognized from bad mornings of his own. The face of someone who had stopped waiting for things to be otherwise.
"What do you want, Ada?"
"A coffee." She glanced at the darkened café. "Apparently that's not happening."
"Ada."
The rain intensified. She exhaled slowly through her nose.
"I wanted to see that you were alright." She said it simply. No spin on it. "Simmons' files. After everything in Tall Oaks, I read the full report. What they put you through." Her eyes moved to his. "I wanted to see it for myself."
Leon was quiet for a long moment.
"You could've just called."
"Could I?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
No. She couldn't have. They existed in the spaces between things, cities neither of them lived in, hours that belonged to no itinerary, and a phone call would have made it too ordinary. Ordinary things between them didn't happen.
She could have found him on an op. Could have appeared on some rooftop or materialized out of a collapsing lab as she had a dozen times before, kept it professional, kept it simple. She hadn't. She'd waited for a quiet night and a closed café and rain, and that meant something he wasn't going to examine too closely.
"I'm alright," he said.
"You look tired."
"I'm always tired."
"More than usual." She turned back to the rain. A scooter buzzed past, absurd and cheerful. "You have that look. Like you've been carrying something and forgotten what it feels like to put it down."
Leon leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Studying her profile.
"You ever put it down?" he asked. "Whatever you carry."
She considered the question like she was actually turning it over, which she didn't always do. "No," she admitted. "But I've gotten better at pretending I'm not holding it."
"That's not the same thing."
"No." Quietly. "It isn't."
They stood like that for a while. The rain softened. Somewhere above them, a shutter banged in the wind.
Leon had a list of things he'd never said to her. He'd been adding to it since Raccoon City, since he was twenty-five and first understood that surviving something wasn't the same as leaving it behind. The list was long now. He knew every item by heart. Had for years.
Why do you keep leaving? What are you actually afraid of? Do you know what it does to me, every time I don't know if you're alive?
He could go on. He said none of them.
Instead: "There's a bar two streets over. Still open."
Ada looked at him. Something in her expression shifted, opened fractionally, like a door moved by a draft.
"One drink," she said.
"One drink."
She stepped fully under the awning then. Close enough that he could see the rain caught in her hair, and he thought: this is what I'll remember when I'm old. These narrow windows, these hours that didn't belong to anyone.
She looked up at him. "Leon."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you're alright."
He held her gaze and let it be what it was.
"Yeah," he said again, softer. "Me too."
She stepped out into the rain and he followed, two steps behind, then beside her, then together, moving through the wet Lisbon dark toward a bar that was still lit, still warm, still open.
Which, for them, had always been enough. And which had never, not once, been enough.
***
The bar was small and wood-paneled and smelled like port wine and old smoke. They stayed for two drinks, not one.
They talked around things and between them, Ada asking oblique questions about his work that weren't really about his work, Leon answering with a sideways honesty he kept for her alone.
She laughed once. A real one — caught her off guard, her hand rising briefly to cover it like she could take it back, eyes bright. Leon stopped mid-sentence. Looked at her. Didn't say anything.
The bar filled up around them. Leon reached for his glass and his hand brushed hers on the table.
Neither of them moved.
He looked at her. She looked at their hands.
Then she pulled hers back, reached for her jacket on the back of the chair, and said, "I should go."
"Ada—"
"Thank you for the drinks." She was already standing, and he watched it happen the way it always did, the composure coming back into her face like a shutter closing, quiet. She shrugged the jacket on. "Get some rest before your extraction. You look like hell."
"You said I looked tired."
"Both things are true." She held his gaze one beat past comfortable, then walked out.
Leon sat with his glass and didn't go after her. Chasing her was the one thing that would guarantee he'd lose her entirely. He'd understood that early, and it had cost him nothing to accept and everything to live with. So he let her move through the door and back into the rain, and he finished his drink, and he went to his safehouse, and he did not sleep.