Chapter Text
They sit together at a small cafe with blue walls inside the Kasbah district in Tangier. Their knees almost touch; Leon is a tall man. Ada brought wedding rings.
“I got our rings, Leon,” she says, and throws him one.
“A ring?”
“Tell me you get the idea,” Ada teases. Between them is a plate of hummus and olives and half-bitten pita, and two bottles of local lagers.
Leon holds the ring up to the sun. It’s silver, plain, and unmarked. It’s inconspicuous. He turns to her, questioningly. The ice-blue in his eyes matches the coast. “Alright. It’s not a tracker, is it?”
“What do you think?” Ada peers at him and pops an olive in her mouth, and there’s a little of something playful in her eyes. She finds his confusion charming, even for a man who’s almost 40. ”No, it’s not…” she admits. “And I don’t need to track you, Leon, when you call me enough. More than enough, actually. All the time.”
But Leon is thinking of something else. “Call me old-fashioned, Ada, but aren’t we supposed to wear this after we get married?”
Ada is quiet for a moment. The answer is so simple, really. “Well, we should do what we can while we can, Leon.”
Leon understands. Those in their profession, people like them—those who know everything about the devils and nothing about peace—usually die young. He looks at Ada. These days, she wears her hair a bit longer and slightly curled, pinned to the side. She’s still stunning, and he’s still stunned, exactly the same way he was at 21 and 27. Leon wonders if they are the exception. He says, “I get it.”
Ada leans back and closes her eyes and feels the gentle wind. March has been busy. There’s an upcoming job in Casablanca in two days, then in Skopje, and so many more in so many places after that. She is not certain if they’ll make their next rendezvous. But for now, for now, there’s a quiet lull of music from the old stereo and the sky is so blue. She turns back to Leon and says, “...And you wanna talk old-fashioned? You didn’t get me an engagement ring.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually say yes, Ada, you were telling me to walk away while I was proposing.”
“Oh, Leon.” Ada shakes her head. “And we can still have that wedding you want,” she assures him. Then: “So, you don’t want to wear it?”
“I never said that.” Leon leans closer and he gives her the ring back. “Actually, I do, Ada.”
Ada knows what it means. She takes the ring from him and puts it on the ring finger of his left hand and says, “There.”
Leon looks at the ring on his finger in quiet, subdued wonderment.
Ada watches him. Leon in combat; Leon in tactical gear; Lions in the wild—those things have been natural. This Leon is a strange thing to see, she thinks, like a creature out of his natural habitat.
After a while, he says, “Don’t forget to tell me your vows.”
“Only after you tell me yours.”
Leon grins a little, quite like a smirk. “Sure.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something, handsome?” Ada gives him her ring. “Put it on me.”
(Ada remembers Tangier this way: the blue coast, the ice-blue eyes, that he said I do first, and the soft, tapering lull of music from the old stereo.)
In Montevideo, they hold hands and take a stroll along the Rambla coast in that quiet moment before dawn. They are blonde and dark-haired, mysterious and beautiful. And the small laughs and conversations they share feel a little too intimate.
Only secret lovers come here—many say—and do that.
“Ada! I’m thinking—urgh— do you want a church wedding? Maybe somewhere in Spain—?” Leon calls her while he’s engaged in combat against an escaped BOW up on a rooftop of a Korail storage facility in Daejeon. It’s nighttime, and it’s raining.
“I’m thinking—bang!—maybe—reloads—somewhere quiet? You know, for old times’ sake.”
On the other end of the line, Ada is reading surveillance notes under the afternoon sunshine and easy breeze of Santander. She turns away from her work and considers him, and then hears his grunts in between a slash and roar. A fight is going on. Good thing she is never worried for him.
There’s another louder, more explosive bang and the sharp sound of flesh splitting. A 990-TAC, she guesses.
“I’m not very sentimental, but you know…” Ada tells him, and that is true, because memories are double-edged swords. She looks over at the vivid blueness of the Spanish coastline from her hotel veranda: it will be good to see it in a new light, “...I don’t mind the idea at all.”
“Alright. I’ll handle everything.” She could hear Leon smile through the phone. “I just hope there are no more cultists in there hiding nasty surprises. Kind of ruins the mood.”
A week later, Ada received a Polaroid shot and a wedding invitation from Leon. The photo bears an image of a small baroque church with its address, a date, and the time scrawled at the bottom white space. In the invitation, there’s an image of a bear hugging a wedding bell and a neat gold print of “Leon invites Ada to say I do” instead of the usual nice things people put in a wedding invitation which irritates and warms Ada in equal measure because he is entirely efficient but also has dumb humor; Leon added a scribble of “Cute, huh?” beside the bear.
Also in the envelope, there’s a post-it note that says, “sign and don’t lose this or I’ll get in trouble with the consulate, it’s the only copy,” and then falls a pre-filled, authentic but definitely out-of-protocol Spanish Civil Registry document with their names fully written out as husband and wife.
Mrs. Kennedy is a security clearance. She collects dust in a marriage certificate in somebody’s basement in Louisiana or she’s a scanned document file hidden inside the division’s server, along with countless government cover-ups, that require the highest clearance. Or she might not exist at all. But Leon S. Kennedy wears a ring. And people know he does things on purpose. He wears his ring all the time—every time he’s working on the field domestically or internationally; incoming combat data and photographs will always show him with a ring or putting it back on. He wears his ring even on the rarer days that he’s at the DSO headquarters and burdened by paperwork instead of a 20-foot tentacled mutation. He only takes his ring out when he heads to the office gym to punch mannequins, then wears it again after showering. When he puts it back, he does so carefully and slowly.
Mr. Kennedy makes no effort to hide his ring and will only address questions about it as if he’s answering interrogation questions—with stone-cold silence.
Mr. Wong doesn’t have an identity, but he’s the subject of curious speculations inside Ada’s network of operatives. Although Ada never directly acknowledged her marriage to the people in her network, the silver ring on her left hand and the coy smile she had whenever somebody, often clients or private contractors, glanced at it were confirmation enough. Sometimes, she intentionally draws attention to her wedding ring: “Interested to know?” She would ask; “No,” they would answer; “Smart,” she would respond and then say anyway: “He’s the neighbourhood watchman, engaged in a lot of local safety initiatives for the community.”
Mrs. Wong runs mercenary units that strictly conduct people extraction and provide security in known armed-conflict areas with heavy bio-contamination worldwide. They absolutely don’t believe it that her husband is a neighbourhood watchman.
“You said you’d call me, Ada,” Leon says over the phone. It’s only been an hour since arriving in Reykjavik and he’s already reached the outskirts of the capital. He’s driving slowly, looking for a specific unmarked pathway.
Ahead, Mount Esja stretches wide and quiet. There is no aurora tonight, but that’s alright.
“Did I?” Ada laughs from the other line. Leon can hear chopping and something simmering on her end. “I specifically said I’d call you when you’re not working, Leon. Unlike you, who calls me every time.”
“Yeah, well—” Leon turns right onto an off-road path.
“Your smartass has no answer to that?”
“—no, that’s true.”
After five years of marriage, Leon and Ada still talk about random things over the phone: who sleeps on the job more and if passing out counts; who can do a cooler-looking one-handed press check between them, even if it’s entirely useless in combat; whether shibari counts as an acceptable modern method of interrogation; guns with high recoil; whether the sky is starry, and if they’re looking at the same one at the same time; who they would be if they weren’t Leon and Ada.
“Are you headed somewhere?”
Leon hesitates for a moment. There is no specific destination on his display. “Yeah. And you, are you home?”
There’s a pause on Ada’s line, then comes her answer, “Not quite.”
Leon makes another turn and says, “Me, too.”
…
Ada stands by the cast iron pot on the stove, deeply disapproving her choice of pot and temperature.
Her call with Leon ended a few minutes ago. Even now, there is something they almost never do: talk much about their professional lives. Not because of a lack of trust, but out of professional conduct and courtesy. These days, they don’t cross paths, and have not in the past years. But nothing is entirely impossible. They are professionals first, and Ada dreads the day she sees Leon on the opposite end again.
Ada is thinking of ditching cooking in favor of wine and potato chips when her doorbell suddenly rings.
She instinctively grabs the knife, ready to throw it.
It’s a safe house, and there’s no scheduled appointment at this time, and then comes Leon’s unmistakable voice from the speaker: “I have a package delivery for Mrs. Kennedy—me.”