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Alaska was one of the last states in the union Leon hadn’t been to; his work with the government had sent him all over the place, and at 40 years old he’d seen most of the country, including the parts of it no one wanted to see or cared about. His whole life he’d been curious about Alaska; at age 16 or 17 he’d contemplated taking off after high school to go work on a fishing boat because he’d heard you could make a lot of money doing it and at that point he’d had absolutely no goal for life, just nebulous half-baked ideas. Alaska seemed like a place you went to disappear; it seemed like one of the last places in the US you could consider a frontier. Whenever Claire talked about her life’s dreams of disappearing into a wilderness never to be seen again, the location occasionally changed. For years she’d been fixated on West Virginia, but sometimes she talked about Canada, sometimes she talked about Alaska. She’d never been to Alaska, either.
Leon supposed he should not have been surprised that at one point Umbrella had operations in remote Alaska; it was precisely the type of place you could set up shop unbeknownst to the rest of the world. They’d done just that, and once everything had fallen apart, once the government had blown in and mostly dismantled things in the late 90s and early 2000s, the outpost had been forgotten to time and outreach, abandoned and rusting in the frozen wasteland. It stayed that way for years, a dark secret surrounded by blowing snow and long weeks of night.
But then someone had found it. And unluckily for them, the abandoned facility had been teeming with the types of things most places associated with Umbrella were, both seen and unseen.
By the time frantic messages were being sent by the people left alive in the settlement of Point Hope, Alaska, it was too late. Pseudo-local authorities were sent in never to be heard from again.
Eventually the US government got word of it, and as he’d been many times before, Leon was sent in as a one-man point team. He was told not to expect survivors. He was told to eliminate threats. He was told to scorch the earth behind him. He was told to make it less of a clusterfuck for a containment team.
He’d been through plenty of outbreaks at that point. Somehow the remoteness of the location, the sparseness of the population, the blowing snow and the polar night against the endless dark sea made things seem different. Leon didn’t know the precise population of Point Hope, but he estimated it was a few hundred people. Barely a blip in terms of population. Certainly he’d lived through outbreaks in more crowded quarters than that.
It all seemed more apocalyptic and despairing there on the edge of civilization. The residents of the remote outpost never saw it coming. They hadn’t stood a chance.
There’d been survivors, people who had holed up in the darkness with weapons; Leon had been shocked to find them, they’d been shocked to see him. Location and weather made backup and extraction a nightmare—there were only so many people you could fit on a snowmobile. It was still mostly accessible by sea, conditions permitting, and the small airport had burned at some point in the chaos but in Leon’s estimation the single runway was still accessible, weather permitting. There were no roads in or out. Coming in by land meant snowmobile or dog sled. It felt like the edge of the earth. It felt like a place time forgot. It teemed with infected. The gunshots seemed loud in the vacuum of black sky and white snow.
In the end, Leon had stood there, light on ammo, heavy on exhaustion, government amphetamine making his jaw clench, watching most of what was left of the settlement burn against the long night, waiting for reinforcements. The settlement was as clear as it was going to be, the survivors were as secure as they were going to be, and at that point Leon figured someone like the BSAA or the Rangers would blow in and clean up the carnage he’d left and lead the survivors to salvation. He was one man; most of what truly needed done was beyond his capabilities. The presence of a lone man sent by the government had not inspired hope in the survivors he’d encountered; Leon had to assure them he was merely the first wave. What the government would do with the few survivors, Leon did not know. Such things were out of his purview. He had not seen the sun in several days. He’d gotten used to his extremities being kind of numb. He’d seen volumes of blood and entrails in the snow. He heard the howling and barking of abandoned sled dogs in his ears, their owners shuffling mindlessly into the night, infected and looking for flesh, until he’d put a bullet in their heads.
And that had been that. Extraction came, containment forces showed up; Leon, wired on government crank and nearly-frostbitten, could check Alaska off his Places I’ve Been In The Shit bucket list. The return to civilization was long; Nome felt like a thriving metropolis compared to where he’d been. Leon considered this as a way of life; considered having an outbreak crawl out of the endless winter night to a settlement that was more or less effectively trapped in place, cut off from civilization. It felt like a new aspect to the nightmare he’d never considered, and he was glad to leave it behind. He didn’t know what was worse—an outbreak in close urban quarters, the crowds of the city hemming you in; or an outbreak in a place so remote you could go weeks without any outside interference, and it was just you and the frozen, indifferent silence dealing with the infected.
By the time he made it to Eielson AFB in Fairbanks, he felt like a dead man. It had taken 36 hours to get there, and he was still in Alaska. He still had approximately 10 to 12 hours of interrupted air travel left to get back to DC, and one more stop at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho.
The op was over, but he ate more government go pills anyway because otherwise he was going to collapse into a corner and go comatose. The uniformed enlisted at Eielson looked at him like he’d grown another head, or like he was a rarely spotted cryptid. One asked him what it’d been like.
“The end of the fucking world at the edge of the fucking world,” Leon had replied, torn between body-numbing exhaustion and a vibrating brain.
From Fairbanks it’d been a C-17 ride to Mountain Home, where again Leon was regarded by the local enlisted like he’d just snatched fire from the gods. At that point he was beyond fried and just jaded enough by years of same-viral-shit-different-location to wonder what had been worse, the outbreak in Point Hope or the journey back from the edge of civilization. He was sure he looked like he belonged out in the wilderness, wild-eyed and mostly bearded at that point. By the time he’d reached Mountain Home the enlisted may have looked at him like he was some kind of thing spotted once in a lifetime, but none of them dared to approach to talk to him.
From Mountain Home it was another C-17 ride to Andrews, and by the time Leon landed there, in Maryland, he had severe doubts about his ability to get himself home to Virginia without killing himself. Hunnigan met him on the ground and her voice was far off and tinny in his ears; he had the head-full-of-cotton feeling he always had once the government crank wore off. He felt like he could drink several gallons of water. He’d been cold so long he considered a vacation on the surface of the sun. He declined a visit to Walter Reed; he had no injuries aside from minor scrapes and bruises, and off he was shuttled to the offices to blankly recount his experiences and have the outcome of his experiences narrated to him. At some point there would be a report, and jointly he and Hunnigan would toil over that report. A government shrink stopped in briefly to spectate his sleepless narration. Leon looked and sounded like he’d been through electro-shock therapy. That seemed good enough for the government shrink, who left the room as silently as he’d entered.
It was 4:30 PM on a Wednesday. Time no longer had meaning. He’d been awake so long he was hearing shit and felt like he could feel his hair growing. Hunnigan forbid him to drive. He told her he was incapable of it.
He ended up asleep on the floor in a conference room, still in all his gear, still in the heavy arctic coat he’d been in for days at that point. He hadn’t even made it to the locker room to change into civvies and shower. His last memories had been laying down on the floor in sheer exhaustion, Hunnigan closing the door and turning out the light behind her.
When he awoke, stiff and uncomfortable, it was 1:30 AM. The offices were quieter than they usually were; they were never empty, but it was quieter. He emerged from the conference room feeling like it was his first day on earth; he was dehydrated, ravenous, and blinking against florescent lighting.
He still had a commute. He still needed to make it home. It’d been over a week.
Leon stopped at a 24 hour grocery store outside Reston and bought two gallons of water. He figured he looked insane driving down the road in the middle of the night slamming gallons of water but it was after 2 AM and there was hardly any traffic on the highway, no one to see him. The government meth dried you out, and there weren’t exactly opportunities for self-maintenance often during ops. Looking insane was the least of his concerns; he figured he was halfway there anyway.
By the time he made it home to Middleburg it was 3 AM or damn near it, and the Jeep’s door shutting echoed loudly across the acre of land he jointly owned with Claire. She’d fought him tooth and nail about the joint part; she’d input funds from the sale of her house on Long Island into the equation but a piece of real estate at over a million dollars was out of her range. It’d been Leon who’d done most of the financial heavy lifting, and because of that at first she’d resolutely refused to have her name on any part of any paperwork. It’d taken days of convincing for her to agree to have her name on something she hadn’t earned. At times Leon did not know if he admired Claire’s headstrong ways or if they made him want to beat his own head into a wall.
Leon entered the dark, quiet house and felt like collapsing all over again. He tried to be as quiet as possible even though he knew these days Claire slept relatively soundly; that didn’t mean he needed to be slamming shit around and slamming doors. He went into the kitchen like a man possessed and pulled open the fridge, praying Claire had been motivated to cook in his absence and that there were leftovers in the fridge. His prayers were answered. There were Tupperwares of varying sizes within. For the second half of his life Leon had been somewhat cautious about what he put in his body, attempting to maintain peak physical form without the added fight of bad food decisions, but in the aftermath of an op all bets were off. He could and would eat anything. He became a human garbage disposal, harkening back to age 20 or so. The first thing he polished off was a container of leftover mashed potatoes. Belatedly he realized there’d been gravy in the fridge too, and he’d eaten the thing the gravy went with, rendering it useless. At some point in his absence she’d evidently ordered pizza, and the remaining pieces were the next thing to go into his mouth. Another Tupperware yielded some kind of pasta and he inhaled that too, cold, right out of the container. The last thing that seemed appetizing was a lone piece of corn on the cob in saran wrap—he ate that, too.
He looked at his watch. It was now pushing 3:30 AM. He still felt like he could sleep for years. He felt like he couldn’t get warm. It was Virginia in December; it was approximately 20 degrees outside. It felt like a tropical fucking heatwave compared to where he’d been. For a moment his brain jumped back to long shadows in the polar night, to the echo of groans and screeches out of the infected.
Then he realized he was standing in the middle of his still relatively-new-to-him kitchen, staring blankly into space. He was worthless at that moment. He suspected he’d started being worthless around the time he’d stood outside what was left of Point Hope watching most of it cast flames and smoke into the starry sky.
Leon turned out the light in the kitchen and headed to the other end of the house, intent on the bedroom. It was dark and quiet in there, and he could just barely make out the blanketed lump that was Claire in the center of the bed that seemed far too big for just her. Numbly he stripped himself down to his underwear and left the clothes in a pile on the floor, then got into the bed like a man seeking absolution. He scooted over and put his hands on Claire, seeking to pull her into his embrace, and she started minutely and let out a sharp breath.
“It’s just me,” he said lowly, and Claire let go of the tension she’d assumed and became pliable in his arms, letting him pull her towards him. Leon still felt frozen to the core; the warmth from her body and the bed seemed somehow out of his reach even though he was enveloped in it.
Claire turned over drowsily in his arms and snuggled up against him, humming. “How was it?” she murmured.
Leon felt fairly certain this one was going to make its way into the news, so he didn’t feel like he had to maintain the level of secrecy he may normally have. “I’ve been to Alaska,” he said into her hair.
“Mmm?” Claire hummed by way of reply.
“I think you should reconsider your dreams of living so far outside civilization that no one can hear you scream,” he said, and she shifted, humming again.
“Not great, I take it,” she said quietly.
“No. Not great.” He sighed some and held onto her, her lithe body so warm in his arms it almost burned. He felt satin; approximately two months ago Claire had gone to an estate sale and ended up with a motherload of satiny, lacy nightgowns from circa 1955. He’d been amused she’d bought them, and when she wore them she claimed it was because she was out of laundry, but she wore them frequently enough that Leon suspected it was that she liked them more than she was out of laundry.
“Did you experience polar night?” she asked, her hand snaking up to rub along his neck, his jaw.
“Yes. I was way the fuck out there.” He paused. “No roads. Only sea, air, or snowmobile.”
“Hmm.” She sighed a little. “Are you okay?”
Leon was still adjusting to life where there was someone around when he returned from ops. For so many years it had been hiding himself away, drinking to numb whatever he felt, staring into space blankly in his shoebox of an apartment. Even years ago when Claire had been in his life the first time, he’d avoided subjecting her to his presence in the immediate aftermath of ops. He was still adjusting to life where there was someone present who gave a shit; Claire was still adjusting to life where she shared a space with someone who occasionally preferred to be left alone to clear his own head.
“Yeah,” he said after a long moment, after mental inventory. “I feel like I’ve been backed over by a fucking dump truck and I’m still cold, but yeah.”
“Mm. C’mere.” She worked her arm around him, pressing her body against his. She felt like a soft, hot furnace and his body was just slow to catch on. He didn’t know how much of it was mental at this point; normally he was the furnace, but he felt like some part of him was still there in the Alaskan darkness, wind and snow whipping his hair around his face. “I’m glad you’re home,” she whispered. “It’s weird around here without you.”
He knew the feeling. When he was home and she was sent off around the world he felt like he’d been dropped into someone else’s life; the house and its trappings felt alien, not meant for him. It all seemed to make more sense when she was there. He was quiet for a long moment. “I think I’ve seen all of Alaska I want to,” he said. “I don’t think I ever want to go back.”
“Okay,” she murmured, and her lips pressed against his neck in a few soft kisses. “Heard.” Her legs brushed against his, and she let out a soft noise, her body seeming to settle into the bed more.
It was the middle of the night. She had to get up in the morning. Now was not the time for him to unburden his haunted thoughts about remote Alaska and things that wanted to sink their teeth into his flesh. Maybe there wasn’t ever really a time for it; next week, two weeks from now, a month from now it’d be somewhere different but perhaps the same hazards, and it all felt like a broken record at this point. There was probably little she could say to him that would genuinely make him feel any different than he did, but she could be a warm, comforting weight in his arms. Maybe that was all he needed. He often didn’t know what the fuck he needed, but he managed anyway, and he tried to be less of a maladjusted fuck in the interests of continuing to share a life with her. He didn’t make demands of her; the fact that she existed in his space was often more than enough to give things meaning, to quiet the noises in his head.
It was, after all, infinitely preferable to come home to her warm body in a bed rather than falling into the bottom of a bottle, crawling out 24 hours later feeling like he’d flayed his brain.
“I love you,” she breathed, so quiet it was almost lost in the room.
“I love you too, sweetheart,” he said, pressing his face into her hair.
He was exhausted but he stared into the darkness of the room over the top of her head for some time, part of him still on that windswept Alaskan peninsula, guns in hand, wondering when it all ended. He did not know, and he knew to contemplate it too heavily was the way to madness or rage or some kind of emotion that made him feel ruined, so he forced himself to be present in a bedroom in Middleburg, Virginia, and to close his eyes.