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“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Leon slipped one eye open. He was alone in the king-sized bed, the only evidence that another body had lain next to his found in the disarray of white sateen sheets saturated with a dark floral scent. It wasn’t the first time that he had woken to find that his partner had forsaken the blissful comfort of sleep after hours of vigorous physical activity, but it was one of the few that she hadn’t disappeared into the night, abandoning their temporary haven without even so much as a goodbye.
Shifting onto his back and propping himself against the pillows stacked between him and the headboard, Leon held back a shudder as the linen covering him slid down his chest, exposing his bare skin to the cool air belched out by the hotel room’s rattling, decades-old air conditioner. What did, however, elicit a shiver from him was the sight of the woman standing beside the AC unit.
She, like him, was as naked as the day she had been born. Standing with her back to Leon, face angled so she could see between the gaps in the venetian blinds, he couldn’t read her expression, but he knew her well enough to know that she was angry with him, could tell that she was furious by the way she leaned slightly on her left leg, arms tucked tightly beneath her breasts. She had kept her voice level, devoid of any strong emotions, but he had detected the almost imperceptible tremor in her tenor despite her best efforts to control her tone.
Moving his legs off the right side of the bed, he placed his feet on the soft carpet and bent forward, setting his elbows on his knees. Threading his calloused fingers together, he waited patiently for her to speak again.
“You could have died. Almost did die, if what that FBI analyst reported is true. Given her attention to detail and lack of embellishments in her previous work, I’m inclined to believe she recorded the whole truth.”
Leon almost asked how she’d gotten a copy of Grace Ashcroft’s report, “The Truth Behind Raccoon City”, but quickly dismissed the impulse. He’d learned long ago that she wouldn’t tell him; asking her while she was in an agitated state wouldn’t do either of them any good.
He shook his head, a wry smile stretching across his weathered face.
Zombies, Tyrants, Lickers, Ganados…the list of creatures and infected he could face without flinching was endless. But a pissed off Ada Wong? That was scarier than any bioweapon or cultist.
“It was your idea to get these rings,” she—Ada—reminded him, holding up her left hand. On her fourth finger—her ring finger—a simple silver band, identical to the one on his own, glinted in the moonlight peaking through the shade’s slats. “Does the promise they represent mean so little to you?” A pause. “Do I mean so little to you?”
That got a response out of him.
“Ada—” The box spring groaned as Leon shifted his weight, pushing his heavy, muscled body off of the mattress.
“I’m not finished yet,” Ada admonished as he took a step towards her, finally turning around to face him.
Leon couldn’t stop his mouth from dropping open in dumb amazement.
The years had done little to diminish Ada’s beauty. If anything, they had accentuated it. Her chin-cropped hair, once as dark as a raven’s feathers, was shot through with silver. While still fit and athletic, the hard cut of her curves had softened around the edges, and there were wrinkles where there had once been flawless flesh. The scars she had accumulated throughout the years stood out more, the natural loss of collagen and elastin making them darker and more pronounced. Leon loved it—the silver, the softness, the wrinkles, the scars. He loved it all.
“Don’t look at me like that. You’re not lost puppying your way out of this one.”
Leon offered her an apologetic grin. “A man can try, can’t he?”
Ada’s response was a disapproving frown.
“Right. Not the time. Old habit.” Leon held up his hands up in defeat. “Sorry.”
“You should be,” his lover chastised, “for returning to Raccoon City without telling me.”
“The t-Vi—”
“Don’t.” Ada held up her left hand, the metallic band on her finger flashing as if in warning. “It was never about your infection. Even if you hadn’t had the dormant t-Virus simmering in your veins, you would have showed up and saved the day.” She cocked a challenging eyebrow. “Or am I wrong?”
“Sherry also had—”
“Forget Sherry!” Ada snapped. Leon blinked, startled by her outburst. The normally unshakable woman paused, closed her eyes, sucked in a breath. Leon counted to ten before she exhaled through her nose and opened her eyes again. “Just…forget Sherry. For this moment. Forget her.”
“OK.” It was Leon’s turn to pause. He considered Ada’s words, brow furrowing. Would he have showed up and saved the day, t-Virus notwithstanding? The answer didn’t take him long to reach. “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong.”
“I didn’t think you would.” Ada sighed heavily, shaking her head as her shoulders drooped. “Oh, Leon…”
It took everything that Leon was made of to not cross the gap between them and crush Ada to his chest, securing her within his iron embrace. He hadn’t meant to hurt her; he’d only ever wanted to protect her. And yet, despite his best efforts and good intentions…he had wounded her deeply.
“This was a quest of atonement…for a sin you didn’t even commit.” Ada snorted a laugh through her nose. “If anything, I should have been the one to go. The one to be infected. Not you.”
“Ada…”
“I was in Raccoon City, weeks before the outbreak,” she continued, wrapping her arms around herself. “I had been sent to procure a sample of the G-Virus, and I…I was there. When it all started.”
This wasn’t breaking news to Leon; she’d laid out for him the extent of her involvement in the events that had led to Raccoon City’s destruction the night that Leon had decided to marry her. She had shrugged off his thanks for her surprising candor in typical Ada fashion, dismissing it as “old history”. He hadn’t taken her apparent cavalierness as offensive; with Ada, you had to read between the lines, and the mere fact that she had shared what she had with him had spoken volumes. It had been her way of trying to help him, of letting him know that things had been set in motion long before he’d ever stepped foot in Mizoil Gas Station.
“I knew what was happening, what was at stake,” Ada pressed on, voice distant, present in body but not in mind. “I saw the infection spread. I witnessed people turn. And I just…did my job. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
Despite having deemed the Raccoon City incident as “old history”, it was clear to Leon now that it had affected Ada as much as it had affected him. She blamed herself for what had happened, if not to Raccoon City, then to him. There was no way she could have known the longterm consequences, of course, though even if she had known, what could she have done? What would she have done, existing as the person she had been then, before Leon?
“Ada…”
Leon didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to help Ada with this anger, this pain, because he felt the same; he held himself responsible for the events that had happened all those years ago as much as she did, whether or not it was rational for either of them to do so. He shook his head, a grim smile stretching his stubbled cheeks, dirty-blonde bangs falling into his eyes as he looked down at the floor, fists clenching. What a broken pair they made.
Soft vibrations pulled him from his reverie, Ada’s dainty feet edging into the bounds of his vision. He felt her long fingers tickle his face, trace the remnants of the vein-like blemishes left by the t-Virus down his neck. He snatched her hand, unable to stop the shiver that crawled its way through his spine, raising his head so his ice blue eyes met her dark chocolate brown.
“Why didn’t you let me help you?”
Leon tightened his grip on her hand.
Why hadn’t he let Ada help him? Why hadn’t he told her?
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing.
She was partly right, that it had been a quest of atonement, regardless of his infection. Even if he hadn’t committed a sin, even if none of what had transpired all those years ago had been his fault, there had always been that nagging feeling in his gut that he hadn’t done enough—hadn’t been enough. Not just for the innocent citizens of Raccoon City, not just for Marvin Branagh, but for Luis Serra, for Helena’s sister, for anyone he’d ever met and loved and lost. And with that nagging feeling came a fear, a fear that was greater than Ada’s wrath.
“I…I couldn’t lose you,” he found himself admitting. He closed his eyes and gently brought her hand to his nose, breathing in her scent as he brushed her fingers against his lips. She was there, with him, in the present. She wasn’t unmoving in the belly of NEST, her body crumbled and broken, blood as scarlet as her dress leaking out of every orifice. She wasn’t staring unseeing into the Lanshiang night sky, organs painting the flight deck of an aircraft carrier crimson. “Not again.”
“And what if I had been infected, too, hm? You could have lost me, despite your attempt to keep me safe. What would you have done then?”
What would he have done? Burned down the world. But that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
“Would you have told me?” Leon rebutted instead, lowering her hand and threading his fingers through hers. “If you had been infected? Would you have let me help you? Or would you have gone at it alone? Like you always do?”
Ada had drawn closer to him as they spoke, was mere inches from him now, her breath hot against his chin. “I think we both know the answer to that.”
“Ada—”
Her lips crashed into his, her mouth swallowing his words. Her kiss was angry and afraid, desperate and feral, needy and demanding. He answered in kind, free hand finding its way to the back of her head while the other released her hand and locked onto her hip. He needed this, needed her, just as much as she needed him. He needed to feel her pulse beneath her skin, needed to feel her heart beating in time with his, needed to feel her around him.
The kiss ended before he was ready for it to end. Breathing heavily, Leon opened his eyes, a bit of pride swelling within him at the dazed glaze in Ada’s.
“It’s hard to argue with you when you do that,” he said, wiping away a thin line of drool from the corner of Ada’s mouth.
“Why do you think I do it?” she asked with a smirk.
Leon grunted in reply.
Women.
“But, seriously, Leon…. The next time you find yourself battling a life-threatening illness…” Ada hooked her arms around his neck, pulling him towards her until their foreheads touched. “Do your wife a favor and give her a call. She’s more than capable of handling herself—and you.” She gave a slight shake of her head. “A girl can’t even let herself get knocked out once…”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Leon said quickly, both of his hands on her waist now. “I know you can take care of yourself—and me.”
“Do you know that?”
“I do,” he answered eagerly.
“Your actions of late say otherwise.”
Leon cringed. She had him there. “What do I have to do to make it up to you?”
Ada hmmed. “Not sure yet. Haven’t decided.”
“Will you tell me when you are?”
“I might…if you’re lucky.” He could hear the smile in her voice, even though he couldn’t see it. Whatever morose mood had held her in its grasp seemed to be relenting its hold.
“Is there anything I can do to increase my odds?”
Ada leaned back, arms still resting on his shoulders, and looked up at him, mischief written in the tilt of her head. “I can think of one or two things…” She trailed off, glancing behind him.
Leon felt something primal within him stir. “Will you let me…?”
Ada answered by sliding her arms down his, grabbing his left hand with her right, and tugging him not-so-subtly towards the bed. Leon let her guide him, completely aware of how the sex, while amazing, wouldn’t fix their many, many issues. They weren’t dealing with the core of Ada’s anger, or Leon’s eagerness to sacrifice himself for the greater good. They weren’t talking about how they still both kept secrets, how, after all these years, despite being married, still danced around their feelings for one another. They weren’t admitting how they both remained guarded, putting up a front so that the other wouldn’t worry, how they would cut each other out in times of distress to save the other from harm. There were many things for them to work on, many habits they had to change.
But, Leon supposed as Ada shoved him onto the mattress and crawled on top of him, their mouths meeting once again, for now…for now, just being alive and together would be enough.