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Claire hated hospitals. Not because of her parents—usually, if you had dead parents and expressed an aversion to hospitals, people tended to nod or say, “Ah,” in a way that said this was the final piece of the puzzle, the bit that explained everything. But the Redfields hadn’t had any lingering illnesses, had not faded away slowly and tragically while Claire and Chris watched from their bedsides, monitors beeping and fluids dripping and nurses never coming quickly enough when the button was pressed. They had simply been here one moment, and then they were gone the next. Accidents were like that. So Claire’s dislike of hospitals had come about organically. It was just that being in a hospital meant that you were sick or that someone you knew was sick. She’d never met anyone who loved hospitals. Hating hospitals really should have been the default setting, in her opinion—you went there to get treated when something was really wrong, but you didn’t have to be happy about it.
There was nothing wrong with Claire. They’d cleaned her wounds and slapped a band-aid on her forehead and declared her perfectly fine. After she’d had been patched up and encouraged to take a frankly much-needed shower, she’d changed into some scrubs the hospital had found her, her own soiled clothes in a plastic drawstring bag. The doctors would check Sherry out, patch up Leon’s gunshot wound, and then they could all be on their way. Nothing to it.
Except, of course, there was quite a lot more to it.
When Claire emerged from what had honestly felt like a five-star spa experience after the night she’d just had, she found some guys in suits—government-types, the kind that promised to give her a massive headache—waiting for her. They told her they had questions—about Raccoon City, about the secret lab, about Dr. Birkin, about Sherry. They set off alarm bells in her head. But it wasn’t until she told them she wouldn’t tell them anything until after she checked on Sherry that she realized just how bad their situation really was.
While Claire had been cleaning herself up, Sherry had been moved to some sad, stark room for “observation.” It looked like most normal hospital rooms, except no one could enter save medical staff, and whenever they did, they wore something that looked like a hazmat suit. There was a one-way window they could see her through from the hall, where one of the suits had posted himself, wearing sunglasses inside like an asshole. As soon as Claire found out where Sherry had been moved to, she parked herself outside the window in one of the most uncomfortable chairs known to man, her bag of dirty clothes at her feet, and waited. At the very least, if one of those creeps was going to be standing here watching Sherry, Claire could watch him.
It wasn’t hard to guess why Sherry was under observation like this. They were probably afraid she was going to Hulk out and turn into some crazy monster like her dad. No one wanted to listen, or at least didn’t care, that Sherry had been given an antidote, that she was no longer sick or infected with the G-virus, that Annette Birkin’s last act had been to save her daughter’s life. It didn’t seem to matter that Claire—and, presumably, Leon—had been clear that Sherry hadn’t changed at all in the long, exhausting trek to the nearest town, where they’d found a phone and managed to secure a ride to the closest hospital. Honestly, Sherry was handling everything kind of remarkably well for a kid her age. Claire wasn’t sure just how fucked up what Sherry had been through would’ve made her, but it was somewhere between a lot and padded room for the rest of her life.
She’d been there for a couple of hours, sitting, anxiously watching—Sherry seemed bored, flipping through the TV channels and periodically asking the room at large (correctly guessing, most likely, that someone was watching her on the other side of the glass) when she could be allowed to see Claire and Leon—when one of the suits tried talking to her again. When Claire gave her usual less-than-cooperative answer, he threatened to have her arrested. She looked at him, exhausted and full of contempt, and said, “Okay, then—go ahead.” When he stalked off—maybe to make a call to see if they really could arrest her—she closed her eyes and let her head tip back to rest against the seat. Everything hurt. But something warned her that if she let herself rest even for a second, they would take Sherry away when she wasn’t looking and Claire would never see her again.
“Claire?”
She opened her eyes, ready to push out of the chair, to fight, but it was only Leon, looking much cleaner than the last time she’d seen him and with his arm in a sling. He, too, had been given a set of ill-fitting hospital scrubs. It was a relief to see him; the feeling washed over her and loosened her limbs, eased some of the tension in the back of her neck. They’d been in this together from the beginning, since the overrun gas station. Having him standing beside her chair made her feel like the world was a little less off its axis.
“Oh,” she said, letting the chair take her weight again. “Leon. Your shoulder…”
His mouth twitched, a smile so quick it was more like a memory of one. “I’m okay. It went all the way through, so. They gave me some antibiotics to make sure I don’t get an infection.” His eyes crinkled at the corners then, and even though his mouth didn’t really move, she could tell he was amused. One finger tapped on a corner of his forehead. “This is cute.”
Claire’s hand went to the mirroring spot on her own forehead, belatedly remembering the band-aid. A flush bloomed, crawling up her neck to her cheeks. “Ha-ha,” she said. Their circumstances aside, she was only human; it was hard not to react when a guy you had definitely had an immediate crush on said you were cute. Even if he was just teasing you. This was so embarrassing.
Thankfully, he turned to look through the one-way glass, and Claire turned to look with him. Sherry had given up on the television for now and was lying back on her pillows, staring at the ceiling. “How’s Sherry?”
“Bored, I think. Scared. Lonely.”
“Have they let you see her?”
Claire snorted. “No. Not that I haven’t tried. They’ve asked me lots of questions, too. I haven’t answered any of those.”
“Yeah.” Something about the way Leon said it—tight, exasperated, a little sarcastic—made her look at him. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “They’ve asked me a lot of questions, too.”
“About Sherry?”
“About everything.” There was something bitter in Leon’s voice, something that Claire hadn’t heard before. Throughout the night, whenever they had been able to check in with one another, he’d sounded exhausted, harried, but always with a little bit of hope. This new note put a sour taste in the back of her mouth. “I think they’re gonna try to cover it up.”
Claire blinked. “What, all of it? They dropped a bomb on the city, Leon, you and I both saw it—”
“As much as they can.”
There were dark smudges under Leon’s eyes, like someone had dipped their fingers into a mixture of purple-black paint and smeared their thumbs above the curve of his cheekbones. Claire was sure she looked similar, if not worse; a full week’s worth of luggage would’ve probably fit into the bags she was carrying. They were too young for this, she thought, almost hysterical. She still felt like a kid most of the time, and Leon couldn’t have been much older than she was. Definitely not as old as Chris.
God, Chris—where the fuck was he?
Almost as if reading her mind, Leon asked, “Did you find out anything about your brother?”
“I—uh, yeah. Maybe?” She’d tucked the letter she’d found into the pocket of her jacket, although it was probably a disgusting, pulpy mess by now, what with wading through the sewers and getting drenched in gore from all of the exploding zombies. “I found this letter from him in the S.T.A.R.S. office—maybe you saw it when you were in there? But it was weird, it didn’t sound like him at all.”
On the other side of the glass, Sherry appeared to have fallen asleep while waiting for something, anything, to happen. She looked so small and pale against the sheets.
“Maybe it was in code?”
Claire turned so quickly to look at Leon that she felt something seize in her neck. “Code? What do you mean?”
“I think I know the letter you mean.” His eyebrows were drawn down, a wrinkle forming between them.
Claire felt a wild urge to press her thumb there and smooth it out. She sat on her hands.
Leon was still talking. “He mentioned something about an umbrella, right? I don’t know, it just… It seemed like a weird thing to say, but if he was investigating Umbrella…”
“What, like the corporation?” Claire’s mind spun. She clawed at her bag of dirty clothes, fumbled around with her jacket until she managed to unzip the breast pocket. The letter was surprisingly still in decent shape, probably because she’d tucked it into the higher pocket. It was a little grimy, but she could make out most of what Chris had written. “I just got back from a date with a hot chick. Bet you can guess what we got up to under her extra-large umbrella. You think that’s code for—what?”
She felt very stupid, but her brain was so tired that she couldn’t keep up with her thoughts as they came in. The answer felt so, so close—she just had to reach out and grab it, but it kept slipping through her fingers like sand.
At least Leon seemed to be able to make the connection. “Umbrella. They’re responsible for all of this, aren’t they? Maybe Chris knew that. Maybe he found an informant inside of Umbrella who’s willing to talk.” When Claire inhaled sharply, he held up his good arm, palm out—a cautionary gesture. “I’m just guessing, Claire. I don’t know your brother. But if you think it seems like a weird letter for him to write, then maybe there’s something more to it.”
She chewed on that. It was more of a lead than she had had twenty-four hours ago, even if it was only the product of two over-tired minds who had spent the whole night fighting for their lives. Chris’s letter also had said he was in Europe, which was so barely helpful it was practically useless. But if she could narrow it down to places where Umbrella had labs…
“It’s all I’ve got,” she said.
Even to herself, her voice sounded strained. There was a catch at the back of her throat. Claire was not a crier, almost ever, had cried herself out during her parents’ funeral and since then tried as best as she could to buck up, soldier on, be a baby sister that Chris could be proud of, that wouldn’t feel like such a burden. But Chris was missing and Raccoon City had been overrun by zombies and a little girl had had to watch her father become a monster and her mother die on the floor in front of her.
Maybe it was all right to have a little bit of a cry.
Just not yet.
She cleared her throat. “You said you think they’re gonna try to cover it up. You mean Sherry, too.”
Leon’s jaw flexed again. He didn’t deny it.
Claire felt a little hysterical again. “Leon?”
“They wanna study her.” His voice was low, the hand on his good arm clenched into a fist at his side. “Because she’s got the G-virus in her but hasn’t changed. She had the antidote, but apparently the virus is still inside of her.”
Her hysteria gave way to a hot, burning anger. It rumbled in her chest, roared white-hot in her mind. How dare they, she thought. How fucking dare they. “So, they want to—what? Dissect her? Like some fucking lab rat? She’s just a kid. She lost her parents!”
Alerted by the commotion Claire was causing, a disapproving nurse poked her head around the corner. Leon waved and apologized, and when the nurse disappeared back around the corner and Leon turned back to her, Claire realized that her eyes were at the level of his mouth.
She didn’t remember getting to her feet.
She was not sorry.
“That’s fucking bullshit,” she said, keeping her voice lower. The only thing keeping her from shouting again was the fear that they’d kick her out if she kept yelling, and then who would look after Sherry? “They can’t be allowed to do that.”
Leon’s shoulders were sloped with exhaustion, the curve of his mouth wry and tired, but there was a steely determination in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a sort of jadedness, a stoic rage. This, too, made her angry; he’d been so wide-eyed and hopeful when they first met. A fucking helicopter had crashed into the police station and blown up and he’d still told her that everything was going to be okay, that they were going to get out of this.
Umbrella. They’d taken so much already—the lives of everyone in Raccoon City, Sherry’s family, Claire’s brother, Leon’s hope. Fuck them. Fuck all of this.
“With her parents…gone”—he tripped over the word, as if unsure of how, exactly, to explain the circumstances surrounding what had (hopefully) been the end of the creature that had been Dr. Birkin—“Sherry’s a ward of the state. So, probably.”
“They can’t just kill her and poke around at her insides,” Claire hissed.
“No,” Leon agreed. “They can’t. I made sure.”
Dread washed over her, starting in a trickle on top of her head, like someone had cracked an egg on her skull. The tips of her fingers tingled. “What do you mean? What did you do?”
“Umbrella needs to pay for what they did.”
“Leon.”
“I made a deal with them.” He said it in a rush, looking through the window at Sherry rather than at Claire, as if he couldn’t stand seeing her face when he told her. “I join their new anti-Umbrella taskforce, they promise to keep Sherry safe from the people at Umbrella who are probably going to be looking for her. Maybe some blood tests, I don’t know, but no dissecting. We’re allowed to stay in contact with her, check up on how she’s doing.”
Something in his tone suggested that Leon had been very clear about what he would do if he found that Sherry wasn’t being treated fairly.
It was like he’d slapped her. She felt—she didn’t know what she felt. Relieved, that Sherry wasn’t going to be split open and used for spare parts in some creepy government lab. Upset, that she would have to remain hidden while Umbrella was still a threat. Mad—mad at the government for putting them in this position and mad at Leon for accepting this dogshit deal. Mad at Chris for not being here. Mad at herself for not picking Sherry up and running far, far away where no one would ever find either of them ever again.
What she wanted to do was wrap her hands around Leon’s throat and throttle him until he saw reason.
What she did instead was sit back down. “Fuck.”
Leon snorted. “Yeah.”
“I’ll join, too,” she said. The fire had lit inside of her again, a warmth kindling her chest. They could be in this together. And they could make the people responsible for all of Sherry’s suffering pay. “If you’re joining, I want to—”
“No.”
There was a terrible silence.
Claire tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more than a little angry and hurt. “Wow,” she said. I mean, if you just wanted to get rid of me, you didn’t need to hang around—”
She didn’t like how hurt she was by all of this, by this simple but firm rejection. It hadn’t been that long, but she’d already started to feel like it was the three of them against the world—who else could possibly understand what they had been through last night, anyway? Was it still even last night? Two nights ago? What fucking day was it? She’d lost track. But the thought of Leon leaving made everything feel like it was tilting again, like the floor was about to slide out from under her.
But that was fine, it was just fine. She didn’t need Leon anyway. She was self-sufficient, she was strong, and she had shot the hell out of a fuckton of zombies. If Leon didn’t want her joining his little taskforce because he thought she was too young or too weak, well. He’d be the one eating his words when she proved him wrong.
His voice, gentle, as if he knew she was spiraling, cut through her train of thought.
“That’s not what I mean.” Leon crouched in front of her chair, leaning his weight on one knee, like the world’s bleakest proposal. He rested his good hand on one of the chair’s arms. “Please don’t join up with them. Claire—I didn’t have any other choice.” The arm of the chair creaked as his grip on it tightened. His eyes were big again, like they’d been when she’d first met him, young puppydog eyes that begged her to hear him. “I don’t have anywhere to go, and there’s no one waiting for me. We have to keep Sherry safe, but you don’t have to sacrifice your life to do it. You’ve got your brother—you need to find him. Maybe now even more than before. He might be our best bet at making Umbrella pay.”
He really did have such a good face.
It would’ve been nice, just for a little while, to get to live in the little found family fantasy Sherry had constructed for them on their walk to the next town. Her apartment was far from the Ritz, but they could’ve had Sunday morning pancakes, something she and Chris had done when she was a kid and he was trying to be both parent and big brother. Claire would’ve maybe liked having a dog.
She put her face in her hands and groaned. He was right, but that didn’t make it suck any less or make her feel any less shitty. “I promised Sherry I’d take her home with me,” she said into her palms. “She wanted to see where I live.”
Leon didn’t have anything to say about that. Claire was grateful. Anything he could’ve said would’ve felt like a lie or a platitude, and she didn’t have the patience for either of those right now. She would stay here with Sherry until the girl was moved to wherever she was going to be or until they decided it was time for Claire to go, whichever came first. And then she would go home, pack, and go to Europe to find her brother.
She slid her hands off of her face. “Can we keep in touch? I know you said we’ll be allowed to talk to Sherry, but like, with each other?”
His doe eyes widened, his pretty mouth curved into a shy smile. “Yeah,” he said, the word coming out on an exhale. He shifted his weight back on his knee and heel, removing his hand from the chair to rub at the back of his neck. “But, uh, I find myself without a current home address or phone number at the moment.”
“Oh,” she said. “Of course, duh, the bomb.” There was a discarded pen lying next to her in the chair, probably dropped by its previous occupant. She ripped off a blank piece of Chris’s letter and scribbled her address and phone number on it, then thrust it at Leon. “Whenever you find a place to land, here’s where to find me.”
He took it, his face still a little mystified, like he expected the paper to turn to dust as soon as he touched it. When it remained intact, he tucked it carefully into the breast pocket of his borrowed scrubs.
“I’ll do that,” he promised. He climbed back to his feet, grimacing as something pained him—probably his shoulder. “Do you want a coffee or tea or something? I doubt it’s any good, but if you feel how I do, you could probably use it.”
“Honestly, I wish I could take a nap,” she admitted, tucking her knees up to her chest, resting her feet on the chair. They’d given her those grippy hospital socks, and the rubber on the bottom rasped against the chair’s scratchy fabric. “But I kept feeling like if I close my eyes for even a second, they’ll take Sherry away when I’m not looking.”
They both looked through the glass into the hospital room. Sherry was taking another stab at the television, trying to use the remote attached to her bed to turn on the television and frowning at the screen. She was doing better than either of them would’ve been in that situation, probably. Claire would’ve probably been lying in wait behind the door to ambush the next person who entered, ready to bite and claw her way to freedom. That probably would’ve just landed her a sedative injection and a forced nap, but maybe she’d have had the satisfaction of taking one or two of them out before they got to her.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Leon said. “Why don’t you get some rest.”
Claire eyed him over the tops of her knees. “Aren’t you tired?”
“I was out for a little while,” he admitted. “They gave me pain meds when they were stitching up my shoulder and it knocked me out for a bit. I’ll be fine, really. Take a nap.” Correctly reading her expression, the corner of his mouth turned up. “I’ll wake you up if something happens, I promise.”
She didn’t want to, but she really was exhausted. Besides, if she did have to fight a few hazmat-suit wearing doctors and/or government types in suits, it would be better to have at least a little sleep under her belt.
“Fine, all right. But the second something happens, you wake me up.”
Leon didn’t even bother to fight his grin. It made her feel a little bit like smiling, too, despite everything. He held up his hand, palm out. “I swear.”
“All right.”
She readjusted her legs and slid down to let her shoulder press into the side of the chair and take most of her weight. She’d probably wake up with a crick in her neck. They might have let her have a spare bed at the hospital to sleep in, as long as there were rooms available (and if not, didn’t the doctors and nurses have a place to rest? On soap operas, they were always sneaking into some hospital staff-only room with beds to have an illicit affair), but she didn’t want to leave the spot by Sherry’s room.
Leon adjusted his stance, coming to stand closer to the chair. Her head bumped against his hip, but Claire left it there, too tired to do anything about it and also sort of hoping if she kept her head propped there that her neck wouldn’t give her too much grief when she woke up. He smelled like hospital soap.
Leon, for his part, didn’t move away.
“The second something happens, Leon, I swear to God.”
He chuckled, a boyish sound. She wondered what his face looked like doing it, but her eyelids were too heavy for her to even try to look up at him. Next time, her hazy mind promised her. Next time.
“Go to sleep, Claire.”
And Claire, curled up in the world’s most uncomfortable chair, her head resting on the hip of a man she’d just met the night before, sitting in front of the hospital room of the child whose life she’d saved, did.