Work Text:
Debriefs fucking suck. They always suck. They were by far the worst part of Leon’s job—and, considering what his job entailed that said a lot. Inter-agency debriefs were a particularly awful beast that deserved a special place in Hell. Typically, Leon was more or less fine with Redfield running the show on op’s with BSAA involvement, but the man was so long winded. In the field it’s ‘go here, do this, shoot the B.O.W.’s and try not to get yourself killed, Kennedy,’ but after the fact? It was all room dimensions, resource management inquiries, and fucking HR. Nobody asked for HR. Why is HR even in the room? No one wants them here.
“Lee!” Leon jerked.
“What?” His reply was flatly annoyed.
“Seriously? I’ve asked you the same question three times,” Redfield glared.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” Leon sing-songed, much to the palpable disapproval of the suits around him. Hey, at least Sherry laughed, that’s something.
“Walk me through the disposal measures you took in the sterilization chamber,” Redfield repeated. Leon paused. The what?
“Uh, you’re gonna have to refresh my memory on that one,” Chris clicked a button on the remote and the projector screen flashed over to a starkly lit disaster zone, replete with dead lickers and bulbous, pale skinned human-esque B.O.W.’s Leon squinted at the screen—nope, still nothing. “I’ll be honest, I don’t think that one was me,” he shrugged lamely.
“What do you mean you don’t think it was you?” Chris pressed.
“I was passed out in a pile of garbage, actively dying of late term RCS. Forgive my less than perfect memory,” Leon sniped back.
“That’s not what—” Chris pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Clarify. Please.” That please was gritted out from between clenched teeth.
“I’m telling you, I don’t remember even going in that lab. It was probably Grace that took care of those.” Chris stared at him. Scratch that, everyone (save for Sherry) seemed to be staring at him. “What?” He asked the room.
“There were eleven B.O.W.’s in and around the sterilization chamber and connected lab,” a suit he vaguely recognized from previous debriefs pointed out (Gary? Larry? Eh, not important.) Leon squinted harder at the projector. Only eleven? That was a lot of blood for—Hemolytic Injector, he reminded himself.
“If you say so,” Leon said with another shrug. “Probably easy work for her after the care center,” he tacked on, mostly to give Grace the credit she absolutely deserved.
“Alright, fine, what about the bioweapon repository? The one off the operations room,” Chris clicked the projector over again to show another slide of a space Leon was 100% sure he’d never seen in his life.
“Nah, not me,” Leon fidgeted with his pen, twirling it between his fingers as he leaned back in the conference chair.
“Seriously?” Gary or Larry asked, incredulously.
“Gary, look—”
“My name is Adam.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Look, I went through maybe four sections of that place. Maybe. I was hallucinating for half of it—definitely the wrong half to be hallucinating for, since I’m pretty sure I shot a few threatening looking autoclaves—” he didn’t, but he liked to be funny. “But for the most part Agent Ashcroft did the heavy lifting. She had to physically drag my sorry ass back into PANDORA, I was barely upright by the end of things. You need to be asking her these questions.” Adam looked displeased.
“Agent Ashcroft will have a separate debrief with the FBI—”
“Andrew, she already wrote the fucking report. This entire meeting could have been an email, and I have better shit to do,” Leon rose from his chair, his knees audibly popping. Adam looked incensed about the whole name thing, but what the fuck ever. Sherry seemed to be barely hanging on to a facade of decorum, and Chris was, as usual, very over his shit. The other assorted suits were wise enough to stay silent, but the judgmental looks he was getting spoke volumes.
“So, your report is that you did nothing,” Chris remarked tersely.
“Not nothing,” Leon corrected. “I took out a few B.O.W.’s myself, and the ‘elite squad’ they sent after me,” no one ever seemed to appreciate his well placed air quotes. “It’s all in the written report, which I turned in two days ago. If it’s not in my report, I didn’t have a hand in it. Is that enough for you people?” More aggrieved stares. “Great. Chris, we still on for lunch?” Chris sighed.
“Yeah man, of course we are.” He waved him out of the room with an annoyed sigh. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Leon took his exit without further ado.
“Come on man, gimme something!” Chris groaned.
“What do you mean give you something? Didn’t you read the reports?” Leon shot back, talking around a mouth full of french fries.
“Yes, your report, and the Wolves’ reports. Ashcroft’s wasn’t made completely available to us, most of it is still under FBI lockdown,” Chris pointed out, frustration clear. “And I know you know how detailed your after-action shit is, it’s like if sparknotes were being written by someone deliberately trying to obfuscate how many regs they’re breaking at any given moment.” Well, he had a point there. Leon did leave quite a bit out of his own op-record—that had been his standard practice, really, ever since he got back from Lanshiang.
“Fine man, what do you want to know?” Leon leaned back into the crunchy vinyl of the diner booth, trying (and failing) to hide how pleased he was with his needling.
“Rhodes Hill, for one. You get there, get choked out, then just head straight for the central terminal? There was no security?” Chris reached for the salt shaker, dumping a frankly inadvisable amount of sodium all over his chili dog.
“None. They engineered an outbreak to act as security, but when I came to and started poking around it was… well, let's say it felt like showing up, dick in hand with jack-shit to do,” he shrugged.
“And it was Grace Ashcroft that cleared it? All of it?” Chris wasn’t working very hard to keep the disbelief out of his tone, and Leon found himself mildly offended on her behalf. This was, of course, somewhat hypocritical of him, given his own assumptions, but still.
“Mmhmm,” he affirmed, clearing his throat with a sip of Dr. Pepper. “I asked her about it, once it was all said and done with and we were waiting for your guys to show up. She said she ‘thought it would be easier to move around’ if she just took them all down herself.” He laughed to himself, remembering how fucking flabbergasted he had been.
“Lee, she’s 5’3” and a hundred pounds. How did she take them all down?” Chris looked very much like a man pulling teeth.
“She found a gadget, worked with B.O.W. blood. She’d feed it some scrap and punch in some code and it would just spit out whatever useful shit she needed. There’s this injector thing—looks just like a med-injector, though, design choices probably need to be re-thought—that if you hit an infected with it they literally implode,” Leon gesticulated wildly, trying to convey how absolutely bonkers he thought it all was—though, the awe in his voice probably did a lot of heavy lifting in that regard.
“Now that sounds like a useful bit of tech. I didn’t see anything in the Wolves’ logs about something like that, what happened to it?”
“Oh, I told her to keep it.” Chris… didn’t look happy.
“You told her to keep it?” Leon nodded. “You told a civilian to keep an unknown and unresearched piece of technology that operates on bioweapon genetic byproducts?” Well, when you put it like that.
“To be fair, she technically isn’t a civilian. But yes, I told her to keep it,” Leon affirmed. Chris took a deep, slow breath.
“Okay. Okay, sure. Why?” Contrary to popular belief, Leon did think things through, sometimes. In his tenure at the DSO he’d become widely regarded as the best of the best, but with a devil-may-care attitude—while that wasn’t incorrect, it did somewhat undersell how much he cared about his ops and the people he dedicated his life to protecting.
“Did you see the evidence from the Wrenwood Hotel that came in?” He asked instead of answering outright. Chris’ lips pursed into a firm, displeased line, but he nodded. “They’ve had her under constant surveillance since at least 2024. Before then, too, but she was moving around so much they couldn’t keep up with her for more than a few days at a time.” Those photos were deeply, deeply unnerving. While Grace had told him—briefly—about the photos in the aftermath of it all, Leon had only gotten to see them for himself through Sherry’s digging into the FBI’s internal report on the whole fiasco, and when she’d forwarded them to him… suffice it to say, anger didn’t begin to cover it. “They’ve been watching her, Chris. Zeno, or Gideon, or hell the Connections as a whole, I don’t fucking know, but she’s a target. There’s only so much I can do to protect her. I can’t be there 24/7, and we still haven’t figured out who was ultimately behind sending her to Wrenwood alone. Why the fuck would I make her give up the only thing that kept her alive through all that shit when there are still credible threats to her safety?” Chris’ expression of incredulous annoyance faded somewhat, replaced by a slowly dawning look of revelation.
“Oh, fuck, Lee. You care about her,” he sounded surprised, and Leon couldn’t fathom why.
“Yes? Of course I do, how could I not?”
“No, no, you care about her. Like, not as a mission objective, not as someone you had to save, but her!” Chris pointed a fry at him accusingly, as if he were trying to convince Leon of something he didn’t already know.
“I know that? I mean, I’m taking her to Mythos tomorrow night,” Leon pointed out.
“What, like on a date?” Chris’ voice was simultaneously hushed and shrill. Leon really had to figure out how he managed that, it was a very nifty trick.
“Yes, like on a date. What are you, twelve? Are you going to ask me if I like like her next?” He snorted derisively.
“She’s twenty-five!” Ok, that one kind of hurt.
“I know that, too. Christ Chris, do you think I’m unaware of the optics?” Leon sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. The fact of the matter was, he had 24 years on Grace Ashcroft. It was an age gap almost as old as the woman herself, and he hadn’t given it a single second of thought before impulsively begging her to spend time with him. He was almost as shocked as Chris was that she’d even agreed, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Look, say what you will, but we’re both adults. She’s adopting a child, for fuck’s sakes, it’s not as if I’m cruising the local university trying to pick up co-eds, give me a bit more credit than that,” he snapped, more defensively than he’d really meant to. Chris leveled an aggressively neutral stare at Leon, the silence between them stretching out for five, then ten, then nearly twenty absolutely unbearable seconds.
“You always did go for women that could kick your ass, huh? I guess I just didn’t picture Ashcroft as being your type in that regard,” Chris finally broke, the enforced stoicism fading away into a resigned sort of humor.
“Honestly? Neither did I,” Leon admitted, his defensive posture bleeding away in the face of his friend’s unspoken—if initially reluctant—acceptance.
“You know what this means, though, right?” No, he didn’t, and he was afraid to ask. “You’ve got to bring her around to the next barbecue!” Chris’ smile was both enthusiastic and shit-eating, a special quality of the Redfield line.
“Absolutely not. Give me some time to win her over before you lot scare her off!” Leon laughed, throwing his balled up napkin at Chris, who swatted it away with a good-natured snort.
“I hope it works out for you, brother,” Chris’ tone traded the joviality for something kinder and more sincere. “You look happy. I haven’t seen you like this in years.”
“Thanks, Redfield. I hope so, too.” There was something special there with Grace, Leon thought. Something none of his other poorly conceived of situationships or badly thought-through infatuations could boast of. He could make this work, he knew he could.