Chapter Text
I met Leon about two years ago; spring of 2003.
My reassignment came shortly after I was “advised” to transfer out of the Bureau. All very hush-hush, of course, but I knew it was coming.
It’d been four years since Raccoon City fell by then, and it was only a matter of time before the consequences of my actions came back to bite me in the ass. After all, having been sent deep undercover—investigating Umbrella for months, just before the Arklay outbreak—someone was bound to uncover the fact that I’d been one of the few survivors of the Raccoon City incident.
So, when two agents—dressed like something straight out of Men in Black—barged into work no more than forty-eight hours after the denial of my ‘transfer’, I accepted my fate.
I figured it’d be hours-long interrogation, filmed for archival, all my words carefully scrutinised for imperfections and inconsistencies. Every word logged and recorded; deciphering whether or not I was keeping Umbrella’s secrets to myself.
But they flashed their badges too quickly for anyone to decipher the validity of their credentials, handed my unit chief an envelope with a seal I’d never seen, and escorted me immediately to an unmarked SUV with one-way doors and bullet proof glass.
It was then that I started considering their use of more off-the-record methods—ones I knew the government wasn’t above resorting to.
There was only one problem with that.
I didn’t know the specifics about Umbrella and the havoc they caused in ‘98. Or, at least, not anything they didn’t already know (or anything I hadn’t put in my case report back then). And they were sure to have done their research.
Imagine my relief to find out that I was being recruited rather than tortured. Then the following connection that they hadn’t been asking me to join. And then, the realisation that my life, as I knew it, was over.
(Or so I’d thought at the time, but I’m a bit of an overthinker.)
And so, just as quickly as the government can make someone appear or disappear, I was whisked away to a new life—house and office packed away, badge and gun surrendered, shoved onto a plane with a ticket in hand and my day-to-day life stripped bare and thrown away like trash.
That alone left me feeling hollow, but the training? The militaristic conditioning? It left me raw.
By the time I made it to the White House’s doorstep—and then my new office in some concrete federal headquarters—I was getting paranoid and growing cynical.
Dreary suits and red tape, ‘top-secret’ and ‘classified’ stamped onto nearly everything I touched, bureaucracy, secrecy, whispers of missions in other countries “for the greater good”...?
I was convinced I’d become a government-sanctioned terrorist.
Thankfully, I was wrong. But, still, it wasn’t much better to feel like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Or to find out that you really were the glue holding things together.
‘“The threat of world annihilation is ever-present, but the US government refuses to let it be at the hands of a global monster apocalypse.
Oh, how, you ask?? By having you destroy said monsters, of course!”’
Comforting.
I was convinced there was nothing left for me besides nihilism.
Well, that is, until my first official assignment, where I quickly learned that annoyance was also an option.
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I’d been surrounded by suits and ties galore. A professional intel meeting. Once again, I’d felt like curling in on myself and staring at nothing; just trying to hold it together while I found myself in that suffocating formality I hate so much.
I try to keep to myself during these things, not focus too hard on anyone or anything in particular. Keep my body language rigid, confident, even a little bored, eyes stay off to the side of the conference room.
But upon sparing just one glance at the scene? Blue.
It caught me off guard.
Cold, blue, piercing eyes stared back.
And they were staring right at me.
I’d bristled, brows furrowed as I registered that skeptical detachment he held in gaze. The permanent scowl. I’d recognised it as the embodiment of how I felt; of how I imagined years spent here would manifest.
The rest of him rendered later—blonde hair, model cheekbones, and unfairly good looks…. It was all secondary to the way his gaze cut into me first. Background noise. The intensity of his gaze was at the forefront of my mind.
When his brow twitched, the ghost of something like distaste tugging imperceptibly at his lips, he turned his too-sharp gaze away.
He was so quick to dismiss, and it made my ego (or whatever was left of such a foreign concept) flare.
I scoffed and tried not to lour, turning my attention elsewhere when the meeting began. Some people were just bitter. That wasn’t my problem.
I crossed my arms tight over my chest, kept my head up, and didn’t spare him a second of my time.
But when the gathering concluded—uptight businessmen and too-stiff officials scattering as quickly as they’d amassed—he lingered. And so did my supervisor, who made quick introductions and informed us that we were assigned partners for the incident we were just briefed about.
I remember I tried not to grit my teeth, accepting with a curt nod. The blonde—who I now know as (the ironically-named) Agent Leon Kennedy— had remained stoic and silent as ever across from me. Not a bit of irritation showed on his face.
The mission? Investigate the mysterious disappearances in the Romanian countryside. Although, by the sound of it, ‘investigating’ didn’t seem to cover how extensive said mission would be. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.)
Of course, getting to Romania had been the easiest part.
Locating and identifying the problem? Also relatively easy.
But staying around him? Torturously aggravating. It felt like all he did was judge and critique my every decision; and with every scoff or glare, I’d snap back with enough bite to remind him to fix his face.
It’d been a much longer mission than anticipated. And much rockier, too.
It was a wonder we didn’t kill each other before we even got to the infected—all we did was fight and argue. Bickering like idiots.
Infiltrating the area, fighting the infected and dodging bullets, reliving flashbacks of when I barely survived Raccoon City and its horrors? That was hell. It didn’t take long before discovering that yet another one of Umbrella’s viruses was at play.
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It took three weeks to take down the mob responsible—a sect of the bratva, taking residence in a Romanian village to deal in bioweapons. And as much as I wanted to wring Leon’s neck most of the time, he’d covered me when it counted. Saved my life a handful of times, too.
Against all odds, dependence formed sometime among hundreds of missions, and our camaraderie grew.
He became a permanent thorn in my side.
Mission partners who bickered 24/7, acted like the other’s existence was the most inconvenient inevitability ever, and argued like an old married couple. But when it came down to it, being around one another was the only time things felt sort-of normal in our catastrophic day-to-day.
And if I pressed him enough, he might be gracious enough to admit that I was his friend, too.