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In the aftermath of an operation, inside a med tent, Chris watches Leon remove his left glove and put on his wedding ring—the thing gleams brightly under the fluorescent bulbs. On the other side of the tent is Ada Wong, leaning against a table, appearing entirely uninterested.
“I should go. My wife and I hate having late dinners,” Leon tells Chris.
“Then you shouldn’t make people wait, go,” Ada drawls from across, crossing her arms against her chest.
Chris looks up from counting what’s left of his magnum shells, looks from Leon to Ada and back again, calculates the distance between them and then takes another look at Leon’s shiny wedding ring and Ada’s seeming lack of reaction and closed-up stance, and wonders—didn’t they hook up? What the fuck was that about in Lanshiang then?
Earlier, Chris and Ada Wong arrive together at the mission site through his helicopter, almost at the same time as Leon, who comes in driving a black car to the site. The Wolf Hound Squad, which got there earlier through an air drop, had time to set up the perimeter.
Ada Wong gets out of the helicopter at the same time Leon finds a spot and parks the vehicle. She walks past him as he closes the car door, and nothing else.
Chris immediately engages Umber Eyes for an onsite report, but not before witnessing this non-existent exchange between Leon and Ada Wong, which says a lot.
Even Chris himself got a stern greeting from Leon. Huh.
. . .
Ada Wong throws a small bandage at Leon, which he accepts with a transactional, “Thanks.”
“You’ll live,” Ada Wong says to Leon plainly, before walking away, back to her observation perch, and nothing else.
. . .
Chris doesn’t see that, is only vaguely aware of it because Canine radios him, “Did you see what happened earlier? Cold. Alpha, weren’t they fucking?” and broadcasts it to the entire Wolf Hound Squad transceiver.
“He’s already married. I saw the ring, back in Raccoon City last October,” Umber Eyes says.
“Didn’t you say they have history?”
Chris sighs, reaches out to his comms, and shuts them down immediately, “Stop gossiping. Pack up.”
Then Chris turns to Leon, who’s standing not far, leaning on a metal pole while waiting for his DSO extraction, “Sorry about that.”
Chris’s comms are on speaker; he is sure Leon heard everything.
But Leon only shrugs, and says, “No problem.”
After they left, Chris thinks: maybe there was a nasty breakup or a fall out at some point, and neither brings it up because it’s awkward. He is not one to pry, and he shouldn’t really give a fuck, so long as they’re both working together, well-oiled, and do so without incident—it’s fine.
Chris lights a cigarette and takes a drag, watches Leon board an FOS helicopter and lift out of the site as soon as he gets in. Some minutes later, Ada Wong leaves the site, and he catches the icy look she gives Canine and Tundra, who both flag her, as she rolls down the driver’s side window of a black car.
He respects that. It proves Leon and Ada Wong are entirely professional, strictly keep private matters out, stay focused, and remain committed to the job. As the mission lead, that’s all he needs.
That’s functional. Maybe a little sad, but functional.
While en route to another operation site, Chris receives a message from Leon: Lunch at my house Saturday, my wife likes you apparently.
Great, Chris thinks, he’s at the age when he gets casual invites to harmless weekend BBQ and brunches, then his eyes narrow at the screen, hold on—
“Redfield,” Ada calls suddenly, and coldly, looking up from a screen she’s reading. She is sitting cross-legged across him, in a dress, in red soled-heels. She refused to wear tactical protective garments when offered by his team. The only indication of her role is a submachine gun—increased capacity, with better grips and upgraded optics—leaning on the seat beside her. She also has her IRIS on, which gleams brightly blue at him, and makes her look like a Terminator, “Your team has all the coordinates wrong.”
Chris doesn’t argue. Instead, he fixes her gaze. Ada Wong is an operative who’s as thorough as a motherfucker. When she raises something, he’s better off listening. There’s no ego at play here, he simply respects competence, so he says, “Show me.”
Chris and Ada Wong have been working together these days.
It’s Saturday, and Chris arrives at the address—one of the least known areas in Newport. And when he gets to the iron gates, which automatically lets him in, he drives through and passes a line of two identical Porsche SUVs and some other equally expensive cars along the driveway, all of them in black.
It’s an estate. Stone, with a lush garden wrapped around it, and very old-money—obviously purchased from one.
How rich did this rookie become?
Chris pulls up the invitation again, and has time to think, hold on—
He has never met Leon’s wife. How could she say she likes him?
. . .
Chris looks up. He hears Leon's hurried voice at the other end of the double doors, and when it’s opened, a barefoot Ada first crosses his line of sight, and from what he could immediately establish—is chasing a little girl.
And the little girl, black-haired, in a blue dress, is clutching a single red-soled, high-heeled shoe while running around from the foyer to the living room, it seems.
“Not my shoe,” Ada catches the little girl and gently carries her up, “—my darling.”
“I have her bear!” Leon offers, quickly snatching a big brown bear from a basket in the foyer labeled with ‘Emergency outdoor toys: waterproof.’
“We should have gotten her a smaller one, this one could smother her,” Ada cautions, carefully wrestling her pointy shoe from the little girl’s grip.
Leon, beside Ada, is trying to distract the girl with the big bear, which is working. The little girl is following the bear and is reaching for it, allowing Ada to fully take the shoe from her little hands.
“I think she likes it just fine, and drags it everywhere,” Leon says quietly, reaching out to adjust the little girl's pony tail; she has bright ice-blue eyes.
“—Through the grass, and it gets around the house,” Ada points out, looking at Leon.
“It’s alright, I always clean after her,” Leon shrugs.
“How are you so lenient, every time—”
Witnessing all these, Chris thinks—Alright. He looks from Leon to Ada and back again, re-evaluates the entire situation around them, then takes another look at Leon’s wedding ring and Ada’s matching ring, and wonders—since when has this been going on? And he’s been so wrong.
Leon turns to Chris, who’s still at the threshold, and nods, “Hey, sorry about that. Kid’s stuff.”
Ada looks at Chris, and tells him—not at all a greeting, “You, stop holding my husband and I up, we’re trying for a second. Your late night briefings are bothersome.”
“She means welcome and come in,” Leon says, then taps his back and clears the way for him to come inside.
“ —the hell?” laughs Chris, who, for the first time in quite a long time, feels like he’s just been effectively disarmed.
. . .
“How long has this been going on?” Chris asks, once inside.
Leon, who’s out his usual compression shirts and jackets and tactical gear, is wearing a navy blue polo shirt and dark pants and loafers; he is evidently very relaxed as he leads Chris to the living room. There’s also a folded reading glasses hanging on the front of his shirt.
Ada, likewise, is out of her usual choice of dresses, and is in an oversized long-sleeved white polo and high-waist pants, and her long hair is up in a messy bun.
Both sights Chris has never seen before, and it’s not upsetting.
“She just turned two—so how long do you think?” Ada answers, a little cheekily, then she turns to Leon, “I thought you told him.”
“I thought you told him.”
“No.”
“No, nobody told me—” Chris drawls.
Leon reasons, “Aren’t you two working together?”
Ada argues, “Don’t you two go way back?”
Leon is holding his daughter, who clings to him.
Chris notices her little blue eyes are trained on him, like she's either suspicious of a stranger or fascinated. He thinks, yeah, it’s a small Ada alright.
“Twelve years,” Ada eventually concedes, looking at Chris.
“—ten, on paper,” Leon interrupts, looking at his wife, “You’re counting before that.”
“Yes. The years when you were chasing after me.”
“More like tracking you.”
“No, that was your excuse. You were chasing after me. Quite a hopeless romantic, you were. You sawed off the end of your shotgun’s barrel to make a ring and then gave it to me when you lost the first engagement ring. I still have it.”
“Tracking you,” Leon insists, clipped, “About work. It was an investigation. There’s a difference.”
“You sound like that when you lie,” Ada says, a little smug; the way only a spouse can undercut the other.
Ah fuck, Chris thinks. He is more professionally offended. Ten years. Twelve years. He is not as interested in the history behind them—that’s none of his business—but more to do with how long they had been able to keep such a relationship low-fucking-profile that even he had been thrown off.
And how it largely feels like he’s eavesdropping on two people who have been married for 50 years, “Whatever, you two. I don’t care.”
. . .
Inside, it’s not what Chris quite predicted. He nearly expects a version of sanitized wealth and designer furniture, all beige and bullshit, but not really. Their house is neat, has taste but nothing conspicuous, lived-in, and very occupied. There are photos.
Leon and Ada both come home to this, don’t they?
Chris doesn’t quite feel warmth but this is very nearly the same thing—Yeah, this is good.
. . .
“I can’t kick you out now, you can stay,” Ada tells Chris impassively, putting on an apron, “Look after her.”
As Leon and Ada disappear into the kitchen, Chris is left with their daughter in the living room. Leon said she can’t quite speak yet but knows enough words.
“Hey,” Chris nods at the little girl, “You a spy?”
The little girl stares up at him, in clear display of Ada’s features. Her black hair slightly wavy around her face as she stares up at him.
“So they do come in small sizes now,” Chris shakes his head, lightly amused, recalling how the bigger Ada has no qualms scolding him, Alpha, over the use of his own helicopter and wrong coordinates.
She doesn’t react that much other than blink a few times at him, tilting her head and hugging her teddy bear closer. Her ice blue eyes continue to follow him curiously.
“Great cover, nobody suspects,” Chris nods in approval anyway.
Then the little girl crawls to him, and then points to something, and Chris follows it, finding the shoe—the same one Ada took from her and quickly hid—behind a potted oversized indoor tree-plant.
“That one?” Chris snickers, then nods back at her in approval, “Observant little brat, aren’t you?”
“But no you can’t play with that, it will poke your eyes out. Look at this.”
Chris takes the shoe out and demonstrates getting his eye poked by a stiletto heel, he fake-shrieks. The little girl laughs.
“Don’t laugh, that’s not supposed to be funny,” Chris says, suddenly somewhat disappointed, and wonders what kind of sense of humor toddlers have.
. . .
When Chris moves to put the shoe to another, higher place, he accidentally overhears Leon and Ada talking in the kitchen while they make things themselves—from the looks of it, pasta and flatbread—in the same register as they do on a mission.
“Do you put salt or pepper first?” Ada asks Leon.
Leon, who’s sort of an overwhelming presence in their kitchen despite its size, is also wearing an apron while rolling out dough. There’s an array of small bowls in front of him. They seem organized enough. Ada stands by the stove, various copper pans hang near her head.
“Doesn’t matter,” Leon shrugs. He answers with the cadence of an instinctive homecook.
“How much, what unit? Measurement? Is it in milliliters?”
“Just eyeball it.”
“Fine, how do you chop the onions?”
“Whatever feels right.”
“What is a thyme?”
“I don’t know. Probably 10 minutes. If it’s boiling, you’ll see bubbles. If it’s burning, you’ll smell it.”
Ada sighs. She takes a tasting spoon and tastes the tomato sauce, and lightly leaves a smear on her lips and unceremoniously throws the spoon straight into the sink across the kitchen without looking. It lands.
She rounds the corner, goes to where he is, on the other side of the island.
“How’s the taste of this, then,” Ada asks Leon quietly, and when he turns, she kisses him on the lips.
“More salt?” Leon responds, and after, he adds, like an afterthought, “You know I don’t remember brushing my teeth.”
“Oh? Then I shouldn’t have. Do you want me to take my kiss back?” Ada feigns concern.
“Sure.”
Ada kisses him again—
. . .
Chris backs away slowly, shaking his head at the questionable shit they’re doing, like exchanging saliva over his soon-to-be-lunch—fuck that.
He goes back to where their daughter is playing, in between a massive curved sofa and a glass center table filled with multiple vases of lilies, and tells her, “Your parents are damn weirdos.”
“…da-mn.” The little girl cheerfully repeats, pinching the cheeks of her teddy bear.
Chris quickly looks back down at her, realizes it, and drops to one knee in front of her, like a massive, imposing dark presence in the middle of Leon and Ada’s sunny living room filled with fresh flowers.
“No, don't repeat what I said. You can’t swear yet,” he tells her firmly, but a lot lighter, “You can do that in 15 years, or 12. I don’t mind.”
Then it’s lunch. There isn’t a lot of fanfare.
Chris could offer to help, little things like setting up the table, but one look at Ada—the way she effortlessly balances all those plates and silverware as she walks across the dining room—and he deduces she has no problem telling him to get the fuck out of her way as she sets the table herself. She seems knowledgeable anyway. Leon is still in the kitchen and doing all the transfers and plating.
It’s good that the doors in the dining room open to a view of the coast, so he could amuse himself with internally mapping and listing possible escape routes through the open Atlantic Ocean, which they—Leon and Ada—definitely have a lot of. Maybe they could compare notes on who has a stronger perimeter security and control, for fun, and over beers.
Outside, it’s sunny, very blue. It’s not a bad day to be off-duty.
In the afternoon, they said they might go fishing, an idea that he vaguely agrees to. Ada curiously likes to keep different kinds of boats around all the time. “Remembrance,” Leon said at some point, as if that explains it. Chris has no idea what the hell that means.
Ada has finished setting the table, and is talking to her daughter about something else. Leon comes out of the kitchen, and begins completing the table. So it’s this, then, Chris thinks, they are simply working on the field, then they come home, the rest is noise.
Chris glances at the little girl, now securely sitting on a high chair, and lingers at the sight.
He decides he will kick Leon out of the mission they’re collaborating on, even if it’s an off-the-record one, not known to DSO. It’s nothing to do with his capability—there’s absolutely no question on that, but more of a command decision he knows he’s going to make the moment he realizes they have a daughter. He just doesn’t like keeping both parents on a single mission at the same time.
But he will delay this operational update until Monday, since Leon and Ada like to own the weekends whenever they can and he respects that.
Ada calls him, not a change in her expression, “Redfield, I invited you, it’s time.”
“Alright,” Chris heads back inside the dining room; he decides he’s off-duty today, too.