Chapter Text
Leon bites his tongue against the molten hot pain running down his wounded arm on the wind down from batting away at a sagging leaf in Umbrella’s… greenhouse? Orchard of deranged wonders? Whatever it is, he wants out. As he pockets the chip to add to his wristband, the room begins to shake. With a streak of irritation accompanied by his stomach dropping down to his feet in fear, he gets a running start out to the lobby, ducking as shattered glass sprays through the air.
He glances around him and spies a few chairs, and knowing they won’t buy him much time, he jams one underneath the door handle anyway before darting toward the testing lab where the sample must be. Sterile, soulless blank walls offer no consolation, only serving to deepen the dread as the structure of the NEST shakes around him. Leon, one hand on his gun, turns so the final door between him and the sample will open after receiving the sight of his ID wristband.
It does, thank god, because if it hadn’t, he doesn’t know what he would have done. Surely he’d have figured it out, but after the debacle of the Raccoon City Police Department and the sewage—the smell of which clings to him like a lethal perfume, hushed only by the sharp tang of his own blood— he’s running a little low on brain power. And gun power, he thinks regretfully, having spent a lot of it on the remaining staff of the pharmaceutical company. Or, ‘pharmaceutical’ company, Leon mentally revises, air quotes necessary.
The machine waits, still and approachable, at the end of the lab hall, a beacon after all of his efforts. Leon’s shoulders tense, though, because as much as he wants to indulge in the tempting sliver of relief, the man hunched over it muttering frantically under his breath quells the desire somewhat. Matilda is in his hand in seconds, safety off as he points the gun where, beneath the crisp white lab coat collar, lies the man’s neck.
Attention snagged by the click, the scientist turns, hands instinctively flying to his sides, above his head. Sitting crookedly on his nose are rectangular glasses. Disheveled hair frames his forehead in dark curls, the rest of it tied back halfheartedly. He’s barefaced, looking to be about as young as Leon is. His chest squeezes with the crippling realization that this man is not infected, but he’s… he’s no doubt complicit. He white-knuckles the gun, brows furrowing behind it.
“Hey, you,” Leon announces, voice raised but only so the inflection falls on the man’s ears, no further. “Step away from the sample.”
Frantic eyes flit behind glass from the incubator machine and back to Leon. “Ah— Hola, are you a cop?” He waves with one hand, and it’s such a tonal diversion from the rest of Leon’s night that something between a laugh and a groan of pain escapes him unbidden.
“Yes,” he says, pulling the walls back up as best he can. “Back off from the sample and tell me who you are.”
Indecision slips across the man’s face. He stays rooted to the ground, managing to look apologetic even as he disobeys. “My name is Luis Serra,” he offers. “And… I am afraid I cannot do that, senor. I came to destroy them.” He nods toward Leon, seeming to indicate his uniform. “Surely you want that too, no?”
He tries not to falter the softer Luis’ hedging voice gets, but he’s so exhausted, and they’re so close to getting to the bottom of this. Leon sighs shakily, remembers Ada. “No,” he returns. “That’s evidence. I need to take it with me.”
Luis actually laughs, a stark contrast from the timid man he’s shown himself to be so far. “Evidence?” He asks, lowering his hands only to sweep them around the room, gesturing toward the grotesque prototypes in glass containers— mounds of flesh sporting eyes, an amputated arm with sickly pallid skin. “With respect, officer, you have evidence all around you. This entire city is evidence now,” Luis continues, a particular brand of ire in his voice that Leon identifies quickly as self-deprication. “Allow me to do what I need to do with this,” he says, pinching the vial between thumb and forefinger, still moving slowly enough so as to not test Leon’s trigger finger.
Nothing has interrupted them yet, and perhaps naive, Leon dares to take the chance. He puts away his gun but holds up a hand. “Stop.”
Luis blinks.
“Did you help create it?”
Luis breathes out through his nose and straightens. “No,” he says, truthful enough. But face value remarks aren’t to be trusted, not without being turned over first, searched for more.
“But…” Leon prompts, absently rubbing the soiled bandages on his arm.
“I was on a team—” Luis starts, sleight of hand commendable but not powerful enough to escape Leon’s notice. He traces the movement of Luis pocketing the sample and curses under his breath before coming closer, an “I said drop that!” coming from his mouth.
Luis backs himself against the wall, accepting Leon’s fist at the center of his chest with a grunt. He doesn’t budge regarding the sample. “I was on a team,” he repeats. “To improve a prototype.”
A dog with a bone, Leon latches on. “What kind of prototype? A virus?”
“A bioweapon,” Luis hisses. “A mutation designed to pursue subjects with human-like intelligence. But that was the problem, eh? The things can take only a few orders at a time. Not so much up here.” He snakes a hand between them, dares to tip-tap at Leon’s forehead. He sucks in a breath and flinches. “We kept trying to make them smarter, but nothing survived the procedures."
He uses the answering retreat of Luis’ arm to try to take the sample. Part of him itches to destroy it, too, believing it better in nonexistence than in the hands of anyone, even if they’re FBI. Leon bats away Luis’ arm and wraps his hand around the wrist, turning him so he’s pressed against the wall, back to Leon. He goes with a squeaky umph. He does not stop talking.
“They didn’t tell us everything,” says Luis, nearing desperation. “I thought I was making a living, not —”
Leon flattens his forearm against the man’s shoulders as he squirms, patting him down until he feels the vial in one of his pockets. He fishes it out before stepping away. “Designed to pursue, you said, right?” He asks. “Yeah, I met one of your prototypes. You thought that was being used for good?”
The man, incensed, whirls around, more hair having fallen from his tie. “I didn’t think it was being used for this,” he retorts. “Senor, you cannot let that fall into the wrong hands,” Luis tries again, shaking his head.
Leon clenches his jaw. “I can get you to safety,” he tells Luis. “But you don’t have a say in what happens now. I’m not even sure I shouldn’t be arresting you right now.”
Expecting Luis to follow him, he turns on his heel and marches resolutely from the lab. Instantly, a voice rings over the intercoms as alarms start to blare around them.
“Luis!”
“Behind you,” calls the other man, still aggravated but not about to tackle Leon and endanger them both to regain power over the exchange. They break into jogging at the same time. As they emerge from the laboratory, something bursts through the ceiling, crashing toward the floor in a mess of debris and gnarled flesh. Oh. And one unmistakably large gleaming orange eye.
“¡Oye!” Luis skids to a stop at his side.
Leon draws his gun. “You, again,” he growls.
But the doors peel open again, and Annette Birkin stumbles through, more in disarray than before. “Move,” she commands. “He’s mine.”
Stunned, Leon and Luis watch her take a stand. She holds up her gun, eyes fixed on what Leon knows now has to be her former husband, unrecognizable as such, unable to even be pinned down as human anymore. “This has to end,” she says, and fires.
An agonized, howling cry emits from the creature as it takes the hit, collapsing and making the bridge underneath their feet shake perilously. Luis fights for balance and Leon, on instinct, steadies him with one arm before returning both hands to his gun.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Sorry, William,” continues Annette. “You left me no choice.”
Her blonde hair, caked in debris and blood, sways in its ponytail as she wields the gun again and fires.
“Warn a guy next time,” Luis gripes as the movement of the monster shakes them again. That horrible, blinking eye, fixes beyond Annette and to Leon, who takes the lapse in action to move closer and flank it, prepared to finish it off.
Luis scrambles to follow, though in lieu of holding up a gun, he’s unsheathed a dagger that’s poised close to the eye. He looks down at the horror without his expression shifting at all, and Leon feels the final traces of cautious animosity shift into begrudging respect.
But the eye closes, and then the thing lie still.
Annette doesn’t spare Luis attention, just stays close to its side, sentinel.
He crouches. “You called this thing William,” Leon poses slowly, intent on confirming what he already knows to be true. The footage he saw, the way it has tirelessly attacked to protect the NEST, even before Leon even drew nearer to it. He swallows the temptation to be sick, even while bile crawls ruinously up his throat. “Why?”
“It shouldn’t have been like this…” Annette says, voice shaky. “It’s Umbrella’s fault—this whole mess.”
Luis gazes at the ridges protruding from it, appearing to visually pick apart what is growth and what was already there, waiting to be contorted. “You can say that again,” he murmurs.
Leon looks quizzically at them both. “You’re Umbrella, too.” Then, to just Annette. “You’re telling me you weren’t involved in this.”
“Yes,” she replies, then sags, voice climbing up into a desperate octave that scrapes harshly against Leon’s ears, his still persistent headache. “But we never meant for this to happen!”
The admission sends her into apt distress, chest heaving. Her eyes are wide as they regard Leon.
He rises to his feet, sending a glance to Luis as if to say stay here.
“Tell me everything— right from the start,” says Leon, approaching her, desperate just the same to piece the increasingly large picture together. Does it go deeper under the city? Does it span further across the world? Luis’ accent is European— Spanish, is this virus there, too?
Annette Birkin tells him what he already suspected, and being right does nothing to reassure him. It sends a shiver down his back, the thought of William Birkin injecting himself with the sample, willingly becoming one of them. The casualties in the process… that’s ill-advised science, not progress. It’s corruption. Umbrella is sick— Raccoon City is sick.
Leon ducks his head. “So you made this monster.”
“We made the G-virus,” Annette responds. “But we never intended this to—”
Anger boils up. “You can spin it anyway you want,” Leon says. “You’re still responsible.”
Something stirs.
“Hey, some help,” Luis calls, voice raised to a shout. “Over here!”
That roar again. Leon scrambles back while a fleshy claw wraps around Annette. She yells, struggling against it, but is lifted with ease into the air.
“Joder,” gasps Luis, staring up.
A slick sound echoes in the chamber accompanied by a choke from Annette. She’s hurt, Leon thinks, before the monster winds up and throws her to the far back wall. She goes with a crash and a gruesome bloodstain, crumbling to the ground and curling in on herself.
“It’s moving,” Luis shouts, breaking into something between a jog and a skip to evade the monster as it stands. Leon’s eyes flicker back from Annette to behold the stretch of its arms, sporting new claws, any traces of humanity thoroughly vanished.
“The hell,” Leon asks, for the umpteenth time, following its movements with his gun.
One gratuitously large arm raises and casts a shadow over Leon.
In a moment of surprise, he’s too sluggish to catch on until it comes crashing down.
“Oh shit!” He sidesteps, catching his breath while Luis darts around it back to his side. He still holds the knife like it is much more dangerous than it is. They peer behind it to see Annette, now upright, stagger to a control panel.
“No, don’t—” Luis pleads, before they’re plunged in red light and their platform begins to lower.
Leon fixes his stance, anticipating yet another duel with this thing.
He stares up at Annette. She leans weakly over the panel, holding his eyes as she becomes smaller and smaller while they gradually lower. “We can’t let him get away!”
Leon nods, grasping onto the rail and making to jump over.
“Wait up,” insists Luis, following suit.
They both roll out of the way, making distance between them and the lowering platform with William Birkin atop it.
“Put down the knife,” Leon says.
Luis looks at him like he has started to mutate before him. Leon almost has a mind to check. “Are you crazy?”
Leon detaches the flamethrower from his back. “Can you use this?” He asks, in a hurry.
Luis gulps, looking warily around. He knife clatters to the floor and he takes the weapon. “Can’t say I have before, cowboy.” He checks the valve, squinting before adjusting his hold with a nod as they skitter behind a shipping container. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll practice,” he says. “After all, we have ourselves quite the large target.”
His breath catches, amusement weeding up despite the fear. “Stay hidden and light him up,” Leon tells Luis. “I’ll create openings for you.”
Luis gets closer to the ground, gun resting partially on his shoulder. His overgrown dark hair rests in a messy knot at the base of his skull, but a few strands have fallen out and into his face, which he clears with a plume of air from the corner of his lips. “Sí.”
Leon backs away, making for the monster again as it adjusts to its surroundings. “Alright,” he says, lifting Matilda to aim straight for bullseye. “We end this here.”
In an instant, it’s sloughing toward him. He gets the largest eye, ducks, and then uses the ample opportunity of being in a blindspot to aim for its head. The bullet just barely grazes, but it disorients the creature all the same. William Birkin stumbles and spins, looking for Leon as blood spatters into one of his eyes.
He knows he’s done enough when a plume of flame begins to lick at its body, and he receives a flash of Luis’ lab coat as the man finds another angle.
“Eyes on me,” Leon grits, reloading. “All of them.”
He fires the entire clip into the assortment of eyes, narrowly dodging a sweeping arm, then takes a leap and rolls just underneath the beast so keep it searching for him. As he’s catching his breath, fumbling for the shotgun at his back, another burst of fire rolls along the shoulders of the monster, beckoning more deafening cries.
His shoulder protests and he takes the distraction to groan, yanking the gun into his hands and shoving the handgun haphazardly into his pocket. The floor is cool and hard against his back, but Leon feels like he could fall asleep curled over it like this.
“That’s right, cabrón, come get some more,” Luis taunts with a sharp cry of stunned laughter, unleashing more flames and popping one of the eyes. Green pus leaks over the floor. Leon pushes himself to standing with a blegh noise as his only comfort. To think he’d maybe be finished with being sprayed in disgusting bile, soaked to the bone in sewer water. He’s never going to shower this off.
Luis catches his eye as he backs into the crevice between some storage units. “Up and at it, cowboy! We can’t stop till it’s dead!”
He sounds so cheerful. Leon sniffs, cocks the gun in the direction of Birkin. “It just better stay dead this time,” he answers, breaking into a jog in order not to waste his aim while it’s still feasible.
It lands. Leon’s breath sweeps out of him in relief when the largest eye explodes into more of that obscene liquid and the creature’s gait leans heavily on one side, leaving it exposed. Nearly there, he thinks, angling the shotgun at its leg to further the imbalance.
The shot hardly connects, and it isn’t enough. William Birkin roars, then regains his footing proper and wraps malformed hands around a power apparatus that glows blue. Leon has two more bullets, and from how liberally he’s been using the flamethrower, it’s a good guess that Luis is reaching the bottom end of ammunition too.
They have to end this now.
Leon crouches as he makes his way over, watching devastatingly sharp claws wrap around the thing and dislodge it from the source. A damning noise answers the separation and sparks begin to fly. He makes the connection just before it’s thrown at him.
“Shoot it!”
Off of Luis’ command, Leon aims and fires right at the object and watches as it blows in the creature’s face, setting it ablaze. Luis cheers, swinging down using the side of the shipping container with the firearm tucked inside his coat, secured between bicep and chest. “Nice one,” he appraises, the genuine amazement rolling off of him enough to coax just a little heat to Leon’s face.
“Thanks for the help,” Leon says instead, swallowing back a smile.
Luis, eyes alight, waves the words off. “Believe me, senor, it is the least I can do. I came to clean up this mess.”
Leon taps his arm and nods toward the lift. They begin the small trek over.
“Why did you work for them?” He asks, trying and failing to keep the unbridled disgust from his voice.
Luis’ pace doesn’t falter, but his face crumples like he may fall over. “Why are you working for the authorities, hm?”
“I want to help people,” Leon says matter-of-factly.
“Don’t we all,” says Luis, dry enough to cut. “I did not get my start at Umbrella for being bloodthirsty. I was simply naive. A kid.”
Leon sniffs, gesturing to the lift when they approach it.
“After you, I insist.” Luis chivalrously sweeps an arm. Leon blinks dazedly before complying. He presses the button and listens to it rev up.
Luis rests against the railing.
“You had to catch on eventually,” Leon tries. “Mutations? Bioweapons?”
The word is new in his mouth, but not in his body, bruised and sluggishly bleeding in several places, he’s sure, and not in his eyes, burned with enough material to fuel nightmares for multiple lives. He squints at Luis, watching Leon reproachfully, and wonders what he’s seen, how he remains so jovial in the face of every reason to give up.
Luis nods. “They have a funny way of spinning things, Umbrella,” he tells Leon. “Like a spider, trapping you to do its bidding. I continued, thinking no, they wouldn’t do this, convincing myself that if one life was saved than my work was not a betrayal.” He taps a finger against the railing, making an unhappy noise in his throat. “See, I did not think they only cared for their own hides.”
“So you came here to destroy your hard work?”
“Not my hard work,” corrects Luis. “My hard work is on the loose. Unreachable, I suspect. I don’t suppose you have more, eh, supercops out that can stand to fight these things?”
Leon flushes at the implication that he’s been standing it that well, but he hasn’t died yet, has he? The way Luis looks at him is making him sweat.
“I don’t know,” he says truthfully. “The station was empty when I got there. There was one officer, Marvin, but he, I…”
Leon sees the officer’s body flash before him, the ragged, pained breath on the cusp of transformation. Coming apart or coming into something new, he doesn’t know, but it’s something he’ll never forget. He remembers the ring of gunshots when the Lieutenant had gotten back up, the irony of reporting for duty to an empty station and a dead lieutenant.
“Come back to me, cowboy,” murmurs Luis, knocking his boot against the toe of Leon’s shoe as their ride clicks into place, bringing them back to where Leon has left Ada waiting. “We’ve got to go.”
He blinks, shakes the thought away despite the way it clings to his clothes. “The sample is going to the FBI.”
Luis looks like he’s winding up to protest, but he’s interrupted by a deathly moaning sound, coming from Annette, hand over her side as she writhes in pain. She looks only vaguely surprised to see them. Leon crouches at her side. “Jesus, that looks bad,” he observes, eyeing the considerable amount of blood that had soaked through her clothes and onto her hands.
Annette’s breathing comes shallow and her head lolls to the side. “Feels worse, believe me.”
“Look,” says Leon. “About what you said…” He searches himself for any aid but comes up empty. “I don’t know how much I believe it, but I’m willing to—”
She grabs his arm. “Just tell me you’ll destroy that G sample.”
Luis coughs behind him. It sounds especially pointed. “Yes, talk some sense into him,” he gripes.
Leon releases a measured exhale through his nose. It would be better if it didn’t exist at all. There’s no way something like this gets to live it out in an evidence bag or the freezer of a lab, untouched and allowed to remain a mystery. It’ll die like the things he’s seen tonight— briefly, a through-route to coming back to life.
He stands firm on his ground despite the creeping doubt, citing the same reasons he’d given Luis even as the man himself gives a frustrated groan from behind him.
And Annette does the strangest thing, then. It even puts Luis on a swivel, shifting in confusion behind them when Annette begins to laugh, weak amused breath petering out with spots of blood on her bottom lip. Her face pinches around something vicious. “You trust that bitch?”
Leon tilts his head. Ada?
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Leon hedges, defensively, even as his heart sinks a little. Something subtle clicks into place. Luis doesn’t make a sound. If not for the eyes drilling a hole in his back, Leon would think he scrambled away.
“She’s not FBI,” Annette croaks, teeth grit in pain. “She’s a mercenary.”
“Mierda.” A hand claps over Leon’s shoulder. “Now,” Luis encourages. “We need to dispose of it.”
Annette nods, rattled by another cough. “She’s gonna sell it. The G-Virus is gonna go to the highest bidder.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Luis argues, hand trailing over Leon’s flank as if searching for the hidden vial.
Leon brushes him off, getting to his feet. Why would Ada lie to him? Surely after witnessing the horrors they have, they’d all be of one mind not to allow it to fall into the wrong hands. This can’t happen again. “That’s bullshit,” he says, carefully devoid of emotion, walking off in search of the woman herself while Annette dissolves into wretched coughing.
“I hope you’re right,” she manages, before her speech becomes too intercut with wheezing and the wet sound of blood collecting in her throat to be discernable.
“Lo siento,” Luis tells her, sorrowful, before rushing to follow, already speaking again. “You heard her,” he insists.
They hustle through another set of automatic doors, Leon turning a blind ear to Luis so he can think. If it is true, which he doesn’t want it to be, perhaps he can talk her out of it? If she’s not FBI, he can take her in.
Into the station armed with no officers, his mind throws back at him. He grunts and keeps moving.
An announcement begins above them.
“Attention. Self-destruct sequence initiated,” before it launches into evacuation instructions.
“Shit,” hisses Luis.
Leon breaks into a sprint. “We’ll make it.”
They burst into the canal that Leon took into the NEST. The air smells different, charged with the imminent destruction, perhaps. He casts a sidelong glance to Luis, whose chest is heaving with the physical effort, most of his hair fallen out of its hair tie, leaving a few strands hanging at the back of his head. He’s got one hand on his glasses and another over his side where Leon guesses he’s nursing a cramp.
Rustling makes both of their chins jerk to the left.
There, Ada stands, posture favoring her good leg, poised over one of the machines. A fire ignites in Leon’s chest, preemptively angry at what seems to be true.
Luis raises an eyebrow. “Ah, that’s your mercenary, no?”
“I was just thinking about you,” Leon calls, slowing to a walk as he steps onto the bridge.
Ada’s head snaps up in a laughably similar manner to Leon’s just before. She instantly starts toward him. His heart still flies at the sight of her, caked in sewer grime and somehow not a hair out of place.
“That makes two of us,” Ada answers, concealing her limp in a way that, to Leon, makes her pain more obvious. “I was getting worried.”
This, he chooses to believe, because he simply wants it to be true. Would a mercenary worry about him? Probably not. But an FBI agent, of course. They’d been a team for a moment there.
He nods. “Y’know, we make a good team,” Leon says. “But I gotta ask you something.”
Ada’s eyes flash, then go to Luis, lagging cautiously a few steps behind. She opens her mouth but seems not to care for his presence as much as the sample. “The way’s clear. Please, tell me you got it,” Ada continues unfettered, stepping down the stairs and expectantly holding her arm out.
Oh.
Leon blinks. “I got it.”
Rubble begins to fall around them, from high enough above that for the first time, Leon feels a doubt for their probability of getting above ground again. The bridge tremours under his feet.
Luis grips the railing, whispering a gravel sharp “Oye!”
“Let me verify the G sample and we’ll get the hell out of here,” pushes Ada, pressing closer.
Leon hardens. That’s not the demand of someone who cares about what the sample has done, it’s the need to fill a quota. To deliver. To whom, Leon doesn’t even want to think about. He feels his mouth make a thin line. “Before we do that, I ran into Annette.”
Ada drops her hand, lips parted as she listens, suddenly interested.
Guilty, provides Leon’s conscience. “She claims you’re not FBI.”
Ada goes still for hardly a second, before making a face at Leon that sends his blood running. It’s almost mocking, if he didn’t detect just a little bit of earnest sadness there for a minute. She shakes her head. “Oh, Leon.” Those same eyes once filled with a focus he’d liked have now gone cold and calculating. She shifts her weight. He knows that posturing—
She draws her gun, clicking off the safety with a flourish. “Why couldn’t you just hand over the sample?”
For the first time that night, Leon is seeing Ada for what she is. An adept master at manipulation, a woman hungry, though for what, to what end, he can’t say for sure. His previous desire for her doesn’t wane, however, but he feels it smothered in betrayal.
He grabs for his own gun, “because I realized, as much as I wanted to trust you,” Leon says, pointing at her even as the movement of doing so makes his limbs as heavy as lead, “I didn’t.”
“I really hoped it wouldn’t end up like this,” states Ada.
It sounds true. Leon’s hand tightens on the handle, every graze against the trigger threatening to bring tears to his eyes. He thought, he really thought…
“Ah—” Luis moves at his side, and Leon catches the business end of the flamethrower in his peripheral. “Looks like the officer has one more dancing partner on his side than you do, amigo. ”
Leon hadn’t actually expected that from him, but he doesn’t look away from Ada. She hasn’t even spared Luis a glance.
“So that’s all this was,” Leon says, voice tight with emotion he can’t dare to let further through the cracks. But of course he does— his voice shakes like the lab shaking apart all around them. To think he’d believed the lick of luck he’d gotten. “I was just some pawn to you?”
Larger chunks of rubble and rock scatter around them. The air grows thick, sweltering, humid. Dust flies around them. Luis clears his throat, looking less distinctly uncomfortable pointing a gun at someone than even Leon is. His arms don’t waver around the flamethrower, but his hands leave sweat gleaming on the barrel.
Ada shakes her head, and for a moment, Leon soars, but she had just been moving some hair from her face. To make sure she doesn’t miss, he tells himself. “Look, I’m just doing my job,” she begins.
“And I’m doing mine,” interrupts Leon, cascading into a yell. “So drop that damn gun!” He searches her face. “I’m taking you in.”
Ada takes a step forward. Leon refuses to budge although his body screams to. The gun presses ever closer. “Hand over the sample, Leon.” Her tone is strange, foreign to him. She’s scaring him, suddenly, with a fear deeper than that of the monsters he’d been putting down throughout the night. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
You already have, he doesn’t say.
“Then don’t hurt him,” Luis pipes up gruffly.
Ada finally glances at him. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she tells him, voice as cruel as it is soft.
Her eyes return to Leon, wide. She looks as close to afraid as he thinks he’s seen her. Of what? Her own choice to shoot him? He resists the urge to deflate the situation, knowing with resentment it was his own willful ignorance of her that brought them here.
A horrible noise emits behind them, coupled with a startled shout from Luis. The Umbrella scientist hurls himself forward, stopping just short of Ada’s gun. Two thirds of the bridge creak, and in a slow motion, the chunk just behind him falls into the abyss. He grunts, feeling the air behind his shoes shift around the absence of the bridge.
They have seconds, if that, before they’re plunged down there.
The sample burns a hole in his pocket. He holds out a hand to Luis and the man straightens, lowering his gun with a wild look thrown his way.
“Go,” Leon mouths.
“No!” Luis barks, shaking his head. “I’m staying with you, senor.” It sounds more like I have nowhere else to go.
Well, do any of them?
Leon drops his arms at his sides, giving her a clean shot of his chest. There’s nothing but empty air and a long, long way down behind him. If he goes down, the sample is destroyed. Ada and Luis can make their own choices. He’s not relinquishing the sample to anyone. It stops here.
“Then you shoot me,” Leon challenges, nodding toward himself. He’s wide open. “But I don’t think you can.”
Now he’ll see. How much of her was a mirage?
Ada lifts her head and contemplates her target. Her face is blank.
Leon braces, making sure not to look away.
They each are silent, only Luis’ breathing to pass the milliseconds.
Ada lowers her gun. Luis exhales loudly, scrambling for a further hold on the railings. “Look,” he says tentatively. “If either of you want to live, we have to move—”
A gunshot pierces the air. Leon doesn’t feel any pain, but he sees blood spring from Ada’s shoulder. She doesn’t even blink, eyes resolutely on Leon, as she falters. Only after a second of shock and delayed pain setting in does she twist to cup a hand over her bleeding arm. Bright red blood spills over her hand quickly. She doesn’t hiss or cry out, she hardly even winces.
Leon feels his own wound smarting in sympathy. The wound that she bandaged, he thinks with all the grace of rubbing salt in a wound. He turns over his shoulder to see Annette, slouched against the wall with her gun raised. Still smoking.
“Anything to make herself feel better,” Luis remarks.
Then they’re sliding. The rest of the bridge shakes underneath them. Ada vanishes from view for a moment, nearly going over the edge before Leon shoots his hand out to grab onto hers. Nearby, Luis makes a stained noise as he uses the bars to pull himself up. The sample slips from one of his compartments and with the sound of glass sliding over the trembling walkway, falls cleanly over the edge. So little fanfare for such a momentous object. Ada traces it with narrowed eyes. Leon gives her another tug, every muscle in him screaming.
“Come on,” the scientist growls. “G-virus destroyed. We did what we came to do.”
Leon can’t even see the ground underneath them— just Ada, holding onto him, a shock of red in the darkness around them. His arm strains, but he trusts he won’t fall. He tries to lift her to no avail— the bridge creaks under him. He can’t, not without risking his own certain death, which would surely mean Luis’ as well.
“It’s too late,” Ada grunts, the sweat on her arm making Leon’s hand slip. He winces, digging in the pads of his fingers more.
Ada blinks up at him. “Just let me go,” she urges.
Please don’t chase the fucking sample with your life Leon thinks but doesn’t say. He just stares down at her, desperately scared for the umpteenth time.
“You heard the woman,” pipes up Luis, an undignified groan slipping from his mouth as he tries to keep himself steady. “Leon, anda.”
“No,” Leon says, strangled, his eyes clouding with tears he can’t seem to suppress. His vision blurs— the red of Ada’s dress and Ada’s blood, the endless black of the long, long fall below. “Don’t say that, I’ve got you.”
Ada doesn’t respond, but she slowly slides her arm further toward her own body so Leon’s grip falters. He gasps, tries to regain lost ground, while Luis shifts behind him. His teeth are grit when he tries again “Leon, do you want to die?”
For the first time since she’d raised her gun at him, Ada’s eyes glimmer with kindness. A surreal hope Leon has only seeing from the dying. Her lips form the ghost of a smile. She slips without so much of a trace of fear flitting about her. Only graceful acceptance.
Her fingers twitch. Leon tries not to think about the fact that maybe it’s because she wishes she could hold him, too.
“Take care of yourself, Leon.”
With a greedy inhale from the abyss, Ada wrenches herself from Leon’s grasp and falls. He watches her with horror broken open over his face until she vanishes like she’d been swallowed. Leon collapses, arms hugging the wavering passageway his body clings to. It doesn’t feel like he’s allowing himself anything as he breaks down, just pure overflow of the emotions his excruciating tenure in Raccoon City have afflicted. His chin sits against cool metal, thick tears slipping down to his jaw. His arm hurts, his sides hurt, his feet hurt. When he sobs, he sobs for all of it. The sheer weight of more losses than most accumulate in a lifetime, in, what? He’d only been here for a few god damn hours.
He knows even if he gets out alive, part of him will always remain sentenced here. How could it not? He’s going to search for Ada everywhere.
Luis moves. Just a step.
“No,” he groans, arm still hanging uselessly under him like he could reach Ada if he reaches down far enough.
Silence follows but only for a moment.
“Leon,” Luis tries, like the third time is actually the charm. Fingers sink into his collar, and with unexpected strength, yank him upward. Leon slumps dangerously forward before Luis puts more muscle into it and drags him back.
The scientist’s face is sorrowful without being pitying, scared without making Leon more unsteady than he already is. There’s a crack in one of the lenses of his glasses, splitting his eye into two. He’s abandoned the flamethrower to get Leon back on his feet.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Luis says, slow. “Eight minutes, maybe.” He moves his hand from Leon’s shirt, soothes over the wrinkles like they’re not ruined anyway, caked in blood and brine and filthy matter he doesn’t want to have to think about. His hand retrieves Leon’s gun from his holster and shoves it into his hands as he walks backward, Leon following like he’s under a trance.
They step off of the platform right as it falls with an immense crack, descending to the same godless place Ada’s body now lie. There’s no light down here.
His fingers find their home, click the safety off.
Luis brightens, gives a few vigorous nods. “That’s it, cowboy,” he says, voice softer and warmer than Leon has heard it in their brief time together. He thinks for a moment that he needs to get them out of here— Luis has to live, because if he dies too, that may be the last of Leon to go.
“We are going to run,” Luis says. “I know a quick way out. But it’s not going to be easy.” The alarms ring a fever pitch, a death knoll, but Luis’ voice cuts through with clarity.
He eyes the barrel of Leon’s gun, looking utterly fearless as the laboratory crumbles into nothing around him. Self-assured. Leon wonders if it’s because of him, isn’t sure why he wants it to be as much as he does.
“I lead the way, and you keep the walkway clear for me, si?”
Leon nods, voice thicker than he’d care to admit when he says “I can do that.”
“Course you can,” says Luis easily, flooding Leon with a heat he’s confused by but doesn’t hate. He whirls around, already breaking into a jog.
“Try to keep up!” With a final glance over his shoulder, Luis is scanning his keycard and bolting around the corner.
Leon matches his gait without much effort, excavating an indignant “you’re not even running that fast,” from his throat.
Luis makes an amused noise, navigating them through a maze of hallways until he’s pushing open a large metal door and revealing a staircase.
A growl has both of their heads jerking. Sure enough, there’s a man with a lab coat and hazy eyes sprawled across the stairs. He’s bleeding from his ear and his mouth, sporting gruesome stains over his clothes and exposed arms.
With an eugh, Luis kicks his outstretched hand away and slinks against the wall.
Leon fires two clean bullets into its skull and then they’re moving again.
They fall into a rhythm, Luis running ahead and shoving the animated corpses behind him for Leon to take care of. It’s much easier than getting stunned by them ambling around the corner or charging at him from indistinct darkness. Luis has no shortage of warnings— oye, over here, coming at your right, watch your six, sancho— or affronted noises when he sees something making its way over to them.
Eventually, they burst through a door facing a train platform.
“Oh thank god,” is ripped from Leon’s throat before Luis can even raise his hand and point.
He slips his gun back at his side and they run to catch it, both slinging themselves into an empty cabin with matching noises of exertion.
Leon’s chest is heaving as he slumps against the wall, watching as Luis rolls over onto his back, similarly exhausted. A hand is slung over his chest, skin tan against the crisp white of his lab coat. His hair has fallen out of its tie, surrounding him on the floor like a darkened halo or a pool of blood. Leon shuts his eyes, rests his forehead on his bent knee, and tries to school his brain to thinking less in terms of blood and death and more of we got out.
“Hell of a first dance,” Luis croaks, pushing himself up after another few seconds savoring being horizontal.
Leon sniffs, wiping sweat from his forehead with his wrist. The movement tugs at his wound and sends a groan up from between his ribs. He sinks his teeth into the inside of his cheek, made vaguely sick by the disgusting taste in his mouth. It had been impossible not to ingest the sewer water he’d been moving around in, but he wishes he tried a little harder.
“Who shot you,” ventures Luis, quirking a brow, voice low with curiosity and a twinge of sympathy.
Leon cuts him a dry look. “Annette,” he sighs. “She was aiming for Ada, but I…”
He shrugs.
Luis’ lips curl. “Ah, of course. Prince charming.”