Archive of Our Own

“I’ve got it.”

Leon perked up as Hannigan suddenly spoke in his ear. He tilted his head like he wasn’t supposed to when wearing a hidden ear piece, needing to actually focus to hear his handler over the San Francisco traffic. Miserable and muggy with more pollution than oxygen, he was desperate for intel so he could stop idling here on the side of the rode and get away from the exhaust fumes surrounding him. California’s attempt to go all electric had failed in chaotic style, as everything in California was wont to. He had more carbon dioxide in his lungs than smog, to be completely fair.

He shifted, the seat of this Ducati not nearly as comfortable after sitting on it for over a fucking hour. He loved this bike, it was his personal with the feds covering gas and wear and tear, he’d driven this thing across the country and into Canada more than once, but right now? It felt like his ass was sitting on a pile of bricks. And his leather jacket was sticking against his back even with the barrier of his t-shirt because of course oceanside cities were humid to a heinous degree. And the sun was so god damn bright, and the streets were so tight with trash piled up, and the people were just awful. He’d seen at least three people eye him up as a possible theft target.

God, he hated this city.

“Spill.”

“Fifty acres, thirty minutes from a pretty well kept grocery store, twenty minutes from a hospital, twenty minutes from first responders, and lakefront. It’s also under budget by about fifty-K.”

Leon’s brow shot up. That was one of the better lots he and Hannigan had managed to find. Fifty acres was a little big, but the lakefront was the real selling point he needed to care about. “What’s the lake like? How many lots share the lake?”

“It’s private, actually. You really have a thirty acre lot with twenty acres of lake. I can’t imagine why you want that. The mosquitoes will be awful.

The lake wasn’t for Leon. Hannigan knew better. “Anything prebuilt?”

“Prebuilt cabin, two stories, three bed and two bath, with an updated kitchen. Layout looks nice enough.” Leon’s stomach churned at that description. She already knew so much, and she’d never even been there. That meant the interior photos were public. ”Background checks of all surrounding lot residents came back with no real concerns. Unless you’re suddenly a stickler for speeding infractions?”

“Now you’re just being cheeky.”

Hannigan let out something that was more of a huff than a laugh. “The dock is in pretty bad shape, but it wouldn’t take much to make it functional. The closest town is pretty small, under fourth thousand, but they get a mild winter, and they’ve got a strong tourism pull. You might have to deal with idiots not understanding what a property fence means.”

That certainly wasn’t a dealbreaker. Leon would happily put up signs boasting as to the rights of the property owner with fun little threats. He’d honesty been thinking a lot about personalization of something he owned rather than the sizable but barren flat he leased in D.C., though the anxiety of leaving said flat overshadowed excitement. He tried to tell himself that it would be nice to know what it was like to have a home without sharing the wall with a neighbor. He just wished there wasn’t already a home on the property. The idea of anyone knowing exactly how to operate his possible home made his skin crawl with paranoia.

“This sounds perfect,” he commented, knowing damn it wasn’t, but needing to weigh his options. “What’s the catch?”

She hesitated. “It’s in Arizona.”

“Veto,” Leon replied immediately.

Hannigan sighed, but she didn’t sound surprised at all as she said, “Yeah, I don’t blame you there.”

“Where was that place?” Leon asked. “From the sound of it and with that population, I’d guess Williams, right? So the Grand Canyon railroad is connected, meaning we’d hear a damn train if we’re close enough to the tracks. Fuck that, Ingrid, I’d have to drive all the way down into Phoenix for any decent shopping, and I’d rather eat my own hand than step foot into that city.” He glared as a car sped past him, way too close to his leg for comfort. “I’m sweating my balls off here, and it’s not even eighty degrees yet! The hell were you thinking, pitching that one to me?”

“I was thinking that you’re gonna have to either raise your budget to get what you’re wanting, or make sacrifices,” Hannigan replied with amusement in her voice. “There’s still that gorgeous lot up in Montana, remember? And it’s close enough to the Canadian border that you’d just have to drive in for a much cheaper flight. Trout pond, prebuilt home, five bedrooms for all your visitors, a manageable twenty acres…”

“Five million dollars,” Leon reminded her firmly as she trailed off. Also, public photos of the interior of said home. And it was hardly a home in the first place. Damn thing was more like a modern mansion. He’d felt his skin crawling as he’d looked over the manor-esque abode, relating it to the manors he had swept in search of bioweapons.

“Which you both can easily afford with all the savings you’ve accumulated from literally zero vacations taken and all of the bonuses you’re paid out to keep your mouths shut. Honestly, Leon, it’s like you forget you’re one of the highest paid special agents of all time. You should start living like it.”

Absolutely not– Leon stockpiled money now that he wasn’t paying his shitty parents a damn dime. Perks of them being dead and all, one of the few thousand to not survive their injuries from the New York incident. Hannigan was right, he had enough just on his own in his savings, and it wasn’t like he’d be paying cash upfront if he didn’t have to. And it wasn’t like he had to save money for emergencies beyond what he already had. Leon was one of the lucky few that knew the end of the world would be a long, drawn out process that would completely nullify any economy. The dead didn’t care if what kind of paper he had in his wallet, and neither would any survivors.

It was hard, though, to imagine spending the money he hoarded so carefully. Growing up not having much of it made it harder to let go now that he did. He could afford it, he totally could, especially when he wasn’t going it alone. He just– really got nervous about this shit. Everything that normal people did with their normal lives made Leon very, very nervous. And the idea of spending such a ridiculous amount of money on himself in a way? It made his stomach churn.

Leon blew out a breath. He suddenly didn’t want to think about this anymore.

“Check your phone– how do any of those look?”

Leon frowned and pulled out said phone. Hannigan didn’t normally want him diverting his attention away from surveilling during an op. Was she trying to send him images of the Arizona lot to convince him? It wasn’t going to work, he would never enter the desert as long as he had a choice, let alone live there. Why would she–

Oh– oh, she’d sent engagement rings. Leon scrolled down the few imagines she’d sent, his mouth twisting when none of them caught his eye. Too many diamonds along a thick silver or gold band, too bright and pristine. Any of these wouldn’t last a single combat situation without countless scratches, and anything with diamonds was just asking for them to get lost in a hot zone. Plus, none of them seemed right.

“Veto,” he murmured, shaking his head, disappointment thick.

“You’ll find the right one eventually.”

He sighed. “I’m not so sure myself.”

As a semi-truck barreled by and absolutely eradicated the health of Leon’s lungs, he thought of the last kiss he’d shared with Chris. Three days ago in Leon’s apartment, the man in a rush, his go-bag over his shoulder, frazzled with suddenly being called out for something about Jill, halfway through the door and ready to run down the hall– only for the man to cry our and whirl around, finding Leon watching him until the last second as he always did in the foyer, taking Leon by the jaw and kissing him like it was their first. Chris always kissed Leon like it was their first.

“It’s fine,” He told mostly himself, but also Hannigan. “It’s not like he’s going anywhere.” Leon readjusted his feet and got with the program. He switched his feed from the chat he shared with Hannigan to the operation details, however scarce they were. “So what’s the deal with this Doctor Antonio Taylor guy?”

“He’s wanted for espionage and aiding enemy states,” Hannigan said like that wasn’t the United States’s bread and butter. The annoying red train thing went by him, brakes squeaking. “San Francisco PD sent SWAT to his last location, but they were attacked by an unknown group with a lot of firepower.” Leon’s favorite. “Whoever these people are,” Hannigan went on as Leon watched the poor guy he was supposed to find get loaded into the back of a van. “They have Taylor now.”

Leon sighed, noting the level 4 body armor the attackers were wearing, tactical black. “That can’t be good.”

“That’s an understatement. He was involved in top-secret research for our military, and now foreign agents are after him too. We need him in custody, a-sap. Like, yesterday a-sap.”

He understood where she was coming from, except he really didn’t. So what if this bastard knew things he shouldn’t? Leon would bet that the feds had happily funded all those terrible things until their dog bit the hand that fed. He hated covering up the mistakes of a shitty government. “You love to rush me, don’t you?”

“We know the route the van took,” Hannigan went on, skillfully ignoring his complaint as Leon eyed his watch. “If our calculations are correct, it should pass you in a minute or–”

The van fucking passed him. Orange at the front and back, the side white with a dry cleaning logo plastered on, the fucking van passed him.

“They’re early,” Leon snapped as he shoved his phone away and yanked hard on the throttle, revving the engine to life before peeling into the street, making the sharp turn with his teeth grit.

He pushed the bike to its limits, but the weaving streets allowed little room to gain any distance, Leon cursing as he was forced to weave through traffic and shoot past pedestrians, the van always just ahead. The situation got even worse as it made a hard right onto an on-ramp, rumbling up onto the 101, spelling absolutely disaster. He could tell by the way the truck was dart between cars with little regard for blending in that they knew he was on their tail. He kept his head low and eyes sharp as he climbed the ramp and finally started to eat the distance, resigning himself to doing something really, really stupid.

Leon pulled his Sentinel from the holster at his thigh, fighting to keep his aim steady as he aimed for the tires. When he’d been told he had permission to use firearms in public, he’d balked at the very idea of risking civilian life, but now he realized the mission details had had a point. And serious firepower, right? Serious enough to call him in? He had a bad feeling that there was someone in that vehicle that boosted abilities beyond the realm of human.

Just one bullet, that was all it would take. He was the best shot in the business, he just needed to take one tire, just one–

Something slammed into him and he grunted, squeezing the trigger purely out of reflex as the Ducati veered hard to the right, Leon forced to lower his gun and correct, or else he’d be mince meat along the asphalt. He chanced a glance to his left, seeing his attacker on her own bike, dressed in a deep maroon bodysuit with her arms bare, a helmet covering her face. So either a suicidal idiot, or someone who knew road rash wouldn’t slow them down.

She slammed into him a few more times, obviously trying to throw him off the pursuit of the van, and more than likely kill him. Leon kept steady and shot ahead the second he had enough breathing room, widening the gap between himself and the woman, gracefully aiming directly behind him, squeezing off a few rounds while still being painfully mindful of the civilians driving around them.

She dodged the bullets as easily as he’d expected, and then she– popped a fucking wheelie, accelerating and closing the gap, slamming her wheel down on the back of Leon’s bike and nearly throwing him into another vehicle. Leon barely recovered, shooting forward again, realizing just how bad this was. He was being pursued by a woman that wasn’t worried about being injured. He was being pursued by a woman who, in all likelihood, was infected. Like himself back in Spain, how Sherry was now. This bitch wasn’t fucking normal, and she didn’t care if she risked her neck to kill him, because her neck wasn’t easy to snap.

Leon fell into the defensive, focused on getting that distance back and maintaining it. The van was ahead, but that was only half of his concern right now. Especially as they sped into a tunnel, Leon reluctantly stowing his gun, because he wasn’t about to have innocent blood on his hands. The woman sped forward and around Leon, his gut dropping as he watched her come alongside a semi hauling a multi-level open car hauler. He watched her reach and undo a very, very important pin, and saw the upper back ramp drop, the lower car crushed as the other vehicles began to roll off the carrier and directly towards him.

“Oh, shit.”

Vehicles flew towards him at breakneck speed, spinning on top of their noses, flipping wildly with the momentum. Leon swerved hard, left and right, every turn of the handles narrowly saving him from death by mere inches. He somehow survived, breaking through the tunnel with labored breaths, his heart racing and hands clammy, but alive.

Fuck this bitch.

Leon threw caution to the wind, catching up quickly now that he wasn’t worried about anything but getting even. He came alongside the woman and yanked out his Sentinel, firing twice into her bike, but the bullets ricocheting in a stroke of bad luck. The bitch braked and then darted left, climbing up the back of the now empty trailer, speeding up the slope and out of sight, before her bike crashed down to earth, smashing into the concrete, sparks flying as it skittered and forced Leon to swerve again t dodge, but what the fuck, where was she, what had happened–

She landed heavy on his back, Leon crying out as she flattened his sternum into the hump of the bike, her arms wrapped tight around his neck. Leon struggled as best he could, but he knew that only one of them would end up dead if he lost control and tossed them. The woman started to twisted around him, hanging off his right side, Leon fighting to keep balanced while also fighting not to choke while also fighting not to fuckking crash. A sharp, short turn had her legs losing their grip, but she still hung on, her legs above the road the blurred beneath them. Leon sped them up to another semi, getting close to the trailer, hoping to scrape her off–

She suddenly lifted her entire body to the left, running up the side of the trailer’s box, and flipping herself in air. She landed with her legs spread right in front of Leon like something out of a batshit porno, before the stilleto of one of her heels perfectly pushed the break in.

The front tire screamed, the smell of burning rubber assaulting Leon’s senses as the back wheel shot up and Leon fought like hell to keep the whole thing from flipping over. The bitch launched herself into the air and the bike went down despite the best of Leon’s abilities, Leon crying out as he toppled onto the asphalt, tucking and rolling as the bike shot overhead and smashed itself to bits along the freeway. Every bone in Leon’s body ached as he tumbled onto one knee, gun up, some asshole in a Prius honking at him as it sped past, like Leon wanted to be here. He lined his sights down the rode, then up, but saw her standing atop a civilian vehicle that was speeding away. He wasn’t going to risk that shot.

But– he noticed, too, as she shrank from sight, that he recognized her. Blonde with that kind of body suit, a tall, imposing figure, able to do the craziest of stunts in the tallest of heels. He knew her.

The Ducati was hissing with a bad, bad leak. He shook his head with a sigh, shaking his head. “I loved that bike.” Then he turned and played frogger, heading for the shoulder, pressing into his ear to say, “Give me everything you have on Glenn Arias’s old friends– now.” fighting Maria Gomez again in yet another city boasting a population in the millions? Not a good sign.

. . .

Chris’s hands were clenched tight at hiss ides as he marched down the hall of the temporary intelligence facility the B.S.A.A. had built overnight in San Francisco, California. A crap shoot of a wild guess as to the whereabouts of the person the B.S.A.A. was tracking for the recent, numerous, small scale outbreaks, Chris was loath to say that he was enjoying the enjoying the California sun.

There was a strange energy to this side of the country, a country he hadn’t really lived in for more than a few days at a time since the nineties. Maybe the energy of America had changed since he’d left, but things just felt different went he stepped outside of these dreary, windowless walls into the vibrant, bustling, somewhat disgusting streets of one of the most iconic cities in the world. He was trying to convince Piers to drive down Lombard street with him.

Not that he hoped to be here much longer. Being torn from Leon in the middle of his weekend had been worse than breaking a bone, if he were honest. Leon hadn’t looked anything less than kind and understanding, but that actually made him feel worse. He didn’t deserve someone who had that kind of patience for his tumultuous schedule. Leon didn’t deserve the instability.

Chris sighed as he walked down an empty, dark, depressing hallway. Seriously, he would bring it up again, would it kill the BSAA to at least give them windows? He didn’t give a shit about security anymore since the bad guys already had far more secrets than them, what if there was an outbreak? They only had three viable exits without windows, it was like the BSAA just wanted them to die at this point. God, he wanted to go to the beach. He wanted sunlight. He wanted warmth and a soft laugh and hair as bright as the sun itself and the strongest thighs in the god damn world around his waist. Chris just wanted to go home.

Instead, he walked into Rebecca’s morgue and steeled himself for bad news.

The aforementioned scientist was sat at a long table with delicate equipment that was worth more than Chris’s yearly salary. She was typing on her laptop, expression pinched with focus, barely moving as the glass doors opened for him. “Hi, Rebecca,” he called out for the sake of formalities. Only then did she turn, looking at him blearily through glasses that reflected the light far too easily.

“Hey, Chris,” she greeted, sounding almost surprised to see him. She must’ve been working too hard. “Where’s Jill?’

Chris sighed and put his hands on his hips. Another wrench in his day. “I’m having her write up the report about last night.” The report he really hadn’t been able to write himself, or anyone else on the team, for that matter. She’d cleared the whole damn place on her own, ignoring standard operator protocol. He didn’t know a damn thing about how it had gone down, so what was there for him to write? She’d done all the work, she wrote the report.

“Ah, I get it. Punishment.”

Chris stared at her, trying to figure out how that was punishment. He had to write a million reports a day. Also standard protocol. Everyone on that op was writing a report. “Don’t even go there,” he warned, pacing to the other side of the room. “Anyway, the city now has twelve cases like the one last night.” He faced the bodies behind the glass, the rows of innocent lives laid out on tables, covered in tarps, denied a proper burial. He sighed again. “Did your tests turn anything up?”

“Well, they were all infected with an improved version of the T-virus,” Rebecca explained. “And they all have needle marks.”

Chris frowned. Improved version. Did that mean his longstanding immunity no longer applied, at least to this strain? Also– “No bites?”

Rebecca made a noise of denial as she pushed away from her desk and stood to join him at the window into the morgue. “None of them were bitten, only their victims. And the victims didn’t turn. They died from their wounds. From what I can tell so far, this virus isn’t spread via airborne particles or saliva.”

God dammit. Chris turned to face her, arms crossed over his chest. “It’s something new.” Relatively speaking, that was. Still the T-virus, after all. They had more cures for the T-virus than any other Bioweapon on record. “We have to stop whoever’s behind this. Fast.”

Rebecca hesitated. “Jill wasn’t bitten, was she?”

“No,” Chris denied, stepping back as Rebecca seemed to sag in relief. If she had been, Chris would’ve led with that, jesus. “Just being reckless, as usual.”

“Why are you so hung up on that?” Rebecca demanded. “You think you’re the only one allowed to risk your life to save others?”

Chris scoffed. “What?”

“After all she’s been through,” Rebecca barreled on. “She’s finally back in the field.” Yeah, and she was ignoring all standard protocol for operating within a unit. Chris had noticed. “If she’s being reckless, like you say,” which she was, “It’s probably because she’s trying to make up for what happened to her.”

Like that was a good reason to get herself killed? “You mean how Wesker brainwashed her and made her come after us?” He didn’t need the reminder, he needed Rebecca to understand how little sense she was making. Jill wanting to make up for undeserved guilt didn’t even remotely excuse her actions. “No one’s blaming Jill for that.”

“No one. Except Jill.”

Chris sighed for a third time. Rebecca really needed to leave the office once in a while. And he needed to find Jill. Luckily, the latter would be easy enough to achieve. Another stroll down the most miserable hallway he’d seen in weeks found Chris in the range hat accompanied the armory, with Jill taking her frustrations out on a target that resembled swiss cheese more than anything else. She was reloading as Chris walked in, giving him just enough time to cover her ears as she brought up the Samurai Edge and resumed fire, gaze laser focused as she decimated her target.

She was an impressive shot, there was no doubt about it. And honestly, Chris had half a mind to recommend she leave SOU entirely, or at least become an offshoot.

Ever since Jill had returned from her extended leave and re-entered the field, Chris had keenly noticed the similarities between Jill’s new combat style, and Leon’s. Quick, quiet, and devastatingly lethal, suited more to keeping in the shadows and cleanly taking out targets with selective opportunity rather than a chaotic firefight. Chris had a couple ideas in mind he wanted to suggest to her that he’d thought up while learning more about Leon’s role in DSO. If Jil ever actually sat down and talked to him, maybe he’d get the chance to bring them up.

He stood just to Jill’s right, knowing she knew he was there. His palms did little in the realm of genuine ear-pro, but he was too far along in his career to really care now. Jill and him used to crack jokes about that, back before Wesker had taken everything from her. They would purposefully say things to and about each other just out of earshot, seeing how far away they could get before the other person wouldn’t hear. Chris had lost every time and Jill had called him an old man. He was much older now. He hoped Jill would call him that again, if only to know she remembered what they’d once meant to each other.

Chris missed her. Jill was standing right in front of him, and he missed her. He knew that too much had happened to her, she’d seen too many things, and missed far too many more. God, Jill didn’t even know about China, she didn’t know about New York, she didn’t know. She’d been stuck in time for years. She’d been left behind, whether they’d meant to leave her or not. Chris knew grief. He knew regret. He knew guilt. But he had an awful feeling there was no one who knew how detached from the world Jill felt now.

She didn’t even finish her clip before clearing the chamber and ejecting the mag, setting it down to turn and face him, ear-pro tugged off her head. “What’s up?”

Chris sighed through his nose this time. “... I want you off this case. You need some time off.”

Jill scoffed and turned away from him. “You’re joking.”

He wished she was, but her actions had shown Chris that she was a dangerous to herself and the team. “It’s good you’re back,” he genuinely told her as she walked to the bench in the back of the room. “I just don’t want you to push yourself too hard. You’ve been through a lot.” And she wasn’t thinking clearly, At least, she wasn’t thinking clearly for working with a unit rather than herself.

Jill was quiet for a moment, her hand resting on the handle of the fridge. “When I was being mind-controlled by Wesker and the P-30, all I wanted was to kill you. All of you. I was conscious, but I couldn’t stop myself.” Frustrating bled through her words like it poured from an open wound. Chris swallowed hard, wishing he could give him some kinda of solace or comfort. But there was nothing he could give. “It was like living in a nightmare.”

Chris cast his eyes to the ground, wishing he wasn’t about to admit this. “Sometimes, the nightmare sticks with you.” He’d lived every nightmare he could possibly imagine up until this point. Losing his parents, being forced to fight against his own COs simply to save a life, then the mansion, then– then everything after that. The fear. The horror. And then knowing, for so long, that someone he loved more than anything was in that same hell, alone, and he couldn’t do anything to protect him. “And if you’re not careful, it’ll swallow you up.”

Jill opened the fridge and told Chris a lie. “I’m fine now.” She grabbed two waters, tossing one to Chris, which he caught. “Don’t worry about me.”

Chris didn’t know how not to worry.

Jill shut the door and dropped down onto the bench beside it. Her breaths echoed int he concrete room, and the way she consistently avoided his eyes said far too much. Such an insane thing to ask of him. Jill knew better than most that all Chris did was worry. Not because people weren’t good enough, not because he thought he was better, but because he knew they were up against impossible odds. It didn’t matter how much faith Chris had in his abilities, or Leon’s, or Jill’s. There was always a bigger fish.

Chris shuffled over, his body tense, almost pained. Not only was he too old for this shit, but he also had a bad habit of always wearing his gear. Leon was the only person who could ever coax the gear from his shoulders, reminding Chris that he needed to turn off. God, he wished Leon were here right now. The other man was much better with conversations like this. Leon always knew what to say.

Chris leaned against the fridge, trying to figure this out. “... There was a time where I was ready to step down,” he murmured, seeing the way Jill’s head turned to him in surprise. “It was before Edonia. The war was changing faster than we could keep up. I didn’t have anyone to ground me, anyone to keep my hopes for the future up. Hell, I didn’t see a future for me at all. Things were getting worse with every day. I couldn’t keep my head up. Couldn’t keep my head high. And I had this soldier beneath me– you know him. Piers.”

Jill nodded. “He’s on leave right now.”

Chris knew. The lucky bastard had definitely earned it. “I was going to have him take over for me. I trusted him, and he trusted me. He fought alongside me for years, and then…” Chris swallowed hard, staring into the darkness of the range. “It was a worst case scenario on top of a dead end at the end of the world. We were facing an impossible monster and he– he infected himself. C-Virus, no vaccine at that second in time. He infected himself because he thought that was the only way out. He was in so much pain. He knew he was going to die. He knew he was going to turn at any second. So at the end, when we had just one working way out, he tried to push me inside while leaving himself behind. He almost died trying to save me.” Then he glanced to Jill. “But Leon saved him.”

She didn’t look away.

“We have to be ready to die in the line of duty,” Chris said, pushing away from the fridge to really look her in the eye. “It’s part of the job. But rushing in like you did last night, you’re not just risking your life. You were risking the life of everyone on our team. You were risking my life. And just like Piers infected himself for what he thought would be the greater good, he only made himself a larger risk to me, and he knew it.”

Jill finally looked away.

Chris grimaced. “Honestly, I probably would’ve done the same as you years ago. That’s why our job is hard. We have to consider stuff like that. We have to remember we’re not alone, and that it’s not just our head on the chopping blocks in the field. Always.” She was starting to get annoyed with him, Chris could see it, but he wanted her to understand that things were different now.

“We’ve been in this fight for so long, we’re getting numb to it,” he said somberly. “But this isn’t the mansion, Jill. This isn’t Raccoon City. We’re BSAA, and we have teams. They hardly ever sanction partnerships anymore, the days of a two-man team are long gone. This war doesn’t allow mistakes like we could’ve made before, this war isn’t about solving puzzles for keys to get out of a building, or of a city. Hell, it’s not even like Africa anymore, where we had one bag guy and we gunned them down. We have to be even more careful now. Because if we’re not, that numbness will burn right down to our souls and make us complacent, make us think we know how things we’ll go and fuck it all up. We have to play it by the books, or we run the risk of killing our people. Going in alone, guns blazing? That’s asking to lose your whole team. Trust me.”

If he had learned anything from LanShiang, he had learned that his own brazen, disgusting rage had killed every single man following him in that decaying city. Piers had been right in his fury with Chris’s actions. He had gotten them all killed– twice.

Jill stood. There was a smoothness to her expression, a burning in her eyes, and Chris knew he hadn’t gotten through to her. “Innocent people are being poisoned and used as weapons,” She said as she strode past him, returning to her station. She turned to him for only a moment to say, “Whoever’s doing that has no soul. And if we want to stop them, we can’t afford to think about being numb, or souls, or any of that shit. At least I can’t.”

She left him with those words, pulling the ear-pro back on and silently excusing Chris with her back to his face. Chris’s shoulders hung heavy, wishing things were different. Jill was right, to an extent. But she had this awful idea that she was expendable. Maybe she felt she was good enough to not really be risking her life when she acted so thoughtlessly in the field, but Chris knew better. None of them were bulletproof. None of them were good enough to be safe. Hell– none of them even knew what safe was.

The steady gunfire resumed, and Chris had no choice but to leave. He really needed lessons or something when it came to talking about this shit.

. . .

Jill had forgotten how quickly shit could hit the fan. One second, they’d been part of a noisy, lumbering group of tourists that hadn’t known when to shut up, and the next? Dropping like flies, and coming right back up, the undead rising in a matter of a blink. Maybe Chris had been right– this war wasn’t the way she remembered it to be.

Jill had never seen people turn that quickly. It was like a biological switch had been flipped, fastforwarding natural decomp and decaying the human body in a breath, the mind gone, blood pouring from orifices, and the poor victim sprinting like a madman for its pound of flesh. At least Jill could assume the turn to be relatively painless with how quickly victims succumbed. But the lack of an infection source and the chaos of the scene, coupled with the unpredictability of the infections targets? Their odds weren’t looking good.

Especially not her own odds, to be honest, officially separated from Chris and Claire. Jill knew she could handle shit on her own, but she worked best in smaller scale areas, not an entire damn island with one of the notorious prisons in the world perched atop it. She cursed her self for not snagging some sort of map for the layout, remembering only glancing at it over Chris’s shoulder during the ferry ride out. To be honest, none of them had expected much to happen, let a lone an outbreak. It just went to show how little Jill knew about this new war on B.O.W.s.

In retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have died down the hole with no way out. And in further retrospect, the prison shouldn’t be open to tourists if the entire fucking floor could just give out under the weight of a few bodies like it had. She had decided to make the best of it and scout the underground tunnels, though she didn’t know why these tunnels existed in the first place. At least this way, they might be able to find out who was infected civilians for the hell of it. What was the point of starting an outbreak on a tiny, isolated island? There was either no plan or purpose to it at all, or a much larger scheme than she was ready for.

God, it reeked down here.

Her flashlight hardly helped, the pillar of light barely able to penetrate more than fifteen or so feet in front of her. Everything was brick and stone down here, echoing all around. And she was likely below sea level at certain points, so the continuous drip of water from literally every direction, while par four the course, was throwing her instincts into overdrive. Every little noise could be an infected, every tiny sound could spell her doom. With so much happening at once, and with the Redfields god knew where but hopefully alive, she needed to keep on her toes. All this audio from so many different directions was making said toes exhausted.

To make it even worse? She’d lost her gun. Again. The updated Samurai Edge had likely fallen from her grip and been crushed by rubble in her fall. She was without a weapon and without backup, unless Chris and Claire were pursuing her, but that would be unlikely if they still had survivors to protect. Jill was on her own, and when she would’ve been confident about that before, as she had been when operating that house all alone, she was only on edge now, realizing that going in alone without a lick of intel was a lot more difficult than she’d expected.

She approached a corner and flicked off her light, pressing against the wall and peaking around, seeing nothing, so she came back– wait.

Jill did a double take and spotted a shadow of a person moving slowly down a lower walkway on one side of a sewer river. She couldn’t see much detail in the shadow, but the person was dead silent in their steps, and moving away from her. She didn’t know who it was. She wasn’t going to take any chances.

Knife drawn and ready at her hip because the gun she’d snagged from the security guard was empty and discarded, one hand out in anticipation of blocking, Jill crept down the concrete walkway that framed the slowly moving, utterly rancid smelling waters. She gave extra care to her steps, ensuring not even the soles scuffed the ground, confident her approach would remain undetected.

A thousand possibilities swam in her mind, possible combatants that guarded the underground, perhaps a lone adversary whose ego was about to get him or her caught. She knew for a fact it wasn’t Chris or Claire. Claire wasn’t wide enough to cast a shadow like that, and Chris wouldn’t know stealth if it crept up on him and socked him across the jaw. Whoever that was, they were a stranger, and they did not belong in the private sewer system of a retired prison experiencing an outbreak.

She crept up quicker, anticipation and anxiety about a fight making her stealth suffer. Even as she slowly gained, passing alcoves on the brick storing what looked like equipment and small storage, her heart was already pounding, nerves becoming her downfall. She broke into a swift joke, her breath coming sharp, succumbing to her panic in losing the unknown combatant, running to the corner without caution–

A gloved hand darted out, shoving down her own that was outstretched, Jill flinching to the side sharply and trying to stab with the knife. A thick arm came up, a fist reading to knock her across the side of her head, Jill grabbing it and pushing it aside to stab again, straight for the skull– and was blocked again.

This stranger was impossible to see in the darkness, but it was obviously a man with the grunts she heard over her own, and this man was skilled. He effortlessly read her intentions and was ready with a an arm or a wrist and even a fist, and he was faster than he had any right being with such visible strength. Still, Jill wouldn’t be beat by some stranger in the fucking sewers, and she grit her teeth with her next swipe, taking note that the man, while wielding a gun, was not pointing it at her or with lethal intent despite her knife that was continuously begging to bury itself in his brains.

Jill quickly slammed her foot into the side of the man’s knee, sending him down and rolling over the bowed back, grabbing the arm and flipping the man over her body with the momentum, the combatant expertly rolling to his feet and coming up with the gun ready to smack her across the temple, her own knife blocked from being buried in his kidneys, the light landing just right–

Jill froze, breathing hard. Oh, shit. That explained why the man had only fought defensively. “Leon?”

Leon’s brow was pinched, his eyes darting across her face, like he was struggling to recognize her for a moment. Jill couldn’t blame him, really, they hadn’t met face to face since Raccoon City. He blew a breath of surprise, and Leon was shocked by how frustratingly youthful the man looked after all this time. Jill had an excuse for looking disturbingly young, after having been slow roasted by the P-30 for literally years. Where the hell did Leon get off? “Well, whaddya know? Jill Valentine.” Leon dropped his hands, and that pinch to his brow didn’t relax. He was wary of her. She couldn’t blame him. But he was also polite in asking, “How’s it going?”

Jill was about to give him some snark because they were in the fucking sewer, when the familiar snarl of a zombie sounded to her right, Leon’s left. The man was quick on his heel, spinning and firing two quick shots, the zombie’s brains spraying bright pink and red in the green light of the sewers. Jill still had her knife up, trying to figure out how that thing had snuck up on them. Even worse, she saw a shambling shadow reflecting on the curve of the tunnel wall behind it. There were more of these things down here.

“So, uh, Jill?” Leon called out, his voice calm, but just barely. “What are those things doing here?”

A good question– they hadn’t had a T-virus outbreak on U.S. soil in god knew how long. And considering what Jill had learned of Leon’s latest career, it was kinda his business to know. “They were tourists,” she admitted, a bit of a lift to her words. Leon taking things so well was really taking the edge off.

Leon fired twice again, two gorgeous shots taking down two more infected, far down the hall. “That’s one fucked-up tour,” Leon mumbled at her side, beginning to back up. He scanned the miniature horde that was encroaching on their position, then glance to her hands– namely, to the knife she held. “You got a gun?”

“Nope.” She couldn’t help the sharp way the word left her. “Lost it.” She was S-O-L, and she didn’t expect–

In absolutely ridiculous display of ambidextrousness, Leon pulled a gun from his vest, spun it gracefully in his fingers to ready the chamber with a one-handed pull of the slide, handing over a pre-loaded Springfield V10 Ultra Combat, clean as a whistle and sending a gust of relief through her. “Here.”

She was not going to look any kind of fucking horse in the mouth. “Thanks.” Just a little smaller than her preference, bu the kickback of the first three bullets was a godsend. Jill wasn’t going to question it. If Leon was comfortable enough with giving her his secondary after everything, she was going to do right by him.With both of them now armed, Jill was able to drop her far share of the steadily marching infected, focus stilling her hands and her thoughts, Leon able to take out anything she could miss, and with Jill finally feeling like she was evening out the odds–

One of the last zombies was suddenly yanked to the ground and into the darkness by a very long, very wet tendroil. It was dragged into the water with a splash. Leon lowered his gun, expression washing over with trepidation. “Uh-oh.”

Uh-oh was right. The serenity of combat from before abandoned her. Her hands were going to start shaking again if she weren’t careful. They continued their slow, now silent retreat, likely praying in unison that they’d escape–

The body from before was launched from the sewer, smacking hard into the ground right in front of them, Jill so startled she outright collapsed backwards, landing hard on her ass but still able to keep the gun up. Leon went down on a knee behind her, a hand planted near her back, his chest arching towards her, almost protective. The body at her feet was just half a torso and half of a leg, everything else torn from the body, bloody gore and cracked bones left behind. A low, terrifyingly familiar growl echoed as a form slinks from the depths on all fours, crawling into the light, sinew and muscle stretching across an animal-like frame.

A licker– Jill couldn’t even remember the last time she’d fought one of these.

Jill and Leon remained dead silent as it clambered over the body of its most recent meal. Something was off about this one, these odd protrusions from the back of the head with thousand of spindly spikes, like coral or the ribbing of a fish’s fins. The licker cocked its head from side to side, listening intently. It started to pass by them both, crawling over Jill’s boot, those teeth glinting in the low light of the sewers. That thick tongue flicked at the air like a lizard’s. This close, she could see strange flaps of skin hanging from the throat.

Jill’s breath involuntarily caught. Leon quickly brought up two fingers in her peripheral, but it was too late to try and keep quiet now. The licker slowed what had once been a steady path away from them. The grotesque head slowly turned in their direction, a threatening trill filling the air. It turned around and crawled back for them, and Jill decided breathing was overrated. There was a reflection in her peripherals, Leon steadying his gun as the licker crawled to her side, the ridiculously large claws curling into the concrete directly by her thigh. That tongue wagged in the air by her knee, then between her thighs, Jill watching with terror even as Leon aimed the gun at the thing’s bulbous, swollen, exposed brains. He was ready to fire, but only if need be. She wasn’t going to die. Jill was not going to die.

The jaw of the licker opened wide, revealing two mandibles at the bottom row rather than the standard single bottom hinge of a person. The tongue writhed in the air up her torso, and the breath of this thing smelled like decayed, rotten fish. Jill felt almost dizzy with the stench, the tongue so close to her face that she could feel the what radiating. A prehistoric growl warbled from its rotten throat. What the fuck was this thing?

The tongue lifted and swayed in her face. Jill couldn’t help it– she leaned back and away, grinding her teeth to keep from screaming like she wished she could, the monster so fucking close that she was actively counting down the final seconds of her life. She leaned even further as the tip almost trembled with something like delight, but the sudden touch of cold plastic to her shoulder had her panicking. Jill quickly put her arm out to stop the gas container she’d knocked against from tipping over– only for a leveler that had been inside the handle to clatter noisily to the ground.

Ah, shit.

The thing surged for her, but Leon was quicker, slamming the sole of his boot into the licker to kick it away, firing a devastating shot into its brains to give him enough time to yank Jill to her feet and break into a dead sprint. But even as the first licker went silent with true death, Jill heard another growl, and remembered that there was always more than one. As one lunged through the air for them, Leon twisted around and made another effortless perfect shot right through the brains. When Jill looked back to confirm the kill, she saw at least three more left.

Ah, shit.

She fired backwards almost blindly, Leon doing the same as he realized the numbers would quickly overwhelm them and run their guns dry. Their sprint would hopefully take them around corners and gain enough distance to take them out one by one, if they could just–

Something wet snagged Jill by the ankle and she hit the concrete hard, lights flashing behind her eyes as her head throbbed. The fucking tongue dragged her down, Jill barely able to pop the heads of the others that tried to make a snack out of her while she was a helpless catch on a line. But as she was reeled in too fast for her to aim, Jill abandoned her weapon, scrabbling at the concrete, her nails failing to catch, pain shooting down her arms as she was brought closer and closer to too fucking many teeth, her odds–

Leon suddenly slammed into her line of sight, their hands clapping with a ironclad grip, Leon holding on tight as the licker at her feet fought the weight of two people. The pain in her leg grew worse and worse, a burning that told her her hip was about to dislocated, pained grunts slipping past her lips. Leon quickly turned his body, digging his heels in to anchor, making a miraculous shot at another licker that tried to tear out Leon’s throat, only for another tongue from the ceiling to snag Leon’s wrist.

“Duck!” Jill cried out, Leon quickly throwing his head back to let her make the shot– but then that threw off Leon’s balance, and they were both skidding across the slimy ground again, right for the jaws–

Leon got himself upright again and made the final two shots, narrowly saving their skin. Jill’s breath shuddered out of her chest with relief, but Leon didn’t even allow a moment’s rest, ordering, “Let’s go,” already turning onto his feet and pulling her up by the elbow. They broke into a sprint again as more splashes echoed behind them, the skittering of claws telling Jill exactly why Leon hadn’t rested.

“How many of these are there?!” she cried out as they ran, daring to look over her should and feeling her gut drop every time the numbers seemed to multiply.

“I ain’t stopping to count!” Leon shouted back as they reached a sharp turn down another tunnel. They whirled around in unison and tried to thin the numbers as best they could, but a horde of lickers was as game over as it got. Leon made this sound of near distress before he was pushing Jill to the right behind the wall, shouting, “Move!” Jill grunted but flattered herself against the wall, looking back and watching Leon score a fantastic kick, launching a gas canister in the air and firing a clean shot. The man was immediately at her side and ducking as light and flame exploded down the tunnel, a roaring burst of sound before everything went silent, the horde going down in a blaze.

Embers and heat licked at their skin with smoke, the oxygen feeling a little thin, but the both of them alive. “Zero,” Leon breathed as he sagged back against the wall.

Jill made a face. “What?”

Leon cut his chin, eyes glinting in the dying firelight. “You wanted to know how many there were.”

Jill sagged with him. “Oh.”

Leon met her eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Let’s move.” He darted ahead, moving quickly and silently with the efficiency of an agent that wasn’t used to having someone else along for the ride. Jill quickly followed in step, opting for the Harris technique because like hell was she going to get caught off guard again.

The lights quickly dimmed and then failed entirely, Leon and Jill entering a part of the sewers that lacked electricity from the looks of it. The ground grew soppier beneath her boots despite the sewage waterway no longer splitting the center, and the corners of the arched ceiling had mold growing, thick and pungent. Both her and Leon’s flashlights combined were barely enough to light the way. “What’s up with this tunnel?” She murmured.

She didn’t expect any response, let alone something intelligent. “It’s to move munitions,” Leon replied to her dull shock. “Back when Alcatraz was a military fortress.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” she drawled.

Even stranger? Leon chuckled. “After this, I’m putting tour guide on my resume. I got to teach you something new, right? You better give me a good rating, Valentine.”

She shook her head. “Why are you here?” As far as she knew, only the B.S.A.A. had been investigating the small outbreaks, though that couldn’t be feasible, now that she really thought about it. Of course the United States government would know about the outbreaks, the B.S.A.A. would have to report to them. That was the only way they could actually legally be on U.S. soil, right?

Leon stopped his crouched crawl, going down on one knee with his light trained ahead. “Doctor Antonio Taylor,” he said, which, okay, that didn’t ring a single fucking bell. “He’s a specialist in robotics engineering. He tried to sell his research to another country, but got kidnapped by a bunch of terrorists. Dumbass should’ve known better, broadcasting his knowledge and location like an idiot. These doctors think they’re so damn smart, but don’t even use a dummy computer when on the dark web. Intel said they brought him to Alcatraz.” He paused, then did a double take, gaze curious. “What are you doing here?”

“A new virus is on the loose,” she replied, standing from her crouch to keep going as Leon moved to do so first. Surely he knew about the virus, right? “Clues pointed here, so me, Chris, and Clarie came to have a look around.”

She saw Leon go rigid with the name. Something twisted in her chest. Not jealousy, thankfully, but something else she couldn’t name.

“... I remember a briefing coming across Hannigan’s desk that she sent my way,” Leon said, seemingly avoiding the name. “Eleven attacks last I heard. Unknown infection method, accelerated T-virus. Our cases seem to be connected.”

“You think so?” Aside from location, she couldn’t imagine how.

“Yeah,” Leon oh-so-helpfully confirmed.

“How?”

“Working on it.”

She rolled her eyes, scanning the walls again. They were still brick, the ceiling still concrete, as was the floor, but Leon’s explanation for the purpose of the tunnels made a lot of sense. This was a long, wide hallway with few bumps and nowhere to store anything. She had a feeling they were getting closer and closer to the ocean than she’d like, stretching further from the mainland.

“The Redfields– what happened?”

There it was.

Jill grimaced. “There was an outbreak. No clue how it happened. Random members of the tour group we were with suddenly turned and killed the rest. The ones who were infected were the same as the attacks. No clue how it happened. No bites.”

“And the Redfields?”

Jill could admit it had been a little cruel to purposefully avoid his real question. She’d simply been curious as to how far he would push. “I was separated from them. Last I saw, Claire had survivors in a larger holding area, and Chris was on the second level with another survivor as well.” She paused, watching the tension in Leon’s back, and narrowed her eyes. “He was fine, you know. Chris can handle himself.”

“I know.”

Did he? “Then why are you even worried?”

Leon glanced back at her, something tired in his expression. She glared at him. Chris was a seasoned soldier. Worrying about him was insulting.

“I’ve heard you’ve been struggling with teamwork since re-entering the field,” Leon said, his tone mild enough to not betray the emotions she couldn’t read in his face. “Guess I should’ve expected it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know, just because Wesker turned you into an unthinking machine, doesn’t mean you actually are one.”

Jill’s teeth clacked shut so quickly that she felt it in her skull. She shoved her gaze straight ahead into the darkness as her heart hammered in her chest. It was an animalistic reaction, a fight or flight response at the mere mention of what had happened. She tightened her grip on her flashlight and tried to get her thoughts grounded before she remembered.

“Then again– I think I know how you feel.”

Jill was fighting a tremble in her jaw as she shook her head. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Leon agreed somberly. “I don’t know, not exactly. Not to the extent of what you survived. But I do know what it’s like to push everything away. To dissociate until all you are is the mission and the goal you’re trying to reach. I know what it’s like to stop being a person and only be a weapon.” He paused again, crouching on one knee and twisting back, the flashlight kept low so he didn’t blind her. “Jill– you’re not wrong to work the way you do. Going in alone, guns blazing, not thinking about anything but the mission. You’re not wrong. You’re just not what the B.S.A.A. wants right now in a soldier.”

The painful hammering slowed with Leon’s words, and Jill hadn’t realized how much she needed to be validated in her methods until Leon told her, to her face, that she was doing the right thing. Or at least, she was doing right by herself. And he really did know, didn’t he? He was the solo operative. He’d handled himself all the way into Alcatraz, and even now, with Jill at his side, he was self-sufficient. He’d been the one to give her another gun, so confident in his ability that he could afford to lose his secondary. His problem solving, his active use of the environment, his running knowledge of location– he was a man who had been fighting alone for a very, very long time. If anyone knew how Jill felt, it would be him.

“A team slows you down,” She said, ignoring the instinctive shame she felt with her own words. “You have to worry about them all the fucking time. And if one person fucks up, it’s everyone’s head.” She sighed. “Chris says that going in alone is just as dangerous, but what does he know?”

“About solo work? Only a little.” She looked up again and saw a crooked smile on Leon’s face. “He’s at his best with a team, you know that. He hates feeling alone in the field. He’s not wrong for that either. But he’s a big guy, you know? And his stealth is shittier than yours. With him, the team compensates and carries out things he needs done when he doesn’t have enough eyes or ears or hands. A team handles big time shit. Solo is quiet. Solo is quick. And solo is small.”

“Saving the president’s daughter is hardly small,” Jill scoffed.

Leon chuckled, shrugging. “Got me there. Maybe I used the wrong word. These people that call the shots, they look to teams when they want the shitshow to hit the news. But they call for the single, solitary agent when they want the goal achieved without a trace of evidence.And when you’re alone on an op? The only person you’re responsible for is yourself. Well– unless you’re saving the president’s daughter.”

Jill smiled a little bit back. “... Worrying about others is a distraction. It’s a weakness.”

“No,” Leon firmly denied to her surprise. “Worrying about them is a distraction, but never a weakness. The only people that don’t worry about their loved ones or what they’re trying to protect are the people that only work to destroy. But there’s a fine line between not letting yourself worry, and not worrying at all.”

She nodded. It made sense. That was how she knew for a fact Leon did get it. Maybe not the story behind it, maybe not the same kind of trauma, but– it felt like the outcome had been the same for them both.

Leon suddenly stiffened again. He tilted his head to the side, then turned forward again. An expression unlike anything Jill had seen so far was on his face. She couldn’t help but tense with him. “What’s wrong?” Leon quickly put a hand back, and the urgency only multiplied.

“You feel that?”

Jill made a face, scanning the area with her flashlight, just seeing more of the same, disgustingly dank tunnel. “What?”

“There’s a draft.” Leon’s left hand went into the air, free of a gove as his fingertips danced, searching for a sensation Jill hadn’t noticed. His hand drafted to the left, to the wall at their side, and he waved the hand around. “It’s coming from here.”

How the fuck– how did Leon know all of this shit and notice all these things? She’d called him self-sufficient only moments ago. Maybe semi-human was a better description.

Leon flattened his hand against a larger brick, grunting softly as he pushed, the block actually inching forward with his strength. A little extra effort, and it was shoved out the other side, collapsing and crumbling noisily. Leon crept closer as Jill brought her light up to give him better line of sight, the man hooking his hand for the bottom one and drawing a couple more bricks towards them, steadily creating an entrance. As he worked and the tunnel echoed with the debris, Jill looked up and down the tunnel to ensure nothing snuck up on them with the sudden noise.

In no time at all, an even darker tunnel stretched before them. It was about four feet wide and three feet tall– crawling specs only, no room to stand, and no room to go alongside one another. Not ideal.

“We don’t know where it goes,” Jill murmured as her light failed to reveal a damn thing in the pitch black. “Maybe outsider or farther into this maze.

“Either way,” Leon replied. “It’s better than here.” He turned to her with a playfulness glinting in his eyes. “C’mon. It’ll be like we’re breaking out of prison. It’ll be fun.”

Fun was not the word Jill would use to describe any of this shit, but as Leon crawled into the tunnel first, silently putting himself at the most risk for her, Jill ground her teeth and told herself that this– this was how solo operatives had to be. If Leon didn’t keep his hopes up with whatever banter he could come up with, god knew what would happen to his sanity.

Odd– Jill suddenly realized that she could probably learn a thing or two.

The tunnel didn’t even lead that far, only a few thirty feet or so before Leon’s soft call to slow down echoed back to her, a faint blue-green glow painting Leon’s hair a ghost of the blond it had once been. He stalled at the exit, then crawled out first, clearing the room with slow sweeps of his gun while Jill crawled out after him.

Her own scan of their surroundings did not give her a modicum of relief, despite no longer crawling through a tiny tunnel that smelled of dust and death. They were in a huge room now, metal lining the walls, water pumps and other pipes creating intricate and accidental shapes along the walls. They were back with the water, which was an odd green and smelled of far too much salt. There were metal causeways to help navigate the deep pool beneath them– and the lickers that she could see floating in the depths, seemingly asleep.

Jesus christ– they could swim.

Leon started to move because they had no other choice, but holy fuck, Jill couldn’t get her sights on anything for long enough to clear it. The room was way too big and too dark and there was far too much water beneath them. She couldn’t even assure there were no cameras on them. Fuck, she wouldn’t even be able to make a shot of one of them hit the water and went on. “This is not good,” she warned Leon despite knowing damn well he realized the same. God, even all the vulnerabilities aside, who the hell had made this place and why? She prayed the pool below wasn’t open access to the ocean. She prayed they weren’t about to see a full-scale assault on the shoreline.

Leon sighed, sounding almost frustrated, but what the hell did he expect? They had just uncovered something bad and couldn’t even start to find there way back and alert the people that could handle this!

“At least we know we’re on the right track!”

She was not in the mood for his optimism right now. “No,” she shot back, letting snark fill her words, a sarcasm returning that she hadn’t used in years. “You think?”

“Yup,” he replied, completely unperturbed. “C’mon.”

Jill shuddered as a licker bobbed gently to the surface. She couldn’t even see how many there were below to count them, the water too dark and too murky. “We can’t leave them like this. They’re unconscious, it’s not they’re not even turned on. We should try to take them out now!”

“They’re fish in water, Jill,” Leon shot back, fighting to keep his words patient. “You wanna go solo, don’t you? You want to be able to do your shit without a team? Then you gotta learn to pick your battles.” He glanced over his shoulder for her. “At the end of the day, you’re just one person, and that’s more down there than we even know. If you’re serious about going it alone? You’re gonna need to learn to count.”

Leon turned back ahead, leaving Jill to grimace, cut her chin, and follow. She had a bad, bad feeling that he was right. This wasn’t the war she’d known before losing herself to Wesker– she had a lot to learn.

They slinked along the metal catwalk to a door at the end, Leon gently shouldering it open, and ducking in quickly with his gun up. It was strange, seeing him operate the same way she did, if only because she was used to being chastised for doing so within the B.S.A.A.. No nodding, no pointing, no hand signs, not really. Go it alone and get the fuck out.

There was much more light in this room, and the room itself was even larger, around the size of a football field. Metal walkways framed the edge of the room and the sides of another giant fucking hole that led to the ocean. The equipment and machinery around clued Jill in enough to ask, “What’s a submarine dock doing here?”

Leon paused his sweep of the room to face the giant hole Jill couldn’t look away from. “Probably another holdover from when this was a fortress,” he told her. “You know, the first Pacific submarine group was actually based in San Francisco. Four submarines total, two of them even built in the city. Alcatraz was a fort all the way until 1933. It would make sense to utilize its access to the Pacific ocean without much risk of civilian access.”

Jill looked to him with bewilderment. “You just know all this shit, huh? You were able to solve the Rockfort prison riddle so damn quickly. I’d thought you were a spy who’d already been given the answers.”

Leon blew out a breath. “... You really wanna talk about that now?”

“Not particularly,” she admitted, looking ahead again. There was half a submarine hanging from a huge claw, like it had been torn in half and lifted out of the water for inspection. “But I’m frankly shocked you’re not holding a grudge.”

“Grudges are for the young,” Leon replied like it was that simple. “Look– they’re using it for an armory now.” He was right in that assumption. Several Humvees and :”military grade” containers were stacked up in the sides of the room. Whoever the hell “they” were. Likely Leon’s terrorists, homegrown or not. Leon cut his chin up to an observation deck, glass overlooking the web of metal walkways and braces and equipment. “Let’s check it out.”

Climbing the stairs into the observation deck, Jill felt her skin crawl at the sight of a small half-wall of monitors displaying various areas around the island, along with tech that was a good few decades older than the rest of the equipment in here. Jill was drawn to a particular camera feed showing the walkway through the submerged B.O.W. containment room they’d just been in, the one they’d found by sheer accident and Leon’s observation skills with the tunnel. Leon, though, approached another screen. It had a three-dimensional display of what looked like a super fucked up mosquito with all sorts of technical jargon Jill wasn’t paid enough to understand.

She shook her head, looking back to her point of interest– the strange licker variants that had been floating in the murky water. The center display showed a count of all the B.O.W.s, all of them displayed green, presumably to relay that their physical status was optimal. “What are they?” she wondered aloud. She didn’t expect Leon to know.

Ridiculously, Leon huffed and actually gave her an answer. “Bio-drones.” He circled around her, stalking around the observation room with a clear purpose she couldn’t relate to, gathering more data from the looks of it. “That room we passed through before is the incubation tank. The guy I’m here for, Antonio Taylor? This is his area of expertise. And these drones look ready to go. So he’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

Jill set her jaw as she scanned more and more of what she could understand. Bio-drones, engineered and operated by an enemy of the state, in the hands of someone who was mysteriously infecting innocent tourists with a new strand of the T-virus? And they were standing right in front of what looked like the central operating system? Why pass up on a golden opportunity? “He can wait,” she declared. “Let’s burn it all.”

She expected pushback, a voice like Chris’s or Rebecca’s advising caution from the former, and wanting to collect more intel from the later. Instead, she got Leon’s low growl of agreement. “Yeah. We’ll start with the incubation tank.” Leon Kennedy was just full of surprises, wasn’t he?

“Well, if it isn’t Jill Valentine and Leon S. Kennedy.”

They both flinched their weapons up to the ceiling as an unknown voice came of the P.A. system, a male’s voice to be exact, and sounding a little young. Reflexively, Jill’s breath quickened, more of that panic she couldn’t control returning as Leon pressed his back to her own, either a strategic stance or just a comforting presence.

“Well, if it isn’t…” Leon called back out as Jill scanned the corners for a camera or a speaker or something. “... Whoever you are!”

“Why don’t you come out and talk?” Jill demanded, instantly knowing they were dealing with a coward who had a god complex.

The man laughed, and Jill was again struck with how young he sounded. “How about you come to me? I’m in the main prison block. Ground floor.” He paused, likely to sound dramatic. “Chris and Claire are waiting for you.”

She felt Leon stiffen, the strong muscles in his back becoming like iron with more of that tension he felt when mentioning that certain Redfield. She turned back, meeting Leon’s eyes over the their shoulders, and for the first time, she saw fear in those unfamiliar blue eyes that had always been steady ground until now. Jill hadn’t thought it would be so simple to alarm a once unwavering man. His one weakness, it looked like. But even knowing what little she did of the history between Leon and the Redfields, Jill knew she shouldn’t be surprised.

“We have to go,” he whispered urgently.

Jill only cast one last glance to the computers, knowing it would be better for all of them to ignore the call and smash all of this into pieces while they could, but– despite all of her boasting with Chris about not worrying about souls, her own heart twisted and raged against the idea of the siblings being used against her as well. She knew they should stay here and bring it all down, bottom to top. But she also knew she would never forgive herself if something happened to Chris to Claire.

Jill cursed softly, but relented. There was never a doubt that she would give in. The nod Jill gave Leon was stilted, but determined. “Let’s go.” The relief she saw in Leon’s eyes was enough to tell her she’d made the right decision.

. . .

He wasn’t panicking.

Leon told himself over and over again, he was not panicking. Jill Valentine was a hell of an unknown variable, and he could not afford to panick, so that was why he wasn’t panicking, absolutely not, no room for error, don’t fucking panic, officer, don’t give them the satisfaction.

It had been cleared that the ominous voice from behind the curtain had either incapacitated the Redfields in some way– that was the only possible method to be so confident in securing them. The asshole had seemed pretty positive he had the Redfields under his thumb, so either they were hurt, or one of them was hurt and the other was being threatened with the safety of the injury into complacency.

Chris and Claire would rather die than see their sibling perish, and it was a stupid, pointless, endless loop of sacrifice in the name of protection between them, one Leon really wasn’t allowed to critique because he was the same for them and they were the same for him. They’d become this tight little group since New York and Chris finally feeling secure enough in his psychological rigidity to accept Leon into his life, with Leon attending their dinners with the Burton family, and being invited to shit that he couldn’t always attend, and Claire having even more of an excuse to talk his ear off now that she didn’t have to tip-toe around his grief.

Claire had always been Leon’s friend, someone he trusted, someone he knew he could rely on and even, maybe, turn to when he needed help. But after New York, she latched onto him with the determination and affection of a sister he’d never had. Still technically didn’t have either, but she wanted to be, and Leon felt it in the way she smiled at him and greeted him and asked him to go to every little even whether she knew he’d be able to make it or not.

It was insane to think about, but somewhere along the way, Leon had actually found himself a family. And here he was, stuck in the Farallon islands, with the millionth headcase ego-maniac of the year, holding that family over his head. Leon was just grateful Jack and Piers were in vacation, and that Sherry was on her own operation. At least they were safe. At least half of his small family was miles away and breathing.

Leon wasn’t even going to let himself think about Chris, not right now, not when he needed his head on straight and his gun steady. Jill was unpredictable, especially with all the things Chris had told him, and while Leon had confidence in her ability through sheer observation, he could tell she was at a knife’s edge with her emotions. Leon had done his utmost to keep her spirits up with his own bullshitting, but this? Chris possibly in danger, in the clutches of whoever the hell was behind the newest wave of outbreaks? He couldn’t keep this up, he couldn’t keep stong, not forever, not like this. If Leon lost Chris–

God.

If Leon lost Chris? That would be the end of it. The end of everything. It would be over. And that was the way it had always been for him.

The lower level of the cellblocks in the main holding facility was pitch black, Leon taking point as he scanned each and every cell, vigilant for a sign of their missing allies. Leon’s previous role of keeping his cool for Valentine was long gone, and the urgency in his movements would give him away in a heartbeat to anyone that knew him. He wasn’t moving as slowly as he would normally allow, with Jill’s back to his own, scanning their corners, the upper walkway, the ceiling. He wasn’t taking this shit slow and smooth, he was going to find his god damn boyfriend and he was going to put a bullet in any asshole that got in his way.

Another sweep of countless others of his flashlight caught on something–

“Chris?” Leon called out, barely able to believe it when he saw the shape of his lover slouched in a cell, pale as death and barely able to keep his eyes open. He dug his heels in to reach the man– only for Chris to jerk his head back, to the next cell over, a silent request that Leon couldn’t deny. “Claire!”

He ran for the next cell despite every bone in his body wanting to touch Chris and confirm his beating heart, instead darting to Claire’s cell and checking the bars, seeing if it really was locked. Claire breathed his name and Leon’s heart nearly stopped when he heard how bad she was.

“What’re you doing here?” Chris labored out, the fear in his own words palpable. Leon couldn’t blame him, for once. Shit being this bad? He’d be terrified to find Chris inexplicably in a hot zone as well. JIll was at the older Redfield’s cell and sliding down onto her knee, Chris reaching for her through the bars. “Hey, Jill. You’re– okay.”

“Oh my god,” Jill blurted out. “You’re so pale.” No shit, Valentine. “Claire?” she then called out, reaching beneath where Leon was tugging at rusted iron, knowing that if he could just get the right angle, he’d easily be able to break the locking mechanism solely due to wear and tear. “Hang in there.”

“Hurry! Get us out of here!”

The most weasley, annoying voice Leon had ever heard in his life had his movements stalling. Leon instantly tore his gaze from Claire up to a figure in Claire’s cell that he’d barely noticed. He stared at the features and cursed softly. “Son of a bitch.” He then rose to his full height, something white hot and ugly brimming to life in his chest. “Antonio Taylor.” The man wisely backed himself away from the bars.

“What?” Claire breathed from where she was collapsed across a bench, struggling to move her head from Leon to his target, then back. “His name’s Davis.”

“No,” Leon denied, low and pissed. “That’s a fake name. He’s Taylor alright.”

The bastard watched Leon like he was afraid of him. “How did you–”

“This scumbag’s wanted for leaking national secrets to the enemies fo the U.S. of A.,” Leon barreled on, his free hand clenching into a tight fist at his side. And all that shit upstairs, the biodrones and the implications of finding such tech employed in an area experiencing a outbreak? He had a feeling that treason was the least of the man’s crimes. “Better get used to this, Taylor– you’re living in a cell from here on out, one way or another.”

The lights suddenly blared to light overhead, Leon whipping around and aiming his sights up. As footsteps echoed around, Leon selfishly let his gaze cut to Chris, seeing the man pressed to the bars, white as bone, his whole body shuddering with every breath. Leon yanked his gaze away from the man and back to the shadows consuming the walkway overhead. He was going to protect Chris from whatever came next, or die trying.

“Welcome to Alcatraz.”

A man walked into sight, a visible limp and something like a cane in hand. He was dressed in all black like he took wardrobe advice from Albert Wesker, and greeted them like they were honored guests and like he wasn’t a piece of shit. “I’m Dylan Blake. It’s an honor to have you all here. Together.” Freakishly enough, he sounded like he meant it. And his voice was definitely the one he and Jill had heard back in observation tower.

Footsteps sounded behind the man, Leon swallowing hard at the sight of Maria Gomez stalking slowly forward like she was ready to slit every throat she got her hands on.

“I bet you’re wondering how people are being infected without being bitten.”

Hardly– Leon had so many theories, all of them strengthened by Taylor in the cell. The biotech was easily capable of short range infection through the drones themselves. Most of these were designed for the sake of chemical warfare in the first place, it wasn’t difficult to connect the dots. So long as the drones remained in range with the network it operated on, they could infected targets with ease. Each drone likely held one dose each, and it was miniscule in size. It would only take a small swarm to infected a crowd. And it would be virtually impossible to see before it was too late–

Something pricked the back of his neck, painful as a bee sting, dropping Leon’s heart out of his chest. He slapped a hand back to the location of the pain, his vision immediately beginning to spot with the signs of vertigo, and his legs suddenly felt weak. His breathing suddenly slowed and became painful, like something was actively crushing his chest. His skin grew clammy with fever. Leon knew the feeling well.

“That was one of my prototype drones.”

He’d been infected.

“I tell it who to infect, and it always finds its target.”

Leon couldn’t keep himself upright. His leg gave out, Leon collapsing to a knee, Jill calling out his name, but it was hard to hear past the blood roaring in his ears. Leon pitched forward, unable to even keep his gun up, one hand to the floor as the other clutched his neck, the point of infection.

Jill went low with him, placing a hand on his shoulder, and god– it was useless, but wasn’t that kind of her.

“The versions I will mass-produce are what you saw in the other chamber, and they’re ready to go,” the psychopath Dylan went on. What a shitty name for a bad guy. Dylan. Leon would laugh if his body wasn’t actively fighting a strain of B.O.W. he should’ve had immunity to. “By tomorrow morning, my virus will be all over the world.”

Leon absolutely would have laughed. Did this man not realize how his own tech worked? Leon had gotten a crash course, the biodrones wouldn’t be able to fly across the fucking world, they weren’t powerful enough to fight any wind current stronger than a tower fan at its highest setting. These things wouldn’t make it across the ocean, they wouldn’t even make it across the country. Dylan had only tested them in controlled settings, the interior of buildings, where weather wasn't a factor. What kind of absolute fucking idiot was he?

Maria hopped over the ledge, landing smoothly on the concrete in her stilettos, stalking towards him. Leon used the last of his strength to draw up Peach, his grip shaking, his limbs trembling, only for the souped up bitch to slam her heel against his hand to knock the gun away, then whirl around in a roundhouse, brute strength smashing into Leon’s jaw and slamming him against the bars of the occupied cells. Fucking Taylor cowered away, whimpering like an infant, as something weak tugged at the back of his shirt, either Chris or Claire. Maria stood tall above him, staring down at him impassively.

“I get it now,” Leon rasped, holding his aching jawbone. “The tech… the virus… You got it all from Arias. That’s why she’s here.”

“Arias and I did a lot of business together.”

Arias was a lot stupider than Leon had realized.

“So, you could say that we were sort of close. And since you murdered poor Maria’s father, I thought this was a good opportunity to settle the score. For both of us.” Like hell they had. That man had been as good as dead after accepting whatever the fuck Arias shot him up with. Leon glared weakly up at Maria, wondering where the hell these people got off, blaming four soldiers for the insane decisions of their loved ones. “Right now, they’re probably cheering us on from the afterlife.”

“Picking up where Arias left off,” Chris git out, Leon shuddering a breath as he heard the man speak.

“Oh, no. This is way different from what he wanted to do.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Leon grit out.

“It’s over now,” Jill snapped, her weapon aimed and Maria just watching her like she couldn’t give a shit. “Get your hands up.”

Leon was literally surrounded by idiots right now. A shitty villain who was just copy, recklessly pasting the efforts of the last, a virus that he should be immune to breaking down his body, the love of his life infected and suffering, and their last hope acting like she could arrest this man when Maria, who had just kicked Leon so hard he’d been flung across the floor, right next to her. Leon suddenly and clearly understood why Chris was so worried about Jill being back in the field.

Dylan sighed, so fucking dramatic and full of himself that Leon thought he was seeing Ramon Salazar reborn with about four extra feet to his height. “B.S.A.A., D.S.O., TerraSave,” Dylan listed like they could’ve forgotten who they were employed by. “You still think you’re fighting evil syndicates like Umbrella, saving the world, et cetera, et cetera.”

“We protect the innocent!” Chris forced from his dying lungs.

“Hardly!” Dylan replied with a short bark of sardonic laughter. “The huge corporations and the corrupt execs that run them, the ones getting big, fat bonuses for maintaining the status quo, that’s who you work for, who you really protect! And the innocent will continue to suffer as long as you do.”

Damn, that was news to Leon. When was someone going to tell him that by going into a hot zone, literally grabbing innocent civilians and dragging them out, and then putting down the infected was not protecting the innocent? Leon wasn’t blind, he knew the assholes at the top only care about themselves, but what the hell was Dylan going on about? And even worse–

“You’ve got more screws loose… than this whole jail,” Leon rasped, shaking his head. “You preach that the innocent suffer… because we protect the execs… and here you are. Turning an innocent tour… into a bloodbath.” He barely managed to lift his head, disgust burning in his eyes for the bastard that as so braindead that he didn’t see his own hypocrisy. “The innocent continue to suffer… because of sick fucks like you. You’re no better… than the people you hate.”

Dylan snarled, but he was already getting emotional, so caught up in his bullshit that he thought he was the smartest person in the room. “You’re nothing more than pawns, suckers.”

“What do you know?” Claire demanded, her words shaking. “Leon’s right– you’re no better than… than Umbrella and all the others!”

“What do I know?” Dylan turned away like an overdramatic fuck, then tapped his cane on the floor several times, like he was experiencing a fucking episode. “What I know is that I’m suck of this world and how the ones with all the money and power get to decide what’s right and wrong, good and evil.”

“Killing people is evil!” Leon labored out, actually rolling his eyes.

“There’s no such thing as justice in a world like that,” Dylan continued, his tirade just hot air at this point. “So, I’m going to use my virus–” That he took from Arias. “– to clean the slate.”

“Sure,” Leon grit out. “Kill everything. Like all the others before you.” That was literally Wesker and Saddler’s plan. Things never fucking changed.

“Not everything,” Dylan denied with a sharp cut of his head. “With these biodrones, I decide who gets infected and who doesn’t.” He just said the world would be infected by tomorrow. “Example, Miss Valentine.” Leon’s gaze shot to Jill, breath catching, anticipating her to fall– “I left her alone so she could experience what I went through so many years go, when I thought I was on the side of justice.”

Jill shook her head, her breathing always giving her away. “You’re insane!”

“Instead of pointing your gun at me,” Dulan advised. “You should be worried about him, trapped in that cell with Claire.” Leon glanced to where Dylan was pointing. Really? Taylor? Let the man rot, he was likely going to be sentenced to death anyways. “She’s not looking too good. It won’t be long before Claire turns. And when she does, she’ll rip the not-so-good Doctor Taylor’s guts out. And another innocent life will be lost.

“You heard him!” Taylor slammed himself against the bars, and Leon wished he had enough left in him to just gut the man himself with his knife. “Shoot her before she kills me!” Leon would make it slow too. He’d never killed a human being before, but he wouldn’t mind Taylor being his first, the rat. Claire began to moan and twist behind him, but he refused to move. If Claire did turn, Leon–

… Leon knew what he would do. If only to save Chris and Jill the agony of the action, he would put Claire down. He’d done the same with Adam and it would never hurt any less. But he would do it, for them.

“Here we have Leon S. Kennedy,” Dylan suddenly announced, like he had suddenly remembered the rest of his speech. “Working hard for people who lie and cover up the truth, who propagate the endless cycle of battles he keeps fighting.” And Leon never would’ve done it in the first place if he’d had the choice. It just went to show Dylan wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. Anyone who knew anything knew Leon hadn’t signed up for the hell of it. “And you’re all burnt out from it.”

“Yeah, well,” Leon grit out, exhausted of people truly believing he’d wanted this life in the first place. “It’s a living.”

“And Claire Redfield,” Dylan went on. “You think your group helps people. But they don’t do anything to stop the actual cause of all the suffering.”

“They’re a fucking non-profit, dumbass,” Leon groused from the floor, glancing to Maria just to see what she thought of all this. She continued to watch Leon, expression almost serene. Leon wondered how much of her was actually left in there. Then, considering the grief she’d gone through, Leon wondered how much of Maria had been in there to begin with.

“They offer bandages instead of real solutions. I bet you keep doing it out of pride. Because it makes you feel like you’re doing good.”

“Nothing wrong,” Claire grit out through clenched teeth. “With helping– people.” Damn right, Claire.

“Sure,” Dylan huffed, as if he was doing anything better than Claire did. “Keep telling yourself that. We both know you prefer sitting back and letting others do the dirty work… Like you do with your brother. Chris Redfield. Despite the fact that you lose team members on every single mission, you keep coming back with more. How many lives have you sacrificed–”

Alright, that was it– show’s over.

“Jill!” Leon barked, grabbing a flash grenade from his vest and pulling the pin, tossing it across the floor in front of himself, turning his head away as light flared brighter than the sun, the explosion itself ringing in Leon’s ears as the light faded as quickly as it had come– but with one less captive listener in the room. Leon laughed, the use of his laboring breath hurting like a son of a bitch, but he didn’t care. Dylan cried out in frustration and yanked his own gun up, Leon flinching to the side, thinking he was about to be shot–

The bang echoed, but Leon was unscathed, and he whipped around as Claire cried out, Dr. Taylor collapsing to the floor with blood seeping through his shirt. Like Leon said– good riddance.

Sharp leather collided with his ribs, Leon choking on a cry as Maria whipped him across the floor again. Her strength was immeasurable, and Leon didn’t think his body could withstand much of this. He pitched forward onto his hands and knees, desperation and old, old instinct pleading with him to crawl away, but another solid collision with his ribs had him rolling across the ground. Child-born fear had Leon recovering quickly, kicking the soles of his boots to the ground as he looked up at Maria in terror, realizing she looked a lot like his mouth, his back against the bars of a cell before the boot slammed into his neck and the heel dug deep into his left shoulder– into where he’d taken a bullet for Ada Wong.

“Don’t worry about them,” Dylan suddenly bellowed as Leon gasped and writhed, trying to push the leg away, trying to relieve himself of the pain, but knowing better than to fight back against a monster he couldn’t defeat. “They’ll suffer for a while, then turn soon enough.” Maria pulled her foot away and Leon collapsed, gulping air as his heart threatened to hammer out of his chest. He’d done the right thing.

“As for Jill…” Dylan looked over them in disdain before he limped away, so weak and pathetic and cowardly from on high. “She can do whatever she wants. We’re at the final stage now. Once the biodrones hatch from their licker hosts, we’ll have millions. They’ll leave the island, and then there’s no stopping them.”

Maria stalked after her new master, leaving them alone. He watched her go, shaking from head to toe as awful memories he’d ignored for ages suddenly wellbed beneath the surface. He felt cold all over, a telltale sign that his psyche was going to bad places. Leon struggled to bring himself up, struggled to do anything. Every part of him ached and cried for rest, for a cure, but it was over. At least Jill made it out, right? At least there was a chance the world would survive. Leon just wished he wasn’t shivering, feeling like he’d been dunked in ice and left to drown. He could feel the darkness tugging at his vision, at his breath, at his bones. He didn’t want to die like this. He didn’t want to die alone–

A weak hand took him by the sleeve, familiar and warm, and Leon shoved all that depressing bullshit away, renewed by purpose. With agony and infuriating slow progress, Leon grabbed a bar and dragged himself closer to the touch– closer to the light– closer to the cell his lover was trapped it. It felt like a Herculean task, but he’d never been a quitter. Dragging legs that were dead weight, Leon barely managed to get himself to where Chris was, seeing the man’s face, the handsome features he’d long since memorized, the gorgeous depths of his eyes despite the pain that broiled within. Leon smiled, shaky and fragile. They were dying, both of them. At least they’d get to do it together.

Chris slumped off the bench, leaning against the bars as well, Their bodies pressed together where they could touch, and it was better than nothing. Leon’s head sagged against the metal, Chris doing the same, every point of contact warm and alive, for now. An arm slipped between the bars, barely able to fit with how much muscle the man had, looping feebly around Leon’s waist. Despite everything, Leon’s body relaxed on instinct. He was with Chris. It would be okay. Everything would be okay.

“Are you okay?”

The question whispered in his ear was appreciated, but probably not appropriate. Leon tried to laugh, but the sound came out as a ragged cough, one that he worried would tear his lungs. Chris tried to hold him a little tighter with the small fit, and Leon could easily picture the worried pinch he knew would be on the man’s brow.

“Dying in your arms,” he whispered back. “So fucking romantic.”

“You’re not… allowed to die, Leon S. Kennedy.”

Chris had no authority in the matter, but it was sweet, nonetheless. Leon could hear Claire desperately tending to the injured and dying doctor who really fucking didn’t deserve the effort. He hoped Claire wasn’t trying too hard. If they remained still and didn’t get their hearts pumping too quickly, they could slow the spread of the virus. It would only be delaying the inevitable, but didn’t they all deserve a quiet death by now? Leon only hoped he would turn last. He didn’t want Chris or Claire to see him become a monster. It would be– indescribable to witness the turn Claire, and Leon would never survive Chris’s descent into violent instinct and gore, but if he could save them the agony, then he would gladly fall on any sword.

He also knew for a fact that Chris and Claire were thinking the same damn thing.

“I’m so… sorry.”

Leon’s throat clenched as Chris apologized for no good reason. It was so difficult for them to talk, so painful to force the air through their throats and out. Chris should be reserving his strength, not prostrating himself for the millionth time. “It’s okay,” he forced out, needing Chris to know he didn’t blame the man. He wasn’t stupid, after all. Chris wasn’t apologizing for Leon being here– he was apologizing for screwing up and needing to be saved. He was apologizing for being bait. “We all need… a little rescuing now and again.”

“Shouldn’t be here,” Chris told him, words agonizing and slow. Then, because Leon could absolutely argue that, he added, “Shouldn’t– have to die here.”

Leon just hummed softly, knowing there was nothing he could say, so there was no reason to waste the effort. He pressed as hard as he could into the bars, taking the bruising pain of the metal into his bones solely for the chance to feel a little more of Chris against him.

“Should be able to… die quietly. In a home. Safe.”

Leon sighed softly through his nose and used what little strength he could muster to gently squeeze Chris’s wrist. “Don’t need home,” he rasped. “Don’t need lakes. Trees. Quiet. Don’t need it… to die happy. Just need you.”

He could hear Claire still struggling in her cell, the absolute badass likely experiencing all the same torture Chris and Leon were slaves too, but she was on her damn feet and trying to save a man who didn’t deserve it. And that bastard Dylan had said she let others do the dirty work, like aiding survivors was easy, like helping wounded and damaged people through trauma was a walk in the park, like anyone getting out of an outbreak was on easy street for there on. Dylan didn’t know a damn thing. Leon wished that the bullet had killed Taylor outright, so that Claire wouldn’t have to exert herself like this and suffer. He wished he could help, but– well, not a damn chance in hell he could pull apart cell bars. If that were in his power, Chris wouldn’t be struggling against the metal himself to pull Leon closer.

“Can’t do anything about me,” he heard Claire say, her wrecked voice echoing dully across the stone and concrete. “But I can still… stop your bleeding.”

“What’s the point?” Leon shut his eyes as Taylor spoke, hatred twisting in his chest. Maybe Chris and Claire could put aside differences and say human was human, but Leon could never forgive these bastards that participated in outbreaks– and whatever the hell else Taylor had intended to kickstart by selling his tech. The man was a monster, just like the rest of them. “After what he said, don’t you feel like giving up?”

Leon chuckled at that, because of course the fucking coward would think giving up was even an option in the first place. “He made his choice,” Leon grit out, an extra throb of awful shooting through his body in the effort to raise his voice. Chris tightened his arm and murmured something in Leon’s ear, probably urging him to save his energy. “We made ours. That’s all.”

It was that simple.

“The world’s fucked up– no denying it,” Chris said into Leon’s skin rather than his ear, still using every ounce of care and gentleness even when in death’s arms. “Destroying it’s easy. The hard part’s doing the right thing… regardless.”

God, god damn, god fucking fuck, Leon was so in love with this man. And he agreed. “Can’t save the world… by killing it.”

“We’re all dying,” Taylor said like they needed the reminder, voice wobbling. “How can you be so calm?”

Leon felt Chris tremble a little against his side. He turned his chin just enough to catch a glimmer of the man’s eyes and forced a shaky smile before they said in unison, “We got Jill.” He felt Chris’s own chuckle against the feverish skin of his cheek and knew Chris was proud Leon felt the same about Chris’s closest friend, after everything. “If she’s still out there,” Leon whispered. “We’ve got hope.”

“Stop, stop,” Taylor suddenly murmured, Leon trying to lift his head and figure out what was going on. “It’s okay. My life was all about me. I didn’t care about anything else. If I’d met you all sooner… maybe I could’ve turned it around.”

“Just let me help you.”

Leon’s heart broke for Claire right there. Part of him wished she was colder, if only so she wouldn’t be so affected and haunted by the lives she couldn’t save, whether they deserved saving or not.

“I made a back door into the network– for insurance. In case they screwed me over, which they did.”

Leon, despite everything, perked up when he heard that. A backdoor. That was perfect, he knew he could figure that out easy as breathing, he would just need to find it, and then it would be as simple as inputting shit Hannigan had drilled into his head over and over, basic coding and how to fuck it all up just by adding a semicolon.

How would they get in? Was it accessible on a terminal or was it an exterior drive connection? Could he get in through the wi-fi network Dylan had to be using out here in the middle of a rock on the ocean? How long would it take to access? Before getting his hopes up, Leon wanted to know how much of a chance they really had. Because really, the chances of Leon making it to that backdoor was slim, and he had a feeling Jill hadn’t taken many IT courses since coming back to the field. Hell, as far as he knew? She still used a flip phone.

“He probably changed all the codes after I escaped,” Taylor droned on as a fresh stab of agony laced through Leon’s body. He swallowed the whimper of pain that would’ve otherwise escaped, but Chris felt it regardless, and the brush of chapped lips across his temple wasn’t enough to soothe the agony. “But if you… enter the password…”

Leon couldn’t hear anything after that. The man’s voice was too faint. On the other side of a concrete wall, Doctor Antonio Taylor died. And as much as Leon knew it was the least of what the man deserved, he was bizarrely grateful to the bastard still. If he hadn’t been in pursuit of the traitor, he would’ve never found Chris. He would’ve lost the love of his life halfway across the country. Chris would’ve died alone, and Leon would’ve never forgiven himself. No one in Leon’s life would’ve blamed him for biting the bullet if that had happened.

Claire’s labored breath pitched with grief, and that was enough to make Leon mourn the doctor just a little. He wasn’t worth the pain he was causing Claire, but Claire was too damn good of a person to not crumble with loss of a human life. And then he heard her breaths twist into agonized moans and this– this was it. This was what he knew was coming.

“Claire! Claire!” Chris shouted for his sister, and Leon was just relieved that the wall of concrete would keep the man from seeing his sister infected. She was behind bars too, she wouldn’t be a threat, but Leon knew Claire wouldn’t want to become a monster even if she never hurt a fly. He didn’t have his secondary, but he still had his knife. He would put her down, let her rest. And then Chris would turn, and he’d do the same.

And then– and then Leon would turn. The lone zombie staggering up and down the empty halls. After years of fighting, he would become the very thing that he had first escaped the clutches of in Raccoon City. He thought of Marvin Branagh and the way he’d fought so hard against the virus. By Leon’s count, Marvin had resisted the T-virus a lot longer than Leon had managed. Good on him. Leon would end up like him. Like all the others. A shambling corpse, soulless, tormented. A nightmare.

… He was going to end up the same as his parents. Oh, god. It didn’t matter how much Leon dyed his hair to keep from flinching at his reflection in the mirror. Leon was the spitting image of his namesake, and he would remain so, even in death.

His eyes burned. For the first time since being infected, Leon felt actual fear.

Then he heard footsteps.

Forcing himself to turn his head, Leon’s blurred vision made out movement far down the row of cells. He was a figure in green approaching. As the figure got closer, he recognized it as Rebecca, jogging steadily.

Leong ground his teeth and dug in deep, because he would not become his father.

A little faster, Chambers. “... Rebecca.”

“Leon!”

Bizarrely, and probably because he was still actively dying, Leon realized she sounded like Ashley when she called out his name like that. The doctor skidding to a halt on un-padded knees in front of her, dropping the case she’d been carrying to the ground and flicking it open. “I have the vaccine. I-I saw Jill out there too.” Leon eyed the foam-lined interior of the case, seeing four needles lined up and ready to go. “I saw Jill too. She’s headed for the armory.” She turned to him, bright eyes laser-focused. “This’ll sting a bit.”

Leon was going to ask more, but the doctor suddenly jabbing the vaccine right into his neck shut Leon up, forcing a ragged intake of air that burned his lungs, but by fucking god, he wasn’t gonna die, so any amount of pain from the recovery was worth it. The flood of the vaccine brought immediate relief, enough for Leon to lift his head and cut his chin to the next cell. “Claire.” Then he didn’t wait for permission, grabbing another of the syringes and turning in Chris’s weakening grip, gently pushing his gloved hand through sweaty short hair to hold him still as Leon jabbed their saving grace into the man’s blood. “C’mon, baby,” he murmured as Rebecca scrambled to Claire and saved her life. “We’re not done yet.”

But then, and only because he knew he couldn’t leave Jill alone in this, with the vaccine safely administered, Leon ducked his head to press a kiss to what skin of Chris’s he could reach trough the bars, before launching himself to his feet and just giving Rebecca a tap on the shoulder in passing as he plunged back into the darkness of Alcatraz.

Just because Jill could go it alone didn’t mean she should have to. Years ago, the woman had been complicit in leaving Leon behind. Leon refused to do the same to her. Leon’d gown out of grudges in China. He’d never admit it, if only for Jill’s pride, but it was still the truth, if unspoken. And hey, if she asked? Leon would just say he’d been trying to find that backdoor.

. . .

Seeing Jill safe and without any new scratches was only as much of a relief as the situation allowed. Even more of a relief was Leon running up to them, covered in far more bruises and scratches than he had been only ten minutes ago, but when he informed them all that Dylan had released the biodrones, the relief soured just a little. And then the giant, disgusting mass of red flesh with elephant limbs had launched it from the depths of the canal, destroying the submarine lift structure with its sheer size, and just, what the fuck, at least these things used to have some fucking character to their horrific bodies, this was just rancid.

“Oh, that’s just wrong,” Claire complained as the thing roar, the disturbingly humanoid face settled in the twisting, infected skin facing them, a far too human eye blinking. It had all these extra limbs with no digits at the end, just useless lengths of skin and bone that were only any good to batter and destroy. Water torrented from the body, revealing more and more red and black of muscle and flesh. It moved slowly due to its mass, and was around six stories tall by Chris’s estimate. He agreed with his sister– this shit was wrong. “What the hell is that!”

The thing threw its head back, exposing human teeth as it shrieked at them. “Dylan used the virus to fuse with a bioweapon,” Jill told them as she stepped backwards.

That was that, then. “Looks like we’re dealing with this first,” Chris declared, marching forward as he reloaded his Beretta 92FS, Jill already striding ahead to do the same, Claire and Rebecca flanking, and Leon wearing an expression of bewilderment but following the crowd because he was smart enough not to question shit sometimes. Realistically, Chris had a feeling their current arsenal wouldn’t do much, and he’d compare his heftier selection to a peashooter, but they had to trial and error this shit. The bigger they were, the harder they fell– but the higher the fire power it took to topple them. And Chris had a feeling that Mathilda at his side wouldn’t be much better.

Still– even if it was pointless, it was exhilarating, because Chris had never, ever faced down a late stage infected with not only his lover and his partner at his side, but his sister and Rebecca as well. The five of them in a wedge formation, raising their weapons, Chris noticing keenly that Jill’s firearm was Leon’s, a part of Chris’s chest seemed to cinch shut, and he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they could handle this together, without a single person leaving in a body bad– an official first for Chris Redfield.

“Let’s do it,” Leon said with a cut of his chin because he knew this was wasted ammo.

“Yeah,” Claire confirmed, likely just happy to be there.

They fired as one, and it was no surprise when their low caliber bullets barely managed to penetrate the flesh. It was going to be a battle of scale, trying to find a weapon capable of more damage than the last, but hopefully a little extra lead would slow it down.

He was wrong, of course– only a few shots went off before the thing swung on its back legs, the long neck-tail-thing on the back of its head colliding with the platform the small group was making their stand on, crumbling the thick metal as easy as a soda can. Chris leaped after Jill, the two of them already eyeing the armory at their disposal. As he landed roughly on the lower level, a glance back showed Leon and Claire doing the absolute most in their own dodge, Leon launching himself off the railing behind him with a kick, and Claire literally just flipping over the limb. Showoffs.

Another shot rang out, and Chris watched the hook of a crawler train suddenly swing low overhead. It passed the monster that had once been Dylan at first, but as it swung back around, the hook itself snagged inside the jaw, the thing roaring and throwing its head in pain. Chris and Jill’s gaze shot to the crawler crane itself, seeing the thing teeter forward, and making a breath of eye contact before they both sprinted in the opposite direction, away from the toppling crane. Chris distantly wondered if they were going to bring the roof down on their heads purely on accident.

He ran for one of the shipping crates, digging around in the weapons for anything that could be used. He saw rockets hit the thing from some other corner of the submarine dock, and the way Dylan staggered back, lifting one of its massive limbs, and hollered again was a damn good sign. He pushed around through more boxes, grinning to himself as he recognized a white label, popping the snaps and yanking the M202 from its cozy bed. Jill had scrounged an M4A1, peppering shots at the thing, but Chris had the real firepower hefted up on his shoulder. “‘Scuse me,” he called out, widening his stance and aiming down the side.

“He’s all yours,” Jill drawled, putting a hand over her right ear just before Chris fired, launching the rockets at Dylan’s side, nodding in approval when they tore deep into the massive ribs. Dylan turned towards them, roaring again, and really, the fucking human teeth were genuinely the worst part about this freak, Chris felt ill.

“That thing doesn’t wanna die,” He told Jill as he dropped the empty M202, glancing back for more options.

“He’s a tough cookie alright,” Jill agreed breathlessly, turning in tandem with Chris so they could both look for more. More crates were pulled from the shipping containers, Chris finding a machine gun of his own, an M60 with an ammunition belt ready to go. He flopped the belt over his shoulder as he kicked a crate towards his partner, shouting Jill’s name before he pulled the bolt and took aim, bullets hammering Dylan, still hardly putting a dent. His belt quickly ate itself up, Chris cursing and stepping back while Jill tore through bits of flesh with the Remington he’d found her, giving Chris just the narrow window of spotting a green fuel truck lumber its way atop the rubble, heading right for Dulan’s grotesque body.

Chris cursed softly and smacked a hand out to push Jill’s Remington down as Leon climbed out of the driver’s window and waited until the last second before he pulled the pin from a grenade, dropping it into the body before running down the length of the still-accelerating truck, leaping from the back as the grenade burst and the tank followed suit, the man narrowly avoiding being blown to bits by only a few feet of safety, Leon tucking and rolling across the ground, landing with his back facing the explosion, but still thrust forward by the shockwave in a way that made Chris’s heart leap into his throat.

“Your boyfriend’s fucking crazy!” Jill gasped, shaking her head despite the grim respect Chris saw in her eyes. The fact that she’d actually acknowledged Leon was Chris’s boyfriend was enough to distract Chris from the fact that she was one hundred percent correct.

Then Dylan was thrashing with the pain of having its literal guts concussed, the long protrusion at its back scraping across the ceiling, shaking the entire foundation of the facility, and sending vehicle-sized rubble crashing below. Jill grabbed at his elbow, getting him to run, the two of them fleeing the crushing weight of Dylan’s limb while also maneuvering through the rubble and fleeing the falling sky, a desperate sprint for safety that had Chris’s lungs screaming for mercy, but there was safety just ahead–

Jill cried out first, and then Chris felt the collision, thrown through the air by that same tail, smacked hard into another shipping container, his body aching. Chris groaned as he wobbled back to his feet, looking up to see if he was about to be mince meat– and instead being forced to watch Leon artfully take the bastard on all by himself, expertly ducking beneath stabs of the limbs that would’ve otherwise turned his bones into powder, ducking and weaving and spraying bullets from a surprisingly quick-firing AA-12.

His breath caught as he watched Leon narrowly avoid another near-fatal jab of rotten flesh, Rebecca’s words that Leon might not be fully operational echoing in his head. As shipping crates tumbled, Chris knew the man was barely holding his ground. He was about to dig his boots in and run for the other man, if at least to be a distraction, when he heard Jill shout.

“Chris! Leon!”

Chris whipped around to his partner, eyes widening at the sight of some monstrous piece of machinery in her hands, a gun longer than a damn motorcycle in her clutches, Jill shuffling up the top of a container, likely looking for a place to set the thing up. “What’s that!” Leon called out while he hung from the literal fucking ceiling, literally holding on to a beam with one hand, and yet still able to sound so damn interested in the latest firepower.

“It’s a plasma rifle!” Jill called back. “It heats up to twenty thousands degrees, but it’s short range! Can you get that thing any closer?”

Chris rolled his shoulders and shook his head. “‘Can we get it closer?’, she says,” he grumbled to himself, formulating a plan as he spotted a miraculously undamaged Humvee, giving Leon a nod, who dropped from the ceiling and slid gracefully down a collapsed walkway like it was a slide. Leon landed atop the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat where he belonged, starting the engine and slamming on the gas, the tires burning rubber as he made three quick donuts and spun it towards Chris. Chris leaped up and got his foot in the back, moving with the momentum of Leon’s driving, grabbing the Browning M2HB mounted in the back.

“Hang on!” Leon almost sang as he shot for the shambling monstrosity with brazen confidence, his dark blond hair whipped around his face by the speed, Chris allowing himself a second longer to look before he pounded the ammo feed cover and yanked the bolt. Jill was dead on the money, his boyfriend was crazy, and god, was he gorgeous for every second of it.

“Hope this works,” Chris said before curling his finger and relishing the way blood and puss sprayed with the smack of the bullets.

“Definitely going on vacation after this,” Leon replied. “I’m thinking as far from the ocean as possible– every heard of the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility?” Chris made a vague expression of confusion as he focused on keeping the gun on target. “They call it the E-P-O-I. It’s in the Dzungarian Basin, in Xinjiang Uygur. You’re gonna love it.”

“Anything for you, darling,” Chris drawled before swinging round with a sharp turn of the vehicle, Leon weaving between the huge legs and buying Jill as much time as possible. Right as Leon passed them under her position, there was a thundering crack, Chris ducking sharply as a bolt of brightblue light shot into the towering creature, the thing thrown back and collapsing with a scream. The wild thrash of its limbs got fucking lucky, smacking into the Humvee, Chris and Leon thrown and hitting the ground. Leon rolled up onto his knee with it because he was just that infuriatingly talented, with Chris landing on his side wrong with a grunt of pain, ending up on his shoulder and hip, going slow to make sure he didn’t break anything. He was getting too old for this shit.

“Is that it?” Leon demanded with an edge of hope to his words. He slid to Chris’s side and helping Chris get to his feet, wincing as he saw the bruise that was quickly forming up the back of Chris’s neck. “Did we kill it?”

Chris grimaced as he got himself upright again with Leon’s help, studying the fallen mass of flesh. If they were lucky, that would be all it took. He held his breath, waiting, hoping–

The thing suddenly lumbered back up, only on one leg this time, a groan of pain escaping those bizarre teeth, but still alive. Chris cursed and forced himself onto his own feet again, Leon making a soft noise of concern at the way Chris took a little longer than normal. “I’m okay,” he promised the other man, giving him a nod. “C’mon– Jill’s needs us.”

Leon nodded and pushed Chris forward first, getting them both moving. He looked to Dylan again and saw the moment it slammed its only working hoof down, launching Jill into the air. He ground his teeth and sprinted far beyond his limit, sliding in and narrowly putting a hand out to catch Jill’s head as she hit a metal slab of what had once been the upper level, saving her from a concussion. He slid to a halt at her side, feeling the woman’s eyes on him as he hunched protectively over her as the monster faced them and gnashed its teeth. Chris patted himself down for a weapon but came up empty, so he twisted his torso even further inwards to make sure Jill wouldn’t take the next hit–

Only for Leon to thrust himself between them and the monster, his Sentinel up and firing two shots into the thing’s hauntingly human eye, protecting them both with his body as a shield. Leon almost put a hand up to stop him, but suddenly the thing started to act– strange.

It leaned in close to Leon, opening and closing its jaw like it wanted to talk, that fucking eyeball peering into them with intelligence or maybe even emotion, it didn’t matter, that shit didn’t belong. Leon paused, always knowing when to stop and take stock of a situation, and when the damn thing actually just turned away and started to lumber the opposite direction? Chris didn’t blame Leon for his very quiet demand of, “What the fuck?”

He took a step back, glancing to Jill and Chris as if they had the answers, then darted forward in pursuit of the thing that dragged its body across the ground with its only working limb, blood trails smeared behind it. Chris looked down at his partner. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” Jill promised, clapping Chris’s hand when he offered it, pulling her to her feet. “I’m gonna get some charges, the neck is so close to severing.”

“I’ll stick with Leon,” Chris replied with a nod of agreement to the plan. “We’ll keep it off you.”

There was a playful glint in Jill’s eyes that Chris had never seen before, but she was gone before he could ask. He turned back and saw Leon dropping into another vehicle, a Humvee with a loadout truck bed, the man urgently studying the actions of the creature. As Chris dropped down to join him and eye what looked like a very, very strange set of thick pipes, Leon cursed, vaulting the frame of the vehicle for the driver’s seat. “It’s heading for open water,” He told Chris, words sharp.

“Like hell it is,” Chris ground out, holding on tight to the frame as he smelled burning rubber again, the vehicle peeling across the concrete as Leon sped down the concrete framing the water that was opposite of their target. Ahead of them, the sluice gate began to lower itself, but it would not be fast enough, Chris could see that. He glanced down to the strange components in the back of the truck with him and knew Leon had a plan. On the other side of the water, Chris spotted Jill sprinting her way across and under and over rubble, and then just beneath Dylan entirely, a duffel bag at her side. She had a plan too– good. Between Leon and Jill, there was no way they wouldn’t win this.

Still– it would help knowing what the plan actually was. “What’s the idea, Leon?” Chris called out of the roar of the engine. A flash of bright red caught his attention in his peripheral, and the sight of Jill in front of Dylan with a burning flare that she waved in the air, shouting for the monster’s attention, was going to give him a heart attack.

“She can handle him for a second,” Leon assured Chris with more confidence than he had any right having. “We’re gonna help her bring it down for good!”

The truck’s brakes shrieked as Leon stomped them into the bottom frame, the vehicle itself drifting and swerving before wobbling to a halt. He climbed into the back and grabbed one of the huge, thick tubes, cutting his chin for Chris to do the same. “Jill got to have fun with the plasma rifle,” he huffed like it was a competition– whoever got to play with the coolest gun won, right? That was how Leon saw these things, and it was stupidly endearing if not ridiculous. “Let’s see what this puppy can do.”

Chris stared at the two sections in bewilderment. It was long a Frankenstein’s monster of, what? A ridiculously huge Carl Gustaf Recoilless M4 and an AT4? Who the hell built this shit? “You know how to use this?”

Leon shot him a look. “It’s got a trigger, doesn’t it?” he shot back before lifting his side and pointing to Chris’s. “That goes in here.” Chris rolled his eyes but picked up his end, smirking at Leon when the man could only get the first half of his own off the ground, while Chris easily lifted the whole thing. Leon arched a brow back before saying, “It’s a male-male connection, baby,” words smooth and forcing a sputtered laugh from Chris before the pushed their components together and slotted them in place with a satisfying click. “Up and up, soldier.”

Chris nodded and lifted the gun onto his shoulder, grunting as he held it steady long enough for Leon to slip under and support the other end, able to aim along the sights, his back to Chris and giving orders. “Down,” Leon breathed, turning the “gun” just slightly to the left. “A little higher.” Chris brought his end down, praying they did this quickly enough to actually keep the thing from getting into the ocean. “Yeah,” Leon grunted. “Perfect. Jill’s fine, just focus for me. Hold her steady…” Chris held his breath, bracing– “Fire!”

The recoil of the thing was like getting hit by a truck, the flash of light from the ignition blinding, and really, it sucked that he couldn’t even watch the thing hit, but he heard it. The metal screamed as the sluice gate collapsed, Chris lowering the thing off his back just in time to see it sink in deep, hopefully on top of Dylan, and then the dramatic burst of water from a large explosion below. “That’s that,” Leon said with an audible grin– right as Jill bobbed up from the surface.

Chris reeled back then glared at Leon for a split second. “You said she was fine!” he shouted as he ran for the edge of the water, dropping to his stomach and shoving his hand towards her, Jill giving her an exhausted smile as she took it and allowed Chris to drag her back onto solid ground.

“Look at her, she’s fine,” Leon huffed as he jogged up behind Chris. “I knew she could handle it.” Chris renewed his glare on Leon, only to catch the wink Leon gave Jill, which Jill– Jill returned? Well, god dammit, if they were actually getting along, then Chris literally couldn’t be mad.

He scowled but gave in. “Just glad you’re safe,” he told Jill. “You should probably take Rebecca’s vaccine, just in case. If you swallowed any of that water he was in, who knows what the infection will look like.”

Jill rolled her eyes but have him another of her cheeky salutes, which made Leon laugh. Chris just shook his head, because the sight of two of the most important people in the world to him getting along was enough to dissuade any of his complaints. “Looks like us suckers win again,” he said, proud of them and what they’d accomplished on their own.

“Yeah,” Leon sighed, stretching out his neck. Chris realized he hadn’t seen Maria once since she’d left them in the cells. Could Leon have handled that for them? Jesus, what couldn’t the man do? “And we’ll keep coming back for more. Like always.” He brushed off his shoulder, making a face at the gore in the water. “Hannigan’s gonna kill me.”

Chris just grinned and decided not to stop himself, bending down to press his lips to Leon’s. The sputter of surprise from the other man and the teasing sniggering from Jill was all Chris needed to hear to know everything was really okay.

. . .

The sun was rising on Alcatraz as Leon and the others trudged down the entrance steps. He looked around, noting the surprising absence of the sea fog despite the early hours of the day. There weren’t any birds about either, no gulls swooping low for an early meal, but he chose to be grateful for their absence rather than worry at the implications. At this point, mother earth knew damn well what an outbreak meant. It was like nature itself fled every time– smart.

They’d met up with Claire and Rebecca after ensuring Dylan the dumbass was well and truly dead, and Claire had excitedly informed Leon that his instructions had worked. The code got them into a backdoor that had been nestled within the code itself, a hyperlink revealed that gained them access to the complex instructions laid out for the drones. Leon just took the credit, knowing Hannigan had taught him that one. Maybe if he showed her how great he’d done with a computer issue, she’d be less likely to chew his ear off for possibly polluting the Bay Area waters. Probably not, but he could hope.

Rebecca and Claire wasted no time in sitting their asses down on the steps, Chris hesitating before doing the same, obviously wanting to be close to his sister. Leon glanced back to ensure they were fine, then passed Jill leaning against a wall, before he strode to the front and scanned the horizon, not seeing a damn boat in sight. He heaved a sigh, tapping his earpiece again, hoping the signal got to his people eventually. Rebecca had said she’d arrived with San Francisco SWAT, but they’d all been killed. The intervention of local law enforcement meant Hannigan absolutely had eyes on him, from however far away. Nothing to do now but wait.

He went the opposite side from Jill of the stone wall framing the rise of the stairs the others were resting on, leaning against the concrete and crossing his arms over his chest. “Well, I know what I’m gonna take away from this experience.”

Rebecca sat forward, intwining her fingers atop her knees. “What’s that?”

“Prison tours suck.”

Jill chuckled and looked away, shaking away.

“So do giant shark monsters,” Claire said.

Chris and Leon ruefully met eyes. This was not the first disgustingly overgrown shark they’d both fought to the death. Chris then looked to the sun and said, “So did this op.”

Jill hummed softly. “Yeah,” she agreed. “But we sure did kick some ass, didn’t we?”

Leon saw the softest smile come over Chris’s face and felt his heart warm. “We sure did. All of us,” Chris confirmed, watching Jill with such serenity in this eyes that Leon couldn’t even be jealous. Peace came so rarely to the man. Leon would never begrudge him of it.

The whirr of helicopter blades began to pierce Leon’s awareness, and he saw their ticket out of there come from the blinding light of the sun into view, three helicopters approaching. He frowned, recognizing one particular craft itself. Leon pushed off the wall and took point, heading for the open ground meant for docking ships. Claire and Rebecca followed closely behind, with Leon glancing back to see Chris and Jill trade soft words before bumping fists. Good– they’d been through far too much together for trauma and a grudge to keep them apart.

The crafts touched down, and more of the city’s SWAT along with members of the National Guard filed out, two units ready to scout and ensure the safety of the facility. Leon was confident they hadn’t left anything alive in there. Hopefully, they’d give Maria a burial. She wasn’t a good person by any means, but she hadn’t built any of this shit. Maria’s biggest mistake had been trusting the men in her life who led her astray. She, more than any other bastard they’d met tonight, deserved some kind of funeral.

With the last helicopter obviously being their ticket out of there, Leon scrutinized the Bell-UH1 “Iroquois.” He stopped dead in his tracks under the quickly spinning blades, crossing his arm over his chest, and glaring into the cockpit. Behind the glass, Mike Graham smiled back and waved.

“What’s wrong?” Claire asked in a raised voice to be heard, coming up behind him.

“I’m in so much fucking trouble,” Leon huffed to himself before stomping to the side of the hanger and yanking the metal door open, waving the women in first. Mike laughed at him, not even needing to say a damn thing. His presence was enough, and Leon had heard him, loud and clear.

Then Chris came jogging up, eyes alight with interest. “It’s Mike!” he told Leon excitedly, as if Leon couldn’t fucking tell.

“Yeah, it’s Mike,” Leon bit back with as much as sarcasm as he could muster. As Chris climbed into the back, Leon smacked him hard on the ass in retaliation. Chris yelped and swatted at Leon’s hair before climbing into the cockpit, pulling on a headset to chat with their pilot, going over the specs. Poor guy should’ve stuck with the Air Force. Chris could’ve flown cool planes and collected. God damn.

Jill was the last to approach, and Leon stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. As bright blue eyes looked to him alarm, Leon was quick to dissuade her concerns. “We’ve got a big family dinner thing coming up this Friday,” he told her, leaning in so he wouldn’t be shouting in her face. “Everyone’s coming. It’s at my place, Chris and Claire know the address. You should swing by.”

Jill studied him for a long moment, her gaze searching his own. Leon smiled crookedly, letting her look for whatever she needed. He knew the ball was in his court now. Jill was back, and Leon wanted her in Chris’s life. Since Leon was the only thing that could possibly stand between the two, he would happily hold out the olive branch.

“... You’re in D.C., right?”

That was a yes. Leon nodded, clapping her shoulder wit care so to keep from aggravating injuries. “Bring a dish– it’s a potluck.”

Jill nodded back and climbed into the helicopter. Leon followed her, didn’t even give the prison a second glance, and collapsed onto the bench next to Jill. He flipped Mike off when the pilot tried to get him to wear a headset. No way was he going to get torn into on the same line as everyone else. In lieu of following orders, Leon gave himself a small mercy, crossing his ankles, tipping his head back, and soaking in the rising sun as the helicopter lifted off the ground and took them one step closer to home.

. . .

The light filtering through the small slit in Leon’s blackout curtains woke Chris slowly, the sliver of light warming the skin of his torso and arms as it arched across their entwined bodies. Chris groaned softly as he stretched his legs and toes, squinting into the otherwise dark room, feeling a weight on his arm and taking care not to move it. He curled his arm at the elbow instead, fingers bending inwards to card gently through soft locks, blunt nails scratching gently across Leon’s scalp. The man made a soft noise and nuzzled into Chris’s bicep. Chris felt a smile tug at his lips as he watched Leon sleep, his chest warm and fuzzy.

It was a rare treat to sleep in. He could tell by the way the light glowed gold across his skin that they were well into the morning by now, likely eight A.M. at least. He wasn’t in a rush. They’d only gotten in last night around midnight, with barely enough energy to shuffle into the shower and participate in their “traditional post-op fuck”, as Leon liked to call it. Chris hadn’t even considered that the man would have enough life left in him for a round, let alone two, but the man was always full of surprises, and he was a stickler for the strange little traditions they’d developed as a couple.

That was probably why Chris would never complain. After living over a decade thinking he would never have this, he wasn’t able to resent or begrudge any second of the other man. Just being wanted by Leon after everything he’d done meant the world to him. All the other shit, the added bonus of a home cooked meal, knowing he had someone so skilled at his back, knowing he had someone who would always defend him? That was beyond him, and he would always be grateful.

Leon made a soft noise in his sleep, something like a moan, and Chris knew he was waking up, however slowly. It was a gift to discover all of the nuances Leon had to his name. Like how he had five different locks on his front door, but he only employed one of them ever since Jake started to hang around more often. Or the way Leon would have a religious morning run, except whenever Chris was around, because apparently Leon turn sex into cardio. Or even how Leon could recognize every single license plate parked in the lot of the complex he lived in, knowing the name of the person who owned it, and where they lived in the building. Oh, but the most surprising? Leon literally only used conditioner in his hair. No product, no gel or cream, nothing. Just shampoo and conditioner. Chris had been stunned for days in discovering that.

“Turn off the sun.”

Leon’s muffled complaint had a chuckle rumbling through Chris’s body. He looked to the man on his arm again and saw Leon’s eyes were slits, that gorgeous blue glaring mildly at the light across their bodies, the light that had disturbed his slumber. His dark blond hair was tucked behind his hair, those angular features on display for Chris to admire. Those fill lips were pursed with annoyance and there were already creases forming in his brow. He was stunning, always had been. Chris lifted his arm, and Leon’s head in turn, allowing Chris to curl inwards and press a kiss to the man’s cheek.

Leon made a face, looking up at Chris in question as he was lowered back to the bed. “What was that for?”

“I love you,” Chris replied quietly. Leon flushed all the way down his neck and groaned, turning his face to hide his eyes in the soft muscle of Chris’s arm. He chuckled, always enjoying embarrassing his lover. “Now you say it back.”

“You’re the worst,” Leon grumbled into his skin. A gentle nip from the man’s teeth had Chris laughing and rolling over, getting Leon beneath him so Chris could loom overhead and kiss the man fully. Leon made a noise of complaint because morning breath he had to pretend morning breath bothered him, but Chris knew the man was secretly overjoyed to have these tiny moments between them for the same reasons Chris had. He pulled away after only a few seconds, not wanting to torture the man. “I’ll kill you,” Leon huffed anyways.

“So early in the morning?” Chris pouted down at him. His phone buzzed on the nightstand and Chris groaned while Leon mumbled something about work respecting their time off. He rolled back onto his back and stretched out to the nightstand, grabbing his device and squirting at the artificial light. Leon nestled his head in the crook of Chris’s shoulder, being nosy as always. Leon didn’t need reading glasses like Chris was starting, so he was able to understand the notification first.

“What– order confirmation and approval? From Ducati?”

Ah, shit. The cat was outta the bag.

“You spoiled your own damn surprise, baby,” Chris groused, swiping up and squinting again at the buttons. Leon reached in and helpfully put in Chris’s password for him. “Thanks,” he murmured before navigating to his email and bringing the particular receipt up. It showed a a particular bike, brand spankin’ new, the image in displaying it as default red. “What’s this, baby?”

Leon made a soft noise. “That’s the Pinagle R,” Leon told him like a good boy. “Latest model this year, state of the art tech, I’ve heard the throttle will vibrate you down to your damn soul. That thing’s fifty M-P-H faster than my old one. That thing’s thirty thousand dollars.” The man’s eyes were bright as he spoke, and Chris watched the excitement bloom across Leon’s expression. In moments like these, Chris saw the boy he once knew, the twenty-one-year-old cop, fresh out of the academy and desperate to prove his worth. In moments like these, Chris knew that that same young man was still alive. He’d survived, no matter what Leon thought. “Why are you showing me this?”

Chris just hummed and scrolled lower so Leon could see the receipt– namely, the part where it clearly showed Chris’s bank details paying out the exactly cost. Thirty-three thousand dollars, to be precise. Leon’s breath caught. “Hannigan told me you lost yours to Maria,” Chris murmured. “Which, by the way, I am absolutely assuming you kicked her ass, and that’s kinda insane. She was almost as souped up as Wesker. Definitely at the level of Jill with the P-30.”

“It’s nothing,” Leon said quickly. “You– you bought this?” Chris nodded. “For me?” Chris nodded again. “What– what about the house?”

Chris turned off his phone and set it down. He’d had a short conversation with Hannigan after his own debrief with DSO. The consequences of doing technically unsanctioned shit, but at least he had friends in high places to help him get out of trouble. If only BSAA would just follow the damn law. It was like they wanted him to end up in jail and out of their way.

Anyways– “Hannigan pointed out something important,” he murmured. “That the list we’ve got with all the things we want in a home… it’s not really a ‘we’ thing, is it?” He pulling Leon in tighter, an arm around the man’s shoulders. “She helped me realize that not a damn thing on that list we’ve got is what you want. And that got me thinking, you know?”

He gestured around the room. Leon’s bedroom was large and had plenty of room for Chris to slot in alongside the man, fitting himself in Leon’s life. The bed was easily big enough for them both. The bathroom had two sinks. The living room was huge and had room for Chris’s ridiculously large television. Leon had memorized the layout of his kitchen long ago and could navigate the thing with his eyes closed. This was Leon’s home, and it had easily allowed Chris to join the man. As much as it might be nice to one day have a home with the man, Chris couldn’t forget that Leon had clawed his way up from misery and built a life for himself. Chris knew things could be better, but what did that matter? He didn’t want to be added to the list of people that had taken Leon’s life from him.

“We’ve got a home right here already,” Chris murmured. “And honestly, there’s no reason for me to dig up your roots and make you move. Not right now.” He rubbed up and down Leon’s arm. “I can keep an eye out for the perfect property and snag it, but we don’t need to leave this place. Not any time soon. It’s perfect for you. And it’s good enough for me.”

“You don’t mean that,” Leon said.

“I do,” Chris replied, open and honest. “I really, really do. That lake I want? I can get that someday. But I don’t want to make you settle. I’d rather wait for the perfect opportunity and build our life from the ground up.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to Leon’s temple. “Don’t bother arguing. You literally clip coupons for the mom and pop you go to every weekend. I’m not making you leave this life you’d made behind.”

There was a pause from the other man, but only a split second, that breath of indecision Leon fell into when his life wasn’t on the line. The moment passed, and Chris suddenly found himself with a lapful of Leon S. Kennedy, warm and alive and yearning, the man bent down to kiss the daylight out of Chris, stealing his oxygen and ability to process thoughts. Chris moaned stupidly as Leon snagged his lower lip between his teeth, that tongue plunging back alongside his own only once Chris tasted iron. His arms came up and held onto Leon by the slim waist, his huge hands holding tight, fingertips digging in to press the best kind of bruises into pale skin, overshadowing old cigarette burn scars that they barely noticed anymore.

“I just don’t see the point,” Leon gasped into Chris’s mouth, grinding down in Chris’s lap. “Look what we have here, look how good it already is, you’re a five minute walk from the airport, and it’s so safe, Chris, everything is so safe here. And you know the names of all the people who work out the grocery store, we’ know the lady that makes your favorite club sandwiches down the street, we know this place so well and it’s good, isn’t it? We don’t need to leave.”

Chris smiled despite the way he could barely think. He couldn’t believe he’d ever thought of taking this from Leon. Home meant something different to a man who’d never known it as a child. And what Leon had said back in Alcatraz, in their dying moments– maybe Chris didn’t need the home itself to feel like he had everything he needed. Four walls of his own was nice, and he’d love to be near a lake one day, but that convenience wasn’t worth tearing Leon from the first and only home he’d ever known. Leon had been right the other day. All they really needed was each other.

Wouldn’t stop Chris from giving him shit, though. “You just didn’t like having a pre-built home.”

Leon yanked himself away and up, jabbing an accusatory finger into Chris’s chest, trying to be intimidating, but failing to come off as remotely threatening with how his lips were red and slick from the kiss. “People can see the layout online, you ass, they could just know the entire layout of our home from a fucking search engine,” Leon rightfully raged. “What the hell are we gonna do with that, Chris? Maybe you’ve got all these friends, but I’m a classified agent, I’m a fucking ghost, and for a god damn good reason, you wanna just let people who wanna kill me know where the fucking bathroom is, how many windows we have, how many vehicles can fit in the garage? You’re fucking insane, I’m not about to let Sherry or Jake come into a place like that, no fucking way.”

And there was the crux of the issue. Chris couldn’t blame the man, not with his history, and the history of those he welcomed into his life. Jake alone would be explanation enough, and Chris saw the benefit in keeping the layout of their future home unknown to the public. Sherry was the icing on the cake, really, coveted for her exposure to the G-virus and the incredible affects it had on her body. And with how long Sherry’s life had been held over Leon’s head– it just made sense. It was heartbreaking too, but a lot of Leon’s life made something deep within Chris ache with grief he would never be able to reconcile. Chris could only get used to it and do his best to brighten Leon’s days, one by one.

“Get back here and kiss me,” was all Chris said, reaching up to paw gently at Leon’s chest, the man huffing softly but returning without complaint, a shiver passing through Leon’s body into his own–

“Dad!” came a sudden shout from the other side of the large apartment, a door slamming shut. Speak of the devil, Chris supposed. “The butcher opened early, so I got everything! Did you wanna use the grill or the oven for the fish?”

”Shit,”, the two men swore emphatically and in unison. Leon rolled out of bed with the grace of a cat, snatching up sweatpants from the floor, tugging them on, then quickly realizing they were too small and not his, before dropping the sweatpants again and grabbing the second pair.

“I told her to text me,” Leon hissed as he dressed hurriedly, Chris snagging his own shirt and wrangling it on over his head. “God dammit, I don’t have the marinade ready. Did you check the propane?”

“Sorry, darling,” Chris snorted as he worked his sweatpants up each leg. “I was too busy blowing your mind last night to check on the propane.”

“I’ll blow you,” Leon tried to threaten, quickly making a face as he realized what he’d said. “No, wait–”

“Dad?” Sherry called out, sounding like she was coming closer. “Are you here?”

Leon yanked his shirt on and darted for the bedroom door. Sherry was close to entering the hall, they only had a few seconds left, but the man still took the time to whirl around, practically hanging off the door frame as he gave Chris a wink and a quiet, “Love you, baby,” before he was falling into the hall and loudly complaining, “You lose your phone? What happened to texting me? Traffic is crazy this week with the elections coming up, you’re supposed to let me know you got here in one piece!”

“Oh my god, Dad. I’m not about to text you while driving.”

Chris sighed as he finished getting dressed and ran a hand through his hair, hoping it wouldn’t look like he’d just made out with Leon like a teenager. Sherry would notice no matter what he did, though. Chris wouldn’t complain either way. Anything to let Leon be the father he deserved to be.

“Morning, Sherry,” Chris said as he slipped into the hall, giving the woman a blinding smile as he smacked Leon’s ass hard enough to make the man yelp when he passed. Sherry shrieked with a protest at PDA, Leon growled some kind of threat, and Chris just laughed as he marched his ass to the porch to check on the state of their grill.

. . .

Jill Valentine stared at the innocuous, blank door with a glass baking dish in her hands, the tinfoil covering the contents reflecting light from the hall window to her right directly into her face. She took a step back and shook herself, heaving a breath, knowing she could do this. It was just a party, right? And not even a formal one, just a small thing friends did when they were normal and celebrated little nothings for no damn reason. This was normal bullshit. Jill could handle normal bullshit.

She lifted her hand from the warm bottom of the glass, fist poised over the white painted door to knock, only for the thing to fly open on its own, a tall, young man leaning nonchalantly against the doorframe, red hair buzzed to his scalp, a scar across the left side of his face, familiar eyes glinting as they scrutinized her.

“Finally decided to show up, huh?”

Jill had heard quite a few things about Wesker’s biological son, but not enough to prepare her for how uncanny the resemblance was. It was the off-putting kind of similar, where if she really analyzed the man’s face, she’d see nothing, but if she took a step back and took the young man in as a whole, she’d see the spitting image of her worst nightmare. Chris had warned her with a quick text the day before that Jake Muller would be present, so she hadn’t been blindsided, but still– Jake was definitely his father’s son.

Said son narrowed his eyes at Jill. She’d heard a lot about the resemblance. She’d also heard a lot about his temper and the vulnerability it existed to hide. “Got a problem, jarhead number three?”

Jill arched a brow back. “Do I really look like a Marine to you?”

The man paused, then huffed, stepping back. “I don’t even know anymore.”

“Captain Valentine!”

The call from inside the apartment was from Chris’s most loyal soldier, Piers waving his hand with a bright smile. Jill had to purse her lips, because while the man was dressed in his normal, gaudy patriotic garb, he was also bright red from a terrible sunburn, the redness itself damn near painful just to look at. Jill winced as the man came closer, letting her see the painful tan line around his neck.

“You made it!” Piers announced, more voices rising behind him. Jill couldn’t see around the two younger men so she had no idea what she was going into. “Chris told me to expect you, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t think you’d still be in D.C.”

“Had to debrief D.S.O., didn’t I?” She eyed Jake again, who finally pulled away and let her get her first glimpse of the place.

Leon’s apartment was open, clean, full of natural light from the large windows opposite the entryway, and void of decoration. The furniture was basic and unremarkable. There was a huge, L-shaped sofa that was an unassuming gray without a single decorative pillow, a sole woobie tossed over the back. The curtains that were pulled back were just gray blackout curtains. There wasn’t a single photo on the walls. It was exactly what Jill had expected.

What Jill hadn’t expected was Pennsylvanian Senator Ashley Graham, sitting prim and proper on said boring, gray couch, alongside the helicopter pilot that had picked them up from Alcatraz.

Piers must’ve quickly caught on as to why Jill’s eyes were suddenly the size of saucers. “Hey, Ashley!” Piers called out, grinning as he turned around. “Say hi to Jill Valentine.”

“Jill’s here?”

The exclamation came from further in the apartment, but Jill was more focused on the fucking senator that was rising to her feet, smiling bight and vibrant as she crossed the livingroom, wearing a pencil dress and tights but no shoes, to shake Jill’s hand. “Chris hasn’t shut up about you,” Ashley said. “It’s awesome to finally meet you, Jill.”

“Ma’am,” Jill replied stupidly, because the senator was even prettier in person than she was on television. Her eyes sparkled and her makeup was immaculate, the shoulder length blonde hair pulled back from her eyes with a clip that glinted in the sunlight. Jill had to shake herself, shaking that hand a little firmer. Jesus, this woman’s hands were so soft. “It’s an honor.”

“What honor?” Ashley asked.

“I’m so glad you made it.”

Claire was suddenly at Jill’s side, just as vibrant and peppy and pretty as Ashley, but at least Jill was used to her. She sagged a little relief with finally having some familiarity. Claire grabbed the other side of the dish. “What’d you bring? I was betting it would be store bought cookies.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Jill groused, giving Ashley a nod as Claire ushered her into the kitchen. The kitchen itself was glistening and clean, all the utilities updated, with a spice rack spanning the entire backsplash of the counters and oven. Judging by how most of the spice glasses were some degree of half empty, Jill assumed Leon actually cooked, and was surprised. She knew for a fact Chris didn’t. “It’s risotto. A family recipe.”

Claire’s gaze shot to her, and Jill understood why. The Valentine family being described as complicated was an understatement. She didn’t talk about her family at all, really, and everyone took notice on the rare occasion she did. “It’s my grandma’s,” Jill clarified because she knew Claire wanted to ask, but wouldn’t for the sake of being too nice for her own good. “Figured I’d put my best foot forward.”

“Thanks, Jill,” Claire said with so much of her usual earnestness that Jill knew she’d made the right call. “I’ll warm it up in the oven.” There were more dishes along the white, marble counters, what looked like a homemade chocolate cake, a bed of potatoes sprinkled with parsley and a red spice, maybe paprika? There was fresh bred as well and a tray of roasted asparagus. All the dishes that contained the different foods were uncoordinated and mismatching, letting Jill infer that just about everyone attending had participated in the potluck.

Jill watched her move across the island for one of the ovens– Leon apparently had two– and kept her voice as nonchalant as she could when she asked, “You seem pretty at home here.”

Claire sent her a wry grin, meaning all that nonchalance had been for nothing, but she wouldn’t receive judgment from the other woman. “One of the many bonuses to Leon and Chris finally getting their shit together and getting together is that Chris has to be stateside a lot more often. And since Leon’s got the safest place, what with his necessary clearance and all, I just started showing up. And since Leon sure as hell ain’t gonna turn me away, I got pretty used to the place.” She shrugged as she slid the uncovered risotto into the oven, standing smoothly and setting the appliance to warm. “It’s not like I’m the only one that stops by all the time. Jake practically lives in the guest bedroom, and the only reason you wouldn’t find Sherry here is if she was on an op.”

Jill nodded slowly along. “Sherry. As in, Sherry Birkin?”

Claire nodded back. “Yeah. Leon’s daughter, remember?”

“From Raccoon City.”

Claire groaned. “God, I hate that word.”

Jill smiled a little, shaking her head. “I’m glad you still get to see her.”

“Oh, it was never an issue, me seeing her. Really, we’re all just happy we’re all able to be together now.” Claire’s expression was almost wistful, her eyes filled with a lingering sadness. Jill knew there was a lot of tragedy in the wake of this tentatively happy ending for the Redfield siblings. She could only hope there wasn’t any further tragedy ahead.

The glass porch door suddenly shoved itself open, another blonde woman bustling into the apartment with a large tray that had something grilled to perfection atop it. “Claire, I’ve got the fish!” Sherry Birkin declared, nudging Jake out of the way with her elbow when the man made to snag from the entree. “Oh, Jill! Hi!” Sherry set the tray down on the island counter, letting Jill get a good look at perfectly glazed and charred white fish steaks, the food itself smelling divine, with a bed of herbs and lemon slices surrounding it all. There was easily enough food to feed everyone in the apartment, especially with Jill’s risotto and the dishes everyone else had brought.

“I guess that means all the survivors of Raccoon City are here,” Sherry stated like that was normal.

“I hate that word,” Claire complained again. “Why do you have to keep bringing that up?”

“She can talk about whatever she wants,” Jake said from sofa, with Ashley and the pilot already sitting back down. “She’s the one that made it. Let her talk.”

“She should be more understanding of what others have been through,” Piers argued. “It’s not like Raccoon City was any fun for them.”

“I hate that word,” Claire hissed, rolling her eyes, Jill smiling softly in pity. As Sherry began to argue with Jake and Piers, and Claire busied herself with plates and silverware, Jill caught movement in her peripherals, catching sight of two figures on the porch– Chris and Leon, all alone outside, enjoying what had to be some peace and quiet.

She watched, taking in how Leon was against the balcony wall, nursing a beer in one hand, watching Chris scrape off the grill, his mouth moving, talking about something. Whatever he said made Chris laugh, bright and happy, head tipped back. Then Leon smiled wide enough to crinkle his eyes, so visibly proud to have been the one to make Chris laugh at all. Leon then said something else that had Chris turning around, reaching up to take Leon by the chin and pull him in for a kiss that had Leon’s gaze going soft and his body loose.

Something cold touched her knuckles, Jill automatically flexing her fingers and taking the beer that was handed to her by Sherry. The three younger adults were still arguing while Ashley starting quizzing the pilot– her husband, actually– about channels to watch gold as she turned on the television. Claire pulled out the risotto and boastfully swept her hand across the now steaming side dish.

Despite the chaos os raised voices from childish bickering, Jill followed in Leon’s footsteps, relaxing her shoulders, falling into a place of ease, and letting herself finally feel normal again.