Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“I don’t—I don’t feel so good.”

Ashley’s voice pulls him out of the hard stare he has on the mainland. It’s quiet back there, as she clings onto the back of his holsters, huddled close like she’s afraid she might go flying right off the jet ski if she leans back at all. It doesn’t help that there’s seawater crashing all about them, wind whipping through their ears and hair with a cold, salty chill.

In all honesty, Leon doesn’t feel great either. His fight with Krauser had been a lot; he thinks his nose might be broken. That, and running around for two straight days, periodically passing out here and there, never does any good.

His head is killing him.

The sun’s starting to rise.

“Yeah? Makes sense, you’ve been through a lot.” Leon calls back, eyes trained ahead on the shore. “Just—puke into the wind, okay?”

“That’s really not helpful!” Ashley gripes louder.

Ashley’s an interesting kid, that’s for sure. 

Most kids, he imagines, probably would’ve gone into full shutdown mode at this point. But she’d managed to keep herself together, and more importantly survive long enough for him to get to her. He remembers the statistics of it back in the academy–how the first 24 hours are always the most dangerous for kids to go missing. For anyone, really. Of course, she has the benefit of being a political tool. Well, it’s not exactly a benefit in any other way, all things considered. If the world keeps spiraling the way it has been, he’s sure somebody else is gonna wanna get their hands on the President’s daughter.

It sounds so cheesy in his head, that fact. When he was a kid her age, he probably would’ve thought it badass that he’d survived a double homicide, a zombie outbreak (another cheesy-feeling thing, but then again, his life is working out to be the world’s longest-running and flattest-falling joke), a mutated cartel, and now his own traitorous Major and an undead cult leader with a free, family-sized side of undead, sinewy cultists. All on an assignment hand-delivered from White House staff and likely so deeply buried in files and files and files and classified stamps that nobody’s gonna find it until the radiation clears from Racoon City.

Leon isn’t entirely sure what the punch line for that one’s supposed to be.

Then again, when he was a kid her age, he wouldn’t’ve survived this. Leon doesn’t think so, at least. She’d been driving home from some early college thing, or that’s what he’d learned in the briefing. And sure, she’d had her security detail and everything, because of course she did, of course she needs one with the arms race at hand—it’s 2004, for hell’s sake. Why can’t everything go wrong all at once, right? And all the more, of course a cult got its hands on bioweapons, conveniently buried in amber like some shitty re-enactment of a prehistoric theme park disaster. 

In all truth, Leon’s tired of bioweapons. He’s tired of kids getting wrapped up in the messy sandboxes of world leaders and sticky geniuses and assholes with superiority complexes.

He has to fight not to think of where the kids in this village went.

El Pueblo carves a foreboding figure in the brightening skyline.

Barren trees and deteriorating Spanish country houses scatter the rocky shoreline towards the inlet, painted in swirls of yellowed leaves. They’re few and far between, soon petering out as the pines wrap around the slowly collapsing figure of the castle.

It makes his skin crawl to think of what’s been left behind inside, and he wants nothing to do with it. He doesn’t even want to walk through it now that everything’s over.

He’s sure Ashley doesn’t, either.

No, a nice walk in the woods would do them good, even if the castle is a good pickup point.

Ashley’s voice picks up in a croak over his shoulder, caught in a cough.

“Are we almost there?”

“Yeah, hang tight kid. Are you gonna puke or are you gonna pass out?”

“Uh-” Searchingly, she pauses. He can feel her hair tousling at the back of his neck.

Strangely enough, it sets him on edge.

“I don’t—I dunno, can we just get on land? I wanna go home.”

Well, if that doesn’t make him feel awful.

Her voice reminds him a little too much of Sherry. She’d be the same age as Ashley is now, wouldn’t she?

“Just hang on,” he assures again, working up every ounce of assurance he has left in him.

It’s been an exhausting two days, honestly. It’s weighing on him, on his bones, as he carefully maneuvers them through the waves along the edge of the rocky coastline. Leon doesn’t want them to end up a red pulp in the rocks and whitewater there after all of this, even if he can feel Ashley sagging a little; even if he can feel his own shoulders wanting to give.

Still, he drags his will through to get them to the shore.

He cuts a path through the narrow estuary out from the village lake, letting the tide push them in. Every second they spend on the water instead of back on land still has him worried. They’ve driven a long way over the gap between the island and the mainland, he doesn’t know how much. At the edge of the cliffs under the castle, the wind still whips wildly about in the narrow stone and crevices. The morning waves aren’t merciful either, rolling harshly up against the support beams of the boathouse as he approaches it. The thing’s just on the edge of falling apart, like everything else in this damn place.

If Leon’s really especially lucky, he might actually get to go on vacation. Maybe even to the non-infected side of Spain.

That’d be nice. Madrid’s supposed to be cool, if any of the Rick Steve’s Europe episodes hold any truth.

Maybe in Madrid he can get better hotel TV. Spanish TV is supposed to be fun, right?

He’s getting away from himself, though. He needs to get Ashley in better hands, shower, kill the spine crushing headache rattling through him, put on something other than tactical gear, and sleep for days.

“Almost there,” he calls back. “We just gotta walk back and find somewhere to hunker down, ‘kay? We’ll probably get a chopper in a couple hours.”

“ Hours ?” Ashley groans, and had she not been absolutely drained she might’ve sounded like a bratty teenager.

He’s happy she hasn’t been awful like that. Of course, rescuing a first-time teenage kidnapee has its issues. There were moments when she’d ventured too far from his side, got scooped up and almost run off, and even gotten tackled by those batshit cultists a couple times.

But then again, she’d run around and avoided infected people pretty well, managed to make her way through the castle like it was some sort of fucked-up escape room, driven a crane (Leon doubts they actually teach ‘driving construction equipment’ in driver’s ed like she’d said, but he’s not going to complain) and she’d managed to free herself and almost hit him with a candelabra when he’d found her.

That’d been two days ago.

Leon wants to swear, but he’s pretty sure it’s reaching the point in the mission where she might actually remember the details and not be caught up in the shock of everything. There’s definitely some kind of faux pas in swearing in front of the President’s daughter and not mentioning it in the field report.

He maneuvers the jet ski into the frankly depressing and disgusting looking boathouse. It reeks of salt in here, so much his eyes almost well up. But at least they aren’t in the open ocean anymore.

Bangs damp from the seawater, Leon does his best to run a hand through it to get it out of his face, gore and gunk aside.

If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll fall in and get a little bath.

“Come on-” he huffs, reaching for the edge of the dock to draw the jet ski alongside it.
The water swelling and receding underneath them makes it difficult to hold them  steady, but he turns back a bit in his seat to offer out a hand for her to climb up ahead by.

Leon’s a little struck by the sight of himself there.

His skin is still pale, clammy, and he wants to think that it’s just sea spray and morning humidity. That still doesn’t bury the sight of his veins– dark, varicose under his skin as much as they had been only hours before on the table. Something in the back of his mind creeps along, like some internal warning he knows he should be listening to.

He tries not to think about it. 

Tries , at least, as Ashley’s small and equally pale hand grips onto his forearm and pushes herself up.

Like their skin is mapped in mirror images, like some sick sort of copy paste, she only seems all the paler. He can see it clearer there in the mess of her chipped green nail polish, up her fingers in black tendrils under the skin. They’re still thin, still spidery, crawling up through the whole of her, up her shoulders, the back of her neck behind her short cropped blonde hair. Even the gaps torn in the knees of her tights prove the extent of it.

It’s fine, though, it has to be. Because their infection is gone; Luis’ machine killed it—his last posthumous act of redemption in the face of his hand in the mess here. It has to have worked, because it hurt like hell, and he saw it, he saw it there on the chunky little computer screen through the CT screen as Ashley’s parasite died.

She’d been smart enough to figure it out for him too, after he’d passed out.

But she’s too smart, because as she stops to crouch there on the crooked boards of the dock, she stares right back down.

Her eyes are bloodshot, and it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end with just how seriously she stares first at him, and then down at where her own hands are wrapped around her knees.

Kids shouldn’t have to be this smart, he thinks dryly.

But Ashley doesn’t say anything, so he elects not to mention it either.

It has to be… just recovery. Just the leftovers working out of their immune systems, or something equally as sensible.

With a sigh, he reaches for the key of the jetski, making sure the thing’s off, and more importantly unusable, as he leans to haul himself over the edge. As if she’d been waiting, Ashley grabs onto his arm and makes to try hauling him up, ending up slumped there on the floor as he gets over the edge.

Sucking in a shaken breath, he flips his rifle back around to his back and stuffs the key in his pocket with Ada’s little bear keychain.

If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll run into her soon enough to return it.

Still, he has to stop and stay there for a moment, crouched and barely leaning into one of the splintering pilings as his skull feels almost too tight for him, a wave of nausea rolling up far faster than he could’ve ever anticipated. It’s confusing how breathless he feels. Leon knows well he’s been pushed farther, harder, on other missions. 

But then again, he’s never had to deal with any kind of infection.

They can’t stay here.

“Let’s go.” He manages to grunt out, pushing himself up—and oh, it’s unmistakable that he feels himself swaying. His head swims for a second as he sucks in a breath. But he buries it quickly, shaking his head as he turns back to offer Ashley a hand where she’s still slouched, knelt there on the dock.

She’s staring up at him with an uneasy look on her face.

“What?”

“It’s fine-” it rushes out of her in a peep as she reaches up to grab his hand. 

It doesn’t escape him that she gives a little wheeze when he hauls her to her feet.

It won’t be good if he delivers her back in this state, but Leon isn’t a doctor. His experience with all these new viruses and mutagens is entirely combative; it’s never been this personal, save for Sherry—in fact, the way she’d looked there in Claire's arms isn’t much different to how Ashley looks now.  He’s sure if Claire were here, she’d have a cow over it. Sherry still had the scars on her little cheeks when she’d been taken away, up around where her left eye had gone a little hazy from her infection, all remnants of her recovery.

That has to be it.

“So how long is a few hours?” Ashle  asks, taking an uneven few steps to catch up with him as he starts to make his way outside.

With a considering hum, he glances back.

Ashley’s hunched over, short cropped hair all wind tousled and damp from seaspray. Even her now very filthy orange sweater is all damp. She looks cold. Had he still had his coat, he would’ve had something to give her to help that.

But she’s pale. So, so pale. Shit.

Sucking in an uneasy breath, he glances back ahead. “Don’t worry, it’ll feel like no time passed at all. Maybe you can catch some shuteye while we wait. You could probably use it.”

“Oh, that’s flattering.” She snorts. “I could say the same about you.”

Leon casts a sideways glance over his shoulder then, one that has her faltering just a touch as she picks up her pace.

“Let me just find us somewhere to hang out before you go worrying about that, alright?”

“...’kay.”

She falls silently into step just behind him, so close he can practically hear her breathing. That’s fine. It’s fine; it’s good, really, considering how freaked out the poor kid probably is. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see she has her head on a swivel, immediately peering about as they step out from the boathouse and onto the trail, blessedly clear of bodies or traps for the moment.

The morning is still, and cool, and almost overwhelmingly bright after spending so long dodging spotlights in the dark. Painted pink and orange against the yellow surface of the leaves in the forest around them, it’s almost… peaceful. Still.

He’d really like to vacation in a place like this. Just take some time for himself. But he’s not entirely sure he’ll look at serene fall forests and isolated coastal villages the same, ever again.

“That’s nice,” Ashley remarks softly, as if she’d read his mind. Her tired gaze traces over the colorful display surrounding them. “That’s really pretty.”

“Well, hey. What’d’you say we go around the castle so you can keep looking at it?”

Once more peering over his shoulder, Ashley thankfully seems to lighten up a bit despite her clear exhaustion. Nodding quickly, her shoulders sag and her expression softens down from the tired scowl that’d been painting her features.

“Yeah, I like that plan. I think I’ve got a lifetime fill of castles.”

Unable to help but chuckle, Leon finds himself stopping a bit just to usher her ahead. It’ll be easier to keep an eye on her there–harder for her to be snatched up by any remaining combatants or get infected, and he can easily see over her to catch any traps. Seeming pretty pleased, she picks her way over the rocky path, carefully starting on the route away from the crumbling façade of the Valdelobos Castle.

He’ll need to get his DAGR up and running if it has any battery left. He’ll need to tell somebody to go after Mike’s remains, too, if there’s anything left of him—at least something for his family back home. That, and whatever’s left for the BSAA to scoop up and use for analysis. Maybe Leon can do that when they find a house safe enough to hunker down in, and he can try to get in touch with Ingrid out there on the boat somewhere. There’s gotta be a carrier out there with another chopper, right? Ingrid’s been in touch on and off; even if the connection’s choppy as shit, at least maybe he can finally get the relief of letting her and everybody else offshore know that the coast is finally clear.

“Who was that lady back there?” 

Ashley’s voice pulls his gaze from the path for just a moment. Quickly, he glances over.

“What lady?”

“Oh, you know,” Ashley says, her tone the verbal equivalent of an eye-roll. “Just the only lady there .”

“I dunno, you could’ve been talking about one of the cultists.”

She laughs. It’s a sleep deprived kind of laugh, the kind that comes out when teenagers stay up too late in dorms, or in diners at night right before graduation, or in phone calls with people who haven’t seen him in person in years. Her laugh quickly falls apart into a faint cough like she’d choked on it a little, but still she grins over at him.

He can’t help but smile a little bit for that.

Ashely huffs. “No! Obviously the other chick, the one with the red dress! What’s her deal? Are you guys friends or something?”

Ah. Of course she wants to know about Ada.

Then again, there’s plenty Leon wants to know about her himself. He knows for a fact that Ada’s not FBI, even if he’d fallen for that the first time they’d run into each other. He’s still not even sure her name is actually Ada, even if it’s the only thing he’ll probably ever call her. He’s honestly surprised she’d managed to get herself captured, what with her tendency to appear and disappear out of thin air entirely on her whim. 
Sometimes, he swears she’s a figment of his imagination. Except for the fact that she has a tendency to point a gun at him, which feels pretty real.
And keeps him from dying.
And offers vague, prophetic warnings in her weird, mysterious, kind-of-hot way.

“I guess you could say that...”

“Are you dating?” For a moment, Ashley’s grin manages to erase some of the exhaustion dragging at her features.

“ No.”

“You answered too fast. You’re totally dating.”

An exasperated sigh tears from him as he shakes his head. Subconsciously, his hand drifts to his pistol; the deeper they get into these woods, the more on edge he feels. He swears, one of those infected or one of the fucked up dogs is gonna pop out before he can get himself together.

Honestly, he feels like he’s falling apart a little bit. A little woozy—no, hungover, kinda. There’s a pounding headache rising in the back of his neck, an ache in his arms and back and everywhere . Then again, Leon’s been going nonstop for two, three days now, and passing out doesn’t exactly count as sleep.

Leon can distantly remember something about passing out too much fucking up people’s heads, but he doesn’t exactly have the time to be concerned about it. He grumbles, pulling his attention back to the girl walking ahead of him. 

“What, are you interrogating me now?” 

“I dunno,” Ashley shrugs with what has to be the most enthusiasm she’s had in some time.

“How about don’t?”

She whips her head about, and if it weren’t for the darkened veins crawling across her face, she might’ve looked the proper part of the bratty teenager he’d been wanting to avoid. Still, she quirks a brow and peers ahead.

“You’re like… well, not every girl gets a super special secret agent.

” Unimpressed, Leon blinks at her for a moment. “Well. I’m not exactly the first pick from the pet store window.”

That’s not what I meant!” Ashley exclaims, clearly flustered for the callout. “I just-like, look, we stopped a whole zombie… mutant, alien cult or whatever, right? We’re like…”

  “ You are my charge .” Leon interjects before she can continue.

Her face falls. Considerably. A much more defeated sigh escapes him then, and he picks his head up to stare dutifully forward along the steepening path.

“Look, I know it’s been a tough couple days, but I gotta lay it out,” he says, blunt and grimacing a little bit for it. “I’m probably not gonna end up on your security team. You’ll go home and-I’ll end up in another country doing whatever it is that whatever organization your dad’s getting friendly with needs me to do.”

“Oh.”

“...yeah.”

Mustering up some sort of reassurance, anything, he continues when he catches just how dejected she sounds at the thought. “You might wanna find a therapist or something after this. Or do the whole ‘train until you forget’ and become an agent thing. You got-you got that, y’know, you’re not half bad for somebody ending up in this kinda mess for the first time.”

Ashley seems to gnaw on her lip, gaze dropping in thought as she folds her arms about herself. He almost wants to do a double take– he swears she only looks paler, but still she belatedly trudges along, picking her way over the rockier side of the path.

“Okay.”

They go quiet again.

Normally, Leon wouldn’t have really minded some kind of conversation. Yet something deep and aching keeps weighing on him, driving the dull throb in his head deeper and deeper like a spike in a railway. Maybe it’s just the world’s worst tension headache after coming across things far too familiar to him. Or the stress of such a high profile mission, or having lost… lost people. Luis, and Mike this time. 
Luis had really wanted to make up for what he’d done. He’d made a cure . He’d been so heartbroken that his last words had been about change and forgiveness, and there’s something horrible feeling about that.

Leon’s never been one to smoke, but maybe he should have a drink to honor him.  Luis would probably be cracking jokes despite the states of Leon and Ashley both, working out in that big head of his just how to make them heal a little faster from their infections. But Luis is gone.

“Hey!” Ashley’s voice cuts in. “D’you think that one’s okay?”

He’d been in his head again.

Shit, normally Leon’s never so in his head, and yet, he feels like he keeps catching himself from tripping all the deeper into his own thoughts.

Shaking himself out of it, Leon peers up to spot the top of the hill. Along the ridgeline, there appears to be a still-standing village house. It’s a smaller house, surrounded by hand-plowed fields about a hundred or so feet in each direction. Massive patches of the crop are dead, heaps of wilted cabbages intermingled with a few spare heads of it all leafy and overgrown between the weeds. Chickens scurry about freely, and the house itself appears to be long empty. Really, it borders on being a shack.

“Worth a shot.” Leon shrugs, picking up his pace a little bit.

Between the fluttering leaves and chilly winds off the ocean, it’s easy enough to forge ahead towards the shack of a house.

He slows as they maneuver closer, ears perked and eyes peeled for any odd movement, any grumbling, any swearing or mumbling in Spanish. Thankfully, there’s nothing he can make out. Still, one can’t be too cautious.

Holding his pistol close, Leon readies it in his hands as he nods back for Ashley to follow. It’s almost like second nature for her now, despite them being in this odd situation for such a short time. She steps where he steps, shoulders hunched forward in tense anticipation as if she, too, expects something to jump out at them again.

The windows are black when Leon peers through, serenaded by nothing but morning birdsong and feral chickens. Not even the growling of those turned dogs offers warning. But still, carefully, warily, he reaches out for the front door. 

It creaks open hollowly. Offhandedly, he notices the finish on the door has nearly entirely peeled off, splintering under his darkened fingertips.

He needs to grab a shower or something as soon as he gets back out of the zone.

He holds his breath as he peers around the corner and inside.

It’s simple. Dark. Warm, even, especially now that they’re out of the wind. Inside is mostly wooden and stucco walls, gone worn out and grimy with lack of care.The small square living space is filled by a stairwell in the far back corner, along with cooking tables and dining chairs and the local novelty of an indoor water pump.

Score. 

Well, actually not score, because the water’s fucked.
Maybe that isn’t the best idea. Better to be safe than sorry.

Staring down the short sight of his outstretched pistol, Leon sweeps the room. Creeping forward to peer into the dark corners of the room, he passes the stairs with Ashley right there at his back. The place is covered with a thin layer of dust, only now disturbed by their footsteps and the wind rolling in around their shoes. Onions, garlic, and peppers hang from the ceiling. The place doesn’t look disturbed out of the blue; everything’s in its place, save for what appears to be a bowl and a mirror shattered on the floor near the stairs, as well as a frankly depressing attempt at boarding up the windows.

It reminds him of the houses he saw in the town during Operation Javier, all just left like people were leaving for a day out. Each and every one of them had something wrong in it, at least one small thing easily dismissed for an accident. Others were entirely torn apart.

Those always make him think of the ghost of a station in Racoon City. The thought alone has his finger dancing far too eagerly over the trigger, like he can hear rain, like he can smell blood.

He pushes it aside for the moment to keep his mind on the mission.

Satisfied that the room is clear, he loops around the table and steps over the shattered glass and pottery. Turning back, Ashley gives a start, freezing in her tracks for just a moment until he waves for her to settle.

“Just stay down here by the door. Get ready to make a run for it if I say. Got it?”

Earning a dogged nod in response, Ashley steps back towards the creaky front door. “Got it.”

“Good.”

With that, Leon eases a few steps up to peer over the edge of the second floor landing. He can practically feel Ashley staring after him, practically leaning as if she can look for herself. Still, he keeps his eyes ahead. No ax or chainsaw comes down on his skull, so he steps up a bit further into the space. Past the banister, there’s nothing but a bed, surrounded by a whole arrangement of Catholic paraphernalia that rivals the ghost of the orphanage back in Pennsylvania in its gaudiness.

Still, there’s not a single sign of habitation, dead or alive, and he looses a sigh.

“Clear.”

“Oh, good.” Ashley sighs, leaning back against the door as if she might slide down it in some theatrical expression of just how bored and tired she probably is. At that, he makes his way down with far more ease across his shoulders, even if he’s entirely conscious of the dark lines curling across the  skin on his arms out the corner of his eye.

Ashley’s haven’t faded much either. If at all.

Awesome. That’s just awesome.

“Yeah, just stay where I can see you, alright?” he requests, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m not going back outside, it’s freezing!” 

She must hear him roll his eyes at that, because she gives a short scoff as he shuffles by, finally slipping his pistol back in his thigh holster as he gives the door a firm shake to make sure it’s properly shut.

“Obviously,” he replies. “But seriously, I’d rather not have one of those crazy assholes come through one of the windows here –again-- and lose you. Again.”

“Right.” Ashley’s tone falters. She breaks into a short cough then, something that has to drag itself out of her throat, something that has the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. He feels pretty compelled to clear his throat all of a sudden.

“Are you good?”

“Yeah... I just think m’ getting a cold.” It comes out slowly, and she seems to believe it just about as much as he does. Then again, maybe she’s getting sick. Sherry had a cold for a few days, and Ashley’s been going nonstop as much as he has, all in a sleeveless sweater.

Once they get on the chopper, they can pump her full of whatever antibiotics and medicine she’ll need anyway.

The headache is still rolling up his spine.

“Just pop a squat while I call our ride, Ashley.” He offers, waving for her to find somewhere to sit in their sad, dusty little hideout.

He cautiously sweeps aside some of the glass and pottery with his boot, propping himself against the archway to the stairs as he finally tugs out his DAGR and radio for the first time in hours.

Ingrid’s gonna be pissed.

The DAGR, despite having been brand new at the start of this mission, is already dented and scuffed. The thick, gross, green plastic coating has deep scores in it, and for a moment he’s worried it won’t turn on. Miraculously, it does. After holding the clunky power button for what feels like way too long, the company logo appears in the analog green. The familiar ‘Rockwell Collins’ pops across the tiny screen, the warning screen, and as he pops through the buttons and the navigation screen, he sighs.

No SV.

How accurate are the current coordinates, even? He hopes it didn’t last take a read on the island, but knowing his luck, it might’ve. And Leon really isn’t keen on having to go back out into the cold just to get a satellite.

The thought makes him cough. It twinges at the back of his mouth, and he takes a moment to try and clear his throat. It feels phlegmy, gross, and it doesn’t go away. In fact, his eyes just burn a little, he swears his ears start to ring.

That’s… not good. That’s very not good.

Ashley coughs somewhere behind him, and the sound of it is so jarring that it has him picking up his head. She’s meandered her way over to one of the shittily boarded up windows, holding just barely onto the edge of one to stare out between them. Here, the room is slowly being painted red and orange in the morning light –almost blindingly so– but still she stares out.

She looks scrawny standing there. It’s definitely a rude thought, but the kid’s a string bean. It’s a miracle she’d managed to drag him up onto the table with his kevlar chest plate and everything strapped to him. Then again, if Ashley’s proven one thing, it’s that she’s extremely determined.

“You know, this isn’t really what I was thinking when I told my mom I wanted to study abroad someday,” she remarks with a sigh. “...can’t really beat the view, though.”

Leon makes an effort to fight down the cough bubbling in his chest, something he’s sure has to be a remnant of the UV procedure back on the table, on the island. He really hopes he doesn’t get asthma from it or something.

Still, he finds himself setting down his DAGR and radio on that little dining table, stepping back just a bit to focus. Maybe if he lets the DAGR sit and search he can get an actual, accurate SV. He makes his way over to the other window at that thought, bracing an arm against the boards to stare out.

Half of him anticipates seeing a horde of infected stumbling up the coastline towards them.
Instead, the view he finds is… pleasant. Nice, even. Something he’d see in one of those picturesque postcards one of his fellow trainees liked to collect before they became too much of a risk in terms of tracking mission history. 

Out before the house the cabbage field stretches, a low fog rolling along the plowlines and upturned dirt. The fog hangs low on the horizon, out into the Atlantic. The waves roll harshly up against the steep edge of the place. Out to the north sits Castle Valdelobos. The center keep must’ve collapsed in at some point during the night while they were on the island, the walls crumbling from the BOWs that’d been left to trample through the halls. A part of him feels bad for it—there’s something wrong in all the history just dead there, something that’d once been good and fine in all the notes and records he’d been able to find left behind from justices past. No place is left the same after an outbreak, ever, not the people or the buildings or even the earth itself.

It’ll be a miracle if this place isn’t wiped off the map.

Really, it’d be a loss. Despite everything fucked up about the place, it really is pretty. The kinda place old geezers retire and become faces in bars at, with old stories about wars they didn’t fight.

The sky is slowly shifting from orange to yellow as the sun finally begins to crawl over the horizon.

He can still make out a plume of smoke from the island, out there in the fog.

“...you know,” he weighs what to say next, hesitating, before electing not to take any peace from her in that moment. “Uh, nevermind.”

It reminds him of that second night after Racoon City, waking up with Claire and Sherry in the wilderness to see a fiery plume up over the mountains sending all their experiences up in ash and dust and radiation. The ground had shaken; they could hear the avalanches for miles and miles. They’d watched the specks of helicopters and planes against the brightness, buzzing away like bees from a dead hive. They’d felt the shockwave hit so hard that it shook the trees around them and ripped the breath from his lungs.

It’d sat there, for hours and hours against the horizon in testament to the hellscape they’d managed to survive.

It’d marred the sunrise that morning very similarly.

“What?”
Ashley turns and looks up at him, and it aches how much she looks like Sherry. Of course, last time he saw Sherry, she hadn’t been sixteen; she’d been ten, a little uneasy and staring up at him with those great big blue eyes. He’d promised Claire he’d keep her safe, and they’d been out there for weeks moving from town to town in the aftermath of Racoon City—between hotel rooms and nightmares and McDonald’s breakfasts scraped out of his dwindling bank account. The last time Sherry had looked up at him like that, holding his hand, she’d said ‘what?’ and he’d lied and said ‘it’s okay’, and that was the last time he ever saw her.

She’d be sixteen now. Probably still as blonde, still as blue eyed, and he wonders if she kept her red headband, if she’d wear her hair in a bob like Ashley does. 

And now, Ashley looks at him like she had in that damned castle, even if it’s an expression considerably less scared. Like she isn’t entirely sure what to do, like she’s entirely exhausted, like he’s just lied and said ‘we can beat it’ to will their miraculous survival through all this.

With a shaky, weary sigh, he shakes his head.

“The sunrises after something bad’s over are always the best ones,” he says.

Her brow eases as she turns to stare out the window again, a faint smile quirking across her round face.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “They’re just better. Dunno why.”

“I don’t think we need to know why. It’s nice,” Ashley relents. “It’s nice. Thanks, Leon.”

She seems so happy despite it all. It’s enough to pull a proper smile from him then, as he reaches out to give her shoulder a little pat before turning back towards the table.

“Hey, don’t stare at the sun too long, you’ll go blind.”

“As if!” She snorts. At least her sense of humor is still intact.

Leaving her there to enjoy the view, he tugs out one of the rickety wooden chairs to sit. The instant he drops into it, his legs wake up in a wild ache. It’s so severe he almost thinks they’re cramping up, something that has him sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth.

Jesus. He didn’t push himself that far. He didn’t get thrown into any walls (that he can remember), and he knows he doesn’t just give out this easily. Something in the back of Leon’s mind itches and aches that something’s wrong —very, very wrong –and he wants nothing to do with the thought.

If he thinks too much about it, he might just freak out. Before now, Leon’s never been infected, and the T-Virus had been a whole different rodeo. So had the G-Virus, technically—as far as he knows, the affects of the virus just depend on the person. No matter what, though, it’ll eat everybody from the inside out. Marvin had lasted hours before finally turning. 

But Las Plagas is… was different. Getting a parasite injected into him had been a first in many, many categories. Never before had he had a virus, or a parasite (he’s pretty sure ticks don’t count), or a hive mind, or anything mutagenic anywhere near his insides. It’s like those assholes –specifically, Saddler– had noticed that ‘being infected by every shitty thing possible’ hadn’t been on Leon’s bucket list, and they’d decided to add it on, just to scribble it out seconds after.

There’s gotta be some shitty punchline somewhere in that, too.

But Luis’ UV procedure had worked. Leon had seen the parasite in Ashley’s ribcage, squirming and writhing under the CT camera as it’d been blasted to amorphous, non-functioning bits. And then he’d woken up on the table.

What if—what if Ashley hadn’t actually managed to get his parasite?

No. No, she’s smart, and she’s coughing just as much as he is.

He just needs to get Ashley home, get a drink, say whatever measly prayers he can muster for Luis. Maybe Leon can even work up the guts to have a smoke in Luis’ name instead of getting blackout drunk.

With a weary sigh, Leon clears his throat and reaches for where he’d left his DAGR on the table. A much greater groan escapes him when he finds there’s no update in coordinates, and he forgoes fiddling with it and getting pissed for plucking up his image radio. Pulling the dials and flicking up the antenna, he finds himself relieved to get a connection.

Even with the fuzzy image, he spots himself in the half matte reflection of the screen.

Jesus, he’s pale. Really pale —darkened veins crawl and curl about the shape of his face, looking shapeless in the undetailed reflection. It has his chest tightening uncomfortably, and without giving himself a moment to actually think about it, Leon toes over one of the bigger mirror shards left on the floor. 

Leon stares down at it with a growing sense of dread.

He’s just as pale in this reflection as the one in the video radio screen, even if the details are much sharper. He’s unnerved at the sight of himself staring down. Lips dry and cracked and bloodied from his fight with Krauser, the pale undersurface of him marred by a webbing of blackened vessels and veins. His eyes look bloodshot, red around the edges, puffy like he’d been having a breakdown. Leon almost thinks he could laugh at the thought; he’s been out of it for hours living second to second, minute to minute, and now that he’s in the home stretch to the finish, this is when he gives out?

He feels like he’s gonna go senile. No—he feels like he’s overreacting, even though his gut is screaming that there’s something wrong . Slowly, he leans over to pick the shard up.

His hands are wrong. Blackened, jagged and slightly overgrown nails sit on the ends of his fingers, almost grey from the sheer amount of toxic looking spider-webbing of his blood vessels, veins, all of it—oh fuck. Oh fuck.

He drops the mirror shard unceremoniously on the table, recoiling from it like it's on fire.

Luis hadn’t ever mentioned if he’d successfully used the machine before.

Leon lurches to pick up the video radio.

“Roost, Condor One, over.” Leon grimaces at how strained his voice comes out.

“Go ahead Condor One.” Ingrid’s voice breaks over the line, and he can just barely make her out there on the other end of the line. Still in her dark station, probably on the ship, she has her glasses back on again, hair a mess like she’d been running around. “Good to hear from you. It’s been three hours since last contact.”

Shit, three hours? Her voice is edging on somewhere between upset and concerned, and he knows if they ever actually see each other face to face, she might go postal on him. 

“Sorry about that,” he croaks. “Had to take a bit of a detour. We’re ready for pickup. Baby Eagle’s gonna be in need of some medical care.”

Ingrid hesitates for just a moment. He doesn’t blame her; she’s been running around in circles on a wild radio goose chase just to get in contact with him half the time, while he’s been too busy blowing parasite-infected locals to bits with whatever ammo he can get his hands on.

“I need details, Condor One.”

“M’ not sure if that’s something you want over radio,” Leon admits with a grimace. “We– we’re gonna need a biohazard team, probably.”

“That’s not helpful.” Ingrid remarks rather shortly.

Leon pauses, glancing over in consideration to where Ashley’s still lingering by the window. Of course, private channel or not –a little bit of room for casual conversation or not– they’re always at risk of having ears in the cornfield. Mouth suddenly feeling dry, he licks his lips and tries desperately to clear his throat again.

“The locals got their hands on something… uhm… similar to the RCDI.” It’s not exactly a subtle acronym, anybody who already knows enough about covert government operations probably knows plenty about the Racoon City Destruction Incident. But it’s the most he can muster without saying ‘oh yeah, the village is probably still full of people with scorpion parasites that shoot out their heads and whip around like fucked up Chain Chomps’. 

That’d probably cause a lot of conniptions.

“...copy that, Condor One.” Ingrid relents, turning just a touch through the fuzzy feed."

“I’ll get you our last coordinates and then work on getting some good SV down here.”

“The original pickup point might be our go-to.”

“Gotcha- Copy that, Roost.”

He turns back to pick up the DAGR off the table for a moment, very pointedly ignoring the mirror shard, when Ashley gives a wheeze.

It’s an awful sound, almost blood curling, and Leon’s head snaps up to find her sort of swaying over towards the table, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“Ashley?”

Her voice escapes in a breath.

“I uhm—I just need to sit down-”

It all happens so fast. Her eyes roll up in her head, and for all of two seconds, all he can see are the whites of them there as her body careens for the floor. Leon moves before he can even think, narrowly managing to catch her before she crashes into the ground. Still, she sinks to the floor and he goes with her, holding onto her shoulders. When he speaks, a wave of nausea rolls over him so fast, so hard, he thinks he might keel over. 

Oh fuck. Oh fuck-

“Ashley?”

Urgently, he tries to shake her, before freezing.

Those dark marks across her face are growing all the darker, her eyelids fluttering wildly. It seems like she’s fallen unconscious, slumped there in his arms as her head lolls back. That’s—no good, that’s not good at all, Luis hadn’t mentioned this. Had the parasite died? Is she gonna freak out on him, is she still infected?

Shouting up to the radio on the table, Leon tries to carefully set her down as she begins to shake.

“Roost, I’mma need you to hold—Ashley-?” With her eyes fluttering wildly, he can only make out the bloodshot whites of her eyes, her mouth starting to jerk open and closed with a wild clacking of her teeth. Absently, he finds himself a little struck at the thought that she might bite her tongue off like that. What’s all the more horrifying is that he catches the sight of her teeth—jagged, longer than any normal person’s teeth, marred and reddened from her coughing.

She’d been coughing up blood from her infection before this.

 “Ashley, I need you to talk to me!”

“This is Roost to Condor One, what the hell is going on over there!?”

Ingrid’s voice sounds so distant. Of course it is, she’s on the damn radio, but his ears are ringing and his throat feels caught up, all of him is aching, his head is swimming– but his charge is right there and she’s not okay.  
Leon isn’t a doctor. Sure, he’s great at taking in information from briefings –he’d done great on all of his written tests in the academy. But he doesn’t know shit about how this infection thing works except for the one golden rule of ‘Don’t Get Infected’.

He can’t kill her. No way in hell can he kill her, even if it might be a mercy.

“Ashley!”

He feels it coming on before he can even react. A cold sweat, something he could mistake for the sheer stress of losing his charge to some reactive seizure. President Graham’s daughter. Sherry. His continued success is the only think keeping her alive, as far as he knows, and Jesus fucking Christ it—she looks too similar, Ashley looks too similar, and it hurts to breathe.

He needs to get his shit together.

“Come –come on, kid, come on, talk to me, work with me here!”

Her skin is so cold when he grabs her face to try and steady it, and Jesus, he’s not a doctor , he doesn’t know if she needs CPR or the serum they’ve already run out of, and his hands look black against the exposed white of her skin, the shock of her dirtied blonde hair.

“Fuck-”

A sound escapes the kid, frantic and terrified. He remembers her breaking down in the castle, panicking about becoming like those mindless infected villagers. It’s like her whole body is locking up—he doesn’t remember that happening to the locals, but he does remember the feeling: unable to move, wrapped up in his own skin, muscles all spasming into action beyond his control while some greater mind willed him to stand there.

She’s crying, gasping, choking like Sherry had in the cable car.

Here, Ashley feels just as small, clinging onto him as if for life itself.

He can feel his whole body cramping up, clouding in, his pulse in his throat in the cold sweat across his skin and he feels like he’s boiling, his spine alight with his limbs and he needs to sit down.

He needs to stop this.

Leon, for once, can’t think of anything to do but try to keep her still as she starts seizing.
Frantically, he looks around for anything like there’ll be something there to help. Like Luis won’t be slumped in that mine spitting up blood around his cigarette, like he’ll be there in some apparition to offer answers.

The house is still as his head swims, and it dawns on him just how fucked they are.

It hadn’t worked.

It hadn’t worked- 

“No. No, no, no , Ashley, come on, talk to me—you can fight it!-” This feels different. There’s no will behind this. No purpose. It just is. “- Fuck !”

“This is Roost to Condor One. Come in!”

Ingrid’s still on the line. The line’s still open, more importantly, but Leon feels as if all of his muscles are locked up. It hurts to breathe.

He wants to lay down, but that’s ridiculous.

Painstakingly, he helps her lay on her back there, unsure of how long this’s going to last. His hands tremor, long and dark and wrong and aching, pulling at each thread of muscle in his body in some macabre harp concert. He can hear himself in pain; he’s not even sure when he opened his mouth.

“Is this thing even on! Condor One, do you read me!?”

He kind of wants to shout at her to be quiet. Inexplicably, awfully. In the back of his mind, Leon’s worried that something might hear them here, Ashley with her squeaking through her wheezing breaths, himself trying just to breathe, one at a time, hunched over her there. Karma is a bitch, prayer is his shortcoming here. Had they been back in that chapel, maybe he’d be able to will some miracle into existence.

They need that now, they need it.

“Please… talk-talk t’ me, Ashley-?” He almost feels selfish wanting the assurance that she isn’t dying on him, because really, Leon can’t be sure.

She’s looking at him.

He doesn’t remember when her eyes opened, when she started clinging onto him, but she’s clinging, she’s terrified and she can’t get words out of her mouth because it keeps clacking open, shut, open, shut, between scattered squeaks of pain.

That matters more than anything in this moment, even as his vision starts to go blurry.

“Leon! Do you read me? Come in! Is Baby Eagle alright?”

If they’re lucky, maybe their heads will burst out into the parasite, or—no, no, the parasites are gone, he has to keep reminding himself of that. Even then, between the waves of cold sweat, his skin feels like it's on fire, like it's gonna peel back off from his spine.

Ashley stares, seizing up and slumping with each passing second, gravity feels like too much, he goes spilling to the floor half under the table with twitching fingers.

Jesus, fuck , it hurts.

Vision gone white, blind with the pain, Leon musters up the strength to reach up towards the table. The DAGR, the video radio, even the glass shard all come raining down, crashing, clattering, shattering across the floor. The DAGR, a brick as it is, goes tumbling out of reach, but he frantically reaches out for the video radio, dragging it close.

His arm is twitching, tensing up, his skin feels tight and hot and the grime of the past few days is caught in a film of sweat that nearly has the video radio slipping between his blackened fingertips.

His hand, chalky and marred, grasping–it looks a little like the history books, like those images of the plague, Leon thinks haplessly.

“-Ingrid?” He manages out, and he’s horrified at how it escapes him in a whisper. He wants to scream it, to call out, to explain, to tell her to send somebody faster.

He ends up dropping the radio with his hands shaking so hard, leaving Ingrid to stare at the ceiling.

“Come in– Leon, are you and Ashley alright!?”

Something’s moving under his skin.

Leon wants to be sick.

Coughing, wheezing, he keels over there against the rough boards of the floor.

The last thing he remembers seeing is the dried garlic overhead, and the sun painting long orange stripes across the floor between the boards. He can see Ashley out of the corner of his eye– her orange sweater, her hair looking like fire in the strip of light she’s caught in as her body shudders against whatever infection has taken hold.

Perhaps they were screwed from the beginning.

Staring up, unable to move, Leon can hear Ingrid calling out distantly over the video radio.

He can hear his own pulse in his head.

He can feel his skin alight and itching, aching, roiling, muscles tensed so far they’re due to snap, body twitching beyond his control.

Fuck.

He can’t see.

Leon loses it somewhere in that, pulled under by the merciless plucking of his strained muscles and chattering teeth, mouth open to meet Ashley’s drowned out cries of agony.