Chapter Text
The night is quiet and boring, just one more in a monotonous string between fieldwork assignments.
Leon pops a tablet to the back of his mouth and washes it down with a palmful of water. He could dry-swallow but he does enough of that in the field.
Funny. In the action movies he watched as a kid, he never saw the hero dutifully taking his SSRIs. The good doctor assigned to him assures him that the pills are crucial to his success as an agent. Not his success as a functioning human being, just a weapon.
Leon didn’t mind the meds though. He felt on more of an even-keel when taking them and the side effects were minimal. It took him a little longer to climax than it used to but that didn’t really matter. How long had it been since he was with a partner anyway?
He looks at the ornate, silver key resting in a dish on the bathroom vanity.
There had been no worry about taking too long to finish with Luis. The fear and exhilaration they felt fighting for their lives meant that Leon ran out of his agency-assigned prophylactics fast. Maybe successful agents weren’t supposed to fuck more than three times while deployed in the field? He had certainly never done anything like that before or since.
He shuts the medicine cabinet and looks at himself. He doesn’t look as haggard as he feels so he chalks that up as a win. He’s in need of a trim though. Haircuts are one of the rare times when he can relax and just focus on the feeling of someone touching him with no ill intent. He usually slips the stylist an extra ten on the understanding that he doesn’t sit in the chair to chat.
He hasn’t felt like chatting in a while. Maybe not since coming back alone from Spain. He grips the edge of the vanity. The subject of Luis is like a tender bruise that he can’t help probing.
Luis had tricked him, manipulated Leon into fucking him, then he just disappeared. No note, no message, nothing. His grip tightens on the vanity. Maybe Luis just intrinsically understood that he wasn’t deserving of love. It was probably some kind of field that Leon generates like one of those deep sea creatures.
Stop.
He squats down and closes his eyes. He focuses on what he can hear: the distant whine of traffic on the interstate adjacent to his boring apartment block, the slam of a door down the hall, his upstairs neighbor running the shower. There’s three.
He opens his eyes and looks around the bathroom: a faded bottle of Bactine, a pack of disposable razors, the tarnished lab key. Another three.
Finally, he stands up and clenches his left fist, rolls his neck from side to side, and wiggles his toes on the soft bathroom rug. Three.
Feeling a little better, he shakes out his entire body and exits the bathroom.
He didn’t learn the 333 Rule from his government-assigned shrink. A nice, Jane Fonda-looking therapist taught it to him. She thinks he’s a firefighter from a nearby suburb. He sees her once every two weeks, fieldwork notwithstanding.
He heads to his bedroom to change into something more comfortable. Jeans are chucked into a hamper and well-worn sweatpants are pulled from a drawer. The elastic wore out years ago and a spot of bleach ate through the material near his left knee but Leon has no intention of tossing the pair. He got them when he was still at the Police Academy. Worn-out as they were, the pants are a kind of talisman from a time when his life didn’t feel so fucked up.
Given the way his night is going, Leon decides to distract himself with a movie.
He doesn’t tend to spend a lot of money on himself but movies and music are things he does splurge on. Since getting a DVD player a couple years before, he had started to replace his VHS collection. The slim disks, kept in a binder, were much easier to haul around than the shelves of boxy plastic.
He flips through the binder pages until settling on something film noir. He feels like a bad noir detective on most days. He grabs the remote for the DVD player and dims the lights.
Just as he starts to get comfortable, there’s a knock at the door.
He doesn’t get visitors, barely orders takeout, and has deliveries sent to the nondescript mailroom on the ground floor of his building. Taking care not to make any noise, he slides off the couch, creeps towards the console table by the door and takes out a knife. He turns his body perpendicular to the door, in case of shotgun blast, and looks through the peephole.
The woman waiting impatiently on his doorstep has the uniform and utility bag of a telephone company worker but no one from the phone company has ever looked this good. Ada. What was she doing here?
“Who is it,” Leon calls through the door.
“Hello, this is Sandra from the phone company. I’m here to install that new line you ordered.”
Ada’s customer service voice is pretty good but he can’t imagine her whipping up lattes or answering phones for a living. Even in another life. “Oh, sure thing,” Leon calls again. “Just give me a moment to get decent.”
“Of course, sir.”
Huh, Leon could get used to “sir.”
He rolls his neck a few times and shakes out his arms before pulling back the chain and multiple deadbolts he had installed himself after first leasing the place. They wouldn’t stop someone who was truly determined but he hoped they would buy him some time in a worst-case scenario someday. “Okay, it’s open. Come on in!”
The moment Ada crosses the threshold and shuts the door behind her, Leon presses her against the wall with the edge of his knife to her throat.
“How do you know where I live?”
To her credit, Ada is unperturbed. Like she knows Leon won’t do anything. She’s probably right.
“Oh puppy,” she purrs, “I know plenty of things about you.”
“Fine, next question. What are you doing here?”
A hint of irritation passes over her well-schooled features. “I’m here to fix your mess, as a matter of fact. So I’d appreciate it if you got the fuck out of my face. I hope you don’t treat all the utility workers like this.”
Leon can’t help but roll his eyes. “Haha. I’ll let you go but please don’t try anything stupid. I just got the living room set up the way I like it. Checked out a feng shui book from the library and everything.” He holds his hands up and watches as Ada performs her own eye roll.
Not wasting time, she pushes past him and places her utility bag on the dining room table. She pulls out a piece of equipment that looks like a small bullhorn and begins methodically waving it across his apartment.
“My place isn’t bugged.”
“Well,” she says, “then this won’t take too long. How about you make yourself useful and pour us a little of that bourbon the White House sent over?” Without looking at him, Ada continues her scan of his apartment.
Leon doesn’t even bother interrogating her about the bottle that President Graham sent to him for a job well done. Ashley wasn’t too worse for wear after Spain but he’s still not sure how “well done” the job had been.
Despite having gotten the bottle a year ago, he has more than half left. If he takes more than a glass of booze with his meds, he starts feeling drowsy and sluggish.
He pours them both a couple fingers of bourbon and takes the glasses into the living room. Ada has clearly completed her initial scan and has moved on to the rest of his place. He hears a door open down the hall and hopes to god that no one has bugged his bathroom.
Too bewildered to get back on the couch, he stands in the middle of his living room and shifts his weight from foot to foot while sipping the bourbon. Ada sure knew how to make a guy feel uncomfortable in his own apartment. He didn’t even have shoes on for god’s sake.
After a few more minutes of banging around, Ada returns to the living room and powers down her bullhorn.
“Bourbon for the lady.”
“Thanks.” She accepts the glass and sips a little. “So you have no idea why I’m here?”
“If I did, I probably wouldn’t have welcomed you at knifepoint.”
Ada snorts. “That’s fair.”
Leon takes a moment to look at Ada. Really look. Of course, she’s as beautiful as ever. Even in this cheap, polyester work uniform. But there’s an agitation under the surface and it puts his stomach on edge.
“Ada, I’m actually happy to see you but I wish I knew what this was about. You’re freaking me out a little and I prefer not to be freaked out in my own home.”
She takes another sip of bourbon and tosses her hat next to the utility bag on the dining room table. “To be clear,” she begins, “this is at real personal cost to me and only possible because I called in some substantial favors. I coordinated this effort in the memory of the 21-year-old doofus that I met in RC all those years ago. He wouldn’t have done something this stupid. You, on the other hand—”
“This is not helping me to understand what’s going on,” Leon interrupts.
“What’s going on”—she crosses the room to start rifling through her bag with a free hand—“is that you fucked up big time in Spain.”
“Spain was almost a year ago!”
“Oh, believe me, I am aware.” She apparently finds what she was looking for and moves to shove a device into his hand. It almost looks like a pager. “Keep this on you at all times and make sure it’s charged. I’m not bringing you another one. In fact, you’re lucky that I brought you this one.”
She’s on the verge of working herself into a lather. He’s never seen her this agitated before. It would almost be funny if he weren’t terrified. There’s nothing that he can think of that would bring her to show up in person to drop off material like this.
“Once again, this is for the little puppy I found wandering around Raccoon City. If I knew that he would grow up to make such bad decisions, I’d have put him down myself.”
“This is really—”
She plants herself in front of him and presses an envelope into his hand. To make things even more confusing, she tiptoes up and presses a kiss on his cheek. “Congratulations. Now, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
With that parting line, she grabs her things and stalks out of his apartment.
“Don’t let the door hit you, I guess.”
With trepidation, he opens up the envelope. It contains a single piece of cardstock and he stares at it, uncomprehending.
After a moment, it becomes clear. He sinks down to the floor and puts his head in his hands.