Chapter Text
The first memory she has is from when she was three.
Back then, her mother had pulled her into herself and ran her long, delicate fingers through her dark curls and whispered in her ears in a language she rarely uses these days, “You’re so smart, darling. Don’t tell anyone that your first memory is from when you were so young — smart girls get hurt in the world.” She wonders if that was the right thing to say to a young girl — if her mother was loving and merciful or just mean.
She decides to go with the former — because words matter so little when actions are present. And her actions were kind — delicate and deliberate. Slow and caring.
She remembers so little about her all these years later. Something exceptionally close to the scent of flowers; a smell she has been chasing unknowingly for years and years. She has narrowed it down to lilac and something sharper like mint.
It hits her sometimes — walking past a stranger on the street, or when someone brushes past her in a crowded room — that elusive, aching familiarity. A perfume, a shampoo, a ghost of breath too close to her own. Lilac and mint.
Years ago, it used to stop her in her tracks — like a lightning strike, sudden and sharp. Nowadays, though, she walks past the scent and doesn’t blink an eye. She doesn’t look back — she doesn’t gape at the source of the scent, to check subconsciously for hints of an Asian woman with braided hair.
There’s a kind of dignity in letting the scent pass through her like a memory does — ungraspable, already gone by the time you notice it.
She tells herself that this is growth — this stillness, this refusal to chase ghosts. That letting the scent pass without pause is proof she’s no longer the girl who used to scan every crowd for the impossible.
But some part of her still catalogues it. Not consciously, not anymore, but in quiet places. The back of her throat tightens imperceptibly. Her spine straightens. She stores the moment away like a pressed flower — flattened, preserved, hidden between the pages of her day.
Lilac and mint.
Nevertheless, her mother’s advice turned out to be useful in her line of work. People do tend to dislike smarter women — to plot for their downfall and to want to put them back into their places. She’s seen what happens to smart women — they become puppets with no way out. They are always outsmarted by men.
No, men fear smart — they chip away at the intelligence until it withers and nothing is left of it.
They desire beautiful women — skin like snow and eyes deep but thoughtless. Women who can laugh and bash their eyelashes. Women whom they can underestimate. She learned that early on and she’s never looked back. They like a bit of skin, a whole lot of cleavage.
So she gave them that. The cleavage, the laugh, the glance that looked a little too wide-eyed to be threatening. She let them think she was slow. Sweet. Just clever enough to be amusing at a dinner party, but not clever enough to outmaneuver anyone.
It worked — horrifyingly well.
She learned to play small, to weaponize her softness. Her intelligence became something she used in the shadows, never in full daylight. She dropped her eyes at the right moment, let them interrupt her, let them explain things she already understood in triplicate. Smiled through it all.
And while they talked, she listened. While they underestimated her, she made plans.
She’s not ashamed of it. Not anymore. At some point, she realized this was a kind of brilliance — surviving in plain sight. Disappearing just enough to be invisible, but never so much that she disappeared from the game. There’s power in invisibility, if you know how to use it. And she does.
To her clients, she’s smart enough to get the job done but not smart enough to double cross them — they make the mistake of underestimating her every step of the way and they never learn. She can’t do that to me, they think, I would never fall for a trap that obvious. It’s best for business to let them go on thinking that. To people on her missions, when she’s not shooting the living dead, she’s clueless. She’s whoever she needs to be.
She has been these people — different names, different personalities; doe eyed and clueless, sharp and biting, spunky and flirty, angry and damaged, fixable and lovely.
She’s all of them. None of them. A masterclass in controlled fiction wearing a heartbeat.
Sometimes, when she’s especially sentimental and flashes of memory from earlier years of her life — usually echoes and flashbacks and black and white pictures — come to her late in the night, she wonders who she truly is. She can’t remember much of her life before the deceit. Before hiding part of herself in favor of letting the world see what they wanted to see, what they needed to see.
Sometimes, she lists things in her head. Facts about herself that seem buried deep — under all the disguises and lies — facts that even elude her own conscience let alone others’.
1. Her first memory is from when she was three years old. She was chasing a butterfly — an insect she hadn’t quite seen before. It had white wings, brown dots and the tiniest body she had ever seen. She had followed her around the house, watching as light danced on her wings. She had watched her smash herself against the closed windows, begging to be let out. She wasn’t tall enough to reach the handles back then, so she had watched helplessly until the creature had tired itself out and it had fallen. Back then, she didn’t know that it had died — she imagined it had fallen asleep. Peaceful and regenerating. She had continued watching it long after it was gone. White — with brown spots.
2. She had a mother and a father. She forces herself to think of more people in their house — perhaps siblings running around; younger or older. Sometimes, she thinks she’s grabbing onto the ends of a rotten rug and the more she digs her fingers in, the more it falls apart. She has given up the search in her memories since then — all it does is make her forget the little she does remember.
3. The first person she killed was a little boy.
The list is no longer than ten items — after all, she started in the business from an early age.
“Miss Wong,” the man in front of her leans closer, pushing the folder across the table. She smiles at him, a small twist of the lips; enough to exude confidence and to keep him pleased, his belly full of what he’s seeking. “I believe this is the information you need.” She already knows what’s written in the file — after all, she never takes on a mission before researching — but she allows him to fill her in. To feign cluelessness and scan the file.
“And the payment?” she asks, her voice an octave lower than she’s comfortable in, laced with honey. The man smiles, taking a sip of his coffee.
“All in due time, my dear,” he says.
She smiles again — warmer this time, indulgent, letting the “my dear” slip off her like water. Letting him think he’s charming, letting him believe she’s amused.
She is not.
She notes the way he’s trying to impress her, the half-buttoned collar, the Rolex she clocked the moment he walked in, the subtle bulge under his coat — either a weapon or a wire. Or both. He reeks of half-truths and bureaucratic rot, like too many men she’s dealt with before.
Still, she plays along. She always does.
“I know you know this,” she leans closer, letting her dress fall loose under her, letting a lock of hair frame her face, letting her head tilt sweetly and her eyes warm. “But I would much rather operate with all our cards on the table.” Oh, the lies — she gets terribly bored of having to repeat them to everyone but it’s what work is, no? Endless charades, the same path over and over again.
The man sighs and Ada lets him think that he is considering her offer even despite the fact that she knows he’s already agreed to it. “You drive a hard bargain, Miss Wong,” he sighs, feigning frustration.
“Please, call me Ada,” she offers, a small token of her gratitude as she slips a piece of paper across the table. On it, her number is scrawled — a number that he’s going to accept as they always do. A number that will be wired in half before she sets off. “I don’t believe I am asking for much, sir.”
The man lifts the paper with a careful hand, his eyes scanning the digits like he’s decoding a secret. Ada doesn’t flinch under his scrutiny — she rarely does. Instead, she leans back in her chair, her fingers resting delicately on the folder he pushed her way. She’s careful to let it sit there, motionless. It’s a message he receives — she won’t indulge unless she is satiated first and he needs to do his part.
Eventually he sighs, “I do believe we have an agreement, Miss Wong.”
She smiles, offering her hand.
They always do.
—
The one thing she can never complain about is showers. She tried taking baths when she was first taken in by The Organization, smuggled into the United States, a dirty little child from Vietnamese war zones but they were too messy for her taste.
Sitting in her own filth was never quite as fascinating as they made it out to be. Plus, the stillness in taking a bath makes her skin crawl — the way you have to wait, surrounded by a body of water that gives your enemy the chance to dunk your head in and watch you struggle. She’s wary of it because she’s been the perpetrator. More times that she can count.
She much prefers showers — they are quick, they get the job done and they’re more effective than any salves for bruises after a tiring mission.
The scalding heat of the water hits her shoulders, tracing old scars and fresh bruises alike. She watches the steam rise, fogging the mirror, cloaking the room in soft white — the closest thing to anonymity she ever really gets. For a moment, just a breath of it, she isn’t Ada Wong. She’s skin and bone, heat and pulse. Nobody. Nobody at all.
She tilts her face up into the spray, letting it erase the last mission from her hair, her collarbones, her wrists. Blood always lingers in strange places.
The last man she killed had begged. That part always stays with her longer than it should. Not the bullet, not the angle of it, not even the sound — those things fade. But begging? That sticks to your ribs.
Contrary to popular belief — and that belief has been immensely good for business — she doesn’t much enjoy killing people. Men, begging, that’s another thing — she likes to see the ones who have made the mistake of underestimating her fall to their knees and beg her to spare them. This one didn’t even know her.
“Please,” his voice had shaken. Ada had given him at least the dignity to look into his eyes and shoot. Looking away is the cowardly thing to do, after all.
It’s better when they do not know her. When they do, they beg, using her name like it’s a weapon that can be wielded against her. They whine, Ada please. She makes them suffer for it — for the foolish notion that her name is a reason to spare them.
The man must’ve had so much blood because the water runs and runs and still, she doesn’t feel clean. Comforted, perhaps — alive. But not fully absolved. Outside, the USB drive sits on her nightstand, a token that ought to be taken to her client in the following week once the suspicion has worn off. Tonight, though, she’s done with computers and guns.
Tonight, she relaxes.
She stays in the shower until the hot water starts to run cold and she’s sure there are no remnants of destroyed, dead hemoglobins in her hair.
She steps out of the shower slowly, deliberately — like a ghost re-entering her body. Her breath fogs the mirror as she wipes it with the side of her palm, revealing her face in sections: one cheekbone, then the other, her mouth, her nose, and finally — her eyes.
They are steady.
Still.
She wonders when she stopped shaking after shooting. A long time, now.
The first time she held a gun, her hands were trembling. She missed, none of the bullets hitting the targets.
The man beside her — nameless now, like most of them — had laughed. A low, amused sound that scraped against her nerves like glass dragged across concrete. He took the gun from her hands, adjusted her grip with too-warm fingers, and said, “Try again. Or die like a dog.” She remembers his voice, too close to her ears and making her skin crawl
She was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.
There were no safety nets in the facility — just tasks and failure. Rewards and consequences. She learned fast. She had to.
She hit the target the second time. Not the bullseye — but enough to stay out of the dark rooms for another week, enough to get fed, enough to be chosen for missions that boosted her status, made it so that everyone knew she had teeth and she wasn’t afraid to bite. That’s all it ever was, at first. Survival in increments. Avoiding punishment. Staying useful.
Now she doesn’t miss.
Now she can shoot a moving target with her eyes closed, she can predict the movement before the opponent’s nervous system has even come up with it, can point at locations that would paralyze instantly, kill on spot and avoid getting dirty. She smirks at the thought as she sits behind the mirror, rubbing cream on her neck, looking at herself.
She knows she’s beautiful. She’s known it for as long as she can remember and she does well to preserve that — it works well for her to be desired, admired, liked. So she works through her routine with the meticulousness of a surgeon; cream, lotion, perfume, clothes, make up and hair. By the time she’s done, the familiar version of herself — the one she’s grown accustomed to — stares back at her.
The knock comes just as she’s zipping up her dress — soft, deliberate. Not a neighbor. Not a friend. She doesn’t have those. This knock means business . It’s rhythmic — the same tone that has become a theme song in her head. Three knocks, a pause, two following and then a pause. Repeat.
She doesn’t call out. Just moves silently through the hotel room, dripping water across dark hardwood, her hair still damp, cooling the back of her neck.
A man stands on the other side of the door. Slate gray suit, lean frame, paper envelope in hand. He doesn’t try to come in — good. He knows better.
She narrows her eyes.
He holds the envelope out.
No names. No greetings. Just, “It’s room service, ma’am.”
Her fingers hover for a beat before taking it. She studies him — pale face, too smooth, like it had been pulled tight and set under glass. He’s new. Not Organization high-clearance, just a courier. But still — he’s seen things. His jaw is clenched too tightly for a man running errands.
She steps back and closes the door in his face.
Inside, she lays the envelope on the table like a scalpel on a tray.
RACCOON CITY: MISSION BRIEF.
Target:
Acquire G-Virus sample.
Location:
Umbrella underground research facility.
Cover Identity:
FBI agent, assigned to investigate the pharmaceutical corruption in Raccoon.
Local Variables:
Unstable infection zone. Bio-organic weapons. Civilian resistance negligible.
Note:
Other agents have failed to secure the asset. You are to succeed. At any cost.
Her eyes scan the rest of the file — all the gory details and need-to-know information sprawled on the paper. By the time she’s done, she already has a move strategy forming in her brain.
She smirks. That’s what not missing gets you — missions that must be impossible but somehow, become possible. Her phone — burner, brown, enough minutes left on it to still be of use — chimes. She knows what it is before she even reads it.
Time and place.
08:30. Helipad D17. Coordinates attached.
She doesn’t respond. She never does. The people who send her these things don’t expect confirmation — they expect obedience, and she’s made an art of that illusion. Compliance as camouflage. Silence as signature.
She powers the phone off, snaps it in half, and tosses the pieces into the toilet. No trace. No second chance. No hesitation. She’s done this too many times to even think about it.
There — another mission beginning before this one is cold.
The USB delivery has to wait.
—
The first time she sees him, she almost pities him. What a fool. He’s young — wide-eyed and clueless, naive and gullible. Struggling for his life in a battle that he will lose. She should let him die — that would be merciful. To say farewell before he has seen more of the gore around them. At least, if he ever gets to an afterlife, he won’t carry too much disturbance.
But he struggles against the dog — grunting and growling — and she wonders if he wants a chance to survive this. If he’s ready for the consequences of walking from a city like this.
She shoots the thing before she can overthink it or change her mind.
The creature falls limp beside him with a sickening thud — a mound of rot and violence, stilled by her bullet. He scrambles back, breath heaving, and she watches as his eyes flick up to meet hers. “Hey,” she calls.
“Who is that?”
“Stay sharp,” she warns. Maybe she shouldn’t. If the boy doesn’t have enough wits to kill the dog before it attacks again, maybe it really was a waste of bullets. But the man moves, reaches for his gun and the sound of a gun shot puts the creature down. A gun that doesn’t get lowered, instead pointed at her face. It’s almost funny had it not been so pathetic. “Lower it,” she’s almost bored reaching for her fake badge and flicking it at the young cop in front of her. “FBI.”
“Sorry,” he mumbles, sighing. “Thank you.” Another gun shot. She doesn’t take chances. “For your help.”
She knows his type. Children who grew up dreaming of becoming a cop in the name of justice or some ideology the United States has sold them. Gullible, controllable — lap dogs that work all their lives and never once question authority. He’s dumped into hell now, it seems, and his ideology won’t save him.
The pity sits in her stomach — deep-rooted and unshakable. So strong that it almost turns into resentment at the sight of him. How stupid can he be? “Surprised you made it this far,” she says and contempt falls off her words — she can’t help it. She can’t disguise it under concern or admiration as she does for every man dancing in front of her like a peacock. Here, it doesn’t matter if she’s loud and dismissive. Only zombies will be her witnesses anyway.
He asks too many questions, feigning confidence like she can’t read through his facade and see the scared little boy under. When it verges on becoming unbearable, she snaps, “do yourself a favor; stop asking questions and get the hell out of here.” He can take this as advice — save himself before the city is turned to ashes and only him and the monsters are left under the ruins.
She walks away before he can talk more — before he can start running his mouth off and attract attention and compromise her mission.
She walks away before she becomes dangerously close to see an old flame in there — someone who looked just like him a little too much, struggling — naive and foolish.
—
Perhaps ruins of a dying city aren’t the best places to reminisce about the past but as she walks through the broken, shattered homes and shoots at creatures lurking around almost automatically, she can’t help but let her mind wander.
Wander to a time when everything wasn’t a given for her — when she, like the rookie from earlier, didn’t know the rules of the game. When she was hopeful and wide-eyed, nurturing an ideology in her head that she’d come to regret.
She was fifteen when she first fell in love — almost a decade ago and the memory still lurks in the back of her mind though the sting is now more a dull ache than anything. Like a phantom limb; unintelligible, invisible.
She hadn’t seen her before — one of the new girls, no doubt, torn from another part of the world with no space for orphans and weaklings. The Organization was exceptionally good at identifying them. She had soft, golden hair, her skin pale under the dim light of the Dark Room and her nose was red. It must’ve been her first time in the Room — the place they were thrown into when a mission went gone, bullets went array, the smallest misstep in their well-oiled machine had been detected.
She can’t recall why she was in the hole that time — perhaps an untimely smile at a client that had made him suspicious, perhaps a misstep on the high-rope that in real life would translate to The Organization losing one of its expensive investments — but she remembers her vividly. Her name was Alina.
She was the same age as her, still attached to her real-life; her real name, her real identity. She hadn’t yet been stripped of everything that made her human. Perhaps that was the luring aspect of her — or maybe it was the wide-eyed look on her face that begged someone to protect her. Whatever it was, she couldn’t look away.
Back then, she was called Meilin. That’s the name Alina knew. It means ‘beautiful and delicate’ — something they thought suited her. Something that matched her ‘exotic’ looks — her narrow eyes and pale skin and skinny body. Something that made her marketable.
She was crying the first time she saw her — Alina’s tears were rolling down her cheeks and her face was ashen and she couldn’t help it. She reached out. “Stop that,” she snapped, telling herself that she was doing this to keep away from the wrath of them. They didn’t take kindly to crying — to emotions spilling out.
But Alina didn’t flinch. She just blinked at her through the dark like she hadn’t understood. Or maybe she had. Maybe she had just decided, even then, not to be afraid of her.
That part still makes her wince when she remembers it — the steadiness in Alina’s gaze, even when she was trembling. She hadn’t been trained into silence yet. Into obedience. That came later. They beat it into you gently at first — silence rewarded, hesitation punished, language scrubbed clean of identity. Eventually you forgot how to speak like a person. Eventually, you didn’t cry unless you were told to.
But Alina was still raw. New. Still someone.
“What is this place?” Alina asked with a thick accent that hadn’t yet been trained out of here and it had almost made her snarl. Instead, she shook her head.
“You’re not supposed to talk in the Dark Room,” she explained. Alina, too, asked many questions. She followed her around and asked about The Organization, about what they were supposed to do, about which knives were fit best to throw, about the bullets and guns and dances and rituals and when she ran out of them, she asked about her. Her family — her origins.
She had nothing to give to her.
“That’s okay,” Alina whispered when she admitted that she didn’t remember her homeland, her family, or her past. When she told her that she didn’t have a name. “I can tell you my story and then we can share it, da?”
She had agreed back then. But then Alina died when they were nineteen — five years ago — and she was struck from the records. Her name, her past, her family — all wiped. With that, Ada’s past was wiped, too. Once again — clean slate.
—
“Who is that?” the rookie asks, clearly disturbed by the scene in front of him. She sighs. He never does learn, does he? By now, he should’ve been roaming the streets, begging for a way out but he’s still here. Well, his problem then.
“It’s just me,” she says, “So you can put that thing away.”
He explains as she looks at the corpse in front of her but it’s not much of an explanation. Stumbling through words and clueless ramblings.
“I told you to get out of here. You wouldn’t want to end up like Ben, would you?” He asks questions — endless lines of fucking questions that exhaust her. She answers one, half-truths and lies mixed — but the second one is where she draws the line as she walks away. Time is running out and she has a job to do.
“Hey — you can’t keep walking away from me!” the rookie says and maybe it’s brave or perhaps stupid that he leaps forward and catches her arm. She doesn’t know if it’s disgust or anger that makes her free her arms just as soon as he touches her. “I don’t even know your name!” He argues like that’s supposed to mean something. Like knowing her name would get him out of this hellhole. “I’m Leon Kennedy.”
Stupid.
Volunteering information like he doesn’t know the value of it.
“Find a way out, Leon. Before it’s too late. Then we’ll talk,” she starts to walk away. The truth of the matter is that she hasn’t come up with a name for this mission — she didn’t imagine she’d meet very many alive people down here to socialize with so The Organization didn’t provide an identity and she didn’t think ahead. But what does that matter? The chances of him getting out of this place is slim to none. She can reuse the name twice in a row — perhaps the boy will die peacefully thinking that he knows the name of one of the living down here. “Name’s Ada.”
He doesn’t follow her. Doesn’t ask more questions.
Thank fucking god.
—
The third time’s supposed to be the charm but apparently it’s just more trouble for Ada. He looks like a puppy when he looks at her and if he wants in, then she’ll let him play.
And like a good dog, he follows her.
—
He’s noble. That’s his biggest flaw. He looks at the world around himself and he feels everything — every scar, every gaping wound oozing blood, every injustice. He believes in a ‘cause’ — in the greater good, in the fact that he can all on his own fix a city that will by all means be forgotten in history.
For a second — just a fraction of one, really — Ada considers killing him to put him out of his misery so that he’d never have to face the reality of it all. Then, she doesn’t. Because she doesn’t believe in greater good. She doesn’t have to be noble and loyal. She can feed him lies he would like to hear — words that will calm him down and bless his self-righteous heart and make him think that he’s doing good.
It’s a favor, really — it’s saving his life as much as shooting at the Tyrant or the dog was.
And he’s all too happy to gobble down the lie — to have a purpose.
So really, he should thank her.
—
He is clumsy. If she were anyone else, anywhere else, perhaps she’d give him grief over the fact that from time to time, he stumbles against the rogue pebbles in their way. But as it turns out, he makes for decent company — and an even better asset. She could use him, she thinks — make him do the dirty work and then plan a careful exit strategy.
He’s enamoured and interested if the way his eyes keep snapping to her every three seconds is any indication — if not that, then blushing when she looks him directly in the eyes in the certain give-away. She doesn’t mind the way he looks at her — in fact, she leans into it. Every brush of her fingers against his arm, every tilt of her head when she asks him something she already knows the answer to, is deliberate. She’s threading a hook and watching it catch.
Men like Leon are easy in that way. They think they’re difficult, unreadable, solid — but all it takes is a little warmth in the right place and they melt, blind to everything except the version of you they want to see. They think they’re heroes — saviors. They enjoy the damsel in distress act — the wide-eyed girl who stumbles over herself.
She’s not that.
But still, she lets him think she’s just human enough to be worth protecting. Just vulnerable enough to need him. She’s learned it’s easier to keep people compliant when they think they’re in control.
They fight side by side — his aim still clumsy but improving under pressure. He’s not useless. That’s what makes him dangerous. Because he survives — through the monsters and the sewers and everything else, he survives.
She thinks she knows him — he’s smart enough to hide when bullets are flying, cunning enough to shoot where the enemy is vulnerable. And maybe because she knows that all of this — the act, the flirting, the staying close and concerned takes — is fake that she’s surprised when he dives in front of a bullet for her.
She freezes for a second — the echo of a moment in time, eons and galaxies away from where they are trapped rendering her useless — before she gets to her feet. His eyes are glassy, a faint pained smile on his face.
Why the fuck did you do that? She wants to shake him. Why would you do that? Is he truly that foolish? Is he really that naive to want to protect people with his own body — his own life?
Not people. Her.
She pities him at that moment — ever the sacrificial lamb, jumping on a grenade and choking on familiar words that only action movie heroes say. He needs to know that people in real life beg to be saved — they beg Ada to abandon her mission and save their lives.
She never does.
But still as the pain makes him squirm and her better judgement orders her to grant him his last request — after all, she did always know that he wasn’t going to make it — she can’t leave. Not when the grunting has turned into a soft whimper, his voice disappearing for what feels like forever. “ Fuck, ” she hisses through gritted teeth.
She hates herself for it — for the way her hands are already moving, pressing down on the wound like she actually cares whether or not he bleeds out in this sewer. Every second she wastes on him is a second closer to the window closing, the sample getting lost, her mission failing. She should be walking away. She should already be gone.
“Stay still,” she mutters, though he’s barely moving. His breath comes shallow and shaky, the adrenaline already fading from his system. He blinks at her like he’s still trying to focus, still trying to make her out through the pain.
“Ada,” he breathes. Like her name matters. Like saying it is some sort of talisman that will keep him alive.
She can’t stand that. The way he looks at her like she’s worth the trouble.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him flatly, tightening the pressure on his side until he grits his teeth. “You don’t even know me.”
He laughs — actually laughs — before it curls into a pained groan. “Still… worth it,” he says, voice barely above a whisper.
She makes it hurt a little more than strictly necessary for the cardinal sin of calling her name — curling his tongue around it so that it’s a little more than the identity she has taken on at the moment, for making her want to respond to it. Not that the pain bothers him much anyway. He passes out before she’s half-way done disinfecting the wound and dressing it.
When she’s done, she contemplates leaving. She knows that she should and that she will. She’s already wasted far too much time on the rookie and time is of utmost importance right now, seconds slipping away.
Still, like the damn fool she is, in a moment of weakness or an impulse she fails to fight, she takes off her trench coat, draping it over Leon.
“Fuck,” she mutters again, taking a look around.
Tick-tock.
She leaves — hating that she is hoping against hope that one of the creatures lurking around doesn’t sink its teeth into him.
—
She’s used to dressing wounds — her own, mostly. It’s been years since she’s taken care of another. In her line of work, the wounded are as good as dead. If you can get yourself out, then you’re useful. If not, you’re another name forgotten in a long line of nobodies.
She tells herself Leon should’ve been one of those nobodies.
He wasn’t.
Maybe it’s his hair. It’s been a while since she’s seen that shade of blond — slightly dirty, bright even under the dim light, falling straight around him. She’s seen that hair before and bitterly, she wonders if she has a ‘type’. Not that Leon is… It’s just meaningless thoughts as she walks through the corridors, alone this time.
She’s gotten used to his chatter and now the halls keep him company by echoing her footsteps.
The last wound she dressed was Alina’s. Back then, she was called Mary but still, she could recall her original self and in their quiet moments, stolen under the vice of punishments and late nights they couldn’t sleep, she was Alina to her. Ada, though, she was anyone they desired them to be. Alina called her ‘dorogaya’ — my darling.
Alina took a bullet to her stomach — blood spilling out like it wasn’t supposed to be thicker than water. It got everywhere — on her hands, on her hair, on her body. It marked her — drowned her. She pressed her hands onto the gaping hole until her arms ached and until the enemy got dangerously close.
Even after that.
She nearly died that day. Alongside Alina.
“ Leave her, ” they had ordered.
She obeyed orders. She did.
She still doesn’t remember if Alina was alive when she let go. That’s the trouble with moments like that — your mind learns how to smear them until they’re barely real. If you can’t recall the details, you don’t have to carry them.
But she remembers that Alina wasn’t like Leon — she begged her not to go. She choked on her blood, toxic to her internal organs as it refused to stay inside of her arteries and veins and help her heart out, and she asked Ada to save her. “Dorogaya,” she whispered, “Please.”
She didn’t oblige. She didn’t wait. If she had, she wouldn’t be walking the underground tunnels now — she’d be burned, struck, dissipated.
But she carried Alina’s blood under her fingernails for days.
Even when she scrubbed until her skin turned raw, the faint copper scent lingered. It clung to her like a memory she couldn’t wash away. And maybe she didn’t want to. Because if the blood faded, then so did Alina — and Alina had already been fading long before the bullet tore through her.
She remembers looking back once — just once — as she was pulled away. Alina on the ground, her face slack in a way that meant the pain was gone but so was everything else. Ada had thought then, with a strange, detached clarity, that she would never hear “dorogaya” again in that strange accent she had gotten so used to.
And she was right.
That was the last time Ada dressed a wound that wasn’t hers. Until Leon.
Now here she is, cursing herself for the same mistake — for letting someone’s breathing slow enough for her to count between each inhale, for noticing the color draining from their face, for allowing their name to become a weight in her mouth.
She tells herself she only stayed long enough to keep him alive so he could be useful later. That she wasn’t… lingering. That she didn’t watch the faint rise and fall of his chest just to confirm it hadn’t stopped altogether.
Try as she might, she’s still human — these dug up feelings (worry and anxiety swirling in her gut) are her reaction to an ill-fated romance from years ago. Nothing related to the city falling apart around her and the people lingering in it.
She patched him up because she’s learned that you don’t let your investments wither. Not until they sorely disappoint you.
And Ada hasn’t disappointed The Organization so far. She doesn’t intend to, either.
—
She can handle pain — mostly. But the metal pushed in her flesh, tearing through blood vessels, sending blinding, shooting pain up her spine each time she so much as breathes is no walk in the park. “ Fuck ,” she breathes the word out through her nose and she waits.
She hopes Leon is alive. That he is recovered enough to make his way to her. That her investment has paid off and he’s coming for her.
She hopes that he’s left. That he’s smart enough to recognize that he should turn back and leave — that she’s weak and compromised and not worth it. She’s bleeding out, unable to take the stick out so what good is she, really? One way or another, she’s going to be discarded — she doesn’t have to take someone else with her, too.
But she’s not him. The martyr — the hero.
She hopes that he shows up more than all.
—
She thinks later, when the dust has settled and Leon has finally figured out that she’s not who she says she is, he’ll remember this moment. The one where his nose wrinkles up slightly, a twinkling mischievous look behind his eyes and assures her that she’s stuck with him when she tries to act a hero and tell him to go — a convincing enough act for the rookie, then, because he stays.
She wonders how he’ll torture himself later — when inevitably, Ada has to stand in front of him and empty her magazine on him. Should he have seen this coming?
He’s unlike most of the men she’s dealt with in a way — eager to protect, determined to be ‘the man’, willing to please. He wants to be good — to be the person someone needs, to be depended on and not fuck-up what he’s told to do.
It’s endearing — or it would be to any other girl stuck with him. If the world was kind enough to him to not put him in her way, she thinks that some other girl would’ve fallen for the act and if the both of them managed to get out safely, they’d build a house together and Leon would probably build chairs and repair broken lamps and pull her into him, eager to please.
Some other girl. A shame he’s stuck with her then.
The universe must not like him very much.
—
She is faintly aware that she can let him go without kissing him. He doesn’t seem to be in it for the seducing part of it all — unless he’s an exceptionally good actor that can fake that innocent, ideological look. He’s in the middle of a speech — about the right thing to do or another thing she can’t bother to keep up with and she relies on the first instinct that takes over.
A trick that’s worked every single time.
She lunges forward — pretending like she’s overcome with emotions she just can’t keep at bay — and presses her lips to his. His face is warm under her palm and he lets out a small gasp as their lips stay close, tangled together in a chaste kiss. He doesn’t move — Ada, amused, thinks about how funny it’d be if this was his first kiss.
It isn’t — she hopes to god that it isn’t — but the surprised, frozen move tells her that he’s not much of a Casanova either. “I’ll be fine,” she does the routine — the fluttering eyelids, the hard swallow that show just how much he’s affected her and how beside herself she is because of the intimate moment they’ve just shared, the concerned eyes. She runs her palm on his thigh and she feeds him a lie she’s rehearsed, every detail down to perfection.
He doesn’t react the same way others do, though — wanting to take her for themselves, hungry for more of her touches, more of her kisses, lit up because of the promise of a tomorrow with her. No, he’s introspective, quiet. Speechless almost.
Later when he leaves with a weak shadow of a never-arriving smile and an assurance that he’s well-aware she’s depending on him, she wonders if she blew it.
If this little indulgence, a moment that she liked to steal for herself, to seal his fate, was a tad too much. If she had pushed him too far, read him completely wrong.
She sits there, her mind in overdrive as her hands cradle her head. She’s being paranoid. Leon has no reason to doubt her — she’s saved his life and she’s flashed the badge and she’s become a damsel for him to save. Everything has been down to the book — a procedure she knows by heart, rehearsed and perfected over years.
But she still can’t shake off the looming presence of doubt behind her eyelids, the one that gets to stand up when minutes pass and she begins to despise the stillness.
She can’t take any chances.
Not when there’s a possibility the rookie has come to outsmart her.
—
“Oh, Leon,” she coos. Perhaps it’s at odds with the gun she’s pointing at his face but she really did want this to end another way. With Leon walking out of the city with an ego that might’ve been a little bruised and a self-confidence that was just a tad shaken, a bit more cynical but not so much that he couldn’t move on. Now, she has to kill him to get the sample. To finish her job.
And gods, he looks crestfallen — offended, almost. Was I just a pawn to you?
The answer comes quick, yes.
But the truth of the matter is, he asked to be involved in the game. He wanted to even despite the fact that time and time again, she told him to leave. She gave him an out every time — she wouldn’t even shoot him when he turned her back on her. That was how serious she was. He’s the one who chose to stay. The one who has brought them to this point.
But then he does something foolish. Something that should have no other outcome but a bullet lodged into his chest.
“Shoot me then,” he dares, thinking that she won’t. She doesn’t lower her gun. It can be so easy — something she’s done time and time again. Men have been staring down the barrel of her gun for far longer than she can recall. Some of them begging, on their knees and drowning in their own tears, some of them unaware that death is waiting for them and some of them making the same mistake as Leon, thinking that they can call her bluff. Thinking that she won’t shoot him.
Leon’s eyes lock onto hers, fierce and unyielding despite the faint tremor betraying the weight of what he’s asking. The faint quiver in his voice barely registers against the steady, cold click of her finger tightening on the trigger.
It occurs to her that it’s not bravado. It’s not recklessness. It’s a test — a desperate challenge thrown like a gauntlet. To see if she means it, if this carefully maintained facade of control and calculation is real. That perhaps, Leon wasn’t being played — that maybe something was real.
Was it?
Why can’t she pull the trigger? It’s so easy — a thing she can do in her sleep, easier than drinking water when it comes to her. Her gun is a second arm to her — an extended part of her autonomy that is more her than any other part of her. Still, she can’t pull the trigger.
Why?
The bridge starts to fall apart around them and she has no time to contemplate it, to pick up her own brain, as she lets her arm fall.
And that’s the first mistake. (First? Hasn’t tonight been riddled by mistakes?) That’s when a bullet lodges itself in her right shoulder — piercing and cold and so quick that for a second, Ada doesn’t even realize that she’s been shot. She looks at her gaping wound — blood oozing and the starts of pain starting to work its way up her arm — in surprise.
Anette Birkin. That bitch.
—
She’s going to die. The last memories of the night will be the worried eyes of a man she nearly conned out of his life, holding onto her, knowing that he won’t be able to pull her up over the border of the falling bridge. “Take care of yourself, Leon,” and she means it. It would be a shame for her to have passed up the opportunity to kill him three times in favor of saving his life and still have him end up in a ditch somewhere.
If the afterlife is real, she’ll watch over him. Just to make sure her efforts aren’t wasted.
—
Even in death, her body is programmed to do what’s expected from her. Perhaps that’s why her broken body is curled around the sample of the virus like her life depends on it. It might as well. She wonders what’s broken her fall — if it was the way she tried to hold on to everything to break the speed and survive it or if it’s a guardian angel she might’ve believed in when she was toddler. Whatever it is, she stays awake long enough to call The Organization.
To curl around the sample and wait.
—
They’re not very happy with her so she doesn’t pour gasoline on fire by antagonizing them and telling them about Leon and the hitches in the mission. She blames that bitch Anette and because the sample has been secured — despite the fact that she’ll be out of work and bed-ridden for two weeks in the least — they can let her get off with a warning that tells her if she ever finds herself in a situation like that, it’ll be far more merciful to put herself out of her misery than to wait for them.
At least Ada would have the luxury of emptying a bullet in her own brain if she takes the route out — The Organization won’t be as merciful.
In the two weeks that she keeps to herself, hiding in a hotel room, licking her wounds and crossing her fingers that she doesn’t have internal bleeding, she thinks about Raccoon City. She watches it go up in flames on the television, followed by the president acting like he’s done some noble job — some selfless act of sacrifice. She wonders if Leon is watching it from the audience, his heart swelling at the sound of the national anthem that just seems like lies fed to people like him; good, old, honest country boys.
She wonders what he thinks of her most of all. Especially at night, when the world is exceptionally quiet and still, she wonders if he thinks she’s dead. He must — no one survives that fall. No one but her.
Does he lie awake at night just as she does and go over their moments back in the city, tethered to each other by things neither of them understood or has he already forgotten her, another ghost in a city that has countless names on its death roll? Probably the latter.
She knows that he won’t forgive her — that he must be cross with her for the lies and the deceit. She can live with that; she doesn’t look much for forgiveness anymore. She wonders if he resents her for it — or worse, pitties her for the work she does.
Perhaps it’s the morphine she doses herself on that makes her think those wretched, broken thoughts. She blames the dreams on the painkiller, too — opioids have the strangest effects on people, after all.
The dreams come in shards — jagged flashes of memories twisted by the haze of morphine. Faces she barely recognizes, voices distorted like static on a radio. But always, beneath the noise, there’s that relentless pull: Leon’s eyes, steady and searching, full of questions she never dared answer.
She sees herself through his gaze — not the sharp, untouchable agent, but the fractured woman beneath the mask. The one who lets down her guard for a moment too long, who gambles with lives, who is maybe more vulnerable than she’d admit even to herself.
And then the nightmares — the bridge crumbling, the gunfire echoing in her ears, the warmth of her own blood soaking into her shirt, her fingers slipping, grasping for something lost. The helplessness of falling, falling, without end.
Each time she jolts awake, heart pounding, sweat chilling on her skin.
She’s alone.
No one comes to catch her.
Some nights, when the world seems set on punishing her, she sees Alina. She asks, why wasn’t I the exception? Why was the rookie the person she hesitated for and not Alina?
Because they weren’t watching me there, she answers the ghost of the first girl she ever loved, the first person that made her heart rate pick up, the person that took her breath away. The last person to die in her arms, when she still cared, a humane part still living on in her. She had imagined that part had died with Alina.
But she hadn’t shot Leon. It wasn’t even hesitation, followed by a moment of clarity. It was confusing — earth-shattering and head-turning.
That moment — the one she can’t quite explain — lingers longer than any mission brief or calculated risk ever could. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t weakness. It was something raw, something impossible to bottle up in all her years of training and cold calculation.
She thought she’d built herself into an unbreakable fortress. Every lie rehearsed, every touch measured, every word designed to deceive or manipulate. But in that fleeting second, when Leon’s steady gaze locked onto hers, the façade cracked.
She saw not just the rookie, not just the naive idealist, but a mirror — a reflection of a part of herself she thought long buried. A fragile, desperate thread of something like hope.
The same thread that tied her to Alina.
And maybe that’s why she didn’t pull the trigger.
Because no matter how many times she’s told herself to be the ruthless operator, the shadow in the dark, a fragment of that first love still lives in her — the part that hesitates for the people who mean something. The part that can’t quite bear to be completely alone.
That’s the contradiction tearing her apart. She survives because she’s ruthless. But she hesitates because she’s human.
Alina’s ghost whispers in those lonely nights, a reminder of the cost of caring — and the cost of not.
Ada closes her eyes, letting the morphine wash over her again, pushing the ache deeper into the background. Somewhere, beneath the pain and the lies, she wonders if she’ll ever be free of the ghosts she’s carried all this time.
Or if survival itself is just another kind of prison.
—
When the painkillers wear off, so do the thoughts. Slowly and little-by-little the pain in her shoulder becomes a dull, distant memory, only throbbing when the weather is cold and she’s worked herself to the brink of exhaustion. She gets back into the game, the scar on her thigh little more than a distant reminder of Raccoon city. She meets with her clients, prods around in beautiful dresses and colorful wigs and The Organization seems to forgive her shortcomings with each new client, each new successful mission.
She goes back to normal.
She flies under the radar, burying the name Ada Wong, residing in other aliases, names to be discarded and forgotten in a matter of months. Still, for a reason unbeknownst to her, when she’s off duty, Ada is the name she uses. When she has a drink at the bar and the bartender decides to keep her company, Ada is the name she offers them.
She tells herself it’s because she’s gotten used to it — a night like Raccoon City is bound to change you, wanting to run back into familiar spaces. She tells herself that it’s not because it’s the name he knows her by. No, that would be foolish and naive and it’s been years since she’s been either of those things.
So she stops thinking about him altogether — about that night, about names, about shy, little smiles and chaste kisses that she’s not too familiar with.
She erases Leon S. Kennedy from her memory.
—
Of course, nothing ever goes as planned and as much as she prides herself on being able to control her urges, some nights bore her out of her mind. Quiet nights after a mission when her body needs a fix of adrenaline so badly that she wants to shed her skin and crawl out of it. It’s a night like that — stranded in a hotel room in Washington DC, told to lay low after a mission — that her mind wanders again.
It’s perhaps the city — the city that Leon lives in as part of the President’s security team, finally bowing his head in front of the authority that set fire to the city he was so determined to save. She wonders how they convinced him — how he convinced himself. Not that it’s hard to imagine — she knows the games powerful men can play to get what they want when people have so much to lose and Leon S. Kennedy is someone that has so much to lose at every turn. She wonders, though, if he regrets the decision. If now, months after Raccoon City, he wishes that Ada had shot her on that bridge.
Or perhaps he’s all too happy to be melted into a country he joined the force to serve.
She knows where he lives — she can’t help it if she thirsts for knowledge, curious to keep an eye on the boy that cost her so much to save.
Ada doesn’t admit it even to herself, but she longs to see him one more time, from somewhere in the shadows, lingering and faint.
Not out of obsession — at least, that’s what she tells herself — but out of a strange, lingering tether that refuses to snap.
Sometimes, it’s a flicker on the news: a confident smile during a press briefing, standing behind the President of the United States, the weight of responsibility settled into his stance like armor. Other times, it’s late at night, scrolling through social media, catching glimpses of him in candid moments — the kind no official photo would ever show. Unaware he’s being watched, unaware that a ghost of the past still holds him in her mind.
She notes how different he is now in the pictures — not the rookie with idealistic fire but a man hardened by the weight of decisions no one should have to make. The faint lines under his eyes, the rare but telling pauses before he speaks, the way his eyes sometimes drift to a place no one else can reach.
He looks older than he really is — like that night in the city has aged him more than anything else would. And perhaps it was less Raccoon City itself and more what followed it.
Ada wonders if he dreams of that night, too. If his mind replays the broken bridge, the gun in her hand, the moment their worlds collided and shifted forever. Does he see her as the ruthless operator that used and manipulated him? Or the girl with a metal pole poking out of her thigh, shivering as he pulled it out with eyes wide and shining, the version of herself that she doesn’t recognise? Or perhaps a ghost — someone long gone.
Perhaps boredom is what moves her to unlatch the window. She’s high in the sky but flying has never been a problem for her — she’s survived falls more fatal than this. She doesn’t want The Organization to know about him. He’s her little secret — dirty and sinful — and taking the front door would tip too many people off, turn one too many heads.
Slipping out of the hotel and getting to Leon’s apartment is an easy feat — another Wednesday night. She watches his window, leaning against a tree on the other side of the street, melting into the shadows. If he looks out of his kitchen window, he might catch a glimpse of her. He will perhaps think she’s a ghost — a peripheral being, someone he can’t quite tether down. He wouldn’t be wrong.
But his lights are off and he doesn’t look out of the window.
She’s not sure how long she stands there. Long enough to be embarrassed, surely, but she’s past the point of shaming herself for the little delicacies she allows herself. She stands until she’s certain that he’s not at home tonight. Perhaps he’s cozying it up at a partner’s house, leaning into some lovely girl or boy — the ultimate boy next door fantasy.
But even as she thinks that, she knows that it’s unlikely. Not that she knows him — not really, not more than a few trauma-ridden hours in the middle of a warzone a lifetime away — but something tells her that perhaps the job at the white house is demanding and an all-nighter is the reason his light doesn’t turn on.
She allows herself a moment of solitude — a grace she rarely bestows upon herself — to pretend that the memory of tonight can be struck from her mind and she doesn’t have to hold herself to it. In the lieu of that promise, she moves through shadows, climbing his walls and unlocking his window with ease.
If she wasn’t supposed to be a ghost, she’d tell him to invest more in security. But then again, that would only make her job harder.
She looks around at his place. She’s never thought about his apartment — about what kind of furniture he would have, or the sort of wallpaper would furnish his living room. As someone that doesn’t have a home — always on the move, bouncing from one safe-house to the other, one hotel to a dingy, unsuspecting motel — she has never spared much thought to interior designs but his house…
It’s soulless.
She didn’t expect daisies in the vase and pink, patterned unicorn wallpapers (though now that she thinks of it, perhaps she was expecting that) but she didn’t think it’d ring so hollow. So impersonal.
There are no living things in his house, the color scheme depressingly grey. No photos on the walls, no clutter of books or trinkets — just cold lines and sharp edges, like a sterile museum exhibit that breathes but never feels. A plain couch, a coffee table with a few scattered papers, a TV sitting silently in the corner. A chair pulled neatly to the desk where a laptop waits like an unspoken invitation.
She finds, with a pang of disappointment, that she would’ve liked it if he had framed pictures of himself. From when he was a little child, a picture frame with a family, perhaps. He seemed the type to have one of those — a good, honey midwest boy with a picket fence and a mother as blond as he is, his father playing catch with him in the evenings, working in summer, biking to drop off milk or newspaper. The American dream.
It’s a man’s apartment, she thinks. Not one built for comfort or warmth, but for function and formality. A place to crash, to sleep, to reboot. Not a place to live.
She wonders if she’s known him all wrong — if the boy she found under the grasp of a deadly monster was nothing but a figment of her imagination. That boy would have a family — a kettle always on the stove, an old, worn-out rug in the middle of his living room, a cactus in the corner because he’s too busy for real plants but he’d like another living thing with him.
She glances at her watch. It’s late and any moment now, Leon could come home and she’d much rather not be seen by him. He might have a heart attack thinking she’s risen from the dead. It would be a cruel joke in the face of the actual undead they have fought.
She goes back the way she came in, making sure nothing has been touched, disturbed or interrupted — no clue as to the fact that she ever existed in the space Leon occupies.
At the hotel, she promises herself to forget about that night. About the lack of warmth. About everything else, too.
———
When Leon gets home, there’s a package in front of his door. He sighs, rubbing his temples as he crouches down, inspecting it. It has no return address, suspiciously identity-less. The logical thing — the thing he’s learned in training — would be to turn it in. report it. After all, he is a federal agent and the target of many malicious intentions.
But then again, what’s the worst that can happen?
It can be a bomb.
Or it can be something worse.
Leon’s fingers hesitate on the tape sealing the box. The silence of the hallway presses in around him, thick and expectant. Perhaps he should practise caution — open the package somewhere out in the open where it wouldn’t have any civilian casualties. He picks it, studying it. On it, there’s a note scrawled in a handwriting he doesn’t recognise.
Don’t overthink it, Kennedy, the note says, Just something to liven up the space.
He carefully opens the package, his mind acutely aware of the gear strapped to his hip. But the thing inside isn’t what he expected. It’s neither a bomb nor a gun — a souvenir of a violent life he’s grown accustomed to in the past couple of months.
It’s a cactus.
A small one, with soft prickly thorns.
Leon blinks, stunned for a moment by the simplicity of it. A cactus — small, unassuming, fragile in its own stubborn way. He pulls it out gently, the plant wobbling slightly in its tiny pot wrapped in cheap plastic. The note’s tone echoes in his mind — “ Just something to liven up the space. ”
He glances down the hallway, half-expecting someone to be lurking in the shadows, waiting to see his reaction. But there’s nothing. Only the quiet hum of the city seeping through the windows.
His fingers brush the tiny spikes cautiously, and a slow, ironic smile creeps across his face.
It’s oddly… perfect.
A cactus. Tough, low-maintenance. A reminder that even in the hardest environments, life finds a way to persist — prickly, resilient, quietly enduring.
It must be Claire’s doing — she’s always going on and on about how unfriendly his apartment is. But if it were Claire, wouldn’t she sign the note? A taunt from a close friend scrawled at the end of it? He inspects the plant for something suspicious — a camera, an audio recorder, something to break down his defences. But he finds nothing.
It’s just a cactus.
He sighs as he opens the door, having half a mind to throw it out. An unsigned gift is never welcome. But then again.
What harm can a small cactus do? So instead of being pessimistic, cautious — instead of doing his job, meticulously and flawlessly — he sets the small plant on the windowsill where the weak moonlight spills in. It looks out of place, yet somehow fitting — a small, stubborn piece of life in his cold, sterile apartment.
“Alright, stranger,” he says to no one in particular, perhaps to the cactus in front of him. He thinks of naming the cactus ‘Stan’ — but is it a boy? Perhaps it’s a girl. Maybe ‘Lucy’ would be more fitting. Wait what the fuck is he one about? Naming a cactus? Still. It’s alive — changing the place, making him feel like he’s not so alone anymore. “Is the place lively enough for you now?”