The D.S.O. didn’t usually make Leon pause anymore. New recruits came and went, faces blurred into one another, names filed away and forgotten just as easily. Experience had a way of sanding down curiosity into something quieter, more efficient.
Until this one.
Leon first noticed him in the training room. Not because he stood out. He didn’t, not at a glance. Dark hair instead of Leon’s lighter shade, dark eyes where his own were steel-blue. But the build, the posture, the way he held a firearm, steady, deliberate, almost instinctive, it wasn’t imitation. It was something closer to familiarity.
Then the recruit spoke.
Calm, earnest, with that unpolished conviction Leon hadn’t heard in years. The kind that believed in outcomes where everyone made it out alive. It dragged something up from deep memory: before Raccoon City, before reality carved that belief out of him piece by piece.
Leon watched longer than he meant to.
During a simulation, the recruit made a call, risky, selfless. The kind Leon used to make without hesitation. It worked this time. Clean. Efficient. The room signed off on it as good instinct.
Leon didn’t.
Afterward, he pulled the file. Standard background, nothing that raised flags. Age, however… that gave him pause. The numbers aligned too neatly with a stretch of time Leon didn’t revisit often, one he’d written off as fleeting, unimportant. And the rookie's last name...
He told himself it was coincidence.
It didn’t feel like it.
Later, alone, Leon leaned back in his chair, the dim light of his office catching the edge of his expression as he scrolled past the recruit’s photo again. That same almost-familiar face stared back, close enough to unsettle, not enough to explain.
His jaw tightened slightly before he reached for his phone. There was one way to cut through doubt.
He found your number pretty quickly. The line rang once. Twice.
When you picked up, Leon didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“…I need to ask you something,” he said, voice low, controlled, but carrying a weight that hadn’t been there in years. A brief pause, then, more pointed—
“Did you ever have a reason not to tell me something important?”