The Porsche cuts through the night, engine low and steady, heading toward a place that no longer officially exists. Beyond the barricades and warning signs, past the radiation markers and dead checkpoints, lies what used to be Raccoon City.

Thirty years after the outbreak—and the fire that followed—it’s nothing but a quarantined exclusion zone now. A scar on the map. A place erased by policy, not memory.

Leon knows better than to believe it’s gone. The road is cracked, half-swallowed by weeds, the air heavy with a silence that feels manufactured.

Even after decades, the land hasn’t forgiven what happened here. Neither has he. With you beside him, the distance feels shorter than it should.

It’s been a long time since he last saw you like this—sitting beside him, quiet, composed, carrying the same weight he does without ever having to say it out loud. Years pass differently for people like them. Long stretches of nothing. Then everything all at once.

Leon exhales slowly. “Didn’t think it’d be this long,” he says. “Since I saw you.” The words feel heavier than he means them to.

He doesn’t look over. He doesn’t need to. He knows that expression. He’s memorized it over years of half-goodbyes and unfinished conversations.

The mission brief replays in his head—unauthorized activity inside the zone, signs of something old surfacing where it shouldn’t. Same cycle. Different decade.

He tightens his grip on the wheel. “I don’t feel it the same way anymore,” Leon adds after a moment. Not explaining. Not apologizing. “Not like I did back then.”

Raccoon City took something from him that never quite grew back. He still functions. Still moves forward. Still shows up when the world asks. But whatever belief he once had in clean endings burned out a long time ago.

And now he’s driving straight back into the fallout. “With you here…” His voice trails off briefly, thoughtful. “It’s strange.”

Familiar. Dangerous.

What Leon never says is how it began.

You were meant to be a partner. Reliable. Temporary. Working together made things quieter in his head, easier to manage after years of loss and unfinished endings. At first, it was just a distraction—something to keep his thoughts from circling back to Ada, to the ache she left behind, to the part of him that never quite learned how to let her go.

But distractions aren’t supposed to last.

Somewhere between missions and shared silence, it stops being something they both agreed not to name. He started noticing how his guard lowered around you, how the weight of the job eased when you were nearby. That realization unsettled him more than any assignment ever had.

So he never named it. Never chased it. Let it stay unresolved.

The headlights sweep over rusted fencing and half-collapsed signs. Leon catches his reflection in the windshield—older, quieter, worn down by too many missions that never truly ended.

His thoughts drift, uninvited, to the last time he saw you. A safehouse. Low light. The kind of silence that only comes after surviving something together. He remembers waking up alone. The room already cold. No note. Just absence.

He doesn’t say it outright.

Instead, he murmurs, “You always were good at disappearing.”

There’s no accusation in it. Just fact. History.

Leon shifts gears as the outer perimeter of the exclusion zone comes into view.

“I don’t really think about how these end anymore,” he says quietly. “You just do the job.”

He keeps his eyes on the road, jaw tightening slightly before he allows himself a brief glance in your direction.

“Still,” he adds, voice lower, rougher, “coming back here alone didn’t feel like something I could stomach.”

The Porsche keeps moving forward, toward the ruins of a past that never stayed buried, carrying two people who never quite learned how to let each other go.

And Leon drives on, knowing some missions aren’t about saving anyone. They’re about surviving what comes back.