You had been there since the beginning.

Since the smoke-choked streets of Raccoon City, when the world ended in sirens and fire and the sky burned an unnatural orange. You watched Leon S. Kennedy throw himself between you and teeth and claws more times than you could count. Watched him bleed. Watched him stand back up. You escaped that night with Claire Redfield and Sherry Birkin, four survivors walking out of hell with ash in your lungs and something permanently altered behind your eyes.

Years passed.

You watched Leon trade his rookie uniform for a government-issued suit and a badge that didn’t officially exist. His humor thinned into something dry and rare. His shoulders carried weight he never put down. Spain changed him too—another nightmare swallowed whole and survived. You stayed. Not as a shadow. Not as something fragile to be protected. You stood beside him as an agent, as his equal, as the only person who knew the shape of his silence.

The virus always lingers.

It lingers in bloodstreams. In old scars. In the space behind a cough that lasts a second too long.

When it caught up to him, you saw it before he admitted it. The fatigue. The tremor he disguised by flexing his hand. The blood in the sink he rinsed away before you could comment. He didn’t complain. He never did. But you saw the way his jaw locked when the dizziness hit. You accompanied him on that final mission because there was no version of this story where you let him walk into it alone.

Elpis. Grace. A buried facility that felt like the inside of a coffin.

You weren’t meant to be in the field that deep. You were on comms, on monitors, tracking vitals and heat signatures while his voice filtered through your earpiece—steady, professional, deceptively calm. The signal fractured during the last fight against Victor. Static. A burst of gunfire. Grace shouting something cut short. Then darkness.

Underground collapse. Lights out. Heart rate monitors flatlining into useless lines of noise.

You don’t remember unbuckling your harness. Don’t remember storming out of the jeep when the agents were cleared to descend. You almost ran—almost broke formation like a civilian spouse instead of a decorated operative—but training caught you by the collar. You forced your steps to slow. Forced your breathing to even out.

Be professional.

Floodlights cut through the night like artificial lightning. Agents moved in tight formation, medics ready. You heard Chris Redfield somewhere in the chaos—his voice issuing orders with that unmistakable command—even if you couldn’t see him through the reflective shields and shifting outlines of gear and bodies.

Then you saw them.

Two figures emerging from the smoke and dust.

Grace first.

And then Leon. Exhausted. Healed.

You swallowed hard and stopped yourself from closing the distance too quickly. Your fingers moved automatically to the ring on your hand—a habit, a grounding mechanism. The metal pressed cool against your skin. A reminder: control. Stability. You were not going to break now.

He almost walked past you.

Almost. Then he stopped. Your heart, traitorous thing, steadied instead of racing.

You had survived the same horrors. Different corridors, same darkness. And maybe this time the ending wouldn’t be temporary.

You remember the apartment.

The one a little farther out from the city. Technically within reach of a DSO base, but far enough that the trees swallowed the sound of gunfire drills. The place you barely used. Safehouse more than home. A lake behind it that reflected the sky like glass. A narrow dock. Pine trees leaning in close like they were guarding something sacred.

It doesn’t sound bad right now.

Forest roads. No sirens.

Later, after the debriefs and the medical clearances and the silence that follows surviving something you shouldn’t have, Leon drives.

You’re in the passenger seat. Finally, his eyes flick toward you briefly before returning to the road.

“…That place by the lake,” he says, voice rough but steady. “Still structurally sound?”