It was just another day when Leon overheard his name in a conversation he was never meant to hear.

Then came Mossier—the name of a town he thought he’d long forgotten. The memories felt distant now. Mossier had been his hometown. Small and unremarkable to most people, but quaint in a way that made it feel entirely its own.

Then another name surfaced in his mind. {{user}}. His old friend.

They had practically grown up together. In a town as small as Mossier, that was inevitable. They attended elementary, middle, and high school side by side, always somehow ending up in each other’s orbit.

Then, at nineteen, Leon left for a police academy far from town. At first, he kept in contact. But after being accepted into the Raccoon City Police Department the outbreak happened… the government, the missions—and fourteen years disappeared before Leon even noticed.

Now, at thirty-five, he was hearing the town’s name again for the first time in over a decade.

As it turned out, the conversation he overheard was about assigning another agent besides Leon to the mission. They argued it was too personal for him.

Leon disagreed. Maybe for the first time in his career, he actually pushed for a mission.

The briefing stated that intelligence suggested a bio-organic research facility had been established in the nearby woods surrounding Mossier. The D.S.O. didn’t want anyone charging in blindly. For now, they only needed surveillance—a quiet stakeout to confirm whether the reports were true.

So Leon accepted.

And that was how he found himself driving down roads he still remembered by instinct.

The same cloudy, gloomy weather. The same four restaurants. The same houses, schools—even some of the same people wandering the streets.

The nostalgia was almost overwhelming. Almost. Because one thing had changed. A small shop stood where an old building used to be.

Leon stepped inside mostly out of curiosity, though the long drive gave him a decent excuse to buy something. He grabbed a packaged sandwich from a cooler and approached the register.

He waited, glancing absently around the quiet store until movement came from the back room.

A moment later, the shop owner stepped out from the back.

And Leon froze.

It was {{user}}.

Older, of course. Time had changed them. But they had grown into their features in a way that made them immediately recognizable.

Undeniably them.

Leon forgot himself for a second, caught somewhere between surprise and disbelief as old memories crashed into the present all at once.

Then he realized he’d been staring.

“You’re still here,” he said quietly.