Preliminary Author's Notes: Hey everyone. This is my first fan story, a fun little project to shake off some creative cobwebs I've got going on. It started small but has turned into something pretty expansive. It'll be a long one, but I hope you enjoy it.

It falls under the loose definition of a "fandom pairing" as it focuses on two specific characters and filling in some gaps and maybe giving them an ending... maybe not. You'll see what I mean. We'll see how it goes.

A few notes about the story and the content - I probably won't include trigger warnings at the top of each chapter, but since you have to stop here first, I'll just put them here. Violence, gore, language, a lot of pretty explicit sexual content, sticky political issues of the day, racism... there's a lot of them here. Heavy on the cursing the sexual content. I'll try to handle them as sensitively as I can, but please understand that none of the viewpoints included here reflect my own. They're all purely for plot purposes.

A final note. I tend towards realism whenever I can, so it may run aground of what we're used to in the series. When in doubt, I try to make sense over being beholden to canon. This first chapter is short one, just to get it rolling.

Okay, enough talking. Here goes! Hope you enjoy.

- 7

"I never meant to get us in this deep
I never meant for this to mean a thing

I got caught up by the chase
And you got high on every little game

Oh, if I could go back in time
When you only held me in my mind
Just a longing gone without a trace
Oh, I wish I'd never ever seen your face

I wish you were the one
Wish you were the one that got away"

- The Civil Wars

1999, August

Leon sat in the overstuffed leather chair, his feet braced wide on the floor, fingers laced between his knees. The doctor across from him drummed his pen on his clipboard and crossed his legs. A black trouser sock exposed itself from under his pant leg.

The clock on the wall ticked. They hadn't spoken in a solid minute or maybe longer. The silence was uncomfortable and pensive. Examining. Intrusive.

"I think it's time to talk about this woman you met," the doctor said. His accent was a blend of a few European dialects Leon didn't have the energy to place.

Leon's eyes flicked to the clock – 1542. A little over fifteen minutes until their weekly appointment was over. "Her name is Ada." He paused. "Was, Ada."

"Ada," the doctor corrected himself. "Tell me about her."

The truth was that Leon had forgotten most of what he knew, by force. He'd stuffed his memories down somewhere deep, slammed a cover over them. First, anger, consuming and directionless, a blackening heat rolling over everything about that week in September, curling it into ashes. Then sadness, the kind where nothing seemed worth the effort, then... nothing. Just a hole that you couldn't throw enough things into to crawl out of it. It ate his sense of perspective, warped his sense of justice, then had the temerity to ask for more, gluttonous.

Leon had no more.

"What do you want to know?" Leon said.

"She seems to play a very important part in this... pivotal point in your life which you've discussed," the doctor said, the word pivotal more like a spit of distaste. "but you've left her out nearly completely in your retelling."

Leon looked back at the floor. The rug was ornate and expensive, and he'd made very good friends with the scrollwork. He spent most of these appointments staring at it.

Her voice was becoming less distinct in his memories. He couldn't remember what color her eyes were, but he could recall with ease what she smelled like – orchids and pepper. The feel of her skin, soft, like petals. Everything else fell into disarray and fuzziness with time, blending with different women he'd met since. But that smell had never been replicated, burned somewhere deep behind his temples, never far away.

"Our appointments will help you immensely," the doctor pointed out, "but you will only get out of them what you put in, Leon. And as I am led to understand by your superiors, this... incident... is still interfering with your training. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is not a life sentence, but you have to want to move past it. If you don't, all the therapy in the world won't help."

Leon picked at the cuticle around his thumbnail, absentminded, somewhere far away.

"She needed me," Leon said. His sentence was interrupted with an involuntary swallow. "And I let her die."

The doctor's face, sallow and angular, stared at Leon from his badge. There was a jumble of numbers in black block letters beneath his photo, which announced him as a medical corps contractor, but only if you knew how to read the callsigns.

"You feel a great shame over this, by the sounds of it."

'Great' was the most impressive understatement Leon had ever heard. His first foray into a role he'd intended to occupy for the rest of his life had been underpinned by massive failure and catastrophe, failures which cost him so much that it was hard to tabulate it all, let alone attempt to replace it. The human cost was too high, and he was starting to realize that though he still walked and talked and sucked breath, he was included in that body count. He was mourning the death of the woman he loved, and the death of the man he thought he'd be - the life he'd thought he'd have, both snapped away with brutal cosmic indifference in a matter of hours.

"I'm not sure what I feel," Leon said. "It's a lot. Too much, sometimes." He heard that silvery giggle, tickling the back of his brain, felt his mouth turn down.

"Hm. I'm very sorry." The doctor said. "That sounds like a difficult thing to reconcile, Leon, considering your job – service. Protecting the people. Do you feel as if you perhaps struggle with the fact that you were the one to survive, and Ada did not?"

"I... maybe. This isn't the way it was supposed to happen." Leon said. "It was like no matter what I did..."

Leon trailed off. The doctor said nothing, allowing the silence to coax the rest of the sentence out of him.

"...I couldn't bring her with me. She was brought into my life just to... exist in that moment of time, and then be taken away." Leon's regret was immediate. It was melodramatic, bitter nonsense, and he knew it, but it was his reality. He could only speak to that reality.

"It sounds like you cared about her very much." The doctor wrote a note on his clipboard, with the mildest hint of interest in his voice.

"I know how it sounds," Leon said, defensive.

"How does it sound?" The doctor asked.

Leon looked up at him, his posture slumped, defeated. "I knew her for less than a week."

The doctor waited again, allowing Leon time to find the words. The room around Leon seemed to squeeze in, cold and unfeeling. It was decorated with expensive-looking fixtures and drapes and rugs, but the drab utilitarianism of the Department of Defense peeked through in the gray paint on the walls, the metal door, harsh lighting, barred windows.

"It sounds desperate," Leon said. "Crazy, I guess. Like I'm crazy."

"You are very hard on yourself. The times in which you met sounded desperate and crazy, Leon. Disasters have borne much crazier things than becoming attached to someone in your care."

The doctor shrugged. "Human emotions generally have little regard for how we think they should operate," he said. "They just do."

Leon digested it, turning it over in his head. He supposed it was true. "I'd really like to stop talking about this."

"In a moment. However..." the doctor said, "a question. You mentioned two other people, a woman, and a younger girl. Have they expressed similar sentiments about Ada?"

Leon didn't have to think about it. "They never met her." He said.

"They had no contact with her, at all?"

Leon shook his head. "No. Not that I knew of."

"And neither of these friends saw her die. That was... just you?"

Leon was slowly awakening to the direction this conversation was going. He felt his chest expanding with slow, deliberate breaths, the kind that his father had taught him, as a child, to use to calm himself down when he'd felt himself getting angry.

"That's right. Just me."

"This insight changes things, quite a bit." The doctor said with a sigh deep in his throat, settling back into his chair. "Do you think, Leon, that these other people who you met during the natural disaster perceive your relationship with Ada as..." he gesticulated with a hand, gesturing in a circle, like flipping an imaginary Rolodex for the right word. "Legitimate?"

Leon felt his top lip curl up by degrees. "What does that mean?"

"Stress can do things to a person's psyche that under normal circumstances may be out of character, is all I'm saying."

"No." Leon said, firmly, then caught himself. "I mean, yes. Yes, of course, they do. She was real. What happened between us was definitely real. I saw it. I was there."

The doctor looked at him, impassive. Leon's defense hung in the air, that same heavy, clinical silence attacking it in ways words couldn't.

"Hm. But – that's our time," said the doctor, "I feel we've made some real progress in this session, Leon. Next week, same time."

The doctor turned to his desk and immediately set upon his clipboard again, his back to Leon. Leon pushed himself out of the seat and started the long march back to his barracks, only half attentive to his surroundings, feeling as if he understood less about himself than he had when he'd walked in.