Disclaimer: I am unassociated with Resident Evil and its various rights.

Author's Note: I said after Untraditional that I'd never touch RE again. I lied. Written for Donatien Valiarde, winner of bets and provocateur of Leon/Ada fic-bunnies everywhere. Set in an alternate future.

that most expected betrayal

They're running ragged, hiding in the wilderness, scratching life out of leaves and stone. It rained only a few days ago, which suits them both well enough. Anything's better than the week when the earth ran cracked and dry underneath their feet and the dust itself seemed to choke cries from their throats. He doesn't protest when, in the third month, she begins to bring meat back to camp: squirrels and sparrows and hares. Cute things, each throat neatly snapped. She regards it as only another step to ensure their survival, but Leon makes jokes, rough and low in his throat, as they roast limbs over the evening fire.

For any other mark, Ada would have suggested hiding in civilization, where it's easy to drown in a crowd, turn a corner and disappear. But this is Leon. She's risked him before, and she knows the things he can survive. This is a danger too great to face.

Even now she knows the foolishness of staying with him. A lone man is harder to track, and despite all of Ada's skills, lingering by his side only makes their plans predictable. She should go - but surely they must have taken that into account when they began to hunt him down. They have her profile on record down to the day she started her first mission. It's the practical thing to do, and so she flings it to the wind. Instead, they separate once every few weeks (keeping the schedule fluid in order to render it untraceable), arrange a meeting place and leave two paths for their pursuers to follow. Unknown to Leon, Ada often doubles back, breaks down the traces of their camp and distorts the clues towards their number (two). The less her organization can glean from those tracks, the better.

It gives her time, too, to think about what to do next.

She had not expected to have her loyalties turn - but then, their projects had been running darker and steadily darker, steered as if by a hand outside their ranks. At last, she understood when they gave her the mission on Leon. Ostensibly it was to eliminate a last witness who could not be bought or sold, but she knew as well as any other agent that she had not been discreet, had met him too often, and this was their rite of re-initiation.

Only something had felt off about the situation. Suspecting treachery, she first took Leon on the road in order to buy herself time to track it to its source; but, as the months passed and their relentless pursuit continued, she saw the truth of it. Their goals were as they had always been, their willingness to sacrifice all in the name of progress. They had not changed.

Ada has.

In the morning, Leon finds a red scrap of paper among the ashes of the campfire. He doesn't understand the significance, but she does. To him she doesn't speak of it - at least not until he pins her to the nearest trunk and demands to know what's happened, what it could possibly mean.

For a moment she only looks at him, startled all over again. She's schooled herself well enough that the betrayal could not have come from her lips, her lashes, her composed and teasing eyes. Yet there is no other explanation--

And that is Leon's greatest advantage.

She measures him out, skill by skill, counts the elements and memories that make up his courage and inexplicable capability and still he manages to surpass every expectation. It's an instant's doubt, but she can't help wondering if she could have made the wrong choice after all. If she trusted his abilities a little more, perhaps he might--

No, she thinks, as the memory of her organization's last and greatest weapon twists down her nerves like a wicked vine. No one could survive the completion of that project. Even now, she sees it laid open on the white table, nerves writhing and gleaming, tangled in blood and veined, pulsing masses, its limbs still half-stitched from the latest operation. Leon's greatest strength is his utter humanity, and the project - even that mere, slinking prototype - is beyond that.

But she does not tell him of those things because he didn't ask. Instead, she answers his question: the only way that the red paper could have arrived would be if another dropped it into the flames. It didn't burn, despite the coals still smouldering, which means that infiltration must have crept into the camp, waited until one of them was near waking, then left it for them to find. It means that in spite of all their tactics, they have failed after all; the enemy must have been tracking them from the very start.

Red, she tells him, is a message of blood and butterflies - of death and forgiveness.

The rest she does not say. He catches her by the arm and starts to stride away, heedless of the flames licking over the tinder he's just dropped on the fire. "We have to leave," he throws over his shoulder. "Now. Before they--"

"Too late for that, handsome. They've got us where they want us. If we don't surrender--"

"They'll kill us." Leon snorts. "Sounds like a plan." A beat passes. He turns, still gripping her wrist in his circled fingers. "Ada."

She offers him a lazy smile, its edges blunted by weeks of traveling. She doesn't even remember what forest they're in now, or the name of the last town where she stocked up on cartridges. Their resources are finite; their enemies' are not.

And then the gun is sliding out from its holster, flashing in the sun as she spins it onto her finger and cocks it. Leon starts back, but her other hand's doubled back to clamp onto his.

"So you're still working with them. I should have known."

He's not afraid - not of her, not anymore, and again she doubts. So many regrets, so many secrets she meant to spill - more than lips and skin and the way she curls her fingers in his hair as he bucks up against her in the night (and there are other ways to keep warm, but this is Leon and desperation has brought her to worse cases). She keeps her smile curling, delighted, slow, and leans over to speak into his ear in case they're being watched.

Too late for anything else, now.

"They aren't going to kill us. If you aren't dead by tomorrow, they'll release their latest. Would you like to find out what it's like to be torn to death?"

It wouldn't be the toughest monster he's faced, but they've been on the run for weeks, and the few cartridges between them is hardly enough to buy them any time at all.

Leon exhales into a laugh, smoky and ragged. "Guess all this running for the past few weeks've been for nothing, huh?"

He does not say that he will forgive her. Forgiveness is irrelevant to this. It's the necessary thing, what she's doing. She has no choice. Instead, he lowers his head and he kisses her, a desperate pressure of lips and teeth scraping, the thrill electric and dark as ever. She hardly feels him slow and ease as the silencer fires, once, to the heart.

His body crumples to the dirt, pliant and heavy in that way that bodies are just before rigor mortis sets in.

Blood is still drumming a loud pace in her ears, all the louder in the silence of his stopped pulse. She does not raise the gun. She does not set the muzzle between her teeth. That would be the romantic thing to do, and Ada is practical if nothing else. Fulfilling her original mission saves Leon a painful death by torture and restores her to the graces of her organization. Already her mind is clearing, grief settling into separate compartments, to be considered later when she has the time. Now, at last, Ada can see her path as if a single thread that joins her clockwork body to the future.

Ada Wong will take their forgiveness, will return to the rank and file -- and will destroy it.

And on the ruins of their crude and stained ambitions, she will give him his funeral pyre.

end

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