Chapter 13 – Sweet Dreams

Darkness. It was all she could see; could feel.

Am I dead?

Ada tried to open her eyes, and eventually, they flickered open. Harsh Orange light stung her eyes and she had to squint to make out her surroundings. Darkness above her. The cold metal beneath her skin. Pain in her entire body. Then she felt the heat.

Oh God, I've died and gone to hell

She struggled to move, adjusting to the fresh pains as she sat up; sirens in the distance, blaring something about an emergency…

This is worse than hell; I'm still in Raccoon freaking City.

Ada shook her head and stood up on her shaking legs, she felt as if all the energy had been sapped out of them and walking was a terrible chore. Looking around, she realised she was on one of the bottom levels in the underground laboratory. A huge metal catwalk wound around a gigantic electric generator that was letting of sparks at regular intervals. A large glow surrounded the air in front of her, and as she walked to the edge of the railing, she realised it was a massive vat of chemicals, although at the temperature they were being kept at it looked like a small volcano; the lava-like substance boiling and popping with simmering ferociousness.

How the hell did I get all the way down here?

Darkness; it was the last thing she could remember… and that quivering rush in her stomach as she fell for what seemed like an eternity. She was a hell of a long way down… how was it possible she could survive a fall like that and still be walking – well, limping – around? Ada felt more blood trickle down her shoulder, and peeled the blood-stained fabric of her dress back to reveal the bullet wound from…

From the bitch who shot me.

Her right side stung like a mother from her ride on the transport lift – Birkin thought it appropriate to tear her a new one just as she was reaching her objective and for the first time in over 24 hours making progress. But your okay, he took care of you and your okay. He wanted to escape with you so he patched you up and went to find an escape route, and…

And I let go of his hand.

He had tried to save her worthless but yet again even after she threatened to kill him over a tube of liquid zombie maker. He knew Annette had told him the truth about her and he still tried to save her, even when she pointed that gun at him and confirmed every horrible conclusion he had most likely come to. She betrayed him in the worst way possible, he found out you're a cold-hearted manipulative killer who steals bio-weapons for huge corporations as a day job, and he still wants to run off into the sunset you.

"Leon, please forgive me."

It was the last thought, the thought of him that shot panic through her system.

I let go of his hand so he could escape… what if he never made it out, what if I ruined any chance of us escaping together just for him to die because of a ticking clock…. Shit, the self destruct!

Ada suddenly spurred to life, the pain in her body suddenly not as important as the need to run. She probably had minutes to escape the labs – and being a good few hundred floors beneath the surface she had no way of getting out. Not only that, she had to leave the emergency cargo train on the bottom floor free for Leon to escape if he was still alive. Her only hope was up – the emergency elevators would be working now, and she had the master key…

She sprinted across the platform, feeling nothing of the agony she previously tolerated, rounding the corner – and stopped in her tracks. There it was. The very thing that had got her in this shitty mess in the first place. The little tube that had almost cost her life was glinting up at her innocently. She picked it up and rolled it between her fingers, admiring its simplicity and fearing it potential. Even if she made it out, Wesker would never trust her again and she would be deemed expendable. Then she smiled as a thought crossed her mind; she could kill two birds with one stone and please more than one of her employers. All she needed was a radio signal…

Pocketing the vial, she sprinted for the door, hoping the big guy would be as friendly with her as he was the last time she made contact.

"Leon, be safe, I promise I'll repay you someday."

Ada vowed her only mission from that day would be to survive… and to see Leon Kennedy's face one last time, even if he couldn't see hers.

There was a flutter in her stomach, that same feeling of falling from a great height that seemed to accompany most of her dreams. That rush of adrenaline, the sudden outburst of fear as she prepared for the impact that would inevitably kill her…

And slowly she opened her eyes. Pale moonlight poured through the shabby thin curtains of the tiny room. Her hair was stuck to her forehead and her skin was glazed in a thin layer of sweat. She felt the butterflies subside and her heart rate return to normal.

That night, the memories so vivid all of a sudden, everything used to seem so distant and blurry… as if I was watching someone else's dream through a dirty telescope. Why is it now starting to come back to me when I've spent the last six years trying to forget?

The bathroom door opened and Ada jumped slightly, not out of surprise, but because Leon had stepped into the room dripping wet and wearing nothing but a towel wrapped tightly around his waist. His hair was clinging to his forehead and creeping down over his eye level, forcing him to brush a hand across and push it back. He practically jumped ten feet when he looked up and saw that Ada was looking right at him. The cool air had hit his body and beads of condensation were forming across his entire body… and Ada's jaw just about hit the floor.

"Ada, your awake… sorry I was, uh, hoping to get changed before you uh, woke up."

He groped his towel nervously and shrunk back into the safety of the bathroom doorway. Whether it was his embarrassment, the escaping heat from the bathroom or the image she now had permanently stored in her brain like a screensaver, Ada felt the temperature of the room rise considerably. She hoped she wasn't blushing as he put on her best flirtatious tone.

"Don't worry, if you want you can change in here, I promise I won't look."

She noticed his shirt and pants lying on a chair across the room and couldn't help but smile, knowing that he had at some point in the night been walking around in his boxers alone.

Too bad I was asleep…

"Uh, if you could just turn around one second that would be fine."

Ada obliged, flicking the covers around to her left and swiveled her body ever so slightly towards the window. She turned her head away but knew she would risk a peak once he was in her peripheral vision.

"Only a second huh?"

He gave a little nervous chuckle that seemed more like a half-hearted grunt, and she wondered why he was so bothered about her seeing him like that. It wasn't like he was this shy the last time they spent a night together, she had seen him in his underwear – true it was only a few brief seconds before he got into bed but still, he trusted her enough at the time.

Maybe that's just it though, maybe he's lost his trust in you, the number of times you've screwed him over lately it's hardly surprising, or maybe he just got caught off guard.

Leon scurried over to the chair and picked up his clothes, hoisting his boxers up along the way. Ada chose not to look as he hurried back to the bathroom, wondering if she was because she felt as vulnerable that night as he was feeling now. She remembered how much she had let her guard down, not because she wanted to, but because she needed to. She remembered how much she trusted him and expected him to trust her, but not to understand and comfort her in the way he did. After all, they had been through; she was amazed at how much he seemed to care for her. He re-entered the room again moments later with a slightly less pink flush to his face and seemed to be back to his normal self.

"Sorry about that, now where did we get up to earlier?"

"As I recall I hadn't gotten far before we took a nap."

"Okay, just fill me in as best you can – anything you can tell me I want to know no matter how small a detail."

"Alright, here we go."

Leon took a seat on the edge of her bed and Ada took a deep breath, hoping to get everything out without stopping too much.

"The reason I asked you to meet up with me this morning, is because Wesker has a price on your head, and now he has a price on mine. I received a package that morning, detailing my mission. Wesker wanted me to send you to a public location on the pretense of meeting up with you. He provided me with equipment too, a PSG1 Sniper rifle. He wanted me to assassinate you in public so there would be plenty of witnesses.

His face was dead set. He didn't even seem slightly shocked that she could have quite easily killed him. If it was possible, Ada respected him even more at that moment.

"Obviously, as soon as I got the briefing I realised he must have found out I've been working indirectly with you and helping you out on your missions. He must have known I wouldn't go through with it, plus he's probably found out by now that I've kept other things from him, and if there's one thing Wesker hates its disloyalty."

"You betrayed Wesker? How did you manage that?"

"The sample… I kept the real one and sent him a fake one. A dead parasite that hadn't started decomposition yet. We took the parasite from its host and let it die, that way we could keep Wesker occupied with it while we studied the real one."

"Who's 'we'?"

"The Organisation, n independent vigilante operations force intent on counteracting bio-terrorists and making sure their bioweapons aren't used against the public at all costs. We try to save the test subjects from experimentation whenever we can and exterminate the ones we can't save. Most of the time the effects are irreversible and the subjects have to be destroyed, whether they be animals, mammals, plants, even humans. Not that by the time we reach them there's much left of them to be salvaged as 'human'. Needles to say Wesker has been top of our Christmas list now for about a decade."

Leon simply stared at her. He seemed to dive into her eyes and search deep within her for an answer she didn't know the question to. He stared at her for several minutes but it seemed so much longer to her. It made her feel vulnerable and exposed like he could reach deep within her soul and pull out the real Ada if he wanted to. The Ada she had trained, no, forced herself to lock away and never let out. It was the part of her that died many years ago, yet simply by being there with her, that side that was cold calculating and heartless melted away. All that was left was the young girl that wanted to cry when she was alone and despised the person she had become.

"Ada – I had no idea… why didn't you tell me any of this before? Why couldn't you trust me instead of leading me on, lying to me? Betraying me?"

"Because I had to. I'm a double agent. It's my job to lie, I had to keep up pretenses with Wesker in order to earn his trust and help the Organisation. If either one of my covers was blown I would be responsible for letting Albert Wesker loose on the world with nobody capable of stopping him. I had to make everybody believe I was truly on his side."

"Even me?"

"Especially you Leon. But now I guess all the lies and backstabbing can stop."

He looked down at his hands while he fiddled with the cotton of her sheets. He was making an excuse not to look at her. She must have hurt him so much over these years.

"Leon I want you to know something. Nothing has hurt me more than having to earn your trust and then throw it back in your face time and time again. If I had some way of avoiding it I would have done it, but I see I've hurt you deeply and I can't take that away, and for that, I'm truly sorry."

Leon was gazing at her with such awe and respect that she felt even more self-conscious than before. In fact, she'd never been so self-aware in her entire life. Still, she gazed back at him with that same respect.

"Can I ask you something, Leon?"

"Anything."

"Do you ever feel self-conscious around me? I noticed you got all shy all of a sudden earlier, are you not comfortable with me anymore?"

"I feel self-conscious around you all the time, but it's not because of you. To tell you the truth, I just haven't been comfortable with myself lately."

"Why not?"

"Because of my scars. Every time I look in the mirror I see what each one means to me. I've been shot and injured on duty, I've had broken bones and bruises on every part of my body, I've been cut up and stitched back together so many times I've lost count. As each new scar appears on my body I realise not a single one doesn't haunt me somehow. I'm 27 years old and I'm scared that this may be all my life has in store for me. Day after day of risk-taking and life-threatening situations. The worst thing of all though is that I'm choosing to do this to myself. I'm voluntarily ruining my own life and any chance of it ever becoming normal. I guess I'm just scared about a lot of things right now."

"Let me see them."

"What?"

"I want you to show me the real you, scars and all. I want you to show me each and every one of them no matter how horrible or how ugly you think they may be."

Leon understood what she was trying to do. She could see it in his eyes. She never took her gaze off him as he undressed slowly and deliberately, purposefully showing her every angle. The first one she noticed was on his right calf, a small white line ran across his leg.

"I broke my leg when I was 19, I was still a rookie at the training academy and I got injured during one of the training exercises. I had to have the bone screwed back into place."

A larger, pinkish line ran across his left thigh, just below the hem of his boxer shorts.

"Stabbed while undercover for the government a few months before I got signed to the president. I went to arrest a guy and I disarmed him, only for him to pull a knife on me before I could find it. Left me with about twenty stitches. The irony is; now I always carry a knife on me in case I'm in the same situation."

He removed his shirt, the mark making itself known as soon as the fabric slid over his skin. The large red gash that ran diagonally from his right shoulder blade looked very recent.

"Spain. One of the Ganado's caught me with a hatchet from behind before I could dodge it. Lucky I had a tetanus shot before I left. Still hurts when I shower and I can't sleep too heavily on it."

He turned around to face Ada, his face still and set. His eyes burned with certainty. He seemed strangely proud somehow… then Ada realised what it was. He grabbed her hand and placed her fingers over the small white scar, pressing her hand on it delicately. It was shaped like an explosion off of a firework, it reminded her somewhat of a burning fuse; Ada could swear she could feel the heat from it as it burned brightly against the skin on his shoulder.

"This is my biggest one. I got it saving the life of the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on. Not a day goes by I don't think about it, but it's the only scar on my body I'd gladly go through the pain of getting if I had to do it again."

Ada seemed to hold her breath for the longest of seconds before doing something she had been waiting to do for six years. She leaned forward and kissed him, pulling him closer until she could smell the soap on his skin, feeling the softness of his still damp hair. Her lips locked with his and they gently caressed before pulling away agonisingly slowly; her top lip soon finding his way back onto his bottom, her tongue seductively sliding along the grove that met in the middle. Leon's hand worked its way to the small of her back, pulling her closer. It wasn't until Ada broke the kiss that she realised her hand was pressed on his left shoulder. She looked into his eyes and her hand shot away, like a knee jerk reaction to touching something hot. She felt something then, something she had no idea how to deal with, and although it terrified her, she embraced it for the moment.

Get a grip, Ada, don't do this now.

"So, what do we do now?"

"You get dressed. And I go take a shower. We'll decide what happens when I'm finished."

"I'll be sure to stay awake for that then."

"Let's just hope I don't forget my towel."

Leon smiled at her from the bed, and Ada smiled back, not her usual suggestive smirk, but a genuine smile. His eyes never left her until she shut the bathroom door, making a note to conveniently forget her clothes.