Ada's eyes cracked open groggily. It was the middle of the night, some time in the very early A.M., and the wind had slowed down outside now… Did she hear something? She wasn't sure what had pulled her from sleep, and started to drift off again.

The faint sound was there again. It was indistinct, but it sounded like her guest in the other room. She slowly emerged from the mound of blankets and pulled on her robe and slippers, hesitantly making her way to his room.

She could make Leon's shape out dimly in the dark room, loosely draped with blankets and laying on his side, and it took her a moment to notice that he would shake occasionally. The uneasy noises seemed to be from him as well, reacting to something in his dream world. A grimace or a look of fear would cross his face frequently. She watched him curiously, hoping he wouldn't wake up and see her standing there looking incredibly suspicious.

He suddenly opened his eyes and swore, jolting in bed and making Ada jump as well. He looked around while propped up on his elbow, breathing heavily, eyes darting in the darkness.

"Leon…" she said in a voice just barely above a whisper. "You're alright."

He started to tense and raised his arm at her voice, then just let out a sigh and laid back down on the pillow.

"Sorry… didn't mean to wake you up."

She sat on the edge of the bed and leaned on his shoulder. His breaths slowly calmed down and became more even.

"I'd hoped I was done having those…I'm fine."

She stayed with him like that for a little while, until he was calm enough that he seemed to drift off again. She then carefully got up and shuffled back to her room, but it was harder for her to get back to sleep. Her image of him as the invincible, zombie-fighting good-boy had cracked just a bit.

"So what was it?" Ada asked, stepping through the smooth, unbroken snow.

Leon sipped the coffee he had in a thermos and plodded along beside her.

"A long dark hallway. A plaga regenerator. Kind of mixed with the things in China… And uh… you, at some point. I woke up when the thing started sprinting at me and screaming."

Ada furrowed her brows.

"Do you have a lot of dreams like that?"

He shrugged.

"It comes and goes. More frequently lately."

The weather during the night had dropped about a foot of snow on top of the mountain, blanketing the area in an incredible quiet. Their steps were the loudest thing around if they didn't talk. Scraggly seasonal trees cut a sharp contrast against the smooth snow, and the evergreens between them carried white mounds on their branches.

"Have you talked to anybody about it?"

Leon huffed.

"What, you think they're gonna let me go talk about my secret government mission trauma with a therapist? Tell them all about the Umbrella-brand zombie monsters?"

"Maybe they have government-approved therapists on standby?"

"Hmph. Not in the BSAA. Not a whole lot of people I can talk to about it."

Ada glanced at him as he sipped his steaming coffee again, then went back to watching her steps.

"I never knew it was a problem. You always seemed like you knew what you were doing…confident."

"You didn't exactly hang around to see anything other than the most dangerous parts…"

"…Fair point."

They walked a little ways in silence before Leon spoke up.

"Has it ever bothered you? You always seemed like you knew exactly what you were doing too…whatever that was."

She got a wry little smirk, a subtle thing that was more noticeable now that she had her burgundy lipstick on. Her makeup had magically reappeared that morning, he noticed, even though it was just the two of them.

"Aside from needing to take a break after the last one, no. You were thrown into the mess, but this is what I signed up to do."

"Huh. So you thrive on it."

"You could put it that way."

He just shook his head with a little smile.

"I should have guessed. I don't exactly—"

Whump

He startled and whipped around, only for Ada to sigh and tug on his jacket, turning him back around.

"It's a pile of snow falling off a tree, stop freaking me out." She stooped while she walked, gathering a little ball of snow in her gloved hands.

He grimaced and shoved his hand back into his pocket, marching onward beside her.

"As I was uh…saying…I don't exactly do well in new places either, lately. I feel a lot safer when I'm back in my apartment, and nothing's exploding, and no one's trying to stab me…" Ada looked up at him with a slightly surprised glance, which he met with a tired one. "If it had been anyone else writing that letter, I'm not sure I would have even driven out here."

"I think you would have… you've run into places you don't know before and saved the day plenty of times. You didn't know what you were up against in Racoon City either."

"And I got shot."

"…Or in Spain."

"Where I got infected with a parasite."

"China?"

"Everything exploded, I crashed a helicopter and a plane, your clone tried to kill me, I almost got eaten by a meat dinosaur named Simmons—"

"Okay, okay, I'm starting to see your point. Maybe chasing down B.O.W.s isn't a healthy career choice." She looked down at the little ball of snow in her hands with an unreadable, distant expression. "To be honest I was going to throw this at you, but now I'm worried you'll have a panic attack if I do."

Leon slowed to a stop, causing Ada to stop a few feet ahead and look back at him curiously. He stared at her with a blank look, then closed his thermos and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

"You're telling me…" He stooped and began to gather a much larger ball of snow. "That you were going to just going to throw a snowball…" He started packing it into a softball-sized wad of ammunition, and Ada started running as well as she could through the foot of snow with a laugh. "At an innocent, unarmed government agent—" He punctuated the statement by hurling the snowball, only to be pelted in the chest with a tinier one at the same time.

Within seconds it was war, and the two were chasing each other between the trees. Half-packed wads of snow went sailing, frequently disintegrating midair. With two highly trained professionals, however, they almost always either showered the other in snow or hit with a satisfying smack.

"If you fall in the creek I'm not coming to rescue you!" Ada yelled across the snow, ducking behind a tree as a snowball went sailing past.

"What creek?" He started gathering another shot.

"The little one over—AIYEEK"