Part Three

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have. - Anonymous

Although her memories of the time are quite vivid, there was no moment during her first year as an agent that was more brilliantly lucid than the operation in Berlin. She had diffused a detonation device attached to over a hundred pounds of C4. It had taken six minutes with every second devoted to inspecting and teasing apart several wires, connecting cables, circuit panels and a myriad of screws. That was the kind of patience Ada was used to providing. But the threads of that patience were fraying at the ends as she tried to persuade Mei Li to keep still. It was a pretty bad idea to turn your back on Mei Li; you never knew where she'd wander off to next. Though Ada found that this wasn't too surprising considering this child was meant to be her own progeny. Every tactic Ada could use to control an adult were rather…inappropriate to use against a child, so she had had to improvise. Ada was never one to turn down a challenge. After having to coax Mei Li from the her curious inspection of the bath salts around half a dozen times, Ada found that keeping the child focused on the task in hand, rather than simply doing it all for her, made things go a lot more smoothly. Mei Li for her part seemed quite content rambling over the events of the past week.

'Mommy, what did you do in Washington?'

Hell if I know.

'Just boring adult things,' Ada reached over the sink and turned off the water.

'Oh. Why were you gone so long?'

'I had things to do…'

'What things?'

Ada sighed and dipped the washcloth into the soapy water, 'Just things.'

'Will you go back again soon?' Mei Li continued with tenacious curiosity, 'Mommy!'

'Please!' Ada yelled as she pulled away and left the stunned child by the sink.

This was a bad idea. She had taken the child to give Leon a break, but it was only when they had reached the top of the stairs that Ada had realised that she didn't know what to do with her. She had no idea why she was doing this or even really how to do this. No matter how many times she had tried to convince herself that this little girl didn't exist, she'd look closely at her and feel overcome with helplessness and fear.

Ada's mother had practically been a child herself when she had become a parent. Neither of them had had the capacity to take care of the other, so they had had to look elsewhere. Ada had looked inside herself and her mother had looked anywhere but. They had wandered from home to home every time the landlord changed the locks and the succession of abusive boyfriends had been her mother's anaesthesia. Ada had dwelled in the shadows like a spectator and they had left her alone. Most of the time. Her mother had been her model of how to (or rather how not to) change identities. Today she was a waitress, yesterday a singer, last week a dancer, last month sober, tomorrow sorry and the next day she'd start all over again. She had never worn the costume; she had let the costume wear her. But Ada had never resented her or desired an apology. It was a simple fact that some people were cut out for a normal life and others were not.

Then why did she feel so guilty? Why did she feel she owed this girl…this hallucination an apology?

Taking the washcloth from Mei Li's hands, Ada wiped the last of the stains from her face and gave her a soft smile, 'There we go. All pretty again.'

She stood and held out her hand, 'I'm sorry to yell. I'm just a little tired.'

Mei Li stayed perfectly still and gazed up at her with a confused and distressed frown. Ada prayed the girl wasn't as stubborn as she was, 'Come on…sweetie.'

The girl gave a shrug and let Ada lead her to her bedroom. Mei Li's room was yellow and bright. Sunlight painted the walls and draped its rays across her bed. Several crude drawings lined the walls with her name printed in bold, black ink in their corners. Toys were stacked in haphazard rows and broken crayons lay discarded on a tiny drawing table. It was an idyllic children's room. As a child Ada had spent most of her time out of the house rather than in. A bedroom had just been for sleeping in and it wasn't until after her mother had died that she had known any better. Home hadn't been…the most comfortable of places.

Mei Li's velvety giggle drew Ada from her reverie. She was standing by her bed and reaching under her pillow, presumably now over her bout of silent sulking.

'Mommy, did you see? I lost my first tooth,' she pointed keenly at the gap in her mouth.

'Yes, I saw,' Ada walked slowly over to her and knelt to look at the tiny white chunk in the girl's hand.

'Daddy made me put it under my pillow. He says I'll get a present from the tooth fairy.'

Biting back a smirk, Ada nodded, 'Of course.'

Mei Li frowned, 'But Mommy, I don't think there is a tooth fairy. I think it's just a story he tells.'

'Have you told your father that you think this?'

'No,' Mei leaned close to Ada's face and whispered conspiratorially, 'I think daddy wants to be the tooth fairy. I don't want to make him sad. And I want my present.'

Ada laughed, the light sound that filled the room was almost alien to her. She hadn't laughed like this in a long time. Shaking her head, she took the tooth from Mei's hand and slid it back under the pillow, 'Well we wouldn't want to make daddy sad. We'll keep this between us.'

Mei Li grinned, 'Daddy promised to take me to see the fireworks at the pier tomorrow!'

Ada pretended to know what she was talking about and simply nodded at every question she asked. After helping Mei Li into a yellow dress and soft black shoes, Ada ran a soft brush through the girl's hair a few times before gently tying it into two neat pigtails.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the door open gently and turned to find Leon in the doorway. He was dressed in a sweater and had shaved, making him look decidedly more focused than before.

'Is she ready?' he asked.

Ada straightened and folded her arms across her chest, 'All done.'

'Good. I'm taking Mei to Joan and Mike's house for a play date, just for an hour or so. I thought you…we could use some time alone. Is that all right?'

'Yes. Fine. Look, I think I'm more tired than I realised. I'll stay here,' Ada replied.

'Can I take Marie with me?' Mei Li asked holding aloft a big, pale coloured teddy bear with a blue ribbon around its neck.

'Sure Peanut,' Leon smiled down at her, 'Can you go downstairs and put on your jacket? Mommy and I will be down in a minute.'

The girl nodded and tottered out of the room.

When he was sure she was out of earshot Leon ran his fingers thorough his hair and sat gently on the bed. His size and sheer masculinity stood in stark contrast to the delicate little bed. It would have made Ada laugh if it wasn't for the air of tension surrounding him. His eyes were rooted to the floor as if he expecting some grand solution to sprout from the carpet.

'Ada, I tried to let this go but I'm still concerned. Are you sure you're feeling well?' seeing her roll her eyes he continued a little more forcefully, 'I'm serious.'

'Just drop it Leon, please.'

'Drop what?' he pleaded, 'Something must have happened back east. One minute you're fine and the next you're pushing me away or staring at Mei like she's some kind of monster.'

Ada averted her eyes and caught sight of the shimmering ring on her left hand. A surge of anger and frustration unfurled like a fist in her stomach.

What is it with you? You always have to play the Good Samaritan.

'Maybe I'm not okay. Maybe I am feeling unwell,' she replied darkly, 'Do you think this is easy for me? I don't know if I can do this.'

'I don't understand. What do you mean?'

'What does it matter anyway?'

'It matters to me!'

'Keep your voice down,' she snapped.

He rose suddenly, his eyes furiously dark, 'Fine. Just don't play the martyr and pretend I didn't ask.'

He left and Ada swallowed the obscene reply that was forming in her throat. She slammed her fist into the wall behind her, 'Damn it!'

As she leaned against the window frame in Mei's room, her arms tightly crossed in front of her, Ada closed her eyes and began to try to think of a way out of this mess. This was obviously a mistake. She'd tried to cooperate with this flight of fancy but it turned out to be a game that was out of her league. She had a real fight she had to contend with back in the real world. That was her concern. Not this.

Well, 'game over' it is.

She was relieved that Leon and Mei Li were gone by the time she came downstairs. Ada had changed into a pair of loose pants and a jacket before scavenging the kitchen, den and dining room for anything that might facilitate an escape.

'Ah!' Ada grinned when she found a set of car keys on the coffee table in the den. Scooping them into her pocket she was about to leave when she spotted a small gold frame on the bookshelf by the wall. It held an old and slightly torn picture. On closer inspection Ada realised it didn't belong to the collection she had seen upstairs.

'I don't believe it,' she whispered and gaped at the image.

It was of her. She was aged about seven or eight and standing on a pier by some water with her mother at her side. Snatching the frame Ada ran to the window and held it up. No wonder the view had looked familiar! She had been here as a child. In fact, she still had this photograph at the bottom of a box back home. Ada had been amazed at how easy it had been to remove all semblances of her past from her apartment in Chicago after Raccoon City. The last thing to go had been that photograph of Jon and her that had somehow survived the disaster. In that snapshot her smile had been large but had stopped at her eyes leaving their expression blank. That Ada Wong, like so many of her other personas, was nothing but ashes now. Since then she had continued to live her life by instinct, becoming who she needed to be moment by moment. But in a life like that your future seems so shapeless and elusive. Chasing it soon becomes exhausting. Perhaps you could only reinvent yourself so many times.

But this picture of her at the lake, the one she held in her shaking hands, had somehow survived the fire. It was of a happier time, a short window of hope, six months before Ada's mother had died.

Putting the picture back in its place Ada found her attention captured again, this time by a thick book on the shelf. It was leather bound and seemed ancient compared to the shiny paperbacks that surrounded it. She pulled it out and began to slowly leaf through its yellowing pages. It was an early edition of Doctor Zhivago, her favorite novel. The first page had an inscription in neat copperplate handwriting. It read: 'To Ada on our first anniversary. My heart and soul always. Leon.'

She closed her eyes and let out a shaky breath whilst returning the book to its space.

Why does this have to feel so real? The more I see, the more I remember what I don't really have and what I shouldn't want in the first place.

'Leaving so soon?'

Ada looked up to see her grandmother idly lounging in an overstuffed armchair at the other end of the room. She wore a lavender suit with a gold broach and had her long wisps of grey hair stacked neatly in curls atop her head.

'Nice outfit.'

'I'm really not prepared to accept sarcasm from a woman who travels to a muddy Spanish village in a red cocktail dress and high-heels.'

Ada raised an eyebrow, 'Point taken. Why are you here? Trying to keep me from leaving perhaps?'

'I can't do that. I told you,' her grandmother waved a hand to encompass the entire room, 'This is your party.'

'Party's over,' she replied, 'I'm not about to fall for emotional manipulation.'

The woman's eyes widened causing her blue eye shadow to rise inches on her brow, 'You think I put those things there? It was you.'

Ada paused to consider this. No one except her and her mother had been aware of that trip to the lake or the photograph. At least as far as she knew.

'Your mother brought you here didn't she? Before she…did what she did.'

'You mean before she killed herself?' Ada rolled her eyes, 'I'm not eight anymore. You don't have to coddle me.'

'It was always hard to talk about it,' her grandmother continued, 'You were the one that found her body, yet I couldn't bear the thought of anyone causing you to live through it again.'

Ada turned away and paced the carpet in deliberate, methodical steps, trying to tread the memories into the ground. Memories of razorblades and blood on dove white porcelain.

'How kind. Though the support would have been more useful when your daughter and grandchild were practically destitute. Or were you just afraid your high-status friends would find out that your only child was a teenage mother with a drug habit?'

The woman showed no reaction. She simply left her seat and walked along side Ada. Her perfume coiled through the air. It was jasmine, just as it had been everyday during their short time together. Her maternal grandmother had taken her in after the incident, but their relationship had been a strained one. She had always been too busy at the laboratory to pay her granddaughter much direct attention, though Ada had never experienced any unkindness from her. Perhaps shame and guilt had caused them both to tiptoe around each other for those three years.

'You're lost and afraid Ada. But you're like me and you're like your mother. You won't admit it. You've lost hope, you have no idea what you're going to do when you face Wesker and that fear is paralysing you slowly.'

'I know what my mission is.'

'Then why did you decide to help Leon here?' the woman interjected, 'Why take care of that little girl?'

'You're right. This isn't my problem, it isn't even real,' she replied.

'But you did it anyway. It just felt right didn't it? Being with them? Protecting him, just like you did in Raccoon City and in Spain?'

'Protecting him is easy.'

'And loving him isn't?'

'No. It isn't!' Ada stopped and turned to face her, fury spitting from her lips, 'Is this what you think I want? Paisley curtains and a house by a lake? This isn't self-pity. It's just a simple fact I learned a very long time ago. It doesn't matter what I feel, lives like this aren't meant for people like me!'

'Maybe. Maybe not. If you knew what you really wanted you wouldn't be going through all this in the first place. You'd be dreaming about chocolate or AK-47s or whatever it is you're into now. Perhaps you don't need all this- this house, or even the peace and quiet. Maybe you just need him and he needs you.'

'That's a lot of maybes.'

'Well cold, hard facts can't keep you warm at night.'

'Then I'll buy a couple of extra blankets.'

The woman laughed and shook her silver curls, 'I have missed you, Little One.'

Ada was about to reply when she heard a car pull up outside the house, 'Damn it.'

She peaked out of the window and saw Leon in the driveway. He was pulling several grocery bags out of the trunk of the car. Balancing them precariously on one arm, he stopped to talk to a passer-by who obviously knew him. It was hard to remember that he wasn't real when every movement, the tone of his voice and the feel of his skin was everything she remembered. Under Wesker's orders, Ada had kept Leon under observation intermittently after Raccoon City. But now she was watching him laugh and relax up-close rather than through the lens of a camera. It was the potent performance of a fantasy.

'You put on a brave face Ada,' her grandmother's voice pierced the air, 'and you follow your mission objectives to the letter- it makes you feel strong, just like your mother's addiction did for her and my work did for me. The mission is something you can control and it helps distract you from the emptiness.'

'I'm sick of your platitudes,' Ada replied, 'They don't negate the fact that if this is a dream, then that isn't really Leon.'

'You know, your great grandmother used to tell me that when you meet someone special you will continue to carry a piece of them inside you. That man out there is as real as you are in a way. He's the piece of Leon that you've been carrying around for the past six years. Come on. How long have you wished for time like this? And you're wasting it with rhetoric and the ghost of an old woman.'

Ada turned from the window and once again found that the woman was gone, leaving only the scent of jasmine lingering in the air. She heard the front door open and heavy footsteps travel along the hall in the direction of the kitchen. Almost automatically, her mind sketched out the lines of an escape route across her conscious. Leon didn't know for sure that she was still in the house. She could leave and he wouldn't be able to stop her. Ada gripped the car keys in her hand so that the cool metal left a jagged imprint on her palm. Across the hall she heard the rustling of bags and the sound of Leon opening and closing cupboards.

He won't be able to hear you. Go. Now.

She stuffed the keys roughly into her jacket pocket and strode out of the room. But with each step she felt as though air was being pounded out of her lungs. Her hands were quivering so much that she had to ball them into fists to keep them still.

Come on! You've done this a hundred times before.

Perhaps that was the problem. She had never had anything worth sticking around for in the past. And though this was a dream, there was one thing that felt so real that it crippled her- Leon. The more time she spent here, the more time she felt the costume slipping away. This place was like a concentrated burst of him- fierce, loyal, loving, and affectionate.

Her footsteps slowed till she stopped by the kitchen door. Leon had his back to her as he unpacked various items onto the table. Leaning against the doorframe in silence she watched him stretch and saw the muscles of his wide shoulders tighten. She smiled. He was so beautiful. Lately, nothing was even half as simple as it should have been. When Leon had kissed her in the bedroom earlier she had felt her heart swell and tear. Even enjoying a modicum of physical intimacy with a man that didn't exist outside of her mind held its complications. Whatever she was experiencing it felt excruciatingly real, from the pleasure to the pain. But she knew it wasn't real and she knew it was going to end. So every smile, every kiss and every emotion was tainted with hopelessness. But one thing was for sure; she'd never forgive herself for letting this opportunity go. No matter the end, no matter the pain, here and now he was hers.

Ada was standing behind him before she had even been aware she'd moved from the door. Slipping her hands around his waist she grinned as she felt him jump in surprise.

'You're getting a little sloppy Agent Kennedy,' she murmured against his shoulder blades. She gently tapped her fingers along the plane of his stomach and relished the feel of him shivering under her hands.

'I find it's best not to be on combat mode when I'm at home,' he replied and turned in her arms.

His expression was carefully composed as he eyed her change of clothes.

'Are you going out?'

Ada let her hands fall limply from his waist, 'No.'

Leon nodded but didn't move. His body was barely an inch from hers and the air between them was so charged that she could almost feel the pulsing of his heartbeat against her chest. It may have been minutes or mere seconds that they stood in silence just staring at each other, willing the other to talk.

'When will Mei Li be home?' she started on neutral ground.

'Joan will give her a ride home in a few hours. Her kids really love playing with Mei. In fact so does her dog. I'm counting down the days till Mei asks for one for her next birthday.'

'Maybe you could use the time to get some rest.'

Leon shrugged and shot her a half grin, 'Sleep deprivation is the norm for both of us. Four years after Wesker's death and we're still cleaning up his mess. Maybe I can ask the President to give us a little break every now and then.'

Ada smiled back, letting her gaze sweep indulgently over his face, 'So you really did miss me.'

He pursed his lips and brought his hand up to touch her hair with slow and methodical strokes, 'I had dreams about you while you were gone.'

'Oh yeah?' she asked breathlessly.

'Hell yeah,' he leaned towards her and let his breath caress her neck as he punctuated his words with chaste kisses along her collar bone, 'Have you ever had a dream that felt so completely real? I swear that when I woke up I could still taste you. Maybe my subconscious was just compensating me till you were able to come home.'

Ada leaned forward and nuzzled his shoulder to hide the blush on her cheeks. She slipped her hands under his sweater and felt his skin. Leon lifted his head and she saw longing and regret battling each other in his expression.

He sighed and straightened, leaving one hand on her cheek and the other tentatively brushing her hip, 'I'm sorry for what I said earlier.'

Not knowing how to respond, Ada simply closed her eyes against a sudden and uncomfortable onslaught of tears.

'When I get too overprotective, well…I can behave like a jackass sometimes and…'

'Hush Leon,' she opened her eyes and briefly pressed her fingertips to his mouth, 'No more talking.'

He nodded. It amazed her how he sometimes seemed to understand her, to know who she was beneath the mask. It frightened her a little. They had never been very good with words, but their actions had always been loud and unashamedly clear. Leon brought his hand to her chin, lifted her face upwards to meet his and kissed her passionately. Ada wrapped her arms around his neck as his tightly circled her waist. She threw her body against him till his back was pressed roughly against the table. The sounds of her sighs and his moans seemed to merge against their lips till neither knew where each had originated. For endless seconds she clung to him, her awareness geared relentlessly into that kiss as she made love to him in her mind.

Ada gently pulled away and heard him groan deeply. She beamed playfully up at him and traced his forehead with her finger.

'For the record,' she breathed, 'I missed you too.'

Without a word, Leon smiled broadly, swept her into his arms and carried her up the stairs.