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The moment her eyes land on his unmoving form, she knows it’s too late.
Leon Kennedy is laying on the ground, his bloody and broken body a stark contrast against the otherwise pristine white snow.
It’s laughable, how quickly a life can be snuffed out. It only takes a fraction of a second. Ada wonders whether she might’ve blinked and missed the moment the light left his eyes. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.
It feels wrong, to see him so still. Leon has never been still, in all the years she’s known him. Always moving, always fighting. It frustrated her at times, his stubborn effervescence. Now though, she would trade anything in the world to see him pick himself back up, determination burning in his gaze as he steels himself for another battle. He has done it so unfailingly and so many times that it seems unfathomable that he would not do so now.
Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe there is still hope. Leon has always been a survivor. He would not be defeated so easily. Not now. Not like this.
Slowly, Ada crawls toward him, dragging her uncooperating body along. Pain shoots through her ribs, but she pushes it aside, her hands clawing into the snow.
She has to get to him. She has to be sure.
After what feels like an eternity, Ada finally manages to move within arm’s reach of Leon, just close enough to shake his shoulder as best she can, with her own arm bleeding and half-numb.
Leon remains motionless. His too-long bangs have fallen, obscuring his eyes. Ada suppresses the urge to brush them aside. She’s afraid she might find unseeing blue eyes, staring past her at nothing at all.
She isn’t ready for such cinching proof of his mortality.
Ada knows she shouldn’t mourn. Mourning won’t reverse the clock and change the brutal reality presenting itself before her. No, this was always inevitable. Those in their profession did not tend to live long enough to go gray.
Nevertheless, grief hits her body like a wrecking ball into a concrete wall.
“Leon,” she croaks out, as if by calling his name she might be able to summon his soul back into his body, to undo the terrible violence which has been wrought upon his body, to rouse him and breathe the air back into his lungs.
All she gets in response is silence.
Ada closes her eyes. It doesn’t matter. If things go the way she suspects they will, she’ll be joining him soon enough.
Opening her eyes again, she watches snowflakes fall onto Leon’s hair, like tiny crystals woven into gold.
In death, he looks almost like a painting, ethereal and eternal.
She wonders how many times she had taken him for granted in life. How many times she had torn herself from him before either of them were ready, so confident in her assertion that there would always be a next time.
And for a time, there was. Until there wasn’t anymore.
The cold, which had seeped into her bones, merciless and unrelenting, had become almost tolerable. Comfortable, even. Ada had imagined countless scenarios in which she would meet her untimely end, each one more violent than the last, but she never thought she’d go out like this. Quietly. Peacefully. Beside the only man for whom she had felt the closest emotion to love.
It isn’t so bad, all things considered. They were always meant to be together. Their destinies had been irrevocably intertwined, ever since the moment she first laid her eyes upon his face, youthful and terrified, in the darkness of a dying city.
It seems fitting, to begin in the dead of night, and end in the broad daylight. Poetic, almost.
Her only regret is not being able to hold him one last time.
Oh well, she thinks as her hand manages to find his. This is better than I could’ve asked for. Better than I deserve.
As her consciousness fades away for the final time, Ada feels lighter than she has ever felt before.
end