The only reason Leon doesn’t watch Luis with the same intensity in return is he doesn’t want to get caught staring. He still slips occasionally, whenever there’s a moment Luis takes his eyes off of him and he forgets himself - staring with hawklike intensity as if he doesn’t quite believe what he’s seeing. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d run into someone he once counted an ally (a friend?) seeming to rise from certain death, or even the second time within the past while weirdly enough, but…
With Krauser and Ada, things had been different. More complicated, in a way that made things almost easier, in a way.
And so the two of them play a stupid cat and mouse game of staring at each other and not saying anything about it, until Luis breaks the silence first.
“Yeah. We both did. They were just about to wrap up the last round of testing to make sure we didn’t bring home any more unwanted guests -“ he taps his chest, just over the new scar on his sternum, for emphasis - “when I woke up here. We’re in the clear.”
Thanks to you. The sentiment catches in his throat, harder to express than it should be. Leon glances away, folding his arms over his chest.
“She… asked about you, first thing when I found her,” is what he manages to say instead. It feels important to tell him. To let him know that Ashley remembered him too.
Luis catches the way Leon taps his chest immediately, and it feels like a weight lifted off of his own. In his studying of Leon, he had caught the various clues - the lack of blackened veins and bloodshot eyes being a major one - enough to hope that Leon had made it to his lab. But it felt like putting too much importance on himself to ask that way point-blank.
He smiles fondly, swallows to hide the way his throat goes tight when Leon mentions that Ashley asked about him.
"I'm sorry to have disappointed her," he says, around all the other things he could say. "...But I'm glad. That both of you are alright."
"You can make it up to her by getting out of whatever this is safe," says Leon, resolutely. "Then it's just a question of if she'll forgive me for telling her you were dead."
It's a joke, but a heavy one, and one that comes with the question: how are you not? He doesn't expect Luis to answer - he'd seemed just as surprised as Leon was, if not more - but he watches him carefully all the same, just in case there is some hidden insight he's picked up since then.
Luis huffs obligingly with a smile at the joke. Leon has seen the wound- or what's left of it- better than Luis himself can; it's hard to fake that kind of miracle, but harder to fake dying. Or mostly dying, maybe.
"Perhaps it's best you thought I was," he says, maybe the first thing he's said that wasn't layered. "I was already gone, makes it easier to leave me behind, eh." Crucially, there isn't a trace of bitterness in his voice. It would have been a tough call - but Luis couldn't have faulted him for making it.
Leon thinks very hard in that moment about how long he spent at Luis's side, at what they'd both thought was the end. He'd counted the seconds, measuring the slowing of his pulse, watching his breath grow weaker and weaker. It was a waste of valuable time, he knows - every second had counted, when it came to getting the suppressant to Ashley - but he hadn't been able to bring himself to go, not even after Luis had lost consciousness. He'd only been able to tear himself away once his hand had started to grow cold in his, when there was no one left to sit vigil for.
He doesn't say anything about that, though. He can't.
"Yeah. But you're here now, and - I don't know if you can tell, but the wound's already scarred over. While all of mine are still stitched up and healing." He takes a deep breath. "It doesn't make sense. But... Aqua - he looked like someone had grabbed him out of the ocean and somehow dumped him in here before he could blink, and someone else I was talking to said last he checked the year was 2018, and portals to other dimensions had been opening up all over the place for three years. I don't think he was trying to fuck with me, either. Something's very wrong here, and I can't get my head around it."
"2018?" Luis repeats. "Did you ask if there were flying cars yet?" It's a joke, of course, with 2018 only being 14 years away. But he's trying to lighten the mood.
"I think for now we keep an open mind." He leans back thoughtfully, able to mostly mask the grimace as a twinge of pain runs down his spine.
"Sorry to say, Sancho, but I don't think we'll be shooting our way out of this one."
"Must've slipped my mind. Apparently there's dragons and griffins, though."
Leon watches with a twinge of sympathy as Luis sits back - anybody else might miss it, but Leon's seen enough people try to hide how much injuries are bothering them (and done the same himself) to recognize it on sight. There's not much he can do about it right now, though.
"Damn. That's most of what I'm good for. You got any ideas in that big brain of yours?"
Luis does, admittedly, briefly get a boyish sparkle in his eye at the mention of dragons.
But he's a grown man who only pretends to believe in fairy tales, so he has to rein it in.
"Mm... Not enough data for a hypothesis, I'm afraid." They've only been here a couple hours, after all. But the look on his face is more akin to someone being presented with a new puzzle to solve, than concern.
"Right now, I think we try and find out more about these rules, and whoever gave them to us."
The slightest hint of a smile crosses Leon's face in response to that - easy to miss and gone in an instant, but definitely there. He thought Luis might appreciate that.
"Yeah. Seems like we've got some exploring to do, and talking to people. Another guy I was talking to said it seemed like a teenager wrote them down, but there's, uh. Kind of a lot of those here? I mean, look."
He sounds deeply concerned about this as he flips open his journal to the spread of profiles, holding it out so both of them can see.
"Now's not the time to have a midlife crisis," Leon fires back, almost on reflex. "Seriously though - feels like our first priority should be finding out if anyone here knows more about who put us here and why."
He thinks back on what he's been told, trying to figure out what's important enough to tell Luis and what's probably not relevant.
"Light said he's been through something like this before - kidnapped and locked up with a bunch of other people, forced to do puzzles to escape - but that he didn't think it was the same people this time around. Yoojin's the one from the future, and says there's pocket dimensions that can be sorta like this, but not quite. Otto said he's not used to magic existing either, but one day he got pulled into another universe by a wizard." He finishes rattling all that off, pauses to consider if there's anything he missed, and says, "That's about all I've managed to get out of anyone so far."
"Well done, Sancho," Luis says. "I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to get around just yet, myself, but it sounds like either we have a steep learning curve ahead of us, or everyone here is crazy as a goat."
He leans his elbows on his thighs and folds his hands together, trying to hide the pain again as the movement pulls at the scar on his back.
"What about the rest of the house? Anything interesting?" Given Leon's penchant for looting every square inch of any area he finds himself in, he guesses he's been thorough.
Leon frowns a little, watching for any sign of pain or discomfort as Luis shifts position, and lo and behold. There's not much he can do about it though, other than wince in apologetic sympathy.
(And for what it's worth, he's been keeping his paranoid magpie instincts in check just fine so far. He didn't even steal the keys off the pantry door or anything!)
"Couple of things. The windows are all... mismatched. Each one looks out over completely different scenery, even the ones right next to each other. And I swear the hallways change shape whenever I'm not looking. The doors and windows are unbreakable, too, at least with any tools we have handy. Can't even scratch the glass." He sighs. "Probably would've written off the magic stuff as people trying to fuck with me if not for all that. If there's a scientific explanation for all of that, it's more advanced than anything I'm aware of."
"There's probably some explanation, but it would either be invented by the owner, or require a lot of funding. The windows could be screens, covered with panes of extremely hard crystal. Doors and windowframes can be reinforced from the other side, or even fake..."
He takes out his lighter and begins to fidget with it.
"But again, that kind of thing is very expensive."
“Yeah. It’d be a weird investment, making an unbreakable funhouse. Not to mention the kind of coordination it’d take to kidnap - what, over 20 people, some of them on the brink of death? - and lock them all inside.”
Leon pauses, then adds;
“Not that it’d be the first murder mansion in the world, or even in the last six years, but if this is someone collecting combat data for their new weapons then they’re putting a lot of effort into some weird places.”
"Or vengeful ghosts. Would that fall under 'a curse', though?"
He wrinkles his nose, clearly not pleased about this line of thought even though he was the one insisting on it.
"Ugh. That reminds me, though. For what it's worth - I did manage to kill Saddler, and I guess he was basically some kind of shitty wizard. Had to go through him to get Ashley out."
"Mm. Wasn't easy, but it was worth it. After everything he did." Everything he'd tried to do, too. Which also reminds him...
"Question for you, though. Ada - she said she had a deal with you. Something to do with the amber. Do you know what she was planning on doing with it?"
He'd assumed, if Luis was in on it, that it couldn't have been anything too fucked up. But he'd like to get some confirmation of that, if possible.
Luis feels a chill, as clearly as if there was a gun in his face.
"Ah," he says, eloquently.
"When we made our arrangement, I was at a very low point... I was only trying to do the same thing I did at Umbrella - and that is, run. Save my own skin, you know?"
Well, that doesn't feel great to hear. Leon goes a little bit pale as the implications of their respective decisions hit him. He wants to be mad about it. A part of him feels like he should be mad at Luis, and he kind of is, but mostly he just feels stupid for having trusted Ada on so little evidence that she'd make the right decision this time around. Fuck. What was he thinking? That Luis was a better judge of character than he was?
"Uh. Thanks for being honest, I guess. Now it's up to her what happens next."
"A woman's heart is a mysterious thing..." Luis says, in a tone like he's agreeing.
But he liked Ada. And he liked to think that by the end he'd managed to grow on her a little, too. He remembers calling her, but barely remembers what he said. It had been hard to speak - and he'd been trying to get to where Leon was fighting the man who stabbed him.
"I did get the sense that you two were acquainted, but as you can imagine she is not the most forthcoming with details."
"Hers especially," says Leon, sounding exhausted just thinking about it. "I met her when I was still a rookie cop in Raccoon City, a couple days before the bombs fell."
He takes a deep breath, taking a moment to decide how much detail to share here before continuing.
"She was posing as an FBI agent investigating the outbreak. Convinced me to retrieve a sample of the G-Virus for her as 'evidence', when the plan was really to sell it on the black market. The way things went... I don't know if she's to blame for it getting out, in the end, but it was her original mission."
The name had crossed Luis' radar, after he left Umbrella. In the way that American news permeated the global culture, the news that the American president had launched a nuclear strike on one of his own cities and immediately resigned had been inescapable.
Well, that explained why Leon had reacted with such hostility at first.
He takes out his lighter and starts to spin it between his fingers, not knowing what to say for a moment.
"She helped me gather the ingredients to make the suppressant. She refused to let me give up when the doses I had hidden were destroyed."
He looks up at Leon.
"While we're stuck here, I think maybe we just have to believe that people can change."
Leon just nods, looking subdued and thoughtful. He's quiet for a moment before he responds.
People can change, right?
"Yeah, you're right," he says, sighing again. Ada had scoffed pretty hard at the idea that he'd changed, at least, but had dodged the question on her own end by exiting stage up before he could press her on it. "There's no point in worrying about it right now, anyway. Not unless we run into any plagas scuttling around here."
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nothingbadeverhappensto) wrote2025-05-01 11:19 am
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a friend?) seeming to rise from certain death, or even the second time within the past while weirdly enough, but…With Krauser and Ada, things had been different. More complicated, in a way that made things almost easier, in a way.
And so the two of them play a stupid cat and mouse game of staring at each other and not saying anything about it, until Luis breaks the silence first.
“Yeah. We both did. They were just about to wrap up the last round of testing to make sure we didn’t bring home any more unwanted guests -“ he taps his chest, just over the new scar on his sternum, for emphasis - “when I woke up here. We’re in the clear.”
Thanks to you. The sentiment catches in his throat, harder to express than it should be. Leon glances away, folding his arms over his chest.
“She… asked about you, first thing when I found her,” is what he manages to say instead. It feels important to tell him. To let him know that Ashley remembered him too.
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He smiles fondly, swallows to hide the way his throat goes tight when Leon mentions that Ashley asked about him.
"I'm sorry to have disappointed her," he says, around all the other things he could say. "...But I'm glad. That both of you are alright."
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It's a joke, but a heavy one, and one that comes with the question: how are you not? He doesn't expect Luis to answer - he'd seemed just as surprised as Leon was, if not more - but he watches him carefully all the same, just in case there is some hidden insight he's picked up since then.
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"Perhaps it's best you thought I was," he says, maybe the first thing he's said that wasn't layered. "I was already gone, makes it easier to leave me behind, eh." Crucially, there isn't a trace of bitterness in his voice. It would have been a tough call - but Luis couldn't have faulted him for making it.
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He doesn't say anything about that, though. He can't.
"Yeah. But you're here now, and - I don't know if you can tell, but the wound's already scarred over. While all of mine are still stitched up and healing." He takes a deep breath. "It doesn't make sense. But... Aqua - he looked like someone had grabbed him out of the ocean and somehow dumped him in here before he could blink, and someone else I was talking to said last he checked the year was 2018, and portals to other dimensions had been opening up all over the place for three years. I don't think he was trying to fuck with me, either. Something's very wrong here, and I can't get my head around it."
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"I think for now we keep an open mind." He leans back thoughtfully, able to mostly mask the grimace as a twinge of pain runs down his spine.
"Sorry to say, Sancho, but I don't think we'll be shooting our way out of this one."
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Leon watches with a twinge of sympathy as Luis sits back - anybody else might miss it, but Leon's seen enough people try to hide how much injuries are bothering them (and done the same himself) to recognize it on sight. There's not much he can do about it right now, though.
"Damn. That's most of what I'm good for. You got any ideas in that big brain of yours?"
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But he's a grown man who only pretends to believe in fairy tales, so he has to rein it in.
"Mm... Not enough data for a hypothesis, I'm afraid." They've only been here a couple hours, after all. But the look on his face is more akin to someone being presented with a new puzzle to solve, than concern.
"Right now, I think we try and find out more about these rules, and whoever gave them to us."
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"Yeah. Seems like we've got some exploring to do, and talking to people. Another guy I was talking to said it seemed like a teenager wrote them down, but there's, uh. Kind of a lot of those here? I mean, look."
He sounds deeply concerned about this as he flips open his journal to the spread of profiles, holding it out so both of them can see.
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"Well, at least we're not the oldest, eh?" he quips, but he doesn't sound super jazzed about the median age either.
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He thinks back on what he's been told, trying to figure out what's important enough to tell Luis and what's probably not relevant.
"Light said he's been through something like this before - kidnapped and locked up with a bunch of other people, forced to do puzzles to escape - but that he didn't think it was the same people this time around. Yoojin's the one from the future, and says there's pocket dimensions that can be sorta like this, but not quite. Otto said he's not used to magic existing either, but one day he got pulled into another universe by a wizard." He finishes rattling all that off, pauses to consider if there's anything he missed, and says, "That's about all I've managed to get out of anyone so far."
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He leans his elbows on his thighs and folds his hands together, trying to hide the pain again as the movement pulls at the scar on his back.
"What about the rest of the house? Anything interesting?" Given Leon's penchant for looting every square inch of any area he finds himself in, he guesses he's been thorough.
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(And for what it's worth, he's been keeping his paranoid magpie instincts in check just fine so far. He didn't even steal the keys off the pantry door or anything!)
"Couple of things. The windows are all... mismatched. Each one looks out over completely different scenery, even the ones right next to each other. And I swear the hallways change shape whenever I'm not looking. The doors and windows are unbreakable, too, at least with any tools we have handy. Can't even scratch the glass." He sighs. "Probably would've written off the magic stuff as people trying to fuck with me if not for all that. If there's a scientific explanation for all of that, it's more advanced than anything I'm aware of."
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"There's probably some explanation, but it would either be invented by the owner, or require a lot of funding. The windows could be screens, covered with panes of extremely hard crystal. Doors and windowframes can be reinforced from the other side, or even fake..."
He takes out his lighter and begins to fidget with it.
"But again, that kind of thing is very expensive."
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Leon pauses, then adds;
“Not that it’d be the first murder mansion in the world, or even in the last six years, but if this is someone collecting combat data for their new weapons then they’re putting a lot of effort into some weird places.”
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"Maybe both."
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He wrinkles his nose, clearly not pleased about this line of thought even though he was the one insisting on it.
"Ugh. That reminds me, though. For what it's worth - I did manage to kill Saddler, and I guess he was basically some kind of shitty wizard. Had to go through him to get Ashley out."
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"He liked to dress like one, certainly. And what he lacked in personality, he made up for in mind control parasites."
He begins flipping his lighter, just basic spins.
"But I'm glad you took him out."
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"Question for you, though. Ada - she said she had a deal with you. Something to do with the amber. Do you know what she was planning on doing with it?"
He'd assumed, if Luis was in on it, that it couldn't have been anything too fucked up. But he'd like to get some confirmation of that, if possible.
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"Ah," he says, eloquently.
"When we made our arrangement, I was at a very low point... I was only trying to do the same thing I did at Umbrella - and that is, run. Save my own skin, you know?"
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Well, that doesn't feel great to hear. Leon goes a little bit pale as the implications of their respective decisions hit him. He wants to be mad about it. A part of him feels like he should be mad at Luis, and he kind of is, but mostly he just feels stupid for having trusted Ada on so little evidence that she'd make the right decision this time around. Fuck. What was he thinking? That Luis was a better judge of character than he was?
"Uh. Thanks for being honest, I guess. Now it's up to her what happens next."
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But he liked Ada. And he liked to think that by the end he'd managed to grow on her a little, too. He remembers calling her, but barely remembers what he said. It had been hard to speak - and he'd been trying to get to where Leon was fighting the man who stabbed him.
"I did get the sense that you two were acquainted, but as you can imagine she is not the most forthcoming with details."
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He takes a deep breath, taking a moment to decide how much detail to share here before continuing.
"She was posing as an FBI agent investigating the outbreak. Convinced me to retrieve a sample of the G-Virus for her as 'evidence', when the plan was really to sell it on the black market. The way things went... I don't know if she's to blame for it getting out, in the end, but it was her original mission."
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Well, that explained why Leon had reacted with such hostility at first.
He takes out his lighter and starts to spin it between his fingers, not knowing what to say for a moment.
"She helped me gather the ingredients to make the suppressant. She refused to let me give up when the doses I had hidden were destroyed."
He looks up at Leon.
"While we're stuck here, I think maybe we just have to believe that people can change."
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People can change, right?
"Yeah, you're right," he says, sighing again. Ada had scoffed pretty hard at the idea that he'd changed, at least, but had dodged the question on her own end by exiting stage up before he could press her on it. "There's no point in worrying about it right now, anyway. Not unless we run into any plagas scuttling around here."