Title: Storytime
Fandom: Resident Evil (movies)
Rating: G
Length: 779
Content notes: Minor violence/gore?
Author notes: For fan_flashworks Challenge #22, "Cliche". My chosen cliche is 'telling stories around a fire' haha :P Also fits the prompt 'fire' at both residentevilfic and hc_bingo ; last sentence is courtesy of a prompt at writerverse . Major spoilers for Resident Evil: Retribution.
Summary: Alice, Luther and Barry gather around the fire to hear exactly how Leon became leader of the resistance.



It’s late in the day when they decide to swap stories. Late in the game. It was bound to happen eventually; a bunch of no-good clannish outlaws can’t hope to go far without a confession or two.

They sit by the fire. Alice goes first, naturally. She has Becky leaning against her shoulder and she doesn’t know where to start, but she goes with her gut instinct because it’s got her this far. She starts with Rain (the first Rain, not her virulent hybrid archetype) and Matt and the Hive. They’re all eager to hear how the outbreak really happened, and Alice only leaves a few details out (she can’t have them knowing about her faux-marriage with Spence, not yet). She tells them about Raccoon City, and it still tastes as bitter on her tongue as before.

“I was there,” said Leon, “I left before things got gruesome.”

Alice nods. She wonders if Leon would have done things differently. She skims over the desert, over Carlos. It’s those kind of stories that are best left until Becky is asleep. Luther starts to chip in when Alice gets to the Chris-and-Claire part of her story, and she wraps it up no time.

“That it?” Laughs Barry. He’s in awe that the story of the end of the world could be told in a matter of minutes. For Alice it’s all still too close to the skin, unprocessed and sitting in the forefront of her brain, ready to be used as ammo. It’s all still just knives and punches and shotgun shells.

“Yeah,” says Alice, “that’s it.”

Leon sees the way she looks down at Becky, who is asleep now, and clears his throat. “Um. My turn?”

“At last, soldier boy,” Luther looks up, “tells us exactly how you came to be leading the resistance.”

“Like I said, I was in Raccoon City. Before things got crazy. I got out before –” he looks at Alice sharply. She sees blood and graveyards and Angela’s box of magicure, she sees Jill and Carlos in stark contrast, she sees Nemesis, and has to remind herself that she’s seeing Matt.

“That’s right,” she says, “S.T.A.R.S.” She remembers the thick stitched lips of Nemesis’ face, the way they’d torn it around his teeth, stapled him back together and sent him out to kill heroes.

Leon nods. “We were only just beginning to suspect that Umbrella was up to something. We weren’t even sure of how far into the company it went. Our work got us suspended, and suddenly there wasn’t really a reason to stick around. Jill wouldn’t leave, said we still had a duty to the citizens, but I got a lead in Europe and I left. Five days later, I saw the news reports. Five days.”

Alice wants to tell him to carry on, to never stop talking; he’s breathing meaning into everything that happened. Alice is afraid to tell him how much hope he’s given her – the very fact that the resistance exists gives her hope enough to go on.

“After Europe, I came to Moscow. Got myself on the underground network – gangs, thieves, mercenaries, you can imagine the type – and started working from the bottom up. I knew there had to be something. I didn’t know if Jill was alive, I thought maybe she’d been killed.” She hears his unspoken final words I wish she had. She sees the self-hatred creep in, the sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach that he could even think such a thing.

But she gets it. It’s blood and tears and unfair justice, and she gets it. She’s also failed Jill, and she’s failed Matt, and Rain, and she hopes to god she hasn’t failed Becky.

Leon grits his teeth, shudders a little in the Moscow chill. “I figured that if Jill had seen something worth fighting for, then…” And that’s where he stops, throws a rock into the fire and leans back on his elbows, staring at the sky. He’s come up against a brick wall and it’s made of regrets and Jill and five days too late.

She nods, and smiles, to let him know that she understands how he can’t go on. He’s a soldier, a marksman, he’s good with politics, with this winning-the-war-bravado; his bleeding heart just gets in the way.

There’s a moment of silence, and then Luther busies himself with his bag and Barry turns away to go check the perimeter, and Alice and Leon stare at one another with Becky between them. She knows there’s more to his story. There always is when the world ends. She’ll hear it one day, but in that moment, it’s enough.