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Leon S. Kennedy must be sick in the head.
There is no other logical explanation for the state of this room, or the state of the man crouching within it. The floor is a graveyard of his own making. Stiff, unwashed denim and discarded flannel shirts are piled into small mountains near the closet, smelling faintly of stale sweat and gunpowder. Sticky porcelain plates stacked three high on the dresser host colonies of green mold, while paper takeout cartons, half-collapsed and leaking dried grease, litter the perimeter of his bed. Then there are the bottles. Clear glass, brown glass, green glass, all empty, rolling against one another with a dull clink whenever the floorboards shift.
He hasn't opened the window in months. The glass pane is coated in a thick film of city grime on the outside and condensation on the inside, trapping a heavy, sour air rotting. Right there, glinting next to a half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon, rests his DSO-issued loaded pistol.
The room is dark save for the cool, pale light of the moon cutting through the unwashed window, casting a silver sheen over the large pad of heavy grain paper resting on his knees.
Leon’s hand is trembling. It is a violent, erratic shudder that starts deep in his shoulder blade, travels down the rigid muscles of his forearm, and ends at his fingertips. Every time he tries to press the charcoal to the paper, his fingers twitch, leaving erratic, jagged black marks instead of the smooth contour he desires. He squeezes his eyes shut, swallowing the dry lump in his throat, trying to force the tremors down through sheer willpower.
It doesn't work.
The alcohol is wearing off, or perhaps it is taking over, he can’t tell anymore. He hasn't been truly sober in weeks, the days blended together into a gray smudge of waking up, drinking until the memories blur, and grabbing a new piece of charcoal.
And Leon...Leon needs to draw. If he does not draw her now, she will vanish completely. The alcohol that numbs his mind is also eating away at his memory, dissolving the sharp angles of her jaw, the specific slope of her nose, and the way her eyes narrow when listening intently.
And Leon...Leon is terrified of waking up to a mind that is a blank canvas, devoid of her image. So, despite the shaking, despite the madness creeping into the corners of his vision, he forces the charcoal against the page.
To draw is to engage in a form of ancient, beautiful sickness. Human history is defined by this specific insanity. Thousands of years ago, in caverns buried deep beneath the earth where the sun never shone, primitive men dragged burnt sticks across rough stone walls just to prove they existed, to capture the spirits of beasts they both feared and worshiped. They were the first to realize that to capture an image is to possess a piece of the soul.
As the centuries went on, that primal urge curdled into something far more dangerous, something laced with greed and an insatiable hunger. The Renaissance masters did not merely paint; they dissected. They sneaked into morgues in the dead of the night, slicing through pale flesh, peeling back muscle layers, and scraping bones just to understand how a wrist bends, how a tendon pulls. They violated the sanctity of the dead just to mimic life on a piece of wood or canvas. That is the fundamental greed of the artist, an absolute refusal to let reality exist on its own terms. The artist looks at a world created by a higher power and decides it is insufficient. They want to tear it apart and rebuild it with their own hands.
Art is, at its core, a desperate, blasphemous attempt to play God. When a sculptor takes a block of cold marble and chips away at it until it takes the form of a weeping woman, he is breathing life into stone. He is forcing an inanimate object to mimic the deepest complexities of human emotion. When a painter mixes pigments made from crushed beetles, lapis lazuli, and toxic lead, they are creating a universe out of nothingness. They command light, they dictate form, and they decide who lives forever and who fades into oblivion.
It is an act of supreme arrogance.
And Leon...Leon feels that arrogance now, heavy and intoxicating, a counterweight to the liquor in his veins. He wants to be the deity of this small, darkened room. He wants to command her image to appear before him, to bind her to this paper so she can never truly leave him behind.
The history of art is a chronicle of madness. Think of the painters who went blind staring into the sun to capture its true essence, or those who swallowed mercury and lead pigment until their minds dissolved into paranoia and delirium. Think of the madness that drove men to paint the ceilings of grand cathedrals until their spines deformed and their eyes wept blood. They did it because the urge to create is a parasite.Once it takes root in the brain, it devours everything else. It eats away at sanity, comfort, and peace until nothing remains but the absolute necessity of the stroke.
Leon feels that parasite chewing at his own mind right now.
His fingers are stained black to the knuckles, the dust clogging his pores, settling beneath his fingernails like dirt from a fresh grave. He does not care. He welcomes the grime if it means he can stop the erosion of his mind.
His focus narrows entirely onto the human form. The human body is the ultimate masterpiece, an incredibly intricate machine of flesh, bone, and blood, yet it is so fragile, so easily broken. Artists throughout antiquity recognized this duality. They spent lifetimes trying to map the geography of the torso, the architecture of the spine, the precise way light pools in the sunken above a collarbone. They sought the divine proportion, the golden ratio, believing that within the measurements of limbs and torsos lay the secret code of the cosmos.
Leon drags the charcoal downward, mapping out a long, unbroken curve. He does not need a model; the memory is seared into the skin of his palms, even if his brain is struggling to hold onto the visual details. He closes his eyes for a second, the charcoal hovering millimeters above the paper, and he can almost feel her body beneath his again.
Ada.
He remembers the weight of her breast in his hand, the perfect, soft roundness of it, the tip hardening against his palm as the temperature in the room rose. He remembers the curve of her hip, a sharp, elegant line that tapered into a waist he could span with his hands.
When they were together, the skin was hot, damp with exertion, smelling of expensive perfume and her favorite cigarette. He remembers the way her ribs would expand against his chest when she gasped, a sudden, sharp intake of air that felt like life itself breaking through a frozen surface. He remembers the musculature of her thighs, strong and taut, gripping him.
Ada.
To draw a body from memory is to relive the touch, but it is also an act of theft. He is taking her physical essence, the memory of her most vulnerable state, and pinning it down like a collector preserving a specimen.
Ada.
Butterflies come to his mind then. Not the colorful, vibrant creatures that flutter through open meadows under the summer sun, but the concept of them. A butterfly is a creature defined by a violent transformation, a complete dissolution of its old self inside a dark chrysalis until it emerges as something entirely different, something beautiful but fleeting. But more than that, he thinks of the collectors.
The men who chase these delicate creatures with nets, capture them, and drive a silver pin straight through their thorax, securing them to a velvet-lined board inside a glass case. The butterfly is preserved perfectly forever, its colors never fading, its wings spread wide for eternity, but it is dead. It will never fly again. It has been stripped of its agency so that someone can look at it and admire its beauty at leisure.
He is disgustingly and pitifully no better than them.
Leon is driving a charcoal pin through her memory. He wants to capture the dangerous, elusive creature that flits in and out of his life, leaving nothing but devastation in her wake. He wants to pin her down so she cannot escape him, even if it is only on a sheet of medium-grain paper.
The charcoal snaps under the sudden, aggressive pressure of his hand. A sharp black fragment flies off, bouncing against the bottle of bourbon before settling into the carpet. Leon doesn't blink. He uses the jagged, broken edge of the piece remaining in his hand to darken the lines around her eyes. He is trying to capture her expression, but not the smug, confident smirk she usually wears. He wants to draw her in a state of euphoria.
Ada.
It is a terrible, selfish desire, but it is the only way to ensure the memory stays sharp. Euphoria strips away the performance. At the brink of ecstasy, a person's eyes are widen, the pupils dilate until they are deep pools of ink, and the fine muscles around the mouth twitch with vulnerability. If he can draw her bliss, he can capture the absolute truth of her. He wants to see her looking out from the paper not as an enigma, but as a human being who can be hurt, who can be held, who can feel the same terrifying gravity that is currently pulling him down into the dirt.
Ada.
He works with a frantic, feverish energy now. The madness of the art has him completely in its grip. The greed takes over. He wants more than just her shape; he wants her breath, he wants her heat, he wants the specific way her skin felt when it was pressed against his. He uses his thumb to smudge the charcoal, softening the transition from the deep darkness of the background to the silver-lit contour of her shoulder. The friction burns his skin, the paper acting like sandpaper against his flesh, but the pain is grounding. It tells him he is still alive, even if he is living in a tomb of unwashed clothes and empty liquor bottles.
Ada.
He has done it. He has played God in the dark. He has taken the fragmented, alcohol-soaked ruins of his memory and reconstructed a woman out of dust and paper. She is there, trapped in the grain, her naked body twisting away from the dark, her face caught in a permanent, beautiful state of euphoric release, looking back at him through the silver light.
But as the euphoria of creation begins to wane, the cold reality of the room crashes back into his chest. The smell of the old takeout is still there. The mountain of unwashed clothes is still there. The loaded gun is still next to the bottle, an option that never truly goes away. He looks down at his hands, completely blackened by the medium, looking less like the hands of a man and more like the charred claws of something that crawled out of a furnace.
He has preserved her, yes. He has built a monument to his own obsession in the middle of a wasteland. But as he looks at the drawing, he realizes the grand tragedy of the artist. No matter how perfectly he draws her, no matter how much of his own sanity he pours into the paper, the page remains cold to the touch. The paper does not warm up under his hand. The drawn lips do not part to say his name. The breast he carefully shaded does not rise and fall with a heartbeat.
He is still alone in the dark, surrounded by the debris of his life. He closes the pad slowly, the heavy paper coming together with a soft sigh, hiding her face, hiding her, leaving him once more with nothing.
Helena took two steps closer, her brow furrowing. "Look at this," she murmured.
Leon didn't move for several seconds. Then, with a slow, deliberate turn of his head, he shifted his gaze to where she was standing. He didn't walk over immediately. He let the space stretch between them until the distance felt deliberate, a physical manifestation of his refusal to engage. When he finally joined her, his footsteps were heavy, devoid of any attempt to be light or accommodating.
The painting was an oil on canvas, the brushstrokes thick, violent, and desperate. It depicted an old man, his body bent nearly double in a wooden chair, his face buried entirely in his clenched fists. He wore a simple blue smock and heavy boots, his elbows resting on his knees as if the very air in the room was crushing his spine. The background was a stark, featureless space of washed-out oranges and sickly greens, offering no comfort, no escape, and no context other than the raw, naked reality of an existential collapse.
"Van Gogh," Helena read from the small brass plaque beneath the frame. "At Eternity's Gate." She stared at the old man's hands, the way the paint seemed to pile up around his knuckles like dried salt. "It’s devastating. He looks like he’s just... given up. Like there’s nothing left inside him to fight with."
"He hasn't given up," Leon said.
The words came out before he could stop them, his voice dropping into a lower, gravelly register that caught Helena by surprise. It was the first time all evening his tone had carried any genuine color, even if that color was the dark, bruised hue of an old scar.
Helena glanced at him, noting the way his blue eyes had narrowed, tracking the specific curve of the old man’s back. "What do you mean? He’s weeping into his hands."
"It’s about endurance," Leon stated, his gaze locked onto the canvas. "It’s not about dying. It’s about the terrifying realization that you have to keep living even when the infrastructure of everything you loved has been burned down to the ground. The grief isn't a white flag. It’s the friction of staying alive."
If Ada were standing here right now, Leon thought, she wouldn't have looked at the old man first. She would have looked at the space around him. She would have dismantled the painting within three seconds, her mind working through the historical background, the psychological state of the artist during his stay in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and the precise philosophical implications of the title.
Ada Wong did not just look at art; she dissected it with a surgical precision that made Leon feel like a child holding a crayon. She possessed an intricate, comprehensive library of knowledge regarding nineteenth-century European literature and the post-impressionist movement, a facet of her identity she wore as casually as a silk scarf but used as effectively as a firearm.
He remembered a rainy night in a motel in Prague years ago. There had been an old, leather-bound volume of Arthur Schopenhauer’s essays on the desk, left behind by some previous occupant. Leon had been cleaning the firing pin of his Matilda, while Ada had picked up the book, flipping through the yellowed pages with her slender, manicured fingers.
She had started talking about the concept of the representation of the world as will. She had explained to him how Van Gogh’s later works weren't merely snapshots of madness, but a direct, visual translation of that philosophical struggle. She had told him that Van Gogh was attempting to paint the thing behind the thing, the raw, pulsing energy of existence that most people spent their entire lives ignoring because it was too bright, too terrifying to look at directly.
Ada would have told Helena that At Eternity's Gate was based on an early lithograph the artist had done during his time in The Hague, a study of a pensioner named Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland. She would have detailed how the repetition of the motif over years wasn't an accident of convenience, but an obsession with the universality of human suffering. She had this way of speaking about historical figures as if she had shared a drink with them in a dim tavern the night before, understanding their motives, their failures, and their secret artistic compromises.
Leon could almost hear her voice in his ear now, sharp and mocking yet completely brilliant, explaining the theological undertones of the piece. She would have pointed out that Van Gogh was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during that period of his life, drawing on the themes of an enduring soul that survives the degradation of the physical body. She would have leaned against the gallery railing, her red dress a stark contrast to the muted tones of the artwork, and she would have told him that the old man wasn't crying because he was weak; he was crying because he was looking into the abyss of eternity and realizing that man is condemned to be free, condemned to carry his own history like a sack of wet stones.
Her mind was a vast, labyrinthine network of literary references. She could quote Cristina Rossetti or Baudelaire in the same breath she used to negotiate the price of a bio-weapon on the black market. Leon had once heard her banter with a corrupt French diplomat about the structure of Gustave Flaubert’s sentences, arguing that the true tragedy of Madame Bovary wasn't her death, but the absolute mediocrity of her surroundings. The diplomat had been enchanted, completely unaware that while Ada was analyzing the syntax of nineteenth-century realism, her left hand was under the table, downloading the encrypted launch codes from his personal tablet.
She used her education as armor and an instrument. She understood that men in power were intimidated by brute force but entirely disarmed by a woman who could deconstruct their favorite philosophical texts while looking down at them through the sights of a crossbow. She had explained to Leon once, during a tense standoff in an abandoned church in Spain, that her preference for classical art was rooted in its permanence. Everything else in their line of work was temporary, human flesh dissolved by acid, cities wiped off the map by thermobaric strikes, political regimes collapsing overnight. But a well-constructed argument, a perfect line of prose, or a masterfully applied stroke of oil paint stayed. It outlived the corruption. It outlived the agencies that bought and sold human lives.
He watched the painting now, through the filter of her mind. He saw the blue of the smock not just as a color choice, but as the traditional garb of the working class that Van Gogh revered, an artistic declaration of solidarity with the broken and the forgotten. Ada had taught him to look for those details, to see the politics hidden in the brushwork, the philosophy masked by the aesthetic. She was well-versed in the theories of the Frankfurt School, once spending twenty minutes explaining the concept of the culture industry to him while they were hiding in a drainage pipe beneath a corporate facility in Tokyo. He hadn't understood half of the terminology she used, but he had understood the sharp, bright intensity in her eyes, the way her intellect burned through the grime of their circumstances like a flare.
She loved the complexity of things. She despised simple answers and binary moralities, which was why she found the standard government briefs he lived by so entirely tedious. To Ada, the world wasn't a map of good and evil; it was a complex literary text that required constant interpretation, full of subtext, unreliable narrators, and tragic irony. And she was the ultimate critic, hovering above the narrative, rewriting the pages to suit her own mysterious conclusions.
A sudden, sharp metallic click from the corridor to the right snapped Leon out of his thoughts.
Helena moved first, she drew her weapon in a single, fluid motion, her body pivoting to cover the entrance to the smaller study connected to the gallery. The door was a heavy slab of dark walnut, and it was swinging open with a slow, deliberate creak.
"Step back," Helena commanded, her voice dropping into her official agent tone, her sights aligned with the widening gap of the doorway.
Leon didn't draw his gun. He stood perfectly still, his eyes narrowing as a familiar scent drifted through the gap before the person even materialized, the distinct, delicate fragrance of expensive night-blooming jasmine.
Ada Wong stepped into the room.
She was wearing a dark crimson coat that caught the light of the chandeliers, her dark hair perfectly styled, framing her face with that characteristic asymmetry. Her expression was neutral, but her dark eyes were alight with an amusement that was entirely directed at Leon.
She looked nothing like the woman in his drawing pad.
Ada.
"You really should watch your flanks, Leon," she said, her voice smooth and deliberate, cutting through the tension of the room like a silver blade. She didn't look at Helena’s gun at all; she kept her eyes directly at him. "How disappointing for a man so sharp."
Helena’s muscles remained locked for a split second, her eyes darting between Leon’s completely unbothered posture and Ada’s relaxed stance. Then, recognizing the specific nature of the intrusion, Helena lowered her weapon with a sharp, controlled motion, her thumb clicking the safety back into place.
"The BSAA and the DSO are already moving the perimeters," Helena said quickly, her voice urgent as she stepped past Leon to close the heavy walnut door behind them, sealing the three of them into the gallery space. "The whole block is about to go into lockdown. If you're here for the ledger, you're looking in the wrong wing."
Ada turned her head slightly, giving Helena a brief, approving nod that felt entirely condescending yet entirely earned. "Always so efficient, Helena. But I’ve already taken care of the ledger. The broker was surprisingly cooperative once he realized his life expectancy had dropped to double digits."
She turned back to Leon, taking two deliberate steps toward him. The cold, distant air he had maintained all evening didn't shatter, but it shifted, turning into a defensive crust against the sheer gravity of her presence.
"You look tired, Leon," Ada murmured, stopping just outside his personal space. She reached up, her gloved fingers hovering an inch away from his jawline, not quite touching the rough skin but making the gesture feel incredibly intimate nonetheless. "You need to take care of yourself. This assignment is a mess, even by your standards."
Leon didn't flinch. He didn't move away from her hand. "I'm doing my job, Ada."
A small, knowing smile touched the corners of her lips, something private and fleeting. "Of course you are. Just remember to stay alert. I’d hate to see anything happen to my pretty boy."
Leon’s jaw tightened, a faint flush of color rising beneath his tan, though his expression remained as hard as marble. "Ada—"
Before he could finish the sentence, before Helena could even ask how she planned to exit the secured sector, Ada stepped backward with a graceful, backward stride that looked almost like a dance move. She backed right up against the low stone balustrade of the open balcony that looked out over the darkened estate grounds.
"See you around, Leon," she said.
She flashed them one last, bright smile, and then, with a seamless, backward tilt of her torso, she let herself drop over the edge of the balcony.
"Ada!" Leon snapped, his cold demeanor instantly evaporating as he sprinted across the parquet floor, his heavy boots slamming against the wood.
Helena was right behind him, her hands gripping the cold stone of the balustrade as they both leaned over the edge, looking down into the darkness of the Moreau gardens twenty feet below.
The courtyard was completely empty. There was no sound of a body hitting the hedges, no rustle of leaves, no footsteps sprinting across the gravel paths. The manicured lawns stretched out beneath the moonlight, perfectly still, perfectly vacant. The wind stirred the tops of the cypress trees, but other than that, the courtyard held no trace of her escape. She was simply gone, leaving nothing behind but the faint, fading scent of jasmine lingering in the night air.
Leon stared down at the empty gravel for a long moment, his hands gripping the stone until his knuckles turned white.
Ada.
A narrow, windowless vault that smells of damp plaster, cheap spearmint mouthwash, and old rust. The floor tiles are a sickly, discolored white, cracked in spiderweb patterns near the base of the toilet where the cold water line constantly leaks a slow, dripping into a plastic bucket. The grout has turned a bruised, charcoal gray from months of neglected moisture.
Above the porcelain sink, which is permanently stained with the copper-brown rings of dried shaving cream and hard water, hangs a cheap, frameless mirror. Its silver backing is peeling away at the corners like rotting skin, leaving dark, blind spots in the reflection.
A rusted metal medicine cabinet hung slightly askew on its hinges by the wall on the left, containing three expired bottles of prescription pain relievers, a half-used roll of sterile gauze, and a plastic container of heavy-duty antiseptic that smelled distinctly of alcohol and burnt pine. The tub itself was a heavy, cast-iron beast with clawed feet, its white enamel scratched and worn down to the grey metal beneath where his combat boots had scuffed the surface during a dozen rushed, midnight cleanups. The solitary, unshaded halogen bulb dangles from a frayed cord in the center of the ceiling, casting a harsh, yellow glare that flickers whenever the tenants upstairs run their washing machine. The shower curtain, a translucent sheet of cheap plastic, is coated in a thin, slimy layer of orange soap scum along the bottom hem. The only sign of life is a single, stiff towel slung over the towel rack, stiff from salt and old sweat, smelling faintly of the harbor. Leon flipped the switch, his eyes adjusting instantly to the brutal illumination of the fluorescent tube.
He didn't take off his jacket. He didn't loosen the silk tie that sat like a noose around his throat. He simply walked over to the tub, leaned over the side, and turned both brass taps on to their full capacity.
The water rushed out in a fierce, steaming torrent, splashing against the old porcelain before settling into a deep, rising pool. It was perfectly clear, free of salt or oils, a pure, sterile volume that grew higher and higher until it neared the brass overflow valve.
Leon stood up, his joints popping in the small room. Without a single glance toward the mirror, without removing his leather holster, his shoes, or his dark formal jacket, he stepped over the high edge of the tub.
The fabric of his trousers ballooned for a second before the heavy, hot water claimed them, pinning the cloth against his thighs. He sat down, the water rising past his waist, soaking through his dress shirt, the heat blooming across his skin like a sudden fever. He drew his knees up slightly, letting the water submerge his chest, his shoulders, until it reached his collarbone.
The suit jacket grew heavy, waterlogged and dark, dragging him down into the basin with the physical presence of a wet blanket.
Then, with a slow, deliberate tilt of his head, Leon let himself slide backward, lowering his skull beneath the surface.
The world above died instantly.
And Leon...Leon kept his eyes wide open.
Through the clear, shimmering medium, the harsh light overhead was fractured into moving ribbons of silver and grey. He stared up through the liquid ceiling, watching the distorted lines of his own hands floating near his chest. But more than that, he looked at what the water revealed. In the reflection of the tub’s surface from beneath, and in the sheer, unblinking clarity of the immersion, he could see the unmistakable erosion of his own flesh.
The water didn't lie.
The water showed the skin around his knuckles, scarred and thickened by years. It showed the heavy, deep set of his eyes, the faint lines spreading across his temples like fractures in ice. The beauty of his youth was fading, being systematically eaten away by the friction of his existence. He was thirty-something now, but underwater, looking at the structural fatigue of his own frame, he felt ninety. The boy was dead, buried beneath layers of scar tissue, viral exposure, and the terrible, accumulating cost of government service.
And yet, as his lungs began to tighten with the first, faint demands for oxygen, his mind drifted back to the red dress. Back to her.
Ada.
Ada didn't fade. That was the terrifying, miraculous thing about her. The world could burn, cities could turn to ash, and Ada would still emerge from the wreckage with her hair perfectly styled and her skin looking like silk.
He closed his eyes under the water, letting the memory of her replace the sterile clarity of the tub. He remembered every secret rendezvous. He remembered every mornings that burned his soul with dread. He had reached out then, his hand rough, calloused, and stained with the grease, and he had touched her cheek.
The contrast had been almost painful. His palm, hardened by years had felt like sandpaper against the impossible softness of her skin. She had felt delicate, like a porcelain figure that should have shattered under the slightest pressure, yet he knew she was more lethal than any viral strain he had ever hunted. Her skin had been cool, smooth, smelling of that signature jasmine, a texture that seemed entirely removed from the dirt and the blood of the world they lived in. It was a softness that didn't belong in his life, a luxury he couldn't afford to keep but couldn't force himself to forget. Even now, with his body submerged in a suit that was rapidly growing cold, he could feel the ghost of that texture against his thumb, a teasing, phantom sensation that always slipped through his fingers the moment he tried to hold onto it.
He broke the surface with a sudden, violent heave, his mouth opening as he sucked the hot, damp air of the bathroom back into his lungs. The water cascaded off his hair, running down his face in thick, heavy streams that tasted of nothing at all. He sat up, his soaked jacket dripping heavily against the sides of the tub, the clear water around him remaining undisturbed, completely free of the grime he felt inside.
He leaned his head back against the cold iron rim of the tub, staring up at the ceiling.
"The tragedy of art," he whispered to the empty room, his voice hoarse, scraping against the tiled walls.
He understood it now. He understood what Ada had been trying to tell him through all her philosophical posturing and her late-night lectures on Van Gogh and Flaubert.
The tragedy of art wasn't that it depicted sadness or that the artists died in poverty. The tragedy was its permanence in the face of human decay. That painting, At Eternity's Gate and his sketch of her, would exist long after Leon’s heart stopped beating. The old man in the blue smock would remain frozen in his grief, perfectly preserved, beautiful in his agony, for hundreds of years. The brushstrokes would keep their shape; the oil would keep its color just like how his art of hers tucked away in his pile of filth.
But humans? Humans broke. They aged. They watched the softness of the people they loved slip away into the dark, leaving behind only the rough, scarred remnants of a life spent surviving. Art was a cruel joke played by the dead on the living, a reminder that something could be beautiful and lasting while the flesh that created it, and the flesh that protected it, was destined to rot.
Ada understood that. She had aligned herself with the art. She had made herself a myth, a recurring motif in his life that never degraded, never grew old, and never stayed long enough to be ruined by the reality of the morning light. She was the painting on the wall, and he was just the old man in the chair, burying his face in his hands, waiting for the eternity that would never look back.
Leon closed his eyes again, the water in the tub slowly losing its heat, turning cold against his skin, but he didn't move. He just sat there in his ruined suit, listening to the drip of the sink, counting the seconds until the next assignment called him back.
Ada.