project: eden | leon kennedy

▪︎ Chapter 1 ▪︎

When Thea was a little girl, everything seemed perfect. Until one day, everything collapsed around her.

When she was little, she saw her parents as the perfect adults; successful and loving people. She wanted to be like them: either a scientist like her mother or an agent like her father. But when she got into high school she learned that she hated everything that had any business with Chemistry, it made her cry more than boys did, so she decided the cop life was it.

Thea was always the best. She was the prettiest girl in her class, the smartest girl in her year, and she took as many AP classes as she could, never even getting a B, just straight A's. She put her whole heart and soul into everything she did, trying her absolute best to be the only thing she wanted to be: perfect. She even got the honors of telling the speech at her graduation, all of her teachers smiling from ear to ear at how proud they were of her. Everybody thought she was the perfect girl.

But her parents didn't view her as perfect. They saw her as an opportunity to fulfill their needs. That was her first heartbreak.

Her father at least tried to hide the fact that he wanted so much more out of her than a cop. Her mother, on the other hand... She wasn't happy about the fact she wasn't going to be a scientist like her.

Thea didn't have many friends despite being nice and warm to most people. She just didn't have the time to maintain a good friendship, all she had was a good relationship with most people. But that was enough for her for most of her life, until she got into college. There, she experienced how lonely she was in her entire life. It made her miserable. And while in high school everybody viewed her as the popular but cool girl, in college nobody viewed her more than a pretty face. And that caused her second heartbreak.

On one particularly bad week, she let her grades slip. She was still on top of her classes, she just wasn't perfect. And some of her professors commented on it.

"I noticed how you got a lower grade on your last assignment. Did something happen? Is there a problem in class?"

Then, she heard some of the girls talk in the row behind her.

"She's acting like a bitch because she isn't the best. Good thing that Kennedy took her crown away. What an entitled slut."

That was her third heartbreak. It broke her how other people hated her just because she wanted to be the best version of herself. She wanted to make her parents proud. And now everybody hated her.

At a college party, she got drunk for the first time. She had sex for the first time, too. With a boy that bragged about it the very next day, saying how easy she was. After that, she got catcalled more often and most of the boys just wanted to have their way with her. None of them viewed her more than a pretty face or a great body. None of them noticed how hard she tried to get on their level at the shooting range or with academics. So, she became better than all of them.

Then she met Leon Kennedy. The one who stole her title as 'the best student'. She wasn't on top of her class anymore, she got shoved off her pretty glass throne and he took her seat. He caused her mother to dislike her more because she wasn't the perfect daughter she needed to be. He ruined everything.

Leon Kennedy was her final heartbreak.

And Thea was dead set on making him regret his life. Nobody could steal her title and live. And that made Leon Kennedy her arch-nemesis.

Throughout their academics, she always tried to one-up him. He didn't even have to try that hard to be good at everything: it looked like he was just a natural at the field, something deeper pushing him to be the excellent cadet he was. But that didn't stop Thea from hating his guts, no. She wanted to get back her title, no matter what.