𝐇𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐬...✧˖°.
summary: requested by this anon ♡ Leon comes home from a mission quieter than usual, and you try to give him the kind of peace he never knows how to ask for. But when a nightmare pulls him somewhere far away from you, he wakes up to something he can barely forgive himself for: hurting you.
warnings: re4!leon x reader, heavy angst with fluff, no use of y/n, hurt/comfort, PTSD/nightmares, trauma response, accidental violence during sleep, choking/strangulation, panic, guilt, crying, emotional breakdown, mentions/allusions to Leon’s childhood trauma, mentions of past abuse/neglect, Raccoon City trauma, self-hatred, fear of hurting a loved one, intense emotional distress, comfort after a traumatic incident, english is not the authors first language.
author's note: sorry this took me so long to post. This one needed more time than I expected, mostly because I really wanted to handle Leon’s trauma and vulnerability with the weight they deserved instead of rushing it. Thank you for being patient with me and for sending requests in general — I promise I’m still working through them. Some take me longer than others, especially when they get this emotionally heavy, but I haven’t forgotten about them. This fic deals with PTSD, nightmares and accidental harm during sleep, so please read with care — nothing here is meant to romanticize trauma or violence♡.
Leon and you had been together for a few years.
You knew he was a special agent and, unfortunately, one of the very few survivors of Raccoon City, something that had left a deep scar on his mental health and marked the rest of his life. It was part of the reason he did what he did now.
You met one night at a bar because you had a few mutual friends. When Leon saw you for the first time, he was stunned by your beauty. No exaggeration, it was like everything around you disappeared. He only had eyes for you and that warm, loving light you seemed to carry with you.
Leon hadn’t had an easy childhood. His parents had struggled with substance abuse, so he had been raised by his grandparents, and when they passed away, the emotional emptiness he already carried only grew heavier. When he first started talking to you, everything was a little awkward and cliché: the cold, guarded boy and the sunshine girl.
The first day he saw you, he was far too embarrassed to approach you. Even though Leon was objectively handsome, he was deeply insecure about himself. It was at another gathering with your mutual friends that he finally worked up the courage to come closer. He started with dumb jokes, the kind that didn’t usually make many people laugh, but they always managed to pull a smile from you, and every time that happened, Leon melted a little more inside.
You began texting, then started meeting up more often, and he always offered to drive you home. Until one of those nights, outside the entrance of your building, you shared your first kiss: innocent, genuine, nervous. Not long after, you officially started dating, and since then, your relationship had been good. Really good.
Of course, it was hard not being able to see Leon much whenever he was away on missions, but you knew he was out there protecting thousands of people.
For Leon, however, the beginning of your relationship was a little harder. Not because of you. Never because of you. He considered you, even if he rarely said it out loud, the best thing that had ever happened to him. His life had always felt like a stormy sea, dark and violent, full of whirlpools of pain since he was old enough to remember, and then you had arrived like a warm breeze, pulling him out of his own mind. That was exactly why he felt so terribly guilty sometimes. He thought he wasn’t good enough for you, that you deserved something better than him, even if there were moments when you managed to make him believe, just a little, that he was worthy of being loved.
It was supposed to be a quiet night in the apartment you had shared for years.
Outside, it was cold. The city was wet from the thin rain that had been falling since late afternoon, and the headlights of passing cars reflected against the asphalt like blurry stains of color. Inside, though, everything was warm. The heating was on, a blanket lay abandoned on the couch, two mugs had been left on the coffee table, and a movie was playing softly in the background.
Leon had come home only a few hours earlier.
He hadn’t told you much about the mission, like he usually did whenever something had gone worse than expected. Over time, you had learned to read him without needing to ask. You knew the difference between when he was truly tired and when he was simply pretending to be tired so he wouldn’t worry you.
That night, it was the second one.
He had showered as soon as he got home, changed into clean clothes, and left his jacket hanging over the back of a chair. He was wearing a dark shirt and comfortable pants, his hair still slightly damp, his jaw tight with that tension that always settled there when his mind was still somewhere else, even if his body had already made it back home.
Still, he was trying to be there with you.
That was what hurt the most about Leon sometimes. Even when he was destroyed, he still found a way to sit beside you, ask about your day, listen to you talk about any domestic nonsense as if that alone was enough to convince him the world could still be a livable place. He had asked if you had eaten, if you had gotten home from work safely, if the bathroom light had started flickering again — the one he had been promising to fix for weeks, though there was always another mission before he could.
“You’re very quiet,” you said from the kitchen as you put away the glass you had just washed.
Leon was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching you in a way that wasn’t exactly sad, but not peaceful either. He looked like he was trying to memorize you. The shape of your face under the yellow kitchen light, your comfortable clothes, the way you moved around your home like everything there was safe.
He was terrible at lying when it came to you.
You turned around slowly, drying your hands with a towel, and looked at him with that expression of yours that always managed to make him lower his guard, even when he didn’t want to. Leon held your gaze for a few seconds, then looked away with a small exhale through his nose, almost a laugh, but without any humor in it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Leon said, something close to pleading hidden in his voice.
“Like you’re reading my mind.”
You approached him calmly, without crowding him too much at first, because you had also learned there were nights when Leon needed to be held tightly, and others when he first needed to remember he was allowed to be touched. You placed a hand against his chest and felt the uneven rhythm of his breathing beneath your palm.
“I don’t need to know everything,” you murmured. “I just want you to rest.”
The way his eyes softened was almost unbearable.
Leon lowered his gaze to your hand on his chest and, for a moment, he looked much younger. Like a boy. Not the trained agent, not the survivor, not the man the government called whenever the world started falling apart. Just Leon. The same Leon who had approached you years ago with a terrible joke, pretending to have a confidence he didn’t really possess, and who had stared at you as if he couldn’t understand what you could possibly see in someone like him. The same boy who had only ever wanted love from his family.
“Sometimes it’s hard to come back,” he confessed suddenly.
He didn’t say it dramatically. He didn’t even look at you when he said it. He said it quietly, like he was ashamed of admitting it. Like speaking about it in the middle of such a normal life would somehow stain it.
You didn’t answer right away. You only lifted your hand to his neck, gently stroking his skin with your thumb. Leon closed his eyes for a second.
“But you do come back, Leon,” you told him, caressing his cheek. “That’s so much more incredible than you think.”
You led him to the couch, and Leon let you.
He let you sit him down, let you cover him with the blanket, let his head fall back as you settled beside him. The movie kept playing on the screen, but neither of you paid attention to it. You talked for a while, more to fill the silence than because you had anything important to say. You told him about a woman who had cut in line at the supermarket, about a package that had been delayed, about something silly on your phone that had made you laugh, and Leon listened carefully.
Every now and then, his fingers found yours beneath the blanket. He didn’t say anything, but he squeezed your hand a little tighter whenever you laughed.
Later, when the weight of the night started settling over the apartment, you noticed his eyes were far too tired.
He almost never slept well after coming home from a mission. Some nights, he stayed awake until dawn, sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, trying not to make a sound. Other nights, he fell asleep from pure exhaustion and woke up startled an hour later, chest rising and falling too fast, his hand instinctively searching for something that wasn’t there anymore.
You knew about his nightmares. You knew the names he sometimes muttered without meaning to, the places he returned to whenever he closed his eyes.
But that night, he seemed too exhausted even to fight sleep.
“Let’s go to bed, baby,” you whispered sweetly, running your fingers through his hair.
Leon opened his eyes slowly, like he had been seconds away from falling asleep sitting up.
The bedroom was dim when you got into bed. From there, the rain sounded softer, barely a murmur against the window, and the streetlight slipped through the curtains, drawing pale lines over the sheets. Leon lay on his back at first, stiff, one arm resting over his stomach, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. You turned toward him without saying anything. A few seconds passed before he lifted his arm.
You moved closer slowly, resting your head on his chest, and he wrapped his arm around you carefully. Your hand stayed against his side, feeling his breathing slowly begin to match yours.
You fell asleep before he did.
The last thing you remembered was his hand stroking your back in slow, repetitive movements, almost unconscious.
For a while, everything was quiet.
It wasn’t a loud noise or a sudden movement at first. It was a small tension in Leon’s body. A nearly imperceptible hardening beneath your cheek. His breathing, which had been heavy and deep until then, began to break into strange intervals, as if something inside him was dragging his sleep toward a darker place. You didn’t fully wake up. You only frowned, still trapped in that confused space between sleep and consciousness.
Leon moved, barely at first, then with more force.
His arm, which had been resting over your waist, tightened around you. His fingers closed around the fabric of your shirt, and his breathing grew faster, more agitated. He muttered something you couldn’t understand.
“Leon…” you whispered, your voice thick with sleep.
You lifted your head, propping yourself up on one elbow, trying to see his face through the shadows. His brows were furrowed, his eyes squeezed shut too tightly, his jaw clenched. He didn’t look like he was simply asleep.
Like something invisible was pressing down on him from the inside, forcing him to relive a scene you couldn’t see.
“Baby,” you murmured, touching his shoulder gently. “Leon, wake up.”
One second, you were sitting up on the mattress.
The next, he had moved with a violence that knocked the air out of you from sheer shock. You didn’t understand what was happening at first. You only felt the weight of his body turning toward you, one hand pushing you down against the bed and the other closing around your throat.
For the first few seconds, your mind refused to accept what was happening.
It was Leon. Your Leon. The same man who brushed your hair away from your face when you fell asleep on the couch, the same one who held your hand in the street without realizing it, the same one who apologized if he brushed against you too roughly while passing through a narrow doorway.
That was why it took you a moment to feel fear.
Because before fear, there was confusion.
“Leon…” you tried to say.
Your voice barely came out.
He was still asleep. Or somewhere worse than sleep. His face was distorted, washed in the weak light from the window, but there was nothing conscious in his expression. He wasn’t looking at you. He wasn’t seeing you. His breathing came out harsh, furious, desperate, like he was fighting someone who wasn’t you.
You tried to pull his hand away gently at first. Still with that absurd part of your mind trying not to scare him, trying to wake him without hurting him.
But the pressure increased.
Your fingers closed around his wrist with more force. You tried to move your head, to pull away, but you were trapped against the mattress and he was too heavy. Your legs shifted under the sheets, kicking clumsily against the bed. The sound of your breathing turned horrible, weak and broken, trying to find oxygen where there wasn’t any.
Your nails dug into his skin. You pulled at his hands, tried to say his name again, but only a strangled sound came out, almost unrecognizable. Tears filled your eyes before you could stop them.
And the worst part was that it was still Leon.
His hair fell over his forehead the way it always did. His shirt smelled like detergent and him. The hand stealing the air from your lungs was the same hand that had been stroking your back to help you fall asleep less than an hour earlier.
The contradiction was so cruel that a part of you couldn’t process it.
Then, somehow, you managed to touch his face.
It wasn’t a strong hit. Barely a clumsy, desperate tap against his cheek. But it was enough for Leon to suck in a sharp breath, as if something had violently dragged him up from underwater.
And that second was almost worse than everything before it, because you saw consciousness return to him little by little. His eyes dropped to his own hand, still closed around your throat.
Leon let go of you as if you had burned him.
He backed away so quickly he almost fell off the bed, hitting the nightstand without even noticing. You half sat up, bringing both hands to your throat as you coughed violently, trying to drag air back into your lungs. Every breath scraped. Your throat burned. The sound that came out of you didn’t seem like your own.
Leon was standing on the other side of the bed.
The pale light from the window carved across his face, and you had never seen him like that. Not even after a mission. Not even when he had come home covered in wounds, his gaze lost.
This was naked, absolute horror.
You were still coughing. You tried to look at him, tried to say something, but you couldn’t. Your throat wouldn’t obey.
Leon took a step toward you by instinct, then stopped.
His eyes fell back to your neck, to the marks already beginning to turn red against your skin. The color drained from his face.
“No, no, no…” he repeated, this time with his voice breaking as he brought both hands to his head. “Oh my God. Oh my God, what did I do?”
The room filled with an unbearable silence.
Leon looked like he didn’t even dare to blink. His eyes were fixed on you, but not like before. Not with the quiet tenderness he had when he watched you in the kitchen or on the couch. He looked at you like you were living proof of everything he feared most about himself.
“Leon…” you finally managed to say.
Your voice came out hoarse, damaged, almost unrecognizable.
He brought a hand to his mouth, like he was going to be sick. His shoulders collapsed forward and he shook his head over and over again, unable to accept your broken voice, your marked throat, your wet eyes still trying to understand him even then.
You tried to move toward the edge of the bed. You didn’t know if you wanted to hug him, calm him down, or simply make sure he was there too, that both of you had made it back from that nightmare.
But the second he saw you trying to get closer, Leon stepped back.
“No,” he said, with a desperate urgency. “Don’t come near me.”
“Leon, you were asleep…” you said, your voice slowly clearing.
You stayed seated on the bed, struggling to breathe, while he began to fall apart in front of you in a silent, horrible way. Leon didn’t cry like other people. He didn’t allow himself to collapse completely. He only went very still. Too still. His jaw barely trembling, his eyes shining with a guilt that looked like it was eating him alive from the inside.
“Look at me,” you whispered.
It took him several seconds to obey. When he finally lifted his gaze, there was so much fear in his eyes that for a moment, you forgot the pain in your throat. Leon Kennedy, the man who had survived monsters, dying cities, missions that would have destroyed anyone else, was looking at you like a terrified child who had just discovered his nightmares could crawl out of his head and touch the only good thing he had.
“I thought…” he started, but the sentence broke before it could go anywhere. “I was there again. I couldn’t… I couldn’t tell the difference. Someone was on top of me, or I was… I don’t know. I don’t know what I saw. I just know that when I opened my eyes, it was you and I…”
Leon tore his eyes away from your neck and pushed both hands into his hair, tugging at it with such raw desperation that it hurt to watch. His breathing began to break, first in short, dry bursts, then into a sob he tried to swallow but that came out anyway, ugly and devastating.
He bent forward, sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees and head lowered, as if the weight of everything he had spent years burying had fallen on him all at once.
“No,” he repeated, but it no longer sounded like an order meant for you. It sounded like a plea against himself. “No, no, no… God, no.”
Leon broke with a choked, almost childlike sound, bringing one hand to his mouth as if he was ashamed you could hear him. His chest tightened, his shoulders began to shake, and suddenly there was no agent, no survivor, no man capable of walking into hell and coming out alive even if it tore him apart.
There was only Leon, barefoot in the dark bedroom, crying like he had become the boy who learned too early that no one was coming to save him.
“I can’t do this to you,” he said between sobs, almost breathless. “Not to you. Not you.”
You moved slowly, with all the care in the world, as if any sudden gesture could make him believe he was still inside the nightmare. You got out of bed without coming too close, keeping your hands visible, your voice low and soft, even though you were trembling inside too.
“Leon, look at me for a second.”
He shook his head, pressing his fingers to his eyes.
“No. I can’t look at you after…” The sentence died in his mouth. He sobbed again, harder this time, with a broken anger that seemed to come from somewhere very old. “I saw your face. I saw your face and I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know if it was you, I didn’t know if I was there, I didn’t know if it was…” He ran out of voice, breathing too fast. “And my hands were on your throat.”
His eyes were red, bright, full of a guilt so wild it looked like he was hating himself with everything he had.
“What if I hadn’t woken up?” he asked, his voice destroyed. “What if next time I don’t wake up? What if you can’t…” He choked on the sentence, pressed a hand to his chest, and shut his eyes like he was going to be sick. “I can’t. I can’t touch you. I can’t be near you.”
That hurt more than the mark on your throat.
Because you knew him. Leon was scared, trying to tear himself out of your life before, in his mind, he could destroy it. He was the same man who blamed himself for cities he couldn’t save, for partners he couldn’t bring back, for decisions made when he was barely more than a boy in a uniform too big for him, a gun in his hand. He was Leon locking himself back inside that dark room from his childhood, where no one had ever taught him that love could stay even when he was a mess.
“I’m not going to leave you just because you’re scared,” you murmured.
“Please,” he said then, and that word completely disarmed you. “Please don’t make this harder.”
You stayed still. Not because you wanted to obey him, but because you understood that coming closer without permission, right then, could sink him even further. Leon was trembling all over. His breathing was out of control, his hands clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white, and still, he couldn’t stop staring at your neck.
“Okay,” you whispered. “I’m not going to touch you if you don’t want me to. But stay here with me. Breathe with me.”
“Look at my hand,” you said, lifting it slowly between the two of you. “Just that. Don’t look at my neck. Don’t look at anything else. Look at my hand.”
Leon swallowed. It took him an awful effort, but eventually he obeyed. His eyes dropped to your fingers as you opened and closed them slowly, giving him a simple, almost silly rhythm, as if you were calling back a part of him that had been trapped somewhere else.
“Breathe in with me,” you asked. “One… two… three…”
“That’s it. Now let it out.”
The second breath was worse than the first. The third too. But by the fourth, his shoulders lowered just a little, enough for you to see he was trying to come back.
“You’re not there,” you told him softly. “You’re home, with me. Your boots are by the door because you never put them away properly, even though you swear you do.”
Leon made a sound that almost became a laugh, but turned into another sob instead.
“And I’m here,” you continued. “I’m alive.”
He covered his face with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and then again, lower, more broken. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like to open your eyes and see that the only person who…” His mouth trembled, unable to say it without falling apart. “The only person who has ever made me feel safe was scared of me.”
That was when you couldn’t stop your own eyes from filling with tears.
Because Leon never said things like that. Never so clearly. He loved you in small, quiet, almost clumsy acts sometimes. Checking your car before a trip. Leaving you the warm side of the bed when he got up earlier. Making coffee even when his hands were shaking after a bad night. Staying awake watching the door while you slept.
Hearing him admit you were his safe place while he hated himself for making you afraid was too much.
“Leon,” you said, taking one tiny step closer. “I was scared of what was happening. Not of you.”
The sentence came out so small that for a moment, you stopped seeing the grown man in front of you. You saw the boy who had probably learned to hide in silence, not to ask for help, not to cry too loudly because no one would comfort him, or because crying only made things worse. You saw the teenager who probably grew up believing affection always came with conditions, that tenderness could disappear at any second, that if someone touched him, it was safer to prepare for the blow. You saw that twenty-one-year-old boy who arrived in Raccoon City with his whole life ahead of him and left with eyes that looked older forever.
And you understood Leon wasn’t only crying because of that night.
He was crying for all the nights of his life.
“Come to the bathroom with me,” you whispered.
He looked up, confused, still soaked in tears.
“Not for anything weird. Just… come. Let’s wash our faces. Both of us.”
You walked toward the door slowly, without touching him. At first, you thought he wouldn’t follow. You heard him breathing behind you, too still, too lost. But a few seconds later, the mattress creaked, and his footsteps appeared behind you, uncertain.
In the bathroom, the light was too white.
You caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror: messy hair, wet eyes, your throat marked. Leon saw it too. He froze in the doorway, jaw clenched, and for a second you thought he was going to leave.
“Don’t look at that right now,” you asked him.
“How can I not look at it?”
“Because right now I need you to look at me.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but couldn’t. He just stood there, broken and obedient, his eyes lowering to your face as if he expected to find hatred there.
He only found exhaustion, fear still, yes, but also love.
You turned on the faucet and waited until the water ran warm. You soaked a small towel, wrung it out, and moved closer to him, stopping before touching his face.
Leon swallowed. His eyes filled again. He nodded once, barely, and you lifted the towel to his cheek.
You cleaned him with a tenderness that almost hurt. You passed the damp fabric beneath his eyes, along his jaw, over his trembling mouth as he tried to hold back more sobs. Leon closed his eyes when you touched his forehead, and suddenly he looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
He was exhausted from waking up every night ready to fight ghosts no one else could see.
“You were little,” you murmured, not really knowing whether you meant the nightmare, Raccoon, his childhood, or all of it at once. “Too little for everything that happened to you. And then the world just kept asking for more.” You wiped away another tear before it could fall. “More strength, more cold blood, more missions…”
This time, when he cried, he didn’t try to hide it as quickly. The sound came from deep in his chest, raw and aching, and you set the towel down on the sink so you could hold his face between your hands. He tensed at first, but he didn’t pull away.
“I don’t know how to be anything else,” he confessed, his voice barely there. “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to… stop. When I was a kid, I learned not to make noise, not to bother anyone, to hold on until it passed. After Raccoon…” He shut his eyes tightly. “Just more orders, more dead people. And then you came along, and for the first time I thought maybe I could have something clean. Something that wasn’t rotten because of everything I’ve touched.”
It hurt to hear him talk about himself like that.
“You’re not rotten, Leon,” you told him, frowning at his words.
“You don’t know how many things I’ve done.”
“I know how you love me.”
He opened his eyes, ruined.
You stroked his cheekbones with your thumbs. Leon closed his eyes again and rested his forehead against yours with a trembling slowness, like such a simple gesture scared him and soothed him at the same time.
“I want to shower,” he murmured suddenly. “I need to… get this off me.”
You prepared the shower while he sat on the closed toilet lid, staring at a fixed point on the floor, fingers intertwined, shoulders collapsed. You left a clean towel nearby and adjusted the water until it was warm. You didn’t try to make it romantic. There was nothing like that in that moment. Only care. Only real intimacy, the kind that asks for nothing but to hold the other person when they can’t hold themselves.
When he stepped under the water, he left the shower door partly open, maybe because the idea of being completely alone with his head scared him. You sat on the bathroom floor, leaning your back against the sink cabinet, so he could see you if he opened his eyes.
At first, he said nothing.
The water fell over his hair, down his neck and back, and Leon pressed one hand against the wall, lowering his head. His shoulders started shaking again. This time, he didn’t do it silently. He cried with the water falling over him, his breathing broken, one hand covering his mouth and the other gripping the tile, as if that shower were the only place where he could let himself fall apart.
“I’m here,” you reminded him very softly.
Leon nodded without looking at you, but his fingers loosened slightly against the wall.
When he stepped out, wrapped in a towel, wet hair sticking to his forehead, he looked younger. Not calmer yet, but less far away. His eyes were swollen, his face clean, his skin flushed from the hot water, and there was such obvious fragility to him that you wanted to hug him until the whole world went quiet.
You handed him a clean shirt. He took it with clumsy fingers.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
This time, he didn’t step back.
You moved closer slowly and dried his hair with another towel, rubbing gently, careful not to make any sudden movements. Leon let you, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his gaze lowered and his hands resting on his knees. Every now and then, a late sob escaped him, one of those that linger after the worst of the crying has passed.
Leon had never received this as a child.
You leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to the top of his head, barely brushing him.
Then, with a slowness that almost undid you, he rested his forehead against your stomach and closed his eyes.
He didn’t hug you at first. He only stayed there. Then you lowered one hand to his damp hair and the other to the back of his neck, holding him carefully.
Leon let out a trembling breath and wrapped his arms around your waist. Not tightly, not like before, but with fear, with reverence, as if he were holding something sacred he never wanted to break again.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against your shirt.
You returned to the bedroom without rushing.
You changed the sheets because Leon couldn’t look at the bed without tensing, and you didn’t argue. You let him do something useful: gather the old sheets, open the window for a few seconds, adjust the pillows. You knew he needed to feel like his hands could be used to care, not only destroy.
After everything was clean and the room smelled faintly of cold air and soap, you turned off the main light and left only the bedside lamp on.
Leon stood beside the bed.
“I can sleep on the couch.”
“I don’t want you to sleep on the couch,” you answered quickly. “You can stay on the other side of the bed. We can leave space between us. We can keep the light on. We can do whatever you need, but I don’t want you punishing yourself.”
His eyes filled with tears again, though this time they didn’t fall with the same violence. He looked too exhausted even to hate himself.
“What do you need?” he asked.
The question touched something deep inside you.
“I need you to listen when I tell you I’m still here. And I need you not to push me away.”
You got into bed carefully. He lay on his back, rigid, hands on his chest, staring at the ceiling. You turned toward him. For a while, you didn’t touch him. You only watched him breathe, noticing how every muscle in his body still seemed ready to run.
He barely turned his head.
The question seemed to hurt him and comfort him at the same time.
“Yes,” he said, so quietly you almost didn’t hear it.
You moved just close enough to kiss his cheek.
Then again, a little higher.
Then his temple, where his hair was still damp. His forehead, over a crease of tension that refused to disappear. The bridge of his nose. His cheekbone, just beneath his eye, where the salty trace of tears still lingered.
“You don’t have to do this,” he murmured.
You gave him another kiss on the cheek.
Tears slipped out again, silent this time, sliding toward his temples. You kissed the corner of his mouth with such tenderness it was barely a touch. You only wanted him to know your love hadn’t been extinguished by fear.
“You are not your nightmares,” you whispered. “You are not what they did to you, or Raccoon, or the hands of whoever hurt you when you were little. You’re Leon. My Leon. And you’re here with me.”
He turned his face toward you, completely disarmed.
“Then don’t sleep yet. Stay with me.”
Leon swallowed and nodded, though every part of him still looked like it wanted to keep apologizing until his voice gave out.
He watched you for a few seconds, as if he were still asking for permission in silence, and then he moved toward you with a broken, almost ashamed slowness. He didn’t hug you all at once. First, he rested his forehead against your chest, right above your heartbeat, and when he heard it still there, alive and steady beneath his ear, something in him finally surrendered.
His arms wrapped carefully around your waist, still trembling, and he clung to you as if you were the only thing capable of keeping him in the present. You ran a hand through his hair slowly, feeling his breathing fall apart against your shirt in small, exhausted sobs, and Leon squeezed his eyes shut, hiding his face in you like a child who had finally found a safe place to break without being left alone.
“When I was little,” he whispered against your chest, “sometimes I imagined someone coming into my room and telling me I could sleep. That I didn’t have to watch the door. That I didn’t have to listen for footsteps.”
You moved a little closer and covered his face in small, slow kisses, placing them wherever the pain seemed to have settled. His forehead. His temple. His cheek. His closed eyelid. The tip of his nose. His tense jaw.
Leon slowly stopped crying.
“You can sleep,” you told him softly. “I’m here. The door is closed. No one is going to hurt you. I’m with you.”
His mouth trembled one last time.
For a moment, you thought he was going to cry again, but he only let out a long, tired, almost defeated sigh. The tension in his shoulders began to loosen very slowly, like a rope that had finally stopped being pulled to the point of snapping.
“I love you,” he murmured, his voice so small it seemed to come from some hidden place inside him.
Leon kept looking at your face through half-lidded eyes, as if he needed to check one more time that you were still there, that you hadn’t become another loss, that the night hadn’t taken away the only good thing he allowed himself to want.
You stroked his knuckles with your thumb, slowly, over and over again, until his breathing began to match yours.
In the end, Leon fell asleep without letting go of you.
It wasn’t a deep sleep at first. His brow furrowed every now and then, his hand tightened over yours, and every small sound in the apartment seemed to brush against his skin even while he slept. But he wasn’t alone inside his head anymore. Every time his breathing changed, you whispered his name gently, and he came back.
And when his body finally surrendered completely, Leon searched for your warmth, his face calmer than you had seen it all night.
You pressed one last kiss to his forehead.
“That’s it, love,” you whispered, even though he could barely hear you anymore. “Rest. You don’t have to survive tonight anymore.”
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