A wooden box tucked into the back of a closet, beneath old mission files and a winter coat Leon hasn't worn in years.
It isn't locked, which surprises you. He isn't secretive, but there are parts of him that always seem closed anyway.
You lift the lid and look inside. There is no order to it. No labels in the heap, no dates cataloguing anything. It's just...things.
A dried flower pressed between the pages of a notebook.
A receipt folded in half.
You pick it up. It's one you don't remember taking. Leon is sitting on the porch steps outside your old apartment, sleeves rolled to his elbows, sunlight caught in his hair. He's looking down at something you've said, smiling faintly. Not looking at the camera. Looking at you.
Beneath it is a note. Four words in your handwriting.
Nothing more. Nothing important.
Except apparently it was.
You keep digging through the box and realize it's a collection of things so small they should have been forgotten.
The paper wristband from a fair.
A drawing done in a child's unsteady hand.
It was like he was collecting proof of something, as though someone spent years gathering fragments of happiness before they could disappear. Or more likely, as though someone did not trust himself to remember.
This isn't a memory box. It's a reliquary. A shrine built from ordinary things.
You don't hear Leon come in. You only feel his presence when he stops in the doorway.
You turn to him and hold up the note. The tiny scrap of paper. The one that took you all of five seconds to write.
His gaze falls to it. Something passes across his face and suddenly you understand that he knows exactly what is in this box.
He could probably tell you where each one came from.
He probably knew the date, what the weather was like, what you were wearing, because apparently, he logged that information with almost religious zeal.
You have the strange feeling that he has opened this box on nights when sleep wouldn't come and sat alone in the dark with these remnants of a life he never expected to have.
You stare at him and see him suddenly, not as the man you married, but as the man who has attended more funerals than birthdays, and the man who learned young that people can be there one day and gone the next, and the man who spent years believing happiness was something borrowed rather than owned.
Suddenly the box feels unbearably sacred because none of these things are valuable. At least, not to anyone else. The paper is yellowing. The photographs are fading. Most people would have thrown them away, but Leon kept them because they prove something.
That something good stayed.
His eyes meet yours, and for the first time, you wonder if devotion has ever been a strong enough word for what Leon Kennedy feels. Devotion implies faith.
This feels more like reverence, like a man kneeling in the ruins of a church, carefully preserving the last evidence that God once lived there.
And, unbelievably, to him, that God was you.
A/N: I love to make Leon Kennedy hurt, just to let us comfort him. A bit of a sadist, one might say.
The second part will include comforting and will be sent out tonight in the Princess Correspondence at 8
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