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CALL OF DUTY —

➥ tf141 reacts to [reader] clinging to them!

➥ tf141 getting gaslighted by [reader]!

➥ tf141 reacting to [reader] having excessively watery eyes!

➥ tf141 reacting to [reader] giving them a 'happy father's day' card!

➥ tf141 reacting to [reader] telling them corny jokes!

➥ alejandro, könig, alex, and kate reacting to [reader] giving them father's/mother's day cards!

➥ bedbound [reader gets trapped under collapsed building, tf141 visits them one by one in the medbay.]

➥ scary dog privileges [reader is scary to everyone but the main tf141 boys.]

➥ pardon? [reader doesn't understand any british slang and ends up bullying the british.]

➥ unwind [reader gives tf141 tea/coffee after a long mission.]

➥ don't breathe [reader is buried alive, cap. price saves them.]

➥ duckling [reader has sleeping problems, gaz helps them out via cuddles and affectionate petnames.]

➥ carry me to bed, please [reader gets carried to bed after falling asleep in price's office.]

➥ need a ride? [reader gets followed by a creep while walking home, the 141 helps ward off said creep.]

➥ below zero [reader is trapped in a freezer, ghost rescues them.]

➥ self-slaughter [reader is "caught" harming themselves by the 141.]

➥ stretched too thin [reader is overworking themselves, gaz forces them to sleep.]

➥ déjà vu [reader and ghost's backstories are very similar.]

➥ soft spot [reader is an age regressor, ghost is their caregiver for a little bit after some research.]

➥how the sausage gets made [reader has a nightmare, the 141 helps 'em out.]

➥glass half-full, or half-empty? [reader is buried alive, realizes some things, is then introduced to age regression and is taken care of by gaz and price.]

➥ residual self-image [reader takes SSRIs, almost overdoses, price confronts them ft. bad matrix references.]

➥ what's a noise to an eardrum? [reader goes to ghost's quarters after a rough mission, sleep deprived.]

➥after hours [reader is stalking ghost.]

➥day shift [after hours cont'd.]

RESIDENT EVIL ―

➥step one: tell me, what have i done? [reader and leon kennedy both work at stratcom and get sent on a mission overseas together; part 1 of a series.]

➥step two: you know you better believe [cont. of step one: tell me, what have i done?]

➥step three: you know you'll never be me, so [cont. of step two: you know you better believe]

09:00

Drip. Drip. Drip.

There’s some kind of clear liquid dripping from the ceiling. You want to assume that it’s water, but with Umbrella, you never know. 

As you and Leon walk further into the basement, it becomes more and more clear what it’s been used for. Not necessarily as a lab, but still as a unit for research, judging by the various zombies you’ve come across and the bodies they’ve already eaten and left nothing of but bone laying against walls and on the floor. Some are chained, as if left there on purpose, and some aren’t, as if cannibalized or escaped. 

For some strange reason, you can feel your anxiety rising more as the two of you venture deeper into the dark room, your notepad and the samples you collected earlier weighing heavy in your pocket. Maybe it’s the fact that you and Leon both need to use your flashlights to see at all in here, or the fact that there’s gore everywhere you step, but no matter what it is, something has you feeling uneasy. 

It’s that sense of impending doom that comes before a heart attack. There’s a rush that goes through you, whether it’s adrenaline or not you don’t know, but it travels through your body quickly and makes you lean closer to Leon. You don’t know if it’s because he’s feeling that same unnerving feeling, but he’s very slightly leaning close to you too, making you a little less nervous. It doesn’t help that your radios don’t seem to work at all down here, with Hunnigan’s voice having been absent ever since you began traversing through the dark basement, and a few test runs proving that nothing but static can be heard through either of your ear pieces. 

The mission can’t stop, even if the conditions are less than optimal. They usually are, anyway. As much as you’d love to keep having Leon’s voice in your ear, either guiding you through the dimmed hallways or making jokes to lighten the mood both for yourself and him, you figure you can live without it for a few minutes if the two of you ever split up. Knowing how these missions typically go, it’s likely that you will. 

“Ah, shit.” 

The curse leaves you as you see a split in the road, conveniently coming into view just as you were thinking about it. Leon sighs quietly at the sight of the two branching off hallways, both blocked by double doors with one having flickering lights illuminating a dark hallway seen through the thin strip of glass in the door, and the other nothing but pitch black. You both know, as you see the two doors, that you’ll have to part ways for a little bit, as much as you both hate it. Not just because you’ll be away from each other, which is a nightmare on its own―maybe there’s some layers of less-than-healthy codependency between the two of you, but that never hurt anyone―but also because you’ll have no way of immediately contacting each other. 

Still, you have work to do. As you turn to Leon, about to ask which door either of you should go through, you catch sight of a black metal object being offered to you. Your gaze lowers and you see the handgun Leon usually keeps holstered on his hip, opposite of the revolver kept on the other side of him. It's then that you realize you don’t really have a proper weapon, which, sure, that’s probably something you should be given considering the situation you’re in, but as a part of the forensics team and an acting field medic on occasion, you never really questioned its absence from your person.

“Are you sure?” you frown, looking at the gun Leon tries to hand to you, the muzzle facing his feet and the grip facing you. He nods, clearly not taking ‘no’ for an answer. You’ve seen his work with a knife before, you know that he’s more than capable of taking care of himself without a melee weapon, but you still get nervous at the thought of him being without a gun. 

“Positive,” Leon replies without hesitation, shaking the gun lightly in his grip to try and prompt you to take it. You’re confident in your abilities with a gun, that’s a fact that you’ve never questioned, having been trained in combat after being picked up from Seattle just like every other poor soul involved in some Raccoon City-type incident. Still, you hate to leave Leon with nothing much more than a hunting knife. 

“Don’t die on me,” you warn him, taking the gun gingerly and holding it in your hand to make up for your lack of a holster, “it’ll be on my conscience forever.” 

Leon’s too-serious expression melts into something else at your words, and there’s a small smile left on his face instead. “I’ll try my best, Doc.”

You both look back at the set of doors, and Leon points to the pitch black one, asserting, “I’ll take that one, you go through the other one. Meet up back here in ten minutes or less if you don’t find anything.” 

“If I don’t see you…?” 

“Then go through my door.” 

“And vice versa.” 

“Exactly,” Leon nods, not moving from his spot even as you begin walking towards your door, the flickering lights promising you some sort of safety, “be careful.” 

You scoff, “I’m always careful.” 

Leon raises an eyebrow at you but doesn’t argue, leaving you to push through the doors and walk into your designated hallway. As the doors close behind you, Leon’s expression fades into something more neutral, and with nothing else to do, he finally makes his way to his own double doors and pushes through.

—

Leon can’t stop thinking about it. There’s usually a million thoughts going through his head, ranging from what he’s going to eat for dinner to if he can spare the bullets on the enemy in front of him, but right now he can only think about the ten minutes he was in that closet with you. Well, it’s closer to eleven, at around ten minutes and forty seconds, but damn it, he’ll minimize it as much as he can just to get the entire situation out of his head. Every step he takes echoes off the metal walls around him and his frustration is stomped out with it, ricocheting off the walls and swirling around him like the heat in an incubator. 

He keeps walking, and he keeps feeling that heat beating against his back, hard enough that if it really were any hotter than fifty degrees in here, he’d be sweating. Shit, he might actually be sweating, just thinking about it. About you. About that disgusting closet, rotted with mold and termites, with a scent like the deepest pits of hell and tension like the lava lakes within it. Thick with heat and melting the shame off of his skin, wax wings making candle rivers down his back and bleached white feathers making a breadcrumb trail behind him. His very own River Styx flows behind him as he walks further into the basement, and dread floods his very soul, thinking about the instant that you flinched away from him as Hunnigan interrupted the two of you. The flying feeling he had when you leaned in just as he did, the wind under his wings carrying him above the old closet and inches turning into centimeters away from the sun, and yet―

That heat, that beautiful heat that peppers his skin like kisses betrays him and takes those same kisses away from him. And Jesus, if he wasn’t so used to Hunnigan, he’d be mad at her. Selfishly, so mad at her, for no reason other than she ripped the wax off his back and slapped him with a half-melted slab of it. No more mad at himself, though; not as mad as he was with himself a few days ago when he was in your lab, sitting right next to you, not wanting to leave. When he was two steps from the door and halted the moment you spoke, barely listening to what you said, just wanting to hear you. 

And that look on your face, hesitant and nervous and about to say something important―he knows it was important, it had to be, his perception’s too good to fail him at a moment like that―when suddenly your apprentice barged into the room, still looking sick and spit still slick at the corners of his mouth. He looked at you then, and that hesitancy faded into nothingness, soon replaced by exasperation and a tired shake of your head. His stupid, stupid decision to just walk out and not kick out your apprentice to get another five minutes with you and just hear you makes him so unbelievably mad at himself. 

Maybe that’s what’s really wrong with him. His inability to push for what he wants, to just accept everything he’s given and never push back. Not that he’s not assertive, but he sure as hell isn’t demanding. Not while he’s sober, anyway. Shit, maybe he does need to go get a drink after all of this is over. Whether or not he should invite you requires an entire pros and cons list, consisting of well, if he invites you, he’ll be able to drink with a friend and won’t look like a miserable asshole at the bar, and on the opposite end, if he invites you, he might drink more than he intended to, and spill either alcohol or every moment he’s thought about how you’d look sleeping next to him with nothing but his shirt on, with one burning significantly more than the other. And, spoiler alert, it’s not the alcohol. 

Or maybe he just needs to get it all out. Maybe he just needs a shot or two, and then he can safely tell you that hey, I’ve been been thinking about you for the past seven years now, and you’re the only one who makes me feel like I actually have more to live for than being a tool for the government to use every time they encounter a B.O.W. in a foreign country. You’re not the type to think he’d be disingenuous if he was a little tipsy while he told you, right? God, he hopes not. He can’t remember the last time he was home by himself and didn’t have a few glasses of whiskey before heading off to bed, hoping that the last nightmare he lived through won’t invade his dreams through the gentle haze of alcohol flooding his mind.

Leon frowns as he reaches the concrete wall signalling the end of his journey. There’s nowhere to go but back, it seems, the gray walls crowding him into a hallway with an underwhelming end. With nothing else to do―the doors are all either gateways to empty rooms or locked with no way of opening them, no matter how much weight Leon puts into his feet as they make contact with the doors―Leon finds himself turning around and starting to head back. He assumes that you’ve either found something or ran into a similar issue, and imagines that he’ll just regroup with you once he makes his way out of his corridor. 

It’s times like these that he wishes the connection between your earpieces weren’t so fickle, and that he could just contact you and ask if you’re okay, but the basement’s disruption of your signal prevents him from doing so. Leon isn’t even thinking about Hunnigan anymore despite the fact that he should be worried about updating her on his findings, or lack thereof. It’s perfectly normal to be worrying about your partner, but he was taught that the mission will always come first, no matter your connection to who you’re working with. And it’s those moments that he remembers his role in the grand scheme of the government’s attempts at minimizing Umbrella’s damage; he’s not their pawn, but their knight, just as easily sacrificed as he is praised for his work.

Leon shakes away his thoughts, and starts to walk back faster.

—

The flickering lights don’t do much to make you feel safer. You can see more than Leon probably can, but the annoying buzz of the yellow-white lights aren’t comforting at all, and neither is the occasional moment where the hallway goes almost entirely dark only to be lit up once again, leaving you with incremental moments of heightened anxiety thinking about if something will suddenly spawn from the shadows in front of you. Your grip on the gun Leon lended you is tight, and every time you feel the metal start to feel a little too warm, you remind yourself to loosen your grip. 

Your mind is relatively empty as you walk through the hallway. Partially out of ignoring what’s been happening the past few days, and also out of fear that you’ll distract yourself with said thoughts about what’s been happening and end up dying in a cold, dark basement, alone. It’s hard to purposefully ignore everything, especially as every now and then, a too prolonged bout of silence will prompt your mind to start replaying the short length of time you’d been stuck in that closet, and what would’ve happened had Hunnigan’s voice not interrupted the two of you. You can’t tell if you’re grateful for it or not, considering that when you really think about it, you don’t know if Leon was actually leaning in too or not. 

It could’ve just been your imagination. Maybe your mind was just trying to see something that wasn’t there, with the dark contributing to your delusions, making you think that Leon was getting closer but in reality was staying perfectly still. You were so caught up in yourself that, honestly, you might’ve just been imagining all that tension. If you had leaned in just a little too close, and your lips brushed against Leon’s, and he ended up pulling away, or getting offended, or―

Shit. Stop thinking about it. This isn’t helping at all. You need to keep walking forward, faster, try to get to the end of this hallway as quickly as possible and just hope to whoever’s listening that you don’t find anything of importance. You’d rather just find a wall of nothing so that you can head back and go up that elevator again, catch a flight back home, and try to just move past everything that’s happened so far. 

You get further down the hall, and the lights slowly get more stable. They flicker less, leaving more light for you, guiding you down an exponentially expanding corridor. As you look at the walls on either side of you, concrete begins to be separated by glass walls, six small holes at the top of each one providing oxygen to the creatures held inside each cell. They barely react to your presence, with most of them either standing still or roaming aimlessly within their small, glass-concrete prisons. 

They all hold different deformities, you notice. Some are just rotting human bodies with glassy eyes and not much else, but others have longer limbs with rippling muscles that move underneath their skin like water, or larger, satellite-like ears that twitch with every step you take. You reach for your notepad mindlessly, your writing utensil coming out of your pocket with it, and you note every mutation you see as you linger by each cell. It helps keep your mind busy with anything but Leon, instead focusing solely on the disgusting creatures in front of you. 

And to think that, at some point, they were human. Your eyebrows draw together for a split second at the thought, and you promptly ignore it as you keep writing, eyes moving continuously between your paper and the deformed zombie you’re currently standing in front of. It’s staring at you, but its foggy eyes look through you, unable to see you but still able to hear the sound of your pencil gliding across the thin paper of your notepad. 

You’re so engrossed in your writing, determined to keep your mind on it for as long as possible, that you don’t even notice the fingers deftly slipping into the collar of your coat until you’re suddenly pulled back and thrown to the ground. 

It nearly knocks the wind out of you with the force of it, but you manage to gasp in enough air to keep you from losing too much of it. As you look above you, you see a blonde woman standing over you, her face coming more into view as she kneels down to get closer to you. Her knees crack with the effort, and there’s a small wince that crosses her face before she schools her expression into something more neutral. There’s the natural upwards curve of her lips that almost makes her look like she’s smiling, but her eyes tell you that she’s not. 

You attempt to roll over and at least get onto your knees so that you can fight her, your gun still in your hand but your position making it nearly impossible to accurately shoot at her, but the woman stops you before you can. Her hand is firm against your throat, holding you down with strength you didn’t expect from her, seeing her deep wrinkles and thin arms, but she manages to keep you down. Your legs instinctively fold up so that you can push yourself upwards with more leverage, but the tiny prick and weird pressure you feel in your neck makes you hesitate, stupid as the reaction is, and it’s barely a few seconds later until your knees give out and your legs fall limp against the concrete floor you now fully lay on. 

Your breathing takes a little more effort now. Your lungs constantly feel like they’re being compressed, your skin starting to feel a little tighter, and your muscles locking up to the point where you don’t think you can move them at all. 

“There we go,” the woman coos above you, standing back up and slowly walking around you until she’s facing you, “no running now, skatte. I need you to stay still for this.” 

She moves to straddle you as she comes down, getting as close to you as possible. Her body is uncomfortably cold and almost rock solid, feeling like a human-sized boulder sitting on top of you. From this angle, you can better read the tag on her dirtied lab coat, seeing the name Gitte Sveistrup in bold letters staring at you. The syringe she pulled from your neck rolls away from your head now, the sound of the plastic tube slowly growing fainter, and a small knife replaces it in her hand. 

“I didn’t realize we would meet so soon,” Sveistrup murmurs against your ear as she presses down against you, her thighs bracketing yours and the sharp edge of her knife dangerously close to slicing a red line across your throat as she holds it against you, “I apologize for giving such an awful first impression of me. I wish we met differently.” 

You can’t respond to her verbally or even with the movement of your head, unable to do anything but lay under her. You don’t hyperventilate like you might if your chest didn’t feel like there was a heavy weight pressing down against it, but a chill still runs up your spine at the sheer helplessness of your position.

Sveistrup breathes raggedly against you, and the cadence of her voice slows before dipping down into an almost intimate tone, “I’m dying faster than I thought I would. This sickness… I thought I created a vaccine, but I was ambushed by Pluto barely a week ago. I can feel it changing me, and it’s so… so painful.” 

Her lips are touching the shell of your ear and you wince at the contact, but she doesn’t react to your clear discomfort, only continuing on, “Have you felt it, lille lam? This… reminder of your mortality, after forgetting that you, too, have life, and therefore can be punished by God?” 

The knife drags against your skin, just barely nicking the top-most layer of it but still stinging. The slow drag makes you bite your lip, refusing to make any noises that may alert Sveistrup of her success in harming you. She can see through the hardened expression on your face, though; her lips form a smile against your ear, wide enough for the skin to crack and cold blood to smear against your skin. The feeling makes you shiver. 

“What’s your goal?” Your voice comes out in a croak from disuse, your lips moving just enough to properly form words, though you have no luck moving any other part of your body. “To take me down with you?” 

Sveistrup hums in consideration, pulling her face away from your ear to look down at you. Her knife is pulled away from your throat, and you hate that she feels safe enough to do so, because that means that she knows you’re unable to do anything against the threat she poses. 

“No,” Sveistrup admits, setting her knife to the side, right above your head and in the center of your two now pinned down arms. Taunting you. “I need your help.” 

“For Pluto?” you assume, thinking that Sveistrup needs help developing the virus.

Sveistrup’s eyes narrow at you. “Virussen? No. I underestimated Pluto, I understand that now. I know this infection like I know myself now, and I know that there’s nothing more to find from it. But…” 

Sveistrup’s gaze moves away from you, as if lost in thought for a moment, before she comes back to herself and continues, “... I need to make sure that my cure works. It was built purely from a hypothetical, never tested on myself for fear that it would have the opposite effect or no effect at all, but now that you’re here… you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” 

Unfortunately, you do. You caught on the moment she said she needed to make sure that the cure worked before she used it on herself, knowing that she meant to use it on you first, since you’re the most viable test subject she has―not yet deformed by the virus, ready to be injected with it and subsequently “cured” assuming that the cure does work―and the most convenient. You don’t voice any of this, though, because you can see on her face that she already knows that you do. 

“Of course you do. You’re very smart, clearly.” Sveistrup nods in agreement with herself, and stands up, looming over you. You can just barely move your head to track her movements, seeing her walking away from you and a little further into the hall. You keep thinking about what she’s going to do to you, what’s going to happen if the cure doesn’t work but the virus does, if Leon will ever get here in order to stop her―

“Don’t think too hard, it makes it worse,” Sveistrup calls out over her shoulder, before coming back with two syringes in either of her hands. One holds a pink-tinted liquid with a light red strand of aggregated material inside of it, fleshy and holding together despite its frayed edges. The other is a clear liquid, clearly thick, telling by the way the air bubbles trapped inside of the syringe move slowly through the liquid. She kneels beside you now rather than straddling you, which you’re eternally grateful for, and sets down the clear liquid-filled needle without much regard for how much bacteria is on the floor. 

She looks away for just a moment, fiddling with the syringe to ensure that no air bubbles escape into your bloodstream, and you try your best to move your arms as she does. Her eyebrows are furrowing now, and foreign curses are whispered under her breath as the plunger refuses to move. Your dominant arm, though still heavy and feeling sluggish, manages to move down slightly. You pause your moving, checking to see if she noticed, but she didn’t. 

As quickly as you can, you move your arm further down, shifting your hand so that it’s facing your abandoned gun. You would get the knife closer to you, but you don’t trust yourself to move at Sveistrup with enough force in order to actually do any lethal damage. The handgun is cold now as your fingers brush against the grip of it, and you swallow quietly as you try your best to actually get your fingers to wrap around it. Sveistrup finally got the plunger to move, and her expression goes back to something less frustrated, and your hand is moving faster, trying so hard to just get your hand to properly grip the gun and angle it upwards just enough to get her. 

“I wish I had better utensils for such―” Sveistrup is just about to turn back to you, functioning syringe in hand, when you manage to steady your gun on the ground and turn the muzzle upwards just enough so that when you pull the trigger, a loud bang sounds out and a large, red hole is suddenly present in her shoulder. 

A half-surprised-half-pained noise escapes Sveistrup, and she reaches for her knife with her non-injured side, while you deliver another quick shot to her arm. She’s quick to pivot and half-plunge her knife into the bottom left of your abdomen, making an involuntary inward hiss escape you and a sharp groan follow it soon after. The shock leaves you a little more mobile, fortunately for you, making it easier for you to maneuver yourself into a more comfortable position. She’s practically leaning over you now, so you knock down her injured shoulder and move so that you’re half-straddling her and half-planking on the ground. In this position, you can ease yourself up into a sitting position, and point your gun directly at her forehead.

Even just the sight of the muzzle facing her has a cry pre-emptively leaving her, and even now as she’s laying down, there’s a small, pained whimper that comes with each of her exhales. A similar noise is leaving you as you breathe heavily, practically panting now, but you know that you need to get out quickly to treat your own wound. Still, you have Sveistrup right here, and you won’t pass up the opportunity to question her a little more.

“Where’s Dr. Andersen?” you pant, your voice coming out a little hoarse but still understandable. Sveistrup stares at you, eyes narrowing minutely for a split second before she scoffs. 

“Why does it matter?” Sveistrup spits, about to attempt to get up with her good arm but stopping once she realizes that you’re still pointing the gun at her. You give her a look, ignoring how you’re getting a little dizzy standing for so long, and Sveistrup sighs, “He’s gone. That’s all that I can tell you, is that he’s― he’s gone.”

You raise an eyebrow at her. Assuming she’s telling the truth, which you’d like to think that she is to make this whole ordeal a whole lot simpler, you should just kill her now and head back out. There’s no point in leaving her alive or taking her, there’s nothing that you could get out of her that you don’t already know. 

Seeing that you’re not moving from your position above her, Sveistrup looks around, looking almost nervous. You track her eyes, but she’s just looking around herself, most likely searching for an exit of some sort. Her eyes flit back to you, and she stays quiet for a few more seconds, before seemingly breaking. 

“Fuck! Fine, he’s―” Sveistrup swallows, before her head jerks in a nodding movement towards one of the cells in the wall further behind her, “he’s there.” 

Your gaze shifts from her face to the cell, but you don’t have to look to know what you’d find. Or, at least, you didn’t think you did. You don’t get the best view of the interior of the cell from here, instead looking in it from a weird angle, but you can see the standing, rotting body that you expected to find in there. What you didn’t expect to see, though, is ragged plaid covering the five-foot-five or -six zombie’s body, with his pants not fitting him properly and liver spots dotting his cheeks and neck. 

“I found him this morning.” Sveistrup sounds almost proud of herself for a moment, “This is his punishment for leaving me to do this on my own.” 

“How did he get like that so fast?” you have to ask, eyebrows furrowing as you better observe the man, tilting your head to get a better angle of him. Sveistrup gives a small smile at your curiosity. 

“Magic,” she whispers conspiratorially, making your gaze snap back to her with an unimpressed look. You guess you’ll just have to find out how exactly that happened from the report, then. 

You feel a little light-headed after looking back at her so fast, and you figure that you should probably be moving faster to get back to the safehouse as fast as possible. Taking a few deep breaths, you bring your gun back up, not having realized that you let it drop to your side at some point, and Sveistrup’s eyes immediately widen. 

“Wait, wait―” 

You don’t wait for her to plead her case to you. A quick shot to the head has her quiet in a second, and you deem her dead the moment you see the faint twitching of her muscles and hear the air in her lungs begin to escape her. You step back away from her, and you stumble into the wall in your attempt to try and walk properly. It’s almost entirely adrenaline that gets you moving, pushing yourself off of the wall and walking as fast as you can down the hallway. You’re just glad the walk isn’t too far, with your limp slowing you down significantly and not allowing you to walk more than a few steps before having to stop for a moment and catch your breath. 

The flickering lights are starting to make you feel sick, between whatever chemical agent Sveistrup injected you with―which, it must be more than a paralyzer, you now realize, considering that your vision blurs every now and then and you see double when you walk for too long without a break―and the wound in your abdomen. It’s not big by any means, or at least not big for a stab wound, but it’s still deep enough to make you want to lay back down and wait until the throbbing sensation dulls down to something more bearable. 

You reach the doors in a little less than ten minutes, with your walking gradually getting faster as the chemicals flowing through you had slowly dissipated and allowed you a little more movement, and you push through them by putting all of your weight on one of the doors. And as you push through with a grunt, still holding your side to slow the bleeding as much as you can, you swear you think you’re hallucinating when you catch sight of a familiar blonde standing in front of you. 

You figure out quickly, though, that you’re not hallucinating, as said “hallucination” begins to speak.

Leon says your name worriedly, and when you don’t immediately respond to him, he rushes towards you and grabs you by the shoulders to help you stand up straighter. You groan quietly at the effort, and shift your hand slightly off of your wound to show Leon the bloody mess beneath your palm before putting pressure back onto it the best you can. 

“Hey,” you put your free hand on his shoulder to cease his imminent concern, and his gaze flits from your wound to go up to your face, the small grin on your face making his brows furrow together, “you’re never gonna guess who I just ran into.”  

10:03

The ride back to the safe house is, in Leon’s personal opinion, maybe one of the most stressful car rides he’s ever had the displeasure of being involved in.

He’s speeding down the road with you in the passenger seat, still holding a hand over your wound and biting back small noises at the dull throbbing in your abdomen. He knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that because you’re still conscious and able to speak, the wound can’t be too bad. Not too bad in terms of what “too bad” is defined as in your line of work, he means, reconsidering his thoughts as he realizes that he just called a stab wound not too bad. 

The car ride is relatively quiet, the silence only broken up by Leon asking if you’re still alive and you replying that you won’t be if he doesn’t drive faster, and each time he obliges by speeding up a little bit. He doesn’t need to switch gears anymore, not stopping at lights and not slowing down for turns, the car nearly tipping over a few times with his reckless driving. You can barely tell anyway, from what he can see every time he spares a glance at you, everything from a small bump in the road to a dangerous turn feeling just as stomach-turning for you. 

You’re back at the safehouse in a significantly shorter amount of time than it took you to leave it and reach that facility. The trip from the car to the inside of the house is a blur, with Leon quickly picking you up from the passenger’s seat and moving you inside of the house as fast as he can, grabbing the back of a wooden chair with his free hand as his other hand keeps you held against him, chest pressed against his and hand wedged between both of your abdomens to apply pressure to your own.

Leon’s quick to set you down on one of the kitchen chairs he dragged into the makeshift living room, trying to ignore your shallow breathing for his own sake. Your hand is still over your wound but not applying enough pressure, so he quickly yanks his shirt up and over his head, bundling it up into a ball and wedging it between your hand and the still bleeding wound, the small noise you let out at the feeling making him wince. He’s usually better with this, better at separating his feelings from his actions, but he can’t bring himself to do so now. Not when it’s you. 

“You have to hold this here, okay?” Leon’s voice comes out as more pleading than he wished it would, but he was stupid to think that he could keep even a fraction of the concern he holds for you from lacing his tone, “Okay?”

You nod the best you can, giving a small up-down movement with your head that Leon decides is good enough. He’s quick to search the safe house for a medical kit to patch you up with, finding one of yours that you kept in your makeshift-bedroom in case of emergencies, and he figures that it’ll have to do the trick until you can get proper medical attention. He hurries back to you, unzipping the hard case of the kit as he gets back to you, still sitting on that kitchen chair and leaning back while you keep Leon’s bundled shirt pressed against you the best you can. 

Leon looks between you and the kit, trying to think. His mind is both going too fast and not fast enough to figure out what to do, and he’s about to just say fuck it and start stitching you up here before you speak up. 

“Couch,” you remind Leon the best you can with the raspy quality that your voice has taken on. Leon nods quickly, realizing that this should’ve been the first step, but tries not to beat himself up over not just immediately laying you down against a flat surface. He gathers you in his arms and is swift in his transfer of you from the chair to the couch a few paces away. You nod towards the medical kit once he sets you down, and he opens it, finding a few different useful items. 

He doesn’t pick up the suture needle and nylon thread yet, now figuring that he’ll have to stitch you up after disinfecting your wound. He catches you prying his balled up shirt off of your wound from his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t stop you, assuming that you know what you’re doing. Leon grabs a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the kit, but the moment his fingers properly grasp it, you make an urgent warning sound in the back of your throat. 

“Not that―” you cough a little from the quickness with which you speak, and Leon almost immediately puts the bottle back, “use the saline next to it.” 

Leon looks to the left of the hydrogen peroxide and finds a small bottle of sterile saline with a spray attachment on top of it, picking that up instead and making his way back to you. You squint at the bottle in his hand and sigh, relieved, before gesturing towards your wound, implicating that Leon should spray the solution over it. He obliges easily, following your lead, and even as you hiss at the stinging feeling of the wash flooding your wound, he carries through with it until he sees you motion for him to stop. The can is topped and tossed to the side quickly, and Leon moves to grab the suture material from the kit. 

He sees the look you give him at the sight of him with the curved needle and the blue thread that comes with it, and he tries to give you the most comforting look that he can. The wound seems to have slowed its bleeding significantly, with it not being so deep that it’s fatal, but deep enough to cause worrying amounts of blood loss if not dealt with accordingly. 

“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before,” Leon tries to reassure you, attempting to firmly grasp the small needle between his fingers. 

“Needle holders,” you stress, genuinely sounding concerned for your own safety with your life in Leon’s hands. He pauses his fumbling with the suture needle for a moment, and looks down at the medkit, seeing the tools you’re referring to and realizing now why they felt so familiar when he first saw them. Leon reaches down and grabs one of the scissor-like tools, and spots a pair of forceps next to it, grabbing that as well and coming back up, holding the two tools up and waiting for your approval. 

You nod at the sight, relaxing once again and wincing at the pressure in your abdomen, and Leon realizes at the sight of you that he should probably be moving a little bit faster. He looks down at your wound and thinks. He remembers one stitch pattern from his emergency training, but he barely remembers how he did it, just knowing that it was the simplest one he could learn and the easiest one to do. He barely stitches himself up during missions, never getting any practice in, usually relying on the cans of magical first-aid spray he’s provided with and whatever strange herbs he finds while he’s wandering around. 

“Okay,” Leon breathes, swallowing before leaning over you and closer to your wound, steadying the needle he’s holding with the needle holder and gently prodding at the skin surrounding the puncture site with the forceps. He can see you trying to slow your breathing to make it easier for him, less movement jostling the tools in his hands around, and he finds himself grateful for your efforts even if he wishes you didn’t have to do that for him. He carefully pinches the skin at the edge of one side of the wound with the forceps, and with a deep breath, begins stitching you up. 

Pulling the skin apart and pushing it back together with every stitch and hearing each pained breath that comes from you as he does makes Leon’s stomach turn, but he doesn’t stop. He pushes through the awful feeling the sounds of your struggling bring him, and ignores each small grunt that escapes you, instead focusing on his stitching. He knows that he must be messing up a little bit, must be sloppy with his work, but he figures that if it’s good enough, he can call for medical attention to be on the helicopter coming your way as soon as he finds his backup radio. 

Tying the knots after each small suture is surprisingly easy, and gets easier as Leon gets used to effectively using scissors for hands. You get quieter as he continues, and he thinks it's you also getting used to the feeling of a needle and string sliding in and out of you, though he knows that the feeling is weird enough that it still gets bothersome even after a few minutes of it happening. 

It’s not a large wound by any means, so it doesn’t take him too long to stitch. Albeit, he is rushing himself a little bit, wanting to call in a helicopter to get the two of you out of here as fast as possible, but he’s trying to go just the perfect speed where he isn’t going too slow but isn’t going so fast as to hurt you too much or make the stitching ineffective. In maybe fifteen minutes, he’s managed to carefully stitch your wound together, and ties off the last knot before searching around him for a pair of scissors. The medical kit contains a small pair, and he leans down to grab it, carefully handling the small blades and cutting off the excess thread left on the needle. 

“Jesus,” Leon huffs out under his breath, finally allowing himself to actually breathe as he pulls away from you, tossing the suture needle and leftover thread onto the coffee table behind him. He looks at the bundled up shirt lying beside your head, and manages to joke poorly, “if you wanted my shirt off that bad, you could’ve just asked.” 

“Nobody asked you to take your shirt off, Leon,” you immediately reply, voice still a little raspy but sounding better. You try to push yourself up onto your elbows to see Leon better, but he quickly moves to push you back down by the area just under your collarbone until you’re flat against the couch again. He gives you a warning look at your efforts. 

“You’re staying here until we get picked up,” Leon orders you, trying to sound as serious as he can while you give him an offended look at his clear distrust in your ability to sit up a little bit, “shit, I need to tell Hunnigan what happened.” 

“Can’t believe I’m getting kicked out to the couch…” Leon ignores your wistful muttering in favor of searching for his backup radio, walking back to your temporary bedroom and looking through his bag. He finds a small, black device with a light green screen and a few buttons indicating whether he wants to call someone or hang up. 

As he walks back to you, Leon presses the button that automatically connects him to Hunnigan’s line, and brings the device up to his ear. It takes a few seconds, but eventually Hunnigan’s voice is heard through the small, low-quality speakers. 

“Leon?”

“We can’t get to the extraction point.” Leon sits down next to your legs, switching the device in his hand to his nondominant one so that he can rest his right hand on your knee, “And we need a medical team.” 

“I’ll send a team down to you,” Hunnigan replies easily, typing sounds heard from her end, “what happened over there?”

“You also did not have to carry me, at all,” Leon hears you say from his right, though he pointedly ignores you, even as you continue, “I could’ve walked.” 

“They got hurt?”

“Badly. Stab wound.” 

“Are you being serious?”

“I’ll let the team know, I have some people already deployed in Sweden. They’ll be over to you in an hour or two. Can you wait that long?” 

Leon looks over at you, looking at the sutures holding your skin together, and decides on replying, “I think so.” 

“Good. We’ll get you to a private airport with a plane ready as soon as we can. Just hang in there for now, okay?” 

“Copy that.” 

00:27

The bench outside of your apartment has a really, really shitty view of the city. Still, you sit there, right beside Leon. You lean back against the bench, and your head naturally leans to the side, not entirely on Leon’s shoulder but almost there. It’s quiet out here, and it smells like freshly cut grass and familiar cologne on worn leather. You feel like, if you stay here too long, your feet will become rooted to the ground and you’ll stay sitting here forever. You don’t think you’d mind that too much, as long as Leon’s still sitting here beside you. 

You’re both usually quiet when you come out here. Not necessarily silent, more like shared quiet conversations held under pale moonlight, illuminating the both of you in ways that have your eyes lingering on each other when you think it won’t be noticed. Leon’s hair looks silvery under the moon, you’ve noticed, with the blonde ends of his hair looking more white than pale yellow and the brunette roots looking light a lighter, mousier chestnut-like color than usual. Dark shadows are cast over the skin by his nose, and his cheeks give the impression that they dip deeper than they actually do. You know that they aren’t contoured how the moon makes them out to be because you’ve held them before in your hands, your thumbs digging into that same skin as if it could suck you in and keep you trapped there with him forever. 

You don’t realize you’re staring at him until he looks back at you, catching you, and you look away instinctively. Leon snorts at how you immediately avert your gaze, but he doesn’t comment on it. 

Instead, Leon continues to look at you, for so long that it turns into staring. When you look back at him, his pupils are dilated. They look like two black holes staring right at you, the icy blue of his irises distorting around the horizon of his pupils, two singularities burning holes through your own two eyes. Distantly, you remind yourself that the sun is setting and therefore his eyes are searching for more light, but the forefront of your mind wants so desperately for you to believe that article you read some months ago stating that it could be due to attraction. It’s nothing more than a pseudo-science, just as real as your blood being blue, or prayer curing disease, or―

“Thinking about something?” Leon’s voice interrupts you. There’s a smirk on his face that you can’t tell if you want to slap it off or kiss it off. 

“Not you.” 

“Didn’t say you were.” He’s insufferable. Too smug for his own good. Arrogant bastard who thinks he can just get whatever he wants whenever he wants, all because he’s the president’s number-one cocksucker, prancing around with his daughter and some stupid scientist from Spain that you don’t think about on the daily. Annoying and not anywhere near qualified to just barge into your lab whenever he wants to, that stupid grin on his face and a new vial of whatever for you to play with, always acting as if he’s so great for bringing it to you. 

To you, specifically, some traitorous voice in the back of your mind tries to speak up, but you shut it down easily. 

“Y’know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you actually are thinking about me,” Leon insists, some level of curiosity dipping into his tone despite that teasing lilt he still keeps in his voice, “penny for your thoughts?”

“You’ll need a whole lot more than a penny for those.” He huffs out a laugh and your heart beats a little faster. Asshole. 

“I can match your salary if you want,” Leon offers. You’d think he’s serious if not for the look on his face, so knowing, as if he knows every little thing about you. You’re starting to think he might.

—

Leon can’t tell if you want to kiss him or kill him. He’ll take either one, as long as it’s you, but he much prefers the former. 

You’re silent for a bit, and he feels something like a buzzing along his veins, humming under his skin and damn near making him vibrate with the intensity of it. Forget anything from a gun or a glass, this feeling is worse than any shot he’s taken. Your eyes are flitting all over his face and it’s killing him, whether you intend for it to or not, and he’s so close to just leaning in and kissing that frown right off your face. It seems to always be present, only ever going away when Leon manages to make you laugh or smile, and damn it if it doesn’t make his ego that much bigger just knowing that he’s only ever witnessed himself wipe that frown off your face. 

“Your pupils are dilated. It’s making me worry,” you speak, finally, and all Leon hears is that you were looking at his eyes. 

“... Is that really all you’re thinking about?” Leon has to ask, needing some confirmation that you’re interested in him beyond the size of his pupils. 

“What else should I be thinking about?” you respond with your own question, all the more frustrating and making that buzzing a little stronger, his pinky twitching and his hand gently pulling together into a fist to stop it. Leon doesn’t dare look away despite having the strong urge to do so, just to get away from your intense stare, and instead remains looking unblinkingly at your face. 

His eyes flit down to your lips. They’re slightly chapped, but so are his, so he can’t judge. A hand comes up to the side of your face without either of you realizing it, him only noticing that his body has moved on its own once his palm comes into contact with your cold skin. He can feel the weight of your face just barely drop into his hand and it makes both his heart and breath stutter, hitching and going out of rhythm for the quickest moment before Leon makes his decision. 

He’s waited long enough. There’s been too many interrupted moments for him not to seize this one, just in case Hunnigan manages to come out of nowhere and pull the two of you apart again, or in case your apprentice comes by and distracts you enough for the moment to pass.

So, instead of answering your question―which, let’s be honest, both of you have known since the beginning of this conversation that nothing asked here has really mattered―he slightly tilts your face upwards and leans in. 

Your lips meet his and he swears you’ve killed him. Your lips are all cold but he doesn’t mind, it balances out his own warm ones, and something in his mind clicks into place. Every question centered around you swimming around in his mind is drowned out, sinking from his brain to his lips and leaking into your mouth as it parts slightly. His thumb swipes back and forth over your cheek on its own accord, as natural as his rapidly beating heart, and with every swipe he feels sugar. 

You’re leaning in, too, and he’s eternally grateful to feel the weight of you leaning into him a little more. Almost bitterly, he thinks to himself that he could’ve had this so much sooner, that he could’ve had you so much sooner had he not allowed so many distractions to come between the two of you, but he doesn’t dwell on all the missed opportunities. Not when he just took advantage of this one. 

Leon mourns the loss of your lips as you slowly pull away. He’s tempted to chase after you, but seeing as you need some time to actually breathe, he lets you find some space from his lips. 

“I’ve wanted to do that,” Leon breathes out, his tongue darting out to quickly wet his lips before continuing, “for years.”

You stare at him, and for a moment Leon wonders if that was too much, but you reply after a few seconds with, “... Years?” 

“Years,” Leon confirms, leaning back in to press a chaste kiss to your lips, then another one on your cheek, “ever since you stitched me up after that sparring match back in―” 

“Leon,” you interrupt him, pulling back slightly so that you can look at his face better, your own eyes wide as your gaze flits over Leon’s face. “That was seven years ago.”

Leon nods mindlessly, trying to lean back in to press his lips against yours again, but your hand on his forehead stops him. 

“You waited seven years?”

“You mad at me or something?” Leon asks, a grin tugging at his lips at your reaction. You blink at him, giving him the impression for a few seconds that you might actually be a little mad at him. 

“We could’ve been doing this―” Leon doesn’t let your hand stop him from leaning in this time, cutting you off by stealing another kiss from you and keeping his lips pressed against yours until he can feel you stop trying to talk. He pulls away just enough so that your lips are no longer touching, but you can still feel his breath on your lips and vice versa. 

“Seven years ago, I know,” Leon finishes your sentence for you, “I was… playing the long game.” 

He doesn’t let you reply, utilizing the little space between your lips to lean back in and keep your mouth shut before you can open it again, leaving no room to argue with him. 

It’s only a few seconds later, when you’ve accepted your fate and have decided to card your fingers through the hair at the back of Leon’s head while you relax into him, that a few loud bangs cause the two of you to abruptly part. You’re both surprised by the sudden noise, even if it’s a normal occurrence near your apartment, and your eyebrows furrow at the sound. Leon, however, tries to just ignore it. 

“You think those are gunshots?” you ask, looking around for a moment, though Leon just turns your face back to his.

“... I think that they’re fireworks,” Leon settles on after a second of deliberating what to say to continue what you were both doing before hearing the very obvious gunshots. He’s already leaning back in, not willing to let this moment go interrupted because of a few gunshots some ways away from the two of you.

“No, I’m― I’m pretty sure those are gunshots―” Leon interrupts you once again, lips pressed against yours, breathing his beating heart into you to help you understand just how badly he needs this.

“Shhh,” he murmurs against your lips, “fireworks.” 

06:24

“God… damn it―” 

Leon’s cursing under his breath again, fiddling with the gear shift in the center console of the shitty car the two of you are in. You’re trying your best not to laugh at his frustration, but it’s getting harder to bite down on your cheek without drawing blood from your efforts. You know it’ll only make Leon more frustrated, but you really can’t help the small, quick exhale that comes from you that would barely count as a laugh if you were around anyone else. Leon, though, lets his gaze flit over to you for a second, eyes narrowed. 

“Oh, is this funny to you?” Leon asks you accusingly, his eyes going back to the road and not even bothering to use his turn signal as he takes a left, “Because if you’d like to try and drive this thing…” 

“No, I’m― I’m good,” your smile, as much as you try to bite it back, is too evident in your voice for Leon not to notice, “you’re doing great, actually. Only about ten more minutes and we’ll be there.” 

Leon grumbles under his breath, much to your amusement, but doesn’t bother to form some sort of rebuttal against your clear lying. 

The facility the two of you are headed towards isn’t exactly the most secretive. It’s a large, white building with Umbrella’s logo slapped on one of the topmost corners, their logo below it written in Danish script and a vast parking lot covering the space behind it that tapers off into a small forest area. The community around it is the more curious part. A small neighborhood of very few homes, with almost no cars in sight. No people, either, and a few bicycles left abandoned on either the sidewalk or driveways. The best word you could use to describe it would be barren; you don’t even know if there’s any life left in this neighborhood, and the implications that an Umbrella lab being so close to an area like this brings is enough to unsettle you. 

As you approach the facility, more things become apparent. The small notepad in your hand is scribbled on by the pen you keep in the other hand as you observe and jot down the various instances of roadkill littering the sides of the street, noting that from what you can see, these seem to be mainly dead squirrels. Fairly large, gray, with short, rounded ears and bushy tails, similar to what you might see lingering in the trees on the way to work. Not native to Europe, you make sure to note, turning away from the road to focus on your writing, possibly bigger than the invasive ones, but unsure from where I can see them. Brought in by Umbrella?

It wouldn’t surprise you. The first real mission you ever went on, you found a lab―not necessarily Umbrella, but speculated to be some sort of connected company―that brought in their own samples to avoid the suspicion that would come with the animal population in the local area dwindling. You suspect that Umbrella might be trying to do the same, and write that down as well. It’s only a few more minutes until Leon sighs in relief, parking the car in one of the many vacant spots available and not caring about how he managed to take up two parking spots. Your notepad and pen are stuffed in the lower pocket of your coat. 

“Did you see the entrance at all?” you ask, frowning as you look over at the facility for a moment before directing your attention to the glovebox. You open it, and as Leon shakes his head to indicate that he didn’t, you hand him his gun and knife. He holsters both of them, maneuvering himself into a slightly awkward position while sitting to do so, before fishing his earpiece out of his side pocket and settling again. 

“No. I’m guessing there’s a door around the back or some kind of hatch they left unlocked,” Leon tells you as he slots the earpiece into his ear, wincing at the small squeal it gives at the pressure before settling back down to a quiet hum. You already put your own in before getting into the car, waiting for Hunnigan to start guiding the two of you through the facility. 

“Pretty shitty design, isn’t it?” you comment. Leon hums in agreement. 

“Well, they’re not exactly known for their architecture,” Leon dryly responds, waiting for you to unbuckle your seatbelt before opening his door. You snort at that and open your own door, getting out of the car in sync with him and shutting the door behind you. Walking around to his side of the car, Leon waits for you to reach him before walking closer to the building.

The gray sky doesn’t contrast much with the slight off-white of the building. Clouds loom overhead, and there’s the slightest breeze that just barely rustles the dying leaves among the trees surrounding the area and taking up the rear end of the building. It’s not so cold that visual evidence of your breaths form in the air as white puffs of frozen condensation, but still cold enough to make you grateful that you’re wearing a trench coat. 

The building isn’t the biggest you’ve seen, but it’s definitely up there as far as Umbrella facilities go. As you look up at the white building towering over you and your pseudo-partner, you can’t help but wonder how employees on their first day would get inside. There’s no obvious doors, no windows, and no directions guiding you to any sort of entrance. 

“I’m really, really hoping there’s not some bullshit puzzle we have to do in order to get in there,” you sigh, and Leon clearly shares the sentiment, clicking his tongue and trying to find any evidence of entry he can.

“Yeah…” Leon frowns as he looks up at the building, readjusting his gloves as he does so. Your gaze falls to the fingerless leather pieces adorning his hands, and your eyes linger there for a few more seconds until Leon speaks again and you look back at his face. “Didn’t the report say the lab was under―” 

“Hej!” 

You and Leon both startle and turn around at the sudden sound of someone else’s voice, the foreign noise cutting through the solemn quiet environment like a guillotine. There’s a man running towards the two of you―late forties or early fifties, balding, maybe two hundred and fifty-something pounds from what you can see, eyes red-rimmed and crow’s feet crinkling the skin beside either of his eyes, liver spots visible on his cheeks and neck―in ragged clothes, and Leon immediately reaches for his holstered gun. You catch the movement and put a hand on his forearm before he can pull out the handgun, and his movements falter before stopping. 

“You―” the man gasps for air once he reaches the two of you, putting his hands on his knees and looking down for a moment before looking back up at the two of you. He’s shorter than both of you, standing at maybe five-foot-five or -six, and his pants bunch awkwardly around one of his legs as he stands back up straight. “You should not be here. There’s, uh, um… it’s a hazard, to be this close to the facility.”

“... Okay,” you slowly respond, eyebrows furrowing at the sight before you, “did you work here?” 

The man is about to speak before he decides to just shake his head negatively, eyes closing for a moment as he does, before he finally catches his breath and responds, “Nej, but, there’s news going around, saying not to go near here. There is… waste. It’s not safe to be so close to it. Unless… are you investigating what happened?” 

You take your eyes off of him for just a second to look at Leon, who looks back at you, and some silent, mutual understanding is met; both of you know that this man is lying. How Leon knows, you’re not sure, but you can see the way he deliberately looks away from you. How his gaze flits around, trying not to meet yours, and how he pants and feigns catching his breath to distract both you and himself from the fact that he’s trying to make something up. The fact that he assumed the two of you were investigating, too, as if that would be something obvious by the way the two of you are dressed. The black trench coat you’re in might seem a little typical for an as-seen-on-TV detective, but the skin tight―and when you say skin tight, you mean skin tight―compression shirt Leon’s wearing along with his dark cargo pants and tactical belt tells a different story. 

“We are,” Leon says before you can reply, which you can’t tell if you’re grateful for or not, “if you know anything, now would be a good time to share it with us.” 

“Oh, I don’t―” the man laughs too loud to sound innocent, his chortles eventually tapering off into coughs, where he puts a finger up to let you both know he needs a second, before continuing, “I just live here. There, I mean, right over there.” 

He points at a house some ways away from where you’re all standing. You tilt your head to look around him and get your eyes on it, seeing the small, dark blue house he’s referring to. Leon raises an eyebrow as he looks at the worn-down house, the door left slightly ajar as if someone had attempted to close it behind them in a hurry. It would make his behavior and his story make more sense if he didn’t exaggerate himself to the point of suspicion. 

“So you wouldn’t happen to know how to get inside of this place, would you?” you ask, pointing a thumb back at the building. The man’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly, but you catch the slight movement of his eyelids before he can mask his facial expressions once again with something more neutral. Something you assume he thinks is more welcoming. 

“Oh, I wouldn’t go in there at all,” the man says, almost like a warning, before his voice dips into a lower tone that one might use to tell a scary story or an urban myth, “from what I hear, they’re doing a lot more than just making medicine in there. Det er farligt arbejde, siger jeg.”

It’s dangerous work, I say. You tilt your head to the side slightly at the words, but Leon isn’t so privy to look into what the man is saying beyond the vague manner in which he speaks. 

“Thanks for the tip,” he says blankly. You both look at each other for a moment, debating what to do, before turning back to where the man is. “What’s your―” 

Where the man was, you should say instead, seeing as where he once stood is now nothing but air. There’s no traces of his existence beyond the crumpled leaves that he stepped on in his haste to reach the two of you. You both look around, and when you see no sign of him, you both give each other a concerned expression. 

“Probably should’ve gotten his name at the start, huh?” 

“Yeah, probably.” 

“Whose name?” You jump slightly at the sound of Hunnigan’s voice, much to Leon’s amusement, seeing as he’s more used to Hunnigan interrupting his conversations than you are. 

“Strange guy right outside of the lab,” Leon supplies helpfully, “tried to convince us not to go in.” 

“A scientist?”

“He said he wasn’t, but I don’t believe him,” you reply for Leon, who nods in agreement. 

“Is he still there?”

“He actually, uh, ran away just before you talked.”

“Did you get his name, at least?”

“... No.” 

You and Leon both hear Hunnigan sigh over comms. “Unbelievable.”

“Sorry, but ‘Condor-1’ was a little busy brooding at him to ask anything important.” Leon looks at you, offended, and you promptly ignore the objectively funny look on his face to continue talking to Hunnigan, “If we find him again, we’ll let you know.” 

“Of course you will,” if Hunnigan ever rolled her eyes at either of you, you’d think that she just did so, but as much as the two of you test her limits, she remains professional, “you can enter the lab through the back entrance, there should be a door leading to the ground floor. I can’t see where the basement entrance is, but if you both find anything important on the ground floor, you probably won’t have to go down there at all.”

“Isn’t the basement where the lab is?” Leon asks, walking alongside you towards the back of the entrance. The barren nature of the parking lot makes it almost uncanny, walking through it in order to round the back corner of the building, and the overgrown vegetation closing in only adds to the apocalyptic nature of the environment. 

“Where part of it is, yes. We can always send in another team to scope it out if needed. Just focus on the floors you can get to for now.”

You both reach the back entrance of the facility, and Leon goes to open the door. The rectangular knob turns easily, albeit with a slight creak due to the rust littering the metal handle, and he pushes open the door. Strangely, as you both walk in, you’re immediately met with the cafeteria, and all the people who were once in there to eat lunch.

06:51

A group of five undead, or a hoard as you’ve deemed them, stands together and stares at you and Leon. The noises they make grow more different as more of them surround the two of you, like hums of agreement in the form of zombified groans, as if agreeing to put aside their need to eat each other in favor of eating the new food source they see in front of them. The fact that they eat each other at all is mystery enough, but to see them seemingly communicate with each other in order to unionize and work together to focus on you and Leon is all the more fascinating. Morbidly, of course; you hate these creatures as much as the next person, but you can’t deny your curiosity. 

Leon raises his gun, and you don’t stop him, not when he’s the only one with a weapon good enough to use against the zombies. When they drop, one by one, they let out screams that are unusual, even for them. Loud enough to echo off the abandoned walls of the cafeteria, and at the sound, the other zombies’ heads will seemingly subconsciously whip around to find the source of the sound, before turning back to Leon. The process repeats, and as those disgusting bodies hit the floor, you mentally note how each one seems to let out an ear-piercing scream that acts as a warning to the others that there’s a threat in the area. It’s the only thing that would make sense, you think, considering how each scream is what catches the attention of the zombies, not the shots themselves.

You and Leon keep moving wordlessly. The smell of rotting food slowly dissipates as you make your way to a long hallway, a few doors on either side of each wall, with one large double-door situation at the end of the hall. You’re already on the left, so your gaze goes to the door closest to you, which has a plate on the side of it deeming it the blood analysis lab. It’s an unspoken agreement between the two of you that formed before getting here that you’ll handle the sample collecting and Leon will handle the fighting; it’s not that you can’t fight, it was made sure of that you and everyone else the government grabbed had some sort of training, but you weren’t trained to the same degree as Leon. You thank whoever’s watching over you for that, because you don’t know if you could survive much of what Krauser had all his little mentees doing. 

“I’ll take this side?” you offer, Leon already nodding in agreement before you finish your sentence, anticipating what you were going to ask. 

“Let me know if you need help,” Leon reminds you, tapping his ear to point out the communication system you two share. 

“Got it.” Both of you part ways, with Leon stepping into the room closest to him and you doing the same with the lab. The door automatically closes behind you, and the lights come on the moment you enter the room. 

It’s not a very large room by any means, but content-wise, it’s full of things to sample. You gravitate towards the station in the back of the room first, finding a row of supplies used for blood staining. There’s flasks of methylene blue on magnetic stir plates, small white rods settled in the bottom of each one, and a few labeled containers behind the plates containing the components used to make the blue solution. As you pull out your notepad to write everything down, your eyes flit across the long table everything is set down on, taking note of what it’s being used for. 

You jot down the obvious blank space on the table, noting that the leftover slides left slanted against the wall suggest that this was an area for them to dry after smearing blood on, and the well-kept nature of the environment suggests that nobody left here in a hurry. Not this area, at least; you write down that this means whatever caused the abandonment of the lab didn’t start in this room. There’s a decently sized glass bottle of liquid labeled as Wright plet in the corner, along with racks of different sized micropipettes and several reagent bottles filled with varying amounts of distilled water scattered about the area. As you look away from the station, you see shelves with boxes of different sized gloves lining them, with a disproportionately large amount of L-sized gloves to the small amount of M- and S-sized gloves. There’s an eyewash station just below the shelving. 

Walking around, you spot more stations with different purposes. There’s a sink next to a long table of slides with a pinkish-red hue staining them, as opposed to the blue colored slides still drying against the wall in the other station. Next to these slides are a similarly sized glass bottle to the one containing the Wright stain, except this one now reads Giemsa plet. 

Both used for staining blood, you note, one for differentiating between cells, one for identifying diseases and parasites. You can’t see any actual blood in the area, unfortunately, even as you go through various refrigerators and find solutions like acetic acid and methanol stashed on several shelves. You jot this down too, and just as you’re about to leave and move on to the next room, your eyes catch sight of a microscope. One singular microscope on a table large enough to fit five, suspiciously enough, and already loaded with a slide under the glass. 

Curiously, you approach the microscope, and adjust the slide. It’s just barely off-center, which you fix, and you change the lens until it’s at 10X before observing. You have to adjust the focus on the slide for a minute, struggling to get the microscope to actually focus on the details of what’s on it, but you eventually get it. Your eyebrows furrow at the sight of the slide. This lab, from what you were told, has been abandoned for at least three years, judging by what Intel told both you and Leon in that briefing. 

Yet, the bacteria on the slide are still moving. They shouldn’t be moving even if the slide were freshly stained, and yet they’re just barely wiggling around the glass surface of it, and as you magnify the lens more to view the bacteria more clearly, their movements become more obvious. You note your observations in your notepad, your pencil scribbling furiously at the paper as you try and jot down everything you see. You pull your face away from the oculars, and your attention is redirected to a small paper packet laying on the table beside the microscope.

You find out quickly that it’s a field report, titled PLUTO: 1 - 9 with minimal details on the cover page. Visible details are the date the report was made, which is dated 15/9/96, the name of the reporter, Dr. Sveistrup, and the company’s logo at the bottom of the page. Any other details are redacted. As you go through the field report, you find that Dr. Sveistrup is studying a virus called the “t-Pluto virus”, somehow making out a few details through the black redacted lines covering up what you assume to be text too important for any prying eyes to see. The redactions are splotchy, though, you note. Too splotchy. They don’t look neat enough to have been done with any care or concern for who may have found the report, so whoever did it must’ve not anticipated that you’d find it. You separate the first page of the report from the others and use both hands to hold the packet up to the bright, flickering fluorescent light above you, lining up the blacked-out lines with the white light and squinting your eyes. 

It’s not concentrated enough to make out any of the redacted words. You purse your lips and bring the paper back to yourself, thumb tapping mindlessly at the flat surface of it before pausing. You reach for your flashlight and turn it on as you bring it up to the paper, slotting the flat illuminated end of it underneath the blacked out words and leaning in to try and read them. It’s hard to tell the black letters from the black ink covering them, but it’s possible, and you walk over to the light switch controlling the overhead lights to turn them off in order to read the words better.

You try your best to make out the carelessly-hidden-away lines of text, and re-read the observations.

Fase 1 - 9/9, 14/9/96. Dr. Sveistrup, Hansen og Andersen.

Brug methylenblåt til at løse iltproblemet efter transformationen; »methemoglobinæmi« opstår kort efter injektionen af t-Pluto på trods af alle forsøg på at forhindre det. Årsagen er ukendt.

Klikkertræning er blevet anvendt til at måle de overlevendes auditive sanser efter behandlingen med methylenblåt.

Hver behandlet person udviser en lignende reaktion, når de placeres tæt på en anden person: først vil de forsøge at undgå hinanden, men vil snart forsøge at kannibalisere hinanden. Yderligere forskning er nødvendig for at forstå, hvor trangen til kannibalisme stammer fra. Dr. Andersen foreslår, at hver person ikke kan skelne hinanden fra en ubehandlet menneskelig person.

Uanset hvad er dette forsøg det første, hvor der er udvist kannibalisme på trods af minimale ændringer i virussen. Dr. Sveistrup har til hensigt at finde denne uønskede ændring, mens Dr. Hansen fortsætter med at forske i de allerede forvandlede individer.

Blodprøver fra de forvandlede vil blive undersøgt i lokale 111.

Just as you finish reading the last bullet point, Hunnigan’s voice comes through the radio, the quality crackling slightly due to disuse. Still, her voice is easily decipherable.

“Leon, I found two people working there listed under ‘Jeppe Andersen’. One lab manager, one head of research for Project Pluto. I’d say the latter is who you’re looking for.” 

“Project Pluto…” Leon considers, voice slightly hushed as he speaks. “Any chance we know anything about that?”

You respond before Hunnigan can say ‘no’, your finger going to your earpiece and pressing down on it to speak, “Think I just found out. There’s a ‘Dr. Andersen’ working on a ‘t-Pluto virus’ with two other researchers, Dr. Sveistrup and Dr. Hansen.” 

You can practically hear Leon’s grimace over the radio as you move back to the table and write down everything you can translate from the report. Reports of cannibalism from the infected, usage of clicker-training to gauge how well they can hear and what noises they respond to, the methylene blue being used to treat the MetHb they develop shortly after receiving the t-Pluto, you write down quickly, having little trouble writing clearly in the dark, having gotten used to doing so over the years, Dr. Andersen suggests that the infected can’t tell each other apart from non-infected individuals, Dr. Hansen is studying the transformed individuals while Dr. Sveistrup finds the change in the virus that caused the cannibalism.

“Another variant?” Hunnigan inquires, her typing audible through her radio. You nod even though she can’t see you, and your finger goes back to your earpiece.

“Think so. I found a field report on the different phases of it, and they did a sloppy job of redacting it,” you inform her, skimming through the rest of the pages of the report and jotting down any other important details as you go along flashing your flashlight underneath the poorly redacted text, “it’s from ‘96, so they’ve been doing this for almost a decade. I’ll get it back to you once we’re out of here.” 

“I’ll try to find those doctors for you, I think there’s a good chance they’re the ones who abandoned post,” Hunnigan easily replies, “keep up the good work, Dr.”

“And me?” Leon prompts Hunnigan with a hope-filled voice, the sound of it making a small smile tug at your lips. 

“I don’t know, have you done anything?” Hunnigan asks, though it’s clear in her voice what she expected Leon to respond with. He sighs over comms. 

“Just say you have favorites next time,” Leon mutters, as if actually disappointed. 

“Oh, is someone mad they haven’t found anything yet?”

“I found a whole bunch’a dead bodies,” Leon deadpans, “is that good enough for you?”

“I’d like it if you could ID any of those bodies, Leon,” Hunnigan reminds Leon.

“Yeah, Leon. Go ID the dead bodies.” 

“If you insist…” Leon sighs exaggeratedly, making you snicker after you take your finger off your earpiece. You put your notepad and pencil back into your pocket and flick the lights back on, the illuminated bars above you flickering for a moment before humming and staying on. Moving to the shelves of gloves, you find your size and slide them on, the medical blue covering your hands down to just under where your wrists end. Carefully, you grab a small plastic evidence bag from your pocket and move to take the slide from the microscope, slipping the glass rectangle into the bag and sealing it firmly. 

You slip the bag into your pocket and take off your gloves, pinching the area above your wrist and sliding it up to your mid-hand before doing the same for your other hand, except you slide the glove all the way off this time, and use it to remove the rest of the other one. You toss both items in the red trash labeled as being used for biohazardous items, and quickly exit the room, folding the report up and stuffing it in your pocket as you do.

“I’m moving to room 112, there’s two left on my side,” you let Leon know, pressing on the earpiece as you enter the next room. 

“Copy that. I’m not seeing any identification on any of the bodies, but they’re all scientists from the looks of it. I’m moving on in a minute.”

“No identification?” You furrow your eyebrows, flicking on the lights in the new room you’re in and walking around, seeing a similar set up to the last room with different equipment and one additional fridge. “What, no name tags or anything?”

“No, just lab coats,” Leon confirms, and you hear a door across the hall open and click closed as he speaks, the sound echoing through his communication device, “moving to room 115, right across from you.”

“What was in the room besides bodies?” Hunnigan inquires, still typing at her computer, the occasional mouse click heard as well, “I just got the names of the scientists in that report, too. Gitte Sveistrup and Mikkel Hansen are the two unknowns.”

“It was a room that had a thing in the back, like a table but with glass kind of encasing it,” Leon describes, “forgot what it’s called, but that was the only notable thing in the room.”

“Oh, a fume hood?” 

“Sure.”

“And there was nothing in it?”

“No, I didn’t see anything in it. There was a spray bottle with something in it next to it―”

“Probably ethanol.”

“―and some paper towels, but nothing else.”

You frown at the information. With your own fume hood, you usually keep pipette tips and plastic tubes inside of it, knowing that they need to be kept sterile before being put into the hood and it’s a pain to constantly be bringing in new ones. 

“Clearly they knew that they were leaving and cleaned some stuff up, considering that the report I found was partially redacted, but they weren’t in a hurry,” you mutter to yourself, though you keep your finger pressed against your earpiece, “they could’ve just been done working for a day, but why would the fume hood be empty? And why would they just leave blood smears out to dry if staining them barely takes more than ten minutes?”

“The room you were in didn’t have any bodies, right?” You nod at Leon's question even though he can’t see it, and he continues with a suggestion, “Maybe they left that room to go into another one and didn’t think they wouldn’t come back to it.”

You mull over his suggestion, pulling your notepad back out to write down the environment of the new room you’re in. “I could see that, yeah. There’s nobody in this room, either.” 

“Weird. I’m seeing more bodies.”

“Look out for those nametags, okay? I’m really hoping to confirm the deaths of those three doctors.”

“Copy that, Doc.” 

There’s more blood samples in this new room, you notice. There’s plenty scattered about different tables, all labeled with different numbers―numbers, you note, not names, just numbers, all generated in a way that makes me think that the numbers are determined by how many people these researchers experimented on―and what blood type is kept inside each plastic vial. You count five type O positive vials, three type AB positive, and two type B positive vials. Conveniently, there’s a microscope on the table next to this one, so you grab one of the vials and two of the various glass slides messily spread on the table. 

You mentally note the more rushed nature of this table, though you remind yourself that it could just be due to the employees here being less organized than those in the previous room. You brush both thoughts off, instead looking around for another pair of gloves and finding your size on a nearby shelf. You’re quick to slide gloves over your hands, these ones a powdery black color, and you set up one of the slides to lay on the table while holding the other one pinched between your index finger and thumb. 

You grab a small plastic straw, about the circumference of a toothpick, and gently unscrew the cap of the vial containing the blood sample. Using the straw, you dip into the dark red liquid and get maybe a tenth of a milliliter on the plastic. You dot the blood on the slide laying on the table as you set down the vial carefully, and you toss the straw across the table mindlessly before using the other slide you grabbed to smear the blood. You line up the very edge of the slide with the dot of red and wait for it to spread across that edge before quickly swiping the slide across the other, creating a thin but decent layer of blood across the slide. 

You toss the other one and go back to the refrigerator, searching for some kind of stain to use, but you don’t find any. Frowning, you swiftly exit the room and go back into the other one, grabbing the two glass bottles of stain from the backmost station and dipping into the fridge to grab the distilled water and diluted acetic acid solution. You’re quick to go back into the other room, laser-focused on staining the blood smear you just created. 

Slowly, you follow the steps to stain the blood the best you can. You use different solutions back at the office, opting for a specially made technique that’s generally more effective than what one might find in the average lab, but staining like this works just as well. In between the times needed to allow the slide to dry and let the stain set in, you decide to pass the few minutes by talking to Leon. 

“Anything interesting happening over there, Kennedy?” 

“Wish I could say so, but no,” Leon replies quickly, “I found one nametag for a ‘Søren Kjær’. Sound familiar?”

“Wish I could say so,” you parrot his words back to him. You hear the sound of clothing rustling, and Leon’s grin is evident in his next sentence. 

“What are you up to over there?” 

“I found some blood samples and I’m trying to see if they’re any similar to the one I found in the other room,” you tell him, the topic reminding you that you should dip the slide into the next stain. You didn’t bother to pour the stains into a separate container like you usually would, instead opting to dip the slide straight into the bottle and rinse off the stain with the distilled water that you also chose to not separate from the original container. 

“Sounds pretty interesting to me.”

“Do this every day for half a decade and see how interesting it is then.” 

“You’ve seen me almost every day for eight years. Is this your way of telling me I’m not interesting anymore?” 

“Well, I didn’t want to say it, but…”

“Asshole.” You snicker, and seeing as the slide with the blood smear is now dry, you prepare it to be observed before setting it under the lens of the microscope. You adjust the focus, letting the bacteria settled on the slide become more clear, before switching the lens to a more magnified one. At 40X, you adjust the light underneath the sample to increase how visible the smaller details of the smear are. You view the blood for a few seconds. It looks nearly identical to the other sample.

“Sorry. You know I didn’t mean it, right?”

“Sure, but that still hurts to hear,” Leon sighs, and you can hear the smirk in his voice as he offers, “what do you think about coming over here and making it up to me?”

You can’t help the snort that leaves you at the forced suggestive tone he uses, even if some part of you thinks that if he sounded even just a smidge more genuine, you’d be running across the hall and barreling into him as fast as possible. But, because he’s joking and you know he’s joking, you teasingly warn him, “Careful there… you know big brother’s watching.” 

He chuckles quietly at your conspiratorial tone. Hunnigan’s quiet at your comment, seemingly ignoring the two of you until you provide some intelligent words she can respond to.

You adjust the objective lens to 100X, and just as you’re about to voice your findings to Hunnigan, something slams into the door. 

You flinch at the noise, and you assume that it’s Leon, about to scold him for being so loud when the zombies around here are attracted solely to noise, but the weight against the door slams against it again. 

And this time, as it puts all of its dead weight against the door, the wooden panel splinters open to reveal two pale bodies leaning against each other.

The quiet seems louder now, especially with you having just barely held back from letting out a startled noise at the sight before you. 

You hold your breath. There’s this awful sense of dread that settles in your stomach, and each reverberating step against tiled floors echoes in your chest like the bass of a drum. Infected groans surround you, their voices shifting tones. Searching. You hate that you can hear the curiosity in their tones, how they sound almost life-like, as if these not-people haven’t been taken over by some virus. Each shaky breath that leaves and enters you has them twitching, their muscles itching to stretch and turn in your direction, to turn their attention to you. 

From what you can see, they can’t. The cataracts covering their eyes, as the doctors observed in the field report you read, are less of cataracts and more of a result of corneal clouding. It still impairs their ability to see, though, and for this, you’re grateful. However, this only means that they rely more on their other senses, and unluckily for you, they’ve settled on hearing. With every slight hitch in your breath, their attention is drawn to your direction, though not directly to you. Slowly, with the least shaky movements you can manage, you reach up to mute the small device in your ear, and the scratchy noise it makes nearly makes you flinch. Not necessarily from the volume or squeakiness of the noise, but because of the way it only serves to add more tension to your already tense environment. 

You grab one of the glass bottles of stain. You spare one glance at the label. With a silent ‘rest-in-peace’ to the perfectly fine bottle of Giemsa stain you’ve grabbed, you quietly wind back your arm and toss the bottle against the furthest wall away from you that you can. Once it hits that parallel wall, the zombies immediately screech and walk towards it, and as their screeches fill the room, you make a break for the door and run out. 

A relieved breath leaves you the moment the door closes, but your relief doesn’t last for long, as you only see more of the same creatures coming from the hall leading to the cafeteria, all slowly ambling forward in your direction.

08:22

Leon takes his time with searching the room he’s in for more nametags, strangely calm for once while on a mission. He always prefers recon missions to his usual ones, where he goes in with the goal of saving someone or taking down someone and ends up with a whole lot more than that on his plate. Hell, he can’t even remember the last time he went on a reconnaissance mission where his one and only goal was to scope out the area and then leave. 

He whistles quietly as he goes through the room, and absentmindedly gives a wolf-whistle once he finds another body with an actual name tag. He really didn’t expect to find any at all, but to find two? Shit, today might just be his lucky day. He walks the short distance over to the body, ignoring the blood and guts littering the floor beside it, too desensitized to the gore to be too bothering by putting his hands near it. As he pinches the metal clasp of the name tag, he reads the name Mikkel Hansen and all he can think about is how you’re going to react to him proudly handing you the name tag of one of the head researchers of the Big Bad™ the both of you are trying to get to the bottom of.

Leon hears the sound of glass shattering in the room across from the hall and his eyebrows furrow, his movements in trying to get the name tag off the new body pausing. He’s about to speak and ask you what’s wrong, but you beat him to it. Your end of the radio crackles because of the sheer quiet of your whispers, but he can hear the distant groaning of a second party near you as you speak. 

“Leon, there’s a group of five of them down the hall.” He swallows and quickly pockets the name tag he just pulled off Dr. Mikkel Hansen’s body, his middle finger going to press on the earpiece lodged in his ear. 

“Don’t move, I’m right here,” Leon tries to make his voice as reassuring as possible to keep you calm as he responds to you, his own voice a low murmur to keep any unwanted attention from being drawn to him. He’s quick to get to the door, though he reminds himself to stay quiet and not hurry, knowing that things would only get worse if he ended up being too loud in his attempt to help you. 

He reminds himself to tell his higher-ups that you need a gun for these missions too, even if you’re not taking on the brunt of the fight. Storing that thought in the back of his mind for later, Leon carefully opens the door and sees you standing in the middle of the hallway while staring at the creatures making their way up the stairs. Your eyes flit to his figure once he exits the room, and the attention of the undead goes to him as well. And for a moment, it’s quiet, the creatures pausing their mindless noises, before continuing with a familiar noise Leon recalls them making while the two of you were in the cafeteria.

Among the groaning creatures, all unable to be told apart from each other except for the clothes desperately clinging to their figures, is some kind of agreement. These ones won’t eat each other, not when they see fresh meat within reach; it’s this fact that drives Leon to draw his gun, safety off and finger on the trigger, the handle of it sliding into proper position in his hand like he’s practiced over the years. Cold metal meets leather gloves, weathered by his work, and his eyes may as well act as barrels with how his gaze locks onto his targets and his shots land exactly as he intends them to. The creatures all drop with every few bullets he spares on them, hitting the floor with loud thumps and meaningless screeches, withering away just as they should’ve all those years ago.

“Quick!” Leon grabs onto you without so much as thinking about it and tugs you along with him, quick to run down the hall and push through the double doors the two of you were avoiding. The stairs behind the door are steep, and both of you nearly trip on them several times, especially with Leon going two at a time and dragging you behind him with a grip so firm that if he weren’t so focused, his mind would go wandering to places outside of the facility, but you both eventually reach the second floor without him lingering too much on his grip on your wrist could be utilized in a different setting.

From there, you’re quick to reach a new room, though he soon realizes that his ability to open the door so easily and barge in extends to the zombies you’re both trying to hide from. Thankfully for him, though, you spot an old closet in the corner of the room, and both of you barely think about the size of it before dragging Leon with you towards it. 

You both manage to get inside and close the doors the best you can, though the rotting wood doesn’t make it too easy for you. The deteriorated state of the wood makes the doors feel almost fragile, as if one wrong tug could have either panel collapsing in a matter of seconds. Still, you both manage to get the doors closed just in time before the zombies manage to hear the doors closing and your heavy breathing. Both of you are laying against either side of the closet, not so close that your chests are pressed together, but close enough that there’s barely three inches between the two of you. 

It takes a few moments before you both catch your breath, your heavy breathing slowing and quieting down.

—

“Well, this is awkward, huh?”

“You’re making it worse.” 

The cramped space of the closet has both of your voices sounding louder than they probably are, even the smallest breaths sounding like panting within the confines of the old wood. Deteriorating dark wood that feels strangely damp against the palms of your hands where they splay out against the wall in an effort to give Leon space, the feeling of it making your eyebrows furrow slightly. You can physically feel splinters sliding underneath the pads of your exposed fingers, though you suppose you can take the time to dig those out later, as staying as far from Leon as possible is the priority right now. That, and staying away from the infected lingering outside of the closet. 

Leon’s quiet huff of laughter from your complaint sends a rush of heat to your cheeks. You can feel the warmth of his breath on your skin, cold from the low temperatures of the building, and you can’t help but slightly relax your rigid posture at the feeling. 

“I get that often,” Leon murmurs, before lightly puffing air at the hair getting in front of his eye. You have no idea why he bothers, considering there’s not much to see inside the cramped space with how dark it is, and he can just hear the groaning of the zombies outside, but you don’t comment on this and instead hum quietly in understanding. 

“From me?” 

“Mostly.” You can hear the grin in his voice, and you want to take your hands to his face to mold his lips into something of a straight line, just so that you don’t have to imagine the smirk probably tugging at his lips as he speaks to you. Though, that’s assuming that you wouldn’t just give into every urge you have and cradle his face in your hands, thumbs rubbing just under his eyes at the dark spots that seem to be permanently stuck there, gently tilting his face down just slightly so you can more comfortably tilt your own upwards and―

“How long ‘til they leave?” your eyes flit to the small crack in the space between the two closet doors, your voice coming out in a much quieter whisper than Leon’s. He peeks out the door and tries to observe the infected individuals, though not much can be seen beyond the small crack where the doors of the closet don’t quite meet, simply a distorted view of the bed and the wall opposite of the closet. Shrugging, Leon looks back at you―or, at least, his eyes rest where the vague outline of your face is―and replies in a slightly louder voice. 

“Don’t know. We gotta wait them out,” he unhelpfully replies, making you sigh quietly. It’s far from ideal to be trapped in here with him, especially following your crisis just a few days ago, but you don’t need him to know that you’ve been dreading the inevitable moment when the two of you would be trapped together with no escape. Still, Leon notices your disappointment, and frowns at it. 

“You comfortable?” Leon asks, assuming that that’s the issue. You’re sure he can see the wall behind you, much more broken than his side, and decide to nod in response instead of giving a real answer. It’s not comfortable by any means, but it’s not the real reason that you’re uncomfortable―that reason he doesn’t have to know, not now. Though, as if recognizing the slight hesitation you had before nodding even with the darkness of the closet, Leon gently ghosts one of his hands over your shoulder. 

“Are you sure?” Leon asks again, and dear God his voice, you think you might die and go straight to hell for every scenario you imagine in the split second you have before he speaks again, “We can switch. My side’s pretty smooth.” 

“It’s fine,” you shake your head, taking his hand away from your shoulder and giving it a squeeze before releasing it and letting it fall back to Leon’s side. He frowns, but doesn’t protest, simply looking back out the small sliver of leeway the doors give you. 

“We won’t be here for too much longer,” Leon murmurs, still hearing distant groans from the infected, not willing to risk getting out even with little zombies left. They’re dissipating quickly, having lost both you and Leon since your footsteps and gunshots are no longer giving the two of you away, “... why the hell is there a bedroom in an Umbrella facility?” 

You were just wondering the same thing, funnily enough. As the fog clouding your mind cleared, it became more confusing as to why there’s a bedroom in the upstairs floor of a facility, just above rooms used to test hazardous materials. You wouldn’t feel safe sleeping in here, personally, considering all of the risks that come with a vent connected to a room storing biohazards being in the room you sleep in, but you can’t say that Umbrella scientists are the most rule-following when it comes to safety risks. 

“A bedroom that clearly nobody’s used in a very long time,” you mutter, bending one of your knees to put a foot behind you, gently pushing a few centimeters off of the wall. The discomfort is genuinely starting to affect your back, and while you aren’t really old by any means, all the bullshit you’ve put up with over the years has done a number on your back and a few other parts of your body. 

You’re a fraction of an inch closer to Leon now. This fact does not go unnoticed by you. 

Leon, though, ignores this new development in your proximity, and in a low whisper says, “Yeah. I don’t think this kind of deterioration happens after less than five years. This feels more like decade-territory.” 

“Mhm,” you hum, not taking your eyes off of Leon, all while he continues looking out the closet. 

“You think it was one of the scientists living here?” 

“I would be the least surprised if it was one of the head researchers for whatever fucked up t-Virus variant they were making downstairs.”

Leon nods in agreement, and finally looks back at you. It’s now that he seems to notice the decrease in the proximity between the two of you, and instead of teasing you about it like you thought he would, he freezes up. Even though it’s just for a second and he forcibly relaxes himself just moments later, you still find yourself getting nervous over his reaction.

“Sorry, it’s just―” you gesture to the closet wall behind you the best you can, and Leon quickly nods again in understanding. 

“You’re fine,” he assures you, though his words come out just slightly too quickly. The inflection of his voice―and you notice this quickly, because you search for this constantly, hoping to hear it more because you know this is who Leon really is―sounds more like what it might come out as if he were just seven years younger, stumbling into you back at camp and trying to start up a small yet awkward conversation with you.

You try not to smile at his tone, simply replying, “Okay.”

It’s quiet for a little bit. The groans of the zombies are nearly entirely gone now, more of a memory than anything else, but you both remain in the closet. Despite yourself, you’re slowly gravitating towards Leon, though not by much more than fractions of centimeters at a time. Still, you’re getting closer to him, and it feels like the room is gradually getting warmer the longer you stay in the close confines of the closet. There’s levels of tension sealed into the closet as the mere seconds tick by, absorbed by the rotting wood surrounding the both of you and surrounding you two like a weighted blanket.

Leon’s noticing that you’re slowly getting closer to him. He doesn’t point it out, he doesn’t tease you, and he doesn’t even do so much as push you away or lean away from you. No, he does something much worse. 

Leon leans in closer, his cool breath ghosting over your lips. You can smell the mint of his gum with every exhale. Like a key to a lock, the very smell of it has the seam of your lips parting subconsciously, and even in the dark of the closet you can see Leon’s eyes dart down to the slight movement. It’s subtle, and your mouth doesn’t open with the action, but it means something. Something that you hate to put your finger on because you know that you can, you know this feeling intimately, like knowing the cause of death of yet another body that’s been presented to you. It’s the opposite of the cold, sterile feeling you get when you fill out another chart, reporting the clinical details of a body’s state; it feels like looking at art. Like seeing a body and seeing the soul inside of it, not just the gore living in it. 

That gore is what you see every day, in every one, except for Leon. He’s more than just the organs trapped inside the home of his skin. He’s the sound of a heart drumming against your ribcage after completing a marathon, and the sense of accomplishment that has dopamine flooding your brain; he’s the adrenaline that has your muscles stretching beyond their limits, and the sweat that you only feel after the fact. There’s very little things you can appreciate in the world now, with a mind trained to see nothing but flesh and bone, but you can appreciate him, him and his body painted with scars and imperfections, each light line on his skin like the light hitting a raised streak of paint just perfectly enough to give it depth. 

And this is dangerous, now, thinking this while Leon’s so close to you. While he’s, for God knows what reason, getting closer. 

You can feel your heart thumping in your chest. It’s rapid and loud, your heart working overtime to compensate for all the heavy feelings that settle in it, pumping liquid love and desire through your pulmonary veins to your aorta and spreading hot emotion throughout your body until your nerves feel like they’re on fire. It almost feels like you’re dying, being burned alive, and yet you find yourself leaning in closer, closing the inches turning into centimeters of distance between you and Leon, until―

“I just found a way into the basement for both of you.” Hunnigan’s voice startles you and Leon, cutting through the thick tension in the closet immediately. The way that you jump slightly has you subsequently leaning back away from Leon, which for whatever reason makes another disappointed expression cross his face, but he quickly recovers and lightly kicks open the closet doors. 

The zombies have been gone for a while, and you barely noticed. In all fairness, you were being distracted by Leon leaning into you, and it seems that he was distracted by the same thing. 

“Perfect timing.” You can’t tell if Leon’s being sarcastic or not here, but you don’t ask and you’re not sure if you want to find out. “How do we get in?”

“There’s a set of four elevators in the West wing of the building, any of them work, just scan any name tags you picked up when you’re in the elevator and head down to the basement,” Hunnigan explains. 

You swallow and you’re about to apologize to Leon before he seems to pause and remember something. He looks at you, and for a moment you think he’s going to ask you what the hell the two of you were just about to do, before he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a name tag, waving it at you. You catch the name on the paper encased in plastic, and you blink in surprise before grabbing it from Leon before he can lift it out of your reach. 

“Dr. Hansen?” you ask, and Leon nods, almost proudly. It seems the moment has brushed over for now, and for that you’re forever grateful. You can’t imagine this coming back to bite you in the ass later.

“Mikkel Hansen, confirmed dead in room 115,” Leon says over comms, though he’s looking at you the entire time, seeming expectant. Your lips quirk upwards into a small grin at the confirmation, a little more relieved now that you know where one of the three researchers are. 

“That leaves Gitte Sveistrup and Søren Andersen, then.”

“Hey, good job, buddy,” you lightly punch his upper arm, which he doesn’t even go to hold dramatically as he usually would, a bigger grin spreading across his face instead at your playful praise of his work, “thanks for contributing to the mission.” 

“Oh, well, you know me,” Leon starts walking towards the door as he sighs, “I try.” 

You give a small laugh at his words, and the tension between the two of you dissolves. It’s quick, how you both fall back into your normal routine of teasing each other, having gotten used to lightening up intense moments like this. Usually, the intense moments are more of near-death experiences in a physical sense than an emotional one, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. Not when you’ve both developed using humor as a coping mechanism for nearly everything. 

The walk back downstairs is quiet. There’s no telling where those zombies are now, seeing as you don’t run into them again while walking down the stairs and through the double doors at the bottom of them, and you manage to get down the hallway and across the cafeteria without seeing any zombies except for the dead bodies of the ones Leon shot earlier. 

Getting into the West wing is the easiest part of the mission so far. Leon presses a button for the elevator and taps his foot on the ground as you both wait for it to rise to your floor, waiting only a minute before the elevator dings and the doors open. He scans Dr. Hansen’s name tag on the black sensor bar under the buttons engraved with different levels, and selects the ‘LG’ option before leaning back against the elevator wall next to you. Over the speakers, there’s some static crackling, before calm music fills the metal box you’re both in. 

Leon whistles along to the music. You ride the elevator in silence.

Or, mostly silence. 

“What do you think we’re gonna find?” you ask, referring to the basement. Leon’s whistling pauses and he looks over at you, mulling over your question, before settling on shrugging. 

“Hopefully two dead researchers and a preserved tube of t-Pluto,” Leon responds. There must be some kind of concerned look on your face, or something that would be a cause for concern for himself, because his eyebrows draw together for a split second at the sight of you before his hand goes to your shoulder. You don’t need to be comforted right now, but you would never correct Leon on something like this, not when the warmth of his hand is seeping into your skin through your coat and there’s this reassuring look on his face that has you thinking yeah, you know what, I can pretend to be nervous for a few seconds if he’ll look at me like this. 

“Don’t worry, okay? I got you. If there’s anything down there, I’ll get it, even if it’s just a spider or something.” And wow, you can’t count on both hands how many times you’ve dreamed of him talking like that, saying he’s got you and sounding like he’ll take care of anything out to get you. 

You swallow and nod, “Thanks, Leon.”

He nods, and seems to hesitate for a moment―you can’t tell if it’s your mind play tricks on you or if he really is hesitating to take his hand off of you―before sliding his hand off your shoulder, his fingers brushing against your upper arm as he lets his hand fall back to his side. Just as he looks back to the elevator door, the speaker dings again, signifying that you’re both now in the basement. 

You look out the door into the dimmed room, and back to Leon, who's looking at you again. 

“Guess this is it.” Leon unholsters his gun, and you wait for him to check it and make sure it’s loaded and ready before gesturing to the door. 

“You first?” you prompt him, and Leon sighs, before nodding wistfully, as if being forced to go out first. 

“Anything for you, Doc.” 

13:52

“So… I know we’ve known each other for a while now…” you swallow, nervous as you’ve ever been, staring at the unblinking eyes ahead of you, “and I… I really don’t know how to say this, but I’ve actually… liked you. A lot. And I think you should let me maybe take you out to dinner, or…” 

Pale blue eyes stare at you, and you wait with bated breath for a response. The corpse, which looks somewhat similar to Leon if you ignore its facial structure and too-thin lips, doesn’t say a word to you. You sigh, mumbling some defeated words under your breath, something like no, that’s so corny, that’d never work, and move to drag the light blue sheet back over the body. The eyes are all glazed over and unfocused, too foggy for you to even try to pretend that they belong to Leon. The skin, all too pale as well, pales―hah, get it?―in comparison to Leon’s own fair but not paper-white skin, always too warm and nothing like the ice cold skin your gloves fingers gently brush against. 

Maybe you’re more like the corpse. Skin always too cold, eyes apparently so unfocused that Leon sometimes has to check up on you mid-meeting to make sure you aren’t dissociating, lips damn near bleeding with how forgetful you are with making sure they’re moisturized. The only difference is that you’re breathing, even if you passively wish your body would slip up and forget to do so for a little bit, and that corpse is as lifeless as a slab of concrete. The only thing that gives away any evidence of life is the rot creeping up its neck, molded green and bruised yellow spots making it enough for your apprentice to have abandoned you maybe half an hour ago. Oh well. They always end up vomiting and quitting within the first week or two anyway. You’ve learned not to get attached, especially not to the ones that have that look about them; a look that reminds you all too well of the little rats littering the streets, all wet from the sewers and somehow having a look in their eyes that is far too vindicating for a damn rodent. 

A knock at the door knocks you out of your thoughts, and you exit your mind palace for a second to turn in the direction of the door. It’s already open, but your visitor has knocked on the partially ajar door anyway, making his presence known. 

“It wouldn’t happen to be your kid throwing up in the toilets down the hall, would it?” Leon asks, even though he already knows the answer. You shrug and nod down to the body beside you, the sight making Leon wince once his eyes land on the corpse, though he doesn’t take off running with hurried apologies like your “kid” had. 

“He’s the same age as me, believe it or not,” you deadpan, Leon’s eyebrows raising slightly at the new information, “but yes, yes it is. I’d ask if he’s okay, but I think I can guess pretty well how he’s doing.” 

“Can I hear the guess?” 

Your eyebrows draw together slightly, “... Not… okay…?”

“Bingo,” Leon grins, moving to roll a chair next to yours, not bothering to put on gloves or even put anything on over his white button-up, “very good guess, Doc, that’s two-hundred points to you. Wanna choose the next category?”

“Can I get…” you think for a moment, gaze shifting back to the corpse, “... ‘How is Leon Doing’ for two hundred, please?” 

“Leon is feeling blank because he hasn’t seen a certain forensic scientist all day and got blank they didn’t come in,” Leon’s gaze follows yours for just a moment before returning to your face.

“What is ‘worried’?” you answer after a second of fake deliberating, Leon’s grin widening slightly as he nods. 

“And that’s another two hundred points to you. Phenomenal job, doctor.”

“What a riveting game show,” you reply dryly, making Leon huff out a laugh and bump your shoulder with his, right before looking at the corpse again and letting that smile of his drop slightly much to your disappointment. You forget sometimes how seeing what you see on the daily tends to dampen your colleagues’ moods.

“So, who's the unlucky guy?” Leon asks, nodding down to the corpse. You recite information from your report without looking at your clipboard, which you’re way too proud of being able to do, considering the simplicity of the skill.

“John Doe, male in his twenties or early thirties, showed signs of sudden cardiac arrest when I inspected his heart,” you lift the covers back without thinking to ask, not catching how Leon’s eyebrows furrow for just a second before relaxing again, “you can see this part is bigger than it’s meant to be right here, usually hypertrophy in that region indicates cardiac arrest. Weird, because usually men are more likely to have a heart attack or… any kind of heart condition, really, in their late forties at the earliest.”

“Huh,” Leon unhelpfully replies, leaning in to look a little closer at the man’s exposed heart, his ribs removed right above it for easier access, “where’d they find him?”

They, you both know, refers to whatever group was last sent on a search-and-rescue mission and managed to find some unlucky bastard who was victim to one of Umbrella’s irresponsible scientists proving why playing God is almost always a terrible idea. This time, it was Chris who brought him back, delivering him to you with a grimace that split his lip back open from where it was busted from whatever he fought and managed to beat. You imagine the bruises and dripping blood on his knuckles whenever he gets back from a mission tells a better story than words in how exactly he manages to beat whatever he comes across. That, or he’s just punching boulders for fun whenever he’s out and about in foreign countries. Either or. You wouldn’t put it past him.

“Underground lab in Northern Europe,” you supply helpfully, brushing the sheet back over the body, “not a scientist, they don’t think. Maybe an experiment. Failed, obviously, but still proof that they had something in the works.” 

“Northern Europe?” Leon asks, eyebrows furrowed again and looking a little more concerned. You can tell where his mind’s gone already, and you shake your head.

“Not Spain. Further North. Up in one of the Scandinavian countries, I wasn’t told exactly which one,” you reassure him, the crease between his eyebrows softening and that concern just barely leaving his eyes, “I have to wait for the mission report. Redfield’s still working on it.”

“Chris?” Leon’s full of questions today, it seems, you muse, “Why are we taking care of this?”

“BSAA’s focused on something else right now, and we aren’t?” you guess, tilting your head to the side slightly, “At least, I’m not.”

“Lazy bastards.” You huff out a laugh at Leon’s quiet mutterings, not noticing the way his lips slightly quirk up at the sound. Looking back at the body, you observe the vacant look in the corpse’s eyes, so used to seeing that same cloudy gaze in many others but still not used to that weird feeling of dread the sight invokes. 

“Just means more money for me, so…” you shrug, “can’t really complain.”

“Mmm.” Leon scrutinizes the corpse’s face for a second before shaking his head and looking back at you, “Still. They don’t need to make you do all their dirty work.” 

“What, you don’t want me making more money or something?” “Yeah, you know me. Greedy asshole who wants the highest salary here,” Leon nearly rolls his eyes as he speaks with that sarcastic tone he has a bad habit of using, and you can tell by the way he looks away for a quick second before catching himself, and you snort at his sarcasm.

“Sure, dude,” you flick the back of his hand with your fingers, making him flinch back slightly with a dramatically wounded noise, “now get out of my lab.”

“You know you want me here,” Leon has the audacity to wink, and you’re horrified to find out that you’re still attracted to him even after he does. 

You give him a look despite yourself, and he backs off, putting his hands up in surrender and getting up from the chair he stole from your apprentice. As he walks towards the door, you feel some weird surge of confidence within you. Maybe it’s the easy conversation, or the way you were rehearsing to the corpse before Leon barged in, but for whatever reason before he leaves you call out, “Leon?”

He turns surprisingly fast, “Yeah?”

You hesitate, because now really doesn’t seem like the time or place, but you still start your offer, “I―” 

Just then, your apprentice comes back in through the door, nearly hitting Leon with it and babbling apologies as he walks back in, “I’m so, so sorry, oh my God, I swear I’ve never― I’ve never had an issue with blood or guts or anything before, I―”

Leon raises an eyebrow at you, and you sigh before shaking your head. You swear he hesitates before slipping past the apprentice and leaving.

“You’re fine,” you assure the apprentice, his frantic speaking ceasing as soon as you start talking, “I get it. It’s not a pretty body by any means. Just… let me handle the rest of it for today.” 

“Are you sure?” he asks, and before you can reassure him, his eyebrows furrow, “Also, what was that guy doing in here? I thought only technicians were allowed in here? Unless he is, but then why did he―”

Jesus.

09:33

The next time Leon sees you, it’s in a different lab, your gaze focused through the clear glass of a cleanhood and working diligently to aliquot some mystery liquid into different tubes. What it is, he has no idea, but that hardened gaze in your eyes is enough to distract him from whatever you’re pipetting. A gaze that truly only rivals the intensity of brandy served neat, slid to him from across a bar by a bartender looking slightly concerned with how much he’s drunk in the past hour. He clears his throat to make his presence known and you pause in your pipetting to look back at him, and he swears your eyes light up at the sight of him.

That is, until you set down your equipment and walk towards him, reaching for the vial in his hand. Ah, right. The thing I came here to give you.

“A gift? For me?” you ask, and damn it if he doesn’t smile at the teasing lilt in your voice, sugar-rimmed lips tempting him to just lean down and have a taste. 

“Always just for you, Doc,” he responds, offering the vial to you, dark red liquid staining the sides of it, “got it this morning from up in Canada. One of the islands way up North.” 

You give a low whistle and the way your lips pucker slightly makes him feel like he’s already in hell for all the thoughts he’s having about you, cheeks burning as you take the vial from him, blood lazily sloshing around. Unnatural movements, he can tell just from looking at it, even without any actual hematologic knowledge.

“Nice. Would be nicer if it were labeled, though.” 

“I tried my best.” 

“Mm. I can tell.” Leon can’t tell if he’s meant to be offended by that, “Thank you.”

“No problem. What’re you gonna do with it?”

“Label it. Run it through a gel. Maybe do an IEF test. See if it’s connected to that body Redfield brought me a few days ago, which is… unlikely, but you can’t rule anything out around here.”

“Right, right,” Leon nods, as if he knows what any of that is. You huff out a small laugh, and he thinks he should act clueless more often, seeing as that’s what usually gets him those types of laughs. 

“It’ll help figure out if the blood is abnormal or not. See if it has anything to do with any heart conditions, blood conditions… y’know. Important stuff.” 

“I don’t like that you’re implying that my stuff isn’t important stuff.” 

“I’m not implying shit, Agent. You,” you press the bottom of the vial against Leon’s chest to make a point, before pulling it away along with all the oxygen in his lungs, “do plenty of ‘important stuff’. I also happen to do plenty of important stuff.” 

After he recovers from having the air stolen from him, he responds, “Uh-huh. You sure you’re not just saying that to make yourself feel better?”

You raise an eyebrow at him, before pointing to the door. He immediately drops the smug tone from his voice and his eyes widen slightly, “No, wait―”

“Out.” 

“But―”

“Out.”

When you see Leon in the breakroom a few hours later, you make a point to slide a cup of coffee over to him, a small cup of creamer having been emptied into the once-black coffee to lighten the taste a bit. Leon would drink anything, you know that, but you also know that his nose still wrinkles slightly at the taste of straight black coffee and that those wrinkles smooth out when he tastes the familiar not-too-sweet caramel flavor your coworkers keep stocked in the pantry. 

He raises an eyebrow at the cup, then knowingly looks at you with a smirk, “Feeling bad already?”

“Just take the coffee.” 

He does, taking the cup gingerly into his hands, taking off the lid and blowing gently across the surface of the dark brown liquid. It’s still steaming, but he takes a sip anyway, only to show his gratitude. You appreciate the act, especially as you watch him burn his tongue on the still-hot liquid. Stifling a small laugh, you see him set the cup down and purse his lips, clearly trying to keep down some kind of noise from the burning liquid going down his throat. 

“Thank you,” he rasps, and you can’t help the breathy laugh that escapes you at his words. 

“Uh-huh. It’s, uh, still hot, by the way.” 

“Don’t laugh at me while I’m down, you sonuvabitch,” Leon winces as the tip of his burnt tongue consistently hits the back of his front teeth. You manage to calm yourself by biting the inside of your cheek. 

“Sorry, sorry. Couldn’t help it.”

For a change of topic, Leon clears his throat and picks the cup back up, blowing a little more harshly on it as he asks, “Any luck with the blood testing?”

You think for a moment, before responding, “Yes and no. It was hard to really test any of it ‘cause it kept coagulating before we could do anything with it, but from what we got, it’s something that a different team’s going to work on. Nothing that we need to concern ourselves with.”

“And the John Doe?” Leon inquires, taking a sip, this time not wincing at the heat. Either his tongue is too burnt for him to care, or he’s cooled it down enough to comfortably drink. 

“Not connected,” you reply shortly, and Leon frowns, as if disappointed for you. “John Doe is still John Doe. An infected John Doe, though, which… I don’t know if that’s better or worse than non-infected.” 

Leon’s head tilts to the side slightly. It’s a habit he’s kept since his rookie days, from what you’ve observed, and the sight always forces you to bite back a smile. It’s a nice reminder that he’s not always so serious, or at least, not with you, and that there’s still some of that bright-eyed rookie in him. 

“He’s infected with something we know of, right?” Leon asks hopefully, though he already knows that it’s all false-hope in his voice, “Not something new that’s nothing like we’ve ever encountered that’s somehow spawned in a small, rural village in the middle of nowhere?” 

“When has that ever been the case?” you ask, and Leon sighs, knowing that you’re right. You can’t help the grin that tugs at your lips at the look on his face. Purposefully dramatic and dejected, as if you’d really crushed all his hopes and dreams, despite him having no real expectations for what you discovered. “It’s similar to the T-Virus, but not similar enough to be it. It must be some modified version, or something.” 

The mention of the T-Virus causes something to flash across Leon’s face. Recognition and something else that you don’t catch before it disappears, but you can guess what exactly he’s thinking. 

“It’s not―” Before you can finish your sentence, someone else enters the break room. All these suits look the same to you, all sound the same to you, and they all annoy you the same. Leon feels similarly, you assume, based on the way his expression morphs into something else once the intruder comes in. Something more serious, so drastically different from what his face once was that you would laugh if you weren’t also suddenly much more guarded. 

“Agent, Doctor,” the man addresses the both of you, before nodding his head in the direction of the hallway, “you’re both needed in Room 214a.” 

02:21

By the time you reach the plane, it’s well past midnight. You’ve both grown accustomed to packing bags on short notice, only bringing the absolute essentials and maybe a little something more to keep you motivated. For you, it’s a bottle of your favorite drink, which you intend to drink as soon as you land to at least have a good start in Denmark. For Leon, it’s a pack of gum, which he bought at the gas station on the way here, along with your drink. You fished your wallet out of your pocket after he came back to the car with it, intending to pay him back, but he just shook his head and insisted that you don’t owe him any money. You didn’t protest. You kind of needed those two dollars. 

Leon settles into the seat beside you. The private plane the two of you are in is small, with a limited number of seats and walking room, but in good condition. 

“Guess what Hunnigan got me?” Leon reaches into his back pocket, though not yet revealing what he grabbed. You sigh and try to tilt your head to look at what he’s holding, but Leon immediately shifts his hand to be further behind his back. “Hey! No cheating.”

You give him an unimpressed look, tired after the long day. “I don’t know, some bleach and toner?” 

Leon’s eyebrows furrow. “What?” 

“Your roots are showing.” 

“Hey.” You snort at Leon’s offended tone, and your hand comes up to grab a section of his hair. His brunette roots are barely grown out an inch, but they could’ve been a centimeter and you’d still make fun of him. Leon swats your hand away from his hair, dramatic as he always is, and he scoffs. 

“Sorry. Is it something for the assignment?” 

Leon reveals a small pocket book, pulling it away from his back and waving it in the air slightly. The front reads Engelsk til Dansk. “Yeah. A dictionary, I think. I don’t know, I haven’t really read it yet.” 

You hum, as if interested. Leon catches your disinterest red-voiced, and he shoots you a knowing look. He can tell that you’re tired, not wanting to go on another mission, much preferring the safety of the office over the mystery that comes with travelling to a new place with new threats. New threats like whoever created the virus that killed that John Doe. 

His body was disturbing, even to you. After Leon left and you continued your examination, you found remains in his stomach and intestines that hadn’t yet been fully digested; human remains, that of which was rotted even before they entered his system. The only reasonable explanation for their presence is that he ate them, but you don’t know why he’d eat dead flesh―because you could tell that these samples were of organisms infected with something similar to him, the unique patterns of the fat and muscle identical to his―especially if he was infected with something like the zombie-creating disease that is the T-Virus. A mutation of it, or a new strain, maybe, that caused a cannibalistic desire in the infected is the best explanation that you have. 

“Well, don’t be too enthusiastic about it,” Leon teases you, tossing the book onto the small table in front of the two of you. He’s not really bothered, though; you know this better than anyone. He can handle silence. Prefers it sometimes, even with you, but usually less so than with others. You’ve essentially been each other’s safe spaces for the past almost eight years, and the connection between you two is about as strong if not stronger than every close friendship you’ve had in the past. 

“Sorry, I’m just…” you gesture vaguely to the book, before leaning back in your seat, sighing quietly and closing your eyes, “so thrilled to hear you learn Danish.”

Leon smiles at the sight of you, small and soft, and reaches over you to recline your seat back further. “Yeah?”

Your breath nearly catches in your throat as you feel him lean over you, and you don’t know what he’s doing until you feel your seat jerk back a few inches, just barely stopping yourself from flinching at the feeling of it. You don’t bother to mumble out a thanks, the sentiment is there in you choosing not to push Leon away and he knows it. 

“Yeah.” You’re about to tell Leon to stop talking so you can get some rest, but you get an idea before you do. Peeking one eye open, you look at him and catch him already looking at you, his gaze soft but that same softness getting blinked away the moment he catches you looking at him. “Hey, what’s the word for ‘red’?” 

“Red?” Leon asks, eyebrows furrowing together for a quick second, before he grabs the book and searches for the ‘R’ section. He’s quick to find it, eyes diligently searching each page and letter until he sees his target. “Yeah, it’s…” 

His eyebrows draw together again, and he squints at the page, trying, “... Rod?” 

“I’m pretty sure that’s English, bud.”

“No, it’s― look,” Leon shows you the page, the boldened word rød pointed out helpfully with his finger. You nod. 

“Yeah, rød.” He looks at you weirdly as you pronounce it. 

And, you can tell he’s genuinely trying when he pronounces it again, but he can’t quite get it right. 

“Ool.” 

“No.” 

“Rool?”

“Hey, English again. Rød.” 

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Ool.” 

“Dude, it says how to pronounce it right there.”

Out of the thirteen hours you’re on that plane, maybe three of them are spent sleeping. The other ten are a muddled mix of pronouncing Danish words―or, making fun of Leon’s inability to do so, his tongue somehow betraying him with this language more than it did with Spanish, which you still make fun of him for―talking about what to expect during the mission, and casual conversations meant to both pass the time and keep any form of normalcy you can in order to not go crazy. It helps, having those simple conversations, pretending like the two of you are on a flight for pleasure and not for work.  

Not talking about work helps a lot, too. At work, you obviously can’t escape conversations about your work, and outside of work, you don’t really have many close friends outside of the agency. You have one or two, sure, but you’ve found that it’s much harder to be normal than it is to act normal with normal civilians. Those who don’t know the same horrors that you do, who live their lives not fearing what the big-bad pharmaceutical company is cooking up in their labs, instead worrying about when they’d be able to take their next vacation or if they’ll be able to catch the train or bus in time to get to their normal, 9-5 job, working at a desk not littered with papers about different infections terrorizing the people of various cities.

You think that it helps Leon as well. Being normal doesn’t come easy to him; you know well enough how hard it is for him to be normal, for him to pretend that he doesn’t trace his own scars every night and wonder what he’s done to deserve any of them healing. He’s only ever confided in you once, but that one time is one time more than everyone else he talks to, except for maybe Claire, and that one time was dense enough with heavy emotions to make you feel like it deserves to be deemed more than just that one time that Leon opened up to you. It was something deeper than that, and you suspect that Leon understands that as well as you do. 

You wake up from your short slumber a few minutes before landing, with Leon’s hand shaking your shoulder. You’ve touched wheels down in Denmark, at some private landing strip on the island of Lolland, just as the mission briefing detailed. True to its name, the briefing was brief, sharing only the most important information with you and promising that Hunnigan would provide more details along the way. From what you understand, there’s a small community in Lolland surrounding an Umbrella lab, essentially acting as a fence for the building, preventing anyone from suspecting Umbrella of any heinous crimes. The lab, presumed to be underground, should be abandoned and safe to freely explore, gather samples from, and take pictures of for analysis. Three main doctors went missing from the lab, their names unknown and their absence the only confirmed information about them. 

The goal is to scope out the lab, take samples, pictures, and leave. You and Leon both know that with your combined luck, it won’t be that easy, but you’re just hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.

15:56

“Hunnigan’s contacting us at 0600 with these,” Leon tosses you an earpiece, which you catch easily, setting it down on the table next to your bag. All of your equipment is kept in two separate bags, each set on a large table you’ve claimed for yourself, which Leon decided not to protest considering your role in this mission. The safe house the two of you are in is big, with one floor and a decent-sized kitchen, as well as two twin beds set down on parallel walls, and a small living room with no television. The dirty concrete floors and wooden walls aren’t the coziest, but it’s not the worst base you’ve stayed in. 

“And until then?” you inquire, pulling out some of your equipment and setting it up. It’s mainly tools to analyze blood and tissue samples, which includes a portable incubator and the few unused agar plates you could find stored away from two weeks ago in the fridge. They should still be fine, but you hate to use plates so old, having gotten used to having your assistant pour them for you a few days in advance and having fresh ones to use for culturing. Still, you can work with these. 

“Rest, prepare, the usual,” Leon answers, unpacking his own things, including various weapons and clothing, “learn more Danish, maybe.” 

“Yeah, you need the practice,” you hum, and Leon scoffs in feigned annoyance, making a small smile tug at your lips. 

“Focus on playing with your toys, Doc,” Leon retorts, voice slightly childish, and you roll your eyes at his tone. You don’t bother to respond, instead focusing on getting your incubator to start up so that you can set the temperature it should warm up to, hoping that it’ll be ready by tomorrow so that you can incubate any samples you find as soon as possible. 

The next few hours are filled with comfortable silence. After so much talking, you’re tired and in desperate need of rest. You’re hungry, sure, but not hungry enough to give up sleep to spare on food. You’ve set up all your equipment, and you ran diagnostics on all of them, recalibrating them if needed and switching some of them off to preserve energy. Now, all that’s left to do is figure out the bed situation. 

You rejoin Leon once you make it to the other side of the room, where the two twin beds sit opposite of each other. The issue is that both beds are so small that you think one wrong toss could send you to the floor, which, albeit, isn’t much of a fall considering that the beds are really just mattresses with thin sheets laying directly on the floor, but you don’t think that sleeping on the dirty concrete is a very good idea for either of you. That, and you’ll never admit it out loud, but you hate the idea of sleeping so far away from Leon. It’s hard enough to not just drive over to his apartment most nights and sleep over, and you’ve known each other for long enough that things like carpooling and sleeping in the same room has become normal for both of you, so normal that you sometimes crave it. 

You hope Leon doesn’t know this, but knowing him, he probably does. Still, you choose to believe that he lives in ignorance of your cravings.

“So…” Leon looks over at you, his gaze flitting back and forth between the mattresses. 

You return his gaze, and pretend to mull over your options, before offering, “I’ll push the left one, you push the right?”

Leon nods easily, his shoulders relaxing and letting go of tension that you barely noticed was there, and you both move to either mattress. Simultaneously, you both push the small mattresses to the center of the room, only the heads of each mattress against the wall and leaving a few feet of space between the sides of each mattress and either wall. You think that, a few years ago, you would’ve had to suppress some kind of noise at the mere thought of sleeping next to Leon, but the thought of it barely stands out to you now. You’ve done this before, before during and outside of missions. It started with missions, where only one bed was provided, as cliché as it seems. You both agreed that it was simply a matter of staying professional, and that you’re both adults who are fully capable of sleeping next to each other without making a big deal out of it. 

After maybe two missions where this happened―funnily enough, the only two missions the two of you have ever gone on together―the practice started bleeding into your personal lives. Nightmares were the trigger for most nights spent together, mainly on your part but occasionally on Leon’s part as well, starting out when you were both too young to be the hardened, glorified servants you are now. Then, when you both moved out of the military base that you were both kept on and got your own apartments, nights spent together became more of a mindless thing. Less a necessity, more of a sort of indulgence in the connection the two of you share. 

Since then, the left side of every bed has been established as yours, just as the right side of every bed has become Leon’s. 

04:41

There’s no screaming. It’s dead quiet, save for the dragging footsteps of one of the infected city dwellers, and for the heavy breathing you can’t seem to make any quieter. Evacuations were stopped a day or two ago. You weren’t brave enough to walk all the way up to the police department, not when you’re stuck Downtown nowhere even near the University District at all, so you kept yourself locked up in your apartment. 

Awful idea in hindsight. To be fair, you’d almost fully accepted that you were dead―you even started feeling bad for whatever student’s spot you took in the class you were waitlisted on and got into, thinking that maybe they got out and could’ve had a better future than you do―only being stopped by your fear of death. You couldn’t kill yourself. Physically, yes, but mentally, you couldn’t work yourself up to doing it. You couldn’t go out there. You didn’t know how those things worked, how they infected people, if it was anything like the movies. 

No. You had to just wait it out. Maybe the city would get searched at some point for survivors, and you’d be found. With your luck, most likely not, but you were holding onto any hope you could find within yourself. Fingers still tightly wrapped around the handle of a kitchen knife, you wait. They’re lingering outside your front door. 

When you think about it, which is always unwilling, you don’t remember how exactly you got out. It’s a blur from working up the courage to go outside to making it to central Seattle, walking on the barren sides of I-5, usually so busy and now so vacant that you almost miss the constant traffic and the constant absence of turn signals. You can just barely hear your mom’s warnings of not stepping on needles on the ground, and can remember how you always rolled your eyes when she wasn’t looking, wondering when you could possibly run into a needle on the ground and actually step on it. 

The answer came to you then, when you found yourself dodging a few on your way to central. If your mom were here, you’re sure she’d give you a smug smile, “I told you so” on the tip of her tongue. You think she’s dead. She didn’t answer any of your calls. Neither did anyone else you called. Either they’re evacuated or dead, and honestly, you’re not sure which is worse; if they were evacuated, they’re choosing to ignore you, and if they’re dead, then they’re… dead. 

You never get grabbed by a zombie. They get close, but never close enough to bite you. You’re more worried about the mutated creatures that you’re positive could pick you up and toss you around without breaking a sweat, a particularly tall, humanoid one having chased you down the highway as you ran as fast as you could. You just wanted to get to UW, see if anyone’s even there, and if they aren’t, then you’ll just have to try and get a car and drive out of Seattle. 

Maybe Everett’s safe. Maybe Leavenworth’s safe. The latter seems more appealing to you as you get further North. A Christmas town seems nice right about now. Maybe you can immerse yourself in some sort of Hallmark-like mindset, and that’s how you’ll cope with your family and friends being dead, along with your future as a pharmacologist. Not that you can’t get to another college and take a pharma class there, but you don’t think you’ll be able to even hear the word “virus” without flinching after this. 

You never make it to UW. You get to one of the Seattle colleges, your knees close to giving out, and collapse next to a car. One of those khaki-tan vans that you’ve always hated. You have bruises littering your body, a large one spanning the entirety of the side of your torso and a few more along your arms and legs. There’s a gash that’s sluggishly bleeding across your thigh and another cut that’s covered by a yellow-tinted bandage on your left bicep. 

You haven’t found another bandage yet. You haven’t found anything to stitch yourself up with. No painkillers, either, much to your dismay. Hell, you haven’t found a reason to live at this point. Your vision goes a little blurry. You feel a little more out-of-body now, your sight fading to black at the edges like burnt paper. There’s a zombie in your peripheral vision. Your eyelids are drooping. You feel like you’re falling as it gets closer, dragging its feet against the ground and opening its mouth wide as a growl escapes it, collapsing to the ground and crawling towards you. 

It’s getting closer. Your breathing is getting quicker, and the icy blue sedan you’re sitting next to stares at you mockingly, reflecting that zombie getting closer when you look back at it. You try to crawl but you’re not in control of your body anymore. Your hands don’t look like yours anymore. They don’t feel like yours anymore. They feel so cold, so numb against the pavement, and you press up against that deep red truck, your breathing getting so much quicker, that zombie getting closer, getting faster, and you’re crying you think if the wetness on your cheeks says anything, and it’s so close, and―

Just as the zombie is about to sink its teeth into your neck, you wake up. You sit up with quick, shallow breaths, not with gasps like you used to. You got rid of that habit when it almost got you killed after sleeping in an abandoned post office, gasping loud enough after a nightmare for zombies to come shuffling along to you, forcing you out of the building and running down to the mall close by. Quiet, you learned quickly, was key with these zombies. No matter how quiet you are here, though, Leon is a light enough sleeper that he wakes up the instant that you do if not a few seconds later. When his eyes open and his gaze lands on you trying to self-regulate, a hand on your chest measuring your heartbeat and forcing yourself to calm down with slower breaths, he sits up and puts a hand on your shoulder. The touch would make you flinch if it were anyone but him. You can recognize the unique feeling of his hand on you now, after this exact scenario has happened so many times, and you swallow at the feeling. 

“You okay?” Leon rasps out, his free hand rubbing at his eyes. You nod wordlessly, not finding the words to respond to him verbally right now, and he accepts your answer. His hand gently slides across your back to your other shoulder, carefully tugging you back down against the mattress with him. “C’mere.” 

You lean your head down and a relaxed huff of air is exhaled through your nostrils. His chest is firm through the loose cotton covering it, the easy rise and fall of the broad plane of flesh the most comforting turbulence you’ve ever experienced. If you listen closely―and you do, of course you do―you can hear the gentle thumping of his heart, the sounds of it pumping blood alerting your own blood to rush to your face, heating up your cheeks with the warmth of it. Something like a mating call, you think distantly. Something innate, coming to you without thinking; it happens so naturally that you can’t help but let your thoughts linger on it, feeling much closer to your unevolved ancestors than you ever have before.

His heart beats at eighty per minute. Calculating this just by keeping your ear on his chest may not be as accurate as two fingers to his neck, but you’re not calculating for accuracy. You’re calculating to keep your own sanity in check; you’re making sure that you’re not losing your mind being so close to him, having the privilege to practically lay on him by his own implied request, albeit that request being made due to his concern. God, he’s concerned? About me? The thought’s about as dizzying as all the blood rushing to your head, so overwhelming that you fear you may pass out before you can savor this moment the way you want to. Your breath hitches involuntarily and you would curse yourself for having such obvious tells of your nerves, but all rational thought flies out the window once you hear that thumping pick up. 

It’s just barely faster for a few moments. An anomaly. A sign that he noticed, that it in some way affected his heart, making it beat faster. Everything you’ve ever known about the heart seems to vanish from your mind in that moment just as you’re about to wonder what could’ve caused that, and the only thing that remains is the light buzzing in your ears from the bugs crawling up the walls, watching this intimate moment shamelessly. You’re afraid that if you move, you won’t be able to hear his heart as well as you do now, so you stay frozen in place and keep listening to his heart. It falls back into its regular rate easily. You almost mourn the loss of the evidence of him paying attention to you that manifested in the form of his fast-beating heart.

The thought of that alone, even after the moment has passed, has you biting the inside of your cheek and controlling your breathing so well that it starts to sound too mechanical to be natural. Fuck the closeness of it all, the warmth of his skin on yours; you can feel that any time he holds your hand or places his own on your shoulder, sometimes even slinging his whole arm around both shoulders and pulling you into a side hug. You aren’t taking it for granted, but it happens often enough that you’re more used to it now. This, however, is entirely new. This thing, so often lifeless in your line of work, is gushing with nothing but life, and you can hear it. It’s not the squelching of your fingers examining white and gray tissue, or the gentle sloshing of formaldehyde, but instead the beautiful pumping of blood. Tissues intact. Red, real, and bleeding, in a chest that moves with every soft breath. Under a rib cage that can hold the weight of your head, and by extension everything you’ve ever thought or felt, everything that you are. All packaged in soft skin marred with scars, so ugly to the owner but evidence of precious life to the beholder, proof of the skin’s ability to heal. Proof of the owner’s ability to heal.

You don’t say a word. Your labored breathing is enough, and it’s abundantly clear that it’s no longer from your nightmare, at least to you. Leon’s hand comes up to rest on your arm and carefully drags up and down the goosebump-covered skin, calloused fingers like sand paper scraping away at the physical evidence of your nerves. You welcome them, wondering how you managed to get the flames to come to the moth for once, and sigh quietly at the way those same flames lick at your cold wings. You can’t see his face, but the corners of Leon’s lips quirk up ever-so slightly at the near-silent sound, and his heart rate gets the tiniest bit faster for a moment before slowing once again. Without examining him like you’re so used to doing, you’re left only with his heart to determine how he’s feeling. 

“You still with me?” Leon murmurs, tone slightly amused, warm breath wafting down and fanning across the top of your head. You hum affirmatively, and he’s quiet for a moment before commenting, “Thought you might’ve fallen asleep already.” “I’m tryin’ to.”

“I know.” You purse your lips and Leon continues, “I want you to, even if it seems hard right now.”

“I know,” you parrot Leon’s words back at him, and he raises an eyebrow at you, “I was just… you know.”

And he does know. His words are drowning in his intense understanding, even with his simple response of, “Yeah.” 

“Trapped.” Something about him makes you want to elaborate. When you were first scooped up by a recon group scoping out your city for any remaining zombies and assigned a therapist, you couldn’t bring yourself to talk about any of it, not without feeling trapped again. Just thinking about it used to make you choke up, and hot shame would burn at your cheeks as if branding you with your trauma, carving into you with those painful memories like two initials and a heart into the bark of a tree. But Leon’s presence brings a level of safety that the clinical nature of your therapist never could, like cool water against those burns, and his voice the bandages that cover the brandings.

“I get it,” Leon does, you know he does, and you think that’s the difference between him and that therapist, “but I also can’t have my partner yawning in the middle of a fight, so…”

“You can handle yourself,” you, despite yourself, shift so that your chin is resting on Leon’s chest, your eyes looking down at his face, “y’know, ‘cause I heard that you’re the great Leon Scott Kennedy, who somehow managed to save the president’s daughter―”

“Are you ever going to stop bringing that up?” Leon exasperatedly groans before you can finish your sentence, the dampened mood your nightmare caused lifting with his false annoyance.

His heart’s beating faster. You feel it under your chin and you nearly sigh at the feeling, but instead respond with a breathy laugh, “I’ll stop bringing it up once your little fanclub stops.” 

Leon grins at your laugh and response, nearly forgetting that he’s actually talking to you and that time hasn’t actually slowed just for him to observe you before he replies, “Hey, I thought it was a pretty impressive accomplishment.” 

“Maybe you thought wrong,” you hum, stifling a laugh at the scandalized gasp that escapes Leon. 

“You’re aware I’m your superior officer, right? I don’t think you should be talking to me like this.” 

“I don’t even think you’re my officer at all, Leon.” 

—

He is. All yours, entirely yours, since the day he saw you in the medical wing back in his training days, painstakingly slow while stitching him up and mumbling mindless apologies under your breath for your devastating speed. His hand continues gently caressing your arm, fingers running over slight dips and various scars. They’re too much like his own scars. They hold too many similar memories, similar experiences, evidence of near death and severe injury, someone or something else managing to leave their mark on you. He thinks he may hate them more than he hates his own. He’ll never hate how you look, of course, but he’ll always hold some resentment for not being able to shield you from the monsters causing you that pain, even if he’s not sure what he could’ve done to prevent any of it. 

“Close enough,” Leon huffs out instead of voicing any of that, “I’m confident that I outrank you.” 

“A guy saves the president’s daughter one time and suddenly thinks he outranks everyone he interacts with.” 

“Because I do,” he’s aware of how arrogant he sounds, and even if half the time it’s not much more than a façade, he happens to mean his words this time. You scoff at him and it feels like mockery, showing off how you still have your breath while he’s lost his own just from hearing your playful annoyance at his words. 

You don’t respond to him. You’re quiet enough that he thinks you might’ve finally succumbed to sleep, just about to mentally cheer himself on for managing to wear you out―even if there’s a much easier and preferred way of doing so―before you shift again, the side of your face pressed against the front of his shoulder. He looks down slightly to get a glimpse of your face, and sees your eyes closed. He can’t tell if he’s thankful that you can’t see him, or if he’s sad not to be able to see your eyes for another second. Either way, you don’t give him any response still, your fingers not even idly moving against his skin and your legs staying miraculously still. 

Leon whispers your name and you barely stir. A hand sneaks its way up to the side of your neck and his fore- and middle-fingers press gently against your pulse, feeling the slow, calming beating of your heart, like grapes hitting the bottom of a barrel. He sighs through his nose and slides his hand down to your upper arm, thumb rubbing absentminded circles into your clothed skin, careful not to wake you with his slow movements. Not when your breathing is finally evening out, the sweet wine that spills from your lips with every exhale reaching just over his chin, the sensation tickling him slightly. If he wasn’t so clean-shaven, he’s sure some of his hair would brush slightly with the air.

You’re right there. He’s close enough that he could just lean down and press his lips to yours, taste the sweet sugar of your lips and dip his tongue into the rum pooling in your mouth, the most welcoming burn already present behind his own lips just as he thinks about it. His tongue dances behind his teeth for just a moment before his lips part, his own brandy-soaked breath mingling with your sweetened exhales, the maraschino cherry dangling in the back of your throat leaking demerara syrup and grenadine to make the perfect Jack Rose pooling right at the bottom of your mouth. 

Carefully, Leon’s lips meet the top of your head, pressing ever-so gently before pulling away. 

He’s quiet now. He waits with bated breath for any sign of his lips having disturbed your rest, but you don’t give any sign, only continuing to softly breathe and keep your eyes closed. Something like regret threatens to break into his mind, but before it can, Leon slams the mental front door of his brain shut and closes his eyes without a second thought. He’s not dealing with that right now. It makes what he did all the more stupid, his enabling of his own actions, practically begging himself to just compromise the mission in favor of selfishly taking what he wants. Still, he shuts himself down, the alcohol reaching his brain and making everything go hazy. The cocktail puts him to sleep.