Leon's expression remained unreadable, though something softened at the edges as Wade spoke. No sympathy. Recognition. It was the peculiar comfort of discovering another person who had learned the anatomy of self-destruction so intimately they could diagnose it on sight in everyone except themselves. He turned the glass beneath his fingertips, watching the amber catch the light. "I was wondering which uniform taught you to watch a room like that." The pieces fit nearly into place now. The steady cadence. The restraint. The instinct to listen before speaking. Men who had lived too long around catastrophe developed their own dialect, and Leon had become fluent in it years ago.

for the first time since walking into the room, chase didn't have a joke ready.

it was a weird feeling.

usually he could find SOMETHING. some smartass comment. some grin. some way to keep things moving before anybody got close enough to start digging around in places he didn't want touched. but dr. grey kept doing this thing where he'd take whatever chase gave him and somehow find the truth sitting underneath it anyway. not because he was forcing it out of him. not because he was cornering him. he was just... paying attention.

and chase was starting to realize how little that happened.

his eyes drifted down toward his hands when leon mentioned his mother. the scars across his knuckles suddenly felt a lot more visible than they had a minute ago. he flexed his fingers once, watching old white lines shift against tanned skin. there had been a time when every split knuckle and busted lip had felt normal. expected, even. a time when he'd thought fighting was the ONLY thing he was actually good at. hockey had changed that. saved him, probably. gave him a future instead of a mugshot. but hearing leon talk about tracing damage back to where it started made something uncomfortable settle in his chest. because chase had spent years making sure he never had to look that far back.

"you know," he said after a moment, voice quieter than before, "i think you're the first person who's ever looked at me and thought there's probably a reason for that."

a laugh escaped him, though there wasn't much humor in it.

"most people just stop at angry."

his shoulders shifted slightly before he caught himself and stilled again. he was getting tired of being aware of every ache in his body. tired of sitting still long enough to notice them. the season gave him an excuse not to. there was always another game, another practice, another flight. no room to think. no room to remember. the offseason was different. too much empty space. too much time spent alone with himself.

his gaze lifted back toward leon.

"i don't really know what happens when the control stops working," he admitted. "that's kinda the problem." his brow furrowed slightly. "i spend most of my life making sure it doesn't." another pause. "hockey helps. always has." his mouth twisted briefly. "when i'm playing, everything makes sense. somebody tells me where to be, what my job is, who i'm supposed to hit. easy."

his eyes flickered away for a second before returning.

"the rest of it gets a little messier."

the admission hung there longer than he wanted it to.

chase let out a slow breath through his nose before shaking his head. "and for the record, i don't love that you might be right." a corner of his mouth pulled upward. "i was really hoping this was gonna be one of those appointments where you tell me i'm healing great and then i get to leave feeling smug about it."

the grin lingered for a moment before softening.

"but..." he hesitated, and he hated that he hesitated. "i get what you're saying." his eyes dropped briefly to the floor between them. "about ignoring it." another beat. "i'm just not sure what i'm supposed to do with it once i STOP ignoring it."

that, more than anything he'd said so far, felt honest. enough that it made him uncomfortable almost immediately afterward. he rubbed the back of his neck and huffed out a quiet laugh.

For a long moment, Leon said nothing. The room settled into a silence that felt almost reverent, softened only by the muted hum of fluorescent lights and the distant cadence of hospital life beyond the closed door. Somewhere down the corridor, a cart rolled across polished linoleum before disappearing again, the sound fading until it became indistinguishable from the building's quiet pulse. Chase's words lingered in the space between them, refusing to dissipate. Leon had learned long ago that honesty possessed a kind of gravity. Once spoken aloud, it altered the atmosphere around it.

His gaze remained on Chase without the clinical sharpness it had carried prior. There was still observation, of course. Leon wasn't certain he knew how to stop observing people. It had become less a profession than an instinct, a reflex honed over decades until it was indistinguishable from breathing. But there was a difference now. He was no longer searching for symptoms. He was listening to the shape of the man sitting across from him.

Chase's words struck him with an unexpected heaviness. His gaze lowered briefly to the chart resting forgotten on his desk, though he wasn't reading it. He found himself thinking instead of all the years he had spent in operating rooms where people spoke about bodies as though they existed independently from the lives lived inside them. Torn ligaments. Fractured clavicles. Ruptured tendons. Injuries catalogued neatly beneath diagnostic codes, detached from the circumstances that had shaped the hands, shoulders, and bones that arrived at the table. Medicine had always been strangely eager to separate flesh from history. Leon had never been able to.

"There is always a reason," he said at last, his voice quiet enough that it almost blended with the room itself. "Human beings are remarkably consistent creatures. We adapt to survive, and if we survive long enough, those adaptations become so familiar that we mistake them for personality." His fingers rested lightly against the edge of the desk, tracing absent circles across the smooth wood.

"I have never believed anger appears in isolation," he said, his eyes lifting again. "It typically begins its life as something else." Fear, shame, helplessness, grief. The names always remained unspoken. Leon had seen every variation imaginable, both in his patients and in himself. The body possessed an astonishing ability to disguise old wounds beneath new behaviors. Violence was often nothing more than fear that had forgotten how to introduce itself.

frankie had seen suffering, too. not in operating rooms, or beneath bright surgical lights with clean instruments and hands trained to save what could still be saved, but in darker places. she’d seen it on ships when sailors realized too late that the song in the air wasn’t salvation. they’d seen it in the eyes of their sisters when demeter’s curse settled into their bones and remade their grief into hunger. she’d seen it in humans, again and again, in wars and famines and alleys and bedrooms, in the petty cruelties they inflicted on one another when no gods were watching. they’d seen enough of it to know suffering didn’t make anyone noble. sometimes it only made them inventive.

Leon's breath caught almost imperceptibly when Frankie told him he was the first person in a very long time to make them feel safe. There was no triumph in hearing it. No quiet satisfaction that he had somehow succeeded where others had failed. The confession settled over him with the solemn weight of responsibility, because he understood, perhaps better than Frankie realized, that trust was never a reward. It was something painfully alive, something that required tending every day it existed. He had spent years watching lives unravel over the smallest betrayals to know that trust rarely shattered all at once. More often, it eroded quietly, one disappointment at a time, until two people looked at one another and realized the ground beneath them had disappeared without either noticing.

He refused to let that happen here.

they have a schedule ; one that usually is proceeded with a call, to remind, as if he wasn't ever sure enough of the patterns that they'd set. perhaps he took no notice, his attentions otherwise focused and absorbed on the act of SAVING HIS WIFE, to which... what was she going to say? it was a kind of love and devotion that would have sounded hollow to her if she were to speak of it, she'd never allowed for this much room, she's never felt like that for anybody, but it did give her some sense, when looking at him, that perhaps there was a grain of truth in the songs she hears, and the movies she sees, about how love can be real. love could be alive. and some people, like leon, were willing to give their all in order to maintain what love had given them.

for better OR FOR WORSE, in this case.

so despite the lack of a call, she still comes. the right supplies, the same timing. but it should have registered that there was something wrong in this. that he was a creature of habit, and that even if it was something that she'd found annoying, the change should have been notice for alarm. it was on HER for missing that, her trek met with an unusually silent entryway, the woman setting down the case she'd brought with her, heavily, down at the hammered steal table that defined the front room.

"hello...?" her nerves are on RED ALERT for this. something is wrong, so terribly wrong, and it could mean anything from he's died and been eaten by the very woman he was attempting to save, or that perhaps there was an entire outbreak that had leaked into the surrounding area that she might have to contend with. she presses a button on her phone, recording a note for an old colleague. "... something's not right on site. no response from the doctor. we might have a problem here. send backup if you hear nothing from me after 30 minutes." well. for whatever use that might provide them.

the door she's come through before is ajar. it's alarming, yes, but she nudged it open, a gun withdrawn. now wasn't the time to play polite... this was the kind of thing that got you killed, and she'd seen too much of what the nightmare could look like for her to take to a RETREAT now. "doctor..." caution edged her tone, lanced it quiet. there's no sound, but she descends the stairs, smells the wet, the metal, the sterile sting in the air as her footsteps met empty room after empty room.

but it takes time. the place where his wife was kept was shut, but as she entered, the lights out, she could make out the outline of something. someone. a breath drawn sharp as the spy's gaze leveled over their frame, realizing that it was likely him, but not moving, no odd and sudden sounds that'd indicate he'd met the SAME END as his wife, but... "leon?" her voice was softer this time. for him, seeing that stirring then, a step forward, taken, until her head turned. she could see the blood splatter against the observation window. the body, heavy, on the floor. she looks long cold. he doesn't move. a hand, settling, there at his shoulder. a quiet comfort. an unspoken apology.

For a long moment, Leon did not acknowledge the touch. He remained seated on the floor with his back against the reinforced observation window, one knee drawn toward his chest while the other leg stretched limply across the polished concrete. The laboratory around him had settled into a terrible kind of stillness, the sort that followed catastrophe only after every alarm had finished screaming. Somewhere overhead, a ventilation fan droned with unwavering indifference. One fluorescent bulb flickered sporadically, casting the room into alternating bands of pale light and shadow that swept across his face without eliciting so much as a blink. The blood on the glass had already begun to dry. It no longer ran. It simply clung.

His gloved hands rested motionless in his lap, stained so thoroughly crimson that it had become impossible to distinguish where latex ended and flesh began. One sleeve of his lab coat had been torn nearly to the elbow, exposing skin mottled with bruised and shallow crescent-shaped cuts that looked more defensive than accidental. They had stopped bleeding some time ago. Only when Ada's hand settled against his shoulder did his breathing hitch. It was not because it had startled him, but because it reminded him that someone else still existed. "You are late." The words arrived hoarse, almost inaudible, carrying none of their usual dry wit. They were remnants of routine spoken by a man whose routines had just been obliterated.

A humorless smile threatened the corner of his mouth before collapsing beneath its own weight. "I almost called." His eyes never left the body lying beyond the observation glass. Daisy had come to rest several feet from the reinforced door separating them. The scene was gruesome. Guilt began to trickle. Horror still hadn't hit. There is a bleak moment of nothingness before emotion strikes, and he suffers under the void until his time comes to pay his debts. The violence had already passed. The struggle had exhausted itself hours earlier, leaving only silence to occupy the space where snarls and fractured attempts at speech had once lived. Her body lay twisted at an unnatural angle, one arm reaching toward the window as though she had been trying to remember why she kept returning to it. Leon knew why. It was because he had always been on the other side.

whatever's       wrong       with       me,       i       will       take       to       bed.       i       give       in       so       easy       nature       chews       on       me.       little       death       like       lead,       poisonous       and       heavy.       it       has       always       been       this       way.       i       am       punished       by       love.

*ೃ༄     independent     and     canon-divergent     interpretation     of     WILLOUGHBY     TUCKER     from     the     lore     of     Ethel     Cain.     loved     by     MORGUE     (27,     she/her).     inspiration     taken     from     various     horror     media     and     living     in     the     south.     a     study     in     nature     versus     nurture,     trauma     bonds,      and     running     from     what     could     save     you. 

but she had no doubt he'd say that it was worth it. that love, love was worth it. and while ada wished she could say that she saw the romanticism in it all, she would have hoped if it were her that her lover would have killed her long before now - having seen what happens to people as they LOST THEIR MINDS and then themselves. frankly, the fact that leon's wife had managed to make it so long without succumbing fully to her infection, both either in death, or in her half - life, that made her present state the kind of miracle that the organization didn't mind funding. was that, love? the power of it, stringing out a life, letting it hang, within the strings of newly harvested organs and the taste of fresh cut fruit between one's fingers?

leon hopes to undo what others have done. what experiments they've managed to inflict upon another person, their selfish pursuits for GREATNESS coming at a cost. he says it's not for that. it's for a person. but it's almost as if the goal doesn't really matter, in the fact of the cost of it all. and ada knew that he cared for none of the infamy, just that things might hit upon that perfect set of impossible factors. to go back in time. to be there for his wife when he'd otherwise been unable. to find himself never having had to make the bad choice in the first place. it's all something that strikes with the wish that things could be different. and at times, looking at him now, ada wished that for him too.

and yes, she does remember that he was, in fact, a matter of a work at this point. it didn't stop her from having a heart, regardless of how much she might have denied it otherwise. he talks about her, describing the shambling outline of a person who was and wasn't there. a ghost in her own body, the worst kind of torture, though, he hardly was here asking for her SCIENTIFIC OPINION. if he had, he might have found himself faced with the fact that she found there was very little hope left here. especially with the increasing frequency in which he approached her, of late, asking for her to journey out here to deliver many such a cooler.

"the woman with a red smile..." ada repeated, as if almost bemused. well. she supposed that could be here. she was a woman in red to many people in their dreams of her, the closest one often got to actually touching her. she remained an elusive, distant thing, purposefully keeping a particular distance from everyone and everything. you don't mix business with pleasure, in ada's world, and she knew from watching people like leon that falling in love all too often marked for a wretched sacrifice of self. ada wasn't sure she was as STRONG as him to be able to withstand such a blow.

that same, red smile, curved. "well. here's to you rewriting a better ending to a woman who deserves as much." she always took PARTICULAR CARE to refer to her in the present tense, despite her personal reservations. he didn't care for her doubt, her pity. he was on his own mission, and she, a mere means for facilitation along the way. "now i hope that you too have been eating. i know people such as yourself tend to get wrapped up in your work and that it can be hard to remember to find the time. but if you can't keep going, neither can she." that's the extent, she supposes, of what empathy she can extend to him. "shall we then? the notes you can give me, i'll take now. and you know where to find me, leon. you always do."

Leon watched that familiar smile settle across her face, and for a fleeting moment — he understood why Daisy had remembered it. It was striking, certainly. Impossible to forget. Yet it was not the color that lingered in one's memory so much as the contradiction of it. Ada smiled like someone who had spent a lifetime observing joy from behind reinforced glass. She wore warmth convincingly enough to put others at ease, but there was always the impression that she had measured exactly how much of it to reveal before the expression ever reached her lips. It was practiced. Controlled. Beautiful in the way a scalpel was beautiful — precise enough to inspire admiration and caution in equal measure. Perhaps that was the reason why Daisy remembered her, or perhaps those parts of the human mind that survived catastrophe simply clung to the brightest things they could still recognize.

He found himself looking past Ada for only a moment, toward the narrow observation window. Nothing stirred now. The room beyond had settled once more into silence, the kind that never truly comforted him. It only meant she was waiting. Sleeping, perhaps. Or simply existing in that strange limbo where hours ceased to matter. His wife's heartbeat still echoed through the monitor. Slow, steady, and stolen.

Ada offered him hope with the same practiced ease she delivered organs and blood, and Leon suspected she did not even realize what a dangerous thing hope had become inside these walls. Hope had long since ceased to resemble optimism. It had become a pathology all its own, something feeding on reason until there was scarcely anything left. "I appreciate," he said quietly, "that you never speak about her as though she is already dead." His eyes lingered on the reinforced door. "Most people do." Doctors had; government officials certainly had. The committee assigned to review his revoked license had referred to Daisy as the remains of the patient while she had still been breathing, less than fifty feet from where they sat.

He remembered standing before them in bloodstained gloves, begging men who had never met her to stop speaking about his wife as though she were evidence sealed inside a file cabinet. The memory curdled something deep inside him. "They stop using names first," he murmured, more to himself than to Ada. "Then they stop using pronouns. Eventually, they stop remembering there was ever a person beneath the diagnosis." A quiet breath escaped him.

"That is how these things begin." Not with monsters or viruses, but with the language. With enough distance between words and humanity that vivisection became research, casualties became acceptable loss, and wives became specimens. His attention shifted back to Ada as she gently turned the conversation toward him instead, remarking that he ought to eat if he expected either of them to survive this. For the first time that evening, his expression softened into something almost embarrassed. "I forgot breakfast." The admission came with surprising ease. "And lunch." There was no self-pity in it, only an absent-minded confession, as though he were recalling a misplaced instrument. "I had intended to stop after recalibrating the perfusion pumps. They required less recalibration than I expected." Which, translated from Leon's peculiar language, meant he had worked uninterrupted for nearly eighteen hours without noticing the passage of time.

He crossed toward a weathered oak desk tucked beneath an overflowing bookshelf. Unlike the chaos that consumed the rest of the laboratory, this corner had been maintained with meticulous care. Every notebook rested in deliberate alignment. Every folder was labeled in Daisy's handwriting from years ago, preserved as though moving them would erase another piece of her. Leon unlocked the top drawer with a brass key worn smooth by years of use. Inside rested dozens of journals. He selected one bound in dark leather, then another considerably thinner volume. After a moment's hesitation, he reached for a third before stopping himself.

No, not that one. That one remained exactly where it belonged. He carried the chosen notebooks back to her, setting them atop the refrigerated case she had delivered with almost reverential care. "You'll find everything pertaining to the latest vascular integration trials, immunosuppressive response, and neural conductivity mapping." His fingertips remained resting on the covers for another heartbeat. "There are omissions." He met her eyes without apology. "There always will be." Not because he distrusted Ada personally, though distrust had become nature years ago. There simply remained certain discoveries that could not leave this laboratory. Some because they were unfinished, others because they were too successful.

Leon withdrew a small cryogenic vial from the breast pocket of his lab coat. The liquid inside shimmered an impossible shade between crimson and black, viscous enough that it moved only reluctantly when he placed it beside the journals. "The sample," his voice returning to that familiar clinical cadence. "The recombinant enzyme expressed itself three days." He had slept perhaps four hours since then. "It either represents the first meaningful stabilization we've observed, or it is about to fail catastrophically." His gaze drifted unconsciously toward Daisy's room. His statement lacked fear, composed solely of sturdy acceptance. He had long ago learned that science bore no obligation to reward sacrifice. "If it fails, I'll ask you for more."

Hunting hallowed ground is hungry work, and Salem is inclined to indulge in the basest of impulses more often than not, for her own sanity. --- Nothing in the way that she carries herself betrays the sharpness of her teeth or guile. On the contrary, she is a polished, pampered marvel to the human eye. Willowy and lean of limb. Sunkissed, and brandishing a crown of thick tawny waves. -- Perhaps God has a sense of humor when forming his apex predators. Maybe she's made Salem in her image.

Leon seems proof of her impudent tongue and its reach. Charmed by the straightforward crook of her index and husky tones. He's herded himself neatly in capable clutches and lapped insistently at the reserves of her restraint.

Salem minds her claws. She minds his humanity and the hardwired instinct to marinate in his fear & awe.

This is about need.

The room is anonymous with reason. Everything remains starkly banal compared to their coupling. She a creature of significant pride; will not be outshone by something as stupid as decor. He strikes her as someone drawn to practical comfort.

The touch is certain; he's gone from half-hearted to caging her firmly. Judas, betrayer of his dick print, strains against the promise between honeyed thighs. Irony of ironies, she's where he goes to feel human.

Reality does not exist in these four walls. Her weapons and his scalpel lay barren in respective zip codes. Instead? She has the pleasure of his quiet unravelling. -- The way greedy green eyes perceive every hint of her honesty.

Warring against her mouth. He tastes like her favorite cigarettes and inoffensive hard candy. Her fingers curl instinctively, search for an anchor to keep the beast nipping at her heels at bay. Devour, it says. Petulant and impatient in the wake of such devout obedience.

A lamb.

He is, isn't he? Sacrificial at her altar. Prying himself open so she can lap her leisure from his ribcage. Sweetly, like his fingertips tracing the warmth between her thighs. It becons, and his breath comes short. A stutter; he's cocooned by her. The curtain of her long hair, her thighs digging into his hips as she nibbles a careful trail from his kiss-bruised mouth to a sharp jawline and her fingers rearrange to unzip his fly between them. This is her testament to patience. He is in one piece, and her appetite is whet.

Her hips press into the careful ministrations of his thumb. Eager. Salem rocks lazily against the damp spot where they mingle, and rewards with a hum. The smile at the edge of her mouth is indulgent. God peeking down from half lidded eyes full of knowing.

"You're so pretty I could eat you up." He's aware she will; her fingertips are already fishing the full weight of him out from bothersome fabric. Reminder, neither has much here but the clothes they have on. She can't very well pop his buttons and trappings at her leisure.

Her teeth ache in a much too small mouth.

"I should've brought the ribbons." It hardly matters that he's quiet as a church mouse. Salem takes it as a compliment. A man with a slippery, quick tongue is only a gift between a pair of quaking thighs. She gives a mournful sigh at the rousing mental picture of pale skin bound by fabric, and wraps her fingers firm around his cock with a languid pump. He's silk in her hand. Slick and marinated in hints of choir boy lust if the way he's working her is anything to go by.

Haunted & holy. Picturesque.

He feels the precise moment her fingers bridge the gap between his fly and his skin. The metallic rasp of the zipper is the only sound in the room, sharp and final, a sudden incision into the silence that leaves him laid open. The cool air of the room hits him for a fleeting second before her hand, warm and possessive, closes around the full, aching weight of him.

His eyes shut tight, a low, broken sound catching in the back of his throat. He is a man who deals with the physical, in the tangible systems of the body, yet under her touch, he feels less like a collection of organs, and more like a live wire. Her fingers are firm, the pump of her hand languid and practiced, dragging the silk of his own skin over the hard, pulsing reality of his need. It is a slow, methodical undoing — the kind of patient dissection he usually performs on others, now turned inward until he is nothing but sensation and the desperate, greedy handfuls he takes of her thighs.

The mentions of ribbons — of binding his pale skin and pinning him further into this state of forced helplessness — brings a fresh surge of blood to his face and his cock. He can see it behind his eyelids: the clinical precision of silk ties against his wrists, the contrast of his own pallor against the tawny, sun-kissed warmth of her. The mental image is a suture he didn't know he needed, pulling the jagged edges of his desire into a singular, sharp point. He doesn't need to speak; the way his hips buck upward into her palm, seeking the friction like a dying man seeks air, is a testament louder than any confession.

His hands, buried deep under her skirt, don't falter. Even as her tongue drags along her lower lip in that wolfish, predatory promise, his fingers find the scorching heat of her center. He is precise, his thumb finding the exact rhythm that draws the indulgent hum from her throat. His touch is a blend of surgical focus and base, starving lust. He traces the damp mingling of their heat, his breathing coming in shallow, jagged hitches that sound more like prayers than air.

When she guides him to the threshold, the scorched-earth warmth of her pressing against the head of his cock, the world outside the walls ceases to exist. There is no research, no ghosts of the woman he couldn't save. There is only the tilt of her head, the blue-green pin of her gaze, and the choice she has laid out in front of him.

He doesn't want the kiss. He does not want the hollow comfort of a mouth when the rest of him is screaming to be buried inside of her, to be cocooned by that woodland scent and the terrifying, beautiful safety of her teeth. His hands move from her thigh to the back of her neck, fingers tangling in the tawny waves of her hair to pull her down. Not with a certain violence, but with a desperate, crushing need to be close. He doesn't let her mouth reach his yet; he holds her just an inch away, his eyes searching hers with a terrifying, obsessive clarity. He's looking for the beast, for the predator, for the very thing that threatens to eat him alive — and he's inviting it in.

for a moment, frankie didn’t know what to do with any of it.

not his hand against hers. not the quiet of his voice. not the impossible patience in how he looked at them, like they weren’t a wound he meant to close or a mystery he meant to finish solving, but a person he was willing to sit with even when the truth of them became difficult. that was the part she’d never known how to survive. cruelty had rules. hunger had patterns. fear announced itself if you knew where to look. but kindness, REAL kindness, the kind that asked for nothing and stayed anyway, had always seemed like a trap with better lighting.

Leon had witnessed every imaginable expression of human suffering. He had watched soldiers cling to consciousness through injuries that should have killed them long before help arrived. He had stood beneath the harsh lights of operating rooms while families waited on the other side of closed doors, believing that whatever happened next rested entirely in his hands. He had looked into the eyes of men and women who knew they were dying and understood, with an almost unbearable clarity, that there existed no combination of knowledge or skill capable of changing the outcome. Those moments had shaped him into someone who believed composure was a virtue, that restraint was another form of mercy, and that allowing emotion to outrun reason only served to make tragedy more difficult to endure.

Nothing in all of those years had prepared him for the quiet devastation of hearing someone tell him they trusted him.