#leon x reader

The video version ↓

Rating: Explicit (second part) Category: F/M Relationships: RE9!Leon/Reader Words: ~7.4k Part 1/2 Language: English

✘ Masterlist ✘

Leon knew falling for you was a stupid idea, but as your friendship grew, the list of reasons for loving you kept going on and on (and on and on…) A short story in which Leon falls head over heels for the 7-Eleven cashier on the night shift, and frantically looks for reasons to come back every given opportunity. Too bad said cashier is convinced the nice man always coming back at weird hours of the night for trivial purchases is some kind of mobster.

[⚠️SAFE TO READ, NO RE9 SPOILERS.⚠️] This one is for the messy girls who still don’t have their lives figured out. You’re doing just fine, girlie.💗

Enjoy~

IN WHICH,

For months at the academy, Leon Kennedy and Y/N L/N were nothing but rival names on a leaderboard, each constructing a wildly inaccurate, mildly irritating mental profile of the other. When they finally cross paths as greenhorn rookies on their first day at the Raccoon City Police Department, the petty rivalry melts into a sudden, undeniable spark. Forced into close proximity as the precinct's newest recruits, they navigate the eccentricities of small-town policing while realizing their assumptions couldn't have been more wrong. As buried feelings and unspoken tension come to a head under the watchful eyes of their colleagues, a sudden flash of jealousy forces a soft-spoken rookie to finally make his move.

╰┈➤ Pairing: Rookie!Leon S. Kennedy x Rookie!Reader

╰┈➤ Setting: Raccoon City Police Department (Complete Non-Bioterrorism/Normal World AU)

╰┈➤ Tropes: Academy Rivals-to-Lovers, Miscommunication/Wrong Impressions, Forced Proximity, Shy Leon, Mutual Pining, Cute Jealousy.

╰┈➤ Series.

Chapter Index

< prev , END.

Chapter 10 : Clear Skies Over Victory Boulevard

The silence inside Leon’s apartment didn't feel like the heavy, suffocating weight that had stretched between their desks all week. It was soft, vibrating, and so loud with the memory of the riverfront alleyway that every time the radiator hissed, Leon’s chest tightened with a dizzying, frantic pulse.

Outside, the first hints of dawn were breaking over the Arklay Mountains, painting the damp streets of the North West district in a pale, lavender glow. The storm had completely cleared, leaving only the crisp, cool static of early morning filtering through the glass.

Leon sat on the edge of his bed, his long legs stretched out across the worn hardwood. He had changed into a pair of soft gray sweatpants and a faded academy t-shirt that had seen better days. Between both palms, he held a heavy ceramic mug of black coffee, watching the steam roll up and disappear into the dim light. He looked entirely worn out, his sandy hair still dry and chaotic from the rain, but the frantic, defensive edge in his shoulders had completely melted away.

From the kitchen alcove, the quiet scuff of bare feet broke the quiet.

Y/N stepped into the room, adjusting the sleeves of his navy-blue RPD hoodie. It swallowed her completely, the cuffs hanging past her knuckles and the hem dropping to her mid-thigh. She didn't look like the sharp, quick-witted officer who had spent the night mapping out grid coordinates; she looked soft, sleepy, and devastatingly real.

She caught him staring. A slow, knowing smirk tugged at the corner of her lips as she leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. "You know, if you look into that mug any harder, you're going to read the future in the coffee grounds, Kennedy."

Leon let out a quiet, rough laugh, the dimple in his right cheek showing itself for the first time all night. He didn't look away. "I’m just trying to make sense of how we got back here. It feels like the floor is still shaking a little."

"That’s just the radiator," Y/N murmured. She walked over, her movements slow and completely unhurried, before sliding onto the edge of the mattress right beside him. The sudden shift of her warmth cutting through the morning chill made his breath hitch. She reached out, her fingers sliding over his knuckles, gently taking the mug from his hands and setting it on the nightstand. "And for the record? You don't have to make sense of anything right now."

Leon turned his body to face her, his wide blue eyes locking onto hers with a sudden, fierce gravity that stripped away any remaining playful pretense. He reached out, his long, pale fingers wrapping securely around her wrist, guiding her hand up until her palm was pressed flat against the center of his chest.

"I do, though," Leon whispered, his voice dropping into a raw, breathless register that went straight to her ribs. Under her hand, his heart was drumming a frantic, echoing rhythm. "Because when I was standing in that dark corridor at the precinct... listening to Vance tell you everything you deserved... I realized I’d spent two months being an absolute coward. I was so terrified of ruining our partnership that I almost let a man who doesn't even know you buy your way out of this city."

He looked down at her hand against his shirt, his grip tightening just enough to keep her anchored there. "He could offer you the capital district, Y/N. He could offer you a division leader who actually has a career to stand on. I'm a rookie with a messy desk and a spotless record that doesn't mean a damn thing out in the real world. But when he touched your arm in the rain... I snapped. I didn't care about the rules. I just knew I couldn't breathe if you left."

Y/N didn't pull her hand away. Instead, she leaned in closer, her other hand coming up to cup the side of his face, her thumb smoothing over the warm, flushed skin of his cheekbone. Her eyes were wide, dark, and filled with a fierce, quiet intensity that silenced the lingering panic in his chest.

"Leon, listen to me," she said, her voice dropping into a low, unshakeable cadence. "Vance didn't see me. He saw a quick study he could recruit to make his unit look better on an administrative review. He didn't know that I can't think straight when a case gets heavy until I've had an extra sugar packet from the breakroom. He didn't know that I leave paperclips everywhere because it helps me think. You know every single line of how I work. You’ve had my back since the morning you tripped over the welcome mat."

A small, breathless laugh escaped her lips, her forehead coming to rest gently against his. "I don't want a perfect, sterile office in the capital. I want the broken typewriter. I want the stupid scoreboard. I want the partner who looks like he’s about to pass out from stress but still remembers to bring me donuts on a double shift. I’ve wanted you since September, Leon. Vance was just an obstacle."

The last remnants of Leon's crushing insecurity completely dissolved. He let out a long, shuddering breath, his arms coming up to wrap securely around her waist, pulling her flush against him until the space between them vanished entirely.

He kissed her.

This time, there was no rain blurring his vision, no distant radio static, and no senior officer standing three feet away in the mud. It was slow, deep, and heavily deliberate—a quiet, aching release of two months of unspoken friction. Leon’s lips moved against hers with a possessive, deep sincerity, his hands traveling up the back of the heavy hoodie, tracing the sharp line of her spine as if he were memorizing the exact weight of her in his arms.

Y/N sighed into the kiss, her fingers tangling tightly into the chaotic locks of hair at the back of his neck, pulling him down until he was entirely hers. She tasted like the lingering chill of the storm and the sweet, rich heat of the morning, and it was the most grounding thing Leon had ever felt.

When he finally pulled back a fraction of an inch, his lips were damp and his cheeks were flushed a beautiful, deep pink. He kept his eyes locked onto hers, his long frame shifting until he leaned back against the stacked pillows, bringing her down with him until she was draped comfortably over his chest, her chin resting on his collarbone.

"So," Leon murmured, a soft, dimpled smile finally breaking through his dazed expression. His fingers traced lazy, rhythmic circles against her hip. "How are we supposed to look Marvin in the eye at 0900 hours without him realizing we've completely ruined our professional synergy?"

Y/N let out a quiet, amused huff against his neck, her fingers playing with the collar of his t-shirt. "Marvin already knows, Kennedy. He told you to fix your hair because you looked like you’d been caught in a jet turbine. He was basically telling you to get your act together."

"I think my act is perfectly together right now," Leon whispered, his chest expanding with a deep, content breath as he tightened his arms around her shoulders.

"Mhm. We'll see about that when you're trying to explain why your pen organizer is out of alignment tomorrow morning," she teased, her eyelids growing heavy as the profound exhaustion of the long night finally took over.

Leon didn't reply. He just leaned his head down, pressing a quiet, lingering kiss into the crown of her hair, his heart beating a slow, steady rhythm against her cheek. Outside, the lavender sky was slowly turning into a brilliant, warm gold, flooding the small room with light, but neither of them noticed. They were already asleep, anchored together in the quiet space they had fought all night to keep.

The Hidden Variable

Y/N spent her entire life trying to escape her father's shadow. A prodigy civil engineer, she wanted nothing to do with his work—until his involvement in illegal bioweapon experiments was exposed after his death.

Accused of crimes she never committed and imprisoned as a high-risk threat, Y/N escapes custody to find her missing brother and uncover the truth. Now one of the country's most wanted fugitives, she is being hunted by Leon S. Kennedy, the agent assigned to bring her in.

As dangerous secrets surrounding her family begin to surface, the line between hunter and fugitive starts to blur. With trust becoming increasingly difficult—and increasingly impossible to ignore—Y/N and Leon may discover that the truth isn't the only thing drawing them together.

Leon S. Kennedy x Reader

Chapter 7: House Rules 8.7k words

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter / Masterlist / ao3

The sun came in through the blinds in thin, parallel lines.

You registered it before you registered anything else, the specific quality of morning light that had been filtered and arrived in narrow bars across the ceiling rather than all at once, the kind of light that meant a room with a window facing east and a blind that hadn't been fully drawn. You lay still for a moment and let consciousness complete its return without rushing it.

You sat up slowly.

The room resolved itself around you, the guest room, Leon's apartment, the previous evening assembling itself in the correct sequence. The alley. The car. The doctor. The handshake.

You looked down at yourself.

Right. The clothes.

The clothes you'd arrived in were not- acceptable was too generous a word. They were the clothes of someone who had crawled through a ventilation shaft, been hit with a gun butt, fallen through bushes from a third floor window, fought in a tree line, walked an hour through a city while bleeding, and then spent an unknown number of hours unconscious in various locations. They reflected all of that comprehensively and in detail.

You needed a bath. You needed it urgently and completely, and you needed clean clothes, and you needed both of these things before you engaged with anything else the day was planning to present you with.

You got to your feet with the slow, managed care of someone who had learned to negotiate with their own body rather than simply issue it instructions. The room stayed where it was supposed to be, which you noted as a positive development and didn't push by moving too fast. You found the door on the far wall and opened it.

Ensuite.

You stood in the doorway and looked at it properly.

It was large. Not guest-bathroom large, genuinely, substantially large, the kind of proportions that communicated a certain relationship with money and space that most people didn't have access to. White stone surfaces, veined slightly, the material expensive and deliberately chosen. A shower against the far wall, glass-enclosed, the size of a small room. And against the opposite wall, a freestanding bath, oval, deep, with those curved edges that existed for comfort rather than function, positioned under a frosted-glass panel that let in soft, diffused morning light without the full exposure of a clear window.

You looked at the bath for a moment.

You were aware, in the specific way of someone who had spent eleven weeks in a cell with a combined toilet-and-sink steel unit, of what this represented.

You went back through the bedroom and tried the other door.

Walk-in wardrobe.

Also large. Also mostly empty, the hanging rails present and well-made, the shelving solid and precisely fitted, all of it waiting for an occupant who either hadn't arrived yet or simply didn't accumulate possessions at the rate the storage suggested. You moved through it methodically, the way you moved through any space you were assessing, high shelves first, then eye level, then low, then drawers, the systematic left-to-right of someone who had learned not to miss things by rushing.

Most of it was genuinely empty. But in the second drawer from the bottom on the left side, folded without particular care, there was a shirt, dark navy, soft fabric, well-made in the specific way of something bought for quality rather than occasion. Below it, in the same drawer, a pair of trousers. Grey, simple, clearly built for someone with considerably longer legs and a more substantial build than yours.

You held the trousers up.

The waist could be managed. The length was another matter.

Beggars can't be choosers, you thought, and took both items back to the bathroom.

***

You set the clothes on the far corner of the vanity where they wouldn't get wet, and turned on the bath taps. The water came out hot almost immediately, genuinely hot, not the tepid compromise of institution plumbing or the slow build of an old system, but actually hot, within seconds, which was another data point in the growing body of evidence that Leon's apartment operated at a standard that most people didn't get to observe up close.

While the bath filled you placed both hands on the vanity edge and looked at yourself in the mirror.

The mirror in Hargrove had been scratched and poorly lit, designed to provide the minimum necessary information rather than clarity. This mirror was the opposite. Large, well-lit by the frosted morning light from the window panel, positioned at the precise angle that left nothing ambiguous about what you looked like.

You looked terrible.

Not just the injury, though the injury was significant, the bandaging wrapping your head in a way that covered the stitches but couldn't fully disguise the swelling beneath, the slight discolouration at the edge of the dressing where the wound had wept overnight. Underneath the bandaging there were the other things, the accumulated evidence of the past four days: the shadows under your eyes that had moved from tired into the category of architectural features, the particular pallor of blood loss, the split skin on your knuckles, the scrape on your forearm, the various small marks and bruises that served as a detailed timeline of recent events.

You looked at yourself for a moment with the detached, cataloguing attention you usually reserved for structural assessments.

Then your eyes went sideways to the closed bedroom door, through which Leon Kennedy was presumably somewhere in the apartment on the other side of the wall.

You look like this, you told yourself, while there is a very attractive man twenty metres away.

You turned away from the mirror. 

The bath was nearly full.

You turned off the taps and lowered yourself carefully. The water was hot — properly, luxuriously hot, the temperature that arrived at the edge of too much and then became exactly right — and the contact of it was immediate and comprehensive and you let it be what it was for a moment without thinking about anything at all.

Just the heat. Just the quiet. Just the particular, specific relief of a person who had been cold and dirty and on the move for four days being neither cold nor dirty nor on the move for the first time.

You closed your eyes.

The bathroom had a quality of stillness to it, the acoustic softness of stone surfaces absorbing sound, the frosted light giving the room a diffused, even glow that didn't demand anything from your eyes. You could hear the faint sounds of the building around you, the distant, muffled suggestion of the city outside, something mechanical running in the walls, the small sounds of a space that was very well insulated from everything beyond itself.

You opened your eyes and looked at the array of products arranged on the edge of the bath. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, all in the same clean, unbranded white bottles that suggested either a very specific aesthetic preference or a housekeeper who made these decisions. You picked up the shampoo and considered the logistics of washing your hair around the stitches and the bandaging — logistics that required patience and a realistic assessment of what clean enough meant under the current constraints.

You managed clean enough.

You washed your hair slowly, working around the bandaging, your body operating within a specific set of limitations and making the best of them. You worked the shampoo through with your fingertips, gentle around the wound site, less gentle everywhere else, and let the hot water do as much of the work as it could.

Then you sat back and closed your eyes again.

Your thoughts went, as they always went when you stopped actively directing them, to the notes. To Daniel. To the address at the bottom of the margin in the smallest handwriting, the one you'd been repeating to yourself in the alley like a structural anchor. You said it in your head now — a check, a confirmation that it was still there and hadn't been lost in the concussion and the unconsciousness and the sequence of everything else.

Still there. Clear. Intact.

Good.

He was out there. Running, hiding, alive, the three facts that had become the load-bearing elements of your entire current existence, the things everything else was built around. He had been at the facility recently. He had understood, finally, what the research was and what it was designed for, and he had run rather than continue being part of it, and that meant —

That meant he was not who they'd been saying he was.

That meant the case was wrong.

That meant the people who had built the case on the wrong understanding were going to face the specific, precise consequences of having done that, and you were going to be personally and specifically involved in making sure those consequences arrived.

The flame in your chest was there, not the panic from the alley, not the hot, desperate fear of someone who thought they were dying. Something older and more controlled than that. The anger that had been building since the handcuffs in the firm's car park, since Interrogation Room 2 and Calloway's careful, insufficient explanations. The same flame that had kept you mapping the facility ceiling for eleven weeks and had gotten you out through the ventilation shaft and across the chain-link fence and through four days of this.

Every person involved in what had been done to Daniel,  to you, was going to pay for it. In the specific, meticulous, thoroughly documented way that you intended. Not in the dramatic way, not the immediate way, not the way that produced gratification at the cost of efficacy. In the way that lasted. The way that couldn't be undone or recontextualised or managed away.

You were going to use Leon to get there.

Not against him, you'd clarified that to yourself already, in the bath, in the quiet, looking at the frosted window above you. Working with him, the way you worked with any structural element that happened to be load-bearing in the direction you needed. He was capable and he believed you and he had resources you didn't have and the combination of those three things made him the most valuable variable in your current situation. You were going to use that variable with every bit of the planning capacity that had produced the escape from Hargrove.

You were not physically strong. You'd never been physically strong, that had always been Daniel's side of things, the athletics, the outdoor pursuits, the general physical ease that he wore the way some people wore competence. You had the other thing. You understood physics, and the application of physics to structures, and the way force could be redirected rather than matched, and you had demonstrated over the past four days that those things were, in their own specific way, as functional as anything else.

Leon was better than you at the fighting and the field work. Obviously. Thirteen years of this, the specific experience of surviving things that should have been unsurvivable, you couldn't replicate that and you weren't going to try. What you could do was plan. Given sufficient preparation time, sufficient observation, and the structural information, you were, not unstoppable, you'd learned enough humility from the tree line to retire that word, but formidable. Genuinely formidable. And combined with Leon's specific capabilities the combination was significantly more effective than either of you alone.

Which was, you supposed, the point.

You opened your eyes and looked at the ceiling.

Then you got out of the bath.

The process of getting clean had taken longer than it should have and used more energy than it should have, and the body's report on the situation was comprehensive as you stood on the warm stone floor and reached for the towel. Your head was making a sustained and articulate argument for the return of the horizontal position. You managed it around the argument. The shower got exactly two minutes, the minimum necessary to rinse off what the bath had loosened, and you kept your head angled precisely away from the bandaging the entire time, one hand on the shower wall, the other managing the angle.

Then you dried yourself carefully, avoiding the stitches, and looked at the clothes on the vanity corner.

The shirt was enormous. It fell past your hips and the sleeves required rolling to a comical degree and the fabric, which had been made for someone with a considerably more substantial chest and shoulder situation, bagged around you. The trousers required the same rolling at the ankle as the shirt sleeves, and the waist sat where it sat and you managed it with the drawstring.

No undergarment.

You considered this situation briefly, acknowledged it, and filed it firmly in the category of later.

You looked at yourself in the mirror one more time.

Enormous borrowed clothes, bandaged head, shadows under your eyes.

The very attractive man was still twenty metres away.

You went to find the kitchen.

***

The corridor outside the guest room was wider than it needed to be, the kind of corridor that existed in apartments where space hadn't been a constraint during the design. Multiple doors along it, you noted them as you passed, the way you noted all spatial information, filing them for later reference. The corridor opened at the far end into the main living space, and you stopped at the threshold.

The living room and kitchen were open plan and the first thing you registered was the light. Large windows, floor-to-ceiling on the east wall, and the morning was coming through them at the specific generous angle of east-facing glass in autumn, flooding the room with something close to gold. The ceilings were high. The whole space had the quality of somewhere designed to feel larger than its measurements, and it succeeded.

The furniture was minimal and excellent. A sofa that looked like it had been chosen by someone who understood quality and then barely used, the cushions still holding the precise shape of furniture that had been sat on occasionally rather than lived in. A low table with nothing on it. The kitchen island across the open space, marble-topped, the kind of marble that had been chosen rather than specified by default.

You walked toward the kitchen, letting your hand trail along the cabinet faces as you went. The cabinets were smooth and unmarked, the handles unchipped, the surfaces clean in the specific way of things that hadn't been used enough to be worn. You opened one: glassware, arranged with a precision that suggested either a very organised mind or someone who'd arranged them once and not moved them since. Another: pristine. A third: the kind of new that meant the items inside had arrived with the apartment's last renovation and had been waiting since then.

The kitchen supplies were brand new. Some of them were still in their original packaging, the cardboard unbroken, the plastic seals intact. The chopping board had never been used. The knife block was complete and unmarked.

You stood in the kitchen and looked around the space and felt the specific quality of it settle over you. It was a beautiful apartment. It was also, in a very particular way, an empty one, not physically empty, it had everything an apartment was supposed to have, but empty in the way that spaces were empty when they hadn't been occupied enough to acquire the residue of an actual life. No photographs. No accumulated objects of the kind that ended up on shelves because someone put them there without thinking and then stopped noticing them. No evidence of habits or routines beyond the absolute functional minimum.

Your childhood home had felt like this.

Your father's house, large and correct and precisely maintained and utterly devoid of the warmth that required the presence of people who actually lived there rather than people who occupied the space between obligations. You'd hated that quality in the house. You'd spent your entire adolescence trying to generate some approximation of warmth in rooms that seemed designed to refuse it.

This felt different from that, though. Your father's house had been deliberately empty, a performance of a certain life, the surfaces maintained as display rather than function. This felt accidentally empty. Leon's apartment, you thought, was the apartment of someone who was very good at their job and spent most of their time doing it. Who had created a functional base rather than a home. Who hadn't made the emptiness on purpose and hadn't particularly noticed it either.

You were still trailing your hand along the cabinet edge, thinking about that, when you became aware of the presence behind you.

"You shouldn't be out of bed yet."

You turned around.

Leon was standing at the edge of the kitchen, close enough that you hadn't heard him approach, which told you two things: that your environmental awareness was operating below its standard parameters, and that he moved very quietly when he chose to, which was probably a professional habit that had become a permanent condition. He was fully dressed, dark trousers, a shirt in a deep grey that sat well against the general architecture of him, and something in his overall presentation that had the quality of someone who had been up for a while rather than someone who had just gotten up.

Except his hair was slightly wrong.

Not dramatically wrong, just the specific, almost imperceptible wrongness of someone who'd been awake and moving but hadn't gotten around to the last two minutes of the morning routine. A few strands at the front not quite where they usually sat. You considered this piece of evidence and the conclusion it implied, that you'd been moving around enough to wake him, and that he'd come out to find you without taking the time to fully address it first, and found the conclusion quietly, disproportionately satisfying.

You smiled at him.

He looked at you with the expression that was his default for situations he was reading as potentially problematic, neutral on the surface, something more attentive underneath it.

"Don't worry about me," you said, turning slightly and picking up the painkillers that were sitting on the counter, you'd spotted them on the way in, just to give your hands something to do and your eyes somewhere to go that wasn't his face. You turned the packet over, reading the back with the expression of someone paying attention to it. "Or — are you worried I'm going to do something?"

"I can't say that I fully trust you," he said, moving toward you with the calm, unhurried directness of someone who had already decided what they were going to do before they started doing it. "But we're working together, so I don't think you'll be doing anything stupid." He paused, stopping beside you, and took the painkillers from your hand with a matter-of-factness that left no room for discussion. "You're smarter than that."

He shook one tablet out. Filled a glass from the tap, the water cold, clear, the sound of it sharp in the kitchen's quiet, and set both in front of you.

You looked at the glass. Then at him. Then you sat down on the stool at the island, which was what your legs had been suggesting for the past several minutes anyway, and swallowed the tablet with water that was cold and good and felt like an immediate improvement to your situation.

"Thanks," you said.

He sat on the stool beside you. Not across the island, beside you. You looked straight ahead at the pristine kitchen and were very normal about this.

"I spoke with my team," he said. "You'll be staying here until this is resolved."

He looked at you as he said it, the watchful quality, reading your response before you gave one.

Where else would I go, you thought, I'm essentially homeless. You had no safe house, no registered vehicle, a compromised identity structure, eight stitches in your head, and you were currently sitting in someone else's clothes in someone else's kitchen. The full inventory of your current material situation was not one you intended to share. You bit the inside of your cheek and nodded.

It was, if you were honest, going better than you'd expected. The escape had worked. The notes were safe. The address was in your head. And now you were here, which was, not ideal in every dimension, but operationally sound. You were off the street, you had medical attention you wouldn't have sought for yourself, and you had the most capable person currently assigned to your case on the same side of things as you, at least provisionally.

The universe was being almost suspicious about it. Things didn't come this easily to you. They never had. You'd always had to fight for every inch of every thing that had ever gone your way, and this particular sequence of events was moving with a smoothness that made the back of your neck prickle slightly.

Something bad was coming. You could feel it the way you felt structural instability, not seeing it yet, but knowing the conditions for it were accumulating somewhere you couldn't see.

"The location from the notes," Leon said. "We'll go when you're feeling better."

"No." You turned on the stool to face him. "What if something happens in the meantime? Every day we wait is another day Daniel is out there alone. We need to move as soon as possible."

You knew it was stupid even as the words came out. You knew it in the way you knew things that were factually correct but operationally irrelevant, you were aware of your own head wound, aware of the dizziness that arrived without warning and departed on its own schedule, aware that you'd used the corridor wall as a navigation aid on the way to the kitchen. You knew all of it. But Daniel was somewhere out there with the same people who had come to the facility, and the guilt of sitting still had a specific, persistent weight to it that made rational assessment more difficult than it should have been.

"Don't be stupid." His tone wasn't unkind but it had no room in it for negotiation, the specific quality of someone who had made a decision and was communicating it as a fact rather than a position. "You'll drag us both down if you come like this. We either wait until you're functional or I go without you. Those are the options."

You looked at him for a moment.

You thought about pointing out that he wasn't going to go without you, because the entire basis of the arrangement was working together and going without you would immediately and comprehensively undermine that basis. You considered making this argument. You looked at his expression and determined that making it would be accurate and entirely pointless.

"Okay," you said, looking at your hands on the counter.

A beat of quiet. Then, from beside you, delivered in the tone of someone appending an administrative update to a conversation that had already concluded: "I've also arranged for some clothes and other things to be sent over for you. They should arrive later today."

You looked at him. "How do you know what size clothes I wear?"

He turned his head toward you. One eyebrow elevated by the most minimal degree — genuinely confused by the question. "We found your apartment," he said. "I don't know your size. Whoever's collecting them does."

You processed that. Then processed what your question had implied about what you'd been assuming, and felt something warm move up the back of your neck that you were going to classify as a reaction to the painkiller and not think about further. You produced a small, contained cough and redirected your gaze to the kitchen island's surface.

"Right," you said. "Obviously."

He held his gaze on you for one more second and then he stood and moved around to the kitchen side of the island. You heard the sound of a coffee machine beginning its process, and then the small sounds of him moving around the kitchen, the particular economy of it, nothing unnecessary, everything direct,  you stared at the marble surface and maintained your composure.

Then, entirely against your better judgment, you looked up.

His back was to you as he stood at the counter, and you were not going to catalogue his back, you were specifically not doing that, except that his shirt was fitted across the shoulder in the particular way of a shirt that hadn't been chosen to be fitted but simply reflected the reality of what it was covering, which was the back of a man who had been in the field since twenty-one and whose physical existence showed the evidence of that in the specific, architectural way of something built for function rather than form.

You looked at the counter again.

You looked at it for a sustained and deliberate period.

"So," you said, in the tone of someone steering a conversation out of the territory it had been heading into. "What are we doing today?"

He was quiet for a moment, the deciding-how-much-to-tell-you quiet, the one you'd learned to identify. "I'm going to the office," he said. "There are things I need to follow up in person. Documents, people I need to speak with." He paused. "You're going to rest."

"I'm sorry?"

"You're going to stay here and rest," he said, as though the repetition might improve your reception of the information.

"You expect me to sit here all day and do nothing." You said.

 "I genuinely cannot do that. You understand that's not something I'm physically capable of."

He turned around.

He had a coffee in his hand, and he was looking at you with an expression that occupied the territory between patience and something considerably drier. "You might have hit your head a bit harder than I realised."

You opened your mouth.

"Everyone knows your face," he continued, before you could. "You were on television for four days. You're still a fugitive, you're still a criminal on paper, and there are still people who came to a facility yesterday specifically to find you who are now aware that they didn't. You cannot go outside and pretend to be a normal person." He took a sip of his coffee. "You're also operating on a head wound and a concussion that the doctor was quite specific about. So. You're staying here."

You looked at him.

He was right. You knew he was right. Your brain knew he was right — the same brain that had spent eleven weeks mapping a federal facility and planning an escape could perform the basic calculation that a fugitive with a bandaged head and a face that had been on the news was not going to move through a city unnoticed, not even with glasses and a hat. The brain knew all of that.

The rest of you was remembering the cell. The silence in Hargrove after lights-out, and the ceiling with its crack that was three millimetres wider than it had been last Tuesday, and the forty-three seconds between Reyes's footsteps and the observation window darkening. The feeling of walls that did not move and routines that did not vary and the particular, sustained pressure of a life that had been reduced to a space that could be mapped in twenty-six steps because there wasn't enough of it to take twenty-seven.

Your chest did something tight and unpleasant.

"Fine," you said. Quietly. Looking at your hands.

A short silence.

"What are you doing at the office?" you asked. You looked up at him. 

He looked at you for a moment. You had the sense, again, of a decision being made about how much to give. "I need to pull some documents," he said finally. "There are connections in the official case file that I think point somewhere the summary didn't follow. I need to look at them in person, with full access." He paused. "I'm not doing anything without you. Whatever I find, I'll bring back." He set his coffee cup down. "I'll be a few hours. I'll bring food."

He held your gaze for a moment and you held his and the kitchen was quiet around both of you with the particular quality of a space that was waiting to see what happened next.

"Okay," you said.

He picked up his cup again. Nodded once. And went back down the corridor toward his room.

You stayed at the island.

You could hear him, faintly, the sounds of a person moving through a space they knew well, the economical sounds of someone changing clothes. A drawer. A door. The low, barely audible sounds of a person going through the sequence of their morning routine in the room at the far end of the corridor. You looked at the television on the wall above the living room and got up from the stool and went and sat on the sofa and turned it on.

The screen filled with the daytime programming of a channel that apparently believed in cooking competitions as a format for all occasions. You watched it with approximately ten percent of your attention. The rest of it was on the sounds from the corridor.

And then the sounds stopped.

Leon came back through.

The fragrance arrived slightly before he did, not heavily, not the aggressive application of someone who wanted to be smelled from across a room. Subtle, and therefore considerably more effective than heavy would have been. It was the kind of scent that made you think of cold air and cedar and something underneath both of those things that didn't have a direct reference point, just the specific warm-and-clean quality of someone who had chosen well and worn it correctly. You filed this information in the place where you kept all information of this nature, which was getting somewhat crowded.

Then he came through the corridor and you looked at him and the filing system became briefly overloaded.

He had changed into a dark blue shirt that fit in an apparently effortless way that everything he wore fit, and a jacket over it, dark, well-cut, the kind of jacket that didn't announce itself but changed the entire geometry of the person wearing it. The trousers were the same dark colour and the overall effect of the combination was, you were going to need a moment.

You were not going to get a moment because he was crossing the living room toward the door and he had already seen you looking.

You had been looking. You were aware that you had been looking in a way that was legible. You were aware that he was aware of it because there was a beat, one second, two, where his gaze was on you as you looked at him, before he looked away toward the door with the controlled, deliberate quality of someone who had noted something and made a decision about what to do with it, and the decision was apparently door.

"Bye bye," you said, a little embarrassed at being caught staring. You gave him a small wave. "Don't miss me too much."

He looked at you. He nodded once. And then he unlocked the door and left.

The door closed.

The apartment was quiet.

You sat on the sofa with the cooking competition on the television and the smell of his fragrance still present in the room, faint and specific and really quite good, and looked at the closed door.

Then you looked at the clock.

You would wait ten minutes. Ten minutes was the reasonable interval. Ten minutes constituted due respect for the spirit, if not the letter, of the arrangement.

You waited ten minutes.

Then you got up.

You went to the window first.

The street below was doing what streets did in the late morning, the purposeful, indifferent movement of a city going about its business, pedestrians with places to be, a delivery vehicle double-parked, two people talking outside the building opposite. Nothing that activated the threat-assessment instincts you'd been developing over the past four days. No vehicles that had been there too long. No configurations of people that suggested anything other than the ordinary.

Good.

You went back to your room.

The spare painkillers on the bedside table went into your trouser pocket. You'd noted them the night before and retrieved them now with the quiet efficiency of long-established habit. Then you headed back to the walk-in wardrobe.

This time, you searched with considerably more care. The shirt and trousers had been enough before, but now you were looking for something that could get you out of the apartment unnoticed. You worked methodically through each shelf and drawer, checking every corner with the quiet thoroughness that had become second nature over the past eleven weeks.

"Come on," you murmured, pushing aside a folded towel, checking behind a stack of folded shirts that turned out to be all the same shirt in different states of age. "Come on, come on—"

The top shelf on the right side. Behind a box that turned out to contain miscellaneous cables from devices that apparently no longer existed, you recognised this category of box, everyone had one, your fingers found fabric.

A beanie. Black. Simple. The completely unremarkable kind.

You held it up and looked at it.

"Yes," you said, quietly, to the wardrobe.

One more pass of the shelving, and on the second shelf from the bottom on the left side, behind a folded scarf: a pair of glasses. Clear lenses, square frames, the kind of frames that were either stylishly minimalist or had simply not gone out of style since they'd been bought, and the distinction didn't matter. You tried them. No prescription — the world remained the same.

You took both items to the bathroom mirror.

The beanie went on first. You eased it down over your head with slow, careful movements, taking particular care around the bandaging. The fabric pressed against the stitches immediately, a dull, persistent ache blooming beneath it. You paused, breathed through the discomfort, then adjusted the fit millimetre by millimetre until it settled where you wanted it. By the time you were finished, the bandaging was completely hidden and the beanie looked as though it belonged there rather than serving a very specific purpose.

The glasses next.

You looked at yourself.

Different. Not completely different, the shadows were still there, the pallor still present, but the immediate visual recognition was disrupted. The beanie covered the bandaging. The glasses redirected the eye. The enormous borrowed shirt and rolled trouser bottoms served as their own kind of camouflage, nobody on file had a photograph of you in this outfit.

Not perfect. Better than nothing. Considerably better than the bandaged-head-and-bloodstained-clothing look that the city had already had one day to log.

You went to the window again. Checked the street. Still clear.

Then you went to the front door and reached for the handle.

The handle moved.

The door did not.

You tried again, giving the handle a second turn as though it might simply have failed to communicate its intentions the first time. It moved freely beneath your hand. The door didn't. It remained firmly in place, held shut by the unmistakable certainty of a deadlock engaged from the outside.

You removed your hand from the handle.

You looked at the door.

The smirk that had been building across the past twenty minutes, the anticipatory satisfaction of a plan in motion, left your face with the specific, immediate totality of something that had been there and then wasn't.

He had locked the door.

Of course he had.

You stood in the hallway of Leon Kennedy's very large, very expensive, very locked apartment and looked at the door that was not going to open and thought several things in rapid succession, none of which were particularly charitable.

Then you sighed.

You put your hands in the pockets of the enormous trousers and looked at the apartment spread out around you, the high ceilings and the pristine kitchen and the large windows and the cooking competition still audible from the television in the living room.

Well.

You took the beanie off, the pressure was making the stitches make their opinions known with increasing specificity, and tucked it under your arm. And you went to explore.

The corridor had five doors besides the guest room you'd been using.

You'd noted them when you'd first come through, and you went through them now with the same methodical attention you gave to all spatial assessments. The first door on the left revealed a bathroom, smaller than the ensuite, functional, nothing particular. You closed it and continued.

The second door was Leon's room.

You stood in the doorway for a moment and looked.

It was larger than the guest room, as master bedrooms tended to be, though the difference wasn't nearly as dramatic as the apartment itself had led you to expect. The bed had already been made, the duvet pulled smooth and the corners squared with the kind of neatness that looked habitual rather than deliberate. The room was undeniably tidy, but it wasn't pristine. It felt lived in, just quietly so. A book rested face-down on the bedside table, halfway through by the look of it. A dark jacket hung over the chair in the corner, discarded without much thought rather than carefully arranged. A watch sat on the dresser. Small things. Ordinary things. The sort of details that accumulated when someone actually occupied a space instead of simply passing through it.

The difference was subtle, but unmistakable. Unlike the rest of the apartment, which had the polished, almost impersonal quality of somewhere designed to be admired, this room belonged to someone. Nothing was out of place, yet nothing felt staged either. Everything seemed to exist exactly where it had naturally been left. It wasn't the immaculate perfection of a hotel room or a carefully curated show home. It was the quiet order of a man who cleaned up after himself, who valued routine over appearance, and who spent so little time at home that there was never much opportunity for clutter to accumulate in the first place.

You didn't go any further.

There was a line between observing and intruding, and you knew exactly where it was. Curiosity was one thing. Walking into another person's bedroom and opening drawers simply because you could was something else entirely. Leon had trusted you enough to leave you here. However reluctant that trust might have been, you weren't about to repay it by violating the only genuinely private space in the apartment.

You stayed in the doorway, letting your eyes travel over the room instead.

The walk-in wardrobe stood open just beyond the bedroom, visible from where you were. Unlike the one attached to the guest room, this one was actually lived in. Clothes filled the rails in neat, deliberate rows—dark suits grouped together, shirts arranged from white through grey to navy and black, jackets hanging with enough space between them that none were crushed. Shoes were lined beneath them in pairs. Nothing looked excessive. If anything, the wardrobe was surprisingly restrained for someone who could clearly afford far more than this.

It wasn't the wardrobe of a man interested in fashion.

It was the wardrobe of someone who bought good things because they lasted, replaced them only when necessary, and organised them because searching for a shirt in the morning was an unnecessary waste of time.

It suited him.

A faint scent drifted from the room, subtle enough that you almost didn't register it. Laundry detergent. Fresh cotton. Something clean with the understated hint of cedar and whatever aftershave he used. Nothing overpowering. Nothing designed to announce itself. Just... him.

You became aware that you'd been standing there for slightly longer than was reasonable.

You closed the bedroom door.

Firmly.

Before your thoughts decided to become significantly less professional than they had been thirty seconds ago.

The laundry room proved considerably less distracting. Functional shelves, neatly stacked detergent, spare towels folded with military precision, a washing machine that looked as though it saw remarkably little use. The storage room beside it was much the same, boxes carefully labelled, shelving arranged with practical efficiency, everything occupying a place that had clearly been assigned to it long ago. Even the things hidden away were organised.

And then: the office.

You stood in the doorway for considerably longer than you'd stood anywhere else in the apartment. The difference announced itself immediately. The rest of the apartment had been somewhere a person returned to. Ate. Slept. Left again. This was somewhere they stayed. It wasn't simply a desk pushed against a wall or a laptop balanced on a dining table. It was an actual office, built into the apartment as though whoever had designed the place had understood that work wasn't something its owner occasionally brought home, it followed him whether he wanted it to or not.

The desk dominated the room, large enough to spread documents across without running out of space. Dark wood, solid construction, the kind of furniture bought once and expected to outlast its owner. A closed laptop sat precisely in the centre, charger coiled neatly beside it, a leather notebook resting square against one corner. A desk lamp arched over the surface at exactly the angle that suggested it was used late into the evening more often than not. Nothing had been left lying around, but nothing looked staged either. It was simply organised. Not the obsessive organisation of someone uncomfortable with disorder, but the practical organisation of someone who knew exactly where everything belonged because wasting time looking for it was inefficient.

Your eyes drifted to the bookshelves. There were hundreds of books. Not decorative collections bought by the metre to impress visitors. These had clearly accumulated over years. Thick technical manuals sat beside history books. Military biographies leaned against binders full of reports. There were novels wedged sideways between folders where someone had obviously finished reading them and simply never bothered to move them somewhere more appropriate. Some volumes had cracked spines. Others still held bookmarks halfway through, waiting for evenings that apparently hadn't happened yet. Somehow, that interested you more than the expensive furniture. Bookshelves like these always told stories that carefully arranged displays never could.

A ceramic mug sat abandoned beside one stack of files, a faint coffee ring dried into the wood beneath it. Someone had probably intended to wipe it away later before something else demanded their attention. Two uncapped pens rested beside an open folder. Another file sat slightly crooked beneath it, as though it had been put down in the middle of a thought and never straightened afterwards. Tiny imperfections. Tiny pieces of evidence. The room wasn't immaculate because nobody used it. It was slightly untidy because somebody did. Without entirely meaning to, you found yourself smiling.

Your attention drifted toward the seating area opposite the desk. A dark sofa occupied the far wall beneath a television, positioned close enough to the bookshelves that you could easily imagine someone sitting there with a file balanced on one knee while the evening news played quietly in the background without ever really watching it. It wasn't luxurious despite what the apartment itself might have suggested. Comfortable, certainly, but in the practical sense rather than the extravagant one. The kind of sofa chosen because long nights eventually required somewhere other than a desk chair, not because it matched a catalogue. Like everything else in the room, it felt functional before it felt expensive, and somehow that seemed entirely consistent with everything you had observed about Leon Kennedy so far.

Only then did you notice the second door.

It blended almost perfectly into the wall beside the sofa, painted the same colour as the surrounding panels, easy enough to overlook unless you were already paying attention. You walked towards it without really deciding to, curiosity carrying you the last few steps before you reached for the handle. It turned perhaps two degrees before stopping.

Locked.

Of course it was.

You tried again, slower this time, as though approaching the mechanism more politely might persuade it to reconsider. It didn't. The handle stopped in exactly the same place with the indifferent certainty of a lock doing precisely what it had been designed to do. You crouched slightly instead, studying the hardware. Different lock. Newer than the others throughout the apartment. Reinforced strike plate. Minimal clearance around the frame. Good hinges. Not something installed simply because somebody valued their privacy. Something installed because whatever lay behind it wasn't intended to be accessed casually.

Interesting.

Your fingertips rested lightly against the cool metal handle while your mind, entirely without permission, began constructing possibilities. Storage for classified case files. A weapons room. Some absurd government panic room hidden behind an ordinary-looking door. A secret armoury seemed slightly too dramatic, though admittedly not impossible considering whose apartment this actually was. Then again, perhaps it was simply another office. Or a spare bedroom. Human curiosity, you reflected, had an extraordinary habit of assigning enormous importance to the only thing it wasn't allowed to look at.

You gave the handle one final, entirely unnecessary tug.

It remained completely unimpressed.

"...Rude," you muttered.

You lingered for another second before stepping away. You'd already decided you weren't going to pick the lock. The decision had been made almost as soon as you'd realised it existed. There was a line between satisfying your curiosity and violating the trust of the person currently allowing you to hide in their home, and despite everything that had happened over the past four days, you weren't prepared to cross it. That didn't stop you wondering about it. It merely meant the wondering would have to remain theoretical.

You went to the desk. Looked through the surface without touching anything, the closed laptop, a pen, a small stack of papers that were face-down. You opened the desk drawer on the left side: paper clips, a charger cable, a notepad with nothing written on it. The drawer on the right side: more cables. The central drawer: pens, a small key ring with two keys that you lifted and examined and which belonged to nothing you could currently identify.

No key to the locked door.

Naturally.

You sat on the edge of the desk and looked at the bookshelves.

Your eyes moved along the spines, the files had labels that were numerical rather than descriptive, the government instinct for classification evident even in personal storage. The books were a mix: technical manuals, some clearly professional, a few novels, several books on history, one or two that had the look of things that had been read many times. You tilted your head to read the spine of the one that looked most worn.

A sound.

You went still.

It was faint, and it was coming from somewhere behind the wall, or no, not behind the wall, further, more to the right, toward the guest room you'd been using. A small sound. The specific, light quality of something moving at speed over a hard surface. Then a different sound, lower, like something heavier hitting something slightly hollow.

You picked up the beanie and glasses from the desk where you'd set them, out of pure instinct, and followed the sound.

It led you back down the corridor and into the guest room, which you crossed to the window. You reached the curtain and pushed it aside.

A fire escape.

And on the fire escape landing, engaged in a focused and apparently serious pursuit: a kitten. Small, not quite grown, white with grey patches distributed in the specific, unconsidered way of cats that hadn't chosen their own colouring. It was chasing a pigeon that was significantly larger than it and apparently unconcerned, which did not appear to be diminishing the kitten's confidence in the enterprise.

You stood with the curtain pushed aside and looked at this for a moment.

Then you opened the window.

The kitten stopped. Looked at you. The pigeon took the opportunity to leave, departing with the unhurried dignity of something that had never been in serious danger. The kitten watched it go, then looked back at you, and made a sound that was less a meow and more an announcement.

"Where did you come from?" you said. The fire escape landing was small — one of three you could see descending below, the building's external emergency exit. The kitten had presumably come up from somewhere, or along from somewhere, or had materialised specifically to complicate your morning, all three options being roughly equally plausible at this point. "Where's your mommy?"

The kitten came toward you. Stepped directly from the fire escape landing onto the windowsill and then from the windowsill into your arms with the complete, matter-of-fact confidence of something that had decided the matter was settled and was simply implementing the decision.

You caught it.

It was warm and small and it settled against your chest with the immediate, boneless quality of a cat that had found its location for the foreseeable future and was done with the discussion.

You looked down at it. Small face, round, the kitten eyes that were still finding their final colour — currently somewhere between grey and blue, the specific intermediate shade of things that hadn't finished deciding what they were going to be.

Blue, you thought, with the involuntary specificity of a brain that had a filing system and knew how to use it. They're going to be blue.

The kitten blinked at you.

You looked at it for a moment.

"You're mine now," you said.

The kitten offered no objection. It tucked its head against your collarbone and made a sound that was less meow and more purr-adjacent, the sound of something that had arrived where it was going and was satisfied about it.

You climbed back through the window with the cat against your chest, closed it, and stood in the guest room considering the logistics. Leon's apartment. A cat that had appeared from a fire escape. The approximate amount of time before Leon returned.

You went to the kitchen.

Leon's kitchen, with its brand new surfaces and its pristine utensils and its completely unused everything, yielded a plate after a brief search and a small amount of milk from the refrigerator, which appeared to be one of the only things in the refrigerator, the fridge being mostly a large cold space with very little in it beyond the basic infrastructure of someone who ate out or didn't eat regularly or both.

You set the plate on the kitchen floor.

The kitten descended from your arms with the fluid, unhurried grace of a cat that had decided it was now ready to be on the floor, and approached the milk with the serious, focused attention of something that had priorities and was applying them.

You watched it drink.

He wouldn't mind. Probably.

You stood in Leon's pristine kitchen watching a kitten drink milk from one of his probably very expensive plates and considered the general shape of your morning. Locked apartment. Explored the whole of it. Found a beanie and glasses. Found a kitten on the fire escape. The fire escape, you noted, which extended down to, you thought about the height from the window, the number of landings below, a drop to street level that was manageable, probably, if you were in full health.

You were not in full health.

You had made the assessment when you were standing on the fire escape with the kitten, and the assessment was that today, specifically today, with the head wound and the dizziness and the specific way your legs had been communicating with you since you'd gotten out of the bath, the fire escape was in the category of available but not advisable. Getting down was one thing. Getting down and then having your legs decide they were done, which they had been periodically doing today without warning, in a public street where your face was on the news, that was the category of outcome you were trying to avoid.

The universe was not, in fact, giving you an easy day. 

You went back to the guest room and hid the beanie and glasses at the bottom of the drawer where you'd found the shirt and trousers, behind the towel, where they'd be accessible and not immediately visible to someone who wasn't looking for them.

Then you went back to the living room.

The cooking competition was still on. You lay down on the sofa, the sofa that was, as previously noted, extremely comfortable, and put one arm over your eyes against the light and let the dizziness that had been building since the kitchen do what it was going to do.

The kitten, whose location you tracked by sound, finished the milk. Padded across the kitchen floor. Padded across the living room. There was a brief moment of assessment from somewhere near your feet, and then a small, specific warmth settled at the bottom of the sofa near your ankles.

The cooking competition murmured on.

Your thoughts ran the address, checked it, confirmed it was still there.

Then they ran a few other things that you were not going to examine.

He is painfully awkward at first. Rookie Leon already feels out of his depth being thrown into the Raccoon City disaster, so meeting someone he cares about makes him even more nervous.

He tries to act confident and heroic, but he trips over his words a lot. If Reader compliments him, his brain completely short-circuits.

Protective instincts kick in immediately. Leon places himself between Reader and danger without thinking. Even if Reader is capable, he still checks constantly.

“Are you hurt? Did that thing scratch you?”

He feels responsible for everyone’s safety, but Reader especially.

The dorky side of Leon shows, Rookie Leon makes dumb jokes during stressful moments just to lighten the mood. Half the time the jokes are terrible, but Reader laughs anyway, which makes him smile.

He secretly feels proud if he can make Reader laugh in such a terrifying situation.

Surviving Raccoon City together creates a bond very fast. Leon begins relying on Reader’s opinions and instincts during decisions. If he’s scared or overwhelmed, Reader is one of the few people he admits it to.

During brief safe moments (like hiding in a room at the RPD station), they talk softly to pass time. Leon asks about Reader’s life before everything happened. He listens very carefully, like hearing about normal life reminds him what he’s fighting for.

Leon gives Reader his spare jacket or gloves if they’re cold. He always walks slightly behind or beside them, watching the hallway for danger. If Reader gets injured, he gets extremely serious and focused until they’re safe.

At first Leon thinks he just wants to protect Reader because it’s “his job.” Eventually he realizes he worries about them in a way that feels, different. After the nightmare ends, he would probably be shy about admitting those feelings.

Leon would check in constantly to make sure Reader is okay mentally and physically. He might suggest simple things like getting food together or walking somewhere quiet. Even after everything they survived, he still acts like a slightly nervous rookie around them.

(no hate to people who do this i just crave plot)