#leonskennedy

Today wasn't normal. There wasn’t a version of today that could’ve been.

This round had meant something different than the usual kind of danger. No active threat. No countdown. No one’s life bleeding out in real time.

Just the truth. What actually happened. Seven years of a story you’d only ever been handed one side of—and now the other half, finally, laid out in front of you.

And all it had done was make you angrier.

The DSO had sent Leon into an active outbreak while the infection was already eating through him. While he was dying. That single fact kept returning, kept circling the same groove in your mind, kept cutting deeper every time it came back around—because no amount of rational thought seemed capable of sitting still beside it.

Every explanation you tried to build fell apart before it finished forming. Every scenario you turned over ended in the same place.

Around and around until—

A knock at your door.

Your body stills.

Not V’s. She had a rhythm to hers—three short, the middle one slightly heavier. You’d learned to recognize it the same way you’d learned to recognize her silences: involuntarily, and completely.

Not Leon’s either. He would’ve texted. Or not knocked at all.

You didn’t answer.

Something held you back from the reflex—that practiced, automatic *come in* that usually lived right behind your teeth. Instead you sat there, listening, and the silence that followed felt textured somehow. Not empty. The kind of quiet that had something behind it.

“What the fuck.” You breathed it more than said it, pushing up from your desk.

The shades were already down—you’d pulled them at some point during the afternoon, not entirely consciously, just needing the cut-off from whatever was happening beyond your office walls. Small mercies.

Then you saw it.

A piece of paper, folded neatly, resting on the floor just inside your door.

You didn’t move toward it immediately. That instinct—the one that got wired in during Raccoon City and never fully unwired—had already kicked in. You stood where you were and you listened first. Two minutes, maybe more. Tracking the ambient sounds of the building: the low hum of the HVAC, distant footsteps going the other direction, the particular silence of a hallway that had recently been vacated.

Nothing that shouldn’t be there.

Your feet carried you forward before you’d fully decided to move.

The paper was folded with a precision that felt deliberate—not someone in a hurry, not something dashed off. You crouched and picked it up, turned it over. Nothing on the outside. You unfolded it.

The more you know, the more danger you’re in. The longer he stays with you, the worse it’ll become.

-----

The handwriting was unfamiliar. More than that—it was off. Too controlled, almost architectural, like someone who’d learned a particular version of neatness and applied it with a kind of mechanical care. Not a person in a hurry. Not someone panicking.

Someone who’d wanted it to look like a warning.

Your analytical brain had already taken over before the rest of you caught up—because that was the job, and the job didn’t pause for your personal situation.

Warning or threat. The distinction mattered. Warnings came from people who wanted you to act. Threats came from people who wanted you afraid.

The setup felt like both.

Your body has its own opinion. Stomach tight. Chest heavier than it should be. That specific weight behind your sternum that you’d learned, years ago, to stop calling fear and start calling information.

Slowly, carefully, you moved back to your desk. Cleaned up. Filed what needed to be filed, tucked the note into your bag with the rest of the work you were pretending you’d get to later. You didn’t rush. Moving faster meant panic, and panic was a liability—that was something Leon had pressed into you long before you understood why it mattered.

Don’t panic. Move.

You moved.

The pressure in your body stayed constant as you gathered yourself, ticking along beneath everything like a second heartbeat. You grabbed your coat from the hook by the door. Paused. Checked the handle. Then you stepped out, pulled the door shut quietly behind you, and let your ears do the work your eyes couldn’t.

The building was mostly quiet at this hour—night staff only, the people who handled calls and dispatched teams when cases couldn’t wait for morning. People you knew. People you had no reason to suspect.

And yet.

Your heels marked time against the floor as you moved through the hall, and every blind corner got its moment—a pause, a check, the same instinct that had kept you breathing in a city that tried to swallow everyone who stepped into it. Raccoon City didn’t leave you. It just got quieter. It settled into the body and waited.

Tonight, it was wide awake.

-----

The cool air hit your face when you pushed through the door to the outside, and for half a second it almost worked—almost pulled you back into something resembling the present. Your trench coat caught the breeze, heels ringing against concrete now instead of tile.

You had always hated parking garages.

There was something about them that never resolved into comfort. The city sound bounced wrong off the walls—distorted, close, impossible to locate accurately. You could hear everything and nothing at once, and that was the problem.

You heard it when you were about fifteen paces in.

Footsteps.

Not loud. Not dramatic. Just—present, where they hadn’t been a moment before, matching your rhythm close enough to be intentional and stopping just a half-beat after you did. Like someone who’d almost gotten the timing right.

Your hand was in your pocket before you’d consciously decided to put it there. Cold metal under your fingers. The knife. Another reflex Raccoon City had built into you and never asked permission to keep.

You didn’t stop moving.

Your car was roughly two hundred feet ahead—tucked into the corner, where you always left it. You kept your pace measured, resisting the pull to run, and the footsteps behind you came back immediately. Heavier than yours. Rougher. Deliberate in a way that had nothing to do with coincidence.

The more danger you’re in. The worse it’ll get.

You had your phone out before you’d finished the thought, pulling up the last contact—still unnamed, still just a number you’d been stubborn about saving.

You hit call.

It rang twice,

“There’s someone following me.”

You didn’t give him a greeting. There wasn’t room for one.

The pause on the other end lasted less than a second.

“Where are you.”

Not a question. You’d know that tone anywhere—the one that meant his brain had already started running the problem and his mouth was just catching up.

“Parking garage at work. The footsteps are heavy. I can’t place them.”

You heard a door slam through the phone. Then the ambient sound of outside air. He was already moving.

“Leon—”

“Get in your car. Don’t move until I’m there.”* A beat. *“There’s a pistol in your glove box. One round.”

Your head turned—instinct, not decision—and that was when you caught it.

A silhouette, half-dissolved in the LED wash of the garage. Someone large, broad, determined in each step. Moving with the particular kind of intention that didn’t second-guess itself.

“Oh, what the fuck–!” The words slipped out of you in a hushed yell of fear.

You heard your name through the phone. His voice, tight in a way it almost never was.

The door of your car unlocking registered distantly, some part of you having already made the decision while the rest of you was still processing. You got in. Locked it. Reached for the glove box without questioning why there was a loaded weapon in there or when he’d put it there, because now wasn’t the time.

The phone went dead in your hand.

“Fuck”

Your car lurched.

Two sharp reports—pop, pop—and the vehicle dropped on one side and then the other. Tires. Both of them.

The blacked-out windows were the only thing working in your favor right now. You pressed back against the seat, pistol raised, watching the shadow resolve and shift beyond the glass—heavy gear, a stride that was going somewhere specific. Still no face. Not enough light.

Then headlights swept in hard from the corner—a large SUV, cutting fast across your line of sight—and gunfire erupted before your brain had fully processed anything in front of you. 

You went low, wedging yourself down between the seat and the dash, the sound of it swallowing the space around you completely.

When you came back up—sliding out the driver’s side, staying behind the car’s body—the silhouette was gone. Leapt over the barrier wall, you realized, tracking the direction. Disappeared into whatever was below.

Then you caught Leon, hanging over the ledge. Sweeping the ground. Then the structure. Then moving back toward his car with something in his gait that was not his usual controlled pace.

“(Y/N)?”

“Over here.” Your voice came out steadier than it had any right to. You stood, moved around the car door, found him on the other side with his eyes already on you—scanning you the way he did when he was confirming damage before he allowed himself to feel anything about it.

He didn’t say anything.

He pulled you in.

Not carefully—with the particular urgency of someone who needed to feel the proof of you before anything else could happen. His arms closed and then tightened, that last fraction of pressure that didn’t ask permission.

You felt him exhale into your shoulder. Hard. Like he’d been holding it since the phone cut out.

“I thought I lost you.” Low. Rough. Almost not there at all—the way things sounded when they escaped before he could catch them.

“No—” Your throat was doing something complicated. “I’m here. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t.” He pulled back, enough to look at you. Something crossed his face—a flicker of something that didn’t normally surface. You’d learned, over years, to read the smaller register he operated in. The one other people missed. “I’m sorry.”

You watched his eyes.

They were different.

Not different the way stress changed someone, not the flat exhaustion he’d been carrying since Requiem—the antiviral, the months after. This was something else. Something that had gotten past the wall for just a second.

“Your eyes,” you said, quiet. “That’s not just—”

“Don’t.” His voice came back harder on that word—not unkind, but final. The same tone he used to shut down lines of inquiry in the field. Something pressing down on something else. A lid, doing its job. “Don’t start that.”

You let it go.

You looked at your car—two flat tires, sitting wrong on the concrete, looking exhausted in its own way.

“Well.” A short, breathless sound escaped you that was almost a laugh. “There goes getting home on my own terms.”

“Don’t worry about the car.” His hands found your waist—just briefly, just enough to remind you both that you were standing upright. “I’ll handle it. Right now I’m getting you home.”

“Leon.” You watched his face as he reached for the door. “Who was that?”

He exhaled through his nose. Slow. The kind of exhale that bought time. “Didn’t get a clear look.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’ve got.” He held the door open. “Get in. I’ll handle it.”

Your mouth opened.

Closed.

His hand gestured—a short, patient motion—and you found yourself hoisting into the passenger seat before you’d fully decided to do it, bag going to the floor, jaw set, eyes on him as he rounded the front.

The engine started.

The note was still in your bag.

The footsteps were still ringing off the walls in your memory.

And somewhere in the space behind your sternum, where the anger had been running its circles all afternoon, something new had settled in alongside it—something colder, something that didn’t have a name yet but was starting to take shape.

The more you know

The longer he stays

The worse it’ll become