Leon’s right at your back, one step behind, his voice no louder than the squeaky stairs but grating like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Because the mission wasn’t fraught enough already.

“Generally a good idea to shut up under the circumstances,” you hiss back.

“Good thing you practiced, then.”

“Leon–“

He cuts you off with a hand on your shoulder, pausing you in front of the rooftop access door. Lightning flashes again, filtering through the great white face of the clock dial behind you, illuminating the steel edge of Leon’s gaze.

“If this is gonna work, I need you to talk to me.”

“I do.” Vetoed attempt to push through the door.

“Not chat. Talk.”

You’re not looking at him, your jaw tight.

“Can we pick this up later?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Okay, so you've been avoidant. He couldn’t have done this in fucking transit?

“Are you not challenged enough by this mission? Are you bored, lashing out in class?”

“I know about the copy of the lab results,” he says. Panic flashes through you like the sparking thunderclouds overhead.

Fuck.

His gaze is intense on the side of your face. “Tell me why.”

“Why what.”

“Why the cloak and dagger,” he says. “I would have shown you if you asked. You didn’t.”

It might be easier if he was mad at you. It sounds like he is, but you know him better than that.

He’s worried.

“It’s not personal,” you tell him. “I just… needed….”

Distant thunder fills your silence. Leon’s eyes narrow, working to translate what you’re not saying.

“What are you hiding?”

With a frustrated grunt, you jerk out of his grasp and shove through the access door.

You’re not fucking doing this here.

The rain is louder out here in the open, pinging off the metal scaffolding, gurgling through the gutters, a constant faded hiss in the distance. Thunder tumbles clumsily from the sky, rolling and rattling across the ground, shuddering up the clock tower. The nearby scaffold framework rattles lightly.

You keep moving, pace steady and cautious, the soles of your shoes parting shallow puddles on the platforms.

Movement, above and below you. Claws tapping, slow. Chattering breathing, almost lost under the beat of the rain.

You stop, listening hard, triangulating locations. Just behind you, Leon’s doing the same thing.

You lean back against his shoulder to speak closer to his ear.

“We should split up,” you whisper.

“We’re not even official.”

Your temper spikes.

His back hits the wet wall of the clock tower when you shove him.

“Do you plan on joining the fucking mission at some point?”

Lightning illuminates the knot between his eyebrows. Now he’s angry.

“You seem happy to go it alone,” he bites back.

“Of all fucking times, Leon–”

His eyes refocus over your shoulder and he pushes you down, hatchet flashing to parry where your head had been, flashing again to sever the licker’s long tongue. It hits the wet scaffolding with a spray of bright crimson and slithers off the side as you surge up, cramming the barrel of your gun under the licker’s chin.

BANG

The muzzle flash burns its flesh, the bullet blows its brain cap clean off. It gums the platform above and showers down in viscid clumps.

And that's your location compromised.

“We gotta move! Come on!”

Duh, you’re already moving. His hand goes for your back to push you forward, but it’s just a graze of fingertips before you’re out of reach, running.

The rain’s not making it easy. You swing around the corner, hydroplaning, and catch Leon before he runs past.

“I’ll go high, you go low,” you say breathlessly, jerking your chin towards the set of ladders that drew you up short. He grabs your wrist before you can break away.

“No, I’m right behind you.”

“Don’t be difficult.”

“Seriously? Pot or kettle?”

The licker comes out of nowhere, leaping for the sounds of your bickering. A backhanded sweep of its sinewy arm sends you both tumbling.

You’re lighter; you tumble further.

Your gun, the lightest of all, goes sailing down into the rainy night.

"Fuck," you manage, choked off.

Your body is swinging off the edge of the level, hanging by your armpits. You try to kip up and catch your knee on the scaffolding, but the kipping motion slides you further off the wet platform. Fine; you’ll just drop onto the level below and run before the licker can–

Leon catches your arms and starts to haul you up.

“No, let go! It’s f–“

Fine, is what you’re saying. Which it turns out that it’s not, because you’d fucking shouted.

The pain is so sudden, so extreme, you don’t even scream. You can’t.

You just drop.

The last thing you hear is Leon’s voice screaming your name, before your body hits the scaffolding below and everything cuts to black.

They’ll confirm later, it was the licker below. You’ll only see the wound after it’s sewn closed, a jagged diagonal strike like a red ceremonial sash across your torso. It's gonna be one hell of a scar, but all things considered, you were lucky.

They’ll tell you later about how they found you. How Leon was carrying your limp body, how his clothes were saturated with your blood, how he hadn’t even noticed the violent gash down his own face, bleeding into his eye.

How there were lickers back on the tower that were next to torn apart.

They’ll tell you, that’s when everyone knew. There had been speculation after the venom case, after Leon’s reassessment, of course there was. The two of you are thick as thieves and people love to talk.

This… spilled the beans.

They’d never seen Leon snap like that before.

Of course, you won’t hear any of this for days, yet.

You have to wake up first.

“When do you have to go in?”

The morning light is just a murky lavender, distilled by the living room blinds.

“They didn’t give me a timeline,” Leon murmurs, his lips against the soft, warm skin over your heart. He kisses lower, unhurried, leaving small wet marks like a placket of glass buttons down your front.

You catch his head. He's undeterred.

“Should you find out?”

“It’s not high on my to-do list.”

“Leon. I just want to make sure you’re in the clear.”

“I'm fine,” he promises the skin below your navel. He runs his hands down your legs, gently encouraging you to lift them, draping them over his shoulders.

The first touch of his mouth, his tongue, to your naked cunt has your soul ascending on a hot column of breath.

“Oh my god.”

He hums. You thread your fingers into his hair, your legs spilling wider as he wriggles his shoulders under your thighs, settling in.

He takes his time exploring you, watching the rise and ebb of your body as you writhe, the hill and then hollow of your stomach, the furrows and rising cliffs of your ribs as your lungs fill, empty, hitch.

Every motion of his lips, every move of his tongue, every application of suction is a call and response, reading you. He picks you apart, thread by thread, until you’re unmoored, tethered only by his hands on your body, and then shake apart beneath him, your thighs clamping around his head, your hand pulling his hair.

“Two-three,” he tells you, gently biting the inside of your thigh. Your body’s still twitching with aftershocks.

“New day,” you manage, breathless. “One-zero."

“Mm. Out ahead, huh?”

”I know where you can put in a head.”

He crawls up over you, grinning against your mouth.

“That was terrible.”

You're grinning back, then meeting his tongue, tasting yourself as he kisses you deep. You trail your fingers up his thigh, searching blind. It's not a difficult search.

You stroke him to full mast, his hips eager to help, and then guide the head of his cock where you want it.

The morning light is thick and golden, tracing his naked silhouette in a blazing halo as he pushes into you, inch by careful, rocking inch. You close the final gap with a hungry shove, pressing flush against him, feeling his dick throb inside your tight heat.

He rolls your pliant body in fervent waves, a low and tame motion building inexorably into great peaking crests, crashing into you until you bubble over and dissolve again like foam on the sand.

“Two-zero,” you gasp when you’re back down on earth, and knock him onto his back.

Your skin burns gold, gilded by the rising sunlight as you use your hand at the glossy head of his cock, your wet pussy grinding on the base of his shaft, until he throws his head back and comes, hard, managing to hit the underside of his chin.

Your mistake was in ever leaving the bubble of that night, that morning, where everything between you flowed seamlessly, where it all boiled down to weight-heat-skin and the thrumming electricity of your bodies joined, connected, a circuit closed.

The real world, time, consequences. They’re all waiting for you outside, with brass knuckles.

There’s a cat curled on your lap.

You’re in bed; warm, numb, floating. Drifting below the surface, comfortable in inky blackness. In nothingness.

You could stay like this forever.

But — the cat. The weight of it is creating a sinkhole in your calm waters, a growing eddie that’s sucking your focus towards it. Persistent.

The weight moves. It lifts, heat bleeding away, and then resettles in the same place, a slightly different shape.

You hear a long exhale through a human nose. It’s… deeply familiar.

Your forehead creases.

You open your eyes. It’s slow, like you’re remembering how. Like your eyelids are too heavy.

Everything’s blurry, just a smeared palette of colors all blended together. Nonsense input.

You close it out again and drift in the nothingness.

You could live here, where nothing matters.

But — the breathing. Steady, gentle, caressing a shore, pulling back within. So familiar. Tugging at you, a riptide, drawing you outside of yourself.

The smeared colors aren’t as blended together this time, not as blurry. They’re coalescing into shapes the more you look at them.

You concentrate.

The black of a flatscreen TV, dark, mounted to a soft green wall, shadowed.

The rectangled grid of a drop ceiling.

The white plastic curve of a footboard. Gentle hills and valleys under thin blankets; your feet and legs.

A dark lump, hunched over, with tawny brown hair.

It’s not a cat on your lap.

It’s Leon’s head.

He’s asleep, his chair pulled right up to the side of the bed, his head pillowed on your thighs. Turned towards you.

Horribly, it takes you a second to recognize him.

There’s a thick, dark slash running down his face, laced up with little black stitches. The skin around his eye is bruised, purple mottling into green as it heals, and his scruff is overgrown.

He looks like hell.

Your arm, resting at your side, is trapped under his shoulder. He’s got his hand above the bend of your elbow; a seismometer waiting for a tremor.

You raise your free hand, IV line dragging against your hip, and weakly brush the hair away from his eyes.

Leon wakes with a start.

With a flurry of motion, your lap goes cold. Because he’s holding you.

He’s careful of your heavily bandaged midsection, cradling your head to his chest, his heart thumping against your ear.

He presses a kiss tight to your crown.

“Fuck,” he says alongside your name, his voice ragged.

You can feel him trembling; it’s subtle. You put your arm around him, burying your face against his shoulder, just breathing him in. He’s a little sour, like he’s been wearing the same shirt for a while.

You don’t care.

“How long have you been here?” Your voice is chalky, hardly more than a whisper.

“Three days.”

“Straight?”

“You’re one to talk.”

“No, like they let you stay? What about visiting hours?”

He steps back to look at you, and fuck, there it is.

He knows.

“I told them I was the father of the baby,” he confirms for you, quiet. “Guess the joke's on me, huh."

You sag back against the pillows. This is what you get for playing avoidance, for fucking dragging your feet.

He had to find out like this.

"The lab report,” he says, not a question. Piecing the picture together out loud.

"Researching the likelihood of birthing a demonic watermelon.”

You’re casting around for something to drink. Leon leans over; there’s a cup with a straw on the bedside table, waiting. A silent hope.

Christ. Three days.

He hands it to you.

“My sperm wasn’t altered,” he’s saying. “Nothing foreign.”

“I know. Now.” The water’s lukewarm, but it feels fresh against your starchy throat.

"What happened to the pill?”

“I’m still on it,” you tell him. “So that’s the other thing.”

You share an extended, weighted look.

He drops heavily into his chair. The legs give a short toot against the linoleum floor.

"Well, fuck," he sums up. You couldn’t have put it better yourself.

"I was gonna have labs run an assessment on me, on this," you say, waving vaguely towards your stomach. "I just… hadn't worked up the nerve."

"You know it’s not a watermelon.”

"No," you agree. "It's us. So I thought, before I went to – essentially – our coworkers, I'd better tell you."

“So you were gonna tell me.”

You throw him a look. “I was almost there.”

“One hell of a pregnant pause.”

You roll your eyes shut, pained.

“Leon…”

You're not annoyed. You’ve actually maybe never been so relieved. Jokes are your baseline. He's just shown you the terrain between you and it turns out, there aren't that many rocks.

You take in a deep breath, released from the tight bands of panic.

“Listen, I’m sorry I shut you out. I just…"

You don't need to find the words. He's nodding, running his hand over his mouth. His overgrown scruff sounds like sandpaper against his dry palm.

“I know.”

He does know; he does it, too. It’s a stupid branch of the goddamn protective instinct — in times of personal crisis, push everyone to surface, don’t let anyone near your spiraling deep.

Don’t let them see that you’re drowning.

It’s not a self-preserving instinct.

"Infuriating, isn't it."

He snorts, half-rolling his eyes.

"How many fingers am I holding up."

He’s flipping you off.

You raise him your own, then hold it out. Reaching.

He links your middle fingers together like a pinky promise, and doesn’t let go.

"You do look like shit this time," you tell him.

"Long couple of days,” he understates. Exhaustion’s sitting heavy on his shoulders.

You grasp his wrist, tugging lightly.

"Come here."

He doesn’t fight it, crawling up onto the bed with you, over you, leaning his forehead against yours. You touch his bristly face, run your thumb parallel to the line of black stitches on his cheek. The scabbing is gummy, thick and raised. It’s also going to be one hell of a scar.

He’s watching your eyes.

"Mine's bigger," you whisper.

His forehead bunches, and then he’s kissing you.

"Don't," he says. “Don’t. Not about this.”

His voice is wrong. Cracking. You pull his head back to look at him, incredulous.

“You are not blaming yourself.”

“You had yourself handled. If I had just let you drop–“

You press your fingers over his lips.

“You had me. If I had just let you pull me up,” you counter. “This is not your fault, so don’t you dare.”

He shuts his eyes, his forehead against yours again. Like he’s too tired to hold it up himself.

You close your eyes too. Just breathing with him.

His weight shifts, one hand coming to rest over your low stomach.

“That is your fault,” you murmur.

“Yeah,” he says. “A little fighter, huh.”

“No kidding.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Mm. We’re not having a DSO baby. We don’t need to blaze that trail.”

“There’s always retirement.”

The air sucks out of the room.

You push him back by the shoulder. He meets your eyes, completely level.

"You’re not serious.”

"We're comfortable. We could do it."

“Leon, that’s…”

It opens in your mind's eye; a rose-tinted aperture, a glowing window into a future.

Leon's strong arms, holding someone tiny. Yours. His.

A perfect hand in miniature, reaching up, touched by his lips.

No weapons weighing him down. The only monsters the ones under the bed. The only biohazards trapped inside a diaper genie.

In the harsh fluorescents of the real world, Leon’s lips brush light between your eyebrows. You’re clutching his shirt.

“Yeah. You're seeing it.”

It’s beautiful, achingly so. But it’s a fantasy.

You don’t even know each other together, yet. For shit’s sake, you only just admitted that you loved each other three weeks ago, and it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing since then.

Mostly your fault.

“Kind of a crazy speed run.”

“And we’re the prime example of sanity.”

He’s got you there.

“Could you really walk away, when you know it's not over?”

He studies you, quiet. Then,

“Could you?”

You look between his eyes. You can see yourself reflected in them, a dark silhouette against white hospital sheets.

How many years of your lives have you already dedicated, how much have you already sacrificed? Why should you give this job your forever, when all it seems to promise you is a forever cut short?

One foot wrong. That’s all it takes.

Impossible workplace standards, really.

“Someday I get to be selfish.”

“Someday?”

“Yeah. Preferably before I topple apart.”

“Well, I’m right beside you when you are,” he says, his breath ghosting over your lips. You catch his face.

“Don’t put that on me.”

“Then stay on my nine and be ready.”

The shadow of a smile plays on your face, wry.

“You won’t.”

He looks up suddenly, turning his face out of your grasp.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“The call of the bingo hall.”

Your breath gusts out through your nose, your face collapsing into a grudging grin. You press it into his neck.

“You’re an idiot.”

You feel his laugh more than you hear it, a vibration against your skin. He nuzzles your face out from the crook of his neck, brushing your lips together.

“Someday,” he whispers.

It’s not a commitment. It’s not a date to circle on the calendar and a countdown to start.

But it’s an intention, a pledge dropped past the ramparts of your teeth, burned onto your tongue with the heat of his own.

Someday.

Together.

Aaand then a nurse walks in and shouts Leon down like a muddy dog on the furniture

On AO3

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you'd like to be added to the taglist when I post these fics 🧡

Thanks again to anon for the prompt!