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Chris has always been a light sleeper, and he knows this. So when he feels a shift in the weight on the bed, the loss of Leon’s body heat, and hears the quick pitter-patter of footsteps, he wakes. His eyes open and he looks around, sees the bedroom door open, sees light spilling out into the hallway from the bathroom. The fan in the bathroom sounds like the loudest thing in the dead of night, and he rises, slowly, carefully.Leon always told him his stealth was shit, and Chris knows that, recognizes it, when the bathroom door shuts before he can even turn the corner to see what’s wrong.
He also knows Leon’s anxiety attacks, how they work, how sometimes he can’t handle the added sensation of someone else’s touch in addition to the heightened emotions. He understands from the barrier put up between them that Leon doesn’t seem like welcoming his touch just yet tonight. So Chris sighs and leans his back against the door. He knows that he can hear the door settling against his weight, knows that Leon will know that as a sign that he’s here and always will be. He doesn’t say anything, knows that Leon wouldn’t be able to process anything he says well enough in this state.
Chris knows a lot about nights like this.
So he, too, takes deep breaths like he would instruct Leon if he were face-to-face with him. No point in helping the panicking if he, too, was in the same state.
Silence seems to flood the halls of their home, until it drains away once Chris hears the sound of something clattering to the floor. Something sharp, tinny, the sound is higher-pitched in his ears. It’s not like the dull, hollow sound of a bottle of lotion or the sound of a plastic cup, it’s not like the sound of toothbrushes or toothpaste. No, it sounds more like metal.
Chris suddenly needs this door to open, and open now. He rises to his feet-- he didn’t realize he’d come to sit on the floor, now that he thinks about it-- and gently places one hand on the door.
“Leon?” He says his lover’s name gently, and then repeats it again-- “Leon?” -- with a little more urgency. He dares to knock, just in case Leon didn’t hear him speak, but isn’t met with much more than the muffled sound of the bathroom fan running.
“Leon, I’m going to open this door, okay? I’m letting you know now that I am going to open this door, and I’m going to check on you.” Patience is key with Leon’s anxiety attacks, and Chris knows that if it were anyone else he would have torn his own hair out at this point out of sheer frustration. But with Leon, he has learned, and he knows, and frustration is not welcome.
So Chris places his hand on the doorknob. He turns it, but doesn’t push it open. Not yet.
Chris knows about Leon’s past with self-harm.
The night that they’d made love the first time, Chris had asked. After all, the scars on his upper arms and his thighs were too straight, too orderly, some too wide to have ever been gained in something like a fight. They were nothing like the scars Chris had to match from long years of fighting B.O.W.s, so Chris had asked.
“Bad habit,” Leon muttered, a half-hearted attempt at confronting something so personal callously so as to try and make peace with the emotions trying not to show on his face. Chris rubbed his hand over Leon’s hip, earning him a slight shiver, and he shifted a little closer to him.
“You don’t have to tell me, Leon. Believe me, I know the feeling.” Chris replied. Sometimes some scars held too much of a story, too heavy a weight to lift off one’s chest. He still retained some scars left over from that damned mansion in the Arklay mountains, from the beginning, from literal fucking decades ago that have faded nearly into nothing, but even if Chris closed his eyes he could still pinpoint the location of each and every one.
“... Honestly, I don’t even know why I started.” A dull chuckle left Leon’s lips. He dipped his head, hair shielding his eyes from Chris. “All I know is that I was hurting. I think I wanted to make sense of it, somehow.”
“Make sense of it?”
“You know, like… when you’re... angry, you just want to punch or shoot something?”
Chris nodded. Understanding dawned on him. “... You needed an outlet.”
“It’s an unhealthy one.” The fact that it sounded like Leon was still dealing with this made Chris’s heart honest to god ache for his lover.
“... When did it start?” He asked. Hopefully it wasn’t too invasive a question.
“You know that mission I did, in 2002, after South America?”
Chris knew this story. About Operation Javier, the mission Leon had gone on with Jack Krauser, who would ultimately come to betray him years later in Spain. Leon had talked about the flashbacks he’d had to Raccoon City during that op, fighting off hordes of zombies with nothing more than one partner at his side and seeing new horrors as he crawled through sewers in a weird industrial area of South America. He nodded again.
Leon took a deep breath. Chris held his. Though he seemed on the verge of speaking again, Leon really didn’t have to say much more for Chris to understand-- he’d had flashbacks to Raccoon and probably couldn’t deal with them emotionally until after the operation was over. Until he was alone with himself and was able to try and tide over the turmoil, the whirlwind of emotion, in the only way that made sense to him at the time.
“It’s okay,” Chris offered softly. “It’s okay. I promise.” He wrapped his arms around Leon and gently brought him into his chest. Leon didn’t cry, but he could feel in the way Leon took another deep but trembling breath, the way his hands curled around his shoulders, that Leon definitely wanted to.
If he could.
It’s been a long time since Leon has ever relapsed into this sort of thing. Long enough that Chris has never been privy to one. If it were a flask or a bottle of whiskey before him, he’d know what to do. All he’s known about Leon’s past with self-harm is the ghosts that mar his skin, of nights painful enough to go past a bottle and straight to a blade. So Chris has no idea how to react when he opens the door and sees blood on the floor, near pooled on the pure white tile and Leon’s arms and thighs stained with crimson, his fingers shaking, the blade stolen from a boxcutter glinting in the overhead fluorescent lights of the bathroom and looking innocently at him.
His first, immediate thought is panic , because Leon is bleeding. Wounds are scattered across his left thigh and wrist and Leon is crying , blood has smeared itself across trembling hands and pale skin and Chris’s heart aches more than it did when he’d first listened to Leon open up about this. Each sob wracks through Leon’s already unsteady limbs. He looks small, fragile, unsteady. There has only been a handful of times Chris has seen Leon in such moments of weakness, but not even enough to count fully on one hand. So Chris kneels before Leon, tries to tear his eyes away from the blood now staining the tile, and takes a deep breath as he outstretches his hand.
“Leon.” He says his name quietly. When Leon doesn’t respond Chris repeats his name again, making him look up. Leon’s eyes are swollen red with tears, face flushed and hair a mess. When Leon sees him his face twists into agony, like he’s ashamed Chris is seeing him like this. He looks between the hand outstretched before him and Chris’s eyes.
“C-Chris…”
Everything in Chris’s body is screaming at him to run, to get the first aid kit and the antiseptic and hydrogen peroxide and immediately get to work, but he doesn’t know if Leon would like to be alone. He doesn’t want to entertain the thought of Leon immediately reaching for the blade again as soon as he gets up, so he speaks. “Do… Do you want me to stay, or... can I run and go and get the first aid kit from the kitchen?”
“Just-- g-give me a second. Please. With you. I don’t… I don’t think that I...” The next words are unspoken, but Chris has a feeling Leon probably thinks of what Chris thinks he’d do next if Chris left his side.
Chris nods his head, and then he reaches his hand out a bit more. “Can I touch you?”
This time Leon nods, and Chris takes Leon’s right hand, feeling the dry blood on his palm, and reaches up to kiss him on the forehead.
Patience is key with Leon’s anxiety attacks, as well as his relapses.
Whether it’s hours, minutes, or seconds, Chris doesn’t know, but Leon starts to regain some sort of control over himself. His breathing calms, his hands are no longer as shaky, and Chris finally feels like he can breathe a little more comfortably. Leon has pressed his other hand to his wrist, but Chris is still worried about the cuts on his thigh. He looks at Leon, looks him in the eye, and is glad Leon can meet him.
“I’m going to take the blade, okay?”
Chris gingerly picks up the blade in between his fingers and as he looks down at it he wants to snap it in half, damn it for ever tempting Leon to do this to himself after years of being clean. But he wraps it in some toilet paper and tosses it in the garbage. He’ll talk to Leon later about whether or not he can face blades in the next few hours or even days, right now comes treatment.
When Chris settles once again before Leon, he takes his right hand once more, runs the pad of his thumb across Leon’s knuckles. A small gesture of comfort, of reprieve. One that Leon, though merely insignificant, loves as reassurance during the rare missions or operations they embark on together, or even just a mindless gesture while they’re doing something as simple as watching a movie or laying in bed, waiting for sleep to take them both. He offers a smile that Leon returns.
“Can I go and get the first aid kit, or do you still need more time?” Chris asks, and Leon nods.
“I think--” Leon takes a deep breath-- “I’ll be okay.”
“I’ll only be a couple of seconds, promise.” And Chris plants one more soft kiss to Leon’s forehead before he stands.
The bed is warm again.
Chris gently cards his fingers through Leon’s hair and Leon takes a deep breath.
“Gonna ask me to talk about it?” Leon asks dully. Chris is sure he knows by now he would have asked the question.
“Not unless you want to.” Chances are Leon is the same as he always is, and Chris doesn’t really need to tiptoe around this like he’s doing so. But for Chris, this is new. He’s never seen or helped Leon through a relapse like this.
“It’s the same old shit, really. Dunno why I decided to do this on impulse instead.”
Leon sounds like he’s blaming himself, which Chris just about hates. Because it’s not Leon’s fault, never has been that he was thrown into this. He’d just come into it a rookie cop who’d survived Raccoon City, whose luck somehow overcame all odds that one fateful night, and it had landed him into a war against greedy corporations and the monsters they made, and awful brilliant people who wanted a taste of what it was like to play god with no care for the lives lost in the process.
“It’s not your fault.” Chris murmurs as he presses a kiss to Leon’s temple.
“I feel like all the people I could have saved are screaming at me beyond the grave telling me otherwise.”
Chris knows what he’s talking about.
Raccoon City to begin with, one of the biggest losses in his life-- Leon has said before that maybe if he’d come the day he was supposed to, he could have helped fight, helped keep people safe, like he was supposed to. That same feeling extended to Tall Oaks, where Chris knew Leon was still living with the grief and the guilt that had come with shooting the infected President, and Lanshiang-- even though Leon couldn’t do much about the latter two as much as he could with Raccoon, since he had no real idea what the hell was going on and he was just one man with another solitary partner, there was no possible way he could have known that the Chief Security Advisor Simmons of all people was behind everything and that--
“It’s not your fault.” Chris repeated again, a little more stronger this time. “God, Leon, none of these things have ever and never will be your fault.”
Leon is quiet. Chris holds him a little tighter. Tonight must have been a worse night than others, the nightmare must have been more agonizing than usual to have prompted Leon into breaking apart the way he did. So he holds him, tight, with one arm around Leon’s torso and the other pressing his head into his chest because it’s like Chris can feel every single piece of him and even though he knows it can’t be fixed all magically like that, he still feels like maybe if he holds him tight enough then maybe he can help stitch Leon back together.
And maybe it works.
“I’m… just so tired, Chris.”
Leon’s voice is weak, wavering, and it makes the usually unseen admittance hit all the much harder. Chris feels like crying for him, even.
“It’s okay. Everything’s okay, Leon. It’s not your fault, and I get it, I really fucking get it, but you’re just one man with the weight of the world on your shoulders--” The words are interrupted by a sharp inhale, maybe Chris will dare to cry for him-- “and-- and all we can do is mourn them and look for a way to protect what’s left tomorrow. It feels like every death is on you, but I promise, it’s not. None of us can help it.”
Leon takes in a shaky breath. “It hurts, it fucking hurts , goddammit--”
“I know, I know it hurts, Leon, but I swear to you that it’s not your fucking fault. We owe it to the people we lose to fight to protect the people we have now.” If Chris thought he was holding Leon tight, then he’s definitely holding him much tighter now that once more sobs between both of them are once more starting to resurface. “You’re a-- you’re a good man, Leon Kennedy, and I love you with everything I fucking have. Don’t you dare try taking the blame for shit that isn’t your fault.”
At a particularly painful-sounding sob, Chris presses another kiss to Leon’s temple. He can feel his chest tighten, too, so he’s pretty sure he’s also crying.
It’s like time stands still as they stay here, baring open wounds and crying to make up for all the times they wanted to but couldn’t. The moon watches them both as they pour the pent-up anguish into the darkness of the night, and once both men have cried until there’s nothing left to cry, silence falls over them both once more, like a blanket. They lay there, basking in the comfort of the other’s warmth, taking deep breaths to once more come back down to the earth they both swore to save.
“It’s okay.” The words don’t even sound like words to Chris at this point, he’s muttered them so much over these past few minutes that they sound and feel foreign coming out of his mouth.
Tomorrow once more they’ll go into work and fight like always in a war that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. A war that has caused so many lives to be lost, for so many lives to be sacrificed, for so many lives to be ruined.
But right now all Chris knows, in the quiet of the late night, in this very moment, that things are okay. He rubs circles into Leon’s back as his body comes to a still, as his breathing evens out, as he falls asleep.
He presses one more gentle kiss to his forehead as exhaustion washes over him. Tomorrow is another day, but right now, things are okay.
Chris falls asleep, tired, but content in the embrace of his lover. And right now, that is what matters.