Chapter Text
You met him on a Sunday night in 1999, when Claire invited you over because she said, shaking her head in the way you knew meant she felt horribly sad for you and your lonely government agent existence, “Leon, it’s Christmas. At least think about coming by.” You told her you’d be fine on your own, you’d celebrated on your own plenty of times before, but something about the sad look in her eye made you reconsider, and so you took a bottle of sparkling cider (on account of Sherry) and came to her apartment.
He was handsome then. You knew his name well enough when Claire introduced the two of you, because you’d read his memo in the STARS office and you’d e-mailed him when Claire had gone missing, but those points of contact didn’t prepare you for the dimpled smile, the warmth of his eyes, the strong grip of his hand. You always fell in love too easily, and this was no exception.
You didn’t kiss him then. You didn’t kiss him through the whole week, though you were tempted to, though you wanted to, though you wondered how his lips would feel pressed to yours. But you weren’t sure if he’d want that from you, and you didn’t want to lose him so early. Selfishly, you didn’t want to lose Claire’s goodwill. You didn’t know if they’d be fine with that, or if they’d freeze you out, and you were so fucking lonely you knew that if the Redfields froze you out then you would wilt in the cold, your hands stuck to their windowpane, on the outside looking in. That was unacceptable.
So you didn’t tell him, not in 1999. Claire only found out later, much later, the year afterward, when you both got drunk and you told her and she told you too: there had been a girl she had left behind, before she came to Raccoon City. “And then she dumped me,” she said, “because—god, this is going to sound horrible.”
“It can’t be worse than anything we’ve been through,” you said, because it couldn’t be.
“I almost stabbed her,” said Claire. “Came out of a nightmare and almost stabbed my girlfriend right through the face. I thought she was a zombie.” She half-laughed, half-sobbed, and you didn’t say anything, just pulled her in close and held her while she cried, and imagined yourself burning Umbrella to the ground for Claire, for Chris, for Sherry. For Marvin and Kendo and Emma and Raccoon City. Maybe even for the rookie you were, the kid who’d walked into a hellscape with wide eyes and something like faith in his heart.
But all you could do was hold her, and hold her secret and yours close to your heart.
--
The thing is, Wesker is a sadist, and a narcissist, and a goddamn maniac. Chris knows this pretty well already. But he hadn’t quite realized the depths of it until Wesker draped himself over Leon’s back and pulled the mask off him and said, “I thought you’d be so much happier to see us, Chris. After all, you’ve been running after him since you first saw him.”
“No,” Chris whispers.
Jill sucks in a horrified breath, as if for a moment seeing herself in Leon’s place, her brown hair turned near-white. If she hadn’t landed in the hospital just days before they were supposed to go after Ozwell Spencer, it might well have been her standing there by Wesker, and not Leon.
Sheva says nothing, but her gun swings to the space where Excella used to be, briefly, before swinging back to Wesker.
“Leon,” says Chris, desperately, looking into those dead eyes, “Leon, come on, it’s me. It’s Chris. You remember me, right?”
“That’s Leon Kennedy?” Sheva says, baffled.
“The one and only,” says Wesker, with an oily smile. “I have to say: he called for you. Quite a few times. Why, I think he’s missed you.” The way he says it is a dead giveaway to the fact that he’s clocked them both, and finds this whole thing amusing, like a bit in a sketch show. Chris charges forward even when Jill tries to hold him back, screaming in fury at Wesker, but Leon slams into him with the force of a train and knocks him to the ground. “Now let’s finish this once and for all,” says Wesker. “You have the advantage of numbers over us. I think three against two is more than fair, eh, Leon?”
Leon says nothing.
And maybe that’s the worst part. In all the time Chris has ever known him, Leon has never not been silent like this. He’s much, much stealthier than Chris himself, sure, but he’s got a smart mouth. He’s never been completely silent, before this.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Chris snarls.
“Chris,” says Jill, stepping forward to touch his arm. “Focus. Leon and I need you.”
Sheva hovers close to Jill, guarding her back. She’s been doing that a lot, staying on Jill’s six, and Chris hasn’t missed the meaningful looks they’ve been throwing to each other, the smiles and lingering touches. It had wrenched at his heart to see, but he’s glad of her presence now. “Wesker,” she says, “you’re a damn scumbag. Whatever you did to Kennedy, we’re going to make you pay for it.”
“I improved him,” says Wesker. “It’s a poor agent who talks back to his superiors, I believe.” He steps back and checks his watch, as if this is just a business meeting that’s running overlong, but Chris caught the flash of anger on Leon’s face, the way his eyes flicked to Wesker for a moment, just a moment, with deep abiding fury.
“Seven minutes,” Wesker says, unmindful of that. All right. Seven minutes Chris can handle, probably. They can survive that long, him, Jill and Sheva, and it’s enough time for Chris to come up with a plan to get Leon back. “Seven minutes is all I can spare to play with you.”
--
Dr. Raquel Goldstein teaches you a grounding technique in one of your therapy sessions with her, just about the only therapist who’s made any progress with you, the absolute worst person to have in a therapist’s office. Or at least that’s what you’re pretty sure your reputation is. You are, historically, unbelievably bad at opening up to people, and this was before Wesker got his hands on you and stuck his fingers in your organs and rearranged your fucking brain with drugs and a super-serum. You’re still not sure whether you’re all the way you or if he left some horrific surprise in your psyche somewhere. You wouldn’t put it past him.
You’ve chased off all the other therapists. Except Goldstein, who took one look at you and called you on your bullshit. You liked her on the spot. That didn’t mean you didn’t try to chase her off, it just meant you were a little more reluctant about it, and she sensed that. You think sometimes she gets a thrill from this, and it was something you accused her of once: seeing you as a puzzle that needed solving, needed unlocking, and then you’d be fixed. She’d taken down her glasses, locked eyes with you, and said, “Why do you think you need to be fixed, Leon?”
And you didn’t know how to answer that.
So you’re not really fixed, because human beings can’t be fixed, but. She teaches you a grounding technique: you put your feet on the ground, breathe deep, and talk about the present. You say the date and the time, you say where you are, you say what you can see. You tell yourself you’re safe. You tell yourself that Wesker’s dead and that you’re still here. You’re still here. You’re still here.
That’s a victory in itself, she says.
“Shitty victory,” you say, “just being alive.”
“Au contraire,” says Goldstein. “It’s a big one. Imagine all the things you’d miss out on if you weren’t alive.”
You come out of the session with homework. You haven’t gone back to work in a while, your legal status is still up in the air, and you’ve heard that Claire has stolen Sherry away from government custody after Wesker’s death, so it’s not like they can make you go back if you don’t want to, and you don’t want to. You really don’t want to. You had a panic attack on Goldstein’s couch at the thought of it, which was embarrassing for you, and you begged her not to tell anyone, but there you go, you don’t want to go back to work like nothing fucking happened and your hair’s just a funky little dye job that went wrong. But that leaves you with a lot of free time, so: homework.
You live at Chris’s place. Your old place was sold off after your “death,” which means you’re also homeless on top of being unemployed, mentally ill, and legally dead. In your most morbid moments, you tell Chris that the only thing you haven’t got on there is “addicted to drugs,” but you are an alcoholic so maybe that counts. He makes that look, you know the one, where his brow furrows and his mouth purses and his eyes fixate on you, the ongoing dumpster fire sharing space with him in his apartment, and he makes a sad noise in the back of his throat. You hate that look. You just want to kiss it off his face, and he won’t kiss you, and you want to shake him about it. Why the fuck wouldn’t he kiss you, he went through hell for you, with you. You also can’t kiss him, because if he does touch you, you honestly think you might try to claw at him.
Sometimes you hate him. Sometimes you even miss Wesker, because at the very fucking least you had someone to blame for the issues all the brainwashing and mind control gave you. Now you’ve only got your own damn self to blame and Chris is so fucking understanding but at the same time he’s skittish, you can tell, he walks on eggshells around you. Like he’s afraid you’ll break. You want to laugh, because you’re already a shattered wreck, there’s nothing he can do that can break you even further. You want to scream, because Chris is treating you like you’re one of those delicate Fabergé eggs, and you wonder if he’s forgotten that you killed multiple people, in front of him, on the way to a helicopter meant to pull the both of you out of Kijuju.
In truth, all you want is for everything to stop being so goddamn complicated, especially in your brain. All you want is to be fixed, to be normal again, to be Leon S. Kennedy without all that goddamn baggage Wesker dumped on you.
You have homework from therapy, instead, because a human being is not the same as a machine (despite everything Wesker did to you to convince you otherwise) and therefore cannot be fixed, but at least it’s something to focus on. You printed out a worksheet and Goldstein’s told you to write down your kneejerk thoughts about the Spencer Estate and how it all went down, and for several minutes all you hear is the scratching of your pencil against the paper.
You only stop when Chris comes in. You know the sound of his footsteps, the heavy tread, the careless humming. He’s total shit at stealth when not on a mission—you think it’s his way of relaxing, turning off the mission brain, telling himself he’s home.
You hastily fold the paper up and hide it. It’s irrational, you know this. Chris is not the kind of person who’d demand you tell him your most private thoughts, who’d make you tell him the things you want so badly to keep secret. But you learned not to count on privacy and secrecy, so everything you write for therapy homework now, you hide on instinct.
“Mission go okay?” you ask.
“Fuck,” is Chris’s response. “God. Someone got their hands on the T-Phobos virus and tried to base another strain off it.” He slumps into a chair, presses the heel of his palm against an eyelid, and exhales, shoulders slumping downwards. You want nothing more than to climb into his lap and hold him tight, but at the same time if he touches you, if anyone touches you, you will bite them, not even in a sexy way, just to get them to back off, and then it’ll be a whole scene.
So you just sit there and say, “Oh. Shit. It’s gone, though, right?”
“We stopped production, at least,” says Chris. “That’s something. But we lost good people in the mess.” He exhales through his lips, a soft huff of air. “Shit,” he says.
You want to kiss him. You don’t. Instead, you get up and you pour him some sweet iced tea, and you sit there torturing yourself with watching him while he drinks it, watching his throat, his hands, his posture loosening in front of you.
You put your feet on the ground and you breathe deep. You don’t speak out loud, but you think: it’s Wednesday, 2:16 PM, and you are in an apartment in New York.