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I
He can feel it crawling under his skin. It twitches and stretches and burrows and Leon can feel it’s there, that it’s rearranging him from the inside out. No, not rearranging. Remaking. Unmaking.
He claws at his arms but you can’t scratch an itch three inches below your skin. The red marks become furrows and tiny ruby beads of blood start to well up. Something twitches, somewhere in his back, and the droplets turn to ink. Black races up his arms, burns as it reaches for his heart, for his brain, for him.
Somewhere behind him is the clatter of gunfire, demanding his attention. He draws his own pistol with fingers that are stiff and clumsy and trying to betray him. He holds it with two hands, the better to be steady, to hide his shaking grip, to hide how close he is to being unmade. A breath—he can feel his lungs when he breathes and this strikes him as a problem—and pops up over the barricade to fire at the infected cultist. The bullet makes the man’s hood fall back, and Leon blinks when it reveals his face. It’s been chewed half off, and spittle dribbles from the man’s lips. He shuffles towards Leon, the only expression in his eyes the hungry gleam of a rabid dog. Gunfire again, but now it is night.
Leon is in Spain.
Leon is in Raccoon City.
The veins in his neck twitch and Leon is nowhere and nothing and being unmade—
Leon is awake in his bedroom and gasping for breath, sweat-soaked sheets clutched tight in his fingers. Soft moonlight filters in through the corner of his window that the curtains don’t quite cover.
The nightmare is over, but sometimes he feels like he never really wakes up.
There is no point in trying to go back to sleep. He tosses the thin sheet away and slides out of the bed, stopping for a moment to check the time. 4:27. Then he checks his phone, checks the news.
He is not in Spain.
He is not in Raccoon City.
Downstairs, in the room he’s converted to a gym, he tries to channel the restless energy of the jumbled flashbacks into a workout. It doesn’t work, not really, but it keeps him in shape and gives him something to focus on other than recalling the feeling of Las Plagas burrowing into him.
The further he gets through the day, the further those feelings recede. He goes longer between remembering that crawling feeling, or the slack nothing behind someone’s eyes. Sometimes, when he is lucky, he will go days between the nightmares spun from memories, and he will go hours at a time without so much as a twitch.
Most of the time, Leon is not lucky.
He was not lucky when the outbreak happened. He was not lucky when he was sent to Spain.
Sometimes, in the dark, when he waits for his fingers to unclench from the sheet, he thinks the only time he’s been lucky is because he actually got Ashley out. One lucky instance in years is not a very good track record, and so he maintains luck doesn’t really exist.
He sees her sometimes, on the tv, in the background. The president is halfway through a second term now, and sometimes Ashley is behind him at a speech or a campaign event or a charity gala. Every time, he is briefly grateful that if he had to be lucky only once, it was for someone other than himself.
There are things to occupy him, of course. Training, mostly, for a job he didn’t want but couldn’t refuse after Raccoon City. Sometimes the job itself, in deployments lasting hours or days. They never make the news—of course they don’t make the news—but he is assured they’re important, and thanked for his service.
He doesn’t mind the jobs so much any more. They give him something to focus on other than the dreams.
The letter catches him by surprise. It’s been five years since he brought Ashley home, and he figured that, except for the dreams, that was the end of it. But no, according to the letter, it’s taken five years to get through the case files and the reports and he will be receiving an award for services to the country, for Raccoon City and for saving Ashley. The public won’t know the details, but there will be a gala, and he will get a fancy medal.
The letter also mentions he will wear a suit and he will be present at the awards ceremony and the gala. It is not framed as a suggestion. There is mention of a stipend that has been set aside for a new suit.
Leon wonders briefly if he can manufacture an emergency that will occur the same day.
He suspects any emergency will be dealt with by someone else unless it’s another outbreak of the T-virus or Las Plagas or something else that will haunt his dreams, and those are already fucked up enough.
Buying a suit is a chore, not just because it requires measuring and poking and prodding but because Leon sometimes feels like he’s forgotten how to be a person.
The clerk is nice enough and makes polite chit-chat, but Leon finds himself not totally sure how to answer. “What’s the occasion?” the clerk says as he wraps a measuring tape around Leon’s chest.
“I saved the world so they’re throwing me a party.”
The clerk laughs. “Must be some party.” He chuckles again while he moves the tape measure. If only Leon had actually been trying to make a joke instead of answering the question.
“Any specific colour for the shirt?” the clerk asks as he jots down some final notes on a pad of legal paper.
“Something that brings out my eyes. I’ve been told I have to look pretty,” Leon says.
The clerk nods knowingly. “My missus gets after me to dress up properly all the time. I always tell her, I make suits, but that doesn’t mean I want to wear them to every event.”
Leon makes a noise that comes dangerously close to a snort. There is no missus to tell him anything—unless you count the government, and he’d prefer not to think himself married to his work or the politicians only slightly less parasitic than Las Plagas. How would he explain the dreams? The refusal to let himself be anything but active all the time, the better to not let thoughts intrude? How would he even start that relationship? He can picture it now: walking up to some woman in a bar, hitting her with a smile and a wink. “Want to sleep with a secret agent? It'll be just like James Bond, except they don’t tell you James Bond has PTSD out the ass and will wake you up at three in the morning.”
He doesn’t say these things to the clerk. Just says, “My sense of fashion is shit, so whatever you think is best.”
The clerk scribbles one last note and then nods. “We’ll have everything ready for you next Tuesday. You can come in for a fitting and we’ll make any adjustments. Should be plenty of time before your gala.”
“No need to rush on my account,” he says as he pulls out the fancy government credit card to pay. He shares a laugh with the clerk that is more out of social obligation than hilarity.
It is the most normal interaction Leon has had in months.
II
The suit fits excellently but Leon still tugs at the collar every so often. It’s stifling in a way that has nothing to do with how it lies on his neck or the quality of the fabric. The ceremony itself was a blur of lights and a smile that felt not quite genuine but was close enough that he didn’t even get a frown from the publicity manager who spent the last two weeks hammering manners into his head. The medal is ostentatious, but fortunately he was able to put it in a box after the flashbulbs died down. It’s not that he doesn’t think he deserves it—shit, he’d like to see anyone go through what he’s been through and come out half as functional—but that it draws an attention he doesn’t care for. He doesn’t want to be the top of the list for whatever fucked up plague or parasite is coming next. He doesn’t want to be simpered at by politicians who think his support will buy him a few more votes from the kind of people who have Support Our Troops bumper stickers.
Leon has had to become a lot of things since he first walked into that police station that haunts his nightmares, but all of those things have lowered his tolerance for bullshit, not the other way around.
Fortunately, he wasn’t the only honouree this evening, and without the medal hanging around his neck like a glittering invitation, he has been able to blend in with the crowd. He clings to the edges of it, always moving slightly, always watching.
He’d like to say he’s watching the sequins on dresses and judging the knots on ties. That he’s watching the people flirting and failing and the people settling petty jealousies in overly-polite tones and then smiling in a victory so gently snatched from an opponent that only the loser knows they’ve lost. He watches President Graham as well, of course, because Graham has the largest following, the crowd coalescing around him.
Leon is watching all of these things, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t also watching for the first signs that something isn’t right. That every time someone twitches, his shoulders tighten ever so slightly until it’s clear they aren’t losing their mind. He knows where all the exits are, and every time someone stumbles because their heels are too high or they’ve had too much wine, he has to breathe out through his nose until the urge to flee passes.
Maybe what he’s been through has made him a coward.
He’d like to think he’s just been turned into a survivor.
A soft burst of laughter near him draws his attention and he tugs his collar again when he sees its origins. Ashley is holding a glass of champagne and smiling in the direction of a man in a suit. The smile is polite and the laughter is genuine, but it’s clear from the man’s expression that he is neither amused nor intending to be polite.
Ashley doesn’t need to be rescued from a senator’s son—Leon has seen snatches of her speeches and knows she is perfectly capable of rescuing herself from this situation—but he almost intervenes. For a moment it’s Spain, and he has a job, and he can ignore everything else until the job is done.
Leon is not in Spain.
Leon is in a ballroom that is three degrees too warm and probably a safer place to be than retreading old ground in his head. The senator’s son storms away and any danger to Ashley, physical or social or otherwise, slides away with him. In a way, it would have been nice if he had tried something. Leon’s better at fighting than he is at pretending to care about politics.
A waiter carrying a tray of champagne flutes with something bubbly and red glides by and Leon snatches a glass by the stem. The waiter doesn’t miss a single step as he presses a napkin into Leon’s hand before he disappears into the crowd. Leon tries a sip and recognizes champagne and something that tastes like cranberries. It’s pleasant on his tongue and gives his hand something to do instead of imagining a fist.
“I thought I saw you over here,” a voice says by his shoulder, as immediately recognizable as its presence is confusing. Leon jerks in surprise and turns to find Ashley standing near him, holding a glass that matches his own. Her dress is long and somehow manages to be gold without being shiny. It’s simple but fits her perfectly, rippling slightly whenever she moves. It reminds him of something a Hollywood star from 1940 might wear. Her jewelry is subtle, pearl earrings and a necklace that matches. If he had to pick a word to describe her, he’d say she was elegant.
How far they have come from when he first saw her in the falling down church, in a dirty sweater. If you didn’t know—Leon sometimes wishes he didn’t know—you would never guess that person and the woman standing before him now were one and the same.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he says, which is only a little bit of a lie. He expected to see her somewhere at this event. He didn’t expect to see her talking to him. To remember who he was, or to recognize him, or to make time separately to talk to him instead of senators and their sons.
Ashley tilts her head to the side. “Didn’t you?”
“Should I have?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
It’s a fair question and one Leon doesn’t really know how to answer. “Well I just figured you’d be too busy, I guess. Although I suppose I am exceptionally handsome today.”
She laughs and Leon is suddenly no longer concerned with his collar or the heat or feeling like he needs to fight his way out. “I’ve never seen you in a suit. Or even a real uniform. It does make you exceptionally handsome.”
Leon prides himself on always having a quick comeback. Something witty is best, but something cheesy will do (and is usually what he ends up going with, although he always pretends that was his first choice). He can think of nothing clever or cheesy or anything at all to say. He didn’t expect her to agree with him, even in jest.
Fortunately for him, she carries on. “How have you been, Leon?”
That he can answer. “Well they threw a whole party for me, so pretty good. How about you?”
Ashley smiles gently at him. “No Leon. How have you been?”
Leon suddenly understands what she’s asking, and it’s an entirely different question. He hears the words she didn’t say. “Oh. Well, uh. They gave me sleeping pills for a while there, but I was just drained all the time. So I don’t take them anymore.” It’s an answer that’s not an answer, just like her question was about something else entirely.
“Dreams?” she asks.
“You too?”
She nods, and the smile slips away from her face for a moment. “It’s hard to believe sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He pauses, frowns slightly at her expression. “Are you okay?”
Ashley smiles again, and it catches him almost by surprise. “It’s been a long time since you asked me that.” Seeing his expression, she continues. “When you rescued me. Well, actually, every time you rescued me, it was sorta an ongoing process. You always asked if I was okay right away if I ever got knocked down or grabbed or god knows what else. I appreciated that a lot, actually.”
“Of course I checked on you. Piss poor rescue it would be otherwise,” Leon says. He squints at her for a moment. “Is that not normal?”
“Have you met some of the Secret Service guys?”
They share a sensible chuckle. Somewhere behind them there is another burst of noise, a laugh that sounds too much for a moment like a scream, and Leon’s shoulders tense. He can’t fail to notice that Ashley’s does the same.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he says, suddenly aware of that very fact. “Are you okay?”
“Some days,” she says. “Most days.” She sips from her drink. “There was a lot of therapy when I got back, but it’s hard, y’know? How do you explain that shit to someone who wasn’t there?”
“You don’t,” Leon says instantly. He’s been through the same. How do you explain Raccoon City? How do you explain showing up to your new job and fighting the fucking apocalypse? How do you explain the feeling of something burrowing into you and knowing that your first priority isn’t to deal with that, but it’s instead to make sure that someone else gets out, even if you can’t?
How do you explain that you’re not always sure you’re glad you got out?
He finishes the rest of his glass of whatever it is in one swallow. He’s suddenly all too aware of their history and their present. The transition from dirty sweater to golden dress. The way he continues being a soldier—or is he still a cop or is he nothing at all?—and she gets a chance to continue shining softly in the lights of ballrooms just like this one.
“I know it’s not easy,” he says, “but I’m glad you have the chance to get better.”
“Thanks to you.” Ashley smiles gently at him and the force of it almost knocks him off his feet. He decides the distraction in his head is from drinking too much or drinking too quickly or anything at all that has nothing to do with her.
Leon is bad at lying, even to himself.
“Just doing my job,” he says with what he hopes is a casual shrug. And then, because for some reason he can’t stop the words from bubbling up in his throat, he adds, “I’ve never regretted that job. I mean, I actually regret a lot about that job, because that was fucked up. But I’ve never regretted getting the chance to meet you.”
“It was fucked up,” Ashely agrees. “But it was nice to meet you too.”
Time stretches out between them for a moment, long and elastic like taffy, and Leon thinks for a second he will say something else that he would mean and couldn’t take back, but Ashley smiles again and says, “It was really nice seeing you, Leon,” and the moment passes.
“You too, Ashley. Knock ‘em dead out there.”
She sips her drink, smiles one last time—Leon is suddenly aware she’s smiled more in this conversation than in their entire time in Spain, not that he can blame her—and starts to move away. Before she gets more than a step, Leon’s traitorous mouth opens again and he finds himself asking, “Do you want to get a coffee some time?” Ashley looks at him quizzically. “We could talk about it. If that would help.”
“That would be nice,” she says after a moment. “Give me your phone.”
He hands it over wordlessly and watches as she taps in a new contact, then sends herself a message. “Here,” she says, handing back. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Leon just nods and watches her walk away.
Maybe it was worth coming to this gala after all.
III
Leon has been through hell. In fact, all the classical versions of hell are probably easier to handle than the shit he’s actually been through. He has killed monstrosities that used to be people and more people who are still human than he cares to count. His life makes the heroes of action films look like they’re on Sunday strolls.
Leon would almost prefer to do it all again than to write this one fucking text message.
It should be easy. It’s not hard to compose a sentence or two and send it. But for some reason, he finds himself writing and reading and rewriting and rereading and starting all over again. For the moment, he is choosing not to interrogate why one message is so difficult.
After agonizing for far too long, Leon manages to write a straightforward text about meeting at a local coffee shop that’s small and independent and has a nice balcony for sitting on where they are unlikely to be recognized. When his phone chimes a moment later, he braces himself for the inevitable disappointment of a message that will tell him she was just being polite at the gala.
The actual message reads simply “that sounds great! See you then :)”
Leon stares at his phone for a minute.
This is not what he expected, but he is committed to it now.
He finds himself at the coffee shop two afternoons in a row. The first is because he has made a habit of preparedness. He orders a latte, because it takes longer to make than coffee, and uses the handful of extra minutes to analyze the bottom floor. The door is beside a beautifully painted glass window—he estimates he could shatter it with a kick if necessary, but two separate tables are beside it, each with mismatched chairs, and a chair swung with force will be easier and more effective—and has a bell that jangles cheerfully when it opens. In the unlikely but not impossible event something happens (Leon has learned to consider nothing impossible) he will have warning if the danger comes from that quarter. He shifts his weight and uses the movement to glance surreptitiously down the little hallway behind the bar. It goes only a few feet before it turns into what he assumes is the kitchen, but he can see the edge of a heavy door, industrial and painted the same off-white as the rest of the hallway. Likely no latch on the outside, but an escape route if necessary. There are two more windows on the far wall, each again with handy chairs.
The barista tells him in the overly-perky voice of the customer service worker who is already imagining what they will be doing after their shift that his latte is ready. Leon thanks her and carries his drink up the stairs, noting that each step creaks except for one right in the middle. Something coming up will have to make a sound.
The upper floor is smaller, jutting out into the space above the bar but not meeting the far wall. Its height makes it awkward to envision jumping below, and so that will be an escape of last resort. More windows decorate the walls up here, looking out at the branches of a tree as older by far than this neighbourhood. A better exit. The balcony itself is bright, accessed through a small sliding door propped open in the pleasant spring day. It features a small table and one a little larger, six slightly different wooden chairs scattered about. Some sort of hedge somehow planted around the edge of the balcony offers privacy from the street below, although the gaps between the hedges allow him to see glimpses of the pedestrians and the cars as they go about their lives.
Satisfied that he can get himself—and Ashley—out of a bind if one occurs, Leon settles at the smaller table and drinks his latte. It is surprisingly good and he lets himself linger over it for longer than he otherwise would.
The following afternoon, he makes sure to get himself to the café five minutes before the time he gave Ashley, confident this will give him plenty of time to claim the little table upstairs. To his surprise, she is already standing a little out of the way, scrutinizing their menu.
Whether this is on purpose or accidental he cannot say, and does not allow himself time for speculation before he slides up to her. His steps are slightly heavier than they would normally be, the better to make the old wooden floor creak and alert her to his presence. She turns and smiles at him—his heart does a funny thing in his chest for half a beat—and waves, even though he is only a few feet from her. “Hi,” she says, then gestures at the menu. “How are you?”
“Good,” he says automatically, social scripts carrying him past the momentary palpitation. “You?”
“Good.”
“There’s a balcony upstairs,” he says. “What do you want to drink? I’ll order and you can grab us a table.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she says, clearly a little surprised.
Leon doubts himself for a moment then decides he’s already committed to it. “It’s no trouble,” he says with a smile he hopes is reassuring. “What’ll it be?”
Ashley eyes the menu a moment longer before selecting one of the many teas listed in neat chalk letters. “See you in a minute,” she says as she heads for the stairs.
Leon orders her tea and a coffee for himself and then carries the two steaming mugs carefully up the creaking stairs. As he’d hoped, the small table on the balcony was vacant and Ashley has claimed it. “Here you go,” he says as he puts her mug down in front of her.
“Thanks again,” she says, wrapping her hands around it and blowing gently on the steaming surface.
Leon sits in the other chair, adjusting the position of it just slightly so he can see both into the café and through the hedges, sips his coffee, and then is struck by a silence which is suddenly as insurmountable as anything he has ever faced.
They sit like that for a minute and Leon is on the verge of apologizing for this whole terrible idea and making his retreat when Ashley breaks the silence. “I was surprised you actually texted me,” she says, looking up at him with an inscrutable expression.
“Why?” Leon asks. It is the inverse of their conversation in the ballroom. Maybe they are both full of surprises.
Ashley dunks the teabag in her mug a couple times before pulling it out and setting it on a wad of napkins she appears to have procured for this purpose. “Well you… You made it pretty clear you weren’t interested in a relationship when we finally got out of there.” She does not specify where there is and she does not need to. A moment later she flushes. “Not that I mean, like, a relationship relationship, I’m not assuming anything.” She takes a hasty sip of tea and does an admirable job of not wincing even though Leon is sure it is still too hot to comfortably drink. “But you didn’t even give me a chance to believe you were interested in talking after we got back. You’ve never come to any event or anything that you had an invitation to.”
This is true, but Leon prudently chooses not to remark on it.
She continues. “I mean, you were only at that gala because I’m pretty sure you were ordered to be there. So. It’s not exactly like in five years you’ve ever before wanted to talk. I guess I’m just surprised you do now.”
All at once, Leon feels a little embarrassed. “It wasn’t anything personal,” he says hurriedly, and then takes a sip of his also still too hot coffee to buy himself time. “I didn’t… It seemed like you’d have an easier time recovering if a living reminder of what happened wasn’t lurking around you.”
“I thought you were SpecOps, not a therapist.” The red has started to drain from Ashley’s cheeks, which are now only faintly flushed, and Leon is struck by the sudden thought that she’s cute when she blushes, a thought which he hastily shoves to the back of his mind.
“I’m not even really SpecOps,” he says with a little self-depreciating laugh. “Just a cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Well, that’s still not a therapist.”
Leon is forced to agree with this assessment. “I didn’t want to make things complicated. I’m sorry if it came across like I didn’t like you or something. For what it’s worth, you’re my favourite person I’ve ever rescued.”
She laughs, and he’s pretty sure it’s genuine. “No really,” he says, just in case it wasn’t. “You were pretty instrumental in your own rescue. I just helped you out with the harder bits.” He takes another sip of coffee. “And you rescued me too, when we finally got to Luis’ office.”
It’s a moment that features in a lot of his dreams. Ashley, sitting in the chair, pale and wrung-out and momentarily unconscious, and who could blame her after whatever that device did. Waiting for her to wake up, wanting to reach for her pulse to make sure he’s saved her instead of killing her, but struggling just to stay upright. Black creeping across his vision like veins—sometimes he wonders if it really was his veins, if some trick of his last lucid moments let him see his own demise creeping through his eyeballs—and reaching out to grab something, anything before a vague sensation of falling, falling, falling. He does not recall the exact moment of hitting the floor, because in his memories he fell right through it and into some manufactured nightmare where Saddler was waiting to cajole him for not accepting his fate. Leon recalls only fragments of swimming through dream haze, lurching towards a glistening wall that might be a door to consciousness or to his death.
In the worst dreams, Leon stays in that haze and never dies nor wakes up, endlessly slogging towards eternity while Saddler laughs.
It is only because Ashley woke up in time, wrestled him into that chair, and figured out how to run the machine that he thankfully slept through that he is able to have coffee with her at all.
“You’re making me sound a lot cooler than I was,” Ashley says, startling him out of his reverie. “I was so freaked out.”
“I was freaked out too.”
Ashley makes a noise that could almost be called a snort and flaps a hand at him. “You don’t need to make me feel better.”
It’s Leon’s turn to laugh. “I don’t know what kind of cool customer you think I am, but I’d honestly be a little concerned by anyone who wasn’t freaked out in that situation. It wasn’t my first apocalypse rodeo, but it’s still a lot to deal with.”
Ashley considers this and nods. “Okay well, we can both have been freaking out then I guess.”
The conversation turns to more benign topics. They sip their drinks and discuss the banalities of existing for five years. Ashley tells him about finishing university, about the charity work she does and how long it took her father to stop texting her every few hours with any excuse he could think of just to make sure she was still okay. Leon tells her about training and the garden he started growing two years ago. He was extremely proud last autumn when he discovered he had grown a pumpkin that weighed almost twenty pounds and probably describes it with a bit too much enthusiasm, but Ashley smiles encouragingly at him and asks whether he cooked it and how it tasted and then they’re discussing favourite foods and restaurants. Once started, it is easy to keep the conversation flowing.
Leon does not remember the last time it was easy to talk about meaningless things with anyone. More than a decade ago. A lifetime.
They do not talk about Spain. They do not talk about Raccoon City. They do not talk about apocalypses, averted or personal or otherwise.
Halfway through her second mug of tea, Ashley says, rather out of the blue, “Did you think it was like the firefighter thing?”
Leon struggles with this question for a moment before he is forced to simply say, “What?”
“Sorry, I know that was out of nowhere. I just mean, when I asked if you wanted me to talk about getting you put on my security detail, you were really nice about saying no without actually saying no. It’s a thing with firefighters where they rescue people and then those people decide they’re in love with them, because, y’know, getting rescued.” She blushes again and Leon again resolutely decides not to notice that it’s cute. “So I just figured, when you said no, that’s what you thought it was. That I had decided I was in love with you.”
“I mean, you sounded a little bit like you were. Not that I would blame you,” Leon says and then immediately kicks himself. It would be harder to sound more like an egotistical asshole if he tried, and he is emphatically not trying. “Sorry,” he adds quickly.
“No no, it’s okay.” Ashley toys with one of the damp napkins on the table. “I mean, I was flirting with you, and pretty badly. So I get it.”
Leon does not know how to respond to this admission, and so he swallows a mouthful of coffee instead.
After a pause, Ashley goes on. “I just figured you should know that it wasn’t just that you were hot and I was swooning because I was being rescued.”
“Are you calling me hot?” Leon asks, which also makes him sound more like the egotistical asshole he is starting to worry that he is.
This makes her laugh. “You basically work out for a living, Leon. I think it’s a reasonable statement.”
“Thanks. I do more than work out for a living though. I also garden.”
“I’ve heard.”
“You said it wasn’t just that I basically work out for a living and rescuing you, though, and I feel I should really point out again the rescuing was at least sort of mutual by that point.” Part of him wonders if pursuing this conversation is a bad idea, but he is burning with curiosity.
“You were really nice, the whole time,” Ashley says. “Like, the whole time. You always made sure I was doing okay. I wasn’t really doing okay, but you made me feel like I was. I felt… safe. As safe as I could with the whole parasite thing, anyways.”
“Just doing my job.”
"See, I don’t think you were.” She looks down at the table when he doesn’t answer. “I think you’re actually not really your average swaggering Marine, I think
you’re actually a nice person, who actually cared about me, even if it was strictly professional. And I’ve thought about it a lot since then. That can’t possibly be what you were expecting when they sent you in. And you had a parasite too. And everything you did was still trying to make me feel better and feel safe. So yeah. Of course by the time we got out I thought I had a crush on you.”
“You thought you did?” Leon says. He doesn’t mean to ask it as a question, but the way she puts it in the past tense makes him feel like the earlier funny thing his heart did and his thoughts about her being cute could not have had worse timing.
“Yeah. And then we got back to the States, and I went back to school, and I got a lot of therapy, and I thought it was the firefighter thing.”
Leon is suddenly possessed by the need to say something and comes up with, “Maybe I should have been a firefighter instead of a cop.” This veers dangerously close to flirting in a conversation where he’s been all but told any romantic attraction is misplaced, but he can’t say it’s not an earnest sentiment.
The corner of Ashley’s mouth quirks up in a half-smile. “I tried dating a couple of times.”
Leon regrets trying to flirt at this statement and resorts again to his coffee mug, noticing only after he tips it towards himself that it is, in fact, empty. Ashely continues. “And what I found was that… no one understood. Not really. And the guys, even the nice ones, well… they didn’t make me feel safe. No one checked if I was okay in situations, and if I wasn’t, they didn’t really know how to deal with it. Or pretend they did. And I realized it wasn’t a firefighter thing. That’s why I tried to get you invited to things. But you didn’t come to any until the gala. So I figured you still thought that way. That’s why I was surprised you invited me for coffee.”
This is not an admission of current romantic attraction, but Leon’s heart does the flippy thing again. “I’m glad you came for coffee,” he says dumbly.
“Yeah. Me too.”
They sit in companionable silence for a minute. Leon feels like he is on the precipice of something, but whether it is a looming disaster or something else entirely he can’t say. The moment never comes, because Ashley checks her phone and makes a soft noise of surprise. “Sorry, I’ve gotta run. I didn’t realize we sat so long.” She stands and starts shrugging her coat on.
All at once, Leon realizes the coffee is at an end and that he wants it to keep going. So he nods, stands, puts his own coat on, and just as Ashley opens her mouth to say something else, he says instead, “Do you want to get dinner some time?”
It’s not quite an invitation for a date, just like the confessions earlier weren’t really confirmation of a romantic attraction, but it hangs the air like fog between them until Ashley smiles suddenly and says, “I would.”
IV
The dreams have taken on an unpleasant new characteristic. Ashley used to be in them sometimes, but now she is always there, and always somehow just out of Leon’s reach. Her sweater brushes against his fingertips as she falls or transforms or just outright dies on the pavement.
In the shower after a particularly bad night, Leon lets the water try to wash off his fears that this thing between them that he doesn’t even have yet will be lost. There has been nothing to indicate that there is anything more than a passing interest and he still questions how much interest there even is. Besides, what matters is that the dreams are wrong. He got Ashley out. He got himself out.
He is not owed anything more than he has already taken from the end of the world.
It has been several days since he asked Ashely for dinner, but they have not yet been able to nail down an evening they are both free. Really, an evening that Ashley is free, because Leon has nothing but time after training and paperwork unless he’s deployed. He has begun to suspect that this is on purpose, that it is easier to never be free than to say that she isn’t interested outright.
He has resolved himself to this attitude when his phone chimes. He smiles slightly when he sees it is from Ashley, and then frowns because it is from Ashley. This’ll be some other deferment, some other excuse.
What it is instead is baffling.
>Do you know how to dance?
Leon looks at the question like it might come alive and bite him. It is such a specific and unexpected question that he can’t figure out what the motive behind it is.
Granted, he’s apparently been bad at figuring out Ashley’s motives the whole time.
After a moment of wrestling with himself, he replies.
>I took a class a few years ago.
He has tried an endless string of hobbies to pass his spare time, on the advice of the myriad of therapists he has seen. They have helped—he is at least able to function in public and no one is the wiser to how the things he has seen stick to his skin like oil—but he has struggled to stick to any of them expect reading novels and doing jigsaw puzzles. It makes him feel old sometimes, sitting with a cup of tea and a puzzle, but he can’t deny it is satisfying to fit the pieces together and he seems to sleep better when he remembers to do them regularly. Dance classes didn’t stick—it relied too much on other people—but he still remembers the steps, or close enough that he won’t embarrass himself in public.
His phone chimes again.
>How do you feel about formal dinners?
That question at least he can answer.
>Not my favourite.
There is a pause for a few minutes and Leon spends them willing the words to reveal more of their meaning to him. They remain unphased. Then a chime, and he is almost ashamed of how quickly he checks the message.
>Would you be willing to go to one anyways?
>It is technically dinner!
>And normally I have to take a bodyguard, but if you come, I won’t need one
>It’s on Friday
Maybe, Leon thinks, she wasn’t trying to avoid going to dinner with him after all. But this is hardly what he was envisioning. Still, he finds himself agreeing, getting the details.
On Friday evening, he drums his fingers against his steering wheel while he waits for her to come out from her apartment building. He spends the few minutes of calm trying to figure out what he wants from this. Is it a date? Is it the start of something? The end of it? Is he just a convenient and more pleasant to speak to bodyguard?
He finds no answers in the slight static that surrounds the music from the radio before Ashey is suddenly there and sliding into his car. “Hey,” she says with a smile.
“Hey,” he replies.
They make small talk until they arrive. Leon offers his arm to Ashley after handing the keys to the valet and wonders if the pink in her cheeks is from the cold or because she is blushing. They make their way inside the ballroom, stopping to hand in their coats at the coat check—Leon takes a moment to appreciate how the deep green dress Ashley is wearing fits her perfectly and is again reminded of his earlier assessment of elegant—and then they are into the glitz of the golden hall strung with garlands and ornaments and the buzz of a hundred little conversations of varying significance.
“Remind me what this is for again?” Leon says, trying to resist the temptation to crane his neck and look around. The gala a few weeks ago was the fanciest thing he’d been to in his life, but it seems like he might have to get used to it if he is going to be spending time with Ashley. She has not taken his arm again since they came inside, and he struggles to mask the twinge of disappointment that pokes him in the ribs.
“Christmas fundraiser,” Ashley says. “There’s basically one a week at this time of year. This one is for the library.”
That’s all the answer he gets, because someone is coming over, already enthusiastically holding a hand out to Ashley. For an hour before dinner, his life becomes standing slightly off to the side while she chats with this senator or that business magnate. He is introduced to people who he forgets immediately. His smile feels painted on.
This is not what he had in mind for a dinner and he is starting to regret agreeing to be a personable bodyguard.
Finally, the crowd is ushered into another room scattered with tables. “Sorry about this,” Ashley whispers as they sit. “We’ll have more time after dinner.”
Leon only has time to murmur that it’s okay before the rest of their table companions arrive and the conversation is swept along to plans to spend Christmas skiing at Aspen or in the Swiss Alps. A gentleman across from enthusiastically relates his difficulties in getting the new electric model of Porsche—“Better for the environment, you know!” he tells the woman smiling beside him while Leon tries hard to pretend he thinks any car is worth more than a hundred thousand dollars—and to his left, a woman leans a little over him to tell Ashley that Mrs. so-and-so’s husband was in fact cheating on her. Ashley receives this news with less enthusiasm than the woman seems to think it warrants and the lady withdraws.
“Is this supposed to be fun?” Leon whispers to Ashley.
“Nope,” she replies with a grimace. “But it will be afterwards!” Her attention is then claimed by electric Porsche guy, and Leon is left to continue eating his overly fancy roast beef dinner.
Finally, dinner and desert and coffee are over, and the doors back to the first room have been thrown open. Soft music comes through, and Ashley brushes her fingers against his arm. It tingles, even through Leon’s suit jacket. “Come dance with me?” she asks. “We can actually talk that way.”
Leon is only too eager not to be brushed off by the well-to-do. He escorts her into the ballroom and it takes them only a moment to find a free space on the dance floor. He settles one hand on her waist and forces himself to keep his touch light, to make sure he is not confining her, even though he longs to seize her attention all for himself. She smiles up at him and his fingers tighten ever so slightly and against his better judgement, but she appears to take no notice, or if she does, she makes no complaints.
“So,” he says as they begin to dance.
“So,” she agrees. “Regret coming yet?”
This startles a laugh out of Leon. “I was wondering if I was just there to intimidate that guy with the roaming hands.”
Ashley shudders. “Ugh, don’t remind me. He’s always like that, no matter how many times you say no.”
“So I’m here at least a little bit to intimidate him,” Leon says with a smile.
“I’m not gonna complain.”
They share a little laugh and then Leon focuses on the dance for a minute. He can’t do anything fancy but he at least remembers the steps and hasn’t stepped on Ashley at any point, so he figures he’s doing pretty good. For the first time all night, he starts to relax.
For the first time in a long time, Leon starts to actually have fun.
The band finishes their song and Ashley lets go of Leon’s hand to clap politely. He follows suite half a second later. The band starts up again and he gently reclaims Ashley’s hand.
He is struck by how right it feels there.
They alternate chitchat and dancing for a while. Leon soaks in the lights and the music and Ashley and knows that this is just a temporary bright spot instead of his life but oh, he wants this to be his life.
“I need a break,” Ashley tells him after a few dances.
“No problem. Grab us a seat, I’ll get you something to drink. What do you want?” Even while he talks, Leon is leading her over to one of the little tables around the edge of the room. They are peppered with an assortment of the more elderly guests and the more reticent. Several have suit jackets hanging off chairs with no sign of anyone nearby. A cheerfully red tie lies discarded beside an empty whiskey glass.
For one sideways half-second, Leon is reminded of how things in Raccoon City seemed frozen in time, mid-celebration or otherwise. He breathes in through his nose, lets the smell of pine garlands and wine and warmth and spices and people wash over him. Holds the breath while he lets the music and chatter sink into him, so different from panicked screams and mindless mumbling. Breathes out through the mouth, remembers that he is not in Raccoon City and he is not in Spain.
“Leon?” Ashley says beside him and he curses internally. She must have noticed the momentary pause, the expression that stole onto his face before he shoved it away.
“It’s fine,” he says as he turns to give her a smile he hopes is reassuring and feels only a little bit like lying. He pulls a chair out for her. “What do you want from the bar?”
“Vodka cranberry please,” Ashley says. Her eyes rove over his face and she seems unsatisfied with whatever she finds there, but she doesn’t press.
Leon is grateful she doesn’t. They may have shared the same things, but he doesn’t need to relive them in this crowded public room. “You got it,” he says instead and points finger guns at her, because his hands apparently have decided to operate independently of his brain in an attempt to reestablish normalcy.
While he waits for the bartender to take his order, he scans the room. There’s six exits, and he figures out the most efficient way to each of them from the table where Ashley is sitting. He breathes in, breathes out.
“Vodka cranberry for the lady,” he says when he gets back to the table and sets the glass in front of her.
“Thanks!” Ashley says brightly, sliding her phone back into her bag. They sit in silence for a moment and Leon starts to worry his earlier lapse has changed something. He drums his fingers against his knee under the table and tries to think of something that will erase the moment. Before he can, Ashley says, “Hey, are you okay?”
The question startles him for a reason he can’t quite put into words. He doesn’t know if it’s the surprise or something else that makes him answer honestly. “I am now, yeah. Just had a second there where I got lost.”
Lost in time, lost in space. Lost in himself, in memories that drape around him like a cloak that threatens to choke him.
Ashley doesn’t need to ask what he means, just nods and sips her drink. “We can go if you want.”
Leon shakes his head firmly. “No, it was just for a moment. I’m happy to stay if you’re still enjoying yourself, really.”
“I am.” Ashley puts her glass back on the table. “I want to make sure you’re comfortable though. I know these things are a lot when you’re not used to them. I mean, I am used to them and they’re still a lot.”
Leon chuckles. “Man, how the tables have turned. It was once my job to make sure you were okay, and here we are. I’m fine, I promise.”
Ashley brightens and he knows he has finally convinced her. They fall into a conversation about what the people dancing are wearing. Leon marvels at how easy it is for this to happen. How easy it is to talk to her. In a handful of meetings, he has said as much to Ashley as he’s said cumulatively to any one person in five years.
The band strikes up a slow song, and Ashley puts her mostly empty glass on the table. “Dance with me again?” she asks, suddenly just a little shyer than she was, stealing a glance up at him from under her lashes.
In answer, Leon holds out a hand. She settles hers in it and they head to the dance floor. They don’t speak, but it is a companionable silence. There is an intimacy in this closeness that Leon does not dare break with words. The world around them fades, and for the first time in years, Leon forgets he is in a crowd.
He considers the last time he held Ashley, catching her from a drop as they fled Saddler’s minions. Five years ago.
A lifetime.
They were both cold and dirty and tired, but neither of them willing to give up. He remembers what went from straightforward rescue to averting the apocalypse and the way she barely complained. He admired—still admires—the way she handled herself. At some point, his determination to get her out okay went from the professional to the personal, although he has never admitted this to himself until just now.
Ashley is warm underneath his hands and he finds himself bending towards her, caught in her orbit. All at once, he is struck with the realization that she is gorgeously, terrifyingly alive, alive, alive. He feels unbalanced.
He feels like he is drowning.
If this is what drowning is like, he does not want to be rescued.
He is still leaning down towards Ashley a little, and he is gratified to note that her face is tilted up towards him. They are separated by the space of a breath, maybe two, and he longs to close that gap. Some part of him stays distant, stays observing, and reminds him that this is a public place. They have not even really been on a date.
Leon is not sure he cares about any of that.
The song ends and polite applause erupts around them. The moment ends abruptly, but Leon cannot quite get his composure back. He straightens up, feels his pulse jackhammering in his ears. He and Ashley look at each other. “You’re beautiful,” he says abruptly and means it with his whole being.
She flushes and glances down before looking back up at him. “You’re not too bad yourself.”
“We put all the other couples here to shame,” he jokes and realizes only a moment later it implies they are a couple.
“As long as they don’t try to make us parasite puppets about it,” Ashley says, and the fact she does not disavow his implication warms him right down to his toes.
On stage, the band takes a final bow and shuffles off. Music starts being played over a speaker somewhere, a subtle sign that the party is ending. The crowd has thinned out considerably since the last dinner plates were cleared away, and Leon realizes with a spreading disappointment that this stolen night is hurtling towards a close.
“Let me drive you home,” he says, cursing himself for missing his chance. It’s a chance he didn’t even know he wanted to have, one he only realizes he had as the window of opportunity closes with a soft thud of finality.
“Thanks,” Ashley says. For a second, Leon swears he sees the same disappointment he feels flash past her face, but then the second is gone and he is leading her out into the cold while they wait for the valet.
The car ride home is mostly silent, each of them lost in their thoughts. The digital clock reads 02:17 when Leon pulls up in front of her apartment. He gets out and jogs around to her side to open the door, a ridiculous act of chivalry he can’t stop himself from making. Ashley gets out and stops inches from him. “That was a really fun night, Leon,” she says. Leon watches their breath mingle in the cold and swallows past a sudden dryness.
“Thanks for inviting me,” he replies. They are so close he can feel the warmth of her along his front and they are so close to touching but he cannot bring himself to close the gap. She steps past him and the moment is lost again. He closes the car door and then gathers his courage. “We should do this again some time.”
Ashley brightens. “Yeah. Text me, okay?”
“I will,” Leon promises, and he watches her walk inside.
Later, lying in bed, he replays the dance over and over in his mind.
In his mind, just before he drifts into sleep, he allows himself to imagine what closing the gap between them would feel like and determines that he will not miss another opportunity if the universe is kind enough to grant him one.
V
The next night, Leon jerks awake, his breathing coming in ragged gasps. He presses a hand against the scar on his chest and reassures himself that it is not twitching, that there is nothing there except memories.
A therapist once told him memories can’t hurt you but he wonders some times how accurate that is.
When he calms down, he stares up at the ceiling and silently pleads with the universe. It will take exactly one episode for Ashley to realize he’s not nearly as composed as she thinks, that he’s playacting at steadiness. That he rescued her and she rescued him but some part of him got left behind in Spain, and some part of him was left behind in Raccoon City, and he doesn’t know how to get the pieces back.
He opens his phone and starts looking up reviews for nice restaurants. Ones that are small, quiet, the kind that require reservations. The kind where the lights never get brighter than they need to and if there’s any music at all it’s soft classical or someone on a piano, not Top 40 piped in on a speaker played a little bit too loud. There’s a Japanese place that fits the bill and he makes a reservation without even thinking about it, without even asking what day works, because he is filled with a growing desperation when he thinks about the way she smiles and does not want to give her the chance to realize how fucked up he is now, to think better of how much space she leaves between them.
It's late—or very early, depending on how one views the time—but he sends her a screenshot of the reservation before he loses his nerve. In the morning, maybe she’ll be upset at him, maybe she won’t reply at all, but here, in the close darkness of his room, he can imagine she’ll be pleased. He can imagine—
His phone buzzes beneath his fingers and he blinks at it in surprise. There on the screen is Ashley’s name and an unread message notification. He swipes it open and breathes a sigh of relief when he realizes that she’s free, that she’s excited to go. And then his relief turns into a wince and he taps out a quick message.
>Sorry to wake you. I thought your phone would be on silent for the night. My bad
The reply is almost immediate.
>You didn’t wake me, don’t worry. Couldn’t sleep
Leon doesn’t hesitate.
>Want to talk about it?
His phone rings a moment later. “Hey,” he says softly. There is no reason to be quiet, no one here to disturb, but he says it softly nevertheless, almost reverently.
“Hey,” Ashley says in a voice equally quiet. They sit for a minute on their respective ends of the phone, listening to the faint not-quite-silence that hangs between them. Then Ashley says, “You’re up late.”
“Maybe I’m just up early,” Leon says.
“Were you that excited about going to dinner?” Ashley says.
Maybe it’s just that being sleep-deprived makes him more honest but Leon finds himself saying, “I get these dreams sometimes. Usually it’s easier to do something else for a bit. In this case, being excited about dinner and looking up restaurants.”
“Yeah, dreams,” Ashley says. “Same here.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“You already asked me that. That’s why we’re talking now.”
“Sure, but now I’m asking specifically if you want to talk about the dreams.”
The not-quite-silence fills the phone again and Leon wonders if maybe he pushed too hard. Hell, he couldn’t even say more than he has dreams; what right is it to ask her to delve into hers?
But then she answers and his anxiety breaks. “Do you remember when I tried to shoot you?” she asks in a voice just barely audible.
“I remember Saddler controlling you and him trying to shoot me through you,” Leon says, feeling a flash of anger at the long-dead psychopath. “And I also remember you fought him and didn’t in fact shoot me.”
“Yeah.” A brief pause, then a breath. “Sometimes I dream that, but I almost always wind up shooting you in the end. Don’t read into that too much I guess.”
Leon huffs softly. “I don’t think Saddler fucking with you means you want to shoot me.”
Ashley laughs. It’s a ghost of the rich sound Leon remembers from the ballroom. “Good, ‘cause I don’t. But that was the dream.”
Leon wants to say something comforting. Something that will ease her mind, put her back to sleep, will reassure her.
Leon doesn’t even know how to reassure himself, not really.
“That whole thing was fucked,” he says. “Thanks for not shooting me, by the way.” Maybe not reassuring, but honest.
Ashley laughs again, and it’s a little closer to normal this time. “You’re welcome, Leon.”
“And just so you know,” he says, feeling a little buoyed by her laugh, “having fucked up dreams doesn’t make you a shitty person. You went through more than most people ever will. I’d be surprised if you weren’t having fucked up dreams.”
“How do you deal with them?”
The million dollar question. How does Leon deal with them? He mostly doesn’t. He wakes up from them and reminds himself he isn’t anywhere except his bedroom and he’s already survived the worst things that will ever happen to him. (He has to believe this or he will simply snap one day. One apocalypse is bad luck, two is a record. Three means fuck it, everyone goes down, him included, so he just refuses to believe in a third one.)
“I look up nice restaurants,” he says eventually. “Or I go for a jog. I read a lot of mystery novels and do a lot of puzzles. I do anything other than go back to sleep. And I try to remember that it’s already happened and it can’t hurt me anymore. That last part sounds so cliché.”
He waits for her to realize he’s not the shining knight she seems to think he is. That he is just as broken, maybe more.
“That makes me feel better,” she says instead, and Leon frowns in confusion.
“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself. “I mean,” he adds, pinching the bridge of his nose and making a note never to try and have a serious conversation when he’s sleep deprived, “I’m glad it makes you feel better, but why is that exactly?”
There’s a sound on the other end of the line that he realizes is her slowly blowing out a breath. “I guess I’m just relieved that it’s both of us. Sorry, that makes me sound terrible. But I’ve thought for a long time it’s something about me. Like, I can’t get over it because I’m… I don’t know. But… I’m glad it’s not just me. Sometimes I think it’s because Saddler is still…” She trails off and Leon can hear the hitch in her breath and something in his chest suddenly aches profoundly.
He rescued her and she rescued him but maybe they both left pieces in places they can never get back.
“Hey,” he says, fiercely but softly still. “Saddler is fish food. That whole fucking place blew up. There is fuck all that piece of shit can do to you now. And everything that happened—that wasn’t your fault, not even close.” He stops with effort, reins himself in. In a gentler voice he says, “There is nothing wrong with you. I’m so sorry about what happened. But none of it is your fault. You fought them the whole time, and it’s only because you fought them that either of us made it out, okay? There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Okay,” Ashley says in a voice that’s a little thicker and a little muffled and Leon knows she’s been crying even though she doesn’t say it. “Okay.”
Leon wishes he was there so he could wrap her up in a hug, so he could try to comfort her in some way that isn’t words. But all he has is words, so he says, “It’s not your fault.”
“I believe you,” Ashley says. And then, “Do you still want to go to dinner?”
“Of course,” he says instantly. “Why wouldn’t I? It would be a little hypocritical if I didn’t want to go to dinner because you had nightmares.”
“Okay.” A pause. “Thanks Leon. I’m gonna try to go back to sleep. But I’ll see you for dinner?”
“Definitely. And Ashley?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time you have a nightmare, you can call me, okay? Any time you like.”
“I will.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Leon spends a long time looking at his phone after she hangs up. He is pretty sure he helped, at least a little, and when he lays back down, his own words ring in his ears.
It’s not your fault.
Leon sleeps without more dreams for the first time in days.
VI
Leon is not in Spain and he is not in Raccoon City and despite that he is nervous as hell as he sits in his car and waits for Ashley to appear. Sure, he’s been to hoity-toity parties and for coffee with her, but this will be the first meeting that is unambiguously a date. Maybe this will be when she realizes that she just wants to be friends. That she isn’t broken, but maybe he is, and it would be better if she returns to her life and he returns to his existence.
They haven’t spoken since the phone call. Maybe she’s had time to think and realized this isn’t for her. That he isn’t the man she remembers. That he doesn’t know if he can ever be that man again.
His ruminations are interrupted by a tap on his window. He unlocks the door and smiles at Ashley as she slides in. “Hey,” he says.
“Hi. How are you?” Ashley smiles at him and then turns her attention to her seatbelt, giving Leon the opportunity to reach into the back seat and grab the bouquet of flowers he picked up on the way. Nothing fancy, no roses or anything, but it’s a pretty spray of daisies and deep red chrysanthemums with lots of greenery around them. He waits and is gratified when Ashley turns back to him and her jaw drops. “Leon!” she exclaims. “You didn’t have to get me flowers!”
“I did get you flowers though,” he says as he offers them to her. Her fingers brush against his as she takes the bouquet. His hand tingles and he has to force himself not to flex his fingers before he lays them back on the steering wheel and starts to drive. “How have you been?”
“Good,” Ashley says, still smiling down at the flowers. “Busy. But I slept better.”
Something tight in Leon’s chest that he didn’t even know was there loosens, just slightly. “I’m glad,” he says.
They exchange chit-chat on the drive. Leon’s attention is divided between the conversation, driving, and the vague anxiety he can’t seem to shake. In the restaurant, he pulls her chair out for her, wonders if that’s too old fashioned, and has to drag himself back into the conversation by force of will. He hasn’t been this nervous in a long time and he can’t even say why it matters so much to him that she likes him or doesn’t.
They sail through conversational topics over cocktails and appetizers. Ashley gets figs stuffed with goat cheese and when Leon observes he’s never had a fig, she all but forces him to try one. “They’re my favourite,” she confides after she eats one. “But it’s hard to get really good fresh ones here sometimes. The best ones are from Greece, but the ones we get are mostly from California.”
For one mad moment, Leon almost asks her to go to Greece with him just to get her a basket of figs. Instead, he says, “I can see why you like them so much,” and changes the subject. He cannot help but imagine her in Greece, looking at some ruin or sitting on a beach. He imagines her happy and laughing and eating figs and wants so badly for that to be her reality instead of the one haunted by nightmares.
What if he holds her back? What if she can’t escape her past because he’s a living breathing reminder of it?
Leon does not usually think of himself as a selfish person, but he has to wonder if it is selfish to try and make himself part of her life when he so obviously does not belong there. She belongs in sunshine.
He belongs to the shadows.
With effort, he returns his attention to the conversation. He is starting to feel that after dinner, he should drop her off, make his apologies—maybe he can say he just didn’t feel a spark, that’s something that comes up in the mystery novels he reads—and then make sure he doesn’t impose himself on her any further. That would be better for her. So he spends the rest of dinner trying to memorize how she looks under the lights, the way her mouth forms words, the way her bracelet glints when she gesticulates.
By dessert, he’s made up his mind. He can’t offer her anything that she doesn’t already have except an extra helping of trauma and fewer nights of sleep. It is a painful realization but one he can’t escape. Soon it will just be him again, and he’ll be alone with his dreams of Las Plagas and his memories of dead eyes.
When they pull up at her apartment, he gets out to open the door for her again. He steels himself to tell her it’s been nice, to start making his excuses. She steps out with the flowers, and he is struck by how the smell of them mingles so well with her perfume. His resolve wavers, just for a moment. “I had a great time,” he starts, because sooner started, sooner over, and he doesn’t want to drag this out for either of their sakes.
“Me too,” Ashley says with a grin. She steps past him, the warmth of her moving away, and he turns to watch her like a sunflower turns to the sun.
“Ashley,” he says, trying to start again.
But then she says, “Would you like to come up for a coffee?” and whatever resolve Leon has crumbles. He can be unselfish in the morning. But here, in the glow of the streetlights, with her smiling and looking shyly at him from under her lashes, here Leon cannot help but be selfish. The universe owes him nothing, Ashley owes him nothing, but he wants to be selfish for one more night before he has to wake up from this.
“I would really like that,” he says honestly, maybe half a second too fast, and then gestures at the car. “Let me just park properly.”
He finds a spot half a block away and then jogs back to the door, gratified to see her still waiting outside, her breath coming in great plumes that hang in the still night. “Just for coffee,” he says as they step inside.
“Just for coffee,” Ashley agrees as the elevator doors close behind them.
Leon waits behind her while she unlocks her door, wondering what he will see. He’s never considered what her space might look like, never thought he might be privileged enough to do more than just imagine it. Her apartment turns out to be bright—he wonders briefly if she collects lamps, because he sees half a dozen in her living room alone—and colourful. Thick blankets drape across the couch and her floor is carpeted by three mismatched rugs. An orange cat is sleeping on a red chair, though it opens one eye and meows half-heartedly at her before it resumes its nap. “That’s Pickles,” she says as she shucks her coat and her boots off.
“Pickles?” Leon says, not quite sure he heard right.
“Pickles,” Ashley says, already moving to the kitchen, separated from the living room only by a granite-topped island. “He mostly sleeps, but he might come say hi to you. He’s a bit picky about people, don’t take it personally if he goes to hide.” She rummages through some cupboards until she comes up with a vase and starts trimming the flowers.
“I won’t read anything into whether or not your cat likes me,” Leon says. He makes sure his boots are neatly lined up and his coat is straight on the hanger before following her into the room. Since the chair is already taken, he sits on the couch instead. “Do you need any help?”
“Pretty sure I can manage flowers and coffee,” she says with a laugh. “Thanks though.” A moment later she says, “Oh, you could pick a record though!”
“Sure thing,” Leon says. He spots a record player in the corner, under a large hanging vine that spills out of a basket. An old milk crate is tucked under the table, full of record sleeves. The cat meows at him as he passes the chair and he waves at it absentmindedly. He pulls the milk crate out and starts flipping through the records. Some bands he recognizes, some he doesn’t. There’s a few records that are just big band or swing music, which surprises him, but he can’t quite explain why. After a moment of indecision, he decides to go with an album from something called The Glenn Miller Orchestra.
“Good choice,” Ashley says as she carries two mugs of steaming coffee out to the couch and the first chords spill off the record and into the air.
“Thanks,” Leon says as he takes a mug. Their fingers brush again and he tries to memorize how warm she is in the half-second of contact. He is stealing all these things that he does not deserve, her time and her smiles and her whisper-light touch. He will drink his coffee and he will leave and have only these stolen things to remember this, to remember her on the nights where he cannot go back to sleep. Leon is a thief and he will take with him whatever his heart can carry. “Your apartment is cozy,” he says, looking around the room again. There are strings of fairy lights that crisscross the ceiling and what feels like every possible colour somewhere in the rugs or the furniture or the art.
“Do you like it?” Ashley asks.
“I do,” he replies. “It’s nicer than my place.”
In part because he has made little effort to make his place anything more than where he can sleep and workout and read and shower. Why would he need to make it somewhere people want to come over? If he were to die on some deployment somewhere, it would only take an afternoon of work and a new coat of paint to get it ready for sale.
Ashley smiles at him and he forgets what he was thinking about. “I wanted to make it something that could never be mistaken for anywhere those maniacs would want to be.”
“Somewhere safe,” Leon says.
“Somewhere safe,” she agrees.
The record is playing something soft and slow with demure trumpets and gentle flutes and the apartment smells like green growing things and coffee and Ashley practically glows under the myriad of low lights and Leon realizes with a shock that he is happy, really and properly happy. The realization is followed by a crushing ache when he remembers this is temporary.
Does it really have to be temporary?
“Dance with me?” Ashley says as she stands and offers him her hand.
Leon doesn’t even need to think about it before he accepts. He lets himself be led to an open corner and then pulls her close, closer than they were in the ballroom under a hundred pairs of watchful eyes. He knows this is dangerous, that this will not help him when he decides to leave.
Funny how a decision that seemed so obvious and so inflexible suddenly seems so hard to follow through.
“You sure like dancing,” he murmurs.
“I love dancing. And you’re good at it too,” Ashley says. “Even when it’s just in a living room.”
“I’d dance with you anywhere,” Leon says and means it with his whole being. If he thought he was drowning before, he is dying now, and it’s the nicest thing he’s ever felt. He knows if he does not leave now, he won’t unless she tells him to. He will be selfish because he is desperate to stay in her orbit. Some part of him knows—prays—hopes that she will save him again if only he stays with her, if only he gives her everything he has to offer and gladly. Leon has been through hell for her, with her, and he should release her and leave and let her go back to her shining world.
Leon does not leave.
Ashley looks up at him and he is suddenly aware that her face is only inches from his. Her lips are just a little bit parted. He can feel her breath against his skin and its beautiful and aggravating and he finds himself leaning down, stopping when they are almost touching, when one more little push will bring them together. The world has narrowed to this single inch that separates them, a space absent of touch but filled with sharp warmth. “Tell me no and I’ll stop,” Leon whispers. “Or push me away and I’ll leave.”
Ashley does neither of these things. Instead, she leans up and closes the distance between them and then they are kissing and Leon is entirely lost. There is no hope of leaving now, no hope that he can preserve any separation from want he wants and what he should do. He is a ship that has plunged heedless into a hurricane, and he will be sunk or he will see the sunlight on the other side.
Ashley pulls away, just slightly, and says, “I don’t what you to stop. Or to leave.” Her voice is unstable, full of extra breath, and her cheeks are too pink for it just to be from the lights.
Instead of answering her, Leon pulls her in again. Maybe in the morning this will be nothing but a memory but for now, for now he has been given grace for his selfishness, and he will not waste it.
His kisses are hungry but she responds to them with equal enthusiasm. He starts to fiddle with the hem of her sweater until he is able to slip his fingers underneath it, finding warm skin. Ashley inhales sharply and something in Leon’s abdomen thrills in response.
This is as close to heaven as Leon is ever likely to get.
There is a quiet desperation in how he moves his hands along her side, how he silently begs to learn the exact shape of her and commit it to memory. When her fingers graze his belly he starts a little. This is more human contact than he has had in years.
In a decade or more.
It takes a little effort to figure out how to pick her up while he keeps kissing her, but Leon manages. Ashley breaks away anyways with a startled little laugh and Leon thinks he would kill someone to hear her laugh like that again. They look at each other, breathing hard, and then Ashley whispers, “Bedroom is the door on the left,” and gives him a grin that’s downright wicked.
Leon wastes no time in carrying her there.
VII
Something is twitching in Leon’s chest. He feels it shift, wrap around his ribcage. He reaches for it and it pulses, stars covering his vision, and then it seems to slide down into his arm, into his fingers, freezing them in place. Every attempt he makes to move increases the resistance until he’s entirely still except for the twitching that agonizes all his senses.
Ashley steps in front of him and he tries to open his mouth to warn her, to tell her to run, but his teeth are clamped so tightly together he is sure a molar is going to crack any minute. His whole body is twitching now, and he can’t tell if it’s in time with his pulse or if even his heart has been hijacked.
“Goodbye,” Ashley says, and Leon realizes that the veins in her face are black, twitching to the same time as the thing burrowed beneath his skin. She raises a gun, finger on the trigger, and Leon tries to force himself to move—
He sits up with a gasp, the pistol’s discharge still ringing in his ears. Already his hand is halfway under the pillow, reaching for a knife that isn’t there.
Leon is not in Spain. He is not in Raccoon City.
He is in Ashley’s bedroom, and this realization hits him like a ton of bricks as he buries his head in his hands. Maybe he can just lie back down, maybe she hasn’t woken up, maybe he can—
“Leon?” Ashley says sleepily from somewhere beside him.
So much for that idea. Leon makes no effort to move, even though he should. He should try and brush this off, but he doesn’t know how to, doesn’t know how to finish slowing his pulse back down, how to sound like it was nothing. To look at her now, to see the pity or the dawning realization that he is no longer whole in her eyes… he cannot bear to see it, and so he stays where he is and tries to make his breathing sound even instead of shaky.
“It’s alright,” Ashley says softly as she sets a hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, you’re here in my apartment. There’s nothing here except me and the cat.”
This is not what Leon expected. Gentleness is not something he encounters.
It is not something he deserves.
There is a sudden lump in his throat and he can’t say anything past it. His shoulders shake with the effort of keeping himself together. Ashley continues murmuring soft reassurances and rubbing little circles on his back. Eventually, the pressure in his throat fades and he is all at once exhausted. “Sorry to wake you,” he mutters, uncurling just a little.
“It’s fine,” Ashley says in the same gentle tone, but there is a hint of iron underneath it, a suggestion that she will not bother entertaining an argument or further apologies. “Dreams?”
Leon just nods.
“They’re the worst. Here, lie back down.” She tugs lightly on his shoulders and he finds himself complying. Ashley tucks herself close to him and he finds himself wrapping an arm around her. She is warm and if she is warm that means she is alive and breathing and here with him and that means Leon won, no matter what the dreams might say.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t have to see this,” Leon says, more to the ceiling than to her. “I’ll…”
Ashley huffs. “You’ll what?” she asks, and then doesn’t bother waiting for an answer. “You’ll say something stupid because you’re sleep deprived. You having a nightmare doesn’t mean anything, Leon.”
This line of thinking does not seem to match his own.
“But…”
Ashley props herself up just enough to suddenly loom in his vision and look down at him sternly. “Listen. You told me that nightmares meant there was nothing wrong with me and it wasn’t my fault. Now either that’s true for both of us, or for neither of us. Okay?”
“Okay,” Leon says, somewhat bewildered by the quiet ferocity in her voice.
“Good.” She lowers herself back down and yawns. “Goodnight, Leon.”
“Goodnight,” he whispers. He holds her while her breathing evens back out into sleep.
Leon is not in Spain.
Leon is not in Raccoon City.
Leon is here, in Ashley’s room, and she is warm against him. He marvels at her, at her resilience, her gentleness, her grace. The way he saved her and she saved him and she is still saving him here in the quiet darkness.
As he drifts back to sleep, for the first time, Leon feels like maybe he is a lucky man after all.