Work Text:
When the morning bleeds through the cracks of his curtain, she kisses the corner of his parted mouth— because the thin slit of light landed in that exact spot, and it glowed like an objective marker. Stray hair strands litter his forehead, and she brushes them away; light taps, the pads of her fingers in kitten licks.
It was strange.
To watch someone breathe. To count their lashes. To see the machinations of what would appear when they wake up— brows raised first, then eyelids, then blue irises, then a voice that creaked like old floorboards, “Morning….”
She takes back her hand, as if she just touched something scalding.
“Morning, handsome.”
He raises a brow, the corner of his mouth, the very same one she kissed, quirks up, “What were you doing?”
What was she doing?
Ada doesn’t know. Ada doesn’t know what she’s doing at all. There are times when she’s less calculated, when there is an ache in her bones that numbed all the coherence in her brain, when her skin yearns— so hard— to cling onto someone else’s. And that scares her. Because she is Ada Wong.
And she will be.
Even when Leon is this close.
“What do you think?”
Leon scoffs, then rolls his eyes, and Ada reflects, biting the hollows of her cheek as she watches him: would she treat him differently in Raccoon city if he was less handsome?
“Think you’re watching me sleep.” he cranes his head. His bangs follow. He had unnaturally fluffy hair. She likes digging her fingers in it, she discovered, last night, when he was… more unconscious, “Are you?”
Yes. She was. She was watching him sleep, because she wanted to be close to him and it was unbearable— how much she wanted to just touch and feel and claw inside of him. She was so happy she was here, wrapped in the blanket he slept in every night, with her head lying on the same pillow, and his weight on her frame; everything was so lived in, so grounded, it made her feel alive. Or whatever this was that she felt.
Because this… this is unfamiliar.
Fear and doubt, on the other hand, “Or kill you in your sleep, really think I’m just not using you again?”
“There are more efficient ways.”
“I like to play with my food.”
He props himself up with his arm, she stares him down.
And maybe he’d drag her out of his bed, escort her out of his room, throw out what little she took with her, or he’d decide that Ada Wong was a butterfly, and he preferred the chase, and she wasn’t that beautiful when she was as close as she was, wearing out every day he’d chosen to let her stay. And maybe… maybe that was easier.
Or maybe.
“Go ahead then.” he stands up from the bed, and Ada stifles at the loss of his warmth. He pulls off the blanket away from her, shakes it flat, and puts it over his arm, “Stab me with the kitchen knife while I make you breakfast.”
She draws her lips in a thin line.
He does too, less out of contempt and self-pity, so it seems.
—
Ada doesn’t really know if whatever tethered them to each other was love.
(And there’s a small part of her that wanted it to be.)
“I love you.” she mutters once, when Leon is out buying groceries for her fifth breakfast since she’d started living with him. She says it to the cobwebs in the corner of Leon’s ceiling. And it fills her with so much flourish that she smiles. And says it again. “I love you.”
“I love you.” And again, embracing the pillow that housed his wooden shampoo scent. She kicks her legs and buries her face in it, taking a deep inhale.
“I love you.” And again, when she’s putting his shirt on, oversized against her frame, with an alcohol stain just right in the collar. She takes it off, and tries to scrub the stain out ten minutes later.
“I love you.” she whispers this time, tiptoeing on a tall wooden stool as she dusts off the webs in his ceiling.
Leon comes home, and his house is a lot cleaner, and Ada’s legs are propped up against the coffee table, and she’s watching an old DVD. She doesn’t look at him at all, but smiles at the sound of his metal keys slotting around a sticky hook she tacked on the wall.
—
Ada loses her favorite Dior lipstick once. She assumed it made its home in a hotel bathroom from across the world, probably, so she thinks nothing of it.
But tonight, she slips inside Leon’s apartment window, simply because it was on the way to the airport, scuttles on towards his bathroom to reapply her makeup, and finds a very similar lipstick lying down on his bathroom sink.
She furrows her eyebrows at its offensive location and picks it up to observe it. Maybe it was another girl’s? Or maybe Leon had been gaining the penchant for expensive lipcare?
But its tube is halved and its butt had a metal scratch. This was hers, all right.
Her reveling is interrupted by the telltale click of the apartment’s living room light switch, she bites back a smile.
She leaves her lipstick there.
She’ll pick it up another day.
She slips out the window, leaves it ajar.
—
“I bought a drawer for you.” Leon says, this time, as a disembodied voice from his tiny storage room.
“And why is that?”
“We can’t keep sharing the same closet.” Leon peeks out from the door, reemerging with a tall Ikea box, “I mistake your thongs for mine sometimes.”
Ada chuckles softly, “Here I thought you were just some perv.”
“That, too.” Leon hands her the box, “You’ve assembled guns, you can do this by yourself.”
Ada stares the box down, then looks at Leon, “And what’ll you do?”
Leon shrugs, “Think of more ways to furnish my apartment so you stay over more often.” he points at the Ikea box, “This is part one. Won’t help you so you stay an hour longer.”
Ada scoffs, then turns away to hide the smile that escapes her lips.
—
Leon never really needed to come up with another way, Ada thinks, when she’s eating her twenty-third breakfast at his apartment.
(Leon never needed to come up with another way— Ada assumed this was her twenty-third breakfast, somewhere along the way, she’d lost count).