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It starts almost three weeks after Leon finally settles down for the first time. Sherry is somewhere safe, far away from him, the government paying his rent for him as long as he does whatever he asks, a rookie who just had dumb luck and survived the impossible. That's when he meets the rest of them. Jill Valentine, a former STARS member, refuses to join whatever team they want to send Leon to spearhead, but is one of the only people still alive and around who understands what he's going through.
She comes with Carlos Oliveira, a man almost a head taller than Leon with messy curls that don't look cared for and a small scar across his cheek that Leon always finds himself drawn to. Like Jill, he doesn't want any part in any United States Government-sanctioned activities, doesn't want to join the new organization Jill is working on, and just wants to go home. He can't. They won't let him leave, they make up new things to keep him here, and they don't pay for his hotel stays.
Leon offers him his pull-out couch, it's not much, but it's close to Leon's new headquarters and Carlos' temporary headquarters, closer than the shitty motel he had been paying for nightly on the hope that he would be allowed to leave soon. Carlos took it, because they both knew that he didn't really have a choice, and it was nice.
He makes himself scarce, always in meetings demanding to be let go, or curled up on the couch with his laptop typing up report after report so he can just be rid of this stupid event. But they will never let him go, and it seems like even Carlos knows that, he knows too much, he's too valuable, he can handle himself better than anyone else. It also doesn't help that he formerly worked for the company that caused this whole mess, and Carlos isn't exactly keen on keeping any of their secrets.
Carlos will tell them anything they want to hear, so they're always pulling him to hear everything he knows, which is not as much as Leon had expected honestly.
It was almost peaceful, living with Carlos, he's funny, they have the same sense of humor and the same sense of justice for the people around them. He doesn't mind when Sherry comes to visit whenever she may be allowed, which is not often over the first few months. They go to the bar down the street from their place and drink until Leon feels numb in the face and they have to carry each other home or call Jill for backup because they somehow got lost in the three blocks back to their place.
Because it's theirs now. Leon doesn't have a lot of stuff, but Carlos' stuff has been slowly invading around his apartment, like a spiraling infection, photos of his family propped up next to newly printed ones of Leon's, the very few he has, slowly Leon's office becomes Carlos' storage unit, before just becoming his bed room, they move their desks into the living room, and it's tight, but it'll work until he has to leave.
Carlos's food fills his fridge, he likes cooking, not like Leon, who hates going out to restaurants and also hates cooking so he will reach into the fridge and eat whatever he can find raw. Carlos found him once just eating a bag of carrots and decided he had to fix that immediately, and took up the chore of cooking for them almost every night, as long as Leon washed up after them.
Carlos fits into his life better than he would like to admit, better than the ex-girlfriend he had, whom he only lived with for a few months before she dumped his ass and moved out. Carlos slots in like he was always there, his drinking buddy, his movie watching buddy, he proofreads his reports and Leon will spellcheck his, they eat dinner together every night and watch bad reality TV on bad days when neither of them wants to leave the house.
It's their place now, in the few months that they spend together, growing closer by the day, which is why it sucks when Leon is sent on his first-ever mission, a request by the goddamn president himself. The Raccoon City outbreak was less contained than they had originally thought, and one infected had gotten out and was terrorizing a small town on the other side of the Arklay mountains, and it was his job to deal with it, solo.
Leon takes it in stride, because he has no other choice, and tells Carlos not to burn the place down with that charming smile he's becoming known for around the office that Carlos can always see through.
He doesn't acknowledge it, just gives him an identical grin, and says he'll probably get a lot more work done with Leon out of the house.
The mission itself is easy, a couple of infected woodland creatures and a mutant bear are easy to handle, flying under the radar in a small town that's already on edge was harder. He was a different man to them, a new name and badge, FBI investigating the 'murders'. He felt like a bad crime show main character, playing a role he was never meant to play.
The zombies were easy, but killing people who look like they're still human is a lot harder than killing a mutant rabid bear. Leon finds himself tossing and turning at night, seeing the people's dead eyes looking back at him, stale and emotionless, not there at all anymore, their hands twitching until they stop, motionless. Gone, for good this time, no longer a suit being puppeteered by a virus, but a dead man once more.
Leon sleeps in a motel just outside of town, staring at the lamp he can't bear to turn off, the scratchy sheets rubbing against scars new and old, healed and healing, and he'll get up, walk around the room, desperate to talk to someone, anyone, who isn't a countryman wanting him out of their town. He wants to talk to Carlos or Jill or even Claire, if she's even still alive out there, wherever she has found herself.
The nights spent tossing and turning, sleepless and going outside to his small patio to stare at the sky make him sloppy, slow, and tired. But the mission is over within the week, once he's cleared every square acre of that damn forest, once he's triple checked their water systems to make sure nothing is contaminating it, once he makes sure there's nothing wrong with anyone in the town, no bites or bleeding eyes or scarred skin.
A chopper picks him up and brings him straight back to headquarters, they strip him of his clothes and weapons, everything he brought with him and everything he got his carefully analyzed, and what they deem evidence is taken from him, files he found and photos he took, even random trinkets, even the shoes on his feet which they did not pay for. Leon's still mad about it when they give him clothes to change into.
It's late. Sometime past midnight when he's finally allowed to leave with the promise that he'll be back bright and early tomorrow to talk to the president again, to give his verbal recorded statement before he returns to his new office to write a full report on the situation, which is expected on his boss's desk by the end of the week.
He's tired. Leon is so tired. He's spent the last week unable to sleep, cut up and shot at it and bitten, cured and slapped around by townsfolk, he hasn't been able to close his eyes without seeing Raccoon City, without seeing all the destruction he had caused, all the lives he couldn't save, lives that would never be put to rest, trapped in the ruins of buildings that had a bomb dropped on them.
No one talks about it. They'll bring it up, but they don't say how it feels, to know that if Leon hadn't figured out those stupid puzzles it would've been him there, gone, could've been Sherry or Claire or Jill or Carlos.
But it wasn't them. It was just thousands of innocent lives, people who had never gotten the chance to escape, who had been living among the dead for weeks at that point, people who would still have a chance if anyone had cared enough to help them. But no one had, and now the echoes of their voices haunt Leon's memory, their faces in the streets, stained with blood and mold all he sees when he closes his eyes at night.
Leon gets a cab home. It's dark and the streetlights get progressively more worn down as they approach their apartment, until the flickering turns to fully dead lights, bathing him in nothing but moonlight. He tosses the cab driver a hundred and doesn't say anything. He trudges up the stairs, the elevator had been down at their place for two months now, and Leon doesn't think they're clamoring to replace it.
Leon's whole body hurts, achy bones creaking as he ascends the stairs, his muscles pulled tight, flexing uncomfortably under his skin. He twisted the same ankle twice, got scratched by a couple of mutant forest dwellers, and got tossed around by a couple of particularly strong zombies, fell through the ground into a mineshaft, all the typical stuff. Not as bad as Raccoon City, but he had almost forgotten how much pain he was in after that night, but he can't forget now, can't ignore the sharp pain shooting throughout his entire body as he unlocks his door with shaky hands, his keys the only thing they let him take home.
The place is quiet when he gets in, Carlos isn't on the couch slumped over his laptop like he is a lot of the time, everything is clean, almost too clean for how they normally leave it, and Leon's already on edge, but finds himself holding his personal gun closer to his side, hand steady as he practically stumbles into his room. He doesn't point it at the lump in his bed, hidden under the covers, because he recognizes that mop of tangled curls poking out of the top of his blankets.
The lump moves, fast, snapping up and his blankets fall around him, a hand whips out, and right in Leon's face is Carlos' personal pistol.
He lowers it almost immediately, safety clicking back on, and puts it on the bedside table for them both to see hastily.
"I'm sorry," Carlos says softly.
Leon doesn't know if he's apologizing for shoving a gun in his face or sleeping in his bed, but Leon doesn't particularly care. Carlos looks soft, sleep rumpled, one pant leg of his sweat pants is riding up almost to his knee, there are creases on his face and his too-big shirt is hanging off one shoulder. Leon places his gun next to Carlos's on the bedside table.
They're not used to being serious with each other. They're the funny ones, the ones that use humor to cope with all the shit they've been through. But this isn't the first time Carlos had waved a gun at him, the other few times when jolting awake from a nightmare, and it won't be the last. They never talk about it, they never talk about any of the serious stuff, and Leon knows they won't tonight, but maybe they could.
"Leon, I'm really sorry, I know this is weird—"
So it was about the bed then, huh.
"Shut up," Leon says, he shrugs his scratchy jacket off his shoulders, kicking off his shoes before he takes a step closer to Carlos, whose sitting on the edge of his bed looking ready to bolt back to his own bedroom. "I don't care."
"You should, I mean this is really fucking weird of me to do—"
Leon doesn't know why he does it, but he steps between Carlos' open legs, and grabs a hold of his face, and he can feel his cheeks heat up under his palms, can feel his chest against his thighs, the way his heart begins to thump wildly, and he wonders if Carlos can hear his, beating just as hard.
"I missed you too," he says earnestly, "man," he tacks on for good measure.
Carlos grins, any fear of being ridiculed gone, his hands come gently up to Leon's waist like he's nervous, rolling the state-issued shirt between his fingers.
"You look awful."
"Not a very nice thing to say to the guy who's letting you crash in his bed."
”Leon.”
Leon pushes him down, and they both flop onto the bed uncomfortably, until Carlos wiggles up, and they're face to face almost touching, until Leon moves in and wraps himself around Carlos like a clingy koala.
He had always been tactile, and his ex had always hated it. Carlos had come from a big family, a touchy family, he was a hugger and Leon had to get used to it all over again, but it was never anything like this, it was never their whole bodies pressed together like they wanted to melt into one being. Leon doesn't know what it means, but he doesn't care, for now, he just wants to sleep.
Leon buries his face in Carlos' neck and closes his eyes, and for the first time in months, he doesn't see the faces of the dead staring back at him, but he sees Carlos, with stars in his eyes, soft and sleep-rumpled, holding him. Leon sees what he imagines he'll look like tomorrow morning, and maybe, for the first time since Raccoon City, he'll dream of something good for once.