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Claire didn’t mind puzzles. As a matter of fact, she was quite good at solving them. To Claire, every little detail mattered. She found puzzles entertaining. Even thrilling at times. But ultimately, it was the reward that she chased - feeling euphoric when everything fit together perfectly.
But there was always that one puzzle that left her feeling hopeless and lost. The one that made her question everything.
The rewards from this particular puzzle left her with melancholy. Frustration. Anxiety.
An incomplete puzzle with missing pieces. She had to learn to hang it up. But, as stubborn as Claire Redfield is, she always left it out on the table, returning to it when an opportunity presented itself.
Even now she eyes this puzzle - watches from across the table as he leans back in his chair, arms crossed with that typical narrow gaze of his. Despite having told her brother that she didn’t have time to join them, she ends up out with them at dinner.
And it’s painfully awkward. As she’s trying to come up with a believable excuse just to dash out the front door of the restaurant, Chris asks her a question and it throws her completely off base. When all eyes turn to her, she can feel a memorable pair of blue the most.
Being around him was easy at one point, almost as easy as breathing. But as of late, she was finding it harder to be herself. And everyone noticed. Chris and Jill do a great job of acting like the weird vibe that hovers in the air between Claire and Leon isn't a massive elephant in the room. In doing so, they end up having to talk the most in their group to keep the conversation flowing easily.
“You have your hair down.” Claire’s eyes snap to Leon’s instantly.
She runs a hand through her hair, pushing it back. “Yeah, it was … giving me a headache," she explains truthfully.
He nods his head as he looks down at his lap. “Sherry called me yesterday,” he tells her. As she waits for him to explain more, he looks up at her again. “She came across a strange document about a virus or something. When I tried to ask her about it, she wouldn’t tell me anything. Has she told you anything about it?”
Claire sighs. “No, she hasn’t. I’ll give her a call tonight,” she promises. Leon looks at her, a bit strangely, his eyes softening in the usual way they do when they talked. In a way she wishes he wouldn't.
“What are you guys talking about over there?” Chris asks. “Anything important?”
“No,” Claire says as she grins. “Why do you assume it’s important?”
Her brother gives her a look that she can read plain as day. “Because you guys never talk anymore. I figured it had to be work related then.”
Claire ignores the statement. “It’s Sherry. I just need to give her a call. Actually, I’ll be right back. Just order me whatever,” she says to her brother, tapping his shoulder on the way up.
As she steps away from the table, her legs find themselves walking to the entrance. She exits the restaurant and steps into the cloudy day outside. Finding her phone in her jacket, she pulls it out and goes to her messages app.
Claire: Did you need to tell me something?
It takes a solid minute but the blonde girl responds to her in quick fashion.
Sherry: No???
Claire: You told Leon about some document? Why didn’t you tell me?
Sherry: Oh that
Sherry: Wait are you with Leon right now?
Claire: Dinner with Chris and Jill
Sherry: And Leon I assume. You know it’d be a lot easier if you guys would just get past whatever this is
Sherry: Our group chat feels like a cemetery
Claire: I’ll call you tonight.
Sherry: I am begging you to talk to him. PLEASEEEE
Sherry: This is ridiculous and you know it. Just talk to him.
Claire huffs out a deep sigh as she pockets her phone again. As she gets ready to turn to head back inside, it’s Leon she sees walking out the door. “Hey,” she says to him as he steps closer to her. “I was just messaging Sherry.”
“Claire.” It’s her name, one she’s heard for decades, but when he says it, she swears it feels brand new. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll figure out what’s in that document and I can let you know-”
“No,” he cuts her off. “Not about that.”
“Oh... Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get back inside,” she tells him, hoping he would just accept it for the time being. This conversation was one she certainly didn’t want to have outside of an Italian restaurant while her brother was likely watching them.
“Claire, you have to understand that this hasn’t been easy on me either,” Leon says to her. “When it comes to you and Sherry, I’ve been dealt with a lot of unfortunate cards."
She narrows her eyes at him, ready to argue but listening nonetheless. It was a compelling start, she would give him that.
“I only wanted to protect you both. This is the only way I know how. And somehow, it ended up like this. With us not even looking at one another.”
Claire takes in a deep breath, struggling with her emotions as they run rampant inside of her. “Protect us from what, Leon? Have I ever been someone that needed help?”
Leon only stares at her with defeat twinkling in his eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. This was … something that could have ended badly. You would have carried a target on your back.”
Rolling her eyes slightly, she crosses her arms. “Okay, fine. You were protecting us. Thank you, Leon. I really appreciate your valiant efforts. Is that what you needed me to say? Let’s just move on.”
She steps around him to head back in when his hand reaches out and wraps around her elbow. Not tightly, or firmly, but just enough to hold her there in place. “You’re mad at me for something else.”
Bingo.
She hopes her face doesn’t show it. He was always really good at finding out things, at picking up on clues, being a detective. It never took him too long. For a moment, she wonders how long he’d known about this too and made her look foolish.
“I’m not mad at you,” she lies, staring him down, hoping he stops.
“What’s wrong, Claire?” he asks her, his hand dropping from her elbow. “Just tell me.”
And it’s times like these, that the puzzle seemingly wants to fit together. Where she looks at him and sees him gazing down at her like she’s all that matters right then and there. It always feels nice, receiving his full attention.
But she’s hard-headed and refuses to admit it out loud to herself, let alone him. The feeling of being someone’s second best just cuts too deep. Because that’s all she understood herself to be in his life. Watching as he pined after another woman all these years made her crush on him turn bitter.
That’s all he ever was to her. A schoolgirl kind of crush. A fantasy that survived in daydreams of being in a courtyard, smiling despite the circumstances. The delusions of a happy-ever-after in a world like theirs.
He would never be hers. She knew that. It was a stupid and silly idea to let it grow into something much bigger than it needed to be.
Actually, it was her fault they ended up like this. Told herself that it’d be a lot easier if she’d just stop talking to him altogether. Finding a perfect way ‘out’ was all she needed and she took it as soon as it was feasible.
All the pretending she did, acting like it didn’t physically pain her whenever he said that woman’s name. When her friends and colleagues would gossip about it to her every time he got entangled with a certain mercenary. So, yeah, cutting him off completely was pretty much ideal for her.
“I can’t tell you,” she says quietly, her eyes glued to the nice shoes she put on for the evening.
“Hey, look at me… Why not?” He tries to get her to look at him and when she does, she sees the rookie police officer. It sends a jolt down her spine. All of her efforts to try and see him differently, to see him as just a teammate and nothing else, go down the drain. She wondered if any of the moments back then meant half as much to him as they meant to her.
“Leon, please,” she begs him, taking a step backward. “Let’s just… talk about it later.”
Running a hand through his hair with evident frustration, he agrees to that. “Okay, after dinner then.”
Claire wants to argue with that but the way he looks at her makes her go numb. For a moment neither of them move. The cloudy afternoon air sits heavy between them, carrying the faint smell of rain and Italian spices drifting from the restaurant behind them.
When they return to the table, Chris immediately looks between them, his expression sharpened with poorly hidden curiosity. Claire beats him to the question. “Sherry found something odd. But I’ll deal with it later.” Chris squints at her like he’s trying to read between the lines, but thankfully their food appears before he can start any interrogations.
The sky darkens when they argue over the check. For a good couple of minutes, the last bit of their evening ended with everyone arguing over the bill. Chris won that battle by slyly giving his credit card to the waiter when no one was looking.
By the time they step outside, the air smells heavily of rain. The sky above them is thick with dark clouds that hang low over the city, the streetlights flickering on one by one as evening settles in. Jill and Chris head in the direction of their parked car down the block. “You two coming?” Chris asks over his shoulder when he realizes they aren’t following.
Leon doesn’t answer. Claire hesitates.
Jill catches on quickly as she backtracks to give Claire a quick hug. “We’ll have to catch up soon. Just us next time,” Jill says with a grin. Walking back over to Chris, she tugs at his arm. “Come on, Chris.”
“But -” he argues futilely. Chris throws his sister one last curious look, allowing himself to be dragged away.
And just like that, she finds herself in the exact position she’s spent years trying to avoid. Claire shoves her hands into her jacket pockets. “Well,” she mutters, staring at the sidewalk. “I guess this is the part where we talk.”
When she glances back up, Leon motions his head down the opposite direction of where her brother and Jill headed off in. They walk side by side at an unhurried pace, weaving around people carrying umbrellas as the wind begins to pick up. Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbles low across the sky.
“You said you couldn’t tell me earlier,” he says. “About why you were mad.” She hates how nervous that simple sentence makes her feel. It helps (slightly) that he isn’t looking at her. His attention remains forward as they walk. “You think you're second best.”
Claire’s head snaps toward him. But Leon doesn’t meet her gaze. Instead he gestures toward a sleek black car parked along the curb just ahead. His car. She understands the silent suggestion and walks around to the passenger side. The inside of his luxury car feels almost too quiet once the doors close behind them. Leon hasn’t even started the engine. The rain begins to tap softly against the windshield.
“Has this been about Ada?” he finally asks in the deafening silence.
Her name lingers in the air, in the short distance between them. Over the center console that separates them. Closing her eyes briefly, she laughs quietly to herself. “You really want to know?” she murmurs. When he doesn’t answer, she looks at him. “You spent years chasing after her. Everyone knows it, talks about it. Every time you two crossed paths, it was like no one else existed. Including me.”
“I knew it. Claire, that’s not-”
“And it bothered me, okay?” She shifts in her seat to focus on him. Now that the truth started spilling out of her, it was like a dam had broken and she wanted him to know exactly what she felt. “Watching you run after her. Defend her. And I just had to pretend like that never bothered me.”
“I cared about Ada,” Leon admits quietly. “Yeah, maybe more than I should have,” he shifts in his seat too, tension pulling across his shoulders.
“Yeah, no shit. That tends to happen when you’re in love with someone,” she tells him a bit haughtily.
He scoffs, his eyes tearing away from hers with restraint evident in his entire body. “You’re wrong.”
“Wrong?” It’s her this time who laughs bitterly. "How so?"
When his eyes find hers once more, they lock onto her and it silences the anger in her entire being. “You’ve always been good at reading people, understanding situations. You pick on things that most people miss. But you are completely wrong about this.”
She lets out a breath through her nose, shaking her head as she looks away from him toward the rain streaking down the windshield. “Whatever, Leon. You’re always waiting for her to show up again. I’m not stupid so please don't try and-”
“I won’t lie to you and pretend things with Ada weren’t complicated,” he says. “It was complicated with her but it wasn’t love.”
Claire’s heart beats steadily, she can feel her entire body react to him. The rain drops get heavier as it falls out of the dark sky, lightning making an appearance every couple of minutes. “What was it then?”
He shakes his head. “Raccoon City - it’s hard to forget that place and everything that happened there. It’s hard to erase memories of that night, God knows I’ve tried. It lives in my mind constantly.” He lets out a deep breath. “I just kept … trying to make sense of it all. What she was doing. Which side she was really on. But that wasn’t love.”
“You risked your life for her.”
Leon finally turns to look at her again. “I never knew which version of Ada I was going to get every time I saw her.” Leon’s expression softens just a fraction as his gaze lingers on Claire’s face. “With you, I always knew exactly who you were.”
Claire’s chest tightens. Sitting in the car with him, listening to him speak earnestly, made her defenses start to fall apart. Every wall she put up, every layer she added, he broke right through them.
“You were never second best, Claire. I just kept my distance from you.”
A missing piece of the puzzle finds its way back to the board. “Why?” She wanted more. Becoming more greedy for the truth.
“You’ve always been a part of this world. And every time something new happened, you were right there in the middle of it.”
There is a brief pause between them and she shrugs. “I mean, it’s my job.”
“Yeah, but my job made it worse.”
Claire studies his face. “What are you talking about?”
Leon glances at her again. “Do you really think the government wouldn’t have tried to use you if they knew how important you were to me?”
Claire opens her mouth to argue but stops. Another piece snapped into place. An image started to form in her mind that made more sense than it had in years. “But what about-”
“It was never like that with her, Claire.”
“You pushed me away to protect me…” she says it out loud, her stomach twisting in knots. “Why wouldn’t you at least let me make a decision? You know you don’t get to decide what I can and can’t handle.” Frustrated now, she leans back into the seat. A million thoughts running through her head. “So what now?” she asks, looking out the windshield, at the downpour in front of her.
“I guess that depends.”
She looks at him. “On what exactly?”
His eyes catch hers. “On whether you’re still planning to keep pretending you never wanted anything more than friendship with me.”
Claire’s pulse skyrockets, probably. As a matter of fact, she’s pretty certain he can probably hear her pulse pounding too.
“Because if that’s what you want, I’ll respect it,” he says quietly. “But if it isn’t… then maybe we should stop lying to each other.”
The quiet inside the car stretched until it felt almost tangible. Leon’s words still hung in the air between them.
Maybe we should stop lying to each other.
Claire stared forward, her eyes tracing the lightening rain drops leaving a path of water down the windshield. Her fingers were curled into the sleeves of her jacket, twisting the fabric without her realizing it. She felt strangely exposed, like the quiet had peeled something open inside her that she had spent years carefully sealing shut.
Leon, on the other hand, didn’t look away - his gaze steady on her. He watched her with the same careful patience he had always shown her, the kind that had once made her feel understood and now made her feel cornered at the same time. He didn’t rush her, didn’t press the conversation forward. He simply waited, the faint tension in his shoulders the only sign that the moment mattered just as much to him.
He let her take her time.
He always did.
Her thoughts drifted backward at the mention of Raccoon City. To terrible, frightening memories she had long since convinced herself were fully buried in the darkest corners of her mind. Flooding back out once again and she shuts her eyes. But then - there’s him in the midst of it all. The rookie cop in a borrowed uniform, scared shitless but determined. The strange comfort she had felt in those brief moments of quiet between chaos, when it had just been the two, or rather three, of them while the world collapsed.
The very beginning of feelings she tried to push aside - a crush born from adrenaline and survival.
Time had only complicated it. Leon being assigned to a ‘top-secret’ unit, all of the confidential missions, all of the distance. Years passed with him drifting in and out of her life like some restless ghost.
But then there was Ada Wong. The mysterious mercenary who always seemed to appear at the worst possible time, then vanished just as quickly. And with her went the agent who never quite seemed able to let her go.
Jealousy had never been an emotion Claire liked admitting to. To pretend it didn’t bother her when colleagues mentioned it in passing, when friends teased Leon about it, when whispers of their latest encounter reached her ears. Bitterness had slowly taken root where that hopeful little spark had once lived.
Claire shifted slightly in her seat, leaning her head back against the headrest as another breath left her lungs. Beside her, Leon remained still.
He had watched her long enough now to recognize the storm of thoughts behind her silence. Claire Redfield had never been particularly hard to read if you knew what to look for.
When Claire finally turned her head to look at him, the weight of his gaze broke whatever fragile wall she had left. “I loved you for so long, I can't even remember exactly when or how it happened. Probably since we had our first date," she jokes, trying to ease the tension. The words felt strangely calm leaving her mouth. A weight lifts from her shoulders.
“A helluva first date," he remembers, grinning. "Loved... Past tense?” he asks gently.
There's a different tension that builds as his blue eyes pierce her with an intensity that made it difficult to think. “No, not past tense,” she admits.
Something warm settles into his features. She watches the relief sink its way into his body as the uneasiness fades. And for her, she feels free. Her confession was the centerpiece, tying everything together.
Slowly, carefully, he leans across the center console. His hand reaches out, hovering for only a moment before gently taking hers. His fingers slipped hesitantly into her palm, as if he were still giving her the chance to pull away. She parts her fingers to allow him space to clear through. Their hands fit together perfectly. She glanced down at the way his fingers intertwined with hers and a small, quiet smile found its way onto her face. Her heart explodes, maybe just a little.
“Claire,” he murmured. She could listen to him say her name for hours. “I love you, too. Only you.”
The kiss wasn’t rushed or desperate or dramatic. It was cautious at first, like both of them were still adjusting to the reality of this moment. That this was finally happening. Claire tilted her head slightly, meeting him halfway, accepting everything he was offering.
And then, she leaned into it even more. Greedy to have all of him.
The world outside faded into the background completely - all she could focus on was Leon. Her rookie cop. The guy who told her everything would always be fine despite the circumstances. The guy who held her in that motel outside Raccoon City when she’d fallen into a pit of anxiety and despair. The same guy who ran to save her life when she couldn’t figure a way out.
For years Leon had felt like an unfinished puzzle in her life. Something complicated and impossible to solve.
But now, with his hand wrapped around hers and his lips still warm against her own, Claire realized something that made her chest feel light for the first time in a long while.
The puzzle never had any missing pieces.
They had simply been waiting for the right moment to finally fall into place.