Work Text:
You don't have to live if you don't wanna live
It's just I would much prefer if you did
You don't have to die if you don't wanna die
There still are worlds of love in your eyes
Countless worlds of love in your eyes
Put down the knife
I'll carry you back to our room
Put down the knife
I'll carry you back to our room
Where there are miles and miles of bedsheets
I'll softly tuck you in
I'd dig a hundred graves for you
And melt endless limbs
- Crippling Alcoholism, "Beloved"
..................................................................
Claire rocketed up in the bed, a strangled sound dying in her throat. Her heart raced, her eyes were unfocused, and her hands were shaky.
Every time she thought she was fine; every time she thought they were gone for good. In the past it’d been every night, every other night. Now, in the present, she could go months and months between nightmares. It lulled her into a false sense of security; the hope that they’d never come back.
And then she’d find herself jerking awake in a puddle of sweat, visions of mutations, visions of blood, visions of violence in her head. Her brain spooled frantically, trying to process the situation around her, trying to dispel the hell of her sleeping thoughts. Her brain switched it up on her; she had infinite nightmare fuel contained within. Sometimes it was Raccoon, sometimes it was Rockfort, sometimes it was her own murderous deeds in Europe; her 20 year old self’s teeth grit, watching blood spill.
“Hey. Hey,” Leon’s voice came from next to her. This night she wasn’t alone like she usually was when her brain treated her to awful memory theatre; her brain was still spooling too fast to consider his presence. She stared into the darkness, haunted. His hand came to her face, grabbing her chin in a way that was forceful but tender, and he pressed his face against hers, his grip on her chin forcing her slack mouth open some. “You’re alright,” he said. “Breathe.” He kissed her cheek once, twice. “Look here.” His hand on her chin was firm, trying to turn her to him, but she kept her neck locked, staring out into space, fighting against his hand, every iota of her being all jagged edges.
Her breathing echoed harsh in the otherwise quiet room. Rational thought began to win the battle; it was years later, she was in bed on Long Island, she’d let on to the man next to her that occasionally she was not as collected as she pretended to be.
“Fuck,” she muttered, half in recoil at the content of her nightmares, half in shame she wasn’t more in control of herself at this point in her life.
“You’re alright,” Leon assured her, pulling her against him. “C’mere.”
Claire allowed herself to be cradled, her eyes still wide and wild into the darkness of the room over his arm. The back of her shirt was covered in sweat; she could feel it in her hairline. She wondered what time it was.
“Jesus,” she gusted after long moments, blinking. “It’s just the rest of my fucking life.”
“Hmm?” Leon hummed, holding her.
“The dreams,” she said. “I’m going to be 80 years old and waking up in a sweat.”
“The past doesn’t let you go easy,” Leon said. His hand moved, rubbing down over the crown of her head, down over her back, up and down the knots of her spine. “You’re soaked.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, without much thought.
She could feel him patting the bed behind her, where she’d been laying; she figured it was probably damp too. “Here,” he said, reaching down to the bottom of her shirt, pulling upward on it. “Up. Off.” She lifted her arms and let him pull the wet shirt off her, and he tossed it out into the room. “Come over on this side,” he said, and he pulled at her, urging her across his legs over onto the other side of him, onto the side of the bed that was usually his. Limply she complied, and allowed him to position her, to hold onto her. It was dry over here, and warm from where he’d been laying asleep until she’d woken him up.
“You wanna tell me what it was about?” he asked.
Claire stewed. “The usual. Scared shitless, low on ammo, things trying to rip me limb from limb, sometimes succeeding.” She sighed. “Sometimes I die, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes it’s not about that. Sometimes it’s about other things. Sometimes I’m the monster.”
“I know the feeling,” he said. He rolled her to him, hugging her; her breasts crushed against his chest and in this instance it was more about closeness and comfort than it was about arousal, which was what it usually was. “You’re alright.”
Half-naked she shuddered in the chill of the room, and Leon reached down, tugging blankets from under her. His movements were an odd combination of forceful and caring; he moved with an assurance like he was rendering battlefield first aid to someone bleeding out, like there were steps to doing this. He pulled the blankets out from under her and then up and over her, taking her back into his arms, into the warmth of his body. Leon ran like a furnace; his skin felt superheated against her goosefleshed own.
“When do they stop?” Claire asked after a long moment of silence, Leon’s hand drifting up and down her arm.
“They don’t, I don’t think,” Leon said. “At least you wake up. I don’t, anymore. My body just keeps letting it happen to me.”
Claire remembered the days after Raccoon, a younger Leon jolting awake in bed, tense and terse. She contemplated his brain just letting him go through it, one long nightmare that didn’t end until morningtime. She was glad she still had a safety release; glad her brain eventually drove enough adrenaline to the rest of her body to jolt her awake. She remembered being cut back loose into the world after all was said and done; Raccoon, time on the run, Europe, everything after. She remembered resignedly shaking pills into her hand every night before bed, pills to make her sleep, pills to keep the monsters at bay. Eventually she hadn’t needed the pills anymore, but every once in a while, she wished she still had some.
“I want a normal life,” Claire said, lowly and abruptly.
“We all do,” Leon said. “The past doesn’t let you go easy,” he repeated.
“I hate it,” she said, and she was acutely aware that sometimes she just let her emotions, big and raw and blunt, flood out when she was around him. It made her feel like a child; no filter, emotionally immature, something to be coddled. Leon did coddle her, in his own way. Maybe it was what she wanted. Maybe deep at her core she just wanted him to tell her it would all be okay and the bad times were over. Maybe her giving up control when it came to him extended to things outside of sex.
“I know,” he said. “I wish I knew a way to fix it. For you, for me, for all of us.”
“I want to be normal,” she said.
“You are normal. Your brain is reacting to abnormal things.” He cradled her, kissed her damp hairline. “You’re normal. You’re very human. You’re also safe, and nothing is going to happen to you.” He sounded so assured, as if he were telling her the sky was blue or the earth went around the sun.
“Maybe,” she murmured, staring into his chest in the darkness.
“You’re alright,” he said. “You’re here, I’m here. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Part of her accepted being coddled; it was, after all, what she wanted deep inside. He told her exactly what she wanted to hear. Another part of her knew he could not always be there, and whatever would happen in her life would happen. Laying there in his arms, it was easy to believe she was just safe forever and nothing bad would ever come for her again, either in nightmares or in her life. Claire couldn’t give into the illusion entirely, no matter how badly she wanted to there in his arms. She remembered the three of them, herself, Sherry, and Leon all in a tangle in the bed in the days after Raccoon, all so scared shitless they ended up in a knot in the bed, clinging to each other. She remembered Sherry crying into her neck, remembered Leon sitting bolt upright in bed fumbling so hard for a gun next to the bed that he knocked it on the floor.
Now Sherry was an adult, Leon was off serving the government’s purposes, and Claire still had nightmares. She felt frozen in time; she felt like life had marched past her and left her in the dust, cradling her damaged memories.
“You need to go back to sleep, sweetheart,” Leon said to her, into her hair. She sighed.
“Yeah. Eventually,” she said.
His hand drifted up and down her bare back, soothingly. For a man who could probably wring the life out of someone effortlessly, he was surprisingly delicate with her at times. Claire found some small, secret part of her wanted that; the man who could efficiently punish with his hands treating her like she was some kind of china doll. Claire didn’t fully know what she wanted; her thoughts confused her at times. Some quintessentially feminine part of her she buried deep inside just wanted Leon to take away all her problems, wanted him to baby her. Externally, Claire could not let him do it. She was too realistic to be someone’s pampered little thing. She pushed, sometimes; she put on her tough bitch exterior and told him he was being silly when he tried to do too much for her. Sometimes, though, she just let herself be small, let him be in control.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Relax.” His hand was still drifting on her back.
“It’s going to take me a while,” she said, but she did close her eyes.
“I won’t go back to sleep until you do,” he said.
“If you want to go to sleep, go to sleep,” she replied.
“No.” He pulled her against him. “You first. I’m good at being awake.”
Claire let out a gust, lying there, allowing him to soothe her with his hands, his presence. She thought of infected hands on her, fighting against them in a hallway, the muzzle of her handgun coming up underneath a jaw barely hanging on from rot and firing, deafening in her ears. She thought of a man turned into a monster, slowly swallowing a train car while she stood there dumbfounded, shotgun in her hands, Sherry in the car behind her with Leon wounded and half-drunk with blood loss. She thought of creeping up behind a guard outside a chateau in Germany, putting her gun to the back of his head, and firing. She thought of bouncing along in a van, tied up, beaten, and hooded after she’d been captured in France. She thought of watching what had been an earnest and admittedly annoying young man mutate into something monstrous and come after her, thought of what Wesker’s hands felt like pulling her hair and slapping her face.
“It never stops,” she said tiredly. “How do you make it stop?”
“I don’t think you do,” Leon said. “You learn to live with it. It hits you in the gut less.”
Claire knew he was right, but the lack of other available answers frustrated her. She wanted a solution that didn’t exist; she wanted time travel, she wanted to go back to when she was young and wild and undamaged. She laid there, eyes closed, heart pounding. She shuddered; she didn’t know if it was residual horror or cold or just a sensation that seized her.
Leon’s hand was firm on the back of her head. “You’re alright. I’ve got you.”
Claire warred with herself; she remembered Daddy kissing it and making it better, remembered being five years old and crawling into bed with Chris. Maybe her whole life she’d wanted to be coddled, and tried to hide it. Maybe she’d been weak and less than capable this whole time, and just not able to admit it to herself. She thought of comforting and reassuring Sherry; she thought of being in dangerous situations at work and taking the lead, rallying her coworkers behind her. She thought of holding her own in physical fights, in firefights.
All her life she’d simultaneously been so hard it scared lesser people, while so weak she just wanted to crawl into someone’s arms and collapse.
Tomorrow she’d have to be capable again; calm, assured, and directed at work. Her coworkers expected no less of her. She didn’t crack; she found ways out of tough situations. She blazed trails, she stood up for the little guy, she stuck her nose where it didn’t belong in the name of justice.
Tonight, she was a scared little girl, who just wanted someone capable to hold her and keep the monsters at bay. She gave in.
“Don’t let me go,” she murmured, and Leon adjusted his arms around her.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve got you, baby.”
Claire let herself be weak. It felt like an indulgence of being alive, of breathing, of having survived her past.