Work Text:
Leon vividly remembered the night he first met you. In fact, sometimes he even dreamed about it on the rare nights where the nightmares left him alone.
It hadn’t been the seediest bar in town but nor was it one of those oddly clean, hip ones. It had a general assortment of sports paraphernalia on the walls and above the bar. He couldn’t remember what had been on the TV tucked into one corner behind the bar. Probably was baseball or something else equally inane. The place probably smelled faintly of cigarettes.
What he did remember, though, was he had been drinking alone. That had been the whole point of picking this particular bar where he had little chance of running into anyone he knew. The week had been long and whiskey sounded like just the way to unwind. That period of training had been brutal and had only just recently returned him State-side with some room now to breathe.
Maybe a someone or two had tried to talk to him at the counter before he met you. It really didn’t matter.
What did matter was when he noticed a lone young woman sitting in a booth in the corner. A rather attractive young woman around his age with a small spiral notebook beside her drink and a pen that kept finding its way tucked behind her ear. One assessing look later and he had the distinct impression that you didn’t normally go to bars—that you barely knew what you were doing there. Not in the sense that you didn’t know how to navigate the bar, per se. More like that it didn’t seem like your kind of locale.
That impression remained as he watched you covertly for the next hour. In that time, you nursed that same drink, no one joined you, and you went from scanning the room to jotting something or other in that notebook. Then, with no real conviction to explain why, he decided to try talking to you. He would never be able to explain what exactly in that specific moment had convinced him to try his luck with you. He could think of plenty of reasons after the fact. But in that precise moment in time? He had nothing but a faint feeling in his stomach that it was worth a shot, however brief.
At best and much later, he could rationalize that at the time, he had been chaffing against the state of his life. Survivor of Raccoon City after having the worst first day on the job for a rookie cop ever and now a training government agent who hadn’t gotten much choice in the matter. Did he want to continue the fight against the ills unleashed onto the world by the Umbrella Corporation? Sure, of course. Did he like that the government had leveraged a child’s life to ensure he couldn’t say no? Of course not.
For once in what felt like an eternity, it seemed reasonable that he wanted to try his hand at something different.
Fresh refill of whiskey in hand, he sauntered to your booth. You looked up at him with raised brows and cautious eyes.
Leon gestured to the empty seat across from you. “Seat taken?”
“No,” you replied.
“May I take it?”
Your head tilted to the side, assessing. You waved at the seat. “Sure, go ahead.”
That alone seemed like progress. At least one or two guys had, by his estimation, attempted to strike up conversation and take that coveted seat.
Both had failed to get this far.
“Name’s Leon,” he said by way of introduction.
You similarly only gave your first name.
He plopped down into the seat, ignoring the rips in the cracked leather. “So, what’s a lady like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, slurring his words only a little.
“Excuse me?”
He remembered thinking then that you looked even prettier up close than you did from a distance, your eyes bright even under the dim lights.
He explained, “Well, you don’t exactly strike me as the type of lady that enjoys places like this. And you’ve been nursing the same drink for an hour.”
You grimaced. “Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe not to anyone else. But me? I’d like to think I’m an observant sort of guy.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like you’re waiting on anyone, which has me curious what you’re doing here.”
You raised a brow at him, spending a moment seemingly debating your answer. Then you said, “I’m observing.”
“What, like this is some sort of city safari? Trying to watch humans in their natural habitat?”
You cracked an amused smile at that. The whiskey might’ve been talking, but you seemed actually amused at his clunky attempt at a joke. “Something like that.”
He gave you a long, curious look.
Before he could start throwing out theories on what “that” could mean, you explained, “I’m a writer. Or, I’d like to be a writer. Right now I just work an office job and write in my spare time.” You licked your lips, a motion that drew his attention to just how lovely those lips really were, especially with a shine to them. “I thought coming here would be a good way to do some people watching.”
He glanced at the notepad. “And the notebook’s for taking notes?”
“That’s the idea.”
He leaned over the table on folded arms. “Alright, I’ll bite.”
You blinked owlishly. “What?”
“Tell me what you make of all these people here. I’m curious.” Hastily, he added, “If you don’t mind.”
At first, he thought you were about to turn him down when you opened your mouth. To his surprise, you shrugged instead.
“Ah, what the hell? Why not.”
Flipping the notebook open, you also leaned over the table. Like as if the pair of you were initiating a conspiracy. Close as he was now, he could faintly smell your perfume. Not too strong and lightly sweet. Even though he knew approximately nothing about you, he still somehow thought it suited you.
One by one, you went through various people who either had been or still were at the bar. The guys on one end of the bar counter that clearly came here regularly to meet up and watch whatever game was on TV together. The lonely older man in the far corner that kept looking at his left hand, which you suspected was indicative of marital problems of some kind. Of the guy-girl pair in a far booth that you were pretty certain were having an affair. The set of people playing darts who looked barely old enough to be drinking that seemed to be having a wild time with a selection of bar food and pitchers of beers. That group, you suspected, were celebrating something—maybe they just finished up midterms at a nearby college.
“What about me?” he asked when you seemed to have gotten to the end of your notes but hadn’t said anything about him.
Even in the subdued lighting, he could see your checks flush.
You glanced at him tentatively, pressing your lips together. “You… I thought you looked like someone who’s here on a mission to unwind. Like you’ve had a really long week and just needed a few drinks to let loose.”
His brows rose at that. That was awfully on the nose. Although for him “a really long week” had been several really long years at this point.
But you didn’t need to know that.
“Guilty as charged,” he said with a laugh to cover up how your words had hit the mark.
Time to change the subject.
“If you weren’t on a reconnaissance mission to a bar, where would you be?” he asked.
“At home.”
The answer came so quick he almost laughed. “And when not at home?”
“Probably a coffee shop. The library. Maybe the park.”
I can work with that.
The thought nearly threw him off balance. Then he decided to just accept it. Why not see where this went? So much of his life so far had gone poorly. He had just finished his main training circuit that had sent him from one city or even country to another for weeks at a time. Now he was home in the States for the foreseeable future. Maybe this ultimately would go the same way as all his other previous entanglements, but there was only one way to find out. One way to find out if he could have a taste of a normal life.
If he could remember what it was like to be normal—even if it was just for a bit.
Honestly, in hindsight it felt in the moment something like madness. Like tempting fate to see if for once, he could have something like this. Something that wasn’t tied to his duty to rid the world of the hellish ilk of bioengineered viruses.
With all of that in mind, he took the plunge. “Can I have your number?”
You cocked your head at him. Blinked. Then pressed your lips together and eventually smiled. “Sure.”
That was how he wound up at the end of the night with a folded piece of paper in his pocket with your full name and phone number on it.
He surprised even himself when he called you a few nights later. After all, the Leon that had gotten your phone number had been slightly inebriated and had accordingly lower inhibitions.
He was surprised even more when you actually picked up. Then surprised himself again when he actually followed through on asking you for coffee at a cafe not too far from the bar you had met at and you said yes. To top off that whole multi-layered cake of bewilderment was how well the conversation went—both on the phone and at the cafe. He found you were easy to talk to, thoughtful, and above all notably honest.
It was during that first coffee outing that he eventually asked, “You got a boyfriend?”
You arched a brow at him. In a voice that was carefully neutral, you said, “No, why? Are you thinking about applying for the position?”
His heart began to thump in his chest. “Maybe. Would you consider my application?”
You looked at him then, eyes pensive. He thought about cracking some joke to diffuse the situation and circumvent the possibility of you saying no when you said, “I would.”
Here he thought he was being an impulsive lunatic for being so upfront with you, but maybe you were too. It was easy to think so years later when the trajectory of your relationship had become self-evident.
When asked years later why you had accepted his advances so readily, your only response was that you “had a feeling about him.”
After that coffee date, he kept calling when he could. Much to his amazement, you kept answering. You went out again for coffee. Then out again for lunch. Took a walk in a nearby park. Then out yet again, this time for dinner. He found excuses where possible to sit next to you and casually (or not so casually, as you later pointed out) put his arm on the back of your chair or across the back of the bench.
At that dinner, you asked him if you were his girlfriend now. He in turn asked if you’d accepted his boyfriend application, which left you smiling coyly.
All you said then was, “Yes.”
And that was that.
At the beginning (and for a long time afterwards, to be perfectly frank), you only knew that he had a “government job.” That was all he had said and yet he had a feeling you quickly picked up on more than the specific words that came out of his mouth. When he first had to leave town for an assignment, your parting words to him were, “Stay safe.”
Those words followed him across the globe. For a while, he thought they might be the last thing he heard from you. Not just because his survival was never guaranteed but because he found it difficult to imagine someone so normal as you would wait for a guy like him. That sooner or later you would realize that there were plenty of guys out there who didn’t disappear for days or weeks at a time and could only vaguely articulate what he did for a living.
And yet after he came back, you still picked up when he called.
“Hello?”
One word from you and he felt the lingering restlessness in his chest from his last assignment calm.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said.
Lamest greeting ever when he hadn’t talked to you in a week.
“Hi, Leon,” you replied, two words and yet so pleasantly bright in his ears. Like as if you were actually excited to be hearing from him after a week of silence. He particularly liked his name in your voice in that moment. “How are you? Everything go okay?” you asked.
Those two questions and similar variations became a ritual. Even when you had no idea what he did or what he had seen, your first priority was always to ask how he was. To ask if everything was okay.
You were one of the few people that presented genuine interest in his well being as a person, not an agent. It was hard not to find that solicitous behavior addicting.
So long as you kept responding, he kept calling. So long as you accepted him back when he had to suddenly postpone dates or leave for a while, he kept coming back to you.